Tag Archives: Christmas

The real war on Christmas

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Baby Rudolf, Baby Bratz, no Baby Santa 
A rabbi in Seattle wanted to put a menorah in the municipal train station to accompany a display of Christmas trees. Was he thinking the trees were another faith’s religious symbols? Did he mean to ask to juxtapose a dreidel instead?

The train station administrators backed down and removed the trees altogether, a concession I’d argue they needn’t have made, but certainly one that fueled the Christian backlash. A now knee-jerk indignation about a supposed war on Christmas!

I’ve got news for the Christians, there is a war on Christmas, you’re fighting it, amongst yourselves. You fundamentalists are wanting Christmas to mean something religious again, but the materialists among you, by my count, every last one of you minus Jesus, already ceded the holiday to commerce long ago.

“Happy Holidays” is neither religious nor irreligious. “Merry Christmas” does not belie a believer or non-believer. The international holiday as demarcated by what’s believed to have been Jesus of Nazareth’s birthday and New Year’s (for non-Chinese), is called Christmas. It represents a huge surge in retail sales, for some merchants up to 90% of their yearly gross. Retailers of every denomination celebrate Christmas.

Put a menorah next to a manger if you must, but neither of them belong at the North Pole with Santa, Rudolf and Ol’ Tannenbaum. Joyeux Noel, Gud Yule, and Boldog Karácsony everyone!

Holiday season anti-war TV spot

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Names engraved in stone
A proposed 30 second television commercial aimed at counter-recruitment.

Camera opens on a festive living room where a large extended family is posing for a picture beside the Christmas tree.

Camera moves past family, over an incidental table beneath a window on which sits a framed photo of a soldier in uniform.

Camera keeps moving out the window, through a decorated yard, along sidewalk where a mother is pushing a baby carriage, led by three or four exuberant children.

Camera continues across street to car paused at corner streetlight beside a municipal park. Inside a young couple is talking, holding hands.

Camera moves through car, over shoulder of driver, lingering on young woman in the passenger seat smiling [nearly at camera] at the driver, then continues out the window to the park.

Camera floats through snow-covered park in straight line toward a distant monolith, a lone war memorial surrounded by empty park benches.

Camera closes in on list of engraved names, narrowing in on single name.

Borders & Ignoble

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Retail citadelI found myself inside one of these boxes again, waiting for my wife to finish up some mall shopping I had tried to talk her out of. These 2 chains of supposed bookstores are like the Democrats and Republicans almost. Nobody can tell any real difference between the two of them.

Usually, I can pull up a chair, and browse their discount picture books for a bit, but this time they had the music (Christmas oriented for the season) cranked up double the usual volume, and it began to drive me a little crazy. It was really annoying, giving some, I guess, an incentive to buy quick and get out of there. I didn’t have that incentive though. These places aren’t really bookstores so much, and I have a hard time even finding anything much of interest to read inside, let alone for puchase.

What do I mean about Borders and its chain competition not really being bookstores? Well, I happened to come across what B & N describe themselves as being to explain some. Here it is…

“Our mission is to operate the best specialty retail business in America.”

This little pearl of thought sits upon all the computer screens as a screen saver, and also is meant to be personal inspiration for the mechanized robots, I meant customer assistants that work there. Nothing about books about these places really. It’s about specialty retail business.

Still, people who enter are most often confused. They do seem to believe that they are in a real bookstore. Actually, meany of the customers have nere seen an actual bookstore, or at least not close up between the shevles. Or even if they happened to stroll through the shelves of a real bookstore, have never really looked much to see what was on the shelves. So it’s kind of easy to see how so many get confused about thinking that they are inside an actual living breathing bookstore. But they aren’t!

They are inside a specialty retail business, that’s all. A good place to sit at a table with a laptop sipping coffee. A good place to buy some pop music crap for some demented teenager one might know. Or a place to pick up a calendar, or some blank sheets of paper for correspondence or a blank diary perhaps? Sure there are books there, but not so many real ones. Many are dedicated to computer programming, or things like Manja (6 shelves alone for that Japanese cartoon stuff and ‘role playing’).

There are categorized sections of everything, well almost. Theses stores are marked off like a MS windows filing system and give sort of a superficial encyclopedic appearance. But little old stupid me. The category that interest me most is Foreign Literature. But look around? I saw about 55 shelves titled Fiction and Literature, but strangely enough there’s hardly a book of foreign literature in this group! One would think upon browsing there, that only dimwitted American authors were alive today? Oh, and maybe a dimwitted Brit, or two.

Oh sure, maybe I should go over to the Science Fiction (20 shelves), Mystery (14 shelves), or Romance (10 shelves) sections. Nothing. Everybody is an America. Apparently they never write mysteries or SF in Italy or Spain, Brazil or Africa? If they do, certainly you can’t find it at an American specialty retail store, as opposed to a bookstore. Despite their supposed thoroughness, Borders and B & N apparently don’t carry certain stuff. Like foreign fiction. Go figure.

They also don’t carry current affairs (3 stacks) commentary much, unless it is Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, that sort of gag-us quality of thought. One does find 13 stacks of Christian babble, too. 6 stacks of Tarot/ New Age 1 1/2 stacks of ‘Eastern Religions”. I am an atheist myself, so I looked for that stack? If you really want to befuddle employees in these stores, go up to one and ask to be directed to atheist oriented non-fiction. It’s great fun!

Or better yet, tell them that you have found the 10 stacks of Romance novels, but that you are a man and would like to see some male oriented porn instead. In book form. They might direct you to a shelf entitled Erotica (in some stores less regionally influenced by Dobson’s minions)? But then, you will see only gay ‘erotica’ there. Tell the clerk that you are not gay and would rather see their collection of porn books for heterosexual men. “Sorry, Sir, we only have magazines in that genre.” My reply is always, “What? The adult entertainment business is a multi-trillion dollar one, and yet your retail establishment carries not a porn book at all, outside of the gay ones!” And in Colorado Springs, not even much of that. Moo.

So, as an atheist heterosexual porn seeker who loves foreign lit, I am kind of out of luck at these specialty retail establishments. If I was a gay person, ‘spiritually inclined’, and didn’t know that a word was ever written outside US national boundaries, I might be in better shape, it seems. Or, if I could just get more interested in reading romance novels or military history, which is where the multiple stacks are. Yes, these stores don’t really seem to know that history has been passed through, unless it circled on a planet other than USA and has been interpretted by a Republican minded citizen. Not true, you can find some Democrats, too. Like Michael Moore, perhaps? But you’ll be much better off if you like books with names like ‘Semper Fi’, etc.

All in all, these retail establishments are more Americana than a retro Fifties Diner would be. But they are not quite being bookstores by doing that. In short, your prospective reading material is being grossly censored, and that’s why so few are purchasing from the shelves, and more just seem to be sipping their Lattes and Mochas, or talking on their cell phones while inside. Borders and Ignoble seems more like a telephone booth at times, than an actual bookstore.

At this point, one might object to my comments. “‘Erotica’ should be censored by B & N. Go to an ‘adult store’ if you want such filth!” But they don’t carry books there, I will moan. “And as an atheist, go to Hell and get some books by atheists.” Or to the philosophy stacks, as I have been directed by employees. As if all philosophers were automatically atheists, lol. Sorry, I’ll just order my atheist books from the Sceptical Inquirer magazine folk, thank you. And for a good porn book, I’ll just have to write my own, it seems. Though it’ll never get published, let alone make it to the B & N.

And if I might want to know how the French care about life, I will just have to confine myself to Agatha Christie, it seems. That is after I get through with the latest from Ann Coulter I purchased at the specialty retail store. She tells it like it is about the French. And she is informative about the Arab mind, too.

Nobody reads anymore, no publishers publish anymore, and no specialty retail establishments even stock what little is still around. The last time I have seen much of interest in a bookstore/ specialty retainl establishment was in a University of Texas dorm building. They had a little used bookstore that had some used books of African writers that had been published by the African Studies Dept of the UT.

Americans once wrote great literature back before the ’50s. Unfortunately, all those works are out of print and unavailable mainly. The lit was too red, it seems. Efforts to get them reprinted have flopped miserably. We have become a specialty retail people, and not a literate one. Oops, my wife is back from the mall. Got to end my rant. Bless her heart, she bought nothing at all. Or, maybe she did and is just hiding it away from Scrooge?

Oaxaca to Greeley with Will Brad in between

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I’ve been posting about Oaxaca for some time now, and in the beginning I believe that those who saw these posts were thinking… What’s Oaxaca have to do with us and our lives in Colorado Springs?

In fact, I had gone earlier to the local weekly, CS Indy, and they had shown zero interest in allowing me to write about Mexican events for them, or for anything on the issue to really be published there. Apparently they needed the space for more important things, like their puff piece this last issue on the newly elected Republican Congressman, Doug Lamborn, titled laughingly, ‘Rarin’ to go’.

Oh, yeah! This must be some sort of reach out to lost members of Ted Haggard’s flock, I guess? That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the publisher and editor of that paper to be running such crap. I doubt that they can outdo The Gazette though in this sappy style of …uh… ‘reporting’. I’m worried about these liberal souls over there at the Indy. I’m even scared that they may become born again evangelical pastors or some such?

But back to the world of reality. Many in Colorado began to pay more attention to Oaxaca when Gringo photographer Brad Will was shot down there like a dog. He was busy filming events for the rest of the world to be able to see, and that is just too dangerous to allow to happen freely. Some folk began to take notice of events in far off Oaxaca, though most thought of Brad as being way braver than they could ever be as Americans. And they thought more foolhardy, too.

Cut to events in Greeley and across the nation this week, as Bush sent in the INS troops to take people’s minds off his failures as US Commander in Chief in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 1200 human beings rounded up and shackled for doing America’s nastiest work, working in slaughter houses. Families are being split asunder, children may have to permanently relocate to countries they have never known, and all of us get to ponder how more threatened we are becoming from the horde of American uniformed brownshirts, blueshirts, and khakishirts everywhere around us. Merry Christmas from Uncle Damn and Scrooge Dubya.

Even though so many folk in Greeley apparently supported rounding up their neighbors (this can be seen from the Greeley papers website where these racists post their tripe), now they are getting a quick lesson of what Oaxaca is all about. Oaxaca is about American forced trade policies (NAFTA) that have destroyed people’s livelihoods across much of Mexico, and how many of those people had to leave their homeland because of the American government’s actions just to get the same shaft here!

And in Greeley, Colorado, it’s how one’s personal racism and hatred can lead to destroying the lives of others. Not a pretty scene, as many Anglo kids go back to school and see their schoolmates being disappeared in front of their eyes. What a lesson in American citizenship for them, without doubt.

They then return home to see many of their supposedly Christian parents cheerleading for INS. Some of these parents will then be lining up for the jobs of the people victimized by this witchhunt, just like so many Germans profited from the stolen property of their Jewish neighbors once. We are a nation of immigrants, but some just go bad after a generation or two living here.

Check out the video Documentary of Oaxaca at the web site of the friendsofbradwill.com. You’ll have to punch into ‘videos’ once you reach this site. Its a lengthy documentary (28 min) , but it gives about as good and authentic of an explanation of the connections between Colorado’s world and the world of Oaxaca that might be found online right now. Well worth the time. And if you are still interested about Brad Will, scroll down to the other video called ‘I like the cops’, where Brad can be seen singing (he’s no Dylan, and I mean that in the best sense, too) and strumming the guitar while showing his love for the Men in Blue. Three minutes, and he got it all down about right.

Malachi (the man in Chicago who set himself on fire to protest the US slaughter in Iraq) and Brad, two examples of American sacrifice that inspire us. True American heroes, both in their own ways. Both trying to bring our country back to some sense of reality. Compare them to Doug Lamborn and Ted Haggard, perhaps? Oh, and compare Brad to the Men in Blue.

Bush gives early Christmas gift to racists- turns INS loose on Latino workers

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With Bush’s press affairs going so badly for the Iraq Holy Christian Crusade againsts Arabs and Muslims, how to rally the kore Klan klowns around the flag once again? If the Middle East holy war for oil appears to be sputtering along on only one cylinder, why not jumpstart another holy crusade somewhere to distract people with? You know? What about the one that Anglo racists have going against the Spanish speaking? What a thought!

What a nice Christmas gift for the White, English speaking, America First, hate all the rest crowd, too! Turn INS loose in droves around the country at meatpacking plants! Kick America’s most exploited workers in the teeth, too! Fuck the unions! They thought they won a victory in Houston by raising Latino janitors salaries a dime or two in the SEIU Justice for Janitors effort. We’ll teach those mojados a lesson! Si, no se puede, pendejos! That’s the Bush way! He’s such a compassionate conservative.

And for the kids of the parents to be rounded up? Well Uncle Dubya has a nice lump of coal for them for Christmas! He’s a sweetheart, he is. And such great photo ops for the press! Anglo dittoshits just love to see those minorities hauled away in shackles! Their only regret is that more aren’t shot down like dogs.

In Greeley, Colorado alone, the INS goon squads hauled away over 300 from the Swift meatpacking plant there alone. Nationwide the total hauled off to be deported is sure to go over 1,000. See the map locator at the end of the Greeley paper’s article above to see where the other Swift plants are. Apparently Hyrum, Utah needed over 150 stormtroopers on hand to do the dirty work at that plant.

Here is a Denver paper slideshow of the pigshow at Greeley

To add insult to injury, the INS cops decided to loudly and publicly accuse the rounded up with being all involved in Identity Theft crimes. How better to make Spanish speaking people really be labelled hardened criminals amongst Anglos than to throw this stuff into the stew? So our latest messages from the authorities is, Don’t be Muslims and pray in airports and don’t be talking Spanish in public, if you know what’s good for you, that is.

Since Democrats are also on board this Holy Crusade, we can expect much more of this tax paid hatemongering ahead of us. Our political representatives from both parties suck totally on immigration issues. They both entirely support this sort of witchhunt against the working poor, all under the guise of ‘keeping our borders safe’ and ‘protecting the native workforce’.

Resolve for justice and peace in 2007

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Peace sign Christmans wreaths prevailI’d like to see 2007 bring renewed optimism for being able to fight injustice around the world. We’re seeing unprecedented rebellions on every continent, citizen’s efforts to reform the traditional mechanisms of inequality and oppression. People are protesting rigged elections, usurious banking systems, phony environmental policies, authoritarianism and outright military aggression. People are laying their lives on the line for what they believe. I’d like the people of Colorado Springs to awaken to such a call.

Colorado Springs sits in the belly of the military industrial beast. While our neighbors may cheer militarism, a rising number have also been coming to see the effects of US corporate policies in a different light. We resist our nation’s bellicosity and refuse to allow its actions being done in our name.

We face an uphill battle against a fascist media and an undereducated populace, but it would be a far cry to conclude that we will not prevail. We will prevail because we must. There is no brotherhood of man without equality and mutual respect. There is no humanity without offering our most to those in need. A life lived upon the backs of others is not worth living. Pursuit of happiness without concern for the suffering of others leads us nowhere.

If we can lead by example our efforts will have already prevailed.

Newborn Hope and Faded Beauty

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Tiny handOn Thursday and Friday I, along with 1600 of my closest friends, dolled up and went to the Broadmoor International Center to attend the annual Newborn Hope luncheon and fashion show. This is a spectacular event, something that we look forward to all year. Filet mignon, chocolate mousse and champagne are culinary staples. Beautiful models from Denver, both male and female, entertain us. We have a silent auction (Botox, rounds of golf, ski jackets, jewelry), we sell table decorations and Christmas ornaments, we have a balloon raffle. We have fun. We raise money.

I have been involved with Newborn Hope for more than a decade. I have co-chaired the event, co-chaired the Advisory Council, been a member of the Corporate Board. Newborn Hope is about prematurity prevention and maternal/neonatal healthcare. I could go on and on about my passion for our mission and for the organization, but I think I’ll save that for another time.

What I want to talk about are the women who are Newborn Hope. Shortly after I became involved with the organization, I discovered that I was pregnant with twins. I had had 4 easy pregnancies in the past so this discovery did not deter me from my normal behavior in the slightest. At 26 weeks (normal gestation is 40 weeks) I went to my doctor for a routine check up. Ironically, she informed me that I was in pre-term labor and that I needed to walk across the parking lot and check myself into the hospital.

The long and short of it is that I ended up enduring 10 weeks of strict bedrest. I had 4 young children at home but was told that I was allowed to get up only once every 2 hours to go to the bathroom. Yeah, right. Puh-lease.

My Newborn Hope friends, none of whom I knew well at the time, heard of my plight and knew how important, and how impossible, compliance was. In order to help me and my little preborns, they arranged for a different committee member to deliver a meal to my home, enough to feed the 6 of us, every night for 10 weeks. A woman I hardly knew called me and said, politely but firmly, “I will be in your driveway every morning at 7:45 to take your kids to school. Please have them watch for me.” Another woman drove my little David to preschool three times per week, a thirty minute round trip.

Twice during my confinement, 20 women or so brought me a moveable feast. They showed up on my doorstep with egg dishes and waffles and bacon and sweet rolls, flowers even. They arranged chairs around me, hugged me, talked to me, made me laugh. Two hours later they gathered everything up, washed and put away every dish, left me with a few good books, and out they went. It was a bit surreal. Kind of like Cat in the Hat.

My new friends came and took my little ones to Happy Apple Farm to get Halloween pumpkins. They showed up every day at 3:30 to lift my little Lara out of her crib after her afternoon nap. They heard that I was having a hard time reading so they blazed in, taught me to cross stitch, brought me everything I needed to complete a project, and raced back out to their own lives.

A severely premature infant is the most expensive medical patient there is. Much more expensive than a cancer patient, a transplant patient, an accident victim. More importantly, premature babies can have developmental delays, vision problems, physical difficulties that last a lifetime. My twins, had they been born at 26 weeks, might be very different children today. I am grateful for their good health. I’ll be forever thankful for the women who helped me carry to term.

I took a friend of mine, a guy, to the luncheon this year. I wanted to share with him an important part of my life, to show him what I’ve done for 10 years, to introduce him to the people who’ve made a huge difference to me and to Devon and Ryan. He was one of only a few men among 800 women. I thought that it would be fun. Educational. Inspiring perhaps. Sadly, he saw a bunch of middle-aged women, shoved into leather pants and halter tops, flaunting back fat and delightful but embarrassing fake boobs, hoping to regain lost youth. How sad and how jaded. I’m really sorry that that is all he saw.

I saw my angels. I saw my friends. I saw love in action. I saw gorgeous women who’ve made a difference to me and to the community.

Relax, guy friend. You don’t need to tell us about our faded beauty. We already know. Many of us who are involved with Newborn Hope have had heartbreaking experience with prematurity. We’ve also dealt with breast cancer, aging parents, learning disabilities…you name it. As a result, we don’t worry too much about our saddlebags. Our chin hairs. Our wrinkled foreheads. Our sagging boobs. We’d rather revel in the potential and perfection of our children. And in the beauty and kindness of our aging friends.

So go screw yourself. You’ll never again be invited to hang out with the ladies who lunch.

Holy Hell! It’s Holy Huggables!

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Blue eyes goatie and braidsI just got off the phone talking to the United States Marine Corp about their ‘Toys for Tots’ program. “How dare you try to shut up Jesus”, I told them. Damn, if they didn’t listen to the peace loving public and have decided to distribute the Talking Jesus dolls to kids this Christmas after all. If you are not sufficiently impoverished from paying war taxes to get one free from the Pentagon, well why not just order one online. I’m getting my daughter a free Takling Esther one myself. And there’s Talking Moses, too.
 
Sorry, Damned Satan dolls not available at this time. Order now! Holy Huggables!

War on Terror- the boardgame

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At last, an up to date replacement for our family’s RISK game. We were beginning to tire of this stodgy old war game almost as out dated as chess itself. The last time we called it quits after only some 8 1/2 hours, so when we heard about this awesome new game, we went a little bananas. And this fabulous game of stealth and strategy is actually coming out just at the perfect time! It is, in fact, the perfect Christian Christmas gift! Mail one to friends and family, along with a fruitcake. You can play like the pros do, too! So have some fun, and go play

Afghanistan, where cowardly US military is deliberately murdering children

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Every week now, it seems that the US puppet president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is ‘investigating’ another tragic ‘accidental bombing of civilians. He demands that these ‘accidents’ stop. But these are not accidents, and Karzai knows this well, as every other Afghan must now know it well, too. An accident occurs once or twice, but an intentional strategy of targeting civilians becomes constant, as have become the US bombings of Afghan civilians in the more remote regions of that country.
 
The strategy is ‘to destroy the sea that the guerrilla fighter must swim in’, as it was once explained in the Vietnam War era, years ago. In short, the quickest, easiest way to combat the enemy, is simply to target his wife and family, including the kids. So the cowardly US-led NATO army of occupation in Afghanistan, is systematically doing that instead of engaging the enemy on the ground, where politically dangerous casualties might occur. Bomb the Afghan women and children in their homes from up high, if there is even the remotest military resistance to US forces in their general neighborhood.

This is the same strategy that the US government formerly used in SE Asia, some 35 to 45 years previously. It is the same strategy that the NAZIs used when they pushed into East Europe against the Russians during the Second World War. In their pathway, they razed to the ground villages, towns, and even entire cities. It is even the same strategy that Mafia gangsters use against their opponents. It is the same strategy that the US fed Colombian death squads use, too. They go into villages with chain saws, and cut people up before their own family members. Basically, this is government sponsored terrorism against civilians, and the US is committing internationally recognized war crimes by targeting civilians instead of the armed combatants they face. The strategy, is to target the families of combatants, and not those who might actually be able to inflict return casualties upon the invading and occupying, barbarian armed forces.

see Hamid Karzai orders investigation

We expect this cowardice from the cowardly US military commanders and chiefs, like Dubya and Dick Cheney, Donald and Alberto, who all get great glee out of torturing US-held POWs. And we expect it from the US grunts, too. They mainly just want to get out alive, and don’t much care who gets hurt, as long as it is not themselves. Innocent children bombed as they play, or as they sleep? Well who cares? Not the uniformed soldier cowards, nor their leaders. They are much like the Israeli troops, another cowardly group of soldiers, that distributed hundreds of thousands of cluster bombes in the last 3 days of their Lebanon vacation. Early Christmas for the children? Well the uniformed forces of occupying armies don’t care. They are simply cowards who want to get back home whole, and they will follow cowardly orders, from cowardly leaders.

But what of the press? The press barely even reports Afghanistan these days to US readers. And when they do, they cowardly hide away the nature of what they are reporting on. To the US press, the Afghanistan fighting is a NATO conflict, and they will report whole articles without even once using the letters, ‘US’ or ‘USA’! Let’s keep our jobs, and let’s keep the whole Afghanistan issue away from the American public, who are too cowardly to actually think about what they are doing to that poor country.

And what about the US peaceniks’? They are cowardly, too. 99% of them vote for the Democratic Party, and talking about Afghanistan is too embarrasing to the top party hacks. So, shhhhhh….. Keep quiet. The recent AFSC tour of their ‘Eyes Wide Open’ exhibit was basically a ‘Mouths Tightly Closed’ exhibit of their AFSC political cowardice when it comes to Afghanistan. They should remember and be ashamed of this, when the Quaker leaders are inside the voter booths pushing the levers for the Democratic Party candidates. They could have put boots out for the US soldiers killed in Afghanistan. But they didn’t. They could have placed out shoes of Afghani civilians killed by US and allied troops, but they didn’t.

But the other liberal peaceniks from the other liberal churches are equally as cowardly. When was the last time one saw a sign saying, Get Out of Afghanistan Now? All the talk is of Iraq instead. The liberal megawebsite, commondreams, carries bumperstickers calling for Get out of Iraq, No war with Iran, and even No War with Syria. But Get Out of Afghanistan? Not a chance! More political cowardness. It would push the Democratic Party hacks too hard. Yet our country is now deliberately bombing civilian children in that country, and doing it routinely, too.

It is political cowardice to bomb huts full of empoverished women and children noncombatants, rather than fight on the ground below against the men. But that’s what an imperialist army is full of. They are full of cowards who want to kill people like they are playing some video game back in the suburbs at home. But it, too, is cowardly for the US Peace Movement not to demand that our government get its troops out of Afghanistan with the same force we demand it get out of Iraq. We are betraying the children of that country, who are being slaughtered down like cattle. Yes, we have a cowardly antiwar movement in the US that wants only to concentrate on ‘Iraq’, and getting their cowardly Democratic Party leaders elected to office once again. Let’s hope that liberals can grow some backbone, and start opposing this war, too. Otherwise, the peace crowd is just as bad as ‘our troops’, who mainly want to kill from afar and from up high, with no possilbe repercussions to their cowardly, uniformed selves. Those that don’t mind killing innocent children, just so that they can claim a high ‘enemy’ body count.

America’s Pirates

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No, this is not about ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, but about Microsoft and WalMart instead. Every year Forbes Magazine does its glowing presentation about the super-rich who rule us that really should be better called ‘Pirates of The United States of America’. Replace Johnny Depp with Bill Gates, perhaps, and have a great flick! Actually, a lot of liberal Democratic Party romantics already really seem to find him sexy, and if they flutter over Al Gore’s movie then certainly Bill Gates as pirate would be a blockbuster for them, if made into film. And YES go figure about some liberals’ personal taste? Throw in Hillary with Bill for yet more romance amongst the pirate super-rich. And the Democratic Party faithful will swoon.

So the gist of Forbes summary this year is that the top 400 people with big bucks gained another $120 billion over the last year. Yes, all through hard work. That gives these worthy pirates a total value of 1 and 1/4 triillion dollars. It broke my slide rule just calculating all that dough. Where did it come from, Folks? So hard to guess, ain’t it?

Hint, hint, hint, for the really thick. It came from theft. You got your pocket picked and still don’t know it! What could you do with an extra 1 and 1/4 trillion dollars those top 400 US pirates grabbed overall? And shoot, that’s not even talking about any Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, or dark seedy Arab pirates! How many pirates do you think the world’s poor can support? The Mexican poor support quite a few all alone, including ones’ called Hank, and another called Slim! And no doubt, America will turn out yet more next year.

Attention, All Pirates. Neiman Marcus’s Christmas catalog will be out soon! I hear there is even a yacht made out of solid diamonds for sale. How can it float, but it’s quite a sight to see? I love that catalog!

Dale Chihuly meet Brent Green

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Brent Green shortA friend of mine is a filmmaker and I’d like to crow about him a little. His name is Brent Green and I came to know him through the local filmmaker festival, The Pikes Peak Passion Film Festival.
 
Brent Green
Brent was from the East and settled in Colorado Springs for a while as he worked on his animated short films. He passed VHS copies through my mailbox with notes saying “please return asap this is my only copy.”

I was not impressed by the note and postponed having a look until he called me up and asked for them back. I told him I was having a public screening that night, did he want to join us? I felt my hand a little forced, but what the hell.

What the hell were my friends’ and my literal words when we saw Brent’s Susa’s Red Shoes. Amazing!

Brent featured prominently in the next two Passion Festivals and has since moved on to not surprisingly greener pastures. Grants, artists wanting to collaborate, shows in Chelsea galleries, a screening at the MOMA, a FilmMaker magazine profile, and a retrospective at UCLA. Brent’s third short Hadacol Christmas showed at Sundance this year. He told me it was incredible to watch a theater of 1000 people watch your film. I anticipated his fourth short to show at multiple festivals around the world, but Paulina Hollers has lapped the festival circuit. Its premier will be at the Getty. Yes. The Getty.

I’m relating this story, an indulgence obviously, not simply because it is invigorating and inspiring to me, but because of something I read recently in local art news. I read that our Fine Arts Center, The Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, has just announced that it has paid artist Dale Chihuly two millions dollars for yet more of his glass objects d’ crap. Their Chihuly show last year broke attendence records and they’d like to see more of that.

Dale Chihuly
Dale Chihuly makes giant glass tchotchkes which are just too ludicrous to behold, on pedestals even! He’s a performance artists too, chucking large glass balls into the sea (minus the traditional suspended fishing nets), as if it’s not industrial littering, and he hangs large bound glass droppings by iron exoskeletons over canals in Venice, a sight so superbly crass and dim-sighted. Then he can say his works have shown in Venice. Like Hasselhoff, big in Germany.

Christo, another single-named impresario, drapes landscapes but doesn’t pretend that the plastic wrap is the art in itself. He doesn’t sell pieces of it to provincial Fine Art Centers for two million dollars.

Dale Chihuly is an art director showoff who hires glass blowers to do his work and then sues them if they produce pieces of blown glass on their own. What? He’s copyrighted extruded glass? He’s trademarked giant hanging paperweights? This is fine art that someone thinks he’s patented. It’s a miserable waste of attention. And our city’s chief art center is wallowing in it.

My up and coming, once local, friend is at the Getty. We’re left with Chihuly.

Chihuly glass bottomed bottomA few years ago, our FAC was criticized for having sold off its choice Native American pieces in what appeared to have been an underhanded insider raid on its unmatched collection. We lost many irreplaceable pieces but the upside was that the FAC got some cash in exchange.
 
Now we see how they’re spending it. On Carnival glass. Do you remember why it was called Carnival Glass? Because it was all sparkly but wasn’t worth much. Carnival Glass was produced during the Great Depression when folk didn’t have much to spend. It was the poor man’s crystal. At least the price was right.

Used American soccer balls

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Soccer ball used in one gameThere’s a local drive to round up soccer balls to send off to the children of Iraq. And they don’t want new ones.
 
An eight year old friend of mine came home from school and explained the logic. “Iraqi children want soccer balls that have been played with by American children. Just like when I go to the ballgame and catch a ball that’s been hit into the bleachers. American kids are excited to have a baseball that’s been used by professional players. Iraqi kids are excited to have soccer balls used by American kids!”

Except that the distinction kids make between new and used is universal. Everywhere there are such things as hand-me-downs probably. Otherwise the concept of children of two nations sharing their toys with each other sounded nice.

Then I learned further instructions. If you do not have a used soccer ball to give and are inclined to purchase a new soccer ball, the organizers would like you to give the new ball to your local soccer league in exchange for a used one of theirs. Thus the local soccer teams will benefit from this program as well.

Does that sound like unmitigated self serving crap to you?

When charities solicit donations of toys for AMERICAN children at Christmas, they always specify that the toy must be NEW, not the least bit used.

Pictured: A soccer ball fit for Iraqi kids. Scuffed and scratched by American kids before the American kids got a new one.

War On Idiocy

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The WAR ON expression has come to mean what any more? War On Drugs. What did that mean? Trying to address the drug addiction problem, obviously. Wouldn’t it have been better to call it: “addressing the drug addiction problem?” Declaring a war on the noun drugs has meant thousands incarcerated for being victims.

Similarly, the War On Terrorism is having a disasterously misguided effect on the world. Horribly hilarious, if the world was made of words. Instead of addressing the problems that lead to terrorism, we are fighting a word. As if there is a culture of people whose highest ideology is terrorism.

The WAR ON expression began with President Lyndon Johnson, not with the War On The People Of Vietnam, but with the War On Poverty. That description fit. The problem at base level was poverty.

The idiocy-mongers at the helm of our national shipwreck, at their most disingenuous, are inventing other fictional wars against which they hope to rally public support. There was a War On Christmas apparently, and now they are rallying defenders against the War On Christianity. The attack is coming from the godless left, from the culture elites, etc.

Was there a War On Christmas? Is there a War On Christianity? I’d add a few more and let you decide. Is there a War On Republicans who vote against their own self interest? Is there a War On Corporations who deny Global Warming? Is there a War On Union Members who continue to vote for free trade and globalization and slave labor? Is there a War On Religious Revelers who believed there was a War On Christmas?

There for damn sure is! It’s called the WAR ON IDIOCY. It’s the effort to make Americans into less mal-informed, less mal-educated global citizens, for everybody’s good, especially their own. To paraphrase an early American patriot: it wasn’t the idiots who got us our democracy, it won’t be the idiots who help us keep it.

And you capital “C” Christians who think the end of the world is nigh -and you are trying to hasten it- if you don’t want “idiocy” to define “Christianity” it’s going to be up to you to behave yourself.

The War On Idiocy is a bastard of a fight. It’s the front of the class finally having to turn to the back of the class and say “Shut the fuck up you moron, you’re holding all of us back with your inanity! Believe what you want to believe, whatever, but kindly leave the curriculum to Miss Hillhoople and sit down, PLEASE!”

And then, because this is a war after all, can we help but add: “IDIOT!”

A Christmas message

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Christmas Lights over Camp CaseyCAMP CASEY COLORADO SPRINGS
Waiting in line at the Post Office the other day I overheard a local advertisement on the radio encouraging the usual holiday splurge “because you’ve been good this year!”
 
I thought to myself, who among Americans can say they’ve been good this year?

We’ve all of us, by our acquiescence, permitted the prosecution of an illegal occupation of a sovereign nation. We’ve overseen the slaughter of thousands, we’ve accepted large levels of collateral damage, we’ve sanctioned and justified the use of torture, in our name.

Outside of war, we’ve continued to abide the exploitation of child labor, prison labor, slave labor and poverty. We participated in the destruction of the natural world, in sexual exploitation and genocide. We’ve watched the suffering of fellow human beings, and permitted further suffering outside the view of our cameras.

Do we take responsibility for these offenses or not? Let’s at least concede this is not the year to say that we’ve been good.

To my friends who’ve spoken out, we may or may not have done our best, but let’s keep at it. Merry Christmas!

To those who didn’t feel the urge, or thought there was nothing that could be done: may the spirit of Christmas, of peace and goodwill inspire you.

For holiday cheer, I offer these amusements:
– Kurt Vonnegut’s dissection of our current leadership
– The War-on-Christmas canard scuttled [warning: profanity]
– The NEOCONS in pictures and song [one profanity, repeated]
– My Best-of-2005 collection.

Cheers,
Eric

Objectivity on local radio

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Dec 5 procession
This week some colleagues and I marched on our knees to the Colorado College president’s office to present signed petitions which asked that the college radio station carry a news program called DEMOCRACY NOW! (Exclamation theirs.) We’ve yet to receive a reply, but I wanted to explain our actions.

First of all, what is DEMOCRACY NOW? DN is a daily radio and television news show out of New York City that stands nearly alone in covering the stories which are being kept out of the corporate owned media. For example, every year the Colorado Springs Independent covers the year’s ten most censored stories. DN reports those and more, usually as they happen.

Do you know the story of Khaled al-Masri, the German Muslim who is currently being represented by the ACLU in a lawsuit against the CIA, for unlawful abduction, rendition, incarceration and torture? DN reported his story a year ago, after al-Masri found himself freshly drugged and dropped into a field in Macedonia. His story sounded so strange but had the ring of truth to it. Experts were planning to analyze strands of his hair to verify his account. It took more than a year before al-Masri was able to break national news. In between, how many extra-judicial abductions have been allowed to take place?

And the recent attention paid to the U.S. use of Napalm, and their use of White Phosphor as a chemical weapon? DN reported such incidences from the very first day the U.S. assault began.

Why KRCC? Because local community radio station is our great hope, and our first impediment.

By now it is widely accepted that FOX and the network media are mouthpieces for corporate moneyed interests. People of education turn to NPR and the NYT for example for what they believe is the balanced picture. But it’s not, and critical thinkers are beginning to see that the media has been playing a good cop bad cop psych-op routine. One side of the media plays the good cop, with its supposed liberal bias, but ultimately has the same agenda as its partner.

The local community looks to KRCC as a trusted advocate of objective news. But a growing number who supplement their news from the internet and from the Indy see that NPR really doesn’t cut it anymore. Have you heard NPR advancing the “Christmas” vs “holiday” war-on-Christmas canard? Elsewhere this story has been exposed as a concoction of the far right, but NPR is dutifully giving it legs.

Why go to the president of CC? Because KRCC station manager Mario Valdes has repeatedly rebuked everyone’s requests. Community members have been after him for years and his reply has been the same. Mr. Valdes has even slandered the effort by categorizing it as a small minority who want a political bias on KRCC. No one is asking for bias, just objectivity. And the number of people who’ve made this request has not been small. And it’s always been growing.

Plenty of public radio stations have adopted DN and can provide wonderful testimonies. They testify that DN beats out Morning Edition and All Things Considered in popularity. In some cases DN is their leading fund-raiser. While it might be hard right now to mount a large rally in front of the station to advocate for this change, it’s clear that if KRCC carried DN, and then threatened to take it away, crowds would protest en mass.

What next? Give station manager Mario Valdes the chance to argue for what values he stands when he opposes DEMOCRACY NOW. Let’s hear beyond the arguments which NPR advances to try to stem their eroding control over their affiliates. NPR has always fought the intrusion of a spoiler like DN in their line-up because it significantly hampers their editorial discretion.

Let’s schedule a townhall meeting, a public debate. To make it interesting public viewing, let’s make it a tag team debate. If Mr. Valdes is so concerned that Colorado Springs is such an uneducated community, too easily put off by issues of social justice and human rights, let’s cater to his mythical plebeian audience. The debate can be tag team, open to all, WWF rules!

Mr. Valdes will then get to see just how small is the group of DN advocates. As we’ll see how many people share Mr Valdes’ opinion against more objectivity on KRCC. Mr Valdes may bring the support and sympathy of many listeners, but how many will stand up next to him to argue against freedom of the press, Democracy Now’s many prestigious journalism awards, and the growing movement to reclaim the airwaves for the people?

Reprinted from MyKRCC.org

What if you were a friend of Valerie Plame?

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Put yourself in someone else’s shoes for the moment.

Let’s say you are the wife of a mid-management engineer employed at a manufacturing facility in the Middle East, or Africa, or anywhere in the world.

Say you were known to frequent parties thrown by the wife of the American Embassador. Or you attended monthly luncheons perhaps, or any of the multitude of fund raisers and NGO activities which she attended.

Say you still kept in touch, or exchanged Christmas cards. Perhaps she called you even after she’d moved away. Perhaps she has asked you to welcome friends of hers who will be visiting your country.

Say that wife’s name was Valerie Plame, wife of Embassador Joe Wilson. Say perhaps that you were one of many social contacts that Valerie Plame kept to talk about social issues, especially about weapons proliferation. Perhaps you shared a concern for illegal weapons development or manufacture.

Now say you suddenly read in the newspaper that it has been revealed that Valerie Plame was not just an embassador’s wife, but a CIA operative.

Who saw you with her? Who has access to the telephone records which could implicate you? And what about everyone else in danger of being suspected of revealing secrets to the US CIA? Your diplomat, ex-pat friends and fellow nationals, all around the world, members of other social groups, peace societies.

Depending on where you live, on how paranoid is your governement, or on how corrupt are you industrialists, you are now a marked person. Among countless others. You may be viewed as a current threat. Or you may be a target for kiling merely for nationalist honor.

Bob Novak was the conservative columnist who outed Valerie Plame. He was tipped off by two senior white house sources who wanted to intimidate Embassador Wilson from speaking out against the war. Bob Novak refuses to name the sources, many believe one of them to be Karl Rove.

Shouldn’t Bob Novak be held liable none the less? He knew that outing a CIA agent was a federal crime. Blowing Valerie Plame’s cover was the least of the repercussions. Think of the thousands of her friends and contacts all over the world who may or may not have been helping the cause of reducing nuclear proliferation.