Tag Archives: cocaine

Film critics toe corporate line to re-kill messenger Gary Webb, after Hollywood

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Gary Webb
AT BEST “KILL THE MESSENGER” portrays suspiciously deceased journalist Gary Webb as a heroic sleuth who refused to compromise his principles. At best, the film re-reports the enormous crime which Webb exposed in his series DARK ALLIANCE, that the CIA’s support of the Nicaraguan CONTRAs in the 1980s involved facilitating the smuggling of drugs into the US, in such large quantities as to precipitate the crack cocaine epidemic, delivered to our major inner cities by the CIA. UNFORTUNATELY the film muddies the crack connection, as Webb’s detractors did back then. Two deliberate plot omissions suggest this is probably not a coincidence.

Conveniently the screenplay ends before the years when Gary Webb was able to elaborate on those links. By then he’d lost his audience. Unfortunately the film that might have given his life’s work a main stage reprise chose not to go that far. Does it matter anymore? These days the CIA and its covert cohorts are understood to have authored a litany of unimaginable evils. So it’s not too early to demonize the CIA. Evidently someone thinks the American public is not ready to be shown the racist stratagems of corportate class war.

Exposing the genesis of the crack attack on African American ghettos is clearly a missed opportunity for a film in 2014. Given Ferguson. Given the rising awareness of our government’s coordinated and premeditated containment and criminalization of dark-skinned populations. Let’s remember that while the US was fighting Nicaraguan rebels, it was also at war with the Black Liberation Army. Funding and arming drug warlords was the same strategy Brazil used to administrate the favelas, via proxy gangs. One might say that LA’s Bloods and Crips played domestic Contras set loose to destabilize community building efforts by militant Black Power.

UNPARDONABLE however are the film’s departures from the truth, which paint a curious fiction as if to indemnify the national press from its complicity with the intelligence community. Two lies will stand out to anyone who was there. (Did the filmmakers think their audience would be only millennials?)

First, the San Jose Mercury News was hardly a “local news outlet” unfamiliar with handling national stories and unknown to the average reader. The Mercury News was an award winning paper which competed with metropolitan mastheads. I can’t imagine its employees aren’t indignant by the film’s yokel characterization. The Los Angeles Times’ vindictive campaign to defame Gary Webb was hardly driven by professional embarassment over a missed scoop.

Second, the Contra-CIA drug smuggling link was suspected well before Gary Webb brought it to the mainstream. I remember during the Iran-Contra Hearings a decade earlier, the alternative media often lamented that the official investigation had been narrowed to exclude mention of the cocaine connection.

These amendments might be excused for simplifying the plot except that they minimize the breadth of the corporate identity of Webb’s censors. How very 90s of this narrative to pretend that Capitalist media outlets compete for news scoops like highschoolers at a science olympics. Newspapers and networks have always only ever peddled the themes their owners dictate. Media consolidation has only meant the manufacturing of public consent has become more uniform, perfectly illustrated by the collusion of the tag-team that hit Gary Webb.

AND AFTER HOLLYWOOD FAILED GARY WEBB, the film critics were waiting with daggers.

David Denby begins his New Yorker review by associating KTM with other crusading journalist thrillers, “some depicting real events, some not”, then pointing to director Michael Cuesta’s “paranoid” TV work, finally contriving that the film botches “many contraditory assertions.” Um, sorry, neither. But I do worry that giving all thumbs down will succeed in scaring away viewers. Denby finishes by making it all about actor Jeremy Renner, un-ironically aping the campaign waged on Gary Webb, overtly described in the film, shifting the focus from the story to all about the messenger.

The Washington Post dispatched one-time Webb adversary Jeff Leen to reprise the hatchet job begun when Gary Webb broke the story. Labeling Webb as “no journalism hero”, Leen’s rebuttal hangs on the technicality that no CIA “employees” were implicated, ignoring what everyone knows post-Blackwater, post-Wikileaks, that the US has long outsourced its crimes, from torture to food service. Dimwit.

Barack Obama is your president

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Does the presidential plane say NIGGER?COLORADO SPRINGS- The superintendent of District 12 schools announced Friday that Barack Obama’s address to schoolchildren on Tuesday will not be shown in his district’s schools. I’m no defender of this president, but I have to ask, what possible rationale could excuse such disrespect? It’s probably too easy to decry racism, so what’s left?

Personally, of course, I could imagine steering schoolchildren clear of George W. Bush. Old President Bush had a 13% or so approval rating. Foreign leaders dismissed him as a moron. It was whispered that he’d resumed drinking, and it was common knowledge that he’d been a cocaine user until his forties. George Bush was no example for impressionable youth. What parent could hold him up as a role model, other than the town drunk or village idiot who was not to be emulated? But I’m certain the same schools just a year ago would never have crossed that president.

Setting aside his surprising political turns, Barack Obama projects inspiring leadership qualities. He speaks intelligently with attentiveness and compassion. His message to children is to be one of encouragement in the hard times ahead, dealing with the increased imperative of higher education. Recent generations have been growing successively nihilistic. Perhaps the economy’s turn is an appropriate occasion for a president to address our nation’s kids. We like to call them our future.

Bush gave our schools the disastrous NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT which completely degraded public schools and ushered the calls for privatization of education under the guise of Charter Schools. In Colorado, Bush’s measure prompted the CSAPs, which hobble teachers by requiring classes to focus on passing standardized tests, instead of teaching broader lessons. Bush’s act also guarantees that military recruiters have access to the personal records of our children at their most vulnerable, to more easily prey upon them when they are rebellious teens. Bush was no friend of schoolchildren.

Election button 2008Obama on the other hand won a decisive victory in November, and no small number of his supporters were young children. Many teachers were pushing for Obama and his promise of hope, in the midst of a culture of pessimism sowed by George W. and his destructive agendas. Bush waged war against everything schoolchildren are fostered to care about. Obama’s campaign represented salvation for our planet. How now are school administrators prepared to extricate the students from their own personal rapport with the new president?

To quote a favorite Twit, Badbanana:

Obama is going to address the nation’s schoolchildren? One good fart joke and the Democrats control Congress for 60 years.

We know of course the high pitched extremists groups whom the superintendent thinks he is placating. They are the Teabaggers and Birthers who reject Obama as president. “He’s not my president” they say. They learned the phrase from their adversaries who protested the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, but never understood its meaning. Obviously they have nothing to teach children about the workings of democracy.

At the recent health care town hall hosted by Congressman Doug Lamborn, I had a chance to witness these Birthers, so named because they reject Barack Obama’s birth certificate. They are so certain that Obama will be discovered to be foreign born and will thus be stripped of the presidency. “Three More Months, Three More Months” they countered, while progressive citizens were chanting for health care reform.

Ed Bircham of Bircham Office ProductsLocal wing nut business owner Ed Bircham was dancing a jig singing “Ho Ho, Obama’s Got To Go, Ho Ho.” Egged on by KVOR djs and unabashed gay-bashers, Ed Bircham repeated his calls for Obama’s removal from office.

Incredible. Obama hasn’t done anything yet –which is my complaint– so what have the teabaggers against him? It’s patently absurd, if it wasn’t so obviously bigoted. “No Country For Old Bigots” I yelled.

Actually I joined local NAACP leader James Tucker in interjecting “Obama Is Your President” between Bircham’s call for his ouster. “Respect Your President” we found ourselves saying, even as I knew that I would not hold myself to such restraint. On the other hand, my opposition to President Obama has nothing to do with his skin color. On what principles do these white men disagree with Barack Obama, except that they’re not about to show deference to a nigger?

Semper Fi, Ollie- Again…

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You know, this whole scene in Israel and Palestine right now has the marks of Bush double dealing again, playing all sides against the middle.

The cowboy-looking swarthy fellow who identified himself as a Jew AND a Marine. last night as he was cursing us…

…brought this back to mind.

I wonder, sometimes, how much guilt does the U.S. government share, in our name and with our tax dollars of course, and our kin on the ground… and under the ground.

Why, exactly, did the “smart money” give arms to Hizbollah?

Knowing of course that Hizbollah doesn’t like them and would do their level best to strike, but you notice, the so-called Patriots who struck the deal, they didn’t get killed.

Over 300 Marines, mostly the scions of the “lower” classes, got killed.

Likewise, when the deals were struck with the Medellin Cartel, same time, yeah? There was a “Massive Crackdown” on the southern borders, for those of us who smoked marijuana, it was a Famine in the Land.

Suddenly, though, “black tar” and smokeable cocaine were everywhere.

You might say, tongue firmly in cheek, there was a massive “smack” or a “crack”, down on the southern border.

When I was stopped by the Border Patrol and they were waving guns in my face, screaming in Spanish, there were actually death squads in El Paso at the same time.

And since they didn’t offer any badge or insignia type evidence to the contrary, at least primarily, yeah, I thought that was who it was.

The idea that these Drug Militia were financed at least partly by Yankee Government donations crossed my mind more than once.

Fortunately, a bullet hasn’t crossed my mind, not yet at least.

Then, Bush comes off with the strangest ever response to the 9/11 strikes… his operatives start saying that the Colombians in particular were funneling money to al Qa’eda…. and no explanation of why exactly they would know that.

The one that fits most perfectly is the connection between Saddam Hussein and Bush, Manuel Noriega and Bush… as in Bush the Elder and “Saint Ronnie the Incredibly Teflon Nice”…

USMC Lt. Colonel Oliver North.

I would say, and Mr North should listen, he’s been playing with some incredibly BAD boys.

North is now the biggest link left between Bush Junior and al Qa’eda.

He should look to what happened to the Other Major Links.

Probably with his assistance. Because he’s not averse in any way to lying, stealing, killing or betrayal…

Perhaps his “loyalty” to the Bu’ush Regime lies in his innate cowardice, he’s scared to testify.

How about it, Ollie? You’ve got friends“associates in town here who monitor this website and our activities, and our writings.

Somewhere under all that slime with which you coated yourself, maybe there’s a little bit, a spark, if you will, of actual Patriotism.

Truth, Ollie, truth… it’s the only path left for you,
I’ve looked down the barrels of your comrades guns before. The only way I survived was by standing my ground.

Semper Fi.

You know what it means. “faithful forever”.

You haven’t been faithful yet, not to the Marine Corps, nor to America nor to God Himself.

Nor to yourself. You’ve let yourself become the Lap-dog of the Empire.

Make that stand for the first time in your life.

Pentagon Airlines carries both cocaine and renditioned prisoners

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Cocaine planeThis scandal is being kept pretty much out of the US news. What we are referring to is the Mexico drug plane used for US ‘rendition’ flights: report It really shows the low moral character of the US government torturers. The torturers are connected with cocaine pushing too, though is that really so surprising?

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Shades of Colombia where the US puppet government is connected with the cocaine crowd, too. And brings back memories of Colonel Ollie North in Central America. There is a long history of Pentagon connections with pushers.

‘USA! USA! USA!’

This is the chant that many of the McCainites responded with to the antiwar protesters as these militarism nuts lined up like sheep to go see their clown during his campaign visit yesterday in Colorado Springs, That got met by simply leading their chant in front of them,

‘USA, USA, USA…. USA Stop Torture of POWs Now!’

Shut the fools up real quick, it did. Try it. The Right Wing no longer even tries to muster up its previous effort to deny the reality of US torture of POWs. They are just pathetic as they try to call others out as being UnAmerican, though it is they themselves who support using torture on innocent US held prisoners. Just pathetic they are… And shameless, too.

Is Bush problem drinking still a secret?

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We learned only after Roosevelt’s presidency that he had to be propped-up for photo-ops because FDR was otherwise confined to a wheelchair. The American public learned only after Ronald Reagan retired that he suffered from Alzhemers for most of his second term. Once our decider idiot’s joyride is over, is there something it will then be safe then to tell us that Vladimir Putin already knows about George Bush Jr?
This way Mr Bush

We know he’s incurious, uneducated and inappropriate. We know he was an alcoholic and cocaine addict into his 40s, until he found religion before the campaign trail. Is it possible some of his down-home stupidity could be drink-fueled?

Bush at the swimming eventIn the alter-universe of the blogosphere, it’s being surmised that George W. was blotto at the Beijing Olympics. Here’s one of the pics floating that thesis.

Colombia- the Pentagon’s South American mafia state

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Colombia, quite simply, is the Pentagon’s South American mafia state. It’s government is headed up by a death squad kingpin with multiple connections to the cocaine trafficking trade that Washington, D.C. says it is supposedly fighting. And now, Colombia’s government has begun to act, with Pentagon OK, like Israel acts against Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza, and Turkey against Kurdish regions of Iraq.

In fact, more and more the Pentagon and Washington themselves are acting like international gangsters. Unfortunately, the military-industrial cartel offices in Northern Virginia are much better funded than any other gangsters the world has ever known.

The latest terrorism coming out of our nation’s military warehouse, was the Colombia excursion into Ecuador to shoot down, in their sleep, a political leader opposing the Colombian death squad gang headed by Uribe. This in the midst of negotiations to free prisoners held by the FARC. The Colombian government doesn’t want these prisoners to be released, but wants merely to continue their own death squad activities, sanctioned by the Democrats and Republicans alike, in DC.

Venezuela mobilizes forces to Colombia border (to counter joint Colombian-Pentagon threats)

The Colombian military attack inside Ecuador’s borders was Made in USA.

Televised football is the fascist pageant

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Offensive projectileI’ll tell you, this is the heart of the beast. Colorado Springs may be the apex of US religio-military nonsense, but the American beast is television, the rotten core of which is Fox TV, and its absolute poisoned heart is televised football.

Football is crass, violent, anonymous, uniformed, incorporated and a perfectly trivial distraction from all else. Nothing new, but I’d like to offer this impression.

For starters, have you noticed, the camera coverage of the cheerleaders is from exactly the angle a pervert would ask? In uncouth parlance it’s called “upskirt.” How do you suppose the camera bearers excuse themselves panning across the cheerleaders at bare thigh level? It’s neither a spectator POV, nor that of any athlete, unless he’s Chucky, strolling well wide to receive the cheerleaders. When the girls leap on and off the shoulders of their male counterparts, the cameras explicably-enough climb to male shoulder level.

Of course it’s not a matter of impolite cameramen getting up from their knees. The cameras today float on wires like surveillance robots to produce tailor-made angles. Being my point I suppose.

Thanks to these robots, the audience is afforded action shots without precedence. As a result, we can follow the action practically outside the context of what’s taking place. It’s great isn’t it? Who cares what bones are getting crunched outside the frame, follow the ball. The action is violent but without consequence. Athletes are expected to defy physics for cameras themselves liberated from constraint. Catch without thought to how you’ll land. The players are so jacked up on painkillers and adrenaline that the impacts will register only later. Off camera.

That’s how we fight wars, isn’t it? Eye on the bouncing ball, all damage is collateral, the players expendable.

Players jump all over themselves enthusiastically after successful plays, but lo, have been forbidden to posture victoriously in the end zone. The unsportsmanlike penalty is unpopular and proving difficult for the athletes to avoid. I can tell you what that’s about. The rich white man doesn’t mind his gladiators amping themselves for a challenge, but he’ll be damned if he has to witness what will almost always be a black man crowing about his superiority. Rich white men can propagate rap music to the masses like crack cocaine, but they’re not about to abide the braggadocio themselves. When did acting too-big-for-your-britches become unsportsmanlike behavior? When it proved to make heroes of the likes of Muhammed Ali. Who went to jail sooner than go to Vietnam.

The media coverage is equally restrictive about which athletes it acquaints with viewers. Do you think Peyton Manning is the only charismatic quarterback, or rather the only safe spokesman? The videotaped segments of players introducing themselves have become completely stilted in formality. Post-game interviews mandate that athletes wear some official headgear which casts their features in shadow, preserving their anonymity. They remain monosyllabic gladiator brutes who otherwise wear helmets, increasingly now with visors like so many Power Ranger Storm Troopers.

The talking heads attendant to the bowl games, whether ex-athletes or sportscasters, were all wearing the Neocon uniform, the black suit, and new for 2008, a four button jacket buttoned to the top like a veritable military uniform. Only Brent Musburger had enough clout to decline the odd conformity. Black used to denote caretakers. Fully buttoned suits were for tailors and soldiers. History has never looked fondly on soldiers who wore black.

Getting high with Darwin and Keynes

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stop the war on drugsThe war on drugs. Oh yes, it’s a nasty endless little war, one that’s filling our prisons with small-time users/entrepreneurs and costing the taxpayers billions. It’s a war that hasn’t helped our poor addicted countrymen one iota, and it’s a war for which win-happy Bush has not yet declared victory. But neither has he hung his head in defeat, which he certainly should.

The DEA bigwigs ought to be lamenting the indisputable fact that its decades-long fight against drugs is not working. In fact, it’s making things worse. After spending more than six billion dollars to cripple the Medellin and Cali cartels, the IBM and General Motors of the drug industry, cocaine production and trafficking in Colombia has actually increased. Hundreds of smaller and more efficient cartels have filled the void left by the blue chip cartels, kind of like the dot.com explosion, except the brilliant, creative, innovators happen to run drugs. And the DEA hasn’t a clue who they are or how to stop them.

The war on drugs has penalized and incarcerated thousands of small-time drug dealers/users, the weak and dumb, the poor souls who would never be counted among the fittest in a Darwinian assessment. Years of artificial selection have given rise to the super drug-dealer, the one who, like the virulent bacteria that have arisen from overuse of antibiotics, is more efficient, more cunning, more innovative and much more difficult to eradicate. How can politicians hope to win a war with a strategy that ensures that only the most efficient and creative drug traffickers survive?

The relentless persecution of small-time drug dealers has decreased the supply of drugs on our streets. I suppose this can be seen as a good thing. However, the demand remains. Thus, according to accepted economic theory, interdiction has supported higher prices for the super dealers and provided incentive for more traffickers to enter the drug economy.

Alas, the war on drugs has been a complete waste of time and money. It’s time for the DEA to huddle in the war room and come up with a new strategic plan. They should bring in some new generals, hopefully with public health backgrounds. They might even want to get off their moral steeds and decriminalize recreational drug use, thereby decreasing the demand for illegal drugs. They might decide to throw their allotted resources at dangerous criminals and our underlying social problems and let the small-time stoners be. That is if success is truly their goal.

After all, wouldn’t it make sense to address the underlying demand for drugs? Shouldn’t the DEA stop focusing on supply and address the unchanged demand for illicit drugs? Of course, this would mean funding public health initiatives and educational programs which are not nearly as fun as fighting a war against cagey dark-skinned enemies in exotic foreign locales. No, the men in suits aren’t really interested in giving up their fat federal budgets in order to win the struggle against drug abuse.
The war is too much fun.

So we will keep building expensive prisons and filling them disproportionately with people of color, too poor to make waves. We’ll keep propping up the super-drug dealers we’ve created. We’ll ask Congress for $1.4 billion to fight the drug-crazed Mexicans from Merida, the enemy du jour. And we’ll rejoice that, as is true for all of our wars, there is no end in sight.

I’ve cured AIDS !!!

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The Cure for AIDS
1. If you are gay/str8/lesbian/trans/bi and have tested for HIv and been told you are positive for the antibodies to HIv, (using Western Blot type test which register as much as 70% false positives) or been told due to a low T-cell count or high viral load count with PCR test, you are at risk for AIDS, and that HIv is the cause … you need to first thing, look your doctor or AIDS org. counselor in the eye and say: I’m not taking the AZT, HAART, Protease Inhibitors, chemo poison drugs that are the main regimen for treatment and that will destroy my immune system and internal organs (depending on dosage and length of time on the meds). Nor will I be a guinea pig for any new untested drugs or vaccines. Nor will I take any drugs for HIv because HIv is not cytotoxic nor can it destroy my T-cells. Over 60 known diseases cross react with the unreliable Elisa or Western Blot type HIv tests giving false positives. Don’t believe the HIv=AIDS “death sentence”. Sources: Help For HIV and Living Without HIV Drugs.

2. If you are pregnant and test “positive” for the HIv antibodies (meaning your immune system has destroyed it and you’re actually HIv negative) or the PCR viral count/low T-cell farse, refuse the drugs vehemently. HIv in infants passes in 90% of cases. In the remaining cases it really doesn’t matter as HIv can do nothing being a non-cytotoxic retrovirus and will likely soon be passed by healthy immune system. AZT drugs cause many different birth/developmental defects! Retroviruses cannot destroy the cells they infect. Long known in virology. See African Treatment Information Group (a PDF)

3. If you are a gay male, stop having unprotected sex especially if promiscuous because multiple std’s and then resistance to antibiotics cause immune suppression. And possible immune destruction if in combination with this you are doing poppers, I.V. drugs, meth, heroin etc……heavily. And not getting sleep. Foreign proteins from sperm that may enter through torn anal lining are more serious as this may be a causation of autoimmunity where the immune system attacks itself.

4. If you are a hemophiliac getting blood transfusions, know that HIv is a retrovirus, cannot cause anything and that you are more at risk of foreign proteins or other real viruses in donor blood reacting in your body and overwhelming your immune system. You need to be extra ambitious in taking care of your immune system. Don’t buy into HIv.

5. For all; Stop all heavy drug use as in I.V.drugs like heroin, meth, cocaine. Limit marijuana and also alcohol, and take care of your immune system with regular exercise, laughter, lots of water, avoiding stress, avoiding refined sugars, flour, cut down or quit dairy, and get as close to vegetarian diet (i.e. raw foods, organic) as possible. Stop worrying about HIv. Personally I will never worry about HIv testing again. In 1st world nations supposed HIv infecteds live long healthy lives without AZT or any HIv drugs.

That’s it. I’ve just cured American, European and other 1st world nation “AIDS!” You’re welcome.

AIDS in Africa, Distinguishing Fact from Fiction (a PDF)
African and other similar circumstance countries with many poor living in squalid, unsanitary, overcrowded slum conditions with rampant malnutrition, unsanitary water, parasitical disease and lack of access to health care …well we all know their fate. Because no one cares about them. UNAIDS, WHO and CDC can however count their deaths and diseases as AIDS by their own permission and rules, without HIv.

No wonder we’re fooled into believing that they are dying of AIDS. It is indifference they are really dying of. And all the old diseases and conditions of developing poor countries, now categorized as AIDS cases or deaths. All of UNAIDS, CDC and WHO HIv/AIDS case numbers are projections that never develop into real numbers. Or outright lies. Death by HIv caused AIDS is a lie.

What Killed Makgatho Mandela?
Did Nelson Mandela’s son really die of AIDS?

AZT -Shouldn’t we ask, why give a drug that mimics the symptoms of a “probable” causation HIv, that you’re trying to cure with same drug? I know the answer:

Glaxo Wellcome puts the following warning in large, bold-faced, capital letters at the start of the section in the 1999 Physician’s Desk Reference that describes AZT (referred to under the name Retrovir or Zidovudine).

“RETROVIR (ZIDOVUDINE) MAY BE ASSOCIATED WITH SEVERE HEMATOLOGIC TOXICITY INCLUDING GRANULOCYTOPENIA AND SEVERE ANEMIA PARTICULARLY IN PATIENTS WITH ADVANCED HIV DISEASE (SEE WARNINGS). PROLONGED USE OF RETROVIR HAS ALSO BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH WITH SYMPTOMATIC MYOPATHY SIMILAR TO THAT PRODUCED BY HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS.”

An earlier version of the Physician’s Desk Reference, published in 1992 made the connection even clearer:

“It is often difficult to distinguish adverse events possibly associated with Zidovudine administration from underlying signs of HIV disease or intercurrent illness.”

Happy World AID$ Day !!

Militarizing society everywhere

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America’s ‘War on Drugs’ is creating disaster across the planet. This week it came home to my neighborhood, as the Colorado Springs police closed down a whole block on Madison Street, of all places, to do its Swat Team training. Helped in this endeavor by the local Jewish Synagogue, who loaned them a house to use, about 20 cops, 5 dog terrorists, and 12 pig mobiles wasted the afternoon away playing with their toys.

Switch now to a new Brazilian film, Tropa de Elite, that shows how this nonsense plays out in the poor neighborhoods of that great South American country, as the very same militarized policing units act as death squads, all in the name of ‘fighting drugs’.

Switch to Afghanistan where a US occupation army pretends to be fighting the spread of opium.

Switch to Colombia, where the US death squads pretend to be fighting cocaine.

It’s time to get the police out of all our neighborhoods, cut the Pentagon down to size, and fight the expansion of Fort Carson into yet more of SE Colorado. Aren’t you tired of them militarizing society everywhere?

The Semite’s anti-Semite

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Would it be anti-Semitism to make note that the US entertainment industry is predominated by Jews? Studio heads, producers, financiers are disproportionately Jewish, fair to say? Television, newspapers, publishing houses, quite a number headed by Jews. We could throw in the fashion industry, department stores, talent agencies, advertising agencies, financial institutions, it seems so stereotypical, but it is oddly true. The head start which Jews got during Christianity’s Dark Ages when no one but a Jew could a lender be, has set people of Jewish lineage well ahead in the world of commerce. Businesses can have an air of waspness, as the Bourgeoisie always did, but behind them, financing them, were Jews. It is not defamatory to make this observation, is it? No disrespect intended toward Jews.

It’s like pointing out that due in no small part to the African-American heritage having involved the selective breeding of slaves, Black athletes now dominate every professional sport in their hood. Of late, even golf. This is not racist talk, it’s straight talk.

So let’s address the Jewish lock on the US communications industry. It looks waspish, all the talking heads, the fat men, are wasps, but the money men are Jews. On the TV, rarely is any fun made of Jews, or Israel. The Israeli lobby can dominate our congress but the media is not going to tell us about it. Our TVs can make fun of Evangelicals, lampoon all priests as pedophiles, browbeat black welfare mothers, but Jews are inviolate. Is it because Jews have editorial control? Who knows.

When something like the Mel Gibson outburst happens, I can’t help but wonder how complex this gets. Gibson’s drunken tantrum didn’t have to make the news, in fact the police tried to downplay it. Instead the media ran with it, making Mel Gibson a household joke. Why? He would seem to be a valuable media property, why tarnish it? Later when I saw the release of Apocalypto, with Mel Gibson’s name getting top billing, I had to wonder whether the anti-Semitic rant was tarnish at all. Maybe in some ways it made Gibson more popular. Maybe it enhanced the box office for Apocalypto.

Then I heard a pundit criticizing the excessive media coverage of Gibson’s tirade compared to the lesser media coverage of Hezb’Allah’s simultaneous rampage against Israel. That false comparison hit a note for me. The media hadn’t failed to report Israel’s travails facing rocket attacks, what they failed to cover was Israel’s assault on Lebanon and Israel’s pledge to bomb ten buildings in Beirut for every Hezb’Allah rocket that struck an Israeli. The media failed to report the Lebanese civilians being massacred out of all proportion to the Israeli soldiers killed. It failed to report the secret raids in Palestine under cover of the assault on Lebanon. The media continues to underreport the targeted assassinations of Lebanese and Palestinian politicians, duly elected, with whom Israel does not want to deal.

But in the midst of all the non-reporting on Lebanon, word was still filtering out about Israel’s atrocities. It was coming mostly over the internet, via international news sources, but the truth was reaching many Americans. By the time Mel Gibson made his drunken anti-Semitic rant, a good number of Americans were coming to see that an Israeli-driven blood-bath was being perpetrated in the Middle East and American Jews were providing cover, even defending it. In a sense, as Israeli atrocities escalated, someone was bound to decry it. And it came in the form of a drunken Mel Gibson. And the media seized on it.

Kinda like the emperor parading naked, his handlers looking nervously around hoping that no one breaks decorum. But a young boy is bound to speak up unless you can preempt it with a moment you can manage. Instead of a boy, a stooge, speaking what everyone dares think, but a stooge easily discredited. Archie Bunker drunk, instead of Michael Wallace stone sober. Thus the media can address the issue of the anti-Israel backlash as anti-Semitism and not the issue of Israeli genocide in Lebanon and Palestine.

Karl Rove did this with George Bush’s cocaine rap in college. Rove knew the police records would come up, so he leaked them to a reporter whom Rove knew could be discredited. St Martin’s Press published the facts in Favorite Son, Rove stepped out to reveal the JB Hatfield’s dubious past. Immediately St Martin’s Press voluntarily withdrew all copies and burned them. Bush’s arrest for cocaine possession, very likely drug dealing, and the community service he received at a time when possession of marijuana would land prison time, simply went away.

Oh, Favorite Son was republished, and the facts circulate online, but the media didn’t and doesn’t cover it. You’d think they’d like a great story. I’m always reminded of why most of TV shows are so dumb, because they make the commercials look brilliant. That is, after all, the business of televison

I am not suggesting that Mel Gibson is part of a media conspiracy. Not in the least. I am suggesting that how the media choses to shape a story, whether to tell it or not, how to tell it, is certainly conspiratorial. Conspiracy is a loaded term because it’s become a discredited term. A handful of media entities colluding to shape a story is not a conspiracy anymore than you deciding to organize a surprise birthday party for a coworker would be a conspiracy. In your case, there’s a clear common interest in keeping the party a secret and you do it. In the case of a media conglomerate owners who decide what news may or may not hurt their common friend Israel, it doesn’t take a conspiracy to agree on a common cause. Show only Israelis worrying about rocket attacks, don’t show the half million cluster bombs left in Lebanon to snare curiosity-killed toddlers.

And when there’s a undercurrent brewing up in America, bursting to decry the Israeli murderers and their apologist Jews at home, point the camera at one who’s famous, maybe mildly sympathetic, drunk of course so it’ll be forgivable and let him rant. Next in front of everyone slap his wrists to teach how unseemly it is to be brnaded anti-Semitic. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt Gibson much, remember the adage, no such thing as bad publicity. When Apocalypto comes around, Gibson’s name will still draw. And Apocalypto’s message will work even better on the dumb white supremacists who thought his rant was serious.

It’s not anti-Semitic to condemn Israel for its campaign of genocide and apartheid in Palestine and Lebanon. It’s not anti-Semitic to point at the Israeli influence over our government’s actions. It’s not anti-Semitic or defamatory to accuse American Jews of uncritical support of colonial Zionism. It is not a case for the Jewish Anti-Defamation League to ask the American Jews underwriting our media to stop lying to themselves and us.

Humor

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I once had to break up with a perfectly good boyfriend. He was 6’5″, 240 pounds, Denver Broncos tight end, straight-A student, fast car, cool apartment….blah, blah. We had dated for two years, discussed marriage and children, a serious deal. But I knew that it was time for me to pull the plug. Why, you ask? Here’s the honest truth. He thought the Three Stooges were HILARIOUS.
 
pictureThis may seem a ridiculous reason but, really, when your man is curled up in a fetal position night after night, laughing convulsively at Larry, Curly and Moe, a feeling of separateness, a moat that no drawbridge can span, envelops you and leaves you completely alone, bereft, devoid of vision and hope.

I’ve often said that my sense of humor has saved me as I’ve weathered the storms of life. Don’t laugh. I’m very serious about this. I think the ability to see irony or absurdity, the ability to be self-effacing, has enabled me to cope with all that has come my way. A sense of humor is more therapeutic to me than Prozac or Valium or crack cocaine (it was only that one time, I swear).

This past weekend I stumbled across VH1’s 100 Best Saturday Night Live skits. I think I may be one of the only people on the planet who has watched SNL religiously, season after season, since its inception in 1975. I was in the 8th grade when SNL began. I’m 44 now. In a good year perhaps 30% of the skits could qualify as funny. But those that are change our perspective, change our lives really. Do you remember when the old George Bush overcame the wimp factor to become our 41st president? Do you remember when he drew a line in the sand…daring the Iraqis to mess with the US of A? His approval rating was higher at that time than almost any president in history. Enter Dana Carvey. His affectionate, yet biting, parody of George Bush allowed us all to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Yes, we elected him, we like him….but we have reservations. Na Ga Da…what the hell does that mean?

Now we have president number 43, Dubya. Shit, hell, fuck. Please give us something to laugh about because he’s letting us down big time. This war sucks. At least let us mock his laugh. Hehehehe. My goodness, can’t we make fun of his fraternity boy demeanor….his inability to speak in complete sentences? If not, how about those daughters of his? Texas girls…tequila-swilling, blow-job-giving hose bags. Well…nothing that I wasn’t but who cares? I wasn’t in the public eye so too bad presidential daughters!

And Hillary. You went to Wellesley like all smart lesbians do. You could be our next president if only you didn’t have cankles! Look it up in the dictionary you’ll see a picture of Hillary Clinton’s lower leg. Hahahahahahaha! No credibility with me because no differentiation between your calves and ankles! Universal health care?! SHUT THE HELL UP, FATTO!!!

Thank you, Lorne Michaels, for sticking with SNL. Thank you for being politically incorrect (a phrase that didn’t even exist back then). You’ve given wings to a whole new generation of political satirists…..Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert. We hunger for someone to interpret our global reality. It sucks. But it’s funny. Yes, there’s terror in the world but there is also laughter, my friends. Tell me that there isn’t something humorous about tall skinny Osama hiding in a cave needing dialysis. Poor Osama. Just the name Osama doubles me over. O-S-A-M-A.

Back to you, my Stooge-loving former sweetie pie, I know you married not too long after we parted. I imagine that your wife is beautiful, your children perfect. I picture their prowess on the field, their superiority in the classroom. But mostly I picture grubby hands, erect across the bridges of freckled noses….avoiding the inevitable double eye poke. It’s a life that I could never be a part of. Nyuk, nyuk! Woo, woo!

Parents and the teenage drug dealer

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I sympathize with parents who have a child on drugs. I’m thinking not so much about the child who’s doing fine in school, or has ambition and is moving forward. I’m thinking more about the kid who isn’t, who’s discovered a rut of drugs and complacency and nothing but drugs and instant gratification. I’m thinking the two are mutually exclusive, but that may be my prejudice.

It’s one thing to indulge that child, and quite another to endanger everyone else’s.

Maybe the parents think that drug use is okay. Maybe it’s cute, or harmless. Maybe it reminds them of their youthful experimentation. I’m not sure those parents are in touch with today’s controlled substance options.

I wish all parents could attend just one Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meeting to hear about what addicts these days are up against. Hear how drugs destroy families, or preoccupy lives or derail ambitions or usurp the joy to be found in just everyday things. Sometimes the chemistry of addiction overtakes a person’s every daily thought until they die.

It’s not simply pot, mushrooms and cocaine nowadays. Today there are all variations of meth, crack, heroin, ecstasy and speed in deadly combinations. Pot heads may argue that they only abuse pot, but marijuana today is laced with any of the above ingredients as fortifiers. The old pot high may still satisfy That 70’s Show, but kids today expect a more potent hit.

But to discuss the issue of dealing. Maybe some parents are proud of their child’s entrepreneurial initiative. Maybe they see it as making the best of an otherwise unprofitable fixation.

Maybe it’s like being the parent of a bully. The problem is not my bully, the self-assertive domineering chip-off-the-old-block, the problem is that the other kids are submissive and lesser and thus deserving. It’s survival of the fit, of my DNA. Maybe parenting a drug dealer is like that. The problem is not the dealing, we think, it’s the other kids who need the drugs and can’t arrange clever dealing setups like my kid.

What’s a parent to do? Call the cops on their own kid? Jeopardize the child’s academic career, give him a criminal record to haunt him until always? That would be my argument to call the cops before he turns 18, so his record as a minor will be expunged. Otherwise, the option certainly does seem extreme.

On the other hand, to do nothing is off-the-chart selfish. Selfish. Your kid is not dealing to 30 year-old opium addicts in the big city. Your kid is dealing in school! High school, junior high, grade school, wherever. Your kid is turning dozens if not hundreds of other kids onto drugs. Many of whom will follow his sorry footsteps and cause anguish for their parents. Were you feeling lonesome in your anguish? How thoughtful of you to share your bad parenting.

If you’ve set your kid up in his own unsupervised apartment, you’ve given your neighborhood a drug den. A place for other kids to hide and get into trouble. I’ve seen how accounting for a kid’s time works, you’re diligent, you expect other parents to be diligent, thus supervision for every kid’s activities is accounted for. Enabling a drug den is worse than going on vacation and not telling your friends that your house or child will be unsupervised. You’ve created a full time unchaperoned oasis. Did you have that as a child?

If your drug dealer begins to report vandalism to his car or house, which he says can only be random, you’ve got a whole lot of possible suspects. It could be the neighbors who resent living next to a house from which carloads of kids come and go at all hours of the night. It could be an angry parent who’s caught their child there. It could be rival students who resent the drug-dealer swagger that interrupts the otherwise traditional jock-based hierarchy of a school class. But clearly someone wants your child to move. I say move him!

It could be a rival drug dealer who’s been pushed out, or who’s trying to push in to the territory. The territories being the schools remember, however many schools are involved. It could be a distributor to whom your child passes money. Or fails to pass money. This isn’t Weeds where all the money changing, if terse, is convivial.

Is it going to take a panicked phone call in the middle of the night to convince you? A call from your child dealer asking you for $6K as soon as the bank opens to pay off some goons who will otherwise kill him, because the money’s gone lost, or there’s some misunderstanding, but “trust me, these guys won’t listen to reason.”

I don’t think it’s such an unselfish thing to ask of a parent, to keep a child clean, and to do their part to keep drug dealers out of the neighborhood. If you’ve got more children coming up for example, it’s not unselfish at all. Or if you think of your children’s friends as your children, as precious and delicate as your own.

Are you really thinking, if my child doesn’t deal it, somebody else will? Well social responsibility really doesn’t work that way. Yes somebody else will. Let it haunt their conscience.

Bush and the former mayor of Tehran

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Revolutionaries escorting CIA from US embassyThis is just RICH! Another headline! Bush and his Iranian nemisis to address the U.N. on the same day. Bush determined to avoid Ahmadinejad in the hallway! AND HOW!
 
Bush’s people don’t want to make an issue of the two meeting, although if Ahmadinejad approaches, “nobody’s going to body-block” him. Talk about giving diplomacy a chance.

Of the man who leads Iran, the nation which has been the demon of Bush’s preoccupation and the focus of Bush’s address to the General Assembly, Bush aids don’t want to accord Ahmadinejad so much importance. “We’re talking about the former mayor of Tehran here.”

Really. And Bush is what? A former what?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was among the former Revolutionary Guard student leaders who seized the American embassy in Tehran and precipitated the fall of the Shah and the end of US influence in Persia.

Bush was what? What? Oil man? Sports team owner? Alcoholic until he was 40? Maybe drinks still? Draft dodger of the blue-blood sort, dodged even his Reservist duty? Cocaine dealer in college, busted and sentenced to community service when others served long prison sentences? What? He won’t deign to meet with a former mayor of Tehran?

Ahmadinejad may be mouthing off too much for everyone’s comfort, but he has also singlehandedly brought the question of Israel’s legitimacy in the Middle East back to the discussion of a resolution in Palestine.

Ahmadinejad made minced meat of Mike Wallace in his CBS interview, in spite of the fact that 60-Minutes had control of the editing. I’m reluctant to mention Ahmadinejad and Saddam Hussein in the same sentence, but the Iranian president’s interview reminded me of Saddam’s talk with Dan Rather. The soon to be toppled dictator ran circles around our boy Dan. One rarely sees presidents measured up against journalists. Both are bright, but the brilliance required of a self-made statesman becomes pretty self evidence.

Now let’s talk about George Bush. Bush can’t even be interviewed by an informal commission without being accompanied by Dick Cheney. The vice-president’s nickname in CIA circles is “Edgar.” The best guess is that Edgar is a reference to Edgar Bergen, father of Candice Bergen and beloved ventriloquist to his wooden chum Charley McCarthy. Would Bush be the dummy “Charley?” Is that too much of a stretch?

Bush can’t handle a debate without an electronic prompter, nor a speech without someone feeding him his lines. That’s why he pauses between phrases. We know the routine from weddings: repeat after me: to have and to hold, to have and to hold, till death do us part, till death do us part, amen, amen. Bush can’t even handle an audience that isn’t vetted of just the hardcore ditto-heads.

White house officials are saying it is Ahmadinejad who is eager to avoid coming face to face with Bush. He’d come out at a disadvantage they say “because he’s shorter than Bush.” Really now? Shorter than Bush? I don’t even believe that.

Mara Liasson, Washington gossip

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NPR correspondent Mara Liasson spoke at Colorado College last night. What we thought would be an insider’s glimpse of the primaries turned out to be just that. Ms. Liasson spoke only of Kerry, Edwards and Dean. When asked about the other prospects, she countered that she expected we only wanted to hear about the candidates who would prove to matter.

How is a candidate like Kucinich, who is trying to bring issues such as health care, fair labor, environment, an end to war, and a return to human rights, to the fore, how is such a candidate to get covered by reporters who only want to report dispassionately about a candidate’s odds of winning? I mean, you tell us that “a candidate who wins in W state, but fails to win X and Y has never won Z,” that’s reporting? That’s more like Sports Talk.

Why not have reported about who won the debates? Edwards and Kerry, your favorite subjects, came off very stiff in the debates. Kucinich and friends ran circles around them, wouldn’t that have been worthy of reporting?

Isn’t the only thing standing between Kucinich and a viable candidacy, a media that’s refusing to consider him viable? Can you separate Kucinich’s chances from the tough chance he has with networks bent on keeping his issues invisible? What about your own sense of responsibility to report on every candidate, especially if you know their platform will resonate with the American public, if only given some visibility?

You dismiss the Bush AWOL charges as having been reported in 2000. For the record they were ignored in 2000, and you’re doing it again by suggesting they’re old news. They’re 30 years old news! Members of the National Guard today who have gone AWOL from Iraq are sitting in the brig, they’re not out snorting cocaine, even dealing cocaine, and then serving community service for having been caught. But Bush’s records have not only gone missing, they’ve been erased or sealed in the name of National Security. Wouldn’t that merit reporting? But that’s not your beat? Crime? Issues? The environment?

My question? Shouldn’t NPR consider covering the presidential election with correspondents who want to report more than just political gossip and primary statistics like it’s a horse race?

No, my real question: How much does FOX and MSNBC’s framing of the news, like the New York Time’s “all the news that’s fit to print,” determine what NPR can report? Is NPR too anxious about looking into the margins for fear it will marginalize itself? I guess that’s rhetorical. More constructively: How can the mainstream framing, that focus, be increased to include the interests of the American middle class, progressives, and peace-loving peoples around the world?