Tag Archives: Easter

Racist Jew sweeps Christian America with blackface Borat

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Sacha CohenHollywood has a long history of producing and distributing films with antiArab racist themes and imagery. Shall we just say, that they are quite embedded with the Pentagon on this dehumanizing of the current official US ‘enemy’, the Arab Muslim. Standard Hollywood ‘action’ tripe goes where some lower class All ‘Merican Black and White US heroes together, take down shady looking terrorist Middle Eastern types, who are out to kill good wholesome Christian babies to drink their blood. They don’t like our freedoms, it seems, but our buffoon heroes always win after some big bang bang. OK, how many times can you run the same crap before it gets old, right?
 
Enter racist Zionist Jew, Sacha Baron Cohen. He does the Muslim-face comedy routine of showing Christian Americans just how backward those Jew hating Muslims really are. Ha-Ha-Ha. It’s not the same old Black and White, buddy action figure, GI Joe stuff, at least. So the film, Borat, is sweeping America’s cinema land, including right here in Colorado Springs. ‘Borat’ being the backward Negro, oh sorry… I meant backward Muslim that Cohen portrays.

If this sort of schtick was done by a White actor portraying a Chinese man, or a Latino, or a Black person, we would have a media world in outrage at the blatant racism. But have a Jew portray Muslims as backward, comedic, imbecilic, and anti-woman, well then…. aw shucks, them Jews just can’t be racist, can they? Look what Hitler did to them. So they get a free pass from God for eternity, we Christian folk feel so damn guilty ’bout it we do. Let’s laugh along with the Jew about those Muslim retards in the boonies we are abombing right now. AntiMuslim racism just feels so damn good! We’re America!

Here is the prototypical Cohen routine if you have yet to see it, Throw the Jew down the well.

An Inconvenient Truth; Al Gore in the Balance

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This last Friday I headed over to see a herd of well-fed liberals that rodeoed themselves into the Unitarian Church for a free showing of the film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. The corral was packed and after we were informed that a pastor was on the way from Denver to moralize to us later, the film began to roll. Another showing of ‘Al Gore, the Intellectual Politican’ was under way. Hey, it kinda of reminded me of the repeated US`showing of ‘Jimmy Carter, Born Again Liberal Christian’, too. Holy Mackeral. Why buy a used car from the other guys, when we got such a sincere team over at Slick’s Used Cars Emporium?

My daughter was one of about 5 church-like kids dragged into the Unitarian Church that evening. And she lasted only 30 minutes, and then I had to go. She had to go that is, since I actually kind of wanted to stay. The film had a ‘Don’t Feed the Bears’ ambience to it, that made me feel like I was watching a Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo Bear rerun from my youth. Plus, it had that feel of those professional ‘Why You Need to Join Your Local Union’ stuff the AFL-CIO occasionally puts out. But my daughter was demanding that I rent her some obscure foreign film from over at Toons Video instead of staying and watching more of the freebee.

So how the Hell can I review a film when I watched only 30 minutes of it? Easily. I have been watching Al Gore for much longer than just the 90 minutes the film lasts. Here is Mr Environmental Guru as I have seen him over the years.

1) Supported Poppy Bush’s so-called Desert Strom that resulted in the deployment of Depleted Uranium radioctivity across the region. It also led to further environmental catastrophe as Hussein retaliated by incinerating the oil refineries of Kuwait.

2) As VP, he later went on to head up an Adminstration that deliberately targeted Yugoslavia’s civilian infrastructure through a US bombing campaign. As a result, the Danube was totally polluted with highly toxic waste. He also supported 8 years more of continued bombing of Iraq during that time, which certainly did not improve the ecology already destroyed by US warmaking he had supported even when a Republican had been directing the effort.

3) He supported the invasion of Afghanistan, which has left entire regions there decimated by so-called ‘bunker busting’ weaponry. Hardly a major ‘green’ effort on the part of Gore.

4) Gore has sat quiet as Israel bombed a civilian installation in Lebanon, which is a country invaded with total Bush support and complicity. Result?… a tidal wave of petro pollution that is the worst spill ever experienced in the Eastern Meidterranean. It will take decades to repair the damage, yet ‘Green’ Al Gore is silent.

5) Al Gore holds large number of shares in Occidental Oil, the company that polluted the Love Canal in New York State. It is also a company heavily invested in Colombia where Gore has helped have tons of isecticide dropped onto rural areas under the guise of waging a Clinton made ‘drug war’. The company sold off its holdings from the area after their drilling in U’wa tribal lands came up negative. Despite U’wa protests against this drilling, the Gore family held its shares in the company. Too bad the U’wa’s note to Gore was not part of the movie.

We could go on, but why should anyone believe Al Gore is doing anything other than image restructuring for himself, and the Democratic Party? If you are depending on him to be pro-environmental, then I got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. If you are depending on the Democratic Party to stop the Pentagon (which is the main danger to global environments), then you should have your head examined.

White Mountain

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Hitch your horse to this manservantWhite Mountain met its match last night, at their homecoming football game. The idea usually is to pick an opponent to beat at your homecoming festivities. Later you might visit a fellow school on their homecoming weekend and lose to them in return. But “South,” the underprivileged shoe-in with half the athletic department and budget, would not play ball. And that was the good news.

There was a distinct home advantage, the bigger, better lit bleachers, the multiple cheerleading squads, the band, the fireworks, everything uphill and upwind from the diminutive visitors stands. But the Indians got whooped by the visiting Pueblo South Colts, and maybe expected it. It felt like a surprise to most, and it was pretty dark out there. Add to that the anonymity of shiny football helmets under high school stadium lights, but if you looked closely you could tell it was darker on the south side of the field. The Pueblo South High School players were black and hispanic.

White Mountain gets its name because there are no children of color there. Well, there are the occasional adopted black children, and the whitish black children of privilege, but few others. Cheyenne Mountain is very very white. Nothing wrong with that, it’s an affluent neighborhood and welcomes all who can afford to be there.

But at the base of Cheyenne Mountain is a racism more overt and the children of White Mountain pass it everyday. Cheyenne Mountain Resort is a terribly exclusive country club with amazingly expensive membership fees and golf tee fees. And all the attendants there are black. It’s the Pullman porter valet concept with plantation era uniforms. They look like lawn jockey figurines. Thin black people in pure white clothes. Smiling black faces, happy to be there. Nothing illegal about the hiring standard, here’s how it works:

Cheyenne Mountain Resorts applies for an immigration waiver to hire international workers. They claim the jobs which resorts offer cannot be filled by the local labor force. The pay’s not enough, the career prospects are not enough, and true enough, the local populace is not enough either. Too fat maybe, poor work ethic, have social problems perhaps, and locals have their own transport to bring or fetch complications for the resort. Locals bring too much financial baggage to the table.

On the other hand, imported laborers are housed at company apartments. They’re shuttled to and from work. When they’ve finished their three month stint they are sent home. Deliriously uncomplicated and cheap. Cheyenne Mountain Resorts does its hiring in Jamaica. Know any white people in Jamaica? Well, they don’t appear to sign up to work across the sea, away from their home and family, on a rich man’s plantation.

The Broadmoor takes advantage of the same immigrant labor waiver to staff its hotel and restaurant, except they hire exclusively in Eastern Europe. I’m not sure that’s not racist to another extreme. The slavic labor force is the least expensive in the world, in the world of white people. There are no colored peoples there.

The immigrant labor waiver is an unfair means for local employers to escape contributing to a sustainable and healthy local community. It’s a foreign aid program of sorts, but at the expense of what could be local jobs. And when it’s racially segregated, it’s ugly. I plan to ask around if White Mountain prefers its golf jockeys all black. If they can’t say it with a straight face, they should stop it.

This isn’t about racism, it’s about economic justice. If we want to believe in the notion that the American dream is available to people of all shades and heritage, we must not teach our children that racial differences dictate social status.

The evolution debate ist tot

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Giant footprints in limestoneWe’re going to see the dinosaur tracks in Pinon Canyon this weekend. We’ll hike along the Pergatoire River which runs through southeastern Colorado and retrace a quarter mile long trail left by a brontosaurus.
 
At issue for my companions is what to make of theologians who would like us to believe that the Earth is only as old as The Bible says, something like 6,000 years. I’d like to contemplate that idea from the perspective of standing in a footprint made 150 million years ago. Supposedly.
 
Is carbon-dating flawed? Are scientists misleading mankind? It only matters if you want to believe that the christian bible is literally true. If the bible represents truth in the context of man’s understanding of the natural world at the time, then our new scientific understandings are not really suspect at all.

This is why Nietzsche wrote after Darwin’s theory, that God is dead. Is a discredited bible the Word of God or Man?

Infallibility
So who’s doing the arguing? Is it the Word-of-God people who want to refuse any contradictory evidence, or the scientists who couldn’t care a wit if their findings confirm or do not confirm church dogma? Bible adherents have chosen to take their stand against “evolutionary theory.” Because it can’t stand. Because it would make God’s word wrong.

“Theory” the Biblists decry, is as unreliable as it sounds. The inherent uncertainty of the scientific term insinuates that theory is more like wobbly fact. In Biblist lingo, theory becomes diametrically opposed to, and is perhaps the diabolical opposite of, fact. Hence the “debate.” Notice no one is scheduling debates over the theory of gravity or Pythagoras.

Thus Creationist Biblists have been challenging all comers to debate evolution in the court of public comprehension. There have been of course, science popularizers who’ve undertaken to educate the Biblists, perhaps hoping to create some middle ground. Pop-scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould engaged church dogma adherents to expand their understanding of the natural world. Meanwhile, actual scientists are laboring away, at science, working from the concepts of evolution into the further reaches. If these scientists look up at all, at the awkward “debate” conducted in their name, they wonder who gave those guys name tags? Who appointed them as apologists for scientific discovery and imbued them with authority to arbitrate and integrate scientific findings with church lore?

A debate between real scientists and creationists would look like an argument between a pediatrician and a fashion designer about what color pee should come out of the baby. It’s arguing apples and orange bowls. A debate about evolution is really between philosophers and theologians, because scientists aren’t debating anything. And the Biblists are the schoolchildren arguing they don’t want to learn their lessons, in fact they want to rewrite their lessons, and they want to debate their right to do so with linguists.

In trying to pick their fight, Biblists like to accuse scientists of arrogance. This is a false portrait, and comes perhaps from scientists not wanting to debate their findings with non-scientists. Why should they? You don’t argue football with someone that doesn’t know football from basketball. A scientist’s task is not to argue. A scientist makes a building block and moves on to the next. Where would we be if scientists only ever argued the validity of the single block. Build, concede its limitations, and move on. How can we build a two story house if someone on the committee perserverates on the first story being too speculative? Build the second story, if the first turns out to be flawed, we’ll start anew. Mankind still does not fully understand electricity. That doesn’t mean we can’t make telephones and phonographs and semiconductors and go to the moon in the meantime.

You might consider an architect full of excessive hubris for building towers higher than you yourself would ascend comfortably. You don’t understand the engineering, so he can’t build the skyscraper?

Intelligent Design
The theory of intelligent design offers a related illustration. I don’t have any doubt that many scientists would like to see our understanding of nature explained by an intelligent design. The problem is that science is not yet there, in fact it’s been pointing elsewhere. For now, we have to say, man’s knowledge through science cannot explain an intelligent design. Religious nuts are there, but for unscientific reasons. Intelligent Design may be true, but you can’t build anything with it. Scientists may want to build a 200 story building, but they don’t have the necessary blocks. Intelligent Design believers may be already want to dwell there, but you can’t start at the 200th floor and build downward.

There are a number of signs that evolution in practice is not as it appears. The GAIA concept offers to my mind a likely clue that there is a larger design at work. The idea that the fabric of nature on our planet might be governed by a cohesive unity, directly challenges the theory of random mutation by individuals. Could such scientific building blocks as proving GAIA lead to validating the biblical notion of Intelligent Design? Maybe that’s a possibility. Could it lead us to understand that Adam of Eden fashioned Eve from his own rib? Well, if you like, maybe that too. Right now I’d have to tell you that Adam’s rib is not my area of expertise and I’m certainly not prepared to debate it.

Pinon Canyon land grab

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150 million year old dinosaur tracksThe US Army at Fort Carson is trying to annex a million acres of Southeastern Colorado to test its new weapons. The area is called Pinon Canyon and contains the longest extant dinosaur tracks anywhere. The 150 million year-old Allosaur and Brontosaur tracks extend one quarter mile along the Purgatory River.

Come to the Colorado College meeting tonight, Tuesday September 19 at WES hall to learn how we can fight it.

Failed athletes in the military

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Athlete dyingMuch was made of Uday’s wrath when athletes on the Iraqi soccer team would return untriumphant. If a player made a gaffe, Saddam’s evil son Uday would send him off to the front. The Iran-Iraq Front at that time.
 
Americans are familiar with the lingo. It was a running joke on Hogan’s Heroes and became a timeless adage. Displease Der Fuhrer, you’re sent to the Russian Front.

Well now, where do suppose members of America’s military sports teams go if they fail to deliver the goods? If you are cut from the Army football team, or baseball team, or volleyball team, or basketball team, or any of the four branches of our military’s athletic self-promotion programs? Where are our soldiers sent if they are not playing for the home team?

We even send members of the military bands there. Our Eastern Front.

Israelites go home

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Baja JudeaAdmittedly this is a picture of Tel Aviv residents protesting their nation’s militant actions against Lebanon and gathering to offer a prayer for peace.
 
On another level, is it also a picture of fair-skinned westerners on a Middle Eastern beach who’ve overstayed their welcome?
 
Maybe it’s time to close Club Med Judea.

Americans descend upon Baja Mexico all the time, we don’t try to annex it. Or Costa Rica, or Belize. There’s nothing wrong with vacationing in the tropics, but is it fair to emigrate there, declare it your own, and ask the world to protect you from the anger of the people who you sent packing?

Let American and European Jews have their promised land, as promised vacation land. Visit and sunbathe all you want, then go home. This idea that white man should colonize Arabia is so 19th century. Colonization doesn’t work, and we have no right.

Nowhere was this more obvious than South Africa, where white colonizers held themselves as superior to the natives, imposing apartheid to force the indigenous populations to keep to their own neighborhoods.

Can there ever be peace in the Holy Land? Of course there can. Return Israel to its rightful owners. Let Jew, Muslim and Christian live together in a secular state. Will there always be sectarian violence? Perhaps, we’re seeing it elsewhere between Muslims. Sectarian problems will have to be worked out between neighbors. It’s clear the answer was not to give the whole ball of wax to one religion. Especially not the white one.

Sheehan power

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Cindy Sheehan has no peer in the world. She can travel to any country and be received by their governments as a dignitary. Few celebrities or politicians can expect such treatment, and when they do, their entitlement comes from being plugged into the establishment.
 
Cindy Sheehan’s power comes from the people. It comes from our belief that an outsider could make a difference in the turn of events. The American media could easily have ignored Cindy Sheehan’s stand in Crawford Texas, but Sheehan had captured the public’s fascination. Why? Because she reflected the public’s idealism. As long as the ordinary people of the world believe that there exists someone who could call President Bush to the carpet, Cindy Sheehan will be imbued with her power. Who other than one improbable woman could face off the man who holds the fate of the world in his hands?

This Easter Cindy Sheehan is returning to Crawford Texas to lay siege one more time to President Bush in his lair. Since initiating her movement in August last year, Sheehan has participated in diverse actions, including a Thanksgiving reprise in Crawford which led only to several prompt arrests. The media has learned that as public attention wanes, it can ignore or temper their enthousiasm for Cindy Sheehan when it wants to. Again, Sheehan’s power comes only from us.

Perhaps it is again time to rally to Sheehan’s side. Maybe joining Sheehan’s vigil in Crawford for Easter can once more focus the world’s hope that the peace movement can plant itself before George Bush’s eyes.

We can rally in large numbers all over the world, but because the media can typify the effort as lacking cohesion, it can certainly pretend that the peace movement is peopled by malcontents who offer no alternative.

Cindy Sheehan offers a real alternative, and I think she has hit on an ideal strategy. Not just withdrawal from Iraq, but an appeal to Bush’s conscience. He may have one.

Spika’s sledgehammer

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Tonight was Gwyn Coleman’s Art Wars III at the historic City Auditorium, a great success as usual, everyone on the youthful side of the Colorado Springs art community was there. Spika had a performance piece in the show, and here’s what Spika did, the big goof.

Early in the evening Spika and an assistant painted a huge mural on stage of the United States in neon red against a black background. At the center of the red map was a yellow circle with a blue outer ring, over which was a green hazmat symbol.

Just before his performance piece which he called Metaxis, Spika led a robed figure [his wife dressed in burlap and darkened skin] resembling a Middle Eastern Muslim of irrelevant gender. She sat before the symbol at the middle of the America mural. Spika stood centerstage before a blacklight clad only in a pair of black shorts.

To a recording of Bob Dylan singing Masters of War, Spika rolled up his shorts into the sides of the waistband so that his attire resembled that of Jesus or Tarzan or Captain Underpants. Then Spika began to rub fluorescent red paint all over his legs and bare feet.

Spika wiped his hands on the front of his shorts, a repetitive move which looked uncomfortably indulgent until we saw that he was cleaning his hands for the next color. Then Spika covered the upper half of his body with blue paint. By this time the soundtrack had progressed to Jimmy Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner. Spika rubbed the blue into his face and poured what remained of the blue paint over his hair.

Now Spika wrapped a skirt of white stripes around his waist. These were strips of white paper suspended on a wire waistband. Then he draped a similar shawl of white paper stars over his shoulders. Having made a living flag of himself, Spika donned a yellow crown of spikes, whatever it is that the Statue of Liberty wears, greatly amplified and struck a pose. Once the applause subsided, Spika walked over to the robed figure at the center of the America mural.

We were not sure as he turned his back to her, if he wasn’t bending to take a crap on the Muslim, but instead he sat between her legs. Then Spika slowly reclined into the arms of his robed non-westerner to create …a pieta, and the crowd went wild.

Free the captives

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Shrine for war captivesFor Tom Fox,
Jim Loney,
Norman Kember,
Harmeet Singh Sooden;
for Jill Carroll,
all Western hostages,
all Eastern hostages;
for all detainees held without charges
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo,
and CIA black sites around the world;
for prisoners of conscience everywhere.

The 911 Reichtag Fire

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In 1933 someone set fire to the Reichstag, the historic German Parliament Building. Hitler seized on the occasion to incite in the German population a fear of terrorists and foreign agents, and trumped up his case for the preemptive invasion of Eastern Europe.
 
To prevent further acts of terrorism, Hitler curtailed civil rights and created the first concentration camp at Dachau. Predating the extermination camps by a half dozen years, Dachau began as an internment camp for political foes and other “enemies of the state.” Many Germans felt that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi deception, set deliberately to further Nazi goals.

2001 brought the American People their 9-11, with similar doubt as to how it came to happen. Americans were also given their Dachau at Guantanamo Bay, a prison camp absent every American notion of civil right. Americans soon became responsible as well for waging a preemptive war on Iraq based on trumped up charges of WMDs, and American atrocities at Mazar-i-Sharif and Fallujah, which beg comparison to the Nazi taking of Czechoslovakia, and Nazi acts at Babi Yar and Lidice.

To compare American to Nazis may seem like a profound trivialization of the horror of the Holocaust. There is no evil greater than that which perpetrated the Holocaust. But the Final Solution didn’t start until 1940. The U.S. Neocons are comparatively early in their game.

History has now confirmed that it was the Nazis themselves who started the Reichstag fire. They set the fire at night, while no one was in the building. Not a single life was lost. Not very Nazi-like. Someday history will reveal the truth about who perpetrated the events of September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center. Time will eventually have to overcome this administration’s persistent efforts to thwart investigation and accountability.

IF the Neocons in the U. S. administration, either by negligence or malice, did allow or facilitate or instigate or perpetrate this ugly tragedy, if they did this, what can they have yet in store for the American people?

(Reprinted ArmchairCommando.)

911 crackpot theory

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Not hot enough to melt steel
Call me a crackpot, but I have to say it. I believe 9-11 was a setup.
 
There’s no denying that a band of Saudi gentlemen flew those planes into the World Trade Center. There’s no denying that the Saudi Muslims were upset about US military bases in their holy land. There’s no denying that the third world has cause to attack the first world. For all intents and purposes that is what happened, or should have happened even.
 
It is nearly irrelevant to suggest otherwise. Except to suggest that it needn’t have happened, or certainly needn’t have succeeded.

I would suggest, and I am not alone, that 9-11 was orchestrated maybe, facilitated certainly, and permitted without a doubt by the U.S. government.

Evidence abounds, and let me say that plenty of false evidence is being circulated to support deliberate crackpot theories. Efforts to reconstruct what happened on 911 are being thwarted not just by stone-walling but by disinformation campaigns as well to marginalize those who won’t drink the kool-aid.

If there is one thing that is very easy to prove, it’s that this administration has fought every effort to shed light on the subject.

The black boxes were never found. The Air Traffic Control voice recordings were immediately destroyed. Video surveillance cameras were out of order. Other surveillance tapes were confiscated. Survivors or their relations were offered unprecedented financial compensation in exchange for forfeiture of their right to investigate liabilities. The scope of the official investigation was kept very limited.

In practically every airline crash since the beginning of black boxes the black boxes have been found. They may be nearly destroyed, their tapes may be unusable, but the boxes were always there. They didn’t vaporize.

Just because an American TV audience was awed by the calamity of the falling towers does not mean mean that the gods of physics were likewise so struck that they relaxed the natural laws. Steel doesn’t melt at 1/5 the required temperature any more than you’d expect to make a horseshoe over a bonfire. A building doesn’t vaporize into its own footprint without well placed charges. Demolition companies would be out of work if all it took to fell two of the world’s tallest buildings was jet fuel.

A curious bit of evidence points to the hijackers having been assisted in their Florida flight training by the CIA. The flight school, even their rental car, was tied to the CIA. This detail makes for a very unique conspiracy theory indeed because it doesn’t suggest that everybody was in on it.

Why would the aspiring hijackers have needed the help of CIA? To evade the watchful eyes of the FBI. In fact the evidence became public that at several points the FBI had to be told to back off.

These days, even pre-911, you couldn’t buy a cup of coffee without somebody knowing about it. We saw with the quick apprehension of Timothy McVey that ATM transactions, credit card activities and car rentals are very easily sniffed out by the FBI. Where else could 19 single middle eastern men with Interpol profiles have rented a car but from an rental agency not listed in the phone book, not affiliated with national chains, and owned by someone with ties to the CIA?

Not everybody wanted to see the US attacked.

Believe what you want. Dismiss any of the 911 eleven theories which to you sound extreme. But you’ll probably also have to dismiss the theory that every last one of this nation’s defense systems failed that day, and that it’s alright that all the evidence is missing too.

It took over an hour for the planes to reach their destinations, we didn’t know they had diverted from their flight plans, we didn’t scramble jets to intercept, then we destroy all the Air Traffic Controller audio tapes of the ordeal?

The conclusion is horrific yes.

In defense of fundamentalism

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Mankind is going in circles.

When you look at the Greek histories you can see periods of democracy and liberty lead to corruption and oppression, until the next democracy emerges centuries later.

From the dark ages emerged the Renaissance whose sun is still shining on our times, if perhaps just our subconscience by twilight. For we are descending again into darkness, this time a secular dark age.

The common man’s adventures in self fulfillment are going off cycle.

Advances in medicine and science, our understanding of the natural world, make us think that humanity is progressing. But this is not progress. this is merely complication. Who’s to say that a scientist has any better grasp of the workings of the universe than does a shaman? Because you can read a book doesn’t mean you can throw it further.

In philosophy as well as science, there is a sense that through time, each successive thought builds upon our past. Yet you’d be hard pressed to find a scholar who could say that any philosopher or scientist has surpassed yet Aristotle. As Eisenstein was to be with film, so Aristotle was to rational man: medium fully explored.

From an Eastern perspective, Buddhism has for quite a long time been trying to raise the world’s consciousness. An admirable goal, but has it succeeded from one generation to the next?

Man’s personal development certainly goes in circles. Development leads to entropy and decay. Vitality flourishes then becomes decadence. By the time you have a culture preoccupied with its sex life, you’ve got a people with a spirituality going nowhere.

You can look around today and see signs of this decay everywhere. Look at the ultra-violent video games or at a mass media obsessed with sex: a sexuality absolutely removed from procreation.

While it’s hard to explain why any of these preoccupations are vices per se, they are traditional signs of end times. They accompany the death of culture, as the decline of the Roman Empire, as before them the Greeks. They signal biblical end times like Babel, Sodom and so on.

To champion personal freedoms may feel righteous. What feels more natural than the motivation to explore and indulge our personal proclivities? But perhaps this is only hastening the end of our cycle.

Why not instead try to transcend this downward curve?

Fundamentalist religions do this. They deny human nature because they want to transcend it. They see mankind’s weakness to succumb to idolatry and self destruction and they think maybe this time they can avert it.

That’s my guess as to what they think they are doing.

Toons is discovered by Business Journal

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Here’s a very nice article about the unique film collection at TOONS.
Reprinted from The Colorado Springs Business Journal:

‘Oasis’ for the offbeat
By BOZENA WELBORNE, Editorial Intern

Most people, when they think of Toons — if they’ve heard of the store at all — will envision a graffiti-ridden former gas station-turned-store on Nevada Avenue. Its location and its ambience make it a likely hangout for the Colorado College students in its vicinity.

But it’s much more than that. Toons actually draws much of its clientele from “working, commuting students from UCCS or other community colleges, as well as students who come by during the holidays,” said Eric Verlo, the founder of the music, video and vintage items store.

The store has an eclectic collection of videos, used albums and CDs, vintage posters and collectibles that run the gamut from “clairvoyant,” heat-sensitive gummy fish (the cheapest item in the store at 25 cents, and very popular with those CC students) to $2,000 vintage jukeboxes (the most expensive item and the least likely to be sold, Verlo says).

Most of the used goods come directly from the closets and attics of the Colorado Springs community. Generally, Toons will purchase used items at 50 percent of their original price, though it may vary according to the quality of the item or how many copies of the item Toons has in stock.

Toons’ owner is especially proud of the store’s diverse video collection, with 4,700 titles and maintains they are not merely hard-to-find videos, but videos the average person has “probably never even heard of.” What the store can’t make up in number, it makes up in the sheer diversity of its collection. There is also a very strong Eastern European film collection, as well as the obligatory French films.

Verlo emphasizes the highly academic nature of a portion of the collection, maintaining that many of the films are chosen specifically because of their sociopolitical or cultural significance.

Because the store carries such a diverse assortment of items diverging from the mainstream, Verlo is hard-pressed to identify any competitors. The most likely candidates would be Media Play, Best Buy and Blockbuster Video. Verlo says those retailers are just beginning to realize the potential of catering to the non-mainstream market, of “introducing people to new things,” and may increasingly compete directly with Toons.

Few people know that there are actually two Toons stores, one at 802 N. Nevada Ave., but also a less well-known store at 3163 W. Colorado Ave. The latter, actually called the Bookman, opened first in 1990, while the Nevada Avenue location opened at the site of an old gas station in 1993, in a conscious effort to drift away from the typical strip-mall-feel evident at many stores.

Verlo came up with the idea of opening such a store while visiting his retired parents in Colorado Springs. Verlo started contemplating what he would do after his own retirement and, considering his passion for books, decided that he would like to own a bookstore and thus, the initial idea of Toons was formed. Verlo’s unique life has also had an influence on the eclectic nature of the store. Verlo is a graduate of UCLA who has lived in France and the Philippines, and has traveled extensively.

Verlo estimates startup costs fell somewhere in the $10,000 range. Since the idea of the store was a gradual development, the inventory itself was gradually collected without a specific vision. So, the cost of accumulating the inventory wound up being more expensive. Today, Verlo knows that probably was not the best way to purchase the store’s inventory, but the method is responsible for the store’s unique, museum-like feel. He emphasizes that the store’s existence is not really driven as much by a profit motive as it is by the idea of creating a collection of unusual items to intrigue and be enjoyed by the entire community. Toons is still pretty much breaking even with any excess profit immediately re-invested into enlarging the diversity of the store’s wares. This accentuates the fact that it is really a labor of love on Verlo’s part, as well as that of the staff.

Although it expanded to the Nevada Avenue store in 1993, Toons is now branching out onto the Internet with its own Web site at http://www.toonsmusic.com. The store’s staff created and maintains the site.

Ironically, Colorado Springs’ growth has not benefited Toons. Verlo said most of the growth has been at the outskirts of the city. Because of this, he says, fewer people come downtown, where the store is located.

Currently, Toons is trying to attract a more upscale, older clientele at the Nevada Avenue store and has consequently sectioned off a portion of the store, hoping to appeal to this new client base. Jitterbuzz.com, a top Washington D.C.-based Web site for swing and lindy hop aficionados, called the section “the largest swing selection of any record store in town (Colorado Springs).” Verlo hopes the store’s new setup offers some variety, while allowing the older and younger generations to choose whether to interact or keep to themselves.

Verlo believes that Toons’ ultimate legacy for the Colorado Springs community is its very existence. It provides the city with an oasis of non-mainstream ideas. Verlo advises those who seek success or at least contentment in the business arena to “do what (they) want in life,” as he did in creating Toons.