Tag Archives: Food

Got health insurance?

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Universal healthcare you say? Every civilized nation on earth has it except us? Well, take a look at the average American when compared to a French or Canadian counterpart. Fat, dumb and happy. Chubby hand reaching out….trying to find a Hot Pocket, or an open pocket. Gimme more, gimme more. Fill my yap. I deserve it. Don’t expect me to care for myself, or my family.

We can thank the government and the educational system for creating a nation of uninformed cretins. We can thank the food industry for lining their pockets at the expense of good nutrition and health. We can thank the legal system for stealing Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs….leaving doctors to take the safest path. We can thank the pharmaceutical companies for corrupting our well-meaning doctors and putting profiteering ahead of health.

The truth is that most doctors are saps who care about the average American. I was married to one for many years. Never once did I see him hesitate to help an uninsured individual. He’s a fantastic surgeon who knows little about wellness. You’ve gotta cut to cure. You’ve got pain? Here is Vicodin. You’ve got inflammation? Let me give you a cortisone shot. Depression or anxiety? Zoloft and Paxil. Exercise? Massage? Acupuncture? Herbs? Good nutrition? Safety? Self discipline? Not on the radar. Medical education is driven by those that stand to gain. If there isn’t profit in a particular course of treatment, it is not part of the curriculum. The powers that be do not make money from whole grains, whole foods, supplements, Eastern medicine, helmets, exercise. Thus, our poor students learn nothing about wellness. And they are unaware of their lack.

Enter the greediest of parasites–attorneys. When managed care first came to the fore, every doc I know was willing to forego unnecessary tests, to save healthcare dollars. Dave had great confidence in his diagnostic powers. He knew what his patient needed and had the balls to refuse unneeded and expensive tests. In one year, when the average surgeon ordered several hundred MRIs, Dave ordered 11. Alas, it took only one lawsuit by a fat, diabetic smoker to change his opinion. “Did you order an MRI?” “No, it was unnecessary.” “Isn’t that the standard of care in the community?” “Yes, but it was unnecessary in this case.” Nevermind that an MRI would tell him nothing that he didn’t know. It was an Achille’s heel with a jury of uneducated peers. Now, my idealistic and caring husband has become jaded. Why on earth would he put himself, his family and his reputation on the line to save a few bucks for Centura? Especially when they are taking the “savings” to line the pockets of their top executives.

Let’s also talk about end-of-life issues. Many healthcare dollars are spent in the last two weeks of a terminal patient’s life. To say euthanasia is to belie one’s atheistic nature and to bring brimstone down upon one’s head. To suggest withholding care is to betray an uncaring attitude. Bullshit! Who wants to spend his last days unconscious, hooked up to IVs, soiling the sheets and dragging out the grieving process for loved ones? No one I know. But what doctor is brave enough to make the suggestion? Jack Kevorkian was imprisioned for honoring the requests of the dying. He was a revolutionary. He paid a great price. I won’t encourage Dave to take the same path, although I think it is a noble one.

Until the American public is willing and able to start looking out for their own health and well-being, until they are willing and able to educate themselves and their children, until people are willing to forego expensive testing, until they are willing to see a nurse, a midwife, a physical therapist or a physician’s assistant for their primary care, there will be no moving forward. Any presidential candidate promoting a universal healthcare plan best be prepared to confront not only the corporations who control our food supply and our education, but also the Unhealthy American and his cousin, the Greedy American. I will not support a candidate who doesn’t have the knowledge and integrity to speak truth.

Addiction

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Food, drink, drugs, sex, love. The hedonist’s playthings. But when does pleasure become addiction? When does not-quite-enough become too much? I’ll tell you. When you become double-minded about the pursuit. When you know that what you seek is not what you really want. When you’d rather be free, but you find yourself enslaved. When you act against your better judgment, for whatever reason.
 
Time to change. Reclaim power and peace of mind. Move on.

You are how you eat

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There are land crabs around the cenotes of Yucatan which burrow in the mud, eating the mud actually. They’re bright blue and red. We don’t eat them because they taste like mud. It occurred to me today as I ate a naturally-grown apple, actively hoping to avoid a worm, that perhaps a worm growing in an apple might taste of apple.

If man has traditionally avoided worms, I’m not about to buck tradition. I wondered if eating raw produce in the days before pesticides involved the little ritual I was mindful to adopt between each bite. A blemish at the base suggested to me that something might already be eating this fruit. But it didn’t seem too difficult to plan to avoid the path already taken. I would simply take a bite, then check the corresponding area to see if a hole indicated a trail into the chunk in my mouth. If so, I could spit it out. If not I could chew with peace of mind.

What an unsettling experience, in retrospect, having to hold each morsel in escrow in my mouth until it was deduced to be safe. Thanks to modern chemistry we are accustomed to chowing down our food, without care, without pause, and without maybe that little bit more appreciation.

Botulism erases brand name distinction

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Nothing like a little botulism to blow the lid off brand identity. Does it make a difference whose label is on the can? Apparently not. Unless you can visualize factory assembly lines where some cans are prepared with better ingredients than others. Same suppliers, same machinery, same ovens, in this case the same inadequate cooking temperature.

Brand label transparency happened just recently with contaminated pet food, many brands it turned out are manufactured by the same company, Menu Foods. Now we have deficiently canned people-product from Castleberry. And lo, they make dog food as well.

The problem is with Castleberry’s chili sauce. If you don’t live on the east coast, Castleberry may not ring a bell with you. But they are responsible for these labels too:

Austex, Best Yet, Big Y, Black Rock, Bryan, Bunker Hill, Cattle Drive, Firefighter, Food Club, Georgia, Gold Star, Great Value, Kroger, Lowe’s, Meijer, Morton House, Paramount, Piggly-Wiggly, Prudence, Southern Home, Steak N Shake, Thirfty Maid, Triple Bar and Value Time.

And the dog food brand Natural Balance. This one looks like it’s table scraps. A doggy bag in a can.

How is this for dog food?

Brand name taste is an abstraction

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A friend of mine is a restauranteur who by his own admission doesn’t know much about wine. Never the less his wine rep was bringing over a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem for some occasion. I asked my friend if he’d read up on Sauterne vintages, the better to appreciate it. He looked at me quizzically. I persisted, thinking something along the lines of Tom Wolfe’s Painted Word, that you had to know about the theory of abstract art to appreciate what you saw. I didn’t get far because my friend was attuned to the un-abstract measure of his customer’s palate. Did they taste a distinctive quality? That was enough. You don’t need a text to appreciate pre-abstract art. Epicure likewise is not abstract.

Many aspects of our lives have become experiences of abstract quality. We may not prefer a fashion, but are happy enough with it so long as we believe others like it. A designer label says what we want about us, regardless whether we have a say about it. Marketing goes a long way to produce our appreciation. When we use the product we feel ourselves in the commercial. For some beverages, I’m certain the commercial has become the product. We begin enjoying the Coke from the first cold beads of condensation on the can, through the Shtffk of cracking the pop tab, until it’s down our throat. Right then we all know Coke doesn’t satisfy our thirst, because we already want more. It satisfies our craving to inhabit the Coke world.

Sugar is not an acquired taste, but wanting to be a Pepper is. Breakfast cereal feeds a pathetic sweet tooth. Cheap beer and the new soft-liquors feed conditioned desires.

Not only is the processed food industry relying on its talent to taylor our appetite, it undermines our reliance on our own senses. If something is not advertised, can it be of value? Ice cream flavored of cookies ‘n cream isn’t good enough unless they are Oreo brand cookies. Toffee must be Heath Bars, peanut butter must be Reeses. Except for regional salsas or steak marinades, products fade from the supermarket shelves if nt cross branded with a national identity. This has become an easier feat for the big guys because they’ve conglomerated so many diverse products, from babies diapers to tobacco.

The brand name is now the critical ingredient which we all taste with our imagination, crafted by ceaseless ad campaigns. A product’s advertising is itself a stipend paid to the media companies to ensure a brand stays on the public palate. Remember Oh Henry? Somebody lapsed in their payment.

Now the powerhouse food corps are using the same manipulative method to plant doubt in the consumer’s mind about their own ability to judge taste. (I remember an subscription tag line for GQ magazine to this effect: You don’t know fashion, let GQ tell you.) How could what you think tastes good, have any bearing on what they tell you tastes good?

With health food the fearful conglomerates caution, how do you know it’s really organic? But isn’t that the same assumption I threw at my friend? It’s true with processed food, we can’t taste BGH or Mad Cow spinal matter, or protein additives necessarily. But other factors like refined sugars, fats, or chemical pesticides we can detect. In the produce department, it’s not just a matter of stickers that say “organic” or higher prices or more easily blemished fruit, it’s the taste. Organic produce tastes fuller, richer, more pleasing, more satisfying.

Our own natural sense of taste tells us whether we are enjoying it or not. No textbook, afficionado’s article, or 30 second commercial need tell us what we think of that apple. Or what we think of the non-stickered apple which tastes like the floor cleaner we thought they used in the supermarket. That isn’t the floor we were smelling, it was the apples. If it weren’t for the antiseptic packaging, the inert food content and the slick marketing directing our taste buds, we’d realize the whole supermarket smelled of Union Carbide and Monsanto.

The Good Samaritan in few of us

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I sat in the church pew absolutely shocked to be reminded how many times the word peace is mentioned at mass. I was struck mainly to think that American church-goers pay lip service to this word every weekend, year by year at war, and yet our military aggression persists without congregations raising their voices to protest. What kind of peace are they praying for? You know it of course, for peace at the barrel of a gun.

These churchgoers also listen every week to readings and homilies about religious virtues. What context is piety given in the midst of deliberate war and economic predation?

Last Sunday I was treated to the parable of the good Samaritan. Probably you know it, Jesus’ answer to how we should treat our neighbor. Jesus told of a man fallen victim to brigands, left for dead at the side of the road. A priest passed unmoved, so too a fellow Jew, crossing to the other side to avoid the man in need. Finally the Samaritan, an ethnic origin unchosen by God and held in general suspicion and disdain, interrupted his journey and the rest is history, well biblical history. The Samaritans might have been dog-fighting Nazi bastards every last one, until Jesus immortalized the hypothetical actions of one and now Samaritan is synonymous with good.

Today we hear the story about the traveller in need and think it’s a no brainer. We liken ourselves to natural Samaritans and can all but visualize our fellow parishioners lining up to help as readily as we queue for communion. But would that be true? Why were the original passersby so reluctant to help? I wondered if our priest sermonizing on the moral was prepared to explain his ancient colleague’s un-priestly callousness.

Perhaps the priest and the other unhelpful fellow formed a particular opinion about the denuded victim. Maybe he was thought to have been damn foolish or careless to have fallen victim to the bandits. What good does it do to help a person who doesn’t have sense enough to help himself? Give him money and it will likely flow directly to the next bandits on the trail. Perhaps that’s what the passersby were thinking. The Samaritan knew better, he knew that true compassion shows itself toward your enemy. Compassion toward your brother or compatriot is just teamsmanship. Real compassion is finding sympathy for someone unlike you out of kinship for all beings.

It’s certainly time to update the parable. How likely is it for any of us today to encounter a denuded mugging victim? Of course we’d be on board, but we’re never tested. What if, however, the victim is a welfare recipient beaten down by the system? Or a fat person on food stamps duped out of an understanding of health and self-preservation by predatory capitalism? What about a drunken derelict whose self-destructiveness is owed to some demon and now he’s likely to medicate himself to death and even rob you of more than your assistance to do it?

What if it’s a drug pusher or pimp or gang banger, who’s been given no other option? Perhaps a gambler who’ll throw away the last cent meant for his baby’s formula? Or perhaps a well-fed hag who runs a windowless bordello full of girls abducted from the countryside, she herself dying of cancer, a victim of tobacco brigands or chemical pollution robber barons? That person. Would you stop to help that person, as Jesus asks, as a good neighbor?

Take the Potter taste test challenge

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Harry Potter jumps the sharkMy comments about JK Rowling were mean spirited naturally, but the reaction was like I’d made a snotty put-down of something exalted. Was my criticism limited by subjectivity?
 
This is not Fancy Feast versus the same thing in an economy brand can. Do you think quality is a matter of subjective taste? In such case you are confused by the hyperbole of marketing. A Coke tastes like its commercials, a Pepsi like theirs. That’s not taste. In many things involving our senses, the human being was designed to judge quantitative differences.
 
Why raise the subject at all? No one expects a symphony from an ice cream truck. But when promoters want to drive an ice cream truck unto the stage at Carnegie Hall, naturally some of us want to intone.

To me, you know literature when you see it. You’re reading along, and before you know it you become distracted by notions not linearly related to the physical events of the plot, musings, asides, descriptions which express larger truths. They don’t stand out necessarily, except you find yourself reading more slowly, lost in thought. That’s literature. It’s more to chew.

Of course everything doesn’t have to be literature. I can appreciate a Big Mac, even praise it, without having to pretend it’s filet mignon. I’m not defensive either way. But I’ll also add that if you were to serve me the same Big Mac reconfigured as Haut Cuisine on an oversized plate with pepper and Special Sauce cast about artfully, I could easily delight myself confusing it for something nutritious. Though it be the same poison.

And here is my point. My palate is not very sophisticated about food. I can enjoy a claret or a cheap Shiraz equally. I’m uneducated and inexperienced with them. Similarly I can’t tell a saxophone from the hydraulic exertions of a garbage truck.

Just as we fall short teaching critical thinking in our schools, might we also raise readers lacking discernment for meaningful writing? Readers who might confuse writing of nutritional value with writing that can give you heart disease?

Life in the fast lane

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Have you ever fasted? We all have heard about people who do, but why do they fast? Why on earth would they fast? Self deprivation and delayed gratification have no place in the American way of life. Growing up Catholic we always tried to give something up for Lent. Usually it was something that we didn’t much care for to begin with, like black-eyed peas. But to truly take oneself out of a state of constant satiation seems unnecessary, if not downright crazy.

I’ll tell you something unbelievable. Fasting is fantastic. It is healthy. It is powerful. Physically, the process of digestion consumes more energy than nearly anything we human beings do. It is nonstop and tiring to the body. The garbage we put into ourselves on a daily basis overwhelms our systems…thanks in part to gluttony but with big kudos to the food industry who has meddled with the food supply to the point of absurdity.

The absolute best way to fast requires copious amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables, an expensive juicer, lots of time. A simpler fast that I’ve discovered has been around for 50 years or so. 3 ounces of fresh-squeezed lemon or lime juice, 3 ounces of Grade B maple syrup (this is not the syrup you buy at the local supermarket….look at a health food store or buy it via the internet). 2 or 3 capsules of cayenne pepper. 24 ounces of distilled water. Drink this all day long.

Day one is the most difficult. The body begins to release toxins. You may feel sluggish. You’ll certainly feel your addictions to various foods. Day two is a bit easier. By day three or four you’ll begin to feel powerful…akin to runners’ euphoria. Your body is free, your mind is unencumbered, you are living life on a higher plane.

Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days. Do you think that this was a sacrificial act? If so, it certainly pales in comparison to death on a cross. No, I believe Jesus fasted to release himself from the bonds of human frailty….to put himself in contact with the divine. That’s why yogis fast, why Muslims and Christians fast. Why I fast. Try it. It will certainly change your body. Perhaps it will change your life.

J.K. Rowling and the Dead Zone

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With author J.K. Rowling declaring she’s written the last of the Harry Potter titles, there’s a panic coming from the publishing world that there will be nothing to take Harry’s place. I suppose this fear anticipates the readership’s sadness, it certainly expresses the commercial concern, but it cloaks itself in a [Scholastic] librarian’s voice: whatever now will the children find interest in reading?
 
Harry Potter has been around for ten years. Educators like to credit him for pulling children from the terminus of their gaming consoles. If Potter has created an upsurge in reading, I ask you, to where has it led? Ten years is enough to have nourished the new generation. Over 325 million Rowling books have been sold. The first Harry Potter readers are already graduated from college. What are they doing?

It’s a leading question, because I haven’t an answer. It’s not discernible. Blogs, Myspace, trivia-tourism, what? I’ll confer with college professors and get back to you, but it certainly isn’t the Peace Corps.

I would purport that the Scholastic [1] worship of Harry betrays a lack of faith in what it means to read. Do children need to be rewarded for reading? Is not escaping into the abstract a pleasure unto itself? I thought it was a fundamental need that even distinguishes us as human beings. Do we have to offer candy bars to induce people to eat? I’m sure humans can run themselves out of gas out of sheer distraction, but I know appetite is inherent.

A key is to educate children that there’s a world beyond theirs, an abstraction beyond their horizon, which can be explored through reading. Much of it, history, thought, imagination, lies only in books. Travel and science can lie beyond if they wish. Those subjects are taught in school, via reading. Teachers who suspect their students haven’t bought into reading are obviously not grading to challenging standards.

Through books lies an existence of infinite proportion, as n approaches the finite lifetime. Are the Potters hypothesizing that children must be coaxed into this world, without regard that it might be form over substance? Do children whose thumbs twitch for video games need to be lured by books that feel like video games which lead, like arcades and the pool halls before them, nowhere? With Harry Potter, are we creating readers or are we killing them off? Form has become the new substance, which to some sounds clever and new, but really means empty is the new full.

Dead Zone
There’s something happening outside the Mississippi Delta where man’s agricultural runoff, waste and industrial pollutants meet the sea. It’s being called a Dead Zone, which describes it literally, and it’s growing. The phenomena is a total collapse of the ecosystem leaving Hypoxia, the absence of oxygen in the water. It starts with the algae, then never mind every next link in the food chain [2]. We’ve measured it only since 20 years ago. Doubtless it started earlier. Doubtless too it’s happening exponentially in every estuary downstream of overpopulation. I read about Hypoxia overtaking Lake Victoria in Africa, rendering it a sinkhole, the social repercussions of which match Dante.

I cannot but wonder if such a consequence of pollution cannot manifest itself on the human population. Could not our minds become sink holes? Could not a culture or generation be faced with a Dead Zone?

Debilitating, not irreversible in the grand scheme, but certainly final, like stunted growth. Generations of minds shrunk below capacity, below what we might have wished for them, like fingers crippled by the early industrial age. A dead zone of thought, of initiative or motivation, of energy needed to get out of the dead zone. Why it’s called a dead zone, not merely an empty one.

Booksellers seem happy as snakes to see our children want sugar instead of oxygen.

Footnotes
1. The publishers of Harry Potter, Scholastic Press, is a commercial enterprise, not an educational concern as the name implies. It’s like the pseudo-junk food company Subway, owned their ads say, by Doctors Associates, Inc.
2. Overuse of synthetic fertilizers has been causing rising hypoxia on every coast. The excess nitrates lead to blooms of algae which pull all the oxygen from the water, knocking the breath from all other living things. So my analogy is closer than I intended.

Coming soon to an airbase near you

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Time to revisit this leaked C-130 targeting video of a US Afghan turkey shoot. With the Creech AFB remote Reapers, American snipers working electronically can now sit stateside, with YOU AS THEIR HUMAN SHIELD.

(The control room chatter remind me of an auction house, where spotters call out the hits in case the auctioneer is too busy to see them.)

What am I thinking, we could outsource this function to the lowest unprincipled bidder. If telecommunications can permit Pakistanis to sort US mail or take our fast food drive-through orders, why not let them do the killing on our video game consoles?

US government breeds terrorism everywhere

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Our government is the #1 breeder of terrorism across the planet, same as it is the #1 world breeder of drug trafficking. The latest from Iraq is news of how a car bomb went off in a Kurdish market where people buy their food, with hundreds killed and wounded. Who did it? The short answer is that you and I did.

How so, you might ask? Simple. It’s because you and I mainly sat back and watched our government destroy a country, and then divide up the ruins between 3 principle groups; the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunni. Then we sat back while our government set them against each other. We did next to nothing to stop this from happening, and we continue to do next to nothing as if it were not our responsibility to act.

OK, that’s the short and abstract answer to who set that bomb off. But who might have done it physically, and why? Most will turn their accusations to one of the groups being victimized by the US occupiers. But truth is, it could have been set off by many others, including the Turkish government and the US government itself. Can imagine the Turkish government, whose brutality to the Kurds is legendary, but not the US government? But why not?

The US government practices collective punishment daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. It so much as a bb gun goes off directed at US forces, the US levels entire neighborhoods. In Afghanistan, it’s just bombs away from a high. In Iraq itself, the reaction usually mimics more the Israeli style counter insurgencies against Palestinian communities. In both manners, the civilians take a big hit for any resistance activities that they may or may not have partially sanctioned i their neighborhood.

Back to the market bomb. What is there to make us think that the US military does not use these terrorist attacks as yet another tool in the manipulation of events to make their occupation of Iraq come off? They did this sort of thing constantly in Vietnam, as did the French in Algeria. In war, nobody can ever be too sure of who is responsible for what? What one can be sure of is that occupation breeds acts of terrorism, usually against others than those doing the occupying.

Message from the US government post 9/11? We are better at using terrorism than you can ever be, al qaeda.

Farfour Mouse vs Mickey

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It’s hard to believe how lost in LaLaLa Land are America’s proZionist conservatives. One big issue for some of them is the supposed ‘hostage taking’ of Mickey Mouse by Gaza Strip’s Farfour Mouse. I’m not making this stuff up either! See Farfour for yourself.

These lunatics of the American Right don’t get riled up about what Israel and the US have done to the million plus people of the Gaza Strip, way over 50% of them children. It matters not the least to them that Gaza has the lowest standard fo living in the world, and that most of the inhabitants living in this total misery are children. No. Instead they are worried about this mouse, Farfour! They’re worried that he’s a terrorist rat teaching the kids to hate! Can you imagine how lost in nonsense these nuts actually are? They’re our neighbors, too. Scary.

Here is another clip with some CNN commentary of Farfour in action, but go read the American posters’ comments and see who is really sick in the head. And nobody seems too concerned about Farfoura. But then again she’s not a mouse, is she? She’s more the butterfly… The Daffy Zionist Ducks can handle that. But don’t pick on Walt’s pre-WW2 made fascist rodent, or they get all upset.

And nobody seems to care about Walt Disney himself. He wa a rather loathsome character.
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Below is the real situation in Gaza, where per capita GDP is now around $500-$600 per year and falling.
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on the 40th anniversary of occupation my statement in the UN
SPECIAL MEETING TO MARK 40 YEARS OF OCCUPATION
BY ISRAEL OF THE PALESTINIAN TERRITORY,
INCLUDING EAST JERUSALEM

UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK
7 June 2007
STATEMENT BY

DR. MONA EL FARRA
PROJECTS DIRECTOR
MIDDLE EAST CHILDREN’S ALLIANCE

Red Crescent Society For Gaza Strip
GAZA

?Your Excellency Mr. Paul Badji, Chairman of the Committee,
Distinguished guests and Excellencies,

It is my honour to be amongst you today, despite the gravity of the occasion being commemorated, on this 40th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

First, let me say that 2007 is the 40th anniversary of 59 years of the brutal occupation of the Palestinian people.

As we called for an end to apartheid in South Africa and the right of all people to live together and have equal rights, we must now, before it is too late, call for true justice for the Palestinians.

Today, we heard about the economic plight of the Palestinian people. We heard about Palestinians in Israeli prisons which number close to 8,000 men and women, including approximately 350 children under the age of 14, most of whom have been tortured.

How many UN resolutions must be passed by the UN? How many years of calling for 2 States before there is an understanding that Israel continues its aggression on the ground against women, children and men, the demolition of thousands of homes and the continued building of the apartheid wall?

Let us not just speak of the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza. We must never forget those who live as second-class citizens inside Israel and most of all, those who were forced from their homes and lands in 1948.

Now is the time to call for a real peace, with justice for all the children in the region. This can only be accomplished by supporting the right of return of all Palestinians.

Now is the time to acknowledge that the two-State solution is not the answer.

From Gaza I came, where the children of my country have no safe homes, no safe streets, no proper and adequate health facilities, no proper food, clean water, or regular electrical power, no recreational activities and no good education. The list of deprivation of their basic needs is too long to count.

I lived this occupation as a child, and am still living it as an adult. I can see it in the eyes of my daughter when she is afraid, tired, restless and exhausted because of the unsafe and unpredictable quality of life in Gaza under occupation. I saw it as soon as we crossed the borders on our way to Egypt, where she sensed something new and different: freedom, safety and space. Gaza is like a big, unsafe prison. And it is a very small place for 1.4 million people, half of whom are children.

I face the occupation every day during my work when hundreds of Palestinian patients are denied permits and accessibility to proper medical treatment, outside Gaza. There are a few lucky patients who get a referral and permit for treatment outside Gaza. The majority, however, have to wait and wait. Many die while waiting.

What is more heart-breaking than children who do not have adequate food and a healthy atmosphere to grow up to be well rounded adults? According to the Health Work Committees Organization, 42 per cent of children in Gaza under the age of 5 suffer from iron deficiency anemia and 45 per cent suffer from some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, due to the experiences that they are subjected to as a result of the non-stop military actions of the Israeli Occupation Forces, which almost always affect civilians in one way or another.

I will never forget the story of a woman in labor, who had to wait several hours at a checkpoint last November, during one of many Israeli military operations in the north of Gaza. Eventually she arrived at the Al Awda hospital in Jabalia refugee camp where she gave birth to her baby. When she left the hospital with the baby to go to home in the village of Beit Hanoun, there was no home; her home had been demolished by the Israeli occupying army. There are many cases and many stories, but I believe it is not the numbers that really matter, even one incident such as the above is one enough human rights violation.

I remember a 4-year old child in the same village who was forced to stay in one room with all members of his family for 48 hours while the Israeli Army commandeered their home. The child was thirsty and the soldier was there with his bottle of water, the occupied and the occupier in the same space. The soldier offered water to the thirsty child. The child said “no, no, no”. The child’s natural reaction was a combination of fear of what the soldier represents and the steadfastness in the face of the occupation. This is what characterizes the Palestinian people: steadfastness and resistance in the face of all adversity; even small children can express it with their natural reactions more than any words or speeches. The soldier on the other hand is a human being that has been forced by the Israeli occupation machine to lose his humanity.

Whenever I think of Palestinian children and their lives under occupation, I always think of the Israeli children. As adults, we have a commitment to both sets of children to provide a safe environment for them to live peacefully. It is not the occupation or the wall or the ongoing aggression against my people that will bring safety or security for Israeli children, only peace that is based on justice will do so. Justice means that the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be considered. Israel must recognize its moral responsibility towards the Palestinian refugees.

While Israel is physically outside Gaza, it still completely controls our lives, all aspects of our lives: health, education, economy and freedom of movement.

Life under occupation is degrading to human dignity. It has deprived us of our freedom, and only free people can make peace. It is most peculiar that we are forced to deal with the patterns of life under occupation as normal, well-established facts and when people lost hope and faith in the world or any future chances for change, and when the world turns its head away.

On the 40th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, it is fitting to call once again on the international community to put pressure on Israel to fulfil its obligations by abiding by the UN resolutions related to Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israeli occupation should be ended now and the right of return must not be forgotten.

Thank you.

American companies busy at work killing the kids daily

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Protests at the G8 economic conference in Europe and Bush and Rice preaching the joys of capitalism to Putin as the Pentagon encircles Russia with new weapons. These are the headlines in the news this week and last.

Most all of us now understand how the US’s military-industrial complex kills children daily around the globe, since one has to be in obtuse and total denial to not know about this. But what about our other industrial giants? Aren’t they helping others out, and most especially helping out the world’s children to live better lives?

George Monbiot has an excellent commentary about this issue titled (at least on their site), G8: Watch What They Do, Not What They Say. A` large part of his article discusses some big American companies involvement in helping kill Philippine children for their stockholders benefit. And how the US government itself steps in to ensure that this be the case.

This is not a situation limited to the Philippines and/ or breastfeeding. American corporations carry out economic policies that kill all around the globe. They are constantly working to sell coca cola, corn syrup, and other expensive food trash to children whose parents have little money. In Mexico and Central America, vending of fruit and licuados is rapidly in decline, while corn tortilla prices skyrocket. Meanwhile, the countryside is turned to desert by American pushed ag policies. Children perish in these conditions, and they are the conditions that US corporations push worldwide.

Yes, American companies are busy at work daily killing kids to make a better profit for themselves. Add that to the policies they push that degrade the world’s ecology, and the kids are in danger everywhere. There has got to be a better way than allowing the ‘free market’ to just run amok.

DR Congo-4,000,000 dead in last decade and counting

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The real African locale where genocide is occurring is not so much in Sudan, but rather in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So why is there not a ‘Save Congo Coalition’? After all, 4,000,00 dead in just the last decade is nothing trivial at all. Don’t the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ folk give a damn?

No doubt as I write these words, there are speakers at the ‘Peace’ conference in Albuquerque wailing about how action must be taken FOR Darfur. But they won’t say hardly a whisper about the DR Congo. Why not? Well it might just be because there are already 18,000 ‘peacekeeper’ troops in the DR Congo, and yet the fighting keeps on continuing. And the UN Security Council wants out, even as it demands to be let into Sudan! The ‘Save Darfur’ solution of sending in the troops is no more likely to work in Sudan than it really has been working in the DR Congo.

There are real reasons why troops controlled from Washington DC and European capitals do not alleviate much the suffering, but actually add to it long term. That’s because there is no commitment to spend any money on anything other than soldiers and their equipment. The amount of money spent on food for the people of the DR Congo is far less than the money spent on troops. Much less.

It is a disgrace, that while there are those who in our country and Britain demand sending in the Pentagon controlled troops to yet more African countries, they remain largely silent about how in the epicenter of current African genocide (DR Congo), far less than $100 million dollars is spent to help out a huge population of starving people! UNICEF states that currently 1,200 people a day are dying in the DR Congo there, unnecessarily due to the conflicts and poverty/ disease arising from war.

Troops were sent into Somalia, and the US is now begging its proxy invader, Ethiopia, to stay in and further occupy Mogadishu. The US is actually spreading conflict in Africa, and not stopping inter-ethnic conflicts like there are in parts of Sudan. Want to help Africa out? Then try the following approach…

All US controlled troops out of Africa! Send- Food, not Bombs.

All of Africa’s burdensome international debt needs to be written off, and the ‘Save Darfur’ people need to think about saving Africa as a whole instead, by simply demanding that food and medical relief be prioritized instead of their current calls for economic wars (boycotts) and sending in new branches of the military to one locale or another. Help save the people of the DR Congo, and help save the Sudanese and Somalian people, too. And please, please, please…. Close AFRICOM (the US Pentagon African command center) down.

Who is to blame for hunger in Darfur and what to do about it?

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Darfur has become a cause celeb-re for many people in the imperialist countries of the US and Western Europe. They are demanding legislation that pushes for intervention by what are deemed ‘peacekeeper’ troops.

If you go to the rallies that demand ‘Save Darfur’, you hear speakers squarely putting the blame for the deaths in Darfur on Arabs and China. The solution of the ‘Save Darfur’ crowd? Send in the troops in to be controlled by the governments of the US and its European allies. The calls go out for legislation that would enable just that.

But who and what really is to blame for world hunger, including that in Darfur region refugee camps? What other possible solution to the crisis in Darfur would work, if not sending in the troops? There certainly is a crisis in Darfur and that is something worth working to alleviate.

How about campaigning for Food Aid instead of troop intervention? The Developed World only spends about $2 billion per year in world relief of hunger. That’s right! Only $2 billion for all the world. The slogan —Food Not Bombs— really is relevant here, yet the ‘Save Darfur’ activists seem oblivious to that? Instead, they blame Khartoum and China for all the problems in Darfur, and actually are demanding an economic war be engaged in against Sudan! That would work like Clinton’s sanctions did against the Iraqi people. That’s no solution at all but is a crime in the making instead.

How easy it would be to increase the food aid relief to $10 billion dollars from the current sad level of $2 billion. The US portion of that would be about $6 billion dollars. Instead, our government prefers to intervene with troops and bombs, and unfortunately there are many misguided activists that are campaigning for just that using Darfur as their excuse. Shame on them. Food, Not Bombs instead. Sending in the military is not the solution to the murders of civilians in Darfur, nor anywhere elsewhere for that matter. Lets call for Food Relief for all of Africa, and in a manner that does not destroy local food production, too. That’s the decent thing to do.

Rush Limbaugh needs to get the can for Hate Speech, too

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Here is a video of Rush Limbaugh’s promotion of ‘black face’ in the wake of Imus’s getting his papers from his sponsors for his own racist hate speech. Barack the magic negro The timing was deliberate, too. It is Limbaugh’s defense of Hate Speech in general, of which he is one of the biggest practitioners of.

These hypocrites call for the firing of any even mildly liberal professor they can dig up, and then try to wrap themselves in the mantle of ‘Free Speech’ when it comes to themselves and their constant spreading of Hate Speech across the airways. But there is a big difference between the two types of speech. Let me give my own experience at an antiwar vigil yesterday to illustrate.

Yesterday me and another antiwar protester were practicing our right to Free Speech by appearing with signs at a busy intersection. They said ‘PEACE’ and ‘NO WAR’. Some hecklers who disagreed with our message started shouting ‘Bush, Bush, Bush’ from their cars. They, too, were practicing their right to Free Speech, but then it turned nasty.

It turned into an example of them practicing Hate Speech. These young and belligerent men parked their cars and started to menace us. One of them told me to ‘Suck his Dick’, as they threateningly seemed to be building up to a physical assault on us, even though hundreds of driver-byers would have been watching! They made it clear that they would have assaulted us physically, except for the fact that so many onlookers would have witnessing their attack if they did.

As they left, one of them who had worked himself up full of hatred for us, angrily backed his vehicle into the tall lamp post in the parking lot of the Fast Food ‘restaurant’ he was at. Comical and sad. That’s what practicing Hate Speech usually comes down to, but it does have the danger of potentially causing others deep harm, and usually in an effort to stop others from their right to exercise their Free Speech.

Let’s face it. Much of the work of people like Ann Coulter Imus and Rush Limbaugh is nothing more than the most flimsily camouflaged Hate Speech. It’s basically not much more than telling others to ‘suck their dicks’, and it’s usually directed at people of other races, other sexual orientation, and those from other cultures. Oh, and against others practicing their Free Speech to openly disagree with government policies.

It is not being against hate mongers’ Free Speech to demand of their sponsors that these practitioners of Hate Speech either clear up tehri acts and eliminate their Hate Speech routines, or just hit the road. There are plenty of ways to express one’s disagreement with ‘liberals’ than in using Hate Speech, so let the message be sent out that we are tired of this constant hate mongering on the airways.

Some like Rush Limbaugh and Imus will never engage in civil exercise of Free Speech, but rather will continue to principally engage in Hate Speech if continually allowed to. So let’s hope that Rush will get the can, too, like Imus did. That would be a big victory against Hate Speech, and a big victory in favor of Free Speech. Similarly, me and my fellow antiwar protesters of yesterday will continue to engage in our right to Free Speech, no matter how many middle fingers come our way along with the threats to possibly physically attack us.

We will meet soon with the city police to discuss how to keep them from physically attacking us for practicing Free Speech in this city. I don’t expect much, or anything for that matter. The police, just like the Bush Adminstration, are totally in favor of Hate Speech and totally incapable of defending the public’s right to engage in Free Speech. I’d have to see a miracle from God before I would ever think otherwise.

Israel obstinate

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PLOMore nations gave formal recognition to the PLO, a terrorist group, than to Israel. Thus more people thought the Palestinian Liberation Organization had a “right to exist” than did Israel, a chunk of Arab land appropriated to make a Jewish State. To date Israel has rejected 70 UN resolutions against its actions. I think it bears repeating them, lest typifying Israel’s behavior as illegal, be dismissed as a rant.

# 1. General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947): the 1947 Partition plan of Palestine and the creation of Israel.
# 2. General Assembly Resolution 194 (1947): Palestinian Refugees have the right to return to their homes in Israel.
# 3. Resolution 106 (1955): condemns Israel for Gaza raid.
# 4. Resolution 111 (1956): condemns Israel for raid on Syria that killed fifty-six people.
# 5. Resolution 127 (1958): recommends Israel suspend its no-man’s zone’ in Jerusalem.
# 6. Resolution 162 (1961): urges Israel to comply with UN decisions.
# 7. Resolution 171 (1962): determines flagrant violations by Israel in its attack on Syria.
# 8. Resolution 228 (1966): censures Israel for its attack on Samu in the West Bank, then under Jordanian control.
# 9. Resolution 237 (1967): urges Israel to allow return of new 1967 Palestinian refugees.
# 10. Resolution 242 (1967): Israel’s occupation of Palestine is Illegal.
# 11. Resolution 248 (1968): condemns Israel for its massive attack on Karameh in Jordan.
# 12. Resolution 250 (1968): calls on Israel to refrain from holding military parade in Jerusalem.
# 13. Resolution 251 (1968): deeply deplores Israeli military parade in Jerusalem in defiance of Resolution 250.
# 14. Resolution 252 (1968): declares invalid Israel’s acts to unify Jerusalem as Jewish capital.
# 15. Resolution 256 (1968): condemns Israeli raids on Jordan as flagrant violation.
# 16. Resolution 259 (1968): deplores Israel’s refusal to accept UN mission to probe occupation.
# 17. Resolution 262 (1968): condemns Israel for attack on Beirut airport.
# 18. Resolution 265 (1969): condemns Israel for air attacks for Salt in Jordan.
# 19. Resolution 267 (1969): censures Israel for administrative acts to change the status of Jerusalem.
# 20. Resolution 270 (1969): condemns Israel for air attacks on villages in southern Lebanon.
# 21. Resolution 271 (1969): condemns Israel’s failure to obey UN resolutions on Jerusalem.
# 22. Resolution 279 (1970): demands withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon.
# 23. Resolution 280 (1970): condemns Israeli’s attacks against Lebanon.
# 24. Resolution 285 (1970): demands immediate Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
# 25. Resolution 298 (1971): deplores Israel’s changing of the status of Jerusalem.
# 26. Resolution 313 (1972): demands that Israel stop attacks against Lebanon.
# 27. Resolution 316 (1972): condemns Israel for repeated attacks on Lebanon.
# 28. Resolution 317 (1972): deplores Israel’s refusal to release.
# 29. Resolution 332 (1973): condemns Israel’s repeated attacks against Lebanon.
# 30. Resolution 337 (1973): condemns Israel for violating Lebanon’s sovereignty.
# 31. Resolution 347 (1974): condemns Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
# 32. General Assembly Resolution 3236 (1974): affirms the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine to self-determination without external interference and to national independence and sovereignty.
# 33. Resolution 425 (1978): calls on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon.
# 34. Resolution 427 (1978): calls on Israel to complete its withdrawal from Lebanon.
# 35. Resolution 444 (1979): deplores Israel’s lack of cooperation with UN peacekeeping forces.
# 36. Resolution 446 (1979): determines that Israeli settlements are a serious obstruction to peace and calls on Israel to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
# 37. Resolution 450 (1979): calls on Israel to stop attacking Lebanon.
# 38. Resolution 452 (1979): calls on Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territories.
# 39. Resolution 465 (1980): deplores Israel’s settlements and asks all member states not to assist its settlements program.
# 40. Resolution 467 (1980): strongly deplores Israel’s military intervention in Lebanon.
# 41. Resolution 468 (1980): calls on Israel to rescind illegal expulsions of two Palestinian mayors and a judge and to facilitate their return.
# 42. Resolution 469 (1980): strongly deplores Israel’s failure to observe the council’s order not to deport Palestinians.
# 43. Resolution 471 (1980): expresses deep concern at Israel’s failure to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
# 44. Resolution 476 (1980): reiterates that Israel’s claim to Jerusalem are null and void.
# 45. Resolution 478 (1980): censures (Israel) in the strongest terms for its claim to Jerusalem in its Basic Law.
# 46. Resolution 484 (1980): declares it imperative that Israel re-admit two deported Palestinian mayors.
# 47. Resolution 487 (1981): strongly condemns Israel for its attack on Iraq’s nuclear facility.
# 48. Resolution 497 (1981): decides that Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights is null and void and demands that Israel rescinds its decision forthwith.
# 49. Resolution 498 (1981): calls on Israel to withdraw from Lebanon.
# 50. Resolution 501 (1982): calls on Israel to stop attacks against Lebanon and withdraw its troops.
# 51. Resolution 509 (1982): demands that Israel withdraw its forces forthwith and unconditionally from Lebanon.
# 52. Resolution 515 (1982): demands that Israel lift its siege of Beirut and allow food supplies to be brought in.
# 53. Resolution 517 (1982): censures Israel for failing to obey UN resolutions and demands that Israel withdraw its forces from Lebanon.
# 54. Resolution 518 (1982): demands that Israel cooperate fully with UN forces in Lebanon.
# 55. Resolution 520 (1982): condemns Israel’s attack into West Beirut.
# 56. Resolution 573 (1985): condemns Israel vigorously for bombing Tunisia in attack on PLO headquarters.
# 57. Resolution 587 (1986): takes note of previous calls on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and urges all parties to withdraw.
# 58. Resolution 592 (1986): strongly deplores the killing of Palestinian students at Bir Zeit University by Israeli troops.
# 59. Resolution 605 (1987): strongly deplores Israel’s policies and practices denying the human rights of Palestinians.
# 60. Resolution 607 (1988): calls on Israel not to deport Palestinians and strongly requests it to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
# 61. Resolution 608 (1988): deeply regrets that Israel has defied the United Nations and deported Palestinian civilians.
# 62. Resolution 636 (1989): deeply regrets Israeli deportation of Palestinian civilians.
# 63. Resolution 641 (1989): deplores Israel’s continuing deportation of Palestinians.
# 64. Resolution 672 (1990): condemns Israel for violence against Palestinians at the Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount.
# 65. Resolution 673 (1990): deplores Israel’s refusal to cooperate with the United Nations.
# 66. Resolution 681 (1990): deplores Israel’s resumption of the deportation of Palestinians.
# 67. Resolution 694 (1991): deplores Israel’s deportation of Palestinians and calls on it to ensure their safe and immediate return.
# 68. Resolution 726 (1992): strongly condemns Israel’s deportation of Palestinians.
# 69. Resolution 799 (1992): strongly condemns Israel’s deportation of 413 Palestinians and calls for their immediate return.
# 70. Resolution 1397 (2002): affirms a vision of a region where two states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side within secure and recognized borders.
# 71. General Assembly Resolution ES-10/15 (2004): declares the wall built inside the occupied territories as contrary to international law and asks Israel to demolish it.

New Age posturing with the ‘pickaninnies’

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Those who grew up in the Old South, remember when racist politicians used to pose with ‘Negro’ children to supposedly show their concern for Black people. That was a crude technique to deflect criticism for being a racist.

White racists often called Black children ‘pickaninnies’, and loved to rub their heads with the different type of hair. They would then comment about how cute and funny Black children were as opposed to the uppity adult Blacks who never fully wanted to acknowledge their assigned places in Apartheid America.

Why the term ‘pickaninny’ for Black children? Try thinking about what ‘pick a ninny’ means. A ninny means a fool. Black children were considered kind of adorable jesters in the court of White racist America of that era, so Whites often tried to help out the supposedly ‘adorable pickaninnies’ with gifts of food and clothing. That made the racist feel good and generous, instead of feeling full of self loathing for being the miserable monsters that most racists really are.

So enter today’s world, and has the posturing with the ‘pickaninnies’ now disappeared? No, it has just morphed into technicolor instead. Instead of touching the ‘pickaninnies moppy heads’ old style, we have good hearted folk posing themselves next to emaciated, injured, and distraught ‘pickaninnies’. And this is done outside US borders, and not inside them as of Old. Case in point is Mia Farrow posing in Chad today on Yahoo News with her great concern for the welfare of the ‘pickaninny’.

Don’t get me wrong here. Much suffering is underway in Africa, as it has been ongoing for centuries. That’s not the point of the posturing though, no more than it was with the posturing of the past. Why is Darfur THE GENOCIDE, and not Congo or Iraq or Palestine? That is the point of the posturing, simply to deflect attention elsewhere from one’s own crimes.

It is not just actresses like Mia Farrow, doing the posturing with the ‘pickaninny’ neither. Here is from antiwar.com today which links to an article titled… Bush considering Darfur no-fly zone. The title says it all. But look who else is posturing to deflect attention away from their own constructed genocides! It is Israel itself. We have Israel, Bush, and Mia Farrow all posing with the ‘pickaninny’. That little ‘pickaninny’ is called Darfur and we are supposed to forget all context in the real world and cry along with the crocodile tears of the genocidal and racist maniacs running amok across the planet. I refer to the governmental leaders of Israel and the US.

They can’t be racists and genocidists at all, look at their concern for the ‘pickaninny’! ‘Save the Pickaninny!’ they seem to be all shouting at one time. Send the candy distributing troops (our boys) in to save the ‘pickaninnies’ of Darfur! Hands off the ‘pickaninnies’! In the link, it is noted that ‘The Holocaust museum has taken the lead on behalf of Darfur’. How nice. Not noted is why the Holocaust museum has not taken the lead on behalf of the Palestinians instead? And why is Bush not trying to impose a no-fly zone over Iraq at this time instead of Darfur?

Let’s face it, New Age posturing with the ‘pickaniny’ is just as nauseating as it was in the Old South of another era. In fact, it may be even more repulsive than before.

Algeria, Eritrea, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Chad, Yemen- all pulled into made by US war

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It is no longer even just Iran, Somalia, and Syria that are now being pulled into the vortex of the US government’s mad assault on the Muslim world. The above countries, too, are all being made part of the US grab for declining oil reserves. All are to have their security sacrificed, and all in the name of making the US supposedly more secure!.

This should give some people, who believe that it is total madness for the US to attack Iran therefore it can’t be in the planning, some food for thought? Regionalized warfare is in the planning and is being carried out though, whether we like it or not. It is no longer a matter of when it might occur, simply because it already is occurring.

Algeria is now sinking back into its decades long dirty war between its military and Islamic Rightist forces, as Turkey ‘s millitary is with its newest attacks on its oppressed Kurdish citizens. Hezbollah, in Lebanon, announces that Dick Cheney has begun a covert war against them inside that country, while Chad has now become drawn into conflict with Sudan. And in the Horn of Africa, the US is torturingand murering people alongside allies Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, as Eritrea is being accused newly of supporting ‘terrorism’ because it opposes the US made invasion of Somalia with Ethiopian troops! Even in Thailand, the former government’s persecution of its Muslim community has now rebounded into that country presently being ruled most unstably by a group of coup leaders.

The real threat ahead as the US government moves its troops into line for an assault on Iran, is that the countries of Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Egypt will also have their stability crumble, not to mention other places like Saudi Arabia and Morocco, Nigeria, and the Congo, once again. Meanwhile, our politicians of both parties act as if all this is not all their doing! It is, and just like they don’t give a damn about the destruction they are causing abroad, they don’t give a damn about what they aere doing to the common American, neither.

Other US peace activists with misdemeanor charges pending

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The Saint Patrick’s Day Parade produced a net total of 7 misdemeanor charges against 7 peace people here in Colorado Springs, but is that typical of the whole US to have this sort of thing happen? After all we are the country where human rights are respected, democracy flourishes in a garden like atmosphere, and habeus corpus is the law of the land. So let’s go to Florida now and see what produced another misdemeanor charge agianst a peacenik to be filed once again by local police?

Instead of the provocative and inflamatory KIDS NOT BOMBS sign that Marie carried, there the peacenik actually carried an even more inflamatory sign! One that demanded FOOD NOT BOMBS! How horrible is that?! These subversives need to show some respect to ordinary Americans, who just want to live in a non-violent society uninterrupted all the time by violent protesters inconsiderately spreading their messages of hate. They should just shut up and get a job.

And all the nice folk upset at the 7 charged here in Colorado Springs should also write to the mayor of the lovely town of Orlando, and let him know that they in Colorado Springs support what he is doing to keep Mickey Mouse safe in America. The nutty Leftist there is lucky the police didn’t use the stun guns on him, when his stew was stolen. Oh well, next time. This ‘peace’ thug certainly will be unable to keep himself out of trouble once again. Why don’t they pass a federal 3 misdemeanors and you are out law?

AMERICA LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT! If you can’t live by the rules I’ll buy you a free ticket to Guantanamo, Peace Dudes…

Medicine for profit is a world disaster in march

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Medicine for profit is a march down a blind alley and the reason why is quite simple to understand. ‘Care’ for an individual for an individual fee, is the ultimate non-holistic approach possible since health is so absolutely connected to the environment that people live in.

To treat the individual in an effective manner, doctors have to also treat the environment as well. But just go and try telling this to your average numbskull private-profit doc that the American medical schools turn out so in mass. These think-they-know-it-all degreed idiots are sure they know what’s best for you, but the medical machine they are part of never does jack shit to treat the environmental conditions that make people sick. Logically and scientifically it makes no sense. But that is medicine for profit for you, is it not?

Take as just one tiny example, the cathedrals where many of these doctors often practice in; the hospitals. The doctors often stroll in with their coats and ties on, while the patients and medical worker peons that the doctor boss around are most often passing their days in areas more nasty than your home toilet area. Most of these doctors are cynical bastards that almost entirely identify with the corporate structure they have melded and immersed themselves into. They say they care about the patients they take in for a fee, but the ‘care’ most often stops when the bucks stop. Or it never begins in the first place.

Don’t believe me? Then try going into an average doctors office without medical insurance cards in hand. What’s the first thing one gets asked when they show up half dead into the ER? It is always, ‘What’s your coverage?’ And if you got none, you most often will get sent packing. ‘Dumped’ is the word now used, and that’s not exactly treating the patients holistically. Not at all.

Truth is, the medical doctors are not allowed (nor allow themselves to even contemplate) to treat the environment. That is seen as the terrain of the corporations and their government alone. The average American doctor concedes that area without even a bleat of protest. But why? Public Health is certainly important in the treatment of disease, isn’t it?

Why treat the farm worker, say, after his exposure to deadly pesticides? Why not treat the environment to prevent the disease, Doc? No money in it for you? Why not treat the lack of food, the lack of clean drinking water, the lack of a decent living space, the lack of a decent wage, instead of just treating the now already sickened individual who comes to you with insurance card in hand, Doctor? Too scared to fight disease? Too bought off by the hundreds of thousands you are often making?

You are a fraud, corporate medicine and corporate model doctors. You turn all of us in your medical factories into dehumanized entities with only titles and employee numbers in hand, and not even our own humanity which you strip away from us bit by bit, same as you strip away the sick and elderly folk’s dignity. You turn us all into an Evil Empire that churns out your profits, and destroys people’s health. You destroy the environment same as your corporate cousins in agriculture, mining, and military goods production do, alsdo.

You are strip mining world health, not bettering it, all to make bucks. And the US doctors are all aboard this gigantic con game on society, hiding behind a facade of being all high tech and scientific. Instead, you business doctors are as nasty as an MRSA sore, a Vancomycin resistant diarrhea, a brain dead corpse in the ICU, a multi drug resistant TB, and all the other products of made by your corporate medical model and your human devolution as system into monster. All you hold now to bedazzle the crowd with, is some sort of future tech fix that is the pie in the sky you always promise. Meanwhile, you turn our environment into cesspool. You are turning all of us into ‘medical waste’, Corporate Doc.

Chemistry in the food supply

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Ask any veterinarian what you’re supposed to be feeding your dog or cat, they’ll tell you dry food only, and water. So perhaps people poisoning their pets with wet canned meals have achieved their result, more recently accelerated by the accidental Melamine additive in wheat gluten imported from China.

The FDA has been reluctant to reveal the companies behind the wayward toxin, even as the public grapples with the possibility that the plastic derivative may have reached the human food supply. Naming names reveals not just the corporate logos but also the extended interweaving of chemical companies in the food industry.

Did you have any idea the can of Alpo held by Mr. Publishers Clearinghouse contained Wheat Gluten from Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. or partner Suzhou Textile Import and Export Co. of Jiangsu, China; imported by ChemNutra Inc. of Las Vegas, Nevada; sold to pet food giants Nestle Purina, Del Monte, Hill’s Pet Nutrition, and behind-the scenes giant Menu Foods Inc. of Canada which makes 100 of the different smaller pet food brands? Whatever are you deliberating in the pet food isle, which TV commercial will best please your domestic companion?

You knew pet food wasn’t made by Keebler Elves or the Jolly Green Giant, but did you suspect the truth was so sordidly mundane? Nearly all people food passes through the chemical fingers of Archer Daniels Midland or Monsanto or both. Wait until the FDA tries to keep their names out of the spotlight.

When laws protect the criminals and not the common people

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Somebody has just burglarized your place, they get caught, but then the police walk away with them, laughing about the whole ‘misunderstanding’. It’s even worse than that, since while the judge watches, the burglars ‘apologize’ to you for their crimes and then walk out the courtroom door with the loot!

Hey! Maybe these robbers are actually in with the police, you think. What else can one think, when the burglars admit they’re guilty of the crime, apologize to you, and then say they won’t let it happen again and will take measures to make sure you stay safe in the future! And the judge lets them off the hook for the theft! If you had taken $5 of food unauthorized from your local grocery, you might have gotten locked up for life!

How is it that American has come to coddle its criminals in such a manner? I know of more than a few cases, where after the criminals did bodily harm to some of our neighbors, they got off Scot free! Can you believe that? These folk sustained permanent injuries that they will have to suffer with the rest of their now destroyed lives, and the criminals get to go on about their business, laughing and boasting of what they have done!

It seems that there are now 2 sets of laws; one for the decent common fok, and another set of much cushy regulations for the criminals! Hard working people get the shaft while hardened lifetime criminals drive around with their stolen goods and thuimb their noses at the rest of us. Is this really America?

Look at this case from Washington DC for example. The powers that be practically are giving awards out for these crimes and to these criminals. Where is the concern for the victims here? And one of the criminals actually has the gall to say,

‘And it’s frustrating.’

Damn right it is, you need to be in jail, Pal. What has come to America when criminals like these 2 in DC continue to run loose? Doesn’t anybody care about stopping crime any more? Stop coddling these criminals!

‘American Owned’?- racism on Route 66

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You know the routine. You’ve driven 400-500 miles and are so tired you can barely move. Time to find a room so you pull into the first motel you see. And there’s that big nasty sign…. AMERICAN OWNED … in the window.

OK, I admit it. At times, I eat at McDonalds and shop at WalMart, but one thing I try never to do is to stay at a hotel with that overt racist flag out front. In fact, I always ask the Indian hotel owners and managers elsewhere if they will fix me some Indian food if I smell it in the air.

I don’t want to help out any of those ‘American Owned’ assholes with their stupid nativist racism. ‘American’ born they may be, but so are all members of the KKK, too. I prefer hard working immigrants to American born that try to appeal to the basest instincts in the worst amongst us.

Long live all the hard working immigrants of all nationalities amongst us. They are what make America so much better than it would be if we were nothing more than a homogenous bloc of stupid, ingrown twits.

Viva variedad!

I need a joint

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I need a joint, but religious people won’t let me have one. I need a joint at times because I suffer from the itch (pruritus, caused by mild pedal edema and skin allergies). No seriously, I do, really and it can be quite uncomfortable.

Marijuana relieves this condition but I won’t smoke it as long as it is illegal and my smoking it could put me in jail, wreck my ability to hold a license to work in my profession, etc. There is another medicine available fo this condition, but it is not over the counter for the same reason that marijuana isn’t over the counter legally. Religion makes for bad medicine, that’s why.

Religion has a long tradition of practicing medicine without a license. Look at all thee food laws in the Torah, Bible, etc. Think of what Hindus are not allowed to eat? Muslims prohibit pork amongst the meats because infested pork causes disease. If you are a Muslim, any medicine such as a ham sandwich is prohibited. Not even with a doctor’s prescription may you have one. Similarly, alcoholism is prevented theoretically for Muslims, by being flat out banned. Uh, for good health reasons I am sure. Hindus are not even allowed good chicken soup! Food is medicine and all religions practice medicine, often quite bad medicine, with their food fetishes. But they practice medicine in other ways too.

Christianity is just as bizarre as the other faiths are in regards to their ideas of what is good medicine. But at least with God’s food laws Christians don’t seem to obey them much anymore. But Christians do yank coca out of coke, the codeine out of cough syrup (despite it truly being the best drug for the condition of having a cough), and marijuana out of personal use and paper making, and make Atarax (a great med for itch of throat and skin) prohibited without an expensive visit to a doctor’s office.

Strangely enough, almost anything that reduces affliction in an effective manner is viewed with paranoia by Christians! Notice how ‘drug stores’ no longer are called that? That’s because drugs DO work, so our new word for drug distribution centers is now the word ‘pharmacy’. That’s because prescriptions most often don’t work, so they are considered superior to what does actually work within our overly religious society! That would be drugs chosen through one’s own efforts, rather than the efforts of the priestly docs.

Have you ever noticed how the major industrialized country with the most religious Christian nuttyness, the USA, has the nuttiest, most preposterous medical system in the entire industrialized world? It is not a mere coincidence. Lots of medicine here is considered good only because it hurts like Hell, delivers you to a Hellish-like state, are delivers you directly to Hell. Not a mere coincidence. Christians like Hell more than they like good medicine. That was a fact way before the Prohibition Era.

Well, since I don’t have the money to get a $5 drug (Atarax) with a $150 visit to the doctor’s office, nor have the illegal mota at hand, tonite I will just whip my feet with thorned branches in the manner of some wild extreme Christian penitent once again, as the itch comes across me after the swelling of my feet and the itch begins, shortly after the socks come off (pedal edema). And if I have a hard cough from a cold then I’ll do without the codeine, all because my Christian neighbors are all so damn nutty as Hell. They’ll let you rot ’till half dead, then spend a million dollars keeping you half alive. I need a joint. It’s too depressing thinking about it.