Tag Archives: Globe

Thank you, sir! May I have another?

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Buenos Aires protest
This morning I clicked on our new upper-left graphic which imparts info about protesting the state democratic convention. What I discovered was page after page of terms to meet and rules to obey, laid out neatly by the powers-that-be, so that would-be activists can protest the most egregious war and power-hungry administration in our country’s history. Happily chirping about meetings with policemen and attorneys, the activists invite us to join them in defining the terms of their oppression.

I’m sorry, I know these people are wannabe do-gooders, but this bullshit is akin to meeting with a gang of rapists to consent to the terms of one’s degradation. Oh yes, please! Just use lubricant and let me lie in a comfortable bed!

It’s pathetic that our passionate anti-war activists have so little vision, so little faith in human history, such a lack of conviction and temerity that they can be contented to hand out fliers and maps, cower in a cage gilded especially for them, and be completely marginalized by the system they profess to oppose.

Here’s my idea. Do not legitimize the trampling of your civil liberties and the silencing of your voices by compliantly meeting with police officers and attorneys. Instead tell them that you’ll see them on Venetucci Boulevard with a thousand of your closest friends. You’ll have drums and cowbells and bullhorns and offensive banners and whatever fuck else you feel like bringing. Tell them you’ll sing and shout and march and cross every boundary they put up to keep you on the fringe. Tell them you’ll do whatever the fuck you want to in order to make your voices heard.

What the hell? The vast majority of Americans oppose this war and despise this administration. Why aren’t they out on the streets? Do you really believe they’ll join you there as soon as they are enlightened by Amy Goodman? No! They aren’t out on the streets because they are sheep waiting for a shepherd. So where are the shepherds, our visionary and inspiring leaders? Where are the men with balls, bravely putting their necks on the line in the name of peace and justice? Where are the courageous vaginas, fresh from their New Orleans beaver fest, newly empowered to fight violence against women all over the globe? The anti-war movement in Colorado Springs does not have a single leader. It has a few worker bees — banner painters and flier makers — who don’t have a clue about what it’s going to take to stop the machine.

If you are like me you are saying “Well, Marie, why aren’t you out there making a difference?” I’ll tell you why. I am the system’s bitch. I have assets that can be frozen by the IRS. I have children in the public school system. I have dough invested in Social Security. I am tied by law to an ex-husband which precludes me from moving my family to another neighborhood, let alone another country. I am a cog in the machine. And in the scheme of things, nothing more.

I am, by position and ultimately by choice, powerless. But at least I don’t pretend to be anything more.

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Here are some pictures from the protest I was inadvertently caught up in in Buenos Aires. Maybe because Argentinians recently lived under a military government, one that silenced dissenters by kidnapping them and dropping them into the ocean, they appreciate their regained freedoms enough to band together and make their voices heard.

Argentina protestors
Argentina plaza protest
Banner
Blue period
Che
Drums
After the main protest
In the street
Green peace shirt
Osama

POLICE AND MEDIA! ON THE FRINGE! BEHIND THE BARRIER!
Argentina cops behind the barrier
Argentina riot police behind the fence
Argentina protest media

Iraq contractor deaths counted in digits

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Revealed: two more US contractors were killed in Iraq. Their bodies discovered after they had been captured last year. The FBI has asked the families not to comment publicly. Plus, this latest report came with more gruesome detail than Americans are accustomed. Something about severed fingers.

Family members blabbing would certainly mar the news blackout under which our contractor mercenaries are concealed. Americans are told nothing about private warrior activities or casualties. Only by researching the number of US life insurance claims filed, listing Iraq as the place of death, was the Boston Globe able to tally 1,123 deaths in the Iraq private sector.

Though the condition of the two bodies are not being revealed, one of the bodies had been alive recently enough to provide a finger which his captors sent to expedite negotiations. Enclosed with it were fingers from three other captive contractors, whose bodies have not yet turned up. Perhaps the fingers were the proof our investigators asked for, that the captors held who they say they held, and that their captives were still alive.

Separating combatants from their fingers has a long precedent in war, in particular the index and middle finger, aka trigger fingers. This ensured that if your captive was released, he would no longer be able to wield a rifle against you.

Except for today’s report, severed fingers in Iraq hadn’t made the news. We don’t know, for example, which finger, or if this had been the first for Crescent Security Group Guard Paul Johnson-Reuben. Only FBI agents would know if hostage fingers arrive on a monthly basis, as a reminder or status check on the lives being negotiated. Do ten digits mark a captive’s expiration date?

Isn’t it interesting that the FBI is handling the case? Why not the CIA, nor INTERPOL, who handle international crimes, instead of our domestic investigators? To me this suggests something about the international jurisdiction of sovereign Iraq.

The Genetic Purity Kennel Club

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Miniature Alsatian from MaltaThe 132nd Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show aired this week, much to my excitement and sheer delight. Broadcast from Madison Square Garden, the competition is the height of absurdity, but plenty of hilarious fun. In case you’ve never watched, dozens of dogs, broken into categories such as sporting, terrier, herding, or toy are placed, one by one, on a table draped with fine linens and examined by a stern-looking woman wearing a full-length silk dupioni skirt and fitted cropped jacket, pearls and heels. She dramatically pulls back the lips of each show dog to inspect the teeth and gums, checks the body position, runs her hands up and down the pooch’s torso to assess bone structure, lifts the tail for reasons unknown, and then grunts her assent.

The handler then puts the dog to the ground and somberly run-walks it in front of the bedecked judging panel. This is the best part of the circus. The women handlers are middle-aged, wearing knee-length skirts and sensible shoes and are usually rather frumpy. The male handlers, in great contrast, are young cute men wearing Armani suits. The spectacle never fails to make me laugh hysterically, even to the point of falling from my chair.

One of the more interesting things in the show is the commentary about the history of the various purebred dogs: where they originated and what their use was in bygone days. Dogs were domesticated generally not as pets, but as herders, hunters, workers, or for the amusement of the royal and wealthy.

There are 400 million domesticated dogs around the globe. Scientists looking into canine DNA have postulated that all dogs descended from gray wolves in East Asia about 15,000 years ago, and came to the New World across the Bering Straight with human nomads. Analysis of ancient canine skeletons from Alaska to Peru shows a genetic link to the Old World gray wolf. However, the DNA of modern New World dogs shows no evidence of Old World wolf genes, likely because European colonists brought their own hybrid dogs and systematically discouraged breeding of Native American dogs. Even the Mexican hairless dog, thought to have developed in the Americas nearly 2,000 years ago, possesses mostly European DNA.

Hybridization to develop new breeds began merely 500 years ago, and has resulted in the widely-divergent pure breeds we see today. This targeted breeding continues and each year another specimen or two is added to the American Kennel Club’s canine A-list. This year it is the French Beauceron and the Swedish Vallhund. As in human inbreeding, notably the royal families of Europe who have close blood ties which are strengthened by noble intermarriage, incestually-bred organisms are more likely to manifest genetic imperfections and problematic temperaments. Still, the lure of genetic purity remains.

A recent study reported in Science magazine found that dogs are perhaps the most perceptive species when it comes to recognizing and interpreting human behavior. A 15,000-year friendship between man and animal has engendered this symbiotic bond. Watching the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, with its products of purposeful breeding, had me wondering about man’s relationship with dogs in other parts of the world. Do they pamper, exercise, feed and water their dogs like we do? Are dogs beloved family members or communal property tended by all? What types of dogs have arisen when natural selection and breeding are allowed to reign?

On your travels, take note of the dogs. Are they skinny and neglected or, as in Peru, seemingly well-tended but running free? I was recently in Playa del Carmen walking along Fifth Avenue and noticed dogs of every shape and size, well-behaved and non-threatening, but seemingly never attached to an owner, let alone a leash. Try also to find out the dogs’ names. Rover, Spot, and Fido? Or are they named like the show pups: Roundtown Mercedes Of Maryscot, Cookieland Seasyde Hollyberry, or Jangio’s Ringo Starr Kurlkrek?

Below is a picture of a dog that was sitting at my feet in a cafe in Aguas Calientas, near Machu Picchu. If you are so inclined, take pictures of street dogs in your travels, or even dogs with owners, and send them to me. I will do the same on my upcoming trips to Argentina and Chile. I’d love to amass a collection of pictures and stories of dogs around the globe. There will be no trophies or prize money awarded. This will be purely for fun.

Street dog Peru

All your women are belong to us

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AYBABTU variant: All Your Babes Are Belong To Us. In ancient days when kingdoms conquered each other, the winners would slaughter the vanquished males and keep the females for themselves, to augment their own number. Warring cannibals still do the same when they raid rival villages. They kill the men, eat them to acquire their power, and take the girls for brides or for slave labor.

It would seem tribal prejudices aren’t entrenched when it comes to another culture’s women. Is this because foreign females are less threatening, or because coveting another’s spouse transcends bigotry? Westerners fantasize that Native Americans raided the pioneer settlements to take captive the white women on account of their white beauty. I doubt it. Women are smaller than men and can be dominated, wives and laborers being more or less the same thing.

Western society seems preoccupied to fetishistic extremes with the safety of its white women, while negligent about the fate of those of darker skin. But does that mean we are not interested in non-white women? Of course not. The recent focus on trying to introduce western education into Islamic cultures is strategically targeting young Muslim girls. It seems altruistic, but follows the usual pattern of male-mankind’s predatory nature.

Naturally the benefits of separating girls from their communities serves the need of human traffickers, for the sex trade but to a much bigger degree, all industrial applications.

Look at the Maquiladoras on the Mexican border, where US manufacturers have relocated to exploit cheap Mexican labor without having to ship products too much further to reach American consumers. Look into those factories, they are full of women.

Look at the sweat shops in our port cities, where non-citizens labor undocumented -or falsely documented- they’re women.

The work camps set up in the US territories to skirt our labor laws and duck import tariffs are also full of women. Indeed clothing mills and electronics factories across the globe are staffed predominantly with women. Men are left with the construction, transportation and extraction industries, the labor issues of which affect the industrialist bottom line not the least.

We may guard our white women closely, feigning paternal self-interest, but we’re after all women, for the traditional role of indentured servitude.

Jamie Leigh Jones is still locked in a box

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Jamie Leigh Jones KBR HalliburtonWhen they teach in math class about the square roots of numbers, you invariably encounter the paradox of negative numbers. Since neither two positive factors nor two negatives can produce a negative, you’re told the square root of a negative is “irreducible” and you must leave the equation be. It turns out that this explanation was really a matter of convenience, because later in the year students revisit the square root of -1 and learn it can be called an imaginary number. Now you were expected to solve the equation, and zoom, math took off from there. I remember feeling betrayed that math had become an abstraction, so comfortable was I to be stuck at the simpler impasse.

I use this analogy to contemplate some oversimplifications about law which are being used to temper moral indignation at the machinations of our government. We’re told, for example, that we’ve subverted the rule of law in Iraq, that enemy combatants are not covered by the Geneva Conventions, that Guantanamo Cuba falls neither under Cuban law nor our dominion. We’re told the International Criminal courts do not have jurisdiction over Americans and we’re told our contractor-mercenaries are exempt from anyone’s prosecution. Those legal impediments to justice are not only imaginary, to say it in legalese, they’re balderdash.

My math teacher had a educational reason to maintain that the square root of -1 was unsolvable. Whatever motive does anyone have to keep the American public in the dark about the suspension of human rights?

NBC has just trumpeted the tragic case of Jamie Leigh Jones, but presumes simultaneously to reinforce the aforementioned balderdash. Two years ago Jones was gang raped by KBR coworkers in Iraq and kept in a shipping container until she was able to convince one of her keepers to lend her a cell phone. Her father then called a congressman who called the State Department who sent agents over to KBR’s compound in the Green Zone to set her free. Since that time, the feds have dropped the case, the rape-kit evidence has gone missing, KBR claims it has been ordered to conduct no investigation, and Jones is left with no recourse but to file a civil suit. Now she is being told that an arbitration clause in her contract prevents her from doing even that.

The truths being asserted, as indignant as they might make us feel, are that contractors in Iraq are outside the reach of any law. Specifically Iraqi law, as dictated by Viceroy Bremer’s famous contractor indemnity clause, but by inference, US law, because Iraq is a “sovereign nation,” and International Law, because otherwise our whole country could be held accountable for what it’s perpetrated there.

I’ve even read it asserted that two years marks the expiration of Jone’s right to redress from her attackers. Wherever have you heard of so short a statute of limitation for rape?

Another assumption attempts to bolster the impregnability of arbitration clauses which have become de rigueur in corporate employment contracts. Such clauses may forbid civil litigation, rightfully, but do not preclude responsibility for criminal acts. The supposed ambiguity that Jones’ rape cannot be considered a crime is to build a crock upon a sham. No contract may dictate that a assignee consents to be the victim of a crime. Sorry boys.

Likewise, the concept of Iraq being a lawless state is our Defense Department’s wet dream. We may administrate Iraq like the Wild West, as it may for now be under our screws, but like everywhere else on the globe, Iraq is protected by international law. You might also find lawyers who will argue that any lands under the authority of our government are bound by the US constitution period.

The only thing standing between the KBR miscreants and fair judgment is our government’s determination [not] to apply the law. If the media wanted to report that all Blackwater KBR killer rapists are indemnified exclusively by Bush decree, that would be the truth.

Thank you Miss Jones for pressing on with your accusations and lawsuit. Please don’t let the disinformation discourage you.

The United Nations engages in war in East Congo

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In East Congo, Just like in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Sudan, and Somalia, the United Nations is playing a propaganda role backing up the US government and the Pentagon. But in East Congo , see Brutal peacekeepers: Congo’s election, the UN’s massacre, the United Nations is actually battling the population same as it has done in Haiti.

It’s troops go into battle alongside Congo government forces, and what a sorry war it is waging indeed.

What is the United Nation’s actual record in preventing strife between the Tutsi and Hutu? Pretty horrible. And now once again, this same ethnic divide is the cause of the reopening of the Congo’s on again /off again Civil War. The United Nations directed by Pentagon power from afar has no solution offered to help end this strife, beyond sending in ‘peacekeeping troops’, and ones that often engage in battle themselves, though most often they are behind the front lines support troops for occupation approved of by the US government.

What is needed, as in Sudan and Somalia, is a FULLY funded economic assistance plan that helps out ALL ethnic groups, not just one against another. As long as the United Nations is controlled by the US and European colonizers, we can expect continual outbursts of ethnic violence, not just in Africa, but around the globe. The UN currently is not really doing much more than follow Pentagon lead as directed to do so from D.C., and the Pentagon thrives off using one ethnic group against another. There is no major economic aid being offered to end the warfare in Eastern Congo.

The World Peace Movement should not see the United Nations as its friend in the effort to stop all the wars being waged by our US government. It just isn’t, and East Congo is yet another example of how ‘peacekeeping troops’ just don’t keep the peace, but instead even engage in the war.

Like the wars in Somalia/ Horn of Africa, this war in East Congo/ Rwanda/ Burundi is easily as deadly as the regional strife has been in Sudan, and the UN is having little positive role to play in actually stopping the slaughter. Nothing will until economic stability is actually created, but that is not part of the United Nations activities nor is it part of what the bi-partisan US government wants to do in Africa. The US government just wants to play one ethnic group off against the other to better control the continent.

The ‘Save Darfur’ PR scam

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Alternet today published The Black Agenda Report’s commentary calling the ‘Save Darfur’ a US interventionist PR scam. Ten Reasons to Suspect “Save Darfur” is a PR Scam ‘Humanitarian intervention’ is getting to be a more and more difficult sale for the government to make.

It reminds me even of a new and used car dealership I once ran into. The salesman had this gigantic 3 foot by 2 foot Bible on his desk. Don’t buy it!

And don’t buy that the US government is some how the agent for progressive intervention anywhere around the globe. It just is not. Too bad that it is this way, but it just is.

Want to help the people of the world out? Then fight against giving this country’s government permission to go into other peoples’ territories to run their affairs. The ‘Save Darfur’ campaign is in great part a government funded PR scam that does the complete opposite of that. It wants our government to tell others just what to do, to do it our way, and to punish any of those who get in the way. It is a campaign to provide rationale for military interventionism into important parts of Africa that our corporate government wants to control.

The CDC report on MRSA severely understates the problem

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‘The antibiotic-resistant infections, commonly called MRSA, were once confined to a few hospitals, but a new study by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2005 they made an estimated 94,000 Americans seriously ill and killed almost 19,000, compared with 17,000 who died of AIDS.’

This CDC report reported on heavily in the news today, goes on to mention that MRSA is killing more people in the US than AIDS does, so it sounds like this is a true picture of how dangerous this problem of MRSA is becoming. But….. notice the wording of the report, that it mentions that ‘94,000 Americans become seriously ill’ .

Here is the thing though. MRSA does not always make one ‘seriously ill’. It is a disease that usually never even gets diagnosed. The CDC does not mention these millions of people that are coming down with MRSA that are not ‘seriously ill’, and gives the impression that MRSA is only a problem for less than 100,000 each year in the US! The CDC is deliberately misstating how bad this problem really is.

Why is this so? It is so simply because the CDC does not have any real plan to deal with this problem. I mean other than telling people to wash their hands, etc. So it understates how widespread MRSA actually is, and keeps the spotlight off themselves and the US Medical Establishment for not even diagnosing this condition in most people who have had bouts of MRSA.

MRSA is not diagnosed much because people with MRSA sores seemingly just have extremely difficult and painful lesions that refuse to heal well. Many deal with this without seeking medical help, or while being denied medical help for the condition. Most people just plain don’t recognize a MRSA sore when it develops on them.

I myself have had MRSA sores develop at pressure points about 5-6 different times, and never have been treated for this. A few of these sores left scars even. They hurt like the devil, but i was not ‘seriously ill’ to use the vocabulary of the CDC.

MRSA is just one part of the epidemics of new infectious diseases spreading like wildfires around the globe. Yesterday I wrote about C-Diff killing off larger and larger numbers, and the day before I wrote about resistant TB. The world is seeing capitalist for-profit medicine disintegrate before our very eyes, and the business world has no plan to fight the epidemics.

We need an entirely different set up to deliver medical and nursing care to those who need it. And we need a world guaranteed income for all the world’s people, otherwise poverty will continue to add gasoline to the fire, so to speak. We are all going to be in deep, deep trouble with infectious diseases continuing to not be dealt with wisely by the for-profit health systems we are currently stuck with. Many are going to die unless something much different is done real fast.

The Kangaroo Trial of Lieutenant Colonel William Steele

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Saddam’s US jailer goes on trial What’s this about? Who is this man, Lieutenant Colonel William Steele, who now faces life in prison? What did he do?

Wikipedia gives us some basic information about the charges this man faces. William H. Steele We learn what the legal charges consist of here, and what we find is that this man, like Guantanamo military chaplain James Yee before him, has done absolutely nothing worthy of being made into a criminal offense. James Yee was let go after a torturing Kafkaesque experience where the military threatened to destroy his life completely. William Steele will not be so lucky it appears.

So what did he supposedly do, this Lieutenant Colonel? It turns out that he gave Saddam Hussein a cigar and some hair color to cover up the gray hair while he was in jail! For this he is charged with aiding an enemy of the United States and was threatened originally with the death penalty!

Oh yes, there are other charges they used to stack the deck for conviction against this career officer. He was charged with flirting some with a female interpreter! And get this! He was charged with having porn on his computer! Oh, and it gets much worse…. He allowed some kids, that were thrown into this military prison, to call out on his own personal cell phone to notify family members of their arrest by the US storm troopers! What a beast!

I think we can see now why people like Yee and Steele have to be imprisoned. They are to be made into an example for others in the US military, that no compassion must be allowed with Muslim prisoners. Muslim prisoners are to be tortured, humiliated, and murdered, and not coddled as Steele is made out to have been doing.

What a contrast! Under the Bush Administration with active Democratic Party help, the US has put thousands of POWs in Afghanistan in air tight containers where they were suffocated, choked, and shot to death. They have hooded and tortured POWs at Guantanamo using isolation techniques of sensory deprivation. They have raped and sexually humiliated POWs at Abu Ghraib, along with using other forms of physical and psychological tortures. They have moved (‘rendered’) POWs to hidden torture centers around the globe using a hidden fleet of unmarked aircraft. But giving a cigar to Saddam Hussein in jail is now to be made into a capital offense, which in the infinite mercy of these Christian Crusaders will be turned into a mere life sentence in prison. All minds off Donald Rumsfield and Dickey Cheney… Who’s the guy who gave the cigar to Saddam? Get him! Give him LIFE!

This whole trial is an indecent charade, and shows how little support the government really does give the troops. Instead of support, they threaten and bully them just like they wish to do with the rest of the whole world. When you sign up with the military, you truly do sign a deal with the Devil. This is the real mistake that Lieutenant Colonel William Steele has made. Now he is to be scapegoated and made into an example for the other troops.

Bad guy! You showed a drop of compassion for our official enemy, the Muslims. For this you must be punished but good.

Faith in UN intervention in Darfur misplaced

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Stephen Gowans’, Faith in UN intervention in Darfur Misplaced, explains well why demanding supposedly humanitarian interventions from one’s own imperialist country is a real loser.

Often times the people doing this, do not directly call for their own government to directly intervene but rather for it to use the United Nations to do so. They think that by doing this, it will somehow change the whole character of what is going on when Great Powers boss weaker countries around! They refuse to acknowledge that the United Nations is strictly a tool controlled by the US and the Western European powers to legitimize their own colonial-imperialism.

Activists in World Powers, such as the US is, should not demand that their governments intervene in the affairs of weaker nations, even when the reasons to do so might seem totally compelling. Instead they should be trying to disassemble the militaries used by their own reactionary governments, rather than trying to find reasons to mobilize them.

It is pure pretense to believe that our corporate governments will ever do ‘relief’ projects ‘right’, whether it be in Darfur, or in New Orleans. Surely, calling for one’s own government to rebuild New Orleans ‘right’ should come well before trying to convince our own failed government to take their profit-making mayhem into another spot on the globe. The Army Corps of Engineers couldn’t even build the levee system right in New Orleans, let alone be relied upon to save people in Darfur.

The United Nations is totally an imperial Frankenstein at this point. We should have no faith that it will do anything other than do as its masters will have it do. The UN record at guaranteeing world peace is quite appalling. It is a totally failed institution.

This September 11 in Colorado Springs

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All THEIR plans for continued warfare are predicated on the US as being some sort of grand victim in the world, but it is not. Once the Christian Right Wing claimed that their persecution of Jewish people around the globe was based on their perception that Jews had killed Christ. Now, they substitute Muslims for Jews, and claim that persecution of Muslims is due to Muslims having attacked the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001.

Iraq is a Muslim country, therefore ‘Christian’ America attacked and continues to occupy it. Payback for September 11 many Americans still continue to think. In reality, the ‘Christian’ warfare is far more due to the ‘Christian’ corporations worshiping their stock portfolios more than they do God. It’s the dollar that counts, but they combine it with God as cover. They combine it with their supposed patriotism, too. But they are not patriots, these ‘Christian’ corporations. They are money makers for the super-rich, and job givers to those who have few real Christian scruples.

This September 11 in Colorado Springs, peace activists will be going out to where these ‘Christian’ corporations congregate in their profit making/ war making. In Colorado Springs, that site is the corner of Fountain and South Academy Blvd. There, one can find Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, and a host of other lesser known corporations, but war making/ blood sucking/ profit making vampire corporations none the less. They have non-descriptive names like GTEC, Alliant (largest maker of depleted uranium munitions in the world), Intecom, BAE Systems, etc. These are all concentrated in 2 buildings at this single intersection in our city.

Many people go by, yet simply do not notice the presence of these war profiteers! This September 11 we plan to change that, and will vigil at this intersection from 10AM in the morning to 4PM in the afternoon. Our signs will concentrate on three points.

Here are the Merchants of Death…
Kids, Not Bombs!
Disarm Lockheed’s WOMD Now!

We hope you participate and have your participation help keep you from becoming depressed later about the propaganda you are likely to see and hear through the US corporate media on 9/11. It’s your chance to tell the public passing by on this busy intersection, just who you think are the real war mongers out there in our world. It is truly the American corporations that make a killing with their constant killing that fits the bill as for who is being the bloodiest war mongers these days. They are All American, but you will be more so, simply if you protest the bloodshed that they are causing.

See you there on 9/11! Be there and send a message that you don’t want more war against other countries. Enough is enough!

Mincing Words with Nature’s Matriarch

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I learned about Sudden Wetland Dieback yesterday. What’s that? The salt marshlands of America’s east coast are turning inexplicably to muddy wastelands and scientists have developed a euphemism for the occasion.
Not nice to fool Mother NatureThe nomenclature reminds me of another unnatural phenomena that’s been given its own death form: Coral Bleaching. That describes coral reefs which have suddenly expired white as ghosts. As if we’d need to call the piles of bones in the elephant graveyard, Elephant Bleaching.

I understand that scientist want to name what they are seeking to study, but doesn’t a name confer the unfortunate suggestion of a natural occurrence?

It also adds a step, is seems to me at least psychologically, between the effect and the cause. The poor Indonesians in 2004 didn’t suffer a Rapid Oft-Fatal High Water Relocation. It was a Tsunami. Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance wasn’t due to Cement Negative Buoyancy Cankles. It was the mob. Do we need to study the criminal element’s access to poured concrete, or do we need to go after who done it?

The immediate agent of the dieback may be dust from Africa, just as an impassive Pacific may be blamed on an intensified gulf stream (belittled with the appellation El Nino), but wherefore comes this unprecedented toxicity of the elements? We all know. It’s not nice to fool mother nature.

I’d like to know what specifically is meant by dieback? Perhaps those subversive academics are allowing after all for the inclusion of the principle of equal and opposite reaction: blow-back.

We know what’s behind wetland dieback, coral dieback and El Nino blowback, it’s man’s unnatural pollution. It’s our excess carbon emissions and then some, which are heating and killing the globe. There’s already a neat term, sufficiently unnatural sounding: Global Warming. Corporate polluter think-tanks have already re-termed the problem Climate Change to introduce an ambiguity of inherent badness. Change can be good. Only Luddites fear change. The fittest survive change.

The corporate media very cleverly reframed the recent Enviro-palooza concert event as A Climate In Crisis. Sound the alarm there’s a crisis! But what to do, what to do?! The Global Warming warning was too simple. When bath water becomes too warm, for example, we know what to do: shut off the hot water.

Do we need to rename extinction as Pervasive Survival-Instinct Reversal? We could, if we are seeking to ameliorate the intermediate effectiveness of the death blow. Or we could find out who took out the contract on our murder and prevent it.

To belabor mixed metaphors, put an ambulance at the base of the cliff to address Near-Instant Altitude Deceleration Injury, or go to the mountain and curb Dead Man’s Curve.

‘Doctor’s Plot’ hysteria spreads to Australia

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Three weeks after 9/11, I called back to make a follow-up appointment with my dermatologist, an Arab doctor working in a Border community in Texas. It turns out that the local hospital had fired him, though they said that a family emergency had been the reason he was no longer available.

Perhaps, that’s why these ‘doctor’s plots’ seem like such old hat from my own personal perspective. One minute my doctor was there, and the next minute he was just disappeared. Nobody asked any questions.

Cut to the recent hysteria whipped up in Britain, where the anti-immigrant/anti-terrorist witch hunt now centers around Muslim doctors, and their supposed underground network to kill people. At best, the attempted bombings of 2 airports seem to hinge only on the actions of 2 doctors, one from Iraq and the other from Lebanon. The rest that were arrested are not even closely involved with these 2 events, though they are being held never the less. But how much confidence can be placed that even the 2 doctors mentioned above did anything illegal? Do we trusty the Military/ Homeland Security apparatus that much to believe that they are incapable of fabricating the whole event? After all, these are the people that think it their right to hold people without lawyers and trials, and torture them in secret prisons around the globe.

Now, this ‘doctor’s plot’ hysteria has spread to Australia, and it is only a short matter of time ’till it comes our way here in the USA. How gullible will our population be? I’m afraid that it is not a very reassuring scenario.

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.

The Jena 6

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Nooses were hung from this treeThe Jena 6 are a group of black High School kids who got into a fight with a White kid in a racist public school in a racist little town called Jena, Louisiana. Now they are receiving national attention since the police and the city government there decided to use the judicial system against these Black kids and charged them with attempted murder. Exaggerated criminal charges for a school yard brawl provoked by the racist actions of the ‘victim’.

We also live in a city here in Colorado Springs where the police, too, also have the approval of the city government to use the judicial system falsely and punitively against its own citizens. The fat cats at The editorial board of The Gazette think it aggressive and rude for us to point this out to other folk, and have sarcastically asked us ‘brutal’ local peaceniks (in their editorial today) to ‘Give Peace a Chance’.

Like the cheerleaders(The Gazette editorial staff) of a US war machine that has killed millions around the globe are at all convincing about any political issues they take up! Not hardly. They are warmongers instead. And they are just as insincere as have been the cops and their supporters on the Colorado Springs city council up to now.

Sorry, but it is the city government that has to control its police to make peace happen in this city. Instead, it seems that many amongst the powers to be like using the police as attack dogs against the pro-peace groups of our city? That’s why The Gazette fuels this sort of witch hunt mentality by feeding false information to the public and uses quotes both out of context and also minus portions of the actual content of what was said to their reporter. But back to the problems of Jena, Louisiana…..

Check out the local yokel paper there especially in the comments section after the article. Here is Znet’s article on the issue

Justice Now in Jena and Colorado Springs! Stop using the judicial system in a partisan manner that supports racism and war. Drop the false charges. Oh, and restore habeas Corpus and end the use of torture, too. Got that, Gazette? (If I had sent that in to their letters column they would have chopped it all up into incoherence. I know from my experience with them.)

The ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ propaganda in support of US African military intervention is utterly reactionary

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Sunday in Denver one of the many nationwide rallies by the so-called ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ will be held, demanding that Bush, John Negroponte, Condaleeza Rice, and The Pentagon move troops into Sudan supposedly to help stop a civil war in that country.

Their incredible demands pushing for yet more US militarism come at the exact same time that the US government has just created close to half a million refugees in Somalia in the short time span of just 6 weeks! The US is the cause of genocides worldwide not the relief of any of them.

One cannot imagine anything more totally reprehensible and retrograde than what these nitwitty do-gooder liberal types are doing now than in currently rallying to justify to the public yet more US global foreign interventionism at this particular moment. It’s like they haven’t an ounce of common sense about them at all? It’s all very sad to see liberal peaceniks actually push for US governmental militarism rather than opposing it as they should be spending their entire energies doing.

Sure, all in the antiwar community want the end of warfare in Sudan as well as throughout Africa to occur. But calling for ‘peace’ to be implemented by the Pentagon meddling is hair brained at best. And asking for the Pentagon to intervene in Darfur is exactly what the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ is doing despite their stealth tactics in going about it.

Their ‘Call to Action’ is the polar opposite of the mainstream International Peace Movement’s strategy, which is to call for the US to end the Made-by-the-US genocide currently being implemented by the US military against the Iraqi people. It is the job of the Peace community to oppose one’s own government’s imperialism and not to help justify it, as the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ is currently doing.

With the construction of a US military African command center (AFRICOM) now underway, the ‘Save Darfur Coaliton’ should be opposing this. Instead, they are actually demanding that it be put into service! And once in Darfur, where else in Africa will the call go out to to send in US or US directed troops as directed by AFRICOM? We know already, do we not? AFRICOM is directing the war against the Somali people now and abducting POWs taken there to be taken out and tortured in other countries, same as has been done in Afghanistan and Iraq. The call to ‘Save Darfur’ in actuality is a call to plan out more genocides, rather than to eliminate one of them.

US troops out of Africa, not into the continent! Stop the Pentagon! No more military adventures using supposed humanitarianism as the justification.

PS… here is from the ‘Save Darfur’ blog. The same types that had the US kidnapping and removing President Aristide from Haiti and occupying that country with US directed troops are the same people now running the “Save Darfur Coalition’. This is not a group of humanitarians at all. They are from the US State Department.

….
Global Day for Darfur III – A Critical Initiative Now!
Posted on Monday, 04/23/07 – 9:23 am
Cross-posted at Globe for Darfur

Amb. (ret.) Lawrence Rossin, Senior International Coordinator at the Save Darfur Coalition, is responsible for designing and leading implementation of the Coalition’s outreach to foreign governments and non-governmental organizations to advocate on behalf of the people of Darfur. Rossin joined the Coalition after serving as Assistant Secretary General and Principal Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, and as part of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. He has also served in a number of diplomatic positions in the U.S. Department of State.

What next, a required chador and veil for Jewish women in Israel?

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This BBC item about the backwardness of many Jewish people in Israel has its humorous side I think. See the article Israel’s ‘modesty buses’ draw fire.

One might note, also, that Israel is quite advanced in its traffic in prostitutes from around the globe. Go figure? Israel kind of has a certain Dubai flavor of sorts it seems. Except more Jewish, of course. Probably more and better tasting felafel’s, too, and more kickbuttzim? We’re definitely living in a funny world.

Oh, and they have more efficient Jewish terrorists than do the Arab communities. The Jewish people of Israel are bulldozers ahead in that department! Nuclear people. More organized. More money from the US, and the US loves their terrorism.

The United Nations is complicit with US war criminality and genocide everywhere

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The United Nations is fully supporting US war crimes in multiple nations around our planet. It has become nothing less than a total satellite captured in the orbit of the US Pentagon. In Iraq, the UN has sat by without ever condemning the US genocide in that country, but rather participating in it. Over 2 million Iraqi casualties have been killed solely due to US interference against the Iraqi people over more than a decade and a half, and the role of the UN has been in total support of that.

There are currently over 4 million Iraqi refugees, 2 million inside and 2 million outside Iraq. The UN has little to say about that, and little relief offered to the victims. All its efforts go to help the US government intervene around the planet.

Jordan alone, with a population of a little over 5 million has taken in almost 1 million Iraqi refugees! That would be the equivalent relative to population as if the US had had to take in 60 million destitute refugees from some war zone! Syria, with a population of slightly less than 19 million, has had to take in an even greater number of Iraqi refugees from US violence than the almost 1 million in Jordan. And as the US and Israel are currently threatening Syria with attack alongside its ally Iran, the UN sits back nodding its head in acquiescence! Lest we forget, Syria was Iran’s ally while the US and its Arab client states were funding Saddam Hussein in its war upon Iran. It is the US that supported Saddam, not Syria or Iran, and the UN never did anything to stop him from killing hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranians. .

The situation is the same around the globe, as the UN everywhere is running backup for US foreign policy and the resulting mayhem and atrocities that follow in the wake of US war crimes. The United Nations is helping the US occupy Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Haiti as well as Iraq. These are all nations where the US violated international law and bombed, invaded and occupied these countries with its military. The United Nations has acted as an integral part of these war crimes, lending the support of the troops of its misnamed ‘Security Council’ at crucial intervals. In short, the United Nations has become the Pentagon’s whore, constantly pimped out to service America’s reactionary foreign policy.

We move to Africa, and the United Nations today is calling for occupation of Somalia with its troops instead of condemning the US-Ethiopian invasion of that country. The United Nations offers no security to the people’s of the world from US war crimes and genocides. In Africa, the countries of Rwanda and Congo can attest to that.

The UN rushes into action everywhere behind US military interventionism and it offers political cover for the US just to help perpetuate this criminality. With its history the United Nations can no longer hope to be reformed but instead should be impeached and dissolved the same as was done to its predecessor, The League of Nations.

The people of the world need to get the UN out of the nations it currently helps occupy on behalf of the US. We need an international body of nations, but the UN has defaulted on all its responsibilities, and is not acting as anything other than an agent of the richer imperial nations of the world, all bullied into line by US firepower. This is a body that can not be reformed any more, just as is the US 2 party system of corporate political control. It’s time we admit that the UN is complicit with all the US war crimes being committed and not innocently continue to back this organization as some possible alternative to the US government itself. It isn’t, and never will be.

Stop the war now and get the United Nations troops back to all their home countries. These troops are nothing more than mercenaries in the same vein that Halliburton’s are. They are not peacekeepers, but rather nothing more than another type of privatization of US military operations. Dissolve the UN Security Council Now and Help Save the World from US imperialism. The UN is no friend of anybody, other than friend to the rich and powerful corporate state creeps heading up the US government.

Bush threatening military intervention into Sudan (thanks to Democratic Party liberals)

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Congratulations go out to the ‘Save Darfur’ community of liberals. How pleased you have to be now. Your campaign to send US troops and US directed troops to intervene in the affairs of yet another nation are now bearing fruit, and the Bush Adminstration is now mobilizing itself with Democrats to invade yet another country, that country being Sudan. Oh for sure you never called it a ‘Send in the Troops campaign’, but called it a ‘Stop the Genocide’ campaign instead. How clever! How so ever decent of you.

Funny though that genocide was never used to describe what happened (and still probably is happening) in the Congo, and not once did I hear you sweethearts call for a campaign to stop the US GENOCIDE in Iraq. Since 1991 the US has killed several million Iraqis through war and economic sanctions, yet somehow that never sparked your indignation and labelling of the US as a genocide perpetrator? Why not? Instead you call upon the genocidal US forces to ‘save’ others, all located far outside US borders. How very bizarre. I just don’t get it? Are you liberals total numbskulls. or what?

Yesterday John Negroponte, Ronald Reagan’s master architect of screwing up Central America during the ’80s, was in North Africa threatening US military intervention into Sudan. Joseph Biden, a leading Democratic Party hack, is also calling for US troops to be sent in. Anbd unbelievably in this context, many liberals ac`tually are holding a week of rallies around the planet in 2 weeks to rally support to this cause! Two weeks from Sunday there is one to be held in Denver, and liberals lost in fantasy land here in Colorado Springs also plan to attend the rally! How about using some of that gray matter in your skulls and reconsider what you are actually mobilizing for?

I will be attending this rally, too, with signs calling for the US to get out of Africa, not into it. What a radical concept, ay? I will have signs calling for the US to get out of Somalia, and calling for the US to terminate its new military African command center called, AFRICOM. We need to be calling for the demobilization of US controlled military forces, not calling for further extension of their warfare. Activists working for US and European intervention into Darfur are doing the absolute worst thing possible at this time when they should actually be working to pull US troops out of Iraq instead. Stop getting yourselves lost in space, Space Cadets! If you are against genocide, then at least educate yourselves enough to know which countries perpetrate it. The US would be at the top of the list, FYI.

Liberals sometimes just seem to be totally living in a fantasy world. Just this week I was at a Justice and Peace event where the speaker was actually praising the United Nations! How ass backwards is that? The US controls the UN Security Council and has these military forces doing its dirty work around the globe. The UN is now a thoroughly controlled and thoroughly reaccionary force everwhere. It specializes in mop up operations for the Pentagon, from the Balkans to Haiti to Iraq and Afghanistan. It will be a blissful day in heaven when liberals in the US can begin to put 2 plus 2 together and begin to differentiate reality from their fantasies some little bit. Praising the UN and/ or calling for African Union troops, NATO troops, and UN troops to intervene in places like Sudan is not a move towards world peace and an end to conflict, but are words and actions that will just help increase US military interventionism everywhere.

US OUT OF AFRICA NOW, not into it! Nobody likes the mass deaths inside Africa and that’s why we need the imperialists out, and not in. Demonstrate to withdraw US forces now. Get the US Out of all the foreign places where they are now repressing the world’s peoples. Our government has absolutely no progressive role to play in world politics until we can radically alter it. Since we are not even close to doing that at this point, the call for troops to be used elsewhere is about as backwards as liberal Democrats can be. You should be trying to demobize the military-industrial complex, not use it abroad! Get with the program, Liberals. And I’m not talking about getting with the Bush program for Africa, as you are currently doing.

Are they ‘Green’, or just the same old corporate cons?

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A lot of energy is now being put into painting corporations ‘Green’. Here in Colorado Springs, we have a local daily rag that is so fossilized that it resists doing even that, and instead is still trying to deny that there are any ecological problems at all. But this is a trench (stance) increasingly unable to be adequately defended by corporate America, so mostly they have retreated into a new trench laid a way back from the previous one of pure denial.

The second trench is painted ‘Green’ in a much louder manner than paraders did at the St Pat’s Day events around the globe, but is there anything real about the ‘Green’ of corporate America? Is the leopard really losing its grimey spots, and being turned into a nice green pussy cat of environmental responsibility? Is Dupont going ‘responsible’, say?

Check out what Fidel Castro has to say about American plans for biofuels. It turns out that he is alive after all, so reactionaries everywhere, your tickets to go down to Miami to celebrate his death with the Cuban-CIA rif-raf will just have to be put on hold once again. Maybe you can get your money back still? Oh, but you have waited so long…. for Castro to be murdered, or just expire on his own. Instead, you wake up and find that he is doing the Al Gore Tango instead! And more convincingly than Al himself does, too. How you must weep and wail!

Shallowest Ecology

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We live in wonderland times. Many might have heard about deep ecology and might even be supporters of it. But what about shallow ecology? Well it turns out that both terms were founded by the same man, Arne Naess, and despite the greater familiarity with the term ‘deep ecology’, there are many more advocates of ‘environmentalism’ that are into shallow ecology, than deep.

And to be even more comprehensive, we are also into having a plethora of what should be called shallowest ecology advocates. These are kind of like the plethora of anti Iraq War peace folk we have, who are noteven really shallow peace in their views, but shallowest peace. People like Hillary and Wesley (Clark) for examples. But who are the shallowest ecology advocates amongst us? In Colorado Springs, we might say that Richard Skorman is, the former vice mayor of the city.

I did not attend, but word has it that Poor Richard’s owned by Skorman, actually last week invited a Dupont exec up to us as ‘green’ and envormental friendly! To attend, one would have had to plump down some $10 I believe? to hear such nonsense espoused. Did anybody actually go? Please write if you did. As Steve Martin once said, ‘comedy is never pretty’ and this event must of been truly ugly. Wish I had made it for the laughs, if nothing else.

I did attend another shallowest ecology event, though, that was the free talk last night at Colorado College by Matthew Simmons, who I discovered afterward, was energy advisor to Bush at one time. Heck, ignorant me. I thought of him as just being an author who wrote some about Peak Oil Theory, not as exec and Bushie. And that’s why I attended the talk.

Simnmons gave a pretty good brief overview of Peak Oil theory to an audience of quite a few doubters. A radicalizing topic when the subject is actually understood, but that was what wierd about the meeting; there was no sense of energy, no sense of rage, no sense of realization that the world is facing a catastrophe in the near future. It was a shallow ecologist preaching to an audience full of more than a few far shallowest ecology people.

Peak Oil theory posits that cheap and available world oil is peaking at this point, and the world is going to face an increasingly tight cut off of energy resource flow in the years ahead. This will happen while we are all currently having our needs poorly met, through a capitalist production and distribution economy based on high energy resource waste and continual anarchist expansion. In other words, we are coming upon tight times ahead, while our world economy is a waste,toss, and run one. We’re running towards a brick wall.

My announcement to the audience about the March 17-18 antiwar activities ahead in our city, was followed by a further brief comment about how the US military was a major waster of energy and was acting as pirates around the globe looking to loot remaining energy supplies. Matthew Simmons then instead of addressing what I had just said, only commented that the military leaders were now beginning to show interest in the Peak Oil ‘question’, and that he was happy by that. Well, la-de-la-da! It was Peak Oil turned into shallowest ecology like gold turned to lead in front of my very own eyes. Peak Oil in a puff.

So I now have an energy formula to produce new critical masses of Shallowest Ecology? Just put Colorado Springs local Richard Skorman, any Dupont exec (preferably racial minoprity or woman), Matthew Simmons in his Twilight (partial name of his book, Twilight in the Desert), Dick Cheney, and Al Gore all together into a giant green bag. And then shake hard! Then listen to whatever pops out of their mouths. That is Shallowest Ecology in its purest essence. We’re in big trouble.

Is Kosovo just an accident of war?

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Remember when America was torn asunder and went to war for the Albanians? Yeah, the liberals’ war. Clinton and Gore’s war. We cared so much about Albanians then and whether they were getting a fair shake! Makes one laugh in retrospect, does it not?

Care about them now, Liberal? We bombed and invaded another nation, and the cheerleaders for that activity back then, are the liberals innocents so aghast about Dubya’s and Dick’s actions these days. They’re planning to ‘take back America’ for us the Democrats say! What a bunch of sorry ass phonies those donkeys are! But if one day you support invading and tearing apart one ethnic minority out of a multi-ethnic society, then it shouldn’t surprise the Democrats that the Republicans are doing the exact same thing in Iraq today. Oops, didn’t Slick Willy start that off, in fact, by arming the Kurds?

Well what to do about Kosovo? The NATO forces want to move on, yet can’t. They’re too busy guarding Albanians for Western humanists, I guess? So why not have 2 Albanias? The genius who thought that might be a cute trick is Bill Clinton! But how to do it? Even with all the aid and support the Kosovo Albanians have received, the 2,000,000 of them have an unemployment rate of over 50%. Remember those evil Serbs that oppressed these gentle US allies so? Well, Milosevic never allowed such a crime to occur to the people there. It was the American, Brit, European Union imperialists that did them in.

I remember even all the so many European, American, Australian, Canadian socialist and communist groups that said that they were against that war, yet supported the US objectives there. They said that they opposed Milosevic, and opposed NATO in equal part. Heard any of them lately urging that NATO pick up and leave? Shoot, NATO is using the bases they built in Bosnia and Kosovo both, to ‘render’ and torture prisoners from other parts of the globe. Heard the Lefty, anti-Milosevic do-gooders campaign on that issue much? Neither have I.

Is Kosovo an accident of war? examines the issues a bit. Heck, Kosovo as it exists today was no accident, but rather it was an excuse for a crime. It was an excuse for a gang of imperialist countries to further crack up the multiethnic society that was once called Yugoslavia. Your British and American liberals brought that crime on, and by extension they brought the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq into being.

Let’s take back American from the Democratic Party liberal dummies, too! And the other Kosovo lesson to take home to heart? Just because a group calls itself Left, socialist, or communist even, does not mean that they know much what they are doing or talking about. They may be screaming along with the liberals to supposedly help folk out in boonies, like Darfur, East Timor, Kosovo, etc. But when all is said and done they are mainly helping the imperialists formulate propaganda to convince people that their wars are necessary to help people, when in fact, they are most certainly not.

Ugly Betty’s ugly Golden Globe

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The actress who plays Ugly Betty said she thought it was awesome that America has embraced a completely new face.

Ugly face of American comedyNew face, her ass! Ugly Betty is a new face like Urkel was not Webster, Gary Coleman, Fat Albert, and Kid Dynamite. Like Alf was not Ronald Reagan.

The best thing I can say about Ugly Betty –I learned tonight from the acceptance speech– the show is about hispanic American immigrants, a faction of our population sorely lacking in heroic protagonists on Anglo TV. Too bad the creators consider Hispanic ugly.

Ugly
What does Ugly Betty say about how Americans see themselves on TV when to see ugly, we have to fit an actress with prosthetics, bad hair, braces, and a fat suit. And of course, eyeglasses. Ugly is artificial. We seem also to want to say that ugly is genetic and it’s for keeps.

Although the dental braces indicate Betty is consiously on track for self-improvement and TV normalcy, her transistional ugliness is also a movie insider’s ugly. It’s the stereotypical Hollywood beginner’s ugly where female Horatio Algers start out as caterpillars but everyone is already assured a happy ending because from the begining they could recognize under the familiar cliched trappings the butterfly that is going to emerge, usually a recognizable beautiful actress. The actress who accepted the Golden Globe award was of course very pretty.

Except where most story lines dealing with appearances are guided by the idea that beauty is only skin deep etc, Ugly Betty is self-consciously inferior. struggling as she is every episode to prove and improve herself.

Though not enough to dress better. A superficiality that strikes me with Ugly Betty is the insistence on ugly clothes and support shoes. How many ugly people do you know address corporate boards in their grandmother’s worst frock? One of the glaring aspects about unattractiveness in the real world is the insistence of some homely people to dress like they are not.

World Cinema, like typical domestic independent film, is distinguished by actors who look like authentic people. The faces are real, the complexions imperfect, the looks asymmetric, the hair whatever it is. Their stories are thus easier to communicate and identify with. In Hollywood, plastic is real, and the audiences who watch the blockbusters don’t get anything from the experience but adrenaline.

Why did I not see the Hispanic component in Ugly Betty before -except for the dad who doesn’t speak English and who gets a visit from the INS? Because Ugly Betty’s caricature masks every nuance of reality. Her artificial face shows cultural, social or racial feature. She is a potato head with four or five “ugly” accessories, one of them being race.

You have the right to travel anywhere, why don’t they?

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If there is one position that American liberals and conservatives seem to have a common answer to, it must be that of supporting making America a gated community. Conservatives most often desire this with sadistic glee, while liberals tend to be quite apologetic about it.

But together they both desire retreat behind thick and reinforced walls. Why the reason for this unity on this one matter? Because America’s liberals and conservatives are quite nationalistic at heart, and scared of the world, too. They fear that the world is out to take their treasures away! America First!…then becomes their combined cheer.

But is it right for so many of us Americans, rich and poor alike, to desire to deny others a right that we cherish so much for ourselves? Which right is the fundamental one, to be essentially unchained by restraining laws and documents and to be able to travel anywhere around the globe with total freedom from police bullies and tyrants? What gives us this right, but makes us want to deny it to others so strongly?

I believe that it is simply because Americans no longer know the suffering that passports, visas, and bureaucratic paperwork causes so many other people around the globe. We as a nation are like the rich amongst us, who believe that they are due better than all those who surround them. That believe that they should live, while others are best left to die.

A`whole nation that shares amongst itself such a heartless, cruel attitude that there is a supposed necessity constantly to have a gated and walled community, is a rotten and corrupt one that will fail and fall. It is an arrogant nation that has allowed its heart to be turned into stone. It is a nation that goes rotting behind its moat. A nation that will try to turn corporate clowns into saints.

Millions of women injured yearly from outlawing abortions

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Outlawing abortions has the same effect as outlawing drug use or outlawing prostitution. In all 3 cases, the ‘remedy’ makes things much worse than the supposed ‘crime’ does by itself. Untold misery always occurs when other people insist on inserting their ideas of morality into the law, and therefore onto others that do not share those beliefs. Right, Ted? Why force people into having kids when they cannot support them, or even themselves?

A BBC article discusses the results of a study about the effects on women’s health of outlawing abortions throughout much of the globe. But can such a study truly tell the whole story? Can it document the effects of all those unwanted children born to women that had their abortions blocked by repressive laws? Can it document what it is like to be those children born into poverty stricken families overloaded with other unwanted kids?