Tag Archives: NBA

The real war on Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

Songs banned by Clear Channel radio stations

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As part of the project to mirror web resource material that the media would otherwise hope to bury, here is the list of music recordings which Clear Channel banned from the airwaves of its enormous network of radio stations. On the heels of 9/11, Clear Channel asserted these songs had “questionable content.”

Drowning Pool “Bodies”
Mudvayne “Death Blooms”
Megadeth “Dread and the Fugitive,” “Sweating Bullets”
Saliva “Click Click Boom”
P.O.D. “Boom”
Metallica “Seek and Destroy,” “Harvester or Sorrow,” “Enter Sandman,”
“Fade to Black”
All Rage Against The Machine songs
Nine Inch Nails “Head Like a Hole”
Godsmack “Bad Religion”
Tool “Intolerance”
Soundgarden “Blow Up the Outside World”
AC/DC “Shot Down in Flames,” “Shoot to Thrill,” “Dirty Deeds”
“Highway to Hell,” “Safe in New York City,” “TNT,” “Hell’s Bells”
Black Sabbath “War Pigs,” “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” “Suicide Solution”
Dio “Holy Diver”
Steve Miller “Jet Airliner”
Van Halen “Jump”
Queen “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Killer Queen”
Pat Benatar “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” “Love is a Battlefield”
Oingo Boingo “Dead Man’s Party”
REM “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”
Talking Heads “Burning Down the House”
Judas Priest “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll”
Pink Floyd “Run Like Hell,” “Mother”
Savage Garden “Crash and Burn”
Dave Matthews Band “Crash Into Me”
Bangles “Walk Like an Egyptian”
Pretenders “My City Was Gone”
Alanis Morissette “Ironic”
Barenaked Ladies “Falling for the First Time”
Fuel “Bad Day”
John Parr “St. Elmo’s Fire”
Peter Gabriel “When You’re Falling”
Kansas “Dust in the Wind”
Led Zeppelin “Stairway to Heaven”
The Beatles “A Day in the Life,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,”
“Ticket To Ride,” “Obla Di, Obla Da”
Bob Dylan/Guns N Roses “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
Arthur Brown “Fire”
Blue Oyster Cult “Burnin’ For You”
Paul McCartney and Wings “Live and Let Die”
Jimmy Hendrix “Hey Joe”
Jackson Brown “Doctor My Eyes”
John Mellencamp “Crumbling Down.” “I’m On Fire”
U2 “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
Boston “Smokin”
Billy Joel “Only the Good Die Young”
Barry McGuire “Eve of Destruction”
Steam “Na Na Na Na Hey Hey”
Drifters “On Broadway”
Shelly Fabares “Johnny Angel”
Los Bravos “Black is Black”
Peter and Gordon “I Go To Pieces,” “A World Without Love”
Elvis “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise”
Zombies “She’s Not There”
Elton John “Benny & The Jets,” “Daniel,” “Rocket Man”
Jerry Lee Lewis “Great Balls of Fire”
Santana “Evil Ways”
Louis Armstrong “What A Wonderful World”
Youngbloods “Get Together”
Ad Libs “The Boy from New York City”
Peter Paul and Mary “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”
Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday”
Simon And Garfunkel “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
Happenings “See You in Septemeber”
Carole King “I Feel the Earth Move”
Yager and Evans “In the Year 2525”
Norman Greenbaum “Spirit in the Sky”
Brooklyn Bridge “Worst That Could Happen”
Three Degrees “When Will I See You Again”
Cat Stevens “Peace Train,” “Morning Has Broken”
Jan and Dean “Dead Man’s Curve”
Martha & the Vandellas “Nowhere to Run”
Martha and the Vandellas/Van Halen “Dancing in the Streets”
Hollies “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
San Cooke Herman Hermits, “Wonder World”
Petula Clark “A Sign of the Times”
Don McLean “American Pie”
J. Frank Wilson “Last Kiss”
Buddy Holly and the Crickets “That’ll Be the Day”
John Lennon “Imagine”
Bobby Darin “Mack the Knife”
The Clash “Rock the Casbah”
Surfaris “Wipeout”
Blood Sweat and Tears “And When I Die”
Dave Clark Five “Bits and Pieces”
Tramps “Disco Inferno”
Paper Lace “The Night Chicago Died”
Frank Sinatra “New York, New York”
Creedence Clearwater Revival “Travelin’ Band”
The Gap Band “You Dropped a Bomb On Me”
Alien Ant Farm “Smooth Criminal”
3 Doors Down “Duck and Run”
The Doors “The End”
Third Eye Blind “Jumper”
Neil Diamond “America”
Lenny Kravitz “Fly Away”
Tom Petty “Free Fallin'”
Bruce Springsteen “I’m On Fire,” “Goin’ Down”
Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight”
Alice in Chains “Rooster,” “Sea of Sorrow,” “Down in a Hole,”
“Them Bone”
Beastie Boys “Sure Shot,” “Sabotage”
The Cult “Fire Woman”
Everclear “Santa Monica”
Filter “Hey Man, Nice Shot”
Foo Fighters “Learn to Fly”
Korn “Falling Away From Me”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “Aeroplane,” “Under the Bridge”
Smashing Pumpkins “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
System of a Down “Chop Suey!”
Skeeter Davis “End of the World”
Rickey Nelson “Travelin’ Man”
Chi-Lites “Have You Seen Her”
Animals “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”
Fontella Bass “Rescue Me”
Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels “Devil with the Blue Dress”
James Taylor “Fire and Rain”
Edwin Starr/Bruce Springstein “War”
Lynyrd Skynyrd “Tuesday’s Gone”
Limp Bizkit “Break Stuff”
Green Day “Brain Stew”
Temple of the Dog “Say Hello to Heaven”
Sugar Ray “Fly”
Local H “Bound for the Floor”
Slipknot “Left Behind, Wait and Bleed”
Bush “Speed Kills”
311 “Down”
Stone Temple Pilots “Big Bang Baby,” “Dead and Bloated”
Soundgarden “Fell on Black Days,” “Black Hole Sun”

Limbo to be sunk into limbo as it orbits alongside Pluto

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I was just getting used to Pluto’s demotion when along comes the news that Pope Rat is thinking about demoting Limbo. Well just how the Hell can he do such a thing, we might ask? It appears that a commission of high Roman Catholic theologians have been considering the concept of Limbo’s existence for some time, and just like all the astronomers got together and said that Pluto is not a planet but just a lowly Kuiper belt object, the specialists on God have decided that The Almighty doesn’t put unbaptized babies into Limbo after all.

Before Limbo came along, it was thought that little unbaptized babies were sent straight into Hell so now they might even be headed to Heaven at this point, since nobody really feels the little boogers deserve to burn etenally in Hellfire once again. The fetuses must go somewhere, too, along with the little unbaptized babies, and Limbo was just such a boring place that theologians began to think that God couldn’t be so Kafkaesque to condemn such innocence to boredom in such a diabolical manner.

To read more about this important issue (and also to see a delightful picture of our handsome Pope) go to this BBC article.

Global South evangelism

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Viewed from MexicoThe Global South. There’s an interesting term. I heard it bandied about on the radio yesterday. What a brilliant glimpse of the parochial drive to globalize, to convince us and all to be global citizens. “South” to whom, developed nations? The “southern” climes which struggle perpetually to develop are the tropical zones between the northern and southern hemispheres. They’re not south of Australia, for example, or Argentina. We live on a spinning marble, let’s remember. No one’s on top. Americans have accepted international where we used to say foreign. “Global South” is about as xenophobic as overseas, with condescension thrown in.

In Carlos Fentes’ The Old Gringo, a fictional account of Ambrose Bierce’s last days following the Zapata revolution in Mexico, the aging writer encounters Poncho Villa. Behind Villa’s men on a front porch hangs a map of North America, upside down. When Bierce points this out, the Mexican fighter explains that whether Mexico is viewed as above or below Los Estados Unidos is of course a matter of perspective.

The context in which I heard a Global South being discussed on NPR’s Fresh Air was on the matter of religion. The warmer countries are practicing a more durable form of Christianity apparently. They are an example, it was insinuated, of which traditional developed-nation Christians must take heed. That was the pitch.

The scare? The darkies will usurp our northern moral authority. “Will the next pope be from the Global South,” an incredulous Terry Gross asked? It’s not even a question was the reply. With their overwhelming preponderance of Catholics, the Global South will elect popes of color for as far as we can see. That was not even an answer, if you were paying attention, and clever. Otherwise how to explain a Catholic Church already vastly Latin American electing a German ex-Nazi to popehood?

I hope I’m not also contributing to the condescending tone by suggesting that the tropics offer mankind not much in the Christianity department. Spirituality yes, especially as it might be tied to nature and man’s quest to transcend his basic and collective nature, but self-reflection on printed texts? I think that’s been best left to the colder climes which necessitate industriousness and passing the time indoors reading.

I mean in no way to disparage religion as it’s practiced where it is needed. But to insinuate that a prayer spoken in a precarious environment should put our well-fed congregations to shame is manipulative and base.

Maybe of course we are being prepared for the global economy, the new downsized everybody. No health care, reduced social services, reduced community wealth. Iraqification. The New World Order is a Third World Order. Get ready for Global South uncertainty, anxiety, fragility, mortality and a faith with which to endure it.

The religious example with which NPR was trying to inspire its listeners was made clear by this incredible question: “Is the Global South mainly Evangelical?” The non-answer was again a misleading confirmation. “We should avoid trying to analyze the Global South in northern terms.” Exactly. Different parlance for different folks, my thesis entirely.

And Terry, over half of the world’s Christians are Catholic. The percentage is even higher in the tropics. Evangelicals garner but a fraction. Yours was what’s called a loaded question. So, are most NBA stars rapists? Very hard to say in white men terms probably.

Israelites go home

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

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

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

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

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

Mel Gibson in vino veritas

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Was Mel Gibson speaking his mind when he was pulled over for drunk driving? No doubt he was. In Vino Veritas. It wouldn’t be in Latin if it weren’t true. Discounting some of the vociferous hyperbole owed to his drunken ego, were Gibson’s comments anti-Semitic? How low is the bar for what is anti-Semitic? Gibson didn’t say he hated Jews.

Gibson’s Passion Spiel was held to be anti-Semitic because it portrayed the Jews as responsible for Jesus’ death. Who did kill Christ, if it even matters? Who betrayed him, who complained about him to the Romans, who passed up their chance to have him freed? Is it a matter of biblical interpretation? Whose? Is it anti-Semitic to bring it up because the subject is still too inflammatory after 2000 years? It’s water under the bridge, it’s not water evaporated to nowhere.

I think Gibson’s alcoholic state released sentiments a lot of us are feeling as we watch Israel unleash wave after wave of bombs upon captive Lebanese masses, while our media fiddles.

Polite people are cautioning everywhere, a Jew is not the same as a Zionist. Specifically, ordinary Jews should not be blamed for Israel’s inhumanity.

Well… why are all the Jews on television speaking in support of Israel? Why are newspapers focusing on the dozen Israeli victims and not the hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese?

A Jew who does not repudiate Israel, is as guilty as a Zionist. He may not be a Zionist, but wouldn’t he equal a Zionist?

2. Media
How about, just for the immediate time-being, and I know this might sound anti-Jewish, while Israel is killing UN observers and refugees, while Israel is breaking humanitarian laws and refusing to consider a cease-fire, how about we stop asking Jewish pundits on television to explain both sides of the conflict? How about we disqualify all Jewish Center For Peace spokesmen if they are going to persistently proclaim Israel’s moral authority?

You wouldn’t ask a Dixicrat to officiate an NBA game.

Do we need Jewish American think-tank/lobbying-groups weighing in on Israel’s right to commit mass war crimes in Lebanon? Everywhere you look, all the experts/supporters are Jewish or US senators. What is up with that?

Kofi Annan makes an emergency outcry about Israel deliberately targetting a UN peacekeeping observation post, and Jewish pundits question his report.

They reply: “Of course Israel would not do that. How absurd. Why would Israel do that?” But the media talking heads do not take them up on this question:

“Why indeed?”
 
How about: because the observation post might have witnessed Israel doing something too dastardly for words. More dastardly than targeting refugees or ambulances or hospitals or civilian residences or what else.
 
The Arab-Israeli conflict has already seen civilian massacres perpetrated by Israel accompanied by the bombing of the U.N. forces meant to protect those civilians. Qana was the site of a civilian cum U.N. massacre before it was yesterday’s massacre.
 
How indeed did Kofi Annan know the attacks on the U.N. observers were deliberate? Because the Israeli forces kept firing, even as further U.N. troops attempted to rescue the victims. 		  Ambulance given Israeli treatment

 
ADDENDUM 8.03
Today Mel Gibson’s outburst and subsequent apology is being co-opted by the Jewish Lobby. With the tide of American public opinion rising against the Zionist drives to exterminate their Arab neighbors, Mel Gibson was giving voice to popular sentiment.

When Gibson immediately espressed his remorse for what he’d said, and asked for forgiveness, prominent Jewish spokesmen stepped in to offer that forgiveness. Even President Bush echoed their response.

Thus all of us who may have doubted Israel are forgiven and invited back into the fold. The error was not Israel’s bombing of a four-story building full of children in Qana, the error was our doubting the righteousness of Israel defending its own.

Short term life expectancy

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This week 1,500 Army reservists from the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division are being ordered from Kuwait to join the embattled Marines in Iraq’s Anbar province. Their commander General Casey assured us this deployment will be short-term. “Definitely short-term” he reiterated.
 
With casualty rates so high, is the general’s confidence based on the soldier’s probable life expectancy?

The white Olympics

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Smokestacks of TurinToday I watched the opening ceremonies of the White Olympics in Torino.
 
Yes, White Olympics. Virtually all the athletes are white. White because winter sports take place in northern climes where most everybody is white. White because winter sports require equipment beyond what tropical non-developed countries can afford their athletes. White because that is the color of the world aristocracy.

But the Summer Olympics were very much the same. Compared to World Soccer, or the NBA, or the NFL, or the AFL-CIO, the Summer Olympics are lily-white.

So everyone at the Winter Olympics is white, the entire South African team is white. The few dark faces among the white are citizens of white countries who trace their roots elsewhere.

When the American team made its entrance, I wondered, where were the boos? The American athletes were smiling and waving, many were hamming for the camera, one was talking on her phone. An audience was never shown, either booing or applauding.

But there would not have been booing at this pageant. This was a fete for the developed countries, presently at war with darker skinned countries. This was a white man’s club. The few delegates from dark countries were vestiges of the old colonial representatives, cousins of the western nations, returned home having lost their lands and authority to land-reform and indigenous efforts to reclaim territorial autonomy.

So this celebration was the bi-annual gathering of the ruling class, their athletes who can afford to practice their athletics full time, and the spectators who can jet around the world and attend the events.

And the symbol of power from which the ruling classes owe their supremacy was visible in the Olympic flame. Some might also find it was appropriate for the industrial city of Torino.
 
I thought it looked right out of Antonioni’s stark 1964 film Red Desert about industrial ennui, the multiple-funneled smokestack that is this year’s Olympic cauldron.

Vets Day part 2: the 3rd Armored Cav

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Black gloved marchers
Before the Guernica that became Fallujah,
 
before our use of chemical weapons in Fallujah,

before there were civilians immolated in their beds by white phosphor in Fallujah,

before Napalm under the disguise of Mark-77 was used in Fallujah,

before our tanks were running over the injured Iraqis in the streets of Fallujah,

before our helicopters were killing every last family trying to wade across the Euphrates River to escape the blood bath that was Fallujah,

before we were turning back all able-bodied men from the age of 11 to 65 from the lines of refugees trying to leave Fallujah because we didn’t want insurgents to escape our pincer movement, forcing them back into the city to make a stand,

before we declared that anyone not evacuated from Fallujah would be treated as a combatant,

before we declared our determination to make an example of Fallujah.

2.
Before we tried to make an example of Fallujah the first time because the world saw what they did to the four contractor mercenaries,

but had to pull out because we hadn’t yet thought to cut off access to the hospitals from which were escaping horror stories of the atrocities we were committing against the civilians of Fallujah.

Before we had thought to ban Al-Jazeera from Iraq for reporting on Fallujah despite our restrictions,

before we killed the Al-Arabia reporter who dared to venture into Fallujah.

3.
Before the famous desecration of the bodies of the contractor-mercenaries by enraged Fallujah youth who’d often seen contractor-cowboys ride through their streets shooting indiscriminately out the window;

before our military tried to cordon off Fallujah with encampments.

4.
Before the killing of three unarmed Iraqi marchers, and the wounding of dozens more, who’d assembled to protest a massacre the day before, both times by nervous 82nd Airborne soldiers who thought they had been fired upon first.

3.
Before the massacre of schoolboys protesting the occupation of their school by American soldiers. The soldiers claimed to have been fired upon and yet the only bullet holes to be found after the killing of 17 unarmed Iraqi men and boys were from the American guns.

5.
Before that time Fallujah had not been occupied. Fallujah remained restful throughout America’s invasion of Iraq. It was not until the actions of the 82nd Airborne and the Marine Expeditionary Force that Fallujah erupted into a hotbed for the insurgency and, as a result of American anger, into American war crimes recalling Lidice and Guernica.

Throughout this period, and in between the disastrous actions by the 82nd and the Marines, Fallujah and the Anbar Provence were the responsibility of the 3rd Armored Cavalry of Fort Carson, Colorado Springs. To their credit, they were not party to the unfortunate American actions.