Better than Nixon saying (as Vice President) "you won't have Dick Nixon around anymore" Of course he lied. Later he said "I am not a crook!" Again, he perjured. Trump was very succinct. To the point. "I'm fucked" ... actually, he's sodomized with a shovel, sideways so it would hurt more.
Tag: Puritans
Let’s all celebrate Mithra’s birthday!
I get to feeling kind of Puritanical at this time of year.... so 'Why didn't Puritans like Christmas? ...They had several reasons, including the fact that it did not originate as a Christian holiday.' 'The upper classes in ancient Rome celebrated Dec. 25 as the birthday of the sun god Mithra. The date fell right in the middle of Saturnalia, a month-long holiday dedicated to food, drink, and revelry, and Pope Julius I is said to have chosen that day to celebrate Christ's birth as a way of co-opting the pagan rituals.' See When Americans banned Christmas--- The first 'War on Christmas' was declared almost 400 years ago, courtesy of our Puritan forefathers. Have a Merry Mithraday!
Tis the season once more….
for the Talk Radio Hate Speech about a "war on Christmas." I don't actually think they're stupid, mind you, they know full well that they're lying... and omitting a HUGE amount of data. So, to fact check them ONCE MORE... The Founding Fathers never instituted either Christmas or Thanksgiving as national holidays. Nor did the Pilgrims. Nor the Puritans. Abraham Lincoln did recognize both, but with the emphasis on Thanksgiving. Some of Lincolns closest friends and advisers were rabid anti-Catholics. King James First was crowned king because he was, at least in name, a Protestant. King James invited the Puritans and the Pilgrims, not very courteously, to get out of England. Because they said he was too Catholic. Their major sticking point was Christmas. He was for it. They were against it. The Hate Radio people insist that we're supposed to rule America and just by consequential extension, the entire world, by the several bickering groups of Late Medieval Feudal Warlords who were killing each other and a whole bunch of civilians in Europe at the time, and had just begun to tear up America, over different interpretations of the Christian faith. As usual in these Battles of (nit)Wits, the primary victims were Other Christians. Because in England at the time there were few openly Non-Christians to be had. Jews maybe. Jews who were burned at the stake, hanged, tortured etc etc right along with people suspected of Witchcraft. Or Christian Blasphemy. Which brings it to the central theme of the Hate Speech Radio Talkmongers. Why, you might ask, did the "founding fathers" NOT establish a natoinal religion? Well, I might answer, the slaughter of Christians by Christians was fresh in their memories. Washington had participated in an extremely bloody extension of an ongoing European "holy" war between Catholics and Protestants. In America the casualty count was comparatively low, mostly because the White Population was relatively low. Which brings up that ugly business of the Founding Fathers being Anti-American, as in, anti-Indian. In the mad rush to cast the Puritans especially but also the Pilgrims as Pure Saints who get to make our daily decisions and run our Government from Beyond The Grave, they have to omit details. Lots of Details. The scene replayed in countless Thanksgiving pageants of Racial Harmony between English Invaders and Americans has many dark corners that the Haters don't want to illuminate. It complicates the simplicity of their "war on christmas" ranting. And if they encouraged their listeners to actually think it would be bad for their bottom line. For instance many Puritans wrestled with the question of Where Did The Indians Originate? Because we're not mentioned in Genesis. Some, like the witch-hunter Cotten Mather,often quoted by the Hate-mongers on Fox News and Clear Channel as being a "Founding Father" whose original intent is Holy and Beyond Question, not only hated Christmas but also many of the toys which are now given for Christmas, meaning Dolls, were declared by him an his contemporaries as being Agents of the Devil. And that Indians have no souls, since we're not
The G.I. Jihadi Doll…
So my brother was telling me, about a toy that brainwashes little Palestinian and Iraqi and Afghan children into growing up to be Suicide Bombers which is intensely Bullshit on many levels. One is the Fundamentalist Islamic aversion to Dolls, much like the Puritans and Pilgrims lynching people as "witches" for giving kids dolls to play with. But the preacher who told him this, and of course had never had any more experience with Islam than my brother did, said that the doll had a little toy sword, a little toy rifle, and toy bombs... Just like the very REAL toy made by a company with many Military Contracts, such as making the butt-piece for the M16 rifle, buttons for the uniforms...and their doll shown above has bombs, has a gun, has knives... The big difference is, THIS doll actually exists. When Right Wing Lunatics preach that the Terror Doll is being used to brainwash little kids into the Suicide Bomb Cult, their Brainless followers eat it up with a spoon... and fork... and Tabasco Sauce... When the Society of Friends, the Quakers, point out the REAL doll and how the REAL doll is used to lure AmeriKlan kids into the Killing Machine, romanticizing War and Death, The Right Wing Lunatics Scream that the QUAKERS must be Terrorists and accuse the QUAKERS of Hate Speech. Our Local Right Wing Radio Propagandist "Gunny" Bob for instance. Oh, yeah, Gunny, three words... Semper... Fi... BITCH... Then there's the idea that Muslim preachers tell the Suicide Bombers that God is on their side, and if they die while fighting the Infidel they'll be taken to Heaven and adored by God and all the Saints and all the Angels... oh, wait, that's EXACTLY what USAF and Army and Marine and Naval Chaplains tell the HOMICIDE Bombers before each mission.
Opposition to Public Education
Why Republicans HATE Public Education. In the Words of THEIR prophet Hitler "Universal Public Education is the most virulent toxin that Liberalism can inflict upon itself. It only makes the Lower Classes think more highly of themselves than they ought, and leads to discontent with their position in life. Truly, they only need enough education to be Efficient Coolies for our industries" (Liberties taken with the exact English phrases, the Original was in German) We often are accused of "ignorance" when the Anti-Semitic Supporters of Killing Palestinians, for example, or the one who calls him/herself "Friend" posts... publish their reactionary Angry Hate Speech on Not My Tribe. In a slightly backward twist we are often accused of being "intellectual Elitists", but Still ignorant. Or "idiots". Without Public Education we would be left with home-schooling, or Parochial Education. Those of us who weren't born with silver spoons in our mouths would be left out in either case. "Keep 'em Ignorant" And for not just nearly but EXACTLY the same reason American Slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write. I'm sure the Republican't respondents will argue that it's not like that, I'm just spouting Marxist Propaganda again, the Repukelickin' Party doesn't actually engage in class warfare or racism blah blah blah blah... My grandfather was a cowboy. Not like George Bush with his "ranch" and 5 cows bought and maintained by his Trust Fund, a trust fund which I'm once again going to point out came from an enterprise his family engaged in called Slave Trading. They'll say that, Yankee Puritans they claim to be, their family didn't actually own slaves. Nor did their favorite "charity" the Yale Foundation. No, they wouldn't soil their own hands with the whips and chains necessary to "earn" their money for them... They just owned a fleet of Slave Ships. That and Grand-poppy Prescott Bush laundered money for the Nazis, which they don't a) apologize for and b) they're still spending the money they got from BOTH enterprises. No, Grandpa Brown was a REAL cowboy. So was his brother Loy and their brother-in-law Tom. In Texas in those days that meant Impoverished. Cowboys were just then being romanticized in the public IMAGINATION through those new-fangled movin' picture thingies. Uncle Tom wound up being the foreman of the Rolling Hills Ranch in Keene, Texas, until the ranch was sold to Halliburton in the late 70s to make a Game Ranch. Like the one where Former Vice President and Current Active War Criminal Richard Cheney shot his friend in the face while they were "hunting" captive, hand raised "Wild" ducks. They also have or had a website wherein you could with a click of your mouse or joystick "hunt" and actually kill actual formerly live animals (until you put the mouse pointer over them and clicked) Uncle Tom described it as a place where they bought old, diseased "wild" zoo and circus animals dependent upon your actual skill level they would drug the animals or even chain them up for you so you wouldn't miss. That way you could go on an African Safari without ever leaving
Jesus vs. Santa rivalry is nothing new
A holiday detente: As Easter sprung from fertility celebrations befitting the rebirth of spring, so Christmas originated from offerings of the season's greetings to the winter solstice. And while Christians might have taken over the party, they've had to retain the yule tree and other pagan party favors to ensure converts would still RSVP to the festivities. The struggle between Jesus and Santa is nothing new. The First War on Christmas happened in Oliver Cromwell's England when Christmas idolatry came to be forbidden by law. Popular merriment was deemed to have strayed too far from the Protestant message of the church, the Lord's Day etc, so Lord Protector Cromwell reined things in, for a time, until the reformer's dominance over the parliament and the influence of the Puritans waned. I heard this story on NPR, half of it actually. They described Christmas having been made illegal for a period, but curiously didn't mention which period, and who in England had done it. Puritans you say? Might these have been the same Puritans who came to America's shore? The same. Well, they shared forefathers (Our forefathers, if our WASP history books can be believed, emphasizing as they do our "Christian Nation" while minimizing Jefferson and the other 90% of our settlers). Thus religious intolerance, on the part of the Puritans, drove the rest of England to send them packing, post paid, to take their anti-everybody else's Christmas to New England, where it was thought there were no revelers to be bothered. The Puritans fled religious intolerance to THEIR intolerance basically. What BS to assert that English merry folk did not accord them freedom of religion. England wanted freedom FROM the Puritan's brand of religion. For some reason our historians seem content to leave open the suggestion that the Puritan party-pooper recount being expelled from the party because of his "wild and crazy" ways! Just as in Old England, the American puritanical pin heads every so often revive to prominence, usually in reaction to economic or social catastrophe, to prescribe austerity across the board, from no drinking to unhappy holidays. In their current incarnation they're Fundies aghast at what's become of their Christmas. The "true meaning" having become too commercial, too secular, not enough infant Christ worship, etc. We've got a nation of party-poopers, wanting to repo the universal Xmas holiday and its international message of brotherhood: Peace on Earth, Goodwill To All Mankind. Puritans aren't about being good, they're the fine folk who who accepted the turkey, then thanked the Lord, not the heathens. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!
The new prurience in men’s magazines
FHM, STUFF, MAXIM, RAZOR, et al. Porn is back at the 7-11. It's the resurgence of clean porn to counter the free-for-all no-holes-barred internet, just like Hugh Hefner's Playboy Magazine put glossy clean brakes on the sexual revolution. Hef put a gloss coat on the age-old girly magazine and put it unto the coffee table, Guccione dirtied it up with Penthouse and put it back under the mattress and Flynt left no fig leaf unturned with Hustler and put pornography right back in the garage. But after the ugly fin de siecle the puritans are back. Now we have the nouveau prurient clothed seductresses. Here little flesh is revealed that is not already displayed on every popular magazine cover. Naked media stars, but covered. That's another story, nudity in fashion magazine magazines. Today's men's magazine's entice but don't deliver, they tease, and apparently that's enough. In the porn heydays of the seventies, the magazines were owned by independent publishers. You could say "I read Playboy for the articles" and it'd be true. Many anti-establishment stories could only see daylight through the independent press. But the magazines today belong to the publishing empires which belong to the advertizing empires which belong to the consumer goods empire. You can't use sex to sell anything if the boys are getting the sex. Visually at least. The curious aspect of the today's bathroom reading for boys is the lack of sexual depth. It's all surface. It's curves and titilation without a sense of anything lying beneath, inside, beyond. It's beads of water, not sweat. Surface and complexion is all that matters. Breast implants don't matter because they'll be under wrap. You're not going to keep them, you're not even going to undress them. Knock them against the bathroom door at the nightclub, disrobe them in the darkness at her place, you'll be gone before it's light. Only the visual coutour matters. To whom? The virgin spectator.
Waterboarding not dunking
Vice-president Cheney has just explicitly admitted that US interrogators use waterboarding as a method of interrogation. The decision to use it is a "no brainer" Cheney says, it's not torture, referring to the practice as more like dunking. Probably we all conjure images of the wooden see-saw at the water's edge, where the Puritans sought confessions from witches. Others I guess envision the dunking booth at the school fair. Neither would be correct. David Corn features an updated description of waterboarding, sent him from Jonah Blank, a former senior editor of US News and World Report. Blank attached pictures from the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, now a museum commemorating the Khymer Rouge attrocities. It's the former site of a notorious torture facility. Of the many torture methods used by the Khymer Rouge, only two instruments are diplayed to represent the worst. Both involve water torture. One of them is the waterboard. Water torture goes way back, and Dick Cheney of Halliburton and of the USofA are upholding its fine tradition.
Ahmadinejad and Hamas not denying Holocaust
No one is suggesting that the Holocaust didn't happen, or that six million Jews weren't killed by the Nazis. The mythology surrounding the Holocaust has to do with its aftermath: how the murder of six million Jews became justification for the creation of a Jewish state on land which belonged altogether to someone else. That is the mythology about the Holocaust which natives of the Middle East would like the rest of us to contemplate. Western media seems intent on perpetuating a distortion of the Muslim position. So intent are they to avoid questioning the legitimacy of Zionism that anyone who does is painted as a "Holocaust denier." No one is denying the Holocaust! And no one is calling for killing any more Jews! "Wiping Israel off the map" is a truncated translation of what the Muslim voices have expressed. It does not mean "off the face of the earth" or "eradicate" or "exterminate." Right to exist Hamas is often described as not believing in Israel's right to exist. It sounds so unreasonable. Everyone has a right to exist. But Israel is not a person, it's an entity. Try this on for size. Does Jewish occupied Palestine have a right to exist? Did French occupied Algeria have a "right to exist?" Algeria had a right to exist, and the French there had every right to exist, as a minority. And as we've seen with all former colonies, the majority population has an inclination to rise against its upper class oppressors. The west has of course the inclination to try to prop up those embattled regimes. Israel was a nation created in 1949, carved out of the land of the Palestinians to make a home for European Jews. Israel is regarded by many as a last example of colonialism. White settlers laying claim to the lands of another people. Now the Israelis are erecting a wall to separate themselves from the darker skinned Arabs. It's an apartheid wall, and we've seen apartheid before. The Boers of Dutch ancestry no longer rule South Africa because the world wouldn't stand for it. Israelis have as much right to exist as anyone, as the Boers for example, but they don't have a divine right to exist on the backs of their native brothers. Israelis call it a "fence." To construct it required demolishing entire Palestinian neighborhoods, often separating Palestinian farmers from their fields and orchards. Off the map When the Iranian president says he would like to wipe Israel off the map, he's not saying he wishes to kill anyone. He didn't say he wants to see Israel wiped off the face of the earth, he's saying he'd like to see Israel off the map OF THE MIDDLE EAST! Ahmadinejad even suggested that Israel relocate itself to Europe. If Europeans feel so bad about the Holocaust which they inflicted upon the Jews, why shouldn't it fall to Europe to