Tag Archives: Weed

Democratic Party voters do not want a return to the Clintons, yet…

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In a sure sign of how the Democratic Party is not a democratically run body at all, Hillary Clinton continues to seem to have a lock on the nomination.

Most Democratic Party voters simply do not want a return of the Clintons to power and certainly most voters as a whole do not want such. Yet the Clinton machine seems to be the ruling power in that party. Corporate money combined with undemocratic bureaucracy within the DP combine to overrule the people’s vote.

Let’s face it, Obama’s main appeal is simply that he is not a Clinton, and Edwards main ball and chain is that he was the VP candidate tied with Ketchup man Kerry. So that leaves it as to whether the Clinton machine can break Obama or not? I think the answer is that it can, and already has. Hillary Clinton has a lock on being the party’s ticket.

So where are all the Kucinich folk now? Where are those who always tell us that the only choice is the Democratic Party? They are stuck getting ready to tell us to return the Tweedle Dee to power as the Tweedle Dumb will seem just to horrid to imagine (to them). In short, liberals have already lost the election, and since they have put no effort into building a counter movement to corporate power in the electoral arena, their votes will not count except to be wasted on bringing slick Hillary to office. Once again, DP voting liberals will have helped build the charade and con that the US is a real democracy, when in fact it is not.

Darfur round and round table discussion

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No imperial intervention on the pretext of DarfurPeople please come prepared to the Darfur round table discussion tomorrow night. The in-house event at the PPJPC is intended to bridge a perceived divide that our organization may be telegraphing regarding non endorsement of the Save Darfur organization and other like efforts. Is the PPJPC for western intervention in Sudan or against, military and/or economic?

I’m hoping a moderator will be able to preempt filibusters by spirited missionaries intent on witnessing with descriptions of Janjaweed atrocities until the rest acquiesce in submission.

Come prepared to be informed, but please do the background research. The discussion time will be limited and will be quite ill-served, I think, with a chorus responding “I didn’t know snake oil was both TASTY and LESS FILLING.”

If you can read about the Darfur Crisis, you can read why it is also considered the Darfur Controversy.

Uproot nuclear missiles in our backyard

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Uproot not upgrade nuclear missiles in our backyard
Vigil to commemorate Trinity atomic test blast, July 16, 1945
Nuclear SILO N-8, Weld County, 1pm Saturday, July 14, 2007
(CITIZENS FOR PEACE IN SPACE carpool starts at PPJPC at 9:30am)

From Bill Sulzman of Citizens for Peace In Space:
UPROOT, DON’T UPGRADE MISSILES IN OUR BACKYARD

The nuclear non proliferation treaty (1970) and the International Court of Justice opinion (1996) both call for the dismantling of all nuclear arsenals and the prevention of new nuclear weapons anywhere.

U.S. policy ignores both principles. Nuclear silo N-8 in Weld County should be uprooted not upgraded. Ranchers and farmers know the scourge that weeds represent. For good things to grow bad ones have to be eliminated and replaced. The 49 Minuteman III missiles in our state and the other 451 spread across parts of Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana and North Dakota are illegal, immoral and noxious for the whole world. They need to be eliminated to restore the integrity of our state and our country.

Join us on July 14 at Nuclear silo N-8 in Weld County, the site of the 2002 Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares action. Help us express our gratitude to Sisters Ardeth, Carol and Jackie and to Fr Carl Kabat who remains imprisoned for a similar action in North Dakota last year. We will also remember the Trinity atomic blast which occurred July 16, 1945.

The vigil at the silo will start at 1:00. We will leave in a carpool from the Justice and Peace Office, 214 E. Vermijo Colorado Springs at 9:30 AM on Saturday July 14. For more details call 389 0644. We will have maps for those who are driving.

Super bowl Janet Jackson and Republican morality.

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This is something I published a couple of years ago. Every bit as relevant as today. And every bit today as then, some things are timeless.
This one contains a “dirty” word, so you might go ahead and set your browser Content Filter to profanity blocking. Better to censor yourself than try to censor me.

But now, once again, we are going to have the hyperbole and rampant commercialism pushed onto our senses, over and over and over and endlessly and I bet you thought I was going to say over again and again and again and repeatedly.

I don’t know the exact date of the Super Bowl. Just that it’s about a couple of weeks. I know the Chicago Bears are going to be one team, because of the hype I got as soon as I opened one of my email servers.

I am sure everybody is going to get lots and lots of Emails saying Bears or ? you choose… or New Poll: Who will it be Bears or ?

There will be jockeying to find out what the commercials are going to be for the half-time show, there will be much breathless wide-eyed awe and stories about what the commercials and so much (ok, I lied, there are more than one “dirty” word in this) all kinds of who-seriously-gives-a-fat-rat’s-ass-about-it bullshit, to lead us up to the Big Game.

A lot of the commercials are going to be for beer. And other drugs, especially alcoholic drugs.

You know the ones, they say at the end of it “(name of brewer/distiller) urges you to DRINK (notice they put this word last) responsibly”.

It is dope dealing at its finest. The crack house and the opium den and the weed corner are blown away (sick dope reference) by this magnum opus of Purveyance of Demon Rum.

And it is on a Sunday, a Pagan holy day, co-opted by Christianity, for worship of our respective God or gods. Pastors in Churches across the land are going to schedule their services, especially the evening services, around this latter-day Circus Maximus. And their morning services too, because the worshipers are going to have to rush to the store after services so they can score their dope and munchies for the BIGGGGG DEALLLLL…….

So I got the Super Bowl part embedded in our consciousness, right?

Now to the Republican Morality part, for a quick tease, then to Janet Jackson and the Infamous Titty Incident, then back to a slightly longer rant on Republican “Morality”.

The owners of the NFL teams, virtually all of them, are supporters of the Republican party. And the R’s pay it back in spades by supporting legislation that makes the PUBLIC TREASURY pay for the stadia, (yes, I spelled that last word right, I’m practicing my Latin, are you?) the security, the traffic control, and in-stadium dope I mean Beer Sales. That last because some stadia, like the ill-fated Cotton Bowl in Dallas, are in dry precincts. Which is the real reason the Cowboys don’t play in Dallas, for decades it has been in Irving, and next year it won’t be in Dallas County even.

The cities have to pay for the construction of the stadia out of bond money, and they are always told that it will boost the local economy.

Also here in Colorado, there was a guy running for Senator, you might recognize the name Pete COORS. And yes, he is heir to the beer fortune.

On to The Titty Incident.

Janet Jackson, during the half-time 3 years ago or was it 4, I lose count of things like football. Got her costume deliberately torn at the end of a song and exposed part of her (gasp! the HORROR!!) breast. Now, I didn’t get to see this. I don’t watch football. The homo-eroticism of 22 very large gentlemen throwing their bodies at each other doesn’t do it for me.

There was much scandal. Much public outcry. Much Breast Beating in the halls of Congress, (yeah, I know, that last joke was horrible but I had to get it off my chest) even the Commander in Chimp of the United States saying that he hadn’t watched the incident, but it was a lovely breast.

Ok so I might have taken a little liberty with that last statement, but I don’t keep abreast of the off the wall statements of Mr Bush, every time I try to watch one of his speeches my brain tries to escape by crawling out my left ear.

The Moral Outrage sweeping the country was amazing, especially in the R party.

Like Mr Coors.

 During the 04 super bowl, and I know I know, the Super Bowl calendar starts from S.B. I and S.B.II and so forth, with the not-very-subtle Roman numerals numbering system. Instead of A.D. or C.E., measured from the birth of Christ or the birth of Christianity, depending on your faith viewpoint. But I don’t worship the oblong ball. So it matters naught to me how the Hell many S.B. there were.

Mr Coors was OUTRAGED about this public impropriety. How dare they interrupt his half time show where he had a commercial or two over the years, with scantily clad women whose costumes showed a substantially higher percentage of overall Breast Acreage than Ms Jackson did, telling the poor saps watching that somehow they would have a shot at touching these breasts if they only buy his brand of Dope. For people who keep up with such things, these are the modern version of the Vestal Virgins performing their religious duty at the modern Circus Maximus, the Cheerleaders, who get paid a paltry amount for their Services on the field, but get much more opportunity working in commercials. Like for Mr Coors.

Since this was an Election Year, when all the Noble Laws about the Half Time show being lagged 4 seconds or so just to protect America from such an awful sight ever again….

And the Republican NFL team owners who pimp out these Vestal Virgins as part of their Circus, were also outraged, that Ms Jackson would Dare To Expose America to a sight of substantially less breast-age than their own cheerleaders and even most of the Female fans and even some of the (ewwweewwww) male fans show during every game. I mean, one team has its fans wear cheese on their heads, and paint their naked upper torsi green and yellow, and show over and over again one in particular a set of udders that would make a topless dancer envious (or nauseous) and who happens to be a guy (I think)

So this year we will be (or you will be, I plan to be out riding my bicycle, while the streets are practically deserted for four or five hours) watching a heavily subsidized, heavily censored, erotic commercial enterprise, knowing that the GOP Big Brother apparatus will be protecting us from such unseemly behaviour ever again occurring.

I have a weed problem

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Unsavory charactersI don’t watch the Sopranos so I don’t know whether this kind of thing happens everyday on television. Authority figure / love interest / recurring character / moral compass on the TV show Weeds gets driven summarily into a garage and killed.
 
Sitting in his car outside a drug deal gone awry, he is asked by a girl to roll down his window. She releases the locks and two goons slip in beside him from both sides and turn the car into an awaiting garage. The garage door lowers to the soundtrack “time to die.” Did I mention he was a cop?

The other thing the cop character representated was the show’s least morally compromised character. He was a narc who lapsed in a self-interested act, to protect his lady friend pot dealer, with the hope that she then get out of the business. When she does not, and in fact ramps up her activities to become a grower, he rebels at her decision, ultimately forcing estrangement. Then she betrays him and it gets ugly.

And what happened when loverboy died? Our Miss Dealer, in the midst of a multiple gunpoint drug deal standoff, interrupts to wander, to wax, glassy eyed and aimlessly about the kitchen, repeating “he’s dead?”

That scene captured two incongruous aspects of the show: the heroine’s empathetic innocence, walking around in bemused bewilderment at what happens to her, and two, the comic non-violence (dead copper aside) of the suburban drug world.

To its credit, Weeds teaches nothing of the real world of pot growing, distribution, addiction or law enforcement. In the same way that it is too idyllic, it is also thankfully uninstructional. Pickups are mere social calls, a grow house is tended as neighbors coming in to feed the fish while you’re away. There is no question of unreliability that in real life always marks a Keystone Cops constabulary of pot heads. Dealing is never shown. Our heroine is a “natural” at dealing, we’re told, but we never see what that would be actually. Sort of like we never saw interior design practiced in Designing Women.

We see pot fetishism, even an implied popular support for pot smoking by a suburban majority, and addiction is never shown. Unless you count our heroine’s addiction to the business of easy money and notoriety. The series started with a sudden widow facing an insurmountable suburban house payment, who is dropped into pot dealing as a last resort.

I’ve wanted to address the problem of Weeds. Everyone’s quirky. Because we become familiar with them, we do become empathetic. You could say they are all flawed but real human beings. I’ll assert they are not even. All the characters are opportunists and hedonists and worse than a non moral tale. They tell an immoral tale.

Liberal Democrats, your votes will not be counted

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Election fever is once again in the air. All around us we see Liberal Democrats with their yard signs and bumperstickers as the delirium builds. And once again, they will try for change by promoting their Tweedle Dees against the others guys’ TweedleDumbs. If there any content to be found, it is simply in that the Democratic Party ‘loyal oppositionists’ seem to have rather more polite candidates, as opposed to the ruder ones the Republicans run. All the election paraphernalia is generally without differentiating slogans, or even differentiating colors. Yet this is somewhat deceptive, as the opposing religious brethen have convinced themselves that this is a battle of socialism versus fascism! Yes, that’s what it is in fantasy land America. Sad to say, but both sides just go on simply ignoring that it is the corporate world that funds both these 2 political parties, and that the corporate world is not about to give up the charade that having both these parties dominating the electoral game provides.

Both groupings have constructed a paranoid view of the other. The Republicans are going to steal the vote at the machines again, shouts the liberal Democratic Party cadre. Bush is a Fascist! And the Republicans swear that Al Gore and the now silent, Michael Moore, are socialist devils. And well, Al Franken is a Judas socialist devil we suppose. The Democrats side with the ‘Islamo Fascists’, you see (if you are a true believing dittohead). So, now it is in quite in vogue to fascist-bait these days, no matter what angle you come from. Perhaps this is an Israeli idealogical import? If you’re not with us, you are against us… sort of a Moses style, religious world view. Both the liberal and conservative American religions love this stuff!

Well here’s the thing. Most people are not with either of these 2 religious camps anymore. The great American agnostic majority is beginning to form, and they don’t like the fact that their votes don’t count. The Repubilcan Right wants a Christian Republic declared, but Bush doesn’t deliver. The Democratic Party liberal wants the US out of Iraq and a stop to the bankrupting of our country through the Pentagon welfare system. And the Democratic Party hierarchy says NAY. Or whatever the sound a donkey makes? The corporations funding both parties want neither a theocracy, nor a society without ample, Pentagon based corporate welfare. So Liberal Democrats, your vote won’t count, just like the Right Wing Christian votes will not be counted, neither. Neither one of your two world views is the core values of your respective corporate funded political parties.

So why continue getting religion, if your vote won’t count, Liberals? Howard Dean, DP chair, already told you that it don’t make a difference if the Democrats do win. You heard it from the donkey’s mouth! Your votes will not be counted, and it has nothing to do with the Diebold machines. It has nothing to do with gerrymandering voter registration lists. It has nothing to do with fascism. It has all to do with corporations not listening to consumers. When you vote Demcoratic Party, you are consuming a corproate ideological product. Consider it yet another mass produced hamburger taken in. So you don’t like the secret sauce and complain to management. They are laughing at you, not changing their product line.

Big liberals going to pressure the corporate board of Democratic Party Unlimited in Gall? I just visited the Progressive Democrats of America website, and they are calling for … get this!… that the Democrats should CENSURE Bush and Cheney! Not jail him, nor even impeach him. What backbone, what pressure they apply! These liberal nuns at PDA want Dean to demand a slapping of Dick and Dubya’s wrists with the rulers! Oh such torture! Bush and Cheney must be shaking in their combat boots. lol. Well, Liberals, the Republicans will shoot you down just like so many quail! OOps, your own party will do it for them, won’t they? Ask Dean. The answer is there already.

So please get off your butts, and stop campaigning. Your vote will not be counted. Try something else.

Blood diamonds

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Before it was a movie title, it distinguished a type of diamond. Blood Diamond was a diamond industry term, a Scarlet Letter, to characterize an uncertain, perhaps blood-tainted, provenance. To be specific, a diamond bought from a rebel controlled region of the third world where the diamonds are traded illegally, meaning outside the market share of the diamond cartel, because a diamond sold without profiting the traditional diamond merchants is an illegal diamond. Don’t you find that odd?

The price of diamonds is kept artificially high as a result of the diamond cartel. By a tradition of laws, the Antwerp merchants have managed to make anyone else’s trading of diamonds illegal, enforcing their monopoly. If you were to discover a diamond mine and did not want to do business with the Antwerp monopoly, you’d be considered an international criminal. In the turmoil of a civil war, if you seized a mine, by definition owned by one of their partners, the cartel would label your merchandise bloody.

The diamond cartel/monopoly is reeling, so we hear, from the Hollywood release of the movie Blood Diamonds. Not because it enlightens the public about the diamond market, but because the movie embellishes upon the unpalatable stigma of blood diamonds. Diamond sellers are worried that their business will be tarnished by their own ugly creation, in this case the severed limbs of the people of Liberia forced to work in the diamond mines by feuding rebels. The merchants are selling those same diamonds after all, it only depends on who sold which to whom.

Therefore the industry is stepping up its reassurances that showroom products are guaranteed not to be blood diamonds. There are stamps of authenticity, for example, which would be lacking on blood diamonds. Really? Do you imagine they hold huge bonfires to destroy contraband diamonds like so much unwanted weed? A blood diamond captured from diamond smugglers becomes a plenty-fine diamond, once again profitable to the cartel. The logic being that the diamonds were confiscated, thus no money went to reward their bearers, thus no bloodletting was given a monetary encouragement.

Even if this was true, it doesn’t address what blood diamonds are about.

The diamond cartel was a fortuitous monopoly to grow out of a few merchants’ control of the then known diamond mines. It’s a throwback legacy of the early trade monopolies granted by kings to encourage exploration and trade. The Portuguese were once given the exclusive right to trade around the horn of Africa, then later around the horn of America. The advantage was held later by the Spanish, the Dutch and the English. The Dutch East India Trading Company was a corporate example, the Hudson Bay Fur Trading Company another. We’ve long since outgrown the need to grant exclusives to conquering explorers. Except for diamonds.

The diamond monopoly upholds diamond prices which is sort of in everybody’s interest, the everybody who owns a diamond. Unregulated, it’s calculated that diamonds would lose half their value, maybe more were diamonds to lose their “a diamond is forever” allure.

There’s another common interest which I’ll address in a moment.

For now, imagine the cartel/monopoly concept if it had been granted for automobiles. Daimler Benz would be producing expensive cars for the wealthy and Henry Ford’s Model-T would be a blood-car. Only the rich would be driving cars and policemen would be chasing the poor in illegal vehicles.

Today’s monopolies are granted through patents and copyrights. Artificial rights which ensure high prices and that the poor are left out. As this applies to medicines and technology, the price differential becomes inhumane. Aids drugs are a tragic example.

The other important reason we tolerate the diamond monopoly is to maintain stability for the ownership class within the globalized economy. Diamonds are one of the few commodities which compete with a global currency. Drugs are another. The movement of value, as represented by diamonds, can fuel economic activity outside the control of banks and regulatory agencies. Commodities represent real value, as compared to currency which represents but a representation. As a result, diamonds which are easily concealed from government tax collectors, can readily be used to fund counter-government activities such as rebellions and emancipations. Bad for business.

Is this really a democracy?

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I sent in to get registered the last hour of the last day where I could vote this election coming up. But I don’t know why? Every round of this Tweedle Dee/ Tweedle Dum charade they call ‘democracy’ just leaves me feeling more and more alienated. Democracy is when power is contested, but there is no contest for power in America. The corporations run our society, and in fact, they run the world’s. So why do we keep going through this pretense that something will change depending on the result of our vote?

MILFs and the state of public education

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Yes, I know. I’m lucky. I was born under a lucky star. I have my health and my wealth. I have a big house, two fantabulous cars, and six exceptional children. I recently won the Filling the Deep End of the Gene Pool award. “Oh my goodness. I am so honored. I’d like to thank the Catholic Church, especially Father Foxhoven for his guidance during my difficult teenage years.” I have big boobs, a small butt (think upside down pear), and I’m generally considered a MILF, my daily affirmation. If you don’t know what a MILF is then (A) You don’t know any high school boys or (B) You don’t watch WEEDS.

My point? I am supposedly part of the elite….the people who have NO WORRIES….NO HEARTACHE….GOOD HAIR EVERY DAY. We wake up each morning and weep tears of joy at our good fortune. We drink mimosas before school and feel compassion for those who have less. “God, why? Why, oh why, isn’t everyone as blessed as I?”

Speaking of school. I am in a district with an incredible curriculum. We have a college prep program, Gifted and Talented programs, Science and Math Olympiad programs, Music programs, Advanced Placement programs that can get our kids into Stanford quicker than you can say “Will that be MasterCard or Visa?”

So what is my gripe? Well, the Ninth Court of Appeals recently ruled that when we turn our children over to the public school system, we check them at the door. THEY are in charge of MY children. My dynasty. They determine what my children learn, both in and out of the classroom. THEY? Who are they? Do THEY live on my street? Play golf at my country club? WHO THE FUCK ARE THEY?

Here’s who they are. THEY are the administrators who allowed a troubled little girl, out-of-district-but-we-do-like-to-be-inclusive, push my perfect baby boy off the top of the slide and break his arm with absolutely no punishment. THEY are the principal who suspended my perfect baby girl for writing a clever cartoon about how girlz can deal with pesky boyz by spraying them with freeze spray and framing and hanging them in the hallway–something about a specific threat against a named individual. THEY are the government fuckheads who make my perfect darlings walk through the halls with “safe hands” clasped behind their backs so they can’t threaten anyone. THEY are the counselors who called my children in during my very amicable divorce without my permission to tell them about how uncertain their futures are now that their parents have split up.

I am one of the fortunate individuals who has options. I can move my children to another school within the district. I can change districts. I can move to a private school. I can home school. Actually, I’ve opted to do several of these over the years. But since I pay my property taxes and abide by the Constitution, I would rather bitch. Bitch about government overstepping its bounds. Bitch about social engineering. Bitch about the NEA. Bitch about revisionist history. Mostly I want to bitch about people–people who control people. The unluckiest people in the world.

Parents and the teenage drug dealer

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I sympathize with parents who have a child on drugs. I’m thinking not so much about the child who’s doing fine in school, or has ambition and is moving forward. I’m thinking more about the kid who isn’t, who’s discovered a rut of drugs and complacency and nothing but drugs and instant gratification. I’m thinking the two are mutually exclusive, but that may be my prejudice.

It’s one thing to indulge that child, and quite another to endanger everyone else’s.

Maybe the parents think that drug use is okay. Maybe it’s cute, or harmless. Maybe it reminds them of their youthful experimentation. I’m not sure those parents are in touch with today’s controlled substance options.

I wish all parents could attend just one Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meeting to hear about what addicts these days are up against. Hear how drugs destroy families, or preoccupy lives or derail ambitions or usurp the joy to be found in just everyday things. Sometimes the chemistry of addiction overtakes a person’s every daily thought until they die.

It’s not simply pot, mushrooms and cocaine nowadays. Today there are all variations of meth, crack, heroin, ecstasy and speed in deadly combinations. Pot heads may argue that they only abuse pot, but marijuana today is laced with any of the above ingredients as fortifiers. The old pot high may still satisfy That 70’s Show, but kids today expect a more potent hit.

But to discuss the issue of dealing. Maybe some parents are proud of their child’s entrepreneurial initiative. Maybe they see it as making the best of an otherwise unprofitable fixation.

Maybe it’s like being the parent of a bully. The problem is not my bully, the self-assertive domineering chip-off-the-old-block, the problem is that the other kids are submissive and lesser and thus deserving. It’s survival of the fit, of my DNA. Maybe parenting a drug dealer is like that. The problem is not the dealing, we think, it’s the other kids who need the drugs and can’t arrange clever dealing setups like my kid.

What’s a parent to do? Call the cops on their own kid? Jeopardize the child’s academic career, give him a criminal record to haunt him until always? That would be my argument to call the cops before he turns 18, so his record as a minor will be expunged. Otherwise, the option certainly does seem extreme.

On the other hand, to do nothing is off-the-chart selfish. Selfish. Your kid is not dealing to 30 year-old opium addicts in the big city. Your kid is dealing in school! High school, junior high, grade school, wherever. Your kid is turning dozens if not hundreds of other kids onto drugs. Many of whom will follow his sorry footsteps and cause anguish for their parents. Were you feeling lonesome in your anguish? How thoughtful of you to share your bad parenting.

If you’ve set your kid up in his own unsupervised apartment, you’ve given your neighborhood a drug den. A place for other kids to hide and get into trouble. I’ve seen how accounting for a kid’s time works, you’re diligent, you expect other parents to be diligent, thus supervision for every kid’s activities is accounted for. Enabling a drug den is worse than going on vacation and not telling your friends that your house or child will be unsupervised. You’ve created a full time unchaperoned oasis. Did you have that as a child?

If your drug dealer begins to report vandalism to his car or house, which he says can only be random, you’ve got a whole lot of possible suspects. It could be the neighbors who resent living next to a house from which carloads of kids come and go at all hours of the night. It could be an angry parent who’s caught their child there. It could be rival students who resent the drug-dealer swagger that interrupts the otherwise traditional jock-based hierarchy of a school class. But clearly someone wants your child to move. I say move him!

It could be a rival drug dealer who’s been pushed out, or who’s trying to push in to the territory. The territories being the schools remember, however many schools are involved. It could be a distributor to whom your child passes money. Or fails to pass money. This isn’t Weeds where all the money changing, if terse, is convivial.

Is it going to take a panicked phone call in the middle of the night to convince you? A call from your child dealer asking you for $6K as soon as the bank opens to pay off some goons who will otherwise kill him, because the money’s gone lost, or there’s some misunderstanding, but “trust me, these guys won’t listen to reason.”

I don’t think it’s such an unselfish thing to ask of a parent, to keep a child clean, and to do their part to keep drug dealers out of the neighborhood. If you’ve got more children coming up for example, it’s not unselfish at all. Or if you think of your children’s friends as your children, as precious and delicate as your own.

Are you really thinking, if my child doesn’t deal it, somebody else will? Well social responsibility really doesn’t work that way. Yes somebody else will. Let it haunt their conscience.

Mexico’s election and ours, the different and the same

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Across the US political spectrum it is now widely understood that the US government does aggressively intervene in Latin America, no matter whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. So no matter what political stripe your average Joe and Jane neighbor may be here in Colorado Springs, you are not too likely to have one deny that the US has historically intervened South of The Border in some form or another; militarily, economically, and culturally. The neighbor leaning Left might say that this has been negative for those countries, while the Rightist will most probably sing interventionism’s praises. The memory of Reagan’s Central American wars of the ’80s remains strong, because some of these wars were so widely covered in the press.

There is one caveat to mention here. The belief that the US is intervening, and has intervened in the past in Latin America, is mostly confined within opinion by the American public, that this is so only south of Mexico. Why? The answer is in that the US press as a whole, treats mention of US interventionism in Mexico and its politics as its grand taboo. Despite the fact that Mexico is a huge and populous country and is where the Third World meets the US to our South, the US press does all it can to keep Americans just as ignorant about Mexico as they can be made.

As one example, just how many non Hispanic Americans can name the Mexican states that border the US? How many of these same Americans know that Mexico is divided into states even? But how many of these same folk yet have strong and basically uninformed opinions regarding immigration from that country? The sum total of belief the US non Hispanic public has been taught by the English language US press, is that Mexico is poor and that many want to live here because of that. Further information is kept back, and the widespread Anglo public view is that Mexicans run their own country and the US has nothing to do with that. Unfortunately, that perception is totally false.

To illustrate the point that the US in fact has a major role in directing Mexican life, let me just mention a few facts about Walmart in Mexico. This American company is Mexico’s largest private employer with over 100,000 employees and over 800 stores there. It now is entering into the countries banking structure as a major player, too. It is just ridiculous to imagine that the Walton family of Arkansas is just standing to the side when political and economic decisions are being made, whether in Spanish, or not.. They have an agenda, and push it just as hard in Mexico as they do in the US. Their agenda, in short, is to make profits in that country and to move those billions to Bentonville, USA.

I don’t want to pick on Walmart here. They are just one of many prominent examples of US presence in Mexico, and exploitment of it. They have high level company officials, as other US companies and the US government itself do, that interact with the Mexican elites themselves to maintain a ‘good business climate’. What existed before the year 2000, was the longest running one-party dictatorship in the world. Both Mexican and US elites decided was that this was not good for business at that time. Previously, they had agreed that this dictatorship was absolutely just the thing for business and US government support for the PRI dictatorship was kept solid. And the US press’s silence about this ran solid for decades, too.

In the last 2 US presidential elections, the results left many believing that fraud had carried Bush into office twice. At any rate Bush received less votes (called popular votes, as if that made them insignificant) than Al Gore did in 2000, and yet got the office! Gore realized that though he had won the vote count and that the Republicans had fraudently purged voter lists of largely eligible Black voters, that he was not as popular amongst the US elite as Bush was at the time. So he laid down his claim for the presidency, and conceded without a struggle! And America has been as it has, ever since.

Mexico had its presidential election about 10 weeks ago. News of it was kept quiet in the US daily press, as if it was of no real concern to Americans. Pretty strange behavior for what bills itself as the ‘free press’, but not real shocking if we consider how the US press has been largely lap dogs in support of Bush’s multiple invasions, occupations, and wars. Not much coverage of Bush in Haiti these days, neither. How much real examination has there been of whether the Israeli invasion of Lebanon had roots in the White House?

But what came out of this election south of us was a fraudulent result that will possibly impact the US as much as Iraq now does. After all, the US and Mexico are intertwined on the North American continent, and neither country will ever become an island into itself,no matter how hard it is tried. I could go into the many details of why the results were fraudulent, something that is now being denied in US daily editorial after another. That would seem arcane and boring to most readers though. What counts, is that about half of the Mexican population is certain that the results are fraudulent and the official president stands with little legitimacy in their eyes. And the US supports that man, as do the Mexican church, government, and economic elites that have long impoverished that country.

What really is fearful to the US media, is that the official ‘loser’ of the Mexican presidential race, Antonio Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), has chosen a path completely in contrast to that of our US loser of the past, Al Gore. He has decided to struggle against the fraud rather than to meekly surrender to it. Despite the effort to reconstruct Gore’s image amongst the US public as Mr. Ecology, he will probably go down in history as the goat that led to the construction of the Bush Administration. Mexico’s ‘loser’, AMLO, may well go down to being seen as a hero in the struggle against US control of his country, and the destruction of its national integrity.

The situation in Mexico now is quite complex. The country’s highest court just put a man in office, that even with fraud in his favor, gathered less than 40% of the votes! The south of the country went for AMLO, and the north went more to Calderon, now the official ‘president’. About 30% of the country stuck with the PRI, party of the no supposedly defunct one-party dictatorship of the past. Fact is, that both Calderon’s party and the PRI have been acting in conjunction with each other, as if they were but 2 wings of one corporate party. Does this ring a bell for some Americans?

Our government and institutions should not fall into line accepting Mexican electoral fraud as they are now doing. The fact that they have done so bodes poorly for our own embattled system. Neither country can afford to continue where only elites make decisions that effect all of us. Neither country needs Tweedle-Dee/ Tweedle-Dumb governance. That way leads to national insecurity for both nations.