Archive for May, 2012

What the Right Really Believes…
May 29, 2012

What follows is the complete text of an email I received recently.

This really is priceless!!

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away"

THE FIRE CHIEF SAID..PRICELESS

The Fire Chief Said…

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
Not fair to make judgment of this, until you see what the Fire Chief says!!!!

In South Los Angeles , a 4-plex home was destroyed by a fire.

A Mexican family of six, all welfare recipients and gang members,
Lived on the first floor, they died.

An Islamic group of seven welfare cheats,
All illegally in the country from Kenya , lived on the second floor,
And they, too, all perished in the fire.

6 LA, Hispanic, Gang Bangers, & ex-cons,
Lived on the 3rd floor and they, too, died.

A lone, white couple lived on the top floor.
The couple survived the fire.

Jesse Jackson, John Burris and Al Sharpton were furious!!
They flew into LA and met with the fire chief, on camera.
They loudly demanded to know,
Why the Blacks, Black Muslims and Hispanics,
All died in the fire and why only the White couple lived?

The Fire Chief said,
"They were at work"

This has just got to keep on circulating… it’s too good…

This is how the right wing thinks. This is Tea Party. This is Republican conservatism. This is the heart of the modern Republican party.

Nineteen people burned to death in a house fire. None of them were white. The white people survived because they were at work.

Nineteen people burned to death.

And that’s funny. Because they weren’t white. Because their lives were different. Because they were, what, morally defective?

But the white couple? Apparently very virtuous. They were at work, of some kind.

This is virulently racist stereotyping. It’s the sort of thing that serves to confirm the beliefs of the shallow ‘thinkers’ on the right.

It’s the sort of thing that leads to concentration camps and furnaces, all run by the ‘right people’, the good people, the moral people, the people who think it funny that nineteen people burned to death in a house fire.

And it is the sort of thing that appears to be very popular on the right. The party of Boehner. Of Palin. Of Kantor. Of the Koch brothers. Of Romney. Of Limbaugh and Hannity. Of fundogelicals. The party of morality and family values.

It is now an American value that people of color burn to death in house fires. That’s a family value today.

And it’s funny. Pricelessly funny.

Isn’t it?

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Afghanistan: The Little Brown Poor People Have Already Won
May 29, 2012

Did you ever take a close look at pictures of American soldiers trekking around Afghanistan? You’ll see guys humping fifty to a hundred pounds of gear.

And the ‘enemy’? Guys in Afghan street clothes carrying AKs.

Guess who won the war? Yup, the little guys with the funny hats and scruffy beards.

But, you say, it’s not over yet. How could they have won?

You might also ask yourself who the Americans are fighting. Al Qaeda? Pretty much gone ten years ago. The Taliban? Apparently, but they’re fighting a civil war, or will as soon as the Americans get out of the way. And then there’s the ‘suspected insurgents’ and the ‘suspected militants’. It’s never ‘insurgents’ or ‘militants’. And a good many of them are, didja notice, somewhere between the ages of just born to, oh, say, ten years old.

Of course the point for the Afghanis is that they are fighting on their home turf. They live there. They have a long history there. Long and bloody, but it’s their history and their land.

And really, the Americans, their supply line goes halfway around the world. And their lines of reasoning come straight from the rabbit hole. Ripping Afghanistan apart so that ‘terrorists can never use Afghanistan as a launching pad for attacks on the United States again.’ The Americans seem to have forgotten the attacks of 9/11 were launched from major American airports using American airplanes and the criminals were trained in American flight schools. Al Qaeda, or whoever, and it is increasingly obvious that the Americans are fighting whoever, doesn’t need Afghanistan. Or any particular country or place. A dining room table in Peoria, Illinois will serve just fine as a planning venue.

So not only do the Americans not know who they’re fighting, or why, but they’re being beaten. Ten years and Afghanistan just sinks deeper into corruption and violence. But that’s not the win.

The win for the ‘enemy’ is that the United States has spent well over a half a trillion dollars to date, and is on the hook for probably another trillion or more just to provide for the soldiers damaged in the fight. Add in another couple of trillion for the Iraq war.

So the United States is several trillion dollars in the hole, and counting, based on the whims and ignorance of a narcissistic, egotistical adolescent President named Bush and his amoral sidekick Cheney. And a smart guy, or maybe not so smart guy, named Obama continues to throw money into the snakepits of Afghanistan and corporate war profiteers in the United States.

And just how does that count for a win for the little brown guys with the AKs?

Because all the money could have gone to making the United States a stronger, safer country instead of a weak, mewling giant. It could have gone to building a first class education system instead of the existing failing system that’s being undermined by the ignorant fanatics the conservative movement has unleashed in America. That money could have gone to improving infrastructure, to building first class rail systems and urban transit systems. That money could have gone into massive investments in research and development and implementation of energy systems that could free the country from dependence on the oil and coal that are killing the world. That money could have gone to produce a first class healthcare system instead of a third rate insurance system that enriches CEOs at the cost of the lives and health of citizens.

But we have none of those things. Nor will we in the foreseeable future. Our Dear Leaders have decided it is better to fight a war and kill innocent foreign children than it is to risk the wrath of the conservatives, the know-nothings, the ignorant, the religious fanatics, and the rest of the blind ideologues who shout and stomp their feet and then vote for the candidates who appeal to their basest instincts.

The United States was once the place where people the world over aspired to go. It was thought to be the land of freedom and civility. Now, to aspire to become an American is to aspire to sink into a moral sewer.

So, yes, al Qaeda, or whoever, has won. The United States allowed al Qaeda, or whoever, to allow the United States to cut its own throat. And a fine job of it the United States has done.

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End The Bloodshed in Syria: Kill Assad
May 27, 2012

Bashar al Assad in Syria killed some ninety people in the town of Hula yesterday or Friday. Thirty-two were children. Assad claims he was acting against ‘armed terrorist groups’, his standard justification for his mass murders. Pictures of dead children, their heads split open, name Assad for what he is.

The world wrings its hands and asks him to stop using heavy weapons in civilian areas. There are calls for the United Nations Security Council to meet and condemn the action. The United States wants Russia to help ‘ease’ Assad from power.

Ease Assad from power?

The man is a liar, a psychopathic mass murderer, a piece of moral scum no decent human being would have in his home. He murders children, not as ‘collateral damage’ but as policy.

And analysts and government spokesmen in the West bemoan that there is no easy solution to the situation. It’s too complicated, they say. Our hands are tied, they say. Israel is too close to Syria, they say. Alawite Christians are involved, they say. The Syrian army is too strong, they say. Our actions might precipitate civil war, they say. So they let it go on and make mewling noises about what a terrible thing it is that the Syrian government is slaughtering its own people, that Syrian soldiers, under the command of Assad, are splitting open the heads of children.

You cannot negotiate with an animal like Assad. His father was an amoral animal. His brother is an amoral animal. Both have bred spawn.

There is only one way to end Assad’s murderous rampage. Kill him. Kill his wife. Kill his children. Kill his brother. Kill his brother’s children. Kill the entire Assad family.

Meet savagery with savagery. Hunt them with SEAL teams. Send cruise missiles into their mansions and palaces and homes. Hound them until they are hiding in caves and then fire the caves with napalm.

But before you do that, take Bashar al Assad aside in one of those fancy rooms where diplomats and politicians decide how many of what kind of anonymous people they will arrange the deaths of and tell him he has two hours to withdraw his forces to barracks. At the end of the two hours, if he refuses, tell him there is no place on earth he, his wife, his children, his relatives, can hide. Tell him they will all be hunted down and killed. The legacy of Assad will be… exactly nothing. The blood of the Assad line will water the desert and disappear forever.

And then do it. No matter if he stops the attacks on the Syrian people. Kill him and his no matter what. Such people can not be tolerated any longer. Not in the Middle East. Not in Africa. Not in Asia. Not in Europe. Not in South America. Not in North America. Not in the United States.

Of course none of that will happen. Assad will continue on his merry, bloody way knowing the countries that could stop him haven’t got the balls to do it. He knows they will continue to wring their hands and say bad things about him, but will do nothing. The response of sanctions is simply a joke. They don’t affect him and his in any serious way and he doesn’t give a damn about what the sanctions visit on the Syrian people. He knows, in that clear-sighted way that psychopaths know things, that he will never be called to account for the blood on his hands.

When you look into the abyss of human nature, when you look into the darkest, ugliest places, the depths of what we are, you will see Assad grinning back at you.

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The Inquisition Lives! Or You Never Know When To Expect Joey Ratz.
May 25, 2012

From the BBC:

The Vatican has said it has detained a person it suspects of leaking a series of confidential documents and letters to the media.

The leaks have described alleged corruption, mismanagement, and internal conflicts among top Holy See officials.

The Vatican said the person was being questioned by Vatican magistrates, but gave no further details about their identity.

The "Vatileaks" scandal, as it is known, has enraged the Holy See.

Last month, Pope Benedict XVI set up a special commission of cardinals to investigate the leaks.

"The inquiry carried out by Vatican police… allowed them to identify someone in possession of confidential documents," Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told journalists.

"This person is currently being questioned."

In the Vatican dungeons, no doubt.

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The United States of America in The Year 2050
May 25, 2012

The Dominion is the current government of the United States of America. It is a Protestant-rooted government, now in power since 2020, when it took over the previous government and replaced it with a theocracy.

The movement had its roots in right-wing conservatism, beginning with the corruption and weakening of American democracy under Ronald Reagan. Further degradation of the American Republic occurred under succeeding Presidents, and culminating in the final nails in the proverbial coffin pounded in by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both under the baleful influence of the terrorist campaigns of Osama bin Laden and a variety of terrorist networks. In effect the Americans were terrified by fanatic theocrats  into creating a dictatorship of theocrats.

The initial movement, rooted in the Tea Party, was funded secretly by a cabal of billionaires and millionaires, including many who were responsible for bringing down the American and world economies late in the first decade of the century. These men, including the Koch brothers and other wealthy right-wing families, wanted to have the power of government to themselves, to create the American world so that it would benefit them and to hell with the four hundred million American citizens who actually made their wealth possible.

Their miscalculation involved the religious right, especially the people of the Dominionist movement, a Christian sect that believed it should, could, and would rule the country and create a nation that functioned according to Biblical law tempered by the philosophy of Jesus Christ. The cabal of wealth attempted to use the religious right, including the Dominionists, to further their own agenda, knowing that the American people were not, generally speaking, the brightest lights in the closet and would fall hook, line, and sinker, for a movement professing to clean up Washington and bring morality back to the nation. They were right, of course, especially given that they were responsible for the degradation of education and the dumbing down of the press.

What they didn’t count on was the determination of the Christian sects to rule, especially the Dominionist sect. Intellectually the cabal was outmatched by the Dominion, despite the Dominion religious delusion. But the Dominionists believed in their delusion, believed wholeheartedly that they were the chosen ones, born to lead the nation into the bosom of Jesus Christ, even if a few people had to die under torture on the way to the promised land. Not a few of those were members of the cabal.

The cabal pumped money into political campaigns that featured seemingly moderate candidates with a religious bent, candidates who were Dominion but who were careful to keep their deeper views under wraps. As the cabal controlled the press and the press had long since decided to act like lapdogs to wealth and power, the electorate, most of it, bought the story of a return to honesty and integrity in government and were willing to admit a strong religious element as well. So seat after seat, in the House and the Senate, the Dominion gradually took over Congress. It took only a few years. In 2020 they took the Presidency, throwing out the incumbent, a man wholly owned by the cabal. In 2020 the Dominion had taken over the government of the United States, legally, at the ballot box, although they were dishonest about it.

In 2020 the gloves came off. The military, long a hotbed of Christian religious fundamentalist fever, went along with the new program and became a domestic enforcement arm of the new government. Throughout society Catholics and Jews were eased out, or thrown out, of positions of influence, replaced with loyal Protestant hacks. The courts were turned into religious courts. The schools were required to teach the Bible and Dominionist theology. Liberal professors and administrations in colleges were removed, replaced with dogmatists. Teaching evolution was outlawed. Social Security, Medicare, the entire Democratic New Deal platform of programs, all were scrapped under the guise of personal responsibility and self-reliance and dependence on the god of the Dominionists.

And the people bought it. They had long since allowed themselves to be castrated by a corporate press, by a consumer ideology, and by a weak education system. There was grumbling, of course, but the grumblers somehow managed to disappear and after a while the grumbling stopped and people got on with their lives as best they could, and kept silent while at it – after all, there seemed to be spies everywhere – you couldn’t trust the neighbors anymore.

There were during this time many battles between the Dominion’s military arms and various Protestant sects that disagreed with Dominion theology, though very few of them disagreed with the religious takeover of the government. These were street battles, militia wars, gang fights even. Though fewer, they continue into the present.

The Dominion’s foreign policy caused consternation in the world, though it was cheered by the wingnut yahoos on the home front. After all, they controlled the most powerful armies and arsenals in the world, and were quite willing to use them in the name of God. The Vatican War in 2030, though it lasted only a few hours until Vatican City was reduced to rubble, put the world on notice, and the world cowered. The Europeans knew what they were up against: their history was full of the depredations of religious tyrants, and since the Europeans were no match for the military might of America they simply stood back and waited for the drama to play out.

The nuclear destruction of Tehran, Baghdad, Cairo, and Beijing followed soon after the Vatican War, and then there was no one to pose a credible threat to the Americans. The Russians simply crawled into their shell and the world hunkered down to wait out these new, deadly Americans.

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Election 2012: A Choice? Not A Chance!
May 25, 2012

I read yesterday about Obama’s pushing for drilling in the Arctic, facilitating Shell’s lust to pollute up there.

What a choice for November! A corporate stooge in Obama, a pandering corporate acolyte in Romney.

Any chance we had to mitigate global warming or to protect the environment from our rape of it died with these two corporate pigs.

Bend over and kiss your biosphere goodbye, everyone.

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George W. Bush, Dick Cheney Convicted Of War Crimes. Hallelujah!!
May 13, 2012

For real. Somebody finally had the balls to do the right thing.

From the article in Foreign Policy Journal:

Throughout the week the tribunal was packed with legal experts and law students as witnesses gave testimony and then cross examination by the defence led by lawyer Jason Kay Kit Leon.

The court heard how

  • Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old engineer from Fallujah in Iraq had his fingernails removed by pliers.
  • Ali Shalal was attached with bare electrical wires and electrocuted and hung from a wall.
  • Moazzam Begg was beaten, hooded and put in solitary confinement.
  • Jameelah was stripped and humiliated, and was used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter.

The witnesses also detailed how they have residual injuries till today.

Moazzam Begg, now working as a director for the London-based human rights group Cageprisoners said he was delighted with the verdict, but added: “When people talk about Nuremberg you have to remember those tried were all prosecuted after the war.

“Right now Guantanamo is still open, people are still being held there and are still being tortured there.”

This was not a mere exercise. The actions were taken by a legitimate war crimes tribunal, such as any nation could have initiated, and should have initiated some time ago. Nor is their action merely a toothless statement. The article concludes:

“The Tribunal also recommends to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission that the names of all the 8 convicted persons be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals and be publicised accordingly.

“The Tribunal recommends to the War Crimes Commission to give the widest international publicity to this conviction and grant of reparations, as these are universal crimes for which there is a responsibility upon nations to institute prosecutions if any of these Accused persons may enter their jurisdictions”.

I hope that any or all of these bastards gets arrested and tried. And ideally, for justice, thrown in a cell in the bowels of Iraq.

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American Military Has Forgotten 9/11, Learned Nothing
May 13, 2012

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has revealed that…

…officers from all four branches of the U.S. Military were instructed at the Joint Forces Staff College (JFSC) in Norfolk, VA, that the “option” of waging total war on civilian populations of the Muslim faith in a manner similar to the “historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” should be openly embraced and explored.

The tenor of the ideas taught, and the arrogance and utter stupidity of the teachers, and of the military itself in allowing these teachings, can be summed up in this quote from the MRFF article:

“We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’…This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.” Such phrases, as uttered by JFSC faculty member Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, constitute openly genocidal hate speech — the likes of which have led to some of the worst horrors in modern history.

Those statements are the ravings of arrogant minds, of minds disconnected from reality, of minds that accept, as Jacob Bronowski noted, no test in reality. These minds are unhinged, are cast loose from the moorings of the real world. And these statements are the core of the education being given to American staff officers, the people who run the military.

The article goes on to note:

Firm countermeasures must be put in place to prevent the further propagation of criminal tactics and military strategies, as exemplified by the hypothetical destruction of Mecca and Medina (the paramount holy cities of the Muslim faith), and the reduction of Islam “to cult status” at the hands of a global “anti-Islamist” coalition bizarrely envisioned by JFSC faculty member Lt. Col. Dooley.

Destroy Mecca and Medina?

That is the statement, hypothetical or not, and one must suspect that it was not a hypothetical but a genuine belief, given the context, that is the statement that tells us that the United States Military has not only forgotten 9/11 but has lost its collective mind.

On 9/11 a handful of religious fanatics (a breed that currently pervades the entire American military command structure, according to the work of the MRFF) destroyed commercial buildings in New York City and part of the Pentagon, and killed, all told, some three thousand people.

The result was that the people of the United States united behind a religiously deluded President and went on a rampage in the Islamic world, a rampage that served no purpose, that destroyed two countries (three if you count the damage the United States has inflicted on itself), and that has done, in final effect, nothing to stem terrorism.

Do the geniuses at the JFSC think that bombing Mecca and Medina, located in the lands of an ally, Saudi Arabia, will bring the Islamic world to its knees? Do they think that inflicting massive civilian casualties (which we have already done in Iraq and Afghanistan, to virtually no avail) will make the Muslim world bow down to us, beg our forgiveness, and offer us free oil for a hundred years? That appears to be what the United States Military thinks and is inculcating in its command staff.

No. The Islamic world will do what the United States did. They will unite behind a leader, or a series of leaders, and there will be no place in the world, including at home, where Americans will be safe from the insanity an attack on Mecca and Medina will unleash. There will be no fleets of Islamic planes and ships attacking the United States, but no American corporation will be able to operate overseas; no American tourist will be safe anywhere in the world; no American politician will be safe walking from his front door to his car in the morning. And it is likely that following such an act against the Islamic world our allies in Europe and Asia will abandon the United States. With good reason: the United States will have become a bastion of madness and terror, a snakepit of delusion and mass hallucination, a genocidal horror loose in the world.

But our military geniuses apparently haven’t a clue. They have allowed the Christian crazies into their ranks and would seem to have bought into the Christian delusion of religious dominance of the world through the use of American military power. Christianity is at best a delusion, but coupled with military and political power it is a disease, a virulent sickness, a  mind-destroying plague that must be stamped out of our military, from top to bottom, without mercy.

And the sooner it is excised as well from our political life the better. America is a diseased nation, and the disease is religion. It leads to national madness, and the virulence infecting the military will feed into the plague infecting the civilian governance. The world, and the nation, will pay a horrible price for such delusional arrogance and madness.

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Michelle Bachmann Not An American? She’s Swiss!
May 10, 2012

Politico is running a story about Bachmann admitting now that she has been a Swiss citizen for thirty-four years.

Devious wench, eh?

She’s claiming dual citizenship since she married the Swiss guy who runs the anti-gay clinic with Medicaid money. Problem is neither she nor he notified the Swiss government, nor the United States government.

But really, who cares? She’s just another mindless fundogelical freak out to corrupt the United States and make as much money as she can while doing it.

But maybe we ought to see her birth certificate. You know, just to make sure she really is an American and not a Swiss spy. And after all, if she ‘forgot’ to notify the United States government that she held dual citizenship while serving as a Representative in Congress, and serving on the freaking House Intelligence Committee, what other little details has she conveniently ‘forgotten’ to reveal?

And really, folks, she ran for President, remember? Do we really want a Swiss person sitting in the Oval Office? A faux Swiss person at that? After all, those people enable wealthy tax criminals like Mitt Romney and the like to hide money from the United States Internal Revenue service while the rest of us pay their tax tab. Kinda makes you wonder how much she and the Doctor have squirreled away in one of those secret numbered accounts, eh?

She claims she was born in Iowa. But hey, anybody can say that about themselves. And she does have that weird accent that speaks of something not really American. I dunno, folks, I dunno.

Yeah, let’s see the birth certificate, Michelle. The real one. How about it? Come on! Obama showed you his. Now you show us yours.

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Pledge of Allegiance is UnAmerican
May 9, 2012

Much is being made in my town of a selectman failing to open a meeting of the Board of Selectmen with the Pledge of Allegiance, a policy that is only a little over two years old.

Her oversight was not principled. She was chairing the meeting and running late and decided to skip the pledge. Her only previous demurral regarding the pledge was that she was not comfortable with the phrase ‘under God’ and wouldn’t be saying those two words.

But for skipping the pledge at the meeting she chaired she has been vilified publicly and privately, and subjected to hate mail, death threats, and who knows what else. She was essentially browbeaten into making a public apology, an action strongly reminiscent of the public ‘confessions’ of dissenters and other miscreants under various communist regimes.

This town, Falmouth, Massachusetts, makes a big deal of  its public service committee called ‘No Place For Hate’. Apparently some kinds of hate are okay here.

I wish she had taken a principled stand and refused to speak the pledge or to stand for it when others babbled it.

The Pledge of Allegiance is a piece of unAmerican jingoism. More than that, it is a quasi-religious loyalty oath. It has no place in a diverse democracy of free citizens.

No one – no one – should be compelled by the state, by the law, by public peer pressure, or by petty public officials, as in Falmouth, to recite a public loyalty oath, nor to respect an oath that compels religious observance. Not in the United States.

Perhaps in petty dictatorships. Perhaps in fascist or communist states. Perhaps in authoritarian religious hierarchies among Christians, or Muslims, or Jews. Perhaps in the right-wing theocratic wet-dream nation the religious fundogelicals and the Tea Party desperately seek to create. But not here. Not here where dissent and the freedom of speech and thought were once among our highest values.

The Pledge is no more a sign of genuine patriotism than the flag lapel pins our Congressmen wear, or the flags being beaten up when attached to private cars wheeling around town, or the hateful, self-serving spewings of right-wing mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh and his ilk over the publicly-owned broadcast spectrum. After all, no terrorist worth his salt would refuse to speak in public, loudly and proudly, the American pledge of allegiance if it served his purposes.

When authorities call for the Pledge to be spoken, you can stand up for conformism and thought control and incipient tyranny, or you can sit down for democracy, freedom, and a nation of law and fact-based reason.

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