06/23/03 For all those American supporters of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian
territories based on biblical property rights, you just got
to know that they have all given their homes and property to their local Native American Indians, where there is no dispute as to who the original land once belonged.
06/21/03 Politicians have for the
most part one job, which it to create more - more jobs, more business, more production, money, more government and as a result more garbage, pollution, complexity and ultimately crime. The job of what is essentially two types of politicians is for the Liberal lawmakers to create more for the many, and at the same time mitigate some of the damage that is done by the exigencies of ever more, such as pollution, but also the shortages of housing, jobs, health systems, or education, that derive from population increases that accords with more. The job of the Pseudo-conservative politicians is
to create more for the few elite, to protect that more, and
the devil take the hind most.
06/19/03 Operating sports teams on statistics is probably a good idea over the long haul. If one flips a coin, over the long run it comes out 50/50. But the short series is another level altogether. Over the years one may observe some coaches and managers get to the playoffs but never the final, some always win when they do, and some can't win at all. One could speculate that teams at this level have a degree of parity. If some coaches and managers mostly win and some mostly lose, it might indicate where the difference lies. Statistics don't necessarily apply in the short run as the coin can come up heads six times in a row. Assuming both teams are at parity, the difference may be in the decisions, intuition, strategy, luck, psychology, guts or circumstance of the moment. In the World Series of 1988, Tommy Lasorta sent the gimpy Kirk Gibson to the plate, down by one in the last of the ninth with 2 outs, against Eckersley the best reliever in the game. Statistics might have said pitch to him. Intuition might have said no, first base was open. As it was, with the gimp, limp around the bases homerun, this may have been the single decision upon which the series was decided, (Dodgers) regardless of Hershiser.
06/17/03 It is reported that types
like the Bush Republican retinue and Gingrich Gang hate hippies. It seems that many have that boiled crab clean look. About as eccentric as they get is a bow tie. The hippies were into natural, and if there is anything the Right Wing hates it is natural and nature. What they admire is everything developed, refined, manufactured, elite, trained, groomed, processed, bettered, advanced, increased, customized, bred or expanded. They consider nature to be the evil antipathy to heaven. And as a side note - no money in the natural, like free sun, air or walking in the woods.
06/15/03 To understand America
one must understand that there are certain conventions that underlie every aspect of the culture. The most predominant
of these is profit. Even the education of children is of
less importance than profit. A teacher may be cited, for not using a current edition of a textbook, even if an older version is better. This is because the education of children is as much or more about selling books, that are continuously generated by the book publishers, as it is about education. To understand America, you need mostly to know how to follow the money.
06/13/03 The neo-conservative, (neo-con) and the neo-morality is a kind of lower class righteousness, wherein the perception is that the system
is stacked against one by the scourge of scoundrels. So to equalize things, one gets to lie, cheat, steal and yes even murder, to make things equitable. Ok to lie to justify the war, break every international treaty that one does not like, character assassinate all those that disagree, demonize them, use any means that one can get away with to promote ones interests: threaten people and countries, make war, make money, make mayhem. Members of this current US administration may have money and power, may belong to elite clubs, but have no class whatsoever. They are what used to be called the bourgeois or new rich. And of course America is the triumph of the bourgeois classes, that the eighteenth century European intellectuals so vehemently warned against.
06/09/03 The guvment can be bad and government is often bad. But when this is the case, at least
in the US, it is usually because the government is not acting for the people but instead for private interests. The capitalists, corporations and criminals infiltrate and commandeer government agencies and use them for their own narrow interests. Since the media mantra has been, for any number of years now, private efficiency versus government incompetence, the people tend to
blame the government and cannot blame the true source of the problem which is the privateering of government services. The latest case is the FCC ruling allowing the further concentration of the media. The FCC was hijacked 50
years ago and of course those benefiting from this
privatization are not going to squeal on themselves.
06/05/03 Is Bush a liar? He can't make three statements without four of them being a lie. He reneged on nearly every campaign promise he ever made. The social security lock box has been burglarized, they intending to borrow 2 TRILLION from it over the next 10 years. He promised to pay down the federal dept, that is now skyrocketing. Bush pledged to provide Medicare prescription drug coverage for all seniors. Seniors are having every one of their programs cut. He said he was not in the business of nation building. He said he would leave no child behind but now refuses to fund children's education. And the list goes on... These people can be understood. For whatever they say, think the opposite. When they say good - think bad. When they say peace - think war. When they say truth - think lies. Maybe Jim Hightower said it best. "Our present president seems to love to lie. Not because George W likes doing wrong, but because lies simplify his life, turning his confusion into clarity." A moron must lie to make it all make sense.
06/03/03 Group wants warning labels on Teflon coated pans, in that Teflon when overheated can create toxins that can be carcinogenic. They called Reagan the Teflon president, meaning that for all the crimes that were committed by members of his administration - 26 felony convictions, nothing would stick in terms of scandal. Well now the reason has become absolutely obvious. The media made the pan scorching hot for Carter, toxic for Gary Heart and Dukakis and carcinogenic for Clinton and Gore and the Democratic Party.
Slick schtick for Republicans and seared shmear for everyone
else.
06/01/03 Poor Jessica. If the Iraqi version of the Jessica Lynch story is correct, Jessica has a vehicle accident, is injured, gets captured, is taken care of by Iraqi doctors, and is picked up by the American military.
In repatriation she finds out that she is famous throughout
the world, has shot it out with Iraqi soldiers, has taken
more than one bullet, has been held in military detention
and possibly tortured, has been rescued from the Iraqi Army
in a dare and do military operation, that she is being offered as much as millions for a book and movie deal, and will be making the TV talk show circuit as a national hero. If the Iraqi version is correct, they have without her knowledge or consent used her, corrupted her, are forcing her to lie and
to live a lie, and are paying her big money and fame to do it. A wake-up call to the real America, no wonder she has lost her memory.
05/28/03 J. Edgar Hoover remained
the head of the FBI for nearly 50 years by blackmail. He kept dossiers on every political or cultural personage in the US.
On the other hand, he testified before congress that he never heard of the mafia. The office of 'Total Information Awareness' now renamed 'Terrorism Information Awareness' or what could become the 'Ministry of Fear' if misused, will be for the purpose of black mail. Any fascist regime needs the support
of the government, political and even the economic and cultural infrastructure. One way to insure this support (why did all those German bureaucrats support the Nazis?) is the tried
and true method, used by such as Hoover or Hitler and
every 2 bit tinhorn dictator - blackmail.
05/28/03 A great line from the
movie 'Our Man in Havana', written by Graham Greene with
Alec Guinness playing a vacuum cleaner salesman working for
the British secret service, talking to Ernie Kovacs, playing
a local police chief in Havana, Cuba. Kovacs is explaining
the use of torture in most of the Latin American Countries,
who they can and cannot torture. Not found in the book but
in the screen play, if recollection serves, is something to
the affect that: Guinness: But your people are not free to think... Kovacs: We don't care what our people think. They
are free to think whatever they want as long as they do what
we tell them. But on the other hand, you in your democracies cannot control your people by force and torture, and thus management can only be maintained by controlling what they think.
05/26/03 Now that the Ministry of Mass Distraction has directed that attention be shifted from Iraq
to the homeland, where attention has been focused on getting
the tax cut bill through congress, will the ministry now shift attention overseas again, through the vehicle of renewed tensions, with especially Iran or Korea, the remaining
spokes of the axel of evil? North Korea would be the obvious
choice, the other side of the world and away from the mess that is Iraq. But North Korea is so volatile, anything could happen. Of course the ministry is lately lacking credibility after lying about the reasons to invade Iraq. And Iran holds elections. So it should be an interesting study in mass information modification, if indeed the ministry decides
to focus on Iran.
05/25/03 The local paper here, a misnomer since they are owned by one of the largest chains in the country, has gotten more and more pseudo-conservative as the Iraq war has approached and is now passed, based on the tenor of their opinion pages. Could have guessed. A paper that prints the first amendment at the bottom of the op-ed page every day, is certainly one, that will be the last to ever print anything that would need to be protected by it.
05/23/03 The Bush political bastion likes to tout democracy throughout the world. Trouble is here at home they do everything they can to prevent it. Florida governor Jeb the 'Celeb' Bush, in conjunction with his Secretary Of State, hired a company named Choice Point to
purge the voter rolls of mostly minority democrats, through false association with felons. Wonder how this pillar of democratic ideals can show his face in the light of day? Why even a dog has the capacity of shame. Puts the Bush family and their ilk, on the evolutionary hierarchy of mammals, somewhere down around the level amphibians. You'd think ol' Jeb would at least be more mindful of swamps.
05/22/03 People are complaining about the lack of bidding for contracts in Iraq. How about lack of legality. It would seem that if a corporation has not been indicted for fraud, swindling, bribery, stealing, insider trading or lying - they will not get a contract in Iraq. Is it not fitting? The invasion of Iraq in itself will turn out to be one of the biggest swindles in history. The tush Bush administration is a gang of racketeers. Of course who else is going to get the contracts, but their friends who are also of the order. Company keeps as company does.
05/21/03 According to a study in the British Medical Journal, second-hand smoke is not as dangerous as thought. This professed scientific finding is immediately attacked by the Liberals.
Whether this finding is true or not does not matter in the context of this particular Liberal perspective. Smoking is
bad, harmful and promotes death, therefore this finding,
even if it is the truth, encourages a bad end. Thus it is better to promote a lie, if the end is justified by the untruth. This is a case of the virtuous lie. However it is
more often than not counterproductive, because of the vices, those that practice them usually hate the vice of lying
more than any of the others, when they can recognize it.
05/19/03 Back in the day, many American cities had the most wonderful mass transit systems, electric buses and even water cable ferries. Oil, auto, and tires, in form of General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone Tire, went into all these cities and said they would buy these mass transit systems (privatize them) and run them more cheaply saving the tax payers money. What they did was run them into the ground and bankrupt them on purpose. Reason: so they would have to be replaced by cars trucks, and buses and more oil and tires, that they of course sold. This is exactly the strategy being used by the present Bush, 'the bust trust' administration, in bankrupting the federal state and local governments, so as to force a sell off public owned institutions. A scenario might be a monthly bill for police
and fire, and if you can't pay - well. Or if these officers
are getting only minimum wage, may have to pay them on the
side (bribe) to get any service.
05/17/03 Truth in America, that's an oxymoron. For instance, what's to be done with Saudi Arabia? They are not like a Cuban or a Chinese dictatorship. They are the US's dictatorship. More than anything in the world the US needs Saudi Arabian oil. They have to support this dictatorship don't they. Would they support any move to change the form of government? They cannot. They cannot afford the possibility
of a government that might affect negatively, the flow of oil
to their own and world markets. Truth or consequences, one example of reality conflicting with America's professed ideals. Lying replaces the ethics of truth, and the entire moral fabric of America, becomes subverted to the realities of its greedy appetites.
05/16/03 In fairness to the media, the world of Republicanism and the Bush 'the brat' administration is so bizarre, that the most creative fantasy writer's could
never come up with this political reality we have today. The reason and justification, contravening all international and civil law, was that they invaded Iraq to stop the use or
disbursement of nuclear, and chemical weapons. No weapons have been found, but it appears that locations where they may have been stored, may have been looted, and thus what they invaded to prevent has happened anyway - while they were guarding the oil and not these known locations. And no one says a word. The media must be dazed and completely overwhelmed by the preposterousness of it all.
05/14/03 It was said that 'Bush
the brain', wants to make law that disallows small cars;
the reasoning being that there are so many larger SUVs,
that for safety sake small cars should be eliminated. In
reality the larger the vehicle the more profit the
manufacturer makes, same with housing. It can seemingly be observed, that the larger the gas-guzzling vehicle, the smaller and less educated the brain that navigates it. Indexed by gas mileage, one advertises one's intelligence quota as a status symbol. In a similar vein, the honesty of the politician can generally be gauged by the number of flags they surround themselves with. The greater the display of flags, the more money that will be passing from the patriot to the politician
and his friends.
05/12/03 In yet another example of the subversion of values and integrity, the winner of baseball's Allstar Game, an event for show and fun, will determine homefield advantage in the World Series, and thus in 8 out of
10 cases the winner of the series itself. The interior integrity of the pre-existent state, in this case the quality of the World Series, is affected and altered for the exterior private agenda of a television network, for ends other than the game itself, namely profit. American professional baseball has agreed to the request of Fox Network - owned by Rupert Murdock, an imigrant from Australia whose sole contribution
to American culture is sleeze, propaganda and sports programing. This illustrates the propensity of the progressive Right Wing, to use and exploit the conditions enjoyed by a majority, for the gain of a private limited minority, and
which coincidentally exemplifies the philosophy and value
system of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party.
05/10/03 How did the American public come to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack or had nuclear weapons, when even the administration didn't lie
about the former? Propaganda nothing new - if one remembers happy, richly dressed, 'Caucasian' rice paddy farmers, said to be in Asia, from World War II news footage. Maybe they are a little more subtle today. Like the other day, the showing of a semi-trailer truck in Iraq, stating absolutely, that it was a mobile bio-weapons lab, while they then show (visual) hundreds of stacked shell casings, and then (visual) Americans in biological weapons suits, while they announce that another
two thousand inspectors will be added to the search for bio-weapons. People tend to associate the stated fact or
lie (mobile weapons lab) with the innocuous in themselves,
but subliminal visuals. Or like Fox, never one to beat around the bush, showing still pictures of democratic presidential candidates one after another, with a large stationary caption box underneath, containing in big letters "DEBATE DEBACLE".
05/08/03 Some believe that even an 'illegal' Iraq War was worth the 'Roadmap to Peace'. Trouble
is it looks like the same old roadmap to nowhere. Lot of good Global Positioning does them. This latest map is just the same as all the other treasure maps trundled out over the years. The 'X' is off the page. It puts off the 3 most fundamental issues,
as it always was, that are: to make Jerusalem an international city, to disband the illegal settlements and return to the pre-1967 boundaries, and the return of refugees problem. Although why Palestinians successfully settled elsewhere's, would want to return to the state of Israel is not understood, like oil and water. These problems are always put off to Never Never Land. The cart before the horse. They argue endlessly about the cart, but the horse, that is necessary to take them anywhere, is off down the roadless traveled, leading again to no person's land.
05/06/03 The US is internationally famous for its double standards. This is because it is a Right Wing country. Double standards are an integral aspect of the Right Wing. The object and sole reason for living, for those
on the Right is progressive elitism as wealth, property, fame, power, influence, and special privileges. Then there is everybody else. Thus there is one standard for the superior elite and other 'lesser' standards for the rest. What’s the sense in being elite if you are bound by the same rules as the common herd. Take William (Mr. Morality) Bennett, the Pseudo-conservative Republican guardian of US morals, who it turns out makes millions on lectures and books chastising the immorality of especially liberals, and then gambles a deal of it away at major casinos. Of course the same rules can't be applied to him. He is not an ordinary gambler. He has special rules. Considers himself exemplary for conveniently not hypocritically condemning his own vice. America is full of millionaire moralists and in fact it is a veritable industry. And they even have their very own political party.
05/04/03 It was the last minutes of
a bowl game with Ohio State ahead by less than a touchdown
and driving for the clinch. The Ohio State quarterback threw
an interception, and the opponent's pass defense having picked it off, ran down the sideline, past the Ohio State bench heading for a certain touchdown and bowl win. Woody Hayes the Ohio State coach, ran onto the field and tackled him, preventing the opponent's certain win. A fairly shocking event, but what was even more awesome, was that through it all, considering the time it took for the refs to straighten this mess out, was that the national television commentators did not mention that it ever happened, not a single word. They managed to somehow ignore the whole incident. In a case such as this the viewer might begin to doubt even his or her own senses. Reminiscent of the way the US media covers the Republican Party and especially the beguiling Bush administration.
05/02/03 The simple fact is that Bush the Barbarian and his political minions do not much care for democracy. They did not care for it in the 2000 election in Florida where they fixed the vote, by scrubbing the voter rolls of felons and anyone with a similar name as a felon. They did not like it again in Florida in '02 where the scrub was still not corrected. They did not like the UN vote that did support their invasion of Iraq, and damned the UN and anyone who voted against them. It is now said they would like to eliminate the UN as a Democratic institution wherein voting affects their policies. This is because at root, all elitists are fascists. The US Right Wing ascribes to elitist superiorities from white, Christian or rich to advanced, righteous or capitalist. As with any sort of elitism, it is not anybody that can qualify. For those who don't, it can hardly be expected that they should have an equal, or even any say at all for that matter, in the decisions of the elite. The Iraqis can have any sort of government they want so long as it is the right one.
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