Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Only one year after George W. Bush's re-election, after mobs of people supported him as the enlightened, the compassionate, the champion of morality, democracy and freedom; after we saw him embracing a girl of 9/11 in a perfect pose for the photographer; after we heard so many words from him wittingly biblical to feign inspiration and moral fibre (but of course many saw how bullshit all that was), what can everybody, his supporters included, clearly see now?
We see that the enlightenment of Bush was a theatrical device (quite poor too), in line with the best tradition of TV preachers who keep saying that Jesus is coming, or that pretend they heal between commercials, and who of course find people prepared to gulp everything down; we find how the compassionate one was not so compassionate and how blithely enjoyed endless holidays at his ranch even in the imminence of a disastrous hurricane, and how his compassion was not sufficient to protect vast areas of his country agaist a much predicted disaster (and is real compassion shown in words only, or in acts?); we see how the champion of morality, democracy and freedom started a war on deceit, playing with the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and without a clue of strategy; we see the massive squandering of resources, many happily put in unknown pockets of friends' companies and other war vultures; we see how human rights have often been obliterated in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay; we see how many civil rights are endangered domestically; we see how the Bush administration is pervaded by a thick streak of corruption and cronyism, the latter being a shame for whom pretends to serve a country, as a country is best served with competence; we see how, more and more, by the day, the Bush administration appears like a clique (if not a Mafia-like gang) animated by obscure interests, kept hidden to the public, which have to do with mere pursuit of power and financial returns for selected corporations; we see how the international vision of Bush is not that of a pacified planet, but a planet continuously torn by war and destruction that a military-corporate gang deems necessary to expand their power; we see how this very same international vision of Bush is one of broken alliances and arrogance when it comes to issues that benefit all nations (UN, Kyoto, UNESCO diversity Pact, Geneva Conventions etc.).
This appeared clear to many even before Bush was re-elected. But, I wonder, why the others, those who voted him, did not pay more attention? The signs were there.
George Bush is probably the first American president in history to have been elected thanks to the massive exploitation of TV- and religion-induced gullibility and fanaticism. Following this path, his administration has exploited cinematographically the disaster of 9/11 to follow the hyperconservative agenda of PNAC's fanatics; has exploited religion to boost his scarce substance with an injection of unconditional support, typical of believers. For power and money. Read all that you can about PNAC (present and former members of it are Republicans and part of the Bush administration) and you will get and idea of the raving mad, vision (but delirium would be an apter word) behind the Bush administration.
Two of PNAC's fundamental proprositions:
"American leadership is good both for America and for the world"
"such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle"
But of course, all administrations which thrive in bad faith and corruption and bulshit, are also generally incompetent and favour incompetence, as they reward loyalty almost exclusively. So their very nature is also a cause of their end. Problem is, when people realise this, these very administrations have had some time to make disasters.
Will the lesson be learned for the future? Will people be able to discern substance from rhetoric, manipulation and deceit? New attitudes are required, new ways of thinking. America needs new generations of people who are not wallowing into dull optimistic consumerism and do not let their mind be obfuscated by TV, religion and cheap rhetoric.
- Winston Churchill
This seems to have been written after Guantanamo Bay too.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
From RawStory:
Make it stop
By John Steinberg | RAW STORY COLUMNIST
[...]
I just found, via the normally smile-inducing Poor Man blog, a site describing a documentary about atrocities committed by Afghan troops under the supervision of U.S. Special Forces after the siege of Kunduz in November of 2001. Here is the summary:
The film provides eyewitness testimony that U.S. troops were complicit in the massacre of thousands of Taliban prisoners during the Afghan War.
It tells the story of thousands of prisoners who surrendered to the US military’s Afghan allies after the siege of Kunduz. According to eyewitnesses, some three thousand of the prisoners were forced into sealed containers and loaded onto trucks for transport to Sheberghan prison. Eyewitnesses say when the prisoners began shouting for air, U.S.-allied Afghan soldiers fired directly into the truck, killing many of them. The rest suffered through an appalling road trip lasting up to four days, so thirsty they clawed at the skin of their fellow prisoners as they licked perspiration and even drank blood from open wounds.
Witnesses say that when the trucks arrived and soldiers opened the containers, most of the people inside were dead. They also say US Special Forces re-directed the containers carrying the living and dead into the desert and stood by as survivors were shot and buried. Now, up to three thousand bodies lie buried in a mass grave.
Read the whole article here.
After reading about Rosa Parks fighting for the dignity of black people, and ultimately helping all Americans live in a better society, read now about "singers" Lamb and Lynx Gaede.
That's what they say: "We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," and "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."
They sing a song titled "Sacrifice", a tribute to Nazi Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy Fuhrer.
They are young, but their age is no excuse. Home-schooled by their mother, they are the living example of how racial hatred and stupidity can be transmitted through generations.
As these two girls presumably have an audience, this raises troubling questions on the mental and moral fibre of some sectors of American society, fifty years after Rosa Parks refused to leave a seat to a white man on a bus.
Read the article here.
Rosa Park's arrest in 1955, photo found here.
Rosa Parks, champion of civil rights in America, died at the age of 92.
In December 1 1955, on a bus in Montgomery she refused to give her seat to a white man asking for it and was arrested and fined because of the laws existing at that time imposing racial separation.
Her refusal triggered a movement which ultimately led to the affirmation of the civil rights of black people.
Read the article on the Guardian here.
Monday, October 24, 2005
"Unmasked by the British press (Financial Times, Sunday Times) in the summer of 2004, Rocco Martino [an intelligence agent] reveals: "It is true, I am behind the dissemination of those documents (on uranium from Nigeria), but I have been tricked. Both Americans and Italians are behind this story. It was an operation of disinformation".
Unfortunately the article is in Italian (read here).
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Halliburton's New Low In Treachery
The Capital Times :: EDITORIAL :: 8A
Monday, October 17, 2005
Dave Zweifel
The two-part series retraced the journey of a group of Nepalese men who were lured to the Mideast with fraudulent paperwork that promised them jobs at a luxury hotel in Amman, Jordan, but instead wound up in Iraq working for the Halliburton subsidiary KBR, America's biggest private contractor there.
What was even more startling was the stories' revelation that the operation is financed with U.S. taxpayer money.
According to the Tribune, American tax dollars and the wartime needs of the U.S. military are fueling an illicit pipeline of cheap foreign labor into Iraq. Most of those falling for the fraudulent job offers are impoverished Asians who, the newspaper said, "often are deceived, exploited and put in harm's way with little protection." [Read the whole article here]
Axis of Good? Exporting that democracy? Pleaseeeeeeeeeee.
Friday, October 21, 2005
To Nobodaddy
by William Blake
Why art thou silent & invisible
Father of jealousy
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching Eye
Why darkness & obscurity
In all thy words & laws
That none dare eat the fruit but from
The wily serpents jaws
Or is it because Secresy
gains females loud applause
However one should also reflect on the fact that the "administrators of mystery" (priests, witch doctors etc.) gain power by suggesting they are intermediaries with the "invisible" (contrived).
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Instead of seeing the benefits for the whole planet in protecting cultural diversity, the U.S. appears only concerned about safeguarding the sales of its Hollywood movies. All nations have approved this pact, except the United States and Israel.
This type of arrogant and dogged attitude of trying to safeguard the "national interest" instead of seeing the common interests of all nations in the world, has also been seen in occasion of the Kyoto Agreement, or in the unilateral rejection of the Geneva Convention in some cases, or in the disrespect of the U.N..
Arrogance is not a smart policy for alliances.
I am afraid not. The flow of scandals, incompetence, subterfuge, lies, deception, appears to be in the physiology of the Bush Administration. It just came out that president Bush nominee for the Supreme Court, Harriet Meiers, provided misleading information to the Senate Judiciary Committee (read here).
A question of fundamental importance. What Would JOE Do?
A question with political, philosophical, theological and even personal implications. A view on metaphysics or lack thereof. You can find this shirt and others here ! (yes, well, this would be a bit of a self-referential piece of info, would it not?)
US soldiers desecrate Taliban dead in Afghanistan. [Image: Stephen Dupont]
Bodies of Talibans were burned facing the Mecca by American soldiers, in an intentional act of disrespect and humiliation (read here), for Muslims a dead man must be buried, not burned.
As aptly the blogger ironically titles "US military continues to win friends in the Muslim world"-
Prez Iraq team fought to squelch war critics
So determined was the ring of top officials to win its argument that it morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims, sources told the Daily News.
One of those critics was ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush that Iraq sought nuclear materials in Africa. His punishment was the media outing of his wife, CIA spy Valerie Plame, an affair that became a "side show" for the White House Iraq Group, the sources said. [...]
Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley. WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer.
Read the whole article here.
COMMENT: The above news, not so surprising to attentive observers, sound to me like a real conspiracy from people of the Bush administration. And of course it would be hard to believe that the president were not part of this too either directly or indirectly.
Published: October 20 2005 00:00 | Last updated: October 20 2005 00:19
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”
[Read the whole article here.]
COMMENT: With unremitting eloquence, the current American administration shows its disgraceful nature. After dulled, blind and dogged policies of death and destruction in the Middle East and incompetence in pacifying Iraq more than two years after "mission accomplished", after the show of brutality at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we saw the incompetence in dealing with predicted natural disasters like hurricane Katrina, the scandals involving officials of the Bush administration, DeLay, Rove, Libby. And yet again the tendency to reward loyalty in appointing people to key positions, like in the case of Meiers, privileging ideology and cronyism. The self-claimed beacon of world democracies shows the frayed quality of its moral fabric, which stands out even more for its very hapless claim of moral, and even religious, supremacy.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Of course, all the above is more likely to work with the masses of people who, since birth, have been incessantly duped with religious theatrical content whose fanciful nature, unlike that of fairy tales or stories on tooth elves or Father Christmas, enjoys a privileged status of reality.
Given the above, when exposed to the words of the priest - basically a man in drag or an actor wearing constantly a costume - the average faithful will almost automatically give them credibility, as in the best tradition of Pavlov's experiments. While the clerical peacocks can cock about self-pleased.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Some people's claimed propensity to feel "concerned" easily passes the limit of discretion and respect of the individual sphere of other persons, their right to privacy and decisional integrity. "Concern" is sometimes used to justify obsessive presence, bulimic profusion of words, obstinacy in stating unasked opinions on matters that are of no pertinence to those expressing them.
In some extreme cases, this attitude, which is surely a neurotic trait, causes an understandable sense of anxiety and impatience. The victim starts correlating each and every single act of his to the immediate, unfailing response of the other, anticipates even such a response, and the mental anticipation triggers irritation and anger. An obvious evidence of the possibility of spreading neurosis.
From a more general point of view, one could consider that the attempt to make one's presence felt as indispensable in the autonomous decision-making process of another person represents the desire to have power which, in turn, often also reflects a desire of recognition. As psychological dynamics teaches, a certain behaviour often originates from its opposite. The obsession for power, and recognition, hides the feeling of having no power and no recognition.
Interestingly, this particular approach regards not only single individuals but institutions. Some religions which establish obsessive rituals and norms aim at infringing the sphere of autonomy of the individual and becoming integral with his decision-making process, taking over, so to say, even in the minutest acts of life. In doing so, they intend to expand their sphere of power for the very reason that each and every single member of such institutions have a latent sense of powerlessness and alienation. The slave aims at ruling by transforming others into slaves.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
From UNFPA State of the World Population 2005:
"Worldwide, an estimated one in five women will be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.(1) One in three will have been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused, usually by a family member or an acquaintance.(2) More often than not, the perpetrators go unpunished. Each year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are trafficked and enslaved, millions more are subjected to harmful practices. Violence kills and disables as many women between the ages of 15 and 44 as cancer. And its toll on women’s health surpasses that of traffic accidents and malaria combined.(3)"
So listen to this.
At the University "Regina Apostolorum" in Rome the second edition of a five-month course in Exorcism will start tomorrow (read here, in Italian).
The course is for priests and theology students who are to become priests, but is open to laymen and nuns too, though the "profession" shall be a prerogative of priests.
I thought we were in 2005 and not in bloody Middle Ages or even amongst tribes with witch doctors.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.
“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.
The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US.
Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing “intelligent design” to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.
But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be “historical”. At most, they say, they may contain “historical traces”. [...]
The Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, but continue: “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.”
They go on to condemn fundamentalism for its “intransigent intolerance” and to warn of “significant dangers” involved in a fundamentalist approach.
“Such an approach is dangerous, for example, when people of one nation or group see in the Bible a mandate for their own superiority, and even consider themselves permitted by the Bible to use violence against others.”
Read the whole article here.
- Joe London
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Today's Repubblica online informs of an interesting exhibit in Dresden, Germany, "100,000 years of sex".
250 items coming from 60 different museums, some dating 30,000 years ago, provide insight of the view of sex of our ancestors (read here the article in Italian). Some pictures here.
BBC will report Bush told Palestinian leaders that God had told him to end tyranny in Iraq
Excerpt:
Foreign Minister Shaath declares: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"
Read the whole article here.
COMMENT: George Bush had already mentioned having consulted a "higher father" and so on before starting a war on Iraq. But certainly the above statements, if true, raise even more perplexity. Anyone who think he is told by God to wage wars around the world would seem safer in a padded room rather than leading the most powerful nation in the world.
Or perhaps, as in a funny cartoon I saw, the voice of God was really that of Karl Rove, whispered from somewhere in Bush's bedroom, and Bush really believed it was God's. Even worse.
You guys realise we are not talking of a comedian, I mean someone who works as a comedian, don't you?
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
On the Ron Insana Radio Show, BRAD FRIEDMAN has debated ANN COULTER.
Compulsive left-bashing journalist and author of "How to talk to a liberal", Ann Coulter did actually succumb when talking to a liberal.
Click here to read the post on Bradblog.com. An mp3 audio file of the debate is available.
Monday, October 03, 2005
Source to Stephanopoulos: President Bush Directly Involved In Leak Scandal
