Sin City

On the thirty first floor/ your gold-plated door/ won’t keep out/ the Lord’s burning rain…

There’s no use crying and complaining that the change we elected is not the change we expected. We’ve been had…again. Fool me once...fool me twice…fool me for the hundredth time, well, now we’re starting to have a little problem. We’ve learned that politics is not the art of what’s possible; it’s the art manipulation and deception. And, boy-oh-boy, what a tangled web we weave. Everybody in Washington’s got something to hide, which means that everybody in Washington is subject to blackmail; which means that every significant vote is simply pro forma – occasionally they pretend to debate, and sometimes they pretend to hold felonious feet to the fire, but mostly they’re just marking time until they can indulge some form of tax-payer funded mischief…call boys and girls, cocktails, narcotics, and leisure.

Some are leveraged by bigger secrets than others. Mr. Obama has a big secret; it seems he wasn’t born in the United States (people don’t spend millions of dollars on high-priced lawyers when the oh-so easy alternative is simple document presentation…that is, if the document exists); and so, if he wishes to remain in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania, he must do the bidding of the self same powers presently preventing this atom-bomb from hitting the press. The same good people who parroted every single sleazy lie used to justify these unjustifiable wars, the yellow cake uranium from Niger, the weapons of mass destruction, the Iraq-al queda connection, non-stop op-eding about the viciousness of Saddam; you know, the same media companies whose parent companies own major subsidiary companies that produce the munitions, tanks, helicopters and airplanes needed for unnecessary wars. Which is to say, if Obama wants to continue cruising around in Air Force One, he’ll need to keep dropping bombs on the ‘terrorists’ who happen to live atop or around major oil fields and oil pipelines. And if he expects The Syndicate to sustain its slavish devotion and regular tithing to his personality cult, he’ll keep on shelving single-payer health care; and if Obama wants to keep the press corps in his pocket, he’ll continue promoting the same big-business policies as his predecessor. Sadly, it seems Mr. Obama’s complexion is his only contrastable quality.

Well, let’s be fair. We will see the next act in the ongoing burlesque of social division. We’ll see abortion and homosexuality mediated through a more progressive parlance; and those words, and the attendant laws and executive orders they effect, will be readily deployed in dividing the American people against themselves. The various races and creeds populating this country are, in fact, starting to get along comfortably; and though the powers mourn the loss of their race card, they always seem to have another ace up their sleeve. We’re entering a new phase of the cultural war. More and more behaviors will be linked to genetic predispositions; and as our modern day phrenologists (psychologists) issue doctrines faulting any and all abhorrent behaviors to their antecedent genes (except, that is, INTOLERENCE!), we’ll establish our line of demarcation: on one side those of ‘science’ and compassion, and the bigots who expect people to take responsibility for their actions pitted against them. You wanted change, America; and change you shall have.

Speaking of ‘change’ and behavior, there is now, as you read this humble post, a group of highly paid and educated do-gooders debating the most efficient means for absolving your carbon-based transgressions; all of you who haven’t an off-shore tax haven, that is. Climate ‘science’ can be likened to psychology the same way psychology can be likened to phrenology: none need hard data or testable theories. Ceaseless promotion, anecdotes and a massive profit potential are all that’s required for legitimacy. Global warming…scratch that: since we’ve seen some of the coldest temps and longest winters on record, we need a new term to cover all meteorological anomalies; ‘climate change’ will do nicely; until it won’t…as I was saying, global warming, ahem, climate change is the new, new religion and mother earth is your new deity. Who would go on befouling their mother? Who will argue with hard ‘science’? Since we all now know that our every act, up to and including exhalation, are mortal sins, we need a new messiah and some high priests to sanction the behaviors of some and decree the extermination of others. No price is too high for the little people to pay; your comforts, your wants, your needs…everything must pass through the crucible of Climate Science. Moreover, if you want to get right down to it, YOU and the superfluity of yous overcrowding this fragile planet are the real problem.

Yes, something will soon be done about you and the copious volume of carbon catalyzed by your heedless existence…this decadent automobile driving, meat eating, and air conditioning enjoying life you think you’re entitled to.

Sarcasm aside, we do have an overabundance, a cancer even, of ‘solution’ factories; otherwise known as ‘think tanks’. These Washington and New York based institutions are funded and staffed by people who use terms like ‘useless eaters’ behind closed doors, and then print phrases like ‘population control’ in their papers. I say overabundance because their conclusions are of a single accord: again, we don’t use words like eugenics in public (even though they will publicly laud its most vocal proponents, like Margaret Sanger), but it’s eugenics nonetheless. They stay busy, busy as termites; when they’re not writing something for The New Republic or Foreign Affairs, they’re off crafting a speech for their patron, some high priest of Molech, to deliver at Bilderberg or the Bohemian Club. Don’t think this is merely impotent theorizing; notice how The Project for a New American Century quickly evolved into 911…but I digress.

It’s been a while since I’ve written; because I didn’t just want to write. I was thinking. Trying to generate a big idea; an idea capable of generating real change, the kind of change hundreds of millions of Americans are desperate for. The time is nigh for big ideas.

Before I set to actually generating ideas, I wanted to construct a framework for my thoughts. Beginning with an overarching dictum, I sought to establish several requirements, which I felt proceeded logically from that basis. No need to bore you with the details; I only wish to establish that my reckoning represents an inverse of the fermented filth from Fifth Avenue and the Colombian District.

Problem: Our representatives (who’ve lately begun calling themselves, and do in fact fancy themselves, leaders…ha!) are wildly corrupt, impossibly incompetent, unjustifiably vain, and comically stupid. Reaction: We’ve been substituting one capital letter (D and R) for another, taking them at their word, and believing there is an actual, substantive difference. Solution: Ban all political parties, caucuses, conferences…all party based collusion. I do, however, believe there is room for limited issue based alignment.

I know my solution seems so simple that it’s trite; but if you consider all the inevitable benefits, you may become a believer. Now, before I took the time to write about this idea, I tested it with almost every acquaintance and many strangers, and I wasted a lot of time weighing viable alternatives. Based on the small sample I’ve assembled, I believe this idea could quickly amass the kind of popular support needed for passage; and more importantly, it has the potential to return our government to the people it pretends to represent.

A government sans parties is a government that doesn’t cultivate and invite corruption. Currently, we ONLY discover a scandal when party leadership has identified an expendable or a renegade. I’d go so far as to say that we’ve probably lost some of our better legislators due to scandal; in Washington, if you don’t toe the line, you end up hanging from it. A politician that cannot call on the vast resources of his party’s money and power is a politician who will remain beholden to his legitimate power source – his constituents.

Ferreting out corruption is just the beginning: Can you imagine a government composed of representatives who vote the way their constituents demand? Can you fathom a system where sincerity and honor were the surest means for winning reelection? Can you picture a legislature where every vote was decided by officials who vote their conscience? A bunch of guys already did; they are called our Founding Fathers; and George Washington’s, the father of the Founding Fathers, most ardent wish was that parties would never form.

If you do retain hope for this once great nation, you’ll invest it in a future where Democrats and Republicans are only discussed in the past tense.

I never have time for this anymore, but when I do have time, In my next post, I’ll go into greater detail; for now, I just wanted to put it out there.


Well the scientists say/ it’ll all wash away/ but we don’t believe anymore

SG

Hold The Presses -- or -- The Off Ramp To Serfdom

One of the most, if not THE most, vital institutions in any society – no matter the particular ideology ordering that society – is its press corps. The closer and more responsive journalists are to the audience they serve, the better. Unfortunately, journalism has slid along the same slime-track paved by our pathetic and predatory politicians, to an elitist encampment far removed from the average American. Journalism has unapologetically served the very powers they were established and entrusted to monitor; the effrontery they’ve exhibited to those who loyally subscribed to their metropolitan dailies, their weekly periodicals and their monthly news-magazines is now being repaid in kind – the people have had enough of the monstrous lies and the balderdash, the craven sycophancy and obeisance to power, and most of all the BORING and distracting items they pass along as news in an ongoing effort to anesthetize our indignation to the high crimes everyday executed in our nations halls of power! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

The thoroughly homogenized and blandly inane propaganda starts on NPR’s evening edition, is slightly reworded a couple hours later on CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX and CNN, and then leads on the following morning’s metropolitan dailies – it’s been the same tripe for so long I cannot remember a legitimate, honorable forth estate (or is it the fifth or third or second or first – the lines are irrevocably blurred). The worthless bureaucrats who call themselves journalists better start applying for their bailout now; the feds and the Pentagon do owe you, after all; they owe you big time. Or do they? Inasmuch as the stories were written for you, and you merely rephrased them, pasted a dateline and byline, and then broadcast the latest press release from Washington’s politbureau or the Pentagon’s propaganda department, comrade, I’d say you’re SOL.

Are we supposed to overlook the FACT that the ‘HOLY’ NEW YORK TIMES vets its stories through the government – as a matter of policy?! Is the centralized ownership of EVERY news outlet – a centralized ownership representing the most nefarious and jingoistic industries in this fair land…read: MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX – a democratic principal? These are the self same alliances for which we reserved our fiercest scorn when posturing against the fascists and communists. But, make no mistake, we are as pious as ever; we’re ceaselessly reminded how our leaders are accountable to the voting public…well, except for 2000 (Supreme Court Theft) and 2004 (Ohio Fraud); and except for the fact that every district is Gerrymandered; and except for the fact that money from corporate sponsorship – BTW, the same deep-pocketed corporate conglomerates own the media outlets, who in turn decide who is and who is not invited to the debates, and in turn own the companies that actually COUNT THE VOTES – dictates who will run as a Democrat and who will run as a Republican, to ensure all contingencies are co-opted and controlled; but, other than that, yes, the politicians answer to the people…we’re a democracy after all! That’s how TARP and the other banker bailouts were passed, by responsive public servants, loyal and beholden to the people. All under the noses of our vigilant press corps, who glibly gloss over the shadowy yet ubiquitous fascist coup that is everyday violently clawing at the last scraps of our Constitution.

All of the above is everywhere affirmed and WAS insouciantly tolerated; which is to say, folks know the press is a sorry gaggle of backscratchers and impudent insiders, but because folks have for a long time prospered and their sons and daughters didn’t go to war unless they signed up for it, it didn’t trouble them all that much. The cluelessness is not endemic of the masses; rather, it seems, cluelessness is a priori of the press itself; they seem sincere when they scratch their heads wondering where their docile and gullible audience strayed. If this cluelessness weren’t so vexing it would be amusing; they have the galling temerity to wonder why we would search out meat and potato news when they’ve been shoving soy crackers down our throats for time out of mind! And then, to exacerbate the bathos, they make these pathetic attempts to ‘remind’ us how valuable they are, constantly repeating tropes like, ‘bloggers still depend on the MSM, hyperlinking their efforts to legitimate investigative journalism, to organizations that have the resources to produce quality news’. Apoplectic, yes; convincing, no. MSM, get it through your heads: the only people who find your crap credible and esteem your efforts are those who stand to benefit.

Truly, I thank God for bloggers, for citizen journalists, for Google, for YouTube, for all the arenas where truth triumphs and unagendized information is transmitted for the most sincere and patriotic of purposes. There is no way to predict how this will all end or where it will lead, but a few things are certain: the monuments our captains of industry have erected to their vanity and perfidy will either serve in their demise or will suffer the same; journalism will recapture the fire that corporate constraints have snuffed; the people and the new journalists will be one in the same; truth will again be spoken to power!

Let me take this chance to recognize a few established yet sincere sources, those who have maintained their integrity, their wit, their perspicacity, their dedication and their erudition: First and foremost, HARPERS MAGAZINE, then VANITY FAIR, THE NATION and, to a lesser extent, The NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. I cannot say that the above referenced are uniformly vigilant arbiters of truth, but the effort is certainly there; and for that, I salute them. There are others, I’m sure, who likewise maintain standards, and to them I apologize for the omission. The rest of you treasonous rags, especially the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, FOX, CBS, NBC, CNN, AP, REUTERS, KNIGHT RIDDER and the LA TIMES, rot in hell!

In conclusion, I want to ensure that the tone is furious and impolitic; I want to transmit as much anger as words can muster; I want this to hurt! The raw rage roiling myself and millions more will become more and more palpable as the collapse of our country intensifies. Let me underscore something: the unimaginably wicked crime of 911 and the thousands MURDERED for that pernicious predicate will NOT go unrequited. The theft of trillions of tax-payer dollars will NOT be ‘written-off’. The guilty will NOT go unpunished. You wretched ‘journalists’ have stood by and waved the flag while young men and women were sent to their deaths; while scores of thousands of Arabs were slaughtered; while the tax-payer was fleeced; while the Constitution was shredded; while this nation crumbled. The lion share of the burden is freighted on your shoulders, and you want to carp and whine about declining readership! MAY THE GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH DAMN YOU, you petulant pieces of excrement!

Look out kid, they keep it all hid…

Seth Gentry

Revolution Number 9 -- or -- The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot's Nightmare Redux

Perhaps it’s too late to formulate predictions for the upcoming year; the idiot/lemmings invariably belch a bevy of banal prognostications within a standard timeframe – two weeks before the 31st of the year that’s closing and two weeks after the inception of that unfolding. If you’ve read my polemics preceding this piece, you’ll know I’m not too keen on standards of any sort; if, on the other hand, you are presently acquainting yourself with my unique rendering of all things past and present, oriental and occidental, let me first welcome and then warn you – I do not do things the way they’re elsewhere done. Really, though, I don’t intend my tardiness as a contrived contrast; I tarried for its own sake, an excuse without exception as exception to excuse.

As preface to my predictions, I should say that such is a precarious game; especially in this digital age; an age in which your words are immortalized – etched upon an infinite digital score, stored and shelved in Google’s vault, easily retrieved by anyone who should want. And again, it matters little if you’re absolutely correct; close does count, but not enough. One way off the mark is not easily assuaged by twenty in the park; but if that’s a score, I’ve lost count. Speaking of this digital age, it’s far more forgiving for those who stack soapboxes to sneak a peak over the horizon; in epochs past the penalties for improvident prophets were severe – and gravely so. I think Deuteronomy condemned the imprecise to a stoning; one that has nothing to do with what’s done in Amsterdam’s coffee houses.

I suppose I’d be wise to project an evident and eminent episode or two – I could safely submit Hillary’s soon-coming covert and overt rebellion to the Obama doctrine (no matter the specifics of said doctrine); I could contribute my name to the many already predicting England’s insolvency; it’s also clear as can be that Obama’s meteoric ascent will not defy president or the implacable laws of physics (nor, for that matter, metaphysics), he, like every other Icarus preceding, will soon discover that gravity is both merciless and wholly unimpressed; it is also obvious that China will not merely fail to ‘rescue’ our anemic economy but will enter a terrific and terminal tailspin unrivaled in the annals of commerce and statecraft…yes, I could be wise and loiter in the lobby of conventional sophistry-prophesy; but, as stated above, convention is the bane of my conscious existence.

The nature of my prediction(s) is more ecumenical and less specific; and, specifically, it’s more or less dire. In the Year of Our Lord, 2009, we will witness – and some of ‘we’, not necessarily me, will bear witness as participants – the most coordinated, the most violent, the most desperate, the most pitiless, the most…well, I guess that’s a sufficient string of superlatives…and – and it’s incumbent that I add this adjective, as it’s the seminal motivation – at the same time JUSTIFIED revolution the world has ever seen.

Inasmuch as I’m not philosophically averse to world-wide governance, I am vehemently opposed the shadowy and duplicitous organism that’s presently assuming a nebulous yet cogent form. It’s a cowardly iteration of the ancient ambition, unwilling to proclaim its aims, its constituents or its methods; hiding like a phantom, percolating from the bog of human misery after orchestrating some diaphanous ‘false-flag’ attack – or any other dilemma whereby the hordes despair for a savior. Furthermore, their craven tactics can be readily identified in all levels of the world’s ‘civilized’ nations: from dissolving immediate and extended families, debt-slavery, a pernicious and profit-mad pharmacopeia, vapid pop-psychology preached in the pulpits (and profit-mad preachers), disassociation from traditions, transient communities of cocooned couch-potatoes leading sedentary secluded (and altogether meaningless) lives, powerless and puerile legislatures (who ignominiously assent to increasingly centralized authority as long as their district is forever preserved my Mr. Gerrymander)…in general, promoting weakness, depravity and dullness at every turn; banking (sic) on a flaccid and inert populace, one that will yield to any authority so long as it provides cable television and lots of goodies laced with MSG and high-frutose corn syrup.

Their (whoever ‘they’ truly are) plan would work if enough time were invested; only, they are displaying the kind of haste and greed characteristic of children and morons. I suspect that an aging cabal seeks desperately to witness the fruition of their ambitions before they meet their maker; and so, in order that they may glean some fruit from their efforts, they’re attempting to artificially, and prematurely, stimulate a dynamic that is both inorganic and obviously contrived. Fatally, they’re assuming that the masses are fully conditioned and adequately ignorant.

Albeit the masses are partially conditioned and mostly ignorant; however, as with all things of an imprecise nature, it’s an issue of degrees – and, as it concerns their concerns, this effort is far from achieving a serviceable conditioning. Moreover, they are trifling with the people’s god, boldly and with rank impunity. True, they’ve successfully substituted the Gospel of Christ for a protean and platitudinous ‘religion’ that offends none and threatens its practitioners only; but Christ is not the God to Whom I refer, it is Mammon.

The Christian Faith has been sublimated in two generations; it has been discarded as antique, bigoted and irrelevant. Sufficed by Science, Reason and Capitalism, this beacon to the world of men has been bastardized and contorted into a Rotary club for altruists; or, as Dylan would say, ‘social clubs in drag disguise’. Insofar as Christianity WAS the final arbiter of society; WAS the foundation for the individual and his fortitude; WAS the articulator of the family and its fortunes, when such a mighty pillar is dislodged, it necessitates a fundamental reordering. Therefore, the chief cornerstone of Western thought and act was pushed off a cliff to be replaced with the artifice of iron and clay.

This feckless and imbecilic generation has elevated material wealth and their ‘psychological’ disposition (or mental health…whichever you prefer) over and against mercy and salvation; nothing is considered unless its utility is the paramount consideration; in short, the ‘self’ is the new god, and this god is mediated through possessions and prestige; and, sadly, this condition is most acute in the churches of Christendom – even secular humanists have more humanity than the modern ‘Christian’. Now, you cannot deprive the people of their god without suffering terrific consequences; this has been violently demonstrated throughout history. These Republicans and Democrats, these plutocrats and kleptocrats, seem to think they can capriciously pry the idols from the people – like they did in the Great Depression and a few times before – without a brutal reckoning. Remember Laban’s bloodlust when Rachel attempted to spirit the family idols away with the gullible husband she shared with her sister…remember it well.

The people will not react with docility and acceptance as they did in the 1930’s; for then they served the God of their fathers. Rather, they will hunt down those who confiscated their idols; they will seek revenge in the name of their new gods, the ones ‘they’ gave them. Currently, the people don’t know the temple has been pillaged; because the people cannot yet feel the pain of separation and despair. As soon as bread lines start to form; as soon as idle-unemployed hands start to itch and stomachs start to crave; as soon as their fiat currency cannot be exchanged for the material with which they practice their auto-idolatry; as soon as this titanic defrauding of the American citizen starts to hurt, they will look for someone to hurt in turn – and they will make sure that the penalty is precisely levied, they will not accept scape-goats, they will thirst for the blood of the guilty.

PS -- does anyone have any doubts as to the cause and purpose of these record-setting gun sales?


…and Balaam’s ass rebuked him.

Seth Gentry

I Try To Harmonzie With Songs The Lonesome Sparrow Sings -- or -- Zionism, THE Noblest of All Human Pursuits

These last ten or so days have been murder; as relations with my neighbor have deteriorated to a morass of bloody warfare.

While I typically reserve this space for urgent and or ecumenical matters, I feel my problem may be instructive for the world at large; like they say, all politics is local, therefore, and by the same token, so too are all matters of sovereignty and stewardship local – at least insofar as they are reflected and magnified among nation states.

Unless I preface my description of the most recent events with those that brought us to the present tense, you may fail to see the moral aspect of my intent and the benevolence of my actions.

Once upon a time, there was a poor and very large black family that inhabited the land I now own. Vying against the elements and international commodities markets too eek out a living; salting their bread with the sweat of their brow; breaking their back every day under the hot, southern sun, only to torment it further on a feculent, lumpy mat in the corner at night; praying ceaselessly for the briefest cessation of their trouble; their life was an ongoing travail, and it was hardly a life worth living. This is where I came in -- or, rather, where my grandfather, who left everything to me when he passed on, came in.

Granddaddy (and his progeny) was the wise and fortunate beneficiary of a government program back in 1948. Without exploring the nuance and minutiae of this program, I’ll do my best to describe it briefly: essentially, the law stated that any minority farmer’s land could be purchased for whatever price the government saw fit. It was an extension of eminent domain – a very far reaching extension of eminent domain – nice and legal, sanctioned by a popularly elected government. Hey, don’t blame me, the law’s the law.

Granddaddy was very popular because he was very wealthy; moreover, his popularity was very pragmatic – in that, he only sought to cultivate his popularity among the powerful. As I said above, granddaddy was very wise; but to simply say he was wise in no wise does him justice, he was the wisest and subtlest of all the men of his generation. In fact, granddaddy was so wise that he always won in business; which is not to say that he was ethical or law-abiding, only successful, which is a lot. Now, because of the ruthless way in which granddaddy conducted his affairs and because he rubbed many the wrong way, he suffered a very disproportionate calamity – so disproportionate that even his sworn and most savage enemies pitied him.

Again, for the sake of time, I’ll relate the catastrophe as quickly as I can: an insecure and frustrated little man felt himself slighted by granddaddy; and so, less for revenge and more as a manifestation of his insecurities, this little maniac systematically murdered my grandmother, all my aunts and uncles along with most of their children. My family was, for the most part, wiped out – only a remnant remained.

So renowned was this crime that it made national news; and so horrific was this crime that it precipitated a pervasive pathos, everyone, even those whom granddaddy ruined financially, came to convey their condolences. Granddaddy was even summoned to the governor’s office so that the great man could, in person, express his shock, grief and sympathy. But there was more to that meeting than a simple, “m so sorry to hear about…”, that meeting was to yield a substantial expression of pity; a reparation of sorts, a way to make it all right. The best, if not the only, way to help a wealthy man recover from his mourning is, of course, by expanding his fortune.

In the course of their conversation, the governor asked granddaddy if there was anything the former could do for the latter; and the latter, well appraised of the new ‘minority farmer land law’ (or whatever it was called) as he was, and keen to parlay pity unto purloining a property, posited thusly: “Governor, it’s come to my attention that ole Mr. Ishmael, the crippled colored fella who owns that nice parcel between the river and the county line, has fallen behind on his property taxes. Now, the way I see it, we can either wait for him to default, which he will inevitably do, or we can right the wrong that happened to me and help Mr. Ishmael out of the jam he’s wedged himself into.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Granddaddy, by dint of his clever little coup, walked out of the governor’s office with the title to the most fertile and the most bucolic piece of land you could hope to find in all of Dixie. Benevolent as he was, granddaddy let Mr. Ishmael stay on a part of the seven hundred acre spread he hadn’t any use for. Things were okay for a while; but, soon enough, some of Mr. Ishmael’s sons caught a fever of indignation. They burned granddaddy’s new barn and sabotaged his tractor and keyed his new Cadillac.

Not surprisingly, granddaddy razed their shacks to the ground and burnt all their possessions, annexing what he’d given them, and compelled them into a brutal life of sharecropping – a craven and indentured way of life, no doubt; but, granddaddy felt he was firm but fair, and the governor agreed.

This way of life has continued to this very day; Mr. Ishmael’s sons are now tending my rows, milking my cows, feeding my chickens. Granddaddy tried to warn me; he tried to tell me what these ingrates would do – granddaddy was usually right. The Ishmael boys are savages! They’ve been throwing rocks into my house; gathering in front of my barn to burn me in effigy; making insane claims about their claims to the land; and, most of all, reusing to recognize my legitimate claims.

Suffice it to say, they have gone too far! I can’t have these animals throwing rocks into my CHILDREN’S bedroom! Did you hear me? I said they were throwing rocks into my children’s bedroom…rocks! They could have killed one of my boys! So, finally, I’ve decided to take granddaddy’s advice: last week I initiated a little campaign of sorts; my sons and I took our rifles and started firing indiscriminately into their homes. They’ve been carping and whining about a few deaths or something…who cares; they started it! Like I said, they were throwing rocks into my children’s bedrooms! Also, they are always lying and inflating the casualties when we get into a row – I probably only killed twenty or thirty of them, while they ‘claim’ over fifty. I wish I’d killed more than fifty, as my son cut his foot on a shard of glass from one of their rocks. In any event, you can’t believe a word they say.
My problems with the Ishmaels have been astir since before I can recollect; but with this latest affront, with these rocks and glass shards, I mean to put an end to it once and for all. Every time I make a concession for peace, like the time I told them they could have electricity for six hours every Sunday and they promised to behave themselves, they turn around and do something else to provoke me. I’ve been provoked for the last time. After I bulldoze their homes and kill every Ishmael I deem responsible (which, if you ask me, is everyone of them), I’m going to invite some of my family members to move onto the land, resettle it and purge it of those malefactors forever.

Don’t worry, though; I won’t have to suffer any consequences for my actions (why should I..right? I mean, has a person ever been more justified?). Granddaddy discovered long ago that his wealth and his connections put him far beyond the reach of the law: first, I’ll win in the court of public opinion because members of my extended family own all the media outlets around here; so we’ll just run story after story telling, of course, ‘our’ story, which is the only story – like I said, you can’t trust those Ishmaels. And once you win in the court of public opinion, you have nothing to fear.

Oh, by the way, I’d like to vehemently express my support for Israel in their struggle against the Muslim Terror. They should bomb every school (where we all know they learn nothing but hate and bomb making), every mosque (where we all know they do nothing but worship the devil-god of terrorism), every home(where we all know they do nothing but make bombs and baby terrorists), every hospital (where we all know they do nothing but artificially inseminate their women with ‘the evil terrorist gene’ they bought from the Russians), every garden (where we all know they grow foods that make them want to make bombs), and every place of business (where we all know they are planning their next terrorist act every moment of their work day).

They should also continue their blockade; everyone knows that if these people get things like food and medicine, they’re only going to use them to make bombs and fire them at innocent Israeli children. Thank goodness for Zionism, without it, people like me would feel all alone in the world. It seems that those in power in Israel learned a lot form the Holacaust: they learned how to ghettoize a population, how to control their movements, how to seize their property, how to demonize them, how to drive them to madness with torment so that they will act irrationally, and, finally, how to make the case for genocide and feel nice and pious about it.

These people are undoubtedly God’s Chosen; and if Americans would ever come to their senses, we’d finally learn how to deal with our minority problem. Just think about it: we could start with Mexicans, harass them mercilessly, take everything they’ve earned, dislocate them to a ‘reservation’, build a wall around it (see, now you have them concentrated in a small area where you won’t hurt any of your own, and it’s more cost effective to eliminate them), brutalize them for the smallest infraction, limit their movements, strip them of all autonomy and dignity, and watch what happens. Sure enough, they’ll start to do whatever they can to attack ‘us’, then we loop their pathetic efforts endlessly on every newscast, and, viola, you’ve got all the rationalization you need to grind them into the dirt forever.


you don't tug on superman's cape/ you don't spit into the wind/ you don't poke the mask of the ole lone ranger...

SG

Ants Marching -- or -- Hope Is Hate and Vise Versa

It should now be well understood that Obama’s victory is little more than a function of our hatred for George W Bush; and that fact is well understood by those who actually did the voting. For those who’ve somehow wedged their way into a position that pays them to analyze, deconstruct, and illuminate the trends, trajectories and triumphs of America’s politicos, this obvious equation is a bit more opaque. There seems to be some confusion; as we are ever redirected from our better judgment to the nuance of nincompoops.

Let us then turn from Obama’s ‘hope’, policy proposals, ‘movement’ ideologues, and parsing pundits, and instead focus on our collective hatred of a man and specifically what leavened that hatred sufficient to eclipse the hope, policy proposals and movement ideologues of Bush, to which the American people deferred, by electoral college majority, twice in one decade.

The hatred I’m addressing is so ubiquitous, so passionate, and so complete that there was little any Republican of any disposition could have done to first assuage, and then translate, it into victory – no matter how strategic or narrow. On the part of the above referenced pundits, there is ever the tendency to reduce a complex (no matter how Byzantine its basics or legion its lessons) to a simplified bit of sophistry. And then, without the faintest hint of irony, they go on to fill the cavity of their weekly column with a copious rendering of their axiomatic argument. In other words, their occupation and all they produce thereby, is an affront to the intelligence of the American people. They’ve made the fatuous forecast a wildly profitable trade at the expense of thoughtful reflection and substantive debate.

This election and the preceding primaries are proof-positive of the average American’s intelligence; and further, their capacity for processing a sea of information, and then making sound judgments based on that information, has been widely demonstrated. For me, this election is more a positive reflection of the Average American Voter than Obama himself. They were not deceived by Hillary’s contrived campaign; the pervasive rejection of plastic pragmatism warmed my heart. Moreover, they roundly rejected any assimilation of Bush or his doctrines in nominating McCain (though McCain, imbecile that he obviously is, heeded a horde of terrible advice, morphing into the same, sad assimilation that his party sent packing in primary after primary…read, Romney). Before McCain started trending toward political perdition, I thought we, the American people, cannot lose – either way, we will see a thorough repudiation of all things neo-con. McCain, stubborn and cagey cuss that he is, was hell-bent on proving me wrong, and by late spring/early summer he had done just that.

Now, before I fall into the same snare that’s sucked nearly every prognosticator into its vortex, I’ll back away from Obama and McCain and return to the casus belli himself, W. W was (is) a little man from a big family, the feckless progeny of a patrician dynasty; one who sought to reconcile conservatism and compassion; one who proposed to recognize wisdom and ‘intellectual’ inanity, and to treat the former with gravity and esteem while exposing the latter as a fraud and intricate exercise in blather; one who proposed a thoughtful understanding of America’s role in the world, and how to limit that role within its proper sphere rather than recklessly expanding it; and, most of all, to return honor and dignity to the office of the Presidency. He not only failed to accomplish any of these grand objectives, but toiled tirelessly against them.

If I were to delineate each and every instance of malfeasance, this would quickly balloon into a titanic diatribe; rather, let’s all agree that Bush has been as busy as a termite tearing down the house in which he abides. And though about 25% of Americans still believe his efforts noble, we can, by this percentage, deduce the fraction of American idiots there are contributing to our national discourse. Conversely, we can safely assume that another 25% are anchoring the idiocy of the other end of the political spectrum. So, we are left with about half of the nation; a goodly portion, to guide our progress and to check our excess.

This better half to which I refer are the honorable practitioners of democracy; they are a great mass who are now weary of platforms, promises and politics writ large; for they have graduated from a very severe curriculum, and are now summa cum laude in cynicism. Obviously, I do not agree that the majority of American voters were swept away by Obama’s message of ‘hope’; rather, they electing the candidate most divorced from Bush/Rove/Cheney doctrines. Americans want to cleave from the Right and all its false promises of prosperity, patriotism and public accountability, and then cleave to the left (or at least the newest manifestation thereof).

All of which is why, in spite of contrary campaign promises, I am thrilled with the combative appointments Obama’s making. I believe Obama understands the blood-lust that motivated the Average American Voter; I believe he knows what we want; finally, I believe he is capable of accomplishing it. We do not simply want to corner the Republicans and teach them a lesson; we want to raze them to the dirt. We want the Republicans to be a political afterthought and an omen to any who would attempt similar strategies and programs. Most of all, we want hearings, trials and convictions! CONVICTIONS, CONVICTIONS, CONVICTIONS!

I sincerely ‘hope’ that Obama’s administration at first humbles, then, progressively, seeks to dismantle the whole machine. This would result in a natural and long-awaited outcome: After the Republican party is left in ruins, they will have to form two parties from the shards of the original. They will be left with the pro-business camp and the socially conservative camp; and the Democrats will return to the big-tent philosophy that was so successful for so many decades. And, W, we have you to thank for it all. No more will any Machiavellian be able to cobble together a coalition of fiscal and social conservatives, and then behave as a fascist dictator. No more will a president treat his (or her) co-equal branches of government as obstacles or impediments, and then relegate them to ceremonial status – clapping and booing on command like a pack of trained seals, or rubberstamping any legislation, no matter how odious, so long as it originated from the oval office.

Yes, America may soon be a nation we can all love; but the means to that end is, was and will be a scorching and unmitigated hate.

The ants go marching two-by-two/ hurrah -- hurrah…and they all go marching/ down, to the ground/ to get out/ of the rain

SG

Exposing an Evident Fraud -- Le Monde, The French Newspaper of Record, Reminds World of True Jewish Roots

I've been forced to make many confessions in the course of my life; I've done things that, formerly, I could never have fathomed; and, most of all, I've confronted realities I once condemned as fantasies. Congradulating the French for their courage, is, admittedly, one such confession; demanding that zionists abandon their ambitions is something I never fathomed I'd do; and, finally, I have to confess that the reality of the accepted Jewish narrative, from Moses to Sharon, is, for the most part, pure fiction -- manufactured and marketed, it seems, to accomodate the afore mentioned zionist ambitions.

A while back, I read an alarming acedemic essay on Jewish ancestry. Although it made perfect sense, and jibed comfortably with documented world history, it was absolutly averse to all I'd long embraced regarding these put-upon peoples. Whenever I read or otherwise stumble upon something so jarring, I do all I can to refute it; if, however, refutation requires factual contortions and emotional condemnations, my critical filter kicks in and I prepare myself for another awakening.

If the article posted below has a similar effect on you, I suggest that you likewise brace yourself; for it is all as true as true can be. Speaking of truth, the ONLY truly jewish among us are a minority of Sephardic Jews and some of those living in Palistine pre-Balfore.

This article even supports the Biblical account; insofar as Daniel, who WAS taken to Babylon for their 'best and brightest' program, left behind all of his friends and family. The popular Jewish assertion that the Romans pried them from Palestine is patently false; it does seem that most former Jews converted to either Christianity or Islam -- as difficult as that may be for modern 'Jews' to accept, it is as close to Truth as we can get.

This article, by Schlomo Sand, crushes any and all justifications for the brutal usurpation of Arab soverignty over Palastine. It was and is an illegal claim; and it requires continuous criminal acts to support it. It's time we all start calling our representatives in Congress and remind them how confusing it must be for the rest of the world: How can a nation that passionatly advocates democracy, human rights and the protection of minorities continue to financially, politically and militarily support a nation that trashes all these sacred principals with impunity? Not just supports, but bankrolls, fights wars for, and provides munitions for the brutal suppression of Arab peoples.

Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile
Israel deliberately forgets its history
An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East
By Schlomo Sand
Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive descendant of a Jewish people which has existed since it received the Torah (1) in Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.
Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they always managed to preserve blood links between their scattered communities. Their uniqueness was never compromised.
At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return to their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a virgin land, had been waiting for its original inhabitants to return and awaken it. It belonged to the Jews, rather than to an Arab minority that had no history and had arrived there by chance. The wars in which the wandering people reconquered their land were just; the violent opposition of the local population was criminal.
This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented, imaginative historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people. Judaism’s abundant historiography encompasses many different approaches.
But none have ever questioned the basic concepts developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Discoveries that might threaten this picture of a linear past were marginalised. The national imperative rejected any contradiction of or deviation from the dominant story. University departments exclusively devoted to “the history of the Jewish people”, as distinct from those teaching what is known in Israel as general history, made a significant contribution to this selective vision. The debate on what constitutes Jewishness has obvious legal implications, but historians ignored it: as far as they are concerned, any descendant of the people forced into exile 2,000 years ago is a Jew.
Nor did these official investigators of the past join the controversy provoked by the “new historians” from the late 1980s. Most of the limited number of participants in this public debate were from other disciplines or non-academic circles: sociologists, orientalists, linguists, geographers, political scientists, literary academics and archaeologists developed new perspectives on the Jewish and Zionist past. Departments of Jewish history remained defensive and conservative, basing themselves on received ideas. While there have been few significant developments in national history over the past 60 years (a situation unlikely to change in the short term), the facts that have emerged face any honest historian with fundamental questions.
Founding myths shaken
Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a “national” vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham’s journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have subsequently turned these Biblical “truths” into the basis of national education.
But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.
Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.
Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.
Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea (2).
Proselytising zeal
But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.
The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud (3) authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.
Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.
The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture (4).
Prism of Zionism
Until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish people were more or less reluctantly acknowledged by Zionist historiography. But thereafter they were marginalised and finally erased from Israeli public memory. The Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967 believed themselves to be the direct descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than – God forbid – of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen. The Jews claimed to constitute a specific ethnic group that had returned to Jerusalem, its capital, from 2,000 years of exile and wandering.
This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be supported by biology as well as history. Since the 1970s supposedly scientific research, carried out in Israel, has desperately striven to demonstrate that Jews throughout the world are closely genetically related.
Research into the origins of populations now constitutes a legitimate and popular field in molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has been accorded honoured status in the frenzied search for the unique origin of the “chosen people”. The problem is that this historical fantasy has come to underpin the politics of identity of the state 
of Israel. By validating an essentialist, 
ethnocentric definition of Judaism it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews – whether Arabs, Russian immigrants or foreign workers.
Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.
A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its own citizens. It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish history while the prism of Zionism continues to fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum. But Jews worldwide have always tended to form religious communities, usually by conversion; they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived from a unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of wandering.
The development of historiography and the evolution of modernity were consequences of the invention of the nation state, which preoccupied millions during the 19th and 20th centuries. The new millennium has seen these dreams begin to shatter.
And more and more academics are analysing, dissecting and deconstructing the great national stories, especially the myths of common origin so dear to chroniclers of the past.
Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008)



English language editorial director: Wendy Kristianasen - all rights reserved © 1997-2008 Le Monde diplomatique.

Where the Women Come and Go Talking of Michelangelo – or – Excerpts from the Diary of First Lady, Laura Bush

Note: Some elements of this piece are redacted (re: The Secret Service).

Laura and I go way back. When you spend ten years in the same book club, you’re bound to develop a close friendship, and, quite naturally, develop such a friendship we did, which, I happily confess, endures to this day. Over the years, we’ve read and reviewed hundreds of books together; although she’ll read most anything, and devotes the full power of her curious and expansive mind to all literary endeavors, she’s highly partial to stories about married women with twin daughters, who are trapped in loveless marriages to closeted homosexuals.

When nominating candidates for the upcoming month, I’d invariably submit some baroque, thousand-page piece of fiction from pre-revolutionary France. Laura, as if she were attempting to exercise some inner demon, would passionately advocate “REDACTED” – even though we’d already twice read “REDACTED” in the last twenty months. Never failing to invest the proceedings with an eerie, surreal discomfiture, her obsession required about eight minutes, our compassionate patience, and a gentle reminder of our recent rereading; then, as if her self-possession resumed control and switched her mind and body off of auto-pilot, she would ‘snap’ out of it; and the clever, composed and charming woman that she is would emerge from somewhere deep within.

Let me be the first to tell you, Laura Bush is a keen observer of the human condition and a perspicacious literary deconstructionist. And so, in light of the fact that the most important character assessment she’ll ever make was, well, I’ll be polite and say that one is left to ponder her judgment, and more specifically, her motive in selecting a life-partner.

Nevertheless, when it was Laura’s turn to preside over the nomination process, predictably and without exception, she would guide our group’s conclusion to the afore mentioned genre – passionate, married women trapped in a loveless sham, raising multiple children (preferably twin girls) along with a closeted (and politically powerful) homosexual for husband – and then reward us with grateful guarantees like, ‘we shan’t regret this…you’ll see’ or ‘fabulous discretion you’ve all shown today; and, as a matter of principal, shrewd discretion will not go unrewarded…I promise’. Yielding to our First Lady’s desire, no matter how fatuous the favored material she forced on us, was always worth it; if only for those sparkling eyes and her childlike mirth.

Reading “REDACTED” or “REDACTED” was arduous and unrewarding; though we all knew that either of those, and any other similar, would soon come to life when Laura recited her illuminating exegesis of the text. If only it weren’t a cliché it may resonate and imbue the proper effect, but to say, ‘the book came alive’ is in this case no metaphor; the pages really did ‘come to life’ in those big, expressive, soulful eyes – almost as if she’d lived the very drama we were there dissecting.

I write all this to lend what follows below as much credibility as possible. And, if I were actually in a book of the month club with the First Lady (or even in a book of the month club, period), I imagine it all would have gone down as described above. So, what you are about to read are actual pages from Laura Bush, First Lady of the United States of America’s Diary; as she definitely would have sent me photocopies, if not the originals, if I’d only asked.

All that was required was a ‘snapshot’, a few day’s window into the innermost life of our Whitehouse; that’s what I requested and that’s what I got, and all for simply asking. Sweet, sweet lady, our First Lady.

*** 8 March 2008 ***

Dear Diary,

Trent Lott, Lindsey Graham, Larry Craig, Ken Melhman, Mitch McConnell, Dennis Hastert, Karl Rove, Mark Foley and Ralph Reed are all over again. It’s nearly two AM; why can’t they find somewhere else to play strip poker? Most of all, I don’t want the girls to walk in on them AGAIN! Especially when they invite the male strippers…What am I talking about? They always invite the male strippers! The fact that they’re all as gay as they can be is one thing, but do they have to put that sign on the door (He-Man Woman Hater’s Club – No Girls Allowed!)…how utterly adolescent.

*** 12 November 2004 ***

Dear Diary,

I hate it when ‘he’ calls him ‘Georgie’! In fact, I hate it when he calls him anything, for any reason. But he always calls, and without the faintest ‘how do you do’, he demands to speak with ‘Georgie’. That’s what I used to call him back before I knew; or rather, back before I found out. Oh, Diary, must we go over this again? Okay, okay, you’re right, I concede; Diary, you’re always right.

It was Valentines Day, 1985, Victor Ashe shows up unannounced in a pink, velveteen tuxedo holding a dozen pink roses, swaying back and forth as drunk as a Navy ensign on leave in Bangkok.

“Where’s Georgie?!” Victor Demands.
“He’s in the back acres clearing brush with REDACTED…what are ‘you’ doing here?” I demanded.
Ignoring my question, he says, “Is that so…he’s clearing ‘brush’ in the ‘back’ acres with ‘REDACTED’?”
“Yeeeesss.” Infusing all the apoplexy I could into that single word.

Mr. Fancy Pants then storms out of the house, slams the door, slumps into his Porsche, and lays on the horn. I had to go take a shower, turn on the radio and put in ear plugs just to escape the noise of that damned horn. The Germans sure do know how to engineer a car-horn. He literally laid on that horn for a full hour and a half until ‘Georgie’ and REDACTED pulled into the drive in our old farm truck.

Victor then stormed out of his car, bottle of vodka in hand, pink tuxedo tails flapping against his gait, and gave ‘Georgie’ the tongue lashing of his life (at least as far as I know). REDACTED looked confused and intimidated, and so hastily evacuated our estate. Georgie dejectedly stumbled into the house and made his way to our bedroom without even meeting my gaze.

Tops and Tails then sat right next to me on the sofa, patted my thigh, and whispered, “Valentine’s belongs to me, GIRLFRIEND! And don’t you dare forget it!” And I haven’t yet.

After Victor returned to his car to await Georgie’s primping and powdering, I took a valium and climbed in the Town Car for a nice, long drive. Waiting to return home after I was sure they’d left, I set to finish reading my novel. It’s been many years since that day, but the pain is still as acute as it was back then.

“No.” I told Victor Ashe, “Georgie was not available.” Every time he calls I think of that Valentine’s Day, but, tender-hearted woman that I am, I can’t bring myself to tell poor Victor that Georgie is not available because he’s giving yet another ‘interview’ to Jeff Gannon.

*** 21 January 2005 ***

Dear Diary,

Jeff Gannon this, Jeff Gannon that; Jeff Gannon is all I hear about anymore. He’s acting like a thirteen year old girl over this pathetic little prostitute. And, to make matters worse, he’s been using the word ‘fabulous’ in every other sentence, whether or not it applies – just, it seems, to hear himself say it. I try to be understanding; he is who he is; and I want him to be happy…but this is all too much! Dick (Cheney) can’t even get through to him. Georgie will text him a hundred times a day…it’s the first thing he does when he wakes up and the last thing he does before going to bed at night (well, almost the last thing; I think he’d have withdrawals without his nightly fix of homosexual pornography on that iPod). OH MY STARS! Let me tell you, Diary, when Jeff is due to visit, Georgie is as giddy as a preschooler at Christmas. He’s strollin around, whistling, callin in airstrikes while making airplane sound-effects. He’ll even rub up against Miss Piggy (Karl Rove) in anticipation! And now that I have the perspective that I have, it’s become, well, I have to say it’s cute; precious in fact.

*** 9 October 2008 ***


Dear Diary,

Georgie is sad; a sad little boy in an aging man’s body; and ‘tis sadder still watching him mope around the West Wing all day like this. He doesn’t’ have a friend in the world; Dick made him promise to never speak with Jeff Gannon again; they tease him all day in the news and around the office; he’s being booted out of the job he loves; he’ll never be able to declare an unprovoked and illegal war (and, for that matter, no war at all) again; he knows he’ll never be able to deprive large segments of the population of their constitutionally guaranteed rights; he’ll never participate in another Easter Egg hunt (he loves them so; I think I’ll write Mrs. Obama a nice note asking if Georgie can participate next Easter); and, most of all, he’ll have to forfeit his favorite activity of all – drunken gay orgies aboard Air Force One while hurricanes destroy major American cities. It’s like taking a toddler’s favorite toy, and I, for one, feel sorry for him.

Believe me, I know my husband is a vile, wicked man; probably one of the worst men who’s ever lived (relative to the damage he’s done and the deaths of innocents he’s directly responsible for). But even Hitler had his Eva Braun…someone has to love him, and that someone is me.



I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker/ and I have seen The Eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker/ and in short, I was afraid

SG

Response to Pat Buchanan's Most Recent Post -- or -- Takin It to The Streets

I posted this today on Pat Buchanan's Site -- www.buchanan.org -- in repsonse to his piece discussing our increasingly unresolved military engagements; in other words, the fact that we never seem to 'win' a war, only leave after huge ammounts of capital and blood have been wasted. I like Mr. Buchanan a lot, and don't disagree with him often; so I think I'll add a permanant link to his site. Well, I'll do it if he actually publishes my post instead of censoring it (as is often the case when you bring up 911).

Calvin Coolidge: "The business of the American people is Business."

George W Bush: "Some people call you the elite; I call you my Base."

For those attempting to make sense of recent world events, I suggest you abandon all hope or radically alter the perspective through which you view those events. If, for example, you cling to some naïve understanding of American democracy – that it’s a republic, or rooted in Constitutional principals, or even beholden to the will of the American voter – the world will remain an opaque and inscrutable place. If, on the other hand, you manage to pry your perspective from the puerile propaganda pouring from that pervasive sludge-pump centrally positioned in every American’s living room, bedroom, den, kitchen and patio, there may be hope for you yet.

Profit: it’s not a motive, it’s THE motive. Very recently, I spoke at length with a friend from the wonderful, philanthropic world of medicine; and in case you’re wondering, he is a native of the pharmacological realm of that world. As is increasingly the case, members of my generation (X) are pausing, taking a look around, and attempting to reconcile our drive to succeed and our (heretofore latent and sublimated) sense of fair-play, or, for lack of a better word, guilt.

Allow me to give this discussion with my pharma-rep friend and my nascent and cynical worldview some context: About seven months ago, I had another discussion with another professional friend; this friend happened to be an architect/structural engineer, employed by one of the largest and most esteemed firms in this country. This discussion was the catalyst to a new understanding, one that stripped away all the artifice and pretence that had invariably tinctured my opinions with a rosy, all-American hue…because I’m a patriot; because I’m an innate optimist; because I always want to believe the best. Lending our leaders the benefit of the doubt and believing that they did indeed have my best interest at heart was – and is – a particularly blighted form of folly. I’ll come back to the architect conversation in a moment…

Now, after a round of pathetic apologetics (in other words, our justifications and rationalizations for living the kinds of lives we lead, working the endless hours we work, and even the beliefs we publicly espouse), we ‘got real’ as our contemporary parlance would put it. Rather than reaffirm all the particulars we did posit, I’ll skip ahead to our mutual conclusion: Modern medicine (specifically pharma) hasn’t any interest whatsoever in ‘healing’ or ‘cures’; the watchword of the last half-century is ‘therapy’. No longer do we see the pill that wipes out some dread disease; rather, we have a series of life-long prescriptions, so that we can ‘treat’ or ‘manage’ disease. This paradigm shift is no accident, nor do I believe it’s a function of the law of diminishing returns (as that economic law relates to research and development); it is instead a purposed program developed to ensure ceaseless incremental payments. From the perspective of the boardroom, it’s much more profitable to manage disease than to eradicate it; so, America, get nice and comfortable with your regimen of pills, cause you ain’t gettin an alternative.

What is true for medicine is also true for military: There are still many (most of them watch FOX News regularly) who refuse to believe that our astoundingly profitable military-industrial complex influences – if not dictates – American foreign policy relative to martial matters. And if you are of that imbecilic ilk, allow me to make a frank and unfettered statement: our nation’s military contractors explicitly advocate warfare for America and her allies (at least those permitted to purchase arms from those producers). Moreover, they aid in articulating these various battles such that they sustained indefinitely, and so that they may segue into other ancillary flare-ups.

This is all very obvious and elementary; only, it’s absolutely averse to our most dearly held beliefs. We do not like to think that the leaders we elect (thereby implicating ourselves as complicit enablers) are capable of making such wicked calculations; but, as our Lord said, “ye shall know them by their fruits”. The platitudinous rhetoric of stump-speeches should not inform our understanding, but actions; truth is not the currency of State of The Union addresses, but disinformation; promoting the common welfare is not the objective, but corporate welfare; ‘we the people’ is a narrow and very elite ‘we’ – and you and I have no share in it.

What then did my architect friend have to say that sent shudders down my spine? What did countless hours and days and weeks and months of careful, objective research yield? What does every clue indicate – whether it’s the science fiction of the NIST or this Sunday’s 60 Minutes? Well, sadly, it’s that the ‘official’ narrative of the events of 911 are an abject and alarming fraud. But, most distressing, to even mention such for so many is professional suicide; and it arouses cat-calls, pillorying, slander, terminations, ad nausea. The fact that Osama Bin Laden hasn’t even been charged with the crimes of 911 (no one has) shouldn’t be of any concern; the fact that all three laws of thermodynamics must be thrown out for the ‘official’ story to properly function is, apparently, irrelevant; the fact that every building in the world is now at risk of imploding at the speed of gravity within its footprint after a few hour fire (almost invisible fire in building 7), exacerbated by this bizarre and IMPOSSIBLE phenomena of ‘thermal expansion’ shouldn’t be unsettling.

My fellow Americans, our nation has been taken over by a cabal of evil. We are careening down the road to serfdom. We are on the precipice of collapse. Your freedoms and liberties (along with your savings) are everyday atrophied; furthermore, and to further the apoplexy, those same freedoms and liberties are to be sacrificed to ensure sustained freedom and liberty (ah, don’t you love the double-speak). We are in the midst of a transformation that historians (if they are in fact allowed to record history) will condemn, and our apathy does indeed merit such condemnation. The two-party system is bankrupt.

The ‘bailout’ that barreled through congress was proof-positive of representative democracy’s distance and disdain for those they represent. You’re right, Mr. Buchanan, McCain would have won the election if he’d responded to the ubiquitous rage over that menacing perfidy by standing up for the people. But, if you are still naïve enough to believe that your opinions and best interest matter, I have a bond from Lincoln Savings and Loan to sell you. And if you believe that Obama is a peace-maker and represents real change, I have some investment property in Chicago’s south side to sell you. Ron Paul is the only hope for this country; but since he still clings to this pernicious two-party system, I have no use for him either. Thanks, Mr. Paul, for getting our hopes up for NOTHING! I want my money back, Mr. Paul – as I expected you to run as a third party candidate.

All and all can only fall/ with a crushing but meaningless blow/ and there are no truth’s outside the gates of Eden

SG

New and Improved Common Sense -- or -- Thomas Paine, Eat Your Heart Out

I’ve come to a conclusion, a conclusion beyond dispute. A conclusion derived from a subset of other conclusions that were all formed from a structurally sound analytical process; in which, a control data set is contrast against observable phenomena and empirical results. So you can see, my conclusion (as with all my other conclusions) is as close to Law as you’re going to get; without the tedium and drudgery of committees, quorums, vetoes, super-majorities, on and on and on.

In case you haven’t yet suspected, I’m far too big to fail. The hopes and dreams of too many Americans are leveraged against my sustained and gaudy largess. I am, however, humbly prepared to sacrifice an 80% share of my enterprise (though the share is composed of common stock; so I naturally retain all binding authority and overlording continence) in exchange for a 134.53 billion dollar ‘loan’. Because there no laws compelling my condescension to you, the tax-payer, the ultimate guarantor of this ‘loan’, there will be no explanation detailing the process that yielded so precise a figure. It is far too esoteric for the common man, and for that matter, left-wing ‘academics’, who, may I remind you, are responsible for my current misfortune.

As a matter of principal, these funds will not be subject to oversight, nor will binding preconditions of any sort be levied, or even discussed; we are Americans after all, let’s not allow an anomalous hiccup to skew our values off into a socialistic morass – tis’ a slippery slope, and if we allow this liberal heresy, we’ll soon be paying joe-six-pack’s rent for him, or giving him low interest loans when he should be allowed to suffer for his poor decision making, and let the Invisible Hand guide him through life and on to ‘true’ prosperity.

The future, nebulous and inscrutable as it is, cannot of itself resolve the myriad ‘complexities’ conspiring against my enterprise and, ultimately, all the benefactors of my superior abilities; that being said and well understood, we must leave the door open to future ‘loans’ – as an 80% share-holder, you now have a perpetual obligation to my sustained presence in the market. By virtue of your nascent participation in my enterprise, I feel it incumbent to describe the nature of my dealings: I do not actually ‘make’ anything, in the traditional sense – actually, I create quite a bit of waste, both physically and psychically. Essentially, I direct an organization that drafts and transfers pieces of paper, and increasingly we’re digitally encoding bits – we’ve determined that paper is an unnecessary expense and a potential legal hazard. You see, digitally encoded bits are easy to delete, manipulate, and hide; which is why we believe that computers have a real future in the market and are probably here to stay.

These last few months have been trying for all of us, and particularly for me; which is why I intend to take a few months off before addressing these complexities cascading through my enterprise. In my absence, I expect all my employees to work a couple dozen extra hours each week to show our new shareholders the kind of commitment we are prepared to make. According to common sense and forthcoming legislation, workers and overlords are reciprocal parts of a single synergy; so, logically, in order to best address these corporate complexities, we must prepare in radically different ways: the worker must labor furiously up to a manic pitch in order to ascend, while the overlord decompresses and relaxes in order to descend, melding together at that perfect nexus.

I write you these words as I prepare for takeoff to an undisclosed location, for an undisclosed time, with the lion share of your loan safely stowed in my overhead compartment. Upon my return, I expect all official records fully and permanently converted to the digitally encoded bit and stored in those computer thingys. Other business matters will be administered by my board of directors. With respect to politics, I direct that the share of your loan not on board with me now is to be distributed among conservative, value-voting congressmen to initiate passage of my Common Sense Legislative Agenda. These laws are vital if you people expect continued protection from freedom-hating/baby-eating terrorists; furthermore, this dynamic legislation will retain our position in the world, our robust economy, and readily available lattes.

The Common Sense Legislative Agenda is my magnum opus and the logical conclusion of the uber-man’s prerogative. They guarantee the rights of the elite to capriciously take our frustrations or wrath out on people who get in our way, or any living creature; both violently and emotionally, or in any manner we so choose. They protect our personal wealth and guarantee a minimum rate for its growth. These laws cultivate our image in all forms of media, severely punishing any ‘journalist’ who does not first clear their story with its object. They not only grant us immunity from imprisonment or fine, but also shield us from prosecution. We will be legally authorized to employ our host nation’s military forces in the service of our enterprise; if the military forces are already thus employed, a rival petitioner is entitled to a small force until more resources are free for his disposal. Local, state and federal law enforcement may be used as body guards, an entourage or even landscapers (if Mexicans start demanding higher wages), there are in fact no constraints on the use of law enforcement. Municipalities are hereby compelled to build and bankroll at least one arena for our ownership and the exclusive use of our favorite sporting team. We can hereby install toll-stations anywhere we so choose, as long as it is not within 50 miles of a fellow overlord. These statues are included in the Common Sense Legislative Agenda, but are in no way limited to them – there are in fact hundreds of laws within; I simply wanted my new shareholders to get a sense for the coming changes.

As far as the common worker and his daily life is concerned, there will, for him, be no perceptible change; codifying my agenda is but a recognition of our present state of affairs, for all of my laws are in everyday practice throughout this nation. Moreover, it’s important and practical to officially sanction our status; we do, after all, live in a nation of laws. Finally, I want to counsel my new shareholders against any obnoxious displays of resistance; we’re all in this together, ‘what’s good for me is good for you’ (note: ‘what’s good for me is good for you’ will soon replace ‘in God we trust’ on our nation’s currency). Let’s all behave as mature adults, do what needs to be done, and boldly embrace our Brave New World; because I’m not coming back until you do.

come senators congressmen/ please heed the call/ don't stand in the doorway/ don't block up the hall

SG

Population Control -- or -- Finally, a Good Answer to an Old Question, and The "True" Environmentalists' Dream

Dearest Peoples of Earth,

Can we all not agree, something need desperately to be done. You people are populating all over this planet like you own the place. Insolent bipedal mutants you are, befouling my crisp, clean air, polluting my crystal clear water, clanking and rankoring up my slience. It's gone too far; in a word your presence has become untenable.

If you do not soon resolve the 'issue' of your presence, action will be taken; but before any real action is taken, I'm going to give you all a chance to surrender and do something decent and moral for once in your lives. As I'm not some kind of overbearing control freak, I'm allowing you all to option your own individual method. Note: We do not need ironists attempting to 'send a message' with their bloody and unattractive demise -- have some respect for the outcome and the process. Besides, your posterity is already arranged for you -- I'm developing a website where I'll post your picture along with one of a hundred differnt Beatles quotes from which to choose; if you submit an unauthorized quote, an approved quote will be selected for you.

Those not electing to take control of their own destines will encounter one of two dread options: 1) continue to live in a dyopsian world of confusion and despair hazarding any number of inevitable and horribly painful 'natural' fates. 2) Relocate to the new biosphere I'll soon be opening. The biosphere will provide all the luxuries of home, will be self sustaining, and be a fortress of safety. Most of all, you'll live knowing your life is not advesely affecting the world outside. Note: The biosphere has been traditionally called a cave. But, bear in mind, the temperature is always a pleasant 68 degrees (so you'll never 'need' any form of electricity), your eyes will adjust to the darkness, and it has been proven that humans can subsist -- and quite happily I might add -- on bat-meat alone. Space is limited.

First things first: In order to assert a level of contol suffiecent to compel your cooperation, I'll need to assess each and every one of you. Every one is hereby required to send me a self addressed, prepaid envelope so that you may receive my survey. This survey is to include a brief bio and relevant statistical data (age, sex, height, blood type, and of course your opinion of the Beatles); the bio is used to assess your value, it should outline your usefulness, how and to what end you intend to contribute that utility, and how enthusiastic you are to demonstrate yourself an asset. The survey should also include a money order for 79.99 (or it's US dollar equivalent) to ensure prompt and thorough evaluation. Note: in addition to the survey, some will be required to volenteer as administrators of the assessment; however, your participation does not affect the 79.99 survery fee. In reward for your service, and for practical reasons, those volenteering for adminsitrative staff will be among the last required to make the 'ultimate contribution' to my endeavor.

Obviously, for the sake of my own sustained existance, I will require a very large staff to escourt me into my eco-friendly and highly progressive new world. Those volenteering for Permanant Staff Status (PSS) should mark their survey on the front in big, bold, red PSS letters if interested; any sloppy or stained surveys will be rejected, but not the survey fee. All PSS will be required to pass a thorough health examination, be quarenteened until the final stage, be sterilzed, have a subcutaneuous GPS chip embedded, and share my sense of humor -- no exceptions.

I think I've adequatly established my case; and I think you should agree. Not to overemphasize a point, but since there is no need for questions -- what questions could anyone have -- I will immediatly close the floor to questions. Again, for fear of overstating the obvious, it's clear that this program is in the best interest of every living creature; as every living creature can no longer be subject to the tyranny of your arrogance and vanity. Since we're all agreed, I'll need you all to comply with my instructions with haste but in an orderly fashion; promptness will be rewarded and honored, procrastination will be punished and shamed.

I am/ I am/ I am superman/ and I can do anything...I am/ I am/ I am superman and I know what's happening

or

swan swan/ hummingbird/ hurrah we are all free now


SG

Kierkegaard's Progeny -- A Ghost Is Born

Less than once in a lifetime, less than once a century, less than once a millennium, just once; just once will the world yield a genius like Soren Kierkegaard – The Great Dane. Over time and from time out of mind, I've read more that I could possibly recall; while I consider most of said time well spent, it is, as with everything, an issue of degrees: some of my literary endeavors have arched a brow, some have been recommended to family and friends, still others are reread and their salient thoughts underscored, yet a small portion of my investment is still earning interest and at exponential rates.

There is an ineffable and sublime thrill that courses through those for whom genius is recorded and preserved. Whatever process, or gland or neural packet invigorates this soul-jarring reverberation, I cannot say; I can, however, say that it makes life worth the living and pries those of us otherwise averse to modern life and its fatuous burlesque from our downy-soft beds. We set to scouring sundry scripts for the surge it sends spiraling and pulsing throughout our members -- we pursue it like a junkie does his fix. Countless hours, days, weeks and months combing through fiction, philosophy, history, theology, and esoteric tomes we log in our endeavors, though most of what's uncovered is rubbish or stilted and contrived sophistry. Often we must abort our pursuit, saunter deep into the woods (sometimes a metaphorical woodland), partition our cares and concerns, and just let it flow; even so, this is a form of auto-stimulation, and alas, as with the other more common form of stimulation, when two are wed as one the effect is compounded and more complete – for both the giver and the taker.

An Ode to Kierkegaard:

Our world and our condition is a medium of tension through which we wade, lunge and struggle to salt our bread by the sweat of our brow, a desperate existence demanding true persistence throughout our many ceaseless trials. Waging war against a nebulous and protean menace, a specter stalking without and within us, a struggle and a search is the dual human premise and the sum of our condition. We're after something, anything that can answer our loneliness in suffering and align off-centered disposition. We are wedged into a wanton and materialistic age of carnality and ephemera; and despite our preference for a more enlightened era, Providence saw fit to splice our selves into this frantic and hopeless Diaspora.

The people are weighed and found wanting! Oh the irony of an age affording easy access to the efforts of most every noble sage; yet the hordes crowd and cluster about the most inane, puerile, wasteful, vulgar, vile and vain means by which they can wile away their precious, irredeemable days. What a price the ancients would have paid to conjure on an incandescent page their triumphs and their highest aims.

The ancients are yet among us and their condemnation forms a chorus: seek ye first the Kingdom of God (here comes the bonus) and all things will be added to you.

For many, many centuries wisdom played like a symphony with each succeeding age adding a unique melody. There were first the Egyptians with their enigmatic images; next the Hebrews and their Holy Scriptures; then the Greeks and all their glory; succeeded by the Romans refining and restructuring reason; leading to the Roman-Christians, struggling in vain to reconcile reason and religion led by Aquino and Augustine; onto the majesty of the Goths, Gauls, Anglos and other Europeans, who through the Renaissance reformed the great religion dropping two titanic bombs -- Luther with this Thesis and Calvin with his tomes – into the lifeless Catholic catacombs. For a few hundred years, men fumbled with their freedom through sundry fits and struggles. Then, a single note held long and languid, going by the name Hegel, and before him the hopes of man were mangled. Though as with all great symphonies, a solemn note is meant to be the prelude to a towering and spectacular acme.

Out of a cold and cruel climate Western thought realized its climax, and if they could have killed him there, there is no doubt they would. Kierkegaard is the name given this crescendo, and if you don’t remember, prophets in their hometown go unheeded, but by his words far off thunder clouds were seeded, drenching the land and sea, giving life to you and me – that we may have it more abundantly.

Back to the essay…

Reading is not a passive activity; it requires your effort and attention. Understanding that, one should never dither ones precious time with Tom Clancy, James Patterson, Steven King or the like. Truly, one shouldn’t waste one second reading anyone on the best seller list, nor for that matter anyone currently drawing breath – television has corrupted man’s capacity for profound thought. If you expect to gain by your effort – and by all effort you should expect gain – begin with a stout diet of the classics and the Bible. I suggest you start with those; for you cannot begin to comprehend Kierkegaard without a solid grounding in the classics and especially scripture. Always remember, Kierkegaard is a Christian, and an exemplary one at that.

Not to appear immodest, but to be honest, I’ve never read any author’s work that didn’t readily adhere to my understanding; almost as if the ideas were either filling a cavity or affirming an incomplete notion I’d started then aborted at one time or another. This is as it should be, for all who can appreciate it, genius has an eerily familiar character and an actuating energy that our latent receptacles synthesize into a palatable concept – in the same fashion opiates engage with their unique receptors, with which we are endowed at birth (and the sensation produced is not unlike that one gets with codeine or morphine). Kierkegaard is both of the great pantheon of genius and beyond it; he can be likened to this group, and he is certainly part of it; but in another way that is difficult to define, he is divorced from it – as he both straddles and supersedes it the great fraternity of genius. With Kierkegaard there is still that familiar quality; but the towering majesty of his thought exceeds anything for which I could ever have aspired. Kierkegaard is beyond me; and if I ever state that I have gotten beyond him, I’m either lying, further advanced than I imagine I’ll be, or simply stating it out of spite and frustration. It’s not that I don’t get what he’s saying; it’s that I cannot replicate it in kind. Not that I’m attempting to imitate him, but each great thinker has a method (for lack of a better word), a manner by which they process and pursue an idea, and while I can replicate Hegel’s, Kant’s, Plato’s, Freud’s, Dostoevsky’s, Proust’s, and many, many others; again, Kierkegaard is beyond me.




When the devil came/ he was not red/ he was chrome/ and he said/ come with me…I felt no fear


SG

Tyranny is HERE! Outing the Criminal Conspiracy.

Before breaking entirely with the status quo and defiantly drawing a line in the sand, I wanted to wait for this last bit of the 911 Commission’s Report. Serious doubts have, for me, been festering for about six months now; and in anticipation of the NIST’s report regarding the symmetrical implosion of Building 7 at the speed of gravity and within its own footprint, I wanted to patiently wait and see – give them, again, the benefit of the doubt. While I cannot say exactly what I was expecting from an organization that consistently extrudes ‘findings’ that are dubious at best and (likely) criminal at worst, the conclusion that Building 7 fell due to the magic of “thermal expansion” is completely unacceptable.

Suffice it to say, if this was in fact the cause of the collapse, then none of us are safe. Every electrical outlet, every coffee pot, every static spark, every faulty wire is a potential pulverizing agent capable of bringing down the world’s most robust constructs within a few short hours. This report should incite panic in the streets; for it suggests that everything we know about physical engineering, thermodynamics and structural integrity is an abject fraud. This report represents an either/or for our nation and the world at large: either we scrap every building in the world and revise every code, or we send these hacks packing and staff our nation’s agencies with responsible, competent individuals.

Inasmuch as the criminals supporting this ongoing bloodletting would sooner embrace the former option instead of submit to the latter, we may in fact witness a charade of code revisions and the like; as everyone knows, lies require more and more lies to reinforce the first. Be the American public as they are – dumb, deluded and distracted – the deciders have, thus far, escaped the trials and indictments that are their due; however, the present moment is continually expiring and so is the trust Americans place in their government.

Allow me to qualify the above statement: when I say the American public is dumb, deluded and distracted, I am not suggesting it’s a terminal condition; rather it is a willful self-deception. The people are content – but ever less so – with their inexpensive gadgets, their numbing narcotics, their sitcoms and cartoons, in short, their ease. As that ease gradually dissipates and the god of our age starts to ebb and slide past the horizon, men will inevitably turn to the east and search out something new. Which is not to say that this awakening will be in any way passive; the people are enraged with fraudulent gods and masters. They will not laconically lament the theft and deception and death proffered as patriotic zeal and then silently move on; they will revolt and the revolution will not be velvety and gentle.

I ask all who read this to take action. To write letters. To ask questions. To confront power. To cancel subscriptions. To protest. To expose liars. To seek Truth diligently. To protest the advertisers. To organize. To get INVOLVED! To embrace your duties as citizens of a democracy is not simply the service you owe your country, it is the highest secular calling you can answer. There is no longer any shame in publicly confessing your doubts regarding 911; the shame has been monopolized by our government and their pliant and well heeled media. Do not be cowed by imbeciles who swell with pride when dismissing the 911 Truth Movement; they are the same type that welcomed the Gestapo and then groveled in the street for bread. There is no other end for tyranny.

From this day forth, I am dedicating myself to this movement. From this day forth, I will no longer cloak my true feelings in tacit implications. From this day forth, I will see to it that as many as I can reach are compelled to seek Truth and act upon it. This final and massive lie has tipped the scale for me. There is no other acceptable conclusion but that our government – especially the executive – is a criminal, bloodthirsty coup.

The time is now!

SG

Letter to the Editor of the new york times -- RE: NIST Building 7 fiction

Attn. Editor,

So this is it?

Jason Blair was on to something; where can I apply to become a staff writer for the new york times (you no longer deserve capital letters)? Everybody knows that’s the place to go when wearied of silly impediments like fact checking, integrity and the tedium of investigation…you know (or maybe you don’t), journalism. If Horace Greeley were still alive he would, I’m sure, give your ears a vigorous boxing (that was the style of the time). Me, I’m daily growing more and more nonplussed, apoplectic and despondent.

What does the world’s newspaper of record do with the biggest story of the 20th century, how do they cover the catalyst for two wars, hundreds of thousands of deaths, comprehensive constitutional reversal, corporate theft of public resources in the hundreds of billions, and a patently pernicious presidency? What else but bury it in the NY/Region section; to of course tacitly suggest this affects only you New Yorkers. How then should the story be reported? How else but with insouciant indifference, yet it should be tempered with a tepid stab at ‘balance’ – you wouldn’t want to seem in any way biased.

Ah, but there’s a small problem – the physical impossibility of this puerile propaganda. What are you to do? It’s well known that the new york times building is chock full of “papers and furnishings”; run for the exits gentle staffers, the coffee pot could bring your building to ruin! In fact, every building in the nation is in severe peril…no one is safe…if steel can buckle and buildings can implode symmetrically within their footprint after a few hour fire that hardly anyone can see, then everyone, in every hamlet, burg, town, city and megalopolis is everyday hazarding their life by walking into their place of business. This is no insignificant matter; if we’re to believe this NIST report, then every existing statistical model regarding structural integrity is as reliable as, well, a new york times story.

Fortunately, there is no danger. Buildings are erected with the greatest of care by professionals who are competent, responsible and thorough, unlike – we can confidently say – the editorial staff of the new york times. Your credibility may be esteemed at 1600 Pennsylvania, but out here in fly-over country, you’re increasingly maligned as a sycophantic shill.

After seven years of supine and obeisant supplication to this tyrannical administration, are you not ready to stand up? Are you really that willing to sacrifice the greatest newspaper the world has ever seen for fear of retribution? This criticism is not simply a function of my convictions relative to 911, it is an overarching indictment addressing the abject betrayal of journalistic integrity and your civic duty.

These things are destine to emerge; you, your masters, all of the mainstream media, and of course our government cannot stand in the way of Truth (yes, the Platonic variety). Moreover, have you convinced yourself that you’ll escape unscathed? No, posterity will deal harshly with you; and not some distant, cloistered academic whose work will only affect the few; rather, the coming economic collapse will foster an environment of pervasive skepticism. When the life’s work and savings of oh so many evaporates and they begin to understand how this manipulation was orchestrated and, further, how it was abetted by the journalists whose job it was to alert them; well, I suggest you emigrate to Argentina or wherever you fascists hide these days.

You wanted to make your Reichstag sufficiently dramatic, didn’t you? You thought the people needed something spectacular to spur them on to blind belligerence. But, quite simply, you went too far. Your New Pearl Harbor is an odious and obvious ploy. I didn’t take the time to look into this until recently.

A close friend of mine is a structural engineer/architect who is employed by a major architectural firm, whose main focus is the design of skyscrapers throughout the world. Over a few beers a few months ago, he told me that the official story of 911 is no just a little skewed, but a titanic contortion of the laws of thermodynamics and the physical principals of engineering. Soon thereafter, I started to investigate on my own; and as the days and weeks progress, so does my anger and apoplexy.

As far as I and many millions of others are concerned, you are a criminally negligent enterprise; as the duty to pursue Truth is magnified by your proximity to the perfidy. This movement is growing at an exponential clip, and your problems are only exacerbated by the disinformation you espouse. Do not beseech the heavens or bemoan the death throes of traditional journalism; you have only yourselves to blame for your demise. The reason individuals search out alternative sources for news is because there are far better sources for news.

I commend you, you editors of THE NEW PRAVDA TIMES, you have sewn the seeds of your own destruction through your contempt for your readers and your disdain of duty. I wish you nothing but the worst.

“all the plans of mice and men...”


Sincerely,

Seth Gentry

The Way, The Hope and The Light

"Light came into the world; but men preferred the darkness instead"

Way down in the heart of Dixie, righteous indignation and self-satisfied piety are passionately proffered in the stead of thoughtful political discourse. It’s not difficult to demonstrate the fact that we’re sacrificing our wallets and well being to the rhetoric of ‘values’; we’ll ruefully concede, shake our head, peer off into the heavens, invoke some bit of scripture, and imbue the words ‘abortion’ and ‘homosexuality’ with all the gravity we can muster. But I have a bit of scripture, too, “ye shall know them by their fruits”.

What are the fruits of the Republican Party’s family tree? Can it be likened to the Tree of Life or the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? What tree yields war, torture, malice toward the poor, materialism, greed, lawlessness, hypocrisy, conspicuous corruption, churlishness, and large scale perfidy? I’m no judge, so I can’t say for sure, but I’d wager that you’ll find a serpent coiled about it. Evidence is, it seems, immaterial. Folks don’t want to confront the reality before them; and when they are forced to face facts, they typically manufacture some frail rationalization, or simply repeat the one they heard the night before on Fox News.

Let’s put it another way, if the Republican party were on trial for being pro life or defenders of our values, would they be found guilty? What evidence, beyond rhetoric, could anyone produce to support the accusation? Even with a Supreme Court stacked with sycophants, both houses of Congress cowed and commanded, most of the governors of the individual states, most appellate courts crammed with conservatives, a sympathetic press corps who has learned not to tamper with the executive, on and on and on. If there were ever a time in which a president could accomplish a pet project, the years immediately following 9/11 were it. What did the values voters get for their hegemony? A superfluous war; wealthy benefactors rewarded with gaudy tax-cuts; incredible debt for the lower and middle classes; the wholesale abandonment of the average man’s interest; collapsing infrastructure; tax CREDITS for big oil in times of record profits; corn-based ethanol for industrial agriculture; civil liberties stolen by fiat; and a broken economy. Nothing for you, pro-lifers…nothing at all.

All these facts and the evidence notwithstanding, Values Voters remain steadfast Republicans. It goes way beyond ‘fool me twice’; these poor saps have been fooled so many times that they’d rather remain wrong – they’re like a mistress who’s been promised and promised and promised, she knows the promises are lies, but she clings to them, whoring herself in favor of confronting a mountain of shame. Hell, they elevated W to the status of demigod; a political pope of sorts. This whole church-state movement had become so pervasive that congregants could not distinguish the one from the other; so for them, abandoning the Republican Party was (is) tantamount to abandoning Christianity itself. All this being said, I am starting to see some significant change.

The winds of a new way are starting to waft through the vaunted ceilings of America’s churches. Unfortunately, the front has not seeped substantially past the Mason-Dixon line. Furthermore and fortunately, as far as the spiritual well-being of America’s Christians is concerned, some of the ‘leaders’ of this big-business-big-government-christianity are starting to pass on; and, hopefully, the long shadow they cast – the darkness that stunted the growth of oh so many – has lifted. I pray for a new kind of Christian leadership in this country; a leadership that keeps its eye on The Cross, one that recognizes politics as a necessary evil, one that doesn’t espouse one party or the other, one that heeds Paul’s advice, “our politics are in heaven”. For you cannot serve God and Mammon…and again, ‘a house divided against itself must fall’.

Faith is the evidence of things not seen.

SG

The Not So Grateful and The Not So Dead

Let me qualify my support for Obama. Let me say that I will try to sustain my support, fully aware of the calamity to come…

I remember an article from the New York Times, or maybe it was The Wall Street Journal, (though I feel it was more likely the latter) the tone in said article was casual; well, maybe ‘casual’ isn’t the right word; it was more like the tone used in those ‘heartwarming’ stories they inevitably wedge in just before the final commercial on Friday night’s newscast. Before describing it, I’ll also say that it was written way back (about a year ago) when Obama was still that guy who gave a superlative speech at Kerry’s convention; still just a young senator from Chicago testing the waters, his brand, or possibly posturing for a vice presidential nomination.

The piece told the story of a young down-and-out, wanna-be rapper from Oakland, who lived out of his car and struggled against moderate to heavy cocaine usage. This hapless hoodlum was skimming along the surface of a tenuous existence when he saw a name that resonated powerfully within. Only this name was a little altered from the more familiar “Barry” Obama; though “Barak” could easily be reconciled to his recognition. Apparently “Barry” had made good; his old brutha had turned a big score; and bruthas being bruthas, it was incumbent that Barry kick down; you know, hook a brutha up. We can safely assume that this very rational dynamic was indeed coursing through this aging scamp’s skull, for he wasted little time in placing a call to Barry’s handlers.

Sadly, Barry was no longer Barry. Barak would not, could not, or hadn’t the time to condescend his august personage down to comfort the poor waif. And ‘comfort’ was clearly defined on the part of the latter; he needed cash, and he needed it right away. In fact, this need was a consistent urgency for nearly fifteen years. Sadly, again, Barry saw fit to sustain this urgent need until such a time as his buddy boned-up, went to Harvard Law, got busy helping otha brutas out, met himself a benefactor (Alert: Rezko is no longer available; there have been some recent ‘developments’ regarding this kind-hearted man), or, failing this, live out his own high-spirited narrative.

Apparently, the disappointment on the part of his old pal was palpable, expecting, as he did, that his old buddy would know why and to what end these desperately needed funds would be applied. Barak was, however, kindly enough to impart an insouciant lecture on boot-strapping; and since lectures are difficult to convert into eight-balls, I suspect Barak’s benevolence was not well-received. I also suspect that this case is not isolated; in fact, I’d guess that it was, for a time, a frequent occurrence – back when Barak’s new name (accompanied by that impossible to forget last name) was freshly bandied about. I wonder how many skeletons are clamoring in that closet.

With Bush’s very extensive cocaine usage, there was less reason to fear. His buddies were drawn from Andover and Yale and Harvard; there would hardly ever be reason for retribution on their part, except in the case of ideological differences, in which case the potential tattlers would likely consider it beneath their dignity to spill the beans. And since some of the colorful characters from Bush’s past (especially a couple of lovers) died or disappeared mysteriously, there was even less reason to fear. James Baker and other Texas titans can handle anything, anything at all. Barak hasn’t any mechanism for such situations, he relies on the good will of others and or ‘hope’ (pause for laughter)…

Faith, hope and love notwithstanding, he still has the press in his pocket, at least most of them. But, no matter how large a majority of media-types Obama has persuaded, there are still Republican journalists – a fair share of them, in fact. And if recent history relative to conservative journalists has taught us anything, it’s that they are bottom-feeders, almost without exception. They not only consent to character assignation, many of them owe their entire career to it. That being said, and knowing that there are at least a half-dozen cases like the one I read itchin for a big payoff, it is only a matter of time before Bill O’Reilly or some such hack has resurrected a specter from Senator Obama’s past.

Brace yourself, America; Barak will be bloodied in the public square. Your golden boy is not 24 karat.

And the kids all laugh and shake their bones/ and the politicians throwin stones/ singing ashes ashes all fall down/ ashes ashes all fall down