In Charles Ortleb's book, The Closing Argument, he chronicles the trial of a Black man accused to have attempted murder by spreading the HIV virus through unprotected sex and puts the HIV-AIDS theory on trial by challenging the science behind it. Ortleb was the publisher of The New York Native, a writer, and printed many of the early dissident pieces from Celia Farber, who recently released Serious Adverse Events about the controversies surrounding the invention of HIV as a deadly virus.
Australia in 2006 has brought fiction to reality. An Australian, Andre Chad Parenzee, 35, has been convicted of endangering the lives of three female sex partners with whom he had "unprotected" sex. Like the lawyer in Ortleb's novella, Parenzee's lawyer turns the tables on the government's case by putting a huge question mark next to HIV's potency as a killer virus.
A recent story in The Australian provides some details.
It has been horrifying enough that sex between men is demonized and found yet another rationale to be curbed, chained, proscribed, then outright made illegal - isn't it ironic while we pretend to celebrate gay rights, we demonize gay sexuality unless it strives for "marriage" rights! But if straights are to be also convicted of the kind of sex their parents and grandparents performed, we have truly entered a tortured musical comedy.
The judge in the trial has just set aside the conviction to put essentially HIV on trial. Dr. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a noted HIV dissident, has been flown in as an expert witness. She has been asked if HIV causes AIDS and replied in an interview that there was no such proof, and she proceeds to lay out her counter-argument.
Dr. Eleni is not alone among those in the scientific community who, from the infamous 1984 Press Conference, has resisted the HIV-AIDS link. David Rasnick is another. But the most famous is a former star and National Academy of Sciences member, Univ. of California researcher, Peter Duesberg.
25 October 2006
The Fraud Behind US Elections
I remember growing up as a political junkie, intrigued with the drama of debates, and watching the televised presidential debates. These debates were always sponsored by what was to my young mind a strange group, The League of Women Voters. To me it sounded like a militia of warrior women defending the election system.
Whatever they were, this League crumbled when sponsorship was taken from them by the financiers of the US two-party junta.
It did not actually begin wth H. Ross Perot's invitation to join the debates, but that was the straw on the two-parties' back. The problem stirred with the historical challenge posed by Dr. Lenora Fulani, socialist, early gay-rights advocate, feminist, and presidential candidate from the New Alliance Party [in some states, aka Peace & Freedom Party]. Fulani had qualified from 1980 onward for Federal matching funds, had qualified to appear on the ballots of all 50 states, and yet was ignored by mainstream media.
She challenged the League of Women Voters to invite her to join the presidential debates, and the League refused with some garbage about her percentages not being high enough.
Enter Perot. His percentages met the League requirements, so to the chagrin of the two-party elite, he made his famous appearance between tweedle dee and tweedle dummer. But it would be the last time.
In a coups, the Democratic and Republican Parties snatched the historic debates from the League and created the Commission on Presidential Debates, which we have to this day. It should have been called the Commission to Keep the Two-Party System, because it assured no other party would grace the stage and be known to masses of people ever again.
This is YOUR democracy.
I tell this story because as we approach another election in a few weeks, we are stuck in the old narrative on national, state, and local levels.
Why bother voting when the choices given us at that critical point have been pre-screened and pre-weeded by interests diametrically opposed to working people and the poor? Fidel, after the Cuban Revolution, 1959, promised to hold elections. But when he saw what the US was planning by heavily funding candidates who would give Cuban lands back to the US, the revolutionary government cancelled the elections: he noted, in the 2nd Declaration of Havana, what elections in the West actually are: ways for the US, the monopolies, and Cuba's ruling class to offer versions of their policies and the people given the indignity to ratify them. To what end? Not to the benefit of working people certainly.
Interestingly, when Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega pondered whether to hold elections in the late 1980's after 10 years of bloody US-backed Contra war, Fidel cautioned him what would happen, and certainly did happen. The US CIA flooded Violeta Chamorro's election coffer with millions of dollars, and she handily beat Ortega and plunged Nicaragua's poor into pre-revolution poverty.
I hope Iraq's dissidents are taking note as the US tries to bring democracy there.
Green Party and Socialist Party USA candidates are being ignored by the press and excluded from televised debates all over the US. They are told that they are not known, they are told that people usually vote for Democrats or Republicans so their presence would be a distraction, they are told they are not polling high enough to qualify.
Peter Camejo, Green Party gubernatorial candidate in California, is a member of a party which has polled high enough to be recognized by California's Secretary of State [the Socialist Party USA has not]; he polled third in the infamous run-off between Schwarzenegger and Grey Davis ... and yet, he will not be covered, has not been covered by the press, and was not allowed into the debate between the current Republican governor and Democrat Phil Angelides.
Meanwhile, we are in a state of angst about Electronic Voting Machines, worried that our votes might not be fairly counted, demanding a paper receipt.
So what if they are or aren't counted when what we are being offered to vote for has been pre-treated and homogenized by corporate interests and ruling elites?
Why vote at all? Moreover, why vote when we apparently have no democracy in which to participate? I think it was Emma Goldman who said that Voting was the Opiate of the masses, and that every 4 years they doped themselves.
I cannot think of any significant social movement won at a ballot box: the abolition of chattel slavery, voting rights for women, the 8-hour work day, the minimum wage ... not even the end of the British colony soon to be known as the United States of America. None came to us by ballot but by struggle and organizing and war.
Whatever they were, this League crumbled when sponsorship was taken from them by the financiers of the US two-party junta.
It did not actually begin wth H. Ross Perot's invitation to join the debates, but that was the straw on the two-parties' back. The problem stirred with the historical challenge posed by Dr. Lenora Fulani, socialist, early gay-rights advocate, feminist, and presidential candidate from the New Alliance Party [in some states, aka Peace & Freedom Party]. Fulani had qualified from 1980 onward for Federal matching funds, had qualified to appear on the ballots of all 50 states, and yet was ignored by mainstream media.
She challenged the League of Women Voters to invite her to join the presidential debates, and the League refused with some garbage about her percentages not being high enough.
Enter Perot. His percentages met the League requirements, so to the chagrin of the two-party elite, he made his famous appearance between tweedle dee and tweedle dummer. But it would be the last time.
In a coups, the Democratic and Republican Parties snatched the historic debates from the League and created the Commission on Presidential Debates, which we have to this day. It should have been called the Commission to Keep the Two-Party System, because it assured no other party would grace the stage and be known to masses of people ever again.
This is YOUR democracy.
I tell this story because as we approach another election in a few weeks, we are stuck in the old narrative on national, state, and local levels.
Why bother voting when the choices given us at that critical point have been pre-screened and pre-weeded by interests diametrically opposed to working people and the poor? Fidel, after the Cuban Revolution, 1959, promised to hold elections. But when he saw what the US was planning by heavily funding candidates who would give Cuban lands back to the US, the revolutionary government cancelled the elections: he noted, in the 2nd Declaration of Havana, what elections in the West actually are: ways for the US, the monopolies, and Cuba's ruling class to offer versions of their policies and the people given the indignity to ratify them. To what end? Not to the benefit of working people certainly.
Interestingly, when Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega pondered whether to hold elections in the late 1980's after 10 years of bloody US-backed Contra war, Fidel cautioned him what would happen, and certainly did happen. The US CIA flooded Violeta Chamorro's election coffer with millions of dollars, and she handily beat Ortega and plunged Nicaragua's poor into pre-revolution poverty.
I hope Iraq's dissidents are taking note as the US tries to bring democracy there.
Green Party and Socialist Party USA candidates are being ignored by the press and excluded from televised debates all over the US. They are told that they are not known, they are told that people usually vote for Democrats or Republicans so their presence would be a distraction, they are told they are not polling high enough to qualify.
Peter Camejo, Green Party gubernatorial candidate in California, is a member of a party which has polled high enough to be recognized by California's Secretary of State [the Socialist Party USA has not]; he polled third in the infamous run-off between Schwarzenegger and Grey Davis ... and yet, he will not be covered, has not been covered by the press, and was not allowed into the debate between the current Republican governor and Democrat Phil Angelides.
Meanwhile, we are in a state of angst about Electronic Voting Machines, worried that our votes might not be fairly counted, demanding a paper receipt.
So what if they are or aren't counted when what we are being offered to vote for has been pre-treated and homogenized by corporate interests and ruling elites?
Why vote at all? Moreover, why vote when we apparently have no democracy in which to participate? I think it was Emma Goldman who said that Voting was the Opiate of the masses, and that every 4 years they doped themselves.
I cannot think of any significant social movement won at a ballot box: the abolition of chattel slavery, voting rights for women, the 8-hour work day, the minimum wage ... not even the end of the British colony soon to be known as the United States of America. None came to us by ballot but by struggle and organizing and war.
17 October 2006
Obama, another rising and falling star ... so no blinking!
This love fest for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is interesting in that we who read history know that we have been here before, presented with a minority darling of whom we are amazed at his intelligence. The outcome to these careers is predictable. White America, by whom we really mean CORPORATE US (The CU), since whites and especially poor whites have nothing to do with this and are as forgotten a species as anyone in the working class, love this Black man who embraces the Middle. Colin Powell is preceived as another MIDDLE lover. The CU think they can safely back and fund this ethnic minority who won't tread on their tax breaks or on the role of the US government in the commercial world - their role is to open doors and where they don't open to bomb them open. This, while giving crafty lip service to the poor, is THE MIDDLE.
Where the CU err time and time and time again since Jacksonian Democracy in the US, and the Great Reform ACT in the UK, when the rabble had to be contended with for votes[!] is that Obama constituency - Blacks, minorities, progressives, the poor - will be dazzled by him at first, seeing him as one of them, but they will quickly find him more an active member of the CU and an honorary member of the Wage-Slave, beholden to the CU, making excuses for the CU and sticking it to the poor.
The poor will abandon him, his legitimacy will fall, and there goes his public career. He will remain a senator and get fat or become a senior fellow at a bourgeoise think-tank, and in between head an "Initiative" to solve some global crisis.
Fidel broke through this dilemma down pretty handily a year after the Cuban Revolution, 1959. He said he could have abandoned the reasons for the revolution for accommodation with the plantation owners and the US embassy or he could have done we he had to do to keep his promise to change Cuban society. This change could not come from United Fruit or the US military, so since both had lost both were asked to leave. Obama will not do this
Where the CU err time and time and time again since Jacksonian Democracy in the US, and the Great Reform ACT in the UK, when the rabble had to be contended with for votes[!] is that Obama constituency - Blacks, minorities, progressives, the poor - will be dazzled by him at first, seeing him as one of them, but they will quickly find him more an active member of the CU and an honorary member of the Wage-Slave, beholden to the CU, making excuses for the CU and sticking it to the poor.
The poor will abandon him, his legitimacy will fall, and there goes his public career. He will remain a senator and get fat or become a senior fellow at a bourgeoise think-tank, and in between head an "Initiative" to solve some global crisis.
Fidel broke through this dilemma down pretty handily a year after the Cuban Revolution, 1959. He said he could have abandoned the reasons for the revolution for accommodation with the plantation owners and the US embassy or he could have done we he had to do to keep his promise to change Cuban society. This change could not come from United Fruit or the US military, so since both had lost both were asked to leave. Obama will not do this
05 October 2006
NAMBLA & Rep. Foley: More Capitalist Collateral Damage
Interestingly, just before news of Congressman Foley's illicit advances toward young high school students, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured a short "expose" on the evils of NAMBLA. I daresay most people outside the above-35 gay male community don't know what NAMBLA is or why I would link it to Foley. NAMBLA is the North American Man Boy Love Association. In my younger years, just coming out, it seemed to get a lot of backpage press in alternative gay news organs - this is like off-off Broadway. Gay rights activists fought with each other whether to include or attack this entity. I remember that Harry Hay, gay civil rights activists and communist, was a lone voice not in supporting NAMBLA, but discouraging attacks from gay men as showing division to the enemy.
Not surprisingly, Oprah with her soccer-mom demographic was livid at the existence of such an organization and wondered why it would be allowed. She was given a lecture by an NBC reporter on the First Amendment: expression is one thing; an act is something else altogether, Oprah.
This seems to be Foley's defense thus far: pointing to his abuse by a church elder and checking himself into alcoholic rehab. He engaged in inappropriate internet chatter. His spokesmen have said he is not a pedophile, that he never had sex with any under-aged boys.
Oprah's Show also featured an NBC journalist who has gained note and ratings for his Dateline NBC: Catch a Predator series, where grown men are caught on camera meeting under-aged boys and girls. When they confess, they all say they have never done this before, never gone to meet an under-aged girl or boy, never had sex with a child.
This is all supposed to disturb us and we snicker as Foley's confession as we do these men who claim never to have done this before. We are supposed to be disturbed by this. It is supposed to be inexcusable, right?
Well, the thing that excuses this sort of behavior is the history of Capitalism. Wherever you have a system which unevenly distributes resources - or doesn't distribute resources at all - you set up a privileged group and another which will be preyed on. Not ironically, we are told to emulate the pirates - the privileged - and despise the prey with all kinds of names, some from the streets and many from the Academy.
This time, the prey are children.
The history of women under Capitalism has been full of predatory acts. The predator was Capitalism and men were its privileged agents. Since women were denied access to wealth - land, income of their own [it was often given to the husband by right] - they had to prositute themselves, whether with tricks or with suitor-gentlemen. In many major US cities, a single woman could not rent an apartment without her father's co-signature within my lifetime. It doesn't really matter on some level how one prostitutes.
While we would like to imagine we come from a long line of lovers, we have to face the reality that most of our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on, and even our own mothers in many parts of the world have to marry predators - men who have been given access to even a small part of wealth where the woman has none.
Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators? She has too many preyed-upons in her audience. Will she expose the crime we do to children by divesting them of rights? Not likely.
My comparison of women to children is in their treatment. Both are marginalized not by Nature but by Law.
By legal definition, a boy has few rights. Beyond this, the boys that NAMBLA seeks are poor ones, Third World ones, who are not only with fewer rights but fewer options. The Congressional pages preyed upon by Foley will statistically go on to College and better jobs and perpetuate this Division, the poor ones will produce children who will have to hustle.
In one segment on The Oprah Show, they are shown on hidden camera to be arranging a trip to Mexico to find boys, and they boast how they money will go further their.
The other side to this is equally sad. In fact, one can go to such places as Mexico and the boys will often offer themselves to you, not for love, but for money, because they have none ... because their governments are corrupt and have taken land and water rights from them to benefit corporations or global agreements.
Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators?
Unfortunately, by legal definition, children are without power. It is over the top for even many socialists to acknowledge the sacred family unit as, like the British monarchy, a feudal institution, and needs remedy before anything meaningful happens. And until we are ready for that remedy, children WILL be preyed on and no law, no speech will stop a congressman, a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a parent from preying on and abusing a child. It's the Power, stupid.
Not surprisingly, Oprah with her soccer-mom demographic was livid at the existence of such an organization and wondered why it would be allowed. She was given a lecture by an NBC reporter on the First Amendment: expression is one thing; an act is something else altogether, Oprah.
This seems to be Foley's defense thus far: pointing to his abuse by a church elder and checking himself into alcoholic rehab. He engaged in inappropriate internet chatter. His spokesmen have said he is not a pedophile, that he never had sex with any under-aged boys.
Oprah's Show also featured an NBC journalist who has gained note and ratings for his Dateline NBC: Catch a Predator series, where grown men are caught on camera meeting under-aged boys and girls. When they confess, they all say they have never done this before, never gone to meet an under-aged girl or boy, never had sex with a child.
This is all supposed to disturb us and we snicker as Foley's confession as we do these men who claim never to have done this before. We are supposed to be disturbed by this. It is supposed to be inexcusable, right?
Well, the thing that excuses this sort of behavior is the history of Capitalism. Wherever you have a system which unevenly distributes resources - or doesn't distribute resources at all - you set up a privileged group and another which will be preyed on. Not ironically, we are told to emulate the pirates - the privileged - and despise the prey with all kinds of names, some from the streets and many from the Academy.
This time, the prey are children.
The history of women under Capitalism has been full of predatory acts. The predator was Capitalism and men were its privileged agents. Since women were denied access to wealth - land, income of their own [it was often given to the husband by right] - they had to prositute themselves, whether with tricks or with suitor-gentlemen. In many major US cities, a single woman could not rent an apartment without her father's co-signature within my lifetime. It doesn't really matter on some level how one prostitutes.
While we would like to imagine we come from a long line of lovers, we have to face the reality that most of our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on, and even our own mothers in many parts of the world have to marry predators - men who have been given access to even a small part of wealth where the woman has none.
Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators? She has too many preyed-upons in her audience. Will she expose the crime we do to children by divesting them of rights? Not likely.
My comparison of women to children is in their treatment. Both are marginalized not by Nature but by Law.
By legal definition, a boy has few rights. Beyond this, the boys that NAMBLA seeks are poor ones, Third World ones, who are not only with fewer rights but fewer options. The Congressional pages preyed upon by Foley will statistically go on to College and better jobs and perpetuate this Division, the poor ones will produce children who will have to hustle.
In one segment on The Oprah Show, they are shown on hidden camera to be arranging a trip to Mexico to find boys, and they boast how they money will go further their.
The other side to this is equally sad. In fact, one can go to such places as Mexico and the boys will often offer themselves to you, not for love, but for money, because they have none ... because their governments are corrupt and have taken land and water rights from them to benefit corporations or global agreements.
Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators?
Unfortunately, by legal definition, children are without power. It is over the top for even many socialists to acknowledge the sacred family unit as, like the British monarchy, a feudal institution, and needs remedy before anything meaningful happens. And until we are ready for that remedy, children WILL be preyed on and no law, no speech will stop a congressman, a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a parent from preying on and abusing a child. It's the Power, stupid.
08 August 2006
31 Reasons Why the US opposes Fidel, Socialism, & The Cuban Revolution
1. overthrew a us-backed dictator, fulgencio batista
2. returned cuban land and mineral resources to the cuban nation
3. in 72 hours repelled a us-backed invasion at Playa Giron [Bay of Pigs]
4. eradicated illiteracy in one year
5. achieved one of the highest kindergarten-9th grade retention rates
6. highest number of school teachers per capita
7. free publically funded education from kindergarten to doctoral studies
8. lowest infant mortality 60 per 1000 in the hemisphere, lower than many US cities
9. increased life expectancy by 15 years with its universal health care system
10. highest number of doctors per capita
11. commercial-free tv, where public-service announcements inform
12. eradicated racist Jim Crow laws imposed on Cuba from the US
13. no paramilitary death squads
14. development of sport and culture
15. supported Algerian nationalists against France
16. supported and sent troops to aid Angola against US-backed apartheid South Africa
17. supplied weapons to Algeria to fight off US-backed Moroccan invasion
18. sent a brigade to aid Syria in defense of the Golan Heights against Israel
19. supported Patrice Lumumba in the Republic of Congo and his supporters
20. supported Congolese freedom fighters against US-backed Mobutu
21. aided in the independence of Portuguese colonies with Amilcar Cabral
22. Cuito Cuanavale!
23. stood in solidarity with the people and struggle of Viet Nam from 1960 on
24. aided economic development of Grenada until US invasion
25. internationalist missions of doctors, technicians, and teachers
26. supported Nelson Mandela when Reagan and Thatcher called him a terrorist.
27. offered and was refused to dispatch first responders after Katrina
28. spoke on behalf of children who do not have even a piece of bread
29. offered political asylum to Black and Puerto Rican activists, like Assata Shakur
30. thwarted 686 CIA assassination attempts made public through US Congress
31. Survived the machinations of Eisenhower, the Kennedy Brothers, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton ... and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover
for these crimes against the new world order, fidel must be punished.
Gracias, Fidel!
2. returned cuban land and mineral resources to the cuban nation
3. in 72 hours repelled a us-backed invasion at Playa Giron [Bay of Pigs]
4. eradicated illiteracy in one year
5. achieved one of the highest kindergarten-9th grade retention rates
6. highest number of school teachers per capita
7. free publically funded education from kindergarten to doctoral studies
8. lowest infant mortality 60 per 1000 in the hemisphere, lower than many US cities
9. increased life expectancy by 15 years with its universal health care system
10. highest number of doctors per capita
11. commercial-free tv, where public-service announcements inform
12. eradicated racist Jim Crow laws imposed on Cuba from the US
13. no paramilitary death squads
14. development of sport and culture
15. supported Algerian nationalists against France
16. supported and sent troops to aid Angola against US-backed apartheid South Africa
17. supplied weapons to Algeria to fight off US-backed Moroccan invasion
18. sent a brigade to aid Syria in defense of the Golan Heights against Israel
19. supported Patrice Lumumba in the Republic of Congo and his supporters
20. supported Congolese freedom fighters against US-backed Mobutu
21. aided in the independence of Portuguese colonies with Amilcar Cabral
22. Cuito Cuanavale!
23. stood in solidarity with the people and struggle of Viet Nam from 1960 on
24. aided economic development of Grenada until US invasion
25. internationalist missions of doctors, technicians, and teachers
26. supported Nelson Mandela when Reagan and Thatcher called him a terrorist.
27. offered and was refused to dispatch first responders after Katrina
28. spoke on behalf of children who do not have even a piece of bread
29. offered political asylum to Black and Puerto Rican activists, like Assata Shakur
30. thwarted 686 CIA assassination attempts made public through US Congress
31. Survived the machinations of Eisenhower, the Kennedy Brothers, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton ... and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover
for these crimes against the new world order, fidel must be punished.
Gracias, Fidel!
21 July 2006
Case Against Israel, Part One
Let me be the first non-candidate on the Left to call for Israel to be packed up and dispersed back to Europe and its small laboring class Ethiopian Jews back to Africa. This farce has gone on quite long enough and added gross injury and death and misery to the horrific, unbelievable crime of the German Nazi Holocaust. There is no justice in Israel's existence. It is as much a thorn in a foreign land as the Dutch settlers in South Africa and resulted in similar crimes. Their present war in Lebanon smells so much like the US war in Guatemala, 1954, where the US claimed to be assaulted and democratic aspirations had to be crushed. Israel is our Hessian.
You will not hear the US political party system saying anything remotely like this. Congress just further proved their uselessness by coming together and passing a resolution supporting Israel's act of war.
So it's not surprising as I write this is a whisper of ground assault trickle into the air.
Israel is not my friend. US administrations are fond of saying this, with deep compassion in their voices. But it is not the 11th commandment that Israel "exist."
Several years ago, to the glee of the West, the Cold War was won and a whole complex Soviet republic disappeared. Since its creation, it has been the thorn of the West, a threat to the West, because it existed, because of its model of socialism-communism. The USSR herself committed errors and atrocities along the way for which is cannot be forgiven either. I never heard a Western politican say the USSR was a friend or that they believed in its existence.
But let us look at the 20th century, that modern world just passed us by, and ask ourselves which country is the more sensible invention: a socialist state or a religious one? One seems to fit into the forward momentum of the world, the sense that resources cannot be horded by a few and the rest be benefitted, or as Socialst Party USA member, Helen Keller, instructed a British friend, votes for women is an afterthought when 90% of Briton's land and wealth is controlled by 10% and the remaining wealth left to the 90%.
The other state seems to take us far backwards, maybe to the 16th century, when religious wars began, the Roman Catholics were splitting up, and lines were being drawn in the sand with blood.
One is the longtime enemy, USSR, and the other is our friend, Israel.
Why Israel? Historically that territory is its home, and the racist persecution by European ruling classes, ruling families, civil society fed their dream of an Eden. But the world is heavy with historical territory, the US being entirely just that, from sea to sea, and heaven help the soccer moms and the land barons when some mighty power decides to replace the USA with the nations of the Cherokee, Choctau, Iroqois, et al, et al.
That too would be absurd. Ethnic states. Religious states. Do these represent steps forward or back into the European-inspired Dark Ages?
Globalization has existed since the slave trade, was part of the slave trade, and was fueled by the slave trade. Cargo. Peoples. For all kinds of reasons, they began moving around, fleeing or in search of something. The face of what was believed to be pure nations dramatically changed. And after all that mixing was well underway, the West, imposes a religious state in the middle of the former Ottoman Empire, its own corpse just buried, a few swim strokes north from Africa.
The world will never except Israel, because it is a nuisance, a non-sequitor, and the resurrection of a time left in history. Though the bankers and investors may since this Frankenstein creation is an anchor to Our Interests, and Evangelicals do because they are eager for the End of the World and Christ's return. That is a subject for part 2.
You will not hear the US political party system saying anything remotely like this. Congress just further proved their uselessness by coming together and passing a resolution supporting Israel's act of war.
So it's not surprising as I write this is a whisper of ground assault trickle into the air.
Israel is not my friend. US administrations are fond of saying this, with deep compassion in their voices. But it is not the 11th commandment that Israel "exist."
Several years ago, to the glee of the West, the Cold War was won and a whole complex Soviet republic disappeared. Since its creation, it has been the thorn of the West, a threat to the West, because it existed, because of its model of socialism-communism. The USSR herself committed errors and atrocities along the way for which is cannot be forgiven either. I never heard a Western politican say the USSR was a friend or that they believed in its existence.
But let us look at the 20th century, that modern world just passed us by, and ask ourselves which country is the more sensible invention: a socialist state or a religious one? One seems to fit into the forward momentum of the world, the sense that resources cannot be horded by a few and the rest be benefitted, or as Socialst Party USA member, Helen Keller, instructed a British friend, votes for women is an afterthought when 90% of Briton's land and wealth is controlled by 10% and the remaining wealth left to the 90%.
The other state seems to take us far backwards, maybe to the 16th century, when religious wars began, the Roman Catholics were splitting up, and lines were being drawn in the sand with blood.
One is the longtime enemy, USSR, and the other is our friend, Israel.
Why Israel? Historically that territory is its home, and the racist persecution by European ruling classes, ruling families, civil society fed their dream of an Eden. But the world is heavy with historical territory, the US being entirely just that, from sea to sea, and heaven help the soccer moms and the land barons when some mighty power decides to replace the USA with the nations of the Cherokee, Choctau, Iroqois, et al, et al.
That too would be absurd. Ethnic states. Religious states. Do these represent steps forward or back into the European-inspired Dark Ages?
Globalization has existed since the slave trade, was part of the slave trade, and was fueled by the slave trade. Cargo. Peoples. For all kinds of reasons, they began moving around, fleeing or in search of something. The face of what was believed to be pure nations dramatically changed. And after all that mixing was well underway, the West, imposes a religious state in the middle of the former Ottoman Empire, its own corpse just buried, a few swim strokes north from Africa.
The world will never except Israel, because it is a nuisance, a non-sequitor, and the resurrection of a time left in history. Though the bankers and investors may since this Frankenstein creation is an anchor to Our Interests, and Evangelicals do because they are eager for the End of the World and Christ's return. That is a subject for part 2.
28 June 2006
Why George W Thinks He's a KING
A comment GW Bush made early in his presidency bothered me. Then he repeated it a few months later, and it bothered me much more. He said that politics would be easier if he were a dictator, but that he wasn't.
As the economy dipped further into the royal dungeon, I waited for the man who'd been handed the election by the US Supreme Court to do something dictator-like. Then, as Lincoln would say, the war came ... 9/11.
Bush has attacked the press, dared say it should shut up about what he's doing, tested the limits and crossed the lines of Congressional statutes, exposed secret agents, jailed journalists, and is now investigating a famous newspaper.
This strikes liberals as odd, leftists as treasonous, and even many on the right get tongue-tied trying to defend this strange man.
But all we need to do is look at our biggest ally and friend, our lieutenant in arms, as Gore Vidal called the island/aircraft carrier: The United Kingdom.
The UK is a constitutional monarchy. The Executive Branch, legally headed by the Queen, conventionally guided by the prime minister, has enormous wiggle room to do what it pleases without input from its legislator under something called the Royal Prerogative. War can be waged in the Falklands, and Parliament not consulted at all. It was eerie for a person in the US to watch members of Parliament ask Tony Blair if they'd be allowed to debate an Iraqi Misadventure.
This mini-lesson in the ancient royal prerogative explains GW's open contempt for the law in general and the press in particular. Bush believes he has magically, despite the US Constitution, inherited these divine rights of kings.
Day to day, the queen no longer exercises this ancient prerogative, but the prime minister does in her name. The Royal Prerogative extends to war powers, like Iraq. Peace terms. Treaties. Trade. Coinage. Diplomats. The prison system. Even when Parliament opens and when it closes. Which men and women comprise HER government. No law becomes a law without the queen's approval, not by signing her name but with the flourish la reine le veult.
The press has fewer liberties than it does in the US. The press can be restricted from reporting certain information.
Parliament, in case you didn't know, is to raise money for the Executive. The purse in modern days is the only pull the legislature would have on an executive with theoretical unlimited power. A decent legislature would use this pull. A cowardly one would buckle every time to whatever whim of the Executive Branch. Where a legislature was cowardly you might hope for an independent courts system to stand up to the Executive. Even in the UK, there is a measure of judicial review as far back as the 1600's
The US Congress is a coward. Ot is not just a purse. It is an independent branch. And it has allowed, from the appointment of George Bush to all its bluster and no bite over every abuse committed by his presidency.
It is no longer far-fetched that we may, at this rate, elect a man who would declare himself president for life and lay his hands on his favorite son as heir and our Congress knock each other over to support him.
One of White House counsel's infamous memos to the effect embraced the history of common law as giving the president his powers. Common Law. In case you didn't know this was a royal invention of Henry II where he sought to have law applied equitably in the kingdom by travelling from town to town and holding court to adjudicate.
As the economy dipped further into the royal dungeon, I waited for the man who'd been handed the election by the US Supreme Court to do something dictator-like. Then, as Lincoln would say, the war came ... 9/11.
Bush has attacked the press, dared say it should shut up about what he's doing, tested the limits and crossed the lines of Congressional statutes, exposed secret agents, jailed journalists, and is now investigating a famous newspaper.
This strikes liberals as odd, leftists as treasonous, and even many on the right get tongue-tied trying to defend this strange man.
But all we need to do is look at our biggest ally and friend, our lieutenant in arms, as Gore Vidal called the island/aircraft carrier: The United Kingdom.
The UK is a constitutional monarchy. The Executive Branch, legally headed by the Queen, conventionally guided by the prime minister, has enormous wiggle room to do what it pleases without input from its legislator under something called the Royal Prerogative. War can be waged in the Falklands, and Parliament not consulted at all. It was eerie for a person in the US to watch members of Parliament ask Tony Blair if they'd be allowed to debate an Iraqi Misadventure.
This mini-lesson in the ancient royal prerogative explains GW's open contempt for the law in general and the press in particular. Bush believes he has magically, despite the US Constitution, inherited these divine rights of kings.
Day to day, the queen no longer exercises this ancient prerogative, but the prime minister does in her name. The Royal Prerogative extends to war powers, like Iraq. Peace terms. Treaties. Trade. Coinage. Diplomats. The prison system. Even when Parliament opens and when it closes. Which men and women comprise HER government. No law becomes a law without the queen's approval, not by signing her name but with the flourish la reine le veult.
The press has fewer liberties than it does in the US. The press can be restricted from reporting certain information.
Parliament, in case you didn't know, is to raise money for the Executive. The purse in modern days is the only pull the legislature would have on an executive with theoretical unlimited power. A decent legislature would use this pull. A cowardly one would buckle every time to whatever whim of the Executive Branch. Where a legislature was cowardly you might hope for an independent courts system to stand up to the Executive. Even in the UK, there is a measure of judicial review as far back as the 1600's
The US Congress is a coward. Ot is not just a purse. It is an independent branch. And it has allowed, from the appointment of George Bush to all its bluster and no bite over every abuse committed by his presidency.
It is no longer far-fetched that we may, at this rate, elect a man who would declare himself president for life and lay his hands on his favorite son as heir and our Congress knock each other over to support him.
One of White House counsel's infamous memos to the effect embraced the history of common law as giving the president his powers. Common Law. In case you didn't know this was a royal invention of Henry II where he sought to have law applied equitably in the kingdom by travelling from town to town and holding court to adjudicate.
21 June 2006
Angelina Jolie, Refugees, & The Politics of Easy Answers
Actors are often not the best personalities to help us frame social issues. I don't know why this seems so, but whether it be a conservative Mel Gibson or a liberal Susan Sarandon or the irony of ironies of a life-long dope addict like Liz Taylor stomping for AIDS money, Hollywood, like its movies, can only deal best with the shallowest aspect of our world. British actress, Glenda Jackson, found the best remedy for this simplicity was to give up acting and join a socialist political party, where she today sits in Parliament. Angelina Jolie, whom I would like to play Wonder Woman if Hollywood would tire of re-makes of Superman, is stomping for the world's refugees. She herself orchestrated an interview on CNN. She has also made a name for herself adopting Third World children. And true to Hollywood form, we are getting a global pandemic framed in the most narrow way, which limits the questions we ask and the solutions we propose.
This is not Jolie's fault. The UN has a World Refugee Day. It does not have a World Dispossessed of Land Day. The UN has a Children's Fund. It does not have an agency for parents. Paulo Freire began his literacy lessons with the words "The Land belongs to the tiller." Jolie needs a lesson from the Brazilian educator, Freire.
So in light of our attention being drawn to the sorrowful plight of refugees and the needs of babies in need of food, water, and love I would like to pose some fundamental questions outside the range book-ended with dire need and Jolie herself.
[1] If these are Refugees, why aren't we asking where their homes are, their lands, their farms?
[2] Where are the parents of these orphans, and if they are no longer on this earth, where are the grandparents, aunts, uncles?
Where is the land? Some farm land in the Third World has become unfarmable. This is due to a combination of really bad colonial farming practices imposed for decades upon decades by imperial powers to extract as much wealth as fast as possible without regard to the health of the soil.
Bad land is also due to bad farming by peasant farmers themselves. You might argue they learned these worst practices from their Masters, but who knows: you can't write a law and make bad clay into good soil, so there's no use crying over that split milk.
But much of the land of the dispossessed has been confiscated by Third World governments beholden to Western Capital. They have debts to pay or they want financing, and this comes with Strings, and the Strings are to sell this, sell that, end government ownership of public utilities and allow private, Western companies to take them. And these Third World governments have used their militaries and their thugs to drive people off susbsistence farmlands to sell the rights to that land for global purposes.
Enter your refugees, framed narrowly by the camps on one side and Angelina Jolie on the other.
Orphans are just the middle step child of the Refugee Crisis. While you certainly can pinpoint cases of whole families being wiped out save a baby, these cases are the exception. What is happening is that these families - be they mother and/or father and/or grandparents - simply cannot afford another mouth to feed, since their land has been taken and they are dispersed hither and yonder in various encampments across the former colonial world. Their water rights privatized and sold to Western interests. They are no longer just poor, they are destitute, and a murderous band of thugs is at their heels driving them away from their real estate. Look at Sudan.
Look at MEXICO. The Mexican government and ruling class removed the land rights citation from the Mexican Constitution in the 1980's. Pres. Salinas signed it. It was this action that sparked the organization of the Zapatista Movement. It also drove subsistent, poorly educated farm people off their land, into the cities, where they faired no better, and eventually into the streets of the US, where they now ask for RIGHTS.
Refugees do not come from the Heavens. They come from political decisions. These aren't Refugee Crises or Orphans at all, but people being starved from the source of their lives, people who are being dropped further down the scale of the Capitalist Food Chain.
Ambassador Jolie's advocacy for them, her pleas for money, does not end that Food Chain or raise their place on it. Oscar Wilde once said you cannot end poverty by keeping the poor alive; just so, why are we fundraising to keep these desert camps operating, by definition based in areas that are unfarmable and unsaleable.
So we are evolving into a system where Poor Farmers have no land to sow, Third World women can no longer care for their babies, where Third World families cannot even give the basics, not because of some Natural Disaster but because of a Man-made one.
And Betchel's stock rises as it secures even the rights to RAIN WATER in South America!
This is not Jolie's fault. The UN has a World Refugee Day. It does not have a World Dispossessed of Land Day. The UN has a Children's Fund. It does not have an agency for parents. Paulo Freire began his literacy lessons with the words "The Land belongs to the tiller." Jolie needs a lesson from the Brazilian educator, Freire.
So in light of our attention being drawn to the sorrowful plight of refugees and the needs of babies in need of food, water, and love I would like to pose some fundamental questions outside the range book-ended with dire need and Jolie herself.
[1] If these are Refugees, why aren't we asking where their homes are, their lands, their farms?
[2] Where are the parents of these orphans, and if they are no longer on this earth, where are the grandparents, aunts, uncles?
Where is the land? Some farm land in the Third World has become unfarmable. This is due to a combination of really bad colonial farming practices imposed for decades upon decades by imperial powers to extract as much wealth as fast as possible without regard to the health of the soil.
Bad land is also due to bad farming by peasant farmers themselves. You might argue they learned these worst practices from their Masters, but who knows: you can't write a law and make bad clay into good soil, so there's no use crying over that split milk.
But much of the land of the dispossessed has been confiscated by Third World governments beholden to Western Capital. They have debts to pay or they want financing, and this comes with Strings, and the Strings are to sell this, sell that, end government ownership of public utilities and allow private, Western companies to take them. And these Third World governments have used their militaries and their thugs to drive people off susbsistence farmlands to sell the rights to that land for global purposes.
Enter your refugees, framed narrowly by the camps on one side and Angelina Jolie on the other.
Orphans are just the middle step child of the Refugee Crisis. While you certainly can pinpoint cases of whole families being wiped out save a baby, these cases are the exception. What is happening is that these families - be they mother and/or father and/or grandparents - simply cannot afford another mouth to feed, since their land has been taken and they are dispersed hither and yonder in various encampments across the former colonial world. Their water rights privatized and sold to Western interests. They are no longer just poor, they are destitute, and a murderous band of thugs is at their heels driving them away from their real estate. Look at Sudan.
Look at MEXICO. The Mexican government and ruling class removed the land rights citation from the Mexican Constitution in the 1980's. Pres. Salinas signed it. It was this action that sparked the organization of the Zapatista Movement. It also drove subsistent, poorly educated farm people off their land, into the cities, where they faired no better, and eventually into the streets of the US, where they now ask for RIGHTS.
Refugees do not come from the Heavens. They come from political decisions. These aren't Refugee Crises or Orphans at all, but people being starved from the source of their lives, people who are being dropped further down the scale of the Capitalist Food Chain.
Ambassador Jolie's advocacy for them, her pleas for money, does not end that Food Chain or raise their place on it. Oscar Wilde once said you cannot end poverty by keeping the poor alive; just so, why are we fundraising to keep these desert camps operating, by definition based in areas that are unfarmable and unsaleable.
So we are evolving into a system where Poor Farmers have no land to sow, Third World women can no longer care for their babies, where Third World families cannot even give the basics, not because of some Natural Disaster but because of a Man-made one.
And Betchel's stock rises as it secures even the rights to RAIN WATER in South America!
15 June 2006
98 Blacks Out of 4800 [the dark cream of some dark cream of a dark lense]
Ninety-eight select Black undergrads have been selected to join the incoming freshman class at a public university, University of California Los Angeles. Ninety-eight. This is the lowest number admitted to this public university since the early 1970's. The University said it is troubled by the trend and is open to suggestions. One of those publicly backed laws a few years ago prevents them from considering race in their admissions, and they admit to having turned many away as not meeting the criteria.
The Black Civil Rights Gentry have predictably come out and demanded the university bring more in anyway, that the university go back and re-assess those rejected applicants. And so just out of the gate, the discussion looks rigged to frame an education debate outside of ever discussing the state of, direction of, purpose for schooling in the US. Just so, we won't discuss the provocative things in these high school graduates they are letting loose on the streets, in the public name.
We cannot change our schools. Since we are the Greatest Country in the World, why should we? This is the brain-dead logic of an old US Civil War general. Technology has changed for better or worse in Britain's Queen's 50-year reign. At the start of her reign, she could not have imagined being able to eat her cornflakes from tupperware containers. Now she is said to enjoy them very much this way.
Our public schools are stuck in the Industrial Revolution [but so is the British monarchy!] where they no longer just miseducate our children, they are also making mules ... I mean JACKASSES of them. Rather than look at this horrific state of affairs, some want UCLA to re-assess its entry requirements.
We've been at this junction before. Richard Rodriguez, who somewhere must be penning something on this matter, one hopes, which will be ignored, one hopes not, explains what happened at the genesis of the affirmative action movement, circa 1968. Would it be numbers [bean counting, critics later called it] or would it be reforming a bad system that harmed most poor children, Black, white, Latin, Native, Asian?? Rodriguez explains in his HUNGER FOR MEMORY memoir the civil rights hegemony chose Numbers, which guaranteed that those Black children least affected by the ravages of white racism would be culled from the ghetto and placed - alone - in white schools ... where they would exist in some kind of limbo land. The Blacks danced and whites sighed with relief. Limbo meant those Blacks wouldn't go passed Human Resources Captains ... for godsake, don't let them near the Bank!
Our school system, which educator Marva Collins said was a Soviet plot done to ourselves by ourselves without Soviet direction to stupify generations of US children and guarantee that while the USSR had to change, the US ... well, we would remain in the Industrial Age and cause the inevitable fall to be from a higher ledge.
Nobody look down, please!
Don't think the other 4702 undergrads who got in to UCLA are any better off. These kids are schooled dumb but have benefitted from SAT preparation classes at $500 a session.
Los Angeles schools are the worse I have ever seen. People ask me if I think about returning to teaching, but all I need to do is look at the useless social trash these schools are making of a generation of beautiful human souls. Why would I contribute to the Mission of making young men and women socially and economically inept, let alone incapable of getting through the doors of a public university? Fifty percent of the minority kids are reported to not make it through the system. The LA Solution? Build MORE schools.
Isn't General Motors and Ford, the Laurel and Hardy of MBA's, falling ceremoniously apart from adding woe to their misery by producing more recallable steel boxes no one wants to buy?? I guess as GM goes ... but this is a punch line.
The United States slides ever so gently into becoming an international joke. We shall be lucky to pick cotton for the Chinese - the we being the graduating class of 2010 at UCLA, that is.
The Black Civil Rights Gentry have predictably come out and demanded the university bring more in anyway, that the university go back and re-assess those rejected applicants. And so just out of the gate, the discussion looks rigged to frame an education debate outside of ever discussing the state of, direction of, purpose for schooling in the US. Just so, we won't discuss the provocative things in these high school graduates they are letting loose on the streets, in the public name.
We cannot change our schools. Since we are the Greatest Country in the World, why should we? This is the brain-dead logic of an old US Civil War general. Technology has changed for better or worse in Britain's Queen's 50-year reign. At the start of her reign, she could not have imagined being able to eat her cornflakes from tupperware containers. Now she is said to enjoy them very much this way.
Our public schools are stuck in the Industrial Revolution [but so is the British monarchy!] where they no longer just miseducate our children, they are also making mules ... I mean JACKASSES of them. Rather than look at this horrific state of affairs, some want UCLA to re-assess its entry requirements.
We've been at this junction before. Richard Rodriguez, who somewhere must be penning something on this matter, one hopes, which will be ignored, one hopes not, explains what happened at the genesis of the affirmative action movement, circa 1968. Would it be numbers [bean counting, critics later called it] or would it be reforming a bad system that harmed most poor children, Black, white, Latin, Native, Asian?? Rodriguez explains in his HUNGER FOR MEMORY memoir the civil rights hegemony chose Numbers, which guaranteed that those Black children least affected by the ravages of white racism would be culled from the ghetto and placed - alone - in white schools ... where they would exist in some kind of limbo land. The Blacks danced and whites sighed with relief. Limbo meant those Blacks wouldn't go passed Human Resources Captains ... for godsake, don't let them near the Bank!
Our school system, which educator Marva Collins said was a Soviet plot done to ourselves by ourselves without Soviet direction to stupify generations of US children and guarantee that while the USSR had to change, the US ... well, we would remain in the Industrial Age and cause the inevitable fall to be from a higher ledge.
Nobody look down, please!
Don't think the other 4702 undergrads who got in to UCLA are any better off. These kids are schooled dumb but have benefitted from SAT preparation classes at $500 a session.
Los Angeles schools are the worse I have ever seen. People ask me if I think about returning to teaching, but all I need to do is look at the useless social trash these schools are making of a generation of beautiful human souls. Why would I contribute to the Mission of making young men and women socially and economically inept, let alone incapable of getting through the doors of a public university? Fifty percent of the minority kids are reported to not make it through the system. The LA Solution? Build MORE schools.
Isn't General Motors and Ford, the Laurel and Hardy of MBA's, falling ceremoniously apart from adding woe to their misery by producing more recallable steel boxes no one wants to buy?? I guess as GM goes ... but this is a punch line.
The United States slides ever so gently into becoming an international joke. We shall be lucky to pick cotton for the Chinese - the we being the graduating class of 2010 at UCLA, that is.
07 June 2006
Dateline: NBC reveals the US Police State [Child "Predators," & The US Penal Mentality]
NBC News Dateline and Chris Hansen have scored top ratings for their stings "To Catch a Predator" in which they trap Internet child predators on camera. Most of us don't condone adult sex with children - altho a recent spat of blonde female schoolteachers jaunting with their young boy students is looked upon as another case of boys will always be boys, even celebrated in a Charles-&-Diana-style interview on Larry King's CNN broadcast. Men as the adults in these realtions is viewed more serious, and the public has enjoyed watching man after man get scooped up on prime time.
Yet, I remain very troubled by this version of tv justice. Maybe it's the vast array of people from all walks of life. Actors. Clergy. Teachers. Government employees. Upper-end white-collar managers. These can be jaw-dropping moments as we scale the upper end of the class system. The poor are inbred anyway, so we expect nasty behavior from them. Ruthlessly, what we don't conclude about our social codes from this multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-class parade is troubling. When I was a first-year school teacher, I often made class rules out of a sense of frustration. Invariably, they didn't work: like, demanding absolute silence for silence sake. This is corrosive to a class. You learn as a teacher never to make a rule you cannot enforce. When rules were obviously ludicrous, a product of my naivete, the answer was not to come down harder on the rule but to do away with it and find a new way. Just so, such social codes that make masses of people criminals are equally corrosive to the community: as much as we think we know what child predators look like and have strong social rules against it, that people from literally all walks of life have been caught in NBC's sting should demand, finally, a frank discussion of sex in our society. I found it odd that these men, driving long hours to break the law, cross a line, would bring condoms. There are things here we need to discuss.
But we will not discuss anything, and this is the other most troubling thing about these programs. We enjoy watching the fantasy of the police getting their man, event after event. In the Florida shoot, the police routinely tackle the men the ground in the denouement. Nowhere in the program do we get a sociologist or psychologist speaking to any context of this problem, this crime. We have been trained not to care. We have not, thus far, even gotten a defense lawyer's stand on behalf of their clients: we do not care. This is liberal crap. What would a trial serve since these perverts are clearly guilty? This is the skew of these very, very disruptive programs: show an infraction in a social code which needs to be re-examined and then show the solution in the arms of the police force. Welcome to the makings of a police state.
Yet, I remain very troubled by this version of tv justice. Maybe it's the vast array of people from all walks of life. Actors. Clergy. Teachers. Government employees. Upper-end white-collar managers. These can be jaw-dropping moments as we scale the upper end of the class system. The poor are inbred anyway, so we expect nasty behavior from them. Ruthlessly, what we don't conclude about our social codes from this multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-class parade is troubling. When I was a first-year school teacher, I often made class rules out of a sense of frustration. Invariably, they didn't work: like, demanding absolute silence for silence sake. This is corrosive to a class. You learn as a teacher never to make a rule you cannot enforce. When rules were obviously ludicrous, a product of my naivete, the answer was not to come down harder on the rule but to do away with it and find a new way. Just so, such social codes that make masses of people criminals are equally corrosive to the community: as much as we think we know what child predators look like and have strong social rules against it, that people from literally all walks of life have been caught in NBC's sting should demand, finally, a frank discussion of sex in our society. I found it odd that these men, driving long hours to break the law, cross a line, would bring condoms. There are things here we need to discuss.
But we will not discuss anything, and this is the other most troubling thing about these programs. We enjoy watching the fantasy of the police getting their man, event after event. In the Florida shoot, the police routinely tackle the men the ground in the denouement. Nowhere in the program do we get a sociologist or psychologist speaking to any context of this problem, this crime. We have been trained not to care. We have not, thus far, even gotten a defense lawyer's stand on behalf of their clients: we do not care. This is liberal crap. What would a trial serve since these perverts are clearly guilty? This is the skew of these very, very disruptive programs: show an infraction in a social code which needs to be re-examined and then show the solution in the arms of the police force. Welcome to the makings of a police state.
04 June 2006
News Release: GAYS NOT THE CAUSE OF HIV [another typical whitewashed western redemption tale]
The whole point of a story circulating on the web, that Gays are not the cause of HIV, but rather Africa is not just the propaganda purposes to keep saying AIDS effects us all, when demonstrably it has not after 25 years; the purpose to this story is also to heap more blame on the Dark Continent, a popular and convenient receptacle: a heathen hunter/gatherer and a green monkey! And we are to believe that from this strange consummation in some other epoch, believable only and uniquely because it is AFRICA, gay men in major urban areas began a preciptous dropping off like flies in 1981.
These scientists admit to a great many holes in their theory, a great many unknowns, yet they are comfortable putting this nonsense forward probably because it plays on the West's established stereotypes about Africa. And we all know Black men are sexual predators. Unfortunately in present day, poorly educated US, Whites as much as Blacks are prone to give in to these racist assumptions. Remember the AFRICANIZED bees, courtesy not of Ghana or Angola but rather Central America?!
Another hole: why didn't the colonial masters of these African colonies get impacted first and disproportionately? The Belgians. The French. The British. They were right there at ground zero, probably bareback raping African women and African men. Why then the US, which had no colonies in Africa, and why gay men? The scientists are stupefied. No matter: blame Africa.
We have left the corridors of science long ago and have been asked to participate in Magical Thinking, not the exemplary kind of a Garcia Marquez but a remedial kind like Uncle Remus.
HIV, whatever it might be, it does not cause AIDS. That it may or may not exist in human beings along with countless other microbes the ORIGINS of which we do not yet know demonstrates how little we know at all. That HIV - and every other germ - can affect without infect is widely demonstrable: that is science 101. That AIDS happens with or without HIV is also widely demonstrable.
Ergo ... The "cause" of HIV is probably an unimportant. The cause of death, critical. It is nice for some that a coroner can list AIDS on a death certificate now and loved ones have no idea what KILLED their son, daughter, mother, father. Nice, too, that we can train our eyes off the cause of misery in the swath of the globe where these deaths occur: the colonies and its children, the poor, the outcast. Globalization that has judiciously taken lands and water rights and plunged the poor into destitution is not the Cause of Death. It is AIDS, AIDS, AIDS.
These scientists admit to a great many holes in their theory, a great many unknowns, yet they are comfortable putting this nonsense forward probably because it plays on the West's established stereotypes about Africa. And we all know Black men are sexual predators. Unfortunately in present day, poorly educated US, Whites as much as Blacks are prone to give in to these racist assumptions. Remember the AFRICANIZED bees, courtesy not of Ghana or Angola but rather Central America?!
Another hole: why didn't the colonial masters of these African colonies get impacted first and disproportionately? The Belgians. The French. The British. They were right there at ground zero, probably bareback raping African women and African men. Why then the US, which had no colonies in Africa, and why gay men? The scientists are stupefied. No matter: blame Africa.
We have left the corridors of science long ago and have been asked to participate in Magical Thinking, not the exemplary kind of a Garcia Marquez but a remedial kind like Uncle Remus.
HIV, whatever it might be, it does not cause AIDS. That it may or may not exist in human beings along with countless other microbes the ORIGINS of which we do not yet know demonstrates how little we know at all. That HIV - and every other germ - can affect without infect is widely demonstrable: that is science 101. That AIDS happens with or without HIV is also widely demonstrable.
Ergo ... The "cause" of HIV is probably an unimportant. The cause of death, critical. It is nice for some that a coroner can list AIDS on a death certificate now and loved ones have no idea what KILLED their son, daughter, mother, father. Nice, too, that we can train our eyes off the cause of misery in the swath of the globe where these deaths occur: the colonies and its children, the poor, the outcast. Globalization that has judiciously taken lands and water rights and plunged the poor into destitution is not the Cause of Death. It is AIDS, AIDS, AIDS.
31 May 2006
The Age of AIDS Revisionism [or, Frontline does David Lean one better]
Frontline's production, The Age of AIDS, was only interesting in how it revisted a chronology many of us have forgotten. It offered visuals to events I was too young to witness so added a dimension to history, maybe like being able to see Queen Elizabeth I recite her Tilbury speech to troops fighting Spain. But it glossed over shamelessly the historical record. Not mine, theirs. Like, those early patients, whom the doctors were quoted as saying were healthy one day and sick the next with PCP pnuemonias. Really? Their own literature documents these gay men had had multiple std infections, were drug users, including poppers [amyl nitrates, implicated in Kaposi Sarcoma], and had had regular treatments of antibiotics. These are not immune builders but toxins. So keep in mind this is what "their" doctors describe as healthy. They truly white washed the AZT controversy: yes it was developed in the 50's as a cancer treatment, but they failed to tell us why it was not on the market from the 1950's to the 1980's: its toxicity. Apparently it was bad for the general population but just fine for gay men. At any rate, their own studies report that AZT disproportionately ill-effected BLACK men. This was also not said. There were no doctors like the ones I have come across who use terms like "kill" and "murder" when they express remorse about administering AZT to any patient. There were none of the other scientists at all actually. Injection drug use was casually referenced but never linked from the LA beginning to Thailand to the former Soviet bloc where AIDS is allegedly rising. Needles. Could it be what's IN the needles and not the needles themselves? The April 1984 news conference with Secy of Health Margaret Heckler is the stuff of legend. It was unprecedented since at that juncture, no consensus had been formed as to the cause of AIDS, more scientists than the Gallo and Montaigner were trying to solve this riddle, yet there she was literally choking on her words with the controversial Dr Gallo at her side. I had often referred to and read about that news conference, and last night got to see it for the first time. Then there was the overshadowing character, much like the expansive and overwhelming desert was in "Lawrence of Arabia," of AFRICA. AFRICA The Sinister. The Dark Continent. From beginning to end, the lone hunter/gatherer in the bush and his strange ways with the green monkeys. Those monkeys. Savages!! I realized the empire is a weak sickly thing that can only rely on pushing old buttons to weave its ridiculous tales. One wonders at this point if the germ theory - barely a hundred years old - has any credibility. I am close to declaring it not. No where in this movie did I see what THEY call long-term nonprogressors. These are people who have been told they have HIV and after 5, 10, 20 years have had no unusual illnesses. They uniquely do not take those medicines, which are said to save but also explode your liver, collapse youe kidney, destroy bone marrow, wear awar at your joints, cause blindness, nausea, vomiting, rashes. Remember: healthy one day, sick the next? They call them long-term nonprogressors: some of us are just made to question whatever HIV might be, it does not cause AIDS.
30 May 2006
Church-Think vs University-Think [Bring Back the Lions II]
When I was in my first year at college, living in Liggett dorm [Washington University], our dorm advisor took us Black men and women aside one night for a chat. We were few back then, maybe 7 or 8, and while this Black male dorm advisor pretended to give us advice, I think he was actually wrestling in the middle of things himself. His subject was dating and marriage, and he suggested that we would have to be open to dating outside our "race" as we got further in our educations. If that campus was any indication he was correct. But St. Louis had a large Black population: couldn't we date or marry among them? His argument, further, was that what we'd encounter was something that wouldn't jive with the mindsets being shaped as undergraduates and graduate students: that, professionally we would be set apart and intellectually would have different set of tools with which to view the world than a partner who'd only gone as far as high school. Fast forward 20 years, and I think more and more about that fireside chat. My mind has grown more curious, more disciplined, more thirsty for what goes on in the world and how it operates. I have posed questions about a range of topics. What I have experienced - in a generality - is that there is truth to a Black resistance to exploring ideas, asking questions, interrogating "facts" versus an openness among Whites to all that. This is the trend, not an absolute. But it is strictly Black gay men who ban me from online discussion groups, Black gay men who will not date me for my politics. I have not met a white gay man to date who has reacted that strongly. White men, tending to have had educations beyond high school, may not agree with me but they respect the idea of Interrogation. It is not seen as disrespectful. It is not dangerous. Black men, tethered to a Church whose ideas are somewhat medieval, a hierarchy, keep their head down and the loudmouth in the group is a threat to survival. I would be the loudmouth. Unlike Bill Cosby, I do see the socio-economic basis for this - half of Black students dropping out of high school in LA; those who do graduate, many cannot read, etc., etc. Stupidity has been imposed on us somewhat. But this is not enough: something must spark the poor to awaken, to see that education is a duty to oneself. It is also a duty to the Democracy, and this is what uttermost is in peril. The Democracy. Regardless who I come to date, we cannot have a democracy with part of the population unable and unwilling to weigh Issues. Question motives. Interrogate the status quo. Strive for Competence.
29 May 2006
Bring Back the Lions? [Why Christianity Spread]
Christian nobles boast of the religion's spread around the globe as testament to its divine message and how it inspires faith, hope, love and everlasting Life. But a look at Christian beginnings offers a clue to what is really behind Christian popularity. Constantine, known as the first Roman Emperor to embrace Christianity, did not do so until on his deathbed. Before that, he conspired with Church hierarchy for the prestige he was losing with his own Roman nobles. What did he do? Tolerant of all religions de jure, pagans and Jesus cultists all, he lavished honors and commissions on Christians and showed some disfavor to pagans in higher taxes. In education, we might call this giving a cue, provoking a desired response. With the result that Christianity grew in popularity. Hellenism [pagans] grew to the fringes. Recall that 19th century British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, was born into a Jewish family but his father had him baptised in the Church of England [Anglicans], so he could have access to better schools and social mobility. Christianity has spread the globe in large part because the Masters of the Earth have wielded the Bible and Cross in their conquests and lavished prizes on the converts, and the conquered have followed the lead. Peculiarly, in much the same way poor Third World countries have found AIDS scares to be enormously lucrative, even inflating HIV rates to get western money they would not get otherwise, Christianity has covered the world. But what of Religion? What has been lost in the abandon of ancient, earth religions and their gods for a bribe?
27 May 2006
Illegal Immigration [or, How the International Workers Movement Lost its Balls and went to High Tea]
A recent article in the Socialist Labor Party 's The Militant tries to accuse those against illegal immigration as being racist and/or without conscience. They are just one in a long list of left organizations who have successfully framed immigration as a race/humanitarian issue. The Militant article sites some early Socialist Party officials who spread fears of Yellow and Black perils across the US and counters them with selected quotes by Mr Lenin. As a Socialist myself, I am a bit baffled by the continued framing of immigration as one of race or even humanitarianism. I am baffled too with how foreign government's, like Mexico's, is allowed to prattle about rights of migrants when they have none at home. This is liberalism witha RED COAT. A few generations ago, the workers movement was international. It was Socialist. It was Communist. And it was without borders. It was also bloody. But the Imperial powers struck a deal with labor, in exchange for recognition of their unions, some of its demands, the unions would stop wildcat strikes and weed out socialists and communists from their ranks. Just prior to the FDR administration, wildcats spread across the country because union bosses had lost touch with their base. Socialism, even in the US, was threateningly on the horizon. Bu to stop the bloody class war, a peace treaty was made. Irony of ironies, even the British Labour Party threw out communists! What they gained in legitimacy and invitations to Buckingham Palace, they lost in being a voice for workers, who exist beyond political borders. Consequence? Workers in Mexico, the largest source of our illegals, are framed not as abandoned, landless workers but as pathetic cogs who must be cared for in the slave labor they only qualify for in the US. Overwhelmingly - but not exclusively, Mexican illegals arrive with 3rd grade OR BELOW educations. They are unskilled, uneducated. Professional contractors - their likely employers - lament their incapacity to command basic [to us] math concepts necessary for landscaping. So, these poor workers can mow and pick, pick and mow. A traditional socialist approach to these workers would have been to organize them AT HOME to change their governments, secure labor and land rights [which they have none in Mexico, not since Mexican President Salinas signed away their land rights in 1985]. I suggest our US, Canadian, and First World Labor Unions provide seed money to the Third World to enable their activists to organize, petition, and to the extent that voting changes anything, have voting drives. Immigrants usually want to stay home and march for their rights, wave their flags, demand recognition: why must they come to the US to do that?
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