|
13 Apr 2007 @ 07:14, by Vaxen Var
THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIANCE
If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law: Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobediance, 1849
The stage is set. Cheney and Bush still see themselves as the deciders and their preemptive agenda is still in play. The timid Democrats are about to be sucked into funding the Iraq fiasco and thus setting the stage for being responsible for its consequences when Bush leaves office in 2009.
Even today we see that that the insurgency ( freedom Fighters ) have penetrated the Iraq Green Zone with a suicide bomber and that's not counting the 15 to 20 daily rocket attacks.The time for wishful thinking is over ~ we lost and we deserve to lose and be humiliated in the process of Bush & Cheney's illegal occupation and travesty of justice .
Since we lack a national leader who will speak for the people's agenda ~ I call on Britain's George Galloway who proclaims to the British people " If George Bush bombs Iran, we should bring this country to a standstill. "
Even Lee Iococca, at 82 years old, is fed up with this Administration ~ [link]
" Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course." Stay the course? You've got to be kidding ... This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out ! "
Yes, it's almost time for civil disobediance ~ for we are, indeed, the agents of injustice in Iraq and perhaps in short time Iran and if Congress won't act by cutting off funding or even impeachment hearings ~ we must act even if it means breaking the law . It is our duty !
Custodians of chaos
By Kurt Vonnegut
"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.
The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.
We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show
But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana.
Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
"As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.
"As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say. "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
And so on.
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the US Constitution.
But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".
George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves! Privatise the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.
The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on.
I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.
In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.
And with good reason.
In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.
Piece of cake.
In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.
Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece of cake.
The O'Reilly Factor.
So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.
Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction there.
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the first world war. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the first world war so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?
Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."
Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?
© 2005 Kurt Vonnegut Extracted from A Man Without a Country: : A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
ICH (Information Clearing House)
[link]
|
|
Category: Economics, Financing, Banking
8 comments
13 Apr 2007 @ 07:22 by : Tag Clouds...
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app
13 Apr 2007 @ 11:51 by : Tagged
- for finding a map flaw in Namibia. But no flaws in the log of PP's above - all rings quite true. One of the reasons India and China economies are booming is because investment organisations are being set up here to actually invest in these countries to make sure they get some profit from the economic expansion!! So they are fuelling the economic growth in these places, by handing out the capital to do so. This the problem with Zietgeists, they have a life of their own, in which people are reduced to mere functionaries, even Presidents, unless these people take steps to Individualise and become aware of pain within their own physiques in order to be slightly aware of the pain in others perhaps due to their actions.. It can only be a natural calamity which brings down the Zietgeists, and in which real people can become, who will be forced to do something, if they can.
Can not anyone help me with my Constant Time plan? I need to be thrown connumdrums to work out the small things (minute bits)? The more the merrier.
13 Apr 2007 @ 12:43 by : I'd love to...
but how can I go about doing that, nocola? You know what the World Bank does? WHwen the loans come do and the third world country (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) default then zoom... enslavement to the money (so called yet isn't) beast comes in to take over.
Oh, there is good and bad in the BIS. I've examined their policies for a number of years now and have found some very good people and some very bad practices.
Promised 'amendments' for change and a healthier economic. I don't believe that at all.
The 'Crown' is notorious for their money mechanix and one day I suppose that Templar square will be blown to bitty bits...
Now, Constant Time? Personally I do not believe in time other than as a tool to be applied in season thus its' relativity. For me... a non existent participle in the over all flow...
Panta Rheii (everything flows)...
Give a holler in an email and let me know how I can be of assistance nicola.
14 Apr 2007 @ 10:42 by : All My Friends At World Bank
Can you imagine what kind of people work in there? And now we hear of an actual love affair going on. Wow, all that money and all that heat! And here are the lovers~~~
{link:http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2007/04/14/rizawolfowitz_wideweb__470x312,2.jpg}
Isn't he charming? Whether tonguing fresh spit onto his hair or sticking a thumb up his nose, this guy is my model! Maureen says he's clearly as bumbling at love as he is leading the world to war. And the lovely recipient of his oozing body? She's claiming victimization. Send her to Baghdad, I say, for a clearer definition of the term.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/pressure-on-world-bank-boss/2007/04/14/1175971403641.html
14 Apr 2007 @ 23:41 by @76.173.44.20 : Society
"Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon, many people who can't
get into it, do that." [from "The Importance of Being Ernest"]
15 Apr 2007 @ 08:35 by : RingADingDing Chimes In Again
Well well well, if it isn't the same 76.173.44.20 we've come to know and love at jazzoLOG, where apparently her corrective services also are required.
The section of Maureen Dowd's column yesterday about Wolfie's society chick~~~
More Con Than Neo
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Saturday 14 April 2007
Usually, spring in Washington finds us caught up in the cherry blossoms and the ursine courtship rituals of the pandas.
But this chilly April, we are forced to contemplate the batrachian grapplings of Paul Wolfowitz, the man who cherry-picked intelligence to sell us a war with Iraq.
You will not be surprised to learn, gentle readers, that Wolfie in love is no less deceptive and bumbling than Wolfie at war.
Proving he is more con than neo, he confessed that he had not been candid with his staff at the World Bank. While he was acting holier than thou, demanding incorruptibility from poor countries desperate for loans, he was enriching his girlfriend with tax-free ducats.
He has yet to admit any real mistakes with the hellish war that claimed five more American soldiers as stunned Baghdad residents dealt with the aftermath of bombings of the Iraqi Parliament, where body parts flew, and of a bridge over the Tigris, where cars sank.
But he admitted on Thursday that he'd made a mistake when he got his sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who shares his passion for democratizing the Middle East, a raise to $193,590 - more than the taxpaying (and taxing) Condi Rice makes. No doubt it seemed like small change compared with the money pit of remaking Iraq - a task he once prophesied would be paid for with Iraqi oil money. Maybe he should have remunerated his girlfriend with Iraqi oil revenues, instead of ripping off the bank to advance his romantic agenda.
No one is satisfied with his apology. Not the World Bank employees who booed Wolfie and yelled, "Resign! Resign!" in the bank lobby.
Not Alison Cave, the chairwoman of the bank's staff association, who said that Mr. Wolfowitz must "act honorably and resign."
Not his girlfriend, who says she's the suffering victim, forced by Wolfie's arrival to be sent to the State Department (where, in a festival of nepotism, she reported to Liz Cheney).
And not his critics, who say Wolfie has been cherry-picking again, this time with his anticorruption crusade. They say he has used it to turn the bank into a tool for his unrealistic democracy campaign, which foundered in Baghdad, and for punishing countries that defy the United States.
Wolfie also alienated the bank by bringing two highhanded aides with him from Bushworld, aides who had helped him with Iraq. One was the abrasive Robin Cleveland, called Wolfie's Rottweiler. The other was Kevin Kellems, known as Keeper of the Comb after his star turn in "Fahrenheit 9/11," where he handed his boss a comb so Wolfie could slick it with spittle for TV. (Maybe his girlfriend didn't get enough of a raise.) Like W., Wolfie is dangerous precisely because he's so persuaded of his own virtue.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041407C.shtml
16 Apr 2007 @ 00:29 by : He's Jewish...
What do you expect?
29 Apr 2016 @ 07:51 by @103.12.162.4 : brilliant! I would like to share this ar
Togel Online Singapore
Togel Online Hongkong
Bandar Togel Singapore
Bandar Togel
Togel Online Terpercaya
Bandar Togel Online Terpercaya
Togel Online
Agen Togel Online Terpercaya
Agen Togel Online
Other entries in Economics, Financing, Banking
2 Oct 2015 @ 22:16: Release of the iviCivi Project
24 Jun 2010 @ 02:13: BAILING OUT AILING BANKS IS IMMORAL/CRIMINAL
1 Jun 2010 @ 07:25: Extirpating Capitalism
30 May 2010 @ 06:13: ‘LATE’ CAPITALISM CRASHING DOWN ITS DEATH BED
28 May 2010 @ 02:27: EUROZONE’S BURNING, CONVENE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CONFERENCE!
7 Jan 2009 @ 15:36: Did God invent natural money?
11 Dec 2008 @ 14:29: Borrowing money to a beggar
2 Dec 2008 @ 07:03: 10,000 "uninsured" depositors of Indymac Bank
1 Dec 2008 @ 11:01: Important Notice Of Change In Terms
30 Nov 2008 @ 05:10: HEALING GLOBAL ECONOMY VIA NEW FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE
|
