In These Times

Harvard Injury Control Research Center Guns and homicide (literature review). We performed a review of the academic literature on the effects of gun availability on homicide rates. Major Findings: A broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide. Publication: Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David. "Firearm Availability and Homicide: A Review of …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Harvard Injury Control Research Center Guns and suicide (literature review). We performed reviews of the academic literature on the effects of gun availability on suicide rates. Major Findings: The preponderance of current evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for youth suicide in the United States. The evidence that gun availability increases the suicide rates of adults is credible, but is currently less compelling. Most of the disaggregate findings of particular studies (e.g. handguns are more of a risk factor than long guns, guns stored unlocked pose a greater risk than guns stored locked) are suggestive but not yet …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Gun availability and state suicide rates, 1981-2001 (time series analysis) Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and suicide over time, 1981-2001. Major Findings: Changes in the levels of household firearm gun ownership was significantly associated with changes in both firearm suicide and overall suicide, for men, women and children, even after controlling for region, unemployment, alcohol consumption and poverty. There was no relationship between changes in gun ownership and changes in non-firearm suicide. Publication: Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David; Lippman, Steven. "The Association between Changes in Household Firearm …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Why, that's mighty neighborly of you, Pilgrim. Twenty-four per cent? Between the Brits and the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland, Ireland's been awash with firearms for at least the last century. But most of those weapons were hidden and cached in Ireland and used by the IRA in Northern Ireland. Now that British military and Irish paramilitary operations are terminated or reduced, some significant share of those weapons are being circulated among the public. There's your 24% increase in the murder rate right there. Peace breaks out in Northern Ireland and all hell breaks loose in Ireland. That's one …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

"If you ban handguns from law abiding hands, then what next?" Good grief, Goofus. It's like, I say that 9+7=16 and you say no, dummy, it's 10, and then you accuse me of using a base ten number system. If you ban handguns from general circulation, then you reduce the number of weapons available to the criminals. No one's talking about "uninventing" the pistol; we're talking about drastically reducing the production and distribution of pistols. Legitimate manufacturers churn out millions of them every year. If you think some cottage industry of criminal craftsman can pick up the slack, then you're wrong. …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

"It is estimated that only about 8% of all defensive gun uses (DGU) resulted in an injury or the attacker, so for every DGU seen in the news, there are more than ten more DGUs you will most likely never see in the media." Of course, you meant "of the attacker" rather than "or the attacker". Your sympathy for offensive gun users (OGU) is commendable. But of those estimates of defensive gun uses, how many respondents actually admitted that they were injured or disarmed by their attackers? The ones who were killed weren't capable of responding to the poll, but the …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Canada anymore."

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

That's a clever quote, KK. First, you express your grievance from the "soap box", and then you ratify it at the "ballot box". And if that doesn't work, you break the law and vindicate the injustice at the "jury box". And if that doesn't work, you reach for the "cartridge box". Who did you have in mind, other than that hypothetical liberal majority that wants to confiscate your handguns? That quotation, by the way, is attributed to Larry McDonald, former congressman from Georgia, past president of the John Birch Society, who died after his flight (KAL007) was shot down by Soviet …

Posted to Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands

Neither of your citations refer to the links included. "Maybe those links above would work better"...if they actually worked.

Posted to Smearing Israel's Critics

The cavalry shipped out to Iraq, dickhead.

Posted to The Counterproductive War on Gangs

Dr. Gregory D. Foster Background: Gregory D. Foster is Professor of Political Science at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, Washington, D.C., where he previously has served as George C. Marshall Professor and J. Carlton Ward Distinguished Professor and Director of Research. He also is Executive Director of the Defense Environmental Forum, a joint venture between the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Installations & Environment) and the President of the National Defense University. During his tenure at the Industrial College, he has served as director of the Elements of National Power course, the Values, Ethics, and Leadership …

Posted to General Failure

Doctors pay high medical insurance premiums because they or their colleagues occasionally commit medical malpractice. Someone fails to perform a necessary test, usually because the health insurance provider won't cover the entire cost of the procedure, or prescribes a poorly tested medication, and a patient is crippled for life, or dead. That you would sympathize with the people who commit the malpractice, and against the people who suffer it, betrays your typical preference for the upper middle-class professional over the working-class laborer. I suppose in your fantasyland of a perfect free-market economy we should all just shut up and be grateful …

Posted to The Unions' Man?

What the fuck, WTF. It was a "nonexistent problem" because it was prevented from becoming a problem, before all those greedy, liberal lawyers could march up the courthouse steps and sue the crap out of all those innocent, conservative corporations for ignoring it. Nobody gets elected for preventing a problem. People get elected for creating the problem and then reacting to it, like priests who create the guilt and then absolve the sinners for feeling guilty about committing their crimes. It's usually more dramatic to convict the criminal than prevent the crime. Cheaper, too, unless we regard the value of life …

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

Some of the rednecks' favorite atrocities were the result of global warming, or have we all already forgotten that the desertification of the northern, mainly Arab, regions of Sudan forced the migration of those rendered homeless into a genocidal competition with their southern African countrymen? The rednecks love to condemn the liberals for their pc lack of sensitivity to the Darfur genocide, but continue to conveniently ignore its ultimate cause.

Posted to Two Degrees From Devastation

"First of all, the military aid to Israel has to stop. This coming year [2007??] it will amount to $2.4 billion. Products from the settlements, and official representatives of the Israeli government should be boycotted. AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], which works against the interests of my country, should be replaced by more moderate Jewish organizations." Yonatan Shapira

Posted to An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight

Q: How many Israelis does it take to change a light bulb? A: Just one. Twenty thousand IDF soldiers to defend two hundred thousand Israeli settlers to build two hundred settlements containing eleven hundred light bulbs per settlement.

Posted to An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight

"First of all, the military aid to Israel has to stop. This coming year [2007??] it will amount to $2.4 billion." Yonatan Shapira "....the combined economic and miltary US aid to Israel is over 5 billion annually..." blondemike

Posted to An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight

Slavery and the Jim Crow racist laws which resulted from the "industrial" abolition of slavery made racism a regional institution in the South. The willingness of Northern corporate owners to import and hire non-union black workers to break the industrial unions and their strikes for better working conditions made racism a national institution. You and Whatthefuck apparently believe that you bear no responsibility for the repressive racism of your "racial" predecessors, but you're willing to enjoy the generational benefits of racist preferential discrimination in housing, education, and employment which two hundred years of white male supremacy have conferred upon you. Most …

Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial

Heterosexuality became the norm because the population was under constant threat of extinction. Today the threat is overpopulation, hence the proactive normative alternatives to heterosexuality. Of course, you rightwing think tank knuckleheads would rather react to the problem (than proactively prevent it) with wars, revolutions, famines, epidemics and ecological disasters. After all, it's the American way.

Posted to Bisexual Healing

So now you're saying that the nasty French and British socialists started the war, and the innocent nazis were victims of Jewish-inspired socialist oppression. Dickhead.

Posted to Bisexual Healing

Damn, Chicago. I wish you wouldn't interrupt me when I'm in the process of insulting the Fascist from Oakland. The thing about military Keynesianism is that it acts as an economic stabilizer which attempts to prevent capitalist over-expansion or collapse. When the economy expands (aggregate supply exceeds aggregate demand), prices drop, factories are closed and workers are laid off. Excess productive capacity and surplus labor are redirected into the military economy which produce destructive, domestically non-competitive products that are directed against national competitors. When the economy contracts (aggregate demand exceeds aggregate supply), prices rise, factories are re-opened and workers are recalled. …

Posted to Bisexual Healing

I didn't realize the Arabs were a "race", so how does being "anti-Arab" suddenly become racist? Perhaps anti-Arabic sentiments could be construed as anti-Semitism, with Israeli bigots characterized as "self-hating Semites". It's very confusing. It's strange that you would admit the existence of racism in Haifa but deny its existence in Oakland.

Posted to For Israel's Sake

It may be different in the deep South? You think? A rare admission from someone who blames the victims of American racism for the racism they must constantly endure. How did you determine that many more blacks than whites in Oakland are racists? So now according to your American anthropologist, Carlton Coon, and your wife, there currently exist four races: Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and the Jews. The problem with subdividing the human race into fictitious subsets is that it becomes impossible to stop. In fact, it's difficult to justify racism without the pseudo-scientific conceptual framework of "races".

Posted to For Israel's Sake

But that's the point, isn't it. You can't justify racism without the "authoritative" citation of racists who arbitrarilly define the limits of "race", any more than you can justify sexism without the authoritative citation of sexists who arbitrarilly define the roles and limitations of gender. The great majority of any ethnic group will usually regard themselves as a separate ethnic group. How did you determine that the majority of Jews regard themselves as a separate race? I suppose you rely upon the authority of your Jewish wife for that astounding conclusion, just as you seem to rely upon your own considerable …

Posted to For Israel's Sake

If you believe that the "great majority" of Jews regard themselves as a separate race then you obviously don't know too many Jews. Every ethnic group that ever existed considers itself the "chosen people". So what? Racism, by definition, is the belief that some defined group of people is superior to all other groups, and the motivating factor is the justifying definition of race. Sexists do define gender roles, just as racists define racial roles. The dominant group will always attempt to define the cultural values ("objective reality") of the dominated.

Posted to For Israel's Sake

No, Mike, there's only one human race, period. Anything more than that is just another racist, sexist attempt to re-establish a dominant "scientific" authority to justify the domination of the dominated.

Posted to For Israel's Sake

Libertarian? Empirical objectivist? Anarcho-capitalist? Hell, Mike, you can call yourself the Queen of England if you want. Your adolescent references to "hebes, coons and beaners", along with your racist defense of race, tell me all I need to know about your apparent infatuation with fascism. The only significant question is the following: are you in fact a fascist, or do you just play the role on the internet?

Posted to For Israel's Sake

"Most Jews are like most other people..." This is true, Mike. Most people of any ethnic or "racial" group are like most other people, despite your insistent efforts to categorize them as "hebes, coons and beaners". "...an overwhelming percentage of hypercritical, loudmouthed mediocrities." And you're the loudest hypocritical mediocrity of them all. Prior to the French Revolution, the only book in most European homes was the Bible. The ancient Hebrews were no more or less barbaric than their barbarian neighbors, including the Greeks and the Romans. The "chosen people myth" is a universal attribute of all distinct social cultures, including your …

Posted to For Israel's Sake

Sorry, Mike, but you don't know what you're talking about. The Greeks were as irrational as any other tribe of the time. The Pythagorians tried to assassanite anyone who revealed the existence of what turned out to be irrational numbers, rather than admit that their "rational" universe was a fraud. The Greek military was more vicious and blood-thirsty than their opponents, which was why they ruled the "civilized" world until the Romans, even more barbaric than the Greeks, defeated them. Your half-assed dialectic between "rationalism and mysticism" is just another figment of Nietsche's nihilist imagination which the Nazis exploited to justify …

Posted to For Israel's Sake

Now he's got his Jewish "wife" and Jewish "friends" calling Jews "kikes". What's next? His latino and colored "friends" are waiting in the wings, ready to transubstantiate his racist beliefs into objective facts.

Posted to For Israel's Sake

He denies the existence of racism (unless it's the racism of blacks for whites), he denies the existence of anti-Semitism (unless it's the anti-Semitism of Jews for the Palestinians), he denies the existence of god (unless it's the god of nature and libertarian free trade, which he worships), and now he denies the existence of mental illness (unless it's the mental illness of the people who disagree with him).

Posted to For Israel's Sake

Well, he certainly wants people to believe that he's a fascist, which isn't quite the same as being a fascist.

Posted to Reclaiming What Makes Us Human

Speaking of Google, check out "blondemike oakland white men dating".

Posted to Reclaiming What Makes Us Human

There's only one race, blindmoke, and that's the human race. Any other classification is just another ignorant attempt to assert the fictitious superiority of one group of people over another. And don't bother citing the authority of Cornelius "Cracker" Coon, the Great White Hope of American anthropologists. People who constantly cite "authorities" are generally obsessed with their own absence of "authority". You're a disgrace to atheists throughout the world.

Posted to Obamas Base: Broader Than Black

Young, unemployed, violent gangbangers typically do not have the opportunity to work hard and pay taxes, let alone get married, buy a house and raise a family. The Irish, Italian and Appalachian ganbangers who terrorized the neighborhoods I grew up in typically got drafted. The military was the People's University which directed their violent adolescent alienation at "foreign" enemies, and afterwards allowed the survivors to get a job, get married, buy a house and raise a family. At the time, military service was the only "affirmative action" available to them. Naturally, instead of making affirmative action available to all the children …

Posted to Obamas Base: Broader Than Black

Roger Pearson (born 1927) is a British eugenics advocate and editor of several scholarly journals published by the Institute for the Study of Man. Life and work Originally from Great Britain, in 1958 Pearson founded the Northern League "to foster the interests, friendship and solidarity of all Teutonic nations." He recruited Hans Günther, who received awards under the National Socialist regime for his work on race, Ernest Cox of the Ku Klux Klan, and Dr. Wilhelm Kesserow, a former SS officer. He joined the Eugenics Society in 1963 and became a fellow in 1977. Pearson was brought to the United States …

Posted to Obamas Base: Broader Than Black

Your "revisionism" has reduced the Jewish holocaust to the pedestrian status of ordinary casualties of war, and thereby you deny that it ever occurred, implying that anti-Semitism doesn't exist. therefore it's OK to be anti-Semitic. You've done the same thing with racism, with the added twist that as you deny the existence of racism you simultaneously advocate the existence of race and the consequent superiority of one race over all the others. According to your logic, if racism and anti-Semitism do not exist, then it's excusable and "natural" to express racist and anti-Semitic invective at the slightest personal or political provocation. …

Posted to Obamas Base: Broader Than Black

Kuya's got the right idea. We're all people of color. If you doubt that, then stick your hand up against the monitor and then compare the color of your skin to the cultural ideal. (In your case, Mike, you would be well-advised to release your cock before you perform the experiment.) In other words, we're all colored people. As for the derivation of "politically correct", I was under the impression that PC stood for "patriotically correct". What it might have meant a hundred years ago is completely irrelevant. Nowadays, you can't separate the wingnuts from the flags they've wrapped around their …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

There's only one race, Mike, and that's the human race. The regional variations to which you refer are barely relevant and, with time (and a judicious application of miscegenation), they will become completely irrelevant. Even the albinos are colored. In other words, there's no such thing as the "white" race. But then, by then the dominant racist controversy will be resurrected along the lines of genetically modified humans and their unmodified counterparts, or among the divergent strains of modification. After all, after eliminating all of our natural predators, how else are humans expected to evolve?

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

The Rise and Fall of UNESCO Man by Kenan Malik The question of what constitutes human nature is usually understood in terms of the nature-nurture debate. Through the nature-nurture prism, we can survey the past century and see dramatic shifts in the dominant ways we have conceived of humanness - crudely from a prewar racialised concept of human nature, to a postwar largely cultural view of humanness, to the contemporary rehabilitation of Darwinian Man. These swings of the nature-nurture pendulum we often think of almost as paradigm shifts in the Kuhnian sense. There is, however, another way of understanding this historical …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

The UNESCO statements, however, were not simply about race. They also pulled together a number of themes about human nature that had become highly influential in social and cultural anthropology - particularly through the work of figures such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict - and in behaviourist psychology; themes which laid the basis for postwar antiracism and the liberal consensus. One such theme was the belief that humans are post-evolutionary. Whereas the Ubermensch of racial science was entirely moulded by the laws of nature, UNESCO Man was a cultural being: biology played little role in his make-up. Linked to …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

Humans do not make culture; culture makes humans. An individual cannot escape the force of destiny imposed by his culture and history. Culture, like race, appears as a transcendent category outside of our immediate consciousness but which is transmitted from generation to generation. Racial science expressed a mechanistic view of humanness, one in which human history flowed inevitably according to the laws of nature. UNESCO Man embodied an idealist view, in which humans were not rooted in their nature, and in which human history and culture are reified. What united the two was a common view of human beings, not as …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

Second, and linked to this, is a failure to address the question of human subjectivity. Naturalistic theories take it as axiomatic that human nature should be understood in the same terms as rest of nature. But such an approach inevitably precludes the understanding of subjectivity. Natural organisms are objects. Humans uniquely are object and subject. Understanding humans in the same way as the rest of nature inevitably means understanding humans as if we were simply objects. Another way of putting this is that humans are ontologically distinct from the rest of nature. A purely naturalistic account of human nature, therefore, cannot …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

Judging all the members of a given category, based on your experience of the actions of some of them, is prejudicial. If your wife is mugged at gunpoint by several armed black gangbangers, then you would be justified in concluding that all armed gangbangers are violent and dangerous people, and ought to be avoided or confronted for their crimes. You would not be justified in concluding that most colored folk are inherently less intelligent than their lighter-skinned counter-parts. Prejudicial conclusions are simply unfounded conclusions which we accept uncritically and then search for the evidence to support them.

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

"Its all that Nazi propaganda you have been spouting. Its rotted your brain." Texas, you employed a reductio ad Hitlerum argument (alternatively referred to as argumentum ad Nazium) and therefore, by virtue of Godwin's Law, you automatically lose the debate. If it's any consolation, the person who coined the phrase, and thereby made Mike's forensic victory possible, was Leo Strauss, the father of neoconservatism.

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

But you were right about The Bell Curve; the data was indeed skewed. First of all, the authors falsely assumed that since intelligence is heritable, that therefore it must be determined, for the most part, by genetic inheritance. And then they decided to weight the data to eliminate any non-genetic, or cultural determinants. In short, they decided to ignore the influence of education (among other intervening environmental variables, such as health, nutrition, cognitive stimulation, parental intervention, etc.) on the development of intelligence. Subsequent analysis has shown that ignoring the influence of education on intelligence will significantly overstate the correlation between intelligence …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

Mike, "the idea that some races are inherently inferior to others is the definition of racism." But then, like the holocaust, you've already demonstrated your willingness to deny the existence of racism. Doofus.

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

Racism Resurgent: How Media Let The Bell Curve's Pseudo-Science Define the Agenda on Race By Jim Naureckas When the New Republic devoted almost an entire issue (10/31/94) to a debate with the authors of The Bell Curve, editor Andrew Sullivan justified the decision by writing, "The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief." In fact, the idea that some races are inherently inferior to others is the definition of racism. What the New Republic was saying - along with other media outlets that prominently and respectfully considered the thesis of …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

Pioneers of Eugenics As well they might. Nearly all the research that Murray and Herrnstein relied on for their central claims about race and IQ was funded by the Pioneer Fund, described by the London Sunday Telegraph (3/12/89) as a "neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far righi in American politics." The fund's mission is to promote eugenics, a philosophy that maintains that "genetically unfit" individuals or races are a threat to society. The Pioneer Fund was set up in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a millionaire who advocated sending blacks back to Africa. The foundation's charter set forth the group's missions …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

Lynn has received at least $325,000 from the Pioneer Fund (Rolling Stone, 10/20/94). He frequently publishes in eugenicist journals like Mankind Quarterly - published by Roger Pearson and co-edited by Lynn himself - and Personality and Individual Differences, edited by Pioneer grantee Hans Eysenck. Among Lynn's writings cited in The Bell Curve are "The Intelligence of the Mongoloids" and "Positive Correlations Between Head Size and IQ." Murray and Herrnstein describe Lynn as "a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences." Here's a sample of Lynn's thinking on such differences: "What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

That sort of circular argument abounds in The Bell Curve. Although sociologist Jane Mercer has shown that supposed racial differences in IQ vanish if one controls for a variety of socio-economic variables, the authors reject her method because their theories assume that low IQ causes people to be poor, rather than poverty causing low IQs. Similarly, even though IQ tests show that average scores are rising - by as much as 15 points since World War II - "real" IQs must be falling, since low IQ women are having more babies. Giants in the Profession Another person whose advice Murray and …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

"More Brain Or More Penis" Rushton (who's gotten more than $770,000 from Pioneer) has transformed the Victorian science of cranial measurement into a sexual fetish--measuring not only head and brain size, but also the size of breasts, buttocks and genitals. "It's a trade-off: More brain or more penis. You can't have everything," he told Rolling Stone's Adam Miller (10/20/94), explaining his philosophy of evolution. Rushton was reprimanded by his school, the University of Western Ontario, for accosting people in a local shopping mall and asking them how big their penises were and how far they could ejaculate. "A zoologist doesn't need …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

The Bell Curve also fits in well with some current political agendas. The immigration issue has been seized upon by the U.S. right wing, as it has by the far right in other countries. Much of Murray and Herrnstein's book is devoted to suggesting that "Latino and black immigrants are...putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence." The connection between the book and the anti-immigrant movement is, once again, the Pioneer Fund; the fund has always feared immigrants, although its concerns have shifted from Poles and Italians to blacks and Latinos. The leading anti-immigration group in the U.S. is the …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

"I knew Dr. Roger Pearson quite well about thirty years ago and he published a first-rate anthropology textbook." Posted by blondemike on Mar 5, 2007 at 12:40 PM Roger Pearson (born 1927) is a British eugenics advocate and editor of several scholarly journals published by the Institute for the Study of Man. Life and work Originally from Great Britain, in 1958 Pearson founded the Northern League "to foster the interests, friendship and solidarity of all Teutonic nations." He recruited Hans G�nther, who received awards under the National Socialist regime for his work on race, Ernest Cox of the Ku Klux Klan, …

Posted to A Politically Correct Lexicon

You're on the wrong thread, dude.

Posted to Thirty More Years

As LB once remarked, Mike, you've been baiting so many people for such a long time on these threads that if anyone can be called a "master baiter", it would have to be you. And why would it "please" you to publicly wipe anyone's "stinky butt", let alone Scorp the Corpse (a corporate coprophiliac), who will only get pissed and tell us again, for the third time, that he once knocked off the heels of his combat boots to qualify for advanced combat training. Wipe your own butt, and spare us the gruesome, graphic detail. Everyone here seems to assume that …

Posted to Baracks Black Dilemma

Robert Conquest? The anti-communist from the Hoover Institute who relies on fascist sources to inflate the Ukrainian famine casualties (the Ukrainian holocaust) in order to minimize the Jewish holocaust? Good grief, Goober. You and Mike are soulmates after all. So many sockpuppets... So little time...

Posted to Baracks Black Dilemma

Well, excuse me for interrupting your private debate with Mike, but this is a public board, even if the two of you are determined to publicly embarass yourselves in the process. Feel free to enlighten us lesser intellects. What exactly is it that we don't understand?

Posted to Baracks Black Dilemma

corpse \'korps\ n slang [ME corps, fr. MF, fr. L corpus] : a corporate coprophiliac (commonly ascribed to Peter Watts, from his Rifters trilogy). You nasty people need to stop persecuting the (S)corps. I mean, it's vicious. You hit him with a flower. You do it every hour. Oh, baby, your'e so vicious.

Posted to In You More Than Yourself

The ability to acquire any specific language, or any specific combination of specific languages, is a learned skill. These specific abilities to acquire specific languages are universally hard-wired. Chomsky may be disputed for specific aspects of his linguistic theory, but the theory in general, that language is a hard-wired human acquisition, is generally accepted by all linguists. On the other hand, specific languages, such as English, do tend to reinforce certain basic cognitive perceptions of our environment. Sentences are almost invariably led by single capitalized letters, and followed by a multiple train of noncapitalized letters, interspersed with proper nouns and names …

Posted to Spoils of War

That Israel is being used, willingly or otherwise, to further US interests is a much more credible premise than its controversial counterpart: that the US is being used to further Israel's interests. That all parties concerned, the US, Israel and the Middle East in general, are drifting regressively to their respective fundamentalist roots in response to the unresolved crises of modernism is also apparent. It's also possible that American foreign policy is specifically intended to disrupt the production of petroleum in order to forestall the advent of peak production and the economic dislocations which are sure to ensue from a protracted …

Posted to Spoils of War

If not for the two Gulf wars, and the sanctions imposed on Iraqi petroleum production, world oil production may well have peaked ten years ago, with world-wide catastrophic economic consequences. American foreign policy, for at least the last ten years, has been employed to fuel sectarian conflicts in the Middle East -- Israelis against the Palestinians, the Sunnis (in Iraq and Saudi Arabia), the Shia (in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Syria) and the Kurds (in Iraq and Turkey) against each other. I don't agree with the strategy, but evidently the people who construct the policy apparently believe no other viable alternative …

Posted to Spoils of War

...stinky ass... ...diarrhea breath... ...WHIGGER... ...shabbas goy ass... ...Your wife�s hooker job... ...pathetic pieces of statist-collectivist shit... ...it�s a turd... ...Portnoy poo panties... ...tsunami of excrement... ...there were no gas chambers, no mass extermination program, no conspiracy to exterminate European Jewry and nowhere near six million Jews died, probaly 1-2 million at most from all causes... ...Anne Frank['s]... �diary� is a fraud... ...This is a nuanced subject and an emotionalistic little shit lumps in his panties liberal like you can�t grasp this intellectually... ...you�re whore wife is now wearing an orange jump[suit], just like you�re ugly Mama did for the same …

Posted to A Dark Night in Iceland

...black brother crap... Africa is a total failure since independence. Colonialism will be returning and everyone will be better off. Posted by blondemike on Dec 21, 2006 at 11:39 AM What "toon" are you talking about? Are you trying to spell "coon"? Posted by blondemike on Dec 26, 2006 at 11:03 AM ...Black To The Future bullcrap... Posted by blondemike on Dec 26, 2006 at 2:32 PM ...they want to take Afro names, speak ebonics and dress like buffoons... Shoot up, shoot out and drop out. Thank god you all had all those good hearted Jewish people like my wife getting …

Posted to A View on Pelosi from a World Away

i noticed on an earlier posting you referred to the diaspora.....wonder where that comes from ? same people who got you the civil rights fraud, did all your free legal work and taught you how to use finger bowls and not fart loudly at lbj's signing ceremonies......ever wonder why every group has leapfrogged over your peepul ? why when whitey was celebrating the moon landing, rev abernathy was leading the mule train at cape canaveral ? my ancestors were virginia gentlemen and they treated their slaves real well, it was like a socialist state, they fed, clothed, educated (well tried to) …

Posted to A View on Pelosi from a World Away

Ordo, what is this black nationalist anti-white rap ? We have heard this inevitability of history line before and you will notice that the great expositor of same, the Soviet Bloc, has long self-destructed. Ergo, with people of color nonsense. Ever take a look at the African continent ? No, that�s not the wave of the future. Redhorse, my remarks have been aimed at a portion of the black population, the lumpen, criminal degenerate Mo Fo culture, not all blacks. As you well know. So what does your When will you stop beating your wife type questions have to do with …

Posted to A View on Pelosi from a World Away

I take it that you are the lowlife who attacked me on the Randzapper blog. When I briefly posted my comments on holocaust revisionism on the Barnes site you raised no objection or gave any semblance of an argument. Your whole approach is Hey,isn't this outrageous that someone could doubt this holy truth. Several folks have and the uniform response in many countries is to imprison them. Here they can't quite do that yet so smears are the only "argument" of the traditional defenders of the holohoax. Sometime check out the video of the Michael Shermer-Mark Webb debate and you can …

Posted to A View on Pelosi from a World Away

Michael Hardesty said... randzapper doesn't even use a pseudonym. And I had several people use my computer to respond to your silly stuff. So your wrong again. And unlike the coward randzapper people had the ability to respond to me or my friends, something that doesn't exist on the zapper's site. Quite a difference, Barnes. If you read A Person's review you can see he debunked the essence of it from reading the first 31 pages. Why waste more time like I did in reading the rest of the book ? Far from being "inane" A Person's comments are quite lucid …

Posted to A View on Pelosi from a World Away

Michael Hardesty said... I'm part of a writing team, moron. When I write from here at work, there are lots of like minded people around. It's a collective computer, doesn't belong to any one person. And don't we know that you are the little coward behind "randzapper" Danny boy ! Frankly I won't be seeing you, after reading A Person I realize I never have to take you & the Nyquist-Ryan axis seriously. 12/12/2006 08:47:00 AM Daniel Barnes said... No, I know nothing about the Randzapper. He sure knows you tho...;-) 12/12/2006 09:42:00 AM Anonymous said... Jumpin' Jesus on a Pogo-Cross! …

Posted to A View on Pelosi from a World Away

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Posted to A View on Pelosi from a World Away

Posted to A View on Pelosi from a World Away

White guys claiming to be persecuted by colored folk.

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Right, Tex. There's nothing like an expensive, beautiful phallic symbol to get you all hard and horny, just like your hero.

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Hey, Tex. If it's a "steal" at 300 grand, does that make it rape? And how about that stick shift? Jerk it around a few times and you can make the engine roar.

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

All the more reason to read his exciting narratives once again.

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Hey, Tex. Is that a pistol in your pocket, or have you been dreaming of driving that car again? Never mind. Just curious. What's even more curious is your nasty little habit of lifting entire articles off the web and passing them off as your own. The case in question is your selective quotation of a Wikipedia rough draft on the coup d'etat in Chile. Unfortunately you failed to include the quotation marks which might have informed your audience that the opinion expressed was not your own. On the other hand, you did manage to include a pair of extraneous quotes …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Good grief. The Goober has gone and quoted himself again. That's definitely symptomatic of a terminal mental dysfunction, probably a premature manifestation of Alzheimer's. No, Dumbo, wealth is not created. It's stolen from the people who are forced to create it with half-assed appeals to patriotic self-interest, who themselves stole it from the people who originally possessed it. It's stolen by the people who kidnapped the people who produced it for them. It's a chain of theft, murder and dispossession that's older than the Bible itself, that glorifies the crimes they commit to survive in a world ruled by brute self-interest, …

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Don't piss him off, LB. He'll stop taking the meds and create another sock puppet.. MH speaking through BM speaking through HJ is more than we can tolerate as it is. But, wait! He's got another hand, two feet and a periodically rampant penis, which means... LB, say it ain't so! Not YOU!!!!!!

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Excuse me, but I'm trying to resolve an existential crisis here, and you keep interrupting the process. Give me second to suspend my disbelief. There. That's better.

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Well, shet mah mouth. So, tell me. If we're all sock puppets, does that mean there's a Master Puppeteer somewhere out there in Puppetland, the universal set of all puppet sets? Including the empty puppet set and the universal puppet set itself?

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

And, finally, if he slips the sock on his cock, does that make him a peckerhead?

Posted to The Spychopath Who Loved Me

Ad hominem "gobbledegook"? Oy vey, LB, don't you mean "wordsalad"? If you review the threads on this site, you'll discover that the Hawaiian Jerk began posting his racist, antisemitic, anticommunist left-baiting rants almost immediately after Aryan Mike discontinued his own, which indicates that he very probably was banned from the site at that time. Unless The Jerk appears again, we can be reasonably certain that he also has been banned fron the site. His rants were even more racist and antisemitic than Mike's. Michael Hardesty used to write for Z magazine. His rhetorical attacks on racism, sexism and Zionism on conservative …

Posted to Chávez Consolidates Power

Scorp, I scoped him out several years ago, on an earlier thread (11-10-04), when he was passing himself off as, of all people, Michael Hardesty. Check it out. Don't take this the wrong way, but he is smarter than all of us. He's certainly smarter than I am. On second thought, he's probably just as smart as you are. No more. No less.

Posted to Chávez Consolidates Power

Hardesty, you're full of shit, as usual. Jefferson fathered six children with Hennings. His will explicitly stipulated that after his death his children would be freed, and they were. I'm sure you can cite all sorts of bullshit references from the Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation to confound the facts, but the fact is that Jefferson's support for equality extended beyond the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, income, intelligence, religuous or cultural affiliation or political ideology, because Jefferson believed in the one social attribute which surpassed and inspired all of the above, and that's our shared humanity. Not the accidental …

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

Sorry. I should have said "...provocatively racist, anti-semitic remarks". Stop shilling for the settlers and get a life. And since when did Jefferson's alleged miscegenation suddenly become a source of shame for him, except in the fevered imagination of his racist auditors. I can easilly entertain the plausible presumption that he regarded it as a source of pride. It's only the rednecks who bridle at the possibility that the sacred white paternity of their founding fathers might conceivably be mixed with "colored" blood.

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

And it's nothing but racist to draw inviduous attention to the sociopathology of one race and ignore the causal context of the endemic sociopathology which reinforces it.

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

You call that anal surgery? Looks like oral masturbation for the double-jointed.

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

You bet, good buddy. "Ergo" to you, too.

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

Sweet dreams, sweetheart.

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

Check it out.

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

Race is not issue in much of Latin America as it is here. Except for a few all white countries like Argentina, Uruguay and Chile the population is much more mixed than in North America. There is no black power or white power movements in those countries. Chavez is trying to overcome US isolation but he has to be careful about overdoing the black brother crap. Latins and blacks here can�t stand each other. Africa is a total failure since independence. Colonialism will be returning and everyone will be better off. United States Posted by blondemike on Dec 21, 2006 at …

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

Ordo, look turkey, I don�t who the hell you are and could care less. I�ve already covered this ground ad infinitum with Redhorse and Chessfrog among others. The Africans have plenty of blood on their own hands, they have killed five milllion of each other in the Congo alone in the last few years. Almost every state in Africa is a catalogue of horrors. The rest of your blather is hard to make out except for the childish insults. Africa is dying out and the only hope is that next time it can be repopulated with intelligent, sentient beings. The CPUSA …

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

get off it, redhorse, blacks make up a far higher percentage proportionally of all welfare cases than any other group, this is statistically proven and for an empirical test go into any welfare office in any us urban area. it�s not the conservatives that are screwing us but the big liberal multinationals that have destroyed american industry by hiring too many incompetent blacks and females. the disastrous liberal integration policies since 1954 have turned our country into a third world hellhole. the warren court decisions like miranda freeing millions of black and latino criminals have destroyed our urban areas. crackhead blacks …

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

redhorse, what�s a �toon� ? isn�t that japanese kiddie porn ? you don�t mean �coon� do you ? that has multiple meanings. when i was a teen in florida we had a legal coon hunting season. United States Posted by hawaii jack on Dec 29, 2006 at 12:52 PM you plugging that lying black left bullshit about sally hennings ? all the black leftists in this nation aren�t fit to lick the sweat off jefferson�s balls. you did a pedophile number on your kids ? goddamn, your disgusting. if i�m a toon (undefined) is it ok to call you a coon …

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

still trying to free willie, major ? United States Posted by hawaii jack on Jan 2, 2007 at 7:42 PM zzzzzzzzzzz United States Posted by hawaii jack on Jan 3, 2007 at 6:10 PM redhorse, you�re old lady said you never went three times.......like she and I did. major, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz United States Posted by hawaii jack on Jan 3, 2007 at 7:51 PM BORING. BORING. BORING. Major, the most uninteresting and boring thing since you�re we dding night. United States Posted by hawaii jack on Jan 4, 2007 at 1:43 PM

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

Race is not issue in much of Latin America as it is here. Except for a few all white countries like Argentina, Uruguay and Chile the population is much more mixed than in North America. There is no black power or white power movements in those countries. Chavez is trying to overcome US isolation but he has to be careful about overdoing the black brother crap. Latins and blacks here can�t stand each other. Africa is a total failure since independence. Colonialism will be returning and everyone will be better off. Posted by blondemike on Dec 21, 2006 at 11:39 AM …

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

Ordo, look turkey, I don�t who the hell you are and could care less. I�ve already covered this ground ad infinitum with Redhorse and Chessfrog among others. The Africans have plenty of blood on their own hands, they have killed five milllion of each other in the Congo alone in the last few years. Almost every state in Africa is a catalogue of horrors. The rest of your blather is hard to make out except for the childish insults. Africa is dying out and the only hope is that next time it can be repopulated with intelligent, sentient beings. The CPUSA …

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

redhorse, what�s a �toon� ? isn�t that japanese kiddie porn ? you don�t mean �coon� do you ? that has multiple meanings. when i was a teen in florida we had a legal ,b>coon hunting season. Posted by hawaii jack on Dec 29, 2006 at 12:52 PM you plugging that lying black left bullshit about sally hennings ? all the black leftists in this nation aren�t fit to lick the sweat off jefferson�s balls. you did a pedophile number on your kids ? goddamn, your disgusting. if i�m a toon (undefined) is it ok to call you a coon ? as …

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

still trying to free willie, major ? Posted by hawaii jack on Jan 2, 2007 at 7:42 PM zzzzzzzzzzz Posted by hawaii jack on Jan 3, 2007 at 6:10 PM redhorse, you�re old lady said you never went three times.......like she and I did. major, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Posted by hawaii jack on Jan 3, 2007 at 7:51 PM BORING. BORING. BORING. Major, the most uninteresting and boring thing since you�re wedding night. Posted by hawaii jack on Jan 4, 2007 at 1:43 PM

Posted to The Caracas Consensus

Yikes. All you overburdened, underpaid, over-educated remnants of a recessive meritorious gentry make my poor, proletarian heart swell with sorrow. Time to break out the violins and play a mournful dirge to your shattered dreams of unrequited affluence.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Not quite. It's more like feeling entitled to the income to which you've become accustomed. If you need further instruction, consult any one of Suze Orman's televised lectures. Anne Richards once compared George Bush to someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a home run. Lots of other people got him to the plate, including the people who struck out. I don't own a million dollar dump in Oakland. My highest valued asset is a ten year old Toyota that's slowly rusting out around me. But if you need to know the primary reason why Reagan and …

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Hey, what can I say? I'm having another bad day at work, what with the recently passed referendum on secondhand smoke, and the holidays are typically depressing to begin with. I doubt that the rich even know that we exist, or care, much less waste their precious laughter at our trivial disagreements. And, Mike, you should know better than anyone else that the majority of the traffic on the net is just an excuse for people to vent their anger and frustration. You've done it so often yourself. I'm sorry your old lady got mugged. I hope she's well and the …

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

The ultra-rich are the people who get their butts kissed by people like you and me. "Good morning, Sir (or Madam). How may we kiss your ass today? And thank you for the tip." A nation of waiters put out for their customers. Put out, output, productivity. It's a gratifying experience all around, as all of us are simultaneously waiters and customers. And the "wealth" we create, well, figure it out for yourself.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Stop it, Mike. I'm sorry your wife was attacked, and you might be surprised to discover that most of the rest of us feel the same. I can only imagine how I might feel if I almost lost someone whom I loved as much as you obviously love your wife. I can do more than that, and tell you that I felt powerless and angry and guilty that I could do nothing to protect her. Give yourself a break, for a change.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

He's no more pathetic than you or anyone else, including that dickhead who says he knocked off the heels on his combat boots to qualify for military service. When you feel powerless to protect the people you most love you gladly invoke the scorn of everyone else if only to ignore your own inability to respond to the situation.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Have it your way, Mike. You're not helping anyone by generating the animosity of your friends. But if you'd rather be feared than respected then knock yourself out.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Yeah, Jackass. All dem colored criminals jes terarizing you in yo million dollar dump in Oahu. You might want to consider the cost of contructing a few mass crematoria. Nothing sinister. All those executions, you'll just need to remove the dead bodies more efficiently. Your good buddy Mike will be happy to rationalize your doubts for you, but you don't sound like someone who harbors too many of them.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Fuck off, Jackoff.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Right, "pally". Which spot did you hope to "rub"?

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Get some help, Mike. Your Jekyll and Hyde routine is wearing thin.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Well, so far you've managed to reinforce the stereotypical caricature of a racist, antisemitic fascist. Mud city? Shitcago? Greatest cesspool in the land? It's as if you're inviting us to draw the obvious conclusion that you're, well, a racist, antisemitic fascist. You know, someone who believes the white majority is being persecuted and oppressed by the black and Jewish minorities.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Aryan Mike and the Hawaiian Jerk are the same person. Mike discontinued his comments on Thursday, the 28th, which coincidentally is the same date that Jack initiated his own. Now Jack is gone, too, indicating that the two of them have been banned from the site. Interestingly, Hardesty used to be a contributing writer for Z magazine.

Posted to We Are All Waiters Now

Another computer, another ISP and you're good to go. Right, Mike? Er, Jack? Whoever you happen to be at any given momemt.

Posted to White Progressives Don't Get It

Well said. It's a mistake, in my opinion, to place science in opposition to religion, when it's really an evolved extension ot it, a more rational religion which makes all of us acolytes at the altar of an Almighty Method, an Invisible Hand which determines the destiny of each and every one of us, if only a sufficiently complex model can be constructed to account for a manageably infinite variety of variables. Religion was invented to promote solidarity and social cohesion for a civilization whose members are made constantly conscious of their individual mortality, and promised the relative immortality of the …

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

There's nothing natural about the universe we inhabit, from the alphabet we use to construct our thoughts to the computers we use to communicate them. Very few of us would survive in a natural universe. In fact, most of us exist in a supernatural universe, and we are, therefore, the supernatural beings who exist within it. Your failure to recognize this obvious phenomenon makes me, for example, an invisible supernatural being. QED

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

There's nothing "natural" about civilization. As I understand it, it evolved over the millenia to secure our ancestors from the constant threat of extinction from their "natural" predators (all those horns and claws and fangs which were combined to communicate the symbolic presence of a demon). As such, we are naturally inclined to perceive the universe from a supernatural perspective, one which reflects a special imperative to dominate nature. As our consciousness evolved, so did the precision of the language we used to explain our environment. We no longer bury our dead to limit our exposure to predatory scavengers. Many of …

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

I don't want to get hung up on the semantics of nature, other than to observe that many natural scientists are themselves prone to invoke the supernatural when confronted with the implications of their experiments. Oppenheimer's comparison of the human race to the god of destruction comes to mind, or Newton's persistent efforts to transmute lead into gold, presumably the reason why he was placed in charge of the Royal Mint. His conception of gravity, for that matter, invoked the miraculous phenomenon of action at a distance, and much of the research of modern physics (curved space, gravity waves) is an …

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

Our civilization is suffused with the supernatural spirit of the living and the dead. Just because you choose to ignore their presence doesn't mean they don't exist. You're reading these words on a monitor which was produced by thousands of people, from the people who acquired the raw materials to the people who manufactured the component parts to those who assembled them and shipped the finished product to your doorstep. I'm sure you reject the labor theory of spiritual investment, but the spirit of the people who produced that monitor is right there in front of you, running an electrical current …

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

You're missing the trees for the leaves, Mike. I'm not sure of the situation in the Pacific Southwest, but out here in the Great Lakes most of them are definitely deciduous and at this time of the year they're impossible to ignore. The analysts are schooled in the skills of dissection, but the rest of us are essentially synthetic. We need to locate ourselves at the center of some grand scheme of creation. Otherwise, what's a metaphor?

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

We are the creators and we celebrate our creation through the ceremony of religious worship. That projective leap of illogical faith ensures our social solidarity and reinforces our individual subordination to the survival of the social constructs we create to sustain our continued collective existence. Those constructs, in the aggregate, assume the attributes of divinity and are, literally, supernatural, or "above nature", not because we are literally, individually or even collectively omnipotent, omniscient and immortal but because, in the aggregate and over the millenia, we construct the collective means by which we defeat or domesticate our natural competitors. It's a helluva …

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

In fact, gravity has a variety of god-like attributes. It acts on all things, therefore it's omnipotent and omnipresent, and at all times, therefore it's immortal. On the other hand, we don't normally regard gravity as all-knowing, or even moderately intelligent, therefore it's not omniscient. So we conclude that gravity is moderately god-like, but not sufficiently divine to warrant our worship, not unlike electromagnetics and the nuclear reaction (blessed be its name).

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

Browsing the science section of Border's several months ago, I ran across a book entitled The God Gene whose author hypothesizes that belief in god is a naturally selected genetic trait which serves to ensure the survival of the species by encouraging the mass imagination of hope where, against the stark reality of our inevitable mortality, none exists. Religion, therefore, and by extension, Science, provides us with the only realistic alternative we have: the opportunity to reinforce our social solidarity and create the cultural constructs necessary to generate the more limited hope that our individual lives have some modicum of meaning …

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

David, If You See The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him is the title of a Zen Buddhist koan, not an advocation for deicide. In fact, God cannot be killed, and I can prove it. If God exists, then by definition God cannot be killed. If God does not exist, then God cannot be killed. Therefore, God cannot be killed. Mike was being sarcastic.

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

Dave, I was being sarcastic myself. But you probably knew that, too. I'm an atheist, just like Mike, although I don't share his faith in the moral legitimacy of the scientific project. The atrocities of the past several centuries should have disabused all of us of that fatuous fantasy, which is why so many of us are reverting to the fallback position: that good old time religion. When the world around us is gradually falling apart it's reassuring to realize that redemption is just around the corner. It relieves us of any unnecessary anxiety and allows us to endure the inevitable …

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

A mother, whose daughter was about to be married, was surprised to see her distraught daughter return early from a date with her fiance. "Nina, what's wrong?", said the mother. "Mike just told me he's an atheist.", exclaimed Nina. "Oh, mother, he doesn't even believe in hell!" "Marry him anyway.", said the mother. "Between the two of us, we'll show him how wrong he really is."

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

Three people, a rabbi, a priest and an atheist, were about to be executed in the Terror, during the French Revolution. The executioner drags the rabbi to the guillotine and says, "Have you any last words for the crowd, before I cut off your head?" The rabbi says, "I believe in the god of Moses and Abraham, who will not desert me in my hour of need." So the executioner throws him on the platform, locks the collar around his neck, raises the blade and releases it. The blade screams down the length of the guillotine and stops, just above the …

Posted to The Godless Fundamentalist

President Kennedy took office in 1961, and was concerned about his economy, which at that point was irregular and falling. Kennedy advocated tax cuts to increase tax receipts, which was a novel idea at the time.

It might have been novel in the aftermath of the First World War when Keynes invented it, but by the 60s it was economic dogma. Military Keynsianism has ruled the economy since, and including , the Second World War.

Posted to Dueling Democrats

"It was also novel in the fourteenth century...?" Good Grief, Goober. It was novel at the dawn of the agricultural revolution, if you insist, when the mass production of food also produced social stratification and the rise of military empires. But counter-cyclical fiscal and monetary policy was invented by Keynes to offset the negative cyclical effects of the capitalist industrial revolution. Namely, communism and fascism, which are the two principal subsets of capitalism. All other modern political ideologies reside within the intersection of the two, and all of them, including communism and fascism, are capitalist.

Posted to Dueling Democrats

A card-carrying member of Mensa? Holy Shit. Someone should notify the Fatherland Security.

Posted to Dueling Democrats

Don't worry, WTF. No one's gonna confiscate your property.

Posted to The Reparations Bandwagon

Many victims of concentration camps received (and will continue to receive) reparations from European corporations which collaborated with European fascists to profit from their slave labor and the confiscation of their property, presumably with the whole-hearted sympathy and approval of those of you who currently object to exactly the same remedial procedures to be applied to the victims of American slavery and institutional discrimination. The difference, obviously, is that the victims were white, and the corporate criminals were European.

Posted to The Reparations Bandwagon

Try again, Kuya. Nothing in my post can be even remotely contrived as a racial slur, unless you believe that the racist contrast of proposed reparations between the black and white victims of corporate fascism is a racial slur. It's much easier to criticize the more recent descendants of foreign fascists for their crimes against foreign victims.

Posted to The Reparations Bandwagon

Frankly, I don't see why dickheads like trippin should be excluded from the benefits of reparations for the crimes committed against him and his family, by corporate criminals who perpetuate misery for their own money-grubbing sado-masochistic delusions of power and profit, and I say that despite his pasty-assed whitebread racist attitudes. In fact, his racism is one of the byproducts of the exploitation. My point was that reparations for white folks have been demonstrably met with an almost universal approbation by a generally white population, while reparations for the rest have not. Sorry about the misunderstanding.

Posted to The Reparations Bandwagon

If you want to understand more of their motivations and poltical attitudes then spend an hour or so examining the entries and links in Wikipedia under the initial heading of "Weatherman". I think we can safely conclude that most of them renounce the violence which they believe they were provoked into by the atrocities of the the Vietnam war and the political polarization which that war produced. Many of the charges against them were dropped due to lack of evidence or the illegal activities of the government which produced biased evidence (Cointelpro). They operated in an environment in which, especially in …

Posted to Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn

Ayers and Dohrn weren�t activists, they were criminals. Its unfortunate that they aren�t serving long prison sentences. Posted by chopper on Aug 18, 2006 at 11:54 PM

It is a shame that Chopper is not serving a very very long prison term. Posted by Spinoza750 on Aug 23, 2006 at 8:16 PM

This is a very good example of how much of the left now disdains concepts such as freedom of speech. Posted by chopper on Aug 28, 2006 at 3:45 PM

You initiated the exchange, you dimwit. And after quoting the response completely beyond the context of the debate you …

Posted to Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn

I apologize for the profanity. You're not a dickhead. You're a sanctimious dickhead.

Posted to Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn

The guy's a dickhead, a sanctimonious dickhead and simply too stupid to understand why anyone would become angry after reading his idiotic posts. No one's infringing on your freedom of expression, Floyd. But when you make provocative statements ("Its unfortunate that they aren’t serving long prison sentences."), you deliberately invite a provocative response ("It is a shame that Chopper is not serving a very very long prison term."). To pretend to be offended by your correspondent's contempt, which you provoked to begin with, is the height of hypocrisy. To conclude therefore that "much of the left...disdains...freedom of speech" is an unmistakable …

Posted to Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn

Chill out, Chipper. No one's gonna kill you. The overwhelming majority of dead capitalists died peacefully in their sleep. Their principal concern was not the anarchist and communist assasins lurking in the shadows of their palatial estates, but which of their filial ingrates wuold inherit the lion's share of the loot, taxes notwithstanding. Communism and fascism are the two sides of the same democratic coin, the two ideologies which made possible the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In other words, democracy is the balance between the two, which is why fascism is so often defined as "the communism of the rich" …

Posted to Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn

No, Dexter. Communism and fascism are intersecting subsets of capitalism. The intersection contains all the other forms of political ideology used to justify capitalism.

Posted to Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn

Apparently, you don't understand the political "philosophy" or the insults. In fact, your responses indicate that you don't understand much of anything at all.

Posted to Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn

A nation which bombs the crap out of a militarilly defenseless country and then, after sustaining unacceptably high military casualties, retreats behind the skirts of a proposed ceasefire which it claims will nevertheless threaten its preferential security, is hardly powerful enough to occupy anything but the territory of the refugees it expelled from its illegal borders sixty years ago. You ought to know better.

Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah

It's not the "People�s Republic of Hezbollah". It's the "Fascist Republic of Hezbollah". George Bush said so himself. It's bad enough that you believe your own propaganda. Confusing it is inexcusable.

Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah

Do those 20,330 square miles include the settlements in the West Bank, or Jerusalem, or the potential occupation of the Southern "half of Lebnon, the Sinai and Syria all the way to Damascus"? Israel can barely maintain its occupation of the West Bank, let alone the Gaza Strip or the Sinai Peninsula, or the Southdern sectors of Syria and Lebanon. The sad truth is that the unilateral creation of Israel and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank has brutalized both the Palestinians and the Israelis, and forestalled the economic integration and regional development of the Middle East (including Israel), a …

Posted to Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah

Speaking as an unacknowleged amateur, I can't see any plausible reason for buildings of that size to fall outside the footprint. Given the massive weight involved, even at the upper stories, the amount of force required to drop the building outside its footprint would be proportionately, and implausibly, massive. By the way, your argument depends upon the precision of your definition for footprint. If you mean the exact dimensions of the base of the building, then the building fell outside the footprint. If you include Manhatten Island, then the building fell inside the footprint.

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Science? Sure, why not? For a building to fall outside its footprint, however that footprint is defined, it would have to fall some specified distance from the center of its footprint. Let's assume that a building (the center of its drop zone) falls y feet from its footprint. Then the force required to move it that distance would be F=kmg, where: m = the mass of the building, g = the gravitational constant, and k = y/h, for h = the height of the building. So the force would, in fact, have to proportional to the weight, mg, of the building. …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

"There are instead engineers and scientists who have clearly detailed why it is not possible for the fires and planes to have brought down the buildings, and despite the massive ad-hominem attacks such people are made to suffer whenever they speak out, exactly why more don’t, NOBODY has ever actually tackled the hard science behind these claims." Judging from "the massive ad-hominem attacks" you make against anyone who appears to disagree with your conclusions, you would be better advised to follow your own advice. Aside from the hypocrisy of it all, it alienates anyone from even considering the evidence you present, …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

If it starts toppling off to any side like that, if the force from above is continuous, (gravity is constant so it is) and it is meeting resistance then the momentum of the toppling tower floors would have continued in the same arc as they began. The only way that could have straigtened up is if the lower floors turned to water suddenly.

So, what? If part of a structure is torquing off its vertical axis, due to the resistance of the remaining structure below, then the structure will continue to torque off its vertical axis until the resistance …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Major, you are ABSOLUTELY correct in saying that the structure will continue torquing! Which makes it impossible for the torqing structure to drop straight down, unless the pivot is removed.

Not necessarilly. If we assume that no demolition occurred, then at vertical or near vertical orientation, the structure would oscillate about its axis as it encounters intermittant resistance from below. Eventually, the mass of the structure, as a function of its skew from the vertical, would be greater then the mass of resistance it encounters, and it would then overcome the self-correcting inertial oscillations. But by then the structure …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

"If this actually happened, why would the top portion have the capacity to crush the lower portion 400% larger, which was homogenous in material make-up with the upper portion." The load-bearing capacity of the support columns were no longer rigidly reinforced, because the kinetic energy of an airliner travelling at close to maximum speed (m*v squared) is enormous enough to plow through less than 70 exterior columns (just through the collision side of the structure, not the entire 280 columns) to compromise the integrity of the12 core support columns which faced the collision side of the structure.

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

And that madman, Natalie, is George Bush and his merry band of neocon pranksters, who lied about the reasons for invading Iraq and now lie about the reasons for occupying the country, killing and torturing the people who resist the occupation and enslaving the survivors under barely veiled threats of instigating a civil war. Whether they're directly responsible for destroying the World Trade Center is still a debatable topic and that's the purpose of this thread. I happen to believe that their incompetence and deliberate refusal to prevent the catastophe is reason enough to impeach and convict them for treason, and …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

My goodness, Major Major, You’re just another squib video away from joining this circus. You seem to have bought into a lot of other myths, or at least distortions, so I think you might be a prime candidate for conversion. The impression I get from your post is that you think it’s not debatable that foreign policy decisions made by the Bush administration are wrong. On the other hand, you seem to think that the possibility of bombs in buildings shouldn’t be ruled out. Do I read you right on that?

Actually, I usually avoid the videos because they …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

"Interesting theory, Major, one I'd heard before, ..." You didn't "hear" it. You read it. Just like I did. "My bad." No hay problemo. Just donate the million dollars to ITT. "Belief is a force. It's a weak force, by comparison with gravity; when it comes to moving mountains, gravity wins every time." -Terry Pratchett, Pyramids, Harper Torch, 1989, p. 202.

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Hmm. I still see no reason why this should be so symmetrical, why such a massive cloud of pulverised particles was created almost instantaneously, why all the massive central-core columns collapsed together, and how large sections of steel were projected hundreds of meters. At the same time there were"fireballs" at ground level.

Everyone here seems determined to ignore the elephant in the living room, as if we're all waiting for someone else to "notice" it. One guy comments on the strange smell in the air while the other guy just can't understand who dropped that huge load of crap on …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

If you know it's not my theory, then why call it my theory? It's F.R.Greening's theory, which you knew when you provided the following link: http://www.911myths.com/WTCTHERM.pdf Greening, a retired nuclear engineer from Ontario, Canada, subsequently challenged Jones to conduct a more realistic experiment to verify his claims, which Jones did. The results are described in a paper which can be obtained at this link. Another unrelated study appears to conclude that the kinetic energy required to create the pyroclastic clouds of debris could not be obtained from the gravitational potential energy which brought down the buildings: http://911research.wtc7.net/papers/dustvolume/volumev3.html It's …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Thermite is a chemical mixture of aluminum and ferric oxide powders which is ignited by a fuse burning at an extremely high temperature. Greening's rebuttal to Jones' demonstration (pouring molten aluminum over rusted steel) implied that the demonstration did not sufficiently replicate the conditions encountered at the WTC impact zone, asserting that molten aluminum is more likely to produce an explosive reaction with a pre-heated mixture of crushed concrete, gypsum and rusted steel, because crushing those materials increased their surface area and therefore the likelihood of an explosive reaction. (Thermite, after all, is a mixture of fine powders, reduced to dimensions …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

"Hawaii.indymedia website says that 14 tons of explosive were required to pulverize 90,000 tons of concrete flooring in each WTC Tower. But that is 11 tons more explosive than required to drop each Tower." It's interesting that you would refer to the Hawaii IMC coverage of Hoffman's analysis of the WTC debris cloud, because the section you employ to substantiate your allegations (The Unexplored Option -- Explosives) was not part of Hoffman's original analysis but was interposed by the person who posted the paper on the thread. Comparing Hoffman's actual analysis to the IMC post will easilly establish the …

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

"I recommend that anyone convicted of headhunting, human sacrifice, deliberately targeting civilians, or using human shields to protect themselves while engaged in warfare be boiled in pig offal and buried head down in a lime pit 300 feet deep." http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/97808/index.php

Posted to The 9/11 Faith Movement

Well, actually, it's a socialism of the rich who, like Rupert Murdoch and Melonhead Scaife, fund fools like "Flush" Limbaugh and "Loofa" O'Reilly who exploit the hatred and resentment of fundamentalists who correctly conclude that liberalism has rendered obsolete their most cherished rationalizations for the poverty and ignorance they endure.

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

I think we can all agree that the liberals pushed the envelope of change beyond the bounds of social acceptance. So what? That, by default, is the definition of social change. Education is the universal solvent, which is why the conservatives are so hell-bent on restricting its availability to the people who can best "afford and appreciate" it. Nobody likes being told they're racist, or sexist, anti-semitic or homophobic, especially when the economic fallout is severe. Eventually the demagogues roll in and say, "No, no, we're not racists after all. We're just ordinary law-abiding, God-fearing citizens of the greatest nation in …

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

The Bush administration has proposed to cut 48 federally funded programs from the education budget, for a total savings of 4.3 billion dollars. "Virtually all 48 programs ... are intended to educate children, young adults and college students who are disabled, economically disadvantaged, limited English-proficient and even illiterate." "The President wants to replace these programs with $1.5 billion to hold high schools 'accountable' (police and punish, not help) for teaching and providing 'intervention' for 'non-performing' students. He also plans to give teachers business-style bonuses of $500 million to improve test scores. The remaining $300 million will be invested in high-end academics …

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

In ten years your daughter will have her degree in pharmacology and will be working as an assistant pharmacist for an annual salary of $30-40,000. If she's like most college graduates from the rural South, she will move to the city, because that's where the good-paying jobs are, the ones which provide a living income, decent working conditions and a liberal benefits package. If necessary, she'll help you and your family move to the city with her. If not, she'll bring her family out to the country once a year to visit gramma and granpa. They'll sit at the dinner table …

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

It wasn't the Republicans who built the dams which provided electricity to the rural South, or the water and sewer systems which reduced the spread of disease, or the hospitals and regional clinics which provided the medical care to treat or prevent illness, or the schools which provide the skills required to obtain a living wage, or hired the local residents to build it all, or set up the public pension programs and the medical programs and the housing programs to feed and house the elderly and the indigent and disabled. It wasn't the Republicans who provided farmers with subsidies to …

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

No one here is trying to convert you to "liberalism", although it's strange that you would log onto a progressive website to declare your passionate refusal to renounce your conservative convictions. Seems like a lot of unnecessary hassle just to reaffirm your patriotic beliefs. Whatever. Incidentally, none of the Saudis or Pakistanis responsible for 911 came here "illegally". All of them carried the appropriate documentation required to legally enter the US. In fact, one of their passports was recovered among the rubble of the World Trade Center. The 911 perpetrators were legal immigrants who were nationals of our allies in the …

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

And like the cartoon character who steps through the scenic background and zips it up behind her, she disappears. A-th-a-th-a-that's all, folks.

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

Brian, please. You had it right the first time. It's Rebuplicans, not Republicans. And while we're at it, it's Fux News.

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

The Jews are attacking the Christians? Has no one notified the folks at Homeland Security? Someone should raise the colored alert to yellow, orange, red or (gasp) black. Wait! Wasn't Christ a Jew? Or black? I'm confused.

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

Goddam liberals.

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

Good grief, Tina. Anyone can copy and paste from a White House website, as you did from this one: http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/economy/ Allow me to demonstrate:

THE CLINTON-GORE ECONOMIC RECORD: THE LOWEST UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN 30 YEARS THE LOWEST UNEMPLOYMENT RATE SINCE 1969 AND MORE THAN 20 MILLION NEW JOBS. In 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected President, the American economy was barely creating jobs, wages were stagnant, and the unemployment rate was 7.5 percent. His bold, three-part economic strategy focused on three objectives: fiscal discipline, investing in education, health care, science and technology, and opening foreign markets. Today�s jobs release …

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

Tina's Anne Coulter's illegitimate daughter. They did a DNA test and discovered that both of them share a "genetic predisposition to plagiarize".

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

Jew attacking Christians? I mean, Jews attacking Moslems, maybe that might be more plausible, in the Middle East where most of the population is Moslem and most of the population of Israel is Jewish. But even there you'd have to be seriously suicidal to piss off the people of a region who so overwhelmingly outnumber you. But to seriously assert that US Jews are attacking US Christians is even more delusional than asserting that the neocons attacked Iraq to defend the US from Iraqi WMDs. This joker is definitely not worried about who's attacking who. He's defending his hero, Shawn Stewart, …

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

You don't have to be Jewish to steal another people's land and resources, kill the people who resist and enslave the survivors. In fact, Christian Americans have been doing it for several centuries. I'm tempted to say that Americans wrote the book on that glorious chapter of history, but we all know that it's just another recurrent theme in the tapestry of civilization, one which would be almost boring in its almost infinite variety and repitition if it didn't require the ritual sacrifice of innocent victims. Some of us understand that the elimination of predatory rivals actually results in the production …

Posted to Two Faces of GOP Hate

After all, who in his "right" mind would vote for Gore and Lieberman, or Kerry and Edwards, when he can vote for "Dick and Bush" instead? That's American politics, according to Cline, sublimated to its most basic elements

Posted to Welcome to the Media Revolution

Somebody once wrapped an American flag around Cline's butt and he's been kissing it ever since. Nowadays he can't tell the difference between patriotism and kissing his own ass, but he's gotten very good at it and expects everyone else to kiss it as well, or suffer his comic accusations of treason. "Little George" Bush and "Big Dick" Cheney are his role models.

Posted to Welcome to the Media Revolution

Tina, you should be overjoyed to review the article quoterd below.

Jun 28, 6:39 PM EDT Pentagon Revises Anti-Wingnut Document By PAULINE JELINEK Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon is revising a document that calls conservatism a mental disorder, officials said Wednesday. Lawmakers, medical professionals and others had pressed for the change in a document outlining procedures for dealing with disabled service members. "Conservatism should not have been characterized as a mental disorder in an appendix of a procedural instruction," Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, a Defense Department spokesman, said Wednesday. "A clarification will be issued over the next …

Posted to Welcome to the Media Revolution

You my Daddy, sweet cheeks, but you keep covering your ass with that stupid flag. Actually the article states that "[t]he Pentagon is revising a document that calls homosexuality a mental disorder", which appears to imply that even those inveterate homophobes in the Pentagon are changing their stripes. It's hilarious to see you include your own comments among those "which make a mockery of intelligent debate", as if you ever had anything intelligent to contribute to the dialogue on this website. You and Tina and (Marine) Scorp have been baiting the debate for years, with mixed success. Criticizing the people who …

Posted to Welcome to the Media Revolution

Will somebody please give Bush a blowjob so that the Republicans in Congress can get around to impeaching him? Tina, your unconditional admiration for the man would make you the perfect logical choice. Just grit your teeth and do your patriotic duty. Uh, thanks, Jay. Same to you.

Posted to Welcome to the Media Revolution

For a good example of how trolls like Tina are rendered absolutely useless, click here.

Posted to Welcome to the Media Revolution

How goes it, Tina? You say "fellaytio" and George says "fellahtio"? The future of the nation rests upon your slender shoulders.

Posted to Welcome to the Media Revolution

The social context within which the words are employed is probably more important than the words themselves. Most minorities are acutely aware of the inherently racist structure of the world within which they necessarilly exist, and recognize the futility of separating themselves from it. Racism resides within an economic power structure which minorities cannot avoid. Lesbians, on the other hand, can and do regard male paternalism and sexual domination as irrelevant to their sexual choices. In other words, they can choose to dissociate themselves from a sexist universe, while minorities are forced to work within a racist universe.

Posted to Sticks & Stones and Dykes

I suppose you could say the same for conservatives who affectionately refer to each other as "fascist" and "racist", and liberals who call each other "communist", or, occasionally, conservatives and liberals who describe each other, respectively, as "bleeding heart" and "hemorrhoidal".

Posted to Sticks & Stones and Dykes

No one's advocating mandatory fellatio, Woof. On the other hand, giving Bush a blowjob might conceivably persuade a Republican dominated Congress to impeach him.

Posted to Curriculum Wars

The people who currently oppose the inclusion of gays among the American mainstream population are the sons and daughters of the people who opposed the inclusion of minorities among the American mainstream, who were themselves the sons and daughters of the people who opposed the inclusion of immigrants and women among the American mainstream, and all of them - children, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents - were opposed to the social dislocations created by the Industrial Revolution, which required an educated (indoctrinated), industrial workforce. The public education system was created to educate a rural agricultural workforce and transform it into an urban …

Posted to Curriculum Wars

No one's forcing you or your children to become gay. What the conservatives object to is that no one's forcing anyone to be straight either. Sexuality, in an urban, capital-intensive industrial society, is a personal choice. The two principal precursors to modernization are a rising literacy rate and the emergence of a wider variety of birth control. People are no longer compelled, biologically or socially, to produce large extended families, which were necessary to maintain rural, labor-intensive agricultural societies, which required a large peasant or slave workforce to feed them, standing armies to defend them, and a religious or secular priesthood …

Posted to Curriculum Wars

"Gay marriage" is a Republican oxymoron, intended to galvanize its conservative Christian fundamentalist base into voting for an administration which continues to blame the liberals for its own neoconservative economic incompetence. Capital flight has impoverished everyone in this country, from the people who lose their jobs and benefits to outsourced production, to the people who lose their retirement benefits to mergers and bankruptcy, to the people who can no longer afford to send their children to college, or obtain adequate medical care for themselves and their families, to the middle-class professionals who can no longer rely upon an expanding pool of …

Posted to Curriculum Wars

Woof-woof, Wolf. When capital flight flees to the suburbs, or the exurbs, or out-of-stae, or out of the country, the people who can best afford to flee (the middle class, including the minority middle-class) will fly with it. This normally results in a higher urban unemployment rate, a lower urban median income, a larger working-class population competing against one another for a shrinking employment base, a larger population of public education students less inclined or prepared to succeed in an academic or vocational market which rewards the children of the economic migrants who might have been otherwise inclined to employ or …

Posted to Black Politics Paradigm Paradox

Jesus, Woof. Ain't it a drag when you can't get the respect you know you deserve? Go play in the traffic on some freeper site. Someone there is bound to wrap an American flag around your sad, silly, sorry ass, and salute.

Posted to Iraq on the Big Screen

A grudging concession from an idiot who probably supported mandatory sentencing when the Republicans and conservative Democrats advocated them to persuade a terrified pre-911electorate to vote for them. Now the "costs" appear to be more excessive then the welfare which once barely sustained them. Incarceration is just another conservative euphemism for welfare, which itself was just another American euphemism for criminal social neglect.

Posted to Convict Nation

Jeb Bush, the inbred brother of the Chickenhawk-in-Chief, who nearly lost the election in 2000 because he couldn't steal enough votes to put his brother over the top? Governor of the Great State of Florida, where airhead Republican bimbos compete against each other to become trophy wives to Rich and Famous Octogenarian Republican crooks? Ah, Tina. Go back to Canton before you get burned. You're completely out of your depth in Florida.

Posted to Convict Nation

More to the point, is human nature essentially or potentially good or evil? If good, then is the purpose of prison to rehabilitate the people who fall from grace and nurture their wayward souls back to the flock? If evil, then are we compelled to punish the people who fail to accept their social responsibility and respect legitimate authority, and isolate them from the responsible, God-fearing majority? Is the predominant percentage of "nonwhite" inmates in American prisons a function of American racism and economic segregation, or simply a racial predisposition to resist racist expectations? In a nation whose majority of residents …

Posted to Convict Nation

Since we're speculating on the creation of comic stereotypes, let's get philosophical and create a mythological universe populated by "Gods and mortals", where the "Gods", by definition, are systemic social organizations composed of subsidiary social organizations which themselves are motivated by local organizations of families composed of "mortals". Each contituent organization derives its divine characteristics from the mortality of its membership which seeks to minimize its individual mortality by investing its energy in the maintenance and reproduction of the organization which simultaneously sustains and destroys them. Morality and ethics are thereby required to promote social cohesion at the expense of its …

Posted to Pow! Shazaam! Its ғMinoriteam!

Hey Redhorse, Your correct about about 2 of the stories. I thought the 16 yr old confessed. The other guy was arrested because of a DNA match, so he is guilty. Second, I’m NOT a racist. lol… I have to laugh when you liberals call everyone a racist .... too funny. Posted by tina1 on Jun 1, 2006 at 7:42 PM

Black Man Found Guilty In White ‘Grandma’ Attack http://www.nbc4.com/news/9199699/detail.html This is on video, like Rodney King, but we never heard about this on CNN. A black man attacked and beat a white 83 year old white lady. …

Posted to If Ken Lay Was Black

That's the point, Redhorse. She could have said something like: "...AND YOU WONDER WHY WHITE PEOPLE DON'T LIKE BLACK PEOPLE!!!!" But she didn't. Reagan made racism respectable for rednecks like tina, allowing them to rarionalize their bigotry. Bush is trying his best to make fascism respectable for essentially the same reasons, constructing the foundations for a police state mentality, which allows the authoritarians like tina to rationalize their not-so-latent neonazi tendencies.

Posted to If Ken Lay Was Black

I think we're all over-analyzing her racism. She's just another redneck asshole.

Posted to If Ken Lay Was Black

"...the numbers are distorted..." That's cute, Dude. So, what you and the (Marine) Scorp seem to be saying is that Clinton's irresponsible runup of the Tao (to around 11,000 by the time the Boy Genius assumed the office in January, 2001) was responsible for the "crash" in September, 2001 when the Tao dropped like a rock to 7,500, and only the valiant, heroic efforts of Republican economic ingenuity saved us from an impending economic catastrophe (tax cuts and all that other good shit) which by December of 2002 was chugging along at around 8,900, until once again Bubba's speculative bubble burst …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Actually, I googled finance.google.com to get an overview of the DJIA over the last six years. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the correlation between massive military spending (Afghanistan, Homeland Security and Iraq) and economic "growth". I see no reason why the fascists can't continue to stimulate the economy indefinitely, other than the collateral damage they cause to the rest of the world, and the people they sacrifice to implement the policy. That, by definition, is the meaning of American fascism. We live in the real world, asshole, not your fantasy of the "free" market and the …

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

It's an ancient Chinese arbitrage trading society - Tai Kwan Do

Posted to Why Exiting Iraq Wont Be Easy

Spokesmen for the Bush administration recently announced their approval for the funding of the Washington Monument Project. "Exposure to corrosive atmospheric conditions like acid rain threatens to destroy our treasured phallic monuments. The administration has subsequently decided to cover them all with a plastic 'prophylactic' shroud." The no-bid contract to protect our national cultural heritage was awarded to Halliburton, which has acquired extensive paramilitary experience in "making democracy safe for the world."

Posted to Disclaimer

But that's the point of placing a condom on a phallic symbol, especially one which, like the Bush administration, insists on screwing the world with its right-wing infatuation with fascism masquerading as democracy.

Posted to Disclaimer

Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect the fascists to approve, let alone fund, the project. Aside from its conceptual appeal (another thought experiment, Wolf), the prospect of placing a plastic shroud over the Washington monument is practically nil. Nevertheless, other (more realistic) artistic expressions are not, such as rolling a condom over a small replica of the monument and sending to your favorite fascist. Your local Fox News affiliate would certainly appreciate the gesture. Bill O'Reilly might even reserve a few minutes of his propaganda extravaganza to denounce it, although I'm sure he'd rather have another loofa.

Posted to Disclaimer

Good Grief, Goober. If it makes you feel any better, forget about the Washington monument, or any replica thereof. Just send the guy a condom, preferably unused. After all, he's spreading a social disease.

Posted to Disclaimer

It's amazing how the trolls around here never seem to get the point. Apparently they live in an inverse parallel universe where attacking the left on a progressive website is somehow construed as self-defense, while being ridiculed for their intolerance is tantamount to being intolerant. For God's sake, Gomer. Forget about the condoms, too. Just download a graphic of Dumbo the Flying Elephant off the web and caption it "Mission Accomplished" or "Roundtrip to Bahgdad". Hang it on the office bulletin board.

Posted to Disclaimer

When governments, or cultural institutions, or the media, withhold funding from, or exposure to, the arts because some of it is offensive (read "critical") to those institutions, then you know you're living in a police state, where any dissident expression is either repressed or overtly denounced as unpatriotic or obscene. I hesitate to use the word "fascist" because Chipper might become offended, once again, and attempt to lecture me on the politically correct connotations of "real" fascism, something he seems to have derived from his own "authentic" experience, where the stormtroopers break into your house and murder you in your bed …

Posted to Disclaimer

Don't forget Thomas Kincade.

Posted to Disclaimer

I imagine that the cost of covering a phallic symbol like the Washington monument with an over-sized condom would be expensive. The cost alone of producing the condom would probably run into the tens of thousands of dollars, assuming that a company like Carter-Wallace, Inc.could be persuaded to produce it. I can hear Rush Limbaugh right now, urging his auditors to "boycott Trojan Lubricated Condoms, with Special Receptacle End. Folks, our good friends at Schmid Laboratories are true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool, patriotic Republicans and they're ready, even as I speak, to gratify your every contraceptive desire. Remember: a Fourex 'non-slip lubricated contraceptive condom' …

Posted to Disclaimer

Thanks, David. I have little doubt that I could raise the necessary funds, even among Americans, to "put a Trojan on the Monument", but even if I got the National Parks Service to approve the project, the exhibition itself would be counter-productive. In fact, if the wingnuts had an ounce of intelligence to spare among the entire lot, they would be lobbying the Bush administration to increase federal funing for the National Endowment for the Arts, if only to generate greater support for their own conservative agenda. Like the "welfare queens" and "Willie Horton", references to the art of Robert Mapplethorpe …

Posted to Disclaimer

The problem is that you have to cover yourself with the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegience every hour on the hour just to prove that you're not a terrorist, which is bullshit to begin with, because most of the terrorists, the ones running the War on Terror in DC, are doing the same thing.

Posted to Disclaimer

Chipper and Woof remind me of John Scalzi's description of a Conservative: someone "who would rather shit on a freshly-baked cherry pie than share it with anyone outside the [clan]."

Posted to Disclaimer

What it boils down to is you think forced contributions to marginal artists whose real agenda is to destroy the institutions they are criticizing is necessary to avoid a “fascist” society. Posted by chopper on Jun 11, 2006 at 3:47 PM

First of all, the "forced contributions" debate on the morality of taxation is a moot issue. Whether we like it or not, all of us live in a society where taxation is a mandatory obligation. Theoretically, we get to pick and choose the people who determine the tax code, but we don't get to pick and choose the …

Posted to Disclaimer

Oy vey, Chipper. Even your Chickenhawk-in-Chief, the archetypical Flying Elephant (Roundtrip to Baghdad, Part II), even he agrees with me. He's been complaining about the racism, sexism, homophobia, class discrimination, militarism and religious extremism of the Arabs for such a long time now that most of us might feel justified in concluding that he's actually a closet liberal in drag.

Posted to Disclaimer

Falling victim to anger and fear has been a staple of American politics since the dawn of the revolution, that first American civil war which was fought within the framework of a world war between the French and the English and the Spaniards, when American colonial expansion was checked by a British reluctance to antagonize the French and their indigenous allies, who were understandably apprehensive at the prospect of losing their tribal territories to a technologically superior race of white European emigrants whose solitary source of social cohesion was their predictable ability "to fall victim to anger and fear". We've been …

Posted to What Ails Us?

Every 12 years the nation cycles through 6 federal elections, which include 3 presidential elections, 6 full congressional elections for the house (435 members) and 2 full congressional elections for the senate (100 members). If we assume that each candidate has at least one opponent then the average cost of a federal election is: ACFE = /6 = P + 870*H + 67*S where: P = the average cost of a presidential election, H = the average cost of a congressional election for the house and S = the average cost of a congressional election for the …

Posted to Careless Industry

Sufferin' succotash, Sylvester. I used a twelve-year, six-election cycle to obtain a general estimate on the average cost of a federal election, since only one third of the Senate is elected during any given federal election and the President is elected on a four-year cycle. Election costs averaged over six elections provide a more accurate estimate of the costs incurred in obtaining a President and the members of Congress. You may regard it as a "mathematical fallacy" (since when did you suddenly become a mathematician?) but the formulation still provides a lowball estimate on the amount of money required to elect …

Posted to Careless Industry

Sacre merde, mon ami. Was there a topic to this thread? Normally, the topic, whatever it happens to be, is generally decomposed into its two constituent components: the left side, which loves to ridicule the rich, and the right side, which thereby feels compelled to ridicule the poor, when it's not blaming the liberals for misleading them. All of us then retire to our respective corners, basking in the warm glow of an imagined partisan admiration, while the trainers wipe away the blood and sweat for the next round. It's an exciting diversionary experience, which in this case ignores the observation …

Posted to Careless Industry

The Minutemen to which you refer were anticolonial guerillas, just like the Vietcong who dug punji pits on jungle trails and the Arab insurgents who plant IEDs on Iraqi highways. They terrorized the Loyalists who supported British rule, hanging many of them when they controlled the towns and villages, and burning them and their property to the ground when forced by the redcoats to retreat to the woods. And securing their borders was the last thing most of them wanted. They fought a revolutionary civil war to open up the borders, to initiate a westward expansion in which they were the …

Posted to Careless Industry

Oh, you mean the Arizona Minutemen, not the rabble-rousing smugglers and misfits like Paul Revere and Tom Paine whose parents emigrated to the colonies to escape the restraints of British religious or political oppression, or, in many cases, the poorhouse or the gallows. You mean the Modern Minutemen who roam the Rio Grande in search of Mexican misfits who emigrate to a country which once belonged to them, for virtually the same reasons which inspired their lighter-skinned antecedents. By the way, someone forgot to remind the Minutemen that the Canadian border is totally undefended. Hordes of French-Canadian Quebecois have already invaded …

Posted to Careless Industry

Amazing. Speaking of the French, have you heard the joke about the Rabbi who walks into a bar with a frog on his shoulder? "Hey, where'd you get that?", says the bartender. "in Brooklyn.", says the frog. "There's hundreds of them."

Posted to Careless Industry

Good Grief! We've managed to stray back on topic once again. Somebody, quick! Summon the trolls and send in the clowns! For God's sake, Tina! Where are you when we really need you?

Posted to Careless Industry

Time test: 10:45 PM, 05-15-06 Right. Apparently the clowns were watching their Fearless Leader deploy the National Guard along the Mexican border, another one of Rove's wedge issues designed to shore up their eroding Conservative base and sow dissension among their Liberal foes. Thanks for the input, Alan.

Posted to Careless Industry

OK, Sargeant Major. I'll spell it out for you. No one's even thinking of deploying the National Guard along the Canadian border, despite the massive number of Canadian immigrants, particularly the French-Canadians in New England, who over the years have managed to insinuate themselves among the American population, displacing millions of American farmers and factory laborers and, over several generations, achieving an astounding cultural and economic degree of social assimilation to American society. I am, of course, being sarcastic. The Quebecois who came here were as diligant and industrious as their Southern, dark-skinned counterparts. They displaced the labor that American New …

Posted to Careless Industry

I believe my point was that the Mexican border is about to be militarized, unlike the Canadian border which, except for the War of 1812, never had been. The principal difference between the two countries is that Canada is predominantly white. The militarization of the Mexican border, by the way, could easilly become the justifying basis for the reinstitution of the draft, one in which all draftees are stationed in the country for "homeland security" duty, including border patrol, and only volunteers, with suitable incentives, are drawn from the domestic pool for service in foreign imperial conflicts. As for the assimilation …

Posted to Careless Industry

Fuck God, and fuck you. Both of you.

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Actually, the practical effect of welfare was to mitigate the poverty endured by the indigent whose services were no longer required by the businessmen who once employed them. Millions were fed, housed, clothed and educated by a government which recognized its responsibility "to promote the general welfare". No one claimed to be "saving souls" or "building family values" or whatever other fatuous euphemism politicians employ to flog the faithful. It was understood that people were free to form their own "values" and save their own "souls", without the benevolent interference of the god squad.

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

The public schools were created to transform an agrarian population into an industrial workforce. You can't operate a steel mill without draftsmen, engineers, metallurgists and chemists. Unfortunately, the teachers invested with the responsibility of educating their students actually assumed their responsiblities and taught their students to appreciate less practical subjects, such as Art, Music, English Lit, Economics, Sociology and Political Science, which compelled many of their proteges to assume a correspondingly critical perspective with respect to the more traditional American institutions of racism, sexism, class stratification and imperialism, which in turn transformed an ignorant, labor-intensive agricultural workforce into an educated, capital-intensive …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Good Grief, Gomer. I didn't mean to confuse you. Actually, I did, but I can see that your ideological armor renders you impervious to reasonable discourse. You're obviously the product of a parochial education. In your Manichean universe, the Democrats are evil and the Republicans epitomize an apotheosis of civic virtue. In such a universe it's easy to demonize the soft sciences and deify the more phallic, mathematical and physical academic disciplines. You might be surprised (and dismayed) to discover that economics and market finance are included among the former, flaccid category. In fact, it's become increasingly apparent that the hard …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

It would be a mistake to accuse people like scorp, wolf and tina1 of racism. They resent the misrepresentation and they would be right to resent it. These folks are equal opportunity sado-masochists, a skill which is highly regarded among the military elite, especially the Marine Scorp, where shitting on your subordinates and kissing your superior officer's' butt is the institutional norm. Most of us return to civilian status and manage to resolve the experience. But the ass-kissing, ass-kicking power-tripping bullshit usually requires a much longer period of resolution. Often there is no resolution. Ora pro nobis.

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Oy vey. You do understand, don't you, that you attempt to encourage the impossible? Which reminds me of a joke (possibly your own) I read on this site several months ago: Rene Descartes walks into a bistro in Paris and stands at the counter, contemplating the clockwork precision of the universe. The proprietor asks him if he wants a beer, and Descartes replies, "I think not." And promptly disappears. These days, the dominant political wisdom can best be described as cogito non, ergo sum conservitus.

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

I don't share your optimism for converting the fascists and the conservatives. Conversion is a religious experience. More accurately, it's a psychological process which requires a catastrophic event to shake loose the ideological foundations which support it, and the eventual end result is usually the reconstruction of another, equally misleading ideological framework, like liberalism, or socialism. People need to believe in something. Otherwise, we would continue to destroy one another indefinitely. Oh, wait. We're doing that already, aren't we? I imagine that people like tina or scorp were once liberals, but their faith in liberalism was destroyed by some catastrophic event, …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Wow! Quick response. Classic case of overcompensation.

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

American slavery is, by definition, the violent imposition of white authority over black slaves. In a male-dominated society, characterized by the imposition of male authority over females, any threat to the authority of males is a threat to their masculinity. Hence, male slaves were especially oppressed because they represented a threat to white masculinity. This pattern of white male dominance has afflicted the black community since the era of American slavery through the post-bellum period of Reconstruction to the present. The overwhelming majority of black males are forced by circumstance to submit to the supervision of white males, from their initial …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Evidently, any reference to the elimination of white male dominance is enough to threaten the masculinity of the dominated white males among us. This, after all, is the significance of the redneck backlash which Nixon, Reagan and the Bush klan have so assiduously exploited for the last forty years. Nixon's Southern Strategy was tailored to capitalize on the Southern white male resentment which resulted from the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Reagan continued the clandestine assault on civil rights by attacking welfare, which, incidentally, benefitted both black and white recipients, despite the pejorative connotations which Republicans were quick to ascribe …

Posted to Black Men: The Crisis Continues

Lou Dobbs is a tool. After all, he graduated from Harvard, with a degree in economics, no less, which proves the point. What can you say about a guy who cites a study on immigration from the National Academy of Sciences to conclude that even though immigrant labor contributes ten billion dollars to the American economy, the costs of immigrant labor debit the economy by ten to twenty billion dollars, when in fact the study explicitly concludes that immigrant labor contributes ten billion dollars in net benefits to the economy. Or when he states that one third of the American prison …

Posted to Keeping America Empty

Yikes! When people like knocko and whatthehell appear to join the ranks of the liberals and the progressives, you know it's time to head for the hills and barricade the village gates. Lynch an employer? Now there's a novel (presumptive) solution, one worthy of anyone seeking to ingratiate himself with the people he ordinarilly dislikes. But, seriously, folks. Even fascists are people, even though they themselves would prefer to regard themselves as white people. The State of Michigan, home to a wide variety of fascist organizations, has a long and (dis)honorable history of fascist infatuation. Henry Ford himself was a fascist, …

Posted to Keeping America Empty

Having stolen the land from the original inhabitants, the thieves were compelled to import slaves to work it, because the indigenous inhabitants could not be compelled to submit to slavery, whereas the people seized from another continent had no other choice. Now their descendants complain about the evils of illegal immigration, as if the emigration of their own antecedants was a virtuous event. Hilarity doesn't even begin to describe the convoluted logic employed to justify the moral rectitude of those who profit from the benefits of conquest.

Posted to Keeping America Empty

Who do you think is maintaining the infrastructure in this country? In a post-industrial economy where industry migrates to foreign shores in search of zero (or negative) tax rates, cheap labor and the virtual absence of environmental restrictions, the people who once were employed by local industry, both foreign and domestic, are inclined to migrate elsewhere to obtain employment. Many of them end up here, employed by governments which are compelled by the erosion of their tax base to privatize the services they once performed themselves. In other words, they subcontract those services to companies who hire the immigrants, at slaveshop …

Posted to Keeping America Empty

Linus Torvalds. Pauling invented massive doses of vitamin C.

Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos

The US is one of the most successful settler states in the history of the world, and Israel is only one of its more modern adherents. To claim that Israeli foreign policy determines American foreign policy is misleading. If Israel has any influence on American foreign policy, it exists largely from its resonance to the American historical experience and its ability to generate public support for American imperial objectives.

Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents

The blind spot is that the Israeli historical experience mirrors its American model, and thereby confers upon Israel an ideological veneer of unexamined justification for its invasion and occupation of indigenous territories, and the gradual expulsion of its original inhabitants. Zionist settlers, many of them American expatriates steeped in the moral tradition of the Old West, travelling the Chisolm Trail to Jerusalem, beating back the hordes of hostile natives who attack them with demonic ferocity. What could be more evocative? It's Gunsmoke, with Hebrew subtitles.

Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents

The idea is to make apartheid and ethnic cleansing morally defensible, not simply because of any inherent sympathetic affiliation with Israeli Zionists, but because Zionism resonates with and reinforces American imperial policy, which began almost as soon as American independence from the British was concluded. William Appleman Williams describes the American westward expansion as an imperial project which required the serial extirpation of indigenous natives from the territories which eventually were incorporated into the "united states" of North America. This project would have been impossible without the importation of European emigrants, who otherwise would have revolted against the leadership of their …

Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents

As long as Israel remains an exclusively Jewish state, exclusive of the Palestinians it expelled, it will continue to attract the animosity of the region, and thereby preclude the secular development of the Middle East, an economic evolution which otherwise would naturally align itself to European integration. US foreign policy has consistently been applied to prevent any alliance of Middle Eastern states with any of its economic rivals. What could be more symbiotic than this?

Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents

But the alternative to globalization is, in fact, nationalism. It's not as if the neocons are simply paying lip service to nationalist principles in order to mystify the masses with appeals to religious and cultural parochialism, as they continue to globalize the world economy. Or, in any case, it doesn't much matter if they are. The net result remains the same: a steady increase in nationalist sentiment throughout the world, cultural xenophobia, religious hysteria and proto-fascist populism. One might just as easilly argue that the neocons achieved political dominance from the reaction to a neoliberal faith in economic globalization. Countries, including …

Posted to The Israel Lobby and its Discontents

They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards -- George Armstrong Custer.

Posted to Barbarians at the Helm

They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards -- Typically Paranoid Delusions of an American Fascist

You've done it again, Daffy. You and your courageous neoconservative colleagues continue to parrot the party line: it's us against the hostile hordes who threaten to disturb our racial and political supremacy. It's the same old tired narrative which terrified the original colonists four hundred years ago. Yesterday, we were surrounded by the savage Indians. Today, we're surrounded by the savage Iraqis. Tomorrow, we'll be surrounded by the savage Chinese. Thank God for the military. They'll protect us from the savages who want to kill …

Posted to Barbarians at the Helm

You still don't get it, do you? Listening to you lecture us about "the (literally) poor bastards" who surround us is a lot like listening to Hitler complain about the Jews and communists who corrupt the heart of German culture, the subhumans who surround the supermen who deserve to rule the world. Our modern, professional, volunteer military has assumed the collective social attributes of a shark, which has to keep killing in order to keep from starving to death. The Soviet Union didn't simply collapse from inefficiency and corruption. Like the Germans, the Russians were transformed from a feudal to an …

Posted to Barbarians at the Helm

There is no painless transition from feudalism to industrialism. The English fought a civil war (Cromwell's revolution) and created a world-wide empire to dispose of their surplus population. The French had their own revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars to shed their surplus peasants, and incidentally made the American revolution possible (some genius decided that the best way to crush the French revolution was to ship off the revolutionaries to the New World in opposition to the English loyalists in the colonies). The Spanish, Germans, Japanese and Italians had their fascist revolutions and the Russians and Chinese had their communist revolutions. …

Posted to Barbarians at the Helm

It's not "Impure Marxism", you d(u)ckhead, it's "vulgar Marxism". If you insist on misquoting the socialists, then at least get it right and misquote them correctly.

The people who start, or try to start, socialist revolutions are not workers and peasants. On the contrary: Lenin was a lawyer, Stalin studied to be a priest, Bukharin was an intellectual and politician, Mao was a scholar and a warlord, Castro was a lawyer, Che was a doctor, Chavez is a soldier, Sulzburger is a publisher, and Streisand is a dingbat.

I"m surprised you haven't accused the socialists of starting, or trying to start, …

Posted to Barbarians at the Helm

Well, offhand, I'd say that we'll continue to ignore your posts (and cabbie's, too), since the two of you seem to know what you're talking about while the rest of us would rather grind away at our own respective ideological axes. No pun intended. For example, the idea that undocumented workers are an unmiitgated social evil is nonsense, since most of them are employed by people who would otherwise be out of business without them: small to medium farmers who would otherwise be unable to compete with agribusiness, landscapers laid off from their auto plants, local restaurants competing against the national …

Posted to Theyve Come for Us All

The point is, this country was built on the unpaid or underpaid labor of undocumented immigrants or, as the case may be, emigrants.

Posted to Theyve Come for Us All

I believe that what I said was that the progressives were running so far ahead of the pack that no one realized that no one was following them. That is to say, they lost touch with their base, which is the Democrats, who were fighting a protracted rearguard skirmish with the Republicans over the backlash vote: white, Southern male working-class voters. The Southern strategy is essential to the Republicans who understand that the social tide is shifting from Northern urban industrial regions to Southern suburban and rural, and traditionally non-unionized, agricultural regions, where much of the current industrial migration occurs (when …

Posted to The Republicans Democracy Disorder

So you're saying that Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack the Americans at Pearl Harbor (which he did by cutting off their access to oil in Southeast Asia) in order to swing American opinion to support the war in Europe, just as Bush provoked Al Queda to attack the Pentagon and World Trade Center ("carpet of gold or carpet of bombs") in order to swing American opinion to support the war in Iraq. In order to mitigate the approaching impact of peak oil, or, in any case, to forestall its occurrence through military and political destabilization throughout the Middle East? …

Posted to The Republicans Democracy Disorder

Goodness gracious. I haven't seen so many capitalized letters since tina1 last graced us with her dubious presence. You clearly implied that the Roosevelt administration had advance knowledge of an impending attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. I merely took the extra step and assumed that his administration passively provoked the Japanese to attack. It's a reasonable assumption, given the long history of American provocation and retaliation in its continental march from New England to the West Coast, and beyond. Remember the Alamo? Or the Maine? Or the Tonkin Gulf? Or April Glaspie's diplomatic absence of opinion with respect to …

Posted to The Republicans Democracy Disorder

I wasn't implying that you were implying that I was implying that you were implying anything more than what you actually wrote. In fact, I agree with your general thesis that the Democrats are preferable to the Republicans, but only because our bipolar political structure allows for nothing else. I suppose if I were an affluent member of the middle or upper classes, or a Southern white male member of the working class, I would feel otherwise. I merely stated my opinion which, based on the predatory history of the US, I regard as reasonable or, as you said, circumstantial. The …

Posted to The Republicans Democracy Disorder

Tina's currently pre-occupied with the Bauer thread, trying to prove that the Jeb Bush reduced the crime rate in Florida.

Posted to Witness for the Prosecution

You won't be voting "for a republican or democrat" because you're not an American citizen, you un-American "arse".

Posted to Witness for the Prosecution

My apologies for any insult inferred, but you really set yourself up with your "alienable" choice of colloquial expression. For that matter, I'm inclined to further insult you for your miserable choice of emigration from Seattle to Florida, that criminal utopia for these united states. That you might disagree with me merely indicates that you are one of the criminals in question, which I doubt, or that you've managed to isolate yourself from the predatory pool of victims upon which the criminals prey. Of course, Jeb Bush ranks among the best of them. Stealing minority votes is his specialty. If your …

Posted to Witness for the Prosecution

In light of your subsequent remarks, I am regretfully compelled to retract my previous apology. You may have been born in Seattle, but you presently reside in some sado-masochistic fantasyland where the occupation of a defenseless, demoralized and all-but-destroyed people is somehow equated to a war with Germany and Japan. You should be ashamed of yourself, and the leaders to which you slavishly defer.

Posted to Witness for the Prosecution

Torture is being promoted in order to minimize the emotional and political impact of an illegal occupation of Iraq.The overwhelming majority of troops in Iraq are not torturing anyone, aside from the daily indignities that military occupations generally impose upon an occupied people. But those indignities, coupled with the collateral damage derived from attacking the people who resist American occupation, appear to be less traumatic than they actually are when compared against the relatively minor threat of torture.

Posted to Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency

I don't mean to imply that Iraqis are not being tortured. Negroponte after all is ambassador to Iraq. And Negroponte has built his career around the principle of outsourcing torture to the indigenous representatives of American occupation, in this case the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.

Posted to Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency

All of which serves to increase the contrast between the noble American "liberators" of Iraq and their "savage, uncivilized" Iraqi confederates who, with their equally savage and uncivilized antagonists, require an extended American occupation of Iraq, in order to "make the Iraqis safe for democracy".

Posted to Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency

The US unilaterally invaded and occupied Iraq without the approval of the UN, which it sought to obtain from the Security Council, as Liberal notes. It sought authorization to bolster its claims of legality. It received no authorization. Therefore, the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq is illegal. Negroponte is currently the Director of National Intelligence. Zalmay Khalizdad succeeded him to the Iraqi ambassadorship. Therefore, Negroponte is no longer ambassador to Iraq. What's you point? Finally, the Canadian Conservative Party is more liberal than the American Democratic Party. In fact, all of the major political parties in Canada - the Liberals, …

Posted to Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency

In the year 2000 Florida had an estimated population of 15,982,378 which ranked the state 4th in population. For that year the State of Florida had a total Crime Index of 5,694.7 reported incidents per 100,000 people. This ranked the state as having the 2nd highest total Crime Index. For Violent Crime Florida had a reported incident rate of 812.0 per 100,000 people. This ranked the state as having the 1st highest occurrence for Violent Crime among the states. For crimes against Property, the state had a reported incident rate of 4,882.7 per 100,000 people, which ranked as the state …

Posted to Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency

Crime rates across the board have been dropping for the last forty years, Tweety. And they've risen periodically only after the Republicans have screwed up the economy with tax cuts and subsidies to the rich and "free enterprise" for the rest of us. The only people complaining about rising crime rates are the politicians who need a "safe" issue to scare a paranoid population into voting for them, and the media who need to generate high advertising rates through their constant production of pornographic violence. And, of course, neocon numbskulls like you who eat it all up. Conservatism is a sociaql …

Posted to Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency

What are you talking about? My best friend told me that the game was postponed until next Sunday. Then he gave me the Seahawks, with a ten point spread. If you want some of that action, I'll be happy to accomodate you.

Posted to Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency

Tweety has a point. It's perverted, as usual, but it's still a point. The Republican response to their altruistic abolition of ADC and Social Security is to construct an extensive system of prisons. It's called "compassionate conservatism" and its proponents hope to replace the urban slums with a more pastoral congregation of rural "communities" for the indigent and their dissident colleagues. It's called "The American Gulag". Conservatism is a social disease.

Posted to Let Them Eat Crap

The rise of fundamentalism is more than just a neoconservative tactic to maintain control over a liberal world system. The liberal world order is breaking down, collapsing under the weight of its inability to integrate competing peripheral states. Fundamentalism, in America, the Middle East and Israel, is the recessionary system which inherits the remnants of an expansionary economic conflict between communism and fascism, and those liberal democracies which felt compelled to export one or the other in order to maintain their economic dominance over all of them. What's left is a transitory retreat to more primitive systems of social control. …

Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?

Marx spoofing Friedman? Mon dieu, mon ami. I thought I was spoofing Berrington Moore, by way of Immanuel Wallerstien. The third world's been trapped between the communists and the fascists for at least the last hundred years, and all they have to show for it is the successive, serial decimation of their secular leadership, and the reactionary rise of a religious fundamentalism which spurns both of them. Your litany of liberal support for the dictatoships of the world ignores the complementary communist support for the dictators who defeated them, or were overthrown by them.

Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?

You may be right, but to paraphrase Moore (Barrington, not Michael), most of the third world countries are, or were, agricultural monarchies in transition to becoming industrial democratic states. The former peasantry are turned out into an unemployed reserve labor force of industrial proles forced to find alternative employment as either emigrants or military conscripts or factory labor. A relative minority is allowed to join an emergent, more educated middle class who administer the demands of their employers and supervise the labor of their employees. These proto-industrial societies are forced to rapidly shed their excess (unemployed) population, either through colonization or …

Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?

The Israelis attempt to maintain the fiction that the "Palestinian territories" are an indefinite political entity separate from the state of Israel, while the Palestinians maintain that Israel itself is a fictitious state with no legal right to exist. The Israelis therefore reject any responsibility for the legal rights of the people dispossessed by the creation of the state of Irael, other than the right to employ them as migrant labor when convenient, while the Palestinians continue to vacillate between a half-hearted recognition of the Israeli state, in order to generate international support for the creation of a separate Palestinian state, …

Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?

Rabbit, I hesitate to mention it since it will only initiate another interminable succession of posts but, for what it's worth, if you restrict yourself to one or two contributions at a time, people will more likely read them, rather skimming or skipping over them. Chicago, globalization is dead in the water. Peak oil is about to transform an expanding global economy into an aggregation of isolated local economies.

Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?

Bite me, mate.

Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?

Rabbit, my original criticism stands. If your objective is to persuade people to ignore your posts, then keep doing what you're doing. Your scattershot diatribes of crimes and misdemeanors just turns people off, not because they're inaccurate but because they're interminable and often one-sided. Your lack of certitude with respect to your own convictions compels you to over-compensate by responding with a rote litany of ideological boilerplate, as if you need to constantly re-affirm the rectitude of your own beliefs.

Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?

Just for the record, Rabbit considers the person who straps explosives to himself and who then goes out into the streets of his enemy and takes out a bunch of civilians, is an honourable and worthy man. Compared to the soldier, who looks down a computer sight from his helicopter gunship and launches a missile in a civilian target or even a potential civilian target, and the goes home to dinner.

This is pure ideology which invites a false comparison between the "heroic" Iraqi patriot who sacrifices his life for his country, and only incidentally destroys other Iraqi citizens, …

Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?

There's nothing "honorable or worthy" about killing civilians, and I would hope to be the first to admit it, even if my family had been murdered by my enemies and I had retaliated in kind. There's nothing "honorable or worthy" about any kind of violent conflict, justified or not, and every person who ever survived such a conflict eventually admits it, or suffers from the consequences of avoiding the admission. The landscape of my country is littered with the walking wounded who contort themselves into impossible positions of moral justification, and I can only surmise that the affliction is universal: in …

Posted to Hamas: Sharon's Legacy?

The Democratic strategy is to deny the Republicans the opportunity to apply the wedge issues which they've refined to a fine art of divisive non-debate. Otherwise neocons like Tweety will start babbling about things like gay scout leaders and pasting god on the buck, or the pledge of allegience. Or "playing hide the hot dog".

Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words

Well, we'll see, Tweety. I don't think Gore "snapped". He's calling for a special prosecutor to investigate illegal wiretaps. Whether he gets one is beside the point. The Democrats will continue to focus on the issue. Americans don't like being monitored by the chickenhawks. Even the Barret report won't help you there. Murtha's calling for withdrawal from Iraq, making it harder for the Chickenhawk-in-Chief to declare victory and get out. Maybe they'll declare another "national emergency" and attack Iran. I hear the Israelis are champing at the bit on that. Lots of them are quietly emigrating back to the US. I …

Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words

The economy "stagnated" because the costs of the Vietnam war kicked off an inflationary spiral which was reinforced by the recessionary world energy crisis, which followed from the Yom Kippur war and the subsequent Arab oil embargo. Get your facts straight before you start spouting your free market mantras.

Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words

Military expenditures destroy wealth. In fact, the costs of Vietnam include fifty thousand American fatalities, including hundreds of thousands of American casualties, not to mention the two million Vietnamese fatalities (men, woman and children). Idiots such as yourself never do. How do you measure the value of lives unlived, or the foreclosure of countless claims to the future value of those who survived the conflict? The oil embargo, which forced the Israelis to conclude their war against the Arabs, created a world-wide global recession which lasted until the 80's and elected your senile patron saint to the White House. That and …

Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words

I wasn't referring to you, dubya, and I apologize for the confusion. My remarks were directed to Daffy Duck and his sidekick, Sylvester. And, of course, the clandestine Tweety, who loves to bait the liberals with decontextualized political diatribes. When the rich were feeding high off the hog, the plutocrats could afford to throw a few crumbs to the people whose work made their affluence possible. Now that their marginal rates of return are beginning to recede, they encourage their political dependents to throw the "unproductive" overboard, ignoring the obvious conclusion that they happen to be the most unproductive of them …

Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words

You'll have to wait until your senator is defeated at the polls and replaced by a Republican. That and a $1000 campaign donation might stimulate his (or her) attention. But to get him to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee requires the election of a Democratic president in 2008.

Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words

Believe it or not, dubya, but it's the Democrats, and not the progressives, who will prevent it. The progressives are running so far ahead of the pack that they no longer realize that no one is following them. The Democrats still have the power and the resources to counter the campaign. That's the short (and ugly) version of the reality we continue to refuse to accept.

Posted to Alito Hearings Drowning in Words

Hey tina1... What's the big deal? Everything she said about you and your sidekick neocon hacks is true. You spout empty rants about stereotypes... You definitely talk straight out of your assholes... The part about being morons is right on the money... Ditto with the useless sycophantic twits... Strongly agree about the dumb ass retarded dipshits and the drop of piss in a bucket of shit... And I doubt that anyone would disagree that you're a bunch of antisocial assholes in love with the smell of your own shit. I'm sure that most of us here would agree that dubya was …

Posted to Postcards From the Front

Onslaught of Kenyon students voting makes national headlines Hundreds of Kenyon students proved their mettle on Election Day, as they waited in line for as long as ten hours to cast their ballots. The local polling place had only two voting machines, one of which malfunctioned for several hours. Students, many of them first-time voters, persevered along with faculty members and community residents, bolstered by volunteers who brought them food, water, and umbrellas to ward off the rain. The last voters emerged at 4:00 a.m., applauded by their peers. Newspapers, radio and television stations, and Internet news sites throughout the …

Posted to Ghosts in the Voting Machines

The BBC News reported that "electoral officials said one of the precincts at Kenyon College in Knox County has a long line of people waiting to vote and it could go on for several hours." The Chicago Tribune reported that first-year student Clare Keating, of Skokie, Illinois, arrived at the Gambier polls at 8:00 a.m., "and found a queue that snaked through hallways and around the building housing the polling station. 'I waited three and a half hours to vote, which I found ridiculous,' she said. 'It looked like a Disneyland ride.' The wait caused Keating to miss a class, …

Posted to Ghosts in the Voting Machines

Bloomberg.com also observed that, "Voting in Ohio was plagued by long delays at some polling places. Voters in Gambier, the home of Kenyon College, waited more than four hours to cast their ballots. At the 1,500-student college, some voters were waiting in line after midnight." They reported that according to English professor David Lynn, poll workers told voters they might have to wait as much as five hours in order to vote. KTLA.com, the Web site of Los Angeles television station KTLA, quoted sophomore Lauren Gray, who was still in line at midnight waiting to cast her vote: "'When it's …

Posted to Ghosts in the Voting Machines

The Mansfield (Ohio) News Journal reported that, "Kenyon College students, standing in lines as long as four hours Tuesday, stood under umbrellas and did homework as they waited, taking it all in stride. Those students, and millions of other young people, demonstrated a keen interest in the country's future." The Mount Vernon (Ohio) Daily News, observed that, "spirits remained high among the voters, predominately Kenyon students, many of whom were voting for the first time. At 10 p.m., student Ben Taylor let out a cheer after casting his ballot, excited to be voting in his first election and because the …

Posted to Ghosts in the Voting Machines

We Can't Make it Here Anymore Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign Sitting there by the left turn line Flag on the wheelchair flapping in the breeze One leg missing, both hands free No one's paying much mind to him The V.A. budget's stretched so thin And there's more comin' home from the Mideast war We can't make it here anymore That big ol' building was the textile mill It fed our kids and it paid our bills But they turned us out and they closed the doors We can't make it here anymore See all those pallets piled up on …

Posted to Country's Jingoistic Jingles

"Let 'Er Rip" I Can Tell There's Something You Don't Wanna Tell Me It's Killing You 'Cause The Words Are Hard To Find I Know You Want To Break It To Me Gently Well Sweet Baby Say What's On Your Mind [Chorus:] Let 'Er Rip, Let It Fly Come On Baby, Say It, Do You Think I'm Gonna Cry I Ain't About To Bawl, And I Ain't Gonna Die So If You're Gonna Say Goodbye, Don't Take All Day And Night Let 'Er Rip, Let It Fly Why The Drama, We Don't Have To Drag Out This Situation It Wasn't You, …

Posted to Country's Jingoistic Jingles

Let 'Em Fly Ain't no talkin' to this man Ain't no pretty other side Ain't no way to understand the stupid words of pride It would take an acrobat and I already tried all that I'm gonna let him fly - mmm Things can move at such a pace The second hand just waved good-bye You know the light has left his face But you can't recall just where or why So there was reallly nothing to it I just went and cut right through it I said I'm gonna let him fly Ooo yea There's no mercy in a live …

Posted to Country's Jingoistic Jingles

Well, dang it, dubya. They can't quite take credit for rebuilding Eye-rak unless someone (never mind who) destroys it to begin with. And here's where the Dynamic Trio (the Caped Conservative Crusader or Sylvester "Suffffrin' Succcatash" the Cat or "tiny tina" Tweety Bird) pipes up to blame it on the liberal Democrats, and praise the conservative Republicans for defending us from the fasc - I mean, comm - er, terrorists. First you outsource the industry. Then you outsource the people "rendered" unemployed by industrial "flight".

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

The plant in San Antonio, Texas will employ 1800 assembly line workers, which is 90% of the entire workforce. Toyota pays them $15 - $20 an hour. If we assume that the annual average wage for a full-time, non-temporary Toyota assembly line worker is $50,000 (including over-time), then the breakdown for management staff, according to your own figures, is as follows: *Georgetown, KY (693 management staff) - average salary $249,275 *Princeton, IN (466 management staff) - average salary $275,749 *Fremont, CA (571 management staff) - average salry $364,633 I understand that having a degree should improve your prospects for employment, but …

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Oops. I pasted the wrong wage estimate ($41,600) into the last two entries of the spreadsheet formula. The corrected results are: *Georgetown, KY (693 management staff) - average salary $249,275 *Princeton, IN (466 management staff) - average salary $200,221 *Fremont, CA (571 management staff) - average salary $288,959 Which make the average management salary four to six times the average assembly line wage, instead of four to seven times the wage, Sorry. Your priorities are still fucked up.

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Tweety. You posted a clearly misleading message which implied that the average autoworker employed by Toyota is well-paid, insinuating that autoworkers represented by their unions are over-paid. I took your data at face value and demonstrated that the management staff (as indicated by their average salary) at Toyota plants in the US are overpaid. Now you're whining about how people "who struggled thru college to get [a] degree and then went to night school to get an MBA" deserve to be over-paid. Let's ignore your assumption that students "struggle" to obtain their ticket to the "American Dream" (I've been there and …

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Fangs and claws? You forgot to mention the horns poking from my forehead and the tail hanging from my butt. Or did you object to my objections to tina1's caricature of capitalism, her miraculous multiplication of cattle? Capitalism derives its meaning from the latin root capita, or head, and refers to the ancient custom of trade in animals, or "beasts of burden". From there it quickly evolved into the slave trade, and all those lovely methods of management for which the Romans and their western descendents were widely known. One of those "methods of management" was the monopolization of knowledge and …

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Moooooo...

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

[Liberal tax and spend policies] are still grossly ineffiecient, but we aren�t throwing as much money down that black hole.

Oy vey, Jay. An insult from you is an occasion for celebration.

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Throwing taxes down the "black hole" is a trademark Republican conservative hot button buzz phrase, and it's meant to indicate that welfare programs are wasted on the people who recieve them, namely, people of color. It's a conscious political appeal to our subconscious racist inclinations.

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Of course, "welfare for the rich and free enterprise for the rest of us" is a trademark liberal Democratic buzz phrase, which is meant to imply that government contracts and tax rebates (or subsidies) are wasted on the rich. But wasting money on the rich is a more credible criticism.

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

All of which ties in neatly to the topic of this thread, which is that Republicans are "grossly" more corrupt than Democrats.

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Jay. Just scroll up to the top of the thread and review your own remarks. I've accused you of spouting racist bullshit before (your defense of the Bush administration's response to the hurricane in NO and your simultaneous villification of the victims of that disaster comes to mind) and your contributions to this thread confirm the conclusion (that you're a racist). Your typical knee-jerk reaction is to deny or ignore the accusation and ridicule my presumably liberal delusions of grandeur. You and tina1 ought to get together. You'd make a great couple. If you had simply replied that I'm a counter-racist, …

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

For someone who pretends to be intelligent, you're about as dense as the metaphors you employ to obscure your semi-conscious racist attitudes. Ever since Nixon's "Southern strategy" the Republicans have been playing to the Southern redneck crowd - from Reagan's "welfare queen" to Bush's contrived hysteria over Willie Horton to his son's cultivated Southern accent (y'all) and strenuous bouts with the brush on his Texas ranch. The Republican's won the election in 2001 with Jeb's liberal disqualification of thousands of minority voters. They've made a fetish of blaming the victims of poverty for the indigence they endure at the expense of …

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Jesus, Tweety, you're just chock full of helpful tidbits of anecdotal political trivia. I completely agree with your observation that "spending for veterans benefits had grown 27% since Bush took office in 2000, and the ranks of veterans drawing benefits have increased by more than 1 million." In fact, the costs of the war in Iraq will eventually reach two trillion dollars, due to the medical costs required to treat the military casualties. That you would cite the statistic to buttress your support of the Chickenhawk-in-Chief is a breath-taking indication of your pathological patriotism.

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Imitation is the highest form of praise, Sylvester.

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

The Republicans are full of mythological metaphors. They believe in the strong, silent male leader, the Old Testament patriarch who frees his people from slavery and leads them to the promised land, hacking their way through the wilderness and fighting the godless savages who demonically impede their desperate progress and threaten their very survival. It's the myth of every settler state which ever invaded another land to defeat and subdue or extirminate its original inhabitants and occupy its territory for their own, dressed up in religious or political ideology to justify the morally indefensible atrocities they commit to establish and consolidate …

Posted to The Republican Crack-Up

Given that the Natioinal Strategy really says nothing that hasn't already been clearly contradicted by subsequent events (weapons of mass destruction, Al Qaida connections, the gratitude of a grateful population for their salvation from the tyranny of Hussein's regime, the degradation and torture of ordinary Iraqis in order to capture and torture those who resist the occupation of their country by foreign invaders), given that, as such, it was stated in response to criticisms that there was no justifiable strategy for the invasion or subsequent occupation of Iraq, it's not surprising that such a strategy should be propagated by someone who …

Posted to Tale of Two Wars

�Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house every creature�d been tortured, including the mouse. Grandpa was hung from the doorframe with care; And bound in a corner was Grandma, quite bare. For Mama and Papa, some discreet waterboarding might serve to uncover the secrets they�re hoarding. The children fared better, just hooded and gagged, for the CIA guys weren�t quite sure what they�d bagged. The thing started simply (as things often do) when Grandpa sent email he later would rue: �My idiot son and his little Miss Thing have unleashed on the world a terrorist ring.� He meant …

Posted to Tale of Two Wars

Coons and woodchucks? Goodness gracious, Gomer. You country folk shore do talk funny. Commies and Natzies, no less. Well, Pilgrim, you might be surprised to discover that most every gummint is this world is either communist or fascist, or some combination of both. They're two sides of the same coin called democracy. The trick is to ignore the pretty pictures on either side and concentrate on the value of the material in between. Which was why those founding fathers decided to include all those "loopholes", and established a procedure for creating more of them. Your precious republic would have established a …

Posted to Evo Morales Has Plans for Bolivia

Well-informed? I resent your insinuation, sir, and demand satisfaction for the slight. Pistols at the crack of dawn!

Posted to Evo Morales Has Plans for Bolivia

And not just the commies, but the natzies, too! If your father spent forty-two years working on the factory floor of a tool and die company that went belly up because most of the competition outsourced their production to China or India or Hungary and ended up with a pension that paid him two hundred dollars a month so that now he's still working for an auto parts outlet to make ends meet, then you're likely to run with the Democrats and their "commie sympathizers". If your father spent forty-two years working as the CFO for that same company and had …

Posted to Evo Morales Has Plans for Bolivia

The triumph - and curse - of science is that you have to standardize your environment in order to minimize your unknowns to a manageable level, in order to ensure a predictable outcome. You can't drive a car without a network of roads and highways to convey it. Even a Land Rover requires a relatively flat, level surface in order to function efficiently. The ability to reduce (standardize) your variables in order to predict a positive outcome is not limited to physics and the presumably inanimate objects it manipulates, but extends beyond the physical boundaries to include social, economic and political …

Posted to Lapham's Way

I'm not arguing for or against the Scientific Project, in contrast to the Theocratic Project. I'm just trying to delineate the structural similarities between the two, and see where it gets us. The Scientific Project would have been impossible without the Industrial Revolution, just as the Theocratic Project would have been impossible without the Agricultural Revolution. In either case, major advances were made with respect to the social division of labor. Entire categories of class, and the people who constituted them, were created and destroyed in order to accomodate emergent methods of production and social reproduction. The evolution of industrialism is …

Posted to Lapham's Way

There are no giants. We stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, who stood on the shoulders of their predecessors, who stood on the shoulders of their predecessors. Our individual social contributions are incremental and infinitesimal, and appear to be gigantic only in the limits of integration over the history of our special experience. Speecial, as opposed to speshul. Innovation is a social and collective process, and requires the participation of all its constituents.

Posted to Lapham's Way

In other words, intelligence is over-rated.

Posted to Lapham's Way

I guess I'm not as infatuated with the "intellectual giants" as you seem to be. More to the point, our collective infatuation with hyperindividuality ignores the people who provide the intellectual aristocracy with the affluence and leisure they require to construct the masterpiece. To cite your own example, it took an entire society to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, from the stonecutters who quarried the granite to the masons who built the structure, the "canvas", to the peasants who starved to provide his patrons with the food to feed him. Catch-22? What's that? My father, C. Sharp Major, was, …

Posted to Lapham's Way

Good Grief, Wiley. Don't you understand? We are all interchangeable action figures, with labels pasted to our foreheads which advertise the requisate affiliation: liberal, conservative, communist, fascist, patriot, traitor, friend or foe... Halt! Who goes there? The reason that 90% of the casualties in modern warfare are civilians is that civilians no longer exist. Tropes for the troops. Left, right, left, right, left, right...lohadalo, hachalobrilo...

Posted to When Boys Will be Jarheads

Germans aren't goosestepping much these days because the Russians killed most of the people who practiced the two-step goose-step who, for their part, killed many of the Russians who practiced the one-step goose-step (20 million Russian dead, at a conservative estimate). Of course, the English and American geese made it all possible by holding the line in the Middle East, and forcing the fascists to attack the communists -- a convenient solution for all concerned, unless you happened to be German or Russian, and one which served them well for over two centuries. The United States and United Kingdom are each …

Posted to When Boys Will be Jarheads

The topic is military dehumanization, and those dystopian possibilities which it promotes. I would like to believe that more utopian possiblities are present but, as you say, I wouldn't bet on it either, at least not in the short or middle term. Surplus populations are normally resolved by means of warfare, revolution, famine, epidemic and religous or ideological fundamentalism. The oil in Iraq, incidentally, is high-grade crude and easilly refined.

Posted to When Boys Will be Jarheads

I don't know of anyone, male or female, white or not, who decides to have more children for consciously racist reasons, although I do agree that the process is stimulated by fear (all those tv programs notwithstanding). People afraid of becoming unemployed, or underemployed, may choose to improve their prospects by assuming more traditional marital responsibilities, especially when federal, state and local funding for education is dropping like a stone. Federal funding for abstinence promotion programs is a great way to increase the birthrate. Packing the courts with people opposed to abortion is another. All of the above is consonant with …

Posted to When Boys Will be Jarheads

But that's my point: it's not a neocon plan. I'm sure the neocons have a plan -- PNAC, and all that -- but there's no real or viable conspiracy to take over the government that I know of, other than the standard political strategies to which parties are historically prone to exploit, and that includes the entire spectrum of contrived alarms, obfuscated motivations and outright misrepresentations which impel the affluent to ensure their continued affluence. My point is that cultural (moral) verities follow from economic necessity. Corporations cannot consolidate their profits without outsourcing their production, from the cities to the suburbs, …

Posted to When Boys Will be Jarheads

Speaking of game theory, the headcrabs continue to attack me, even after I destroy the zombies who host them, as I attempt to reload my rocket launcher from the cache across the other side of the rubble-strewn roof, where my own medics constantly impede my attempts to destroy the spider-bots who attack us. Of course, all this graphic activity tends to periodically lock up the computer, and kicks me into another predictable episode of a-fib, which further infuriates my doctor, who's trying to minimize the coagulant levels in my circulatory system, and simultaneously treat the fibrillation, in order to reduce the …

Posted to When Boys Will be Jarheads

If residents of New Orleans cannot take the personal responsibilty to educate themselves on election issues then why do we want those people determining the future of this city.

Because they live there, and most of the people you hope to represent do not.

I happen to be one of those �white district� residents and am considering running for the city council of New Orleans because of the pathetic leadership that we have had to endure for decades.

What you mean "we", Kemo Sabe?

Voting is a right that carries with it a huge responsibility and …

Posted to Voter Disenfranchisement by Attrition

The intended profanity was censored by the management and replaced with less offensive placeholders. The compliment was entirely unintended. Your proactive "get it done" mentality appears to rely upon the goodwill of an administration which rewards the affluent and ignores everyone else. Socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest of us. The problem with all of us pulling together "to get the job done" is that most of us are pulling harder than you are. Sitting there on the buckboard with the reins in one hand and a megaphone in the other one, it's easy to forget that …

Posted to Voter Disenfranchisement by Attrition

Ho-ho-ho, mother-fucker.

Posted to Voter Disenfranchisement by Attrition

The State Board of Elections, in a Republican administration, allocated an insufficient number of voting machines in Democratic precincts, even as they knew that the Democrats conducted an all-out campaign to register as many minorities as possible prior to the election. Meanwhile, the Republicans rallied their own rural registrants with a gay-marraige referendum designed to drum up the fundamentalist vote. (The queers are coming! The queers are coming!) Fortunately for them, they had the foresight to reserve an adequate amount of machines for their homophobic brethren. The only obvious mental disorder is your own.

Posted to Voter Disenfranchisement by Attrition

A simple Google search will provide you with links to thousands of articles which describe exactly how the Republicans stole the election in Ohio, just as they stole the election in Florida in 2000. Since you appear to be pathologically pre-disposed to ignore them, I'll spell it out for you: they disenfranchised the minority vote. Even Christopher Hitchens, the formerly left-wing poster boy of the neocons, admits it. Incidentally, you seem to be the one who's obsessed with blaming the liberals for your own mental disabilities. You would be better advised to follow your own advice. I'll say it again, Waguespack: …

Posted to Voter Disenfranchisement by Attrition

As a born-again, Bible-thumping atheist, I've read through these comments with a simultaneous sense of fascination and frustration. You don't have to be a communist or a socialist or even a liberal to realize that traditional religious norms and prohibitions are the product of one basic, supreme principle, and that is the survival of the society whose ruling exponents promulgate them. The principal problem for any society, ancient or modern, or postmodern, is work: how do you direct and administrate the labor of all of its members to ensure the survival and continued succession of that society as a whole. Society, …

Posted to Mo Money for Monogamy

Islam, Sex And The Western Left by Kola Odetola 16th August 05 While differing in their responses to the west�s war on terror, read non compliant Muslim nations, right wingers, liberals and a lot of silent leftists share in varying degrees a unity in support of one its most vociferously avowed aims � the liberation of the Islamic world�s women. Of course the notion that a society which sells everything from yoghurt to high powered precision tools by the invitation to lust after naked female flesh, is an epitome of the rights of women is perverse, however remarkable the advances …

Posted to Mo Money for Monogamy

(page2 of 3) The fact is the economic genocide perpetrated by the west on the poor world over the last two decades has generated industrial prostitution there on a scale probably unprecedented in the entire history of the human race. Faced with ruin, deafened with spurious western talk of women�s rights - from Africa to Asia, from Latin America, to �recently liberated� Eastern Europe, most women from poor families can now only survive by selling their bodies to men, mostly wealthy mostly pro west males, in prostitution of one form or another of varying degrees of degradation. In the third …

Posted to Mo Money for Monogamy

(page 3 of 3) The beneficiaries of female humiliation in these countries are the few with the resources to enslave poor women to their lust - the rich and upper middle class whose own daughters cry for �freedom� because they don�t have to pay for it with their bodies. Since the fundamentalists also target, however indirectly, the upper classes in these societies their slogans find a ready ear in the slums who supply the beds of the rich with their daughters, wives and mothers. If Cromwell�s Puritanism in debauched aristocratic England attracted the support of the oppressed poor why are …

Posted to Mo Money for Monogamy