Lil ol me got tagged
Question is; are there eight things about me that anyone would care to know – that I am willing to post on a blog that I haven’t already?
1) I know that people are stupid enough to destroy the earth
2)I discovered that I was a liberal while taking business classes.
3) I think I have a pretty good understanding of what my country has become
4) I think people who bring children into this world now are stupid, ignorant, or selfish, because the kids are going to suffer.
5) Greed makes me sick
6) I'm obsessed with the out of control world population.
7) The only fiction series I have enjoyed in the last 5 years is the Plum series.
8) I am proud to say that my family and friends are reproducing at less than replacement level. (My obsession again)
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
My personal 4th
If you're looking for jingoistic, feel-good happy talk, go visit someone else's blog today.
I finished Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen this morning and immediately started reading Sundown Towns by the same author.
Nine freaking pages into Sundown Towns I came across this:
That evening in Decatur revolutionized my thinking. I now perceived that in the normal course of human events, most and perhaps all towns would not be all-white. Racial exclusion was required. "If they did not have such a policy,"observed an African American resident of Du Quoin, Illinois, about the all-white towns around Du Quoin, "surely blacks would be in them."I came to understand that he was right. "If people of color aren't around,"writes commentator Time Wise, "there's a reason, having something to do with history, and exclusion..." (#16 footnote)
Though mind-boggling to me, this insight proved hardly new. As early as 1858, before the dispersal of African Americans throughout the North prompted by the Civl War, the Wyandotte Herald in Wyandotte, in Southeastern Michigan, stated, "Wyandotte is again without a single colored inhabitant, something remarkable for a city of over 6,000 people." Even then, tThe Herald understood that a city of over 6,000 people as "remarkable"for being all-white. We shall see that a series of riots and threats was required to keep Wyandotte white over the years.
Why would these two paragraphs stand out to me?
Because I wondered about the longer history of Wyandotte, in Southeastern Michigan.
You see, I have Wyandotte blood in me.
On the other hand, being a proud, patriotic (mostly white) American, I can't help but wonder how many Iraq war veterans (that we are sending to make some rich white fucks richer) are going to hit the deck once the fireworks start tonight?
Hmmm, maybe I'll skip the fireworks, they kind of make me jumpy. Maybe I'll go see Michael Moore's Sicko, although I don't really need to, my parents are fighting with their insurance companies all the time.
Happy fucking "Independence Day" folks. At least Scooter Libby has something to celebrate
And here's a nice wrap up for today, even though I missed it a couple of days ago:
San Diego Public Schools Grapple with Muslim Prayer by: Lucas O'Connor
Mon Jul 02, 2007 at 08:44:03 AM PD
Uhhh, Lucas, isn't Hirsi Ali from Somalia?
Let me be clear. Fundamentalist Islam is not something I want invited in to my country, my city, my home. Like any form of fundamentalist religion, I flat out hate the motherfuckers.
I finished Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen this morning and immediately started reading Sundown Towns by the same author.
Nine freaking pages into Sundown Towns I came across this:
That evening in Decatur revolutionized my thinking. I now perceived that in the normal course of human events, most and perhaps all towns would not be all-white. Racial exclusion was required. "If they did not have such a policy,"observed an African American resident of Du Quoin, Illinois, about the all-white towns around Du Quoin, "surely blacks would be in them."I came to understand that he was right. "If people of color aren't around,"writes commentator Time Wise, "there's a reason, having something to do with history, and exclusion..." (#16 footnote)
Though mind-boggling to me, this insight proved hardly new. As early as 1858, before the dispersal of African Americans throughout the North prompted by the Civl War, the Wyandotte Herald in Wyandotte, in Southeastern Michigan, stated, "Wyandotte is again without a single colored inhabitant, something remarkable for a city of over 6,000 people." Even then, tThe Herald understood that a city of over 6,000 people as "remarkable"for being all-white. We shall see that a series of riots and threats was required to keep Wyandotte white over the years.
Why would these two paragraphs stand out to me?
Because I wondered about the longer history of Wyandotte, in Southeastern Michigan.
You see, I have Wyandotte blood in me.
On the other hand, being a proud, patriotic (mostly white) American, I can't help but wonder how many Iraq war veterans (that we are sending to make some rich white fucks richer) are going to hit the deck once the fireworks start tonight?
Hmmm, maybe I'll skip the fireworks, they kind of make me jumpy. Maybe I'll go see Michael Moore's Sicko, although I don't really need to, my parents are fighting with their insurance companies all the time.
Happy fucking "Independence Day" folks. At least Scooter Libby has something to celebrate
And here's a nice wrap up for today, even though I missed it a couple of days ago:
San Diego Public Schools Grapple with Muslim Prayer by: Lucas O'Connor
Mon Jul 02, 2007 at 08:44:03 AM PD
Uhhh, Lucas, isn't Hirsi Ali from Somalia?
Let me be clear. Fundamentalist Islam is not something I want invited in to my country, my city, my home. Like any form of fundamentalist religion, I flat out hate the motherfuckers.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Put away the flags
Published on Sunday, July 1, 2007 by The Progressive
by Howard Zinn
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.
Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early.
When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”
When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”
It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went towar.
We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.
How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.
We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best-selling “A People’s History of the United States” (Perennial Classics, 2003, latest edition). This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project.
©2007 The Progressive Magazine
by Howard Zinn
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.
Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early.
When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”
When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”
It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went towar.
We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.
How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.
We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best-selling “A People’s History of the United States” (Perennial Classics, 2003, latest edition). This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project.
©2007 The Progressive Magazine
Sunday, July 01, 2007
What's that giant sucking sound I hear?
Fluor, Dyncorp, KBR win contract
From Times Wire Services
June 29, 2007
Irvine-based Fluor Corp., Dyncorp International Inc. and KBR Inc., a former unit of Halliburton Co., were awarded parts of a U.S. Army contract with a combined potential value of as much as $150 billion to provide services to the military in the Middle East.
The contract, the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) IV, would be worth as much as $5 billion a year in business for each of the companies, with the potential duration of 10 years.
The Army said the contract was parceled out to three companies rather than just one to "more effectively manage the number and scope of LOGCAP actions required to fight the global war on terror."
Fluor Corp.
DynCorp in Colombia: Outsourcing the Drug War
by Jeremy Bigwood, Special to CorpWatch
May 23rd, 2001
Oh, that giant sucking sound.
That's just the sound of military-industrial-congressional-complex bankrupting the next few generations, Yeesh, you'd think that I'd never heard that before.
From Times Wire Services
June 29, 2007
Irvine-based Fluor Corp., Dyncorp International Inc. and KBR Inc., a former unit of Halliburton Co., were awarded parts of a U.S. Army contract with a combined potential value of as much as $150 billion to provide services to the military in the Middle East.
The contract, the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) IV, would be worth as much as $5 billion a year in business for each of the companies, with the potential duration of 10 years.
The Army said the contract was parceled out to three companies rather than just one to "more effectively manage the number and scope of LOGCAP actions required to fight the global war on terror."
Fluor Corp.
DynCorp in Colombia: Outsourcing the Drug War
by Jeremy Bigwood, Special to CorpWatch
May 23rd, 2001
Oh, that giant sucking sound.
That's just the sound of military-industrial-congressional-complex bankrupting the next few generations, Yeesh, you'd think that I'd never heard that before.
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