This guy lost his arm in Iraq… but the army says he owes them money.
TagPolitics
I agree with my 83-year-old father, who said that it would take a century to undo the damage to the country that Bush will be responsible for in the next four years. That is to say, the damage will not be repaired in my lifetime, let alone his; and probably not in the lifetime of my daughter either. The United States, and the world, will be a meaner and more oppressive place, with the virtues of tolerance and compassion increasingly under siege, if not altogether obliterated. And there’s nothing you or I can do about it.
What interests me most, in a morbid sort of way, is the motives and desires of the voters on November 2nd. For make no mistake about it: the American people have willfully and knowingly chosen to embrace radical evil. Yes, this was an election about “values.” […]
I think, rather, that 59 million people voted for Bush in full consciousness of what they were doing. They were aware of the harms that they would suffer from this action, but they were willing to put personal advantage aside in order to serve a higher duty … The American people have said, in effect, that no sacrifice is too great, no price is too high to pay, when it is a matter of affirming the Values of bigotry, torture, xenophobia, ignorance, and general social corruption. They have pledged themselves to radical evil, transcendently, knowingly, come what may.
And that is why I have nothing to say. I only hope that I remember, in the years to come, that however grievously my family and myself are harmed by the results of the American people’s moral choice (and this harm will not be negligable: I am likely to find myself destitute in old age, and bereft of the freedoms that I have, thus far, unquestioningly enjoyed and pretty much taken for granted; and my daughter is likely to have many paths of advancement closed off to her), that nonetheless we are still in a relatively privileged position, so that the ills we will suffer will be quite trivial in comparison to those that will be suffered by the vast majority of the population, both in the United States and throughout the world.
This year’s first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. NO MAS.
[…]
Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.
Things haven’t changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West — which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.
[…]
The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime Change.
[…]
Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart — which is more than even the president’s friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.
This year’s first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. NO MAS. […]
Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.
Things haven’t changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West — which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch. […]
The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime Change. […]
Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart — which is more than even the president’s friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.
Our intrepid comrades at Fleshbot report that sex magick-cum-activism-cum-cum civic service project, Votergasm, threatens to bow under the forces of sex-negative empire and Rush Limbaugh’s minions:
Rush Limbaugh called the folks at Votergasm a bunch of “depraved lunatics” on his radio broadcast this afternoon and called for his minions to take action: “Let’s shut down this site, folks.” (Sounds like an incitement to a DOS attack to us – isn’t that illegal or something?) The bumptious pill-popper also instructed listeners to flood site director Michelle Collins’ inbox with emails saying “If Kerry wins, we’ll all get screwed” – despite the fact that Votergasm is emphatically non-partisan (though pro-naked partying). So far, the site’s still up – if crawling – but if you manage to get through, now’s the perfect time to sign their pledge and help get young voters to the polls (and the bedroom) this November.
You heard it. Now, just lie back and do it for your country.
First in a (belated) series of practical magick and the upcoming opportunity to dethrone George II, let us visit The Green Dragon for some inspiration, straight outta those chaotic days of good old August 2004:
Our friends with the dragon had offered to help us if we wanted to do a spiral dance in front of the Garden, so as we got near I began drawing the cluster together, speaking to our friends in the Rhythm Workers? Union to coordinate some drumming of a rhythm we could chant to, looking for an open space. We found it, around 33rd St. We dropped back behind the dragon, because the sound system inside it was too loud for our ears. The police are rumored to have a sound weapon that will disperse crowds with painful levels of noise, but this was friendly fire that drove us back. Where the crowd thinned just slightly, we grabbed the opportunity, formed our circle and began to spiral in, chanting,
No army can hold back a thought, No fence can chain the sea, The earth cannot be sold or bought, All life shall be free.
The spiral stopped the already slow march, and I felt guilty about that, but the march had been stopping anyway for hours and we felt another five minutes or so wouldn’t kill anyone. Then some energy roared through me like a freight train, and I stopped feeling anything else. Some of it was horrible, nauseating energy that needed to be released and cleansed. Some of it was powerful, earth energy, a kind of raw life force that pulsed and thundered and rose up into a great, focused cone of power. Someone told me to look behind, and in the relatively empty space between us and the line of cops at 34th St., the dragon was burning.
The flames rose up and in that moment, it seemed a perfect icon of our magic, a powerful spell, although I can?t rationally explain why. Later Delight said the dragon is luck and the Republicans? luck was burning. Of course, it had tactical repercussions…
(… continue with her entire account of witchjamming the RNC.)
A decade after Kerry helped shut the bank down, the CIA discovered Osama bin Laden was among those with accounts at the bank. A French intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post in 2002 identified dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed, and that the financial network operated by bin Laden today “is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI.” As one senior U.S. investigator said in 2002, “BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations.”
I’d like to see this story sprout legs. Why hasn’t the Kerry camp been pushing this issue? This is a great counter-point to anyone who says Kerry is soft on terrorism, that Bush and Kerry are the same, or to anyone who believes that the only way to win the war on terrorism is to wage expensive wars on poor nations and sacrifice our civil liberties.
John Perry Barlowe interview in Reason
The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.
It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. In my heart of hearts I’m with you. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I’m not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.
Psywarrior is an exhaustive collection of materials about psychological operations and psywar, including erotic psy-ops throughout war history.
(via Boing Boing)
As I noted last week, commercial applications of brain imaging open up whole new vistas of manipulation via visual cortex…
Using M.R.I.’s to See Politics on the Brain:
“This research can show how a candidate is unfairly targeting the weaknesses and foibles of voters, and that can be empowering,” said Professor Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Baylor College of Medicine.
Of course, political consultants could also use this technology to create more manipulative commercials, though Mr. Freedman and Mr. Knapp say they do not hope for partisan advantage from their research.
“We just want to start exploring this new frontier,” Mr. Knapp said….
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