free tibet
falun gong
March 2008 Archives
of the democrat party is really what the male power structure within is after. Their target is the female boomer superdelegate. BOW TO THE MEN, YOU WOMEN!!! BOW TO OBAMA!!!! REVERSE THIRTY YEARS OF FEMINISM FOR THE SAKE OF THIS MAN'S EGO!
Roseanne appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" on 3/25 and talked about everything from her current stand up run in Vegas to her thoughts on politics to being a mother and grandmother. It is an interview with the Domestic Goddess that you have to see!
Forward, into the Past
I was thinking about Obama's preacher's rant, and something stood out. It was his mention of how the bogus, useless "Drug War" rolls on while more prisons are built and more Black men are locked up in Hell holes that the people who run things increasingly want to privatize.
When I think about the horror of the inner cities and the millions of people that American Capitalism has failed and the huge numbers of our citizens that we incarcerate, an idea occurs to me that seems less strange the more I think about it. With the economy going South and looking like it could stay down there for who-knows-how-long, I wonder what percentage of prisoners might prefer a return to Slavery with just a few alterations. I'm not trying to be funny or ridiculous.
Let's take a look at what might actually be a few pluses for all involved. 1). In spite of some hard physical labor (which is often done now, by Mexican children in more than a few cases), I'd bet that there are more than a few men who would suffer that in exchange for being out of a concrete cage and into the outdoors. When you look at prisoners, en masse, "pumping iron" for all they're worth in an attempt to be better-equipped to deal with vicious physical attacks that are always a possibility, does picking cotton or anything else seem so incredibly back-breaking or terrifying? In terms of public safety I don't know that you'd have a tougher time with security out in rural settings if you used all the help that today's technology can provide (electric fence, helicopter surveillance, etc.).
It seems like a person could retrieve some of their dignity, manhood, whatever, more easily in an environment of hard but productive work than they can in the horrible context of prison. And it's not entirely unprecedented; we all know about the common practice of prisoners making license plates and doing other tasks and being paid pennies for their work, literally.
I'm sure as hell not here to romanticize Slavery but even slaves had it better in some ways than inhabitants of modern prisons. They had some access to the opposite sex, for example. With all due respect to Gay people in what passes for civilized society, the sexual brutality that results when men are forced into crowded conditions with no outlet for those impulses and often not even enough privacy to relieve themselves is de-humanizing. Then there's the relentless torture of being deprived of any contact with the Natural world. Slaves at least could feel the sun on their faces and the earth under their feet. Even under the harshest conditions there was a little time for rest and even things like practicing folk arts like carving and sketching and playing music. The Blues, which is at the heart of so much of our musical heritage came from what were called "Field hollers."
I wouldn't advocate forcing anyone to work in the fields or shovel dirt all day. But, it seems like it would be less miserable to feel like you're part of a system that's bringing food to peoples' tables or holding floowaters back or improving roads or whatever than it is to sit in a cell surrounded by frustrated, angry potential victimizers.
Let's look at the "moral" aspect. Abraham Lincoln said that he would have freed all of the slaves or none of the slaves if that's what it took to preserve the Union. And, if you take a look at it, almost every culture has something that amounts to a Servant Class; more recently, the double-talkers in this country told us that we'd have to get used to being a "Service Economy" once they saw to it that the unionized manufacturing jobs fled the country. Karl Marx used the term "wage slaves" to describe the people in a Capitalist economy who make just enough to make sure they can return to work the next day/week, etc. We've all heard the terms "paycheck-to-paycheck, up to our eyeballs in debt, working like a dog and spinning our wheels". Sure, the average worker in America has it vastly better, materially, than what anyone would think of as a slave's standard of living, but when your livelihood and home are constantly at risk, aren't lots of us in a prison of sorts?
They say that so many people (mostly Republicans) see "Illegal Immigration" as the prime issue in the next election. I guess you can make the connection there with what I'm saying. Who needs illegal immigrants when you have slaves? And, do I even have to say how happy it woud make American corporations, Agribusiness-related and otherwise to have a source of not cheap but FREE Labor? Let's face it: if you've ever bought anything at WalMart you have things in your home that were produced by what almost anyone would consider slave labor.
Finally, we all know that there have been chain gangs out on the roads and in the fields for centuries. If we brought an ounce of compassion to the process re-instituting Slavery might be an answer to more than one of our problems. My real motivation here, though, is to shock everyone just a little into looking at how far we've fallen when it comes to how we treat our fellow human beings, even as we continue to leap ahead technologically.
it's something to think about.
Well, it's that time of the Year when those of us who don't want to be tortured in Hell forever think about how much God loves us. You know, you REALLY have to like somebody a whole big bunch to prove it by letting a sadistic police state torture your only kid to death in public. What an imagination that God has, huh, Gang? That's WAY better than flowers and candy, although those chocolate bunnies always were the true meaning of Easter for me.
I wish I had a shekel for every ancient cult whose mythology involved a superhero who stood up to the bad guys, got killed and then came back to life. They were usually born of a virgin and they invariably went into a scary cave or tomb where shit was hitting big fans and then they came out victorious. Yay! I wonder if The Tunnel of Love was big even back in the earliest Neolithic amusement parks.
I don't want to seem ungrateful for Jesus's huge sacrifice. I thank people like crazy just for getting me from the airport. However, and I hope this doesn't rile up any inbred, banjo-picking, Buybull-thumping, racist, misogynist, hooker-patronizing TV evangelists or their well-meaning lemming-like followers....BUT, what exactly was the huge sacrifice if JC got up 3 days later and got beamed up to Heaven? My dad suffered horribly from Cancer for months and months and then died and had to go into a hole in the ground and stay there. That was after a lifetime of busting his ass every day out in all kinds of weather so that my life could be better than his. He never thought of himself, he had one suit and he got buried in it. And he's still laying there and holding down the fort without bitching about it. And, get this: he never ONCE said to me, "Hey, I sacrificed, you OWE me....BIG TIME!"
Now, THAT'S how a REAL father showed love.
Happy Easter, Everybody.....you know the drill.
a decent hardworking church fearing american.
must speak out on Israel NOW!
are what's being destroyed by this democrat party's war.
AND CONTINUE FIGHTING IN FRONT OF AMERICA UNTIL SHE SLAPS HIM AND TEARS OFF HIS SHIRT AND THEN THE AUDIENCE BOOS!!! AWESOME!!!! The black and white audience members will unleash all of their pent up bigotry at each of their targets. Then the women and men turn on each other, and then Obama starts to talk about how we need unity and the audience starts to chant: go to oprah, go to OPRAH...
(the following is the column of John Argent and it doesn't neccessarily reflect the views of the proprietor of this website).
HILARY & "THE MASTER STROKE"
by John Argent
They say that Hilary's brilliant ad (the scary 3 AM phone call with the sleeping children images) made the difference for her and swung enough voters away from Obama to stop his winning streak. Whatever works, I guess.
Remember how a couple of weeks back she sat on the stage with him and said that she was proud to be running against him and that however things turned out, we the people would be alright? That's a far cry from the ad I just mentioned which basically says that your kids lives are in danger if an untested rookie like Obama gets anywhere near the White House. So, she says, the most important issue is who has the most experience when it comes to protecting the country. See where this is going? If keeping us and our children safe is the central issue in this campaign (after all, who needs health insurance or jobs if you've just been beheaded by the Islamo-Fascist hordes waiting to spring out and get us the minute the super-experienced President stops killing or scaring them off sufficiently?)....then wouldn't the only choice by Hilary's reckoning be John McCain? He was learning to kill and scare evildoers when Hilary was in grade school.
There you have it: in one fell swoop, Hilary 1.) has shown Obama to be scary and unfit to be President because it's all about experience with scary people and he has less of that than her 2.) shown herself to be an opportunistic flip-flopper because ten days before that she publicly stated that we'd be just FINE with him as President if that's how the voting goes, and 3.) Basically validated John McCain's assertion that it's all about experience and he's got the most, there, by far.
Wow! You have to give it to the Republicans: who would have guessed that Hilary's slimeball Campaign honcho Mark Penn was working for Karl Rove? McCain can breathe easy and start "walking for President" now and just show Hilary's clips where she's calling Obama "fine" .....then, after two weeks of getting her ass kicked "explaining" how scary it would be for us and our children if that clueless neophyte got anywhere near the White House. Triple play Hilary: Obama BAD, Hilary Flip-Flopper on the most important issue, McCain, the best protector of the three by her reckoning.
Guess I'll be voting for Nader, now. He probably has a better chance than Obama OR Hilary now that she's poisoned the well by saying it IS all about being scared and having experience with scaring scary people. If there's one thing McCain's got the experience edge in it's scaring people worse than they scare us.
And the home............of the.............BRAVE (?)
OR...should we root for Mccain, so that the vile mess and treason that the republicans have visited upon our country has to be cleaned up by them? Sometimes it feels like they want to unload the responsibility of what has happened on a woman and a black man, (clinton, obama) so that they can then sit in their ivory towers and complain that democrats are unable to fix things. The republicans are responsible for everything from the war to the recession (depression) and it seems wrong to allow them to walk away. In a way, I want Mccain to head the mess...the coming riots, the violence, the poverty and anger that his friends have sewed. It may very well be the best karma in the world for the greedy rat bastards who have made money from selling our country out. They may have to "serve" us from Paraguay, since showing their faces here may be too risky for them.
Take a look at Roseanneworld member Skip Hunt's beautiful photography. You'll find more of his work at his Web site, Skip Hunt Photography.
"Alex, it's getting to be an issue."
"What is?" I asked innocently.
"Your obsession! You make a Roseanne reference to every single thing I say. You"re addicted."
I refrained from telling her this reminded me of the episode in season eight when Jackie gets hooked on the internet.
"Face it," she said. "No one actually watches that show anymore. Even Nick @ Nite has stopped showing it."
"Look," I said. "I don't have time for this. You know I have to write my essay for Vegas. Now what should I say when I meet her?"
She grabbed me by the collar and yanked me toward her. "Listen to me. I'm sick of hearing you hum that awful theme song: I'm not interested in what Buck got on his report card: and above all, I don't care how Roseanne's hair evolved from the first season to the last."
Now she had crossed the line.
"You're sick," she said with the same scowl Bev had when Red Buttons made a pass at her in season six. I suppose she saw the look on my face because she cried, "You're doing it again! I can tell even when you don't say anything!"
"Really?"
"I'm giving you an ultimatum, Alex," she finally said. "Me or Roseanne."
I glanced over at my Roseanne DVD collection, organized according to Neilson ratings, for what seemed like just a minute, but when I looked back, she was gone.
I curled up in a chair, covered myself in my afghan (an exact replica of that on the Connor couch), and pressed Play.
I thought this was so clever and original and dark. It made me laugh.
I am having a blast doing stand up (my real love) there! The crowds have been great and the shopping and food in town are awesome! come and see me sat thru wed. until june!!!
HOMER, A READER HERE WRITES:
redbird's view
Third World Crisis in America
Oglala Lakota stats:
* Average Pine Ridge family annual income is $3,700
*Infant Mortality rate is THREE times the national average
*97 per cent of people living on Pine Ridge live BELOW the poverty
level
*Life expectancy is 48 for men and 52 for women
*Pine Ridge family members' chance of getting diabetes is EIGHT TIMES the national average.
Learn more about the Oglala Lakota at Pine Ridge at www.re-member.org
At this site you will find several organizations that are helping to try to eliminate some of the extreme poverty there.
Recent Comments