There's no better time to leave Ithaca than now, and the fact that I won't be coming back until my senior year makes it even more fantastic!
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Housing Woes -- Foreals?!
Am I the only one who has perpetual, domestic issues with housemates? Why does everything turn sour over night? It's so frustrating. I don't know where to begin anymore. Am I destined to be eternally afflicted by housemate drama?
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Bush Urged To Issue ‘Pre-Emptive Pardons’ for Illegal Programs Officials
July 22, 2008
The New York Times reported this weekend that “[f]elons are asking President Bush for pardons and commutations at historic levels as he nears his final months in office, a time when many other presidents have granted a flurry of clemency requests.” However the Times noted that despite commuting Scooter Libby’s prison sentence, applicants “should expect to be disappointed” because Bush “has made little use of his clemency power” compared to past presidents.
Except perhaps if you participated in any illegal activity involving the Bush administration’s controversial counterterrorism programs. According to the Times, “several members of the conservative legal community” in Washington D.C. are urging Bush to issue “pre-emptive pardons” to those involved so as to “not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills”:
Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.
Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. […]
“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”
Stuart Taylor, Jr., a constitutional law fellow at Brookings, agrees, saying in a recent Newsweek column that investigations into the Bush administration’s “high level ‘war crimes’” are a “bad idea” and instead called for a “truth commission“:
A criminal investigation would only hinder efforts to determine the truth, and preclude any apologies. It would spur those who know the most to take the Fifth. Any prosecutions would also touch off years of partisan warfare. […]
Absent pardons, pressure to go after GOP “war criminals” would make it very hard to unite Americans of all stripes behind solutions to the many economic and social challenges facing the country.
In fact, the conservative D.C. lawyer circuit may just get its wish. The White House “would not say whether the administration was considering pre-emptive pardons, nor whether it would rule them out.” (HT: Dan Froomkin)
The New York Times reported this weekend that “[f]elons are asking President Bush for pardons and commutations at historic levels as he nears his final months in office, a time when many other presidents have granted a flurry of clemency requests.” However the Times noted that despite commuting Scooter Libby’s prison sentence, applicants “should expect to be disappointed” because Bush “has made little use of his clemency power” compared to past presidents.
Except perhaps if you participated in any illegal activity involving the Bush administration’s controversial counterterrorism programs. According to the Times, “several members of the conservative legal community” in Washington D.C. are urging Bush to issue “pre-emptive pardons” to those involved so as to “not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills”:
Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.
Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. […]
“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”
Stuart Taylor, Jr., a constitutional law fellow at Brookings, agrees, saying in a recent Newsweek column that investigations into the Bush administration’s “high level ‘war crimes’” are a “bad idea” and instead called for a “truth commission“:
A criminal investigation would only hinder efforts to determine the truth, and preclude any apologies. It would spur those who know the most to take the Fifth. Any prosecutions would also touch off years of partisan warfare. […]
Absent pardons, pressure to go after GOP “war criminals” would make it very hard to unite Americans of all stripes behind solutions to the many economic and social challenges facing the country.
In fact, the conservative D.C. lawyer circuit may just get its wish. The White House “would not say whether the administration was considering pre-emptive pardons, nor whether it would rule them out.” (HT: Dan Froomkin)
Monday, June 16, 2008
The State of Modern Cell Phone Culture: Not Good
This is going to be the first of two entries stemming from the same outing. My family and I went to see "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" yesterday (the first time the entire family went to see a movie together in years), and we were all pretty happy about this. We get there just in time for the previews (which all looked quite good, as previews these days tend to), my dad got popcorn, and things were looking up. Then, the movie started, and as if on cue, this stupid woman in front of us pulls out not one but two cell phones to fiddle around with. It's safe to say she was texting on her Sidekick or whatever annoying text machine she had, but on some flip phone (presumably her boyfriend's) it looked like she was changing the settings or something. For an hour. The sad thing is that I could actually tell what she was doing since the theater was, as theaters tend to be, dark. She didn't stop until I got tired of having faith in human beings and started kicking her chair. Needless to say, she got the message and put that shit away.
This leads into the point that I really wanted to make: people have actually become over-reliant on their cell phones. It isn't enough to be capable of contacting people at any point in time; people actually feel like it's necessary to stay in constant contact with others regardless of other preoccupations that would otherwise merit full attention. I mean, there's no way that you can't set aside two hours of your life to enjoy a movie, and if you can't, don't go. Rent a movie--stay at home where you can do whatever you want without bothering people trying to share the same experience. Of course this goes beyond the movies, but that's just one pertinent example. Wherever you go, you can see someone answer their phone or return a text without a second thought as to how it will affect others, and though that effect can vary in terms of negativity, it's still not good. There used to be something sacred about eating a meal at a restaurant, rooting for your team at a sporting event, or driving from one place to another, yet now anywhere is fair territory for hollering at yo boy or hitting up shorty with a text.
This leads into the point that I really wanted to make: people have actually become over-reliant on their cell phones. It isn't enough to be capable of contacting people at any point in time; people actually feel like it's necessary to stay in constant contact with others regardless of other preoccupations that would otherwise merit full attention. I mean, there's no way that you can't set aside two hours of your life to enjoy a movie, and if you can't, don't go. Rent a movie--stay at home where you can do whatever you want without bothering people trying to share the same experience. Of course this goes beyond the movies, but that's just one pertinent example. Wherever you go, you can see someone answer their phone or return a text without a second thought as to how it will affect others, and though that effect can vary in terms of negativity, it's still not good. There used to be something sacred about eating a meal at a restaurant, rooting for your team at a sporting event, or driving from one place to another, yet now anywhere is fair territory for hollering at yo boy or hitting up shorty with a text.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Police State: Cops Attack, Threaten to Taser Prayer Walkers
Brenda NorrellCensored NewsJune 13, 2008
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Unprovoked Columbus, Ohio police attacked Long Walkers, by first pointing a taser at the head of Michael Lane and then forcing Luv the Mezenger to the ground and handcuffing him.
The Longest Walk Northern Route was walking this prayer through Columbus on Monday, June 2, when police squad cars and arrest wagons arrived. Without discussion of the purpose of the prayer walk, or verifying that the Ohio Department of Transportation had been notified of the prayer walk, police attacked the walkers.
Michael Lane, who arrived on the walk with his wife, Sharon Heta, Maori, and their children from New Zealand, was targeted by police with a taser.
As dozens of police came at the walkers, a police officer held a taser three feet away from Lane’s head.
Luv the Mezenger from Los Angeles went to the aid of Lane. At that point, police officers threw Luv on the ground and handcuffed him. Luv has been on the walk since it left California in February, walking on snowshoes over a stretch of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Lane, who has a law degree from the Arizona State University, said the worst part of being targeted by a police officer with a taser was that it terrified his daughters who only knew that a gun was being pointed at their father’s head.
Across the continent, police-induced deaths from tasers have increased.
Luv suffered minor injuries from the police attack. Police made no arrests.
Govinda Dalton, broadcasting on the live Longest Walk Talk radio on Earthcycles web radio, said, “They came to arrest the walkers with paddy wagons without even having a discussion as to what the walk is about, or the fact that the Ohio Department of Transportation has already been contacted.”
The harassment by Ohio police continued, Tuesday, June 3, when police ordered Longest Walk drummers off an area at the Ohio State Capitol. However, the Long Walkers continued with their press conference and aired statements on their loud speaker at the capitol.
It has been almost four months since the prayer walk began on Alcatraz, on Feb. 11. Up until June 2, there had been no attacks on the walkers. In fact, the majority of the governors in the states that the northern route has walked through have issued proclamations of support for the Longest Walk 2.
The Longest Walk 2 for Mother Earth and protection of sacred places is being walked thirty years after the original 1978 Longest Walk, a prayer walk for Indian rights and the recognition of the inherent sovereignty of Indian people and Indian Nations.
Earthcycles’ Longest Walk Talk Radio has archived 400 interviews with walkers and people along the route since the walk left Alcatraz, on issues all across America.
The radio topics, voiced by people across America, have included the rise of the police state in the United States, the targeting of American Indians by city, state and federal police, the rise of xenophobia and the television-fueled, fear-mongering by the Bush administration. As a result of the fear-mongering, the Bush administration has found it easy to void federal laws, including waivers of more than 30 federal laws to build the US/Mexico border wall and seize private lands by way of eminent domain for the border wall. Across America, people are alarmed that the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, including free speech, have been violated.
On the Yankton Indian Nation, about 50 South Dakota police units recently swarmed a group of Yankton peacefully standing in defense of their sovereign land from a corporate hog farm under construction near the Head Start. About 40 Dakota from Yankton were arrested in two waves of arrests. The arrests and construction are now being challenged in court, but the construction of the disease-producing hog farm has accelerated.The radio topics include global climate change, nuclear testing and gold mining on Western Shoshone lands and violations of treaty rights. Another issue is the loss of Paiute traditional hunting and gathering rights. Scientists are battling Paiutes for 10,000 year old Spirit Cave Man. Paiutes have gone to federal court in an effort to rebury the remains with respect. In Kansas, the Kickapoo are a nation without water and having to haul all their water.Other interviews focus on the proliferation of censored news concerning Navajo coal mining and relocation, Nazi-type forces at the US/Mexico border and the destruction of Tohono O’odham ancestors’ remains for the border wall. The news has also been censored on ceremonial and religious rights denied to Native inmates in U.S. prisons.
Those interviewed include Mohawks at the northern border, Navajo from Big Mountain, Arizona, Apache and Tohono O’odham from the southern border and Maori from New Zealand. Indigenous Peoples also discuss the continual oppression of Indigenous Peoples, particularly from the four countries who refused to vote for adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia did not vote for the Declaration, which was adopted by the U.N. in 2007 and recognizes Indigenous Peoples’ rights to their traditional territories. Following the U.N. vote, New Zealand police raided and arrested Maori in the sovereignty movement there and new mining and disease-producing energy developments proliferated in Indigenous territories around the globe.
The newest threat to Indigenous Peoples survival is carbon credits, a fictional concept which allows polluters to continue polluting. The carbon market is a scheme creating millionaires which has increased the attacks and displacement of Indigenous Peoples. The World Bank and corporations are seizing Indigenous’ lands for new projects, particularly in South America. Indigenous Peoples were assassinated in Colombia as land was cleared for a wind project.
On the Longest Walk Talk Radio, there are also interviews on the economic collapse and war profiteering in the United States, the proliferation of power plants to enrich Bush’s corporate donors, profiteering by private security contractors such as Blackwater and the rapid expansion and construction of private prisons to imprison migrants for profit. At the Hutto migrant prison in Taylor, Texas, women, children and babies are imprisoned. Women have been sexually assaulted and children are deprived and abused. The United States denied entry to the prison by a United Nations Rapporteur documenting abuses of migrants.
Another reality voiced on the radio talk show is the cost of the bogus war in Iraq. American Indians and people of color, along with poor whites, are considered expendables to die in Iraq.
Meanwhile, on the Longest Walk northern route, on Wednesday, June 4, the walkers were all safe and well, but with a great deal of wet camping gear, after another night of lightning and rain in an eastern Ohio campground. During the past four months, walkers have camped in below freezing temperatures in the west and then camped in weeks of rain and winds from tornados in the Midwest.
Walkers on the northern route converge with walkers on the southern route, now in Alabama, to march into Washington on July 11. A four day Cultural Survival Summit is planned for July 8 – 11 and rallies and events for July 12 – 13.
Listen to the latest interviews about the prayer walkers attacked by Ohio police:http://www.earthcycles.net/
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Unprovoked Columbus, Ohio police attacked Long Walkers, by first pointing a taser at the head of Michael Lane and then forcing Luv the Mezenger to the ground and handcuffing him.
The Longest Walk Northern Route was walking this prayer through Columbus on Monday, June 2, when police squad cars and arrest wagons arrived. Without discussion of the purpose of the prayer walk, or verifying that the Ohio Department of Transportation had been notified of the prayer walk, police attacked the walkers.
Michael Lane, who arrived on the walk with his wife, Sharon Heta, Maori, and their children from New Zealand, was targeted by police with a taser.
As dozens of police came at the walkers, a police officer held a taser three feet away from Lane’s head.
Luv the Mezenger from Los Angeles went to the aid of Lane. At that point, police officers threw Luv on the ground and handcuffed him. Luv has been on the walk since it left California in February, walking on snowshoes over a stretch of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Lane, who has a law degree from the Arizona State University, said the worst part of being targeted by a police officer with a taser was that it terrified his daughters who only knew that a gun was being pointed at their father’s head.
Across the continent, police-induced deaths from tasers have increased.
Luv suffered minor injuries from the police attack. Police made no arrests.
Govinda Dalton, broadcasting on the live Longest Walk Talk radio on Earthcycles web radio, said, “They came to arrest the walkers with paddy wagons without even having a discussion as to what the walk is about, or the fact that the Ohio Department of Transportation has already been contacted.”
The harassment by Ohio police continued, Tuesday, June 3, when police ordered Longest Walk drummers off an area at the Ohio State Capitol. However, the Long Walkers continued with their press conference and aired statements on their loud speaker at the capitol.
It has been almost four months since the prayer walk began on Alcatraz, on Feb. 11. Up until June 2, there had been no attacks on the walkers. In fact, the majority of the governors in the states that the northern route has walked through have issued proclamations of support for the Longest Walk 2.
The Longest Walk 2 for Mother Earth and protection of sacred places is being walked thirty years after the original 1978 Longest Walk, a prayer walk for Indian rights and the recognition of the inherent sovereignty of Indian people and Indian Nations.
Earthcycles’ Longest Walk Talk Radio has archived 400 interviews with walkers and people along the route since the walk left Alcatraz, on issues all across America.
The radio topics, voiced by people across America, have included the rise of the police state in the United States, the targeting of American Indians by city, state and federal police, the rise of xenophobia and the television-fueled, fear-mongering by the Bush administration. As a result of the fear-mongering, the Bush administration has found it easy to void federal laws, including waivers of more than 30 federal laws to build the US/Mexico border wall and seize private lands by way of eminent domain for the border wall. Across America, people are alarmed that the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, including free speech, have been violated.
On the Yankton Indian Nation, about 50 South Dakota police units recently swarmed a group of Yankton peacefully standing in defense of their sovereign land from a corporate hog farm under construction near the Head Start. About 40 Dakota from Yankton were arrested in two waves of arrests. The arrests and construction are now being challenged in court, but the construction of the disease-producing hog farm has accelerated.The radio topics include global climate change, nuclear testing and gold mining on Western Shoshone lands and violations of treaty rights. Another issue is the loss of Paiute traditional hunting and gathering rights. Scientists are battling Paiutes for 10,000 year old Spirit Cave Man. Paiutes have gone to federal court in an effort to rebury the remains with respect. In Kansas, the Kickapoo are a nation without water and having to haul all their water.Other interviews focus on the proliferation of censored news concerning Navajo coal mining and relocation, Nazi-type forces at the US/Mexico border and the destruction of Tohono O’odham ancestors’ remains for the border wall. The news has also been censored on ceremonial and religious rights denied to Native inmates in U.S. prisons.
Those interviewed include Mohawks at the northern border, Navajo from Big Mountain, Arizona, Apache and Tohono O’odham from the southern border and Maori from New Zealand. Indigenous Peoples also discuss the continual oppression of Indigenous Peoples, particularly from the four countries who refused to vote for adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia did not vote for the Declaration, which was adopted by the U.N. in 2007 and recognizes Indigenous Peoples’ rights to their traditional territories. Following the U.N. vote, New Zealand police raided and arrested Maori in the sovereignty movement there and new mining and disease-producing energy developments proliferated in Indigenous territories around the globe.
The newest threat to Indigenous Peoples survival is carbon credits, a fictional concept which allows polluters to continue polluting. The carbon market is a scheme creating millionaires which has increased the attacks and displacement of Indigenous Peoples. The World Bank and corporations are seizing Indigenous’ lands for new projects, particularly in South America. Indigenous Peoples were assassinated in Colombia as land was cleared for a wind project.
On the Longest Walk Talk Radio, there are also interviews on the economic collapse and war profiteering in the United States, the proliferation of power plants to enrich Bush’s corporate donors, profiteering by private security contractors such as Blackwater and the rapid expansion and construction of private prisons to imprison migrants for profit. At the Hutto migrant prison in Taylor, Texas, women, children and babies are imprisoned. Women have been sexually assaulted and children are deprived and abused. The United States denied entry to the prison by a United Nations Rapporteur documenting abuses of migrants.
Another reality voiced on the radio talk show is the cost of the bogus war in Iraq. American Indians and people of color, along with poor whites, are considered expendables to die in Iraq.
Meanwhile, on the Longest Walk northern route, on Wednesday, June 4, the walkers were all safe and well, but with a great deal of wet camping gear, after another night of lightning and rain in an eastern Ohio campground. During the past four months, walkers have camped in below freezing temperatures in the west and then camped in weeks of rain and winds from tornados in the Midwest.
Walkers on the northern route converge with walkers on the southern route, now in Alabama, to march into Washington on July 11. A four day Cultural Survival Summit is planned for July 8 – 11 and rallies and events for July 12 – 13.
Listen to the latest interviews about the prayer walkers attacked by Ohio police:http://www.earthcycles.net/
Friday, June 13, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
The Electric Car will Rise Again!!!
Many Californians are feeling the economic burden brought upon them by incredibly high gas prices. With gas prices reaching record highs, it is common for a regular commute to work and to school to reach 50 to even 100 dollars a week. Current alternatives that are regularly advertised as "solutions" only extend the problems of American oil dependence, perpetuating the continual need to spend more money at the gas pump. If gas prices reach a new feat of 7 or even 10 dollars per gallon with the average American driving Hybrid cars, Ethanol Gasoline Bio-Fuel vehicles, or "Fuel Efficient" vehicles, they too will also pay the same absurd prices all Americans pay today with vehicles made in the 90's.
Electric vehicles have and will be the most effective means of solving the current oil crisis, and will continue to be a more effective solution as time goes by. Although electric vehicles that performs as well or better than normal gas vehicles cost more that 40,000 dollars, the fact that it can out perform normal gas vehicles today says something positive about the emerging greatness of electric vehicles. The Tesla with specs of 130 mph, 0-60 in 4 secs, 220 miles per charge, and a recharge time of 3.5 hours, provides Americans a glimpse of what the future holds for electric transportation. No longer do the excuses of charge time and performance hinder the sale value of these vehicles. Two new vehicle's being created in Ontario California enables both trucks and SUV's with sustainable performance and reliability. The Phoenixmotors SUT and SUV has a charge time of 10 minutes (0 to full) and has a drive time of more than 100 miles per charge. The likely hood of these vehicles turning their eyes towards the regular US consumer base is highly probable. Green Vehicles has already done so by creating one of the cheapest and the most available cars to the American population, retailing at about 10,000 dollars. he trend toward electric cars had and is scaring the large car cooperation's into electric submission, forcing them to create electric vehicles of their own. Nissan and its fully electric Maxima and the new Chevy Volt are two cars being pushed to be sold in 2010.
This is the Triac from Green Vehicles.
Fuel-Cell hybrid vehicles does create a new solution to this ever growing crisis; however, this technology will likely never see the light of day until 2040. Fuel-Cell vehicles still cannot perform to the lowest standards of old 90's electric vehicles, unable to drive in cold weather, wet weather, or extremely hot weather. Until these problems are fixed and once the prices of these fuel-cell vehicles are brought down to a reasonable for most consumers, they will not be a likely solution to the gas problem.
Electric vehicles have and will be the most effective means of solving the current oil crisis, and will continue to be a more effective solution as time goes by. Although electric vehicles that performs as well or better than normal gas vehicles cost more that 40,000 dollars, the fact that it can out perform normal gas vehicles today says something positive about the emerging greatness of electric vehicles. The Tesla with specs of 130 mph, 0-60 in 4 secs, 220 miles per charge, and a recharge time of 3.5 hours, provides Americans a glimpse of what the future holds for electric transportation. No longer do the excuses of charge time and performance hinder the sale value of these vehicles. Two new vehicle's being created in Ontario California enables both trucks and SUV's with sustainable performance and reliability. The Phoenixmotors SUT and SUV has a charge time of 10 minutes (0 to full) and has a drive time of more than 100 miles per charge. The likely hood of these vehicles turning their eyes towards the regular US consumer base is highly probable. Green Vehicles has already done so by creating one of the cheapest and the most available cars to the American population, retailing at about 10,000 dollars. he trend toward electric cars had and is scaring the large car cooperation's into electric submission, forcing them to create electric vehicles of their own. Nissan and its fully electric Maxima and the new Chevy Volt are two cars being pushed to be sold in 2010.Consumers are screaming for gas relief and third party companies are trying to fill their needs; unfortunately for those who are currently getting trampled on by the gas companies, they have to wait a couple of years before the consumer versions of these cars become available. The solution, however, is not getting persuaded by current advertisements to go ahead by buy a Hybrid or a Fuel "Efficient Vehicle" but to wait til the market bears its fruits and purchase a car that uses zero gasoline, and requires less than 1 cent to drive to work and school.
This is the Triac from Green Vehicles.Price: 10,000
Specs: 60 miles per charge
6 hour charge time
80 MPh
Made out of Nascar grade Steel
1 Driver Carpool Access
Avaliable NOW
Website: www.greenvehicles.com
More Websites:
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Strangers with candy . . . and knives
Okay, so I'm writing this blog later than I told Bernadette that I would (though at this time of night, who really keeps track?). For those of you who aren't accustomed to the same internet slang as I am, the initial p in the picture stands for 'pretty', not anything else you might be reading into it. It's safe to say that we saw "The Strangers" tonight; however, I still can't pinpoint what exactly we saw. Generally, I try to stay away from horror movies that claim to be based on a true story if only for the fact that they're usually just about some sort of deranged serial killer(s) killing some regular people in gruesome fashion, but this one looked like it had something supernatural about it. Turns out, I was wrong. Parts of this movie make you want to believe it's got something supernatural behind it, but all it really amounted to was eighty five minutes of build up (involving classic horror elements like chase scenes, the atmosphere, and ambient sounds to scare you) and five minutes of snuff. Then it ends in a somewhat matter of fact manner, letting you know flat out that you saw 95% of a decent horror movie and 5% of a documentary about the murders (yes, people die, that shouldn't spoil anything for you if you're masochistic enough to still want to see this movie) that occurred one night at an out-of-the-way cabin. Does this movie have scares? Yes. Does this movie have blood and guts? Yes. Does this movie leave you feeling like you watched a complete movie? No, and I think that's the worst thing you can do to a moviegoer.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Oh Grandpa.....
We all know that this is an important year in choosing our next president. The G.O.P. already has grandpa McCain (who sucks) and it’s only a matter of time until Obama wins the democratic nomination. But something that has been bugging me to the point where the little voice in my head with the straightjacket had to be let loose onto the public. What is driving me crazy is hearing about Clinton supporters voting for McCain rather than Obama if she is not selected. And this is even more prevalent in women that support her. So this goes out to the people out there that think it’s better to vote for McCain or not voting at all: Do you realize what will happen if we have McCain in charge? He wants to bomb Iran, keep us in Iraq for 100 years, appoint Supreme Court judges that will over turn Roe V. Wade, AND not to mention his short temper. Does this sound like a person that should have his hands on the big red button?
As it comes to Iraq, a reporter asked him how long it would take to get out of there and his reply was, “Maybe 100 years”. 100 FREAKING YEARS!!!!! And he also said that there will be more wars. Do you think that we should even be there now? This is a man that doesn’t know which side to support in Iraq. First he said that Iraq was training terrorists and had nukes. When we found out that they had no nukes and things in Iraq started to go bad, he, just like Bush started to blame things on Iran. The things that he said about Iraq were used again to describe Iran. Here’s the twist: When we were in Afghanistan (which is the right place to be), Iran helped us to get Osama. So an ally went from being just that, an ally, to an enemy in just a few years. I think he’s starting to suffer from Alzheimer’s. To top that off he made a bad joke about bombing Iran by making a parity of “Barbara Ann” singing “bomb bomb bomb Iran”. Hey grandpa you’re running for president not trying to win American Idol as Weird Al.
My next point is to some of the women out there who would rather not vote and/or support McCain. The people that sit on the Supreme Court are really getting old and will likely step down in the next few years. Who ever is president picks a person to replace them and McCain has mentioned that he would pick judges who favor the ending of a women’s right to choose. Wouldn’t you rather have a choice then have a small group of men tell you that you can’t?
Then, there is his short temper. Oh man, this guy is a loose cannon. There is a report that he went across some seats to hit another senator from his own party just because he got into an argument with him. There are also reports that he called his own wife (who is the heir to the Anheuser-Busch fortune) a “C. U. Next Tuesday”. He has gotten into shouting matches with his campain staffers for wearing “fruity” sweaters. Even when he was younger he stated in his autobiography that he would hold his breath until he passed out if he didn’t get what he wanted.
Is John McCain a war hero? Yes he is but that doesn’t qualify him to be our next president. What Clinton is doing right now by staying in the race is only hurting the party. Her actions make it look like she is running not because she has a chance, but because she feels like shes intitled to it. We need the time now untill the election to beat McGrandpa and to bring the Democratic Party together. So vote for whom ever the nominee is because if we don’t then we the people lose and not just Clinton.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The Death Proof
I love movies with karmic endings, especially those that involve killing off some sort of villainous force. And I don't hesitate to say that either.
There's something about Taratino's filmmaking that appeals to the struggle of human nature. In the first part of the movie, we see three, very innocent, albeit scantily-clad girls get killed, rather viciously and graphically on-screen, for no apparent reason. Then again, do serial killers really need a reason to kill? The serial killer, played by Kurt Russell, seemed to target girls who appeared to be wild, carefree, and risque--individuals free from the oppression of men. During the latter half of the movie, after a fantastically-shot chase scene, the serial killer finally got what he deserved. The three girls, thanks to some amazing stunt work, ultimately outwitted him and gave him a brutal beating so bad-ass and blood-gushing that would make any sex offender run the other way.
Death Proof reinforced my penchant for movies with endings that cater to the inner vindictiveness of human nature. It's incredibly aggravating when villains are the ones getting to enjoy the fun and getting away for it. Tarantino's films have a history of successfully pandering to two crucial elements that makes films satisfying: He creates enough suspense to keep the plot well-oiled and wraps every little nuance up deliciously!
Although this entry may seem to be far removed from the premise of a complaint, I sometimes wished my life would play out like a Tarantino movie--but to a much lesser degree (I am no borderline schizophrenic, after all). I often wonder why there are so many rotten, detestable people out there and not enough of those who truly take action to triumph over these social defiles. I recently had to eliminate two people, who sown the seeds to a petty rumor about me, from my social circle, and, to be frank, I am glad I did. Since then, I've made it known that I will disassociate with people who solely thrive only on gossip and do anything within my ability to make their lives harder. Let the sabotage begin, bitches!
Creating your own good ending has never felt so empowering :)
Friday, May 16, 2008
T.M.Z. (Theres My Zoloft)
This is something that I have had issues with for quite a while now and I have a picture that supports my thought; so I decided to rant about it. Reality TV is stupid. This includes the millions of entertainment shows out there. Isn’t there anything that we can do with our time then watch celebrities go in and out of clubs, bars, and restaurants (TMZ)? Isn’t there anything that we can do then watch 10 people in a house doing nothing but try to get laid (Big Brother)? Have we as a society become so tired our own lives that we have to live them through the people that we see on TV or in movies? We all have problems in our lives that we don’t like dealing with but we can’t just ignore them by drowning ourselves in other people lives. I mean who cares if Britney hits another car. Who cares if someone has cellulite on their ass or who went shopping where? People, we have bigger problems in this country then focusing on whether someone is wearing underwear or not. Gas is going to be over 4 bucks a gallon, people are losing their houses, and our troops are dying over seas. Right now people have to choose if they should buy gas, food, or pay off their mortgage. And how many people under the age of 30 really keep up with world politics, better yet U.S. politics? Did you know that the U.S. had Nelson Mandela on the terror watch list? Yes, Nelson Mandela; the peace loving, falsely imprisoned political activist. And I bet that only a few people out there knew that he was on there. We need to stop all this celebrity obsession about who’s dating whom and what nut is jumping around like a monkey on Oprah’s sofa. We should be concentrating on how we are going to get gas down to a reasonable price, how to keep people in their homes and how we can fight global climate change. And has anyone thought of this? So people please leave reality TV alone and pick up a newspaper, read a book or something.
Please watch parts 1 and 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h013lSAypt8
Monday, May 12, 2008
Why is this so hard?
"That's what she said." As much as I love "The Office", the best part about this joke isn't its evocation of Michael Scott, it's how it can suddenly send a docile conversation between friends into a bawdy frenzy of laughter that is often not unwelcome.
This rant is probably only going to be half as potent as it ought to be since I don't really have this problem, yet that in no way means that it isn't important. It's easy enough to say that saying "relationships are tough" is cliche; however, it's just as sophomoric to respond by saying "tough it out". Life isn't something that can be pegged so easily by quick, easy responses, and anyone who thinks it can has one eye open at best. To be clear, I don't intend to discuss romantic relationships but rather interpersonal relationships of any kind.
Let's start off by talking about how natural it is for people to want closeness with others (if only for the reason that it is). On my first day of kindergarten, I went up to another boy and asked him if he wanted to be best friends with me. He said yes, and we were best friends for the next nine years (we were never as close after high school separated us into different social circles, though we were always friends and still are). Even though it's impossible to be that blunt after those early days of elementary school, it's only natural for anyone to search out others to share life with. This is clearly much easier for people who have a support base well-established and near at hand, though it's easy to forget that not everyone has this luxury. I know that, last Summer, I was somewhat nervous about how I'd be spending my time outside of class since I was just starting at UCLA as most of my friends were graduating. Fortunately, a vacancy opened up at my friend Matt's apartment, and I jumped at the chance to live with a friend. I went from having a somewhat shaky support base to having a trusted friend at my place of residence, and I don't think I'll ever forget just how lucky I've been.
Another friend of mine hasn't been nearly as lucky with building relationships where he has none. He moved to Michigan in order to work (for a very appealing salary, mind you), but he's found it to be nearly impossible to establish a support base there (it's a company town and most of the employees have families already). Now he spends his money--the reason he moved out there--on weekend trips to visit his friends in other states. There's just no way any person can live well without a friend or two who can just be there.
We're all looking for kindred spirits to share bits of life with. Sometimes you'll get lucky and fall into a situation with like-minded people, sometimes you'll want to run home as quick as you can just to feel like you're among people you trust. Either way, relationships are easy to take for granted and frustrating to be without, and everyone needs at least a little help to ease the burden of being human beings.
Where's My F-ing Beef
Come one come all to the latest addition to “Who Sucks”. Now I was trying to have my next post to be on something else, but something happened at dinner on Friday that it just couldn’t be helped. Now this is more of a local rant but “THAI PURPLE SUCKS”. Why do they suck? Well for starters the restaurant looks like a combination of an old Italian restaurant and a scene out of the jungle book. So the seven of us sit down at our table and there is nothing on the table which is ok but when they brought out the plates they were still wet. And to top that off the guy(?) cleaned them off while the plates were still in front of us with paper napkins. Then “it” came back with our silverware set which three of them were incomplete and never came back to finish off the missing sets. Then as we sat there for 10 minutes we got our order taken. I ordered some kind of beef dish. Then 5 minutes later the guy came back and tells my friend that they were all out of what he ordered. So then he asked to see the menu again; 15 minutes later, the first two dishes come out and back with a menu. The waiter then asked my friend what else he wanted to order. As three more dishes come out my friend and I are still waiting for our food. As his food comes out I sit there waiting and wondering if my food is ever going to come out. I mean they didn’t have to go to Texas to kill a fucking cow to get some meat. As we sit there trying to find a waiter to ask, they seem to ignore us. If it wasn’t for my wife and the food she ordered, I would have starved. As we finally grab a waiter and informed him of my missing dish, he said he would check on it. I told him to forget it and that I didn’t want it any more. And he walked away. WTF??? No sorry. No I don’t know what happened. No manager coming over and apologizing to us. So after that whole deal we left them a nice tip. Yes I was being sarcastic. Hell I had to go some place else to get food that’s not going to get spat in. We would all have been better off going to a taco truck to eat. Their food is better, cheaper, and I wouldn’t have been waiting for my damn beef dinner. I know I don’t expect a free meal or a discount on our bill but just an apology. So to all the people that read this who reside in the city of Alhambra, that place sucks.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Behind the Ivy: Think OChem is hard? Think again.
As witnessed by the thousands upon thousands of prospective, college applicants across the country on the colorful, professionally-printed brochures, there is an implicit promise universities and colleges, across the land of spacious skies and purple mountain majesties, are making, and it is one, big FAT lie. While I already am fortunate enough to have an established group of friends (including the ones who post on this blog, of course :)) back home, I honestly came to Cornell, aside from its academic prestige, looking to forge life-long friendships (on some level, at least) and foster personal growth simply as a result of being here.
To my dismay, the quality of friendships I have been pining for in a collegiate environment is far from reality. I have found myself entangled in three social circles, since the beginning of my journey in obtaining an Ivy League diploma that guarantees limitless opportunities and, for some, secures a chance at having a lucrative and socially-advantageous future. Being a part of three social circles isn't something that I'd exactly be proud of or gloat about; as a matter of fact, it demonstrates how the Cornell community itself and at large is so severely fragmented and, quite bluntly, as loose as Paris Hilton's gaping vagina after multiple sex-capades. There appears to be no common ground that glues the students together. When such gluing does occur, it is only limited to certain, social clusters that pervade campus-wide. Everyone seems to settle for convenient friendships with those in their immediate proximity. Case in point: Supposedly close friends I had last semester live in another residential house 5 minutes away from me, yet we no longer eat or hang out together. Our interaction with one another have been reduced to platitudinous greetings and farewells.
It saddens me greatly to think that I might have to cohabit with this dismal reality for the next two years. I don't think I can even begin to scratch the surface of this "Big Red" farce as to why people here are so seemingly incapable of confiding in each other and letting go of their inhibitions. While having coffee with my friend Caroline last night, she briefly mentioned in passing that there is this girl who would converse with her after their club meetings but would never proceed to make plans for future gatherings or express any interest in further developing their friendship beyond the level of being acquaintances. It struck me, at the moment of Caroline's revelation, that this is precisely the problem I invariably observe on the Cornell campus. On the one hand, it is easy to meet new people within the sizable student population; on the other hand, it is frustratingly difficult to maintain flourishing and faithful friendships.
Although Organic Chemistry is one of the toughest courses an undergraduate student can take, I believe there is a greater obstacle ahead that is more self-defeating and demoralizing than any class--and that is learning how to navigate the social anatomy of college life. I rest my case. Now share yours.
San Francisco: A Tale of Stops, Shops, and Mom and Pops
I don't think everyone knows, but I was more or less forced to come up to Fremont this weekend for some conveniently-planned back-to-back parties--a memorial tonight and a baby party tomorrow. Anyway, today my dad, sister, and I went to San Francisco so that we could at least enjoy part of the day, and just that alone is full of tales of interest.
Before we even got into the city, we were stopped on the God-forsaken 880 freeway in Oakland by an irritatingly-friendly Highway Patrolman. He cited us for speeding, going 78 in a 65 zone, but the worst part is that we were just going with the flow of traffic. We were in our Toyota Sienna, and we weren't even passing people. When asked about why we were singled out, the officer said that we just the one he chose to pace and that he couldn't stop everyone. So basically, it was just bad luck. What a bullshit small-town mentality towards the law. Our trip into San Francisco did not have the best of starts.
Just to get into the city, there was a $4 toll on the Oakland Bay Bridge, marking the start of our fairly expensive day (past however much the ticket was for). We headed right for Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf, because my Dad likes it. He tends to gravitate towards touristy areas, but I didn't really mind since I hadn't been there in probably ten years. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a fairly rotten memory, so I'm thankful that many of my memories of that place are in tact. I remember it being full of shops all trying to peddle cheap stuff with a San Franciscan allure. Now, the area's been revamped with upscale restaurants, live music, and other stuff for people other than tourists to do. The focal point is the Boudin bakery, which has been completely revamped and is a major draw for anyone; it's been made to showcase their bread and its universal appeal, plus there's a huge area to eat and buy bread/food/coffee related items. The actual pier is still pretty touristy, but it's nice to see the general area with a broader appeal.
After that, we went to have lunch at Joe's Cable Car, a little burger place that was featured on Food Network's "Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives". Since this is more or less my favorite show on that channel, I was looking forward to a burger comprised of as-advertised fresh ground chuck, but I was pleased to find something else I'm not opposed to: cute, Asian waitresses (think Shakas except an old-fashioned diner)! This was a shock because the owner is like a Greek immigrant, so the fit just seemed really odd. I'm definitely lapsing a bit into my caveman roots, yet I can't help but say that it was nice to get a little flirting in (the girls in Westwood tend to be a bit snooty, but that's another story). What can I say? I came for the burgers, I'd go back for the service.
That's it for San Francisco. Stay tuned for the Fremont files.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
And Away They Go....
Here is another rant about who sucks. This time I’m taking aim at PETA. Yes the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Now I’m not saying I like seeing animals killed for fun. But I do have a problem with some of their actions that they take to get their point across. Some of their stunts are totally off the wall. My first point is them throwing red paint on people who wear fur. Now I do agree that fur isn’t a good thing for fashion, but to ruin someone’s coat just because you don’t like what they’re wearing is stupid. So if I take that into consideration then I should do the same thing for people who can’t match their socks with their skirts or pants. My second point is that they wanted the historic Green Bay Packers to change their name because they were named after a meat packing industry. IT’S A NAME PEOPLE! Just because they were named after an industry that was the staple of that area and was a source of jobs for many, you want their named changed? Oh and they hated the name “cheese heads” because cheese come from cows. Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Now what set this off is the situation at the Kentucky Derby. If you didn’t know already, the horse Eight Belles, broke two ankles after the race was finished, and had to be put down right there on the track. Was it a horrible thing that happened? Yes. But should the jockey be at fault? No. PETA clams that the jockey pushed Eight Belles to hard and knew that the horse was hurt before the race. Now they want to have the jockey suspended. Also jockeys probably love the horses that they ride on more the PETA loves rats. Ok now here are the facts: Each horse has to go through an exam before they could race and the doctors CLEARED Eight Belles to race. The jockey had nothing to do with the horse getting hurt. The horse was coming to a stop then just keeled over. Also jockeys can tell when there is something wrong with the horses during a race. And they’re riding at a high rate of speed. I don’t think that they would push their horses that hard just to get thrown off and trampled. Does PETA do some good things? Yes they do. But do they do things that just make you scratch your head? Oh hell yes. You know what just to make them mad I’m going to order a steak for dinner. Bon appetit’.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Some bedtime reading
Fascism in Ten Easy Steps
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
from Naomi Wolf's "The End of Americ: A Letter to a Young Patriot"
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
from Naomi Wolf's "The End of Americ: A Letter to a Young Patriot"
Friday, May 2, 2008
Here Comes the Feds
To whom this may concern:Bush sucks! And I’m not talking about the green shrubbery in the front of your yard. I don’t know why we even had him as president in the first place or the second time. Oh wait we didn’t vote for him. We had that election stolen from us twice. And yes I still think that. I don’t know why people thought that he could run this country. Hell he ran two companies to the ground and he sucked at running the Texas Rangers. So who cares if he’s the type of person that you could have a drink with. Hell you can have a drink with a drunk but does that mean that he could handle the responsibility of leading millions of people. Hell I wouldn’t trust “lil Bush” running a lemon-aid stand, let alone the nation. Now I don’t have time right now to go through all the dumb things that he has done, but what has he really done for the common people? Yeah he lowered taxes; yes that’s a good one. WRONG!!! What his tax cuts did was just put more money back in the pockets of the top 1% that owns 96% of this nation’s wealth. You really don’t take advantage of those breaks until you make 750,000 dollars or more. Now the last time I checked, I’ve never known one person that makes that much that does not play pro sports. So you get back 50 bucks or more. But think of how much a billionaire would get back. MILLIONS. And just think where that money could go. Would those millions have helped save that bridge in Minnesota, or help fix the dams in New Orleans, or how about just pay for the occupation of Iraq. Just think of the past few months that have happened around you. Gas went up a dollar, people are losing their houses, and more of our solders are getting killed. But there is light at the end of this tunnel. He’s done at the end of the year. Oh wait we might not be able to see that light if we get into it with Iran (look it up). I better stop talking before the FBI comes after me.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
The Word Nazi, part 1
I have prejudices. Lots of them, as I expect most people do, though they probably don't go around talking about them. Of course, that means I must dive headfirst into this vast and uncharted ocean of idiosyncrasies.
Today's little tidbit of disdain focuses on the word 'visceral', more specifically on people who use that word. As an English major, I value every word individually since each has its own function and use. However, even before I found a passion for English, it always appeared to me that only certain people had 'visceral' as part of their vernacular. For example, there was an extremely irritating guy named Justin who was in almost every club I was in in high school. If you had seen him, you'd have sworn that he was already practicing to be a politician--glad-handing and sweet-talking his way into his teachers/advisors' good graces. Granted, these were honor societies that included the school's most sheltered and elitist students, but he took pretentiousness to new levels. Every day, he wore a short-sleeved dress shirt tucked neatly into pressed slacks and dress shoes. Then, when talking in meetings, he'd talk as if he were giving a vocabulary lesson, using his practiced SAT words then explaining their meanings, as if we all hadn't studied the same things. He eventually annoyed so many people that some of the bigger kids actually picked up his little car (an amusing little facet of his otherwise irritating story) and hid it from him.
Anyway, the point of the story is that he's the kind of person who would describe an experience as visceral, even in high school. Now I'm all for being able to take an objective look at a situation, but I don't feel that the visceral is all that different from, well, anything else. It's like saying that certain emotions are less evolved than others, but that's impossible since all emotions are instinctual. People wanting to intellectualize emotions is what gets my goat, and I'd like it if everyone could just admit to being human and, by design, not having full control over themselves.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The Ex File
So, as many of you may recall, I was dating Dustin over the summer of 2007. Needless to say, our relationship hit a rough patch shortly after my arrival here in Ithaca. I thought I had, initially and naively, made the right "pick" (my apologies for the use of farming vernacular, but I find it appropriate to think that a piece of ripe, crisply juicy fruit is the equivalent to a decent, male companion). As always, this long-distance shindig turned out to be far worse than imagined in my funnel vision.
I never openly admitted to this, but Dustin and I were still informally dating (and semi-canoodling) during winter break--despite our breakup, which happened just two months before. What you guys may not be cognizant of is the fact that immediately after the breakup that I had personally proposed, our relationship exhibited all shades of gray. While neither of us (yes, myself included) were too thrill in the aftermath of the breakup, Dustin went on an emotional rampage. He had decided, as a way to mend his broken heart, by disassociating himself with me and removing me from his social circle. Um, how childish can someone who is 5 years my senior be? Apparently, very easily. It hit me, at that very moment, that I was, perhaps, a little too mature and too much for him to handle. Though I was disheartened, I believe that I dealt with the situation in a very amicable and tactful way. Another epiphany came right up my alley a few weeks after that: "Maybe, we're just not meant to be." And that's precisely the impetus I needed to move onward and forward with my life.
Just recently, Dustin took some time out of his busy schedule as a graduate student to tell me that he started dating someone new. I was like: "That's great! Congratulations!" At first, my reaction was a grateful one--grateful that someone else had come along to sweep the mess I had created. That didn't last too long. The next day, I felt all the pangs of loneliness and stings of revenge served on a delightfully frigid platter in very, heavily-portioned servings. Once again, Dustin had reinforced the extent of childish behavior he could achieve. What kind of insensitive bastard would openly declare to a person he had just broken up with that he has started dating someone new? Does a grace period not exist? Am I the only odd one out when it comes to that sorta mentality? I still question his sincerity and friendship, even now that the melodrama have significantly died down.
I am really starting to reconsider this whole "gay" thing; after all, it's just a phase right? :P
**On a more positive and wholly unrelated note, I got a 96 on my Gerontology op-ed paper! Loves it.
- T
Monday, April 28, 2008
Ithacation: It's Another Rainy Day in Spring
Weather-wise, things aren't exactly looking up here in Ithaca for me. My gray jeans, which coincidentally mirror the color of the gloomy skies, are drenched near the hems. There's nothing as alarming or shocking as the unpredictable climate here; the nightlife, the people, my so-called Ivy League quality education deserve no grandiloquent praise. It is my hope, of course, that my life here would continue to improve from here on out--it has in certain ways, but not entirely to my satisfaction. If only Ezra Cornell was a bit more savvy and geographically-aware, we'd be located in a more tropical area and given the title as a coastal, aquatic Ivy. The motto 'Ithaca is Gorges' does not hold true, unless you happen to be a tourist here during late Spring and the Summer months.
Also, the other, generally more atrocious half of my double, dorm room reeks as a result of piggish hygiene and revolting, dietary habits. Heed my advice: Please, please have your kids room in a single when the time comes, if possible. The extra money itself, which isn't much, can heavily impact the psychological and physical well-being of your child. I am so thankful, on some many levels, that I will be living off campus, IN MY OWN ROOM, with two of my fraternity brothers next Fall!
See you all three weeks from now :)
- T
Sunday, April 27, 2008
A place for our friends; who needs Myspace?
That title is a bit misleading. In all honesty, I do use Myspace, though for the most part only to check out new bands and to keep in touch with people who refuse to use any of the other million forms of communication now available to us. This group blog, for instance, is a way for us to not only share any of our angry, amusing, and often absurd rants with each other but also with a wider audience. However, unlike Myspace, this site is purely devoted to our thoughts and is not cluttered with advertisements for dating or free ringtone websites, links to the profiles of cool new people, or inane bulletins posted by some lovable cretin you knew from high school. Basically, we're creating a place for our friends--for anyone who shares our feelings on the countless things that make the world go around--one that is not a part of a huge international conglomerate that wishes to brainwash its patrons into believing that their entire lives can be fulfilled in one place. Come for the slices of life, stay because those slices taste like they come from familiar recipes.
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