Usama on Freedom. AP reports that a videotape that seems to be of Usama bin Laden appeared on Al-Jazeera Friday. In the tape, bin Laden puts the lie to the ridiculous assertion the Bush Administration has used for years to ‘explain’ the attacks upon the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind," he said.

He accused President Bush of "misleading" the American people since the 2001 suicide airline hijackings that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"Your security is not in the hands of (Democratic candidate John) Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. "Your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said.

"To the U.S. people, my talk is to you about the best way to avoid another disaster," he said. "I tell you: security is an important element of human life and free people do not give up their security."

"If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn't attack Sweden, for example. It is known that those who hate freedom do not have dignified souls, like those of the 19 blessed ones," he said, referring to the 19 hijackers.

"We fought you because we are free ... and want to regain freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security we undermine yours."

There. Straight from the horse's mouth, we have now a clear, unequivocal statement that al-Qaeda is attacking us not because we are free but because our government is Zionist. Let us never again hear anyone talk about the U.S. being attacked because "our enemies hate freedom".
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And let my city’s airport get rid of the ridiculous post-9/11 add-on “Liberty” and revert to “Newark International Airport”, a good enuf name that is accurate and not the slightest pretentious.
+
Arabs do NOT “hate freedom”, and no sane person can believe they do. Indeed, Bush’s entire “nation-building” project going on in Iraq, his entire premise that the Iraqi people would rejoice in the streets and put up no resistance to our invasion, was based on the notion that they want freedom!
+
The United States was NEVER attacked “because it is free”. It was attacked for one reason and one reason only: that the United States is an active and enthusiastic accomplice in the endless crimes of Israel. And everyone knows it. Even every hack politician who chattered mindless nonsense about “freedom” knew as he uttered such dishonest claptrap that he was just trying to distract Americans from the fact, obvious to everyone in the world, including Americans, that we are being killed for Israel. Every U.S. soldier blown up or gunned down in Iraq, every civilian beheaded, is dying for Israel. And we all know it.
+
The tone of Mr. bin Laden’s message seems, from the report, much calmer and more reasoned than others we have heard. I’m not persuaded bin Laden is still alive — he had severe kidney problems three years ago, and dialysis is not readily available in mountain caves — and his message could have been issued at any time since Bush’s rants about “freedom” started to pour out of his lying lips in September 2001. But in any event we now have it from bin Laden himself: the attacks had nothing to do with freedom. And his army of individuals do not hate freedom but want it: freedom from Zionism and the murders and enslavement of Arabs committed in its name, with active U.S. connivance.
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Will either Kerry, who is ancestrally part-Jewish, or Bush, who seems to think that Christianity is a type of Judaism, and that Judaism = Zionism (which it most assuredly does not) make any fundamental change in our Middle East policy? Only drastic, basic change in U.S. policy, renouncing Zionism, will end the endless war the neo-cons have started. But we hear nothing about changing the policy that got us into this mess, do we? Military strength is supposed to save us from our own folly. It won’t tho, because it can’t.
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There is only one way to end the “permanent war” that the neo-cons have set us upon, against a billion Moslems: renounce Zionism as the lunatic evil it is and give Palestinians the rights we demand for ourselves
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Decent Jews can continue to live in Palestine, as Jewish Palestinians, just as they live in the United States as Jewish Americans. Zionism does not improve their lives but endangers both their lives and, if you believe in such things, their immortal souls, now imperiled by crimes against their neighbors, crimes forbidden by the Torah. There is only one road to peace: the path of justice, something Judaism is supposed to care about.
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There does not need to be a permanent war between the U.S. and Islam. Disown Zionism. Destroy it. Merge “Israel” back into a United Palestine under a secular government that takes no sides in religious matters and accords everyone freedom of conscience. Then, just as he has attended Christmas and Easter services with Christian Palestinians, President Arafat (should he survive his current health crisis) will attend Rosh Hashana services with Jewish Palestinians. And Jews will have much less to atone for on Yom Kippur.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:23 PM

 
Hiding the Numbers. Yesterday afternoon, the top news story on Netscape.com was a study published by the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet that 100,000 more Iraqis had died since the U.S. invasion began than would ordinarily be expected from prior death rates, especially as victims of bombing campaigns. Before noon today, that story was not only not the TOP story; it had also disappeared from the entire list of stories offered by Netscape.com.
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It wasn't on AOL, Netscape's parent. Not on CNN.com. Not on Yahoo. The story had DISAPPEARED. Why is that?
+
Oh, I did find a one-sentence paragraph about it in a story about bad news complicating Bush's campaign, but one sentence of many, given no importance. And it was 14th on the SECOND screen of international stories at NYTimes.com.
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It was not the subject of an editorial nor op-ed column in the Times condemning the carnage. It was not the subject of an editorial nor column in the New York Post pooh-poohing the methodology and pretending that the numbers are wildly exaggerated or, in the alternative, proudly declaiming that those damned Iraqis 'had it coming'. Why is there no discussion of these appalling numbers?
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No governmental numbers have been forthcoming, nor are they likely to, as I have long understood. Certainly Saddam's government didn't want his people to know how many of them had died because of his adventurism. Certainly the U.S. hand-picked successor government doesn't want people to know how many Iraqis have been killed by the people who put them in office. Certainly the U.S. Government and the rightwing politicians and media who support the endless murder of Iraqis don't want Americans to understand that this has been a horrendous crime against humanity of a size they did not understand and cannot justify especially now that we know there were never Weapons of Mass Destruction ready to be launched at our homeland.
+
But why are liberals silent? I'm genuinely puzzled.
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We have been absolutely without numbers as to how many Iraqis have died because of a 13-year campaign of violence and economic strangulation ("sanctions") conducted by the U.S. Government. Only the vaguest of numbers, unconfirmed and unconfirmable, have issued, such as the UN speculation that a quarter million (!) Iraqis, mostly children and some elderly, may have died as the result of sanctions. Madeleine Albright, the evil witch who served as Bill Clinton's incompetent Secretary of State, was asked if she thought the campaign to 'contain' Iraq was worth that kind of death toll, and she said yes, she did think so! And now we have public-health investigators concluding that the second Gulf War may have killed 100,000 more Iraqis, but the media, politicians of both parties, and public DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT.
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Have we no conscience?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:33 PM

 
Playing Footsie with the Butchers of Beijing. Our "conservative" President has "chang[ed] a longstanding policy in managing the diplomatically nuanced rivalry" between Communist China and Taiwan. Three times, Colin Powell, Bush's Secretary of State, said that the United States (that is, George W. Bush) favors "reunification" of Taiwan and mainland China!

Mr. Powell, speaking in two television interviews on Monday during a brief visit to Beijing, emphasized that Taiwan was not a sovereign nation and that the United States favored its "peaceful reunification" with China.

And then:

In a separate interview, with CNN, Mr. Powell also changed the diplomatic code used to discuss the outcome of any talks between the rival governments. "We want both sides not to take unilateral action that would prejudice an eventual outcome, a reunification that all parties are seeking," he said. * * *

In the past, American officials had not endorsed China's contention that the goal should be reunification, which China insists it will achieve "at any price," including war.

No, Mr. Powell, not "all parties" are seeking "reunification" if that means that democratic and capitalist Taiwan is merged into Communist and command-economy China. Indeed, there are some Taiwanese (some polls suggest quite a few, as a matter of fact) who would like Taiwan to become a State of our Union. It would make a splendid addition to the Nation.
+
ABC News reported today, however:

Powell clarified his remarks in a TV interview Wednesday with the U.S. television channel CNBC. He said the goal "really is to have a peaceful resolution of the problem" between Taiwan and China[.]

What "resolution" does Mr. Powell, and his President, foresee if Taiwan is not sovereign and must make no moves to establish independence? Is the Bush Administration "flip-flopping" on Taiwan? Or is it just mealy-mouthing its way out of the embarrassment of making plain that it is an enemy of Taiwan independence?
+
Last Friday I warned Taiwan statehood advocates who said they felt "much more comfortable" with Bush than Kerry, that Bush would sell Taiwan out in a minute to preserve the huge (but catastrophically unprofitable) trade with Communist China. David Chou, head of the Taiwan statehood movement, sent our email group today the Joseph Kahn article cited first above. It's gratifying to see my warning so quickly borne out.
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What is not gratifying is the stance of the gutless and unprincipled Bush Administration in cozying up to the Butchers of Beijing by selling out the people of Taiwan and giving Communist China implicit permission to move to annex Taiwan "peacefully", without saying what the Bush Administration would do if China decided that peaceful reunification would take too long. Anyone who thinks Bush would do a thing to stop an invasion of Taiwan by the Butchers of Beijing is a fool.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:47 PM

 
Last Chance for the Democrats. I tried again today to wake the Democrats to the one issue they can win a landslide with, but I don't know if it will do any good. It may very well be that the Democrats really don't want to win this election because they have no good way out of the Iraq debacle and would prefer that the Republicans twist in the wind of that violent desert.
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Still, just on the CHANCE that some part of them does want to win, even if that means they will inherit the mess Bush has made in Iraq, I sent the following messages to Senator Edwards and my own Senator, Jon Corzine. (The latter message, shown below, incorporates the former.) I have slightly altered the advice given two days ago in this blog, but the differences are consequential, and the issue supremely important, so I stress it again today.)
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>>FYI, I sent today the following message to Senator Edwards, which bears on your role in trying to win a Democratic majority in Congress:
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"It's Personal Debt and Bankruptcy, Stupid." In 1992, Bill Clinton won the White House with a simple slogan that everyone in his camp kept ever in mind: "It's the economy, stupid." While a little insulting to the people working for him, that slogan made the point that the single issue most likely to win the White House for the Democrats was the economy.
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Today, we need everyone in this country to think of an equally simple, powerful sentence as we enter the last days before the election: "It's personal debt and bankruptcy, stupid."
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Are you trying to lose this election? It looks that way. Even if the Republicans and Democrats were even on every other issue, there is one issue uppermost in the lives of 120 million Americans that Democrats can use to win by a landslide, but I haven't heard it mentioned even once with any prominence in MONTHS. The people of this country are DROWNING IN DEBT. It has become a palpable, ever-present, horrible OPPRESSION on the lives of perhaps 40 million families and tens of millions of single people who are harassed by creditors and cannot see themselves EVER getting out of debt. The Republicans want to make bankruptcy almost impossible for ordinary people, to TRAP THEM IN DEBT. The very idea that they could never declare bankruptcy TERRIFIES people trapped in debt, yet you won't use this MOST POWERFUL OF ISSUES to win this election. Why not? Democrats could win not just the White House but also BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS by landing HARD on DEBT! Not the national debt, tho that is a related issue, but PERSONAL debt.
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The people who run this country are, alas, all rich. Even you, who pride yourself for having escaped poverty, are now RICH. Have you forgotten what it was to be poor? This election is being run as tho you and Senator Kerry have NO IDEA of what worries Americans most.
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There is ONE issue that trumps all others, including the fear-mongering of the Bush Administration: DEBT, with its Siamese twin, USURY, and its escape clause, BANKRUPTCY — which the Republicans want to TAKE AWAY from the poor and hard-pressed middle class.
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People in this country are forced to pay 19%, 21%, even 26.90%, interest for the PRIVILEGE of having a credit card or even a charge card for Sears or the Home Depot — downscale stores with upscale interest rates on their charge cards. They are hit with LATE FEES and OVERLIMIT FEES and DEFAULT RATES if they miss a payment. An introductory rate of 9.7% or even 0% can turn into a default rate of 28.740%!
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Perhaps you have no idea of the kinds of interest and fee upon fee upon fee that ordinary Americans are charged — which fees raise the already-usurious interest rates they pay to EXTRAORDINARILY USURIOUS RATES. You pay your credit-card bills on time every month so don't incur any such interest charges or fees. So perhaps you know, intellectually, about these rates but don't FEEL it the way over a hundred million Americans FEEL it.
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Republicans LOVE the fact that the poor and middle class are paying over BILLIONS of dollars in interest and fees to the rich who own the credit companies that are victimizing Americans.
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But why are Democrats almost entirely SILENT on personal DEBT, the ONE issue that could win both the White House AND CONGRESS for them?
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The South is the poorest part of this country, and probably the most oppressed by DEBT, most in need of the continuing availability of BANKRUPTCY. But the Democratic Party seems to have written off the South as permanently Republican! Why? Poverty trumps worry about gay marriage or abortion or stem-cell research or any of the other "values" issues, and Democrats can make poor Southern whites understand that the Republicans are playing them for fools, using shiny, flashing "values" issues to distract them from the fact that Republicans want to TRAP THEM IN DEBT and make them into veritable DEBT SLAVES and WAGE SLAVES so afraid of losing their job -- because they are so deep in DEBT that they will then lose their HOUSE and have to live in their car, if they even HAVE a car -- that they will accept wage cuts and reduced benefits, even "part-time" status that renders them INELIGIBLE for fringe benefits!
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If you can't make poor Southern whites see that the Republicans want to take bankruptcy away from the poor and crush the middle class, then you unfit to be Vice President of the United States.
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It is stupid, stupid, STUPID not to land hard on personal debt and the Republicans' clearly stated intention to make it almost impossible for ordinary Americans to escape oppressive debt (while permitting corporations to declare bankruptcy easily, as to void labor contracts). In these last few days before the election, the Democrats should be reminding Americans 60 TIMES A DAY of the 19%, 21%, 28.740% interest rates they are charged; of LATE FEES and OVERLIMIT FEES and ATM FEES; of BILL COLLECTORS and DUNNING LETTERS and PHONE CALLS at home and AT WORK -harassing- them over debt. Of interest being charged ON late fees and overlimit fees! Of thousands of dollars of debt piling up further hundreds and hundreds of dollars of debt due to the malicious behavior of the credit-card companies and banks that the Richpublicans own. REMIND THEM OF THE OPPRESSION OF DEBT, AND THEY WILL VOTE DEMOCRATIC. STAY SILENT ON DEBT, AND LOSE THE ELECTION. It's that simple, because, truly, "It's debt and bankruptcy, stupid."
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Sincerely, L. Craig Schoonmaker (http://antipost.blogspot.com), Chairman, Expansionist Party of the United States, Newark, NJ (website at http://members.aol.com/XPUS)<<

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:59 PM

 
"Pilot Error" Your Ass! The National Transportation Safety Board's investigator of the crash in Queens of flight 587 that killed 265 people has made the astonishing and criminally outrageous assertion that "pilot error" was responsible! You see, the co-pilot's actions in trying to steer out of turbulence caused by a plane that took off just ahead of flight 587 were "unnecessary and aggressive" and caused the plane's tail to fall off!
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Huh? The plane's TAIL FELL OFF and that is somehow the co-pilot's fault? No! Absolutely not.
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I don't care how "aggressively" he steered. A plane's tail is not supposed to FALL OFF!
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What next? A driver who turns his steering wheel "aggressively" to avoid a deer in the road causes his front wheels to fall off? A player who pushes his joystick "aggressively" in a video game causes his PlayStation to explode? A computer user who uses his mouse "aggressively" causes his hard drive to crash, destroying all his data? NO-O-O-O-O!!!!
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No "pilot error" can make a properly designed and constructed plane's TAIL FALL OFF! The investigator's charge is inexcusably insane. If the NTSB follows thru and announces that grotesque assertion as its official finding, every member who voted for such a finding should be lined up in front of a firing squad — and have to hope the guns don't shoot because the riflemen squeeze the triggers "aggressively". At the very least, the survivors of the co-pilot should sue for defamation because the finding is clearly contrary to fact.
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Pilots make many errors, I'm sure. Making the TAIL OF THEIR PLANE FALL OFF is not one of them.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:42 PM

 
It's Personal Debt and Usury, Stupid. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the White House with a simple slogan that everyone in his camp kept ever in mind: "It's the economy, stupid."
+
While very insulting to the people working for him, that slogan made the point that the single issue most likely to win the White House for the Democrats was the economy.
+
Today, we need everyone in this country to think of an equally simple, powerful sentence as we enter the last days before the election: "It's personal debt and usury, stupid."
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The people who run this country are, alas, all rich. Even John Edwards, who prides himself for having escaped poverty, is RICH. Has he forgotten what it was to be poor?
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Kerry was never poor. Nor was Dubya. This race is THE BATTLE OF THE BRAHMINS. Dubya likes to present himself as an ordinary guy, a working-class stiff, so AFFECTS rolled-up sleeves on EXPENSIVE shirts (the one I saw him in today on TV was BEAUTIFUL, and probably cost him $100 or $200), but he rolled up the sleeves, as his handlers told him to do, to appear working-class. Yeah, right. Wear a $200 shirt and roll up the sleeves. Good move, Georgie Boy.
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The politics of the United States have been fundamentally corrupted by money. Almost no one can run for public office now who is not rich, in part because no one but the rich can afford to take off a YEAR from their job to run for office. So we get, as candidates, rich people who haven't the vaguest idea what life is like for the rest of us. They need to ask their staff or hire professional advisory services to find out what most concerns ordinary people. Oddly, despite all the MILLIONS or TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars that the Democrats MUST have spent on "focus groups" and market research, they seem not to have even the vaguest of ideas as to what worries most Americans most.
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I tried to tell them, by email to the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry campaign, but they have paid NO attention to me. What do I know? I'm just a GENIUS (at least in statistical terms) who lives in THE REAL WORLD, unlike the class that the rich and SUPER-RICH that both present candidates for President come from. What would I know about what ordinary Americans feel? Surely the super-rich, men born with a silver spoon in their mouth, into families of wealth and political influence, know better than a working man what voters want. Of course they do. The rich are absolutely tuned in to what ordinary people care about. Of course they are.
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There is one issue, and one issue ONLY, that can trump all others, including the fear-mongering of the Bush Administration: DEBT, with its Siamese twin, USURY, and its escape clause, BANKRUPTCY — which the Republicans want to TAKE AWAY from the poor and hard-pressed middle class.
+
Watch cable television, if not even over-air television, for a single nite, any nite you choose, and you will see commercial after commercial for services that promise to free viewers from DEBT. The candidates for high office don't see such things of course, because they are too busy to watch the television that ordinary people watch, and even if they did see these spots -- five and ten a nite -- for programs to wipe out debt, they WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY'RE SEEING.
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They have no idea that ordinary people in this country are required to pay 19% or 21% interest for the PRIVILEGE of having a charge card for Sears or the Home Depot — downscale stores with upscale interest rates on their charge cards. Nor do these RICH candidates know that ordinary people are hit with LATE FEES and OVERLIMIT FEES and DEFAULT RATES if they miss a payment. Our RICH candidates have no idea of the kinds of interest and fee upon fee upon fee that ordinary Americans are charged — which fees raise the already-usurious interest rates they pay to EXTRAORDINARILY USURIOUS RATES. How would they know about such things? They pay their credit-card bills on time every month so don't incur any such interest charges or fees.
+
Do they even care about the interest rates and fees ordinary Americans are charged?
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Plainly, Republicans LOVE the fact that the poor and middle class are paying over BILLIONS of dollars in interest and fees to the rich who own the credit-card companies that their vict ... customers use, not so much because they want to but because they have to.
+
But why are Democrats almost entirely SILENT on personal DEBT, the ONE issue that could win both the White House AND CONGRESS for them?
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I must seriously wonder if Democrats at the highest level have been told to write off the poor and middle-class of the South to implement some new Grand Strategy, in order to feel better about what is, at present, almost certain to be a vicious electoral beating by Republicans. They have let the super-rich of the Republican Party (RICHpublicans) establish both the agenda and the terms of the national debate, and the Democrats keep having to scramble to counter the preposterous and ugly charges Republicans make
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I just recently got out of deep personal debt, thanks, alas, to money I came into when my late mother's house was sold, and thought I had forcefully ended my own connection with an abusive credit-card issuer, Citibank, when I sent off a big check and told them to close my MasterCard account, after having ended a relationship of some 20 years a few months earlier with its parent bank, because Citibank has become inexcusably exploitative. But before my letter — enclosing my cut-up credit card — could be acted upon, some automatic recurring charges were entered, so I have one last payment before I am free of Citibank forever. Alas, the Home Depot has stupidly hired Citicards to run its credit-card program. So now I must cut off my Home Depot credit-card relationship. I might also close out my relationship with the Home Depot, except that Lowe's has not yet built a store near me. I have heard that Lowe's is planning to open a store within a few miles of my house, and I may very well transfer my slight loyalties to Lowe's from the Home Depot thereafter.
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The Home Depot should NOT allow Citicards to run its credit-card operation. Citicards is an abusive and offensive outfit that will drive away customers. I paid off my balance at the Vauxhall store last nite, and will now CUT UP AND RETURN my Home Depot credit card to Home Depot management, because I DESPISE Citicards, but other people may have more difficulty closing out their Home Depot credit-card account and end up HATING Home Depot. Citicards telephoned me at home THREE TIMES over $20 overdue! AND sent me a LETTER by U.S. Postal Service. Over $20! I' m not exactly rich, but I do presently have FAR more money than time with which to pay bills, and have recently arranged to have most of my bills autodebited from my bank account each month, but not my Home Depot bill, because it varies in amount, whereas most of the bills I have arranged to pay automatically are the same amount each month.
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The Home Depot and every other retailer that offers their own credit card but charges customers outrageously high interest and/or hassles customers over TRIVIAL amounts are STUPID, and deserve to LOSE the customers they ABUSE. Alas, a great many American retailers today are stupid, and they turn over their reputation to credit companies that are recklessly and infuriatingly abusive, as turns many customers into enemies of the very companies they once had good thoughts about. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
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So too are the Democrats stupid, stupid, STUPID in not landing hard on personal debt and the Republicans' clearly stated intention to make it almost impossible for ordinary Americans to escape oppressive debt (while permitting corporations to declare bankruptcy easily, as to void labor contracts). In these last few days before the election, the Democrats should be reminding Americans of the 19%, 21%, 28.740% interest rates they are charged; of late fees and overlimit fees and ATM fees; of bill collectors and dunning letters and phone calls at home and at work harassing them over debt. Of interest being charged ON late fees and overlimit fees! Of thousands of dollars of debt piling up further hundreds and hundreds of dollars of debt from the punitive and malicious behavior of the credit-card companies and banks that the Richpublicans own. Remind them of the oppression of debt, and they will vote Democratic. Stay silent on debt, and lose the election. It's that simple, because it really is debt and usury, stupid.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:53 AM

 
Election Divisions. The loose interorganizational alliance of statehood-minded people to which my organization (the Expansionist Party of the United States) belongs is split on presidential preference. The head of the Taiwanese statehood group said:

Please note that all the Formosa Statehood Movement groups are urging their members to help re-elect George Bush. With Bush in the White House, we feel much more comfortable.

I replied with the following two-paragraph email to the United States International email group. The itemization in brackets is explained below this block quote:

I don't understand anyone supporting George Bush. His 4 years have been a catastrophe. [1] He permitted the 9/11 attacks, [2] he launched a war [a] of aggression against Iraq [b] that has become a nitemare, [3] he took the greatest budgetary surplus in the history of the world and turned it into a deficit in nine months, [4] he is running the world's largest deficits that will likely double the national debt if he is re-elected, [5] he is promoting politics of division and hatred of minorities, [6] he is keeping us from enacting any universal healthcare measure, [7] he has presided over a huge growth in the disparities in wealth between rich and poor, [8] he is impoverishing the middle class and [9] keeps increasing the size and invasiveness of the federal government (intruding wholesale into education, in which the feds have no right at all to act), all the while talking about smaller government!

Taiwanese have no reason to feel comfortable with George Bush, who is running a $124 BILLION deficit with mainland (Communist) China EVERY YEAR, and who would sell out Taiwan in two seconds to maintain that trade, which enables his rich friends to push U.S. wages down and force Americans to accept fewer and less generous fringe benefits. [10] He is in bed with the Butchers of Beijing, and wouldn't lift one little finger to stop an invasion of Taiwan.

I thought, after I'd sent that email, to count how many causes for opposing Bush I had articulated in those two paragraphs, and it turns out to be 10, just the number I've wanted for a feature here "10 Reasons the Democrats Should Trounce the Republicans This Election". But then I was reminded by the news item yesterday about a sergeant being sentenced to prison for 8 years for his role in the Abu Ghraib scandal, that there are more than 10.
+
So I will focus this weekend on drafting short presentations on each of the 10, 11, or however many Reasons I want to put on this blog from now till the election. But the list above is a good start.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:43 PM

 
Kerry Isn't FDR but JFK. It is grotesque that Eric Fettman, in trying to discredit John Kerry, would praise Franklin Roosevelt, especially with this quote: "conferences are out of the window. You never get anywhere with a conference." I seem to remember a conference FDR did participate in, at Yalta, USSR, which issued a declaration that included this exalted language on one of its aims: "assisting the peoples liberated from the domination of Nazi Germany and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of Europe to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems." One of the issuers of that declaration then went on to impose Communism on the whole of East Europe, making "Axis satellite states" into Soviet satellites instead!
+
FDR was the supreme Communist sympathizer who also, bizarrely, admired British imperialism while dismantling our own empire, and thus laying the basis for Castro's dictatorship in Cuba and Marcos's dictatorship in the Philippines. In foreign poilicy he was on the wrong side of almost everything, and provides no authority for Fettman's stupid premise.
+
J.F. Kerry met the first JFK, as did Clinton, who made an enormous impression upon both. Kennedy was anti-Communist, and an adamant and progressive internationalist who implemented a proposal from Hubert Humphrey, another "liberal", to establish a Peace Corps. The first JFK also embarked upon an Alliance for Progress in Latin America, which subsequent presidents stuck to, altho they abandoned the name. It is because of that decades-long U.S. pressure and internationalist engagement that almost all of Latin America is today democratic.
+
The first JFK was very much a "Massachusetts liberal" — and proud of it. We were never in my lifetime (and I'm almost 60) as happy as a Nation, or as proud, as when the first JFK was President. And we went nuts when he was assassinated.
+
Would a latter-day JFK bring us a second "Camelot"? The second Bush sure hasn't.
+
(Responsive to "Flunking the FDR Test", by Eric Fettman, New York Post, October 21, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:49 PM

 
Flu Info and Nonsense. In a column published today by the New York Post, a doctor (Marc K. Siegel) offers this interesting bit of information:

The killer is often not the flu itself, but the diseases that accompany it, such as pneumonia. And pneumonia can be prevented by the pneumonia vaccine, which is in ample supply this year, or treated with antibiotics. Without the flu shot, many doctors are remembering to offer the pneumonia shot to their high-risk patients, which may well be more life saving.

Sounds like good advice.
+
Alas, he screws up his entire column with this bit of preposterous overstatement in his first paragraph:

THIS year's first flu-related death came not from the disease, but from an elderly woman who fell while waiting for the vaccine. Throughout history, panic has killed far more than the disease that causes it.

I don't know if "the disease that causes it" refers only to the flu or to any disease that has caused a panic, but in either case the statement is patently false. Consider this passage from the introduction to a PBS webpage:

no flu ever struck as fast, as hard, and with such lethal power as the 1918, or "Spanish Flu," which rivals the Black Death as the deadliest epidemic in history. To a world already ravaged by war, the 1918 pandemic was crippling; some 30 to 40 million people died worldwide, with the highest death rate occuring in young men and women. In the United States, 675,000 people died, including over 40,000 G.I.s -- 40 percent of all those who perished in World War I.

There is no way that panic caused more than 30 or 40 million deaths in 1918. And if the reference is to any disease, it is even more nonsensical, inasmuch as the Black Death killed a third of the population of Europe in the 14th Century.
+
Dr. Siegel's careless statement thus approaches FDR's preposterous assertion that "We have nothing to fear but fear itself"! The United States was in the worst Depression of its entire history, with tens of millions of people unemployed and at the edge of starvation, and the planet was moving toward World War II, the greatest military calamity of all time, but we had "nothing to fear but fear itself"? I think not.
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(Responsive to "Flu Fears and Facts" by Marc K. Siegel, New York Post, October 20, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:46 PM

 
Radio Interview Went Well (Enuf). NewsRadio 700WLW in Cincinnati, Ohio did indeed call me Monday nite shortly after 10:30pm, and its streaming audio on the Internet empowered some of my colleagues elsewhere in the U.S. and at least Britain to listen.
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The host, Scott Sloan, is very good at what he does -- if exhaustingly energetic -- and he (or someone on his staff) had done his homework, so presented for me to respond to, some of my stances from the Schoonmaker 2000 webpage -- tho they apparently did not pick up on the update, to the 2004 campaign, Schoonmaker 2004.
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Scott (or should I call him "Mr. Sloan", since we don't really know each other? naa -- this is the United States, and we're quite casual about these things) asked a full menu of questions specific to one of my many (c. 153) webpages. I had little wiggle-room to talk about other concerns, but I did manage to get two key URLs out into the void, OntarioUSA.org and UnitedNorthAmerica.org. I also made plain that anyone can find the "Expansionist Party of the United States" easily thru any search engine.
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I did not get to mention either www.usataiwan.org (a site that promotes "Commonwealth" status for Taiwan) or www.TOP-Party.tk (a Philippine-statehood site. (FYI, "tk" is the Internet abbreviation for Tokelau, a New Zealand territory in the South Pacific.)
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Nor (I am ashamed to admit) have I yet updated the United States International website to show the USA-Taiwan Commonwealth Foundation or a Taiwan statehood organization (whose website has apparently been sabotaged by the government of Taiwan and/or mainland (Communist) China, as a member of USI, or even the Philippine statehood site, which has changed URLs of late. I've been very busy, but that is pretty near inexcusable. Frankly, I need help in managing these various interrelated websites.
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In any case, I closed out last nite's radio interview by trying to make the point that perhaps the single most serious issue facing Americans today is PERSONAL DEBT. I also tried to alert listeners to the fact that I discuss that issue, at (eloquent) length, at the Schoonmaker 2004 presidential-election website.
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Till next time, here's my tribute to my British colleague Jeremy Pender, who found the streaming-audio site for us and encouraged his British contacts to listen: Ta ta!, cheerio, and all that rot!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:14 AM

 
Radio Interview Tonite. Anyone who wants to hear what I sound like can try listening tonite to NewsRadio 700WLW in Cincinnati, Ohio or go to their streaming audio site on the Internet at http://www.700wlw.com/streaming.html shortly after 10:30pm EDT (3:30am Greenwich time). I will be interviewed by Scott Sloan on that Clear Channel station. He says it can be heard in 38 states and at least parts of Canada over-air. The streaming-audio website provides an alternative in case you can't receive WLW on the radio.
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There is, however, a note at the top of that site, that "Due to our moving to a new building, the streaming audio may experience problems, but will be back to normal as soon as possible." I hope it's working tonite, because we have people in various parts of the world who might want to listen. (The streaming-audio website speaks, at the bottom of the opening screen, to some 'common issues' that can cause problems in hearing that audio, such as virus-protection and firewall programs. So you might want to check in advance of the interview whether any of that applies to you.) The stream also goes silent when local commercials air, since the station's license does not permit putting ads online.
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This is one of a series of interviews with third parties on their view of the November election. I'll be speaking for the Expansionist Party of the United States to raise our concerns and urge everyone to vote to oust Republicans not just from the White House but from both houses of Congress as well. I will also try to mention how the race would differ if our program were well along, such that Canada, Britain, and Puerto Rico/USVI were voting. I will also try to mention the URLs of allied organizations, such as www.OntarioUSA.org and www.UnitedNorthAmerica.org. If there are points you adamantly believe I should stress, let me know before 10pm Newark time tonite: mailto:XPUS@aol.com

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:40 PM

 
Item 1 (of 2, including foto): Hypocrisy on Cheney's Daughter. The New York Post and both Dick and Lynne Cheney have reacted with make-believe indignation to the fact that both John Kerry and John Edwards have mentioned that their daughter is a lesbian. Cheney himself addressed that issue very publicly in standing AGAINST his President's and his party platform's insistence that same-sex marriage should be barred by a constitutional amendment. That daughter, Mary, actually "works for the campaign but keeps a low profile". In short, she is an anti-gay and self-despising anti-lesbian bitch who deserves no respect from anyone.
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Still, the Post on October 15th called mentioning Ms. Mary's orientation "loathsome"!

As if [the fact that Cheney raised the issue of his daughter's orientation] gives Kerry-Edwards the right to drag an innocent bystander's name into the muck. * * *

Clearly, he has no respect for Mary Cheney; has he none as well for the dignity of the office he seeks?

The two candidates — and Elizabeth Edwards — owe Dick and Lynne Cheney a public apology.

Mary Cheney, too.

The Post just doesn't "get it": there is nothing WRONG with lesbianism, nor homosexuality, so mentioning it is not "dragging" anyone "into the muck". Muck! Astounding. Lesbianism is "muck"! And this is supposed to be a sympathetic reaction?
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The furor from the 'Right' about this "loathsome" behavior of the Democrats is grotesque. The implication is that Republicans are tolerant and accepting of lesbians but Democrats are anti-lesbian bigots, when the exact opposite is the case. Democrats are relatively pro-gay and pro-lesbian, which is the very reason the Republicans have raised the ridiculous proposal to amend the Constitution to forbid states from sanctioning same-sex marriage. They can't have it both ways, bashing 'faggots' and 'dykes' with a campaign pledge to "defend marriage" against 'deviants', AND pose as champions of sexual tolerance!
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Nor is Ms. Cheney "an innocent bystander". She has taken a public stand in favor of the re-election of George Bush, an antihomosexual and anti-lesbian bigot. That makes her a legitimate subject of public discussion.
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Would it be "loathsome" and "despicable" for the Kerry and Edwards campaign to say that Bush's daughters are heterosexual? Of course not. The Post's bigotry is showing.
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Moreover, it is entirely appropriate to point out that the champions of Bible Belt bigotry have themselves lesbian or gay relatives (Candace Gingrich), even children (Mary Cheney) who, 'despite' the best upbringing, insisted on being 'deviants'. What does that say about their upbringing, if one thinks that homosexuality or lesbianism is a "choice", "against God"? Character matters, and if a parent "raised his kids wrong", as Bible-thumpers might see things, that is a legitimate issue in a campaign about "values", now isn't it?
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And if there is a split in the Republican ticket on a major issue, it is the right of the electorate to know that. Because Vice Presidents do sometimes become President mid-term (e.g., Truman, Johnson, Ford in living memory — and Gore would have too, had the Republicans succeeded in ousting Clinton).
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Altho Dick Cheney's heart problems might lead people to think him more likely to die in office than Bush, Bush is Public Enemy No. 1 for a billion Moslems, so might very well be assassinated before his term would end. Then Cheney, with his "soft", "permissive" attitude toward "deviancy", would become President, and he would stop pushing for a constitutional amendment to "defend marriage", now wouldn't he? That is a legitimate issue for social conservatives to bear in mind when they vote in November.
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The Post also reveals its simpleminded ignorance in calling Mary Cheney "gay". "Gay" is not a catchall for "nonheterosexual". It may be a little cumbersome to speak of "gay and lesbian", but it is no more proper to call lesbians "gay" than it would be to call blacks "Oriental" just because they are both "nonwhite". The differences between people cannot be swept aside by linguistic legerdemain. The world is complicated, and it is important to recognize that people are what they are, not just what they are not. This is a common error that must be corrected by all media.
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I wrote the following letter October 6th to The New York Times over this same issue. Inasmuch as it has not yet been published by the Times, I assume it won't be published there, so publish it here:

The Times made a serious error in speaking of "Mr. Cheney, who has a gay daughter". No, Mr. Cheney has a lesbian daughter. "Lesbian" is a distinct word because lesbians are not "gay", which term is specific to men. I know there is willful confusion of these two terms by the dysfunctional "lesbigay" movement, but you must realize that that movement is dominated by people with identity problems who have never outgrown the fact that they were raised to be heterosexual, and have never thought about what it is to be gay nor, more to the point, what it is not.
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Seeking allies and larger numbers for demonstrations and political influence, the movement has not just reached out to lesbians but actually subordinated gay men to lesbian women. Could any more powerful proof be adduced of the deformed state of the lesbigay movement than that the Gay MEN’S Health Crisis has a female executive director – and the default identification for people requesting information at the top of the Gay MEN’S Health Crisis website is "I am a woman"?
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Thirty-four years ago I put forward the term "Gay Pride" for events surrounding the then-upcoming first march commemorating the Stonewall Riots. Through all that time I have seen gay men fail to grow but constantly falter and fall backward, in large part because they refuse to accept that they are alone in the world, and every attempt to increase their numbers by identifying with people unlike them is destructive to their identity, undercutting their personality and everything they hope to achieve.
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It is supremely important that gay men reject identification with women, be they heterosexual or lesbian. Gender confusion is one of the most painful and difficult problems gay men face in a predominantly heterosexual society. It manifests itself most tragically in the notion that people can be "transgendered", a "woman trapped in a man’s body", which of course is certifiable lunacy.
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Gay manhood starts with refusing to identify with lesbians, and the Times does gay men grave disservice in calling lesbians "gay". If lesbians were covered by "gay", they wouldn’t need their own word, would they?

Item 2: Jewisher (and More Militarist) Than Thou. The Associated Press reported this week:

George Bush appealed to Florida's large Jewish population by signing a bill requiring the State Department to document attacks on Jews around the world. The department had opposed the measure, calling it unnecessary.

* * *

"Senator Kerry apparently decided supporting the troops even while they were in harm's way was not as important as shoring up his own political position,'' Bush said.

To a chorus of anti-Kerry boos, Bush accused his rival of playing politics with war: "At a time of great threat to our country, at a time of great challenge to the world, the commander in chief must stand on principle, not the shifting sands of political convenience.''

What is he saying here? (a) He is the real Jew, and his Government is dedicated to the Jews above all others on Earth. Mind you, Kerry's ancestors were REAL Jews. Can Bush really expect Jews to prefer a "goy" to a member of their own tribe?
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And what, exactly, is George Bush's country, that he thinks that its government should track attacks upon Jews worldwide? Does he demand that attacks on Christians worldwide be tracked? If not, why not? Are Christians unimportant to Bush?
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His war in Iraq has brought attacks upon churches in Iraq, and produced the characterization of Christians as "crusaders" and enemies of Islam everywhere! But that's apparently not important to him.
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(b) Bush put our kids "in harm's way"! Kerry doesn't want them "in harm's way". For whom , then, should Americans worried about our kids being "in harm's way" vote? For the guy who PUT them in harm's way or the guy who wants to take them OUT of harm's way? The choice really is that simple.
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My friend Gaetano here in Newark sent me, today, the following wonderful picture that he got from his Republican cousin, which the cousin thought to be a pro-Bush image for showing him among the people he supports. But it is a mosaic made from the fotos of DEAD SOLDIERS. Gaetano sent it with the caption "Nobody died when Clinton lied", and appended this note:

This photo is a composite of American soldiers who have died in Iraq over the last year.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Or in this case, hundreds of lives. And growing daily.

Please consider forwarding this note to eligible voters.

And let's remember in November.

Amen. Let me, however, add that the fotos in this picture are woefully inadequate to convey the horror Bush has unleashed thru his lies. At least 20 TIMES as many Iraqis would have to be pictured WITH these Americans to show that. There is no personal computer able to show so large a picture. You have to imagine it.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:32 PM

 
Item 1 (of 2): Mutiny in Iraq. AOL today hilited a report by the Associated Press that up to 19 members of an army reserve supply unit stationed in Iraq are under confinement and being investigated for possible "disciplinary measures" (court-martial? execution?) for refusal to follow orders to take trucks in bad repair, that had only "homemade" armor, on a supply mission up one of the most dangerous roads in Iraq. One of the female members of the mutinous platoon called her mother in Dothan, Alabama to say:

''This is a real, real, big emergency,'' McClenny said in her message. ''I need you to contact someone. I mean, raise pure hell.''* * *

Staff Sgt. Christopher Stokes, a 37-year-old chemical engineer from Charlotte, N.C., went to Iraq with the 343rd but had to come home because of an injury. He said reservists were given inferior equipment and tensions in the company had been building since they were deployed in February.

''It wasn't really safe,'' he said. ''The vehicles are not all that up to par anyway. The armor that they have is homemade. It's not really armor. It's like little steel rails.'' * * *

The platoon has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina[.]

The report says the story first broke in The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss. (The Clarion-Ledger has a wonderful feature at its website, online postcards that one can send to friends to show them Jackson-area sights. I discovered this several months ago and think it's something our local (Newark) newspaper, The Star-Ledger, should emulate.)
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The Bush Administration is in deep, deep trouble if SOUTHERN reservists are refusing to follow orders in his insane war, and calling their mommies to complain bitterly about the conditions they are serving under and the dangers they are being subjected to in having to take dangerous vehicles over dangerous roads in a war many people in the South and elsewhere do not see any reason for us to have undertaken, now that the reasons given have all been proved false.
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The South is Bush's base, the only possible source of a victory in November. He has tried to worry Southerners about attacks by furriners upon the U.S. "homeland", but their sons and daughters aren't stationed here in the Good Old U.S. of A. to protect us from invasion. They're 7,000 miles from Alabama and Mississippi, risking their lives — for what? People in the isolation-inclined South will find it increasingly hard to come up with an answer to that question.

Item 2: Flu-Shot Tyranny. Talk about government intrusion on medical decisions, which the Bush Administration is supposed to oppose (which is one way it justifies its opposition to universal health coverage)! AP reports that several states and the District of Columbia are threatening healthcare workers with JAIL if they give flu shots to "healthy, low-risk people". That's insane, and should be fought tooth and nail by everyone who cares about civil liberties. If the courts can't or won't act in timely fashion, the people should take the law into their own hands — which is where the law resides, in the people — and mob the legislators who passed such laws and the people who enforce them, and beat them so severely they will never again so much as attempt such high-handed tyranny.
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It is not for government to say who can get what medications, when. The influenza strains we now face are not the Black Death nor bubonic plague. They're not even the horrendous strain that killed millions around the world in 1918. Government has absolutely no authority to interfere with private health decisions as regards flu shots.
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Yes, some people do die every year from the flu, but almost all of them are elderly and infirm, and everybody has to die sometime, from something. A lot of the oldest among us are weary of life, and are just waiting for death to take them. For some people, then, flu is a release from a life of uselessness and loneliness. Religious people might say it is God's will, his "calling them home" and ending their suffering. Nonreligious people can nonetheless see death as a blessing for some, among whom number people who have outlived all their friends and many of their relatives, including their own children, or who never had children so have no one on Earth to live for.
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In fighting off the flu or anything else, will to live is crucial. So maybe a large proportion of the elderly who die from the flu surrender to it gladly.
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There is a famous story, Death Takes a Holiday, by the Italian writer Alberto Casella, that has been made into two movies (one by the same name, in 1934, and a derivative work, the Brad Pitt movie Meet Joe Black, in 1998). In the 1934 film, Fredric March plays Death, who takes human form to try to understand why people cling to life. While he is 'on holiday', many disasters that would ordinarily kill people take place, but everyone survives. Unfortunately, many of the people who survive are in hideous agony that only death can end — but Death is on vacation, so people linger in agony. He eventually returns to active duty, and ends the misery of thousands.
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This parable teaches that all life ends in death, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because with death, suffering ends. And for many people, to live is to suffer.
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While it may seem callous to mention it, the frail elderly are often a drain on a family's financial and emotional resources. As long as a parent or grandparent enjoys life despite all, a family or society may gladly undertake the burden. But when life is a burden for everyone, death from flu isn't a bad end.
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Putting all that aside, flu shots themselves entail health risks for some people, especially those who have an allergy to eggs (since the virus used is grown in hen's eggs). Many people whom government advises to get flu shots do not in fact get them, for their own reasons. And flu shots don't always work:

It's possible to get the flu if you are exposed right before getting a flu shot and up to two weeks after a shot, because the vaccine takes two weeks to kick in. Older people with low immune systems may get the flu anyway, but a milder case.

In Seattle, the union representing 600 nurses who were ordered to get flu shots or be fired(!) filed suit to stop forced inoculations because these people, who should know about the risks, did not wish to be subjected to medical treatment they regard as unnecessary, possibly ineffective against influenza, and risky to their health in other regards, all without their consent. A Seattle Times columnist, Danny Neat, on October 8th observed:

Last year, the flu shot didn't work so well. It's estimated that half the adults who came down with flu had first gotten the shot.

This year, some flu vaccine is contaminated. When discovered in August, U.S. officials promised it was no big deal.

They were undercut this week by the British, who, citing bacterial contamination, shut down a plant that makes half our vaccine supply. * * *

In their court filing, the nurses go so far as to allege that requiring flu shots violates the hospital's duty "to maintain a safe and healthy workplace." * * *

Add to that the constant problems with the vaccine supply and its spotty record at warding off flu. It hardly inspires confidence, does it? * * *

Until healthy, intelligent doctors and nurses are willing to take the shot without being forced, count me out.

Compulsion has no place in medicine. None at all. Not to force people to take a given medication or vaccine. Not to deny patients their choice of medications or vaccines. Being safe and feeling safe may not be the same thing. But being safe while feeling unsafe is not a desirable state, and people have the right to make irrational choices in their own medical treatment. If a doctor chooses to give a flu shot to a patient that the government — the government! — says isn't "at risk" of serious adverse consequences if s/he should in fact get the flu because s/he was denied vaccine, that is his medical judgment. Government has no right to interfere with such judgments but should butt out!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:42 PM

 
Peace Prize Idiocy. This year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Kenyan Wangari Maathai, is an idiot — a well-intentioned idiot but an idiot nonetheless. And to claim that her work advances peace is stretching the word "peace" to uses it doesn't cover. She got people to plant trees, 31 million of them across Africa. That's very nice, but has nothing to do with peace.
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The rationale that deforestation produces a reduction in resources that gives rise to conflict is strained at best. I know of no war that has arisen from deforestation — none.
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The Nobel committee has once again wandered very far from the core concern of the Peace Prize: peace, meaning the reduction of organized violence, international and internal wars. The Nobel Peace Prize is not an environmental prize nor a human rights prize. It is intended to reward the promotion of peaceful interactions among nations, groups, and individuals. It is not a catchall for every socially constructive activity.
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If the Nobel committee wants to promote environmentalism, human rights, or any other cause, it should create new prizes in those categories, but not taint the Peace Prize and weaken its influence in promoting peace by inducing people to work to win it. It should assuredly not be given to someone who actually promotes intergroup resentment and suspicion, as Ms. Maathai has done in asserting very publicly that the so-called "AIDS virus" — which is no such thing* — was produced by white people in a Western laboratory and deliberately, maliciously loosed upon Africa to kill black people!
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Is there a special connection between AIDS and blacks? Yes, alas, there is, because there is a special connection between DRUGS and blacks in Western countries, and profound POVERTY and blacks in Africa. Tony Brown, producer/host of the (former?) long-running black PBS program Tony Brown's Journal, and South African President Thabo Mbeki are among the prominent blacks who have publicly expressed doubts about the HIV-causes-AIDS hypothesis — which hypothesis is NOT fact but only an assertion, an assertion that doesn't make any sense.
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Mbeki has waffled on the issue, sometimes yielding to pressures to conform to the orthodoxy promoted by the U.S. Government, which invented AIDS as a "disease" (rather than drug injury, which it plainly has always been in the West). Apart from drug addicts in Africa developing AIDS (as drug addicts in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere who have no connection to each other have developed AIDS independently), it is by no means clear that anything unusual is happening in Africa, epidemiologically speaking. Africans today are dying from the same diseases they have always died from, and in fact are living LONGER now than ever before. That may astonish you, but I have followed this for decades, and know that life expectancy has risen over that time. How is that possible if 'the continent of Africa is dying from AIDS', as simpleminded alarmists would have you believe?
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American blacks said to have AIDS also have a long and generally well-known history of drug use or underlying bad health of long duration that did not require nor arise from a mysterious and magical "new" virus. AIDS has never entered the general population of any country where we have really good information (that is, the U.S., Canada, Western Europe), even tho for the first several years, half of the entire planet's AIDS cases were in one country: the United States. Here, in the original home of AIDS, the "disease" has remained tightly confined — for 24 years! — to communities soaked in DRUGS, and the only people who have died from "AIDS" have used drugs, either dangerous recreational drugs or toxic anti-AIDS prescription drugs (which are powerful and toxic enuf alone to produce death in the high dosages they were originally prescribed in) — or both.
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Because AIDS has never entered the general population, and plainly won't EVER do so, an impossibility for a viral disease spread by sex and blood — not "improbability": IMPOSSIBILITY, something that could not possibly happen — it is plain that AIDS is not a viral disease. Res ipse loquitur: the thing speaks for itself. While AIDS has vanished as a serious public-health concern in the United States and other Western countries precisely because it has never entered the general population, it continues to ravage small segments of Western societies, all of them soaked in drugs. In the U.S., it is blacks, Hispanics, and some small segment of gay men (those in the subculture that still, amazingly, regards drugs as "cool"!) who are still developing AIDS and still dying from it. Everyone else is untouched.
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Such a pattern is absolutely impossible for a viral "epidemic" spread by sex and blood. Real diseases strike down the rich and poor without distinction; black and white without distinction; Spanish-speaking and English-speaking without distinction; gay and straight without distinction. But AIDS discriminates. A tiny virus, without eyes to see race, ears to hear language, or brain to form a will to attack some types of people but leave others untouched, is magically able to DISCRIMINATE against minorities! One has to be very credulous and completely clueless as regards science to believe any such thing.
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The new Nobel laureate in "Peace" is one such credulous and clueless fool. If she had genuinely promoted peace instead of environmentalism, we might pass over her incendiary remarks about white people loosing AIDS upon Africa. But since her work in promoting reforestation has only the most tenuous of ties to peace, the Nobel committee should revoke her prize and give it to someone else.
___________________

*For more about the reality (and unreality) of AIDS, see this blog's entries of May 7th and September 16th, 2004.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:50 PM

 
Two Brief Items. Item 1: Good Riddance to Christopher Reeve. "Do not speak ill of the dead" is a very old proverb, dating to the "Seven Sages" of around 600 B.C. That does not make it good advice. Christopher Reeve is another of those "heroes" who started as victims and only after they suffered a tragedy of their own did they become public-spirited. Until his horseback-riding injury, Christopher Reeve was just another Hollywood slimeball.
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Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen observed today that:

Reeve's insistence that he would someday walk again is proved sadly false — as some always said it would be. He was criticized by knowledgeable people for what they characterized as his ignorant or opportunistic optimism — he appeared in a TV ad promoting spinal cord research — and giving false hope to others in his condition. What these people needed above all, Reeve's critics said, was the determination to face reality — not the bogus dream that the past could somehow become the future.

Reeve doubtless did some good in the nine years he lived after his injury, in giving spinal-cord injuries a higher profile and more priority than they otherwise might have had. But he also turned into an advocate of childslaughter. Babies, he suggested, should be created for the express purpose of chopping them up for parts! Reeve advocated embryonic stem-cell research, research that might NOT produce hoped-for advances but would DEFINITELY kill children.
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But, then, Christopher Reeve's attitudes toward children were not the best to begin with. He was a bastardizer: he had a son out of wedlock, and only later married the mother. Why? Why not marry before the child was born and save him from even the slightest stigma?
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Reeve also was involved in some minor way in pro-Communist activities in the Vietnam era and participated in filmic sado-masochistic violence, especially in the odious Superman IV.
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He lived a privileged life (private school, Ivy League college), partly here in New Jersey, and died from an injury sustained in a sport of the rich, "eventing" (a combination of "the precision of dressage with the excitement of cross-country and show jumping"). All the rehabilitation (including six months at the Kessler Institute in NJ) and the finest medical care in the world couldn't save him. But at least his idle life of wealth and privilege ended with that accident, and he finally, at age 42, did something useful. Better late than never.
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Item 2: Ten Commandments Revisited. AP reports today that the Supreme Court has agreed to take a case about governmental displays of the Ten Commandments. Hopefully it is not to undo its 1980 prohibition of such displays, but simply to make plain that divergent rulings from various courts are unacceptable and all governments must stop trying to push Judaism upon the unwilling. Yes, I said Judaism, because the Ten Commandments are Jewish, NOT Christian. Jesus gave Christians three commandments, not ten (see this blog's entry of May 12, 2004). The most important of those three is the Golden Rule. If you heed that one rule, you don't need to list ten, twenty, or a hundred specific prohibitions.
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But I would oppose even the display of the Golden Rule in government facilities, because it is not for government to tell us what religion or religious precepts to follow. The First Amendment was inserted into the Constitution to protect minorities, including that smallest of minorities, the individual, from impositions by the majority. We can respect each other's rights to believe other than as we do, or we can have religious war. Religious freedom, sí! Ten Commandments, no!
__________________

* I reject the arrogant Jewish term "B.C.E."; there are about 2.015 billion Christians on Earth, 33% of the entire world's population, as against some 18 million Jews, 0.2% of the world's population. There is absolutely no reason for 2 billion Christians to accommodate 18 million Jews with "B.C.E.", any more than there would be to adopt the Jewish calendar.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:54 PM

 
Execution/Murder; Hero/Victim. The media are carelessly throwing around words of enormous importance, producing moral confusions in listeners. It's got to stop.
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Language matters. George Orwell (real name, Eric Blair), the British author of the classic parable Animal Farm and the cautionary tale 1984, wrote an essay we were required to read in college freshman English, in which he says that careless writing both arises from and contributes to careless thinking.
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The extreme case of language being used to affect thinking is Orwell's "Newspeak", in which words are so altered and restricted in meaning that they can be understood only in the context of the official government line. Examples from the book include:

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

The most potent examples of Newspeak today are probably "liberation" for the invasion of Iraq and "HIV" or "the AIDS virus" for a virus that has nothing to do with human immunity.
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To invade a country and overthrow its government is not "liberation" if in the process you kill thousands or tens of thousands, impose a brutal military occupation, and replace an effective government with an utterly ineffective government, all of which produces chaos on the street and mass death from terrorism and murder of resistance fighters by the occupying power.
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"HIV" is an even more potent example of Newspeak, because its very name, "Human Immunodeficiency Virus", requires that one accept the idea that it is necessarily related to immune deficiency. Worse, its pair, "the AIDS virus", also requires one to accept that it causes immune deficiency, which it does not. See www.virusmyth.com, especially the articles by Peter Duesberg and John Lauritsen; this blog's entries of September 16 and May 6, 2004; and my layman's language presentation "Everything government says about AIDS is false".
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A concept related to Newspeak, also from 1984, is "Doublethink", which I confess I don't understand very well. It is explained thus at K1 Internet Publishing's 1984 website:

Doublethink is a kind of manipulation of the mind. Generally, one could say that Doublethink makes people accept contradictions, and it makes them also believe that the party is the only institution that distinguishes between right and wrong. This manipulation is mainly done by the Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), where Winston Smith works. When a person that is well grounded in Doublethink recognizes a contradiction or a lie by the Party, then the person thinks that he is remembering a false fact. The use of the word Doublethink involves doublethink. With the help of the Minitrue, it is not only possible to change written facts, but also facts that are remembered by people. So complete control of the country and its citizens is provided.

(This also gets us into the realm of false memories, which raises the issue of "recovered memories" that have produced criminal complaints and lawsuits against parents and others for "crimes" against children that were "forgotten" for decades but eventually "recovered". But that's another topic, for another time.)
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How, you may wonder, can people "accept contradictions"? Easily, apparently. In the Jewish Book of Genesis in the Bible (part of the Torah, in turn part of the "Old Testament"), which many Christians pretend to believe is the literal word of God, Adam is the first and only human being created by God. Adam becomes lonely, so God then creates Eve out of Adam, but no other human being whatsoever. The human race descends from these two unique people. Their children do not have sex with either their parents or each other, yet a human race descends from them.
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If Adam and Eve were really the only people created by God, then it is inescapable that the human race is based on incest! Yet incest is reviled as unacceptably sinful. This biblical fable thus produces two unreconcilable contradictions: that is, two sets of mutually exclusive beliefs. To believe one precludes believing the other. Yet, hundreds of millions of people claim to believe both sets of contradictions. That's part of what Archie Bunker meant when he said, "Faith is something you believe that nobody in his right mind would believe."
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How is it possible for the human race to reproduce without incest if there are only two people and reproduction is sexual? It's not. And if the very existence of humanity, an obvious good (one would think), depended upon incest, how can incest be evil? Hmm.
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How does the Old Testament explain these obvious contradictions? It doesn't. It simply says, on page 2 of my reference version of the King James Bible, that "God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. [Gen. 2:7] * * * It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him so created Eve from one of Adam's ribs [Gen. 2:18-23]. On page 3, Genesis says "Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living." Seems pretty clear, doesn't it, that one woman was the ultimate mother of all future human beings.
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By page 4, a scant two pages after God creates man in the form of Adam, one person, Cain, who is banished from his parents' home for murdering his brother Abel, says, "My punishment is greater than I can bear. ... It shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me." [Gen. 4:13-14] Huh? Every who? There isn't supposed to be anybody else on the whole planet at that point in time except Adam, Eve, and Cain. Yet Cain is afraid that other people will slay him. What other people?
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Cain "went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden." [Gen. 4:16] So he was nowhere near his mother, the only woman on Earth. Yet the very next phrase in the Bible is "And Cain knew his wife". Huh? What wife? How did he find a wife? There weren't supposed to be any other people on Earth except Adam, Eve, and Cain, and Cain didn't marry Eve.
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How does the Bible explain this? It doesn't, unless you take this cryptic passage and interpret it loosely: "In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created." [Gen. 5:1] Clear as mud.
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"Adam", then, is a collective? for male and female human beings of unstated number? That doesn't solve the problem, because Adam was supposed to be the name of the man who was alone, without a helpmate, until God created a woman out of his rib. [Gen. 2:20-22]. One man, one rib, one woman. And that one woman was "the mother of all living" [Gen. 3:20]. That's the premise. But it does assuredly not square with Cain being able to find a wife in Nod, who was not his sister and not related to Adam and Eve!
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Was there just some ambiguity in the King James Version that later translations fixed? Well, here's the same passage, Genesis 3:20, in the New Living Translation: "she [Eve] would be the mother of all people everywhere."
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Plainly, then, if Adam and Eve were the only two people "in the beginning", then the human race could not have arisen save thru incest, yet we are supposed to think incest evil — and the Bible itself says that Cain married a woman from Nod, when there weren't supposed to be any people in Nod!
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It is not possible for people to believe two mutually exclusive things. Either Adam and Eve were the only two people, and the human race arose in incest; or the human race did not arise from incest because there were other people, which means that the "original sin" of Adam and Eve has no bearing on people not descended from them. Yet there are people who claim to believe in the literal truth of the Bible.
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The Bible contradicts itself endlessly. The Adam-and-Eve vs. Cain's-wife contradiction is just one of many blatant contradictions and logical absurdities. So the only person who can possibly believe in the literal truth of the Bible is a lunatic. That would be okay if such people just sat quietly in a room somewhere and listened to their deluded nonsense inside their own heads, but they don't. They go out into the world and try to impose their lunacy on others.
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This brings us back to the insane and evil widespread misuse of the words "execution" and "hero" by media today. We are endlessly assailed by news reports of terrorists "executing" hostages by beheading, or of "Mafia-style executions". Ordinary people who die in fires, or the woman who died a week after she identified the body of her son just shipped back from Iraq are "heroes". No.
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Murder is not execution. Execution is the rightful taking of life as punishment for crime. Murder is one of the crimes, the most common crime in fact, for which execution is the punishment.
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Terrorists who kill hostages seized off the street for no reason but that they are from a foreign country do not perform executions. They commit murders. Gangsters who tie people up and shoot them in the back of the head do not "execute" them. They murder them.
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The other half of this particular, and despicable, moral confusion is the notion, stated or tacit, that execution is murder. This is a common assertion by the anti-capital-punishment crowd, that the state has no right to take a human life, no matter how terrible the thing(s) a person may have done. That is moral blindness that almost the whole of the world rejects.
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There are some people so afraid of dying that even to think of anyone being killed by the state makes them fear for their own lives. Mind you, most of these fearful people would never commit a crime that would bring the death penalty to them. Many would, in fact, be so guilt-ridden if they did in fact violate their own moral code to murder someone that they would want to die for their crime. But all taking of life is equally evil — to the simpleton. Whether a person is victim or victimizer makes no difference to them. It does to every decent person on Earth, but not to them. We must not let them influence our judgment, and the judgment of morality: there are some things so wrong that only execution even begins to equate with justice.
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Hero/Victim. A person who dies in a fire or traffic accident or from a broken heart at the death of her son is a victim. A hero is someone who risks danger to help others. A hero doesn't necessarily suffer any negative consequence from a heroic act.
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Conversely, a victim's injury does not necessarily arise from anything s/he tried to do for anyone else. Merely suffering harm, even death, does not make a person a hero. And dying in the commission of a crime assuredly does not make a person a hero.
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It has become commonplace, in this age of Newspeak — which has another sense today, "news speak", the language of news media — to talk of our soldiers in Iraq as "heroes". No, aggressors are not heroes. The brave soldiers of Hitler's Wehmacht who invaded Poland were not heroes. The brave soldiers of the U.S. military who invaded Iraq were not heroes.
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They did not storm into Iraq to help the people of Iraq. They went 6,000 miles and more out of their way to attack a country that had never attacked us and was not preparing to attack us. They have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis in their own "homeland", and continue to kill dozens a month in an unlawful and immoral occupation that Iraqi patriots are resisting by force of arms; and pretend that their brutal occupation is "liberation". That's disgusting.
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Our soldiers are, let us be blunt, killers. They are trained to kill; they have killed large numbers of Iraqis and their allies, and continue to kill, all the while pretending that they are doing good things for Iraqis and that Iraq is "better off today" than before their vicious, murderous invasion and brutal occupation.
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That occupation has brought chaos and mass death from terrorism in addition to the deaths inflicted by Americans who seem to think that tho they were not invited into the country by Iraqis and Iraqis plainly want them out, they have not just the right to stay but even the right to kill any Iraqi who resists their occupation. They, foreigners, have the right to kill Iraqis in Iraq! The very notion is insane.
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Iraqis have every right to fight back against foreign invaders, and to welcome foreign fighters to help in the struggle just as Spaniards welcomed foreign fighters in the Spanish Civil War. If the circumstances were reversed, if Iraqis had invaded us without any conceivable justification and were daily killing our resistance fighters, we wouldn't regard the Iraqis as "heroes", would we?
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What's sauce for the goose really is sauce for the gander. American soldiers in Iraq are not heroes but villains. They don't know why they are there, but are killing Iraqis every day anyway. They are not heroes but criminals. Every one of them who is killed deserves to die, and should not be given any honor when they return in a body bag.
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I am not a hypocrite. I don't condemn the war and occupation but pretend that the people who are prosecuting that war and continuing to crush Iraq under a hobnailed boot are somehow not responsible for what they're doing. Yes they are! "I was only following orders" didn't save German soldiers at Nuremberg. It won't save American soldiers from, at the least, devastating pangs of conscience for the rest of their lives, and it might not save them from an international war-crimes tribunal five years from now.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:06 PM

 
Item 1: Fear-Mongering. The Bush Administration has put school districts in six states on alert that a computer disk containing

photos, floor plans and other information about [American] schools ... downloaded data the U.S. military found in July — all publicly available on the Internet — [and] an Education Department report guiding schools on how to prepare and respond to a crisis, one official said Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

So says an Associated Press report today that is remarkable in its vagueness. Where was this "data" found? In whose custody? "The officials said it was unclear who downloaded the information and stressed they had no evidence of any specific threats involving the schools." Was it found in an Iraqi government office, such as an education-ministry department concerned with building new schools and preparing for emergencies, which are much more likely to occur in Iraq than here? If so, then the find is worse than meaningless: it is absolutely the opposite of worrisome, but shows that Iraqis want to learn from U.S. architects and emergency-preparedness experts how to maximize safety for children and staff in public schools. If that is in fact the case, then this Bush Administration source who would speak only "on condition of anonymity" has betrayed his public trust.
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Indeed, for all we know from the AP story, the disk belonged to an American army reservist who in ordinary life is a teacher — and a Republican Party organizer! We need much more information to know what importance to assign this alarmist report, a report issued less than four weeks before the election even tho the "data" was found in July — three months ago! The report itself starts out "Education officials in six states were put on notice last month". Hmm. So we are seeing, 3½ weeks before the election, a report practically calculated to worry people about possible terrorist attacks upon American schools, that relates to a warning to school districts last month about data found two months before that! Double-hmm.
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Was this "data" found in a collection of similar materials, focusing on school design, architecture, and urban planning? or in a collection of plainly terrorism-related materials, such as instructions for building a bomb from readily available components, forging documents (and deciding what kinds of documents are most appropriate for a given action), surveillance and planning, avoiding suspicion, finding uniforms in order to pose as a security guard, utility worker, cable guy, or substitute teacher? Context is important. None was given in the article. Was any given to the local education authorities?
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Two school districts in my state, New Jersey, were among those alerted, one in South Jersey (Franklinville, near Vineland) and one in Central Jersey, Rumson (where Bruce Springsteen once had an estate). Vineland is a depressed community that has not fared well under the Bush Administration's handling of the economy, so might be inclined to vote Democratic, absent worry about terrorism in their neighborhood that, they are assured, only Republicans can prevent. (Mind you, the Republicans didn't do a very good job of preventing the World Trade Center attacks, now did they?) Rumson is rich, so is probably inclined to vote Republican anyway, tho the Congressman from that district is a Democrat — and a five-time winner on the game show Jeopardy!
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(In trying to find out what Congressman represents Rumson, I discovered truly shocking, exceedingly bizarre boundaries to New Jersey's congressional districts. They look like something a drunk might have drawn in his twelfth straight hour of drinking. We need to impose computer-aided design in drawing districts that are as compact and geometrically regular as possible — allowing for inclusion of entire municipalities when possible but striving for simple compactness, without regard to any other consideration. Start in one corner of a state and draw a district as close to square as possible; then create the next square and the next and the next out in all directions until every square inch is in one compact district or another. Boundaries like those for New Jersey's 4th, 12th, and 6th Congressional Districts (which adjoin, despite their discontinuous numbers) should be forbidden, on pain of flogging.)
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Of the six states in which these alerted school districts are located (California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, and Oregon), half (50%) are among the 21 "swing states" (42% of the Nation) as calculated by the online magazine Intervention. One of the states implicitly 'targeted for terror' is also one of swingthestate.org's five most critical states, Florida.
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In trying to find out which are expected to be "blue" states (voting Democratic) and which "red" (Republican) in the coming election, I found the interesting assertion that "Red States Feed at Federal Trough, Blue States Supply the Feed". That is, there is a transfer of wealth in this country from states that tend to vote Democratic to states that vote Republican. Very interesting.
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In any case, two of the states 'targeted for terrorism' are solidly democratic (California and my own, New Jersey) and one is solidly Republican (Georgia). Why the people in a state as poor as Georgia would vote for Richpublicans is beyond my comprehension. New Jerseyans are half again as well off as Georgians, but we know better than to vote Republican. When will poor Southerners wake to the fact that Republicans are willfully and maliciously keeping them poor?
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Returning to the base question here, whether the discovery of a single computer disk in Iraq that contains information about a few American schools has any terroristic significance at all, I do not doubt for a minute that there are terrorists who would love to carry out attacks upon U.S. schools — but also upon government buildings, office buildings, bridges, tunnels, and every other kind of structure in this country. But we must bear ever in mind that the mere desire to attack us does not equate with either the ability or a working plan to do so.
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The two worst terrorist attacks upon the United States were both upon the high-visibility New York City target the World Trade Center. They were 8½ years apart. The Bush Administration keeps trying to worry us, in the expectation that Americans will somehow trust Republicans to do a better job of preventing attacks than will Democrats. Vice President Cheney, Slimeball in Chief, so much as said so, repeatedly, in campaign remarks. But the World Trade Center came tumbling down on George Bush's watch, not John Kerry's. So why on Earth would we feel safe under the 'watchful eye' of the very team that allowed the World Trade Center attacks to come off so brilliantly? The brilliant execution of that horrible attack contrasts vividly with the utter, bumbling incompetence of the Bush Administration in preventing it.
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Now, we are to believe, the Republicans have learned their lesson, and it is only because they are so brilliantly defending us that there hasn't been another successful terrorist attack since 2001. But the last successful attack before that was 8½ years earlier, in 1993, and only 6 people died in that attack, under Democrats. Doesn't that mean that Democrats protected us perfectly well for 8 years, until they had to leave office and turn over the keys to the White House to George W. Bush?
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There is no basis whatsoever to believe that Republicans are doing a better job than Democrats in preventing terrorist attacks.
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Item 2: Taking Orders from International Organizations. The Bush Administration has endlessly declaimed that when it comes to national security, they will never take orders from the United Nations nor clear anything they do with any foreign country. But when it comes to the Nation's economic security, they gladly take orders from the World Trade Organization AND European Union!
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The Associated Press reported today that the House of Representatives has passed a corporate-welfare bill (a reform of the corporate tax law) that hands $136 billion in tax breaks to corporations but

would repeal a $5 billion annual tax break provided to American exporters that was ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization. Ending the tax break is needed to lift retaliatory tariffs that have been imposed on U.S. exports to Europe. * * *
Opponents also objected to $42.6 billion in tax relief for multinational corporations, which they contended would increase the movement of U.S. jobs overseas.

Astounding. Bush and his Republican Party have cravenly ceded control of the U.S. economy to the WTO and EU. Decisions affecting the economic security of Americans are being made by foreigners, and that passes for 'defending America' among Republicans. It seems a "global test" on 'fair trade' is fine with the Bush Administration, and if foreigners in Geneva and Brussels don't approve of elements of our tax code, the Bushbabies will rush thru a change in the law to French-kiss WTO and EU ass.
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Let's hope that if Kerry and Edwards bounce Bush and his free-trading scumbags out of the White House, we will leave the WTO or demand it alter its arrogant behavior; tell the European Union to go fuck itself — if it wants trade war, it can have trade war, and it will lose badly, because we don't need ANYTHING from Europe; not anything at all —; and pursue policies in international trade that serve Americans' best interests, not just in preventing the export of jobs but also in improving wages, working conditions, and benefits for decent working people all across the world, thus to promote peace thru economic progress.
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The Bushies have placed us in a race to the bottom, using the poorest people on the planet to undercut American wages and benefits, make Americans insecure, and bully American workers into accepting cuts in wages and benefits just to keep their jobs.
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There are two ways to improve American "competitiveness" in the "global economy". One is to cut Americans' compensation and the costs of doing business here by slashing worker protections, safety regulations, etc. The other is to raise wages, increase benefits, improve worker protections, and promote more stringent safety regulations, etc., abroad.
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Bush and other Republican plutocrats favor the first, because they're not the ones who will be hurt by offshoring American jobs. U.S. voters, however, should choose the second.
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A vote for Bush or for Republicans in either house of Congress is a vote to impoverish the United States and lower the whole planet to the lowest common denominator of worker misery. We cannot want that.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:17 PM