Naivete, or Bullsh*t? The big story on newstalk TV today is the book by Scott McClellan in which the former Press Secretary of the Bush White House expresses dismay at having been lied to about Iraq. Mr. McClellan is apparently, finally, duly ashamed of his doing the White House's lying for it for years, but it's more than a little late. Mr. McClellan used his likeability to make the preposterous things he said more acceptable to both the press corps and the general population. Could he really have been so stupid as to have believed the insane things he said in his official capacity, and be astonished now that he was fooled? I don't believe it.
+
Mr. McClellan is one of those once-decent people who get caught up in indecent acts committed by the people around him, and have trouble separating themselves from the crowd they theretofore regarded as friends, allies, and people of like mind. But there are groups that it may make sense to join (Boy Scouts, Chamber of Commerce), but other groups it makes no sense to join (street gangs, the Mafia). Perhaps Mr. McClellan, influenced by his parents, friends, and neighbors, joined the Young Republicans before he knew what the world was about, and then found himself swept along by the euphoria of a Republican era into thinking that his party could achieve real change for the better in the Nation and the world. But how long could such euphoria have lasted? How long can you stand at the center of things and not realize that things are going terribly wrong?
+
Worse, the TV pundits evaluating McClellan's words today continue to issue their own lies, and continue to pretend to believe that the Iraq War was waged for defensible reasons, this time having to do with "democratic imperialism", the desire to impose democracy, supposedly for everyone's good, in the Middle East. What a bunch of bullsh(asterisk).
+
The war against Iraq was waged for one reason and one reason only: to defend Israel by destroying the nearest and greatest danger to it, the government of Saddam Hussein in charge in a rich oil state. That is all. Nothing else. No concern about Saddam's harboring terrorists with designs on the United States. No worry about Weapons of Mass Destruction, much less nukes. No concern that Saddam would develop not just nuclear weapons but the entire panoply of intercontinental missile technology, guidance systems, and launch infrastructure that would be necessary to reach the U.S. from 6,000 miles away. No worry that Saddam would use Al-Qaeda to infiltrate into the U.S. and set off a dirty bomb or full-scale nuclear explosive device. None of that. Nobody in the White House or any reputable thinktank, no matter how "conservative" (reactionary), could believe any of that.
+
No, the war was fought, at Israeli order carried out by Israeli agents posing as Americans (Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and other "neocons", all Jewish and/or Radical Zionist), for one purpose and one purpose only: to destroy Iraq as a menace to Israel.
+
It was not necessary to launch a full-scale attack upon the entire country if the object were to kill Saddam and his closest advisers. Not necessary to destroy power plants, TV and radio transmission towers and studios, electric generating stations, water and sewage treatment plants, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and on and on, if the object were merely to kill Saddam and the core of his government. No, the purpose of the war was to destroy Iraq and kill as many Iraqis as possible, immediately and in the months and years following, in order permanently to destroy Iraq's capability of attacking Israel. That is all.
+
Once you understand that base mission, you understand that the Iraq War has been a phenomenal success. It has destroyed Iraq. It has killed huge numbers of Iraqis and continues to kill more every day. It has permanently weakened Iraq — at least as long as the U.S. continues to occupy Iraq. And that is why the U.S. is not permitted by its Israeli overlord to exit Iraq, because Israel understands that Iraq can be weakened only as long as the U.S. continues to occupy it. Once the U.S. exits, Iraqis might patch things up among its key groups, restore national unity, and make Iraq an important, rich, and powerful country once again — and thus, once again, a danger to Israel. Any remotely representative government of Iraq will be an enemy of Israel, so unless the United States manages to maintain in power a government not the slitest representative of the PEOPLE of Iraq, essentially all of whom are militantly anti-Zionist and would like Iraq to do its part in destroying Zionism., Iraq will revert to becoming a leader of the effort to destroy Israel.
+
Now, what exactly does "destroy Israel" mean? John McCain has expressed concern about Iranian President Ahmadinajad's desire to 'wipe Israel off the map'. What does that  mean? Let us do that all-too-rare thing, for a minute: think. Consider today's maps, of the world and the U.S.
+
Where, Mr. McCain, is British North America on today's map of the world? Anglo-Egyptian Sudan? French West Africa? the Kingdom of Hawaii? Belgian Congo? Zaire? Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands? Tanganyika? Gran Colombia? Soviet Union? Czechoslovakia? East Germany? Answer: nowhere. They have been wiped off the map.
+
As regards the map of the United States, please point out to me Indian Territory, the Northwest Territory, the Virginia portion of the District of Columbia, the Oregon Territory, the Western Reserve. They too have all been wiped off the face of the Earth.
+
But no one, much less millions, died to accomplish these changes. So wiping something off the map does not mean to kill everybody in that territory, does it? It means only ending the existence of a particular geopolitical unit, as by merger, division, renaming, or some other means. Yes, it can include massive death if people resist more moderate means, but it does not HAVE to.
+
Israel was created by dividing Palestine. It can be eliminated by merging it back into Palestine, and giving everyone the same rights in all parts of the reunified territory, as happened when East Germany was wiped off the face of the Earth and merged with West Germany to form reunified Germany. So let's stop pretending that enemies of Zionism have a will to genocide. Many of us want only an end to tribalism and discrimination on the basis of race, religion, language, and ethnic identification, all of which forms of discrimination are in vicious effect in Israel. Segregation in Mississippi was relatively benign — after all, no Mississippi town ever built a fortified wall down Main Street to keep "the coloreds" in their place. But even Mississippi's relatively trivial discrimination had to be ended by outside intervention, in this case by the United States Government. The very same Government can end the hideous and violent segregation in Palestine, and grant equal rights to everyone. In that way might we achieve real peace in Palestine, and thus eliminate the burr under the Arab saddle that keeps the Middle East in turmoil. But no one in the U.S. Government will so much as mention such a solution, much less exert U.S. power to see it thru.
+
John McCain may be the only Presidential candidate saying expressly, "I will not surrender in Iraq", but all the contenders, of both parties, pledge absolute, undying fealty to their Israeli overlord. Hillary Clinton goes so far as to threaten war against Iran, as McCain seems also to favor, to protect Israel from the NEXT threat: "Iraq 2, The Sequel". Both Clinton and McCain have implied that they would wage another pre-emptive war to protect Israel. Clinton has gone so far as to vow to launch a full-scale nuclear war against Iran to "obliterate" it — and thus, presumbably, kill a major portion of Iran's 66 million people, the greatest single crime in the history of the world — if the government of Iran launches a nuclear attack upon her beloved Israel.
+
Fealty to Israel has replaced loyalty to the United States as the highest value in American politics at the highest levels, and the entire ruling class of the United States is now actively disloyal to the United States. Israel comes first. If we have to see the United States destroyed in a full-scale nuclear war to stand with Israel, everyone in the present ruling class in Washington will gladly push the button to launch World War III — for Israel.
+
How might such a war start? Russia and Communist China, furious with the United States for many reasons, could make formal alliance with Iran and pledge that if the United States attacks Iran, both Russia and Communist China will launch simultaneous conventional attacks upon the United States. The cowboys — and cowgirls — of Washington, on orders from their Israeli masters, "call their bluff" and attack Iran anyway. Russia and China launch conventional-weapon attacks on U.S. bases in Germany, Korea, and Japan. The U.S. retaliates with cruise missile and smart-bomb attacks on targets within the Russian and Chinese homelands. Russia and China retaliate with attacks upon the U.S. homeland with intercontinental ballistic missiles, which the U.S. has to assume are carrying nuclear warheads, so responds with nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles — et voilà! WWIII.
+
Such a war would kill a minimum of what? 30 million Iranians (in that not all the firepower we could focus on Iran if it were the only target could be so focused if we also had to launch simultaneous attacks upon Russia and Communist China, which together cover 10.3 million square miles, about 2.8 times as large as the U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii). The death toll in the United States could be on the order of 160 million Americans, as to so massively disrupt our civilization as effectively to end it. 100 million Russians could die, effectively ending their civilization. And 500 million Chinese could die, but that would probably NOT end their civilization, in that there would be 800 million Chinese left. All this for 6 million Jews who insist on being someplace they have no right nor reason to be, doing terrible things out of tribal arrogance and the feeling that as "God's Chosen People" they are entitled to do terrible things to anyone they want, for any reason they want, or even for sport, and no one has the right even to say a mean word, much less retaliate militarily.
+
The fallout from thousands of nuclear explosions would, within weeks, rain down on most of the planet, and the dust thrown up might (or might not) produce a "nuclear winter", which could cause catastrophe not just for human populations far outside the immediate impact zone but also for animals and plants all over the globe. But that's a small price to pay for the safety of the Jews, or such of the Jews as survive an Iranian — and/or Russian and/or Chinese attack — isn't it? The Jews have the legend of The Flood, after all, in which their God drowned the world, killing kittens and puppies more than just evil people, and leaving only one Jewish family alive, so all this fits perfectly into their worldview. No big deal.
+
Even if we somehow avoid World War III, despite everything that Radical Zionists are doing to produce it, even the current wars produced by Zionism are causing enormous dislocations and economic stresses on the U.S. and all other countries heavily influenced by distress in the U.S. The New York Times  reported yesterday that UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) alone has lost $38 billion — billion with a B — because of the U.S. mortgage crisis, one indicator of how U.S. economic distress can affect major economic institutions thousands of miles distant.
+
The Iraq War, with all its costs and ramifications thru many areas of the world's economics and politics, was fought for Israel, period. An attack upon Iran would be launched for Israel, period. A full-scale nuclear exchange prompted by a U.S. attack upon Iran would be for Israel, period. And all the costs of all these wars are directly and inescapably traced to Jews high in U.S. media and government.
+
How do we pre-empt the next war for Israel, and its possible escalation into WWIII? Plainly the first step is cutting the crap about "democratic imperialism" and the continuing U.S. occupation of Iraq being FOR the people of Iraq, and accepting that malevolence toward Moslems in general and Iraq in particular is the sole motive for the U.S. invasion and continuing occupation — and then committing to force an end to that horrendous, ongoing crime by withdrawing from Iraq immediately, and making plain to the powers that be in Washington that we will not sit idly by if they attempt to attack Iran but will riot in the streets, attack the Capitol, storm the White House and hang everyone working to produce another calamity, which might easily escalate, thru miscalculation after miscalculation, into World War III.
+
But surely, you might think, such multiple miscalculations could not really happen . Well, let's see.
+
• 'Saddam has weapons of Mass Destruction, including a nuclear weapons program.'
• 'The people of Iraq will greet us as liberators, and shower our soldiers with flowers in gratitude.'
• 'The war will be over in six weeks.'
• 'Democracy is the cure for the problems of the Middle East' (so the election of Hamas in Gaza must have been an advance for peace, no?).
• 'Democracy in Iraq will produce a domino effect of democratization across the entire region.'
+
No, we could never make even one major miscalculation in the Middle East, much less a chain of miscalculations as could produce World War III. Go back to the couch and watch TV.
____________________

* Speaking of miscalculations, the "global warming" people have a lot of 'splainin to do. Northwestern New Jersey and adjoining New York State are under a FROST WARNING for tonite, May 28th. Frost. At the end of May. That is "global warming".
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,084 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:06 PM

 
Fiting Militarism. (And yes, I see the irony.)

This is Memorial Day, a day set aside by the Federal Government originally to remember the men (not "men and women") who died in defense of the Union in the Civil War (not the "War Between the States"). It has since been broadened in conception as a day to remember the fallen in all our wars — even Confederate soldiers who died trying to destroy the Union!
+
In addition to Memorial Day, we also have Veterans Day (the Monday closest to November 11th) and Armed Forces Day (the third Saturday in May, the same month as Memorial Day). And each of the United States' several branches of the armed forces celebrates its own day as well. Altho Memorial Day was originally to be commemorated on May 30th and Veterans Day (originally Armistice Day) was to be celebrated on, not near, November 11th, the date when hostilities ceased in World War I, both of these days now wander over the calendar to find a Monday, so we can have a three-day weekend. It would seem that our soldiers are worth honoring, but not if we have to do it mid-week.
+
Three days a year given over to glorifying militarism is at least two too many.
+
Even Liberals feel an obligation to avoid criticizing our "heroes" in order not to be thought "unpatriotic". Militarism, you see, IS patriotism, and patriotism today IS militarism.
+
The official line among Liberals nowadays is that it is the President and his Administration that is responsible for wars and their terrible toll, not the "valiant men and [now also] women" who carry out those attacks and commit those crimes. No, they're not responsible at all. They are just patriots "serving their country". And when they attack a country that never attacked us and kill — what? as many as 600,000 Iraqis, a figure David Letterman recently offered on his talk show — they are "only following orders". That phrase never sounds right unless given a German accent.
+
Pretending they were "only following orders" didn't save German officers at Nuremberg, and it won't save American war criminals in some future war-crimes tribunal, domestic or international.
+
Many of our "heroes" are no such thing, but cold-blooded killers. They entered the military not to "serve their country" but to serve themselves and take out their aggressions on helpless foreign victims. They get to be sado-masochistic butchers, even rapists and multiple murderers, and still get praise heaped upon them, and medals pinned to their chest. Oh, they wouldn't be honored for rape and murder, but those are easy enuf to cover up, especially when The Establishment is intent on protecting the reputation of the military by concealing common crimes committed in wartime by 'our brave heroes'.
+
The typical enlistee does not enter the military to "defend his country" but to find a job and receive benefits during and after his or, now, her tour of duty. And if that job is to kill people, they will kill people, no questions asked.
+
All American adults have seen tapes of Gulf War I attacks on Iraqi targets in which we hear the attackers cheer when a direct hit kills people, as tho it is some kind of harmless video game. And this is why the Government does nothing about monstrously vicious video games, because it wants heartless, mindless killer robots to be produced in the millions by a popular culture of heartless, mindless violence and sado-masochism, to keep the military well stocked with obedient monsters — which is what the military is: obedient, mindless, heartless professional killers. Let us never forget that. Let us never glorify militarism nor forgive the crimes committed in the name of God and country.
+
In the 20th Century, three major countries were taken over by militarism, their cultures perniciously transformed into a cult of violence for Fatherland, or History, or Emperor. All of them committed monstrous crimes for those specious causes. Italy created an empire by attacking defenseless Ethiopians, then participating in an Axis that tried to conquer the world. Oh, there may be a few mentally conservative historians who refuse to believe even today that the Germans and Japanese, acting in concert with Italy and some other minor partners, really intended to conquer the world. Most people, however, accept that yes, they really did aspire to world conquest. That seems ridiculous to us, now, but it didn't to them, then. They were so certain it could be done that Hitler gladly took on both the United States and Soviet Union at the same time. Never mind that between them those two powers had hundreds of millions of people, a vast area filled with resources, and, especially in the case of the United States, a nearly infinite productive capacity with which to create the matériel of war. Immediately after, and because of, World War II those two countries, individually, became the planet's two superpowers, opposed to each other. But in WWII itself, those superpowers were allied, and militarists in Germany and perhaps even in Japan thought they could win! Militarism, you see, can rot the mind.
+
The result for those countries was vast devastation and humiliation. Italy, the most junior partner, got off relatively litely. Germany lost millions of men, women, and children to violent death, and a substantial portion of its pre-war territory, with a third of what remained being administered as a separate country for over 40 years. Japan suffered two atom bomb blasts that destroyed two major cities, but emerged with all its home territory intact. Germany's reputation has never recovered, and nobody really trusts it. Japan has rewritten history to pretend that it did nothing very wrong, even tho the number of people it killed is doubtless far huger than those Germany killed, and refuses to this day to accept any guilt for a war it insists was defensive and designed to liberate Asia from outside domination. But nobody trusts Japan either, and its constitution forbids resurgent militarism. A few madmen in the U.S., intent on getting Japan to shoulder more of the burden of "defense" and "security" around the world, would like to see the leash taken off Japan's military. They must be stopped.
+
Throughout history, the glorification of militarism has produced catastrophic consequences, for the victims of aggressive states and, eventually, for those states themselves. The Roman Republic was destroyed by militarism, and, in its turn, the successor to the Republic, the Empire, was also ravaged by militarism, with generals ousting Emperor after Emperor to take power themselves.
+
Historians now believe that in all probability, Mayan "civilization" was destroyed not by drought or other climate change, but by a culture of endless war, of attacks on neighboring city-states and counterattacks from those neighbors, of mass death thru human sacrifice and slauter of captives.
+
Aztec "civilization" brutalized surrounding peoples, and stacked up mountains of skulls of people killed by a stone knife plunged into their chest to rip out their still-beating hearts. As many as 100,000 people a year were murdered by the Aztecs' insane, bloodthirsty, militarist culture. So when the Spaniards arrived and gave conquered and tributary peoples a chance to destroy their oppressor, they leapt to form an alliance to destroy Aztec culture, and tear down the largest city of the Western Hemisphere. And they did.
+
But some people never learn, and to this day we hear and see, in book and film, "heroic" tales of insane militaristic adventures and defenses of old, from Troy to Marathon to the conquests of Alexander, to all those to whom we can attach a defensible "spin". I haven't seen any glorifications of the slauters of Jengis Khan or Tamerlane, yet. But at the rate we're going, I wouldn't be surprised to see such massive criminals not merely whitewashed but glorified. (In the 1956 movie The Conqueror, John Wayne played a young Jengis Khan, who is shown in a sympathetic lite, and whose massive crimes against humanity thousands of miles outward from his home in Mongolia are not shown.) It would be very hard to show the reality of the vast slauter and devastation caused by the Mongol Hordes and still put a heroic spin upon them.
+
Alas, some Mexican nationalists actually dare to pretend pride in the Aztecs! And that kind of insane pride in savagery is not universally condemned.
+
But when Germans organize neo-Nazi groups, they are actively persecuted by the German authorities, who even attempt to impose their anti-Nazi laws extraterritorially, to punish non-Germans acting hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
+
The people of Mongolia have very warm feelings for Jengis Khan, and brag how that one man probably has more progeny living today than any other man in the history of the world, "about 8% of the men in a large region of Asia (about 0.5% of the men in the world)" (and, thus, their children too). Forgotten are the literally uncounted dead killed by their people and their culture of callous, even exuberant violence. They even want to erect a statue to the monster in Washington, DC! I would suggest to any public board contemplating approval of such a statue that they read The Devil's Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe by James Chambers first. If they nonetheless approve such a statue, I suggest the next statue they approve be one of Adolf Hitler.
+
In the United States, unreconstructed Confederate sympathizers gloss over the highest of treasons and glorify the worst traitors any society has ever had, the Robert E. Lees and Jefferson Davises, and name parks and highways after them, erect monuments to them, and fly the Confederate Battle Flag as a sign of Southern pride. Never mind that the Confederacy started a war that killed over 600,000 Americans, most of them on the Union side. Never mind Andersonville, a Confederate prison for Union soldiers that was the Auschwitz of its time. The United States, always easily confused, actually consented to the slap in the face that the State of Virginia committed against the national government, and accepted a statue of the world's single worst traitor, Robert E. Lee, to stand in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol Building! Astounding. A man who tried with all his might to destroy the United States, and who single-handedly prolonged the war by months or years, and thereby killed uncounted thousands of Americans, North and South, stands as a hero in the Capitol of the country he tried to destroy. That is militarism gone mad, and there's more where that came from.
+
Robert E. Lee was not an honorable man. The criminal things he did in uniform were not heroic, only criminal. But because he wore a uniform, we pretend he was a honorable man. I guess Charles Manson's only mistake was not to design a uniform and create his Family into an Army.
+
All militaries are evil. At present, some are a necessary evil. But they are all evil.
+
Civilization must work itself away from militarism and stop glorifying murderers in uniforms. We must revise all the institutions that have produced the need for militaries. We must merge countries and subject them to a common law agreed by consent of the people and enforced by courts and police, not armies. We must glory not in the warmakers but in the peacemakers — and stop calling weapons things like "Peacemaker" and "Peacekeeper".
+
Militarism is corrosive, and has destroyed other civilizations. It can destroy ours too. Let's end all the rhetoric about our "heroes" in Iraq, where they have no right nor reason to be. There may be some heroes in Afghanistan, a just war against a monstrous, militarist, and murderous cult, the Taliban. But the only American heroes as regards Iraq are those demanding an immediate and unconditional pullout.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,082 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:00 PM

 
'Thumbs Up' Nonsense. AOL early today hilited a story about our completely misunderstanding the ancient Roman gesture by which a crowd supposedly indicated whether a gladiator should be killed or spared after defeat.
+
(I must wonder about the whole fite-to-the-death thing about gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. In the case of gladiators who were spared the death penalty if they agreed to fite in the arena, it is conceivable that Romans did pit criminals against each other, to the death. But other types of gladiators? I am certain that enemies of Roman paganism in the Christian church exaggerated the cruelty and barbarism of the pagan regime that preceded the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. The legend of gladiatorial fites to the death also conveniently plays into other groups' agendas, such as the Jewish insistence that it was the Romans, not the Jews, who killed Jesus (even tho the New Testament says plainly that the Jewish crowd demanded Jesus be killed even tho Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, wanted to free him, finding no guilt in him worthy of death). Protestants intent on maligning Roman Catholicism also love the idea of the Roman Church somehow being implicated in the supposed monstrous cruelty of ancient Rome. How much deliberate human death was ever inflicted in ancient Roman amphitheaters — NOT including the Colosseum, by the way — is probably not knowable. Even most of the writings of contemporary Latin authors are known only from copies from later times, made by Christian (anti-pagan) scribes.)
+
In any case, the AOL story asserts, with absolute certitude, that we have it all wrong. The thumbs-up gesture urged death; and there was no thumbs-down sign, only a closed fist with the thumb not extended. That sounded to me bizarre, in that the popular understanding is that thumbs-up represented a good thing, which is the way it is universally employed today in the West. So I checked Wikipedia, which, it turns out, may be the source of that (mis)information. In that article, the anonymous author(s) make the same assertion:

Actually, death to a gladiator was shown as a thumbs up whereas to keep the gladiator alive the people showed their fist with their thumb tucked under their hand — hidden.

Oh? Earlier in the very same article, this passage states plainly:

However, the type of gesture described by the phrase pollice verso and its meaning is unclear in the historical and literary record.

A footnote at the end of that sentence leads to James Grout: The Gladiator and the Thumb, part of the Encyclopædia Romana, which says plainly:

There is no clear textual evidence for the position of the thumb, and the Latin does not admit to precise understanding.

Yet, despite that express acknowledgment that the actual position of the thumb cannot be known from the existing texts, the author goes on to assert he knows that a thumb pressed against the fist, not pointed upward, indicated mercy. It is, in short, a complete fabrication to say that we know that thumbs-up meant death! Contemptible arrogance.
+
How about evidence from the use of the gesture today? Wikipedia says:

In Italy, in the right context, it can simply indicate the number one. Generally it is perceived as "OK".

So in ITALY, where ROME is and always has been located, thumbs-up means "OK". Are we to assume, then, that Italians, who speak a form of very-late Latin, and in many other aspects of culture are very much Roman, the popular culture has flipped the meaning of thumbs-up? Or perhaps we are to believe that "death" and "OK" are the same thing in Italian culture.

In Egypt, it means perfect or very good. It's widely common between people.

[By contrast,] "Thumbs up" traditionally translates as the foulest of gesticular insults in some Middle Eastern countries — the most straightforward interpretation is "Up yours, pal!" The sign has a similarly pejorative meaning in parts of West Africa, South America (except Brazil), Iran, Greece, and Sardinia, according to Roger E. Axtell's book Gestures: The Do's and Taboos of Body Language Around the World.

Egypt is in the Middle East, but was an important part of the Roman Empire, unlike, say, the Arabian Peninsula. Egypt is also a very traditional society, and in Egypt, thumbs-up is a very positive gesture.
+
With the exception of a very few pockets (noted above), the thumbs-up gesture has a positive meaning throughout the Western world. The entire West descends culturally from Rome. We are now, however, to believe that the entire Western world, some 1.25 billion people in Europe, the bulk of the Americas, and Australasia, somehow got it wrong. I don't believe it.
+
Let's go back to the Latin phrase about gladiatorial combat: "pollice verso" means, literally, "turned thumb". Now we need to do something all too few people seem to do: think.
+
Almost all of us have at least one thumb. So take a moment and look at your thumb(s). Start with your arms at your side. Which way do your thumbs point? Forward. Lift your forearm up into horizontal position, as to shake hands. Which way do your thumbs point? Upward. If you indicate the length of something with your outstretched hands, which way do your thumbs point? Upward.
+
When you type, or rest your hands on an armrest, your thumbs point sideways, toward each other. If you go to carry something, like a tray, or make a hand gesture while talking (such as to ask "What?"), the thumbs point outward.
+
Logically, wouldn't "verso" mean turned the opposite of the way the thumbs ordinarily point? In virtually all normal human activities, the one direction the thumbs do not ever naturally point is downward from the plane of the hand. Rotating an extended thumb downward is something of an unnatural exertion, which tends to force the elbows outward if the arm is bent, or is slitely uncomfortable if the arm is strate. The thumb naturally points forward, upward, inward, or outward, in almost every activity. The one direction the thumb almost never points is downward.
+
So what do you think "pollice verso" actually meant? It's clear to me it meant thumb pointing down, which is exactly the way that it is interpreted in the popular culture. Why, then, do some people insist on rewriting history to claim the opposite of what we all understand, just to be different?
+
We will never really know, with certitude, what "pollice verso" meant to ancient Romans attending a gladiatorial combat, unless someone from another culture, who felt it necessary to explain the gesture to his own countrymen, has written an absolutely unambiguous description in an authentic text in his own foreign language in a manuscript or engraving that actually dates to the time of the observation. Absent that, it is completely unreasonable to assert that we know now that thumbs-up actually meant kill, not spare the life of, a gladiator.
+
When will people stop trying to rewrite history on the basis of nothing but personal arrogance?
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,080 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:28 PM

 
Self-Intensifying Delusion. The Democratic Party has lost all touch with reality, and the Republicans are also flirting with delusion. The longer pundits keep talking about this Presidential contest without saying plainly that a black man and white woman are unelectable, that long will ever more deformed thinking seize control of the Democratic Party.
+
BaLack Obama, trying to curry favor with Billary's base, has publicly thanked Hillary Clinton for widening opportunities for his dauters! So now not only has he made whites in general uneasy about a black man taking over the 'White' House but he has also now raised the specter of a series of black female Presidents! Let's be plain: BaLack Obama is an unelectable "mulatto" — a word I have not heard in this campaign, because it's not politically correct, but represents the worst nitemare of two hundred million Americans, both black and white: their child marrying someone of the 'opposite race' and having "gray" babies. BaLack is running for President of a Nation much of which has serious problems with blacks, not just in the South, but also in the suburbs of major cities ravaged by black riots and crime, and among white-fliters all over the country.
+
His remark about opportunities for his dauters means that Obama has now joined in one person everything conservatives hate about Democratic politics: the raising up of blacks at the expense of whites, and of women at the expense of men. Brilliant!
+
The Democrats are so deluded that their "dream team" is BaLack and Hillary, and even without Hillary, BaLack has taken up all the tenets of Radical Feminism that we rejected when we refused to pass the so-called "Equal Rights Amendment" in the Seventies and early Eighties. But the heck with national rejection of Radical Feminism. Full speed ahead into the Brave New World of lesbian feminism, where women take over everything, including the Presidency, and (white) men are pushed to the bottom of society so first black men and then black women can rule the Nation.
+
On the Republican side, people are today talking up Mitt Romney as a possible Vice Presidential candidate on the McCain ticket. Can the Republicans really be as deluded as Democrats, ignore the fact that Romney was trounced by anti-Mormon feeling, and install a Mormon within "a heartbeat of the Presidency" of an old man whom many Americans think will not survive even a full first term? If so, then maybe we can have a black President after all, because there are many white Southern Baptists who might hate the thought of a black President but would rather have a black man who is a member of a mainline Protestant denomination than a white man who is a member of a cult.
+
It would be extremely stupid of Mr. McCain to choose a Mormon as running mate. It would also be stupid, but not AS stupid, for him to choose Mike Huckabee, a fool who readily tells the world that he does not believe in evolution. But McCain is insane, so who knows what will control his decision? I suspect that he will not have complete latitude in the selection of a running mate, anyway, since the Republican Party cannot count on independents and crossover votes alone, but must solidify the Republican "base" as well, and the Republican base is mainline Protestant.
+
So why all the talk of Romney being a top contender for the Veep spot on the Republican ticket? Do TV pundits really believe the crap they unload? Don't their noses detect the smell? Or are they just trying to keep the nonsense going and pretend that this country is about to do something historic, on either side of the November contest? The Democrats will create the first black President, or woman President, or the Republicans will create the first Mormon President if John McCain dies in office (or before)! S-u-u-u-u-u-u-re they will.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:31 PM

 
BaLack Obama. Pundits feign surprise that North Carolina, a Southern state despite its name, is showing a supposed change of heart regarding Barack Obama. What a surprise! Southerners thinking about NOT voting for a black man! Who on Earth would have anticipated such a thing?
+
(Imitation) Feminism affords cover for white racists, whereby they can pretend to be progressives by hiding their racism behind a preference for white women who are cast as a "minority" who need to be "liberated", and so it's not that they are rightwing, regressive scum, no!, they're just decent, open-minded human beings opening their hearts to downtrodden women. Of course they are — but only when the alternative is hiring black men, voting for black men, etc. When there is no pressure to hire "minorities" (and of course women are the majority of the population, not a minority at all) and women won't work cheaper, white employers will hire white men every time. But if women will work cheaper, then employers are happy to employ docile, obedient women who only want to get thru the workday and get home to their family, rather than men, even white men, who expect something from a job other than a "job". Men might aspire to a "career". Most women just want a job for a paycheck to take care of their kids.
+
Women who aspire to a career of a kind that requires dedication often have to prove that they will take their job seriously and put it FIRST. That's easy enuf for single women, but almost entirely unacceptable to married women with children. An employer wants all employees on the job every workday, on time, with their mind fully on their work. They can't have a woman staying out of work at inopportune times to take care of a sick kid or elderly parent. The result is that even a substantial proportion of "career women" who accept that they want kids, "stop out" for several years to raise their children past infancy, and may then find themselves at a stark disadvantage when trying to return to the workforce, especially in a field in which technology has changed.
+
But if a racist pressured to hire a "minority" applicant has to choose between a black, single man who is current on the appropriate technology and ready to devote more than 35 hours a week to diligent pursuit of his job responsibilities, on the one hand, and a white woman who has some catching up to do in the technological area, and may need some flextime to take care of family responsibilities, on the other hand, he will hire the white woman. Because you can teach a white woman new technology, and work around some minor scheduling problems, but you can't change a black man's race.
+
BaLack Obama cannot be elected President of the United States in 2008. It ain'ta gonna happen, despite the pretense of media pundits that with a war that's going badly and an economy in recession and a dollar that has fallen like a stone and all the other things that have gone wrong, it should be a "slam-dunk" for ANY Democratic nominee to defeat ANY Republican, and especially a Republican who stands by some of the hugely unpopular President Bush's policies. Except for three things: race, gender, and the fact that John McCain is NOT President Bush, and everybody knows that.
+
There is of course an attempt by people to portray John McCain as George Bush in different clothing, just as there is an attempt to portray BaLack Obama as Jeremiah Wright hiding black rage. But the people aren't stupid. They know that McCain is not Bush and Obama is not Wright. They also know that Obama is BaLack and McCain is White. And Hillary Clinton is not any of those people, tho she does wear men's clothing to try to impress people that she is as tuf (butch) as any man. But one thing "Hillary" is, is BILL Clinton, the only reason her candidacy is taken in the slitest seriously. So whereas BaLack and John are different from each other and the current President, Hillary CLINTON is NOT 'her own woman' but her husband, hidden. Were she, by some appalling miracle, to become the Democratic nominee, she would be trounced for her gender and for her husband, who disgraced the Nation for years of sexual scandals, scandals the Nation does not want to return to. No, we'll take a nice old man with a pretty younger wife, thank you very much.
+
(Indeed, if by some incomprehensible accident Billary were to be elected President, someone would have to sue to rule them out of taking office because of the 22nd Amendment. Perhaps a group of Congressmen could assert standing to challenge an illegal candidacy.)
+
So the knives have come out, and the "race card" has been dealt from the bottom of the deck by the Clinton campaign. No matter. If they didn't do it, the Republicans would.
+
(Media Stupidity. I had to reboot my computer after installing some new software, so turned on TV and watched some news while waiting. CNN was trying to cover the Guam Presidential primary — which, more than incidentally, should never have been permitted, since Guam has no electoral votes so cannot vote for President — and, at the same time, a live appearance by Barack Obama. They had subtitling across the bottom of the screen, with the CNN logo above that to the left. And then they put up a box, 'Where They Stand' on the left, and put up info about various of Obama's stances, the bottom words of which appeared BEHIND the CNN logo, where, that is to say, you could not read them! Is everybody in media an idiot?)
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,066 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:52 PM