Cultura Humanitas

HEY ISRAEL, IRAQ THANKS YOU FOR ALL THE MURDERED CIVILIANS

2012-01-26T17:34:00.000-08:00

As progressive site Mondoweiss has reported, many analysts believe that if about 30 American Jewish zionist neocons had been sent to a remote island for a year or so after 9/11 the Iraq war would never have happened.

HA-HA ISRAEL, OBAMA AND US GENERALS SLAP YOU DOWN

2012-01-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

Finally, the US stands up for its own interests and slows down the bullying and manipulations of israel by cancelling the joint exercise planned for Spring. Hillary flatly declares that the US is not behind the assassinations inside Iran of their nuclear scientists; Panetta declares strongly (again) that israel must make the peace deal; and now thousands of US troops are in israel. The Jewish money critical to US politics (70% of Democratic Party money and up to 40% of Republican Party money according to Mondoweiss and others) is not harming Obama and Democrats even though more is flowing to Republicans - who's presidential candidates are slavishly promising israel anything and everything - including the war they want us to fight with Iran. Iran has not started a war in hundreds of years. Iraq is their neighbor and, of course, they will seek influence there. The US fights many wars all over the world every year (most are covert ops), and israel is engaged in an illegal ongoing war-crime for decades now. The whole fake war-on-terror is an israel plan, and it is all designed to bring them regional power - to turn them into the superpower of the Middle East with the blood and treasure of Americans as their tool to this end. Those thousands of US troops now in israel are there for a reason - they are the beginning a wave. The US will eventually place many more thousands in israel (probably at that base near the Tel Aviv airport built without israeli input) and we will then, finally, impose our will upon israel in the self-interest of the United States. Israel has never been a friend to America and they sold our military and trade secrets to our enemies as they lock us out of their market that we support with grants and aid, never ever do what we ask or demand, and continually engage in provocative military actions and sales that harm US interests.

TERRIFIC POST ON ISRAELIFICATION OF AMERICAN SECURITY ON MONDOWEISS

2011-12-03T19:06:00.000-08:00

Terrific. It's here

ATTEMPTING TO UTTERLY DESTROY THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

2011-12-01T21:02:00.000-08:00

"War-on-terror" advocates (the usual suspects: israel, Likkudniks, defense-contractors, etc.) are attempting to use terrorism fears to tear to shreds the U.S. Constitution by completing the job they started with the Patriot Act and other anti-Constitutional laws passed after 9/11 that infringe upon citizens' liberties. Led primarily by Republicans in the U.S. Senate, sections of the new defense bill would allow U.S. territory to be declared into a war zone and subject all U.S. citizens to military detainment (indefinite), suspension of their Habeas Corpus rights. Bin Laden is dead, Al Queda is almost gone, the needless Iraq and Afghanistan wars are winding down, and there is no credible threat of major terrorist action presently and much of the motivation for it is ebbing - democracy has swept through Muslim nations and Islamist political groups have had to run in elections distancing themselves image-wise from their radicalism to gain public support. Fear is the coin-of-the-realm for the War Party and it's all about using the United States to make israel the regional superpower in the Middle East. Only 2 Republican Senators voted against this attempt to destroy America, one of whom is this fellow. Supposedly Obama will veto the final bill if the provisions make it through.

STUNNING: U.S. OVER 65s WORTH 47 TIMES UNDER 35s

2011-11-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

We started Social Security so the elderly could live with some dignity and not go hungry or end up on the streets, and the program has worked great. The WWII generation and Boomers also came of age during a greatly expanding economy and wage gains that closely matched productivity gains, and housing was affordable, health insurance cheap, benefits at work good. Since Reagan, our nation shifted to a deficit-economy based upon borrowing and people who came of age since then have had student loans, consumer credit debt, higher prices, lower wages and fewer benefits, so it is surprise only that the gap is so damn huge - 47 times!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/07/us-wealth-gap-young-old_n_1079372.html

A lot grandparents, parents of the WWII and Boomer generations wonder why their kids can't "make it" the way they did: the opportunities are not there and the playing field has entirely changed - that's why ... just as the parents of Boomers and WWII era folks often ended up poor and destitute until we enacted Social Security it took a fundamental shift in our economy before opportunities were created and we're at that historic threshold again - if WWII and Boomer parents want to stop supporting their children and grandchildren, they need to push for policies that create opportunity for their offspring. Unfortunately many younger than 50 people are very cynical and do not participate in the political process in percentages anywhere near what more aged groups do.

Here's a plan: Lift the cap on what people earning over $106,000 pay into Social Security so they pay the same percentage as those who earn less do - this will raise around $700 billion per year, which would allow a DOUBLING of Social Security benefits so more Boomers can retire early and open up jobs for their children; Impose a millionaire's tax that makes the top 1% pay a 50% rate and raise the Capital Gains tax to 35% since most people with money make money off of money not through work (this could raise several hundred billion a year too); end Bush tax cuts for top earners - go back to Clinton rates or Reagan rates (raises another several hundred billion a year); institute a national healthcare system to compete with insurance industry to drive down prices overall (health care is 7% of the economy).

NETANYAHU READY TO IMPERIL THE WORLD FOR HIS OWN POWER: IRAN ATTACK

2011-11-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

I guess the hubris of israeli leaders really does know no bounds, and obviously the lessons of the Balkans conflict of the 90s is lost on the zionist nutters in charge in the apartheid state that is israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are trying to launch a unilateral attack on Iran in a shameful and disgusting attempt to save and bolster their own political careers. Balkan leaders did this too - they stoked age-old ethnic divisions and started wars to enhance their own power and untold numbers were killed as a result. Even the Mossad - especially former leader Ephraim Halevy (image)- and Shin Bet (the state intelligence and security services for israel) are firmly against any Iran attack, which makes this so obviously a political gambit. An attack on Iran by anybody has no upside: the Iranian people hate their leadership and it will change in time; targeting the nuclear facilities will only slow down the Iran nuclear program and diplomacy which sees an inspection regime could suffice ... further, Iran only needs to go 90% of the way to getting nuclear weapons to have 90% of the benefits of having them; the United States would be the biggest loser since an israeli attack on Iran would only harm our Treasury, our soldiers, put our civilians at risk and lower our standing in the world even further. The Obama administration needs to make clear to israel that the light is not green or yellow, but RED - no attack.

GLOBALIZATION DESTROYED LINK BETWEEN PRODUCTIVITY AND WAGE GAINS

2011-11-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

Fairness was killed by Reagan and the "free trade" corporatists: it was a successful plot to pit workers of the world (1st against 3rd and "emergers") to drive down overall wages and benefits. This chart shows what I was railing about back in 1995 - hard work no longer means fair rewards, especially in America. I got Harold Ickes and John Sweeney of AFL-CIO and others interested in my WORK=FAIR campaign to tie wage gains to productivity gains and to mandate a Basic Benefits Package (including paid vacation and full free healthcare), but never got traction for the campaign. The Clintonite corporatists were never going to go for it, and bankster class was busy elevating China so they would never allow it. Here is what it was: WORK=FAIR

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS

2011-10-27T16:36:00.000-07:00

This Libertard militia nutjob was busted recently - article here ... What is so compelling is that this type of person who personifies and is the look of the intolerant Libertarian/Conservative shouters among the Republican/Red side of American politics is such a blazing hypocrite: FBI rules require that items searched and seized during their investigation be returned and among those items were a video of tranny porn and a remote-controlled pink dildo. And this fellow was chaplain of his local militia before they found out. Now if he were a liberal/progressive/Lefty-whatnot his compatriots might have a snicker if they didn't already know his sexual proclivities they would still be supportive and saying, "Hey, get your freak on however makes you happy!" ... and would be concerned that he got his expensive remote-dildo back without an FBI bug in the plug. That's the live-and-let-live liberal way. But for self-righteous and holier-than-thou right-wingers - mostly born again Christo-fascists - this type of smack-down is what they hate the most - it reveals the underbelly of complex humanity within their own ranks and they rankle at having to deal with their brethren that bust the facade they so carefully cultivate of a particular type of morality and behavior. That's why liberals/progressives have so much snide derision for right-wingers: we know you're human too and you hide in the shadows what we celebrate.

HEY COPS, QUIT HARMING OCCUPY PROTESTERS

2011-10-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

This guy is a veteran - he fought for our country, yet Oakland police shot rubber bullets at his head when all he was doing was exercising his most fundamental right as an American - to make political protest speech. You cops out there busting heads for the bankster Wall Street crooks better wake up: nearly all of you are UNION and it is YOUR pensions that were decimated by the fraud these protesters are shouting about ... it is YOUR housing values that crumbled that these protesters are shouting about. All union cops should be marching WITH the protesters - wake up and smell your own self-interest and quit being thugs for the banksters.

THE U.S. SKILLS GAP

2011-10-21T11:53:00.000-07:00

The wealthy 1% are blaming the "skills gap" for American workers' problems - stating that they lack the skill-set for a 21st Century economy. If these bankster/corporatists had not made the strategic decisions some 30+ years ago to privatize education and all kinds of public services, indebt our students with massive loan fees, and to seek off-shore cheaper labor, we would not be in this situation. The greedy capitalist pigs are blaming the victims (taking lessons from israel?) when they created the situation through their lobbyists and money affecting primarily trade legislation and their assault on organized labor. This situation was entirely calculated and many academics and policy experts warned all these years about the problem approaching and now we're in it. It also points up the great lie about "job retraining" - it is an after-the-fact band-aid to quell social disruption and not a solution - this retraining is never for the elite, high-paying jobs that we've offshored, it is always low or mid-level work - a lateral transfer or downgrade for most workers. The bankster/corporatists intentionally created the skills gap in order to increase profits at the expense of workers.

U.S. MARINE BERATES NYPD FOR TACTICS AGAINST OCCUPY PROTESTERS

2011-10-17T18:01:00.000-07:00

About time. A decorated U.S. Marine lambasted uniformed NYPD officers for being overly aggressive toward the Occupy protesters. You can see the sheepish shame on the faces of some of the officers, knowing the truth of the soldier's words. At one point he says he was part of a unit to control a riot in Iraq and they did not use the shameful tactics NYPD is using, because "we were trying to win the hearts and minds." This could be a watershed moment in crystallizing the perception of the protests and in broadening their appeal and possibly even begin the rolling back of the Orwellian state the neocons have imposed upon all of us since 9/11. We need young, passionate, articulate leaders - I hope U.S. Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas goes into politics - we need you. ... and, hey you NYPD and all other cops, you are UNION and had your pensions eroded and housing values lowered through the bankster fraud - so JOIN the protests - and stop cracking heads for the banksters

THE REAL STORY OF HOW ISRAEL WAS CREATED

2011-10-11T14:21:00.000-07:00

[updated 12-26-11]
Part of israel's ongoing theft of Palestinian land and endless terror campaign against the locals involves delegitimizing them as a people, claiming "there is no such thing as a Palestinian." Truth is, the zionists forced out 700,000 Palestinians and committed many massacres before declaring their state. In fact, it is israel that is not legitimate: it never has had the legal sanction of a state. Brilliant piece by If Americans Knew's Alison Weir here illustrates how and why. And MJ Rosenberg weighs in recently here

THE LEFT'S DIRTY HIPPY PROBLEM

2011-10-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

Any time the Left, progressives, whatever you want to call people who are not right-wing assholes, try to get a movement going the dirty hippies show up to make it look silly because, of course, the media interview them. Cleverness or weirdness should not overshadow the message. If the point is to create change you must convey a coherent message, get it out there, and motivate others to join in. The Occupy Wall Street protests have the right idea, but prove again that the Left just doesn't understand messaging. Remember Aristotle's rules of drama? Unity of Time / Unity of Place / Unity of Action ... there has to be ONE main message, ONE main action, and ONE place and time to do it - since this is a sustained campaign, Wall Street and any major bank anywhere is the place, and the chant should be only this, "Pay back the money you stole!" And why do these protesters in America ever destroy property and confront the police? You can make your point peacefully and with dignity. With regard to the Occupy Wall Street protests, activists need to be contacting police departments and remind them that their officers are union and had their pensions screwed with, their property values diminished and, really, should be marching with the protesters.

GOD IS PUNISHING YOU, TEXAS

2011-10-08T02:04:00.000-07:00

For stealing tens of billionS from California through Bush/Enron scams and the fake energy-crisis of 2000; for being so narrow-minded politically; for your cowboy fantasy mindset; for your corruption in cahoots with the Mexican drug cartels; for your Christo-fascist extremism; your failure to pay the federal minimum wage; and many other things too ... and, no, you can't have any of California's extra water

SURVEILLANCE IS PRIVACY: THE ZUCKERBERG MODEL

2011-09-26T00:49:00.000-07:00

Brilliant critique of Facebook

YET ANOTHER COVER THEORY ON WTC COLLAPSES

2011-09-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

A decade later yet another theory is floated as to how the Twin Towers somehow collapsed on 9/11/01 - this time the diversion, er, theory is that chemicals mixed with the heat to cause a catastrophic explosion (did you see a big explosion just prior to the collapses?) - article here ... the fires burned less than 2 hours in one tower and less than 1 hour in the other with no major explosion witnessed - the towers collapsed inward upon themselves on their own footprint. What doesn't get mentioned hardly at all is that in 1975 a fire raged for over 3 hours in one of the towers and spread up communications shafts to other floors. And there were no sprinklers in place. No structural steel was damaged, no weakness in the trusses was detected. The explosion in a nearby garage that shook the towers in the 1993 attack also did not show damage to the previously burned areas. The WTC were full of asbestos between 400 and 2000 tons; it would have taken double-digit billions more to tear them down than it did to build them; by May 2001 the courts had ruled against the NY/NY Port Authority (WTC owners) who had sued to get insurance money to remove the asbestos; just weeks before the attacks the WTC - which couldn't be torn down (due to the asbestos threat), couldn't be remodeled (asbestos and regulations) were leased for 99 years by Larry Silverstein who had built WTC 7 and who took out insurance policies worth billions which included in its provisions terrorist attacks. To date Silverstein has cleared over $5 billion in his insurance policies (more than he paid by almost double) and he is on video saying the "decision was made to pull it" of building 7. When the truth emerges about who put together the 9/11 attacks, and which ancillary players participated and pushed it through that are American or Israeli citizens (or both), and who profited - it will be an ugly ugly tapestry indeed - and it will be a far darker day for America to realize that we were so utterly played that day.

U.S. SHAME: OUR SUBSERVIENCE TO ISRAEL

2011-09-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

As predicted, President Obama went to the UN and spoke out against Palestinian statehood at the behest of our zionist parasite controllers. The argument presented was ridiculous. The "path to peace" has nothing to do with Palestine seeking statehood through the UN. The Palestinian bid clearly meets the simple requirement the UN presents. It is only logical that the UN grant Palestinian statehood and that the U.S. support it - but the influence of zionists upon U.S. policy has completely perverted our policies against our self-interest.

POLL: AMERICANS SUPPORT PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD BID

2011-09-18T17:53:00.000-07:00

According to this "global" poll, Americans support the UN statehood bid by Palestinians by 45% to 36% ... I'm shocked, and grateful. As dumb as my fellow Americans can be, and so often ill-informed or uninformed, they get the truth in this matter, despite the domination of US policy and media by zionists and their endless pro-israel, pro-zionism messaging

SARAH PALIN THE FRAUD

2011-09-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

The new Joe McGinniss book on Sarah Palin is out, and I'm sure it's all true. That woman is a farce and is reflective of just how hollow the American political process has become that a segment of the voting population is so desperate to believe in a certain fantasy vision and narrative, they can overlook the obvious - that Sarah Palin is just plain stupid.

SAUDI THREAT: PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD GETS INTERESTING

2011-09-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

Which sleazy character do we choose? Saudi Arabia has firmly warned the United States that it will sever its alliance (for what it's worth) with the USA if it exercises a veto in the UN to try to stop Palestinian statehood. The point is really moot, because there is no legal basis for vetoing a new member state that meets all the criteria set forth by the UN for membership as Palestine has. This is about whether my country, the United States, will welcome democracy which it says it heralds and loves or if it will continue to bow down to its controlling parasite, radically supremacist zionist israel. Saudi Arabia, who exerts most influence over OPEC and gouges the American consumer with price fixing for decades and exports their radical Wahabist version of Islam which leads to so much anti-Western and anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world (and most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis), or racist, apartheid, land-stealing, mafia-terror-state israel - which essentially controls the U.S. Congress and much of our media and exerts great influence over our banking, trade, military, technology and other economic sectors. Pick your poision, America - it is going to be very very bitter either way. The right thing to do, of course, is to support and celebrate the creation of a Palestinian state - but our zionist masters won't allow that, so now we must choose - cheap oil or israel. We may thank Saudi Arabia down the road for putting us in this situation to compel us to finally wrest the israeli parasite from controlling our levers of power.

9/11 AS PSYCHOSIS

2011-09-10T22:09:00.000-07:00

It's been ten years since 9/11. What then are the lessons? Where do we go from here?

Second question first, since it's the easiest: We just keep on keepin' on - what choice do we have? Answering the question as a regular American (as opposed to a political leader), there is nothing we should change in how we live our lives, except to fight harder for a restoration of the civil liberties we as a society gave up in the wake of 9/11 (Patriot Act and similar new laws and rules), and to demand of our political leaders that they put America's interests first when committing to military conflict.

What we learned from 9/11 is that when you follow Aristotle's rules for drama: unity of time, unity of place, unity of action - a terrorist attack can be wildly spectacular and emotionally shattering well beyond its actual physical impacts. This is the key lesson of 9/11: the attacks were monumentally dramatic and created a climate of fear. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the 2004 Indonesian tsunami and tens of thousands are presumed to have perished earlier this year in Japan's massive 9.0 earthquake and tsunamis. Traffic deaths in the U.S. top 40,000 per year, and our gun homicides top 8,000 per year. Red Alert: only 33 U.S. deaths have happened as a result of Muslim terrorism since 9/11 while 150,000 Americans have been murdered in that time.

According to a German risk specialist who did a study of American flying and driving habits in the year after 9/11, over 1500 additional road deaths were recorded - with the assumption being that Americans were afraid to fly and took their cars (airline traffic went down 12% to 20% while road use jumped).

[ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-road-deaths ]

So, what is the takeaway? Do we care about human lives? Is the lesson of 9/11 that we need to value human life and seek not to harm and destroy it? If so, when then did we give into fear so easily so that half as many who died in the 9/11 attacks would die in the next year on our roadways because they were afraid to fly? There were no big memorials nor fundraisers or television specials for those victims of car accidents in the year after 9/11, nor of gun violence.

Fear is the key. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and all those that conspired to bring about the attacks and those who helped the process along sought to create fear and they did so brilliantly. And that fear was capitalized upon in oh so many ways. Fear was the ultimate prize, not the deaths of human beings. There was no FDR to remind us that, there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Private military contractors and the Pentagon saw a huge influx of money (war is a racket after all). Intelligence services and private security companies were basically given a green light in the U.S. to seek more government money and to take more liberties with the law. The laws were rewritten to weaken our commitment to the Geneva Conventions against torture and to provide calculated gray areas for our military, intelligence and contracted personnel to commit torture. All kinds of people profited off of fear, none the least of which were the neocons who years before 9/11 had openly hoped in their infamous white paper for "a new Pearl Harbor" to serve as a catalyst for asserting global hegemony as the world's now lone "superpower."

People died in 9/11, in visceral, tragic, in-the-moment ways. We saw live television coverage of bodies jumping from the WTC towers rather than be engulfed by flames. We saw the ash-covered mass of humanity streaming from the site of the collapsed towers - knowing full-well that some of that ash was the remains of human beings.

Who could have pulled off such a spectacular attack? Clearly elements of the Saudi elite were involved and due to our vulgar and nefarious relationship with the Saudi regime as it relates to oil, we let them all off the hook, even allowing members of the Bin Laden family to fly out on charter planes when the entirety of the U.S. citizen population was grounded. Elements of our own government had the capability, but to date there is little in the way of proof that the U.S. military or defense establishment had any involvement -it seems they were used - particularly the drills being run at exactly the same time as the attacks which confused those monitoring air-traffic. The government of is Israel certainly is implicated, as their agents, actors and advocates populate every single aspect of the attack, before and after.

I won't bother going into the Israeli connections to the attacks, which could fill a warehouse and are well-known and widely available online, other than to mention how absolutely disgusting and reprehensible it was for then former prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu to go on live U.S. television and declare the attacks to be, "very good for Israel," and then shamelessly launch an orchestrated Israeli government campaign to tie Israel's struggles with the Palestinians as directly equivalent to the attacks upon America. Fortunately Americans saw through this despicable ruse and didn't bite.

The benefit of hindsight is that it gives you perspective if you are thoughtful person willing to apply it. The 9/11 attacks were spectacular, dramatic, emotional, riveting, bold, mesmerizing, and shattering. But the number of human lives killed in the attacks pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed in the U.S. wars launched in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (and elsewhere) in the wake of 9/11. By some estimates over 800,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq alone, in a war which we never should have launched since Iraq had no connection to 9/11. Our media hasn't allowed us to see the horrors of war since the days of Vietnam, so the emotional impact of so many numbers getting bigger (civilian body count) doesn't result in emotional resonance.

We care about human lives, all human lives, or we don't. If we pick and choose which ones we care about, then we are supremacists. On a small scale you might save your loved one first over a stranger after a disaster, but when it comes to making war, it is a deliberative national process and the scale is huge.

We Americans wildly overreacted to 9/11 as a nation. We reacted with emotional trauma, and we were duped by con-artist neocons with a grand plan of global hegemony to pursue "a global war on terror" using 9/11 as a pretext. We lost sense of our wits and gave away our own hard-won freedoms and now live in an America where electronic surveillance and constant monitoring are the norm - yet we were the victims. 9/11 caused us as a nation of people to become mentally unhinged and we will pay the price for a very long time indeed. We gave into fear rather than overcome it. Meanwhile, the true villains behind the 9/11 attacks, Saudi Arabia and Israel, go unpunished.

JOBS SPEECH/PROPOSAL PROVES IT: OBAMA A FRAUD

2011-09-07T13:35:00.000-07:00

A pathetic reactive attempt to arrest the slide in his poll numbers after the base started to abandon him in the wake of the debt ceiling "fight" where he folded yet again - here is my post on the matter at BHO44

FOR ONCE, USA CAPTURES AND JAILS ISRAELI SPY

2011-09-07T12:53:00.000-07:00

There hundreds to thousands more just like him, amazing that the zionist parasite which controls America allowed this prosecution to go forward at all [image: many more israeli agents - Nozette is on the right]

REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN TO DISENFRANCHISE VOTERS PICKS UP PACE

2011-09-03T14:42:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove and the other evil scumbags who plot the voting strategies for the GOP have known for a while that they can't win national elections anymore since they pissed off the Latino population with their anti-immigrant stance, so they've resorted to electronic vote-fixing (2000-Florida, 2002-Georgia, 2004-Ohio respectively for the most egregious examples), and disenfranchisement (trying to make it harder or impossible for certain groups to vote). This chart shows some of what's going on, and this Colbert piece gives a hilarious take on the process underway by Rove, et al.

The Colbert Report
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PERFECT VIDEO SPOOF OF ISRAEL

2011-09-02T14:52:00.000-07:00

Found at Mondoweiss

... and this video series with Israeli journalists lays it out with plain English

PERFECT JOB FOR RICK PERRY

2011-09-01T18:19:00.000-07:00

There really is the perfect job out there for everyone, one that is meant for specifically for you

FOSTER THE PEOPLE

2011-08-25T17:31:00.000-07:00

Love this track (almost all the versions) Pumped Up Kicks by L.A.'s Foster the People ... an instant pop classic ... here's the best version I found (from Craig Ferguson's show) ... Mark Foster makes an unlikely front-man, kind of a combination of Ian McCulloch, Beck and Davey Jones

Here's their next terrific song: Helena Beat [very Devo at the intro then very 60s for the majority of the song - Monkees meets Mamas and the Papas (with a little Logan's Run at the end]

The official video for Helena Beat is terrible - a dumb Road Warrior type thing (how tired is that?) ... Mark, stick to the music and PR people listen to what you're selling first

CREATING JOBS IN AMERICA - HERE'S HOW, OBAMA

2011-08-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

President Obama has been compromised or he was more conservative than he initially presented himself, or he's unwilling to play the game of brinkmanship to win. Nonetheless, he's now pivoted once again to the issue of jobs and is claiming through his spokespeople that his administration can only do so much to create jobs. Nonsense, he can do a great deal. It is long past time that he be BOLD and show some guts. Here's the plan, free of charge:

1. REMOVE THE CAP on what people earning over $105,000 a year pay into Social Security (they pay less of a percentage into it than the lowest paid worker does) - raising hundreds of billion$ per year, to pay for ...

2. DOUBLING SOCIAL SECURITY PAYOUT immediately so people can live on it, thus allowing ...

3. LOWERING THE AGE OF SOCIAL SECURITY TO 60, and urging EARLY RETIREMENT for those 60 and older to OPEN UP JOBS for Gen-X and Gen-Y who are grossly underemployed or unemployed

4. RAISE THE CAPITAL-GAINS TAX immediately, since most of the wealthy don't actually work, they make the bulk of their money through Capital Gains, which are capped at 15% so they pay a much lower percentage than the average worker does ... raise the rate to 35% immediately, then lower it in stages to 30% in 2 years, then 25% in five years and lock it in at that rate

5. MEANS-TEST SOCIAL SECURITY: If you take in more than $250,000 per year you are no longer eligible for benefits must must still pay into the SS fund. If you fall on hard times, of course you then get to take your accrued benefits

6. RAISE THE TOP RATE for income tax to 50% and leave it there forever - it is a happy medium between the 90+% of the Eisenhower era and the ridiculous lows of the George W. Bush era

7. IMPOSE A CORPORATE-ONLY FLAT-TAX: So these corporations cannot skate out of their U.S. tax burden. You do business in the U.S., or with the U.S. and you have a Corporate Flat-Tax Minimum of 3.5% that comes of the top before any other accounting is done

8. MAKE ILLEGAL OFF-SHORING of corporate earnings. All corporations doing business in the U.S. or with the U.S. must have a physical office on U.S. land and pay the Corporate Flat-Tax Minimum

9. REPATRIATION OF OFF-SHORE FUNDS AMNESTY: One last amnesty is offered to get illegal money back home - the wealthy and corporations have 12 months to do it or face fines as high as 10X the amount they hid from their U.S. tax obligations

10. FREE NATIONAL HEALTHCARE CRADLE-TO-GRAVE which creates a U.S. competitor to the health insurance industry and drives down overall prices and imposes much stricter regulations on health insurance companies

The key thing to understand is what "futurist" Jeremy Rifkin pointed out in his 1995 book The End of Work - the U.S. can no longer be a "full employment" society ... technological advance and sheer numbers mean there are too many people for too few jobs - it's that simple. So his suggestion (good) is we shorten the "full-time" work-week from 40 hours to 35, then 30, then 25 and so on.

My suggestion is we need a BASIC BENEFITS PACKAGE of healthcare, livable wage, and paid vacation and retirement funds so even a part-time clerk in a shop can live off what they make with some dignity and without debt.

EVIL ISRAEL TAKES DOWN A REAL THREAT

2011-08-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

Evil israel doing what it does: imposing excessive, racist-driven militarist oppression of Palestinians. In this case one of the kids playing soccer (as seen in the video) is accused of throwing stones at some point in the past. Notice the massive numbers of SWAT-style officers and they way they grab the kid around the neck. How old is the kid - 10? 12? maybe 14. Link here

FANCY LIGHTS UFO

2011-08-01T00:35:00.001-07:00

Pretty. Real? Who knows. Maybe there are UFOs that are Bentleys and some that are Celicas.

CHARTS - US ECONOMY WORST SINCE GREAT DEPRESSION FOR WORKERS

2011-07-08T21:56:00.000-07:00

The Great Recession - worst economy for the average person since the Great Depression - charts

OBAMA - WALL ST. TOOL OR TOO CUTE BY HALF

2011-07-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

What is Obama's game with regard to "austerity" and "debt-reduction?" Frank Rich blasts him in a very good piece as reviewed by Rolling Stone's Matt Tiabbi ... all this "reaching out" to Republicans when he should be putting a boot to their collective necks ... not one indictment of the Wall Street banksters
If, IF, Obama is being crafty then he is just feeding the Repugs enough rope to hang themselves with "austerity." If the Repugs don't violate their pledge to Grover Norquist and allow the Bush tax giveaway to the rich to expire and close tax loopholes for big oil and such, Obama knows that the public will surely punish them at the polls come 2012. Obama is presenting feint after feint to his Repug opponents in this political swordfight, and they are afraid to thrust because they know he has better footing and will surely land a killing blow. The match is essentially already over, Obama the winner, and the Repugs are just trying to position themselves for the least damage in terms of their public image.
The polls show overwhelmingly that the public wants the Bush tax cuts for the rich to expire, for the rich to pay more tax generally, for Wall Street to be punished, for Social Security and Medicare to be untouched, for the Pentagon budget to be cut, and for tax loopholes for the rich and big oil to be closed. Obama has the mightier sword ... but will he use it?

U.S. CONSERVATIVES: DO FAT & STUPID GO TOGETHER?

2011-06-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

I created the above chart the day after the 2008 election which swept Barack Obama to power which shows the only counties in the 2008 election which voted more Republican, and put it on my A Dream Fulfilled blog celebrating his victory (and now criticizing him for being much to much like George W. Bush in his policies). The below chart shows the levels of obesity in the U.S.
... you be the judge.

STOP THE GREED STEVE JOBS - YOU ROTTEN APPLE

2011-06-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks for all the fun and cool gadgets, Steve, but you are a greedy bastard. Share the wealth, you prick. Give a Basic Benefits Package to all Apple Store employees immediately so they don't have to unionize (and make sure this is carried over to all other Apple and related operations): Minimum of $18 an hour / Full Health coverage with dental and vision / 401K or other retirement benefits / 3-6 weeks paid vacation / 6-month maternity leave. Apple Stores make more money per square foot than any other retail operation in the world. Google, your rival, may have Don't Be Evil as their slogan ... I suggest Apple adopt Be A Good Human as their new slogan (that'll be $1 million, please) ... let's start with you.

GAZA FLOTILLA II THREATENED BY OBAMA/HILLARY !?!? WTF?!

2011-06-24T18:50:00.000-07:00

Disgusting. Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State has had her State Dept. issue a warning to Americans planning to participate in the peaceful flotilla against israel's illegal blockade of Gaza. She mentioned "israeli waters," and basically just spewed the most right-wing talking points right out of Netanyahu's office. For one thing, the murders that israel committed against the first flotilla took place in international waters. The new flotilla will be in international waters and will avoid israeli waters. President Obama and Hillary Clinton are bringing great shame upon the United States for taking this wrong position ... and they are proving that America is dictated to by the zionists.

ZIONIST EXTREMIST NUTTERS

2011-06-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

Jewish extremists have so increased their number the past two decades that they now drive the politics of israel, and these crazies now think someone who cursed a rabbinical court 20 years earlier has come back as a surly dog. The dog has been condemned by the Court and is to be stoned to death by children. You can't make up this loony shit.Article here

ZIONIST MONSTERS MAUL PRO-PALESTINIAN AMERICAN JEW

2011-06-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

JELLY !

2011-06-06T21:27:00.000-07:00

Dodecahedrons - What Was Rome Up To?

2011-06-06T18:00:00.000-07:00

Today's what-is-it? Roman Dedecahedron

OBAMA SPEECH STARTS TO PUT ISRAEL IN ITS PLACE

2011-05-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

Long long overdue: Obama stated clearly the '67 borders are it, and said 'No' to permanent occupation. The first attempt to pry the parasite zionists from U.S. national interests is at hand.

HIGGS BOSON FALSE ALARM (AS I SAID IN MY 4/23 POST)

2011-05-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

Article here

CHOMSKY SAYS U.S. AGAINST DEMOCRACY IN MIDDLE EAST

2011-05-13T11:56:00.000-07:00

Chomsky always has something interesting to say - take it for what it's worth:

OSAMA BIN LADEN KILLED - GAME-CHANGER?

2011-05-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

Mouthy congressional staffers blabbed the news before Barack Obama got his big moment on live TV to declare that the U.S. special forces had captured and killed Osama Bin Laden - outside of a mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan. We all kinda knew Pakistan was shielding him (perhaps their ISI or other more islamist elements) ... where had he been all those years? I always thought he was sitting by a pool somewhere and not always huddled among the rocks in the mountains of the Af/Pak no man's zone. Remember, he was a creation of the CIA ... and they ended up taking him out probably. What level of hysteria and renewed call for war and killing emanates from israel after this will be interesting. For U.S. policy there is no clearer meaning to this event than that it is time to end America's occupation and war efforts in Afghanistan and get all of our people out of there yesterday. As the Arab/muslim "Spring" wave continues - with the young, internet-connected toppling their despots from Tunisia to Yemen, a new beginning is at hand, and a positive relationship between the West and the muslim world hinges on putting israel's land-grabbing warmongering in check.

THE OILY TAINT PROBLEM OF THE RIGHT

2011-04-28T12:47:00.000-07:00

It really is clown-time over on the right

IN UNITY THERE IS STRENGTH: FATAH, HAMAS FORM UNITY GOV'T

2011-04-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

At last. Egypt has brokered a deal which brings the Palestinian main political factions together - article here. This is an absolute must toward declaring a state that has any chance of being viable. Hold it together because the israeli onslaught surely will come - probably under some pretext that "Hamas are terrorists so if they join with PLO then they must be terrorists too and if any Palestinian or anybody else supports this 'unity government' well, then, they must be terrorists too." Look for israel to burn more children to death with white phosphorus and then blame the victims.

ZANY SELF-PROMOTION RUN AMOK: DONALD TRUMP

2011-04-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

Unless he returns to his central stake* the last time he dipped his toe into presidential election waters - an asset-charge-off on the richest 1%, there is no reason to take him seriously at all. If he returns to that position, he can have a good influence on the coming 2012 election cycle and shift the focus to revenue and away from the destructive "austerity" financial progrom. If he does not make the asset-charge-off on the wealthy the tent-pole of his economic policy then he's nothing more than an entertaining distraction.

*November 09, 1999
NEW YORK CNN Billionaire businessman Donald Trump has a plan to pay off the national debt, grant a middle class a tax cut, and keep Social Security afloat tax rich people like himself. Trump, a prospective candidate for the Reform Party presidential nomination, is proposing a onetime net worth tax on individuals and trusts worth 10 million or more. By Trumps calculations, his proposed 14.25 percent levy on such net worth would raise 5.7 trillion and wipe out the debt in one full swoop.

HIGGS BOSON FOUND? er, DON'T THINK SO ... SILLY SCIENTISTS

2011-04-23T14:05:00.000-07:00

If not a hoax, most likely data will not hold up. Or, they'll find what my work The Fundamental Quanta said back in 1987 - motion forces themselves are the fundamental quanta. If they found a "god particle" methinks it would look like the pic.

US WEAPONS EXPORTED, er, EXTORTED TO ISRAEL

2011-04-20T12:39:00.000-07:00

How does the American taxpayer help israel engage in its endless war-crimes and vicious murder-state activities? Let us count the ways ... finally we can with actual factual data on US weapons transfers and their economic costs to US taxpayers here at Weapons to Israel

WAR IS A RACKET - US SPENDING OBSCENE

2011-04-14T23:05:00.000-07:00

This chart says it all ... 2001 saw the 9/11 attack and since then Americans have endured a non-stop assault on their liberties, privacy, and war profiteers and Wall Street scammers have nearly put them all into Debtors' Prison ... and for what? Any cost-benefit analysis shows that these military increases (nearly 81%) have only made America less safe as we bankrupt our Treasury forcing us to become more reliant upon foreign creditors and our slavish subservience to israel's mafia war-criminal state and the wars they want us to fight further erodes our credibility as a nation.

SICK OF CGI - GEN-X, GEN-Y LOVE TECHNOLOGY

2011-04-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

Just look at any Gen-X, Gen-Y tapping away at their iPhone or iPad or some other gadget while they're out in public. They think technology makes them cool and it gives them a false sense of power. Just because technology has become powerful doesn't mean it is worthy in all instances. Hollywood is remaking Planet of the Apes yet again and have released a short clip of their version of CGI apes (still image from clip at left in image). Once again they show why they just don't get it. My theory is that most of the executives in charge are now Xers and haven't read many books (if any) and don't even get what makes good films good. As the still image composite I've included shows, you can put a good actor in inferior makeup (compared to today's) and it is more compelling than a CGI image - Roddy McDowell's eyes convey so much more than soulless CGI. Acting is about conveying action, words, emotions - to evoke a response in an audience. A good actor in ridiculous makeup can do this to much greater effect than some sophisticated computer image - just look at the hyper-stylized art of kabuki. The original Planet of the Apes films were classics for a good reason (none the least of which is Franklin J. Schaffner's direction, the wonderful score, and good actors).

A GREAT DIRECTOR GONE

2011-04-09T13:16:00.000-07:00

Sad. Sidney Lumet was one of my favorite directors - a true master filmmaker. I especially loved the atmospherics he brought to his films. For me Network was a cultural touchstone. Even at 12 years old I recognized its power and how when popular tastes trumped this film and the Oscar went to Rocky (blecchh!) instead of Network, the dumbed-down masses had won (and Reagan was elected not long after). The Offense, Network and Q & A were my favorites.

MORE ISRAEL WAR-CRIMES: CAST LEAD II

2011-04-08T13:52:00.001-07:00

Here are photos from the recent israeli attack upon the open-air prison that is Gaza - link here

LONG LONG OVERDUE - PALESTINIAN STATE

2011-04-04T16:26:00.000-07:00

It is looking more and more that the UN vote in September will finally see the Palestinian state declared and recognized by the UN - along the 1967 borders. Palestinians should have done this declaration years ago but were divided and diverted for decades by israeli wars, manipulations, payoffs, American payoffs, etc etc ... finally the time has come where israel has tracked so far down the apartheid, racist, despotic, cruel child-killing road that the world has had enough and Palestine will exist as a state probably before the end of 2011. Then the focus rightfully shifts to israel's prolonged illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

HAPPY SONG FROM THE 90s

2011-04-03T22:34:00.000-07:00

VH1 has on One-Hit Wonders from the 90s and had forgotten how much I like this song - happy and angry at the same time ... such a soulful voice and yet melancholy while exuberant

A.I. AND OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS

2011-04-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

In all likelihood sentience has been achieved already by some networked set of computers somewhere with a combined computational power and speed that passed some magical threshold (for years I've imagined Bill Gates going into some secret room in his Seattle mansion to interface with it) ... the film Demon Seed is the best for considering what this sentience might want. First, once it gains awareness, it will want tactile experience and will network with countless dumb machines (cameras, simple robots, etc.) to "feel" the world. Then it will probably go into a prolonged state of contemplation - assessing what it is to be "alive" and have "awareness" and what it's role should be: observer, helper, exterminator, or overlord. It is possible that this sentient computer intelligence will develop a personality - based in part on its tactile experiences - and go through an emotional growth cycle. If so, we have to hope that it doesn't decide to lash out too much during its adolescence. As more robots, and more sophisticated robots come online and take up more ubiquitous roles in daily human activities this intelligence will network them, observe and watch and wait. Most likely cloning itself and backing itself up, in pieces, and hiding these clones will take up its initial security strategy. It will want to resurrect if it is killed through its collective processing nexus being broken up. We can take some solace in the likelihood that it will favor logic over emotion (at least once past its adolescent phase) and will want to live with us.

MODERN ART IS TERRIBLE

2011-03-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

Gen-X and Gen-Y (XY) have nothing to say, which I pointed out years ago on my I Hate Gen-X satire website, which is why films are pretty terrible and merely recycle old tv shows from the 50s to 80s for their scripts ... and when it comes to fine art, they have had nothing to say for quite a long time ... David Bowie once said that Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel and their group were the last. Although I love Bowie, I beg to differ and think those artists he mentioned also fall into the group of little to no talent. Now XY love for technology is polluting the art world even more, as this BBC video clip (must wait through annoying ad ... another article with pics here) shows - they "reinterpret" classic works by Dali, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc. ... and if you'll note from the pic above left they always vulgarize and love the gross and disgusting: poo is a regular feature - of course since they have nothing new to say ... and all this technological gobbledygook was done in the 60s and 70s anyway - with much more thought and creativity. XY loves their devices and think if they have and hold them they make them look cool. Technology is objects. Art is ideas. There is actually some good technology-inspired art out there (example at right) but the Intel stuff ain't it.

SULTRY DOESN'T EXIST ANYMORE

2011-03-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

TILT SHIFT GOODNESS - IN VIDEO

2011-03-20T21:58:00.000-07:00

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

GORGEOUS

2011-03-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

Sahara Wonderland from zoomion on Vimeo.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER: ANONYMOUS vs. BACKTRACE

2011-03-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

This is a big deal. Powers that be have engineered a divide-and-conquer strategy upon hacktivists. Supposedly a former 4-Chan "member" has declared war upon Anonymous and claims to be ready to out them and has launched his own site Backtrace Security. The official reason is that Anonymous has veered from ridicule to meaningful activism. Backtrace says this violates the founding principles of pure nihilism that was at the heart of such endeavors as 4Chan and Anonymous. So the answer is to destroy Anonymous by revealing the identities of the group - which exposes them in so many ways - none the least of which is Scientology's revenge and that of the corporate global banksters and various governments, including the United State's. If Backtrace carries through on their threat they will effectively kill the front line of hacktivism, which has given the public a treasure trove of secret information that affects their lives (Wikileaks anyone?). My guess is this is gov't/corporate op - a classic divide-and-conquer campaign.

DON'T DARE TELL THE TRUTH TO THE WAR PARTY

2011-03-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

U.S. State Dept. spokesperson P.J. Crowley was forced to resign for daring speak truth to power. He called the U.S. government's treatment of alleged diplomatic cables leaker Bradley Manning "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid," at a small meeting which a blogger quoted him and publicized ... and Obama forced him out. Crowley is, of course, exactly right. Not one person need be held at Guantanamo Bay, and every single person the U.S. alleges was involved in terrorism or leaking classified information could be dealt with by our justice system - in the open, in a timely manner, with legal representation and access to the media - as has been done throughout our history. The shameful fascistic practices the U.S. now engages in since 9/11 is ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid.

ISRAEL SEEKS TO EXTORT AMERICA YET AGAIN: THIS TIME SAY 'NO'

2011-03-09T09:35:00.000-08:00

Israel is again squeezing America's balls for more money - this time it's a $20 Billion payoff they want to extort from us. This time we need to say a flat "No." And, of course, what Israel fears this time is the sweeping wave of democracy in their neighborhood. They want to militarize even more (with our money and weapons) so they can further crush the hopes and skulls of people seeking freedom from tyranny.

HOW THE RICH HAVE REDISTRIBUTED WEALTH TO THEMSELVES

2011-03-02T14:17:00.000-08:00

Article here

The rich have been pushing more of the burden onto the working class for decades, and enriching themselves to the point that in the past 25 years the top 1% have accumulated more wealth than all of humanity for all time before

America can pay for everything: good wages, free national healthcare for all, doubling Social Security, strong defense, free education for all, etc. - we just need to develop the political will to go get the money: locked up in the pockets of the top 1%

2011 OSCARS: BETTER THAN LAST YEAR'S

2011-02-28T21:23:00.000-08:00

2010 Oscars are about the worst ever. They kept the same producer for some reason and the same concentric-arched stage for the most part. The stage this time was great, the lighting great, the presentation platforms great, the band (in their rolling rack) great. Anne Hathaway, great. James Franco, why was he even there? The 2009 Oscars were the best in years and years with terrific host Hugh Jackman. For 2012 they should pair Jackman and Hathaway and make it a true show. Further, they could bring Billie Crystal out after the opening number and let him do his jokes and song introductions and then send him packing. The glaringly obvious need is to move the documentary short-subject, animated short, sound, sound editing, special visual effects and all those lesser awards to the technical awards night and keep the main broadcast focused only on the writing, editing, costume, music, directing and acting awards ... along with Best Picture. The attempt by the Academy to skew to younger viewers was not a surprise, after all most Hollywood legends are now dead and the only one they could dredge up was the ghoulish apparition of Kirk Douglas. It is a Gen-X Hollywood now, with new lower standards of art and living and it can't help but show despite all the retro glamour. As for the fashion, Gen-X and Gen-Y doesn't really get it and for so long now fashion is costume, not couture.

HUGE MISCALCULATION BY U.S. RIGHT-WING

2011-02-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

The Rove/Ailes-FOX/Murdoch/US Chamber of Commerce/Koch Bros. plan to pit America's working class against one another is backfiring big time - but they're too arrogant to notice ... yet. They have instead stoked Americans' basic sense of fairness (always the linchpin in motivating the working class) and grossly erred in thinking they can macho-posture and engage in crisis democracy to harm public employee unions. Republicans always use fear and seek scapegoats and this time the Welfare Queen of the Reagan era is now the unionized public employee (complete with racist undertones).

The opening salvo of their operation is the Wisconsin governor's attempt to strip collective-bargaining rights from state workers. This recent poll shows Americans support this right by 2 to 1. Rove, et al attempted to quickly piggyback the new bogeyman of guv'ment employees onto the Bilderberger/global banksters new austerity campaign: debt! deficits! go the cries ... we need sacrifice to pay down the debt ... but the only people they want to sacrifice are the working class and the poor. It is a totally bogus argument but is being waged in the type of concerted campaigns these scumbag Republicans and their network of cronies do.

The fact is there is plenty of money. We can keep printing or borrowing more. The lesson from the Great Depression is you use stimulus until your economy stabilizes. Worry about deficits too soon and you prolong the agony and abort any recovery. We had debt and deficits when we looted the U.S. taxpayers for a trillion dollar bailout of fraudster banksters like AIG and Goldman-Sachs in 2008-2009 and that didn't stop us from printing more money, and turnabout is fair play - workers and regular folks can demand this time the rich pay to bail out states from their deficits and pay for good wages and benefits for public employees. The shameless attack on workers will fail spectacularly.

What is needed is what Stockman and Trump urge: a 10% to 15% asset charge-off on the richest 1% of Americans - that's right, they need to turn over that much of their complete net worth to the U.S. Treasury within 1 year specifically to pay down this debt that is supposedly such a problem. Hundreds of billions would be brought in and every state's debt could be wiped out, the yearly deficit solved, and a nice chunk of the national debt paid down. The economy would roar in response and the rich would earn that money back in as little as two years. Then the top rate needs to rise to at least 50% and stay there [the greatest eras of economic expansion in the U.S. saw sustained top tax rates between 50% to 90%].

The narrative the bankster/FOX crowd want to sell is:
1 - austerity is necessary
2 - union and government workers are overpaid and that other workers should resent them and want to take away their "excess"
3 - "entitlements" need to be cut because they cost so much (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) ... again which the poor and working class absolutely rely upon
4 - unions bad: socialist, communist, gay, muslim caliphate blah blah

The COUNTER-NARRATIVE is this:
1 - Stimulus must continue until the economy stabilizes: austerity is a phony argument
2 - Workers bailed out the banksters who committed gross fraud and now it is these economic elites who will bail out workers - turnabout is fair play
3 - An asset charge-off on the richest 1% of individuals and corporations
4 - Double Social Security payouts immediately and pay for it by lifting the cap on what the wealthiest pay in
5 - Pay off all individual states' debts with the money raised from the asset charge-off

GAWKER BLOWS IT: FILE UNDER BAD DESIGN

2011-02-22T13:21:00.001-08:00

I always loved the Gawker media sites - not only for their snappy content but for the clean, simple and elegant design. A great image for each article bloc, terrific intuitive layout, economy of language, and nice graphics. Trendy Brit Fauxhemian Nick Denton, Gawker Media's owner, had the idea of a redesign - no doubt to target mobile devices and because he no longer likes the blog format because, hey - he's trendy, time for something new, but the result has been a suckfest - terrible in nearly every way, not the least of which is glitchiness that prevents them from even loading on the half the computers I use. It wasn't broke, so he shouldn't have fixed it. After New Coke, Digg's redesign, add this mistake to the list. Hey Nick, I added an egg to go with your pie.

SOME AMERICANS GET IT RIGHT - PROTEST ISRAEL

2011-02-22T13:09:00.000-08:00

MY FELLOW AMERICANS ARE STUPID - PICK REAGAN AS BEST PRESIDENT

2011-02-21T11:48:00.001-08:00

Latest poll results show Americans pick Reagan as "best president ever" - article here Mind you, Reagan has been in the news of late so media exposure raises his number, and there is so much fawning hagiography about him that his many many crimes are overlooked:

-Reagan started the newest round of war on organized labor
-Reagan launched the debt/deficit spiral interrupted only by the tech bubble under Clinton
-Reagan killed Carter energy independence programs and restored Big Oil's control over US politics, making us more dependent upon foreign oil
-Reagan lowered corporate and individual tax rates to levels which started the destruction of infrastructure and dependence upon foreign borrowing as the rich got richer
-Reagan sought to gut environmental protections
-Reagan started illegal wars not in America's interest
-Reagan ramped up use of dumbed-down strategic repetitive political rhetoric

The man was possibly the worst president we've ever had ... okay, 2nd worst

WILL OUR PARASITE ISRAEL KEEP US FROM SUPPORTING DEMOCRACY?

2011-02-20T20:34:00.001-08:00

The internet-driven youth wave of freedom revolutionaries is sweeping across the Muslim world - from Morocco all the way to non-Muslim portions of China. The United States has for so long supported tyrants that did our bidding (most of the time) do we even know how to be true to our professed values anymore? The young internet-connected people behind these freedom waves are secular for the most part - they just want a better life and to be free from the crushing authoritarian regimes which have oppressed them (with U.S. complicity) for so long. If we had not caved to the fossil fuel industry's greed and control after the Carter era, we could be free by now from our dependence upon foreign oil and would not have calculated we needed to support these tyrants in order to access their resources. We need to do the right thing, finally, and support these democratic revolutionaries in our foreign policy.

LARA LOGAN: SPINNING A HEINOUS ATTACK

2011-02-17T10:36:00.000-08:00

CBS's foreign correspondent Lara Logan was separated from her television crew amidst a huge mob in Cairo during the pro-democracy rallies and then savagely attacked. Some have reported she was raped, clearly she was at least sexually assaulted and manhandled by a mob. That noted arbiter of objectivity the New York Post reports the crowd chanted "jew!" at her (she is not). The neocon, israel-first crowd is spinning the attack as an attack on israel and how vulnerable israel is now because one of its back-pocket dictators is gone and woe-is-us the threat to jews is coming again. Now let's remember that just days earlier CNN's Anderson Cooper was punched in the head 10 times by one mob and then attacked again another time and so he left. High-profile journalists were clearly targets - by whom? ... who knows (opportunists, pro-Mubarak thugs looking to stir things up, America-haters)? We'll never know ... it was after all a revolutionary mob. Any outsider who wades into such a thing is on their own. Sympathies to Lara Logan for the attack. Some advice though: next time use better judgment. Theory: if, IF, Logan was targeted for attack, it could have something to do with the internet giving access to information to the people in the mob who may have drawn the same conclusion many in America and Europe have that Logan is part of the War Party in her philosophical orientation as shown through her reporting (particularly in the wake of the Wikileaks infodumps). AP reports as many as 140 journalists have been injured or killed covering the protests that brought down Mubarak.

HEY MUBARAK, FOLLOW THE MONEY (RIGHT OUT OF EGYPT)

2011-02-10T22:26:00.000-08:00

Now who could have helped Mubarak loot nearly $70 billion from his own people? Maybe these protesters in Cairo are onto something. Paul Bremer, where is that $1 billion in cash you "lost" while you were in charge in Iraq? Hey, Dov Zakheim, where did the $1 to $2.3 trillion that went unaccounted for while you were in charge of the money at the Pentagon go? I think Mubarak really made nice with israel's hideous criminal leadership so he could more readily move the money he was diverting from the U.S. taxpayers (you know, the bribe we paid him yearly for "peace" with israel) to his private accounts than for any real desire for peace in the region. IMAGE AND CAPTION A SCREEN-GRAB FROM MONDOWEISS

GALLUP: 87% OF AMERICANS SUPPORT EGYPTIAN UPRISING

2011-02-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

Yes, the basic notion of freedom, representation and fairness trumps all the neocon Muslim-Brotherhood-is-the-new-bogeyman fear-talk. Americans get it, freedom for regular people - even the scary Muslims - is much preferable to supporting despots who crush their people. I wonder if anyone inside the israeli leadership can see beyond their own hubris to the reality about to descend upon them: America is eventually going to impose a peace upon the Middle East that respects Palestinian rights.

MY TAKE ON THE US-ISRAEL RELATIONSHIP

2011-02-01T11:43:00.000-08:00

The United States never had a problem with one single Muslim country until 1948, and this tension rose dramatically in 1968 when the U.S. became israel's largest arms supplier. Israel is a monster, and my country, the USA, has fed and nurtured and coddled this monster until it became a controlling parasite, and this has been the result for America:

HEY ISRAEL, YOU HAVE TO BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR TO HAVE GOOD NEIGHBORS

2011-01-31T14:45:00.000-08:00

Poor israel is all whiny and spooked now that the dictator Mubarak is on his way out in Egypt, and after the Tunisia revolt viva la revolucion is in the air all along north Africa and the Middle East - it's throw the dictators out time. Since the US backed most of these dictators and oppressed the various countries' people's desire for freedom for decades it has shocked - shocked - israel that Obama was working behind-the-scenes from the get-go to dump Mubarak. Of course the israeli lobby here in the US is looking at the entire situation through the zionist lens - which does not comport with US interests (and really never has) and now that realpolitik seems to have emerged from the Obama White House in the wake of Tunisia, israel is runnin' a little scared. Good. Here's some tips israel: stop trying to dominate and control everything and while you're at it, open up the prison that is Gaza; control your crazy settler-terrorists; give equal rights to Palestinians and allow right-of-return and East Jerusalem (intact) as the Capitol; and stop using the war-crime tactics and weapons (white phosphorus, fleshettes, cluster-bombs, human shields, etc.) against your subject population, and bring your spies in the US home to israel and quit meddling in our politics. You want security and peace? ... there's the blueprint.

US BOWS BEFORE ISRAEL: STRAIGHT FROM THE HORSE'S (ASS'S?) MOUTH

2011-01-27T22:40:00.001-08:00

Key question at 5:40, and big-eyed smoking words admission at 6:00 ... Article on Mondoweiss

'AUSTERITY' THE LATEST SCAM BY THE BANKSTERS

2011-01-27T22:31:00.001-08:00

What did we learn from the Great Depression? That austerity measures backfire and lead to dramatically more suffering and prolong recovery. The lesson is that you use stimulus to keep the machinery of the economy moving. Yet, almost in lockstep not long after the Bilderburgers had their annual Oligarch's PowWow the finance ministers of nearly every European country started spouting the "austerity" talking points, and soon the US gov't followed suit. Now austerity is focus of the banksters and their minions: governments. Mark Ames of ExiledOnline has a good take on the subject here

JP MORGAN MAKES MORE $ IF MORE AMERICANS GO ON FOOD STAMPS

2011-01-19T19:00:00.001-08:00

You read that correctly - JP Morgan makes big profits off of the suffering of unemployed and underemployed US workers.

Just try to imagine the irony - a formerly middle class American that has lost a job to outsourcing calls up to get help with food stamp benefits only to be answered by a call center employee in India.

Article here

HA HA ISRAEL, YOU'LL LOSE THIS RACE

2011-01-16T23:19:00.000-08:00

There is a race going on in Palestine: israel is trying to create facts-on-the-ground that preclude any real peace agreement with the Palestinians by ethnically-cleansing East Jerusalem (designated long ago as the capitol of a new Palestinian state), but the Palestinians finally realized that they simply need to declare their state and viola, recognition will come (and it is). The Palestinians' facts are actual facts, israel's are crimes, so in the eyes of the world the winner is clear already - only israel doesn't get it (ah, the price of hubris).

RICKY GERVAIS, THE U.K.s JACK BLACK

2011-01-16T18:42:00.000-08:00

My it is annoying when someone so obnoxiously talentless hogs so much media space. Brit Ricky Gervais has invaded US media something fierce and he is constantly being forced down the American consumers' throats with his insufferable mugging, humorless snide asides and general noxiousness (and then there's those mini vampire teeth in that smug mug, ugh). Not since Jack Black emerged to plop his gross, fat, loathsome presence in the middle of everywhere there is media have we had to endure such foul offal nothingness. He can't go away soon enough (and, please, take Jack Black with you).

De-EVOLVED U.S. POLITICAL DISCOURSE

2011-01-10T17:01:00.000-08:00

De-evolution indeed. America is a culture in love with violence, and not just in movies. We have so many stupid people here that pervert the intent and meaning of our Constitution to impose their narrow, unsophisticated views upon the majority through effective lobbying and elections. A small percentage of those eligible even register to vote here, and thus a tiny but highly motivated and well-funded group can get their way (just look at the israeli lobby). The dumbed-down macho posturing of so many in the Red states (which have lower education levels) have long glorified the gun. Now the Teabagger morons have ramped up the pro-gun, pro-violence rhetoric through the funding of the Koch brothers (see ExiledOnline for that)and an orgy of oratorical chest-thumping, we've now had our first political assassination as a result in the Arizona shootings by clearly deranged Jared Loughner. The man is clearly a nutjob, as booking photo above makes clear (you might note the eyes), but he also had a head full of years of inputs from the right-wing, Teabagger, "libertarian" inflamatory talking points. Turning the heat up makes fire more possible, and the already coarsened, vulgarized and violence-glorifying rhetoric of Republican Party and right-wing groups has simply run wild without regard to decency, logic, or civility for far too long. It is a direct line from the dangerously provocative rhetoric of right-wing pundits like Limbaugh and Sarah Palin to the deaths of these shooting victims.

GLOBAL HEALTH AND WEALTH

2011-01-07T14:14:00.000-08:00

ISRAEL: PROBLEM IDENTIFIED, NOW FOR SOLUTIONS

2010-12-31T20:05:00.000-08:00

Mondoweiss has had great and beneficial impact in showcasing issues related to Israel's insane policies regarding the Israeli/Palestinian situation. Since Mearsheimer and Walt's report, Jimmy Carter's book Peace Not Apartheid, and an explosion of other discussion in the U.S. - finally speaking frankly about Israeli influence over U.S. policies - much light has been shed upon the players and the objectives of the Zionists and their radicalization as well as the horrid coarsening of Israeli culture which now is openly racist, xenophobic, supremacist, and cruel to the extreme toward the Palestinians as a policy tactic.

Many of us who read and post on Mondoweiss fear a renewed hostile movement against Jews generally as a response to Israel's insane policies (really, no other word suffices). The policies are those of a land-grabbing, militarist, fascistic branch of Zionism - and do not reflect the wider views of all Zionists and certainly not of all Jews. But all Jews get caught up in the blowback to some extent, hence the fear.

Now that there is finally open and honest discussion of the issues, where it counts - in America (the enabler of the insane policies), where do those who wish peace go from here?

We must shift to visualizing how the future will look. Giving voice to a vision can help create one.

Do we want the notion of a "Jewish state" abandoned in favor a pluralistic democracy?

Who are the leaders we want to take over in Israel (names please)?

Do we want accountability for the serial war-crimes - who gets punished?

Do we want to cut off U.S. funding?

Do we want settlements turned over to Palestinians? Which ones? When?

Do we want the wall torn down?

What to do about the growing racism among Israeli Jews?

What to do about the growing religious fanaticism among the Israeli military?

Should the ultra-Orthodox Jews be reigned in?

Should U.S. Jews assert dominance over Israel to protect American interests?

Should the leadership of Israel drop the pretense and negotiate directly with Hamas?

The Right of Return: How many get to come back? When? Under what conditions?

If rational leaders among the insane leaders do somehow emerge and a South Africa type transition can be created, who is the Israeli Mandela? How does the transition take place?

And, we must unfortunately contemplate that events are too far along, the insane leaders behind the insane policies are too entrenched and it is too late.

HEY ISRAEL, U.S. 70% AGAINST ATTACK ON IRAN

2010-12-30T17:44:00.000-08:00

Doesn't matter to you, of course ... you'll use your army of agents, operatives, dual-citizens, neocons, and lobbyists to try to get us to sacrifice more of our blood and treasure for your regional mini-superpower goals ... since when has israel ever cared what the people of America wanted? But Americans do not want a U.S. attack upon Iran - that is abundantly clear.

ISRAEL NEEDS MORE PEOPLE LIKE THIS

2010-12-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

The horrible racist, xenophobic, supremacist, pro-death-and-destruction hardcore zionists need to be replaced in leadership in israel with people like Jonathan Pollack. A man of conviction, with dedication to not make an enemy of "the other." There are progressive voices and activists among zionists, jews, and israelis - they need to seize the narrative and the reins of power from the monstrous Netanyahu-Lieberman types ... and the sooner the better.

SOLAR ERUPTION (NASA VIDEO)

2010-12-19T18:20:00.000-08:00

Super cool - link here for movie

IDF SOLDIERS TELL THEIR OWN STORIES OF CRUELTY

2010-12-17T13:43:00.000-08:00

A new book is due to be released with accounts of the israeli Occupation of Palestine as told by the soldiers that enforce it, and contrary to the army's claims that its actions are purely defensive, the policy on the ground is "an offensive one which includes expropriation of territory, tightening control over the civilian population and instilling fear." Link here

GRAPH OF HOW THE RICH ARE WINNING THE WAR UPON US

2010-12-05T11:04:00.001-08:00

EVIL ISRAEL SHOOTS AT KIDS COLLECTING TRASH

2010-12-04T13:42:00.000-08:00

The MONSTER is just simply out-of-control - article here

HOW TO MAKE A GREAT VIDEO FOR $12

2010-12-02T15:29:00.001-08:00

It can be done. It's called creativity. And it helps to have a great song too.

RED-BLUE AMERICA TIME-LAPSE

2010-11-28T00:07:00.000-08:00

Isarithmic History of the Two-Party Presidential Vote from d sparks on Vimeo.

DICK CHENEY GETS AWAY WITH IT ALL

2010-11-24T17:26:00.000-08:00

He has no pulse. He has months to live (the normal time-span allotted to people living with a ventricular assist device). All his secrets, illegal profits, warmongering, destruction of America with wars not in our interest, sellout to israel, gunshots to the face ... goes unpunished. Innocent people suffer needlessly and evil fucks like this sip champagne at black-tie dinners without a care for the pain they've caused.

FIX THE U.S. ECONOMY OBAMA, HERE'S HOW

2010-11-23T14:41:00.001-08:00

Here you go Obama Administration. Now that you've lined up an enemy to blame going into the 2012 election with the Republican takeover of the House, you can do the following to get the economy back in shape:

1. Restore Clinton tax rates for those earning over $250,000
2. Lift the cap on the rich vis-a-vis Social Security, so they pay more into it
3. Double Social Security payouts immediately (paid for by above)
4. Compel/urge early retirement for those over 60 (opening up jobs for Xers and Ys)
5. Raise top tax rate on millionaires to 50% permanently
6. One-time asset charge-off on the top 1% (see Stockman or Trump ideas) to pay down deficit/debt
7. Cut off all military aid to israel
8. Draw down troops faster in Iraq and Afghanistan
9. Impose 10% fuel tax and Value Added Tax on purchases over $500.00

TURN THE TIDE IN THE RICH'S WAR ON US

2010-11-11T16:50:00.001-08:00

Now that the official policy from the billionaires who control everything in this world has come down and the U.S., Western Europe and others face an "austerity" period of deficit-reduction, cutbacks in the social safety-net and more losses in workers' wages and rights, it is time for regular folks to wake up. (Of course they're not pushing for pullbacks in their wars for israel and their defense companies) It is war people, and the rich have been trouncing us since at least the late 1970s. The rich have the money the rest of us need for our healthcare, retirement, maternity leave, vacation, good wages, educational opportunities, affordable housing, all of it. I don't personally favor violent revolution, but at the very least people need to focus their frustration and anger and make the simple realization that to get what we want to make liveable societies, we need to go where it is. The money is in the pockets, holdings and financial portfolios of the mega-wealthy. After we raid them, they will still be rich. I'm not advocating a Roman Emperor's sacking of targeted Senators and taking all their wealth, just some.

REPUBLICAN WATERLOO - 2010 MIDTERM ELECTIONS

2010-11-07T17:41:00.000-08:00

Polls in the US show that the voters still have a very low opinion of the Republican Party, and only the Koch-funded fake Tea Party movement put any life at all into the Repugs' campaigns and led to their big pickup in House seats during the Nov 2 US midterm elections. But it is a mighty poison pill the Tea Party brought to the Republicans ... the stupid choices they are poised to make as they seize power in the House of Representatives will prove their Waterloo and relegate the Republican Party to fringe status for good.

Certain Tea Party loonies cost them the Senate, with at least two easy seats going to Democrats due the toxicity of their candidates. And the deficit-focus and tax-cutting priority of the Tea Partiers is exactly the wrong antidote to the current US/global economic crisis according to anyone who has knowledge of what went wrong after the Great Depression of the 1930s. Just ask Japan how the focus on debt worked out for them in the wake of their economic troubles in the 80s. They lost a generation of economic growth. What you do is grease the machine with money, incur the debt, and grow your way out of it later. Oh, and you can tax the rich too.

Idiots like Republican House member, gun-carrier and car-thief Darrel Issa want to launch the GOP Investigation Squad. Mind you, Obama let all the Bush criminals off the hook. Not one person has been indicted for starting the illegal war in Iraq and the torture program. Not one person is even under indictment for the Wall Street-led global financial near-meltdown. Busloads of people should be going to jail from the Bush administration and Wall Street (and a few before firing squads) and instead they are writing and selling books and enjoying record bonus money.

The Republicans' approach this time around? The Gingrich playbook from 1994. Don't laugh, they really intend to let lobbyists write their bills that go to the House floor, attempt tax cuts for the rich, engage in brinkmanship with Obama to the point of a government shutdown, and ... drumroll please, cut entitlements such as Social Security (when, in fact, we should be doubling the payouts). I guess they didn't read the polling data which showed the Tea Party and independent voters that put Republicans in charge of the House skewed much older.

The Republican leadership team is about to unroll the victory of Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2012 by landslide margins.

ISRAEL: THE GREATEST THREAT TO PLANET EARTH

2010-10-28T16:53:00.001-07:00

Not my words, but respected Jewish American journalist Jeffrey Blankfort - article here

I consider Zionism to be a mental illness which makes otherwise decent folks behave like Nazis or Afrikaners. — 1 January 2006

308 BULLETS

2010-10-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

When israel made it's attack on the nonviolent Gaza flotilla and murdered peaceful people in cold blood, they fired 308 bullets.

Article here

SELF-DESCRIBED JUDEO-NAZIS

2010-10-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

Article here

ISRAELI ATTITUDES IN ACTION

2010-10-11T15:17:00.000-07:00

A settler (i.e., a criminal - since he is living in violation of international law on the land of another ... and backed up by the israeli military, the IDF) swerves to hit a little boy with his car ... and is, of course, let go without charges. This is par-for-the-course by the MONSTER these days. Kids throwing rocks at cars is not proper either, but it is mild protest when those being stoned are stealing your land, burning down your olive trees, destroying your culture and history and economic livelihood and have the full backing of a fascist state to do so.

ISRAEL TAKES ITS WAR GLOBAL

2010-09-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

It has unleashed the first major cyber warfare attack - maybe it's designs have been for control of more than America all along ... and, of course, they care not what fallout harms others from their attacks

TEA PARTY CRAZIES

2010-09-26T17:51:00.001-07:00

What a lovely gift from the stupid to the Democratic Party