The grandeur that was Rome - 20 May 2012

Where has everyone present at Zimmerman’s medical treatment been all this time?  Has anyone besides me, in the mass media or the social media or any government, asked that?  What do we the people do with our First Amendment rights?

Since Zimmerman might have healed by now, those claiming that he had all those injuries might be lying, but others could still come forward to witness for or against their claims.  Mass media reporters could have found many of those people and could be finding them now, and Facebook and Twitter users could be using their social media power to demand that they do, but they aren’t and don’t.  The power of the people publicly to express their concerns increases minute by minute while we irresponsibly continue to abdicate.

Those present at Zimmerman’s medical treatment were avoiding being involved!  The mass media profit by selling hedonism to tweeters posting theirs in their neighbors’ faces!  We use the First Amendment to protect our egocentrism!

Ninth grade civics - 19 May 2012

Why are nearly all women the media present to support feminism lesbians?

Wolf Blitzer, the quintessential representative of “the most trusted name in news,” called two females he interviewed “you guys” and asked why the anti-violence bill currently creeping through Congress needs “additional language” specifying women.  And one of the women said that “women don’t like contentious environments.”  The fundamental question is literacy.

The bill doesn’t need additional language, because the bill is already entirely redundant, saying nothing the Bill of Rights doesn’t say.  Similarly, the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are redundant, because the Bill of Rights repeats what Jefferson said about rights in the Declaration of Independence.  But, apparently, Jefferson didn’t mean what he said.

However, a difference between Jefferson and his successors is that Jefferson knew he was a hypocrite, saying that someday the slaves he never freed from his oppression would “rise from the dust.”  Government and media politicians talking about the current redundant language apparently think they’re saying something new.  And thus the electorate buys big government.

How is any housewife with children not in a contentious environment?

Marvelous Matt - 18 Maay 2012

“This above all: to thine own self be true,” said Shakespeare’s character Polonius to his son, as his son was going off to prep. school.  Preppy Chris Matthews gave the same advice to students graduating from Howard University last week.  That’s appropriate in that Shakespeare presented Polonius as a buffoon.

Camelot Chris also calls himself a liberal while lionizing the preppy Kennedy clan whom similarly hypocritical people call America’s monarchy.  He also supports the notion that William Jefferson Clinton, whose middle name presumably is either for Jefferson Davis or for Thomas Jefferson, who demonstrated his hypocrisy by declaring “unalienable rights” he alienated from several hundred slaves he never freed.  Matthews is liberal as Clinton is black as Obama is gay.

So let’s hope that the most important predominantly black university in the United States educates its students well enough for them to know that Kennedy did nothing for civil rights until Matthews’ medium forced him to do it for votes and that buffoon Matthews’ main “exceptionalism” is his loud mouth.

The Gordian knot - 17 May 2012

All we’d have to do to solve the whole problem of “marriage equality” is comply with the United States Constitution’s provision for separation of church and state as Germany does.  That is, we could solve the whole problem by divorcing marriage from the state, with a constitutional denouement.  Untie it from the government entirely.

In Germany, the government sanctions only civil unions, leaving sanctioning marriage only to churches.  Churches define marriage, and no one in Germany has to go to a church to gain the same civil rights as does any couple who goes only to city hall to declare their union, but we the people of the United States would rather bicker about words.  Let's cut the crap.

And the whole issue comes only from people calling themselves Christians insisting that all of us use their definition of marriage and people who ordinarily otherwise don’t go to church accepting their definition.  Our Supreme Court, if its job is determining constitutionality, should decide against that.  But we the people would have to sue.

The Oprah lottery - 16 May 2012

What part of “independent” don’t political pundits understand?  They, both in the media and in the government, talk as though independents are a third political party.  Independents, by the word’s definition, unite under no separate issue or set of issues on any platform.

I voted for both Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush, because I did enough research to know that their foreign and domestic policies would work together to improve life for everyone, tending toward world peace and pulling us out of the temporary economic downswings that cost them reelection.  But most of the partisan and independent electorate blame them for the downswings and give credit to their successors, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, who reaped the benefits.  And the Twitter generation isn’t changing such.

Independents are people who listen to Chris (American exceptionalism) Matthews and James (It’s the economy, stupid) Carville or Liz (Democrats envy Romney) Trotta and Judge (The jury won’t buy it) Jeanine well enough to know they’re all ignorant wackos!

Barnums and suckers - 15 May 2012

J. P. Morgan Chase has about two trillion dollars in assets, and it’s in the news now for having blown about two billion dollars on a trading error, and people are freaking out as though there weren’t two thousand billions in two trillion.

The Obama administration and the Reagan administration have in common that Obama isn’t administering the Obama administration as Reagan didn’t administer the Reagan administration.  The Klingon Clintons and the Dean/Reid/Pelosi evil triad put Obama into the Whitehouse as a token to perpetuate Kennedy’s and Johnson’s hypocrisy that suckered descendants of slaves into joining the electorate under the delusion that the Democratic Party was no longer the party of Jefferson Davis.  And George Herbert Walker Bush helmed ending the Cold War while Reagan preached or joked to the public or slept or joked through cabinet meetings.

Random Romney was correct in saying that people form and direct corporations as they form and direct small businesses and families.  But people join the media circus people to ignore plain facts.  We bear any nonsense any minute.

The death of Polonius - 14 May 2012

Camelot Chris Matthews, claiming to be liberal while promoting regressing the United States into feudal monarchy with the Kennedy clan as kings, is now calling what Marvelous Mitt did to that gay kid a haircut and a prep school prank and never what it was.  It was a violent perverse homophobic hate crime showing that Random Romney has been a violent perverse jerk since he was a child.  And Matthews, ordinarily hating all Republicans, is letting them slide on that.

“Phobia” in the word “homophobia” refers to psychological defense to which Freud gave the names “reaction formation” and “projection.”  Examples are Freud’s calling anything longer than it is wide a phallic symbol while he was dying of throat cancer but couldn’t stop smoking cigars, Hitler’s engineering the murder of six million Jews while his own ancestry was partly Jewish, and Michele Bachmann’s husband trying to cure people of homosexuality.  And now we have Random homophobic Romney using the words “marvelous” and “terribly” and “tender.”

But the bottom line is that Marvelous Mitt Random Romney was a violent perverse jerk when he harassed that kid, when he put a dog in a cage and tied it to the top of his family’s car to take it on vacation, and every other minute of his hateful hypocritical life.  And any political party that nominates such a person to preside over any government deserves the loss any reasonable electorate will deliver to it.  No one should permit him to preside over anything.

The irresponsibility defense - 13 May 2012

Deon and Pilar Sanders are fighting over their children after his Pilar accused Deon of beating her in front of them.  Mr. Sanders took to court a trophy Mrs. Sanders said he used to hit her and said it was too heavy for him to use for that and tweeted pictures of their children he said he took while they were filing police complaints against her.  Mrs. Sanders said Mr. Sanders is only trying to get her out of their house by any means but buying her another one.

Two adult men are accusing John Travolta of sexually molesting them.  Travolta presented as evidence a check from a New York Restaurant from the evening of the morning one of the men said Travolta molested him in Los Angeles.  The men’s attorney responded by saying that anyone could have ridden a horse from Los Angeles to New York in the thirteen hours between the time of the molesting he alleged and the time of the restaurant check.

Not subscribing to People magazine, I feel no more compassion for those celebrities’ situations than I do for the situations of people of whom I’m unaware, but I feel compassion for every person.  So I think that most tragic in the mass media reporting of that insanity is that none of the reporters pointed out the absurdity of the behavior of those persons and their attorneys.  And the passive voice has dominated all those people’s voices.

Haha Hillary - 12 May 2012

The so-called Secretary of State of the United States is saying that people are preoccupied with her appearance.  I watch the whole spectrum of national news media and have never heard anyone mention her appearance.  But maybe she’s playing that ploy to women she thinks are preoccupied with their appearance.

She’s already played that card by “standing by her” man Bill, as though her alliance with him were more than for their careers, and she’s proven herself otherwise phony.  Remember that she said she was running from and dodging sniper fire while she was accepting flowers from a little girl in Bosnia.  And note her playing her role as Secretary of State as though it were a TV part.

She’s as bogus as Bill’s setting up his offices in Harlem in keeping with his bogus title “the first black president,” to support her run to represent New York in the United States Senate, while neither of them ever spent much time there.  But her shrieking cackle is all anyone should need to know.  She’s all counterfeit.

Snakeoil - 11 May 2012

MSNBC’s Swaziland Peace Corps volunteer Chris Matthews presented on his cartilage brain program a political pundit saying that people “accused Obama of being an Arab.”  Saudi Arabia helped the CIA tip the United States government about the latest underwear hoax.  Osama, not Obama, was Saudi Arabian.

People accused Obama of being Islamic, and Islam originated in what’s now Saudi Arabia, but Muslims are all over Earth.  Obama’s father is Kenyan, but Kenya is on a different continent from that of Saudia Arabia, and most Kenyans call themselves Christians.  I wonder if that pundit thinks Jews are Nazis because Germany is the birthplace of ancestors of more than 90% of the Judaic people now on Earth.

Next Matthews might say that the Bush family is Islamic, because both Presidents Bush made money in the oil business, and most of the OPEC nations are Arabic.  The underwear hoaxes have terrorized only in that the United States government and media have given them credibility.  Let’s think for ourselves.

Yahooism - 10 May 2012

Biden didn’t say he’s comfortable with same-sex marriage.    Pundits and the electorate should learn English.  He said he’s comfortable with civil unions.

During my United States Army assignment to Germany, between my U. S. Army assignments to Vietnam and Afghanistan, German separation of church and state required separate ceremonies for what we in the United States call civil unions and marriages.  The German state sanctioned what we call civil unions at city halls, and religions sanctioned what we call marriage in places of worship, and the latter was legally entirely discretionary.  And note that we the people of the United States leave Hinduism, the third most populous religion on Earth, out of the question.

Biden also said in that interview that he lowered his right hand to take the oath of his office.  He lowered his left to Bible.  He raised his right into air.

Cubio - 9 May 2012

John McCain and Marvelous Mitt and Marco Rubio have all said that Obama should have protected that Chinese dissident’s freedom of speech in China and helped him immigrate to the United States by any means necessary.  Yet all three of them say that the United States government should not permit Mexican workers to flee to the United States to pursue their inalienable rights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness by means including skipping legal procedures their poverty denies them.  Let’s consider perspective.

McCain also said that the United States Government should use military force to defend 25,000 Syrians against their government’s forcing from their homes into refugee camps.  But McCain supports the Israeli government’s having driven millions of Palestinians from their homes into refugee camps.  And, accordingly, he supports the United States Government’s supporting that.

And ask why the United States government permitted Cubans like Rubio’s parents to flee Castro without hiring attorneys to jump them through hoops but doesn’t permit Mexicans similarly to flee drug lords.

Mystique - 8 May 2012

When whoever killed JFK killed him, MSNBC’s Democratic propaganda machine’s Chris Matthews was in high school, young enough to catch the Kennedy cult disease and too young to vote.  After graduating from college, when Kennedy’s Vice President had built a military force of more than a half-million Americans in Southeast Asia to kill what he called little yellow people, Matthews was old enough to vote.  But he dodged the draft to go to Swaziland with Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

And Matthews still worships Kennedy and is now selling his book promoting the Camelot nonsense that suggests that John was like Arthur while Jacqueline was like Guinevere.  A fact of that matter is that John was more like Lancelot while Marilyn was more like Guinevere.  And Matthews similarly supports the Clintons.

Matthews, and every other person who thinks an arrogant shit who nearly caused a nuclear war was a great President of the United States, should wake up.

Egostasy - 7 May 2012

Returning home from Michigan Friday evening, I did something I never do, that late at night.  I turned on my television, to try to catch up with world events that occurred, during my fourteen hours of driving.  But the nearest thing to news I found was David Letterman talking with Anderson Cooper.

Cooper talked more seriously than Obama does when he’s on late night talk shows, causing me to wonder who he thinks he is and who Letterman thinks he is, besides wondering why anyone cares.  And Cooper increased my wonder by saying that he’s spoken with Secret Service agents and found them to be smart.  Neither, apparently, is Cooper smart.

The whole thing reminds me of my son’s telling me that the best place for news is Comedy Central after telling me that raves are this millennium’s equivalent of Woodstock and that he found them mind-expanding and that he’s highly intelligent because he’s always been a problem-solver.

Winesburg hunting - 6 May 2012

I’ve returned to New Orleans from my tiny Michigan hometown and found it much as I left it while demographically different.  While I was growing up there, the populace succeeded in keeping out anyone one not white, and I saw nearly no one not white during my visit.  But I saw two African Americans in bars, and an Arab population remains there after the closing of a foundry that shipped in many because white folks wouldn’t work in the foundry, and a man who lives in the house where I lived when I was four told me that “Mexicans with their chickens” live in the neighborhood behind his house.

When I lived in Coldwater, the town didn’t have the luxury of cheap labor, and so poor white folks whom rich white kids said had cooties worked at the foundry and picked the strawberries, and I was one who did some of each.  So, in my next book, I’ll treat Coldwater much as Sherwood Anderson and Carson McCullers treated there.  And I expect that to anger many of my rich or poor Coldwater High School classmates.

I made an offer to buy a house five blocks from Coldwater’s main intersection, and I’m hoping to finish writing Ashes there, but that may be an adventure.  I don’t know how the town will respond to this web log.  But we may soon know.

SEAL’d lips - 5 May 2012

Republican political pundits are saying that “nobody’s disputing” that Obama killed Osama.  But some of them are saying that his trip to Afghanistan on the anniversary of his claiming to have done it exploits bin Laden’s death for political reasons.  I accept the latter but not the former.

I have vehemently disputed that anyone killed Osama bin Laden in that compound near Islamabad.  Anyone can add the year of facts following Obama’s claim to the decade of facts since 9/11, to suspect reasonably that Osama had died years before, and that the claim was a deliberate political hoax.  And another political tactic was the fostering of fear that al Qaeda might have launched retaliation attacks in New York on the anniversary.

A fact that gives al Qaeda cause to celebrate the anniversary is that the hoax played into al Qaeda’s hand by undercutting relations between the United States and Pakistan.  But I see no reason to believe that Obama knows it was a hoax.  I doubt that Robert Gates told him that.

Creeping phallic crisis - 4 May 2012

Witnesses at Jon Edwards’ trial said they joined in his lies because they thought that their not lying with him would keep him out of the Presidency.  Their lying and supporting lying to dupe us the other people of our nation into electing a liar to preside over our government is treason.  And thinking that any one person’s individual ambition is more important than is the general welfare all the people of a nation defines the word “criminal.”

And those treasonous criminal witnesses at that treasonous criminal’s trial said they supported his lies after he asked them to hide them from his wife, to assure her continuing to support him as they did, while she was dying.

But we the people of the United States suffer such as Edwards and Clinton and Kennedy and Romney gladly.

Super Smallville - 3 May 2012

My first two days back in Coldwater supported my supposition that every place in the United States that has as many people as has Coldwater is pretty much the same as any that has as many people as has New York City.  In August, I’ll spend a month in China and Nepal and India, partly to see whether that’s true on the other side of Earth.  I’ll tell you what I find there then.

My friend Bob McNall, with whom I shoplifted while we were in middle school, is now a real estate agent in Coldwater and showed me the house I told him I may wish to buy.  It met my hopes, and so I stepped from there to visiting the bars I frequented when I last lived in Coldwater, and I found only superficial changes in the decades since.  One where my father played cards while I was a child still has the most decadent of the town’s bar flies, and the one from which its owner 86’d me for celebrating my return from Vietnam still has as regulars that former owner and a high school friend of mine who now has cancer after making his bed-ridden wife watch him screw another woman.

And one of the barmaids in the latter bar preferred not to talk about those former acquaintances of mine, while the other said her college major was in western civilization but preferred to talk about sports, but she talked with Frank  Moseley there.  And he’s African American and talked history and literary art with me.  Such didn’t happen in Coldwater while I was growing up.

Home sweet home - 2 May 2012

I grew up in a small town, Coldwater, Michigan.  And, between boredom and poverty, I fled there as soon as I could.  I began traveling with a carnival company in my sixteenth summer and enlisted in the Army at the end of my eighteenth.

But now I may be going back.  When I retired two years ago, I fled Boston’s hypocrisy and sports mania to New Orleans, where I had happily lived among its French Quarter’s creative people in two stretches of about two years each.  But in my two years there I’ve found that even the Vieux Carre Commission, which the residents of the Quarter established more than a half century ago to preserve the neighborhood’s historical heritage, has  sold out to the Saints and Harrah’s Casino and  other Las Vegas interests with the corrupt politicians.

So, here I am, back in Coldwater looking for a house to buy, where I can sit in the back yard and look up at the maple leaves or in my kitchen and look out at the snow, and not mind if neighborhood kids knocks a ball through my windows.

Why are most prostitutes black? - 1 May 2012

When ABC’s New Orleans affiliate WGNO’s twisted News with a Twist anchors twisted that the problem with the behavior of the male Secret Service agents in Columbia and El Salvador is that it “makes our guys look bad,” they pointed to fact that sexism is alive and thriving in the United States of America, nearly a century after the passage of its Constitution’s 19^th Amendment.

Like hard boy Chris Matthews and soap sister Alex Wagner, one of those twisted anchors is male while the other is female, like the Arkansas Hill-Bill couple.  CNN recently pointed out, while twisting that the story was about Ann Romney’s heroism, that Marvelous Mitt’s using his wife in his campaign may be killing her as Jon Edward’s using his wife must have precipitated her early departure.  And we twist ourselves into calling such creeping cancerous crap romantic.

And now the USPS has slipped onto the slimy sexist slope by way of a commercial depicting and obviously homosexual man telling his wife to “Keep it up, Honey.”  She’s on the sidewalk in front of their business jumping around in a chicken suit to promote it.  The problem with those Secret Service agents’ behavior is that men have driven women into prostitution.   

Classifying what is isn’t - 30 April 2012

Subliminal silliness is back in vogue.  CNN presented some guy saying that a study shows that the electorate tends to vote for cute candidates.  He cited Clinton and Kennedy as examples, but part of the problem with that argument is that cuteness is in the eyes of the beholder, and a more fundamental flaw in it is that our sense of cuteness isn’t subliminal but a frequent subject of our open conversation.

And he also used the phrase “perceived ideas,” as though what we perceive is subliminal while what we conceive is conscious, but CNN followed that story with a story more directly about the current campaigns for the Presidency and showed a pundit saying that Romney’s saying we should have let GM go bankrupt equated to saying we should have let GM and all its jobs go away.  Had GM declared bankruptcy, it would have restructured just as it did under the bailouts, and it would have come out stronger just as U. S. Airways did a few years ago.  But the pundit’s hogwash wasn’t subliminal suggestion but an overt lie depending on ignorance.

Subliminal is more like ABC’s New Orleans affiliate WGNO calling it’s evening news show News with a Twist, entertaining people by their subliminal wish to twist out of paying attention to the news and into being as twisted as Bourbon Street sports fans, and the show’s anchors have now twisted that the problem with the Secret Service agents in Columbia is that they “make our guys look bad.”

Racial profiling - 29 April 2012

A couple of weeks after the Easter of 2002, when some Palestinians were hiding from Israel in the Church of the Nativity, I took a vacation from my job as Finance Administrator  for a Franciscan-founded homeless shelter between Boston Common and Boston’s Chinatown, to see what Israelis and Palestinians were doing, in Bethlehem.

I saw Israeli soldiers with loaded automatic assault rifles on buses and on a beach in Tel Aviv, and I saw Palestinian children playing in the streets beneath Israeli snipers in Bethlehem, and I rode those buses from Tel Aviv to Tiberius and back down to Jerusalem.  In Tiberius I bought beer from a kiosk and drank it at a table on the sidewalk there, and I asked the person who sold me the beer how he could tell whether people walking there were Israelis or Palestinians, and he told me that the area was Israeli.  But that evening, in a restaurant about three blocks from the kiosk, I drank beer with Palestinians shouting that Netanyahu is an asshole.

I was in Tiberius because it’s near the hill on which the Roman Catholic Church says Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount.  I rode a bus there also, but on the hill I had no reason to wonder whether the people around me were Israeli or Palestinian, because no other humans were there.  My main company was the lilies of the field.

Is “Studebaker” a word? - 28 April 2012

I couldn’t think of a reason for George Herbert Walker Bush endorsing Marvelous Mitt until I remembered that George Romney ran the company that built Bush’s first car after World War II.

Wolf Blitzer raised the question of whether Christians should be concerned about a Mormon being President.  Apparently Blitzer doesn’t know that the Jesus Christ in the church’s title the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the Christ after whom Christians call themselves.  The Mormon Church is a denomination different from other denominations as other denominations are different from each other.

But Blitzer followed that silly question by presenting a story depicting Marvelous Mitt as a benevolent Bishop of that at least nominally Christian church, and Jack Cafferty said it was the best presentation of Romney’s religion he had ever seen, and it included some female Mormons saying why they like Marvelous Mitt.  One said that she had asked him whether she had to choose between loving the church and loving her husband and that he had replied that she could do both and that he would show her how.  What he showed her was his converting the woman’s husband to Mormonism also.

But another woman showed the fundamental problem with Marvelous Mitt.  She said that Romney would do whatever he needed to do to become President, and I thought of his flip-flopping and deceiving by quoting his opponents out of context and his out-and-out lying, and I thought of how white folks like Romney reacted to Malcolm X using the phrase “by any means necessary.  Marvelous Mitt shouldn’t sell cars.

“In the beginning was the word,” babbled Evangel John before babbling that he was the disciple Jesus loved and John 3:16, the basis for promising eternal life to the superstitious for money

Supercilious - 27 April 2012

I’m a child of poverty and degeneracy, but my mother tried to give her children what we wanted, and so she put Wild Root Cream Oil on our grocery list when Sal Mineo was famous.  I wanted it so I could grease my hair to make it look like his in a hope to fit in with more fortunate children.  Of course that didn’t work.

My high school shop teacher, who also coached the football team both my size and my inability to buy shoes kept me from joining, took up a collection to get me a haircut.  I took the money and went to the barbershop where all the more fortunate boys and men went and got a crew cut befitting the fashion of that time after the demise of Sal Mineo’s popularity.  And, later in high school, when I earned a little money of my own, I bought Ivy League clothes and had my hair cut in a Princeton, and somewhat fit in.  But that was only my secondary education in bad hair days.  I’ve had a bad hair life.

After high school, I joined the Army and fit my hair within Army regulations, which did not befit the hippy hairstyle of those ten years.  In 1975, after I left the Army, I grew my hair to fit the fashion that went along with bell bottom trousers.  But now I’m bald and fortunately fit with many people now shaving their heads.

How to build a golden calf - 26 April 2012

Silly Santorum called Obama a snob for promoting post-secondary education, and now Marvelous Mitt has donned that mantel by responding to Obama’s saying he wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth by bragging that George Romney was successful without a college education, as though it’s all about money.

CNN Sunday aired PayPal’s CEO offering a $100,000 fellowship to someone willing and able to forgo a college education to use computer technology to solve “the world’s greatest problems.”  The world’s greatest problem may be that people think that money is more than a medium of exchange and has inherent value.  Essential to solving the world’s greatest problems is knowing enough history not to repeat it.

Computer technology helps people prolong other people’s lives and produce green vehicles, but the next question is what people will do with those lives and those vehicles, and the answer might be what Hitler did with Volkswagens.  Those computer techies need to learn that.  Otherwise they’re only geeks.

Poontang - 25 April 2012

When I was in the United States Army in Vietnam, the United States government turned Cam Ranh Village into a red light district, overrunning a fishing community of about 300 families with a business of about 500 bars with prostitutes working in each of them, catering to what those Secret Service agents did in Columbia, and providing “security.”  And, when the Army flew me to Hong Kong for five days of what it called rest and recuperation, it started my visit with about an hour in a room with the other soldiers on my flight listening to an Army Major telling us how to prevent Hong Kong prostitutes from robbing us.  Certainly that was a part of the “culture” of the Department of Defense then, and it has continued through Tailhook two decades later to now, two more decades later.

When I was in the United States Army but attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency as Intelligence Assistant to our Defense Attaché in our embassy in Kabul while we ended the Afghan monarchy, a drunken Peace Corps volunteer brought an Afghan prostitute to a party I hosted at my house for members of the community of military and intelligence and diplomatic operatives with whom I worked there, and the party ended with a game of spin the bottle.  And, during that assignment, I caught a ride on a maintenance flight of my office’s aircraft to Bangkok, where I and one of my co-workers and some of the Marines guarding our embassies in Kabul and Bangkok spent a lot of time in Patpong, Bangkok’s main red light district.  We teamed together to go out to hook “tail.”

And now, during this sudden revelation that the Secret Service behaves similarly, revelations have also arisen that male West Point cadets are still raping female West Point cadets and that the academy’s and the army’s hierarchy sanctions that as it did during revelations decades ago shortly after the beginning of admitting women there.  And Panetta, the politician Secretary of Defense, has said that the only way to stop such is to send a message that people can’t get away with such, a message that should go without saying, but has gone unheeded for decades.  And the media, maybe most notably MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, is treating the Secret Service situation as though the problem is only that the agents got caught.  We need the NOW to stop standing by such as Clinton.  Now.

Pippa and the pistol - 24 April 2012

Pakistan is considering deporting the widows of Osama bin Laden.  Because the SEAL’s left the the women we’re calling that behind for Pakistani disposition, we don’t know who they are as we don’t know whose was the body the SEAL’s dropped into the Persian Gulf, as we don’t know the extent of Pakistani complicity in the secrecy in which we seal the SEAL’s.  We don’t know how hard Pakistan’s government is trying to heal its breach with the United States’ the situation provoked.

And the media are either not asking the appropriate questions or providing to us their audience the answers to those questions.  And that’s normal for them, another example being their not asking how that 75-year-old man sneakily buried that 6-year-old boy beneath concrete the FBI needs days to penetrate with jack hammers, presumably because the media are in business to profit by such as the sensationalism of claiming to solve the mystery of what happened to the first missing child to have his picture on a milk carton.  And we the people let them slide.

Paying more attention to American Idol and Dancing with the Stars and Monday Night Football than to the evening news is how Rome fell, with its Emperor fiddling at banquets when he wasn’t watching slaves kill each other for his entertainment, while it burned.  Khrushchev said that the United States would fall to the Soviet Union like overripe fruit because of such, but instead the Soviet Union fell to such, but left it in Russia.  Pogo said later that we have met the enemy and he is us.

Sitting on Capitol Hill - 23 April 2012

MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan’s show presented a pundit saying that SchoolhouseRock’s presenting a cartoon character singing that he’s a bill and describing the basic steps of passing one through the United States Congress is a lie because it mentions the constitutional steps but not lobbying.  MSNBC should understand that the show’s audience was pre-secondary school children.  The song was a step not a final stop.

And, on the same show, another pundit said that Nissan’s CEO doesn’t care about anything but money and that that’s smart.  Bank robbers may care about nothing but money, but chief executives of major corporations can’t succeed without producing products or services that are both marketable and merchantable.  So, caring nothing for the customer isn’t competitive, and it stupidly loses everyone’s money.

But maybe the craziest thing about all that is that MSNBC is a propaganda machine for the Democratic Party and accordingly calls itself liberal.  Its suggesting that introducing civics to school children is partisan propaganda and that conscienceless profiteering is smart is hypocritical.  People calling themselves liberal ordinarily claim to support education and not to support money-mongering.

Fern Hill - 22 April 2012

Donna Brazile said that Dick Clark broke down racial barriers, and she cited his letting Michael Jackson and Chubby Checker perform on American Bandstand as examples and compared that to the white baseball manager’s letting Jackie Robinson play in the Major Leagues, and she still treats William Jefferson Clinton as though he were “the first black president.”

Carnivals used to have what people called nigger shows, and Romans used to display slaves gaming against each other in the Coliseum, and that’s fundamentally what Dick Clark did to Jackson and Checker and what that baseball manager did to Jackie Robinson.  Referring to Jackie Robinson, a CNN pundit said on the 65^th anniversary of his entry into the “major leagues” that he wasn’t the best player in the “negro league” but the one the manager thought would be most able to blow off harassment from sports fans and players, the one most likely to be an Uncle Tom.  Brazile is an Aunt Jemima for the party of Jefferson Davis.

And most of us white folks ignore the facts of those situations, because we enjoy the entertainment they provide us, because we’re like the Romans.  We fiddle while we burn and call Clark the world’s oldest teenager, evading obvious facts to the extent of saying plastic surgery and other cosmetology rejuvenates us, like Michael Jackson.  Jackson and Clark are dead.

Not asking but telling - 21 April 2012

Married Mormon Marvelous Mitt told Soapy Sawyer that people don’t know him “terribly well.”  So let’s remember that Marvelous Mitt’s dishonesty has extended from flip-flopping, to quoting his political rivals out of context, to telling bold-faced lies.  And let’s consider Diane Sawyer’s husband and Michele Bachmann’s husband and think about homosexuality. 

Of all the persons I’ve known, among my top ten favorites is a lesbian who wore denim and chains and drove a Mustang with a stick shift and drew animations for Hanna-Barbera, and her Army veteran girlfriend was also a friend of mine.  And my youngest son is gay, and he told me that years before he told his mother, and another of my top ten favorite persons was a man who thought he was in the closet until he died at the age of 79, although everyone who knew him knew of his sexual orientation, and none of our mutual friends cared.  So the only problem I have with homosexuality is that being in the closet generalizes to other lying.

And that came home to me when I heard my son, whose mother married a Mormon after divorcing me, brag about his ability to lie.  Before he told his mother he was gay, he told me that part of his problem with Mormons is that many of them are homosexual, while marrying women to have sons.  That seems to me to be more terrible than marvelous.

Chauvinism - 20 April 2012

The first person to call Mary Magdalene a prostitute was a Pope the Roman Catholic Church calls Gregory the Great.  He did that in a speech five centuries after she lived, presumably to support the Church’s excluding from the Bible the Gospels saying that Jesus told his disciples that Mary understood the Gospels more clearly than they did and that they should listen to her, after the “apostle” Saul of Tarsus called himself Paul and said women shouldn’t speak in church.  Fifteen centuries after Gregory died, the Church retracted his slander but not its proscription against ordaining women, and most people still think she was a prostitute partly because they haven’t read the Bible.

Jehanne of Domremy, whom English-speaking people call Joan of Arc because “Joan” is a modern English form of Jehanne as Jeanne is a modern French form of Jehanne and because her father was from Arc, withstood months of efforts by a Roman Catholic Bishop to intimidate her and witnesses and fifty other clerics of the court over which he presided and by her integrity kept him from convicting her of anything or sentencing her to anything.  So that Bishop, after having the executioners prepare for a fire, turned her over to them with no instructions as Pilate turned Jesus over to the Pharisees and Sadducees.  The executioners burned the girl because the Bishop had no justification for turning her over to them without convicting and sentencing her.

The Bishop’s name was Cauchon, which appropriately sounds like French for “pig,” and we appropriately use that word to refer to police like those who tried to let George Zimmerman off the hook for murdering Trayvon Martin.  And we could as well use it to refer to the Popes and Archbishops continue to let pedophile priests slide as though Jesus’ telling us to love little children means we should fuck them, as we could as well use it to refer to Wikipedia’s saying that Cauchon’s kangaroo court convicted Jehanne of heresy, and sentenced her to burn at the stake.  But, as most of us still call the Magdalena a prostitute, the media support all that slander and criminal bigotry.