The Turkish Just Don’t Get It

Sigh. This is distressing. Here’s an article about what’s going on in Turkey. The government had moved to lift a ban on head-scarves in school, so that women who want to wear the religious emblem can do so, arguing that preventing them from wearing them to school was inhibiting some Muslim women from receiving educations (a valid argument). But the courts have struck it down.

Now, I’m a secularist. But you can’t exclude the religious from participating in public life. You can’t ban head-scarves any more than you can demand head-scarves. It’s about freedom, about unity in diversity.

Egads. I’m proud of the Turks for keeping religion out of government. But that can’t mean excluding the religious from participating in other aspects of life. It just means not legislating religiously motivated laws or establishing any state-sanctioned religion.

I fear this sort of thing will cause a backlash against secularism. I hope the Turkish secularists get their heads out of their butts and figure out what freedom means before that happens.

We Are the Most Lied-To, Gullible Populace on the Planet

Wowsers. This book of Noam Chomsky’s, Failed States, is just chock full of facts that show up our media and our government as a pack of liars.

The list of atrocities committed by our own government (like the 1985 bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, which was actually committed by the CIA, a known fact at this point, though the media never bothered to correct the perception they created by passing along the government’s story that it was a terrorist) just boggles the mind. Presidents from both parties over the years have protected the oil companies’ interests in the Middle East with crime after crime against civilian populations over there. Some of them we’ve never heard a word about, some we’ve heard about but with a twisted slant to blame it all on terrorism. Wherever, in the Middle East, South America, or Asia, real democracy has flowered, we’ve stamped it out in favor of fascist regimes (like that of Saddam Hussein, who was put in power by JFK in the 60s) willing to cooperate with our interests.

If you want to know the facts about what’s really going on in the middle east, get this book. Like they’re stamping on our mail these days, those words of one of my cousins however many times removed and however imperfect himself, John Adams, “Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.” We need to wake up as a country and deal with the fact that we are living under a long-term fascist regime that started long before any of us were born, right back to the founding of our country, which purports to value freedom but which only gives it lip service, and which is actually set up to benefit the few, the super-rich, who head these multi-national corporations. It started with cotton. Now it’s oil.

The primary obstacle to progress for us as a species is America and our corrupt government. This is not a partisan issue, either. The Democrats are just as complicit, though BushCo, with its clumsy handling and constant underestimation of our intelligence, has certainly taken it to new heights, or should I say lows?

Please, let’s stop acting like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed a load of BS. Let’s seek the truth, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Illuminati or reptilian hybrids. It’s got to do with money and power.

President Bush and John Quincy Adams: Soulmates of History

The Monroe Doctrine begins and ends with a president’s son:

As has been noted before, there is a lot of similarity between George W. Bush and John Quincy Adams. Both men were presidents as well as sons of presidents. Both fathers were perceived as rather ineffectual or undistinguished. Both sons got involved in controversial wars in other lands, and both wars were ethically questionable. Most importantly, it is my contention that both men are terminal points in the life-span of the philosophy of the Monroe Doctrine. John Quincy Adams is the beginning of a string of presidencies that assume the validity of the Monroe Doctrine; George Bush’s presidency is the last.

John Quincy Adams was Secretary of State under President Monroe from 1817-1825. As such he was involved in the formulation and first use of the philosophy of the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine officially dates to the state of the union address of President Monroe on December 2, 1823. Officially, the Monroe Doctrine promulgates the philosophy “that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” Hence, it officially is a clarion call for independence of the Western Hemisphere from European colonization. However, there are more than a few holes in the official statement. First among these is that the original speech only references the Russian influence in the Oregon territories and the Spanish influence in Florida. Oddly enough, this stern warning that we will protect North and South America from any colonization (being the true lovers of freedom we are) seems not to affect Canada, which was a thoroughly British colonial area, securely controlled by our most probable enemy as proved by the then-recent War of 1812. John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State, helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine, the causes of which may be found in the first conflict with the Seminoles. There were three Seminole wars in Florida, 1817-1818, 1835-1842, and 1855-1858. So John Quincy Adams helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine while Secretary of State during the first conflict. It was mainly needed to justify the actions of Andrew Jackson, who in official response to the Scott Massacre, set about to attack the Spanish, villages of freed slaves, to exterminate towns of Indians and execute British citizens who were nuzzling in on our trade profits. There was no question we wanted Florida, as Adams was engaged in purchase negotiations with Spain for Florida prior to the first war. Adams used double-speak, finger-pointing, and Orwellian word re-definition to make grossly offensive and atrocious actions justifiable, in short, supplying, as does Condoleeza Rice today, the mental gymnastics to justify a war, about which even General Ethan Allen Hitchcock had admitted, “The government is in the wrong, and this is the chief cause of the persevering opposition of the Indians, who have nobly defended their country against our attempt to enforce a fraudulent treaty. The natives used every means to avoid a war, but were forced into it by the tyranny of our government.”

“So Adams let the Spanish protest, then issued a letter (with 72 supporting documents) blaming the war on the British, Spanish and Indians. In the letter he also apologized for the seizure of West Florida, said that it had not been American policy to seize Spanish territory, and offered to give St. Marks and Pensacola back to Spain. Spain accepted and eventually resumed negotiations for the sale of Florida. [Suddenly turning face, Adams began] defending Jackson’s actions as necessary, and sensing that they strengthened his diplomatic standing, Adams demanded Spain either control the inhabitants of East Florida or cede it to the United States! An agreement was then reached whereby Spain ceded East Florida to the United States and renounced all claim to West Florida.”

US State Department website on the Monroe Doctrine

So the financial boon that had been sought all along had finally been obtained by public misrepresentation of the conflict and justification of the genocidal means to the American and international community as twisted self-defense. This conflict was enshrined in American policy as the Monroe Doctrine. While the overt reason for the Monroe Doctrine was self-defense and freedom from European colonization, the true subtext was desire for profit, economic monopoly, justification of immoral violence, and a blank check for future southern expansion of the young American empire.

And what about our glorious freedom from European colonization? Isn’t that the real point of the Monroe Doctrine, that America believes in free, self-determinate nations, and will stand like a beacon protecting the Western Hemisphere from being used by European, Soviet, or any other imperial power? Would it surprise you to know that the Monroe Doctrine was crafted with the British, mainly to limit French and Spanish profits in exploiting the New World at the expense of any loss to British or American wealth?

“British Foreign Minister George Canning proposed that the United States and the United Kingdom join to warn off France and Spain from intervention [in any of the recently freed colonies: Argentina, Chile, Columbia, or Mexico]. Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison urged Monroe to accept the offer, but . . . Adams also was quite concerned about the efforts of Russia and Mexico to extend their influence over the Oregon Country, which had already been jointly claimed by the Americans and British. At the Cabinet meeting of November 7, 1823, Adams argued against Canning’s offer, and declared, ‘It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war.’”

wikipedia article on Monroe Doctrine

This clearly is a chronology of an economic arrangement with the British regarding the exploitation of the indigenous peoples and Spanish Americas, with the inspiration by Adams that America was mature enough to administer these economic prizes. Adams, in formulating the Monroe Doctrine, is writing future presidents a blank check to attack the other peoples of the earth for the sake of American profit. He also has set the course of crying self-defense and security while clutching slaves and dollars to a bullying chest.

The parallels between this conflict and the Iraq war are many. Apparently the war was decided ahead of time for economic reasons. The American public was lied to about the origins and true goals of the war. Such similarities illustrate how the doctrine of America’s right to use violence for material gain was now enshrined in American political philosophy. The actions of Andrew Jackson, seen by many of his time as a frightening enemy of freedom, the American Napoleon, had now been given the veneer of philosophy and acceptable expression in international affairs.

Theodore Roosevelt extended the Monroe Doctrine to Latin America. “In 1928, the Clark Memorandum was released, concluding that the Doctrine gave the United States the right to intervene in Latin American affairs when it perceived a threat to its interests or internal dangers, even without European interference. Internal dangers included events such as elections as acceptable justification for intervention.” It is not surprising that the reach of the Doctrine keeps growing, as it was in origin a blank check to commit violence for economic gain. Kennedy extended the Monroe Doctrine to justify the Cold War. “The Monroe Doctrine means what it has meant since President Monroe and John Quincy Adams enunciated it, and that is that we would oppose a foreign power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere, and that is why we oppose what is happening in Cuba today. That is why we have cut off our trade. That is why we worked in the Organization of American States and in other ways to isolate the Communist menace in Cuba. That is why we will continue to give a good deal of our effort and attention to it.” The same logic is next extended to Nicaragua by Reagan. It is apparent in the judgment against the US by the world court that the Monroe Doctrine had always placed us philosophically as aggressors against other nations in disdain for morality or international opinion.

The true legacy of the Monroe Doctrine is the inherent belief that the best government is the one that maximizes power and wealth. This is why governments like Bush’s seem so fascist. It is the close relationship between government and the economically and socially powerful in these governments, and the way their decisions only benefit the wealthy and powerful (like Chevron or Haliburton), not the common man (who sends his son to die in Iraq). I suppose Bush is not consciously fascist, or he would show less disdain for friends like Saddam Hussein, but he shares the characteristics of proto-fascism. “Semiotician Umberto Eco attempts to identify the characteristics of proto-fascism as the cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, cult of action for action’s sake, life is lived for struggle, fear of difference, rejection of disagreement, contempt for the weak, cult of masculinity and machismo, qualitative populism, appeal to a frustrated majority, obsession with a plot, illicitly wealthy enemies, education to become a hero, and speaking Newspeak, in his popular essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt. More recently, an emphasis has been placed upon the aspect of populist fascist rhetoric that argues for a “re-birth” of a conflated nation.” But I believe our presidents have simply been guilty of the viewpoint that since they are rich and powerful, as are all who are not marginalized in our society, that benefiting such individuals by continuous acquisition of power and wealth would necessarily be the best course. Now, ideas in public discourse emerge such as how Americans are less secure thanks to Mr. Bush’s unilateral actions in Iraq which have galvanized terrorists, how we Americans are not having our needs met in education or health care, or how we fought a war for oil, but pay over $3.50 a gallon for gas after obtaining a monopoly on Iraqi oil reserves and production, since our gas trophy is being used to control the oil markets of Europe and Asia for the profit of the same few. So how could I have fought a war for oil and money, which I and most Americans find morally objectionable, while at the same time have no money to show for the selling of my soul? Only by following the Monroe Doctrine, which has implicitly guided America in every choice to seek to maximize wealth and power at the quality and expense of human life and happiness. In this respect, Bush is an excellent president, for he has fulfilled the Monroe Doctrine in fullness. As Madeline Albright says, “every president has a position much like the Bush doctrine in his back pocket, but it is simply foolish to smash people in the face with it and to implement it in a manner that will infuriate even allies.” In his interview with Jeremy Paxon, Noam Chomsky relays that “Henry Kissinger for example described [the Bush doctrine] as a revolutionary new doctrine which tears to shreds the Westphalian System, the 17th-century system of International Order and of course the UN Charter. But nevertheless, [this interpretation of Kissinger's] has been very widely criticized within the foreign policy elite. . . on the narrow ground the doctrine is not really new, it’s [only more] extreme.” Bush is merely the logical culmination of the Monroe Doctrine, it’s fullest expression. We can now see it for the justification of horror and non-responsibility to the needs of the everyday American people that it truly is. Bush may someday be remembered not as the worst president, but rather as the very best at expressing a very bad and very dead idea, that government’s job is only to accumulate wealth and power to its very limit. Instead the president of the future will be judged by how he or she has met the needs of the American people.

The DNC Are a Bunch of Fools

Here’s a BBC article to ponder. It’s about the confusion in Florida over the primary and whether or not they’ll be able to have their delegates at the convention. It seems there’s a power struggle between the national party and the Florida dems over control.

I didn’t think they could do it, but I’m afraid they’re going to hand it to the Grand Old Poopheads AGAIN. I’m afraid we’re going to end up with McCain, with his crazy ideas and lack of understanding of personal freedom, just because the Democrats can’t get their heads out of their heinies long enough to see past next week. I’m so exasperated.

The American Empire Project: Noam Chomsky and Failed States

I’m adding this website to my blogroll, and I wanted to bring it to people’s attention.

After we’d read an interview with Noam Chomsky in an old issue of the excellent (ad-free) Canadian magazine The Sun, Maj. and I got interested in the man and his work, not so much his work in linguistics (which you really need to be a specialist to understand), but his political work. Maj. just started reading his book, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, in which he uses Bush’s definition of a failed state (a state exhibiting the following: 1. inability or unwillingness to protect its citizens from violence; 2. regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law; and 3. if they have democratic forms of government, they have no real substance) to examine America and show how we are ourselves a failed state. Just the forward is powerful enough to make any thinking person want to throw these guys out of office. The first chapter begins with a paragraph worth excerpting:

Half a century ago, in July 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issued an extraordinary appeal to the people of the world, asking them “to set aside” the strong feelings they have about many issues and to consider themselves “only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.” The choice facing the world is “stark and dreadful and inescapable; shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”

In a country being bankrupted, morally and financially, in order that these few men may wage their (for them) profitable wars, I do not see how so many can cling to the notion that we are living in the America our forebears fought and died to create. There is no longer any “of the people, by the people, for the people” anymore. This is not my country. We’re living in a failed state.

Divided We Fail

Here’s a new link for the blogroll. It’s called “Divided We Fail,” and it’s part of AARP. They’re obviously in it to try to fix social security, but they’re making health-care a big issue, too.

What I love is their symbol: it’s a donkey-elephant hybrid. It’s a powerful image that says it all.

That’s why I changed my subtitle up there: for a long time it was, “It’s Time the World Got It’s Head Out of It’s Ass.” But we really do need to come together, America. My international readers, forgive me, but we are in so much trouble over here that I think it’s important to focus on our problems at home. After all, our dysfunctions affect the entire world. If we can fix our problems, there’s a good chance things will get better for everyone.

Does President Bush have Brain Damage?

Seriously, I think maybe his years of drug and alcohol abuse, combined with the stress of the job, have left him with some serious impairments. We watched some videos of him speaking and interacting recently, and his inability to keep his train of thought, his inappropriate use of humor, and his sheer lack of attention, really make him seem so. Majutsu tells me there are some people who believe he is, in fact, mentally impaired, if not mentally ill.

I remember watching Reagan all those years ago and thinking the same thing, that the man was not all there. And it did turn out that he was suffering the beginnings of Alzheimer’s syndrome.

I would love to hear from people in the medical field on this one. Doesn’t Pres. Bush seem like he’s a bit off in the head? It’s embarrassing to have this man represent the country.

Bayer Ranks High in the List of Evil Corporations

If you’re concerned about a shadowy group of Europeans pulling our political strings and ruining good people’s lives (what some like to call the Illuminati, though anyone with sense has to see that these folk are not enlightened in the least), check out the Wikipedia article on Bayer AG.

Here are some interesting snippets:

As part of the reparations after World War I, Bayer had its assets, including rights to its name and trademarks, confiscated in the United States, Canada, and several other countries. In the United States and Canada, Bayer’s assets and trademarks were acquired by Sterling Drug, a predecessor of Sterling Winthrop.

Bayer became part of IG Farben, a conglomerate of German chemical industries which formed the financial core of the Nazi regime. IG Farben owned 42.5% of the company that manufactured Zyklon B, a chemical used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. When the Allies split IG Farben after World War II for involvement in several Nazi war crimes, Bayer reappeared as an individual business. Bayer executive Fritzter Meer, sentenced to seven years in prison by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, was made head of the supervisory board of Bayer in 1956, after his release.

Isn’t that great? I’m thinking of writing a short story based on the transactions…imagine, businessmen making a deal over boxes of poison gas. “Thanks for doing your part for the Final Solution, Fritz. And here’s a bag of money for it, to boot.”

Bayer AG is involved in an ongoing controversy with French and Nova Scotian beekeepers over claimed pesticide kills of honeybees from its seed treatment insecticide imidacloprid. France has since issued a provisional ban on the use of Imidacloprid for corn seed treatment pending further action. A consortium of U.S. beekeepers has also filed a civil suit against Bayer CropScience for alleged losses.

I’m wondering if this could explain the problems bee keepers in America have been having with the as-yet unexplained hive collapse syndrome which is threatening our food supply.

Austrian journalist Klaus Werner alleged in his Black Book on Brand Companies, that the Bayer subsidiary H.C. Starck financed the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo by trading illegally with the mineral coltan. The allegations were also confirmed by a U.N. panel of experts. Bayer alleged that since 2001 it didn’t trade any more with congolese coltan, but never proved where their resources came from.

How much these people care about human lives: zero. Which would explain the following:

In October 2001, Bayer was taken to court after 24 children in the remote Andean village of Tauccamarca were killed and 18 more severely poisoned when they drank a powdered milk substitute that had been contaminated with methyl parathion.

The white powder that resembles powdered milk and has no strong chemical odour was packaged in small plastic bags that provide no protection to users and give no indication of the danger of the product within. The bags were labelled in Spanish only, and carried drawings of healthy carrots and potatoes but no pictograms indicating danger or toxicity.

Let’s worry about reality, folks, not science-fiction human-reptilian hybrids. There are evil homo sapiens on this planet. No extraterrestrial DNA needed.

Dennis Kucinich’s Health Care Plan

I think health care ought to be one of the major issues in the election, and Kucinich seems to have some good ideas. Here’s an excerpt from this article in the Atlanta Progressive News that gives the details.

KUCINICH: SINGLE-PAYER UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE PLAN

“When people tell me that national health insurance is the right answer but is not politically feasible, I tell them that the opposite is true,” Kucinich wrote in a statement on healthcare-now.org. “Passage is inevitable - it is only a matter of time.”

Kucinich is also for the second year now a co-sponsor of HR 676 in Congress, a bill sponsored by US Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), to enact single-payer universal health care nationwide. The bill number is the same in the 110th Session as it was in the 109th.

The bill had 79 total cosponsors but failed to get out of Committee in the 109th Session, with new cosponsors joining on each month. Georgia’s US Reps. Sanford Bishop (D-GA) [a centrist], John Lewis (D-GA), and Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) were all co-sponsors.

Here’s how HR 676 works: The bill would expand the existing Medicare program so that every person living in the United States and U.S. territories could receive publicly financed, privately delivered health care. Each person would receive a United States National Health Insurance Card with ID number.

Services include inpatient and outpatient care, emergency care, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, long-term care, mental health services, dentistry, eye care, chiropractic, and substance abuse treatment.

Under this act, there will be no co-pays or deductibles. Everyone has their choice of physicians, providers, hospitals, clinics, and practices.

To fund the system, the act would repeal the Bush tax cuts for the highest income earners and establish a 5 percent health tax on the top 5 percent of income earners, a 10 percent tax on the top 1 percent of income earners, and a one-third of 1 percent transaction tax.

There would also be an employer and employee payroll tax of 4.75. Federal and state funding rates for existing health programs would remain unchanged.

“If you leave the halls of Congress, go to a barbershop or a bus station, everyone has a horror story,” Joel Segal, Senior Legislative Assistant to Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), said of the current health care system.

“Universal health care is inevitable,” Segal added.

“A majority of people in this country are not benefitting from the current system,” Rita Valenti, an Atlanta resident who has advocated for single-payer health care for two decades, said.

“People are so embarrassed when they get used by insurance companies,” Margie Rece, a mental health nurse who also advocates for a single-payer health care system, told APN.

Of course, Maj, in the health care industry as he is, doesn’t think anyone’s plans really deal with the reality of the situation. He believes that the president can’t really fix that problem, but only has power to take us into war (or not). In which care Kucinich is also the best choice, because he clearly is the one least likely to do so.

Song of Solomon is the only part of the Bible that should be read

Kabbalah notes:

The schechinah is a female spirit , who as a symbol generated by the unconscious, ties together the various aspects or modalities of the mind. The kabbalah is the itemization of the mind’s modalities, so as to gain both self-knowledge and control of the self. Many of the letters or paths of the kabbalah take the form of abstractions of sexual relations with the schechinah or abstractions of her sexual anatomy. Whether a man or woman is the practitioner, the inner self, or the schechinah, is this divine female, and one’s divinity is attained by imitating her divine intercourse with the lord of the universe. She is in constant loving embrace with the world. As she says, “His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me.” The earth, symbolized by a bull, without mind, is dead. This is why when you first meet the schechinah she is alone and yearning, a widowed goddess, for the earth cannot be seen as a lord without her love. “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves: I sought him, but I found him not.” But it is the love and activity of the schechinah for her lover that returns him to life, joins he and she together in the joyous dance that is the mind at play and in love with the earth.

Below is the elucidation of some paths or energies in my meditations:

Daleth- Door. Understanding. Entry into the temple where one is taught by the schechinah.
Mem - Water. Breast milk. Pain and loss. Tears. Her crying face with her absent lover, keening. That which ties us to life, also the joy and nourishment of existence, food, plants and animals for food, clothing, medicine, and spirituality.
Peh - Mouth. Fellatio. Aggressiveness, drive. Taking over, domination. Energy to do tasks.
Shin - Tooth. The fangs of criticism and self-abrogation. Trial. The harsh aspects of life and nature.

It is clear that the Bible does contain a mystical system. The Song of Solomon is probably the clearest and most accessible pathway to understand the coherent and effective mystical tradition that is behind the poetry of the Bible. The danger of misapplying the remainder of the Bible into aberrant and irrational attitudes that are destructive to self and others is so high, that I believe nothing should be read except the Song of Solomon until that poem is understood. If you read the Song of Solomon and it doesn’t make perfect sense to you, then you should put the Bible away and not read another word of it for a long time. Go meditate, learn, study, love, live. Read the poem only when you are drawn to it because you have already seen it manifested in your own heart. Otherwise, don’t touch that potentially poisonous book of difficult poems. The Song of Solomon is a gate keeper for the rest of the kabbalah. If this path, which is not generic or advantageous to all, does not work for you, there is still the beauty of life, poems to chant, songs to sing and mountains to climb, but to misapply deep unconscious symbols to reality, like fundamentalists apply bad theology to worse politics, is as dumb as spending today the money you dreamed you had last night. It won’t work, and it disrespects the schechinah to such an extent that the mental damage may be hard if not impossible to undue.