Saturday, February 25, 2006

Secret Revolutionary – The True Story of George W. Bush

When George Bush Jr. was a Yale undergrad back in the 1960’s he had a secret love affair with a beautiful and brilliant young woman. But this young woman, who we will call Tanya, was no spoiled sorority queen, but a leader of Yale SDS. George spotted her one day, striding across the campus, bull-horn in hand, bra-less and mini-skirted. He fell immediately in love – a love from which he would never recover and one that would change his entire life.

At first Tanya would have nothing to do with the seemingly mindless, shallow, frat-boy son of a CIA mass murderer, but George revealed his true self. He had learned early to hide his sensitivity and quick intellect from his ogre-like mother and cold distant father. Now with Tanya he opened up. She took to George, and thrilled at the possibility of winning him over to the side of the Revolution. Tanya explained to him the true nature of US imperialism and George holding his hand on her leather-bound copy of the Communist Manifesto swore to “expend every drop of blood, every breath, for the cause of World Revolution.”

George, of course, wanted to join SDS. Tanya wouldn’t let him. “We have enough snot-nosed little rich boys in our midst.” She said. “I have something better in mind for you!”
Tanya explained that with his family’s connections his old man could be president one day, which means George could, if he played his cards right, do the same. “Then you will have the Empire by the balls!” Then she told him the tough part. They must separate and never see each other again – for the good of the Revolution. George wept bitter tears, but agreed. They kissed goodbye and she whispered softly in his ear, “Remember Leon Trotsky.”

After graduating with a C minus from Yale (he had to do this to keep up the pretext he was a dumb-ass rich kid) he joined the Alabama Air Reserve. He did this as a way of resisting the Vietnam War of which he was a fervent opponent. George spent most of his time picking up cheap floozies, snorting coke and drinking bourbon as form of rebellion and as a way of dulling the deep pain he felt from the loss of Tanya.

After the Air Reserve, George Senior insisted that his son go into business and set him up in a number of oil companies. All of these George W. ran into bankruptcy as a protest against capitalism and as a middle index finger to his domineering father. But he did manage to make friends with the Bin Laden family, which proved to be of great import years later. George continued to drink and coke-up, for it was difficult for him to lead this double life – committed revolutionary socialist pretending to be a reactionary moron.

But the wait began to pay off. His father became Vice President, then President. George W began to make his move. He stopped boozing and coking, claiming he had found Jesus, but it reality it was because his plans were coming to fruition. Acting the part of a heartless brute, he got himself elected governor of Texas. He would cry at night at the thought of all the prisoners he was executing, but held his act together with the thought, “Well, Lenin says you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

All these years he had been studying (in secret of course) the works of the great revolutionaries. George knew what had to be done to destroy the Empire. First off, he had to create imperial over-stretch. Get the US military bogged down in many places at once that it becomes too costly and inoperable. He must run the USA into bankruptcy and destroy its industrial base. He must divide the US from its allies and unite the whole world against it. At home, he must unite the true-blue conservatives and the left against the Federal Government.

Finally George became – we wouldn’t exactly say elected – the President. He knew what to do – surround himself with crackpots and the most venal individuals he could find, to set everyone’s teeth on edge. The very dregs of the child-molesting, drug-dealing, money-laundering, stock-defrauding Washington Republicans were all put on the pay roll. From the very bottom of this human cesspool he dredged up Cheney and Rumsfeld, chuckling to himself as he wiped off the shit and mucus. A pair of clapped-out male crack whores called Pearly and Wolfi were picked up off one of the sleazier DC streets where they peddled their hemorrhoidal buttocks to visiting Labour MP’s and South America generals. “These two, I will make my court “intellectuals!” and collapsed into a paroxysm of laughter at his own cynical wit.

We all know what happened next. Osama and the boys (with a little guidance from the Mossad, who had their own agenda) made the WCT fall down and go boom. This was the signal for George to go into action. He sent the military into that bit of soldier fly paper called Afghanistan, where they remain stuck. Then, he bankrupted government finances by giving billions in tax cuts to the rich and ballooning the war budget. Next, war in Iraq, now possibly Iran as well. The Imperial spandex is about to bust. The whole world now hates the US government and its corporations. George W. created the biggest demonstrations in the world. Latin America is in flames and daily Bush’s useful idiots like Rumsfeld and Rice pour oil on it. .

George is truly a happy man. The World Revolution is underway. In his daydreams he thinks, “Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, BUSH.”

Man Marries Goat In Shotgun Wedding

(I wonder about the children...) Thanx to Bob M. for this story

A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his "wife", after he was caught having sex with the animal. The goat's owner, Mr Alifi, said he surprised the man with his goat and took him to a council of elders. They ordered the man, Mr Tombe, to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to Mr Alifi.

"We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together," Mr Alifi said.

Mr Alifi, Hai Malakal in Upper Nile State, told the Juba Post newspaper that he heard a loud noise around midnight on 13 February and immediately rushed outside to find Mr Tombe with his goat.

"When I asked him: 'What are you doing there?', he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up".

Mr Alifi then called elders to decide how to deal with the case.

"They said I should not take him to the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife," Mr Alifi told the newspaper.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr//1/hi/world/africa/4748292.stm

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Lessons In Economics

The “Lessons In Economics” based on cows is an old Internet joke, but it has a definite right-wing bias. I have written my own version to rectify this.

American Capitalism

I have two cows. I form a corporation. With the investment raised I buy a bull and soon produce a herd. The cows work long hours for lousy feed, have no medical insurance and only get a weeks vacation. I sell my milk at a loss and under-cut the other farmers, putting them out of business. Thus, I get their pasture and cows, adding them to my farm. Some stubborn farmers remain, but I use eminent domain to take their pasture. My cows revolt and form a union. I get the police to beat them and break the union. The leader of the cows union is arrested on a host of bogus charges, tortured and given 90 years in prison. Then I discover milk is cheaper in India, fire all the cows, build a Gated Community on the pasture land and import milk from India. The government gives me a patent for Potable Bovine Liquid and a copyright on the name “Milk” and thanks to the WTO I now have a global monopoly on the sale and production of milk.

Canadian Capitalism

I have two cows. I form a corporation. The Federal Government gives me $200,000,000 with which I buy most the cows in the country. Then I sell all the cows, take my money and move to the USA.


18th Century English Capitalist

I have two cows. But I notice there are a lot of wild cows in England, grazing on their own pasture land. So I tell my friends in Parliament about this and they pass an Enclosure Act and drive the wild cows off the land which is then deeded to me. I become very wealthy. But all those wild cows wandering the roads mooing for fodder are a problem, so I get my friends in government to arrest the cows and transport them to the Colonies where they work on my farms that the Crown has so kindly granted me. But most of the wild cows die and those that don’t run away and join the Indians. I hear there is a good supply of big, tough cows in Africa so I take a ship and gather them up. Mind you, about half die en route back to the Colonies, but, there’s millions more where they came from. The African cows sometimes revolt, but burning the leaders alive or hanging them by the udders usually helps restore order. I develop a three-way trade; fodder from England, cows from Africa and Colonial milk back to England, but soon find the African cow trade to be the most profitable of the three. Of course, from time to time the cows try to take over a ship or the damned Frenchies try to grab them, but the Royal Navy is always there to help me. By now, I have bought a title, (Lord Fucinarsle) a seat in Parliament and a 50 room Country House, which is rather nice. In my spare time I write letters to The Times on the “Virtues of Free Enterprise” and “The Need to Control the Lower Orders” and am planning a new business venture - selling opium to the Chinese!

Nazi

I have two cows. I complain to the Fuhrer about this and he offers to sell me cows expropriated from Jews, communists and other sub-humans at below market price, provided I kick-back an amount to the Party. I experiment on my now very large herd and find that thru the application of torture I can double milk production. This combined with slave labor makes me a very wealthy man. But alas, the forces of International Judeo-Bolshevism triumph over the Fatherland and I am forced to flee. Luckily, the Vatican smuggles me out and I end up in Paraguay. In the midst of this mongrel and degenerate race I begin my dairy farm anew. Then one day a man from the CIA comes by. I am so pleased to be once more among gentlemen who share my Christian faith and implacable hatred of cultural Jew-Bolshevism and miscegenation that I sign on immediately. After a number of adventure-filled years overthrowing socialist-infested democracies, I end up with my old friend Klaus Barbie, creating the international cocaine cartel, so important during the Iran-Contra days. Now retired in the USA, from time to time the School of the Americas has me teach “The Art of Cow Torture” to South American Latifundists to improve their milk production.

Anarchist

I have two cows. I get together with other farmers and buy a bull which we share. Our herds grow. Our animals are treated with ethical standards and we farm organically. We also form a cooperative to buy feed and equipment and a cooperative dairy to process the milk, make butter and yogurt and market these products. At the same time we develop a credit union which helps local people set up small cheese production as well as a host of other small spin-off industries. The American capitalists hear of our success and the US Government declares us a nest of communist terrorists funded by Hugo Chavez and a threat to democracy. Soon Cowntras are infiltrating our herds, poisoning the milk and murdering the calves.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Some Questions For Your Banker

If you're in the banking industry, a teller, a manager, a territory supervisor, please answer the following questions. Take an oath, and then answer them under the possibility of a charge of perjury if you tell a lie. Sign your name, as well as your bank branch - in other words, take responsibility for your answer.

1. Who creates money in Canada, and at what benefit?
2. While the country's municipal, provincial, and federal leaders complain constantly of having no money to do anything with, how is it that the private banks keep reporting profits?
3. What were the profits of your bank in 2005, and where did they come from, i.e. what are the profitable activities of banking?
4. Does it make sense to have private banks such as yours create the money, and if so, why?
5. What would happen if the Bank of Canada began to create all of the money in our Canadian monetary system, and your bank were forced to stop?
6. As there are no securities taken for credit card accounts, i.e. credit is given based purely on a person's perceived ability to repay what is used, along with their promise to do so, how do you justify the right to be the one to create that credit and charge interest for doing so? Why shouldn't people just promise the seller of the service or product that they will pay over time, and give the interest to the seller rather than the bank?
7. Who gave you the right to create money/credit and do they maintain the ability to take that right away?

By Donn Tarris (originally posted in The Tyee
15\2\06 as a response to the article “ Just Don't Call It Funny Money”)

Climate Change In Human Development

New evidence shows the importance of climate change as a factor in human development. This evidence also shows that new human arrivals integrated with previous populations, rather than exterminating them, as was once thought.
See here.

If Automobiles Were Designed By Microsoft.

They would come in 500 body styles and 2000 colors yet only start 50% of the time.

As well as a car, it would also be a boat, an airplane, a lawn mower, a washing machine, a refrigerator and a video camera. But none of these would ever work properly.

They would have 1000 page instruction manuals, written in incomprehensible jargon, which would devote 100 pages to the car seats, but none to tell you what to do if the car doesn’t start, nor how to adjust the timing, injection or change the spark plugs.

Sometimes when you turned the key to start, insulting or incomprehensible messages would bellow out from a speaker beneath the dashboard, such as, “What you are doing is illegal!” or “Error! The blexpics is unattached to the fundumentum, do you wish to continue, yes, no?) Often when driving along, you would get one of these messages and the engine would stall.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Marcos For The OBU

There is undoubtedly an anarcho-syndicalist influence on the Zapatista Movement and other grass-roots community movements in Mexico. Just this Thursday, Delegate Zero (Subcommandante Marcos) of Mexico’s ‘Other Campaign’, said, “…everyone should come together in one grand sindicato (union movement) – workers with students, teachers and others. We are millions in the same situation, Gains are not a gift, they are the results of a struggle. National unionization is the solution, demanding the restitution of labor rights, with workers replacing owners…”

For the rest of the story click here

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Wny Is US Capitalism So Barbaric?

Of course, all capitalism is barbaric, the very idea of a small minority bullying and exploiting the majority is monstrous, and something we should have thrust into history's overflowing dustbin a long time ago.

However, the British Empire, itself no soft touch, was never as vindictive as the US Empire. (1) Many a Commonwealth leader spent time in a British jail for leading an independence movement. Think only of Kenyatta, Nehru and Nkumah. Yet, after independence these countries were treated like any other. Why couldn't the US have done the same with Castro or the Sandinistas?

If the socialist or nationalist alternatives to US corporate capitalism don't work as the US ideologues claim, then what's the problem? Let people try populism, social democracy, peasant anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, even marxist-leninism - or any combination thereof - and if such methods don't develop the economy, the people will realize it, drop it, and then do what the Gringos want. Why destroy any attempted alternative? Perhaps it is the realization that some of these alternatives might actually work and that a ruthless corporate capitalism has no answers for economic development, but is merely a means to pillage the weak.

What we have with the US Empire is a deep and bitter hostility to pluralism. Britain and France accepted the fact that many of their former colonies had self-styled socialist or even Marxist-Leninist governments. They found no trouble maintaining normal relations with these regimes. Not the US. Every dirty trick in the book has been used against governments the US disapproves of, including economic warfare, military coups and terrorism.

The Empire mirrors the mother state. Both France and Britain have been more pluralist and in some ways, more democratic than the USA, since at least the turn of the century. Labour, socialist and communist parties have long sat in parliament and no one thought anything of it. In the US, the Debsian SPUSA was hounded out of existence, as was the Communist Party. While anarcho-syndicalists have always been part of the French trade union movement, in the US they were terrorized, subject to both judicial and vigilante lynching. In France dissident intellectuals and artists are celebrities and have streets named after them when they die. In England, while not as celebrated, they are still regarded as part of cultural life. In the USA, such people, when not ignored, are vehemently condemned from press and pulpit, and Hell will freeze before you see a Noam Chomsky Street or Howard Zinn Avenue.

This anti-pluralist and anti-democratic tendency, is I think, rooted in racism, social darwinism and Protestant sectarianism. While all three are also found in England, and the first two in France, they are not as powerful, mitigated by both conservative noblesse oblige and the egalitarian sentiments of a strong social democratic movement. Racism and social darwinism were the dominant aspects of American ruling class ideology and, in spite of cosmetic changes, remain so until today. (2) As for the Protestant sects, their belief that "we are special because we are saved and all others are sinners who deserve eternal punishment" explains the mixture of pious hypocrisy and viciousness you see all the time in US foreign policy.

Take the case of Latin America. To torture and murder hundreds of thousands of people, to deliberately push millions into destitution, such crimes have to be rationalized by claiming inferior status for the victims, both racially and in the so-called struggle for survival. In the USA itself, social darwinism is blatant. The poor deserve to be poor and workers deserve low wages and lousy working conditions, for they wouldn’t be working here if they weren’t losers in the Great Competition of Life. I, on the other hand, in my gated community (sic) and my 20,000 square foot “house” , deserve everything I have, for I am a Winner, and truly, Ghod has smiled upon me.

1. The British killed at least 20,000 people in Kenya and the French hundreds of thousands in Algeria. Hardly a soft touch, yet after independence, the relationship between the new countries and the former masters were normal. The British government did not try to wreck Kenya’s economy, nor did the French send teams of “Contras” into Algeria to rape and murder.
2. The problem is, they are exporting this foul, Nazi-like ideology under the guise of globalization and neoliberalism. Thus Canada and Europe are undermining their social democratic traditions, working and living conditions are declining for the majority, while the parasite minority becomes ever wealthier.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Nonsense As Social Control

Most religions and ideologies contain elements which don’t make any sense. Not just those due to ignorance, but beliefs that are irrational, even downright bonkers. The sort of stuff that even a bit of common-sensical thinking would lead one to question. Examples? Well, try transubstantiation, (1) bodily resurrection, match-head size embryos as babies, or the world as 6000 years old. Let’s not just pick on religions – there are lots of secular nutbarbarisms too, try the idea that Jews control the world or that some raving psychopathic killer is The Great Teacher of The Proletariat.

If you wish to belong to the group, whether church, cult or political party, you have to accept these crazy aspects. With religions, in a whole-hearted fashion, for if you secretly question one of these beliefs you are guilt of a mortal sin.

The idea behind this is, accept one bit of lunacy and you are softened up to accept other lunacies. Accept whoppers like bodily resurrection or transubstantiation and you will be ready to cheer when heretics are burned at the stake. Once you weaken the power of human reason, once you allow an irrational belief to take hold, you open the door to further irrationalisms. Get the individual to distrust his-her reasoning power and they will be open to manipulation by church or state. Accept the initial nonsense, you have begun to doubt your reasoning ability and will allow others to manipulate you with beliefs that have no more logic behind them than “ It is a sin, crime, treason, to believe otherwise. For the sake of the Church, Nation, The Leader, you must believe this.”

Thru this understanding of the power of nonsense we get a further insight into the insanity of the 20th Century. The men who went off cheering to WW1, the people who turned in their neighbors to the Nazis because they were Jews or leftists, those who happily rounded up the “kulaks” or the “Trotskyites” - all these poor saps had been softened up well in advance. They already had their heads stuffed with church irrationality and the non-believers among them had their own set of crackpot notions like eugenics, social darwinism and “race science”.

Given this brain-softening, it’s easy to accept a Fuerher, A War To End All Wars, or The Infallible Leader of the Proletariat. And in the United States today, it is no coincidence that 40% of the population support the invasion of Iraq, the same percent that think the world was created in 4004 BC.

1. The belief that during Communion the bread and wine are not just the symbols of the blood and flesh of Christ actually BECOME the blood and flesh.
Blogging Change
BCBloggers Code: Progressive Bloggers Site Meter