Why does shit happen to me when I am probably the most kindest, generous, sensitive, morally sound individual on the face of this earth? How come god protects George W Bush from cancerous polyps but he lets my mother die of cancer? Don’t get me wrong Patriot Act monitor, I’m pleased that George W was saved from the potentially hazardous polyps. But why not protect my mother also, a virtuous person if there ever was one? George W. Bush, like Bill Clinton who was saved by medical science from heart trouble, is a monumental piece of trash. They were saved by medical science but not my mother. Yes the two presidents are god”s children too but I would think that if I was god and I was dispensing justice to people I would surely give a decent amount of justice to my mother at least to the point of not letting her die at the age of 55.
Similarly, where is the justice with the people who serve God. Pope John Paul II and the current Pope Benedict have done everything in their power to block movements of the poor to better their plight. They have seemed to prefer that the poor in Latin America remain docile, impoverished and terrorised with the promise that if they follow the sacraments, don’t get aboritions, etc. they will achieve utopia in the after-life. Benedict and John Paul have been slobbered over, while John Paul’s denuciations of unregulated capitalism have gone unnoticed. Meanwhile Catholic clergy who have tried to seriously help the poor such as Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador or Dom Helder Camara of Brazil have either been murdered or had their lives made a living hell. It seems like the story of the Old Testament prophets keeps being repeated in the relgiious world. I myself was baptized in my mother’s religion, the Catholic faith. I admire aspects of the faith but it seems that the majority of the church leadership still serves the rich at the expense of the poor as the church has done since Roman times. Opus Dei is a very terrible group with a terrible philosophy
P>Why has the good good lord given me obsessive compuslive and anxiety disorder since roughly 1997? These disorders have afflicted me less and less since I first was subjected to medication in February 2001 but with many regressions of varying intensity in between. You’d think that considering my virtue that god would not give these disorders to me but would give them to George W. Bush or Thomas Friedman or Christopher Hitchens.
Was it really necessary for JOhn Nichols to write such sentimental mush about Tim Russert in The Nation? I mean I’m very sorry Russert died but come on lets not attribute to Russert things he was not. I’m glad The Nation printed more pieces on Russert far less sentimental than Nichols’s. But then again the article is typical of John Nichols’s sentimental, somewhat humorless style. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/329703/tim_russert_and_the_end_of_no_talking_points_journalism
I get upset when I see some leftists talk of Jon Stewart as if he is fucking George Seldes or IF Stone or somebody. Stewart is a centrist liberal. He has some good guests once in a while, sometimes the satire is very clever or sometimes mildly amusing but obvious. I think the "investigative" pieces can be funny in a non-political way. I’ve heard he has a cat named Chomsky but come on that dosen’t mean anything. Overall the political content on the show is very much within the narrow center-right American political specturm. Stewart is way overrated. I think Colbert’s schtick is much more clever and Colbert’s show overall is pretty superior.
Here is some data from President Woodrlow Wilson’s 1915 Commission on Industrial Relations about the standard of living of the great majority of American workers under Capitalism. I quote from a footnote from my on-going master’s thesis:
"The 1915 presidential Commission on Industrial Relations provided a number of statistics to argue that a great many American workers were oppressed by unrestrained free market capitalism. It stressed the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States. For example it claimed that while the American economy expanded rapidly, the share of the net product of manufacturing going to that industry’s workers actually declined from 44.9 percent in 1889 to 40. 2 percent in 1909. </SPAN>It deduced from income tax statistics that in 1914, two percent of the American population owned sixty percent of the nation’s wealth. It classified as "poor" nearly two-thirds of the nation’s people. It cited evidence from the 1909 presidential Commission on Immigration that a third of 619,595workers in basic manufacturingand coal mining earned less than $10 per week. The infant mortality rate in families of workers earning less than $10 per week was 256 per 1000; the rate for families who earned more than $25 per week declined to 84 per 1000. Over 35000 workers died on the job in the United States in 1914, over half of which the Commission estimated to have been preventable deaths."
Lesbians. I have never been able to consistently enjoy lesbianism though I’m expected to as a heterosexual American male. It may be because my libido senses the intensity of the coming arousal and just kind of shuts down. Or it may be because I get the impression that the laides are not really enjoying the expierence. They are doing it because somebody is paying them, be it the Girls Gone Wild sleazebags, porn operators, etc. or they are drunk and want to be accepted by males who are urging them to do it. If there is any chance I’m to be aroused by lesbians I think I need to know that the ladies are really genuinely enjoying the experience deep down in their hearts. Or it may be that I’m heterosexual and lesbianism just has a limited appeal. Or it may be that lesbian porn is just so grotesque that it can’t play to my simple refined sensibilities. I don’t think most lesbians make love in such a manner. I look forward, with god’s help, to better cultivate my potential for sexual arousal by lesbians so that I may become a better American male. </P><BR><br><P>Lesbians of course are still pretty much hated in mainstream American culture except when they attract the arousal of males but even then the "hot" lesbians are respected only to the extent that they can be objectified. I mean the Ellen DeGeneres show has been succesfull and corporations like American Express use her as their spokesperson but that is because she does not accentuate herself at all as a lesbian. She presents herself as a harmless creature who loves everybody. Yes I know that she exercised a great deal of courage and got alot of abuse and suffered a great deal mentally when she came out of the closet in 1997 but people may have forgotten that. In any case Ellen is the exception; most lesbians, in a best case scenario, are still viewed as "different" and are at best laughed at while at worst
One hears persons of the male species say sometimes: "two girls that’s sexy but two guys, oh that’s gross." Such a feelling of course is a cultural construction. Our so-called culture sees two guys fornicating as against the notions of masculinity that have been ingrained in people. I’m sure if it was marketed right by corporations, females would be unashamed to say that they get off seeing two hot guys fornicating. Ideas about homosexuality are ingrained in people from birth along with ideas about everything else in the world by family, mass media, business marketing, schools, religion, etc. A great many people in this world and especially in this country have no ability to analyze the ideas about the world that have been ingrained in them from birth. They have no "intellectual self-defense" as Chomsky calls it. Intellectual self-defense is certainly not encouraged in this country.
I remember reading, in the online edition of The Nation years ago, a writer who gushed that Will & Grace was the most progressive show on TV. But tell me this, are the lives of Will and Jack typical of gay males in this country? Are the lives of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guys any more typical? Is the typical gay male a superficial whiny upper class jerk like Will or a clown like Jack? Or is a gay male more likely to be a teenager who has been made homeless because his family kicked him out on the ground of his sexuality? Is a gay male more likely to have been the victim of assault by young punks inflamed by Eminem’s lyrics?
If you are a person who believes in the argument that "Well if we allow gays to marry then we surely have to allow people to marry goats or cows" then you are a fucking idiot. We are talking about two consenting human beings having a loving relationship not a human preying on a helpless animal, you fucking turd. Go get a fucking soul and a fucking brain you fucking piece of shit. (This is me chanelling the late Bill Hicks). </P><br><P>I was reading something on the Black Agenda Report website that I think made an important point about leftists who are excited about all the young people Obama has inspired. What are such "Progressives for Obama" doing to ensure that the Obama "movement" will exert serious pressure against the right wing economic policies and militaristic foreign policies that Obama will implement immediately if he gets elected? Tom Hayden has said (my own paraprhase) "I’m not focusing on Obama’s policies, I care about the movement of people he has inspired." Ok but it seems to me that this movement is full of people who have little knowledge of Obama’s policies and are attracted to him because of the superficial aspects: his magenitic personality, effective oratory, his vague calls for "hope" and "change," etc. Most of these Obama fans don’t have the slightest idea as to the broad policies they would like Obama to implement. Thus it seems to me it will be easy for Obama to continue the dismantling of our meager welfare state, keep the military budget bigger than the rest of the world combined, give corporations more power over us, etc. etc. Because so many Obama supporters don’t base their support on policy grounds but on being inspired by his speeches and friendly personality, etc.
I’ve been listening to Rush Limbaugh alot in the middle of the night as I can’t sleep. Rush imparted the novel information the other day that the people who run the World Trade Organization (WTO) are "Marxists." He read on the air that a WTO report warned about the very low savings rate in the United States. Indeed we are a nation drowning in debit whether it be in businesses, households, etc. This level of debt concerns business leaders who look at the long term picture. .Business leaders have to have an idea what is going on in the world. To find out, they don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh. No, they read the news section (certainly not the editorial section) of the Wall Street Journal or the Economist or look at WTO reports. A decent savings rate of course is an indicator of a healthy captialist economy. Limbaugh is most likely genuinely too stupid to see the reasonable nature of the WTO report. All he knows is that foreigners were criticizing the Bush administration’s economy and so they are "Marxists" in his imbecile world
I also heard Limbaugh rant about this documentary on PBS that aired some time ago. According to the report Limbaugh read on the air the documentary said the United States committed mass murder against civilians during World War II and we allied with mass murderer Stalin and we weren’t any better than the Nazis, etc. Limbaugh explained that the author behind this series was Niall Ferguson. Limbaugh apparently forgot that Ferguson is a McCain supporter and author of books praising the war on terror and European civilization and so on. But LImbaugh kept ranting about how the documentary was part of a plot by Democrats and leftists to undermine support for America’s military and the US in general by preaching defeat in Iraq, undermining the US economy by pushing the global warming "hoax", etc
After the Supreme Court decision about Guantanamo, Limbaugh on his web site described justice Anthony Kennedy as a friend of terrorists for writing the decision calling for habeas corpas rights for the Guantanamo detainees. Anybody who does not completely subscribe to U.S. military propaganda knows that people in Guantanamo have undergone hideous treatment. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. have made inflammatory rhetoric against the detainees saying that they are the worst terrrorists in the world. All the while they have gradually released a significant majority of the 700 some prisoners originally held. Holding the Guantanamo captives has not been about fighting terror but about attempting to inspire fear in the Muslim world that the Bush people are the global mafia don and will destroy anyone who gets in their way. Probably all but a few of the remaining detainees are not genuine terrorists. Many of them were probably handed over to the U.S. by warlords in Afghanistan who took bounty payments after randomly picking out someone from a rival trible and saying "This guy is one of Bin Laden’s lieutenants" Then the guy is taken to Bagram or Guantanamno and hideously tortured for a few years by half-crazed, half-witted marines and then, as the majority of Guantanamo detainees have been thus far, released. This is a very ugly episode. If god had any justice he would put Rush Limbaugh on trial for war crimes using the Julius Streicher precedent at Nuremberg
Here is Bill Hicks on Rush Limbaugh from the early <br><br><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" height="344" width="425" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/pg2_MntkMzg&hl=en&fs=1">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never" />
<param name="allowNetworking" value="internal" />
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pg2_MntkMzg&hl=en&fs=1" />
</object>
I really hate that Bernie Mac show. Reruns of it come ..South Park reruns at 1AM on channel 11 in the Seattle area. And Bernie Mac is such a big clown. God what an idiot. Another show that uspets me is Scrubs. There’s something about Zach Braff that really bothers me.
I don’t know if there has ever been a worse R&B/rap song on mainstream radio in recent memory than Ray J’s "Sexy Can I." What a cheap piece of garbage. Then again 80 percent of the songs played on Kube 93, the so-called Hip Hop/R&B station owned by Clear Channel in Seattle, are complete trash. It has been that way for a long time. Anybody who has a song with the bulk of the lyrics being some variation of "Go ahead mami shake that thang" or "Girl I like the way you shake it" can get airtime these days. Almost no people who actually know how to rap–even with violent, sexist lyrics–can make it on the radio these days. MTV is a little better presenting a wider variety of rappers but they don’t play hardly any music of any variety anymore, at least on MTV and MTV2
I’ve been watching Bill Hicks bits on Youtube and I got to say that I don’t find him all that funny. I can appreciate the spirit behind his jokes alot of the time but I really have never laughed out loud except when he said during the first Gulf War that he was against the troops but for the war. I’ve watched David Cross and Lenny Bruce but I haven’t laughed at them much either. I think my sense of humor is so refined that it takes alot to get me to laugh. In any case Bill Hicks died of Pancreatic cancer in 1994. Again where is the justice? People who are of vastly less value to the world recover from serious medical troubles but Bill Hicks got pancreatic cancer, a disease that will kill you 99 percent of the time within 5 years, and probably 80 percent of the time within a year or two.
A few weeks ago when the Seattle Mariners fired their manager John McLaren I listened to a press conference where Howard Lincoln the Mariners CEO said that the ownership group was not operating in order to make profit or to maximize profit but for the good of the community. Now the Mariners don’t have shareholders and shit but for him to say that they don’t worry about making money was really quite amusing. He may really believe in his heart that the ownership group operates for the public good. Of course the ownership manipulated the state legislature into making the public subsidize a new stadium back in the mid-90’s the profits for which they currently enjoy
The Sonics have left Seattle. The owner, a right wing asshole named Clayton Bennet, tried to blackmail the city into building him a new arena, though the current arena underwent substantial renovations during the mid-90’s. The politicians in Oklahoma City bamboozled their constituents into paying for renovations on the existing arena in the city so this asshole can make even more money. All the sports talk hosts in Seattle are very angry with the politicians for not accepting an offer from investors led by Steve Ballmer the Microsoft CEO to fund 75 percent of the Key arena renovation while the public would fund the other 25 percent. Still the cost in tax dollars would have been about 50 or 75 million. These sports radio hosts are all very wealthy and don’t really know what’s going on in the world outside sports and their own country clubs and so think it’s not too big a deal for the public to thrown money into building a sports stadium. Of course the money saved and gained from Bennett paying the city to buy out the lease on the arena and the refusal to contribute public money toward building the arena is not going to be used to pay for health care for poor children or anything like that. I was suprised that Seattle mayor Greg Nickels didn’t accomodate Bennett. Nickels in general is very generous to big business and developers like Paul Allen
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate