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Class and politics

This is an open letter to white people, to poor people, to working stiffs, and everyone in between. This is not directed at those whose conditions are extremely comfortable.

I have a number of friends who have confided in me their fear that if Barack Obama gets elected, he will work to ensure that blacks thrive and whites suffer, or something to that stupid effect. This is something i simply do not understand, and i hesitate to call those people ignorant buffoons – but it’s difficult not to.

I believe that one of the biggest social problems in America today is that minorities feel disenfranchised. I know from experience that it’s hard not to wallow in misery when you’re depressed beyond the will to live. Maybe i’m completely wrong, but i think that minority groups are overflowing with people who feel that there is no real hope – and the natural fringe elements that are set to negative action, either in abject hopeless despairing nihilism, simple apathy, or as a means to an end. It’s sad to see this happen in the colorful but hopeless ghettos across America (just as it is sad to see it happen in salt-white Appalachia, etc., only perhaps more so within minority communities, due to the fact that it almost certainly could have been prevented generations beforehand).

Can you imagine the positive potential of having a President who is not white, inspiring people of all colors, all over America, with the idea, realized, that anyone truly can be what they want to be, do what they want to do, and become who they most wish they could be? Can you imagine people – of all stripes – actually living up to their full potential, or at the very least, earnestly trying to do so? I don’t know, it just sounds like a promising idea to me.

“But I feel disenfranchised,” whines the white friend, in mock-misery, either not realizing or not caring that they sound as if they truly believe themselves to be somehow more important than anyone else.

And of course you do – there’s no need for the belligerent, dramatic moaning. But you are not just an angry white male. Of course you feel disenfranchised – you are; you make less than half what your boss makes, while doing more than twice as much actual work! (Should your boss pay more taxes than you? Perhaps we might ask: should you, who makes far less than your boss does, pay less taxes than your boss pays?)

You are a member of the largest single group in America today: the working poor. You are a member of the majority. If you are a white male, you are a member of multiple majorities. What can the largest group of people do if they pool their efforts?

What can the majority do?

You are not without power. You can affect change. We can change the world. And we will, but we have to do it together.

The real minority in this nation is the wealthy. But they are not without tremendous power! The power that the rich have been enjoying for centuries dwarfs the kind of power that you and i can ever even imagine yielding. And yet, we are the majority.

I have heard many claim that the United States is a meritocracy; it is no more a meritocracy than it is a magical wonderland of lollipop-cities filled with rainbow-riding unicorns. The United States is currently a plutocracy; an oligarchy; an aristocracy, ruled over by a minority of the extremely wealthy.

It’s time to take our country back from the hands of the merciless, the pitiless, the rich plutarchs who tell the rest of us what to do and hold us down so they can continue to sit on our breaking backs with their sacks of pilfered riches. Stand up, you workers, and let those riders fall where they may!

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Class and politics

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

This is an open letter to white people, to poor people, to working stiffs, and everyone in between. This is not directed at those whose conditions are extremely comfortable.

I have a number of friends who have confided in me their fear that if Barack Obama gets elected, he will work to ensure that blacks thrive and whites suffer, or something to that stupid effect. This is something i simply do not understand, and i hesitate to call those people ignorant buffoons – but it’s difficult not to.

I believe that one of the biggest social problems in America today is that minorities feel disenfranchised. I know from experience that it’s hard not to wallow in misery when you’re depressed beyond the will to live. Maybe i’m completely wrong, but i think that minority groups are overflowing with people who feel that there is no real hope – and the natural fringe elements that are set to negative action, either in abject hopeless despairing nihilism, simple apathy, or as a means to an end. It’s sad to see this happen in the colorful but hopeless ghettos across America (just as it is sad to see it happen in salt-white Appalachia, etc., only perhaps more so within minority communities, due to the fact that it almost certainly could have been prevented generations beforehand).

Can you imagine the positive potential of having a President who is not white, inspiring people of all colors, all over America, with the idea, realized, that anyone truly can be what they want to be, do what they want to do, and become who they most wish they could be? Can you imagine people – of all stripes – actually living up to their full potential, or at the very least, earnestly trying to do so? I don’t know, it just sounds like a promising idea to me.

“But I feel disenfranchised,” whines the white friend, in mock-misery, either not realizing or not caring that they sound as if they truly believe themselves to be somehow more important than anyone else.

And of course you do – there’s no need for the belligerent, dramatic moaning. But you are not just an angry white male. Of course you feel disenfranchised – you are; you make less than half what your boss makes, while doing more than twice as much actual work! (Should your boss pay more taxes than you? Perhaps we might ask: should you, who makes far less than your boss does, pay less taxes than your boss pays?)

You are a member of the largest single group in America today: the working poor. You are a member of the majority. If you are a white male, you are a member of multiple majorities. What can the largest group of people do if they pool their efforts?

What can the majority do?

You are not without power. You can affect change. We can change the world. And we will, but we have to do it together.

The real minority in this nation is the wealthy. But they are not without tremendous power! The power that the rich have been enjoying for centuries dwarfs the kind of power that you and i can ever even imagine yielding. And yet, we are the majority.

I have heard many claim that the United States is a meritocracy; it is no more a meritocracy than it is a magical wonderland of lollipop-cities filled with rainbow-riding unicorns. The United States is currently a plutocracy; an oligarchy; an aristocracy, ruled over by a minority of the extremely wealthy.

It’s time to take our country back from the hands of the merciless, the pitiless, the rich plutarchs who tell the rest of us what to do and hold us down so they can continue to sit on our breaking backs with their sacks of pilfered riches. Stand up, you workers, and let those riders fall where they may!

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current events internets media uncategorized

Compelling anti-war video

Former U.S. soldier droppin’ some Truth about this bullshit war in Iraq. Do your self and your conscience and your country and your fellow human beings a favor by watching this and then doing something about it.

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current events uncategorized

The Highest Cost of War

If i were living in a video game, i would probably do video game things: senseless slaughter, reckless driving, and generally causing mayhem. It’s sure as hell fun in a video game.

I’d probably have a real itchy trigger finger; blowing character’s heads clean off would cause me to ceaselessly cackle as i wheel about looking for more victims, and more nastiness to get into.

Soldiers, however, do not live in video games. They kill real people. Actual human beings, with lives and families and friends and day jobs – be they evildoers or just innocent civilians, caught in the line of fire. Sometimes, though, things go wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Frankly, it’s getting a little tedious, hearing and reading about all the civilian deaths in Iraq. It has been going on for a long time, after all.

That’s why i put off reading this The Nation piece (alt.link.print) for about a week before i got around to reading it.

The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise… Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

I can not and will not blame soldiers en masse or individually. It’s a real bad situation over there, and we need to get those guys out of there as quickly as we possibly can, before more soldiers crack under pressure and bring the whole damn thing down.

It’s ok to be against the war and NOT spit on returning soldiers. That kind of folly is for idiot hippies with misguided frustration. These guys need a lot of help, from many different angles. War does terrible things to a man’s soul. But we must have hope that these inner demons can be defeated, every last one of them, for every last soldier who was there and saw bad things happen.

The bottom line: we’ve gotta get out of that place.

In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties have already taken a heavy toll–both on the Iraqi people and on the US servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi physicians… published a study late last year… that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion… [They] found that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be “conservative,” since “deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party.”

“Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist [Jeff] Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”

“It just gets frustrating,” Specialist [Garett] Reppenhagen said. “Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people…. So it’s a constant psychological battle to try to, you know, keep–to stay humane.”

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current events internets media uncategorized

Keith Olbermann vs. George W. Bush

Check out this angrily passionate editorial by the great Keith Olbermann re: the new, absolutely diabolical Military Commissions Act. (Read up on it and know that this is terrible and insane.)

[youtube]uqxmPjB0WSs[/youtube]
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current events uncategorized

Foley’s follies

Foley’s Alleged Priest Molester Named

Mark Foley, Pointing the Finger in HellSo… I suppose this makes it… okay now?

Just like a Republican to turn around when he’s being accused of some heinous act and suddenly point the finger at somebody else. Poor priest probably never even touched the bastard. Maybe.

I can hear his voice, lo, across the great digital expanse:

“Well, yeah, I guess I did sort of do the wrong thing, kind of. But he’s the one who really did it! He made me! If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have done anything wrong at all, ever! It’s all his fault! I didn’t really do anything, really!”

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current events internets uncategorized

Suspicious Looking Device

Suspicious Looking Device“The only function of the Suspicious Looking Device is to appear as suspicious as possible, whether carried in hand or placed indiscrimately in public places.

“The SLD contains LEDs, a LED array, a character display, an optical distance sensor, capacitive touch sensor, buzzer, and motors.”

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current events uncategorized

Hacking Your Way to a Better Tomorrow

Did you know: If you’re really serious about getting your favorite greasy politician elected, you could

  • invest hundreds of hours (unpaid in most cases) campaigning for them
  • or you could

  • simply hack the Diebold machine taking the votes, which only requires a few minutes of your time.
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current events uncategorized

Ann Richards, R.I.P.

Richards remembered as “a true Texas hero”

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current events internets media uncategorized

The Yes Men in Nawlins

The Yes Men, a group of painfully satirical culture jamming pranksters, have done it again: they duped organizers of the Gulf Coast Reconstruction and Hurricane Preparedness Summit into thinking that Andy Bichlbaum was Rene Oswin, an official stand-in for Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Alphonso Jackson, announcing that HUD was not going to tear down 5,000 units of affordable public housing (projects) in New Orleans …a blatant lie meant to bring attention to the fact that HUD was actually planning on doing the exact opposite, even with people clamoring to return to some semblance of normal home life.

William Loiry, president of meeting sponsor Equity International, said he was duped.

“We were contacted about a week ago or so by someone who we believed to be [public relations firm] Hill & Knowlton [saying] that they were representing the HUD secretary and that he wanted to make a major announcement at this summit.”

Loiry said he was told a few minutes before he had planned to introduce Jackson that the secretary would be replaced by Oswin.

Video here; CNN article here.

And to explain, from The Yes Men‘s website:

Identity theft: Small-time criminals impersonate honest people in order to steal their money. Targets are ordinary folks whose ID numbers fell into the wrong hands.

Identity correction: Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.

The Yes Men have impersonated some of the world’s most powerful criminals at conferences, on the web, and on television, in order to correct their identities. They currently have hundreds of thousands of job openings. Sign up today!

See also:

Situationist International (you must absorb this information to fully understand culture jamming!)
The Yes Men movie

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current events family friends life uncategorized

More Stem Cell sites…

Stem Cell Action Network
http://www.stemcellaction.org

Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research
http://www.stemcellfunding.org/

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current events uncategorized

NORAD 9/11 tapes

Listen to these 9/11 tapes from NORAD’s NEAD base for chills. Read the whole story of how the effort to quell the 9/11 attacks was doomed from the beginning by faulty communications and a military that was sadly outmanned, overwhelmed, and ultimately outgunned. From Vanity Fair. Chilling, terrifying stuff. The candor, and humanity, on these tapes is stone-cold real.

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current events uncategorized

Denying reality in Washington

Global warming is all in our minds. Also an apparent figment of our imagination: more than 100 people (so far) who have died as a direct cause of the current heat wave sweeping California.

While NASA has actually removed the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” from its mission statement, an obvious sign that the idiotic monkey-hear, monkey-repeat global-warming deniers in Washington have them under their ridiculously fat thumbs, they’ve also been cutting or delaying programs intended to figure this climate change thing out.

So, has the politicization of science gone from merely hurting children by denying the obvious reality of evolution to actually killing people by denying the obvious reality of the global warming catastrophe?

So who’s on the side of citizenry, if our government wants to roll over and play stupid while we roast in the ever-increasing temperatures that are currently making our little planet a little less inhabitable each day? (Certainly not Republicans, who defiantly show their disgust with the poor by continually voting not to increase the minimum wage, all the while voting to give themselves raises and give tax cuts to the poor rich people in this country.)

What’s the real deal here, then? Is the U.S. government trying to enslave its own people by creating an environment where we have no recourse or protection from calamity without paying? Has America finally been turned over to Big Business? Where has all this incredible ignorance come from, and why is it actively trying to take us back to the Dark Ages, when common people were literally at the mercy of all-powerful tyrants? And how is it that We, the People, are actually letting this happen to us?

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current events

Flickr stream: photos from arabist

Lookit what hatred can do (photos from arabist of the Israel-Lebanon conflict)

Warning: some extremely graphic images of victims of Israeli war violence in Lebanon.

It’s too bad that the assholes in Hezbollah have to literally ruin the lives of Lebanese civilians by incurring the extreme wrath of Israel (who, let’s face it, pulled the trigger in the terrible images linked to above). I’ve always had a great fondness for the Lebanese. I had a childhood friend who (if i remember right) was Lebanese (he didn’t speak a word of English but we had fun, i hope), and who couldn’t love the country that gave us the late, great Khalil Gibran.

Extreme bad behavior never benefits anyone, whether coming from aggressors or defenders. Violence is violence. If this is how we solve our differences, then the human race truly is doomed to extinction, and godspeed.

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current events

Independent infographic pretty much says it all

The Independent (UK)

Categories
current events internets

link roundup

Top 10 places to find royalty free, public domain, stock photos

Stephen Hawking in the news: “It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species… Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.” – He’s also working on a children’s book a la Harry Potter, sans magic. Dude!

Footage of meteoroid hitting the moon.

Court orders Bob Taft (Governor- OH) to disclose potentially scandalous records. Corrupt Bob must give up. What a loser.

Aussie lyrebird is like a freaking dictaphone of nature! I’ve heard wild stories about this bird, but hear it imitate – perfectly! – a buzzing chainsaw, and two different camera shutters!

After the Rodney King riots in South Central, the city gave residents a plot of land in good faith. How nice! They’ve since turned it into the largest urban farm in America! Unfortunately, it is at this very moment under corporate and police attack. It seems the land was dubiously sold out from under The People to developers. Shame, shame, shame! This is outrageous, and reeks of the kind of “indian-giving” that white people are most famous for.

Don’t even try to cancel AOL. They’ll just give you the runaround and, erm, ask for your father. WTF.

Sexy ro-bots having sexy sex.

An even weirder video: “dancing” Japanese girls teaching defensive English. I guess. Don’t make fun of them.

EFF‘s The Corruptibles!

The Show with Zefrank is a freaking riot!

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current events internets uncategorized

Impeach Bush for Peace

Here’s an idea: DIY impeachment!

If you don’t think there’s enough evidence to mandate an impeachment of George W. Bush, you might not have been aware of the facts. That’s okay. We don’t actually blame you.

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current events

Jon Stewart vs. Bill Bennett

You don’t want to miss Jon Stewart skewering conservative Bill Bennett over gay marriage. Way to go, Jon!

Stewart: So why not encourage gay people to join in in that family arrangement if that is what provides stability to a society?

Bennett: Well I think if gay people are already members of families—

Stewart: What?!

Bennett: They’re sons and they’re daughters—

Stewart: So that’s where the buck stops. That’s the gay ceiling.

Bennett: Look, it’s a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a woman.

Stewart: I disagree. I think it’s a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.

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current events

Geneva Convention? What Geneva Convention?

I can see it now: “But sir! Nobody told us we couldn’t torture & humiliate suspected enemy combatants!”

Pentagon to omit Geneva ban from new army manual: report – Yahoo! News

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – New policies on prisoners being drawn up by the Pentagon will reportedly omit a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans “humiliating and degrading treatment.”Citing unidentified but knowledgeable military officials, the Los Angeles Times said the step would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift by the US government away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
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current events memories

Today in 1989…

Remember Tiananmen Square.