How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
Give me time please. The mountains are Annapurna and Annapurna South in the Himalayas, which were our backdrop for our recent six day trek. I like that photo because we took it ourselves, however, the foreground is overwritten. I have the ability use others, but not today.
Too much sky – maybe cropping would help. But then too much white? Accountants do not do good web page.
“America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy. (Former President Jimmy Carter)
Falsism? If so, evidence would include the matter being open for discussion, with raging debate, condemnations, discussions at high levels, and television and radio pundits blowing wind from all directions.
Truism? If so, the matter would be ignored in all mainstream media, and only reported in the foreign country where it was made (Germany), not even in the English-language section of the Spiegel website, which printed the original interview.
Truism.
terrorists (Oops! Wrong century) communists and their firing squads as noble Americans try to rescue them. In the face of such blather one must face the reality of Cuba, good and bad on all sides. But in Swede’s mind, any evil on the part of Castro makes his argument a slam-dunk winner.
Back during the time of McKinley and JP Morgan’s stooge Teddy Roosevelt, a Cuban revolution to oust Spain was hijacked by the Americans. A courageous revolution of liberation was diverted to the benefit of a new oppressor.
Continue reading “It all goes back to the Bay of Pigs”
Those who know me also know that my older brother was a Catholic priest. He died in 2011. Anyone who knew Fr. Steve Tokarski also knew that he was a man of impeccable character and credentials. Nary a hint of scandal came within a thousand miles of him during his life, and for good reason.
The logo to the left, taken from a Meanwhile in Art post, was designed for a Catholic Archdiocesan Youth Commission in 1973, and seems appropriate. It won an award at that time, and now appears creepy. But there is a reason for the misbehavior of priests.
I can explain part of it. I do not condone it. I can explain the behavior of an abused child who in turn abuses other children as an adult. That does not mean that jail sentences, shame and shunning are not in order. Explaining does not justify.
Continue reading “The unnaturalness of celibacy”
From Big Swede, a man who apparently stops reading when he is a the point where he can clip and paste:
“Long live the Cuban Revolution. Long live comrade Fidel Castro… Cuban internationalists have done so much for African independence, freedom, and justice. We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious imperialist campaign designed to destroy the advances of the Cuban revolution. We too want to control our destiny… There can be no surrender. It is a case of freedom or death. The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people.”
— Nelson Mandela
He has no idea why Mandela praised the Cuban leadership. I do. Most of my readers do. That’s what separates us.
Big Swede, the doomed Sisyphus and Randian who appears eternally tasked to fight Marxism if it ever reappears, gives us all a what-for at 4&20, quoting another source, of course.
Marxist revolutionaries from Frank Marshall Davis to Billy Ayers to Saul Alinsky to David Axelrod have all known that it will never be possible to establish a one-party Socialist/Marxist State in the U.S. as long as there is a strong Middle Class. It is the Middle Class—not the extremely wealthy, or the poor—that represent the big stumbling block to Socialism. It is the Middle Class that keeps Democracy (as we used to know it) alive via the “Civil Society.” It is the Middle Class that participates most actively in all of the horizontal organizations and relationships that form the back-bone of Civil Society: The PTAs, the Lions Clubs, the Shriners, the small and independent Churches, the Charity groups, the Business Organizations, a Free and Open Press, and even Labor Unions when they are small and locally based, and Political Parties when they have a strong local grass-roots organization (as opposed to the large nationally based, top-down Unions and Political Parties we have today). The “Tea Party” is a classic example of a grass-roots, bottom up loose collection of horizontally organized individual citizens. In short, the “Civil Society” is the entire collection of myriad voluntary associations that exist in a Democracy, but are totally absent in Socialist States.-AMERICADEATHWATCH
Why do people get trapped in time warps? When did David Axelrod become a leftist? Obama too, I suppose, has had an epiphany. Why are “Business Organizations” good while labor unions must be small and local? Why the Lions and Shriners but not Sierrans and feminists? And how can socialism promote “one-party” states even as all openly socialist countries have at least three, while crony-capitalist corporate-socialist US has only one oligarchical party masquerading as two?
Your own words only Swede, if you dare enter these shark-infested waters. You are hopelessly lost in the silly dialogue of the Cold War, it appears.
In my younger years I did not understand why people believe lies, and thought that mere presentation of the truthful alternative would be enough to open eyes. There was so much ground to cover, so much to learn, and so little reward ahead for me that given the opportunity again, I might simply slip into slumber with the rest of the American public. It is so much easier.
I’ve spent decades now trying to gain a better understanding of the world, and to what end? Only to be laughed at and ridiculed by people who have not read beyond Glenn Beck or Ayn Rand? It has to be a reward unto itself, or there is no point to it.
Anyway, today we celebrate wondrous leader bringing Iran to the table, forcing that rogue nation to abandon its nuclear program and allowing us to give thanks for a safer world. Good for him! I celebrate along side all of you with the following caveats:
So I raise my glass with the rest of us in honor of a nobody doing nothing. That’s how we roll. Happy Thanksgiving!
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PS: Lizard 19, about all those writers that went before you over there, we must be polite, I realize. But you’re waaaaaay better then them. Without you it was just another Democratic blog, kind of trivial and boring and predictable. You’ve become perhaps the best writer on the Montana blog scene. You’d share that space with Budge had he not given it up.
We are traveling again today, this time by car. We’re going to Billings, Montana. I grew up there. Towns are like minds – they can be narrow confines or exciting adventures.
Boulder, Colorado is an exciting adventure. Billings, for me, was a narrow confine. (Also, all of the interstate accesses to Billings are ugly. The town itself so not bad, but it strikes travelers as refineries and truck stops.)
Billings is a hot and dusty prairie town, close to mountains but part of that semi-desert region called Eastern Montana, about 12 inches of rainfall yearly. Like all home towns, we don’t appreciate what they really are until they are in our rear view mirrors.
The times I have visited there since leaving I’ve been surprised at how little activity there is after hours, and how scattered it is. The downtown area is lifeless, and its center of gravity has moved west, but no one seems to know where.
Billings is not an aesthetically pleasing place to the outside eye. New neighborhoods sprouted up, and all of old Billings is not much more than old houses spliced with long straight roads to get to new Billings. Out there on the west end is brand new infrastructure with roundabouts at most intersections, new shopping malls and planned housing, parks and commercial islands.
It’s all predictable, even boring. I used to drive out in the corn fields west of town looking for birds or passing the time. Out there you will find lots of … corn. East of town is more corn, but more varied geography – some hills, cliffs, viewpoints, streams. East of town are farms and cows, west of town are feedlots and gravel pits.
Overlooking Billings are the Rimrocks – a long cliff-like feature that extends perhaps forty miles west or more. A local geologist told me that the theory was that it was the remnants of a Fire Island-type sand reef where retreating waves built it up in the ancient sea beds. I’ll take his word for it. On top of the rims is riverbed gravel, so it was once a streambed for the Yellowstone River. The importance of the rims in community life is a long stretch overlooking the city where kids can park and drink beer and grope each other while adults pretend they are at the sock hop. That is the city’s Blueball Lane.
Before someone chimes in and tells me of the city’s rich culture, music, and intellectual life, I ‘ll concede the point. There are two colleges there, large medical facilities, three refineries in the region, and all of that requires smart and well-educated people to run it. There’s an NPR outlet that is NPRish to the hilt, playing classical music all day and Car Talk and Wait Wait on weekends just to keep people aware it even exists. Yellowstone Public Radio offers all of the news that the other news outlets offer, identical news in fact, but somehow they think they are better at it. Never did get that.
In 2000, my last general election there before moving up the road to Bozeman, Billings turned out 2,144 votes, 3.73% of those who bothered, for Ralph Nader. That turned a few heads. WTF? Billings?
I did that. I went door-to-door for weeks collecting signatures to get him on the ballot. …[redacted by my editor]… I walked house-to-house evenings with the petitions. It was relaxing, satisfying, better than watching TV. I collected maybe 2,000 signatures during that time.
Here’s what I think happened, at least with the ones who didn’t think the petition was for Rob Natelson* (it is Billings, after all): people were vaguely aware of a Ralph Nader, a consumer protection guy, the Corvair and Pinto and all of that, and maybe even heard he was running for president. There was scant news coverage, but after signing the petition they were alerted to his existence. Once keyed in, they began to pay attention. He wasn’t radical, and the things he said sounded more like New Deal or New Frontier than The Internationale.
Bush and Gore were doing their best to drive people into staying home. Nader was something new, perhaps something old. Those who signed the petitions were probably the bulk of those who voted for him, including the Natelson faction.
I did that. We, the local Greens, also staged a publicity stunt: We got together one Saturday and went along a highway atop the rims and cleaned up all of the litter. We had a big sign that said “Clean Up Politics – Vote Nader!” That got a little TV time, which is the primary way people know politics. We did that.
Anyway, ten-hour drive, and evenings in a place where you can drop a quarter on the pavement at night and then hear it bounce. I’m not saying that you can’t go home again. You can. But why?
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*Natelson was a statewide phenomenon, the regional Randian and well-known throughout the area. Last I heard he had moved to Golden, Colorado.
I watched Real Time with Bill Maher last night, always good for a laugh. But it was the 50th for JFK and I hoped there’d be some discussion. Understand that on American TV it is not possible to have a full discussion complete with evidence and skeptics. Only official truth is allowed, but Maher occasionally pushes the line, since HBO is less susceptible to advertiser pressure.
It was all predictable except:
(JFK Jr. Told him that he viewed it as pointless, that no matter what happened that day, he grew up without a dad.)
The art of assassination has gotten so much better over time. No one questions whether JFK Jr.’s death was murder. Most likely it was. Even the smart ones don’t know to wonder about that. We’re deep, deep into thought-controlled environs, much more so than in 1963.
Paul Begala offers all we can hope for on mainstream TV, a little bit of smuggling. Katty Kay, a fearless BBC news journalist, also a guest, was oblivious. She offered wisdom about the nature of conspiracy theorists and was clueless about the assassination. She obviously has never exposed herself to any evidence. But what can we expect? If she did so, and if she internalized the implications, she’d soon be out of work, either voluntarily or by force.
This is key to journalists who work in the US: They are not disingenuous. They are not dishonest. They are simply incurious by nature, and deep into group-think. Those who do not exhibit those traits don’t advance. There are no ticking time bombs in these folks. The right questions never occur to them.
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*The Magic Bullet Theory is not suspicious. It is merely ludicrous.
This is something for people who are well seasoned and still cooking. Every one of us knows exactly where we were on November 22, 1963 when we heard the news. I was in eighth grade and had been misbehaving. I was sent across the hall to sit with the seventh graders to eat my lunch. Others were going room to room spreading the horrible news, and Susan Hennessy brought it to us. There was stunned silence, then tears and sobbing.
Everyone, that is, except George H.W. Bush, who says he does not remember where he was when he heard. (He was in Dallas. Later that day he would phone the FBI from Tyler, Texas to implicate a young student named James Parrot in the crime. But hell, who remembers picayune stuff like that!)
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Bush was a member of the CIA at that time, this fact confirmed by a memo from J Edgar Hoover. His odd behavior, the phone call to the FBI, is unexplained. Speculation is that he did it to place himself somewhere else on that day other than Dallas. But documentation also exists of his presence in Dallas. Did he have a role in the assassination? Possibly, though he was quite young. He did run Zapata Corporation, a shell company and front for the CIA that was using oil drilling platforms in the Gulf to stage terrorist attacks inside Cuba.
So there’s that.
Should a member of the CIA, a highly secret organization engaged in intelligence gathering and covert warfare, be allowed to be POTUS? It appears to me that because they are by definition engaged in illegal activity, that a member cannot uphold the oath of office.
Piece of Mindful 