July 15, 2008 archive

Contemplating the upcoming trip to Austin has me thinking about the Native Americans and how I have always drawn such inspiration from them.  They make frequent appearances in my art both for their beauty and for their symbolic power.  They mean many things to me but to boil it down I would say they represent the natural human, living in harmony with the environment, and, more regrettably, man’s inhumanity to man.

An editorial from socialistworker.org subheaded For supporters drawn to his pledge to withdraw from Iraq, Barack Obama’s latest talk about “refining” his position has left them feeling betrayed.  Here’s the link: http://socialistworker.org/200…

Several days ago, on 6 July, an early morning wedding procession in eastern Afghanistan’s Nargarhar Region was crossing through a pass in a ridge separating two valleys when they were bombed by American planes. It was to have been a big double wedding between two families, with each family exchanging a bride and a groom. One family lived in the valley on one side of the mountain and the other family was from the valley on the opposite side.

What began as celebration ended with maybe 52 people dead, most of them women and children, and others badly injured.

BBC News

been all over and it looks the same just another excuse for buildings

said I been all over and it looks the same

ice cream stands and brand new cars

attorneys at law and Jehovah’s Witnesses

how many churches do they need

yeah how many churches do they need

well sign me up for the

ChurchofLatterDayPentecostalReformistEpiscopalianPostJesuitSacrificialCommunionoftheNew TestamentRevisionists

and I’ll be covered when I go

but for now i got Crowley in a cup

and the moon is pulling

the moon it pulls

hop into the inbetween

again again again

hop into the inbetween

aren’t you overdue?

the flags they flew at 6000 feet

the flags they flew at dawn

your shirt is here in place of you

your boots

your hat

and gloves

Update: Reload your Ajax folks, using Shift Control R, because I was dead in the damn water for half an hour.

I can hardly expect you to respond, but as far as I can determine comments are turned off at this point across the whole blog.

I hope the situation is resolved soon, but I’ve already run around in circles with my hair on fire so there’s not a lot more I can do.

At least I won’t have to listen to your whining- NO COMMENTS DUH!

You see…

Glenn Greenwald is just too radical and left wing for respectable bloggers to support-

All of this highlights the central political dilemma in the U.S.

The Bush-led Republican Party, marching in virtual lockstep, has been the author of the radicalism, extremism and lawlessness of the last seven years, presiding over an endlessly expanding Surveillance State and accompanying war-making machine, and the dismantling of numerous core Constitutional principles.

While numerous individual elected Democrats have opposed many of these measures, the Democratic Party’s leadership, and the Party collectively, has done nothing to stop it and much to support and enable all of it.

As the 2006 election and these subsequent events conclusively demonstrate, mindlessly supporting and electing more Democrats for its own sake doesn’t solve or even mitigate anything.

But it’s also true that actions which result in handing Republicans control over any branches of the Government — including supporting third-party candidates or abstaining from the process altogether — makes matters worse still.

Nobody who finds the above-documented events objectionable can rationally embrace a course of action that directly or indirectly empowers those who are the prime forces behind these events: namely, the mainstream GOP in its current incarnation.

All of that, in turn, leads to this pressing question: what is the best course for those who want to battle against these civil-liberties-destroying, rule-of-law-trampling, war-making policies that the GOP leadership pushes and the Democratic Party leadership supports, enables, and/or passively accepts?

In a two-party system where blind support for either party will do nothing but perpetuate these policies, how can they be undermined?

Graphic photo at end depicts the wounds Khadr was denied treatment for while he was being interrogated.

Mandated by a high court ruling, the defense lawyers representing Omar Khadr have been given and will release 7 1/2 hours of videotaped interrogation tomorrow. Khadr was arrested at 15 and held in Gitmo, where he remains today.

While Khadr’s supporters have claimed for years he was tortured in custody, his lawyers say the latest revelations have finally caught the attention of a Canadian public that’s growing less willing to sacrifice human rights in the name of national security.

It seems that Canadians are sick of their government participating in America’s illegal torture/detention practices, and their courts agree.

Amid skyrocketing oil, gasoline, coal, and electricity (coming to a neighborhood near you) prices, 2008 offers Americans quite serious and stark choices between knowledgeable, impassioned, and thoughtful candidates when it comes to finding paths toward a prosperous 21st century economy, on the one side, and Fossil-Fool candidates focused on tightening our shackles to the ever-more costly (pollution, financial, otherwise) and archaic oil-coal based energy system.

One of these choices comes in Oregon, where Speaker of the House Jeff Merkley against so-called “moderate” Republican Gordon Smith.  

Jeff was an easy choice for membership in the ranks of the Energy Smart Act Blue page. Join me after the fold for some indications as to why.

By now most every knows of the sad news, for the U.S. Military, of the 9 Americans Killed in the Afghan Attack, with 15 wounded as well as others at the firebase.

A more recent report can be found here, Afghanistan: ‘Hundreds’ attacked NATO base with their Story Highlights being:

**Afghanistan: Attack involved 400 to 500 militants. 9 American soldiers killed

**Attack was the deadliest for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since June 2005

**NATO spokesman: “This was a larger scale attack than normal”

**Bomb kills 6 Afghan guards accompanying vehicle of U.S. private security firm

And many know the deaths of Afgans and Coalition forces occupying Afganistan, especially U.S. forces, has surpassed those in Iraq for several weeks now, even before the above attack.

From the wrong side of Culebra on San Antonio’s westside to inside Nuremberg walls.

A few years back I took a trip with some kinder to Deutschland. And there while doing due diligence watching o’ de flock of youngsters.  I took a stroll down to the square in front of the church.  I had wandered around and looked at the neato shops and liitle eateries on the inside of the great wall. Before that I had wandered the streets of Nuremburg, looking at the buildings that showed the obvious patches on the buildings with damage that the Allies had visited on the city and its people.

There in the square in front of the church was a group of small brown men.  There in some colorful feathered headdress the Mexican men stamped their feet and played on a flute tunes that belonged to the past or at least another mystical part of the ancient Mexico. Evoking some deep dark jungle and yet there amidst the old dark centuries old bricks that kept the German people inside from the outside, people were held captive by the spectacle, the noveltyof some short brown men from Vera Cruz reenacting an Aztec dance and ritual.