The recent Occupy Wall Street (and accompanying “Occupy” movements in various cities, such as Occupy Boston) are amazing.  Protests are ephemeral – an afternoon, maybe a few days, just a blip (if even mentioned) on  the news radar.  But the Occupy movement has been able to persist, not unlike the protests in Egypt and other areas of the Middle East.

It’s like people finally had enough, enough of obstructionist politics, of government always helping corporations, letting business and profits drive government.  It’s like other people have been thinking along the lines of my “People VS Profit” post and decided to stand up.

It’s an open secret that our “free market economy” is only free for the corporate interests.  They get to profit with abandon, using workers as if they were unfeeling robots, often not even caring much about customers, as long as both profits and stock prices keep going up. About 99% of us are left to manage on our own – and those who are not extremely privileged are more-or-less screwed.

If “business” destroys the land near you or poisons your health or destroys small businesses or hires people at wages so low they need food stamps, it’s all good, as long as the business contributes to our national GDP.  Why is the measure of our economy all about aggregate revenue and never about wages or well-being of individuals?

I think people are tired of this broken system – they want financial reform, they want political reform – they want a system by the people and for the people, not a system based on profit and greed.

Live long and Occupy.

I don’t understand why adult human beings consider it normal/healthy to eat fluids intended for infants or fetuses of other species.

Eggs are embryonic fluid (albumin + yolk) intended for a microscopic organism to grow thousands of times in size into a baby reptile, bird, amphibian or fish.

Milk is infant formula. Human breast milk is meant to help babies develop into semi-autonomous children.  Likewise for cow udder milk – intended for mostly helpless newborn calves.

How the unwilling donor animals are treated is sad, but regardless of the treatment, how can these fetus/infant fluids be deemed healthy for daily consumption by adults?

Eggs & animal milk are both over-full of protein, fat and cholesterol – far more than any adult needs.  Did you know that excess protein is converted into fat?  And that overconsumption of protein can cause kidney stones and leech calcium from bones?  And  that overconsumption of fat and cholesterol can lead to heart disease?  Did you know that USA is #1 in heart disease (primarily due to overconsumption of fatty animal products like milk and eggs)?

{Their} Mother Knows Best

take other species’
reproductive secretions
how can you eat them?

More extreme weather is clearly a sign from God to fundamentalists to “cut it out“.  Hurricane Irene ransacks the entire East Coast just days after a severe earthquake shook a number of East Coast states and only a few months after a record number of tornadoes swirled about the country (e.g., devastating Joplin, MI).

Obviously, God is tired of the haters, hating on birth control, evolution, homosexuals, government and everything else the fundamentalist zealots (of all religious stripes) love to hate.

This is a clear message of “Can’t we all just get along?”

You know what?  It works - in times of severe weather, neighbors actually help each other and don’t concern themselves with each others’ bedroom habits or fight about rituals or philosophy – they just work to help each other get by, clear the debris and get things functioning again.  But how soon we forget these lessons.

picture from behind my building – a tree downed power lines and blocks my through street (Aug. 29, 2011)

The current political debates, around the debt ceiling, budget deficits and Obama’s leadership are laden with vitriol and zealotry, but are especially frustrating because of the two elephants in the room which never get addressed.

Pretense of colorblindness as concerns our president. Obama is our first non-white president in a country which had widespread race-based slavery less than 200 years ago and widespread legalized racial discrimination until about 50 years ago and which still enjoys a widespread, if subtle, institutionalized racism which exhorts “whiteness” as the norm and regularly punishes those who do not adopt white styles of dress, speech and culture.  Non-whites make up a ridiculously high percentage of the prison population, people living in poverty and people affected by the latest recession.

It is utterly absurd to pretend that race has nothing to do with the difficulties faced by our country and by Obama as leader of this white-normative nation.  If I could ask for one bold change to Obama’s rhetoric, it would be for him to start openly and honestly addressing the race issue.  White racists like Glenn Beck have been calling him “racist” and other epithets for (despite what artificial reasons they cite) taking what is “supposed to be” a white man’s job.  Pundits and press frequently claim that Obama is an “elite liberal” which certainly does not reflect on his political record (filled with centrist and compromise positions), but does reflect his existence – as a black president.

How can we have a meaningful discourse on Obama as president without touching on the effect his race is having in his efforts to lead the country?  How can we unpack the Tea Party and Republican/Conservative and, yes, to an extent, Democrat/Liberal backlash against Obama without discussing race?

President of (y)our Animosity

Audacity Pope
Facilitator Rancor
Ignore (not) Color

Entitlements reform. This concept is both hilarious and infuriating as meant by the people who are pressing hardest for it.  Essentially, it is the people who’ve gotten the biggest handouts saying that people who get the smallest handouts deserve nothing at all.  What is a trust fund or inheritence or having college paid for completely by someone else (e.g., parents) if not entitlement?  What is getting a cushy job without even an interview at a parent’s business if not entitlement?  What is making money through the privilege of owning something (e.g., property, stocks, business) and paying a lower tax rate on your money’s income than many who labor for their wages (you can get a rough idea of how the static capital gains tax compares to [top] income taxe in this chart) if not entitlement?

Politicians who are pushing for so-called entitlement reforms are the same ones who voted against ending oil subsidies (i.e., corporate welfare), even though oil companies have been making extremely large profits even during the recent Recession.

Entitlement Reformers (waggle golden fingers)

Accumulation
Cross-generational Spread
Luxury Spoon-Fed

Ladies who expect male dates to pay for everything up front (1st date and beyond) should expect that those men will in turn be expecting things. Perhaps sex, perhaps housewifey things, but certainly some level of sublimation.  After all, who would pay for something (that is not charity) and not expect to gain something from their purchases?

If women are serious about gaining equality, it means everything. All the boons of being a “helpless” woman fall away, including the financial ones and all of life, including romantic life, must be balanced.  Those who expect to get things without paying, get what you’d expect – debt.  Have fun cooking, cleaning and primping for your gentle-man, entitled ladies.

Chivalry Seesaw

privilege prickles
benefits mask detriments
pay in other ways

Murder is a peculiar and elusive category of killing.  It doesn’t simply refer to intentional (non-accidental) killing nor to offensive (non-self-defense) killing.  In fact, it really has no objective meaning at all – it’s entirely circumstantial, more of an exception than a category, much like the term “cruelty”.

If killing occurs for a reason or by individual(s) that a specific other person or persons doesn’t approve of, then it’s murder?!  If the killing is sanctioned by a government (its law enforcement, military, contracted mercenaries or approved rebel forces), then it’s “war” or “collateral damage”!? If done by a non-sanctioned entity (like by non-approved “insurgents”), then it’s “murder”?!

On the other hand, someone dying of natural causes can be considered murder – such as one’s son dying of cancer (when chemotherapy, a toxic treatment was not applied), but when one’s health insurance withholds potentially life-saving treatments, it’s totally fine!  Murder is totally contextual.

Authorized Life-taking

meat isn’t murder
neither is execution
nor kills by soldier

Seems to me there are two main types of Republicans which are fundamentally at odds.

There is the fake fiscal conservative type who claims to want to keep government small and lean, but really wants the government to minimize involvement with people (no social entitlements) while maintaining corporate welfare (subsidies/tax-incentives and special legal benefits or allowances) and an oversize military budget (much of that tied into corporate welfare, a la weapons manufacturers and “contractor” mercenaries).  There is also a much smaller genuine fiscal conservative group (libertarian-leaning) who legitimately want to stop corporate welfare as well as minimizing social welfare.   Both of these groups rally around the idea of keeping government out of our lives.

Then there are is the social conservative type, who wants more government involvement with certain Christian sects (e.g. prayer in schools, teaching alternatives to evolution) and they want their religious values to translate into legal restrictions (e.g., preventing all of the following: gay marriage/relationships, abortions, contraceptions, sex education and premarital sex).  What these social conservatives really want is more government involvement in people’s lives.

One group wants the government to do the bare minimum for citizens (and supposedly minimize spending), while the other group wants government to babysit people (with more spending in regulation and law-enforcement).  And yet, somehow, the Republican party is a blend of these two ideologies.  I don’t really get it.

G.O.P.  S.O.P.

corporate pleasure
legislate against sinners
find your own treasure

Suicide Bombers are scary.  Terrifying even.

But why?

It’s because they are humans that have been turned into weapons.  They can’t be reasoned with; there’s no chance to defeat them.  They might be stopped by destroying the mechanics (their body), but there’s no other way, mere injury or impossible odds won’t stop them. And they’re willing to kill regular people (non-soldiers) to achieve their goal.

That sounds great, but let’s do one better – how about we use robots instead?

That way, we showcase our technical and financial superiority, while maintaining the same advantages of having a weapon without human failings which can execute both targeted and indiscriminate killing.  Moreover, we can use human intelligence to direct these robots, while preventing the human “drivers” from coming to harm themselves or identifying with the victims  and experiencing the stress of  live combat (by substituting a video-game-like experience). Our hands stay clean while we wreak havoc = win-win.

Oh, yeah, we got it.  Predator drone is better than suicide bomber, big time.  Take that, you low-tech losers!

American Innovation

suicide bombers
are ghetto, real powers use
robotic killers

In part sparked by a recent book I read (American Subversive, which I bought at an independent bookstore, but I linked to Amazon for convenience), I’ve been pondering the morass that is our political climate and the tangents we fixate on.  It’s not that abortion, gay marriage or other such things are completely unimportant, but they are not “the” important things and they’re divisive rather than unitive.  I can’t help but think that the constant spotlight on such things is intended to divide us.

If we ask ourselves what is truly important, it’s fairly obvious and I think we all could agree.  People are important. How do I get enough food to eat?  How can I live a long, healthy and productive life?  How can I have good relationships with neighbors and loved ones? How can I take care of my family (or enable them to take care of me)?  Survival, health, social life, that’s it.  Maybe a little freedom thrown in (i.e., freedom to have one’s own faith and thoughts).

Profit is not necessarily compatible with that.  It’s cheaper to lay waste – to the environment, to our health, to our lives (to our foreign neighbor’s lives), in the pursuit of easy money. Politicians know this – that’s why they focus on fringe and relatively money-neutral issues like abortion (whether it’s legal or not has very little impact on industry, on the economy).

If I had to come up with a political slogan, to drive us out of this mess, I’d say:

People Over Profit

Uncompromising – everything good can follow from this. Any politician who runs with that slogan (rather than something generic and disposable like “Change” or “Hope”), we could trust.  People Over Profit would mean that citizens would always be prioritized above industry/economy.  If it’s good for people (like environmental regulations regulating hydraulic fracturing), but potentially damaging to industry, there would be no question – government is there primarily for the people not to keep money flowing.  People over profit seems like a pipe dream, but maybe someday.

Profit contrapositive

so-called “right” and “left”
When have you heard Dem or Rep
say people > business?

Mainstream journalism has gotten weak in this country (USA).  Maybe it always was, but I recall stories from way back about things like the Watergate scandal, the Pentagon Papers, the atrocities in Vietnam, the Muckrakers of the turn of the 20th century.  Lately, it all seems like a game of Simon Says.

Simon Says we must give more control to government and especially the executive branch after 9.11 (sure, it’s fine to imprison people without charges or evidence).  Simon Says Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (even though it was fairly obvious to a casual observer like me that there was no evidence) so we must invade.   Simon Says product A has helpful properties X, Y, Z (a “news” story written by an advertising person at a for-profit company and used directly, uncritically by news organizations).  Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of State in 2002) famously said, in relation to WMDs, “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” and the press just let that stand – as if that were sufficient justification for invading a sovereign nation and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

What gets to me is the lack of challenge or skepticism.  Journalists should be well-informed on the subject of an interview and they should challenge the interviewee on any statements they make not backed up by logic or evidence (or, worse, seeming contrary to the evidence, like the WMDs myth).  Yet they do not – they just seem to accept all that is said by the so-called expert and then regurgitate that to the public.

In America, we have “fair and balanced” news coverage which is really just selling the line the so-called experts are saying.  This may involve politics in terms of picking right or left leaning experts (as on Fox), or it may be neutral and picking a variety of political-wing experts (as on NPR).  In the rare cases where journalists (as opposed to pundits) actually challenge the interviewees, it is generally to one consistent bias and is not done equally to all interviewees (e.g., some Fox shows and also left-leaning shows like Rachel Maddow, although I happen to like the latter).

Last week, I heard a military representative being interviewed on NPR about the future of Afghanistan following the death of Osama bin Laden.  When asked about withdrawing from Afghanistan, this so-called expert said (as best I recall), “That would cause civil war, leading to the death of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people.”   The journalist replied, “Mmm..   It’s a tough situation.”  Really?   And not, “There’s already a civil war in Afghanistan which has killed thousands of people, how would the US/Coalition withdrawal “cause” a civil war?  How would it be worse than what’s happening now?”

This lack of critical journalism is nowhere more apparent than when compared to the BBC News. The British journalists on that show pretty much challenge anyone they interview, from representatives of their own government to ambassadors from other governments to casual people or “experts” who make unfounded statements.  It doesn’t matter if the interviewee is right or left leaning or is an “official” – they still get a healthy dose of skepticism.

Newspapers are dying, in part because of the growth (and relative cheapness) of online information, but also because there are so many more sources of information now and some of them actually do critical investigative journalism on a regular basis.  Wikileaks is doing the job of numerous newspapers, which should be finding out and reporting on things like the number of civilian casualties (more than 200,000) due to the Iraq war.  Hopefully the Simon Says of mainstream journalism will fade like a fad, or else the proliferation of “alternative” news sources will become the mainstream.