predictions

I could start with the easy prediction: Propaganda mindsets will prevail in 2009.

Thus, instead of asking why Afghanistan is occupied by US troops-- since even the FBI admits there is no evidence proving that Bin Laden, with the collaboration of the Afghans, perpetrated the 9/11 hijackings-- US citizens will ask "what is the best way to help Afghanistan help itself?" The chauvinism, racism, and pure violent evil of such a question will not come up in public discourse. Likewise, the fact that the Gaza prisoners' rockets have retaliated at a rate of 1/100th the rate of Israeli violence for the last several years will remain obscure. It will be an unwelcome fact. Here's another one we won't talk about: we negotiatied to free all Iraqi prisoners that weren't charged with a crime. But we haven't.

Maybe it's a terrorist fact, skulking around in the bushes somewhere. Some facts are just plain offensive to decent people. Like those pictures of Gaza toddlers' severed heads-- they will be denounced as hysterical demagoguery. How dare they. Is there no decency?

We think as we are told. Thus we do not say "Every penny of the Treasury/Fed/legislated bailout for those rich bankers must be accounted for! What, their wages come to $1000.00/hour? How outrageous! It must be their damnably corrupt Banker's Union!" No, we do not say that. We are meek. Quiet. We hand over the keys to the mint and step backward, bowing, bowing. Not looking up.

Accountability, I prophesy, won't happen. I have a vision of Christo--remember him?--wrapping up the Statue Of Liberty like a mummy, to show that after the failure to impeach, the failure to prosecute the telecom spying, the failure to prosecute torturers and warmongers, Liberty is but a mummified zombie (he could include a loudspeaker at Liberty's mouth endlessly repeating "BRAINZZZ..." in an asthmatic monotone)--but no. Uh uh.

I'm pretty sure these predictions are correct, so you can start calling me Swami. Other predictions are a little more difficult, but not impossible--like the economy; you'd think with all the hand-wringing, I'd be inclined to get all contrary, and say things will be all right. But that's not the case at all; I'd say there isn't nearly enough hand wringing right now. Now is the time to wring your fool hands off, say I. One word: hyperinflation.

Yup, hyperinflation. Not only does 'hyperinflation' have an impressive five syllables, it is the word to describe what happens when you attempt to print your way out of national bankruptcy. Who is going to buy up the debt on all those trillions? "Not us," say the Chinese. "Not us," say the Japanese. "Who you looking at," say the Saudis. I, Swami, say that hyperinflation may come hop-hop-hopping our way, maybe before the year is out. If I lose my Swami status over this, I'll be okay with it. Just buy me a drink or something (or trade hoarded beans for it).

Now, if I were an adept Swami, I'd tell you whether the sunspot maximum, coming this way after a too-long sunspot minimum, will knock out power grids worldwide or not. There's no telling, really, though it is tempting to speculate that oscillation in one direction--towards the just-ended and too-long minimum--might be followed by a pendulum swing the other way. Last time the Sun got really cranky, nineteenth-century telegraph lines caught fire. Everything else kept on keeping on, though, because it was the nineteenth century, and everything from the electrical, sewer and water supply to ship navigation was NOT dependent on feeble electrical patterns pulsing in silicon flakes. So this is an either-or: either it's not a problem, or we're all gonna die.

Screaming.

script

Before I talk about the war on Gaza, I’d like to present a little background information.

Not long ago the Palestinians were informed of the decree establishing the sealing of Gaza.
Gaza was sealed off by checkpoints and a high wall. Its construction took many months to complete. The work was carried out by the construction firm Schmidt & Münstermann. The Gaza wall was 3.5 m high, topped by glass and barbed wire.
There were already 445 deaths in Gaza. The death toll thereafter rose rapidly: in January 2009 to 898. Then the monthly figure fluctuated.
Gaza's ties with the outside world were handled by the Transferstelle, an Israeli authority that was in charge of the traffic of goods, both into and out of Gaza.
Several methods were employed to carry out the smuggling operations: through buildings that were connected with buildings on the Israeli side, across the wall, through camouflaged openings in the wall and through underground tunnels. Smuggling on a larger scale also took place at the gates. Policemen, soldiers, Palestinians, and Jews were involved, bribery was the order of the day. The tunnels were bombed mercilessly.
And despite that, without paying attention to the victims, the smuggling never stopped for a moment. When the street was still slippery with the blood that had been spilled, other [smugglers] already set out, as soon as the "candles"** had signaled that the way was clear, to carry on with the work....
Children and women were also engaged on a smaller scale, risking their lives too. Every day smugglers were caught, paying the ultimate sacrifice. According to press accounts the necessary food, smuggled into Gaza, represented 80% of all the products brought in.
.................

You will notice that there are inaccuracies and peculiarities in the account I just read. That is because it is not an account of the condition of Gaza, it is a pastiche of accounts of conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto. I just changed a few words--I changed "ghetto" for "Gaza," German for Israeli, 1941 for 2009, and I added the phrase "the tunnels were bombed mercilessly" out of whole cloth. But the sealing of the area, the desperation, the intent of extermination, is much the same. To be fair, Israel intends to let starvation do the work entirely, rather than rushing the Palestinians off to death camps.

Does Israel intend a wider war? More on that in a moment.

You may wish to call Oregon Senator Ron Wyden at 503-326-7525, to give him your opinion. His motto is "standing up for Oregon."

comingXupXonXkbooXradio

This December 25th, I'll be talking about Mithra and his visit from the Three Kings generations before the Christ legend was ever thought up. Why should people cling to a religion that was cooked up for State control sixteen hundred years ago? Yeah, that's right, sixteen hundred and change, not two thousand...that's at 9AM Thursday, Yule/Saturnalia/Solis Invictus Day, also known as Christmas.

There will be a brief interview with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, too! Call in with your favorite drink recipes (especially mimosas!), and get ready to sing along with satiric tunes. Oh yeah, and Merry Solstice to all!

gayToday

The triumph of Barack Hussein Obama was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least the extent and ferocity of the coordinated Republican attempt to remove whole communities of voters from participation. The Republicans did their best to cover their crimes—they produced three persons in Tennessee who claimed that their votes had been flipped to Obama, but then those persons disappeared and it became obvious that they were frauds. There was the whole unjustified attack on ACORN community organizing, too, but after the truth came out, that ACORN had been perfectly responsible in its registration drives, that meme only worked up the god, guns, and gays base, and had no effect outside those pointy-headed borders.

The roll of election theft incidents is truly too large to address in this space.

This is the time and the opportunity to replace the US broken elections system with a nationwide, independent, internationally supervised election system. In civilized countries, like Canada and Australia, there are no problems with local yokels trying to disenfranchise voters by the thousands; everyone votes on a paper, with a big box next to each candidate or issue that you put a check in, yes or no, the ballots are hand-counted, and the results are ready that evening. It's not rocket science. There are no constantly-breaking-down secret-squirrel ES&S or Diebold machines—there never was a need for them. The need is for a commitment to actual citizen participation on an equal basis, and that is where our me-first video-game SUV-owning culture breaks down. But despite decades of indoctrination, you and I aren't consumers. That word should be viewed as the insult it is. We are citizens, and we should be fully vetted participants in society. We have a right to vote, therefore we have a right to free and accessible information and education. Education and information should never have been turned over to plutocrats, whose agenda is the domestication of the popular mind.

............
Measure 8 has passed in California, and the queer-bashing will begin anew.

As a queer with a 14-year relationship, I am infuriated at the vicious and underhanded attempts by religious bigots to undermine my marriage. My marriage is sacred—it's a joyous union of life partners, not a three-year consumerist breeding agreement punctuated by divorce. My marriage is as sacred as any other, because I'm a human being with human rights, and among those rights is equality. If you can get married, so can I. If you should get your partner's Social Security and pension after your partner's passing, so should my partner. Who would deny it to her? Who would go to my partner after my passing, and say "I'm sorry Ani, but since your partner changed gender, you are condemned to poverty?" Who among you would do this evil deed?


There are some who argue that their god demands that queers be punished by stoning to death, and I stand by their right to argue for that idiotic god. They just can't act on its recommendations. This is a secular society, and anyone who expects me to abide by the rules of their god must first bring their god along and show it to me. Let it impress me with its wisdom and power and the fact of its existence. Until then, the queer-hating god has no power over me. No fair shooting me or beating me to death with a baseball bat, and saying God told you to. Oh no. You trot that god out here right now and it can just explain its business right before my eyes. Nor can you open up a Bible or a Koran, I don't care what they have written down—people wrote those words, and they were wrong. So bring the god itself, or else admit that the whole anti-queer religious concept is your personal or cultural speculation, and nothing to do with reality nor science.


Likewise, I'd like to have someone explain to me how the Constitution or civil society countenances a procedure in which a referendum can be used to deny human rights to some segment—any segment—of the population. We the people developed these democratic instruments to expand human rights, not to restrict and deny them. The anti-queer movement is a pitiful thing, a puppet of neocons since the beginning, a successful effort to turn the working class against itself. The logical extension of its illogic is the ovens where Hitler burned a million genocided queers just prior to 1945. There is a monument in Amsterdam to that occurrence, and it serves to remind everyone of the logical end of queer-bashing. Queerness is obviously an evolutionary advantage for large mammaliam populations, and it won't go away, and even Hitler did not burn it out, because it's in our genetic code, thank goodness. The brain of Evolution is older and wiser than the brain of Hitler, thank goodness.


So I think we need a queer monument in this town, something big. But times are getting tight, so no need to spend a lot of money on it. We'll just rename Hawthorne Bridge. Right now it's named after the head of a bygone asylum for the insane, which of course included persons who were merely transgender or queer. So from now on it's the Queer Memorial Bridge, and I call on the City Council to provide a large bronze plaque giving the history of the Gay holocaust, and some buckets of pink paint. I'm serious. Who will go to the City Council with me? Hooray for the Queer Bridge! The Queer Bridge connects East and West with a cheerful pink lift span. All who travel it will affirm human rights for all. Celebrate the Queer Bridge!

yeswedid

Obama Acceptance Speech



Theme: UNITY



Boilerplate aside, this was an interesting speech. As the French horns lingered in cascading sixth chords, President Elect Obama stressed again and again the need for everyone to come together. In his litany of the types of Americans making up the whole, he included "gays and straights" along with everyone else—something unimaginable for a Bush or McCain Presidency. Of course he also set the furniture for a new Camelot, mentioning his wife Michelle and his children Sasha and Meliya, and a First Dog yet to be named. Young partiers whooped and stalked the streets in cities across the nation, as the new President urged Americans to abandon cynicism and embrace the idea that "change has come."



An acceptance speech may be viewed as the first act of a new Presidency, though the Inauguration will not come for a couple of months. Obama emphasized the two occupations, which he called the "two wars," as challenges for his new Administration, but he also pointed to the financial meltdown, and, encouragingly, mentioned "a planet in peril" in the same breath. As I listened to the list of agenda items that followed, I was pleased to note that this euphemism for climate change had come in the first tier. Following that primary category of challenges, the shovel-list continued: Healthcare, education, jobs—"putting our people back to work," as he said, which is a better formulation than the usual boilerplate indicating breaks for the rich that we've heard since Reagan—and then he acknowledged that he needed to "repair alliances" with the globe, and he then called for patience.



He will need a lot of patience, not least because his entire prospective treasury has already been robbed, in a maneuver of arrogance, cynicism and collaborationism that he also voted for. I believe that this is the time to lay the groundwork for a completely utilitarian and necessary maneuver, one that is unthinkable now but will become inevitable later, that is, that Obama will be unable to move forward without confiscating the wealth of the great corporations. Obama will need to nationalize Exxon, Mobil, and BP, and he will need a solid groundswell of support from all of us. So start talking about it, please!



Obama also departed from the toxic attitude of the Bush Administration by stating directly, though not in as many words, that he would be open to dissent. Dissent has been nearly criminalized under the neocon regime. What a breath of fresh air that is.



Citing the experience of a 106-year old African American voter, Obama pointed to what he called the genius of America—the ability to change. He had already stated that only here could he have such social mobility—a point easily challenged by anyone familiar with social mobility statistics in France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, of Finland, but a hopeful sentiment all the same.

debate

It's amazing how far we have been browbeaten to the Right. This society is well domesticated, so that we turn to a man who proposes to expand a sadistic, immoral occupation of Afghanistan, a man who supports the provision of vouchers to religious parents so that they can avoid the secularizing effect of the real world on their children, a man who poses as morally superior to gays, reserving marriage only to nongays--to this man, the Left looks with great hope and longing, and throws its collective shoulder to the wheel of his election. It's absurd, disturbing, disheartening, and it's only rational. Because on his right, as the other major candidate to aspire the Executive Branch, an angry poseur awaits his appointment by caging rules, voter purges, voter intimidation, midnight electronic voter machine chicanery, or even the Supreme Court.

On this side, imperialism and corporate hegemony; on that side, imperialism, corporate hegemony, and a bizarrely fascistic military/industrial theology that promises to make all of us cowering serfs. I'll be fleeing to the same side of the cage as the rest of you, but let no one say I believe the cage is open.

McCain is truly disgusting. In last night's debate he was a caricature of frozen grimaces, angry sneers, "air quotes" to show his disdain for the idea of taking women's health seriously, and even rolling eyes--this last his
reaction to Obama's seemingly ordinary but actually quite shocking revelation of the facts on the ground in Colombia, where death squads rule the day and democratic union leaders are assassinated regularly and with impunity. You're not supposed to be allowed to be a Senator, to get that far in the US political process, and ever say that sort of truth out loud, but Obama doesn't seem to understand that yet, and it clearly irritates Grandpa Heart Attack. Shut the hell up, Grandpa was mugging, no one cares about the god damn little people in Colombia. But apparently Obama does still make that kind of mistake. I like that.

One of the funnier moments was the whole "Joe the Plumber" meme, which comes in a long line of traditional easy visual references for the Great Unwashed--that's supposed to be you and me--you know, "Harry and Louise," or in Reagan's 1980 campaign, "the bear in the woods." A simple image for simple folk. That was McCain's nuclear assault, if you will, and Obama treated it like a softball lob and batted it out of the park. Turns out "Joe the Plumber" actually has a handy quarter million to buy out a business with, which is more than you and I will ever see, and McCain wanted to pretend that he was just some working-class shmo who wanted to get by; but Obama pointed out that if Joe had really been so ordinary, he would pay nothing under Obama's tax adjustment, which merely restores some mild taxation to the owning class. The Republican Party has a long-standing sucker play in which the masses are reeled in by thinking that by removing reasonable taxation and regulation from the parasite class, from the billionaires, they will be allowed to become billionaires too someday. It's easy to show, with comparative data from social democracies, that the US system works against class ascension and not for it, that Joe will never, ever become a billionaire no matter how hard and how intelligently he works; but the myth has seemed unbreakable until yesterday, when Obama simply pulled out a pin and popped it. McCain's attempts to bluster the meme back into life fell flat. And I liked that too. Maybe McCain's slurs against Obama as a socialist terrorist would have carried some strength to the casual observer, if McCain hadn't come off as a superannuated ranting nut.

And I'll say this about age: It wouldn't matter if McCain had actually released all of his medical data, and if he didn't insist on the rightness of his grossly privileged and sexist life. He cannot appear modern in the presence of his trophy wife, who he obtained after dumping his first wife after a disfiguring car accident. Modern people point to the rightness of their path wile acknowledging the errors of their past, but McCain would rather no one dare ever mention his trail of smashed aircraft and destroyed Savings and Loans. That's what makes him look old--his angry response to ordinary examination, as if he were a member of an untouchable class, the sort of class the US population wishes to dispense with, to move onward to an egalitarian future.

इ किल्लेद Capitalism

Okay, I admit it. I killed Capitalism. It was me--calling and emailing my Representatives and Senators, demanding that they stop the bailout.

I couldn't be happier about this. At this writing, the stock market (the DJIA anyway) has apparently stopped trading after sliding 770 points. It's almost at the magic 10,000 mark! Will the bosses get off our backs yet?

Oh yeah, I know, we haven't build up a shadow socialist economy yet, so there'll be that little affair of mass starvation, riots, looting, you know. The rough stuff. But at least I killed capitalism. Ding dong, the rich is dead! Which rich is that? The wicked rich!

There will be SOME who say that capitalism isn't dead. Well, fine. So I exaggerated. There are others, however, who are already pointing to the Left and saying that Neocon prosperity could have gone on forever if nasty Reds like me hadn't poisoned the well and prevented the bailout. I like to think that they're right. That I killed capitalism. Ahhhhhhh. 770 pointsssss.......