I get the feeling that to really understand the world today, one must have a solid understanding of thousands of years of history about Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. Having said that, I know close to nothing about this subject. I’d really like to learn more.
Category: Politics
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Elections Today
Looking up my polling place information…
It is in a garage which is located in…
an alley on a…
15.3% slope.Only in San Francisco 🙂
My cousin Mark says, “15.3% slope? Does that affect the way people lean towards or away from a candidate?”
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You Have Been Robbed
You owe it to yourself to read this article on Rolling Stone about how the 2004 presidential election was stolen.
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Using the Bill of Rights as Toilet Paper
I was chatting with Ben the other day, and we were talking a bit about the Bill of Rights. I was explaining how I am familiar with the Bill of Rights, but I am not so good at recognizing which amendment goes with with number. So I thought maybe it would be good to read it over again. While reading, I was noticing how little the Bill of Rights is actually respected. The following are just examples, and are by no means intended to be comprehensive.
1st Amendment: All of the things that are done with faith-based initiatives. Attorney General Gonzales speaks of prosecuting journalists.
2nd Amendment: San Francisco has banned handguns.
4th Amendment: Illegal NSA wiretapping of US citizens.
5th Amendment: Guantanamo Bay.
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Iran
George W. Bush once said, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
I wonder if this great saying will hold true if Bush tries to invade Iran, where the American people are the ones being fooled.
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Morris Berman on KQED Forum
Cultural Historian Morris Berman, who has just written a new book “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire.” was on KQED Forum yesterday talking about the downfall of the American empire.
One of his biggest arguments of why the American empire is coming to an end is because, evidently, Americans are idiots. He used the standard statistics about x% of Americans don’t know this, and x% of Americans can’t even locate [location] on a map. Despite these standard arguments, I still get the impression that Americans aren’t generally idiots. I think that we may be particularly strange, good or bad, in certain ways, but one thing we are not is stupid.
And a question that I always thought would be great to ask these people that make the American idiot argument is – “Well what of other countries? How do they stack up in these same surveys that have been asked of Americans?” Well, one caller asked just that question, in his own words of course:
Mr. Berman is wrong if he thinks Americans are ignorant and the rest of the world is informed. As someone who has lived in Europe, Mr. Berman should know that people in those countries are just as ignorant about the outside world and their countries as we are. These surveys are taken often, and the results are just as depressing as our own…
What was Mr. Berman’s response (to the above caller and other “detractors”)? Mr. Berman: “Read the book.”
Of course Michael Krasny, the host, wouldn’t let him stand with this response alone. He pressed for more, which Mr. Berman responded to as follows:
Oh, it’s so untrue, so untrue. The, the uh, surveys that have been taken, you know, I don’t know, of course this would be politically too sensitive, to do, that the UN or UNESCO would do a comparitive IQ study, but I’m, I’m guessing that Danes, uh, there was one study that indicated that Indians, as in Bombay, that Indians had a higher IQ than Americans by about five percentage points. I, I thought, “Don’t you mean twenty-five?” Umm, I would say the same of Danes or Swedes and so on. I remember, um, Patricia Williams did an uh, she’s an attorney that does a column in the Nation, and she was, uh, in the provinces in France talking to a 12-year-old boy in the nineties who knew, she said, more the in and out, ins and outs, of Clinton’s US foreign policy than the typical anchor person on TV in the United States – that you couldn’t have the same level of discussion. That’s been my experience of Europe as well. These people read, and if you read European newspapers, whether its The Guardian or Le Monde, and so on, what you see is that there’s a level of discussion that we can’t even come close to, that the New York Times turns into largely mythology, when you come down to it now, as opposed to something like, um, (couldn’t understand) in Europe, it’s a…(Berman cut off)
So, the best argument of the American people’s stupidity as compared to other countries is using the following evidence:
– Indians have a five percent higher IQ.
– Some 12-year old boy has a better understanding of Clinton’s foreign policy than the typical US news anchor.
– Newspapers from other countries have a higher level of discussion than US newspapers.Wow. I mean, if he really had some solid things to say in response to that caller’s comments, he could have started to convince me that Americans are idiots. But when he resorted to a comparison of our mass medias when asked about the ignorance of the general population, it was obvious that his thesis is baseless.
Opinions like this, which I think are rampant in the liberal elite community, are what I think is wrong with the liberal movement.
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Can We Not Also Blame Ourselves?
A lot of people are pissed off at the current administration. Surely, George Bush is one of the worst presidents that this country has seen. And so we will go ahead and blame, blame, blame the Bush administration. OK, sure, the administration should take a lot of blame. But we are only in the situation we are in because we have allowed it to happen.
You might say that George Bush was never actually elected in 2000. And you’d be right. But actually elected or not, it was damn close. So we still should take a lot of the blame because, stolen election or not, the election had to be very close for it to be stolen. But then he was elected to office again in 2004. So we have failed in electing someone else to office.
OK, well let’s suppose that we have all “learned” from our mistakes and elect a nice Democrat to office in 2008. Who are we kidding? All a Democrat will do is be less of a corporate whore. A Democrat will whine and complain that we never should have been in Iraq to begin with, but of course according to almost all of them, we can’t leave now.
So our country will still have a lot of bass ackwards inequalities and still be fighting a war of agression in Iraq. But of course it won’t be our fault, because we will have voted for a nice friendly Democrat. What else were we to do?
Well, what exactly is holding us back from not voting for one of the two major parties? In the end, nothing. Sure, our election laws are pretty screwed up. I mean a third party can’t even get into the debates. They can’t even get on some ballots. Well, this needs to be fixed. But we all have a responsibility to analyze our current situation and then analyze what options we have to remedy the current situation. Not voting or voting for one of the two major parties is not a remedy to our current situation. It is time for each citizen in the United States to take responsibility for their part in the current state of the country.
I like how Noam Chomsky puts it — He says that he couldn’t look himself in the mirror each morning if he didn’t do what he does.
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Cereal with an Agenda
I am eating some “Golden Honey Granola” right now. Wow, it sure is delicious. But a couple of things irk me here.
First of all, it is put out by the “Peace Cereal” brand. Sure, peace sounds like a great idea. But how about you just give me the god damned cereal, and let’s keep politics separate from it. You sure as hell don’t see “War Monger O’s” promoting the neocon viewpoint.
Secondly, the box says that “10% of Profits Donated to Creating Peace”. Here’s an idea: how about you charge less money for your cereal to make the same profit, and let me decide what to do with the difference?
I am not sure who these people are trying to fool. OK, so donate whatever percentage of your profits to some good cause. Great. But by putting it on the box, it is obvious that you are just trying to profit off of the peace movement.
Another cereal I have seen is “Heritage O’s”. Ooh, I want to buy those so that I can support cultural diversity! I can taste the moral correctness in every bite!
I’ve got a better name for these cereals. Let’s call them “Help, I’m Being Eaten by a Crazy Liberal!”
So you want to be a liberal company still? Well let’s do it in a way that makes sense. Get rid of the normal corporate structure and make the company worker owned. Be environmentally responsible. Be honest to the consumer and put out a good product. Now those are things that I can get behind. That is being a good liberal company within the confines of being a company.
I guess this is the punishment I get for shopping at San Francisco Real Food. This is a store which obviously just panders to the rich liberal crowd. I shop there because it is yummy, convenient, and the only full grocery store within a decent walk from my apartment. All of the food there is organic, and all of it is very much over priced. It is quite obvious that they are simply looking to profit as much as possible off of the organic/liberal/yuppie/anti-capitalist/anti-war “market”.
And when I googled “San Francisco Real Food” to try to find their website, I find this gem of an article. So this company quite obviously cares little about the liberal movement. They’re just another union-busting company looking to line their pockets.
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The Real Headline
The past couple of days has given us headlines like “White House Takes Heat Over Shooting Disclosure” (ABC News). But I see that headline and read “White House has Cheney Shoot a Guy to Take the Heat off of Them for the Whole Orwell Thing”.
Yeah, call me paranoid, but would that not be good strategy? The wiretapping story is now at #12 on Google News’ US news section. Another interesting note – four of the top twelve stories on the US news section are about the White House getting in trouble.