Get Real, Mikey

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been caught in one of his own lies. This is the mayor who berates New Yorkers for griping about the commute. In The World According to Mike, he knows just what it's like to drag yer ass across the city to work. He takes the subway to City Hall. So he says.

Not quite so says The New York Times. Turns out that his holiness hizonner has his minions drive him in an SUV caravan 22 blocks to the nearest express subway stop. Mikey is too important to walk five minutes from his 79th Street mansion to the nearest local stop.

How many goons cover his sorry ass on the subway, the Times doesn't say.

Poor Mikey, it's tough being a billionaire mayor of New York. Nobody understands just how much more important he is than everybody else.

Stay Free Or Die!

Subtitle: Stay Free With a Vengeance! And what's with the butterfly on the packaging. Birds and bees? You're a butterfly, free as a butterfly. Fly away little butterfly. Get caught in some kid's net. (Do kids catch butterfly's these days, or just bullets in the name of George "War Criminal" Bush's notion of peace?) -- Maybe it's a moth.

The Psychosis of American Exceptionalism

George Bush represents the truest, most insane, and logical conclusion of the notion that the United States is better than everyone else. WE ARE RIGHT. Our entertainers embody this. Witness Paris Hilton's conviction [sic] that she should not be punished for exactly those crimes that regular folks (you and me) go to prison for (and for much longer).Or witness our brave new arsenal of American superweapons. Pilotless drones -- designed to allow us to attack with utter impunity -- no fear of reprisal and thus no disincentive to attack.

What's Your Drug of Choice

New York Times runs a series of stories about the growing problems of air travel, especially in the US. Apparently, since Bush's atrocities are proving ineffective, American business has risen to the challenge -- just make it so unpleasant, terrorists won't want to fly, nor will anyone else.

One of the Times's segments -- the terror of tiny tots tearing about. So one intrepid reader wrote in with her solution -- drug the little tikes. Brilliant. The US has in mind something like this for future use on soldiers -- make them aggressive with drugs. Make workers obedient. Make children silent. Make people like me shut up. (I said it, you didn't.)

And the Children Shall Lead

It makes me feel better to know that these teens have already made more in a single year than I will in my lifetime.

It's the Real Thing ... Get your recommended daily allowance today!

Welcome to Coke Plus -- with vitamins and minerals! Take six Coke's and call me in the morning? Who knows, maybe the coke will be back in the Coke sometime soon. Coke could be the next big pharmaceutical -- but then they would have to charge us so much our health insurers would have to deny us coverage.

More Harvard War Criminals

Tom Hayden has an essay posted July 14th on The Nation's website. Still more evidence of the sheer indifference of Harvard to its stuff-shirt motto: "Veritas" or "truth" -- of course, if they put that in scare quotes, they'd be closer to genuine truth. Or perhaps "truth in the service of power".

Add, then, the Carr Center for Human Rights to the list that already included the Center's home, the Kennedy School of Government. And don't forget the Harvard Business School, the Law School, and so on. The Business School entertained Israel's Bomber Harris -- Dan Halutz, the IDF architect of Israel's 2006 crimes in Lebanon.

The Law School, of course, is the home of the plagiarist and bigot Alan Dershowitz. And the Kennedy School has a long history of welcoming a wide gamut of minor and major war criminals. Guatemalan war criminal Hector Gramajo received a Master's in Public Administration in 1991. Doron Almog was a senior fellow in 2004. (Almog was subject to a 2005 arrest warrant in London on suspicion of war crimes.)

Minor war criminal Michael Ignatieff resided there until crawling back under a rock in Canada.

Northeast under water

The Union of Concerned Scientists has published a study of likely effects of unchecked carbon emissions over the remainder of this century.

For the religious right, it should look biblical -- Boston gets hammered. Atlantic City, haven poor idolaters of mammon will see frequent disastrous flooding. Wall Street, home of wealthy idolaters of mammon, can look forward to submersion.

Below are an aerial view of Manhattan's Wall Street area and Boston's Back Bay (MIT is directly north, across the Charles River):

University to the . . .

Harvard's road just gets better and better. Newest addition: Senator David Vitter, Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar. Self-righteous prig from Louisiana now admits that he has been among the clients of DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

Still, hypocritical adulterer pales in comparison to real war crimes (not that Vitter hasn't wholeheartedly endorsed those).

Harvard's leading war criminals (profs, alumni, etc.): Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush (still trying to wrap my head around how the "World's Greatest University" let this moron in), John Yoo (also a credit to Yale), Alan Dershowitz, Hector Gramajo, Dan Halutz, Samuel Huntington, Casper Weinberger, Alberto Gonzalez, John Abizaid, Frank Carlucci, Michael Chertoff, Douglas Feith, Michael Ignatieff

And for comparison:

Among Stanford's leading war criminals: Condoleeza Rice, Edward Teller, George Shultz, Edwin Meese, Ehud Barak

Yale's: George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, John Yoo, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Paul Wolfowitz, Dickless Cheney, Gerald Ford, John Ashcroft, Joseph Lieberman, William F. Buckley

The War Criminals' Delight

American media are waving their hands, Thomas Friedman is blubbering, Condoleeza Rice is preaching, and American and Israelis generally are doing the standard line: "It's all the Palestinians' fault".

What's actually happening? Israel occupies Palestine for 40 years, systematically rapes the land, kills the people. The US arms Israel to do still more of same. Palestinians demand the very rights Israelis and Americans demand for themselves. Palestinians exercise their democratic rights. Israel and the US apply ever harsher measures. Palestinian society falls apart.

And then the Americans and Israelis say, "See? We told you so."

There is no people, no animal, that could be treated as Israelis and Americans treat Palestinians without cries that a crime is being committed. Yet in the case of the Palestinians, Friedman, Dershowitz, Rice, Cheney, their fellow war criminals blame the victims without fail.

Later this year -- in September -- we will see the 25th anniversary of the Israeli (particularly Sharon) orchestrated massacre at Sabra and Shatila. My prediction: the US and Israel will ignore it. Or they will blame the Palestinians. And if anyone dare criticize Israel for that crime, that person will be attacked in the style exemplified by Dershowitz.

Burn, Baby, Burn (or "From Paris, With Love")

Oh the shape of things to come. Poor Paris. Found prison didn't agree with her. It's tough going 15 minutes without a cellphone or a chance to check your pout in the mirror.

And what about us? Who's fiddling while Rome burns?

The Road to Hell is Paved with Cement . . . Maybe Asphalt

United States to World: "Go to Hell"

The BBC and others reported on Saturday, 26 May 2007, that the US is rejecting proposals to address greenhouse emissions in advance of the June G8 summit in Germany. The BBC story quotes US comments: "We have tried to 'tread lightly' but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position."

Check NPR and others for reports that the US wants China to curb its emissions.

Refugees Seek Refuge

The bitter irony of the life of the Palestinian people. Driven from their homes by a people driven from their homes. Oppressed by the oppressed.

Now in northern Lebanon, the Lebanese army shells a Palestinian refugee camp. And Palestinian refugees flee -- refugees from the refuge. Could there be a better summation of our time?

By the way, when you hear, see, read a news account on NPR, CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, check to see whether they mention any of the following:
1. That the residents of the camp are Palestinians.
2. That the Lebanese army is forbidden to enter the camp, so they shell because that's 'okay'.
3. That the Palestians are refugees from the Israelis, dispossessed in 1948, 1967, and ever since.

Introducing the End

This is a rambling rant on the end of our world. Global warming, ice caps melting, species disappearing. Bush's Crusade. Braindead politicians fiddle. Pick your favorite. Enjoy it. Mull it over. Savor the taste.

My thesis? Humans are an evolutionary failure, like sabre tooth tigers. Evidently, our brains are very good at concocting ways to destroy one another. As many have suggested before, we have failed utterly to develop adequate means to solve the problems we create. Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is right. War is the human metier.

Case in point: Dresden, 1945. A refugee city, a city of art, firebombed into oblivion by the British and the Americans. If we are unable to admit that such a bombing, killing tens of thousands of civilians, was outrage (even though visited upon Nazi Germany), then what can we say of ourselves?

Hiroshima, Kosovo, the Nazi death camps, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. How often do we need to be reminded?