You ever noticed (FEMA)?

You ever notice that all those rednecks and meth-heads (often inhabiting the same body!) who are yammering about "We're all going to be dragged kicking and screaming to FEMA camps man, any day now!" are all white? Did you ever notice that none of them gave a shit about all those African-Americans languishing in FEMA trailers for roughly two years except when they thought they were getting a "free ride"? Yeah, me too, but really: where was the outrage over many of these same people having to inhale formaldehyde for months? No conspiracy there, agreed, just not for the same reason they might unthink it was so.

Imagine had these refugees been white, middle-class. Imagine that they had been taken there, sometimes against their wills like in 1927 when another storm ravaged the place, to be held for a a very long time with few rights to speak of in toxic surroundings. The Libertarians, the rednecks, the red-headed stepchildren of the American Left who have smoked too much dope for decades with predictable results, have an erection (nipples too) over FEMA this, FEMA that, but the slant is always the same: an anti-government agenda that's arch-conservative, almost certainly baseless in the terms their putting them in and basically racist at heart.

Seriously, where was the alarm over these poor black families being forcibly relocated, permanently in many cases, away from New Orleans? Wasn't this your legendary FEMA camp theory based on your own criteria? No, these were only a gaggle of dirty niggers (to you), so it didn't matter. It didn't matter when a naturalized Middle Eastern businessman was detained by private security in a bus station...that was OK and then repainted by assholes on the right like Alex Jones as a purely government move. The message must always be that it's the big, bad Boogeyman "gubmint," never the most serious threat to liberty across the globe, multinational corporations.

This shit is a ploy, conscious or not, it is code. We know you have an agenda. We know you're afraid of black people, of minorities. We know you're ignorant, that you're the boring crank at a party that everyone ignores for good reason. Now shut up about FEMA camps you racist, yammering retards.

Someone's creating false memes: "Obama putting 20,000 troops on streets in case of civil unrest"

The far right have truly lost their minds this time: do a Google search of the keywords "Obama" and "20,000 troops" right now. Good.

Now, you can see the same endlessly replicated articles and the resurrection of old clips from wacko-demagogues suggesting that President Obama is placing 20,000 military personnel in the streets of America, implying at a very fragile moment here when Congress is flirting with a debt default and economic disaster that they're for an expected uprising, "civil unrest."

Why, even the neo-Nazis at StormFront have cut-n'-pasted this misrepresentation of fact, a blatantly conscious re-framing of a contingency plan for those very troops to train state law enforcement how to deal with unrest in the incidence of an attack by weapons-of-mass- destruction, otherwise known as WMDs during the run-up to the war in Iraq. They're at it again.

One of the links went to a states rights group, so in looking at all the rest, it was obvious that this was a fixation of the right, the lunatic fringe. Indeed, FEMA is once again being invoked with their stunning array of concentration camps--never mind that they couldn't find their asses during Katrina--they're cunning and evil, quite competent, that lot. Actually, they're as dumb as the paranoids further to the right of them.

Here's the problem with the claims of many of these kooks: it's not a new story. The program, while troubling to be sure, was begun under George W. Bush in his last month in office. Barack Obama had won the 2008 elections, he was a president-elect, not president. But look at the articles and the links in your Google search, and you will find that it's all framed under Obama placing 20,000 federal troops on the streets of America in case of civil disorder coming from a debt default, one created, mind you, by these very same wackos on the right and the candidates they voted into office recently.

Is this denial of one's responsibility in creating a total mess of things or what? Instead of logical compromise, they want it so many ways that they've lost it, all of it. "Troops will patrol the streets," says one of the slavering, semi-literate authors of a caption that emanates from a December 1, 2008 Washington Post article titled, "Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security," since all of these moronic captions spreading this meme were born from it, consciously, by a pack of hysterical idiots who cannot cope emotionally with a black president...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113002217_pf.html/

The Northwest flight tard who blew his balls off (blues)

It seemed poetic, didn't it? The ruins of Detroit and the rest of America now needed to be protected once again from rich Nigerian tards with a screw loose (definitely not Fela Kuti material) and Gulf state professionals (easily indoctrinated with a middle-class education), and this would then require things like a "Department of Homeland Security for the Department of Homeland Security," it being that corrupt and worthless government institution created by "anti-government conservatives" inspired by the laughably sad likes of Grover Norquist. Thanks for the inaction with FEMA during Katrina. Point taken: government doesn't work...when you're in charge.

Yes, Washington D.C. really is Hollywood for ugly, stupid weaklings, and a more byzantine route to sex hasn't existed since the Mandarins. It's called "dysfunctional" for reason.

We're told with a straight face by Republicans, pundits (usually the same thing), and even the White House, that this is all serious when it's not. There's nothing serious or even remotely threatening about a retard blowing his balls off on a crowded airliner. This is all that he accomplished. This is the threat of terrorism, creole bourgeois extremists. That's not a very real threat at all. The real threat is how compromised our elected leaders--a euphemism--are to the paymasters in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states. This is that infinitesimal chance that you'll slip in the shower and break your neck. This is the fear of one's shadow, the time of the hollow men. They will build palaces to this stupidity and this fear that will stand less than a generation, because you can't build a solid foundation on quivering shit.

To be afraid of a gaggle of clowns; to hand over any rights whatsoever over this; to think that the threat of terrorism is especially great and will affect you; is madness. The threat--I repeat--the threat is not real, and the war on terror is theater. No, I don't think this was "planned"--once again, like the events of September 11th, 2001, this is one more case of profound bureaucratic incompetence, piled one-upon-another and opportunism after-the-fact. I repeat: this is not a confirmation that government does not work. It's a confirmation that conservatives and corporatist influence within government do not work, and can never work to protect us or even to provide a livable society. In other words, any State-corporate nexus is the problem, and this comes from the revolving-door of appointees from the corporate world, something this current president has done plenty of, just like the last. Why would he fire all these Bush II appointees when he's the same? Quit fooling yourself.

But if stupid young men blowing their balls off scares you enough to hand over your liberty, you don't deserve any. If you allow the herd to stampede us there without a fight, you don't deserve any. Cowardice comes in many forms, and Americans do plenty of talking and no walking. I could take these bastards on any flight, any time, any day. I am not afraid. Cowards are afraid of their own shadow, and that's exactly what's happening in the American mind (or what's left of it) right now: we know our wars are illegal and immoral and that we have something coming to us. We know we are complicit. This is collective-guilt writ large. Did he blow off your balls, or his?

Some observations on them thar' "FEMA internement camps" (that'll learn ya'!)

WWW--Let me make this crystal clear: if you believe this meme, you're probably either gullible, crazy, or both, but you're assuredly rocketing towards crankdom, even with the mess we're in right now, and it's a big mess brought to us from many of the same people making these claims. The first time I ever heard of this stupid meme was in a poorly produced and heavily-slanted videotape from the nefarious and long ago discredited Linda Thompson, a former Indianapolis attorney who cranked-out a few documentaries on Waco that were--to put it politely--conflated alarmist crap.

There was an earlier example during Iran-Contra: "leftist" anti-intervention activists were running around with their heads cut-off when it was revealed that Oliver North had considered arresting and detaining some of them in the event of an invasion of Nicaragua. It never amounted to anything, and never would have, it was North being G. Gordon Liddy, meaning batshit crazy. The overreaction was equally nuts and added to the hyped post-Watergate paranoia infecting the body politic, and it has continued into today. Thompson continued this meme in a way that could only be of benefit to Republicans, and didn't invent it, but popularized it in a way unlike ever before, and when the Internet was primarily the domain (pun intended) of geeks and IT wackos (like elements of the Legion of Doom) who thought like herself.

According to the SPLC, Thompson is currently living in North Carolina right now, where she must feel right at home. After calling for a militia attack on the nation's capital in 1995, she was thoroughly discredited, even among her "allies"on the right and throughout the militia movement in the Midwest. Her time was up at the mic. If you live in N.C., tell her hello, photograph her, and post it online. She deserves further scrutiny for the mess she left behind, now spreading like syphilis all over the Internet, but again, she didn't invent this meme, but she exploited it and popularized it further. It never surprised me that Thompson was working out of Indianapolis at the time, and she was good for a time, very clever. But it got out of hand as it tends to. For a few minutes, she had me fooled, but I was in college at the time and young (naive). But unlike the people who still cling to this pathetic belief, I grew out of it quickly.

Working out of a strip mall next to a Dominoe's Pizza (shades of the wacko Jack T. Chick who's been making similar claims for decades along with the John Birch Society), she had created her garbage anti-government propaganda, garnering as much as $300,000 from over-credulous meth-addicts and down-on-their-luck farmers. Thompson truly was a darling of the Libertarian/militia right. In some ways she still is a kind of a "shade" or "phantasm" since her part of the meme has outlived her time in the spotlight. Just today, someone on Facebook told me with a sense of utmost certainty about (I'm paraphrasing), "FEMA camps being set-up to incarcerate American dissidents throughout the nation in time of a national emergency." Sound familiar? They might want to quit smoking dope and pull their head out of their ass, it's pointing rightwards.

Yes, there was something called CABLE SPLICER, GARDEN PLOT, COINTELPRO, and several other programs of the same kind during the chaos of the 1960s-70s, they were unconstitutional, and at least as far as we know, they were shuttered. Is this a good excuse to disengage from the political process? Who generally benefits from that? It tends to be the GOP. A takeover doesn't work as these people describe it, it comes in increments, and with them running around chasing ghosts they certainly aren't any threat to one. Great, they know hot to cut-and-paste, maybe even read.

What's interesting is that unless it fits their anti-government meme, Libertarians are generally unmotivated or silent on similar threats found in specific provisions of the Patriot Act and have yet to put up an even remotely workable or sustained fight against it at all, just more of their conspiracy theory yammering that would never stand up in a court of law or lead to the creation of any investigative commissions. When you believe this garbage, the very notion of political participation is out the window, and it's pathetic. Never mind that Libertarians (including Alex Jones in their nexus) and the militias were/are part of the far right. Never mind that they're not fighting the actual "good fight" against all of these post-9/11 attacks on our rights as groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), CREW, or the ACLU are; they just talk, write, and bloviate like the ineffectual children that they always were and are. None of what they do is ever going to reach a court of law unless it's them who has misbehaved, just look at Jones--just not if you've eaten recently.

Thompson did quite a job on some very ignorant and immature people throughout the Midwest and even the former Confederacy, and she chose her marks well. She was calculated. This kind of dysfunctional behavior is part of "the pedagogy of the oppressed," to borrow a phrase. One of the biggest problems now is that they're trying to infiltrate the antiwar movement and the progressive movement, and they're making some inroads. Additionally, they have some ties to the white hate movement, albeit indirectly in most cases. Frankly, that's good enough for me. There is a real threat, but it's not from the government, it's from the politicians who are leading us all over the cliff. There is no substitute for political participation.

Most of the politicians in Washington have strings coming out of their backs leading to Wall Street and its environs, and they're laughing all the way to the bank at the fringe populist minority, a group of oxymorons if ever there was one. The fact is, they're the minority and they're not part of the progressive movement in any real sense, but they are problematic and should be countered at every juncture and removed if necessary from these groups in a polite and legal fashion, as befits a truly progressive movement. No one said struggle was easy or that you weren't going to get your hands dirty, and these people are dragging us down a bit and muddying the waters. That's how it goes and how it's always been, and how it's always going to be. Accept that it's a part of your entire life--the struggle against unaccountable power--and you've made a very serious step towards adulthood.

A good summation of Thompson from the SPLC:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=367

More GOP Failures and Negligence: The Lower 9th Ward is Flooding Again

New Orleans, Louisiana--That's right, it's happening again, and we're getting scanty coverage of it in a manner that's familiar. Some levees that did not break during Katrina have broken and the Industrial Canal levees are being breached by overtopping as evident from what coverage we're seeing today on television. This appears to have happened within the last two hours.

Mission accomplished: the GOP is still wrecking America. McCain's urging of aid is a belated move by the problem itself. Meanwhile--back at the ranch--Bush is coddling-up with mommy (who looks like the spitting image of George Washington) and daddy. Incredible, but we expected John McCain to keep eating that cake with George W. Bush the second time around.

"New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward Flooding From Gustav's Storm Surges," All Headline News, 09.01.2008: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7012135607