Some more thoughts on the word "retarded"

Now that Sarah Palin's tried very feebly--as is her wont in all endeavors--to control our language when she can't even control her own, it's time to pull our collective-heads out of our collective-asses and realize that this is just a word and that the context it's used in and the intent behind it are what's important. The word itself is unimportant, and mature adults know this and accept it for what it is. People say hurtful things, get over it, grow-up.

But we's a reactionary people--bawss--and we go off half-cocked all the time since many of us "natives" (Eurotrash) are descended from lynch mobs, though that's another fairy tale for another time. Does it have to be said that this is just a word? Yes, apparently, it does: it's just a word, folks. You can't shield yourself or your kids from everything, and sometimes, sometimes, we have be tolerant and take our licks like everyone else. That's life, and part of being a real adult. You accept that there are things that are never going to go away and that you cannot get rid of them.

When you stampede like a wild herd of mindless buffaloes (OK, that's unfair to the bison), as many of us did in the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11th, 2001, you start fucking-up all over the place. We all blew it, myself included, for various reasons. In my own case, I should have been far more defiant and opposed to the Bush II administration even in the aftermath of that event. I was not, and I was not alone, not by a long-shot. And wasn't the manipulation of language at the core of their misrule for eight very long years that the Tea Baggers (Tea Tards) seem to have missed entirely? Words like "terrorism," "weapons of mass destruction," "mushroom clouds," "attacks," "suspects," "terror alerts," and so many others, were injected with and took on new and very hollow meaning to whip-up fear in an already reactionary society and culture.

The bastards knew their marks well, and they not only rifled-through our wallets, but convinced many of us to hand over our hard won rights as Americans. This was not only stupid, it was, and still is, pathetic, and stinks of a people who probably don't deserve their liberties, if they ever did. That's not to say we can't fix what happened, but we have our work cut out for us, and that means endlessly demanding of the current administration, and probably the one after it, that there are real investigations into the crimes known or suspected of being committed by the administration of George W. Bush. We're either a nation of laws, or merely one of words, and now we seem to even want to hand over one of the last things that makes us truly unique as a nation: a historically rare and wide-ranging freedom of speech and press.

So, for an obviously corrupt and moronic woman and former politician like Sarah Palin to tell anyone what they can and cannot say is absurd and should be met with horselaughs from all corners of American society. The upside of this is that she's actually accelerating the demise of the GOP and causing incredible division in the ranks of the Tea Party (bowel) movement, a group comprised mostly of reactionary small business owners who, until very recently, were either apolitical lumps who flunked civics class, or outright ignoramuses. Instead of the Boston Tea Party, these misguided morons invoke the memory of the same kinds of idiots that gave us the Teapot Dome scandal, courtesy of the gift that keeps on giving, the GOP, a party that makes no bones about being for the big-shots and conglomerates.

Yet many of these same turds that gave us some of the mess we're in think they have the answers when they clearly don't at all. To say that these petty bourgeois fools shit where they eat would be redundant and their reactions are just that: the dysfunctional flailing of retarded children. Put that in your meth-pipe and smoke it tonight, Bubba.

From today's OpEd News mailer: "OpEd news reporter arrested, jailed, charged with criminal conspiracy"

It's been a crazy weekend. Managing editor Cheryl Biren and I went to the Franklin Mills Mall where a demonstration opposing the Army Experience Center was taking place.

It was certainly an experience. We met up there with another OEN editor, Elaine Bower who was there as a demonstrator and protester.

Elaine and I participated in the demonstration. But Cheryl, the whole time, was there as a reporter and photographer.

When the time came when police began arresting protesters who refused to move, Cheryl was there shooting pictures to capture the event. She was the only member of the media there at the time. All others had left already.

That's where the important story begins. Read these two reports to learn more:

OpEdNews Reporter Arrested While Photographing Protest

By Rob Kall2

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OpedNews Journalist and Six Protesters Charged With Criminal Conspiracy After Arrest At "Army Experience Center"

This is a freedom of the press issue and story. Tell your local paper and TV news station to cover it. Contact your favorite MSNBC or Dailyshow or other host to cover it.

And support OpEdNews.com This is such a screaming example of how we cover the story that the mainstream media ignores. The Philadelphia Inquirer didn't even send a reporter to cover this. And the two mainstream media orgs that WERE represented hightailed out when the police said they were going to begin making arrests-- intimidated and bullied into not covering the story.

If you want to depend on weak, mainstream media, ignore this request. If you want to support a strong, independent progressive media, please send your contribution. I can't tell you how urgent our need for contributions is, in these hard times.
Please click here to make a donation today.

thanks,

Rob Kall

Thank you Sen. Jim Webb for introducing the "The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009"

WWW--Virginia Senator (and former Governor) Jim Webb has introduced a bill to create an 18-month commission to evaluate our criminal justice system "from top to bottom," noting that it's "a national disgrace," which is being euphemistic. The bill was introduced yesterday without much fanfare and is reputed to be "quietly supported" by the White House. This bodes very well for the prospects of the legislation and the timing of its introduction is purposeful and serious.

Republican Senators Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) support the bill, and many others in the Senate are likely to follow.

But I believe he cares (amazing, isn't it?), and that he's doing something to reverse the damage of the Reagan era, an era where millions have been incarcerated under the failure known as the "war on drugs," really a racialist war on people. It should be remembered that our drug laws began as "race laws" and have continued this pattern of abuse that's reflected in American criminal justice statistics. Worse still, when Reagan closed our state-run mental health facilities, it threw the mentally ill onto the streets of American cities, then swept many of them into prisons to be housed with violent offenders. No society calling itself civilized would let this specific act of social negligence continue any longer.

Senator Webb notes on his Senate web site:

Why We Urgently Need this Legislation:

• With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses 25% of the world's reported prisoners.

• Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980.

• Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.

• Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country.

• Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society.

• 
  

Webb's social statistics are both shocking and solid, they check out, but we can assume that those who have enriched themselves through unconstitutional forfeiture, private prison building and ownership, investors in privatized prison labor that targets drug offender populations specifically for exploitation, sundry drug police equippers, and the rest of the drug war scum are going to fight this very hard. Bring it on.

I think these exploiters of social misery (who lamely call themselves "heroes") will lose their fight and that the tide has already turned against them and their allies inside and outside of Congress and the courts. Check Senator Webb's page and read the legislation, it's almost revolutionary in the best sense of the word, it's in the best spirit of America.

The Republicans are going to fight this and lose. They and police lobbyists who shouldn't have a right to lobby Congress for anything are going to keep saying what they always have: "If only we had more funding, we could win this!" With the funding we've given them, they should have been able to win WWII several times over. Yet--oddly--the victory never comes for the war that never ends. It's been said over and over that we could stamp-out the usage of illicit-drugs in America, but that it would take the creation of a police state to do it. That's what the advocates of continuing the war on drugs are suggesting in so many words. Their time is ending, now.

That's all the change I need to believe that real change is coming to America. Future generations might say that the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 was when America's "domestic" Cold War began to thaw. Let freedom ring, and let it ring true for us all. Legalization is coming, public statements to the contrary.

Senator Jim Webb's "National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009" page (with a link to its text and supplements): http://webb.senate.gov/email/criminaljusticereform.html

Dalai Lama states that "sex leads to trouble"

"I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion within it." --Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, P. 119, 1930.


WWW--The Dalai Lama's right, you know. There's a gal who I see when I go out who's interested in me, and I think she's all that, cute, etc. . But I don't want any part of it. This isn't to say that I don't believe there are those magical folks among us who can handle love and intimacy, but they're a tiny minority of humanity who don't let it get to them and who can control themselves. It's also not because I don't want to see humanity perpetuate--it's that I know there are too many of us, and we're not all that.

The Lama stated some of the unholy truth this week:

Sexual pressure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication. ...[There] are too [many] ups and downs. ...Naturally as a human being ... some kind of desire for sex comes, but then you use human intelligence to make [the] comprehension that those couples [are] always full of trouble. And in some cases there is suicide [and] murder cases. (AFP, 11.28.2008)

What? The Buddhists are cynics? Uh, yeah, that's a big part of Buddhism, a renunciation of this world. Most Buddhists view the world as being a place of futility, a trap for the soul, something very transitory, and brimming with evil. Correct, and it's how I view the world. Are all relationships futile? No, I don't believe this. But it's close, very close to being that way given the predictability of people's behavior in a relationship.

Freud was right once again. Sex binds us, even when it shouldn't. There would be no point whatsoever to any of this without some carrots (go wild with the symbolism of that, I know you will). The most horrible truth is that when one partner loves another more than the other, they're the inevitable victim in the equation. Almost no one is capable of coping with the responsibility of someone who loves you more than you love them. Being a restless species, we try perversely to make things worse. Not content to leave intimacy despoiled, we inject crass materialism into-the-mix, then blame each other when we fail to meet our mutual expectations.

The worst aspects of humanity have been nurtured under the capitalist order we've all inhabited in our lives, not that it's the only system or order to ruin love and sex. Women in West are especially guilty of promoting this convenient commercialism, wrapped-up as it were in "gifts" that are a mandatory prerequisite for things to be "romantic." Even worse is the female-fixation on the blustering mate who shows constant certainty that they have "things under control," the "Mr. Fix-it" syndrome, when they most definitely have nothing under control.

"Lie to me," she said, "Tell me what I want to hear, not the truth, not ever."

"If you insist," he said. You could just as easily rearrange the genders here, it doesn't matter. We just want to get laid. Men, women, regardless of sexual orientation or how raging our libidos might be. At some point, the flesh needs servicing, empty notions of "romance" aside. Lies are crucial in a culture where the lines between instinct and the repressive conditioning of civilization have blurred.

Self-interest and false sentimentality have been used to keep us buying garbage we never wanted or needed, distracting us away from what's important--each other. We bought it, literally. The Lama goes further than I ever would, Buddhism not being an entirely "humanist" religion and philosophy. He says that we shouldn't get too attached to anyone--not even our loved ones or our children.

This is where I would draw-the-line, and I believe we all need focus on empathy towards others.

There are many sects of Buddhism, so you can tell that they don't agree on such issues either. Yet, he's right about sex. That spells trouble and the over-complication of our lives, it means unnecessary drama and irrational compromise. Men and women are going to have to live separately for a long time before we're all ready for sustainable cohabitation...if that's even possible or desirable.

Hats go off to the lucky few who've already achieved it.

The basic difference between the East and the West is geographical location. The cultural sources are the same. Men and women--and individuals-in-general--are much farther apart than mere cultures in the modern world.

Freud was also right that we're always going to be in conflict with our animal side. Sometimes, a cigar really is just a cigar (why do some feminists use Freudian imagery so much?)...and you can keep it anyway. "Let's do it" might be about the most intellectually and morally honest greeting, but honesty is the last thing anyone cares about. It's enough to turn anyone off. Trouble? Brother, you don't know the meaning of "trouble."