Regis Plugs my Favorite News Show

Why I Plan to Boycott the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.

It was brought to my attention that the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are going to be going back on air without their writers. In other words they are crossing the picket lines and will become scabs. How can it be that supposedly left leaning artists could abandon their fellow artists and side with Westinghouse, part of the Military Industrial Complex? Maybe they have figured that labor is worthless today. I think though if either Mr. Stewart or Mr. Colbert looked around they may see that everything around them was created with labor.
The labor dispute between the studios, General Electric, Disney, Westinghouse, and Fox, and the writers is over revenue. At the moment the writers get no royalties from the shows that their networks air over the Internet, even though the studios are receiving ad revenue from the advertisers. The writers argue that if their work is bringing in money then why don’t they get a cut.
The major companies argue that it is really impossible to figure out any dollar amounts for online content. While at the same time, Westinghouse, owner of CBSViacom, is suing Google for one billion dollars for allowing users of YouTube to post CBSViacom’s content on their site. So again it looks as if the powerful want it both ways. When the hell will people wake up to this phenomenon?
I find it really sad that these two would jump back on air so quickly and even more shocking is that they would cross the picket lines. How can they claim any democratic credentials anymore, and I use a small “d” not a “D” on purpose. It is totally possible that I am wrong about this. It could be that the two of them are going to use their pulpits to lambaste the networks, which pay them, and show support for the writers. Unfortunately if that is the case someone will have to tell me because I will not be watching. I expect this kind of shit from Jay Leno but Stewart and Colbert, they know better.

Funny Spoofs

A little music and reading for Xmas

Here is a great essay by the philosopher Peter Singer. I figured that it was very fitting for Xmas. Of course, it may make you feel bad.
The Singer Solution to World Poverty
Peter Singer
The New York Times Magazine, September 5, 1999

Wow these guys are paranoid

Last night I came across an article on one of my favorite web sites. IT was an essay on 9/11 and the Bush Administration's complicity in the attacks. I decided to add my two cents worth in the comment section and then things get wacky. At one point the other commentators questioned if I worked for the US GOvernment and was there just to spread disinformation. Then they get anti-semitic.
Here's the thread if you are interested. I am "InStride".

Enough Police State

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Police used chemical spray and stun guns Thursday as dozens of protesters seeking to halt the demolition of 4,500 public housing units tried to force their way through an iron gate at City Hall.
One woman was sprayed with chemicals and dragged from the gates. She was taken away on a stretcher by emergency officials. Before that, the woman was seen pouring water from a bottle into her eyes and weeping.

New orleans
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Orchestra Prevented from Entering Gaza to Hold Solidarity Concert in Ramallah

Please circulate widely; Let the whole world know how these Nazis carry on

Maestro Daniel Barenboim expresses deep dismay at discrimination against Palestinian musician, and will hold press conference in Berlin tomorrow in protest. For more information, please contact Maestro Daniel Barenboim. Tel: 00491-792160544.
12.16.2007 | AlKamandjati.com

Ramallah, 16-12-07: An international orchestra refused to perform in Gaza today after its sole Palestinian member, violinist Ramzi Aburedwan, was prevented from entering the Strip by the Israeli authorities and threatened with arrest, despite the fact that all 20 members of the orchestra – including Aburedwan - had secured prior coordination from the Israeli authorities via the General Consulate of France in Jerusalem to enter Gaza.

The orchestra had been due to perform as part of a Baroque Music Festival which is taking place throughout Palestine and Israel, supported by the Barenboim-Said Foundation, the General Consulate of France in Jerusalem, the A.M. Qattan Foundation, and the Goethe Institute of Ramallah.

The tour specifically scheduled a performance in the Strip to give ordinary Gazans some respite from the grinding, daily suffering they face because of Israeli measures of collective punishment and isolation, including fuel and electricity cuts and crippling border closures, which have caused massive levels of poverty and unemployment, and continued Israeli military attacks.

When the orchestra arrived at the Israeli-controlled Erez crossing, all of its international members were told they could pass except Aburedwan, who was told that he had travelled to the crossing illegally despite possessing all the necessary documentation. The orchestra refused to enter Gaza without Aburedwan. After being detained at Erez for almost seven hours, Aburedwan was taken to an Israeli police station in Sderot accompanied by his fellow musicians, where he was held for a further two hours.

All members of the orchestra have now returned to Ramallah and intend to hold a concert in solidarity with Gaza from Ramallah. The concert will take place on Monday 17 December at 13:00, at the Al Kamandjâti Association in Ramallah's Old City. All members of the press and general public are invited to attend.

Maestro Daniel Barenboim, one of the backers of the Festival, expressed his deep dismay at this blatant discrimination against a Palestinian musician, which prevented the orchestra from performing this vital humanitarian act for the people of Gaza. To express his protest, Maestro Barenboim will hold a press conference in Berlin on Monday 17 December at 12:00, where he will be available to respond to comments and requests for information. All members of the international press are invited to attend.

For more information, please contact Maestro Daniel Barenboim. Tel: 00491-792160544.

For more information on Ramzi Aburedwan and the Al Kamandjati Association, please visit: www.alkamandjati.com.

Some Words of Wisdom from other people

Chomsky on Looting:
"As to the question of looting, I myself wouldn't regard that as violence. I don't see why it's more violent for a person to go into a store and take what's there than it is for a person who has money that was achieved by violent methods to go into the store and take what's there by handing over the money. I think one can give a good argument that looting isn't violence at all. In a sense, most of us are looters, or at any rate we are benefiting from others' looting."

H.L. Mencken:
"A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there."
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
"Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time."
"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable."
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

Lord Bertrand Russell:
"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly."
"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence"
"There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths."
"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."

John Dewey:
"Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
"Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis."

Isaiah Berlin:
"Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs."
"Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions."

ALbert Camus:
"After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion"
"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face."
"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

Immanuel Kant:
"Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."
"Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end."
"In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so."

Diogenes of Sinope:
"In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face."
"Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?"
"There is only a finger's difference between a wise man and a fool."

Ludwig Wittgenstein:
"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."
"The face is the soul of the body."
"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."
"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."

Just some thoughts by people with larger brains then me.
-justin

The Garden of Eden is in Missouri?

Catching Mitt

So Mitt Romney gave a speech on religion in an attempt to convince one group of wacko Christians, the Evangelicals, that his absurd religion, Mormonism, isn’t that far from theirs. Here is just a selection of choice quotes from Mitt’s speech, with a little rebuttal.

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.”
Actually if one looks at history there are many examples of how incredibly false this statement is. For instance, persecution is one of religion’s greatest friends. On top of that, religions are mostly based on control, hence sin.

“A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith.”
This is begging the question, at least to an atheist.

"As a young man, Lincoln described what he called America's 'political religion' – the commitment to defend the rule of law and the Constitution. When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God.”
I wish I had the time to go back and locate that quote by Lincoln to understand its context because I read it differently. Does God really care about the Constitution, Mitt?

“Americans do not respect believers of convenience. Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.”
That’s all you people are, who do you think you are kidding?

“But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God.”
Can you really blame us?

“It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.”
Worshipping secularism? WTF?

"We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders – in ceremony and word”
“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814


"The consequence of our common humanity is our responsibility to one another, to our fellow Americans foremost, but also to every child of God.”
Again, doesn’t our “common humanity” overlook lines drawn in the sand?

"Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government. No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty.”
Just go ahead and start reading the Old Testament because you will find that God does not give his humans liberty but nonsensical laws about eating shellfish and how many shekels of gold must make up each curtain rod in the tabernac

“America must never falter in holding high the banner of freedom”
I read recently that the umbilical cord of kings were saved and used as a way to rally the people, they would have parades and wave them in the streets, and was most likely the precursor to modern day flags.

“It was in Philadelphia that our founding fathers defined a revolutionary vision of liberty, grounded on self-evident truths about the equality of all, and the inalienable rights with which each is endowed by his Creator.”
Ya, the equality of all white-male property owners.

"Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me”
So if you haven’t knelt in prayer to the Almighty, the one, the only, GOD, then you are no ally of his. Ouch!

"In that spirit, let us give thanks to the divine 'author of liberty.”
The bible is a book telling people what not to do, not a book granting freedom.

It is sad that in 2007 our leaders feel the need to show how much they love Jesus. I am still waiting for the backlash against all of this. Maybe America will have a mini-Enlightenment since our mini-Crusades aren’t working so well.

Russell's Last Essay

The time has come to review my life as a whole, and to ask whether it has served any useful purpose or has been wholly concerned in futility. Unfortunately, no answer is possible for anyone who does not know the future. Modern weapons make it practically certain that the next serious war will exterminate the human race. This is admitted by all competent authorities, and I shall not waste time in proving it. Any man who cares what the future may have in store therefore has to choose between nothingness and conciliation, not once, but throughout future ages until the sun grows cold.

Unfortunately, our politicians are not accustomed to such a choice. However hard they try, their minds inevitably slide back to the courtroom and the criminal world. If, out of kindness, the last man foresees the murder of the last man but one, the whole law-enforcement campaign imagines all the apparatus of police, Scotland Yard, judges and wigs ready to catch and punish him. But this is not how the scene will be. There will be first the death of nearly all the inhabitants of New York or London or Peking or Tokyo, then a gradual extension of deaths to the country, then famine due to failure of trade, and at last gasping, horrifying lonely death in the mountains, and then eternal silence.

If the Great Powers continue their present policies, some such end as this is inevitable. When two or more Powers disagree, what can they do? A can yield to B, or B can yield to A, or they can reach a compromise, or they can fight. If either yields, it is thought pusillanimous: either it loses caste, or, next time, it must fight; or it must secure an ally. Since the number of States is finite, this process must soon come to an end. We have seen all the steps in this development since the end of the Second War. Consider what happened in the Cuba crisis. Both sides were willing to fight, but at the last possible moment Khrushchev's nerve failed and he allowed the world to live till the next crisis. But it turned out that Russia would have preferred death, and Khrushchev fell.

Can we count on this always happening?

What is the present system?

When there is a quarrel, a conference is summoned, each side debates, they reach two compromises, one favoured by one side, the other by the other. If each contains disarmament clauses, each is aware that they may be infringed. Each considers the tiniest chance of infringement a greater misfortune than the end of the human race. And so nothing is done. The powers must learn that peace is the paramount interest of everybody. To cause this to be realized by governments should be the supreme aim.

What has been achieved towards this end, and what have I personally contributed?

Publicly, in the relations between states, very little, but still something. Russia has expressed willingness to transform NATO by joining it; but China is a new threat. The Vietnam war seems likely to end in negotiation. Generally, the powers (except the U.S.) show a reluctance to go to war. France is uncertain, but leaves room for hope. At any rate, the stark opposition of Communist and non-Communist is breaking down. If peace can be preserved for the next 10 years, it will be possible to hope.

What can private persons do meanwhile? They can agitate, by pointing out the effects of modern war and the danger of the extinction of Man. They can teach men not to hate peoples other than their own, or to cause themselves to be hated. They can value, and cause others to value, what Man has achieved in art and science. They can emphasize the superiority of co-operation to competition.

Finally, have I done anything to further such ends?

Something perhaps, but sadly little in view of the magnitude of the evil. Some few people in England and the U.S.A. I have encouraged in the expression of liberal views, or have terrified with the knowledge of what modern weapons can do. It is not much, but if everybody did as much this Earth would soon be a paradise. Consider for a moment what our planet is and what it might be. At present, for most, there is toil and hunger, constant danger, more hatred than love. There could be a happy world, where co-operation was more in evidence than competition, and monotonous work is done by machines, where what is lovely in nature is not destroyed to make room for hideous machines whose sole business is to kill, and where to promote joy is more respected than to produce mountains of corpses. Do not say this is impossible: it is not. It waits only for men to desire it more than the infliction of torture.

There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.

Radiohead does The Smiths

A little music and a little Iran.

I don't know why but this song has me mesmerized.



No nukes in Iran? What the fuck? Wait a second, hasn’t the Bush administration claimed for years that Iran had a clandestine nuclear weapons program? But now the new National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, comes out and says that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago. That would be 2003, two years after Bush labeled Iran, and because it is a “democracy”, all its people, part of the Axis Of Evil. How can it be that we have had four years of bellicose saber rattling, not too mention all the claims made by Bush and Cheney about their supposed on-going weapons development, when they knew all along there was no program. I think this shows a pattern. Too bad we are the United States of Amnesia.
My conspiracy mind says this, could it be that the intelligence agencies, after being thrown under the bus by Cheney, threatened to go public with this information forcing Bush to release it or suffer a huge attack by career agents. Basically, once bitten, twice shy.

Demands of a thief

"I really wish America had a press corp like Israel."
-Justin

11.25.2007 |Haaretz
By Gideon Levy

The public discourse in Israel has momentarily awoken from its slumber. "To give or not to give," that is the Shakespearean question - "to make concessions" or "not to make concessions." It is good that initial signs of life in the Israeli public have emerged. It was worth going to Annapolis if only for this reason - but this discourse is baseless and distorted. Israel is not being asked "to give" anything to the Palestinians; it is only being asked to return - to return their stolen land and restore their trampled self-respect, along with their fundamental human rights and humanity. This is the primary core issue, the only one worthy of the title, and no one talks about it anymore.

No one is talking about morality anymore. Justice is also an archaic concept, a taboo that has deliberately been erased from all negotiations. Two and a half million people - farmers, merchants, lawyers, drivers, daydreaming teenage girls, love-smitten men, old people, women, children and combatants using violent means for a just cause - have all been living under a brutal boot for 40 years. Meanwhile, in our cafes and living rooms the conversation is over giving or not giving.

Lawyers, philosophers, writers, lecturers, intellectuals and rabbis, who are looked upon for basic knowledge about moral precepts, participate in this distorted discourse. What will they tell their children - after the occupation finally becomes a nightmare of the past - about the period in which they wielded influence? What will they say about their role in this? Israeli students stand at checkpoints as part of their army reserve duty, brutally deciding the fate of people, and then some rush off to lectures on ethics at university, forgetting what they did the previous day and what is being done in their names every single day. Intellectuals publish petitions, "to make concessions" or "not to make concessions," diverting attention from the core issue. There are stormy debates about corruption - whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is corrupt and how the Supreme Court is being undermined. But there is no discussion of the ultimate question: Isn't the occupation the greatest and most terrible corruption to have taken root here, overshadowing everything else?

Security officials are terrified about what would happen if we removed a checkpoint or released prisoners, like the whites in South Africa who whipped up a frenzy of fear about the "great slaughter" that would ensue if blacks were granted their rights. But these are not legitimate questions: The incarceration must be ended and the myriad of political prisoners should be released unconditionally. Just as a thief cannot present demands - neither preconditions nor any other terms - to the owner of the property he has robbed, Israel cannot present demands to the other side as long as the situation remains as it is.

Security? We must defend ourselves by defensive means. Those who do not believe that the only security we will enjoy will come from ending the occupation and from peace can entrench themselves in the army, and behind walls and fences. But we have no right to do what we are doing: Just as no one would conceive of killing the residents of an entire neighborhood, to harass and incarcerate it because of a few criminals living there, there is no justification for abusing an entire people in the name of our security. The question of whether ending the occupation would threaten or strengthen Israel's security is irrelevant. There are not, and cannot be, any preconditions for restoring justice.

No one will discuss this at Annapolis. Even if the real core issues were raised, they would focus on secondary questions - borders, Jerusalem and even refugees. But that would be escaping the main issue. After 40 years, one might have expected that the real core issue would finally be raised for honest and bold discussion: Does Israel have the moral right to continue the occupation? The world should have asked this long ago. The Palestinians should have focused only on this. And above all, we, who bear the guilt, should have been terribly troubled by the answer to this question.