Democracy In Action

Without warning, GAP, the San Francisco-based clothing chain, changed its logo from white-on-blue letters to blue on blue letters within a white square. The company, which has a Facebook Following of 700,000 received an immediate negative feedback from its customer base.

Thoroughly chastened, GAP put the old logo back. "We've heard loud and clear that you don't like the new logo. We've learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what's best for the brand and our customers," the company said.

Fans were relieved; said one: "Thanks for listening. The blue box logo is truly classic. We love it as it is."

Democracy is at least as alive in America as it was in Byzantium where the wrong preference for an icon was enough to cause a riot in the stadium and the fall of the government.

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A Life to Mull Over False Oaths

In the news, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani born American citizen who pled guilty to attempted car-bombing in Times Square, was sentenced today to life in prison without parole. In imposing sentence U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum said "I do hope you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Quran wants you to kill lots of people." Shazad replied, the "Quran gives us the right to defend. And that's all I'm doing, " adding "We do not accept your democracy or your freedom because we already have Sharia law and freedom." Judge Cederbaum cut him short to ask if he had sworn allegiance to the United States when he became a citizen last year.

"I did swear but I did not mean it," said Shahzad.

"So you took a false oath," the judge told him.

Torquemada, wherever he is, must certainly have managed a smile.

But it is not likely Shazad will mull over anything very concrete for long. As a "terrorist" he will no doubt be subject to a Super Max regimen. For those who have no idea what the United States does to convicted "terrorists" suffice to say that it boils down to being locked in a white box 24/7/365. As one defense attorney has put it, "Within a year they become living mushrooms"

There is no reason under Heaven for such sadism. The official justification is that as "potential terorrists" these convicts need to be guarded extra heavily. The problem lies in the "potential". What potential does a person behind several layers of barbed wire, concrete walls and steel bars have of committing further social harm? None. Zero. Zip. An ordinary lock and key will suffice quite well.

No. The Super Max regimen is simply institutionalized sadism of the vilest sort. It is extremely painful to be isolated from human contact, to feel yourself loosing grip as you fall into repeating loops of your own fantasy until, tired of hearing yourself, you become deaf to yourself and turn into a mushroom.

The Government can certainly be expected to punish criminals of various sorts and to take steps to protect the nation and the public from further harm. We have no quarrel with that principle. But no government has the right to engage in cruelty and governments that do are at the end of their historical cycle.

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FUCK GOOGLE

Unbelievable bullshit trying to access this account with a password i KNOW was correct and current. Try to reset it???? Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Endless GOOCRAP that doesn't work.... until finally on the umpteeenth dick around a reset box finally appears.
fucking idiots

A Map is Worth 1000 Words

For years Barfo has implored the U.S. mudia to print a map of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. We must have sent at least 10 chips to the Public Bullshit System's News Hour alone. Back in the 1990's when the Washington Post and the New York Times were blaring away that Arafat had "rejected" Israel's "magnanimous" offer neither of those august organs of disinformation bothered with a MAP. Of course, maps were available. They were just not made available to the American public.... all the more to keep it stupidly in Israel's corner.

Today the headlines from Palestine were much the same as always. Quoth the NY Times,

Palestinian Leaders Urge End to

 Talks With Israel

In an article by Ethan Bronner and Mark Lander it was explained to the rest of us that once again them stiff necked Arabs were refusing to speak to Israel... to an Israel that plaintively just wanted to talk.... for the sake of peace... and to talk some more... and some more

BBC also carried the story that the Palestinian were refusing to talk unless Israel ceased building settlements while the talks went on... and on... But lo and behold -- mirabilis dictu -- BBC also published a MAP:

Makes all the difference in the world, don't it?

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Rahm Emmanual Leaves White House for Greener Pastures

Nice Tie Rahm......

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Political Kitsch and Economic Crime

It couldn't have happened to a more deserving creep: out of the blue, a month before the elections the airwaves are filled with the stunning revelation that Meg Whitman employed an illegal Latina nanny. ... for nine years. Oh but it gets better. When the Social Security Administration requested she clarify the small matter of a mis-match between name and number. ... Whitman ignored the request ..... for six years. Oh buts it gets even better still.  After requiring the illegal Latina to work unpaid overtime, Whitman fired her without cause the day after she declared her candidacy for California's governship.

But that's just the script. As for the drama, the allegations got read to a phalanx of press cameras by a perfectly coiffed and facial'ed Gloria Aldred in tones of aggrieved and outraged victimhood while The Victim herself, all but dressed in sackloth looked on plaintively and providesdsobbing punctuations to Aldred's delivery. When the complaint was read, Aldred turned to the helpless, illegal, victimized victim and hugged her with emotive solidarity as the victim emoted some more. What next? Aldred standing shoulder to shoulder with Oppressed Nanny on the rush hour subway to Brooklyn? It was enough to out-emote the most contrived and collusive trials ever performed in the Roman Forum.

We did some quick calculations. At 15 hours a week, at $23.00 an hour, 15 months lost wages from unlawful termination comes out to $20,700.00. That's less than peanuts for a $400.00 an hour lawyer like Aldred. So Aldred's accountants must have rustled up a hell of a lot of unpaid overtime to beef up the "compensables".

The whole thing has the unmistakeable air of a political contrivance -- a bloody shirt, a "Grover, Grover, Where's my Pa?" We wonder if Aldred realizes that her act has become political kitsch?

But what is not political kitsch or, more importantly, economic kitsch, is that a woman of Whitman's colossal net worth paid another human being spit in the bucket wages of $23.00 an hour.

Of course, the capitalist answer, is that $23.00 an hour was at least, if not more than, the going market rate. But that is precisely the kind of pseudo justification that makes capitalism so disgusting -- it justifies its conduct by the disparity of income it itself creates. It is truly nauseating.

One would think that a person in Whitman's position would want to display her magnanimity, her ability to be over-flowingly generous. A truly generous spirit would say: I have more money than I know what to do with, so I will at least make sure that anyone who is fortunate enough to work for me gets paid more money than they need. This is what it means to "shower blessings" and just as God has showered blessings on Whitman, it was Whitman's Christian duty to shower blessings on people who made her bed, cut her lawn and washed her floors.

Instead, Whitman sees nothing wrong with a system that generates such incredible disparities of wealth and feels no compunction in behaving as miserly and contemptuously as she can get away with. Marie Antoinette paid more for less.

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Holocaust Newspeak at BBC

In the Shrieking News department, today's BBC headlined that "British Holocaust Denier David Irving has arrived in Poland to lead a tour of sites from the Nazi occupation." The article explains that Irving has written a book containing "the suggestion that Hitler knew nothing the Holocaust until late 1943, and that he never gave the order for the annihilation of Europe's Jews."

Does BBC know the meaning of its own English? Does it know what an indirect object is? To say that someone knew nothing of something is not to say that the something did not exist or that it did not take place.

For some reason David Irving is intent on exculpating Hitler for the project to annihilate european Jews; but that does not equate with denying that the genocide took place.

By now, it is unlikely that the fervid scriveners in the BBC Ministry of Truth are even aware of the origins of their own taboo. In the 1960's and 70's Germany, France and other european countries passed laws outlawing racism, denigrating an ethnic group and denying or minimizing the holocaust. Irving has not "denied" Nazi genocide, he has "minimized" some aspect of it.

The problem with any law that seeks to curtail free speech is that it inevitably paints with too broad a brush. What does it mean to "minimize" Nazi genocide? At bottom, it means to disagree in some manner with someone else's imposed, mandatory account. Turning disgreement or divergence from orthodoxy into a crime is simply demanding, under penalty of law, mute, subservient and unthinking assent to an official truth.

The resultant absurdities are never ending. Of late, Bishop Williamson was also accused of "denying" {beat your breast and gasp here} the holocaust. Shrieked the New York Times: he denied "that six million Jews were gassed...."

Well, no serious historian had ever claimed that six million anybodies were "gassed". Neither is there any agreement on the precise number of people who were gassed, starved, murdered, or left to die of exhaustion or disease -- i.e. in some sense "killed" in the overall Nazi "cleansing" programme for Europe.

Raul Hilberg, the jewish historian who is responsible for coining the current usage of the word "holocaust" and who is accepted by Jews and the German government as the "chief historian" of the episode, estimated the total number of deaths from all causes at 5.4 million. Has Hilberg therefore "minimized the holocaust" by deviating from the Weisenthal Institute's "official" figure of "six million"? Certainly 5.4 is less than 6.0.

Hilberg also stated that estimating the total number of deaths was a very complex and uncertain task. A thinking person can see why. The genocide of european Jews was not a simple act of "murdering" X number of Jews. The genocide took place through multi-level and permuting programmes and policies over a four year period. At some point, in such a convergence of processes, an ultimate result or threshold is reached at which point one could easonably say "taken all together this amounts to the equivalent of a systematic plan". (In legal parlance this would be called a "constructive conspiracy" FN-1 .) But to say that calculating the number of deaths is "complex" is to admit that what is called "the holocaust" is also complex.

But if an historical event is complex that necessarily means that there is no simple truth about it. Rather it involves equivocal or uncertain facts giving rise to different inferences and implications. In short, a complex event is something over which reasonable men can in good faith differ. But not, apparently, when it comes to a select group. To question (as Williamson did) the number of Jews who were gassed, becomes the crime of "minimizing" which was then equated with the criminal taboo of "denying" the Holy Holocaust.

It is foolish and in any case beside the point to exculpate Hitler from knowledge of the genocide carried out on his watch. It is true that there is no Fuhrer Order or document which clearly and unequivocally connects him to a planned extermination of Jews. So what? History is as much a question of knowledgable and probable inference as it is of so called "hard facts". In all events, to argue that Hitler did not know of the extermination "until 1943" and then did nothing to stop it afterwards certainly qualifies as an unworthy quibble. But a foolish quibble is not the same as blasphemy.

When the State, at its own initiative or upon the initiative of a faction, turns foolish quibbles into blasphemies, then we have all lost our freedom of speech and with it our freedom of thought.

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