The Power of the Boot

The Note: Counterpunch, remembers how how a member of Bush’s inner circle (Karl Rove?) told the New York Times’ Ron Suskind in summer 2002 the “the reality-based community” had it all wrong, that the world doesn’t “really work anymore” on the basis of “judicious study of discernible reality.” “We’re an empire now,” he boasted, “and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The Note: This is purely and simply Orwell's "Image of the State in 1984".

©Barfo, 2008

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Las Primarias....

"The Primaries" by Francisco Goya y Lucientes

War Mongering On Easter

Except for the Progressive magazine, the USUK press has downplayed Cheney’s war mongering foray in the Holy Land. Instead the headlines announce “Cheney says Independent Palestinian State Overdue.” Yawn.....

What is really going on is that Israel is pressuring a known war hawk to lean on Bush to go to war against Iran.

As reported by the International Herald Tribune: "Welcoming Cheney on Saturday night, Prime Minister Olmert pointedly placed Iran ahead of the peace process as one of "the many items on the common agenda" to be discussed. ' We are both very concerned about Iran; we are anxious to carry on the peace negotiations with the Palestinians.' "

Of course, “We are anxious for peace talks with the Palestinians” is the single most outstanding bull moo of the last 50 years. It is what Israel says every time it takes some action to torpedo whatever umphteenth Peace Plan is on the table. The refrain is intoned so regularly it would not be in the least surprising to learn that it had been incorporated into morning prayers at the Wailing Wall. It is meaningless. It is taken at face value only by morons, and the US mudia.

What Olmert really said was “We are both very concerned about Iran. 00 000 0000000 00 00000 00 000 00000 000000000000 0000 000 000000000000.”

In case one isn't quick enough to understand the meaning of zero, an Israeli official added that Cheney was seen by Jerusalem as "a significant player" who could influence "serious issues that cannot wait." (IHT 03/23/08)

What “serious issues” can’t wait? Certainly not the Peace with Palestine in Our Time issue. While that might be a serious issue, it has been waiting for 60 years. Surely it can wait another nine months until Cheney leaves office.

Well.... what other “serious issues” can’t wait? Peace in Iraq? We all know that Israel has nothing to do with our incursion into Iraq. Global Warming? As if Olmert were pressing Cheney to do something about the Arctic polar bear?

In case anyone still hasn’t figured it out, maybe Cheney’s reply will help. “America's commitment to Israel's security is enduring and unshakable, as is our commitment to Israel's right to defend itself always against terrorism, rocket attacks and other threats from forces dedicated to Israel's destruction,"

Once again, we get fillers packed with zeros. No one denies anyone the right to “defend against” terrorism, whatever that is. The right of self-defense is the bedrock of international relations. Cheney might just as well said he was committed to everyman's right to piss. The question is: against whose wall? Well... for one, against the rocket attacks or more accurately the jumbo firecrackers Hamas is lobbing at Sderot which has forced Israel into aerial bombing of Gaza. That hardly needed clarification. So, discounting the sum of zeros, we are lef with “other threats” allegedly “dedicated to Israel’s destruction.”

I will spare the slow reader any further agony. The issue that “can’t wait” is Iran. What the Israeli official was saying was that Israel regarded Cheney as a key player who could influence President Who himself on an issue that Israel says can’t wait.

The International Herald Tribune, which reported on the Unknown Issue, went on to fill up column inches with the usual blather about Abbas, Hamas, rockets, and the usual nonsense that masquerades as news. But supposing the Times, the Post and the Tribune really can't fathom what is going on, even a moron understands that the vice president doesn’t need to go to Israel to “revitalize” the peace process two weeks after the president himself went to Israel and actually did (or so were told) revitalize it.

In the absence of serious reporting from the Times, the Post, and other outlets of the US mudia, it was left to Mathew Rothschild in the Progressive to note that the sudden departure of Admiral Fallon the other week signaled, if not an imminent attack on Iran, the removal of the safety-lock against doing so.

The missle hatches are open. And on this Sunday, when Christians celebrate the the Suffering and Resurrection of the Prince of Peace, the prince of darkness (while he may attend spurious services in some bunkered conventicle of the US Embassy) is in the Holy Land tete a teting with Israel who wants him to lean on Caesar to attack Iran.

God help us.

© Barfo, 2008

Palm Sunday Pay Day

A friend of mine who is an avowed atheist and thinks religion is a crock of shit has been complaining about Pay Day lenders for a little over a year now. For the silk stocking readership of this blog that might not know what my friend is talking about, a Pay Day lender is a loan shark who specializes in short term, usually two week loans, to tie you over until next pay day. It’s a po’ folk thing.

Suppose a someone makes $100.00 every two weeks. Coming up short at the end of the first week he needs $50.00 to tie him over until next pay day. The smiling Pay Day lender lends him $50.00 for which he will charge him $25.00 in fees and interest. Pay day rolls around and our debtor with a new $100.00 bill in hand goes off to pay his loan ($50.00 + $25.00) and returns home with $25.00 which has to last two weeks. He might as well have gotten hooked on heroin.

While these figures are merely illustrative, a person on minimum wage working 160 hours a grosses $880.00 a month; so the illustration is not that far from reality. Interests and fees charged by Pay Lenders go as high as 800%. [sic].

Is this legal, you might wonder? You bet! A free market is a free market. Reagan taught us all about the evils of Gov’mint meddling and onerous bureaucratic paperwork stifling the “entrepreneurial initiative.”

Well... wait a minute. Wasn’t usury illegal? Wasn’t there a legal cap of 7% interest on loans? Doesn’t the Bible say something about that?

Yes it does. The Old Testament prohibits interest and mandates the forgiveness of debt. Today, Palm Sunday, Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem on an ass, drove the money changers from the outer temple and freed the sacrificial doves from their cages.

But in god-fearing, ever self-righteous, ever self-adulating United States we don’t really give a crap about that, do we? In fact, how many Palm Sunday sermons actually mention Jesus’s act of Compassionate Vandalism?

In State legislatures and in the back-hallways around Congress there are murmurs to the effect that pay day lending is “hurting the economy”. Various compassionate politicians are talking about putting a 36% cap on pay lending. Can’t get more progressive than that, now can you?

Thirty six percent!!! Sho’ is a lot less than 800%. How much is 36% of $50.00 anyways? Answer $18.00. Huh? You mean the outrageous example we started off with was just about the “cure” being proposed by our humanitarians in the Congress?

Go out, wave your psalms, sing your hosannahs, and crucify the widow and the poor man on a cross of interest.

© Barfo, 2008

Pictorial "Balance"

The News: BBC pictures from Gaza show one Israeli woman being led away on a stretcher in bloodless stomach pain agony. (I.e. the theatrics of agony). It also shows one neat and clean rubbelized building with absolutely no photos of maimed children's bodies although it does bother to show one Palestianian funeral where the sand has covered the body so that it looks like a gardening exercise.

The Note: What fucks. This is what passes for "pictorial balance" in the USUK press.

©Barfo, 2008
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Bread Today, Hunger Tomorrow

The News: Explaining why she voted for the communist party in Spain's general election, Gloria Perez chastised president Zapatero for not having done enough "to bring down the price of rents, control mortgage costs, help young people and get us workers better salaries.”

Perez expressed contempt for so-called "tax incentives" and Zapatero's promise of a 400-euro ($620) tax rebate. “That’s bread today, hunger tomorrow. We need reforms that will help us in the long term: better work contracts, better salaries, less inflation.”

The Note: Wouldn't it be nice if workers in the United States had a fraction of Perez's brain power? If they would the "Times" report it?

©Barfo, 2008
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In Torture We Trust

The Thing’s veto of legislation that would have outlawed CIA waterboarding is the shriek from Hell that reflects what this diseased regime has always been about : the poisoining and consumption of everything healthy and decent in the United States.

Howling over the radio waves, Thing salivated that “the fact that we have not been attacked over the past six and a half years is not a matter of chance. ... were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. ... this is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe.”

The Thing never actually asserted that a specific attack had been deterred through the use of torture. Hell’s minion said only that something called our intelligence community “believed” that this “program” had prevented another attack. Once again, injecting poison into the body politic, The Thing sought to induce people into thinking that torture had made us safe. This is a lie.

The truth is that torture does not produce reliable information. The truth is that this diseased regime has been unable to point -- in private or in public -- to a single instance where torture has protected the United States from a specific attack.

So why does Hell’s Bowel Movement insist that torture will make us safe? Does it really believe that? No. It did so because in the festering intestines that are its soul, it knows that the minute the American People buy that lie, they will have been tricked into damning themselves forever. The body politic will have lost all immunity against being consumed entirely.

The instant torture is accepted as capable of protecting us from bad things, it itself becomes a good thing. It will become an accepted routine for bringing about the greater good and we will turn away, dulled and accepting, from the screams and pleadings of the tortured. We will have inverted good and evil. We will have accepted sin.

The moment torture is accepted as protecting us from our “enemies” it becomes acceptable to be used against us, ourselves, in order to ferret out the enemies in our midsts. And not just the known enemies, because the avowed purpose of torture is not to prove what is known but to find out what is unknown. And if not just against known enemies among us, then against any of us to find out who of us is the enemy.

In this way, our acceptance of sin will consume us and the Thing from hell will have triumphed.

Anyone who may have perchanced into this blog, may have wondered why Barfo uses such foul language describing the slime and putrefaction that inhabit our public places. He does so, because this regime and everyone associated with it and everyone who collaborates with it is truly foul and disgusting in every possible way. Foul language is the only way to speak the truth.

©Barfo, 2008