Marie Cocco - Misogyny I Won't Miss

Marie Cocco - Misogyny I Won't Miss - washingtonpost.com

As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss.

I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan "Bros before Hos." The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and are widely sold on the Internet.

I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless-steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won't miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item.
I won't miss Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.

Would the silence prevail if Obama's likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they'd compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama's sex organs play?

There are many reasons Clinton is losing the nomination contest, some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the groundswell for "change." But for all Clinton's political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.

Sun Myung Moon vs Wright - Danger match

Open Left:: Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 2: Sun Myung Moon

Mysterious Republican Money
By Robert Parry
September 7, 2004

If House Speaker Dennis Hastert were really concerned about drug profits being laundered into the U.S. political process, he would not be sliming billionaire financier George Soros with that suspicion. Hastert would be looking at a principal conservative funder: South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon.

While Hastert was unable to cite a shred of evidence that the liberal Soros is funneling illicit money, there is a substantial body of evidence that Moon has long commanded a criminal enterprise with close ties to Asian and South American drug lords. The evidence includes first-hand accounts of money laundering disclosed by Moon confidantes and even family members. Besides those more recent accounts, Moon was convicted of tax fraud based on evidence developed in the late 1970s about his money-laundering activities.

Since serving his tax-evasion sentence in the early 1980s, however, Moon appears to have bought himself protection by spreading hundreds of millions of dollars around conservative causes and through generous speaking fee payments to Republican leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush.

Moon himself has boasted that he spent $1 billion on the right-wing Washington Times in its first decade alone. The newspaper, which started in 1982, continues to lose Moon an estimated $50 million a year but remains a valuable propaganda organ for the Republican Party.

How Moon has managed to cover the vast losses of his media empire and pay for lavish conservative conferences has been one of the most enduring mysteries of Washington, but curiously one of the least investigated - at least since the Reagan-Bush era.

Parry goes on to describe how Moon is connected with the Korean CIA, rightwing Japanese WWII war criminals Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who "grew rich from their association with the yakuza, an organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea," and an assortment of different rightwing regimes in Latin America during the 1980s, including the notorious Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia. This also, inevitable, involved connections to the Nicaraguan Contras cocaine dealing.

If George Soros were to get anywhere near even a fraction of this, we'd never hear the end of it. But Moon? I'll bet that at least half the people reading this have never even heard anything about Moon's involvement in drugs and underworld finance. That's precisely how the projection process works in the fantasy construction of shadow elites.

At Your Next Meeting:

Bees

Give bees a chance by Pat Thomas.

..Bees’ role in the natural order of our world is crucial, and their importance as pollinators, both for agriculture and for wild plants, can’t be underestimated. Nor can it be quantified in monetary terms. Bees are what is known as a “keystone species”, ensuring the continued reproduction and survival not only of plants but of other organisms that depend on those plants for survival. Once a keystone species disappears, other species begin to disappear too - thus Albert Einstein’s apocalyptic and, these days, oft-quote view: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

This vision may be coming true. Our bees are dying - in record numbers. The recent disappearance of catastrophic numbers of bees from their colonies, in the US, especially but also in Europe, has been dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The most striking symptom of CCD is that the bees appear to die away from the hive. One day they fly away and never return. Those few that a left behind, say scientists, are ill indeed. Virtually every known bee virus can be found in their bodies; some carrying five or six viruses, as well as several gungal infections, at the same time. The other worrying factor is the way other bees and insects avoid these abandoned nests. In nature, nothing is wasted and an abandoned hive would normally be taken over by other creatures opportunisticaly looking for food and shelter. But hives suffering from CCD remain empty, suggesting that there may be something toxic in the colony itself.

…As the number of crops we grow increases, the need for pollinators grow too, and these days beekeepers can make more money renting out bees to pollinate food crops than they have ever been able to make selling homemade honey. Migratory pollination is a multibillion-dollar industry. But transporting bees huge distances in giant 18-wheel juggernauts with the hives stacked on top of each other also stresses the insects out. Higher levels of stress in turn make them more vulnerable to disease. Studies show CCD is most prevailent in transported bees, with losses of up to 90% within the colonies. By transporting bees across great distances, beekeepers are also transporting mites and any other parasites, viruses, bacteria and fungi to places they might not otherwise have spread. Industrial-sezed colonies may have greater market value, but they bring the same problems to bees that industrial poultry farmers have visited on chickens and turkeys: the easy spread of disease.

…..In addition, the boxy structure of modern commercial hives - which makes it easier to squeeze several colonies into a small space - and configuration of bees yards have largely been designed for the convenience of human beekeepers an not necessarily with the health and natural biology of the bees in mind. The natural diet of a bee is pollen and honey - a mixture rich in enzymes, anti-oxidants and other health-supporting nutrients. But to beef their bees up for the heavy work of pollination, commercial beekeepers feed them on the bee equivalent of protein bars and lucozade - a mixture of artificial supplements, protein and glucose/fructose syrup. These sticky mixtures are freighted around the country in tankers to wherever the colonies happen to be. This is expensive and occasionally it proes cheaper to kill off whole colonies rather than feed them over the winter. The artificial diets are in part response to the decline of the bees’ natural foraging areas. Fewer plants means less natural food for the bees. But taking any living creature off its natural diet and force-feeding it junk food will inevitably result in poor immunity. Bees in particular have a much less adaptive immune system than we do, so if a bee becomes infected by a virus, its body cnt respond by making specific antibodies.

In a normal colony, the queen can live and produce eggs for several years. In commercial beekeeping, breeding better queens is a profitable business and queens are regularly killed and replaced - as often as every 6 months. The queen may be subjected to the stress of having her wings clipped to identify her and also limit “swarming” - when bees leave one colony with a new queen and form another elsewhere (the natural way for bees to ensure their survival and genetic diversity). To ensure that colonies express the genetic qualities that beekeepers value, however, some virgin queens are artificially inseminated with sperm from crushed males. This practise, while not universal, is gaining popularity as it becomes more difficult for honeybees to survive naturally.

Bee population have been affected by 2 types of mite infestations in recent years: a tracheal mite and the varroa mite that attacks the intestines. ….In a healthy colony, varroacould to some degree be seen as useful, helping to cull the weaker members. But in an already-weakened artificial colonies we treat the infestation with insecticides such as coumaphos, a dangerous organophosphate to which the mites rapily develop resistance. This resistance ca be passed on from generation to generation, and some evidence suggests resistant mites actually trive with repeated exposure. Likewise, the pesticide fluvainate creates resistance in the mite and disrupts the bees’ homing behaviour and ability to navigate. A bee that cnt fin its way back home eventually dies. Pesticides used on food crops and other crops can affect bees, even at sub-lethal doses. Exposure can produce a kind of pesticide intoxication that makes the bees appear “drunk” and disrupts navigation, feeding behaviour, memory, learning and egg-laying. Fipronil, for example,impairs the olfactory memory process. which honeybees use to find pollen and nectar. Spinosad can make bumblebees slower foragers even at low doses. The insecticide imidacloprid can cause bees to forget where their hives are located. …Genetically modified (GM) plants account for 40% of U.S cornfields. ..The bacterial toxin in the corn appeared to alter the surface of the bees’ intestines, weakening it enough to allow the parasites to gain entry.

As more stories of CCD become more prominent, other theories emerge. Mobile phones and overhead power lines have been blamed for interfering with the bees’ homing radar and preventing them from getting back to their colonies. It is not clear how sound this theory is. Better known is the fact that high background levels of electromagnetic radiation can suppress immune response and disrupt the nervous system in a variety of living creatures. It is unlikely that bees are the exception to that rule.

Having been co-opted into industrial farming, commercial bees have become just another type of farming machinery. But the machinery is breaking down. Ironically, the giant farms that destroy natural habitats and use large quantities of pesticides are the ones that need the bees the most, and are at the same time important contributors to their decline.

Bees are sensitive, social social creatures that have achieved a high degree of harmony and productivity in their colonies. Their social structure is both dynaic and ordered. They are intelligent, and become more so with age. They learn and remember; they can use visual orientation to estimate distances from a nectar source while in flight. They construct colonies that are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. They also suffer from occupational diseases. just like we do. …

..Because of our close proximity to bees and our deep reliance on them, any problems in our society - in the way we think and act, in our broader relationship with nature - will also affect theirs. The collapse of the bee population isnt a scientific riddle to be solved with more and better science and technology.

In fact, it could be a frightening vision of our own future.

If you aren't paranoid, you aren't paying attention

From The Magazine : Radar Online : Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time."

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.

"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.'"

I think all the liberals (people who believe humanity needs improvement) should start blogging all the minutia of their lives as did the guy on the Daily Show who discovered he was on the list. The conservatives (people who believe the old ways were the best) are probably immune. See you at the camps.

Love a well turned phrase

Nothing Bush does can be challenged on moral grounds, however unethical or evil it might appear, because all of his actions are directed by God. He can twist the truth, oppress the poor, exalt the rich, despoil the earth, ignore the law - and murder children - without the slightest compunction, the briefest moment of doubt or self-reflection, because he believes, he truly believes, that God squats in his brainpan and tells him what to do. - Chris Floyd (My highest compliments on the wordchoice "squats in his brainpan")

The Recipe

Private Spies

If you thought a mercenary army like Blackwater was threatening, what do you think about this Carlyle acquisition?. Hat tip to Lady Broadoak.

Beware of Free Range Chickens

An FBI Terrorism Conference in the Heartland, Big Brother Close Up by Stan Cox. For a laugh, read this account of the Agro-terrorism conference.

I notice on the conservative blogs that liberals are called "Chicken Littles" for talking about our shaky economy, but who calls them names when they exaggerate the terrorism threat?

How We Won the Battle and Lost the War

As a youth, I was taught the evils of Communism and how bleak life was behind the iron curtain - a monochromatic grey of existence without pleasure. We were told it was hard to do business and get ahead socially or economically if one wasn’t in the communist party in the Soviet Union. Surveillance was prevalent and the German Stasi enlisted citizens to spy on each other. The media was just government propaganda. Organized crime flourished. Military spending used up a massive proportion of taxes. Government officials lived in luxury. Fixed elections and fear and distrust made a whole country paranoid.

Our terrorism curtain mirrors the Soviet Union in nearly every aspect, although corporatocracy rules with two political parties to serve it. So many things are so wrong with America today: the US energy policy designed by corporations; seeds and pig genes owned by Agri-business corporations; corporations running the prison systems and an insane, racist drug industry to supply full occupancy; small sardine businesses trying to compete with whale size corps; corporate profiteering from continuous wars. Democracy died with hardly a whimper and people look the other way because individuals can also make a little stock money from slave wages and famines and participate in the sin.

See you at the camps if our socially criminal system doesn't collapse first.