My Hall of Fame ballot if I had one
1. Barry Bonds
2. Roger Clemens
3. Greg Maddux
4. Mark McGwire
5. Sammy Sosa
6. Craig Biggio
7. Mike Piazza
8. Jeff Bagwell
9. Tim Raines
10. Tom Glavine
Happy Thanksgiving
Joining the JFK truthers
The 50th anniversary of the shooting death of John F. Kennedy is the perfect time to let you know that you are actively reading the blog of a person who believes Kennedy was NOT shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald was, as he claimed to be in the hours following his death, a patsy. It is completely implausible to me that Kennedy could be shot dead from such a distance by an untrained marksman using a gun with a skewed sight who had been spied on for months and years before by the CIA; that the victim’s entire physical frame would lurch backwards--
towards the bullet, and that his wife’s dress would be splattered with blood seated to his right when he had been shot, supposedly, from behind
to his right; that his assailant, alleging a frame-up, would be shot coming out of the jailhouse by a man who, despite preposterous claims of motive involving vengeance for the widow and proving that Jews can be tough when it counts, also happened to be mobbed up larger than Nucky Thompson.
It is infinitely more plausible to me to believe that Oswald, during the most dangerous time period of the four decade-long Cold War, was encouraged by an undercover operative to shoot at the president and to also have an expert shooter positioned elsewhere working on behalf of anti-Castro, anti-Communist, CIA military types that either wanted to punish Kennedy for going too soft on Castro, or to pin the blame of the assassination directly on the Cuban leader, or both. And then the CIA files regarding the case ordered closed for one half century and counting. If you think it impossible that the CIA would do such a thing as to undo the political will of the populace by attempting to assassinate an elected official, then you really don't pay close attention to the news, do you? John may be seated next to Abraham and Martin in heaven, but if he is, he's also seated close to Salvadore Allende and Hugo Chavez.
I stake the entire reputation of this blog, such as it is, upon this decision today to join the ranks of “conspiracy theorists” on the JFK shooting, and I wonder if Bob Schieffer and other doubled-down media members of the privilege class, who have otherwise thrown in entirely behind the military-industrial complex on all other CIA-official stories since, would be willing to place
their reputations, such as
they are, on the contradictory conclusions of the Warren Commission. I suppose that they each continue to cling to the original story because, well, if they’ve been wrong, they at least have had plenty of company. But if it turns out that they
have been wrong (and you could make a case that the Warren Commission findings have already been publicly discredited), then it won’t be simply a mistake of demanding too little evidence at the time or being drawn in, over time, by consensus beliefs. Instead, it will require, for each member of the traditional media, a personal admission to being part of the half-century-long journalistic bungling of—and even complicity in -- the largest and loudest criminal conspiracy in American history.
You can stand for government secrecy or you can stand for open inquiry, but you can’t stand for both. The historical record is important, and since you are one of my very few readers, I’ll just let you know right here that this shit on the blog today is entirely about posterity.
Where's the celebration?
The nuclear freeze agreement with Iran is the historic achievement to date, foreign or domestic, for the Obama administration, with praise wide and warranted enough to spread to Secretary of State Kerry. The credit goes principally to new Iranian President Rouhani, but Obama and Kerry get kudos as well for laying down their swords and walking forward even one step to counter Rouhani's ten. There's no recent precedent for this in American foreign policy towards Iran. The act of diplomacy alone here is historic as the tentative agreement results from the first formal talks between the two states since 1979.
There are no parties being scheduled in the Beltway today however. Much of Washington still sees more legitimacy in a "President Netanyahu" than a President Obama, and it's those blinders, paid for by mountains of stone cold campaign cash, that still prevent them from seeing how far Iran has come on this agreement. There is still no agreement with Israel on ending the apartheid status of Palestine that the international community condemns. Israel still holds up progress on a nuclear proliferation treaty for the entire Middle Eastern region. (Israel is the only country with a massive nuclear capacity in that area.) It will still be a violation of international law every time you hear a U.S. official utter the phrase "all options are on the table" in regards to Iran as the U.N. charter strictly forbids the threat or use of force in international relations (as if anyone besides Noam Chomsky ever acknowledges this fact).
The truth is that Iran, capability or not, has never had motivation to attack the U.S.
or Israel. Any act of aggression on its part towards either well-armed power would certainly mean its almost-complete annihilation. One can see its motivation to enrich uranium, both to provide energy for the nation and to protect itself against its itchy neighbors. Iran has land borders with three countries to its west and east and the U.S. has repeatedly attacked all three of these militarily over the last decade. It's not a stretch to make the claim that Iran's threatening public posturing has actually helped to keep it safe from the fate of its neighbors. Now by agreeing not to enrich uranium above a certain purity, Iran is clearly showing a wish for peace.
Netanyahu, the P.W. Botha of Israel, is pissed of course. We're hearing the words "deception," "self-delusion," and "historic mistake" from him and his government, and as for the hope of a separate peace between Iran and Israel, the Jewish state's cabinet minister for intelligence says only that Israel won't attack Iran-- for the time being. The neo-cons there, and here, are warning that Rouhani is no Gorbachev, that he's a wolf in sheep's clothing, but weren't they also the ones that warned us against Gorbachev? These thuggish conspirators, always eager to promote the concept of permanent enemies, are the greatest enemies of peace on this earth.
The better Oscars
This winter, when the Oscars broadcast is royally sucking, come back here and watch these clips from the Academy's Governors Ball from this weekend. These are the lifetime awards that have been banished from the national telecast since 2009 so that we can watch a 10th anniversary dance salute to the film "Chicago."
Nobody gets played off by the orchestra...
Emma Thompson honors Angela Lansbury.
Robert Osborne introduces Lansbury.
Lansbury emotionally accepts her honorary Oscar.
Gena Rowlands honors Angelina Jolie.
George Lucas explains the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and introduces Jolie.
Jolie accepts the (rarely presented) Hersholt Award.
Magician Bill Taylor honors Steve Martin.
Martin Short honors Martin. (Marty Short has swallowed Hollywood whole.)
Tom Hanks honors Steve Martin.
Martin accepts his honorary Oscar.
American politics today: warts and more warts
Elizabeth Warren says she's not running for president, beginning the cycle again. Every four years, "liberal" Democrats refuse to run against establishment Democrats. It's one disappointment after another, a charade really to believe the prospect of competing candidates and ideas is even a possibility. The second major American political party of no ideas is about to go another election cycle without any debate. It's Hillary Clinton and nobody else.
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My fervent wish this early holiday season is for some industrious hacker to make public all of the private records of Supreme Court justices and Republicrat politicians that
prop up the NSA. To watch the ogres try to spin their hypocrisy would cause me to bliss out.
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Darth and Mrs. Vader came out today in favor of their daughter's homophobia against their other daughter. Liz Cheney campaigning publicly to strip all legal rights away from the marriage between her sister Mary and Mary's wife, and then
Mom and Dad defending Liz's bigotry is a level of crass political opportunism that could make a Clinton wince. Would you sell out your sister or your daughter for a Senate primary victory in Wyoming?
Americans to the rescue
The United States has put itself in a fine mess in regards to its blustering, ineffective, and ever-imperial foreign policy. Our collective view of ourselves—a failure to acknowledge our lost footing in global influence and respect—is widely distorted now for a very good reason: One is not capable of seeing things as they actually are if the facts of the case violate the basic mythology of one’s self. I witnessed this on the smallest scale this week. Not paying close attention, I noticed a headline flash during a local TV newscast in Des Moines on Wednesday. It was a story about doctors and aid workers from the U.S. going to the Philippines to assist in the hurricane relief. The headline on the screen was “Americans to the rescue.”
This is routinely how Americans flatter themselves—as the world’s savior, instead of, more accurately, an increasing source of sponsored crimes and atrocities. It’s incredibly silly. And dishonest. And increasingly dangerous.
Obviously, it’s great that these volunteers are traveling to the Philippines. If you think that’s my criticism, then you aren’t getting the point. Our nation’s focus now is on salvaging empire. If the shattered lives of the storm-ravaged Philippines are able to be improved in the coming months, it will have only a tiny bit more than jack shit to do with America.
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Two separate justice systems are exposed again. Corporate eavesdropping giant Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) spies on and harasses political activists and alleged victims of corporate crimes and there’s no punishment to be had. Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond exposes
their crimes and he gets sentenced this week to the maximum ten years incarceration. The judge in Hammond's case is married to a man whose private information was incidentally exposed as a result of the hacking, yet she refuses to recuse herself from the case and then levees the largest punishment against him that's allowed to her.
Thanks to Hammond’s leak though, we know that the Department of Homeland Security paid Stratfor to spy on members of Occupy Wall Street, Coca-Cola paid them to spy on PETA activists, and Dow Chemical used them to harass victims of the Bhopal gas leak in India, the world’s worst environmental disaster to date. Hammond enters the pantheon of civil liberty heroes, which is adding icons now almost by the month, and it would seem a good bet that we haven’t heard the last from him. With a brilliant, organized, principled whistle blower on the inside, the prison-for-profit industry may have just signed up for more than it bargained for.
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Quote of the day: Harry Belafonte, in 2008, as recaptured in print this week by the New Yorker. Then-Senator Obama, being lacerated by Belafonte publicly, pleaded with the man, "When are you going to cut me some slack?" Belafonte's response,
"What makes you think that's not what I've been doing?"
Remembrance Day
Upon this blessed 95th anniversary of one of the most extraordinary days in human history, the day of the signing of the armistice agreement that ended World War I in 1918, I feel incredibly grateful, personally, for every activist, living or dead—from one end of the globe to the other—that has ever worked for peace. That means those that have stood in sturdy defiance against militarism, anybody that ever marched, or picked up a picket sign, or contributed in any way to a public demonstration against war and violence, perhaps as extreme an action as standing in the path of a tank or before a thuggish reactionary mob.
In most corners of the world, including my country, working publicly for peace means leaving oneself uniquely vulnerable to establishment intimidation and to violent assault by paramilitary police organizations. So thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you. Freedom requires the repeated and relentless action and courage of engaged citizens.
Another tumor for football
The mindset of football players, at all levels of the game, endlessly perplexes me. I would be curious to see how different the reaction would have been to
this Miami Dolphins bullying story, among football insiders, if the perpetrator, Richie Incognito (left, above), had not been recorded bringing the racial element into it in a league whose roster of players is 80% African-American. If it was simply a case of rookie “hazing,” only incidents like the one in which Jonathan Martin’s offensive line mates, led by Incognito, got up as one from a lunch table when Martin sat down (classic move), I believe we’d be hearing a more full-throated defense of the veteran Incognito, as his actions supposedly represent generation after generation of "behind-closed-doors" team initiations.
Even as it stands, we’re hearing many coaches and players opine that Martin’s best course of action, rather than going public with the details and leaving the team, would have been to simply punch Incognito in the mouth, as if that behavior would have ever been tolerated by a head coach that chose Incognito specifically to serve on the team’s “leadership council.”
The entire idea behind hazing, as I've always understood it, is for the lesser-tenured member of the group to be forced to tolerate whatever anti-social bullshit (up to and including racial bigotry, evidently) gets thrown in his face.
Incognito, who supposedly has a sign over his locker that reads "Richie Incognito hates two things-- paying taxes and rookies," got himself busted this time because he called Martin a “half-nigger” on a voicemail message that went public, but it wasn't because of anything else he did, I promise you that. The slurs upon sexual orientation fly just fine with most current and former footballers. The theft (basically) or extortion of $15,000 from Martin for a trip by the offensive line to Las Vegas-- minus Martin-- might also be defended by most in the fraternity.
Incognito will now be punished for the type of miscreant behavior he was rewarded for up until and including last week. By consensus league accounting, Incognito “went too far,” but the dirty little secret in this is that it's Martin that will still have the tougher time finding a job in the NFL after this incident. Despite its best efforts at public relations, the existing culture of the league in regards to concepts beyond its limited sphere like “being a man,” "acting like a man,” and keeping all of the dirty business of the sport “in-house,” is still ass-backwards. If football is now the “national sport” of the United States, consider the tag to be a damning indictment of one institution or the other, or both.
The doddering dunce at the funeral for America
Secretary of State John Kerry
gets trashed on the web here by Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department. Evidently, Kerry’s staff spends a lot of time publicly promoting the amount of traveling the former senator does in his new position, much the same way that the office of a doofus Iowa senator promotes the representative traveling to “all 99 counties” in his state each year. If you are a person who is legitimately awed by this type of political achievement, you are also a person that is actively damaging the case for democratic government.
In only a few months at his post, Kerry’s been outflanked by the new Iranian president. He’s been roundly beaten by Vladimir Putin on the matter of Syria. Palestine remains an apartheid Israeli state, and the genocide of Iraqis continues undeterred, with an estimated 4% of the total 2002 population of Iraq now thought to be dead.
This week, Kerry heads to Poland for the latest stop on his celebrated 2013 NSA Apology Tour. Let’s watch and see what he does and says next-- and what the equally-bumbling White House then does to contradict him. It's all part of their Abbott and Costello-inspired routine of American foreign policy incoherence. Watching Kerry, of all people, try to play at diplomat for a country that all-but-officially abandoned diplomacy 12 years ago is a lesson in humility for the species. I'm sure glad none of this is my fault. I voted for Nader.
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A social action that could have a really positive impact in staving off the looming environmental catastrophe of our planet would be a group of high-profile scientists joining activists, workers, indigenous peoples, and anarchists on the front lines of the anti-capitalistic movement. These men and women of climate science basically need to ditch the lab coats and start getting arrested publicly to draw attention to the dangers of climate change, and as I think more about it, maybe they shouldn't even ditch the lab coats. That would look good.
It’s not enough to issue the warnings. The ones they do may be dire, but then I’m asking myself: if they are, why don’t the scientists do anything about it? This is just the way people think. What scientists say
and do carries a substantial amount of weight. Change in the planet’s temperature is the scientific challenge of our time, and the largest challenge facing the species. It shouldn't take much to convince these people to follow their conscience.
