hate breeds hate and conflict

"Many feel that sex slavery is particularly revolting—and it is. I saw it firsthand. In a Bucharest brothel, for instance, I was offered a mentally handicapped, suicidal girl in exchange for a used car. But for every one woman or child enslaved in commercial sex, there are at least 15 men, women, and children enslaved in other fields, such as domestic work or agricultural labor"
-http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story…

This article is horribly disturbing. It talks about modern day slavery - there are more slaves currently than at any other moment in human history. And not just because the global population is much higher. We need to do something. I'm not sure what yet, but I'm plagued by all of these things I'm seeing and hearing. How can I live and travel freely and at peace when I know that I have resources and privileges that others don't have and never will have.

I took a class called international law and human rights last semester. I'm not sure what I want to do with the rest of my life, but I know that I want to help people. I really do want to make a difference. I want to travel places and see what conditions are really like for people around the world. Awareness is a good thing, but I feel like there is already a lot of awareness in the public. A lot of awareness maybe, but also a lot of ignorance. Everyone knows about the starving children in Africa, everyone knows about the underpaid workers who make our products. But no one seems to care. Or they care, but they economically feel like they have no options. And government intervention does not seem to be helping much anyway. What is one to do? I guess that is the big question of our time. There are so many problems and issues, it seems impossible to do anything to make a difference.

I suppose that the major things I can do right now are simple. I can read, listen, pay attention and think. I can educate myself as much as possible now, while I'm still a student at a university, about social conditions around the world, and even in my neighborhood. And I can start from home. I can volunteer my time at a homeless shelter, I can tutor poor children, I can work at various community outreach centers. All these things I would love to do. I'm researching these things now.

Change must happen at home, in our own communities. I'm an advocate for sustainable agriculture and economics. I'm far from being an expert, but I'm totally willing to learn and educate myself, and I would love to work/volunteer at a local community garden, etc. But I do want to do more, eventually. I'm looking for organizations that really do make a difference. Not necessarily a major difference, we're so far away, we're going to need to take small steps. Even if I only manage to rescue one person from slavery, or stop one child from starving to death, it would totally be worth it.

There is so much I want to do, but I feel like my hands are tied. I hate this, and I would give my possessions, time and talents to worthy causes that are making positive changes in my community and the world. Everything just seems so complicated sometimes.

Talking about politics, or rather trying to educate someone politically, especially Americans is mind numbingly difficult if not altogether impossible.  In large part because we live in the only society in history to ever have an empire that the majority of the populace doesn't know about.

The reason is simple enough, every other empire in history has had to use military force to expand their realm of influence.  Which we certainly do, but our first resort is to share crop whole nations through the IMF, giving them loans to build infrastructure that are set up in a way that they can never be repaid.  Then we go to collect the debt from these nations, and of course since they can't actually pay off the debt, we tell they have to vote with us on a piece of legislation, or support our war efforts elsewhere, or more often than not we force them to privatize their natural resources such as oil or electricity and hand them over to American companies.

We secure their obedience and natural resources without having to fire a single shot.  Now if the leader of one of these countries doesn't go along with this, we simply either overthrow their government through clandestine means, such as we did with Iran in the 50's, or attempted to do in Venezuela more recently.  Or if that fails we simply assassinate the leader in question, often in a plane crash.

Iraq is a perfect example of this.  First we tried to overthrow their government.  When that didn't work we had a CIA asset by the name of Saddam Hussein attempt to assassinate the then leader.  That also failed, but we were able to simply place Saddam in power through other means. 

Saddam is a strong man, which we like, but he wasn't cooperating with our agenda.  However being familiar with the methods we used, he was able to prevent both overthrow and assassination by using methods such as body doubles.  So we sent the military in as a warning in the early 90's to garner his obedience.  Even that didn't work, and eventually we had to go in full force and take him out.  We actually wanted to find him, unlike Osama, so of course we did.

Our nation is a profit driven imperial machine.  Industry, defense contractors, the military, and corporate greed drive our foreign policy.  Not the will of the people.  This is why we didn't get to vote on the war.  This is why even though the majority of people oppose it we're still there.  This is why candidates who oppose war are vilified and ridiculed, and how we always end up with a choice between two imperialists.  Because the corporate forces which dictate our foreign policy are the same corporate influences that fund our politicians, which are the same as the corporate sponsors which support our mainstream media. 

When a news corporation supports itself with advertising revenue, it is the companies that buy those ads who are their customers, not you.  You are the product being sold to these companies.  Distracted by pop sensationalism and meaningless flashy rhetoric so they can sell you diet coke. 

But these are just meaningless words to the masses who not only have no idea what's going on in our own country, they certainly have no awareness of our foreign policy, and almost never any kind of historical perspective.  Their vision of politics and the world is comprised of $500 haircuts, prostitution scandals, blow jobs, and Britney Spears children.

So they don't know anything, but unfortunately still feel entitled to their opinions.  Opinions which are comprised entirely of speculation and propaganda.  They don't listen, nor do they try to learn these things for themselves.  They simply reflexively oppose anything that doesn't fit into their narrow world view.

Some people can't grasp the complexity of the corrupt system as it exists today, and so they turn to shadowy organizations, jews, or aliens controlling things from behind the scenes.  They do so because it's simple and easy to understand.  The same reason that people who don't know anything use straw man arguments about secret puppetmasters and JOOZ to dismiss ideas and information that are too complex for them to grasp.

I guess if I had to summarize my point it would be to say that it's impossible to educate someone unless they already have at least some base of knowledge to put things in context, which of course they often don't.  The problem is not that people need to be educated by others, but that people need to educate themselves.  Something they are woefully unwilling or unable to do.

It's very depressing to want to discuss these subjects intelligently only to find that the only subjects people have enough awareness of to discuss is whether Obama is a secret muslim, or how many houses McCain has, while they almost never have any awareness of their actual views, which differ very little. 

The problem with proles is that you can't get them to ever be anything more, because they don't know they are proles, or even what a prole is.  And why should they care?  They work, fuck, breed, die, and watch some football in between.  They are nothing more than batteries for the machine.  I believe they have the capacity to be real people, but that most of them never will be.

So rejoice over your glorious new leader.  Embrace the change and hope that will surely come.  In the end nothing of significance will change, but if ignorance is bliss, then happiness is one natural resource America will never run out of.

So I had a chance to have a political discussion with a couple of educated and well informed individuals over the last few days, something which I was really looking forward to since people generally can't hold a discussion outside of whether or not they think Palin's daughter secretly had a kid.

After getting into a heavy discussion primarily with the male, what I discovered, rather than the intellectual comparison of ideas I had hoped for, was the same arguments offered by every half wit redneck that ever ventures to oppose something I say, but wrapped in prettier language.

First, on the subject of Libertarianism, which neither could define other than that they had this idea that it was no government anywhere, which is already known as Anarchy.  I attempted to explain to them what my ideal form of government would be, which is socialist libertarianism, and also that to be fair, that there was no clear definition of Libertarianism.  There are some basic tenets, but as to how a Libertarian government should be composed, there are a wide range of opinions ranging from as little government as possible on any level, to a government which has socialized programs such as health care and welfare, but which are administered on a state level.

Not that I ever got to that point, as upon trying to explain the varying definitions and understandings of Libertarianism, I was told that I didn't get to define what Libertarianism was.  Which I wasn't, I was just trying to explain the brand of Libertarianism I espouse, but that didn't matter.  Their argument, which had nothing to do with the subject at hand, was that I was trying to define Libertarianism for everyone, and anything I actually tried to explain was disregarded.

The other argument was that Libertarianism as a form of government is unworkable because Libertarians were mostly white kids.  I'm not sure how that works exactly, but somehow the fact that it's mostly white males that go out to campaign for libertarianism and against the war,  who despite trying to make a difference for something they cared about, were simply being foolish.  Apparently because they had never been pulled over for being brown they didn't have the right to protest the administration or the war. 

The other argument against libertarianism was that apparently it's responsible for slavery.  Libertarians support smaller federal government, the federal government was responsible for abolishing slavery, and therefore all Libertarians are racists who just want to own slaves.  I wonder how they would feel on that issue if the south had won the civil war and slavery had become a federal mandate.  Not to mention that Libertarianism doesn't have anything to do with slavery, but that's no reason you can't make a false correlation then argue against it. 

Again, at no point did they display any understanding of what libertarianism was, nor did they feel they had to, since clearly all libertarians were racist uneducated white kids who didn't appreciate the stability our imperialism offers in that we can eat better out of a garbage can here than people eat in Somalia.  I kid you not, that argument was actually proffered.  Apparently as long as we can eat Big Macs out of the garbage, war, wiretapping, imperialism, reduction of civil liberties, and torture are all ok.

The final arguments, if you can call them that since they were never arguments against anything I was actually proposing.  Instead they were either straw man arguments, or arguments based on what kind of people supposedly shared those beliefs, or rather, what kind of people they decided shared those beliefs based on some stereotype they created.  That is much easier after all than trying to understand or listen to the ideas they're proposing.  Why listen when you can label and dismiss.

Anyway, the final argument seemed to be that thinking that you in any way could imagine a better form of government.  That any individual could suggest an area where clearly we are doing something wrong and suggest an improvement was just them being a hopeless idealist and elitist.  This for example was applied to the idea of libertarianism as a form of government, or Anarchy, which is what they decided was my belief because it was easier to argue against and faster than actually listening to me describe my belief.  The suggestion was that I believed that we should have a libertarian government, and immediately there would be no such thing as the FAA, and we would start rounding up brown people and putting them into cages.

Now, as far as my idealism goes, what I actually believe is that even if we somehow got a libertarian candidate into the presidency, they would be able to accomplish absolutely nothing.  What is clear is that we need to reduce the power and scope of the federal government, and in addition we need some sort of counter influence to our two corporatist parties who both support greater federal powers, which essentially translates to greater power for their corporate influences and supporters.  That's why I voted for Ron Paul in the primaries, not because I thought he would change our entire form of government, but because he would have at least been an opposing voice, and spoken truth to power and the need for less federal control over our lives.

Clearly any kind of realist knows that government is never an ideal representation of it's basic principles, and that it will always be a struggle between opposing forces such as the struggle between populism and corporatism, between more taxes and less, those who think we should have more socialized programs, and those who think we should have less.  The problem now is that we don't have that opposition, we have varying degrees of corporate support with very little representation of the people themselves on any level.  The solution is to set up some kind of actual opposition party to keep this corporatism in check.  Getting a Libertarian party in power would not result in a libertarian state, it would simply serve to help balance the currently existing fascist one.

Personally, I think the idea that you can just vote for Obama and hope that changes things is hopelessly naive and idealistic, but as he put it, Cynthia Mckinney has crazy eyes, and Nader is obviously crazy too.  Clearly he had spent a lot of time comparing and weighing the value of their policy ideas. 

So altogether wholly disappointing, stupid, and no different from arguing with anyone else who has no real understanding of the issues.  Me suggesting any kind of change that would benefit people as a whole was me being an elitist.  Which is actually a Neo Liberal argument that comes from the same people who redefined fascism, a form of government where the federal government doesn't regulate corporate power, but does support it, as the free market.  Anyone who is famliar with the principles of the free market knows that what they are prescribing is nothing like the free market. 

This happened in the early 1900's when corporate and banking interests created arguments which switched populism and corporatism by arguing that populists were just elitists who thought they knew better than everyone else what they needed, and that corporations were the true populists, because they offered the public so many democratic choices and therefore more freedom.  That is you have a much freer democracy from corporations than voting because you can choose whether to buy pepsi or coke, cheddar cheese or monterey jack, Reebok or Nike shoes on a daily basis.

But the overriding argument was that there was no need to argue any of my ideas or present their own because what did I know anyway.  No one should have opinions because that makes them an elitist, and we should in general just accept the way they are, regardless of how bad they get, because proposing anything different is simply the individual being an elitist and trying to impose their beliefs on others.  Again, a perfect example of neo liberalist thought.

A great deal of time would have been saved had they simply presented their arguments in entirety right up front.  Namely, "What do you know?", and "This is Amurca, if you don't like it, move."  Hyuk Hyuk Hyuk.  Whether it comes from a flannel jacket, or a tweed, it doesn't sound any less ignorant to me.

My question is, if you dismiss any opinion which differs from your own, not based on the merits of the ideas themselves, but because anyone who presents ideas is immediately labeled an elitist, then who's really being the elitist?

For almost a year I have been going on about the likelihood if not inevitability of a depression.  Now, as banks continue to collapse, I'm actually beginning to hear financial analysts use the D word in the context of what's happening now. 

This seemed so obvious and inevitable if you know anything about how our economy works, but sadly most people don't, and if a bald guy and a hot chick tell them every thing's O.K. on MSNBC, well that's what they'll believe.  The majority of the population is incapable of critical or independent thought in any area, and simply choose to trust the word generally of whoever feeds them the most comforting bullshit.

Besides the joy of a depression, there are far worse consequences that could arise from such an economic crash, not least of which it would give the administration the legal right to declare martial law.  This is known as the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive and can be found on the White House website here http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/rel….

Of course, just because the conditions now exist to allow our already practically non existent Democracy to be suspended is no reason to worry I'm sure.  Nor should you worry that Halliburton just received a government contract to build internment camps in the U.S., you know, just in case.  Certainly you shouldn't worry that an army unit which has been in Iraq for 35 of the last 36 months is being deployed to the United States for domestic operations. 

No one knows for sure where this will all end up, but we should be able to all agree that  internment camps, depression, and battle hardened troops being used as a civilian police force probably isn't a great confluence of events. 

There are a lot of arguments debunking 9/11 truth.  What these arguments share, from the childishly insistent and poorly informed to the highly respected popular publications and official studies is their tendency to provide a theoretically possible alternative for the collapse, then present that as truth.  Since the approach from an official standpoint was never to find the most likely explanation, but rather an explanation which supported the already presented official version of events, there is nothing resembling the scientific process at work here.  Instead of looking at the evidence at hand and determining the most likely cause, they find possible causes, no matter how implausible.  Once a possibility has been suggested, it is accepted as truth, despite being simply a theory, and not having supporting evidence.

Nothing one could say is going to make fire melt steel, or change the fact that even if you come up with complex arguments for what COULD have happened, that doesn't mean that it DID happen.  The only way you can find what did happen is to look at the evidence with no preconceived result and determine the most likely cause.  Additionally, if someone really wanted to scientifically prove that planes knocked down the towers, they would have to establish that as a hypothesis, then do everything to disprove it, which of course is the opposite of the approach actually taken.

Furthermore, these complex, conflicting, often irrational accounts of what could have happened to cause the towers to collapse alway fail to take building 7 into account.  Jet fuel can't melt steel, but if you want to frame an argument wherein a complex combination of factors including impact of the plane, abundance of jet fuel, and temperature variances create a theoretically possible collapse of the nature we witnessed you can.  It doesn't change the fact that there's no actual evidence this happened, and that coming up with a possible scenario does not make it reality, but you can certainly come up with some semi reasonable and often overly creative alternatives describing  what occurred that day.

While you could explain it any number of ways, including far out theories about alien microwaves from space, when you apply Occam's razor to the available explanations while carefully considering the evidence, I believe it will always be controlled demolition that is the most likely answer.  When you remove whatever bias and predisposition towards a particular outcome you have, the explanation which most closely resembles the events is the controlled demolition theory.  No other explanation begins to adequately explain how 3 buildings, one of which suffered NO plane crash, had NO jet fuel fires, and lost none of it's fire coating could have collapsed in such a uniform manner.  (There's no evidence that the twin towers lost any fire coating either, but the theoretical possibility that the plane could have knocked all the asbestos off the steel infrastructure, which was determined by blasting a foot wide piece of asbestos from 2 feet away with a shotgun,  has become accepted as truth)

All the theories in the world about planes knocking off asbestos, magic traveling jet fuel, temperature variances causing accelerated weakening of the steel, or exothermic reactions causing increases of temperature in access of 1000 degrees Celsius will not change the fact that none of this happened to Building 7.  Building 7 suffered no impact from a plane, contained no magic jet fuel, did not lose it's fire coating, had isolated fires on one side of the building on floors 7, 11, and 12, and even had the fire raged throughout, it again, would not have been even remotely sufficiently hot to melt or even weaken steel. 

Nonetheless however, building 7, which has none of the theoretical factors used as "proof" that the twin towers fell as a natural consequence of the damage they suffered, did fall, and collapsed straight into its own footprint.  The only argument for how this happened is that the collapse was a result of fire, despite Larry Silverstein saying the building was pulled, and more importantly despite the VERY important and often completely ignored fact that normal fire can't melt steel.  All of the arguments used to make this seem plausible for the twin towers do not apply to Building 7.

Which is why, you will almost certainly never hear anyone trying to make you believe this was the work of evil brown men from the desert bring it up. 

Even they can only suspend disbelief so much.

Getting a professional to say something which disputes the information at hand is fairly easy, after all, doctors used to think smoking was not only not bad, but was actually good for you.

As a result, there's a variety of professionals of all fields on both sides of the 9/11 issue offering contradictory arguments and explanations for what happened, which is why it's a difficult issue to deal with for those who take the time.

There are certain things that can't be refuted however.  Some are applications of Occam's razor, critical thinking in general, or simply rational questions for which there is no clear answer.  For example, if a plane really did hit the pentagon, why wouldn't the pentagon simply release that video footage and remove all doubt, quash all the dissent that's occurring still as a result,  rather than just the eleven frames they have released, which only serve to arouse more suspicion as they don't clearly show a plane at all.

Then there's basic physics, such as how can a building collapse so quickly that it's almost free fall speed?  This means that if you dropped a brick from the top of the tower, with absolutely nothing but air resistance slowing it down, it would hit the ground just a little quicker than it took for the top of the tower to hit the ground when it collapsed.

So how is it that 80 plus floors of steel and concrete offered about as much physical resistance to the top part of the building as air would have?  Not to mention falling objects follow the path of least resistance, whereas in this case the falling object in question, rather than being deflected or toppling over as physics would suggest, plowed down through the path of GREATEST resistance.

Plus historically, it's never happened.  No building has ever collapsed in it's own basement from natural causes.  Ever.  Not from planes, not from fire, not from ANYTHING other than controlled explosives.  You can easily prove that it looks LIKE controlled demolition, because we have video of buildings being demolished, but you can't show what a building collapsing into it's own basement from stress or shock looks like, because it's simply never happened.

That day it happened 3 times, the third building which collapsed being WTC 7, or building 7.  So whatever else was the case, to believe the official story is to believe that an isolated fire on 2 to 3 floors of building 7, which was not hit by a jet, and which did not have jet fuel burning within,  suddenly caused the entire 47 story reinforced steel structure to collapse like a house of cards.  You can witness the collapse here http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHA….

The kicker is though, that fire can't burn hot enough to melt steel.  Jet fuel can't burn that hot either, but they argue that it was essentially the heat from jet fuel combined with stress from impact that caused the steel to sufficiently weaken.  There's no proof, but it sound's plausible and that's all they need. 

The "science" in this case is not an attempt to eliminate the impossible and through rigorous testing rule out various possibilities until the theory that can't be dis-proved  becomes reality.  Instead it is a kind of anti science, where they already have a conclusion, and are simply trying to formulate a plausible explanation.

Nothing will change the fact that a regular fire under no circumstances can cause structural steel to melt, so there's no way a fire in building 7 on a couple of floors caused the whole thing to collapse so quickly and in such a controlled fashion, or in fact at all.  Even had the fire burned for days, it should have left an empty steel shell, which you can witness in videos of other steel structures which have had fires burning in them for hours and sometimes days. 

If you want an idea how much damage a modern steel structure can take without collapsing, why not simply look at some of the other WTC buildings which caught fire or sustained heavy damage and didn't collapse. 

Such as
<a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/…" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/…" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>

And
<a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/…" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/…" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>

The anniversary of 9/11 is coming up, so I'll be taking this time to present some arguments with links in dispute of the rather flimsily constructed official story. 

I know this is going to prompt some people to argue, and as in the past I expect to see many of the same arguments again.  So I'm going to take some time to address them in advance before I begin. 

First, don't try to use the argument that suggesting 9/11 was somehow planned is disrespectful to friends and family members of the victims.  The movement was started by friends and family members of the event who found that their questions weren't being answered, and if not for them we would not have even received a show trial.

If you're interested in learning more about that specifically, there's a documentary about the Jersey widows and their attempts to get a trial, which took more than a year.  The movie is called 9/11 Press for Truth and and can be found on google video.

If you are going to accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, at least know what it means.  The words are not inextricably linked, though one would think so.  A conspiracy is quite simply a crime committed and kept secret by more than one person.  Misleading the American people to think Saddam had WMD's with false evidence was a conspiracy.  Secret prisons and torture were a conspiracy.  In a very real sense, government itself is a conspiracy. 

A theory is defined as, "a testable model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise verified through empirical observation." 

So quite simply, a conspiracy theory is an attempt to use empirical observation to determine whether a crime has been committed by people in positions of power.  It is not an argument which in any way disputes the information I will be presenting.

And finally, don't call me a tin foil hat unless you know the origin of the phrase.  It was originally a reference to protesters who wore tin foil hats to protest the development of microwave weapons.  Which we were developing, and have since released such as in the case of the heat ray developed by the pentagon, seen here http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-….

So unless your argument is that I'm either a) right or b) prescient, calling me a tin foil hat doesn't prove anything for your case.

If you do have an argument, which I would be more than happy to address as I am familiar with the NIST, Commission report, and the Popular Mechanics articles on the subject, keep in mind that these 3 reports are in conflict with each other, and each offers a different explanation for events.  It goes to follow therefore that if one theory is legitimate, the other two must be false.

Finally, I'm not trying to tell anyone what or how to think, I'm simply trying to tell people TO think.  Don't take my word for anything, just take the time to look into it for yourself. 

I know that everybody likes to keep up on the newest terminology, the hip new slang, um...yo.  So I thought it would interest you to know that people no longer "plan to protest", instead, and I think you'll agree this is much cooler, they are engaged in a "Conspiracy to riot in the furtherance of Terrorism".

People generally thought the argument that these terrorism laws and labels would eventually be applied to us was absurd.  That it was the slippery slope argument of alarmists.  And yet there it is.  The people who are being charged with this did nothing more than to help coordinate the already existing protests at the RNC so they could work together more effectively.  These charges can bring them up to seven and half years in prison.

Apparently, while there's nothing morally wrong with killing and torturing hundreds of thousands of people, it is morally wrong to suggest it is.  These are the same protests where Amy Goodman and two other reporters from Democracy Now, along with several others, were arrested and released the next day.  The charges against Amy Goodman of obstructing the police for asking them to release her journalists, who clearly had press passes and every right to be there have not been dropped, and so far they seem to have every intention of taking it to trial.

And why not?  Her "reporting" was in fact obstructing the the police's ability to crack down on the public.  If people keep filming these things and telling the public about them, it interferes with the cops abilities to preemptively raid houses of "potential" protesters and hold their children at gunpoint.    What's the point of being a cop after all if you can't terrorize the public.  How else are they supposed to get revenge for 4 years of being called "shit stain" in high school?

Since being accused of terrorism can cause you to lose many of your imagined rights, including your right to a phone call and habeas corpus, this means of course that no one is safe anymore from being shipped off to Guantanamo to have clamps put on their nuts.  Not that they were really safe from it before, but hopefully this will strip away a little more of the illusion. 

TORTURE FUN FACT!  The manual we use to train our "enhanced interrogators" is the very same one used by the Chinese to torture prisoners.  Of course, not understanding semantics as we do, they foolishly called it a torture manual.  Also, the point of torture was never to garner intelligence, but instead to illicit false confessions.

But, no worries, as long as you've never said anything that could be considered negative of the government on the phone or over the internet you're safe.  Probably.

This is America after all.