This Blog is created to stress the importance of Peace as an environmental directive. “I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” – Harry Truman
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McEntire in her S&M video is advocating radio listening. This song and video came out at the same time there was a compaign on Right Wing Radio called, "I heart radio." The 'heart' is a visible heart symbol.
I suppose promoting radio is a way of increasing 'product distribution' but it is really odd a Country singer as popular as McEntire actually uses herself as a commercial for the industry. I think Reba wades into political activism more than anyone wants to talk about.
I haven't heard anything about Reba being a guest on Limbaugh.
The "Gingrick Food Stamp" gaffe is based in a Right Wing cultural attack. It is amazing how far the "County Community" (Reba McEntire) will go to back up their 'idea of political fun.'
The USA has suffered the worst economic recession in recent history due to the policies of the Republican administration of Bush and the info-tainment industry actually ridicule Americans that are receiving food stamps.
The drama that plays out pn "Reba" actually portrays Americans as lazy and enjoying 'government dependancy.' Not only that but the food stamps are viewed as a 'pay off' for the people. "Reba" continues past this segment to make the statement that employment is just waiting for those too lazy to look for it.
The entire show was amazing to realize how it aimed (displaced an entire 'class') anger directly at a group of Americans of a growing poverty level due to Wall Street abuses and abandonment. Maybe as Iraq is becoming the next China or India all the impoverished Americans need to emigrate.
Food stamps have become a populous political expression for the lazy in the USA. It is bigger than Gingrick's statements. There was a reason for the applause and it stems from the 'populous' expression of anger. It relates to the deficit and debt. See, the national debt would disappear if it weren't for the lazy poor in the country.
Maybe the Repubicans are simply trying to cover up the fact their welfare reform under Gingrick has resulted in the unemployed under Bush.
Despite rains that have visited Texas in recent weeks, the drought is profound.
In the satellite picture below it is noted to have a heat transfer system extending from Mexico to the eastern third of the country.
There is an 'interruption' in the image over the extremely dry southern tip of Texas. That is not simply 'the weather' is a result of 'the drought.'
January 17, 2012
1730 z
UNISYS Infrared Satellite Image of the continental USA
The land in Texas is so parched it does not lend itself to rainfall.
When the weather system passes over poorly conditioned land the air heats up and absorbs the heat. As a result the 'water vapor' contained in the weather system is evaporated.
The reason Texas is remaining unrecoverable from the drought is because it has created its own hostile climate outcome.
One of the remarkable climate on the West Coast is contained in the Redwood Forest. There is not necessarily rain in the region in general, but, every morning when the ocean mist rests over the Redwoods it accumulates a humidity within the trees themselves due to the trees use of water for growth and nutrition. As the day progresses and the trees 'respirate' they provide high humidity to the own climate. Literally, the Redwood Forest maintains its own climate due to its storage and use of water vapor.
The same is true in Montain Forests or Cloud Forests. They create and maintain their own climate through their use of water vapor.
In the case of Texas the drought has created a very dry climate for the region. That dry climate simply reinforces itself due to lack of 'climate systems' that provide their own climate and the surrounding region.
Those two images are a full one week apart, yet it is profoundly simple to realize why they are so strongly related.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, (click title to entry - thank you) a multimillionaire and the wealthiest GOP presidential candidate, disclosed that he would never release his income tax returns if he wins the party’s nomination. He’s setting himself apart from past nominees in both political parties who have routinely done so.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that, “Romney whose recent disclosure in august estimated his personal wealth as much as $250 million, said Dec. 22 he had already released extensive financial information and had no ‘current plans’ to make his current tax returns public.”…
This is the most hideous accident I have ever witnessed. The crew was completely incompetent in conducting the safety of passengers. Their only defense is the bizarre content of the disaster.
If divers cannot find those missing there is a chance it is a dangerous situation to explore. The divers need to assess the prospects of retrieving any people still within the hull of the ship. The reality may be, those still missing are not within reach in the current position of the ship.
I am not familiar with the tides and underwater environment including stability of the soils, but, there is the possibility the ship could drift further offshore with arrival of rough weather, etc.
The shipline should be held responsible in the most profound manner for this disaster. Besides the missing and traumatized there will be a environmental disaster accompanying it. I can't believe commercial interests of 'seeking cheap thrills for passengers' actually took priority over every other operational priority. Amazing. Competition is that tough, huh? If competition is that tough then it isn't profitable to leave port at all.
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
...After (click title to entry - thank you) winning the Heavyweight Championship of the World, Cassius Clay announced his conversion to the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) under Elijah Muhammad. From that point forward, Mohammed Ali used his world celebrity to tell America of the plight African Americans had suffered. He was articulate and possessed an excellent speaking voice. And so, at the height of the conflict for Civil Rights, it was decided the best way to silence and punish Ali for his outspoken remarks was to draft him into the service....
Real conservatives. Hmmm... Sort of like 'the orthodoxy,' right? The unshakable. The 'proud to be a slave owner' history. Those 'real' conservatives?
...Real conservatives (click title to entry - thank you) do not go peeking under mattresses to try and flush out people who are not politically correct. That's what liberals do, like this guy in the Nation magazine who finds racism in ever utterance by a Republican.
In fact, the writings this bozo cited were all work I did for a newsletter that existed for the very purpose of puncturing pretensions of political correctness. It was called Heterodoxy and it was published by David Horowitz and Peter Collier.
As the name implies, the whole and entire purpose of Heterodoxy was to challenge the reigning orthodoxy embraced by the liberals who mostly control the mass media....
...Neither is the point to show how Republicans leverage racial anxiety for electoral effect. According to the Agriculture Department, more whites use food stamps than blacks and Latinos combined. By coloring poverty and food insecurity black, even in areas where few black people exist, Republicans hope to spin food stamps as a racial entitlement program, diverting attention from their attempts to balance the budget on the stomachs of the poor. Republicans want to slash spending on food stamps by around 20 percent and in June voted to cut the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program, which provides assistance to poor pregnant women, mothers and children, by 10 percent. All of this is important. But efforts to encourage whites to identify with their race rather than their class, as though the two could be separated and then ranked, is an age-old ploy perfected first by Southern Democrats....
Middle school students in Coeur d'Alene are viewing film footage of their own community this morning, as part of a classroom lesson on racism. The Idaho Public Television special, “The Color of Conscience,” is being shown to Lakes Magnet Middle School students. Following the showing of the film, students in all the school's advisory classes will participate in teacher-led followup discussions on racism. Produced by Idaho Public Television host, Marcia Franklin, “The Color of Conscience” first aired in May....
No one can deny there is a huge problem with the rates of incarceration of African Americans. How often is a drug economy all to available to young black people that believe their reality lies in being hated and deprived of their birth right in the USA?
A young man of any race does not want to know his future is refused. Americans are promised there is a better future 'for the trying.' There is something profoundly wrong within our minority communities and it lies upon a path of economic reality with hopelessness and greed at its heart. Greed is taught in the USA. It is not taught in schools and religious meetings, but, it is taught in the commercialized world of the American consumer. It is benign to most adults able to achieve a Middle Class lifestyle, but, when a child's realtiy is one of a 'dead end,' no doubt their lives become that prophesy.
Michelle, at the very least, is trying to engage the conversation. She does this with murders still occuring and incarcerations of African Americans occurring in disproportion. I applaud her engagement of the problem. It needs to continue to resolve.
...If news reports (click title to entry - thank you) from the last three decades should check clean, Black and Brown males only number the Criminal Justice System today because they choose, of own free will, to turn the ways of crime and disorder; perhaps also because they seem to come from stock inherently deformed and defiled—unable to adapt to a civilized world where barbarism is unacceptable.
And if the renowned rants of Black butlers on the Right should be treasured, Black males only find their human rights violated constantly, only find their dignities criminalized, only fall in the crosshairs of this very real War on Drugs, because they’ve discarded phonetics, filled their iPods with N.W.A. records, altogether accepted academic success as a White Thing, and preferred to sag their khaki pants three inches below waist level....
Old city of Nablus, a Palestinian city in the northern West Bank and Mount Gerizim in background.
"From MLK to Nablus: Fighting Institutionalized Racism and Ongoing Discrimination" (click title to entry - thank you)
...While blatant discrimination remains illegal in the United States, American society still struggles with issues of more hidden discrimination. Education is at the heart of this debate. The fight to ensure equal access to a quality education for all American children, regardless of race, rages onwards. Poverty and the low quality of education available to minority groups are inextricably linked....
...Similar to the way that racial discrimination manifests itself in the American educational system, discrimination also plagues Palestinian refugees, both within the West Bank and in other host countries....
Posted on by claretyo
Tomorrow’s celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day offers us a unique opportunity to reflect on the significance of the Civil Rights Movement, the current situation of race relations in the United States, and some of the parallels that can be drawn between discrimination in the United States and Palestine....
"Racism" is a word kicked around a lot, (click title to entry - thank you) that has expanded to mean just about anything that supports the preservation of a cultural identity at the exclusion of homogenizing it with another, some cultures more susceptible to branding than others. And everything demonized as "racist" has become synonymous with extreme evil, nazis, KKK, etc, which are totally inaccurate associations for the vast part. But at its very essence; at its very core, what most of Western society has now deemed "racist", is really just an extended instinct of self-preservation. Does not the self-preservation instinct extend beyond the proper functioning of ones own physical body into more abstract things like culture and society, making it only natural for a people to want to maintain their unique cultural identity as an extension of themselves?...
...The instinct to continue the culture in which you are part of is NOT synonymous with hate, is NOT mutually inclusive with lusting for the genocide of other cultures, and is NOT a wicked, vile thing that must be bred and brainwashed out of humanity as TPTB are, IMO, actively attempting, especially through the education system with younger people (see California for prime examples in principle). By creating a cultureless people with no history and no identity (or only an identity defined solely by TPTB), humanity is easily divided and broken in spirit. Peoples derive great power from their cultures; a cultureless people are easily fractured and conquered. Culture invisibly binds a people together, and allows them to be part of something greater than themselves; individuals, yet still part of the whole. Both culture and individual are contained within each other.... The Killing Fields of Post-Apartheid South Africa (click here)
JOHANNESBURG WORLD’S TOP MURDER CAPITOL
AUGUST 30, 2001 — The city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands — with 5,6 murders per 100,000 population — has been declared the “murder capitol of Europe”, it was reported here today. Johannesburg, with 61.2 murders per 100,00 population in the year 2000, remains the world’s murder city for the fourth year running, however.
What is astounding about the Santorum/Gingrick 'thing' is that it didn't matter. The racial 'fact sheet' didn't matter. Santorum tied for Iowa and Gingrick is expecting to place well in South Carolina. Are the principles of hate so entrenched in the Republican Party that it is impossible for them to find abhorrence is not possible?
Racism? There’s An App For That (click title to entry - thank you)
by Daryl Gale, The Philadelphia Tribune
...Last week’s victims of foot-in-mouth disease, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, are perfect examples. When Santorum said he wouldn’t help Black people by giving them other people’s money; and when Newt opined that he’d give Blacks janitorial jobs instead of food stamps — you know, so “those people” can learn some sort of work ethic — they were slapped around by everyone from the NAACP to members of their own party.
Both were hauled in front of the cameras and forced to backtrack, explain, and further clarify their idiotic statements until they were blue in the face, and I loved every minute of it. When you say stupid, racist things simply to pander to stupid, racist voters you should be called on it....
The USA has a very low test for tolerance of difference. Simply because religious dogma indicates racism is permitted does not mean it is tolerated by the greater society.
....Again, (click title to entry - thank you) there seem to be an awful lot of parallels between Mormonism and Christianity. Then I researched the racist angle. Before 1978, Blacks weren't non-existent but pretty scarce in the Mormon faith for their doctrines did teach that Black men could not be ordained into positions of power like the priesthood. Today, there is a reported 500,000 members of African descent in the Mormon Church throughout North and South America, namely in the Genesis Group, a group that existed before the 1978 ban was lifted....
Is anger inappropriate when confronting the topic of intolerance, bigotry or racism. Absolutely not. Sometimes it takes a sincere expression of disgust to shake loose the social 'mind think.' Racism is powerful and lives are effected. When lives are affected for no justifible reason, anger would be more than the emotion when reality is realized and the truth revealed.
One of the very common reasons for racism to arise is the need for a "scapegoat". If things are going badly many people’s natural reaction is to blame somebody else. This is exactly what often causes racism, if the unemployment is rising or the national economy is very weak, many people will look for a scapegoat to blame, and in most cases they will choose the people that they do not know, such as those with a different ethnical or cultural background.
The permissiveness of racism taints the image of the USA to allies. There is simply no excuse.
The Many forms of Racism (click title to entry - thank you)
By FLORO L. MERCENE
January 15, 2012, 10:43pm
MANILA, Philippines — Despite the thin veneer of civilized behavior, racism still exists in America in many forms today.
Here’s an example of an article appearing on the Internet.
“Many people in the US continue to have some prejudices against other races. In the view of the US Human rights Network, discrimination permeates all aspects of life in the United States, and extends to all communities of color.
“Discrimination against African Americans, Latin Americans, and Muslims is widely acknowledged. Members of every major American ethnic minority have perceived racism in their dealings with other minority groups,” according to a study entitled Racism in America....
...An internationally recognized expert (click here) on the subject who received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work, Zeskind ties together seemingly disparate strands—from neo-Nazi skinheads, to Holocaust deniers, to Christian Identity churches, to David Duke, to the militia and beyond. Among these elements, two political strategies—mainstreaming and vanguardism—vie for dominance. Mainstreamers believe that a majority of white Christians will eventually support their cause. Vanguardists build small organizations made up of a highly dedicated cadre and plan a naked seizure of power. Zeskind shows how these factions have evolved into a normative social movement that looks like a demographic slice of white America, mostly blue-collar and working middle class, with lawyers and Ph.D.s among its leaders.
When the Cold War ended, traditional conservatives helped birth a new white nationalism, most evident now among anti-immigrant organizations. With the dawn of a new millennium, they are fixated on predictions that white people will lose their majority status and become one minority among many. The book concludes with a look to the future, elucidating the growing threat these groups will pose to coming generations....
The Republicans' Rancid and All-Too-American Dance With Racism (click title to entry - thank you)
Sun, 01/15/2012 - 12:13 — Anonymous
by:
Linn Washington Jr.
As the racist rhetoric oozes from Republican presidential candidates, why are comments contained in Ron Paul newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s being widely considered more offensive than current bigoted banter uttered by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum?...
Of course, what Granny is saying is that if people are gay they automatically have a different emotional content and could never relate to the'heterosexual' event of pregnancy.
According to Granny, only heterosexuals have the biological drive for parental love.
Cultural consistency in respecting others makes it clear there is not much difference between people. In this case, respect for adults included all adults, not just those racially preferred in the house. No superiority. Simply diverse.
...My paternal grandmother (click here) had an African American woman who came to clean her house weekly. She did not hire her because grandma was wealthy, which she was not, but rather due to infirmity. It was just a big help to have someone come and do the heavy cleaning.
I do not remember the lady’s name, but I do remember that I was not permitted to call her, or any other adult, by a first name. I do remember that her first name was Peggy, because I called her that once and got in a decent amount of trouble for it. She was not a maid; she was a person who sold a service, which my grandparents purchased weekly....
