Archive for July, 2014

I’m a little embarrassed.

I do hope you enjoy my etchings because of my unapologetic approach when taking on the big issues.  I just love the big cats.  I confess I’ve been hiding on this one.  My reluctance is informed by personal relationships and the deafening heat of the controversy lately.  The burning incandescence on social media alone singed me enough to back way off.

Maybe I owe you.  MaybeI feel an obligation.  I owe myself.  I struggled with objectivity and visceral anger.   I think I’ve been able to open the aperture  wide enough to allow the big picture.  Had to let lots of light in.  I understand this will chap a lot of asses, but I need to get it off my chest while my hand is steady enough to share my thoughts.

There is no question that the situation between Israel and Palestine is a tragedy beyond imagination for anyone not experiencing it firsthand.

A closed loop of violence leading to more violence. A zero sum game. A vicious cycle of carnage and destruction that is so profound, so utterly horrifying that most of us can not bare to look.

But still, there are those of us who can stare and revel and relish.

It is a vacuum of logic.  No matter what the more moderate rhetoric coming from either side asserts, the ultimate goal is the annihilation of the opposing side. Neither side will own satisfaction without the complete extinction of the other.  They’ve both said as much.  It’s insane.

And for what?

Centuries, sometimes millennia old religious myths. It’s gotta be one of  the dumbest, most ridiculous and pointless campaigns in human history.  What’s new?

Israel finds itself in the position of rolling tanks to a water balloon fight.  Because they can.  And they do.  Not even close to what any sane observer would call a measured response.  Are they guilty of human atrocity and war crimes?

You bet your ass they are.

Kinda like the US in Iraq.

Would Hamas take it upon themselves to engage in exactly the same level of human vivisection if they were wearing the same shoe of absolute military superiority and total economic dominance?

In a fucking heart beat.

Doth both very bad actors have blood on their hands?  The intentional blood of their own people on their hands?  Let me just say they are both so festooned with gore one would be hard pressed to tell them apart.  One might compare numbers but it occurs to me that’s like comparing dicks.

Is the US complicit?  Yes, we are guilty as hell.  We fucking fund it.

Is Palestine?  Absolute Islamic fundamentalist whack jobs.  Quite a bit like Christians.

Is the media culpable by only covering the very extreme edges and without humanity, fomenting polarization as rocket fuel for the inferno?

Absofuckinglutely.

To be clear, I’m not blaming anybody, I’m blaming everybody.

From the Hamas Charter:

“….. “our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious” and calls for the eventual creation of an Islamic state in Palestine, in place of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and the obliteration or dissolution of Israel.”  -Wikiepedia

“The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews [and kill them]; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!” -Wikepedia

“Every day, official Palestinian television calls Jews “rats” and “animals.” This is repugnant. On the official Facebook page of Palestinian schools, one sees photographs of Hitler, and cartoons that illustrate the hadith (statements attributed to the prophet Mohammed) saying that Muslims must kill the Jews before the Last Judgment (“Yom al-Din”).” -The Washington Institute

As for Israel:

” [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.” Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts”. New Statesman, 25 June 1982. 

“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

“We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.” Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” — Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]

Am I supposed  to pick a dog in this hunt?

Explosive murderous hate based exclusively on bullshit undiluted Santa in the sky religious crap.

This cannot possibly end well because logic has no purchase.

The question is, how can it possibly end?

It certainly shows no sign.

Will there ever be a postmortem?

When are we, as a mere single species on this tiny blue marble, going to  gain some humility and grow the fuck up?

It is beyond absurd.  It is beyond disgusting.  There are no words.

A heartbreaking lack of reason.

Drinks for my friends.

 

Have you ever noticed how the blowhards who rail against raising the minimum wage, or even the mandate of one at all, are the same ones who who piss and moan about undocumented workers stealing their jobs?  Ever notice how they never blame the fat white business owners who would sooner drink from a bed pan than pay minimum wage to any skin color, the same ones who exploit these poor workers so as to bathe and shower and wipe their asses with the filthy lucre gleaned from such egregious slavery?

Ever notice?

Isn’t it just awesome that most babysitters command $10 an an hour while the minimum wage is $7.75?

Really awesome.

That head butts me with irony and ridiculousness.

I am blistered by hypocrisy.

Ever notice how they are the same ones who whine about the once powerful unions?  You know, the very entities that guaranteed they get a weekend and a vacation and maybe a pension?

Ever notice how they are from the poorest states?  You know, the red states that get way more than their share of government revenue in the form of social programs than they contribute in the form of tax dollars?

Real brave bunch we’ve got here.

Ever notice how absurdly Christian they are?

If you are willing and able to work a forty hour work week in this country you deserve adequate food, shelter and healthcare.  If they cannot or will not pay a living wage in this country then they do not deserve to do business in this country.  If they cannot recognize that the regions in this country that pay a more competitive wage are thriving and the ones that don’t are wallowing in atrophy, they must be idiots.

The majority of analysis supports the notion that a living wage raises all boats and trickle down economics sinks all but the yachts and the battleships.

You have to be a dumbass if you are still defending the “job creators”.

Their arguments are selfish and ludicrous.  If they don’t get this, if their business model is dependent on attainment and avarice, the erosion of the middle class and the further criminal concentration of wealth, then I invite them to piss up a goddamn rope.

I guess I just don’t understand where we are as a country if such a common sense idea like raising the minimum wage is even controversial for people who schlep and suffer the abuse of the indignant, when the idea is so frustratingly popular.  I guess I just don’t understand it when just about all of us at one time or another have worked those jobs and realize they are no walk in the damn park.  I guess I just don’t understand why these people don’t deserve to live off what they make for serving you your goddamn salad or your fucking hamburger.

I guess I just don’t understand it.

What I really don’t understand is all the dentally challenged mouth breathers that are more worried about winning the lottery someday and having to pay taxes on it than having to work some bullshit job at Walmart and qualify for government subsidies.  I worry that they don’t care that their employer refuses to pay you enough to live on or even the ability to buy their goddamn products without being on the government tit.

What I really don’t understand is the filthy rich, who will never want for anything but love and respect while they perpetuate this madness because their entire world is about excess and privilege and the twisted notion that they deserve it and the other people they suffer day to day do not.

It occurs to me that most of them are dumb as sticks and the rest of them are greedy pricks.

What a brave bunch.

Drinks for my friends.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

What special brand of asshole shows up to protest child refugees from south American countries armed?

What particular kind of stupid is requisite here, to get up in the morning, get dressed, have some coffee, lock and load, looking forward to a day that will be about brandishing your rifle and carrying a moronic and likely misspelled sign depicting mere innocent children as evil and disease ridden infiltrators?

Diseases like Ebola, that don’t exist outside Africa.

Children that are the victims of our oppressive economic policies and our failed, utterly disastrous drug laws.

Who gets out of bed to terrorize children?

Confused and frightened children.  Children who can’t speak our language.

Children of parents just as confused and frightened as a direct result of American influence in their own hopelessly poor South American countries.

Parents so profoundly confused and frightened and obviously absent any other option that they are compelled to exercise the only option they see as viable.  The only option available.  To send them a thousand or more miles a way on a dangerous and arduous journey to the good old US of A.  How sad in the 21st century that is their best choice.

Just exactly what are you very special assholes worried about?  What are you afraid of?  When humans behave this way the only explanation is fear.  Occam’s razor.

Are these guiltless children gonna take your goddamn jobs?

Rick Perry and Sean Hannity need to take it upon themselves to patrol the border armed to the teeth and and fucking televise it?  I guess Ted Nugent wasn’t available.

You people.  Afraid of this.  So afraid you bring your goddamn guns to scare the already traumatized and horrified CHILDREN.  Rednecks.  Teabillies.  Willfully ignorant, deliberately under informed fucktards.  At what age did you lose your capacity for compassion?  At what time in your life did the callus on your soul grow so thick that you can’t recognize human suffering and desperation?

You call yourselves militia.

You’re no militia.  You are the disease.  You are the cancer and we can’t wait until you die of your own insidious malaise.

You are the same car full of dangerous clowns that showed up to defend the now infamous fraud Cliven Bundy.

Bring yer guns boys!

It’s on.

The same clowns that showed up to beat on Americans who dared to demand civil rights already afforded to them in the 60’s.

The same clowns who want to sue or impeach the president.

The same clowns whos biggest legitimate fear is that the American white male dominated society is on the wane.

The same clowns who really need to get over it.  You’re right.  It’s coming to an end and you all are now faced with the task of being equal.  No more unearned privilege.  No more automatic advantage.  You now are faced with the brutal reality of being the same as everyone else.  Equal.  Woe is you, you fucking abject cowards.  Maybe tomorrow you can get up, lock and load and scare the shit out of white people at Chipotle or Target with your stupid fucking guns.

Good for you.

In the meantime, keep eating crayons while fantasizing about lighting up some immigrant with your ridiculous goddamn boom stick.

Your desperation stinks.  And we are sick of the smell.

Drinks for my friends.

I am a woman. I gave birth. It was painful.  Excruciating.  Agony.  No one knows.  I do.

My child knows no one other purview until it gulps air outside of me. Until it leaves my womb it belongs to me and no one else. No other body, governmental or even judicial matters at all to me.

Not as far as I’m concerned anyway.

I really don’t care what you have to say.

I cannot stand five catholic men in black robes who would decide anything for me or the child in my body.  I loathe you for trying.  Your ignorance.  Your arrogance.  Your hubris.  When the day comes I want to relinquish control of my life, my child’s life, to the likes of you, I’ll let you know.  It will have a big fancy seal.  It will be on parchment.  Sheepskin.  You’ll know.  Champagne and caviar.

Until then, shut the fuck up.

We all know you think it’s your religious privilege.  We all know you think you’re somehow entitled to a voice here.  A heavy legislative hand.  A right.  But you are wrong.  You don’t.  You can’t.  You won’t.  You can’t tell me what contraception to use anymore than you can tell me what to do with my womb.  My body.  You stand there, collecting your filthy lucre from the dirtier angels of our filthiest nature and presume to define sin for me.

Fuck you.

You took a stand on the side of a company that wears its hypocrisy on its goddamn face.  They invest in and make money off of the manufacture of contraceptive products.  They willingly paid for the objectionable products for their employees for years.  Decades.  What changed besides Obamacare?  They say their mission is to prevent abortion but the only net gain from this will be more abortion.

By the way, they say the contraceptive products they won’t pay for kill babies.  Wrong.  Completely wrong.  What they do is prevent fertilization.  No beings.  No babies.  How did we get to a place where the Supreme Court is guilty of science denial while listening to and valuing the opinions of clerics and wizards?

Five Roman Catholic men who wear black robes to work.

In this process you would willingly consign me to a coat hanger.

I am a man and I do not accept this jurisprudence.  It is the antithesis of jurisprudence.

But I am a woman too.

It’s like your whole reason is to make sure it’s born.

After that, it’s nobodies business but mine.  Ironic how you grab responsibility before it’s born and surrender it completely the second after.  How do adult white men entertain the notion that they somehow get to champion the fetus and forgo the child?

Jackasses.

They are the last people.

Then, some sonafabitching congressman comes along to make my last stand.

To pretend to speak for me and all the unborn.

I am a woman and I have given birth and if I begin to understand that delivery might mean my death, I get to decide what to do.  If that child will be born inside out?  My problem.  If that child is born with whatever disability?  My problem.

Not yours.

Fuck off.

The same goes for my contraception.  Sometimes it’s to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.  But 56% of the women in this country that avail themselves of contraceptive medication have it prescribed to them by doctors for reasons other than preventing pregnancy.  Sometimes it’s to prevent my spending days in bed writhing in the kind of pain that makes botulism or ebola look Fischer Price.  Sometimes it’s to reduce my risk of certain cancers.  Viruses.  You don’t know.  You can’t you bastards.  I am a woman and you are not.

I can not countenance five greasy old academic males deciding any of this shit.  It’s none of their business.

None at all.

I am a woman.

I would make each of you pregnant tomorrow morning if I could.

Or, I would visit the menstrual cycle upon each of you if I could.

Then we would see who the women are.

That would be awesome.

Bitches.

I am a man speaking for women.

Drinks for my friends.