Love's Strange Ways

One of my favorite songs, by one of my favorite songwriters, Chris Rea.
I hope you dig it.


sj

When passion shines her blinding light on you
You know my friend there's nothing that you can really do
Just follow on behind her veil of deepest purple haze
Down, to love's strange ways

Drowning in a laughter as you go
Intoxicating laughter that spins you high and low
Dangerous times are these, but oh so wonderfully new
Laugh along you fool, can't you they're laughing at you
Lost in the haze
Of love's strange ways

Ain't it funny how it turns
When it's all over, nothing's learned
Just a passion and a fool
And a memory that burns
And that's what you get
When you play with love's strange ways

LIBERTY IS THE BEST SECURITY

Same Game, New Name

Past is prologue, Pal.
Ask anybody with an IQ bigger than their shoe size.

If you can't quite get your mind around America's war on Iraq and Afghanistan -- and now Pakistan -- try reading up on the Indian wars of the 19th Century.
I believe you'll discover that both the propaganda and the slaughter seem hauntingly familiar.

The Middle East is just the natural extension of the Wild West, see?

America wanted the Indians' lands and it took them, killing any "red devils" (translate that as "terrorists") who got in the way, whether man, woman or child.

Now America wants that oil, Baby.
And woe be to anyone who gets in the way, man woman or child.

At Wounded Knee, the 7th Cavalry attacked and killed 150 Lakotas, mostly women and children.
And 20 of these murdering sob's received the Medal of Honor for doing it.

Same old, same old.


sj

A REAL American Hero

New York Times, December 28, 2010

No-No Boy

By Lawrence Downes

Courage takes many forms. Frank Emi, who died in California on Dec. 1, age 94, had the steadfast kind, well suited for lonely struggles and ostracism.

He was a young Japanese-American man sent to an internment camp in Wyoming after Pearl Harbor. He could have gotten out by signing a loyalty oath and enlisting in the Army, proving his patriotism the way so many other Japanese-Americans did — honorably, irrefutably, with their blood, limbs and lives.

Mr. Emi marched in exactly the opposite direction. After receiving draft notices in the camp, he and six other young men created the Fair Play Committee. In March 1944, they signed a declaration challenging the internment policy and their conscription as shameful affronts to the Constitution and American ideals.

“We, the members of the FPC, are not afraid to go to war,” they wrote. “We are not afraid to risk our lives for our country. We would gladly sacrifice our lives to protect and uphold the principles and ideals of our country as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, for on its inviolability depends the freedom, liberty, justice, and protection of all people, including Japanese-Americans and all other minority groups.

“But have we been given such freedom, such liberty, such justice, such protection? NO!!”

Mr. Emi and the six other original signers all refused to serve. More than 300 people in 10 camps joined them. All were prosecuted. Other Japanese-Americans mocked them as the “no-no boys.” The Japanese American Citizens League denounced them as seditious. But Mr. Emi, who spent 18 months in a federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., was right to speak out.

After the war, Mr. Emi worked as a postal clerk and for the State of California. In the 1980s, he joined the fight for redress for Japanese-Americans who were deprived of their property and freedom.

Congress apologized in 1988. It took several more years for the Japanese American Citizens League to withdraw its slander against the resisters. It apologized in 2000.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/19emi.html?_r=2

Thanks to Mike for sending this along.

Time for a New Year's REVOLUTION

2011: "Dissent is what rescues Democracy"

By

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, December 27, 2010

Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.

--Lewis H. Lapham

The year 2011 will bring Americans a larger and more intrusive police state, more unemployment and home foreclosures, no economic recovery, more disregard by the US government of US law, international law, the Constitution, and truth, more suspicion and distrust from allies, more hostility from the rest of the world, and new heights of media sycophancy….

If not already obvious, 2010 has made clear that the US government does not care a whit for the opinions of citizens. The TSA is unequivocal that it will reach no accommodation with Americans other than the violations of their persons that it imposes by its unaccountable power. As for public opposition to war, the Associated Press reported on December 16 that “Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the U.S. can’t let public opinion sway its commitment to Afghanistan.” Gates stated bluntly what has been known for some time: the idea is passe that government in a democracy serves the will of the people. If this quaint notion is still found in civics books, it will soon be edited out…

With truth the declared enemy of the fantasy world in which the government, media, and public reside, the nation has turned on whistleblowers. Bradley Manning, who allegedly provided the media with the video made by US troops of their wanton, fun-filled slaughter of newsmen and civilians, has been abused in solitary confinement for six months. Murdering civilians is a war crime, and as General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the National Press Club on February 17, 2006, “It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral” and to make such orders known. If Manning is the source of the leak, he has been wrongfully imprisoned for meeting his military responsibility. The media have yet to make the point that the person who reported the crime, not the persons who committed it, is the one who has been imprisoned, and without a trial…

READ IT AT:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22524

BIG BROTHER IS A MOTHER-

2011: A Brave New Dystopia

by

Chris Hedges

…The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak.

The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”

Published on Monday, December 27, 2010 by TruthDig.com

READ IT ALL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/27-1

Patches Horsing Around

Talkin' Horses

There’s an old folk tale that on Christmas eve, from the stroke of midnight until the cock crows on Christmas morning, horses – and other animals, too – are gifted with the ability to talk to humans.

That’s a silly myth.

Animals talk to us ALL the time.

We just don’t listen.

sj

DEFINITELY UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Obama’s Liberty Problem:

Why Indefinite Detention by Executive Order Should Scare the Hell Out of People

by

Bill Quigley and Vince Warren

The right to liberty is one of the foundation rights of a free people. The idea that any US President can bypass Congress and bypass the Courts by issuing an Executive Order setting up a new legal system for indefinite detention of people should rightfully scare the hell out of the American people.

Advisors in the Obama administration have floated the idea of creating a special new legal system to indefinitely detain people by Executive Order. Why? To do something with the people wrongfully imprisoned in Guantanamo. Why not follow the law and try them? The government knows it will not be able to win prosecutions against them because they were tortured by the US.

Published on Thursday, December 23, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/23-5

Congratulations, Mrs. Smith; It's a Terrorist.

YOU MAY BE A TERRORIST AND NOT KNOW IT!

According to various government sources the following is a list of behaviors, actions or interests that are “suspicious” and just might indicate terrorist activity:

- Making numerous references to the U.S. Constitution

- Defending the U.S. Constitution

- Claiming driving is a right, not a privilege

- Refusing to identify yourself to an authority figure

- Attempting to monitor the actions of police

- Being bald

- Being a “nice guy”

- Displaying bumper stickers and other paraphernalia associated with the Constitutional, Campaign for Liberty, and Libertarian parties

- Supporting Congressman Ron Paul

- Opposing the implementation of a North American Union

- Owning gold bullion

- Displaying historical U.S. flags

- Opposing abortion

- Being interested in animal rights

- Being a “lone individual”

- Wearing Levi jeans

- Communicating predominantly by cell phone, email or text message

- Looking “normal” in appearance

- Renting a car

- Staying in a hotel or apartment

- Renting a storage facility

- Using cash to make large purchases

- Using pre-paid cellphones or hand-held radios

- Owning large amounts of medicines, alcohol, or baby formula

- Gaining support for a cause by holding meetings, public rallies, or demonstrations

- Gaining support for a cause by using websites, posters, leaflets, or underground press publications

- Possessing a photo-copy of your drivers license, passport, social security card or birth certificate

- Possessing or purchasing GPS technology

- Walking, biking or driving near “potential targets”

- Taking photographs of “potential targets,” including bridges, power plants or government buildings

- Being a property-rights activist

- Trying to influence government or social policy

- Undermining confidence in the government

- Using a sketch pad, camera, map, binoculars or scuba equipment

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY -- AND IT'S YOU!

sj

The Approaching Storm

Berlin, 1934: Awaiting the Storm

by

Fred Reed

Flags. These are always a bad sign. Hardly a politician appears on television who doesn’t stand in front of an American flag, sometimes three American flags. A venomous nationalism now poisons the air, and grows. We are off and rolling.

The trappings of fascism spread. General David Petraeus, commander of the Eastern Front, poses with the President in the White House in combat fatigues. The country is now the Homeland, reminiscent of the Nazi Fatherland and the Soviet Motherland. We hear of American Exceptionalism, the ritual self-idolizaton beloved of pathological nationalism. Blood and Soil. The American Dream. Ubermenschen. All we need is a short Austrian.

We may get one. The times ripen for a man on a horse. (Or perhaps a woman: Twitler of Alaska looms.) An ignorant populaton, unread, unfamiliar with the outside world, focuses its anxieties on troubling dark things lurking abroad, the brown hordes from the south, the rising Chinese, inexplicable Moslems who want to kill all Christians. Sooner rather than later such a mob finds solace in an angry unity. From an unhappy lower middle-class spring Brown Shirts. Wait.

Things come together: Falling standards of living across a country in irremediable decline, diminishing expectations, growing anger in search of focus, a sense of a birthright being stolen as preeminence drifts across the Pacific. Here is fertile soil for some strange crop not yet clearly seen.

It will play out against a backdrop of totalitarian watchfulness all too imaginable. A digital world lends itself to tyranny, making it, I think, inescapable. For practical purposes, the capacity to store data is infinite, to network it across the world, to track, to scan, to watch. This is not the place for a disquisition on the technology of surveillance. Just note that the machinery exists for a totalitarian watchfulness beyond Stalin’s wettest dreams. The government wants this, pushes for it daily, and gets it. You can’t spend a dollar, take a flight, or send an email without a federal federal office watching. It is getting worse and cannot be stopped. Surveillance is too easy.

We will be told, are being told, that to be safe we must submit, that enemies within and without are upon us, that terrorists spawn plots everywhere. Where communists once hid in every closet and the House Unamerican Activities Committee, HUAC, hunted them, now we have Islamo-terrorists hunted by Homeland Security.

What matter civil rights when the Moslem is at our throats? The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the vigilance ends liberty.

Hysteria darkly flowers. Homeland Security now wants to train us in how to react to a nuclear attack, a la 1950. Scare’m, keep’em scared, tell them you are protecting them, and they will kiss your boots. An Australian publishes embarrasing cable traffic from American embassies, and politicians call for him to be killed by the CIA. The agency is revered as a sort of clandestine Batman and Robin, defending America secretly where evil swirls in the coming night. Kill, kill. On subways we are told to watch each other, to report curious behavior to the authorities. Nothing can stop this.

READ THE REST:

http://www.fredoneverything.net/ComingStorm.shtml

DEJA VU

It was not long after the disingenuously-named "Patriot Act" passed.

I needed some stamps and the guy at Mail and More grabbed some for me that featured Old Glory waving in the breeze.

"Got anything else?" I asked.

"What would you like?"

“Anything but goddam flags,” I told him.

He looked at me quizzically.

I'll tell you just what I told him.

There’s an inverse relationship between flags and freedom.

The more flags you see, the less freedom you have.

Remember those Nazi rallies in Nuremburg?

Flags everywhere.

EVERYWHERE.

Flags flying from every vertical object around.

Flags hanging from windows and ledges.

Flags in the hands of infants, waving them no less enthusiastically – or any more consciously – than the zombie-like adults beside them.

Whenever you start seeing a lot of flags, things are going to get bad.

Real bad.

Flags instead of brains.

Flags instead of morality.

Flags instead of questions.

Flags instead of compassion.

Flags instead of truth.

Flags instead of justice.

Flags instead of freedom.

Flags, flags flags.

I hate flags.

Burn them all.

sj

You Tell "em, Sister!

Rookies

I might have to drink one one of their beers sometime, just to toast this commercial.
If you've ever spent any time around horses, you'll find this totally believable.
:)

sj

Thanks to Dr. M for sending!

Connecting the Dots

JFK, 9-11, and the REAL America:

Tying It All Together

by

Jon Phalen

Hijackers?

What makes you think you actually KNOW what happened on those planes? All four were obliterated, along with everyone on board, remember? No crime scene, no direct evidence, no recognizable remains, no witnesses whatsoever -- it's a blank canvas. How convenient for any party intent on launching a new era of global imperialism, and willing to spin this tragedy into a viable excuse. Indeed, all of the attack's consequences are far better explained by this agenda than by Bin Laden's purported death wish. Those presuming to examine this matter, i.e. ALL OF US, need to recognize that such trickery is a timeless specialty of governments.

And yet from that very day we have allowed the government-media complex to focus all attention on one rather thin explanation: Crazy Arabs did it! George W. Bush and his cabinet have made it known to us, in the most arrogant terms, that they will brook no discussion of other possibilities -- an edict most Americans, in their desperation to believe in this man, seem to have embraced. The Bush Administration even withholds its "proof" of Al Qa'eda's guilt; clearly, it considers mere citizens too unimportant to require full explanations, and once again, we're just rolling over and taking it.

The phrases 'spiritually broken' and 'morally adrift' come to mind...

READ THE REST AT: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PHA311A.html

NYC Indymedia.org, 22 November 2003

www.globalresearch.ca 24 November 2003

You won't like it.

Read it anyway.

sj

I LOVE This Kid

Long Time, No Sea

I remember her.
The subtle rising and falling of her chest as she slept.
Her raging fury when aroused.
Our time together was brief, but passionate,
And so long ago.
But now and then
I seem to catch her scent
And I spin around expecting her to be there.
But she isn't.


sj

NEWSFLASH: CONGRESSMAN TELLS TRUTH! HELL REPORTEDLY FROZEN OVER!

The Law of Nature

Photographer Michel Denis-Huot captured these amazing pictures on safari in Kenya 's Masai Mara in October last year.

"These three brothers (cheetahs) have been living together since they left their mother at about 18 months old,' he said. 'On the morning we saw them, they seemed not to be hungry, walking quickly but stopping sometimes to play together. 'At one point, they met a group of impala who ran away. But one youngster was not quick enough and the brothers caught it easily'."






In the real, natural world you only kill to eat.
And you never take more than you need.
You never kill if you don't absolutely have to.
We could learn a thing or two from those cheetahs.

Thanks to Mouse for sending this along.

sj