Lee Iaccoca speaks truth to power...are you ready for The Rapture?

Well it's nice to know Bill Maher has a platform again:

Check out this rant...lovely.

But, wait, there's more! Lee Iacocca is channeling Noam Chomsky!

OK, someone should have caught it when he started in on our "ships of state...going over cliffs" (how about our ship of state hitting a titanic iceberg? Or our train of chiseling political sycophants following our (non) president over the cliff of neo-fascist coup d'etat? Ships going over cliffs? Nah... too Bush League.

But, heck, I'm not complaining. You go Lee!

Australian Scientist: 1 Million Iraqis Killed Since Invasion

"An Australian scientist is estimating the number of deaths in Iraq since the start of the conflict four years ago could be as high as one million. Dr Gideon Polya said "Using the most comprehensive and authoritative literature, and UN demographic data yields an estimate of one million post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq." In October researchers at Johns Hopkins estimated more than 650,000 Iraqis had died since the U.S. invasion."

- http://democracynow.org (Headlines March 19 '07)
- http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/19/1354205

COMPARE AND CONTRAST:
US/Vietnam war (never declared) lasted 9 years.
US participation in WW2: 4.5
US/Iraq War (not declared, but yes, Virginia, it's a goddamn war) 4 years, one day and counting.
Anybody want to take the time how long all "our" other wars lasted, how many of "them" and how many of "us," how much they "cost," please let me know and we'll publish it here.

I think it's a pretty darn good idea to remember how craven the Dems have been throughout this thing, starting from the time Gore caved in during the 2000 election, Kerry in the second on throughout all the depradations of the Bush junta, including the castration of all three branches of the government and (the very easy) co-option of the mainstream media.

I also think that we need to change to a PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM and that this, plus:

• Global warming
• The population bomb,
• PAPER VOTES
• TAKING MONEY OUT OF POLITICS AT ALL LEVELS

....Should be the highest priorities for this benighted country.

An educational system that did not automatically drop-kick kids from one grade to the next would be nice (and I'm not talking about "No child left behind" crap, either.

Pithy and Always Relevant Quotes

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
- Sinclair Lewis

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle"
- George Orwell

Book One, Chapter 5

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." - Syme

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…"

Book Two, Chapter 10

"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

- "1984" George Orwell

More about emailing Al Gore

Some of this won't make sense unless you read my previous Gore posts, btw.

My techie friends point out that email FORMS pop-up when you click on "contact us" in many websites because it helps them help you by getting vital info up-front, while helping them help them to "harvest" (love that term!) information about the sender. Well, in Mr. Gore's case, even that was not available.

At any rate, we certainly are seeing a new Al here (I still think it's not to late for him to drop some quality Sandoz product and REALLY not take it anymore). He's been instrumental in the creation of the new billion dollar prize for a global warming solution, and although I have not seen it yet (my bad, I know) I think I'm on terra firma in opining that "An Inconveniant Truth" is the most compelling (popular/non-academic) case yet made for the FACT and CRITICAL NATURE of global warming.

Which brings me to talking about Hillary Clinton's latest response to why she voted for the war in Iraq. Allow me to summarize her response (minus the firm voice and steely girl-scout gaze):

"Well...uh...I jes thought...uh...my gawd...mah president is tellin' me that these ayrabs have weppuns of mass destruction and ...uh...well jeez...mah own husband wuz a presidaint oncet...so I couldn't imagine that any presidaint could tell a lie!!! So..uh...of course I voted for the war appropriations."

Oh what a bunch of brainless fuckwads we are....To listen to this horseshit, to allow all three branches of "government" to get gang raped by neo-nazi hooligans (not that the rapees aren't scum too), to allow TWO elections to be stolen, to allow the camel of religion back under the tent (first the nose, then the hump), to send hundreds of thousands of people to unbelievably cruel deaths and maiming and loss, and to have the unmitigated conceitedness to worry a thousand times more for "our" dead and wounded vs. "their" dead and wounded, and perhaps most egregiously of all, to sanction by innaction an educational system that educates just enough people to keep the military/industrial complex alive while allowing 99% percent of the population to "graduate" from high school, college and university with just enough information to do their jobs and still not be able to find the US on a world map.

An hour ago, I heard (on demacracynow.org) a US senator say that he had no idea that the World Bank countenanced the sell-out of poor nations' debts for pennies on the dollar. And I believe the poor bastard...he did not know...just like poor Hillary didn't know.

Hey NPR, why not chat with Noam about why you make him wanna hurl?

Highlited below (3rd paragraph down) in bold is Noam Chomsky's dig at NPR. Yes, NPR does have enough dignity left to occasionally broadcast some Chomsky via their Alternative Radio show. But wouldn't it be sweet if they had the balls to do an actual reportage/interview with some NPR journalists about just WHY NPR makes him want to toss his cookies?

From a talk by Noam Chomsky available at

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/01/155215

World-renowned scholar and linguist Noam Chomsky recently spoke an event titled, "What's Next? Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation." It was held at the Emmanuel Church in Boston and sponsored by sponsored by Massachusetts Global Action. Chomsky, who is a professor of Linguistics at MIT, returned from Latin America in October. He talked about the recent elections in the region, which have brought leftist, governments to power that are challenging U.S foreign policy. Chomsky also spoke about Iraq and Iran in the context of Latin America. [includes rush transcript]

(...)In fact, the attitude of the public here towards the political system is very dramatic. I mean, about a third of the population in the United States, according to recent polls, believes that the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11. But they don't think it's a problem, like they don’t think that’s anything to worry about it. Yeah, of course, they’re all crooks and gangsters and murderers, tell us something new, you know. It doesn't have much to do with us. That's a shocking commentary on the state of American democracy.

There's a lot of talk here about, you know, we have a divided country. We have to unify. We need a unifier, somebody who will bring it back together. Red and blue, and so on. That's pretty marginal. It is a divided country. It's divided between public opinion and public policy. A very sharp divide. And on issue after issue, the whole political system is well to the right of the public and public attitudes. And we know a lot about these, because it’s a very well studied topic in the United States.

Just to give one last illustration, I was driving home from work the other day and torturing myself by listening to NPR, and -- I have kind of a masochistic streak I can’t get over. Actually, some day I’m going to sue them. Sometime -- once they got me so angry that I started speeding. I lost control of what I was doing, and I was stopped by a cop, and I was going like 60 miles an hour in a 30 mile zone. Maybe a basis for a civil suit, if there are any lawyers around here. But they had a section on Barack Obama, the great new hope. And it was very exuberant: what a fantastic personality he is and a great candidate, thousands of people coming out. And it went on for about 15 minutes of excited rhetoric. There's only one thing missing. They didn’t say a word about what his policies were on anything. It’s kind of not -- doesn't matter, you know. He’s a unifier. He looks at you when he talks to you. He’s a really decent guy. Great background. OK, that's an election. Bolivia was radically different, and that's a very striking comparison, and it in fact generalizes(...)