Comments on: The Entertainment Value of Snuffing Grandma

By: B99

B99 — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:01:01 +0000

Where do you live USF? How do your parents make their living?

By: United-Socialist-Front

United-Socialist-Front — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 03:56:10 +0000

USA is doomed, there is no hope for this country. If you can move out of USA, because the people who live within the borders of this country want USA to collapse and fail, specially the middle-classes who are real capitalists and right-winger lunatics.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:50:12 +0000

Nos tutela satis ut fake it’

By: Mulga Mumblebrain

Mulga Mumblebrain — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:53:36 +0000

mjosef, the ‘Fair and Balanced’ lie was probably a deliberate laugh, an ongoing insult, but, of course, these facsimiles of humanity are often so moronic and so well brainwashed, that they believe their own bulldust. Of course there is an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ element too. I mean, who’d be game to be the first to pipe up, ‘But, hey, Roger! We’re not fair and balanced. That would piss Rupert off, big-time!’
Actually it puts me in mind of a ward motto we invented one night, while ‘de-briefing’ down at the pub. We settled on ‘We care enough to fake it’. I tried to get some claasics students from the University to put it into Latin, but they were too pissed to be of any help, whatsoever.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:19:07 +0000

That massive failure in the whole structure is coming and not as hard to see the future today as it was in the past. Of course many would like you to believe that you can’t see just fifth years from now as those same people make a few plans for the few in that massive failure. A little secret the greatest Nation in the World is bankrupt and that is today Friday August 21, 2009. I see California now has 11.9% unemployment rate. But not to worry Wall Street is doing fine. It appears they are now in control of all the debt in this out of control system that will as we all know if allowed to move forward destroy the Earth for life forms that again is rather rare in the Universe.

By: desert flower

desert flower — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:20:04 +0000

Hi,
What an amazing article. Very good.

My question is on what would happen (theoretically) if, say, we did get single-payer healthcare and these insurance companies got their walking papers? Nobody has addressed the question of what would happen to all those jobs in this industry, not just those with CEO titles but all those average American’s who work as Customer Service and other low end jobs. The industrial base in U.S. has been entirely ruined (until someone gets wiser and more creative and starts actually PRODUCING REAL PRODUCTS AGAIN). One of the few intact job sectors is the healthcare industry (yes, I know it is sad to call healthcare an industry, but that is what it has become in the U.S.).

So, we not only have an issue of Human Rights and the right to have access to medical help, but this entire issue SHOULD be exposing the entire politcal-economic-corporate-banking mafia-like system that has ruined this nation. And please, this has never been about ‘FREE MARKET”. It is entirely about the oligarchic ruling classes….(I guess its free market only to them, but for the rest of us small cheese its debt, debt, debt….just where they want us all).

Its much easier for these people to rule over us when we are so ignorant and unable to critically think anything through without turning a tv on to get our answers. This is so sad to me.

I don’t see an easy solution, and I don’t think anyone else does either. But thinking that single-payer or any other Human-friendly system will solve the whole dilemma is actually living with head in sand also.

I DO believe in single payer, don’t get me wrong. I just happen to see the BIGGER picture in this whole dilemma.

And the big picture keeps pointing back to the same sources.

It would have been nice they had installed a universal plan long ago. As it is, the quagmire as become so thickened it will actually take a massive failure in the whole structure before we can start rebuilding.

By: balkas b b

balkas b b — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:25:50 +0000

what americans have, among many other nationals, is gangster rule. The larger and the stronger the ruling gang is, the less protests and honor of basic humnat rights matter.
The might will decide any issue; i.e., gang’s ‘laws’ will prevail.
The gang, seems to me, utterly controls armed service, private armies, cia, fbi, city police, manufacture of weapons, money, ‘education’, disinformation, private spies, etc.
tnx
wld massive passive resistance to such a iron-gripped rule loosen that grip?
Yes, likely! But once resistance goes to bed, the gang wld go back to old ways of doing things.
This leads me to conclude: americans need a very strong political party
that wld be talking for low[er] class or non-gangish supporters. tnx

By: United-Socialist-Front

United-Socialist-Front — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:20:59 +0000

DEAR FRIENDS: HERE IS AN INFORMATION I GOT WHICH STATES THAT ZIONIST-US-COLOMBIAN IMPERIALISM AXIS WILL INVADE ECUADOR FIRST, AND THEN VENEZUELA AND BRAZIL TO STEAL THE OIL.

(Its in spanish)

José Luis Pacheco, experto petrolero venezolano: Eje Colombia-EEUU invadirá primero a Ecuador

http://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/n140937.html

20 de agosto 2009. -José Luis Pacheco, experto petrolero venezolano, alertó este jueves que, Ecuador se asoma como el primer país de la región que será invadido por la alianza Colombia-EEUU, en el marco del convenio firmado por estos países respecto a las bases militares.

Pacheco argumentó que esta tesis es factible por la política en la que persiste la nación colombiana de cercar a las FARC en el breve plazo. De allí que auguró que los primeros vientos de guerra apuntan hacia la república que gobierna Rafael Correa.

Sostuvo que esta situación va a desencadenar luego en un conflicto armado donde Venezuela deberá prepararse para afrontar la arremetida del país hermano en alianza con EEUU.

Denunció al gobierno colombiano como un factor perturbador de la integración regional, en virtud de la política que, permanentemente, ha dominado en ese país contraria a los gobiernos de izquierda. “Desde 1830 para acá, en Colombia, han ocurrido muy pocos cambios en materia política, porque siempre ha dominado la oligarquía”.

Reiteró que”nos vamos a ver muy probablemente en un conflicto armado” de inimaginables consecuencias.

Tales declaraciones fueron suministradas por Pacheco durante el programa “Ideas para el Debate”, que transmite Antv, canal de la Asamblea Nacional.

La fuente original de este documento es: Venezolana de Televisión (http://www.vtv.gov.ve)

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:35:21 +0000

Sent this e-mail to Media this morning,

Morning,

The Copenhagen Post – ‎Aug 19, 2009‎
The Foreign Ministry has cancelled 20000 overnight hotel reservations meant for people attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December. .

Now if I was part Indian wait I am you might call this a sign.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2009) — Tasmania’s east coast is recording its highest-ever winter water temperatures of more than 13ºC – up to 1.5ºC above normal – due to a strengthening of an ocean current originating north of Australia.

NOAA polar orbiting satellites obtain the data generating sea surface temperature images. This is a composite 15-day image showing the extension of the Leeuwin Current around Tasmania. (Credit: CSIRO)
Average temperatures of waters at the oceans’ surface in July were the highest ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. The agency said the average sea surface temperature was 1.06 degrees higher than the 20th-century average of 61.5 degrees. Though July was unusually cool in some areas, like the eastern United States, analysts at the NOAA Climate Data Center said the combined global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.03 degrees higher than the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees, the fifth warmest since worldwide record keeping began in 1880. The agency also said that, on average, Arctic sea ice covered 3.4 million square miles in July, 12.7 percent below the 1979-2000 average and the third lowest on record, after 2007 and 2006. NYT

On a cold wintry night in January the buses were being gassed for the demonstrations sorry town hall meetings to keep America free. You see some wanted to try and change the way freedom work’s in the greatest Nation on Earth and the best mind’s we have Steve Forbes, Dick Armey and the good people at Exxon and Massey, Chevron and many more knew this was very very wrong. The American people had been lied to and the truth, justice, and freedom will win. The lies were coming from people who just wanted to redistribute the wealth and change the very fabric of the greatest Nation on Earth. These nut cases were using climate change a Hoax to try and do that and thank God the thinkers among us knew the truth. Drill baby drill USA USA and Palin in 2012. The charts and reports show’s us that these nut cases now have NOAA and NASA and scientists on there side probably because of lobbyists from special interests. Palin in 2012, “Oh my God”.
Don

By: mjosef

mjosef — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:18:13 +0000

Well-said, Mulga, Andres, lichen.
In all the torrent of comment and criticism and schlarship and speechifying over the last few decades of the Information Age, I’ve seen very little that does justice to how egregious and ludicrous the supersystem has become in fomenting this plutocratic upsurge. The rich getting richer should have been a tough sell after the Woodstock era, right? Nah, it was a piece of cake for the masters and the myrmidons, and they were even laughing about it openly, as in their obvious meta-joke of “fair and balanced” Fox News. The phrase is of course stupendously redundant, which is an obvious tip-off to its flagrant Orwellian character – they must have been busting their guts and cackling like fiends when they decided on that whopper. Don’t fall for it, don’t watch it, don’t ever refer to it.

By: Mulga Mumblebrain

Mulga Mumblebrain — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:27:24 +0000

Andres, the USA, like every other capitalist state, is morally corrupt and ethically moribund. All its institutions are frauds designed to disguise the reality of pathocratic plutocracy. Naturally the media, with its responsibility to brainwash the serfs into fanatic dedication to a system that sets out to keep them in life-long wage slavery, servants to increasingly avaricious masters, before an impoverished and increasingly brief retirement, is the most evil and banal organisation of all. Setting out deliberately to distort reality to the advantage of one’s owners, creatures like Murdoch-Moloch, then incessantly screeching that you represent the Free Press is work fit only for vermin, and it’s vermin we get. When a sewer of human perfidy like FoxNews, under the ludicrous lie of ‘Fair and Balanced’, when it is neither, makes a hero of some poor tosser who thinks he is some sort of ‘winner’ because he stands outside a public meeting with his penis substitute strapped to his leg (so easy to reach, and caress)you know human civilization, at least the perverted facsimile of it that pertains in your poor, benighted country, has reached its end-stage.

By: mary

mary — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:23:42 +0000

I liked this article very much. In fact, the points it makes about the “Society of the Spectacle” and how when there are important issues, the public has to be as numbed, dumbed and bored as possible, so that they will not be following the small print that is going to screw them one way or the other, perhaps both.

I lived in the US for half of my life, so I know how expensive health care is, having had an emergency and being “uninsured” as a freelancer, I got a bill in the thousands (7, for precision) for one day of “treatment” of a collapsed lung, but sent out the door because I knew I could not keep up whatever payment was going to hit me should I stay. The other half in Europe, where the treatment isn’t free, but it is considerably cheaper. I know which system I prefer, and I don’t want to influence Americans, because they will never “get” anything resembling European health programmes. However, it seems that the debate is not about the issue at all, but runs along ideological lines, and besides, nothing in the US can change anyway. It is not built into the system. Hope, as the author pointed out, is. It’s just a word and a nice way to look at things that lets you not hold anyone responsible for the failure.

By: Andres Kargar

Andres Kargar — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:16:01 +0000

Hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrated against war prior to the US invasion of Iraq, but the media remained mostly silent and refused to cover their protests.

But when a dozen brainless, right-wing nut jobs get up and protest against government attempt to exercise control over the health care and insurance industries, they are all over the news.

This is the reality of the criminal corporate media, totally subservient to the interests of the owning classes in these United States of America.

By: lichen

lichen — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:40:20 +0000

Mulga, you are right; it is a form of psychopathology, and nothing more. I’m getting more upset by the day that these fucking peices of trash are allowed to bring down our collective quality of life so fucking far with their anti-democracy, life-hating politics that disinvest in society and destroy the planet and us. Yet they still expect that they can go on, not only robbing us of our human rights to free healthcare, college education, clean air, water, healthy food, living wage jobs with benefits…not only that, but they drown us with debts, keep upping the pollution to the point where we may all go extinct, they buy what little democracy we have from the sham “representatives” that should be replaced by the people directly making the decisions. They use “free speech” as an excuse for dominating the entire media to spread their disgustingness as if it was relevant at all.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:23:17 +0000

Just watched NBC Nightly News and they said the oceans are warmer now than ever ever being since record keeping started. Part do to El Nino and something else is at play. That was 15 seconds on the News and then moved on to more important things. I think there starting to adapt and maybe next we will hear where Exxon has a plan.

By: Mulga Mumblebrain

Mulga Mumblebrain — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:18:41 +0000

The idea that it is ideology that is in charge in the US (as it also here in Australia)obscures a deeper truth. The clash of ideologies is, at base, a clash of psychologies, of views of existence. The extreme Rightwing ideology that dominates the West, and that is growing more extreme, more hysterical, more deranged by the day, is rooted, I believe, in a simple pathopsychology. The Rightist, the authoritarian, paranoid, aggressive, violent Rightwinger, who feels no compassion for those whose lives are ruined by an unfair health system just as they are indifferent to the murder of millions of Iraqis, Afghanis etc in The War of Terrorism, is basically a frightened individual.
Flung into this world against their choice, suffering from that ‘sexually transmitted disease with 100% mortality’-life, favoured by Fate ( or not), with utter indifference, in the gifts of physical attractiveness, intelligence and amiability, our Rightwing fellows are riven by fear, and its boon companion, hatred. Basically fear and hatred of the Other, a process exacerbated by the Rightist’s habitual psychological projection, where their feelings of fear and loathing are assumed to be inherent in everyone else.
The process of protecting oneself from this overwhelming dread has produced many of the manifestations of human culture. Religion plainly plays an essential role, denying the reality of death, consoling the unlucky for life’s unfairness, repressing women and keeping a lid on social tension, as the exploited and brutalised rabble are promised ‘pie in the sky’ when they die, just so long as they remain quiescent and obedient during this life. Capitalism, where the accumulation of material possessions is plainly an attempt to compensate for feelings of cosmic insignificance, is another method. The pathopsychological rewards of beggaring others, of stealing with society’s protection and admiration, cannot be underestimated. This being a process for those without scruples, with contempt for others, and being the means by which money power, the primary source of power and legitimacy in capitalist societies, is acquired,capitalism perpetuates the rule of the worst in society, a process that only worsens and aggravates itself with the passage of time.
I think the clearest manifestation of our rule by psychopaths who hate and fear other people is not our endless wars, our massacres, or callous child killing, our mass torture or even our contempt for the weak and powerless within our own societies. It comes, I believe, in our ruling elites’ absolute indifference to the ecological collapse we are living through. I believe that the forces of Evil are mobilising to foment mob hysteria in the US against emissions trading, that third-rate ‘market’ solution’ to anthropogenic climate change. It looks like the same tactics employed in the ‘colour revolutions’ that the US Right has used to impose compliant, pro-business, proto-fascist regimes around the world, coming home. In the face of almost complete scientific consensus that every major life-sustaining ecosystem is collapsing, the Right finances and maintains a gigantic apparatus of lies and misinformation that denies every problem. And its hideous activity is supported, hysterically and belligerently, by the entire ghastly mob of Rightwing homunculi, without any idea or care that they are being manipulated. All that matters for them is the delicious emotion of rank hate that they feel, as they berate the despised ‘Greenies’ and environmentalists that they have been indoctrinated by the corporate media to fear and despise for decades.
When one considers that the Right are not entirely stupid, not universally moronic, what can explain this crusade to stop, by any means necessary, any action to ameliorate our plight? Greed, insatiable avarice, explains much. The capitalist appetite for limitless growth mirrors their limitlless greed, which, of course is antithetical to all natural processes, where sufficiency and balance are all. The unbounded growth of any organism inevitably leads to ecological collapse, yet the capitalist is unconcerned. What is going on?
I suspect it is just the playing out of the Rightists’ omniphobia, their fear and hatred of everything. I suspect that somewhere, deep down in the tortured labyrinth of the Rightwing psyche, that the future, and in particular, those who will be living when the currently extant Rightwingers are dust (having passed through the slime stage)are so absolutely despised that those in power at the moment could not give a stuff whether they suffer or thrive. Indeed, I have noticed more than a few Rightwing anthropogenic climate change denialists lately accusing the scientific rationalists of actually desiring a climate change apocalypse. Leaving aside the trademark insanity of accusing those who are feverishly attempting to avert disaster of really wishing it would happen, it is clearly the most transparent and chilling projection imaginable. By their lurid abuse, they give away their own inner psychic landscape. We are heading for an apocalypse because powerful people want it to happen, which of course, brings us to fundamentalist religious belief. The longing for, the desire for ‘End Times’ when the elect are to be ‘raptured’ to ‘glory’ leaving the evil hordes to death and suffering, lies behind much anthropogenic climate change denialism, I am certain. As the ‘Good Book’ says, the world will end in ‘..the fire next time’, an outcome devoutly to be desired, by some.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:45:45 +0000

The Copenhagen Post – ‎Aug 19, 2009‎
The Foreign Ministry has cancelled 20000 overnight hotel reservations meant for people attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December. .

Now if I was part Indian wait I am you might call this a sign.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:13:03 +0000

Joe that’s it and I always’ remember that lady in a hospital gown walking down the sidewalk that had just got health care in LA and was let out of an ambulance in West or was it East LA as part of her treatment. Strange day’s ahead as the people now in control of this out of control system well the bullshit is going to get very hard to peddle. Just think maybe more people will say wait one little minute how can that be true it just doesn’t make sense. An asteroid football field size North Atlantic welcome to the Universe.