JimBlog.net

The Onion.com makes me belly laugh every time I visit. Here are some favorite headlines gleaned from a recent stumble thru the site, to encourage you to visit, and laugh:

Bush Vows To Remove Toxic Petroleum From National Parks

CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years

Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department

Astronauts Suffer Agonizing, High-Pitched Death After Helium Leak
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infowars.com

For the past two weeks I’ve been listening to Alex Jones daily. This is the Austin, Texas radio journalist and activist who has remained focused for longer than anyone in the media on exposing the drift of our American experiment in democracy toward tyranny. Special concerns of Jones and his guests include 9/11, the power leaving average American citizens and accumulating into the hands of wealthy elites, and the ever-expanding police state as our republic morphs into Big Brother.

He has guests on who share his concerns, such as Willie Nelson, Ray McGovern, and the young man who made the eye-opening documentary Loose Change was his guest host last week. His excellent coverage of the Irish vote against acceptance of the Constitution of Europe included conversation by phone with Irish activists on the ground, and was deeper than anyone in the mainstream and many independent broadcasters.
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Sin blinds.
Power corrupts.
God loves.
Truth shines.
The battle rages on.
The darkness
of misapprehension
is a fog
of war.
All souls
are soldiers,
knowingly
or not
willingly
or not.
Every mind, a moral agent.

netflix.com page for film
imdb.com page
http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/

No End In Sight is a well-made feature-length documentary film which reviews the mistakes made by the Bush Administration in Iraq. I just finished watching it, and it prompted me to write the following observations.

The biggest frustration I have with Bush is that he and his dwindling followers convince themselves that he has been fighting a war on terror, and has made us safer, when in fact his bumbling missteps and criminal neglect to lead his nation’s military has made us much more vulnerable, creating more ill-will and terrorist motivation than if he had just done nothing at all after September 11, 2001.
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America, why not take back our airwaves for neighborhood radio stations?

PROBLEM:
Radio stations across America are being consolidated quickly into fewer and fewer large multi-national corporations. The local voice of local radio is drowned out by ClearChannel, Sirius and XM satellite radio, and even NPR’s local voice is abdicated more and more to the national feed. Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, you could take your freshly minted single down to the local DJ, and he would play it on the radio. You use to be able to call in to a local radio personality and speak personally to all the local listeners about a topic of local concern. News beyond the inane surreal bites that local TV allows past their filters was readily available in the longer, more in-depth treatment only radio news tends to allow any more.

The problem is that you and me, the local consumer of radio, have no voice in this radio marketplace. The powers that we put in charge of making sure our airwaves remain OUR airwaves have sold out to the highest bidders, the media conglomerates. They aren’t hearing us anymore. The two big parties seem more interested in getting elected and preserving status quo than solving any serious problems. Appealing to them will get us nowhere fast.

SOLUTION:
In every single neighborhood in this country is an institution for the education of the public known as the local public school. We, the people, send our kids there (disclaimer: I don’t; I send mine to the private school where I teach, but please– keep reading!), pay for the school’s upkeep through our local property taxes, and occasionally visit the campus for parent-teacher conferences, to vote, or for other community functions. The local public school is a ubiquitous, known entity which is vital to every community, and control over its activities is fiercely maintained at the most local levels, namely, the parents and teachers and local school boards.
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UPDATE: Now that the event has finished, the archiving begins. You can still hear all the testimony at the links below. But Democracy Now! is devoting a portion of their hour long show every day this week to rebroadcasting portions of it. Go to democracynow.org for more.

Iraq Veterans Against the War
warcomeshome.org/wintersoldier2008

You owe it to the troops.
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Corporations have brought great amounts of inventiveness and positive change to Planet Earth. But at what cost? And if it will soon be too late to fix the global damage due to CO2 and other pollutants, why is Exxon attempting to delay the inevitable changes that must happen in order for the human race to survive the next few generations?
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If the dictator is perfectly benevolent and infinitely wise, then dictatorship is to be preferred over democracy.

If the dictator rules in a laissez-faire fashion regarding his subjects’ free moral agency, no one would rebel against him; there would be no motive for revolutionary regime change.

If the dictator had omnipotent power, but only ever chose to use it to empower his subjects to pursue their own passions, loves, and happiness, guiding and guarding them from all dangers without and within, then democracy would be a ridiculous suggestion.

This type of dictatorship describes the political reality described in the biblical pre-fall and post-millennium universe. Here in the present, inside this brief window of time, within the sin vaccination probationary era, there exist a few God-friendly governments. This writer would identify them as democratic republics with strong socialist sympathies. Examples would include the post WWII, pre-Reagan United States of America, and many of the current members of the European Union, notably Norway, France, and Sweden. These nations are God-friendly because they have made the sincere attempt to maintain for their society the values of religious liberty and social justice.
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Having 66,000 pages of tax code is a powerful smoke-screen for the Federal Reserve/IRS’s sleight-of-Invisible-Hand, enabling the power-knowledge of “what does the law mean?” to be reserved to a shadowy priesthood of tax lawyers and high-level economics gurus. Who knows these people? When do they get questioned by journalists on our national news media? When does their work ever get scrutinized? Why doesn’t their all-important job description ever become common knowledge? When does their job performance ever make it into the popular news media, academic curricula, or congressional oversight?

If and when a President or U.S. Senator ever gets to hold them accountable or evaluate their performance, how does he or she know the right questions to ask, without one of these same economic gurus or priests advising them?

How might an interested tax-payer ever gain access to the knowledge base needed to formulate a critical line of inquiry, nevermind legally gain physical access to them in order to even ask the questions?
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“What this suggests about the people running America is far worse than if they were simply malevolent super-geniuses: They don’t know the backstory and couldn’t care less. It’s as though we’re riding in the back seat of a car driven by people who demanded the wheel but aren’t sure what the gas pedal does or what a stop sign actually looks like.”

- from Jonathan Schwartz’s reflections on Bill Kristol’s March 28, 2003 debate with Daniel Ellsberg on CNN

No, I think maybe they actually are malevolent. I can’t seem to distract myself from the perspective of God in the Final Judgment. We gave them napalm! That’s pretty much malevolent’s very definition, yup.

Back up. This is a quote from Jonathan Schwarz’s wonderful article in TomDispatch.com, “The Lost Kristol Tapes,” first seen by me on commondreams. This article is wonderful because it slaps back into his seat that petulant man-baby, Bill Kristol, who wants so bad to get his hands on the launch codes, but somehow (God, maybe?!) keeps getting held back into position as “journalist,” or “advisor,” or, once, Dan Quayle’s chief of staff. Maybe the neocons are smart enough to know that certain people, if given absolute power, would destroy the whole sand box.
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