Considering what the Greek people are going through with the ongoing financial terrorism being waged against them and their country, I found it quite moving that the French in particular have held rallies to show their solidarity with the Greek nation.
The slogan and poster below says it all, especially considering the French nation's own little revolution back in 1789:
Everyone everywhere should feel solidarity for the rape and pillage that is being endured by the Greeks. After all, today it's them, tomorrow it could be us...
Yes, indeed - I too am Greek!
Do you get my point?
As Greece is forced to capitulate YET AGAIN to the Evil Troika that is the IMF, EU and ECB (or some devious variation thereof), so the country plunges even further into the abyss.
The latest 'bailout' of 130-billion euros is nothing of the sort - it's yet another wholesale pillage of public money by banking and financial terrorists under the guises of 'restructuring' and 'austerity measures' for a nation that is, essentially, bankrupt.
The only Greeks who continue to suffer are ordinary Greeks - now made to work longer hours than the Americans or Brits (as if that were a measure of 'productivity'), pay higher taxes than ever, take pay cuts of up to 30%, and still have all their social welfare programs slashed to almost nothing.
No wonder the Greeks are rioting in the streets and Athens looks perpetually bathed in the glow of angry fires.
For all these reasons and more, the only thing I can declare is:
BUY GREEK!!!!!
Whether it's Greek sardines or Greek olives or Greek shoes or Greek anything, we need to buy Greek, Greek, Greek. Hell, I even bought sesame honey sticks the other day just because I saw they were made in Greece! And very nice they were too.
We all need to show our solidarity with the people of Greece. It's the least one can do for an ancient and proud culture that's having it's very democracy and very dignity hacked to pieces as I write this.
Do you get my point?
Browsing through Yahoo today, I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw the following headline:
"French feminist warns green movement forcing women to stay at home"
What?!
I had to read on. And was appalled at what I read, which included, according to the Telegraph online: "Mrs Badinter claims a "holy reactionary alliance" of green politicians, breast-feeding militants, "back to nature" feminists and child psychologists is turning Frenchwomen into slaves to green "fads" like re-usable nappies and organic food."
What was that?
It continues, "In her new book, Conflit, la Femme et la Mere (Conflict, the Woman and the Mother), Mrs Badinter contends that this politically correct cabal is burdening mothers with intolerable guilt unless they stay at home and breast-feed for as long as possible."
What the hell is it with this woman? Is she seriously contending that the environmental movement is somehow 'anti the liberated woman?'
Mme. Badinter appears to have sound credentials - clearly a smart intellectual much admired in a country that still understands the importance of intellectuals in society , she is also married to a famous Socialist lawyer who was once France's Minister of Justice.
However, she is also the founder of one of France's leading advertising agencies (the very well known Public Groupe) and one of the richest women in that country. That may explain a lot - nothing like a filthy rich champagne socialist.
To equate trying to save this planet with being anti-woman or somehow unfeminist, whatever your reasoning, smacks of agitprop reactionary thinking that belies logic. It's like saying that Margaret Thatcher was a staunch feminist just because she became prime minister.
On the contrary, Mme. Badinter, loving this planet is loving all life therein, woman most definitely included.
Intellectual credentials or not, this is the classic case of the message far outweighing the messenger.
In thinking she is somehow being 'autre' or fashionably contraire, Mme. Badinter is being little more than that most tired cliche - the heckler of the environmentalist.
How very petit bourgeoise and pathetic of you, madame - which is why I am making you my Stupid Bitch of the Week.
Do you get my point?
Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London and notorious leftwing rabble rouser, has not only become my man of the week, but quite possibly of the next few months too.
Turns out that 'Red Ken' as he is known was quoted as saying, "Hang a banker a week until the others improve."
I fricking love it!
I heard about this for the first time yesterday on The Keiser Report on Russia Today. It certainly got the thumbs up from Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert! In fact, Max has been baying for the blood of bankers for months now. And in no uncertain terms.
Better still, Ken said this out loud at a business conference of all places. And, according to a spokesman of his, he's said the same thing "about twenty or thirty times before." Talk about a guy with balls the size of an elephant's!
Hurrah! At last, a well-known peson in the UK is openly verbalizing what so many of us 'down below' and around the world believe more and more - that the thieving, degenerate, corrupt banking scheisters that are literally decapitating the world should literally be hanged or shot so that the message gets out there to all banking terrorists:
STOP YOUR OBSCENITY AND STOP DESTROYING THE WORLD! WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH!
Of course, there's been high and mighty 'shock' and 'dismay' from some in the City's banking community. According to Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association, which these days is like being the head of the London Chapter of the Gambino clan, the industry employs half a million “ordinary, hard-working people” [yeah, who've aided and abetted in screwing over tens of millions of ordinary, hardworking people around the world], including 140,000 in London. “Continual demonisation of the entire banking industry . . . is unhelpful and won’t attract jobs and business to the UK,” she said.
Oh, boo hoo to you, you stupid banking bitch.
For too long the banking and financial mavens of the City in London, along with their mafiosi cohorts on Wall Street, have held sway over the world economy and socio-political discourse. With a strangle grip of Olympian proportions. And look at the disgusting mess they've left us in.
All power to Ken for having the balls to say out loud what so many of us want and discuss behind closed doors.
Ken is my Man of the Week - and perhaps beyond.
Do you get my point?
It is almost fifty years ago to the day that John Glenn became the first man to ever orbit the Earth. It was a momentous achievement not only for the United States space program but for all human endeavour into outer space.
Just over seven years later Neil Armstrong became the first man to step onto the moon. A few years after that it was the turn of a series of space shuttle flights, interspersed with space stations, probes into outer space and even a little rover stumbling around a few square feet of Mars - or so it seemed.
It would seem that so much has happened in space exploration in the past fifty years since John Glenn bravely zipped around the world in his little capsule.
Or has it?
Yes, there have been space shuttle triumphs and even space shuttle tragedies, and probes have indeed beamed back fantastic, surreal images from the far reaches of our galaxy and even beyond. Yes, the International Space Station lasted quite a few years and was disbanded just last year (I believe) amidst some fanfare abouts its many achievements.
But what of our human exploration of the outer realms, of 'the next level?' What of more extensive space travel that goes above and beyond a few people (and mega rich folks who paid their way) floating around a cramped, rather shabby-looking space station? What of all the talk in decades past of imminent travel to Mars and even the colonization and terraformation of Mars? What of trips beyond our moon and our immediate heavens, even if only for a brave few?
Why does it seem that, for all the talk of great 'breakthroughs' in space exploration every once in a while, it all seems rather damp squib when compared to the heady space age days of the 1960s, '70s and even '80s?
We just don't seem to have progressed quite as far and quite as flashily as we should have done. Especially when you consider all the phenomenal technological breakthroughs that have occurred in recent years right here on Earth. Changes that have re-shaped the very human existence as we know it. Space exploration, especially by humans, seems to have become almost pedestrian in comparison...
Why so?
The dissolution of the Soviet Union certainly took the urgent fizz out of the space race that was such a cornerstone of Cold War bragging rights. But is that the only reason, especially for the only remaining 'superpower?'
Or could it possibly be the fact that maybe, just maybe, endless wars that cost billions and billions to wage (if you pardon the pun) somehow take precious public money away from a more 'trivial' and less urgent 'expense' like, say, space exploration?
Wars on Earth preventing us all from the joys and collective knowledge acquired from accelerated space exploration? Surely not, hey?
Those brave men who certainly had the right stuff have certainly had their legacy made most shabby in just a half century, give or take.
Do you get my point?
I was devastated to find out early this morning that Whitney Houston had been found dead in her suite in the Beverley Hilton. She was just 48 years of age.
The first reports coming out are that she was found in the bath, possibly from an accidental death due to prescription drugs.
What a tragedy.
For so many years now I had been so hoping she would overcome her well-documented drug addiction and demons. Whilst others made fun of her and mocked her descent into drugs and delusion, I kept hoping, hoping and hoping the Whitney I had loved would return. I even found myself defending her on more than ocassion, as if I somehow owed her that. Like millions of fans around the world, I kept willing her on, so hoping she'd make that big comeback and put all the darkness behind her and be the star once more that we had all fallen in love with back in the 1980s.
But it was not to be. An icon of my youth, the epitome of all that was good and talented and beautiful in that era, is now gone. A voice like no other, a presence like no other. Gone.
There is a reason why the photo I have included of her in this post is one of when she was younger, before the darkness descended upon her.
Goodbye, Whitney. I am so very, very sorry.
I shall miss you...very much.
In my last post I ranted about the four-letter words that are an assault to online freedom and exchange of ideas and creativity, namely SOPA, PIPA and ACTA.
The online campaign against these sinister attempts at censorship on the Internet have been enormous, sustained and very bruising to those pushing for these intellectual property 'protections.' On the streets the protests have been somewhat more muted and less widespread.
Except in one European Union country. A country where the loud street protests against ACTA in particular have numbered in the hundreds of thousands and where even the national government is said to be running scared. One EU country's population is taking a very visible stand.
Is it Germany?
France?
The Netherlands?
No, no, and no again.
It's Poland.
I've seen the footage on Russia Today since last week of Polish citizens in their thousands thronging the streets and squares of Warsaw in the freezing cold, all to make their outrage at ACTA very known to their government. No other European country's populace has come close in so visible and vocal a street opposition to ACTA.
I was taken by surprise. One tends to view Poland (rather patronizingly, I now realize) as quite conservative, staunchly Catholic and very pro-American and, therefore, hardly the country one would guess would be the land in which an almost anarchic revolt against state and corporate censorship would be so vocal and so huge.
It almost made me want to hop on a plane and join them and, heck, maybe even go live in Poland!
If this is what their people are willing to do in the middle of winter (and Polish winters must be no joke) in the name of freedom and against state censorship, then that is one country that must be wholly more vibrant and alive and tuned in than I previously would have thought.
The Poles have put other Europeans to shame on this it would seem. And all power to them for that.
Bravo, Polska!
SOPA
PIPA
ACTA
These are the four letter words of our time. Okay, they're acronyms - but still akin to four letter words; of the very worst kind.
SOPA = Stop Online Piracy Act
PIPA = Protect Intellectual Property Act (much longer, pedantic title, but who cares)
ACTA = Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
Three pieces of legislation or agreements that are a total assault on Internet freedom, privacy and right to free speech as we know it.
Legislators and political leaders bray on and on about how the laws and agreements would be there to protect artists and writers (and billion-dollar corporations, of course) from intellectual property assaults and 'misuse' by websites and bloggers and individual users online. Supporters of ACTA stated how the agreement was tabled "as a response to "the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works," whilst Wikipedia reported how PIPA would have "the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to "rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods", especially those registered outside the U.S."
SOPA and PIPA are American(-corporatist) products, whilst ACTA is an agreement between Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the United States, whilst the European Union and 22 of its member states signed up to it in January of this year as well.
All to 'protect' intellectual property, of course.
The online community saw it all for what it was and thought differently. Rather strongly.
On January 18th Wikipedia shut down for a day, as did many other sites on the Web in protest against what they see as government and corporatist infringements on free exchange of ideas and creativity on the Internet. As reported by that stalwart of establishment so-called journalism, The Washington Post:
"Around the country, Americans woke up without some of the oddball essentials of online life. No Wikipedia. No Reddit, a compendium of links to stories and funny pictures that draws millions a day. And no I Can Has Cheezburger?, the world’s best-known collection of funny cat pictures."
No Wired and a host of other popular sites either, and Firefox and Google both blacked out certain parts of their landing pages to protest what they also saw as online censorship.
I have no doubt that the vociferous backlash from the online community against these travesties of 'intellectual property protection' caught legislators and their corporate pimps by surprise. Both U.S. bills have been shelved (for now, only for now), whilst ACTA has come under big opposition, most especially from a surprising quarter in the EU (see my next post).
Shutting down websites (including blogs just like mine, by the way) for 'illegal' posts, uploads and even links in the name of protecting IP is nothing more than government and corporatist censorship masquerading as 'protection.'
How will sites be monitored for these alleged IP infringements?
Where will the line be drawn on what constitutes 'intellectual property' and the sanctity of copyright (at all costs)?
Why should corporations like those in the movie, recording and porn industries have copyrights that can be endlessly renewed, going well beyond the 50 years limit that used to be normative in copyright law?
What is this really all about?
This is an assault and a colonization by governments and corporations of that last bastion of true democracy and capitalism on Earth - the Internet.
We're all a threat to them - and they know it. That is why we must fight, fight, fight these bastards, so that they leave us the hell alone in the only place where we have some semblance of freedom.
As far as the Internet is concerned, a luta continua!
Do you get my point?
I love getting a good chuckle on a Friday morning, which is why I loved this golden nugget I came across on Yahoo, as reported by Reuters:
"Inmates working at a Vermont
correctional unit's print
shop managed to sneak a prank image of a pig into a state police crest that is emblazoned
on police cars, and 30 cruisers
sported the design for the last year, officials said on Thursday.
The official crest depicts a spotted cow against a background of snowy
mountains, but the inmates' version featured one of the cow's spots shaped like
a pig in an apparent reference to the pejorative word for police, [a] state police
spokeswoman said."
Thirty police cars? And no one noticed for an entire year?
Oh my word. Fricking hilarious!
Of course, Vermont police officials got all sanctimonious about it, stating that it dishonoured the memory of all police officers who had died in the line of duty upholding law and order.
Oh, please.
They're just bloody embarrassed that a bunch of cons were able to do such a sly thing and it wasn't spotted (or, at least, reported) for a whole year.
I can just imagine how those inmates must have laughed their heads off as they plotted their porcine scheme and saw their works of art go forth...priceless.
Pigs in cruisers - I love it.
Tilda Swinton in We Need To Talk About Kevin: I simply cannot remember the last time that a performance has so stunned and so haunted me.
There is a reason why this is the first time ever that I have dedicated a post on this blog to a film performance.
The acclaimed, unsettling novel by Lionel Shriver by the same name stands as one of my favourite books of recent years. The book shook me to the core. I found it utterly brilliant and utterly compelling.
Too often one hears about how a book beloved by many or critically acclaimed is made into a crass film that does it no justice or, worse still, a sub-par, cheapo made-for-TV hack job.
I didn't try to think too much about how the film version of We Need To Talk About Kevin would pan out on the big screen. A complex, tautly written book as devastating as that was always going to be difficult to transfer to that most wickedly capricious of all art forms, the movie. That much I knew.
Thankfully, this film adaptation by Lynne Ramsay is a true success.
But it really is all about Tilda Swinton's masterful performance.
I do remember being very comforted when hearing about a year or so ago that Tilda Swinton was to play the lead role of the mother, Eva Khatchadourian in the film adaptation of Shriver's novel.
I was right to be comforted in that knowledge. Tilda Swinton was superb.
I cannot recall a performance in which the subtlest flicker of the eyes or the hunching of shoulders or the twitch of a nerve in a cheek ever carried so much portent, so much gravitas, simply so much.
An imperfect character played perfectly.
Tilda Swinton's performance is beyond being the best of the year - it's simply one of the best ever. Period.
Her sublime, incredibly intelligent performance in this excellent film should be shown to all drama students and aspiring film actors. Forget the heavy emoting and the crying on tap, kids - this is how it's done.
Bravo, Tilda! I always knew you were one of a kind; one of the very, very best.
The whole escalating furore and ganging up by the West and certain Gulf states against Syria is, quite frankly, beyond the pale in its sheer cynicism and blatant geopolitical posturing.
It's not even posturing - it's masquerading at its most gauche and downright embarrassing.
After all, who the hell are the United States (aka Pimp and Sugar Daddy Supreme to the Apartheid State of Israel), United Kingdom, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain et al really kidding with all this jumping up and down regarding Syria and the sudden 'insurrection' by a 'populist movement' against the Assad regime?
They're certainly not kidding me, that much is for sure.
I do believe the Tunisian revolution was genuine and, to a certain degree, so too the spontaneous outpouring in Tahrir Square that toppled the heinous Mubarak regime in Egypt. I cheered loudly and joyfully for the peoples of those countries in their quest to run out corrupt, violent regimes that had ruled them for too long and too hard.
The authoritarian governments in Jordan, Algeria and Morocco suddenly scrambled throwing rights and promises of social and economic reform to their people. The fear of those regimes was palpable. The Arab Spring felt real and like a delirious fever gripping the entire region, and much to my delight.
But the creepy, brutal quashing of the uprising in Bahrain (fully aided by Saudi tanks and military might, let us not forget) piqued me and provoked an uneasy, sickening stirring deep inside me. Then the travesty known as the Libyan 'civil war' came along, and that made it all too clear - ah yes, the manipulations and geo-political contortions of the United States and its Western-Arab puppets were well under way once more.
The invasion of a sovereign state like Libya on the pretext of 'aiding the human rights' of the civilian population, when we all knew it was all about the gooey black stuff in the ground and getting rid of a dictator who no longer served any purpose, was not only illegal under international law, but set yet another dangerous, perverse precedent in international affairs and diplomacy.
And now Syria. All the usual suspects baying that Assad simply must go, go, GO! - and it's all so utterly transparent and so utterly cynical.
Yes, we all know that Assad is a dictator and that an authoritarian regime is never benign or just. But why now? Why right now? And why not invade nearly every Gulf state if it all boils down to human rights and democracy (which we all know it doesn't)? Jesus, if there's one country that's deserving of a mega invasion to free its people from one of the most disgusting regimes on the planet, then surely it has to be the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?!
Syria would have been invaded a loooong time ago if it had more of that gooey black stuff in its ground. It doesn't, so it's been left alone. But now the United States of Pentagon and its various puppets have set their sights on taking on none other than Iran, with Israel screaming for blood like some vicious little senile bitch on the sidelines, so where to go first? Ah, of course - Iran's closest ally in the region.
Enter, Syria.
And so the charade will get more gargoylesque and more innocent blood will be shed and all for what? Just to eventually invade Iran and create even more mayhem just for the sake of the West's hyper-industrial-military complex and that most neurotic, schizophrenic nation of all, Israel?
The cancer of cynicism will just spread and spread and spread. That's all.
It's been said many, many times before throughout history, but these are troubling times indeed.
Do you get my point?
This telling Time magazine cover from December 2010 has never been more apropos.
Julian Assange is fighting his extradition to Sweden in the Supreme Court in London as I write this - being already at the appeal phase, we all know that his chances of winning on appeal are about as good as George W. Bush suddenly becoming a pacifist and intelligent.
It just isn't going to happen. That is, Assange winning his appeal. He will be extradited to Sweden, where the Swedish authorities have already stated that they will immediately send him off to the United States to stand trial for treason.
And if he loses his treason trial in the United (Corporo-Fascist) States of America then he will be sentenced to death.
That is what fighting for the truth and seeking to unravel corruption and deception in the highest places will get a man like Assange.
That is what you get for trying to reveal the dark secrets of the super-elite and the rancid corruption of our so-called leaders.
That is what you get for living in a world run by Visa and MasterCard and Facebook and Shell and BP and the Pentagon.
My heart is very heavy at the moment. I cannot believe that I am living in a world where a man this brave and this committed to the truth is being frogmarched towards his (possible...probable?) obscene death.
I can only hope, hope, hope that Julian Assange will win his appeal and be able to fight the true fight another day.
Hope can be a very cruel jester.
Do you get my point?
