By Jason Miller

9/3/08

I am the earth. You are the earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers.

–Ymber Delecto

What a sorry lot we humans are, particularly those of us immersed in the “American Way of Life.” Killing is indeed our business. And business has never been better.

According to the World Resources Institute, 4 species go extinct every hour “due to tropical deforestation alone.”

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“Welcome to the land of the free!”

By Ron Jorgenson in St. Paul, Minnesota

2 September 2008

Simulposted with the World Socialist Website

Federal and local police forces carried out five raids over the weekend aimed at stifling and intimidating protesters preparing to take part in demonstrations during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. Armed police used battering rams to break down doors, then cuffed and forced people to floors. They searched and seized property, including computers, political literature and a variety of household items alleged to be used as weapons to disrupt the RNC proceedings scheduled for the week of September 1-4.

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Speaking of sleazy, is that Sarah Palin in the photo on the right?

“Alaska isn’t really very hard to understand. It consists of a minority that loves the wilderness and an overwhelmingly Republican majority that wants to squeeze all the cash it can get out of the state before the oil dries up, the fish die out and the wildlife disappears…”

By John Dolan, [AlterNet]

Posted on September 2, 2008

Most people had never heard of Sarah Palin when she was named the Republican VP nominee. But I’d been hearing her name all too often, because I belong to a group called Defenders of Wildlife — and in her time as governor of Alaska, Palin has used her position as governor of Alaska to ruin the Alaskan wilderness in every way she could.

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Al-Masri is from Beit Hanoun, a small, half-destroyed town on the border with Israel. He trains among the constant sound of bullets and shells. After many appeals involving the Israeli media the runner was allowed to leave his Gaza prison temporarily.

By Ramzy Baroud

9/2/08

To run a full marathon experts suggest that the aspiring athlete requires at least six months of rigorous training, proper gear, a particular diet, regular check-ups, mental focus and preparation, and a variety of gadgets depending on one’s budget. Ironically, the poorest countries in Africa have also produced some of the world’s best marathon runners.

I never imagined running a full marathon myself. Only when my doctor advised me, following back surgery over a year ago, that I should not walk more than 20 minutes at a time did I decide to run one. And I have.

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By Roland Michel Tremblay

8/31/08

So many things are just fake and faking it, just like life. You might think this article will be my least significant one, I feel it is my most significant one. Because it touches to our daily life, everything we do, everything we are. It defines one’s existence from the beginning to the end, if there is such a thing in sight. What are we all about? What is it that we do, that we are? A job. How are we treated in that job? Very badly indeed. Like children, like prisoners, like animals. Well, we will have to put a stop to this corporate bullying.

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The cruelty of craven speciesist hunters who slaughter ridiculously over-matched non-human animals and call it a ’sport’ is boundless, whether the “gamesman” is seeking sadistic pleasure or monetary gain—”The elephant is prized by poachers for its ivory tusks, so the illegal hunters literally hack off the elephant’s face and leave the carcasses to rot.”(the photo and blurb concerning elephant murder originally appeared in Corazon Curioso)

Obsessions

April 2003 Atlantic Monthly

“I was always interested in animals,” says Thomas Venezia, recently the subject of an extensive criminal investigation stemming from his hunting practices. “I always wanted to be near them”

by John Vaillant

Overkill

Until January of last year, when a federal judge fined him $4,500, confiscated $15,000 worth of his equipment, and banned him from hunting anywhere in the world for five years, Thomas Venezia specialized in bagging waterfowl. Venezia was a hunter and guide in his mid-forties who operated out of Williston, Vermont. A virtuoso with duck calls, decoys, and shotguns, he was able to draw down entire flocks of geese flying a thousand feet overhead. Once the birds were within range, he could kill them with shots that other hunters wouldn’t even attempt, sometimes using spectacular, almost instantaneous pivots of his shotgun to dispatch birds flying toward him, head on. “He’s brilliant,” says Bradley Carleton, an expert hunter who assisted Venezia on several hunting trips. “No question. His focus is extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone who was that obsessed.”

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By Carolyn Baker

8/27/08

Simulposted with Speaking Truth to Power

Most individuals who recognize that something is terribly wrong with the world and who for all their complaining are consciously struggling to create a more humane existence on planet earth, also empathically perceive that the essence of empire is its merciless, relentless ability to divide and alienate human beings from each other, from themselves, and from the earth community. As a result, awake, compassionate, twenty-first century earthlings understand that human consciousness cannot be transformed until we have learned on every level that there is no separateness-no “us and them”, no division, no “other.” Certainly, all persons whom I perceive as allies in our collapsing world work very hard to move beyond their empire-inculcated “otherness disorder.”

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BY JOHN STEPPLING ||  Print This Post

8/26/08

A few thoughts on the electoral theatre that is upon us.

First, the most obvious and glaring reality of US politics is that only the very, very rich participate. This single fact really should give one pause, should give everyone who actually works for a living pause. As one old Wobbly put it, there are two kinds of people in the world, those who work and those who don’t.

Now, John McCain, like Kerry, got most of his money via his second wife …. after dumping his first one. Cyndi is a beer heiress, and if McCain were to be elected, and I think he will be, he will the first US president to have signed a pre-nuptial agreement. Anyway, the McCains spend, for household employees, $273,000 (in 2007), according to John McCain’s tax returns. The butler and maid budget for a single year exceeds a decade’s income for most Americans.

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Everyone lived long and was youthful—in a technological Shang-ri-la, brought to our youthful attention by G.E. (only later did I learn that meant General Electric, maker of kitchen appliance-wonders and nuclear bombs).

BY GARY CORSERI ||  Print This Post

8/26/08

Why am I not surprised by Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate? Because I learned as a child: in America, the future never comes!

Should we shake our heads, wondering, when the candidate for “change we can believe in” chooses a consummate Washington “insider” as his co-agent for that change? Not if we understand that we have lived for decades in a military-industrial, media-fashioned, academia-certified, legally sanctioned Disney World/Murdoch World in which the future never comes.

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By Alison Banville ||  Print This Post

8/24/08

In the movie, American Pycho, Christian Bale gives us one of the most chilling portraits of a psychopath ever committed to celluloid. Adapted from the controversial novel of the same name by Brett Easton Ellis, the film introduces us to a man who appears to have it all. Handsome stockbroker Patrick Batemen lives in an expensive apartment, drives a fabulous car, wears exquisitely tailored suits and eats at the best restaurants with his classy fiancé. But these rewards are also the source of a constant, gnawing status-anxiety which sees him desperately fixated on maintaining his position in the hierarchy of success. The scene in which he boils with anger when a colleague produces a superior business card is one of the film’s most fascinating and chilling moments and it is this murderous rage which leads to him descending into an orgiastic killing-spree in which various examples of society’s dispossessed are dispatched.
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