Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Taming Kili


                     Proved to have been impossible. Kili will never be anyone's "indoor" cat. This picture shows Kili before his right tear duct was torn out and his ear torn (in two separate fights). We will miss the hell out of you big buddy. And keep you in our hearts forever.
    

Friday, November 9, 2012

Congratulations, You Own It



    I am sure that readers of this blog will be hoping for a heated, overwrought reaction from myself about the re-election of Hif Majeftie, Mr. Obama. They will be hoping for a ranting tantrum, full of “right-wing” bile and uxor. It is a disappointing state of affairs, but I fully expected it. I am absolutely undeluded by the right wing and their knee jerk mentality which so many celebrity cases have tweeted, twattled, and twittered. For one thing the majority of their impressions of Hif Majeftie are quite off base: that he is Kenyan, a Moslem, and a Socialist, bringing like AntiChrist a slavery of financial austerity.  Certainly we are muddling along, but that is less his own will than it is the unwillingness of industry to take risks in difficult times.

     Wrong they are as to his national origin (he is a native Hawai'ian) but resemblance to Hawai'ian culture ends with him, there. A real akamai Hawai'ian kamaaina might have offered the occasion for more public visits from state residents, in the White House. A real Hawai'ian might have a much more laid-back approach to policy- “Hey bra, what’s the prob?” The President’s personality is more befitting his latter life in the cold, grey windy bitter city of Chicago, where his politics actually took shape.

    That he is a Moslem is indeed another real misnomer. He has oft stated his Christian belief and attends a Christian church, when he goes. He would do well to read Tolstoy (and in that I mean, go deeper than War and Peace, and delve into his philosophical essays)- and get an idea what true Christian fellowship actually entails. It owes much less to Caesar than it does God, and less to any one nation than it does a planetary community.

     Finally, the idea he is a Socialist is wrong as well. He is less a Socialist than he is a Federalist. Federal authority has come under some strong constitutional scrutiny from folks such as myself in recent years and months but Obama sees himself more as the eye on the Pyramid than he does the shield on the Seal.

     It was obvious from the returns that third party candidates would not do well, seeing as “common wisdom” has of late been bent into a “lesser of two evil choices” practice. If all you saw was mainstream media in this election then this would be an easy assumption, but a wrong one. At least 1.6 % of the electorate made clear this year at least there is still truth in Lincoln’s dictum, “but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

      As I made clear in my “No Means No” post, I myself am a former supporter of Hif Majeftie, and folks who like to call themselves political “boffins” would do well to ask people like myself “why did YOU not vote to re-elect, if you had liked him to begin with.” Well, for one, I fell for the con. He talked a good talk. He was NOT George Bush. And he made many promises, which were, to me, a good sign for the positive direction he might take us. I have reneged on this offer of trust, because, frankly, he has earned my distrust. He said he would close Guantanamo- it still festers, like a scab on the Psyche and Goodwill of Columbia. He kept in place a great many of his predecessor’s odious policies and continues to to this day. He promised to lay off the medical marijuana community  and instead, sent his Atty. General out to harass and incarcerate them. He sent his armed thug and goon squads into the Gibson guitar company, to harrass them over an endangered exotic hardwood import restriction which the Indian government themselves had waived, just because the president of Gibson  contributed in a major way to his Republican opponent, before his first election. He –and this is the one thing which irked me most- lied about his intention on (not) signing NDAA 2012. When a man says he will not do something, and then he does, what else can you call him but a liar? When a man claims that some things are inimicable to our way of life, and yet, goes along with political pressures to presume them, what can that make him but a hypocrite?

     Democrats, you elected him. You have had four + years to live with him and his “endless, global war”. You own his illegal Drone War as much as you own LBJ’s Vietnam and Harry Truman’s atomic bombs. (That your Party Chairwoman has no inkling such a thing as his terrorist “Kill List” exists is either a marvel of ignorance or a willful case of denial.) You own all his whining about "George did it first!" as well as his retaining all of George's war and police-state policies. For a candidate who  claimed to be our best hope for Peace, he has shown himself out as a man willing – in a most Machiavellian fashion- to do whatever it takes to win, even if that means the deaths of hundreds (or thousands) of innocent foreigners and even if that means that of US citizens. I am not sure any longer what exactly he is trying to win. This is one problem I have. If he intends to “rub out Al Qaeda”, then the cause is hopeless- they recruit more with every death-by-drone of an innocent bystander- someone’s relative,brother, mother, sister, father. (“But what the hell, they aren’t Americans, so, so what” -I hear the ignorant refrain.)

     War is terror. I believe there is a Latin saying “Dulce Bellum Inexperte”- roughly, “war always seems best to those who know nothing of it.” Hif Majeftie’s minions would like you to think, that because he has “read Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on the subject” that somehow he is a man acting from moral principle. But the works of both of those men dealing with a most un-Christian institution (war = state-sanctioned murder) were written (and are quoted) more to excuse the Crusades and Inquisition than they are valid philosophy for moral purists like myself. And I wonder, ‘has he read Macchiavelli?” because it really seems sometimes (esp, whereas, the Chicago school of politics he represents)- his speeches are full of the language of divisiveness. “ I will FIGHT; We will STRUGGLE; We will DEFEAT”; ”Voting is REVENGE”- the venom and bellicosity in his campaign rhetoric, I was struck by that. “That’s no laid back Honolulu kid talking, there.” That is the same old asshole crap.

     That the great majority of the Democratic Left swallowed their castor oil by voting for him-“I don’t like him, but Romney’s worse”- I think Romney was right to run against Obama’s record. He blew a few things, sure, and maybe he was not up to snuff, or miscalculated the blowback from his “47%  are leeches” comments. The Democrats campaigned more against the Boogieman of what Romney MIGHT have done, than against taking umbrage at what Obama has already been doing, giving this country even more of a black eye in the eyes of the world.

        Apparently also too few of them are aware of Project Censored’s “#1 uncovered story” about the rise of a Police State in the United States of America. This has been a trend, actually, since Bill Clinton was president, but Bush hit the accelerator, and Obama has put pedal to the metal. Internet privacy, Right of Peaceable Assembly to vocalize dissent, hi-tech “solutions” such as spy cameras and domestic drones- these are symptoms of a Federalist mentality which sees a “terrorist” under every bed and a “criminal” behind every joint.

     But I also noted with disgust the way some Democrats have reacted themselves, in their winning, as well. If some people- like Ted Nugent, for one- show little grace or sensibility in defeat, (the candidate possessed, admirably, a great deal more than his supporters) some Democrats show themselves as to possess little graciousness in victory, offering not a hand to grant the vanquished mercy, but tossing in a few more kicks for good measure as well. This approach does not bode well for America.

     And then, there are the political hack “journalist” operatives,  like Chris Matthews, who with great temerity call third party voters “idiots”- I wonder just who‘s the real idiot- the man who saw through both major party candidates, and gave his vote to someone he trusted more, or the man who made of himself  a "useful idiot" for the incumbent, and the Party Platform At All Costs- a vote, not a face, a statistic and demographic, not a person with intellect and judgement. Hail to the Idiocracy! Since the passage of NDAA 2012, we are looking at, not a presidency any longer, but an unprecedented potential military dictatorship. If the US Armed Forces now have a police role inside the USA it blows away 900 years of blood-won Western legal tradition in which (since the Magna Charta) the sovereign (i.e; Executive) was prevented from, and now has the right to: hold and detain anyone he suspects; search and seize anyone’s anything on whatever whim he pleases, KILL whomever he so chooses, anywhere on the face of our planetary home (the NSA will courteously offer up the letters of attainder) and habeus corpus may be placed in suspension in the matter of any possible individual case or national crisis situation, solely because- Hif Majeftie demands. And that is why I will continue to – name him by this sobriquet. Now I return to cultivate my garden, literature, music, friendships, and livelihood-and bid the world- do take a care for each other.