Kelly of Siam

This morning I opend the Crooks and Liars website to find this posting on the Seattle pro health care rally...


In Seattle, thousands rally in favor of health-care reform. But not even the local media cover it
By David Neiwert Monday Sep 07, 2009 12:00pm


I've been in California this week, but my friend Goldy back in Seattle managed to make it out to last week's massive rally in support of health-care reform.

There were several thousand people there, with only a tiny smattering of teabaggers opposed to reform. Goldy has photos and reportage on just how large the support for a public option was.

And yet, guess what? The media completely ignored the rally. Even the local paper -- the ostensibly neutral but in fact Republican-run Seattle Times -- ran not one single word about it.

Of course, forget about the national media bothering to report this, too.

They've been too busy telling us that the public option is dead because of the supposedly massive opposition to it created by teabaggers.

As Goldy says:

None of this happened yesterday in downtown Seattle because no ex-marine angrily yelled down a congressman and nobody got the tip of their finger bitten off and nothing apparently is going to get the media to move from the well-entrenched meme that support for reform is steadily slipping as the public turns against Obama and the Democratic Congress… not even a show of force by the public itself.



From HorsesAss.Org




If a tree falls in the forest, and the Seattle Times isn’t there to hear it fall….
by Goldy, 09/04/2009, 10:39 AM



I’ve no idea where I was yesterday afternoon, but it couldn’t possibly have been at an energetic, 3000-person strong pro-healthcare reform rally in Westlake Park, because I couldn’t find even the tiniest mention of it in this morning’s Seattle Times, so apparently, it never happened. And I have absolutely no idea where all those photos and videos on my camera came from.

It’s like my own personal Twilight Zone.

Of course, whatever didn’t happen in downtown Seattle yesterday, the picture above doesn’t even begin to do it justice, with a sea of bodies extending building to curb, and all the way back under the cover of the trees. Aided by a live band and the wafting aroma of food from street vendors, there was a party atmosphere to the rally which made it feel kinda like a Bumbershoot pre-event. Or at least, it would have felt that way, had it actually happened.



There was also, apparently, no counter-protest yesterday. No really, there wasn’t much of one, with only a couple dozen angry teabaggers at most, cordoned off along a four-foot-wide strip of sidewalk in front of the Starbucks across the street.

This was the most flattering picture I could find, and it’s pretty anemic:



But like I said, since our paper of record didn’t bother to report on it, none of this actually happened. 3000 people of all ages, races and walks of life didn’t crowd into Westlake Park to rally in support of health care reform. A congressman didn’t join business, labor and civic leaders in encouraging the crowd to make their support known. And a well-organized effort by counter-protesters couldn’t muster up much more than a bullhorn and a handful of signs.

None of this happened yesterday in downtown Seattle because no ex-marine angrily yelled down a congressman and nobody got the tip of their finger bitten off and nothing apparently is going to get the media to move from the well-entrenched meme that support for reform is steadily slipping as the public turns against Obama and the Democratic Congress… not even a show of force by the public itself.

UPDATE:
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one imagining yesterday’s health care reform rally, and like me, they managed to capture their hallucinations on camera too. Weird.

During my years as a public school teacher I became aware of the power of state textbook committees. Texas and California are the two largest. These committees decide which textbooks may be used in their state. Their power extends well beyond their local school districts and their state as the textbook publishers look at the committees' guidelines and fall in line. This allows their books to be considered in that state...so the decision of the Texas committee may cause HarperCollins to adopt neo-conservative stance to history. Now, this HarperCollins published school text is up for sale in Washington state.

I was fortunate enought to teach in a small school district that allowed me to use any text I saw fit as long as I could justify it. I was able to use Howard Zinn's "A Peoples' History of America" in my senior class Contemporary World Problems.

More about this later. Take a look at this......
Liars for Jesus
Posted by Richard Collins


Image by George Eastman House via Flickr

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1419644386/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

February 18, 2008

Amazon.com reviewer: Steven L. Roberts (Madison, WI)

Liars for Jesus by Chris Rodda is one of the best written and most important books about contemporary American politics that I have read in years. The only problem with this book is that it was apparently published with the author’s own money, making its availability somewhat limited. This book should be widely read and discussed, because it helps explain why the Christian Right seems so incomprehensibly loony to most of us who are not part of that movement, and, conversely, why they attack the rest of us with such unfettered zeal.

There has been a series of revisionist “history” books published since the end of WWII which give a “Christian” version of American history that attempts to paint the Founding Fathers and subsequent American culture in a way that is in agreement with contemporary Fundamentalism. We have now had a couple of generations of conservative Christians who have been buying into this version of history and reacting angrily to an America that assumes fundamental principals like the separation of church and state to be at the core of what America stands for.

Author Rodda systematically lists and then busts a series of myths that these spurious history books have generated. She leaves no stone unturned in doing so.

Things get really scary when she starts quoting Supreme Court opinions written by Rennquist, Thomas and Burger, and it becomes apparent that members of our highest court do not know the difference between real history and Fundamentalist wishful thinking.

The book is a fascinating study in how the desire for a different set of facts can, over time, morph into an alternative if deluded “reality”.

My Comment:

There is an insidious clandestine effort underway driven by Christian fascists to pollute the common person’s understanding of American history and the part religion plays in that history. This is not merely the usual difference of interpretation that ethical historians normally write about. As Michelle Goldman explains in her book, “Kingdom Coming”, what is dangerous is that a gradual shift has occurred so that what would have been unthinkable rubbish ten years ago is now embraced by the fascists as absolute truth.

Others, trained from childhood to follow authority blindly, accept the lies as truth. Since kids in sham homeschools never encounter any other point of view they readily accept the lies. Which is exactly why their misbegotten parents sequester them in their sham schools to begin with.

Accordingly, this propaganda posing as history is being freely passed around over the Internet and incorporated in textbooks sold to the child abusers engaged in lying to their children. Revisionist history books by several different authors (David Barton, Peter Marshall, Mark A. Beliles (Author), and Stephen K. McDowell to name a few) are widely used in sham homeschools along with grossly distorted books on science that are teaching ID and creation myths and calling it science.

Intelligent Design (ID): somewhere, at some point in time, someone did something, somehow, for some reason, that affected the history of life somehow – Michael De Dora Jr, CFI in a Tweet

Parents do this because they trust the likes of James Dobson, Michael Farris, Phylis Schafly, and Pat Robertson and they have no critical faculties. James Dobson, the high priest of religious child abuse, insists the most important quality a child can have is obedience. According to him children are inherently incorrigible and they must be whipped to convince them to obey what they are told to do. These are the methods totalitarians use.

We know from engaging parents on public discussion forums how deranged these people are and how futile it is to try and hold an intelligent discussion with them. A constant retort is, “well that is your opinion”, facts mean absolutely nothing. Their brains are reduced to a worthless pile of rotten cells that serve no function. Thus, we see the result of The Rise of Idiot America.
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How Idiot America got that way
Posted by Richard Collins


Image by permanently scatterbrained via Flickr



… increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors’ Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its “socialist” healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and “I wouldn’t be here without the NHS”.

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn’t new; it’s only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was “the greatest hoax in human history”, and that all the world’s climatologists were “liars”. The American media then presents itself as an umpire between “the rival sides”, as if they both had evidence behind them. …

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have “faith” – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don’t have “faith” that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need “faith” to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Johann Hari, The Independent

If children are taught to not only believe things on faith, but to also reject claims that are supported by evidence and reason when those claims contradict faith, then it shouldn’t be surprising that we get beliefs like those listed above. This sort of attitude is a great benefit to authority figures since they are, of course, the ultimate arbiters of which beliefs should be taken on faith and which shouldn’t.

What would happen if American schools instituted not just classes on critical thinking and skepticism, but actually inserted lessons on critical thinking throughout the curriculum? What would happen if students in public schools were consistently taught the importance of believing things based on evidence and reasoned arguments, not faith or slavish adherence to tradition or authorities? Who would be able to object without looking completely foolish? — Austin Cline, About.com
Religion Makes Conservative Republicans Impervious to Facts
______________________________________________________________________________
A Q&A with Charles P. Pierce, author of Idiot America
September 3rd, 2009 by Richard Collins


Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America?

Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise. And it looked like the national media simply could not help itself but be swept along. This started me thinking and, when I read a clip in the New York Times about the Creation Museum, I pitched an idea to Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire, that said simply, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” What we determined the theme of the eventual piece—and of the book—would be was “The Consequences Of Believing Nonsense.”

Question: You visited the Creation Museum while writing Idiot America. Describe your experience there. What was your first thought when you saw a dinosaur with a saddle on its back?

Charles P. Pierce: My first thought was that it was hilarious. My second thought was that I was the only person in the place who thought it was, which made me both angry and a little melancholy. Outside of the fact that its “science” is a god-awful parodic stew of paleontology, geology, and epistemology, all of them wholly detached from the actual intellectual method of each of them. The most disappointing thing is that the completed museum is so dreadfully grim and earnest and boring. It even makes dragon myths servant to its fringe biblical interpretations. Who wants to live in a world where dragons are boring?

Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect?

Charles P. Pierce: I don’t know if there’s one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” No. Perception is perception and reality is reality, and if the former doesn’t conform to the latter, then it’s the journalist’s job to hammer and hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it. That’s how “intelligent design” gets treated as “science” simply because a lot of people believe in it.

Question: You delve into Ignatius Donnelly’s life story. In 1880, he published the book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in an attempt to prove that the lost city existed. Yet, you characterize Donnelly as a lovable crank, and don’t take issue with him as you do with modern eccentrics, like Rush Limbaugh. What’s the difference between a harmless crank and a crank in Idiot America?

Charles P. Pierce: Cranks are noble because cranks are independent. Cranks do not care if their ideas succeed—they’d like them to do so—but cranks stand apart. Their value comes when, occasionally, their lonely dissents from the commonplace affect the culture, at which point either the culture moves to adopt them and their ideas come to influence the culture. The American crank is not someone with 600 radio stations spewing bilious canards to an audience of “dittoheads.” The concept of a “dittohead” is anathema to the American crank. He is a freethinker addressing an audience of them, whether that audience is made up of one person or a thousand. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.

Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America?

Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don’t notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.

Question: Is there a voice or leader of Idiot America?

Charles P. Pierce: The leaders of Idiot America are those people who abandoned their obligations to the above. There are lots of people making an awful lot of money selling their ideas and their wares to Idiot America. Idiot America is an act of collective will, a product of lassitude and sloth.

Question: What is the difference between stupidity and glorifying ignorance?

Charles P. Pierce: Stupidity is as stupidity does, to quote a uniquely stupid movie. It has been with us always and always will be. But we moved into an era in which stupidity was celebrated if it managed to sell itself well, if it succeeded, if it made people money. That is “glorifying ignorance.” We moved into an era in which the reflexive instincts of the Gut were celebrated at the expense of reasoned, informed opinion. To this day, we have a political party—the Republicans—who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.

Question: While writing Idiot America, what story or incident made you the most incensed?

Charles P. Pierce: Without question, it was talking to the people at Woodside Hospice, who shared with me what it was like to be inside the whirlwind stirred up by people who used the prolonged death of Terri Schiavo as a political and social volleyball to advance their own unpopular and reckless agenda. There are people—Sean Hannity comes to mind—who, if there is a just god in heaven, should be locked in a room for 20 minutes with Annie Santa Maria, the indomitable woman who works with the patients at the hospice. Only one of them would come out, and it wouldn’t be him.

Question: With the election of President Obama, is Idiot America coming to an end? Or, will there always be a place for idiocy in America?

Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.

Question: Are there any positive signs that we are moving away from Idiot America? If you could create a twelve step program to America back on track, what would be your first suggestion?

Charles P. Pierce: Remember that perception is not reality, that opinion, no matter how widely held, is not fact. An old and wise friend of mine said that the only question that any American citizen is required to answer is “Do you govern or are you governed?” It has to be answered in the former, and that answer has to be continuous. We have to get back to that.

(Photo © Brendan Doris Pierce, 2008)

From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Pierce delivers a rapier-sharp rant on how the America of Franklin and Edison, Fulton and Ford has devolved into America the Uninformed, where citizens hostile to science are exchanging fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and glutting themselves on reality TV and conspiracy theories. Pierce makes no apologies for his liberal bias, and some conservatives—notably evolution opponents and Rush Limbaugh—endure a good deal of bashing. Pierce writes that in the U.S., Fact is merely what enough people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it. He supports his thesis with references to James Madison and other founding fathers, who may have foreseen and rued the emergence of cranks who would threaten the Enlightenment-based nation they were shaping. Although the book is not likely to win any converts from the right wing Pierce so energetically decries, it is an engaging catalogue of those unscientifically verified truths that enthrall and impassion millions of Americans. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This story from Open Democracy




Russia's beleaguered anti-fascists
Vlad Tupikin, 2 - 09 - 2009
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No to Nazis ! - Russian antifa poster

Neo-nazi movements in Russia target foreigners, gypsies and, frequently, the anti-fascists (antifa), not blameless themselves, but often framed by the police. Vlad Tupikin wonders if the Russian government is really dancing to the tune of the neo-nazis.



On Tuesday 4 August 2009 the St. Petersburg City Court examined the appeal in the case of Alexei Bychin, a young anti-fascist arrested in the summer of last year. According to witnesses, the trial lasted around three minutes and upheld Bychin's sentence: five years in a maximum security prison. From three to five, as people say in jest. But this time the story isn't funny at all.

At the beginning of the white nights season in the middle of June 2008, a group of young punk rockers were walking around in the centre of Petersburg. Among them was Alexei Bychin, who had the ironic punk nickname Tolsty (Fatty), because he is thin and small (50 kg, 165 cm). There were girls in the group too.

Not far from the department store Gostiny Dvor, Bychin and the girls encountered two tough guys who decided to pick on them, and in a very peculiar way: they raised their right arms and shouted "Heil Hitler!" These two guys had picked up on signs that the group were anti-fascists. It's not very difficult - punks in Moscow and Petersburg are practically all anti-fascists nowadays, and not just in these cities. A slanging match ensued. Soon, words became actions. The skinheads made a ‘rose' (you knock out the bottom of a bottle and get a real weapon, quite a dangerous one) and hit Bychin. It was one scrawny kid against two big guys (the tradition in Russian society is that girls don't take part in street fights). Bychin took out a knife and stabbed one of them. The nazi sympathizers were not morally prepared for the knife and fled. The girls sighed with relief.

About a month later the police picked up a punk friend of Bychin's. He was handcuffed to a radiator in an uncomfortable position and held there for many hours until he broke down and grassed on Bychin. He rang and asked Bychin to come and meet him. Not expecting to be framed, Bychin turned up and was immediately arrested. The Petersburg police displayed such zeal in this rather trivial case for the understandable reason that the injured man was a colleague, a trainee in the Special Police Force (OMON). The journalist Tatyana Likhanova has unearthed the fact that he is also a former neo-nazi, who was in an extremist political group before he joined the army. A former neo-nazi or a current one, given the "joke" with which Bychin's night incident started?

The question arises: is Bychin paranoid? Why did he grab his knife? No, Alexei's not paranoid, his mental state is quite healthy, as the forensic medical assessment established. They also found a knife wound on his arm that was received at the time of the fight near Gostiny Dvor. But Bychin didn't go to hospital to get his wound treated and the former (?) neo-nazi did. Alexei must have remembered previous encounters between neo-nazis and anti-fascists, while he was being attacked. One in Petersburg ended very badly indeed. In the autumn of 2005 a 20-year-old punk musician and student at the philosophy faculty of St. Petersburg State University Timur Kacharava, was killed by neo-nazis. The killers shouted "Anti-antifa!"

In January 2007, Ivan Yelin, a young anti-fascist, was attacked: he had 21 knife wounds, but miraculously he survived. He managed to make a telephone call and the doctors arrived on time.

If we go further afield, we can continue the list: on 16 April 2006 anti-fascist Alexander Ryukhin was killed on the outskirts of Moscow. He was almost 20 (just a few days short of his birthday), and was going to a concert with a friend. Six neo-nazi killers armed with knives attacked them shouting "Anti-fa! Lets get 'em!" His friend Yegor who was walking next to him managed to run away. The killers caught up with Alexander, and stabbed him in the head and the heart. We note in passing that the investigating officer tried to charge three of the (six) killers who had been caught at the scene of the crime with public order offences. It was only the efforts of the lawyer Stanislav Markelov, now deceased, that ensured they were given a real prison sentence. But only three of them - the other three are still are out there somewhere.

In July 2007 at night on the outskirts of Angarsk neo-nazis attacked a small environmental antinuclear camp, where there were anarchists and anti-fascists. The outcome: seven injured, one killed - Ilya Borodaenko from Nakhodka. The attackers were arrested at the scene of the crime, but released on parole less than a year later. There hasn't been a trial yet. Under the currently fashionable "juvenile justice", consideration is given to the fact that the poor neo-nazi killers were under 18 at the time of the crime, or at least one of them was.

In the spring of 2008 Alexei Krylov was stabbed to death in the centre of Moscow, not far from the Russian presidential administration building. Like Ryukhin, he was going to an anti-fascist punk concert. There were around 15 attackers, and the girl who was with Krylov was also stabbed several times, but she was saved by her backpack, which was cut in several places, and also because she was able to evade some of the blows. Alexei Bychin, without a doubt, knew about all these incidents, as he is part of the same environment as those who were killed. He clearly simply didn't want to be the next person on the list of victims. But he fell victim to the corporate solidarity of the Petersburg police, who twisted the investigation in such a way that the two neo-nazi thugs became the innocent victims. The result was a sentence of five years in a maximum security prison.

However, the story of street confrontations between fascists and anti-fascists doesn't end there. In October 2008 Fyodor Filatov, the leader of the anti-racist skinhead group MTS was stabbed to death in the stairwell of his own building. MTS stands for Moscow Trojan Skinheads. It's worth emphasising once again that not all skinheads in Russia (and the world) are racists and neo-nazis and that the history of the skinhead movement in England began in 1969 with multi-racial groups of young workers. It was only 10 years later, with the beginning of the economic recession and the growth of unemployment, that they began to be recruited by the National Front. Fyodor was also not a racist or neo-nazi; on the contrary, he was an anti-fascist. His four killers have yet to be found. But the secret police were diligent in their pursuit of the anti-fascists: less than a month after Filatov's murder, his best friend, anti-fascist Alexei Olesinov, a former student of the Moscow State University philosophy faculty, was arrested at home.

On a trumped up charge of fighting with the security guards at the club Kult, he was sent down for a year. There were no injuries in the fight, though it wasn't even a fight, more of a scuffle, to club property or the security guards, which is incidentally what they themselves stated at the investigation and at the trial. Stanislav Markelov agreed to represent Fyodor Filatov's relatives in court. He became Olesinov's defence lawyer, but for understandable reasons (his death on 19 January 2009 from a shot to the head in broad daylight, not far from the Kremlin) he did not appear in court. Olesinov was defended in the final stages by lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin.

I am only listing the anti-fascist victims of neo-nazi terror, not the victims of retaliation attacks. This is for a good reason. Despite the established stereotype that "neo-nazis and anti-fascists are one and the same thing", Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian anti-fascists, young men and women of direct action, do not engage in murder. They may rough their enemies up, but they don't kill. In this sense the murder of the Ukrainian neo-nazi Maxim Chaika in Odessa was the tragic result of neo-nazi actions. 15 neo-nazis attacked 5 anti-fascists, who naturally got out their knives. There were no international conspiracies, no intrigues by Russia or any external forces acting against Ukraine, as President Yushchenko unworthily tried to prove during his election campaign. The war between neo-nazis and their enemies goes on all over the world. Now it has affected Ukraine as well.

In fact, and this is also quite well known, anti-fascists are not the only, or even the main, victims of neo-nazi killings. The main victims are foreigners, immigrants from other Soviet republics, gypsies, representatives of other non-Slavic (I almost said "non-Aryan") peoples of Russia. The champions of racial and national homogeneity spare no one. Among episodes laid at the door of the Voevodin-Borovikov gang, whose members have been on trial for six months in Petersburg, there are also murders and attempted murders of children. According to press reports (see for example the article by Natalya Shkurenok in "Vremya Novostei" last week), Voevodin is not ashamed to preach neo-nazism to the jury, and sympathizers of the accused appear at hearings with swastika tattoos on their arms and legs (as it's summer, they can wear shorts to show the Nazi symbol to the people of Petersburg, including survivors of the blockade). During the hearings several members of the gang have brought up episodes that are nothing to do with the case, or accomplices who don't figure in the case files. The judge usually interrupts the eloquence of the accused to say that these details are unnecessary.

Forgive me for a note of pathos: isn't this a farce?

At the beginning of August, the jury in the case of the Voevodin gang went on holiday (Borovikov, the son of a high-ranking Petersburg policeman, who was the second man in the criminal organisation was killed when under arrest in 2006).

Also at the beginning of August in the court of appeal the trial of Bychin took place, which is where I began this article. I don't know where the judges at this hearing were in a hurry to get to - on holiday or to the toilet - but they spoke so unclearly and so quickly that Alexei Bychin's lawyer Olga Tseitlina didn't even catch their surnames. The hearing, I repeat, lasted about three minutes. Bychin's sentence - five years in a maximum security prison - remained in force. For exceeding the limits of justifiable self-defence. At the same time, the accomplices in the murder of Timur Kacharava, with one exception, received laughable prison sentences of one and half, two and two and a half years... Of course, Tseitlina will appeal the sentence (as soon as she receives a copy of the verdict in the post and finds out the names of the judges). But the persistence of the law-enforcement systems in cases where the police esprit de corps has been piqued (in this case the esprit of an OMON trainee who raised his arm in a nazi salute) is also well known.

The day before the trial there was a protest demonstration in support of Alexei Bychin on the embankment of St Peterburg's Griboyedov Canal. The dummy of a cop hanging from the railings was a clear indication of how young antifascists feel that their government and its legal system play along with the neo-nazis. They will continue to feel this until there is some change in the courts