It's Friday night. You're tired and don't want to cook.

Some friends had invited you over for dinner. But they're pretty weird, you think, and you don't recognize what they say they're having. You declined.

You decide to go out to eat. You go downtown to a block that used to have twenty restaurants, but nineteen are boarded up. The line to get into the only one still open is endless.

You wait patiently in line for two hours and finally get seated. The waiter brings you the menu - a post-it note with only two items: fresh shit on a shingle and leftover shit on a shingle.

There's only one waitron and the place is mobbed. The little bot finally comes back after an hour. You ask, "Anything besides shit on a shingle?" It says, "Let. Me. Ask. Cook." and whirs off. Comes back in an hour. "We. Had. More. Choices. Too. Expensive. You. Want. Fresh. Or. Leftover?"

On Probable-President Nobama's campaign website is a slick icon that says "Powered by Hope". I have to admit, that's right on the money (semi-pun intended). For many ersatz and about-to-be-erstwhile Nobama supporters, the power certainly has not been reality. Not without substantial encouragement, progressives slid happily into the glittering swamp of vagueness with nothing to propel them but hope, and conjured up, variously, a Gandhi, a JFK, a Blessed Savior, a Renaissance Black Man, Jack Johnson with a halo.   Read more…

Not Everything That Can Be Done Should Be Done. I am rarely flummoxed. I've been researching and trying to write an essay about the convergence of transhumanism, the technological singularity, and eugenics. I can't . . . I just bloody can not do it. I understand the damn material, but it just freezes my brain. So I'm gonna have to let you do most of the work. I'll provide some basic resources.   Read more…

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Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.
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Several years ago, in the pages of my first blog, ddjangoWIrE, I wrote an essay with the same title. When Blogger "accidentally" deleted my account, relegated ddjangoWIrE to a stripped archive, and "lost" some of my posts, the piece converted to disconnected bits in cyberspace and the essay was gone.

I'm really not going to use that disappearance as the primary excuse to post another brief essay on the same subject. Given the state of our nation, our democracy, and the inattention, malaise, and downright selfishness of its people, there are quite enough reasons to revisit this territory.

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Someday, soon I hope, through enlightened private and public funding, we will carve out of some hills in Mississippi or Alabama, an obsidian panoply of American black heroes. There will, I'm certain, be many more than four faces. It will be called Mt Blackmore.

The short list of candidates should include Marcus Garvey, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Booker T Washington, Sojourner Truth, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammed, Minister Louis Farrakhan, H Rap Brown, Shirley Chisolm, Ron Dellums, and Muhammed Ali.

One of the reasons that I have the "Help Wanted" ad at the top of the page at P! is that I have a sense that freedom, integrity, and justice in America is more likely to be achieved by a coalition of citizens and legislators other than white males.

I recently in these pages decried what I have seen as a chasm between the white male-dominated Left and other politically leftist groups. I'm looking harder at that and I've grown a bit. Maybe that chasm is a positive phenomenon. Perhaps advocating integration and unity is not such a good idea, because the strength and power of the non-white-male left might be forced to compromise beliefs and programs/policies that are essential to a radical revolution. Barak Obama, I venture, is an exceptionally noticeable result of such integration. Colin Powell and Condi "They Named a Damn Oil Tanker After Me" Rice are the most egregious and nauseating outcomes. (Heh . . . I've been working on a whole hip-hop riff about "CondiMints" that will likely not make it through to these pages - but yuh know . . . y'know?).

Courage, it is said, is not the absence of fear. It is acting in spite of the fear.

Yes I'm scared. There's good reason to be. Even if I don't see them, there are snipers on the roof across the street and several drones on the way. But I insist on truth. I'm gonna fill in some of the blanks here, and I pray you'll look The Beast right in the eye.

The United States government has not formally declared war in over fifty years. The US Constitution confines that responsibility to the Congress. President Bush ignores that (because he prides himself on his ignorance), but screw him, y'know?

And Vice President Cheney, over the past week, has snarled his snarl in support of the President like the rabid bulldog that his truly is. Screw him, too, y'know? I realized that I, nearly sixty and weighing only a hundred-fifty pounds, could take the SOB on and knock him silly in a fair fight. Leave the shot gun home, Dick. You're a damn coward, slinking around in your "undisclosed locations." Come out, come out, wherever you are. You do scare me, but you don't intimidate me. You're out there snarling these days because more and more of the truth is seeping though the cracks and it looks like your game may be lost, the jig may be up, and your and Doubleduh's position may be overrun before 2008. I think these days you're more scared than we are.

OK, citizen, turn off "24" or "The Unit" or whatever the hell you're watching with the Miller Lite in your fist, and give me just a few minutes. Treat this like a commercial . . . I know you can do it. It might sting a little bit, because "the truth will set you free, but first it'll drive you crazy." You can take it, right? You're not a coward, right? . . .

More at P!

This is part of the P! series on "Waging Peace". Part 6 will explore the forces of peace available and building in the US and around the globe.

Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here; Part 3 is here; Part 4 is
here.

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Looks like the fat lady won't even have to stretch her pipes.

This from Xinjingbao, in China (reprinted in full):

After Democrats Pick Obama or Hillary, U.S. Election May Be Over

Will U.S. Democrats tear themselves to shreds deciding who to nominate for President? Will the Republican nominee attack Bush and cause internal Republican Party dissention? Who better to ask that one of the most powerful political parties in the world – the Chinese Communists? According to this op-ed article from China's state-controlled Xinjingbao [Beijing News], the Democrats are in such good shape, there may be little need for Americans to vote.

By Mr. Liu, a Scholar in Beijing
Translated By How Xian Neng
February 12, 2007
015 [at] 034536 [dot] htm">China – Xinjingbao – Original Article (Chinese)  Read more…

There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for . . .

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent . . .

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary. -- Mohandas Ghandi

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. -- Dwight Eisenhower

War does not end strife - it sows it. War does not end hatred - it feeds it. For those who argue war is a necessary evil, I say you are half right. War is evil (where strife, there every evil work: Bible, James 3:16). But it is not necessary. War cannot be a necessary evil, because non-violence is a necessary good. The two cannot co-exist. -- Congressman John Lewis

Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. -- Hermann Göring

A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend. -- J. William Fulbright

Waging war to produce peace is a fantastic and ultimate contradiction in terms. At its most essential and spiritual levels, victory does not exist. It is at best a fleeting illusion.

The author Chalmers Johnson (Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire), among many others, has more than convincingly shown how war only seeds more war by, at least, creating resentment and the roots of revenge; by dividing peoples and nations arbitrarily with imposed new borders; by seeing and implementing short-term "strategic solutions" that ignore and/or create longer-term disastrous consequences.

Much of humanity shrugs, claiming that war is inevitable and "a fact of human nature." I absolutely reject that belief. It is not so "black and white". I do believe that humans do carry a tendency to resort to violence, but at the same time ontologically wish and hope for peace. In this context, it is possible to nurture the spirit of peace and starve the appetite for war. Where I am called "naive" in believing this, I wear the appellation proudly as a badge of honor. I say that those who promote war as a solution for anything are ignorant morons.

I submit that "victory" in war is always at the cost of thousands, perhaps millions, of souls, the elimination of nations and cultures, the laying waste of the earth, the expenditure of wealth and resources that could otherwise be used to construct and defend peace, elevating the lives and security of all peoples. Peace without war is by contrast cheap, in some cases free. It is certain that the maintenance of peace is always less costly than the waging of war.

Göring's quote, above, is perfectly true. War and the conditions of war are manufactured by the few, who imagine that they have something to gain for themselves (power and riches). These few generally do not reveal the true motivation for war, but sell war to the many by lies, deceit, and fear. The few rarely actually fight. The waging of war is the task of the many.

On February 6, 2007 Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced in the US House H.R. 808 [PDF], which would establish a cabinet-level US Department of Peace and Nonviolence.

In the "Findings" section of the legislation, we find:

First, the headlines. Islamic Republic News Agency:

Thousands of people attend anti-war demonstrations in US
New York, Jan 28, IRNA

US-Iraq-Demonstration
Thousands of people on Saturday staged demonstration in several American cities, including the capital, in protest at war-mongering policies of the US President George W Bush.

The demonstrators called for an end to Bush's approach toward the war in Iraq and stressed the need for urgent return of the American troops to their home country.

The demonstrators shouted slogans such as, "We do not want another Vietnam".

In Washington, the crowd heard speeches by more than a dozen veterans, anti-war activists, religious leaders, Hollywood celebrities and political leaders like Jesse Jackson, a longtime African-American civil rights activist . . .   Read more…

Brother and Sisters:

As but a single citizen of the United States of America, I raise my voice in sadness and shame at the actions of our government, past, present, and future. I strongly believe that my words and views are shared by a growing majority of American citizens.

The United States of America, indeed the whole world, is in deep doo-doo.

 There is, in America, a potentially powerful, but presently only nascent (if even that), force for positive change. I submit that if that force is not unleashed in the coming months, there is no hope for reversing a catastrophic path toward what will be the final world war. The political terrain is now littered with explosive devices and our government, all of it, carries around the ignition engines, just looking for an opportunity to push the little buttons.

Just Because It's An Old Idea Doesn't Mean It's A Bad Idea One of the characteristics of the illness I call "americanism" is the tendency to pay attention to style and hype rather than truth.