Blood Diamonds

It may be beating a dead horse to talk about blood diamonds except people are still buying them, the artifical custom of the diamond engagement ring persists, and the average person does not feel blinded by rage when they see a commercial for diamonds. Also, you may be wondering what sparked this posting. I didn't just see the movie Blood Diamond and have my eyes opened to this tragedy and rush out to tell the ten people who accidentally come to this blog every day. I have been pissed about this injustice since I was a little high school hoodlum but I recently stumbled on my notes from last summer regarding this topic and I stumbled on this article on Fark.

That article recounts an older story regarding how the value of diamonds was artificially inflated and bullshit symbolism was imbued into the diamond. It recounts how a common stone with little intrinsic value was kept from the market in order to artificially create a low supply while some clever advertisers associated the diamond with eternity and love and forced every man in western society from then on to spend two months salary on a worthless crystal of carbon for fear of sending the wrong message to the woman he loves. Fortunately, for their trouble, those advertisers will have to crouch in the desert of sodomites for all eternity. Unfortunately love isn't enough to overcome the demands of consumerism in our culture, or informed women who truly loved their future husbands would insist on not wearing murder on their hands. They would not be able to look at their enggement ring and see the love of their husband but would instead witness blood flowing from the stone on their ring, the blood of the children who died in the mines and the men and women who were murdered when a new militia came and took over the mine.

Remember those anti-drug adds just after 9-11 where the Bush administration and John Ashcroft were trying to capitalize on nationalism in the war on drugs? They implied a connection within the drugs trade wherein money American teenagers spent on pot went into the coffers of the terrorists who had attacked us. The same is true of the diamond trade. If you buy diamonds, you are putting money into Osama Bin Laden's pockets.

What about the Kimberly process you ask? What are you some lobbyist for the diamond industry? For the rest of you, the Kimberly process is the method the diamond industry created to pretend they were doing something about blood diamonds as a public relations scheme. The process is entirely voluntary, completely self-administered with no accountability, and there are large financial disincentives to poor african countries to conform rigorously to the process's own loose guidelines. Given the fact that emeralds and rubies come from conflict ridden regions in Colombia and Burma respectively, and the gem industry turns a blind eye to the suffering inflicted on people in those areas, it is unsuprising that their own method of self monitoring the origins of diamonds is far from robust. This is what it looks like when evil people try to do good but can't stop thinking of their own greed.

The Friday Bacon

Free The West Memphis Three

The Arkansas Supreme Court denied the appeal to reopen the cases of the convicted. The court has refused to hear the newly arisen DNA evidence that indicates the convicted were not at the location commonly believed to be the scene of the crime, and no DNA from the convicted was found on the victims. This leaves open the previously denied federal appeal.

I Got Yer Millitia Right Here

Today the Supreme Court Ruled that the Second Amendment ensures an individuals right to own and possess a firearm. Few people were suprised by this decision. Either in its ultimate result or in its scope. Scalia, who wrote the position for the majority, has previously written opinions for the court in gun control cases that are fundamentally similar to this result. The Court has said in the past that the right enshrined in the second amendment is an individual right but it is not a right without restriction. This can be seen in past cases regarding the federal ban on fully automatic rifles such as in Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600 (1994).

The cases and statutes throughout the United States have created a general guideline that seems to indicate an individual may own as many guns as they wish for recreation, sporting, or self defense, but may not own military equipment, and may be restricted in time and place of usage and transport within reason. The definition of what is military equipment changes frequently as can be seen by the recent expiration of the Brady Bill which forbid removable magazines of a capacity over ten rounds among other things. This most recent ruling not only ensures the individual's right to own and possess firearms, it also sets a line that may not be crossed in restricting type of gun and how it may be possessed and transported. This is because the D.C. gun ban that is overturned forbid ownership of a handgun. The court has clearly declared that this type of restriction violates the Constitution. The law also required registration of other firearms and that those registered firearms be locked when in the home. It is already well settled law that when transpiorting a gun one must have it locked and the ammunition must be locked in a seperate container, but today's Supreme Court ruling seems to indicate that a local law may not require that one keep ones guns locked in ones own home.

The ruling also seems to indicate that legislation requiring registration of firearms also goes to far. Many may not understand why this would be objectionable. After all, you have to register your car. The principle difference there is that there is no constitutionaly protected right to own and operate a vehicle. This is more than just a trite observation. Though a car may seem more essential to one's daily life, Congress may decide one day that cars are too dangerous and too polluting to allow in private ownership and ban them. However possession of a weapon is a right granted to us by our creator, like freedom of speech, and is protected by the Bill of Rights. The second reason to object to registration of firearms is a bit more paranoid. Firearm registration just gives the government a list of what law abiding citizens have guns ans what they have in their arsenal. The fear of armed government agents going door to door with a list and confescating the firearms of law abiding citizens in a time of emergency, when they are more likely to need them, is less paranoid when you remember that it happened and happened recently. When Bush suspended posse comitatus after hurricans Katrina and the national guard confiscated guns from people who were just trying to defend themselves from looters and murders who were roaming the streets after the disaster.

Despite the apparent clarity, the actual bounds of the Supreme Court's decision will be heavily litigated and fought over. The lawsuits have already started. As this article indicates these lawsuits by the NRA were already in the works before the decision came down.

The Walk of Shame

A conservative, pro-life congressional candidate, knocked up his girlfriend, said he didnt want the baby and then paid for her abortion. I can has hypocracy?

Politicising the Mail Room

We have previously commented on this blog about the propencity of the Bush administration to not only engage in cronyism in hiring but to prefer political supporters over more qualified candidates to the detriment of the function of U.S. governance. The depths to which people were vetted based on their loyalty to the individual that currently holds the office of the President had not been previously revealed. This article describes that it was policy to prefer ideologs at every level of hiring, even down to lowly interns. The ideology-based hiring went so far as to violate the law.

I am not the least bit suprised. Many people would call me cynical for that. Which leaves me wondering at what point, after consistently being vindicated in my cynicism towards government corruption does it cease to be cynicism? When do the people who werent expecting it to get worse get told they are seeing the world through rose colored glasses?

The punchline of the article is that this political monkeying around with the hiring process has not only hurt these specific individuals, but it has hurt the program through which these professioinally inferior, political zombies were hired, and this has hurt the agency of the Justice Department by filling its ranks with substandard ideologs.

George Carlin May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008

It may be cliche but I hope it isnt trite to say that commedians are the ones most free to speak the truth. In between jokes about scabs and finger nail clippings George Carlin had tremendously precient social commentary about freedom of speach, the prison system, religion, big corporations, advertising, and government. After 9/11, his bit about airline security seemed eerily prophetic.


As someone who's art was frequently subject of attempts at censorship, he took a long view of history.

Cleveland Ohio: Terrible American City or The Worst American City?

Cleveland is such a terrible cesspool that the suburbs long ago seperated themselves from it politically and financially as much as possible. This amounts to dozens of tax districts in one county. Each of them jealously guarding their hoard like the poison spewing worms they are. They also tax you both in the city you work and in the city you live. So if you commute from a residential suburb to a commercial or industrial town for work then at tax time you get double teamed up the asshole by fat government dicks.

As you can probably tell this is rather personal for me since this double-dick ass fucking I am getting from these cities amounts to a bill for $100 a month. These are cities in the rust belt. The industry left decades ago. The sewers overflow when it rains. The roads have huge and frequent holes which make them worse than most gravel roads I have driven on. These cities don't plow the snow all winter. There are packs of wild dogs roaming the streets at night. Arson is on the rise. What is that money going for?

More golden pig idols?

The Friday Bacon

Flag Burning

In this image you see President Bush defacing the American Flag in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 700 Destruction of the Flag of the United States. That is the same statute that forbids flag burning. The amusing thing is that flag burning is protected speach under the first amendment but being an arrogant jingoist and writing your name on the flag may not be.

Global Food Crisis: Corn Prices

Now we have the numbers. This is probably the start of the predicted rise in corn prices from the midwest flood that will push all foods and comodoties higher globally. Because not only is there less corn now, we will be exporting less.

Labor Relations

The Teamsters held a protest Saturday to protest high gas prices, and a bad deal they got from FedEx as well as to tell their membership not to vote for John Mccain.

As is usually the case with these sorts of things, the old media isnt covering it. Honestly, I find it frustrating to cover myself. They don't say anything meaningfull about why they are protesting or what they are angry about or what they want to solve the problem. This whole exercise was just to get a bunch of surly men together, dressed alike, to shout slogans at each other. I doubt its effectveness and whether it has any meaning.

I desperately wanted to air their grevances and give some much needed coverage to labor issues here, but all I got was an ear full of rhetoric.

The Global Food Crisis: Too Much Water

Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, And Illinois have all been hit by massive flooding over the last week. Some heroic boyscouts have garnered all the press from this storm but there is another story with wider reaching implications. The flooding has caused damage to farmland across the nation's breadbasket, ruining thousands of acres of fields prior to harvest. These fields are primarily corn and as detailed in a prior posting, corn is the backbone of the U.S. comodoties market. Further, such a huge loss in corn will cause the prices of all foods to rise even more than the international food crisis has caused. The bottom line for you, expect to pay more for all kinds of meat, cerial, grains, milk, and of course, gasoline.

This all brings up the concept of inflation. The general rise in the price of goods as measured by the United States excludes the cost of comodities like food and energy(oil). The standard reason given for this is that even when the economy is stable the costs of oil and food fluctuate wildly and are thusly not directly pinned to the general economy. That reason turnes into a mere excuse to ignore bad news in times like these where inflation is being driven by world crisis level food prise increases and devistating growth in cost of oil. Yet economists will continue to use the old measure and more tellingly the old media will continue to parrot what they are told in their role of controling the public.

Tim Russert: 5/7/1950 - 6/13/2008

Tim Russert Died of a heart attack on Friday. Tim Russert was one of the few reporters left who had the ability to speak truth to power. He could be trusted to ask hard questions about real issues to politicians and when they tried to weazel out of it with rhetoric or prefabricated statements, he would follow up with more tough questions and hold their feet to the fire. His dedication to honest journalism displayed a respect for the average people that is absent in most news coverage today in the old media. The professional respect and dedication he showed are why he is one of my heros. The world is a better place for him having been in it.

The Walk of Shame: Bush Looses Again

The Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration today. The high Court held that despite what the President and the Neo-Cons say, everyone has natural human rights. A foreign citizen has the same human rights that you and I have under the United States' legal system. A person cannot be drprived of those rights by having a certain lable applied to them such as, terrorist, or enemy combatant. Perhaps the Court realized that such things need to be proven beyond simple conjecture. The court also held that people cannot be imprisoned by the United States for an indeterminate period of time, and that anyone imprisoned must be charged with a crime. You know, basic things that are at the foundation of this country and our system of justice.

The Supreme Court came down on the side of freedom and justice today and has once again renewed my faith in our system of government.

The Walk Of Shame: Gubinatorial Spending

The governors mansion in Texas was burned down, probably due to arson. This morning the Governor declared he would rebuild his mansion regardless of the cost to the people of Texas. It is interisting to me that a government official would vow to spare no expense in rebuilding his own mansion when there is a mortgage crisis going on now and millions of people are finding themselves homeless.

My Letter to My Congress People in Regards to Impeachment

Please: Copy and paste (though make sure you make it gender appropriate!)

Sir,
I have lost faith in government, though I do still trust you. Please, please please, support, to the best of your abilities, the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It is worth it. This is not a merely symbolic gesture (and if it was, Congress would be all over it.) It is a message to the American people that the rule of law stands. It is a message to voters, who thought they were voting for action. It is a message to the rest of the world that we are not a rogue nation, that we are interested in a global community AND that we can be a country that can take care of itself.
It is also more than a message. It is a head start on the "truth and reconciliation" process that we will need to be on when the criminals are out of the White House. It is a head start on rebuilding our federal services and departments, our military strength, our stability and economy.
Finally, if you impeach him on the grounds Rep. Kucinich has put forth, then maybe justice will be served to the criminals and the truth behind 9/ll can still be hidden (it's a win-win situation!) Thank you, and, rest assured, you will turn a regular supporter of you into a life long one with a strong stand in support of Kucinich.

Cleveland Ohio: Terrible American City, or The Worst American City? Impeachment Edition

Dennis Kucinich(D-Ohio), the elfin-looking, vegan, UFO-seeing, hot-wife-having Representative from Cleveland has introduced articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush.

I have mixed feelings about many things in that first sentence.

First, Kucinich is a profoundly inefectual represenative. None of the bills he has proposed has ever been passed. Which statistically boads ill for the prospects of these articles of Impeachment. Kucinich will propose any legislation that will get headlines. Kucinich's legislative strategy seems less directed at serving the people of his district but rather intended to provoke headlines that get him enough free attention for his reelection.

The things Kucinich champions with his doomed legislative action are the kinds of things that are the cause of the people, or crafted to promote peace and justice in simple language. So when these things are defeated it makes Kucinich look like he is a champion of the conserns of the common man. However, even if this is genuine and Kucinich really is a champion of the people he is rather Quixotic. Personally, I think the persona of a crusader for justice that tilts at windmills has been crafted by him to keep him in politics. That being said I am willing to live with an inefectual elfin-jester of a representative that loudly champions justice and freedom and peace rather than the typical congressman who is a shill to big industry and lobbying groups and justifies his corruption by dragging home as much pork as he or she can suck out of the public coffers. So even if the virtue Kucinich parades in front of the cameras is fake, Ill take fake virtue over unashamed corruption every day.

As for impeaching president Bush, thats a whole different ball of fishooks. I think President Bush should be impeached. He has been accused of exactly what Nixon did, and Republican party officials have been found guilty of manipulating the vote in Ohio in 2004. There is also the intelligence failure leading up to the 9/11 attack, extrordinary rendition, torture, the lies in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and so forth. However, much of that is just a deriliction of duty and does not amount to a crime. Furthermore, the stuff that he could be charged for is going to provoke a long hard legal battle.

This president has proven that he is beligerant in the extreme to any type of criticism or legal attack on his power. This is bolstered by the neo-con adgenda to make the office of the president extremely powerful. This adgenda is backed up by jmore than greed and evil but by long hours of thought and legal scholarship. This goal at inflating the power of the president is backed up by legal philosophy that argues that these cruel and wicked things that have been done by and on behalf of this administration are actually legal. The simplest way to explain this is that they believe anything the president says is ok, is legal. The insand and frustrating thing to know is that they have the knowledge and scholarship to back this madness up in court if that is what it comes to. The three attornys general that this administration has gone through are proof that there are many in high places already that subscribe to this philosophy of presidential preeminence. All this promises to produce a long and hard legal fight if the congress actually has the stones to follow through.

That is the other problem. The Democratic party hasn't had the testicular fortitude to stand for anything other than giving themselves a pay raise for as long as I have been old enough to read. They cant cut off the funds for the war and they are afraid of a long fight with the Bush administration. But they arent afraid because they will loose, these chicken-shit legislators are afraid of the fight itself. They arent afraid of the possibility that they will losse and this insane legal reasoning that the president's will is law will become the law of America. They are afraid of having to stand up for something other than giving themselves a pay raise. Sen. Feingold (D-Wisconsin) the only one in the senate chamber with cajones enough to still be called a man explained it best. He wrote to me that he believes that any attenpt to impeach Bush would be a waist of time. All impeachment proceedings would do is, distract the congress from repairing the damage he has done over his tenure in office. The long fight would be a circuis and all that would be accomplished would be sound bites and grandstanding. I can only assume that House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) believes something similar when she says that impeachment is off the table.

Much has been said of this kind of pragmatism and cowardice and is being played out in many editorials of this kind. I think the fight must be fought or these legal philosophies will slowly slime their way into the American legal system. Unless resisted this belief that power is greater than justice will destroy freedom.

The Friday Bacon

This week the friday bacon is late because all of the contributors to this blog were out in shacks in God's country where there is no internet. This is also where the comment that makes up this weeks friday bacon comes from.

"Ugh... All that bacon just hit my heart. I wish I could taste bacon with my heart"

Tasers Galore!

To start off what otherwise might be a drab and depressing column about Tasers with a bit of humor, here is a case, from Hamilton, Ontario, of Tasers accidentally setting a perp on fire. With a mind to use it as an improvised weapon, the suspect hid a can of hairspray in his belt, which ignited and set the poor victim of physics aflame briefly. The officer, who extinguished the flames, has been completely cleared of any wrongdoing.

In a twisted web of impartial recollections, contradictory statements, and colorful characters, a Palo Alto man without address is questioning whether police were justified in deploying Tasers against him. I'm not sure how it's reasonable to assume a two liter bottle is a dry ice bomb and thus justify deploying a Taser, but that's what makes this case so interesting.

In a tragic case of would haves and could haves, Robert Ingraham of Thibodaux, Louisiana died after officers deployed a Taser on him. Sadly, this article is lacking in detail, but statements like "he should have gone to court" or "he should have not hit his wife" seem rather inconsequential when one remembers that a man died. The only real questions are "how did a 27 year old man die from a Taser shot?" and "how could this have been prevented?"

In a rare show of positive PRwerk for Taser International, the New York Times reports a study into a case where Taser put someone back into a normal cardio rhythm after 40 minutes in a cold lake in Connecticut. Please don't try this at home, or even in a hospital for that matter.

Australia Withdraws from Iraq

Australia handed over their mission to U.S. command today and began withdrawing their remaining troops. At least they aren't capitulating to terrorism like the Spanish.