[WARNING: sexual abuse]
Any group which is generally male-led, maintains strong insider-versus-outsider privacy, and has its own process for adjudicating misbehavior – is going to be a haven of sexual abuse. Period. This applies in retrospect to the US congress, the roman catholic church, police departments, certain buddhist ashrams, some yoga schools, the boy scouts, etc.
Imagine being told “there are some ballistic missiles coming your way in 5hr, but for political reasons we need you to hunker down in a hole and grip your ankles and hope that they hit where they are supposed to. OK?”
I get lots of emails offering “guest articles” for blogs. By which they mean that they’ll pay me to post some bullshit marketing stuff as though I wrote it.
Today is the day when Americans pause to gloat over the appalling revenge they took in return for 2,977 people killed in the World Trade Center terrorist attack.
This is going to end badly, mark my words.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not a book I have read. Naturally, parts of it have leaked into my consciousness from various sources – it’s a remarkably pervasive fountain of memes.
In my recent posting about Glamour Bees[stderr], I mentioned that it’s a good idea to plan for what happens if your free photo hosting service decides to change their business model, as photobucket did. Astute Commentariat(tm) member Jenna K. pointed out that I appear prescient.
All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act.
The party of “states rights” has decided that California can’t have a ‘net neutrality’ law.
It’s unfashionable to make moral equivocations between 9/11 and what the US and its allies have done in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. It was a cruel and malicious act of terrorism, without a doubt, and triggered an amazingly violent – indiscriminately violent – response from the US. The US regime’s reaction to 9/11 was one of those “If A wrongs me, I am going to feel justified in wronging B and C in return.” Except, of course, ‘retaliation’ doesn’t apply when you’re claiming revenge on the wrong target. As the US did, knowingly and deliberately.