POLITICS of GREED reprise

Please note – the History Channel, International History channel, Military Channel, Discovery, National Geographic, and other shows currently on television are all engineered to avoid American History from 1968 to the present.  Oh, yes, there are superficial exceptions: how the army rangers felt who parachuted into Grenada, for example, but no critique of why they were there policy-wise, or how it fed into the on-going Reagan-Republican orchestrated CIA destabilization program for “socialist,” or “democratic” countries that might resist U.S. commercial domination – read: “big multi-national corporations.” JFK’s death, RFK’s death, Dr. King’s and Malcolm’s deaths took the bright vision of America from us, and left the fear-mongering, greedy bastards who may have colluded to kill them in charge of our nation.  Conspiracy theorists are maligned, but there is truth in what they have to say.

I was in Washington D.C. when Nixon was inaugurated.  It was a glum, horrible, overcast day, cold and rainy, bleak, and that’s where he took the country – into a foggy frozen limbo.  Under Nixon, Allende was assassinated in Chile for advancing the democracy and social justice that drove up the cost of doing business for the usual profiteers.  We invaded Cambodia and Laos to cleanse the place of heathen anti-capitalist Vietnamese, whom we nearly bombed and napalmed into the Stone Age, in order to defend an exploitative ruling elite that served western economic and, therefore, our own geo-political economic interests.  Nixon bugged our loyal opposition party’s campaign headquarters, cheating and lying his way not only into election, but re-election.  He set the modern pattern for Oval Office cover-ups and executive stonewalling, and turned up the paranoid distrust and oppression of the American people by its corrupted leaders.

GOOD BROWNIES

SECOND MARIJUANA PAPER:

NAMING NAMES:

Was it a conspiracy?  Was a viable industry ruined because it threatened public health, or because a few large businesses would profit from banning it?  Hemp was outlawed in 1937 just as new technology that processed it faster, producing higher-quality fiber with less cost and environmental damage than wood-based pulp, was invented.  Hemp would have undercut competing products overnight.  Popular Mechanics predicted that it would become America’s first “billion-dollar crop.  …10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average [forest] pulp land.”

William Randolph Hearst had a vested interest in protecting the pulp industry.  He owned enormous timber acreage and hemp could put his paper-manufacturing division out of business and ruin his land value.  He slanted the news to protect his investments.  He led a yellow journalism campaign to outlaw hemp.  As example, a car accident in which marijuana was found dominated the headlines for weeks, while alcohol-related accidents (outnumbering marijuana over 1,000 to one) made the back pages.  Hearst popularized the word “marijuana” to introduce fear of the unknown to create a useable hysteria.

TEARS IN THE RAIN

Islands w/ apple.

The Ignorant and Superstitious

It’s a shame so many are so ignorant and superstitious at the start of the 21^st Century.  We, as a species, thought so well of ourselves – technologically transcendent, having come so far from the primitive days of ancient Egyptian ritual – but we’re still beset by competing, often violent myths, most of them trailing up out of the deep dark bowels of imagination, the legacy of long-dead ignorant, superstitious zealots.  They contest with one another like gladiators in the arena.  It’s kill, or be killed.  The message of tolerance within most religions is swamped by fanaticism and vengeance.

It’s also true that few people relish being told that their lives are entirely informed by a fantasy.  If not that, what? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied to the universe of the mind?  Life is chaotic in beginning, progress, and end.  Only change is constant.  Random elements always transform what was thought to be solid and immutable.  Religion attempts parental reassurance of the night-frightened child.  However, if a child is encouraged to grow up, to take responsibility for his/her own life and actions – given careful nurture and good information – that child will become a fully contributing self-actualizing adult worth knowing.  He/she will grow up with the tools needed to deal successfully with life.  They won’t need a fable to lean upon for they shall have the truth (which is so much better).  If one regards the earth as if it were as close to heaven as one is likely to get, one might actually take better care of it.