Steal from the Native American Indians? Yes – we still do it

The Indian wars are over, right? We white folks no longer steal land from the Indians, right? Wrong. It never really stops. Consider this from URGENT! TAKE ACTION FOR BIG MOUNTAIN:

“Dear Friends of the Indigenous Peoples of Big Mountain, Black Mesa, AZ.

Something critical is about to happen concerning the traditional communities on Big Mountain and surrounding areas on Black Mesa. Today, more than 30 years after the passage of Public Law 93 - 531, the original Navajo-Hopi Relocation bill, a new bill is before Congress that sets a new timetable for the forced relocation of a number of Navajo families on Black Mesa. Senate bill S. 1003 is now on the Senate Calendar and may be passed at anytime without debate or serious consideration unless the public acts now. The last major relocation bill was approved by the Senate within a month after being placed on the Senate Calendar and stayed in the House of Representatives less than a week before becoming law. It's difficult to convey the serious nature of these new developments. The passage of this bill would effectively devastate these traditional communities of Navajo, or Dineh, stripping them of their identity and way of life which is tied into the land itself.

Native people's lives and livelihoods are on the line!....”

We may not fight them, but we still rob them.

UN says shut down Guantanamo - Bush says the rest of the world is crazy

According to USATODAY.com, 2/16/2006:
"Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Thursday said the United States should close the prison at Guantanamo Bay for terror suspects as soon as possible, backing a key conclusion of a U.N.-appointed independent panel."

According to President George Bush:
“Wut do they no. Were smarter then the rest of the world!”

Four star hotel treatment at Guantanamo.

Republicans love their guns – and they know how to use them

"US Vice-President Dick Cheney has accidentally shot and injured a man during a quail hunting trip. The victim, named as Harry Whittington, was on the trip with Mr Cheney at a ranch in Texas." – BBC News, 13 February.

Harry Whittington:

"Shoot me again Dick! Harder! Harder!"

President Hugo Chavez kicks out missionaries from jungle outposts

According to The Wichita Eagle, Feb. 10, 2006:

“CARACAS, Venezuela -- U.S. missionaries accused by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of espionage have been forced from their remote outposts among jungle tribes by a government order, the final pair leaving Thursday after years of evangelical work.
The New Tribes Mission flew those two out of the rain forest to regroup with other missionaries in the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz. There they will decide what to do next: leave the country or continue with a legal battle seeking to overturn the government's order to expel them from indigenous areas by Sunday.”

Chavez is wise to push them out. These groups are conservative Evangelicals that seek to destroy the local culture of these people and reinforce conservative governments. There impact on these countries is almost always negative.
Most of the group's missionaries are Americans.
To get a good idea of how those groups interfere I local politics, get a copy of In the Presence of My Enemies, By Gracia Burnham.(See F5). I this book, Burnham and her husband are captured by local Muslim guerrillas, Abu Sayyaf and US Reprehensive Todd Tiahrt (R KS) pushed for the blotched military operation where two of the three hostages were killed and as many as 45 Philippine government soldiers (according to Gen. Roy Cimatu of the Philippine Army, or AFP). An unknown number of rebels were also killed. Burnham made her politics known when she campaigned for Tiahrt, during his reelection bid for the US House. Burnham's book has been used by the present Republican administration and members of Congress as a tool to inspire even more military meddling in the Philippines. the US has sent more than 700 troops to help train the Philippine military, according the New York Times.
Tiahrt also made irresponsible and ignorant statements that the guerrillas in the Philippines were nothing more than street gangs. He ignored the historical relationship between the US and the Philippines, which includes the US making the islands a colony from 1901 to 1945. The US crushed a guerrilla uprising by Filipinos trying to win independence. Their leader, Emilio Aquinalda, was captured and killed, even though he had helped the US in its war against Spain. The US also supported President Marcos after he declared martial law in 1972 and set up a dictatorship.

We lost an important feminist writer

Betty Friedan was one of the first to emerge in the late 1960s along with Gloria Stienem to begin challenging the male dominated society we used to live in.
When I was a young boy, everyone considered the idea of women doctors or lawyers a joke. TV sitcoms laughed at the idea. Today there are anti-feminists female writers and pundits who refer to these women as “femi-nazis” and blame much of societies problems on them. Yet these women would not have their jobs if it weren’t for these feminists. Right-wing shit-head women, such as Ann Coulter would not have their jobs without the feminists movement. Yet few women have bashed it harder than Coulter.

According to the USATODAY:

“WASHINGTON (AP) — Betty Friedan, whose manifesto The Feminine Mystique became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.”

Protests begin today

Today was a national day of protests to begin the process of forcing out the George Bush Regime. Protests were held around the country and some may still be going on now. World Can't Wait, organization was mainly responsible for these protests. Not only are we in a deadly war in Iraq over peak oil, many people expect us to be at war in Iran by summer. For this and other reasons people around the country have decided not to wait for another meaningless election. We need to act now. Some examples:


CBS News reported a much better turnout in New York:
“The New York rally drew a crowd of what appeared to be thousands of protesters, who ranged in their political affiliations from moderate Democrats to members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. But the demonstration was not able to attract the hundreds of thousands of people and significant media attention that past anti-war protests generated. "I wish there were more people here," Janice Bryant of New York said. "I don't understand what everybody's thinking in this country. What do people need to understand that these people in this administration need to go?"

What appeared to be thousands of protesters rallied at New York's Union Square. (CBS)


Thousands Turn Out in San Francisco:
A large crowd of mostly peaceful marchers protesting the Bush regime snarled traffic on San Francisco city streets this afternoon.
While most marchers did not cause problems, police reported that 11 people were arrested for blocking the street and two others were arrested for possessing Molotov cocktails.
A Molotov cocktail was thrown at Fifth and Mission Streets, burning the jacket of a police officer.
One officer estimated that a few thousand people were taking part in the protest, which was organized by the group World Can't Wait. The group at one point took up most of a city block.
Police Sgt. Neville Gittens declined to estimate how many marchers participated. Zara Williams, who helped organize the march, said between 3,000 and 4,000 people attended.

Take the People's Mojahedin Organization off the US official terrorists list

Anyone opposed to the present regime of Iran would have to be a complete idiot to oppose a well organized armed group that began fighting the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi regime.
But we have President George Bush for national idiot, who will probably have us at war with Iran by summer and he refuses to take the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran off the US official terrorists lists. The had plenty of experience fighting both the Shah’s regime and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini regime. And yet our idiot president will keep them out of any planned resistance. We can also be fairly certain Bushwill keep, under the designation of “terrorists,” the Communist Party of Iran (MLM), even though many of their members also have had experience fighting the Khomeini regime and the Shah.
But Bush wants yes men, idiots and puppets as the ones he installed in Iraq. So our governnet will probably end up fighting these groups on the battlefield and claiming that the are part of the war on terror.
For more information:

Iran: Take People's Mojahedin off terror list ? Stockholm rally

28 January 2006
NCRI – Undeterred by sub-zero temperature, hundreds of supporters of the Iranian Resistance staged a rally before the Swedish parliament on Thursday to express their full support to the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran.

High Across The Prairie

Steve Otto's latest novel takes an honest look at 1970's Kansas.

Memoirs Of A Drugged-up, Sex-crazed Yippie ---Tales from the 70's Counterculture: Drugs, Sex, Politics and Rock and Roll.

By Steve Otto
Authorhouse Press/2005

Reviewed by Tim Pouncey

Kansas in the late 1970's was so different from today; the Sunflower State might as well have been located in Holland.Remember what it was like to share drugs with close friends and complete strangers? Remember when casual sex was so casual you didn't even know your partners name? Remember when the political climate of Kansas came down squarely on the side of tolerance? Remember when your personal philosophy of life was defined by rock lyrics and not a mission statement?
You don't?
Well, Steve Otto does. In his latest semi-fictional novel, Memoirs Of A Drugged-Up, Sex Crazed Yippie (Authorhouse Press/2005), Otto excavates 1970's counterculture like an archeologist loving dusting off a Mastodon tusk. In a brisk 349 pages, Otto gives us a lucid look at a Kansas few people remember --- or can't remember due to a plentiful supply of "controlled substances" that were constantly and cheaply available. Characters romp through Wichita, Lawrence and even Sedalia Missouri when a cheap thrill was worth what you paid for it and pleasure was just the flipside of danger.
But to dismiss this book as just another nostalgic stoner reminiscing about the last days of the counter-culture would be a major mistake. Although there is a certain "back-in-the-day" wistfulness about the time before political correctness was a mantra, Otto tempers his dreamy history lesson with brutal honesty.
The narrator of the story --- a composite of just about every old druggie you ever met --- may graphically describe the bliss of mainlining MDA, he also reminds us that brief moment of pleasure most often occurred in a squalid apartment at broken kitchen table next to sink full of dirty dishes.Like all good storytellers, Otto takes the reader places they've never been before. Like William Burroughs and Charles Bukowsky, Otto sometimes takes you to places you've never really wanted to visit. Yet, Otto makes it worth the trip by including generous portions of political discourse, Cyrenaic philosophy, post-adolescent lust and near-suicidal thrill seeking to keep the narrative moving along like a junkie careening through a police roadblock.
Otto's work is always provocative and this book will undoubtedly draw the wrath of both solid conservatives and neo-feminists. Otto's characters never mask their contempt for the right-wing agenda and Otto's narrator never hides his obsession with female anatomy. However, criticizing Memoirs because it baits conservatives and objectifies women is missing the point. Filtering 1970's Kansas counterculture through the sensibilities of a naive middle-class, catholic school educated, twenty-something is no easy trick but Otto mostly pulls it off. He has a good ear for times-past and tries --- often successfully --- to make his prose read like it would have been written by someone experiencing these situations 30 years ago. Trying to be simultaneously innovative, entertaining and honest is a juggling act on a unicycle, but Otto is generally at his best when everything's up-in-the-air and he's peddling frantically. When the narrator's budding Marxist politics and his discussions with Iranian nationalists clash with his dawning awareness that Kansas politics has taken a sharp turn to the right, Otto makes it work.

Is Otto's look into the rear-view mirror a true reflection on the 70's, or do the objects simply appear bigger than they were? Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Memoirs resonates with characters buckling under the weight of the America Dream with redemption harder to find than next snort of Cocaine.

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Direct from the publisher.