text:
Pussygrabber kills again
European Pressphoto Agency news photo
Officials with a county medical examiner's office remove a body from one of three Atlanta-area massage parlors where a young white man shot and killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, on Tuesday. Former "President" Pussygrabber, seeking to scapegoat Asians for his own stunning failure to effectively deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic, contributed heavily to the anti-Asian sentiment that is taking lives.
Admittedly, when word first started coming out that Asian Americans and others of Asian descent were being victimized in racist attacks within the U.S., I was a bit dubious. In my everyday life I don't hear anti-Asian sentiment expressed — per the U.S. Census Bureau, 19 percent of those who live in the California city where I live are of Asian descent, compared to only 6 percent of all people nationwide — and the anecdotal stories just didn't jibe with my own observations.
Of course, I wouldn't associate with someone who expressed anti-Asian sentiment. We do, over time, cultivate our own personal social environments; it's kind of like the idiots who claim that of course former "President" Pussygrabber actually won "re"-election in 2020 — because they don't know anyone who voted for Joe Biden!
Attacks on Asian Americans and others of Asian descent on U.S. soil are quite undeniable now, however. We have video. (In the case of the video that I just linked to, in San Francisco recently, an elderly woman of Asian descent fought back against her 39-year-old white-male accused attacker, who apparently quite karmically actually was taken away in a stretcher.)
And the "woke" war on whitey is ongoing, I know fully well, but know that not all of the attacks on Asian Americans are committed by stupid white men; a 28-year-old black man has been charged with attacking elderly Asian Americans in Oakland's Chinatown. And also in Oakland, a 26-year-old black man has been charged with the murder of an elderly man of Asian descent; police say that the murder defendant "has a history of victimizing elderly Asian people."
To my knowledge it hasn't been determined whether the black men's immediate motive was race-based hatred or robbery (perhaps seeing elderly Asian individuals as easy pickings).
But racism has to play a role in many if not most (if not almost all) assaults on those of Asian descent; it's in the background if it's not also in the foreground.
Robert Aaron Long, 21 years old and white, will live in infamy for having gunned down eight people in three massage parlors in the Atlanta area on Tuesday. Six of his eight gun-murder victims were women of Asian descent.
Long has claimed that he perpetrated his massacre not out of race-based hatred, but out of the pain and suffering stemming from his "sexual addiction." (Women always are to blame for heterosexual men's horniness, aren't they?)
Clearly, to Long, the lives of women of Asian descent were disposable (or he wouldn't have disposed of them), and that's because in the conservative white-male culture, women aren't full human beings, and Asian women are even less so. Asian women — many of whom are demure and submissive (or who at least are perceived as such) — are here for our use, after all!
In the background of all of this is the fact that former "President" Pussygrabber frequently spouted off racist, xenophobic words that of course his mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging followers (and even just some dull-minded people listening to him) were going to take as carte blanche to attack those of Asian descent.
As I noted on December 31, I tried to watch then-"President" Pussygrabber's New Year's address, but I could not, as I immediately was turned off by his sickening use of the phrase "the China virus." I wrote:
I came across a YouTube video of Pussygrabber's New Year message. I wanted to know how much of it I could stomach. I mustered up my courage and started to watch the video.
The results of my experiment? I literally couldn't stomach even a full 15 seconds of it.
By 15 seconds in, Pussygrabber uses the phrase "the China virus" to refer to the novel coronavirus/COVID-19.
Seriously, after I heard "the China virus," I'd had more than enough already; I was done, sick to my stomach already, and I clicked out of the video and I don't intend to ever watch any more of it.
So much is propagandistically packed into those three "little" words: "the China virus." …
So [the ignorant mangling of the English language to use the noun "China" as an adjective] hits me immediately with "the China virus," but then, secondly, there is the xenophobia and the racism that "the China virus" is supposed to evoke. That's some sick fucking shit. Adolf Hitler had his Jews. Coming into the White House, "President" Pussygrabber had Mexican immigrants as his own personal Jews; leaving the White House, Pussygrabber has Asians as his own personal Jews.
Scapegoating is a hallmark of fascism. This is why Pussygrabber makes me sick to my stomach: because fucking fascists make me sick to my stomach.…
And, I noted then, "it's far from definitively scientifically concluded that the novel coronavirus actually originated in China. Maybe it did; maybe it did not."
Even if it did, however, of course there is no link between the original nation of the novel coronavirus and the people of Asian descent whom you see on the street.
But, of course, those who are going to verbally and physically attack innocent others aren't known for their intellect.
Still, it's up to all of us to change the environment in which some people believe it's OK to attack a person of Asian descent — just for being a person of Asian descent.
I should have registered my December 31 objection to Pussygrabber's use of "the China virus" (and "the kung flu") more forcefully, and as a nation, we collectively should have called Pussygrabber out, loudly, back then. Instead, we fairly allowed ourselves to become inured to his casual fascism and racism.*
Shame on Pussygrabber, shame on his fascist, fucktarded followers (redundant), and shame on all of us for not doing more to protect every individual from being attacked because of his or her or their very being.
We're not a free nation until all of us are free.
*Well, in fairness to all of us, in November we did vote the piece of shit out of office by more than 7 million votes…
Tagged as "the China virus", "the kung flu", anti-Asian racism, anti-Asian racists, anti-Asian sentiment, Asian Americans, Asian women, Asians, Atlanta, California, China, Chinese, COVID-19, COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump, fascism, fascists, Georgia, hate crimes, novel coronavirus, novel coronavirus pandemic, Oakland, Racism, Racists, Robert Aaron Long, San Francisco, scapegoat, scapegoating, scapegoats, xenophobes, xenophobia
The coronavirus and its metaphors
The baby boomer doomer (a.k.a. the baby boomer remover) is kind of pretty, isn't it? Kind of like a Christmas tree ornament…
I remember the hysteria when HIV/AIDS first emerged in the 1980s. There were calls to quarantine gay men, even though HIV is not at all spread through casual contact — I remember the wholly unfounded hysteria that perhaps HIV was quite easily spread — and, of course, there were the innumerable pronouncements that AIDS was God's punishment. ("AIDS kills fags dead," one slogan put it succinctly.)
Because we gay men were — and still are — considered to be expendable, of course the Reagan regime dragged its feet on doing anything about HIV. The "right" people (if we can even call them people) were dying, after all.
So now comes along a new virus, one that curiously takes out primarily older people. According to data from China, where the new coronavirus first hit, the death rate for the virus breaks down by age group thusly:
The chart is astounding. It suggests that newborns to those aged 9 have a zero percent chance of dying from the new coronavirus, and the death rate goes up with each age group. My age group (the 50s) is 1.3 percent. Of course you don't want to be part of the 1.3 percent, but that's still a pretty low death rate for a plague.
As soon as you are in your 60s, however, the death rate is approaching 4 percent, and in your 70s, you're looking at 8 percent — and approaching 15 percent for those 80 and older.
No wonder they're calling the coronavirus the "baby boomer doomer" and the "baby boomer remover."
Not that the herd couldn't use some culling, and not that I would be torn up if a huge chunk of the baby boomers were offed, but the psychosocial dynamics of a plague sure are interesting.
Because this plague is killing baby boomers, we're seeing much swifter governmental action, of course; we must save every precious baby-boomer ass, right?
But if HIV/AIDS felt like "justice" to the right wing and to other homophobes (such as the Joe Biden voters of today…), well, the coronavirus seems to me, at least in its initial stage, to perhaps offer some poetic justice.
I mean, the cruise is the bright, shining example of baby boomer over-privilege: The baby boomers' parents passed their wealth down to their baby-boomer offspring, and today, the baby boomers are passing "their" wealth down to the likes of cruise-line companies. (To be fair, they're also putting the nation's wealth into McMansions, recreational vehicles, world travel, unnecessary home improvement, bright shiny new cars, time shares, golf, fine dining, expensive wines, etc.)
Boomers ostentatiously spend the nation's wealth on cruises, on which they expect to be treated like royalty. They are to be catered to exhaustively by wage slaves who aren't paid anything even like a living wage — and woe to those wage slaves who don't smile the entire time of their servitude.
I listened to a recent local NPR interview of a baby-boomer-sounding woman who was on the infected Grand Princess cruise liner stopped first in the San Francisco Bay and then redirected to Oakland, and its passengers quarantined at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California.
The whiny, impossible-to-placate baby boomer acted like she was Yelping Travis Air Force Base as though it were just an extension of her fucking cruise experience. Clearly, the entire world is supposed to be designed (just like a cruise liner!) to cater to the whim and whimsy of every single fucking baby boomer; it's their world, and the rest of us are here only to serve them.
In the baby boomers' world, you're either a feudal overlord (a baby boomer) or a serf (everyone else).
So: While I usually don't wish people pain and suffering, given all that I have experienced and observed in my Generation-X lifetime, including, as a gay man, seeing how my fellow gay men were treated (and not treated) during the AIDS crisis, and including how I have been under the baby boomers' thumbs for my entire fucking life, am I going to shed a tear for the baby boomers (and those older) felled by the coronavirus? No, not really, unless one of the vanishingly few good older people, such as Bernie Sanders, were to be taken out by the virus.
Coronavirus, as plagues go, is pretty tame. The flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 killed anywhere from 20 million to 50 million people worldwide, with a death rate of 10 percent to 20 percent, and, very much unlike the new coronavirus, most of its victims were young adults.
That said, should we read into plagues? That is, should we see "signs" in them, including which portions of the population the plagues take and the plagues' body counts?
No, probably, we should not, and there probably is no greater meaning in pandemics — no moral meaning, anyway — but it sure is fun to interpret them, as it were.
For instance, I kind of like to think of the coronavirus as like the earth trying to shake off the parasitic baby boomers in a global act of karmic justice. But that very well might be much more my own private fantasy than anything like fact, which I recognize. (Surely those who proclaimed that "AIDS kills fags dead" didn't doubt whether or not that stance — that gay men have deserved to die of AIDS, probably as a death sentence handed down by An Angry God Himself — has been anything like factual.)
All of that said, even though I'm not in one of the highest risk groups for death from the coronavirus, I'm still at 1.3 percent.
Ironically, just Friday morning I had a routine check-up with my doctor. I felt fine. My vital signs were normal, including my temperature, and the doctor examined my throat and ear canals and apparently found nothing out of the ordinary.
But just later Friday, I started to develop an upper respiratory infection, which I'd avoided all of this past winter until now. I'm experiencing a lot of mucous production, nasal congestion, a bit of a headache and now, a mildly sore throat and an occasional cough. It's annoying, but not severely debilitating.
Is it the coronavirus?
I'm guessing that it's not, that it's one or more of a myriad of other pathogens, viral or bacterial, that cause upper respiratory infections, the vast majority of which my body will conquer on its own, but even if it is the coronavirus, a death rate of 1.3 percent isn't high.
Besides, as a Generation X'er, I'm used to life not being like I'm on a perpetual cruise. Entirely unlike the over-privileged and overly comfortable baby boomers, I can handle some pain and suffering — and even death, if it comes to that.
Ironically, the boomers, quite unintentionally, over the course of my entire lifetime have prepared me to face the worst while they avoid — like the plague… — even the least amount of trouble, inconvenience or unpleasantness.
P.S. Seriously, though, the coronavirus exposes how incredibly fucking stupid the masses are, hoarding such bullshit like hand sanitizer, bleach, rubbing alcohol and even toilet paper.
The ignorant masses excel at seeing risk where it does not exist and at not seeing risk where it does exist. And accordingly, they take actions that they don't need to take and fail to take actions that they do need to take.
P.P.S. The title of this blog piece, if you didn't catch it, is a riff on the late Susan Sontag's book AIDS and Its Metaphors. (Sometimes something just comes into my mind like that…)
Tagged as AIDS, AIDS hysteria, baby boomer doomer, baby boomers, China, cornovirus, coronavirus, cruises, cull the herd, flu pandemic of 1918, gay men, Generation X, HIV/AIDS, hoarding, Homophobia, hysteria, karma, mass hysteria, mass panic, mortality, pandemics, panic, plague, Susan Sontag, the coronavirus and its metaphors
Relations with Russia should be put on ice until the Russians' cold hearts thaw
Nein Olympics for you!
I have mixed feelings, but mostly negative feelings, about Russia.
Vladimir Putin strikes me as a thuggish, retrograde fucktard, replete with his shirtless photo-ops to "prove" how "manly" he is, but at the same time, I am pleased that Russia has given asylum to the brave patriot Edward Snowden.
That said, I hope that Snowden leaves Russia as soon as he can. Russia's homophobia is unpardonable.
Russians have the right to be homophobic, the mantra goes. It's their nation, and they can do as they please!
Really? Did Nazi Germany have the "right" to be anti-Semitic?
Seriously — how many would argue, with a straight face, in polite company, that the Germans had the right, since it was their own nation, to round up and exterminate the Jews (as well as non-heterosexuals and other relatively powerless minority groups) who were on German soil?
Did the Jews not have universal human rights that no nation on Earth had the right to violate? Do all human beings not have certain universal human rights that no nation on Earth has the right to violate?
Does a nation own the human beings who are on its soil? Are those human beings chattel, with whom the nations' governments may do whatsoever they please?
Comparison of Russia's rampant homophobia to the oppression of the Jews by the Nazis is ridiculously over the top, many if not most would argue, but let's remind ourselves that Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews began with "little" things.
The Nazi Germans blamed Jews for the nation's problems post-World War I — as the Putin regime blames non-heterosexuals for Russia's problems post-Cold War — and the Hitler regime began with such official government policies as banning certain forms of speech and by removing Jews from civil-service jobs, university jobs, court jobs and other public jobs, and by banning Jews from public facilities, such as public schools and theaters. Eventually, of course, the Nazis then stole the Jews' wealth and rounded the Jews up into concentration camps, and you know the rest of the story; in a nutshell, once the Nazis realized that they could get away with those "little" things, step by step, those "little" things grew into the Holocaust, in which about two-thirds of Europe's Jews (about six million of them) were murdered by the Nazi regime.
Banning pro-homosexual speech, as Russia has done — and the ban is broad (even simply displaying the rainbow flag, even as a pin, is verboten in Putin's Russia) — is the first salvo in the increased, systematic oppression of an already oppressed group of people.
One wonders what, exactly, we are waiting for in Russia — another Holocaust?
Then could we compare Vladimir Putin's Russia to Adolf Hitler's Germany?
Should we wait for it to progress to that point?
I support a full boycott of Everything Russian, including, of course, the 2014 winter Olympics.
The Olympics should not be held in Russia while Russia — like Nazi Germany did — deems it not only acceptable, but necessary, to persecute, by law, any minority group that is singled out for such special, official persecution.
Nor should the Olympic games be held in any nation that violates the universal rights of human beings. China, whose government does not allow its citizens free speech, should not have been allowed to host of the 2008 summer games. As a non-heterosexual, it's not only the persecution of non-heterosexuals that I reject.
To support Russia in the 2014 winter Olympics is to give tacit approval of the Russian government's official persecution of non-heterosexuals.
As others have, I will point out that the winter and summer 1936 Olympics were held in Adolf Hitler's Germany. (Hitler ruled from 1933 to his death in 1945. His official policies against Jews began in 1933, so the 1936 Olympics were held in Germany after the Hitler regime's persecution of the Jews already had begun, including the stripping of Jews of German citizenship and banning marriages between Jews and non-Jews in Germany.)
Then, the 1940 and 1944 Olympics were cancelled because of World War II.
Yeah, it was a great idea to give Germany the 1936 Olympics, and it's a great idea to give Russia the winter 2014 Olympics.
This can only end well!
Tagged as Adolf Hitler, bigotry, bigots, boycott, boycott Russia, boycotts, China, Edward Snowden, fascism, fascists, Germany, Hitler, Holocaust, homophobes, Homophobia, human rights, Nazi Germany, Nazis, Olympic games, Olympics, Persecution, Politics, Putin, Russia, universal human rights, Vladimir Putin
I'm rooting for underdog Snowden in his fight against the wolves
Reuters image
Although it's awfully inconvenient for the treasonous power elite in Washington, D.C., Edward Snowden is a free man who has the right to travel freely and who does not have to subject himself to a kangaroo court. And nor does any other sovereign nation have to capture Snowden for the convenience of the traitors in D.C. who seek not justice, but who seek revenge against the young man who blew their cover for their actual crimes against us, the American people.
The D.C. rhetoric regarding patriot Edward Snowden is revealing, graphically, the sick and twisted beliefs of the powers that be. We knew that they were drunk on power (which isn't their power, but which is our power that we only temporarily have loaned to them), but now we realize the full scale of their alcoholism.
How dare Snowden travel wherever he wishes? As an American citizen, he is the property of the federal government!
Isn't he? That's how the traitors in D.C. are treating him — as though he were the veritable property of the U.S. government, and therefore, through his (very smart) refusal to just hand himself over to the thugs who no doubt will treat him like Bradley Manning or one of the victims at the Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp, he essentially is stealing government property (himself)!
Freedom? What freedom? You don't have any fucking freedom! You are the property of the U.S. government! You exist for the government! The government does not exist for you!
That is the anti-democratic, fascist, freedom-hating mindset at work here, and we're seeing it from members of both of the duopolistic, pro-corporate, pro-plutocratic parties.
Pathetic closet case Repugnican Tea Party Sen. Lindsey Graham, for instance, typical for the fascist that he is, recently proclaimed that "The freedom trail is not exactly China-Russia-Cuba-Venezuela, so I hope we'll chase [Snowden] to the ends of the Earth…."
That sure sounds like Graham believes that Snowden does not have the right to freely travel, and no, unfortunately, the "freedom trail" does not lead to the United States of America, which is becoming fascist at a rate that would make Benito Mussolini jealous, but probably does lead to an actually democratic nation like Ecuador (said to be one of Snowden's possible final destinations as he runs from the bloodthirsty wolves).
And big, bad "Democratic" Secretary of State John Kerry, for instance, recently huffed and puffed that it is "deeply troubling" that the sovereign nations of China and Russia both apparently have refused to try to capture Snowden, but have let him travel freely — as though either sovereign nation were required to do the bidding of the power elites in D.C. who don't want justice, but who want only to try to protect their own political asses.
Snowden's real "crime," you see, is that he dared to stand up to the powers that be and he embarrassed them (well, actually, they have embarrassed themselves, but of course they're projecting, and so they're blaming him).
The real crime here is the blatantly unconstitutional and treasonous mass spying that the power elites have been perpetrating upon us for years and years now. You don't get to promise us that of course you're not violating our constitutional rights and at the same time refuse to give us (under the guise of "national security") significant details as to what it is, exactly, that you are doing under the cover of darkness.
Those who support Big Brother are the Constitution-violating traitors. Edward Snowden isn't a "traitor" for simply having pointed out the real traitors. He's a patriot for having done so, and he has infinitely more courage than do any of the cowardly worms who bash him, the kind of worthless suck-ups, concerned only about their own precious asses and not about dangerous abuses of power, who made Adolf Hitler's rise to power possible.
The power elite are skating on very thin ice here. Already the U.S. government for years and years has been perceived (quite correctly) by us, the people, to be unresponsive to our needs and unrepresentative of our interests.
An attack on Edward Snowden is an attack on all of us.
To allow the lynching of Edward Snowden is to give the power elites carte blanche to disappear any of us whom they deem an embarrassment to them or otherwise to threaten their power and status.
If we now are going allow the mere embarrassment of the power elites and/or the challenge to the power elites' power (such as by pointing out their crimes, such as their blatant violations of our constitutional protections) to be classified as a "crime," then we might as well wrap up the American experiment right now and call it a Colossal Fucking Failure, and let's just go full-blown already into the nightmare state that George Orwell dreamed of, the nightmare state in which all of us are monitored 24/7 and which any of us can be disappeared at any time by the power elite at their whim.
This is some serious shit, folks.
While I fairly hate to support the system (including our "legal" system) that makes this kind of bullshit even possible, as it gives that system the air of fairness and thus legitimacy, if you want to donate to the Edward Snowden legal defense fund, you can do so here.
Tagged as abuse of power, Big Brother, Bradley Manning, China, domestic spying, Edward Snowden, Edward Snowden legal defense fund, fascism, fascists, Fourth Amendment, George Orwell, John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, news, Politics, power, power elite, privacy, Russia, Snowden, spying, traitors, treason
It's past time to reel in our stormtroopers and shrink the Death Star
There comes a time when you should see things clear [sic]
Free from my innocence, there is no circumstance too severe
Only the need for us, for us to believe again
There is a time, temptation's on the run
Dreamer, you've had your way
Soldier, you've had your day in the sun
Now it's time for us to begin again
Le Bel Age
Only our love will remain
Close to the truth once again …
— Pat Benatar, "Le Bel Age"
Please forgive my incredibly cheesy '80s reference, but I've always loved that line: "Soldier, you've had your day in the sun." (I don't know that that the "dreamer" has had his or her way; I suppose that we need to know what it is, exactly, that the said dreamer dreams.)
At least since after Sept. 11, 2001, "hero" worship — worship of the mostly white male members of the U.S. military, law enforcement and, to a lesser extent, firefighters and emergency medical personnel — has gripped the nation.
Never mind that it's the blowback from our military "heroes'" actions in the Middle East (where they were sent by stupid, white, filthy rich, greedy white men) that brought us 9/11 in the first fucking place.
Blowback is quite real. Take the 16 Afghan civilians, nine of them reportedly children, who reportedly were mowed down by one or more American stormtroopers today in what Reuters calls a "U.S. shooting spree." Their relatives won't want revenge against the United States of America?
Shit like this — the stuff of which 9/11 was made — happens, and then when shit like 9/11 happens, American fucktards scratch their heads and ask, "Why do they hate us so much?" (They then conclude that "they" hate us for our "freedom" and our "democracy" and our general lily-white goodness.)
So the endless loop — endless until we sane, actually patriotic Americans put an end to it or until the American empire collapses completely — is that the U.S. war machine slaughters innocent people in the Middle East, there is predictable retaliation in the form of "terrorism" (it's never called terrorism when the U.S. military or the military of an American ally, such as Israel, slaughters innocent people), and then the members who comprise the U.S. war machine claim that their existence — indeed, their expansion — is necessary because of the global threats! (Never mind that they are the ones who are creating any actual threats.)
Yet a nauseating pro-military, pro-"hero"-worship meme that ABC News rolled out recently is that the members of the U.S. military are "the other 1 percent," and that the rest of us just don't appreciate them enough.
Really? Really? The U.S. military is bleeding us dry of our tax dollars — and because of this obscene military overspending we are watching our empire crumble as did past empires that overspent on their militaries — but we civilians owe the members of the U.S. military even more?
This is the deal: China, which is second in the world in its military spending, spends only one-sixth of what the United States spends on its military. This is what world military spending looks like:
The United States easily could more than halve its military spending and still maintain its undisputed global military dominance. At this point — the point on which the American empire teeters upon collapse — I would accept even a one-third reduction in U.S. military spending (for now), with those funds returned to domestic spending in order to save the fucking empire.
But we are told by the pro-military wingnuts that we must have this level of military spending, even though millions of Americans cannot afford health-care costs (health care never should have been made for-profit), even though our public schools continue to crumble and our teachers don't have the funding that they need (they pay for many things out of their own pockets), even though almost no American (except for the actual 1 percent, the plutocrats) feels any retirement security, even though we have plenty of homeless people in our streets, and speaking of which, our streets are disintegrating and our bridges are falling down.
But even though the U.S. military is bleeding the United States of America fucking dry, ABC News quotes one veteran as having said, "'It's hard not to be a little bit angry when you see the tremendous sacrifice that some have paid in this war' while others have been completely unaffected."
No, the 99 percent of us have been quite affected by the right wing's wars of choice in the Middle East for the benefit of the oily war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton, which received no-bid contracts for the wholly unnecessary war in Iraq that the treasonous, unelected Bush regime delivered for Halliburton and the other oily, war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp. (No war, no profits, so indeed, BushCheneyCorp created a war.)
Largely because of the astronomical costs of the Vietraq War (and also, of course, because of his tax cuts for the wealthiest among us), while George W. Bush inherited a record federal budget surplus from Bill Clinton, Bush handed over to Barack Obama a record federal budget deficit.
Americans who have been unemployed and who have lost their homes and who can't afford decent health care (and for whom a college education is pretty much a financial impossibility) don't need to be lectured to by any bitter veterans that they haven't sacrified enough. They have. We have. We have sacrified ridiculously more than enough to the U.S. war machine, and while the mostly-white-male objects of "hero" worship expect us to get on our knees and suck their dicks (or maybe they want us to play dead and they can then urinate on our "corpses" — that certainly seems to be their fetish), the members of the female-dominated professions, such as teachers and nurses, whose sacrifices also are immense, not only go unappreciated and unrecognized, but are told by the stupid white men that they must continue to suffer budget cuts and have their unions eliminated so that they lose altogether what paltry remaining rights that they have.
(I used to be a nurse in the for-profit wealth care — er, health care — system. I can tell you that with chronic understaffing and other lack of resources due to capitalistic greed, and with patients [most of them baby boomers] feeling entitled to the best health care possible even though most of them put themselves into the hospital because of their selfish, greedy, irresponsible lifestyle choices, going to work felt very much like being in a war zone — so again, nurses and teachers need no fucking lectures on the topic of self-sacrifice from egomaniacal G.I. Joes.)
If American veterans want to be angry for what they have been put through — and I suppose that they should be angry — then they need to be angry at the plutocrats who sent them unnecessarily to war in the first fucking place — and not at us civilians who pay for these military misadventures that are initiated by the treasonous, chickenhawk plutocrats who cannot empty the U.S. Treasury via the military-industrial complex fast enough.
And you know, I was one of millions of Americans who protested during the run-up to the Bush regime's launch of its bogus Vietraq War in March 2003. Yes, I was at the California State Capitol at an anti-imminent-war rally in early 2003. I knew that invading Iraq was a horrible fucking idea, that it was a bogus war that was about to be launched by the treasonous, unelected Bush regime, and I registered my protest.
But at that time we progressives who opposed the impending Vietraq War were branded by the pro-military wingnuts as lunatics or "terrorist"-loving traitors or both.
And today, these pro-military wingnuts are telling us that we're not sacrificing enough for the bogus warfare in the Middle East that we opposed from Day One.
And it's interesting: The members of the U.S. military predominantly come from the red states, and the denizens of the red states are always accusing others of being parasites. They're the hard workers, and we of the blue states are the slacking parasites on their hard work and their sacrifices, according to their narrative, yet it has been the case for years that the blue states get back significantly less from the federal government than they pay into it, while the red states get back significantly more than they pay into it. (I wrote about this fact here way back in April 2009.)
I assume that the calculations that show that the red states actually are the parasites on the blue states factor in the federal tax dollars collected from the blue states that go into the U.S. military and then are diverted predominantly to the red states, but if not, then the parasitical relationship is even more severe than it has been reported.
In any event, upon examination what emerges is the truth: Which is that the red states, appropriate to their assigned color, are blood-suckers — ticks, fleas, leeches — while we of the blue states, appropriate to our assigned color of oxygen-deprived, near-death blue, are the host, and not fucking vice-versa.
The right-wing fascists love the U.S. military because whatever they do not understand or they do not like or agree with they wish to destroy, and because of their ignorance they are fearful, and because they are fearful, they glorify the capacity to kill those of whom they are afraid. Fearful idiots — not truly brave and loving individuals — glorify guns, bombs and other means of killing people.
And, of course, there are millions of traitors — from big-time military contractors all the way down to individual soldiers — who feed at the trough that is U.S. military overspending. They are traitors because they don't care that U.S. military overspending is destroying their own nation; they just want their gravy train to keep on chugging. To justify their continued looting of the U.S. Treasury — to continue to rob us blind — they have to invent perpetual "threats" and "national interests," when the real interests sure the fuck aren't national, but quite personally financial.
Religion has played a role, too, of course. Most members of the U.S. military, most of them being from the "Christo"fascist red states, identify themselves as "Christians," even though, perversely ironically, Jesus Christ was all about nonviolence (turn the other cheek, he taught, not gun down your opponent and then piss on his corpse). These "Christo"fascists are having their little crusade in the Middle East, slaughtering Muslims left and right, but why should atheist taxpayers like me have to fund their fucking crusade?
Prick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and their "Christo"fascist ilk whine that the U.S. government "persecutes" "Christians" and that there should be no separation of church and state in the United States, but when the U.S. government is sponsoring their anti-Muslim crusade, I don't see any real fucking separation of church and state.
Indeed, the U.S. military is rife with "Christo"fascists like Marine Sgt. Gary Stein, who, The Associated Press reports, "first started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots to encourage service members to exercise their free speech rights [and then] declared that he wouldn't follow orders from the commander in chief, President Barack Obama."
This is a photo of the traitor Stein, out of his pointy white hood:
He looks just like all of the other embittered right-wing bald white guys, like "Joe the Plumber," who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Ohio:
(Yes, apparently "Joe the Plumber," a.k.a. Samuel Wurzelbacher, had someone write a book for him. No, he is not expected to win the election in November, and very apparently "the American dream" is that right-wing white guys maintain the control that they've had since the nation's inception. A "dream" for the stupid white men, I suppose, but a fucking nightmare for the rest of us, such as women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-"Christians" and non-fascists. [And civilians in the Middle East, of course…])
So: My — our — federal tax dollars don't go things that we need, such as health care, education, infrastructure maintenance and environmental protection, but go instead to the U.S. military, where blatant traitors like Marine Sgt. Gary Stein proclaim that they don't have to follow the orders of the nation's first black president. On our dime.
Any member of the U.S. military who dared to publicly announce that he or she would not follow George W. Bush's orders would have found him- or herself in knee-deep shit. He or she would have been expected to keep any dissenting political opinions to him- or herself or to be disciplined, but obviously Marine Sgt. Gary Stein and his treasonous, fascistic ilk feel that the U.S. military is only an arm of the American right wing, and thus only Repugnican Tea Party presidents are to be obeyed.
We truly patriotic Americans — who fucking fund the U.S. military in the first place — need to reel in this treasonous bullshit quickly. I see precious little difference between the supposed "subversive," "Communist" infiltration of the U.S. military during the McCarthy era and the actual subversive infiltration of the U.S. military by the right-wing, white supremacist "Christo"fascists today.
It's not their fucking military. It's our fucking military, and it's insane that we fund them only so that they then can bite the hands that feed them.
We progressives need to man up, so to speak, and demand that politicians, perhaps especially those who call themselves "Democrats," stop being cowed by the pro-military, "Christo"fascist right wing and stop being the Pentagon's little bitches. The stupid-white-male-dominated Pentagon (the "Death Star" that I made reference to) should answer to us, the people, and not vice-versa.
Military overspending must be contained before the American empire collapses completely. To be complicit in the empire's collapse is to be a fucking traitor. There is no way around that.
I don't want the members of the U.S. military to be unemployed. We have enough unemployment. I want a great number of those employed by the U.S. military to be re-employed, but this time in capacities that help the taxpayers of the United States of America — and not the greedy, treasonous actual 1 percent, who are the only ones who really benefit from the perpetual bogus warfare that they impose upon the 99 percent of us for their own treasonous war profiteering.
These re-employed, redirected individuals from the U.S. military can be engineers, teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, scientists, construction workers, architects, cooks, environmentalists, artists (yes, we need art much more than we need more bombs and fighter planes), whatever they want to be that they are able to be, and those services are worth paying for.
American stormtroopers urinating on corpses and mowing down innocent civilians in the Middle East as a by-product of obscene war profiteering — that, apparently, is what the pro-military right wing wants.
That's not how I want my tax dollars spent, and the progressive vision, I argue, is infinitely better for the United States of America than is the apocalyptic "vision" of the pro-military "Christo"fascists who tell us progressives that we're just not sacrificing enough for them.
Tagged as "Christo"facists, "Christo"fascism, "Joe the Plumber", "Le Bel Age", Afghanistan, Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots, Bill Clinton, bogus war, bogus warfare, BushCheneyCorp, China, collapse of the American empire, Death Star, Dick Cheney, fascism, fascists, federal budget deficit, Gary Stein, George W. Bush, Halliburton, hero worship, Iraq, Iraq war, Islam, Israel, looting the U.S. Treasury, Marine Sgt. Gary Stein, Middle East, Military industrial complex, military overspending, military spending, Muslims, national interests, national security, Pat Benatar, Pentagon, Politics, Samuel Wurzelbacher, Sgt. Gary Stein, stormtroopers, stupid white men, Terrorism, traitors, treason, U.S. military, United States military, Vietraq War, War, war profiteering, war profiteers, warfare
January 7, 2012 · 7:00 pm
'Bomb-throwing' Ron Paul wins wingnuts' New Hampshire debate
Associated Press photo
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, left, gestures at front-runner former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during tonight's Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate in Manchester, New Hampshire. Romney was polished and toed the party line, while Paul kept it real and wasn't afraid to buck the party consensus.
I live-blogged tonight's Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate, the first 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate that I've watched in its entirety. The live-blogging is below.
I conclude that Ron Paul won the debate, hands down.
5:59 p.m. (Pacific time): The debate should begin within minutes… I've yet to force myself to sit through an entire 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate, but tonight I am going to, come hell or high water.
6:03 p.m.: It's telling that all six candidates are middle-aged or old white men. These are the faces of the Repugnican Tea Party, no doubt. Anyway, with Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos and some other guy moderating, this apparently is a pretty high-level debate…
6:07 p.m.: All of these fascists more or less look alike to me, but thus far Mitt Romney seems to be doing pretty well, with the exception of his fakey-fake "friendly" voice, which is whisper-like and condescending. Rick Santorum seems to be uncomfortable in his own skin, not entirely unlike how he is parodied by Adam Samberg on "Saturday Night Live"…
6:11 p.m.: The candidates are now singing the praises of capitalism, which they aren't calling "capitalism," but are calling "free enterprise," since that polls better and since capitalism isn't as popular as it used to be with the 99 percent these days. There was a mention of how dangerous Iran is, which I'm sure we'll get back to. This "free enterprise" crap sounds just like the portion of a debate I listened to a long time ago, when Michele Bachmann was still in the race…
6:14 p.m.: Ron Paul has called Santorum "corrupt." Santorum has taken issue with this charge, of course. Santorum also states that he isn't a libertarian, but that he believes in some government. (Government when it helps the plutocracy, right?)
6:17 p.m.: Ron Paul brags that he has signed only a handful of appropriations bills in the U.S. House of Representatives, that he opposes most government spending. "I am not a libertarian, Ron," Santorum has repeated.
6:19 p.m.: Rick Perry is on now. He has bashed "corrupt spending" in Washington, D.C., and touts that he's a D.C. outsider. His claim that he has been the "commander in chief" of Texas' National Guard, apparently, is risible.
6:21 p.m.: Ah, we're back to Iran. What's the U.S. without a bogeyman? Jon Huntsman is rambling now. Sawyer asked about Iran, but Huntsman, perhaps fearing he won't be able to answer another question, hasn't answered the question, but has given a little stump speech. Huntsman is as white-bread as Romney is, but maybe that's a product of their Mormonism.
6:25 p.m.: So Romney has called Barack Obama's a "failed presidency," stating that Obama has no leadership experience (I guess that the past three years don't count), and alleging that Obama hasn't been tougher on Iran, even though elective war in the Middle East has brought the American empire to the brink of collapse already.
6:27 p.m.: "Iran's a big problem, without a doubt," Rick Perry has proclaimed, further claiming that Iran (somehow) threatens our freedom. (It would be the plutocrats here at home who threaten our freedom, but that's another blog post.) We heard the same thing about Iraq, did we not? That it was a threat to our freedom and our security? Again, it's apparent that the Repugnican Tea Party fascists intend to use the specter of Iran to scare the populace into voting for them. Will it work again?
6:30 p.m.: Ron Paul passionately has talked about chickenhawks, though who gladly send our young off to war when they avoided military service themselves. Paul and Newt Gingrich went back and forth about whether or not Gingrich evaded military service, which would make him a chickenhawk. It's rare for a Repugnican Tea Party candidate to bash chickenhawks.
6:33 p.m.: Ron Paul passionately has talked about how blacks and other "poor minorities" disproportionately are punished by our "criminal" "justice" system (as opposed to whites), including the fact that blacks and other poor minorities are more likely to be executed than are whites. Paul's rant was a diversion from the question about the reportedly racist overtones of his old newsletter, but it's rare to hear a Repugnican Tea Party candidate admit that the "criminal" "justice" system is patently unfair and racially biased.
6:35 p.m.: So there's a break now. Some fucktarded ABC News pundit has called Ron Paul a "bomb-thrower," but Paul seems sincere in his positions to me. Thus far, Ron Paul is doing the best in the debate, in my book, but as his views are closest to mine, maybe that's why. I find front-runners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum to be yawn-inducing and utterly uninspiring.
6:41 p.m.: Mitt Romney states that he personally opposes any attempt to ban contraception, although he states that he has no idea as to whether or not it would be constitutional for a state to attempt to ban contraception. Romney states that he supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define a marriage as being only between a man and a woman. This makes him utterly unelectable to me, to codify homophobia in the U.S. Constitution.
6:42 p.m.: Romney states that he believes that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned, which also makes him utterly unelectable to me.
6:43 p.m.: Rick Santorum, not to be outdone by Mitt Romney, also states that he also would overturn Roe vs. Wade. These men sure hate women.
6:45 p.m.: The topic now is same-sex marriage. Ron Paul has talked about privacy rights, but I'm not sure of his stance on same-sex marriage. Thus far no one supports same-sex marriage, unsurprisingly, with the possible exception of Paul. Jon Huntsman says he supports civil unions but does not believe that same-sex marriage should be allowed. That's the coward's way out, and separate is not equal.
6:47 p.m.: Santorum says that marriage is a federal issue. (I agree. Same-sex marriage should be allowed in all 50 states.) Santorum sounds like he also supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman only.
6:49 p.m.: Romney has used the bullshit "argument" that same-sex marriage should not be allowed because children should be raised only by heterosexual couples. Studies refute this assertion, and of course many people marry with no intent to raise children. Newt Gingrich essentially has tried to make the argument that "Christo"fascist haters are being oppressed by not being allowed to hate and to discriminate against others based upon their hateful religious beliefs. Oh, well. Gingrich has a snowball's chance in hell of making it to the White House anyway.
6:54 p.m.: Rick Perry couldn't resist adding that he also supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning same-sex marriage, and he is echoing Gingrich's "argument" that the poor "Christo"fascists are experiencing a "war on religion." Really? How about we start throwing them to the lions so that at least they aren't lying through their fucking teeth when they claim that they are so fucking oppressed because they can't cram their bullshit beliefs down our throats?
6:59 p.m.: Sounds like Jon Huntsman supports our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Newt Gingrich has used the topic of Afghanistan to bring up the specter of Iran, but, surprisingly, indicated that the problems in the Middle East don't call for military solutions. Rick Santorum speaks again. He still seems ill at ease. He opposes withdrawing from Afghanistan any day soon, very apparently, because, he says, "radical Islam" is a "threat." (Funny — I see radical "Christianity" as a much bigger and much more immediate threat to my own freedoms and security than I see Islam ever being.)
7:01 p.m.: Rick Perry says that he disagrees with the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, because Iran will overtake Iraq — "literally" "at the speed of light," he said. (Really? Literally at the speed of light?) Like the last governor from Texas knew what to do in Iraq… Anyway, Rick Perry isn't getting much air time, and I predict that his campaign won't make it to next month.
7:04 p.m.: Ron Paul correctly points out that so many of the members of his party can't wait to, as John McCainosaurus once put it, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, but that he thinks it's a bad idea, as the U.S. military already is woefully overextended. (Paul did make an awkward comment about how although the Chinese government killed scores of its own citizens, it was a ping-pong game that "broke the ice." Again: Awkward…)
7:06 p.m.: Rick Santorum seems like he's so nervous that he might barf. We're on another break now.
7:11 p.m.: Still on break. In my book, Ron Paul is winning this debate. However, he's not mimicking all of the others on key stands (Iran evil, same-sex marriage evil, etc.), so I can't see him getting even the vice-presidential spot on the 2012 ticket (presuming he'd even want it).
7:20 p.m.: We're talking about the nation's infrastructure now, apparently having finished with social issues and foreign policy. Mitt Romney is supposed to be talking about infrastructure, but instead he's singing yet another insipid paean to capitalism, as opposed to Barack Obama's "social welfare state." Newt Gingrich is actually answering the question. Newt says that we have to maintain our infrastructure in order to keep pace with China and India (not because it's good for us commoners, but because it's good for business, apparently). Rick Santorum is supposed to be talking about infrastructure, but instead is claiming that corporations are overtaxed and over-regulated. Apparently the Repugs don't really want to talk about the infrastructure, which the unelected Bush regime allowed to crumble for almost a decade.
7:25 p.m.: So little of substance was said on the topic of our crumbling infrastructure. Apparently all of our resources should go into even more warfare in the Middle East for the war profiteers and for Big Oil. Ron Paul is rambling on about cutting spending. Who is going to pay for our infrastructure? Oh, no one, since it's not important, apparently. Rick Perry is now pontificating about lowering taxes (although without taxes, we can't have a commons) and is advocating an energy policy of "drill, baby, drill," essentially, and claims that Texas' being a "right-to-work" state has resulted in job growth there. The plutocrats love it when the worker bees cannot unionize for better working conditions and better pay and benefits and rights. Rick Perry is evil, and his state's jobs are low-paying jobs with bad or no benefits, which is why he focuses on the number of jobs, not the quality of those jobs, in Texas. Bad, low-paying jobs in which the deck is insanely stacked in the favor of the plutocrats are great for the plutocrats, but are catastrophic for the working class.
7:26 p.m.: Mitt Romney says that the November 2012 presidential election is about "the soul of the nation." Indeed. If any of these fascists win, the soul of the nation will wither even further than it has over at least the past decade.
7:28 p.m.: Newt Gingrich has brought up Ronald Reagan. I'm shocked that it has taken this long for the name of St. Ronald to be brought up. (No mention of George W. Bush yet. Not one… Hee hee hee…) Rick Santorum, who still appears to be nauseous, just essentially stated that we don't have socioeconomic classes here in the United States of America, and that Barack Obama has been trying to stoke "class warfare." Wow. We are a classless society? When is the last time that Rick Santorum hosted a homeless person in his home, I wonder? And given that Obama took more money from the Wall Street weasels than John McCainosaurus did in 2008, how has Obama been stoking "class warfare" (as Santorum means it)?
7:32 p.m.: Now the topic is China. Apparently China is The Enemy, too, although I'm sure that Iran remains Public Enemy No. 1. Hmmm. Isn't it the capitalists who sell us out here at home for their own enrichment, rather than anyone in China, who are responsible for our nation's economic collapse? All of these bogeymen, when the enemies are right here among us…
7:40 p.m.: Another break. Overall, this is a sorry batch of candidates, a bunch of circus clowns, for the most part; Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman seem to be the least insane of the six all-white, all-male candidates. Rick Perry wants to be George W. Bush's third term, apparently, and again, I can't see that happening for him; I predict that he'll be the next to drop out. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum seem to be too similar on the issues for it to matter much which one might ever be president, Mitt the Mormon "Christo"fascist or Rick the Catholick "Christo"fascist.
7:42 p.m.: Damn, this shit is over already!
The winner of the debate, in my book, was Ron Paul. The pundits, not shockingly, are calling Mitt Romney the winner. Gee, if being as insipid as a glass of warm milk makes you the winner, then perhaps Romney won, but Paul showed more spunk and passion and sincerity — and, dare I say it, some wisdom — than any of the other five candidates.
I think the pundits are calling Romney the winner only because they're fucktards who are going to side only with establishmentarian, orthodox candidates. To them, Ron Paul essentially is a ghost, an invisible man, because he doesn't say what they think he should say. They don't really listen to him, but only compare what he's saying against what his cohorts/"cohorts" are saying, and because he isn't mimicking his cohorts, and because his views don't fit neatly into the pundits' oversimplified worldview, they simply ignore him or dismiss him.
I hope that Paul sticks it out and keeps sticking it to them. He's the only thing remotely interesting about this crop of backasswards white men who would be president who seem to be stuck in the ethos of the 19fucking50s.
Tagged as "Christo"facists, "Christo"fascism, abortion, Afghanistan, capitalism, chickenhawks, China, circus, circus clowns, class warfare, contraception, debate, Diane Sawyer, fascism, fascists, foreign policy, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, Homophobia, infrastructure, Iran, Iraq, Jon Huntsman, libertarianism, Middle East, Misogyny, Mitt Romney, Mormonism, New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich, privacy, privacy rights, Republican Party, Republican Tea Party, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Roe vs. Wade, Ron Paul, Same-sex marriage, social issues, stupid white men, taxes, Texas, theofascism, theofascists, War, warfare
Repugnican Tea Party's recipe for hell on earth: More babies, more warming
Vice President Joe Biden is under attack again from the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, this time for apparently having voiced his support of China's one-child policy.
What would the Repugnican Tea Party traitors do without Joe Biden? Biden is known for saying impolitical things, and while former veep Dick Cheney should be executed for his war crimes and his crimes against humanity (as should George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, et. al.), the "tea party" traitors' bullshit line is the President Barack Obama (somehow) is responsible for everything that Biden says and does.
What I take Biden's reported statement to mean is that he's understands that China's government decided to limit the nation's population growth. However, China allegedly has "coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization," which Biden opposes, according to a statement issued by Biden's office.
Of course, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have been all over this, insinuating that Biden endorses everything that the Chinese government does. Reports Yahoo! News:
"China's one-child policy is gruesome and barbaric," former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a 2012 contender, said Tuesday in a statement. "Instead of condoning the policy, Vice President Biden should have condemned it in the strongest possible terms. There can be no defense of a government that engages in compulsory sterilization and forced abortions in the name of population control."
"China's one-child policy has led to the great human tragedy of forced abortions throughout China, and Vice President Biden's refusal to 'second-guess' this horrendous policy demonstrates great moral indifference on the part of the Obama Administration," presidential candidate Rick Perry, governor of Texas, said in a statement Tuesday. "Americans value life, and we deserve leaders who will stand up against such inhumanity, not cast a blind eye."
So Joe Biden is a baby killer, you see, and by extension, so is Barack Obama.
Of course, as the American empire continues to collapse, with talk of Social Security and Medicare being wiped out because there are too many Americans to take care of, now would be a great time for the United States of America to seriously begin to consider reining in its own population growth.
Do I advocate forced sterilization or forced abortions? Of course not. And neither does Joe Biden (or Barack Obama or anyone else within the Democratic Party high command), which fucking liars Mitt Romney and Rick Perry — who call themselves "Christians" despite their blatant fucking lies — both fucking know.
Of course, Perry and Romney and their ilk are just pandering to the mouth-breathers' belief that it's a swell idea to keep popping out the puppies, whether we are taking care of these puppies or not, and are putting out there the blatant lie that if re-elected, Barack Obama will initiate forced abortions and forced sterilizations! And the Repugnican Tea Party's base of ignorant, fearful fucktards will believe it — after all, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry said it!
What would be responsible public policy, however, would be for the government to pay for voluntary sterilization. After all, it would be much less expensive for all of us taxpayers to pay for one sterilization procedure than to have to pay for another human being (public school expenses, health care expenses, infrastructure expenses due to population growth, Social Security, etc.).
However, the key is voluntary. Nothing forced.
A sane, responsible population of people that isn't incredibly stupidly hell-bent on its own fucking destruction keeps itself in check, under control.
Not only is our economy collapsing, due mostly to the plutocrats' treasonous greed, of course — we have plenty of wealth in the United States; it's that our wealth has been stolen from us since the Reagan years through a thousand cuts and has been concentrated in the treasonous hands of the plutocratic few, who enjoy the protection of the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party — but let's face it, the more individuals we have using our resources, the faster our resources are depleted, and the planet suffers, too, such as with increased global warming from the increased use of fossil fuels from the increase in the number of consumers of fossil fuels.
Of course, Romney and Perry and their ilk not only want Americans to keep popping out babies that we can't take of, but they "don't believe" in global warming, as though global warming weren't science — which it is — but were something like the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Reports The Associated Press:
Bedford, N.H. — GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry told New Hampshire voters [last week] that he does not believe in manmade global warming, calling it a scientific theory that has not been proven.
"I think we're seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change," the Texas governor said on the first stop of a two-day trip to the first-in-the-nation primary state.
He said some want billions or trillions of taxpayer dollars spent to address the issue, but he added: "I don't think from my perspective that I want to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven and from my perspective is more and more being put into question." …
It's entirely untrue that global warming is just a theory that the world's scientists aren't agreed upon. There is virtually universal agreement among the world's scientists that global warming is very real and is a serious problem.*
It's that Rick Perry is the governor of Texas, Big Oil's No. 1 state, and his campaign contributors, and his party's campaign contributors, give Perry and his ilk an awful lot of money not to "believe" in global warming. The science, you see, as Al Gore put it, is inconvenient to those who profit obscenely, at our long-term expense, from continuing to destroy the planet via the use of fossil fuels — just as, as Gore also pointed out, the discovery that tobacco causes cancer sure rained on Big Tobacco's parade of profiteering. (And, as Gore also pointed out, Big Tobacco tried to lie about the science about the harmful and even lethal effects of its products for as long as it could, just as Big Oil is doing now.)
Now, the whole Texas secession thing aside, I view taking money from Big Oil in order to allow Big Oil to continue to harm us, the people, to amount to treason. A public servant is supposed to serve the people, not harm the people for selfish personal gain. Yet here is traitor Perry calling others traitors. That's typical of the hypocrisy of the right wing, though, of course.
Not to be outdone by Perry, a week after Perry announced that he "doesn't believe" in global warming, Romney pretty much did the same thing, saying, also in New Hampshire, "Do I think the world's getting hotter? Yeah, I don't know that but I think that it is. I don't know if it's mostly caused by humans. What I'm not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don't know the answer to."
Of course, the problem isn't really the spending of trillions of dollars — after all, we blow that much money on bogus wars for the war profiteers. The problem is not allowing Big Oil to continue to profiteer from our demise because of our planet's demise. Big Oil doesn't want its big profits jeopardized, and its cronies within the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party care more about Big Oil's continued obscene profits than they care about the welfare of the rest of us or our planet.
Only one of the Repugnican contenders, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination because he is the sanest of the bunch of contenders, recently declared, "To be clear: I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."** Oh, those of his ill-chosen party do.
But while one is entitled to his or her opinions, one is not entitled to his or her facts — whether one falsely claims that global warming is not a reality or falsely claims that Joe Biden (and other Dems) support forced abortions and/or forced sterilizations.
And the claim of the majority of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors that reality indeed is whatever they deem reality to be — all of that inconvenient science be damned — is the dictionary definition of the word "insanity," which is a break from reality.
And the insanity of the likes of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry isn't just their cute quirkiness. Their insanity threatens all of us and the entire planet, because in the most powerful political office of the United States of America, their insanity would be gargantuanly amplified.
A responsible leader leads us where we need to go, even if many or even most of us are are not thrilled about having to make the journey.
We need to keep our population in check. We clearly can't take care of those who already are here in the United States, so why contribute to our national misery by popping out even more puppies?
We sure love our fossil fuels, but they're killing us, as surely as a person with terminal lung cancer who still loves his or her cigarettes is only hastening his or her own demise.
Perry, Romney & Co. claim to care about life, but short-sighted policies that in the long run threaten all life on the planet aren't what I'd call pro-life.
To support policies that guarantee continued runaway profiteering and personal political gain in the short term but that cause long-term damage to the nation and to the world isn't just short-sighted, irresponsible and insane. It's treasonous.
Based upon just the two critically important issues of population control and global warming alone, the choice for president in November 2012 should be pretty fucking crystal clear to those of us who are not absofuckinglutely insane.
*The Associated Press notes that "Perry's opinion runs counter to the view held by an overwhelming majority of scientists that pollution released from the burning of fossil fuels is heating up the planet. Perry's home state of Texas releases more heat-trapping pollution carbon dioxide — the chief greenhouse gas — than any other state in the country, according to government data." (Emphasis mine.)
**Huntsman also recently stated: "The minute that the Republican Party becomes the … anti-science party, we have a huge problem…. When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 or 100 climate scientists have said … I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science and, therefore, in a losing position."
The only thing there I disagree with is that the Repugnican Tea Paty already is the anti-science party. It isn't becoming the anti-science party.
Tagged as "tea party", Al Gore, Barack Obama, Biden, Big Oil, birth control, China, forced abortions, forced sterilizations, global warming, insanity, Joe Biden, Jon Huntsman, liars, lies, lying liars, Mitt Romney, New Hampshire, Obama, one-child policy, overpopulation, Plutocrats, Politics, population control, President Barack Obama, Republican Party, Republican Tea Party, Rick Perry, science, Texas, traitors, treason, Vice President Joe Biden
UN looking into legality of slaughter of bin Laden
Was this past weekend's assassination of Osama bin Laden legal?
Unsurprisingly, in the articles that I've read online, Americans tend to say that of course it was — he was an "enemy combatant" with whom we were "at war"; U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder actually called, quite speciously, bin Laden's assassination "an act of national self-defense" (and not, say, a revenge killing); and besides, Barack Obama had said when he was campaigning for president that if we got bin Laden in our sights then he would order him killed (as though if you simply warn someone that you will do something illegal, such as rape her or murder him, if you get the opportunity to do so and then do so, then your actual act is not illegal because hey, you'd given him or her a warning!) — while those outside of the U.S. are much less likely to make such a certain pronouncement, expressing problems with the facts that bin Laden was unarmed and that the raid on his compound was conducted without the consent or even the prior notification of the government of the sovereign nation of Pakistan. Bin Laden should have been captured, if at all possible, and put on trial, since everyone, even the likes of bin Laden, has the right to due process, these dissenters have expressed.
One of these dissenters, Kent University international lawyer Nick Grief, called bin Laden's killing what it apparently was: an "extrajudicial killing without due process of the law," and he noted that even Nazi war criminals were brought to trial at the end of World War II.
Louise Doswald-Beck, former legal chief for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said that bin Laden was not an enemy combatant but that "He was basically head of a terrorist criminal network, which means that you're not really looking at the law of armed conflict but at lethal action against a dangerous criminal."
Another British lawyer, Michael Mansfield, said, "The serious risk is that in the absence of an authoritative narrative of events played out in Abbottabad, vengeance will become synonymized with justice, and that revenge will supplant due process. … Whatever feelings of elation and relief may dominate the airwaves, they must not be allowed to submerge core questions about the legality of the exercise, nor to permit vengeance or summary execution to become substitutes for justice." [Emphasis mine.]
And it looks as though the United Nations is investigating the legality of bin Laden's assassination. Reports The Associated Press today:
Geneva – The United Nations' independent investigator on extrajudicial killings* has called on the United States to reveal more details of the raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistan hideaway to allow experts to assess the legality of his killing.
South African law professor Christof Heyns said in a statement [today] that Washington "should disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards."
Heyns says "it will be particularly important to know if the planning of the mission allowed an effort to capture Bin Laden."
His statement echoed similar appeals from other UN officials, human rights groups and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
U.S. officials say the raid is legal under U.S. and international law.
Of course "U.S. officials say the raid [was] legal under U.S. and international law." How often does the perpetrator of a crime admit it?
In any event, it's not like the U.S. is going to respect any adverse finding by the UN anyway. The UN Security Council would not rubber-stamp George W. Bush's illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War, but the Bush regime went ahead and launched it anyway in March 2003. The U.S. respects the UN only when it is convenient for the U.S. to do so, which is one of the many reasons that the U.S. is so hated throughout the world: its blatant hypocrisy and double standards.
I still believe that the assassination of Osama bin Laden was meant, at least in part, for Barack Obama's political gain. I believe that Obama wanted to show that he's just as bad a bad-ass as George W. Bush tried to pass himself off as, and also, what's better to counter the charges that Obama is not really an American and actually is Muslim than to snuff out Osama bin Laden, to take him dead or alive dead?
The so-called "swing voters" are susceptible to such wingnutty charges that Obama isn't a citizen and that he's actually a Muslim, and it's the support of the "swing voters" (he's screwed his progressive base) that Obama so very badly wants for his re-election.
Weirdly, though, in the White House photo of the gathering in the Situation Room during the operation to assassinate bin Laden that everyone has dissected to death —
— to me, Obama doesn't look like the leader of all of it. To me, he looks like he's just kind of shrinking in the corner, a bit bewildered and perhaps overwhelmed by all of it, and hell, just from this photo, Secretary of State Billary Clinton appears to be more in charge than Obama does. Obama appears in the photo to be an onlooker at most.
In any event, Osama bin Laden is dead, which even Al-Qaeda has acknowledged, and it's not like there will be formal repercussions for the U.S. government for once again very apparently having violated international law.
But it will be interesting to see for how long the U.S. can maintain its position as the global bully. Bin Laden's actions significantly weakened what he believed to be the "great Satan," the American empire, costing the United States at least $3 trillion, pundits are saying. (Of course, much if not most of that $3 trillion went to greedy war profiteers, not for the actual benefit of the U.S., and much of it simply disappeared and remains unaccounted for to this day.)
And as China is poised to become the world's No. 1 economy within the next decade, as the U.S. economy continues to teeter on the brink of collapse, how long will the U.S. be able to call the shots globally?
It is in the long-term interests of the United States of America — and any other nation's — to follow the rule of law. It is easier and more convenient, in the short run, to circumvent the law, but to circumvent the law often bites you in the ass later, often (if not usually) costing you more than if you had just done it right the first time.
Because he was not put on trial, but was assassinated, Osama bin Laden is now, to many in the Muslim world, a martyr whose manner of death only proves his assertions about American abuse of power against Arabs and Muslims to be correct. We Americans can, and should, fully expect bin Laden's death to be avenged. And then we'll avenge that. This tit-for-tat bullshit bloodshed can go on for years and years and years, which is exactly what the war profiteers and the weasels of the military-industrial complex want.
And just as the United States was somewhat recovering from its reputation as the global asshole that the treasonous members of the unelected Bush regime earned it, Barack Obama, by mimicking George "W. for Wanted Dead or Alive" Bush, has taken us backasswards again.
Can we at least take away that Nobel Peace Prize that he so prematurely was awarded while the UN investigates the legality of his unilateral order to assassinate bin Laden?
P.S. Reuters reports a little more thoroughly today of the United Nations' looking into the legality of bin Laden's assassination. Reuters reports today:
Martin Scheinin, UN special rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism … and Christof Heyns, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said that in certain exceptional cases, deadly force may be used in "operations against terrorists."
"However, the norm should be that terrorists be dealt with as criminals, through legal processes of arrest, trial and judicially-decided punishment," the independent experts said in a joint statement.
"In respect of the recent use of deadly force against Osama bin Laden, the United States of America should disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards," they said. "It will be particularly important to know if the planning of the mission allowed an effort to capture bin Laden."
Scheinin, a Finnish law professor who teaches in Florence, and Heyns, a South African human rights law professor, report to the UN Human Rights Council, whose 47 members include the United States. …
Navi Pillay, the top UN human rights official, also called this week for light to be shed on the killing, stressing that all counter-terrorism operations must respect international law.
"We've raised a question mark about what happened precisely, more details are needed at this point," her spokesman Rupert Colville told a briefing in Geneva [today].
*Those Obama apologists and American jingoists who take exception to the word "assassination" (as though only, say, an American president could be assassinated) at least cannot argue that bin Laden's killing was indeed, at the least, an extrajudicial execution.
Tagged as Arabs, assassination, Barack Obama, bin Laden, China, due process, Eric Holder, execution, extrajudicial execution, extrajudicial killings, foreign affairs, foreign policy, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, human rights, international law, Iraq, martyrdom, Muslims, national self-defense, Nobel Peace Prize, Obama, Osama, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan, Politics, President Barack Obama, President Obama, revenge, revenge killing, self-defense, summary execution, U.N., United Nations
Donald Trump, president of pettiness
When I wrote that I hope that Donald Trump runs for president, I didn't mention that Trump's "platform" thus far has consisted — solely, as far as I can tell — of questioning where President Barack Obama was born.
I didn't mention that because (1) Trump couldn't win the White House anyway, no matter what; (2) Obama's birth certificate is an uber-non-issue; and (3) my previous post on Trump was about political strategy, not about the fucking birth certificate.
But now that Obama himself has released his full, long-form birth certificate, I'll finally write about the fucking birth certificate.*
First of all, the die-hard "birthers" aren't going to accept the full birth certificate or any document that Obama might put forth. They are going to continue with the conspiracy theories with which they have so much of an emotional, irrational investment. They reject Obama with every white supremacist fiber of their being — primarily because he's half-black — and no document on the fucking planet is going to change that.
This is fine. These conspiracy theorists are a whackjob minority. Minority. Obama didn't need to release his full birth certificate in order to win re-election. I might argue that in the political long term, the better political strategy might have been for Obama to allow the crackpots to continue to stew, increasing his chances for re-election in 2012.
Those who never would vote for a black person for president never would vote for a black person for president anyway. Those are votes that permanently are lost to the white supremacist/racist Repugnican Tea Party.
It would have been better for Team Obama to continue to allow the "birthers" to turn off the undecideds, it seems to me, since it's the undecideds (a.k.a. "swing" or "independent" voters) who — as amazing as it is that anyone could even be undecided — who apparently determine presidential elections these days, terrifyingly. (Well, when the radical right-wingers on the U.S. Supreme Court aren't deciding the "winners" of our presidential elections, that is, of course.)
And then there is Trump.
"I am really honored to play such a big role in hopefully, hopefully getting rid of this issue," Trump trumpeted in response to the release of Obama's full birth certificate.
Trump already has demonstrated that he's way too fucking petty to be president of the United States of America.
With the nation's economy still in shambles — with China expected to overtake the United States as the world's largest economy by 2016, with the Repugnican Tea Party's "path to prosperity" being a disastrous plan to allow the rich and the super-rich pay even less in taxes than they already do and to destroy Medicare, and with neither of the duopolistic parties seriously talking about seriously cutting the bloated budget of the military-industrial complex, which would be key to solving the nation's federal budget deficit — we have had Donald Trump stating that he feels "honored" to have played "such a big role" in the "issue" of where Barack Obama was born.
Identifying the nation's most pressing problems, and then acting to solve them — isn't that the main role of the president of the United States of America?
Thus far, all that Trump has done is jumped onto the nutjob bandwagon.
Of course, being wealthy himself, and with his future being fairly secure, why should he care about what the rest of us care about — the nation's economy and the security of our future (including, of course, protecting Medicare from the raping, plundering and pillaging of the profiteering privateers)?
Donald Trump has the luxury of being able to focus on petty political myths.
The rest of us have much, much bigger fish to fry.
The one glaring hole in all of the Obama conspiracy theories — I've said it before, but I'll say it again — is to actually believe that after the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars that both Billary Clinton and John McCainosaurus had at their disposal to conduct opposition research on Obama in their own quests to win the White House in 2008, there was something damaging about him — and something pretty big — that their investigators/researchers failed to find. This is rather unfuckinglikely.
Obama's die-hard haters are going to remain his haters. He needs to write them off if he hasn't already.
Instead of trying to appease the haters who never are going to cast a vote for him anyway, Obama should be groveling on his hands and knees for the forgiveness of and for the support of members of the "professional left" like me who don't plan to vote for him in November 2012 or to give him a fucking penny toward his re-election — not because we are wrapped up in racism-inspired conspiracy theories, but because we're still waiting for that "hope" and "change" that he promised us back in 2007 and 2008.
P.S. This is a gem. The Associated Press reports that:
In a statement after Obama spoke [about the release of his long-form birth certificate], Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called the issue a distraction — and yet blamed Obama for playing campaign politics by addressing it.
"The president ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing our economy," Priebus said. "Unfortunately, his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority — our economy."
I'm often not sure if Priebus and his ilk are liars or are insane.
Clearly, Donald Trump — not Obama — has been making Obama's birth certificate into an "issue."
To blame Obama for responding to the "issue" is to blame the victim, which seems to be the Repugnican Tea Party traitors' favorite pastime, such as how they blame the working class and the middle class for the nation's economic collapse instead of the treasonous Wall Street crooks who still remain free.
And the assertion that the Repugnican Tea Party — which especially during the eight, long, nightmarish years of unelected rule by the BushCheneyCorp allowed the Wall Street weasels to loot the treasury — truly cares about our economic recovery is like the assertion that the incompetent surgeon who seriously botched your surgery really cares about your health. (And to assert that handing Medicare over to the profiteering private wealth care weasels and that to reduce the taxes for the rich and the super-rich even more is going to help the economy is like having that incompetent surgeon who amputated your wrong leg "fix" the problem by amputating all of your limbs.)
*If you are interested in background on the birth certificate brouhaha, The Associated Press gives this fairly good backgrounder:
The short-form [birth] certificate [that] Obama's campaign released in 2008 is a legally recognized document, the one Hawaii residents receive when they request proof of their birth. Anyone who wants a copy of the more detailed, long form document must submit a waiver request, and have that request approved by Hawaii's health department.
Obama submitted his waiver request last week, asking for two certified copies. His personal counsel, Judith Corley, also submitted a letter on Obama's behalf, saying the president was asking for a waiver so he could make the certificate publicly available and relieve the burden on the health department by the numerous requests it receives for records of his birth.
Hawaii's health director, Loretta Fuddy, responded with a letter of own dated April 25, approving the waiver request. Corley traveled to Hawaii to pick up the documents and carried them back to Washington on a plane. The documents arrived at the White House around 5 p.m. Tuesday.
The White House has released copies of each of the letters.
The newly released [long-form] certificate is signed by the delivery doctor, Obama's mother and the local registrar. His mother, then 18, signed her name (Stanley) Ann Dunham Obama.
The form says [that] Barack Hussein Obama II was born at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, within the city limits of Honolulu.
There's no mention of religion. It says his father, Barack Hussein Obama, age 25, was African and born in Kenya and his mother was Caucasian and born in Wichita, Kan. Obama's mother and the doctor signed the certificate on Aug. 7 and 8.
Hawaii's registrar certified the new photocopy of the document provided to the White House on April 25, 2011.
Comments Off on Donald Trump, president of pettiness
Tagged as "birthers", "path to prosperity", "tea party", China, conspiracy theories, conspiracy theorists, Donald Trump, economy, Medicare, Obama, pettiness, Politics, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Racism, Racists, Reince Priebus, Republican Party, Republican Tea Party, Trump, U.S. economy, white supremacism, white supremacists
The Repugnicans may go to Iran and join the struggle for freedom there
AFP images
These are YouTube video grabs of a young Iranian woman reportedly named Neda, who reportedly was shot to death in the chest during a protest in Tehran on Saturday. Hopefully the Repugnicans and other warhawks won't try to use such tragedies as Neda's death as an excuse to push the United States, which already teeters on the brink of Repugnican-induced collapse, into yet another war in the Middle East for the benefit of the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton.
Iran is a bloody mess, to be sure.
At least 17 Iranians reportedly have been killed while protesting against Iran's old guard in the aftermath of the nation's June 12 presidential election, which the protesters claim the old guard rigged in order to keep hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power.
The Repugnicans — yes, the same bunch of traitors who mired us in the illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War — unsurprisingly are clamoring that the Obama administration isn't doing enough about the current turmoil in Iran.
The images coming out of Tehran indeed are heartbreaking, such as the images of the apparent shooting death of a young Iranian woman, who, it appears, has become sort of a martyr even though it's not clear who shot her, whether she was shot by a member of the Iranian old guard or whether she even was killed by friendly fire.
It would be wonderful to see the Iranians free.
It also would be wonderful to see the Tibetans and the Chinese free from Chinese totalitarianism, too, but why aren't the Repugnicans and the other warhawks clamoring for us to free Tibet and China? And Saudi Arabia from its oppressive monarchy, while we're at it?
There are many nations around the world that aren't free (don't make me Google that fact), and the United States of America cannot free them all.
"Team America: World Police" is just a movie.
Fact is, during the eight long nightmarish years of rule by the unelected Bush regime, the Repugnicans put the United States of America into its weakest state at least during my four decades on the planet.
The United States, rotting from within like the ancient Roman Empire did, still teeters on collapse, but the Repugnican traitors (that's redundant) apparently want us to put even more resources that we don't have into yet another fucking war in the Middle East.
The Repugnicans need to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. They lost the election of November 2008 and they need to start acting like the losers that they are.
The United States of America still needs to recover from the grave wounds that the unelected, lawless Bush regime inflicted upon it. As tragic as the theocratic, totalitarian oppression of the Iranian people is, now is not the time for the United States, which is on life support, to go meddling in the Middle East even more.
If the Repugnicans feel so strongly about launching Operation Iranian Liberation (that's OIL for short), I invite them to take the next boat or plane to Iran and join in the struggle for freedom there.
But not a single member of our military goes to Iran to die for the Repugnicans' business interests in Iran, as more than 4,300 of them already have in Vietraq, and not one American taxpayer's penny goes to OIL, serving only to make the treasonous plutocrats of the Repugnican Party even more filthy rich at the expense of the Iranian people and at the expense of the good of the United States of America.
P.S. This Los Angeles Times piece identifies Neda as 26-year-old Iranian Neda Agha Soltan.
The more you read about Neda, the more tragic her death strikes you, but I think it's important that we not allow our emotions to overrule sound judgment where foreign relations are concerned.
Many apparently well-meaning individuals, such as Peter Daou on the Huffington Post, are being critical of the Obama administration for supposedly not doing enough about what's going on in Iran, but these critics, like Daou, aren't offering up any actual workable solutions, just criticism.
Iran is a mess right now, but there is not much that the United States can do about it.
Maybe, had the unelected Bush regime not incredibly retardedly named Iran as among the "Axis of Evil" in 2002, the United States could do more right now than it can…
Tagged as "Axis of Evil", Ahmadinejad, Bush regime, China, Iran, Iraq, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, martyrdom, Neda, Neda Agha-Soltan, Obama, Obama administration, Peter Daou, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Republican Party, Saudi Arabia, Tehran, Tibet, treason, war profiteering, war profiteers, YouTube


text:
Q: Regex to match continuous recurrent pattern Sorry for previous confusion. I have reedited question now.
Can anybody suggest me pattern to match complete recurrent pattern :
for example :
 "aabaabaab"  => true // here aab is repeating continuously

 "abcdabcd" => true // here abcd is repeating continuously

but
"aabbbaadsdsabbba" => false // here no unique pattern is repeating continuously

A: Try this
^(.+)\1+$

First we capture a group. Then we see whether the group is repeating till the end.
The \1 denotes the first group captured.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
US component makers squeezed by material costs and new tariff on bearings
by Steve Frothingham
Chinese-made bearings of many varieties will be hit with a 25 percent tariff starting July 6, increasing pressure on component makers to raise prices.
LOUISVILLE, Colo. (BRAIN) — When you buy 5,000 pounds of aluminum every day, you notice quickly when the cost per pound goes up 20 percent — or more — in a matter of months.
Dave Batka, owner of Wheels Manufacturing, is noticing. Since the start of the year, he's seen aluminum prices skyrocket, in part because of the tariffs the U.S. imposed on most imported steel and aluminum, and also because of rising material costs stemming from a strong economy and other factors.
Batka is bracing for another price hike next month when a new 25 percent tariff on Chinese bearings kicks in. Along with Chinese GPS units, bearings of many varieties were included in the list of Chinese products subject to the a tariff starting July 6.
"No one makes bearings here, and bikes have a lot of bearings," Batka told BRAIN this week (Chris King Components makes bearings for its own components but doesn't sell them to other parts makers like Batka. Enduro also makes some high-end bearings in the U.S., but uses imported materials that are affected by the tariffs).
Other U.S. component makers tell BRAIN they are experiencing similar cost increases this year, even before the bearing tariff.
"All our metal is U.S.-sourced but all ships rise with the tide, and that tide has risen nearly 20 percent," said Paul Price, founder and owner of Paul Components.
"We put a margin in our pricing structure for 'normal' price fluctuations but we've blown past that so there is some teeth gnashing and hand wringing. At this point we won't raise prices but it will affect the bottom line, R&D spending and possibly compensation in the form of end-of-year bonuses," he said.
Price said he expects to be able to hold prices steady through the end of the year. "I hate to raise prices midyear," he said.
Enduro Bearings, which supplies bearings to Paul, Wheels, and most other domestic component makers and many full suspension bike makers, plans to raise bearing prices 15 percent next month.
Enduro owner Matt Harvey said he expects to raise prices for the 2019 season by 20-25 percent because of the material price hikes. Enduro's aluminum costs are up 18.5 percent so far this year, he said. Some European steel costs have increased even more.
The cost of ceramic balls, made in Japan, also has increased significantly in recent years because Tesla is gobbling up much of the ball manufacturer's capacity in order to use ceramic bearings in its electric cars.
As for the tariffs, Harvey said Enduro doesn't get all its bearings from China. Some cartridge bearings have balls from Japan and seals from Taiwan, and are assembled in Singapore. Others are assembled in the U.S., with races made of steel from France. Enduro makes about 15 sizes of bearings in the U.S., with ceramic balls from Japan and races made of French steel. The U.S.-made bearings are premium products that sell for 10-12 times the price of Chinese bearings.
Enduro's Max bearings, used in many full suspension frame pivots from brands including Santa Cruz and Specialized, are from China and will be subject to the full 25 percent tariff.
Harvey said currently, bearings from China are subject to duties ranging from 4-9 percent.
"That's not that big of a deal. But when you put a 25 percent tariff on top of that, now you are talking about a significant amount of money. That's your margin, right there, more or less. So you can't just absorb that and stay in business."
Harvey said he is exploring expanding Enduro's bearing assembly operation in Singapore, to move more assembly from China. He's also looking into drop shipping more products from China to customers in Europe and Asia.
White Industries also has seen greatly increased material costs this year, said Lynette Toepfer, the component brand's general manager.
"We purchase all USA-made material," Toepfer said. "While the USA-made material is not subjected to the tariff, the moment the tariff was mentioned, our material costs jumped by about 15-20 percent. Our costs are now higher and we are trying to compete with overseas componentry that is not subjected to any additional duties or costs. It is a problem as you can imagine and not helping U.S. manufacturing, at least in our little world."
Back at Wheels, Batka said a bottom bracket is kind of a worst-case example of the material cost increases.
"What is a bottom bracket? It's just aluminum and two bearings, really," he said.
Batka reckons the bearing tariff will add about $5 to the retail cost of an entry level Wheels bottom bracket, raising it from about $40 to $45 in the store. Higher-end bottom brackets, with pricier bearings, would see larger price increases.
Batka has bearing inventory on hand and does not expect to raise prices immediately after the tariff takes effect. And so far he has absorbed the increased material costs, but he can't do that indefinitely.
"We haven't passed-on the material costs yet," he said.
Batka said not all the bearings Wheels buys are for resale: he recently bought four China-made bearings for one of his shop's machines at a cost of $5.000. He has to replace bearings like that about once a year. "Next year, those will be $6,000 if this tariff continues," he said.
A listing of bearings and their HTS codes subject to the new 25% tariff on Chinese goods.
Topics associated with this article: Tariffs
Posted in Industry News 13 hours 6 min ago
Posted in Product/Tech 14 hours 2 min ago

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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The Kumamoto Plant will continue normal operation from 18 April(JST). In the Plant there has been no damage to facilities that would affect production. And all employees are confirmed to be safe.
In addition, we are confirming the impact on our suppliers. We will update with any pertinent information upon confirmation.


text:
Legionnaire's disease bacteria found at Florida health club
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - The bacteria that cause Legionnaire's disease have been found at a health club in Florida, and a second club is being tested for the bacteria.
The Orlando Sentinel reports that health officials concluded Tuesday that water samples from an LA Fitness club in Orlando tested positive for the Legionella bacteria, and they are awaiting test results from a second LA Fitness gym in Orlando.
Two customers at each gym were diagnosed with Legionnaire's disease.
The illness can cause a severe form of pneumonia, and people with compromised respiratory systems are particularly vulnerable to it.
The bacteria usually grow in closed water systems.
Earlier this month, LA Fitness officials notified members of the two gyms about the possible contamination.
Information from: Orlando Sentinel, http://www.orlandosentinel.com/
Disney World reps tour Orange County Convention Center vaccination site


The acquisition was financed with more than $100 million in cash and $339 million in loans. The complex consists of planned research-and-development and office space spread across four buildings.
The San Francisco Shipyard will anchor a wider plan along San Francisco's southeastern shoreline, which also incorporates Candlestick Park. This will be the Bay Area's largest commercial development under single ownership.


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