From: Jason S. Miller
Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether the victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity".
- Rachel Carson
"Our science-driven and abundance-based predator management program involves volunteers who are permitted to use aircraft to kill some predators where we are trying to increase opportunities for Alaskans to put healthy food on their families' dinner tables. It is not hunting."
--Sarah Palin
Please forward Mind Detox to as many people as you can.....
1. THE DOG DAYS OF SEPTEMBER by Gary Corseri
I am supposed to believe that John McCain is a “war-hero.” On the campaign trail, this decrepit muppet cannot get through his set speech without looking at his notes, but he repeats the mantra tirelessly. Frankly, I see nothing “heroic” in dropping bombs on civilians thousands of feet below. The true heroes of the Vietnam War died at Kent State, trying to stop that illegal, imperialist war. Say their names with reverence: Jeffrey, Allison, William, Sandra.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=982
2. DEFINITIONS: THE INTELLIGENTSIA by Gaither Stewart
In pre-revolutionary Russia the intelligentsia did not mean a professional part of the population such as writers, academicians, philosophers, sociologists, academicians and educated people in general. Instead it was a social group united by ideas: a similar political direction, philosophy and world outlook. Just read Dostoevsky’s novels and you read novels of the ideas projected by the intelligentsia of then. Historically the word implies radicalism and a desire for drastic socio-political change, a particularly valid consideration for intellectuals in the USA.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=1596
3. Crisis and the Crossroads of History: The Need for a Radicalized Citizenry by Dr. Steve Best
The global Animal Liberation Movement is an abolitionist movement that demands the end to all forms of animal exploitation, not merely reducing suffering; like its 19th century predecessor, it demands the eradication of slavery, not better treatment of the slaves. Stolen from the wild, bred and raised in captivity, held in cages and chains against their will and without their consent, animals literally are slaves, and thereby integral elements of the contemporary capitalist slave economy.
http://tantmieux.squarespace.com/cyrano-tant-mieux-articles-old/2008/4/1/crisis-and-the-crossroads-of-history-the-need-for-a-radicali.html
4. Of Family Jewels and Scapegoats by Anwaar Hussain
Those documents, Mr. Boucher, proved to be an elaborate record of some of the most outrageous intelligence abuses of the Cold War, including assassination plots against foreign leaders and illegal efforts to spy on Americans including student anti-war activists, Black Power group leaders, Castro sympathizers and Soviet dissidents. The documents revealed that CIA operatives worked closely with local police to gather intelligence against groups planning protests at the presidential conventions in 1972 and that anti-war activists were followed.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=357
5. The Great Circus by John Steppling
Colonialism never ended. Fascism is alive. NATO is an organ of Imperialism, and the defense budget is over two billion a day. So when we get up in the morning to go to a job we don’t like, and to get paid a wage that barely, if it all, can support our family, and when ghouls like Cheney or Biden or Bush or Gordon Brown, or Sarko, or Angie Merkle are held up as anything other than what they are, empty cardboard cut outs created to mouth the platitudes of the prevailing class interests, try to look for the places where real change might take place. The police are there to protect property, not to protect you. Same with the military, which is there to further the economic hegemony of the imperial class. Trust none of it.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=881
6. From ‘Mortgage Crisis’ to ‘Economic Meltdown’ by Rowan Wolf
What we are seeing is the effects of unfettered capitalism. The mantra of the neo-conservatives and Friedmanites is to let “markets” run unchecked by oversight and limitations. The results of that is the unfettered expropriation of wealth and resources. When money and profit are the only consideration, then life (individual’s and the planet’s) is not even on the radar screen. This was indirectly reinforced by McCain’s recent repetition of “the fundamental of the economy are strong.” When he tried to elaborate on that, he said that the “fundamentals” he was referring to were the hard work and ingenuity of the U.S. workforce. What that translates into is that the workforce is still there for exploitation.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=361
7. From “Dominion” to Domination: The Duplicity and Complicity of Matthew Scully by Dr. Steve Best
And, as it turned out, as so many of us were bracing ourselves for the nauseating Republican National Convention in early September 08, not wanting to hear another disingenuous word from “straight-talking” McCain but curious to hear about unknown Alaskan female governor whom he shrewdly chose to win Hillary’s armies of disaffected, we learned — at this crisis moment and critical juncture for the Far Right — that Matthew Scully stepped in to write the kind of speech the McCain team thought necessary to disguise their malignant and predatory policies in terms of populism and family values. Right-wing soldier that he is, Scully stayed up the entire night before the speech and gave the magic words to which Sara Palin only had to give life in order to sell this sordid spectacle and sham to the US public and bring us another 4 more years of Bush—or probably much, much worse.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=930
8. Yes, we’re matricidal: Murdering Mother Earth one forest, one species and one atom at a time by Jason Miller
Our dirty little secret here in the US is that we built and buttressed our crumbling empire by unleashing a force so potent and so capable of rendering life on Earth extinct that it makes capitalism’s “slow motion” ecocide look like candy-striping. In 1945 we became the first and only country to harness the power of nuclear fission and utilize it as a weapon of mass destruction. Our cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians cemented our position as global hegemon.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=918
9. 101 ways to get rich without doing anything socially useful by William Blum
What’s the proper term to use to categorize a person who is … blindly patriotic, jingoist, an evangelical Christian creationist, gun and hunting enthusiast, National Rifle Association supporter; denies the science behind global warming, with a philosophy of “dig, dig, dig”, and in foreign policy: “bomb”, “bomb”, “bomb”; untraveled, uneducated, ignorant, a devoted book-banner, racist, opposed to equal rights for gays, fanatically anti-abortion, anti-feminist, and has a 17-year-old daughter pregnant and unmarried? The proper American term is “white trash”. Or, as the honorable governor of Alaska apparently prefers, “redneck.”
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=1810#more-1810
10. The Internet and the Death of Communications - Part 1 by Michael Goodspeed
When Andy Warhol observed, “Everybody is famous for fifteen minutes,” he surely presaged this era of YouTube kings and queens, these MySpace gods and goddesses, a million faces and voices all competing for a fleeting moment of attention. An endless quest for “love” in the form of hit counts and five-star ratings. On the plus side, collective and individual narcissism can sometimes provide incentive for real creative brilliance — many artistic and intellectual geniuses had immature or downright schizophrenic motives. But everywhere in cyberspace, we see the signs that the “inmates are running the asylum.” If discourse, dialog, circumspection, and humility are the tools of the enlightened, then shouting, bleating, ignorance and arrogance are the tools of the wretched.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=1008
11. Portrait of an Animal Researcher by David Irving
In 2003 at Columbia University, a whistleblower exposed experiments in which mother baboons and their babies in-utero were operated on repeatedly to measure the flow of nicotine through the umbilical chord; baboons had one eye removed in senseless experiments to induce strokes before being abandoned in cages without care or painkillers; and monkeys had metal pipes implanted in their craniums driving them into a frenzy in irrelevant menstrual stress studies. The suffering these animals endured ended only when they died from the effects of the experiments or when they were killed by their researchers.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=960
12. Bageant unbound by Gary Corseri
I don’t know of any contemporary writer who has better expressed the heart and soul and consciousness of this “other America.” Bageant holds the mirror up to human nature–shows us (and the world) our varied, complex, fragile, pathetic, and sometimes triumphant, selves.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=1503
13. PITBULLS and COLONIALIST GHOSTS by John Steppling
Still, the slight, though legitimate connection Obama has to black culture is vitally important. Sarah Palin is the distillation of all that is wrong with America. A mean-spirited half-educated former beauty queen runner up — a snarky loathsome force of reaction, a mendacious bigot and lover of death… running alongside the semi-retarded (and semi senile) son of an Admiral. McCain is perhaps even more stupid than Bush, although such classifications are meaningless when IQ drops below the Mendoza line. Together they form such a vortex of bad faith and anger that nothing I’ve ever seen comes close.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=1379
14. The Doors, Part One by Viola Ransel
Programs were funded for law, economics,political science and business recruits.Fellowships and Chairs helped to createthe American Enterprise Institute.More than thirty of its scholarspopulated the Reagan Administration,including Interior Secretary James Wattand William Bennett of Education.Through the 70s and 80s rightwing tentaclesincreasingly embraced American politics.The Smith-Richardson Foundation incubatedtrickle down, voodoo economics.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=1017
