Bits & Pieces #39

 

Royal Dutch Shell, one of the foreign oil companies that keep running ads on American television informing us what a great bunch of guys they are and how much they’re doing to help America has just been fined $1.1 million for polluting the Arctic air. Not surprisingly, Shell doesn’t mention this in any of their ads. What is surprising is that the fine was only $1.1 million. After all Shell makes billions every year.

 

Why should the fine have been higher? Well, this is a company that set up two rigs in the Arctic ocean without fully exploring the consequences of what they were doing. Their ex-vice-President had the gall and the stupidity to say out loud that drilling in the Alaskan Arctic was relatively easy. Drilling in water is never easy, check out BP and the Gulf Coast, but this moron thinks it is. Then after finding out that they couldn’t complete their mission they ran one of the rigs aground which prompted the administration to bar them from the region this year. They should be barred from the hemisphere forever.

 

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Colorado voters proved recently that they care far more about their ability to kill things than they do about good government. In two recall elections this week, southern Colorado voters threw out two state legislators who had excellent records for doing their job but had gone on record as being for certain gun restrictions.

 

In a country, at a time, when we are so lacking in good governance, it is a direct condemnation of the voters of southern Colorado, that they thought more about their so called rights to kill than they do about having people, with more on their minds than gunpowder, in the state capital. Colorado voters, you are a disgrace to democracy.

 

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The war in Afghanistan was fought because the US couldn’t understand that the Pashtun people couldn’t refuse hospitality to the Saudi’s who sought it as they ran from American forces after 9/11. The Pashtun code of honor demands that if a man asks for asylum you must give it to him. To do otherwise will bring great shame on your name. The Americans just didn’t get that. They thought that the Pashtuns were siding with Al Qaeda and yes,  some of them were, but mainly the tribes were just going along with their age-old custom of giving hospitality to any man that asks for it.

 

The result of our not understanding the Afghan customs even after they were explained to us was a ten-year war that has cost trillions of dollars and in which tens of thousands of lives have been lost.

 

As far as the Afghan people are concerned, there is nothing they can do about this. They are honor bound by their customs, as they should be. We as a country and as a people have lost our understanding of the concept of honor and it is, to a great extent, because of this, that we are in the mess we are in.

 

Americans demanded something that Pashtuns could not give them without bringing down great shame on themselves and their families and tribe. The war in Afghanistan is a war about honor, a concept that seems to have slipped out of the American lexicon. How could we be so blind?  It was easy. Congress had tied the hands of our intelligence services when they dictated that said services could not employ nationals from unfriendly countries or anyone with a criminal record. Where the hell did those morons in congress think spies come from, the convent? It was an idiotic dictum and it crippled American intelligence from the 1980’s until the present.  At the time we invaded Afghanistan we had only a very few people in our various intelligence services that spoke Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Dari, Uzbek, Turkmen, Nuristani,  Baluchi or any of the various languages and dialects spoken there and in the rest of the middle-east. Of course those same congressmen didn’t have to worry about speaking any of those languages, most of them can barely speak legible English.

 

 

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Has anyone out there figured out what a blessing Edward Snowden has been to this country. His outing of NSA has opened a Pandora’s Box of outrageous actions by that out of control spy agency.  Who haven’t they been spying on and to whom haven’t they sold information about you and me? It seems like these guys have broken all the laws they were supposed to be protecting. They make the old Hoover FBI look like solid citizens.

 

The next revelation has to be a photo of Director James Clapper in sexy lingerie and six inch heels.

 

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I recently read a very interesting NY Times article by John Lewis about the Right Wing’s attempts to limit minority access to the voting process. Of course he’s correct. Everyone with any ability to reason knows that the majority of minority’s will normally, regardless of any other considerations, vote Democratic simply because of the way they are treated by right wing bigots.

 

Mr. Lewis points out that a number of states are now requiring state issued picture IDs and that some require a signature. Sure, these measures are, in most cases, the result of Republican’s trying to keep minority voters from voting Democratic, but instead of whining about them, it behooves those who want to get those minority voters to register and vote, to get them the proper ID. The same is true of Mr. Lewis’ lament about shortening the times available for early voting. These are not monstrous barriers, not when one considers the barriers that minorities have overcome just to get where they are now.

 

Instead of whining about them, Mr. Lewis, get off your butt and either change the new laws or make sure that your constituency complies with them, so that they can vote. We know what their goal is. Yours should be to foil them. If the state requires a certain kind of ID and doesn’t make it available, that law is unconstitutional and can be repealed but if the state says you have to have this and we will supply it, then get it. This is not nuclear science. Sure they’re going to drag their feet but you want what they’ve got, so go get it, and in the process, stomp those dragging feet into the ground.

 

 

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Matt Patterson of Newsweek writes that he has become disillusioned with Obama. He claims that Obama’s election was an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon. Well, Matt, there’s nothing inscrutable about Obama’s election. He got elected because the Republicans had just spent eight years staring wars, screwing the economy and lying to the American people. The fact is that my dog could have gotten elected over the ticket of McCain and the bimbo. The Republicans elected Obama through their dishonesty and incompetence and then they did it a second time by running a slate of bigots and dummies that couldn’t have won a race against Osama bin Laden.

 

Obama didn’t get elected by liberals, he got elected by people who were sick of the far Right. He got elected by that center group, who just wanted out of anything Republican. He got elected the second time, by people who were sick of legislators who were more interested in their own political agenda, than in running a country.

 

I don’t know where the hell Matt Patterson and Newsweek have been for the last 13 years but Howdy Doodie has had more functional ideas in that time period than have come out of the entire Republican party.

 

You can knock Obama all you want but he would never have been in office if the Republicans had not offered up a series of slates featuring Bush, Cheney, McCain, Palin, Romney and Ryan. There’s no mystery about how Obama got elected-twice. The only mystery is where the Republican party found such a bumbling collection of political hacks.

 

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Why in the world would anyone, with any sense of humanity or Christian charity ever want to travel to or live in either of the Carolinas.  North and South Carolina have become the epitome of Red neck backward and their residents seem to revel in their inability to think like or act like human beings.

 

Recently in Raleigh, North Carolina, “Love in Wins Ministries,” a charitable organization that has been giving out food to the homeless on Sundays, was forced, under threat of arrest, to stop their charitable actions. Let’s all give a loud rebel yell for the brave cops who forced hungry, homeless people to go without food on the Lord’s Day.

 

As hungry people stood by unable to get the food that the charity had intended for them those brave sons of the old south that make up the Raleigh police department forced the members of the charity, under threat of arrest to pack up their food and depart.

 

Yes, there is a city ordinance that prohibits anyone from distributing food without a permit, and yes this charity should have gotten one,  but the last sensible heads in town had managed to ignore it until this past weekend.  God bless North Carolina and all its charitable, church going public.

 

Then across the border in Columbia South Carolina the police were herding up homeless people and stuffing them into a facility that holds only about one sixth the number forced into it. It seems that Columbia has about 1,518 homeless folk and only has beds for 240 in the shelter they have provided, far outside of town. They have also posted cops at the shelter to prevent anyone from leaving and heading back into town. Those who leave can go away from town but not back into the town. This is America, folks and those are your good old red necks at work showing the world, just how humane Americans can be. These are the same people who don’t want you to vote unless you’re white, stupid and bigoted. God bless them one and all.