13 May 2007

Try, Try Again

I'm interrupting what has so far been an absolutely flawless weekend day here in Mexico City to have another go at wireless posting. Some of you may have seen the embarassingly unsuccessful first attempt I made earlier, using MMS, although I only allowed the results to remain on Nomadicity for a few hours. Despite the obvious problems, I did gain some valuable insights into the process, although these do not include how to post images wirelessly.

I also noted with some chagrin that in fact there are some Jaiku-nauts who have figured out how to post image Jaikus (yes, none of them have started shaving yet).

Irregardless, I have not today been blessed with the ambition to try to figure this out right now. After a very pleasant morning of exploring the positively exquisite Bosque de Chapultepec (Mexico's answer to London's Hyde Park or New York's Central) and several of it's numerous incredible museums, I am now waiting out a pleasant afternoon downpour in a very comfy chair in the bar at the Four Seasons. After depressing myself by reading what passes what passes for a newspaper in Florida's Guisano community (the Miami Herald), I kind of naturally thought to try again with wireless posting, this time using an email client. So once again - if you are reading this, it means I've been successful.

The news from and about the U.S.A. (as related by the Mexican edition of the Miami Herald) is depressingly moronic as always. The front page is depressing for what isn't there - still no impeachment and indictment of Bush or Cheney, no discussion of the cult of violence that led to the Virginia Tech massacre, no bold initiatives to tackle carbon emissions, no acknowledgent or recognition that the plagues of poverty, waste, fast food, urban sprawl, Christian fundamentalism, homelessness, racism, income disparity, and Windows Vista might all be rooted in single core problem - free markets. On page two, there is an article about how some communities in Texas are opposing innoculating girls with a safe and effective vaccine against a sexually-transmitted virus because of fears that it will "encourage them to be sexually active." On page 3, Cheney the draft-dodging apartheid supporter is on board a carrier in the PERSIAN Gulf, waving his big stick threatingly at Iran, declaring "we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region." Dick didn't mention that most of us are far more concerned with American dominance, and American nuclear weapons. Hint, Dick, there is only one country in history that has demonstrated itself untrustworthy in this respect by using it's nuclear arsenal to carry out mass slaughter of civilians, and it's not Iran.

Page 4 has a editorial diatribe by a certain Leonard Pitts, Jr., who rejoices in the recent sentencing of Paris Hilton to 45 days in jail for being "pulled over three times for driving on a suspended licence while on probation for drunken driving." Pitts thinks this is "poetic justice" because he thinks Hilton has for too long set a bad example for "the kids who admire her" by demonstrating indifference to "the rules that govern life here on Planet Earth." He goes on to muse gleefully on the mental image of Hilton in "an orange jumpsuit." Never once in his ramblings on the topic does he venture to make the painfully obvious logical leap (or more properly, "logical baby step") to the lack of consequences for George Bush, who started his career as a member of the privileged class (and whose vacuousness far surpasses that of Hilton) with getting let off for a drink-driving charge, and then went on to dodge the draft, steal two elections, lie to Congress, defy the security council, start an illegal war, and kidnap and torture thousands, and he is still yet to see the orange prison jumpsuit he deserves. I agree Hilton hasn't been a model member of society, but when you are a columnist and you have a choice between writing about the unpunished trangressions of serial commissioner of moving violations, and those of the biggest war criminal of the 21st century, focussing on Hilton doesn't suggest a good sense of priorities.

Moving on to page 5, an article on the 400th anniversery of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia (the first permanent English colony in the Americas) makes no mention of the fact that Virginia suceeded where the others failed because the twin economic pillars of race-based slavery and tobacco, which not only got the colony going, but 200 years later led the colony's elite (led by Washington, Jefferson and Mason) to revolt against a British Crown when it threatened to bring an end to the institution of slavery. Today the racist aristocracy of this state continues to rely on racial oppression, tobacco addiction and massive transfers of funds in the form of "defence" spending at the Pentagon, C.I.A. and Hampton Roads in order to keep their corrupt lifestyles afloat.

On page 6 is a story about continuing U.S. efforts to prevent Guantanamo detainees from getting a fair trial, and page 7 summarises the latest buffoonery of U.S. clients Olmert and Musharraf, as well as an accounting of US violations of the Nuclear NPT.

To Bush's undoubted relief, page 8 was dedicated to Mother's Day gift ideas (too late to give Barbara an abortion gift certificate?). On 9, Garry Trudeau once again gave thanks to the Bush administration for making life so easy for political humourists.

Page 10 was dedicated to "Home Stuff," but in the Opinion section on page 11, some moron by the name of James Pinkerton turned a blind eye to the poverty and despair of America, the the misery of slums of Rio de Janiero, the repression of Hong Kong and Singapore, and the skyrocketing rates of poverty in Russia since 1991 (as well as the mirror-image success stories in Socialist countries like Sweden, Viet Nam, Cuba, Botswana, Venezuela and elsewhere) to wax poetic about how Sarkhozy's election victory was an indication that the entire world now regarded Socialism as a big mistake and realised, with the benefit of hindsight, how much better off we all would have been if we had simply kept the Bourbon monarchs and Marie Antoinette in power in the first place. This is what passes for reasoning with these morons.

Also in the page 11 opinion section was this little update on the Millenium Development Goals by Jeffrey Sachs titled "The Poor Need Aid, not Lectures." Although Sachs, as a Harvard Business School professor and a long-time cheerleader for free-markets, might be expected to be a promoter of the Bush administration (which wraps itself in free-market ideology), this opinion piece was a litany of failed promises, unmet obligations and disappointments in the years since the Millenium Development Goals were established and committed to by the G-8 in 2000. Unsurprisingly, the biggest single dead-beat is Bush's America, which not only has completely failed to meet it's committments to contribute the 1% of GDP that economists almost universally agree is required address the massive economic imbalances that plague most of the world, but is now slipping even from the pathetic 0,1% level it managed under the Clinton Administration. On top of this, it appears the Bush Administration is engaging in an incredibly cynical (even for this bunch) attempt to obfuscate its failings by using misleading accounting (guess those ex-Enron guys have to work somewhere) and cooked numbers. Jeffrey seems honestly surprised to learn that the greedy capitalists who infest the White House aren't willing to meet the committments they themselves made, even though it's a well-known fact that the costs are minimal and the benefits are enormous. Why? Because the costs will hit a handful of Wall Street slimeballs who contributed heavily to Bush's last "election" campaign, and the benefits will fall mostly on some African families; although they number close to a billion, none of them helped Bush steal his last election.

Finally, page 12 contains an account of yet another failed American Conservative policy, the "War on Drugs". Thanks to Conservatives, it's become nearly impossible to get a job In the U.S.A without submitting to a urine test. As a result, millions of Americans have become desparate to find ways to defeat these tests, giving rise to an internet-driven myth that massive doses of Niacin will purge the system of drug traces. Instead, they are ending up in emergency rooms suffering from "heart palpitations, vomiting, blood sugar analomies and liver failure."

That's the news from what the Grouper has aptly named "The Fourth Reich," and that's my rant for the day. This was supposed to be just a technical test, but there you go - once I get started there's just no stopping. Makes me wonder if anyone has ever composed an entire novel using a telephone key pad.

G.
Mexico City
12 May 2007

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