Tag Archives: Iago

Will occupying the streets Sept 17, Oct 6 and 15 precipitate an American Fall?

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“American Fall” would be a pun, yes. A pan-Arabian-like Spring causing the US anti-democracy to tumble, being the objective. The English riots have put a dark spin on what might be Middle America’s reception to popular uprising, but mark the dates, because the brass ring nears whether you have the courage or not, and you won’t have the stomach for the alternative.
 
You’ve probably already sensed the buzz about #SEPT17, campus groups across the country have been bypassing the conventional chaperones to coordinate OCCUPY WALL STREET. Can they do it? Not without your help, and that doesn’t mean switching your phone service or knocking on doors to Get Out The Vote.

Donate, organize or help with the logistics. If you’ve the temerity, attend in person. At the very least, you’ll have your expenses reimbursed when the city settles your civil suit against them for false arrest. New York City already budgeted for the insurance policy that will pay the legal settlements for the probably now textbook law enforcement practice of kettling inconvenient protests. Or, thinking positively, you may just witness history. To make history you have to make it. Don’t leave it up to the Little Red Hen if you want a piece.

Next up is #OCT6, although the day varies regionally. The date marks the 10th anniversary of the Afghan invasion, but social justice groups of all stripes are throwing their sundry complaints unto one banner and have organized marches nationwide. Of course the nationals aims to SEIZE DC, where activists will converge on Freedom Square, English for “Tahrir Square”, with plans to camp there until the people’s voice is heard. DC has passed ordinances against overnight protests, but Freedom Square may be cut some slack for being off the National Mall. It’s a smaller public space which lies on the diagonal between the White House and the Capitol Building, abreast of General Tecumseh Sherman’s horse actually.

The determination to reclaim American Democracy with an action in DC hopes to recreate Madison Wisconsin on the Potomac, with the same grassroots support for a broad set of issues to which both parties have shown themselves unresponsive.

A successful DC foothold will get real traction being closely followed by an international call for a worldwide uprising. #OCT15 is being spearheaded by Spain’s movement for GLOBAL DEMOCRACY. Will it dilute regional efforts to have actions running concurrently, or will synchronized demonstrations overwhelm our transnational overseers? We can wait and see, or we can give it our best shot.

Here are more graphics in support of the kickoff September 17. Borrowing from Tunisia and Egypt, and before that Chicago 1968, it’s US Days of Rage.

In the course of a single spring we’ve seen massive demonstrations which provoked governments to interrupt cellphone service, shut down internet access, and answer protestors with direct gunfire. To what extreme will the USG be driven? What rights remain inviolate in the US? Not communication. Activist cellphones were blocked on the BART in San Francisco to thwart protests against police brutality.

Furkan Dogan was no Leon Klinghoffer, (nor Abu Abbas, ergo no press for him)

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Interesting that when Palestinians hijack a passenger ship, and kill one person, it’s quite a different story than when the Israelis pirate a ship and kill nine, even when one is an American. We remember the Achille Lauro, and the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer executed when the hijackers’ demands were being ignored. 19-year-old Furkan Dogan was executed without the Israeli Commandos making clear why they had any authority to attack the Mavi Marmara in international waters. Not one complaint from the US press or government. The difference is of course that Dogan was not Jewish, but Muslim. Israel’s own brand of antisemitic racism, obviously America’s too.

I wonder if Midnight on the Mavi Marmara will be immortalized like the Voyage of Terror: the Achille Lauro Affair? We all know that story. Evil Arabs seize innocent passengers, negotiate release of passengers for escape flight, American renege on safe passage, intercept plane and capture the terrorists, all except for the ringleader whose name become household for nefarious evildoer. Americans still knew the Iagoian Abu Abbas when he was captured in the invasion of Iraq and died in US captivity. What had been the point of hijacking the Achille Lauro? Prisoner release? Something about Palestine and Israel? That part is certainly fuzzy.

Apparently giving voice to the motives of terrorist acts is to play into their hands, ergo, they’re simply despicable “terrorists,” no one else’s freedom fighters.

Down to sports, empires are tribal

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Down to sports, empires are tribal

American World Cup viewers tuning in to watch their team face England on Saturday might be excused confusion about their adversary’s flag. Instead of the British Union Jack, English fans waved a red and white standard usually only glimpsed in movies where knights fight dragons, crusades, or Braveheart.

That’s the red cross of Saint George, dragon-slayer, minus the diagonal white-on-blue X of Scotland’s Saint Andrew and the red X of Ireland’s Saint Patrick. Where British dominion is concerned, natural resources and labor are commonwealth, assertion of athletic dominance is forever England.

But the England team crest, with the three lions passant-guardant, dates to lionhearted King Richard, the early realm’s warrior expansionist. Technically the heraldic cats are léopards, because the royal houses ruled in the language of the French, and these three show the empire’s spots: Team England’s badge invokes the era when “England” included the conquered Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

As far as world onlookers cared, the first round pairing of USA versus England was an intramural match among conspiratorial members of the Coalition of the Willing. At best one could only root for the good cop colonizer. Early enough in the game, a score fumbled past England’s goalie portended the Gods’ ambivalence over the outcome. Like Olympic teams, the FIFA contenders are groupings of soccer all-stars whose day jobs mean playing side by side, for either Man United or Real Madrid apparently. It’s hard to expect that team allegiances would defer to nationalism any more than to the federation’s television revenues. The achievement of a tie for match USA – England guaranteed to string along the barely interested American TV audience.

England, Scotland and Ireland were grandfathered into FIFA because, despite not being standalone sovereign nations, they originated the competition. Indeed Britain invented football, whose spread across the world is owed to European colonialism.

Sovereignty is no small distinction when it comes to legitimizing sports teams. Taiwan and Tibet are not recognized by China for example, as the Korean halves reject each other, as the US might object to Puerto Rican or Hawaiian bids for succession.

Today a pretense of sovereignty is enough to field a national soccer team. Take Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, for example, and I needn’t stop there. By what standard are they independent entities versus US client states? They have their own flags, for all the US cares, and I daresay American pride would be sacrificed for the political gain of either of these puppets excelling their master in sport. A success in sporting circles would only bolster the facade of their indigenous national sovereignty.

Does it say something about the difference between contemporary empires and past, that the US doesn’t need to stamp the red, white and blue unto its colonial projects? Nor dominate them in the arena?

We can contrast America’s far-flung possessions and occupations with the British Commonwealth, whose flags closely mimicked mother Britain’s theme. But I’d like to clarify Ireland’s representation on the British flag. The cross of St. Patrick whose outline informs the Union Jack, represents Ireland before her independence. Still occupied Northern Ireland has a flag which duplicates England’s but for the addition of a loyalist co-opted red hand at its center.

While England holds fast to Scotland’s oil and Ireland’s loyalists, when it comes to sport, she wants all the credit.

Would you believe Fortune 500 corps & “Bat Gangs?” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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Would you believe Fortune 500 corps & “Bat Gangs?” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Poverty threatens sense of prosperityFrom the same mouth that told reporters the ludicrous tale that scouts from two Fortune 500 companies told a local realtor (let’s leave her unnamed, shall we) they rejected locating in Colorado Springs on account of the city’s homeless camps along I-25 –yeah right– comes a really despicable meme she’s now trying to spread of teenage “bat gangs” purportedly terrorizing our homeless.

The fabrication serves two purposes: to lend urgency to efforts to get the homeless out of their tents, and to scare the vulnerable would-be victims themselves. A tent isn’t shelter enough if there are gangs of youth ready to bludgeon every homeless they encounter.

I was almost taken in myself when I received this email titled “HOMELESS ATTACKS”, the text of which has also been copy and pasted unto other online forums:

Sitting here with a homeless friend who got beat up by the Bat Gang on Saturday. He said it was 8 kids with baseball bats who attacked him under the Bijou Bridge. He was taken to Memorial Hospital and spent the night. He got stitches around his right eye and his right elbow.

We’re lucky he is alive! Again we need your support to transition the homeless out of the tent camps to shelters.

It turns out a user “Beepbeep” has been peddling this hard on local websites, luckily without much traction. Any ideas about how to intervene if she lands another TV interview? Fear-mongering like this slanders the CSPD and further erodes the image of Colorado Springs.

A search of the Gazette brings up the murder last year of a vagrant on the I-25 pedestrian overpass, killed with a baseball bat. A teen bragged to his a friend about the crime, and now the friend may be implicated as well. This is a development from the recent trial. From this our enterprising Iago has extrapolated a “bat gang” of malevolent teens, to put fear into stories told around homeless campfires.

Her most recent example cannot be corroborated. Even given the benefit of the doubt, our misinformant may have fallen dupe to a homeless cliche, the public drunk’s version of “a dog ate my homework.” I remember from friends cleaning up their act at the Salvation Army, when someone fell off the wagon and returned literally bruised, from a fall or fight they were too inebriated to remember, the blame was cast away from themselves. What happened was often a recurring theme, the bang-up attributed to “teenage tormentors” armed with bats.

Can you think of a more despicable strategy, to haunt the neighborhood with a fictional specter, all for the sake of trying to shoo the homeless out of town. It’s the KKK’s burning cross strategy isn’t it?

You have forgotten what to remember

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You have forgotten what to remember

You are not forgottenCan someone please explain to me what it means to fly this flag? The POW-MIA flag is ubiquitous these days around veterans. Our town hall flies this black flag halfway below the Stars and Stripes. When the latter is at half mast, the former hangs indecorously low. Which reminds me of a pirate ship stalking a wavering Old Glory.

I understand POW and MIA, and “you are not forgotten.” But there is no flag for the veterans, the dead or wounded, to whom does this lone flag speak and why?

Since the Gulf War, the US military maintains that it loses track of none of its soldiers. We’ve had POWs but they’ve been returned, and we’ve had MIAs whose bodies have been found. One was recovered even recently, though it was the body of a pilot lost over Iraq, understood to have died. Casualties at sea are still sometimes unrecoverable, but at least something about American war-making proficiency now permits us to confirm deaths even sans corpus. Supposedly.

US military engagements between those wars, and later, have been kept outside public scrutiny, or not officially admitted. As a result, they’ve added no POWs or MIAs for the home front to worry over.

Which leaves Vietnam, from whose era comes the dark silhouette of a bent inmate in the shadow of a prison guard tower. According to the last report, there remain 1728 American soldiers missing in action in Indochina. They are unaccounted for — it might be more fair to say–not missing persons, expected to turn up.

During the Vietnam War, the MIA list gave hope that your soldier wasn’t among the fallen. It was a hope that loved ones could cling to for even years after the fall of Siagon. On the radio, a Dick Curless hit from 1965 continued to resonate even as the war receded from memory. “Six Times a Day” told of a bride in post-WWII Germany who met the trains every day, awaiting the return of her German soldier, held by the Soviets in war-reparation labor camps until the Russians considered them to have atoned. Was this what we expected Vietnam was doing?

Six times a day the trains came down from Frankfort
The night he came ten years were almost through
She held him close and said I knew you’d be here
He said I had no doubt you’d be here too

American wives were determined to wait even longer, except evidence of post-war prisoners never came. There was speculation of a cover-up, suspicions which politicians like John Kerry and John McCain do little to assuage. After the war, some believe that prisoner GIs were left behind, whom the North Vietnamese hoped to exchange for war reparations. Instead of paying, it’s conjectured that the US government chose to deny the existence of those men. No American diplomat has ever confirmed the scenario, and no surviving GI has ever surfaced.

The closest we’ve come to rescuing POWs was at the movies, when Rambo went back for a jailbreak and to do-over America’s lost war.

Even as the rumor persisted, the fate of the abandoned POWs is assumed to have been execution at the hands of their former foe, presumed so exasperated and bitter. The general consensus today, no matter the theory, is that no veteran is anticipated to step alive from the sad lists of the Vietnam MIA.

If they are presumed dead, then what separates an MIA from the dead, who we honor together with all veterans? The Vietnam MIA have been added to the Vietnam Memorial. How now is their memory any different?

Even recently I’ve seen relatives of those MIA conduct special ceremonies on Memorial Day, with the empty place setting, the chair, the vase and rose, etc. It looks to me as though the family members have even passed the ritual down to grandchildren who would not even have know the missing soldier. But this ceremony isn’t conducted for the regular dead, who are also missing from the family table, it’s reserved for the missing dead. And so I wonder at the distinction.

MIAs represent casualties who fell off the books. If a soldier’s capture is confirmed, his status changes to POW, otherwise soldiers come up missing through desertion, treason, malfeasance, or physical obliteration. Mother nature can dispose of bodies, but the most common cause of disappearance is owed to the inhuman scale of mechanized war. As weapons grew more powerful, physical bodies more frequently disintegrated. Missing bodies today, even looking back retrospectively, are the result of human beings eclipsed by machine violence. In the engagements America has chosen from Vietnam onward, usually the technology for the big violence is our side’s alone. Which is not to implicate friendly fire. Often USAF air strikes are called in over battlefields strewn already with GI fatalities.

At first the act of flying a POW flag was aimed at the Vietnamese, to remind all around us, with a sideways glance at our enemies, of our concern for our soldiers. Perhaps the MIA component was an urging to Vietnam as well, after the war, to put effort into recovering US soldier remains. Over the decades, I’m not sure that Vietnam could have shown itself more cooperative. If archeological digs are today able to unearth more evidence, it’s not because the Vietnamese weren’t trying.

Who today are we addressing with the POW-MIA flags? I see these flags usually paired with the Red, White and Blue. But those are directed at our foes.

If a soldier’s relation has question to suspect their soldier is an MIA, isn’t that a beef to take up with the US military? The POW-MIA flag seems to say, we don’t trust you, don’t lie to us about our boys in uniform. We don’t want you smashing their bodies to smithereens, or leaving them behind and not telling us. The POW-MIA flag is a renegade message which says: we support the troops, but not their mission. Give them back.

Flying the POW-MIA flag is so unpatriotic, it’s patriotic.

We wanted Odysseus, we got Othello

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America needs an Odysseus, obviously, to outwit the Cyclops and put out his eye. Against the all-seeing American health insurance lobby, our politicians are virtually powerless. To overcome this omniscient villainy without an Odysseus, the only hope is to rush the monster all at once — and all at once, put it to the sword. Senators and congressmen may say the industry is too powerful to defy, I do not doubt it. But if all act in unison, the beast’s threats will be its last, and come to naught.

But isn’t that courageous scenario as plausible as hoping Obama could be our Odysseus? Greed is so much more persuasive than cooperation. Pitted against each other, the Senators collect huge bounties from their lobbyists. If they slay the great Insurance dragon, to the jubilant acclaim of their constituents, they gain nothing. A big, collective nothing for their pains.

But it’s a lovely fantasy. Eradicate the damn thing entirely. Exterminate it from root to tentacle. Decapitate the leaders, parade the profiteers before their angry victims, strip their families of their riches, make examples of them all. Put every last of their agents on the unemployment line. Or better, hold truth and reconciliation hearings to let the Little Eichmans face the aggrieved survivors of insurance casualties.

I’d like to see the insurance company employees squirm, in particular those attending the health care town halls, pretending to speak for common citizens, in reality trying to protect their miserable jobs. What if instead they feared for their lives? If we cannot reach their consciences, let us tickle their throats.

If the health care reform debate is going to raise mobs, it should rouse lynch mobs. Call for the blood of the 3rd party criminals, who feather their planes and yachts and mansions with the last breaths of millions.

The media are quibbling about the 46 million uninsured, belittling the number because it’s really only “everyone’s best guess.” What about the rest of us, the uninsured insured, and the under-insured insured. The health insurers take our money, but offer, when a claim must be made, only mediocre coverage, if any at all. Of course only the sick learn they have inadequate coverage.

If you worry the sick do not number enough to sway the American public, be assured the number will only grow bigger. But even if you count only the sick as victims of the insurance crisis, you must consider that the sense of security of the healthy is lost as well.

Until such time that angry Americans can storm the insurance monoliths, because their representatives in DC won’t do it, we hold out hope for a passing Odysseus. Unfortunately what we got was an Othello, against an Iago far too cunning.

Was Aught Eight an inauspicious omen?

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Was Aught Eight an inauspicious omen?

obama zero posterI remember the discussion in the nineties of what to name the coming decade. In a previous century yrs 1900-09 were aught years, but “the aughts” is an archaic term. Aught means: no thing; not anything: nil, nothing, null, zero, nix, zilch.

In bookkeeping terms, as with data processing, an aught with its diagonal slash helps the accountant differentiate a zero from an O.

I’m amused obviously, that O stands for Obama, optimism and Oprah; and figuratively it represents a zero. With a slash, we can make the distinction, and association, more pointed.

Admittedly, the 00 decade was defined by George W. Bush, and zero fits, doesn’t it, to describe his gas gauge, if not obviously his mileage? In 2008 Barack Obama promised a return from the brink of meaninglessness, this decade, not later, but how far has he got? His followers hold still plenty of hope, things being complicated in Washington and what not, but Obama is looking more like Bush’s fall guy than his arresting officer.

With his legislative majority, George Bush proved you can take a world to war, dismantle regulatory protections, rape the environment, eliminate rights, screw every last living earthly being, and raid the treasury for the bankers, each act performed faster than a Sotomayor confirmation.

With majorities everywhere, even with public opinion on his side, Obama can’t reform health care. And he didn’t have a stolen election behind him.

We’re fast approaching the anniversary of September 11, an impressive benchmark if you will, for George Bush’s first term. I’d be surprised if Obama could put a Cessna into the Hudson by then.

Of course I recognize that Obama is up against more than the Republicans. He faces the powers that be, the corporations, financiers and oligarchs, the “deciders” whose deciding Bush pretended to do by himself. But if the President of the United States is not the Leader of the Free World, is not the most powerful figure on Earth, as his office is held to be, what is he? Are we prepared to accept that our democratic election accounts for naught?

Obama was elected in aught-eight. Judging by the job he’s doing, the superlatives flying from the corporate media about how he’s turned world public opinion, brought change, ended racism, and pretends to be drawing down bad things, Obama will be a shoe-in incumbent. Come next election, we’ll still need someone to offer us hope for mini-versal health care. So from ’08 we have eight years of aught.

Next to the White House

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Next to the White House

While visiting Washington DC in March, I found it interesting to note the edifices closest to the White House.
The Executive Office Building

EAST, WEST
The neighbor to the immediate East of the Obama’s White House is the Department of the Treasury. Is that any surprise? Of course not, but how bourgeois! I could imagine Scrooge McDuck sneaking across the White House garden twice a day to check his reserves. To the West is what we now call the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It’s the site of the suspicious office fires which may or may not have masked a recent vice-president’s misdeeds. The edifice looks straight out of A Series of Unfortunate Events, and check out the plaque which commemorates what the building used to be called:

State War and Navy Departments

Probably that should be no surprise as well: the White house sandwiched between Treasury and War. “State, War and Navy.” How so much less duplicitous than the “Department of Defense.”

SOUTHWEST
Behind the former War offices, to the Southwest of the White House, lies the war memorial to end all war memorials. It’s the WWI Memorial, of considerably diminutive size compared to those commemorations of subsequent wars which have spilled unto the Mall, but its form followed the convention of the typical Great War monuments erected throughout Europe among the nations who had participated.

WWI monument to US Army Expeditionary Force

Except the American version is dedicated to the “Expeditionary Forces” which I just love. That’s what WWI was about for the US. The trenches of Europe were no place Americans needed to defend their freedom. The troops we sent, to relieve France and England, represented a foreign expedition, exactly that. More precisely, our troops were an R&D expedition for our blustering capitalists.

(This may be no time or place to note that history books do not link America’s WWI experience with the Influenza outbreak of 1917-18, which began in the barracks of US soldiers being mobilized for war. American soldiers took their flu to Europe and ultimately killed 50 million people. Those were not the days before we knew better to stay home to prevent infecting others.)

The US entry into WWI was bitterly opposed by a peace movement which the war-opportunist-profiteers maligned as isolationist. Selfish globalization-denying isolationism has been the slander ever since, used against anyone who tries to block military interventions in all their guises.

Ultimately WWI was no affair of ours, had the Huns emerged victorious, American foreign affairs would hardly have changed. Our foreign trading partners would have numbered more Germans, that’s all. But it’s useless to compare alternative outcomes of WWI, all things staying constant, because America participated and profited wildly.

If American investors had not jumped in Over There, the greatest business opportunities of blossoming industrialism would have been missed. The opportunities offered by the Europeans fighting amongst themselves, proved to have been momentous.

And here was the monument to those lost American lives, sacrificed so that American industrial might, in particular the new banking monopolists, could seize the European spheres of influence throughout the world. Of course the lost lives of the American Expeditionary Force were remembered thus:

“…WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE WORLD WAR THAT LIBERTY AND THE IDEALS OF OUR COUNTRY MIGHT ENDURE”

It would take another World War for the US to appropriate the colonies and oil fields by means of contracts and loans, with the leverage of coming to their aid again, this time armed with lend-lease bills.

SOUTHEAST
To the Southeast of the White House, across the back lawn, lies the monument antecedent to the Great War. It’s the Civil War Memorial, atop which rides the triumphant General William Tecumseh Sherman. (Who, to be fair, presided over the War Department for a long stretch after the Civil War, actually this nation’s longest peacetime period.)

Sherman monumentCurious that I chose to crop his personage from my pictures, but my eyes were drawn to the lesser figures around the base of the monument, in particular, a half naked woman.

The memorial seemed to include various uniformed Civil War participants. How egalitarian to include a woman. But this woman was no French Revolutionary with breast bared oblivious as she rallied her comrades to victory. This delicate woman was unarmed and stripped to the waist, her children in tattered rags at her feet.

Could this statue be offering another conceit to the reality of war, to Sherman’s March to the sea, to the burning of Atlanta, to the shameful destruction he visited on the secessionist South? Was this a nod to the real role given to Women in war, their sons and husbands taken from them, a non-combatant left helpless to defend her children or herself. Did the shirt torn from her body confess to the woman’s rape?

More probably the feminine likeness personified man’s attraction to war, a soldier’s predilection for her beauty. How many war monuments memorialize as they also beacon?

Much of the terrain around the White House grounds is blocked off by secondary and tertiary security perimeters. But for the arrival of bus unloadng its visitors to see it, the Civil War Monument is normally cordoned off. When I had passed it earlier, a balaclava-clad guard was blocking the only entrance.

SOUTH
The grassy expanse immediately South of the White House, permitting the First Family an uninterrupted view of the National Mall, has actually been given over to parking permits. The loop of asphalt across the lawn, with cars strewn diagonally along the edges, gives the unfortunate impression of overflow event parking. In any other neighborhood, the crowd of cars would be a dead giveaway that someone on the block was having a party.

Service Connected Organic Brain Syndrome

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This email was sent to NMT, from a Rafael Diaz, recording an experience at the Lake City VA Medical Center. It’s an unusual chain email that doesn’t appear to ask anything from its recipient. We present it to our readers, unless directed to do something otherwise.

Rafael A. Díaz Nieves
Live Oak, Fl

SWORN STATEMENT
Friday, March 13, 2009

Wrongdoer:
Dr. James Kim, Psychiatrist
North Florida/South Georgia
Veterans Health System

Facility:
Lake City VA Medical Center

Dr James Kim has violated my HIPPA LAW rights and has endangered my life. While under his care in numerous occasions I have reminded him that I was his patient not my wife Edna Irizarry, I expressly said to him that I don’t want him talking anything about my treatment with her and anyone else. My privacy is my paramount, especially regarding my Mental Health care because of the stigma society gives to this matters. On the month of August 2005 I was prescribe Quetiapine Fumarte (generic name) of Seroquel. I tried this medication and informed Dr. Kim that I will not take this medication anymore because of the reaction I got from it. As soon I took it I went short of breath and felt like I was dying I was turning blue because I start breathing and had to force myself to breath. Thank god I just tried with a little peace like 1/8 of the pill and this reaction lasted about 2 hours. I remember this because in my entire life I have never reacted so violent to a medication. This turned out to be an allergic reaction to this medication.

In several occasions I communicated Dr. Kim that for some reasons the sleeping aid medication was not coming in to my home via mail and that I was buying over the counter sleeping aids. When I came to be under his care I was taking Dilanting to prevent the headaches that causes seizures on me and Fioricet without codeine because codeine gave me more headaches and Ambiance as needed to help me go to sleep when the pain is too hard. My compensation is for Service Connected Organic Brain Syndrome as secondary to Service Connected Posttraumatic Headaches.

I have told this to him in various occasions and in one time he answered me that after talking to my wife she explained him that my compensation was for bipolar disorders among other things. Immediately I told him that I was the patient and not she, and that I don’t want to have to prove myself to him. And we never talk about the subject again.

1- Dr. James Kim Violation of the HIPPA Law has been rampant, in my case. He had no right to discuss anything of my treatment with no one specially Mrs. Irizarry

2- Regarding the medication, once I said NO, he should have stopped prescribing it and using the US Postal Service to send that medication to my home. After requesting a copy of my treatment with him I discovered that as soon I informed Dr. Kim that the medication gave such violent reaction He appointed Mrs. Irizarry in charge of my medicate me without my knowledge and he had no right to do so. (Thank God Mrs. Irizarry have not decide to kill me at that time. I have found bottles full of this medication hiding all over the home.)

3- The fact that I was medicated against my will or knowledge cannot be denied. Do to the way Mrs. Irizarry used against me so many starts and withdrawals with this medication that had harmed my body. Now I have Diabetes Type 2 with Peripheral Neuropathy, Tardive Dyskenesia that makes me look like I have Parkinson’s disease. All of them well known side effects of Seroquel. Not even the state have the right to medicate a person without His/hers will without “Do Process”. But for some reason Dr. Kim and Mrs. Irizarry did.

4- After Mrs. Irizarry abandoned the home I have discovered various bottles of Quetiapine Fumarte or Seroquel, hidden in different parts of my house. My condition is that I have Traumatic Brain Syndrome or TBI that causes Migraine headaches, seizures and a Congestive problem that causes me to loose or forget things while in stress and that is the reason of my compensation. This medication kills people with TBI. One of the side effects of this medication is Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome and that is a fact. (Please find document with definitions and causes attached) especially people with TBI. It has come to light that Mrs. Irizarry has been trying to kill me in various occasions among other things. For this there are witnesses and one of the weapons Mrs. Irizarry has used is this medication. Because she knows the side effects and how dangerous are for me because her mother is a Pharmacist and the first time I took this medication she was one the persons I contacted and advise me and her daughter of the side effects and how dangerous it was specially for people with brain damage. Also at that time Mrs. Irizarry was going to College in order to become a nurse.

After reading my medical record I discover that Dr. Kim was adjusting the milligrams of this medication, without my knowledge. I don’t know with whom he was discussing this treatment. What I do know it was not with me because from the beginning I reject this treatment or medication. I have had episodes of MNS that are documented. This I discovered after requesting a copy of my medical records from Shands of Live Oak. One of the many occasions that I passed out since September 2007 an ambulance was called to my home and Mrs. Irizarry informed the paramedics that I was taking Quetiapine and that we were having problems and I did not know how to deal with them. (Nothing further from the truth for that you can ask Mr. William Nieves Social Worker at the Lake City VA medical Center) at the Hospital the ER DR ask me what medications I was taking and because in years I have not see any coming in via the US Mail in to my home, I said none. If I don’t know I am taking it.. How can I deny treatment?

5- On December 2008 I learn that Dr Kim was supposedly worried that I was delusional because one occasion he ask me about my family in Puerto Rico. And after I told him about them, things like my Uncle was the Comptroller of Puerto Rico that my Sister was a lawyer. He told me that my wife told him that that was the sort of thing I was inventing in my head. After I learn that I requested some family members I including my Uncle Manuel Diaz Saldaña Comptroller of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. (Please find copy of the letters attached as support of this complaint)

6- I have knowledge that recently Suwannee County Deputy Sheriff Robinson (386-362-2222) called Dr. Kim and that Dr Kim told him that I was schizophrenic and I was inventing all this. This was told to me by Robinson on the afternoon of March 12, 2009 at my residence. Now that Dr. Kim knows that he was deceived by Mrs. Irizarry he is trying to cover His crimes with this label. And that make him an accessory of Mrs. Irizarry crimes against me.

7- The first bottle of medication can be considered malpractice at best, but after the second bottle on and especially in conjunction with Mrs. Irizarry to give me the medication without my knowledge is irresponsible and criminal act of him and could had coasted me my life. I have found various bottles that should not have been sent to my address using the US POSTAL SERVICE specially knowing that Mrs. Irizarry will intercept them. These have been found by family and friends after Mrs. Irizarry abandon the home.

8- There is a matter of a letter that Mrs. Irizarry used in court to take custody of my children that appears to be a diagnostic and is sign by Dr. Kim. Mrs. Irizarry said that it was given to her by Dr. Kim but there is no record of such letter been requested by me that am his patient. I was granted custody of the children last year and with that letter that basically say that I am crazy they were taken from me. (Please find document attached)

9- I am alive by the Grace of God. But for the rest of my life I will have to deal with the Diabetes, Neuropathy and the Dyskinesia and that is not right. I don’t deserve this. Dr. James Kim has violated my privacy, HIPPA Law Rights, My trust and above of all put my life in grave danger of getting kill by Mrs. Irizarry using the medication that he provided her.

10- Without knowledge of the circumstances that are happening in my home. The domestic violence that I have endure, since September 2007, at the hands of Mrs. Irizarry. And the violence that my children were exposed at the hands of Mrs. Irizarry. He has stated that the children are in danger with me and talk to DCF about me. There are witness of the battery and abuse the children and me have endured trying to deal with her. First he should have not volunteer medical information without my knowledge and second he had no right to interfere in my personal life. I am the one that was taking care of the children since they were born and especially after Mrs. Irizarry start disappearing for days and weeks and not let anyone know where she were.

11- I am been force by this situation to abandon the house and lose everything I have including the home. Because he, validated the crimes of Mrs. Irizarry against me. I am been treated less than human and I have to endure the humiliation of been stigmatized by Mrs. Irizarry with the help of Dr. Kim. I am been deny entrance to public buildings and now because of the information he volunteer been humiliated by the law enforcement community in more than one occasion. (Please find sworn statement about one of those incidents)

On February 13 2009 at about 1:30 P.M. I, Rafael Angel Diaz Nieves of 9677 105 Dr Live Oak, Fl. 32060 went to the FDLE office located on 815 North Ohio Avenue Live Oak, FL 32064, as instructed by a Suwannee County Deputy Sherriff. The FDLE office has an intercom at the entrance. I proceeded to press the button and announce my name as instructed by the sign posted. The office has a glass door. The receptionist waved at me and walk to the door to grant me entrance to the building when all of the sudden she stopped about 2 feet from the door and then she turned around and rapidly disappear behind a wall behind the reception desk. Then I saw another woman (second person) that also waved at me and walked towards the door and she also turned around and hid in the same area. When I saw what happened got closer to the glass door. Then I saw an Special Agent Robert M. Shotwell whose office is in the front area of the building and with whom I have met before, trying to hide behind a diagonal wall. As he was trying to hide, I saw him making gestures to the other two women to not let me in.. It was very sunny and I stood there for more than ten minutes and pressed the button a few times more because I knew there were people inside the building and close to the reception. No one opened the door to let me in. No one came to explain why they would not open the door to me.

I stood underneath the hot Florida sun for more than 10 minutes and they would not open the door to me. I had to leave without being attended. My entrance was denied. I had no choice but to leave. As I was driving away I saw a white person enter the building trough the same entrance and to the same offices I was denied access. I am the only the only Puerto Rican who’s also a 100% disable US Veteran in Live Oak. These are facts known by the Special Agent I have talked to before and was making denigrating gestures about me. This is the first time in my life I have been denied access to a public building. That day I was humiliated, discriminated and abused by Special Agent Robert M. Shotwell and the employees of the FDLE. I have been mortified since that day; I still feel the humiliation and cannot believe what happened, but it did happened. The whole event made me feel less than human.

Cabinet candidate Bill Richardson was clean enough to run for president?

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Doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd, that Arizona governor Bill Richardson withdraws his name from consideration for the Secretary of Commerce because of some unseemly quid pro quo scheme, yet it hadn’t stopped him from running for president? Where was the press to dig up the story when Richardson was still a potential Democratic presidential nominee?

It’s not as if the subject of corruption hadn’t come up. Greg Palast had exposed the governor in Armed Madhouse.

I like Palast’s extrapolation on Richardson’s ethnic heritage. To summarize, Richardson came by his Hispanic hyphen through his mom’s side. His dad was a Citibank executive, which qualifies Richardson to be a Citibank-American. As a partner in Henry Kissinger’s lobbying firm, Palast also terms him a Kissinger-American.

But what most interested Palast was the corrupt election of 2004, and how George Bush stole Arizona, under the nose of a supposedly Democratic governor. With Richardson momentarily in the spotlight, here’s an excerpt which Palast is circulating:

Bill Richardson – Kissinger-American
by Greg Palast, excerpted from Armed Madhouse

Henry Kissinger and Bill Richardson
January 5, 2009

Bill Richardson is out: Caught with his hand, if not exactly in the cookie jar, at least you could say his sticky finger were near it. I’m not surprised.

For years I’ve been investigating the second-most corrupt state in the USA (after Alaska). I like to check in on the enchanted state with my bud Santiago Juárez.

I knew it was not a polite question, but it was really bugging me, so I asked him, “Exactly how does a Mexican get the name William Richardson?”

Governor Richardson’s dad, Santiago explained, was a Citibank executive assigned to Mexico City. There he met Governor Bill’s mom, and-milagro!-a Mexican-American was born. Richardson gets big mileage out of his mother’s heritage, and that makes him, legitimately, a Mexican-American, a politically useful designation. But it’s just as legitimate to say that Richardson is a Citibank-American.

But Governor Richardson is more than that. Between leaving Bill Clinton’s cabinet where he was Secretary of Energy and grabbing a Hispanic-district seat in Congress, Richardson became a partner in (Henry) Kissinger and Associates. That would make Richardson a Kissinger-American as well.

In 2004, John Kerry won New Mexico-if you counted the votes. But they didn’t – and George Bush won the state and the presidency by just 5,000 ballots. Everyone was talking about the theft of Ohio by Republicans, but few noted that New Mexico was stolen as well. But one fact drove me straight nuts: In the end, this state and its damaged elections were in the hands of Richardson, A Democrat and a Mexican-American one at that.

In New Mexico the issue of uncounted votes is more than skin deep. Lots of Mexican-American votes don’t tally, but Citibank-American votes never get lost. Kissinger American votes always count. The story of America’s failed elections is not about undervotes. It’s about underclass. Disenfranchisement is class warfare by other means. It just happens that in New Mexico, the colors of the underclass are, for the most part, brown and red.

Class War by Other Means

As community organizer Santiago told me:

You take away people’s health insurance and you take their right to union pay scales and you take away their pensions-taking away their vote’s just one more on the list.

Some New Mexico Democrats have no trouble at the voting booth. In Santa Fe, you find trust-fund refugees from Los Angeles wearing Navajo turquoise jewelry and “casual” clothes that cost more than my car. Each one has a personal healer, an unfinished film script and a tan so deep you’d think they’re bred for their leather. They’re Democrats and their votes count. Voting-or at least voting that gets tabulated – is a class privilege. The effect is racial and partisan, but the engine is economic.

The second- and third-highest undervotes in New Mexico were recorded in McKinley and Cibola counties-85% and 72% Hispanic and Native. But the undervote champ is nearly the whitest county in New Mexico: DeBaca, which mangled and lost 8.4% of ballots cast. White DeBaca, whose average income hovers at the national poverty level, is poorer than Hispanic Cibola. No question, disenfranchisement gives off an ugly racial smell, but income is the real predictor of vote loss.

And what about those Bernalillo ghost voters for Bush? Those spirits are, it turns out, quite well-to-do, haunting the mesas west of Albuquerque where the real estate provides unobstructed views of Georgia O’Keeffe sunsets.

This was my third investigation in New Mexico in twenty years. The first time, the state’s Attorney General brought me in to go over the account books of Public Service of New Mexico (PNM), a racketeering enterprise masquerading as an electric company. Too young to understand what I wasn’t supposed to know, I proudly mapped out the sewerage lines of deceit connecting the gas drillers, water lords and political elite of New Mexico. The AG’s office handed me a nice check – which I took not as a reward, but as a payment to leave the state. After a decade away, I returned as a reporter, to look into prisons-for-pro?t out?t Wackenhut Inc. In September 1999, a company insider told me, Wackenhut was cutting costs at its New Mexico jails by sending guards alone into the cell blocks. Ralph Garcia of Santa Rosa, who’d lost his ranch to drought, took the $7.95-an-hour job guarding homicidal neo-Nazis and Mexican mafia thugs in the local Wackenhut lock-up. Inexperienced, untrained and alone, he was stabbed to death by inmates just two weeks after the insider’s warning. So that’s how Garcia became one more impoverished Chicano who lost his vote. No question, that’s not your typical case of voter disenfranchisement, but that’s the reality of the “Land of Enchantment.” New Mexico is the New America, where growing income inequality is creating a feudal divide between the prison-owning class and the prisoner-and-guard class.

Vote spoilage is the owning class’s weapon of choice.

Whose flag does Bill Richardson carry in the nouvelle class war? When I was checking out the New Mexico vote in 2005, my old friends Public Service of New Mexico hit the front page, sued by the State of California for conspiring with Enron to rig the California power market. It is still in court. It was a scam called “Ricochet.” Enron and PNM say it was not illegal. It played out about the time Garcia was walking the cell block. Where was Richardson? He was in Washington, Clinton’s Secretary of Energy, playing chubby cheerleader for PNM’s plan for “deregulation” of the energy market. Deregulation made PNM’s games possible-and Richardson’s employment by Kissinger inevitable.

Richardson, Ready for Takeoff

What about all those suspect spoiled votes in Hispanic and Indian precincts stuck inside the machines? Why didn’t this Mexican-American Democrat ask for a recount? It didn’t just slip Richardson’s little mind: He actively did everything in his power to stop a recount. I was told that it was Richardson himself who encouraged Secretary of State Vigil-Giron to reject the $114,000 payment from pissed-off Democrats and the Green Party. The Governor was too busy to speak with me about this.

Halting the 2004 recount wasn’t enough for Governor Bill, however. He demanded the legislature pass a “reform” law that would require anyone wanting a recount of a suspicious vote to put up a bond of over one million dollars. As a result, “free and fair elections” are now effectively outlawed in New Mexico. You can have a choice of a “free” election or a “fair” election, but not both. Want fair? Then you have to pay a million to recheck the ballots. In other words, it’s against the law to buy votes, but in New Mexico not against the law to buy the vote count.

On his phony reform law, Richardson was called out by a fellow Democrat, State Senator Linda Lopez-an act of indiscreet defiance that would not be forgotten by the Governor’s circle.

The centerpiece of the law signed by the Governor: Ms. Fox-Young’s proposal to require photo ID for new voters. Maybe the former Cabinet Secretary and United Nations Ambassador Richardson couldn’t imagine that photo IDs would be a problem for some voters. After all, Mexican-Americans in Little Texas may have trouble producing acceptable IDs, but it’s no problem at all for a Kissinger-American like Governor Richardson. The Governor and Jimmy Carter both have passports, they have credit cards and they have chauffeurs who will vouch for them.

Richardson wouldn’t speak with me about the 2004 vote fiasco. Instead, he busied himself with his space program. He announced the state would chip in $200 million to build a “spaceport” to land private rocket ships that will be launched beginning in 2009 by Richard Branson, the British billionaire. Passengers have already bought tickets for $200,000 each (round trip, they hope).

The return of the Bush magic flashing tie

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The return of the Bush magic flashing tie

crazy magic necktieMcCain showed up to the OLD MISS debate wearing Dubya’s crazy strobe necktie! Diagonal stripes of particular inconvenient width create signal noise on the interlaced television picture producing mesmerizing patterns of juxtaposed RGB. What might have passed for a Technicolor wardrobe malfunction in earlier days is a deliberate fashion faux-pas today.
In the false, phony, Franglais, trompe d’oeil sense of that f-word.

I doubt it’s beyond anyone’s French to call the mischievous upstaging device a trompe tête.

President Bush has worn that tie when Karl Rove might have judged it more prudent to hypnotize the TV audience sooner than let them focus on what Bush wasn’t saying.

But I’m trying to reconcile what I noticed AFTER the debate. I’m curious about why subsequent replay footage of last night’s debate depicts the errant accessory without the noisy interference. If digital equipment can filter the dissonance, why was it not cleaning up the necktie during the live signal?

Was the flashing tie meant to interrupt the audience’s flow of thought during the debate, but not the viewers’ reception of the pundits’ already vetted after-spin? Would there be a reason to mess with one signal, but make sure another was completely clear?

And if the noisy element is manipulable, might it have been actually carefully crafted? Noise, but shaped noise, with not the chaotic effect of an IED, but a directed disruption like that achieved with a shaped charge.

And not a subliminal message in Morse Code I should think, but visual counterpoint to the audio. In the form of an optic buzzer, pressed if what’s being communicated by the speakers threatens to have an effect that contradicts the programmed message?

Freeway Blogger logs Colorado Springs

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DONT BOMB IRAN set against Colorado Springs skyline
There’s DON’T BOMB IRAN set against the Lilliputian Springs cityscape. State and El Paso County authorities were not pleased with its visibility. Now the sign’s been documented on Freeway Blogger. Here are some EASY instructions if you want to try this at home.

YOU’LL NEED:
1) Continuous-feed computer paper, approx 250 sheets.
2) Duct tape.

Tear the continuous (tractor-feed) paper into eight-sheet segments. You’ll need 31 to spell DON’T BOMB IRAN. Vertical and diagonal strokes are formed by single strips, loops and horizontals are made by bending the strips. Pre-measuring and cutting the paper will facilitate hanging the letters. You won’t have a tangle of spaghetti paper growing as the wind blows.

Choose a location where the wind is blowing from behind you, so that the paper is drawn toward the metal fencing. If the wind is trying to rip your paper letters away from the fence, you won’t have enough tape to secure them.

Ideally you need three people. One to climb on the rail to hold the top of the strip, another to hold the bottom, and a third to dispense the tape. Use strips of 3-inch length to fasten the paper to the wire fence. Make sure the duct tape is wrapped through the links to adhere to the opposite side of the paper.

If you’re not concerned with being considered a vandal, you can leave your sign for someone else to take down while you hit the next freeway overpass.

Leaving recruits to fend for themselves

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I can’t help but think of this iconic photo as we envision our eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. We say that US success in both depends on surrogate nationals to enforce their own subjugation. Recruiting collaborators becomes more difficult as they foresee the precedent which awaits them.
 

No occupied nation in modern history, with the exception yet of Israeli Palestine, has not expelled its presumed invaders, and punished its misguided traitors.

In the iconic image which has come to represent the Fall of Siagon, the “last chopper” was not rescuing South Vietnamese refugees from atop the American Embassy. In actuality the helicopter was evacuating the desperate occupants of the apartment building which housed Vietnamese CIA operatives. These were the South Vietnamese who had served the US and now feared the vengeance of the victorious north.

The King of Spain is a royal asshole

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The international press has been reporting for everybody the spectacle of the King of Spain putting down Hugo Chavez with his comment ‘Why don’t you shut up, Little Boy?’ Why the King of Spain should be attending a summit meeting in Santiago, Chile is never questioned at all though?

Actually, the royal family of Spain is a royal group of royal assholes just like it is with the royal family of England. Can’t somebody chop off their heads please, since this is the 21st century, is it not? There is no need to have kings and queens around any more, not even for ceremonial purposes let alone having them attend summit meetings between countries while opening their big, royally stupid mouths.

It is also interesting to know that it is even against the law in Spain, a supposed democratic country of Europe, to insult the royal family. That being said, the King of Spain is a total asshole for sure. ( I hope they don’t try to put me in prison for 2 years for saying this. There would go my Spanish vacation!)

And they make fun of the laws of Thailand protecting their royal king asshole from cartoons, etc.? The Europeans need to clean up their own royal assholes first, it appears.

Nuke Dublin and other stories

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Ok so not many other stories in this.

But you know how you can go into certain stores, you know the ones, that have posters and bumper stickers and tee shirts with the Tricolor in the international NO sign, the red circle with the diagonal slash?

And short snappy slogans like Nuke Paris or Boycott France or whatever the hell else the Freedom Fries commando would gladly wear or display.

You hear stupid jokes about how the French are worthless as soldiers, the one about “have you heard the joke about the french army? Well the french army IS the joke!!” and every redneck in earshot busts a gut laughing at how very clever that is.

And you think, to yourself, Self, if the French army really were worthless, why are these buffoons so angry that they didn’t throw their worthless soldiers’ lives away the way GW throws away American and British lives?

So I came up with a new thought for Tee Shirts, and Bumper Stickers, a non-slogan to monkey wrench the slogan driven world gone mad.

Boycott Ireland, ask me why or Nuke Dublin (ask me why)

When somebody asks what that means, tell him that the Irish Republic had also refused to back The Chimp’s war play. Along with other Commonwealth nations like Canada.
It seems to me, personally, that all the invective thrown against the French, is done by cowards.

Simple math tells these cowards that though Ireland had also flat out given the Bushmaster the bird on Iraq, in America there are one fuck of a lot more Irish descendants than French. So they play the Frog-baiting game because they feel that the French descendants probably aren’t nearly as likely to kick their damn teeth down their throats.

Of course, that wouldn’t play very well in Louisiana, because most of the non-French whites there are Irish, so who would they target there?

Special effects masked King Kong’s erection

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When I came across the headline MIRACULOUS SPECIAL EFFECTS MASK KING KONG’S MIGHTY MEMBER I thought, that explains a lot.
 
Virginal maidenHollywood convention:
Innocent white maiden
displayed for the taking
against her will
by large beast.

Promotional posters for Peter Jackson’s KING KONG remake show a Naomi Watts, even fully dressed looking every inch desabiller, facing an admiring Kong looking every missing inch a eunuch. What’s up with that?

What is Kong’s interest in his little friend supposed to be about in the first place? I don’t know, is Naomi the mouse who removed his thorn? Is she like KOKO’s kitten? Is she simply an aesthetic beauty with which Kong is so enthralled he must possess her? (Would art-loving in itself be necessarily platonic? I don’t know, can someone pay 58 million dollars for a Van Gogh and not masturbate to it?)

If this primate is in fact infatuated, even if he knows he can’t copulate with his tiny Fay Wray, it would seem only primal that were he to set his petite ami down anywhere to gaze at her, it would not be atop his hand.

And so there it is, the film is about fluff. There is no Mrs. Kong, there are no Kong hormones, there is nothing in Peter Jackson’s Kong world, like the Middle Earth trilogy before it, that has anything to do with sex, with the sexes, with what life is about. It’s like a film about race cars without wheels, not going anywhere useful.

You may tell me that I’ve missed the point, you may ask what do I think Fay Wray is screaming at, you may say that King Kong is sex, but I’ll tell he is not. The Empire State Building may be about sex, but having a hairy ape climbing to the tip of it is not about sex, with a partner at least. And what about all the dinosaurs for God’s sake! (If you think I’m a kill-joy, I’ll tell you that if the part of the virginal maiden had been played by BENJI, I would not have an issue.)

So this is a tale for children, western children, who needn’t grasp a sense of the real world until they are sensibly grown apparently. But there cannot be much good in perpetuating children’s stories to adults.

The problem with storytelling in modern times is bigger than Kong’s erectile disfunction. From today’s Saturday morning cartoons to the typical Hollywood blockbuster, there’s a distinct lack of telling any actual story. There’s an adventure usually, a road story at best, but never anymore a transformation or a lesson or something which an audience could take home with them to illuminate their own life experience.

And not only is there a lack of lesson or insight, there’s deliberate disinformation.

A not very profound example might be Hollywood’s interesting take on how to shoot a gun. Every gang banger has learned from the movies that a handgun is fired sideways, just as you would throw down a gang gesture. A hand extended straight out looks like you’re wanting a handshake, putting your elbow out to the side projects a dancer’s ambivalence of gravity, thus attitude.

Doubtless a gun held sideways is more attractive to film, you can get more of the actor’s face in the shot, but it’s impossible to aim a gun that way. Weight, recoil, even the gunsight conspire against you.

A simply nefarious example of movieland disinformation is sexless male aggression. When Wes Craven makes a film like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, or Sam Peckinpaw makes STRAW DOGS, or Stanley Kubric makes A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, community leaders are outraged, and those filmmakers are vilified!

But the studios are all strangely comfortable with American horror villains like Freddy Krueger of HALLOWEEN and Jason of FRIDAY THE 13TH, both on fruitless psychotic rampages. Even SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE features an intruder bent on killing, not raping the girls. Has there ever been a serial killer who was not motivated by sex, however disfunctional? Hannibal Lecter exudes all of the sadism of a believable predator, without any of the biology. Vampires used to represent sexual malevolence, back when there was just Dracula. Now vampires abound but they’re all zombies.

Am I intending to say that I wish American horror films were more pornographic? Absolutely! The violence is pornographic, why not throw in the sex? Does this exclude children from being able to watch? Certainly!

But I mention these horror films chiefly as examples of villainy depicted out of context. Villainy abounds in the real world, much of it disguised. Villainy abounds in the movies, and usually without a human face. It’s often mega-maniacal or psychotic, far removed from the reality of despotic patriarchs. This is one reason perhaps why President Bush finds it an easy sell to describe terrorists as simply evil-doers. Few in his audience seem to question that terrorists might have any plenty obvious motivions.

Why not describe a real motive or two in the movies? Maybe the world’s 800 pound gorillas don’t want to offer too many clues lest their real world villainies be rooted out. A culture informed about sexual aggression might better understand and respond to problems of gender violence, human trafficking, war atrocity and systemic abuse.

In truth, Shakespeare pioneered the archetype of the faceless villain with Iago, whose plotting against OTHELLO seemed all the more evil because Iago had no discernible motive. But Shakespeare’s devices highlighted his insight into humanity. Hollywood offers not even artifice. Its fables are just plain dumb.

Not that it is terribly brilliant to worry that Peter Jackson’s KING KONG misrepresents what gorillas have in mind with minuscule waifs. The marked absence here of King Kong’s genitalia may not be the most egregious case of cinema-verité violé, but I have to say I’m curious that it may have been pretty big.