BILL CLINTON FOR GAME WARDEN

 

Bill Clinton is the brightest president we have had since Franklin Roosevelt.  But he is hardly the person who should be giving us advice on gun control.  He has a rather dramatic record of being unable to contain his own “gun.”

His assertion that we have, in the United States, a “gun culture” is no more enlightening  and no less true than the assertion that we are a violent and gun-crazy culture.  Should we cater to the crazies?

We also have a “drug culture” is the United States.  Indeed:  we have three such cultures.  We have the drug culture that uses cocaine and crack (a wonderful example of how the rich and the poor are alike), and a drug culture that lives on prescription drugs (rich people only), and a drug culture that uses marijuana (mostly young and middle-aged leftists).   As a nation, we hate and despise the pot-users (pot is harmless for adults), ignore the prescription-drug addicts, and use a wonderfully perverse double standard for poor coke users and affluent cocaine users.  (Can anyone imagine a Darien, Cennecticut, mansion being raided as though it were a Detroit coke house?

Sure we have a gun culture.  Criminals have guns, lots of poor people have guns, and the white and maybe affluent population of the United States has a hundred guns for every one that poor or black Americans have.

Who are the “gun culture” people Bill Clinton is asking us all to pay attention to, to cater to?  Are they black people?  Poor people?  Of course not!  They are what are called in some places the “red-necks”—and the rich and middle-class Americans who are willing to entertain the idea of shooting somebody, to protect their property.

Which is more important in a civilised society: money—property—or human life?   Ask the question another way:  does my way of life trump society, civilisation?

I am an old man.  It has taken me a long time to figure out these arguments—which are so simple that they prove that I am myself a simpleton.

So if you have long sincw figured out these things, and know what to do to solve these very serious problems of ours, please let me know.    

                                                         Sincerely yours,

 
                                                              Bert Hornback   

INTOLERANT PAPISTRY

His Wholiness the Pope is opposed to any criticism of the Catholic church.  Is that news?  Of course not.

Women are second class citicizens.  Women have been the mothers of many of history's papal bastards, some of whom became bishops and cardinals. 

Catholic clerics are above any law, whether human or supposedly divine.  To avoid arrest and prosecution as an accessory to sexual crimes committed in his Boston diocese--rapes of little boys by priests--Bernard Cardinasl Law was whisked away to Rome.  Though not kept in protective custody within the Vatican's walls, Law is in charge of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene--which is under the direct control of the Pope.  So Law is safe from any secular law--and as no doubt the holy Pope believes, from the laws of the God who is subservient to the Pope.

Agnosticism is intolerable to the Pope.  What that says is that everybody has to believe what Rome says.  Agnosticism is intolerant of the Pope's self-declared infallability.  Agnostics might even question the holiness of a Pope who hides Bernard Cardinal Law from justice.  Agnostics might not accept the subjugation of women.

THE CONTINUED ABUSE OF BRADLEY MANNING

Bradley Manning, who exposed U.S. War Crimes, is still in prison.  He has not yet been charged with any crimes.  But he has been in jail--largely in solitary confinement--for three years. 

This is supposedly impossible in the United States--or was so, since 1776 except for a brief period during the Civil War.  But now George W. Bush and Barack Obama have suspended our constitutional right of habeas corpus, and thus have illegally imprisoned Bradley Manning for three years.

Every American citizen who does not object to the inhumane and criminal treatment is guilty of a crime under U.S. law.  Every American citizen who accepts this violation of our constitution is an accessory to Mr. Obama's crime.

Perhaps we should rename the country?  The United Sates Prison--inhabited by peoople who are accessories to a serious crime.

                                                                    Bert G. Hornback

Bert Borrone's Perpetual Motion

Bert Borrone's Perpetual Motion is a memoir by your truly, recently published.  It's a family history, beginning with my granfdather and namesake, who built (with my help) a perpetual motion machine that started all by itself and ran for 47 hours.  If you are interested, you can find it on Amazon, or order it from Inkwater Press.

I hope you like it.

                                     Bert Hornback

And yet another war. . .

Mr. Obama has just decided to start another war.  He has ordered 400 U.S. military personnel--combat troops--to yet another country in the Middle East.  And equipped them with guided missiles.

The US is determined never to learn that (a) might doesn't make right, and that (b) all its aggressive force makes peace less likely in the world.  Braack Obama is supposedly intelligent.  But he is as stupid as the Bushes. 

Politically, the US has been wrong about everything since the Korean War.  It actually saved South Korea.  But its military interventions in Lebanon, Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, the Balkans, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria have all been disastrous.  .

That's quite a record! 

The US could probably cause a disaster by invading the penguins in Antarctica.

No wonder the US is bankrupt.  All they have--beside their arrogance and their stupidity--is nuclear weapons. 

                                               Bert Hornback

UNITED NATIONS--WITH A PALESTINIAN STATE?

UNITED NATIONS--WITH A PALESTINIAN STATE?

Ever since 1945, when the victorious atom-bomb happy United States decided to provide a home for the new United Nations, the idea of a world body has been doomed.  What kept a modicum of civility in the world was not the UN, but the existence of the USSR, which kept the USA from unbridled world supremacy.

The USSR is gone.  The USA pretends to run the world now, but it is less powerful in the UN than it has ever been.  Why?  Because it is a slave-state to Israel.  And the USA's veto power on the UN Security Council effectively belongs to Israel.

Can the USA claim that its support for Israel's occupation of Palestine is in any way justified?  No.  The USA doesn't even try to justify its support for Israel; it simply insists on a "negotiated settlement" of the dispute.

Is there any nation other than Israel that believes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is justified?  No.  The USA doesn't even claim that--which is why it wants a "negotiated settlement."

The USA leads the opposition to Iran's development of nuclear power for peaceful purposes, because the USA claims that Iran wants to build nuclear weapons.  Which country in the world has nuclear weapons, but whose possession of such is simply ignored by the rest of the world?  The nations of the world pretend that Israel doesn't have nuclear weapons:  and though "officially" Israel doesn't have such, its crazy government--governments, for the last fifty years--remain the only real threat to use them.

The reason the USA still sides with Israel is simple:  the USA knows that if Israel is threatened seriously--not if attacked, but if threatened seriously-- it will launch a nuclear attack on somebody. 

The modern world's first genocide was much worse than that which targeted Jews in the 1930s and early 1940s.  The first modern genocide was that carried out by the white invaders of North America:  the Spanish, the Portugese, and the English.  They slaughtered almost the whole Native American population.  Eventually the United States--"all men  are created equal"--herded the surviving Native Americans onto "reservations."   But we don't talk about that.

Nor do we speak of the African slave trade managed by Europeans for their white North American kinsmen when we talk about what happed to Jews during the mid twentieth century.  If we did, we would have to note that in the USA--though slaves were "freed" in 1863--racial discrimination was not outlawed until 1964:  twenty years after the end of the Nazi era.

Has it ever occurred to any of us to set up a state for the brutally suppressed and murdered and dispossessed Native Americans?  And what if they decided to develop nuclear weapons?  Or brutalise their neighbors?        

I needn't go on.  My intention is not to antagonise anyone.  I am not being anti-Semetic.  But I want justice for all the people of the Middle East.  And right now, I am concerned for Palestinians--and worried for all of the rest of the world, because  I don't thing the Israeli government can be trusted.