Dear Mr. Law-Abiding President,

It has taken you five years to remember that you promised to close the Guantanamo concentration camp and torture facility.  And you still won't close it.  The Nazis had about the same amount of time to close their camps--and we tried them at Nuremberg for what they did.  Will you and yours be willing to go there?  It is now restored, and ready for you.

The Athenians of the 5th century B.C. believed in "might makes right."  They were forced, in defeat,  to tear down their city walls.  The Roman empire collapsed.  The British empire--determinedly arrogant to the bitter end--no longer exists, except in Northern Ireland and in the minds of stupid Tories.

The United States is bankrupt financially and morally.  Like North Korea--the only other fourth-world country on earth--it threatens the rest of the world with brutal suicide.  In this, the US--and North Korea--are unlike their predecessors:  Athens, Rome, the Brits, the Nazis weren't capable of  setting off or causing complete world  destruction.  The United States and North Korea are both capable of such.

And you, Mr. Obama, preach..  Preach what?  Patience?  Let the US continue its criminally inhumane acts until it is ready to play at civilization?

SHIT!  The US fought Nazi Germany, while hating its own Jews.  After the US-managed Nuremberg Trials, the US still had--for another ten yeats-- racist laws that denied black Americans basic human rights.  The US accused the Japanese of atrocities, while busily inoculating black prison inmates in Georgia with syphilis in trying to develop a syphilis-weapon.  The US dropped not one but two nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians:  on cities, not military targets.  And it fire-bombed Dresden.

(One of my former friends keeps reminding me of the Marshall Plan, and Chiquita Banana with her "message grave/about a million children that we want to save."  But that was sixty years ago--and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden.)

As president, Mr. Obama, you could close your multiply-illegal concentration camp and torture facility at Guantanamo.  You could do it today--or tomorrow.  You need only issue the order.  You could also apologise for five years of illegal, immoral torture.  You could ask for forgiveness, from the men you have tortured and illegally imprisoned, from the civilized world you have affronted, from the decent US citizens whom you have betrayed.  And maybe then you could resign, and thereby perhaps redeem yourself--partially--from your disgrace.

 Maybe you could offer, in your self-defense, that the US has never actually apologized for the enslavement of your ancestors.  But that excuse won't excuse your own crime:  your crime against humanity.

Taking Sides is Stupid

Taking sides is stupid.  For example. . . .

I disagree with Republican--Conservative--values, thinking, policy.  Their belief in the value and goodness of greed, their championing of a class society, their classist prejudices are abhorrent to me.  They are anti-social, cruel, and stupid.

But Democrats are so blatantly dishonest, so false to their proclaimed values, such vicious warriors, such liars that I can't support them. 

I think that, since 1952, I should rather support--as the lesser of two evils--the Republicans.

Look at what Harry Truman gave us:  Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  True, he also defended South Korea.  But it was Ike who stopped MacArthur, and Ike who warned us against the "military-industrial complex."

Kennedy gave us the Bay of Pigs--and Vietnam.  Johnson gave us the lies about Tonkin Bay.

Nixon--s Republican--gave us Watergate, and the Kent State Murders,  He was mean, though--except when under the influence of Henry Kissinger--simply mean and venal.

Reagan and the Bushe:  nothing decent there.  But then they couldn't have promised to be decent if they had tried.  A stupid B-grade movie star, a lying CIA director and vicious war-monger, and his stupid son.  (One of the pluses for the USA is that the people didn't elect the second Bush.)

Bill Clinton?  A remarkably bright man, with not a single principle in his head,. He could have made a great academic!

And now Obama.  Another supposedly "bright" man--but without honor, without principle, without backbone.  His administration can't tell the truth about anything, and he is himself a split-tongued   liar--about Guantanamo, and maybe about Libya.

If I ever planned to vote again in the United States, I would vote no.  And I would personally give the little wealth I have to support the re-activation of Nuremberg, to try war criminals.  It has been restored. . . .

                                                                    Bert Hornback

                                                                     

"WE WILL ABIDE BY THE LAW--SOMETIMES."


Mr. Obama has done it again.  He has proclaimed out of his left ear that his concentration camp at Gunantanmo Bay is illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, and harmful to our relationships with the rest of the world.  And out his right ear he has announced that there are some prisoners there who can't
be charged with any crime or wrong-doing, but must still be kept in prison for the rest of their lives because we think they might do something harmful to us.

Mr. Obama's Guantanamo is worse than any of the Soviet prison camps, the infamous Siberian stalags of the post World War II years.  Guantanamo is a torture site, and has been since it opened twelve glorious American years ago.  The stalags were hideous labor camps, but the men weren't kept in cages, or tortured.

(Did anybody notice that all the living ex-presidents of the United States appeared to praise George W. Bush and his "library"?  All of them:  and nobody mentioned his wars, or Guantanamo.  Well,
they all have bloody hands, except for Jimmy Carter--and he tried to start a war by invading Iran to rescue 55 captured CIA operatives, but American technology and all his helicopters went down in the desert.)

Mr. Obama must think--perhaps rightly--that all Americans are stupid.  How can we reconcile what his left ear says with what his right ear says?  How can Guantanamo be illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, and harmful to our relations with the rest of the world-- and at the same time be necessary into the interminable future for our national defense?   How can some men who have been illegally imprisoned (and tortured) for twelve years have--at last!--the right to a fair trial--and at the same time other men who have been illegally imprisoned (and tortured) for twelve years, and against whom the US cannot file any charges, having no evidence that they have done anything except dislike us, be kept in prison for the rest of their lives because we think they could be dangerous?

Anybody who thinks that way--as Mr. Obama must--is stupid.  And any of us who accept such a ludicrous idea must be stupid, too.

Hitler's Nazis were brutal murderers  What the US is doing is a lot like what Hitler did: hideous, illegal, immoral.  And someday, when the US falls, some court somewhere will want to bring charges against us.  Nuremberg has been restored.  It could be used again--but not with the US running things!

As a nation, we need to change--and to change the way our country acts in the world.  We need to bring home our troops, our tanks, our planes, our drones, and bury them.  And re-join the world of civilized existence.

WHITHER THE WEATHER AND WHAT'S IN THE WIND?

It seems that the weather started out as simply wind:   so whether the weather was good or not depended on where you were and what you were doing--and maybe on how much weather there was.  A sailor would probably appreciate a bit of weather, as might a would-be sleeper or a hot night.  Pollen probably likes a bit of wind, too.--as do wind-chimes.

In the USA these days, people solemnly complain that there is "too much weather."  They say so, of course with their motors running and all the wall-to-wall lights on in all the smart new business buildings, and with all the flashing electric adverts running twenty-four hours a day.  And all the bombs and such going off.  And all the billions of gallons of aviation fuel Mr. Obama uses every week in his many wars.

The weather, of course, is but a symptom of what's wrong.  What's wrong isn't in the wind, it's in us.  We are the problem.  And the USA is in every way the biggest part of the problem.  Pollution, national debt, and all Mr. Obama's wars.  The USA insists on "power"--and using it.  That's the American Way of Life.

And it will kill us all--unless the winds change.

                                                         

FRANCIS


I never even thought of it:  there has never been a Pope named Francis--till now.  Why not?  Well, Francis of Assisi was a threat to Roman Catholicism--almost as much a threat as Jesus was.

Fifty-odd years ago the power brokers in Rome elected the man who became John XXIII because
they needed somebody to take over--innocuously--until they could settle things among themselves.  He was old, a nobody, and was expected to spend a couple of quiet years as caretaker-pope, then die.  But John XXIII fooled them--and called Vatican II.  And some things changed--but not enough.

Now, the disgraced Benedict has resigned--abdicated--and Rome has suddenly had to elect a new pope.  And somehow they have elected a real theologian, a genuine Christian, a scholar, an honorable man!  And he has chosen the name Francis!

Benedict was a pseudo-intellectual, a mockery whose contribution to the world was a declaration that there were no cows in the stable where Jesus was born.

But the new pope is very much an intellectual.  He understands what Jesus stood for, what he taught.  And unless the Vatican mafia can poison him quickly he may reinvent Christianity, and save it from the last ten or twelve centuries of its disgrace.

Sell all the cathedrals!  Get rid of all the gold chalices and the fancy vestments!  Give the pope's ring to some starving children.  Sell the red shoes and the triple crown.  Open up the Vatican treasuries to feed and clothe the poor.  Turn all the Catholic churches into shelters for the homeless.

Maybe, with Francis as pope, Christianity will become respectable. 

Let's hope so.  Let's support Pope Francis!

                                                                                  BGH

MURDER, INC.

I am just back from from a lovelt three week stay in Korea.

Had it not been for Harry Truman, there wouldn't be a South Korea today.  His intervention--he called it a "police action," not a war, so he could avoid needing Congressional approval--which would have been required, in those good old days when the Unitged States had a constitution.

Despite the insane threats from North Korea, South Koreans still live normal, civilised lives.  We hear the helicopter patrols, we see the frigates around the coast.  But we still live sane lives.

And people don't have guns.  So we don't murder each other.

Nobody here can understand why everybody in the United States has to have a gun.  Or why people
in the supposedly United States have to kill each other all the time.

And people here--even with the North Korean crazies as their neighbors--wonder why the United States wants, constantly, to invade or bomb some other country.

The answers to their questions are several..  (1) Americans are paranoid, and have too many guns.
(2) Americans are vioilent  people.  (3) Americans are greedy, power hungry people.  (4) Americans
are too stupid to understand almost anything.

                                                                                              Bert Hornback

"For Better or Worse":Child-Rearing, Parenting, Marriage

Our political arguments about gay marriage are nonsense.  We can all imagine the statistics about child-neglect, child-abuse, broken homes, single parents, unwanted children, abandoned children, etc.
"Put them altogether," as the old song says, and they don't spell mother and father, mommy and daddy, happiness, nurturing, safety, security, whatever "normalcy" is, or anything else.

So why not recognise that gay parents can be good parents--just as easily as heterosexual parents can be bad parents?  Why shouldn't two people who love each other and live together and want children be preferred--as parents--to two people who don't get along, considered abortion, don't want children, and won't take good care of their offspring?

Are  we that stupid?

Do we expect gay parents to molest their children?  Two gay mothers to molest a foster-daughter?  Two gay fathers to molest a foster-son?  Do we exppect heterosexual parents to molest their children?  Do we expect Oedipus-around-the-corner?  Or the false counterpart?

Okay.  We are officially stupid.  We (particularly we Americans) engage in constant wars, and we have a long history of racial violence.  So sexual perversity--which is what anti-gay prejudice is--is natural and normal for us.

But maybe the world--humanity, sense, intelligence, decency, reason--requires us to overcome our stupidity.  Maybe it's time we quit killing each other, quit hating people who don't look like us, and stop being sexual bigots.

                                                   Bert Hornback