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Humor Times blog - by James Israel

I publish a monthly paper called the Humor Times, available via subscription anywhere in the world. This blog allows me to comment in a more timely manner on current events, etc., since, after all, I have plenty to say!

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Required – and Urgent – Reading for All True Patriots

"We have a mindset, which is that democracy is the resilient rule. Historically it is fragile exception. Democracies take nurturing. They're easy to pull down. The Founders understood that. It's a very dangerous time...

"People really don't understand what fascism looks like. They think it looks kind of like goose-stepping military and barbed wire everywhere. It doesn't look like that. I give examples of closed societies in the book, and after a society is closed, there will often still be a judiciary. There will be journalism. There will be radio. There will even be television. There will be universities and students. Many aspects of the institutions of civil society continue. What happens, though, is everybody knows how far you can go before you lose your job, or how far you can go before getting arrested."

– from an interview with Naomi Wolf on BuzzFlash.com, regarding her new book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot


When the U.S. Congress starts censuring organizations like MoveOn for exercising free speech as they just did, when cops are tasering people for exercising free speech, when it becomes "normal" for the government to spy on its citizens, when habeas corpus is repealed and when the president can decided someone no longer has civil rights and can disappear and torture them at will... then democracy is not only in danger, it is already sliding headlong down a slippery slope into a fascist abyss, and the people had better wake up and lose their sheeple-like complacency, and fast.

This interview with Naomi Wolf, as well as her new book, should be required reading for all Americans!

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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

What part of "Separation of Church and State" does the military not get?

Pentagon Sued Over Mandatory Christianity
A military watchdog organization filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and a US Army major, on behalf of an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. The suit charges the Pentagon with widespread constitutional violations by allegedly trying to force the soldier to embrace evangelical Christianity and then retaliating against him when he refused. [Read the rest at the link above.]

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Attack Iran? Why not, look how well our other unilateral attacks have gone!

The drumbeat for a military assault on Iran is getting louder and louder, mainly from Bush and Cheney, etc, conservative think tanks, and of course the Fox Opinion – er, I mean "News" – channel.

And heck, why not? Things have gone so well in Iraq, and we've hardly scratched the surface of what Halliburton and all our favorite war-mongering corporations can profit off the war industry yet! I mean, c'mon, let's spur the upper-echelons of our economy with more death and destruction! Just think – we could probably triple the America-hating terrorist groups we've already helped create in the middle east!

Of course, all you crazy liberal types will whine and say we'll only be hurting ourselves. You obviously need to listen more to the great minds of our time, like Ann Coulter! And stop being so unpatriotic! After all, patriotism means supporting our resident-in-chief, no matter what hellhole he drags us into, right?

World War III, here we come!

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Tuesday, September 11, 2007

9/11 Anniversary: Still so many unanswered questions

"9/11 changed everything" – so we are told. But does that include eliminating our common sense? My common sense tells me that would be pretty stupid.

And yet, we still have not had a real, independent investigation of the crime, the first sensible thing to do. From the start, all we got were misguided "reasons" to go to war (but of course, no actual declaration of war, as the constitution mandates).

"But I don't believe in conspiracy theories," I hear some of you saying. Well, if you believe the government's official story on the event, you believe a conspiracy theory, because that's what it is. And it's a theory with holes so huge you could fly hijacked jetliners through them.

The questions still being asked are posed by mainstream, intelligent people with degrees in physics, etc., not necessarily just by nutcases wearing tinfoil hats posting to conspiracy blogs. They are asked by seasoned fire fighting veterans like Bill Manning, editor of Fire Engineering Magazine, who called the so-called investigation a "half-baked farce" in the January 2002 issue.

The list of unanswered questions is probably familiar to many of you, but I feel it is worth reiterating some of them on this sixth anniversary of the terrible event:

1) Why were fighter jets not scrambled immediately after it became clear that jetliners were off course, with their transponders turned off? This is Standard Operating Procedure, and has happened hundreds of times in recent years, but not on 9/11.

2) Jet fuel, even when burning at optimum temperatures (like through an engine, and certainly not in the open air), does not get hot enough to melt steel. When New York Fire Department Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer reached the impact zone of the South Tower on the 78th floor at 9:48 am, as a recording of his radio transmission shows, he reported, "We've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines." No steel frame structure in history has ever collapsed due to fire, and there have been much hotter fires, burning for much longer than these fires. So, how can we believe all these huge steel beams melted at the same time, to allow for a "pancake" collapse?

3) All the concrete in the buildings was completely pulverized to fine dust, causing a pyroclastic flow, similar to those caused by volcanic eruptions. There were no chunks of concrete in the wake of the collapses. There were large pools of molten metal in the basements of the towers that took weeks to cool off. How can a gravity collapse cause this? Physicists have shown that the amount of energy it takes to pulverize 90,000 tons of concrete is immense, and not explainable by fire or gravity. Numerous eyewitnesses, captured on videotape at the time, broadcasted by local and national tv, reported huge explosions throughout the building. What was the cause of such destructive force?

4) The biggest smoking gun is this: WTC Building 7, another steel-framed structure, 47 stories high, 300 feet from the nearest Tower and not significantly impacted by debris, collapsed in classic demolition style later in the day, perfectly falling into its own footprint. It had only a few small fires in it, of unknown origin. If this had happened on any other day, there surely would have been a thorough investigation of the collapse. Instead, it is virtually ignored, completely unmentioned in the so-called investigation published in the 9/11 Commission Report. Something brought down that building, and it wasn't fire. What then?

There were so many other strange anomalies that day. And yet, the mainstream media ignores the story, satisfied to regurgitate the government line, over and over again. The U.S. population, traumatized as it was on 9/11, trusted its government and the media to tell the whole story. Our trust was misplaced.

Yes, a lot changed on that day. We began to lose our civil rights, our cowed Congress acquiescing to fear and an overzealous executive. We went to war, but not against the country the hijackers were from, and based on a pack of lies. Our government started ignoring the Geneva Conventions, our civil rights and even Habeus Corpus. We started looking less and less like a country devoted to real freedom, and more and more like the countries run by dictators that are our supposed enemies.

We began to fight the enemy by becoming like them, helping them to attain their goals of destroying our country. My final question today: Does that make sense?

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Friday, September 07, 2007

Nuke mania

Dr. John Gofman, the genius nuclear scientist and medical researcher, passed away last week at the age of 88. He was a principled man in an unprincipled agency, the Atomic Energy Commission. He lost his job and continued to suffer the unyielding attacks of shills within the industry that wanted to discredit him and his findings. Why? He dared to tell the truth. And we'd better keep listening to him through his writings, because the nuclear industry is trying to stage a comeback, as an 'answer' to global warming.

In a great article on The Free Press site, Harvey Wasserman recalls Dr. Gofman's work and his warnings. He was the chief medical researcher for the AEC, and as such, was expected to be a loyal foot soldier for them and help them get thousands of reactors built. Instead, he was honest with the public about his research, and as early as 1969 showed that even "normal" radioactive reactor emissions could kill 32,000 Americans per year.

"The decision to build nuclear power plants," Dr. Gofman said, "may very well be, for the first time, a decision that can result in the desecration of the Earth with respect for life for all future generations... I'm concerned about the fact that whether it melts down or doesn't melt down, you've created an astronomical amount of radioactive garbage which you must contain and isolate better than 99.99 percent perfectly, in peace and war, with human error and human malice, guerrilla activity, psychotics, malfunction of equipment…do you believe that there's anything you'd like to guarantee will be done 99.99 percent perfectly for a hundred thousand years?"

And now, after fifty years of costly power plants that have generated untold tons of unsafe nuclear waste, the industry wants us to let them build more, and with $50 billion or more in loan guarantees -- since of course, they know in advance what a boondoggle they are proposing. Instead, we should listen to the good doctor, and tell these clowns where they can shove their radioactive waste.