This sense of viral isolation, dread and global make-over (for good and worse) gets the proverbial juices flowing of our local and national bards. It’s not a stretch to say there are many people on our coast and farther east who consider themselves to be “poets.”
With a liberal dose of simile, any number of cultural and natural events hearken the phrase, “Blank is like poetry in action.”
I did not complete a journalism degree at university. I do not work for a professional news outlet, whether electronic, acoustic or print in format. I have always understood myself as a curious person, interested in public affairs or what ought to be public, and with a desire and some ability to write both to my friends and to the public at large.
An anti-Semite used to be a person who disliked Jews. Now it is a person who Jews dislike.
– Hajo Meyer, Jewish German-born Dutch physicist and Auschwitz survivor.
Antisemitism is a trick we always use.
– Shulamit Aloni, Jewish Israeli, former Israeli Minister of Education, longtime member of the Israeli parliament.
Author and civil rights attorney John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the enduring effects of the PATRIOT Act and erosion of civil liberties in the US. He also explains “Operation Vigilant Eagle,” a surveillance program to keep tabs on US veterans and track what they say online.
West Point Professor Tim Bakken’s new book The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U.S. Military traces a path of corruption, barbarism, violence, and unaccountability that makes its way from the United States’ military academies (West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs) to the top ranks of the U.S. military and U.S.
Come you masters of war / You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes / You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls / You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know / I can see through your masks….
You fasten all the triggers / For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch / When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion / While the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies / And is buried in the mud.
Given the kind of responses I hear coming from both sides of the Pacific Ocean, I feel it’s necessary to say something more about what the NBA backlash in China is really about.
The NBA commissioner, both in his interviews in Japan and in his written statement to clarify himself, missed the point of what the Chinese people are actually angry about. It’s not about the freedom of an individual to express his or her personal opinions, but about the bottom line of what is acceptable in societies. In the U.S., you support freedom of expression, but do you support openly racist remarks?
Given the state of laws in Canada, it has become necessary to state the obvious:
An individual legitimately can be punished solely for proven actual harm that is also proven to have been caused by the individual.
In a free and democratic society, laws that punish an individual for harm that is hypothesized to have occurred, or hypothesized to have been caused by the individual, or hypothesized to have both occurred and been caused by the individual, are pathological in that such laws attack democracy itself in its foundation, as explained below.
