Thursday, March 13, 2008

THE DARK SIDE IN OUR COURTS?

Don't forget to click the header. Giggle.
The dark side seems to come out in some people who gain power. Well, maybe a lot of people who attain positions of power. For all I know, maybe all of them.
Those of you who read about one of our judges now get the opportunity to read about another one.
Seems that former District Court Judge John Brennan (61) was arrested by the police for trying to choke the life out of his 26 year old girl friend.
According to the cops, he was "extremely intoxicated" and apparently very aggressive since two of the cops drew their guns when they saw Brennan with his arm around the woman's neck.
The woman told the police that Brennan got ticked off because he wanted her to have sex with a hooker and she didn't want to do it.
Brennan was a District Judge in Albuquerque for almost 20 years. But on Memorial Day in 2004, he was arrested for drunk driving and cocaine possession. He resigned his office shortly after the arrest. He pled guilty and got a year's probation and two days of house arrest. (Wow.Wonder what you or I would have gotten?)
He's been working for the Second Chance Rehab Program after he got of the Betty Ford Clinic. He was (is?) a "consultant".
They law in New Mexico sometimes leaves a bit to be desired.
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There are 500,000 stories in the big city. This has been one of them.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

OUR ECONOMY, OUR DEPRESSION

There's a link in the header that will take you to a well done and fast loading movie from the Detroit Free Press. I was impressed by the fact that there was no waiting time while it loaded. Why can't they all do this?

It's about the Michigan governor apparently violating the law. Ho hum.

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The cartoon is not off target at all. I've heard people (public figures) who vociferously demand that we make over our society into Corporate powers and subjugate the "little guy" into a minor role in the "bigger scheme" of things.

A lady named Naomi Klein has written a book titled The Shock Doctrine which explores this further. Here's a quote, about the fall of Communism in the USSR:

"And it was in that moment of flux and disorientation that several very savvy people, many of them in this country, seized on that moment to declare victory not only against communism, but against all ideas but their own. Now, this was the Fukuyama ( Francis Fukuyama is deputy director of the State Department's policy planning staff - ed.) chutzpah, when he actually said—and it seems so strange to read it now—in his famous 1989 speech, that the significance of that moment was not that we were reaching an end of ideology, as some were suggesting, or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as Gorbachev was suggesting, it was not that ideology had ended, but that history as such had ended. He argued that deregulated markets in the economic sphere combined with liberal democracy in the political sphere represented the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government."

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This depression we are entering has been created by power seekers and power users. These powers are no longer interested in "the people"(no matter their protests to the contrary).

They don't care whether the average man can afford medical care (too many people, anyway), they don't care if you can own your house (apartments are more efficient for big populations), they don't care if you have to pay $4 or $5 for a gallon of gasoline (corporate profit is good), they don't care if burning gasoline is poisonous (it's profitable), they don't care if the food you buy is toxic (imports will help kill some overstock people off), they don't care if the toys you buy your children will destroy them (helps prevent too many others from being born in the future), they don't care if religions are used to make war (big enough explosions help keep population down and create opportunities to build bigger buildings).

It goes on and on and we are expected, nay, ordered, to live with it. Procorporate is the new standard of our society and we must learn to embrace it. It is already taught in schools. History, Math, English, Social Studies, Logic no longer require study nor getting acceptable grades to pass the course.

Sometimes, I wonder why we don't just create a new country somewhere where moral and ethical values will be the rule of the land.

OK, I'll likely delete this post when I'm out of this funky mood. Who wants to hear from a geezer who is disgusted with the lack of courage and goodness and morality? Hell, I don't think I want to.