Can someone from the UK give just cause why we should not feel glee at the public disgrace of Jack Straw caught on camera offering access to the government to a Chinese company in exchange for cash? He’d have mortgaged his soul too but even capitalist companies have no use for worn-out shoe leather.

Straw & the other schnook caught (Sir somebody) claim they were duped by reporters who set them up. Is that all they’re packing for defense? Is that why Straw supported the Iraq War? He was duped!? Is that why he let General Pinochet elude justice? Why he wanted the veil worn by Muslim women to be banned? Why he was implicated in extraordinary rendition allowing regimes to kidnap & transfer people from one country to another to torture them (a practice first authorized under Bill Clinton)? Would he rather be declared incompetent than exposed as criminal?

Gee I’m sorry I missed Sunday nights Academy Awards. I was looking forward to seeing “American Sniper” lose. It was awarded “Best Achievement in Sound Editing,” but no big deal. How hard is it to make sniper fire break your ear drums?

Even Lady Gaga dressed in a prom gown & singing the score of “The Sound of Music” doesn’t drown out the croaking from her gigs in Israel & her enthusiastic support for apartheid & ethnic cleansing.

And for my last pronouncement on the Academy Awards, which I did not watch (except in replay): good for Patricia Arquette for her rousing 5-second pitch about pay equality & equal rights for women. And I’m glad it wasn’t directed just at the film industry where women get a few (or is it several?) million dollars less than men.

But what a sorry-assed commentary on the US that this is still an issue in the 21st century. And that objection to racist exclusion in Hollywood was left up to Neil Patrick Harris, who emceed, & made a wee, itsy-bitsy joke out of it.

Homeless in India: this elderly man lives on the street in Delhi. There have been massive protests of seniors in India against the lack of social security. Dumping seniors however, is not unique to a country without social security. Since the IMF-EU austerity programs hit Europe, there have been hundreds of protests because pensions, along with health care & education, were among the first casualties of the neoliberal assault.

There isn’t much reliable data on the demographics of homelessness in the US but there is disturbing evidence that homelessness is increasing among seniors. It’s doesn’t take a whiz kid to understand why. It’s now nearly impossible for retirees on puny little social security checks to afford rents in metropolitan areas. It’s hard enough for working families with more than one wage-earner. Not only is rent control being eliminated but public housing is being sold off to private investors so they can jack up the rents or sell them at exorbitant prices. The same process that is causing mass evictions of renters in Spain is already in full swing in the US.

Children also make up a huge percentage of homeless people in cities around the world (including the US & India) where they are subject to a great deal of violence. It should be said outright, without coyness or timidity, that when the economic system is incapable of providing the elementary requirements of a human life, it’s time to rethink the options. And we ought to do it before climate change has us all buried in snow mounds up to our asses twelve months out of the year.

Housing is a human right!

(Photo by Bernat Armangue/AP)

Now this is where the magic of social transformation begins–with the power of solidarity. Yesterday, in sub-zero temperatures, about 1,000 Muslims formed a “ring of peace” around a synagogue in Oslo chanting “No to antisemitism, no to Islamophobia.” The event was in response to the growing right-wing attacks on both Jews & Muslims throughout Europe.
One of the organizers said, “We want to demonstrate that Jews & Muslims do not hate each other.” Norway’s chief rabbi stood outside before the human chain & sang the traditional Jewish end of Sabbath song.

Israel & media will be in overdrive attempting to thwart such solidarity since distrust, animus, & the acceptance of racism is what Zionist ideology is based on. True to their nefarious commitments, media added an addendum to the report of this solidarity action by claiming the increase in antisemitic incidents began last year “when the conflict between Israel & Palestinian militants in Gaza intensified.” That lie & falsification of history is belied by Europol statistics showing 99% of violent acts toward both Jews & Muslims is primarily from right-wing nationalist groups.

Our deepest respect & fullest solidarity with this action.

(Photo via  Mohammmed Zeyara)

This is one of 15 schoolhouses in Gaza which the UN uses to shelter those displaced by Israel’s ethnic cleansing binge last summer. A UN refugee agency claims they house 10,200 people in them–which means the schools are either the size of the Taj Mahal or the agency is lying.

A nine-month-old baby boy died this week at the UN school in Biet Hanoun when an electrical failure caused a fire. The UN can’t make absolutely certain the facilities are safe for human inhabitance when they move in refugees? They can’t hire some unemployed electricians in Gaza to be on site & monitor the facilities safety?

Is this the same school Israel bombed last summer, claiming it was a Hamas rocket bunker? Fifteen people, mostly women & children died & 200 more were injured. The photo & video documentation of children punctured with shrapnel was unbearable to view. But just recently Israeli officials admitted what the world knew all along: there was no rocket nest in the school. It was part of Israel’s campaign to target children by claiming Palestinians use their children as human shields. Even in a refugee center. How many international laws does that break? Beit Hanoun is just a few miles across the border from Sderot, Israel, where lounge furniture was moved in to watch the ethnic cleansing like a spectator sport.

We would ask what Ban Ki-moon has to say about all this since given the scale of carnage & the crying need for shelter, the UN ought to be screaming bloody murder against Israeli carpet bombing & demanding prosecution for war crimes. But for the UN, humanitarian assistance is doled out with an eyedropper. They’re much better at delivering occupation & cholera.

Build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel (barcode beginning 729); demand “No aid of any kind of Israel!”

(Photo of school fire scene by Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

Even in the midst of squalor, human beings–especially the little ones–show the star dust we are made from. Here a small girl is trying to carry her baby brother across a rickety bridge over sewage. They are Afghan refugees living in slums outside Islamabad, Pakistan. This is emancipation US-style.

(Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP)

This is a Duhalar child sleeping on the reindeer as her mother milks the herd nearby. Duhalars, who live in northern Mongolia along the Siberian border, are among the last nomadic reindeer herders in the world. They depend on reindeer not only for milk & transportation but also their shamanic spirituality. They are seldom eaten.

There are only about 40 Duhalar families remaining, about 200 to 400 people. The reindeer population has also decreased. This isn’t some sort of Darwinian extinction but bungled social policy by the Soviet Union which interfered with Duhalar tradition, forcing many young to move elsewhere. In the 1970s, the USSR halted the nomadic lifestyle, put reindeer under state control, & forced Duhalars into fishing & hunting collectives. That might qualify more as railroading than interference. The state also began harvesting reindeer antlers to supply the Chinese medicine market which is when the reindeer population declined.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the state had no money to pay the collective workers so the reindeer were handed back to them & they returned to the nomadic way of life. The loss of traditional herding knowledge took a toll on those remaining & many reindeer were lost to disease.

Much of their income today is from tourism & likely from putting up the anthropologists who come to scrutinize & document their demise.

Would that the tender relationship between child & deer prevailed in the larger world & bureaucrats would leave the Duhalars alone.

(Photo by Hamid Sardar-Afkhami)

If you’re having a weak moment & feeling down on yourself, go to the PBS website & check out PBS news. Their news commentators are all expensively educated leading figures of the Fourth Estate. A Stanford or Yale education costs a bundle. And still their parents must have had to kiss a lot of butts & call in a lot of favors to get their dummkopf kids a prestigious job in journalism. All that money spent to educate them down the tubes!

Mumble-mouth David Brooks, the resident expert on Islam who can’t distinguish ISIL from the local imam, is only the worst of them. The rest of them waste those educations on parsing the latest speech from Obama; discussing the latest moronic utterance from Giuliani; & trying to find ways to dance around the snow-job the Obama regime just pulled on undocumented immigrants–getting them to identify themselves & their location to the government on the hope of amnesty, & then getting a federal court to annul Obama’s executive order. Now immigration knows just where to pick them up.

Privilege does not serve society one whit. It only jangles our minds & makes us think we’re stupid when what they say doesn’t make a lick of sense. Down with privilege! But in the meanwhile, use it to buoy your spirits when you’re feeling low.

PBS news reported that in Madison, Alabama on February 6th, a 911 call came in alarmed about a “tall, skinny Black man” walking in the neighborhood. The caller did not report he was engaged in suspicious activity but a patrol car was sent to check out why a Black guy was walking down the sidewalk. Fifty-seven-year-old Sureshbhai Patel had just arrived in the US from India to visit his son & care for his 17-month-old grandson. He didn’t speak a word of English.

When the two cops confronted him, he was not a suspect in any crime, was not armed, & was unable to understand their questions. He said “no English”, & repeated his son’s house number. He made a slight movement & one of the cops took him down. Mr. Patel is now partially paralyzed from a spinal injury & faces a very long recovery.

In the tradition of PBS, they brought on two experts for comment. One was a woman from an Indian civil rights group in the US who spoke cogently about racist profiling, making connections to Ferguson & Staten Island. The other guy was a criminology professor from the University of Missouri & also a former cop. He became quite agitated in response to the Indian activist, insisting it was just a procedural mistake, having nothing to do with racism.

Half-witted legal eagles are questioning the criminality of this act & suggest it may be only a civil liability. Racism makes you think funny, approximating derangement.

Please consider contributing to the medical expenses of the Patel family while they pursue litigation against the Madison Police Department:

http://www.gofundme.com/m757pw