US media is chock-full of all kinds of crazy-pants commentators that make the population appear deranged for tolerating them. But they play a useful political function by expressing the detestable, especially the racism that politicians, the Pentagon, & redneck half-wits want to say but feel they can’t get away with. Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Newt Gingrich, & a dozen others on Fox News serve as the voices of social hatred. One can no longer tell if they’re all ugly as sin or if the hating makes them so.

So now out of England we’re getting the stench of an Ann Coulter wannabe named Katie Hopkins whose photos make her look quite deranged but whose racist comments about African immigrants & Palestinians show there’s a purpose to her vituperations. Social hatred is a market niche & she’s playing it out.

Last Fall when Gaza was still reeling & burying their dead from Operation Ethnic Cleansing, she posted a series of tweets accusing Muslim men of being wife-beaters & calling Palestinians “filthy rodents.”

Now she’s put her big barnacled foot in her foul mouth by saying African immigrants are “like cockroaches.” Writing in The Sun newspaper (on Friday just days after 400 immigrants drowned off Libya & two days before over 800 more drowned) under the headline “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants”, she ranted “NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins & show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”

During the Charlie Hebdo flap she tweeted: “Just getting ‪#‎CharlieHebdo‬ tattooed on my forehead. If you going to go. Go big. ‪#‎JeSuisCharlie‬.”

How about we tattoo our feet on her dumb ass & sign this petition to get her bounced as a columnist for The Sun:

https://www.change.org/p/the-sun-newspaper-remove-katie-hop…

(Photo is Hopkins in all her deranged glory)

Betty Windsor & her mutant clan of free-loaders have been lying low for a while. I haven’t been able to get the goods on them lately in my ongoing campaign to ridicule if I can’t rid the planet of feudalism. But soon we’ll have one of those whoop-dee-doo moments forced on us when KKKKaty gives birth to what feudalism calls a princess. When that happens I’ll go into solitary confinement & wait for the regressive monarchical moment in time to pass. I have enough problems with neoliberalism without feudalism getting my adrenalin pumping two-forty.

Never will I tire of denouncing the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the “charity” of Henry Kissinger. They’re running a Mother’s Day special for contributions & promote themselves on their donation forms as “Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein.” They don’t say when it was hijacked by forces from the dark side.

The trustees are a contemporary rogue’s gallery including Kissinger (a creep of boundless ignominies & war crimes), Madeleine Albright (the lowlife who considered the murder of 500,000 Iraqi children small change compared to US military goals) , Eely Weasel (the holocaust profiteer who claimed Palestinians use their children as human shields against Israeli bombs), Colin Powell (US general of the first Gulf War & promoter of US militarism), Timothy Geithner (known for his philanthropy toward banks), & an array of lesser-known creeps.

The media caption to this photo reads: “An Israeli girl picks Ranunculus flowers in a cultivated field in the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nir Yitzhak, along the Israeli-Gaza Strip border. The flower bulbs will be mostly exported to Europe.” We’re going to see a lot more of this kind of photo so we may as well get on to what they’re all about.

The critical mind so often appears to reflect paranoia, seeing malicious intent where there is only love power. More often, the unsuspicious haven’t informed themselves about the workings of the public relations industry which celebrities, politicians, corporations, & governments use to clean up their images. That’s how they turn Justin Bieber from a weasel into a reformed bad boy; Hillary Clinton from an elitist war-monger into a populist hanging with the “little people” over coffee; BP into an environmental paragon even though the Gulf of Mexico is still an oil swamp; & Israel into utopian kibbutzim farming communities rather than an armed encampment.

Israel is on a major public relations/propaganda drive to reverse the damage to their image from Operation Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza last summer. They want Israel to be seen as a land of little girls romping through the flower patch rather than the murderous war machine that hunted down small children in Gaza with bombers. So as they prepare for another bombing siege in Gaza & accelerated land expropriations in the West Bank, we’ll be seeing a lot more of these kinds of images.

One aspect of Operation Ethnic Cleansing that wasn’t reported on much was the loss of livestock in Gaza, including cows, oxen, camels, & donkeys taken out by bombs. There are many species of Ranunculus (also known as buttercups) & they are all poisonous to livestock. Seeds get dispersed by wind, birds, small rodents, & tires on Israel’s invading tanks & military trucks. Is it paranoia to wonder if planting vast Ranunculus fields adjacent to Palestinian farm & grazing land was an act of aggression & not just a commercial choice? Inquiring minds would sure the hell like to know.

After this photo op is finished they’ll want to take the little girl to an infirmary since handling Ranunculus can cause skin rashes & is inadvisable without protection.

Build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel & file this photo under “Israeli propaganda.”

(Photo by Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

This photo circulating on Facebook & twitter had the caption: “Because occupation can’t stop you from wearing your favorite dress.” I don’t want Judith Butler fans up my butt, but I just love it.

Tracing the photo, it apparently originated on FB from a guy in South Africa who identified it as the approach to the Qalandia checkpoint, once referred to in Electronic Intifada as “hell on earth.” It is a large Israeli military checkpoint located not on the border between Israel & the West Bank but in the West Bank near the town of Ramallah & the Qalandia refugee camp. It serves as a barrier separating Palestinians & a military fortress. Israeli soldiers do identity checks here, à la apartheid, & it is the scene of frequent Palestinian protests.

And that makes me love it even more. Because a little girl ought to be able to wear tutus.

(Photo by Mathew Truscott)

Oskar Gröning, a 93-year-old former SS guard at Auschwitz, went on trial in Germany yesterday, charged with being accessory to murder of at least 300,000 prisoners. Over a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, most of them Jewish & primarily in gas chambers. Fifty-five survivors & victims’ relatives are plaintiffs in the case.

Gröning does not deny witnessing the mass killings; in fact, he came to prominence refuting holocaust deniers, saying “I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections [for the gas chambers] took place.” He didn’t march them to their deaths in the gas chambers but prosecutors claim he accounted for their confiscated money & belongings. Close enough to the crime for prosecution.

Putting aside the legal difficulties of prosecuting him or the value of sticking a man on the threshold of death in prison, this case exposes the failure to prosecute Nazis who worked at concentration camps or served fascism in other capacities. One historian claims only 49 of 6,500 SS members who worked at Auschwitz were ever convicted & most sources blame the German judiciary for that. Of course Germany was occupied after the war & the political, economic, & legal affairs of the country were administered by the US, British, French, & Soviet armies.

The US occupation would give us a clue as to why so many Nazis walked away scot-free. It’s an open secret & an absolute abomination that the US military hired hundreds of Nazi scientists & doctors. Many of them were the psychos involved in human experimentation, responsible for developing chemical & biological warfare, the ones who proposed putting nuclear bombs on rockets, & guilty of war crimes. Does this partially explain affinities between Nazi ideology, the Pentagon & US militarism?

The US military spirited about 1,600 Nazis out of Germany, many with false papers, & gave them US citizenship. They put Nazis like Wernher von Braun, a leading figure in the Nazi rocket program, in charge of NASA, the new US space program. Herr von Braun got all sorts of accolades in his life, including from the Nazi regime & the president of the US.

Old man or not, Gröning probably should spend time in jail but there are a whole raft of others who should be exposed even if they’re too dead to prosecute. Eisenhower & Truman would be first among them.

There is a really cheery side to the prosecution of Gröning–who is two years older than Henry Kissinger. Time may not yet have run out to corner that warty old decrepit war monster & bring him to justice. The question of who will have prosecutorial jurisdiction out of the millions clamoring for justice remains open.