Not everyone appreciates my sarcasms regarding the British moochocracy, especially royalists, but I prefer to use mockery to express my deep revulsion at the pomposities & inequalities of feudalism rather than outright contempt. Though I admit the distinction is not always easy to discern.

One simply cannot let the day pass without acknowledging the 93rd birthday of Phil Mountbatten, Betty Windsor’s consort whom she affectionately calls her “anus horribilis.” Our man actually has several last names in German & Greek because no one was willing to claim this unfortunate child even as a newborn–though it doesn’t really matter which name you call him since they all go back to the same set of trolls in the Black Forest. European moochocracy is an incestuous thing which has not belied the warnings of science in any way.

Phil is remarkable in that he’s been able to make it through over nine decades without accomplishing a damn thing. There are garden slugs who exhibit more initiative. They say he speaks a few languages but Betty & her privy council prefer he stick close to English where his guttural obscenities can be mistaken for a phlegm condition.

He does have a military record during WWII but it’s best not to ask much about it. In handling the searchlights & stoking the boilers on a battleship, he nearly brought down the combined allied navy. He’s in the annals of naval history–& not in a good way.

After he married Betty, who was smitten with his venality at a young age, the privy council tried him out on diplomatic duty, traveling to all the former colonies (now called the Commonwealth). After he was deported several times in chains for unseemly comments & conduct the privy council decided it best to keep him under close supervision in Buckingham Palace & just keep stuffing his face with whiskey.

Betty has remained steadfast in her affections for Phil despite his chronic flatulence problem & this is not at all touching but deeply regrettable. They have spawned four children together, one more corrupt than the next & with that streak of venality Phil is so renowned for.

These gunners from one of Betty’s elite artillery troops fire a 41-gun salute in Hyde Park, London to mark Phil’s birthday. Think of the artillery discharge as symbolic–& please don’t embarrass yourself by asking, “symbolic of what”?

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

A US Pentagon spokesman denounced China for holding over a million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. Operating from a higher morality, the US military would never put Muslims in concentration camps. They deem it more humane to demonize 1.5 billion Muslims as terrorists & bomb them to smithereens. It saves its concentration camps for 600,000 Black & 330,000 Latino prisoners (compared to less than 500,000 white prisoners) & for 45,000 undocumented refugees, including 15,000 children.

The sarcasm is not to minimize the barbarism of the Chinese regime but to protest the cynicism & hypocrisy of US human rights denunciations.

BBC has just published an article titled “Christian persecution at near genocide levels.” In a few places there is discrimination against Christians & in fewer places persecution. But the notion of widespread Christian genocides is just arrant rubbish peddled by rightwing forces to counter the reality of actual widespread persecution of & genocides against Muslims, including but not only under the guise of the ‘war on terror’. It’s comparable in its malignancy & idiocy to the notion of reverse racism against white people leading to white genocide. In a political environment where this bullshit is not countered by public protest because progressive forces have fallen under the sway of Islamophobia, all sorts of reactionary forces are emboldened, including anti-Semites, homophobes, women haters.

So what’s so unusual about the Indian Army claiming it found Yeti’s footprints? Obscurantism & imaginary thinking is the norm in politics these days. How else did Putin become a freedom fighter, Maduro a champion of the people, Assad a democrat, Palestinians & Kashmiris terrorists, China socialist, & Trump president?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/30/indian-army-claim-found-footprints-yeti-sparks-ridicule?

Israel, which cynically uses the holocaust to promote the Zionist vision of a Jewish-only state, attempted to evict 70 elderly men & women, including 45 holocaust survivors, from subsidized public housing. The government canceled the eviction notice only after this Haaretz report created a scandal.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-let-us-die-at-home-in-peace-israel-to-evict-dozens-of-holocaust-survivors-1.7192567?

Reposting this from 2012 about how the Obama administration made it legally impossible for the Department of Labor to ever re-raise the issue of child protective laws for children farmworkers in the US, most of whom are Latino. In many ways it can be said that Obama policies concerning immigrants & refugees set the stage for the Trump administration’s massive assaults on immigrant & refugee rights. At the same time as Obama was forcing little kids to work in dangerous situations without protections, he was also arresting & deporting more undocumented immigrants than any previous administration.

In a move breathtaking in its malignancy, the Obama administration just withdrew a proposal to the Department of Labor (DOL) to update safety laws for child farm workers. Contrary to popular misconception, child labor is not entirely illegal in the US. Outside of agriculture, children must be at least 16-years-old to work (14 & 15-year-olds can work as cashiers, grocery baggers, car washers). Children of any age are allowed to work on family farms without restrictions but in agribusiness, with an estimated 800,000 child workers, there are regulations for children under 16-years-old, though they are not monitored or enforced. In formulating the updates, extensive research was done on safety & health hazards for children on industrial farms. They are exposed to pesticides (often sprayed directly by planes as they work), snake & insect bites, razor-sharp tools & lack of safety equipment, dangerous farm machinery (without safety devices like seat belts or roll-over bars), extreme heat, chemicals & explosives, work at extreme heights in silos & grain storage facilities, work in manure pits (with E. coli contamination). Exploitation of child labor is rampant: age restrictions are ignored (as can be seen in this photo of a US cotton worker); children often work 10 or more hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week, & at the peak of harvest, daylight to dusk; they are paid less than the minimum wage; they are not provided with drinking water & toilets. As a result accidents are frequent, maiming common, deaths gruesome. Farmworker children have high incidences of pesticide-related respiratory & digestive diseases, headaches, burning eyes, as well as brain damage, & death. Long-term pesticide exposure in adults is associated with cancer, neurologic problems, & reproductive problems.

The racism of this decision by the Obama administration cannot be denied since 85% of crop workers in the US are Latino. Are these children of no value? The Labor Department said farmers & ranchers complained that the new regulations would negatively impact family-owned farms but since these farms were always specifically exempted from regulation we can be certain it was agribusiness interests who opposed safety protection for small children, which were anyway unlikely to be enforced. This cynicism at the expense of little kids says so much about the Obama administration. Ending the abomination of child labor has to be one of our most important commitments.

(Photo is child farmworker in US)

Apparently, some are lauding Iran’s flogging & secret execution of two 17-year-old cousins arrested when they were 15 on multiple rape charges. Rape is an odious & violent crime & our visceral response is to beat the crap out of the accused & hang them. But courts of law exist precisely to determine actual guilt & restrain vengeance from stooping to barbarism. According to Iranian rape law which is stacked against women, accused rapists can only be convicted on the testimony of multiple witnesses (four Muslim male witnesses or a greater number of male & female witnesses). Amnesty claims Mehdi Sohrabifar & Amin Sedaghat were found guilty in an ‘unfair trial’ but do not elaborate how the trial failed to meet standards of due process. Iranian authorities did not specify the method of execution but Iran commonly uses shooting, hanging, or stoning to death. There is no humane way to execute someone but hanging or stoning are certainly among the most barbaric. What is known is that when the boys were transferred from a juvenile detention center to a prison on April 24th, neither the boys nor their parents were informed that they were to be executed the next day. The families only learned they were executed when authorities gave them the bodies which had marks from being flogged.

A fundamental issue here is that use of the death penalty for those under 18 is strictly prohibited under international human rights law & is a violation of children’s rights. Ninety-seven children under the age of 18 were executed in Iran between 1990 & 2018. Between 85 & 90 children remain on death row in Iran. Iran has become the top executioner of children in the world despite being a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child & the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights which make Iran legally bound to treat anyone under the age of 18 as a child & ensure they are not subject to the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Beside failing children, the Iranian regime has failed to combat the epidemic of violence against women. Legislation to criminalize gender-based violence was approved by the Rouhani administration in May 2017 but Iran’s chief justice refuses to sign off on the bill. Women’s rights activists say stalling is a temporizing tactic to eventually eliminate provisions that expanded the definition of violence to include emotional abuse & restrictions on a women’s freedom of movement. Iranian law deters rape victims from reporting their assault because rape victims can face prosecution for adultery (punishable by execution), “indecency,” or “immoral behavior.” Marital rape is legal. Domestic violence is not a crime & criminal penalties for murder as a result of domestic violence or honor killings are lighter than penalties for other acts of murder. Under Iranian law, girls may be legally married at 13-years-old (compared to 15 for boys) or even younger if their fathers or grandfathers & a judge consent. There are over 40,000 registered marriages of children in Iran, including over 300 girls under the age of 14, with increasing numbers of girls married under the age of ten.

Kangaroo courts & the disturbing arbitrary character in which Iranian laws are administered regarding women make it possible for political dissidents to be accused of rape & given the death sentence. But in June 2018, the gang rape of 41 women & girls in Iranshahr province was covered up by the regime because some of the perpetrators had ties to Iranian security forces. Activists who tried to publicize that case on social media were harassed & arrested.

The Iranian regime systematically discriminates & enables violence against women & girls in a panoply of inequities: by harassing, arresting, fining, & flogging women for ‘crimes’ like appearing in public without covering their hair & bodies; by forcibly segregating women from men; disproportionately punishing women in the judicial system; arresting, interrogating, & imprisoning women’s rights activists; denying women opportunities; favoring men over women in family & other aspects of law.

(Photo is Iranian women’s protest in 2016 from Middle East Observer)

Whoever is behind making the film “Victoria & Abdul” should be hunted down, lined up against a wall, & pummeled with horse manure. It is a deplorable glorification of the British moochocracy, a whitewash of British colonialism in India, & a paean to toadyism on the part of Indian social climbers. It’s about the real-life friendship of an elderly cantankerous Victoria with an Indian servant who began ingratiating & inveighling himself into her affections by kissing her feet. It’s a creepy relationship because it’s rooted in inequality. Abdul is a young Indian Uncle Tom sucking up to a lonely, tyrannical octogenarian. It may have been a platonic relationship but it was certainly racist & libidinal in a deeply repressed way. Trying to find any beauty in this film is akin to those who try to find an inspiring love affair between Thomas Jefferson & his slave mistress Sally Hemings. The only redeeming thing about the movie, other than Judi Dench’s ability to portray an unpleasant imperious old woman, is Abdul’s fellow Indian servant Mohammed who expresses rebellion against British colonialism & abhorrence at Abdul groveling his way up the “stinky, creaking ladder of the shitty British Empire.”

Why are so many Muslims chiding other Muslims to introspection & self-criticism after the Sri Lanka terror attack? That falls right into the ‘war on terror’ narrative where all Muslims are responsible for every crime committed (or alleged to be committed) by a Muslim. Believe me, no one’s every demanded any Catholic apologize for the Inquisition, for the Christian missionaries accompanying colonial troops, or to the thousands of young children raped & molested by priests. There is no such thing as collective guilt by an entire religion, including Islam which has 1.5 billion devotees.