happy anna howard shaw day!

just say NO to the super-commercialized hallmark made-up "holiday" that threw up everywhere today. unless you spent it eating chocolate and cookies and making out. 

where's gwen?

where did she go?? siiigh



i love her voice in this song, it's like it hasn't been tamed yet. i miss no doubt

on america being "great"

This is the smartest thing ive ever read, I found it on the adbusters website, in a comment to a video about the protest in egypt. i just had to copy and paste, too bad the person didn't leave their name!

on revolution and america being "great":

"If something is great, then you need not say that it is great over and over. Greatness is a lie and rationalization for us to not look at ourselves and question why we refuse to become one with the rest of humanity and live for little else than material acquisition. We are not great- we are miserable, spiritually deprived and depraved. All the misery we create, we do so in the name of creating material goods which are all we have to vindicate our worth as human beings. We leave in our wake overseas sweat shops, wars and environmental destruction and we create it only so we can have things which say we are worthwhile. We are the bastard child of puritanism, which is based in Calvinist theological doctrine. The Calvinists believes God's chosen people would be identified by their success and luck in this life. We are just one step away from pure selfish materialism in that we don't bury ourselves with our BMW's, in the style of ancient Egypt.

The lesson is that the greatest weakness of humankind is fear of death, fear of what awaits at the end of this life journey. Our pathalogical materialism has its roots in the human fear of death, as we create mythology to dispell our fear of our imminent death and our weakness as flesh and blood creatures. This is why we feel the need to persecute the poor and nearly torture the unfortunate because we project the reality of our humanity onto them. The poor are like modern human sacrifices. We crush them to claim ourselves immune to misfortune.

No matter where you live, aggression and hate of the poor happens. Even in our most supposedly enlightened cities, even the poor during the recession are thought to be all drug addicts or crazy. There is much self aggrandizing amongst the affluent. The problem is these people have utterly lost their moral compass- hell even their rational compass. Driving an SUV and willfully destroying the only precious habital planet it is possible to reach with our best technology-- this shows, it proves that we are completely insane. We are dripping in fear and insecurity, awash with self-justification and somehow oblivious to reality.

Notice how all SUV's right now have tinted glass in the windows. Notice how now most all of them are manufactured to look like a giant fat ass from the rear. Really, someone should break out the paint and paint a big rear end on one of them. The way they shove in front of you with no regard, it seems like some socially permissible way to be fat and greedy. Except the overweight, whom many are that way due to issues like hypothyroidism and poor food choice being rammed up people's lives, get mistreated. Yet, you can guzzle up the entire oil reserves of Venezuela and not somehow be a "hog" but have stature.

We are simply so miserable a people because we won't attempt to stand out and be ethical- we hide behind our possessions to avoid being pillaried for not "making it." When will we learn self worth has nothing to do with things and is our innate birthright? We become good people when we see our innate worth- seeing it in others comes naturally. To me it feels like the rich, ownership class manipulates us into servitude and slavery to satiate its insane power fantasies.

People revolt elsewhere because they haven't had their self worth and souls murdered in the name of mindless, self-perpetuating materialism. Worse we are paranoid in this country that disregard for being wage slaves means the world will collapse in self-indulgent hedonism. We do seem to have this thing going where we say it is okay to abuse people (the poor) because if we didn't everyone would not do a damned thing. We have no faith in human nature and our innate capacity and need to create and love. Abuse isn't the only motivator for human behavior. Really, I think the problem is that people fear facing that people are good underneath and we don't need the whip to function and that their entire lives are based on a lie that says the opposite of this.

In Germany, workers get time off just to drink beer at work. All Europeans work less and have more time to think and enjoy. Americans are manic workaholics, who live to abuse each other into running off the cliff along with them. All we do is overwork ourselves for nothing and the socially acceptable way to dump the feelings of meaninglessness, betrayal and abuse is on those who have less than them. We are just like the pyramid on our dollar bill, where we make those underneath us bear our weight, while we bear the weight of our superiors. Then there is the capstone at the top where the spoiled billionaires dwell.

And what for?? To build a structure close enough to the heavens for those scared corporate monarchs to reach some sort of fucking immortality? It's probably close to something that *logical* and *rational.* We may as well be toiling in the desert for our Madison Avenue pharohs. We are just as "primitive" as our ancestors when you come down to it.

In reality, I'd respect our culture more if we did bury ourselves with our Gap clothes, Mc Mansions and American Apparel wear. We don't even understand our own true religion, our own social imperatives and for what its worth, the Ancient Egyptians did."