pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HUMAN RIGHTS: DELETED, OR, CONSIGNED TO INSIGNIFICANCE 247. There is no United Nations.�John Bolton (Bush�s newly appointed ambassador to the UN)That�s the same Bolton who wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, that the US is under no legal obligation to abide by international treaties, even signed and ratified ones such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Bush is defying (much to the gratification of my Aaomic-funded hometown). Removing "The use of force should be considered as an instrument of last resort" is one of 450 changes that the Bush administration is demanding be made to the UN�s action agenda that culminates at this month�s summit. This is an unsurprising deletion from an administration with an � �invade first, choose your justifications later� mode of crisis resolution� (Phyllis Bennis, author of the forthcoming Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power �A Declaration of War.� See TomPaine.com). Bennis continues: The U.S. proposal package is designed to force the world to accept as its own the U.S. strategy of abandoning impoverished nations and peoples, rejecting international law, privileging ruthless market forces over any attempted regulation, sidelining the role of international institutions except for the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, and weakening, perhaps fatally, the United Nations itself. (Warning. This entry [obviously] consists of many news excerpts peppered with blatant opinions peppered with a miniscule amount of half-hopeful poetry and news about breast lumps and hurricane winds.) So I wonder if all those photos of impoverished people in their one-room shacks in New Orleans with their naugahyde car seats that they�ve been using as living-room chairs and their TVs on red plastic milk crates will cause enough sustained outrage to force Shrub et al. to at least mask their abandonment of impoverished people in pretty talk, if they will make good-intentioned Americans realize that our policies have abandoned impoverished people for a long time now. Or maybe that�s just till the next good news story comes along. Michael Jackson does something and forget the poor people.... Still. My sister Penelope emailed me to say that she and her conservative husband are considering letting a hurricane family live with them in their gated golf course community. Of course, their list of qualifications is so long that it�s unlikely that any family will qualify.... Me, I say just send an honest lesbian in need of a place to live and who doesn�t expect me to entertain her too much (since queers have the triple whammy of losing their homes, being separated from their lovers by FEMA [who doesn�t recognize nonlegal unions such as ours when they�re dividing people up for dispersement across this great land of opportunity of ours], and who are just trying to adjust to, say, life with a Mormon family in their secret wool underbritches in Salt Lake City ... or, for that matter, for most places in this strange, strange nation of homophobes of ours).
The Bush administration has given the UN what it believes to be a stark choice: adopt the US changes and acquiesce to becoming an adjunct of Washington and a tool of empire, or reject the changes and be consigned to insignificance�
Why do I suddenly want to move to Vancouver and disassociate myself from this empire? Got a call from my dear friend and mentor Shakespeare this morning. She found a lump in the tissue right above her reconstructed breast. It could be scar tissue but is new and feels suspicious, so she is trying to schedule an appointment with oncology ASAP. I told her to come as soon as she can get here and the Bird Hotel will be open. I don�t even want to think about her enduring another round of chemo and radiation ... especially during her last semester of teaching, when all she's doing is looking forward to going home to Kentucky. � Jumping topics again. So that article about the UN prompted some damn interesting posts, including to any member of the House of Representatives who might, by small chance, be logging on to this website: Please, PLEASE impeach this maniac before he starts World War III. What are you waiting for??? WHAT??? You've got the evidence, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR???? ... Let me see if I got this straight....Bill Clinton, who in hindsight, let's face it, was not that bad a president, lied about having an affair with a half-witted intern and you impeached him, right? Right? OK. Now, George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, invaded a country that was a threat to no one but itself, resulting in the deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of men, women and little children�and what??? I'm sorry but am I missing something here? Please explain yourselves. Explain your hypocracy to the mothers and fathers of the almost two thousand dead American kids who have been killed in this fiasco (and that number will at least double by the time this fucking nightmare of an administration is over�that's a conservative estimate)....�Tom Degan � Then there�s the guy who, somehow, found a tie to marijuana (because someone had to...) and asserts that petroleum would be useless if only people ended cannabis prohibitions. I find this utterly fascinating. �End Cannabis prohibition� he writes. I know it sounds simplistic, but if people were to re-valuate the most useful agricultural resource on Earth, then petroleum would be worthless. If that ever happens, BushCo will lose its economic superiority, which affords political control.� Everything that is made from petroleum can be made better, cheaper, and with less pollution from Cannabis (hemp,"'marijuana" etc.). That is the real reason it is prohibited.�Ending the anti-natural prohibition of the "herb bearing seed" called Cannabis is the fundamental challenge of our time. Among the grave harms being inflicted on humanity by constricting the free market in the world's most useful and potentially most abundant agricultural resource are the following:Yep, that�s what he wrote. Just remember, you read it here. 3:58 p.m. - 2005-09-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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