Received e-mail (12/30/2007):

I find it very interesting that you quote the Old Testament in your “From Swords into Plowshares” episode but not in your “Kicking the Apartheid Habit” episode. The quote I’m thinking of is Leviticus 18:22. - R.J. Grigaitis

For those of you who don’t have a Bible handy, Leviticus 18:22 says “”You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.” My response to R.J.:

R.J.,

Perhaps you will also interested in Peter 2:18, Exodus 21:26, or Ephesians 6:5 - so that you will know how to treat your slaves. You do have slaves, don’t you?

Just to be clear, we consider it fair to quote from any source so long as the source is identified (so that readers can examine the context from which it was taken), and deem the quote to be valuable in some way. Quoting from a source does not imply that we must uncritically accept all other pieces of information from that same source to be the absolute truth. That would be stupid.

Bunny

A couple of days ago we hit 2.5 million episode views over at our channel at YouTube. I’m kind of surprised that a program like ours would get so many views at a place like YouTube. It’s not ha-ha funny, we don’t have any sexy pictures, etc. We originally decided to put our videos up at YouTube only because some people had written to us saying that they couldn’t watch our videos on our website (QuickTime incompatibility, etc.). Now more people watch The Pinky Show over there than over here. I bet most of the people over at YouTube don’t even know we have a website.

The other day, a human being friend came over and we were reading through some of the YouTube comments and private messages we’ve received over the past few weeks. Some of the more outrageous ones really made us roll our eyes:

“fucking fags, go watch the news the UN autherized the 2003 invasion, no terrorist in iraq? SADDAM WAS A GOD DAMN TERRORIST!!! no WMDs, go ask the kurds if he had weapons of mass destruction, fuckin dumb whore, my and cousin served proudly in Iraq and dont need any of ur hippie shit.” - YouTube user 75ranger101

“What The Fuck!!! First, you have NO RIGHT to bash the military in any way!! They fight so people can have the opinions they have, they risk there lives to protect OUR FREEDOM!!! Soldiers are given orders and they follow them, they don’t ask questions they simply do as they are told. Second, whether or not the reason’s for being in the middle east are legal or not is’nt the point. I lost family both on 9/11 and in the middle east, I find it bullshit that you would spend so much time ranting about an issue that is not up to you. Your cat looks high and your simply repeating something someone had ALREADY bitched about…..MOVE ON!!!!” - YouTube user dragonslayer9342

“FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKS. “Educational” its all propaganda go fuck youselves you fucking pieces of shit… etc.” - YouTube user ingderf (that first sentence is almost brilliant in its simplicity…)

Afterwards she was asking us if it bothers us that we get so many YouTube messages that are filled with anger, hate, and threats. She looked surprised when I said ‘no’. I don’t really have any feeling about it other than to say that I think it’s a good resource for us. The comments - even the really stupid ones - give us some kind of idea how people out there are ‘thinking’ about the issues. I’m not surprised that there are hundreds of square miles worth of stupid people out there. And to a certain extent I’m actually kind of impressed by it. It’s a reminder that our society has had to work extremely hard to make people that stupid. I don’t believe that human beings can be born that stupid; I’m pretty sure that kind of stupidity has to be intentionally cultivated. And I’m sure it cost a lot of money too.

Actually I think it’s kind of funny that my friend was under the impression that it’s some kind of emotional burden to have a million or so people ‘out there’ hate you, wish pox on you, and so on. I had to remind her that we’re cats and we don’t care what human beings think about us.

~ pinky

I don’t answer a lot of e-mails anymore. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but to be honest, answering individual e-mails is not a good use of time. There’ll probably always be a part of me that feels like I’m being very impolite or not-nice if I ‘ignore’ even one e-mail that we receive, but lately I’ve been trying really hard to keep my feelings in check and look at things programmatically. I have to ask myself: What is our primary responsibility? Well, we’re supposed to be making educational materials. E-mail is fun and all that but since there’s only two of us working on the production end of things, every hour I spend writing e-mails takes away time from research, writing, edting, and so on. Bunny and I typically work 12-14 hour days to keep the PS project moving forward. And at the end of the day we usually just feel too brain-dead to respond to individual e-mails. Plus, I’m a terribly slow writer.

Having said that, we frequently receive e-mails that, for one reason or another, we really want to respond to. Over the past couple of years I’ve been responding to as many of these as possible, but lately there’s just been too many of them and I haven’t been able to keep up at all. So what we’re going to do is try to respond to some of the e-mails we receive here in the Diary area. Bunny does that sometimes (Bunny Mailbag), but not too often. So we’re going to try to do this more often.

Anyway, tonight I wanted to share a very nice e-mail we received a few days ago from a person named David. The things he has to say about fear is, I think, extremely important. The relationships that exist between fear and self-silencing are worth careful examination - not just for the obvious political reasons, but for a million ‘personal’ reasons as well. A few years ago, shortly after we first met, Bunny and I decided that it would be important for us to create some kind of daily practice that would allow us to continually work towards the dissolution of fear. Making The Pinky Show has been a part of that practice.

Oh, and the hot dog story is good too. It really made us laugh.

message: I like your mini shows. I like the content and the way you express it. I especially liked your one about the illegality of the American war against Iraq.

On a more personal note (don’t be scared, I am not dangerous), I want to tell you what made me actually write to you:

Two things basically.

The first one is that listening to you and your audience/contributors de-paranoided me. What I mean by that is, the information I received about in the Pinky Show’s Legality of the Iraq War combined with the link your site provided to the BBC’s “The Power of Nightmares” helped me overcome my resistance to sharing some of my strong convictions online. A week ago, it scared me to know that putting my convictions online potentially exposes me to the any of the 6 billion or so other people here.

But today, the post-Pinky version of myself realizes that my so-called leaders passionately devote considerable resources to engineering fear in the hearts of workaday schmucks like me. People like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Powell, Rice, Pearle, Wolfowitz, depend on my fear and the fear of millions like me. They depend on fear to deter ordinary citizens like me from observing and making our own conclusions about decisions they make that significantly affect the daily life of people like me.

Now that I have had a closer [sic] via your show, I’m angry enough to not care that potentially the whole world can know that I regard our “neoconservative” so-called leaders as dangerous, lying megalomaniacs. They are the mirror image of the very “evildoers who hate us because of our freedoms”. So, thank you. Your show has helped me come to value my own observation and experience enough to share it without regard to fear. You supplied the information and courageous example which inspires me to write to you.

The second thing that made me write to you was a memory evoked by your picture of a sign showing there’s 80 some odd miles to Death Valley. [ pinky’s note: the image he’s talking about is here. ]

My friend Dale and I call it the Hot Dog Water Story. When I was young and dumb, Dale and I had the brilliant idea to go for a 40-mile hike in Death Valley in August. We read about desert conditions. We also checked out an army manual about desert survival from the library. It said a person needs a gallon of water every 20 miles in the desert.

Long story short, we ran out of water anyway, in the middle of Death Valley. So we started to hitchhike. One car after another passed us by. Then a couple driving a Red VW van going in the opposite direction stopped, picked us up, turned around and drove us back to our camp. The couple was from Canada. They also had a cute little baby lying in a small, blanketed crate.

Dale and I were pretty thirsty by the time our good samaritans brought us back to camp. The only water we had left was in a cooler that contained hot dogs floating in warm water. Dale and I were so thirsty that we downed that hot dog water in nothing flat.

It turns out that our rescuers were camped close to Dale and me. We had a good talk about the whole experience when we had dinner together later that day.

So, thanks for reminding me about Hot Dog Water.

Sincerely,

David S.

Okay, that’s today’s interesting e-mail. It’s almost 3 a.m. - I’d better go to bed now. Goodnight! ~ pinky

One of the most common criticisms we receive regarding our The American War: the U.S. in Vietnam episode goes something like this: “How can you say the Gulf of Tonkin Incident never happened? It did happen! You cats are wrong! How dare you conspiracy theorists suggest that the U.S. government used a fraudulent event that never happened to plunge our nation into war… blah blah blah.”

Enter a recently declassified National Security Agency study - Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975 (download the entire report here). The study is a comprehensive analysis of U.S. codebreaking and eavesdropping work during the Vietnam war - the government’s official history of e-spying if you will - and the Gulf of Tonkin incident receives a full analysis from a signals intelligence perspective in Chapter 5. The conclusion of that analysis? The Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened.

Thank you, we will be accepting written apologies at our usual e-mail address.

But seriously, you know what’s really annoying? These people who e-mail us about how we make up stuff to back up our arguments don’t seem to do any research themselves before firing off angry e-mails. The thing is, we were able to figure out that the Tonkin Affair never happened after doing just a few days worth of research into the ‘incident’. It wasn’t difficult to find out that it never happened and we certainly don’t have any high-level security clearances that allow us access to top secret information. We just read normal books and reports that anybody can find in any decent library. So as nice as it is to have the NSA back us up on our “rediculus lies and claims”, this kind of information really is already out there.

Annoying thing #2: The release of the NSA study and its findings were not covered in any of the mainstream U.S. news outlets. None of them. Maybe there’ll be a hailstorm of reports about it next week, but I doubt it. I had to find out about it from a French newswire. Crazy huh.

~ pinky

I was reading an essay by Penny Coleman (Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War) and was especially intrigued by this section describing the psychological ‘conditioning’ of soldiers:

Since World War II, our military has sought and found any number of ways to override the values and belief systems recruits have absorbed from their families, schools, communities and religions. Using the principles of operant conditioning, the military has found ways to reprogram their human software, overriding those characteristics that are inconvenient in a military context, most particularly the inherent resistance human beings have to killing others of their own species. “Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli,” says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, a professor of philosophy and ethics at West Point, “and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely — and understandably — suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat.”

By military standards, operant conditioning has been highly effective. It’s enabled American soldiers to kill more often and more efficiently, and that ability continues to exact a terrible toll on those we have designated as the “enemy.” But the toll on the troops themselves is also tragic. Even when troops struggle honorably with the difference between a protected person and a permissible target (and I believe that the vast majority do so struggle, though the distinction is one I find both ethically and humanely problematic) in war “shit happens.” When soldiers are witness to overwhelming horror, or because of a reflexive accident, an illegitimate order, or because multiple deployments have thoroughly distorted their perceptions, or simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time — those are the moments that will continue to haunt them, the memories they will not be able to forgive or forget, and the stuff of posttraumatic stress injuries.

I’ve been thinking about this all day. Seems to me that when human beings are in their childhood-stage, the adults around them try to teach them things like how to treat each other nicely, how to discern right from wrong, how to think about the consequences of their actions, and other good stuff like that. But doesn’t this curriculum for soldiers - this ‘operant conditioning’ that teaches barely-adult human beings how to bypass the moral autonomy they (hopefully) developed as children - seem like exactly the opposite of good ‘child rearing’?

I don’t get it. If human beings think warring is so necessary, why not just avoid the possibility of confusion, horror, and trauma by training children (i.e., potential soldiers) to be killers from the start? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d rather do away with war altogether, but since most people won’t even allow themselves to seriously explore that as a possibility, perhaps it just makes more sense to speed things along a bit by not cultivating any goodness that’s only going to be have to be destroyed later.

At the very least, all of us cats will be saved the hassle of having to figure out if that human being coming towards us is going to be kind or try to hurt us.

~ pinky

[ addition: Sorry, I forgot to post the link to Ms. Coleman’s essay from which I quoted: http://www.alternet.org/story/72956/ ]

E-mail from ShapeSHFTR:

Dear Bunny, I enjoy reading your replies to e-mails. I have a question for you. I’m guessing that you guys are Democrats and not Republicans. So out of the major Democratic candidates - Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards, who will you be voting for? Who do you think is the real change candidate? And don’t say Kucinich because we all know he doesn’t have a chance to win the nomination! Thanks, just curious what you guys are thinking because you haven’t been talking about the elections. - ShapeSHFTR

Bunny writes:

Hi ShapeSHFTR, I won’t pretend to represent the others, I’ll just state my own position and the others can enter their opinions below if they want.

1. As we’ve pointed out before, cats aren’t allowed to vote. If you American human beings thought about how unfair this is for even 10 seconds you’d see that that’s something that has to be changed. Who the leader of this country is has a profound effect on all animals, not only humans. I agree that some animals cannot operate a voting machine or punch a voting-card (dragonflies come to mind), but that doesn’t mean that our interests should be totally ignored at election time. If you believe in fairness go figure something about re: how to collect animal votes. And I’m not even going to get into the whole trees issue.

2. The whole “You Must Be Either a Democrat or a Republican” mentality annoys me. What happens when neither side is willing to serve the interests of the citizenry? Or to put it another way, why do people have to choose between one of just two parties when both of those parties are actively hurting the most vulnerable among us? Poor people, the elderly, children, the homeless, recent immigrants, Native peoples, and so on. I would call the narrowness of your human elections a joke if the repercussions weren’t so enormously un-funny.

3. I like some things about each of the candidates as people. All of them seem intelligent, which can be nice. Visually speaking, they all have decent smiles, et cetera. But as political candidates, the three you’ve named - Clinton, Obama, Edwards - I don’t like their politics. Just one example, their positions regarding the expansion of war-culture, an issue we have spoken about a lot here at The Pinky Show.

Hillary Clinton: To help our forces recover from Iraq and prepare them to confront the full range of twenty-first-century threats, I will work to expand and modernize the military so that fighting wars no longer comes at the expense of deployments for long-term deterrence, military readiness, or responses to urgent needs at home.

John Edwards: I will double the budget for recruitment and raise the standards for the recruitment pool so that we can reduce our reliance on felony waivers and other exceptions. In addition, I will increase our investment in the maintenance of our equipment for the safety of our troops.

Barack Obama: To renew American leadership in the world, we must immediately begin working to revitalize our military. A strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace. . . . We must use this moment both to rebuild our military and to prepare it for the missions of the future. . . . We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines. . . . I will not hesitate to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests whenever we are attacked or imminently threatened. We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense in order to provide for the common security that underpins global stability — to support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or confront mass atrocities…

[ excerpts from Glenn Greenwald’s excellent essay at Salon ]

4. Seems like every time Kucinich’s name is mentioned, it’s in the context of some kind of mockery or dismissive “interesting but not to be taken seriously” comment. What’s funny to me is that if people would only follow-up with some critical inquiry as to why this is happening, they might actually figure out a thing or two about what’s wrong with elections here in the United States.

I’m not impressed with the American political system. You human beings will get exactly what you deserve. Unfortunately for the rest of us who also live on this planet, we’ll also get what you deserve.

Bunny

[ Kim: Grumpy as usual! ]

[ Bunny: I am not grumpy, I just don’t feel like taking extra time to figure out how to say things all fluffy-like. ]

Here is a must-read article regarding the current movement to bring U.S. universities into closer alignment with the national security/military superstructure. Please read this. All of us have to understand how our so-called public institutions are being used to further the new Americanism agenda.

The essay explains the seven steps involved in the transformation of U.S. universities and colleges:

1. Target dissidents.

2. Arm the schools.

3. Increase surveillance.

4. Data mine student records.

5. Track foreign students.

6. Take over the curriculum, classrooms, and laboratories.

7. Privatize everything.

Read the whole article here: Repress U, by Michael Gould-Wartofsky (from The Nation)

Posted by Bunny

OK, he never actually said that. But articles like this really makes me think that President Bush has a personal vendetta against nature-in-general. Do you think maybe he was bullied by trees as a child?

[ excerpt from a Washington Post story by Marc Kaufman ]

The White House yesterday sought to overrule a federal court’s decision limiting the Navy’s use of sonar in training exercises, exempting the service from complying with two major environmental laws.

Environmentalists who sued to limit the use of loud, mid-frequency sonar — which can be harmful to whales and other marine mammals — said the exemptions were unprecedented and could lead to a larger legal battle over the extent to which the military has to follow environmental laws.

In a court filing yesterday, government attorneys said President Bush had determined that allowing the use of mid-frequency sonar in ongoing exercises off southern California was “essential to national security” and of “paramount interest to the United States.” …The government filings said the federal ruling limiting sonar use “profoundly interferes with the Navy’s global management of U.S. strategic forces, its ability to conduct warfare operations, and ultimately places the lives of American sailors and Marines at risk.”

…”The president’s action is an attack on the rule of law,” said Reynolds, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project. “By exempting the Navy from basic safeguards under both federal and state law, the President is flouting the will of Congress, the decision of the California Coastal Commission, and a ruling by the federal court.” …The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said the waters off southern California are especially rich in marine mammal life and are on migration paths of five species of endangered whales.

In the past these Navy sonar ‘exercises’ have left whales stranded or dead. Stop messing with whales!

Posted by Kim

Bunny and I arrived early in the morning on Sunday. What can I say? I’m just really happy to be back in Hawaii. Hawaii smells good. Everybody we’ve been meeting here has been really kind to us. I was born in Hawaii so I’m pretty familiar with the food here, but for Bunny a lot of the stuff we’ve been having on this trip so far is new and it’s been quite shocking to see how much she can eat when she likes what she sees on the table. Not that I’m suggesting that she’s fat (she’s not).

We’re here to do research and collect materials for an upcoming mini-series on Hawaii. Most people think of Hawaii as an island paradise / tourist destination. But what most people don’t realize is that Hawaii is also a settler colony. Our upcoming episodes will explain what that means and why it’s important to think about.

Financially speaking, these upcoming episodes have been made possible by two grants we recently received - mahalo (thank you) to The Hawaii People’s Fund and the Hawaii Community Foundation! Mimi had written to them asking if they’d be willing to fund an episode or two on settler colonialism, and to our surprise they actually said ‘yes’! I say ’surprised’ because: 1) the settler colonialism argument is still ‘controversial’ here in the U.S. (even though it’s so obviously true if you just consider the facts!); and 2) for the past year Mimi has been tirelessly applying to all sorts of grants but so far we have only gotten rejection letters.

So needless to say we are really happy to receive these grants. It’s not only a big financial lift but equally important for us it is also a big emotional lift. We were starting to think that foundations are allergic to cats or something. So I would like to send Mimi a special thank you for all her hard work. People don’t know that Mimi works long hours at her ‘real job’ and then after that she comes home, sits down, and then she does all the grantwriting for The Pinky Show. So she basically has almost no time in her life for play or just relaxation.

Okay, tonight I was actually going to write about GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) stuff but as you can see I got side-tracked. Since we got here Bunny and I have been learning about GMO kalo (taro) and the more I learn, the angrier I get! What’s happening here with kalo is just like what’s going on on the mainland (and elsewhere) with corporations trying to ‘own’, control, and profit from all aspects of nature. Corn, wild rice, soy, wheat, and many other things have already been deeply affected. Here in Hawaii kalo is considered to be the ancestor of the Hawaiian people. Kalo is their relative. So corporations claiming the right to own and modify kalo seems to me like a totally disrespectful and inappropriate thing to do. I’m truly disgusted by what I’m seeing. We didn’t come to Hawaii to work on an episode about kalo but hopefully next time we’ll be able to do that. In the meantime, please watch this video - it’s called Islands at Risk (30 mintutes long). Also, an excellent documentary to watch for background information about GMO is The Future of Food. This is a must-see documentary - all your perspectives about food and nature will be changed after watching this.

I have to go prepare for tomorrow now. Thank you for reading.

~ pinky

Kim filling in blogging duties again for Pinky while she is in Hawaii.

Guess what. This past Tuesday, the FDA (Food and Drug Association) approved flesh and fluids (a.k.a. ‘meat & milk’) from cloned animals:

“Meat and milk from clones of cattle, swine, and goats, and the offspring of clones from any species traditionally consumed as food, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals.” - FDA official Randall Lutter

Considering the FDA’s dismal food safety record (especially with corporate profiteering lurking in the background), I am not feeling comforted by this recent turn of events.

The decision represents a major step towards allowing biotech corporations to put clone-derived products on supermarket shelves. And maybe even more disturbingly, the FDA has also decided that meat & milk from cloned animals do not need to be labeled as such. Here in the U.S.A., GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) foodstuffs also don’t need to be labeled, so basically no one is able to decide for themselves if they want to eat cloned-derived and GMO foods. Without labeling, none of us can know what we are eating. Or, for that matter, what’s making us sick.

[ read the Agence France-Presse article ]

Posted by Kim

Still guest blogging for Pinky until she is back from Hawaii.

In the news: On Friday, President Bush made a proclamation that kind of blew my mind. Here it is:

On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, we recognize that each life has inherent dignity and matchless value, and we reaffirm our steadfast determination to defend the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society.

America was founded on the belief that all men are created equal and have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and our country remains committed to upholding that founding principle. Since taking office, I have signed legislation to help protect life at all stages, and my Administration will continue to encourage adoption, fund abstinence education and crisis pregnancy programs, and support faith-based groups. Today, as our society searches for new ways to ease human suffering, we must pursue the possibilities of science in a manner that respects the sacred gift of life and upholds our moral values.

Our Nation has made progress in its efforts to protect human life, and we will strive to change hearts and minds with compassion and decency. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day and throughout the year, we help strengthen the culture of life in America and work for the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim Sunday, January 20, 2008, as National Sanctity of Human Life Day. I call upon all Americans to recognize this day with appropriate ceremonies and to underscore our commitment to respecting and protecting the life and dignity of every human being.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eighteenth day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand eight, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-second.

- GEORGE W. BUSH

When I read this my first thought was, “Is this a prank?” Because really - is there anybody out there with a track record like his (human rights abuses, war criminality, shredding constitutional rights, etc.) that would allow themselves to speak publicly about “defending the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society” or “respecting and protecting the life and dignity of every human being”? Of course not! Any normal person would feel too ashamed.

I was confused enough that I finally called Daisy to ask him about it. Well Daisy explained to me that President Bush is not contradicting himself at all. He said that my confusion was coming from the fact that people like President Bush just have a different definition of human life. He said President Bush and his friends only believe in the sanctity of human life in that time frame beginning with conception, right up until 1 second before you’re born.

Okay, that helped a lot. You know, politics wouldn’t be so hard to understand if politicians would just include definitions and explanatory footnotes whenever they try to say something.

Posted by Kim

[ Bunny: Kim said “President Bush and his friends only believe in the sanctity of human life in that time frame beginning with conception, right up until 1 second before you’re born.” I would also add: “From the moment of birth on, your body belongs to the state.” ]

Short post today, I’m in the middle of a really good book.

Bunny has been doing a lot of research about GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) lately. I like food so of course the big question for me when I am marketing is “What should I be avoiding?”. Here is a good list that she sent me yesterday:

http://www.truefoodnow.org/shoppersguide/guide_printable.html

Also make sure you check out the rest of the True Food Network website too. It’s a good website to keep you up to date on the ongoing struggle to keep food healthy and safe.

I’ll post other good lists when I find them.

Posted by Kim.

Another blog by me, Kim.

Our friend Richard at Hawaii People’s Fund sent us an e-mail with a link to some great information today. It is called Iraq: The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War, and is a section of The Center for Public Integrity’s website. There are some analytical commentaries and also an archive of ‘old’ (2002 seems like a long time ago already) video footage of Bush administration people hyping the case for war, an excellent bibliography, and so on. I just spent the last 3 or 4 hours reviewing the information and it is very good. There’s actually no “new” information here - I think we pretty much read up on this stuff while we were researching our own Iraq War episode - but I am very happy that some people are willing to take the time to put so much information together in a way that I can go back and rethink what has happened.

<– example graph from the War Card website.

Pinky is always reminding us how important it is to study history. If we don’t study history of course it’s going to be harder to see what’s being done to us right now in the present. Like Iran. If the American people do not stop their government from warring on Iran, I will be even more disgusted and angry.

Angry cats!

Now I am reading about How to Buy a President. I know I am not in a position to suggest ideas but I would like to see a companion website called How to Have Democracy. (not fake democracy)

While Bunny and Pinky enjoy the sun and ahi poke in Hawaii, I am stuck here in 40°F weather reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I’m not really complaining, it’s actually very fascinating to see what kind of impressions this man had of the United States in ‘the early years’ (~1831). For example, this part:

It is difficult to say what place is taken up in the life of an inhabitant of the United States by his concern for politics. To take a hand in the regulation of society and to discuss it is his biggest concern and, so to speak, the only pleasure an American knows. This feeling pervades the most trifling habits of life; even the women frequently attend public meetings and listen to political harangues as a recreation from their household labors. Debating clubs are, to a certain extent, a substitute for theatrical entertainments: an American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say “Gentlemen” to the person with whom he is conversing.

In some countries the inhabitants seem unwilling to avail themselves of the political privileges which the law gives them; it would seem that they set too high a value upon their time to spend it on the interests of the community; and they shut themselves up in a narrow selfishness, marked out by four sunk fences and a quickset hedge. But if an American were condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence; he would feel an immense void in the life which he is accustomed to lead, and his wretchedness would be unbearable. I am persuaded that if ever a despotism should be established in America, it will be more difficult to overcome the habits that freedom has formed than to conquer the love of freedom itself. (from Chapter 14: WHAT ARE THE REAL ADVANTAGES WHICH AMERICAN SOCIETY DERIVES FROM A DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT)

Wow. I realize a lot can change in 200+ years but to me it sounds like America has undergone a radical personality transplant.

Posted by Kim.

[ Bunny: Hi Kim, thanks for the blogging. If you have time I’d like to hear your thoughts on de Tocqueville’s chapter on the ‘three races’ in America - ‘Whites, Negroes, and Indians’. ]

[ Kim: To me, race is one of the hardest concepts for cats to understand. Why do human beings have race? Is it a power thing? Better to ask Daisy instead. ]

Back in 1982, after witnessing a million people protest nuclear weapons in New York’s Central Park, then-U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig said: “Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.”

That’s a very practical way of looking at things, isn’t it?

Well. It’s true that I don’t want to support U.S. imperialism, which of course includes imperialist wars. It’s also true that the U.S. government needs lots and lots of money to pay for imperialist wars. And I do feel sick to my stomach that over 40% of the taxes that I pay (yes, I pay taxes) are being used to buy bullets to shoot people with, and for bombs and such. I don’t want to pay for this kind of thing. So I’ve been looking for options.

Here are some links to information I’ve found so far:

Don’t Buy Bush’s War @ CodePink

War Tax Resistance info @ War Resisters League

Taxstrike @ Against the Wall Network

2008 War Tax Boycott

It would be great if us taxpayers got to choose where to send our tax dollars. Like, “divert all my money from the military and war spending and spend it on building houses for homeless people and cleaning up the environment instead”. Okay, maybe there’d be ‘too much’ money for the environment and not enough money for fixing pot holes in the roads, but overall I think that’s a minor problem compared to our very expensive addiction to death-culture.

What do you think? I’m not an economist but the idea of a war tax boycott sounds reasonable to me.

Posted by Kim.

Not! It just seems that way. Do you know why only Republicrats get to be on TV?

Just a friendly reminder:

Green Party [ www.GP.org ]

Libertarian Party [ www.LP.org ]

Socialist Party USA [ www.sp-usa.org ]

United States Marijuana Party [ www.usmjparty.com ]

And actually there are more. I’m not endorsing any particular political party, I just wanted to remind everybody that there are parties beyond just the Republicans and Democrats.

And while you’re at it, please read up on different political forms a nation can take. The United States is a constitutional republic, but what is that exactly and what does that mean? What are the alternatives?

This blog entry written by Kim.