Greed or Bleed

Even (some) billionaires agree: the greed class ought to pay taxes.

Sixty-one percent (61%) of taxes went to what’s euphemistically called defense. Defense means keeping upwards of 700 imperial bases throughout the world, even in countries which don’t want the US finger in their pies; it goes to droning civilians, woman and children; it goes to the torture budget at black sites, and at Guantanamo; it goes to running night raid “operations” on Afghani civilians.  Even toady-fellah Hamid Karsai doesn’t like that kind of surgery. It means dropping depleted uranium (essentially waging nuclear war) on countries which have our oil beneath their sands. Of 547 babies born to a sampling of 55 Iraqi families, 15% had serious birth defects caused by contamination of Iraq’s water, soils, air and food stuffs. 

Maybe paying taxes is not such a good idea, not even for billionaires.

An alternative proposal: If you (few) billionaires really want to contribute to your country, why not get an alternative energy enterprise off the ground. The government for sure won’t do it because the government is eyebrow deep in oil, uranium, and CO2.

Most 99% of the bleed class agrees: we need jobs jobs jobs.

What kind of jobs, jobs, jobs?  Combined Systems, Inc. located in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, employs between 100 and 250 people. It manufactures “non-lethal” crowd control paraphernalia for foreign and domestic use combined. Its tear gas canisters litter Tahrir Square today. Tahrir is described by one on-site reporter, Abdel-Koudous, as the largest field hospital in the world. Unarmed people face the military’s lethal weapons. Thousands of people have been wounded, and as of 6 A.M. today, November 22, 2011, 33 people had been killed . The wounded are picked up by two motor bikes which lift them off the ground in tandem and rush them to field hospital stations on the square where they are patched up and return to the front lines.  They keep going back. They know they will be injured if not killed.  One protester lost one eye some months ago. Yesterday he was blinded in the other eye.

Maybe not all jobs, jobs, jobs are such a good idea, not even for people who’ve been foreclosed by the banksters who’ve ripped us off.

A modest proposal: Maybe Combined Systems, Inc. needs to be occupied by the 99%. After all, you can’t eat teargas, and rubber bullets won’t pay the rent.

HABITABLE ZONES: A Fukushima Diary

We picked out planets that are just the right size—between the size of Earth or twice that—and all are within the ‘habitable zones’ of their stars, at distances where there’s the best chance for liquid water—and possibly life—to exist.

— Dan Wertheimer, space sciences lab astrophysicist

There is no place more wonderful than this. There is no place more marvelous than here.

                                                                                                            —Milarepa

Starry night.  All along the horizon, telescopes rotate, staring at the night sky.  In the Atacama Desert, where the skies are transparent like no other place on earth, free of the pollution of city lights, and of temperate zone moisture.

The human race is looking for planets. Hungry for planets in our own image, in the image of Gaia, of Earth. Planets near enough yet far enough from their distant suns not to burn up, not to freeze. Planets which show signs of water in their atmospheres. Planets that revolve around the maybe 50 billion stars in the local galaxy, in the neighborhood we call the Milky Way, and in the narrowest possible tranche of it, 1,235 planets have been sighted that correspond to such spacial parameters, and of those 1,235, 86 stand out, 86 which answer within reasonable limits to those conditions: sufficiently distant from their suns (but not too distant) to entertain the possibility of water.

Imagine 86 watery planets, each with its own orders of life: its own set of one-celled organisms, of invertebrates, of phyla inherited from a primordial past, of the first cone bearing trees, of the first flower bearing plants, of mammals, of insects, of trees, and shrubs and flowers. Imagine 86 planets with their own hereditary, evolutionary lines culminating or perhaps on the way to culminating in sentient, intelligent beings with appendages to hold tools, to compose music, to create dance, with tongues to bend around the syllables of languages structured entirely other than any Earthlings can begin imagining.  Eighty-six planets with their own dynasties of composers, choreographers, writers, poets, singers of songs.  Take all the sounds of all the languages of 86 planets, and all the sounds of all the music of 86 planets, meld them together, imagine the chorus. Now turn down the volume to a whisper: the whisper of the sounds made by the sentient beings of 86 planets. That is only 1/600,000,000th of the sounds of all the neighborhood galaxy’s planets, and, of the universe’s, a fraction so unfathomable, human cognition cannot imagine it.

But this one, this Earth, this Gaia is the one you have.  This one, and only this one. Its rocks, its fossils, palimpsest of times more ancient than time, its petroglyphs of a mankind more ancient than language, more ancient than writing, its horsetails and ginkos, survivors of an unfairytale age of dragons, of cone bearers, of spore bearers, of molds, of microorganisms, of nematodes, of annelids, of the lowliest of beings without which none of our living, none of our songs, or our musics, or our dances, or our writings or our tongues could ever have been possible.

This Gaia is all you have.