Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Identified as a trouble maker by the authorities since childhood, and resolved to live up to the description, Charles Carreon soon discovered that mischief is most effectively fomented through speech. Having mastered the art of flinging verbal pipe-bombs and molotov cocktails at an early age, he refined his skills by writing legal briefs and journalistic exposes, while developing a poetic style that meandered from the lyrical to the political. Journey with him into the dark caves of the human experience, illuminated by the torch of an outraged sense of injustice.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Tue Jun 24, 2014 12:35 am

The Bodhisattva Marshall Plan, Part 3
by Charles Carreon
6/23/14

1.C. Eliminate Self-Identification of Americans as "Consumers"

As the Twig Is Bent, So Grows the Tree


From childhood we are taught that we are "social beings." This of course means about as much to a kid as it would if a tuna said to its offspring, "We live in the sea." Our social environment is so all-encompassing that as children, we cannot perceive it as a discrete phenomenon. Children, who are on the front lines of the useless-crap consuming that has driven the U.S. economy since the fifties, can't imagine what life would be without the orgiastic overproduction of those highly desirable objects we call "toys."

Every ToysRUs is a temple where parents go to acquire ritual objects so their children can become adepts in the religion of childhood. Those children who acquire the right toys will become high priests of the backyard and the playroom. When parents club each other in an effort to get the right toy for their little prince or princess, they don't think they're acting insane. They are trying to secure for their children the status that they know the right toys will bring. After all, what heartless parent would send their child into the psychic mosh pits of kindergarten and grade school without the armor of owning the right toys?

The right toys are the ones that confirm that you have been watching the same TV shows as your friends. We'll know that TV is no longer an effective medium for programming children when ToysRUs closes down. I discovered how much my children were programmed by the damn boob tube when I threw away the TV in my third year of law school. We had our best Christmas ever that year, because none of the kids knew what they were supposed to get. They mostly opted to get new clothes, Josh got a skateboard, Maria got a phone, Ana got Hello Kitty stuff, and everybody was happy. None of them complained that their toys were Chinese knockoffs of the real thing, which had been a problem in the past. I still love the picture of them all that Christmas, holding their self-chosen toys, happy consumers all, but a little less programmed than their friends.

A Portrait of the Consumer

In our society, the primary common activity is "consumption." With so many of us laid off, it certainly isn't "production." The production mindset was useful during the Second World War, when we needed to bomb the living daylights out of Europe and the Pacific, but nowadays, it's not good for business to be too productive. I suspect someone in government decided that having a nation full of "producers" is not inherently good for business, because low unemployment puts upward pressure on wages, and high productivity puts downward pressure on prices. As a result, a nation full of producers would be a nation full of people demanding higher wages and lower prices, which is of course just the sort of nightmare to make the head of your local Chamber of Commerce wake up in a cold sweat next to his trophy wife. But of course we know that when that man wakes up in this world, he relaxes and goes back to sleep with a smile on his face. And when his trophy wife says, "What's the matter, honey?" he snuggles up against her and says, "Nothin', baby. They're all consumers."

Everyone seems to accept the definition of Americans as "consumers." What the heck? Is this a good social self-image? Visualize a consumer. I don't know what you see, but I see a big, fat, white baby in Pampers with a bottle of formula in its mouth, suckin' on that plastic nipple and gettin' fatter 'n fatter. Pretty soon it's gonna fill those Pampers full of shit, and then it'll cry until it gets changed. Then it'll start over again. As consumers grow, they acquire consumer skills, i.e., the ability to shop, open the mail, perform simple tasks in the service economy, get payday loans and invent numbers to put on credit card applications.

During the adult stage of a consumer's life, called the "prime of life," because most consumers spend it watching prime-time TV, the consumer reaches their peak level of utility. The consumer becomes maximally useful when their consumption hits its peak. In our debt-driven economy, they do this because they have "consumer optimism," i.e., the belief that things are going to get better. People who think things are going to get better will borrow money, knowing that someday they will have it to pay back. Thus, believing that one day they will get out of their dead-end job, they will borrow and try to start a family. A couple of consumers may become the father and mother of other consumers, thus employing doctors. Inevitably, they will have a divorce, and their children will get into trouble, thus employing lawyers. Tough as life is, thanks to their unrequited consumer optimism, the hardest working will give "employment" their best shot, and cook up a TV-dinner version of the American dream that will saddle them with high-interest debt for years, thus producing revenue for bankers.

For most consumers, the primary benefit to having a job is that they get to say they are "employed." This legendary condition is said to confer a sense of self-respect, but as many a formerly-employed consumer will tell you, employment is not all it's cracked up to be. At all events, employment rarely lasts for long these days, and losing it forever has turned into the final horizon for many people whose odometer has gone past 55.

The aging consumer, having served the economy to the best of their consuming ability, having been put outside the realm of employability due to their lack of cutting-edge skills and youthful charm, is statistically likely to fall prey to anxiety, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other expensive illnesses available cheap from WalMart. Thus, consumers must consume tranquilizers, insulin, heart medications, and painkillers. They pass from being youthful consumers of entertainment and trivial junk to being aging consumers of "health care," i.e., drugs and expensive procedures, thus providing revenue for the all-important "health care industry." Finally, the vital spirit will leave the consumer, and the corpse they leave behind will give employment to the death industry, which as we know, is thriving.

How different is the life of a consumer from that of a producer! What could a person produce? Anything, really. It's not that we don't have the impulse to produce, but we have been frustrated by a society that makes our creativity irrelevant. It's almost like a conspiracy to make people useless. Thought you could fix cars? Try to tune up a new car without a large manual and a computer. Thought you could program computers? People in India can do it better and faster. Thought you could sing? Who cares -- the airwaves are cluttered with voices. Want to spread a political idea? Go talk to yourself in the free speech zone.

In the Aggregate, Consumers Comprise an Economy, Not a Society

We've accepted our individual identity as consumers, so what are we in the aggregate? You're not going to like this, because consumers, in the aggregate, do not form a social grouping. A nation-sized group of consumers is simply referred to as "the economy." There are no reports on the creative achievements of consumers, unless of course eating contests, stock car races, and school shootings are considered consumer achievements. If you are puzzled by my inclusion of the last, just consider that each school shooter buys a great deal more ammunition than he uses, due to the tendency to stockpile more guns and bullets than can realistically be deployed in one's last stand against the evil society that has oppressed one since childhood. And every school shooting provides a powerful impulse for more police expenditures, more militarization of the schools, and more belief in the need for high-powered weapons in the hands of -- consumers! Obama's response to the crisis of juvenile time bombs going off all over the country is tailored for mass consumption -- give them more tranquilizers.

So a society of consumers is not a society at all. It's just an aggregation of people who are totally hypnotized by material appearances, who identify themselves exclusively with the space contained within their skin, and pursue their individual desires on an ad hoc basis from moment to moment, based on commercial prompts. They lurch from one BigMac Attack to the next, pitting their resources against the menu in an effort to acquire what rudiments of self-respect can be discovered in a Happy Meal. They do not know what it is to experience themselves as members of a group that they feel accepts and appreciates them. Mature consumers thus experience life as the freedom to purchase in an environment where everything truly desirable is beyond their reach, i.e., poverty.

Mature consumers are politically neuter, true "swing" voters who provide the ignorant weight that keeps our ship of state listing to the stupid side. They know nothing about their own interests, because they have never considered them outside the structure of consumerism.

True Self-Interest As the Basis for Social Alliances

To take our leave of consumerism, we must identify our own interests, and align with people of similar interests. Perhaps this seems obvious, but few people practice it. Indeed, those people most convinced that they have joined a group that will advance their interests are mere dupes. Political parties provide an excellent example of this phenomenon. Most Latino voters vote Democratic, and most pundits say the Latino vote sent Obama up to play God, giving him omniscience and putting hellfire in his hand. He gets to see where you were when you made your last phonecall, in case he needs to dispatch a drone to kill you, so the rest of us will be a little safer.

But does Obama show any gratitude to Mexicans for helping him get over? No, Mexicans are the new negroes. Does Obama invite any Mexicans to come and do a fiesta in the Rose Garden? No, he's not a Republican, so he can't advertise his love of enchiladas like Bush did. Does Michelle go to the Mexican border to see if she can make the Immigration and Customs policies a little more humane, and stop separating families like slavers once separated black American families? No, no, no. They don't give us Mexicans a fuckin' plate to admire our beans on.

During the 2008 election, my wife and I were so lonely that we went to the Nader convention in Denver. There we saw thousands of people who were all equally underwhelmed by Obama, enough to rally around the only man with the courage to call phony democracy by its true name. We had great speeches by Ralph and Jello Biafra, we had great music from Nellie McKay, we raised our spirits and raised some money for Ralph. What others called our futile gesture was not futile. To find a suitable quote for our group sentiment, I will quote the Spaniard who, through four years in litigation, forced Google to take his name out of the search engine -- "Resistance is victory!"

But back in 2008, Nader was not the man to support if you wanted to keep your liberal friends and relations happy. There was a project on to make people feel that Obama would be their president. Black Americans rallied to the man they thought was their man, and young people of all ethnicities came along, ready to believe that the man who talked like a high school basketball coach, who believed every player counted, was going to coach their team. Obama's social media meisters had the numbers, the email lists, the fast-response polling data that it takes to morph a message minute by minute, day after day, nudging public opinion into a pocket, until you almost have to win. "Exit polls revealed that Obama had won nearly 70 percent of the vote among Americans under age 25—the highest percentage since U.S. exit polling began in 1976."

Will We Find Our Allies on Facebook?

Obama appointed Chris Hughes, twenty-something Facebook co-founder, to run his Internet marketing campaign. Smart move. Hughes copped User ID Number 5 at Facebook as a people person who focused on user issues, and volunteered his way into the number one Internet job in Obama's campaign machine. By 2007, Obama's Facebook page had 250,000 likes to Hilary's 3,200. Today, BarackObama has over 44 million likes and Hillary2016 has under 400,000. Having helped his man capture the White House, Hughes capped his Facebook tenure by taking $700,000,000 out of the IPO, and bought the New Republic with some change he fished out of the sofa cushions.

Considering how quickly Hughes built a competitor-crushing political machine using social networks, makes you wonder just how much social networks can do to influence politics. I found the answer on the first page of NewRepublic.com. A recent experiment showed that Facebook postings increased voting in a recent election by .39%. When the numbers get into the thousands, those percentages start to decide elections. Attorney Jonathan Zittrain wrote the article, in which he identifies the potential for "digital gerrymandering" by social networking platforms that could send a "get out the vote" message exclusively to people who are voting their way.

Zittrain suggests that for Twitter, or Facebook, or any social network to engage in digital gerrymandering would be so far beyond the pale that ... well -- he doesn't say it won't happen. Let me tell you -- it will inevitably happen unless steps are taken to prevent it, because American consumers are Facebookers.

Facebook has turned out to be a wonderful place for unemployed consumers to while away their time without burning up gasoline driving around looking for a job that doesn't exist. It concentrates all the vulnerable people who are struggling with the collapse of the American economy that began in year 2000 and has never ended, who find themselves in need of some face-saving activity to soak up their excessive spare time. While being addicted even to something as innocuous as chocolate is a private sin indulged in secrecy, being a Facebook addict is openly confessed, as if it were not an admission that, as the alcoholics put it, "we have lost control over our lives."

But on Facebook, you say, we have found our true communities! Oh yes, enough to fill an Arab jail! More about foreign policy later, though. Let's focus on domestic consumers. Yes, you can find people of like mind on Facebook, but you will find it easiest to talk about consumption. The primary purpose of Facebook is to track consumer likes, compile the data, and sell it to advertisers. Zuckerberg didn't choose that word "like" carelessly. The one important thing a consumer does is to like things. Because first you like them, then you buy them. If you don't like them, your opinion's not going to help make a sale, so that explains the missing "dislike" button upon which so many Facebookers have commented.

If you seek to join political speech on Facebook, you will discover that most activist Facebook pages are dominated by whoever happened to be tech-savvy enough to start the page. These self-styled technorati use their power to ban, delete, and censor posts freely, so the Pizza Effect goes into operation, and Facebook speech turns into an exercise in groupthink. Sure you can organize the next meeting handily, and extend the geographic reach of your group for fundraising purposes, and all that other stuff that Chris Hughes is so good at, but you know who he's working for, and he's not an activist.

Since all good liberals know that Obama would never send a hellfire missile down a domestic chimney, we make it a practice to ignore all of the bad news coming from the NSA, the CIA, and the Pentagon. Nothing bad will happen due to our wholesale revelation of our lives on Facebook. Really? Of course you're not a child porn fan, so you don't need to worry that the FBI is trolling for people of that ilk. But they got a much longer list of bad deeds than "child porn" to investigate. Being an Arab, and friending websites that criticize U.S. Middle East policy would be a smart thing only if you are planning your own martyrdom. Would they be talking with real people or FBI agents? Maybe just some down-on-their luck Arab student who overstayed his visa and is working for the FBI hoping to avoid deportation by tending Internet honey pots.

Back in 2012, the FBI was pressuring Facebook, Google, Twitter and other tech data giants to install a digital backdoor to allow their agents access to all their user data. In 2013, Snowden told us they had done it, and we got a snow flurry of doublespeak from Zuckerberg, Brin, and Obama that just knocked it right out of the consumer attention zone. We now can be pretty clear from what we've seen in Egypt, that all that digital, online networking helps oppressive regimes pinpoint dissidents with GPS-level accuracy.

Facebook is a store of personal data so tasty that it is drawing hackers to it like a bowl of fruit attracts gnats. Facebook is attacked by hackers continuously because the rewards of a single good hack can be substantial. Just having a friend with a weak password can expose Facebookers to malware attacks that do things like send out messages asking your friends to wire money because you got mugged in Istanbul. Many of those hackers work for the government, doing things the government isn't supposed to do, like Sabu, one of the Occupy founders who farmed out work to young hackers who hacked for the FBI without realizing how their anarchist efforts had been redirected. Facebook is really nasty territory in which to deposit your life secrets.

Not only is it unsafe, it's a bad deal. By opening a Facebook account, populating it with your life history, and linking to your friends, you turn your relationships into Facebook's property. Your relationships are the map of your motivations. Facebook doesn't care about you at all, but it really loves your motivations. As soon as it has them figured out, it will take away features you "like" and sell them back to you. Take for example the right to have your friends hear you. Used to be a post was a post, and all your friends would see it. But now, only one out of ten friends sees your post -- unless you pay. This is so unfriendly.

The nastiest blow, to a nation that once saw itself as capable of overcoming any obstacle, will be the death of the salesman. Sellers of products and services have never liked salesmen all that much. Google killed most of the world's advertising agencies and its largest media outlets for pre-Internet advertising -- the newspapers and magazines. Now Facebook is closing in on the marketers. Consumers will take the job over. In exchange for a makeup kit or some lingerie, a young person can now find gainful employment tweeting or Facebooking the proof of their satisfaction with the product. The practice is taking off, and is said to generate more sales than standard advertising. When Facebook and the other online "communities" are done, the last bastion of American employment -- salesmanship -- will collapse. Consumers will do all the selling, and Willie Loman will take his last bow. Poor bastard. He wanted to be productive.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Aug 25, 2014 9:58 am

THE BODHISATTVA MARSHALL PLAN, PART 4

1.D. Eliminate Phony Law Enforcement
by Charles Carreon
8/24/14

Questioning Imprisonment

Our society is ostensibly dedicated to what is popularly referred to as "The Rule of Law." This is supposed to inspire us in some way, suggesting that we, as a society, are superior to societies that are not "governed by The Rule of Law." Since European-based colonization efforts dovetailed with racial genocide and the mass destruction of societies that were governed by rules other than "law," this argument has never been put to the test. As a young law student, I was fortunate to hear a talk by the Native American lawyer, Vine Deloria, Jr., author of Custer Died for Your Sins, discussing Native American approaches to what we call "law," i.e., the system of social ordering.

Deloria was an impressive speaker, a very big man, well over 6 feet, dressed in bib overalls, standing to the side of the lectern on the podium in front of a packed classroom, looking like a giant draped in washed denim. The main thing I remember him saying was that Native Americans didn't have jails. As he explained it, the tribe "didn't have any extra braves to put to watching other braves who had misbehaved." That observation fascinated me. Obviously, Native Americans had a system of social control that deterred anti-social conduct and encouraged pro-social conduct; however, it had nothing to do with the terrifying institution that Europeans created, called "imprisonment." This is not to say that Meso-American governments, Aztecas, Incas, and others did not use confinement as a form of punishment. I always assumed that they did; however, it was Deloria who made me aware that this practice was not universal.

Deloria's invocation of a society in which imprisonment was unknown has always stood as a sort of enigma to me. I have never been able to figure it out, and am not the type to accept modern-day explanations for the conduct of people whose traditions have been destroyed. I just don't know how they did it, and I think it's a pity that we can't find out. The "law" that kept unruly braves in line amongst the Shoshone, Crow, Creek, Lakota, and other tribes who were committed to the wandering lifestyle made possible by the abundance of escaped Spanish horses and their wild progeny, can never be understood. It is a terrible pity, because imprisonment is, in my view, the greatest blight on humanity afflicting us today.

I make this denunciation with a relatively clear knowledge of the incarceration system. As a federal contract public defender from 1995 until 2000, I visited many imprisonment facilities, local jails and penitentiaries. There is nothing quite like motorized steel doors clanging shut behind you. Being able to call a jailer and ask to leave seemed like the greatest luxury, especially when I did it after concluding a meeting with a client who didn't have that power. As I explained to many young men, that was the primary difference between us. I could leave, and they couldn't.

My social authority as an attorney allowed me to visit inmates almost any time I wanted, unlike their friends and relatives, who had to wait to see their incarcerated loved ones on visiting days for short periods of time, often separated by glass and speaking to them through telephones. I, on the other hand, could arrive at a moment's notice, ask to see my client, and be ushered into their presence. I finally gave up this line of work, in large part because I just couldn't stand saying goodbye to any more young men who were doing 10-year stints for delivering contraband substances. It was that, and the heartbreaking, completely useless cases involving the deportation of Mexican citizens who had already established families here in the United States that were being torn asunder with bureaucratic efficiency and complete coldness. Witnessing this trail of destruction really became too much for me, especially since my role was very limited, and often I could offer nothing more than competent representation and soothing words that felt hollow and impotent.

The Stamp of Slavery Remains

It was against this background that I formulated my conclusion that law enforcement in this country is phony. It is phony because it masquerades as the pursuit of "justice," when in fact it is the vehicle for enforcement of class inequality, White Master-Race status, and Nordic values, dubbed "Judaeo-Christian" for political, not religious, reasons. Since when do the two religions most antagonistic to each other become conflated into a single philosophy? You can take your choice -- Jesus of Nazareth's philosophy of mercy and kindness, or the genocidal practices of Jehovah -- the two don't mix and weren't meant to. The only important feature of "Jesus" as he is currently popularized, is that he is depicted as a Nordic European. The rest of what we call "Christianity," when it is applied to national policy, is a pure Old Testament power-trip.

Class inequality, and the supremacy of the White Master-Race, is enforced by the use of imprisonment, an institution directly derived from bondsmanship, that was once the fate of generations of European peasants. Bondsmanship came to be called "indentured servitude," often "for a term of years," among Whites. Because of race prejudice and the pious hallucinations of White people who defined Africans as soulless animals, colonial slavers treated them far more cruelly than White bondservants. Slavery achieved official approval from our nation in the Dredd Scott decision, where the Supreme Court held that a slave remained a slave when he crossed into a free state where slavery was illegal, because as an item of property, he could not cheat his owner of his value simply by fleeing the jurisdiction where his owner resided. The persistence in our society of the technologies, economies, and social hierarchies created by "law enforcement" are but the echo of the slave-holder State that was supposedly put to rest by Sherman's march to the sea. But the fires that burned Atlanta were never put out, and slavery's legacy of hate still smolders. Because of the enormity of the cruel, systematic brutalization of Africans by the people and governments of this nation, the national government and the several states stand unified in denial of the crime.

Your Life Is Illegal

Persecuted minorities always find that their social customs are illegal, their sacraments and intoxicants are "drugs," their ceremonies are "heathen." For Native Americans, speaking their native language was a crime. Excluded from the professions (ever see a Black airline pilot on a U.S. domestic flight?) and access to capital, minority people are forced to engage in illegal commerce, often fed by law enforcement that conspires with gangsters to predate on poor communities. Minority citizens are often exposed to prosecution, their activist political leaders can always be slandered as drug dealers, and the artists and creatives easily fall prey to Cointelpro-style setups that lead to their imprisonment.

Minorities find their work made illegal even when it is perfectly honest. The classic victims here are Mexican and Latin-American immigrants who come to the agricultural centers of the nation to find employment. They seek honest employment that, due to their transformation into "consumers," "American" people cannot do. "Consumers" are too sissified to handle work that involves gutting a steer in under a minute, or doing anything at all in blazing heat, like picking fruit and vegetables. Other immigrants, the Wops, Micks and Polacks of the past, venerate their ancestors for their pluck in crossing the seas, and claim noble ancestry by way of their passage through Ellis Island, blessed by Lady Liberty as members of those "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." These arrogant White braggarts deride Mexicans for demonstrating the same pluck. These hatemongers call Mexicans "illegals" as if they were unlawful down to the very bone, rather than being persons who simply do not have the right piece of paper to be on this side of an imaginary line. An imaginary line drawn by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that concluded the war but did not end Anglo hostility.

It goes without saying that when Mexicans and Black people and Asians sell painkillers and euphoriants, it is illegal, because they do it without the necessary licensing. When pharmaceutical companies flood our nation with toxic anti-depressants that are driving people crazy, and super-strength painkillers like Oxycontin, aka hillbilly heroin, now the true opiate for the masses, that is of course legal. In fact, even the "illegal drug trade" is legal when the government manages it.

"Whatever We Do Is Legal"

Which gets us to the rest of the story, which is that the Government's enterprise is lawful, whatever it does, whether it be good or evil, even horrifyingly, transparently evil, such as extreme rendition, torturing people, and the other CIA-Pentagon exploits supposedly confined to the Bush/Cheney/Gonzales/Yoo/Bybee era. It is always lawful, because the Government makes the laws, and since Gonzales took up his pen as the Torturer General, the enactment of laws that make anything legal that is defined as "lawful" has become the routine authoritarian practice in the supposedly democratic precincts of Washington, D.C.

The Government's business is always legal, and today it focuses on keeping many evil and destructive practices a part of our daily life. The Government continues to support extraction businesses around the world as they rape and predate on natural resources and generate ill-will with Native people and other nations. The U.S. Supreme Court's vacating of the verdict against Chevron obtained by Ecuador in its own courts is an extreme example. The Supreme Court's upholding of the Vulture Investor's rights to collect debt against Argentina at its full face value with crushing interest, debt that the market has savagely devalued, is another example.

Fortress America

The United States has completely given up the effort to appear as the world's benefactor, and is making itself known for the imposition of its will by means of extra-judicial force, most blatantly in the case of drone deployments in places like Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, whose people suffer from leadership so craven and despicable that they allow their skies to be patrolled by a foreign nation, and tolerate the killing of innocents within their borders as the price of "global cooperation."

The United States has turned itself into Fortress America, but what the citizens of the nation have not realized is that this Fortress imprisons and surveils them. Within the borders of Fortress America, bundled into their virtual realities, the consumers of the United States are like a termite farm observed by marketers interested in exploiting their habits. The insectile analogy is not misplaced. The consumer role in modern society is obligatory, and closely reflects the insectile model, which is to say, the insectile mind. If you can imagine being judged by an insect, like a preying mantis, or being investigated by a dragonfly, you can imagine the cold mentality that prevails among modern technocrats, who see not people, but demographics, not starving families, but underperforming economies, not soft human bodies, but "terrorists" and "unavoidable collateral damage."

Foreign & Domestic Policies of Oppression Mirror Each Other In Their Contempt For Dark People

If I seem to have merged the enforcement of class injustice with the topic of foreign policy, that is because U.S. foreign policy towards dark people and people in southern nations closely parallels its domestic treatment of dark people even while they are its own citizens, whose ancestors hail from defeated nations like Africans, the Native American tribes, Arabs, Iraquis, and Mexicans. If you reflect upon it, you will perceive that virulent race hatred is only spewed against defeated minorities. There's no prejudice against Austrians, Canadians, Norwegians, and only mild prejudice against the Japanese, who took their WWII internment politely, and fought manfully enough that they were made the guinea pigs for a nucleo-fascist experiment on live human beings.

As for our beloved Americans of German ancestry, their German-American clubs and anti-war organizing in the lead-up to U.S. entry to WWII was never held against them. Sure we burned a number of cities, incinerating a few million Germans, but here in the USA, they weren't rounded up like the Japanese, and with Operation PaperClip, we made smart, weapons-grade Nazis honored Americans who helped us build ICBMs. That's what you call technological progress as a side-benefit of war!

Comparing Civil & Criminal Justice

Domestically, we can see how dark people from defeated nations get a lower brand of justice when they go to court. Poor people are most likely to go to court as criminal defendants or civil debtors. As I will explain, in both of these situations, they will receive a lesser quality of justice. If you want to see how utterly biased towards conviction the criminal justice system is, let's think about this. You have all heard that criminal cases must be proved "beyond a reasonable doubt." You may have heard that civil cases, lawsuits over physical injuries in car accidents and industrial accidents, for example, need to be proven to a "preponderance of the evidence." If you are ever asked to sit on a civil jury, they will explain to you that this is a "lower standard of proof" than "beyond a reasonable doubt." Theoretically, an injured person's right to receive damages when their house is blown up by an exploding oil refinery, needs to be proved only to "a probability," or "a likelihood," in order to obtain a verdict against the oil refinery.

In order to give this lesson a little color, let us use a metaphor. Let us compare trying cases to shooting baskets in a basketball game. Prosecutors, because they are required to prove the facts beyond a reasonable doubt, are shooting through a regular-sized basketball hoop. Civil trial lawyers, who can prevail merely by showing that their client "more likely than not" deserves to win, are shooting hoops through a larger basketball hoop, say, twice as big as an ordinary one. Given this setup, you would expect that the civil lawyers would be racking up much higher scores in their games. They would be scoring into the hundreds of points. Prosecutors, on the other hand, would play games in which scores were much lower. Why? Very simple. It's just easier to shoot a basketball through a larger hoop.

It might surprise you then that civil plaintiffs lose their cases more often than prosecutors. A little under 50% of plaintiffs win their cases, on average, while prosecutors, even the most inept of them, always average much better than a 50% victory rate. Truly aggressive prosecutors achieve victory rates above 90% as a regular matter. Federal prosecutors, because of the powerful bias of the federal court system toward procedures that aid in achieving convictions, secure convictions at a very high rate. The only criminal cases that are harder to win than civil cases are those that have been made particularly difficult for the prosecution by the U.S. Supreme Court's imposition of special procedural hurdles in prosecutions of banks, bankers and ENRON-style megafraudsters.

It is much more difficult for a civil trial lawyer to win an auto accident case than a criminal case because juries don't apply the correct standard. In fact, when they are judging people accused of crimes, juries accept less convincing proof than when they are deciding whether to make a negligent driver pay money to an injured person. A person who finds themself sitting in front of a jury hoping to recover damages because they lost a limb in an industrial accident, or have been put in a wheelchair by a reckless driver, will discover that their lawyer has a far more difficult case to prove than does the prosecutor prosecuting a drunk driver or wife abuser in the courtroom next door. Why? American juries have been so indoctrinated by fear of awarding damages to injured civil plaintiffs that they see them as greedy malingerers, seeking to obtain a windfall at the expense of a poor, unfortunate defendant. Thus, the average civil juror, handed the opportunity to do justice with their verdict, dispenses relatively little justice to their own kind. But when it's time to join the Prosecutor in his noble cause of hammering those who have offended the Judaeo-Christian moral code by dealing in contraband substances, they are only too happy to throw their match into the bonfire. It gives them a good feeling. They know they are doing the right thing.

The Fast Track To Valuable Rights: INCORPORATE!

I also mentioned that when they come to civil court, most poor folks will come in response to creditor lawsuits -- a credit card company or a car dealer will sue them for unpaid debts. Most times, they will be without attorneys, and unlike a criminal prosecution, it does not come with a free lawyer. Since these cases are seen by judges as "cut and dried," those pro se defendants who try to fight discover but modest judicial patience for their efforts. Judges promptly rule against the debtor after reciting a legalistic explanation for the record. Like the experience of the criminal defendant, this is a lower standard of justice than any represented corporation would get in a similar case.

Looking a little bit more closely at how the civil justice system protects corporate entities, we are all now familiar with the much-hated Citizens United decision in which the United States Supreme Court recognized the First Amendment rights of corporations, notwithstanding the fact that any corporation could choose, with the vote of their board of directors, to renounce good forever, expressly join forces with Satan, and ally themselves with the forces of evil as a matter of corporate charter. Indeed, after the Hobby-Lobby decision, that corporation could probably refuse to employ people who insisted on "keeping holy the sabbath," or some other such non-Satanic practice. Corporations are by nature entirely amoral, and therefore are creatures of the moment. If I could buy your corporation outright, I could fire everyone in it, overturn all of your policies, and turn it into a vehicle solely for my will. No entity so subject to arbitrary alteration as to its purpose, and so devoid of moral character can possibly be granted the rights of a citizen. Such an entity cannot be held responsible for anything, because it obviously has no conscience and no moral compass. It could not be instructed in ways of virtue if the project were attempted. It is a machine, and like any machine, it can only be as good as the people who drive it. And it can have no other voice than theirs. Giving such an entity "First Amendment rights" distinct from those of the men who drive it, is merely a legal fiction adopted to benefit the media corporations that design and dictate the consciousness of our nation.

White Media and The Invasion of Demonic Strangers

U.S. media cannot be called anything but "White" media. Its ownership is White. Its orientation is to promote White culture. It depicts other cultures and races as objects of hatred, jaundiced criticism and arrogant pity. What is quite amazing to me is that the Arab-American community, possessed of considerable wealth and influence prior to the 9/11 disaster, sat around for 20 years while the Israel-America/AIPAC lobby that dominates Hollywood churned out one hateful depiction of Middle Eastern people after another. This drumbeat of demonization set the stage for the Iraq war, and has locked us into the contemptible complicity with the "nation of Israel" that can most accurately be described as East New York, a place to ship angry young Jews from Brooklyn so they can play with guns in the settlements that the U.S. government supports as insurance that the conflict will last forever. The management of American opinion regarding the innumerable conflicts that have erupted in the Middle East since the Bush regime initiated its war of aggression on Islamic peoples under the title of "Global War on Terror" has boxed Americans into an untenable view of the world for which we will ultimately pay a very great price. I cannot tell you what that price will be. I can only tell you that when an entire people turns over its productive capacity to a murderous elite that takes it into its head to promulgate its Master Race mandate across the world, and brooks no opposition, that will lead to disaster.

A Most Corrupt Policeman

The United States has long flattered itself with the notion that it is "the world's policeman," and its leaders have most often mused over whether the United States can "afford to continue this role." This sort of arrogant self-depiction of our nation as the dispenser of order in a disorderly world is most reminiscent of the arrogant attitude of the British Raj before Gandhi set the English fox's tail on fire and sent it back to its dangerous little island. India, the English said, would shatter into a million bits if the English left. This was like cancer trying to sell itself to the body as a benefactor, since without it all the organs would fight with each other, rather than with a common foe. Today, from his command post at the center of Fortress America, "President Barack Obama," a puppet for international powers no different than the puppet presidents put into place in Greece and Italy, but managing his tenure with far greater success thanks to his perfidious alliance with the Wall Street/City of London Axis of Financial Evil that treats the world's economy like one big spreadsheet to be managed with the bottom line profits all going to the largest financial entities in the world, in a cycle that sucks wealth into an ever-smaller number of hands. This is the ultimate end of the White technocratic power structure in the United States. Of course, as it internationalizes in foreign affairs, America will increase its capacity to engage in doublespeak, preaching the language of freedom and justice, wearing the robes of Jefferson and Lincoln, while promulgating policies that seek to subject all individual human beings to the will of enormous faceless multinational entities.

Phony law enforcement on the international level is the establishment and maintenance of Fortress America, and the pursuit of policies that seek to divide and conquer enemies and purported friends alike. The Machiavellian attitudes of those who run the U.S. government have been exposed again and again on the international level, most recently by Edward Snowden's disclosures of widespread phonetapping even of the German head of state. As the United States educates the other world's players in power politics, it is sowing dragon's teeth.

The Consumers Are Suitably Cowed

At home, phony law enforcement has established an atmosphere of intimidation towards the citizenry that has reached an almost ideal level. No one in their right mind would think of organizing any kind of anti-governmental resistance that involved the destruction of property, occupying of buildings, or obstruction of public facilities. All of these things can be characterized as terrorism by aggressive prosecutors, and expose people who indulge in such behavior to severe penalties, including lengthy prison terms for apparently trivial conduct, or even no conduct at all, simply the agreement to perform criminal acts in the future. Because of the nationwide enforcement of anti-drug laws, virtually anyone can easily be arrested for possession of narcotics by the use of a little planted evidence or false testimony. Thus, a serious political threat can easily be neutralized by the use of crooked vice squad cops and their usual associates, scumball dealers.

Consumer Habits Are Monitored

Meanwhile, due to social media, people are ventilating their misdeeds and ill-considered behavior where all the world can see it, including the NSA. Arrest records and mugshot photos proliferate online, as do websites that destroy the self-respect of young women whose carelessly shared selfies get into the wrong hands and circulate on the Internet. So much can be known about everyone by anyone, and law enforcement is enjoying a feast of access to compromising data about everyone. The only time they don't seem to like it is when they themselves get caught.

The Fix Is In

The excesses of U.S. foreign military interventionism and the excesses of domestic law enforcement going paramilitary-style have produced a hybrid form of excess at the local level since the U.S. Government launched its program to move high-tech weaponry just returned from Iraq out to the hustings by giving things like 30 ton armored vehicles to small towns that barely have a fire engine. With this kind of trend appearing before us, it behooves us to try and get rid of phony law enforcement before law enforcement gets rid of all limits on its conduct. What has long been a White power structure is now turning into a one-faced monolithic entity that is going to crush everybody under one gigantic system of oppression. The advantages that Whites have enjoyed under the existing system will evaporate like spit on a griddle.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Aug 25, 2014 11:18 pm

THE JOY OF NOTHING -- WHAT IT IS, WHY YOU NEED IT, AND HOW TO GET IT
by Charles Carreon
8/25/14

The Joy of Nothing is defined as the Nothing that gives Joy. Such a Nothing cannot be conceived as a mere absence of content that you could preserve by keeping things out, like never carrying cash, so you can honestly tell street people, "I have nothing." Rather, the Nothing which brings Joy is something you could actually give to a street person, with or without legal tender to leaven the gift.

You might wonder what benefit a street person could obtain from a gift of Nothing, since they already have less of everything than the rest of us. Abundant lack is their condition. Wouldn't more Nothing just aggravate their situation?

No, that's not the case. A solid hit of Nothing is exactly what a person needs when they're down on their luck and down on themselves. Most people, from street people to the Masters of the Universe who rule a world of their own conceiving from their Manhattan towers, are utterly bereft of Nothing. The wealthy wouldn't know where to find Nothing if they suddenly realized how much they could get from it. The wealthy are also so obsessed with getting something for nothing, that paying something to get Nothing wouldn't appeal to them, so they wouldn't even try to buy Nothing with their money.

In seeking to comprehend this Nothing that brings Joy, I am going to avoid metaphors. Metaphorical discussions about Nothing usually shade into solipsism or nihilism. Solipsism and nihilism are fanciful notions that arise from terms like "nothing" and "everything" without first defining them clearly. So the nihilist says something like "everything is nothing," and the solipsist replies, "then I am nothing," but with all of the operative terms undefined, it is truly their conversation that is nothing.

The "Joy" in the title isn't just marketing fluff -- it's the crux of my argument. This Nothing cannot be mere absence, and must be a source of Joy for you and me.

This may strike you as blatantly outrageous. Joy, you respond, is a product of experience, and experience is a product of events, and events are something, not Nothing!

Furthermore the notion of "Joy" is associated with something ephemeral, evanescent, an emotional will-o-the-wisp that it can be very dangerous to pursue. As a mature person, you have likely reconciled yourself to a life in which you experience tiny sparks of Joy in a jumbled universe where boredom, anxiety, fear, and even terror play a greater role than Joy. Perhaps it's easier to understand Joy, at least it seems that way among the common crowd, when we talk about the "Joy of cooking," or the "Joy of sex," or these other lusty sources of pleasure in our physical life. But when I try to reach beyond these few, hackneyed sources of "Joy," I find myself running out of steam. When I get serious about what Joy means to me, the best example I can come up with is the reunion with my loved ones after a trip away, or a reunion with close family members whom I rarely see.

Can we define "Joy"? If I were asked to define Joy, I would say that it is a state of mind that is simultaneously fulfilled and open, and lasts only as long as we do not fear its disappearance. That's why Saturday night is so much more Joyful than Sunday morning, when our precious weekend is already beginning to disappear. Or at least, it used to be that way back when people had jobs and enjoyed their weekends and dreaded their Mondays. But you get the point. Joy lasts as long as we aren't thinking about losing it, and fear and Joy do not appear to coexist. When our fears are relieved, Joy often follows, and when fear arrives, our Joy departs.

When we experience Joy, there is always an underlying sense of satisfaction, of having received something we wanted, like contact with a loved one, or possession of a treasured object, or of course, relief from fear or danger. If you can imagine a life free of fear or danger, a life in which you and those you love are safe and secure, you will almost certainly experience Joy arising just from the imagination. But you won't dare to indulge in that sentiment for long. I would suggest to you that, because fear is far more prevalent in our minds than we are inclined to talk about, Joy and abundance may be hidden right behind a wall of unacknowledged fear. And just suppose that wall of fear turned out to be unnecessary, based on false assumptions -- what would that wall turn into? Nothing. Joy could be that close. That might account for how we continue to believe in it, even when there is so little to be found.

The search for Joy is often a prelude to pain. In Joy, there are many potential seeds of feeling that emerge. The first emotion is often desire to sustain the Joy, followed by fear of losing it, which as we previously discussed, is the beginning of losing it. Thus, tragically, Joy is the birthplace of endless sorrow. The effort to capture Joy is a form of desire, and desire often enlists anger as its henchman, to procure by force the "object of desire" that we identify as the source of Joy. So Joy that comes with strings attached, that arrives on the winds of circumstance and retreats when we pursue it, is dangerous. It draws us in feverish pursuit of objects that can be captured only briefly, if at all. This pursuit leads not to Joy but simply to more pursuit.

To pursue desired objects, be they people, places, actual physical objects, or sensual experiences, is to be a slave to Joy. If we are slaves to Joy, we are never able to look it in the face, as an equal force, in relation to ourselves.

How can I speak of Joy, that arises in our own Self, as a force distinct from ourself? So let's look at that Self that chases Joy. When I do, and I'm not saying you should see what I see, but when I look for the Self that seeks Joy, I see an interior space that Joy illumines with invisible light. In this space, every other play of mental forces has its existence. Both external perceptions and inner thoughts and feelings have their being here. This space, this light, these images and shadows, are all entirely insubstantial. I cannot show them to you. I cannot pluck the flower I see in my mind and give it to you. It is made of this Nothing of which I speak. I cannot show you the true color of the turquoise waters of Havasu Falls and the red rock depths of the Canyon, yet I can recollect their color at will. I can see the color of the water, and the shape of the cliffs. I can hear the sounds of the Falls and the voices of the Canyon birds. I see and hear it all in Nothing.

So you see, I haven't dragooned you into the usual nihilist insult session where you get called nothing and sit there and take it. This Nothing of which I speak is your very Self, my Self. Having seen it, we will not henceforth ignore each other's existence. We will, rather, be more aware of the amazing, non-substantial medium in which we have our experiences, Joy and all the others.

So if all your experiences are all of the same Nothing-substance, does that mean Joy isn't special? I suspect the answer is yes, in one way, and no in another. Yes, in the sense that, if you objectify a Joyful experience, and start the pursuit of Joy that ends in the spiral of unrequitable desire, then Joy is the same as any other experience. But if Joy is understood as the attitude of fulfillment and openness, then it is a very special way of appreciating the space of our awareness. It is a place of balance and understanding. In Joy that does not decay, because there is no fear of losing the experience, the reality of our great, inner Nothingness is evident. And when we look at other people, their wonderful inner Nothingness is apparent to us as the source and impulse of everything about them that we can see, hear, touch, smell and feel.

Our experience of life is not static, you may have noticed -- experience flows. It flows from one present to the next, without any gap. In this flow, we can experience ourselves as a thing among things, blown along like a cluster of leaves swept up in the wind. If our attention shifts from our form to our experience-realm, with its Nothing-substance, and self-illuminating appearances, then we experience ourselves as space. The winds of time reorganize the shapes appearing here endlessly. We possess this space completely, and spontaneously experience fulfillment and openness. Joy has been waiting for us here all along.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Fri Mar 06, 2015 3:42 am

Hater’s Rights vs. Human Rights
by Charles Carreon
March 5, 2015

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Public Citizen’s Paul Levy Making the World Safe for Identity Thieves, by Tara Carreon

Hater’s Rights

Public Citizen Litigation Group, the brainchild of Ralph Nader, was hijacked by the free-hate-speech movement some years back when head litigator Paul Levy decided that the Internet just wasn’t vile enough — haters needed more rights! And you know, if you build a road, people will drive on it, and once PCLG opened the way, a whole business grew up around hate and the destruction of online reputations. A recent mea culpa posted by Sam Biddle, one of the leading lights of the free-hate-speech movement, argues and convinces himself that destroying reputations is not a personal thing — it’s just business.

A Hater Spills His Guts

This is actually Biddle’s version of a deep self-reflection piece, and it all started when the phone rang one day, and one of Biddle’s rapeutation victims was on the line, asking him out for a drink. Her name was Justine Sacco, and Biddle had joined in reposting her tweet to his blog on ValleyWag.com, where hundreds of haters joined the pile on, feeding a very large DIRA that blew up after Sacco tweeted an un-pc statement that she was White and therefore unlikely to get AIDS while visiting Africa. Of course, Justine Sacco was in fact an international PR woman, and has some insight into how to handle people, because she has Biddle apologizing to her, making excuses for the apology, and singing her praises in fifty shades of bullshit. Ever the realist, though, Biddle feels sorry for the poor little girl who thinks that someday someone’s actually going to find her LinkedIn profile on Google page one for her name.

We All Make Mistakes

Among other things that Sacco had to deal with when her DIRA was burning actively, and not merely smoldering like a digital Fukushima, was coordinated, malicious action to exploit her own identity by creating fake Twitter accounts in her name and tweeting insane things that would feed the DIRA. PCLG has been a leader in the fight to defend this practice, and attempted to keep the identity of Christopher Recouvreur secret from me after he registered “charles-carreon.com,” built a fake blog, and made fake posts in my name, that were in fact attributed to me. Biddle doesn’t address these types of abuses that afflicted his new friend Sacco, because after all, he doesn’t do those things — all he needed to do was post the text of the tweet and he knew it would take on a life of its own. And as the nasty comments piled up, he did nothing to breathe the cool breath of reason on the commenters — no — because he thought Sacco was an insensitive monster, just like everyone else.

So at the bottom of his big confessional, Biddle admits that he had it all wrong, and Sacco is a nice woman who meant no harm. Yep, she is not a monster, not an arrogant, insensitive [insert misogynistic epithet here]. She was tweeting a joke to her circle of friends and relatives, many living in South Africa, who would very well understand her tweet to be a satirical jab at Whites who think their skin color makes them immune to a deadly retrovirus. At no point does Biddle say, “Gee, that’s the sort of mistake that could lie at the heart of all of these rapeutations. Maybe we should stop dousing people with lighter fluid and igniting them after reading a few hastily-tapped phrases that seem to suggest they might have an inappropriate way of expressing themselves.” Nor has he ever used the ever-mutable nature of the Internet to post an addendum to the damaging re-tweet post that, to this day, continues the chorus of hatred deriding Sacco’s humanity, and sliming her with anti-woman epithets. Of course, he can’t go too far, because you know, those free-hate-speech people eat their own.

Losing Your Name Isn’t Easy to Do

Biddle got a little DIRA of his own, and folks tried to get him fired, and he got turned into the very first writer at Gawker to be given a sabbatical for all of November 2014, after which he returned to a less prominent role at Gawker. This happened all because he said something about #Gamergate that got so misinterpreted that … oh well, now he understands me better, because the most important question in this debate is “Who’s Ox is Gored?” Once your reputational ox has been gored, like Biddle, you’ll be slapped stupid, and start expressing topsy-turvy notions that suggest you’re suffering from some species of mental derangement:

“I was writing about the law (especially free speech and other constitutional law issues) long before Danger & Play. I am a radical proponent of free speech. When I heard that the court system was being used to silence a young man, I decided to speak out.

Rather than ignore me or let me speak my mind, Social Justice Bullies (a loose collection of toxic people such as Gawker writers and their supplicants) went on the attack. They harassed me, cyber stalked me, and otherwise spread their stench towards me.

I looked into #GamerGate more and saw some revolting faces. I saw people like Sam Biddle (who bullies nerds), Max Read (who enjoys talking about date-rape drugs) and other vile people.”

Poor Sam. He took it square in the face and he’s gone batshit crazy. It’s our fate here at Rapeutation to keep the light on for every DIRA victim, even, or perhaps especially, someone who has sinned like Sam Biddle, because he is still human, and has human rights. The destruction of your good name, as Biddle learned, is quite painful, and it brings the nauseous spectacle of the Internet into sharp relief:

“I watched a whirlpool of spleen and choler swelling till it had sucked in most of my energy and attention, along with that of many of my coworkers. Hundreds of people tweeted or emailed me or my editors; blogs and minor internet personalities sprang into action to challenge me. Their demands started with my firing and escalated from there.”

Oh yes, that is the sound of someone realizing, “Holy shit! My ox is gored!” Biddle may be a big tech blogger, but he is human and every DIRA victim knows this feeling of losing control over their name. When it’s over, they’re not really sure they like the sound of their own name anymore. I suppose back when DIRAs were news, the fact that people were having their names destroyed, one here and one there, now and then, didn’t seem so bad. But when you see that it results in unemployment, divorce, loss of friendships, depression, and suicide, then you gotta wonder, where’s the “public benefit” in twisting the law into a license for online hate speech?

The Right to Be Remembered As Who You Really Are

According to the European Union Court of Human Rights, human beings have the right to prevent Google from indexing their name. On the factsheet about implementation of the ruling, the Euro-regulators say that “Individuals have the right to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them where the information is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive for the purposes of the data processing [and] could not be justified merely by the economic interest of the search engine.”

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans, with the French leading the pack, have used Google’s webform to process requests for removal of their names from the index. Google had been taking names only out of its “local” websites, i.e., Google.de, Google.es, etc. In November 2014, the EU told Google to take the results off Google.com, so this human right has legs. Maybe long enough to reach our own, native shores? Oh, that seems so very unlikely with so much money to be made in the flaying of human flesh, and with the press calling it “the right to be forgotten.” As if to be “remembered” were to have your name and image mutilated for the benefit of Gawker and its “wags.” I don’t want to be forgotten. I’d just like the right to be remembered as myself.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Fri Mar 06, 2015 8:31 am

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ROLY POLYS: AN EXPERT ON THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE AWARDS ACCOLADES
by Charles Carreon
03/06/15

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People called them different things — sowbugs, pillbugs, roly polys, potato bugs. The little black, armored bugs that ball up and pretend to be dead when you touch them. They’re a pretty low form of life, but they’d make perfect Netizens, according to Sam Biddle, the fallen Gawker tech punditwho took a “sabbatical” last year before Christmas after his tweet urging a resurgence of online bullying fell on many thousands of irritated ears connected to fingers that went to work clicking his demise.

Biddle now engages in deeper thinking, and has been suspended from off-the cuff tweeting. In one of his tortured, post-DIRA posts, Biddle gave fellow-DIRA-victim Justine Sacco his highest praise. Justine, who was savaged online for tweeting that she doubted she’d catch AIDS while in Africa, because she was White, garnered an online apology from Biddle after she phoned him and they met for drinks. During their meeting, Justine essentially accepted Biddle’s tender of his guilt-rotted heart, further softened by the drubbing he’d received over his own misconstrued tweet.

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Biddle was then able to reveal the extent of his admiration for Justine. To put it simply, what really turned Biddle on about Justine was that she knew when to shut up. Right away. Curl up in a ball. Tuck your head in your bottom, don’t move and perhaps the threat will take you for dead and go away. It’s not a very inspiring position for a free speech advocate, but this is the law of the jungle. Obey or die.

Biddle, riddled with reputational death himself, mocked fate in a danse macabre. Bowing low before Justine, he swept the dirt, kissing the locket of her shoe. This is supreme wisdom — she remains silent. Together they will endure despite the kiss of death that never fails, and she will rise from the grave of her Internet burial. For in this life, it cannot be the case for Sam Biddle and Justine Sacco that savvy brains such as theirs will look out of desolated eyes, watching their careers expire. No, and denial is a river.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Fri Mar 13, 2015 9:23 pm

Yik Yak Yuck! These Boys Are Not Alright
by Charles Carreon
3/13/2015

What is it with so-called “intelligent” boys these days? It’s hard to tell what’s gotten into them, but it sure as hell looks like the devil. And it’s not the ones who look tough, like this punked-up guy with red hair and a peace sign on his sleeve I just saw walking south on Highway 1 in Half Moon Bay. Like as not, he doesn’t post rape jokes or sexually offensive comments about his teacher on Yik Yak. Since the young man I just saw walking by in black and metal punk regalia is probably not going to any college or university, he probably doesn’t even care about Yik Yak, a Twitter-clone that posts all tweets anonymously from a limited geographic area and has taken the male populations of the nation’s college campuses by storm.

An Ideal App for Adolescent Bullshitters

The main use for Yik Yak is to build a group-think, conformist mentality amongst those hordes of little twits marinating in self-indulgent leisure for four years, fucking off, pretending that they’re hooking up with hotties in the dorms instead of mating with their palms in the shower, and Yik Yakking their life away while their parents think they’re taking notes in lecture class. We used to call it “getting a liberal education,” but there’s nothing liberal about the attitude of many undergraduates, if a recent article in the New York Times has got its facts right.

Students Free to Virtually-Rape Their Teachers at UGA

It was quite a shock to Margaret Crouch when she discovered what a number of anonymous little shitbags in her class were Yik Yakking about. We didn’t actually get to see their nasty comments and attacks on her character that were happening in real time while she attempted to deliver a lecture of educational significance, but we are so familiar with this kind of disgusting drek because of its wide circulation beyond the confines of Yik Yak, that we can easily infer how terrifying, disgusting, and stomach-turning it must have been for this professor.

Unfortunately, Crouch attends the University of Gutless Administrators (“UGA”), also known as EasternMichiganUniversity, who apparently couldn’t find their lawyer, or took their advice on controlling their students from the Free Hate Speech Mafia. As the New York Times put it, “After all, it would take a lawsuit, a subpoena, and some interest in standing behind professors to hire a lawyer to file a lawsuit or serve a subpoena.” Oh, gee! A subpoena! UGA just can’t do that.

EmoryUniversity had a different take on it, and blocked Yik Yak from their servers. The New York Times suggests this is an exercise in futility since students can access it on their wireless plan. So at least the Yik Yak Yuck Fucks have to pay for the goddamned data, and they have to consider whether it’s worth a few cents to rape their professors during class at Emory. At Phillips of Exeter, Mark Zuckerberg’s alma mater, where the elite of the nation are moved out of their middle school Pampers and into full-size adult Attends, the use of Yik Yak became so horrifying and out of hand that the headmaster banned it.

Policing Speech Is Easily Done When It’s Negative Speech About the Police

It is well known that the FBI, like schools, attempt almost nothing at all when faced by speech attacks on ordinary citizens, such as the numerous death threats that have been issued to Michael Moore by celebrities such as Clint Eastwood, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly. Institutions constantly claim that they are powerless when death threats are presented against participants and their activities, such as the gamergate threats against Brianna Wu, that the PAX show refused to take seriously. Just like UGA, unable to think of a way to protect a teacher from its students’ verbal savagery.

But we well know that when the shoe is on the other foot, and someone spits a spitwad in the direction of the FBI, the police, or some government figure with a little clout, they shortly find that their IP address has been traced, their anonymity has been ripped off, and they are dealing with a bunch of guys in black ballistic suits carrying automatic rifles who take the computer and its owner down to the station for a little chat that leads, ultimately, to a plea bargain in federal court.

It’s just a question of whose ox is gored. Women just need to start goring some oxen up on Capitol Hill. It might not take a car caravan of angry women circling the Beltway honking their horns and demanding protection from virtual rape, but then again, why not try it?

Elliot Rodger and the Vengeful Victim

So much for what’s wrong with the schools and the cops. But the boys have created themselves, and must be the primary focus of criticism. Why do young men heap shit on women and indulge prolonged fantasies of sexually-tinged revenge? Thanks to Elliot Rodger, who killed the sorority blondes he lusted after because they would not open their hearts to him, and killed himself because he couldn’t bear the humiliation of being unsexed any longer, we have plenty of insight into this problem from the viewpoint of boys who perceive themselves as the victims of womankind.

Elliot was obsessed with bedding a woman because he believed what the media told him thousands of times since he first starting watching TV and movies — the only guy who is a man is the one who can get a girl to part her thighs. Despite his earnest efforts and reasonable belief that he was as good-looking, articulate, and well-heeled as his peers, he believed he was starving sexually while his cohorts were feasting on luscious lovelies. I suspect his perceptions were out of sync with reality.

While sex at UCSB might be happening all over the place, Elliot was probably less deprived than he thought, compared with other young men. Sexual frustration is a substantial component of the adolescent male life, and almost all boys suffer from it. Sexual frustration accounts for substitutive behavior such as gay sex, compulsive use of pornography, and, now that Yik Yak has empowered them to do it, the pleasures of conducting a virtual gangbang. I once remember talking to a therapist who had worked in Washington state, not the city. He told me that the kind of folks he had been treating in court-ordered therapy would get together in bars and give each other positive feedback for incest and other sick predatory sexual behavior. Groupthink developed in real time using Yik Yak encourages young men to think that they have a legitimate complaint against women, and therefore the right to revenge themselves upon them.

Yik Yak Abuse: A Leading Indicator for Future Sex Predators

Indeed, if you could identify the type of Yik Yakkers who are engaging in the most violent verbal behavior, you might find some people who will later in life turn into someone like Elliot Rodger. If they can commit verbal crimes with impunity, the desire to commit physical crimes with impunity will certainly arise as well.

Speech, of course, is the precusor for action, as the military has long known. Training for warfare develops the ability to see the enemy as merely a target for violence and death. Violent speech leads to violent action, because “as a man thinketh…”

But the boys will tell you they’re just having a good time, and if their mothers or fathers saw what they are Yik Yakking about, they would explain that it’s just the sort of thing that boys do these days, and even though it looks outrageous, it doesn’t mean they are headed in the same direction as Elliot Rodger. But they don’t know that for sure. They don’t know what they’re turning into, because these boys are not alright.

The media insists on saying that communication is just communication, and the load of frivolous, meaningless, merely entertaining communication swells every day. Every day people are asked to believe that more and more free-hate-speech is the wave of the future, and that they are just old fuddy duddies who are not getting it. Yes, Hollywood can tell you that it doesn’t matter how many murders a kid sees, it will never turn him toward violence, and that no matter how many times people see problems solved by putting a bullet in someone’s brain, that it will never cause some kid to put a bullet in somebody’s brain. But a lot of bullets are turning up in brains in this country, and the media is not accepting responsibility for any of it. This is kind of strange, given that the media is well aware of the power of pornography, and during the second world war, the first world war particularly, actively engaged in disseminating racist caricatures and incitements to brutal violence against Asian peoples that ultimately culminated in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, two astoundingly cruel, brutalizations of nearly half a million Japanese people, accomplished by the decision of a single pathetic mediocrity, Harry S. Truman, who apparently wanted to kill more people than Hitler had even attempted to kill in one day.

Words count. The boys are not alright, because the words they eat like Fruitloops and Cheerios are toxic. Their souls, what they have left of them, are severely corrupted. If any of them are reading this, I trust that they will see their image in the mirror I am holding up, and be disgusted, as the rest of the decent world is. They have no legitimate membership in our society, and should all be considered Elliots in the making until they are safely in their graves.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 11:40 pm

The Village
by Charles Carreon
4/27/15

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Ron was not happy. Not happy at all. He was staring at the hole in his dashboard, and he just could not believe it. The windows weren't broken, the doors were still locked the way he'd left them before he started his shift. It was broad daylight. Out loud he breathed the words, "Where's my fucking stereo?" A frown was holding his face prisoner, and it tightened its grip as he reached out and said, "What the hell is this?"

"This" was a wispy piece of iridescent paper, or maybe it was metal, about half the width of a stick of gum, and twice as long. Again he said, "What the hell?" as he flipped on the dome light to give it a closer look.

As he did, it stiffened in his fingers and a gleam ran down its length. Then a string of words began flowing across the surface. The words were ... well he couldn't remember them exactly when he tried to later, but it was essentially something like,

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"Dear Ron,

Your car stereo has not been stolen. You have been selected for a special experiment. Your car stereo has been displaced to a null space, and as a result, a village of 600 people has been spared from destruction. Should you want your stereo back, it will be necessary to displace the village. To make your choice, you need do nothing. The same process that initiated this special experiment will effect its return."


Ron felt a surge of anger, possessiveness. He had really been enjoying his car stereo, and so had his girlfriend. He could put the old one back in. Geez. He stared at the strip of metal that had stopped displaying text and was getting wispy again.

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He stared out the windshield, seeing a village in his mind, drowned at the bottom of a lake someplace in China. He didn't know why he thought that. The note hadn't said anything about China. He went to look at it again. There was nothing between his fingertips. Oh my god. He felt dizzy for a second, like maybe he was losing it, and stuck his hand into the empty space, feeling loose wires. "It's still gone," he said. And he knew why.

Luann didn't even mention when she played the old stereo that he reinstalled. It was weird, almost as if she didn't remember him getting it, or the big deal he'd made about the increase in tonal range the new amp had, with digital fuzzy logic and ... and he realized he didn't miss it at all. Things were going better with Luann, in fact, and maybe it was because he spent less time talking about electronics stuff. He chuckled to himself. Fuckin' crazy shit. "Special experiment. Scammers ... pranksters...." occasionally he wasn't sure, but he couldn't bring himself to test it, to say, "I want my stereo back! Drown the village." No, no. He didn't want to risk it. He did not want his stereo back that bad, or maybe, he realized, at all.

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Ron was looking at Luann's books -- pictures of coral reefs and fishing villages. Luann was making lunch in the kitchen. They'd gotten married about a year before, and on the weekends she liked to cook, and Ron liked to dream about places they could get away to. He called out to Luann, "We should go see some of these places."

"We can't," she replied.

"Why not?"

"Because they're all gone. Drowned by rising seas. Even before that, the coral reefs were killed by rising acid levels."

Ron looked at the cover of the book. It was called "Hidden Paradises," by a couple of photographers. A husband and wife team. Their picture was on the back standing on a dock in some jungle with a pontoon airplane floating next to them. Ron envied them in every fiber of his being. They looked relaxed, satisfied, energized. Just like I'd like to feel, said Ron to himself. He checked the date on the book -- 2018. "I hadn't realized this book was so old," he said to Luann, as he got up off the couch and walked into the kitchen, looking at the couple on the back again. "Why didn't our parents give a shit?"

"It's hard," said Luann. "They were pursuing a dream, right? Isn't that what they taught us in school? The American Dream was unsustainable and toxic? Now sustainability is our path."

"Too bad we couldn't have taken it by choice," answered Ron. He went back to the couch. Their only window was next to it.

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That night he had a dream. He was playing poker, and he got a royal flush. Everyone around the table was looking at him with amazement as he fanned the cards out on the felt. He was about to reach out and scoop the pot, that was stacked with cash, gold, jewels, a king's ransom, it looked like. Then he looked across the table, and there was a little girl in a threadbare muslin dress, looking wan and pale and hungry, and as she looked at him, he saw that she was one of a great crowd behind her, all hungry, all silent, all pleading without breathing a sound. Then suddenly a clock started ringing, and he looked up on the wall and there was a clock there, and both hands were pointed straight up. He awoke with a dry mouth.

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After that, the special experiment resumed, and picked up speed. One day it was his new car, reduced to a scooter, with a little silver wisp hanging off the right-side mirror. It was a nice scooter, and his car was worth a lot -- it displaced a huge slum outside of Rio de Janeiro, and replaced a six square mile swath of Amazonian forest, and several villages of forest dwellers with unique language, culture, and pharmacological wisdom.

He got into the game, wondering what the experiment would hawk next, and how much he'd get for it. From the news, he could see the world becoming a much nicer place to live, but he didn't need the news to see it. The results were all over the neighborhood. For one thing, there was a neighborhood. In the evening, you could hear people calling their kids home for supper, screen doors slamming, and smell dinner aromas drifting across the way. Bicycles were everywhere, and cars rarely seen. Less car accidents, for sure. Strangely, he hadn't heard of a war, anywhere, in years. That was so weird. He tried to remember some of the wars. Like there was one in the desert for so long. Religious thing, or maybe an oil thing. He just couldn't remember.

The years went by, and he never told anyone what was happening. He knew he couldn't be the only participant in the special experiment, and he could tell it was going well, very well indeed. But no one talked about it. No one said, "I'm saving the world one displaced commodity at a time."

But that's how it was. Gradually, even the neighborhood thinned out, and he and Luann decided to move closer to the beach. There were a number of places available, and rent was low. They didn't worry about buying the place. Nobody seemed to worry about buying a place anymore.

About a month after they moved in, all of Ron's automotive tools disappeared, along with the scooter he'd had for years ever since his car disappeared. Now the scooter was gone. He walked into the garage, and whoa, it was a stable. Hmm, he recognized the horse, and it recognized him. He had an apple for it right in his pocket. He fed it to him, and rubbed his head under the forelock. "Whatta ya say, boy? Shall we saddle up for a ride later?" Rusty, that was the horse's name, pawed the ground lightly and whinnied with a soft head shake in reply.

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After dinner, the sun went down red over the sea, and he and Luann sat in woven chairs seeing the world tinged with passionate rose light.

As the sun winked behind the coral atoll offshore, a pod of dolphins broke through the glassy surface of the sea, spreading ripples across the waves. Ron held Luann's hand gently. He looked forward to losing so much more.
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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Wed Jun 17, 2015 1:41 am

Hooray for the Financial Apocalypse, by Charles Carreon

11/01/08

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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Wed Jun 17, 2015 1:41 am

People That Crime Is Too Good For, by Charles Carreon

11/08/08

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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

Postby admin » Wed Jun 17, 2015 1:41 am

Part 1 of the Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, by Charles Carreon

11/12/08

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