MuffinBlog

I added an October 2007 page for Jaidee photos. I moved some photos from September 2007 to October 2007 that weren’t supposed to be there.

Just put up a few more Jaidee photos.

I just finished the chapter in A People’s History of the United States on the Spanish-American war. I have to admit that the only thing I knew about this conflict was that it was between the U.S. and Spain. I thought maybe it had to do with Mexico since that is the only country repopulated by Spain I knew that had fought large battles with the U.S. Not only did I enlighten myself to how Cuba came to hate the U.S. government, but also how the U.S. annexed Puerto Rico and Guam as commonwealths, and Hawaii as a state (eventually). I also didn’t realize that we briefly ran a bloody occupation of the Philippines.

Around the turn of the century, William McKinley was president. He was an out right imperialist (along with his successor, Theodore Roosevelt). He wanted war to get rid of the extras resulting in our overproducing industries since U.S. citizens weren’t buying enough (it being a depression and all). There were also the wealthy business people who didn’t want war if the government could simply “open up markets” in those countries that were ripe for exploitation, but they easily capitulated (i.e. completely reversed their stance) to war whenever “peaceful” means didn’t work.

Spain controlled Cuba, and the Cuban citizens didn’t like that. They started to revolt like we did during our war of independence. But McKinley and others realized that a) the rebels were primarily black, and b) if the rebels succeeded in kicking out Spain, there was no guarantee that the new black government would “open their markets” to us (i.e. allow us to come in and exploit their resources). So we sent a warship down their to make our “freedom loving” presence known, and it got attacked and sunk. This helped rile up American sentiment for the “freedom” of the Cubans.

Eventually we declared war on Spain and invaded Cuba, but refused to acknowledge the rebels. We kept the white government that was installed by Spain, but refused to give them sovereignty until they passed the Platt Amendment to their new constitution. The Platt Amendment allowed the U.S. to intervene militarily in Cuba whenever it wanted, and opened up their markets to U.S. business men. We eventually won and also annexed Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii as side trophies (Hawaii was already overrun by pineapple business interests, but wasn’t controlled by Spain). We then slaughtered people in the Philippines to keep it under control. Is it any wonder that Cuba went socialist? Who the hell would want capitalism after having your independence revolt undermined and your country exploited by a capitalist invader? The Cuban missile crisis was basically our fault because we wouldn’t leave the Cubans the hell alone after we scared them out of capitalism!

A very similar thing is happening in Iraq. The oil companies want control of Iraq’s resources and markets, so the government trumps up some story about liberating Iraq and WMD as an excuse to invade with a disaster (i.e. 9/11) to rile up the population and the corporate press to spread the propaganda. We then setup a puppet government and–this is a recent development–push the puppet government to “open the market” (basically we’re trying to get Iraqi politicians to give the oil companies control of Iraq’s oil resources).

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just history repeating itself.

I subscribe to the National Center for Science Education’s news letter, and finally read the latest issue (September 28). One of the articles described how Sen. David Vitter (R-La) is trying to earmark $100,000 to fund a creationist group to degrade the science curriculum in Louisiana. I don’t live in Louisiana, but I am a U.S. citizen. As such, Sen. Vitter is in fact spending my tax money. I decided to write Sen. Vitter to get an idea of why he feels it necessary to hurt our country’s standing in the world in such troubling times as this. Here is the message I submitted via his web site:

First of all, I should say that I am not one of your constituents. That said, you are spending my tax money, so I figured contacting you is appropriate.

I have read that you are trying to give a Christian group $100,000 dollars “to develop a plan to promote better science education.”

To quote you further:

“This program helps supplement and support educators and school systems that would like to offer all of the explanations in the study of controversial science topics such as global warming and the life sciences.”

I wanted to let you know that there is no controversy in the science community about these topics. All you are doing is helping in the demise of U.S. technical leadership by supporting groups who don’t like science.

If that is what promoting better science education is to you, I think you need more than a better explanation of what you are doing with this $100,000. You need to explain why you feel that it is necessary to waste tax payer money on activities that clearly violate U.S. citizens’ right to freedom of religion and hurt our national competitiveness while we have record deficits, declining enrollment in science and engineering education, and are engaged in two costly wars abroad.

I will be posting this message to my blog at www.muffinspawn.com/blog. Feel free to respond there or through my email address. Thank you.

If he doesn’t respond directly here, I will be sure to post any response I get via email.

Earlier in “The 9th Step to Fascism” I alluded to Naomi Wolf’s 10 step program every government that has come to head a fascist state follows. Many of the steps have already been taken in this country. In an email to my mother on September, 11th of this year I predicted how the Bush administration will complete the program:

Bush will use Iran’s supposed interference in Iraq as an excuse to bomb them, people will protest in large numbers, Bush will use his new powers under the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 to declare martial law, he will arrest and detain without due process thousands of people under the auspices of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 by declaring protesters as “enemy combatants”, and then will call off the 2008 presidential elections on account of the internal disorder.

Unfortunately it looks like the first of my steps to fascism are well in the works:

http://tinyurl.com/2msrb7

By shifting his reasons for bombing Iran to preventing interference in Iraq (never mind that Saudis are purported to be interfering much more), Bush can easily justify attacking Iran on the basis that Congress already gave him all their war powers by both authorizing him to deal with Iraq as he sees fit, and by refunding the war. At least with the nuclear weapons excuse, professional analysts openly admit that Iran was years away from developing such weapons. This gave credibility to the stance that action was not immediately necessary (assuming you believe military action is necessary if they do possess nukes). I’m not hopeful, but let’s just hope protests can halt the bombings before they start. If not, step two of my prediction will most certainly come to pass. After that, as frightening as it may be, it will be entirely up to the president whether the country stays a democracy or not.

One thing that is becoming apparent as I read more and more about labor strikes in A People’s History of the United States is that guns in the hands of the strikers does very little to change the outcome. Overwhelmingly, when the federal government decides to send in the militia, the strike is over. Ironically, this puts a different spin on the 2nd Amendment. Here’s what the 2nd Amendment says:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I’ve always contended that this amendment should be taken in the proper context. It is speaking in support of a militia, not personal self defense. What’s ironic about this is that the militia was used throughout our early history most often to squelch riots as a result of striking labor unions. From the people’s point of view, this is actually in opposition to “a free State”. It protected the entrenched, wealthy, ruling elite from popular revolt. This isn’t suprising if you consider that the constitution was primarily a tool by the ruling elite to control the under class of this new society. In that sense it perhaps did serve it’s purpose in putting up a successfully executed resistance to British rule. That said, fighting off a government that’s thousands of miles a way across an ocean with the support of a unifying replacement government is hardly comparable to fighting off a government that rules from the same land mass by just individual citizens.

Thus I pull two conclusions from this view of guns in our democracy: 1) being armed is little assurance that a popular revolt against the government will succeed, and 2) the 2nd Amendment is actually a very poor device, when taken in the proper historical context, for justifying personal gun ownership. Perhaps it’s no wonder that people who use it only quote the second half of the sentence. The first half of the sentence only makes things worse for one’s pro gun ownership stance the more one knows about the history of this country.

I neglected to mention in my last post that there are new photos for September. There may also be some additional photos in other months since I created the photo pages directly from my photo managing software without any effort to select just those that I thought were decent or redundant. Chances are your time is better spent looking just at the latest September photos.

I did some fairly extensive changes to the layout of MuffinSpawn.com recently. For starters, I got rid of the annoying frames that prevents the user from clearly seeing what URL is associated with the page they’re looking at. In its place I used CSS (cascading style sheets) to create a navigation sidebar on most of the pages. The exceptions are this blog since it’s a third-party application, and my resume since I’m concerned about its appearance with the sidebar. I did add some of the links to the blog “Links” section on its sidebar (lower right corner of this page).

Secondly, I reworked the photos and videos pages. The videos pages is now separate from the photos pages, and includes a new video podcast for all the Jaidee videos. The photos pages have been simplified (no bandwidth-hogging backgrounds and such) and are organized by year *and* month. Hopefully these changes will allow those using dial-up to look at the latest photos and videos more easily, as well as provide a more friendly organization in general.

That’s it for major changes. If anyone has further complaints or suggestions, please let me know.

-Peter

The Senate today passed a non-binding resolution rebuking an advertisement by MoveOn.org that used an epithet for General Petraeus that originated in the army. I’m not going to repeat the epithet or discuss whether the Ad went too far. All that is dwarfed by the fact that the Senate has sided with the executive branch in following Naomi Wolf’s 9th step towards a fascist state: officially condemning dissent as treason. Here’s the statement:

“To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Patraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United State Armed Forces.”

Granted it doesn’t explicitly say “treason” or even anything about patriotism, but it does indicate that they believe it is wrong to question the “honor and integrity” of the general. What would the Senate have done if they had the power to legally retaliate? And don’t think legal retaliation is ridiculous. The Military Commissions Act allows for the striping of habeas corpus rights for anyone deemed an “enemy of the state”.

So all congress would have to do is ask the justice department to label anyone involved with MoveOn.org an “enemy of the state”, and the executive branch could detain those individuals indefinitely without due process of law. It doesn’t really matter too much whether “treason” is explicitly in the legislation. There just needs to be enough pressure on the executive branch to use it’s new found powers to consider dissenting opinions as treasonous. Condemning dissenting opinions in legislation (whether binding or non-binding) is a step towards putting such pressure on the executive. Lets all hope that Bush remains consistent and ignores all advice from outside his inner circle.

This Blog entry is for Vanna since she seems to be my most loyal (and perhaps only) reader…

The Senate (second body of the law-making branch of our national government) has decided not to even discuss at this time whether the people living in Washington D.C. should be allowed to vote for president and be represented in the national government (i.e. have a say on what and how national laws are created). One senator (a member of the Senate) said it was o.k. because the Senate had a lot of other stuff to do.

My opinion is that the people of D.C. have been without a voice in Congress and without federal voting rights for way too long. Delaying discussions is a really mean thing to do to those people. Not giving the people of D.C. voting rights is as bad as allowing only white, male, land owners to vote (as was the case at the beginning of the United States).

I feel similar about Puerto Rico, but they were given a chance in 1998 to vote for either independence, become the 51st state, or remain a commonwealth (i.e. they have to obey some federal laws like tax laws, but they don’t get federal voting rights or representation in Congress)–they chose to remain a commonwealth. The people of D.C. have never been given a chance to choose anything of the sort, and they live on the mainland. What could be more important at this time than the continued disenfranchisement (the denial of rights, especially the right to vote) of U.S. citizens?

Luckily the senators who proposed discussions say they will try again later. I just hope “later” is in time for next year’s presidential election. It would be a shame to deny the people of D.C. their presidential voting rights at a time when there is a big chance that either a woman or a black man could end up being president.