President Obama's values

from Mr. Obama's own lips we hear that he has known all along that the
US government has been concealing the virtual daily killing of civilians in Afghanistan.
he says that is not the issue, but that revealing it is a crime.

i believe nothing else need be said about the man's integrity.

clearly Afghani lives are of as little value to him as honesty itself.

Race Politics in America

President Obama has an African parent, and a Euro-American parent, but he is called "Black". if he had a Japanese parent and a Russian parent, would he be called Japanese, or Russian? or would the more inclusive title Euro-Asian be used? if his parents were French and Italian, would everyone simply call him an Italian? why then, is it considered appropriate to call him "Black", but never "White"? does this go back to the old American rating system of human beings, judging them by the drops of negro blood they possessed? i am told it's because "he looks black". but the recent statement by senate majority leader Harry Reid - that he was voted into office because he didn't look very black (and "speaks so well") doesn't quite fit in with that premise.

modern humans came into being on the African continent, and lived there for about twenty thousand years before they started migrating to the rest of the world. their first trip out of Africa took them to southern Asia. it was their second migration (another twenty thousand years on) that brought them to Europe. so anyone who lives anywhere in the world is a hyphenated African. that is, Europeans are actually Afro-Europeans, while America's 'White" people are Afro-Euro-Americans, and America's Asians are Afro-Asian-Americans. that makes African-Americans the American people with the closest link to our mother country, so to speak. it also points out the utter absurdity of referring to anyone by something as superficial as skin color. we might as well use hair color or body fat content as our identifying criteria. (thus "another red-headed president" or "the slightly overweight president said..." or "Mr. Obama, the thirty-first president to have brown eyes...").

in my opinion, President Obama has done nothing that would differentiate him from any of the previous run of "White" presidents (except, perhaps, to speak better than most of them). like him, they were all wealthy, and like him, and no matter what they said to get into office, they all looked after the interests of the wealthy. he has continued the same foreign policies and wars (which continue to support the military-industrial complex, which also supports the wealthy). one of his first acts as president was to hand over billions of tax-payer dollars to wealthy banks and corporations (which amounts to welfare for the wealthy). he also addressed "African-Americans" in a speech, admonishing them to not assign any blame for their current place in American society on the hundreds of years of slavery, dispossession, hate, and discrimination that they and their ancestors have endured (discrimination which continues, to judge by the increase in hate crimes against people identified as "Black" since Mr. Obama began his presidential campaign - while hate crimes against all other racial groups have declined, or to judge by Mr. Reid's statement, or by spending even a few minutes watching Fox "news").

President Obama is an American president, which means, by definition, that he is part of the ruling class. let's call him the "ruling-class" president, or the "wealthy" one. that way it would be obvious that what we actually have is what we've had all along.

scrutinizing terror

because one Nigerian man (who joined a Yemeni group while he was staying in London) attempted to set off a bomb on a plane over Michigan, all 154 million Nigerians will now be subject to special security measures. bringing this closer to home, since the Oklahoma City Bomber and his assistant were born in New York and Michigan, the citizens of those states should also come under increased scrutiny. while i can almost follow this puerile logic, i am amazed at the audacity of including Cuba on the list of "suspect" countries, since the United States has engaged in covert terrorist attacks against Cuba for over forty years, including shooting down a Cuban airplane (killing all 73 occupants) in 1972 under the orders of then President Nixon. so this set me to wondering just how many countries have legitimate cause to think of United States citizens with "increased scrutiny". surely Iran, since i have just learned that President Obama has continued a Bush Administration policy of appropriating 400 million dollars annually to the covert internal disruption of the Iranian government (while offering a "new beginning" in his well-publicized speech last year). is that not state-sponsored terror? is making a list of countries we can't trust part of the fight AGAINST terror or part of the fight FOR it?

humanity

91,000 horses are killed in the US each year, after spending their lives running races (but mostly standing in narrow stalls) so that humans can play their money games. thus the costs of gambling extend beyond the suffering of the addicted.

in a program allowing inmates to care for rescued horses (pulled from deadly auctions that would have earned their "owners" another couple hundred bucks) wardens say that even the most violent criminals become humanized after a short time. each prisoner considers the horse he cares for his friend. several of them spend their meager earnings on treats, looking forward each morning to being released from their cages so they can release the horses from theirs.

excepting the horse "owners", who often don't bother with trips to the vet once earnings begin to decline, letting broken kneecaps and impounded horseshoes accumulate, there might perhaps be some remote justification for basing the word "humanity" on our species.