MONEY IS SPEECH VS SPEECH IS MONEY

i took my speech into the walmart the other day to buy some stuff but they wouldnt sell me any. no matter how much i tried to explain to them about the Supreme Court, the final arbiter in the land, and about how their decisions were binding on all the citizens of the country, they just wouldn't listen to reason.

amazing that a bunch of ten dollar employees could think they know better than the highest authority the law allows. talk about the emperor's new clothes — how is he going to talk his way into a new suit in this kind of place? 

maybe somebody ought to mention to the court how thin the robes have got lately.

FISH IN A BARREL

what do you think of a government that shoots fish in a barrel?

what do you think of israel?

PLAIN SPEECH PLAIN TRUTH

i was approached on the ferry going home recently by a petitioner with a document to sign. it was protesting the move by the government to allow pipelines across canada from the tar sands in alberta to the west coast, then in tankers down the coast to american refineries. i said i agreed that was not in our interests and would sign it but that it was futile, a pathetic effort really compared to the forces arrayed against it in favor of the pipelines and tankers. what i wanted to sign, might even be willing to work for, was a move to get the money out of politics. money is not speech. that is only one of a growing list of grievous  errors made by the worst supreme court in american history, a court which also reinforces another grievous error committed in the early days of the twentieth century, by affirming that corporations are people, with all the rights of individual citizens. corporations are not people, not individuals, not citizens. there are more examples in america of the emperor's new clothes than i care to enumerate. 

what ever happened to simple honesty and plain speech? gun-owning americans are not militias, corporations are not persons and money is not speech. get it?

PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE

there is a great deal of talk lately about peace in israel — actually i have been hearing more or less constantly all my adult life about efforts to bring peace in the region — but still there is no serious talk of justice. 

peace can never be the object of negotiations. that is impossible to attack as a first principle. there is only one route to peace and that is through finding just solutions, blind, disinterested, egalitarian solutions to problems between (self-identified) factions of the population. as long as individual human beings continue to see themselves as different and more deserving of the considerations of life than so-called enemies there is no prospect for justice. 

and no matter what rules to promote order may be imposed on the parties by intimidation, destruction and murder, no matter what historical rationale is advanced, the prospect of peace without justice will remain forever beyond the grasp of all. 

the old end justifies the means argument rests on the assumption that neither one is fictional. in reality the ends never arrive, but are always just one more action away, retreating apace as the troops advance, like the mirage they are, while the means, everpresent and ruefully if not brutally real, are the reality we all endure.