Evil, Cruel & Heartless

This may make you cry, it made me cry, cringe and rush to my blog to spread the word. What an incredibly blantant irreverence for life. I cannot imagine a society that is okay with that. It makes me glad that I am half a world away from it. I'm not so naive as to think that this doesn't happen in the US, but at least you don't see it on the street at the market place. I'm feeling incredibly sick after viewing the 15 seconds that I managed to see, I just could not watch the entire thing. Raising animals for pelts is bad enough,(although in China they probably do eat raccoons), but to skin an animal alive is... I can't even find a word to describe it. I'm appauled, outraged, and still on the verge of tears thinking about how that poor animal suffered, I cannot imagine the pain and can only hope that the poor dear lost consciousness early on.

If you want to visit the peta site: http://www.peta.org/
You can find the video on the peta site, but here is the direct link. Be advised, this is not for the faint of heart... or stomach.
http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/Prefs.asp?video=wetseal_fur

I could not finish watching this video that I borrowed from another blog. ( http://www.trishleo.com/)

Now that I've ruined your day, forgive me, but please pass it along or blog it so that others can help us stop this cruety.

KKK 41

41 years
Apparently that is the length of time it takes to convict a klansman.
I'm appauled. I'm so outraged by this I wish I had never seen it.
This "man" if you can call him that is 80 years old and wearing
oxygen and NOW they convict him of not murder, not attempted genocide,
but manslaughter. Is this justice? He's been walking around free,
living his life of bigotry and hate for 41 years without consequence.
I'm sorry, but that is fucked up. The youth of America is already
screwed up enough without adding this to the list of things that they
can get away with. Sorry kids, but this is not an issue that is over.
I used to live nearby the Grand Wizzard for the KKK back in Indiana.
These people make George W Bush look like a liberal. Backwoods bigoted
narrow minded dangerous people.

How did this happen? How can it possibly take 41 years to convict?
I can't even talk about this any longer, I'm steaming. It's not good
for me. This is why I don't read the papers or watch the news. Never
a good word, always more murders, rapes, soldier killings, child molestings,
burning homes, and political assholes. I can do without the news
and without hearing about an 80 year old KKK member getting a 41 year reprieve.
GRRRRRRRRRR, I'm upset.
Peace everyone.









Former Klansman found guilty of manslaughter
Conviction coincides with 41st anniversary of civil rights killings

Tuesday, June 21, 2005


PHILADELPHIA, Mississippi (CNN) -- Forty-one years to the day three civil rights workers were ambushed and killed by a Ku Klux Klan mob, a jury found former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen guilty of all three counts of manslaughter Tuesday.

The "Freedom Summer" killings of James Chaney, 21, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, galvanized the civil rights movement.

The jury of nine whites and three blacks reached the decision after several hours of deliberations.

Killen showed no emotion as the verdicts were read.

But as he was being escorted from the courthouse under heavy guard, the wheelchair-bound man took swipes at reporters' microphones and cameras. One of the reporters was black, as was a cameraman.

A date for Killen's sentencing will be set by Circuit Court Judge Marcus Gordon at 2 p.m. ET, a court official said. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years per count, and a minimum of one year per count, Mississippi Attorney General James Hood said.

From her Manhattan home Goodman's mother, Carolyn Goodman, 89, told CNN she had waited a long time for a guilty verdict, but it was "nothing to be happy about."

"I'm just overcome. ... But you know I had a feeling it was going to happen," she said.

"I just hope he's off the streets," she said of Killen. "I don't want anything more terrible than that. I don't want anything violent. I'm against capital punishment."

In his closing argument Monday, Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan implored the 12 jurors to "hold the defendant responsible for what he did."

"What you do today when you go into that jury room is going to echo throughout the history of Neshoba County from now on," Duncan said. "You can either change the history that Edgar Ray Killen and the Klan wrote for us, or you can confirm it."

"Find him guilty of murder," Duncan said. "That's the verdict that the state of Mississippi asks you to return."

He told the jury to think of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner -- three young men who had volunteered to help register blacks to vote in the summer of 1964, an act "so despised it cost them their lives."

Chaney was a black man from Mississippi.

Goodman and Schwerner were white New Yorkers who came to the South with hundreds of other civil rights activists.

"Those three boys and their families were robbed of all the things that Edgar Ray Killen has been able to enjoy for the last 41 years. And the cause of it, the main instigator of it was Edgar Ray Killen and no one else," the district attorney said.

"He was the man who led these murders. He is the man who set the plan in motion. He is the man who recruited the people to carry out the plan. He is the man who directed those men into what to do."

Now 80, the balding, bespectacled Killen -- a former preacher -- appeared to be sleeping during much of the closing remarks.

Hood, who led the case, said he wished "some of my predecessors would have done their duty" by bringing charges against Killen. Noting that it was "not good politics to bring this case up," he said, politics and time should not get in the way of justice.

Hood said testimony showed Killen possessed "venom" at the time of the killings and still does.

"That venom is sitting right there. It is seething behind those glasses," he said. "That coward wants to hide behind this thing and put pressure on you."

Burden of proof
Seeking to undermine the prosecution's case, defense attorney Mitch Moran said "nothing in the record shows Edgar was there" during the ambush and killings.

"The '60s was a terrible era in a lot of ways. We do not need to relive them, and we do need to go forward," Moran said. "What I'm asking you to do is to look at this evidence and hold the state to the burden of proving this case beyond a reasonable doubt."

Another defense attorney, James McIntyre, said, "The burden of proof on this case does not reflect any guilt whatsoever."

"Mr. Edgar Ray Killen had nothing to do with it," he said.

On June 21, 1964, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were on their way to investigate the burning of a black church when they were briefly taken into custody for speeding.

According to testimony, the Klan had burned the church to lure the three men back to Neshoba County.

After they were released from the county jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a KKK mob tailed their car, forced if off the road, and shot them to death. Their bodies were buried in an earthen dam -- in a trench dug in anticipation of the killings, according to testimony.

In a 1967 federal trial an all-white jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of convicting Killen. The lone holdout said she could not vote to convict a preacher.

Seven other men were convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the victims. None served more than six years in prison.

Welcome To Dumbfuckistan

Dumbfuckistan, originally uploaded by underablackenedsky.

Sometimes someone else expresses my angst better than I can. Thank you Patrick Linsey.

Welcome to Dumbfuckistan
That's in Red America, where working-class Americans persist in voting for a party that wholly rejects their most fundamental economic interests

by Patrick Linsey - December 9, 2004

It has to be the most tiresome cliché in contemporary American politics: the latte-swilling, Volvo-driving, French-speaking, liberal elite. And last month, 57 million of them voted for John Kerry.
Thank heavens that those decent, God-fearing folks in the middle and southern portions of America were able to protect us, by coming out in force to reelect President George W. Bush. It's nice to know that somewhere in this land of ours, people have their priorities straight. After all, what pleasure can you really take from a steady job, affordable health insurance, governmentally assured Social Security or a coherent foreign policy when, at the end of the day, you're still confronted with Janet Jackson's nipple or Rosie O'Donnell's wedding ring?

But if one can avoid becoming lost in the banality of oversimplification, there is a question begging to be answered: Why do working-class Americans from the South and the plains states persist in voting for a party that wholly rejects their most fundamental economic interests? Such is the topic of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America , which, even if it cannot fully provide an answer, eloquently demonstrates the question's significance.

Over the past 20 years, a conservative revolution has occurred in Kansas, the state where Thomas Frank grew up. He writes of a state where family farms are gobbled up by massive, government-subsidized agro-businesses. Industry giants flee from the cities like Wichita, leaving only memories of the high-paying, blue-collar jobs that once sustained its economy. In fact, the only Kansas towns with any economic vigor are inhabited either by poor, immigrant laborers toiling in slaughterhouse sweatshops or by millionaires, spending their tax rebates on Ferraris and plasma screen televisions.

In light of these conditions, the emergence of a new political movement in Kansas (and neighboring plains states) is not surprising. But why on earth would such a movement promote economic policies that destroy family farms and condone the outsourcing of industrial jobs? It makes absolutely no sense.

"Strip Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics... But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower."

Frank explains the contradiction by describing Kansans' new political philosophy: the politics of the aggrieved. Despite the fact that Republicans control all three branches of the federal government, they have managed to portray themselves as victimized underdogs. "The key element of this... is the notion of a 'liberal elite...' Our culture and our schools and our government... are controlled by an overeducated ruling class."

Conservative Republicans have been able to take the anger Kansans feel over economic issues and focus it on so-called "liberal elites." They are lectured that these straw men elites are not content to simply live out their own, immoral lives, but they must also foist their depraved culture on decent, everyday Americans.

Meanwhile, far from promoting their own ideas to make things better, the conservative philosophy is that of trench warfare. These new conservatives perceive that their way of life is under constant attack. They denounce the activist judges who rewrite the Constitution. They condemn the Hollywood liberals who fill their televisions with garbage. They curse the brainy, Ivy League professors who want to take their guns and their Bibles away.

Indeed, intellectuals bear the brunt of the outrage. "The social conservatives... use anti-intellectualism to assail any deviation from a system of values that they alternately identify with God and the Earth--people of Red America." Ann Coulter and David Brooks fill reams of paper with bizarre musings stereotyping East and West Coast Democrats.

The trend of anti-intellectualism that Frank depicts is frightening. Students of history will note that when the ruling party begins pointing fingers at scholars, things rarely end well (think Nazi Germany and Mao's Cultural Revolution).

And while the new conservatives are busy shouting their outrage, they elect some of the most right wing, anti-labor, fanatically religious politicians in recent history. Relatively mainstream Republicans, like Bob Dole, retired, making way for Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). When not deregulating the telecom industry, Brownback enjoys activities like washing the feet of his assistant in the manner of Jesus Christ.

While Frank successfully articulates the political climate in Kansas (and indeed in much of the country), he still seems perplexed, and at times exasperated, by the phenomenon. He wonders why the same conditions that once bred the progressive movement in American politics have created a new rise in conservatism that threatens even the reforms of the New Deal.

"The standard reaction in Kansas to the vulgar machinations of the state's self-perpetuating ruling class, to its cronyism and its brazen flaunting of its wealth, to its business scandals and the grinding destruction of the farm communities, is to push ever deeper into the alienated right-wing world of the culture wars."

What the book fails to do is imagine any way to revitalize progressive politics in regions like Kansas. Rather, Frank seems content to document his state's slip into reactionary conservatism and economic ruin.

Still, Thomas Frank deserves credit for organizing a compelling study of America's current political climate. The re-emergence of progressive politics in America, and especially in Kansas, depends on the existence of a party that understands how said politics have been suppressed. This book should be studied closely by leaders in the Democratic Party, many of whom, as evidenced by the most recent election, have absolutely no idea what's the matter with Kansas.

Pandora's Secrets

I'm missing a great day outside.
Since I am not motivated to write.
here is something from my friend
and poet:


Secrets

Screen door slamming
Back porch, leaving
Staircase-three, four, five
Long walk, slowly
Trudging footfall
Looming doors alive

Moving, reluctant
Hands are winding
Wringing, clammy, cold
Heart beats faster
Round the corner
First door squeaks in protest

Concrete stairs
And spider's webs
Dust and dirt, and grime
Going lower
Lower going
And the passage starts to wind

Basement dark
My inner hell
And hands that reach and tear
Lie me down
On sawdust floor
Descend into my mind
Sickly breath
Panting, heavy
Hateful touch and sight
Until the end
Not just spirit rend
So dirty, I may never be clean again

Bile is rising
Hate lies tempting
My name a curse uttered low
Secrets secrets
That's what he whispers
That no one must ever know

Who could I tell?
I think inside
And share this shame that burns?
Secrets secrets
It must stay secret
Else pain will slither
And torment seek
And find my precious dear
If I should tell
This fear not quell
then sister shares
My private hell
For now alone
I bear the sin
But if I speak
He'll bring her in
And so in my hands
My childish hands
I hold her fate
And mine

1/26/00

Tearless

A friend and kindred soul is a wonderful poet.
Sometimes she writes something so simple yet so
profound that I cannot stop reading it. Sometimes
she will write something that finds a place in me
that I would rather keep hidden. Let's call her
Pandora, my gifted friend and poet. Read on and
tell me what your thoughts are.

Tearless

You slid from me
as the sun
fades fast
to lapis;
but my flesh
held fast
to its secrets.

Though my eyes
are arid,
I've found
that sometimes
we cry
in our own
ways.

Change is Growth

Relationships are like works of art, like a sculputure or priceless vase. Once cracked or fractured or shattered it can never really be restored to it's original beauty. The more beautiful and valuable the vase, the more desparate the effort and the realization that it is forever changed. That said, I've found that change is not something that people choose. Rather, change chooses us most of the time, and we muddle through, learning things we must, making choices that shape not only our lives, but the lives of others. Illusions gone, reality staring us in the face, and the true change happens when we see the effect of change on our souls. For me, change is a matter of growth. Embrace growth, embrace change. Quotes from 2 musical greats.
"What we have to learn we rarely choose"~ George Michael.
"The only thing that stays the same is change" ~ Melissa Etheridge

Sometimes when you try to help another, you help yourself. In responding to the blog of a bright young soul I realized that maybe these words might be helpful to more than just that one soul.

content

taking time to feel
wind in my hair
sunlight on my face
cotton candy clouds
hum of a bee
songs from the trees
scent of flowers
wafting by
quiet whispers
natures breath
soothes me
lost in thoughts
of home
of you
of us
content

King Of Pop/Jesus Juice

King of Pop
childhood star
and musical genius
captivating dancer

chiseled your freakish face
mutilated yourself
for reasons we know not
for reasons perhaps you know not

boyish man
your lonely soul
so lost your childhood?
time to grow up Peter Pan

await your verdict
judgement closing in
victory will set you free
conviction may be your demise

money disappeared as quickly
as those african features
and chocolate complexion
turned milky white

is your identity lost
or perhaps never found
raised in the spotlight
of fame and riches

verdict in
not guilty all counts
be not smug in victory
learn your lessons manish boy

wacko they call you
weirdo they call you
try to understand you
but remain bewildered by you

are you this innocent angelic man?
or devilishly deceptive demon?
is this a lesson for humanity?
judge thyself stone throwers

the universe has a master plan
everything happens for a reason
but that does not mean
that we need to know the reasons
for everything

and all i feel is black and white...

Black And White

unravel me
a distant cord
on the outside is forgotten
a constant need

to get along
and the animal awakens
and all I feel is black and white

the road is long
the memory slides
to the whole of my undoing
put aside
I put away
I push it back to get through each day
and all I feel is black and white
and I'm wound up small and tight
and I don't know who I am

everybody loves you when you're easy
everybody hates when you're a bore
everyone is waiting for your entrance so
don't disappoint them

unravel me
untie this chord
the very centre of our union
is caving in
I can't endure
I am the archive of our failure

and all I feel is black and white
and I'm wound up small and tight
and I don't know who I am

everybody loves you when you're easy
everybody hates when you're a bore
everyone is waiting for your entrance so
don't disappoint them

everybody loves you when you're easy so
don't disappoint them

don't disappoint them ...