Not See .... Just Us .....

"In a 1989 Supreme Court case, the late Justice Thurgood Marshall listed some of the signs cops have used in deciding that an air traveler fits the profile of an illegal drug courier: The traveler was the first to deplane; he was the last to deplane; he bought a round-trip ticket; he bought a one-way ticket; he took a nonstop flight; he changed planes; he had no luggage; he had new luggage; he had a gym bag; he was visibly nervous; he looked too calm ....."

thank goodness we have clear guidelines on how to conduct ourselves in all the wars we undertake, that we're so successful at .... why, if we're as successful in the war on terror as we have been on the war on drugs, i know that georgie bush'll be lookin' into the soul of osama "yo mamma" bin laden in no time at all ..... and headin' out for a nice game o' golf with him ..... and the war on drugs? so successful you can hardly cop a joint in our schools or prisons ....

i'm not proud of it, but i'm reading again ..... oooh, dr. pete: whattaya readin'? i'm reading "the third reich in power," clearly gentle bedside table reading .... why am i doing this? i read the news ..... no, i read what passes for news .... and i was going to belabor points and make invidious comparisons between adolf hitler and the national socialist party and george bush and his reptile pack of flesh-eating, corpse-fucking republicans ..... but why would i do that? if you're reading this you probably already agree with my impartial and accurate appraisals of the american body politic unless, of course, you're one of those snooping spying scumbags that's sucking up my tax dollars to perform a 'round-the-clock colonoscopy and anal invasion on me, my family, and my friends .....

my, how far we've come in so little time: john f. kennedy managed to put a man on the moon; george fuckwad bush has put 245,437 paid spies, informants, and cringing lickspittle tattletales in uranus ......

now .... i was going to write about how "president hindenburg applied the death penalty .... retroactively to offences, including treason and arson, committed since Hitler's first full day in office. As some newspaper commentators still dared point out, this violated a fundamental principle of the law, namely that laws should not apply punishments retroactively to crimes that had not carried them when when they were committed. Now nobody committing an offence could be sure what the punishment would be." but i'm not going to write that, because gosharootie, our republicans wouldn't make pass legislation with retroactive and self-serving penalties, would they ......

i thought about including another fun quote, which referred to the exoneration of a communist coterie: "The Nazi leadership was humiliated. The Nazi daily newspaper, the Racial Observer, condemned it as a miscarriage of justice 'that demonstrates the need for a thoroughgoing reform of our legal life, which in many ways still moves along the paths of outmoded liberalistic thought that is foreign to the people.'" but i wouldn't do that, because i know that our american legal system is sacrosanct, and evil venal scumbags would never stack courts, let alone the supreme court of the land, to foster and inculcate a brutal, repressive, self-aggrandizing fundamentalist regressive agenda that would perpetuate their power at the expense of the citizenry and their civil liberties ......

i'd intended to include this quote: "preparations had been under way for the trial of Communist Party leader Ernst Thalmann .... A dossier of charges had been compiled, alleging .... a campaign of terror, bombing, mass poisoning and the taking of hostages. Yet the trial had to be postponed for lack of hard evidence. A death sentence had been agreed upon in advance. (italics mine) .... in the end the Nazi leadership considered it safer to keep Thalmann in 'protective custody,' manacled and isolated, in the obscurity of a cell in the state prison .... without a formal trial."

but why would i do that? gosh, in america? would we imprison people without charges, without access to legal counsel, without informing relatives where they might be? you know, i've always felt that habeus corpus was just one of those dratted details and obstacles that liberals put in the way of the execution of justice ..... and the execution of those gosh-darned terrorrisht criminalsh ..... thank goodness we don't let that run interference with the good times in gitmo ..... or abu ghraib .... or any of the myriad black prisons we've got spotted around the country with enlightened allies like karimov in uzbekistan where your fingernails are torn out before you're boiled to death .....

how about this? "From the very beginning of the Third Reich, interrogation sessions by the police and the Gestapo often resulted in prisoners being returned to their prison cells beaten, bruised, and badly injured ....... [after complaints and negotiations] police and Justice Minstry officials agreed that such arbitrary beatings should cease. Henceforth .... police interrogators were to be limited to adminstering twenty-five lashes to interviewees in the presence of a doctor ....."

thank doodness for compassionate conservatives and the culchur of life .... as long as it doesn't cause "organ failure or death," it isn't torture, not in this country, it isn't ..... (although i have to wonder, if the extensive use of dogs in abu ghraib is part of the "man-dog love" that rick "bring the dead fetus home so the kids can play with their little brother before he stinks too much" santorum was talking about ......)

well ... the police state .... what an interesting concept, and what a growth industry! the nazis, of course, framed criminal behaviour and criminals as "racial degenerates ...." clearly good germans, people of good racial stock, wouldn't do anything contravening the interests of the state .... by the same token you, if you were a good american (and, if you're reading this, i know you're not), wouldn't complain about your phone being tapped, your bank and health records being made available to corporations; your travel patterns catalogued; your written communications monitored .... because if you were "a good american," then you wouldn't have anything to worry about, would you? and, speaking of racial degenerates, isn't it .... mmmmm ...... compelling what a very very large proportion of our incarcerated are the dusky-hued and swarthy complected?

but i'm sure there's no racial agenda here, not in this country .....

i'm going to digress a little here, and cite something else i just read, although i can't for the life of me remember where it was .... it was about migratory patterns of human beings, how groups would move in response to seasons and the movement of game; how they would migrate as weather changed; how they would move as their numbers increased and resources dwindled ...... people have been doing this forever and a day, if not longer ..... why, that's why people left europe to come to america ..... they were hard pressed to be as biased, bigoted, and as close-minded; as dogmatic, intolerant, and prejudiced as they wanted to be, so they needed a new place where they could be self-righteous and intolerant .....

it didn't matter that it was already inhabited ...... let's see .... who was here first? algonquin, iriquois, cherokee; sioux, pawnee, apache; shoshone, navajo, paiute; hope, bellacoola, nez perce; haida, tsimshin, kwakiutl; seminole, shawnee, arapaho ..... the list goes on and on, and that doesn't even count the millions of people living in what is now mexico, or in central america, or in south america, those dirty aliens ......

now we've drawn boundaries and, while we're shipping jobs overseas and rolling up the blue collar workers while shafting the middle class, we're going to let our little vigilantes play cops 'n' n*gg*rs, put up a fence, and shoot sheepherders ..... now, we could ship these stormtrooper wannabes off to iraq, where they could shoot at people who might just shoot back, but no ..... we've got a new racial policy, because it's aimed primarily at swarthy, dark-complected people from south of the border ..... and our tax dollars are going to underwrite national racist policies! in germany it was "da chews dat vus taking da chobs,"and now it's those darned mescans .... and now we're going to legislate langwidge, like, you know, english? as our national langwidge? shit, we don't speak english here, most 'specially our feerless leeeder; i don't know what langwidge he speaks, but it isn't any english i've ever heard ...... hey, we speak 'murkin, and we proud of it and if'n you don't like it you just better go back to where you belong, you durty furner .....

can you hear me, puking blood?

but i'm doing it in english .....

oh .... i was saying, i was going to write about a prison culture, and the institutionalization of brutality which, of course, only happened in nazi germany, and would never happen here ..... why, back in that bad old nazi in germany "it can safely be assumed that [jailers and camp personnel] were committed to their job ... without scruples or qualms about the sufferings to which the prisoners were subjected ....." i thought i might write that "the Gestapo aimed to keep a comprehensive register of 'ememies of the state' ..... cards showed the category to which each individual belonged--dark red for Communist, light red for a Social Democrat, violet for a 'grumbler' and so on ....." but why would i write something like that? why would i be a grumbler? why, some grumblers might go so far as to suggest that our government would ask internet service providers to turn over comprehensive records of web usage of their clients, including sites visited and a list of e-mails sent, just like phone companies did when asked for their records of numbers called ...... and those self-same grumbling cynics would probably go so far as to think that those shameless corporate whores would stumble over their own tits in their eagerness to comply ..... but then, those cynical anti-american fucks would probably also think that there was something amiss with our government and its intelligence agencies closely monitoring known subversive and terrorist groups like greenpeace ..... or the quakers .... and, god save us, p.e.t.a ......

i even thought of writing something about the "interrogation" methods the gestapo used on their prisoners, but then .... you might think that americans would use similar--or even more extravagant--techniques in their illegal prisons, as they played "let's make you piss blood" with their goatherd captives ..... so i'll refrain from that ...... hey, i won't even write that goebbels "told broadcasters and radio managers that 'radio will be purged' of noncomformists and leftists...." why, some journals were so eagerly complicit that they wrote "it was time to rescue Germany ..... by reforming the .... constitution in an authoritarian direction ...." but why i would i do that? it might encourage you to draw unsavoury parallels between state control of the broadcast and print media in nazi germany and the united states of america, where we know that "freedom of the press" means the freedom to do jack shit ..... or less .....

why, i'd even thought of quoting one stalwart german, who said "The fawning and cowardice of this magnificent era makes one go red up to the ears and beyond to think that one is German ...." but this misguided individual was an artist, and we know what the hell they're like, so i won't bother .....

oh, i might have given in to the impulse to just go on and on and on and on and on, and maybe even mention the re-decision of the supremes to deny whistleblowers legitimacy, or protection under the first amendment, meaning, your ass is grass and we'll see you in being boiled over in uzbekistan if you think you're going to bring any government malfeasance, corruption, inefficiency, theft, or just plain assfucking around to light ...... because, if you do, you're threatening national security, which is the security of this administration to do whatever the fuck it is they want, which is to loot, pillage, plunder, and murder with impunity ....

but nah ..... you know, i see that brad pitt's a da-da .... and there was something incredibly exciting about american idol, although i wouldn't fucking know .... and isn't it the last episode of the sopranos coming up? and matthew mcona .... mconnugh ..... i don't even fucking know who he is, but he's split from penelope ..... penelope ..... whatever-the-fuck-her-name-is and whoever-the-fuck-she is ..... and my aol "news" tells me that hollywood celebs are flocking to las vegas because their new addiction is gambling .... and i think another teen girl's gone missing ......

gosh, don't we live in exciting relevant fucking times?

next: dr. pete has a drink .....