micah holmquist's irregular thoughts and links |
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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Saturday, October 30, 2004
I'm having computer problems so this may be my last post for at least a little bit. I'm also dealing with a serious bout of depression. That may also delay postings. RE Bin Laden's message, what's the big deal? It isn't as if people in the U.S. give a shit about what he says or anything. RE this stupid fucking election, it is notable that people are so passionate about it despite the similarities of the two candidates on the most important issues. Why is this? I suspect that it has to with both Bush and Kerry supporters doing a lot of projection. Kerry supporters see Bush as stupid, which he may or may not be, but if he is, he isn't making policy. Bush supporters, on the other hand, see this as their chance to erase the experience of "Vietnam" from the popular collective memory. Hence the desire to say that Kerry's comments about the war (why are by far the most honorable part of Kerry's record) were wrong without refuting. They want to project the message that criticizing Uncle Sam is always wrong. Oh, in case, it wasn't clear, I endorse the presidential ticket of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo. No, it won't make any difference, but no single vote will and thus voting is a waste of time unless you are doing for entertainment.
Thursday, October 28, 2004
"It Is Either There or Here, and Better Them Than Us: A Pro-War Political Myth" doesn't include, "Bush has talked about the differences between a 'pre-September the 11th' approach and his 'post-September the 11th' method, so it is ironic that the 'flytrap' theory makes the "pre-September the 11th' error of thinking the U.S. can be safe from 'terrorism.'" Tuesday, October 26, 2004
War criminal president Kerry "I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president," John Kerry writes in an October 22 column that appeared in The Des Moines Register. Does this mean he will commit "war crimes" as president, just as he did as a soldier? Well, that isn't what he is trying to convey. Monday, October 25, 2004
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Friday, October 22, 2004
Fuck this pastor shit, Bush wants to be God. If He says something, you believe it is true or you are wrong. Thursday, October 21, 2004
Certain lyrics from Suzanne Vega may just sum up the current political culture of the United States of America: They only hit until you cryWOW Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Matt Drudge writes: UPDATE: CNN's Tucker Carlson, Jon Stewart Feuding...I am shocked and outraged at the stupidity of people. Monday, October 18, 2004
Saturday, October 16, 2004
Friday, October 15, 2004
The FOX News Channel had a segment on Ralph Nader's campaign this morning where a Democratic partisan and a GOP partisan were allowed to give their opinion. One said Bush would win and Nader had nothing to do with that. The other said Kerry would win despite Nader. I'm having trouble deciding if it would be better if the people responsible for this segment knew they were perpetuating the two-party system in an absurd fashion or if they didn't. Thursday, October 14, 2004
With "Ghosts of the White House" (http://www.whitehouse.gov/ghosts/), it becomes clear that even a Godly Christian man like President George W. Bush has fallen to demonic activity. Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000) is a great movie but it makes me feel bad about myself. "These people are so cool. I'm a fucking loser," runs through my head. Self-esteem problems are hardly distributed fairly. I doubt Bush has problems with self-esteem and he's waged an invasion to protect the U.S. from weapons of mass destruction and then failed to protect "equipment and materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons" (Irqin Arieff, The Scotsman, October 12). Monday, October 11, 2004
Notes on the production of "reality" It is telling that a group of rightist owned telly stations planning to air an anti-Kerry documentary is news, but the fawning coverage the mainstream media gives both Bush and Kerry is considered a given. In other words, if you had any doubts about your "real" choices are supposed to be, you should just drop them and leave. This is only one of numerous examples of the mainstream media acting to reinforce the binary politics of the United States. In the process, they create what is widely perceived as "reality." *** Team Bush is also good at creating the reality they desire, and they haven't been shrieking from this important task in recent days. In Friday night's debate, Bush responded to a question about who he would pick for the Supreme Court with: I really don't have -- haven't picked anybody yet. Plus, I want them all voting for me.Does Bush know what Dred Scott v. Sanford was about? Does he think the 13th Amendment was unnecessary? This should be a fairly significant story. Here you have the prez showing great ignorance of one of the most important Supreme Court decisions ever in and making the case for a literal interpretation of the Constitution in part by criticizing a decision that was a literal reading of that document, and nobody cares. No wonder Bush was able to convince people Saddam was a "threat." Speaking of that matter, yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Condoleezza Rice said: ...Saddam Hussein had an insatiable appetite for weapons of mass destruction. He had an unflinching hatred for the United States. He had every reason to cooperate with our enemies. This was a gathering and growing threat, and it was time to take care of it."[G]rowing threat"? "[G]rowing threat"? "[G]rowing threat"? Bush, Rice and the rest of the crew never proved there was any threat beyond the mere possibility that anybody with Saddam's money and resources could, if they decided they really wanted to, begin to think about attacking the United States. There was no "threat," if that word is defined in a conventional manner. The fact that no "mainstream" journalist will point this out shows them to be nothing but a pitiful group of hack enablers. What should be equally disturbing, but somehow isn't to me, is the way in which Team Bush has created ridiculously utopian goals for public consumption and yet manage to ridicule a political opponent who goes along with these goals as not supporting them. In a Matt Bai's moderately hagiographical profile of Kerry in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, the Great John Kerry is presented as saying: 'We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Terrorism exists in singularities and so as long as it exists, it will be more than a nuisance, unless of course Kerry is more wedded to the latter part of these words. (Besides, how can he ignore the myriad of ways in which prostitution and illegal gambling are destroying the very fabric of the sprit that makes America great?) Team Bush's response to this is laughable. CNN writes: >Bush campaign Chairman Marc Racicot, in an appearance on CNN's "Late Edition," interpreted Kerry's remarks as saying "that the war on terrorism is like a nuisance. He equated it to prostitution and gambling, a nuisance activity. You know, quite frankly, I just don't think he has the right view of the world. It's a pre-9/11 view of the world."If you can create your own reality, why bother with the commonly accepted one? It will just be full of unpleasant things that go bump in the night. *** I'd criticize Team Kerry for creating their own reality, something they most certainly want to do, as well, but they are so bad at it that it isn't worth doing. Sunday, October 10, 2004
There's a whole lot of things this blogger could write about, but why would anybody want my opinions and comments when they can have the opinion of Noah McCullough, a 9-year-old Presidential history whiz kid/youth journalist with a true talent for memorizing and regurgitating dates and political slogans? McCullough is brillantly correct when he says, "I don't think we should bash any President of the United States, any sitting President of the United States. You can discuss how you disagree, but you shouldn't attack them like Sen. Kerry and his surrogates have been doing." I wonder how he'd react to my criticisms of Bush. Saturday, October 09, 2004
I was writing a post yesterday morning when my mouse gave out. It has been replaced by one of these "optical" slave rodents. If you want to look cool while setting up your new mouse, follow my example and finish Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude (The Penguin Press, 2004) in your downtime. It is a compelling work, but still very flawed. *** My beloved Spartans beat Illinois, 38-25, earlier today. Hopefully I'm wrong about this but I see the defense getting picked apart on big play after big play when they go up against better offenses. *** Thursday, October 07, 2004
Tonight's question on Anderson Cooper 360 is, "Should President Bush admit he made a mistake when he said that Saddam Hussein had WMD?" Who cares? I really just don't get the mindset of people who want an apology on this but don't care about... Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
A little faggott bitch named Paul Bremer is now saying America didn’t have enough troops in Iraq. What a pussy! Can’t he see the Iraqi towel head fucks being killed? Doesn’t that count for anything? No, I guess it doesn’t in the warped little minds of liberal communist postmodernist Kerry supportin' leftists. Monday, October 04, 2004
The rambles of your humble blogger with a cold My latest Press Action piece has a pretty self-explanatory title, "Afghans, Iraqis and Other Non-Americans Exist for Our Amusement Was the Debate's Real Message." *** Speaking of the debate, Bush has gotten a lot of play out of mocking Kerry's "global test" remark, but those cheering Bush for standing up for American whatever always seem to not point out this part of Bush's justification for invading Iraq: ...I went to the United Nations. I didn't need anybody to tell me to go to the United Nations. I decided to go there myself.So one of the reasons for invading Iraq was to back up the word of an international body called the United Nations Security Council. Some sort of test presumably was at work. Actually it is more likely that Bush doesn't really mean what he said and it just part of the plethora of justifications that they have used. Yesterday, on CNN's Late Edition, host Wolf Blitzer and Condoleezza Rice wer involved in the following exchange: BLITZER: Let's talk about some of the things that the president said at the debate because some of them seem to be a little bit sloppy, got repetitive, as you well know.Rice isn't expected to use the same reasoning when it comes to say Saddam Hussein, for reasons relating to the fact that she didn't really mean what she said here. On the "global test" issue, Rice said a lot, including: ...I don't know how you pass a global test, given that, by the way, you couldn't even get consensus on the fact that, after Saddam Hussein had defied the international community for all of those years, that it was time to do something.This would be a lot more interesting if Team Bush had ever showed a need to do something in Iraq. Oh, but I forget, this, like just about everything else coming from Team Bush, because it served an immediate need. On a related note, John Hawkins asks today, "If America's troops trust George Bush to fight the war on terrorism, shouldn't you? No, because I can make up my own opinion about the "war on terrorism" and because I seriously question the critical thinking ability and/or use of critical thinking of any person who signs up to be part of the U.S. military. Saturday, October 02, 2004
Friday, October 01, 2004
I want to see a presidential candidate say, "under my administration the economy will be so good that no person will have to stay with an abusive partner or parent, because they fear leaving means living in poverty." It would represent a fundamental break with the mindless pseudo-utopianism that dominates campaigns now. |