After the Nidal Hasan killings our enemies at the New York Times were running articles about how, Heaven forbid we offend any Muslims by protesting the killings, as they’re so essential to all our military endeavors in Muslim countries. It is a myth that we need Muslims in our military in order to carry out military programs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. This is a myth.

All politics is local politics: “Me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my cousin against the stranger.”

When you’re Stone Age, the person from the next village is an interloper. Do you really think that- take someone like Nidal Hasan there (Please. Take him. Tie a couple stones around his neck, drop him in a pool.: He’s Muslim, Palestinian origin, American born. You think that someone like him goes and approaches Afghan tribesmen, and Miggles the Afghan tribesman is turning to his brethren and going, “By Golly, lads, he’s all right, boys! This fellow’s one of us!” No, ok? No. There is not so much difference in these tribesmen’s eyes, I would wager, between Nidal Hasan (*spit*), and a blonde, blue-eyed, cornfed American boy from Idaho who speaks Rosetta Stone Pashtun. They’re both representing “The Empire.”

All politics is local politics. Me and my cousin against the stranger. Nidal Hasan is the stranger just as much as any American is the stranger.

Anybody can learn Arabic. There’s, uh, no intelligence requirement for knowledge of the Arabic language. Or any language.

I read an editorial a while ago in, I think, the New York Times (*spit*), by a gay man who was serving as a translator in the military, and left the military, was forced out, or bounced, or something, and his point was that the military was losing a lot of talent by throwing out the gays. Big time I concur. Gay men are notoriously good at inserting themselves into disparate social situations; many of them have just the sort of delicate social and cultural antenna, the spy’s attention to nuance and “passing,” that are vital to intelligence work.

I worked once with a transsexual named, hee hee hee, Zoe, who had effed her way around the Arab world. You know the old Arab proverb, don’t you, who doesn’t: a woman for duty, a boy for paradise, and a goat for every day. I believe that Zoe, back when she was “Brian,” had been the “boy for paradise.” Bien entendu, Zoe wouldn’t touch the prospect of working in American intelligence with a ten foot pole because she deplored Dubya for all the obvious reasons.

I tell you this: For the right price Zoe would have worked for anyone. A couple of clever gay American men who are good with languages would be worth dozens of “Muslim Americans” when it comes to communications. The foreigners are not adding anything. They are detracting. They are security risks. Their loyalty is suspect. Moreover, we do not need them. Yankee go home.

It makes no sense that we are fighting two (count ‘em) two wars. We are committing 100,000 men to Afghanistan. How many men are in Iraq? 50,000? It makes no sense that we are fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ostensibly to squelch the terrorist threat against the United States, while we also seem to welcome Muslim immigrants with open arms. Please explain to me how this makes sense. There’s a terrorist threat against the US issuing from Muslim countries, so you say? Wait, what’s that sound? That faint strange music? Oh wait, just the passing of three thousand souls crossing the threshold of my consciousness. They make a funny noise as they pass. A screaming and a groaning, a heavy smell of fear, and one image only: a man whose morning began in the most banal possible way of shaving, of coffee, voluntarily leaping to his death to escape the burning death he knows (he’s seen) awaits him within.

It is not just the number, if you’re American and human. It’s the way these people died. Screaming, crying, cornered like prey. A few had the space and the time for a recitation of “The Lord is My Shepherd” and a voicemail. And all the voicemails said the same thing: I just want to let you know I love you, I just want to let you know I love you, over and over and over.

Thank God for Ralph Peters. One heart’s loyal yet.

This is about the worst thing that Obama could have done. Compromise, ass and face saving. Men will die, and it will be pointless. If we’re getting out in 2011, why shouldn’t we just get out NOW? Why are we sending 30,000 men to Afghanistan to retire them about a year later, no matter what? Why don’t we just offer them up as human sacrifices?

Thirty thousand men? And what is their morale supposed to be like? What are they there to do? Well, God forbid they harm any civilians, right? Because when you’re warring with fanatic Stone Age tribes the line between soldier and civilian is so clear cut, right? In a country where the women are scarcely identifiable as such due to the voluminous body bags they wear and 13 years old is manhood, it makes so much sense to tie the troops hands with rules protecting “civilians.”

Aghanistan is a morass. It sunk the Russians. It sunk the British. Whoever it is who does Obama’s thinking for him seems to kind of get that, hence the definite expiration date. So what are thirty thousand Americans being sent there for?

Rage and despair at the certain prospect of the deaths to come for no good reason that I can see. Rage and despair at seeing the perfidious sacrificing the able to… what? Incompetence and cowardice?

I have to go. I think Lulu has met her match. (“Hi little girl.” “Hi little boy. Whatchoo doin’?”)

With apologies to Louis Carroll.

UDPATE: With further apologies to LEWIS Carroll.

Obama and his friend Al Gore
Were walking hand in hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
They said, “it would be grand!”

“But not on us!” the Liberals cried,
Turning a little blue.
“After such coolness, that would be
A bogus thing to do!”
“Sasha’s new look,” Obama said.
“Did you see it on The View?”

Hello, I am here in the library. I have sent Lulu into hiding in a back corner of the children’s area with a forbidden stash of cheerios and strict instructions to keep them for all our sakes hidden. Good practice. For a while there the Gorgon Sister librarians (so embarrassing when they started offering me toothsome smiles and awkward greetings instead of fierce silences after I wrote the library a check: “Wilt thou lend me thy mare to ride but a mile?/ No, she’s lame going over a stile./ But if thou wilt her to me spare, thou shalt have money for thy mare./ Ho ho! Say you so? Money shall make my mare to go!”)

Yes, the Gorgon Sisters restricted library access to E-Harmony. The last thing they want is Christians breeding. I was too chicken to confront them over it, natch. Especially now I have the highly dubious honor of being in their good graces. Everybody always thinks I’m a liberal before I open my mouth. But I considered it, confronting them: “On what grounds? On what grounds? Indecency? Corruption of minors? The dangerous possibility of it leading to procreative sex within the confines of a Christian marriage???”

Lulu has seized a palm tree from a display and is walking around with it. I just took a photo.

My high-school sweetheart is fighting in Iraq. He is running every day and working on getting his run times down. He thinks the war is silly, suspects all wars are silly, and wants a blowjob. Such is the state of Western civilization in the twenty-first century. I have seen the best minds of my generation… pulverized by nihilism and obliterated in baseness.

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Wars are never silly. Some are ill-conceived endeavors, as I believe are our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq: Everyone out. Afghanistan: Small team of trained killers who have the full go-ahead to do whatever it takes to root out and kill the bad guys.

Caption:

Q: Check out the low-class bimbo who snuck into the White House under false pretences.
A: Yeah. And who’s the chick in the sari?

Hah, hah, hah. More stand up: And I think that the current period in American history, the immediate post-Obama election period, shall be collectively labeled by future historians as The “There Goes the Neighborhood” Period. That would have made an awesome election headline, actually. “Obama Wins Historic Presidential Victory: There Goes the Neighborhood.”

(Chris Rock had a very funny sketch where he was saying that when a white person moves into a black neighborhood, black people say, “Here comes the neighborhood!”)

It’s clearer and clearer that more than anything the current administration is characterized by I.N.C.O.M.P.E.T.E.N.C.E. Which is a good thing, considering their priorities.

Sunday I was feeling rather down in the dumps and too sluggish for anything more than trash reading so I picked up the New York Times magazine. The interview, by some shrew, was of Senator Inhofe. The man, God bless him, is travelling to Copenhagen to serve as a sort of Lorax for the people at the Copenhagen conference. The Just-Another-New-York-Times-Shrew Interviewer told the senator she believes we should afford Khalid Sheik Fat Hairy Slob and his brethren all the privileges associated with American citizenship because “as Americans we should take the high road,” or some such thing. The only time I ever hear liberals invoke Americanism is in the service of America’s destruction. So.

Oh, also there was this article in the Times magazine- a real lap-slapper, cheered me right out of my funk, it did- about this terrible scourge affecting these (rich, self-absorbed) women: lackluster libidos. I think the article was called “Women Who Want to Want.” Awesome. They had this sex therapist who passed out raisins to her group therapy patients and asked them each to take a raisin and squish it, roll it around, smell it, and taste it. Yeah, right? No, I have no idea either how that relates to sex. But it’s so awesome that these women are paying someone to teach them how to make love to a raisin. I think the exercise would be a lot more effective if the raisin were a martini. Or a margarita with salt. Or a White Russian. Or quaaludes. I think you get my meaning. Or, even perhaps come to think of it, a man. Shudder to think. And sorry for the automatic jumping to conclusion that sex equals man, and not, say, transgendered mutant fish.

Then, further on in the article, the sex therapist (who herself ostensibly had no problems doing it) figured out this therapy. It came to her in yoga class, of course. Classic, right? She started taking up this mantra in her yoga class and began observing her breathing and repeating to herself over and over “I am a sensual woman, I am a sensual woman.” I always end up next to women like that whenever I go to a yoga class, and let me tell you it sucks. I pointedly clear my throat when they begin issuing little unseemly moans. Always to no avail.

Remember “My Best Friend’s Wedding”? Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, and other box office formulas? Well, the Chinese, in typically awesomely humorless and blunt fashion called it in their translation, “Help! My Pretend Boyfriend is Gay!” Searingly funny, yes. But with rather a poignant undercurrent of truth. I think that this title would make a better name for “Sex and the City.” I can’t walk down a street in New York City without encountering a couple that brings to mind, “Help! My pretend boyfriend is gay!” Anyway, and that is what chanting the mantra, “I am a sensual woman, I am a sensual woman,” in yoga class brings to mind.

Personally, I didn’t really see how these zero-libido women had so much of a problem. It seemed to me their little problem gives them the tools to lead a fruitful, happy, productive life. No attacking your lover in a jealous rage. No alarmingly costly lingerie purchases.

Local genuinely crazy person sweating this computer. Gotta go.

Funny, though. Sex has become so ubiquitous, banal, dehumanized, and base. And at the same time unnaturally exalted. Could that have something to do with these women’s problem?

I am still here. Of the dozen or so readers who’ve looked at the blog, maybe a couple care, and maybe one of those couple like it.

Whereas every gesture, every chuckle, every glower I make, every thought I express, affects my daughter utterly, and that won’t always be true.

Also, there’s too much information. I’m trying to read The New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times every day, and failing, although not by much. It’s more useful to keep your ear to the ground, than to blather on about your opinions.

Companies are leaving the U.S. Americans, maybe me, will follow.

Did you see the photo of Obama carrying the GQ with himself on the cover? That’s his reading material.

This just out. The Health and Human Services Department’s U.S. Preventative Services Task Force newest studies show that much of what we have come to believe is the basis of sound medical care is actually over-rated and unnecessary. Who knew? (Chuck Schumer and Kathleen Sebelius.)

Doctors, for instance. There’s nothing mysterious or sacred that doctors do that couldn’t be done by a good old-fashioned bureaucrat. Some relative of Charlie Rangel’s, or something.

Antibiotics. Actually, studies show that people are administered far too many antibiotics and far too often. Especially to certain over-privileged segments of society who know who they are.

Plaster casts. Why in India they’d just tie your broken leg to a good strong stick with some rope. And you know what, with a lot of love, and local color, and packs of chattering children, and exotic spices. Stop being such a gringo. You need to move out of your comfort zone, as our statuesque First Lady (rumored to be next year’s draft pick for a certain, unnamed NFL team) puts it so graciously.

(Hah. Actually we’ll all be going to India for our medical care- to see U.S. trained doctors.)

Pap smears. Mammograms. Number one, only women need to get them (that should cut down some). Number two, you don’t need them like all the time. Maybe on special occasions: birthdays (that fall in leap years), 40th wedding anniversaries, events of that type of nature.

Medical attention: it’s really questionable whether it’s really worthwhile at all. The truly organic, holistic, back-to-the-earth approach is to consider disease as merely nature’s way of winnowing down the herd. Shouldn’t we accept nature’s plans for us, as righteous natives do all over the world?

I think we could learn a lot from people in developing countries on a whole host of issues, not just health care. The art of mutely suffering under a despotic government, for example. The whimsical strains of fanciful nihilism, for example, so charming chez the Eastern Europeans, that flower in a society mired in despair.

Child, I ain’t passed the bar, but I know a little bit.
Enough that you won’t illegally search my shit.
Jay-Z, 99 Problems

I actually did pass the bar, and I know a little bit. Enough that I’d like to try my hand at explaining a couple of the grand mysteries turning up in the papers these days. To me, they don’t seem very mysterious.

1) The Case of the Dramatic, Unexplained Pro-Life Surge Under Obama.

In the largest shift in sentiment since pollsters began asking about the topic in 1995, support dropped from 54 to 47 percent in one year.

“To explain this riddle,” said Miss Rosita Marple, with a twinkle in her eye, bringing her rocking chair to a standstill and pausing over her needlework (cross-stitch sampler: Down With the Marxist Pissant.), “Let’s play a game of ‘Which Would You Rather?’”

Which would you rather? The government prohibits abortion or the government provides and thereby authorizes (and the logical extension is eventually mandates) abortions.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out the other day that only about 13% of women who get abortions put it on their health insurance.

The Democrats, stymied on the abortion health reform issue, have suggested that women can get separate “abortion insurance.” Huh? Exhibit Nine Hundred of the Airtight Case that the Democrats are Insane.

2) The Case of the Missing Young Workers.

An article in the Times compares this recession with the two other periods since World War II when unemployment went above 8% (they’ve changed how they count unemployment, by the way).

There are fewer jobs for workers age 54 to 64 than when the cycle began, but that group has done much better than younger workers.

It is not clear why that pattern has changed.

Miss Rosita Marple, laying a finger aside of her nose, twittered. She laughed, that is. Not that she broadcast some half-wit scrambled internet message.

“Well,” she chuckled, “maybe that’s because younger workers are useless gits who don’t know shit these days because they have been Very. Badly. Educated. and they have Zero Character. Would you want them working for you?”

Two examples of the effects of cronyism, being badly educated, and natural stupidity within the past couple weeks:

1. 911 operator makes a mistake, sends firefighters to the wrong house. Ha ha, right? Two people died.

2. New York City Buildings Department workers mark the wrong house for demolition, authorizing the locks on the house cut. Junkies move in, steal and destroy.

The reason why companies are retaining or hiring older workers rather than younger workers is that plummeting standards, both educational standards and standards of comportment, moral standards, and diminised work ethic and loyalty have rendered younger workers less employable than their older counterparts.

Rosita being the exception that proves the rule.

Ron Paul is the living American politician who has the courage, honesty, integrity, intellect, experience, and idealism to present ideas that offer a solution to the state we are now in, which seems to me approaching dire.

It took me about two days to read “The Revolution.” The writing style was plain-spoken. It was very clearly written, so it had the inestimable advantage that it made Rep. Paul’s analysis and ideas very accessible. Rep. Paul was able to explain concepts, some of which related to convoluted government workings, very simply. It shows that he has a great deal of government experience. Sometimes the style was a bit dry, but it was never boring. He wrote it himself, without any help to “jazz it up,” that’s why it might be a bit dry.

I was very very happy that there’s an American politician who does not need a professional co-author to write a book. There’s a very interesting reading list at the end as well. The book is comprised of seven chapters.

Chapter 3, “The Constitution” begins with a quote from Thomas Jefferson (page 41):

Though written constitutions “may be violated in moments of passion or delusion,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1802, “yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people.”

Page 43:

When the president signs a bill into law, he sometimes accompanies the signing with a statement, not necessarily read aloud at the signing ceremony but inserted into the record all the same.
. . .
The Bush administration . . . has very often used the signing statement as a vehicle either for expressing the manner in which the president intends to interpret certain provisions of a law (his interpretation being frequently at odds with the one Congress obviously intended), or even for making clear his intention of not enforcing the provision in question at all. It is not always easy to determine whether the president has followed through on these threats, since they are so often made in areas that the White House shrouds in secrecy: foreign policy and privacy violations. In 2005, though, the Government Accountability Office gave us a very rough estimate of how many of these threatened refusals to enforce legislative provisions were followed up on: in about one-third of the nineteen cases it examined, the provision was not being enforced. Law professor Jonathon Turley was blunt: “By using signing statements to this extent, the president becomes a government unto himself.”

Page 53. Ron Paul quotes Senator Robert A. Taft criticizing President Truman’s decision to send troops to Korea, as Ron Paul puts it, “without so much as a nod in the direction of Congress.” (Page 52) Truman thought his power to do so came from UN authorization and an interpretation of the “commander-in-chief clause” in the Constitution that Ron Paul calls “untenable” as “nothing in American history supports it.”

Robert Taft said (page 53):

“I deny the conclusions of the documents presented by the President or by the executive department, and I would say that if the doctrines therein proclaimed prevailed, they would bring an end to government by the people, because our foreign interests are going gradually to predominate and require a larger and larger place in the field of the activities of our people.”

In 2002, when Ron Paul proposed that Congress make an official declaration of war against Iraq, in accordance with the Constitution (Paul made it clear he was going to oppose the declaration), the Chairman of the International Relations Committee’s response was (page 54):

“There are things in the Constitution that have been overtaken by events, by time. Declaration of war is one of them. There are things no longer relevant to a modern society. We are saying to the president, use your judgment. [What you have proposed is] inappropriate, anachronistic; it isn’t done anymore.”

I’d love to know who said this. The person isn’t named.

From Chapter 4 “Economic Freedom,” page 76:

To get an appreciation for the difference between public and private administration in terms of bureaucracy and cost-effectiveness, consider this. The Brookings Institution’s John Chubb once investigated the number of bureaucrats working in the central administration offices of New York City public schools. Six telephone calls finally yielded someone who knew the answer, but that person was not allowed to disclose it. Another six calls later, Chubb had at last pinned down someone who knew the answer AND could tell him what it was: there were 6,000 bureaucrats working in the central office.
Then Chubb called the Archdiocese of New York, to find out the figure there. (The city’s Catholic schools educated one-fifth as many students as did the government-run schools.) Chubb’s first telephone call was taken by someone who did not know the answer. Here we go again, he thought. But after a moment she said, “Wait a minute; let me count.” Her answer: 26.

Rep. Paul has championed the abolition of income tax.

He makes the point that we do not have the resources to sustain Social Security and Medicare. That’s another depressing point about all this healthcare debate, is that it’s largely moot. Medicare and Medicaid are going to go bust- like tomorrow. Rep. Paul also makes the point that health care was more affordable and accessible before government got involved. He relates the following anecdote (pages 89-90):

Several years ago I had a chance to meet Dr. Robert Berry, who had come to Washington to offer testimony before the congressional Joint Economic Committee, of which I am a member. Dr. Berry had opened a low-cost health clinic in rural Tennessee. The clinic does not accept insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid, a policy that allows Dr. Berry to treat patients without interference from third-party government bureaucrats or HMO administrators. He and his patients can therefore decide for themselves on appropriate treatments.
In other words, Dr. Berry practices medicine as most doctors did 40 years ago, when patients paid cash for ordinary services and had inexpensive catastrophic insurance for serious injuries or illnesses.

Ron Paul states that this doctor usually charges about $35 for routine maladies, and his patients are mostly low-income people who can’t afford health insurance but don’t might not qualify for assistance (page 90).

Rep. Paul is also absolutely against foreign aid, believes “foreign aid should be absolutely rejected” (page 99):

Morally, I cannot justify the violent seizure of property from Americans in order to redistribute that property to a foreign government . . . Surely we can agree that Americans ought not to be doing forced labor on behalf of other regimes, and that is exactly what foreign aid is.

In Chapter 6, “Civil Liberties and Personal Freedom,” Rep. Paul speaks out against the Patriot Act and describes some of its terrifying powers: privacy violations, unconstitutional searches (and detainments, right?), and torture.

I think torture of enemy combatants is a useful technique. So I’m also for a lot of transparency as to who is and who is not considered an enemy combatant, and who exactly’s being tortured and exactly how. Transparency solves a lot of problems.

Rep. Paul talks about the case of Jose Padilla, the aspiring “dirty bomber” (page 121). He was American, which I did not know before reading this book, and he was detained for three and a half years before charges were brought against him, during which time he was tortured. Albeit mildly, about as bad as Obama’s Chicago buddies like Anthony Rezko and Valerie Jarrett torture their poor slum tenants: he was subjected to noxious fumes, and his cell was kept cold for long periods of time. He was also drugged and threatened.

Rep. Paul discusses the ramifications to civil liberties and personal freedom of the war on terror and the war on drugs.

As far as the war on drugs, Rep. Paul gives voice to something I’ve thought a lot: that if drugs were legalized (AND TAXED), their market value immediately depreciates and associated drug crime is mitigated. Drug dealing ceases to be as profitable. (Pages 125-126).

As far as the vice of drug-taking, Rep. Paul quotes Thomas Aquinas, that the law cannot make people virtuous (page 126). Rep. Paul also points out the fact that even though drugs are illegal, they’re widely available, so making them illegal is ineffective (page 131).

Lastly, Rep. Paul writes (page 133) that, “In 2004, a presidential initiative called the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health issued a report calling for forced mental health screening for all American children, beginning in preschool.” Rep. Paul (who is in a position to know) considers that the “obvious beneficiary” of such a program is the pharmaceutical industry who can basically use this program as a prescription medicine recruitment drive. I also see political implications, and it goes along with a measures Phyllis Schlafly recently wrote about, about a national database on school-children.

I remember when I read Clarence Thomas’s autobiography, which was a great- and moving- read, Thomas, who was educated in Catholic schools (the nuns taught him that the racism in the society he was growing up in was morally wrong), wrote that even if he had no money, the very last thing that would go would be his son’s private school tuition. He said that no matter how much debt or how many bills he had to pay (Thomas grew up shockingly dirt poor and even after attending graduate schools was in deep, deep debt. Didn’t pay off his debts until around the time he became a Supreme Court Justice.) he would never send his son to public school, that that was his sine qua non that his son attend private school. I think the reasons why become clearer and clearer.

Lastly, in Chapter 6 “Money: The Forbidden Issue in American Politics,” Rep. Paul addresses… (drumroll, please) the Fed. He explains what the Fed is doing when it tinkers with the interest rates by buying bonds from banks (“Where does the Fed get the money to buy the bonds? It creates it out of thin air, simply writing checks on itself and giving them to banks. If that sounds fishy, then you understand it just fine.” [page 141]).

Rep. Paul also criticizes the fact that America ceased to back up its currency with gold (“the gold standard”). This makes us more prone to Weimar Republic-esque hyperinflation (and oh, you know, Weimar Republic-esque mass hysteria, mass hypnosis, and mass madness). (Pages 140, 149-150).

I totally recommend this book. I’ve only been able to extract a few nuggets to give you an idea. It’s a fascinating book, it will really open your eyes, and it is written like a manifesto, as the title says, so it’s an easy read and the concepts are easy to understand.

Yeah, I think the concept that the country’s going to hell in a handbasket is pretty easy to grasp at this point. Rep. Paul is sensible and wise. He offers solutions. I pray people will simply listen to him.

When authorities do not protect people, people protect themselves.

I’m not starting some citizen militia here (yet). As a woman and a mother, I have a lot to fear from the breakdown of civilization (and I have about as much to fear from vigilante-ism as I do from terrorism.) Uh, who doesn’t? But as we see in countries where civilization has broken down, in an inverse formula to the Titanic’s gentlemen’s creed, women and children get it first.

There is a vacuum. An Islamist terrorist was ALLOWED to kill our TROOPS. The heads of the military and the commander-in-chief have made EXCUSES for him. He most certainly did not snap. “Snapping” is when one does something uncharacteristic. All the evidence shows that what he did was completely within character and absolutely consistent with his ideology- an ideology he wouldn’t shut up about.

People aren’t going to just sit around and wait to get killed. There is a vacuum. The message Americans are getting is that the authorities are not interested in protecting us from acts of terrorism. The other message we’re getting is that Muslims in official positions have not been vetted and that if they are terrorist threats that has been swept under the carpet. Another message we’re getting is from the half-hearted apologies of, uh, one Muslim organization I’ve seen so far. Other than that, silence (satisfied silence?) on the part of the Muslim community. No protests, no vigils, no impassioned condemnations.

The other message we’re getting is that American lives are worth little, that the lives of our troops- our friends, neighbors, sons, daughters, siblings, cousins, parents- are worth little.

What matters is the ideology of those in power and them promoting an ideology that they believe will keep them in power.

I am angry.

Cruel to be kind, in the right measure
Cruel to be kind, it’s a very good sign
Cruel to be kind, means that I love you
Baby, you gotta be cruel to be kind