November 20, 2010 @ 8:00 p.m.
I think that there times when right and wrong are both definite and obvious. I think that what’s happening to the prisoners in Iran is one of those times.
I don’t think it’s fair for anyone to say “Lena’s making a good case for the prisoners today; let’s keep them alive and free them” and then “Lena’s having an off day; let’s kill the prisoners or keep them in jail and torture them.” The strength of my arguments from one day to the next ought to be irrelevant to the efforts that people who are capable of directly approaching the situation make to stop the executions and free everyone who has been jailed for no sound reason.
Similarly, nobody has the right to blame me for the fact that my government is being unreasonable about this issue.
Here are my questions to President Obama:
Mr. President, if you can’t negotiate successfully with Iran in order to free a few prisoners, how are you going to negotiate successfully with Iran about nuclear weapons?
Also; what about the German prisoners? The behavior of the White House on the issue in Iran led to those Germans getting arrested and now they’re being charged by Iran with spying. Today, there are blog posts for White House officials in support of all of Iran’s human rights violations, even though Iran is holding hostages from Germany for no reason and is planning to put them on trial.
Are you planning to continue to endanger not just Iranians, not just Americans, but also Europeans and anyone from any country who try to investigate human rights abuses whether in their own countries or in other countries?
What’s going to happen the next time that Americans get held as hostages somewhere? Do you think that the situation in Iran, however it resolves, is going to be forgotten by anyone? Probably nobody is going to say “no” to requests from the U.S. government for cooperation in freeing American hostages; however, there is willing and concerned help and then there is grudging help given to a superpower that forgets all about and even stomps on people’s rights until it wants something for itself and then demands that everyone run to help.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 20, 2010 @ 8:40 p.m.
I have something to say specifically to all of the students who are allowing themselves to be exploited by their schools, by the media, by participating businesses and by politicians in Vermont.
Being exploited isn’t at all the same thing as becoming mature about your sexuality. The people who encourage you to become part of what’s been happening aren’t offering you freedom; they are leading you into oppression.
What do you think is going to happen the first time that the people who have been exploiting you without you realizing it ask or tell you to do something that you don’t want to do? Do you think that they’re not going to give you a rough time if you try to say “no?”
They could find ways to make school very uncomfortable for you. They could start grading your papers and tests unfairly, lower in comparison to students who do whatever they want. They could encourage other students to bully you. They could refuse to write you references for college.
They could make up stories about you and put them in the newspapers or on TV. They could talk about you in damaging ways on the Internet. They could go out of their way to try to poison the community outside of school against you and make it difficult for you to find or keep work.
The world is a very ugly place in some ways, and one of those ways is exemplified by adults who take advantage of the fact that young people almost never have the perspective or life experience to realize how situations develop over time and where things that seem like fun to naive people at the beginning can and do go.
Recently I wrote about how I lost my virginity when I was 27, and I’m wondering if there are high school and college age students who see that fact about my life as evidence that I am interested in being restrictive and overly punitive about what’s been going on now regarding pedophilia and other kinds of exploitation and harassment by the media and others. As few Americans would be, I wasn’t at all happy about having been a virgin for as long as I was. In my late teens, which is when I would have preferred to start having sex, I wasn’t able to form relationships with people that I liked enough to want to sleep with. I was also unwilling to have sex with people whom I didn’t know just for the sake of having sex, so my years of virginity dragged on for me until finally at 27 I decided I’d had enough virginity for one lifetime and I got it out of the way just to get it out of the way.
One of the reasons that my life got skewed in my late teens in ways that affected my whole life even up until today is that I allowed adults to advise me who shouldn’t have been advising anyone. Not every adult that you meet or who has an impact on your life is going to be good for you or a good person with good judgment; the fact of someone being an adult, being a teacher, or even being generally respected by his or her community is no guarantee that he or she is a healthy person who has your best interests at heart. Not all of the criminals in the world are in jail; not by a lot. Not all of the sick or very confused people in the world are in psychiatric hospitals or in counseling; not by a lot.
The world has good in it, but it also has danger and you’re in the danger. You ARE being abused; you ARE being exploited, and as in most exploitative situations, getting into that situation is a lot easier at the beginning than what happens later, especially when you want to get out.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 20, 2010 @ 10:41 p.m.
It looks as if I need to talk about Iran some more tonight.
I think it's likely that the civil side of Iran's government does whatever it wants, regardless of religion. I think that the women of and associated with the civil side of Iran's government do whatever they want, wear whatever they want, go wherever they want. I think that the women in and associated the rich and powerful families and businesses in Iran do and wear whatever they want and go wherever they want.
I think that the civil side of the Iranian government uses the religious side of the Iranian government to oppress Iran's citizens; religion is the excuse and the means by which the dictatorship is maintained.
The United States doesn't allow polygamy, and it would appear that Iran does--for men. You can have more than one wife in Iran, but you're not supposed to do that here; it's illegal and considered immoral.
You can't kill people or keep them in jail for no reason, and that's what Iran does and wants to continue to do, and that's what the United States and other countries that consider themselves modern and benevolent and which present themselves to the rest of the world that way need to talk Iran out of doing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not sure what happened the other day, whether Weebly spontaneously decided to try to suppress my blog here or if it was pressured into doing so. Next I'm going to put a picture I took of the message I started getting on my screen from Weebly when I was writing about the pedophilia that's been happening; the message told me to log out because Weebly was "upgrading," and when I tried to log back in, I couldn't.
I took a picture of what my screen looked like before Weebly logged me out, and then I went to my Friendster profile and wrote about what was happening.
I think that there times when right and wrong are both definite and obvious. I think that what’s happening to the prisoners in Iran is one of those times.
I don’t think it’s fair for anyone to say “Lena’s making a good case for the prisoners today; let’s keep them alive and free them” and then “Lena’s having an off day; let’s kill the prisoners or keep them in jail and torture them.” The strength of my arguments from one day to the next ought to be irrelevant to the efforts that people who are capable of directly approaching the situation make to stop the executions and free everyone who has been jailed for no sound reason.
Similarly, nobody has the right to blame me for the fact that my government is being unreasonable about this issue.
Here are my questions to President Obama:
Mr. President, if you can’t negotiate successfully with Iran in order to free a few prisoners, how are you going to negotiate successfully with Iran about nuclear weapons?
Also; what about the German prisoners? The behavior of the White House on the issue in Iran led to those Germans getting arrested and now they’re being charged by Iran with spying. Today, there are blog posts for White House officials in support of all of Iran’s human rights violations, even though Iran is holding hostages from Germany for no reason and is planning to put them on trial.
Are you planning to continue to endanger not just Iranians, not just Americans, but also Europeans and anyone from any country who try to investigate human rights abuses whether in their own countries or in other countries?
What’s going to happen the next time that Americans get held as hostages somewhere? Do you think that the situation in Iran, however it resolves, is going to be forgotten by anyone? Probably nobody is going to say “no” to requests from the U.S. government for cooperation in freeing American hostages; however, there is willing and concerned help and then there is grudging help given to a superpower that forgets all about and even stomps on people’s rights until it wants something for itself and then demands that everyone run to help.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 20, 2010 @ 8:40 p.m.
I have something to say specifically to all of the students who are allowing themselves to be exploited by their schools, by the media, by participating businesses and by politicians in Vermont.
Being exploited isn’t at all the same thing as becoming mature about your sexuality. The people who encourage you to become part of what’s been happening aren’t offering you freedom; they are leading you into oppression.
What do you think is going to happen the first time that the people who have been exploiting you without you realizing it ask or tell you to do something that you don’t want to do? Do you think that they’re not going to give you a rough time if you try to say “no?”
They could find ways to make school very uncomfortable for you. They could start grading your papers and tests unfairly, lower in comparison to students who do whatever they want. They could encourage other students to bully you. They could refuse to write you references for college.
They could make up stories about you and put them in the newspapers or on TV. They could talk about you in damaging ways on the Internet. They could go out of their way to try to poison the community outside of school against you and make it difficult for you to find or keep work.
The world is a very ugly place in some ways, and one of those ways is exemplified by adults who take advantage of the fact that young people almost never have the perspective or life experience to realize how situations develop over time and where things that seem like fun to naive people at the beginning can and do go.
Recently I wrote about how I lost my virginity when I was 27, and I’m wondering if there are high school and college age students who see that fact about my life as evidence that I am interested in being restrictive and overly punitive about what’s been going on now regarding pedophilia and other kinds of exploitation and harassment by the media and others. As few Americans would be, I wasn’t at all happy about having been a virgin for as long as I was. In my late teens, which is when I would have preferred to start having sex, I wasn’t able to form relationships with people that I liked enough to want to sleep with. I was also unwilling to have sex with people whom I didn’t know just for the sake of having sex, so my years of virginity dragged on for me until finally at 27 I decided I’d had enough virginity for one lifetime and I got it out of the way just to get it out of the way.
One of the reasons that my life got skewed in my late teens in ways that affected my whole life even up until today is that I allowed adults to advise me who shouldn’t have been advising anyone. Not every adult that you meet or who has an impact on your life is going to be good for you or a good person with good judgment; the fact of someone being an adult, being a teacher, or even being generally respected by his or her community is no guarantee that he or she is a healthy person who has your best interests at heart. Not all of the criminals in the world are in jail; not by a lot. Not all of the sick or very confused people in the world are in psychiatric hospitals or in counseling; not by a lot.
The world has good in it, but it also has danger and you’re in the danger. You ARE being abused; you ARE being exploited, and as in most exploitative situations, getting into that situation is a lot easier at the beginning than what happens later, especially when you want to get out.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 20, 2010 @ 10:41 p.m.
It looks as if I need to talk about Iran some more tonight.
I think it's likely that the civil side of Iran's government does whatever it wants, regardless of religion. I think that the women of and associated with the civil side of Iran's government do whatever they want, wear whatever they want, go wherever they want. I think that the women in and associated the rich and powerful families and businesses in Iran do and wear whatever they want and go wherever they want.
I think that the civil side of the Iranian government uses the religious side of the Iranian government to oppress Iran's citizens; religion is the excuse and the means by which the dictatorship is maintained.
The United States doesn't allow polygamy, and it would appear that Iran does--for men. You can have more than one wife in Iran, but you're not supposed to do that here; it's illegal and considered immoral.
You can't kill people or keep them in jail for no reason, and that's what Iran does and wants to continue to do, and that's what the United States and other countries that consider themselves modern and benevolent and which present themselves to the rest of the world that way need to talk Iran out of doing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not sure what happened the other day, whether Weebly spontaneously decided to try to suppress my blog here or if it was pressured into doing so. Next I'm going to put a picture I took of the message I started getting on my screen from Weebly when I was writing about the pedophilia that's been happening; the message told me to log out because Weebly was "upgrading," and when I tried to log back in, I couldn't.
I took a picture of what my screen looked like before Weebly logged me out, and then I went to my Friendster profile and wrote about what was happening.
November 20, 2010 @ 10:59 p.m.
Next I’m going to put what I wrote on Friendster right after my Weebly blog was suppressed on November 19, 2010.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From my Friendster profile: November 19, 2010 @ 4:33 a.m.
The first time that my blog on Weebly ever got attacked, it was during the summer of 2010 and I was writing about Brian Williams and his harassment efforts.
The computer that runs off the TV screen also got attacked and was inoperable as a computer for quite a while.
There is absolutely no reason why I can't re-publish my discussion of how Brian Williams stole my idea for "Making A Difference" somewhere else on the Internet. He can't hide what he did.
As for the other things that I've said; they're just speculation. If I'm a lunatic, and nobody reads my blog the way the harassers who laugh at me want to claim, then why bother suppressing it?
The U.S. government has made no secret of its sexual harassment, threats, and other things that it has done and encouraged others to do; in fact, the U.S. government has been very sneering and proud to do all of what it's done right out where everyone can see it.
"Marlene Targ Brill," whose websites threaten about putting tape over kids's mouths, bags over their heads and locking them in closets for talking too much; she's still there on a Google search of the name "Barack Obama," at the bottom of the page, where it says:
"Barack Obama: Working To Make A Difference--Marlene Targ Brill."
"Target Lena the Fish-Vagina," in honor of Brian Williams, a thief, a liar, and a sexual harasser.
Even if "Marlene Targ Brill" has nothing to do with me, how is it or anything like it an appropriate thing for the President of the United States to be associated with?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The pictures of Patrick Leahy's website that I have in one of the photo albums on this profile show the steps he took to give public support to Vermont's police departments after the police departments had started getting used by Vermont public schools and the Burlington Free Press in order to threaten people to comply with sexual harassment and pedophilia.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One thing that I wrote tonight on my Weebly blog before it got suppressed was a reminder to high school and college students that everyone who is younger than a high school or college student sees teenagers and people in their 20's as better to emulate than people my age or older.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 19, 2010 @ 6:30 a.m.
Now I understand why the U.S. government has been unofficially but strongly endorsing the executions in Iran; it's because Barack Obama has had no success at all at negotiating with Iran over its interest in developing nuclear weapons. He's been a total failure at it, so he's trying to support stoning in order to make friends with the Iranian government in the hopes that Iran will then capitulate to his demands about the nuclear weapons issue.
You can't blame any country in this day and age for the country's wanting to have nuclear weapons. Certainly a country like the United States, with its vast army and arsenal, isn't going to get anywhere with a country the size of Iran by threatening it; all that's going to do is make it defensive, and why wouldn't it be defensive?
You can't make a country less of a hostile or dangerous place to anyone if you show support for its human rights violations. Supporting the stoning, hanging, or any of those execution or prison sentences and then continuing to pressure Iran to abandon its interest in developing nuclear weapons is counterproductive to any kind of long-term stability; it is, in fact, a direct route to more conflict because it is pandering to and then threatening a dictator and dictators always want more of whatever it is that they've decided that they want.
What's more, Iran's policies about stoning, the reasons it gives for arresting people, and much of the rest of what it has demonstrated about its legal system or lack thereof according to modern standards, are all contributing to a worldwide image of Islam as a religion of cruel extremists who have no interest in or even ability to become a part of the modern world in a productive way. In supporting Iran's policies about how it treats its own citizens and the citizens of other countries, the U.S. government is not only undermining the ability of non-extremist, modern Muslims to present themselves to a world that will accept them without suspicion, the U.S. government is supporting an image of Islam that is extreme and violent and in so doing is being far more supportive by example if not in words of Muslims who are part of terrorist activities than of those who disagree with the use of terrorism.
My Weebly blog got suppressed a couple of hours ago; that's why I'm writing here.
I just did a Google search on the name Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran; he's stating that the world has to let him stone those prisoners or the world will get nowhere with him about the nuclear weapons issue. He's also saying that the fact that there are women on death row in the United States means that the United States has no right to criticize his legal system.
First of all, there are a lot of people in the United States who disagree with the death penalty; for example, the American Civil Liberties Union. I don't always agree with the ACLU, but there's no question that one of its primary purposes is to look at issues from both a legal and a moral standpoint, free of immediate, political pressures. Is it a pure, legal entity, made up only of scholars who can't be swayed by their own prejudices and concerns? Probably not, but as far as I know, such a group doesn't exist.
Second of all, in order to be on death row in the United States, there has to be a lot of evidence that you not only committed a terrible, terrible crime, you are completely incapable of being reformed in any way, and you also have to have been given the sentence in a court that supports the death penalty. Again, a lot of people in the United States who work in law in various capacities disagree with the death penalty, even for obvious, serious, long-term criminals who have committed multiple, terrible, deliberately sadistic and brutal crimes in which there is no possible doubt that they did what they were accused of doing.
I am undecided about the death penalty in the United States for the kind of convicted criminals for whom it is supposed to be reserved. There is a side of me that shrinks from the thought of any kind of execution for anyone, but there is also a side of me that can't stand the thought of those people ever being let out of jail and that also thinks that if I were a criminal and I had a choice between spending the rest of my life in jail or being executed, I'd rather die. Again, the death penalty in the United States is supposed to be reserved for people who have not only committed crimes such as murder but who have been deemed incapable of feeling remorse or being rehabilitated in any way; it is not my impression that any of the prisoners in Iran that have been in the news as a result of the efforts of agencies such as Amnesty International fit the profile of unrepentant, determinedly sadistic criminals who enjoy harming others and who are guaranteed to commit more terrible crimes if they are released back into general society.
Furthermore, prisons in the United States aren't supposed to whip people, and they're definitely not supposed to whip people while saying that the reason for the whipping is that a foreign newspaper printed a prisoner's picture in the paper, whether the picture was there by mistake or not.
American police aren't supposed to arrest journalists for being journalists, sons for being sons, or lawyers for being lawyers; these are all ways in which the American legal system has decided not to be like the Iranian legal system, at least in theory and most of the time in practice, too.
The President of Iran has turned those prisoners into hostages and is using them as leverage for the approaching talks about the the nuclear weapons issue; allow those prisoners to die or remain in jail, and those negotiations will be tainted with blood from that point on.
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will never erase those deaths or the continued detainment of those prisoners from the legacy of President Obama's time in office; maybe the government can suppress my blogs, even all of my blogs, but other people know what's going on, and getting rid of me isn't going to erase what has happened.
Was it the plan of the White House all along to sacrifice the prisoners in Iran to the nuclear weapons negotiations? It was, wasn't it? That's why the White House staff created that blog post for Michelle Obama on September 16, 2010, in which it had a bleeding, red letter "A," two General Electric Ecoimagination Challenge ads that said "Submit Now" and a picture of Carla Bruni; the White House was trying to make it look as if Michelle Obama were threatening Carla Bruni but really what was going on was that the U.S. government was trying to threaten France into ceasing its condemnation of the executions so that the United States could have an easier time threatening Iran about Iran's interest in developing nuclear weapons.
Human sacrifice; that's all it's been. The President of Iran is right about one thing; what right does the U.S. government have to call anyone else savage?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 20, 2010 @ 11:20
Next I’m going to put pictures of the front page of the September 7, 2010 edition of the Burlington Free Press. All of the front pages of all copies of the September 7, 2010 Burlington Free Press looked like this; Jim Fogler, the new President and Publisher of the Burlington Free Press as of September, 2010, had spattered red ink over the front page, across a story about Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani and a few other stories including one about a pregnant Amish woman who died after a buggy crash. The red ink was made to look like blood, and those blood-spattered stories were put next to a picture of President Obama smiling and giving a thumbs-up sign.
On the other side of the picture of President Obama there was a story entitled “It turns out money can buy happiness.” The front page of that edition of the Burlington Free Press, like the front page of many editions of the Burlington Free Press for months before and months since, had more harassment on it. The first story said “So long, Summer: Season was a little hotter and a little wetter than average, so let the winter guessing game begin.” That front page was only the beginning of the sexual harassment present in the Burlington Free Press on September 7, 2010; I still have pictures of what most of the newspaper looked like on that day. There was harassment on every page; it had been that way for months by then.
It was the September 7, 2010 copy of the Burlington Free Press that made me look up the name Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani on the Internet for the first time.
Next I’m going to put what I wrote on Friendster right after my Weebly blog was suppressed on November 19, 2010.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From my Friendster profile: November 19, 2010 @ 4:33 a.m.
The first time that my blog on Weebly ever got attacked, it was during the summer of 2010 and I was writing about Brian Williams and his harassment efforts.
The computer that runs off the TV screen also got attacked and was inoperable as a computer for quite a while.
There is absolutely no reason why I can't re-publish my discussion of how Brian Williams stole my idea for "Making A Difference" somewhere else on the Internet. He can't hide what he did.
As for the other things that I've said; they're just speculation. If I'm a lunatic, and nobody reads my blog the way the harassers who laugh at me want to claim, then why bother suppressing it?
The U.S. government has made no secret of its sexual harassment, threats, and other things that it has done and encouraged others to do; in fact, the U.S. government has been very sneering and proud to do all of what it's done right out where everyone can see it.
"Marlene Targ Brill," whose websites threaten about putting tape over kids's mouths, bags over their heads and locking them in closets for talking too much; she's still there on a Google search of the name "Barack Obama," at the bottom of the page, where it says:
"Barack Obama: Working To Make A Difference--Marlene Targ Brill."
"Target Lena the Fish-Vagina," in honor of Brian Williams, a thief, a liar, and a sexual harasser.
Even if "Marlene Targ Brill" has nothing to do with me, how is it or anything like it an appropriate thing for the President of the United States to be associated with?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The pictures of Patrick Leahy's website that I have in one of the photo albums on this profile show the steps he took to give public support to Vermont's police departments after the police departments had started getting used by Vermont public schools and the Burlington Free Press in order to threaten people to comply with sexual harassment and pedophilia.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One thing that I wrote tonight on my Weebly blog before it got suppressed was a reminder to high school and college students that everyone who is younger than a high school or college student sees teenagers and people in their 20's as better to emulate than people my age or older.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 19, 2010 @ 6:30 a.m.
Now I understand why the U.S. government has been unofficially but strongly endorsing the executions in Iran; it's because Barack Obama has had no success at all at negotiating with Iran over its interest in developing nuclear weapons. He's been a total failure at it, so he's trying to support stoning in order to make friends with the Iranian government in the hopes that Iran will then capitulate to his demands about the nuclear weapons issue.
You can't blame any country in this day and age for the country's wanting to have nuclear weapons. Certainly a country like the United States, with its vast army and arsenal, isn't going to get anywhere with a country the size of Iran by threatening it; all that's going to do is make it defensive, and why wouldn't it be defensive?
You can't make a country less of a hostile or dangerous place to anyone if you show support for its human rights violations. Supporting the stoning, hanging, or any of those execution or prison sentences and then continuing to pressure Iran to abandon its interest in developing nuclear weapons is counterproductive to any kind of long-term stability; it is, in fact, a direct route to more conflict because it is pandering to and then threatening a dictator and dictators always want more of whatever it is that they've decided that they want.
What's more, Iran's policies about stoning, the reasons it gives for arresting people, and much of the rest of what it has demonstrated about its legal system or lack thereof according to modern standards, are all contributing to a worldwide image of Islam as a religion of cruel extremists who have no interest in or even ability to become a part of the modern world in a productive way. In supporting Iran's policies about how it treats its own citizens and the citizens of other countries, the U.S. government is not only undermining the ability of non-extremist, modern Muslims to present themselves to a world that will accept them without suspicion, the U.S. government is supporting an image of Islam that is extreme and violent and in so doing is being far more supportive by example if not in words of Muslims who are part of terrorist activities than of those who disagree with the use of terrorism.
My Weebly blog got suppressed a couple of hours ago; that's why I'm writing here.
I just did a Google search on the name Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran; he's stating that the world has to let him stone those prisoners or the world will get nowhere with him about the nuclear weapons issue. He's also saying that the fact that there are women on death row in the United States means that the United States has no right to criticize his legal system.
First of all, there are a lot of people in the United States who disagree with the death penalty; for example, the American Civil Liberties Union. I don't always agree with the ACLU, but there's no question that one of its primary purposes is to look at issues from both a legal and a moral standpoint, free of immediate, political pressures. Is it a pure, legal entity, made up only of scholars who can't be swayed by their own prejudices and concerns? Probably not, but as far as I know, such a group doesn't exist.
Second of all, in order to be on death row in the United States, there has to be a lot of evidence that you not only committed a terrible, terrible crime, you are completely incapable of being reformed in any way, and you also have to have been given the sentence in a court that supports the death penalty. Again, a lot of people in the United States who work in law in various capacities disagree with the death penalty, even for obvious, serious, long-term criminals who have committed multiple, terrible, deliberately sadistic and brutal crimes in which there is no possible doubt that they did what they were accused of doing.
I am undecided about the death penalty in the United States for the kind of convicted criminals for whom it is supposed to be reserved. There is a side of me that shrinks from the thought of any kind of execution for anyone, but there is also a side of me that can't stand the thought of those people ever being let out of jail and that also thinks that if I were a criminal and I had a choice between spending the rest of my life in jail or being executed, I'd rather die. Again, the death penalty in the United States is supposed to be reserved for people who have not only committed crimes such as murder but who have been deemed incapable of feeling remorse or being rehabilitated in any way; it is not my impression that any of the prisoners in Iran that have been in the news as a result of the efforts of agencies such as Amnesty International fit the profile of unrepentant, determinedly sadistic criminals who enjoy harming others and who are guaranteed to commit more terrible crimes if they are released back into general society.
Furthermore, prisons in the United States aren't supposed to whip people, and they're definitely not supposed to whip people while saying that the reason for the whipping is that a foreign newspaper printed a prisoner's picture in the paper, whether the picture was there by mistake or not.
American police aren't supposed to arrest journalists for being journalists, sons for being sons, or lawyers for being lawyers; these are all ways in which the American legal system has decided not to be like the Iranian legal system, at least in theory and most of the time in practice, too.
The President of Iran has turned those prisoners into hostages and is using them as leverage for the approaching talks about the the nuclear weapons issue; allow those prisoners to die or remain in jail, and those negotiations will be tainted with blood from that point on.
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will never erase those deaths or the continued detainment of those prisoners from the legacy of President Obama's time in office; maybe the government can suppress my blogs, even all of my blogs, but other people know what's going on, and getting rid of me isn't going to erase what has happened.
Was it the plan of the White House all along to sacrifice the prisoners in Iran to the nuclear weapons negotiations? It was, wasn't it? That's why the White House staff created that blog post for Michelle Obama on September 16, 2010, in which it had a bleeding, red letter "A," two General Electric Ecoimagination Challenge ads that said "Submit Now" and a picture of Carla Bruni; the White House was trying to make it look as if Michelle Obama were threatening Carla Bruni but really what was going on was that the U.S. government was trying to threaten France into ceasing its condemnation of the executions so that the United States could have an easier time threatening Iran about Iran's interest in developing nuclear weapons.
Human sacrifice; that's all it's been. The President of Iran is right about one thing; what right does the U.S. government have to call anyone else savage?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 20, 2010 @ 11:20
Next I’m going to put pictures of the front page of the September 7, 2010 edition of the Burlington Free Press. All of the front pages of all copies of the September 7, 2010 Burlington Free Press looked like this; Jim Fogler, the new President and Publisher of the Burlington Free Press as of September, 2010, had spattered red ink over the front page, across a story about Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani and a few other stories including one about a pregnant Amish woman who died after a buggy crash. The red ink was made to look like blood, and those blood-spattered stories were put next to a picture of President Obama smiling and giving a thumbs-up sign.
On the other side of the picture of President Obama there was a story entitled “It turns out money can buy happiness.” The front page of that edition of the Burlington Free Press, like the front page of many editions of the Burlington Free Press for months before and months since, had more harassment on it. The first story said “So long, Summer: Season was a little hotter and a little wetter than average, so let the winter guessing game begin.” That front page was only the beginning of the sexual harassment present in the Burlington Free Press on September 7, 2010; I still have pictures of what most of the newspaper looked like on that day. There was harassment on every page; it had been that way for months by then.
It was the September 7, 2010 copy of the Burlington Free Press that made me look up the name Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani on the Internet for the first time.
November 20, 2010 @ 11:40 p.m.
I’ve been wondering lately if there are women of Baby Boomer age who are supportive of the harassment because they don’t realize that it’s harassment. They are perhaps women who see me as a reincarnation of their own mothers, who lived and raised children during a time that forbid discussion of sex in any way; perhaps those Baby Boomer women think I’m being prudish.
I think that what those Baby Boomer women may not have realized is that the harassers are using modern-day permissiveness about what people discuss in public and the ways that people talk and present themselves in public in order to return women to an era which is much like what they, these Baby Boomer women, rebelled against. How you talk about sex and how you direct your comments is as important if not more important than the language that you use; to put it bluntly, the harassers have been calling me a c--- and a dirty slut for 9 months, and before that the first of the harassers were taunting me about my psychiatric history and making ugly jokes about my being Jewish. None of the earlier harassing jokes and taunts have gone away; the sexual harassment has been added to them.
It couldn’t be more like the worst of the 1950’s and then some; no matter what I do, they are trying to define me by my gender and by other things about me that they think or want others to believe make me inferior. They do it for their own purposes and against all of my protests about it, and very much against the spirit and intention of all anti-discrimination laws.
Copyright L. Kochman November 20, 2010
I’ve been wondering lately if there are women of Baby Boomer age who are supportive of the harassment because they don’t realize that it’s harassment. They are perhaps women who see me as a reincarnation of their own mothers, who lived and raised children during a time that forbid discussion of sex in any way; perhaps those Baby Boomer women think I’m being prudish.
I think that what those Baby Boomer women may not have realized is that the harassers are using modern-day permissiveness about what people discuss in public and the ways that people talk and present themselves in public in order to return women to an era which is much like what they, these Baby Boomer women, rebelled against. How you talk about sex and how you direct your comments is as important if not more important than the language that you use; to put it bluntly, the harassers have been calling me a c--- and a dirty slut for 9 months, and before that the first of the harassers were taunting me about my psychiatric history and making ugly jokes about my being Jewish. None of the earlier harassing jokes and taunts have gone away; the sexual harassment has been added to them.
It couldn’t be more like the worst of the 1950’s and then some; no matter what I do, they are trying to define me by my gender and by other things about me that they think or want others to believe make me inferior. They do it for their own purposes and against all of my protests about it, and very much against the spirit and intention of all anti-discrimination laws.
Copyright L. Kochman November 20, 2010