November 9, 2010
--A note about mistakes
--Nothing less than full equality
--The GOP website and fundraising/ 2012 campaign plans
--The Burlington Free Press November 8, 2010
--Another therapist gone
--Privacy concerns, among other concerns: Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani still under attack by reporters and the Internet
--A note about mistakes
I think that there are people who are as concerned as I am about what has happened over the past several months and about the implications that it has for how the government might become habituated to treating people. I think that it’s for that reason that I get forgiven for making errors, whether they’re fact-checking errors or moments when I say or do the wrong thing.
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--Nothing less than full equality
There’s nothing that the President or anybody else can offer me that will take the place of equality for women and the complete cessation of all support for the gender discrimination, harassment and death threats.
Whatever it is, whether it’s more threats, flattery or human chattel, it’s not going to work.
--The GOP website and fundraising/2012 campaign plans
I wrote almost all of this yesterday, November 8, 2010:
While the Democratic White House, led by President Obama, was fighting with me over its policy of degradation of and violence toward women, the GOP swept the country. At the very least, a great deal of the time and energy of the harassing faction of the Democratic Party, both locally and in Washington, was taken up by dealing with the problems that I’m sure they never expected they’d have when they decided to go after me; how could they give their attention to other issues when every day they were creating a new crisis for themselves with their behavior?
However, the Republican Party isn’t about to give up the opportunity created by President Obama and his Democratic followers to get a lot of money and support from the same group of Hollywood, media and corporate individuals and entities that started the harassment in the first place and that wants political power.
Below the huge captions on the GOP website that say “YOU FIRED PELOSI! GUESS WHO’S NEXT?” AND “FACES OF NEW REPUBLICAN LEADERS,” there are other captions, one of which says “Women Generated The Wave.” When I followed that caption to its page, I saw that the Republican Party had done the same thing that the leaders of the Democratic Party in the White House have done, which was to cover the page with rude and disparaging comments about other people; in fact, the Republican Party seemed to have been both mocking me and wooing me, because the first comment, supposedly by "James Reid," included a paraphrase of some of the things I've said in the past couple of days combined with something I’d said, and meant at the time I said it, about a bunch of Hollywood stars several weeks ago.
However, I NEVER said that any Democrats should become Republicans. I did say that I didn't think that President Obama understood the needs of the general population, but I didn't call him a loser; I've never called him a loser.
--A note about mistakes
--Nothing less than full equality
--The GOP website and fundraising/ 2012 campaign plans
--The Burlington Free Press November 8, 2010
--Another therapist gone
--Privacy concerns, among other concerns: Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani still under attack by reporters and the Internet
--A note about mistakes
I think that there are people who are as concerned as I am about what has happened over the past several months and about the implications that it has for how the government might become habituated to treating people. I think that it’s for that reason that I get forgiven for making errors, whether they’re fact-checking errors or moments when I say or do the wrong thing.
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--Nothing less than full equality
There’s nothing that the President or anybody else can offer me that will take the place of equality for women and the complete cessation of all support for the gender discrimination, harassment and death threats.
Whatever it is, whether it’s more threats, flattery or human chattel, it’s not going to work.
--The GOP website and fundraising/2012 campaign plans
I wrote almost all of this yesterday, November 8, 2010:
While the Democratic White House, led by President Obama, was fighting with me over its policy of degradation of and violence toward women, the GOP swept the country. At the very least, a great deal of the time and energy of the harassing faction of the Democratic Party, both locally and in Washington, was taken up by dealing with the problems that I’m sure they never expected they’d have when they decided to go after me; how could they give their attention to other issues when every day they were creating a new crisis for themselves with their behavior?
However, the Republican Party isn’t about to give up the opportunity created by President Obama and his Democratic followers to get a lot of money and support from the same group of Hollywood, media and corporate individuals and entities that started the harassment in the first place and that wants political power.
Below the huge captions on the GOP website that say “YOU FIRED PELOSI! GUESS WHO’S NEXT?” AND “FACES OF NEW REPUBLICAN LEADERS,” there are other captions, one of which says “Women Generated The Wave.” When I followed that caption to its page, I saw that the Republican Party had done the same thing that the leaders of the Democratic Party in the White House have done, which was to cover the page with rude and disparaging comments about other people; in fact, the Republican Party seemed to have been both mocking me and wooing me, because the first comment, supposedly by "James Reid," included a paraphrase of some of the things I've said in the past couple of days combined with something I’d said, and meant at the time I said it, about a bunch of Hollywood stars several weeks ago.
However, I NEVER said that any Democrats should become Republicans. I did say that I didn't think that President Obama understood the needs of the general population, but I didn't call him a loser; I've never called him a loser.
Almost as soon as I had looked at the "Women Generated The Wave" page, it changed. One of the things that the new essay on the page said was “According to exit polling of U.S. House races nationwide, the gender gap historically enjoyed by Democrat candidates was almost non-existent on Tuesday night (November 2, 2010). CNN reported “this ties 2002 as the lowest ever female vote for Democrats.”
Whatever the Republican Party is trying to say about the Democratic Party on that page, what’s really going on is that the Republican Party wants to cash in, literally and figuratively, on what the Democratic Party started but couldn’t capitalize on in the past few months. The government en masse is offering political power and I think also a not-terribly-circuitous route to business opportunities for already rich and/or influential people and business who are willing to invest in the policies of sexual harassment and threatening behavior that the Obama administration has been endorsing since the summer of 2010.
In addition to pedophilic references and stories whenever it thinks it can get away with them, every week the Burlington Free Press chooses to print quotes from its featured high school “Academic All-Stars” or student athlete section that demonstrate that high school students in Vermont are getting the message that sexual harassment and threatening behavior are perfectly acceptable and good things to do. Every week, it’s obvious that another high school student hopes to be quoted by me on my blog as having made a “fish” or “cheese” comment, or something that has to do with water, rivers, and so on.
This situation is going to have a big, long-term, bad effect not just on American society but all around the world; leaders of other countries are watching what’s going on, and they’re getting the message that the government and a lot of other factions of the United States are committed to turning women into permanent, second class citizens.
In 1920, women in the United States got the right to vote. It hasn’t even been 100 years that women had any say at all.
There’s been no time in the history of the United States that women have generally had the same rights, responsibilities and privileges as men, and there’s been no time when women have been socially considered equal to men. The ugliness and unfairness of this situation have their roots in our country’s heritage of inequality; the Obama administration could have chosen to try to heal that part of our heritage, but it chose to exploit it instead, and now, after the GOP has exploited the weakness to the Democratic Party that the Obama administration’s behavior caused, the GOP wants to move in to take the White House in 2012 and during that process to develop a diversified power structure in the media, the entertainment industry and corporate America by employing the same tactics as the Democrats for the 2012 election and probably in general from now on.
One thing that I wrote a while ago was that it seemed to me that Hollywood and much of the entertainment industry in the United States have been in the same loop for at least 50 years. Once TV started to make people so famous that they couldn’t go anywhere without being followed around, movie stars and all who deal with them became isolated from the rest of society. The social beliefs and practices from a time before the civil rights movement have been passed on almost fully intact in that business, decade after decade, and the lives that people involved in that business lead and the beliefs that they have about themselves and about society have also stayed the same decade after decade.
Hollywood is not a place or business that encourages its stars to interact with reality or with the modern world in any significant way; it seems to discourage that sort of interaction on every level. This past summer the Obama administration, hoping to gain money, votes and influence by exploiting the time capsule that is the entertainment industry, began to make every attempt to bring that industry’s archaic and stultifying ideas back to life in the rest of the world.
During the same decades that the entertainment industry has gone nowhere in terms of its social attitudes and intellectual development except to become a bizarre, perverse combination of grotesque, violent depravity with a rigidly adhered-to 1950’s American social code for gender relations, the pre-civil rights movement social values have been gradually and correctly fading out of the rest of the educated and responsible world. Until the past few months, it would have been completely taboo for any employee in what was considered a normal workplace in the 21st century to make repetitive comments such as “leak” or “fish” or any of the other things that have been getting said, but now that’s happening in workplaces in addition to happening in schools.
Intellectually, the best of the media are more or less in the middle; there are too many people in the media who have both formal educations and constant exposure to new information and facts about what society is really doing for the media to be completely given over to discrimination. I think that’s most true of the most respected newspapers; I am frequently unhappy with the New York Times and others like that newspaper, but I know that people who have to write every day for those kinds of newspapers are generally incapable of staying as uninformed and therefore bigoted as most of the people who work in news, from TV shows to weekly magazines. How those newspapers choose to bias what they write about is another story, but even so, there are a lot of smart people working in news and, unfortunately, it usually takes some intelligence to recognize intelligence, to develop principles, and to adapt to higher standards of social behavior than the standards to which some people are used to or would rather live by.
One thing that has seemed to happen a lot in the media over the past few months was that even newspapers that were willing to criticize President Obama weren’t interested in giving up being discriminatory and threatening against women and against all who respect women. It’s my impression that the President’s behavior and subsequent behavior of his staff and much of the Democratic Party and now the Republican Party have seemed like a collective godsend to everyone who has ever chafed under the burden of treating women, minorities, the disabled, those labeled as mentally ill, the aged, the young, the poor or anybody else respectfully. No wonder the media harassers and others like them accused me of "raining" on their parade; for them, the Obama administration’s endorsement of discrimination and harassment was as if the sun had suddenly made an appearance after being obscured by all the gains made by those who worked on civil rights issues since the United States began as a country.
Any time that you offer power, no matter how you offer it or how unfair the terms of it are, there will always be people who want it and who aren’t concerned with the consequences to society of encouraging the corruption; I think that’s also what happened with the media, which was willing to say “The GOP’s going to win!” but not “The President Should Stop What He’s Doing Because It’s Wrong!” thereby helping the GOP to win without getting the President to stop being discriminatory. Also, more men still have more money, power and better jobs than women do; those men, in addition to men who hope to become more powerful than they are and who will exploit discrimination to do so, and the women who have no concern for anyone but themselves, aren’t interested in having the discrimination end. That’s true in every business, from the media to small business to big business in the United States.
It seems to me that winning is a central value in the value system of politics as they are currently practiced in this country. Everybody likes to win rather than lose; that’s human nature, and I think that the temptation to do whatever works must be stronger in politics than in other lines of work where doing something bad brings more opportunity for immediate punishment than for power.
I wonder how the next couple of years are going to look. It seems to me that in the months leading up to the November 2, 2010 election, the Democratic Party across the country must have been demoralized by the behavior of the Obama administration; how could the Democratic Party not be demoralized by a President and then his staff who betrayed the principles of everything that the Democratic Party has claimed to be? The Obama administration has destroyed the sense of moral superiority that the Democratic Party is used to having about itself in comparison to the Republican Party. The Obama administration has made a total, blatant, and unabashed lie out of the idea that the Democratic Party respects women and the rights of individuals not to be bullied by the government, to live free, responsible and enlightened lives. The Obama administration has destroyed much of what the Democratic Party considered its personal identity, that which separated it and made it feel distinct from and morally better than the Republican Party; there’s nothing enlightened about what the Obama administration has done or continues to do, and there’s certainly nothing in what the Obama administration has done and continues to do that is in any way morally superior to any philosophy about women, secret or otherwise, that the Republican Party might have.
As many people in the Democratic Party who might have been involved in the gender discrimination and threats as there have been, the situation has to have caused immense confusion within the Party and an inability to make decisions, enough confusion to make it incapable of winning most of the country on November 2, 2010.
There are a lot of people in Vermont who, like me, generally prefer what has up until recently been the outward, social philosophy of the Democratic Party; equal rights for everyone, making sure that all kinds of people have a chance to succeed, that kind of thing. I think that probably there were a lot of people here who were afraid that electing a Republican governor would lead to restrictions on abortion rights and funding; if Peter Shumlin got the votes of women who knew about the harassment, those women probably weighed the harassment against the Democratic Party’s usual views on abortion and chose the lesser of two immediate evils. You’ll notice that even I didn’t go so far as to endorse Brian Dubie, the Republican candidate for Governor of Vermont; I tried to find a middle ground by voting for neither of them.
Even with Vice President Biden's visit to Vermont, it was a close race for Governor, and our new Lieutenant Governor is a Republican. According to the unofficial election results, Democrat Peter Shumlin won the race for Vermont Governor over Republican Brian Dubie by 4,331 votes. Those results were posted on the website of the Vermont Secretary of State; that website has stated that the official results from the election will be posted today, Tuesday, November 9, 2010, around noon.
No matter who’s in office now, the discrimination, harassment and threats will lead to decreases in federal and state abortion funding, will lead to more restrictions on abortion and eventually to the overturning of abortion rights altogether. What’s happening in politics now will lead to women being passed over for jobs in favor of men, will lead to women being passed over for admittance to college, graduate and professional school in favor of men, will lead to the disappearance of one opportunity after another that female high school and college students who show up in the Burlington Free Press trying to get publicity by making harassing statements have spent their entire lives assuming will always be there for them. What’s happening now in politics, in the media, in corporations and in the entertainment industry will quickly lead to women being treated worse in the United States than they have been treated since long before the turn of this century. Change the society, and the society will change the law.
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--The November 8, 2010 Burlington Free Press
For a long time I had wondered what was making Vermont a socially backwards place, but seeing the relationships of politics and some prominent people here exposed over the past few months helped me understand; Vermont is corrupt, and has been corrupt for decades. It’s a small state but really it’s just a big, small town.
The Burlington Free Press has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Vermont. The Burlington Free Press is also owned by Gannet, an out-of-state media corporation.
The first headline on the front page of the Burlington Free Press from November 8, 2010 says “Water leak shuts Vt. Yankee.” Next to that article is the lead for another article about UVM students; it has a picture of 3 UVM students in it, including a young woman. At the bottom of the page, there’s an ad for the “New Toyota 2010 FJ Cruiser Special.”
On page 2A, below a caption that says “Nation/World,” is another caption that says “Picture of the Day.” The picture is of marathoners crossing a bridge.
On page 3A, there’s a large article entitled “Tiny Pa. college buoyed by gift of $30 million.”
On page 5A, which is the beginning of the November 8, 2010 “Vermont” section, the first story says “Principals negotiate raise: School Board to review contract proposal.”
Below that story is a story about Tasha Tudor that says “Tudor court battle opens: Children of illustrator fight over estate.” I’m curious as to why the Burlington Free Press put that story next to another story called “Fish club auctions tropicals,” since the article about the late Ms. Tudor says “It’s Tasha Tudor’s image that may take a beating in the five-day trial...” Is the Burlington Free Press really concerned about Ms. Tudor’s image, because I’m not getting that impression.
On page 7A, there’s the end of the fish story, announced by the largest headline on the page, which says “AUCTION: Fish sold.”
Next to that story is a section entitled “In Brief,” which contains two small articles, one of which is about the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, while the other is called “Swanton youth shoots 10-point buck.” Next to the “In Brief” section is a list entitled “Bloodmobile,” which says “This is a list of New England Region Red Cross Bloodmobile stops in Vermont this week,” followed by the list of stops. The Obituary section covers the rest of page 7A.
On page 9A, the cartoon "Blondie" is as follows:
--Omigoodness, look what Alex posted! “I wanna quit school, join the circus, and dance with the wild three-eyed purple squids.”
--I promise, I don’t wanna dance with the wild squids! I was quoting a hot new song lyric!
--Maybe we shouldn’t have let them be our Facebook friends.
--It sure seems to make ‘em jumpy
--Cookie! Who is this “Jivin’ Jude the Party Dude”?!
Also on page 9A, the cartoon Mark Trail is as follows:
--Frank presses down on the gas pedal and speeds toward Mark.
--Holy Mackerel! What’s he doing?
--What the--
--Suddenly a deer bounds out of the woods in front of Frank.
The front page of the “B” section has the beginning of the story about UVM students. Above another picture of the young woman and two men, the largest title on the page says “INTERNAL WORKINGS.”
The “B” section also contains something that I haven’t taken a lot of issue with, but which I think is meant to be harassing anyway. Have people been calling me “Kit Kittredge,” as in the movie about a little girl who wants to be a reporter? Next to an ad for a business called “Kittredge,” there’s an ad that says “You just turned 100; Us? A mere 90. The Chamber found our location and promoted it way back in 1920—and we’ve had a great partnership ever since. Together, it’s been quite an adventure. Congratulations on your 100th birthday. Burlington International Airport.”
I worked for the restaurant at the Burlington International Airport during the summer of 2007. For more than a month, they paid me $3 an hour less than they had hired me for; I made $5.00 an hour plus what I made in tips and commission on sales as one of the food cart attendants in each wing of the airport. I was still able to pay my rent and expenses from that, but when the restaurant fired me soon after I pointed out to the managers that they owed me something like $350, they told me I was lying and that they didn’t owe me any money. These were people for whom I once sold $1000 worth of snacks, packaged sandwiches, coffee and soda in one 6-hour, afternoon shift. There was never anything on the cart or in the refrigerator that cost more than $6.50. It was only after I’d been fired and I called the restaurant and let them know that I was going to take them to small claims court that they sent me a check for what they owed me.
It’s ironic that this ad that the Burlington Free Press has used to call me 100 years old celebrates something that began in 1920, the same year that women in the United States first got the legal right to vote. I’m 36; 36 isn’t even close to being 100.
On page 6B, there’s the “CareerBuilder” section, which is the employment section.
To begin with are two large, side by side ads, one that says “Vermont Creamery: Quality Control Supervisor: Vermont Butter and Cheese Creamery....” while the other ad has a picture of a little boy above a caption that says “P/T Bus Monitors: Part-time bus monitors needed to ride the CCTA busses each morning and afternoon when students are in school. 4 hrs/day, 7 to 9 am and 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Burlington School District”
Page 8B is the first page of today’s “Sports” section. Some of the headlines that are meant to be “pig” and “sealife” references read as follows:
--“Hamlin takes Cup lead with 2 to go: Overtakes Johnson with 8th victory”
--“Giants pummel Seahawks: Improve to 6-2.”
On page 12B, there is the end of the cover story about UVM students that was begun on the front page of the “A” or first section. Here are the ads that the Burlington Free Press put below the article about and picture of three UVM students, two male and one female:
--The Burlington Free Press’s ad with a picture of a piggy bank
--“The Skinny Pancake’s” ad that says “Late fall: dark, cold, rainy...perfect for SKINNY DIPPING!” That ad also includes the ad for the new “Chubby Muffin: Skinny Prices, Chubby Muffins. Home of the $5 local beef burger, the $3 egg ‘n cheese quickie....and MUFFINS!!”
--“Custom Drinkware Sale!: Pints, Mugs, Bottles”
--“Give the Gift of Relaxation:” an ad for a spa/ culinary resort with a picture of a pool
--An ad that says “Keep the Change,” with rebates offered from a heating, plumbing and air conditioning company. There’s a picture of planet Earth in that ad, above a caption that says “Change that’s good for all of us....”
I think that if James Fogler continues in Vermont as the President and Publisher of the Burlington Free Press, his presence and his use of the Burlington Free Press to give support to and to perpetuate harassment, death threats, exploitation and pedophilia will attract other predators such as Mr. Fogler to Vermont. I’ve said before that I think that Mr. Fogler wanted to replace Brad Robertson to run the Burlington Free Press in September, 2010 as a Gannett employee in Vermont because Mr. Fogler had heard about the harassment and pedophilia that the Burlington Free Press had been perpetuating and he wanted to be here so that he could express his own personal interests.
Everyone with a problem will show up in Vermont, looking for work not only in the media but in schools, child care, the public transportation system, government and law enforcement, just to name a few employers which have and have had both a professional obligation and a moral obligation not to endorse any kind of inappropriate and/or dangerous behavior toward anyone. Word will get out, if it hasn’t already, that Vermont is a great place to be a criminal, especially for sexual crimes and violent crimes, and most especially for crimes that are some combination of rape, murder and pedophilia. I think that Mr. Fogler and everyone else of the staff at the Burlington Free Press who enjoys and perpetuates the harassment, death threats and pedophilia, are waiting to see what happens in the big newspapers and the government this week. Will they get encouragement to continue the harassment and the threats? Will they get encouragement to use children and teenagers to make references to sex, violence and death? I would say that everyone else who runs or works at a smaller or community newspaper in Vermont who has been part of all of those things is waiting to find out the same answer, as are the schools, businesses and religious establishments that contributed to the problem.
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---Another therapist gone
I parted company with another therapist on November 8, 2010. I hadn’t talked to her about what’s been going on in terms of the harassment, the government, corporate America, the media, or any famous people, but for quite a while she’d been hinting that she knew about my blog and the general situation. She finally started talking to me last week about whether or not I thought I might have depression.
She had to have known that I wasn’t going to take being diagnosed or subsequently controlled by her; I think she was scared of what's been happening in regard to me and was looking for a way to get me to leave. She got what she wanted.
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--Privacy concerns, among other concerns: Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani still under attack by reporters and the Internet
I recorded and watched the movie “Avatar” from HBO the other night. At 7:05 p.m. on November 8, 2010, I did a Google search on the name “Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani,” and the second, most recent blog post for it had a picture from the movie “Avatar” on the blog post, along with harassing references along the entire side of the page.
The blog post was called “Latin America’s duty to Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani,” and the base of the story was the article with that name. Even the article itself is written by someone who is in support of the harassment. Matt Kennard of the guardian.co.uk, on Thursday, November 4, 2010, published an article called “Latin America’s duty to Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani: It’s shameful that other Latin American leaders have not followed Lula’s lead on offering sanctuary to Iran’s condemned woman."
Here’s what Mr. Kennard wrote in the middle of the article:
“Lula’s intervention was true to form. He is part of a historic movement in Latin America. After centuries of foreign dominion and interference, a collection of independent leaders has sprung up from the ranks of the poor who genuinely represent their people and are building better societies across the region, from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to Evo Morales in Bolivia. But most of these socialist leaders have made a strategic alliance with the Iranian regime as they try to build up relationships outside of US hegemony.
A trade relationship is understandable—the US has an ugly history of liquidating democracy in Latin America and installing their own tyrants to create a happy investment climate for their corporate interests. It’s only rational that the new wave of leftwing leaders try to build independent groupings.”
In other words, a British newspaper published an article condemning US foreign and corporate policy because it wants more control for Great Britain’s corporations in foreign countries. Also, yet another person has taken an interest in something I wrote about and written about it himself in order to get publicity while calling me a slut and maybe also a liar. “Kennard,” as in “canard?” Was that The Guardian’s joke? If so, I can’t imagine that Mr. Kennard wasn’t a willing participant in that joke.
November 9, 2010 @ 9:30 a.m.
In addition to the invasion of privacy indicated by the picture of the movie “Avatar,” the harassing references such as “old whine in new bottles,” references to the BP oil spill, and the ad for “Bestsellers from the Guardian shop: Mini dehumidifiers—buy one get one free,” all of which were placed along the side of the article but were not the only harassing references on that blog post, it looks as if the Presidents of Bolivia and Iran were making fun of me and making fun of the whole situation regarding the prisoners in Iran.
It doesn’t seem to me that the Presidents of Bolivia and Iran care what happens to the Iranian prisoners; neither of those Presidents seems to be taking the situation seriously, so why not let the prisoners go?
Why not let Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, her son, her lawyer, the two German nationals, Zeinab Jalalian and the 16 other prisoners that Amnesty International lists as being on death row at Evin Prison go? If even the President of Iran doesn’t care what happens to them, why not let them go?
Copyright L. Kochman November 9, 2010 @ 9:46 a.m.
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November 9, 2010
I'm in the process of taking pictures of the November 3, 2010 Hometown section of the Burlington Free Press that has the toddler wearing a "Fishing" sweatshirt on its front page and then pictures of children next to ads for "Direct Cremation Services" and Eileen Fisher ads.
I wrote about that Hometown section on my blog page entitled "From November 4, 2010." I should have taken pictures before and put them up, but I couldn't stand looking at any of it anymore.
Today, the Burlington Free Press is covered with pictures of people holding umbrellas. There's a picture of an alligator on the front page under a small story that says "Boat-towing gator sets record: A man who trapped and killed an alligator so big it pulled his boat around a lake has snared what authorities say is Florida's longest gator on record..." The ad for the Toyota "New 2010 FJ Cruiser Special" is again on the front page, below the picture of the alligator.
I'm sure there's more.
I NOTICED A BIG AD FOR PEPSI ALONG THE SIDE OF ONE OF VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN'S BLOG POSTS LAST NIGHT.
EVEN THOUGH THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IS SUPPOSEDLY CALLING FOR A HALT OF MS. ASHTIANI'S EXECUTION, LAST NIGHT VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN SHOWED THE HE WAS NOT ONLY IN SUPPORT OF THAT EXECUTION BUT THAT HE WAS ALSO IN SUPPORT OF THE IMPLICATION OF MICHELLE OBAMA'S SEPTEMBER 16, 2010 WEBSITE THAT, WITH ITS BLEEDING LETTER "A" AND PICTURE OF FRENCH FIRST LADY CARLA BRUNI NEXT TO ADS SAYING "SUBMIT NOW!" SEEMED TO BE SAYING THAT THE UNITED STATES THINKS IT HAS THE RIGHT TO THREATEN OTHER COUNTRIES FOR NO REASON.
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN'S PEPSI AD FROM LAST NIGHT WAS IN SUPPORT OF THE PEPSI AD THAT WAS RECENTLY AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE OF A BLOG POST ABOUT SAKINEH MOHAMMADI ASHTIANI. VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN WAS SHOWING SUPPORT FOR PEPSI'S COPY OF MICHELLE OBAMA'S MESSAGE "TO SUBMIT."
I also noticed last night that blog posts for President Obama had an ad which was most likely meant to be threatening to the TV show Friday Night Lights, and ads which were most likely meant to be threatening to relatives of mine who live in Brookline, MA.
@ 7:58 p.m.
One thing that I haven't mentioned in a while is that it seems to me that the U.S. government watches absolutely everything I do online 24-hours-a-day, every day. Here's why I think that:
There have been times when I have pulled up something on the Internet, left it on the screen and walked away from it, and the next thing I knew, what I had on screen was getting referenced on other people's blog posts. I bet that I can't type an @ sign into any of the search engines such as Google or Bing or Yahoo, erase the @ sign, and have that go unobserved, not only by the government but by all of those search engines, corporations that have taken an interest in me whether it's a positive or negative interest, and probably any number of individuals who have illegally watched everything that happens online from every computer in this house for however long it's been now. A year? Two years? I don't think that the government knew who I was two years ago.
There have been times when I've looked things up on the Internet for a few hours, and then before I've published anything that I write about as a result of having looked things up, I see what I had been researching referenced in a crude and mocking way on blog posts for people such as Vice President Biden; that happened a couple of months ago when I started to research the connection between NBC, General Electric, and General Electric as a weapons manufacturer.
Even when I'm not at my own computer, even when I use a public access computer, the second I log in to any of my own accounts, I'm getting watched online. Ads start showing up on the screen if it's a general e-mail account or anything else that allows people to send information directly to me; it doesn't end until I've logged out.
Here's what I have to say to all of the people who invade my privacy and who then abuse me for what they find out, to everyone who watches everything that happens in this house from the TV to the computers, who watches my bank account and every purchase I make with a debit card, who watches my student loans, who watches my insurance statements and finds out from them whom I see for counseling, who my doctor is, and who gets my insurance to send me a notice increasing the amount I pay for insurance times 5:
I'm going to live my life. Do you understand me? You have no right to do what you've done. There's nothing that I've looked up and figured out on the Internet that anyone who has a computer and a few hours couldn't look up and figure out, too.
Also; does Google want the people in Iran to be abused and to die? If so, why? What connection does Google have to that situation, and why does anybody really think that it's funny, day after day like that? Google is advocating for murder; why?
There are a lot of people who have worked for a long time on the cases in Iran and on other cases like them, in support of human rights, and search engines such as Google are obviously run by people who don't care about any of that work, who don't care about other people's lives, who think it's funny when people get tortured and arrested for no reason and are on the verge of getting executed every day; the ads and captions put by Google around articles about those situations are extremely damaging to everything that human rights groups are trying to do. Google is letting Iran know that Iran's policies on human rights aren't unpopular with companies such as Google; other media and corporations that have done that sort of thing are sending the same message. Google is also letting other countries besides Iran know that Google is encouraging of human rights violations and extreme violence.
What's the investment of those businesses in that situation besides sadism? Is it because countries run by dictators usually possess an abundance of cheap labor for corporations based in supposedly democratic countries?
That's what it is, isn't it? That's why there are so many corporations that want the prisoners in Iran to die.
Ms. Ashtiani isn't just being used as a symbol for me in support of sexual harassment and violence against women; support for her death and/or continued imprisonment and abuse is being used by corporations as a signal to dictatorships that those corporations will never object to human rights violations in countries such as Iran as long as those dictatorships welcome those corporations, buy from those corporations, and invite those corporations to hire the citizens in those dictatorships at a fraction of the cost to the corporations compared to what the corporations would have to pay in salaries, benefits, safe working conditions, retirement plans, permits for building, creating structures and running their businesses in compliance with American standards....the list goes on.
Copyright L. Kochman November 9, 2010
In addition to the invasion of privacy indicated by the picture of the movie “Avatar,” the harassing references such as “old whine in new bottles,” references to the BP oil spill, and the ad for “Bestsellers from the Guardian shop: Mini dehumidifiers—buy one get one free,” all of which were placed along the side of the article but were not the only harassing references on that blog post, it looks as if the Presidents of Bolivia and Iran were making fun of me and making fun of the whole situation regarding the prisoners in Iran.
It doesn’t seem to me that the Presidents of Bolivia and Iran care what happens to the Iranian prisoners; neither of those Presidents seems to be taking the situation seriously, so why not let the prisoners go?
Why not let Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, her son, her lawyer, the two German nationals, Zeinab Jalalian and the 16 other prisoners that Amnesty International lists as being on death row at Evin Prison go? If even the President of Iran doesn’t care what happens to them, why not let them go?
Copyright L. Kochman November 9, 2010 @ 9:46 a.m.
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November 9, 2010
I'm in the process of taking pictures of the November 3, 2010 Hometown section of the Burlington Free Press that has the toddler wearing a "Fishing" sweatshirt on its front page and then pictures of children next to ads for "Direct Cremation Services" and Eileen Fisher ads.
I wrote about that Hometown section on my blog page entitled "From November 4, 2010." I should have taken pictures before and put them up, but I couldn't stand looking at any of it anymore.
Today, the Burlington Free Press is covered with pictures of people holding umbrellas. There's a picture of an alligator on the front page under a small story that says "Boat-towing gator sets record: A man who trapped and killed an alligator so big it pulled his boat around a lake has snared what authorities say is Florida's longest gator on record..." The ad for the Toyota "New 2010 FJ Cruiser Special" is again on the front page, below the picture of the alligator.
I'm sure there's more.
I NOTICED A BIG AD FOR PEPSI ALONG THE SIDE OF ONE OF VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN'S BLOG POSTS LAST NIGHT.
EVEN THOUGH THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IS SUPPOSEDLY CALLING FOR A HALT OF MS. ASHTIANI'S EXECUTION, LAST NIGHT VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN SHOWED THE HE WAS NOT ONLY IN SUPPORT OF THAT EXECUTION BUT THAT HE WAS ALSO IN SUPPORT OF THE IMPLICATION OF MICHELLE OBAMA'S SEPTEMBER 16, 2010 WEBSITE THAT, WITH ITS BLEEDING LETTER "A" AND PICTURE OF FRENCH FIRST LADY CARLA BRUNI NEXT TO ADS SAYING "SUBMIT NOW!" SEEMED TO BE SAYING THAT THE UNITED STATES THINKS IT HAS THE RIGHT TO THREATEN OTHER COUNTRIES FOR NO REASON.
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN'S PEPSI AD FROM LAST NIGHT WAS IN SUPPORT OF THE PEPSI AD THAT WAS RECENTLY AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE OF A BLOG POST ABOUT SAKINEH MOHAMMADI ASHTIANI. VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN WAS SHOWING SUPPORT FOR PEPSI'S COPY OF MICHELLE OBAMA'S MESSAGE "TO SUBMIT."
I also noticed last night that blog posts for President Obama had an ad which was most likely meant to be threatening to the TV show Friday Night Lights, and ads which were most likely meant to be threatening to relatives of mine who live in Brookline, MA.
@ 7:58 p.m.
One thing that I haven't mentioned in a while is that it seems to me that the U.S. government watches absolutely everything I do online 24-hours-a-day, every day. Here's why I think that:
There have been times when I have pulled up something on the Internet, left it on the screen and walked away from it, and the next thing I knew, what I had on screen was getting referenced on other people's blog posts. I bet that I can't type an @ sign into any of the search engines such as Google or Bing or Yahoo, erase the @ sign, and have that go unobserved, not only by the government but by all of those search engines, corporations that have taken an interest in me whether it's a positive or negative interest, and probably any number of individuals who have illegally watched everything that happens online from every computer in this house for however long it's been now. A year? Two years? I don't think that the government knew who I was two years ago.
There have been times when I've looked things up on the Internet for a few hours, and then before I've published anything that I write about as a result of having looked things up, I see what I had been researching referenced in a crude and mocking way on blog posts for people such as Vice President Biden; that happened a couple of months ago when I started to research the connection between NBC, General Electric, and General Electric as a weapons manufacturer.
Even when I'm not at my own computer, even when I use a public access computer, the second I log in to any of my own accounts, I'm getting watched online. Ads start showing up on the screen if it's a general e-mail account or anything else that allows people to send information directly to me; it doesn't end until I've logged out.
Here's what I have to say to all of the people who invade my privacy and who then abuse me for what they find out, to everyone who watches everything that happens in this house from the TV to the computers, who watches my bank account and every purchase I make with a debit card, who watches my student loans, who watches my insurance statements and finds out from them whom I see for counseling, who my doctor is, and who gets my insurance to send me a notice increasing the amount I pay for insurance times 5:
I'm going to live my life. Do you understand me? You have no right to do what you've done. There's nothing that I've looked up and figured out on the Internet that anyone who has a computer and a few hours couldn't look up and figure out, too.
Also; does Google want the people in Iran to be abused and to die? If so, why? What connection does Google have to that situation, and why does anybody really think that it's funny, day after day like that? Google is advocating for murder; why?
There are a lot of people who have worked for a long time on the cases in Iran and on other cases like them, in support of human rights, and search engines such as Google are obviously run by people who don't care about any of that work, who don't care about other people's lives, who think it's funny when people get tortured and arrested for no reason and are on the verge of getting executed every day; the ads and captions put by Google around articles about those situations are extremely damaging to everything that human rights groups are trying to do. Google is letting Iran know that Iran's policies on human rights aren't unpopular with companies such as Google; other media and corporations that have done that sort of thing are sending the same message. Google is also letting other countries besides Iran know that Google is encouraging of human rights violations and extreme violence.
What's the investment of those businesses in that situation besides sadism? Is it because countries run by dictators usually possess an abundance of cheap labor for corporations based in supposedly democratic countries?
That's what it is, isn't it? That's why there are so many corporations that want the prisoners in Iran to die.
Ms. Ashtiani isn't just being used as a symbol for me in support of sexual harassment and violence against women; support for her death and/or continued imprisonment and abuse is being used by corporations as a signal to dictatorships that those corporations will never object to human rights violations in countries such as Iran as long as those dictatorships welcome those corporations, buy from those corporations, and invite those corporations to hire the citizens in those dictatorships at a fraction of the cost to the corporations compared to what the corporations would have to pay in salaries, benefits, safe working conditions, retirement plans, permits for building, creating structures and running their businesses in compliance with American standards....the list goes on.
Copyright L. Kochman November 9, 2010