Война Близнецов

Сумерки красные
над Киевом летят
И тёмные тучи
над майданом сошлись
кровь по асфальту
как дождь бъёт по коже
красные реки
по брущатке текли


ребёнок с ружьём
пуля в груди
Украинец
Русский
за родину шёл
приказ ради денег
позором пошёл

и вот Донетск
кровью облит
выселел всех кому жизнь дорога
мать с ребёнком
пешком в дороге три дня
а в доме все фотки
град со стенками снёс
Нечего есть
Ни в дом положить
Ни голод умолить

Ребёнок с ружьём
пуля в груди
Украинец
Русский
за родину шёл
ради денег
С шумом войны
С ума он сошол.

По телику в Столице
Все Фашисты они
Веритьт такому
 Мозги Водкой поить
Мысли рубить
А там в бою
Где подсолнухи раньше росли
Дети против детей
Повязки на рукавах
разлечят близнеца
от близнеца
Пуля пронзит
Бронь как масло
И материнское сердце
на сквозь прострелит.

И почему
ребёнок с ружьём
пуля в груди
Украинец
Русский
за родину шёл
малыш ради денег ушол

верим и верим им?
Столько детей
За деньги продали
им Верить хотим
Мать ведь одна
Отец пьёт и бьёт
Но другого ведь нет

Штоль делать
Ведь надо им есть
Ребёнка убью
Мать задушу
В зверя сам добровольно прийду
Хочется кожу
Срывать ведь с себя
Сoвесть терзает
И Слёзы идут
Пить водку как воду
Человека в себе, Алкоголем забью
Героин в вену, память спущу

ребёнок с ружьём
Не пущу
пулю из груди,
вытащу
Украинец-
Русский
за родину не шёл
ради денег в рай
не ушол

America, You're Funny: Antibiotics and Surveillance

A recent Frontline documentary discovered a small little story about resistant antibiotics. 

20,000 people die of Antibiotic resistant bacteria, because antibiotics allow for less feed to grow larger animals which become antibiotic resistant which then pass it on to humans. This was known 40 years ago and Europe and Canada stopped feeding antibiotics to their animals.. but the food industry forced the issue shut....

So 20,000 people are killed every day by the drug and food industry. More than all americans killed by terrorism in the past twenty years.. all so that these companies can make more money. Killing for money. Shouldn't that be illegal? Shouldn't they go to jail?

What's really ridiculous is that congress refuses to allow to even collection of data on antibiotics due to industry opposition. So we allow collection of our phone calls to prevent terrorism which affects few but refuse to collect data on that which causes 2,000,000 people being sick every year and 20,000 dying from these diseases.

America, you're funny.

The Birth and Death of Tree of Life

Death is relative

I’m sure Einstein would agree

After all

His death we do not miss

But Einstein’s life

Impacted nearly all.

Some are thankful, I am sure

His kids or wife

May think sad thoughts

And I’m sure he knows that

His ex-wife cursed him

Although maybe not his deeds

Which she herself

May have helped the world to see.

It all depends he’d say.

It all depends fo

Death can be good and

Death can be bad

Depending on perspective

Of those who are

The living, the dying and the unborn.

Sometimes we long for death

When at death’s bed.

For the approach

Is suffering

Like when strung with tubes

Ventilators

And the like

When body has long given up

And would have been dead

If it were not

For modern day extenders

Of a wretched life

The blood suckers

Who are paid for every hour

You are wrongfully alive.

Then,

There are those,

Who cannot bear the thought

That a loved one might depart

They cannot bear the moment

When death shall come

And they won’t be able

To look the beloved

In the eye

Then there are those

Who are not yet born

Who would have loved to have a memory

Of father from experience of their own.

Then there are wives and husbands

Who by their lover had been scorned

Or evil tyrants who kidnapped and had killed

Millions of innocents and yet

They may have those they had tried to kill

But marked for death survived and lived

And tyrants scorn death and life

Of those who cause them

Sleepless nights.

Death, death strikes us to the core

When we listen to an unfinished music score

When we see a painting by an artist

Who by untimely death left an unfinished life

There are kids who never had a chance at kids

And grown ups

Who never should have had their own.

There are children whose life had been

Cut short

By parents who were not ready for a life

And so, regrettably, brought death

Upon their own.

Death, was the savior of their life

Life, would have meant the death

Of all their hopes and dreams.

For some

A child’s life,

Means a mother’s death

And thus a child’s death

Shall be result to keep a mother’s life.

For some a life

Resembles purgatory death,

Neither awake nor sleeping,

Robotic actions of a being with a beating heart

But missing soul.

What is life we ask?

Is it something that can die,

Then surely all machines are living

For all machines shall one day cease to work.

Is it then thought?

There have been many humans who

Had not experienced a single moment

Of what we’d consider mental work

And what we consider thought

Multiplication, calculus, and physics

Reserved for the greatest of the human minds

Computers do with dancer’s grace.

Is it adaptability? Desire to propagate and live?

What is a man depressed

Who takes a step from a tall bridge

With no desire

To make a life or continue his?

What is this tree of life

That one day surely has to die?

What is this tree that with life brings us

Eternal death?

What was it before it sprang first leaf?

Life,

Is sorrow for a friend

Pain of child gone

And parents

Departing with no goodbye.

Death is happiness

Of tyrant gone

Of life well lived

And death well done.

Life, death, birth and living

All encompassed in one ball of yarn

Like subatomic particles

Emerging in a flash

And gone without a trace.

A single trace across the space and time

A child, a bridge, a book,

And sometimes

No mark at all…..

5/20/15

to Alison Matela

Feed

There Is No Such Thing As ISIS, Just Old Disbanded Iraqi Army

In Afghanistan winter of 2002, United States felt victorious and invincible as it routed the Taliban using the Northern Alliance. It seemed like a new warfare was here where we could take on anyone with limited troops and take hold and then enjoy the "peace". This technique was known by many Russian and European generals as the technique of Nazi Germany. This was also the technique America used in Vietnam to gain early victory. However, what most knew besides the reckless American commandos is that this technique brought about quick victory in terms of land acquired but it also brought about a long and protracted resistance and guerrilla war fare.

Across Europe From France to Lithuania, Nazis bled continuously as resistance fighters blew up bridges, rail lines and ambushed Nazi soldiers. In spite of savage retaliations against civilians of towns near the "terrorist" actions, the resistance was a continuous thorn in the side of Nazi soldiers until the end of the war in 1945. As most of us know the famous quote by George Santayana except for the cocksure White House, "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." This quote is the reason for Jewish post-Holocaust mantra of "never forget," for Jews cannot afford to relive another Holocaust as they may not survive it. These words became especially true when what should have been a peaceful Afghanistan blew up into insurgency making the resistance of Europe in World War II look like child's play. United States sustained never ending losses and the losses of anyone who worked with them were ten times those of US, cutting off nearly all cooperation as United States showed itself to be a poor protector. Land mines and constant stream of fighters from across the border made Kabul seem like a constant war zone. United States had little choice but to hide inside the green zone as children and civilians watched their families be ripped by IEDs in markets and mosques. But that was just the beginning.

American blitzkrieg in Iraq only a little more than one year later was called Shock and Awe and it's results were fairly similar to those of the Germans. As Americans walked into the lawless Iraq, the bands of gangs looted like the East Europeans looters robbing their Jewish neighbors. Similarly to the East Europeans killing their Jewish neighbors before the Germans even arrived, Sunni, Shia and Kurd striations soon had blood flowing so thick that one might have confused the endless bombings for one of Moses's plagues on the Pharaoh. Large reason for this violence were the actions of Paul Bremer who thought it wise to disband the Army, leave them without jobs but not secure the tons and tons of munitions and weapons which they would now be free to use and directed by the generals who were allowed to walk away and begin a civil war like we had not seen in a long long time.

The Iraqi ex-generals working with Al Qaida in Iraq in a death match with Shia militias, began a campaign of endless bombings which promulgated our news to the point that hearing about 50, 100 and 150 people blown to bits was no longer news, just part of the daily chatter. Beheadings, mass murder, kidnappings and market bombings which had a tiny bit of shock during the insurgency in Afghanistan broke all bounds. People, tens of thousands dead, thousands of American soldiers all a statistic dismissed by our leaders, statistic that disappeared in the noise of everyday numbers which we could not remember or think of as our brave leaders threw more of our money into the problem, more 18-year-old bodies, more drones and more heavy equipment while at the same time ramping up a surveillance program on US citizens unlike ever before, as if we were the enemy they were afraid of and fought, as if we were the ones that put them in Iraq, Afghanistan and as if we were the ones who were destroying our military through endless deployments. Vietnam was repeating all over again, and the only lessons learned was how to control the public, not fight a war. But that wasn't the end. In fact, that was only the beginning.

Around this point we thought we figured it all out, we thought we would pay the militias and Sunni fighters off and they would become quiet. Many of them did. Even though the wounds of sectarian war felt fresh, they decided to take the money and forget it. They figured they'd try to give this democracy a chance. They thought they would trust United States, but just as the thousands of Native Americans who made pacts with United States only to see those pacts be worth as much as the shells they were written on, so did Iraqi learned that American peace was not what they thought was sold to them.

The problem with democracy is that when a new leader comes to power in four years, all previous bets are off making it very hard for anyone to make long range plans or trust previous agreements. So was the case in this war as new leadership came to power in our country and changed course, the Iraqis were left to survive in a small raft in the wake of a large ship. Our new leadership preferred to look the other way from our commitments, the leadership chose the European approach of appeasers; an approach that cost Europe greatly. The new leader seemed to say all the right things but as history would show, his blunders in someway would lead to destruction and death unimagined even in the quagmire of his predecessor.

As Obama took the last of American troops out of Iraq, the president of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, went after his opponents with a vengeance that made Saddam Hussein look civilized. The Democracy Obama touted would be responsible for sending Sunni areas into poverty, their leaders arrested, tortured and often murdered at rates not seen since Hussein. As Obama continued to sway in indecision in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Ukraine, Gaza and Saudi Arabia with either a unique ability to consistently make the wrong choice or deliberately pick the path of least resistance and greatest evil, Syria disintegrated completely. All norms of warfare fell apart and as Israel was condemned and vilified as it was pounded by rockets and replied with knock rockets and phone calls and leaflets  resulting in 1000 casualties after intense bombardment in an area where one bomb could have killed ten times more, where Obama was ready to cut all ties with a country responding to actual terrorism, he at the same time refused to do anything in neighboring Syria where barrel bombs landed in hospitals, soldiers shelled indiscriminately refugee camps and gas and biological weapons spread on the ground as fast as the dead spread on TV screens. This, this was too much for anyone in Middle East. This was their rallying cry.

At this point the flood of fighters into Syria woke the ex-Iraqi army that were dormant for a time as they were paid of by United States taxpayer money. They were waken like a sleeping bear by the combination of the end of the cash and lack of jobs from the Maliki government in Baghdad on the east and the free flow of arms in Syria. The war machine turned on and there was nothing there to stop it. They ran into Syria, took hold of weapons, erased borders and then spread to Baghdad where the Shia Iraqi army seemed entirely uninterested in protecting any non-Shia areas including the Yazidi and the Kurds.

America and Europe seemed un-interested to help any of the groups who were now decimated, seen as American sympathizers by the drugged up warriors from across the Middle East fighting along side the what used to be Iraqi army during Hussein's reign. This army renamed itself as ISIL and ISIS and Da-Ash, and while America and Europe sat with eyes agape without any ability to comprehend that the events were caused by the policy's of the powers that had ability to stop this. At this point, the young muslims of Europe and United States, tired of the lies and incapable of believing a word of their leaders, happily believed the propaganda of ISIS, traveled to Syria and Iraq and began killing with a thirst that could only be matched by their previous compatriots in uniforms.

Enter today, where we have not ISIS but two civil wars fought by Assad and Maliki against what used to be the army of Iraq, a terrorist force with nothing to loose thanks to the actions of United States and Great Britain and the rest of the Coalition of the Willing. These men, often drugged up are raping their way across the two countries, streaming into Lebanon, destabilizing Pakistan and Yemen, funded by Iran, destroying all shreds of civilization of today, tomorrow and yesterday. This is the effect of lies, this is the effect of arrogance and this is the effect of media sleeping at the wheel.

We planted the seeds which  brought about this weed. And because of that, next time you hear the word ISIS, which makes it sound like something new and unconnected to us, think again and realize that ISIS is not ISIS, ISIS are the same soldiers we thought we defeated in 2003 when Bush landed on that carrier, with the infamous banner: Mission Accomplished.

Meanwhile our Defense Secretary still think that they key to defeating ISIS is to keep them defeated. We'll see how that plan works out.

  

White Priveledge

White privilege is:

Everyone at my school doing and selling drugs, and none of them going to jail for it.

A kid at my high school killing his parents and getting off lightly.

Thousands of white kids at Coachella doing drugs in broad daylight even as cops walk around.

Amnesty boxes at Coachella for the thousands of rich white kids.

SuperMan and The Super Planet

SuperMan thought he was amazing until he landed on the super planet. The problem with the super planet was that it seemed extremely ordinary. People on this planet from the first look were mild mannered, ordinary, weak and feeble. Unlike SuperMan they couldn't run hundreds of miles per hour. They couldn't fly or shoot lasers from their eyes. They couldn't even have x-ray vision or blow super cool air to freeze things around them. Individually, they seemed weak, they were weak.

As a mass they seemed utterly idiotic. They had this ability to follow each other off cliffs without a second thought. They went to wars against each other and built civilizations only to collapse them under the weight of chaos and inability to communicate. SuperMan was clearly superior to these people and thought from the beginning that he would become a de-facto president of the planet.

  He quickly went about showing his skills. He flew around the earth saving people, he picked up trains and stopped dams from collapsing. He ended wars and saved cats stuck in trees. He even chased the earth back into time to try and anticipate buildings collapsing in earthquakes. But to his surprise, the people didn't care much. They would say thank you and move on. What they had was their own super powers that were most of the time far more superior to his.

The people used their super powers after a collapsed dam to rebuild it and make a better one that wouldn't collapse. After every disaster they found a way to come together in groups of superhumans. I call them superhumans because they had this ability to have powers even when looking like they were not super at all. They would somehow know who has what power even though no one wore super costumes. Some had uniforms but they weren't anything like SuperMan's. Their costumes seemed surprisingly utilitarian which bothered superman. The superhumans thought SuperMan's tights and cape were funny, especially his underpants over his tights. He realized that sometimes a most ordinary looking human could re-route all of a plumbing in a house. While another could bring light to every room. SuperMan couldn't do that. He could move a house or take the people out but he had no way of actually saving their house from a flood and if he did, there was no way he could actually fix it.

Another human could direct hundreds of humans to create a levy to withstand huge rivers. All Superman could do was swoop in to save one or two people. But these humans could call on hundreds in helicopters and they would save many more than SuperMan could. They had humans who could direct hundreds of superhumans with many superpowers. One mild mannered superhuman could figure out how to move money so that other humans could eat and live and work and create things as necessary as helicopters or as trivial as toys and beds and televisions. These superhumans didn't have to change into different clothes to call on these powers although many often did. For instance he noticed men and women on golf courses in funny looking shorts trying to put tiny balls into into tiny holes with tiny little clubs. They could hit that ball with no supervision or super strength just by taking advantage of physics that they mastered. They could feel the wind and compensate for it. The same men and women would then put on fancy suits and in those clothes they would direct thousands of other superhumans into amazingly diverse actions from building planes and ships to bringing about relief efforts in far away countries from disease  and natural calamities without having to turn back time or fly or run themselves.

Some of them had ability to take their emotions and transform them into paintings, music, books and movies. The other humans could be moved to tears or laughter by these visions of their own emotions. They could communicate to each-other past, future and world that have never been and might never be.

Superman could not compete with these super powers. Despondent he decided to give up his super talents, they seemed inferior on this planet. He decide to learn one of their trades, ability to collect information and disseminate it to other humans. This ability to go and seek information seemed amazing to him as these humans could take this information and direct their talents with anticipation of future events based on his reporting. He may not have had his cape and he may not have run faster than other humans or fly like the others, but he felt for once super. Because the humans, could drive as fast as him by calling on super power of other humans to build cars which could go faster than him, they could fly farther and faster than him by calling on superhumans who could design and build planes and rockets, but by becoming one of them, by learning a superhuman power, he felt accepted, respected. With his new power he wasn't just a SuperMan, he became a SuperHuman.

Digital Isn't Free

Since the dawn of internet, people assumed, that the internet and everything on it, is cheap and free. They assumed that because information, that we pay on paper, is on a computer screen, has no cost associated with it, that it somehow occurs like air and since we don't pay for air, we shouldn't pay for these ones and zeros.

This notion, which is as silly as the notion that oranges are free since they grow from the ground naturally and there fore should be free at a sore, may have its beginnings from the origins of internet. In the beginning, there was no demand for internet in the public sphere. There was no way to buy it or pay for it and so it had no value, and therefore, anyone who programmed or worked on internet, had no value. It was the days of free AOL and kids who created websites for friends and family, for free. I was one of those kids and I should have been paid.

You see, what is actually the case is that internet isn't free. It is actually very very expensive. It has a low barrier to entry, but everything on it has huge expense, especially if you want to do things right. Just like in the non-virtual world. To create a website for the home, a good one, you need to have an artist or a programmer who spent years developing their skill. You can try, but we know that the result will be the difference between the cabinet you build and one bought at a high end furniture store. You could go cheap with SquareSpace but everyone knows it's an Ikea. If you need something more advanced and custom, then it is like hiring a cheap plumber, it will work for a bit but try to have two people use the shower and the dishwasher and your are hiring an expensive one to clean the mess and re-do the work.

 To develop a more complex site is even more complicated. The complications require time, human time, educated human time, and that costs money. Think, every product has to be photographed, by a professional photographer, just like at a magazine. Then you have to write something, in a way that is professional and catchy and without grammar or spelling mistakes and that takes a writer, a professionally trained writer, like those working for ad agencies or newspapers. You then have to lay the content out in an attractive way, with a help of an designer, like a professionally trained artist. And then you have to have all the different parts working with the interaction of the user in all the millions of combinations that people like to buy and browse and preview the content. That takes a mathematicians and a programmers, and damn good programmers. The quality of these people working on a site is the difference in Amazon.com and buymycrapsandiego.com and that difference is also in price of their paychecks as well as the teams of those people who create the content and then all the support teams and staff that they have to have around them including sales, accounting, finance, IT etc etc etc.

But it doesn't end there, because you think distribution is free but it isn't. Who lays the fiber? Who develops new and faster technology so that you don't download at 26k but at 1Mb/s? Who secures your data so that hackers don't get it? Who makes sure that all these professionals can work quickly and efficiently? And then who pays for all of the terabytes of data that you decide to download and all of your friends from that one site? All that bandwidth costs you $50 bucks a month, you're one person, imagine millions! Multiply those millions and that's how much it costs for a business to send you all those songs. Who should pay for that? Well, you pay for the transportation of the orange, and so you should pay for the transportation of the zero and ones.

Why? Because all of that is created so that you can have the convenience of not carrying around a newspaper which gets your fingers dirty or a fiddle everywhere you go so that every-time you wanted to hear a song, you'd have to play it yourself. Convenience saves time and time is money and people forget sometimes to pay the money just because the time saved is through zeros and ones.

As one last example. If what had value for us was not the content but the form it was sold to us, then we would still buy records instead of downloading songs and we would still have all those free AOL CDs, in fact blank ones. But it is not what carries the content we consume that is important to us, but the content itself. And the more convenient it is for us to get, the more we should pay for it. Because that convenience, is our time and the time of those who made it convenient. And that time, costs money. That's only fair, don't you agree?

"the vast majority of police are..."

We often hear that the cast majority of the police are good people. It is hard to believe that seeing how many after many complaints end up doing grave harm without any reprimand, or when seeing grave violence on behalf of many police and none trying to stop the violence of one, or worse, helping to dole out the punishment to a defenseless guy on the ground. Sadder is to see the countless interactions caught on camera out of the millions others where police physically harm much weaker women, children and even old people.

It is tough to imagine a Police officers job and the type of person that goes into it. The type of people they meet and interactions they have vary drastically from person to person. Generally, it seems that they have the expectation that people ought to follow them, that people will subvert to them completely regardless of their actions, even when inflicting massive amount of pain when human response is to curl up or protect affected area to them is resistance as they want the person to put the hands behind their back while beating them and expecting the person to take it and not resist. They expect old people, young people and people from different cultures to uniformly respond to them and resent any training to understand the people they are supposedly serving. In the moment of altercation, adrenaline takes over, for the cop and the person they interact with. Cops don't generally know if the person they deal with have a weapon, they do and that makes them even more fearful, if the person talking to them seems to not be afraid of their gun then they must be a threat, I've experienced this myself and it is not a pleasant feeling to realize that this person in front of you, can justify killing you and nothing will happen to them. It is a tough job, the type of people to do it should vary depending on who they interact with and should have capacity to control their body and thoughts at any moment.

Maybe some are too traumatized by the violence of the streets, some by being veterans of war or maybe it is the culture of the force, whatever it is, it is scary to realize that the police seem to be out of control and something must be done to help them and us, after all, we're all in this together.