Madame Jane predicts: Things are gonna to get worse, much worse

     My neighbor Madame Jane is not only the world's most accurate fortune-teller, she is also the most completely-ignored fortune-teller since the beginning of time -- except perhaps for Cassandra.  And there is a good reason for this too.  Frankly, Madame Jane is just plain morose.  Nobody wants to be told bad news constantly -- even if it is true.  Even I am getting tired of being haunted by Madame Jane's sad tales of gloom and doom.  And I've told her this time and again.

       But, suddenly, at 6:00 am this morning, there was Madame Jane again, at my front door, banging fiercely away with her fists and shouting,  "You need to wake up, dearie.  Wake up!  And it's time for the whole world to wake up too!"

     "Well, the whole world is going to have to wait," I yelled back, "until after I've brushed my teeth."  Plus I'd just finished reading a book called "Fun Is Good" -- and Madame Jane is definitely not fun. 

    But M.J. was having none of it.  "Things are never going to get better in America," she yelled through the door.  "I have just returned from the future.  Things are only going to get worse.  And right now the only hope of changing this grim future is to band all Americans together as allies, working together in common cause." 

     Read my lips.  "I. Don't. Care."  

     "We need to stop anyone who tries to teach Americans to hate each other.  We need to turn off all those attack-ads on TV -- and then fight desperately like wolves in a pack so that, in the future, things perhaps might possibly remain the same as they are now and not get any worse." 
     Madame Jane took a deep breath and adjusted her wig.

    "The wealthy 1% are now shamelessly attacking black people, brown people, old people, children, Muslims, Native Americans, progressive white people, students and women.  Separately these groups are all minorities.  But united together they can all stand tall -- like the strong and proud Americans they are.  But will they actually even try to unite to protect themselves from these merciless attacks by the oligarchs?  Not gonna happen." 
https://www.facebook.com/NoTeaParty/posts/1003323599693151
 
     No, Madame Jane definitely does not have a fun outlook on life. 

     But then I suddenly remembered what Mahatma Gandhi used to say.  "You must not lose faith in humanity.  Humanity is like an ocean.  If a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the whole ocean does not have to become dirty." 

     So I told that to M.J. -- and she just humphed.  "Mahatma Gandhi's ocean never had to deal with Fukushima."

     "Okay, so the whole world is going to hell in a hand-basket," I said.  "But so what?  Every human being has got to die sometime anyway and there is no escaping that fact -- so what does it matter if our time comes sooner rather than later?  Plus what the freak can I do about any of this freaking mess at freaking 6:00 am in the morning?" 

     But Madame Jane was completely undeterred.  "You need a  wake-up call!" she cried.  No I don't.  I need coffee.

     "You need to start reading up on what is really happening in the world right now, girly-girl -- not just what they tell you on TV.  And after that, you need to go get out in the world and start making some waves.  And even if you are only one drop in an huge ocean, then you need to start making that one drop count.  Because if you and all the other billions of little guys like you don't do something to stop these dire predictions from happening, then who will?  And then everything that I predict will come true." 

     If we snooze, we lose.  Got it.  Now can I go back to bed?

    "And America today currently has the most sadistic foreign policy since Genghis Klan -- and I can clearly see that America's foreign policy will be getting even more sadistic in the next 20 years.  That is, if there still is any America left 20 years from now!  With a foreign policy based on mass murder, who can tell how long America can still stay in business without pissing everyone off -- including God, Allah, the Buddha and Jesus!"  Yikes!  Has Halloween already arrived?  To stay forever?  Apparently so. 
http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2014/10/26/510924us-lawlessness-fuels-global-insecurity/
 
     "And don't even get me started on the Middle East situation."  Too late.

     "All that horrible stuff happening in the Middle East today seems to boil down to just this," Madame Jane said next.  "Everyone in the Middle East is getting screwed -- plus American and Israeli taxpayers are getting screwed too.  And everyone in the Middle East knows who is doing the screwing -- American, Saudi and Israeli neo-cons, none of whom even pay taxes.

     "However, either no one in the Middle East knows how to stop getting screwed or else they just figure, 'Since there is such a lot of screwing going on and no one knows how to stop it, I might as well help the ones doing the screwing rather than be a screwee.'"  Sucks to be them.

     "And then you add a bunch of psychopaths to the mix and also a bunch of eager weapons manufacturers looking for a killing -- and what do you get?  Adam and Eve getting thrown out of the Garden.  Again." 

     Does this mean that if you live in the Holy Land and Fertile Crescent, then knowledge of good and evil comes with the real estate deal?  And just exactly how much evil can these poor Arab schmucks know before there is no one left to know it?  http://journal-neo.org/2014/10/21/is-the-us-ready-to-trigger-wwiii/

     Then Madame Jane muttered something under her breath about 9-11.  Not being fully awake, I asked her to speak up.  Which of course she did.

      "9-11 was a very small terrorist attack.  It only involved twenty Saudis with box cutters and a little help from some NORAD screw-ups.  Only 2,996 Americans were killed."  Only?  Hey, that's a lot! 

     "But every single day of every single year, year in and year out since then, many more than 2,996 Americans are killed every day by the real terrorist attacks that we suffer, right here on our own American soil -- attacks on our lives, our liberty and our pursuit of happiness.  Terrorist attacks!  Terrorist attacks!" 

     Hey, M.J., calm down.  Blood pressure, remember?

     "But sadly, nobody seems to notice about them like they did about 9-11."  What terrorist attacks?

     "Terrorist attacks on our infrastructure, our food supply, our water supply, our agriculture, our veterans, our hospitals, our children, our Constitution, our economy, our..." 

     Oh.  I get it.  You're referring to the Koch brothers, Congressional lobbyists, the military-industrial complex, Monsanto, Citibank, Morgan Stanley and those guys.  Like what that French guy Piketty said, that the richest one percent are currently in possession of half the world's assets -- and the top 10% now own 87% of the world's assets.   And boy are the rest of us 99% gonna be pissed off when there is nothing left for us.  Or, to quote Lynn Stuart Parramore, "In that case, fasten your seatbelts. This ride could get very rough."   http://stopmakingsense.org/2014/10/23/pikettys-prophecy-comes-true-the-planets-middle-class-is-rapidly-going-extinct/

     "Getting pissed off is gonna do the 99% no good at this late date.  They missed their chance to save themselves from serfdom way back in 2000, when they let G.W. Bush steal the presidential election.  And now all they have to save themselves is, er, nothing.  The oligarchs now have all the power -- not to mention all the weapons.  Sorry about that."  That's harsh. 

     "And here's another example for you," said Madame Jane.  "I just went to buy gas at the pump today."  Madame Jane drives a car?  Now that's scary.  "And gas was up 50 cents more from the last time.  Why?  Because of all this ISIS craziness in the Middle East after Congress authorized spending billions of dollars on hiring ISIS pirates and thugs to slaughter women and children in Syria and Iraq in the first place.  And all we Americans get out of it is this stinkin' gasoline price-gouge T-shirt!"  Madame Jane is an American?  That's scary too.  https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=799887010073804&fref=nf

     "Not to mention climate change that will put your grandchildren in the hospital with lung cancer and emphysema!  If we even still have any hospitals left 30 years from now.  And it would be so laughingly easy to put solar panels on top of all our homes and then run our electric cars off of that.  But no.  American neo-cons still force us to pollute and spend trillions on wars for oil." 

     Good grief.  So that is why we taxpayers are financing ISIS's scorched-earth policy in Syria and Iraq -- to drive up the price of oil.  Now can I pleeeze have some coffee?

     "These anti-American oligarch Wall Street terrorists need to leave America the freak alone and go back to where they came from -- the Cayman Islands and Swiss bank vaults where they belong" 

     Then Madame Jane started to glare at me again -- with those fierce and ancient dark gypsy eyes of hers.  "And what exactly are you going to do to stop all this?" she snarled. 

     "Er, uh, sign a petition on the internet to save the dolphins?"

PS:  I'm currently reading a book called "Social," and the author claims that when our brains aren't doing anything else, their default setting is to think about our interactions with others.  That's amazing.  "After Christianity and Islam," says the author, "Facebook is the third largest organization in the world," because people just wanna be friends.

    Hey, maybe Madame Jane can get on FB and then convince all our friendly brains to help save the world.  Why not -- if being BFFs with seven billion other people would give our brains something creative to do.  After all, blowing people up and hoarding money are social activities that suck eggs.

 
     If social interaction actually is the most important thing in the world for our brains, then the Pentagon and banksters are going about things all wrong. 
http://news.yahoo.com/assads-warnings-start-ring-true-turkey-144516592.html
 
     And this could also explain the behavior of  ISIS.  Because its members never really learned the niceties of genuine social interaction because they weren't raised around women, the queens of social interaction and hot gossip, they never learned any real social skills.  So apparently they think that beheading people is the best way to win friends and influence people?  You guys are just gross!

*****
Footnotes about Iraq and Syria:

Washington promotes deadly divisions:  http://www.workers.org/articles/2014/06/25/intervention-iraq/

U.S. Embassy in Ankara Headquarter for ISIS War on Iraq – Hariri Insider http://nsnbc.me/2014/06/22/u-s-embassy-in-ankara-headquarter-for-isis-war-on-iraq-hariri-insider/     "Listening to the chorus of statements insisting that the US has no responsibility for the deepening tragedy inflicted upon the people of Iraq and Libya, one is reminded of nothing so much as the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, from Hermann Göring on down, rising one-by-one in the dock to declare themselves 'not guilty.'

     "As the contradictions and deceptions of Washington’s policy become ever more glaring, US officials simply act as though the American people won’t notice, or will believe anything." 
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/06/30/pers-j30.html

     "Abu Bakr Muhammad Maqdisi in this book has taken the same policy of Genghis Khan, thanks God they didn’t claim they derived their policies from prophet Muhammad, because God said: ‘There has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Last Day and [who] remembers Allah often.’ [Quran 33:21].  So their ‘excellent pattern’ was Genghis Khan. 

    "Genghis Khan used to enter a village and annihilates all living in it, even animals he’d slaughter it, and burn down the houses, so the next village hears that Genghis Khan is coming they flee away and this is what ISIS is doing in Iraq, and what’s the goal of ISIS?  When ISIS entered Samerra they killed a thousand Sunni, and now killing Shiites, and this is the American policy.

      "Henry Kissinger wrote a memo in 1982 or 1984, don’t remember exactly, it’s titled The 100 Years War.  When asked where this 100 years war will occur?  He said in the Middle East when we ignite the war between the Sunnah and the Shiites." 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39005.htm 

Washington Admits: FSA Equals Fictitious Syrian Army

     ....This is a stunning admission, hardly picked up in the Western media. Washington is confirming that there is no such thing as a moderate rebel force in Syria. But what Washington and its fellow state terrorist sponsors are doing is throwing $500 million into a project of creating the semblance of "a credible field force". This creation will then give Western powers and its Arab allies a legitimacy to escalate their criminal covert war for regime change in Syria.

      No wonder Obama warned his war council in Washington that this would be a "long campaign". For the arsonists have become the fireman, the poachers have become gamekeepers, and the deluded have become the therapists.

  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40005.htm

Footnotes about climate change:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26802192

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/24415-focus-will-isis-control-iraqs-oil

Sick Man of Europe: Turkey's infection with the cancer of ISIS

     On October 17, 2014, American journalist Serena Shim was beheaded -- and "not with a sword but a cement truck," to paraphrase T.S. Elliott. 

     Right before she lost her head in a brutal "accidental" collision with a cement truck the size of a freight train, Shim had reported that not only was Turkey supplying ISIS foreign fighters and terrorists from such places as Pakistan and Chechnya with weapons and material, but Turkey was also spiriting wounded ISIS terrorists back over the Syrian border into Turkey, hidden in NGO aid trucks, so they could be treated in Turkish hospitals. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/21/the-death-of-a-reporter/

     Turkish Intelligence is highly suspected of setting up this tragic hit on Shim, hoping to silence her -- but its actions have backfired and all it has really accomplished is to make the whole world put Turkey under a microscope, asking questions about Shim's bloody death and the role that the Turkish intelligence agency played in this beheading. 

     "Turkey. how could you have sunk so low?" the whole world now asks.

     "Hey, it was easy," Turkey replies.  "What else could we do?"  What else could Turkey do indeed -- when the usual crew of polished and professional American and Israeli neo-con con-men (not to be mistaken for actual honest, hardworking and sorely hoodwinked Americans and Israelis) simply showed up at its doorstep, waved their magic wands over Turkish president Erdogan's head and promised to get him the old Ottoman Empire back if only he would attack Syria.  (Or else.)

     And then with his eyes dazzled by dreams of glittering booty, Erdogan fell for the con -- hook, line and sinker.  Of course he did.  And then he opened Pandora's box and let ISIS in.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gioad9TG04

     According to Middle East expert Judith Bello, the Washington Post published a map "of the flow of 15,000 fighters flowing into Syria from more than 80 nations, hardly the foot soldiers of a civil war.  Most of these fighters have entered Syria through Turkey."  http://deconstructedglobe.com/wordpress/?p=1384

     A sorry cancer-like epidemic of death, destruction and deceit has spread over the Middle East in the last few decades.  And Turkey, the "Sick Man of Europe," has been the latest nation to catch it.

     Welcome to the cancer ward, President Erdogan.

     On Thanksgiving this year, Turkey will obviously have nothing to be thankful for, what with ISIS sitting at its table and expecting its dinner -- unless Turkey starts "chemotherapy" immediately.  My prescription for Turkey?  "Stop messing around with ISIS, stop believing the empty promises of American and Israeli neo-con-men, and start behaving in Turkey's citizens' best interests instead."

    Turkey has been trying to join the European Union for years now.  But who wants a Turkey in the EU that has already proven itself to be just another Middle Eastern "soiled dove" for American and Israeli con-men?  Erdogan has thrown the baby out with the bathwater here.

    Just because Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Yemen, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have all been diagnosed with the kind of fuzzy thinking that can only be caused by cancer of the part of the brain that governs common sense and self-preservation, this doesn't mean that Turkey has to waste away too.  Beheading a journalist is common in these other neo-con infected countries.  But one would expect that a sophisticated and modern country like Turkey, a potential member of the EU even, might be immune.  But apparently not.

      President Erdogan, what were you THINKING!

PS:  Looks like the average American and Israeli isn't immune from catching the cancer of stupid thinking either.  If we aren't a lot more careful and watchful and vigilant than we are right now, then we too may soon be contracting this Turkish and Middle Eastern disease -- and then watch our own journalists get beheaded too.  http://my.firedoglake.com/blog/2014/10/21/everything-wrong-with-liberalism-in-one-image-found-on-facebook/

Mary Poppins, Elizabeth Warren & the American banking system

     When I saw the movie "Saving Mr. Banks" during one of my interminably-long plane rides back from Syria (http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2014/06/syria-iraq-captain-phillips-isis.html), I liked it so much that I actually went out and bought a copy of the 1964 "Mary Poppins" Disney classic it was based on -- the one with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke frolicking across the rooftops of London. 

      And much to my surprise, I discovered that Mary Poppins might have been one of the world's first hippies.  Who woulda thought!  And what was even more amazing is that Mary Poppins was one of the first people to warn us about the dangers and perfidy of big bankers and big banks.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxyB29bDbBA

      And fortunately for those of us living here in America one hundred years later, Elizabeth Warren has now become the new Mary Poppins -- also warning us about the dangers and perfidy of big bankers and big banks.

       If only Americans would start paying attention to Elizabeth Warren as much as they paid attention to Julie Andrews! 

     "Hey, Elizabeth!" I also want to shout on the rooftops like Dick VanDyke, "voters aren't listening to you!"  Maybe if Disney studios made a movie about you too?  Then maybe voters would finally start to listen. 

     According to Warren, the American middle class has been absolutely decimated by the banking and credit-card lobbies. http://billmoyers.com/segment/elizabeth-warren-on-americas-invisible-crisis/

    And yet voters still keep falling for all those glossy ads and happy lies that still keep getting pro-big-bank candidates elected to the White House and Congress even though voters can clearly see that they themselves are losing their jobs, having their homes repossessed, becoming slaves to their student loans and getting ripped off bigtime by credit-card debt.  But then I guess that those syrupy ads actually do prove that "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down" after all. 

    In the heroic country of Iceland, their well-informed voters have vigorously fought back against bankster greed and have even re-written their constitution in order to make lending-bubbles and bank fraud illegal.  http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/icelanders-overthrow-government-and-rewrite-constitution-after-banking-fraud-no-word-from-us-media/

     But in America, the opposite happens.  Here in America our very own government, the very one that bank lobbyists have chosen for us to elect, is handing over billions of our very own hard-earned dollars to big banks just as fast as it can.  And Congress is always writing new bankruptcy laws that favor banksters over the middle class every time.  Mary Poppins would be livid, of course, but nobody else seems to even notice these days -- except for Elizabeth Warren.

     And even the Federal Reserve is dancing over the rooftops in glee as it too gives away our money to the banksters just as fast as it possibly can, singing "Step in Time" as gleefully hands over giant bags of taxpayers' money to Chase, Bank of America, CitiBank and Goldman Sachs.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-b_GJ4ltk 

     And the Federal Reserve's chim chem cher-ee chummy coverups are going through the roof too.  http://www.propublica.org/article/carmen-segarras-secret-recordings-from-inside-new-york-fed

     Plus the Senate just vetoed a bill that would have given students a break from paying up to 12% interest on their college loans too.  According to Warren, "This isn't complicated.  It's a choice – a choice that raises a fundamental question about who the United States Senate works for.  Does it work for those who can hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists to protect tax loopholes for billionaires and profits for the big banks?  Or does it work for those who work hard, play by the rules, and are trying to build a future for themselves and their families?"
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/26034-im-calling-their-bluff

    Not to mention the hidden (and not-so-hidden) fees that banks gleefully charge us customers for no reason at all.  http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2011/03/wells-fargos-illegal-overdraft.html

     To try to completely understand how banksters and their toadies in Congress and the Department of Justice are robbing the rest of us blind, you just gotta watch this video of Bill Moyers interviewing bank-fraud expert Thomas K. Black.  Seriously.   You really should watch this:  http://vimeo.com/107916659  

     In this video, Black describes how Obama was elected by the banking industry and how Obama has totally paid back his debt to the banksters by handing them all "get out of jail free" cards.  Is being elected president really worth selling us Americans out to the banksters?  Apparently so.

     "There's no threat to capitalism like capitalists," continues Black.  "They are destroying its underpinnings.  And when dishonest people gain an advantage in the marketplace, bad ethics drive good ethics out.  This is why we need the rule of law."  Doesn't Thomas K. Black sound just like Dick VanDyke, er, I mean Burt the Chimney Sweep here -- as Black proposes that it's high time to sweep clean our banks.

     And now let's talk about America's ratings on the so-called "Misery Index" http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/misery+index.  Apparently America rates higher on the misery charts now than it ever has, even back in the Great Depression -- and probably even as high as did Mary Poppins's 1910 London.  Thanks a lot, banksters.

    Isn't it time that American voters finally join up with Elizabeth Warren and Mary Poppins -- and tell big banks and banksters to go "fly a kite!"

PS:  Speaking of money, look how much of it is being spent in the Middle East -- and not here at home where it is needed!

     According to a recent blog-post at thehill.com, the first official estimates of the ISIS price tag from the Pentagon showed that, "the costs of intervention between mid-June and late-August was $7.5 million per day.  At that rate, the U.S. has spent $850 million on operations against ISIS as of October 8, adding up to about $2.74 billion per year.  The Pentagon has since revised the estimate up to as high as $10 million per day, or $3.65 billion per year.  In reality, both of those numbers are quite likely to be underestimates of what’s to come." http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/220152-america-deserves-to-know-the-price-tag-for-isis

     Looks like the US military is just as bad as the US banksters when it comes to cleaning out America's pocketbooks -- after they both have put us to sleep with false promises and false news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZewopnA6H7E. 

      What we Americans really need to do these days is to once again take Mary Poppins's advice and "Stay Awake"!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yC_voMY6kY

Sometimes you just gotta take a break from fear of ISIS & Ebola!

   Geez Louise!  Here I am living in a wonderful town, on a safe street and with food in the refrigerator.  But all I ever do is worry about poor Syria being invaded by ISIS, America and the Saudis  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40005.htm.

    Here I am with the best medical care in the world located only six blocks from my home -- and I worry about Ebola.  According to John Barry's fascinating book about the 1919 flu epidemic, "The Great Influenza," viruses have a nasty habit of evolving in order to be more contagious and thus have a longer shelf-life.  And remember the bird-flu scare and the swine flu scare?  And the fact that Congress has just slashed the CDC's budget and left us defenseless -- now that the very agency that stopped both of those possible epidemics in their tracks is currently operating at half-speed due to budget cuts?  Good grief.

     Here I am, snug as a bug in a rug, but my neighbor just told me that foam mattresses give off fumes that can ruin my life.  So there goes my foam mattress, out to the dumpster.  Rats.  It was really really comfortable too.

    And the Republican party has been telling me since Reagan's time that I should be afraid -- very afraid.  Of what?  You name it.  Undocumented Americans, commie spies, weapons of mass destruction, drug lords, terrorist invasions, I forget what all else.

     So now the only sane thing I can think of doing today is to spend the day hiding under my (mattress-less) bed.  "But, Jane, you can't do that!  Remember that there might be a bedbug epidemic!"  Oops.  I forgot.

     Maybe I should just move to someplace like Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Sierra Leone instead -- someplace where it's safe.

Big Soda is taking over Berkeley!

     I keep begging Big Soda operatives to take me off their phone lists -- but to no avail.  Daily I get calls from their push-pull mercenaries, frequently even twice a day.  And as Carol Denny wrote in the Berkeley Daily Planet recently, "...the larger issue, as Big Soda’s waterfall of campaign materials proves, is local control.   http://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2014-10-17/article/42578?headline=Measure-D-and-Tobacco-Tactics--Carol-Denney

     We are losing local control of our city to uncaring, for-profit-only mega-corporations who do not give a damn about Berkeley residents or what they think or want.

      Here are some photos of recent Big Soda propaganda mailers (that include appeals to racial minorities, confusing information and sometimes even outright lies) that I myself have gotten in just the last few weeks.  With all that money to throw around, Big Soda could have fixed the teeth of every kid in Berkeley with tooth problems caused by drinking soda!

"Help us, Michelle Obama!" Berkeley's still under attack from Big Soda

     According to First Lady Michelle Obama, 25% of everyone trying to enlist in America's armed forces these days are turned down because of poor health.  And of those who actually make it through the physical exams and join the Army, Marines, etc., 50% of these recruits are in poor enough health that they cost our military 150 billion dollars in healthcare expenses -- plus $100,000 per patient to repair their bad teeth.

     Boots on the ground?  Yeah, sure.  But first we have to find enough healthy young adults to wear those boots in the first place -- and then fix their teeth.  I'm sure that ISIS doesn't have that kind of problem at all.

     Apparently, we pretty much have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find healthy young adults -- or even kids -- in America these days.  "We even have two-year-olds testing with high blood pressure right now," says the First Lady.

     And why is all this happening?  One of the major causes of this scary decay in Americans' health is that they drink too much soda.  And also, we have to pay truly outrageous doctor bills as a result.  So can we tax soda consumers for their fair share of their own health costs?  Something small, like one cent a can?  Seems logical.  We already tax alcohol and tobacco consumers for their fair share of their own health costs, right?

    So the City of Berkeley, which runs three health clinics and a dental clinic, got the bright idea of taxing soda consumers to help cover their own healthcare costs.  And they put a measure on the November ballot to this effect.  And then all Hell broke loose in Berkeley!  Good grief! 

     Soda manufacturing companies reacted like we had spit in their soup and kidnapped their cat!  "Get over it, Big Soda.  This is not about you!"  This is about the consumers of your products who are dying ten or 20 years early because they like your products.  They are the ones who are paying the tax.  Not you.

    So now I get at least one robo-call a day from Big Soda, plus all kinds of mailers, fliers, canvassers and accosters too.  1.2 million dollars worth of junk mail and hounding, telling us Berkeley residents to "Vote No on Measure D" in November.  I think that the people of Berkeley will vote "Yes on D" just because Big Soda has pissed us all off!  http://www.berkeleyvsbigsoda.com/

     Further, no single corporation or individual should be allowed to buy any American election.  Ever.  Not even a city election.  And the "One person, one vote" rule should never be allowed to apply to corporations.  And we the people, not some company hacks on the Supreme Court, should be the ones who decide whether we want to live in a plutocracy or a democracy.  "You have to choose between one or the other," as Justice Brandeis once warned us back in 1916 when the Robber Barons were in charge -- like they are now.

    Bottom line:  "Help us, Michelle!  Put your money where your mouth is.  Come to Berkeley.  Help us.  Save us from Big Soda.  Please!" 

     And you can help too.  Please write the First Lady at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC 20500 and beg her to help little Berkeley out (And also please mention that her hubby needs to get the freak out of the Middle East and start spending all those trillions of dollars that he now spends on killing strangers -- on fixing Americans' teeth instead).

Question for ISIS:  Where'd you get all those swords?

     Okay, so what?  So what if you've just joined ISIS, been given a sword and been sent off to Syria and Iraq.  So what if you now have a huge bloody sword in your hand and you've just cut off somebody's head?  Big freaking deal.  You're the one that will be going to Hell, not me.  But what I want to know is this:  Where, exactly, did you get that huge bloody sword in the first place?  "Swords R Us"?

     From your local "Samurai of the Desert" katana convenience store?

     To find out who is really financing, training and supplying ISIS, just check out who is supplying its swords.

     "Made in China"?  Of course.  Isn't everything these days.  But who are the swords being shipped to?

     Syrians aren't supplying the swords.  Syrians stand solidly behind Assad -- as evidenced by their June elections, and also by the fact that almost all Syrian internal refugees flee to Assad refugee camps, and no one, I repeat, no one ever flees off to ISIS. 

     Syrians hate ISIS -- almost as much as they hate being beheaded!  Plus ISIS is still beheading their fathers and mothers and nephews and cousins and aunts.  How can you possibly become BFFs with someone like that?  Let alone give them more swords so that they can go after your wives and kids too? http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/09/26/fighting-isil-is-a-smokescreen-for-us-mobilization-against-syria-and-iran.html

    According to a new Tweet just sent out from Kurdish Syria, "Hoped American planes will help us.  Instead American tanks in the hands of ISIS are killing us."

     And Libya isn't supplying the swords either.  Why?  Because Libya itself just had its head handed to it on a platter too -- courtesy of the dread Sword of NATO.  All that those American-backed "rebels" now in charge of the failed state of Libya are supplying ISIS with currently are some used American rocket launchers and RPGs left over from Benghazi, and a bunch of guys trained by the US to behead Gaddafi.

     But perhaps Saudi Arabia is supplying the swords?  After all, their state symbol is two swords and a palm tree.  But I still don't understand why the Saudis would do such a dumb thing -- buy entire shipments of swords to give to creepy guys hovering right outside their borders?  Aren't the Saudis afraid of blow-back?  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/30/isis-bomb-muslim-world-air-strikes-saudi-arabia

     Aren't the Saudi princes afraid that "Behead like a Pirate" day might be coming to Riyadh too?

     And isn't it bad enough already that a bunch of Saudis got their hands on those box-cutters over on the other side of the Atlantic back in 2001 -- and just look at all the mischief that caused!  http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/10/05/the-hidden-government-group-linking-jfk-watergate-iran-contra-and-911/  Can Saudis really be trusted to play well with swords right in their very own backyards?  Saudi Arabia is about to find out. 

     And how about Turkey?  Seen any bloody swords stamped "Made in Istanbul" lately?  But why would the Turks want to do that?  The blow-back there would be even more immense.  You'd have to be crazy to arm a horde of ISIS madmen to go next door and cut off your Syrian neighbors' heads -- no matter how much you hate Syrians.  Oops, too late.  http://www.hawarnews.com/english/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2587:turkish-troops-attack-vigil-and-send-military-equipment-to-isis&catid=1:news&Itemid=2  Turkey has already supplied ISIS with every kind of weapon you can think of -- and then naively hired ISIS to be its Neighborhood Watch.  http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/10/u-s-alliance-with-fsa-and-isil-in-six-photographs/#more-55881 

     But apparently Turkey thinks that by supplying weapons to ISIS (and also establishing a no-fly zone over Syria) that Syria will fail too and then Turkey will get the Ottoman empire back.  http://muslimvillage.com/2014/09/28/58258/turkey-changes-posture-after-hostage-release/

     Sorry, Turkey.  It's heads.  You lose.

     But what about Israel?  Did Israeli neo-cons supply all those swords?  Who will ever know?  Who the freak ever knows what Israeli neo-cons are up to?  Certainly not the Jews who first hired them.  And definitely not me.  Ask the Mossad.  But a fly on the wall at Mossad headquarters would probably hear something like this:  "Those stupid Americans actually think that we are their only friends in the Middle East.  However, before we came along America had no enemies there at all.  Good job, guys!"  Followed by a high-five.

     The nightmare of having ISIS swordsmen let loose to create panic and havoc in the Arab world sounds like an Israeli neo-con wet dream to me.

     And what about American neo-cons?  Nah.  Their most important product is weapons, sure, but they prefer selling Tomahawks rather than swords. 

     "But Jane," you might say, "American weapons-manufacturers will sell anything to anyone, even swords to ISIS, if it will make them a buck."  Hell, they'd even sell drones to the Taliban if they thought that money was involved.  They'd sell out America in a heartbeat for money.  They'd probably even behead their own mothers for a few dollars more.  http://antiwar.com/blog/2014/09/26/the-boomerang-effect-how-foreign-policy-changes-domestic-policy/

    According to former Austrian general Matthias Ghalem, several years ago Al Qaeda wannabes "signed a financial-military contract to confront upcoming military and security challenges in southern Syria in the future...and that two deputies of Robert Stephen Ford, US former ambassador to Syria, were also present at the meeting....  And according to the Los Angeles Times, since the opening of a new US base in the desert in southwest of Jordan in November 2012, CIA operatives and US special operations troops have covertly trained these militants in groups of 20 to 45 at a time in two-week courses."  http://en.alalam.ir/news/1511636

     But according to US vice-president Joe Biden, the Saudis are to blame for arming ISIS.  Of course they are.  But it is American weapons that these ISIS cutthroats are firing -- and it is American humvees that ISIS is doing donuts with out in the desert too.  So why not brandish American swords as well?  American neo-cons suddenly draw a line in the sand against swords?  But RPGs are okay?  http://pacificfreepress.com/rss/13501-from-the-mouth-of-biden-veep-admits-us-allies-fund-arm-al-qaeda-al-nusra.html

    And then there's Russia.  Russia stood silently by while the "Coalition of the Willing" beheaded Iraq and Libya.  Would it really be in their best interests to let Syria and Iran get beheaded next?  Or is Russia playing the "Afghanistan Game" with the US instead -- wherein America slowly but surely beheads its own economy by trying to put eleven trillion dollars worth of "boots on the ground" all over the freaking world where they don't belong?  http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/28092014 

    Or did Iran sell ISIS the swords?  With the American military-industrial complex and Israeli neo-cons using every trick in the book to try to find an excuse to put Iran's head on the chopping block for fun and profit even as we speak?  I think not.

     And a friend of mine just asked me the following question:  "Or else could it be that Libya and Syria are/were among the few remaining countries that have resisted the imposition of a central bank associated with the Bank of England/Federal Reserve?"  Hadn't thought of that.  Hell, maybe the banksters bought ISIS their swords!

     And now we get to the next question.  Who the freak would ever even want to behead anyone in the first place?  That takes a whole bunch of work.  Not to mention all that blood-splatter involved  -- and with no laundromats in sight either.

     You've got to be really really angry or crazy or both to cut off someone's head.  So what got these ISIS fruitcakes so pissed off in the first place?  Perhaps it might have been all these past 60 or 70 years that they, their parents and their grandparents have spent trying to survive the constant "War on Arabs" by American colonialists and Israeli neo-cons?  Perhaps this is what has finally sent them around the bend and into horror-movie mode?

     Just be glad that ISIS got their inspiration for weapons from watching the "Walking Dead" and not from watching the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre".  But I'm sure that the weapons industry would far rather prefer producing chainsaws than swords.  Chainsaws are a bit more profitable to make, more effectively bloody and just a bit less Old School.

*****
Yes, those are Marines and large weapons in the background of the photo above.  Yes, that is a Sunni sheik in Al Ambar province, Iraq.    And, yes, that's me too -- trying to think up a not-dumb question to ask.