By Tom Chartier  

Yes, that’s right you heard me. Who let the COW into the classroom? No, no, no, not the mooing, milk-producing, four-legged bovine. I’m talking about COW: Curriculum On Wheels, a teaching device produced by Ignite! Learning. 

COWs are the latest gadgetry in a long line of “easy teaching” scams swallowed by incompetent school administrators, lazy teachers and helpless parents desperate for any sign of learning from their children… like a grade of C+ in “health studies.” 

Basically, COWs are self contained software projectors complete with all the bells and whistles one wants in the “iStupid” age. Miss Crabtree is being replaced by a machine. Real teaching is going down the swirly bowl in favor of catchy jingles and cute cartoons. Hey kids. Let’s see how Mr. Bighead explains Pluto’s demotion from planet to mere space rock. 

by Mickey Z.

Sigmund Freud sez: "America is gigantic; but a gigantic mistake.".

America is a nation built upon myth. If you don't believe me, consider the Florentine merchant-adventurer after whom this country was named. Amerigo Vespucci probably made at least two voyages to the Americas, but he was not the leader of any expedition or the first European of his era to set foot on the mainland. (America named after a self-hyping fraud? It's just too perfect.) Yes, the USA is a nation built upon myth...and the greatest myth of all is that the land of the free is gonna last forever.

I'm sure the Aztecs, the Incas, the Romans, and the Mongols were pretty damn pleased with themselves and figured what they were doing could never end.

by Stephen Lendman

On December 3, 2006 voters in Venezuela will again get to choose who'll lead them as President for the next six years. There's no doubt who that will be as the people's choice is the same man they first elected their leader in December, 1998 with 56% of the vote and reelected him in July, 2000 after the adoption of the Bolivarian Republic's new Constitution with a 60% total. They then saw him survive three failed US-directed and funded attempts to unseat him beginning with the aborted two-day coup in April, 2002, followed by the 2002-03 crippling oil strike, and then the failed August, 2004 recall referendum. Chavistas must believe the man they revere has at least more six lives and will use one of them in a few weeks to continue in the job the Venezuelan people won't entrust to anyone else as long as he wants the job.

They may also hope he has as much good fortune and as many lives as his friend and ally Fidel Castro who in nearly 48 years as Cuba's leader survived over 5,700 US-directed terror attacks against his country and about 600 US attempts to kill him - an astonishing survival record against a powerful and determined foe still trying to remove him to reinstate oligarchic rule over the island state. The Bush administration has the same fate in mind for Hugo Chavez Frias and won't sit by quietly allowing Bolivarianism to flourish and spread which it's doing as more people in the region and beyond are fed up with the old order and want the same benefits Venezuelans have. It's playing out now in Bolivia, on the streets of Mexico and in the run-up to the December 3 Venezuelan presidential election where the people show up in massive numbers most every time Chavez makes a public campaign appearance.

Via sources unknown and by methods unclear ("Stuff happens" – the Hon. Donald R. Rumsfeld), Atlantic Free Press has come into possession of a recording of a psychoanalytic session between Dr. Jungen Freudant and one of this patients, a certain G.W. Bush. Our senior writer, Paul William Roberts, has been so good as to provide the yeoman service of transcribing the tape for our readers.

Dr Freudant: Good to see you, George. How are you?

George W. Bush: Been havin’ problems, Doc…

JF : Yes?

GWB: Big fuckin’ problems…

JF : Tell me…

GWB: My Dad wont take my calls…My wife’s foolin’ around on me…my senior advisers just admitted they’ve been lyin’ to me…and my best friend brought me a present back from England…

JF : A Tony Blair voodoo doll?

GWB: No, I already got one…It was a T-shirt that says, “Bush is just another word for cun—er…for vagina…but in English…”

JF : And how does that make you feel?

"The past is never dead; it's not even past." -- William Faulkner

WATERTOWN, Tennessee – The 20th century was well into its seventh decade, but he still came to the back door every time he needed to see "Mister Edsel" about some business or other. No amount of cajoling would induce him to knock on the front door. Finally, one day, in exasperation, my father told him: "Jim, if you don't come around to the front next time, I'm not going to talk to you. This just won't do." Jim shook his head, perplexed; it seemed a concept too radical to grasp or accept: knocking on a white man's front door.

The past lives longer in the South, as Faulkner, that great bard of race and sex, knew well. Habits of subservience from the days of slavery more than a century before were still lingering here and there, as I could see on my own back porch that day, watching Jim and my father.

It was like a scene from To Kill a Mockingbird; and indeed, "Mister Edsel" had come to play the role of Atticus Finch in the town: an advocate and mediator for people like Jim – a black man from the country, deprived of education, shunted into stoop labor, living in the margins, forever under arbitrary threat from an uncaring officialdom or from sudden outbursts of the deeply-ingrained racial enmity that lurked beneath the placid surface of the white faces all around him.   

It was an unsought role that came to my father simply because he was one of the few white men who treated black people like they were ordinary, fully-fledged human beings, not lepers or clowns or dangerous trash. It was a rare attribute in those days – and it is still much rarer than most would care to admit, even in the "New South," where Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr. stands within reach of becoming the first African-American senator from the old Confederacy since Reconstruction (or as some still like to call it, "the Yankee Occupation").

Ford's surprisingly strong campaign has exposed fault lines long buried beneath Tennessee's creeping – or rather, galloping – suburbanization, where old ways, both good and bad, are rapidly being submerged in the undifferentiated glop of modern American franchise culture. But when money and power are on the line, atavism is the order of the day: ancient fears and hatreds re-emerge – or are mightily encouraged to re-emerge, with all the subtle and not-so-subtle arts of high-tech mass persuasion stoking the flames.

For the stakes in the battle for Tennessee's Senate seat – once considered a lock for the Republicans – have suddenly grown exceedingly high. A Ford win could wrest control of the chamber away from the GOP, putting a serious crimp in the party's bacchanal of greed and graft. What's more, it opens up the possibility of investigations, subpoenas – and worse – for an Administration that is not only suppurating with massive corruption, incompetence, extremism and deceit, but has also openly acknowledged several criminal actions, including torture and warrantless surveillance. The Bush Faction simply cannot afford to face accountability for its monumental failures and misdeeds.

And so in late October, with Ford rising rapidly in the polls, even overtaking his opponent – Bob Corker, a typical tycoon-politician with a bland manner masking sharp practice in his murky business dealings – the Bush Party got serious and whipped out a barn-burning theme from days of yore:  the "hot black buck with nothing but white women on his mind."

(more after the jump; plus an MP3 on a related theme at the end.)

by Phil Rockstroh

A strange genus of the former has overgrown the land. It began as a small hybrid, a member of the Bush family, growing mostly in southern and western states. Some theories hold that its origins were in Connecticut; although, when it was transplanted to Texas, it spread, unchecked, due to the fact that there are few herbivores in the region to limit its pernicious growth. There, in the dry Texas soil, it grew dense and thorny, and thrived when watered with blood and oil.

Left unpruned and unregulated, it grew thicker than an ancient oak, larger than a redwood: It became a Paranoia Sequoia, growing ever larger in the hot greenhouse gases of global climate change; its massive branches spread across the world, casting a shadow of fear and revulsion beneath it.

And it has bore strange and terrible fruit, indeed – as well as proliferate assorted nuts.

by Rod Amis

Three years ago, I began an outline for a foreign policy article, the major thesis of which was that it seemed inevitable at the time that Europe, Africa and South America – if not Australia, for reasons I'll elucidate below – would have to tilt toward the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC,) if for no other reason than to counterbalance the growing economic and military will-to-hegemony of the United States. It was meant to be a reasoned, long-form, foreign policy article to which I could refer back in future considerations.

The impetus for the article was that I believed not enough serious foreign-policy consideration was being made from a dissident and (far) leftist perspective at the time. Looking back on that outline today, for an article never completed, it's easy to pat oneself on the back for being prophetic. But, as Conan Doyle wrote, it was "elementary." There was nowhere else for the world to go. There were two reasons for that conclusion three years ago and those same two reasons obtain today:

Nature abhors a vacuum. The very notion of a unipolar world contradicts everything we know about the dynamics of power in international relations. Even during the Roman empire, let alone the British, there were constant threats and challenges from the community of nations which undercut the will-to-hegemony of the then-dominant power.

In the case of Britain, there was always Austria-Hungary and intermittently France and Spain. In the case of the Romans, there was Carthage, Egypt and those forces that the victor's historians characterized as "barbarians" or "pirates" since they represented no formalized nation states. There was also the formidable and tragic Jewish rebellion. That is was no small matter is evidenced by the fact that Jerusalem was the second city, after Carthage, to be completely razed and sown with salt.

Nonetheless, all of these actors put brakes on the hegemonic impulses of the Great Power of their age to far greater degrees than did internal and domestic political influences. There is a paradigm here worth consideration.

Other (and more astute) students and commentators on history and geopolitics have noted that nation-states, per se, are not the only dominant actors in the world we face in the twenty-first century.

There are now corporate "states," so to speak, with budgets that exceed those of most nations and influence that is genuinely transnational. Thus, it is not a stretch to suggest that Microsoft Corporation, Wal-Mart – the world's largest corporate entity – or certain Non-governmental Organizations – such as those founded by Soros or Gates –have as much potential impact on geopolitical development as do the nation-states still clinging to their atavistic and nationalistic sense of self-importance and "destiny."

by James Kunstler
 

The quality of the buildings was another striking thing. The remnants of Peachville's little main street downtown was composed mostly of one-story buildings so ugly that they seemed to be missing some essential DNA. They were mean little brick boxes lacking any ornament, denoting an utter disregard for the public realm of the street. Along a couple of blocks, the town officials had recently carried out a "street upgrade program," meaning they added a center median with trees in a few places, but the buildings themselves are so weak and homely that no amount of tarting up the streetscape will make much difference.

In an article concerned with the rapid urbanization of India and China, Victor Mallet of London's Financial Times (August 5/6, 2006) points out that Bangalore "has become a byword for a catastrophic failure of urban planning."

Interestingly, he attributes this lapse to "Indian sentimentalism about the supposed benefits of village life, and the consequent incompetence in managing cities" which "contrasts starkly with the ruthless pragmatism of the central and local authorities in China."

Let us not bring up that bugbear of the absence of democracy in China just yet, no matter that the Anglo-Americans are all so keen to bomb us all to "freedom" these days, China being that fearsome and much envied exception.