This picture is here, not to ridicule, but because it shows the madness of someone with a strong compassionate heart who's been forced to betray that compassion - coerced or blackmailed, or both - by pressure she could not withstand.
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Duties of the Secretary of State:These duties — the activities and responsibilities of the State Department—include the following:-state.gov
- Serves as the President’s principal adviser on U.S. foreign policy;
- Conducts negotiations relating to U.S. foreign affairs;
the list goes on
But if Clinton has shown anything during the campaign, when she morphed from establishment to working class candidate, she has an elastic sense of the possible.
Heilbrunn/HuffingtonPost
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Israel’s right to exist, and exist in safety, should never be put into question.
Clinton's Israel and the Middle East index page
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It is even more disturbing that the problem appears to have gotten worse. These textbooks don't give Palestinian children an education, they give them an indoctrination," Senator Clinton said.
It is essential to those of us who care deeply about what is happening in and to, Israel, to recognize that Israel's struggle is a struggle on behalf of a future where people will be able to live with peace and security.
Remarks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
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There is possibly no person President-elect Barack Obama considered for secretary of state who is more reliably pro-Israel than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.)
Abramowitz/Washington Post
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By making morality purely a question of intent, by training children to see that the internal morality of the family, in healthy families, is based on intent first, then outcome, though this shifts slowly toward outcome over intent in healthy families, the internal morality of the family, which has to be based on intent more than outcome in order to raise children, to allow them mistakes, especially well-intentioned ones, the infantilizing process that Christianity is part of - Christianity as practiced here and now - sustains this, and the post-Christian culture of capitalist hedonism, with its force-fed public morality, which depends on that infantilizing version of Christianity for its validity, the community's moral values manufactured by entertainment corporations, and the healthy rejection of that manufactured morality co-opted and redirected by those corporations or by the use of those same corporate devices in the hands of demagogues and clots of feral mutants, are the family's moral boundaries carried out to the extreme edge of human behavior, the world stage no wider than the living room.
Intention is all that matters.
This takes the weight off what happens, it doesn't matter what happens so much as why. Which means you can be tricked into things, and kept in those tricks, seduced by things that aren't in the rules, and trapped.
By making morality purely a question of intent, by training children to see that the internal morality of the family, in healthy families, is based on intent first, then outcome, though this shifts slowly toward outcome over intent in healthy families, the internal morality of the family, which has to be based on intent more than outcome in order to raise children, to allow them mistakes, especially well-intentioned ones, the infantilizing process that Christianity is part of - Christianity as practiced here and now - sustains this, and the post-Christian culture of capitalist hedonism, with its force-fed public morality, which depends on that infantilizing version of Christianity for its validity, the community's moral values manufactured by entertainment corporations, and the healthy rejection of that manufactured morality co-opted and redirected by those corporations or by the use of those same corporate devices in the hands of demagogues and clots of feral mutants, are the family's moral boundaries carried out to the extreme edge of human behavior, the world stage no wider than the living room.
Intention is all that matters.
This takes the weight off what happens, it doesn't matter what happens so much as why. Which means you can be tricked into things, and kept in those tricks, seduced by things that aren't in the rules, and trapped.
No wonder there's so much disdain leveled at the natural world, no wonder the natural world has been stripped down to its bones and now the sounds of even them breaking, because the natural world doesn't recognize the human family as chosen, as special, and will eat it as readily as we eat other families, will allow the human family to be penned up and herded, branded, its sons castrated, the melted tallow of the dead, the fat rendered from the slaughtering houses, fed back to them in streams, to make them fat again. As we do.
No wonder the most dominant and materially successful members of the human family seek to live where the immediate landscape is the natural world, but the natural world held in tight bondage, in total captivity, exhibited in carefully controlled tableaux.
What's most gratifying there isn't the superficial green and symmetry, it's the order, it's the control, the trees pruned and bent to postures of submission and obedient attention, the bushes clipped and trimmed into rigid imposed order, the only "wild" creatures permitted small, harmless, and mostly out of sight.
The message of safety this bound landscape confers answers a deep hunger for security that goes back much farther than language or tools in human history. Which is why it's now the aesthetic of the human communal landscape as well.
This was an outsider's rant until very recently. Eccentric, ill-groomed, unattractive voices and figures, championing something silly and idealistic, green meadows, big wild old trees, la la la la. Nothing practical, nothing central to anyone real - a luxury, not an obligation.
But it was the world itself we were talking about.
Our places in it, and by those places what we are, what we would become, what we have become, and what we're going to become, now.
And because the changes that are ringing down are so immense and threatening it's powerfully important that the moral content of them is almost insignificantly marginal and small.
Because no one has done it "on purpose".
And that's what matters. Whether it was done on purpose or not.
Not whether or not the earth itself will become uninhabitable, but whether or not that condition will be the result of an "accident", or some fiendish plot.
Evil or accident. As if that matters most.
This is why Americans accept traffic mortality rates of close to 50000 every year, year after year, with no complaint.
No wonder the most dominant and materially successful members of the human family seek to live where the immediate landscape is the natural world, but the natural world held in tight bondage, in total captivity, exhibited in carefully controlled tableaux.
What's most gratifying there isn't the superficial green and symmetry, it's the order, it's the control, the trees pruned and bent to postures of submission and obedient attention, the bushes clipped and trimmed into rigid imposed order, the only "wild" creatures permitted small, harmless, and mostly out of sight.
The message of safety this bound landscape confers answers a deep hunger for security that goes back much farther than language or tools in human history. Which is why it's now the aesthetic of the human communal landscape as well.
This was an outsider's rant until very recently. Eccentric, ill-groomed, unattractive voices and figures, championing something silly and idealistic, green meadows, big wild old trees, la la la la. Nothing practical, nothing central to anyone real - a luxury, not an obligation.
But it was the world itself we were talking about.
Our places in it, and by those places what we are, what we would become, what we have become, and what we're going to become, now.
And because the changes that are ringing down are so immense and threatening it's powerfully important that the moral content of them is almost insignificantly marginal and small.
Because no one has done it "on purpose".
And that's what matters. Whether it was done on purpose or not.
Not whether or not the earth itself will become uninhabitable, but whether or not that condition will be the result of an "accident", or some fiendish plot.
Evil or accident. As if that matters most.
This is why Americans accept traffic mortality rates of close to 50000 every year, year after year, with no complaint.
Because no one gets in wrecks on purpose.
And this is why alcohol has become such a strong scapegoat for traffic accidents generally, the "cause" even though statistically it isn't even present in half of them, much less causing the ones it is.
Because getting drunk is intentional, even sinful, and can be blamed because it's intentionally chosen.
Whereas no one can be blamed for driving to work or to the store. No one is "responsible" for driving to work, even when they could have done something different to get there. That's changing, but not quickly, and it's very late for it.
Grown-ups, in their most hope-filled dreams, want the world to be a better place for their children to raise their own children in, and on through the generations.
Grown-ups want at least, at the very least, that the world still be there for their children to muddle through. We're playing with that now.
Moving toward something like responsibility, then away from it. And the big corporate clusters of combining energy are responding - "green" is getting nauseatingly common as a commercial sound, even as it starts to mean little more than another shopping choice.
But we get confused. And science has now walked us to the threshold of physical immortality, what about that?
We get confused about whether everyone should get to have their children grow up, or just us. Is there a right to that? Is it a universal right, or a privilege that can be denied the unworthy?
No one argues publicly against it but almost everyone lives their lives against it. How much more confusing is it to ask who gets to live forever?
And what is that"we"? We're confused about what that is, what "we" are. Does it mean everybody?
If that's what it means then everybody can't live like this anymore, because there are too many of us living this way now, and we have to stop.
And many people faced with that will push for a reduction in the others, in the people that aren't like them, whether poorer or darker or meaner or less "moral". Some easily determined characteristic that allows the division between saved and lost, between the winners and losers.
Something very suspicious and ugly about the survivor reality shows, the constant drumbeat of winning and losing, closer and closer to the Darwinian contest of life and death but all on camera and the cameras are never threatened with losing, all directed from offstage by the invisible minds and hands the watching children are trained to ignore the presence of, even while they obey its hinted commands. Most of them never once let themselves imagine the camera lens through which they "see" the world.
A big part of me wants to believe that I died already, that this is hell or one of its suburbs, that this much evil can't be all there is to being, there had to have been another place where it wasn't like this, where not even the seeds of this world would be allowed to begin.
This can't be all there is to me being what I am, whatever that is. I must have passed through some kind of threshold to get here, failed some test, fallen, given in, submitted to the darkness.
As opposed to, as was the case in the historical narrative of my actual life, just getting the shit kicked out of you until you don't know what the fuck is happening and don't care, and become small and selfish and incomplete and hungry and pretty much blind.
And Mormons, I have a lot of trouble believing in the ultimate reality of a world in which Mormons have so much wealth and power.
And Scientology.
It's a long list.
And a less big but still pretty substantial part of me keeps insisting that this is all being done simply to make me frustrated, me personally, so that I'll take on the burdens and responsibilities of what some invisible but influential presence wants done but doesn't want to carry the blame for, doesn't want its children to bear the weight of, even as they enjoy its beneficial - to them - outcome.
Hillary Clinton as Obama's Secretary of State isn't making me feel any better about anything.
This is from Huffington as well, but the links have been altered:
Karolina Kurkova's Missing Bellybutton Explained (PHOTOS) Victoria's Secret angel Karolina Kurkova surprised onlookers with her...
Because getting drunk is intentional, even sinful, and can be blamed because it's intentionally chosen.
Whereas no one can be blamed for driving to work or to the store. No one is "responsible" for driving to work, even when they could have done something different to get there. That's changing, but not quickly, and it's very late for it.
Grown-ups, in their most hope-filled dreams, want the world to be a better place for their children to raise their own children in, and on through the generations.
Grown-ups want at least, at the very least, that the world still be there for their children to muddle through. We're playing with that now.
Moving toward something like responsibility, then away from it. And the big corporate clusters of combining energy are responding - "green" is getting nauseatingly common as a commercial sound, even as it starts to mean little more than another shopping choice.
But we get confused. And science has now walked us to the threshold of physical immortality, what about that?
We get confused about whether everyone should get to have their children grow up, or just us. Is there a right to that? Is it a universal right, or a privilege that can be denied the unworthy?
No one argues publicly against it but almost everyone lives their lives against it. How much more confusing is it to ask who gets to live forever?
And what is that"we"? We're confused about what that is, what "we" are. Does it mean everybody?
If that's what it means then everybody can't live like this anymore, because there are too many of us living this way now, and we have to stop.
And many people faced with that will push for a reduction in the others, in the people that aren't like them, whether poorer or darker or meaner or less "moral". Some easily determined characteristic that allows the division between saved and lost, between the winners and losers.
Something very suspicious and ugly about the survivor reality shows, the constant drumbeat of winning and losing, closer and closer to the Darwinian contest of life and death but all on camera and the cameras are never threatened with losing, all directed from offstage by the invisible minds and hands the watching children are trained to ignore the presence of, even while they obey its hinted commands. Most of them never once let themselves imagine the camera lens through which they "see" the world.
A big part of me wants to believe that I died already, that this is hell or one of its suburbs, that this much evil can't be all there is to being, there had to have been another place where it wasn't like this, where not even the seeds of this world would be allowed to begin.
This can't be all there is to me being what I am, whatever that is. I must have passed through some kind of threshold to get here, failed some test, fallen, given in, submitted to the darkness.
As opposed to, as was the case in the historical narrative of my actual life, just getting the shit kicked out of you until you don't know what the fuck is happening and don't care, and become small and selfish and incomplete and hungry and pretty much blind.
And Mormons, I have a lot of trouble believing in the ultimate reality of a world in which Mormons have so much wealth and power.
And Scientology.
It's a long list.
And a less big but still pretty substantial part of me keeps insisting that this is all being done simply to make me frustrated, me personally, so that I'll take on the burdens and responsibilities of what some invisible but influential presence wants done but doesn't want to carry the blame for, doesn't want its children to bear the weight of, even as they enjoy its beneficial - to them - outcome.
Hillary Clinton as Obama's Secretary of State isn't making me feel any better about anything.
This is from Huffington as well, but the links have been altered:
