Showing posts with label Margaret Thatcher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Margaret Thatcher. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

American Town Square – Sense of Community – Lost in the Modern Age?





I was totally struck by the statement in Russell Brand’s youthful POV in his Guardian article, about the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher and how she broke a “Sense of Community” along with the Coal Strikers in 1980’s Britain.

That the solidarity that got Britain through a World War with Satan and his minions literally breathing down their necks was the sense of community and sacrifice and blind hard work for the cause.

The Brits turned out Churchill after that war because they did all the heavy lifting in that war and created a sort of socialist state for the benefit of the many and or the all.

That ideas of Marx were not exclusively communist but like the earliest traditions of the Christian faith, a community based on common survival and shared sense of all.

I have written somewhere here or there how I thought of Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the Air Traffic Controller’s union as Conservative ideologue and not as fellow American being the root why we could not protect our skies twenty years later on September 11, 2001.  

That losing experience and sense of camaraderie and common purpose and sticking one’s neck out left us with a scooped out pale reflection of an air controller’s network that could have been an asset in our national defense but instead had been turned into some hollowed trophy of Conservative dogma.

That Ronny fed off of Margaret’s actions in Britain and vice versa in their one upmanship of ways to break humanity in favor of profit and all at the loss of a sense of national purpose or on a local level a sense of community that used to exist in the American town square.

That so much rhetoric these days serves as politics and PR drivel as the ship of state fades from greatness and into the deep forgotten abyss of history like all past empires etc.

Spilled milk? Or a sense of purpose to redirect our personal goals if we are a basic Christian and our national goals if our combined sense of ancestry and common ethic can be re-galvanized into something like the idealized forum and town squares of our youth?

Is the eventual global town square going to be a great place to meet and hang out with your global neighbors or is it going to be one cold stone faced plaza that nobody cares to frequent?


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Russell Brand - A Very Interesting Article By Him On Margaret Thatcher - As Mother of the Nation? - "I Felt Sorry for Her Children"






..."What's going on there, mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them flowers."

The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol

When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. 

Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?

We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: 

"We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The spell of community.

Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.

You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema…

In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen…

She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.


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Glenda Jackson, Labour MP In Parliament - on the Evils of Thatcherism - Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing





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Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Thatcher – Last of the Cold War Triumvirate Antichrist Dies - Eulogy



Cold War Warriors - Triumvirate - Antichrist?
-Thatcher - Reagan - Wojtyla


It sounds a bit ridiculous. But after we defeated evil in World War II, we adapted the tactics of our enemies to fight our enemies.  

This of course has spiraled in seventy odd years to corporate wars paid for by U.S. Taxpayers and torture and suspension of habeas corpus in secret oversea dungeons like Guantanamo.

One has to wonder if Hitler and or the Soviet Union were Satan, then what equal force of evil was needed to defeat them. In the 1980’s I think of no other PR force in the media as the Three Part Antichrist of Reagan, Thatcher and Wojtyla to defeat the thought that people and the production of the people belongs to the people if only in theory and not practice.

Something about deficit spending on the military, secret Contra wars against peasants in Central and South America, along with the breaking of unions, workers' rights, and the obliterating of livelihoods of workers in the north of England at the expense of enriching the wealthy in London and we end up with the Vatican Bank as the money launderer of western empire and ambitions and the plight of buggered children ignored by a Moral in Mask Only papacy on marionette strings pulled by the CIA as three components of evil that live on to this day of these past thirty years to cause, the source, of so much rot in our social and moral systems.

Was the Soviet Union as evil as the collateral damage caused in the West to defeat them?

The airwaves yesterday were pretty much filled with the accomplishments of Margaret Thatcher,the deceased former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She being the last living component of the Triumvirate Antichrist chosen as acceptable evil to fight so-called evil in the East.

Reading the papers today, apparently she died alone in a hotel room, an expensive hotel room no doubt at the Ritz. A first class nursing home / space by any other name. The original press releases gave the impression of her two children being at her side. 

But today, her two children living abroad in Switzerland and Spain, not liking what Britain has become are being searched out for PR statements about their arrival at Mummy’s funeral. 

One also gets the impression that the nursing home room at the Ritz may have been the result of her dear children selling her mansion out from under her in her late stages of dementia and dumping what was left of the Iron Lady into the care of some hourly no benefits paid nurse on call at the hotel front desk?

Not a pretty ending to the great woman the press is trying to paint as the Savior of Britain??? But an ending never the less. We all come to some end in our end.

I give her the fact of being a woman successful in a man’s world and making it to the top of the political heap.  

No doubt the wussification of the male population in Britain since WWII was evident in her rise.

She was a harsh lower middle class grocer’s daughter with harsh lower middle class cares for her white neighbors only in small village Britain of nostalgic thought. Though I cannot remember seeing her ever shaking the hands of a Pakistani merchant or grocer in the less Toni sections of London.

The American Cable news yesterday propped her up as part of a reason to resurrect the tin god of Ronald Reagan from the grave to somehow tout whatever he was supposedly good at, which I think was deficit spending in face of the great evil empire of the Soviet Union that one morning simply faded away.

That the collapse first of the Soviet Union under a system of crony socialism and economic unfairness and inefficiencies merely marked the first system to collapse.  

Our system, that did not retool for peace after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Has merely gone on to invent enemies that we stir up like hornets’ nests by droning them and their neighbors as collateral damage in a new Cold War like model based on some Pentagon Dr. Strangelove mindset run amuck on the world stage.
 
Growing pains of a new global culture?

Thatcher broke the unions and aborted the native coal industry in favor of outsourcing energy to cheap petroleum imports.

In fact on the coal, energy and union thing, I begin to believe that one of the important historic aspects of the Harvard Brown Wharton Global Spreadsheet mentality is that no one from Ivy League colleges or the London School of Economics in their business models want to get their hands dirty, create anything, let alone sit down to a table of human beings, union members and negotiate fair wages and benefits for workers.  

This whole global spreadsheet thing is exporting sweat, dirt and labor further and further down some ladder into hell?

Thatcher did not negotiate. It was not in her nature. In fact the only good thing she did was challenge the bullies of the Argentine Junta that stole the Falkland Islands and started that war.  

Of course, the world was fast changing then.  A mere thousand dollar off the rack French Exocet Missile could if it hit the right spot destroy a billion dollar (a lot of money back then) air craft carrier. But the Brits lucked out with an little bit of unofficial US spy satellite info and the Junta Generals were a bunch a morons, tripping over their own medals, after all was said and done.

The Argentinians, the people, got a measure of freedom from dear Margaret’s middle class shopkeeper demeanor, emphasis on the mean part perhaps. Collateral damage of Maggie’s war. Lol.

At least somebody benefited besides the rich of England, benefited from her arrogance and lack of personal humanity to her own greater native peoples of Britain.

Whatever.

Rest in Peace.

They are going to cremate her. No friendly earth in England to accept her bones? No safe place to hide from getting pissed on in death in your grave?

Where I wonder will her two brats dump her ashes?



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Monday, April 8, 2013

Dancing in the Streets of Britain at word of Death of Margaret Thatcher, Corportist Tool and General all Around Political C*nt




The Victimized Working Class of Britain awoke today to hear of the death of Margaret Thatcher and to start a nationwide party of celebration in response.

Rumors that Ronald Reagan's cadaver will be dung up to attend Maggie's State Funeral at St. Paul's Cathedral.  

Rumors of a Margaret Thatcher Zombie lookalike wandering around in Brighton. LOL















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Friday, March 15, 2013

Pope Francis’ Confused “Complicated Past” – Some Argentine Players – The Process – Second Junta – The Dirty War – Etc.


Orlando Agosti, Jorge Videla and Emilio Massera, during the National Reorganization Process



Jorge Videla -- March 1976-March 1981 President of Argentina

Roberto Viola -- March 1981-December 1981 President of Argentina

Leopoldo Galtieri -- December 1981-June 1982 President of Argentina


Pio Laghi and the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Juan Carlos Aramburu act kindly with the leaders of the Process, Jorge Videla, Leopoldo Galtieri, Omar Graffigna and Armando Lambruschini


Second Military Junta, July 1981.Cardinal Aramburu, General Viola,
General Galtieri, Brigadier Graffigna, Admiral Lambruschini

Leopoldo Galtieri

General Haig and General/President Galtieri discussing the upcoming
consequences of going to War with Britain over the Falkland Islands. 


General Haig praying to his god he could talk Margaret Thatcher
 from going to War in the Falklands and blowing the cozy little setup
 in Argentina with the CIA training camps for the Contras protected by the Junta.


President Galtiere and the Great Peacemaker John Paul II


A young Father Bergoglio SJ, a deer caught in the headlights
of Argentine history,
a nobody in the scheme of things 1976-1983


Freedom of Expression Restored 1983
Victims Remembered
Wall of Metropolitan Cathedral

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Monday, April 16, 2012

No Apologies to Meryl Streep - The Iron Lady is a Shite Movie



I admit to having this love hate thing with Meryl Streep over the years.  I never paid much attention to her career even though the NYT film critics were constantly reporting her latest triumph over the years.  I have no sexual attraction, fantasy/sexual tension (?), towards the actress or the personalities she has portrayed over the years.
  
It took me literally thirty years to see Deer Hunter which was her first stellar part.  I think I formed a wrong opinion of her perhaps after seeing Kramer vs. Kramer in a theater with a girlfriend.  I perhaps equated her performance with the real life relationship that was shaky and ended after that movie quite literally.

I perhaps also had mistaken Ms. Streep for one of these chameleon actors like Keanu Reeves whose film performances seems to only reflect those he acts with rather than the performance itself.  I perhaps mistook Meryl’s performance as a chameleon thing along side Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Kramer vs. Kramer. 

In every movie he does, Dustin Hoffman plays Dustin Hoffman to this day. There is that annoying point in every Hoffman performance where he does that nasal thing in his voice, a metaphor for his maximum method “acting” effort thing and the rest of the performance returns to simply low point Dustin fare (mumbling). (There can only be one Brando Dustin.)

I did not see Sophie’s Choice when it came out.  It seemed a chick flick and there is a saturation point in any life regarding seeing another Holocaust related story.

My real and eternal admiration came in the movie Silkwood.  Saw it with some friends, had not heard of the movie ten minutes before I went in to see it.  Then on the way out, I saw a movie poster and saw that the admirable performance of the actress in that movie had been Meryl Streep.  My jaw dropped.  I saw a movie, liked the performance, and did not know who the actress was; perhaps I was a bit tipsy.  I then and there conceded that Meryl Streep was a very good actress but remained no great fan.

In her later years, I have seen wonderful performances of Streep in movies on TV and not in the movie houses. I will not go on about which flicks I liked of hers over the years or why.

I did last night pay to see her performance on Cable TV in her latest Oscar winning performance in the Iron Lady.  She deserved the Oscar for it as a seasoned character actress of the first class kind in the old Hollywood definitions of such.

I must say however that the script and the storyline of The Iron Lady is Shit.

I was expecting a sympathetic performance of the cold calculating ambitious British politician of Margaret Thatcher. I was sadly disappointed.
 
This is the sort of movie you do after a famous person is dead to invoke sympathy.  No doubt the movie financed with Brit cash is an attempt to make Margaret Thatcher palatable after all these years among the population. Propaganda flick Meryl?  And an attempt to quell the numbers, millions of Brits, who will literally be dancing in the streets on the day of her actual death?

Good performance.  Bad script.  Worthless subject matter.

I will say in retrospective that perhaps Dementia in Lady Thatcher’s case or Alzheimer’s in Ronald Reagan’s case is perhaps caused by people who never practiced thinking in their lifetime.  Never formed an original thought in their lives. Not a nice thing to say.

Don’t pay money to see this movie and you won’t need any Kleenex if you do. (Dry. Very dry. Two drops of vermouth worth.)





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Saturday, April 10, 2010

Benedict XVI and John Paul II - In the Loop with Abusers?

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I start with a quote from Al Jazeera English about a California Priest who got caught molesting kids - his defrocking as requested from then Bishop Cummins of Oakland got put on hold for years before the priest was defrocked.

Pope in new abuse cover-up claim
John Cummins, then a bishop in the US, wrote to the Vatican arguing that Kiesle should be stripped of his priesthood.

"It is my conviction that there would be no scandal if this petition were granted and that as a matter of fact, given the nature of the case, there might be greater scandal to the community if Father Kiesle were allowed to return to the active ministry,'' he wrote.

In a letter sent to the bishop years later, Ratzinger says that Kiesle should be provided with "as much paternal care as possible" while awaiting a final decision.

He urged local church officials to take into account the "good of the universal church" and "detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke within the community of Christ's faithful, particularly considering the young age".

Kiesle was 38 at the time, and remained a priest until 1987. He was convicted of more sex offences against children during the 1990s and now lives as registered sex offender in California.

The Vatican confirmed the letter bore Ratzinger's signature, but refused to comment on its contents.
Hardly a smoking gun but the documents proving the Vatican and the pope to be liars in these matters will continue to come to light and accumulate on the scales of justice.

John Paul II would not let go of priests - they were too valuable as asset to waste. The age of the offending priest was a factor in that at 38, you could probably get another 40 years of labor out of him. In this case Cardinal Ratzinger was probably following orders from his superior John Paul to sit on all exit paperwork for priests, whether molesters or not.

I started with Al Jazeera news service because this story is now on the front pages of Muslim newspapers all over the world.

That I as a Christian, Culturally and minimally, would be ashamed to announce my belief system in Syria, Egypt, Iran, Indonesia etc. because the Roman Catholic church as the so called, by numbers only, leader of the Christian faith – is now content in representing that Christianity to the world as something like a religious whore house full of peckers after little boys and little girls.

The real scandal is not in the numbers, large or small of crimes, but of mismanagement and the absolute cold and distant manner in which people are viewed by the hierarchy of the RC church in the Vatican. In document after document the offending priests or clergy are written about with care along with that of the prestige of the RC corporation. People be damned in comparison to the priests and heirarchy.

The RC church that uses the world Universal which should mean Global means nothing more that the private (by membership only) boys only club in the Vatican.

The hierarchy is separate from the simple faith of the laity and the hierarchy should be chopped off like a diseased limb by the laity.

At least Bishop Cummins in Oakland in the early eighties was trying to get rid of a bad apple of a priest. But we must put all this in context of the ambitions and dreams of John Paul II to use his powers first and only for the dream of a free and united Poland. That buggered children in California was not part of that global dream of a very ambitious Polish Priest and Pope. That by appointing mediocre cronies like Ratzinger to sit on paperwork to get rid of “filth”, John Paul devoted all his efforts in concord with the CIA and the USA to destroy Soviet hegemony.

The theory that any Bishop in the Catholic church can defrock a priest or end celibacy in that diocese will not happen. This will not happen as long as cronies, loyal to their pope only - as Cardinal Ratzinger was blindly loyal to John Paul II, continue in office even after showing failed Management and failed Moral skills. They are not loyal to any mere laity creatures.

No changes will happen so long as these political cronies keep getting put into positions and appointments in Europe and America. And certainly not while these papal stooges keep selling, draining, stealing off assets of those two political entities to build the new next century RC church in Africa and Asia.

Secret of Fatima – End of the Papacy?
John Paul II had the same medieval, backward looking, not friendly user attitude toward the laity that Benedict XVI is now being trashed for. John Paul II could get away with it. John Paul II, if you read current history books, single handedly brought down the evil Soviet Empire. The west, masters of the liberal media, and pro-western, anti-Soviet propaganda, makes John Paul some sort of Nietzsche religious superman if such a combination could possibly occur.

In fact, I think that in fifty years, I believe that historians if they are able to be honest will paint the source of the present crumbling western culture on three people. They will be Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II. Not a true axis of evil so to speak but maybe a goofy “Gang of Three” who set the western civilization down a wrong road toward Global fascism and away from human liberation and freedom – a secular real time salvation.