Man On Fire: 04/17/14

17 Apr 2014

Chained American Dream - Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert with Alasdair Macleod

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the American Dream as being chained to the booth in the waffle house as cogs in the wheels generating income for Wall Street sharpies and the poverty of this century in which the beggar is a reminder of nothing.

The Men’s Human Rights Movement Needs You

Victor Zen: "The issues that effect men and boys, effect you, whether you are a man or a woman and by leaving problems unchecked they can only get worse, they grow in magnitude and they can effect more and more people to the point where it can effect your families, it can effect your loved one's your friends and at that point when there's no system, when there's no support for the suffering whatsoever particularly the suffering of men and boys, you are left only with the entire burden of the suffering with no community support and no emotional support from a culture that is not sympathetic or even epithetic to the issues effecting men and boys. Thankfully this is changing."

Love’s Bitter Rebuke - Over Generations

By Andy Thomas (aka "Andy Man"):
PART 1
I will always remember my mother’s words.“You’ll never forget your first love,” she said as I cried into her arms.
For some months, I had been keeping a terrible secret. My girlfriend, my first girlfriend, had been raped. They didn’t just rape her; they broke her nose. A knife was used. She was cut. There were two of them.
Picture Alley Sheedy in The Breakfast Club — well, that was Louise. Her soft Irish accent, long black hair and scruffy oversized jumpers made me love her with all my heart.
We were both seventeen years old and still at school.
Louise had met my mother just once, but things hadn’t gone well at all. My mother had ignored her and when she had left, she pronounced caustically that Louise looked like she had “come off a council estate*,” and that I was never to bring her to the house again.
I never understood my mother’s snobbery. So much of my mother’s behaviour left me terribly confused. In any case, her prejudice was unfounded — Louise was actually from a wealthy Irish family who lived in the expensive part of town. They were also puritanically Catholic. If anything, I had assumed that my mother would approve.

By John Ward: Although many threaders here obviously think I’m a miserable bugger, the truth is that during any given day I laugh on average about 20 times more than most people. This has probably got something to do with reading 20 times more news: but whether the equality-forcers like it or not, it’s also because older, more intelligent and worldly folks know it’s laughable, and the overwhelmingly majority don’t even know (or care about) what the issues are.
Why should they? They pay their taxes to have soi-disant ‘professionals’ sort this stuff out for them. They think those people know better. And anyway, the semi-final of The Voice is on tomorrow. Between 65 and 80% of the population in the West consume media on most of the issues of the day, and only rarely spot when they’re being manipulated. I was talking to a friend yesterday whose theory is that advertising (or perhaps more accurately, ‘publicity’) has simply invaded the editorial completely, so the thing that drives hacks these days is “Will it get the sales/hits/thread numbers up?” She’s right, of course.
George Orwell famously said that journalism is the craft of printing stuff nasty people don’t want printed, and the rest is just pr. Today, it’s all pr and spin in one form or another.

Who Goes To Jail? Matt Taibbi On American Injustice Gap From Wall Street To Main Street

democracynow: Award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi is out with an explosive new book that asks why the vast majority of white-collar criminals have avoided prison since the financial crisis began, while an unequal justice system imprisons the poor and people of color on a mass scale. In "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap," Taibbi explores how the Depression-level income gap between the wealthy and the poor is mirrored by a "justice" gap in who is targeted for prosecution and imprisonment. "It is much more grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white-collar criminals when you do consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everybody else," Taibbi says.

Our Consent: You Don’t Have It ...Feminists

By John Hembling: I hope nobody minds too much if I spend the entirety of this article talking about my penis.
It might seem self-indulgent of me, of course. I do have my reasons. For example, I have been listening and reading for a number of years, as just about every single other voice within our shared (and fabricated) cultural narrative that tells me, and tells you, and tells anyone within hearing, in the most authoritative and condemning terms, all about my personal, private sexual parts. Yours too, if outboard plumbing is what chance favoured you with.
For some, all P.I.V. – “Penis in Vagina” – is rape. But, of course, never mind the rape; aren’t we all inured to that chorus of hatred by now? Nobody seems to remark at the reduction of the most intimate act of physical affection to mere mechanics.

But our culture’s predominant narrative has more to say, not just on nuts bolts and screws, but on the sexual organs of just less than half the human race.

The Top Ten Crazy Of XY Feminist's Male Privilege List + Runners Up

The U.S. Is An Oligarchy - New Report From P&N Proves It

"..the 0.01% have stolen everything."

By Michael Krieger: Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
- From a recent study titled Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University
In response to the publication of an academic study that essentially proves the United States is nothing more than an oligarchy, many commentators have quipped sentiments that go something like “so tell me something I don’t know.” While I agree that the conclusion is far from surprising to anyone paying attention, the study is significant for two main reasons.