Oct 07 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
“For certain members of our armed forces, there was a message delivered to them somehow, that somehow their Iraqi prisoners were subhuman.”
By Steven Jonas
10/7/07
Recently, a fascinating photo album was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It was found by a U.S. counterintelligence officer in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt, Germany after the end of World War II in 1945. (This meant that whoever assembled the book took it with them as they fled the camp before it was liberated by the Red Army in February 1945.) He kept it hidden away all of these years. It was sent to the Museum in December 2006. It is essentially a scrap book of photos of SS male and female officers and ranks at play outside Auschwitz in 1944. (Here is a short slide show with narrative.)
The photos show these people having picnic lunches, engaging in choral singing, playing with their dogs, gathering for smiling group photos, and smoking cigarettes (even though at Hitler’s behest, the Nazis had instituted the world’s first comprehensive anti-smoking campaign in Germany in the 1930s. And there you thought that all German armed forces members always followed orders.) They even decorated Christmas trees (after all, the slogan “Gott mit Uns” was on their belt buckles). And all this time, thousands of Jews and other nationalities were being gassed and burned at the camp every day. Talk about the banality of evil.
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Sep 26 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
‘I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of being like the good German Joneses who said nothing while their Jewish German neighbors were shipped off standing-room only on cattle cars to be slaughtered like . . . cattle . . . ‘
By Adam Engel
9/26/07
“To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He’s a good man to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble-making person . . . . A Johnson minds his own business. But he will help when help is needed. He doesn’t stand by while someone is drowning or trapped in a wrecked car.”
~ William S. Burroughs, “The Adding Machine”
William Burroughs, that nasty, ex-junky, queer (and what are YOU gonna do about it?), gun enthusiast and satirist, that–horror of horrors–FREE MAN, had a word for the decent, peace loving folk of the world. He called them Johnsons, or The Johnson Family, an expression he first encountered in a book, You Can’t Win, by Joe Black.
While Burroughs described what it means to be a Johnson quite well, he neglected to mention the other family in this Manichean contest: The Joneses.
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Sep 18 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
By John Hanks
9/17/07
After the filth murdered the Wellstones, I knew that we were under a Nazi regime and that soon we would all be dead. At that point I just assumed I was dead, like any experienced combat soldier. I put signs in my car windows that say “Bush ordered 911″ or “Republicans Return to Their Own Vomit”, etc. Since I live in Wyoming, I figured that I would be murdered in short order, but so far I’m fine, after 4 years of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. If you put good hateful signs in your windows, you outflank the crook media, and cell phones often do the rest.
The only way to counter demoralization, which is the stock and trade of the filth, is to cultivate a black and intelligent hatred. Anger is an exhausting weakness and just an expression of demoralization. But, hatred is an instinctual reaction to those who would like to kill you. Republicans are full of hatred because they know that liberals would like to revoke their license to steal. That is why they don’t have to think except in terms of slogans.
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Sep 18 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
EDITORS’ PREAMBLE: Boyish and all-American-looking GOP language whore Frank Luntz has perverted further (a feat in itself!) the sordid and utterly immoral “art” of political p.r. The raves he receives by fellow establishment whores like Time Magazine are eloquent commentary on how “American civilization” operates in corporate terms. On his own website, he touts his horn thusly:
“Frank Luntz is one of the most honored communication professionals in America today. “Time Magazine” named him one of “50 of America’s most promising leaders aged 40 and under” and he is the “hottest pollster” in America according to the “Boston Globe.” Frank was named one of the four “Top Research Minds” by Business Week and was the winner of the coveted Washington Post “Crystal Ball” award for being the most accurate pundit in 1992. Public Television’s Bill Moyers had this to say about Frank: “He’s a magician with a gift for the politics of words and what words best connect with the hearts and minds of the public.” Said comedian Al Franken: ” Asking Frank Luntz if he understands public opinion is like asking Julia Childs if she knows how to make a soufflé.”
By The Rockridge Institute
The radical Right’s messaging and framing infrastructure doesn’t seem so fearsome if you know how to spot its weaknesses.
The radical Right is acutely aware of cases where the general public has progressive values and would ordinarily reject their agenda. The Right’s approach to such cases is deception, often through the use of Orwellian language — language that means the opposite of what it says.
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Aug 22 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
By Carolyn Baker
8/22/07
Originally published at Speaking Truth to Power
Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear; the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future.
~ M.Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled~
Yesterday’s news brought forth the not-surprising revelation that the use of pain medicine in the United States has nearly doubled in the last ten years. Various rationalizations abound-the baby boomers are aging, and there are more of us, and well-you know the song and dance that basically attributes the use of pain killers to the hoards of graying flower children who wish they were feeling groovy instead of arthritic. Not far behind is the rationalization that whereas physicians two decades ago used to inform patients that pain was part of the healing process, they are no longer doing so and are prescribing pain relievers instead. According to an Associated Press story on August 20, “Hydrocodone use increased 217 percent; morphine distribution went up 180 percent; even meperidine, most commonly sold as Demerol, jumped 20 percent” during the past decade.
And of course, the pain is not just physical. One in ten women takes an antidepressant, and the use of psychiatric drugs among children has soared to unprecedented heights. Juxtaposed with the ever-new potpourri of such drugs available to us, is a decrease in the availability of mental health coverage in employee health benefit packages. If such coverage exists, it is most likely limited to a paltry twelve sessions per year with multiple “engraved invitations” from insurance companies and employers to not use or cease using those benefits.
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Aug 20 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
“If that is our choice, just like humanity paid once the price for the ‘will’ of the Almighty Creator through the actions of Hitler, we are once again bound to pay the price for the ‘will’ of God through the actions of Bush.”
By Pablo Ouziel
8/20/07
Many decades ago in Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler stated the following; “I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.” By now we have all had a chance to evaluate the consequences of that “will”. In 2003 an article by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, quoted a Palestinian leader claiming Bush said to him; “God told me to strike at Al-Qaeda. And I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did. And now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”
Studies conducted over the last few decades in regards to the impact of National Socialism on ordinary life in Germany during and after that period have catalogued a serious of civilian attitudes such as keeping silent, looking over one’s shoulder and feeling frightened, and have moved on to evaluate the aftermath of such attitudes and the results of accepting such extreme violence perpetrated on others. A lot of these studies have shown collective signs of guilt, depression and even collective post-traumatic stress disorder.
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