But the following video is so important, so cleverly done, that you can show it to kids, or to people who have no clue, and maybe they will get the point through this gentle cartoon. Take a look:

Show it to others who are not so progressive, still lulled by mainstream assurances. Maybe you can get a conversation going. Maybe you can break through the ingrained propaganda that keeps them ignorant.

If you do, please leave a comment relating your experiences. Inquiring bunnies want to know.

Image via Wikipedia

If you are avoiding a stalker or evading an abusive former partner, your life could depend on not leaving a trail online.

If you are looking for a job or trying to hold onto your existing job, your livelihood could depend on not posting anything online that could possibly offend your employer or potential employer—either the individual or the corporation.

You may think that if you post “anonymously,” or make up a user name, that employers or potential employers cannot track you. You may think you can avoid stalkers by not using your real name. Think again.

For just $17 a month (and up), anyone can subscribe to a new service that can track an email addresses and display all the online profiles associated with that address.

Write something that someone doesn’t like, or that makes them want to find you for any reason, and the new service, called Flowtown, can show them the Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking profiles associated with that email address.

The new service, which describes itself as being under the category of social media tools or social media advertising, specializes in Facebook promotion or Facebook marketing. Marketers can use Flowtown for purposes other than just monitoring the activities of individuals.

If you are smart, and you want to make controversial comments on line, comments of which your boss, spouse, or potential employer might not approve, you will get an email address that is not associated with any other account (such as a gmail address) and use it for potentially controversial comments.

If you are looking for more info on like-minded people, and you don’t mind spending a little money to do it, well, now there is Flowtown. Let me know what you think about that.

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Haiti is an amazing country. Sure, it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. But that is not the fault of the brave and generous Haitian people.

Haiti was formerly one of the most brutal French plantation colonies. Some of the planters there were monsters of sadism and depravity. Read the history.

The rum and sugar trade was so lucrative that it was much cheaper to buy more slaves than to take care of the current batch of Africans. So the plantation owners/managers just worked them to death and bought more.

Besides the obvious cruelty and inhumanity of that practice, there was another drawback. Eventually all the relatively docile peasant farmers who had made the plantations such a success were all used up. In West Africa the European slavers then fomented wars among the tribes and bought the resulting captives as slaves.

These later slaves were mostly highly trained and experienced warriors and sometimes shamans or other spiritual leaders, adept in magic, martial arts, espionage, and other practices. Those were valuable leaders and valuable skills for, say, a revolution.

They escaped by the dozens off the crowded docks of Port au Prince and disappeared into the rugged mountains of Haiti. There they joined forces with former enemies from West Africa and a few tough remnants of the indigenous Indians and formed a formidable fighting force.

They were able to infiltrate the plantations to pass information and coordinate a successful revolution in 1791 against the brutal plantation system in Haiti that was so very profitable for France.

Napoleon sent troops. The Haitians defeated them.

The Spanish sent troops. Ditto.

The successful revolution in Haiti is said to be one reason that Napoleon sold the Louisiana Purchase to Thomas Jefferson in 1803.

When Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of South America, lost his first revolution, the Haitians took him in. They outfitted a new army for him. The only obligation? He must abolish slavery in every country he freed.

The U.S. was still 60 years from even nominally abolishing slavery. A black democracy only a short sail from U.S. shores? Unthinkable! Not to be tolerated.

In (I think) the 1830s France sent an armada of powerful gunboats to blockade the coastal cities of Haiti, threatening to destroy all the coastal towns (at great loss of life) if the government of the fledgling democracy did not agree to pay “reparations” to France for freeing themselves from slavery.

The French forced the Haitians to pay virtually their whole national income to France till the end of the 19th century. Do not criticize Haiti for being a backward country. All the money that should have been used to build roads, schools, universities, hospitals, and other infrastructure had to be paid to the French for generations.

But wait, there is more: The United States of America has invaded tiny Haiti 13 times!

Throughout the 20th century we repeatedly deposed democratically elected presidents of Haiti who stood up for the Haitian people against U.S. corporate interests. We imposed and supported brutal dictatorships.

Popular, democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted by the CIA under President Clinton and exiled from Haiti for 3 years. When he came back, he was reelected.

The U.S. kidnapped him at gunpoint under President Bush and held him incommunicado in Central Africa for weeks. The Bush government threatened the President of Jamaica with similar treatment for offering sanctuary to the Haitian president and his family.

So do not blame the Haitians for their predicament. The U.S. and France put them in the position they are currently in. Only Venezuela, Cuba, and a handful of other countries freed by Bolivar have ever stood up for them.

We owe the Haitians our support for the movement to insist that the French repay the so-called “reparations” they extorted from Haiti at gunpoint in the 19th Century.

America owes the Haitians help and monetary aid now to make up abusing them in the past. And because they need help as our fellow human beings and near neighbors in the New World.

When it gets right down too it, we also owe the Haitians for a huge chunk of middle America—from Louisiana to Idaho—known as the Louisiana Purchase.

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Four years after Hurricane Katrina, only 19 percent of residents have returned to the poorest neighborhoods. That is a disaster for them, but it is not an accident.

A wealthy New Orleans resident gave away the game in 2005, during the Katrina disaster. Referring to the poor, black population of the flooded areas, he told the Wall Street Journal “we do not want them back”.

Standing beside the swimming pool in the backyard of his New Orleans mansion, this latter day “Southern gentleman” said that the storm was a good opportunity to “clean up the city” by getting rid of “those people” (the poor and black who have still not been allowed to move back in to New Orleans). And so the New Orleans elite have managed to do since the storm.

Perfectly sound public housing and homes were torn down to ensure that the poorest people could not return to New Orleans. Naturally the land for the public housing units, only a fraction of which will be replaced (somewhere, sometime, supposedly), is being sold.

The land under the scarcely damaged, sturdily built old public housing projects just happens to be quite near some very expensive New Orleans real estate—and therefore highly valuable to developers.

For decades, everyone knew that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. Yet the federal government (the only entity who could legally do so) did not rebuild or reinforce the levees.

In the interests of real estate developers and right-wing politics they simply waited for a major hurricane to free up valuable land—and vastly change the demographics of New Orleans by getting rid of many thousands of poor, black Democrats.

What happened and is still happening in New Orleans is a crime. People were put in harm’s way and deliberately allowed to die for the sake of politics, racism and greed. Then their homes, including houses that had been owned by families for generations, were taken away.

We must never forget the real meaning—and purpose—of the Katrina disaster.

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Six months ago if anyone said there could be a civil war in America (again), I would have thought they were being right-wing ridiculous. (Remember the corporate-sponsored Tea Party nonsense?) Now I’m not so sure.

In just a few months, the ultra right has begun to reap the harvest of hatred they so shamelessly seeded during the last presidential election campaign.

Oh sure, they have been at it for years. But I cannot believe the fury of people I personally know who used to care about others, who even used to be liberal, against all of us who still are liberal.

I have seen otherwise seemingly nice people literally snarl at a silent TV screen across a crowded restaurant just because it showed an image of the newly elected president. And I have seen people turn on their own families with an irrational hatred for being “liberal.” (You would think it was a curse word.)

Sure the highly paid right-wing propagandists have always spewed vitriol, but somehow this is different. This is ordinary people who have suddenly turned into snarling, spitting Limbaugh sock puppets.

Interestingly some of these folks claim not to even listen to Limbaugh. But then, they don’t have to listen to him to hear the same nasty lies and perverse prevarications repeated endlessly by the Limbaugh wannabes.

For some reason ordinary folks think the imitators are less vicious because they do not bellow and spit into the microphone the way Rush does. But they are wrong.

You know, blatant racism is horrible. But unacknowledged, subtextual racism is horrible, too.

And selfishness, even short-sighted, ignorant selfishness, where people preach and vote against their own interests in order to keep some other, despised group from being treated fairly, is horrible.

But this is different. There is an anger being expressed that just is not rational even by the the usual irrational logic.

And that brings me back to the civil war angle. I’m seeing people turn against their own family members. We are being treated as heretics.

The angry ones are not listening. There is no conversing with them. Their minds are closed.

They parrot propaganda in an angry tone. And here’s what’s weird: they don’t bother to listen because Rush and his cronies have already told them what we supposedly believe, and exactly where we got our benighted notions.

They claim to be mind readers. They know what we read. They know what we think.

We are credulous dupes and conspiracy nuts who believe anything as long as it is left-wing (and apparently “evil”) enough. Whereas they are paragons of rationality, brilliant intellect, omniscience, and common sense. They know this, because Rush (and company) tells them so.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. Um-hmmm. Yep.

Sorry, but turning on your own family that way reminds me very much of another era of demagoguery that filled people with irrational hatred for their erstwhile friends and neighbors.

It was not so long ago as our American Civil War. It was the Nazi era before World War II. Kind of scary, yes?

As part of this whole weirdness, the far-right, the very mouthpieces of corporate greed, are labeling centrists like the President as fascists. The people who listen to them may not know it, but the very definition of fascism (by Musselini himself) was “the merger of business and government”.

Fascism is when business interests take over the government (not, as the Rushites claim, when government takes over a business). So they label Obama as both a socialist and a fascist (two opposite labels, neither of which applies).

You would think the two labels would cancel each other out. But then, you would think.

Are you scared yet? If not, you haven’t been paying attention to what is happening all around you. Things have gotten very, very ugly, and I suspect they are only going to get much uglier between now and the mid-term elections in 2010.

All this slavering hatred is being drummed up for a purpose. And that purpose is to make the world safe for rapacious greed. Again.

There is no compassion and no conscience in it. And that’s what scares me. Again.

Just when we thought Democracy was going to be saved.

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