If I Want To Stick You I'll Stick You (But Not For Money)

Whoo-hoo - it's the lit now:

"Twirling toothpick tips against the skin 'works' just as well or better than 'real' acupuncture. To top it all off, acupuncture and “traditional Chinese medicine” as we know it today were basically reinventions of Chinese folk medicine promoted by Chairman Mao to his people beginning a few years after World War II because his Communist regime couldn’t provide enough 'Western' doctors to supply the health care needs of the Chinese." 

 Repeat as needed,..

 

Making The Really Unreal Real

Cult of Mao

"Exhibition artworks are divided into thematic sections beginning with Cult of Mao. This section examines large-scale oil paintings, woodblock prints, and posters created during the mid-1960s to mid-1970s that depict idealized images of Mao. The best of these were chosen as 'model works,' toured around the country, and were reproduced extensively as posters, acquiring national fame and iconic status. Younger artists, mostly born in the 1940s, endeavored to create realist oil paintings that captured the new revolutionary fervor. Artist Chen Danqing recalled this time in an interview in 2006, 'Nobody told you that you could paint only Mao's portrait. Mao's image was the only thing in the world that you knew you could paint... at the time, I felt that there was no difference between [me and] the Renaissance painters—they painted Jesus, I painted Mao.'"

-- Art Daily.org, on New York's Asia Society exhibition of works made during China's catastrophic "Cultural Revolution."

And let's not forget this art's cultish effect on the present:

If You Go Carrying Pictures Of Chairman Mao,...

“This awakening consciousness of the people is promoting changes in the world, or we might call it turmoil.”

-- Chou En-lai, second in command to Chairman Mao, in 1971.

"If ordinary people don't perceive that our grand ideas are working in their lives, then they can't develop the higher level of consciousness - if I can use kind of a touchy-feely word,..."

-- Bill Clinton at Davos.

Nickelodeon's Shitty Bubblegum Revolution

At the March 13 hearing of the Berkeley Police Review Commission, tearful and angry antiwar protesters claimed local cops knocked them down, stomped them, and otherwise misbehaved during recent rallies protesting the war in Iraq and the presence of military recruiters in town. One activist decried "belligerent riot squads who use batons and arrests ... to silence political speech." Another claimed that "the youth of Berkeley ... were being beaten," albeit providing no specifics. Still another accused the cops of doing "everything they could to facilitate a right-wing hatefest."

But who was really inciting the hatefest? At the February 12 rally, this reporter saw high-school students confronting cops, calling them "cocksuckers," and shouting profanity unprovoked at elderly Marine supporters. Berkeley Unified School District spokesman Mark Coplan said he saw members of the antiwar group World Can't Wait deliberately hiding behind students while poking at police officers. "The police had kids screaming at them with adults behind them encouraging them," Coplan said in an interview about that rally. "I told the kids, 'The Berkeley police are not your enemies. When they tell you to move back, you have to or you'll be arrested.' ... I felt tortured watching what those officers went through that day."

A fixture at antiwar events nationwide, World Can't Wait was founded in 2005 by activists associated with the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, whose web site RevCom.us endorses World Can't Wait in missives such as this one from RCP Chairman Bob Avakian. "The youth ... can be a very powerful force, in relation to the objectives of World Can't Wait," wrote the Berkeley-bred Avakian. "And, of course, from the standpoint of our party, they have a strategically important role in relation to the revolution."

The revolution also had some help from the mainstream media. On February 4, 2007, Nickelodeon's "Nick News" aired "Rebels With a Cause," a segment lauding fourteen-year-old Berkeley High School freshman and World Can't Wait organizer Micah, who was shown wearing an orange Guantánamo jumpsuit and black hood at street protests urging the impeachment of George W. Bush. "Being ready to rock the boat takes courage," host Linda Ellerbee told her viewers as the segment began. Coplan said Nickelodeon personnel told him they were excited to find Micah "because he was young enough to relate to their viewing audience."

- The East Bay Express, in an investigation of anti-war protests, in Berkeley, California.

This goes beyond sucking - it's just wrong - and somebody (many somebodies, including Linda Ellerbee and Nickelodeon) should be charged with child abuse. How dare they.