a lady bug is girlie.

PS
I've fallen in love with the writings of David Sedaris. He explained to me myself somehow. I only want to hear more(I've been listening to his recorded readings). Why is it that the best dudes are gay dudes while I'm cursed into being a straight woman (straight but not square, mind you)?
OK Seriously... time for sleep

Lets start out happy. Here are my little darlins All dressed up for halloween. Poor crying baby, maybe lea wanted a girly costume like her big sister and cousin.



Ok on to the stuff Buchenwald stirred up in me.
I don't know why I have to keep making comparisons but that's whats compelling me so...
Here is a juxtaposition for you.




How do these things relate? Well, It's systems of classification through symbols. Man, that topless hanky dude must be a freak in the sack. Here is a link to the explanation of what the hankys symbolize, and here is a link to what the nazi triangles and stars symbolized . So when are systems of classification good and when are they bad? I think this comparison makes the answer to that question a little to simplistic.
Our guide at Buchenwald explained that queers and Jews were the prisoners that SS guards were pretty much allowed to do anything to. The Nazi's pink triangle was of course taken over, so that a symbol of oppression was turned into a symbol of pride or resistance. . This can be compared to hip hop artist taking "nigga" and flipping it around (to the shock and offense of most of their Granny's).

Alright, now to take a little look at Karl Koch and Janis Karpinski. Karl Koch was the husband to Ilse, the bitch of Buchenwald, he was a bad man, so bad even the Nazis didn't want him in the end. Janis is the woman who was in charge of Abu Ghraib Prison during the time that the torture photos surfaced .
I'm going to take excerpts from two web pages.
The first comes from the bottom of this page on the trial of Ilse Koch. (this section is about Karl Koch)

As the camps became more brutal, Koch was promoted: from Sachsenhausen to Esterwegen to Lichtenburg to Dachau, then to Columbia Street prison in Berlin, renowned for its excesses of torture. Prisoners there were locked in the doghouses, chained by the neck, and forced to lap up their food from a bowl. Anyone failing to bark when Koch walked by received twenty-five lashes with a cane. Koch had one prisoner beaten senseless, then ordered guards to stop up his anus with hot asphalt and force him to drink castor oil.

and here is a long excerpt from an interview with Col. Janis Karpinski, that was on Democracy Now a week or so ago . Col Karpinski is shifting some blame to General Miller, the man who is currently running the Abu Ghraib Prison. (I got that idea from this wiki article )

And he used the example at Guantanamo Bay that the prisoners there, when they're brought in, that they're handled by two military policemen. They're escorted everywhere they go -- belly chains, leg irons, hand irons -- and he said, "You have to treat them like dogs."

AMY GOODMAN: You were there when he said this?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Yes, I was there when he said that. And he said, "They have to know that you are in charge, and if you treat them too nicely, they won't cooperate with you. And at Guantanamo Bay, they earn -- the prisoners earn every single thing they get, to include a change of color of their jumpsuits. When they get there, they're issued a bright orange jumpsuit. They're handled in a very aggressive, forceful manner, and they earn the privilege of transitioning to a white jumpsuit, if they prove themselves to be cooperative."

And I raised my hand. I was just there as a guest. I was not a participant, but I said, "You know, sir, the M.P.s here don't move prisoners with leg irons and hand irons. We don't even have that equipment. We don't have enough funding to buy one jumpsuit per prisoner, let alone an exchange of colors." And he said, "It's no problem. My budget is $125 million a year at Gitmo, and I'm going to give Colonel Pappas all of the resources he needs to do this appropriately."

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Colonel Pappas ran the prison within the prison, is that right? He ran something called the "hard site"?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: He ran the interrogation operations within the prison, that's correct. And it was -- Cell Block 1A and 1B were the two maximum security wings of the hard site, and during General Miller's visit, either at his order or at his request, General Miller told -- instructed Colonel Pappas to get control of Cell Block 1A.

AMY GOODMAN: Treat the prisoners like dogs. That explains the leashes and making prisoners bark?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: It seems to be consistent with those photographs, yes, with the dog collar, the dog leash and un-muzzled dogs. And, in fact, those techniques have appeared in several memorandums that have been signed by senior people.



This bit about the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, earning everything they get makes me think of another thing the kind guide of Buchenwald told me. In Buchenwald the prisoners were able to earn a chance to sleep with the prostitutes brought in. The prostitutes were told they could earn their way out of the camp this way after a year but this seldom happened. There were maybe 15 prostitutes in this all male camp.


alright, alright, enough for now. I really need to figure out what I'm doing and start keeping normal sleeping hours.

vivi and lisa convinced me i look better with short hair and so after months of pain staking growing, i cut it all off again.



PS
my old teacher danny walsh told me that it was Robert Mapplethorpe who did those huge kkk portraits.

The prisoners in the camp had to build things for the Nazis. They dug tunnels and made rifles, things like that. They tried to sabatoge their progress in order to resist the Nazi regime. They had to be careful how they did it though because they would be punished with beatings and death.
My dad was drafted into the military during Vietnam. Due to an injury during training he was stationed in the pentagon doing peon work. He told me the MIT computer guys working there were bitter about their draft and would always fuck up the computer systems before their discharge.

OK more on these subjects later.


dogs treatment in nazi prison vs dog treatment in iraq prison
gay symbol(hanky in the back pocket) vs nazi symbol(red, pink, yellow triangles)

I'm so tired. my schedule is flip flopped and I've been up 20 hours now because i didn't want to miss this excursion to the Buchenwald. It was a perfect day for it, cold and rainy. The monument from the GDR is something, it's huge, like a Roman Colosseum somehow but there are also information centers. The barracks have been plowed down. Only the gate area and crematorium remain. I sleep now.

Let’s go back to 1958. In the little mill town of Bynum, NC there lived 4 teenage boys, Hobo, Kilroy, Skipper, and Pete. These boys’s had a custom for mischief night. They would go out to farmer Green’s house and tip over his outhouse. A few days before Halloween these boys ran into farmer Green at the local store, Grady’s. Framer Green said “I’m ready for you boys this year” the boys laughed and said “yeah right.”
A few days later it was mischief night. The boys piled into Hobo’s old junker and drove out to farmer Green’s house. They parked, hopped out of the car and started running across the pasture toward the distant silhouette of the outhouse. Now, Kilroy was the fastest of all the boys and they could see him way up ahead, running and running, when all of the sudden he disappeared.
The other boys slowed down a bit and started calling out for Kilroy. They found him down in the shit hole yelling, “Get me outta here.” Farmer green had moved the outhouse back a few yards. The boys pulled Kilroy out. He stripped and jumped in the cold river. Then he rode back to town buck necked.