“A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother — and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment!” ~Anna Jarvis, the woman who campaigned for seven years to make “Mother’s Day” a recognized holiday in the U.S.

Anna Jarvis began celebrating Mother’s Day in 1907, two years after her dearly beloved mother died. On the second Sunday in May, she called together friends and family to commemorate the death of her mother, Ann Maria — a tireless peace activist. Jarvis also asked everyone to wear white carnations, which were her mother’s favorite flower.

A year later, Anna asked the officials of her church in Grafton, West Virginia, if they could set aside a Sunday to honor all mothers. The church agreed. Things snowballed, and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother’s Day a national holiday.

But, only a few years later, Anna Jarvis changed her mind.

Promoting Peace, Not Greeting Cards

Jarvis quickly grew embittered at the way Americans commercialized the holiday she’d worked so hard to found. The original Mother’s Day was centered around Jarvis’s own mother’s social activism and had more to do with protesting war and promoting peace and pacifism than appreciating mothers.

Contrary to the yearly anti-war promotion of peace which Anna Jarvis had envisioned to honor her mother, America became infatuated with buying chocolates, flowers, and greeting cards.

Jarvis, along with her sister, spent her family inheritance campaigning against the holiday. On November 24, 1948, the founder of Mother’s Day died childless, blind, and in poverty.

So, in deference to the wishes of Mrs. Anna Jarvis, here’s a salute to all mothers today, but especially to the mothers whose children have been killed and mamed fighting for natural resources in a foreign country so that Halliburton and ExxonMobil CEOs can turn million dollar salaries, and so that the rest of us can drive an SUV thirty miles to work each day. Your courage and sacrifice is commendable.

Read More: Mother’s Day, Anna Jarvis, pacifism, peace activist, anti-corporate activism

Note: Because La Sirena said her entire blogroll should consider themselves tagged by the Five Favorite Songs meme (after she was tagged by ParisianCowboy, who was tagged by Indie Rocker Revolution, who was tagged by…you know, keep following this and you’ll find the pot of gold at the end of the Internet…), and because I’m bending the rules too, here are five of my favorite Beatle songs…

Lady Madonna

When the Beatles entered Abbey Road Studios on February 3, 1968, Paul McCartney had recently read a National Geographic article featuring a picture of an African woman suckling her kid with the caption “Mountain Madonna.” McCartney was also nursing an itch to write something with a Fats Domino boogie-woogie piano feel to it. What emerged was Lady Madonna, and yes, that IS Paul singing the lead on this one.

A few nights later, Paul, John, and George all stood around the microphone and recorded the horn solo in the middle of the song, except instead of playing real horns, they cupped their hands and immitated a three-part horn arrangement with their own voices. Later in the evening, on the spur of the moment, they called up a few real saxophone players to add the final touch to the record.

Lady Madonna was released as a single a little over a month later. And later in the same year? Fats Domino recorded the song he helped inspire, and had his own hit with it.

Listen: Lady Madonna.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun

Famous for its ambiguous lyrics, both Lennon and McCartney have claimed it as their favorite song from The Beatles (the white album.) Scores and scores of fans agree.

But…what to make of the lyrics? Are they an extended metaphor about sex? Or shooting heroin? Or are they literally about a guy who feels happy when he’s holding a warm rifle in his arms, who feels safe when his finger is on the trigger of that firearm he so dearly loves?

John Lennon wrote the song — actually three separate songs he’d merged into one by the time he brought it into the studio. As if three different songs weren’t enough to cram into a 2 minute - 43 second track, John arranged the music to frequently switch between 4/4, 3/4, and even 6/8 time signatures. It sounds like a mess on paper, but through the speakers, it’s a concise piece of genius.

As for the lyrics: in the book, The Beatles Anthology, John Lennon says it’s a story of three people:

The lilting first section is about an old woman. According to Beatles PR man Derek Taylor, when Lennon was stuck for lyrics for this section, he asked everybody to shout out random things in the studio. Taylor supplied the line, “a lizard on a windowpane,” which made it into the song. The line about the man with “multicolored mirrors on his hobnail boots” referred to a real newspaper account of a pervert who wore mirrors on his boots to look up women’s dresses. The man whose hands were busy working overtime referred to another news item about a pickpocket. And those in England know what most Americans don’t: “making a donation to the National Trust” is a euphamism for taking a dump in the park.

The anxious, fast-paced second section is about a junkie. And what of “Mother Superior”? Well…whether it’s a religious dress, or needle marks, nuns and junkies both wear their habits, don’t they?

The 1950s doo-wop sendup third section is about a man who loves his gun (no metaphor intended.) The boys stayed in the studio from 7 PM till 5 AM finishing off the track, and adding the hillarious “bang, bang, shoot, shoot” backing vocals, sung by John, Paul, and George.

More from Lennon’s 1970 Rolling Stone interview:

I think [producer George Martin] showed me a cover of a magazine that said ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun.’ It was a gun magazine. I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something.

Who knows…maybe Lennon thought somebody who finds happiness in a spent gun is more depraved than perverts or heroin addicts.

Listen: Happiness Is A Warm Gun.

Martha My Dear

Paul McCartney had a sheepdog named Martha. He wrote a song to his dog. Great song, fantastic arrangement. Nuff said.

Listen: Martha My Dear.

A Day in the Life

On December 18, 1966, Tara Browne, a young aristocrat and acquaintance of Paul and John, drove his Lotus Elan through South Kensington at high speed, possibly under the influence of drugs, and proceeded through a red traffic light at the junction of Redcliffe Square and Redcliffe Gardens, then slammed into a parked car and died instantly.

A month later, John Lennon recorded the first verse of A Day in the Life, loosely based on the newspaper account of his friend’s accident. To fill in the second verse, he referenced another article about potholes from the January 17th, 1967 Daily Mail:

There are 4000 holes in the road in Blackburn Lancashire, one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey.

There was another article about the Royal Albert Hall in the same paper.

Needing a middle to the song, Paul added a little reverie about his youth school days, waking up, sneaking a smoke on the bus to school.

But, they still couldn’t figure out how to connect Lennon’s two end pieces to McCartney’s middle. So, finally, they pretty much had an entire orchestra go crazy for 24 measures.

The masterpiece was capped off by all the Beatles humming an E major chord. But, then, they didn’t think it had enough punch, so they brought in 3 pianos and, at the same moment, Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr, and studio hand Mal Evans all played one of the most famous chords in music history.

Listen: A Day in the Life.

Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End

At his father’s Liverpool home, McCartney spotted sheet music left on the piano by his stepsister Ruth. The sheet music was for a lullaby-styled poem written by Thomas Dekker. McCartney couldn’t read music, so he put his own tune to the words.

Carry That Weight has been interpreted as carrying the weight of keeping the supergroup together, carrying the weight of being the one blamed for the breakup, and carrying the weight of being a Beatle for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps realizing it was indeed the end, the band persuaded Ringo to record his only ever drum solo to kick off The End, then launched into three rounds of successive guitar solos by Paul, George, and John. Although the Beatles came back to the studio to record individual overdubs, The End marked the last time all four of them recorded together as a group.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Listen: Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight / The End.

P.S. If you made it this far, consider yourself tagged; what’s your five favorite songs?

Read More: The Beatles, Lady Madonna, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, Martha My Dear, A Day in the Life, Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, The End, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr

On Monday, Iranian envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh said Iran would not submit to nuclear inspections while other countries refused to even sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty(NPT). He said this in Geneva, Switzerland, at a meeting of representatives of the 190 countries who HAVE signed the NPT, including Iran.

Fact check: There’s only about 194 countries in the world.

So, which 4 countries haven’t been able to find the time to sign the NPT since it was invented forty years ago to curb the growth of nuclear weapons?

Read the rest at Mortal Spin.

David Rockefeller and his brother, Nelson, originally conceived the twin towers as an urban renewal project to revitalize Lower Manhattan. In 1966, 164 buildings, including many electonics stores in seedy radio row, were demolished to create the WTC construction site.

But, with the realization of the Rockefellers’ urban renewal dream came a nightmare: by the time the first tenants moved into the North Tower in December 1970, the World Trade Center was rife with asbestos…asbestos that 31 years later covered all of Lower Manhattan.

Exactly How Much Asbestos Did the WTC Contain?

Nobody seems to know exactly how much asbestos was in the WTC, but click on the image to the right and you’ll get a pretty good idea: a lot!

The New York Port Authority originally planned to use 5,000 tons of asbestos fireproofing. The fireproofing, trademarked Blade-Shield, was manufactured by United States Mineral Products of Stanhope, N.J. It was 20% asbestos mixed with mineral wool — a concrete-like substance made from melted rock.

By 1971, medical studies began to show the cancerous effects of asbestos, and New York City banned its use in construction — but not before asbestos-containing Blade-Shield was sprayed on the beams and supports of the first 40 floors of the Twin Towers.

The Port Authority claims that over half of the applied asbestos-containing fireproofing had been removed by September 11, 2001.

So, how much asbestos remained in the Twin Towers?

Estimates vary from 400 tons all the way up to 2000 tons.

Getting Rid of 400 Tons of Asbestos

By the 1990s, the twenty-year-old Twin Towers — like any other twenty-year-old office buildings — were due for some major upgrades.

Writes John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:

…in recent years the complex…had the reputation of being A financial misfit, unsuited to modern fiber-optic and Internet technologies, and burdened with an inefficient and costly elevator system.

Unfortunately, due to the danger of spreading asbestos dust, building codes required any remodeling work be preceded by removing the asbestos.

So, in 1991, with two gigantic out-of-date office buildings on its hands, the Port Authority tried to garner the immense funds required to remove the asbestos: it filed suit against its insurers. The case, Port Authority of NY vs. Affiliated FM Insurance Co., sought between 500 million and 1 billion dollars for asbestos abatement.

The case dragged on for years, and then finally, on May 14, 2001, the judge ruled against the Port Authority; there would be no insurance money for asbestos removal.

Because of the asbestos health risks, and their size, the Twin Towers couldn’t be demolished. And because of the asbestos, they couldn’t be upgraded. And disassembling them floor by floor would have run into the double-digit billions of dollars.

So, that’s how, by May 2001, the Port Authority found itself between several rocks and the hard bedrock 70 feet beneath the WTC.

The Bright Catastrophe at the End of the Tunnel

Lucky for the Port Authority, a gullible guy named Larry Silverstein showed up (actually, Silverstein was no stranger to the Port Authority — he’d developed and constructed Building 7 on the WTC site), and he wanted to lease the out-of-date no-future Twin Tower money pits. On July 24, 2001, Silverstein purchased the lease for 99 years in a deal worth over $3.2 billion. He then took out insurance policies that covered terrorist attacks. Just seven weeks later, we’re told the terrorists did indeed attack. That’s what we’re told…but one can never be sure of a story worth $3.2 billion.

To date, Silverstein has received almost $5 billion from nine different insurance companies.

Meanwhile, mesotheliomasos, a rare lung cancer, has already begun to kill some of the hundreds of thousands of Manhattan residents and 9/11 first responders. Doctors and scientists agree that an increasing number of cases will appear due to the tons of WTC asbestos that rained down on Manhattan.

Read More: wtc asbestos, 9/11, 9/11 conspiracy, 9/11 truth, Larry Silverstein, New York Port Authority

“I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career.” ~Bunnatine Greenhouse, former chief contracting officer with the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Congressional hearing, June, 2005.

The depths of Halliburton’s war profiteering seem to know no bounds, and the company’s seeming lack of any moral guidelines baffles the imagination and bruises the soul of America.

Click the link (or watch embedded below) to see what’s really going on with Halliburton in Iraq: Halliburton at it again.

UPDATE: Just today, Halliburton subsidiary KBR reported first quarter profits more than tripled, in part due to its work for the US government in Iraq:

The company’s government and infrastructure unit income was $80 million, up from $70 million. The company cited gains from its work in Iraq, where it is the Pentagon’s largest U.S. contractor.

Last month, the U.S. Army chose KBR, Fluor Corp and DynCorp International Inc to compete to provide housing, laundry and other support services to the U.S. military worth up to $150 billion.

Pull out of Iraq soon? Not while corporations are making that kind of money.

Read More: Halliburton, war profiteers, Iraq War, military industrial complex