More notes:
The anti-smoking temperance movement has set the stage for the big denial scam that is so necessary to get little folks to take the fall for global warming so-called. Taking responsibility for your own actions means you choose to smoke and be addicted or you choose not to. Not a whisper about how we live in a community that's whipped and goaded dawn to dusk by bright flashing smiles and seductive come-ons that seem to originate in the air before our eyes. Not a word about the steady chant of "do this do this do this do this" that rolled out of the grandmother-box the TV was and is, the wolf-box that ate all our grandmothers. The same tools that were used to get people to smoke were used to get them to stop without once any mention of that process itself and the wielders of that being responsible for anything. Like the devil whining at God that he just offered they didn't have to take the deal on the terms displayed. Cars are like that, especially now in America. Big bad gas-drinking nightmares like living rooms where the kids feel right at home, and when the truth comes pouring down out of the sky, the scam's all ready to click right in, you did it to yourselves, you chose this, blind as you were it was your selfishness and bad choosing that did it. Like there's no one there inside that box. No grandma, no wolf, just air and all this flashing light that sounds human, so human, when it tries to sell you something you already want.

Who are they?

The five isolated tribes of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands have survived the tsunami, despite being close to the epicentre of the earthquake. The Sentinelese, who have no contact at all with outsiders, and the Jarawa and Shompen, who have very little contact, all escaped relatively unharmed.

The two smallest tribes, the Onge and Great Andamanese, apparently knew that, on seeing the sea suddenly recede, a tidal wave was likely, and so fled to high ground. Sadly, the most numerous and assimilated tribe, the Nicobarese, were badly affected and many are feared dead. Survival has produced briefing papers for journalists reporting on the Andamanese tribes, emphasizing that they are neither 'primitive' nor 'Stone Age'. Unlike almost everyone else affected by the disaster, the isolated Andamanese tribes do not appear to need outside aid.

Survival International

"But the question is," he concluded, "will the world ever learn?"

Dissection Room, Sachsenhausen
-


Deportes devant le portail du camp de Sachsenhausen
-

Unfortunately for the SS, homosexuals could not be identified as easily as Jews or Communists. Non-German gays were not incarcerated. Since Himmler believed that homosexuality destroyed societies, he thought it beneficial to allow Polish, French, and other non-German gays to remain implanted in their respective cultures-so long as they did not seduce German males. Homosexuals (who were caught) suffered from a mortality rate drastically higher than any of the other incarcerated groups. Those who were caught received the most brutal treatment of anyone in Germany."

excerpt from The Forgotten Holocaust Victims
Philip De Rochambeau
A History of The Holocaust
Father Ryan High School Nashville, Tennessee
-
-

"I saw quite a number of pink triangles. I don't know how they were eventually killed. ... One day they were simply gone."

-

-"Our work, then, was as follows. In the morning we had to cart the snow outside our block from the left side of the road to the right side. In the afternoon we had to cart the same snow back from the right side to the left. We didn't have barrows and shovels to perform this work either, that would have been far too simple for us 'queers'. No, our SS masters had thought up something much better.

"We had to put our coats with the buttoned side backward, and take the snow away in the container this provided We had to shovel up the snow with our hands -- our bare hands, as we didn't have any gloves. We worked in teams of two. Twenty turns at shovelling up the snow with our hands, then twenty turns at carrying it away. And so, right throught the evening, and all at the double!

"This mental and bodily torment lasted six days, until at last new pink-triangle prisoners were delivered to our block and took over for us. Our hands were cracked all over and half frozen off, and we had become dumb and indifferent slaves of the SS.

"I learned from prisoners who had already been in our block a good while that in summer similar work was done with earth and sand. "Above the gate of the prison camp, however, the 'meaningful' Nazi slogan was written in big capitals: 'Freedom through work!'"

Furthermore, homosexuals were at another important disadvantage. They lacked the group support within the camp to maintain morale. As Lautmann observes:

Death rates for homosexuals were much higher, perhaps three to four times higher, than for other non-Jewish categories of prisoners. While their overall numbers are small, their fate in the camps more nearly approximates that of Jews than any of the other categories, except, perhaps, Gypsies. And, homosexuals did not survive for very long. Of those who were exterminated, most were exterminated within the first few months of the camp experience.
Only three categories of homosexual victims of the Nazi regime can be identified with any accuracy: (1) those arrested, sentenced, and executed for homosexual acts; (2) those who were sent to forced labor or concentration camps for homosexual acts and died there; (3) those put to death as part of the program of euthanasia because they had been committed to institutions as homosexual. All others -for example, those who committed suicide -can never be statistically identified or calculated. Also falling outside this figure are those who were permanently mutilated -castrated or sterilized against their will. It must be conceded that analyzing the losses inflicted upon the male homosexual community in Germany and the territories annexed to the Reich is fraught with formidable difficulties. There are simply no census data comparable to those utilized to determine the demographic movement of ethnic or religious communities, not even a "taxonomic" survey of homosexuality in the German population in 1932 and again in 1946. The whole problem of homosexual "identity" is far from being resolved, so that for past epochs a precise demarcation of membership in the community in question is probably impossible.

In sum, Heinrich Himmler was the chief architect of the persecution of male homosexuals in the Third Reich. He was motivated by the belief that a small number of constitutional homosexuals were infecting the rest of the German male population and causing it to withdraw from the breeding pool, and also that homosexuals formed conspiratorial cliques opposed to the policies of the state. He used the SS and police to identify and intern an unknown number of homosexuals in concentration camps. In addition, between 50,000 and 63,000 men were convicted in the regular courts of homosexual offenses. The wave of persecution peaked between 1937 and 1939 and declined thereafter. Most of the homosexuals who died in the concentration camps were victims of overwork, starvation, brutality, and general mistreatment. As a matter of policy, German nationals were not sent to the East for gassing, and this applied also to the homosexual German prisoners. The total number of victims (those incarcerated minus survivors) remains unknown, since no estimates have been made on the basis of the surviving records. Although Lautmann's figure of 5,000 to 10,000 homosexuals incarcerated in the camps may be low, in general it probably reflects the approximate maximum number of homosexual camp victims.

After the war, public opinion, horrified by Nazi crimes against humanity, remained indifferent to the treatment of homosexuals. Thus the West German government denied compensation to those homosexuals who survived the camps and prisons. Further, when the West German Constitutional Court reviewed the constitutionality of the Nazi version of Article 175 in 1957, it upheld the law -ironically, it did so on the 24th anniversary of the burning of the library of Hirschfeld's institute. The court cited legal documents from as far back as 1869 to justify the assertion that "homosexual acts unquestionably offend the moral feelings of the German people." Hence, in a rather extraordinary reversal of the conventional line, the court ventured to place the blame for past and continuing persecution of homosexuals collectively upon the shoulders of its own people. Thereafter West German judges made the application of Article 175 even more punitive. When in 1960 the validity of the 1935 version of Article 175 was challenged before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, it was affirmed with a brief assertion that the state has the right to infringe the privacy of its citizens "for the protection of health and morality."-Paragraph 175:
Wikipedia
US Holocaust Museum
University of South Florida-
-

The gay men 'lucky' enough to be liberated from Sachsenhausen at the end of the war were then imprisoned for the remainder of their sentence. They were, after all, still guilty of committing homosexual acts. In December 2000, the German parliament officially apologised to gays and lesbians who were persecuted under the Nazi regime. They also expressed regret for the 'harm done to homosexual citizens up to 1969' for it was only then that Paragraph 175 was repealed.

Train To Sachsenhausen
David Swatling
Radio Netherlands

-"But if the liberation of Auschwitz marked the beginning of the end of the Holocaust, it did not mark the end of the evil that spawned it," he said in the text of his speech.

"For today, even in societies like Canada, where respect for others is a value, world society is facing new threats of hatred that we must see as challenges to our values. More than ever, we must reaffirm our common values of inclusion and we must firmly reject all forms of hatred."

speech to the U.N.
commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
Elie Wiesel
Tornto Globe and Mail, 25.Jan.05

I'm sorry I'm just having a little trouble right now with this Cuba thing, where it's this horrible place of no freedom and no rights and all dictator tyranny and it's an island and at the south-east tip of the island that Cuba is there's an American military base where Iraqi and Afghani and other brown people are taken and tortured and reprogrammed and who really knows what else they have done to them or even who they are all of them. And Cuba is a bad place. But there's an American military base there. What it reminds of for no reason I can discern is this thing I read one time by this guy who was in other respects pretty much an outlaw or a biker renegade or whatever and he was talking about when he was a kid and how his dad was fucking his sister and both his mom and dad were beating up him and his brothers and his sisters and then there was this argument of some kind and everything got critical and volatile and his sister came out of the back of the house where the bedrooms were and she had this used condom held dangling from her hand and even though it was something everyone in the family knew they all had the ability to live as though they didn't really and also there's a natural thing I think of living when you depend on food and shelter coming from whatever it is that becomes exempt in some ways, it requires a sacrifice, a risk of everything, and what he was saying is his sister took that risk no going back this is it, all her shame and the little bit of comfort denial gave her she threw it right out into the sun and no going back this was it, the nucleus of the family was broken open and would never get repaired.
I don't know why, but Cuba and Guantanamo remind me of that.
Today.

More notes:

The Puritan campaign to eradicate smoking seems pretty successful, and it should be, since it's using all the same tools of coercion and subliminal command/suggestion that caused people to take up smoking to begin with - to get them to quit and/or not take it up; but I still can't reconcile all this concern with the pure lungs of children, and public health as far as smoking goes - with absolute silence from the same moral combatants - concerning the automobile.
All these big-number statistics, a million deaths a year from smoking, a million two hundred thousand deaths a year from traffic worldwide - still the assumption behind the graph is that all those deaths are units, vanishing from a mechanical landscape, like ball bearings or pencils in a factory or a school. The unspoken assumption being they're all replacable because they're statistically interchangeable. One death equals another in the moral combat of the moment.
But smoking, when it does kill kills the mature, the middle-aged, the old almost exclusively. I'm not suggesting that's alright, I'm suggesting the emphasis on the evils of smoking is cowardice in the face of a larger, invincible opponent that's attacking the center of what we are, not the edge.
Traffic death is the largest killer of people under 30 in the US.
Smoking is trivial compared to that, meaningless in the face of that, perpipheral and unimportant, as unhealthy as it may be. Just as, whether you want to admit or not, the death of a child is more weighted, more important than the death of an old man, generally.
More children are dying on the road from "accidents" than from any single other cause, right now in the US, and these brave moral soldiers have spent years and millions of dollars attacking the evils of smoking. Congratulations, heroes! Well done!
And those are random deaths in traffic, unconnected to any behavior or genetic configuration. Except in the larger context, where the behavior is being in the car as opposed to walking or some other form of transportation, and the genetic configuration is being in a family that has adapted to a world overrun with steel and poisonous gases.
So we have these champions of children bravely taking down the tobacco companies - though they haven't really, just diverted their corporate focus to other parts of the world and other products - and creating a solid wall of contempt toward the practice of tobacco comsumption, especially among the young.
While death thins the ranks of the young and healthy like an untouchable aristocrat, choosing his little disposable playthings from the streets as he passes.

The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong,
and freedom, which is eternally right.

"When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, 'It rang as if it meant something.' In our time it means something still."

George W. Bush, Inaugural Address, 20.Jan.05
full text at Aljazeera.net

-

The Liberty Bell is an American bell, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its importance is largely based on mythologizing: a fictional story written by George Lippard in 1847 about an old bellman ringing the bell at the moment the Continental Congress declared independence has become the basis for patriotic lessons taught in elementary schools across the nation.
It may perhaps be true that the bell was rung on July 8, 1776 to summon citizens for the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, but it was not called the Liberty Bell until 1837, when it became a symbol of the abolitionist movement because of its cast inscription from Leviticus 25:10: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." The "Liberty" for which the bell was named is thus liberty for the enslaved Africans and not for the colonists of America.
[...]
In October 2003, the bell was moved a short distance to the southwest to a new pavilion, the Liberty Bell Center. There was some controversy about the site chosen for the new structure, which was just to the south of the site of where George Washington had lived in the 1790s. After the initial planning, the building's site was found to be adjacent to the quarters for the slaves owned by Washington. The decision over how to acknowledge this fact in the display has led to some debate.

Wikipedia

Notes on the contemporary landscape:

How much of your identity is gender-based? How much of that gender-based identity is genitalia-oriented? How much of that genitalia-oriented gender-based identity is altered, or rendered submissive following the mutilating of the foreskin in males, and the clitoris in females? You'd expect the clitoral mutilation to be much more transformative, but it's telling how dismissive the male mutilated become - "It's nothing. They(meaning we, I) don't remember any of it."
It's been sold to the already mutilated as a health measure, cleanliness in the penis being paramount. As though the history of the uncircumcised was a pageant of men with inflamed dicks, dropping by the wayside, ill and unable to procreate. Isn't it more likely that the dominance that follows such a violently intimate act is its real purpose?
Hanging in the background is the ghostly promise that they'll come back for the rest of it if you aren't careful.
-
A large measure, maybe even the bulk, of Satanism is simply Judeo-Christianity for leather-fetishists, the Jehovist template reversed but still dominant - for the "rough trade".
-
How much of the instinctual, gut-reaction antagonism to evolution on the part of fundamentalists is from the subliminal "spell" of it starting with "evol"?
-
I'm trying to imagine how it would feel, two generations later, to have an Aryan body-builder for a sock-puppet.

I was seduced by this :


Subsequent events and the general consensus of my peers has made me feel somewhat duped, as far as the innocence and optimism of Yushchenko's campaign for the Presidency of Ukraine - it seems to have been a relatively skillful manipulation of public relations images and information, a cynical thing - so that when I look at this image:


I'm wary of being manipulated again.
Not, this time obviously, by a beautiful young girl so vulnerably putting flowers on the shields of faceless policemen, but by the potent stance and confident faces of what are, presumably, bodyguards for a man who is almost never photographed without a disconcertingly leering smile on his face.
Allawi's always got that smile - his country's a train wreck, the people he's supposedly leading are dying more and more violently every day, yet he keeps on grinning.
It makes him seem evil. I think he probably is evil, in the sense that evil is a selfishness of Satanic proportion. But he's off to the side in the picture isn't he?
Are those soldiers American? Iraqi? The caption says they're U.S. Special Forces.
They don't look like Americans. They look like Israelis. Were they chosen for that reason? Why is that one soldier in the foreground of the image, with his profile being the focal point, the place where the observer's eye is naturally drawn? The photo's "about" him.
Is this more cynical intent? Accident? Co-incidence? Or is it the intention of the photographer to illustrate something more than the simple narrative of "Armed U.S. special forces escort Iraq's Interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi (L) following the delivery of a C-130 transport plane to the Iraqi Air Force in Baghdad's International Airport, January 19, 2005."
Is there a viciousness revealed here, in the image, and the faces of the men in the image? I think so. And a statement, a boasting of conquest, an arrogance.
A viciousness so profound it's metaphysical, spiritual, cosmic. Psychotic arrogance achieving complete self-gratification.
That's what it looks like.

The image of Allawi and the Special Forces soldiers is lifted from Rigorous Intuition who quotes its caption with a Reuters byline, but a search of the Reuters site, and a Google web and news search, didn't find it.

Odd Happenings in Fallujah

"The soldiers are doing strange things in Fallujah," said one of my contacts in Fallujah who just returned. He was in his city checking on his home and just returned to Baghdad this evening.
Speaking on condition of anonymity he continued, "In the center of the Julan Quarter they are removing entire homes which have been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed are left as they were.
Why are they doing this?"

Dahr Jamail Iraq Dispatches 18.Jan.05

Dahr Jamail

Burhan Fasa'a - a cameraman with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) who witnessed the first eight days of the fighting in Fallujah:

"The military called over loudspeakers for families to surrender and come out of their houses, but Burhan said everyone was too afraid to leave their homes, so soldiers began blasting open the gates to houses and conducting searches.

Americans did not have interpreters with them, so they entered houses and killed people because they didn't speak English! They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and shot people because they didn't obey their orders, even just because the people couldn't understand a word of English. Ninety-five percent of the people killed in the houses that I saw were killed because they couldn't speak English."
[...]
"On Tuesday, November 16th, I saw tanks roll over the wounded in the streets of the Jumariyah Quarter. There is a public clinic there, so we call that the clinic street. There had been a heavy battle in this street, so there were twenty bodies of dead fighters and some wounded civilians in front of this clinic. I was there at the clinic, and at 11 a.m. on the 16th I watched tanks roll over the wounded and dead there."
After another long pause, he looked out the window for awhile. Still looking out the window, he said, "During the nine days I was in Fallujah, all of the wounded men, women, kids and old people, none of them were evacuated. They either suffered to death, or somehow survived."

"I saw civilians trying to swim the Euphrates to escape, and they were all shot by American snipers on the other side of the river."

Dahr Jamail Hard News 25.Dec.04

a democrat by example, and a man of peace

Ardeshir Gholipour
-

Mr Gholipour has been held in [Australian] immigration detention since March 2000, having fled Iran earlier that year. International PEN's Writers in Prison Committee based at the organisation's headquarters in London has investigated Mr Gholipour's story and we can confirm the legitimacy of his claims, and that he has real reason to fear persecution for his legitimate and peaceful political activism should he be returned to Iran. His involvement in the Iran Freedom Movement and the Left Union for Democracy in Iran makes him particularly vulnerable to repression.

As a writer, specifically for the Left Union for Democracy's publication, the Payan peroz Research Bulletin, between 1994 and 1997, and for his work for the samizdat newspaper Khaber Nameh, Gholipour has been particularly courageous in his stance against suppression of dissent in Iran. Notably, Khaber Nameh provided reports and commentary on the murders of prominent writers in the late 1990s, for which a number of Iranian officials were later convicted.

One of those murdered was Pirooz Davani, also a writer, and with whom, until his murder in 1998, Gholipour worked closely. Both worked on articles for Khaber that were strongly critical of the Iranian government and called for constitutional change. Information they published included reports of mass graves containing the bodies of dissidents, and implicating the security services in the deaths and the torture of political activists.

This clandestine magazine also published letters from the well known writer, Faraj Sarkoohi, who at that time had been abducted by intelligence services then sentenced to death, subsequently released and now living in exile in Germany. To publish such articles in late 1990s was an extremely courageous and dangerous activity for which Davani paid with his life.

Letter To Senator Vanstone [Aus.] from Dr. Karin Clark, Chair, Writers in Prison Committee, PEN International
-
reprinted at melbourne indymedia
-

Ardeshir Gholipour's art
at Bid For Freedom/The Brigidine Nuns' Asylum Seekers' Project
-
link BARISTA

One year ago at about this time

Two years ago at about this time

IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF SHELBY COUNTY,

TENNESSEE FOR THE THIRTIETH JUDICIAL

DISTRICT AT MEMPHIS

_______________________________________________

CORETTA SCOTT KING, et al,

Plaintiffs,

Vs. Case No. 97242

LOYD JOWERS, et al,

Defendants.
_

Q. Would you state your name and address for the record, please.
A. Leon Cohen. I reside at 1859 Poplar Pines Drive, Number 201, Memphis, 38119.
[...]
Q. Where did you live before that?
A. New York City.
Q. What did you do in New York City?
A. I was a member of the New York City Police Department. For twenty-three years.
[...]
Q. How often would you say you saw Mr. Bailey in an average week or month?
A. Two or three times a week.
Q. And you became quite friendly with him?
A. Yes, I did.
[...]
Q. Right. What did Mr. Bailey do for a living in 1968?
A. He was the owner and the manager of the Lorraine Motel.
Q. The Lorraine Motel, is that the same motel which Martin Luther King came to stay
in Memphis on April 3rd, 1968?
A. That's correct.
Q. Were you familiar with the fact that
Dr. King was coming to Memphis at that time?
A. No. I was not.
Q. When did you learn that Dr. King was in Memphis?
A. I was on my way back from Nashville when I heard the news on the radio about his
assassination. That's the first I knew of him being in Memphis.
Q. That would have been on the 4th of April that you heard this news?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. When did you next see Mr. Walter Bailey?
A. The very next morning.
Q. On the 5th of April you went to see him?
A. No. I went to take -- to look over the scene at the Lorraine Motel, and I took
some photographs while there. After I had taken photographs, I ran into Mr. Bailey.
Q. What time of the morning would that have been?
A. Between eight and nine a.m., as I best recall.
Q. So it was quite early in the morning?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Actually where did you go to look
over this scene? Where were you? What was your path?
A. Well, I first went to the rooming house where the alleged shots had been fired
and took some photographs from the lavatory of the rooming house aiming towards the
Lorraine Motel. Then I went down and took photographs of the Lorraine Motel and
vicinity. At that time I ran into Mr. Bailey.
Q. And where did you meet Mr. Bailey?
A. Right outside his office.
Q. At the Lorraine Motel?
A. At the Lorraine Motel.
Q. Did you have a conversation with him?
A. Yes, sir, I did.
Q. And what -- how did you perceive him at that time? Was he upset? How did you view him?
A. Well, he seemed visibly upset about the occurrence.
Q. Did you ask him any questions about the incident?
A. I mentioned the terrible occurrence. He said in response, if they had listened to
me, this wouldn't have happened. And he went on to explain that the previous night, he got
a call from a member of Dr. King's group in Atlanta who wanted him to change the location
of the room where Dr. King would be staying. And he was adamantly against that because he
had provided security by the inner court for Dr. King, Dr. King's room.
Q. Where did he want Dr. King to stay in his motel?
A. There was an inner court behind the office which had very good security. In
other words, it was not exposed to public view. Per se.
[...]
Q. And, instead, where did Mr. Bailey say he was being instructed to move Dr. King?
A. The room -- I don't recall the room number, but the room which Dr. King had
occupied that night, that's the room that they wanted him to occupy.
Q. A balcony room?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. For the record, that was Room 306, that balcony room. So Bailey said he was
instructed to move Martin King from room -- well, you didn't know the number, but from a
courtyard room to a balcony room?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Did he say he opposed that?
A. He adamantly opposed it.
Q. Did he say who in Dr. King's organization wanted him placed in that
exposed balcony room?
A. He just mentioned that a member of Dr. King's group had told him, advised him,
he wanted the room changed. He said he knew the person, but I did not question him as to
who it was or his name or pedigree or whatever.
Q. Did he indicate, when he spoke to you, if you can reflect very carefully, Mr.
Cohen, did he use the pronoun "he" or "she"?
A. He used the pronoun "he."
Q. So some male member of Dr. King's Atlanta office instructed the room change?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Once again, when did he receive that instruction?
A. He said the previous night that Dr. King was supposed to stay there.
Q. Prior to the arrival?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Just moving on, when you were down in that area early that morning, did you then or
had you previously had an opportunity or occasion to look at the area behind the
rooming house?
A. No. No, that was the first and last occasion.
Q. Did you look at the area that morning?
A. After the assassination, yes, sir, I did.
Q. How did it appear to you?
A. Which area are you referring to?
Q. I'm referring to the area behind the rooming house above the wall on Mulberry
Street. I could show you -- we have -- can you see this?
A. No, I can't.
[...]
Q. (BY MR. PEPPER) I'm asking you about this area here that is above the wall. There
is a wall here on Mulberry Street. I'm asking you about this area which is behind
the rooming house.
A. Uh-huh.
Q. The rooming house has two wings. There is an alleyway. This is vacant area
fenced in. I'm asking you about this. I just wondered if you had a chance to look at this.
A. Yes, I did, that very same morning I had taken the photographs.
Q. And how did it appear to you? What did you see?
A. Well, it was kind of dense with underbrush.
Q. Dense with underbrush?
A. As a matter of fact, I went to the room which James Earl Ray had occupied and
looked out the window which overlooks the alley and looked out the window intending to
take some photographs, but I never did because they wouldn't have shown anything
outside of the underbrush.
Q. So it was thick underbrush is what you are saying?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Okay.
MR. PEPPER: Thank you, Mr. Cohen. No further questions.

- * - * - * - *_* - * - * - *- * - * - * - *_* - * - * - *-

transcribed statement of Kaye Pittman Black:

Question: Without telling us exactly what was said, but did you have a
telephone conversation with Mayor Ingram on morning of April the 5th?
Answer: Yes, I did. He called somewhere between I would say seven and ten.
The reason I say seven is most of us had been up all night. A lot of us came in at seven,
some had gone home. So it would have been between seven and ten.
Question: And as a result of that conversation, did you go over to the South
Main Street area?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Where did you go and what did you observe at the South Main Street
area?
Answer: The trees which lined the embankment behind the rooming house and which
would have overlooked the Lorraine Motel had been cut and the area had been cleared and
cleaned.
Question: Would you show us the area where the trees that you are talking
about were located?
Answer: They would have been -- this faces the Lorraine back, the back of the
rooming house, correct?
Question: That's the rooming house. That's the back area of the rooming
house there.
Answer: This is where the embankment would have been where the trees
would have been. It overlooks the Lorraine.
In other words, someone here up in the rooming house would have had to look down to
the Lorraine because the embankment was taller than me, which means, you know, which
I'm not very tall, but it would have been six or eight feet tall. I think it was a
concrete embankment holding up the back of the building.

One month without news of Florence Aubenas

It's not unlikely that what's happening in Guantanamo Bay is also happening, and has been happening for years, in the American prison system. Probably far less organized and with less of a hierarchy of pragmatism and utility, with a lot more of a kind of entertainment quotient than the military-run, or something supra-military more likely, programmatic experiments in brainwash and personality reconstruction that are happening in Cuba. It is Cuba, Guantanamo Bay, it's on the Cuban land mass. An American military base where torture and neuro-linguistic degradation are applied to the enemies of the men who run the world, at this time. That Cuba itself is generally viewed as an enemy of those same men and their organizations makes the presence of Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba extremely ironic, or would if it wasn't for the evil that saturates every bit of the images and stories that come from there.
The male fear of sodomizing rape, in most heterosexual males, is so intense it creates a repressive blindness in nice boys, once it's established that prison is where nice boys will get broken into sexual toys. That this idea was created and is perpetuated by the elusive presence behind the curtains of authority seems obvious once it's in front of you, but until then it's one more layer in the atmosphere of control we all breathe. Don't think about it.
At the same time that prison is where nice boys who break the law get raped, it's also where pedophiles, who are essentially rapists of nice boys and girls, get beaten to death. That these two concepts - rapists as lowest of the low/rape as common practice - can't exist side by side in the same place without a lot of cognitive dissonance isn't a problem because, as we said, the fear of that experience, of the image of that experience created by the controlling authorities, is so strong it creates an irrational blindness, as it's intended to do.
Since there have been prisons there have been men who salivated at the thought of the pool of experimental subjects prisons contain. Disposable or near-disposable human beings. The one taboo area, and yet the most important area of research - the human; laboratory animals are graded by their nearness to the human in affect and response, in metabolism and hormonal make-up. Where the fruits of science are applied, what it's for - the human benefits of any scientific research are its justification, its reason for being.
But it's taboo, experimenting on human beings. But these aren't human beings, not really. Better though to keep it very quiet, the public in its half-aware state wouldn't be as understanding, not yet, as it should, as it would be if it were fully awake to the great horizons of possibility that unfold from what are merely unpleasant necessities, the early stages being necessarily more brutal and mistake-filled than later, as the techniques are refined, and the tools developed.
Imagine young Arab men, after a year or so at Guantanamo, slipped into some chaotic place, with deep triggers of programmed action and an implacable calmness, a radiating sense of purpose, with their real, inasmuch as they can be said to have anything real left in their personalities, selves still aligned with the spiritual cause that got them sent to Guantanamo in the first place. Sleepers, as the crime-show writers would call them. Sleepers in the dozens spilling back into the Muslim world, to ensure the victory of the elect, the chosen, the sacred holy presence.
I can remember in my twenties stumbling across a puzzle I still haven't answered - How can there be any good left, when evil has all the tools? Because certainly evil men and women can give to charities and love their relatives and even believe in themselves as good, all the things that genuinely good people can do; in addition they can experiment on other creatures no matter how much suffering it causes, they can defile the world and the sacred in their own names, they can do the most profane things imaginable, and good men and women can't. What tips the balance? Or is it tipped? Are we witnessing the extinction of the human, of what was the human? We may be.
What rises from this is putridly ugly. It's like watching wasps fly in and out of a skull, like watching ants crawling in and out of the body of a dead child. Confronting what's happening is so disheartening it becomes a struggle just to see. And then what to do?
Most of the time what presents itself to me as the easiest way is the cessation of everything, the end of the species, even all mammalian species; though I think that may be the trick, to get someone else to take the blame for what's already happening - by willing it - because the incompetence of the controlling actors now, their visionless haste and heartless manipulative cunning, emotional sickness coupled with demonic professionalism, the soulless streamlined proficiency of this moment, with its gleaming techniques and unstoppable momentum, is headed straight for the guard rail and annihilation.
So that wanting to get rid of them by getting rid of everything aids them, fuels their incompetent lunge toward oblivion. But it hurts so much to look at it - it's a kind of fire, destructive and tormenting, just to see clearly what they're doing.

Slavery is universally regarded as a bad thing - at least in the universe of enlightened Western nations; it's outlawed, and children are taught early and often that it's a crime of the past and a mark of inhumanity where it does exist today - in those backward places in the world where the law and common sense and decency have yet to work their transformations, from the rough brutal primitive to the refined compassionate modern.
As long as we let capitalism define slavery in its own terms it's "making people work for you and not paying them."
Once you pay them it's not slavery anymore.
But if we separate the real crime from its incidental costume what we have is something more like - slavery is making other people miserable to enrich yourself, forcing other people to do work, in order to survive, that they would not be likely to want to do if they were free to choose, and it's work that because they do it, the owner/employer becomes more prosperous. In the legal terms for slavery, the misery is decreed to be financial.
But how hard is it to imagine someone working in a factory, where the air is poison and the wages aren't enough to live on let alone save for later, where the body-damaging and mind-numbing effects are the responsibility of the worker, not the owner?
Or imagine a place that has no other way to make a living, where not working in the only employment available means starving. Not technically slavery, and yet the opportunity for slavery-like conditions is obvious. And the benefits to someone who can run those places of employment to their own benefit, at the expense of the people who work there and especially of those who don't, how different is that from owning slaves?
It is precisely this different, that the law very clearly defines slavery as making people work for you and not paying them; therefore, when people are free to not work for you, even if it means starving, and when they do work for you if you pay them, even if you don't pay them enough to feed and shelter themselves, it's not slavery.
According to the law.

Furer then reveals that the company commander cheered them on: "Good work, tigers." And after they took their prey to their camp, the abuse continued in different forms. "All the other soldiers were waiting there to see what we'd caught. When we came in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly." One of the soldiers, Furer said, "went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted...and laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy."

As savage as it is, checkpoint abuse is not unique in any sense. It fits perfectly well into the general picture of viewing the Palestinians as relative humans who are not entitled to the dignity and respect that full humans deserve.


At the height of Israel's massive reoccupation of Palestinian cities in 2002, for example, soldiers used their knives to engrave the star of David on the arms of a number of detained Palestinian men and teenage boys.


Omar Barghouti/The Electronic Intifada 28.Dec.04

Once, before the Neila prayer on Yom Kippur, Rabbi Avraham Yoshe Freund of Mansod said:

"It is not because they are Zionists that they are evildoers. It is because they are evildoers that they are Zionists."

What the Rabbis said about Zionism in the Previous Generations

Michael Chertoff, nominated as Secretary of Homeland Security

Chertoff is a Zionist Jew. What that means exactly is increasingly difficult to pinpoint, but its factuality is undeniable, he's a Jew, and he's a Zionist.
The colorful Condoleeza Rice recently picked Robert Zoellick to be her Deputy Secretary of State, Zoellick is also a Zionist Jew.
American foreign policy is being overtly directed by Zionist Jews, and soon domestic policy will be too.
One of the primary obstacles to a rational discussion of these increasingly visible presences is the immediate linkage to racist and white supremacist groups any mention of them automatically brings. It's anti-Semitic to point out that the American government is being run by Zionist Jews, and being anti-Semitic is a terrible thing, because it means you approve of the Holocaust. Since the Holocaust is one of the most horrible things that ever happened it's better not to mention it at all, even aside from the obvious danger implicit in criticizing the US government, at this time.
But there it is.
Hidden, then less hidden, now overt.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq was always about protecting Israel, which is why the seeming failure of the military presence there is passed over so lightly, because it isn't failure - it's Mission Accomplished. It was a lie that the Iraqi people were being liberated, it was Iraq itself that was the goal - revenge for ancient wrongs committed against the Chosen People, and strategic dominance of the biggest threat to the Holy Land.
Now the threats to that sacred nation that appear here, in the US, can be dealt with, and then...
Slaves and empire.

"Actually, a Bendix official said it much better than we can:

'...if you have enjoyed a good life while working with asbestos products, why not die from it."

Limited, Inc. 08.Jan.05

Florence Aubenas is missing in Iraq.
She is a reporter for Liberation, a French magazine.
She was reported missing Wednesday morning.
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link Nouvel Observateur

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/
How Exxonmobil funds the climate change sceptics

Pictures of famous men
whose penises were not mutilated
when they were too young to object
-

"If we believe absurdities,
we shall commit atrocities.

There is nothing so venerable
as an ancient abuse."
- Voltaire

_-_

"We should show greater respect for the genius of Nature's designs, rigorously tested and refined over millions of years."
- Charles, Prince of Wales

_-_

The struggle for genital integrity
at Intactivism

Top 10 myths of disaster relief

World Vision

Dealing with the Merchant of Death_

In 2000, aware of the lack of international and national instruments to prosecute Bout, the United States embarked on a campaign to disrupt his enterprise. In the same year, Bout was charged with forging documents in Bangui, when his aircraft used the markings of the state­owned airline on a flight to Gabon, and convicted in abstention to 2 years. He was absolved of the charges on 28 June 2000 without explanation. The Director of Civil Aviation in Bangui was, however, sentenced to a year in prison for fraud and forgery. When it was reported that Bout had armed the Taliban, and possibly also Al Qaeda, prior to the 11 September attack on the World Trade Centre, interest in his activities grew. The US and Britain tracked his shipments and tried to prevent him from buying weapons in Eastern Europe. South Africa was requested to charge Bout under its anti-mercenary legislation but there was insufficient evidence to make a case. After pressure from the United States, Bout and his brother were barred from the centre of their operations in the United Arab Emirates. Previously, the Emirates had agreed to freeze his assets if given details of his money trail, but US officials allegedly refused to do so for fear of compromising their sources._
"U.S. officials have indicated unofficially that the reason is that Bout is useful in Iraq, the sources told IPS. One of Bout's many companies is providing logistical support to U.S. forces in Iraq, well-placed French diplomatic sources say. His private airline British Gulf is supplying goods to the occupation forces, they say.

"In recognition of these services both the U.S. and the British governments have been opposing French efforts to include Bout in the UN mercenaries list, the diplomatic sources revealed."_
Richard Ammar Chichakli is the nephew of a former president of Syria and a veteran of the U.S. Army, a family friend of the bin Ladens who hung out with a youthful Osama and ran a free-trade zone in the United Arab Emirates. According to the United Nations, Chichakli also served as the financial overseer of arms trader Victor Bout's far-flung network of air cargo operations._
After being a blip on the radar screen of the international community since the mid-1990s and operating with impunity for years in Africa's conflict zones, Bout's profile rose markedly after he was linked to supplying the Taliban, which gave military support to al Qaeda. The United Arab Emirates, the main base for his operation, told the United Nations in early 2002 that his companies were prohibited from operating there and banned him from entering. In February 2002, Belgian authorities issued an international arrest warrant through Interpol for him on "money laundering practices and criminal conspiracy." The case is still pending.

Chichakli, who lives in Texas and was named by the United Nations as being Bout's chief financial manager, said U.S. authorities had not contacted him about Bout, even though Bout listed the Texas corporate address for San Air General Trading, a United Arab Emirates-based company owned by former Bout employee Serguei Denissenko, as his destination when he applied for a visa to come to the United States in summer 2000. Chichakli "clearly has connections to Bout," Lee S. Wolosky, a former National Security Council official told ICIJ. Wolosky, who closely followed the international arms trade, said the connection "concerned me and others at the National Security Council," but that there was a limit to what the White House could do, aside from referring the case to law enforcement. "U.S. authorities know everything about Bout," Chichakli said. _
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Mother Jones
Center For Public Integrity
AntiWar.com

100 things we didn't know this time last year

13. Smoking killed nearly one million people worldwide in 2000, according to the World Health Organisation.

89. ...more than 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents worldwide each year.
The first was Bridget Driscoll, knocked down by a car travelling at 12mph in London on 17 August 1896. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death, and warned: "This must never happen again."

BBC

Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders
Select Committee
To Study Governmental Operations [Church Committee]
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AARC Public Library
Sydney Gottlieb was l'ange du mort on that one, and more than a few others, and interestingly enough, ran the MKULTRA program, which brought Ted Kaczynski so much peace of mind.
What I'm suggesting generally is the common assumption that these things occurred only in the receded past, long ago now, and far away, is a comforting illusion.
Even the left in America, such as it is, thinks of the CIA etc. intrigues and assassinations as being Third World/other phenomena, and in the past - never here, and certainly not now.
But I don't see anything in the timeline to suggest that these little monsters have ever lost power - there's no event that looks anything like real defeat for them, only noise and light at the edges of plausibility. And in the last decade a stomach-turning rise in the dark and inexplicable.
One thing the net has done is give a forum to people who know, or know of, or knew; even the consequent flood of nonsense and fictive speculation helped, because it gave cover, and by dissipating attention - kept the heat down.

Windward Passage

asylum

Edwidge Danticat's uncle dies in the custody of Homeland Security, in Miami.

I just found out that Edwidge Danticat's uncle [Joseph Dantica] who raised her while her parents were in the US, died last week while in the custody of Homeland Security. He was 81 years old, he had a valid visa to the US, he was a church pastor, and he was forced to flee Haiti after the UN used his church to stage an 'operation,' killing several civilians in the process.

Hannah Tinti
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Haitian-Americans watched in awe this week as a group of 44 Cuban entertainers applied for political asylum in Las Vegas, unmolested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The treatment of the Cubans could not have contrasted more sharply with the experience of Joseph Dantica, an 81-year-old Haitian Baptist minister who recently applied for asylum in Miami.

St. Petersburg Times
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...as he tried to enter the country, he was taken to Miami's Krome Detention Facility (not a pretty place, I tell you what), and his medication was confiscated.

Although he apparently had a visa and family ready to receive him, Dantica was held pending an immigration hearing. When he "began vomiting and passed out, . . . He was taken to a hospital where family members were not permitted to see him and died the next day."

excerpted from Maud Newton

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We Are Ugly, But We Are Here
article by Edwidge Danticat

too much mystery

There are several problems. The first is the fact that, technically, we don't know the candidates. We know the principal heads of the lists but we don't know who exactly will be running. It really is confusing. They aren't making the lists public because they are afraid the candidates will be assassinated.

Another problem is the selling of ballots...

Baghdad Burning 02.Jan.05

My favorite niece writes to say I didn't mention "the animals". The news spread quickly online that "the animals" were all spared, presumably by having a "sixth sense" that caused them to head for higher ground.
Well I didn't mention it because it's a bogus piece of p.r. that points to exactly the weird and paranoia-inducing inconsistencies that are much too common everywhere now.
We're talking about a moment post-disaster when the human toll was still indeterminate, when whole regions were still unheard from, when even in those places with communication infrastructure the body counts were a matter of conjecture and there was almost no co-ordinated whole-system view.
And "the animals" were all safe. And we knew that because we just knew it. Because the nice people told us it was so.
And I'm not nice, so that's why I didn't mention it.

The world has pledged over $2billion dollars in aid to the relief agencies and governments in the countries hit by the quake/tsunami.
It's approaching the "funeral of Princess Di" level of public absorption/obsession/catharsis.
The early criticisms of the US response have all been made and cataloged. It's now more important - for gadflies generally, and the arcane and suspicious in particular - to begin the arduous nattering at the edges of consensus reality that is their responsibility.
Salient points that need emphasising are:

The environmental destruction along the coastal areas that was and is a direct result of the market demand for cheap farm-raised shrimp and prawns. This mostly involved the "clearing" of the protective buffer that mangrove "swamps" provided, leaving the coastal areas vulnerable to anything the sea did.
It may have been an act of a belligerent God, but that act was made more devastating because it was assisted by heedless men whose only motive was selfish greed. Those same men, starting from the top of their economic food chains, were mostly untouched by the calamity - while the people who were killed and injured, and who lost homes and loved ones, were at worst paid bystanders in that bargain of destruction.

The obstruction of aid to Banda Aceh, and the collaboration in that obstruction by governments with more authority than the Indonesian military, meaning the US primarily.
Most of us didn't know much about what was happening in Aceh before the waves hit, now we know nothing but the stark images of towns and villages completely leveled whose people have disappeared entirely. How convenient for the Indonesian military, and all those who see the war between good and evil as taking place between Judeo-Christian/capitalists and Muslim/communists.

It may indeed have been an act of God.
Two things that passed before my mediated eyes during the last week were:

the Sri Lankan government's refusal of a team of 120 Israeli emergency personnel early on, the official quoted as saying they needed supplies not people, at that time.

And the early, and often repeated though constantly adjusted upward, comparison of the quake to - at first "23,000 atomic bombs" and more recently "a million atomic bombs".
I'm really critical in my reading, far more than most Americans. That got me.
What it says is that it couldn't possibly have been a bomb. It had to be a quake, because it was so big. There are no bombs that big.
As far as I know the seismic footprint of subterranean nuclear explosions is not clearly distinguishable from natural tectonic activity.

Later still, I thought to wonder how advanced "we" are in terms of explosive power.
I don't know much about nuclear weapons and I haven't yet done any research (project for today, I suppose) But the thought problem is simple enough - the atomic bomb, of which the quake was more powerful than a million of, was detonated 60 years ago. It's not unimaginable that the megatonnage or whatever it's called has increased a few thousand fold, or more, in fact I'm certain it has. How much more would depend on breakthroughs and all that secret laboratory excitement that lends itself so readily to conjecture and paranoid suspicion.
We don't know, right now, what the most powerful nuclear device is capable of, or even if there are other more powerful than nuclear devices now waiting to unleash the mighty trampling of whosever's God has his hand on the button, and his butt in the chair
So we sort of know it wasn't a bomb because:
a. there are no bombs that big. Which is impossible to prove or disprove and has to rely for its acceptance or refutation on the credibility of experts and group consensus.
b. no one, even if there are bombs that big, would want to use one, there or anywhere, now.
That's much easier to work with. There is a war against Islam. It is a vicious war waged by zealots who will stop at nothing to win. And who give every indication of being willing and capable, should they face inevitable defeat, of bring everything down with them. The ultimate suicide bombers.
Who operate behind veils of secrecy and walls of misdirection and a bunch of hard-to-metaphor symbolic devices that make it very difficult to know exactly what they're doing, much less talk about it to people who have no background for the subject whatsoever.
The Spanish train bombing.
The WTC.
The plane that was brought down in Pennsylvania that Rumsfeld so eloquently mentioned the other day as being "shot down" by terrorists.
The concerted and relatively successful for a while effort to make any accusation of conspiracy and intrigue a mark of delusional behavior in the accuser.
I could make this list as long as my fingers could still type.
It may have been an act of God, or it may have been an act of nature.
For sure it was abetted by men, it was made worse by men, the harm was increased by negligence and irresponsibility.
And it may have been caused by men entirely, though that idea is heretical and so bizarre it was hard to finish writing this.
I'm not saying it was - I'm saying the point by point refutation depends on some things that are tenuous and vague and impossible to present as evidence with any finality.
We live in an historical moment in which nothing is too strange to be - only technically impossible, and even then...

Who are they?