an ocean of orange and black that spread as far as he could see

The longest deployment of troops in the history of the British military ends at midnight, when the army's operation in Northern Ireland officially comes to an end.

veracity in ether doesn't equal veracity on earth, precisely:

A letter, to this person, about this:

Hey-
I'm a real person. I'd be grateful if you didn't put my name up on your site but I send this knowing you could ignore that.
I'm already extended, out there, at risk, exposed to the truly dangerous professional monitors and data-miners. Amateurs don't worry me too much.
I'm free-lance weird. Unconnected to any govt mind-control apparatus -
consciously that is. Meaning I acknowledge the ultimately unknowable aspects of the subject.
A lot of inexplicable, or at least consensus-reality inexplicable stuff in my life though, for sure.
Most of it stemming from what I believe is the fact that at one point I was profiled along with most of the rest of the potential leaders of my generation, those of us with high IQ's, good looks, and size - by the swine who did that kind of thing, little ratlike jerks combing the public educational systems looking for budding American Che Guevaras and Mao Tse Tungs, Ho Chi Minhs, and all the other threatening liberationist creatures that so scared those dimwitted fogbrain asswipes.
It's my contention that a bunch of us were profiled and taken down in various ways before we could make too big a stink, back in the day. For a lot of reasons I've kept enough of my selves intact to hit back, feebly as may be, from here, relatively comfortably, from this chair, this computer, this moment - thus informant38. And affirm my reverence for the aesthetic and transcendent, thus dirty b.
Your facile - "but dude, if you AREN’T part of some kind of ARG, I would urge you maybe to get a little professional help. No offense" is pretty much the only thing in what I read - I read most of it - in your coverage of Duncan and Blake that was objectionable to me personally.
The textbook for Otherness/Strangeness 1A covers the inevitable trope of when you do have actual genuine inexplicable weirdness professional help is one of the first places you'll turn. And of course are met with the full armor of cultural refusal to see weirdness as anything other than defective integration with the norm. Or worse, are met with with the waiting leer of the very thing you seek help from.
RD Laing famously said it's impossible to become mental healthy in an ill society. If you don't think this society has proven itself beyond question as deeply pathological I'd suggest you sit and think about that for a month or two.
What I've tried off and on but not so often over the years [t]here at blogger&blogspot etc. is to get down some stuff that's irrefutably reality-based, that actually happened to me, get it down while it's still warm from the regurgitant process, which means it comes out often reading chaotic and disjointed - just like the "professionals" would expect. Paranoid screeds, ramblings, dithyrambic gibberish, nonsensical defensively constructed noise.
That's the trouble isn't it?
The production of gibbering victims is indistinguishable from the production of gibbering defectives, after the fact.
I can make pretty good sense when I try real hard though. Actually have done it enough to have gained the praise and respect of some other, far less certifiably paranoid, writers online that I in turn respect. So confirmation at least in some regard.
What I tried to put up about Duncan was some of my pain at her leaving, alongside uncommitted but aware recognition of the things she pointed to in her own not quite chaotic/not quite full-organized way.
I could easily believe given some consistent evidence that Theresa Duncan was a fictive avatar, an Idoru, but I could pretty easily believe the whole of earthly existence is a metaphysical ruse, as well.
If life is indeed composed of real things I'm pretty sure Duncan was one of them, and her concerns well-founded, at least originating in something she couldn't quite express directly enough to get it all the way up and out. Something dark and important. Something rigorous intuition gets close to a lot, in between the flashing UFO lights and the crop circle chaff.
And I feel guilt from seeing but not confirming that in her. Tremendous guilt in point of fact.
I owe her and her memory and by extension her lost lover.
I'm sorry you didn't dig the dirty beloved site, but hey.
And if you dig further on informant38 you'll see that I've addressed the knee-jerk anti-Semitic slander fully and directly, more than once. You may have to dig for it, but it's there.
As far as I'm concerned, constantly and repeatedly affirming your non-anti-Semitic nature in order to be taken seriously as someone who's alarmed by what's happened to the world and the US in particular is suckass behavior. Not my cup of ordure. I don't deal in cliches. I'm clear, with myself at least, about where I'm coming from, and it isn't bigoted or racist, or unthinking.


cheers
msg

Mr. Schumer has considerable say on the issue.
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Goldman Sachs: The Glue That’s Holding the Black Ops Economy Together

"Nothing is being hidden. There is no ulterior motive," said David Foley, the department's Middle East spokesman. "We are continuing to provide detailed information and have been completely transparent."
-
"...more behind the search of our home than, shall we say, the pursuit of justice..."
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“It became what I call a minor obsession of mine for the next six weeks,” she said
[...]
"...I’ve been in this business for 20 years..."

Survival:

Bushmen arrested for hunting
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the last refuge of uncontacted South American Indians is being illegally destroyed
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Peru’s Amazon Indian organisation, AIDESEP, has applied to the courts for oil exploration and drilling to be banned in parts of the Peruvian Amazon inhabited by uncontacted tribes.

Stephen Pinker is dangerous:

By "dangerous ideas" I don't have in mind harmful technologies, like those behind weapons of mass destruction, or evil ideologies, like those of racist, fascist or other fanatical cults. I have in mind statements of fact or policy that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age.

- Pinker/SunTimes 15.Jul.07
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Steve, I think the idea is "harmful technologies" is what's being debated in the first place. And "challenging the collective decency" can pretty much guarantee its champion a label of "evil" if it gets far enough away from that collective's assumption of its own decency.
The weird way you merge racism and fascism with fanatical cults is maybe an indicator of your own mental imbalance. And the prominence from which you deliver this garbage, in this culture, at this time, is kind of a further condemnation.
Anything that seriously challenges anything like what passes for collective decency now isn't going to make the op-ed page of the newspaper, not in the USofA it isn't.
So, ipso facto there, pal.

What they both have in common:

Today, it's the story of Paula Zahn's wholly unsurprising resignation from CNN amid the hoopla of Campbell Brown's ascendancy — but it might as well be the tale of Aaron Brown being not-so-subtly shoved out in favor of Anderson Cooper just over a year and a half ago. What they both have in common: The utter lack of grace and class on the part of CNN, transparently elbowing yesterday's stars out of the way for the newer, younger model.

Rachel Sklar/Huffington/Eat The Press 25.Jul.07
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Eleven people are mentioned in the article, the three most important being Klein, Zahn, and Campbell Brown.
Klein and Zahn are Jews, and Brown, being moved into Zahn's position by Klein, while not Jewish, is married to a guy with an incredible resume, Daniel Samuel Senor.
from Wayne Madsen Report via NewsFollowUp (Madsen's site's gone behind some b.s. paywall) on Senor, when he was being considered for White House Press Secretary:

If Senor gets the job, more retired military officers who served in Iraq may go public with their criticisms of the Bush-Rumsfeld war effort. Senor, who served under CPA viceroy L. Paul Bremer III, was seen as carrying the water for extreme right-wing and pro-Israelis inside the Pentagon and the Likud government in Israel. Senor was an intern for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). His sister is the head of the AIPAC office in Jerusalem and his brother-in-law is the editorial page editor for the neocon Jerusalem Post. Senor was also a director of the US-Israel Business Exchange (USIBEX) and was an senior associate of The Carlyle Group. Senor served as McClellan's deputy press secretary at the White House before taking the CPA job in Baghdad.
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...The Jerusalem Post, whose editorial page editor, Saul Singer, is a neoconservative and is married to Wendy Singer Senor, who runs AIPAC's Jerusalem office. She is the sister of Dan Senor, who was Paul Bremer's chief spokesman at the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Sklar, who's Jewish, sets it up like it's all about the tits and ass and youth and beauty, which it no doubt is to a certain indefinable degree, and she's right to complain and condemn those aspects, but any enterprise that has someone like Dan Senor connected to it has got the same big godawful stink as the Iraq invasion.
Which as we all know, conspiracy addicts aside, is just a big silly mistake, made exclusively and solely and entirely by loony George Bush and nasty Dick Cheney, with the amoeba-like Karl Rove sort of floating around in the background.
Lies and intrigue and groveling deception and look who's right there, smiling.
AIPAC had nothing to do with it, AIPAC's no different than the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors National Association, the fact that Klein runs CNN News has nothing to do with it, the fact that CNN was cheerleading this nightmare from the get, the fact that Israel is much better off now while America is much worse off now has nothing to do with it.
Everything is simple and clear and easily taken in by even the most gullible audience. It's all about cute young faces and nice tits and a firm belly and a quick wit. It's all about consumer seduction. It's all about venality, greed, merchandising anything and everything, and short-sighted greed will never be more than a childish moral flaw that's completely understandable and forgivable in the long run because greed is driving the economy and even though the economy's smacked its whole front end through the guard rail now and the back wheels are spinning free in the gravel at the edge of the cliff all in aching slow-motion but implacably proceeding, greed's still nothing to worry about. And greed's all that's going on.

Two Artists...Missing

Nothing in the Times would even suggest, naturally, that Theresa Duncan had been, or felt she had been, and testified to having been, testified that she had been harassed and intimidated by a dangerous and very powerful man who was conscienceless. There's nothing to suggest anything other than the superficial story as delivered in the news available - she left a note, he left a note, they're gone.
But in loyalty to what she was and did here, in this big after-school hang-out where we knew each other as similar creatures, it needs to be brought forward.
She was funny and cute and harsh and intimidating in a big-city way. Now she's gone.
This was for her.

"The Republicans are praying for another 9/11."

awful revelation:

‘We are trying to feed and manage this insatiable appetite for luxury,’ Cain said with pride.

Harris/ObserverUK/commondreams 22.Jul.07
-

Skinny tires, funny lycra shorts, goofy shoes that require the rider to duckwalk when not on the bike and ridiculous helmets were more the order of the day. Oh, yeah, and did I mention that the race took place in France?
Like so many other Americans, I followed his exploits. But unlike so many others, I had tracked the Tour de France nearly obsessively for years and years before Lance started winning. I can name every winner dating back to 1981. In fact, the first year I paid close attention was the last time a Frenchman won his country's own race. Yes, a very long time ago.

However, this year, I'm having a hard time caring. Blame doping and drugs.

Verhulst/TampaBay 22.Jul.07

No, you blame doping and drugs, I'll blame the devil, with his insinuating technophilic temptations and legions of rationalizing demons.
Check this: You don't care if they spend 75000 dollars on a throwaway bike, hundreds of thousands more on developing and refining shorts, vitamins, nutrition, shoes whatever-the-fuck else it takes, but no no no, nothing can go inside the body! Nothing that would help them win, that isn't you know, like food or something. Well vitamins and minerals.
So the technology of the machine can advance at lightning speed, but the technology of the body can only advance in crippled-up stumbling baby-steps.
You're not mentally ill, right? Because if you were you'd know it, right? And if you were too far gone to figure it out, someone would tell you, wouldn't they?

coming soon
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Amoral dimension:

It emerged that not only had Jacqui Smith, the new Home Secretary, smoked the drug but so had two of her ministers with responsibility for law and order. The admission further undermined Gordon Brown's efforts to demonstrate that he was bringing a moral dimension to his government.

Jones and Toby Helm/TelegraphUK 20.Jul.07

"I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can."

"Some people hate anything to do with the future," Hayek says of his critics who accuse him of being a phoney
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"It's a good feeling. It's kind of neat," Sgt. Jack Richards said.

at this moment, in this world:

Nuclear power officials in Japan today admitted that the world's largest nuclear power plant had suffered at least 50 malfunctions including burst pipes, water leaks and radioactive waste spillage, when it was hit by yesterday's earthquake.
Officials were investigating possible radioactive leaks from the plant after reports that several drums carrying low-level nuclear waste had tipped over and lost their lids during the earthquake, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, in northern Japan.

Guardian UK 17.Jul.07
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The terrorist network Al-Qaida will likely leverage its contacts and capabilities in Iraq to mount an attack on U.S. soil, according to a new National Intelligence Estimate on threats to the United States.
The declassified key findings, to be released publicly on Tuesday, were obtained in advance by The Associated Press.

SHRADERandFLAHERTY/AP-SFGate 17.Jul.07
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The Vatican said Tuesday it would lead the fight against pedophilia, but said the problem was not limited to the Catholic Church and that other institutions should take responsibility.
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi spoke to Vatican Radio after the Los Angeles archdiocese reached a $660 million settlement with more than 500 alleged victims of clergy sex abuse, the largest-ever U.S. payout.

WINFIELD/AP 17.Jul.07
-

-

Firefighters tackled a stubborn wildfire Tuesday in the mountains of Santa Barbara's wine country, with several hundred residents advised to leave their homes over concern that a shift in the wind could push flames their way.
Officials issued the voluntary evacuation notice — the first since the fire began on July 4 — Monday evening.

CBS 17.Jul.07
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A District man pleaded not guilty to child endangerment charges in a Massachusetts district court yesterday after being accused of forcing his two daughters into the trunk of his car Sunday afternoon.
Witnesses told police that Michael Fekete, 48, put his 9- and 11-year-old daughters into the trunk for an unknown period of time, then let them out and placed them in the back seat of the car.

Johnson/WashingtonPost 17.Jul.07

Between August and December of 2006 Prestige Airways flew an enormous number of flights (419!),records at the U.S. Dept of Transportation reveal, between Florida and Haiti.

Help1Up

like many a day for union leaders in Colombia, the most dangerous place in the world to defend workers' rights.

“The accusation is pure conjecture.”
-

THE TLATELOLCO MASSACRE

The Mexican government's planned response to the student rally on the evening of October 2 [1968] was called Operation Galeano. The most definitive account of this operation, culminating with the Tlatelolco Massacre, is found in a Mexican special prosecutor's report released in November 2006. According to this report, early on October 2 elements of the military's Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP, the Presidential High Command) were placed in apartments on the upper floors of the Chihuahua apartment building and other apartment buildings surrounding Tlatelolco's Plaza de las Tres Culturas. (One of the apartments taken over by the EMP in the Molina del Rey building was the residence of a sister-in-law of Interior Minister Echeverría.) Once the rally started, the Army, using from 5,000 to 10,000 soldiers (the accounts varying) and more than 300 tanks and other vehicles, would surround the plaza to prevent those attending the rally from fleeing, while armed military men in civilian clothes, members of a unit called the Batallón Olimpia that had been organized to help protect the Olympic Games, would prevent anyone from entering or leaving the Chihuahua apartment building, in which the organizers of the rally were to be arrested.
[...]
Echeverría was president of Mexico for less than a year when another student massacre occurred in Mexico City. Marching student protesters were attacked on June 10, 1971, by a secret, plain-clothed paramilitary squad called the Halcones (Falcons) trained and paid by the government, using clubs and firearms, resulting in at least 25 deaths. Some wounded students were allegedly finished off by the Falcons in their hospital beds. This so-called halconazo or Corpus Cristi Massacre (named for the day on the Roman Catholic calendar on which it occurred), the preceding Tlatelolco Massacre, and the killing or disappearances of hundreds of leftist radicals in the 1970s and 1980s, would become collectively known as la guerra sucia ("the dirty war").
[...]
Denying that he ordered troops to fire on the student demonstrators, he also discounted the official government explanation that the deadly gunfire came from other student radicals. "These kids were not provocateurs," Echeverría said. "The majority were sons and daughters of workers, farmers and unemployed people." Only one person could have ordered the shooting, said Echeverría, and that was Díaz Ordaz (who died in 1979). "There was a hierarchy. The army is obligated to respond to only one man," Echeverría said. "My conscience is clear."

While Echeverría sounds almost as if he were out of the loop on the night of the Tlatelolco Massacre, or would not have known of an order by Díaz Ordaz to fire on the students, he was not only the man in charge of Mexico's internal security as previously noted, but headed a committee of high government officials, formed immediately after the violence of July 26, 1968, on how to deal with the student unrest...

Artists and labels and spokesmen:

"This is just about the artists getting paid fairly," said Richard Ades, spokesman for SoundExchange. "Artists and labels just want a fair share of the pie."

two points on a long white line:

Two 16-year-old girls from Britain who were allegedly carrying cocaine worth £300,000 have been held by police in Ghana, customs officers said today.
[...]
Ghana, along with other African countries, has become a key staging route for drugs from South America since authorities cracked down on long-established smuggling ports.

Guardian UK 12.Jul.07
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Ghana being one, Haiti being another. Which could explain the bizarre emphasis on "security" down there, in that little island just over the way from Guantanamo.
Some of us had a hard time figuring out why the thugs in charge of US foreign policy were so interested in removing Aristide, the democratically-elected etc of Haiti, and installing, or re-installing or resurrecting or whatever, the mindlessly brutal tontons macoutes.
And guess who's running the international drug trade these days. Any ideas?
Ask Berezovsky, or that whats-his-name from England, Roman Abramovich, or hey, even Jack Abramoff, he might know something about that.

US can still win in Iraq

"I believe we can succeed in Iraq, and I know we must," Bush said at a press conference called to defend his unpopular strategy.

AFP/Yahoo 12.Jul.07
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"...we can succeed in Iraq..."
Not one person in this country knows what that means.
One of the more superficial interpretations would have the establishment of democracy in Iraq as a primary achievement. Democracy being a government, in that ringing set of phrases, "of the people, by the people, for the people".
The people of the US want the Iraq war stopped. Their leaders have refused to stop it. Democracy.
The demons have arranged things so that:
a. It's not a war; so "stopping the war" has no content, doesn't say anything.
b. Stopping whatever it is won't be good for you, but we can't tell you exactly why except that bad things will happen;
c. Democracy now is more like a sports team franchise, where the actual name doesn't signify anything anyway.
The Philadelphia football team aren't eagles, don't have anything to do with birds called eagles. The Utah basketball team has even less to do with jazz.
Democracy is just the name of our team, out there on the field, playing hard and professionally. It's closer to entertainment than anything like moral or ethical conflict.

CASE STUDIES

The Checkpoint in al-Slaikh
Car One: The Killing of Saif Ra`ad `Ali Sa`id al-`Azawi, age 20
Car Two: The Killing of `Adil `Abd al-Karim al-Kawwaz, 42, Haidar `Adil `Abd al-Karim al-Kawwaz, 19, `Ula `Adil `Abd al-Karim al-Kawwaz, 17, and Mirvat `Adil `Abd al-Karim al-Kawwaz, 8
The Killing of `Uday Ahmad Mustafa
The Killing of Farah Fadhil al-Janabi and Mardan Muhammad Hassan
The Killing of Ra`ad Fahd Shallal, Sa`id Majid Sa`dun and `Uday `Abbas`Aday
The Killing of Lt. ‘Ala’ `Ali Salih and Sgt. Muhammad Hilal Nahi
The Killing of Muhammad Subhi Hassan al-Qubaisi
Checkpoint in al-Mansur
Car One: Killing of Zaid `Imad Ghazal Ibrahim al-Ruba`i, 14
Car Two: Killing of Klemantine Salim `Abd al-Karim, 75, Tamir Alber Alias Kasira, 40, and Mazin Alber Alias Kasira, 35
A Bomb and Shooting on Haifa Street

Hearts and Minds:
Post-war Civilian Deaths in Baghdad Caused by U.S. Forces
HRW
-
The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness
Chris Hedges & Laila Al-Arian/The Nation
-
Riverbend: Where is she?
Helena Cobban/Just World News

Giuliani, the Likud Candidate?
Jim Lobe

Clare Short, Independent Labour MP for Birmingham, Ladywood (UK):

I have followed developments in the middle east carefully over many years, and I was well aware before my recent visit how bad things are for the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, I was deeply shocked by Israel's blatant, brutal and systematic annexation of land, demolition of Palestinian homes, and deliberate creation of an apartheid system by which the Palestinians are enclosed in four bantustans, surrounded by a wall, with massive checkpoints that control all Palestinian movements in and out of the ghettos.

The Israelis are clearly and systematically attempting to take the maximum amount of land with the minimum number of Palestinians. As things stand, Israel has taken 85 per cent. of historical Palestine, leaving the remaining 15 per cent. for Palestinian ghettos. More shocking than that is that the international community, including the UK and the EU, does nothing to require Israel to abide by international law, despite all the claims made about European support for human rights and international law.

-
The main reason Israel/Palestine isn't accurately described as apartheid is that the segregated population of South Africa was essential to the economic well-being of white South Africans.

unresolved issues:

Libya's Supreme Court upheld on Wednesday death sentences on six foreign medics for infecting Libyan children with HIV...
-
In a sign of improving US ties with Libya, President George W Bush has announced he is sending the first US ambassador to Tripoli in nearly 35 years.
Wednesday's announcement came despite unresolved issues with Libya over compensation for US relatives of victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland and demands for the release of Bulgarian nurses accused of infecting children with HIV.
[...]
Bush nominated Gene Cretz, currently Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv and previously Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Damascus, to the Tripoli post, which has been empty since 1972.
-

Cretz at pipl

these august voices:

Santorum went on to clearly imply that terror attacks will occur inside America which will alter the body politic and lead to a reversal of the anti-war sentiment now dominating the country.
"Between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public’s going to have a very different view of this war, and it will be because, I think, of some unfortunate events, that like we’re seeing unfold in the UK. But I think the American public’s going to have a very different view," said the former senator from Pennsylvania.
Is Santorum expressing foreknowledge of some coming atrocity or is he merely using a tactic familiar to the leadership of his party - exploiting the fear of terror for the purposes of political rhetoric?
Last month, the new chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party Dennis Milligan said that there needed to be more attacks on American soil for President Bush to regain popular approval.
"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001]," Milligan told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, "And the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country," he concluded.

Global Research 10.Jul.07
prison planet > cryptogon

illustrating how serious Beijing is about tackling product safety:

China Executes Ex-Food and Drug Chief

Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water.
-
It's not like a hatred kind of thing, because I really like the U.S.
-
Fred Thompson’s Wife
*
Is Fred Thompson on the Downlow?

Falling Guys:

It was on July 2, 2003, that the president responded to the continued violence in Iraq, two months after “Mission Accomplished,” by taunting those who want “to harm American troops.” Mr. Bush assured the world that “we’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” The “surge” notwithstanding, we still don’t have the force necessary four years later, because the president never did summon the courage, even as disaster loomed, to back up his own convictions by going to the mat to secure that force.
No one can stop Mr. Bush from freeing a pathetic little fall guy like Scooter Libby. But only those who paid the ultimate price for the avoidable bungling of Iraq have the moral authority to pardon Mr. Bush.

Frank Rich/NYTimes/CommonDreams 08.Jul.07
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Expect more and more of this, with an increasing intensity, as things ravel further. Rich frames the urgency as Bush, Bush is what's wrong. The default and readily available response is get rid of Bush. Problem solved. Unless that isn't what's wrong.
That view depends for its legitimacy on Iraq being a mistake, on everything about the invasion and occupation being a mistake or series of mistakes, or mistakes within what may or may not have been larger more complicated mistakes.
So that the invasion, deceptive and fictional as its causative reasons were, intentional though that deception was, is now just a profound mistake. Mistakenly begun, and mistakenly carried out. Made by Bush, or at its most conspiratorial, Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld. Three white men with delusions of something or other.
And in that bland conspiracy Libby was nothing more than "a pathetic little...guy" who got set up and has now taken a sort of "fall". Though what that fall consists of is hard to determine, except that he has a notoriety now he didn't before. He certainly has a lot more publicly visible sources of income than he did. And champions of one kind or another, including in this low-key, back-handed way, Frank Rich of the New York Times. The Times bearing a large responsibility for shaping the public's view of Iraq, Saddam, the invasion and consequent occupation, and now what to do about the "mistake".
Another view might be that this was intended, all of it. The destruction of Iraq conceived and planned for and carried out successfully - Mission Accomplished.
In that view the actual "fall guy" would be Bush, primarily, and the adjectival "pathetic" and "little" could accurately be extended to all, even to those of us way out here at the edge of things, with our "pathetic" "little" dismay and frustrated helplessness.
The problem with that view in an almost biological sense is it leads directly into an engagement with sinister forces at work in the things, the systems and architectures, that operate to give us cohesion, that provide the "us" of our commonality. That commonality requires an economy, and government, and especially information services that speak to us and for us as part of what we are.
But if this other view is correct, if the New York Times and Frank Rich and Michael Gordon and Judith Miller and Dana Milbank and all the rest of them are and have been all along working toward other, unstated and very different purposes, not speaking for, but to deceive and manipulate, then we don't have that cohesion, except by being victims of it, of them, of whatever it is that's done this to us and what we might have been if this had not happened.

Daniel Ellsberg does compare and contrast on Libby/Vanunu
-
via Scoop

Valley Forge Babylon:

The president mentioned Adam Stephen, a Revolutionary War general who founded Martinsburg, a city of 15,000 in the panhandle of West Virginia. "We give thanks for all the brave citizen-soldiers of our Continental Army who dropped pitchforks and took up muskets to fight for our freedom and liberty and independence," Bush said. He added: "You're the successors of those brave men...Like those early patriots, you're fighting a new and unprecedented war."

WashingtonPost 05.Jul.07
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Satanic amusement as Bush compares the invasion of Iraq and its consequences to the American Revolution. It becomes clearer and clearer that this is not a battle between differing philosophies or even ethical systems, but of essential things, cores of being, spirits and presences. And it's fought here as intensely as there.
-
Most of the talk about withdrawal from Iraq is, and has to be, like family members yelling and crying at men who are fighting and beating on someone to stop. The causes, precipitating moves, the damage done, and the right and wrong of its beginning aren't part of that. Just stop. But then what?
There's a sense in the air around at least some of the noise that just leaving Iraq will do it. But that's emotional and immediate, there's no larger context to it, and the country's in ruins. Forget the political and economic planning that isn't getting done by those who want to leave- what kind of official statement would get made there as it happens? What's the standard etiquette for having done something like that and then just stopping, without resolution or any real finishing?
It may help more to accomplish withdrawal to first get a sentiment and message together, something we can say as a country and a people to another country and people who have been deeply wounded by whatever this is we've done. Sorry's probably not going to be enough.

approximately $ 1 billion a year:

Britain's Transport and General Workers' Union has called upon its 800,000 members to boycott Israeli-made products based on what they term Israel's "criminal policies in Palestinian territories."
The decision to call for a boycott, reached at a union conference in Brighton, is declarative and does not include concrete steps to implement the boycott.
The TGWU is the second British union to call for a boycott on Israel this year - last month the British public services union UNISON also urged its members to refrain from purchasing Israeli products, basing the call on Israel's "criminal behavior in the territories," and Israel's responsibility for the Second Lebanon War.

haaretz 08.Jul.07
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via xymphora
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Intel as Israeli business
Intel in Israel

The cavalry didn't come riding to the rescue; the American Indians did.

oil:

agrofuels threaten to greatly accelerate climate change through the destruction of ecosystems and carbon sinks on which we depend for a stable climate. The rush to agrofuels encourages intensive, industrial agriculture at the expense of sustainable food production.
Monoculture plantations have been doing serious damage around the world for decades, but agrofuels represent a further intensification of the process, endangering what remains of global forest cover and climate. They also threaten the food sovereignty, cultural, human and land rights of indigenous peoples and local communities.
-
Washington's Holy Grail - or Benchmark Supreme - remains the Oil Law. Only 24 of 37 Iraqi cabinet ministers have approved the made-in-Washington draft of the law - which should have been presented for discussion in Parliament this Wednesday. The Kurds have already leaked that they are against it - the terms, not the law in itself. The Sadrists, virtually all Sunni parties and the overwhelming majority of Iraq's population - if they had access to the text - are against handing over the nation's wealth to Anglo-American Big Oil.
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In other Iraq news, the Iraqi cabinet has approved part of a controversial oil law. On Tuesday, cabinet ministers voted to send the law on to parliament. U.S. lawmakers have demanded Iraq advance the measure before it approves additional war funding. Critics say the law would leave Iraq’s oil open to foreign takeover.
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Oil companies from all over the world have been warned by Peru's national indigenous peoples' organization not to explore for oil in areas where uncontacted tribes live. The tribes face extinction from an oil boom in Peru that has seen 70% of the Peruvian Amazon opened up to exploration
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Should everyone drive tiny cars in the future? Then we would be talking about something entirely different. For the vast majority of buyers, a sense of responsibility and driving pleasure go hand-in-hand. You ought to try driving the 12-cylinder diesel. You'd be impressed.

Take Iraq. Take it all.

enabling the passive voice:

As if he hadn’t done enough damage already, helping to promote the American invasion of Iraq with deeply flawed articles in The New York Times, Michael R. Gordon is now writing scare stories that offer ammunition for the growing chorus of neo-cons calling for a U.S. strike against Iran - his most recent effort appearing just this morning.
What’s most lamentable is that editors at The New York Times, who should have learned their lessons four years ago, are once again serving as enablers.

Mitchell/Editor&Publisher 03.Jul.07
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What seems to some of us out here, far from whatever daily grind of pressure and response is working on Gordon and the editors of the Times, and Mitchell you'd have to assume to some extent, a more salient point, is who's being enabled there, as Gordon takes his skills as messenger and value-added information packager once more into the breach, and Mitchell critically if incompletely examines the result.
Mitchell doesn't say, as though it's not as key as what he accurately describes as being done by Gordon and the editors of the New York Times and possibly other less public figures, but if he could say why, if he could bring himself to address it, considering why would allow us to anticipate, forecast, and link other people and events to what's being rejected almost unanimously by everyone in America now except its elected officials and its commercial news organizations - that thing that has currently the face of the "war in Iraq" but is clearly something bigger and darker.
Describing the "growing chorus of neocons" that way, as a chorus, something tangential to the main plot, something closer to a protesting mob than a cabal of efficient conscienceless gangsters, leaves out their main attribute at the moment - that they campaigned for, planned for, organized and prosecuted the lead-in to the invasion of Iraq, and did so with an astonishingly small amount of visible players, successfully, having got what they were after - the destruction of Iraq as a military presence and as an economically independent state in the Middle East has been accomplished. So chorus they may be, but it's a louder and more ominous noise they're making than the phrase carries superficially.
These men or the the interest they serve not only developed the idea of invasion and occupation of Iraq into its current awful reality, they've had years of the sock-puppet acquiescence of the Bush Administration and its Congressional enablers to hand-pick the military leadership the already-owned media now quote, through Gordon, as unquestionable primary sources fingering Iran for events and conditions the rest of us have no clear alternative way of interpreting without relying on imagination and suspicion.
The tacit assumptions behind Mitchell's position, the hoped-for assuming that was no doubt one of Gordon's minor goals - incompetent tyrant Bush and shallow arrogant petroleum-worshipping Cheney, like tumors that can be identified and removed by a familiar and safe operation - are solidified and strengthened by being left unnamed.
The more radical version, that Bush and his whole house of cards, and Gordon and the editors of The New York Times and theirs, are part of an architecture of lies that's deep complex and confusing and even the voices we should be able to rely on to cut through that confusion and make clearer what's happening only add to that confusion - Mitchell and all the rest of the chorus of sane and normative opposition that has barked at them all these years and done nothing, not one single effective thing to stop them, the people who were meant to understand themselves as addressed by that chilling pronouncement from the elect, back in 2002:

"...we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."

Mitchell's response to, and Gordon's regurgitated fiction itself, the splash and ripple of it across the pond of American public attention, keep the larger questions out of sight and mind.
Who's that "we" whose reality we're studying?
Who's done this to the world?
What do they really want?
And what will it take to stop them.

a particularly damning map:

China forced the World Bank to remove damning statistics from a pollution report, the Financial Times has revealed. Among the information cut was the figure that around 750,000 people die in China each year because of pollution.

der Spiegel 04.Jul.07
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dragon bones
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in disciplined lines
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mouthpieces of God
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"...other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact..."
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"...little things lead to bigger things..."
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Resolved, That Richard B. Cheney, Vice President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

We can try to articulate, though it's very near the futile edge, why Bush's pardon of Libby is a wrong thing, and we should. So here. Because it is the stunning hammer, the blunt instrument, the immediate weapon visited upon our hope for a brighter future. "Our" meaning something that doesn't hold Libby and Bush as essential. "Our" meaning something that is kept by, or caught by, or at the mildest impeded by what these men are in the world as we live in it now.
Other brighter quicker minds have explained that keeping Libby in a legal limbo will enable the duplicitous "can't talk about it, ongoing case" curtain to drop over what he did, and what he is, and who he really has served by his moments in the public sector, or behind it and around it.
The particulars of his case aren't what he is to us, it's the connection, the connections, the lines of intrigue and force that go out from his busy mornings and evenings as what he was employed as for that time, a lobbyist, a man of influence and persuasion, someone who could align power and opportunity in ways that brought outcomes to realization that were seen as furthering to the still untouchable men and, we have to begin to recognize this, spirits for whom he labored.
The tacit delusion is Libby has nothing to do with Israel, with Perle and Feith and Abrams and Wolfowitz and Iraq and now Iran, but that's all it is, delusion.
The energy generated by the crepuscular fitting together of all these disparate bits of work burns toward impeachment - it's a natural desire, to punish these men who've seemingly ridden what could have been down into a choiceless morass of bad inevitabilities - but we need to look past that, quickly, toward whatever could put an incompetent fool like Bush at the head of the government of what was at the time the most powerful nation in the world, and Cheney with him and all these little bit players alongside.
It either is a concerted move by something big enough to do that, or it's just cumulative degradation, moral entropy, the piled-up shit of a Darwinian clot of rampant assholes gathered in one place and festering, breeding its bugs and maggotty larvae.
Bush got there, and Cheney and Libby and all them got there by people taking the simpler easier way through, that it's an accident, bad luck, just inertia and momentum and organized greed. That's the first way it comes together as plot and narrative, without the story's comforting sense of some end in mind. Flailing creeps of great complexity striking the vulnerable still-not-quite thing we promised to become, this big experiment, democracy, America.
Or you could look toward something with intent, that meant this, that tells Bush what to do if not what to say, and has Cheney's balls in an invisible vise from which he can't get free, and has Libby's soul in its wallet, and in its arrogance and vicious egotism will stay its course through increasing proof it's doomed us all.
It needs our ignorance and our selfishness to do this, and those are the things we have, by denying them refuting them refusing to obey them, those are the things we have, all we have, to stop it.

real privacy is hard to find:

“The Brits have got something smart going in England, and it was part of why I believe they were able to so quickly apprehend suspects in the terrorist acts over the weekend, and that is they have cameras all over London and other of their major cities,” Lieberman said.
“I think it’s just common sense to do that here much more widely,” he added. “And of course, we can do it without compromising anybody’s real privacy.”

Lieberman
The Hill 01.Jul.07

these people are dangerous:

Defying anti-gay rioting, threats of bloodshed, opposition from Israel's prime minister and Jerusalem's mayor, a vote by Israel's parliament, and rabbinical curses, some 2,000 courageous people staged a dignified Gay Pride march in central Jerusalem last Thursday, June 21.
At least 130 anti-gay protesters had been arrested in the week leading up to the Pride demonstration, as homophobic rioting by the ultra-Orthodox engulfed religious neighborhoods of Israel's capital and the nearby ultra-Orthodox suburb of Bnei Brak, according to a police spokesman. The rioters set vehicles and trashcans ablaze, blocked traffic, and threw stones at police, 24 of whom were reported wounded.
Another 19 ultra-Orthodox protesters were arrested at the Pride march last Thursday, including one man who tried to bomb the parade route.

Direland 28.Jun.07

Gay Bombs at xymphora