a most eager disciple in the peevish dullard:

Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed that the Saudi Shura Council -- the elite group that implements the decisions of the autocratic inner circle -- is preparing "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors," one of the kingdom's leading newspapers, Okaz, reports.

Empire Burlesque 1.0 24.Mar.08

rigged in their favor from the get:

Michael Springmann, head US consular official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, later claims that during this period he is “repeatedly ordered… to issue [more than 100] visas to unqualified applicants.” He turns them down, but is repeatedly overruled by superiors.
[...]
He later learns that recruits from many countries fighting for bin Laden against Russia in Afghanistan were funneled through the Jeddah office to get visas to come to the US, where the recruits would travel to train for the Afghan war. According to Springmann, the Jeddah consulate was run by the CIA and staffed almost entirely by intelligence agents. This visa system may have continued at least through 9/11, and 11 of the 19 9/11 hijackers received their visas through Jeddah.

CRHC
-
via RW > VB

Nothing in the bylaws requires the so-called "Superdelegates" to declare a candidate preference ahead of the convention, and nothing prohibits them from changing their mind once they declare such a preference.

Superdelegates get to cast a vote for the nominee at the 2008 Convention, and are not obligated to vote for the candidate who won their state. For that purpose, we want to track which candidate the delegates have endorsed to get an idea of how they would vote at the convention.

superdelegates.org
-
Since this is what's going to elect the next President of the US, we should probably pay attention to how it works. So far it looks like the electoral college:

A result of the present functionality of the Electoral College is that the national popular vote bears no legal or factual significance. As the aggregate popular vote is irrelevant, both voters and candidates may base their campaign strategies around the existence of the Electoral College. Claims that the Electoral College suppresses the popular will are therefore legitimately open to debate.

wikipedia

Kadosha


From the Presidential Medal of Freedom site's
timeline of Cesar Chavez's life:

On January 25th, outside the Talisman Sugar Plant near Belle Glade, Florida, Nan Freeman was killed in the second week of a UFW picket. Despite repeated complaints to local police of harassment from truck drivers, Ms. Freeman, an 18-year-old college student, was knocked unconscious when a trailer load of cans knocked her against a guard railing. Click here to read Cesar Chavez's statement on Ms. Freeman's death.

The embedded link is empty. This link goes to a UCLA page with a bio of Freeman, and Chavez' statement.

a statement issued in Jerusalem:

Aside from the removal of dozens of roadblocks, Rice also
won Israeli approval to allow Palestinian police to take responsibility for security in the violence-wracked city of Jenin.
The Israelis also pledged to increase the number of travel and work permits given Palestinians and to support economic projects in Palestinian towns.
The Palestinians, meanwhile, are supposed to step up their fight on terrorism and show progress on a major reform of the government.

Prusher/CSMonitor 31.Mar.08
-
If you can't see the mind-control bend in the language of this story you probably shouldn't read the news, or vote.
To help you understand what that means, here are linked words taken directly from the story as written:

Israel had agreed
hindering Palestinian
Palestinians committed
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak agreed
Israeli approval
ordinary Palestinian
to allow Palestinian
The Israelis also pledged
work permits given Palestinians
The Palestinians, meanwhile, are supposed to step up their fight

One or two other instances of the nouns are used essentially neutrally, but the subliminal messages are right there throughout the story, consistent and firm. As they have been in stories about Palestine for years now.
The dynamic of power is right there. The bullshit is right there. The moral wrong is right there. But they didn't train you in school to see things like that. In fact, most of your life you've been trained not to see things like that, even when they're right in front of you.

$7,000:

...a Marine sniper who saw action in Fallujah in 2004, returned to Iraq in July 2006 after growing bored with his civilian life selling swimming pools to California suburbanites.
He planned to re-enlist, but he got a more lucrative offer: $7,000 a month to haul supplies in convoys for Crescent Security Group. He figured he’d have an adventure, help the Iraqi people and build a nest egg to buy a house and marry his fiancée

Baker/Columbian
-

He joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 2001, served two combat tours in Iraq as a scout and a sniper without injury, and fought in the 2004 assault on Fallujah.
Discharged from the Marine Corps in 2005 with the rank of corporal, the chiseled-jaw Munns returned home to Shasta County

-
Enlisted Basic Pay Rates
January 1, 2008 Monthly Military Pay for Enlisted
4 Years of Service
E-7/corporal
$2047.80

“Hooray for our side.”


it starts when you're always afraid:

A lot of this stuff is stupid as hell and totally paranoid — the much-regarded theory that white scientists cooked up AIDS in order to keep Africa poor (as if it needed help) rivals only the 9/11 Truth movement for sheer stone-headed dumbness

Taibbi/rollingstone
-
what it is ain't exactly clear:

Louis Farrakhan, the spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam, blames Jewish doctors for injecting Black babies with AIDS. He preaches that rich Jews are behind the genocide program, just as they were heavily involved in the profitable Dutch-based slave trade.

Cantwell
-
step out of line the Man comes:

"I'm convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease. They got one thing wrong, they never realized it couldn't just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out. So, now it's a national priority. Exactly like drugs became when they escaped the urban centers into white suburbia."

Spike Lee/Sheppard/rollingstone/AmericanThinker
-
What a field day for the heat:

The most common argument against AIDS as genocide, is that Americans would never intentionally murder each other with biological warfare. Unfortunately, modern world history provides numerous examples of people killing each other within the confines of a nation. Various religious groups in Yugoslavia now seek to exterminate each other in their quest for power. The entire Muslim population of Bosnia-Herzegovina is now threatened with extermination by the Christian population. The media has a new term for the killings: "Ethnic Cleansing."
In Iraq, in the Soviet Union, in African nations, and elsewhere on the planet, people continue to murder each other for God knows what reason. Loving is hard; murder is easy.
Why would anyone want to eliminate millions of people on this planet? The answer is overpopulation. There are simply too many people all competing for resources that are limited. For decades, some world planners have insisted that measures be taken to reduce the world's population. Unfortunately, mandatory birth control programs have proven ineffective.

Cantwell2
-
there's a man with a gun over there:

On June 9, 1969 (the same month as the Stonewall Uprising launched the Gay Rights Movement) Pentagon spokesman Dr. Donald MacArthur testified before Congress:

"Within the next five to ten years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organism. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease. A research program to explore the feasibility of this could be completed in approximately five years at a total cost of $10 million."

(HB 15090, pg 129)

Sterling/Rense
-
Into your life it will creep:

Awareness of the real and horrendous human toll must serve as a rallying cry to promote the urgently needed measures that can stem the current march of death. WHO's official estimates of the world wide toll reached by the beginning of 1995 was 18.5 million HIV infections, 6 million cumulative cases of AIDS, 4.5 million AIDS deaths. About 2/3 of these HIV infections and 3/4 of those AIDS cases occurred in Africa. 24 The Global AIDS Policy Coalition offers figures that are somewhat higher, and probably more accurate. They estimate that 1.3 million Africans died of AIDS in 1995 alone, bringing the cumulative death toll there to 7.6 million.
The lies about a WHO conspiracy serve as a diversion from attacking the real causes of this tragedy: the way imperialism and neo-colonialism have drained and crippled Africa. As Dr. Pierce M'pele, director of Congo's Anti-AIDS Program, puts it: "It is undeniable that AIDS is a disease that comes with poverty."
Here are some of the ways the exploitation of Africa and the resulting poverty have blown the dangerous spark of HIV into a raging AIDS forest fire:

1. 300,000 Africans are becoming infected with HIV each year from blood transfusions alone 27 because those plundered nations don't have the money to screen their blood supply.
2. HIV is also being spread because many health clinics can not afford disposable needles and have to reuse old ones. For example, a mission hospital in rural Zaire had just 5 syringes to use for its 300 to 600 daily patients. 28
3. One of the most powerful factors in the sexual transmission of HIV is untreated sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). A recent pilot project in rural Tanzania showed that proper treatment for STDs can reduce HIV transmission by 42 percent. 29 The high rate of untreated STDs in Africa is a direct result of the lack of the most basic public health resources.

At the same time, the prevailing poverty means that many Africans with AIDS don't have even the most basic medication -- such as an aspirin to relieve pain or a lotion for itches that can have them scratching until bloody.

gilbert
-
Everybody look what's going down:

Assessing these (and other) conspiracy theories with a "hermeneutic of generosity," Farmer finds that they are based on a great deal more truth than many official accounts from the early days of the epidemic. Epidemiological studies reveal that the virus did indeed enter Haiti via Americans - gay tourists who had sex with young male sex workers, forced to perform this work due to abject poverty. The high rates of poverty, malnutrition, and poor medical infrastructure allowed the HIV virus to spread easily within the Haitian population. By engaging in a maccro-level analysis and examining the history and political economy of Haiti, Farmer describes the important role the slave trade, Western (neo)colonial powers, and the United States in particular, played in the current poverty of Haitians. In the words of Farmer, "AIDS, although a new disease, is deeply embedded in social and economic structures long in place... violence, poverty, and inequality are the fault lines along which HIV spreads."

wikipedia
-
Okay, now go read The Constant Gardener by John le Carré. Or if you don't read books, get the movie. Then go back through the material with that in mind.

White nose syndrome

I just finished a marathon catch-up on "The Wire", watching the first four seasons on DVD in the space of less than a month. Over and above the most brilliant writing and acting I've ever seen on a TV show, the series is centered in a vision that's driven by a fully engaged compassion for everyone it touches. It's subtle and heroic and impeccably cool, warmly funny, common in the best sense, and the production values are magnificent, but it's that compassionate engagement that marks it as superior art.
David Simon, whose baby it is, is not only Jewish, he's the son of a B'nai Brith official - he's way Jewish, at least in his upbringing and background. But David Simon didn't fool the American public into backing the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He didn't scam the financial system for his own benefit at the expense of less clever folks, he got out there in front of God and everybody and said "Hey, look at this, what the fuck is this shit?"
This is redemptive and healing television, what it should have been all along and has been only far too rarely.
So there's that.
This post from January 2004 is about a friend of mine, mostly a better friend to me than I ever was to him, someone who was brave and generous, crazy smart, and actively rejecting of bullshit and selfish scammers. He was a man with a big heart. Also a Jew. He died trying to save someone's life, in a way that's inarguably, heroically selfless. Read the link.
So there's that, as well.
I've been smacked in the face numerous times, shunned, insulted, surveilled upon - though admittedly not just for having these ideas - subtly intimidated in creepy ways, for saying what I genuinely thought was really happening, what was being lied about and hidden, things that mattered, or seemed to, greatly. Ridiculed on such fortresses of liberal thought as Making Light and Crooked Timber and elsewhere online, for speaking to what I saw between the simplistic lines of received wisdom.
There's a bunch of things I haven't said, here or anywhere, that are weirder, darker, and worse for the digestion even than the Iraq war being a Jewish/Israeli set-up from out the gate, aided and abetted by Jewish-run media; things that had I said them in those erstwhile open forums would have had me banned, or tarred and feathered if that were an available option. For instance:
It's pretty clear that the wholesale international drug trade is run by a consortium of hard-to-pinpoint men who share Jewish ancestry, an American/Russian/Israeli shadow cabal with tentacles everywhere, that that overlaps intimately with the international arms trade, that pretty much the most damaging organizations functioning right now are headed by men who are Jews.
Haiti figures in that, Ghana, Columbia, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Mexico. A lot of poor folks with dark brown skin have been suffering and dying for a long time because of how these men do business.
The material and political power that the majority of fundamentalist Christians have delivered to the Zionist enterprise is no accident, it looks like an intentional result of manipulation that has its roots deep in the past. One of the first scorns anti-anti-Semitic defenders put forward is the so-called canard that "the Jews killed Jesus". Gibsonian delusional belligerence.
Yet like the drug trade, like the Iraq invasion, this is both true and not true at the same time. From what I can get out of two millenia's worth of historic obscurity and obfuscation Jesus showed up, rocked the boat with a message of mercy and compassion, and through the strength of his love for everyone including especially those at the bottom end of society, turned everything upside down. And was arrested and executed for exactly that reason. "The Jews" didn't do that, the Jewish power elite of that time did.
David Simon didn't do it, my friend Scott didn't do it, and Bob Dylan didn't do it either, as nor did Joseph Brodsky or Allen Ginsberg. Anything that suggests complicity there is so inaccurate as to be actively complicit itself. A hard thing to get to the bottom of, and a most effective strategy because of that.
Hannah Mermelstein makes the distinction between Jew, Israeli, and Zionist very clear. A religion, a nationality, an ideology. Those are the only functional terms available to describe what's there within the murk and haze, but they don't pin the villainy accurately enough. And using them inaccurately endangers innocent people, some of whom are on the front lines of resistance, already at risk.
Always it's easier just to let it be, leave it alone, walk away in disgust and helplessness. But once you get out here that's not really an option anymore. And it matters. So there's this.

the ‘most racist article’ in the mainstream media published in the last year

a great big exclamation point:

The Pentagon entrusted a 22-year old previously arrested for domestic violence and having a forged driving licence to be the main supplier of ammunition to Afghan forces at the height of the battle against a resurgent Taliban, it was reported today.

Goldenberg/GuardianUK
-

Courtesy of The New York Times, I'm proud to present to you a brand new member of the Bush Administration War Profiteer Hall of Shame: 22 year-old Efraim Diveroli, whose company AEY has been awarded approximately $300 million in contracts by the Pentagon.

Kiel/TPM
-

At the end, Mr. Diveroli appeared to lament his business with Albania. “It went up higher to the prime minister and his son,” he said. “I can’t fight this mafia. It got too big. The animals just got too out of control.”

C. J. Chivers/NYTimes/WorcesterTelegram&Gazette
-

Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the U.S. military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.
[...]
Diveroli, in a brief telephone interview late last year, denied any wrongdoing. “I know that my company does everything 100 percent on the up and up, and that’s all I’m concerned about,” he said.
[...]
“A lot of us are asking the question,” said a senior State Department official. “How did this guy get all this business?”

Chivers/NYTimes/WorcesterTelegram&Gazette
-
From the comment thread on the TPM article:

BlueCalif: The Miami branch consists of the mom, Ateret Botach (or Boteach) Diveroli, dad Michael, and son Efraim (the other kids seem to be pretty involved in moral activities, such as blogging on the evils of MySpace etc.). They are def linked to the Hebrew community (RASG hebrew Academy, Miami) and lo, to a Michael Jackson "money for the childern" scam (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,49808,00.html). Worldwide Tactical www.wwtactical.com) is the current LLC getting FEMA and Homeland Security contracts from Nebraska to Florida. AEY has advertised as: "Established in 1999, AEY Inc. has made a name for itself in the scrap metal industry as a reliable, efficient, competitive and honest partner" (http://www.recycle.net/trade/aa1029790.html).
- - - -
12quarts: ?? Why is it so important to so many commenters that the family involved is Jewish? Just askin'...
- - - -
iaf: Yeah right, anti-Semitic sentiments are always accidental.
It's well documented that most anti-Semites became anti-Semitic after being struck by a lightning, hit by a bus or exposed to radiation. It also explains how come entire populations around the world who have never met a single Jew in their lives (e.g. most of the Arab world, many Eastern Europeans or large sections of Malaysia and Indonesia) harbor strong anti-Jewish (yes, anti-Jewish, not anti-Israeli) feelings.
Same goes for large segments of Central and South-American populations, where Catholic schools still teach that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. All one gigantic accident.

-
Probably a lot of the concern about Diveroli's ethnicity is that it ties into what appears to be a massive scam on the American people.
Once you start to consider whether or not the accusations of "war by proxy" in Iraq, the idea of the invasion and occupation being done to benefit Israel, which is self-identified as a "Jewish state", hold any water, it's not possible to get back to a world where anti-Semitism is the only cause of these accusations.
It appears more and more that Jewish morality is ethnocentric, not universal. Things are right or wrong depending on whether they're "good for the Jews" or not. So that tricking the US to send its soldiers into the septic morass of occupied Iraq is not an immoral thing, it is a good thing. This is feral, if it's human at all.
I didn't post links to Hannah Mermelstein's eloquent essay and journal, or Anna Baltzer's eloquent and infuriating photos to curry favor with anybody, I did it because the sentiments that drive their work are noble and humane. And since both these women are Jews, clearly my anti-Semitism is of a complex and intricate kind.
I despise Diveroli and everything and everyone he stands for, and what he stands for is a long deep thread in Jewish presence in this world, not unique to Jews in any sense, but not alien either. This can't be denied or argued away.
It would be so much easier and more gratifying to have done with the whole question - it's the goddamned Jews, that's all - and I think now a lot of Americans especially, but also many Europeans and certainly the majority of Muslims are doing just that, because it's easier. But then that's what real work is all about, doing the hard thing because it has to be done, whether you want to do it or not.
It's past time for all these simpering accusations of anti-Semitism to stop, not least because of their falsity and arrogance, the blindness and neurotic panic that fuels them, but especially because of the cover they provide for the darkest and most active villains in the contemporary world.
It's constantly pointed out how long the history of anti-Semitism is and how much suffering Jews as a people, men women and children, have endured because of it, but it may be time to consider how often these same strategies have been employed, and reacted to, genuinely but too broadly.
Perform nefarious acts and scuttle around behind a crowd of the innocent, so that any attack on you becomes an attack on them. The use of human shields as a survival strategy, so solidly in place it's practically genetic.
Hiding behind the innocent is cowardly, and it places your enemy in conflict with his own moral strength, if he has any. Cowardice works, in the short term.
There's a long line of heroes who refused the efficacy of collateral damage, whose integrity forbade making the innocent pay for the crimes of those hidden among them. In a world where all that matters is what works this is foolish indeed, and sentimental - not manly, not bold.
The issue at heart is whether there's anything higher than utility in our lives. I believe there is, and I believe these despicable acts and craven attitudes don't work in the long run, and I believe that's what really matters. Call it a higher utility, or a nobler pragmatism.

a star of david with an exclamation point in the middle

Gas the Arabs!

Anna in the Middle East

Hannah in Palestine

Flowers Against the Occupation

The land there is not naturally rocky; the stones that we walk on are a graveyard of destroyed houses.
-
Birthright Unplugged

A look at Iraqi cleric and his Mahdi Army

courtesy of USAToday

A look at Iraqi cleric and his Mahdi Army

in these very pages:

renegade
renegade
firebrand
wanted
resistance
predicts
demonic
Al-Sadr interview w/ Renato Caprile

March 20, 2008:

On this date the US officially declared war on Iran.

turned a blind eye to merciless

The decision is a major defeat for the world's largest oil company, ExxonMobil

I promise you all, I ensure to you all

We have expressed our great concern


these people were armed and very intimidating:

Thousands of soldiers were seen in Lhasa on Thursday amid reports of a huge military build-up, as the Dalai Lama expressed fears China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters had caused many casualties.
Long military convoys were on the move in Tibet while troops also poured into nearby provinces, after a week of violent unrest against China's rule of the Himalayan region, witnesses, activist groups and media reports said.
"We saw a big convoy of military vehicles with troops in the back," German journalist Georg Blume said from the Tibetan capital Lhasa early Thursday.
"One convoy was about two kilometres (1.2 miles) long and contained about 200 trucks. Each had 30 soldiers on board so that's about 6,000 military personnel in one convoy."
[...]
China said rioters killed 13 innocent civilians in Lhasa while denying that it used deadly force to end the protests. Exiled Tibetan leaders have said about 100 people were believed to have been killed in the Chinese crackdown.

Harmsen/AFP/Yahoo
-

Q. How easy was it for you to see what you wanted to see?
A.[...] as the protests went on I think they also probably felt that having me there would help to get across the scale of the ethnically-targeted violence that the Chinese themselves have also been trying to highlight.
Q. What you say you saw corroborates official version. What did you see?
A. What I saw was calculated targeted violence against an ethnic group, or I should say two ethnic groups, primarily ethnic Han Chinese living in Lhasa, but also members of the Muslim Hui minority in Lhasa. And the Huis in Lhasa control much of the meat industry in the city. Those two groups were singled out by ethnic Tibetans. They marked those businesses that they knew to be Tibetan owned with white traditional scarves.
[...]
It was an extraordinary outpouring of ethnic violence of a most unpleasant nature to watch, which surprised some Tibetans watching it. So they themselves were taken aback at the extent of what they saw. And it was not just targeted against property either. Of course many ethnic Han Chinese and Huis fled as soon as this broke out. But those who were caught in the early stages of it were themselves targeted. Stones thrown at them. At one point, I saw them throwing stones at a boy of maybe around 10 years old perhaps cycling along the street. I in fact walked out in front of them and said stop.

I saw them carrying traditional Tibetan swords, I didn't actually see them getting them out and intimidating people with them. But clearly the purpose of carrying them was to scare people. And speaking later to ethnic Han Chinese, that was one point that they frequently drew attention to. That these people were armed and very intimidating.

Economist's James Miles iv CNN 20.Mar.08

A tale of two pastors:
Compare and contrast Obama's Jeremiah Wright with/to McCain's John Hagee
Lenin's Tomb

Sir:

Your account of our incarnation in Chicago was cheap kicks for you who have sold your pens for Money and have no Fate left but idiot mockery of the Muse that must work in poverty in an America already doomed by materialism.

You suppressed knowledge that the Chicago Review's winter issue was censored by the University of Chicago; that the editors had resigned to publish the material under the name Big Table; that we offered our bodies and Poetry to raise money to help publish the magazine, and left Chicago in the penury in which we had come.

You quoted what was charming in our speech out of context; you ignored the main event, the reading at the Sherman Hotel which was a religious intellectual exposition of poetry's Truth; you perverted the beauty of Orlovsky's tears; you spat on the appearance of the Soul of Poetry in America at a time when America needs that soul most; you brainwashed your millions of readers.

You are an instrument of the Devil and crucify America with your lies; you are the war-creating Whore of Babylon and would be damned were you not mercifully destined to be swallowed by Oblivion with all created things.

ALLEN GINSBERG

PETER ORLOVSKY

GREGORY CORSO in respect to Shelley
New York City

letter to the editor
Time Magazine, Monday, Mar. 09, 1959
-

up for grabs

The CIA And The Media
Carl Bernstein
This is very important, and it's masterfully written.
This paragraph:

For many years, Luce's personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time Inc., vice‑president who was publisher of Life magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964.While a Time executive, Jackson coauthored a CIA‑sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s. Jackson, whose Time‑Life service was interrupted by a one‑year White House tour as an assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower, approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time‑Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce's wife, Clare Boothe. Other arrangements for Time cover, according to CIA officials including those who dealt with Luce), were made with the knowledge of Hedley Donovan, now editor‑in‑chief of Time Inc. Donovan, who took over editorial direction of all Time Inc. publications in 1959, denied in a telephone interview that he knew of any such arrangements. "I was never approached and I'd be amazed if Luce approved such arrangements," Donovan said. "Luce had a very scrupulous regard for the difference between journalism and government."

Also, either Bernstein's having code trouble on his site, or he's pioneering the use of the dropped primary parenthesis. It's consistent throughout the piece, and once you get used to it is way less disruptive to the narrative flow.

rules of engagement:

One time they said that—to fire on all taxicabs, because the enemy was using them for transportation. And in Iraq, any car can be a taxicab. You just paint it white and orange, and there you have it. And one of the snipers across the radio replied back, “Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?” The lieutenant colonel replied back, like, “You heard me, trooper. Fire on all taxicabs.” And once that conversation ended, the town pretty much lit up; all the units that were in there fired on numerous cars—again, you know, people.
-
I remember one woman was walking by, and she was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading towards us. So we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher. And when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was only full of groceries. And, I mean, she had been trying to bring us food, and we blew her to pieces for it.
-
By the time we got to Baghdad, however, I was explicitly told by my chain of command that I could shoot anyone who came closer to me than I felt comfortable with if that person did not immediately move when I ordered them to do so, keeping in mind I don’t speak Arabic.

Winter Soldier : Iraq & Afganistan at Democracy Now!
-
Tips for getting around Baghdad posted by real travelers and Baghdad locals.

Jeff Cohen eloquently describes the moment he became a media critic.

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain's most senior police forensics expert.

innuendos and newspaper articles that suggest:

The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel.

article in the Nation 17.Mar.08
quote from Ann Lewis, Senior Advisor for Hillary Clinton for President, addressing the United Jewish Communities
-
via Mondoweiss

Switzerland is an independent country
-
the women befriended the two men, took out insurance policies on their lives, then drugged them and ran them over
-
We may all be eaten by bears
-
Geert Wilders geeft geen commentaar op de advertentie
also here
-
the story of a reluctant jailer
-
the prison that kept our friends from coming here tonight
-
True socialist revolutions necessarily occupy themselves with the most vulnerable parts of society

the biggest fishing closure in West Coast history

Winter Soldier Testimony : Hart Viges

Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan
video coverage at RealNews

Peter Hessler in depth Tibet Through Chinese Eyes at the Nation

...an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight
-
...this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense
-

But our analysis nevertheless showed clear trends in the focus and conclusions the researchers were making. Between 1965 and 1979 we found (see table 1 for details):

• 7 articles predicting cooling
• 44 predicting warming
• 20 that were neutral

In other words, during the 1970s, when some would have you believe scientists were predicting a coming ice age

they were doing no such thing.

atheism, perhaps our only chance for peace

...assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow...

Zizek/NYTimes
-
As well do statements like that. Harshly condemnatory blanket generalizations with glaring elisions. Ring increasingly hollow.

1.5688

Maybe tomorrow

this case would have never seen the light of day:

JUHU THUKRAL:Sometimes the customer is a police officer himself. And they are terrified of going forward. When we are able to go forward, we often find that the police don’t do anything. So the reason that we oppose these kinds of enhancing penalties against customers is that in the long run it just drives people further underground. And there have been studies that have shown that this doesn’t work very well.

AMY GOODMAN: Though you’re in the minority of the women’s rights groups on that, because they were pushing for—

JUHU THUKRAL: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —instead of the woman being the one who’s constantly rounded up, picked up, arrested and thrown out, the sex worker, that the johns would be focused on, the people like, well, presumably Eliot Spitzer.

JUHU THUKRAL: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And he may now be subject to his own law that he pushed through.

JUHU THUKRAL: There were a number of women’s rights groups who agreed with Eliot Spitzer, obviously, but there were also a lot of groups that didn’t agree with that position, because, again, you know, it sounds like it’s a good answer—let’s go ahead and arrest everybody, and that’s going to end prostitution—but the truth is, people go into prostitution most often because they’re really desperate for money or they are looking around, they’re not able to make enough money. A lot of our clients have jobs in the mainstream and then supplement it with sex work, because they don’t have enough to live on.

The inner circle of the people around Rudy Giuliani hate Eliot Spitzer, and Michael Mukasey is part of that inner circle.
-
DNow! 12.Mar.08

5:

A Pew Research Center report says a sharp fall in US media coverage of the Iraq war has left Americans less interested in and knowledgeable about the conflict, Agence France Presse reports. Only 3 percent of news stories in February were devoted to the war, compared to 15 percent last July. Along with waning interest in Iraq, there has been a significant increase in Americans who say military progress is being made.

in a subtle, discreet way :

The New York Public Library’s venerable lion-guarded building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street is to be renamed for the Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman

NYTimes 11.Mar.08

anyminutenow:

Usenet is replaced by Yahoo! Groups, email is replaced by Facebook, Napster is replaced by iTunes. IRC by Skype, all funded by great accumulations of wealth and firmly in the hands of the ruling class.
Day by day, communications systems are becoming more and more centralized and exclusively mediated. The role of peer to peer technology, the core breakthrough of the Internet, is more and more a contraband technology, a technology for criminals, pirates, rebels, maybe even "terrorists."

Dmytri Kleiner

to meet the demand:

roughly 3,500 tigers
some 40,000 tigers

There are things we don't think about:

just as Al McCoy and myself
both promptly forgot the terrorized vet
who broke his promise to talk about drugs
after they firebombed his Jag
[...]
one year before Allan dropped dead
while going through U.S. Customs
whose film on Pan Am 103 and Jafar
could be shown in Britain but not this country

though he has since been posthumously vindicated
by a police chief's signed statement
that key evidence in the Lockerbie trial
was planted by the CIA

A BALLAD OF DRUGS AND 9/11
Peter Dale Scott
via

difficult for me to effectively serve:

The top U.S. commander in the Middle East is the subject of a glowing magazine article describing him as the only person who might stop the Bush administration from going to war against Iran.

Washington Post 11.Mar.08
-

Barnett recalls that when Fallon was in Cairo in November, the lead story in that day's edition of the English-language daily Egyptian Gazette carried the headline "US rules out strike against Iran" over a picture of Fallon meeting with President Hosni Mubarak.
That story, published on November 19 and not picked up by any US news media, reported that Fallon had "ruled out a possible strike against Iran and said Washington was mulling non-military options instead".

Gareth Porter/Asia Times 11.Mar.08
-

"Recent press reports suggesting a disconnect between my views and the president's policy objectives have become a distraction at a critical time and hamper efforts in the Centcom region," Fallon, who is traveling in Iraq, said in a statement issued by his U.S. headquarters in Tampa, Fla.
"And although I don't believe there have ever been any differences about the objectives of our policy in the Central Command area of responsibility, the simple perception that there is makes it difficult for me to effectively serve America's interests there," he said.

AP/Yahoo 11.Mar.08
-

Admiral Fallon has served this country with honor, determination, and commitment. I thank his wife, Mary, who knows that military service involves the whole family, and I wish them all the best as they begin the next chapter in their lives.

GeorgeWBushPresidentUSA 11.Mar.08

before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters

creating:

Hollywood star Goldie Hawn's appearance at a Jewish National Fund fundraising dinner in Glasgow drew about 150 angry Palestinian protesters, who called the organization 'racist.' The Jewish National Fund has been behind planting trees and creating forests since Israel's birth as a state.

Israel News 11.Mar.08
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Plantin trees on ya granma's head, yo.

Ask me why I'm wearing a mask
Ask me who I am

thousands of people worldwide will stage a protest on March 15th against the Church of Scientology's corruption, and abuse of its members and critics

the empire's new clothes:

A British company has developed a camera that can detect weapons, drugs or explosives hidden under people’s clothes from up to 25 meters away in what could be a breakthrough for the security industry.

The T5000 camera, created by a company called ThruVision, uses what it calls “passive imaging technology” to identify objects by the natural electromagnetic rays — known as Terahertz or T-rays — that they emit.

Reuters/cryptogon 10.Mar.08
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A breakthrough for the security industry, and anyone that employs it.

Nader/Gonzales website

another triumph for Hugo

If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science, it seems most probably that they will serve the purposes of whatever individual or group has the power.

Carl Rogers, quoted in the letter from Jeffrey Kaye to the APA, linked below.
-
Quote also utilized by John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate

The Elders:

With a deep concern about the long-standing conflict in the Middle East and an equally strong wish for peace, The Elders are sending a three-person team on a mission to the region. Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States who negotiated the Camp David Agreement, and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, will visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia from April 13-21 to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the interlocking Middle Eastern conflicts.

The Elders will listen to all parties in the countries.

via

Garment Worker update at ShahidulNews

Jeffrey Kaye

Unlike some others who have left APA [American Psychological Association], my resignation is not based solely on the stance APA has taken regarding the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations. Rather, I view APA's shifting position on interrogations to spring from a decades-long commitment to serve uncritically the national security apparatus of the United States. Recent publications and both public and closed professional events sponsored by APA have made it clear that this organization is dedicated to serving the national security interests of the American government and military, to the extent of ignoring basic human rights practice and law. The influence of the Pentagon and the CIA in APA activities is overt and pervasive, if often hidden.

AlterNet 06.Mar.08

a big pink sign:

Like a herd of antelope, jockeying and shoving for position, 150 young women raced down Amsterdam's most famed fashion street in stiletto heels Thursday, racing for a $15,000 prize.

SanLuisObispo.com 07.Mar.08
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bigger pink

Jim Lobe:

The Bush Doctrine in Embryo

Janes:

As global demand for live transplants keeps growing, the shadowy organ trading business is rapidly expanding, dominated by unscrupulous brokers and facilitated by inadequate national legislations, widespread corrupt practices and a general lack of public awareness on the extent of the trade.
[...]
China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Brazil, the Philippines, Moldova, and Romania are among the world's leading providers of trafficked organs. If China is known for harvesting and selling organs from executed prisoners, the other countries have been dealing essentially with living donors, becoming stakeholders in the fast-growing human trafficking web.
Trafficked organs are either sold domestically, or exported to be transplanted into patients from the US, Europe, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and especially Israel.
-
A US Navy (USN) expeditionary strike group has been deployed to the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of increasing tensions between Lebanon and Syria.

Butch Otter?

Ironically, the proposed changes come at a time when an increasing number of governments are gradually coming round to the idea of following the Dutch example, precisely because it has been such a success.

Protecting our assets in space

Not that China is actually mentioned in the public, unclassified budget documents:

"The Fiscal Year 2009 defense budget request sustains the president's commitment to growing US ground forces that are needed to prevail in the current conflicts in Iran and Afghanistan," a Pentagon press release notes. Additional funds are allocated for "operations, readiness and support" - troop training, replacement parts and equipment, combat supplies, and so on.

But a close examination of the FY 2009 request indicates that the principal sources of future budget growth are not the "war on terror" or other such low-intensity contingencies but rather preparation for all-out combat with a future superpower. Probe a little deeper into Pentagon thinking, and only one potential superpower emerges to justify all this vast spending: the People's Republic of China.

Asia Times 08.Mar.08

We are the taint

...she did it because she was a good little mammy who knew her job was to serve white folks, this time cleaning their moral toilets instead of their porcelain ones...

“Whoever the coward was that committed this disgraceful act on our city will be found and prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” Bloomberg said.

CNN via
-
Said Mr. Bloomberg from behind the flexing walls of the most sophisticated and efficient security systems available to millionaires and their immediate families at this time.
In order for the cycle-bomber to avoid Bloomberg's stern accusation of cowardice he would have had to announce his presence and intent in the light of day.
Although, considering the penalties involved and the readiness of the US police-state apparatus to respond to such imminent threats as toothpaste and eye-drops, it does seem at least kind of brave, to go up against all that. On a bicycle.
And even slightly moral to do that, considering the Army has fucked up so many thousands of kids' lives - also killed a bunch, and maimed the shit out of a bunch more, or rather being in the Army and being sent to Iraq has. And a lot of the returned vets, even the ones with intact bodies, have deep soul trouble, because joining the Army and being sent to Iraq has fucked them up. Or, rather, being in the Army and being sent to Iraq and realizing you've been played has.
It would help a little right now for all of us to remember that these kids are not the equivalent of WWII vets, or even Viet Nam vets, though the pattern holds. The steady filtering down to the most expendable. The transition from the back rooms and register lanes of the big box stores to the mess hall table and the field shower and the war. From Wii and PS3 to guns and IED's. From a small circle of friends who might buy you a beer to a small circle of friends that might save your life. And outside that small circle people that hate and fear you, as opposed to people that merely don't respect you and mostly don't even recognize you as a human being.
The transition from dreams of a better car and a better job to dreams of just staying alive.
The gamble was always whether the scam would hold long enough that when the little expendables figured out enough of the details it wouldn't matter, because by then the big dominos would be toppling right down the line.
A lot of the kids who came back have made it as far as "war for Israel". Not that the cycle-bomber was necessarily one of them, unredressed grievances of all kinds among Iraq war vets are probably running about one-for-one. But the shift has happened. When I first started speaking to that, back in 2003, I pretty consistently got accused of anti-Semitism and thrown off moderated comment threads. I felt like Kenneth Patchens' "Little Man With Wooden Hair". It's not such a controversial idea now.
So how's this? It isn't measurable even in decades, what's been done here, how deep and thick the intrigue goes. Not even in centuries. And it spreads out to the edges of what all this is. Where theoretical physics comes looping back in toward religion, where spirit and body take leave of the illusion of separation, where we really are.
20 or so Israelis have been killed by rocket fire since 2000.
7+ years, 20 bodies.
The Israelis have killed over 100 Palestinians in the last week, many of the dead were children. So, murder. So lies and theft and murder. In the name of what? Survival.
This is morality bent to serve, not served. An ethical landscape where honor and nobility are extinct, museum relics, fairy tales.

"They were Yankee bombs, guided by Yankee satellites," he outlined
-
...to become the Israel of these lands
-
a simple cup of nutritious porridge

part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs:

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war.

Fanonite 04.Mar.08

pretty much all the intelligence that has come to us
has proved to be:

The George W Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" - 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop - as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear program.
But those documents have also been regarded with great suspicion by US and foreign analysts. German officials identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization.
There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel's Mossad.

Despite the fact that it was listed as a terrorist organization, the MEK was a favorite of neo-conservatives in the Pentagon, who were proposing in 2003-2004 to use it as part of a policy to destabilize Iran.
The United States is known to have used intelligence from the MEK on Iranian military questions for years.
-
Porter /ATimes 04.Mar.08

a sensible professional humane response to:

Israeli deputy minister threatens Gaza with 'Shoah'

Helena Cobban 29.Feb.08
-
The trap is of course the admission that Shoah can be justified, is sometimes necessary, can be a legitimate response to provocation and abuse.

bulldozing Rachel Corrie