libros para granma

When informants are improperly used, the results can be devastating

unless history surprises us again, unless, somehow or other, we surprise ourselves

Some of us will fish:

So, is Gaza under occupation or not? What does the so-called withdrawal of the Israeli army really mean? To clarify this matter two boats are leaving Cyprus for Gaza on or about August 7. Forty members of the “Free Gaza Movement” are on their way now to meet in Cyprus and prepare the vessels. They are invited to Gaza by The Palestinian Medical Relief Society, The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, The Palestinian Ministry of Youth and Sport, the local popular committee to break the Gaza siege, and diverse individuals in Gaza. Legally, Israel has nothing to do with this enterprise, because the ships will not enter Israeli waters or ports. They will sail directly from international waters into Gazan waters.

Palestine Think tank

If the refs are crooked the owners are complicit.

The Afghan Victim Memorial Project

sportsmanlike conduct:

Donaghy didn't stop there: In June, he marred the NBA finals by making fresh accusations that the league routinely encouraged refs to ring up bogus fouls to manipulate results but discouraged them from calling technical fouls on star players to keep them in games and protect ticket sales and television ratings.
The allegations — contained in court papers arguing that Donaghy deserved leniency for voluntarily disclosing the alleged corruption — included one instance claiming referees rigged a 2002 playoff series to force it to a revenue-boosting seventh game.

Hays/AP/SFGate 21.Jul.08
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He marred the NBA finals. Notice how the Superbowl's always got that hook right up to the end. Never gets like 45 to 7 at the half. Because the teams are so well-matched.

Who owns the franchises in the NBA? What do they have in common with the owners of the NFL? How much money changes hands around these sporting contests?
Who gets most of it?

"Disgraced NBA ref"xxxx1508
"Donaghy accusations"xx 321

And it must remain undivided:

"Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people"
11.Mar.07

"Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel."
26.Apr.07

OBH
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With [Dennis]Ross at his side, Obama is signalling that we should forget the myth-making: an Obama presidency will be about active, engaged diplomacy, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Israel and Syria, and beyond.

Jonathan Freedland/GuardianUK 23.Jul.08
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Dennis Ross at wikipedia:

During his years of trying to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations he was criticized by people on both sides of the conflict. Palestinians made repeated references to the fact that he is Jewish, and some right-wing conservative Israelis branded him "self-hating" - each questioning his ability to be unbiased.
[...]
Currently, Ross is counselor and Ziegler distinguished fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the first chairman of a new Jerusalem based think tank, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, funded and founded by the Jewish Agency.
[...]
Ross is a Foreign Affairs Analyst for the Fox News Channel in addition to being a frequent commentator in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Ross's first column at The New Republic, "Statecraft", was published on April 9, 2007.

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Possible variants, extensions, and explications of Obama's statement(s):

"Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel as the source of their suffering."

"Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel as the source of their suffering in its role as righteous agent of the wrath of the Almighty."

"Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel as the source of their suffering in its role as righteous agent of the wrath of the Almighty, who only wants peace in the Middle East and prosperity for both sides, and is consequently somewhat blinded by overwhelming frustration at all the violence."

Or... evil is just a relative term, there is no God, and crawling opportunists have taken over every human institution that threatens to cut them out, consequently virtually all human institutions are now under the direct or indirect control of crawling opportunists, who are incapable of running them anywhere but straight into the ground.

Or...life is an illusion perpetuated by inanimate clouds of invisible gas and nanosized particulate matter, with no meaning, no significance, and no possibility of resolution but entropic decline toward absolute stillness.

Or...American politics is as irrecoverably corrupt as Batista's Cuba in the 50's, with no Che no Fidel and no Sierra Maestre.

Or...Obama's a virtual figure, an avatar fielded by the Disney Corporation, which has the best interests of future generations paramount, and is working to get through the selfish resistance and outmoded greediness of the contemporary world by subtlety and subterfuge.

Or..Obama's got baggage, jackets, dirt, and the same blackmailing extortionate thugs who turned Clinton have turned him and will play him all the way through, to the narrow limits of their competence and vision.

lachrymatory gas
you never know...

In 1937 Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians:

'I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place'.

Arundhati Roy/GuardianUK 30.Sep.02
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quote can be found at:
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC (Can)
Wikiquote
-

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.

Winston S. Churchill: departmental minute 12 May 1919 War Office
global research

The most powerful story of all:

Those who are most responsible for carbon pollution are - being insulated by their money - the least likely to suffer its effects.

Though the programme was 90 minutes of nonsense, I find this quite easy to believe. Faced with the overwhelming realities of climate change, people clutch at any reassurance. We want someone to tell us that everything will be alright, that we can carry on enjoying this marvellous feast of fossil fuels without adverse effects.

On almost every other weighty issue, the professional classes appear to be better informed than the rest of the population. On global warming the reverse seems to be true.

George Monbiot/GuardianUK 21.Jul.08

closer to the edge:

I’d say if you are dependent on either a U.N. relief truck or the local Safeway having full shelves you are dead.

We flush our shit into the river via sewage treatment plant - the 3rd world just bypasses the middleman. Either way, don’t eat the fish. Not much difference between an affluent suburbanite (or city dweller for that matter) and an inhabitant of a refugee camp in some stricken area when you see that both are dependent upon outside resources flowing in uninterrupted. Not much difference with ol’ comrade simba’s farm and a jungle village on the other hand. It all comes down to can you grow enough to fill your belly?

What the fuck is suburbia going to do when the tap water runs brown? Asphaltic runnoff from the roof as drinking water? What other option would be available? It’s hard to imagine dysentery taking out the former middle class neighborhood like some third world shithole but that’s how it’s going to be. Population centers without food and water all suffer the same fate.

The point of my post was people are playing their hand now. I often feel like it’s not really fair that I have a couple of aces in the hole and the rest of the table is staying on a pair of threes or folding altogether. Most folks are going to curl up in a fetal position and moan as soon as the power goes out. I’ll just go to bed when it’s dark.

comradesimba 28.Apr.08

LADS:

United States firm Raytheon is working toward the shootdown by laser of a mortar round in flight in the fourth quarter (Q4) of this year, company officials confirmed at Farnborough.

Jane's 21.Jul.08

Nelson Mandela’s real first name

we know that he may have:

The Venezuelan-owned Oil Company Citgo, together with the organization Citizen’s Energy, will provide about 460,000 energy efficient light bulbs to low-income households throughout the U.S
[...]
According to Alvarez [Venezuela’s Ambassador to the U.S],
“The energy problem is a spring, summer, fall, winter problem. We are a country with so much oil, yet we are interested in conservation. We must be. We are all in the same world. We are happy to be in a position to inspire other corporations to help with this pressing problem.”

venezuelanalysis 16.Jul.08
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"I would initiate discussions with our enemies in Cuba and Venezuela…I would cancel the travel restrictions for those who have family in Cuba…I want to join with countries like Brazil to look for cleaner forms of energy…I will approve the Free Trade Agreement with Peru, but I oppose that of Colombia until I have confidence that union leaders are not being killed there…this kind of paramilitary activity has to stop," said Barack Obama.

And Hugo Chávez? Is he a threat to the national security of the United States and the rest of the continent, I asked?

"Yes, I believe he’s a threat, but a manageable one," he answered. "We know for example, that he may have been involved in supporting the FARC, harming a neighbor."

Ramos/El Mercurio/Machetara 13.Jun.08
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A neighbor that we know may be killing its union leaders.

a gigantic cover:

The world trade in ivory, banned 19 years ago to save the African elephant from extinction, is about to take off again, with the emergence of China as a major ivory buyer.
Alarmed conservationists are warning of a new wave of elephant killing across both Africa and Asia if China is allowed to become a legal importer, as looks likely at a meeting in Geneva next week.
The unleashing of a massive Chinese demand for ivory, in the form of trinkets, name seals, expensive carvings and polished ivory tusks, is likely to give an enormous boost to the illegal trade, which is entirely poaching-based, conservationists say.
"This is going to mean a return to the bad old days where elephants are being shot into extinction," said Allan Thornton, of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), the group which provided much of the evidence on which the original ivory ban was based in 1989.

Mcarthy/IndependentUk/commondreams 12.Jul.08
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China seriously:

The Chinese government is seriously fighting the illegal ivory trade, the Foreign Ministry said here Thursday when asked to comment on an NGO report critical of China.
The report is "unfair" and twists facts, said spokesman Liu Jianchao.
The standing committee overseeing the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) decided at a meeting Tuesday in Geneva to give right to China to import African elephant ivory under strict conditions.
Members of the committee voted by a majority that China qualified for the import because it has dramatically improved its enforcement of ivory rules.
Liu said the Chinese government attaches great importance to the protection of wild animals including elephants and has promulgated a series of laws and regulations to severely crack down upon illegal activities of trafficking and sales of wild animals and related products.

Xinhua 17.Jul.08

gas, gas, gaz:

On July 13, Gazprom’s CEO, Alexey Miller, was in Tehran to finalize an agreement on a “full package of projects” with N.I.O.C. that will give the Russians access to Iran’s vast oil and gas reserves. If George W. Bush and the E.U. were worried about the Russians’ ability to control gas flows to the West, they should be scared out of their wits at the prospect of a Russian-Iranian energy alliance. That new alliance likely makes the probability of any type of military action against Iran by the U.S. or the Israelis more remote. Why? Well, one obvious reason is that the Israelis are heavily dependent on Russia for their oil imports.

Bryce/Counterpunch 18.Jul.08

Wildfire Today link below via twitter via Matrullo

no-doc, lo-doc, or Alternative A:

I spoke with Sheila Bair, who’s the head of the FDIC, last December. I asked her, “How many banks are going to fail?” She phumphered around and came up with the number seventy-six. Now we’re talking over 300 potentially. So this crisis is just beginning, and this is one of the problems here. We read the headlines as if everything has already happened, the worst has happened. It hasn’t yet. And that’s what we have to brace ourselves for.

Danny Schechter/DemNow! 17.Jul.08
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Okay, well then there now, yeah. How does all this economic nightmare info mix with the rising drums of bomb bomb bomb Iran?
Will people who've been hammered and pounded by imploding housing and exploding fuel be more, or less, upset by an unprovoked attack on Iran?
Will they be more, or less, skeptical about the official bullshit justifications - yellow cake, WMD, some kind of unprovoked and deadly incident - for it if or when it comes?
Same? I don't think so.

Busy wildfire season raises demand for private firefighters

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Naomi Klein on disaster capitalism and some previous references to private firefighting here, here.
One of these times there's gonna be some hapless family with their house just catching fire watching a private fire truck roll on by, down the road to protect some richer family's house which isn't burning yet. If it hasn't happened already.
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via Wildfire Today

at almost a billion dollars a day:

Understanding hunger begins here: In our world where the bottom 40 percent of us have to survive on just over three percent of world income and eight in ten live in societies where inequalities are worsening, the real "hoarding" is done by those with vastly disproportional income: Their market demand diverts 37 percent of the world's grain and about a third of the world fish catch to livestock, and now almost a third of U.S. corn to ethanol.

How could this extreme and worsening inequality happen? Because of our thin concept of democracy -- that elected government plus a one-rule economy (highest return to existing wealth) are all we need to meet human needs. As a result, economic and political power concentrate in such a way that policies emerge which defy the values and common-sense of most citizens.

For, where are everyday citizens who would choose to have their survival dependent on the vagaries of volatile international markets? Nowhere.

Thus, our hunger crisis is actually a democracy crisis. Hunger can be eliminated only as we remove the influence of concentrated wealth over public choices and ensure the ongoing, healthy distribution of power. The sooner we start recasting the crisis thusly, the sooner we'll all be able to thrive.

Frances Moore Lappé/Huffington 01.Jul.08
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via NewsTrust

The Rose Creek Watershed Alliance

The superstructure of what is now only ironically called high finance is melting and swaying.

his red cape flapping in a stiff breeze:

"In our personal lives and in our communities we can encounter a hostility, something dangerous, a poison which threatens to corrode what is good, reshape who we are, and distort the purpose for which we have been created.
[..]
He told the young people not to be fooled by those "who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty and subjective experience displaces truth."
The Pope railed against domestic violence and abortion, asking, "How can it be that domestic violence torments so many mothers and children?

SMH 18.Jul.08
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The first time I was struck in public by someone in authority was in the fourth grade, standing before the class, being disciplined by the principal, a Catholic nun. Later that year humiliation of an acutely embarrassing form, the favorite discipline of our teacher, Sister Mary Daniel. Physical humiliation. She made Duncan eat three sheets of binder paper at his desk because he'd been nervously chewing some and she caught him. She humiliated Jean Slaughter the smartest girl in the class so intensely she peed her pants, as I sat right behind her this was incontrovertible. Fifth grade was the delusional and vicious Sister Emmanuel whose authority was kept with rage mostly and long dithyrambic monologues none of us could understand, sprinkled with God and Jesus and Mary this-and-that. Then sixth grade a good one, mercy.
Then at a different school, seventh grade, a different order of nuns, a woman in a long black dress having a nervous breakdown stretched out over months while we sat pinned to the desks, some of her symptoms were the by now expected abusive ridicule, others I can't remember.
Then in eighth grade another good one. Mercy.
Then the seminary, a boarding pre-seminary for ninth grade. The list of violent acts and masculinist sadisms I witnessed and experienced there would be if complete very long indeed. The "Dean of Boys" the Jesuit Brady, with his high camp bitchiness vaulting into study hall and swirling my desk around on the freshly waxed floor just the most accessible memory from that year.
Then Catholic high school and the musty sadisms of the Christian Brothers. The little one with the bitchy snide cuts, the big ham-handed one with the one-two slap the second coming from out of nowhere that gave me a minor concussion. The pockmarked one that hated life and the liveliness of his students, the rodent-looking one that threw things like chalk and erasers and hit us in the face when we answered wrong or daydreamed.
How can it be that that.

broker reciprocity

The biggest mansions on Burling and Orchard provide owners with 10,000 to 20,000 square feet of living space and likely cost them somewhere north of $20 million. But those with more modest fortunes can pick up a three-story home on a single lot for $3 million to $4 million...

Chandler | Tribune
—

General Motors Corp. said Tuesday it will lay off salaried workers, cut truck production, suspend its dividend and borrow $2 billion to $3 billion...

yahoo AP/KC*
—

Ford Motor Co.'s June sales drop 27.9 percent as high gas prices, sluggish economy take toll.
With General Motors shares trading near their lowest levels in more than half a century and gasoline prices rising to record levels, the auto industry braced to deliver another bleak monthly report

Google/AP
—
Post impetus generated by this from PWeiss:

Obama's biggest backers include members of Chicago's "billionaire first families," both Jewish: the Pritzkers and the Crowns.
Here's a Tribune article about the "mammoth mansions" that Penny Pritzker, Obama's finance director, and a member of the Crown family are building right across the street from one another...

There was a show on TV in the 60's when everybody had a TV at home but everybody only got 3 channels (plus PBS) to pick from, and pretty much everybody watched TV at night, and so millions and millions, a big chunk of the American population watched this show called "The Beverly Hillbillies" which treated of the lives of a passel of twang-talkin white folk from some place in the mid-South who'd struck oil back home and moved to Beverly Hills with their new-found fortune. Buddy Ebsen was in it.
It had nice theme music if you like banjos, pretty young girls, handsome young guys, humorous crusty old folks etc.
And then in the 70's 80's and 90's with the culture of the television rerun retro thing a whole bunch of more millions were watching that show.
A lot of the humor hinged on the hillbilliness of the protagonists. It was alright to ridicule hillbillies then, in a way other distinct ethnicities could never be, as it had been since the word entered the lexicon.
It still is alright, as witness how often that descriptor was publicly linked to Lynndie England et al.

in recorded state history:

burning a total of 829,000 acres, or nearly 1,300 square miles, as of this morning

Fehd/P/SJMerc - 14.Jul.08

This bank is as safe and as sound as any bank in the country
right now

Every time you see the word "environment" in the media, change it to "our lives and the lives of our children" and change "environmentalists" to "people who care about our lives and the lives of our children".
This will make things a little cumbersome, but it's a far more accurate description of what's there.
As in:

Critics of lifting the drilling moratorium say it would jeopardize the environment

As in:

Environmentalists force way onto coal trains

And:

Schwarzenegger envisions future role as Obama 'energy and environment czar'

And:

Mexico environmentalists fear deforestation to go unabated in UN world heritage site

When the journalist is outright lying, or as near to outright anything as mainstream journalists get these days, it won't scan as well. As in:

Environmentalists Say Yes to Offshore Drilling

Also note the way the ITH headline isolates concern for the Monarch butterfly to Mexico, as if it was mostly a local issue, making it more readily dismissable.

just put down the muffin and leave

Israeli jets using Iraq's airspace
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Israelis killed in Iraq

оружия угроза националной безопасности:

Imbolnavirea subita a presedintelui comunitatii britanice de informatii, Alex Allan, a starnit polemici dupa ce mai multi experti din domeniul securitatii au sugerat ca acesta ar putut fi otravit de serviciul rus de informatii, FSB...

Stiri
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il dito contro l'Fsb

E' giallo sul grave malore che ha colpito il capo dell'intelligence britannica, Alex Allan, ora in coma in un ospedale a Londra. Spia numero uno del Regno Unito in quanto presidente del comitato che coordina i servizi segreti MI5, MI6 e GCHQ, Allan e' stato subito sottoposto a tutti gli esami tossicologici: si e' infatti pensato ad un bis del caso Litvinenko.

excite italia
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The nature of his sudden illness, if it is an assassination attempt, points towards the FSB, successors of Russia’s KGB. They are the masters of assassination by poison.

"Top security expert" Chris Dobson/The Sun UK
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Despite Dobson's top-security-expertness, or rather because of it, or rather because of its vague structure as expressed and the shove-it-down-your-throatness of his comment as presented by The Sun, and despite, or again rather because of his saying it virtually had to be the FSB, because they're the global masters of assassination by poison - at this moment without anything else to go on I'd say it was somebody else.
The irrational idea that because the FSB are masters of poison no one else in the entire modern covert world is capable of assassination by poison is pre-adolescent, fantastic, and does not scan.
Not that it couldn't have been the FSB, just that Dobson's reasoning is pure propaganda-speak and thus highly suspect.
When that happens it's best to work the diametric opposite angle. Somebody Dobson works for wants it to appear to be the FSB.
England is in the reptilian grasp of Russian oligarch/gangsters now, and there is much bitter virulent antagonism between those slimy expatriates and the Russian govt.

Both photos are of the same Alex Allan, who in addition to being Britain's top spy is a committed Deadhead, and runs a song/lyric search site dedicated to the band's music.

without one shot being fired:

“I am unaware of a precedent to such a perfect mission. Maybe only the Israelis…their wonderful commandos may be reminiscent of the mission that took place here.”

Ingrid Betancourt Ynet 04.Jul.08
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The helicopter that did land at the site in Colombia where the 15 hostages were gathered under FARC guard contained a total of 13 people - one nurse, one medical doctor, and 11 crew and military personnel (all disguised as humanitarian workers). The source says some of those 13 people were Colombians.

However, the source still maintains that up to six of those 13 individuals were U.S. special-operations personnel, as reported previously, and that the entire operation was carried out with the active involvement of the U.S. military in cooperation with the Colombian government.

Narco News
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Swiss public radio cited an unidentified source “close to the events, reliable and tested many times in recent years" as saying the operation had in fact been staged to cover up the fact that the US and Colombians had paid $20 million for their freedom.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the rescue “was conceived by the Colombians and executed by the Colombians with our full support."

TimesUK 04.Jul.08
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executed by the Colombians:

Throughout the country, the armed forces are carrying out mass arrests of campesino and labor leaders, even municipal government officials, on trumped-up charges of guerrilla collaboration. Four days after Powell's certification, two unarmed campesinos were killed and dozens of families displaced following a sweep by the army's 12th Brigade at Union Penaya, in the rainforest of Caqueta.

Independent peasant organizations in these regions such as the Cimitarra Valley Campesino Association argue that Colombia's paramilitaries are an extra-official extension of the national army - and therefore, at least indirectly, beneficiaries of US aid. Making matters worse, peasants report that the paramilitaries are forcing campesinos to grow coca--which then results in their communities being sprayed with toxic chemicals by US-piloted aircraft as part of the "war on drugs."

When I visited one community in the Cimitarra Valley last year, residents showed me a tax form issued to their village by the local bloc of the United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia - AUC, the national para network. They said the paras demanded a cut of all their produce to support the war. They also showed me fields--of banana and yucca as well as coca - that had been destroyed by glyphosate sprayed from State Department-contracted DynCorp planes.

Bill Weinberg/TheNation 23.Mar.04
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Yaneth Perez is a single mother of three children. She lives in Arauca, a state in northeastern Colombia that suffers high levels of violence and government repression. Occidental Petroleum owns and operates a massive oil field and pipeline in Arauca, both of which are protected by the U.S. and Colombian military.
[...]
Yaneth is the president of the Dawn of Women for Arauca, an association that works to protect and promote women’s rights in an increasingly volatile region. More than 100 social leaders have been killed and an equal number have been imprisoned on false charges of “rebellion”. The Colombian war is one that fails to differentiate civilians from drug runners, guerrillas, or government military. These atrocities are repeated all over the country; social organizing or unionizing is a crime.
The U.S. government provides $1.5 million a day to Colombia in military aid, under the auspices of fighting a war on drugs. In reality, these funds are used to purchase killing tools for the merciless paramilitaries that keep oil flowing. The “war on drugs” consists of spraying a form of Round-Up from the air, allowing for a high dispersal rate that kills subsistence crops and coca alike, and dissipates dangerously into the groundwater.

Cassidy Randall/New West
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Yaneth Perez

“Women are the most affected,” she said. “They kill our husbands, then go to the schools dressed as clowns to invite the children to become informants.”

among clouds of worlds
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He was the first person to call me when

Jesse Helms, my friend and long-time senator from my home state of North Carolina, was a man of consistent conviction to conservative ideals and courage to faithfully serve God and country based on principle, not popularity or politics...

Rev. Billy Graham on Jesse Helms
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the uncompromisingly defiant exemplar:

Indeed, the mainstream media rarely put Helms's career in context the way they did, for example, with Sam Ervin, a Democrat who served with Helms in the Senate from North Carolina before retiring in 1975. Ervin was the leading legal strategist against Civil Rights legislation, and he largely crafted the Southern Manifesto against Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ruled school segregation unconstitutional. But Ervin was the man who chaired the Watergate hearings that helped bring down Richard Nixon, and his views on civil rights were almost never mentioned. Both Helms and Ervin were courtly, principled conservatives. Only one became a cartoon media villain.
Contrary to his reputation, Helms did change his mind. For his first decade in office he opposed aid to Israel and in 1982, after that nation invaded Lebanon, called for "shutting down" relations. But after learning more about Israel's security fears during a visit there in 1985, and receiving assurances that officials there could support some military sales to moderate Arab nations, he became Israel's stalwart ally. "It was a complete switch," recalls Morris Amitay, former executive director of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby.
Helms also softened on both AIDS and Africa. He developed an unlikely friendship with the rock star Bono...

Mr.Fund/WallStreetJournal on Jesse Helms
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God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives:

Bono told Livni he is also working on a project involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mentioned that U2 guitarist The Edge has relatives in Jerusalem.

History, like God, is watching what we do.
-

E tu Iddio / You, God

You, God
Because of whom i walk in this boundless sky
among clouds of worlds
You are lonelier, poorer than I;
I have seen you wince under the surgeon's scalpel
removing an ulcer from your bowels.
I have seen You dead drunk
staggering empty-eyed,
I have seen You
tense pushing a laden wheel-barrow,
jump for joy over new pockets
over shiny shoes
and call out to me, and stretch out Your hands
happy over a smile and a little kiss.
Those sparrow-like eyes of yours
make me sad.
In order to live, I must be a brother
and a father to You.
And wipe your running nose
and support you in your faltering steps,
build you a stout house
of solid stone in fine plumb, and heal you
if your head limply resting on my knees
burns with fever,
and fetch you bread, soup
and honey and the fruit you like:
it is my way of adoring you.

Danilo Dolce at a clearing in rain
via Matrullo, Tom
vis. which: Bono bites bullet

duping them:

Colombia found explosives set to be used in bombs across the capital in reprisal for this week's rescue of leftist rebels' highest-profile hostages, including Ingrid Betancourt, military officials said on Saturday.
ADVERTISEMENT
The army seized about a ton of explosives at a farm outside Bogota that it suspected the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, planned to use in attacks over the next few days, said the officials, who asked not to be named.
On Wednesday, the military dealt the rebels the latest in a series of severe blows this year, duping them

Reuters/Yahoo 05.Jul.08
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Reuters has become a dependable channel for the current power to run its propaganda unedited and straight from the source. What is that source? Establish the dots of its intent and concerns, do it long enough and accurately enough, you'll see the outline of what that power is. Color it in and there you go.

As with rivers so with nations.

a free enterprise man and deeply religious:

"No man, living or dead, has done more to thwart the best intentions and diminish the prestige of the United States Senate."

George McGovern on Jesse Helms, in the far more innocent days of 1997.
Hal Crowther at the Progressive Populist
via Doc Searls
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A less decorous comment on Helms here

A big job for a nebbish

Concerns persist:

The nation's growing army of private firefighters, many of whom earn $10 to $11 an hour at entry level with no benefits, has not yet won universal acceptance.

Trone-Goad/PE 16.Oct.07
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As many as half of the roughly 5,000 private firefighters based in the Pacific Northwest and contracted by state and federal governments to fight forest fires are immigrants, mostly from Mexico. And an untold number of them are working here illegally.

Kirk Johnson/Yosemite Area 28.May.06
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Haven't yet found current status of private firefighters in California, which is combusting all over at present.
Naomi Klein in The Nation on 01.Jul.08:

With the globe being rocked by multiple shocks, this seems like a good time to see how and where the strategy is being applied.

And the disaster capitalists have been busy--from private firefighters already on the scene in Northern California's wildfires, to land grabs in cyclone-hit Burma, to the housing bill making its way through Congress.

liberation was brewing:

“Don’t think that I felt happy; I pitied him a lot, but I gave thanks to God that he was with people who respect the lives of others, even when they are enemies.”

Ingrid Betancourt, at a press conference shortly after her release. The people she's thanking God for are the Colombian government and its military.

Gaza’s economy has completely collapsed:

Because of the siege, eighty percent of families in Gaza are now dependent on international food aid just to be able to eat. There is over forty percent unemployment , and ninety-five percent of Gaza's industries, as well as a majority of private businesses, have been forced to shut down. Because of shortages in fuel and spare parts, Gaza's only power plant is running at less than seventy percent of capacity, and electrical outages of several hours a day are the rule rather than the exception.
Running water is now available to most households for only four to six hours a day. Sewage treatment centers no longer function properly. Millions of liters of raw sewage have been pumped into heavily populated neighborhoods, and in order to avoid being forced to literally flood these residential areas with even more raw sewage, the Mediterranean Sea has been turned into a toilet. Since January of this year over 10 billion liters of untreated and only partially treated sewage have been released into the Mediterranean. Gaza's fishermen state that the sewage has killed off most of the sea life in the immediate vicinity.

Ramzi Kysia/counterpunch 03.Jul.08
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That guy, though in Jerusalem, on the Caterpillar heavy-duty front-end skip-loader tractor (technically not a bulldozer, calling it one goes a little way toward neutralizing the horror of Rachel Corrie's death) that's currently being reviled as a "terrorist", was essentially being paid to build the walls that keep Palestinians literally eating Israeli shit.
They won't mention that in the tightly-controlled news media America has to make do with now, but that's what it is. Dude was working and getting paid to harm his own people.
Imagine how long you could do that without snapping.

a perfectly sensible attitude

International Solidarity Society:

The human rights group reported that the Israeli army has kidnapped more than 230 Palestinians among them 40 children who are under the age of 19, during the month of June 2008. All were taken to unknown detention camps.

Juan Cole 02.Jul.08
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Laila Ewaiwi - IMEMC News

One recent strategy involves online software that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally.

If Darcy Burner had been threatened, or warned to back off by Arabs and then her house burned to the ground, most of you would immediately suspect the threat had been followed up with arson.
Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was an act of "G_d". Maybe it wasn't.

And this is how change happens:

On Friday, I was on the phone with Darcy Burner, who told me that she got a call from people affiliated with the conservative Jewish political group AIPAC. They told her to distance herself from the new pro-peace group J Street, which they said is full of radical leftists who believe in capitulation to the forces of the Arab world who would overrun and destroy Israel.

Matt Stoller/OpenLeft
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Burner Warned Off J Street:

In fact, I have spoken to someone in a position to know a bit more about what actually happened. This person likely has his own partisan agenda and so his perspective needs to be vetted as well. But the story he tells is that a local Burner volunteer who is also an AIPAC volunteer warned her of the dangers of affiliating with J Street. This supporter was supposedly doing her a favor in telling her how dangerous it could be to her campaign to get into bed with such a group.

Richard Silverstein/Tikun Olam
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Darcy Burner's home destroyed in fire

Wikipedia no es un foro:

MediaWiki Discusión:Spam-blacklist/rebelion.org

la enciclopedia de contenido libre
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via Machetera: How Internet censorship works, Part 4

Sarkozy ex-Mossad secret agent

If there’s an issue they have with me,
they haven’t told me:

But there's also the fact that BoingBoing has often presented itself as a stalwart of cultural openness. Doctorow himself is a well-known copyfighter — a crusader against restrictive intellectual property laws. He has removed a post at least once before — when writer Ursula K. Le Guin asked that an excerpt of her book be taken down — but he immediately wrote a long, apologetic explanation of the incident.

In the case of Violet Blue, no such explanation has been offered, and at least one person has claimed that a comment he left on BoingBoing regarding the issue was "quietly censored."

Meanwhile, rumors go undisputed — free to fuel plenty of conspiracy theories and speculation about BoingBoing's intent.
WebScout/LATimes
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The Nielsen-Haydens are CIA affiliated.
How's that?
Cory Doctorow's kind of a nebbish.
California's on fire.
The moment in the sun for places like Boing Boing has passed, however many thousands of visitors they pull.

an American lie:

This nation is grievously and knowingly failing the young men and women who wear the uniform of its military services, and nothing demonstrates that more powerfully than the suicides of soldiers. According to the Army’s own figures, the rate of suicide among active duty personnel nearly doubled between 2001 and 2006. The number then grew even higher in 2007, when suicide ranked third as the cause of death among members of the National Guard.

James Carroll/ Boston Globe/commondreams

Monbiot:

Almost everyone seems to agree: governments now face a choice between saving the planet and saving the economy. As recession looms, the political pressure to abandon green policies intensifies. A report published yesterday by Ernst & Young suggests that the EU’s puny carbon target will raise energy bills by 20% over the next 12 years. Last week the prime minister’s advisers admitted to the Guardian that his renewable energy plans were “on the margins” of what people will tolerate.

But these fears are based on a false assumption: that there is a cheap alternative to a green economy. Last week New Scientist reported a survey of oil industry experts, which found that most of them believe global oil supplies will peak by 2010. If they are right, the game is up. A report published by the US department of energy in 2005 argued that unless the world begins a crash programme of replacements 10 or 20 years before oil peaks, a crisis “unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society” is unavoidable.

If the world is sliding into recession, it’s partly because governments believed that they could choose between economy and ecology. The price of oil is so high and it hurts so much because there has been no serious effort to reduce our dependency.