Carter does not specifically retract anything he has previously said or written.

"The problems of climate change are directly linked to the irrational development of industry,"

Q. Tarantino in Israel

Phil Weiss in Egypt

climate change protest
the photos make something very clear
I'm unclear on what exactly they make clear
but very clear on the fact that something is being made clear

If Bush Was in Kindergarten, Obama Is in First Grade

it's like hearing Kitty Genovese:

Sri Lanka has publicly warned foreign media, western media and aid agencies that they will be expelled from the country if their reporting is deemed sympathetic to the Tamil Tiger guerrillas, who are making a last stand deep in the island's jungle.

Randeep Ramesh/GuardianUK/commondreams

Elizabeth Kolbert/Environment 360

Wackenhut Cabazon casino crime weirdness

Hey, you don't suppose this might be connected to that coup thing do you?:

Honduras anti-drug chief shot dead by gunmen

BBC

Plan Colombia and Beyond

"I know Christians who lock themselves indoors during the entire Purim holiday"

The Numbers Don't Add Up in Mexico's Drug War

This is not unrelated to this, though in a reverse kind of way.
Sort of like evil is good, and good is evil.
Which is a very effective formula, if you want to get along with current US power-whatever.
Though in the long run evil and good can both be defined away into abstraction and intellectualized into unreality, or reduced to amoral animal contests for biological dominance. Et cetera.
I like the simpler, more superficial version. Evil is selfishly fucking over other people, good is living in a way that gives wider and wider strength to other good beings and systems. Ultimately they're terms of mechanics, but the machine is life itself, being, existence, the pig formulas don't hold. Multiple worlds, recurrent lives, the droid columns marching, eggs laid by swollen queens in dark chambers under the cities, spun webs of cocooned provisioning around whole families, the sticky silk of pablum'd information wrapping communities up, immobilizing, packaging, storage you know, like groceries, for consumption later by the hive's drones and myrmidons. Preserved like frozen chickens in their own homes.
Nice people have more power than they realize. We should work on getting them to realize it.

Amy Goodman = Betsy Ross, pretty much:

U.S. journalist says she was delayed at border

Globe and Mail
via Improprieties

“Some of the gestures cannot be disclosed because they were quite vulgar”

The heart of India is under attack

Guardian > Robot Wisdom > Danny Yee

rich kids have a far greater intellectual capacity anyway:

Amid thousands of student protesters and armed police standing guard, the University of California’s Board of Regents has approved a 32 percent increase in student fees.

DNow!

Dostoyevsky on Jews in Russia, at wikipedia

Yes, that's Abbas, and yes, that's a Star of David.
Photo from AFP pre-takeover or shutdown or whatever the fuck happened to them. Well whatever happened to France etc. and happened to AFP as well.
Photos like that stopped cold suddenly around 2005/06.
As did photos like this:


Transfer of local power from IDF/Israel to Palestinians March I think of 2005, possibly a little earlier. I'm unable to do much of any research on stuff like this now.
Tineye wasn't much help.
But there you go.

1.08 million pounds ($1.77 million) and no bonus:

“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest”

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Chris Jordan

“irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy”

Declare war on God, not on us…

29 Sep 2009:

The U.S.’s shocking performance at the OAS regarding Honduras suggests that the State Department has not heard that President Obama won the election. Who in Washington is making the Obama administration’s Honduran policy? The answer is, for the most part, the Bush crowd.

Latest example: Deputy Chief of Mission to the OAS and Senior Career Foreign Service Officer, W. Lewis Amselem gave a speech there that would have gladdened the Bush White House. A close look at Amselem’s record shows that this is no accident. Amselem is a hard-line figure who served for decades of the Cold War in Guatemala, Guyana, Bolivia, SOUTHCOM and Panama. His inflammatory remarks the other day regarding Honduras’ ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, make him a prime candidate for replacement and retirement. He was not just taking orders; his behavior is in keeping with his recorded performance during his entire career.

Council on Hemispheric Affairs/Scoop
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COHA
-
see also: Negroponte
see also: QLP?

the journey is long, the journey is hard:

No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change.

Obama/Scoop

Richard Cunningham
(October 20th, 1976 - September 4th, 2009)
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via rockrap

"...shrinking the heads of their enemies and wearing them
on the belts holding up their loincloths...:

Anyway, if the ‘natives’ didn’t shrink the heads of the policemen they killed and eat their remains, it was only because there wasn’t time. Not only that, these chunchos – who I’ve seen wearing well-made Lacoste t-shirts and polo shirts, as well as Adidas trainers – say that oil..."

The ‘most racist article of the year’ award
Survival

blood, libel, creepy, sad:

Of even greater concern for the Palestinian families is the fact that at around the time the bodies of their loved ones were whisked off by the army for autopsy, the only institute in Israel that conducts such autopsies, Abu Kabir, near Tel Aviv, was almost certainly at the centre of a trade in organs that later became a scandal inside Israel.
[...]
It is worth remembering in this context the constant refrain from Israel’s peace camp that the brutal, four-decade occupation of the Palestinians has profoundly corrupted Israeli society.

Cook/Counterpunch

completely clogged with tiny pieces of plastic:

They took hundreds of water samples between the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and the notorious garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California, and every one had tiny bits of plastic floating in it. And the closer they sailed to the garbage patch...

SJMerc via Cryptogon

UPDATE: There are reports of a second murdered protester in El Paraiso

Nell suggests:

Recognize and condemn the human rights violations being committed by the coup regime in Honduras

via TinyRev
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"...in Bi’lin, no one goes to sleep before four or five in the morning. We stay awake all night..."

Mondoweiss

That's when it becomes easier to explain

if he wins, it will make it possible for others to:

Emilio Gutiérrez was a single father raising his son, trying to live a quiet life...
[...]
Last year in Ciudad Juarez, there were 1,607 murders. Last year in El Paso, which meets it on the Rio Grande, there were eighteen murders.
I’ll tell you the real danger in this entire thing we’re financing in Mexico at half-a-billion dollars a year, is we’re slaughtering Mexican citizens. They’re the ones dying.

Ch. Bowden intvu/Kouddous/DNow! 11.Aug.09

Much happiness had not either a steam coach of Czech Josef Bozka. This genial mechanic started a construction of a steam car for tree persons after successful testes of a smaller model in his 32 years. Bozek performed it during a public production in Stromovka on 17.th September 1815 but people looked at it like a big toy.

Also, according to Miroslav Holub, he got so miffed at the ridicule he took a sledge hammer to the thing and never did another one.
In 1815.
A steam-powered car.

the sanctions are working:

According to the Associated Press, "A Russian-made Iranian passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed shortly after takeoff Wednesday, nose-diving into a field northwest of the capital and shattering into flaming pieces." And politicos all over the world are responsible for this disaster. If your country voted to sanction airplane parts to Iran, you personally killed all these people.

Jane Stillwater 01.Jul.09
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via wvns

We are also concerned at the increase in numbers of political prisoners being held in West Papua and the reports of systematic torture in the prisons.
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Cronkite's gone
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40 years since touchdown

Detained in India, Arrested in Bangladesh

Shahidul Alam

still more on the way:

"...he [Grieve/MacDiarmid] was led to read, among others, Nietzsche and Bergson and found himself as deeply susceptible to the Nietzschean injunction 'Become what thou art' as he was to Bergson's claim that it was the creative urge rather than natural selection that promoted the evolutionary process.

from Seamus Heaney Finders Keepers A Torchlight Procession of One
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This is getting nearer to what makes Bowden's assertions and rejections important and true, yet confirms as well Keats' championing of ecological balance. What seems incompatible and separating between them is one more example of the reductive frame excluding the game-winning truth - that being the purpose of the frame to start.
Like the insistence on codifiable rules that can be abstracted and transported across time and geography, so that anything else is marginal and can be trivialized and left behind.
There seems to be, in my light reading of it anyway, an insistence in the Sufi tradition on the particularity of teaching, the immediacy of it, and the importance of it being alive and thoroughly in its moment. That's part of that.
The pigs want rules that can be written across the sky so they can be proprietized, trademarked, copyrighted, and owned, and also worked around. Because that's how they've come to own most everything else, including the Official Rule book, while avoiding anything like observant and ethically precise behavior.
"Thou Shalt Not Kill" except bad people, and as collateral damage etc.
Simple versions of the scam abound, not the least heart-tugging being the cliched response of American indigenous to the idea of ownership and salesmanship regarding land and water. As absurd as selling or buying the sky. And they meant that. Which meant they had no standing in a court adjudicating property rights.
Suffusing Bergson's "creative urge" is the assertive presence, the "I'm here" not so much as the cosmic mumbo-jumboish "I AM" as the open, possibly humorous, definitely humble, "I'm here" meaning "yes", meaning "life and me, we're happening", meaning the shark eating the sea lion can be all abstract and have null content of moral parameter and yet the human presence has its valence, rationality can be used to define any moral question down into the sub-atomic, unless that assertion steps in and halts the process.
Sooner or later this runs up against the need for a Higher Authority on the part of those who can't hold that without quaking. This is not to say, or even hint at the idea that there is no Higher Authority.
Whether or not that Authority has any substance isn't germane, it's the configuration of the dynamic that works.
And it's one big reason why we're in this spot.
Death is what's missing from the discourse, among other scary terms.
...more to come...

more to come on this:

I think the problem is balance, the biological equivalent of the politicians' promise of law and order. Balance is not possible - I feel this in my bones - but all the reserves and various mantras of ecology appeal to this idea of balance, of consumption matching production, the killing matching the births, the inputs matching the outputs. Notions like the park [Bowden's campaign to establish a national monument in the desert, the subject of the book] are seen as magic kingdoms where this balance will be displayed to our edification forever and forever and the lamb will lie down with the lion and there will be no talk of lamb chops with a dab of mint jelly on the side. The whales, they be peaceful, and the fucking dolphins are doing advanced mathematics in their soggy skulls. The redwoods are god with the bark on. the mountain lion reeks of serenity and the wolves strut about as mom and dad of the year. This thing called nature has been reduced to the status of Native Americans, creatures that cannot exist in life but only in the mind where they are housebroken and safe had don't shit in the street or talk out of turn. This, I cannot abide. Balance is inhuman. And false. The only balance that actually exists snores in the virtual reality of our nature documentaries, in the prisons of our schools, in the sexual teachings of the masturbating priests and in the hideous recipes of our nutritionists. Leave nothing but your footprints, after you've parked your rig, swaddled yourself in Lycra and put on boots made by cheerful slaves in some distant bog.

from Charles Bowden and Michael Berman's Inferno

whack/out of whack/whack:

For instance, consider research on the sea otter, which Kricher describes at great length, only rather obviously to conclude that "humans can unwittingly induce major alterations in ecosystem food webs."

In fact, the research illustrates much more than that. Between 1990 and 1997, in the western Aleutian Islands, the otter population plummeted by 90 percent because orcas began feeding on them. Previously orcas subsisted on fish-eating harbor seals and sea lions, but human over-fishing in the region led to a drop in seal and sea lion populations, forcing orcas to broaden their diet. Since the otters preyed on sea urchins, fewer otters meant more urchins, a rapidly expanding population that decimated the undersea kelp forests on which they fed. The loss of kelp in turn further disturbed the fish in the area, which relied on kelp for shelter, exacerbating the seal and sea lion famine, impelling orcas to eat more otters. The effect was so dramatic because otters were a "keystone" species in the region, meaning that the stability of the food web depended disproportionately on their well-being. Which is to say that a steady otter population helped to maintain the balance of nature.

Jonathon Keats/Salon 10.Jul.09
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via 3QD
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All well and good for the dispassionate and removed-to-a-safe-and-abstract-intellectual-distance, but that balance gets achieved, can only get achieved, through the same ways and means the balance gets unachieved - eating and reproducing and dying and it's pretty clear that what we're experiencing is the flowering of some creature that can only survive let alone thrive if things are and remain out of balance.
We in that usage being the them and the us and everybody in between. The specific survivability quotients etc are all academic and theoretical, but the teeth and claws belong to something that's fighting for its life as much as anybody else out there is, out here, as much as we are individually and collectively fighting for our lives, and it can't make it, can't do that survivability number, in a balanced world. Can't, not won't - is by its essential nature unable to survive in the world as the world is when it is most healthy. Disease proliferates as the system weakens, like that. And we're discussing the moral activities of what amounts to a disease.
Like the economy, it has to grow to maintain itself, and keep growing even as it reaches the limits of collateral destruction possible, even as the backwash of its wrongness and unsuitability floods the basements of its mud-and-cardboard mansions etc.
Like with so many of the mostly suddenly recently concerned public voices on this matter - not Keats', which seems cogent and reasonable - there's a sense that they're saying without really committing to it that whatever drove us over the precipice should continue as still-in-charge and appropriately so, should continue to drive even so, so get out of the way you confused hippies - we may not be able to save the polar bears or the Inuits but by God we'll save ourselves and our grandchildren.
So really what gets obvious is they have to go, they have to be sidetracked, blunted and dispensed with, stopped, or else the whole thing goes down with them.
There isn't anything more nice and gentle that will work with what's really happening.
What the hope is, I think, for them, or it, or whatever pronoun most fits, is that they can take the web of life out to its thinnest stretch, just grind everything down and eliminate all the accusing lives, turn them into commodities of grief - dispense with the higher mammals just as Ma Nature and her legal team have demanded they themselves be dispensed with - and then gather the fuel and tech necessary to jet-rocket themselves off-planet and go on to find some new world where they can do all this all over again.
They'll be doing this naturally with slaves and robots and all the fun and games of what until just a few cultural moments ago seemed like nothing more than loopy speculative fiction cliche but now looks like the grotesquely accurate description of an awful wreckage, which it is.
It is wonderfully helpful to believe in a greater metaphysical context to human living when confronted with this shit, helpful for the caught soul that can recognize its own complicity and the malevolence of what it's been co-operating with, helpful for it in the short term, which as with all short terms has a definite periodicity, a measurable span, a length past which it is no longer the short term in which that comfort is available, but becomes the now-ended fantasy you bought with your credulity and intentional softness.
Lots of eugenic platforms there but none on offer, sorry. No solution, no formula.
Like beauty - which I'm now convinced is the indisoluble and inevitable culmination of moral rightness - it's about recognizing it, opening to it, experiencing it within and without the self, holding to the will that would sacrifice for something higher, which is what we have to bring to the day as it comes in, but not exposing that to the detailed search of the enemy's drones, who will make of any logic and formula and solution that gets set out in those abstract neutral tones a new set of parameters for its own debased survival.
Which is the point. It's not an accident this trainwreck, it's the dinner preparation of a clot of ghouls. Seeing it as an accident is complicity, a seeking after comfort. A short-term response. They're in it for the long haul and so should we be.

Spit like rain:

I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting - on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms.

Anne Barker/ABC 07.Jul.09

el "fin del Estado de Derecho"
ante las autoridades judiciales:

Si lo hubiéramos dejado acá, ahorita estuviéramos enterrando un montón de gente, justificó el coronel.
La explicación de los militares, al menos del principal asesor jurídico del Ejército de Honduras, coronel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, según los periodistas Carlos Dada y José Luis Sanz, del diario digital El Faro, es que “…después de que el presidente Zelaya, a la cabeza de una turba asaltó la Fuerza Aérea para llevarse un material que había confiscado el Ministerio Público, el comandante de la Fuerza Aérea tenía dos opciones: disparar a la muchedumbre o abrir los portones.

Uno como soldado mide qué pesa más, y eso en derecho se llama Estado de Necesidad. Aunque no nos gustó que se invadiera la Fuerza Aérea, el comandante tomó la decisión acertada. (…) Un día después, “la decisión de sacarlo a Costa Rica la tomamos nosotros como Fuerza Armada, la Junta de Comandantes. Medimos las consecuencias de lo que iba a suceder si nosotros lo dejábamos en el país. Medimos los riesgos y lo que podía suceder”, explica Inestroza.

El principal asesor jurídico del Ejército hondureño, el coronel Bayardo Inestroza, reconoció que los militares cometieron un delito al deponer al presidente Manuel Zelaya pero señaló que la cúpula militar tomó esa decisión "para evitar un derramamiento de sangre".
"En el momento en el que nosotros lo sacamos del país (a Zelaya) en la forma en que se sacó hay un delito. Lo que pasa es que ese delito, en el momento en que se conozcan las circunstancias en que se dio, va a haber una justificación y un eximente que nos va a proteger", afirmó en entrevista al diario hondureño La Prensa.

a new system for waging war:

BILL MOYERS: How do explain this spike in private contractors in both Iraq and Afghanistan?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I think what we're seeing, under President Barack Obama, is sort of old wine in a new bottle. Obama is sending one message to the world, but the reality on the ground, particularly when it comes to private military contractors, is that the status quo remains from the Bush era. Right now there are 250 thousand contractors fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's about 50 percent of the total US fighting force. Which is very similar to what it was under Bush. In Iraq, President Obama has 130 thousand contractors. And we just saw a 23 percent increase in the number of armed contractors in Iraq. In Afghanistan there's been a 29 percent increase in armed contractors. So the radical privatization of war continues unabated under Barack Obama.

Bill Moyers Journal

Why is it that Kurzweil can focus so clearly and radically, acceptable as prophetic visionary, on the assumption of organized energy from the body into the machine, in other words the uploading of the self's architecture out of the short-lived corporeal into the mechanical and immortality that way, but it's laughable, ridiculous to insist that same process or something like it could take place from the body into say something like a 2000 year old tree? Could have been is taking place all along beside us around us through us in us.
Why is that absurd, but Kurzweil's vision of the uploaded self residing in an eternal mechanical housing is plain fascinating?
I'll tell you why.
Because the threat is there - in the tree, in the world, in organic life itself. The rejection of the failed and failing being, greedy grasping incapable, thwarted and petulant, etc and so on. Beauty and grace for all their benevolent lustre are implacable and uncompromising. Kurzweil's vision is a loser's alternative to what's been here from the beginning and won't accept that selfish uber alles mentality of spirit.
You can destroy the world but you don't have the skill or the grace to create it.
Or the humility to help bring it into being.

links from/to Shahidul Alam:

http://www.shahidulnews.com/2009/05/23/dreaming-of-tamil-eelam/

She, like so many others who have been oppressed, will forever yearn for freedom. Until another’s prosperity gives one joy; until another’s sorrow gives one pain; until the betterment of another becomes one’s concern; until one is liberated by another’s freedom; victory over another, will be a defeat for oneself.

http://www.shahidulnews.com/the-unfolding-crisis-in-pakistan/

Rahnuma Ahmed in a four part series, writes on the unfolding crisis in Pakistan

A largely defenseless people struggling to survive and hemmed in on a narrow strip of land, facing indiscriminate air strikes, assault from gun boats and cluster bombs by a well-equipped army...

Israel continues to supply Sri Lanka with arms and military training even after the United States and Britain cut off military supplies to Sri Lanka over the government’s human rights violations.

WMR/onlinejournal

Don't forget the blood of the lamb, honey!

On October 16, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Israel Lobby’s bill, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act. This legislation requires the US Department of State to monitor anti-Semitism worldwide.

To monitor anti-Semitism, it has to be defined. What is the definition? Basically, as defined by the Israel Lobby and Abe Foxman, it boils down to any criticism of Israel or Jews.

Rahm Israel Emanuel hasn’t been mopping floors at the White House. As soon as he gets the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 passed, it will become a crime for any American to tell the truth about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and theft of their lands.

It will be a crime for Christians to acknowledge the New Testament’s account of Jews demanding the crucifixion of Jesus.

It will be a crime to report the extraordinary influence of the Israel Lobby on the White House and Congress, such as the AIPAC-written resolutions praising Israel for its war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza that were endorsed by 100 percent of the US Senate and 99 per cent of the House of Representatives, while the rest of the world condemned Israel for its barbarity.

Paul Craig Roberts

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Something much much more worrisome to me than Jewish control of US public discourse is the vectoring of "carbon footprint" worries with the increasing social and political dominance of Jewish power, as per Th. Friedman and Disney's "Earth".
A still unspoken but widely thought about aspect of the "too many people, not enough resources" thing is how much easier it would be to maintain consumption rates at present per capita levels but reduce the number of consumers, the number of capita per.
It solves the problem of resource scarcity at the same time it solves the uncomfortable problem of trying to get people to give up their toys and luxuries. Keep the toys and luxuries, get rid of the neighbors!
Keep in mind that the people now running the US and most of the rest of Western Civilization have as their central founding myth the "Passover" which is the biological removal of an enemy by the hand of God, operating through his angels. His exterminating angels. Who had to be specifically shown which houses not to infect when it came plague time. Divine power being somewhat myopic.
Thus the blood of the lamb reference.
Keep in mind that Christianity as presently iterated is pretty much just "Judaism for Dummies"
Crazy people who think their self-made deity uses disease to protect them.
Focusing exclusively on Israel - the crimes of mistreatment and subjugation visited on the Palestinians by gloating Israelis, the grotesque atrocities of Gaza, the glaringly obvious fact of Israeli/Jewish manipulation of the US government and public to accomplish the atrocity of Iraq - is no longer strategically accurate, true as it is, important as it is to keep the accusations loud and clear.
But Israel and the US are now part of the same geopolitical entity, as is England and possibly France. Israel is the head, the US is the body, sort of.
These are not sane men, they are not decent men, and they are not noble men. What they are is desperate and conscienceless men.
And just as with the Iraq debacle, it's vital that people get in front of them, not follow behind them cataloging their duplicities and crimes.
Reality isn't enough.
Predict what they'll do and make it plain and simple.
Sabotage their iniquity with truth. And quit worrying about hurting people's feelings.
They aren't.
-

just wondering...

random notes on the fly:

Disney's Earth can be readily interpreted, the phrase not the television program, as a statement of territoriality and possession.
Which seems banal and adolescent until you set Thomas Friedman's eco-posturing next to it. And if like me and more than a few others you have this sense of a restrained hunger for eugenic cull fermenting at the edges of public discourse.
I'm not suggesting there's anything conscious or overt in that. Just one of those happy accidents brought about by the limits of language and the partiality of enlightened consciousness in the main players.
An automatic and obvious response to the excesses of humanity's carbon footprint isn't just the lessening of the carbon footprint itself - using less, using more green tech, etc - in fact built into the frame of the question as it's presented is that the foot itself could well be reduced, the size of the foot itself could be made smaller, and this would lower the carbon footprint as well as making available much that is scarce and growing scarcer now.
In fact it's suspicious that there's so little talk of eugenics at a time like this.
Suspicious to the edge of alarming, except that everything's pretty alarming anyway.
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The term "hyper-Semitic" could be introduced into the discourse now, it would help.

You never know for sure, and that's key, that's the small art, the banal skill, that you never know. There's parallels, threads of identical aspect and manner and codes of dress and vibe, but you never know for sure.
The guy that wrote this was healthy looking, stocky, white, mid-30's maybe, a little too muscled for his purported station, though no station was purported, until you read the thing he left.
Where this is is a library at a major university, open to the public, but on a semi-remote campus, I have a library card here of which I very proudly am in possession of which also I got by plunking down 50$ when I had 73$ to my name and no particular prospect of any further$$.
Which gives my presence here among these young bright minds a quasi-legitimacy that's paper thin and no less dubious than anything but I have it and I'm proud of it and of getting it etc.
So the pigs.
They're not smart, but have resources that create a kind of organizational intelligence and of course have force, power of weaponry and statute, and a proven record of severity and ignorance that makes them dangerous and threatening, and especially for me, way out here on the loopy scary margins of moral integrity and performance.
So I'm reading Moses Maimoniodes up on the fourth floor or the third floor, I can't remember today, it was over two weeks ago, and dude comes in huffing and puffing sits down and starts doing that "Got to win got to win got to win" smashfinger keyboard attack and twice I glanced at his back while he made particular loudness and he turned enough around to catch me looking at the corner of his peripheral and then after a while of smashfinger exercize he splits. Leaving his writing in a word document displayed on the screen. Didn't copy it to other media as far as i know tho maybe he did I just didn't see it, and didn't erase it on completion.
I went and did other stuff but curiosity drove me to check it, I resisted as long as I could so then I read it.
I have psychic armor that's very thick, old, rusted in spots, dented, cratered, spiky in places, things don't get through right away, I read it, then copied onto an SD card and back to the woods I.
Then read it again next time in.
Pigs/not pigs, who knows.
Anyone with literary skill will see the threat in it, the fakeness of "Sequoia" is glaring to me but...you never know, and that's the art, small and uninterestingly banal as it is. Interesting to me because it's one of a novella's worth of similar incidents and similar individuals and similar vague unpinnable threatening moves, some which were obviously swine-origin, some, like this one, you never know for sure.

A Travel & Observation report by Tharon Chandler
04/09/2009
The town of Santa Cruz is in some ways a poorly kept secret. The weather is not the best all the time yet perhaps the People are. The territory is kind to a traveling bum, as the creek swells and flows to the sea. A man can swim in the Ocean, though the air temp nor the water is warm, and then clean off even more in fresh-water of the creek, which is a little warmer and very clear.
Nice ducks land in the creek waters and one female cares for a bubbling brood, even while she still must flee from the aggressive males. The males have a ring-neck and a vivid green head while the female looks are more plain. She seems to be running or flying for her life when three or more males pursue, yet one of the males helps protect the brood of half a dozen chicks, with her. The little chicks must strive against the current of the creek and the parents will not help too closely, this helps the babies to get stronger by the hour.
In the town the bus service is good without being too expensive and attractive people ride the bus; some go to the University. UC Santa Cruz is set in a forest of massive evergreens; probably some kind Sequoia and lush like a rain forest. The forest is mature in that the upper canopy makes for a soft but clear lower level, on the ground. People had lived comfortably in the woods here, as there still are ancient kilns with a view of the sea. The woods have no venomous snakes; not that I have seen, and there are some snails that look like a Mexican Pepper. There are many shelled snails and likely this served as a food source for some people.
The people here are as cordial and beautiful and sophisticated and friendly as anywhere on Earth. Likely a pretty tough security force lurks just behind the scenes. I’d be on their side, against any people who’d do harm, and even to protect the pristine place from unfortunate bums; even as I’m starting to look rather haggard, myself.

Mr William “Tharon” Chandler

Earth Day every day:

The giraffe population of Kenya's Masai Mara reserve has declined by up to 95%
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Even more than in 1970, what’s needed now is an outpouring that organizes itself—with millions of people and, for good measure, some stinky dead fish in the streets.

Sexless, sexual:

In comments at the Vatican that are likely to provoke a furious reaction from homosexual groups, Benedict also warned that blurring the distinction between male and female could lead to the "self-destruction" of the human race.
In his address to the Curia, the Vatican's central administration, he described behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations as "a destruction of God's work" and said that the Roman Catholic Church had a duty to "protect man from the destruction of himself".

Telegraph UK 23.Dec.08
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What is intersex?

“Intersex” is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in-between the usual male and female types—for example, a girl may be born with a noticeably large clitoris, or lacking a vaginal opening, or a boy may be born with a notably small penis, or with a scrotum that is divided so that it has formed more like labia. Or a person may be born with mosaic genetics, so that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some of them have XY.

Though we speak of intersex as an inborn condition, intersex anatomy doesn’t always show up at birth. Sometimes a person isn’t found to have intersex anatomy until she or he reaches the age of puberty, or finds himself an infertile adult, or dies of old age and is autopsied. Some people live and die with intersex anatomy without anyone (including themselves) ever knowing.
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How common is intersex?

To answer this question in an uncontroversial way, you’d have to first get everyone to agree on what counts as intersex —and also to agree on what should count as strictly male or strictly female. That’s hard to do. How small does a penis have to be before it counts as intersex? Do you count “sex chromosome” anomalies as intersex if there’s no apparent external sexual ambiguity?1 (Alice Dreger explores this question in greater depth in her book Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex.)

Here’s what we do know: If you ask experts at medical centers how often a child is born so noticeably atypical in terms of genitalia that a specialist in sex differentiation is called in, the number comes out to about 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births. But a lot more people than that are born with subtler forms of sex anatomy variations, some of which won’t show up until later in life.

Mondoweiss: Why can't you find normanfinkelstein.com on google?

Rachel Corrie birthday observed at Tiny Revolution

Tesla, Steinmetz, GE, hink:

Subsequent photos of this meeting, located in the GE Archives and made available by UPI, curiously (and with poor retouching) show only Einstein and Steinmetz. The original photograph of all three personalities (accompanied by another unidentified individual) are rare and difficult to find.

radlab
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Slightly more effusive more information-bearing site with clearer full picture of Einstein, Steinmetz, the unidentified man, and Tesla here

Can't see what you can't see:

The security operation at this week’s G20 summit was thrown into chaos last night when it emerged that the entire network of central London’s wireless CCTV cameras will have to be turned off because of a legal ruling.

The Department for Transport (DfT) has ruled that Westminster council’s mobile road cameras - a third of the authority’s CCTV network - “do not fully meet the resolution standards required” and must be switched off by midnight tomorrow.

The blackout begins on the eve of the summit, when world leaders arrive in the capital and protesters take to the streets.

Guardian/Cryptogon

This should get things moving:

Americans may still may favor Bud Light, but it's no longer the top beer in the world. That distinction now belongs to a Chinese beer named Snow

FOXNews 31.Mar.09

What in tarnation is happening here:

Obama to Automakers: It's My Way or the Highway

Headline this morning from Reuters
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Obama to Bankers: Hit Me Baby One More Time

Headline sort of burbling up from the under-people that hasn't appeared anywhere yet exactly.
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Does God have a bailout plan for Detroit auto makers? Area churches, both Protestant and Catholic, are praying that God does. How about Jews?
Why are no synagogues mentioned in the coverage of religious institutions whose members are asking for God to help save the auto industry? Are Jews not participating in this new call upon the Almighty?

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, author of You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism. Listed as one of the nation’s 50 most influential rabbis in Newsweek, and a regular commentator on Court TV
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Because Jews were unable to own land in the Middle Ages, they became proficient in commerce and money changing, where literacy and knowledge of languages stood them in good stead. Therefore, some Jews were in a good position to benefit from the rise of commerce. Jews were excluded from leadership and even from employment in most of the major basic industries.

Zionism and Israel Web Log
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Oh, Henry:

Ford’s attempt to prevent unionism at his plants produced strikes and violence, mostly provoked by Ford’s own strikebreakers. He opposed various symbols of social and cultural change around him, including Hollywood movies, out-of-home childcare, government regulation of business, Eastern European immigration and new styles in dress and music. His anti-Semitism reduced him in 1927, for one of the few times in his life, to the position of acknowledging error and asking publicly for forgiveness.

Henry Ford Invents a Jewish Conspiracy
Jewish Virtual Library/American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise
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The social currents of the Age of Enlightenment were generally favorable to Jews. In France the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen granted equality to the Jews. Napoleon extended Jewish emancipation throughout much of Europe. From that time, many Jews began to shed their particularistic ways and adopt the norms of European culture. Jews of ability joined the elite of Europe and made numerous contributions to the arts, science and business. Yet anti-Semitism continued nonetheless. The visibility of wealthy Jews in the banking industry led to a resurgence of conspiracy theories about a Jewish plot to take over the world, including the fabrication and publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by the Russian secret police. So this improvement in the status of Jews which enabled them to mix freely in society paradoxically led to modern anti-Semitism...

Anti-Semitism entry in the New World Encyclopedia
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Google returns 250,000 252,000 hits for "Jews in the auto industry" without quotes

Google returns 224,000 hits for "Jews in the banking industry" without quotes

Ten years later, we remember those ordinary people:

...we have been inspired by their struggles and persistence against difficult odds in difficult conditions. They are the erased, the ignored, the missing and the forgotten of the NATO military campaign, the post-Yugoslav transition, and the intervention of the international community, and we name their situations and think of them today, and invite those who read this to join us in doing so.

GBN/Znet

loosely related, with inverted relative motion:

Hot on the heels of last week's FDA approval, on Monday PepsiCo subsidiary Taco Bell launched its controversial "morning after" burrito, a zesty, Mexican-style entree that prevents unwanted pregnancies if ingested within 36 hours following intercourse.
Developed by a team of top Taco Bell gynecologists, the $1.99 "ContraceptiMelt" burrito creates an inhospitable environment within the womb, causing fertilized ovum tissue to be flushed from the body.

WhoElseButThoseGuys
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President Obama likes to tease Larry Summers as a "propeller head" and a "numbers guy," shorthand for a policy wonk who relishes the kind of esoteric arguments that everyday people might find boring and incomprehensible. But Summers doesn't seem to mind. In fact, the former Harvard president takes the joking with good cheer, his White House associates say, because he is so pleased to be back in power at a historic time.

USNews

Significant risk to somebody, for sure:

Mondoweiss has had its Google Ads disabled.

Celebrations in Nazareth... were also cancelled by the police.

I haven't read or seen Obama's response to his unfortunate simile, I imagine it's a fine example of what an articulate intelligent person with lots of good image advice would say.
What caught him is probably not some inherent bigotry or insensitivity, but his spontaneity, and maybe some leakage from the locker room, like that.
It testifies to how genuine he is, how freestyle he'll take it. Improvisation carries all the risk.
Most of the hollow suits in Washington are incapable of saying something like that, not because they're sensitive to the Special Olympics demographic, but because they're so intent on creating and maintaining an image that will sell, and have been for years. They're good at it, they're pros, but they're as genuine as masks. Obama the few times I've watched him speak was clearly winging it.
That business aside, some noise has been generated by the reversal of official US sentiment about the Armenian genocide. Hard to say from way out here but it's likely the same guys who had him bow to their collective majesty when he got the nomination. They were pretty active in the resistance to recognizing what happened in Armenia as Holocaust-level murder. Them, and the Turks of course. The Turks don't have quite as much power in the US though.
The Zionist cabal/whatever does, and they need the landscape free of all and any other victims of that stature. Can't have anyone watering down the awful.
They own genocide, it's their private copyright, no one uses the term without a license.
Thus Sudan/Darfur, genocide. Sri Lanka/Eelam, not genocide.
Because the Zionists have an active interest in what happens in Sudan/Darfur, and they could give a shit about the Tamils being wiped off the map, or driven into the sea.

Special Olympics bowler with a consistent near double score over Pres. Obama.

Mistakes are an unavoidable part of human history, but sometimes we have the opportunity to correct them.

This comment, from a thread called Seymour Hersh On Cheney's "Executive Assassination Ring" at A Tiny Revolution never appeared. There's a moderation filter called Akismet. The first attempt to post also disappeared. It had the word "shit" in it, so I took it out, rewrote the comment and resent it. Nothing so far.
It's something I believe happened, is happening, and also happened to me, as well as a whole lot of other sons and daughters of the USA. It's not all that happened, certainly not all that happened to me, not the defining presence it might be in someone else's life, but without some acknowledgement of forces like this at work in the world, no other description of things has enough solidity.
And there's been way too much gloating accusation of the crippled and incomplete public affairs of other countries where this stuff has been provably done.
What I'm saying here isn't about me, it's about us, about America.

What's near astonishing to me is the way all but the most paranoid conspiraphiles refuse to do the easy logical jump.
If these bloodsucking demons can do those things - have done them - that far outside their home boundaries, with impunity and resources and approval from above - what would they not be allowed to do at home? What wouldn't they be told to do here?
For the same reasons, to the same ends.
Here.
What would they not do here, where what they do out there has the center of its justification?
They're doing those heinous things to protect the interests of their masters, who live and who have families in the US.
Wouldn't the intensity of that protection increase the closer it got to the objects of its service?
How far back does this go?
Starting at least in the 1950's the US population was massively analyzed and cataloged, the data was being generated and collected everywhere, but especially in the public schools, and out of that data profiles were derived, and acted on.
Children with natural leadership especially marked out, and if they began to fit the wrong profile...
No Che, no Fidel, no Mao, no Garibaldi, no Bolivar, no Spartacus, no Luxemberg, no Villa, no Zapata, no Ghandi, no Wallace, no Jesus, no Luther, no Lorca, and ultimately, especially now when they're most needed, no Jefferson no Washington no Adams no Franklin no Paine.
The same attrition, but done cleaner and with fewer traces, before the problem arose.
Profiles mapped onto the up and coming and the full arsenal applied. And what an arsenal it is. So much easier to nip it in the bud than wait for the turmoil, and risk creating martyrs.
Martyrs last.

.

pig fallout lowers the tone everywhere:

In the wrong hands, technology -- like video cameras and high tech computer programs -- is making it easier for people to spy on -- and stalk -- others without them ever knowing.

"I felt completely violated. Every move I made was watched."

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CBS 09.Mar.09

excitement to the east, excitement to the west:

JERUSALEM — Iran is now capable of producing atomic weapons, Israel's top military intelligence officer said Sunday, sounding the highest-level warning that Israel's arch-enemy has achieved independent nuclear capability.

FOXNews 08.Mar.09
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SEOUL (AFP) – North Korea put its military on combat alert Monday as US and South Korean forces started a major joint exercise which the communist nation has branded as a prelude to invasion.
The North, which is preparing what it calls a satellite launch, also warned that any attempt to shoot down the rocket would be treated as an act of war.

Yahoo 08.Mar.09

Alpha Wolfram:

Stephen Wolfram is building something new -- and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

Spivack/twine
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The most obvious and immediate difference between "Wolfram Alpha" and "Google" is Brin and Page didn't name Google after themselves.
Wolfram's made a major error there.
However wonderful the tool is or becomes, attaching his own name to it is ignoble.

A Story for Mama Corral
by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
via De Tod@s Para Tod@s

Mr. Fish, Mr. Goya, Mrs. Clinton

...and tax the crap out of it

Poverty sells but the poor do not.

their fate is intimately tied to ours

Just one blow for freedom, bro:

pummeling the rebel commandante into submission

The chiseled former U.S. Marine and self-described southern redneck reared back

the coup de grace in the three men’s action-packed new memoir

like a postcard from a rain forest gulag

and in the authors’ interview this week with TIME

Some of their more unpleasant memories are saved for fellow hostage Ingrid Betancourt

acting like a privileged blue-blood — “a frickin’ princess”

Asked to elaborate on Betancourt, Stansell told TIME: “That’s an infection I lived with for many years...

With all eyes on Baghdad and new war heroes like former POW Jessica Lynch

when bad things happen to hired guns

the three gringos admit that living alongside their fellow prisoners proved almost as challenging

Betancourt, who was nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize and whom other freed prisoners have praised for her courageous, selfless behavior in the jungle

By the end, those rats are eating each other

with the help of billions in U.S. military aid

Shortly after their rescue, Stansell, Gonsalves and Howes met their hero, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe...

John Otis!/Time! 01.Mar.09
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Astonishing work from Mr. Otis.
One is saddened, some, gladdened, some, at the fall of once at least passably literate standards for direct CIA-to-TIME newsfeeds.
Yale graduates and everything. Once shining princes of manipulation, now anxious and hopeful as car-wash part-timers and cheap day-labor waiting in the lumberyard parking lot at dawn, as it were.
Come to this. A sad day for the invisible hands of skulduggery and deceit.
The Whore of Babylon(3rd letter down) has grown old, stuck like a piece of lettuce between the implacable grinding teeth of Oblivion.

brown, skin:

Michelle Obama, who has swiftly taken her place as fashion style-setter, seems to be enamored of sleeveless sheaths.

She wore one to President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night. She is pictured with one on the cover of People magazine that hit newsstands today. And she's wearing a black Michael Kors in her official portrait newly posted on the White House website.

Boston Globe 27.feb.09
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racism, no:

The US is likely to boycott a UN racism conference, reports say, saying a text drawn up for the event criticises Israel and restricts free of speech.
An unnamed state department official said the draft document for April's forum in Geneva was "unsalvageable".
Canada and Israel have also said they plan to boycott the meeting.

BBC 28.feb.09

?:

"The basic idea is that between the oceans and the land, about half of the fossil-fuel carbon dioxide is being taken up and not going into the air," he said. "We need to understand that better to predict what's going to happen in the future."
The crash yesterday morning of NASA's carbon observatory is going to make getting those answers more difficult, scientists said.

NYTimes 25.feb.09

and to build a pipeline into China:

But private Chinese firms are also taking advantage of the crisis in other sectors: Diesel-engine giant Weichai Power is expected to buy a French plant that US automaker General Motors is selling off in its struggle to survive.
Though the Chinese economy has also been hit by the crisis, cutting growth by almost half, "what sets China apart is that Chinese banks have not been so badly hurt, and the policy banks still seem ready to lend" in support of key government objectives, says Erika Downs, a China energy specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Ford/CSM/Yahoo 23.feb.09

On March 22, 2008, Brian Lewis, 50, scuttled the Jubilee

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg.

...for they lived in different parts of the world, and so could not have copied each other...

A truckload of cut flowers made it out of Gaza today
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Whacking Grandma:

Children, it is suggested, are being shortchanged by their grandparents. This line of argument has attracted financial support from some leading foundations usually associated with liberal social concerns--Annie E. Casey, Charles Stewart Mott, William and Flora Hewlett. Peterson has teamed up with the Pew Trust and has also created front groups of "concerned youth."
Trouble is, most young people did not buy this pitch when George W. Bush used it to sell Social Security privatization. Most kids seem to think Grandma is entitled to a decent retirement. In fact, whacking Social Security benefits, not to mention Medicaid, directly harms poor children. More poor children live in families dependent on Social Security checks than on welfare, economist Dean Baker points out. If you cut Grandma's Social Security benefits, you are directly making life worse for the poor kids who live with her.

Greider/Naion 11.feb.09
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Guatemala has apologized for allowing the United States to use the country as a platform for the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.
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targeted, banned:

Doctors say wounded Sri Lankan civilians are dying for want of proper medical treatment as they lie trapped in a makeshift hospital in the last rebel-held pocket in the north-east of the island.
This weekend, hundreds of injured civilians poured in to the improvised medical facility in Putumattalan village, which has been repeatedly targeted by artillery. Earlier in the week 16 patients were killed in shelling.
Both government forces and Tamil Tiger separatists have been accused of war crimes during the conflict, although confirmation is impossible because independent journalists are banned from the conflict zone.

GuardianUK 15.feb.09
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AMY GOODMAN:Here in the United States, Reuters, the New York Times, BBC and other publications also have complained to the Israeli prime minister. Why are journalists not allowed in Gaza?
DOV KHENIN: Well, I think that journalists are not allowed into Gaza, in order to not—to not make it possible for people around the world to see whatever is happening in Gaza right now. The situation in Gaza is terrible. You know, the people are doing surgery without, you know, any tools, without anything needed to take care, medically, of people wounded. The situation there is really terrible.

DNow!
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Only the pigs and their journalistic servants use the passive voice now and expect it to work.
People from lower down have long since learned that honesty of intent and clarity of statement are their most reliable weapons. Playing the game of deception from necessity along with the pigs and their journalistic servants means only loss.
Which is why we very seldom read anything directly, in the big-screen news outlets, from those people from lower down - people like the Tamil, or Hamas, or those crazy abajos from the Lacandan jungle.
Journalists "are banned from the conflict zone", and that's all you need to know about that.

By whom? you must not ask too forcefully or you'll be in trouble yourself, though a fairly bright 12 year old could see it's the Sri Lankan military that's decreed and is enforcing the ban.

But that would make them look bad and the journalistic servant who wrote the Guardian article is pretty obviously under orders to not make the Sri Lankan government look bad.
Either "the improvised medical facility in Putumattalan village" or Putumattalan village itself "has been repeatedly targeted by artillery". A medical facility where "Sri Lankan civilians" are dying.
The artillery targets the medical facility, as if those big guns are aiming themselves and firing when no one human's looking - a sad and dangerous by-product of sophisticated military hardware these days.
So if you don't know that one side of the conflict doesn't think of itself as, and would never call itself "Sri Lankan", that what they're fighting for and about is their identity as Tamil, as part of Eelam, fighting for their independence from the US-backed and US-financed Sri Lankan government, well, then you're probably left with the sense, because you don't know, that, as in Gaza, the losers in the fight, in this case the Tamil, are just as responsible as the better-equipped and more numerous, and provably, demonstrably, inarguably more vicious, just as in Gaza - and just as in Gaza these are US-backed government forces, in this case Sri Lankan as opposed to Israeli - for the shelling of hospitals and the killing of innocent civilians.
Even more responsible really, because if they would just give up and stop fighting there would be peace.

Farmers eye Israeli jeeps, picking spinach in between shots

Well, yeah, that's why he's there to begin with:

Mad at disgraced investor Bernard Madoff? There's a toy just for you. One of the vendors at this week's Toy Fair is offering the "Smash-Me Bernie," a $99.95 Madoff lookalike doll that wears a devil-red suit and carries a pitchfork. It comes with its own hammer — so you can pulverize it.

AP/YAhoo 16.feb.09

Huffington, Puffington, albeit:

The term "weblog" was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, the editor of Robot Wisdom (itself a blog, albeit one with some nasty anti-Semitism bopping around on it, so we don't recommend you humor him by visiting the site)

The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging
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Huffington, Puffington, Gaza
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Robot, Wisdom, Gaza
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Huffington, Puffington, Jews
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Robot, Wisdom, Jews

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide :

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Lyderson/WashPo 15.feb.09
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What Invasive Species Are Trying to Tell Us

Species have always been on the move. But they've also been held in check by Earth's geographical barriers, like mountains and oceans. Today the rate of invasions has skyrocketed because of our barrier-hopping technology—jets, ships, trains, cars, which transport everything from mammals to microorganisms far beyond their natural ranges. The process is further accelerated by global climate change, that enormous human experiment unwittingly redistricting the natural world.

Good writing on a serious matter, by Julia Whitty in Mother Jones
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Possibly related:

Two Brentwood publicists said they dropped octuplets mom Nadya Suleman as a client Saturday because they have received a slew of death threats.
[...]
Soon after the births, the couple began representing Suleman for free, and almost immediately started receiving threatening e-mails and phone calls from people enraged over the octuplets saga, she said.
"They hope I die, they hope my business goes under, they want to rip her uterus out," Killeen said. "They say I should be anesthetized and put down like a dog."

Hennessey-Fiske/LATimes 15.feb.09

most savage bushfire:

The Cumberland spa, where she was originally headed, was burnt to the ground. In an instant, Marysville had ceased to exist. Up to 100 people lay dead under its smouldering ruins.

"That fire was evil, it had a purpose," O'Meara says. "It was hungry."

Australian 14.feb.09
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No one promised the world would just keep getting better, no one said it would even stay the way it was - the post-war comforts of the 50's and 60's, prosperity, progress, the way new things kept appearing and then becoming now, what the kids would accept as the way things simply are, and go on to build their own world from that - no one promised it, but everyone accepted that was how it was, expected it to go on, believed it would.
There's your evil, beyond anything savage. And, if you look closely, as with fire there's nothing there really. It's all emptiness, within an outline of expectations that were allowed to grow and build on a foundation of nothing but desire, at the bottom of it all, selfish desire, what all organic life brings to the table.

How we got here, wherever this is, whatever we are now, how we lived, was through balancing that desire with and against something higher, beyond and outside the self and its hungers.

The stories within the story of the fires in Australia show this clearly, awful decisions to withdraw, knowing there are lives left behind that will be lost, knowing to stay will be to lose your own, and in the case of many, those dependent on your decisions as well.

Some of the ones who were there in this, seeing the flames and the blackened lives and the dead, were and still are as admirably selfless as it's possible for humans to be, some weren't. With some it shows up suddenly and disappears as quick as it came.
If there's evil in this it's burning at a frequency we still can't quite recognize, destroying things we don't realize we have and so won't miss immediately.

People were tricked into living evil lives, into living wrong, and the accusation comes naturally to them when the symptoms of that wrong living get overwhelmingly clear, but the fires began years ago, in clean cool rooms where deals were made with no regard to outcome, by men whose vision saw only profit and loss.
If there's evil in this it's not in the heat and fuel and spark of the fires themselves, but where it always is, where it always has been - selfishness that puts its own desire above all else, and takes its gratification whatever the cost to those who'll bear it when the price comes due.

"Fucking" is also taboo:

A top UK Foreign Office official has been arrested on suspicion of an anti-Semitic outburst at a gym, the Daily Mail reported Monday.
Rowan Laxton, who is head of the South Asia Group at the Foreign Office, was watching TV reports of the IDF offensive in Gaza while on an exercise bike at a gym when he was allegedly heard shouting, "F***ing Israelis, f***ing Jews," and saying that IDF soldiers should be wiped off the face of the earth, the British newspaper reported.

JPost 09.feb.09
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via xymphora
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Not to pile on or anything, but the fact that even at this late date it's impossible for publicly responsible journals and institutions to do anything with the word but the cutesy-wootsy "F***ing" is directly related and originating from the same sick mindset that has people writing online and spelling "G-d", because as you know, or should know, the magic of God is easily turned to angry magic if you spell his/its name in full, without those cutesy-wootsy little blanks to make it safe and acceptable.
And that horseshit mumbo-jumbo is directly connected to "F***ing" and, wait for it kids, male circumcision.
Which for a lot of us gringo male gentiles has no magical religious connections, but is something supposedly medical - though it's as medically defensible as female circumcision - that was done to us when we were too young to know what it was about. Whereas for some religious Jews it's done with heavy ritual and conscious teenaged participation. It's also an extremely bizarre ceremony, which I'm coming to think may explain a lot of Jewish insanity and belligerent immaturity - beginning in the wounded male psyche and spreading outward from there - that's f***ing up, which is to say fucking up, the world right now.
Maybe the passing on of a virus, a conscious parasite, a parasite of consciousness, "as above so below" kind of thing. This could be why that ant/grasshopper brain thingie was so chilling at first, so chilling and so fascinating at the same time.
Because of course.
I haven't done any reading about male circumcision lately, so the discussion may have advanced since the last time, when it was still all about "disease prevention" versus WTF***!

This was known as Metzitzeh. In this step the mohel would suck the blood from the circumcision wound with his mouth. Although initially thought to reduce the infections by sucking out any bacteria, it was actually found to introduce infection such as tuberculosis and venereal diseases. More modern day mohels use a glass tube placed over the infant's penis for suction of the blood

wikipedia

Something that never seems to get mentioned is the wonderful psychological weapon that circumcision of the young provides the older males in a society. Them cutting off the tip of your dick being a pretty decisive expression of their dominance. And getting you to participate in that cut as though it's a good thing is truly astounding, and way, way dominant. Whereas setting things up so it happens when you're a baby is just sort of cold and insectile.

Google Victoria fires map
via peacay at Boynton

Actual quote from actual news article written
and edited by well-paid professional journalists:

Israel headed for political gridlock on Wednesday after its election produced rival winners.
Analysts said the country was as split as the Palestinians...

Hamilton/Reuters 11.Feb.09

noun, adjective and verb:

It is time the Obama lovers grew up. It is time those paid to keep the record straight gave us the opportunity to debate informatively. In the 21st century, people power remains a huge and exciting and largely untapped force for change, but it is nothing without truth.

Pilger/NewStatesman 05.Feb.09

David Tiley on the Australian fires

Science, Medicine, Religion, Weather, Etc:

2 Mice Carrying Plague Disappear
The FBI investigated and determined there was no risk to public health or any indication of the terrorist link.
It wasn't the first time plague-infected mice have disappeared from the New Jersey facility...

FOXNews
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At last, Blair is free to 'do God' – and America loves it
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Caylee's remains won't be at memorial service
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China declares drought emergency
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An earthquake that killed at least 80,000 people in Sichuan last year may have been triggered by an enormous dam just miles from the epicentre
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"It's just going to be, probably by a long way, the worst day ever in the history of the state in terms of temperatures and winds," Victoria Premier John Brumby

Australian Firefighters Prepare For Worst
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Absolute devastation
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Bill Gates, mosquitoes
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Mosquitoes, Bill Gates

Our next meditation will be on time:

To make sense of what I’m suggesting it is necessary to reject the notion of time that began in Europe during the 18th century and is closely linked with the positivism and linear accountability of modern capitalism: the notion that a single time, which is unilinear, regular, abstract and irreversible, carries everything. All other cultures have proposed a coexistence of various times surrounded in some way by the timeless.

John Berger/LeMonde (google cache) Feb.06

::: via :::

Well here why not, I can't move without the jangle and thud of some kind of metaphysical whatever anyway. So here.
The World Trade Center collapses into itself, and eight years later world trade itself collapses.
Amazing continuity, really, when you think about it.
Bad news coming in like that tsunami back when.
Out around the edges of all that disaster from the sea narrative did leak the fact that those jumbo prawns everbody was munching were coming out of leveled and gone mangrove swamps at the edge of the sea there where the tsunami hit, which used to buffer the force of rogue waves, diffuse it, spread it out. But they got cut down so cheap shrimp could get to market cheaper.
Damage control evolving over time, so that things came through, things made it through. Creatures and trees and all, learning how to cope with the periodically predictable unexpected.
Something will come through this, something like a small fish, small fishes, or crabs, or anemones, barnacles, that's the idea. Evolution gnaws and gnarls and grunts and groans and then every once in a while the slate's wiped almost clean and there's so much room it's scary and for a long time no competition but the void and oblivion.
It's not going to be all right. Not for a while, maybe not for a long while, maybe not ever if your imagination can't get past something that has to be enough like you that you could slip into its shoes or inhabit its feet and go on.
Sad, pretty much, and here we were almost right there, scurrying around out on the brink of the verge of just about inventing the techniques and technologies that would have given us the possibility of living so long it might as well have been forever.
Coming into it through the tradesmen's entrance, as it were.
Still possible of course.
The other direction's got nicer views. Would you sacrifice your place on that long train of selfish gratification to get something else lifted up higher? Your grandchildren maybe.
Maybe birds, or little frogs that take off in the absence of birds and become, after a few million years of rough evolution, sentient and then some, and travel - see them with vivid green space suits and deep booming radios and pods full of the cutest little tadpoles you ever saw - travel like we keep telling ourselves we're going to, we were going to, we still might, travel - to the stars, with hope.
Can you get to the ledge where "we" are that? Is your heart that big?
It's hard for most of us - once we start toward it, it seems to recede as we advance, or we have to fall back on the local affinity group, which at the moment is awfully fractious, contentious, so nasty to each other it's to the point the "we" of simply being human is shredding apart - and maybe it's supposed to?
Can you do that one?
Because it may be all we have now.
That something will come through this, and we may affect that, cause it, aid it, care for it - that we may shape it, hold it up, let it go.

$45 Emergency Menu for 4 to 6

Hillbilly Housewife

Everything's connected, but nothing makes sense:

News results for Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer
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Jimmy Carter, anti-Semite
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Jimmy Carter, Israel apartheid
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Possibly tainted peanut butter sent to schools

Also:

A 72-year-old milkman who supplied cannabis to customers on his rounds to help ease their aches and pains was today given a suspended sentence.

"He said he sold the cannabis to existing customers because they were old and had aches and pains"

Sam Jones /GuardianUK
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Phelps has also been dropped by one of his sponsors, Kellogg, for having been photographed putting his amphibian features into a glass pipe normally used for smoking marijuana, or so people tell me.

George Vecsey/NYTimes
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Cereal and snack maker Kellogg Co. said it won't renew its sponsorship contract with Olympic swimming star Michael Phelps because of a photo that showed him inhaling from a marijuana pipe.
The Battle Creek, Mich.-based company said Thursday that Phelps's behavior — caught on camera and published Sunday in the British tabloid News of the World — is "not consistent with the image of Kellogg."

AP/NBC
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After all, smoking pot didn't prevent Barack Obama from becoming president. And obviously, recreational marijuana use hasn't harmed Mr. Phelps, whose prodigious performances have garnered 14 gold medals, the most in Olympic history. If he can smoke pot and perform at such a superhuman level, then perhaps we should reconsider the effects of -- and punishments for -- use of the substance.
But, you're probably thinking, very few presidents, Olympic champions and college students are arrested for drug use. My daughter attends a prominent private university in the city, and she tells me many of her peers smoke pot. Yet neither she nor I had ever heard of a single arrest for this crime on campus.

Who are all of these people getting arrested? And what the heck's the matter with them? Don't they know how to get pot delivered 24/7 to their dorm via carriers from whom you order by cellphone?

Well, here's a hint: 83% of those arrested in New York City in the last decade were African-American or Latino. This occurred even though these groups, while underrepresented among college students, don't actually comprise the majority of drug users.

Stanton Peele/WSJ
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Drug hypocrisy's easy to dismiss - it's shallow, superficial, lame - but pretty difficult to understand.
Aside from the large bloc of profit-driven franchise-guarding golden goose-protecting antagonism from the legitimate, as in legal, alcohol industry - I mean you can see why anyone with a paycheck coming in from booze could be anti-pot, and arguing mightily against its presence on the shelves of the local bars and liquor stores, though my informal guess would be even there most of the rah-rah anti-weed action is pro forma and insincere, but why the nice, sincere, worried, decent folks?
Some of it, a pretty small part I imagine, is people who've seen relatives slide off into the deep end, and watched them start by getting high on weed, before they advanced into whatever.
Most of it's political though, or religious in a moral/political sense. And it's because these decent sincere worried good-intentioned folks are being told to be anti-pot, not because experience and inspiration are telling them, because their pastors and priests and the nice people on the television are telling them, often between the lines, without actually saying anything directly.
Most of it's political, in the sense that decisions are being made by politicians in the light of their careers and personal fortunes, to keep marijuana illegal.
Okay but why?
Because the illegal marijuana industry's bigger than cars.
Because the amount of money generated by keeping pot illegal, and thus having its price reflect that artificial scarcity in the face of massive and growing demand, is bigger than the money generated, oh especially now, by manufacturing and selling cars.
And money talks.
And bullshit supposedly walks - though in my experience it's generally to be found walking right along behind the money.