Except he had found the standing sea-rock that even this last Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace that quiets the desire even of praising it.
Of course, no possibility can be discounted as to the identity of the perpetrators of Friday’s attack. But the high-speed issuance of guilty verdicts by politicians should at least be accompanied by a recollection of the ease and expediency of the practice of framing.
As for who stands to benefit from continued instability in Lebanon, it goes without saying that many domestic and international forces have stakes in this business. In his book Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, historian David Hirst writes:
Several states, from inside the region and beyond, have impinged on Lebanon – wooed, bullied or sought to subvert it from within, attacked, invaded, occupied or otherwise maltreated it … But none has done so more strenuously and disruptively than the state of Israel.
Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them some questions. I'd start with: "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?" And: "How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" Or even more pointedly: "How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs were unable to detect an IED that awaited their convoy?"
Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.
Aramark, often contracted to provide food to prisoners at about a dollar a meal, is one of numerous corporations, from phone companies to construction firms, that have found our grotesque system of mass incarceration to be very profitable. The bodies of the poor, when they are not captive, are worth little to corporations. But bodies behind bars can each generate $40,000 to $50,000 a year for corporate coffers. More than 2.2 million men and women are in prisons and jails in the U.S.
Israel cast lead indiscriminately hither and thither, aiming to melt not just our bodies, which it did, but also our allegiance and our hope and our memories, which it could not do. Twenty-three days later, the people of Gaza rose to dust themselves off and to start an arduous journey of rebuilding houses and infrastructure, and reconstructing what the missiles had dispersed and scattered. Twenty-three days of nonstop Israeli hate and hostility—and Gaza rose from it like a phoenix.
The people who queued at the morgues and bade farewell to their loved ones days later queued at bakeries that did not raise their prices, and went out to the grocery stores that also did not raise their prices. And they came back home to distribute what little they bought to the people who were unable to buy because they did not have the money. The people of Gaza were never this close before.
As the first step in rebelling against a broken system and a dysfunctional Congress, the NHRebellion invites you to continue Granny D and Aaron’s work by walking down through New Hampshire. On January 11, 2014—15 years after Granny D began her walk, and beginning on the day Aaron died—we will walk the state from the top to the bottom, recruiting as many citizens in New Hampshire to this cause as we can. Our walk will end on January 24th, the day Granny D was born.
The #NHRebellion was inspired by the late Doris Haddock, aka, Granny D, a citizen of New Hampshire, and who, at the age of 88, walked across the country with a simple sign on her chest: “campaign finance reform.”
Long before I came to the issue, Granny D was recruiting anyone she could to the critically important cause of changing the way campaigns are financed. She believed, as I do, that the current system is a kind of “corruption.” And she believed, as I have come to believe, that unless we find a way to change it, our government will be incapable of addressing sensibly any of the critical issues that it must resolve. Granny D devoted the last part of her life to
this fight. The #NHRebellion will continue her work.
So you might ask, what's the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC's position? Exactly how much money should one extract from a firm that has been shamelessly profiting from business with criminals for years and years? Remember, we're talking about a company that has admitted to a smorgasbord of serious banking crimes. If you're the prosecutor, you've got this bank by the balls. So how much money should you take?
How about all of it? How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they've ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby's auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don't think twice. And then throw them in jail.
Sound harsh? It does, doesn't it? The only problem is, that's exactly what the government does just about every day to ordinary people involved in ordinary drug cases.
Projecting power and fighting wars with minimal risk to one's own soldiers, with high accuracy and and potentially less risk to civilians on the other side, is progress of a sort. But law enforcement at all levels, not to mention our adversaries, are also getting access to these tools. I'm deeply uncomfortable imagining Google as an arms dealer, where its unprecedented knowledge of our lives gets added to devices that in the wrong hands are enormous threats. A company that claims "don't be evil" as a slogan can't be a neutral supplier to anyone with enough cash, or with data to trade.
Dan Gillmor/Guardian 19.Dec.13
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As with everything else that's happening on the big stage now, there's a vision behind it. Always a vision behind it. Hidden, unarticulated, but shaping every act and utterance.
Whose vision, where it has its origin, and especially what it has as the result of vision translated into act, the opening out from conception to birth to maturity, that's the key. And as always, the doubting, the reluctant, the burned and shy are shoved aside or left standing on the sidewalk while the sleek dark vehicles accelerate silently away.
I see a worm inside a mechanical suit of armor, a cpu of inert organic sentience directing the implacable, with no connection to the gone world but formulaic nutrition, the old forms of biological splendor consumed to feed its mechanical necessities until it's a have-to, no longer just possible, no longer a bad choice, now the only choice.
The worm must live this way because it has no protection without it, no way to feed itself without it, no means without it to any other end but futility.
Just as the drones make cowardice viable, and the bitterness of cowardice acceptable, indiscriminately powering the weakest with just enough manual strength to pull those virtual triggers, the long run promise is compensatory not elevation, not extension of the good toward the better, not even transcendence from the neutral flatline of everyday humanity, but up from the sunken margins of failure. Revenge against nature.
The coward and the cripple with equal status to anyone who ever lived, handicaps defects incompleteness overcome to become prosthetic superior strength, because of possession of the machine interface as it grows toward symbiosis.
The worm hungers toward the stars, and it must make human essence its own, replacing the genuine, indefinable human, assuming the center, the reason for collective existence, as long as it requires moral governance to sustain its systemic needs.
Soon enough, in that vision, moral governance will be redundant, and all values will be the worm's survival only.
23.12.13
on the one hand, the other handisn't there __________
Israel condemns US spying revelations
Officials call on US to stop spying on Israel amid renewed calls for release of Jonathan Pollard, jailed in 1980s for spying GuardianUK22.Dec.13
- NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel
• Secret deal places no legal limits on use of data by Israelis
• Only official US government communications protected GuardianUK11.Sep.13
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Israel irked by Snowden revelations of spying on its leaders
JERUSALEM — Israel is the latest country to express displeasure with reports of U.S. and British spying on its leaders, although there was not a great deal of surprise over the revelations or suggestions that they would damage relations. LATimes22.Dec.13
- U.S. shares raw intelligence data with Israel, leaked document shows
The National Security Agency regularly gives Israel intercepts that may include sensitive data about U.S. citizens, a memo leaked by Edward Snowden says. LATimes11.Sep.13
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Israel to U.S.: Stop Spying On Us | TIME.com [22.Dec.13]
Israeli officials broke their silence over the U.S. surveillance scandal Sunday, angrily demanding an end to spying on Israel.
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search for Time magazine on raw data to Israel had no result other than above story
The commander of Operation Xatruch III, a military-police task force based in the Colón province, which includes Bajo Aguán, publicly accused Bird of destabilizing the area by “questioning the methods of the Honduran justice system” and making false claims about security forces operations. On December 12, 2013, the newspaper La Tribuna quoted Col. German Alfaro Escalante as saying: “We are in the process of investigating a complaint against a supposed American named Annie Bird, who is going around doing destabilizing work here in the Aguán sector, meeting with various campesino leaders.” Alfaro’s comments have been reproduced in national media, accompanied by photos of Bird, a US citizen.
Human Rights Watch/ScoopNZ 20.Dec.13
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Honduras is the most corrupt narco-trafficking country in Central America.
20.12.13
Ugh want recognition:
Dan Dediu, from the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands, published a review article earlier this year suggesting that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a similar capacity for language.
He said that the current study brought more weight to the conclusions that Neanderthals had very similar hyoid bones to us, "not only in form but also in what concerns their mechanical properties".
"The authors themselves are understandably cautious in drawing strong conclusions, but I think that their work clearly supports the contention that speech and language is an old feature of our lineage going back at least to the last common ancestor that we shared with the Neanderthals," Dr Dediu told BBC News.
The Role of Horses in World War I:
Meanwhile heavy plough horses, conscripted against expert advice, proved quite unsuitable for the artillery role for which they were earmarked. The official historians noted: ‘Veterinary officers … foresaw their weakness for military purposes, and anticipated the heavy loss which would ensue if they were indiscriminately employed in war … because of great susceptibility to disease, large food and watering requirements, and inability to stand forced marches.’ Heavy horses perished in thousands in France, partly because of the extreme vulnerability of their feet to wet weather.
Dear friends and "fan club members". This will be my one and only comment in twitter regarding the events of pic.twitter.com/nO49W4jI8O
— Stanley Cohen (@StanleyCohenLaw) December 19, 2013
19.12.13
now, with G-d’s great mercy, here in America:
Bolivia on Wednesday accused the United States of helping a New York businessman escape from the South American country where he had spent 18 months in prison and was under house arrest for alleged money laundering.
Interior Minister Carlos Romero said Washington orchestrated a clandestine operation that spirited Jacob Ostreicher, 54, out of Bolivia illegally - further clouding what is known about the entrepreneur's surprise getaway.
...
Ostreicher was arrested for alleged money laundering and connections to drug traffickers related to his purchase of a rice farm in 2008.
Jacob Ostreicher, an Orthodox Jewish American held captive in Bolivia since June 2011 has made his way to the United States, The Algemeiner has confirmed.
A source familiar with efforts to have the businessman released confirmed that an “operation” took place Sunday night that resulted in Ostreicher’s return to his family.
In an email circulated to friends and supporters, his nephew Moshe confirmed the news as well.
“With happiness, we are informing the community of Israel that our dear uncle… has already left the iron curtain in Bolivia, and is now, with G-d’s great mercy, here in America,” Moshe wrote.
algemeiner 16.Dec.13
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No mention in algemeiner of Ostreicher being fingered by Bolivia for drug-money laundering, it's "money laundering and criminal organization". Contempt for the less-chosen isn't controversial, it's overt, prevalent. The enslavement process as a God-granted gift.
It's still impossible to talk openly in the aboveground about "Kosher Mafia" control of the international drug markets.
There's a line of descent from 19th Century opium trade thru 20th century heroin and cocaine to the present.
The dissonance of the stated aims of the Afghan war, the vertical rise in opium production during that war.
Haiti, lawless, broken, crawling with the desperate and willingly corrupt, as transhipment hub.
The neoliberal opening of Myanmar and now consequent increase in opium production in the Golden Triangle.
Geo-political ugliness, and domestic policies that make no sense on the surface.
The common view, virtual consensus, is some greasy ethnics, not Jews, in the case of cocaine the spics of Latin America, as if South American greaseballs had enough weight to run American drug wholesale operations. Shipment at most.
That shit is internal. Powerful. "American". Likely the same power that has American foreign policy in its grasp.
It's idiotic to assume the illegal drug industry's management is outside the country.
I don't know who the unaware think is supposedly running heroin now, I don't think most people even view it as a business like any other, with hierarchies and concentrations of power. And if they do, probably the Italians.
The disjunct between the people's expressed demand that marijuana be decriminalized and federal refusal to stop the war on weed, the rise of "medical" outlets with the same inflated prices as the underground and the simultaneous fed crackdowns that keep the money big.
There's huge money moving through those systems. Enough money that it makes sense that the drug prohibitions, of the US especially, are being bought and paid for by the wholesalers, while supply continues to meet market demand, with just enough legal impedance to keep the prices artificially jacked.
More on this to come.
18.12.13
that our absolute loyalty lies in the disobedience to power:
The circle narrows. The grandmother of a close friend — she’s as old as you are — pleads with her robbers not to be sexually violated, she even claims to be infected with a communicable disease; the nephew of a fellow writer is shot in the face, killed in his own house by a night intruder whom he mistook for a rat; the son of my eldest brother is stabbed in a parking lot outside a restaurant, the blade pierces a lung, the police never turn up, he is saved because his companion calls her boyfriend all the way in Australia by cell phone and he could summon a nurse he happens to know in Johannesburg. (The woman is on a first visit to the country; she leaves the next day and swears never to return.)
One in five American children is now living in poverty, giving the United States the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania.
Scientists have known for years that injection wells and other human activities can induce earthquakes by changing pressures underground. That can have the effect of “unclamping” old stressed faults so the rocks can slip past each other and cause the ground to shake.
The weight of water behind a new dam in China, for example, is thought to have induced a 2008 quake in Sichuan Province that killed 80,000 people
a post-modern film by Jeremy Scahill, about himself, starring himself in many poses:
Economic warfare – strangling nations like Cuba, Iraq and Iran in Medieval fashion – is a type of Dirty Warfare beloved by the Great White Fathers who control the world’s finances. Though no less deadly than atomic bombs, or firebombing Dresden, it is easier to sell to the bourgeoisie.
You’ll hear no mention of this in Scahill’s film, nor will you hear any references to Phil Agee, or the countless others who have explained Dirty War to each generation of Americans since World War Two.
You will not hear about psychological warfare, the essence of Dirty War.
Douglas Valentine/Dissident Voice 07.Jun.13
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I bought in to Scahill's shuck from his audio-appearances on DemocracyNow! when I was still feeling a credulous trust and openness to/for Amy Goodman, which is pretty much gone now.
The openness and trust is gone, Goodman's still on the air, but with what appears to be her conscienceless ennabling of Greenwald and Scahill, and other less distinct undercurrents of collaborative and collective self-interest, I just don't have the faith anymore.
There was a photo of Obama I think on Xinhua, at Goree, the island where captive Africans were held and then embarked in chains toward their new lives as slaves in the New World.
It's a cool stylish image. He's leaning in a 400 yr old doorway, it looks almost but not quite like an 80's Calvin Klein or someone two-page magazine thing. Rough eroded architecture, broad color fields of natural stuff and sky, but he's too far from the camera to be specifically pimping the casualwear.
So I was looking at that, going "Hmm, well...you know, he's got to be thinking, feeling...or no, I'm supposed to be thinking, feeling..." when drowning virtual Somalis and Haitians came pouring over and around and through it, kind of.
People who are actively intentionally on purpose getting into often very sketchy boats, sometimes paying lots of or even all their last moneys, to go and become practically slaves, because that's promising better than the less than nothing and everything collapsing down back home.
So, there's a simple formula, I think. Permeating so much of what's below most of us, lives that are so completely extra they're hard to see until the not-working parts flare up. Even with Salgado and others showing it for years, and Berger and others telling it, for years.
We're taught and feel inherently some kind of human value for all humans, but the practices of the world we live in have been, and still are, reducing people at the bottom to the status of laboratory animals and worse.
Under people.
Surplus we can use. Or some intermediary we use can. And it's okay. Because look, they're working and feeding themselves and they have at least a place to sleep. And because their lives don't really matter and there's millions and millions of them.
That went into moderation at Crooked Timber then disappeared. A thread about the riots by Indian migrant workers in Singapore.
Two attempts to alter machine-objectionable possibilities disappeared along with it. Two nonsense comments made it right to the thread. Now I'm off to try it again. Be right back.
Well, the thread's moved on to a girls' school dance of absurdity and bathos, with real gritty reality bits thrown in. Now the comment wouldn't fit even as loosely as it fit right when I sent it.
So this for now.
The Nielsen-Haydens are CIA, they have been from the get.
Somebody is, has to be, the chances of there not being at least a few prominent internet smart-kid bloggers who are company-affiliated, at least to a degree that's indistinguishable from service to those on the other side, are virtual nothing shading to none at all.
7.12.13
If you are not a legal person, then you are considered, legally, a thing:
Courts recognize that a sufficient, though not necessary condition of a fundamental right like bodily liberty is the possession of certain qualities. With over half a century of scientific evidence to support our legal arguments, and affidavits submitted in support of our lawsuit by an international group of the world’s most respected primatologists, our lawsuits set out to establish that chimpanzees possess such complex cognitive abilities as autonomy, self-determination, self-consciousness, awareness of the past, anticipation of the future, and the ability to make choices; that they display complex emotions like empathy; and that they construct diverse cultures. The possession of these characteristics is sufficient to establish personhood and the consequential fundamental right to bodily liberty.
Our arguments establish that extending legal personhood to all the known chimpanzees in New York is strongly supported by law, science and history. In fact New York law does not limit legal personhood to just human beings. Courts have also routinely extended rights to non-human entities such as corporations.
It is important to note that we are not trying to give human rights to chimpanzees. Human rights belong to human beings. We are advocating for chimpanzee rights for chimpanzees, beginning with the fundamental legal right to bodily liberty.
By 1965, 80 percent of American women had diamond engagement rings:
...it wasn't until the late 19th century, after the discovery of mines in South Africa drove the price of diamonds down, that Americans regularly began to give (or receive) diamond engagement rings. (Before that, some betrothed women got thimbles instead of rings.) Even then, the real blingfest didn't get going until the 1930s, when—dim the lights, strike up the violins, and cue entrance—the De Beers diamond company decided it was time to take action
...
In 1919, De Beers experienced a drop in diamond sales that lasted for two decades. So in the 1930s it turned to the firm N.W. Ayer to devise a national advertising campaign—still relatively rare at the time—to promote its diamonds. Ayer convinced Hollywood actresses to wear diamond rings in public, and, according to Edward Jay Epstein in The Rise and Fall of the Diamond, encouraged fashion designers to discuss the new "trend" toward diamond rings. Between 1938 and 1941, diamond sales went up 55 percent. By 1945 an average bride, one source reported, wore "a brilliant diamond engagement ring and a wedding ring to match in design." The capstone to it all came in 1947, when Frances Gerety—a female copywriter, who, as it happened, never married—wrote the line "A Diamond Is Forever."
Meghan O'Rourke/Slate
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Due to advertising campaign, artificially induced fad, parallel to the artificial insertion of cigarette smoking into the cultural flow - thru Hollywood subliminals and massive focused advertising campaigns - by 1947 diamond demand is way up.
Apartheid begins in South Africa with the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948
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The Rt Hon Cecil John Rhodes DCL was an English businessman, mining magnate, and politician in South Africa. Rhodes was named the chairman of De Beers at the company's founding in 1888.
...
In October 1871, 18-year-old Rhodes and his brother Herbert left the colony for the diamond fields of Kimberley. Financed by N M Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes succeeded over the next 17 years in buying up all the smaller diamond mining operations in the Kimberley area. His monopoly of the world's diamond supply was sealed in 1889 through a strategic partnership with the London-based Diamond Syndicate.
The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.
The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company.
At a moment when anyone with a claim to a share in the Mandela legacy is proud to make that connection, Israel has a painfully difficult case to make.
It was a close, if secretive, ally and arms supplier [to]apartheid South Africa and there is a good case to be made that Israeli support helped the all-white regime in Pretoria to last longer than it otherwise might have.
There have been stories - which are difficult to substantiate definitively - that the co-operation extended into Israel sharing nuclear weapons technology.
Mr Mandela observed sharply that when he was finally released from prison he received invitations to visit "from almost every country in the world, except Israel".
Nelson Mandela has already been mourned by many Jews around the world. And for good reasons.When Mandela was released from prison by de Klerk, he showed statesmanship and reconciliation rather than revenge.
But his biography reveals that he was an enemy of the Israeli people.
A post-apartheid Pretoria that joins in boycotting Jerusalem is one of the more powerful victories for the boycott and divestment campaign. And it’s Nelson Mandela’s legacy.
Informed consent should never be abrogated for any research involving human subjects, under any circumstances, in any country, regardless of local standards and regardless of the type of research.
4.12.13
When the people make dark the light within them
the world darkens
The Guarani have one of the highest murder rates in the world and land theft is at the heart of all the violence. In spite of this, the land demarcation process is stalling – the authorities are doing far too little to challenge ranchers who have taken the tribe’s ancestral land. How many more gruesome killings must the Guarani suffer before their territory is mapped out and protected?
English men have funny haircuts, generally. The placement of attractive women behind but in camera line. Part of the intentional decor.
And as Wikileaks points out, nothing about the real shit. Not even going to look at it.
What Chelsea Manning did, what Jeremy Hammond did, is reveal the lying serpentine evil and its direct connections to real harm - the violent oppression, the spilled blood and ruined lives, the destruction of communities and futures.
What Snowden and the Guardian/Post/Times and Greenwald have accomplished, so far, is the astonishing revelation that powerful secret government agencies are staring at everyone.
I already never read the Daily Kos:
A big part of me thinks, wow what is wrong with you that you see a gorilla there?
It goes without saying that at a time when the scourge of global anti-semitism is on the rise:
"...as we work to end anti-Israel bias in the UN system..."
John Kerry/ScoopNZ 02.Dec.13
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Just kind of writes itself, doesn't it?
3.12.13
silly boys all over the place:
In a 2005 piece David Aaronovitch criticized Atzmon for writing in his essay "On Anti-Semitism" that "We must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously." and "American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forged irrelevant. American Jews do control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least"; Aaronovitch said Atzmon was "a silly boy advancing slightly dangerous arguments".
from the Wikipedia entry on Gilad Atzmon, who Max Blumenthal, among evidently quite a few others, has "repeatedly denounced as an anti-Semite".
Since calling someone an anti-Semite energizes most nice people's radar to a degree that rational open-mindedness toward the accused becomes nearly impossible for them, and is then only achievable with conscious active effort, effort which is counter-productive to the receptive open-minded state, it's a very serious charge to make. It's also nigh impossible, once so accused, to avoid consequent antagonism.
People who level that charge don't really have much awareness of its consequences. Being slimed on and info-groped by assholes like the dishonorable thugs who deploy from groups like the ADL and its many subsidiary orgs is a repellent and polarizing experience all by itself. The accusation can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There's one of those tipping points in there, where whatever the original conditions were, the fear and defensive reactions of Jews to accusations of devious and covert activity - ancient irrational hatred! - practically necessitate a world-controlling response, to neutralize the real and increasing threats - from people who are seriously mad at you because they think you're controlling the world, and fucking up their lives. Even if you weren't doing that, even if it only looked like you were, or if only some of you were.
This is likely to account for at least some of the motives behind the NSA surround-snoop full-system info-suck. But to get to that assertion you have to get to Semitic manipulation of the US governmental apparatus to a degree that would make that doable. Which is conspiracy-thought, and targets the speaker of that thought for ridicule and contempt.
The total absence of discussion and analysis of the NSA's driving impetus, who's been ordering it to do all that, and especially why, would obviously point to something seriously powerful and covert in addition to the acts of surveillance. The discussion either goes underground from there, and onto the glass slides of infinite regress surveillance, or it gets exposed, isolated, and dealt with.
The so-called Southern Poverty Law Center, in its role as monitor of "hate groups", which superficially seems to be valiantly protecting struggling black folks from them dumb-ass cornpone racists and Gestapo re-enactors, functions now primarily as early-warning radar for....
whoever it is that creates the social conditions and cultural ambience in which Atzmon's reputation eats shit in much of polite society and Sheldon Adelson gets to vet the Republican nominee for President.
What Atzmon said above, is what Alterman said below.
2.12.13
Wait,..what?
“If a Jew-hater somewhere, inspired perhaps by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sought to invent an individual who symbolizes almost all the anti-Semitic clichés that have dogged the Jewish people throughout history, he could hardly come up with a character more perfect than Sheldon Adelson.”
Eric Alterman > MaxBlumenthal > Mondoweiss
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This quote is from a piece by Alterman in the Nation, quoted in a piece by Blumenthal at Mondoweiss, around the idea that Alterman's smearing Blumenthal because Alterman says David Duke likes what Blumenthal's doing in his, Blumenthal's, book Goliath.
And since everybody knows Duke's a registered anti-semite, or anti-Semite, or Anti-Semite, or all three, Duke's praise and Alterman's alluding to it, is a smear.
One of the ways you can tell people like Duke are irrationally prejudiced toward Jews is they think people like Adelson, as Alterman describes him, and as both Blumenthal and Mondoweiss evidently concur he does, do exist, and they, anti-Semites, talk about them, people like Adelson, existing, as individuals, and as a type within the collective, Jews.
Alterman seems to be saying that the existence of Sheldon Adelson, and his activities as Sheldon Adelson, are a bad thing for the collective, Jews, because they give fuel to the fire of bigotry, an irrational dangerous bigotry that believes things that aren't true about the collective, Jews.
For instance that people like Sheldon Adelson, a Jewish Republican kingmaker featured prominently in the news during the last US Presidential race, exist and do the things they do.
And it's socially and often legally prohibited, because of the Holocaust, to speak about them as if they do exist, because they don't and it's unfair, because of the Holocaust, to all the decent non-Adelson Jews to say they do. But Alterman is speaking about him.
It's as though Alterman thinks that if it were true that Adelson is who he is and if it were true that he does what he does, it would be bad for the Jews, because it's a negative stereotype right out of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion, and because racists like Duke would then think they were right about Jews.
But wait. Sheldon Adelson really is who he is, and he really does do what he does. And so is, and does, Mel Sembler.
On a less surreal note, both Blumenthal and Phil Weiss and likely other liberal progressive Jews as well, say one main fallacy in the paranoid Zionist mind-set - that festering bigotry against Jews still exists in the US - is refuted by the prosperity and comfort and security and professional and social status currently enjoyed by their peers and relatives. No need for a refuge in Zion.
Something I wish they'd address when they do that is the steep decline in prosperity and well-being of the US middle class and especially the hopelessness-inducing and steadily deteriorating economic conditions in the American underclass. Because that Jewish prosperity they point to would appear to have occurred in near parallel to that precipitous decline for their fellow citizens.
Saying things are great because your people are headed into the 1% in unprecedented numbers, however true, isn't what I'd call a sensible statement at this time.
It's hard to balance accessibility and security, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it:
While Syme might only introduce a few additional speed bumps to state surveillance, it looks great compared to Facebook, where the only good thing about Facebook is that a lot of people are on it. Every other aspect of Facebook is rat poison.
