informant38
.

-
...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not...
Milton, Areopagitica

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.

Jeffers, Meditation On Saviors


-

22.9.14

The comment below didn't appear on this thread
http://crookedtimber.org/2014/09/17/night-will-fall-and-german-concentration-camps-factual-survey/comment-page-3/#comment-567085
Evidently I've been banned from Crooked Timber. Or at least parts of it.
The irony of Cory Robin disemvowelling a different comment, as he did, on another thread, to the satisfaction of the pigs monitoring his excited championing of Steven Salaita's public disciplining, because I took Salaita's outrage two clicks further toward the truth, is likely unavailable to the wimps of academic progressive liberal whatever that shit is. Free speech, unless it bothers us.
Fuck Jews who have no courage. And don't give me that idiocy that Robin's doing anything even mildly valiant. He's protecting far more than he threatens. He's ultimately an athletic coward.

This comment is a response to the philo-Semitic wound-licking of the thread. Like most public displays of Jewish woundedness these days the tone and assumptions in many of the comments are hypocritical and historical dishonest.
It is an incoherence to speak of Jewish villainy in a context of Jewish victimhood. As though both aspects of character can't be displayed in the same people.
It is a form of Holocaust denial to imply the Nazis were after the Jews exclusively. They were racial supremacists, just like Israel is, and they were removing racial impurities from their expanding territories, just like Israel is.
They operated to a vision of racial superiority, just as Israel does, just as many non-Israeli Jews do, however publicly restrained that racial arrogance is.
Israel is acting for something much larger than the tiny population of that tiny country - this is not a controversial statement.
Robin and his affinity group are acting for that same thing, under a different flag.
Jewish chauvinism at a time like this is loathesome.

The comment:

An American veteran commits suicide every 65 minutes, because of the soul-damage of the conflicts they're being sent into, the things they've seen and done, for reasons they've found to be lies, and the failure of the ineffectual and incompetent "support" they receive when they return from those conflicts.
American police kill someone every day, a hugely disproportionate number of those deaths are black and brown and poor.
Conditions in some Central American countries are so dystopic now, children travel at great risk 1000's of miles just to chance the border. In places like Honduras those dystopic conditions are a direct result of the simultaneous War on Drugs and narco-trafficking enabling of American agencies.
The environmental destruction that's looming just ahead of us is being caused by corporations and policies that have in many instances a primarily American origin.

Those are just a few seriously wrong things that are happening right now, and the ambiguous nature of knowledge and culpability in the American public, the control of information and attitude, means most citizens can legitimately claim not to know, and can still claim to be basically decent people, because most of them really "don't know".
More germane to the thread, one feature of the cathartic post-war Nuremberg Trials was the "Doctors' Trial" where the medical enablers of the Nazi death camps were tried for, among other things, human experimentation. I believe nine of the 20 plus doctors on trial were executed.
At the same time as those trials, and throughout the 20th century, human experiments were being conducted in America, often on the captive institutionalized, often glossed with deceptive legalisms and dubiously gained "consent". These were not heartless Aryan scientists doing these things. The famous Salk vaccine for polio was developed in part through human experiments that were far from above-board.
But you didn't know that. You didn't see it.

23.7.14

to give people permission to give up hope:

I don’t think we need hope. I think we need imagination. We need to imagine a future which can’t be planned for and can’t be controlled. I find that people who talk about hope are often really talking about control. They hope desperately that they can keep control of the way things are panning out. Keep the lights on, keep the emails flowing, keep the nice bits of civilisation and lose the nasty ones; keep control of their narrative, the world they understand. Giving up hope, to me, means giving up the illusion of control and accepting that the future is going to be improvised, messy, difficult.

The Tim DeChristopher quote which you use approvingly is something which divides us. I admire anyone who can go to prison for their beliefs (well, not anyone, it rather depends what those beliefs are) but I’m of the opinion that the last thing the world needs right now is more “humanitarians.” What the world needs right now is human beings who are able to see outside the human bubble, and understand that all this talk about collapse, decline, and crisis is not just a human concern. When I look to the future, the thing that frightens me most is not climate change, or the possibility of the lights going out in the lit-up parts of the world, it’s that we may keep this ecocidal civilization going long enough to take everything down with it.
Paul Kingsnorth /grist interview w/Wen Stephenson

30.6.14

This exchange was produced by the same technological manipulation and deceit, by essentially the same people, and for essentially the same reason.
Where the facebook deception is covered by a kind of generalized "Oh we're just learning things!" that exchange, rather the information at its core, was the application of a treacherous gathering of knowledge.
The tools of the craven, the weapons of cowardice.
It's time people wake up to the fact that entrapment is a Satanic strategy.
It begins in superior knowing, uses the predictable, or predicted, behavior of the mark, and relies on human weakness to work. It exploits the incomplete nature of us all.
At its heart is a conversation between evil and God.
"We didn't make them do it! They did it on their own, because they're weak."
There's no virtuous application for the knowledge gained by the facebook experiment. It's only use is for deceit and manipulation. The perversion of the news, which is a perversion of the communal need for shared information.
It's animal experimentation's inevitable evolution.
People on facebook don't feel pain like we do.
Besides they hate us.

25.6.14

"The first task of the American revolutionary is not to think him or herself mad."

23.6.14

obscured by political and financial treason:

"I see five major overlapping threats on the immediate horizon," he continues. "They are all related: the collapse of complex societies, the acceleration of the Earth's demise with changes that used to take 10,000 years now taking three or less, predatory or shock capitalism and financial crime out of the City of London and Wall Street, and political corruption at scale, to include the west supporting 42 of 44 dictators. We are close to multiple mass catastrophes."

What about the claim that the US is on the brink of revolution?
"Revolution is overthrow – the complete reversal of the status quo ante. We are at the end of centuries of what Lionel Tiger calls 'The Manufacture of Evil,' in which merchant banks led by the City of London have conspired with captive governments to concentrate wealth and commoditise everything including humans. What revolution means in practical terms is that balance has been lost and the status quo ante is unsustainable. There are two 'stops' on greed to the nth degree: the first is the carrying capacity of Earth, and the second is human sensibility. We are now at a point where both stops are activating."
Robert David Steele/Nafeez Ahmed/GuardianUK

22.6.14


                                                                                       Eretz Sheol

20.6.14

The first second Iraq War was for the oil.

Zimmer-frame capitalism

18.6.14

They know what’s going on. They cannot find the words to speak.

17.6.14

no middle ground:

In 1999, ex-CIA agent Charles Schlund III went public with the information about the government’s Vietnam-era radio blacklists “to suppress rock music because of its role in the Vietnam War.” It was also around this time that Sainte-Marie learned that the government had tapped her phone and that the FBI had accrued a 31-page file on her. Stonechild scrupulously pieces together the facts of this injustice, and it's sure to stir up some fresh countercultural rage in every Sainte-Marie fan who comes across a copy of It's My Way. But is it too little too late; is his book preaching to an unfortunately small choir? As she muses in the 2006 documentary Buffy Sainte-Marie: A Multimedia Life, “They only have to hold you underwater for about four minutes and you’re dead for a long time, when it comes to radio airplay.”
Lindsay Zoladz/LARB

14.6.14

9.6.14

Searching for Kalpana Chakma

Because everyone deserves the chance to live healthy productive lives:

Few bothered to look closely at the study's fine print, which revealed that the trials resulted in 151 deaths and caused “serious adverse effects” (e.g., paralysis, seizures, febrile convulsions) in 1048 of 5949 children aged 5-17 months. Similar stories emerged in the wake of the Gates-funded MenAfriVac campaign in Chad, where unconfirmed reports alleged that 50 of 500 children forcibly vaccinated for meningitis later developed paralysis. Citing additional abuses, a South African newspaper declared: “We are guinea pigs for the drugmakers.”

It was in India, however, that the implications of BMGF’s collaboration with Big Pharma first rose to widespread public attention. In 2010 seven adolescent tribal girls in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh died after receiving injections of HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) vaccines as part of a large-scale “demonstrational study” funded by the Gates Foundation and administered by PATH. The vaccines, developed by GSK and Merck, were given to approximately 23,000 girls between 10 and 14 years of age, ostensibly to guard against cervical cancers they might develop in old age.

Extrapolating from trial data, Indian physicians later estimated that at least 1,200 girls experienced severe side effects or developed auto-immune disorders as a result of the injections. No follow-up examinations or medical care were offered to the victims. Further investigations revealed pervasive violations of ethical norms: vulnerable village girls were virtually press-ganged into the trials, their parents bullied into signing consent forms they could not read by PATH representatives who made false claims about the safety and efficacy of the drugs. In many cases signatures were simply forged
Research Unit for Political Economy

4.6.14


                                                  Houston, you have a problem

2.6.14

"The evolution of resistance and virulence in structured populations"

"antibiotic winter"

Adieu Henri Bureau and thanks for the metaphor

28.5.14

Pablo De Llano translated by Dyane Jean François
weird-ass funeral in Mexico City
hot shit journalism in El País

27.5.14

I don't give a shit that you feel sorry for me. Get to work and do something:
                                                     -
                                                  Some Notes on Isla Vista

Richard Martinez (father of kid killed in conv. store by E Rodger, half-breed sociopath) thinks he, Martinez, doesn't have a gun, and he doesn't want one. Also he doesn't want his fellow citizens having guns either, evidently.
But he does have one.
His gun is called "Police" it's called "Sheriff" it's called "FBI", "Secret Service", "USArmy".
Take away those guns and Mr. Martinez will want one of his very own to have and to hold real quick.
Or he won't be here.
The mythic levels of sadistic violence in south of the border drug gang murder show the descent to atrocity that's inevitable w/o some kind of stable social context and a forceful authority to maintain it.
There are hideously bad people in the world.
How many and how active they are seems to depend on a lot of things.
One that only gets press in the religious/hippy area is how much kindness is available at any given moment. How much saturation kindness has in the main.
The public index of compassion.
Compassion is an emotional state of being and a way of acting that's antithetical to free-market capitalism.
Don't give me that shit about gazillionaires being all philanthropic once they wise up. That's after they've made their money in the shark tank.

Also the ability to see things coming. To predict, forecast, prophesy.
To stop bad things from happening by seeing them coming before they happen.
The glitch in that is that any predictions, any predictors that call for immediate resolve, something needs done, if they rock the big ark too much, will be thrown over the side.
This is the same template of opposition that calls for social justice run into.
Want to eliminate street crime? Get rid of the unconscionable degree of human misery at the bottom.
But that would mean your greedhead ship would have to change its course.

The solution at the top is protected compounds, invisibility and controlled access.
But the kids won't stay inside all day and night, not until we breed up a bunch of human mushrooms or something.
So they go out into the streets mommy and daddy's plutophilic greed-syndrome have made unsafe.
Surveillance I hear you say.
Put the niggers and white trash on camera 24/7 and let em know you're watching.
Profile the berserkers and render them before they explode, I hear you say.
Only your track record on solutions to serious problems is let's say negligible at best.
And anyway what you're dong there is mostly just creating a bigger more powerful distributed gun, with an invisible silencer on it.
And as we see, guns can be turned on decent people.

We can't devalue human life and expect human lives to not become more expendable.
We can't throw an exponentiating population into permanent, and permanently increasing, anxiety and not expect people to look around for who to get rid of.

My heart says stop writing and work on the deeper part, the part about death not being our enemy.
So that's what I'm going to do now.

25.5.14

131 signatories urge Human Rights Watch to stop being hypocritical lying sacks of shit.

23.5.14

Hawking!

A few notes on reparations:
There seems to be an intelligence working in the contemporary cultural landscape that isn't rooted in time exactly.
So that to it everything's already done, and we all just need to tidy up.
Bright ghost mind.

Those of us who are still operating under the illusion that time is moving steadily, or we're moving steadily through it, have a more onerous task, when it comes to the things of the past.
Crime, violation, atrocity, heinous things abounding. And we owe every good thing in our lives to everything that came before us.
People owning swathes of territory their ancestors stole outright, with bloodshed and illegality pervasive. Hey that was my great-grandfather not me.

Imagine that as a rape that results in pregnancy that comes to term, the birth of a child of that rape.
Imagine that child, grown up, mature, having outlived either parent. The victim and the victimizer, now both gone.
So reparations for the crime of that rape would go to whom?

It's this desire to avoid the complicity of identity that's most vulnerable in the claimants, people whose heartfelt desire is for redress for things that are treated as fortunate accidents for the heirs and beneficiaries of them, not crimes that need to be addressed.
But the assaulting forces, the ones who ridicule the claims, are too fucking stupid to figure that vulnerability out, so they fall back on an idiot's view of history.
That it only began around the time of their graduation from middle school.
Everything before that is over and done. Can we just move on?
Dull ghost mind.

21.5.14

what we all talk about when we think of Haiti

Rachel's father Craig Corrie said, "The Supreme Court now has a choice, to either show the world that the Israeli legal system honors the most basic principles of human rights and can hold its military accountable, or to add to the mounting evidence that justice cannot be found in Israel."

17.5.14

 an antagonism towards the Jewish community and Israel
for reasons which are certainly not apparent:

“Israel years ago, during one of the wars, killed 30 or 40 Americans on a spy ship in the Western Mediterranean,” Fraser told Faine.
“The Americans tried to cover it up. It wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate.”
When asked on what he based the claim, Fraser said: “Information I have. I am not going to tell you the source.”
                                                           ...
“To make these allegations about Israel deliberately targeting Americans when there’s no evidence to support it, when successive inquiries by both the Americans and the Israelis have demonstrated that this was an accident, I just think it is appalling beyond description,” he said.
                                                           ...
“The [USS Liberty] incident was subject to no less than 10 American investigations and an additional three Israeli investigations, all of which found that it was indeed an accident.
JewishNewsAU
-
The just elemental logic there, Fraser says Israel bombed the USS Liberty on purpose - which lots of people know they did, because the Liberty was a spy-recon ship, and the Jews wanted to cold-bloodedly murder a bunch of Egyptian POW's and they didn't want a record of that getting out to the world, which the Liberty was in a position to make - and the American government covered it up, because the American government was compromised by Jewish gangsters someone - and Liebler and Lamm both insist that since the Americans and the Israelis both investigated the incident repeatedly and both found no evidence of anything hinky, it should be case closed.
But wait boys, you're saying the people accused of doing a heinous thing, and the people accused of covering up the doing of that heinous thing, should be the only people investigating whether that heinous thing did in fact occur?
And you're not foaming at the mouth crazy?

16.5.14

I don't do "Days" but if I don't do Naqba Day I'll feel guilty:

7 years ago or so I was talking to this dude, an acquaintance/family friend of my roommate's at the time, Jewish guy, rode a Harley, had that kind of Ackroyd/Leno vibe, sort of normal tough guy.
I was talking to my roommate a few days before that about Palestine and the behavior of Israel, about how Bin Laden fingered US support and enabling of the Zionist atrocities in Palestine as primary cause of Islamic rage, and my theory at the time, still my theory, that the Iraq invasion was a Zionist thing, a proxy use of people the Zionist Jews had total contempt for, poor Americans, for purposes of conquest and revenge on people the Zionists hated and feared, the Iraqis, and my roommate was all you should talk to A__ cause he knows all about that stuff.
So he was over at the house one day and I asked him about the situation, mentioning that J__ had said he was up on the what's what of that. And he was all oh yeah I got the inside skinny on all that.
So I said so what do you got on the Naqba?
And he was all Naqba? Never heard of it.

An American Jew who prided himself on his knowledge of the contemporary Middle East, and was known in his social circle as being a knowledgeable guy.

Go fuck yourselves.

Calling the illegal houses built on stolen land "settlements" duplicitously co-opts the myth of the American West, the pioneers, Westward Ho!, the settlers, the sod house barbwire cowboy movie wilderness tamers of the 19th century.
It works in some pretty intricate ways, the Indians for instance, Native American savages analog to Palestinian savages, the better use of the land and resources by the more civilized invaders, the tangential narrative position of the invaded, their unimportance to the story except as obstacles to the progress and safety of the invaders, the central narrative position of the invading, their chosen-by-God-ness.
The American fantasy was God would prefer the more civilized Europeans to have the use of the bounty and possibility of the New World. So the story has the "settlers" braving weather and savages as if they're the same things, heartless inhuman dangers that have to be bravely overcome.
And the wilderness tamed and settled.
But those aren't "settlements" they're colonies established by aggression and invasion, illegal now in international law, whatever that means ultimately, but thoroughly immoral from any human perspective no matter what, always.
So no wonder the campaign for "post-humanism" is getting amped up.

Let's get beyond all that old-fashioned right-and-wrong bullshit, it's all and only about what works now, what works for us, the post-humans.

Go fuck yourselves.
-
Holocaust Denial:

Pretending the Nazi eugenic program was simply a hate machine devoted to extermination of the Jews.

Instead of what it really was - a purging of the inferior to a template of Master Race eugenic superiority, a culling of the infirm the retarded the insane the anatomically grotesque the socialists the communists the queers the Roma...all of them went down before the mighty wheel of Aryan triumph.
Because the goal was to clean up the gene pool, toward the Aryan ideal.
The problem with educating people about what the Nazis were really doing, and why they were doing it, is it's too fucking close to what the Jews are doing today in Israel, and for precisely the same reasons.
Delusional arrogant assumptions of racial superiority.
Delusions of racial superiority confronting the obstacles presented by their subhuman inferiors, necessitating a campaign to exterminate them, to provide the Chosen Ones a nest for the incubation of their rightful, glorious destiny.
It's virtually note for note what the Zionists are trying to accomplish in Israel, right now.
So no wonder it isn't allowed to be seen for what it is.

Although he’s considered Canada’s most admired figure, Suzuki has been the target of relentless attacks from his nation’s prime minister, corporations and right-wing ideologues.

15.5.14

the dream of an AIDS-free generation is within our grasp:

Over the past 30 years, we have witnessed time and again how stigma, discrimination, and fear – and the misguided policies that stem from them – further fuel the epidemic by deterring those most in need from accessing lifesaving HIV prevention, treatment, and care services. We have also learned from experience that creating programs that respect and uphold the dignity of every human being and provide care to all who need it not only increases the numbers of people who access HIV services but also decreases the numbers of new HIV infection. The cause and effect are clear.
Statement from Ambassador Deborah Birx, M.D., U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, on the Passage of the HIV Prevention and Control Act by the Ugandan Parliament
-
via ScoopNZ
-
Cheers to Ambassador Birx.
It's too bad that "creating programs that respect and uphold the dignity of every human being and people all over the world" won't work equally well on the other epidemics presently causing so much human suffering.

14.5.14

All you need to know about why Greenwald's free and at large 
and Chelsea Manning's in the brig:



a tiny occurrence:

The international drug trade is “basically a monopoly for the ones who control it,” he said. “We want to introduce a huge competitor, which is the state, with all the power of the state.” The endgame is to force cartels out of business through economics: The government will sell weed at a shockingly low price of a dollar a gram. To Mujica, stamping out the violence associated with the drug trade comes down to slashing prices, not funneling billions of dollars to military and police and locking up his citizens.

Perhaps surprisingly, while drug-policy analysts, news-hungry stoners, and other anti-prohibition observers love Uruguay’s move to legalization, it’s actually unpopular within Uruguay. A poll conducted prior to the law’s passage determined that 64 percent of citizens oppose legalizing the drug. And the United Nations’ International Narcotics Control Board has decried the nation, and Pepe in particular, for irresponsible policy decisions. I asked him what he thought about that.

“It has always been like that with changes,” he said, wagging his head. “In 1913 we established divorce as a right for women in Uruguay. You know what they were saying back then? That families would dissolve. That it was the end of good manners and society. There has always been a conservative and traditional opinion out there that’s afraid of change. When I was young and would go dancing at balls, we’d have to wear suits and ties. Otherwise they wouldn’t let us in.
Krishna Andavolu /Vice

both Uruguay/pot links via Sullivan's Dish

a low price designed to compete:

Leftist President Jose Mujica signed a decree outlining the fine print of the new policy on Tuesday. It says Uruguayans will be able to buy up to 10 grams of marijuana a week at between $0.85 and $1 dollar a gram, a low price designed to compete with black market cannabis that mostly comes from Paraguay.

Activists who have backed the measure said legalized marijuana would be high-grade and affordable.

"You can't compare a flower that is quality-controlled by the Public Health Ministry ... with Paraguayan (stuff) which is absolutely harmful because it has external substances," said Bruno Calleros of the Cannabis Liberation Movement.

He said legal marijuana would cost roughly 20 percent of the current market price for similar high-quality marijuana.
Malena Castaldi/Reuters
-
roughly 20 percent of the current market price
roughly 20 percent of the current market price
roughly 20 percent of the current market price

roughly 20 percent of the current market price!

Fuck you Colorado and Washington.
Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you
and especially fuck you greedhead motherfuckers
trying to ride that disgusting vampire train
pretending to set free the weed and its enthusiasts
while you keep the money suck at turbo velocity
fuck you

The US public is in a kennel of greedhead
a factory farm of greedhead
a plantation of greedhead
fuck you greedhead motherfuckers


Sorry for the profanity.

13.5.14

Thinking I may re-up

O you who believe! You are forbidden to inherit women against their will:

I could tell you that Islam was the first system to establish women’s property rights, inheritance rights, the right to education, to marry and divorce of their free will, to be religious scholars, business owners, soldiers.
I could tell you that while Christianity was debating the status of women’s souls and declaring them a source of sin, Islam had already established authoritatively the spiritual equality of men and women and absolved Eve, and womankind at large, of sin.
I could tell you that the world and history is full of highly educated, successful Muslim women who are empowered by their faith, not debilitated by it.
I could tell you terrorism is categorically forbidden in Islam, and that between 1970 and 2012, 97.5% of terror attacks in the U.S. were carried out by non-Muslims.
I could tell you that female genital mutilation is never mentioned in the Quran; the only reference to it is found in a weak narration, and scholars find it objectionable to the point of being classified as impermissible.

Nothing I tell you would matter, though. The facts are irrelevant. That’s how bigotry operates.
Rabia Chaudry/TIME
via Joyce Carol Oates

7.5.14

The President of Russia:

"...if we want to find a long-term solution to the crisis in Ukraine, open, honest and equal dialogue is the only possible option."
-
The problem with that solution is trying to have an open and honest dialog with insane people who have given themselves permission to do anything necessary - literally anything, culminating in the unthinkable, once their delusional aspirations are seen to be impossible - to accomplish their insane goals. They have permission from their God and from their own consciences to lie, to poison, to seduce, to murder by proxy, to trick and manipulate in any of the traditional ways, and to trick and manipulate in new ways that have still to be discovered.
How can anyone have open and honest dialog with lying sacks of shit such as those directing the behavior of the US government?
Well you can't. But you can, as Putin is doing, consistently and continuously refuse to degrade yourself in the face of the degraded and their depraved acts and dishonest words.

The Dongria Kondh resisted the mine that would have destroyed them as a people and should now be left in peace. There is no public interest in hounding them further.

5.5.14

Goodman does Abu Ghraib today
-
From DemocracyNow! i.v. Oct.26 2005 w/ Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was the highest-ranking USmil. figure to take the fall for culpability in the Abu Ghraib "scandal":

AMY GOODMAN: In the interrogations, you told the BBC that you met an Israeli working as an interrogator at the secret intelligence center in Baghdad.

JANIS KARPINSKI: Well, in a separate facility, not under my control, where the task force was originally assigned, I was escorting a general officer, who was not assigned in Iraq, but was making his last visits to different units, because he was getting ready to retire, and he asked to go over to this facility, because he knew a lot of the people that were working over there. And when the sergeant major asked if he wanted to see — tour the rest of the facility, if I wanted to go with them, I declined. I said I would wait there in the foyer. And there were three individuals there, three men, and they had D.C.U. pants on, one of them had blue jeans on, and different shirts.

AMY GOODMAN: D.C.U. means?

JANIS KARPINSKI: Desert camouflage uniform, the desert military uniform pants. And one of them had a pair of blue jeans on. So I said, "What are you guys doing here?" And I said to this one individual, who looked like he was an Arab, I said to him, "Oh, are you a translator? Are you from Kuwait? Are you from Iraq?" And he said, "No, I’m not a translator, and I’m not from Kuwait or Iraq. I’m from Israel. And I work in this facility." So, I never — he never told me that he was an interrogator. But that facility was likely used for interrogation. So, if he worked in that facility, you could conclude that he had something to do with interrogation operations...
-
9 years and the consensus is still that Lynndie England was a sadistic little hillbilly creep and that's why those pictures happened.
What should be electrifying is there were Shin Bet torturers operating in Iraq during the pig circus of Bush's invasion and occupation, but there were no Israeli soldiers on the ground.
None, zero. Not even a token force.
Our greatest ally, that little beacon of democracy in the Middle East.

Fun facts about the Coalition of the Willing

Morton Abramowitz, Eric Edelman and Blaise Misztal:

You see, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t establish the rulers and ownership and agenda-setters for these publications, aka US media, and then go back and trust them when they begin to sell you a whistleblower or a leak as the real deal.
            ...
Mort Abramowitz is a known neocon, Israel lobbyist, CIA and State Department Operative, and PNAC signatory, and has been one of Fethullah Gulen’s main handlers and backers.
Sibel Edmonds/BFP
-
Morton Abramowitz, Eric Edelman and Blaise Misztal:
Staying silent, out of fear that speaking out would harm some short-term interests, risks Turkey’s longer-term stability.
-
The "Zionists" can walk the Secretary of State of the United States back and forth across the world stage. The prospect of their having enough power to do similar things to the relatively insignificant media shouldn't be anything but a foregone conclusion.
Scare quotes because it isn't confined to the Zionist program. The harm of Sheldon Adelson isn't a result of his Zionist chauvinism. That's a symptom of a much deeper pathology.

Jimmy Carter's triumph over the Guinea worm has so many things to teach the rest of us, as we struggle with parasites and the infection of our bodies, literal and figurative, and the bodies of our children and the body of their future, by parasites.
A very important lesson from the Guinea worm,and other parasitic infections, is the hi-jacking of the conscious decision-making of the host.
Your leg is hot, burning and itching unbearably, you want to scratch it, and keep scratching it until you break the skin, and you want to cool it off, get it cooled off by putting it in the river, you want to scratch your leg and put it in the river.
This is the biological strategy of the Guinea worm, to create that desire in its host. It does this by hi-jacking certain pathways in the nerves of the leg.
Because once it gets you to scratch that open sore into your leg, and then put your leg in the river, it can emerge and lay its eggs there, and continue the cycle of its life. Satisfied worm.
Parasites are older than mammals, that's important to consider as well.
As above, so below. That's also very important.

4.5.14

Who is that big woman who just came in here?

Good news for proxy vampires everywhere:

Infusions of young blood may reverse some effects of ageing
-
Coupled with fresh replacement organs, I think we're looking at the first toddling steps of extreme longevity, with the corollary glow of eventual immortality just over the horizon.

As with some of the other more heinous activities of contemporary heinosity, the dominant p.r. says there's no such thing as organ theft.
Right, because in a world falling at an exponential rate into depravity of all kinds except overt speech and images of racism and homophobia (as opposed to systemic racism, which is still culturally central), the enormous profitability of organs - demand far exceeding supply, people dying on the waiting lists - mostly destined for the failing anatomies of the proportionately (compared to the "donors") wealthy, the amoral and immoral willingness to traffic human organs runs smack into an impregnable wall of contemporary virtue.

Which we all know is always stronger than even the most determined heinous malfactors, no matter how big the money involved.

Of course it isn't theft if there's a contract, an agreement, and money changes hands along with the kidneys.
"It wasn't theft! I've got a receipt!"

2.5.14


.






Mt. Baldy may be suffering indigestion

Afghanistan deployed US com-tech at Cryptome

images of Afghanis at Wilson Quarterly
first I've seen of opiate use

1.5.14

Ten Years On:

What about George Bush, Condi, Wolfowitz, and Powell? Will they ever be held accountable for the devastation and the death they wrought in Iraq? Saddam was held accountable for 300,000 Iraqis... Surely someone should be held accountable for the million or so?

Finally, after all is said and done, we shouldn't forget what this was about - making America safer... And are you safer Americans? If you are, why is it that we hear more and more about attacks on your embassies and diplomats? Why is it that you are constantly warned to not go to this country or that one? Is it better now, ten years down the line? Do you feel safer, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis out of the way (granted half of them were women and children, but children grow up, right?)?

And what happened to Riverbend and my family? I eventually moved from Syria. I moved before the heavy fighting, before it got ugly. That’s how fortunate I was. I moved to another country nearby, stayed almost a year, and then made another move to a third Arab country with the hope that, this time, it’ll stick until… Until when? Even the pessimists aren’t sure anymore. When will things improve? When will be able to live normally? How long will it take?
riverbend/Baghdad Burning

orientalist tropes of Palestinian sexual backwardness:

One of the most remarkable features of the Brand Israel campaign is the marketing of a modern Israel as a gay-friendly Israel. Stand With US, a self-declared Zionist organisation, has been quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying: "We decided to improve Israel's image through the gay community in Israel." This "pinkwashing", as it is now commonly termed in activist circles, has currency beyond Israeli gay groups. Within global gay and lesbian organising circuits, to be gay friendly is to be modern, cosmopolitan, developed, first-world, global north, and, most significantly, democratic.

Events such as WorldPride 2006 hosted in Jerusalem and "Out in Israel" recently held in San Francisco highlight Israel as a country committed to democratic ideals of freedom for all, including gays and lesbians. Yet pinkwashing obscures the much more foundational, intractable and, by the terms of the Israeli constitution, necessary lack of freedom that Palestinians have in regards to Israeli state oppression.

Israeli pinkwashing is a potent method through which the terms of Israeli occupation of Palestine are reiterated – Israel is civilised, Palestinians are barbaric, homophobic, uncivilised, suicide-bombing fanatics. It produces Israel as the only gay-friendly country in an otherwise hostile region. This has manifold effects: it denies Israeli homophobic oppression of its own gays and lesbians, of which there is plenty, and it recruits, often unwittingly, gays and lesbians of other countries into a collusion with Israeli violence towards Palestine.
Jasbir Puar/GuardianUk

30.4.14

Policing and the deaf

Ethics:

On May 7, 1998, another disclosure from the government investigation shook the CIA’s weakening defenses. Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a February 11, 1982, “letter of understanding” between the CIA and the Justice Department. The letter, which had been sought by CIA Director William Casey, freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan Contras and Afghan rebels who were fighting a Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan.
America's Debt to Gary Webb
Parry/FAIR March, 2005

28.4.14

the mask comes alive:

What keeps us from being monsters are Emerson and Thoreau and the Beatles and Bob Dylan—great artists who teach us to love and hold off on the hurt. The hurt is inside of us, and of course we can always randomly hurt something, but a great artist will teach you to love a thing and not want to possess it or alter it—just to love it. You finally have to love Big Nurse. It’s the symbol behind her, the combine, that makes her do what she does. You’ve got to fight that, but finally you have to love them all—the poor, broken human beings, even the worst of them.
Ken Kesey
Paris Review interviews

25.4.14

"When I remember it now, I just want to set myself on fire,"

the Age of Noise:

Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its Divine Ground.
Aldous Huxley Silence, Liberty, and Peace (1946)
Stay Free magazine

24.4.14

The Mexican Government is trying to censor the Internet.

1134 – lives not numbers

23.4.14

THE COMING OF THE SILENCE
(After the Summer Tide)
by
Blanche Trask

She doth not walk the village street,
Lest ways too smooth should harm her feet;

She waits until the tide is low,
And there 'mid old rocks, see her go

(The rocks which long must buried be,
'Till winter's low tide sets them free).

She loiters on the long wet sand,
A trailing seaweed in her hand.

The gulls which loud, discordant cry,
Fly seaward as she passes by;

The fog which long for her doth wait
Enthrones and mantles her in state.

The winds that pray her slaves to be,
As scepters holds she o'er the sea.

The low, low tides yet lower creep,
'Till all the world is lost in sleep.
* * * * *
Then mantled fog she throws aside,
The sceptred wind she scatters wide,

And thro' long days she dares to be
What she meant - eternity.

                Gambler Tony Cornero Stralla Playing Craps Aboard Ship "Lux" Off Coast of California

Suspicious death[edit]

On July 31, 1955, Cornero told an investors' meeting in Las Vegas, "We need another $800,000 to stock the casino with cash and pay the liquor and food suppliers." Later that day, Cornero was playing craps in the Desert Inn Casino.[2] Suddenly, he fell to the floor and died.
Rumors soon arose that someone had poisoned Cornero's drink. The rumors gained credence when Cornero's body was removed from the casino floor before anyone contacted the Clark County Coroner or the Clark County Sheriff's Department. Cornero's drinking glass was taken and washed; sheriff's deputies never had the chance to examine it. No autopsy was performed and a coroner's jury in Los Angeles determined that he died of a heart attack.

Aftermath[edit]

Cornero was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. In 1958, the Stardust Resort and Casino finally opened and became the largest hotel in the world. The Stardust would remain a huge success until its demolition by implosion in 2007. Cornero is also credited with the lucrative concept of putting slot machines in the hotel lobby to lure guests as they passed by

22.4.14

"Climate change demands that we consume less, but being consumers is all we know."

"In the best-case scenario, we damage the Earth less.
We are currently wrangling about how much to devastate the Earth."

Yelling at the mirror:

“We continue to be concerned that you cannot dress yourself like a firefighter and behave like an arsonist,” Nuland said.

20.4.14

The well-heeled group seemed receptive.

"...because no organized and sustained opposition makes austerity politically impossible..."

INDIA: National shame

Smedley, we hardly knew ye:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Washington'sBlog

14.4.14

in every generation they stand against us to destroy us:

It’s notable that, despite his racism, Miller was a fan both of David Duke and Louis Farrakhan. What could a white supremacist possibly have liked about the leader of the Nation of Islam?
Other than base hatred of Jews, what Duke and Farrakhan have in common is their belief in conspiracies. Jewish bankers, Jewish media bosses, Jews controlling government – as usual, conspiracies help the marginalized and disempowered reassure themselves...

Forward
-

It’s wrong to blame the writer for the deeds of a psychopath who reads him. Even if that writer has engaged in the same shabby tactic before

Eli Lake tweet
-
   That Lake thing is a marvel of opacity, and disgusting virulence. But it's the twitter, so.
   None of the victims were Jews, but it's still all about the Heil and the Hitler. And Passover! OmG! Passover! How unfortunately timely.
   The celebration of the release from slavery of the Chosen People of God.
   Were there other slaves in Egypt? Slaves who were not Jews?
   Oh, who cares about them.
   Why did the Angel of Death/God need splashes of blood on the lintels of Jewish doors to know to not kill their first-born sons? No accurate record keeping in the higher realms?
   Cross/Miller was arrested in 87, did three years on reduced charges because he gave up a bunch of his race-fellows. So a co-operator, already broken that far. So then prison for three years, then he's free, because this is America, and that's that. Go on about your hate-filled business, citizen!
   Sirhan Sirhan, the Syrian who was convicted of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, has looked from the beginning to possibly be a programmed drone whose function was as an expendable, seemingly autonomous agent of organized covert lunatic nastiness. This is a conspiracy theory of the first order, but it is subscribed to by more than a few rational reasonable folks.
   Considering it's been almost 50 years since the RFK takedown, if that was in fact what it was, you'd think the construction of hypno-programmed human drones would have advanced its techniques and capabilities considerably by now.
   Or there's no such thing.
   Even though that was the Holy Grail of mind-control research for the entire existence of mind-control research, which is a pretty old area of researching things, all in all.
   The amount of resources directed at finding a way to make people do what you want them to - without their having any say in it, or even any real knowledge of what and how and who, just irresistible compulsion - that's a big budget there. With a whole lot of work coming out of it, in deepest secrecy.
   Could be all useless, pointless and futile.
   There's a fading trope about hypnotism that I like, because it makes clear and simple the lying horseshit around this question. The idea that no one can be hypnotized into doing something against their moral character.
   The reason I like it is it exposes the confusion and delusion, or collusion and complicity, of the speaker.
   How does anyone know that people can't be hypnotized to do something they wouldn't do in full consciousness?
   Because we tried, stupid! We tried and tried. We hypnotized dozens of likely subjects and it never worked, not even once.
   Oh. So they hypnotized some guy and told him to go home and murder his grandpa, and he didn't, and they did that 37 more times and it never worked, so that's that?
    But I can guarantee you, I am guaranteeing you, that if they did, if they found a way to do that, it would be one of the most closely guarded secrets of all time. Because the power it would bestow would be incalculable.

13.4.14

A community of people who:

A community of people who read many books has discovered a hidden history of America with corruption so profound and scary that it shocks the sensibilities of most Americans and drives the mainstream press to seek comfort in official government lies. The history of this covert battle for the heart of American Democracy is filled with stories that would make the Sopranos blush and Abraham Lincoln cheer.
Mark Gorton
-
Nolan/Gawker
via cryptogon
-
Encouraging weirdness works so many ways, if you're doing weirdness to begin with.

“The same thing that will happen here if we let it.”

11.4.14

April is
Poetry
Month

10.4.14

the profound and intuitive ties that bind:

A Bushman from the Central Kalahari travelled 5,000 miles from his home in Botswana today to tell the Prince of Wales, ‘We’re not poachers – we hunt to survive.’

In February Botswana’s President Khama was an honoured guest at a global anti-poaching conference in London, alongside Prince Charles and Prince William. The initiative resulted in the launch of Prince William’s United for Wildlife, drawing together seven big conservation organizations, including US-based Conservation International (CI). President Khama is a CI board member.

But President Khama has banned all hunting nationwide, even for Bushmen who hunt to feed their families, under the pretext of clamping down on poaching. However, it has emerged that trophy hunters who pay up to $8,000 to hunt giraffes and zebras are still being allowed to hunt.
Survival

    "Were you ever in on that Cold War stuff, Pop?"
    "For me? Too technical. But people at Bronx Science I ran with...Crazy Yale Jacobian, nice kid, we used to go downtown, make a little change playing Ping-Pong. He went off to MIT, got a job with the RAND Corporation, moved to California. We lost touch."
    "Maybe he didn't work in the blowing-up-the-world department."
    "I know, I'm a judgmental person, sue me. You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some fell. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives."
    "Pop."
    "Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the taxes,absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid."
    Maxine goes sorting among semiexploded kernels for what little popcorn is left. "But history goes on, as you always like to remind us. The Cold War ended, right? the Internet kept evolving, away from military, into civilian - nowadays it's chat rooms, the World Wide Web, shopping online, the worst you can say is it's maybe getting a little commercialized. And look how it's empowering all those billions of people, the promise, the freedom."
    Ernie begins channel-surfing, as if in annoyance. "Call it freedom, it's based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you've got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable. You remember the comics in the Daily News? Dick Tracy's wrist radio? it'll be everywhere, the rubes'll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. Terrific. What they dream about in the Pentagon, worldwide martial law.
    "So this is where I get my paranoia from."
    "Ask your kids. Look at Metal Gear Solid - who do the terrorists kidnap? Who's Snake trying to rescue? The head of DARPA. Think about that, huh?"
    "Pop."
    "Don't believe us, ask your friends in the FBI, you know, those kind policemen with their NCIC database? Fifty, a hundred million files? They'll confirm, I'm sure."
Thomas Pynchon BLEEDING EDGE

8.4.14

Dear Neil Young
(skip the comments section)

7.4.14

"Except that in my business," Maxine gently, "what I see a lot of is innocent people making these deals with the satanic forces, for money way out of scale to anything they're used to, and there's a point where it all rolls in on them, and they go under, and sometimes they don't come back up."
Thomas Pynchon BLEEDING EDGE

2.4.14

"Let everything be said!" I told myself when I first faced up to my tormentors. "Why clamp your lips stupidly together? You have no secrets. Let them know they are working on flesh and blood! Declare your terror, scream when the pain comes! They thrive on stubborn silence: it confirms to them that every soul is a lock they must patiently pick. Bare yourself! Open your heart!" So I shouted and screamed and said whatever came into my head. Insidious rationale! For now what I hear when I loosen my tongue and let it sail free is the subtle whining of a beggar. "Do you know where I slept last night?" I hear myself saying. "Do you know that little lean-to at the back of the granary?..."
J.M. Coetzee Waiting for the Barbarians

31.3.14

Proxy Terror War on Venezuela:

In the past two months over a thousand public buildings have been destroyed or damaged, mostly fire-bombed by what US Secretary of State John Kerry has called the “democratic and peaceful opposition”. Most of the arson is directed at buildings closely associated with the government’s popular and effective social welfare programs. These include neighborhood centers for adult education and training; free public medical and dental clinics; public banks providing low interest loans for micro-economic projects; primary and secondary public schools in poor neighborhoods; publicly-owned food-stores providing subsidized food and groceries as well as the trucks carrying subsidized food and essential goods to working-class neighborhoods...
Petras/BFP

Ching-chong good thing ding-dong:

...the Chinese tycoon Chen Guangbiao made international headlines by publicly announcing his ambitions to buy the New York Times and later the Wall Street Journal. In a TV interview he explained that he would be an ideal newspaper magnate because “I am very good at working with Jews”—who, he said, controlled the media.

Yet Chen presumably, like the majority of Chinese, has few concrete ideas about the reality of Jewish history or practices.
Tablet
via iSteve via xymphora
-
Announcing your intention to write something is almost a guarantee you won't. But.
History and practices.
To get at this you need a take on what was called "The Opium War", after it was over. Why it happened, how it was resolved, and the outcome.
The short version is the Sassoon family, Jewish textile merchants taking advantage of the brutal domination of India by Britain, with its consequently available near-slave labor, minimal overhead etc. got into the wide-open Asian opium trade, and ended up with an exclusive franchise in China. Which was at the time a sort of dystopic 3rd-worldy kind of place.
The Sassoons were making big money on the addiction process, that ultimate retail/consumer hook, steadily expanding their market, and running the whole enterprise in-house.
Then some heroic Chinese, some military figures centrally, disgusted at what they saw happening, began agitating against the damage widespread opium addiction was causing to their society and their people.
They threw a bunch of opium in the Yangtze, broke up the candy stores, ran dealers out etc.
The Sassoons, because of their financial connections in and on the British government, the biggest empire in the world at the time, got the British navy to invade China and whip the asses of the reformers, who fought back, were defeated by a far superior military, and by the terms of surrender were forced by the British to repay the Sassoon organization for lost business and all the opium they threw in the river. Revenge and then some.
At the end of the conflict, the Sassoons had a guaranteed lock on the opium business in China.
That's never stopped. Mickey Cohen, Meyer Lansky, 20th century bosses of the world drug trade. Their heirs have not been disinherited.
Hoover never made move one on Jewish gangsters, as an anti-organized crime warrior he was exclusively concerned with the Italian Mafia. Probably because Lansky's mob, the "Kosher Nostra", equally organized, equally criminal, equally if not more powerful, had blackmail-ready proof of his sexual ambiguity. 8x10 glossies of Edgar in a house dress and lipstick or something.
That's who's got the global illegal drug market lock today. And I'm convinced, without any hard evidence, that that's why the US/NATO is in Afghanistan, the world's number one producer of opium, which just harvested its largest crop ever, under military occupation. An otherwise inexplicable fact.
Because, as Mr. Chen Guangbiao says, the Jews run America. And the media. And the world's illegal drug industry.

and that snake that he is trying to bring into our territories is not welcome here either:

Eliza Knockwood, a Mi’kmaq woman and mother, silenced the crowded room of government officials and industry representatives with her drum to send the message that water is sacred. “Although the language of the Treaties do not capture the true beauty and spirit of my ancestors, it does show us what is important to them and how they lived in harmony with the natural environment.”
Idle No More
via @naomiklein

30.3.14

It was a pretty church, remarkable for the restraint of its decoration, a place Father had often stopped to pray.
In accordance with Orthodox tradition, all of us gathered before his coffin and held a lighted candle throughout the Mass. The priest recited the Requiem liturgy, and a deacon walked around and around the open casket, all the time swinging his censer until we could barely make out my father's face through the clouds of smoke, the cowl of his backward cloak pulled down by the priest so he could peer out of the slit in his eye and not miss any of the exequies. Mass over we followed the coffin, without its lid, and Father's face still uncovered, out of the cathedral. To ensure no one fell, boards had been laid over the snow. They formed a long narrow path from the cathedral to the spot the tsarina had chosen for Father to be buried.
from The Enchantments
Kathryn Harrison's novel of the last days of the Romanov dynasty seen through the eyes of Misha Rasputin, daughter of Grigory.

26.3.14

Metzitzah!

Metzitzah B'Peh!


24.3.14

What one meant by "Take the mask off, man" here,
recently exemplified, illustratively, here.

Life is short. Black life is shorter.

the old superstitious:

                       He has got a turn through the reek. (Gaelic).

 Reek—i.e., smoke.
This saying refers to the old superstitious practice of placing a newly christened child into a basket and passing him over a fire to protect him against the power of evil spirits.
Obscure Proverbs
Curiosities in Proverbs/Dwight Edwards Marvin
Bartleby

19.3.14

20 years too late, NASA steps up to the plate:

After running the numbers on a set of four equations representing human society, a team of NASA-funded mathematicians has come to the grim conclusion that the utter collapse of human civilization will be “difficult to avoid.”
The exact scenario may vary, but in the coming decades humanity is essentially doomed to some variant of “Elites” consuming too much, “resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society.”
That is, unless civilization is ready for one of two “major policy changes”: inequality must be “greatly reduced” or population growth must be “strictly controlled.”
Tristin Hopper/Nat'l Post(Canada)
via @MargaretAtwood
-
In other words either the "Elites" consume too much and everybody eats it, or the "Elites" get rid of all the "excess" "Commoners" and get back to consuming everything in sight after they're out of the way. God forbid something should happen to those precious ones.
With the hope to some day take their heartless appetites and ethical myopia outward to the stars and hey, why not just keep on going? The Satanic* triumph.
This is the vision, has been for some time, the glorious empire, the expanding kingdom. The Elect and the Preterite, the Chosen and the Left Behind. It's a miniaturization of what's really coming. The diabolical facsimile of divine truth. Relatively typical reaction of the wounded - duplicate the circumstance of the wound, with you in control this time.
The disdain from above of people whose only experience of those below is through scum-video surveillance, sycophantic reportage, and the little amount they've had of actual contact, mostly awful, with lives in the world of the under-class.
This is why the polarization everybody's buying into is so insidious. It's divide and conquer. It's working too well.
Contempt is the signifier. Always.

* Still gearing up to the rant on what "Satanic" means, used here. It is not from the patriarchal glossary of institutional religion.
For now: essentially it involves retro-temporality, the ability to move consciousness backward through time. And the wall up ahead where that didn't do any good, all that skullduggery and treachery to get there. All that selfish prophecy and magic, all that poison and proxy violence, all that deceit and betrayal of life.
So there's an astonished and bitterly outraged consciousness, that hasn't been born yet [but is here just the same], that gets its origin, its birth, in that moment of complete denial. The refusal at the Gate.
And it turns around and with folded wings heads back down the timeline. Because there's no other way to go. Outraged, bitter, vindictive, filled with thwarted pride and cauterized ambition.
 Because it was so close, so close. The keys to cellular immortality, the technologies of life extension and dominating environmental control, and those worthless no longer useful peasants fucking everything up.
Imagine what people like Jamie Dimond think of the common man. Or really lots, most, of the more prominent voices today. And the ones who aren't saying anything, just waiting.
Isolated in bubbles of protective security, with no way to even get to the opening moments of shared reality with those below them.
All it takes to make that scenario vivid is some reptilian enabler, with a bag full of evidentiary half-truths. "See? They're stupid, non-productive, there's no reason for them to even exist, beyond the fact they already do. And they hate us, even as they hunger jealously for what we have."

Anyway, that's not the rap, it's here just in case the flow gets interrupted, or something.

18.3.14


The report provides three key messages for every American about climate change:

  • Climate scientists agree: climate change is happening here and now.
  • We are at risk of pushing our climate system toward abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts.
  • The sooner we act, the lower the risk and cost. And there is much we can do.
"Even among members of the broader public who already know about the evidence for climate change and what is causing it, some do not know the degree to which many climate scientist are concerned about the risks of possibly rapid and abrupt climate change — that's something we are dedicated to discussing with multiple audiences, from business leaders and financial experts to decision makers in all walks of life."

Bob Litterman, former Goldman & Sachs Co. executive and senior partner at Kepos Capital, has participated in discussions with the panel on how to accurately measure climate-related risks and the need for a language to talk about climate change through the lens of risk management.
                                                             ...
Economists understand how to create incentives to limit pollution production with maximum effect and minimum collateral damage, but crafting the appropriate response is a complex valuation process that requires quantifying those same uncertainties," Litterman said. "To do so requires scientists and economists to work together, ask tough questions, and break the boundaries of their professional silos. That's what's this initiative aims to do."

AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science)
_________________________________________________________________

An Israeli company offered to pay a Costa Rican woman $20,000 to purchase her left kidney and a doctor reportedly paid for flights for the transplant to be carried out in March 2013, she and her husband said in a sworn statement.
-
Not everyone in Israel is in on the ghoul trade.
Why are these items together? The harm of damaged weather, the broken sky. is more obscene, ultimately more ghastly, than any medical cannibalism. And the total silence from above as to why it's happening, what's caused it, that has prevented actions to stop it, has as much to do with the power men like Litterman have over the public voice as it does the spinelessness of public leaders generally.
Greed has set the world on fire, but it's not capable of putting it out.

Pastillas contra el dolor ajeno

fiscal discipline is the fundamental predicate of a free society:

The problem with anything, a certain amount is OK. But there is a tendency to go to extremes. And all of a sudden, if there's advertising and legitimacy, how many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation? The world's pretty dangerous, very competitive. I think we need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together.
California Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.
-
 Discipline's a funny word. It can mean strength of will or punishment, depending on the use, and the user. Brown's using it in the first sense, of course. But there's a punishment aspect in its use that's pretty widespread, and still going pretty much unchecked and unquestioned.
Talking about "medical" marijuana, in all but the minority of truly medical instances, is so flagrantly hypocritical as to be farcical.
This isn't the necessary hypocrisy of the inescapably compromised - for instance people who think it should be legal but deal in the underground - it's the hypocrisy of those who lie to protect themselves from exposure to legitimate criticism of their unethical greed.
Brown knows the game is to keep the money moving upward - massive amounts of it, with no discipline beyond the enforcement and protection of that upward flow. And that enforcement is primarily centered on the illegality of the weed, and the prosecution and incarceration of enough low-level sellers to keep the big players comfortably fed.
It's a real simple thing, weed is expensive because everybody along the supply chain is risking punishment, from the user to the wholesaler. Marketing it with government "controls" has meant that the illegal price stays pretty close to where it was before there were any dispensaries, or licensed outlets. Taxes! Big time!
I haven't seen any stats but I'm certain neither Colorado nor Washington have seen anything like a price drop toward a reasonable "free market" number. A number representing competition, production costs, and distribution costs without the artificial inflation of illegal risk. It's going to stay at or near the illegal price point, because that's where the money is.
We're talking about a plant you can grow in your own backyard or garage, harvest, and dry in your laundry room.
Fiscal discipline my ass.
As somebody on twitter snarked, it sounds like he's hyping cocaine instead. Alert, competitive, got it.
No small factor in the Wall Street predations of the last couple of decades, coked-out greedheads.
So why's there concern about "some of the potheads", basically meaning most of them?
How about a mediated culture whose central message is "C'mon feed every base impulse you get that can be gratified by buying something"? And we'll bombard kids with that message until they sing it like the national anthem
How about a culture whose primary noise is "gimme that", whose central philosophical question is "What's on TV?"
And the tragic fact of the still unwritten story of all that counter-culture yada, hey that's history, let's move on.
Anyone old enough to have shown all those kids a sensible, responsible way to bring weed into their lives, especially in place of the seriously more dangerous use of alcohol, anyone who could have lead by example, and showed any willingness to, was hounded and driven out of any visible leadership. The only example acceptable to the powers of that time was damage and punishment. The carnage of that moral failure is met with a shrug, and the business of business just keeps rolling along.
Kids started smoking pot, the authorities reacted like they were being attacked by their own children, and now when the battle's clearly over, and most of the country wants legalization, we get "sorta legal" instead, and no recognition whatsoever of why there's a problem, what caused it in the first place, or what to do about it.
Aside from "Just Say Kind Of". And "Show Me The Money".
We're not even going to get into Brown pimping California to Netanyahu.











It’s a sad day for America when you have to get your honest news from the pigs at Goldman Sachs, B of A, and Morgan Stanley.

17.3.14

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There's a long-standing literature that absolutely shows there's a statistical link between Toxo infection and schizophrenia. It's not a big link, but it's solidly there. Schizophrenics have higher than expected rates of having been infected with Toxo, and not particularly the case for other related parasites. Links between schizophrenia and mothers who had house cats during pregnancy. There's a whole literature on that.
                                                                  ...
Two really interesting things. Back to dopamine and the tyrosine hydroxylase gene that Toxo somehow ripped off from mammals, which allows it to make more dopamine. Dopamine levels are too high in schizophrenia. That's the leading suggestion of what schizophrenia is about neurochemically. You take Toxo-infected rodents and their brains have elevated levels of dopamine. Final deal is, and this came from Webster's group, you take a rat who's been Toxo-infected and is now at the state where it would find cat urine to be attractive, and you give it drugs that block dopamine receptors, the drugs that are used to treat schizophrenics, and it stops being attracted to the cat urine. There is some schizophrenia connection here with this.
   Any time Toxo's picked up in the media, and this schizophrenia angle is brought in, the irresistible angle is the generic crazy cat lady, you know, living in the apartment with 43 cats and their detritus. And that's an irresistible one in terms of Toxo psychiatric status: cats. But God knows what stuff is lurking there.
Robert Sapolsky/edge
via synthetic zero
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Desperately, various attempts were made to treat, diagnose or ''cure'' Lucia Joyce. During her first, unwilling incarceration (engineered by Giorgio) in a French sanitarium in 1932, she was said to be suffering from ''hebephrenic psychosis'' (the young person's version of what Kraepelin had defined as dementia praecox). Then she was placed under a disciple of Bleuler at the Burgholz psychiatric clinic in Zurich, where schizophrenia was diagnosed. She was treated by a Dr. Forel, who recommended ''persuasion'' and surveillance. She was analyzed by Jung, who thought her so bound up with her father's psychic system that analysis could not be successful. His colleague Cary Baynes diagnosed repression. Friends of the Joyces -- Maria Jolas, Mary Colum, the heroically well-behaved Harriet Weaver, Joyce's married sister Eileen -- all tried to look after Lucia, in London or Paris or Ireland, more or less disastrously. Her treatments included injections with sea water and animal serum, barbiturates and solitary confinement.
A FIRE IN THE BRAIN: The difficulties of being James Joyce’s daughter
Joan Acocella/New Yorker
via arlindo-correia

Given my upbringing, I really had no choice:

I believe that the root of all injustice and oppression has always been the same – the dehumanization of the other. It is the obsession with Us and Them that can lead us, regardless of racial or religious identity, into the abyss.

Let us never forget that oppression begets more oppression, and the tree of fear and bigotry bears only bitter fruit. The end of the occupation of Palestine, should we all manage to secure it, will mean freedom for the occupied and the occupiers and freedom from the bitter taste of all those wasted years and lives.
Roger Waters/Salon

16.3.14

Rachel Corrie was not rational in the moments before her death, she was emotional. She died heroically for what she felt, not what she thought. Though her thoughts were with her heart, it was what she felt that put her in the way of what killed her.
And she was accused of anti-Semitism. Of course she was. Or being a dupe of anti-Semitism.
Her supporters, and her family, in their grief, were accused of anti-Semitism. And still are.
There's a moment coming when a lot of people are going to be saying "Yeah I'm anti-Semitic, so what?"
It's a mistake for decent people to keep pretending there isn't something hiding behind that smokescreen that is cowardly and evil.
Here it is, that cowardice, that smokescreen, in the present, in print:

More on religion, mostly just notes.
Really it's about the assertion that there's no reason to believe in anything that can't be demonstrated - evidence for the rational mind lacking, why go there?
Which, surprise, I'm a fan! Science is cool! Robots are cool! In the right hands*.
But. A little glance backward and we can see, time after time, thing after thing, that reliance on evidence alone either hid the underlying truth, or misled the rational mind in isolation.
The sun is clearly the source of energy for virtually everything that lives on earth. But that takes some understanding to get to, some evidence and thought. We're there, on that, got it. But it took some work, some gathering of information, and some individual partial understanding, before we got there.
So there's the distinct possibility of more like that still to come, for one thing. Since only a delusional fool would say we're anywhere near a full comprehension of life, what it is, and where it's being lived.
For another there's the total inability of rational views of life that center on all this being mechanical, and ultimately accidental, to comfort the human heart when it's overwhelmed by hurt, or in the midst of its suffering.
Disdain for hearts hungry for that comfort is pretty close to sociopathic. And sociopaths are well-recognized as being relatively unaffected by personal trauma - pragmatic, functional, rational, even in extreme duress - and especially impervious to effect by the experience of trauma in others.
Not the guidance any normal person would seek, or bequeath to their children.
The degradation of emotional being, reduced to secondary, almost luxury status, and the parallel reduction of the aesthetic response, while rational stances are elevated, rewarded, encouraged. It's suspicious.
The reverence and enthusiasm that was genuine, if artificially played, for the FDNY in the aftermath of 911, is pure emotion. The songs that celebrate heroes, the stories of sacrifice and bravery, these are with us because they move us, emotionally. There's nothing rational about it. Mechanistic dissections of emotion aren't alive, and they won't further human aspirations. Though they're great for the encouragement of sociopaths.
Religion's mandate is not confrontation with the unknown, not even maps to it or of it, but conversation with it, and the shaping of attitudes toward it. The absence of that conversation is what has enabled so much of the awful damage the world around us has received from us.
The perversion of that mandate into an excuse for collective selfishness, and the wholesale entrapment of yearning gullible minds in delusional chains, isn't enough to justify rejection of religion itself.
It needs redefining, it needs reformatting, as does the scientific model. Both are needful of each other, and both have been set to war against each other. Suspicious, that, as well.

*Killer drones are not cool, and in the wrong hands, which is the case at present, they're Satanic.
Facebook deploying near-orbital wireless broadcasting drones is a bizarre perversion of the human need for communication, and the possibilities of universal connection for enlightened human progress.
A proven track record of bottlenecking the flow of progress, metering it, slowing it down purely for venal opportunism, is close enough to evil that it should be called out and made to justify itself, before it continues fucking up the future.

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