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

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

"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

The Mexican Government is trying to censor the Internet.

1134 – lives not numbers

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

"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.

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

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.

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
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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.”

April is
Poetry
Month

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

Dear Neil Young
(skip the comments section)

"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

"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