particular social and cultural capital

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

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.

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

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.

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."

 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
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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?

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.
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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.

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
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via ScoopNZ
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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.

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
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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.

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

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."

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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.

Goodman does Abu Ghraib today
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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...

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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
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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.

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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.

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

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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!"

.

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

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