Informant38

2012-01-06T15:27:00.001-08:00

numbers you cannot imagine

Mission accomplished

2011-12-31T13:04:00.001-08:00

What it is going to do is put the first financial barrier between people and their ballot box since we got rid of the poll tax

2011-11-03T14:19:00.000-07:00

DNOW! blog

2011-09-17T15:22:00.000-07:00

sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving

2011-09-07T11:04:00.001-07:00

Where the future went

2011-08-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

"...it turns out they are all bad..."

2011-08-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

"We are sent far, far into the forest to get rubber, and if we do not get it, or if we do not get it quickly enough, we are shot"

2011-08-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

"...anyone who kills scores of civilians for political motives is a 'terrorist'..."

2011-06-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

how it is, how it was:

2011-06-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

no amount is too small

2011-06-10T12:24:00.000-07:00

Dept. of Holocaust Denial, further:

Polish women
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Gipsy woman
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Queers

2011-06-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

That's a medieval illustration of the circumcision of Jesus. That's the Jesus penis, stretched out and ready to be hacked upon.
Not much else in the story after that. He grows up some, at age twelve amazes the wise men in the temple, then pretty much disappears. For almost two decades.
Then He returns, rocks the boat, gets arrested, tortured, and executed as a criminal.
His mother didn't have sex, at least before he was born - the virgin birth being real significant to the tale - and of course the divine Father never, because why would He need to?
Add in the bizarre sexual taboos of the Old Testament, the dismedical fact of bloody mutilation of infant penii across the majority of West-Civ male infants, not to mention Muslims and Jews, and ...whoa. Or rather, woe.
That would be woe, if, like me, you think there's something awfully strange about all that hackery-whackery. Awfully strange, and bloody.

2011-06-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

Fries with that:

DALE MAHARIDGE: Last week they announced that there’s 54,000 new jobs the previous month. And I’m not joking: 25,000 of them were literally McDonald’s jobs.

DemNow!

2011-05-25T17:29:00.000-07:00

Not Rebozo:

And after I spoke out, Netanyahu said, you know,
"This is what’s possible in a democracy. And you wouldn’t be able to get away with this in other countries like Tunisia."
And I think that is ridiculous and absurd. If this is what democracy looks like, that when you speak out for freedom and justice, you get tackled to the ground, you get physically violated and assaulted, and then you get hauled off to jail, that’s not the kind of democracy that I think I want to live in.

Rae Abileah/Mondoweiss

2011-05-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

Department of Holocaust Denial:

These men were German homosexuals, they were sent to "camps", by the Nazis, for being subhuman, along with many other people, some of them Jews, some of them not Jews

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These men were forced to pretend to be homosexuals by agents of whatever, at the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison, in a campaign that seems to have had something to do with the Holocaust, somehow, though the connection is pretty convoluted

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This woman is all by herself, facing a machine. No sex here, certainly no homosexual acts or actors. Her name was Rachel Corrie

2011-04-06T14:15:00.000-07:00

Machetera > Fortress Europe > Libya

2011-03-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

The Holocaust as zero-sum game:

2011-03-07T16:09:00.001-08:00

vox Israeli, vox petrolio

2011-02-25T15:30:00.000-08:00

vox populi, vox dei, vox Israeli
from the halls of Moctezuma
to the shores of Tripoli

2011-02-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

No one knows for sure what caused this signal. There is a slight possibility that it just might originate from an extraterrestrial intelligence...

Also it's possible that the succession of shrieking hysterical violently antagonistic Arab male voices that have led at least four stories I've heard this past week on NPR, followed by calm, reasonable, intelligent English-speaking voices, primarily Jewish, were only there in succession by coincidence, and not as a result of racist bigotry on the part of the NPR production staff et al.

2011-01-25T12:51:00.000-08:00

Total Eclipse at the End of the World
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Campaign to Discredit Jane Mayer
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via cryptogon:

Israel Concerned Russia Will Recognize Palestinian State, and then, Dmitry Medvedev Restates Russian Support for Palestinian State.

*boom*

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Real Climate:

While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing.

2011-01-20T10:51:00.001-08:00

the Arizona attacks are evidence of rising anti-Semitism

2011-01-20T10:44:00.001-08:00

Still here
in the largest sense of that

2010-12-09T12:20:00.001-08:00

absolute contempt

2010-12-07T15:06:00.001-08:00

Lansky @inf38

2010-12-07T14:55:00.000-08:00

WikiLeaks Exposes Israeli Mafia’s Growing Influence

2010-12-07T14:28:00.000-08:00

Neither Wilén’s nor Ardin’s texts complain of rape.
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Ardin's the woman the swine-news drones are championing as the rapee in Assange's currently-happening legal difficulties with the Swedish police.
The fdl piece links her w/ "Cuban" exciters of turmoil and nasty dreamers of scenarios of reconquest, inc. the "Cuban-American mafia".
It is the opinion, strongly held, of inf38, that the food chain of that mafia links vertically upward to a virtually invisible criminal organization, multi-national, hydratic, ruthless, that traces its ancestry directly to Meyer Lansky, the king of kings of pre-Castro Cuba's real economy, which was like Bangkok Vegas and your local street-ho drug-get boulevards all rolled into one tidy tropical island getaway.
It was a Cuba whose ostensible ruler, Batista, was mostly a beard for Lansky's vice operations on the island, in the 50's a wide-open sin park. So not only did the rico aristocracy of Cuba get booted to the penile state virtually en masse, Lansky's thugs and pimps and blackmailers got the heave-ho too. Creating a thirst for vengeance in men known for their long-arc vendettas.

2010-12-02T12:17:00.000-08:00

"I’ll be now releasing the documents of one of the largest banks in America"

2010-12-02T11:01:00.001-08:00

...they have to traverse on rooftops...

2010-12-02T10:54:00.001-08:00

Amazon, the US internet company, has stopped allowing WikiLeaks to use its servers
via

2010-12-02T10:50:00.001-08:00

Banana worm bread
via

2010-12-02T10:48:00.001-08:00

a relative newcomer to the fight against global warming

2010-12-02T10:37:00.001-08:00

A Supercell Thunderstorm Cloud Over Montana

2010-12-02T10:16:00.001-08:00

We will know more today at 2pm EST

2010-12-02T10:11:00.000-08:00

Other organizations that hosted the torture video have also had their websites attacked.

2010-11-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

Reconstruction

All it takes is a five-year-old in pale blue coveralls drawing in a coloring book for a door to open into the light, for the house to be built again and the ochre hillside covered with flowers.

Max Jacob
Dernier Poemes

2010-11-06T16:58:00.001-07:00

"...absolute despair has no art."
Lycidas

"Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet."
Pashtun proverb

"...the child is also mother to the man."
Jim Harrison

The Church says:
the body is a sin
Science says:
the body is a machine
Advertising says:
the body is a business
The body says:
I am a fiesta.

Eduardo Galeano

"..those who do not love the truth will hate it."
Wordsworth

"..dead fish always swim with the stream.'
Breytenbach

"...all our pain comes from restraint of love."
Jeffers

"It is a long time now since I asked heaven for anything, and still my
arms have not come down."
Antonio Porchia trans. W.S. Merwin

"The people imagine they pray before God. But this is not so, for
prayer itself is the essence of divinity."
Anonymous Hasid

"Without religion, however, magic by itself draws man fatally under
the thrall of disincarnate beings who pervade the earth and feed upon
the emotional energies of the human organism. These are called demons,
but the word has ceased to have anything but childish meaning for
modern people."
Anonymous Gnostic monk

"God has not died for the white heron...God has not appeared to the birds."
Yeats

"If the Apocalypse is really just around the corner the correct
attitude would seem to be one of lively curiosity."
Anita Brookner

"I was brought up to think it a sin to waste bread, and I have lived
all my life in a world that wastes life."
Sylvia Townsend Warner

2010-10-16T15:52:00.001-07:00

the most hated man in Israel
via

2010-10-16T15:36:00.001-07:00

50,000 pounds of cheese

2010-10-16T15:31:00.001-07:00

The IDF kills 1 Palestinian civilian every 2 days, on average, with impunity

2010-10-16T15:27:00.000-07:00

pigs in the news:

...after a wild boar attacked him in his olive fields yesterday, breaking both of his legs. The animals are believed to have been released from the nearby Itamar settlement. Such attacks are becoming increasingly common.

Palestine Monitor
via

2010-10-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

way to go O-hi-o:

Following the revelation that an FBI informant may have opened fire just before the 1970 massacre of four anti-war students by members of the US National Guard, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has opened a probe into the events, requesting key documents from the FBI in a letter delivered Saturday morning.

raw story
via

2010-09-20T15:42:00.000-07:00

For Tom
The personage depicted, not photoshopped, is Nikolai Yezhov.

2010-09-20T13:06:00.000-07:00

...but this is the worst I can remember...

also this book is a nicely tucked and folded metaphorical condemnation of the Iraq business and its main participants.

2010-09-20T12:48:00.000-07:00

“Every one of us.”

2010-09-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

Chile and the United States:
Declassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup, September 11, 1973

via open democracy
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Mondoweiss on the current trial in Israel viz. the death of Rachel Corrie
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Mr Fish does Fla Quranflagration.
meanwhile, in Afghanistan...
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and it looks like once again the real cause of another "energy-related" catastrophe is the marketplace's inability to conform to anything like human moral standards, as the San Bruno Ca gas explosion appears to have been the result of PG&E, the local utility company, experiencing restructuring, deregulation, downsizing, and general adherence to the "fellate the shareholders" ethic.

2010-08-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

When did Palestine become central to your writing?

I've only been actively concerned with Palestine as a writer for about seven years. But the crisis, the injustice, the suffering of the Palestinians, have coexisted alongside my whole life as a writer. The length of this injustice, the lack of recognition of it by the rest of the world, while Israel pursues its own logic, totally regardless of the views of the external world - all this I was not conscious of then, but I am now. I look back on the young man I was in Paris in 1948, with Jewish friends who were thinking of going to Israel. They all wore strident blue shirts, and they gave me one, and I wore it with pride. We had an idea of what a kibbutz was to be - an ideal of a co-operative, with a healthy link to the land, a collectivity, a questioning of individuality, all of which appealed to me.

John Berger intv./New Statesman

2010-08-19T13:59:00.001-07:00

and it is gone in the sense you can't see it.

2010-08-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

hear no evil, because, essentially, there's no brain there to receive anything:

...hours after a poll showed that nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they think Obama is Muslim. That was up from 11 percent who said so in March 2009. The survey also showed that just 34 percent said Obama is Christian, down from 48 percent who said so last year. The largest share of people, 43 percent, said they don't know his religion.

Alan Fram/Yahoo/AP

2010-08-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

BBC No Evil:

And so it is that the BBC, absent of integrity, contemptuous of humanity, attempts in this program to turn disarmed, helpless Israeli commandos into heroic self-rescuing commandos who managed to Superman their way out of a circle of well over 100 very motivated men whose brothers lay murdered with multiple gunshot wounds. That is what we call a bald-faced lie. Big time lie, in your face lie, you in the audience are a bunch of drooling idiots lie.

Ken O'Keefe/Pulse

2010-08-10T15:46:00.001-07:00

2010-08-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

Never let a serious crisis go to waste:

Clues to the Obama Administration’s Passive Response to the BP Disaster
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BP is primarily owned by very wealthy individuals.

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The "marketplace", the "economy", whatever you want to name it, has no moral character. None. At all. It's an organism. It acts like one because it is one, and it is not a human organism - though it's progenitors appear to have been some form of human - so it doesn't care about human beings. Unless it's made to act as if it does - food labeling, cigarette package labels, seat belts etc., forced on a whining industry by do-gooders in political office, in response to citizen agitation etc.
The marketplace doesn't "care" about anyone or anything but itself, like most non-social organisms.
Social organisms care about each other to greater or lesser degrees depending on where they are in the Darwinian parade.
People care about each other, termites not so much.
So it's really not smart to expect the "economy" or the "marketplace" to somehow start "caring" about human beings.
In addition to not "sharing" our human moral values, the "marketplace" is structured so that "caring" individuals are filtered out of its food chain pretty early, leaving the field to increasingly ruthless, inhuman actors.
My hypothesis is there's a kind of genetic emotional autism functioning in a lot of guys that get to the top of the heap, marketplace-wise.
It's a good fit - heartless assholes in an inhuman system. But of course that fit leads to progressively more disastrous events and conditions for the human folks, which would be, loosely and optimistically, us.
So over time you have a filtration system that's selecting for the most egregious power-hungry greedheads, in a society that now elevates anyone the "economy" or the "marketplace" has elevated.
This was not always the case, viz. the sanctions and exclusions visited upon "trade" and "merchants" by various aristocracies in times previous. Now big money is as big as it gets on all fronts.
So not only are these egregious power-hungry greedheads driving the "economy" with their heartlessness and their inhumanity, they're also driving society. Such as it is.
Which means in a very real sense, the course of human destiny. In the hands of ruthless inhuman assholes.
Which may be a big part of the reason things are not going so well, generally, for most human folks. At present.
BP happened because of the pressure on the employees - CEOs et al. - to produce bottom-line profits, the bigger the better, no matter what.
Larry Fink, far more than anybody else in the BP chain of command, created the conditions for and executed the Gulf Oil spill, and he's walking away from it virtually unscathed. And not surprisingly, he's connected in all kinds of ways to the guys that did the "Financial Crisis".
Meanwhile Hayward and Dudley dance through the mediated room like paid escorts - now with the US, now with the oligarchs.

2010-08-10T14:36:00.001-07:00

WE DO NOT OBEY.

2010-08-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

the impact of a major mutagenic event:

Uno studio rivela infatti che a Falluja, in Iraq – teatro, nel 2004, di due offensive dei marines americani – la percentuale di tumori è cresciuta di 4 volte, quella di cancro nei bambini di 12 volte, quella di leucemia di 38 volte, la mortalità infantile è di 80 bambini su 1.000 nascite (contro i 17 nella confinante Giordania e 9,7 in Kuwait), le malformazioni infantili sono in costante aumento (una bimba è nata con due teste, altri con gli arti malformati o paralizzati). Solo per fare un paragone, a Hiroshima la percentuale di leucemia salì di 17 volte dopo il bombardamento nucleare. Secondo il dottor Chris Busby, professore dell’Università dell’Ulster e co-autore, insieme ai dottori Malak Hamdan e Entesar Ariabi, della ricerca (intitolata “Cancro, mortalità infantile e rapporto tra sessi alla nascita a Falluja – 2005-2009” e pubblicata sul Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health di Basilea), le varianti di cancro individuate a Falluja sono “simili a quelle riscontrate a Hiroshima, tra i sopravvissuti esposti a radiazioni ionizzanti della bomba e all’uranio del “fallout” (la ricaduta di sostanze tossiche al suolo dopo l’esplosione)”

Giraviti del Mondo
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A new epidemiological study published by the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health (IJERPH) reports that "the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by U.S. atomic bomb strikes in 1945," WSWS said Friday.[1] -- "In a study of 711 houses and 4,843 individuals carried out in January and February 2010, authors Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, Entesar Ariabi and a team of researchers found that the cancer rate had increased fourfold since before the U.S. attack five years ago, and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were exposed to intense fallout radiation," Tom Eley reported...
ufppc
further here
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Cancer rate in Fallujah worse than Hiroshima

The report concludes that the Federal Reserve Board’s intimate relations with the leading powers of Wall Street—the same banks that benefited most from the government’s massive bailout—influenced its strategic decisions on AIG. The panel accuses the Fed and the Treasury Department of brushing aside alternative approaches that would have saved tens of billions in public funds by making these same banks “share the pain.”

Bailing out AIG effectively meant rescuing Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch (as well as a dozens of European banks) from huge losses.

Alternet via cryptogon

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

cnet via cryptogon
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In Los Angeles, in 1997, a major local, state, and federal drug investigation suddenly collapsed. The suspects: Israeli organized crime organizations composed mostly of Russian Jews, with ongoing operations in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Canada, Israel, and Egypt.

The allegations: cocaine and ecstasy trafficking and sophisticated white-collar credit card and computer fraud. A DEA report under date of December 18 stated that there existed serious security breaches in DEA telecommunications by unauthorized "foreign nationals" -- and cites an Israeli-owned firm with which the DEA contracted for wiretap equipment.

wvns@yahoogroups.com

2010-07-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

A link for Cheeseman:

weird drug connections

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Am working on an explanation of absence from here
also a lament as to
sort of a lament anyway.
For now:
Korean name of ship sunk by North Korea turns out to mean "USS Liberty"
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Also, in Korea mourning clothes are white.
The suffering the Korean people have endured as a consequence of the hysterical panic of greedhead Capitalist weirdos in charge of US foreign policy since the 50's, and seemingly continuing unabated to the present moment and beyond, is immense and virtually invisible. But accessible with a little research.
Which I know, my friend Cheeseman, it is my responsibility to provide links toward, and I do feel remiss. But my circumstances...
Ah no, no complaints!
To the barricades, such as they are!

2010-06-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

The ancestors of the Jarawa and the other tribes of the Andaman Islands are thought to have been part of the first successful human migrations out of Africa...

2010-06-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

The Global Warming Debate
A Layman's Guide to the Science and Controversy
7. Attributing Mankind
Pointing the finger

Declaration on Cetacean Rights
5. Cetaceans have the right to the protection of their natural environment.

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Landslide lake in Pakistan
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Wheat harvest met with live ammunition in Gaza "buffer zone"
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Emily Henochowicz was shot directly in the face with a tear gas canister
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And then some guff about Afghanistan sitting on top of trillions of dollars in unexploited minerals which I'm not going to link any of because it's just too enervating to think about besides being dispiriting and contributing to my already disabling levels of desuetude and anomie.

2010-06-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

this is the small crime of Israel

2010-06-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

The iceberg calves:

In the name of US national security, a number of morally questionable and illegal activities were carried out in the years following September 11, 2001. The use of torture and cruel and inhuman treatment in interrogations of detainees in US custody has been well-documented by Physicians for Human Rights and others. The role of health professionals in designing and participating in illegal interrogations has also been investigated and publicly revealed. This current report addresses another morally troubling yet unreported aspect of the role of health professionals in the “enhanced interrogation” program. Our research and analysis demonstrates that the program also involved doctors and other health professionals in conducting unethical research using detainees as human subjects.

Physicians for Human rights
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related precedental iniquity

2010-06-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

Coincidences of valor and integrity:

Diane Wilson,(a high school–educated fisherwoman with a pile of kids and a broke-down truck) distraught shrimper :

I am a fourth generation shrimper from the Gulf. With this BP disaster, I am seeing the destruction of my community and I am outraged. I am also seeing elected representatives like Senator Lisa Murkowski blocking BP from being legally responsible to pay for this catastrophe. She stopped the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act and wants to keep the liability cap at a pitiful $75 million [as against the Act's proposed $10 billion]

CodePink
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U.S. Park Police on June 2 identified the woman arrested for tying herself to a White House fence as actress Q’orianka Kilcher.
Authorities said the 20-year-old Kilcher chained herself to the fence June 1 and her 41-year-old mother, Saskia, poured a shiny black substance over her, according to charging documents.

Native Times

2010-06-09T11:40:00.000-07:00

We know where you live:

This followed a week in which Rabbi Lerner received several verbal death threats on the phone and lots of hate mail to him and to Tikkun.
The attackers used a powerful form of glue to attach posters to his door and around the property of his home attacking Lerner personally, and attacking liberals and progressives as being supporters of terrorism and "Islamo-fascism." They posted a printed bumper sticker saying "fight terror--support Israel" next to a caricature of Judge Goldstone whose UN report on Israel's human rights violations in its attack on Gaza last year has been denounced as anti-Semitic

Tikkun

2010-06-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

possibly everyone else already knew this:

The chief executive of BP sold £1.4 million of his shares in the fuel giant weeks before the Gulf of Mexico oil spill caused its value to collapse

TelegraphUK
via

2010-06-07T13:39:00.000-07:00

Venezuela Led Latin America in Reducing Military Spending in 2009
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Venezuela Continues to Expand Free Public Higher Education Programs
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When considered even-handedly, the arrest of Judge Afiuni for illegally allowing a wealthy banker to be released from custody and thus flee the country reflects the government’s efforts to establish the rule of law in the historically corrupt banking sector and justice system.

Venezuela Analysis

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on another, less even hand:

Since Judge Afiuni’s imprisonment, a dizzying sequence of other high-profile arrests has taken place, pointing to Mr. Chávez’s recent use of his security and intelligence apparatus to quash challenges to his grip on the country’s political institutions. The arrests come at a time of spreading public ire over an economy hobbled by electricity shortages and soaring inflation.

Senior officials in Mr. Chávez’s government here, including Attorney General Luisa Ortega, say the most recent arrests were necessary to suppressconspiracies or to prosecute people whose comments were deemed offensive to Mr. Chávez.

Romero/NYTimes

2010-06-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

possibly everyone else already knows about this:

Douglas H. Brown, Transocean's chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon rig, said key representatives from both companies had a "skirmish" during an 11 a.m. meeting on April 20. Less than 11 hours later, the well had a blowout, an uncontrolled release of oil and gas, killing 11 workers.

WSJ

2010-06-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

as detailed by Gisha, an Israeli human-rights organisation

2010-06-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

this is shockingly missing from mainstream aboveground non-progressive media, for instance NPR:

Former US Ambassador Edward Peck was on the Gaza aid flotilla that came under attack by Israeli forces.

DemNow!

2010-06-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

lots of ditto for DemNow!:

...chained herself to a fence, her body covered in black paint to represent oil. She was forcibly removed, and the police had to use a saw to cut through her chains.

2010-06-07T13:20:00.001-07:00

It’s 2010, and we still live the same way that we did centuries ago.

2010-06-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

and reportedly attacked veteran Israeli activist, the eighty-six-year-old Uri Avnery:

...the mood is incredibly disturbing here. I’m witnessing it every day.
And most of the anger and most of the violent threats are being directed and channeled against the Israeli Palestinian population and members of Knesset who represent Arab parties, like Hanin Zoabi. There’s an Israeli Facebook group that has hundreds of members, and it’s dedicated to the assassination—to inciting the assassination of Hanin Zoabi, the member of Knesset who was physically attacked in the Knesset for attempting to relate here experience on the Mavi Marmara ship. And this Facebook group is where a lot of these right-wing spontaneous demonstrations are being organized.

DemNow!

2010-06-07T13:12:00.001-07:00

My heart is breaking; but I do not mind.

For one thing, as soon as I wrote those words I was able to weep

Alice Walker

2010-06-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

directly involved in the disarming of two Israeli Commandos:

Ken O’Keefe, former US Marine, Gulf War veteran, and now survivor of the Mavi Marmara massacre, has issued a remarkable and searing statement from Istanbul. “While in Israeli custody I, along with everyone else, was subjected to endless abuse and flagrant acts of disrespect. Women and elderly were physically and mentally assaulted. Access to food and water and toilets was denied. Dogs were used against us, we ourselves were treated like dogs. We were exposed to direct sun in stress positions while hand cuffed to the point of losing circulation of blood in our hands. We were lied to incessantly, in fact I am awed at the routineness and comfort in their ability to lie, it is remarkable really. We were abused in just about every way imaginable and I myself was beaten and choked to the point of blacking out… and I was beaten again while in my cell.

In all this what I saw more than anything else...

pulse

2010-06-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

Both NPR/KQED and the BBC, the only news via radio I get in the mountains besides the NBC/ABC/CBS mainline pap which now that I have FM I don't spend much time with, though sadly unable to access Democracy Now! and other progressive radio on KPFA or KUSP where was I? Ah, both are using the "pro-Palestinian" formula to describe the attacked parties in the latest Israeli debacle/atrocity.
It is an interesting term in this context. Functionally it's the obverse of anti-Semite, not opposite to but the positive to the negative. Against the Jews and for the Palestinians. Therefore invalid, wrong, and immoral.
Add in the very real impression most Americans have of terrorist/Palestinian synonymy, so that the semantic difference between "pro-Palestinian" and "pro-terrorist" is very thin if not non-existent in most minds in their respective audiences, and what this term moves forward is much darker than its superficial content.
Both news agencies were also describing the attacked as primarily Turkish which I don't doubt the possibility of but also without any research I'm confident there were people from many countries on board, at least 50 according to one unconfirmed report.
We're all a little stunned I think, and wondering what next, because clearly the US has nothing to bring but the Israeli dictates of its diplomatic actions and postures, and who else in the world is big enough to push back? China? Russia?
Venezuela?
That I am capable, and by extension many others are capable as well, of fully supporting, or being "pro" both Israelis and Palestinians at the same time, that in fact it is that very support that is so troubling and painful here would seem to have escaped the news editors at NPR and the BBC.
Because I do, of course I do, support, feel concern for and solidarity with, Israelis who have no voice in their own government's hysterical cowardice and panic and its cruel manifest, as well as Palestinians with no food or water and very little tangible prospect.
Pro-them yeah.
Vicious thugs with no moral compass but their own hive-minded survivalist pathologies, nah, pass on that. Survival through dishonor, no.
What's his face said "Give me liberty or give me death" somebody else said "Death before dishonor". It echoes. It's been around for a long time, that attitude.
These are not marginal statements, rare as they come to us. We hear them and thrill, because we recognize what they mean, that we have that, that choice, that spirit, that chance. Now. Here.

2010-06-01T09:13:00.001-07:00

He has been injured in the head. We think he may die if he does not receive medical treatment immediately. Another person being taken past in front of me right now has been seriously injured. We are being hit by tear gas, stun grenades. We have navy ships on either side and helicopters overhead. We are being attacked from every single side. This is in international waters, not Israeli waters, not in the sixty-eight-mile exclusion zone. We are being attacked in international waters, completely illegally.

2010-05-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

That's not oil floating out there in the Gulf of Mexico, it's greed.

2010-05-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

a disaster that can be prevented

2010-05-21T14:01:00.000-07:00

DAV

2010-05-11T12:08:00.001-07:00

The electricity supply in the sweatshop in the crowded part of old Dhaka where Asma, 10, makes safety pins for a living is so dangerous that the foreman can only turn on the lights using a broomstick.

"If I use my hands I may get an electric shock," he explains.

2010-05-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

It's Spring, things tend to balance:

Mojave cross at center of court fight reported stolen

Miss USA Contestants Pose in Lingerie

2010-05-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

A Filipino journalist went missing shortly after reporting to the police that a provincial governor and his followers had mauled two members of a TV news crew, according to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines

2010-05-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

Imagine..

...what I'm describing isn't pre-war Germany, but present-day Venezuela
[. . .]
Jewish Venezuelans say their case is different -- because in Venezuela, they tell us, the anti-Semitism stems directly from the government...

Nora Zimmett/HuffingtonPost

2010-05-04T11:35:00.000-07:00

guatemala testimonio
guatemala testimonio bakhtin

What comes first, in the light entry I've made so far into all this - Bakhtinian dialogics, consciousness placed in and working within the living chronotope, not in the abstract planes of inhuman geometry where too much philosophy gets done - is the rejection of the audience as primary, the audience experience as purpose, the audiential grasp of the testimony given, as a kind of entertainment, serious and glamorous because of its irrefutable gravity, where the identification with the speaker becomes cathartic without effecting any real change where it's most demanded, that there's something eventually creepy about too much of it, the experience of it I mean, sitting there watching it unfold, listening to it, gasping in shock and sympathetic pain, outraged frustration, seeing it from the safe distance of the comfortable hall or living room, in the documentary frame, on the screen, or the page.
I'm not Rigoberta Menchú, or Roberto Obregón or Rogelia Cruz, I'm me, here, with this other distinct narrative toward which testimonio comes, piercing as it is, but finally tangential to the here and now of this living which is mine.
Still somehow Guatemala has moved toward the center of what the world as I'm having it with me on this trip of being means to me now.
You want illegal immigrants? What the hell difference does the law make there? Being invited into a country legally and participating legally when you get there in the brutally violent, but legal, oppressive dominance of its poorest people.
Fundamentalist evangelicals, military "advisers", US diplomatic agents, all in the country legally, welcomed all complicit in grotesque crimes. The Latin American story.
No laws being broken means what exactly in a context of immoral dominance by those who own and administer the law-making apparatus?
Well, sure there are laws, some, a few scattered around the halls of just-us. But moral imperatives exist before, above, and beyond the law. They're why the laws were made, are made, in the first place.
What happened in Guatemala right up until this moment is what is wrong pretty much everywhere right now. It's local. It's American. It is still unrepaired, and the damage it began in and became and metastisizes is as pertinent as anything happening, or feared to be about to happen, in Arizona.
The almost incomprehensible wrong of what happened in Guatemala is what needs to be articulated, which is what testimonio embarks toward doing, but it needs to be articulated to the heirs of those who were and are most culpable. The diffuse progeny of the blind evil catastrophe of American business, bourgeois Christianity, the near-cartoonish and surprisingly ubiquitous Israeli exporters of death technologies and techniques, and something else I am at least at present only able to conceive of as malevolent spirit, the tangible spiritual presence of evil, a thing like sickness, functionally caused and symptomatically carried out by atomized and invisible-to-us parts, but taken as a whole, seen from outside in cumulative effect a sentient thing which is an illness, whose aim is its own prosperity, if it has anything like an aim, and isn't just the decay and collapse of something else, that never grew into its own possibility.
What happened in Guatemala is not secondary, it isn't collateral or tangential or any other word that means of no real consequence.
It isn't a metaphor, nor is it a substitute for some larger more obscure karmic relation.
It has the air and ground of Wounded Knee in it, and Fallujah, and Jenin, and Sri Lanka, all saturated in innocent blood, and the still growing catalog of wrong that is the only document that counts now.
What you did to get here. What you didn't have to do to get here, but did, and why nothing of what you want now will be free of that, nothing of what you do now, at its best, at its most free and clean and healing and sacrificing toward the truly innocent. It will carry that with it and within it and everything you do is and will continue to be an attempt to evade the weight of it. You want it to be mine. Somehow what you've done ends up being mine.
All right. I'll carry it, but not for you. With you.
You'll carry it with me.
You will carry this with me, conscious, aware, as I am, remorseful beyond articulation. Or you'll never go anywhere but straight to hell.

2010-04-20T12:01:00.001-07:00

egregious lacunae pt.4:

Rogelia Cruz
-
FRONT LINE GUATEMALA:
Attacks against human rights defenders 2000-2005 (pdf)

US complicity in Guatemala
US military in Guatemala
Israeli complicity in Guatemala
Israeli military in Guatemala

¿Dónde está Roberto Obregón?

Operation Sofia: Documenting Genocide in Guatemala

Memoria del Fuego Century of The Wind
-

"I certainly hope not, but I suspect there are more Timothy McVeighs out there, waiting to imitate his crazed impulses."

Al Eisele
Editor-at-Large of The Hill
-
Puff-crap on Elaine Kagan at HuffPo
Greenwald on Kagan via DemNow!
wikipedia's entry on ZOG, clearly written by zionists
-
The Politics of Rage: Militias and the Future of the Far Right
Jeffrey Kaplan at religion-online

2010-03-16T13:15:00.001-07:00

What we need now is

Magic Socialism

2010-03-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

“There is no serious War on Drugs,” Bowden writes. “Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs.”

DNow!

2010-03-09T12:41:00.000-08:00

This is only a note toward fuller explication, a placeholder, some kind of scrawled sign, an arrow...

First get rid of the inaccurate and dangerous term "The Jews". Even though what we're trying to name uses that to describe itself it has no right to the name because it elides and ignores and refuses standing to what is the most redemptive and humanly inspiring portion of the demographic it calls forth. Even though it's easier to say "The Jews" than to say "Those guys that are doing that". Shooting the wrong person isn't justified by the atrociousness of who you were aiming at, whatever the pigs keep telling us.
Secondly, open up to the mystical, the metaphysical, the spiritual, the mumbo-jombo-y mysteries and occult wonders. Things really are not the way they seem, even though everything we have or do or ever will have or do is tangible physically-based and open to rational inspection. Life is not boundaried by the limits our perceptions, our perceptions are, that's all.
Okay now, the guys we're trying to descrbe are Jews, mostly, at least now, but they are not, keep repeating this, most Jews. They are a minority with power that gives them majority decision-making. And one of their watch-words is "Is it good for the Jews?" This is a very common phrase there. And a lot of us are concerned to the point of irrational anxiety that a conspiracy of this minority of men who are Jews, while not being a conspiracy of all Jews, is responsible for a great deal of the awfulness of this moment, which increases daily. It's important that this get clearer.
Christianity is a Jewish construct. With the Old Testament attached beyond extrication to the New, Christianity is thoroughly and inseparably a Jewish construct. So, is Christianity "good for the Jews"? Historically not so much. Historically a great amount of oppression and active persecution as well as chronic low-grade intolerance and injustice hae originated within the Christian community as instituted. But what about now, today? Because what I'm reaching toward is a metaphysical answer to a puzzle whose ravelling details are destroying virtually everything I most admire about the human presence on earth, and because I can't find a way through the massive complexity that doesn't lead back toward this same idea. That all that suffering went toward a day of retaliative triumph. You need to understand, fully comprehend what it meant for people with slow vengeance burning in their hearts for millenia, to tear down Babylon. And that wasn't the end of it, won't be the end of it. Christianity gave George W. Bush the White House, even more decisively than CNN and FOXNews did, and Gearge W. Bush gave the people I'm trying to name here control over the military and economic strength of the most powerful nation yet seen in world history. So in that sense Christianity has been very good for "The Jews". And if only that's what we were talking about, if only it was something as simply and easily described as "The Jews" I could sit back and spew reams of anti-Semitic theory and condemnation. But it looks more and more to me like the riddle is deep and intricate and profoundly disarming. That the key to our salvation, if salvation is still possible, will have to come out of the same people wjose broad-brush identity covers those who are dooming us and creating suffering on untold scale all around.
Like I said, notes, thoughts still forming, chaotic a little, not organized enough, but who knows what happens tomorrow, and I wanted it said today.

2010-02-23T12:38:00.000-08:00

settlers are the same the world over:

Reliable sources report that at least six Jumma tribal people were killed, and hundreds of houses burnt to the ground, in an attack by soldiers and settlers on tribal villages in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh on Saturday. The attacks took place in the Sajek region, where tensions have been rising since Bengali settlers, supported by the army, have been expanding their settlements on Jumma land.

Survival
via ScoopNZ

2010-02-23T12:36:00.000-08:00

where poverty masquerades as livelihood:

The people of Gaza know they have been abandoned. Some told me the only time they felt hope was when they were being bombed, because at least then the world was paying attention.

Sara Roy/Mondoweiss

2010-02-16T15:46:00.000-08:00

Colombia, the Israel of South America
-
Obama v. Morales on "safety"
-
cepr on Haiti
-
Naomi Klein on Haiti

2010-02-09T16:31:00.000-08:00

The people of Waziristan are...

via commenter Luis Enrique at Crooked Timber

2010-01-26T10:58:00.000-08:00

This is not a natural disaster story:

...it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

It’s time to take that approach abroad, too.

David Brooks/NYTimes
-
Well okay yeah. But it's really about getting rid of poverty while keeping the system that creates it, that depends on the mechanisms that create poverty, keeping what's really wrong because it's thrilling when you're on top, it's too powerful to let go of, so we just have to find a way to keep the swine in power and the system churning toward apotheosis.
It's like being a cocaine addict, wanting to be one and remaining one, because the exhilaration is impossible to turn down, but eating better and getting enough rest. You know, health and stuff.
Poverty's a symptom says Mr. Brooks, and then won't say but implies it's a disease of ignorance and small selfish minds unable to make the change toward participation in Brooks and Co's bravest of the brave newest of the new, worlds.
The actual disease isn't as readily described, unfortunately.
That Mr. Brooks can't find it in himself to once mention Toussaint L'Ouverture is most telling, or should be. Because that's what's wrong in Haiti.
What happened to Toussaint L'Ouverture is what's wrong in Haiti, and here, and everywhere in the capitalist world where poverty's endemic. But seeing that accurately and describing that accurately and demanding it be addressed in substance and at its roots is...is....well it's a demand for socialism is what it is and no way we're getting Mr. David Brooks to talk about socialism with anything but a sneer of disdain. Because it doesn't work and you get loudmouth tinpot dictators like that creep down there whats-his-name uh Chavez.
Plus you could talk about the international drug trade, in Haiti, using Haiti like they use Ghana, which trade most of the uninformed still think of as run by swarthy Italians and equally swarthy sort of Colombian/Mexicans.
Which impression while understandable is now nothing but purest fiction.

2010-01-14T14:44:00.001-08:00

"cognitive infiltration" of groups that advocate "conspiracy theories"

2010-01-14T14:42:00.001-08:00

Below is the ad in question

2010-01-14T14:14:00.000-08:00

the next day:

In a speech to Pentagon employees on September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld disclosed that over $2,000,000,000,000 (yes, twelve zeroes) in Pentagon funds could not be accounted for. “According to some estimates,” he said, “we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”
His statement didn’t make world headlines the next day.
[...]
Coincidentally, when the Pentagon was hit on 9/11, the “plane” hit an office of the Army where an investigation of the of the $2.3 trillion missing was taking place. The office lost 34 of its 45 employees, most of whom were civilian accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts—officials who were reportedly working on the investigation.

Rahnuma Ahmed/Shahidul News

2010-01-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

The most
inconvenient
truth of all

2010-01-10T17:59:00.000-08:00

What is[was] at stake in Copenhagen

2010-01-10T17:57:00.001-08:00

Mohawk grandmothers beaten by Canadian border guards

2010-01-10T17:56:00.001-08:00

blasphemy

2010-01-10T17:46:00.000-08:00

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

2010-01-10T17:43:00.001-08:00

The International Federation of Journalists notes with deep anger and sorrow, that a full year after the daylight murder of Lasantha Wickramatunge in a busy Colombo street, there has been little credible progress in the investigation into an event that caused worldwide outrage.

2010-01-10T17:30:00.000-08:00

I don’t believe in Global Warming.