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Death by Definition

all options are open in terms of how

the body of a baby, caked in dust, in the corner of a bombed-out room

Barack Obama has been running away from New Orleans

What violence there was bore the earmarks of provocation...

trees are not the problem

The starting pay is over $100,00:

Nearly five and a half years on, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in 1,255,026 Iraqi deaths (justforeignpolicy.org), 3.4 million internally displaced Iraqi refugees, 2.2 to 2.4 million Iraqi refugees living abroad. The number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the US is 3,222.

US military casualties number 4,150. Other coalition troops 314. Iraqi Security Force deaths number 7,924. Contractor deaths have reached 444. Three hundred and twenty thousand American veterans of the Iraq war have brain injuries. According to internal e-mails written by Dr Ira Katz, the Department of Veteran Affairs head of mental health, suicide attempts among Iraqi war vets are about a thousand per month.

According to March 2008 estimates, the invasion and occupation has so far cost $526 billion. The estimated long-term bill is $3 trillion (Foreign Policy In Focus).

And the damage done to imperialist souls? It is beyond reckoning. It continues unabated.

Rahnuma Ahmed/New Age/shahidul 06.Sep.08

2 hours, 1 minute ago
Caracas (Reuters):

Several Russian ships and 1,000 soldiers will take part in joint naval maneuvers with Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea later this year, exercises likely to increase diplomatic tensions with Washington, a pro-government newspaper reported on Saturday.

Reuters (Caracas)
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That Reuters stringer should be edited a little more carefully. The phrase "pro-government newspaper" there probably means pro-Venezuelan-government newspaper. Probably for sure.
When I saw that I had this weirdly recursive flash on the Reuters pro-goverment newspaperishness, but American.
So the one pro-government newspaper reports what another pro-a-different-government newspaper said about something.
Except I think the delusion is American newspapers are independent, and free.
Except I think we saw freedom of the press at St. Paul during the RNC. Face down on the asphalt with its hands behind its back.
Then I realized I was losing myself in the grammar and typography because the news had so much gravity.
Dude. Russians in the Carribean.

radioactive tobacco

St. Daniel's 17 bells

Probably not the best time just now to be vague and poetic.
By "Withdraw. Reject. Disengage" I meant from the minds of the oppressing force. Their mouthpieces, their p.r. androids. Like that.
But rereading it it's not carrying that too obviously, and could be seen as directly counter to exactly what Goodman and I-Witness and the people on the street in St. Paul are doing.
There's a psychic or spiritual or non-material aspect to all this, and in that realm engagement gives substance to things created by circumstance, so that concentrating on evil gives it weight and power.
A difficult task to ignore them when they're coming down on you on horses with shields and guns and pepper spray, large faceless creatures armed to the teeth.
I see now that the exhortation is holding a much larger and more complicated thing, a mantra whose purpose and meaning are clear to me but not to anyone else without explanation, which this is trying to be.
There's a seductive aspect to interrogation - power and authority in a relaxed confident mode, the vulnerable prisoner exposed, open to the whims of the uniform and the badge.
Withdraw from that, reject its authority, disengage from the logic traps it offers.
The processes of sanctioned governmental redress appear to be entirely compromised.
The party conventions were seamlessly woven into the same tapestry as the Super Bowl, run by the same people toward the same end. These were commercial enterprises, profitable circuses.
The goals behind them have nothing to do with democracy or human progress or any ideal abstraction.
It's survival, for the men/spirits behind the events, with the promise of technologically-granted immortality and cosmic wealth and power. As science-fictiony as it sounds I think that's what's driving it all.
Apotheosis of the swine.
Meanwhile back on the sidewalk...
We - and I say that even though I'm alone at home sitting on my ass and not out in the street getting beat up by the real neo-Nazis in their black vehicles and dark-blue uniforms - are not trying to get the troops out of Iraq, and end wars for oil - these are symptoms - we're trying to get the pigs off our backs and out of our neighborhoods - that's the disease.
Like everything else "pigs" can be defined out of existence.
I don't mean police, or the invisible cabal behind the Bush Administration. It doesn't have an ethnic specificity.
It's that thing, and all its little constituent members, that's out there doing all this, pulsating, gloating, sneering, lying and stealing and killing people all over the world. The assertion that each constituent of the pigocracy is simply a confused and bent human being, as capable of redemption as anyone else, is true enough, but that's for afterward.
Now it's time to give them nothing.
They have negative energy dynamos, that run on resistance and argument. So those things have to be carefully selected and employed with subtlety. Which is why humor, and music, can be so uplifting and confirming in the face of armed to the teeth phalanxes of demonic looking cops. Because they transcend logic
Because humor and music come from what we are that they aren't.
The assertion of tenderness and light in the face of cruelty and death.

came as a shock to many:

“Since my video was shown, the soldiers shoot at our house all the time,” she said. The shattered and cracked windows at the front of the building confirm her story. “When we leave the windows open, they fire tear gas inside too.”

Lenin's Tomb

Oddly disjunct but related thoughts and notes:
Amy Goodman shines brightly - watching the couple of minutes she had to question the St. Paul etc. police official Commander Captain General Whatever Acceptable Forgetableface, her tone was impeccable, not a trace til the very end of deep distrust and revulsion at the cynicism and professional horseshit she was being offered in response to her righteous testifying, and even when it showed it was restrained, dignified - what powerful self-discipline she showed by that.
This via Free Speech TV, where also Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern were seen. McGovern doing a great George Carlin delivery, Ritter a little slick a little over-ego'd.
Scary thought when one of them talked about the unlikeliness of the pigs opening another front, this time against Iran, that the Marines are already over-committed, the Army's stretched too thin as it is, and Obama's promised to pull them out of Iraq and at the DNC the interviewees were all "redeploy" "redeployment" "the need to redeploy" "need for redeployment". The US Air Force under its born-again leadership is still pretty capable of mass-murder on a grand scale though.
So heads up Afghanistan.
Except - enter scary thought here - how easy it will be to gear up for that, get the rubes ready for it, then have some false flag event in the Gulf, loss of life destruction of ship, like the USS Liberty only without the obviousness of who's behind it, so it can be repurposed as trigger. Then the pull-out continues and the redeployment continues, except that it involves a simple redirection of that "redeployment".
Troops already leaving Iraq sent, instead of to Afghanistan, south and east to the Straits of Hormuz and southern Iran.
Once you've got your proxy army on the march it's a lot easier to shift them quickly to a different objective, much easier than getting them rolling from a standing start.
Afghanistan or Iran, or even southern Russia come to that.
The American people consumers are so browbeaten now they'll accept anything that promises to quiet things down, OR heat things up to the break.
There's that itching painful tension like a massive zit or a boil or something, all that pressure and the wrongness of it wanting release, the squeeze and pop.
The pigs are ready, the people consumers are ready, all that's left is the removal, or neutralization by more complex means of conscience-driven pains-in-the-ass like Amy Goodman and the kids on the street in St. Paul.
How to combat the rabidly contagious cynicism of the pigocracy?
Everybody knows there has to be a big reduction in human biomass, yet nobody sane wants to engage the process out front.
Behind the scenes it's all prionic half-logic and delusional rationality.
The spirits that drive these creeps are themselves delusional.
A fracturing of the paradigm, that spirits can be ill, tricked, mad, filled with wound-hormones and bad ideas, even suicidal.
Suicide-prone immortals would be a subset of the higher entities that little humans might best avoid.

Reject.
Withdraw.
Disengage.
Reject.
Withdraw.
Disengage.
Reject.
Withdraw.
Disengage.
Reject.
Withdraw.
Disengage.

Amy Goodman arrested
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That does it for me.
Amy Goodman is the Betsy Ross of right now.
Amy Goodman is not arrestable, not unless evil is running things.
In which case you would expect it.
Amy Goodman really is the Betsy Ross of right now, the flag she's sewing a contemporary one, made of light and sound.
Evil is running things.
And all those erstwhile Christians sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, cheering it on.

Jane Hamsher on being welcome in Minneapolis
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Lindsay Beyerstein on same
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Greenwald on same
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Uptake on same

McCain’s record on veterans’ issues is shocking and awful

it could be wrong to wait:

Climate change is not just a phenomenon. It is developing into a large scale crisis that threatens large spheres of human development...

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
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Meanwhile:
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week part III

an uproar in Swiss watchmaking circles

on the theme of wolves:

Wolves, which have returned to Switzerland after more than a century's absence, have had a bad press, especially over their attacks on sheep.

But experts say that the wolf is still largely misunderstood and - unlike in stories - poses no danger to humans. A special project has been launched to counter the public's fears.

Wolves were driven to extinction in Switzerland in the 19th century. They started to reappear in small numbers in 1995, having wandered in from neighbouring France, Italy and Austria...

swissinfo
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The use of aircraft to shoot or harass animals from the air is illegal under the US Airborne Hunting Act, enacted in 1972. The act was passed after a nationwide outcry against the aerial hunting of wolves in Alaska.
In June of this year Sarah Palin sanctioned the Alaska Fish and Game helicopter killing of fourteen adult wolves unwilling to leave their dens, and the subsequent “denning” that resulted in the illegal slaughter of fourteen pups the adults had tried to protect. As Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin is answerable for these crimes.
For more than 30 years, the state of Alaska has attempted to circumvent the intent of the Airborne Hunting Act by exploiting a loophole in the law allowing states to “administer” wildlife using aircraft. Under the guise of wildlife management, Alaska contends its current aerial hunting program is not hunting at all but constitutes legitimate wildlife management that artificially boosts wild moose and caribou populations.
The circumstances surrounding Alaska’s program make it clear that the state is allowing aerial hunting, which is banned by federal law.

listics

Sarah Palin, answering a 2006 policy questionnaire:

Q: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?

Palin: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance

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Hunter/DailyKos