approximately $ 1 billion a year:

Britain's Transport and General Workers' Union has called upon its 800,000 members to boycott Israeli-made products based on what they term Israel's "criminal policies in Palestinian territories."
The decision to call for a boycott, reached at a union conference in Brighton, is declarative and does not include concrete steps to implement the boycott.
The TGWU is the second British union to call for a boycott on Israel this year - last month the British public services union UNISON also urged its members to refrain from purchasing Israeli products, basing the call on Israel's "criminal behavior in the territories," and Israel's responsibility for the Second Lebanon War.

haaretz 08.Jul.07
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via xymphora
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Intel as Israeli business
Intel in Israel

The cavalry didn't come riding to the rescue; the American Indians did.

oil:

agrofuels threaten to greatly accelerate climate change through the destruction of ecosystems and carbon sinks on which we depend for a stable climate. The rush to agrofuels encourages intensive, industrial agriculture at the expense of sustainable food production.
Monoculture plantations have been doing serious damage around the world for decades, but agrofuels represent a further intensification of the process, endangering what remains of global forest cover and climate. They also threaten the food sovereignty, cultural, human and land rights of indigenous peoples and local communities.
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Washington's Holy Grail - or Benchmark Supreme - remains the Oil Law. Only 24 of 37 Iraqi cabinet ministers have approved the made-in-Washington draft of the law - which should have been presented for discussion in Parliament this Wednesday. The Kurds have already leaked that they are against it - the terms, not the law in itself. The Sadrists, virtually all Sunni parties and the overwhelming majority of Iraq's population - if they had access to the text - are against handing over the nation's wealth to Anglo-American Big Oil.
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In other Iraq news, the Iraqi cabinet has approved part of a controversial oil law. On Tuesday, cabinet ministers voted to send the law on to parliament. U.S. lawmakers have demanded Iraq advance the measure before it approves additional war funding. Critics say the law would leave Iraq’s oil open to foreign takeover.
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Oil companies from all over the world have been warned by Peru's national indigenous peoples' organization not to explore for oil in areas where uncontacted tribes live. The tribes face extinction from an oil boom in Peru that has seen 70% of the Peruvian Amazon opened up to exploration
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Should everyone drive tiny cars in the future? Then we would be talking about something entirely different. For the vast majority of buyers, a sense of responsibility and driving pleasure go hand-in-hand. You ought to try driving the 12-cylinder diesel. You'd be impressed.

Take Iraq. Take it all.

enabling the passive voice:

As if he hadn’t done enough damage already, helping to promote the American invasion of Iraq with deeply flawed articles in The New York Times, Michael R. Gordon is now writing scare stories that offer ammunition for the growing chorus of neo-cons calling for a U.S. strike against Iran - his most recent effort appearing just this morning.
What’s most lamentable is that editors at The New York Times, who should have learned their lessons four years ago, are once again serving as enablers.

Mitchell/Editor&Publisher 03.Jul.07
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What seems to some of us out here, far from whatever daily grind of pressure and response is working on Gordon and the editors of the Times, and Mitchell you'd have to assume to some extent, a more salient point, is who's being enabled there, as Gordon takes his skills as messenger and value-added information packager once more into the breach, and Mitchell critically if incompletely examines the result.
Mitchell doesn't say, as though it's not as key as what he accurately describes as being done by Gordon and the editors of the New York Times and possibly other less public figures, but if he could say why, if he could bring himself to address it, considering why would allow us to anticipate, forecast, and link other people and events to what's being rejected almost unanimously by everyone in America now except its elected officials and its commercial news organizations - that thing that has currently the face of the "war in Iraq" but is clearly something bigger and darker.
Describing the "growing chorus of neocons" that way, as a chorus, something tangential to the main plot, something closer to a protesting mob than a cabal of efficient conscienceless gangsters, leaves out their main attribute at the moment - that they campaigned for, planned for, organized and prosecuted the lead-in to the invasion of Iraq, and did so with an astonishingly small amount of visible players, successfully, having got what they were after - the destruction of Iraq as a military presence and as an economically independent state in the Middle East has been accomplished. So chorus they may be, but it's a louder and more ominous noise they're making than the phrase carries superficially.
These men or the the interest they serve not only developed the idea of invasion and occupation of Iraq into its current awful reality, they've had years of the sock-puppet acquiescence of the Bush Administration and its Congressional enablers to hand-pick the military leadership the already-owned media now quote, through Gordon, as unquestionable primary sources fingering Iran for events and conditions the rest of us have no clear alternative way of interpreting without relying on imagination and suspicion.
The tacit assumptions behind Mitchell's position, the hoped-for assuming that was no doubt one of Gordon's minor goals - incompetent tyrant Bush and shallow arrogant petroleum-worshipping Cheney, like tumors that can be identified and removed by a familiar and safe operation - are solidified and strengthened by being left unnamed.
The more radical version, that Bush and his whole house of cards, and Gordon and the editors of The New York Times and theirs, are part of an architecture of lies that's deep complex and confusing and even the voices we should be able to rely on to cut through that confusion and make clearer what's happening only add to that confusion - Mitchell and all the rest of the chorus of sane and normative opposition that has barked at them all these years and done nothing, not one single effective thing to stop them, the people who were meant to understand themselves as addressed by that chilling pronouncement from the elect, back in 2002:

"...we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."

Mitchell's response to, and Gordon's regurgitated fiction itself, the splash and ripple of it across the pond of American public attention, keep the larger questions out of sight and mind.
Who's that "we" whose reality we're studying?
Who's done this to the world?
What do they really want?
And what will it take to stop them.

a particularly damning map:

China forced the World Bank to remove damning statistics from a pollution report, the Financial Times has revealed. Among the information cut was the figure that around 750,000 people die in China each year because of pollution.

der Spiegel 04.Jul.07
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dragon bones
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in disciplined lines
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mouthpieces of God
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"...other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact..."
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"...little things lead to bigger things..."
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Resolved, That Richard B. Cheney, Vice President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

We can try to articulate, though it's very near the futile edge, why Bush's pardon of Libby is a wrong thing, and we should. So here. Because it is the stunning hammer, the blunt instrument, the immediate weapon visited upon our hope for a brighter future. "Our" meaning something that doesn't hold Libby and Bush as essential. "Our" meaning something that is kept by, or caught by, or at the mildest impeded by what these men are in the world as we live in it now.
Other brighter quicker minds have explained that keeping Libby in a legal limbo will enable the duplicitous "can't talk about it, ongoing case" curtain to drop over what he did, and what he is, and who he really has served by his moments in the public sector, or behind it and around it.
The particulars of his case aren't what he is to us, it's the connection, the connections, the lines of intrigue and force that go out from his busy mornings and evenings as what he was employed as for that time, a lobbyist, a man of influence and persuasion, someone who could align power and opportunity in ways that brought outcomes to realization that were seen as furthering to the still untouchable men and, we have to begin to recognize this, spirits for whom he labored.
The tacit delusion is Libby has nothing to do with Israel, with Perle and Feith and Abrams and Wolfowitz and Iraq and now Iran, but that's all it is, delusion.
The energy generated by the crepuscular fitting together of all these disparate bits of work burns toward impeachment - it's a natural desire, to punish these men who've seemingly ridden what could have been down into a choiceless morass of bad inevitabilities - but we need to look past that, quickly, toward whatever could put an incompetent fool like Bush at the head of the government of what was at the time the most powerful nation in the world, and Cheney with him and all these little bit players alongside.
It either is a concerted move by something big enough to do that, or it's just cumulative degradation, moral entropy, the piled-up shit of a Darwinian clot of rampant assholes gathered in one place and festering, breeding its bugs and maggotty larvae.
Bush got there, and Cheney and Libby and all them got there by people taking the simpler easier way through, that it's an accident, bad luck, just inertia and momentum and organized greed. That's the first way it comes together as plot and narrative, without the story's comforting sense of some end in mind. Flailing creeps of great complexity striking the vulnerable still-not-quite thing we promised to become, this big experiment, democracy, America.
Or you could look toward something with intent, that meant this, that tells Bush what to do if not what to say, and has Cheney's balls in an invisible vise from which he can't get free, and has Libby's soul in its wallet, and in its arrogance and vicious egotism will stay its course through increasing proof it's doomed us all.
It needs our ignorance and our selfishness to do this, and those are the things we have, by denying them refuting them refusing to obey them, those are the things we have, all we have, to stop it.

real privacy is hard to find:

“The Brits have got something smart going in England, and it was part of why I believe they were able to so quickly apprehend suspects in the terrorist acts over the weekend, and that is they have cameras all over London and other of their major cities,” Lieberman said.
“I think it’s just common sense to do that here much more widely,” he added. “And of course, we can do it without compromising anybody’s real privacy.”

Lieberman
The Hill 01.Jul.07

these people are dangerous:

Defying anti-gay rioting, threats of bloodshed, opposition from Israel's prime minister and Jerusalem's mayor, a vote by Israel's parliament, and rabbinical curses, some 2,000 courageous people staged a dignified Gay Pride march in central Jerusalem last Thursday, June 21.
At least 130 anti-gay protesters had been arrested in the week leading up to the Pride demonstration, as homophobic rioting by the ultra-Orthodox engulfed religious neighborhoods of Israel's capital and the nearby ultra-Orthodox suburb of Bnei Brak, according to a police spokesman. The rioters set vehicles and trashcans ablaze, blocked traffic, and threw stones at police, 24 of whom were reported wounded.
Another 19 ultra-Orthodox protesters were arrested at the Pride march last Thursday, including one man who tried to bomb the parade route.

Direland 28.Jun.07

Gay Bombs at xymphora

the highest rate of incarceration in the world

all of the adult chimps tested have been equal or superior in performance to humans

Los Angeles' driest rainy season in 130 years of record-keeping will go into the books this weekend

Their God is our God

a caliphate with quiche

while you were out:

...doctors that saw fewer patients, younger patients and richer patients (and those that fudged the stats) got paid better. Doctors that saw more patients, older patients, and poorer patients were penalized. Superficial ratings of patient care based on poor control of patient populations will always provide inaccurate information about the real quality of care from your doctor or hospital. Publishing ratings based on these poor controls will give hospitals more incentive to refer or turf patients that are difficult, old, poor, or very sick onto other institutions. This is not good for patient care.

Mark Hoofnagle/denialism 27.Jun.07
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via NewsTrust

support something

we're both going to jump

the humble toad in Greek lagoons

My expanding journalistic integrity Space:

zzMr. Murdoch cooperates closely with China’s censors and state broadcasters, several people who worked for him in China say. He cultivates political ties that he hopes will insulate his business ventures from regulatory interference, these people say.
xzIn speeches and interviews, Mr. Murdoch often supports the policies of Chinese leaders and attacks their critics. A group of China-based reporters for The Journal accused him in a letter to Dow Jones shareholders of “sacrificing journalistic integrity to satisfy personal and political aims,” a charge the News Corporation denies.
xxHis courtship has made him the Chinese leadership’s favorite foreign media baron.

NYTimes - 26.Jun.07