informant38
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...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not...
Milton, Areopagitica

Except he had found the
standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
that quiets the desire even of praising it.

Jeffers, Meditation On Saviors


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30.9.08

our existing unbearable load

...a very quick explanation of the $700 billion bailout within the context of the mechanics of our monetary and banking system:

The taxpayers loan money to the banks. But the taxpayers do not have the money. So we have to borrow it from the banks to give it back to the banks. But the banks do not have the money to loan to the government. So they create it into existence (through a mechanism called fractional reserve) and then loan it to us, at interest, so we can then give it back to them.

Confused?

This is the system.
Kucinich
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Kucinich home

28.9.08

Interview With Sean Hannity of Fox News:

QUESTION: Let me ask this. I know a lot of Americans – and I include myself in this – have lost confidence. You’ve spent the better part of this week at the United Nations. You’ve met with many world leaders this week.

SECRETARY RICE: Right.

QUESTION: We’ve lost confidence in their ability to accomplish things of substance. You know, there has been much anti-American sentiment expressed there, anti-Semitic sentiment expressed at the United Nations. You know, and I’m thinking the United States, we’re about, what, 5 percent of the world’s population, we bear the burden of securing liberty and freedom for the other 95 percent. Has it lost its effectiveness and its ability to accomplish the task of peace and stability and the advancement of freedom in the world?

SECRETARY RICE: You know, Sean...
Scoop NZ 28.Sep.08

25.9.08

23.9.08

And that root cause is...
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Now is the Time to Resist Wall Street's Shock Doctrine
What Gingrich's wish list tells us is that the dumping of private debt into the public coffers is only stage one of the current shock. The second comes when the debt crisis currently being created by this bailout becomes the excuse to privatize social security, lower corporate taxes and cut spending on the poor.

Gagged:

Sarah Palin was gagged at the United Nations when ready to deliver her speech. But her speech got out to the media, nevertheless.

Rally committees concluded they did not want a political venue for the appearance of Ahmadinejad at the UN; therefore, Sarah Palin was sidelined.

In her printed speech, she spoke not only as a Vice Presidential candidate but as a true feminist. She did not fear pointing out specific cruelties leveled against females by Islamic governments, Iran in particular.

She advocated for women everywhere—to be treated civilly—but especially for women in Muslim environs. That is something that the National Organization for Women has not done. That is something that politically liberal females are not noted for.

Sarah Palin speaks for Americans. She speaks especially for women for she has a conscience for women and their situations worldwide.

She stated per The New York Sun:
"It is said that the measure of a country is the treatment of its most vulnerable citizens. By that standard, the Iranian government is both oppressive and barbaric. Under Ahmadinejad's rule, Iranian women are some of the most vulnerable citizens.
If an Iranian woman shows too much hair in public, she risks being beaten or killed.
If she walks down a public street in clothing that violates the state dress code, she could be arrested.
But in the face of this harsh regime..."
Canadian Free Press 23.Sep.08
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Gagged:
Four months ago in the middle of the night, six men dressed in wide-brimmed black hats, black coats, white shirts and black trousers burst into the Jerusalem apartment of a young Jewish woman and taught her a lesson.

Mikhail, who is reluctant to give her full name, had scandalised members of her ultra-orthodox Jewish community by leaving her husband and embracing a secular lifestyle. The men, all members of the theologically conservative Haredi branch of Judaism, tackled her to the ground, slammed her head against the floor and tied a rag around her mouth. One assailant sat on her head as the others kicked her while demanding to know the names of the men she was seeing.

They also threatened to kill her if she did not leave the neighbourhood, which contains many secular as well as religious residents.
[...]
Much of Kreus's time is spent checking out reports of illicit use of new technologies by members of the Haredi community. 'If we discover someone has a computer at home we throw the children out of school,' he said. Enforcing dictates on women's behaviour is another vital part of his brief.

He runs a library housing copies of the enormous notices pasted on the walls of Mea Shearim and other religious neighbourhoods berating women for wearing wigs instead of scarves and advertising appropriate dress on buses.

Signs warning women not to enter if they are wearing trousers, short sleeves or a skirt above the knees, hang in the neighbourhood. One is affixed outside Kreus's two-room house where he lives with his wife and 11 children. 'Every week there's a complaint about the way women dress,' said Kreus.

Extraordinarily, he admitted to slashing the tyres of women who have driven into the neighbourhood who, he said, were indecently dressed. 'There was a mess with the police,' he said. 'Now I'm trying new creative methods, not using violence. Now I make a small hole in their tyres and the air deflates slowly. I'm not destroying their car.'
Guardian 21.Sep.08

22.9.08

money matters:

China has over $900 billion of exposure/investment in US Treasury bills and in debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
[...]
As I noted here recently, the latest figure on the amount of T-bills Japan owes is $593 billion. That means it owns around $260 billion in other, quite possibly much more risky US investments.
Helena Cobban
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Hank Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs on leave, has complete and total control over the nation's treasure. He would be unchecked by Congress, unchecked by the President. He will be king. Here's the text:
"The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this Act, including, without limitation"
Using this power, Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs could pay Goldman Sachs anything he wanted for their mortgage assets. Let's say the market value was 20 cents on the dollar. Hank Paulson could pay them 100 cents on the dollar. Its his decision and his alone. No oversight. No limitations. Hank Paulson could simply give the nation's treasure to Goldman Sachs.
Get it now?
Housing Panic

21.9.08

more than the president of the United States:

During the last five years of his tenure as CEO of now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld's total take was $354 million. John Thain, the current chairman of Merrill Lynch, taken over this week by Bank of America, has been on the job for just nine months. He pocketed a $15 million signing bonus. His predecessor, Stan O'Neal, retired with a package valued at $161 million, after the company reported an $8 billion loss in a single quarter. And remember Bear Stearns's Chairman James Cayne? After the company collapsed earlier this year and was up for sale at bargain basement prices, he sold his stake for more than $60 million.

Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron, the former heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - aka the gods who failed - are fighting to keep severance packages of close to $24 million combined - on top of the millions in salary each earned last year while slaughtering the golden calf. As it is written...
Moyers-Winship/t r u t h o u t | Perspective 19.Sep.08

A Bailout Plan, but Will It All Work?
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News Trust 21.Sep.08

If I say nothing, I have failed:

"It wasn't until after I'd been back that I tried to shut off my experiences in Iraq," Cameron told IPS. "I kept to myself, and was going through my memories and realised we'd destroyed their infrastructure and weren't there to help. I realised it wasn't about freedom and democracy, and the way we conducted ourselves, and the way we brutalised the people, made me against the occupation."

"We were trained to fight and win battles," he said. "I was in artillery, I was trained to blow shit up. We weren't there to rebuild anything or help the Iraqi people."
"It's been so altered...it's not an argument of being on the road to victory because the surge is working, but the fact is that the country has been totally devastated. We need to understand where these people are in just trying to survive on a daily basis."
 Dahr Jamail/IPS

20.9.08

Timeliness:


see also:
eponymity
Kid Charlemagne

18.9.08

security is a relative thing:

How does surveillance get naturalised? Mark Andrejevic, author of Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, believes that reality TV has played a part in transforming American attitudes toward surveillance. Producers of early reality programs such as MTV’s The Real World (1992) had a hard time finding people willing to have their lives taped nearly 24 hours a day for several months. Now, thousands of young people form audition lines in college towns, ‘more people applying to The Real World each year than to Harvard.’ New generations, Andrejevic says, are growing up viewing television shows that let anyone see the lives of others recorded voluntarily. There are other reality shows too, like COPS, where police chases of criminals is filmed. Increasingly, he says, the results of surveillance are seen as `entertainment,’ as being within the realm of the public’s right to know.
ahmed/shahidul 15.Sep.08

17.9.08

Nazis>Bolivia>cocaine>?>CIA>1980>Bush's puppetmasters?

In case it's lost on the thought-disabled, the link in the post below goes to at the moment two hits with quotes from "State Department spokesman Sean McCormack" on the recent Bolivian outbreak of democracy and morality. The news confirms the sad truth, that the US is the enemy of democracy and morality in Latin America.
So screw democracy and morality, right? Go USA!
Another pertinent bit is The arrest today of opposition leader Leopoldo Fernandez
which is a line from this paragraph:

The arrest today of opposition leader Leopoldo Fernandez, governor of the remote Amazonian province of Pando, abruptly ended efforts by the president and opposition leaders to talk about compromises after anti-Morales protesters ransacked government offices in Pando and three other eastern provinces last week. It also prompted the United States to evacuate its Peace Corps volunteers...
Most pertinent of all is that he's been arrested for the massacre of unarmed poor people, 30 at last count, with more than a hundred still missing and unaccounted for, who had gathered and marched in protest at their treatment by the wealthy landowners in Fernandez's prefecture. They were attacked by armed men who had dump trucks ready to remove the expected bodies quickly.
Those unarmed poor people were shot down in cold blood by thugs acting at the indirect direction of the arrested Fernandez, who was acting at the indirect direction of the wealthy landowners in the states of Pando, Santa Cruz, Tarija and Beni, who were themselves acting like debutantes in a ballroom, waltzing in the arms of the US State Department.
The villains are all up and down the line, but the power's in Washington. If the US had said "Don't" those poor people, unarmed men women and children, would still be alive.
Instead the US, in the person of the most execrable and ignominiously banished Philip Goldberg, a man whose job it is to impersonate as best he can an international diplomat, while acting as the servile gofer-stooge for a criminal conspiracy as big and violently evil as, as, as, as - I don't know, the Roman Empire - encouraged, financed, armed, and instructed the would-be slave-owners of Bolivia's eastern states to do what they had to do to maintain control of...the oil.
The fucking oil.
And it is all as well also very much about slavery, make no mistake. Latin America's been a slave plantation in one form or another for the last 500 years.
And it's over now, that time, thanks to rock and roll and the internet - so the pigs are very excited and unhappy.
Which brings us to the real subject of today's address, the Rosenbergs.
Deathbed-like testimony by aging Morton Sobell puts paid to the question of the Rosenbergs' guilt or innocence in atomic spy case of early 50's.
The Rosenbergs, husband and wife Julius and Ethel, were executed at Sing-Sing. It was a pageant of anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, a celebration of blood lust and hysteria. The fact of their spying would seem to give a solidity to the moral stance taken by those who approve of their execution.
But it doesn't.
And it doesn't matter to whom they gave or sold whatever those secrets actually were.
What they worked against has proved itself evil, and that's never addressed, never will be, because evil is in charge of what gets debated, and debating whether or not the evil in charge is in fact evil is not allowed.
But it is, evil, wrong, whatever term your conscience uses to separate what should be from what shouldn't.
Finding out you've committed your life to the defense of something that by any accurate definition should have been your enemy is a dilemma faced by many military professionals.
It drives them to drink, suicide, madness, or small hobbies and retirement.
Any US military professional who's looking at the news today and not feeling soul-conflicted is a weak-minded pussy.
Which is for whom and why I wrote this.
Hey, soldier, wake up!


a prudent step based on the situation on the ground

16.9.08

Palin is a gateway drug to a back-alley brawl Obama can't win.
- John Cusack/Huffington

Sarah Palin:

What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?
A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.
Newsmax 29.Aug.08
via Rolling Stone
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How is it affecting our country? It will affect Alaska more than any other state.
Sarah, how is it affecting our country?
Well it's the end-times, so it's okay.
But God still cares more about little babies than about old people, so there must be more time left.
Maybe we should start building rockets? Or giant crosses, really giant ones, like that could only be seen from space, like across Utah, the whole state from border to border.
As the economy starts eating people in droves, and the weather keeps shaking the whole thing silly, it would give us a project, something to do. 
Take our minds off the fact that driving cars, not Divine Will, is ruining the only home we'll ever have. The drug gasoline has wrecked our lives.
She's not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.
So it's either, what, God, the devil, or natural stuff like, you know, the sun and the moon.
No worries. Already prophesized.
We should now draft all the psychiatric professionals in the US into some great army and mandate them to confront and make clear and plain the insane unlogic Palin's affliction causes her to suffer under, plus all the other millions of like-minded idiots. Heal them before they kill us all.
But then that's sort of the point. She's not really suffering, we are.
 She's dim, and nuts, and cute. No worries.
The demi-urge gloats at the madness his faithful give voice to, because of what it does to the rest of us. 
How disheartening it is, if you're not stupid and crazy.

Courage, brothers and sisters, the end is not yet.



"Get a job," he replied.

15.9.08

UN Staff trapped in Kilinocchi:

I am sending this as im a little desperate but also as i believe this to be a big story. 10 UN internationals including myself have been trying to get out of the LTTE held territories since Friday last week. Due to rapid escalation of the security in the region and protests outside our offices to leave for the fears of the community that when we leave there will be an onslaught of the Sri Lankan army. we now feel that if we do not leave tomorrow Tuesday 16th it maybe too late and we will be trapped in here until the battle for Kilinocchi (LTTE capital) is finished.

the below statement was released to the media today by the UN in Colombo. basically the situation is that it is getting way too close here now.
ShahidulNews

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