"Supporting the Troops" by lying to their families.

Untold Stories from the Pat Tillman / Jessica Lynch Hearings

By DIANE FARSETTA

Counterpunch, Weekend Edition
May 12 / 13, 2007British reporters quickly debunked Lynch's rescue as a staged media event, and, once she was well enough to realize and respond to the narrative, Lynch herself disavowed the rest. During the hearing, Rep. Waxman added another wrinkle -- evidence that the "rescue" operation had been delayed, for publicity purposes:

Rep. Henry Waxman: The military had an opportunity to rescue you, when you were captive for ten days. But there was a whole day, before they captured you, when they were preparing not just to rescue you, but to videotape the rescue. Were you aware of that, or aware of it now?

Private Jessica Lynch: Not at the time, I wasn't aware that they were videotaping me, no. But after the fact, yeah I knew about it and now, you know, I kind of understand why they did it.

Waxman: Well, maybe you understand it. ... I come from Hollywood.

See also: "Pat Tillman, Our Hero":

"Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was "f***ing illegal" and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. ... Mary Tillman says a private meeting was planned between him and Pat after Pat's return--a meeting that never took place, of course. Chomsky confirms this scenario."

Ever?

RICE: So our friends in the neighborhood need to know and the Iraqis need to know that we are not looking to leave Iraq. That’s not why this President went into Iraq and it’s not how –

ROSE: Ever?

RICE: Charlie, we are not going to leave an Iraq that is not capable of defending itself and with a foundation for future reconciliation.

Tout ça n'empêch'pas, Nicolas, qu'la Commune n'est pas morte !

Elle n'est pas morte ! (1886, E. Pottier)
- dédiée aux survivants de la semaine sanglante.

On l'a tuée à coups d'chassepot,
A coups de mitrailleuse,
Et roulée avec son drapeau
Dans la terre argileuse.
Et la tourbe des bourreaux gras
Se croyait la plus forte.
Tout ça n'empêch' pas, Nicolas,
Qu'la Commune n'est pas morte !

Comme faucheurs rasant un pré,
Comme on abat des pommes,
Les Versaillais ont massacré
Pour le moins cent mille hommes.
Et ces cent mille assassinats
Voyez c'que ça rapporte.
Tout ça n'empêch' pas, Nicolas,
Qu'la Commune n'est pas morte !

On a bien fusillé Varlin,
Flourens, Duval, Millière,
Ferré, Rigault, Tony Moilin,
Gavé le cimetière.
On croyait lui couper les bras
Et lui vider l'aorte.
Tout ça n'empêch' pas, Nicolas,
Qu'la Commune n'est pas morte !

Ils ont fait acte de bandits,
Comptant sur le silence,
Ach'vé les blessés dans leurs lits,
Dans leurs lits d'ambulance.
Et le sang inondant les draps
Ruisselait sous la porte.
Tout ça n'empêch'pas, Nicolas,
Qu'la Commune n'est pas morte !

Les journalistes policiers,
Marchands de calomnies,
Ont répandu sur nos charniers
Leurs flots d'ignominies
Les Maxim'Ducamp, les Dumas,
Ont vomi leur eau-forte.
Tout ça n'empêch'pas, Nicolas,
Qu'la Commune n'est pas morte !

C 'est la hache de Damoclès,
Qui plane sur leurs têtes.
A l'enterr'ment de Vallès,
Ils en étaient tous bêtes.
Fait est qu'on était un fier tas
A lui servir d'escorte !
C' qui vous prouve en tout cas, Nicolas
Qu'la Commune n'est pas morte !

Bref, tout ça prouve aux combattants
Qu'Marianne a la peau brune,
Du chien dans l'ventre et qu'il est temps
D'crier : Vive la Commune !
Et ça prouve à tous les Judas
Qu'si ça marche de la sorte,
Ils sentiront dans peu, Nom de Dieu !
Qu'la Commune n'est pas morte !

Boredom

EUROPOL confirms: There Is NO Islamist Terror In Europe

Mathias Bröckers on "The Invented Terrorist Threat"(translation to follow):

24. April 2007

Die erfundene Terrorgefahr.

Am 10. April veröffentlichte Europol, der Zusammenschluß der europäischen Polizeibehörden, einen Bericht über die Gefahren des Terrorismus: “EU Terrorism and Trendreport 2007” . In den Großmedien hierzulande wurde die umfangreiche Studie nicht zum Thema, ja sie wurde nicht einmal erwähnt. Eine Meldung aus den USA hingegen, dass us-amerikanische Einrichtungen in Deutschland einer stärkeren Bedrohung ausgesetzt seien, landete vergangene Woche in sämtlichen Wiederholungsschleifen der Nachrichten. Wie kommt es, dass eine Meldung mit der zweifelhaften Quelle “US-Militärkreise” groß die Runde macht, eine umfangreiche Studie der EU-Polizei aber keinerlei Erwähnung findet ?

Die Europol-Studie hat sämtliche Terroranschläge, die 2006 in 11 EU-Ländern stattfanden, analysiert– von den 498 Anschlägen, die von den Euro-Polizisten untersucht wurden, hatte nach diesen Erkenntnis nur ein einziger einen “islamistischen” Hintergrund, es handelte sich um die verhinderten “Kofferbomber” im letzten Sommer in Deutschland. Zwei weitere angeblich geplante Anschläge in England und Dänemark, die im Vorfeld entdeckt wurden, wurden nicht in die Statistik aufgenommen. Die meisten Anschläge – 136 – werden der baskischen ETA zugeschrieben, insgesamt kamen bei allen 498 terroristischen Attacken in der EU im Jahr 2006 sage und schreibe zwei Menschen ums Leben.

Angesichts dieser Lage von einer “islamistischen Bedrohung” und “Gefahren des Terrorismus” zu reden, ist reine Demagogie. Kein Wunder also, dass diese Terror-Statistik keine Erwähnung fand – die “Terrorischten”, vor denen Wolfgang “Stasi 2.0” Schäuble uns schützen will, existieren einfach nicht, die Bedrohung durch Terrorismus ist für EU-Bürger deutlich niedriger als die Gefahr, vom Blitz getroffen zu werden.


-- As far as I can see, this has been entirely unreported in the British and US media.

Barcelona v Getafe last night (LEO MESSI)

Previous video was removed due to a copyright violation.

No problema!! Aljazeera Sport won't mind I'm sure. Better commentary anyway..

Quarrel

Operation Ajax

...continues.

Journalism is corruption

Glenn Greenwald:

Even six months after this country invaded Iraq, 70% of Americans continued to believe that Saddam helped personally plan the 9/11 attacks. That heinous fact, by itself, should have provoked a major crisis in political journalism -- a desperate effort to find out what went so fundamentally wrong. Yet it did nothing of the sort. Most of the energies of national journalists are devoted instead to defending how they operate and, most of all, condescendingly disparaging their critics as shrill partisans who don't understand the real role of journalists. I honestly find it unfathomable that any national journalist(s)... can defend their profession, and deny that there are deep-seated and fundamental flaws in it, when this country started a war with the overwhelming majority of citizens -- 70% -- believing an absolute, complete myth, a known falsehood, one which, more than anything else, caused them to support that war. Leaving aside every other issue of gullible, government-propaganda-based reporting, that fact standing alone is a towering indictment of our country's press corps, and the fact that they continue to believe that the way they operate is proper, that they are sufficiently adversarial to the political powers that be, and that it is their critics who are "ideological" and therefore easily dismissed -- all reveals that they have not changed at all.They may not know it, but the disaster of the Iraq War and the absolute myths which they allowed to take root -- and which they never investigated, exposed or attacked -- is an inescapable indictment of what they do. That is the foundation on which media criticism rests, and there is nothing "partisan" about it. It is the opposite of "partisan." It is instead a demand that the media fulfill their core responsibility -- to serve as an adversarial check on government -- a responsibility which they have profoundly abdicated.

[via]

Well said, but it's not nearly enough. How should we describe the journalists who allow half the US population to go on believing that their government has proven Osama bin Laden's responsibility for the very same crime?

Everything's coming up roses

And one of the things that I think is most important for progressives to challenge is the discourse that everything in Iraq is a disaster. I think we need to start asking and insisting, disaster for who, because not everybody is losing. It’s certainly a disaster for the Iraqi people. It's certainly a disaster for US taxpayers. But what we have seen -- and it’s extremely clear if we track the numbers -- is that the worse things get in Iraq, the more privatized this war becomes, the more profitable this war becomes for companies like Lockheed Martin, Bechtel, and certainly Blackwater.

-- Naomi Klein

(Same applies to everywhere else, of course.)

"These 'journalists' are Mitläufer"

Watch these two videos simultaneously. It's amazing how they 'sync up' if you start watching the second a bit after the first.

"Wanted blood, Hell for infidels."

Angry Arab: "... anybody who knows Arabic will notice something really odd and fishy about the graffiti: It is not written by an Arabic speaker."

From Death Row

Lynching and Spectacle

(Notice Sailor and Lula in the middle)

Re: Reckless Eyeballing

The black man is righteously put to death before white onlookers after falsely accusing the white man of recklessly eyeballing the white woman and for this transgression attempting to murder him on her orders. The sexually incontinent white woman and the murderous, sexually predatory black man are in league against the innocent, unjustly maligned white man and his good white woman.

Re: New York

Rats take over NY. They slip in first through the unguardedness of the upright citizens, commencing with the negligence-for-convenience of the white man in the anonymous street crowd, conscious and ashamed of his littering, a dry relatively harmless paper, then spreads to the oblivious littering of the white mother too absorbed in mother love in bucolic central park to notice, the same paper; their unwatchfulness opens the floodgates for the brazen littering of the be-suited black man throwing heaven knows what over his shoulder, who seems to trigger the wet organic filth of the sexual young crowd upon whose splash and ooze the rats feed, reproduce...







Re: Smoke and Fire


The film runs backwards to give Amos and Andy a comically unnaural, ghostly air that amuses and charms. "They're so weird!" How did they come to be ghostly and weird? What history unravels and erases itself? Run forward the sequence is: Amos and Andy are confronted by us (with the camera) through a blaze, recalling a torch. They put their hands up defensively. Two gushes of liquid are released from above their heads, seeming to match them, one column of gush for each. They look up, but the camera does not. The camera declines to look up to discover whatever it is that hangs from the trees above, releasing these gushes. Amos and Andy go down on their knees in the mud and make strange motions, then rise again and back away. Again they look up, but we do not. We never look up. Amos backs into the building, lights flash revealing a hook and winch; he emerges with his familiar hat. Again something - lumps, fleshy, smoking, on fire - drops down from the night sky above their heads, and again the camera declines to look up. They back away and the camera inspects the burning pile of flesh. It's only fish. Only fish aflame falling from the Southern night sky at the feet of ghostly, amusing Amos and Andy. Ooo neat. Mysterious and weird.


Re: The "Weird"

Opera Glasses

Satyajit Ray, Charulata

"Yes, you're right. It is gruesome."

Tex Avery, Dumb-hounded

football is fixed

the blog will be appreciated by us "conspiracy theorist" football aficionados!!

The Football Is Fixed Inaugural Annual Awards

Football Matches of the Year: Mexico v Argentina and Germany v Italy in the World Cup provided a reminder of the type of uplifting competitive soccer that used to be more common prior to the influx of gambling money into the game.

Political Leader of the Year: Evo Morales (the President of Bolivia) who continues to stand up for the rights of the coca growing campesinos in the face of American pressure to control the sources of cocaine in South and Central America. Having observed how Uribe (with US backing) eradicated FARC plantations while accomodating AUC plantations in Colombia, Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo are having none of it.

Football Chant of the Year: He Eats Chow Mein, He Votes Sinn Fein, Nakamura, Nakamura (Glasgow Celtic)

Reformed Psychopath of the Year: Bill Gates for setting up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to oversee global poverty and health issues as opposed to profit and wealth issues. One would like to think that this was his initial aim when setting up Microsoft. A pity that it takes private philanthropy to address Third World poverty. A big up for Warren Buffett too.

Sportsperson of the Year: Ricky Ponting. Pom-basher extraordinaire.

Rigged Election of the Year: Mexico by a mile. Utilising electoral procedures more commonly seen in Rwanda and Florida, Calderon and the PAN stole the election from the mayor of Mexico City, Lopez Obrador. Little chance of a country adjacent to the USA developing democratic politics after 71 years of dictatorship under the Orwellian-named Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Dodgy Refereeing Performance of the Year: Poll for trying to prevent the gamble on Australia being landed by denying the Aussies two penalties, disallowing a fair dinkum goal, refusing to send off a second Croat after 3 bookings and generally losing the plot big style. Interesting that his "international retirement" announced post World Cup doesn't include Champions League, UEFA Cup or Euro 2008 games.

Abuse of Democracy of the Year: USA and Israel for undermining, sanctioning, illegally arresting, killing and generally destabilising the democratically elected government of Palestine, Hamas.

Sports Scandal of the Year: Moggiopoli.

Sports Whitewash of the Year: The Steven's report into bung culture.

Political Duplicitous Bastard of the Year: Blair.

Judicial Duplicitous Bastard of the Year: The dodgy David Mills QC (quite crooked?).
Most Interesting Mafiosi Befriending the British establishment of the Year: Super Silvio Berlusconi.

Politicised Footballers of the Year: Patrick Vieira and Lilian Thuram for supporting the rights of disenfranchised immigrants in France and being top players too. El Hadji Diouf for his support for Mouride causes. Can't imagine Ashley Cole or Frank Lampard getting political eh?

Political Appointment of the Year: Hank Paulson moving from Goldman Sachs to US Treasury Chief and only agreeing to go if the US government finally got serious about global climate change.

Footballers of the Year: Ronaldo for being a circus star but, mainly, for getting Engerland knocked out of the World Cup. Essien for being class.

Disappointment to his Father of the Year: Hillary Benn.

Dead Fascist of the Year: Pinochet and let's hope Thatcher joins her role model asap. And people wonder why Latin America has moved to the Left...

Fixed Football Match of the Year: Celtic beating Man Utd. Brilliant theatre proving that sometimes crooked can be artistic.

Investment Bank of the Year: Goldman Sachs - these people know how to trade the markets.

Crap Transfer of the Year: Mourinho for Gallas/ Cole swap. Unbelievable.

Customer Focused Company of the Year: Google. Love the algorithm. Love Blogspot.
Internet Radio Station of the Year: Pandora. My personal DJ.

News Channel of the Year: Al Jazeera. Proper Global Coverage.

Blogs of the Year: The Daily Kos State of the Nation (www.dailykos.com) and Prudent Bear (www.prudentbear.com).

Best Read of the Year: A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn; Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky; Writing And Difference by Jacques Derrida.

Ostrich of the Year: Joint winners Niall Ferguson - colonialism-denier and Bjorn Lomborg - idiotic sceptic.

Slipped Mask of the Year: Blair's apoplexy when a Tory backbencher suggested that England is becoming a police state.

Anarchist Business of the Year: Skype - not content with mashing the music companies with KaZaA, they are now targeting the telecoms companies.


Great White Satan 1 Iran 0 (Iran Ban):

FIFA has today suspended Iran from all international football competitions. We are all totally convinced that this was a footballing decision and a footballing decision alone. Absolutely nothing to do with sanctions in any form. Something suitably arbitrary like government interference in the game was the reason provided. Definitely much more serious than Moggiopoli then.
Global football moves increasingly in step with World Government. Certain countries are rewarded for their compliance with a globalised shareholder society - for example in recent times, Ukraine, Angola, Trinidad and Tobago and a little further back Croatia and Czech Republic. Others are punished - Uzbekistan, North Korea, Iran, Kenya, Romania and China.
Perhaps countries undertaking free market reforms should be weighted by a couple of tenths of a goal in FIFA competitions to take account of this!?

Business As Usual, Obama Brand

Ali Abunimah:

Over the years since I first saw Obama speak I met him about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker. In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by a University of Chicago professor. On that occasion and others Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.

As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, "Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front." He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, "Keep up the good work!"

But Obama's gradual shift into the AIPAC camp had begun as early as 2002 as he planned his move from small time Illinois politics to the national scene. In 2003, Forward reported on how he had "been courting the pro-Israel constituency." He co-sponsored an amendment to the Illinois Pension Code allowing the state of Illinois to lend money to the Israeli government. Among his early backers was Penny Pritzker -- now his national campaign finance chair -- scion of the liberal but staunchly Zionist family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. (The Hyatt Regency hotel on Mount Scopus was built on land forcibly expropriated from Palestinian owners after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967). He has also appointed several prominent pro-Israel advisors.

Obama has also been close to some prominent Arab Americans, and has received their best advice. His decisive trajectory reinforces a lesson that politically weak constituencies have learned many times: access to people with power alone does not translate into influence over policy. Money and votes, but especially money, channelled through sophisticated and coordinated networks that can "bundle" small donations into million dollar chunks are what buy influence on policy. Currently, advocates of Palestinian rights are very far from having such networks at their disposal. Unless they go out and do the hard work to build them, or to support meaningful campaign finance reform, whispering in the ears of politicians will have little impact. (For what it's worth, I did my part. I recently met with Obama's legislative aide, and wrote to Obama urging a more balanced policy towards Palestine.)

If disappointing, given his historically close relations to Palestinian-Americans, Obama's about-face is not surprising. He is merely doing what he thinks is necessary to get elected and he will continue doing it as long as it keeps him in power. Palestinian-Americans are in the same position as civil libertarians who watched with dismay as Obama voted to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, or immigrant rights advocates who were horrified as he voted in favor of a Republican bill to authorize the construction of a 700-mile fence on the border with Mexico.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays Boulez

Sonata nr. 1

Baudrillard's Will...

...is not! He died intestate. The question on everyone's mind: who inherits?

The Progressive Liberals? (The Retort Collective)?

The Maoist Platonic Lacanians? (Mehdi Belhaj Kacem)?

The Orthodox Marxists? (Jonathan Beller)?

The Venture Capitalists? (Seth Goldstein & Lew Ranieri)?

The Monster of History

AmericanStranger on the Zombie Apolcalyse. These ravenous and unproductive consumers, agents not of an end of history but of "the continuation of history by other means", could be described in terms of biopower and biopolitics, but the tireless production through narration, perpetually shocked, interrupted and jolted by image, that the movies represent hint at the limits of that formula, especially when it comes to the expression of the egotism and conscious animosity of the narrating class:

The zombie (as fully realized by Romero), on the other hand, is a loathesome creature capable of inspiring only instant revulsion. It's very stinking, malformed presence puts the lie to any hope one might hold of the beyond, not only existence after death, but the atheist's dream of peace as well. There is no peace in a universe of exchange. Zombies remain dimly conscious, though any sense of dignity that might be assumed to correspond with this rudimentary capacity for self-awareness is stripped away. Zombie-ism turns its victims into slack-jawed mockeries of their former selves, presenting us with the ultimate anti-metaphysical perversion: both the subject and its body may die, but desire (as drive) lurches on. Doctor: "It wants me! It wants food! But it has no stomach, can take no nourishment from what it ingests. It's acting on INSTINCT!" The zombie 'wants' what is useless to it, which is 'life.' Slaves to an illusion, zombies are ugly, stupid, slow, and banal. Like anything so single-minded, zombies are hilarious, but you are always laughing at them, maybe a little nervously. Everything you do is at them. It is not possible to want to be a zombie, but it is so easy to become one, and this is why zombies couldn't be more terrifying to even a modestly socialized American. Zombies, as creatures of drive, are the opposite of freedom...

...

...the entire structure of the narrative, as a post-apocalyptic narrative, is a bourgeois construction, implying/reproducing an ideologically bourgeois audience. While it is capable of creating identification with a) the throwback elitist as tragic figure or b) some middle-way position (usually occupied by the protagonist), the actual agent of the apocalyptic event is always alien, whether it be an asteroid from outer space or a monstrous figure of the crowd, global warming or lumpenproletariat. In any case, huge segments of reality are reduced to mere figures for the liberation of the middle-class psyche, a worldview that easily carries over into one's consumption of CNN or the New York Times.

Paul Féval, Preface, La Vampire:

We undertake to recount a tale, historical it's true, but bourgeois, with features neither of court intrigue, nor military victories and conquests.

It is simply a page from the secret biography of that giant called Paris, who, in the course of his life, had so many adventures!

Jacques Rancière, Les Noms de l'histoire:

Une histoire, [signifying in French both 'story' and 'History'] in the ordinary sense, is a series of events which happen to subjects generally designated by proper names. Now the revolution in historical science has rightly desired to revoke the primacy of such series of events and proper names to the advantage of the longues durées and the lives of the unknown and anonymous. With this, historiography has simultaneously asserted its membership in the scientific and also the democratic age. Une histoire, is also, in the second degree, the account [récit] of these series of events attributed to these proper names. And the account is characterised by its incertitude with regard to the truth of the events related and the reality of the subjects to whom they are attributed. Things would be all too simple if one could say that all History [histoire], according to the expression, is nothing but a story [une histoire]. The property of une histoire is always to be able to be and simultaneously to be able to not be une histoire....

...The science of history constitutes itself against the diverting story or historical romance. It is for this reason that the historians of the old school relied on the rigorous inspection of sources and the critique of documents. It is for this reason that the historians of the new fashion have absorbed the lessons of geography, statistics and demography. Thus the materials of historical construction must be sheltered from the fabulising of opinion and literary turns. It remains that the material is nothing without an architecture. We know it, in the sense of the common expression: to know something is to not have to think about it. That about which we can dispense with thinking is this: history is susceptible only to one single architecture, always the same, and that is this: this series of events happened to such and such a subject. One can choose a different subject: the monarchy instead of kings, social classes, the Mediterranean or the Atlantic instead of Generals and Captains. We nonetheless must face the same leap into the void against which the rigors of no auxilliary discipline can offer any guarantee: we have to nominate subjects, we have to attribute to them conditions, status, affects, experiences.

Jacques Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie:

This double spring of the critique of the revolution permits us to understand the formation of contemporary antidemocraticism. It allows us to understand the inversion of the discourse of democracy which followed the collapse of the USSR. On the one hand, the fall of the Soviet empire was, for a very brief time, greeted joyfully as the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, the victory of individual liberties over statist oppression, symbolised by the rights of man championed by Soviet dissidents or Polish workers. These 'formal' rights had been the primary target of the Marxist critique of democracy, and the collapse of the regimes built on the pretention of promoting a more "real" democracy seemed to indicate their resurgence. But behind the welcome accorded the assertion anew of the rights of man and of rediscovered democracy, the inverse was produced. From the moment that the concept of totalitarianism was no longer useful, the opposition of a 'good' democracy of the rights of man and individual liberties against a bad egalitarian and collectivist democracy fell, as well, into desuetude. The critique of the rights of man resumed immediately all its rights. It might lean in the direction of Hannah Arendt: the rights of man are an illusion because they are the rights of that naked man who is without rights. These are the illusory rights of men that tyrannical regimes have chased from their homes, from their nations, from all citizenship. Everyone knows how much this thesis has regained favour recently. On the one hand it arrived opportunely to support these humanitarian and liberatory interventions by States undertaking, as military and militant democracy, the defense of the rights of those without rights. On the other, it inspired the analysis of Giorgio Agamben, making of the "state of exception" the real content of our democracy. But the critique can also lean toward the marxist manner that the fall of the Soviet empire and the weakening of the movements for emancipation in the West have made available, anew, for all uses: the rights of man are the rights of egoist individuals of bourgeois society.

The point is to discover who are these egoist individuals. Marx understood these as the possessors of the means of production, that is the dominant class for whom the State of the rights of man is an instrument. Current wisdom understands this differently. And in fact a series of slippages suffices to grant to egoist individuals a completely new face. First we make a replacement everyone will allow us - that of "egoist individuals" with "avid consumers". Then we identify these avid consumers with a new socio-historical species, "democratic man".

Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme:

Finally one must take sides and say once and for all, that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more irascible, more overtly savage, more shameless, more completely barbaric; it is an implacable law that all decadent classes see themselves transformed into the receptables of the sewage of history; it is a universal law that every class, before it disappears, must, as a prelude, completely dishonour itself, in every way, and it is with a head buried in manure that dying societies emit their swan songs.

Myopicide & Ontalgocure

Ah! Vous voulez rendre célèbre mon élixir? Bien le merci. Pour avoir ensuite des emmerdements à n'en plus finir. Bien le merci! Je connais déjà ça. Voyez-vous, monsieur L'Aumône, vous êtes jeune, vous n'avez pas l'air d'un sot, vous allez me comprendre. Figurez-vous qu'à vingt-huit ans j'ai découvert un medicament qui guérissait radicalement la myopie : quelques gouttes dans l'œil, et plus besoin de lunettes. Je peux même vous dire avec quoi je fabriquais ce myopicide : avec la fève de malabar. Donc : quelques gouttes dans l'œil, et plus besoin de lunettes. J'ajoute : plus besoin de oculistes, plus besoin d'opticiens. Donc : tous les oculistes ruines, et tous les opticiens. Eh bien, mon cher monsieur L'Aumône, ça a failli me coûter cher cette histoire : ah là là! la vie. Tout simplement. On a voulu m'assassiner. Parfaitement. Et les marchands d'écaille qui voulaient me couper les oreilles. Quand j'ai compris j'ai enterré mon myopicide et je suis venu me cacher ici où j'exploite tout bêtement et tout bonnement mon élixir. Car supposez que je fasse du foin avec? Eh bien! la même histoire recommencerait. Supposez un instant que je guérisse l'ontalgie existentielle et l'angoisse substantielle et l'épilepsie essentielle, qu'est-ce qu'ils deviendraient les médecins, les théologiens, les pharmaciens, les philosophes, les chirurgiens? Tous ruinés! Tous foutus! Plus de Vatican! Plus de Faculté! Oh mais je les connais, ils ne me laisseraient pas faire dès qu'ils commenceraient à entendre parler de guérison zou ils me feraient disparaître de dessus terre où j'ai bien du plaisir à être surtout en ce moment assis que je suis en face d'une gentille mignonne comme cette enfant.

Sayat Nova

Sergei Parajanov, The Color of Pomegranates

Noam Chomsky Joins 9/11 "Jersey" Widows in Calling for Release of 9/11 Documents

Noam Chomsky Joins 9/11 "Jersey" Widows in Calling for Release of 9/11 Documents

February 14, 2007 -- Noam Chomsky has signed a petition written by the 9/11 "Jersey" widows calling for the release of classified documents relating to the 9/11 attacks. The Muckraker Report has contacted him by e-mail and verified that the individual listed on the petition is indeed Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's name is #6432.

That said, now that Chomsky has agreed to sign the widows' petition, the Muckraker Report would like to see the following people sign too: Alexander Cockburn and crew at Counterpunch, the editorial staff at the Nation, Michael Moore, Barbara Ehrenreich, Amy Goodman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Seymour Hersh, Nicholas Leman at the New Yorker, Christopher Hayes, anyone who writes for the Daily Kos, including Kos himself, and the absolutely divine Camille Paglia.


Like I said in my article from a few days ago, (9/11 Widows Keep on Asking the Tough Questions), the Jersey widows say that once they have 15,000 signatures on their petition, they're going to head back to Capitol Hill. Right now they have 6,600 signatures, 1023 of them in the last 60 hours. Please e-mail the link of the petition to all your friends. Ask them to sign and forward the petition to their e-mail contacts. The Jersey widows have to get 8,400 more signatures. They need your help. Come on - give them a hand!

from, via

La pensée sauvage

"We will beat them when we realise it's not our fault that they're doing this."

- Tony Blair

Britney's Shaved Head

I'm not one of those curmudgeons who freaks out every time that Bradgelina moves the war off the front page of the Post, or Katie Couric decides to usher in a whole new era of network news with photos of the imbecile demon-spawn of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. I understand that we live in a demand-based economy and that there is far more demand for brainless celebrity bullshit than there is, say, for the fine print of the Health and Human Services budget.

But that was before this week. I awoke this morning in New York City to find Britney Spears plastered all over the cover of two gigantic daily newspapers, simply because she cut her hair off over the weekend.

(...)

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

George Monbiot gags George Monbiot

Gagging the sceptics

The US, founded to protect basic freedoms, is now insisting that its critics are its enemies

George Monbiot Tuesday October 16, 2001 The Guardian

... If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question everything we see and hear. Though we know that governments lie to us in wartime, most people seem to believe that this universal rule applies to every conflict except the current one. Many of those who now accept that babies were not thrown out of incubators in Kuwait, and that the Belgrano was fleeing when it was hit, are also prepared to believe everything we are being told about Afghanistan and terrorism in the US.

There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical. The magical appearance of the terrorists' luggage, passports and flight manual looks rather too good to be true. The dossier of "evidence" purporting to establish Bin Laden's guilt consists largely of supposition and conjecture. The ration packs being dropped on Afghanistan have no conceivable
purpose other than to create the false impression that starving people are being fed. Even the anthrax scare looks suspiciously convenient. Just as the hawks in Washington were losing the public argument about extending the war to other countries, journalists start receiving envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been labelled "a gift from Iraq". This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who would benefit from a shift in public opinion.

Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public scepticism. Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to challenge and to dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system for which our governments are supposed to be fighting. The true defenders of America are those who are now being told that they are anti-American.

*********************************************************************

Amen to all that.

Sixty-four months on, witness the deterioration in Monbiot's latest articles, which do nothing more than convey some not-very-fascinating news about George Monbiot: In the sixth year of an oxymoronic Global War on Terror conducted by the most ruthless and secretive government in US history, he has noticed that many of that government's opponents are now quite deeply confused. This is a scandal, or so we're told. As George shows us some (very carefully selected) "morons" [sic] thrashing about inelegantly in the dark, he praises himself for having so cleverly noticed their confusion. So preoccupied is he with wrinkling his nose in ostentatious disdain that he neglects to notice one thing: his own current approach to the topic relies entirely on a crass and inexcusable reversal of the burden of proof.

Strange times we live in, when people who call themselves leftists claim to be omniscient and tell us to trust our governments. There is indeed, as Monbiot says, an "epidemic of gibberish" doing the rounds, and it is not pleasant to see him and Alexander Cockburn succumbing to it. Let's hope they both make a full and speedy recovery. Because "we must question everything we see and hear" -- mustn't we? -- even from a source as unimpeachably trustworthy as the Bush-Cheney White House.

Debt. Domination. What For?

DANNY GLOVER: Has the Congress taken up that? I know they did that to some extent over the AGOA Act, but you look at how Latin America has defeated the Free Trade of the Americas, and as resounding as a defeat as that, called into question that. How has Congress looked at free trade? How have they looked at the debt itself? We have an opportunity now with a Democratic congress to really call committees forward to look at this idea around the debt and free trade.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: There's no question that we've got to turn free trade into fair trade. And I come from Detroit, and, as you know, our manufacturing base of automobiles is suffering greatly. It's far easier to bring in a foreign car to this country than it is for us to bring an American product to anywhere else in the world. So that's what we have to get to. The 110th Congress is two months old. We are working to repair so many things that have gone wrong, it's not even funny. Our agendas in most of the committees -- I know with Charlie Rangel -- are overloaded and overtaxed, but we've got to, first of all, relieve these poor nations of debt. You, Harry Belafonte, Nelson Mandela, the Congressional Black Caucus, progressives throughout the country have been talking about getting rid of this debt and then promoting trade. And nothing, Danny, is more disturbing to me than last week's announcement that the US was building a huge military base in Africa. Question: what for?

What for?

St. Bernard Parish

Via BFP

Video

They assassinated King, April 4, 1968

On April 4, 2006 St Bernard public housing residents returned from forced exile, to clean up and reclaim their homes.

People who had leases with HANO and want to join the lawsuit against HANO can sign up online at: http://publichousing.justiceforneworleans.org

For more info: call 504-520-9521 or 504-319-3564

The Spectre of The Decline of Symbolic Efficiency

Has been haunting Western intellectuals for some time:

"What was - and not what is- authority? For it is my contention that we are tempted and entitled to raise this question because authority has vanished from the modern world. Since we can no longer fall back upon authentic and indisputable experiences common to all, the very term has become clouded by controversy and confusion. ... most will agree that a constant, ever-widening and deepening crisis of authority has accompanied the modern world in our century."

Hanna Arendt, "What is Authority", 1963.

Why Frog?

Maybe Kafka was wrong and this apparently interminable Sunday will end more abruptly than any of us expect. We could start betting on how great the Monday will turn out to be, if there is a Monday, and if we're personally reserved for it, and if any of us are in fact still around to experience it.

At any rate, it seems (but who are we to judge?) that amphibian populations worldwide are declining even faster than symbolic efficiency:

" ... 'This is the precedent of a disease working its way across an entire species on the scale of all mammals, all birds or all fish,' said Joseph Mendelson, curator of herpetology at Zoo Atlanta and an organizer of Amphibian Ark. 'Humans would be absolutely stupid if they didn't pay attention to that.'

Amphibians — of which frogs make up the majority — are a vital part of the food chain, eating insects that other animals don't touch and connecting the world of aquatic animals to land dwellers. Without amphibians, the insects that would go unchecked would threaten public health and food supplies. ..."

"A phenomenon likened to the extinction of dinosaurs."- wow. But I mean, frogs, yuk -- like, who needs 'em? If anyone does, then the nuts-and-bolts boffins will no doubt find a solution, using their dependably efficient chemical and mathematical symbols. And meanwhile, as long as Sunday lasts, we have movies to talk about, and lists to compile, and a war on language to be fought, while we continue to ponder the puzzling popularity of apocalyptic fantasies in the year of Our Lord 2007.

Jodi Dean: "ICite, IBan, IDelete, IGoInTheHuff"

The University as Kindergarten, Part 27.

In response to this pernicious rubbish, cited and reprinted in full without comment at ICite, I posted this:

"Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Suffering Cockburn: 9/11 and the Left's Collective Unconsciousness

Two weeks ago, Alexander Cockburn collapsed into a pile of rubble. Today, that pile is still steaming: ..."

http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2006/09/suffering-cockburn-911-and-lefts.html

That was my response, in full and verbatim: the title, the first two lines, and the link. Within minutes, it was deleted, and the following robustly efficient symbols appeared in Ms. Dean's comments box when I tried to ask why:

"You are not allowed to post comments."

Well, that's me told. It's her party and she'll cry if she wants to.

At any rate, President Cheney will be reassured to know that America's graduate students are in very safe hands.

More on this later.

Slavoj Zizek: How To Make Friends With Fat White Women From Dixie

Not like this!.

SZ:

The tolerant, liberal politeness angle, ("I want to take you seeeeeriously"), is crap. Pretending to be interested in the white trash culture, "oooh, grits are so gooood, I just love country music and the klan". And I really hate this term "Reubensian" or "Reubensian Caucasian-American". I prefer "Fat White Cracker" and so do they.

So whenever I meet fat white women from dixie in this kind of situation, I immediately try to break these elitist barriers. And what’s my measure that we truly broke the barrier? Ok, at one level it’s political correctness, but it’s absolutely clear that if you play this game, only politically correct terms and ooooh, this fake interest, “ooooh, how interesting, your culture, broken refigerators sinking into the lawn, what a wealth," and blah, blah, blah, it will backfire. Fat White Women From Dixie confess to me that they secretly despise this kind of thin white cosmopolitan European liberalism. What’s the trick? Humor. It’s a kind of dialectical double reversal. And this is when they really admit you. That somehow you can return to the worst starting point, sexist, class supremacist jokes and so on, but they function no longer as sexist or elitist, but as a kind of obscene solidarity. To give you an extremely vulgar example, I met a fat, really stupid white redneckess from Alabama, and when we became friends, I went into it like, [assuming a naïve, awe-filled whisper] “Is it true that you are, you know, you get so fat so your father will fuck your daughter instead of you?” We became terribly close friends!

- here

Disgusting. How can anyone defend this?


NB: This is a Guest Post by The Big Black Qlipoth who has [not] been terribly close friends with Slavoj Zizek since the Viennese stableboy "candleholder" had the dialectical agility to make an anxious aryan flyswatting cock joke at the "Blogging About Blogging In The Age of Symbolic and Intellectual Deficiency" conference at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, in 1998. For his tastelessness, Big Black Qlipoth has been banned. - Inscrutable Chinaman Qlipoth

Florentine Pogen

Call Me Ishmael. The End.

I once thought about writing a satire in which a smart guy would take it in his head that the next step in avant-gardism would be to compose a novel entirely in emoticons. Now I see I should have had him translate the classics into emoticons:

Almost all publishers are now just small segments of great corporations (think tapeworms), and like supermarkets and breakfast cereal manufacturers they are required to provide product that makes a profit. The smart modern way to make a profit is to tell people what they want and then give it to them. It's not difficult, it's capitalism.

And so, great news: Weidenfeld & Nicolson are launching a new list in the Spring. As a result of market research, which has brought us so much of value over the years, Weidenfeld and Nicolson have come up with 'Compact Editions'. Tag line: Great Books in Half the Time. According to their market research (quoted in a small note Saturday's Book's section of the Guardian) many readers are put off by the 'elitist' image of classics and by their 'daunting length and small print'.

'What is it about Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick that puts you off reading them?' enquires the nice young man running the focus group. 'Oh, they're elitist, of daunting length and the print's too small.' Or were there hoards of angry demonstrators charging through Weidenfeld's offices with placards complaining that they had been alienated by Tolstoy and Melville and demanding their right to buy large print bowdlerisations?

So in the first series of Compact Editions Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick along with David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Vanity Fair and Wives and Daughters will be 'sympathetically edited' down to fewer than 400 pages. But don't fret - so sympathetic are these editors that they will keep the central plot, characters and historical background. Pity really, I could get quite excited about a 21st century Anna Karenina set in Chislehurst and renamed Paige Simkins (she doesn't die in the end - the train's cancelled on account of engineering works).

Jude the Obscure: frowney face, smiley face, frowney face.

Beloved: frowney face, frowney face, smiley face.

Tristram Shandy: smiley face, winking face, smiley face.

The Metamorphosis: frowney face, frowney face, frowney face.

I don't mean to exalt the old canon, just to note the continued destruction of history and human labor by the corporations. De-fund the libraries, take over the schools, turn the old books into baby food. No wonder nobody knows or cares about anything!

Quote

Money trumps peace, sometimes.
- George W. Bush

On How To "Build The Movement"

I read lots of right-wing people, doesn't mean I agree with everything they say. Zizek isn't one of the people I do much with and I do even less (meaning nothing) with his stuff on Yugoslavia. If you have a problem with him, fine, I'm not Serbian, I didn't declare war on your people [sic], I've signed no petitions, and on the whole I think what the West did was pretty stupid (though I don't know all that much about it). Don't really care as I'm not really sure my knowing much about it would help anything.

You really don't know anything about the American education system, but you seem to have some opinions. Quite annoying really.
Anthony Paul Smith Homepage 02.13.07 - 1:44 pm #

This is the American Academic Left.

Pseudo Intellectual Anti-Intellectual Reversion To Infancy, Or Peter Panism

Can Warszawa get a little light through the layers of fungal punning-as-ersatz-argument behind which the anti-intellectual pseudo-intellectuals cower? Can he elicit a rational, to the point, non-ad hominem reply from these devoted anti-intellectuals who declare themselves unable to know or understand anything and yet simultaneously, without tongue in cheek, assert their monopoly on intellect?

It may be hopeless; the assault on "symbolic efficiency" in the academy is too important to capital and too well rewarded to be discouraged by reason or an appeal to political commitments.

Here's Carlo Ginzburg's view of the state of affairs:

We recognise easily in this attitude [certain responses to negationism,] the radical rejection of positivism that has inspired scholars for several decades, especially Americans, as much in the domain of the human sciences as in that of literature. If everything is in the last instance narration, if every narrative can be judged in the same manner true or false - or if you prefer "true" in inverted commas - the only criterion for making distinctions between different narratives derives from the respective effects. I can't go into here the profound roots of this so prevalent sceptical attitude, based on a notion of rhetoric that not only ignores any idea of proof but opposes itself to it: a rhetoric operating under the sign not of Aristotle but of Nietzsche. I only want to remark that the sceptical response with regard to the denial of the [Nazi] genocide has stirred in American academic circles a certain disquiet: one has the impression that a boundary has been crossed, and one can't alleviate the disquiet by the division, at bottom so convenient, between the rejection of the negationist proposals at the moral and political level, and the non-acceptance of them on the intellectual level. It's not the negationist proposals themselves that are troubling; it is the weakness of certain responses to negationism. Over the past few years, we've inquired several times into this; I am thinking of the colloqium in Los Angeles organised by Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation, but also of numerous conferences which took place, from Chicago to Berlin, on the notion of proof. These are little symptoms which may announce a change in the intellectual climate

.

This climate is manufactured. Surely everyone has to face at some time in life the realisation that Daddy NYTimes is not realiable. Generations of adult dissidents have gotten through this seperation from the Paper of Record without mental collapse - Howard Zinn, Angela Davis, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, the list is long. But this generation is reverting to infancy rather than accept that it is because Daddy NYTimes doesn't love you that he does not feed you all the truth that's fit to print and save you the trouble of thinking for yourself. He has his own agenda.

But it is indeed disconcerting to see chronological adults react to this unavoidable awareness with fears for their sanity; it is disturbing to see this simple fact of life in mediatised capitalism precipitate announcements of the total collapse of the disillusioned's capacity for judgement. All this frenzied boastful confusion and bewilderment is an extreme, no doubt psychoanalysable, and cowardly, reaction to the discovery that Authority can lie and that one has to think without Daddy's help and even without his approval. In the US, grown men and women faced with the obvious mendacity of mass media are stricken with a degree of terror that can only be accounted for by a failure of the attainment of basic maturity, and go into denial about Daddy Mass Media's untruthfulness and deceitfulness, insisting instead that the non-correspondence between Daddy's assertions and reality must come about because both language and the human intellects which produce it do not function well anymore. It is, simply, a refusal to grow up, to remove the training wheels from the brain and think without Big BrOther. (It is not that Daddy is lying to you. Daddy still loves you, but can't be informed, can't fact check, can't evaluate evidence, can't tell you the truth, can't tell you what to think; thought and communication itself have degraded to the point of malfunction, and this inexplicable stormy weather in the symbolic order is why it may seem to you that Daddy neither approves of you, nor is quite attached to your wellbeing, and even sometimes may seem to knowingly mislead you, for sinister ends.)

At the Acacacademy of Anthropopopometry

"As concerns this question, our inspired Founder instructs us that the fealty due from the Ultimate in connection with and subjection to the intermediate and the inferential, these being of necessity subordinate to the Auto-Isothermal, and limited subliminally by this contact, which is in all cases sporadic and incandescent, those that ascend to the Abode of the Blest are assimilated in thought and action by the objective influence of the truth which sets us free, otherwise they could not." ... It was just a snow-flurry on a warm day: every flake was distinct and perfect, but they melted before you could grab enough to make a ball out of them.

(From "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes", 1905)

Institutionalised, regulated war

Kramnik,V (2766) - Anand,V (2779) [E05]
Corus A Wijk aan Zee NED (6), 19.01.2007

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2 Be7 5.Nf3 0-0 6.0-0 dxc4 7.Qc2 a6 8.Qxc4 b5 9.Qc2 Bb7 10.Bd2 Ra7 11.Rc1 Be4 12.Qb3 Nc6 13.e3 Qa8 14.Qd1 Nb8 15.Ba5 Rc8 16.a3 Bd6 17.Nbd2 Bd5 18.Qf1 Nbd7 19.b4 e5 20.dxe5 Bxe5 21.Nxe5 Nxe5 22.f3 Nc4 23.Nxc4 Bxc4 24.Qf2 Re8 25.e4 c6 26.Rd1 Rd7 27.Rxd7 Nxd7 28.Rd1 Qb7 29.Rd6 f6 30.f4 Re6 31.Rd2 Re7 32.Qd4 Nf8 33.Qd8 Rd7 34.Rxd7 Qxd7 35.Qxd7 Nxd7 36.e5 fxe5 37.Bxc6 Nf6 38.Bb7 exf4 39.gxf4 Nd5 40.Kf2 Nxf4 41.Ke3 g5 42.Bxa6 Kf7 43.a4 Ke7 44.Bxb5 Bxb5 45.axb5 Kd7 46.Ke4 Ne2 47.Bb6 g4 48.Bf2 Nc3+ 49.Kf5 Nxb5 50.Kxg4 Ke6 51.Kg5 Kf7 52.Kf5 Ke7 53.Bc5+ Black resigns







(via)

Flypaper Theory

A friend told me that a Colombian diplomat told her that violence in Colombia has diminished significantly over the last few years; the US advisors and mercenaries who ran the paramilitary groups are all in Iraq now.

Rampant Infantilism

It's okay warszawa: if symbolic efficiency is really in decline - if this is not just the illusion of people who need to suck truth, the whole truth or nothing but the truth directly from the nipple of the New York Times or wallow in bewilderment (if it won't think for them, no thought is possible as they refuse to think for themselves like adults) - then there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Without highly efficient symbolic function, no military order can be understood or carried out, no banking transactions can occur, no oil or real estate can be owned from afar, no wage contract can be created or enforced - no means and no motive for military aggression and massive violence can exist when the capacity of signs to refer is unreliable. Besides, Bush enjoys being stupid and may order an assault on Irene.

On the other hand, it may be that the confusion is a willed infantilism stemming from panic, from not wanting to surrender the childish belief that "the answer is in our hearts", that everything is for the best, Good invariably has the wherewithal to triumph over Evil by simply attaining pure intellectual virtuousness and discarding its illusions, and that things are never as bad as they seem. Instead of saying "I don't want to know, I don't want to understand, I can't think for myself if the mass media abandons me, I don't want to be responsible", the infantilised can cry "I can't know, I can't understand, I am alone in a world of terrifying illusions" and call that mature and sane.

You would think there was no more fitting object imaginable for psychoanalysis than this insistent, even aggressive declaration of permanent perplexity as an evasion of responsibility and adulthood, and the concurrent denoucement of all who refuse its cradle comforts as psychotic. But...that's not what the Lacanian decoder ring is for.

Portrait Of A Couple

"The comments to this entry are closed."

Death of the subject.

Whodunnit?

A Fresh Demon

One expert on Iraq asked me in perplexity: "Even if Bush does launch a war against Iran, where does he think it will get him? He will still be stuck in Iraq and the Iranians are not going to surrender. He will just have widened the war." The answer to this question is probably that the anti-Iranian tilt of the Bush administration has more to do with American than Iraqi politics. A fresh demon is being presented to the US voter. Iran is portrayed as the hidden hand behind US failure in both Iraq and in Lebanon. The US media, gullible over WMD, is showing itself equally gullible over this exaggerated Iranian threat. The Bush administration has always shown itself more interested in holding power in Washington than in Baghdad. Whatever its failures on the battlefield, the Republicans were able to retain the presidency and both Houses of Congress in 2004. Confrontation with Iran, diverting attention from the fiasco in Iraq, may be their best chance of holding the White House in 2008.

Bad Movie

David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Top Secret!

"He knows the oil is running out - and time with it."

Ad in a US publication, mid-70s.

via

Not with a bang but a BOOM

"The most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, 'We're fucked'."

That slight clatter in the background is the sound of deckchairs being rearranged:

1. Independent, Feb. 7th 2007:

EU bows to car lobby on pollution limits

If you hear a series of loud booms, don't panic:

2. BBC, Feb. 7th 2007:

Booming India expects 9.2% growth

There is plenty of room on the lifeboat for first-class passengers:

3. BBC, Feb. 6th 2007:

Climate change 'affecting' China

At least 300,000 people in north-west China are short of drinking water because of unseasonably warm weather, which officials link to climate change. Parts of Shaanxi province face drought after January saw as little as 10% of average rainfall, state media say.

Cocktails are now being served in the VIP lounge:

4. LA Times, Feb. 5th 2007:

To stabilize atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide — the primary contributor to global warming — CO2 emissions would have to drop 70% to 80%, said Richard Somerville, a theoretical meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. Such a reduction would bring emissions into equilibrium with the planet's ability to absorb carbon dioxide. The last time the planet was in balance was more than 150 years ago, before the widespread use of coal and steam engines.

What would it take to bring that kind of reduction?

"All truck, all trains, all airplanes, cars, motorcycles and boats in the United States — that's 7.3% of global emissions," said Gregg Marland, a fossil fuel pollution expert at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Closing all fossil-fuel-powered electricity plants worldwide and replacing them with windmills, solar panels and nuclear power plants would make a serious dent — a 39% reduction globally, Marland said. His calculation doesn't include all the fossil fuels that would have to be burned to build the greener facilities, though. [...]

I'll have a quadruple Chivas, please. Yes, on the rocks.


* The post heading is a recent quote from Derrick Jensen.

Brother Udo And The Monk Thelonius

One of the best April Fool's day articles ever was about Udo of Aachen, a Medieval Monk with an ultra density mind who purportedly had been studying probability and fractals in the 13th century, with the help of his sidekick monk Thelonius, leaving a Bethlehem Star in the shape of the Mandelbrot set in an illuminated manuscript. "Not since the Piltdown-Sokal Theorem was discovered to have first been proved in 1907 by a provincial Russian electrical engineer, and not in 1979 by Piltdown and Sokal as originally had been thought, has the date of a first proof been so misjudged."

I am sure I saw yesterday a post here at Qlipoth featuring that illuminated ms and a link to the original April Fool's article, and then it disappeared! I suspect it was intended as a kind of a wry comment on the gullibility of "conspiracy theorists"(?) but it's rather more suggestive of the ability to disseminate hoaxes enjoyed by the authoritative spectacle...

BENEATH A VOLUPTUOUS BODY DESIRE SETS A TRAP

Seijun Suzuki, Yaju no seishun

That Was The Rubicon Five Rivers Back

AMY GOODMAN: Here with me now is one of al-Marri’s attorneys, Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice here in New York City. Welcome to Democracy Now!

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: So start from the beginning. How was al-Marri picked up?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, he was arrested at his home by FBI agents, charged with a crime, and then, as you pointed out, shortly before trial and actually literally on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence that was taken from his home without a warrant, the government essentially just pulled the plug on the criminal justice system and by the stroke of a pen transferred him to a military brig to legal limbo, where he had no rights, was held incommunicado and has been detained without charges now for going on four years.

AMY GOODMAN: What is this brig where he is held?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: The brig is a military prison in South Carolina. It typically houses individuals from the military who are convicted, court-martialed for offenses. But he's in a isolated wing of the brig. He's never seen another prisoner. The only individuals he's permitted to see are his captors, the military guards, and now his lawyers are able to see him, but the first seventeen months he was held completely incommunicado. His lawyers were not able to contact him. We had no contact with him.

AMY GOODMAN: For how long?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: For seventeen months.

AMY GOODMAN: For almost a year and a half.

JONATHAN HAFETZ: That's correct. Even the International Committee for the Red Cross was not able to go in. I mean, it was essentially secret detention on US soil. We had no way of knowing if he was alive.

AMY GOODMAN: And what exactly was the charge?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, there was no charge. There were just allegations made, hearsay allegations, allegations we believe that were obtained from detainees through illegal methods, other detainees possibly through torture that the government did not present in court. There has been no hearing, no witnesses, nothing that would resemble what we understand as due process.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what you mean when on the eve of -- you're saying on the eve of trial?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, the trial was a few weeks away, but the judge had scheduled a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence. The government can't present evidence at a trial that’s been taken from someone's home without a warrant. And there was a hearing to find out whether that had happened, and instead of going forward with the hearing, as would normally happen, the government showed up with an order, a one-page order from the President saying, ‘You're an enemy combatant. We're going to dismiss the criminal case, and we’re going to snatch Mr. al-Marri and put him in a brig.’

AMY GOODMAN: And what does “enemy combatant” mean, that he had been fighting on the battlefield?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, the term “enemy combatant” means essentially whatever the government says it means. They've used different definitions in different cases.

AMY GOODMAN: Invented by this administration?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Yeah. The concept of enemy combatant is not a concept that's identified under the laws of war. The government claims it's a customary use of the laws of war or, you know, law of armed conflict, but there is no such thing as enemy combatant as the administration’s used its term.

- here

Ey, wie schmeckt der Coffee süße

The Italian conquest of Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, resulted in the espresso craze in Italy. During the Second World War, each Italian soldier carried an espresso maker in his mess kit. The Starbucks aesthetic__garish, fascistic murals combined with Futurist mechanization of the work force and absurdist shouting__can be traced to Mussolini.

America's love of coffee has always been tied to the affection for conquest. Coffee fueled the "winning of the West" and the usurpation of the former colonies of Spain at the turn of the century. Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia etc. have all been virtual colonies since then, with frequent US armed interventions etc to ensure servitude. These nations constitute the mainstay of our coffee supply, and much blood has been spilled to maintain it. Coffee was the blood of the Indian, and gave one the adrenal rush needed to achieve "manifest destiny". Coffee was "Joe", as in Joe Nobody or John Doe, as the racist dehumanization of the native people's refuted any necessity for their identification. This name was changed to "Java" in the 60's, when the US helped install the Dictator Suharto in Indonesia, who murdered so many of his subjects at the behest of insecure multi-nationals. Although this was a proxy war, not directly fought by us, coffee's taste still reflects the power imparted by the struggle. Its flavor was enriched and it grew in popularity. Whether Indian or Indonesian, coffee was the blood of the vanquished, and it tasted good.

Now, in the global economy, coffee is grown across the entire subjugated third world. When Starbucks sell a bag of beans it's always marked with the region from where it sprang, making the consumer an imperial cannibal connoisseur.

Ian Svenonius, The Bloody Latte

Brzezinski very deliberately NOT saying "no"

From the World Socialist Website, here's more on Zbigniew Brzezinski's astonishing address to the CFR on February 2nd:

Following the hearing, this reporter asked Brzezinski directly if he was suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the US government itself. The former national security adviser was evasive.

The following exchange took place:

Q: Dr. Brzezinski, who do you think would be carrying out this possible provocation?

A: I have no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous.

Q: Are you suggesting there is a possibility it could originate within the US government itself?

A: I’m saying the whole situation can get out of hand and all sorts of calculations can produce a circumstance that would be very difficult to trace.

As a poster called HamdenRice points out on this thread :

"Zbig is hired as a strategic consultant for what he knows, what insiders tell him, not what he guesses. This testimony is not idle speculation; this is what his sources are telling him."

It's pointless to ask why this story isn't all over the mainstream media. But why isn't it all over the left blogosphere?

More Molly Ivins

Nov. 19, 2002: “The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? ... There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now.”

Jan. 16, 2003: “I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’ ”

July 14, 2003: “I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I’d rather not see my prediction come true and I don’t think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. ... We don’t need people with credentials as right-wing ideologues and corporate privatizers — we need people who know how to fix water and power plants.”

Oct. 7, 2003: “Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire. ...I’ve got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I’ve had a bet out that I hoped I’d lose.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski, "conspiracy theorist": A new 9/11 to justify an attack on Iran.

On February 1st 2007, , the Former National Security Advisor to President Carter addressed the Senate Committee On Foreign Relations.

Mr. Brzezinski seems worried, as well he might. This is a man who knows his Washington:

A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD's in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the "decisive ideological struggle" of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America's involvement in World War II.

Trotskist Confectionaries of the Fifties in the Garbatella

Nanni Moretti, Caro Diario

Well, he would, wouldn't he?

The BBC reports:

"On the poisoning of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in London, Mr Putin said he did not believe in conspiracy theories."

This tell us something worth remembering about the cant term "conspiracy theory", what it's good for, and what kind of people routinely use it as a blunt but dependable weapon.

"Mr Litvinenko was a vehement critic of Mr Putin. Mr Putin said Mr Litvinenko "did not possess any secrets" that could have damaged Russia. "

Oh, really? So why did they confiscate his books?

Allegations against the Russian Government

Litvinenko alleged that agents from the FSB co-ordinated the 1999 Russian apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people, whereas Russian officials blamed the explosions on Chechen separatists. This version of events was suggested
earlier by David Satter,[14] and Sergei Yushenkov, vice chairman of the Sergei Kovalev commission created by the Russian Parliament to investigate the bombings. However, Litvinenko provided many new factual details in his book. In December 2003 Russian authorities confiscated over 4000 copies of the book en route to Moscow from the publisher in Latvia.[15]

The War on Terror as Jaws 2

Keith Olbermann on the scaremongering lies in Bush's grotesque State of the Union speech:

President claimed to stop four terror plots, but where is the evidence?

Molly Ivins (1944-2007)

What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols. Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for.