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Edited by author 08-19-2007 05:34 PM
"If the people are not convinced (that the Free World is in mortal danger) it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert danger.

With the support of public opinion, as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our Job - yours and mine -- to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America's might."

-- Charles Wilson, Chairman of the Board of General Electric and Truman appointee to head the Office of Defence Mobilization, in a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."
- Lord Acton

Hi all!
 
Excellent work... much respect dudes...
 
 
Bye

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.” -- James Madison, the father of our Constitution

The Unexpected Nature of Paradigm Shifts

Man, is this a great time to be alive ...

One day you can have one view of the world, and then the next day have that same view totally turned on its head by a new discovery.

Take, for example, the burgeoning field of "Epigenetics" ...

Epigenetics is the study of how environmentally or behaviorally acquired traits can be passed on to future generations - without any change in the DNA of that organism.

Huh?

Yeah ...

Anyone paying attention to what's been happening in biology over the last 150 years just did a double take.

If this sounds to you like "Lamarckism" (the Lamarckism that you learned in High School was "disproven" by Darwinian/Mendelian genetics) you're exactly right.

Despite what has been believed as irrefutable biological truth, there is now a body of evidence that suggests that we didn't have the full picture. The study of Epigenetics shows that changes which occur to you as a result of your environment and behavior can be passed on to future generations. We don't fully understand "the how" yet, but the evidence of this phenomenon seems quite clear.

And no, these changes don't have anything to do with the way you treat your kids. They have everything to do with how you treat yourself.

For example, a cancer you get today could have been triggered by your great grand-mothers exposure to an industrial poison.

The passing of these non-genetic traits has been observed now across multiple generations of mice.

The implications are huge.

If these findings are right, then everything you do ...

... what you eat, your use of recreational chemicals (including alcohol and tobacco), where you live, your moods, your stress levels ...

All of these things can not only affect your health, but any adverse (or favorable) affects could be passed on to future generations as well.

If you've been looking for an excuse to change your lifestyle, I don't think you'll find a better one than that.

Stunning, isn't it?

Also stunning is the way new discoveries can completely up-end everything we think we know.

This unexpected nature of paradigm shifts makes the hubris and arrogance we seem to revere in our popular media all the more absurd.

Hi
 
Looks good! Very useful, good stuff. Good resources here. Thanks much!
 
G'night

 Sorry please :(
Wrogn categgoyr...
 
will be carefil

 
Gratitude

If you read the front page story of the SF Chronicle on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2005, you would have read about a female humpback whale
who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that
caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body-her tail, her torso,
a line tugging in her mouth.
  
A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farralone Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help.
Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in
and untangle her-a very dangerous proposition. One slap of the tail could kill a rescuer.

They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her. When she was free, the divers say she swam in
what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed
them gently around-she thanked them.
  
  
Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth
says her eye was following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.
  
May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate----to be surrounded by people who will help you
get untangled from the things that are binding you. And, may you always know the joy of giving
 
[Luc Majno]

Governmentium

Friday, June 15, 2007

A major research institution (MRI) has recently announced the
identification and classification of the heaviest chemical element
yet known to science.

The new element has been tentatively named Governmentium.

Governmentium has --

1 neutron,
12 assistant neutrons,
75 deputy neutrons,
and 224 assistant deputy neutrons,

giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which
are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be
detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes in contact.
A minute amount of Governmentium causes one example reaction to take
more than four days to complete when a similar normal reaction would
take less than a second.

Governmentium has a nominal half-life of two years; however it does not
actually decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion
of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact,
Governmentium’s mass actually increases over time, since each reorgan-
ization will cause some morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate
that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity
in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as Critical Morass.

So far, scientists have been able to discover almost no useful function for
this intriguing and ubiquitous element.

"Sell a country? Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth?
Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?"
--Tecumseh, SHAWNEE
 
The White Man's (non-Native) way is to possess, control and divide. It has always been difficult
for Indian people to understand this. There are certain things we cannot own that must be shared.
The Land is one of these things. We need to re-look as what what we are doing to the Earth.
We are digging in her veins and foolishly diminishing the natural resources.
We are not living in balance. We do not own the Earth; the Earth owns us.
Today, let us ponder the true relationship between the Earth and ourselves.

Luc Majno

ON RESPECT: http://uk.blog.360.yahoo.com:80/blog-CplNAyIlc6PRvYisHBVo9PYIUEpJ

Submitted by Luc Majno
 

 

Respect means no interruption.
Respect means no confrontation.
Respect means no accusation.
Respect means no "mocking,"
Especially, no mocking of elders.

Respect means no lies between us.
Respect means no betrayal of confidence.
Respect means no "ripping off."
Respect means no hoarding.

Respect means no "Lording it over" someone.
Respect means no ordering around.
Respect means no yelling in anger.
Respect means no bad language.
Respect means no name calling.
Respect means controlling yourself.

Respect is not a commodity.
Respect is a way of being.
Respect is in our chest and not in our hand.
Respect is for all life.

Respect is for every species in the world,
including all four races.
Respect is for all our relations.
Respect is focusing on and dealing in "issues"
and not "personalisms."
Respect is focusing on "what” is right
rather than "who" is right.

Respect means owning our own negativity
and not being a "Blame Shifter."
A "Blame Shifter" is one who projects or shifts
his own negativity onto someone else.
This is the process of bigotry, war, and genocide.

Respect is keeping all lines of communication open
with those who have a different opinion, and making a sincere attempt to let them be heard and understood.

Respect means listening until everyone has been heard and understood, only then is there a possibility for

"Balance and Harmony,"
The goal of Indian spirituality.

Respect - The Key To Life by Dave Chief,
Grandson of Red Dog, Crazy Horse's Band

May 7. Raymond Chandler said you know you're washed up as a writer when you start reading your own old stuff for inspiration. Tony just reminded me about my most under-appreciated essay, Troubleshooting America, which only works if you're sympathetic to the critique of civilization, know some stuff about computer repair, and enjoy metaphors and puns. Also it fits well with the post below.

May 7. The 2008 presidential race is getting interesting! Basically, the framing of the whole discourse gets deeper in bullshit year after year, until all it takes is one candidate who stands up and talks straight, and the internet goes wild and the dominant media have to suppress it. This happened to some extent with Nader in 2000 and Dean in 2004. This year the Democrat to watch is Mike Gravel (pronounced gravEL), who is apparently the only Democrat -- the only Democrat -- to pledge not to start a nuclear war, or in propaganda-talk, "preemptively use nuclear weapons," or in extreme propaganda-talk, "leave all options on the table with Iran."

And the Republican to watch is Ron Paul. You might have seen that ABC news put up a debate poll that listed every candidate except Paul, and when they were swamped with complaints, they added Paul and he blew the other candidates away. He's pretty bad on the issues, but I would probably vote for him over the leading Democrats just because he owes nothing to the ruling powers. In reality, I expect not to vote but to endorse the batshit crazy Rudolph Giuliani over Hillary Clinton, so he can finish Bush's job of destroying the American Empire and making the right look bad.

The same thing is now beginning in France, with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy. The European system is much better than the American system, but both of them are circling around the same whirlpool. Socialism is a temporary compromise between central control and benevolence, which ultimately cannot exist together. The only spiritually sustainable system is one that rises organically from activities that individuals and tribes find intrinsically rewarding. And the easiest (but most painful) way to get there from here is to elect right wingers to run the control system off the rails.

May 7. And a general comment on the below: "Conspiracy theorist" is a propaganda term, a big lie built around a tiny kernel of truth: that a few people are religious about it, and always find a way to believe the most paranoid side of every popular controversy. At the other extreme, you've got people who are equally dogmatic in defending the dominant side on every question of fact. Most of us are in between, and the difference between those of us who accept (not believe) weird things, and those who don't, is not a matter of right and wrong but a matter of how people with different political and intellectual motives deal with reasonable doubt. When I don't have enough information to be sure one way or the other, I always put the burden of proof on the story that backs up the ruling system, and give slack to the story that undermines it; and I always put the burden of proof on the story that provides closure, and give slack to the story that creates openings.

Two Items on Iran, a satire by Monty Python and a knockout "must read and spread" by Ed Herman:
 
 
Call that humiliation?

No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch
 
Terry Jones
Saturday March 31, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2046991,00.html
 
I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.
It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated.
 
And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.
The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn't rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it's just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!
 
What's more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting "stress positions", which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It's all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.
 
And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is "unhappy and stressed".
What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her "unhappy and stressed". She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.
 
As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer - whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.
 
· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
www.terry-jones.net
_________________________________________
 
ZNet | Foreign Policy
 
Beyond Munich: The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further Victim of U.S. Aggression [*]
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson; March 31, 2007
 
    Imagine that when Hitler was threatening to invade Poland, after having swallowed Czechoslovakia—with the help of the Western European powers' appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938—the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Poland, making it more difficult for the imminent victim to defend itself, and at the same time suggested that Poland was the villainous party. That didn’t happen back in 1939, but in a regression from that notorious era of appeasement something quite analogous is happening now.
    Here is the United States, still fighting a brutal war of conquest in Iraq, which it is now doing with UN Security Council approval, with open plans and threats to attack Iran and engage in “regime change,” gathering aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, already engaging in subversive and probing attacks on the prospective target, and the UN Security Council, instead of warning and threatening the aggressor warns, threatens and imposes sanctions on the prospective victim!
   The way it works is that the United States stirs up a big fuss, proclaiming a serious threat to its own national security, and expressing its deep concern over another state's flaunting of Security Council resolutions or dragging its feet on some point of order such as weapons inspections—we know how devoted the United States and its Israeli client are to the rule of law!
 In the Iraq case, this noise was echoed and amplified in the media, often splashed across headlines and drummed up in editorial commentary. In turn, elite opinion in the United States and Britain coalesced around the beliefs (a) that a WMD-related crisis really existed in Baghdad and (b) that it required the Security Council's special attention. Straight through March 19-20 2003, Iraq, the prospective target of a full-scale attack, decried the absurdity of this U.S.-U.K. noise, and filed regular communiqués with the Security Council and Secretary-General documenting the U.S.-U.K. aerial strikes on its territory,[1] including the "spikes of activity" period from September 2002 onward.[2] The vast majority of the world's states and peoples also rejected the war propaganda—including the largely voiceless U.S. public, where in the weeks before the war, two-thirds of non-elite opinion stood firmly behind multilateral approaches to defuse the crisis, foremost of which was permitting the UN weapons inspections to take their course.[3] But then, as now, pretty much the entire world recognized the U.S.-U.K. hijacking of the Security Council, and its strategic misdirection away from a defense of the actual target of the threats (Iraq) onto the execution of the policy of the states making those threats while playing the role of Iraq's potential victims (the U.S. and U.K.).
 So the aggression planning proceeded then and does now with the cooperation of the UN and international community. In the Iraq case, the Security Council allowed itself to be bamboozled into restarting the weapons-inspection process, accepting this as the urgent matter, rather than the war-mobilization and threat of aggression by the United States and its British ally. Although the Security Council did not vote approval of the U.S.-British attack, it helped set it up by inflating the Iraq threat and failing to confront the real threat posed by the United States and Britain. Then, within two months after “shock and awe,” the Security Council voted to give the aggressor the right to stay in Iraq and manage its affairs, thereby approving a gross violation of the UN Charter after the fact.
  Now, four years later, the Security Council has outdone itself. Not only has it failed to condemn the U.S. and Israeli threat to attack Iran—the threat itself a violation of the UN Charter,[4] and one made ever-more real by the U.S. invasions of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq during this decade alone, now followed by a huge U.S. naval buildup near Iran's coast to levels not seen since the U.S. launched its war on Iraq four years ago in what the New York Times just called a "calculated show of force."[5] But even worse, the Council has aided and abetted these potential aggressors by adopting three resolutions in the past eight months under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, each of which affirms that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to international peace and security, and reserves for the Council the right to take "further appropriate measures" should Iran fail to comply—that is, should Iran not cave-in to U.S. demands on exactly the terms demanded.[6]
 
Since July 31, the Council has demanded that Iran “suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development"[7]—despite the fact that Iran's right to engage in these activities is guaranteed under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.[8] Since December 23, it has identified the existence of Iran's nuclear program with so-called "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities"[9]—despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has never shown Iran's program to be engaged in any kind of activities other than peaceful ones. Indeed, in the December 23 resolution, the Council used the phrase "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities" no fewer than eight different times to describe Iran's nuclear program, the clear—and perfectly false—allegation being that for Iran to do research on and develop its indigenous nuclear fuel capabilities places Iran in violation of its NPT commitments.
  But perhaps most egregious of all, the March 24 resolution prohibits Iran from selling "any arms or related material" to other states or individuals (par. 5), and calls upon all states "to exercise vigilance and restraint" in the sale or transfer of a whole list of weapons systems to Iran, "in order to prevent a destabilizing accumulation of arms…" (par. 6).[10] As the editorial voice of The Hindu immediately recognized, the first term is critical "not so much because the Islamic Republic is a major vendor of weapons even to Hamas or Hizbollah but because it gives the U.S. an excuse to intimidate or interdict all Iranian merchant shipping under the guise of 'enforcement'."[11] Likewise with the second term, which, if history is any guide, Washington will interpret as a strict prohibition on weapons sales to Iran, thus depriving the potential victim, faced with attack by one or more nuclear powers, of the right to obtain even non-nuclear means of self defense. This of course has been a standard U.S. tactic over many years, even against puny victims—Guatemala in 1954 and Nicaragua in the 1980s, among other cases. But now the United States has succeeded in getting the Security Council to help it impede the self-defense of yet another target of aggression. In this truly Kafkaesque case, the state targeted for attack (Iran) has been declared a threat to the peace by the Security Council, at the behest of a serial aggressor openly mobilizing its forces to attack the “threat.”[12]
 It should be recognized that the treatment of Iran’s nuclear program, and the Security Council’s cooperation in this treatment, is the ultimate application of a global double standard, enforced by an aggressive superpower now able to get away with both hypocrisy and murder. Only the United States and its allies may possess nuclear weapons. They alone may threaten to use nukes. They alone may improve their nukes and delivery systems. Only client states such as Israel may remain outside the NPT indefinitely and without penalty. The United States may ignore its NPT obligation to work toward nuclear disarmament. It may even renege on its promise never to use nukes against nuke-free states that joined the NPT. But no matter. By sheer fiat-power, no other state may acquire nukes without U.S. consent. Nor as the case of Iran shows may a state engage in its "inalienable right" to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes unless and until the United States approves.
  We are in the midst of a crisis within the post-war international system, as a serial aggressor is now able to mobilize the Security Council, tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security, to declare the state that it threatens with war a menace to the peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target. This carries us beyond Munich.
 
      ---- Endnotes ----
      * A shorter, standard op-ed length version of this commentary was drafted and submitted very widely across the major U.S. print media—and found to be 100 percent unpublishable.
      1. For an extensive list of documents filed at the United Nations by the Iraqi Government over the period August 29, 2001, through March 26, 2003, see David Peterson, "No Memo Required," ZNet, July 1, 2005.
      2. See David Peterson, "'Spikes of Activity'," ZNet, July 5, 2005; and David Peterson, "British Records on the Prewar Bombing of Iraq," ZNet, July 6, 2005.
      3. See Steven Kull et al., Americans on Iraq and the UN Inspections, Program on International Policy Attitudes, January 21-26, 2003.
      4. See, e.g., Chapter I, Article 2: "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nat ions" (par. 4).
      5. "USS John C. Stennis Now Operating in Persian Gulf," Navy Newsstand, March 27, 2007; "Russian intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border," RIA Novosti, March 27, 2007; and Michael R. Gordon, "U.S. Opens Naval Exercise in Persian Gulf," New York Times, March 28, 2007.
      6. See Chapter VII. —We believe it essential to understand that for the Security Council to adopt a resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter means above all that either a threat t o the peace, a breach of the peace, or an act of outright aggression has occurred. Otherwise, there is no point to the Council's resort to its Chapter VII functions and powers. Regardless of what the Council's other members may believe about the import of the Iran resolutions, their assent to these resolutions grants an enormously powerful and dangerous tool of coercion to the United States.
      7. Resolution 1696, July 31, 2006, par. 2.
      8. See the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Preamble, and Articles I, II, and IV.
      9. Resolution 1737, December 23, 2006, par. 2.
      10. Resolution 1747, March 24, 2007, par. 5, par. 6.
      11. "Stepping towards the precipice," Editorial, The Hindu, March 27, 2007.
      12. See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Hegemony and Appeasement: Setting Up the Next U.S.-Israeli Target (Iran) For Another 'Supreme International Crime'," ZNet, January 27, 2007.
 
    [Edward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst, co-author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent; David Peterson is a Chicago-based researcher and journalist.]

Dianne Feinstein resigns committee post amid scandal; accused of war profiteering

Source: www.metroactive.com/metro/03.21.07/dianne-feinstein-resigns-0712.html

Posted by Joshua Holland at 12:52 PM on March 30, 2007.

SEN. Dianne Feinstein has resigned from the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee. As previously and extensively reviewed in these pages, Feinstein was chairperson and ranking member of MILCON for six years, during which time she had a conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum's ownership of two major defense contractors, who were awarded billions of dollars for military construction projects approved by Feinstein.

    As MILCON leader, Feinstein relished the details of military construction, even micromanaging one project at the level of its sewer design. She regularly took junkets to military bases around the world to inspect construction projects, some of which were contracted to her husband's companies, Perini Corp. and URS Corp.

    Perhaps she resigned from MILCON because she could not take the heat generated by Metro's expose of her ethics (which was partially funded by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute). Or was her work on the subcommittee finished because Blum divested ownership of his military construction and advanced weapons manufacturing firms in late 2005?

    The MILCON subcommittee is not only in charge of supervising military construction, it also oversees "quality of life" issues for veterans, which includes building housing for military families and operating hospitals and clinics for wounded soldiers. Perhaps Feinstein is trying to disassociate herself from MILCON's incredible failure to provide decent medical care for wounded soldiers.

    Two years ago, before the Washington Post became belatedly involved, the online magazine Salon.com exposed the horrors of deficient medical care for Iraq war veterans. While leading MILCON, Feinstein had ample warning of the medical-care meltdown. But she was not proactive on veteran's affairs.

    Feinstein abandoned MILCON as her ethical problems were surfacing in the media, and as it was becoming clear that her subcommittee left grievously wounded veterans to rot while her family was profiting from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don't have much to add. For background, check out Joshua Frank giving it to the Senator with both barrels, here.

I'll just say this. Even if you think this criticism of Feinstein is unfair -- as I know some do -- you have to acknowledge that this kind of stuff sends the message that all of Washington is the same. It allows Republicans to hold onto the delusion that their brand of corruption over the past decade was run-of-the-mill -- just Standard Operating Procedure for the party in power -- and it just demoralizes progressives.

"He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,

Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.

He shall peep and mutter;

and the night shall bring Watchers 'neath our window, lest we mock the King"

- Rudyard Kipling

Sixty Days from the Night of Sacrifice


'Evil is wrought by want of thought..' Surah 30, Verse 41

A few days ago, one who is dear to me asked an intriguing, almost surreal question. She said : 'Did they really hang him, or was it all a dream?'

No dream, for every cardboard Caesar requires a slain Vercingetorix to show as part of his triumph. No dream, for while Heads of State may go to the gallows, CEOs and banksters do not. The occupier presides precariously over a disintegrating Iraq at the cost of massive repression - 600,000 slain Iraqis is the commonly accepted figure - while the one who was lynched held Iraq together with much less force.

While, in an ideal world, no repression at all would be the preferred option, which of the two will go down in history as the bloodthirsty tyrant? The Arab world will not easily forget or forgive the sight of the bacon-rind banner flying near acres of charred rubble and shattered golden domes.

The cliché had it that he murdered his own people ; does no-one realise that the government of the USA did exactly that at Waco and elsewhere? Not to mention Britain's deployment of state-sanctioned assassination squads in Northern Ireland. Nor does this include the victims of economic sabotage, accounting to some 80,000 excess deaths under Thatcher*. Huh, people shredded without any non-existent people shredder!

The town of Baquba in Iraq now boasts a university in ruins : surely as good a sign as any of a society that's been wrecked for profit and PNAC. Bodies of civilians killed in 'crossfire' litter the streets. That's 'crossfire' à la Jenin, Nablus and Gaza, of course. You all know what I mean.

But, hey, it's OK as we're bringing democr-acy to these people. But is so great about 'democracy' anyway, even when it doesn't involve mass murder?

Invariably, the word is most often to be heard upon the lips of deceivers. Art Garfunkel neatly summed up this American democracy, 162 years after someone else came to exactly the same verdict:

'We still have only one value system here : 100 dollars is twice as good as 50. In America, that's what our life is all about. The money god has been such a blight on American culture.'

In Eastern Europe, as in Iraq, democracy is hardly as advertised. Would that it were a simple matter of freedom and apple pie. Instead democracy is usually shorthand for the enthronement of the money god, bringing in its wake drugs, unemployment, sky-high property prices, porn, organised crime and other delights.

I recently passed up the opportunity to buy an authoritative guide to post-1945 sculpture for hardly more than pennies. The reason? Apart from Vuchetich's Treptow memorial, all the sculpture depicted in the book resembled low-grade trash. On deeper reflection, surely the sign of a society that has lost its moorings, its grounding in reality. An analogy with the alleged Anglo-American democracy also suggests itself, for we are asked to 'buy' into a system which is superficially glossy, but is also trashy and worthless.

Those who have more than pennies buy up the whole process, including the worthless trash that floats uppermost in it. What does it now cost to buy up the American Presidency? $150 million? $200 million?

In Britain they call it New Labour, maybe as some sort of private jest. Decaying late capitalism I call it, rancid with corruption and crookedness. It flushes billions away turning Iraq and Afghanistan into even greater hell-holes, while hospitals at home crumble, patients contracting diseases unseen for over a hundred years. In most cases this is due to sheer filthiness and neglect. Mist and desolation; inner cities the haunt of drug gangs; cannon fodder recruits on their way to Helmand; the sour smell of fear due to financial squeeze and semi-dismantled economy; churches padlocked, demolished or turned into carpet warehouses; a population controlled by debt and the peer pressure of neurotic consumerism.

I am by no means an expert in all the complexities of Iraqi politics, but I like think that I can submit a situation to rational analysis. The Iraqi resistance would never have got into the position of having 'broken' - Colin Powell's expressive term - the most powerful military force on earth had it not observed certain simple and basic rules.

These rules are simple and have been handed down from predecessor organisations. The French resistance, for instance, tried to include every viewpoint, from monarchist to communist. Additionally, any guerilla group must never antagonise the people it relies on for shelter, succour and support.

Therefore, we can understand attacks on the occupiers and those who collaborate with them. But how can one explain all those bizarre, motiveless bombings of footballers or market women? How could any resistance outfit gain from that?

Is it not a truly sinister, malevolent pantomine that is played out in 'the hell that is Iraq'?

We should study real history, not the history that's approved by authority. Then we'd find out that one participant in the Iraqi tragedy has a prior record of such clandestine operations, both in Central America and Vietnam.

In the good old days - when America was respected, and not the most hated country on the globe - there was a American healer and thinker called William Bates. Mark his words well, for had more heeded these words, the myth of 9/11 would have been universally exposed, and tragedy prevented both in Iraq and Afghanistan :

'The fact is that, except in rare cases, man is not a reasoning being. He is dominated by authority, and when facts are not in accord with the view imposed by authority, so much the worse for the facts. They may, and must, win in the long run; but in the meantime he gropes needlessly in darkness and endures much suffering that might have been avoided.'

* For those unfamiliar with recent British history, Thatcher was the less effeminate version of Blair, run by many of the same wealthy businessmen as her equally demented successor.

yes

It is possible to delete all this slip?

Conspiracy Theories and Plain Old Lies.
We hear a lot of what we assume are conspiracy theories and don't have time to check them out as well as not paying that much attention to the news anyway. We don't have time for that and by most of those around us, we're considered a bit obsessed if we spend too much time on it. Before I retired I got most of my news from the mainstream media and newspapers. When I did retire I spent my time catching up on all the things I had been putting off or had always wanted to do for so many years and never had time. Getting that out of my system, I began researching some of the conspiracy theories floating around at the time. I was surprised to find that I was fairly good at recognizing the truth, or am I? I have been taken-in a time or two only to find that I resent it when I learn the truth. "Research" is the answer. I read everything I can get my hands on and, as time would allow, have as far back as I remember. Not much fiction but that's enjoyable too. The Internet is an excellent source for news.

On line, I read the NY Times, Fox news and Washington Post almost daily, occasionally more. Fox News and some of the other conservative rags are far too often not verifiable. Of course I read two local papers for the gossip. As a student of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the remainder of the Amendments, what led up to the whole experiment and what followed, I find it odd that some reporters make false statements about what is in those documents. Are they not aware that most people know better, that we don't only read what the church, Rush Limbaugh or Bill O Riley, the phone sex guy, tells us to read? But that's another story.

Considering one subject, September 11, 2001: There has been a lot said about what happened on that date but our media doesn't seem to be reporting it well. Most of what had been covered supports the administration and the corporations, but not lately. Now we are hearing that some of what we suspected were "conspiracy theories" are often what really happened. There is an excellent web site, 911Timeline.net, which covers the timeline of that day quite well. I find what they have to say, or what I have checked of it, is based on public record. That's unusual. Of course it continues to be nonexistent in some of the media. You should check it out when you question what you read or hear a conflicting report. Much of the information on 911 Timeline site never hit the news or was buried toward the back of section B of the paper.

Can you remember the reporters who were posting columns produced by the administration's writers and claiming to be the authors? I remember that, they admitted it. They were paid handsomely for their efforts, or lack of efforts. A similar deception has been uncovered in reports from Iraq. In this case the Pentagon or military writers in Iraq are the authors and the reports are passed off as being filed by reporters. There is a fundamental difference between a theory and a lie. A theory is just that, a theory. A lie is a deception, spinning the truth and rewriting scientific data to show a different result, then passing it off as the scientific finding that supports a lie. Much like what happened with the government's own scientist's reports on global warming. Exxon/Mobile was happy to produce the editor for that job. That put the entire world and all its creatures in jeopardy. The burning of fossil fuels is the main contributor to global warming and it would look bad for the producers of them if it were known. It could cut into profits if we did anything to curb their use.
The 2004 Ohio election produced both conspiracy theories and lies. This is an example of a theory becoming fact through public documentation. For example: a claim was made that over 600% of a party's registered voters voted for George W Bush in one precinct. That was easy to verify. Count the number of votes cast for Bush, than count the number of registered republicans. Count the votes for Kerry and the number of voters registered as members of his party. This happened in many Ohio precincts in '04 but to a lesser degree. In each case the exit polls showed results easily reconciled with the number of registered voters of each party. Did you hear much about people going to prison for tampering with the process? Well it happened and was reported toward the end of section B of some newspapers. I must, at this point, say that many papers are better at reporting the news but only after a good old-fashioned public outcry and a lot of letters to the editor.

When we find that the government is lying to us, we must speak out and there are organizations that give us a voice. Moveon.org, among others, is a good place to go for that voice, as are many of the blogs on the net. I suggest we use them.

 
hey just dropping a line to say waht's up. new girl on site and in america...was out of the country for a few years.
hi!

Published on Friday, February 2, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Game Over: Thirty-Six Sure-Fire Signs That Your Empire Is Crumbling
by David Michael Green
 

So. You’ve built yourself an empire, eh?

Well, bully for you!

What’s next, you ask? Well, now you’ve got to do what everybody does when they have an empire, of course. You’ve got to worry about it falling apart, mate!

But how to tell for sure? Let me see if I can be helpful. Here are some rules of thumb to keep in mind, thirty-six sure-fire indicators that your empire is falling apart:

You know your empire’s crumbling when the folks who are gearing up their empire to replace yours start blowing up satellites in space. And then they don’t bother to return your phone calls when you ring up to ask why.

You know your empire’s crumbling when those same folks are cutting deals left, right and center across Asia, Latin America and Africa, while you, your lousy terms, and your arrogant attitude are no longer welcome.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re spending your grandchildren’s money like a drunken sailor, and letting your soon-to-be rivals finance your little splurge (i.e., letting them own your country).

You know your empire’s crumbling when it’s considered an achievement to pretend that you’ve halved the rate at which you’re adding to the massive mountain of debt you’ve already accumulated.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you weaken your currency until it looks as anemic as a Paris runway model, and you’re still setting record trade deficits. (Hint: Because you’re not making anything anymore.)

You know your empire’s crumbling when “the little brown ones” (thank you George H.W. Bush – certainly not me – for that lovely expression) in country after country of “your backyard” blow you off and proudly elect anti-imperialist leftist governments.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you can’t topple those governments and replace them with nice puppet regimes – like in the good old days – even if you wanted to. And you badly want to.

You know your empire’s crumbling when one of their leaders comes to the United Nations and makes fun of your emperor, calling him the devil, and joking about smelling sulphur where he just stood. And though a few folks cringe, everybody laughs.

You know your empire’s crumbling when just about your entire military land force is tied up in a worse-than-useless war launched on the basis of complete fabrications, that every day is actually making you less – not more – secure from external threat.

You know your empire’s crumbling when almost half the soldiers in that war are high-paid mercenaries, and you don’t dare institute a draft.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you send soldiers into war with two weeks training and a lack of armor, and then you keep them there for three, four and five rotations.

You know your empire’s crumbling when a member of the Axis of Evil can test missiles and explode nuclear warheads, and all you can do about it is mumble some pathetic warnings about how they better not do that again or there will be consequences.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you even think that there is an Axis of Evil.

You know your empire’s crumbling when a rag-tag military hodge-podge of irregulars has you pinned down in an endless fight you can’t win, but also can’t lose.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re too dumb to even ban Humvees as a first step toward ending your dependency on a foreign-owned crucial resource.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you trade your prior moral leadership on human rights issues for global disgust at your torture, ‘extraordinary rendition’ (a.k.a. kidnaping for torture) and the dismantling of nine centuries worth of civil liberties progress.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you blow off international law that you once helped create, and undermine the institutions of international governance that you once helped build.

You know your empire’s crumbling when opinion polls confirm that every month you’re more and more despised throughout the world.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you can’t even pull off the hanging of a tin-pot murderous former dictator without turning him into a hero.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re the richest country in the world, but nearly 50 million of your people don’t have basic health care coverage.

You know your empire’s crumbling when the World Health Organization ranks your healthcare system 37th ‘best’ in the world, just above Slovenia, and just below Costa Rica. (And far below Colombia, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.)

You know your empire’s crumbling when instead of making it easier for citizens to obtain a higher education, you’re making it harder and more expensive.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your government gives tax breaks to industries as a reward for exporting your jobs elsewhere.

You know your empire’s crumbling when the so-called ‘opposition’ party can’t even turn that obscenity into a viable campaign theme and use it to clobber the worst emperor in your history.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your middle class has been stagnant for three decades, while the wealth of the hyper-rich continues to climb through the roof.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your reaction to that is to exacerbate the problem by enacting tax policies that massively increase further still the gap between the rich and the rest.

You know your empire’s crumbling when the predatory class has taken over your government and is stripping the country of everything not bolted down to the floor. And then it sells the floor itself, as well, to your rivals.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re spending tens of billions of dollars you don’t own on new nuclear warheads and space weapons that don’t work, to be used against an enemy you don’t have.

You know your empire’s crumbling when one of your cities drowns and your government does next to nothing before, during and after.

You know your empire’s crumbling when a massive environmental nightmare is looming around the corner, and your emperor not only ignores it, but claims it isn’t real while taking steps to exacerbate it.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your emperor is warned by a CIA briefer of an imminent terrorist attack of vast proportions, and responds by remaining on vacation and dismissing the briefer with the words: “All right. You've covered your ass, now.”

You know your empire’s crumbling when the same emperor drops everything to fly across the country from his vacation home in order to sign a bill intervening on the wrong side of a personal medical drama involving a single family.

You know your empire’s crumbling when gays and immigrants are used as diversionary issues to keep people from thinking about the pillaging of their country and their wallets actually taking place. And it works.

You know your empire’s crumbling when people are getting more religious and less scientific, not the other way around.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your political leaders start to be chosen by dynastic rules of succession.

And you especially know your empire’s crumbling when the most idiotic child of one of the least accomplished leaders in its history is not only crowned as the next emperor, but is even revered for a time by most of the public as a great one.

Rome? Britain? Spain?

At this rate we’ll be lucky to end up like Belgium.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

http://www.anis-online.de/2/artclub/blumen/7e.htm#3.htm
 
- The Myth of the Violent Victory -
Anis Hamadeh, Jan. 26, 2007

Is the peace camp "female, old and short"? Is it true that nonviolence gets a very good media coverage? In his article "Nonviolence? The Sword of St. Michael", http://www.israelshamir.net/English/NonViolence.htm Israel Shamir claims just that. "Maybe we won't have peace", he concludes, "but we'll have victory."

Sounds interesting. But... How sweet can a Palestinian victory be after a hundred years of struggle and loss, especially when there is not even peace in sight? The glory, according to Shamir, is with "the fighters with AK machineguns cautiously treading the narrow streets of Nablus or Faluja." Does he really think that those fighters will militarily win against the USA and Israel? In the publics we often find the claim that pacifists are dreamers, but what kind of dream is a military victory? It is difficult to understand how Shamir imagines this to happen. And even if they win, take Hezbollah in Lebanon against the Israeli army, there still are the public opinions in the world that do not foster justice for everyone yet. Therefore the conflicts can only be solved on the level of the publics and not with blood on the streets.

There are several rewarding questions to be derived from this pamphlet. The first one is whether or not one should refer to violent Biblical or Quranic images in order to justify violence, not only for the reason that Shamir's very opponents resort to this strategy, but also because of laicism. But let's hear what Shamir really is angry about: "Too often, non-violence grows not out of humility and self-sacrifice, but out of self-preservation and fear." This, unfortunately, is correct. Too often... but not always. Principally, one can even agree with this: "In this war we have a right and a wrong side, and we are duty bound to support right against wrong." It is the totality and absoluteness which is doubtful and also dangerous for the feeble. Shamir in other texts glorifies Saddam Hussain and mourns the time when there was a military Iraqi deterrence against the highly armed Israel. While progressive people call for a nuclear-free Middle East and a decrease of weapons Shamir clings to visions of the past, visions of fear.

Like the sword of Saint Michael in an Apocalyptic battle the oppressed shall be, and we people are to hail the warriors of the noble cause. Says Shamir. He takes a few examples of pacifists and concludes: "In short, pacifism is a quirky, doubtful and unsuccessful idea", and his notion of love is that it "can cause us to give everything including our life, and it can cause us to take life, as well." Readers may wonder what his point is, as the right of self-defense exists and even international law does not regard violent resistance as violence proper. Therefore Shamir's attacks are not precise and rather aimed at windmills.

In human history there is a clear tendency towards the pacification of the world through laws. It is necessary to fight the corruption of these laws and to bring them further until we have made a just world. Whoever thinks he can wipe off blood with blood will also try to wipe off ink with ink.

Shamir does not sufficiently differentiate between violence and resistance and is content with generalizing pacifists and women and others in a way that his frustrations find a vent and he can feel like an anti-mainstream hero with catching aphorisms. It seems rather trivial. The greatest miracle, anyway, is that the militant resistance fighters promoted in this oevre have barely anything to do with the way Shamir portrays himself rather credibly. Remember him describing his journey in the "Galilee Flowers", where Shamir talks to everybody on his way, also to Zionists and people he feels to actually be oppressors. He rarely is angry, let alone violent. Why, were is the AK machinegun?
-----
 
Anis Hamadeh
Moselstr. 1-3
D-55118 Mainz
Tel.: +49/ (0)6131/4809263
Email: anis@anis-online.de
 
Web: www.anis-online.de
English: www.anis-online.de/index_engl.htm
Français: www.anis-online.de/index_fr.htm
Arabic: www.anis-online.de/index_arab.htm
-----------------------------
Anis Online is a journalistic art website in German, English, French and
Arabic with 1001 pages. It contains music, poetry and prose,
essays, children's stories, satires, interviews, media reviews,
Palestiniana, Orient Online, drawings, an Elvis page and a lot more.

15 Things You Should Never Buy Again
* * *
For a better world, boycott dangerous products
 
   
For more informations:
http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/shopun...opping/neverbuy.cfm
  

1. Styrofoam cups
Styrofoam is forever. It's not biodegradable.
Alternative: Buy recyclable and compostable paper cups.
Best option: Invest in some reusable mugs that you can take with you.

2. Paper towels
Paper towels waste forest resources, landfill space, and your money.
Alternative: When you do buy paper towels, look for recycled, non-bleached products. Search the National Green Pages™ for recycled paper products.
Best option: Buy dishtowels or rags to wash and reuse.


3. Bleached coffee filters
Dioxins, chemicals formed during the chlorine bleaching process, contaminate groundwater and air and are linked to cancer in humans and animals.
Alternative: Look for unbleached paper filters.
Best Option: Use reusable filters such as washable cloth filters.

4. Overpackaged foods and other products
Excess packaging wastes resources and costs you much more. Around thirty three percent of trash in the average American household comes from packaging.
Alternative: Buy products with minimal or reusable packaging.
Best Option: Buy in bulk and use your own containers when shopping.

5. Teak and mahogany
Every year, 27 million acres of tropical rainforest (an area the size of Ohio) are destroyed. Rainforests cover 6% of Earth’s surface and are home to over half of the world’s wild plant, animal, and insect species. The Amazon rainforest produces 40 percent of the world’s oxygen.
Alternative: Look for Forest Stewardship Council certified wood.
Best Option: Reuse wood, and buy furniture and other products made from used or salvaged wood.

Learn how to become WoodWise at home and in your office »

6.Chemical pesticides and herbicides
American households use 80 million pounds of pesticides each year. The EPA found at least one pesticide in almost every water and fish sample from streams and in more than one-half of shallow wells sampled in agricultural and urban areas. These chemicals pose threats to animals and people, especially children.
Alternatives: Buy organic pest controllers such as diatomaceous earth.
Best Option: Plant native plants and practice integrated pest management. Plant flowers and herbs that act as natural pesticides.

7. Conventional household cleaners
Household products can contain hazardous ingredients such as organic solvents and petroleum-based chemicals that can release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into your indoor environment, positing a particular danger for children. The average American household has three to ten of hazardous matter in the home.
Alternative: Look for nontoxic, vegetable-based, biodegradeable cleaners.
Best Option: Try making your own green cleaner using vinegar, water, and castile soap.

Find safe, green cleaners in the National Green Pages™»

8. Higher octane gas than you need
Only one car in ten manufactured since 1982 requires high-octane gasoline. High-octane gas releases more hazardous pollutants into the air, and may be bad for your car.
Alternative: Buy the lowest-octane gas your car requires as listed in your owner's manual
Best option: Make your next car purchase a hybrid. Or ditch the car and take public transportation, ride a bike, or walk.

Learn more about green transportation »

9. Toys made with PVC plastic
70% of PVC is used in construction, but it is also found in everyday plastics, including some children’s toys. Vinyl chloride, the chemical used to make PVC, is a known human carcinogen. Also, additives, such as lead and cadmium, are sometimes added to PVC to keep it from breaking down; these additives can be particularly dangerous in children’s toys. PVC is also the least recycled plastic.
Alternative: Avoid plastics that are labeled as “PVC” or “#3.” Look for #1 and #2 plastics, which are easier to recycle and don’t produce as many toxins. Use sustainable construction materials.
Best option: Take action to tell manufacturers to stop using PVC plastics, especially in children’s toys.

See animation about PVC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpmE_b90XTU

Find safe toys in the National Green Pages™ »

10. Plastic forks and spoons
Disposable plastic utensils are not biodegradeable and not recyclable in most areas.
Alternative: Use compostable food service items. Companies such as Biocorp make cutlery from plant materials such as corn starch and cellulose.
Best option: Carry your own utensils and food containers.


Learn more:

Five more things you should never buy again »
Get our free email newsletter
Find everyday green living tips in the Real Money newsletter
Information updated from 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth, The EarthWorks Group, The Green Consumer. John Elkington, Julia Hailes, and Joel Makower.

 

* * *

5 More Things You Should Never Buy Again



 


 

1. Farm raised salmon. Several studies, including one performed by researchers at Indiana University, have found that PCB's and other environmental toxins are present at higher levels in farm raised salmon than wild salmon.

Pregnant women, women of child-bearing ages, and children should be very careful when choosing fish due to high levels of environmental toxins including mercury found in many fish. Check out our Safe Seafood Tip Sheet to see what the environmental and health risks posed by different fish.

2. Rayon. Developed and manufactured by DuPont as the world's first synthetic fiber, it is made by from liquefied wood pulp. Unfortunately, turning wood into rayon is wasteful and dirty, because lots of water and chemicals are needed to extract usable fibers from trees. Only about a third of the pulp obtained from a tree will end up in finished rayon thread. The resulting fabrics usually require dry cleaning, which is an environmental concern as well as an added expense and inconvenience.

Much of the our rayon sold comes from developing countries, such as Indonesia, where environmental and labor laws are weak and poorly enforced. There is mounting evidence that rayon clothing manufacturing contributes to significant forest destruction and pollution in other countries. Learn more about WoodWise clothes »

3. Beauty/Body Care with Phthalates and Parabens. Phthalates are a group of industrial chemicals linked to birth defects that are used in many cosmetic products, from nail polish to deodorant. Parabens are preservatives used in many cosmetics that have been linked to breast cancer though more research is needed. Phthalates are not listed on product labels and can only be detected in laboratory tests. To be safe, choose products from companies that have signed on to the Compact for Safe Cosmetics. Learn more in our Real Money article, "The Ugly Side of Cosmetics" »

4. Cling Wrap. Many people don't realize that cling wrap may be made with PVC. #3 PVC (polyvinyl chloride) leaches toxins when heated or microwaved and it is an environmental problem throughout its lifecycle. Read more about problems with plastics »

5. High VOC Paints and Finishes. Volatile organic compounds or VOCs can cause health problems from dizziness to lung and kidney damage and are infamous for polluting both indoor and outdoor air. VOCs are found in products including paints as well as finishes used for wood, such a stains or varnishes. There are now a wide array of low or no-VOC paints on the market. Look for paints certified by Green Seal (www.greenseal.org). Or, look for natural paints made by green businesses listed in our National Green Pages™.
  
Learn more ...

Get our free email newsletter
Find everyday green living tips in the Real Money newsletter
Check out our original list of ten things to never buy again
 
Source: http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/shopun...opping/neverbuy.cfm

just posting
just posting

Please do not trust wisincome.com or ongoingprofit.com. These are not genuine sites. They squeeze you of your money and then not answer. Please don't belive them.

My condolences to the people of Iraq with loss of Iraq’s faithful son President Saddam Hussein, viciously murdered by the American Occupation Forces and their local collaborators. He was the first Arab leader who cared for Palestine and Palestinians, who brought war home to Jews, and he will be remembered in Liberated Jerusalem and Liberated Baghdad. He was murdered, and his sons were murdered to extract a cruel revenge for his bombardment of Tel Aviv in 1990 and for his refusal to surrender. It is better to die standing rather than live on one’s knees, and the President died standing. He joined many, many great independence warriors murdered by the Empire. Bush and his henchmen will be held responsible for this cowardly murder, and they will pay for it in this world, and in the next world. Glory to the fallen heroes.



www.israelshamir.net

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Israel Shamir

 

The villain kills innocent people in order to frame Roger Rabbit, that much I remember of the marvellous Zemeckis 88’ cartoon. The movie spoofs Hitchcock private eye films where the hero wades waist-deep in dead bodies, all killed to frame him. Chandler and Hammett developed this genre being bored by always-safe violin-playing Holmesian detectives: their heroes unravel murders while being accused and pursued by police.

The Russian president Vladimir Putin found himself in the uncomfortable position of Roger Rabbit. Soon after the murder of Anna Polikovskaya, an investigative journalist, the defected spy died in London – and accused him on his death bed. The third death, that of obese ex-Prime Minister Gaidar, was avoided but not a new accusation. It appears that every violent or suspicious death is automatically placed at the doorstep of Putin, in the best Chandleresque tradition. Roger Rabbit was framed in order to take over the Toon Town; Putin is framed in order to take over Russia’s policies and resources.

Only a very young, innocent and sincere person may believe that media owners and editors, the Masters of Discourse care about minor Russian political figures like Politkovskaya and Litvinenko. They put Putin on the hot seat so he’ll surrender Iran to the US bombers and Sakhalin-2 to the Western oil companies, sell gas and other national assets at cheap price, forget about his independent political course. They show him and us the impressive might of mass media machine, this unique device built to zombify millions. They can establish the world agenda and present Putin as a killer, Clinton as a sex offender, Chavez as an antisemite, Ahmadinejad as a new Hitler, Palestinians as the offenders and Israelis as victims. Not even the Popes had such power in their best days: whatever they say, goes.

They never fail to mention the KGB career of Putin, though CIA past of Bush and Mossad past of Tsipi Livni is never referred to in a polite society. They remind us of a killed 20 years ago Bulgarian defector, but they do not refer to the greatest organised assassin of our days, of the Jewish state, unless with admiration moderated by political correctness as in Spielberg’s Munich. However, Israel kills, kidnaps and jails its political opponents on daily basis: all Palestinian leaders active 20 years ago were since then assassinated by the Jews. They use poison as well as guided missiles and bunker-busting bombs, and Nes Tsiona centre for chemical and biological warfare produces poisons and other tools for 007, like “bionic killer wasp”

They used their poison in assassination attempt on Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader; the assassins were apprehended and caught red-handed. There is no doubt they used poison to assassinate Yasser Arafat: the Haaretz published a clear hint to such an effect; and intelligence-related Israelis are convinced of it. And here we come to the most interesting part: Arafat’s post mortem revealed presence of Polonium-210, the same poisonous medium that killed the Russian defector. However, the Masters of Discourse and their world-opinion-producing machine pooh-poohed this discovery and connected it to chemotherapy treatment possibly given to the Palestinian leader. Now they say this isotope points to Putin, though Polonium-210 is sold over internet in the US freely.

Everything points to Putin. In today’s Israeli paper, a Russian demand of reciprocity in treatment of arrested criminals (quite an ordinary and usual request) is described as “Putin’s blackmail”; a Russian desire to own petrol stations in the West, not only to sell oil at the well, is described as “Putin’s world dominance drive”. Putin is not made of iron like the old Bolsheviks, and he is liable to submit to pressure, to allow Israel to bomb Iran, to let the western oil companies a free run in his land, like Gorbachev and Yeltsin did. Then he will become a darling of the mass media and his alleged crimes forgotten.

This was the case with Muammar Qaddafi – he was personally accused of every mishap and his country was forced to pay zillions for the Lockerby disaster though they had no connection to it, as admitted international observers at the trial. Qaddafi surrendered to the supreme will of the Masters of Discourse, and all attacks on him ceased immediately. It will happen to Putin, too, if he will just fulfil the desire of Israel and expose Iran to bombs.

Wonderful Indian writer Arundhati Roy wrote that all our leaders are awful; but as long as they let the West to steal their assets they are safe. Only when they object to it, they become monsters in the eyes of ever so docile public opinion. We should try to stop this trend; we can’t fight off the US cruise missiles, but we may and must sabotage the Masters of Discourse’s most powerful weapon, their mass media brainwashing machine by never accepting their line.

________________________________________

In bed with Russophobes


The Litvinenko murder is being used by neocons in their campaign against Putin's national revival

Neil Clark
Monday December 4, 2006
The Guardian



Three weeks on, we are still no closer to knowing who was responsible for the death of the former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. The use of polonium 210 as a murder weapon could point in entirely opposite directions. It might suggest that the killing was carried out on behalf of the Russian security service as a public warning to others who might think of betraying it. But it could also be read as an attempt by President Putin's rich and powerful enemies to discredit the Russian government internationally. Whatever the truth, it has been seized upon across Europe and the US to fuel a growing anti-Russian campaign.

There are certainly grounds for criticising the Russian government from a progressive perspective. Putin has introduced a flat-rate income tax, which greatly benefits the wealthy, and plans the partial marketisation of Russia's education and health systems. He has pursued a bloody campaign of repression in Chechnya. And while some of Russia's oligarchs have been bought to justice, others remain free to flaunt their dubiously acquired wealth, in a country where the gap between rich and poor has become chasmic.

Even so, those on the centre-left who have joined the current wave of Putin-bashing ought to consider whose cause they are serving. Long before the deaths of Litvinenko and the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Russophobes in the US and their allies in Britain were doing all they could to discredit Putin's administration. These rightwing hawks are gunning for Putin not because of concern for human rights but because an independent Russia stands in the way of their plans for global hegemony. The neoconservative grand strategy was recorded in the leaked Wolfowitz memorandum, a secret 1990s Pentagon document that targeted Russia as the biggest future threat to US geostrategic ambitions and projected a US-Russian confrontation over Nato expansion.

Even though Putin has acquiesced in the expansion of American influence in former Soviet republics, the limited steps the Russian president has taken to defend his country's interests have proved too much for Washington's empire builders. In 2003, Bruce P Jackson, the director of the Project for a New American Century, wrote that Putin's partial renationalisation of energy companies threatened the west's "democratic objectives" - and claimed Putin had established a "de facto cold war administration". Jackson's prognosis was simple: a new "soft war" against the Kremlin, a call to arms that has been enthusiastically followed in both the US and Britain.

Every measure Putin has taken has been portrayed by the Russophobes as the work of a sinister totalitarian. Gazprom's decision to start charging Ukraine the going rate for its gas last winter was presented as a threat to the future of western Europe. And while western interference in elections in Ukraine, Georgia and other ex-Soviet republics has been justified on grounds of spreading democracy, any Russian involvement in the affairs of its neighbours has been spun as an attempt to recreate the "evil empire". As part of their strategy, Washington's hawks have been busy promoting Chechen separatism in furtherance of their anti-Putin campaign, as well as championing some of Russia's most notorious oligarchs.

In the absence of genuine evidence of Russian state involvement in the killings of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya, we should be wary about jumping on a bandwagon orchestrated by the people who bought death and destruction to the streets of Baghdad, and whose aim is to neuter any counterweight to the most powerful empire ever seen.

Neilclark66.blogspot.com
neilclark6@hotmail.com

 Our wonderful Polish philosopher-friend Marek G wrote this interesting report about changes in Eastern Europe. Despite some difficult language, it's worth to be read with attention, as Marek explains otherwise unexplainable problems there. See full version including some theological points on Marek's site.
Dr Marek Glogoczowski

 

Eastern Europe: Manufacturing of a „Catholic” Docility
 

The principal feature, which characterizes, already for the second decade, the life of the “won to freedom and democracy” post-Soviet part of the world, is its aggressive Americanization. This truly global phenomenon starts from most elementary nutritive habits, symbolized by Mac Donald’s “junk food refueling stations”, and runs through the whole spectrum of both “plebeian” and “high” culture, ending up in the installation of American citizens at the leadership of nations leftover from the former Soviet Union. In Baltic states actual presidents (Estonia, Lithuania) and Prime Ministers (Latvia), are bearers of American passports, in Ukraine the actual wife of its president is the former worker of the Department of State, in Georgia its aggressive, loving to speak in English, president is the graduate of Columbia University, and in Poland the actual Minister of War, Radek Sikorski, which is the bearer of the British passport, is the member of so-called “neo-conservative think tank” in Washington, D.C. (I wrote purposefully “Minister of War”, not of Defense, for the Polish Army become “miniaturized” to the size hardly over 100 thousand soldiers, for a country of nearly 40 millions of inhabitants. This mini-army is officially trained only for “antiterrorist missions” in distant countries and seas. In particular the Polish “mini Navy” is supposed to defend the Southern Pacific, as told us, during a meeting at my Pomeranian Pedagogical Academy, the freshly formed in USA commandor of Polish Navy.)

 

It is thus evident, that also the political life in these post-socialist (but not “post communist”, as propaganda insists) countries ever more resembles the political spectrum existing in USA. Of course we witness here the development of a typically Anglo-Saxon “bipartisan” system, diverging in its programs in the same manner as the American Democratic “Pepsi Party” diverges in its political taste from the USA Republican “Coca Cola Club”. The most recent, slightly funny example, up to which point the realm of the sociopolitical – or rather sociopathological – life in Poland started to imitate the “cultural spirit” present in USA, gave the proposal, of the minister of Education Roman Giertych, to introduce into the biology course the “science of Creationism”, this at the image of educational practices of certain American “fundamentalist Christian” states. (Of course, on the “science market” in Poland, with creationism competes only the (neo)Darwinian paradigm of “the creation of species, by the means of extermination of not competitive sub-species”; Polish scientific establishment dutifully ignores the more mature “Euro-Continental”, Lamarckian approach to the problem of evolution, present in J-P. Grassé’s book “L’évolution du vivant” and J. Piaget last work “Le comportement, moteur d’évolution”.)

 

All these, truly innumerous, examples of the direction of “development” of Eastern European societies, suggest that in order to see better what is happening in the space from Elbe/Oder to the Pacific Ocean, we have to focus our attention at the development of the American society, which has become a “beacon of nations” to be imitated everywhere. Here of a great help for us is the book, published in 2002 by English journalist Clifford Longley, under the title “Chosen People – the big idea that shapes England and America”. In this voluminous work its author points out that the American populace has become so well “drilled” to behave in a docile manner that whatever the ruling class of this “super” country decides, the populace dutifully obeys. According to Longley, “USA is God”, so no one dares to challenge the Almighty, for such an action is considered not only to be futile, but also noxious to the “Darwinian” social survival of an individual. In particular this “God in form of USA” demands that all remnants of “godless”, collective ownership shall be privatized – in USA only National Parks and the Army remain truly national, and even these “leftovers of the collectivist past” are planned to be privatized too (1). This at the image of the privatization of the rapidly expanding American Penitentiary Complex (in Russian “Gulag”), which at present “hosts” one quarter of all population of prisoners of the world.

 

If we consider the “imperative of privatization”, to be the goal of “God” acting upon our (?) Planet, all major geopolitical events are becoming transparent. I will limit myself to an enumeration of only most visible aspects of these “divine acts of the Lord in form of USA”:

1/ Both the lasting for more than a decade “mole’s war” of USA-NATO against Yugoslavia, and the even more prolonged and bloody war of “axis” USA-GB-Israel against Iraq, were wars for “privatization” of all valuable for invaders riches of these formerly socialist countries.

2/ Also so called “color revolutions”, which finally destroyed the Yugoslavia, and transferred Georgia and than Ukraine into USA semi-colonies, were immediately accompanied by massive privatizations, changing these countries into the New Frontier of greed-minded foreign “investors”.

3/ At present old countries of the European Union are more socialized than its new members like Poland, so quite a number of “Foundations”, localized in principle in England and in USA, are industriously trying to convince the populace of Europe that it urgently has to drop all, remaining from times of the Cold War, social protections. I have in mind in particular the “missionary activity” of this famous Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovski, whom I had a displeasure to meet “face to face” already twice in last 3 decades. He is incessantly touring the Europe, trying to convince its elites that the European Union is a “horrible copy” of the defunct Soviet Union. (Which Bukovski’s “revelation” makes out of USRR a quite prosperous and friendly country!)

4/ There is a continuos “underwater” (as say it in Minsk) war of these Judeo-Anglo-American “foundations” against Bielorussia. This relatively small country, with only ten millions of inhabitants, after the fall of Yugoslavia remains the last “island” in Europe, which stays beyond the grip of “God’s” Kingdom of Private Enterprise Only. Despite that Bielorussia practically has no natural riches, in recent years it started to play a “mini-counterweight” to “God’s” planetary ambitions, especially once it found the common language with other “anti-Western” entities, namely Venezuela and Iran. An interesting fact is that after the failure of “color revolution” in Minsk this spring, the relay in efforts to “domesticate” Bielorussia took Russia, which ultra-rich elite remains hostile to economical and cultural successes of its tiny “white” (bielo) Russian brother.

 

More details what is happening in deteriorating at present relations between Minsk and Moscow provides an article “From the integration dead end towards the Greater Russia”, written by Jurij Tsarik, a collaborator of the “Party of Development” lead by Jurij Kroupnov, and published in October at www.km.ru/magazin/view.asp?. According to Tsarik, in Russia of today prevails the idea of a “liberal empire”, which hopes to maintain its super-state position by the means of a “terror of an owner of energetic resources” only. Such “cultural” concept was formulated already in 2003 (the year of the sharp rise of prices of petrol due to the war in Iraq), by the chief organizer of Russian “liberal reforms” of 1990ies, Anatolij Tchoubais. This hated by Russian nationalists and communists magnate is at present the owner of an enormous Russian Electricity Complex. His simplistic conception of New Russia, as an “energetic super-power”, was presented, by several Russian politologues, during the meeting of G-8 in Petersburg in summer 2006 (2). As Tsarik observes, such a “Russian” conception has lead to the situation that practically all other goals and interests, in the process of integration of post-Soviet sphere of influence, have vanished. The further integration of Russia with Bielorussia was abandoned, out of a fear that the super potent Russian energy corporations will quickly “swallow” the Bielorussian economy, with the repetition of the known already to Bielorussians, since early 1990ies, sinister scenario of “shock dezindustrialization” of the country.

 

Tsarik observes that such “radious future” is of course not desired by Bielorussian government, and even more it is not desired by the Belarus nation: thanks to the “anti Western” economical politics of Lukashenko, Belarus today has become the local industrial super-power, with practically full employment and relatively (in comparison with Russians and Ukrainians) high standard of living. The state owned Bielaz factory in Minsk produces (and sells) at present more tractors than all machine industries of the immense Russia together. In order to understand where from come these “Moscow” pressures, aiming at the privatization and dezindustrialization of Bielorussia, it is worth to recall that the dictating the energetic policy of Russia, magnate Anatolij Tchoubais is linked, via the “Case” Foundation and its Polish secretary Ewa Balcerowicz (the wife of the president of the Polish National Bank, Leszek Balcerowicz), with the whole Anglo-Saxon group of Soros and Carnegie Foundations, as well as with IMF and the World Bank, all of them being “arms” of the “God”, known as the (lead by USA) G-8 assembly of super industrialized states.

 

Tsarik notices that the recent “gas war”, of the state owned Russian Gasprom against Bielorussia, has managed to built up in Bielorussia the feeling of hostility towards Moscow, which until now was considered as Minsk’s closest ally. Earlier the same “Moscow” has managed to make enemies in Ukraine, in which country nearly the half of the population uses Russian as the first language. During the conference at Feldkirch (Austria) this year I had an occasion to speak with a former Soviet secret service agent, who at present lives in New Zealand, trying to stay away both from Russia and USA. He told me that one of reasons, which make the people of Ukraine reluctant to join the Greater Russia, is the fact that this immense country is run at present by “criminals”. This opinion was somehow confirmed during a conference held at Kiev’s MAUP University two years earlier, when the former chief of the Ukrainian police told us that at the beginning of 1990, the Ukrainian police observed – with no possibility to react against – how from Moscow were arriving “police commissaries”, which were organizing the criminal element in Ukraine! (The same happened in Poland too, where the head of Polish Police was murdered at the end of 1990; the “commissioner” of this murder still remains in USA, only very recently apprehended by FBI.) These stories, of a planned criminalization of post-socialist countries, converge with the politics, which USA practiced in occupied by its army territories of Europe after the WW2. At that time the chief of FBI, Edgar Hoover personally brought the Sicilian Mafioso Lucky Luciano back from USA to Italy, in order to revitalize the suppressed by fascists Mafia. This crime syndicate subsequently furnished an efficient protection of Italy against the democratic takeover by communists.

 

The praised by “liberals” privatization of all aspects of social life (see texts of the “guru” of liberals, A. F. von Hayek), automatically destroys all positive aspects of a socialist state: once an enterprise falls into private hands, its owner, seeking to maximize his profits, without any scruples is ready to transfer the production towards distant regions of the globe, which offer to him better gains than industries he “inherited” in his native country. Such process of “alienation” of production from local population is even more accentuated once new owners happen to be foreigners. This is the case in particular in Poland, wherefrom already millions of young people migrated towards more affluent centers of the Western Europe. In short, the abandonment of Marxist “dogma”, demanding the nationalization of means of production, has automatically resulted in the substantial dilution of all local ethnic and national cultures, this due to mass migrations imposed by capitalist free enterprise: at present the Slavic nation of Sorben, whose culture and language survived relatively well in DDR, is risking a rapid disappearance due to the trivial fact that in Eastern regions of Germany there are scarcely jobs, and its population massively emigrates westwards. The desolate at present industrial centers of Silesia in Poland, the rusting cable cars of situated at high altitudes wolfram mines in Northern Caucasus, and the not cultivated since a decade fertile farmlands of Western Ukraine, resemble similar sinister landscapes I’ve seen forty years ago in Northern America, in particular the abandoned industrial cities of the East Coast state of Vermont, and falling into ruins, beautiful wooden villages, which Ukrainians exiled from the early Soviet Union have built in Canadian British Columbia.

 

The similarity, between post-industrial and post-agricultural regions of North America, and desolate at present regions of former USRR, indicates that these immense territories are victims of the same illness. The name of this illness is “the liberal civil society”, which term is an euphemism hiding the reality of the Global Mafia dominant in all G-8 super-states. Such diagnosis implicates that in order to make “a more human future” (a title of the Feldkirch’s “Mut zur Ethik” conference last September), we have to reverse the general convictions what is good and what is evil in human affairs. The “evil people” today are of course these innumerable at present “money dancers”, which form the bulk of not only western, but also eastern politicians, journalists, and bishops-businessmen. As wrote it recently David Montoute “From the true origins of the Gulf War, to the pre-planned dismemberment of Yugoslavia and Iraq, from Wall Street money laundering to the murder of David Kelly, from depleted uranium to ‘false flag’ terrorism, there is now an open-ended list of taboo subjects that the mainstream (i.e. Global Mafia controlled) media and the foundation-funded ‘alternatives’ cannot address. (...) According to Michael Ruppert, the emerging American-led global police state is not merely about private control over the legal system, but is rather a crisis-induced transition from a deeply compromised legal system to a society where force and surveillance completely supplant that system.’” (3).

 

Does the possibility of a humanization of the liberal “civil society” exist?

 

Does any social movement have the chance to revolt against this, laboriously woven at present, “American-led global police state”? Here, as a Pole grown in the very catholic environment of my semi-native Kraków, I have to point out that even the Church has been maneuvered into a role of a docile apologist of a “catholic” – it means generalized, universal – society, which is entirely devoted to the worship of a transnational divinity called Mammon. In Kraków we have even an influential among intelligentsia, “Catholic Weekly” (Tygodnik Powszechny), which specializes in binding together beings formally opposite, namely the Christian credo with the overtly “mammonist” ethics of a liberal, cosmopolite and philo-Semite bourgeoisie. This relatively new for Catholics, philo-mammonist attitude, in case of Protestant churches has a long tradition. Here is sufficient to recall that in 19 century, in order to corrupt the noble Chinese spirit, Englishmen, together with the forced by the British Navy “opening” of China for the commerce of opium, demanded the opening of this country for the penetration of Christian missionaries. It is since these “Opium Wars” dates the Marxist slogan “religion is the opium of people”. As someone observed recently in the Swiss “Zeit-Fragen” weekly, the USA rulers of today give the full credence to this Marxist observation, and their agents are engaged worldwide in spreading this, despised by Marxists, “religious opium”. These agents became so successful in this task that the very recent history, of mass intoxication with various forms of Old Testament based religion, started to remind the not so distant history of the success of sterilization of American farmlands by DDT, in which campaign not only insects, but also consuming these insects birds have been nearly totally exterminated.

 

The presence of ordinary opium in brain centers makes people “soft” and insensitive to their, ever uglier, environment. Moreover, it makes them dependent from this narcotic providers. Seen from this commercial perspective, the present renaissance, at the scale of the entire planet, of various sects and religions, is a sign that their “pushers” expect to make profits comparable to these made by merchants of ordinary drugs. Is it thus possible that also the Christian religion, in its more camouflaged cognitive layer, has been “manufactured”, in Antiquity, as a tool of conquest and subjugation of “weak” and ignorant souls? Such hypothesis finds a kind of a confirmation in practices of contemporary Anglo-Saxon secret services. As relates it Noam Chomsky in one of his numerous books, in the period between two World Wars, the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs have worked, in secrecy, at the project aiming at the invention of an ideology, with which will be possible to intoxicate the population of the entire planet, subjugating it to egoist interests of rulers of the British Empire. The invented at this occasion “opium of intellectuals” turned to be the “gospel” of economical liberalism, preached at the beginning only by professors of London School of Economics, in particular by A.F. von Hayek. Then, at the second stage of “underwater” (as say it in Minsk) war against all possible collectivist “totalitarian” regimes, missionaries of “private enterprise” – like this Vlad Bukowski – were sent to nations, announcing them their liberation by the means of mass privatization of literally everything.

 


References:

 

1. Dr. Robert Hickson “The Crescent Phenomenon of the Privatization of Warfare and Security-Services: New Oligarchic Feudalities, Special-Operations Networks, and Ambiguous Mercenaries in a Time of Borderless Economies and Finance” Oct. 30. 2006. (To be published at www.culturewars.com , Indiana, USA)

 

2. www.kroupnov.ru/pubs/2006/08/31/10412/

 

3. David Montoute “Beyond the Seal of Approval”,http://www.israelshamir.net/Contributors/Contributor40.htm;