Zuma's blog

Afghan Star: 'Ah! Yes! Cha cha cha!'

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:57:37 -0700

Forty years ago, I travelled to Medellin, Colombia with my father, carrying with me a cassette player and a handful of cassettes. Among them was a Jimi Hendrix tape. Playing it for the kids there, one enthusiastically related; "Ah! Yes! Cha cha cha!" Not even "rock and roll!", but 'cha cha cha'... (??!) That really clued me in on a very unexpectedly wide cultural chasm, albeit bridged nonetheless. Mostly.
This came to mind as I learned tonight of 'Afghan Star'... -Only I was the one figuratively saying 'Ah! Yes! Cha cha cha!'...

Afghan Star - The Story

After 30 years of war and Taliban-rule, pop culture has returned to Afghanistan. Afghan Star - a Pop Idol-style TV series – is searching the country for the next generation of music stars. Over 2000 people are auditioning and even three women have come forward to try their luck. The organizers, Tolo TV, believe with this programme they can 'move people from guns to music'.
But in a troubled country like Afghanistan, even music is controversial. Considered sacrilegious by the Mujahiddeen and outright banned by the Taliban (1996-2001), music has come to symbolize freedom for the youth. While the conflict still rages many of those taking part are literally risking their lives.
But the old guard warlords and religious elite have more to worry about than just music. Millions of people watch the show (11 mn watched the final – a third of the country) and vote by SMS from their cell phone for their favourite singers. For many, this is the first time they have encountered democracy: one man or one women equals one vote. All - the different genders, ethnic groups, age sectors - are equal. This is a highly radical idea in a country still essentially based on a male-dominated tribal elder system. For the first time young people, ethnic minorities and women have an arena in which to shine. And at last, the people are allowed to vote for who they want.

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Giving any democratic rights can be downright dangerous!

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:04:21 -0700

The Devil you know...

I respect Eric Margolis, if more out of old habit than current occasional agreement. He can be persuasive to me, addictive even, in his neat brevity. Even when he concedes no pat answers, it feels like he's neatly summed matters up succinctly. I do respect his familiarity with this beat, but often wonder what his perspective's point is. Often as not, it's simply realpolitik vs democracy.

In any case, I expectantly went to his latest column and was not let down. 'We are at it again in Iran.' Well, yes, of course. Realpolitik...

SEEING THROUGH ALL THE PROPAGANDA ABOUT IRAN
WASHINGTON - June 22, 2009
Iran’s political crisis continues to blaze. It’s still impossible to say which leaders or factions will emerge victorious, but one thing is certain: the earthquake in the Islamic Republic is shaking the Mideast and deeply confusing everyone, including the US government.
Highlighting the complexity of this crisis, Meir Dagan, the head of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, reportedly voiced his hope that Iran’s embattled president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would remain in office. On the surface, that sounds absurd, since Ahmadinejad is Israel’s Great Satan.

But, according to Dagan, if Ahmadinejad’s supposedly `moderate’ rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, came to power, it would be harder for Israel to keep up its propaganda war against Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Besides, added the Mossad chief, the devil you know is better.

Meanwhile, we have been watching an intensifying western propaganda campaign against Iran, mounted by the US and British governments. What we hear is commentary and analysis that comes from bitterly anti-regime Iranian exiles, `experts’ with an ax to grind, and US pro-Israel neocons yearning for war with Iran.

In viewing the Muslim world, Westerners keep listening to those who tell them what they want to hear, rather than the facts. We are at it again in Iran.

President Barack Obama’s properly stated he would refrain from being seen to `meddle’ in Iran’s internal affairs in spite of calls by hard-line Republicans for American action – whatever that might be. Obama did the right thing by apologizing for the US/British coup that overthrew Iran’s democratic Mossadegh government in 1953.

But that was not the whole story. Washington has been attempting to overthrow Iran’s Islamic government since the 1979 revolution and continues to do so in spite of pledges of neutrality in the current crisis.

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War and Hate

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:24:27 -0700

"Look What You Made Me Do"

Caesar, Hitler, Nixon - War, Racism, Hatred - Alcohol, Mysogyny, Conformity

Seamless trinities...
One needn't ever drink a drop of alcohol to serve in it's churches...
Just as one needn't ever hit women to perpetuate ever worse to them...
Or as one needn't necessarily exit conventional reality to reject the convention.

Seamless subjects. Addiction: money, ego, power, sex, drugs, food, adrenalin, violence, drugs, fear, hatred, guns, vanity, games, the very creative imperative itself -addiction alone makes an endless daisy chain of seamlessly related subjects. They continue on through Blame and Guilt, and Control. Subjects of enthrallment, helpless captivity. It's a necessary convenience to limit the moment's topic. In such isolation, the seamlessness of the chain is not a foregone understanding though, not at all, quite the opposite. It is not a given understanding that to talk of one is to talk of 'them' all... As it should be; that isn't necessarily true, or false.

The Caesarean spirit roars on, as if Hitler won his war, right on through to our contemporary consequences of Nixon's Southern Strategy.
I come from a very patriarchal family myself, save for my beloved renegade father. As he grew in the early 20th century, our family's patriarchs died off, leaving the matriarchs to only revere them, and their power's fortunes. My father, quite naturally then, married a rather bohemian French woman, who may or may not have remained that way if not for her early death. I inherited her gifts. I inherited her challenges, and his. I inherited their questions and their not so pat answers. Mostly I inherited their freedom upon this island, Mother Earth. I was raised to not be an Ugly American. I was raised to hold Life as my own, a blank canvas to make of it as I will. Here now is the big But:
The Millenia old Dominator Culture.

Better writers than I, actual competent writers to be frank, have well covered the whole and the parts as well since man's fall from grace, with certainly as many interpretations. It is not, however, my fault I am doing this. You made me do it. Whom are you going to believe? Me, or your own lying eyes? I hate you!

Look What You Made Me Do!

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/misogyny

Marcus Tullius Cicero reports that Greek philosophers considered misogyny to be caused by gynophobia, a fear of women.[1] In the late 20th century, feminist theorists proposed misogyny as both a cause and result of patriarchal social structures.[2]

The volumes implied! Daunting. Fortunately for me, it's my dear Lisa's birthday. As best an excuse as any to 'turn left at the laundrymat'.
I close with this alone for now to ponder, a black Commander-in-Chief of such forces that allow, encourage even, rampant racism within, from top to bottom, to necessarily fill their ranks -or more? War and Hatred go together like Peace and Love.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4177/gi_skinhead/

"This is not an ideological preference for white supremacists," Kennard says. "The military just can't meet their troop needs, so their standards have had to drop. That won't change until the war scales down."

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U.S. is recruiting misfits for army
Felons, racists, gang members fill in the ranks
Nick Turse
Sunday, October 1, 2006

After falling short of its goals last year, military recruiting in 2006 has been marked by upbeat pronouncements from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claims of success by the White House, and a spate of recent press reports touting the military's achievement of its woman- and manpower goals.

But the armed forces have met with success only through a fundamental transformation, and not the transformation of the military -- that "co-evolution of concepts, processes, organizations and technology" that Rumsfeld is always talking about either.

While the secretary of defense's longstanding goal of transforming the planet's most powerful military into its highest-tech, most agile, most futuristic fighting force has, in the words of the Washington Post's David VonDrehle, "melted away," the very makeup of the armed forces has been mutating before our collective eyes under the pressure of the war in Iraq. This actual transformation has been reported, but only in scattered articles on the new recruitment landscape in America.

Last year, despite NASCAR, professional bull-riding and Arena Football sponsorships, popular video games that doubled as recruiting tools, TV commercials dripping with seductive scenes of military glory, a "joint marketing communications and market research and studies" program designed to attract, among others, dropouts and those with criminal records for military service, and at least $16,000 in promotional costs for each soldier it managed to sign up, the U.S. military failed to meet its recruiting goals.

This year, those methods have been pumped up and taken over the top in several critical areas that make the old Army ad tagline, "Be All You Can Be," into material for late-night TV punch lines of the future.

In 2004, the Pentagon published a "Moral Waiver Study," whose seemingly benign goal was "to better define relationships between pre-Service behaviors and subsequent Service success." That turned out to mean opening more recruitment doors to potential enlistees with criminal records.

In February, the Baltimore Sun wrote that there was "a significant increase in the number of recruits with what the Army terms 'serious criminal misconduct' in their background" -- a category that included "aggravated assault, robbery, vehicular manslaughter, receiving stolen property and making terrorist threats." From 2004 to 2005, the number of those recruits rose by more than 54 percent, while alcohol and illegal drug waivers, reversing a four-year decline, increased by more than 13 percent.

In June, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that, under pressure to fill the ranks, the Army had been allowing into its ranks increasing numbers of "recruits convicted of misdemeanor crimes, according to experts and military records." In fact, as the military's own data indicated, "the percentage of recruits entering the Army with waivers for misdemeanors and medical problems has more than doubled since 2001."

One beneficiary of the Army's new moral-waiver policies gained a certain prominence this summer. After Steven Green, who served in the 101st Airborne Division, was charged in a rape and quadruple murder in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, it was disclosed that he had been "a high-school dropout from a broken home who enlisted to get some direction in his life, yet was sent home early because of an anti-social personality disorder."

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Iraq veteran: US military full of racist skinheads-from the top down (NATION)

"I Hate Arabs More Than Anybody": Desperate Army Recruits Neo-Nazis

By Matt Kennard, Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Posted June 17, 2009.

Why the U.S. military is ignoring its own regulations and permitting white supremacists to join.

On a muggy Florida evening in 2008, I meet Iraq War veteran Forrest Fogarty in the Winghouse, a little bar-restaurant on the outskirts of Tampa, his favorite hangout. He told me on the phone I would recognize him by his skinhead. Sure enough, when I spot a white guy at a table by the door with a shaved head, white tank top and bulging muscles, I know it can only be him.

Over a plate of chicken wings, he tells me about his path into the white-power movement. "I was 14 when I decided I wanted to be a Nazi," he says. At his first high school, near Los Angeles, he was bullied by black and Latino kids. That's when he first heard Skrewdriver, a band he calls "the godfather of the white power movement." "I became obsessed," he says. He had an image from one of Skrewdriver's album covers -- a Viking carrying a staff, an icon among white nationalists -- tattooed on his left forearm. Soon after he had a Celtic cross, an Irish symbol appropriated by neo-Nazis, emblazoned on his stomach.

At 15, Fogarty moved with his dad to Tampa, where he started picking fights with groups of black kids at his new high school. "On the first day, this bunch of niggers, they thought I was a racist, so they asked, 'Are you in the KKK?'" he tells me. "I said, 'Yeah,' and it was on." Soon enough, he was expelled.

For the next six years, Fogarty flitted from landscaping job to construction job, neither of which he'd ever wanted to do. "I was just drinking and fighting," he says. He started his own Nazi rock group, Attack, and made friends in the National Alliance, at the time the biggest neo-Nazi group in the country. It has called for a "a long-term eugenics program involving at least the entire populations of Europe and America."

But the military ran in Fogarty's family. His grandfather had served during World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and his dad had been a Marine in Vietnam. At 22, Fogarty resolved to follow in their footsteps. "I wanted to serve my country," he says.

Army regulations prohibit soldiers from participating in racist groups, and recruiters are instructed to keep an eye out for suspicious tattoos. Before signing on the dotted line, enlistees are required to explain any tattoos. At a Tampa recruitment office, though, Fogarty sailed right through the signup process. "They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo, and I made up some stuff, and that was that," he says. Soon he was posted to Fort Stewart in Georgia, where he became part of the 3rd Infantry Division.

Fogarty's ex-girlfriend, intent on destroying his new military career, sent a dossier of photographs to Fort Stewart. The photos showed Fogarty attending white supremacist rallies and performing with his band, Attack. "They hauled me before some sort of committee and showed me the pictures," Fogarty says. "I just denied them and said my girlfriend was a spiteful bitch." He adds: "They knew what I was about. But they let it go because I'm a great soldier."

In 2003, Fogarty was sent to Iraq. For two years he served in the military police, escorting officers, including generals, around the hostile country. He says he was granted top-secret clearance and access to battle plans. Fogarty speaks with regret that he "never had any kill counts." But he says his time in Iraq increased his racist resolve.

"I hate Arabs more than anybody, for the simple fact I've served over there and seen how they live," he tells me. "They're just a backward people. Them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I'm concerned. Their customs, everything to do with the Middle East, is just repugnant to me."

Because of his tattoos and his racist comments, most of his buddies and his commanding officers were aware of his Nazism. "They all knew in my unit," he says. "They would always kid around and say, 'Hey, you're that skinhead!'" But no one sounded an alarm to higher-ups. "I would volunteer for all the hardest missions, and they were like, 'Let Fogarty go.' They didn't want to get rid of me."

Fogarty left the Army in 2005 with an honorable discharge. He says he was asked to reenlist. He declined. He was sick of the system.

Since the launch of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has struggled to recruit and reenlist troops. As the conflicts have dragged on, the military has loosened regulations, issuing "moral waivers" in many cases, allowing even those with criminal records to join up. Veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder have been ordered back to the Middle East for second and third tours of duty.

The lax regulations have also opened the military's doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and gang members -- with drastic consequences. Some neo-Nazis have been charged with crimes inside the military, and others have been linked to recruitment efforts for the white right. A recent Department of Homeland Security report, "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," stated: "The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today." Many white supremacists join the Army to secure training for, as they see it, a future domestic race war. Others claim to be shooting Iraqis not to pursue the military's strategic goals but because killing "hajjis" is their duty as white militants.

Soldiers' associations with extremist groups, and their racist actions, contravene a host of military statutes instituted in the past three decades. But during the "war on terror," U.S. armed forces have turned a blind eye on their own regulations. A 2005 Department of Defense report states, "Effectively, the military has a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt they are likely to be able to complete their contracts."

Carter F. Smith is a former military investigator who worked with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command from 2004 to 2006, when he helped to root out gang violence in troops. "When you need more soldiers, you lower the standards, whether you say so or not," he says. "The increase in gangs and extremists is an indicator of this." Military investigators may be concerned about white supremacists, he says. "But they have a war to fight, and they don't have incentive to slow down."

Tom Metzger is the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and current leader of the White Aryan Resistance. He tells me the military has never been more tolerant of racial extremists. "Now they are letting everybody in," he says.

The presence of white supremacists in the military first triggered concern in 1976. At Camp Pendleton in California, a group of black Marines attacked white Marines they mistakenly believed to be in the KKK. The resulting investigation uncovered a KKK chapter at the base and led to the jailing or transfer of 16 Klansmen. Reports of Klan activity among soldiers and Marines surfaced again in the 1980s, spurring President Reagan's Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, to condemn military participation in white supremacist organizations.

Then, in 1995, a black couple was murdered by two neo-Nazi paratroopers around Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The murder investigation turned up evidence that 22 soldiers at Fort Bragg were known to be extremists. That year, language was added to a Department of Defense directive, explicitly prohibiting participation in "organizations that espouse supremacist causes" or "advocate the use of force or violence."

Today a complete ban on membership in racist organizations appears to have been lifted -- though the proliferation of white supremacists in the military is difficult to gauge. The military does not track them as a discrete category, coupling them with gang members. But one indication of the scope comes from the FBI.

Following an investigation of white supremacist groups, a 2008 FBI report declared: "Military experience -- ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces -- is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement." In white supremacist incidents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI identified 203 veterans. Most of them were associated with the National Alliance and the National Socialist Movement, which promote anti-Semitism and the overthrow of the U.S. government, and assorted skinhead groups.

Because the FBI focused only on reported cases, its numbers don't include the many extremist soldiers who have managed to stay off the radar. But its report does pinpoint why the white supremacist movements seek to recruit veterans -- they "may exploit their accesses to restricted areas and intelligence or apply specialized training in weapons, tactics, and organizational skills to benefit the extremist movement."

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Skinhead nation
A potpourri of violence-prone racists, anti-Semites and disaffected youth

by Gil Zohar

From Montreal to Moscow, the media is full of alarming stories of skinheads – heavily tattooed shaved-head youth, bedecked in Nazi symbols - attacking Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, homosexuals and homeless people, whom they perceive as racial enemies.
In August two Israelis were hospitalized after being beaten by a group of skinheads at a rock concert in Belgrade, Serbia. "They were chanting 'Auschwitz, Auschwitz' and 'Go to Germany' as they attacked us," Jarly Avram – one of those assaulted - was reported as saying. No arrests were made.
Similarly that month the Quebec Human Rights Commission awarded $50,000 in damages to a black man who was beaten and stabbed by two neo-Nazi skinheads. Evans Marseille was drinking in an east-end Montreal bar in June 2002 when a group of men started taunting him with Nazi salutes. When he went outside to use the phone, they followed and attacked him.
But it is from Russia with hate that the news of neo-Nazi youth is perhaps most alarming. According to a recent report by the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, "The skinhead movement is growing [in the former Soviet Union]. It now numbers up to 50,000 people and is spreading from major regional centres into small towns and villages."
That is an enormous increase from the skinheads' first appearance in Russia around 1992, when a handful of young punks in Moscow and St. Petersburg started copying European neo-Nazis. One expert says Russia is now home to half of the world's skinheads.
Just how serious a problem are the so-called skinheads?
"Though relatively small in numbers, neo-Nazi skinheads who have adopted white supremacy pose a threat that should not be underestimated," says Bernie Farber, CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress, and an expert on hate groups and white supremacy. "Lacking a moral centre with only hate as a guide, they have been known to act out their animus against vulnerable minorities using violence and intimidation."
The amorphous international skinhead movement - youths who shave their heads, gather at rock concerts and sports events, and sometimes participate in white-supremacist and anti-immigrant activities – developed in the late 1960s Britain out of the MOD (Modernist) movement. The founders were mostly working class youth but came from all economical backgrounds.
Skinhead symbols began innocently as emblematic of working-class pride. Since many youth worked in factories, their shaved heads prevented their hair from getting caught in machinery. Similarly steel-toed boots were worn to protect their feet.
The skinhead hair style quickly became a badge of distinction in contrast to the more bourgeois, long-haired hippie culture popular at the time. Skinhead culture exploded in 1969 to the extent that even the rock band Slade temporarily adopted the look. The subculture gained wider notice as a consequence of graphically violent and sexually explicit novels by Richard Allen, notably Skinhead and Skinhead Escapes.
Postwar Britain received waves of immigrants from Jamaica and Pakistan. The West Indians used to work on the docks with some of the skinheads, and the two groups used to go around "Paki-bashing", i.e. assaulting South Asian immigrants.
In addition to retaining many mod influences, early skinheads were greatly interested in Jamaican Rude Boy style and culture, especially reggae and ska music. But the evolving movement soon created its own musical _expression, called "oi", which was characterized by racist lyrics and calls for violence. The British National Party, a neo-Nazi group, started to back the bands and exploiting them to recruit new members. This is when the skinhead phenomena became a hate group, defined by its own war cry, "RAHOWA" – an acronym for Racial Holy War.
But not all skinheads are racist. In an attempt to counter this negative stereotype, some skinheads formed anti-racist organizations. Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) started in the USA in 1987, and Anti-Racist Action (ARA) began in 1988. In 1988 two SHARPs dragged two female racist skinheads from out of a 7-11 store and beat them with a hammer.
Typically skinheads dress in jeans, Fred Perrys, Ben Shermans, Doc Martin boots, and bomber jackets. Some observers of their scene interpret the colour of their shoe laces and suspenders as having significance: red represents blood that has been shed for the white race; white stands for white power; black for "fresh cut"; and blue for "straight edge".
Should Canadians be concerned about the evolving skinhead culture, and attempts by members to infiltrate the country's armed forces?
"Whenever and wherever racists can gain prominence we should be concerned. This is especially true for their attempts to infiltrate the armed forces. We expect our armed forces to be tolerant and accepting. It is our singular mode of civil protection. The thought of neo-Nazi skinheads trying to gain access to the Canadian military should send chills down our spine," says Farber.

A Skinhead lexicon

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Burning Issue
posted by Mustang Bobby | Tuesday, June 16, 2009

A so-called "Christian" group in Wisconsin has some hot plans for a book in a local library.

    Francesca Lia Block, an award-winning author of young-adult books (the "Weetzie Bat" series among them), has known for a while now that one of her novels, "Baby Be-Bop" is at the center of a controversy in West Bend, Wis.

    A few days ago, she found out that it might be burned at the stake. "Baby Be-Bop" is on a list of titles that a local group calling itself the West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries objects to seeing in the public library. In February, the group asked the library's board to remove a page of recommended titles about gay and lesbian issues for young people (including "Baby Be-Bop") from the library's Web site. Then they demanded that the books be moved from the youth section of the library and placed with the adult collection, "to protect children from accessing them without their parents' knowledge and supervision."

    [...]

    Now an outfit called the Christian Civil Liberties Union has gotten in on the act, suing the library for, according to the West Bend Daily News, "damaging" the "mental and emotional well-being" of several individuals by displaying "Baby Be-Bop" in the library. Since attempts to label the novel as "pornographic" have failed, the (somewhat shadowy) CCLU hopes to brand it as hate speech, in part because it contains the word "nigger." The complainants, described as "elderly" by the newspaper, claim that Block's novel is "explicitly vulgar, racial [sic] and anti-Christian." They want the library's copy not only removed but publicly burned.

    "Baby Be-Bop," a title from the Weetzie Bat series that describes the youth of Weetzie's best friend, Dirk, is, in Block's words, "a very sweet, simple, coming-of-age story about a young man's discovery that he's gay." Dirk is beaten by gay bashers but steadfastly clings to the possibility of finding love. Block finds the disingenuous charges of racism particularly distressing. "Obviously I use those words, including 'faggot,' which is also in the book, to expose racism and homophobia, not promote it," she said. "It's a tiny little book," she added, "but they want to burn it like a witch."

I wouldn't question the CCLU in the area of "hate speech;" they seem to be experts in that field. more

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Is Fox So Crazy That It's Even Alienating Some Conservatives?
By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted June 17, 2009.

The hate-filled rhetoric spewed by Fox pundits like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly is even alarming some of the people who work there.

It must have been an awkward elevator ride for Shep Smith over at Fox News headquarters last Friday, heading up to the 12th-floor studio where his Fox Report program originates. I'm just imagining the nasty looks he must have gotten from co-workers -- if any of them even agreed to ride between floors with him -- on the day that liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman praised Smith in print. Krugman actually referenced him by name as somebody inside Fox News who refused to go along with the "big hate": the right wing's anti-Obama rhetoric -- almost bloodlust -- that now dominates conservative discourse.

Talk about putting a target on the back of a Fox News anchor. A shout-out from the hated Times op-ed page? Things only got worse for Smith over the weekend when the Times' Frank Rich also singled out the Fox News anchor for praise. I mean, c'mon. Were Krugman and Rich trying to get the guy fired?!

In fact, even before being name-dropped by Times liberals, right-wing bloggers had already teed off on Smith ("Shep sucks"; "Shepard Smith has got to go") for having the nerve to call out the "crazies" on the fringe who were targeting President Obama and feeding off conspiratorial hate.

The truth, of course, is that Smith's job isn't in danger. He's considered an untouchable (ratings) golden boy within Fox News who has the backing of his boss, Roger Ailes. (Not to mention a gargantuan $7 million salary.)

Yet by pushing back on the air against the same right-wing hatred that others at Fox News now regularly foment, I wonder if Smith feels increasingly uncomfortable or alienated within Fox News. If he feels like a stranger within the cable news channel he's been with since its inception, as it now rushes headlong into the GOP fever swamps and does it with Glenn Beck, and his conspiratorial ranting, as the new face and voice of Fox News.

I'm starting to wonder if Fox News is big enough for Shep Smith and Glenn Beck.

For the past decade, Fox News brass offered up the same predictable retort that the channel did news during the day and opinion after 8 p.m., and hey, there's nothing wrong with that. (Even if all the opinion ran in one direction.) But now it's opinion in the morning with Fox & Friends, it's opinion in the late afternoon with Glenn Beck at 5 p.m., and opinion 24/7 with Fox Nation online, which mines the territory of everything right of the Drudge Report.

Smith for years has publicly defended Ailes' credo of "fair and balanced," but it's hard to see how the anchor believes it anymore, as he watches the channel he works for actively rile up the right-wing crazies. If Smith watches any of the other 22 hours of Fox News programming that air each day when he's not in front of the camera, he certainly understands that his employer probably represents the most dangerous voice today when it comes to whipping up irrational hostility toward the new president.

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'As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.' -dylan

'So I guess this is where I tell you what I learned - my conclusion, right? Well, my conclusion is: Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time. It's just not worth it. Derek says it's always good to end a paper with a quote. He says someone else has already said it best. So if you can't top it, steal from them and go out strong. So I picked a guy I thought you'd like. 'We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.' -Daniel Vinyard

The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:05:09 -0700

June 23, 2009
Son of PRISP
Obama's Classroom Spies

By DAVID PRICE

As the continuities and disjunctures between the Bush and Obama administrations come into focus it becomes increasingly clear that while Obama’s domestic agenda has some identifiable breaks with Bush’s, at its core, the new administration remains committed to staying the course of American militarization. Now we have an articulate, nuanced president who supports elements of progressive domestic policies, can even comfortably say the phrase LGBT in public speeches, while funding military programs at alarming levels and continuing the Bush administration’s military and intelligence invasion of what used to be civilian life.

The latest manifestation of this continuity came last week when Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, announced plans to transform the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) from a pilot project into a permanent budget item. Blair also announced plans to establish a “Reserve Officers' Training Corps” to train unidentified future intelligence officers in US college classrooms. Like students receiving PRISP funds, the identities of students participating in these programs would not be known to professors, university administrators or fellow students—in effect, these future intelligence analysts and agents would conduct their first covert missions in our university classrooms.

Four years ago I wrote a series of CounterPunch exposés on the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), then a pilot project funded under section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act. PRISP links undergraduate and graduate students with US security and intelligence agencies like the NSA or CIA, and unannounced to universities, professors or fellow-students, PRISP-students enter American university campuses, classrooms, laboratories and professor’s offices without disclosing links to these agencies. PRISP was originally conceived by anthropologist Felix Moos, long a proponent of using anthropological knowledge in waging of counterinsurgency campaigns—an area of growing interest to the Obama administration as it prepares for prolonged soft power counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan.

It seems likely that many of the affected disciplines will offer little resistance and some may quickly warm to announcements of any new funding stream. Traditionally, the disciplines of political science, history or area specialists coming from the humanities have seldom resisted such developments; but for disciplines like anthropology, these undisclosed intelligence-linked programs present devastating ethical and practical problems, as the non-discloser of funding and links to intelligence agencies flies in the face of the basic ethical principles of the discipline. But even without the problems for individual disciplinary ethics codes, the presence of these undisclosed secret sharers in our classrooms betrays fundamental trusts that lie at the core of honest academic endeavors.

While the National Intelligence Director’s move to make PRISP a permanent budget item will damage the academic freedom and integrity of American universities, it will likely be met by the open arms of university administrators facing crashed university endowments and dwindling budgets. That some administrators would so easily accommodate themselves and their institutional integrity for the promise of funds should be of little surprise, but I fear that the combined forces of the current economic collapse conjoined with President Obama’s ability to bring a new liberal credibility to the this warmed-over Bush era project will induce many faculty and students to seriously consider participating in these programs. Times are hard and as funds get scarce it will be increasingly difficult for many to say no.

This development is just the latest installment in on ongoing efforts to increase the militarization of American higher education. None of this should be surprising in a nation that alone spends about 48% of the planet’s military budget. In the social sciences, these shifts away from broad funding sources designed to create independent knowledgeable scholars, to those now requiring indentured servitude has been a long time coming.

Why Does Obama Remind Me Of Reagan?

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:20:43 -0700

...And why does this case bring the question to mind?

I think because both presidents ushered in new chapters of tremendous presidential mendacity in their place in the American narrative, and the Plame case in particular called for Obama to step up. Some comment at the very least ought be made, even by inference. There won't be.

I can almost expect Obama to positively invoke Reagan in a speech some day, without batting an eye. 'Almost'? I won't be one bit surprised when he does. If he hasn't already that I've missed...

Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Plame's Lawsuit Against Cheney, Rove
Tuesday 23 June 2009
by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report

The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a civil lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, against Bush administration officials who were responsible for leaking her covert CIA status to the media and attacking her husband for accusing the White House of twisting prewar Iraq intelligence.

    The Supreme Court's rejection effectively brings the three-year-old case to a close. The Wilson's had sued Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Cheney's ex-chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage for violating their civil rights. Libby was convicted on four of five counts and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. President George W. Bush later commuted the sentence, sparing Libby jail time.

    "The Wilsons and their counsel are disappointed by the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case, but more significantly, this is a setback for our democracy," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an attorney representing the Wilsons. "This decision means that government officials can abuse their power for political purposes without fear of repercussion. Private citizens like the Wilsons, who see their careers destroyed and their lives placed in jeopardy by administration officials seeking to score political points and silence opposition, have no recourse."

US District Court Judge John Bates dismissed the civil lawsuit two years ago. At the time, Bates wrote, as a technical legal matter, Plame and Wilson can't sue under the Constitution. Bates added that the defendants - Cheney, Rove, Libby, and others -had the right to rebut criticism aimed at Wilson, who accused the administration of twisting prewar Iraq intelligence. Bates said the leak of Plame's undercover CIA status to a handful of reporters was "unsavory," but simply a casualty of Wilson's criticism of the administration.

    "The alleged means by which defendants chose to rebut Mr. Wilson's comments and attack his credibility may have been highly unsavory," Bates wrote. "But there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush administration's handling of prewar foreign intelligence by speaking with members of the press, is within the scope of defendants' duties as high-level Executive Branch officials."

    "This case is not just about what top government officials did to Valerie and me," Wilson said following Bates's ruling. "We brought this suit because we strongly believe that politicizing intelligence ultimately serves only to undermine the security of our nation. Today's decision is just the first step in what we have always known would be a long legal battle and we are committed to seeing this case through."

    The Wilsons petitioned the Supreme Court after the Republican-dominated US Court of Appeals for DC Circuit, in a 2 to 1 vote last August, turned down their request for a rehearing. The panel said there was no constitutional precedent established to allow the case to move forward and the court declined to set one.

We Are Termites

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:20:31 -0700

How much can we gouge out of Earth? How much should we not? We don't know.
For all the minerals, oil, coal, and uranium et al we have taken out in a relatively very short span of time, we have no clue to the later consequences of making swiss cheese out of Earth. Moreover, it's practically all gone now, with no thought to (hopefully) a great many future generations of humans, and less to any other species. Certainly nothing for Her, Mother Earth herself. All this great hoard of stuff we've removed may very well be necessary to be where it was, for whatever reason the future may come to see.

Certainly, it wasn't all taken at this same rapacious rate from the beginning, it quickly crept up though, and exponentially added up thereafter. At this point, however, nearing the end of it all, when we are even considering taking out more coal, for example, at a greater cost than the energy so derived pays back, common sense itself fails. Where the profit lay in that, I don't know, and perhaps presuming any is a fallacy. Such need for energy at any cost should not be unquestioningly pursued.

The tacit presumption we own the Earth should likewise be questioned. 'We' are America. 'We' are termites:

Published on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by The Salt Lake Tribune
Sen. Bennett: US Needs 100 More Nuclear Power Plants
by Thomas Burr

WASHINGTON - Sen. Bob Bennett says the path to a clean energy future isn't by capping and trading carbon emissions, but by building, building, building.

Bennett said Monday the nation needs to construct 100 new nuclear reactors by 2030 -- doubling the nation's current number of 104 plants -- if it is serious about slashing carbon emissions while still producing enough electricity to keep up with American needs.

Bennett also brought together three other Republican senators and pro-nuclear energy witnesses to argue for constructing new nuke plants.

"It's been my experience and my position...that one of the driving forces behind America's economic growth has been our access to cheap energy," Bennett said at a Republican-only hearing on energy development he organized. "If we're going to survive in the kind of economy we want, we need to have access to cheap energy."

That means, Bennett says, reviving the idea of building new nuclear reactors, a move the United States hasn't made since 1977. He wasn't alone in that thought.

"The president has said Iran can produce electricity through nuclear power, so why in the world should we not in the United States begin to pick up the technology that we invented," Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said.

"The future of energy is clean energy," said Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, including, "building at least 100 new nuclear power plans in the
next 20 to 25 years."

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said he was stumped why anyone would oppose such a construction blitz.

"You'd think that all Americans can come together on a plan like that," Wicker said.

Of course, one reason even nuclear-industry officials raise is the lack of a solution to tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste piling up at reactors across the country. The Obama administration has essentially killed the plan to store the waste under Yucca Mountain north of Las Vegas, and Congress has yet to decide what to do with the radioactive spent fuel now parked at nuclear plants.

A panel of experts, invited by the ad-hoc committee Bennett chaired Monday, dismissed nuclear-waste concerns.

"How many people are being hurt by waste? It is not occurring in the real world," said Ted Rockwell, a fellow at the American Nuclear Society and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Rockwell later joked that nuclear waste can stay safe in dry ceramic casks at nuclear plants as long as someone posts a sign that says, "Do not eat the ceramic."

"If you don't eat it, it's not going to hurt you," Rockwell said.

Nuclear waste opponents beg to differ.

more

pictures

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:52:18 -0700

speak a thousand words

a once in a lifetime singularity...

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:40:23 -0700

...will absolutely take place july 8 at 4:05.06...

NSA Secret Database Ensnared President Clinton's Private Email

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:05:56 -0700

NSA Secret Database Ensnared President Clinton's Private Email
Wednesday 17 June 2009
by: Kim Zetter | Visit article original @ Wired

A secret NSA surveillance database containing millions of intercepted foreign and domestic e-mails includes the personal correspondence of former President Bill Clinton, according to The New York Times.

An NSA intelligence analyst was apparently investigated after accessing Clinton's personal correspondence in the database, the paper reports, though it didn't say how many of Clinton's e-mails were captured or when the interception occurred.

The database, codenamed Pinwale, allows NSA analysts to search through and read large volumes of e-mail messages, including correspondence to and from Americans. Pinwale is likely the end point for data sucked from internet backbones into NSA-run surveillance rooms at AT&T facilities around the country.

Those rooms were set up by the Bush administration following 9/11, and were finally legalized last year when Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act. The law gives the telecoms immunity for cooperating with the administration; it also opens the way for the NSA to lawfully spy on large groups of phone numbers and e-mail addresses in bulk, instead of having to obtain a warrant for each target.

The NSA can collect the correspondence of Americans with a court order, or without one if the interception occurs incidentally while the agency is targeting people "reasonably believed" to be overseas. But in 2005, the agency "routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants," according to the Times, through this loophole. The paper reports today that the NSA is continuing to over-collect e-mail because of difficulties in filtering and distinguishing between foreign and domestic correspondence.

Perhaps Bill should have texted instead...

Chris Hedges on the meeting in Yekaterinburg

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:21:07 -0700

Published on Monday, June 15, 2009 by TruthDig.com
The American Empire Is Bankrupt
by Chris Hedges

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.

“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”

much more

Dreams

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:46:24 -0700

Driving with my Lisa in my dad's old Kingwood Estates station wagon, I could not keep my eyes open. They were glued shut for all I could do to open them and keep them open. I wasn't even sure if I was hitting the brakes or the gas! I finally managed to pull over and try to do something with my eyes. I went on but still had a problem, so I pulled into a cafeteria and wheeled right back around facing the exit door. The manager came up and complained, and I told him we were leaving. He still complained, calmly but not very reasonably. He even suggested he'd call the cops. I finally managed to go on out. Lisa was wonderful thoughout, very patient and calmly confident. She's so like that. I woke up and told her the dream. The nerve of that guy! She was amused.

The_Dreams_-_1964.dl.mp3

This is great news for internet freedom

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:44:52 -0700

This is great news for internet freedom.

France's highest court has inflicted an embarrassing blow to President Sarkozy by cutting the heart out of a law that was supposed to put France in the forefront of the fight against piracy on the internet.

The Constitutional Council declared access to the internet to be a basic human right, directly opposing the key points of Mr Sarkozy's law, passed in April, which created the first internet police agency in the democratic world.

The strongly-worded decision means that Mr Sarkozy's scheme has backfired and inadvertently boosted those who defend the free-for-all culture of the web.

h/t Primalfire

Usura

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:41:44 -0700

We're screwed

"This has to be on background, OK?" one of the reformers said. "This crisis brought down the world economy and yet Congress still hasn't passed a bill making sure it doesn't happen again."

...

American Usury

One of the fundamental issues that party managers wished to avoid was the scandal of American usury. Usury is the ancient sin of charging inflated interest rates sure to ruin the borrowers. It is considered immoral by Judaism, Christianity and Islam because usury involves the powerful using their wealth to ensnare weak and defenseless borrowers. The classic usurer offers an impossible choice that debtors cannot easily refuse. If they reject the terms of the loan, they will not be able to pay the rent or buy necessities. If they accept the usurious interest rates, their debts will accumulate until they are bankrupted (at which point the creditors claim their property). No civilized society can endure in such conditions.

Usury used to be illegal in the United States but it was "decriminalized" in 1980 -- the dawn of financial deregulation. A Democratic president and Congress repealed all interest-rate controls and the federal law prohibiting usury. Thirty years later, American society is permeated with usurious practices -- credit cards charging 30 percent and higher, subprime mortgages and other forms of predatory lending, the notorious "payday" loans that charge desperate working people an effective interest rate of 500 percent or more. Businesses, especially smaller firms, are also prey to usury in less direct ways.

***

Ezra Pound reads Usura

Usura

CANTO XLV — WITH USURA
by Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)
published in 1937 in The Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLII-LI

WITH USURA

With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that delight might cover their face,

Com a usura nenhum homem tem casa de boa pedra
cada bloco talhado liso e bem ajustado
para que o conjunto dissimule as partes,

with usura

hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luthes
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision,

with usura

seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly

with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with usura the line grows thick

with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling
Stone cutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom

WITH USURA

wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no gain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the the maid's hand
and stoppeth the spinner's cunning.

Pietro Lombardo came not by usura
Duccio came not by usura
nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by usura
nor was "La Callunia" painted.

Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,
No church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.

Not by usura St. Trophime

Not by usura St. Hilaire,

Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling

Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man's courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom

CONTRA NATURAM

They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet

at behest of usura.

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

Before the King James, truth seekers in the English speaking world read the Geneva Bible of 1560 (with Apocrypha).

http://reactor-core.org/geneva/

GENEVA BIBLE, 1560 EDITION

The complete Geneva Bible as a PDF file. The file is 270 Megabytes in size.

http://reactor-core.org/geneva/geneva1560.pdf

***

(our family has an ancient bible, with the middle testaments, of which the Apocrypha was but one of the books within.)

$15 Million Settlement in Wiwa vs. Shell Oil

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:36:03 -0700

BREAKING: $15 Million Settlement in Wiwa vs. Shell Oil

I was skeptical this would happen, but it is clearly an indication of how strong the case was against Shell…

This just in from the Center for Constitutional Rights:

Settlement Reached in Human Rights Cases Against Royal Dutch/Shell

On Eve of Trial, Settlement Agreements Provide $15.5 Million for Compensation to Nigerian Human Rights Activists and to Establish Trust Fund

Today, the parties in Wiwa v. Shell agreed to settle human rights claims charging the Royal Dutch/Shell company, its Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC or Shell Nigeria), and the former head of its Nigerian operation, Brian Anderson, with complicity in the torture, killing, and other abuses of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and other non-violent Nigerian activists in the mid-1990s in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta.

The settlement, whose terms are public, provides a total of $15.5 million. These funds will compensate the 10 plaintiffs, who include family members of the deceased victims; establish a Trust intended to benefit the Ogoni people; and cover a portion of plaintiffs’ legal fees and costs. The settlement is only on behalf of the individual plaintiffs for their individual claims. It does not resolve outstanding issues between Shell and the Ogoni people, and the plaintiffs did not negotiate on behalf of the Ogoni people.

Plaintiff Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jr., the son of Ken Saro-Wiwa explained, “In reaching this settlement, we were very much aware that we are not the only Ogonis who have suffered in our struggle with Shell, which is why we insisted on creating the Kiisi Trust.” The Kiisi Trust—Kiisi means “Progress” in the plaintiffs’ Ogoni language—will allow for initiatives in Ogoni for educational endowments, skills development, agricultural development, women’s programs, small enterprise support, and adult literacy.

Judith Chomsky, cooperating attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and of the attorneys who initiated the lawsuit, stated, “The fortitude shown by our clients in the 13-year struggle to hold Shell accountable has helped establish a principle that goes beyond Shell and Nigeria—that corporations, no matter how powerful, will be held to universal human rights standards.”

Added Jennie Green, the CCR staff attorney who initiated the lawsuit in 1996, “This was one of the first cases to charge a multinational corporation with human rights violations, and this settlement confirms that multinational corporations can no longer act with the impunity they once enjoyed.”

Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:28:09 -0700

I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World

Ralph Nader surprised me here.