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!'...

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

"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.

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.

...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

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:

speak a thousand words

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

more

h/t Primalfire

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.

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

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.

Military-Backed Public Schools On the Rise in US
Monday 01 June 2009
by: | Visit article original @ The Associated Press

Atlanta - The U.S. Marine Corps is wooing public school districts across the country, expanding a network of military academies that has grown steadily despite criticism that it's a recruiting ploy.

"You don't know what you've got til it's gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." -Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

Surprisingly, I'd never heard of Christiania before now, now that it's threatened. I hate that.

"The free city Christiania" Google search

Christiania - Denmark "The free city Christiania"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaau_-eD63g

Clashes in the free city Christiania, Copenhagen.

The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

feeds.wired.com/...nep_newsocialism
wired.com/culture/...nep_newsocialism

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

podcast 184 - "The Boundaries of the Human Mind"

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer

Listen

"What Damasio is showing is that people who, in the lab, get a huge amount of cognitive stimulus all the time start to have no access to the emotional part [of themselves] at all. They can't store to it, and they can't retrieve from it. They become what he calls emotionally neutral."

At what point might China balk at our agenda and what we do with their loaned money? At what point might they 'own' us enough to call or halt the shots? To what degree does Russia figure into it all, indirectly vis a vis our actions in general, and more directly our actual relations with Russia?

(I recently saw something that touched on all this and for all my Googling around cannot return to whatever that was. And it wasn't just China's loans mentioned but Japan's and 'Asia' as well. I didn't realize we'd borrowed so heavily from Japan or that they could even afford to loan us considerable

Dmitriy Kremnev posted an intriguing (to me, anyway) post on Livejournal's Liberal community about Curacao island's upcoming referendum:

The Netherlands Antilles - a last reserve of the Colonialism.
rotte_volf

There is erroneous view, that a current events in the rest of the colonial system - in Netherlands Antilles are not worthy of attention.

April 20, 2009, 12:10 PM ET
Cold Fusion: It's Back–Just in Time for the Great Energy Debate
By Keith Johnson

Wasn't cold fusion supposed to be a myth? Apparently not—"60 Minutes" ran a story Sunday night arguing that so-called cold fusion is "hot again."

The thrust of the "60 Minutes" piece is that laboratories around the world have managed to do what scientists could not in the wake of the now-infamous 1989 announcement of cold fusion: replicate the results.

John Carpenter, 1988

full feature
http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/they_live.php

"Nada, a down-on-his-luck construction worker, discovers a pair of special sunglasses. Wearing them, he is able to see the world as it really is: people being bombarded by media and government with messages like 'Stay Asleep', 'No Imagination', 'Submit to Authority'. Even scarier is that he is able to see that some usually normal-looking people are in fact ugly aliens in charge of the massive campaign to keep humans subdued. " -imdb.com

Published on Friday, April 10, 2009 by YES! Magazine
A Plea To President Obama: Don't Bankrupt America
by Sarah van Gelder

President Obama's massive giveaway to Wall Street threatens to bankrupt the federal government and undermine the agenda that got him elected. Here are some first steps needed to change course.

Dear President Obama,

Bageant: We've Let Corporations and Media Rob Our Souls -- It's Time to Do Something Meaningful
By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted April 6, 2009.

The most chilling accomplishment of American capitalist culture is that we have commodified our own consciousness.