"Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

-Hermann Goering, Hitler's Reich-Marshall at the Nuremberg Trials

via Democratic Veteran

Attended my first ballet. Backstage access courtesy of the Grand Countess. Here are the photos. As always feedback is good. Especially the negative kind.

Been doing a bit of research here in Garmisch. To what extent is the oocupation of Iraq facilitating the theft of Iraqii oil? Are millions of barrels of oil secretly moving through old pipelines daily?

Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq's Oil
Spark Political Fight Between Neocons and Big Oil: "PHILIP CARROLL: There were models everywhere from the total privatization to partial privatization, etc., etc. There were all sorts of ideas floated about the economy of Iraq and what ought to be done. I was very clear that there was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved. End of statement.

GREG PALAST: Even some of those who plotted Saddam's overthrow complained that privatization plans added fuel to the insurgency, costing American, British, and Iraqi lives.

FALAH ALJIBURY: Insurgents and those who wanted to destabilize a new Iraq have used this as means of saying, �Look, you're losing your country. You�re losing your leadership. You're losing all of your resources to a bunch of wealthy people. A bunch of billionaires in the world want to take you over and make your life miserable.� And we saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, of course, built on -- built on the premise that privatization is coming.

GREG PALAST: So, how is the State Department going to douse the flames? Here in Houston, the oil capital of America, the industry wasn't too happy about what was going on. �News Night' discovered that big oil chieftains in Iraq demanded a new policy. The job fell to the Texas think tank, founded by Jim Baker, one-time secretary of State, whose law firm now represents George W. Bush, the government of Saudi Arabia, and Exxon Oil."

Debate rages on use of cervical cancer vaccine / While almost 100% effective, some contend use condones teen sex: "Groups working to reduce the toll of the cancer are eagerly awaiting the vaccine and want it to become part of the standard roster of shots that children, especially girls, receive just before puberty.
Because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted virus, many conservatives oppose making it mandatory, citing fears that it could send a subtle message condoning sexual activity before marriage. Several leading groups that promote abstinence are meeting this week to formulate official policies on the vaccine. "

You can relax about Miers: "And he commented that Miers' decision to become a Christian in her mid-30s was a turning point, both spiritually and politically.
'One evening she called me to her office,� Hecht recalled, �and said she was ready to make a commitment to accept Jesus Christ as her Savior and be born again.�
He walked down the hallway from his office to hers, and there amid the legal briefs and court papers, Miers and Hecht 'prayed and talked,' he said"

Propoganda 102: "CNN just showed a bit of the pre-interview clip. Rough transcript of Pentagon flunky addressing the troops:


The president's going to ask some questions and he may ask all 6 of them, all 3 of them. He might have such a great time talking to you. He might come up with some new questions. So what we want to be prepared for is to not stutter. If there's a question that the president comes up with that we haven't drilled through today I expect the microphone to go through to you Captain Kennedy."

propoganda milling 101:
"The event was technologically challenging and required organization and preparation. The soldiers were advised as to the issues they should expect to discuss, and decided among themselves who would speak to each issue as it may arise.

The service members were excited about the opportunity to speak with the President. No one intended to tell them what to think or how to express themselves; going through likely questions in advance was meant solely to help the troops feel at ease during an obviously unique experience."

One of the better emails, I have recieved:

"This test only has one question, but it's a very
> >important one. By giving an honest answer, you will
> >discover where you stand morally.

> > > The test features an unlikely, completely fictional
> >situation in which you will have to make a decision.
> >Remember that your answer needs to be honest, yet
> >spontaneous.

> > > Please scroll down slowly and give due consideration
> >to each line.

> > > You are in Florida, Miami to be specific. There is
> >chaos all around caused by a hurricane with severe
> >flooding. This is a flood of biblical proportions. You
> >are a photo journalist working for a major newspaper,
> >and you're caught in the middle of this epic disaster.
> >The situation is nearly hopeless. You're trying to
> >shoot career making photos. There are houses and
> >people swirling around you, some disappearing under
> >the water. Nature is unleashing all of its destructive
> >fury.

> > > Suddenly you see a man floundering in the water. He
> >is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken down
> >with the debris. You move closer...
> > >
> > > somehow the man looks familiar. You suddenly realise
> >who it is.

> > > It's George W Bush!

> > > At the same time you notice that the raging waters
> >are about to take him under ... forever. You have two
> >options -

> > > you can save the life of G.W. Bush

> > > or

> > > you can shoot a dramatic Pulitzer Prize winning
> >photo, documenting the death of one of the worlds most
> >powerful men.

> > > So here's the question, and please give an honest
> >answer:

> > > Would you select high contrast colour film, or would
> >you go with the classic simplicity of black and white?"

Hullabaloo: "According to Gardiner, 'It was not bad intelligence' that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, 'It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war' that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner's research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant 'stories of strategic influence' that were known to be false."

Lost a file?
"While we know that tire shops apply weights to the wheel in order to balance the tire, a comparable technology for unbalanced platters is unknown.
The only technology possibly capable of overcoming this problem is Magnetic Force Microscope (MFM) photography, since this technique does not require the platter to spin. However, MFM requires scanning the whole surface of the platter. The MFM moves from region to region, each region yielding a picture. This alone will take several months. Then all these pictures must be stitched together. A 20GB hard drive consists of 160,000,000,000 bits, probably 300,000,000,000 bits including overhead. Each bit is represented by a magnetic flux change. A picture displaying this flux change will probably use 100 bytes, thus inflating each bit by factor 1000. You will have to analyze the amount of 40 Tera byte of data. It is unknown if this technology is in use. It certainly is not 'commercially available and affordable' because a data recovery would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Shot some film you are not planning to make a buck with? Store it Internet Archive: Open Source Movies">here. Public views. Public reviews.

I told you so. I told you so. (Yes, I am talking to you Adam Flynn.)

Misinformation is this adminastration's well-worn tool for covering its bum in the fog of war. In this case the president's war of top concern: public relations.
KR Washington Bureau | 10/02/2005 | No evidence backs up reports of rescue helicopters being fired upon

"NEW ORLEANS - Among the rumors that spread as quickly as floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina, reports that gunmen were taking potshots at rescue helicopters stood out for their senselessness.


On Sept. 1, as patients sweltered in hospitals without power and thousands of people remained stranded on rooftops and in attics, crucial rescue efforts were delayed as word of such attacks spread.


But more than a month later, representatives from the Air Force, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security and Louisiana Air National Guard say they have yet to confirm a single incident of gunfire at helicopters.


Likewise, members of several rescue crews who were told to halt operations say there is no evidence they were under fire."

heads up via Eschaton

Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal - New York Times: "In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated 'covert propaganda' in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban."

Pharyngula::Tales of the X-Mice: how to regenerate

trash t.v bringing the world together...
"i'm flying off tomorrow! but i know everyone loves me, so you can still reach me at my present handphone number. *beams*

i'll miss the singapore idol finals, so i'll make my prediction now: it will be taufik! =D i guess all the angry olinda fans will try to get back at sylvester (the question is: is it syl or sly?) and his ahlianahbeng fans.

sylvester wasn't too bad yesterday, but he seriously can't make it as our representative. can you imagine him at world idol? the polish judge with his orreeebel accent will criticise sly's pronunciation etc. oh, the irony. =/"

World Scott The writing and photography of a guy trapsing through China, his first trip btw.

Buchanan Spit>: "Both parties bear moral responsibility for the mess we are in. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Republicans for beating the drums for war on a country that did not threaten us. The Clinton-Kerry-Biden-Edwards Democrats for giving Bush a blank check to take us to war to remove the issue from the 2002 election. Indeed, Democrats are the more indictable. At least Bush-Cheney believed in the war."

i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all...

... and the rockets red glare gave proof through the night that the flag was still there...

wtf?

CBS News | CIA Flying Suspects To Torture? | March 6, 2005�23:38:02: "Craig Murray is the former British ambassador there. He told 60 Minutes that Uzbek citizens, captured in Afghanistan, were flown back to Taskent on the American plane.

'I know of two instances for certain of prisoners who were brought back in a small jet, and I believe it was happening on a reasonably regular basis,' says Murray.

Murray says the jet was operated by Premiere Executive Airlines.
He says in Uzbekistan, many prisoners are subject to torture techniques straight out of the Middle Ages: 'Techniques of drowning and suffocation, rape was used quite commonly, and also immersion of limbs in boiling liquid.'

Murray complained to his superiors that British intelligence was using information gleaned by torture. He was recalled by London four months ago and quit the foreign service.

Is there any reason to believe that the CIA knows that people are being tortured in these jails?

'The CIA definitely knows. I asked my deputy to go and speak to the CIA, and she came back and reported to me that she'd me with the CIA head of station, who told her that 'Yes, this material probably was obtained under torture, but the CIA didn't see that a problem.'' "

An official Iraqi audit said $1.27 billion allocated by the Defense Ministry for military procurement in 2005 was embezzled by officials and suppliers. In a report completed in May, the Board of Supreme Audit blamed the theft on U.S.-appointed senior Defense Ministry officials, including a former defense minister.

"Huge amounts of money have disappeared," Iraqi Finance Minister Ali Allawi said. "In return we got nothing but scraps of metal. It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history."

Oh Germany!! Land of Order and Labelmakers!!
I miss you; I really do.
I miss eating bread that is made by a Baker
but Jew rhymes with do so I am going to stop this little diddy before
I give the wrong impression.

(transition)

But het here is some work from Granada.

In the land of stepford citizens. i am unable to watch the u.s. news without clutching my knees and rocking back and forth.
colin powell was just interveiwed by babrbara walters. i think at some point she should have just leaned over and whispered some perverted thing into his ear while her hand did something out of camera. it was a love fest.
substantiated reports of powel cursing hyped intel before he went before the UN and spewed lies, sweet lies were left unreferenced. instead he was allowed to lip the white house prbs without so much as a flinch from Media Whore Walters. He stated that he and the president were victims of a careless CIA and poor sourcing.
No mention of the fact that the White House had been so unsatisfied with the panty-waist stance the CIA took on Iraq, that Cheney had to create a new intel agency in the pentagon: the Defense Intelligenc Agecy, in order to get the wardrum he wanted. No mention of the fact that the bad sourcing was largely based upon characters Powell's State Department had considered untrustworthy. I am talking about Chalabi, of course. And the CIA had come to the same conclusion about Chalabi.
It would have been nice if Powell had mentioned that the Pentagon was the only agency that trusted the primary source for much of Powell's UN testimony. Why am I talking about this nonsense? Does anybody care anymore?

Before I become disgusted with the US politics' ability to drain me of otherwise useful energy, can I mention Screwball, another secret source, who happened to be Chalabi's convict brother-in-law and blah blah blah.

And now we return to Katrina coverage. A welcome respite. I love the way this hurricane is being covered. I watch every news broadcast beginning with the 9 a.m. then the noon, then the 4:30 p.m., then the 5:30 p.m. the the 10 p.m. and then Niteline. And you know what is so cool? I have not heard the word rape, and I have not had to look at one of the thousands of bodies that still float down the streets of New Orleans.

I was worried they might try to ruin my appetite for dessert with an honest historical depiction, but luckily FEMA has stopped allowing journalists to photograph dead people. Let us see if we can make a new sense of FEMA: Fascists, uh..., Everyone Must Admire. Sorry, it is late, I am doing my best here. Anyway, the memo, from FEMA outling the journalists' restrictions was headlined: Not Documenting The Blood On Our Hands. HA ha. I still got it...

On a somber note the news reported the federal indictment of two political action commitees for buying illegal election influence. Cool. They failed to mention, twice, atleast that Rep. Delay, Bushit friend and U.S. senator from Texas. founded and ran those PAC's.

Eschaton: "Take a moment to note what's happening here: these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn't get key aid on the scene last week is coming in in force now and taking as one of its key missions cutting public information about what's happening in the city.

This is a domestic, natural disaster. Absent specific cases where members of the press would interfere or get in the way of some particular clean up operation or perhaps demolition work there is simply no reason why credentialed members of the press should not be able to cover everything that is happening in that city. "

BREITBART.COM - Just The News: "Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian who is also Thompson's official biographer, writes that a Feb. 16 note may be Thompson's final written words. It reads:
'No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun _ for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax _ This won't hurt.' "

Stuff from the past few months. Check this stuff out and leave comments. I desire honest feedback.

I am having a cup of coffee. A couple hours east people are pouring out of the buses that trickled to the Astrodome, one of the few lifelines pulling people out of the region. Just read about a mother who gave her child to a lady whose name she didn't even know. "I can't get on this bus, but you've got to try to save this child." I just ordered a chocolate-filled croissant. I love chocolate. An old dead woman is getting eaten by gutter rats. Bush assures me that we have a massive effort underway to continue getting food and water and ice to those who are in need. Why doesn't the liberal media ever report the good things. Surely their must be some white helicopter pilot that dodged the negroes' bullets as he rescued a small well-groomed terrier from a dirty part of town. My croissant is not even warm!!! Where is that damn barrista! Some reporters were told to not go to the New Orleans convention center unless they had their own guns. It seems well-armed civilians have taken control of that particular pool of feces and dying and dead. As the head of FEMA said this morning these people chose to stay there. So before you go and start feeling sorry for those people could you get me a spot of coffee. Black.

Watch your mouth, boy. Ain't no damned rascism. If them folks was white they'd be suffering just the same. Uncle Sam and Uncle Tom got things fixed up real good.

I guess my creative forces are dwindling because for the life of me, I can not imagine white people huddled, confused, deperate, hungry, wet, and dying and dead waiting for days for bread or bus while the world around them descends into a putrid anarchy. But them negroes is dif'rent. It's not US. It's THEM.

Eschaton: "That official told me they were able to take a couple of people out. One woman so desperate that she actually handed up her 2 month old baby and said take my child. I can't get on this bus, but you've got to try to save this child. She didn't even know the woman's name."

New York Daily News - Home - Hunger and rage: "As we walked past the Windsor Court hotel, we were stopped by a female state trooper. 'Y'all came over here without guns? Don't go there. Don't go there unless you have a machine gun around your neck. We pulled our troops out because the civilians have taken over. We don't have the manpower to deal with them,' she said."

BREITBART.COM - Just The News: "To make matters worse, the chief of the Louisiana State Police said he heard of numerous instances of New Orleans police officers _ many of whom from flooded areas _ turning in their badges.
'They indicated that they had lost everything and didn't feel that it was worth them going back to take fire from looters and losing their lives,' Col. Henry Whitehorn said. "

Officials Struggle to Reverse a Growing Sense of Anarchy - New York Times: "Another member of the bread truck party, Gloria Collins, 26, clutched her 6-month old son, Nakee Collins. She acknowledged that the truck she arrived on had been stolen.
'The police stopped us and said, 'I know it's not yours,' but he let us go,' she said. 'There were people shooting to protect their own boats. It's a survival thing.'"

"Scores of bodies covered with white sheets lay on the sidewalk outside one hospital because the morgue was jammed. Many of them were women in black gowns, as well as children and old men.
Sobbing relatives wandered amid the bodies, lifting the sheets to try to identify their kin. When they found them, they would shriek in grief, pound their chests or collapse to the ground, sobbing."

This is civil war.

i know, i know...

The bus ride to Nerja from Malaga was only three euros.

Walking down the narrow streets of my first European town. Towards the Balcon. Flanked by stucco. Emotion swells as the mountains and the sea come into veiw, beneath the dark blue sapphire sky. The sound of the tide pounding through the Medditerranean air. An old Spanish widow standing in a doorway, watching her world pass by. Ice cream shops and a certain cafe. Artists on blankets. Horse-drawn carriages. Shoppers and Drinkers. Young girls and Small dogs. Flowers in bloom. Palms in the wind. The whiff of petrol int he whirr of scooters. When I am far away, and I think of Europe, this is the image that comes to me. In that memory, I am over there at that table drinking a vodka lemon or a cococnut seven or something, and the sun is not yet set. This place was my first love.

There are so many things that I should write...

It is dark now. Somewhere out below the balcony a kid just dove into a swimming pool. Across the way a dog has begun barking, maybe at the sound of my typewriter, but probably not. I am using a laptop. If i were to glace over my shoulder, I would see the red glow of a neon sign that reads "Linda's Bar." It is calling me, or maybe that is the night, or my liver, or just the need for human interaction. I don't know anymore. It wasn't always this way.

The first time i came to Nerja. I was skinny nineteen-year old virgin who couldn't drink or smoke; i was just a kid. Every ideal I had ever invented sat on a pedastal untarnished by those experiences which would eventually make me a man. There has never been a day in my life, since i was here the first time that...

...Wait. Sorry, it's that red light. Let's do an experiment. I am going to go to the bar and order one beer, drink it. Then, I am going to come back and finish my thoughts. That is the plan. Let's see what happens...

That was only three days ago.

More Bob Harris:: "as much as 30% of the country and growing -- are still afflicted with a whole series of bizarre notions, to wit:


1. that corporations whose sole legal purpose is to maximize profit and externalize costs are trustworthy stewards of the public good, and thus deserve legal and political power unavailable to individual citizens

2. that the politicians and media figures who serve these institutions most slavishly, mouthing their deceptive PR and inviting them into the backest rooms of media and government, are the most devoted servants of the working American public

3. and that when (and only when) the name of a specific deity is invoked by these amoral creatures, their work in rolling back and attacking virtually every social, political and environmental protection takes on the holy glow of a just, generous, and loving God of infinite power who nonetheless has chosen to reveal himself only to a minority of humankind


Believing any of these notions requires a stunningly fictitious, invented version of even basic history, economics, and several hard sciences..."

I like this guy.

Bob Harris On The Senate Deal To Preserve Filibusters:
"Long-term, however, the very notion of Senate rules having any meaning at all has itself been put on the table. And if the last few years have shown us anything, it's that what's unimaginably extreme today can be spun into conventional wisdom tomorrow.

Compulsive executive secrecy, lies to Congress, elective war in defiance of virtually the entire world, nationalized surveillance databases, imprisonment without trial, torture without accountability, reporters on the White House payroll, elections with no paper trail, and dozens of other concepts complete alien to any basic understanding of what America is supposed to be have all become a part of the daily landscape.

They push for a foot and we surrender an inch. But fanatics never stop. So gradually we're all pulled along. Inches become feet become miles.

So victory is ours: we only gave an inch this time. Again. "

Are you my dear fellow citizens the victim of propaganda? Today's question: Did Newsweek cause any deaths with its reporting last week? If you anawered yes, then it might be time to start getting your news from somewhere besides the White House Media Whores, or as I prefer d.c.p.r.b.s machine.

From The Light of Reason's Anatomy of Propaganda: "But I find this paragraph buried in the middle of the article even more intriguing:
The appearance of the sign follows a national news story from last week. Newsweek magazine retracted a story reporting that military guards at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet during interrogation of a detainee. The Newsweek story sent Washington in a frenzy and was blamed for igniting Muslim riots and deaths abroad, including a particularly violent outburst in Afghanistan.
You have to love that passive construction: the Newsweek story �was blamed�� Just exactly who was it who blamed Newsweek �for igniting Muslim riots and deaths abroad�? Oh, gee, who knows. It just kind of happened.
What is significant about this paragraph is that it is simply dropped into the story, without a second thought"

The Downing Street Memo :: The most undereported story in years:
To those who troll the globes various papers and blogs none of this stuff is new, per se. But for those making the case that America has really become more odacious in its global criminal activities, the evidence has never been more succinct.

Excerpt: "The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force."

Read the whole thing and then wonder how free is that freedom must be shielded from the truth by this ever-sickening, ever-thickening veil of propaganda.

It's All Newsweek's Fault - New York Times: "Let's stipulate flatly that Newsweek made a serious error. For the sake of argument, let's even posit that the many other similar accounts of Koran desecration (with and without toilets) by American interrogators over the past two years are fantasy - even though they've been given credence by the International Committee of the Red Cross and have turned up repeatedly in legal depositions by torture victims and in newspapers as various as The Denver Post and The Financial Times. Let's also ignore the May 1 New York Times report that a former American interrogator at Guant�namo has corroborated a detainee's account of guards tossing Korans into a pile and stepping on them, thereby prompting a hunger strike. Why don't we just go all the way and erase those photographs of female guards sexually humiliating Muslims (among other heinous crimes) at Abu Ghraib? "

pehaps a better word for televangelists and presidents would be cattle-ist. They seek to effect change in the mindless herds? I do not know but there must be a good bumper sticker in there somewhere.

Just a little something:
"But hope has succeeded in the past, with the abolitionists, the civil rights movement, and the social reformers. As Wallis pointed out, it is no accident that these movements were led by people of faith, for with faith comes hope.
Wallis closed with a plea to his audience to hope. He said that �hope creates the will, will creates action, and action creates change. This is where he puts the contract in front of us and asks us to sign on the dotted line. He wants us to hope."

I have been far too guilty of letting those fundmentalist puppet monkees define for me modern Christianity. This is no small part of my decision to abandon the Christian language as far as I seek to define and navigate my own path. However, I can not help but to get a little sentimental when as I read a piece like this. Now I have no intention of returning to any particular religious narrative for the basis of my understandings, but I am happy that there are some out there carrying their crosses in opposition to BSTBN Christianity. Good luck. Now, I am going to meditate over a beer.

her creamed dishpan hands
tug at flesh-toned pantyhose,
then smooth Sunday rouge
onto to her fleshy cheeks,
framed by pinstriped clothesline hair.
then smooth Sunday rouge
once again
onto the dimpled skin
bared by the scooping neckline
of a second-hand evening gown.

ready for a shiny night in a dusty town.

in the parlor downstairs,
beneath the muffled blare
of big band radio,
smoke floats from a Lucky
man, patient in an oversized easy chair,
the first gentleman caller since Dewey thought he won the election.

A: "What's it like to be back?"

B: "You see things in life, and you'd be surprised what you see. Your life, your whole life is changes. you go through changes in your life- one second you got it made, next second your down in the dumps. and it goes back and forth throughout your whole life. one second you got the most beautiful girl in the world. the next second you don't even have a girlfriend no more. and it goes back and forth and back and forth, you know, and this is life, man. it's changes. this is what you got to go through throughout your whole lifetime. never never, never never land."

British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War: "Seven months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein by military action and warned that in Washington intelligence was 'being fixed around the policy,' according to notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at No. 10 Downing Street.
'Military action was now seen as inevitable,' said the notes, summarizing a report by Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, British intelligence, who had just returned from consultations in Washington along with other senior British officials. Dearlove went on, 'Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'"

Home from Iraq: "Lots of column inches have been spent in the discussion of how our rights as Americans are being surreptitiously confiscated, but what about our complicity, as journalists, in that? It seems to me that the assault on free speech, while the fear and intimidation is in the air, comes as much from us -- as individuals and networks of journalists who censor ourselves -- as it does from any other source.
We need to wake up as individuals and as a community of journalists and start asking the hard and scary questions. Questions we may not really want to know the answers to about ourselves, about our government, about what is being done in our name, and hold the responsible individuals accountable through due process in our legal or electoral system.
We need to begin to be able to look again at our government, our leadership and ourselves critically. That is what the Fourth Estate is all about. That's what American journalism can do at its zenith. I also happen to believe that, in fact, that is the highest form of patriotism -- expecting our country to live up to the promises it makes and the values it purports to hold. The role of the media in assisting the public to ensure those values are reflected in reality is undeniably failing today.
Go ahead, take a hard look in the mirror, ask the questions -- if there is something in our nation that needs repair or change, that is how it will get done, by asking those questions, getting answers and reporting them.
We still have the freedom in this country as individuals and as journalists to defend the rights enshrined in the Constitution, to defend the values that we as individuals still hold dear -- so why aren't we doing it? Are we scared? If we're scared, then who will be there to defend those rights and values when it is "

AIDS Now Compels Africa to Challenge Widows' 'Cleansing' - New York Times: "But they hunted her down, she said, and insisted that if she refused to exorcise her dead husband's spirit, she would be blamed every time a villager died. So she put her two small children to bed and then forced herself to have sex with James's cousin.
'I cried, remembering my husband,' she said. 'When he was finished, I went outside and washed myself because I was very afraid. I was so worried I would contract AIDS and die and leave my children to suffer.'
Here and in a number of nearby nations including Zambia and Kenya, a husband's funeral has long concluded with a final ritual: sex between the widow and one of her husband's relatives, to break the bond with his spirit and, it is said, save her and the rest of the village from insanity or disease. Widows have long tolerated it, and traditional leaders have endorsed it, as an unchallenged tradition of rural African life. "

Brussels Sprouts - New York Times: "At the end of the day, the Chinese would rather live with a nuclear North Korea than risk a collapsed nonnuclear North Korea, and the Europeans would rather live with a nuclear Iran - that Europe can make all kinds of money off of - rather than risk losing Iran's business to prevent it from going nuclear. The Chinese and the Europeans 'each assume that in the end, the U.S. will deter both the North Koreans and the Iranians anyway, so why worry,' Mr. Mandelbaum said.
Are the Europeans and Chinese behaving cynically? Of course, these are the very countries constantly complaining about U.S. 'hegemony,' and calling for a 'multipolar world.' Yet the only thing they are really interested in being a pole for is to oppose the U.S. - not to actually do something hard themselves to stabilize the global system."

WorldNetDaily: Was World War II worth it?: "If Britain endured six years of war and hundreds of thousands of dead in a war she declared to defend Polish freedom, and Polish freedom was lost to communism, how can we say Britain won the war? "

Hullabaloo: "But I'd really appreciate it if they'd can the phony sanctimony from now on and shut the fuck up about 'Desperate Housewives' and dirty talk on TV. If it's ok for the First Lady of the United States to joke publicly about her husbands limp dick and jerking off farm animals then it's ok for Whoopie Goldberg and everybody else to make Bush jokes"

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bush Disarms, Unilaterally: "Today, most U.S. homes can access only 'basic' broadband, among the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband.'"

Journalism is has gone to poop, reason number 456 for those stll countin: "What the audience didn't know was that the ABC videotape had been edited so as to create an inaccurate impression. At that press conference, Mrs. Clinton had been asked not how much work she had done for Madison Guaranty, but how her signature came to be on a letter dealing with Madison Guaranty's 1985 proposal to issue preferred stock. ABC News had seamlessly omitted thirty-nine words from her actual answer, as well as the cut, by interposing a cutaway shot of reporters taking notes. The press conference transcript shows that she actually answered as follows: 'The young attorney [and] the young bank officer did all the work and the letter was sent. But because I was what we called the billing attorney -- in other words, I had to send the bill to get the payment sent -- my name was put on the bottom of the letter. It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about.'"

More Bible?

Another thought: If I murder someone I deserve to go to prison whether I get caught or not. If I possess cocain, but do not get caught, do I also deserve to go to prison? If Bush has admitted to cocoaine, does that mean we are looking at a man who deserves to have been a prisoner of the state?

What is the elegant difference?

Are drugs that bad?: I remember back in my college days, I asked a buddy of mine what he had done on Saturday, and he said took some Mexican Fly, man. He then went on to describe in vivid detail the phychelic effects of the acid.

"So basically," I replied, "You sat on the sofa for six hours."

I thought of him this morning when I read a new report on TV viewership. Americans are watching an average of 4.5 hours of TV everyday, second only to Japan. I thought I had read that intenet use was driving down TV viewership, but I guess not. Or maybe it is one of those Bush decreases: It's not as high as it would have been had Al Gore not invented the internet.

(we all know at this point he never said that, right)

But what if a drug could be made that was cheap and healthy, but still obliterated the mind ino a mesmerizing kaleidescope of color, beauty, sound, and wonder. How many Americans actually have a moral standing that allows them to condemn someone who carefully builds a lifestyle around drug use.

4.5 hours a day. With your snacks on your lap. Your emaciated faces glowing blue in the flickering light of your boobtoob. Your brain reprogrammed to not hear the laugh track, to not see the over-acting. How is that respecting reality, physical, spiritual, or otherwise.

You might as well get all coked up and play Monopoly with imaginary friends.

Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of drug use.

Coning next season. Robot jockeys. Where is the union on this one?

A reminder that America's fighting force is not involuntary.

Fw:

graveyard in praha

the sea is in our sweat.
the ocean is full of tears.

explore

The Big Picture: Dynamic Pricing: DVD versus CD Strategies

HoustonChronicle.com - Life support may be cut based on pay, prognosis:
"A similar case is still in the courts. Texas Children's Hospital wants to discontinue life support on 5-month-old Sun Hudson, who was diagnosed shortly after birth with a fatal form of dwarfism. His mother, Wanda Hudson, wants her son's care to continue at the hospital."

Unlike the Terri Scivaro case, many Texas families are losing family members against the wish of the patients' families. Keep your eyes on the ball.

From Digby:
By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo's because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.

Want to smell like Jesus?

Why do they hate freedom?:
"[Seymour Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.'
He looked frightened."

Nice Quote.:
"'This is a village full of ghosts, not of people, but of nature, a paradise lost.'"

Always read the fine print.:
"AOL ?> [has} the right to 'reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote' all content distributed across the chat network by users.
'You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the content or to be compensated for any such uses,' according to the AIM terms-of-service."

The Politicization of Social Security: More of the same: propaganda for the sheep. God Bless George Bush. Just think what a wanker he'd be if he didn't have Jesus in his heart.

"'We're not just looking for terrorists,' she said.": More erosion of the basic fundamental right to privacy under the guise of homeland security. Nothing new, but we should track the death of liberty atleast as thoroughly as we track the pope's.

I just can not resist:

Olsen, Ashley
1-310-760-1996

A, Christina
323-314-1960

Hilton, Nicky
1-310-926-5149

Kournikova, Anna
305-206-5883

Lavigne, Avril
1-613-532-4092

Lohan, Lindsay
+1-347-596-9990

Richie
1-213-319-5323

all courtesy of Paris Hilton via hackers...

Image133.jpg

Hunter S. Thompson: We are all wired into a survival trip now... 'No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. . . a generation of permanent cripples who never understood the essential fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody. . . is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.

F1000005.JPG

Hunter S. Thompson has done himself in.:
Thompson: We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.' - Written in the year 2000

A few words from Scott Supak: While the fascist, psuedo-religious cults running this plutocracy will celebrate the deep funk that led to this man's demise, those of us who understood his twisted tunnel to the truth will never forget what he did for us...

Me again. I'm not sure what he "did" for me, but this world needs all the characters it can get, and I will miss him for that.

"Be alert", Katie said. "The world needs all the lerts it can get".

From Pat Buchanan>No, al-Qaida was no more attacking our "freedom" when it drove those planes into the World Trade Center than were Iroquois, Sioux and Apache attacking our freedom when they massacred settlers on the frontier. Like Islamists, the Indians saw us as defiling their sacred soil, dispossessing them, imposing a hated hegemony. They cared not about our Constitution – they wanted us off their land.

If we were truly being attacked for our beliefs, and not our behavior, the war would have no end. Yet, all the other guerrilla and terror wars against Western powers there have ended. How?

When the British left Palestine, Irgun terror ended. When the French left Algeria, FLN terror ended. When Israel left Lebanon, Hezbollah terror largely ended. These countries chose to resolve their terror problem by giving up their occupations and letting go. Their perceived imperial presence had been the cause of the terror war, and when they departed and went home, the wars faded away.

I love these Germans and their festivals. We just celebrated Fasching last week. Basically, it has the same raison d'etre as Mardi Gras, but with a lot more substance. In my limited experience in the states it seems activities that involve heavy drinking, street dancing, and cross dressing typically exist for the entertainment of drunken frat boys tossing plastic beads and the bare boobied girls who gratefully recieve them. The good citizens stay at home and watch the spectacle from the comforts/confines of their lazy boy tv chair, nodding their head in silent wonder, thanking the good lord their generation never fell for the lure huffing.

Where as here in Germany the celebrations are attended by entire families, from grandpas with painted faces to babies in wicker strollers. No doubt, the alcohol and the frenzied air make for some hedonistic moments, but for the most part this is just good fun. dancing with strangers, arm and arm, grabbing wine from some girls hand and upending it without barly a "could I...?" Drinking beer by the half liter, out of a bottle no less. Imagine that, People drinking in the crowded streets and with glass bottles. No one threw them into the sea of people, no one brandished broken bottles. Just lovely stuff.
And it is a great excuse for an otherwise straight young man from Texas to wear fishnets, feathered boas, and eyemake-up.

American pathology
delusions
believing our own
self-righteous
bloody religious
nationalistic
propaganda
holy vomit
sacred shit
blind eyes to
our precious empire's
violence and greed
and the ignorance
and apathy
from which it springs

trampling Goodness
feeding the powerful
fucking the hungry

we dissent quietly
between grande caramel lattes
calm cool collected
numbified
good citizens.
how mushy
our American minds
so steeped in cynicsm
and twinkies
that horror and atrocity
are lost beneath
the gauze of doughnut glaze
t.v.'s too small
for proper outrage
flatline brainwave
never to rise
to rebuke
the evil
cast our name.


From Bob Herbert: "We know that people were kept in cells that in some cases were the equivalent of animal cages, and that some detainees, disoriented and despairing, have been shackled like slaves and left to soil themselves with their own urine and feces. Detainees are frequently kicked, punched, beaten and sexually humiliated. Extremely long periods of psychologically damaging isolation are routine.
This is all being done in the name of fighting terror. But the best evidence seems to show that many of the people rounded up and dumped without formal charges into Guant�namo had nothing to do with terror. They just happened to be unfortunate enough to get caught in one of Uncle Sam's depressingly indiscriminate sweeps. Which is what happened to Shafiq Rasul, who was released from Guant�namo about a year ago. His story is instructive, and has not been told widely enough."

Google Image Result for http://www.victorynewsmagazine.com/images/TalibanTransit.jpg
On the day that the defense rested in the military trial of Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, American television news had a much better story to tell: "The Trouble With Harry," as Brian Williams called it on NBC. The British prince had attended a fancy dress costume party in Wiltshire (theme: "native and colonial") wearing a uniform from Rommel's Afrika Korps complete with swastika armband. Even by the standards of this particular royal family, here was idiocy above and beyond the call of duty.

For those of us across the pond, it was heartening to feel morally superior to a world-class twit. But if you stood back for just a second and thought about what was happening in that courtroom in Fort Hood, Tex. - a task that could be accomplished only by reading newspapers, which provided the detailed coverage network TV didn't even attempt - you had to wonder if we had any more moral sense than Britain's widely reviled "clown prince." The lad had apparently managed to reach the age of 20 in blissful ignorance about World War II. Yet here we were in America, in the midst of a war that is going on right now, choosing to look the other way rather than confront the evil committed in our name in a prison we "liberated" from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. What happened in the Fort Hood courtroom this month was surely worthy of as much attention as Harry's re-enactment of "Springtime for Hitler": it was the latest installment in our government's cover up of war crimes.


But a not-so-funny thing happened to the Graner case on its way to trial. Since the early bombshells from Abu Ghraib last year, the torture story has all but vanished from television, even as there have been continued revelations in the major newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. If a story isn't on TV in America, it doesn't exist in our culture.
The latest chapter unfolding in Texas during that pre-inaugural week in January was broadcast on the evening news almost exclusively in brief, mechanical summary, when it was broadcast at all. But it's not as if it lacked drama; it was "Judgment at Nuremberg" turned upside down. Specialist Graner's defense lawyer, Guy Womack, explained it this way in his closing courtroom statement: "In Nuremberg, it was the generals being prosecuted. We were going after the order-givers. Here the government is going after the order-takers." As T. R. Reid reported in The Washington Post, the trial's judge, Col. James L. Pohl of the Army, "refused to allow witnesses to discuss which officers were aware of events in cellblock One-Alpha, or what orders they had given." While Mr. Womack's client, the ringleader of the abuses seen in the Abu Ghraib photographs, deserved everything that was coming to him and then some, there have yet to be any criminal charges leveled against any of the prison's officers, let alone anyone higher up in the chain of command.

Nor are there likely to be any, given how little information about this story makes it to the truly mass commercial media and therefore to a public that, according to polls, disapproves of the prison abuses by a majority that hovers around 80 percent. What information does surface is usually so incomplete or perfunctorily presented that it leaves unchallenged the administration's line that, in President Bush's words, the story involves just "a few American troops" on the night shift.

The minimizing - and in some cases outright elimination - of Abu Ghraib and its aftermath from network news coverage is in part (but only in part) political. Fox News, needless to say, has trivialized the story from the get-go, as hallmarked by Bill O'Reilly's proud refusal to run the photos of Graner & Company after they first surfaced at CBS. (This is in keeping with the agenda of the entire Murdoch empire, whose flagship American paper, The New York Post, twice ran Prince Harry's Nazi costume as a Page 1 banner while relegating Specialist Graner's conviction a day later to the bottom of Page 9.) During the presidential campaign, John Kerry barely mentioned Abu Ghraib, giving TV another reason to let snarling dogs lie. Senator John Warner's initially vigilant Congressional hearings - which threatened to elevate the craggy Virginia Republican to a TV stardom akin to Sam Ervin's during Watergate - mysteriously petered out.

Since the election, some news operations, most conspicuously NBC, have seemed eager to rally around the winner and avoid discouraging words of any kind. A database search of network transcripts finds that NBC's various news operations, in conscious or unconscious emulation of Fox, dug deeper into the Prince Harry scandal than Specialist Graner's trial. "NBC Nightly News" was frequently turned over to a journalism-free "Road to the Inauguration" tour that allowed the new anchor to pose in a series of jus'-folks settings.

But not all explanations for the torture story's downsizing have to do with ideological positioning and craven branding at the networks. The role of pictures in TV news remains paramount, and there has been no fresh visual meat from the scene of the crime (or the others like it) in eight months. The advances in the story since then, many of which involve revelations of indisputably genuine Washington memos, are not telegenic. Meanwhile, the recycling of the original Abu Ghraib snapshots, complemented by the perp walks at Fort Hood, only hammers in the erroneous notion that the story ended there, with the uncovering of a few bad apples at the bottom of the Army's barrel.

There were no cameras at Specialist Graner's trial itself. What happened in the courtroom would thus have to be explained with words - possibly more than a few sentences of words - and that doesn't cut it on commercial television. It takes a televised judicial circus in the grand O. J. Simpson tradition or a huge crew of supporting players eager (or available) for their 15 minutes of TV fame to create a mediathon. When future historians try to figure out why a punk like Scott Peterson became the monster that gobbled up a mother lode of television time in a wartime election year, their roads of inquiry will all lead to Amber Frey.

A more sub rosa deterrent to TV coverage of torture is the chilling effect of this administration's campaign against "indecency" through its proxy, Michael Powell, at the Federal Communications Commission. If stations are fearful of airing "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day, they are unlikely to go into much depth about war stories involving forced group masturbation, electric shock, rape committed with a phosphorescent stick, the burning of cigarettes in prisoners' ears, involuntary enemas and beatings that end in death. (At least 30 prisoner deaths have been under criminal investigation.) When one detainee witness at the Graner trial testified in a taped deposition that he had been forced to eat out of a toilet, that abuse was routinely cited in newspaper accounts but left unreported on network TV newscasts. It might, after all, upset viewers nearly as much as Bono's expletive at the 2003 Golden Globes.

Even so, and despite the dereliction of network news and the subterfuge of the Bush administration, the information is all there in black and white, if not in video or color, for those who want to read it, whether in the daily press or in books like Seymour Hersh's "Chain of Command" and Mark Danner's "Torture and Truth." The operative word, however, may be "want."

Maybe we don't want to know that the abuses were widespread and systematic, stretching from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to unknown locales where "ghost detainees" are held. Or that they started a year before the incidents at Abu Ghraib. Or that they have been carried out by many branches of the war effort, not just Army grunts. Or that lawyers working for Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales gave these acts a legal rationale that is far more menacing to encounter in cold type than the photo of Prince Harry's costume-shop armband.

As Mr. Danner shows in his book, all this and more can be discerned from a close reading of the government's dense investigative reports and the documents that have been reluctantly released (or leaked). Read the record, and the Fort Hood charade is unmasked for what it was: the latest attempt to strictly quarantine the criminality to a few Abu Ghraib guards and, as Mr. Danner writes, to keep their actions "carefully insulated from any charge that they represent, or derived from, U.S. policy - a policy that permits torture."

The abuses may well be going on still. Even as the Graner trial unfolded, The New York Times reported that a secret August 2002 Justice Department memo authorized the use of some 20 specific interrogation practices, including "waterboarding," a form of simulated drowning that was a torture of choice for military regimes in Argentina and Uruguay in the 1970's. This revelation did not make it to network news.

"Nobody seems to be listening," Mr. Danner said last week, as he prepared to return to Iraq to continue reporting on the war for The New York Review. That so few want to listen may in part be a reflection of the country's growing disenchantment with the war as a whole. (In an inauguration-eve Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 44 percent said the war was worth fighting.) The practice of torture by Americans is not only ugly in itself. It conjures up the specter of defeat. We can't "win" the war in Iraq if we lose the battle for public opinion in the Middle East. At the gut level, Americans know that the revelations of Abu Ghraib coincided with - and very likely spurred - the ruthlessness of an insurgency that has since taken the lives of many brave United States troops who would never commit the lawless acts of a Charles Graner or seek some ruling out of Washington that might countenance them.

History tells us that in these cases a reckoning always arrives, and Mr. Danner imagines that "in five years, or maybe sooner, there will be a TV news special called 'Torture: How Did It Happen?' " Even though much of the script can be written now, we will all be sure to express great shock.

A beautiful woman has awoken and left for work. I am left with a cup of English tea, looking out across the snow-capped roofs of Schwabing, the blue oninion of St. Joseph's prodding the gray sky. Seven floors below, cyclists make there way carefully along the frozen terrain of Turkenstrasse. The plant, which recently has had a steady diet of weissbier, leans hopefully towards the open window. But there will be no rain today. The fresh air coming off the city is cold and dry. Somewhere a garbage truck grumbles in the streets below; it is Monday morning, but still sacred as any Sabbath.

I will catch a train in the next hour or so to the country. A friend which I have not yet seen this year awaits me. There in a garden that sits on a slow river, I will eat and drink and read and sleep and breathe mountain air.

What have I done? What I am doing? What are my dreams? Am traversing the distance that separates me from them? Is there even a distance; could this be my dream? What if I never move a stone from here to there, never punch a window through certain metaphysical walls, but am content with not having done so? Am I really free?
This tea is cold.

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i broke through. i am now a moblog.

An aside- my blog erased all the comments. If some one who loves me reads this could you please go through and leave some words so it doesn't look as though no one ever gave me a shout back. Cosmetics.

Speaking of products usually designed for womem, a girl gave me a pair of tights. I know I have seen well-packaged male dancers prancing about on stage with these things, but I can not help but feel I am delving into some deviant behavior here, that perhaps I am beginning the slow downward spiral into women's underwear.
However, they are warm beneath my pants in the dead of winter on my bike through the snow and so on.
Exasperrating the situation- I just received a copy of Robbie Williams greatest hits, and I like it. What is happening to me?

Discovered the joy of careening dead-on into snow banks. The bike sticks and you, the fun-loving rider go flying over the bars, into the snow of course, which is soft, seemingly. But mind the frozen manure and the buried stones. See nose, figure 1a.

Just thought this was interesting...

a writer writes. i am not a writer. i am some one who wants to write a best-selling book, but i can not even keep up this pathetic little blog.. am i a chronic underachiever? should i get a new hobby?
the answer is a resounding no. I will try harder. i will do better. so help me, god.