27 November 2009

putin's tiger

[click image, h/t jo6pac]

Something has been off kilter in my spine the past couple days... which happens once in a while... and I've been busy jumping up and down, hanging from things while wiggling madly, inventing new and wildly improbable contortions, and tromping around suburban No There There in my effort to hasten the precise move that unlocks this particular discomfort... when I'm not in bed trying to rest it and wondering if bed mightn't have done it to me in the first place. I do have a history of waking up in mysteriously worse condition than when I fell asleep, because I run, leap and turn summersaults in my sleep... when not trying to strangle or smother myself to death.

It's hell being me.

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Oh, oh, yes, and while we're on the subject of Russian tigers and Putin, Russian media rocks!

NO REALLY.

Imagine hearing something like this in our fascist media....

I know, I know, people charge this Russian English language station with all kinds of underhanded things, but, they are developing quite a record for getting our truth-tellers who are shut out of our media on for interviews. They seem to be giving equal, or even more, weight to climate change deniers in some of their reports... and even some insisting it's getting colder... but they include scientists, Russian scientists insisting we have a climate crisis of an anthropogenic nature... so even in this they are doing a better job.

I heard some outrageous rumor that Russia has hired a PR firm to begin rehabilitating Stalin's memory... and this seems patently absurd to me, but, well, I guess we're going to see. I don't know for sure about most of what Stalin did or is said to have done, but I'm certain that he is hugely vilified in the West. I'm pretty sure he did cause the deaths of a very lot of people, and whether one might want to defend or excuse that, or condemn it to hell, just the fact that he has been made to loom large as a monster in the minds of Western societies would indicate to me that rehabilitating him, even if he were innocent as the driven snow, is something not to be attempted in this day and age. So, anyway, goofy as they may seem in some areas, I don't think they're that kind of blunderers on the world stage, but will try to keep an eye out for signs of it anyway.

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Yeah, not a good start on rehabilitating Stalin....

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My favorite actress:

[Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov]

Maybe I should start calling myself The Accidental Russophile?

26 November 2009

fumbling athwart byzantium

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... because the Constitution is radioactive pulp, Jeremy, and we're supposed to be not at war with Pakistan.... A bureaucrat couldn't possibly advise one otherwise in such a situation. They can't even lie plausibly, but at least are not afraid because in our military adventures we don't even think about plausibility anymore.

airlifted out of mindanao

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who wants to live forever?

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White House Eyes Afghan Exit by 2017
War Not Going to Last Forever, Spokesman Assures
by Jason Ditz, November 25, 2009

In an effort to reassure Americans ahead of next week’s speech in which President Obama will announce the escalation of the Afghan War, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs wants Americans to rest safe in the knowledge that the war is not going to last forever.

We are in year nine of our efforts in Afghanistan,” Gibbs noted, “we are not going to be there another eight or nine years.” This would mean that the administration is at least hoping at this point to be out of Afghanistan by 2017.

Recent polls have shown Americans increasingly opposed to not only the Afghan War, but to President Obama’s handling of it. In spite of this President Obama is expected to commit another 34,000 troops to the conflict in next week’s speech.

When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the military presence was comparatively limited, and even in summer of 2008 only about 28,000 American soldiers were on the ground. When the latest escalation is approved the US will have over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan.
A complete abdication runs our country.

too much power makes you stupid, among other things

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Scott Horton interviews Andy Worthington about his new movie [half hour]:

gratitude for my life



I stayed up until almost dawn last night, looking around for ways to remember the name of that astonishingly versatile supermodel whose image with a cigarette I would so like to own. I had to go through all manner of bullshit lists of sluts for "modeling" jobs and people's top ten lists for supermodels before it finally dawned on me to add the word "fashion" to my query. This yielded up, finally, a site where I could go down a list of about five hundred of them, mercifully confined to female supermodels, but unmercifully not in alphabetical order, which would have saved a long time because I could remember her initials, just not her name. Finally, I found her and could google around for images and news snippets and videos... to satisfy myself that she is still doing well at the the wizened old age of thirty-two.

Then I got in bed and started reading about Jules Kroll, who's a suspect, or whose company anyway is a suspect, in the minds of some 9/11 Truthers, but somehow I don't think they're going to get to that in this piece. I don't know yet because I finally fell asleep. I got up once to pee and make sure apocalypse had not set in yonder, take my "morning" pills, and flop back into bed. So while you were probably starting your Thanksgiving feast, I was dreaming of Thanksgiving dinner with my family.

I was seated next to my uncle, who was making some offhand bit of sophistry about my father being locked up in the memory ward with a bunch of completely gone old ladies, as though it was indeed tough, but it was better this way. It is not better this way. My father still knows who he is and who we are and that he's locked up with dotty strangers in a nightmare of determined care-giving, virtually no avenue of free will left to him. It's barbaric. No excuses. So I stood up from the table and left to go find my father.

It was pretty late, past visiting hours, but I felt they'd let me see him since I live so far away and this was my only chance to see him. I had a lot of trouble parking in any manner that could be considered adjacent to an entrance to a very strangely arranged confluence of buildings, where, as I understood it, they had moved him to the sixth floor, the top floor. I finally found a spot that seemed to be near the tallest part of this strange complex, that really wasn't one building, more like three or four that were all twisting around each other, connecting in counterintuitive ways.

In the lobby were all the administrators and nurses and orderlies... no old people. These were the people I had to ask in order to get to see Poppa. I said my piece to somebody who agreeably went off to secure permission for me, and found myself waiting at a break table with an orderly and a few shadowy others. The orderly was talking kindly to me and I was responding courteously to him. He was telling me that I'd have to change elevators on the fifth floor to get to the sixth because no elevator went straight to the sixth from the ground floor. This was irksome, but I could understand the problem, having seen the great mess of a place from outside. Except, all of a sudden he began talking to me as though I were world famous, this supermodel who channels something deeply true about me in certain images, and wanted to know how I could get along in this condition with my substance abuse problem....

Well, that was at least as outrageous as the crap that issued from my uncle earlier, so I did exactly as I had earlier: I got up from the table and left. Both departures were abrupt, but without any emotion, any hard edges, just immediately absenting myself from the delusory drivel that issues from sentient beings by way of attempting feats with thin air such as blurring their guilt and shame for heartlessness, placing themselves on some sort of ladder in relation to you... even when it's merely projecting that's what you're trying to do to them... that sort of thing. Just asinine. Just evil. I have no time for it.

So I was off on another odyssey of hallways and elevators, shooting the maze of relativity, to find my father and hug him and thank him and tell him everything, "show him my soul"... be his family with him forever.

I made it to the fifth floor. The halls were very narrow and there were dotty white-haired women speaking gibberish in almost every doorway, and obviously none could direct me to the elevator that would take me to the sixth floor. I got back in the elevator I'd just taken to make sure it didn't really somehow go the rest of the way, and it really didn't. So I got back out to start roaming those narrow hallways echoing with gibberish to find the way up to finally convey completely what I've been trying to get across for my entire life....

And that's where the dream ended.

25 November 2009

9/11 pages

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i loves me my blueberry smoothies

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Make me feel like a million bucks....

zen implications

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This interests me because I have spent hour upon hour listening to the thoughts playing out in others' heads while sitting in a meditation hall. During extreme concentration of mind, as, say, while taking a timed test, I can hear the thoughts of people near me. Entertaining as hell in the first instance, and irritating as hell in the second, as you might imagine....

I'm not kidding.

now THIS is a great idea

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krugman on the return of depression economics

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nosy fascist pricks

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plate tectonics

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Become a farmer... and hassle Obama so much that he can't sleep....

occam's razor strikes again

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jo6pac has ESP... or I do....

the terrorized will love this

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They've spent a whopping 28% of the stimulus money on us plebes so far, and, whut?, 500% is it, now?, of the bailout money on the ruling class, so this seems fair, doesn't it? You're fine with this, aren't you?

It'll make all the warmongers feel more patriotic and we'll be able to pay Blackwater and Halliburton without licking China anymore.

oh, of course not...

[click image]

Don't act so surprised.

24 November 2009

more right under our noses from behind the curtain

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Or listen to him talk about it if you can't bear to do all that reading....

HINT: THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT.
Writing in The Nation Magazine, journalist Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent has revealed Blackwater is secretly operating in Pakistan under a covert program that includes planning the assassination and kidnapping of Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects. Blackwater is also said to be involved in a previously undisclosed U.S. military drone campaign that has killed scores of people inside Pakistan. Blackwater operatives have been working under a covert program run by the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s top covert operations force. The previously undisclosed JSOC operations would mark the first known confirmation of U.S. military activity inside Pakistan.

A military intelligence source said Blackwater o[perative]s are effectively running the drone bombings for both JSOC and the CIA. The CIA drone program is already public knowledge. But the military source says some of the deadliest drone attacks [] attributed to the CIA were actually carried out by JSOC. The article also reveals Blackwater operatives have taken part in ground operations with Pakistani forces under a subcontract with a local security firm. The operations have included house raids and border interdictions in northwest Pakistan and other areas.

Blackwater has also been given responsibility for planning JSOC operations in Uzbekistan. The Nation reports the program has become so secretive th[at] top Obama administration and military officials have likely been unaware of its existence.


[DN! transcripts are notoriously full of typos... so just listen to the report or trust me here.]
No. Really. It's important.

And I'm wondering if Sy Hersh might not have given Scahill one of his sources....

looking for the men behind the curtain

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As I have mentioned, everyone is agape about how the thoroughly discredited neocons could still be wielding so much power, but nobody seems to be putting it together... not just missing Obama's behind the curtain activities, but the behind the curtain activities that are RUNNING Obama. So. Well. Here's a puzzle piece for you:
Russia dismisses allegation of helping Iran build atom bomb

Russia's Foreign Ministry has dismissed as groundless a recent claim by a U.S. nonproliferation expert that Moscow is helping Iran build nuclear weapons.

Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, wrote an article for the Washington Times last week making various allegations over Russian involvement in an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The ministry said in its statement: "The emergence of nuclear weapons in Iran would be just as unacceptable to us as to the United States. We have said this several times. So claims that Russia is helping Iran to build nuclear weapons are entirely unfounded."

In his article, Sokolski cited "leaked International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) documents" as saying Iran is working on a nuclear warhead "small and light enough to enable Iran's latest rocket systems to target NATO's southeastern members".

He said Russians "have been helping Iran complete a heavy water reactor at Arak that is optimized to make weapons usable plutonium," and cited a U.S. intelligence report as saying Russia is helping Iran build a rocket capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.


MOSCOW, November 24 (RIA Novosti)
There are, of course, more... about a hundredth of a percent of the American population... to be more exact.

But, hell, don't let me disturb you. Go right on flipping about Piglips and the Tea Parties. Come unstuck over Michann O'Limbeckitty and the Christofascists relentlessly. That'll show 'em. That'll show 'em exactly what they want to see.

stupefyingly meretricious

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Somebody come pick me up off the floor.

while you're obsessed with piglips' book and teabaggers

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The man behind the curtain is very, very busy ending America. Just click his duplicitous mug to "enjoy" his "quiet" support for instituting permanently even the worst provisions of the filthy PATRIOT Act.

Then, turn your attention to Mr. Nuclear Arms Reduction Nobel Peace Laureate's agreements with India:
US-India commit to nuclear deal
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2009
22:40 MECCA TIME, 19:40 GMT

The US president and Indian prime minister have pledged to fully implement a nuclear accord after talks in Washington, in addition to reaching agreements on issues as diverse as international security, job creation and climate change.

In a White House news conference on Tuesday, Barack Obama said that he and Manmohan Singh had reaffirmed both their administrations' desire to push ahead with the civilian nuclear deal.

The deal allows Washington to authorise selling advanced nuclear related technology to India, reversing more than 30 years of US policy banning the export of nuclear material.

"My administration is committed to fully implementing the US-India civil nuclear agreement which increases American exports and creates jobs in both countries," Obama said.

Singh said he was also confident Obama would "operationalise the nuclear deal as early as possible".

"There are a few 'i's and 't's that have to be crossed, but I am confident and I have the assurance that that process can be completed without much further loss of time."

Asian security

The two men also addressed regional security as they spoke before a state banquet in Singh's honour.

Obama would not reveal whether he intended to increase US troop levels in Afghanistan, saying his intention was to "finish the job", but that the Afghan people would "ultimately have to provide for their own security".

He said that he would announce his strategy for Afghanistan after the Thanksgiving holiday has ended at the weekend.
Referring to the Mumbai attacks in India last year, the president said: "It is in our strategic interests, in our national security interest, to make sure that al-Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot operate effectively.

"We are going to dismantle and degrade their capabilities and ultimately dismantle and destroy their networks."

His comments came just hours after Singh urged Washington to stop "premature talks of exit from Afghanistan" that would "only embolden the terrorist elements who are out to destabilise ... the civilised world".

But while Obama said the US would continue to pressure Pakistan to "use all its influence to curb the power of the terrorist groups" within the country, he acknowleded Washington needed to provide support to civilians and civil society, and not just the Pakistani military.

New Delhi has blamed a Pakistan-based group for last year's attack on Mumbai, which left more than 160 people dead.

Climate change

Singh also said the two countries were planning new agreements on the development and sharing of renewable energy technology.

Obama confirmed the initiative, announcing a greater number of scientific exchange programmes for agricultural, medicinal and environmental studies, saying the two countries had moved closer to a "strong operational agreement" on climate change at next month's Copenhagen summit.

"It's essential that countries do what is necessary to reach a strong operational agreement."

Though both leaders stuck to issues on which both sides shared the same views, analysts said the tone struck before and during the talks suggests a much closer relationship than ever before.

The Indian prime minister had already told the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington of a new partnership that would contribute to "an orderly transition to the new order and be an important factor for global peace and stability".

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Tuesday, Robert Wirsing, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, said the state visit marked a new era in relations between the world's largest democracies.

"The fact is that India is playing an increasingly important role in the international economy. The changes that have come over in India are simply phenomenal ... in economic and military terms, it is a formidable power.

"American investment opportunities are huge ... India is talking about spending $150 billion in its nuclear industy ... and of course India is the largest importer of weapons in the world ... it was these issues that dominated the talks."
And, even yet we can be thankful he's not Hillary... which, excuse me, is cold comfort....

I mean, oh, good, I only lost four toes to frost bite....

23 November 2009

funny thing...

[click image]

I'd just brought up Caligula when suddenly, completely accidentally, I was subjected to this horrific video, made aware of someone who is, much to my astonishment, really very famous. I mean, she's really, really very famous... to the point where googling her brings you this unwanted news and the image results are stupefying. I guess I need to get out more, myself....

when in rome...

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Forced labour and rape, the new face of slavery in America
Paul Harris in Dayton, Ohio
The Observer, Sunday 22 November 2009

Human trafficking has become a major issue in the Midwest heartland of America, causing some campaigners to dub it a modern form of slavery.

Figures from the State Department reveal that 17,500 people are trafficked into the US every year against their will or under false pretences, mainly to be used for sex or forced labour. Experts believe that, when cases of internal trafficking are added, the total number of victims could be up to five times larger. And increasing numbers of trafficked individuals are being transported thousands of miles from America's coasts and into heartland states such as Ohio and Michigan.

"It is not only a crime. It is an abomination," said Professor Mark Ensalaco, a political scientist at the University of Dayton, Ohio, who organised a recent conference on the issue. In Ohio a human trafficking commission has just been set up to study the problem, while in the northern Ohio city of Toledo a special FBI task force is tackling the issue. For many local law enforcement officials, it is a bewildering new world.

In one recent incident a 16-year-old Mexican girl was found to have been trafficked across the US border. Doctors noticed the heavily pregnant girl showed clear signs of physical abuse when she was brought into a hospital in Dayton to give birth. The police were called but the couple who had brought her had already fled. When the girl's story emerged, it became clear she had been kept against her will in the nearby city of Springfield and used for labour and sex. "I thought slavery ended a few centuries ago. But here it is alive and well," said Springfield's sheriff, Gene Kelly.

He emphasised the risks to the girl's baby after it had been born if the doctors had not been so alert: "Like the mother, the baby could have ended up a victim for years to come. Who knows? Future labour? Future person to traffic?"

Ohio anti-trafficking campaigner Phil Cenedella, founder of Combating Trafficking Anywhere, believes that the baby was destined to be sold off by her captors. "They would have put the kid on the black market. It is crazy that this is happening." Human trafficking – defined as forcing someone against their will to work for no reward – has been dubbed modern slavery. At the Dayton conference, it was discussed as a growing social problem, not in some far-off foreign land, but among the cornfields of Ohio.

"The problems are broader than we realised," said Ohio's attorney general, Richard Cordray. "What we want to do is find and disrupt these networks."

One of the country's leading anti-trafficking advocates is Theresa Flores, a former victim. Flores puts a different kind of face on human trafficking in America. She is white, middle-class and blond and looks the epitome of a suburban American woman. She grew up in a wealthy suburb of Detroit in Michigan and did well at school. Yet Flores tells a nightmarish story of two years being drugged, raped and sold for sex.

Flores, whose ordeal was turned into a book called The Sacred Bath: An American Teen's Story of Modern Day Slavery, was attacked and raped when she was 15. Her assailant used the threat of photographs he had taken during her rape to force her into having sex with strangers. She became the effective prisoner of a drugs gang that used her as a prostitute and kept her earnings, or gave her away free to gang members as a "reward". "People don't think that trafficking looks like me or that it can happen to someone who came from a nice neighbourhood. But it does. People need to see outside that box," said Flores.

Flores said that her lowest point came when the gang took her to a seedy motel where she was raped by as many as two dozen men. She woke up alone, abused and with no clothes. "I was told I would die if I told anyone. It happened over and over for two years as I became a sex slave for those men," she said.

Anti-trafficking campaigners point out that cases in the US come in a wide variety of forms involving men, women and children. One major area is that of trafficked labour with people used for domestic work or, more commonly, for back-breaking labour in agricultural industries. But trafficking cases have also occurred in businesses such as restaurants, hair salons and beauty parlours. The overwhelming majority of the rest are sex cases, usually involving young women or children forced into prostitution. The methods used to keep people vary. They include confiscating the passports of those brought in from a foreign country or the threat of extreme violence. Other tactics are to threaten family members if a victim does not comply or, as in Flores's case, to use blackmail.

Trafficking represents a new challenge to law enforcement, especially in regions which have traditionally not thought of it as a major problem. That is especially true where it happens within an immigrant community. Languages are a problem as well as cultural issues and a natural fear that many immigrants – some of them possibly illegal – have of contacting the police.

Kelly believes that is the case in Springfield, a town that is almost the Midwestern archetype. It was once featured in a story in Newsweek magazine entitled "The American Dream". But its 65,000 citizens also face all the problems of a modern America in the grip of a deep recession: an immigration crisis and profoundly changing demographics. The town now hosts several prominent minority communities who make up more than a fifth of its population, including Russians, Chinese, Latinos and Somalis. "There are a lot of people who distrust law enforcement. We need to break down those barriers. Our officers need training, especially in languages," said Kelly. "If you can't speak to people, you can't reach them."

Some commentators and experts have accused victims' advocates and academics of overstating the problem, arguing the problem has been exaggerated and expressing scepticism at the notion that vast organised criminal networks are dealing in human beings for sex or labour. Law enforcement officers also acknowledge that the definitions of trafficking may need refining.

In North Carolina last week the mother of a five-year-old girl was charged with human trafficking after being accused of offering her daughter for sex. The child was later found dead. The crime was horrific, but the distinction between trafficking and simple, sadistic child abuse might not be immediately obvious.

"We have a problem with definition. It is not always straightforward and easy to explain," said Laura Clemmens, a government lawyer in Dayton. "The hard part is bringing it into the light. At the moment these crimes are clouded in secrecy."

drone zapping

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This will send BB2 screaming naked off a cliff....

the hitch

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Do not flinch from studying these images.

The hitch for me is the scene for the women. I went a long time thinking I could bear the agonies of the Afghanistan and Pakistan murderating if it could make the women safer at last, if this travesty could end up defending life instead of pure profit for plutocrats, but I had to take a hard enough look to admit to myself that was just dreaming of decency again, where no decency inheres... only the unstoppable spin of virtuous exceptionalism tumbling out the unstoppable mouths of unspeakably evil people. Just as the "Westernization" of Eastern Europe has worsened things for their population, by dint of capitalism's complete failure to look after the real needs of all its people, so too would/will it leave the women of the Middle East to their public and private hells.

So seeing this has me strangling in my hopes for decency again, another Zen teaching to rise up from it into the pure air of reality, and desperate to make that manifest to you as ever. So do not flinch from watching the video in this Kristof piece either. WILL the people prosecuting these military adventures across the globe see to it that this is stopped for good and ever... or even for a week? You KNOW the answer to that question.

A little while back, Scott Horton had Malalai Joya on Antiwar Radio to tell us to get the hell out of Afghanistan, find ways to help, but not occupy her country, that Afghanistan can work out their own civil liberties if we will just butt out. This, of course, was enough to quell his fears that Code Pink may have been right about the need to save the women, but Malalai Joya is very young, and not very wise, for however brilliant she certainly seems to be. I wonder if she's ever even seen women being treated like this, if she has the first part of a clue about the reality of it. I didn't at her age. It was still abstract to me then. I had to wait until the night I had to go over and save my next door neighbor from her husband to get the picture. In fact, I think entirely too many people, women and men alike, have to have it come that close before it ever dawns on them just how real this is.

So this truth still stares us in the face, like the acid thrown in these women's faces, even if we cannot look, cannot bring ourselves to admit it, even if we cannot shed our delusion enough to agree that we WILL not save these women... short of a miracle, short of enlightenment beaming into the heads of a lot of awful, awful murderating fucks.

Stop. Look. This is not pretty, but it is the truth.

abolish stoop labor

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yes, well, good luck with that....

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Sheesh. These scientists really are living in a dream world, aren't they? I mean, get out of the house! Take a walk. Watch a movie. Get in the same room with a tv for a few minutes....

And, just as an aside, I submit this might not be so reasonable, given the age range of the murderating fucks in control right now... already suspicious as hell about Fudd's longevity....]

man, if this really works, i'm so going to take up texting

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I want a penpal in Russia.

elisabeth bumiller wouldn't be a pseudonym, would it?

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I mean, that stuff sounds so familiar....

deaths from H1N1 vaccine

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Al Jazeera is reporting on the air that there are now eight deaths in Sweden shortly after being vaccinated for H1N1. Doctors insist these people were all sick from other things and the vaccine hasn't got anything to do with it, but al Jazeera is also reporting that medical professionals are showing a surprising reluctance to get vaccinated....

I can't find anything from googling about it except this, which is a few days old, and the number of deaths was just four, but maybe I'm just too tired and can find it in the Global Research Flu Bonanza page when I get up.
In Europe, civilians are increasingly rejecting the H1N1 vaccine. Recent polls in Germany and Austria show only 13 and 18 percent respectively willing to take the shot. In Sweden, four vaccine related deaths have been announced and almost 200 healthcare workers have reported becoming more seriously ill from the vaccination than they might have from a flu infection. In the US, anywhere from 90-99 percent of adverse events go unreported.
Just take at least 2000mgs of Vitamin D extra every day and SKIP the damn vaccine.

There's some guy screaming about how dangerous all vaccines are at the bottom of that piece.

One of my favorite cats just died from vaccine-induced cancer a couple weeks ago.

We need to start smacking these guys around, don't you think?

UPDATE SOMETIME THE NEXT MORNING: Here's a video of al Jazeera's report....

becoming downright medieval in the philippines

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Twenty-one bodies of twenty-nine abducted family and friends of a politician on the southern island of Mindanao who is challenging the local governor have been found... seems the incumbent is not happy about the prospect of this challenge... sent his militiamen after them....

Campaign seasons seem to be bloody, and getting bloodier, in the Philippines.

In fact, it doesn't seem as though an election anywhere has gone well in a long time....

======================================

24 hours later:
8 mins ago

MANILA, Philippines – A Philippine police official says 11 more bodies have been recovered from a mass grave in the country's south, raising the number of massacre victims to 35.

Chief Superintendent Josefino Cataluna says Tuesday more bodies are expected to be recovered in a remote hilly area in southern Ampatuan township where supporters of a local politician and journalists traveling in a convoy were seized by dozens of gunmen Monday.

Police said the convoy of about 40 people was going to register Mangudadatu, vice mayor of Buluan township, to run for provincial governor when they were stopped.

Soldiers and police later found 24 bodies, including those of Mangudadatu's wife, Genalyn, and his two sisters, sprawled on the ground or shot in their vehicles.


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15 hours later than that: 46 bodies....

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52 bodies... 18 of them journalists....

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One ayem, 25 November, al Jazeera is reporting 56 on the air....

The suspect and his family say they won't stand in the way of investigations. Isn't that civilized?