let me know when i get to stop being wuwu for suggesting better

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Or keep hypnotized.

Media reports say that the Israeli Embassy in Cairo has been shut down following the transfer of power from Hosni Mubarak to the Egyptian military.

The report comes while a senior Israeli official said earlier on Friday that it was too soon to speculate about the consequences of Mubarak’s resignation.

“It’s too early to foresee how (the resignation) will affect things,” the official was quoted by Reuters as saying.

The report followed the transfer of power from Mubarak to the Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces, which is headed by Defence Minister Gen. Mohammed Tantawi.

Egypt’s main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, called for the establishment of a civilian government and constitution that “guarantees freedom and human rights.”

The transition of power to the military comes while Mubarak, Vice President Omar Suleiman and Prime Minister Ahmad Shafiq are all former military men. Analysts believe despite the transition Mubarak would still remain in power.

This is while millions of Egyptians have for the past 18 days called for the departure of Mubarak and the establishment of a democratic government.

Earlier in the day vigilantes opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Egypt in a move unprecedented over the past couple of days.

The shooting in El-Kharga came as protestors took over several government buildings in major cities across Egypt on Friday. The last time that live bullets were used against protesters was on Wednesday, when six protesters were killed and hundreds of others were injured — some of them critically.

Reports say protesters have also clashed with security forces and attacked police stations in El-Arish.

Up to you, of course....

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love, 99
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no bravery

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Refusing to accept something — that is, resisting — often has the potential to land us in hot water. However, many of us need to learn and understand that taking the chance of landing in hot water is always better than foolishly sitting in warm, comfortable water while it is being boiled. Sometimes the correct option, the one that will keep us safe and free, is to resist.

In case you missed it in the updating earlier today....

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More points and authorities in re the matter of my standing among the hard left. You will note the proclivities of the author and his position on ElBaradei. I tellz yiz, it always makes me feel better to find evidence that others are on my track... and they're almost always pretty much leftly lefter of what you call "progressive".

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Sharif Abdel Koudous reports from Tahrir Square....

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love, 99
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i blame barackhenaten

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Al Jazeera has been replaying everything over and over and over and over... and specifically to include Hillary Clinton's non-statement regarding the situation in Egypt. It's like watching planes crash into the World Trade Center, okay? I am traumatized. All night the Egyptian Army has been building road blocks, and just generally looking to be gearing up for a lot more control, and people are trickling into the square now, stepping over the supine campers who were up chanting all night, now sleeping it off in place. So. What does al Jazeera do? Why, they play the same clips and interviews over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over ... with occasional snippets of live footage of the action. But the Clinton part is the absolute worst. It's a goddam controlled demolition. It's an inside job. It's a fat fucking lie drilling at my third eye until I want to strip all layers off and go screaming naked off that cliff out there....

I'm snapping this puppy off for now, and will hope to time my next foray for when there might be some GOOD news. I'll add it to this post if.... The cyclone about to hit Queensland has nothing to do with my mood.

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11:00am PST: Old Uncle Dave offers THIS LINK as confirmation of my suspicions, and it is emblematic of the trouble brewing in my muddled brain, so I'm glad he brought it up. I had not bothered to peak at Groupthink until late last night, but I was noticing too many Egypt-related headlines coming up on the feed for my comfort. If it gets heavy rotation on the AP and Reuters, that means only one thing. The controllers want us to be concerned for the overthrow of a government, want popular solidarity behind a "regime change". All the points Lendman brings up have been on my mind, and I think you should give him your eyeprints.

I'm not sure I agree that the other recent uprisings were not welcomed by our controllers, were not managed by them, but mayhap the cables put out by WikiLeaks really did nudge them into it. Being that Mubarak is 82, there can be NO doubt, his replacement has been a priority for the people who have no business controlling anything, but DO control everything.

Other signs that we should be concerned are that Al Jazeera has not only stuck to this with very little attention to the Israeli end of it until today... and it is pretty benign stuff being aired today... and that our cable and satellite services are airing al Jazeera suddenly. It serves to keep them off the MSM so people will think they're the subversive news, but we have seen for quite some time that al Jazeera is no longer the voice of the Middle East, that they have modulated their coverage and commentary to such an extent that they are now only something like a marriage between PBS and CNN, only rarely airing things that give real insight into world affairs. If I hadn't known it already, my visceral reaction to having it on for so many hours every day would have told me.

Added to my wall-to-wall coverage today is the news that Omar Sharif is very, very old. He has not left Cairo. He is 100% in favor of the revolution... but no longer so gorgeous it makes my knees go all wobbly.

Basically, I would feel better if Hu Jintao or Dmitry Medvedev were backing the revolution, if the hairdos on al Jazeera were looking to them for comment on this matter—not that I think they are great humanitarians, but that I think they are more concerned for the real welfare of humans than the controlling elite in the West. That would make me feel more like there is a chance for all of us. As it is, with everyone looking to the imposture who abdicated upon inauguration and the harpy he didn't really supplant, this really does feel like watching airliners smack into skyscrapers.

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Nomi Prins....

Around 2005, Egypt decided to transform its financial system in order to increase its appeal as a magnet for foreign investment, notably banks and real estate speculators. Egypt reduced cumbersome bureaucracy and regulations around foreign property investment through decree (number 583.) International luxury property firms depicted the country as a mecca (of the tax-haven variety) for property speculation, a country offering no capital gains taxes on real estate transactions, no stamp duty, and no inheritance tax.

But, Egypt's more devastating economic transformation centered around its decision to aggressively sell off its national banks as a matter of foreign and financial policy between 2005 and early 2008 (around the time that US banks were stoking a global sub-prime and other forms-of-debt and leverage oriented crisis). Having opened its real estate to foreign investment and private equity speculation, the next step in the deregulation of the country's banks was spurring international bank takeovers complete with new bank openings, where international banks could begin plowing Egyptians for fees. Citigroup, for example, launched the first Cards reward program in 2005, followed by other banks.

According to an article in Executive Magazine in early 2007, which touted the competitive bidding, acquistion and rebranding of Egyptian banks by foreign banks and growth of foreign M&A action, the biggest bank deal of 2006 was the sale of one of the four largest state-run banks, Bank of Alexandria, to Italian bank, Gruppo Sanpaolo IMI. This, a much larger deal than the 70% acquisition by Greek's Piraeus Bank of the Egyptian Commercial Bank in 2005, one of the first deals to be blessed by the Central Bank of Egypt and the Ministry of Investment that unleashed the sale of Egypt's banking system to the highest international bidders.

The greater the pace of foreign bank influx and take-overs to 'modernize' Egypt's banking system, inevitably the more short-term, "hot" money poured into Egypt. Pieces of Egypt, or its companies, continued to be purchased by foreign conglomerates, trickling off when the global financial crisis brewed full force in 2008, though not before Goldman Sachs Strategic Investments Limited in the UK bought a $70 million chunk of Palm Hills Development SAE, a high-end real estate developer, in March, 2008.

Lest you begin to believe I'm too harsh on Western oligarchs....

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love, 99
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may the buddhas of the ten directions protect him

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I can't express the contours of my solidarity with Walid if he has really seen the error of his ways.

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's 30,000-strong Druze community, has thrown his weight behind Hezbollah and Syria in the political showdown with the US-backed March 14 alliance that is brewing in Beirut.

Jumblatt leads a bloc of 11 parliamentarians and his support could now give Hezbollah and its allies a veto over who becomes the country's next president. It is bitter blow to Saad al-Hariri, the caretaker prime minister, as he tries to secure enough votes to form a new government.

But even more significantly, Jumblatt's declared rejection of the UN-backed tribunal investigating the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister and father of Saad al-Hariri, has permanently sealed his break from the March 14 coalition.

This signals a return to his pre-2005 politics, when he viewed Hezbollah as a legitimate resistance movement against Israel, and officially brings his flirtation with pro-Western positions - which contradict his family's long history of alliances with the left and pan-Arab nationalists - to an end.

Jumblatt is known for vacillating between positions, but yesterday's announcement places him firmly in the Lebanese opposition camp and indicates a complete reversal from the strident anti-Syrian declarations that have marked his rhetoric in recent years.

I know I'm just flat out paranoid from EVERYTHING going spectacularly wrong in the Middle East for my ENTIRE life, but I hope we're not setting him up to give us some reason to do the kind of thing we did when Hamas won the Palestinian elections... only worse. They seem to have been setting up a thousand entrances into WWIII over the past decade or two and this could be one of them, or it could be the time when Lebanon FINALLY gets Lebanon for Lebanon, permanently stultifying Israel's attempts to take its resources if not its territory.

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love, 99
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today in assange worship

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Us fairy dust lefties, you know, can't do without our heroes.

Assange says Swedish accusers in a 'tizzy'
(AFP) – 12 hours ago

LONDON — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday the Swedish women who have accused him of sexual assault had got into a "tizzy" about the possibility they had caught a sexually transmitted disease from him.

Assange told the BBC that one account of what happened in August — the month at the centre of allegations against him — was that the two women had panicked when they found out they had both slept with him and went to police who "bamboozled" them.

He insisted he was fighting a Swedish extradition warrant because he believes "no natural justice" would occur in Sweden.

"There are some serious problems with the Swedish prosecution," he said in an interview from the mansion of a wealthy supporter in eastern England where he must stay as part of his bail conditions.

Sweden wants Britain to extradite the 39-year-old Australian to face questioning over allegations from two women that he raped one of them and sexually assaulted the other in Stockholm in August.

Assange claimed that the Swedish authorities had asked that his Swedish lawyer be "gagged", adding that his offers to be interviewed by video link or by Swedish officials in Britain had been rejected.

"I don't need to be at the beck and call of people making allegations," he said.

"I don't need to go back to Sweden. The law says I... have certain rights, and these rights mean that I do not need to speak to random prosecutors around the world who simply want to have a chat, and won't do it in any other standard way."

He said that one account of what occurred in August was that after having discovered they had each had sex with him, they had got into a "tizzy", or a panic, about the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases.

As a result, he said, the women had gone to the police for advice "and then the police jumped in on this and bamboozled the women".

WikiLeaks has enraged Washington by releasing thousands of US diplomatic cables and US Vice President Joe Biden described Assange as a "hi-tech terrorist".

US officials are believed to be considering how to indict Assange for espionage.

In an interview with The Times on Tuesday, Assange compared WikiLeaks' "persecution" to that endured by Jews in the US in the 1950s.

Assange also confirmed that WikiLeaks was holding a vast amount of material about Bank of America which it intends to release early next year.

"We don't want the bank to suffer unless it's called for," Assange told The Times. "But if its management is operating in a responsive way there will be resignations," he said, without giving details about the material.

Shares in Bank of America have fallen amid speculation that it was a WikiLeaks target.

It's a bad weakness....

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BBC interviews Assange... and the interviewer is SO obnoxious you want to knock his block off. Just how big is your dick, anyway? Did you make them come? How many times did you do it, and were there others? Would you describe yourself as kinky? Or... well... would you consider poking it in me? — Jesus.

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love, 99
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limited hangout delivered by an mk ultra weirdo patsy

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And we leftists are suckers for heroes in adversity.

Can somebody tell me what especially awful thing Soros did beside being a billionaire, the general shittiness of fabulous wealth? Have I overlooked something ultra-egregious?

And will people please STOP just assuming others are completely evil because they dis 9/11 Truth? I don't like it much either, but I don't let it send me completely 'round the bend. There ARE solid reasons for people who want to make a big splash against the stream to do that, and it appears to be almost mandatory to be allowed onto the public stage in any meaningful way, so, can we at LEAST get over ourselves just a LITTLE on that one? We need to be sharp.

I'm bugged about this because Alex has admitted that this is scaring him [at around minute eight] in an interview with yet another jealous guy, says he thinks it may really be time to leave.... Is this his way of blunting himself as a threat again? How does anyone have a chance with all this maniacal screeching? Can't we all just please pull together and STOP the bad guys?

Ever?

Anyone know how I can get in touch with Paul Craig Roberts?

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Ahem....

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I wonder if Webster ever bothered reading any of THIS?

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While, yes, I think it totally rocks that Bolivia is hosting WikiLeaks, I'm getting nervous about all the places equating Julian Assange with Daniel Ellsberg. Assange/WikiLeaks is as the New York Times was to Ellsberg. The person or persons who got the documents to WikiLeaks is the Ellsberg of our times. I mean, TIME is looking to make Assange its Person of the Year on the basis of him being like Daniel Ellsberg. Clearly, they are like-minded, and, clearly, they are courageous men, but, well, call me paranoid....

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Probably a good idea to listen to Hillary Mann Leverett if yer thinking this leak is particularly good for a war with Iran. And probably an even better idea to go to her blog. I'd been meaning to do it for a week and kept getting distracted.

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Yet more negative news about Israel in the Cablegate release, but who's counting? Larisa is calling it blackmail.

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love, 99
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email this link to EVERYONE you know

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Blow the whistle on our feebishness!

EMBARRASS THESE FUCKERS INTO FUNCTIONING.

Note Mrs. Robinson calling it activism for the TwitPod generation... which of course means inactivism.

Think of all those fuckers out there making a living off opening up nonprofit websites, getting you all giddy that you are going to change the world by supporting them! Think of them! They have been some of our favorite people over the years. We have NOT wanted to think ill of them. One of us has worked her heart out to get some of them to PERFORM. No dice. It's IDENTICAL to the hopey changey thing Obama had us going on.

WAKE UP.

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In light of all this TRUE stuff here, maybe THIS will not end up being such a bad thing. It might be this fucking clicktivism that has prevented a revolution thus far. Think of it THAT way. There CERTAINLY is merit to my point here, you will have to agree. Think of all the enraged people working out their aggression on the tubes. If they can't DO that anymore, maybe it's the best possible thing for all sentient beings.

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YOU CAN SEE THE RISE OF GROUPTHINK ALREADY. "TWITPOD"....

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Chris is thinking in a similar vein....

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oh, sheesh, petras, please

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Are you going soft?

Likely, the combination of a new phase of the recession, perpetual austerity and mindless imperial wars can turn the current mass malaise and diffuse hostility against the economic and political elite toward socialist movements, parties and trade unions.

Those are already too long in place, PLUS apocalyptic insults to the environment, PLUS still record numbers of foreclosures, homeless and jobless, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Think massive giveaways of testosterone patches or something. Crikey.
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love love love

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Don't change your hair for me.
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another ancient geoglyph civilization uncovered

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I got an email this morning from another friend who thinks extinctifying ourselves full steam ahead with our self-imposed climate disaster is a good thing. I didn't bother to gripe on behalf of every other species that would be extinctified with us. No. They don't care about the other species either. I mean, truly, if we can just lay around while our government and its masters slaughter millions of people, what indication is there that we give a damn about anything?

No. Really. I saw a report about the fashion of throwing acid on people, mostly women and children, in Bangladesh—one mother sat there with her disfigured son and explained that her sister, being jealous of her good fortune, had poured acid down his throat as a baby—and it isn't just in Bangladesh—it's all over the region—and if this can become the done thing whenever a man is jealous or a sister or just, really, whenever you feel the need to express your wrath, how can we expect Americans to be any more sensitive? The liberality of egregious harming is endemic.

What kind of fairydust lefty can ignore that?
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deathless solidarity

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Message to the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

DEAR Hugo,

Today is the 15th anniversary of our encounter at the University of Havana’s Aula Magna on December 14, 1994. The previous night, I had waited for you at the foot of the steps of the plane that brought you to Cuba.

I knew of your armed uprising against the pro-yanki government of Venezuela. News had reached Cuba of your ideas when you were still in prison and, like us, you devoted yourself to intensifying the revolutionary ideas which brought you to the uprising of February 4, 1992.

At the Aula Magna, in a spontaneous and transparent way, you voiced the Bolivarian ideas that you carried within you, and that led you, in the specific conditions of your country and our times, to the struggle for the independence of Venezuela against the tyranny of the empire. After the effort of Bolívar and other great men who, filled with dreams, fought against the yoke of Spanish colonialism, Venezuelan independence was merely a ridiculous pretense.

No moment in history is the same as any other; no idea or human event can be judged outside of its own era. Both you and I share concepts that have evolved throughout millennia, but which have much in common with distant or recent history in that the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and the exploited, oppressors and the oppressed has always been antipathetic and odious. In the present day, it is the source of the most profound shame and the main cause of human suffering and unhappiness.

When productivity, now supported by science and technology, has increased tenfold and, in certain aspects, even hundreds or thousands of times more, such unjust differences should disappear.

You, I and millions of Venezuelans and Cubans share those ideas.

You started with the Christian principles that were instilled in you from an early age and a rebellious nature; I, from the ideas of Marx and a likewise rebellious nature.

There are universally recognized ethical principles which are valid for both Christians and Marxists.

From that starting point, revolutionary ideas are constantly enriched through study and experience.

It is appropriate to note that our sincere and revolutionary friendship emerged when you were not the president of Venezuela. I never asked you for anything. When the Bolivarian movement won its victory in the 1999 elections, the price of oil was less that $10 per barrel. I remember that well because you invited me to your inauguration ceremony.

Your support for Cuba was spontaneous, just as our cooperation with the sister people of Venezuela has always been.

In the midst of the Special Period, following the demise of the USSR, the empire intensified its brutal blockade of our people. At a certain point, fuel prices rose, thus making it difficult for us to obtain supplies. You then guaranteed a safe, steady commercial supply to our country.

We cannot forget that after the political coup against the Bolivarian Revolution in April 2002 and your brilliant victory in the oil coup at the end of that same year, oil prices rose to $60-plus per barrel. You then offered us fuel supplies and credit facilities. Bush was already president of the United States and the mastermind of those illegal and treacherous attacks on the Venezuelan people.

I remember how annoyed you were at his demand that I leave Mexico as a precondition for his landing in that long-suffering country, where you and I were attending a United Nations international conference in which he also should have participated.

They will never forgive the Bolivarian Revolution for its support for Cuba at a time when the empire imagined that our people, after almost half a century of resistance, would once again fall into their hands. In Miami, the counterrevolution demanded three days’ license to kill revolutionaries as soon as the transition government demanded by Bush was installed in Cuba.

Ten years of exemplary and fruitful cooperation between Venezuela and Cuba have passed. The ALBA was born in that period. The U.S-promoted FTAA had failed but the empire was once again on the offensive.

The coup d’état in Honduras and the installation of seven U.S. military bases in Colombia are recent events that occurred after the inauguration of the new president of the United States. His predecessor had reestablished the 4th Fleet, half a century after the end of the last World War, when the Cold War was over and the Soviet Union no longer existed. The real intentions of the empire are obvious this time, behind the amiable smile and African-American face of Barack Obama.

Yesterday, Daniel Ortega explained how the coup in Honduras determined the weakening and conduct of the members of the Central American Integration System.

The empire is mobilizing the right-wing forces of Latin America to strike at Venezuela and, with that, the other ALBA member states. If the considerable oil and gas resources of Bolívar’s homeland were once again seized, the English-speaking Caribbean countries and other nations in Central America would lose the generous supply conditions today offered by revolutionary Venezuela.

Just a few days ago, after President Barack Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy announcing the deployment of a further 30,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan, I wrote a Reflection in which I described as "an unprincipled act" his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize when he had already adopted that that decision.

On December 10, during his acceptance speech in Oslo, he made statements that were an example of imperialist logic and thinking. "… I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill. Some will be killed," he affirmed in trying to present as a "just war" the brutal carnage taking place in that distant land, in which the majority of those who perish are defenseless villagers struck by bombs dropped from drone planes.

After those phrases, which were among the first that he spoke, he devoted more than 4,600 words to presenting his massacre of civilians as a just war. "In today's wars," he affirmed, "many more civilians are killed than soldiers."

More than one million non-combatant civilians have now died in Iraq, Afghanistan and along the Pakistan border.

In that same speech, he praises Nixon and Reagan as distinguished individuals, without stopping to recall that one of them dropped more than one million tons of bombs on Vietnam, and the other one had the Siberian gas pipeline blown up by electronic means so that it would look like an accident. The blast was so great and devastating that nuclear test monitoring equipment registered it.

The speech he gave in Oslo differs from that of West Point because the latter was better crafted and recited. In the Norwegian capital, the speaker’s face demonstrated that he was aware of the insincerity of his words.

Neither the timing nor the circumstances were the same. Oslo is located close to Copenhagen. In that city, the extremely important Climate Change Conference, which I know that you and Evo are planning to attend, is taking place. The most important political battle in human history is being fought there at this very moment. There, one can appreciate in all its magnitude the scope of the damage that developed capitalism has inflicted on humanity. Today, the conference must desperately fight not just for justice but also for the survival of the species.

I have closely followed the ALBA meeting. I congratulate you all. I very much enjoyed seeing so many beloved friends outlining ideas and fighting in a united way. I congratulate you all.

¡Hasta la victoria siempre!

A warm embrace.

Fidel Castro Ruz
December 14, 2009

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what a mess

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I've mustered the spit to watch the news... to watch Democracy Now! again today... and, well, I'm still watching and it's just appalling out there. I am heartened considerably, though, to see all the protesters hanging in there in Copenhagen. No matter what else, that is important.

Amy interviews Evo Morales, who is eerily perfectly in accord with me on everything he talks about here.

Today's broadcast ends it with a wallop so hard it buckled my knees.
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man, oh, man, oh, man

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I really, really wanna go!
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polls closed in bolivia

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Evo expected to win big.

Yay.

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....]

slavoj žižek

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Oh, goody! An hour of Slavoj Žižek.

put the deadly fantasies to bed

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You gotta go check out this bit that makes me feel as though my aching nerves are being bathed in mystical essences. It's not long. It's not full of puff and blow, sturm und drang, just the bluntness of the gods, a nice warm breath of the real tracing the contours of my pounding head in the long circus of hallucinations playing out on your world stage.

Between listening to Glenn and reading this short piece, I may just forget the hair on my head and sleep through the night in celebration of truth. Even the most awful truth is ultimately as kind as a bubble bath, and how my heart howls that so few know that.

passes for good news to fairydust lefties

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I'll just cut to the punchline:

... the British High Court -- pending the results of one final appeal -- will release to the world those seven paragraphs, detailing what the CIA itself told British intelligence agents was done to Binyam Mohamed.

All of this highlights two vital points: (1) the extent to which the Obama administration has been willing to go to cover up evidence of the Bush administration's torture regime; when I interviewed Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, in April, he made clear that these threats were part of a joint cover-up between the U.S. and Britain; and (2) the way in which American citizens are forced to rely on the institutions in foreign countries -- British courts and Spanish prosecutors -- to learn about what our own government has done. War crimes can never stay hidden for long. It's only a matter of time before all of this evidence comes out one way or the other, and when it does, those who worked so vigorously to keep it concealed will be rightly judged to have been complicit in its cover-up.

thoughts on norman finkelstein quitting the gaza siege-breaking march

[click image, video, Norman Finkelstein on innocence of means and innocence of ends]

I always listen as closely as I can to Norman Finkelstein. I have on my sidebar here a button leading to all his lectures and interviews I've posted. Just scroll down to his picture amid the links there and click on his face any time... or click on his name at the footer of this post, and find it all. So you will see I'm not ignorant about who he is and what he does. I am actually darn up to date with him, and he has taught me much about many things, especially about the Israel/Palestine mess.

So I was taken aback by the news that he quit his own march, the breaking of the siege he has been so avid about... but also instantly comfortable in the knowledge that there could not possibly be any unworthy or selfish motive for such a drastic step. It's just flat out not reasonable to assume that this man could do that at this point in his career, at this point in his life, not after all the brilliant books, all the brilliant lectures, all the brilliant work he does to make those books and lectures ever more supportive of positive manifestation of humane intent. There just is no question about that.

You might have questions.

They cannot be based on anything having to do with Norman Finkelstein. They will be based on your own ideas, your own feelings, your own prejudices, your own mental conditioning... they will be based on the content of your own mind, NOT on what is abundantly evident about Norman Finkelstein.

You will want to say, yes, yes, he's done all kinds of good work, yadda, yadda, but this is a betrayal of the Palestinian people! Or he's a prima donna. Or he's a white guy who wants to dictate to brown guys. Whutever.

He wanted to study up on the possibilities of non-violent civil disobedience for the liberation of Palestine. He went to Gandhi himself... to his volumes and volumes and volumes of journal entries, notes, the works. I've listened to him speak about quite a lot of what he's taken away from what he's seen so far.

The kernel of this is that the siege of Gaza can be broken only if the "innocence of means" in the nonviolent action are matched with an "innocence of ends". It cannot succeed unless the rightness of the ends can't be disputed by most people... oh, just listen to him at the image link....

He, of course, is dealing with a lot of professional activists and many, many, many academics from all over. The old saw about herding cats applies. Not enough of these people have the knowledge, wits or emotional resources to cut to the kernel and execute an action that fills the bill... cuts to the heart of the problem and SOLVES it. At least as many have the hubris to assume that remaining faithful to what Dogen meant when he said, "Stop doing and perform!" is some sort of insult to decency, a betrayal of the cause, arrogance, a power play... whutever... sound and fury signifying less than zero, the hoof marks on the barn door from jackasses kicking.

He means to use his energy and his vitality in performance, not waste it in mere busy-ness that only calls itself "action".

What action there is to it will cause the appropriate effect. That's the travesty.

You should have listened to Norman.

Some seem mystified by his lack of detailed explanation of his reason for pulling his endorsement of this action as well as his personal involvement. Someone who is serious about the relief of suffering will not endorse what increases it. Someone whose greatest wish it is to shine a light on the way for you will not participate in folly to appease your ire or to win a popularity contest. This isn't a game. This isn't an abstraction. This is just about as blood and guts as it ever gets. EVERYTHING is on the line for Palestine, and the one out of us all who has not lost sight of that is Norman Finkelstein.

Do you think bullying debating tactics can change that?

Really?

What word can encompass the size of the ignorance that engages in such ugly futility?

[The stupidest part of all this controversy and confusion is that he stated this very clearly both before and after his resignation from this endeavor. Perfectly clearly, omitting nothing, and yet there are all these scandalized and angry and sightless gripes flying around Blogistan. Just disgraceful.]

[Luckily for everybody, I got fed up with the scrolling involved to argue with the horse's asses pissing and hissing at me over at PULSE, and then my computer died, or I would have subjected each of those bitching about my hero worship to this... and we'd've had to go into this long Zen Lesson about it all... and it would have been headachesville.]

american-bought mole plays gandhi in iran

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Our guys must have given him some intense body guard action to get this out of him. Long as he has a bunch of frustrated Iranians to make excuses for him, it's just too tempting to resist letting that go to waste. Still, he's stupid to rely on it because the regime grabbing his sorry ass and slamming him in jail, or just shooting him, would be much better for our purposes. In fact, now we can do a Neda on him and the entire world will revile the "murdering theocracy" that "wants to nuke Israel".

He's obviously no Einstein and he's obviously no Gandhi either.

When I said he was looking like the Iranian Obama, I had no idea how precisely I'd whacked that nail on its head....

Iran's Mousavi calls for more civil disobedience

The statement from the nation's opposition leader comes two days after parliament voted to mostly approve a Cabinet of hard-liners loyal to Ahmadinejad.

By Borzou Daragahi
September 5, 2009 | 5:15 a.m.

Reporting from Beirut - Iran's leading opposition figure today called on his supporters to continue acts of peaceful civil disobedience in his first major communiqué in weeks.

Mir Hossein Mousavi also demanded that authorities launch an independent probe of Iran's disputed presidential elections and punish those who allegedly abused protesters and detainees in the unrest afterward.

"We shouldn't leave any stone unturned and live up to our commitments in our struggle against cheaters and liars," he said in a statement published to his news website, Kalamenews.com. "In pursuing our cause we should brave all the accusations, and we shouldn't duck any act of courage or daring."

Mousavi, a former prime minister, ran and lost against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a June 12 election marred by allegations of massive vote rigging that continue to roil the nation. Though Mousavi's deputies have been hauled before televised mass tribunals for questioning the results and his allies threatened with arrest by the Revolutionary Guard, he has remained unbowed.

The statement came two days after parliament voted to mostly approve a Cabinet of hard-line loyalists to Ahmadinejad, disappointing opposition figures who had hoped the battered president would be further weakened in a lengthy brawl over the formation of his government.

Ahmadinejad met today with visiting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who voiced support for Iran's nuclear program in an attempt to counter the image of Tehran's diplomatic isolation as world powers prepare to consider a course of action.

The website of the German magazine Der Spiegel, citing unnamed diplomats, today reported that Russia and China have rejected a U.S. and West European proposal to begin discussions on upping sanctions on Iran.

Mousavi unveiled no new plan of action or strategy for his "Green Path of Hope," the grassroots political movement he announced in mid-August. But he implicitly called for a continuation of nightly rooftop anti-government chants and demonstrations. "There is no way but praying to God and calls of [Allah Akbar] in small and big gatherings with all-out efforts and endeavors," he said in the statement.

Earlier this week, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the hard-line Revolutionary Guard, delivered a speech defining Iranian reformists such as former President Mohammad Khatami as enemies of the state.

Their refusal to back down in the face of such threats and ongoing pressure suggests no quick resolution of Iran's greatest domestic political crisis since the early years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

"Despite the smear campaign of the state-run propaganda machine, it is we who are calling for the restoration of confidence and peace in society," Mousavi said in his statement. "It is we who want to avoid any kind of extremism and violence."

Authorities continue to be unnerved by Mousavi's green movement. They have barred fans from entering certain soccer matches, apparently afraid that Mousavi supporters would turn the televised games into opposition rallies.

This week plainclothes security officials crushed a Ramadan supper gathering of detainees' families and supporters outside Evin Prison as well as a boisterous rally outside a downtown Tehran mosque.

Authorities announced the unprecedented first-ever cancellation of annual mid-Ramadan ceremonies at the tomb of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's revolutionary founder, after Mousavi supporters threatened to turn the event into an opposition rally.

Now authorities nervously watch as opposition supporters announce plans to chant anti-government slogans during annual Qods Day commemorations Sept. 18, which is marked by officially sanctioned rallies against Israel.

To defuse the political crisis, Mousavi announced a nine-point plan that includes creating a fact-finding committee to investigate election irregularities, reforming electoral laws, punishing alleged violent elements in the security forces, restitution to victims of official violence, lifting pressures on independent media and barring military officials from interfering in politics.

"Now our people have felt in their skin, flesh and bones that the only way to save the country is peaceful coexistence of different tastes, walks of life, ethnicities, religions and schools of thought in this vast country whose diversity of lifestyles and communities was part and parcel of her identity since ancient times," Mousavi said.

I mean, as long as people can keep thinking Obama is a great man who will restore America to the people, and Hugo Chàvez a heartless dictator who abuses his people, why not keep playing these games to dupe the rest of the world's population?

The key to our enslavement has been perfectly cut and polished.