mainstream and mainstream-influenced media

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I was going to spend a lot of time editing this mindfuck, but if I am ultimately going to do that, it'll just be later.

Radioactive water at 5 million times limit found at Japan plant
By Mayumi Negishi and Yoko Nishikawa – 7 mins ago

TOKYO (Reuters) – The operator of Japan's crippled nuclear power plant said on Tuesday it had found water with 5 million times the legal limit of radioactivity as it struggles for a fourth week to contain the world's biggest nuclear disaster in quarter of a century.

Underlining the concern over spreading radiation, the government said it was considering imposing radioactivity restrictions on seafood for the first time in the crisis after contaminated fish were found in seas well south of the damaged nuclear reactors.

The plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) offered token "condolence" money to those affected in the Fukushima region where the plant is based, the local mayors who came to Tokyo to meet Prime Minister Naoto Kan made clear they expected far more help.

"We have borne the risks, co-existed and flourished with TEPCO for more than 40 years, and all these years, we have fully trusted the myth that nuclear plants are absolutely safe," said Katsuya Endo, the mayor of Tomioka town.

He was one of eight Fukushima prefecture mayors who went to Kan to demand compensation and support for employment, housing and education for the tens of thousands of people evacuated as a result of the radiation crisis.

In desperation, engineers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant have turned to what are little more than home remedies to stem the flow of contaminated water. On Tuesday, they used "liquid glass" in the hope of plugging cracks in a leaking concrete pit.

"We tried pouring sawdust, newspaper and concrete mixtures into the side of the pit (leading to tunnels outside reactor No.2), but the mixture does not seem to be entering the cracks," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA).

"We also still do not know how the highly contaminated water is seeping out of reactor No.2," said Nishiyama.

TEPCO said it suspected that a stone layer beneath the trench feeding into the pit at reactor No. 2 might be the source of the contaminated water, but added they were still investigating the exact causes and were prepared for the possibility that there were other sources of radioactive water.

Engineers also plan to build two giant polyester "silt curtains" in the sea to block the spread of more contamination from the plant.

Workers are still struggling to restart cooling pumps -- which recycle the water -- in four reactors damaged by last month's 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami.

Until those are fixed, they must pump in water from outside to prevent overheating and meltdowns. In the process, that creates more contaminated water that has to be pumped out and stored somewhere else or released into the sea.

There is a total of 60,000 tons of highly contaminated water in the plant after workers frantically poured in seawater when fuel rods experienced partial meltdown after the tsunami hit northeast Japan on March 11.

TEPCO on Monday had to start releasing 11,500 tons of low-level radioactive seawater after it ran out of storage capacity for more highly contaminated water. The release will continue until Friday.

FIVE MILLION TIMES LEGAL LIMIT

Radioactive iodine of up to 4,800 times the legal limit has been recorded in the sea near the plant. Cesium was found at levels above safety limits in tiny "kounago" fish in waters Ibaraki Prefecture, south of Fukushima, local media reported.

Iodine-131 in the water near the sluice gate of reactor No. 2 hit a high on April 2 of 7.5 million times the legal limit. The water, which was not released into the ocean, fell to 5 million times the legal limit on Monday.

TEPCO said it had started paying token "condolence money" to local governments to aid people evacuated from around its stricken plant or affected by the radiation crisis.

It faces a huge bill for the damage caused by its crippled reactors, but said it must first assess the extent of damage before paying actual compensation.

"We are still in discussion as to what extent we will pay on our own and to what extent we will have assistance from the government," TEPCO executive vice-president Takashi Fujimotohe told a news conference.

TEPCO offered just 20 million yen ($238,000) in condolence money each to towns near the reactors whose residents were forced to evacuate. A second TEPCO official said they offered that sum to 10 towns but one refused to take the money.

FISH PRICES TUMBLE

Fishermen from neighboring Ibaraki prefecture saw prices for flounder and sea bream tumble as buyers shunned their catch.

"Unless problems at the plant end soon, fishermen won't be able to go on living without compensation. We want compensation from TEPCO, the government and the prefecture," said Hikaru Sugiyama a fishing cooperative official in Ibaraki.

The company's shares plunged to a record low of 363 yen on Tuesday on uncertainty over the nuclear crisis, and are now over 80 percent of their value before the quake struck.

The quake and tsunami have left nearly 28,000 people dead or missing, thousands homeless and Japan's northeast coast a wreck.

The world's costliest natural disaster has caused power blackouts and cuts to supply chains, threatening Japan's economic growth and the operations of global firms from semiconductor makers to shipbuilders.

Fujimoto said TEPCO wants to avoid having to impose rolling power blackouts in summer, when demand surges due to heavy use of air-conditioning. Analysts say blackouts could cause the biggest economic damage to Japan.

($1 = 84.040 Japanese Yen)

I mean, if I begin doing that for you, it will take up my whole life, and it will take up my whole life doing NOTHING to spark the interest in awakening in you.

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love, 99
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subliminals

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Pfeh.

Not looking for sympathy here, but the life of a political reporter isn’t all champagne and canapes. Consider our man Scott Powers, who was sent over to the Winter Park home of Alan Ginsburg this morning as the designated “pool reporter” — aka scribe — for the fundraiser where Vice President Joe Biden is appearing on behalf of U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

Turns out the veep hadn’t arrived, but about 150 guests (minimum donation $500) were already in the house. So to prevent Scott from mingling with the crowd, a member of Biden’s advance team consigned him to a storage closet — and then stood outside the door to make sure he didn’t walk out without permission.

An aide has apologized.

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Corbett Report podcast on cause of nukequake....

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All protestors and all riot cops are police....

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Don't watch this....

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Selected paragraphs:

Radiation levels that can prove fatal were detected outside reactor buildings at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, signaling a partial fuel meltdown and complicating efforts to contain the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

...

Plutonium-239, a byproduct of fission used in nuclear weapons, was found in soil samples taken on the plant site March 21 and March 22, Tokyo Electric said in a statement today. Two of the five samples contained more plutonium than known to have been deposited by atmospheric nuclear-bomb fallout and probably came from the damaged plant, according to the statement.

...

Plutonium was part of the fuel mix in reactor No. 3. Used fuel rods from other reactors may also have been a source of the material, Edwin Lyman, a radiological specialist for the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, said on a conference call with reporters. Plutonium inhalation causes lung, liver and bone cancer, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

I object strenuously to the term "partial meltdown". Obviously, it is meant to convey that not all the fuel in a reactor has melted and gone walkabout, but it very blatantly downplays the seriousness of any walkabout nuclear fuels... and, in this case, the worst of them.

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You are letting them

Five of the six biggest container shippers are maintaining routes to Tokyo and Yokohama after the U.S. Navy said radiation on vessels from the leaking Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant can be scrubbed off with soap and water.

A.P Moeller-Maersk A/S, Mediterranean Shipping Co. and CMA CGM SA, the top three, are still serving Japan’s two busiest container ports, 2 1/2 weeks after an earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima plant, 220 kilometers (135 miles) to the north. Among the top six shippers, only Hapag-Lloyd AG, the No. 4, is diverting vessels to docks in the south of the country.

The Japanese government is allowing ships to sail as close as 30 kilometers to the stricken reactors, and the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, says operations in and out of Japan can continue as normal, with levels of radiation presenting no medical basis for imposing restrictions.

“These are extremely low levels and are easily cleaned off,” Commander Jeff Davis, a spokesman for Seventh Fleet, which is helping with recovery efforts, said by yesterday by telephone. “Even if they weren’t, they still wouldn’t rise to the level where they would cause any harm to human health.”

kill us.

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love, 99
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yes, well, uhm

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I think we better first consult Russia before believing anything our media puts out about the Paradorian dictator carrying out airstrikes against his people. Too, we need to consult our better sense to wonder anymore if that is even an over-reaction to righteous protest, now don't we? Just as we need to wonder if the Western frame for the "revolutions" in the Middle East might not be just a little on the outright preposterous side, as usual. In short, we need to think for ourselves on this one, get in touch with our own inner, and far greater than we usually settle for, SENSE.

REFLECTIONS OF FIDEL
NATO’s inevitable war (Part II) — (Part I)

WHEN Gaddafi, aged just 28 and a colonel in the Libyan army, inspired by his Egyptian colleague Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Idris I in 1969, he implemented important revolutionary measures such as agrarian reform and the nationalization of oil. The growing income was dedicated to economic and social development, particularly educational and health services for the small Libyan population located in a vast desert territory with very little arable land.

An extensive and deep sea of "fossil water" existed beneath that desert. When I heard about an experimental cultivation area I had the impression that, in the future, those aquifers would be more valuable than oil.

Religious faith, preached with the fervor that characterizes Muslim nations, in part helped to compensate for the strong tribal tendency which still survives in that Arab country.

Libyan revolutionaries devised and implemented their own ideas in relation to legal and political institutions, which Cuba, as a principle, respected.

We totally abstained from expressing any opinions concerning the concepts of the Libyan leadership.

We can clearly see that the fundamental concern of the United States and NATO is not Libya, but the revolutionary wave unleashed in the Arab world, which they wish to prevent at all costs.

It is an irrefutable fact that relations between the United States and its NATO allies in recent years were excellent until the rebellion in Egypt and in Tunisia arose.

In high-level meetings between Libya and NATO leaders, none of the latter had any problems with Gaddafi. The country was a secure source of high-quality oil, gas and even potassium supplies. The problems which arose between them in the early decades had been overcome.

Strategic sectors such as oil pumping and transportation were opened up to foreign investment.

Privatizations were extended to many public enterprises. The International Monetary Fund exercised its beatific role in the implementation of those operations.

Logically, Aznar was fulsome in his praise of Gaddafi and after him, Blair, Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Zapatero and even my friend the King of Spain, paraded past the sardonic regard of the Libyan leader. They were happy.

Although it might seem that I am mocking that is not the case; I am simply asking myself why they now want to take Gaddafi before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

They are accusing him 24 hours a day of firing on unarmed citizens who were protesting. Why did they not explain to the world that the weapons and, above all, the sophisticated machinery of repression possessed by Libya, was supplied by the United States, Britain and other illustrious hosts of Gaddafi?

I strongly oppose the cynicism and lies currently being used to justify the invasion and occupation of Libya.

The last time that I visited Gaddafi was in May 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his very modest residence, where he took me to see what was left of it. It received a direct hit from the aircraft and was considerably destroyed; his little daughter three years of age died in the attack: she was murdered by Ronald Reagan. There was no prior agreement on the part of NATO, the Human Rights Committee, or the Security Council.

My previous visit had taken place in 1977, eight years after the beginning of the revolutionary process in Libya. I visited Tripoli; I took part in the General People’s Congress in Sebha; I toured the first agricultural experiments with water pumped from the vast sea of fossil waters; I visited Benghazi, I was the object of a warm reception. It was a legendary country which had been the scenario of historic battles in World War II. It did not as yet have six million inhabitants, nor were its enormous volumes of oil and fossil waters known. The former Portuguese colonies in Africa had already been liberated.

We had fought for 15 years in Angola against mercenary armies organized along tribal lines by the United States, the Mobutu government, and the well-equipped and trained racist apartheid army. This army, following U.S. instructions, as is now known, invaded Angola in 1975 in order to prevent its independence, reaching the outskirts of Luanda with its motorized forces. A number of Cuban instructors died in that brutal invasion. Resources were sent with all urgency.

Expelled from that country by Cuban internationalists and Angolan troops to the border of South African occupied Namibia, the racists were given the mission of eliminating the revolutionary process in Angola.

With the support of the United States and Israel they developed nuclear weapons. They already possessed them when the Cuban and Angolan troops defeated their land and air forces in Cuito Cuanavale and, defying the risk – using conventional tactics and means – advanced toward the border with Namibia, where the apartheid troops were attempting to resist. Twice in their history our forces have been at risk of attack by those kinds of weapons: in October of 1962 and in southern Angola, but on that second occasion, not even deploying those nuclear weapons that South Africa possessed could they have prevented the defeat which marked the end of the odious system. Those events took place under the government of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Piet Botha in South Africa.

There is no talk of that and the hundreds of thousands of lives which the imperialist adventure cost.

I regret having to recall those events when another great risk is hovering over the Arab peoples, because they are not resigned to continue being the victims of plunder and oppression.

The Revolution in the Arab world so much feared by the United States and NATO is that of those who lack all rights in the face of those who flaunt all privileges, and thus is destined to be more profound than the one unleashed in Europe in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille.

Not even Louis XIV, when he proclaimed that he was the state, possessed the privileges of King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia and far less the vast wealth that lies below the surface of that almost desert country, where yankee transnationals determine the pumping and thus the price of oil in the world.

When the Libyan crisis began, extraction in Saudi Arabia rose to one million barrels a day at minimum cost and, in consequence, by that concept alone, the income of that country and those who control it has risen to one billon dollars a day.

No one should imagine that the Saudi people are swimming in money. There are moving accounts of the living conditions of many construction workers and those in other sectors obliged to work 13 to 14 hours a day for paltry wages.

Shocked by the revolutionary wave which is shaking the prevalent system of plunder, in the wake of what took place with workers in Egypt and Tunisia, but also unemployed youth in Jordan, the occupied territories of Palestine, Yemen and even Bahrain and the Arab Emirates with higher per capita income, the upper echelons of the Saudi hierarchy has been impacted by the events.

As opposed to other times, today the Arab peoples receive almost instantaneous information on events, albeit exceptionally manipulated.

The worst thing for the status quo of the privileged sectors is that those persistent events are coinciding with a considerable increase in food prices and the devastating impact of climate change, while the United States, the largest producer of corn in the world, is wasting 40% of that product and a significant part of soy production on biofuels to feed automobiles. Lester Brown, the best informed American ecologist in the world on agricultural products, can surely give us an idea of the current food situation.

The Bolivarian president, Hugo Chávez, is making a valiant effort to find a solution without NATO intervention in Libya. The chances of his attaining that objective would improve if he can achieve the feat of creating a broad movement of opinion before and not after the intervention takes place, and the peoples do not have to see the atrocious experience of Iraq repeated in other countries.

End of Reflection.

The need to open one's mind, to cut from the consensus trance being dictated by our execrable media is so blaring that it makes one squint, hurts one's ears. There is relief to be had by just doing it, at last—quit clinging to the fringes of this obviously sociopathic course at all, quit thrashing around in these oceans of cognitive dissonance, and just get the hell to it. No?

Yes.

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love, 99
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here's yer sign

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Each and every one of those nonprofit "progressive" sites that fly up in response to constitutional crises and election fraud and gun control and financial meltdown and torture and illegal wars and toxic planet and wilderness preservation and wildlife preservation and forest preservation and water preservation and feeding starving people and treating AIDS in Africa and watershed reparations and you goddam name it are going for THIS. This is what they are about.

Sean Penn recently came out and quite nearly said as much... trying manfully to get the point across without sounding like a foaming conspiracy theorist bliss ninny lefty... and HE would know... in case you are skeptical of my bona fides in this matter.

WHAT does it take to open people's eyes that they can't simply throw money at things? That this world is up to us?

A cast iron frying pan upside the head?

Wait! Wait! I have one of those!

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They make it so damn easy for us to be ignorant—and we snatch at that chance, it being such a relief from the constant pressure from fear and outrage and unease and opprobrium and struggle to get from outta bed in the morning to back into it at night.

And I do mean whether they are progressives or arch conservatives.

LISTEN to her. The only way to get power is to take responsibility.

No excuses.

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There actually is one good organization to support. Can't accuse Watson of just paycheck-mongering, and then playing dirty politics to increase it instead of performing on your trust. I wish we had a couple billion more like him.

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love, 99
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ye have always been many and they have always been few

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We are shirking our way back to this. I was going to say we are working our way back to it, and there are many ways that applies, especially since shirking this hard is much more arduous than work, but, well, now, I guess I've gone with both. The ONLY reason you work this hard to shirk your very human being itself is because you dread physical harm, dread the angry glare of the space lizards who nowadays maybe don't care what your position is on the matter of Mary's virginity, but are quite near to burning you at the stake for impeding their hypnodrome with shit like 9/11 Truth or defying the TSA. So you need to THINK about your status as a walking dead human, realize there are fates worse than death and you're in one.

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You know, I don't think I ever mentioned how pissed it made me to keep hearing and reading hairdos and commentators speaking of Egyptians having lost their fear, quite as though these hairdos and commentators didn't have at least as much fear to lose.

It's a fucking emergency that they lose it, but not even staring it in the face gets that through to them.

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love, 99
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oh, welcome home

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I find this:

Two U.S. citizens with diplomatic status were quietly withdrawn from Pakistan after being involved in a fatal car accident last month while trying to help Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor being held by Pakistani authorities on murder charges.

Two officials familiar with U.S. government activities in Pakistan said the two Americans who left the country worked for the CIA under contract as protective officers. This means they were employed as highly skilled bodyguards, like Davis, for CIA operations officers serving in Pakistan.

The two Americans who left Pakistan have not been otherwise identified by U.S. or Pakistani authorities. The CIA declined to comment.

that goes on to make this all sound perfectly reasonable under bad circumstances, and I'm wondering to myself if this could just be CIA rat bastards getting a karmic shot from left field or if it's just more covering for their filthy rat bastard activities. The ones for which they are being handsomely paid. And then I think it would be well if they were all scooped up and plopped down somewhere with no population for a couple hundred miles in any direction.

This is all next to a headline that reads: Obama breaks silence, condemns Libya crackdown ...pfeh. Would you mind telling me WHY it's of interest WHAT Obama says about Libya? Is it actually that America is looking to its president to say stuff? Do we need a spokesmodel in chief? I mean, have you been avid to hear him on this subject?

Do you think I oughta get back in my car now?

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On the other hand:

ATHENS, Greece — They blockade highway toll booths to give drivers free passage. They cover subway ticket machines with plastic bags so commuters can't pay. Even doctors are joining in, preventing patients from paying fees at state hospitals.

Some call it civil disobedience. Others a freeloading spirit. Either way, Greece's "I Won't Pay" movement has sparked heated debate in a nation reeling from a debt crisis that's forced the government to take drastic austerity measures — including higher taxes, wage and pension cuts, and price spikes in public services.

What started as a small pressure group of residents outside Athens angered by higher highway tolls has grown into a movement affecting ever more sectors of society — one that many say is being hijacked by left-wing parties keen to ride popular discontent.

A rash of political scandals in recent years, including a dubious land swap deal with a rich monastery and alleged bribes in state contracts — has fueled the rebellious mood.

At dawn last Friday, about 100 bleary-eyed activists from a Communist Party-backed labor union covered ticket machines with plastic bags at Athens metro stations, preventing passengers from paying their fares, to protest public transport ticket price hikes.

Other activists have taped up ticket machines on buses and trams. And thousands of people simply don't bother validating their public transport tickets when they take the subway or the bus.

"The people have paid already through their taxes, so they should be able to travel for free," said Konstantinos Thimianos, 36, an activist standing at the metro picket line in central Syntagma Square.

In one of their frequent occupations of the toll booths on the northern outskirts of Athens recently, protesters wore brightly colored vests with "total disobedience" emblazoned across their backs, and chanted: "We won't pay for their crisis!"

The tactic has cropped up in the health sector, with some state hospital doctors staging a blockade in front of pay counters to prevent patients from paying their €5 flat fee for consultations.

Critics deride the protests as yet another example of a freeloading mentality that helped lead the country into its financial mess.

"The course from initial lawlessness to final wanton irresponsibility is like a spreading cancer," Dionysis Gousetis said in a recent column in the respected daily broadsheet Kathimerini.

"Now, with the crisis as an alibi ... the freeloaders don't hide. They appear publicly and proudly and act like heroes of civil disobedience. Something like Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi," Gousetis wrote. "They're not satisfied with not paying themselves. They are forcing others to follow them."

Many accuse left-wing parties and labor unions of usurping a grassroots movement with legitimate grievances for their own political ends.

"You think that lawlessness is something revolutionary, which helps the Greek people," Prime Minister George Papandreou said recently, lashing out in Parliament at Coalition of the Left party head Alexis Tsipras. "It is the lawlessness which we have in our country that the Greek people are paying for today."

But there is something about the "I Won't Pay" movement that speaks to something deeper within Greek society: a propensity to bend the rules, to rebel against authority, particularly that of the state.

It is so ingrained that many Greeks barely notice the myriad small, daily transgressions — the motorcycle driving on the sidewalk, the car running the red light, the blatant disregard of yet another government attempt to ban smoking in restaurants and bars.

Less innocuous is persistent and widespread tax avoidance despite increasingly desperate government measures.

"There is a general culture of lawlessness, starting from the most basic thing, tax evasion or tax avoidance, which is something that Greeks have been exercising since their state was created," said social commentator Nikos Dimou.

But many see the "I Won't Pay" movement as something much simpler: the people's refusal to pay for the mistakes of a series of governments accused of squandering the nation's future through corruption and cronyism.

"I don't think it's part of the Greek character. Greeks, when they see that the law is being applied in general, they will implement it too," said Nikos Louvros, the 55-year-old chain-smoking owner of an Athens bar that openly flouts the smoking ban.

"But when it isn't being applied to some, such as when there are ministers who have been stealing, ... Well, if the laws aren't implemented at the top, others won't implement them."

Maybe I should start smoking in restaurants and bringing produce over the California border from Oregon and, and, and... well, SPEEDING and not paying the fines... and fomenting general obstreperousness all around....

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We should just teach kids basic math and how to read and then let them listen to James Corbett. They'd be ten thousand percent better off. Would they not?

I mean, it occurs to me that most of us know most of what he's saying there already, but we do continually let that litany of facts sink back into the great existential puddle. NO dispositive action is ever taken against it. So we should consider yanking our kids out of school after second grade and smoking in elevators from now on.

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love, 99
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just shoot me

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They talk as though this kind of mindfucking isn't what has already been going on... for, like, well, for how long? It's as though they think this is some sort of original plan. It's as though the sociopathy laced all through its math is the expression of an advancement of some kind. Are people honestly this stupid and blind, or am I in a coma somewhere, having the nightmare of all human history?

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love, 99
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suleiman stepping up — updating — suleiman stepping in place

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Mubarak is meeting with Suleiman right now and will be making a live, not pre-recorded statement tonight... which means today here... they're being very noncommittal about it on AJ, but the expectation is that Mubarak will stand down. I want to remind you that this is NOT what the uprising is about. It is only what Israel and the United States want. I called it for Suleiman almost as soon as he was appointed VP. I wonder who won in the WH/State spat....

We can only hope the protests don't ebb and Suleiman goes the way of Mubarak soon... but then they will have to make it through ElBaradei to get what DC wanted in the first place.

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Letting Indyk open his yap was a sign.

... The U.S. does not want a people's government in Cairo.

Martin Indyk, a former Clinton Administration official at the U.S. National Security Council with an area of responsible for the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and an individual closely tied to the Obama Administration, told The New York Times that the U.S. must work towards bringing the Egyptian military into control of Egypt until a "moderate and legitimate political leadership [can] emerge." Not only did Indyk call for a military takeover in Egypt, he also used U.S. State Department double-speak. What U.S. officials mean by "moderate" are dictatorships and regimes like Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Jordan, Morocco, and Ben Ali's Tunisia. As for legitimacy, in the eyes of U.S. officials, it means individuals who will serve U.S. interests.

As though we really needed one.

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NOON... 10pm in Cairo, Mubarak still has not spoken. News wires say he's resigned and then there was a military coup. So... if true... and that speech is late... Suleiman may have been president for five minutes....

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12:15pm... Truly, the reportage on this has become outright psychedelic over the last twenty minutes. Everything but the kitchen sink has been thrown into it... including "no way is Mubarak stepping down" and all the blather about him staying president but handing powers to Suleiman, and that the military supports Suleiman... so it could damn well be Suleiman and the military are forcing Mubarak out. Speech now fifteen minutes late.

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12:20pm... One significant development is that Egyptian State TV has suddenly been broadcasting the images of the mob celebrating in the square. They have been making it look really small when they haven't been ignoring it altogether throughout the seventeen days of the uprising.

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12:30pm... Speech now half an hour late.

6:00pm: The CIA chief reportedly says there is a "strong likelihood" Mubarak will step down tonight.

5:39pm: Huge chant, Tahrir Square seemingly in unison, shouting: "The army and the people in one hand - the army and the people are united."

5:35pm: Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera's correspondent, reports: "Now, for the first time, we are getting the sense that senior military officers are discussing 'national issues', which is a very significant development indeed."

5:30pm: "Ambiguous" statement from military confirms its “commitment and responsibility to safeguard the people and to protect the interests of the nation, and its duty to protect the riches and assets of the people and of Egypt”. Mentioned the demands of the people are “lawful and legitimate”. Understood the military council met separately from Mubarak.

5:23pm: NDP Secretary General Hossam Badrawi says he expects Mubarak to respond to the demands of the people tonight. An official statement from the military is imminent.

5:20pm: A senior military commander is reported to have told protesters that all their demands will be met, but no official confirmation is yet available.

Still waiting. Muslim Brotherhood says it fears a military coup if Mubarak steps down.

So... you can see, AJ has no clue, and probably neither do any of the other news outlets.

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12:35pm... Crowd now chanting SULEIMAN OUT. They had started to disperse for the day when the military made it's "announcement" and everyone and more came rushing back in. The square is carpeted with people.

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12:45pm... Mubarak speaking, father to children, all the blood of those who fell for a better Egypt will not go to waste. Perpetrators will be punished. Adamant to fulfill all promises. Important to admit mistakes and rectify them. [Doesn't sound like a resignation speech so far.] Will not be dictated to from outside. I announced plainly that I will not run for reëlection. This is the oath I have taken before God and the nation. Will continue to implement the peaceful transition of power. ... [Definitely NOT a resignation speech....]

AJ turning up sounds of crowd griping in background.

Still speaking, but not looking good....

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12:55pm... Crowd is SCREAMING, SCREAMING, SCREAMING, SCREAMING... and Mubarak is still speaking, not even saying, yet, that he is transferring power. People are pissed.

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1:00pm... I think he MIGHT have just said he was transferring power, but it was followed so closely by another jab against being dictated to from outside, I'm not sure. Crowd is PISSED.

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1:05pm... He did not step down OR aside.

THE CROWD HAS GONE BATSHIT CRAZY. OMG!

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1:15pm... Crowd waving shoes in the air. Major expression of contempt.

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1:20pm... Mubarak seems clear this is coming from outside of Egypt, but he seems unclear that it's also being borne up INSIDE the country. There isn't any question in my mind that this was started by covert ops in place to unseat him, but the Egyptian people leapt on it and have died at least in their hundreds for it. So Mubarak's appeal tonight sounds outright psychotic. Can the man really think he can woo the uprising back to his side by expressions of patriotism and reminding them of the outside influence? Now? What planet is he on?

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1:25pm... AJ is saying that Mubarak did say he would delegate more power to Suleiman, but not that he was transferring the powers of the presidency to him. So that would be why I was confused by his words. The crowd wasn't listening at all by then. They were SCREAMING invective and grabbing their shoes to wave.

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1:35pm... Suleiman is speaking now. Mubarak has delegated to him the responsibility of safeguarding the interests of Egypt. Road map for implementation of changes in place. Peaceful transfer. Safeguard the youth revolution. Civilized realization of the demands of the people. We can make this future bright, rife with freedom and democracy. We can't allow perpetrating and plotting against Egypt. Go home and go back to work. Don't listen to the seditious news. We have started work, relying on God and the armed forces. Team spirit. Vows to work for the homeland.

"Boring Vice Torturer"....

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1:45pm...Reporter on AJ says the street reaction is outrage. The military has split into factions over this. Liable to be bloodshed. No longer an organized protest, but a revolution with its own momentum.

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1:55pm... Israel is whining via AJ correspondent. Big surprise, I know.

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2:10pm... Retired military officer telling AJ he can't figure out if Mubarak has transferred any power at all. Hopes to get a better perspective in an hour or two. Says there are about four million people in the streets right now. [After midnight in Cairo.]

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2:25pm... Hundreds of protestors have started marching to the presidential palace in Heliopolis... may grant Mubarak's wish to die on Egyptian soil.

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4:00pm... I just snapped off AJ. I'm left hoping Mrs. Mubarak puts some cyanide in Hosni's bedtime regimen or that the faction that lit out for the palace takes him out, but I can't take listening to this anymore. It just makes me fearful and angry.

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love, 99
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i'm being vindicated left and right lately

[click image]

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Better be careful not to get too cocky... and, of course, I'd love to be right about happier things....

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love, 99
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yes, i really do hate that funhouse mirror image

[click image]

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I know he didn't mean for me to take it that way, but—he really IS a funhouse mirror image of a human, aka SPACE LIZARD.

Oddly, not a single journalist raised this extraordinary connection with US government officials — nor the blatant conflict of interest it appears to represent.

Mr Wisner is a retired State Department 36-year career diplomat – he served as US ambassador to Egypt, Zambia, the Philippines and India under eight American presidents. In other words, he was not a political appointee. But it is inconceivable Hillary Clinton did not know of his employment by a company that works for the very dictator which Mr Wisner now defends in the face of a massive democratic opposition in Egypt.

So why on earth was he sent to talk to Mubarak, who is in effect a client of Mr Wisner's current employers?

Fuck. No matter how devious he is, he can NEVER out-devious Hillary. And this is what people call "presidential" in 2011. How mindfucked are you to even consider it?

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I suppose I could as well put this under Harman's post below, but Glenn Greenwald is saying it in the Egyptian Corruption vs. American Corruption column, so I will too:

How many American politicians with a national platform over the last thirty years have failed to convert their political standing into great personal wealth? Perhaps only those who began their political careers with great wealth. Ex-Presidents and their wives and top aides are routinely lavished with many millions of dollars from media companies and other corporations for books, speeches and other services (Obama didn't even wait to become President to capitalize on his political celebrity), while a large portion of ex-members of Congress and administration officials with any real power feed at the trough of corporate largesse in exchange for peddling their influence. It would literally be impossible to list all the top officials from both parties who have quickly converted their political influence into vast personal wealth over the past two decades; it'd be much quicker to list the few who haven't.

And that's to say nothing of the virtually limitless political power automatically wielded by those with great private wealth, who own America's government institutions and literally write most of its laws.

Kablammy, and to think he's dulled by dengue fever!

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love, 99
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as you know, i have grave misgivings about these toppling regimes

[click image]

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Not that I'm against them toppling, but I am very worried about who's in line to replace them. I know we have had agitators assigned to various Middle East, North African and Central Asian countries for quite some time and the ability of oligarchs to manipulate mass consciousness has been proven transcendentally effective. So it is IMPERATIVE we remember to think critically AND not be distracted from putting ourselves in shape to survive the gathering storm.

And, get it straight, TwitFace is not your friend.

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For instance, this is making the rounds on TwitFace:

During this critical time, while Mubarak is attempting to derail the Egyptians’ Revolution, we call on the National Coalition to stay firm on our demands:

1. Immediate resignation of Hosni Mubarak.
2. The creation of temporary National Gov’t comprised of the people who the Egyptians can trust. The former regime should be excluded from this Gov’t.

New Leadership Responsibilities:

— All political prisoners should be released.
— The accountability of the former regime in respect to policies towards: poverty and torture.
— Freedom to all Egyptians to form their own political factions without governmental interference.

Until all the above demands are met we call on all Egyptians to:

— Call for a general strike starting Sunday the 30th of January, 2011.
— Form a national group in all Egyptian communities to protect public welfare and to face anyone who tries to meddle and destroy our governmental (public) and privately owned properties.
— Do not give the previous regime (i.e Mubarak) and their cronies the opportunity to give a bad picture of this uprising and revolution.

Long Live The Egyptian Revolution

All freedom belongs to the Egyptians.

All sacrifice belongs to the homeland.

Sounds great! Doesn't it?

All morning I was hearing al Jazeera reporting that the word on the street is that the people want ElBaradei—a resident of VIENNA—to lead the temporary national government. Most Egyptians don't even know who he is... or even what the IAEA is. Those who have heard of him have only heard about him on TV... through the mass media... the media that are owned and operated by the controlling elite... people we can't trust with ANYTHING... the people who installed the dictators the people are overthrowing... The Enemy.

We all like ElBaradei for not caving to pressure to "exaggerate" a nuclear threat from Iran... except... obviously, now, that was his mandate. He didn't defy anyone to stick to the truth. And after a big deal being made of him returning to Egypt when he stepped down from the IAEA, he didn't really move back at all. He lives in Vienna, and had to quickly hop a flight to Cairo in order to make Friday Prayers, be placed under house arrest and yet be mystically available to assure locals he is willing to put together the temporary government. I don't know. I think you ought not to take this stuff at face value. That's what got us here.

PLUS, "accountability for poverty and torture" is a big problem for US now too... but what are WE doing?

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love, 99
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i've been worrying about this for at least a week

[click image]

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Notwithstanding the outrage over F. William Engdahl daring to suggest such a thing, this is a real possibility. I'm not getting over having been duped by the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine. It reminds me of when my horse kicked me in the head. She was trying to kick another horse, but got me instead, and for many years after my stomach would start trying to trade places with my liver every time I was in a corral with a loose horse. No, just because you've been kicked in the head five or six times by color and flower revolutions doesn't mean every one of them has been incited by our covert ops, but we do have to keep asking that goddam question we learned was key when we got kicked in the head in 2001. I might not have even mentioned this, because I truly am in visceral solidarity with the Egyptians and Tunisians and Yemenis and all those rising up around the world, except for my reaction to seeing ElBaradei's name keep popping up in news accounts of the Egyptian uprising.

We have been hearing about him for Mubarak's post ever since he left the IAEA. Just like we kept hearing Hillary's name for president since the day after Clinton left office. She was going to be president until they realized a black president would be even harder to dis whilst bringing hardcore fascism down around us. You know that's so. THE MEDIA ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS. Their function is to keep us in a specially-crafted consensus trance, they didn't change their tune about Hillary until their bosses decided on Obama, and then we got a veritable cosmic symphony of celebration of Martin's Dream while the McCain/Palin circus kept the bubbas busy... so we DO need to be suspicious as hell right now.

The United States DOES have armies of black ops in every country of strategic interest. That's been shown over and over and over. JSOC has been busily hiring since the advent of Genghis Ponzi Yoo's administration, so think. Find links. Pray The Guardian starts hitting the Cairo cables hard... or at least one of the sites trying to help wade through them.

... and ... just as I was about to mention my worry about whether we should not now suspect Anonymous too, I see THIS... which has made me more suspicious. Mindfuckers Rule the World. We need our own global news operation. We couldn't get it, no matter what, because they would infiltrate it and coöpt it. This. Is. NO. Fun.

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love, 99
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palestinian version of hatfields and mccoys

[click image]

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They're every bit as susceptible to mindfucking as we are. Clearly.

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DON'T give me that innocent look.

One of the things that shocks me the most about this kind of thing is how willing everyone seems to be to bend over and just take it. We’ll carry guns to rallies and have a genuine freak-out if someone suggests raising the top marginal rate a point, but there are honest to goodness abuses of authority and prosecutorial misconduct every single day, and only a few people really speak up about it. Hell, even at this website, where the commenters mainly identify as center to center-left, when allegations of misconduct and abuse by our government are put forward, the reaction among a fair number of people is to get their panties in a bunch about the blogger who mentioned it, or to simply swallow the government line. It’s insane. WikiLeaks is a perfect case in point — I know when I find out that my government is lying to me, my first reaction is to get really mad at Julian Assange and Bradley Manning and Glenn Greenwald, and to spend several months talking about whether or not Assange’s ego is too big or if Glenn uses too many words.

Just craziness.

Your ass is grass as long as you keep letting your default settings run you. YOU did NOT set those defaults. THEY did. YOUR responsibility is to get rid of them, to wake up.

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AND DON'T BE DISTRACTED.

[O]ne of the more noteworthy developments is an accelerating campaign to remove the mojahedin-e khalq, or MEK, from the U.S. Government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. Over the last few months, a number of prominent Republicans—including John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former White House homeland security and counterterrorism coordinator Fran Townsend, and new House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen—have been publicly agitating to delist the MEK. But this effort has now gone bipartisan and big time, including engaging the services of a Washington, DC consulting firm.

To document this last point, we link here to the video of an event held in Washington last week, clearly designed to build public support for delisting the MEK as part of a U.S.-led campaign for regime change in Tehran. The event was organized by Executive Action, LLC, which describes itself as “a McKinsey & Company with muscle, a private CIA and Defense Department available to address your most intractable problems and difficult challenges”. (Exactly who engaged Executive Action’s services for this event is not clear.) Featured speakers included not only Republican figures like Mukasey, but also retired U.S. Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni; former New Mexico Governor, Clinton Administration cabinet officer, and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson; former Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli; and retired Marine Corps General James Jones—who just stepped down, in November 2010, as President Obama’s first national security adviser. [And particularly scary, go to video hour 1:16 and see for yourself.] All of the speakers argued for bringing down the Islamic Republic and forging a new political order in Iran—and for embracing the MEK as the foundation of a new Iranian “opposition” capable of bringing about both of these objectives.

If this action doesn't help convince you of the error of your conditioned partisan identification, nothing will.

History DOES rhyme. And we KNOW this drill.

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love, 99
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another pile up

[click image — listing important points from Cablegate]

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I don't know if this will turn into my usual mode. It too is NOT helpful for people trying to search for things here... or link to something here... but almost everything is linked via the untracked URL shorteners on TwitFace these days anyway and there just isn't any way around the fact that even the longest and most precise documentations of things amount to ephemera SO much more quickly than ever before and searching anything anywhere has its good days and its bad days in any case and since I'm not piling it up and then posting it, but rather posting it and then piling it up, you can still get yer daily hits of protective mindfucks in titrated blasts.... The great part about being me is I can just do it how I do it when I do it and keep open for that little flaw in the fabric to use conditions to enhance the possibilities for everyone....

Reminder....

Well, who among us is going to CHECK?

Probably impossible to maintain empire without the Big Pharma....

Theater....

Tony who?

RIGHT HERE....

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The very existence of the Department of Homeland Security is due in large part to Senator Lieberman. Dating back to the first days after 9/11, he has been an instrumental architect of the very way we work to keep America safe from the evolving threats we face in the 21st century. Senator Lieberman's tireless, nonpartisan efforts have truly made our country more secure, and he has my personal thanks. I wish him the very best in his upcoming retirement, and I look forward to continuing to work with him to secure our country over the next two years.

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Today's Keiser Report....

How much more last millennium can you get?

Gaiavores' dream....

Keystone Kops....

How that hopey/changey thing is working out in the Gulf....

But we can still make fashion statements....

More Lieberman loss lamentation....

Awwwww....

They mindfuck cops too....

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Reports emanating from Central Somalia yesterday indicate that a unit of United States forces descended in an area called Gaan, 18 kilometres north of Haradhere, a former base of the notorious Somali pirates and a current stronghold of Al-Shabaab, the Somali Islamist movement opposing the government.

The marines are said to have used a helicopter to reach the remote location.

According to Shabelle, a broadcaster in Mogadishu, five armed soldiers descended from the chopper and immediately handcuffed three Somali youth that were next to a vehicle being repaired following a breakdown.

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I'm looking forward to a time when I'm not on a secret watch, search, harass, detain, interrogate, delay, annoy and stress list. —Jacob Appelbaum

Churchill Club forum on Why WikiLeaks Matters... video, nearly two hours....

Tsarion on Energy Vampires... video, hour and a half....

Not being a dope about the Baby Doc thing....

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love, 99
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never even a partly-plausible explanation in school

[click image]

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Not even at university. Aren't you tired of stunting yourself to get along? Will this be okay with you on your deathbed? Have you not even the courage to realize where you've been misled and amend it? And couldn't you ever admit this in public to help it start being okay with more stunted people? No? Really?

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Lots of Egyptology podcasts to listen to here....

[Well, not really Egyptology so much as Egyptly gossiping and bashing academe... so sorta fun to listen to anyway.]

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love, 99
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theories abound

[click image]

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I keep getting asked about all these die-offs of various critters. I'd already been onto the outrageous cetacean beachings everywhere, and the bees, but crustaceans and birds and fish and lort only knows what have been making the news across the globe lately too. I've seen all of these:

Activist Post

Mainstream Explanations:  Lightning, hail, mid-air collision, power lines, and New Year fireworks for the birds . . . but disease for the fish.  This is even rolling eyes in the mainstream media.  Birds are incredibly sensitive to their environment (think Canary in the coal mine), and the thought that they were caught by surprise, or that they "fowled" up their flight pattern is patently ridiculous.  And where are the roasted birds from this lightning strike?  And what about fish dying in the same region?  Just a "disease" coincidence.  One mainstream headline has to be enshrined as the saddest attempt at sensationalism, while revealing an obvious natural conclusion Falling Birds Likely Died From Massive Trauma.  Really?

Meteor showers:  We are in a period of intense seasonal meteor showers, and several perennial YouTubers reported hearing sonic booms in the area that could have indicated a local shock wave.  This would be one non-conspiratorial, natural cause that actually makes sense, but it is hard to connect to both birds and fish, unless it produced a disabling frequency.  There were indeed other sound anomalies according to the report highlighted above.

New Madrid Fault Line:  An excellent article by The American Dream collated data about the recent earthquake activity along this fault line that runs along the mid-eastern section of the U.S.  Combined with gas fracking, the immense geological activity in the region, and the BP oil drilling disaster, which off-gassed the dispersant, Corexit, into the atmosphere, and we should be wondering about any mass deaths in the region.  Nevertheless, this has turned into a global event, so the above could be a side effect of something larger, or a direct contributing factor.

Government testing:  The long history of government testing has been exposed by many researchers.  The strange component to this die-off is that only certain species have been affected, but within the entire region.  And some reports have indicated that the organs of these birds were liquefied, which could indicate a possible virus. Could this implicate species-specific bio-weapons? It is on record that discussions have taken place about race-specific bio-weapons; perhaps this is a test of delivery capability?

GMO mutation:  Mike Adams of Natural News sets forth an interesting theory: this latest event is local, but the die-offs are happening across species as bee populations and bats are also declining.  Adams points out that Monsanto has a corporate office in Arkansas.  Just wondering.

Geoengineering:  Could spraying in the area have caused this type of fallout?  Perhaps something new added to the mixture? Chemtrails have quickly moved from conspiracy theory to documented fact.  So much so, that the powers-that-be have had to admit to the program, but a beneficial one in their view.  Between cloud seeding and possible connections to HAARP, chemtrail fallout must be considered, especially as it is being conducted nearly worldwide.  Rosalind Peterson has been at the forefront of connecting geoengineering to GMOs as a combined source for oxygen-depleting algae blooms that very well could affect a wide spectrum of natural systems. Furthermore, some believe that the delivery system for chemtrails can also disperse pathogens.  If there is a flu or disease outbreak in the coming days or weeks among the human population in areas where the birds have fallen, the chemtrail connection could be made.  If this happens, the contagion could be blamed on a new, deadly bird flu.  A last possibility connected to chemtrails would be nanoparticles.

HAARP:  Birds and fish can be susceptible to subtle frequency alteration.  An interesting YouTube post from a long-time fisherman mentioned the "pearl" plate behind the eye of the affected type of drum fish in this event.  He made a plea for anyone in the area to look for signs of damage to this plate.  Both birds and fish navigate in highly coordinated ways that indicate that they move and communicate via frequencies.  Could the HAARP array in Alaska have short-circuited their navigation systems?  Or, perhaps this is the beginning of a cascading effect from decades of electromagnetic pollution emanating from EMF and ELF waves shot around the planet via a wide range of modern communications.

Scalar Weapons:  These directed energy beam weapons can be deployed via satellite and create a wide range of "natural disasters" that can be tuned to certain frequencies.  Their radius is reported to be several miles.  Even crazier is that we have been told that the dead birds encountered massive trauma.  One of the reported abilities of scalar weapons is to create a Tesla shield of plasma, like a bubble, that could explode anything that enters its airspace.  Some have speculated that this technology is in full operation.  But what if it truly is still at the testing phase?  Remember, this is happening in South America, too.

Project Blue Beam:  Were they testing a sound generator for the global theater of alien invasion?  This one is "out there" for sure, but NASA itself has announced its preparation for such a scenario. Project Blue Beam, like its counterpart HAARP, uses the natural energy present in the ionosphere as both a visual and acoustical device.  Again, perhaps they are not at the ready stage yet, but, like Tesla, have made an unintentional misstep. 

Geomagnetic and other Earth changes:  As anyone can see from the above range of possibilities, we are facing an array of human tampering.  However, the backdrop to this are the anomalies beginning to take form with the apparent wandering of our magnetic pole, as even National Geographic reported that the north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia.  Add to this a dwindling magnetosphere and falling oxygen levels, and the deaths among more delicate species might portend a larger problem.  Finally, an increase in sun activity and magnetic storms might be weakening our overall natural habitat.

Plus more.

I have a sneaking suspicion this is something akin to the new torture method mentioned by b yesterday. They're flashing awful images in our cell to make us uneasy, to make us more afraid of what they're going to do to us.

Whatever's the case, this last notion should be turned around. They should be afraid of what we're going to do to them. They never will be if we keep watching those ugly images flashing in our darkness.

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love, 99
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o'tutankhamun

[click image, playlist, NINE hours]

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Hear all about the Irish boy king... contemplate the mindfucking that has gone into everything we only think we know. Time-consuming, but could prove transcendental....

Note well: even recent news not only doesn't mention his Western-European DNA but mentions things that lead one away from that covered up discovery. Think, indeed, of all the truth tellers whose righteous information has been kept from reaching the masses. Think of how out of it this makes the masses. Think how tricking us becomes progressively easier, how we might as well be chimps when it gets to this point.



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love, 99
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i'm neglecting my doctorate in out there

[click image, playlist]

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I love listening to these alternative historians. Even if I can't hang with some of the symbolism stuff they come up with, some of their well-educated speculation, they are just loaded down with facts you NEVER see in the mainstream, stuff completely inaccessible to anyone but those who will REALLY give their lives to digging for the truth. I'm only a couple of vids into the playlist just now and already he's said a couple things that gave me some STRONG ah-ha hits. Einstein once said that truth makes music, and that rang like perfect truth to me when I first read it. Ever since, I have been ultra-alert to the kind of music new bits of information or insight make. It's a great gauge of what has merit. One still should check to be sure it isn't one's conditioning making stuff sound right, but after some practice, and with the baseline conviction not to fall for the programming, this stuff begins to get one somewhere beside lost in a cramped little dark, dark, pitch dark box.

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Doggedly, I slog through the whole thing, but I think the very best bits came right at the start. Most of the rest of it is just so full of really not very compelling speculation. I mean, they stick to the general script, the broad overview of what the true landscape HAS to look like, but sheesh, what I go through to become conversant enough with this stuff sometimes makes me doubt the value of so much work. Maybe it was just the subcommittee crap from earlier but I'm having a very hard time keeping my attention on this sort of superficially interesting blather.

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love, 99
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peter b and sibel talk to ray mcgovern — UPDATING

[click image]

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... Vladimir Putin's opposite number in a state spy organ. Just needed to reïterate the asininity of thinking Putin is some kind of devil because he was a KGB agent. Putin joined the KGB at age 23 and resigned at age 40. McGovern, after serving as an intelligence officer in the military for a couple years, spent twenty-seven years in the CIA, and decorated by Bush for his service, before retiring. I am not besmirching McGovern. I'm saying you're being a thoughtless ass for thinking Putin is some kind of demon on this basis.

It's also my opinion that you are being a thoughtless ass if you think Putin has been killing all those journalists and spies, when he has so many murderous billionaire oligarchs working full time to discredit him. Yes, if I were Putin, I'd have rounded them up, locked them all in the slammer and thrown away the key. Putin only told them they could keep their filthy lucre so long as they NEVER interfered in politics in any way. A distinctly anti-fascist move, designed to get the most for the Russian economy while protecting it from further depredation by billionaire crime bosses. He has been as good as his word. He leaves them alone, but the moment they start trying to take over media organs and political movements, kabam, they're locked up. Much more difficult and dangerous than my way, but probably better for the people of Russia, given all the givens.

I don't know Putin's soul—haven't Dubya's powers of insight, I guess—but I want you to quit solidifying around all the bullshit propaganda you've been fed, and hysterical raving and finger pointing by people more avid to lap that up than even you are. If you have seen nothing else by visiting this blog, you have to have started putting it together that our minds have been being controlled for our whole lives, that our time in school was about planting all the basic misrepresentations upon which to perpetuate our exploitation.

We have no viable basis for dissing Putin or Russia, while Putin and Russia have a multitude of bases for dissing us.

And I've given up on the Wikileaks controversies because they have now muddied it all so hopelessly that it doesn't bear comment anymore, that it's actually wrong to comment on it at all now... even though, obviously, others don't see it that way.

So, viva Wikileaks.

If you listen to McGovern droning, here, all the way through, he seems to be making a pretty good case that the danger of Israel attacking Iran any day now is high....

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For your entertainment...

I just went out to inspect my garden, pluck bits of tree duff from the Scottish moss, see if I oughta water, scrutinize the daisy scene, ignore for once the weeds, that sort of thing... and my neighbor yelled out her window that she thought I ought to write a book and call it The Barefoot Contessa. I told her I thought that had already been done. She says a sequel would be just the thing.

Sigh.

I should have asked to speak with her husband, just to goose her....

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For your convenience...

I've noticed people coming in from various social media sites and so I got over myself enough to make it easier for you to share this stuff when you are inclined. Find now itty little unobtrusive buttons under posts toward this end. I still don't approve of your participation on those harbingers of doom, but I do in fact want your life to be easier.

I tried doing it with this cool gizzy that floats along at the bottom of your screen and might even have used it, despite its search function being Google, except that it put a big blot on whatever image was on the screen, instructing you to click it to share it. I'd thought merely clicking in the floating toolbar gizzy would suffice, but... noooooo. So I yanked that puppy, pending some ability to make it stop being so obnoxious. [Got rid of the obnoxious part the very next day.] [It's a damn Israeli company and I can't do that.]

Having thus put myself on the precipice of a headache, I will now engage in my coffee thing and chill.

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For my aggravation...

Not having my medicine coffee yet, I just noticed that now Blogger has put stats on my dashboard... on top of the whole comments and spam malarkey.... No sooner do I nix Google Analytics for being Google Analytics on TOP of not being accurate, which none of them are, none—let me repeat—none of them are accurate, and not very edifying at all, being mostly geared toward people wishing to gauge themselves against targets they set for themselves, or some such twaddle, than they decide to put their bullshit stats on my dashboard!

What is this?

The Perils of Pauline?

Crikey.

Anyway, I think Blogger must be feeling the pain from too many moving over to WordPress, because they are trying to make this have all the functions of WordPress blogs. I'd've moved to WordPress if they'd let me have my goddam template. They would if I pay, and they would if I wanna use their software on my own site, which involves paying too. So I guess Blogger/Google is trying to prevent more defections or something. They could probably recoup a lot of popularity simply by returning to conformance with their old motto; to wit: DON'T BE EVIL. But that, I guess, would be too much like altruistic or something, and fascists aren't having ANY o' dat.

Right. Coffee.

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For Edna's edification...

Someone by the name of Edna, I hope not my aunt, wants to know how I can be so assertive about stats being inaccurate. I know because I have had friends who were obsessed with stats and popularity ratings on certain ratings services. I have NOT been able to hang with that stuff, even as I have tried to be a good neighbor, a good Netizen, and do what I can to help, with links and joining services, the works. I tried to go along peacefully with that stuff, but then I started noticing wild anomalies, which put me in mind to try out the various and sundry popularity enhancing tools and stats services and ratings systems... all that shit... and see if I could find some measure of uniformity, or even a trend toward yielding up a viable notion when combining them all in some abstract formula. Zip. Bubkes. No dice. The places purporting to keep track of who's linking to you miss shitloads of them. The places purporting to rate your popularity miss shitloads of them AND adopt some completely inscrutable formula for deciding your popularity rating, and, sure enough, your rating goes up and down, sometimes by hundreds of points, with NO correlation to any other measuring device extant. At whim. Not any of the services that count your visitors, at least none of the free ones, agree on Thing One. They can diverge from hundreds of hits to thousands of hits, according to cosmic alignments only.

I then took each in turn and did everything I could to test the patency of their information. Not only could I not make them count or reflect any of these testing maneuvers with any reliability, but as though by karma, things would happen, accidental discoveries be made, that showed it was NOT just me. It was happening to everyone. And systems you felt you could contribute to in order to boost someone or some post you admired, could be and WERE being GAMED by maniacs, to actually make it more harmful to speak up for some truth teller or other than to just nut up. It seems that if you insist on these things, the best way is to just pick one and tell yourself to believe that, which I, of course, do NOT endorse, delusion being very low on my totem pole. I kept ONE of the stats services because OCCASIONALLY it lets me identify an asshole... which I am happy to report is not necessary very often.

Maybe paid services are more reliable. Probably not.

I'm sure it's all new and improved from the satanic games at Digg and Reddit over at MyBook and TwitFace and SpaceBuzz, for whatever other failings I'm certain inhere, but I'm crazy enough, thank you. You are welcome to go there, and now you can even go some of there from here, but that's as far as I can go.

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For my entertainment...

I rented "Brooklyn's Finest" since Richard Gere is in it; "The City of Your Final Destination" because I have to find out; and "Date Night" because that Carell guy is so pleasantly putzy. I need a rest from my doctoral blitz. That stuff Farrell was talking about last night fried my circuits. I gotta slow up to get all my wires back in order.

I may even put some brandy in my evening blueberry thing.

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For your information...

Date Night was a dud, with some very, very funny spots in it. Steve Carell is so entertaining, but I was disappointed by pretty much all the rest of it.

Brooklyn's Finest was sad and horrible and Richard Gere was the very least engaging of anyone in it. That was hard to bear. He just wasn't convincing at all... or rather... went sooooo far into the empty shell he was playing that he was just, well... completely empty. Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke were riveting... even though the plot lines and situations were outright horrifying. The movie really slammed the living shit out of upper level law enforcement, and placed the cops down here with us human refuse. Still, I don't think it excuses them. I won't think it until they start realizing who they are and who we are... and pick the right side.

The City of Your Final Destination was mostly a day dream, a dream of love and gorgeous loneliness. They had to throw in a bit about the parents who had to flee the Nazis, the parents who didn't feel safe anywhere, just had to elevate the suffering of the chosen while it went about making us dream. Great acting, mostly, and gorgeous setting, but I really hated having to be jarred awake at the end.

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liberal wingnut trolls

[click image, via Agent BB2]

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I find I am beginning to lose my patience on the subject of Julian Assange. I think this is happening because I still fear actually naming the journalists I know are behind Assange and Wikileaks, that my being frustrated in that urge is making me feel testy about people persisting in suspicions I feel have been planted by the Democratic-Fascists to mindfuck you further into uselessness against their true purpose.

I'm pretty pissed off about this.

I don't know if you'd find this salient, but the jackass at the image link had a blog on Obama's campaign page... and this feels a lot like the bust of Obama people planting fake racists in Tea Party protests.

You guys need to remember that perception management is everything to this administration, to the global elite. It is VITAL to them that you keep fighting with your fellows and swimming around in the bottomless glue pits of confusion they keep at a hard simmer for you. There are only a very few of them and there are billions of us. ALL they have to do to keep us down is to keep us benighted. And almost nobody seems even remotely inclined to snap out of it.

I'm begging you: SNAP OUT OF IT.

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A good showing by John Pilger.

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