our resolve leaves something to be desired

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So far, the news is doing nothing for me. I think they've dialed-up the apathy rays again.

A Wisconsin judge issued a temporary restraining order Friday blocking the state's new and contentious collective bargaining law from taking effect, raising the possibility that the Legislature may have to vote again to pass the bill.

Dane County District Judge Maryann Sumi granted the restraining order in response to a lawsuit filed by the district attorney alleging that Republican lawmakers violated the state's open meetings law by hastily convening a special committee before the Senate passed the bill.

Sumi said her ruling would not prevent the Legislature from reconvening the committee with proper notice and passing the bill again.

So don't get excited... and I cannot recommend highly enough that you watch yesterday's Keiser Report. If you are SERIOUS, you will watch it and listen at least twice.

Seems the Pragmatists of Groupthink may not have thought this one through.

The Newspaper Guild has joined a group of Huffington Post bloggers in protesting the site's pay policy — specifically, its lack of pay.

The union said it requested a meeting with the Huffington Post to discuss the situation. "Thus far, the request has been ignored," the guild wrote.

“The idea of going on strike when no one really notices,” Huffington said. “Go ahead, go on strike.”

The Newspaper Guild, though, has over 26,000 members.

The natural comeback for this is that blogging for free at HuffPo gives you needed exposure for your own blog. She will point to the success of FireDogLake, and The Young Turks. And, especially, let you be on strike until doomsday because there are a trillion more bloggers and celebs out there who will jump at the chance to fill your shoes.

I'd be inclined to look at this as an opportunity to reclaim your soul... but that's me.

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love, 99
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you know that knitting blog i've been threatening?

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Well, you can stop worrying. You wouldn't believe what I've been doing for the past six hours. I've been wading through the "design" blogs by wealthy housewives. O.M.G. They've all been scouring flea markets and junktique shops and reading the Crate&Barrel catalog on the john. Utterly pathetic. I don't know how many thousands I have paged through and couldn't even find one good enough to link.

Fussy. NO composition. Every last one of them makes sickening blather whenever hubby must go out of town, like they think he's going to check from the road, while they're fucking the gardener and snapping half-wilted flowers draped over the edges of their beds with their free hand. Like I said: O.M.G. I need my head examined.

Nobody's dying at our hands.

Nobody's been facing-down stormtroopers.

Nobody's sick on the Redneck Riviera.

Nobody's being tortured by our puppets.

Did I mention that each of them is so disgustingly sweet I have barfed any number of times? O.M.G. They are all one no-talent airhead. I'm not kidding. Horrific. Horrific. Horrific. People who are unfailingly darling over crap, total, soulless crap, are the most evil of all.

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love, 99
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dueling jackasses

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Bill Ryan and Kerry Cassidy had a good thing going, going out and interviewing all the best proponents of Out There and uploading the result to YouTube. They got very popular, very quickly for providing this service. Then, and I think this is due to Bill dumping Kerry for a much more interesting woman in Europe, their team split and all manner of nastiness ensued in Outer Outer Blogistan. They began competing for the most eyeprints on their individual stuff. Bill was winning, hands down, even letting Kerry spin her wheels on any number of whackos, but then he decided to top himself with his "Charles" and "The Rulers of the World" thing. This inflamed Kerry's already pyrotechnic ire and she has retaliated with this "White Hats" shit.

They have formally cancelled each other out, and we can only hope some grownups—more interested in chronicling the work of alternative scholars, researchers, historians, physicists, et al., than squabbling over whose world view obtains or who sleeps with who—take up delivering the goods while these two war themselves into blissful oblivion.

If one's purpose is really popularity instead of enlightening being—no matter how many flowery and altruistic-sounding speeches one makes—it shows up soon enough, eh?

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love, 99
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at least it will be obvious now even to diehards

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I mean, I don't like admitting I know people who go there every day for their news.

The Huffington Post is privately owned by its two co-founders, Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, as well as investors. AOL's statement said the directors of each company and shareholders of the Huffington Post have already approved the [sale to AOL], which is expected to be completed by the middle of the year.

Originally a politics blog aimed at Democrats, the Huffington Post branched out into celebrity coverage and turned itself into one of the biggest pieces of real estate in online news media in the US, rapidly overtaking more established media organisations such as the Washington Post by deftly utilising the internet to exploit untapped markets.

Huffington has said that her site made a profit in 2010 for the first time. The New York Times reported that Huffington Post executives estimate that the site will generate $60m in revenue this year, compared with $31m in 2010.

Maybe now people will grok that this is MSM we're talkin'... brain sucking mass hypnosis... brought to you by space lizards... sliming you from every corner of "civilization", INCLUDING the intertubes.

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love, 99
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LOL

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Raimondo loses patience with Arianna helping Hosni with her legendarily assholish headlines.

I see the Huffington Post has another one of their over-sized screaming headlines: "Day of Departure — Will Massive March Force Mubarak's Hand?"

Yes, that's right, Arianna — you airhead — Mubarak will be "forced" to kill, jail, and repress the protesters in Tahrir Square and around the country because their march was too massive.

Why does anybody take this social-climbing limousine faux-liberal seriously? She married a gay guy — Michael Huffington came out to her before they tied the knot — so she could stay in the country, and then acted surprised when she "found out" he played for the Other Team. I say put her on a plane — albeit not before disabling her gaudy purple Blackberry — and ship her back to Greece, pronto.

She can't help herself, Justin.

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love, 99
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sunday in egypt uprising — UPDATED

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I know I'm tuning into today's uprising early, but I mistimed my nap. I'm crabby as hell to find the hairdos on al Jazeera now referring to the citizens' watch groups as "vigilantes". That's so much more colorful... and pleasing to plutocrats as a bonus. The truth fills the people on the streets and I am outraged to hear media turning it into lowly words and mind control.

It is Sunday in Egypt, which is the Egyptian equivalent of our Monday. The military has closed off the downtown area, keeping cars out, but letting people walk in. Reports of old people quaking in their homes with clubs, waiting for young men to come take everything they have, but, as of now, that is not happening. The people are policing themselves pretty darn well by what I can see and glean from when they actually interview Egyptians in the middle of it. Too much attention to the crap on the web. But... the day is just beginning... and the people will be out in force again today.

Heh, Chris Floyd seems to be in a similar mood:

Oh, but you know what? We even shouldn't be talking about all this. This whole Egyptian uprising business seems to be making some of our leading progressives feel a bit wiggly. Atrios, for example, has salted several of his brief squibs about these momentous events with grumpy asides. For example:

I get a bit fed up with the ultra-serious tweeting and retweeting the revolution stuff which happens when Big Events are going on.

Yes, don't you just hate that? People being all ultra-serious and stuff about a brave popular uprising in a long-repressed land? I mean, really: couldn't they just do some cat-blogging or something? That would be, like, way more cool.

Or this:

I get a wee bit uncomfortable at the way people enthusiastically cheer on revolutionary movements in other countries they don't know much about. I'm not defending bad governments, just objecting to the notion that revolution=democracy. It's never clear what will emerge on the other side.

Yeah, that makes me squirm a wee bit in my Barcalounger as well: people being all ignorantly enthusiastic about these breakthrough moments in history, these rare upsurgings of the human spirit. Why, they probably haven't even read an article from the Center for American Progress telling them what to think about it yet! People like that should just shut up.

For my part, it's mostly been about the audacity of what we only call things in this world. I'm chuffed that they're reporting Mubarak's appointments of vice president and prime minister as though Mubarak were pharaoh, as though someone can have proclaimed himself "president" and that means he can impose his will and whim for thirty years and everybody—EVEN when the entire nation is in the streets screaming for him to get out—keeps talking as though he is President of Egypt and those silly swearings-in had anything to do with actuality.

Two people got into the museum night before last, almost certainly police, wrecked a couple mummies and smashed a couple things and left. It continues to be reported as though it just happened and things are really senseless and out of hand. That is getting on my nerves. I know, I know, I suck as a reporter because I have so little patience for this crap. I CARE ABOUT THOSE ANTIQUITIES ALMOST AS MUCH AS I CARE FOR THE PEOPLE, BUT, PLEASE, LET'S JUST MAKE SURE THE ANTIQUITIES ARE VERY WELL GUARDED AND CUT THE SENSATIONALISM, CAN WE?

Anyway, everything is jake so far this morning. I'll try to stay awake into the zone where stuff stops happening.

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Democracy Now!'s Kouddous reports from Cairo....

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I LOVE THEM.

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2:15am PST:

Okay. I just had to snap off al Jazeera. Couldn't take another second of their prattle, despite the occasional infusion of information we can use. The hairdos of this world have ALWAYS sent me over the edge, and my Zen gets very brittle and volatile after a while when faced with them in such heavy rotation. I mean, for sure it's better when they're only images on a screen and I don't have to scare the living snot out of them, which I unerringly do, in person, but, still... not pretty.

It is not pretty.

I've heard guys on the street, local bloggers, a journalist in Suez, I think, and one very riled woman protestor, ALL saying the looting was instigated by the state to frighten people into staying home to protect their belongings. This accounts fully for why the riot police suddenly disappeared from the streets yesterday. I don't know if it has worked. It's after noon in Cairo now and the crowds are still thin. I know they don't hit full stride until later, but I think there should be more people out right now. I don't want to sit here getting angrier and more frustrated over this stupid coverage for which I should be very, very grateful, it being the ONLY coverage of the Egyptian uprising we have.

I have added a bunch of links to this post that ought to keep you busy if you are patient enough to read back through and hunt them down, and I hope you will add links in comments while I'm trying to pull myself back together and/or getting some sleep.

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love, 99
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i'm getting into my not-a-tub

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Try not to think about it....

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No. Really.

Officials: US drops demand for settlement freeze
By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press – Tue Dec 7, 5:38 pm ET

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has abandoned attempts to persuade Israel to slow West Bank settlement activity, officials said Tuesday, dealing a major blow to the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and one of the president's top foreign policy initiatives.

After months of trying to broker a formula under which Israel would impose a new, temporary settlement freeze in return for U.S. promises and incentives, two American officials said the administration has concluded that course won't work. The decision was expected to be announced later Tuesday.

Talks stalled in September, barely a month after they started. The Palestinians refused to return to direct negotiations until a new freeze was in place following the expiration of an earlier, 10-month Israeli slowdown in settlement expansion.

Now, said the U.S. officials, American pressure for a three-month moratorium and the U.S. incentives package, which included political, diplomatic and security assurances for Israel, are off the table. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

The White House's bid for a Middle East peace settlement was a longshot from the start, but its apparent breakdown comes at a time when the administration is struggling on a number of fronts abroad. There is slow progress in the Afghan war, increasing friction with China and the embarrassing deluge of confidential diplomatic cables released by the website WikiLeaks.

The U.S. officials said the administration was not giving up efforts to broker a peace deal and noted that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will visit Washington next week for consultations.

The U.S. will be talking with both sides in the coming days, one of the officials said, while Arab states and other interested countries also will be consulted.

However, the administration's decision to drop support for the Palestinians' key demand could mean the end of the moribund peace process.

Obama had made Israeli-Palestinian peace a major goal of his administration, appointing seasoned peace negotiator George Mitchell as his special Mideast envoy on his second day in office.

Mitchell made dozens of trips to the region to get the parties to agree to direct talks. In early September, with the expiration of the initial slowdown looming, Obama brought Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas along with the leaders of Jordan and Egypt to launch the face-to-face discussions, which failed.

Neither Israeli nor Palestinian officials would comment on the developments in Washington before their official announcement.

Earlier Tuesday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the U.S. had halted talks with Israel on settlement activity because Washington was distracted by the WikiLeaks release of secret documents.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley responded by saying that Israel may have been preoccupied with putting out a huge forest fire that burned until Sunday.

The U.S. had been pressing Israel to renew a moratorium on new settlement construction in exchange for security guarantees and diplomatic assurances of support. Israel wanted those in writing, as well as a pledge that east Jerusalem would be exempt from the moratorium.

The Palestinians refused to return to the peace talks unless Israel halted all building in the West Bank and east Jerusalem — lands they want for part of their future state.

Peace talks began in September but ground to a halt three weeks later after Israel's original moratorium on new West Bank construction expired.

Netanyahu returned from a November trip to the U.S. with a list of guarantees, including 20 next-generation stealth fighter planes and U.S. pledges to veto anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, according to Israeli officials.

In exchange, Israel was asked to renew the expired limits on settlement construction.

Days later the deal snagged after members of Netanyahu's Cabinet demanded a written pledge from the U.S. that the moratorium would exclude east Jerusalem. Such a pledge never materialized.

The U.S. had wanted a moratorium in the hopes that it would allow Israel and the Palestinians to make enough progress in drawing their future borders to make the settlement question irrelevant.

With borders determined, Israel could resume building on any territories it would expect to keep under a final peace deal.

But Israeli officials said Tuesday that short of an understanding on borders, a crisis could erupt if Israel agreed to the freeze sought by the U.S.

Now, said Israeli officials, insisting on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the contacts, the U.S. and Israel have agreed on a statement that "in the coming days and weeks, efforts will continue toward finding ways to renew the direct negotiations in order to reach a framework that would lead in the end to an agreement between the two sides."

I can barely move for the wrath shooting ice crystals through my veins!

Mister North has NOT come through with my barn loft and clawfoot tub. I'm probably going to be dead first.

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I think I will look at it this way: Maybe it will get the anti-Israel profiteers to stop masturbating on Julian Assange.

I have to look for the silver lining. Maybe that will crash JP Morgan too.

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love, 99
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why don't i think duff's made a retraction?

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WikiLeaks Exposes Israeli Mafia’s Growing Influence
Cable reveals Mafia-government connection — But US media don't care to dig for the story
by Justin Raimondo
December 03, 2010

I love how the pundits are yawning over the latest WikiLeaks revelations: oh, there’s nothing to see here, it’s all so boring, no "smoking gun," so let’s just move right along. These people are just plain lazy: they want "scoops" delivered to their front doors, all neatly packaged and labeled as such. In short, they don’t want to have to do any work, beyond the usual cut-and-paste. Which is why a lot of the really juicy stuff coming out of WikiLeaks continues to elude them.

Take, for example, this excerpt from a cable dated May 15, 2009 — entitled "Israel, A Promised Land for Organized Crime?" — sent by our embassy in Tel Aviv, which deals with the rising influence of Israeli organized crime:

"As recently as March 2009, Zvika Ben Shabat, Yaacov Avitan, and Tzuri Roka requested visas to attend a ‘security-related convention’ in Las Vegas. According to local media reports, all three had involvement with OC. Post asked the applicants to provide police reports for any criminal records in Israel, but without such evidence there is no immediate ineligibility for links to OC. Luckily, all three have so far failed to return for continued adjudication of their applications. Nevertheless, it is fair to assume that many known OC figures hold valid tourist visas to the United States and travel freely."

What are organized crime figures doing showing up at a "security-related convention" in Las Vegas? Well, it seems Mr. Zvika Ben Shabat is the President of "H.A.Sh Security Group," an Israeli company that offers security services worldwide. Indeed, they just signed an agreement to start a joint venture with India’s giant Micro-Technologies, a company which is described as follows:

"Micro Technologies was established by Dr. [P.] Shekhar, who served as the person in charge on behalf of the Indian Government for advancement and development of the technology and software field in India (First Director Software Technology Park in India), and his company deals with the development of technologies and is already active in many markets around the world, amongst which are: Denmark, Brussels, Italy, New York, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and more. The company has security technologies for identification and monitoring of cell phones, vehicles, structures, computers, infrastructures and WIFI technologies."

In other words, they specialize in snooping, otherwise known as spying. The first Micro Technologies/H.A. Sh Security Group project is a "command and control center" to be built in Mumbai, India. As for what the H.A.Sh Security Group specializes in, well, take a look at these YouTube videos: here, here, and here, for starters. And get a load of who is the Chairman of H.A.Sh Security: none other than retired Major General Dan Ronen, whose resume appears here:

"2001-2003 – Israel Police: Head of the Operations Division, with the rank of Major General; Coordination of activities of all police units in the operational field; Coordination with the General Security Service and IDF units in the battle against terrorism; 2004-2007 – Israel Police: Commander of Northern Region (the largest of the police regions); Responsible for liaison and coordination vis-à-vis heads of local authorities; Responsible for leading and commanding the overall forces and systems during the second Lebanon War, in missions involving defense of the residents in the northern home front; Areas of Expertise: Combat against terrorism and suicide bombers coordination and operation of emergency and rescue organizations Combat against crime and crime organizations."

Gen. Ronen is listed as the Chairman of H.A.Sh Security Group, with Mr. Ben Shabat, variously described [pdf] as the President, Vice-President, and Director. So why is one of Israel’s former top cops in a business relationship with a known member of the Israeli Mafia?

Enquiring minds want to know!

Ominously, the cable goes on to bemoan the fact that Israeli organized crime figures are no longer automatically prevented from entering the US due to a change in the rules. As the author, someone named Cunningham, notes in an appended comment entitled "OC [Organized Crime] Slipping Through the Consular Cracks":

"Given the growing reach and lethal methods of Israeli OC, blocking the travel of known OC figures to the United States is a matter of great concern to Post. Through collaboration with Israeli and U.S. law enforcement authorities, Post has developed an extensive database and placed lookouts for OC figures and their foot soldiers. Nevertheless, the above visa cases demonstrate the challenges that have arisen since the termination of the Visas Shark in September 2008. Unlike OC groups from the former Soviet Union, Italy, China, and Central America, application of INA 212(a)(3)(A)(ii) against Israeli OC is not specifically authorized per Foreign Affairs Manual 40.31 N5.3. As such, Israelis who are known to work for or belong to OC families are not automatically ineligible for travel to the United States."

"Visas Shark" was apparently a program that effectively excluded organized crime figures from the US, and its termination is noted here: instead, the embassy must go through a complex bureaucratic procedure in order to exclude a suspected organized crime member. First, the consular official must determine that a "reasonable suspicion" exists to identify a visa applicant as a member of an organized crime syndicate, and then the matter goes back to the State Department’s "Office of Legislation, Regulations, and Advisory Assistance," which will then determine if a "reason to believe" the derogatory information on the applicant exists. A whole laundry list of possible "reasons to believe" are listed, including:

"Acknowledgement of membership by the individual, …actively working to further the organization’s aims in a way to suggest close affiliation; Receiving financial support or recognition from the organization; Determination of membership by a competent court; Statement from local or U.S. law enforcement authorities that the individual is a member; Frequent association with other members; Voluntarily displaying symbols of the organization; and participating in the organization’s activities, even if lawful."

Yet it was due to media reports that the author of the cable determined the connection of Messrs Ben Shabat, Avitan, and Roka to organized crime. Is this good enough to have a "reason to believe"? Ask the Office of Legislation, Regulation, and Advisory Assistance — which is what our embassy in Tel Aviv (and, indeed, our embassies all around the world) must do before they can refuse a visa to an applicant on that basis.

Not that the Israeli Mafia has had any problem entering the United States in the past — and making its presence felt. As Fox News’ Carl Cameron reported on December 17, 2001:

"Los Angeles, 1997, a major local, state and federal drug investigating sours. The suspects: Israeli organized crime with operations in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Canada, Israel and Egypt. The allegations: cocaine and ecstasy trafficking, and sophisticated white-collar credit card and computer fraud.

"The problem: according to classified law enforcement documents obtained by Fox News, the bad guys had the cops’ beepers, cell phones, even home phones under surveillance. Some who did get caught admitted to having hundreds of numbers and using them to avoid arrest.

"This compromised law enforcement communications between LAPD detectives and other assigned law enforcement officers working various aspects of the case. The organization discovered communications between organized crime intelligence division detectives, the FBI and the Secret Service.

"Shock spread from the DEA to the FBI in Washington, and then the CIA. An investigation of the problem, according to law enforcement documents, concluded, ‘The organization has apparent extensive access to database systems to identify pertinent personal and biographical information.’"

Israel’s hi-tech military sector is booming in the midst of a world economic downturn, and the "homeland security" industry is something they’ve jumped into head first, as Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania knows all too well. It was Rendell who hired them to oversee Pennsylvania’s security — until it was revealed they were spying on legal citizens' groups who were protesting the construction of a local power plant. Israeli "security" firms are operating all over the US, as well as abroad, in airports, and government facilities, and if Israeli organized crime is now a factor in that booming industry, then surely that’s a major security concern — or ought to be.

Cameron’s four-part Fox News investigation into Israeli spying in the US seemed to posit a connection between the Israeli government and the Israeli Mafia, and, thanks to WikiLeaks, we can now see the link made visible. The Gen. Ronen-Ben Shabat connection, through the H.A.Sh Security Group, shows Cameron’s reporting was based on more than a mere suspicion. Given the additional information provided by this cable, it is reasonable to believe a corrupted segment of the Israeli military-law enforcement establishment has literally gone into business with Israeli organized crime.

If that isn’t scary — and newsworthy — I don’t know what is. Yet our laid-back pundits, and "journalists" — who want a story delivered on a silver platter — complain that there’s nothing really new to be found in the WikiLeaks cables.

That’s because they aren’t looking.

[Ed Note: I insert currently working links for the ones that have died on Justin here, but no guarantee how long they'll stay happening. So whatever mirror you go to, just append " cable/2009/05/09TELAVIV1098.html " to their Cablegate page address and it should pull up the cable being referenced here.]

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love, 99
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obsession makes you feeble-minded

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It pains me that Old Uncle Dave has been all but completely forced off the tubes due to the death of his antiquated machine. His resort to an even older but still semi-living machine makes it so he pretty much can only operate on his email, get his news via his subscriptions, unable to really go to the links purporting to support what he gets. A little while ago he sent me links to a number of blogs, all bashing the snot out of Julian Assange for his "obvious Israel bias". They are claiming, as Gordon Duff and Michael Rivero seem to be bidding them claim, that the latest release from WikiLeaks proves this.

No. You morons. If it "proves" anything related to a bias toward Israel, it would be a STATE DEPARTMENT bias in their favor, and so they should be lauding Assange to the skies for having gotten the information in front of us. I am just about barfing from the idiocy on display as a consequence of this release. And it is SICKENING that those who would defend Palestine, if they had any courage, are screaming this FEEBLE-MINDED accusation across all Blogistan.

Jesus. You stupid fucks.

READ THE CABLES.

Do you think Assange COMPOSED them? HOW could over a quarter of a million UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE documents constitute proof of Julian Assange's perfidious political/ethnic biases? One might doubt the provenance of so much juicy information, but there can be no "proof" or even EVIDENCE of such to be gotten from the leak itself. Any information or lack thereof contained in it can ONLY provide evidence of the STATE DEPARTMENT'S actions and intensions and biases.

READ THE CABLES.

I am flaming angry and my mangled finger hurts like crazy. It is interfering mightily with my ability to type, my ability to express my ire and my exasperation fully enough to you.

DON'T BE A LAZY JACKASS. READ THE CABLES.

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HUNNERTS OF WIKILEAKS MIRRORS....

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love, 99
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there are jews in gordon duff's breakfast cereal

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They've bugged his pants. They control everything but his website. He should be a NOVELIST, okay? He'd make more money and do more good. You would not believe how many times that guy's CRAP has entered into my attention stream since the latest Wikileaks release... whut? Not even 24 hours yet? And I now feel compelled to point out AGAIN that maybe the biggest travesty of all the lying and other forms of deceit from our government is that bent minds then can flourish. And Duff's got the perfect gig. What perfidy would we find beneath Israel these days? I can't think of one. And neither can you. So he can make shit up and "support" it with nothing but gales of hyperbole from his barrel chest, and people will think maybe he's got an inside track. He's really good at yanking on your moral indignation and decimated sense of citizenship to put shit over on you that should have been flushed before it left his house.

Please. All you have to do is take assertions from him at random and start googling them. If you can find ANY support for them, it is unerringly MUCH less authoritative than he made it out to be, but mostly there is NO support for it because HE'S JUST MAKING IT UP. Capisce?

I was finally forced, by dint of so many friends asking about or mentioning it, to read his latest hit piece on Wikileaks. It's psychedelic. It's beyond the pale. Has it crossed his mind that Julian Assange has not been arrested because he hasn't broken the law and too many big names in publishing WANT what they can only get this way and too many people in the government WANT the information out but won't put it out any other way? Have ANY of these things crossed his pickled synapses? No.

The same can be said of others envious and/or suspicious of the swath Assange has cut through the unbound galaxies of pusillanimity that rule Western "Civilization", but Duff may just take the cake. It seems he's looking for cables in this dump that put Israel in any kind of bad light, a lack thereof constituting proof that Wikileaks is an instrument of Zionism to discredit our sterling president and further the cause of a planetary Zion... or something... since ALL perfidies involve Israel or its supporters. He blathers about how there isn't a scrap of dirt on Israel but loads of filth heaped on Pakistan in previous leaks. Doesn't slow to consider that maybe there wouldn't BE anything about Israel in a quadrillion incident reports from the Iraq and Af-Pak wars. Nor does he slow to consider that no diplomat in their right mind would be caught dead leaving evidence of a partially negative feeling about Israel or they'd be out on their asses before they could draw another paycheck. Sheesh.

He acts as though he's been through every scrap of all the Wikileaks releases, when you KNOW he's not sober long enough to get through even a tenth of it, and as though he's been through all of THIS one, when only 1% of it is out for the public thus far. Oh, I know, I know, one of his high level connections told him all about it. Right.

Anyway, I'm tired and don't want to talk about this asshole, but something snapped. He seems to have too much influence in my circles and THAT freaks me out. Truly, truly now, you MUST learn not to let what you already think influence you so much when you encounter new information, because if it rings enough of your chimes, like further besmirching the already thoroughly self-besmirched Israel we all want to move to the South Pole, and tickling the paranoia from all the lies and offenses to the Constitution and war crimes and corruption and openly fascist privileges for the perpetrators of these, well, you can fall into a very, very, very deep hole and never climb back out. Kinda like the one we're in.

I must reiterate that, no, I have no way of knowing for 100% certain that something is not hinky with Wikileaks, but, yes, I have really good reason to believe that some seriously heavy hitters in journalism, ones we still respect, have helped bring Wikileaks to the fore. I suppose it could be an elaborate ruse to trick them into thinking they are still real journalists, help keep the veneer of a functioning press, but as long as all these frustrated novelists are thinking up such wild things, why aren't any of them postulating that forces for good are trying to establish themselves? Do we think absolutely EVERYONE in government is a satanic shape-shifting space lizard? Does it never cross your mind that there might be some who didn't sign on for this and want to do what they can to fix it?

And I still say that even if it's all a monster hoax, it STILL does not distract from the BEAUTY of even the fiction of such an entity operating in this world. Are you NUTS? Just the THOUGHT of it can turn millions of young people.

Please. PLEASE. I spend endless hours finding you things to help you unlock your mental prisons. I show you how I open my head not to be used by the polemicists. I give up people and sites I'd far rather just enjoy so you can SEE that I'm not just hot air on these things. DON'T let that bellicose maniac poison you back up now. Okay?

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Don't spoze this counts?

¶4. (S) GOI officials have given different timelines for when
they believe Iran will have full enrichment capability. In
February, PM Sharon told the Secretary that he believes there
is still time remaining to pressure Iran, but that the window
of opportunity is closing quickly. DefMin Mofaz cautioned
that Iran is "less than one year away," while the head of
research in military intelligence estimated that Iran would
reach this point by early 2007. Technical experts at the
IAEC predicted that Iran would have enrichment capability
within six months of the end of the suspension agreement. A
few GOI officials admitted informally that these estimates
need to be taken with caution. The head of the MFA's
strategic affairs division recalled that GOI assessments from
1993 predicted that Iran would possess an atomic bomb by 1998
at the latest.

Nah....

That, right there, puts Israel in a very bad light, from back in 2005, and makes them look the worse NOW, but I'm sure this is much too mild to suit Duff... and so's this... but I just skimmed a couple three or four cables in the ONE PERCENT of them released on the Wikileaks site so far and came up with these two mild examples.

Of course, I should remind everyone that even the worst language out of diplomats is RADICALLY mild anyway. It has driven me up a wall for my entire adult life, and so I'm not going to be supposing I'll get any relief on THAT score even if they dig up a million cables for us to read. Lavrov's efforts for Gaza are maybe as harsh as we're going to get out of any of them. These aren't private conversations or notes or inter-office memos, they're the official diplomatic reports. It's all cocktail parties and luncheons and talking points. We can see the thrust of it, but don't be expecting their hair to let down. Probably the worst of it will be the things going out to the embassies from the State Department, not the cables coming in to the State Department from the embassies.

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Goddammit! I've been up all night. The sun is coming up. I'm beat. I wanna get flat and this fiendish shithead I'd tried so hard to just dismiss and ignore all day just kept raising his evil head and, even not deigning to have any kind of reaction to it in its utter unworthiness, the fact of its presence on emails and at sites I visit ended up setting me off from the back door. Sometimes the Zen lets down as you get too tired and loopy and that's when this sort of thing can rush in and ruin yer little I'm-going-to-bed-now thing.

But I have to stress to you that Duff seems so clear on the fact that there are dual-citizen moles everywhere in government, and I just can't fathom why he would suppose for an instant this would escape their coworker's notice, that they'd be apt to EVER indicate by means available to those moles anything scandalous to Israeli sensibilities. IN FACT, they'd be inclined to put out as much as they could that would stroke the Israelis, rather than irk them, because we all KNOW the penalty for irking Israel is quite severe.

In fact, for their own reasons, foreign diplomats will almost without exception try to couch everything they say to us in terms that are stroking what they perceive us to want, NOT being genuine, NOT even a little, JUST trying to move things along in a manner that keeps things as comfortable for themselves as possible while just flat out ceding the lip service to our psychopathic foreign policy imperatives. When anyone brushes up on a declarative sentence, the report expresses amazement at the candor.

WE'RE TALKIN' DIPLOMATS HERE.

We're not talking about normal people. It's something like an endless minuet surrealistically looping through slaughter and famine and the clatter of rattling sabers. Just think about it. Was Duff even asking for something that could reasonably be expected out of THESE people? I'm not going back to read it again, and I only raced over the reprehensible words, but it occurs to me that the depths of the unreasonableness of his whole position there just keep on sinking even lower the more I think about it. I do generally want to snatch at least one good point out of even really offensive stuff to remind myself that these are PEOPLE who need to be working with the rest of us for a better world, but I don't think there was even one good point in it... but maybe I'm just too tired and it'll come back to me in a dream.

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HUNNERTS OF WIKILEAKS MIRRORS....

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love, 99
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barfing blood from the blowout

[click image, mp3, and those little bright specks in and around the oil on the satellite image are ships burning off methane]

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Rashes, very, very sick, entire communities in Louisiana "vomiting blood, passing blood when they go to the bathroom"... at 14:17 on the mp3... plus all kinds of other UGLY toxicity problems to report. [Dahr interview is in the first hour and you can skip over the commercials... so it won't take the whole two hours.]

This is DAHR JAMAIL talking... not some flake whose word is impeachable... DAHR JAMAIL. NOT a mother-fuckin' liar, not even given to exaggeration. Yank Obama out of the White House. Don't bother to whine for impeachment.

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You're going to notice that the latest article for PUKE-OUT dot org they mention in this interview says bubkes about people puking blood, not even nearly the level of trouble coming out his mouth in this interview. This would not be because Dahr was loath to tell us about it on that website. Nope. You might say, "Well, this was an interview and so that information doesn't fit here." There's plenty of editorializing where it could have been mentioned. OR it could have come in another piece, or a preface to the interview, or a postscript. You KNOW why it isn't mentioned in his piece. So, they are NOT about getting the truth out to people who need it. They ARE about getting the truth watered down so as not to piss off the big boys too much.

Oh, don't be alarmist about it! Don't sensationalize. We'll seem like those nut job conspiracy theorists. No, no, just stick to the dull facts, sound even-tempered, don't frighten anyone. We are mentally-stable yuppies, not foaming lunatics who can't spell.

Filthy whores.

"Calling it fascism is spot on."

Fascism is outright no goddam fun at all.

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Not even sand castles....

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love, 99
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i thought it was blogger's interface with the nsa acting up on me again

[click image]

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But maybe it's CERN black holes. Whatever it is, there are times when a second post window opens up when I upload an image and I don't know what the heck could be up with that, but, depending on how many things I'm doing at once, sometimes the post that has the image link in it isn't the one that gets posted. So you click the image and just get the image instead of whatever it was I was trying to point out. I know a lot of you are reading these posts and not mentioning this little crucial glitch to me, and, well, it's hard enough being me, dammit!

If yer too shy to speak up in public, you could email me, ya know. Or. You could continue to believe I'm an even more vexing blogger than it already would seem without any of the cyber-anomalies that bear on this world.

I'm still blind because I can't put my contacts in while having to administer all this goo a bunch of times a day, and tomorrow I go to a genuine ophthalmologist to see if he can't tell me a little more about the ins and outs of this iritis gig. If he dilates my eyes again, it's gonna make me sick and really blind again for another couple days. This is preventing me going to see my Poppa and it could become mildly Shakespearean around here....

I'm going to ask him, if he wants to dilate my eyes, if there isn't any other way to accomplish his ends.

I don't know. Maybe they can tunnel in through your ears. It doesn't hurt to ask.

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love, 99
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don't i know it

[click image]

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Julian Assange, it turns out, has pissed-off most of Greater Blogistan by saying this. He is being 100% accurate, in a spectacularly beautiful-to-me way here. You may have noticed that I have slowed up with my determination to bring you the raw materials over what people have to say about them, dancing all around them, because it became very clear to me that no one was interested in the raw data. People are barely interested in the digested data. People are barely interested in the dancing around the data. People will only slow their tube luge when they find bits that agree with what they already think. Content providers with an eye to awakening their visitors to serious matters are, in relative terms, internet flops.

The gadflies are hissing about Assange's bluntness on this score.

This is the second time I have felt a hard kick in my gut to put myself at his service, maybe help him summarize the material, or just go out and mow down all his opposition... preferring of course the former, but maybe being better-suited to the latter... who can tell? Probably you.

The snippet at the image link can be found in its entirety here.

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I want to add that people like this guy, who are disparaging Assange on bases like these:

DEBKAfile, in an article in its subscription-only version, is contending that Britain leaked the military reports published in Wikileaks.

Their arguments are that only US reports were leaked, indicating that the US was specifically being targeted. The (British) Guardian played the lead role in coordinating publication of a prefabricated storyline leveling several damaging accusations against the US and casting Julian Assange as a persecuted victim. The Guardian, New York Times, and Der Speigel all agreed to run the story as proposed and accepted the July 25 publication deadline without having actually read more than 2% of the documents.

DEBKA notes that all the leak documents cover six-year period ending in December 2009, their interval terminating at the point at which President Obama announced his new Afghanistan War strategy. DEBKA contends that the end point is deliberate, sparing Obama specific association with accusations arising from the leaked documents, but also implicitly warning that the next batch could be aimed his way.

The British motivation, according to DEBKAfile, would be Barack Obama’s systematic downgrading of the British-American special relationship on the basis of personal and ideological anti-colonialist resentments, specifically exacerbated by the administration’s vilifying BP over an unfortunate accident followed by accusations in the US Congress that BP played a role in securing the Lockerbie bomber’s release. Retired senior official from MI5 and MI6 are rumored to hold positions on BP’s board of directors.

don't seem to take into account that Assange himself might well be, probably is, completely innocent of any complicity in the duplicity possibly being perpetrated upon him to discredit him... which is what they do before they literally assassinate people like Julian Assange.

It has been my theory for some weeks that this Manning kid has agreed to play the leaker of this information in exchange for a sex change and a brand new identity. The basis for this is starting to hit the mainstream, but I noted somewhere in my wanderings quite a while back. So maybe you want to consider this. Unbelievable as you might find it that anyone could come out as brazenly manly as Assange has without it being a setup, it is not without historical precedent and, again, even if it IS faked, it is STILL good for putting the right ideas in people's heads.

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i don't think the pay is good enough

[click image]

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But I could be wrong. We could ask some of the proprietors of Groupthink. They would know.

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Have I mentioned lately how much I hate these fuckers? Ain't this hopey changey stuff the bee's knees? Fuck.

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choices

[click image]

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A while back, I find while going back to put the new BPGOM label on posts relating to the apocalypse in progress in the Gulf, I was making light of weighing the options for the best way to go out... for all of us to go out. I was doing it to help impress on everyone the SERIOUSNESS of all this stuff, but maybe I'm going to be thinking of Cary Grant a lot in what very well might be the last time on earth any of us have.

I'm thinking at this moment that all these guys posting about the abiotic oil thing and the inescapable conclusion that this blowout is UNSTOPPABLE should NOT be posting it on the internet and wailing about it on the airwaves, netcasting it... or not JUST doing that, anyway.

THEY SHOULD BE STORMING THE WHITE HOUSE.

After all, WHO is the one who most needs to be convinced of REALITY right this very now? WHERE does one aim one's spear for the absolute optimum amount of effectiveness possible? Is this REALLY just going to get poured into the partisan gossip pipes? WHAT does that effect in the REAL world? They're talking a catastrophe of supervolcanic magnetude... are they not?

And I don't mean "supervolcano" as in actual volcano. I mean it in terms of amounts of greenhouse gasses and toxins emitted... which would end up having the SAME effect as a supervolcano. IN FACT, they may be dumping the Corexit on there like there is no tomorrow, DESPITE how many living things—INCLUDING PEOPLE—it kills, precisely to keep as much of these horrific gases from our atmosphere as possible. I'm not given to thinking of altruistic reasons these pigs might be doing what they do, but that would account for their continued balls-to-the-wall use of it. Keeping as much of it as possible subsurface MIGHT be the only way they can think to keep most of us alive.

Get a feel for the size of the blowout....

Playing Russian Roulette with nukes....

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unamerican

[click image]

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Would that the masses identifying with one side or the other of these lathering polemics could stop and notice that NEITHER side is interested in America... in the America set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This might as well be frank fascism. It seems that that's really what people prefer, that we're really just fighting over whether our fascism will kick poor and different people to death openly or just diplomatically allow them to die off in the great blind spot of no media coverage. Should this empire use might-makes-right to wipe out the excess baggage? Or should it just sort of let that baggage get lost?

Should we just shoot obviously unarmed and obviously not threatening people from our helicopter gun ships? Or let them carry on struggling out of sight? Should we just kill the women who will have to go back to wearing burqas? Or is it enough to kill their husbands now and let them die optionless beggars behind our backs? Do we want slaves to have the option of abortion? Or is it murder to deprive the state of its cannon fodder? Will homosexual activities stop being so exciting if we let them be okay? Or is it better to make sure the poor can vote for their preferred mode of abjection to plutocrats? Which kind of Constitutional terrorism should be squished by the iron fist of the State first? Code Pink or Tea Partiers?

I am seriously bummed Maddow has done this... but... maybe it will teach us what we need to learn.
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Incidentally, it's now apparent to me that the door open to moving the tea parties in the right direction has closed, and we have the brilliant work of Democratic-Fascist Party shills to thank for this. Nice work, Groupthink.

Now you can concentrate on cheering Rachel to new heights—or depths—strengthening the gleaming PATRIOT Act.
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even as i mourn, i know roberts has done the right thing

[click image, thanks to Doug for the links and Agent BB2 for the image]

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I sure wish RT would stop hiring Valley Girls for their anchor desks. It would help if someone a little less flippant were interviewing him. He certainly commands the respect. The girl in this one is better.

But they can't dim the truth of what Paul Craig Roberts says... I hope you agree. Even as I will miss his trenchant input online, he is doing the right thing. He isn't continuing to grind out piece after piece after USELESS piece, doing naught but garnering fans, when EFFECTIVENESS must be our only aim, when ACTION is mandatory to positive manifestation. I know this shit comes with a built-in excuse—the-pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword shtick—but that, clearly, isn't so... or not in our current circumstances, anyway. Roberts even says it in his Good-Bye piece.

I wonder how many in the mobs of pen-brandishers who have adored him will HEED him.

Another reminder:

In fact, the world is an abode of truth
for one who is truthful with it
and an abode of well-being
for one who understands it.
It is an abode of riches
for one who learns from it
and an abode of counsel
for one who takes the warning from it.

...

It started out with well-being
and created misfortune,
awakening desires and fears,
causing alarm and alert.
So some people revile it
on a morning of remorse,
while others will praise it
on the day of resurrection,
for the world reminded them
and they bore it in mind,
and it spoke to them
and they verified what it said,
and it cautioned them
and they took the warning.

The world is a transitory abode,
not a permanent abode.
And the people in it
are of two sorts:
one who sells his soul
and ruins it,
and one who ransoms his soul
and frees it.

—Counsels of Ḥaḍrat 'Alī
[translated by Thomas Cleary]

Those who have chosen to keep grinding away at their opinions, their scholarship, their erudition, their righteous invective against the perfidies upon perfidies abounding, putting more energy into the complete assimilation of the nuances of their blog ratings than they ever would into the nuances of taking the warning, are selling their souls and ruining them.

This is exactly why I have to really screw up my generosity to link to Chris Floyd when everything he ever says or does would in other circumstances tend to make me wish he were my husband. This is why I can't go to places like Chris' blog very often, can't hang on Robert Parry's or Ray McGovern's or blankety-blank's every word. If it isn't as to-the-bone truthy as Roberts' stuff—if it's packed with cleverisms, the braggadocio of literary excellence, the fervent straw grasping, the ceaseless and sickening efforts to sound "balanced" and "reasonable" and "non-conspiratorial" while painting their air beings as humane and praiseworthy and adorable, the elevation of virtually meaningless "journalistic" bits to the status of stink bombs to lob at the other side of the culture wars, that sort of thing—what the fuck do we want with it?

At best it is a bunch of otherwise-decent humanity trying to whistle past a graveyard—except the graveyard is our planet—except you can't whistle past the apocalypse.

So bless Paul Craig Roberts for throwing that Seventh Samurai sword on his way out.
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head shill, rahmbette malden huffington's latest hit job

[click image of Arianna Huffington greeting Rupert Murdoch]

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There seems to be a great deal of skepticism about Massa's explanation for his departure from Congress. I swallowed hard and listened to the entire interview with Glenn Beck and then this snippet from his appearance with Larry King, and find I believe him about Rahmbo poking him in the chest in the shower, and about why he quit. I don't know if he really did anything so unethical as to sexually harass any staff, but we all know it wouldn't even have come up if he did... unless they wanted to dump his ass. So that part of it is actually moot.

Beck seemed irked that Massa would not dish enough dirt on this mechanism for political hardball, and we all should be irked about that, but no one should be surprised, because the hardball gets exponentially worse, sometimes lethal, when someone attempts to do that.

There is little reasonable doubt that the White House was doing this to him because they are bent on passing this fascist "health" bill, and the head shill for the Democratic Fascist Party is out there with everyone else in Emanuel's pocket to fuck with your head nonstop until he gets his way.
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T-H-E-A-T-E-R ....
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space lizards are liberals — UPDATED

[click image, video lecture about our extraterrestrial origins, lately seeming saner, I know you agree, hour and a half]

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Very uncharacteristically, I have been frittering away my day today. Yesterday was filled with high aggravation in the fascist state... my freedom impinged upon egregiously by a BANK. Friends try to suggest to me that it was because of the biggest brightest fullest moon thing, but, no, it was because of the fascists and me becoming SO pissed off that I did that supremely unZen gig where I melt down and do things like lock my key in my car just as it's starting to rain in the bank parking lot.

We didn't cut my hair very much since it was much too short last time and my salon lady didn't charge me, which turned out to be very lucky because if she had, I then would not have had the cash to pay the towing guy who came and got me back into Goldie Honda.

Woke up this morning, pissed off all over again, at that jackass on whom I wasted too much time, over the bit about his cluelessness as to how the United States has broken the NPT. This is just ONE example of completely unpardonable ignorance that he turns around and makes sound like informed opinion or using to "correct" one of his erring interlocutors, but it's the second example in under twenty-four hours of me running old completely delusory nerve movies instead of being on it, so to speak. So I'm zoning on the space lizard chronicles today, and puttering, and not trying to form up into anything to make any points whatsoever... except this one:

Email from me to one of my Tea Party friends last week:

Veteran calling for arrest of justices
http://tinyurl.com/ye8dr2t

Olbermann's rant
http://tinyurl.com/yeqohsg

To which he added and forwarded to his whole email tree of "wingnut" buddies:

If this doesn't piss you off nothing will. I never saw anything in the news about this, did anybody else?

And, finally, today, he just forwarded back one of their responses to me:

This is a gut wrencher. Since that fateful day on 9/11, we have failed to push for the truth of what really happened. This is the upshot. We now get to see the enemy in action. In 1963 I swore an oath as a 2nd Lt in the US Army to uphold the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. It should now be clear to all with eyes to see our greatest enemy is DOMESTIC. This would have been oh so obvious long ago if we had conducted an honest investigation of the evidence surrounding 9/11.

By the way, couple months ago joined Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth. Check out their site.....ae911truth.org....if you haven't seen it. They got lotsa proof. So does pilotsfor911truth.org. Go figure....thousands of professionals from every walk of life are dedicated to finding out the truth of 9/11 and it's a non-issue w/the press. What does that tell you about them....also in the enemy camp w/the judges and other loyalists.

Keep the faith.

THESE ARE SAMPLES OF THE PEOPLE IN THE TEA PARTIES. HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT FROM US?

So now I'm going back into the formlessness and will show back up when there's anything worthy of sharing....
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Two Hours Later — See, I'm so vexed about how we can sit back and turn people of a different politics of lifestyle en masse into cartoons, or the targets in a video game, abstractions, like this. People screaming about the fascist media like anyone needs convincing that the MSM lies. We think because we can point to Fox News lies that this somehow improves the more intellectually satisfying manipulations coming out of MSNBC. We think that the people more temperamentally disposed to hearing Fox than MSNBC are assholes who don't care about our country, and they think the same of us. Do we EVER stop to think they have a point for us at least as valid as ours for them? And even when someone works her butt off to finally make that clear, does it stay clear for more than the split second before you go into battle formation in your head? And THEN what the fuck are you defending?

Fascism.

People on BOTH sides are defending fascism from each other while fascism marches on... while plutocrats giggle and plebeians starve. WHAT sense is there to this?

We LOVE to prattle about our sacred scientific knowledge outstripping their stupid beliefs in imaginary friends, yet for decades science has been insisting that what it finds is always dependent on the observer, that the observing itself is part of whatever reality it finds and documents. How many times do you hear them wondering if any phenomena can be real where there is no observer... on, say, a planet with no life... and never ONCE does a ONE of them EVER even begin to postulate that our idea of sentience isn't necessarily accurate... that the stuff of the universe itself is sentient... EVEN when it's a rock... thereby erasing the vexation about how anything can happen where no one can witness it.

The ancients tried to give you this clue with the koan [A koan is a teaching device designed to encode vital concepts such that successive generations cannot strip them of their content, the means used to prevent wisdom from being turned into more delusion before you have a chance in hell to grasp an ion of it.] about a tree falling when no one was there, but you turned it into a joke.

It's the same thing with this partisan caricaturization thing. This lethal polemicizing. It's all posture. All self portraiture. Preening. Preening like the dolt quantum physicists who can't solve their big anomaly by supposing for an instant that a speck of dust is as aware as they are. Deaf, dumb and blind ego.

Effectively LESS sentient than a rock.
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maybe not

[click image]

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I find I really want you to listen to this hour-long interview I also linked last night:



It doesn't matter who is speaking. It only matters that both are knowledgeable, ordinarily bright, humans, expressing what has been going on and is still going on. The people in charge have been doing what they're doing to us now to every other country in turn and in blocks for a very long time. The delusion hammered into you since childhood by society and by the media, without letup, has prevented you from assimilating this and stopping it. So take out an hour and listen.

You can hear about how we sabotaged Russia's economy... how much Larry Summers had to do with it... about the consequences of that... about how it's happening to us now... about what this does to life expectancy, quality of life... about a few very motivated people making life hell for masses of not that kind of motivated people. You need to listen. It is a much more accurate assessment of the State of Our Union than anything that came out Obama's mouth last night.

Agent BB2 and I had been talking about it already down the page, here, and, guys, this is not a drill. And this is ALL of us. So, continuing in this vein, he just gave me this link, which I'm hoping helps pound it home.

Radical Inequality Is Literally Killing Us
New scientific research shows that Wall Street's war on the middle class is sabotaging our longevity.
By Sam Pizzigati | January 27, 2010

Two British intellectuals — one a distinguished, gray-haired professor emeritus, the other a rising young academic superstar — have just finished a 15-day speaking tour across the United States. They came to fan the flames of “populist rage.”

We don’t, of course, normally associate populist rage with sophisticated scholars. Our most eminent pundits almost always employ "populist rage” as a condescending, even derisive, put-down, a tag for an unfocused, unthinking anger directed toward elites — a cry from the great unwashed masses born of frustration and envy.

But Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, our two recent scholarly British visitors, would beg to differ. Populist rage at bank bailouts and Wall Street bonuses, they believe, actually reflects state-of-the-art scientific insight.

Wilkinson and Pickett both work as epidemiologists. They study the health of populations, and, over recent decades, pioneering work by Wilkinson has helped reveal the most reliable foundation for good health and long life. Want to live long and prosper? Go live in a relatively equal society.

Over 200 studies since the early 1980s have now documented that people living in societies where wealth has concentrated at the top of the economic ladder live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than people who live in societies that spread their wealth more evenly.

And we’re not talking just poor folks here. All people in unequal societies do worse. Middle-income people in the United States, the world’s most unequal developed nation, have shorter lifespans than middle-income people in Japan, Sweden and a host of other more equal nations.

This same dynamic, Wilkinson and Pickett show in their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, is operating on all our most basic yardsticks of social decency. On everything from homicides and teen pregnancies to drug addiction and levels of trust, people living in more equal nations do better — from three to 10 times better — than people in societies where treasure tilts to the top.

And that treasure, in the United States, is tilting top-bound as rapidly as ever. The latest Wall Street bank bonus totals may have no precedent in American history. Seldom — if ever — have so few profited so profusely in the midst of a general economic collapse.

The 32,500 souls fortunate enough to work at Wall Street banking giant Goldman Sachs will pocket an average $498,153 for their labors in 2009. Their total compensation for the year, $16.2 billion, runs $3.3 billion more than the pay that went the year before to the 207,315 teachers who staff New York state’s public schools.

We see this same top-heavy distribution of income throughout the U.S. economy.

Two weeks ago, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that just a tad over a million U.S. taxpayers will take home over $500,000 in 2010. These one million top-earners will collect $200 billion more in income this year than the 80 million taxpayers who make $40,000 or less.

The data from epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett remind us that gaps like these have consequences: they translate into ever-higher levels of stress and insecurity in nearly every corner of our daily lives. This economic insecurity assaults more than just our household finances. Over time, the chronic stress it causes actually wears down our immune systems. Our epic inequality, in essence, is quite literally killing us.

Last week, on the last day of the Wilkinson and Pickett U.S. speaking tour, Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich joined the two British scientists at an Economic Policy Institute forum in Washington, DC.

Democratic Party politicos, Ehrenreich charged, “have failed to speak to the resentment out there on inequality."

Average Americans will rage, and rightfully so, until they do.

Do you want to hang out and despair? Do you want to go ridicule right wing dummies on the Righteous Wing oases of Outer Blogistan? Feel like tweeting about Piglips' malapropisms today? Is this your plan?

The power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. —Howard Zinn
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