assange is doing a brilliant job

[click image, switched link to YouTube version to spare you the commercial....]

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I am SO impressed by his dignity, courage, heart and decency. The calumnies heaped upon him by people writhing in the light this shines on their own consciences just appall the snot out of me. Even many who are yet decent enough not to besmirch him outright seem too damn jaded to just look at what is before them and see the actual. We're in SUCH a mess! One man steps out to hold up a klieg lamp and mirror for us, and point, and fend off the snapping dogs of torture and rapine, to save lives, to help all humanity, and the response has been this psychedelic. He's just dazzling in this interview. He's doing SUCH a good job, despite the horrendous pressures. Wow. Just wow.

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UN probing Manning's mistreatment....

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And, evidently, making pronouncements on the mistreatment of journalists as well....

UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection
the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression

Joint Statement On Wikileaks

December 21, 2010 — In light of ongoing developments related to the release of diplomatic cables by the organization Wikileaks, and the publication of information contained in those cables by mainstream news organizations, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression see fit to recall a number of international legal principles. The rapporteurs call upon States and other relevant actors to keep these principles in mind when responding to the aforementioned developments.

1. The right to access information held by public authorities is a fundamental human right subject to a strict regime of exceptions. The right to access to information protects the right of every person to access public information and to know what governments are doing on their behalf. It is a right that has received particular attention from the international community, given its importance to the consolidation, functioning and preservation of democratic regimes. Without the protection of this right, it is impossible for citizens to know the truth, demand accountability and fully exercise their right to political participation. National authorities should take active steps to ensure the principle of maximum transparency, address the culture of secrecy that still prevails in many countries and increase the amount of information subject to routine disclosure.

2. At the same time, the right of access to information should be subject to a narrowly tailored system of exceptions to protect overriding public and private interests such as national security and the rights and security of other persons. Secrecy laws should define national security precisely and indicate clearly the criteria which should be used in determining whether or not information can be declared secret. Exceptions to access to information on national security or other grounds should apply only where there is a risk of substantial harm to the protected interest and where that harm is greater than the overall public interest in having access to the information. In accordance with international standards, information regarding human rights violations should not be considered secret or classified.

3. Public authorities and their staff bear sole responsibility for protecting the confidentiality of legitimately classified information under their control. Other individuals, including journalists, media workers and civil society representatives, who receive and disseminate classified information because they believe it is in the public interest, should not be subject to liability unless they committed fraud or another crime to obtain the information. In addition, government "whistleblowers" releasing information on violations of the law, on wrongdoing by public bodies, on a serious threat to health, safety or the environment, or on a breach of human rights or humanitarian law should be protected against legal, administrative or employment-related sanctions if they act in good faith. Any attempt to impose subsequent liability on those who disseminate classified information should be grounded in previously established laws enforced by impartial and independent legal systems with full respect for due process guarantees, including the right to appeal.

4. Direct or indirect government interference in or pressure exerted upon any expression or information transmitted through any means of oral, written, artistic, visual or electronic communication must be prohibited by law when it is aimed at influencing content. Such illegitimate interference includes politically motivated legal cases brought against journalists and independent media, and blocking of websites and web domains on political grounds. Calls by public officials for illegitimate retributive action are not acceptable.

5. Filtering systems which are not end-user controlled — whether imposed by a government or commercial service provider — are a form of prior censorship and cannot be justified. Corporations that provide Internet services should make an effort to ensure that they respect the rights of their clients to use the Internet without arbitrary interference.

6. Self-regulatory mechanisms for journalists have played an important role in fostering greater awareness about how to report on and address difficult and controversial subjects. Special journalistic responsibility is called for when reporting information from confidential sources that may affect valuable interests such as fundamental rights or the security of other persons. Ethical codes for journalists should therefore provide for an evaluation of the public interest in obtaining such information. Such codes can also provide useful guidance for new forms of communication and for new media organizations, which should likewise voluntarily adopt ethical best practices to ensure that the information made available is accurate, fairly presented and does not cause substantial harm to legally protected interests such as human rights.

Catalina Botero Marino
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression

Frank LaRue
UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression

Hail, hail, rock and roll.

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OUTRIGHT BRILLIANT.

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love, 99
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i am SO sick of WORDS

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This time the mindfuck is calling forgeries "inacurate affidavits" and "false signatures", but for as outrageous as this is, it's the new normal, for sure. Outright lies. Spin. Creative framing. People getting together to form new cleverisms for naming FELONIES. Screaming for the assassination of a hero for busting villains of COSMIC proportions. It's getting on my nerves in a really big way. Yes, the TV is blasting away in the other room, and yes, that ALWAYS makes my head feel as though it's about to explode, but, nope. I'M FREAKING OUT ABOUT THE ABUSE OF LANGUAGE THAT HAS BROUGHT ABOUT THE MASS MORTIFICATION OF SYNAPSES ACROSS VAST SWATHS OF PLANET EARTH. I've given up trying to make my mother's computer do it and plugged mine in. I've just done listening to a number of news clips and reading various news reports... mostly to do with Assange, but really everything... and the use of words to control perception, EVEN in the face of something this cut and dry, is making me want to shoot myself.

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love, 99
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values

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Is this okay with you?

Pink diamond sells for record $46M at auction
(AP) – 6 hours ago

GENEVA (AP) — A rare pink diamond smashed the world record for a jewel at auction Tuesday, selling for more than $46 million to a well-known gem dealer.

London jeweler Laurence Graff paid $46,158,674, for the 24.78-carat "fancy intense pink" diamond, which he immediately named "The Graff Pink."

"It is the most fabulous diamond I've seen in the history of my career and I'm delighted to have bought it," Graff said in a statement released by auction house Sotheby's, which offered the stone at its Geneva sale.

The sale price was almost double the $24.3 million achieved by the blue 35.56-carat Wittelsbach-Graff diamond in 2008. That was also bought by Graff.

"This is the highest price ever bid for a jewel at auction," said David Bennett, the head of Sotheby's jewelry division, as the auction room in Geneva's luxury Beau Rivage hotel erupted into applause.

"Everybody was surprised it went that high," Mart van Drunen, a jeweler from Amsterdam, commented after the sale. "He clearly wants to have all the rarest diamonds in the world."

Rich buyers from developing countries have been dipping their hand in the high end of the market in recent years, but experts say emerging middle classes particularly in India are doing as much if not more to lift prices. Ongoing doubts about the stock market have also helped drive up the value of gold and precious jewels, said van Drunen.

Four bidders competed for the pink diamond, which was last sold 60 years ago by New York jeweler Harry Winston. The seller chose to remain anonymous, said Sotheby's.

Graff had the blue diamond recut after purchase, to the displeasure of purists who considered it an act of vandalism against a unique object. It wasn't immediately known whether he planned to alter the pink diamond, which Sotheby's says has a flaw unnoticeable to the naked eye but may be graded as internally flawless after re-polishing.

Sotheby's said it sold jewels worth $105.1 million Tuesday, also a world record for a single sale. The auction included items once belonging to Christina Onassis, the daughter of the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, and Cristina Ford, the second wife of Henry Ford's grandson Henry Ford II.

"I think this tells you a bit about the health of the market," Bennett told reporters after the sale.

One Israeli diamond dealer, who asked to remain anonymous, summed it up differently: "These are crazy prices," he said.

Fuck of a lot of soap....

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love, 99
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i put it to you

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Has it ever occurred to you that the "alarmists" are screaming and hopping up and down so hard because you won't be moved? A freight train is headed straight for us and yer standing there, staring blankly at it as though you had no more sense than a terrified bunny wabbit.

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olbermann has chutzpah

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It frosts me that so many otherwise intelligent people so gleefully leap behind the dangerous blather—aka, propaganda—streaming in full-throated hypocrisy out the mouths of "our" talking heads.

Filthy and despicable stuff posing as the consensus you want to align with... to your detriment, to such lethal ends.

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feel like holding a press conference next month?

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Will it do any good? Is there ANY way to make this do any good?

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i'm appalled

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I have been ducking around in the tubes to see what people are saying about Julian Assange and I am appalled. Some paragon of groupthink is pissed because Assange reminding us that Taliban are also Afghans will supposedly give rightwing warmongers something to bludgeon us lefty peaceniks with. Excuse me, Agonistas, but yer fucking Democratic-Fascists are every bit as warmongering as yer Republican-Fascists, and I personally appreciate the man using the attention he's getting to remind the public of certain fundamentals we seem to have completely forgotten.

People are accusing Assange of being an "attention whore". Mother fuck. You get out there and do that and see what it's like. People seemed to lap up Sibel Edmonds' intermittent attention-gathering blitzes, which drove me crazy, because she NEVER came out with anything to add to the nothing we got from her to begin with, but the woman had to be plenty scared that the public forgetting her would make her disposable. And how much the MORE so does this have to be for Julian Assange, who IS splatting it all out there at every opportunity?

I know, I know, some of you are suspicious of his motives, or of the fact that he's still walking around, or whatever it is you are skeptical about, but just SUPPOSE for a moment that everything you've been hearing about Wikileaks' mission is TRUE, and Assange is their frontman. I find myself afraid to mention in pixels the people I know are supporting him in case it gets some really great journalists in trouble. I believe it. I believe it because I've been watching it play out, and I've been noting all these people I respect giving him support, and I know goddam well anyone working that hard to wreck the lethal secrecy of criminal governments is heavily in danger of being assassinated. The only protection he has is popularity with the public. AND HE DESERVES IT.

Fuck you.

No. Really. Fuck you.

You scumbucket groupthink bloggers are empowering the bad guys with your petty bitching.

I hope each of you chokes on a pretzel.

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LISTEN UP!

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who are we?

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Maybe it's just me, but there are some horrifying parallels between this story and THIS one... [or here]... not the best way to start my day online....

Oh, but, hey....

I really wanna know.
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SPLC: definitely fascists-in-denial

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The sun just popped out from behind the oceans of angry gods that have covered my home for the last two days, and it would have been a happy moment if I had not turned on Democracy Now! today. As it is, from the segment I have linked with the image VanGogh dashed off of me in the throes of this meltdown, I think I may have to shoot myself... since shooting the perps is hereby made unquestionably inexcusable by a long-revered bastion of American liberalism.

In this segment, some asshole, some white, mutant-looking and fascist-talking asshole, by the name of Potok, speaking on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center, has done a damn fine imitation of partisan extremism, presented an outright Rovian face for all to see. He did it on one of the very last hopes for American journalism, turning it, at least for this segment, into a Fox News broadcast.

How insane do I have to watch this become?

Remember that dorky guy who shot to fame as Seinfeld's kooky neighbor? Remember the big stink made over the "racist" epithets he shouted at some black men who were heckling him in his stand-up act?

Hurt people, people who feel threatened, entirely too frequently lash out with the most hurtful stuff they can think up—stuff bearing no relation to the hurt in question—sometimes not even to anything even loosely based on actuality in any form—and CLASSICALLY, to the point of it being TRITE, have to apologize for the nasty, completely outrageous, things they have said after the crisis passes and the emotion-enflamed brain begins to function normally again... that is for the sector who can bring themselves to apologize ever, even when they KNOW they were wrong... which might not even be most of the most who react this way to feelings of fear and anger and hurt and threat. Believe me, I know this one BY HEART. It has astounded me every time it has happened to me in my LIFE. Almost everyone I have EVER met does this when pressed, hateful and shameful as I find it.

THE GUY ISN'T A RACIST. HE JUST WENT FOR THE MOST HURTFUL LANGUAGE HE COULD MUSTER IN HIS EFFORT TO MAKE THE ATTACK GO AWAY. HE'S NOT A FUCKING RACIST. YOU KNOW THAT'S THE TRUTH.

But, at least half of you out there won't admit you know that if I live to be a thousand. Nossir, you fucking won't.

All this HORSESHIT about Tea Partiers being racist is like THAT. They're hurt. Except for the White Supremacist guys who are trying and so far have failed to coöpt the movement—no different from the RNC attempts to do the same, except even LESS successfully—the people in the Tea Party Movement are as hurt and threatened and scared and harmed and angered and frustrated and beside-themselves—THIS ISN'T JUST HAPPENING TO LIBERALS!—IT'S HAPPENING TO ALL AMERICA!—THE DEMOCRATS ARE DOING IT TO US NOW!—behind what's going on as we are. Only THEY have gotten up to DO something about it... WARTS AND ALL.

The SPLC is standing up to smack them down... to smack US down.

You fuckers! You fuckers! You FUCKERS!

Jesus. Christ. YOU FUCKERS!

THE SPLC? You fuckers.

Maybe I'll get the moxie to finish freaking about this after I'm done bashing my head with this brick.
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You fuckers. LUCIDITY is the ONLY thing that can save us now.

This display would not have any correlation with that.

That is all.
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I mean, you fuckers, anybody noticed the horrific uptick in media hype about our homegrown "extremists" lately? And do you have a guess what THAT is about? Are you going to just let yourself slide right into that comfy propaganda about Oklahoma City being a "rightwing extremist" attack?

THINK! NO. REALLY. THINK! WAKE THE FUCK UP!
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19 April 1775 — American Revolutionary War begins at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

19 April 1993 — The 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco ends when the feds firebombed eighty-one people to death.

19 April 1995 — Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is bombed, killing 168, and patsy Timothy McVeigh is very swiftly executed for it.

19 April 2010 — FINE day for Americans to protest fascism in Washington, D.C., not even a little bit more nefarious than ANY of our antiwar protests.

Fuck you. FUCK YOU.... No. I really mean it.
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Yes. I know exactly what happens to people who dare do anything as outrageous as call someone from the SPLC things like "mutant" and "asshole". If someone doesn't leap immediately to the ornate defense of that revered institution of anti-poverty—anti-racism—they are likely to come under heavy suspicion, right there, but going postal on them? Sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege....

Deal with it.

I'm telling you the truth. ANY institution that becomes this mainstream becomes the agar for apocalypse... because the people who OWN the mainstream... WHICH IS NOT YOU... is not US... are in control of ALL its institutions. You cannot have it any other way in an oligarchy. Not EVEN The Society For People Born On Planet Earth stays FOR the people born on planet earth once it is mainstream.

Snap out of it.
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DOESN'T ANYONE SEE JUST HOW BEYOND THE PALE PSYCHEDELIC IT IS TO CALL PEOPLE WHO ARE PROTESTING FASCISTS "NAZI BROWN SHIRTS"?

Oh. My. God.
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We are every bit as disoriented and disorienting as those we revile this way.
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READ THIS!

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READ THIS!

Bury them in emails....

Don't listen to the political mesmerizers! Fuck Kos. Fuck all of Groupthink! THIS IS WRONG! This is SEEEEEERIOUSLY bad. Doesn't matter WHAT party you're in or WHAT way you lean.

THIS IS WRONG! SCREAM BLOODY MURDER!
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nails it

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Just cleans their clocks... a little harsh on the unwashed masses, but nails it on liberals.

...the liberal establishment is ... still whining about the same-old riddle that’s paralyzed them for 30 straight years: “Why don’t Republicans debate fairly and honestly?!” And their answer comes down to the same feeble: “It’s because Republicans aren’t as good as we liberals are.”

Flippin' over and over and over and OVER again, day in and day out, 24/7/365, it NEVER stops being liberals bragging about how educated and smart and truthful and honest and virtuous and dignified we are. Pander to that shit and yer in 'em in Liberal circles. No matter what. It makes me want to puke. I am SO sick of it. I might even be able to endure it without bellowing about it every five minutes if everybody would just skip the elevation of themselves at others' expense even PART of the time, but it is RELENTLESS.

It's a black hole.

Unable to take one's attention from any opportunity to think well of oneself, one continually misses the opportunities for effectiveness. Bark at one to wake them from such lethal revery and righteous indignation, punctuated by sparks and flashes of incendiary sophistry, swirl in a fathomless ocean of smoke, sucking sense out of the air at an event horizon the precise demarkation of which describes the range of audibility.

A black hole.

Believe me. I've done the math. I know what I'm saying.
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they don't want you to think too much

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Ron Paul’s Victory: How Sweet It Is!
Paul victory causes panic on neocon Right, Obama-ite Left

by Justin Raimondo, 24 February 2010

Ron Paul is to neocons what a silver bullet is to vampires, and, for me at least, a great deal of the joy accompanying Ron Paul’s CPAC victory has been anticipating the squeals of outrage, shock, and real pain coming from those circles. This may be my sadistic streak coming out, albeit not for the first time, but after years of hearing Paul and his supporters dismissed as “fringe” irrelevant sectarians with no real political prospects, you’ll forgive me if I indulge myself in a little gratuitous cruelty.

Fox News simply repeated the word “unscientific” whenever it mentioned the CPAC poll results, as its “news” reporters wondered aloud if indeed Paul’s runaway victory had any meaning at all. Most of the attendees were young activists, Fox anchors endlessly reminded their viewers – and oh those wacky kids! Fox also amplified the boos that greeted the announcement of Paul’s victory, but the reality is that the hall was at that moment filled with those who had come to hear Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich, two speakers that were boycotted by the libertarians present on account of their odious views and smears directed at the Good Doctor. Is Fox News seriously asking us to believe the conference-goers were booing themselves?

The reliably neocon blog Powerline harrumphed that the Paul victory “is dismaying, to the extent one takes it seriously. Ron Paul is the crazy uncle in the Republican Party’s attic. He is not a principled libertarian like, say, Steve Forbes. Rather, as I noted in this post, where I likened him to Pee-Wee Herman, Paul has a rather sinister history as a hater and conspiracy theorist.”

Paul, the genial 75-year old physician from rural Texas, who radiates a palpable benevolence – “sinister”? Aside from the melodramatics, however, what this means is that, according to Powerline, a significant portion of the conservative movement has been taken over by a “sinister” conspiracy of – conspiracy theorists! Oh, and Paul’s not really a libertarian – only plumb-line supporters of perpetual war, torture, and the suspension of the Constitution in the name of the “war on terrorism,” such as the editors of Powerlust, are “real” libertarians. Uh huh. Sure they are. War, torture, and tyranny – sounds “libertarian” to me!

Oddly, the supposedly “conservative” Powerline echoes the leftist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who angrily notes in the Huffington Post the less than reverent Paulian approach to Abraham Lincoln, and reiterates the same grab-bag of lies and innuendo unleashed by Jamie Kirchick at The New Republic and dutifully echoed and amplified by Reason magazine and its former employee David Weigel – who has now graduated up to the “right-wing extremist” beat at MSNBC. I debunked this nonsense here, here, here, here, and here – or, as Hutchinson would put it, I “reveled in it.”

Hutchinson’s screed is remarkable for its tone of hysteria – Paul’s followers are invariably “fanatical,” having fallen victim to “Paul mania,” and they are also “scary.” Although this fusillade comes from someone on the ostensible “left,” it is indistinguishable from the jeremiads that poured forth from the likes of David Frum and the neoconservatives during the GOP presidential primaries: Hutchinson accuses Paul of being a racist, claiming that his CPAC speech was “sprinkled here and there with racial baits.” Really? I challenge Hutchinson, or anyone else, to listen to Paul’s speech, go through it line by line, and come up with a single half-credible “racial bait.” Where oh where are these “baits?” On this point Hutchinson is mum: he doesn’t think he needs to be more specific, because, you see, he’s the expert on racism, and we’ll just have to take his word for it.

Hutchinson is riled by Paul’s insistence that the Civil War could and should have been avoided, if at all possible. As to whether it could have been avoided, I’ll leave that to the historians and specialists to argue out. After all, it’s a risky business to engage in could-have-beens, and so it’s best to leave that to the authors of alternate histories. That it should have been avoided, if at all humanly possible, would hardly seem to be a controversial position: it was certainly the bloodiest war in our history, one that tore the nation asunder long after the issue had been “settled” by force of arms. Why is it a hate crime to suggest that it would have been better if hundreds of thousands of Americans hadn’t been slaughtered, maimed, and impoverished by a vicious conflict must remain a mystery of the Hutchinsonian mind, one best kept under lock and key.

All of these anti-Paul polemics seem to blend into a single panic-stricken shriek. Ex-Reason employee Weigel chimes in with his view – really a hope – that conservatives are essentially hostile to the antiwar Paulian message, and, what’s more:

”Conservatives don’t want their image to the American people to be septuagenarian politicians who bang on about the need to close down American bases and speak at meetings of the John Birch Society. … It was accidentally very revealing of how far right the party’s gotten.”

The first time as tragedy, the second as farce – the old Marxian aphorism comes unbidden as I contemplate the reappearance of the Birch Scare. You’ve heard of the Red Scare, of course, as a time of evil, when honest pinkos were tarred as Commies and a monster called Tail-Gunner Joe roamed the land. I’ll bet you haven’t heard of the Birch Scare, however, a weirdly parallel phenomenon that occurred during the early 1960s, when the John Birch Society first came to public attention.

The Birch Society was founded by Robert Welch, a candy maker, a rather mild-mannered and courtly man who for a while was excoriated by the liberal media as a veritable devil. After first being denounced by the neoconservatives of his day in an anthology titled The Radical Right, Welch and the Society found themselves inundated by a series of hysterical journalistic attacks that portrayed them as demonic hate-mongers secretly plotting to overthrow the government. Breathless exposés appeared almost daily in the mainstream media, warning against the dire Birch menace: they were organized into secret “cells,” and they were spreading their message of “hate” and “division” – well, you know the drill.

In reality, Welch was a rather idiosyncratic example of an Old Rightist, that breed of conservative that died out with the death of Robert A. Taft and Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. Sure, he had some, ah … exotic views, but in essence he was just a good old fashioned anti-Communist whose suspicion of what he called “internationalism” eventually led him to oppose US military adventurism overseas. In a mid-1960s edition of the Birch Society’s internal bulletin, he denounced the Vietnam war and proposed that the Society initiate a campaign to extend their slogan of “Get US Out” – which had previously applied to the United Nations – to mean get us out of the war.

That’s why it was funny to watch MSNBC’s “news” anchors rail on and on about how the Birchers – who had been allowed to co-sponsor CPAC – had re-”infiltrated” the conservative movement, and isn’t it horrible, blah blah blah. They then had the nerve to trot out Buckley’s ghost, wondering why WFB’s famous “excommunication” of the Birchers had been rescinded. If only those commie-hippie-liberals realized that one of the principal reasons given by Buckley for the anti-Bircher interdict was Welch’s opposition to the Vietnam war. The Birchers were tolerated as long as they confined themselves to rehashed McCarthyism – after all, Buckley had written a book defending the red-baiting Senator, although somewhat half-heartedly. And of course McCarthy’s downfall occurred when he started targeting alleged Communist infiltration of the US military – an investigative thread that Welch simply took up and elaborated on.

Although the Society has been smeared as racist, as well as anti-Semitic, and called every name in the book, the truth is quite the opposite: Welch was an intransigent opponent of racism, and he regarded anti-Semites as sinister “neutralizers” who were objectively aligned with the Society’s enemies. (The raving lunatic Revilo P. Oliver, a professor of classics and a fanatical anti-Semite, was unceremoniously kicked off the JBS Council by Welch, and racists regularly received the same treatment.)

The Birchers’ real sin, in Buckley’s eyes, was to oppose the Warfare State as much as they opposed the Welfare State. They were the first to alert conservatives to the dangers of George Herbert Walker Bush’s “New World Order.” And when Bush II moved to implement and complete his father’s hegemonist dream at gunpoint in Iraq, the Society strongly opposed the war – unlike various and sundry “liberals.”

When liberals who know or care nothing about the history of the conservative movement trot out Buckley, you know they’re up to no good. They claim they want to “understand” what’s going on with the tea-party movement, and the identity crisis on the Right, but their “analysis” is just a lot of ideological ax-grinding. There’s no real attempt to come to grips with the issues raised by the Ron Paul movement, and the much wider wave of discontent that is now rolling across the country.

The anti-interventionist, anti-government trend in the GOP, represented by the Paulian triumph at CPAC, is really just a delayed reaction to the end of the cold war and the promise of a return to normalcy. You’ll recall, back then, when the Berlin Wall fell, conservatives came around to a non-interventionist outlook. Bill Clinton’s promiscuous meddling in affairs that should have been none of our business accelerated a trend that would have developed naturally anyway. What happened to interrupt this growing “isolationism” was 9/11.

Yet as signal an event as that was, as hard as it hit the American psyche and changed our politics, the objective circumstances that gave rise to anti-interventionism on the right are still present and on the increase. To begin with, there is no worldwide ideological challenge to liberal democracy, no competing universalist ideology like Communism seeking to claim the allegiance of the world’s peoples. The sectarian”appeal” of al-Qaeda and allied terrorist organizations is very narrow, strictly limited to the Muslim world: in any case, the threat posed by bin Laden is hardly equal to that posed by the old Communist International.

This fact and the economic facts of reality – that we cannot continue to fund an overseas empire without going bankrupt – conspire against any “conservative” who wants to limit government and mobilize massive armies to occupy vast portions of Central Asia.

In the midst of an economic crisis such as has not been seen since the 1930s, the War Party is at a loss as to how to drum up enthusiasm for yet another bout of Mideast adventurism. That they’ve even lost their most reliable allies in the conservative movement, which is now rallying behind the anti-interventionist champion Ron Paul, shows just how remarkably weak they have become. The Rabinowitz-Frum wing of the Republican party is small, and getting smaller by the minute: how many battalions does Powerline command, anyway?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, as a supporter of the present admnistration – which is waging an immoral and unsustainable war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan – has every reason to find Ron Paul and his supporters “scary.”So do the neocons, the vultures of the American politics, who hover over every battlefield cheering on the slaughter. I revel in their fear: it gladdens my heart and sustains me. Because it means, not that we’re winning, necessarily, but that we can win. And in a battle of this kind, so hard and unforgiving, that makes all the difference.

Having read a riveting biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which was detailed about Lincoln's bungling as Commander in Chief, I can't bring myself to be much more than "less than reverent" about him myself. Millions died needlessly because of the years he wasted putting pencil pushers in charge. If he had not finally decided on Grant there might not have been enough Americans left to defend our ill-gotten gains from the decimated natives—the natives decimated solely on account of the widely-held belief in the righteousness of profit.

Of course, nowadays, I'm wondering if we shouldn't be reviling Lincoln for "saving the union"....

I liked this Raimondo piece especially because it shows how long plutocrats have been able to lead the American public by the nose with horrifically-consequential distortions and outight lies. It wasn't just the McCarthy shit, not by a long shot. They try to marginalize real opposition first. Then they vilify it. Then they assassinate it. Sometimes they have to skip the preliminaries and go straight to assassination, but they do it unerringly, and they're doing it to the Tea Partiers now.
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pickled americans

[click image, i WAS going to post a compromising image of a sheep, but took pity....]

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Not a frickin' word on the tv news... not even part of one.

As you know, if I'm at my parents'... er, my mother's... house, there is NO escaping the fascist media blaring to the point of vibrating the walls in the other room. Not a damn word.
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KAOS psychic cam intercepts CONTROL op in progress

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Agent BB2 has been spotted by this weird tank full of obese psychics under the KAOS HQ in DC and their neural chips are broadcasting images of the aging master spy who is, even now under threat of dire torture, mining fast food outlets at GITMO for me. Your solidarity, your deepest urges for sanity and clean arteries are required to break up the fat psychics' mental lock....

Turn that putrescent vat full of fascist fatties into a deep frier with the sheer force of your good intentions!

Urgent! Urgent! Drop everything. Red alert.

hypnotized slobs rule oxford too

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Iran condemns Oxford for honoring slain protester
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer – Wed Nov 11, 4:01 pm ET

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran has protested to an Oxford University college over a scholarship in memory of the slain Iranian student who became an icon of mass street protests sparked by the disputed June election.

In Tehran, a small group of hard-line women demonstrated Wednesday against the scholarship in front of the British Embassy. The women chanted "Death to Britain," the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

Oxford's Queen's College established the Neda Agha Soltan Graduate Scholarship in Philosophy earlier this year, named for the 27-year-old student fatally shot on June 20 on the sidelines of a Tehran demonstration. Her dying moments were caught on a video viewed by millions on the Internet, and she became a potent symbol of the opposition's struggle.

"It seems that the University of Oxford has stepped up involvement in a politically motivated campaign which is not only in sharp contrast with academic objectives" but also linked to British interference in Iran's post-election turmoil, Iran's Embassy in London said in a letter to the provost of the British university's college. Queen's College confirmed it had received the letter dated Tuesday.

Iran has in the past accused Britain of playing a role in the protests following the June 12 presidential election and meddling in its internal affairs. The opposition said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election by fraud. But hard-liners have described the massive protests as a plot by Iran's enemies to overthrow the system of clerical rule through a 'velvet revolution.'

The Iranian letter said Soltan's "suspicious death" is still a criminal case being investigated by the police at home. It said she had been shot on an isolated street far from the protesters and her "murderers" had filmed her and her companions for 20 minutes before the killing.

The letter also mentioned Arash Hejazi, an Iranian doctor who was with Soltan at the time she was shot and said he tried to save her life. Hejazi is studying at Oxford and was visiting Iran at the time.

"Surprising, an Oxford fellow, Mr. Arash Hejazi, who had arrived in Iran two days before Neda's killing, was present on the scene when she was bleeding to death and immediately left for London the day after her horrible death," the letter said. "There is further supporting evidence indicating a pre-made scenario and other complications yet to be investigated.

In July, a couple weeks after Soltan's death, Iran's police chief said intelligence officials were seeking Hejazi. That came after Hejazi returned to London and told the BBC that Soltan apparently was shot by a member of the volunteer Basij militia, which is linked to Iran's powerful and elite Revolutionary Guard corps. Hejazi said protesters spotted an armed member of the militia on a motorcycle, and stopped and disarmed him.

Iranian police claimed this was a fabrication and the incident had nothing to do with the street riots. Police did not say why officials want Hejazi, but the regime repeatedly has implicated protesters and foreign agents in Soltan's death.

The protesters in Tehran Wednesday accused Hejazi of being behind Soltan's killing and demanded his extradition, even though he is not facing any charges in Iran.

"We want you to extradite Neda Agha Soltan Murderer" read a placard carried by the women. They also chanted "U.K. and U.S. perpetrators."

The provost of Queen's College, Paul Madden, said the names of scholarships were decided, "within reason," by donors. The college did not disclose the donors behind the Soltan scholarship, but said the key individual was a British citizen who is well known to the college.

The scholarship is open to all philosophy students, with preference given to Iranians and those of Iranian descent. The first holder is Arianne Shahvisi, studying for a master's degree in the philosophy of physics.

iran's green war movement

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Very obviously now the kids are being agitated by neocons.

Not a doubt left in my mind.

Idiots. Hotheaded, HEEDLESS, idiots... trying to get some more megamillions killed.

Pastor Hagee is giddy about the prospects....

[Disinclined to heed history as I know you must be, "like sheep", you will continue to ignore the decades and decades of American covert ops inside Iran, that did NOT stop in 1979, ever ready and willing to do just as their handlers bid them. Who on this or any other planet would counsel you to dis Russia at this point? NOBODY but the fucking fiends who have been killing you, torturing you, and stealing from you since 1953. Hateful green war sheep. You DARE compare your "superstitious" president to W when it's W's pals herding every last green-waving one of you off a cliff... herding ALL OF US into another world war. Filthy, rapacious, fascist fuckers are calling every shot, shooting every shot, in your "reform" movement. Good-bye superstitious religious kooks and hello nukes and more repression than even your parents endured.]

he's SEVENTY-SIX years old, for crapsakes

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It was over three decades ago. We were not as maniacal about this sort of behavior back then. Lots of mothers threw their daughters at men like him, EVEN when they were under age. He was badly publicly humiliated, and he did his time. Judicial dithering and outrageousness made it clear to him he might as well deport himself. He's settled it with his victim. This is just beyond the pale.

You don't have to like him. You don't have to condone it. But you sure as hell can look at the facts and dig around for a sense of proportion. Jesus.

a different kind of looking

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I'm very tired of children walking around in grown up skin bags. They're so exhausting. You give it to them straight and it ends up like you'd shot it through a crystal. The light hooks a left or a right and they're as blind as if you'd never turned on your beam. I want to scream, "This means you!" I do. I do. But kiddies keep blathering their invective and their excuses and their blubbering over the mean élite... printing it on t-shirts, squirting it on blogs, carrying placards, stickering their bumpers... wearing their colors....

They can't hear. They can't see. They're all walking around as though this sentience gig they've got going for them is actuality and not just the contents of their own benighted heads entertaining them... as reality plays out, completely invisibly, in plain sight.

We all want to ascribe to Americans this ugly failing, bitch about the uniquely American nature of such spoiled incoherence, but, well, on the tubes now, we know that just isn't so.

We also know that this problem doesn't inhere just the bubbas out there, just the uneducated, the great unwashed. Nossirreebob, it don't. There are PhDs from everywhere quite as childish and lightless as, say, yer basic census worker lyncher... while I do grant statistically less likely to lynch. That's okay, though, because their stupidity is at least as deadly... just less apparent... and especially to them. Truth be told, smart people are harder to wake up because their minds are too well defended against sense breaking on their intellectual shores.

People are too used to calling their idiocy "honesty" and wouldn't know the kind of honesty it takes to wake up, to grow up, to stop all this nitwit doing and perform, if it walked up, a surprise polar bear, swiped their jaws off their faces, left them scrambling across their own icebergs to get them back on their bloody-dim pusses. It's that appalling. You aren't interacting with anyone if you only read what you already think, only hear what harks up what you've already made of thin air, only see what your conditioning says is real. Nope. You're locked in a space suit you call skin, and you should be praying for that polar bear.

We've got a global case of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I going here on the tubes and out in the walking around world, too. Yes we do. It makes my spine feel like a hot poker and all my muscles limp. My head feels like it's gonna fall off its titanium plate. I'm giving you the hairy eyeball, tonight, children.

Maybe in the morning I can do better.

you don't seem to be seeing what's going on here

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Retired Col. Lettie Bien, an adviser to the No. 2 commander in Iraq, wears jeweled letters spelling "U.S.A" at a naturalization ceremony for US Troops at al-Faw Palace on the western outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, July 4, 2009. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was in attendance as some 237 soldiers from 59 countries took the oath during his visit to Iraq.

Biden went over there to help consecrate the pact we have made with people so desperate for citizenship they will obviate the need to create a draft to fight all the war these fuckers deem profitable enough.

And I know you've already heard about their little boo-boo on the economy, but I want you to listen to Biden spit that out again, and then make sure you have read and digested this vital article. It's a project to take in this little constellation of linked concepts, but if you embark upon it, you might finally get the idea that none of this is about incompetence, or about politics. None of it. You just keep fascinated by those complaints because almost everything you encounter reinforces it. The government and the media and even most of the sites on the internet are training you just as your parents trained you to use the toilet instead of your diaper.

[Oh, oh, and, here, amuse yourself to death with this one....]

jim cramer did a good job

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His pants are down and he's taking it like a man. Jon Stewart is a credit to America, and Cramer had to take the beating for what Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke and dozens of CEOs should be experiencing.

It's as I've said a thousand times. These guys are regular people who simply don't realize, the way it needs to be realized, what they are doing. They are just like fighter pilots who feel they're playing a video game when they're actually incinerating thousands of innocent people. Even when you remind them that's what they're doing, it doesn't sink home. We are cartoons to each other... we've become cartoons to each other in the press of this kaleidoscopically ornate and G-force speed of events we call the world.

Turning real creatures into abstractions, into cartoons, is what makes us the razor wire wool of flesh-eating sheep, strutting around as if everything else is pixels in a video game, the ink on the funny pages.