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I am so tired.
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love, 99
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Showing posts with label wikileaks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wikileaks. Show all posts
22 March 2011
19 March 2011
thinking of heroes
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Someone mentioned that this meltdown and mystery radiation levels thing—the nukequake—is a perfect illustration of why we need WikiLeaks, why we need men like Assange....
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love, 99
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15 March 2011
11 March 2011
i've run out of patience
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The very weakest of my ten perfectings is patience, but enough is too much already.
A federal magistrate ruled Friday that prosecutors can demand Twitter account information of certain users in their criminal probe into the disclosure of classified documents on WikiLeaks.
Three of the five account holders targeted by the government had asked the judge to reverse an earlier order she issued requiring Twitter to turn over the information to prosecutors. The Twitter users argued that the government was on a fishing expedition and its request amounted to an unconstitutional violation of their freedom of speech and association.
But in a ruling issued Friday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Carroll Buchanan said the government's request was reasonable and did nothing to hamper the Twitter users' free speech rights.
"The freedom of association does not shield members from cooperating with legitimate government investigations," Buchanan wrote in her 20-page opinion.
The efforts by the Twitter users marked the first legal skirmish in the Justice Department's criminal investigation of the WikiLeaks disclosures, but is unlikely to be the last. The Twitter users' lawyers, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation - had previously said they would appeal an unfavorable ruling from the magistrate to a trial judge.
A federal law - the Stored Communications Act - allows prosecutors to obtain certain electronic data without a search warrant or a demonstration of probable cause. Instead, the government must only show that it has a reasonable belief that the records it seeks are relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.
Prosecutors said the law is used routinely in criminal investigations, and that the WikiLeaks investigation is no different from any other criminal probe.
The U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which is investigating the WikiLeaks case, declined comment after Friday's hearing.
Buchanan agreed with prosecutors, and said the Twitter users had no reason to expect that the information sought by prosecutors would be kept private. The order does not seek the content of the tweets themselves, which are already publicly disseminated. Instead, it seeks certain "non-content" information, like billing records and IP addresses associated with the accounts.
"The Twitter Order does not seek to control or direct the content of petitioners' speech or association," Buchanan wrote.
Lawyers for the Twitter users had argued that people would be less likely to speak freely if they knew that doing so could result in their being subjected to a government investigation.
Twitter did not immediately respond Friday to questions about whether it now intends to turn over the information sought by prosecutors.
The original order issued by Buchanan in December 2010 at prosecutors' request sought account information from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is being held at Quantico Marine Corps Base amid allegations that he leaked classified documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to WikiLeaks.
Three other accounts belonging to American Jacob Appelbaum, Dutch citizen Rop Gonggrijp and Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland's parliament, were also targeted. Those three challenged the court order. Assange has contended that, as an Australian citizen, he is not subject to American law.
Buchanan also rejected a request that would have required the government to disclose whether it sought similar records from other social networking sites like Facebook..
love, 99
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02 March 2011
!!! RED ALERT !!!
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An Army private suspected of leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive and classified documents to the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group was charged Wednesday with aiding the enemy, a crime that can bring the death penalty or life in prison.
The Army filed 22 new charges against Pvt. 1st Class Bradley E. Manning, including causing intelligence information to be published on the Internet. The charges don't specify which documents, but the charges involve the suspected distribution by the military analyst of more than 250,000 confidential State Department cables as well as a raft of Iraq and Afghanistan war logs. Thousands of the documents have been published on the WikiLeaks website.
Although aiding the enemy is a capital offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Army prosecutors have notified the Manning defense team that it will not recommend the death penalty to the two-star general who is in charge of proceeding with legal action.
The Army has not ruled out charging others in the case, pending the results of an ongoing review. Army leaders have suggested that there may have been supervisory lapses that allowed the breach to occur..
love, 99
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01 March 2011
i need to bring something to your attention
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I am not so sure that anyone in Libya was really that unhappy.... I'm trying mightily to stay off the pushbutton revolution circuit, not fall for it and not knock myself out to sniff down every last whiff of evidence to present to you that things are NOT as they seem to those in consensus trance, those listening to the bleatings from headlines anywhere and any way they seep into any aspect of consciousness... usually functionally subliminally. I want to remind you that we are no longer a nation of people who will leap to discern this sort of thing. I want to confess to you that one of my favorite sites has so bitten into this Spreading Democracy 2.0 crap that I cannot even bear to click-in to look at the blather... from a really intelligent bunch....
Don't mistake my avoidance of losing my cookies for apathy, that's all.
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Give the money to WikiLeaks for blowing the whistle and for causing the controllers to start pushing buttons to distract us utterly from WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, before our heads stop spinning.
The celeb-studded shows were part of the extravagant lifestyle of the dictator's sons, whose splashy parties and out-of-control spending have angered their countrymen, many of whom wallow in poverty as the Gadhafi clan benefits from the country's oil riches..
love, 99
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24 February 2011
oh, welcome home
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I find this:
Two U.S. citizens with diplomatic status were quietly withdrawn from Pakistan after being involved in a fatal car accident last month while trying to help Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor being held by Pakistani authorities on murder charges.
Two officials familiar with U.S. government activities in Pakistan said the two Americans who left the country worked for the CIA under contract as protective officers. This means they were employed as highly skilled bodyguards, like Davis, for CIA operations officers serving in Pakistan.
The two Americans who left Pakistan have not been otherwise identified by U.S. or Pakistani authorities. The CIA declined to comment.This is all next to a headline that reads:
Obama breaks silence, condemns Libya crackdown ...pfeh. Would you mind telling me WHY it's of interest WHAT Obama says about Libya? Is it actually that America is looking to its president to say stuff? Do we need a spokesmodel in chief? I mean, have you been avid to hear him on this subject?Do you think I oughta get back in my car now?
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On the other hand:
ATHENS, Greece — They blockade highway toll booths to give drivers free passage. They cover subway ticket machines with plastic bags so commuters can't pay. Even doctors are joining in, preventing patients from paying fees at state hospitals.
Some call it civil disobedience. Others a freeloading spirit. Either way, Greece's "I Won't Pay" movement has sparked heated debate in a nation reeling from a debt crisis that's forced the government to take drastic austerity measures — including higher taxes, wage and pension cuts, and price spikes in public services.
What started as a small pressure group of residents outside Athens angered by higher highway tolls has grown into a movement affecting ever more sectors of society — one that many say is being hijacked by left-wing parties keen to ride popular discontent.
A rash of political scandals in recent years, including a dubious land swap deal with a rich monastery and alleged bribes in state contracts — has fueled the rebellious mood.
At dawn last Friday, about 100 bleary-eyed activists from a Communist Party-backed labor union covered ticket machines with plastic bags at Athens metro stations, preventing passengers from paying their fares, to protest public transport ticket price hikes.
Other activists have taped up ticket machines on buses and trams. And thousands of people simply don't bother validating their public transport tickets when they take the subway or the bus.
"The people have paid already through their taxes, so they should be able to travel for free," said Konstantinos Thimianos, 36, an activist standing at the metro picket line in central Syntagma Square.
In one of their frequent occupations of the toll booths on the northern outskirts of Athens recently, protesters wore brightly colored vests with "total disobedience" emblazoned across their backs, and chanted: "We won't pay for their crisis!"
The tactic has cropped up in the health sector, with some state hospital doctors staging a blockade in front of pay counters to prevent patients from paying their €5 flat fee for consultations.
Critics deride the protests as yet another example of a freeloading mentality that helped lead the country into its financial mess.
"The course from initial lawlessness to final wanton irresponsibility is like a spreading cancer," Dionysis Gousetis said in a recent column in the respected daily broadsheet Kathimerini.
"Now, with the crisis as an alibi ... the freeloaders don't hide. They appear publicly and proudly and act like heroes of civil disobedience. Something like Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi," Gousetis wrote. "They're not satisfied with not paying themselves. They are forcing others to follow them."
Many accuse left-wing parties and labor unions of usurping a grassroots movement with legitimate grievances for their own political ends.
"You think that lawlessness is something revolutionary, which helps the Greek people," Prime Minister George Papandreou said recently, lashing out in Parliament at Coalition of the Left party head Alexis Tsipras. "It is the lawlessness which we have in our country that the Greek people are paying for today."
But there is something about the "I Won't Pay" movement that speaks to something deeper within Greek society: a propensity to bend the rules, to rebel against authority, particularly that of the state.
It is so ingrained that many Greeks barely notice the myriad small, daily transgressions — the motorcycle driving on the sidewalk, the car running the red light, the blatant disregard of yet another government attempt to ban smoking in restaurants and bars.
Less innocuous is persistent and widespread tax avoidance despite increasingly desperate government measures.
"There is a general culture of lawlessness, starting from the most basic thing, tax evasion or tax avoidance, which is something that Greeks have been exercising since their state was created," said social commentator Nikos Dimou.
But many see the "I Won't Pay" movement as something much simpler: the people's refusal to pay for the mistakes of a series of governments accused of squandering the nation's future through corruption and cronyism.
"I don't think it's part of the Greek character. Greeks, when they see that the law is being applied in general, they will implement it too," said Nikos Louvros, the 55-year-old chain-smoking owner of an Athens bar that openly flouts the smoking ban.
"But when it isn't being applied to some, such as when there are ministers who have been stealing, ... Well, if the laws aren't implemented at the top, others won't implement them.".
We should just teach kids basic math and how to read and then let them listen to James Corbett. They'd be ten thousand percent better off. Would they not?
I mean, it occurs to me that most of us know most of what he's saying there already, but we do continually let that litany of facts sink back into the great existential puddle. NO dispositive action is ever taken against it. So we should consider yanking our kids out of school after second grade and smoking in elevators from now on.
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love, 99
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16 February 2011
just shoot me
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They talk as though this kind of mindfucking isn't what has already been going on... for, like, well, for how long? It's as though they think this is some sort of original plan. It's as though the sociopathy laced all through its math is the expression of an advancement of some kind. Are people honestly this stupid and blind, or am I in a coma somewhere, having the nightmare of all human history?
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love, 99
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11 February 2011
feds helping bank smear journalists
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Not just WikiLeaks, which is an outrage in itself.
And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America's General Counsel by the Justice Department — meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks.
That's why this should be taken seriously, despite how ignorant, trite and laughably shallow is the specific leaked anti-WikiLeaks proposal. As creepy and odious as this is, there's nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous' hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it's being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely.
But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power. I've written many times about this issue — the full-scale merger between public and private spheres — because it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.
That's what this anti-WikiLeaks campaign is generally: it's a concerted, unified effort between government and the most powerful entities in the private sector....
love, 99
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09 February 2011
you can blow with this or you can blow with that
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I can blow with both, but you can choose between some engaging hours with old Tsarion interviews and gaping at some really lame WikiLeaks response proposal... that... er... isn't working out very well at all. Up to you.
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Extra Credit....
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Ultra Extra Credit....
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love, 99
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i'm being vindicated left and right lately
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Better be careful not to get too cocky... and, of course, I'd love to be right about happier things....
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love, 99
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08 February 2011
commodity bubbles are going out of control
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You fuckers doing yer speculating should curl up and die instead.
The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.
The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.
The revelation comes as the oil price has soared in recent weeks to more than $100 a barrel on global demand and tensions in the Middle East. Many analysts expect that the Saudis and their Opec cartel partners would pump more oil if rising prices threatened to choke off demand.I gotta say, I had this entire problem completely parsed by the time I was thirteen years old, and have endured all manner of karma for it my whole life, only to live to see for undeniably certain that I was right from the git. Yes, that and two bucks will buy me a cup of coffee, I know, but, you fuckers, WHY won't you wake up?
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love, 99
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sounds like it went well for truth today in court
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Only, we gotta wait maybe weeks to find out if truth is good enough for the court.
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love, 99
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07 February 2011
that reminds me
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I set us all to setting our hearts on Julian's release last night, resolving to get in bed with the determination to dream of this, even, and then got in bed and picked up a magazine to combat the alertness trying to poke through my drowsiness. I was reading some blather about the relative merits of a couple of maverick Muslim scholars when I dropped into dreamland and kept being annoyed by the vision of some Muslim official somewhere lying very charmingly to some parliament or other. He was kind of handsome. He was doing an Obama. I kept being so angry about it that it would wake me back up, pissed off, and then I'd sink right back into it. I don't think it was a dream. I think it's happened or is happening or will happen and I was seeing it, but so unwilling that this is all I can say about it.
So I got up this "morning" chuffed and puffed and cranky as anything over not having gotten to the part where I invoked the good dream for Assange... but... after thinking about it a while, I'm now much more pissed off even that I was so obtuse about noting the precise specs of this Muslim politician I saw.
Never mind. JULIAN. We must concentrate on this ending tomorrow. We must concentrate on freeing a truthteller.
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love, 99
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04 February 2011
i told you so
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Now Wikileaks has provided the proof. You might want to contemplate the implications of this for a few moments. Among other things, it makes Judy Wood and Joseph Farrell seem a lot less out there on the matter of 9/11.
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love, 99
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02 February 2011
01 February 2011
9/11 cables finally being published
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I can't get into it until I get some urgent chores behind me, but I figgered you'd want the hedzup....
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One other point: the fact that the government was asking newspapers precisely which cables they’d publish makes me wonder whether they didn’t have — and may still not have, though given the numbers of copies floating around I suspect they now know — a clear idea of which cables were included in the document dump. Geoff Morrell’s press conference last week made it clear that they still only consider Bradley Manning a person of interest in the leak of the larger dump, meaning that if he leaked them, they haven’t identified how he did so. But is it possible that — at least in November — they didn’t even know what cables were included in the dump?.
love, 99
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31 January 2011
i blame barackhenaten
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Al Jazeera has been replaying everything over and over and over and over... and specifically to include Hillary Clinton's non-statement regarding the situation in Egypt. It's like watching planes crash into the World Trade Center, okay? I am traumatized. All night the Egyptian Army has been building road blocks, and just generally looking to be gearing up for a lot more control, and people are trickling into the square now, stepping over the supine campers who were up chanting all night, now sleeping it off in place. So. What does al Jazeera do? Why, they play the same clips and interviews over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over ... with occasional snippets of live footage of the action. But the Clinton part is the absolute worst. It's a goddam controlled demolition. It's an inside job. It's a fat fucking lie drilling at my third eye until I want to strip all layers off and go screaming naked off that cliff out there....
I'm snapping this puppy off for now, and will hope to time my next foray for when there might be some GOOD news. I'll add it to this post if.... The cyclone about to hit Queensland has nothing to do with my mood.
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11:00am PST: Old Uncle Dave offers THIS LINK as confirmation of my suspicions, and it is emblematic of the trouble brewing in my muddled brain, so I'm glad he brought it up. I had not bothered to peak at Groupthink until late last night, but I was noticing too many Egypt-related headlines coming up on the feed for my comfort. If it gets heavy rotation on the AP and Reuters, that means only one thing. The controllers want us to be concerned for the overthrow of a government, want popular solidarity behind a "regime change". All the points Lendman brings up have been on my mind, and I think you should give him your eyeprints.
I'm not sure I agree that the other recent uprisings were not welcomed by our controllers, were not managed by them, but mayhap the cables put out by WikiLeaks really did nudge them into it. Being that Mubarak is 82, there can be NO doubt, his replacement has been a priority for the people who have no business controlling anything, but DO control everything.
Other signs that we should be concerned are that Al Jazeera has not only stuck to this with very little attention to the Israeli end of it until today... and it is pretty benign stuff being aired today... and that our cable and satellite services are airing al Jazeera suddenly. It serves to keep them off the MSM so people will think they're the subversive news, but we have seen for quite some time that al Jazeera is no longer the voice of the Middle East, that they have modulated their coverage and commentary to such an extent that they are now only something like a marriage between PBS and CNN, only rarely airing things that give real insight into world affairs. If I hadn't known it already, my visceral reaction to having it on for so many hours every day would have told me.
Added to my wall-to-wall coverage today is the news that Omar Sharif is very, very old. He has not left Cairo. He is 100% in favor of the revolution... but no longer so gorgeous it makes my knees go all wobbly.
Basically, I would feel better if Hu Jintao or Dmitry Medvedev were backing the revolution, if the hairdos on al Jazeera were looking to them for comment on this matter—not that I think they are great humanitarians, but that I think they are more concerned for the real welfare of humans than the controlling elite in the West. That would make me feel more like there is a chance for all of us. As it is, with everyone looking to the imposture who abdicated upon inauguration and the harpy he didn't really supplant, this really does feel like watching airliners smack into skyscrapers.
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Nomi Prins....
Around 2005, Egypt decided to transform its financial system in order to increase its appeal as a magnet for foreign investment, notably banks and real estate speculators. Egypt reduced cumbersome bureaucracy and regulations around foreign property investment through decree (number 583.) International luxury property firms depicted the country as a mecca (of the tax-haven variety) for property speculation, a country offering no capital gains taxes on real estate transactions, no stamp duty, and no inheritance tax.
But, Egypt's more devastating economic transformation centered around its decision to aggressively sell off its national banks as a matter of foreign and financial policy between 2005 and early 2008 (around the time that US banks were stoking a global sub-prime and other forms-of-debt and leverage oriented crisis). Having opened its real estate to foreign investment and private equity speculation, the next step in the deregulation of the country's banks was spurring international bank takeovers complete with new bank openings, where international banks could begin plowing Egyptians for fees. Citigroup, for example, launched the first Cards reward program in 2005, followed by other banks.
According to an article in Executive Magazine in early 2007, which touted the competitive bidding, acquistion and rebranding of Egyptian banks by foreign banks and growth of foreign M&A action, the biggest bank deal of 2006 was the sale of one of the four largest state-run banks, Bank of Alexandria, to Italian bank, Gruppo Sanpaolo IMI. This, a much larger deal than the 70% acquisition by Greek's Piraeus Bank of the Egyptian Commercial Bank in 2005, one of the first deals to be blessed by the Central Bank of Egypt and the Ministry of Investment that unleashed the sale of Egypt's banking system to the highest international bidders.
The greater the pace of foreign bank influx and take-overs to 'modernize' Egypt's banking system, inevitably the more short-term, "hot" money poured into Egypt. Pieces of Egypt, or its companies, continued to be purchased by foreign conglomerates, trickling off when the global financial crisis brewed full force in 2008, though not before Goldman Sachs Strategic Investments Limited in the UK bought a $70 million chunk of Palm Hills Development SAE, a high-end real estate developer, in March, 2008..
love, 99
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