al jazeera phoning it in

[click image]

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It's not just them. It's all over the place. Most of them are reporting three explosions at the Fukushima nuclear plant. There have been four. Four separate reactor containment structures have blown up. There are a total of six at the site, and the last two still intact are in danger of losing the coolant level needed to prevent explosions just like the first four. Thousands of spent, but nonetheless highly radioactive, fuel rods are also at risk of losing cooling water. There is no mention anywhere of any of the reactors actually melting down, only some mention of some rods being exposed and emitting exponentially more radiation than the original safe-ish-but-troubling releases. Don't ask me to give you any links because it changes back into something else the minute I try to go back to it.

Any of you left suffering under the delusion that information on the tubes is better than on the tube can only feel marginally more comfort if you are willing never to sleep and to catch EVERYTHING hot off the press. It goes away, I tell you. It goes away. Soon it will not get up there at all.

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I am caving in, here, to link Dave Lindorff's hyperbolic post about the construction of these nuclear power units, because it contains some salient information, but I edited the living snot out of it because the bare facts are more than enough:

These plants feature huge pools of water up in the higher level of the containment building above the reactors, which hold the spent fuel rods from the reactor. These rods are still “hot” but besides the uranium fuel pellets, they also contain the highly radioactive and potentially biologically active decay products of the fission process — particularly radioactive Cesium 137, Iodine 131 and Strontium 90.

If these waste cooling ponds were to be damaged in an explosion and lose their cooling and radiation-shielding water, they could burst into flame from the resulting burning of the highly flammable zirconium cladding of the fuel rods, blasting perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster. Each pool generally contains five to ten times as much nuclear material as the reactors themselves. A 1997 Nuclear Regulatory Commission study predicted that a waste pool fire could render a 188-square-mile area uninhabitable.

The Fukushima Reactor 3 unit uses MOX fuel rods, which are a mix of uranium and plutonium. Plutonium is far more dangerous chemically and in terms of its radioactivity.

Few are mentioning the problem with the fallout being blown over the Pacific. The explosions, or fires, or meltdowns, or near meltdowns, whatever way you want to look at it, are spewing radioactive material directly in the path of the Jet Stream that is rolling right on over to bump into the California coast, all of Oregon and Washington, and even on up into western B.C. and Alaska over the next few days.

Would that we had a Julian Assange in the IAEA or some American outpost of matters nuclear. Anyone got a geiger counter?

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love, 99
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okay, good for cory

[click image]

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I am heartily pleased to see this there.

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love, 99
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hopes for foreclosures to start ramping up again

[click image]

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I have a really bad headache.

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He picks the weirdest things to try to keep up appearances with.

Caught between their boss’ anti-lobbyist rhetoric and the reality of governing, President Barack Obama’s aides often steer meetings with lobbyists to a complex just off the White House grounds — and several of the lobbyists involved say they believe the choice of venue is no accident.

It allows the Obama administration to keep these lobbyist meetings shielded from public view — and out of Secret Service logs kept on visitors to the White House and later released to the public.

There are a growing number of wuwu types stumping for us to forget our government and start arranging new ways to handle things that just completely leaves them out. I originally thought that might be a more palatable approach and leave us in better shape than with a just straight up revolution, but that it would require more eye opening than I think the nation is prepared to sustain. It just hit me how much WORK it would be too. So. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen, despite items about deaths in our Middle East melee and everything you ever wanted to know about the Oscars but were afraid to ask popping up side-by-side in the MSM, to include here on the tubes, you fucking filthy debauched swine.

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love, 99
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here's yer sign

[click image]

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

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

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

A cast iron frying pan upside the head?

Wait! Wait! I have one of those!

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

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

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

No excuses.

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

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love, 99
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phil is speaking server to me again

[click image — that's my friend Phil with the red beard]

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I just hate it when he does that. I never know what he's trying to convey. I am the ACE at taking in even THE most inscrutable terms or accents or whatever, but Phil-speak, which I suspect is server-speak, never yields up anything that makes sense to me. I have also just learned—against all odds—that my problem with the "wrong" box for the hard drive to my dead Mac has not been that the box is wrong! The hitch has been that they put so many alternative plugs for alternative drives in there, expecting all the unused ones to just be skrinched up in the box—uselessly—with the drive, and after you have done all that—OMG—Bob is quite suddenly and so mystically your uncle. I am now back in possession of all my emails and all my stash of old images and they are all in their own little history folder and now my old hard drive is my fully functioning external drive for backing up the crap I accumulate so the bits that are not crap are also not lost. I feel elevated to the height of at least Everest that the problem has been stupidity and now that I'm in Jim's house with all this stuff, the problem can have gone away and a clear path into the future stretches out before me.

Contrary to popular expectations, I love to find out that I have been wrong... or stupid... or ditzy... whatever the hitch has been. It means everything can get better! That—no kidding—feels like sex. Try it.

So. Jim, who knows the very soul of my paranoia—aka deeply-held Americanism—has recommended that I look-in to this plug computing thing, or whutever it is, and so the image link is meant to be my gateway into the eventual escape from fascism. My friends love me. They put up with my weirdness and they help me be happily weird. Do you realize how important that is? No. Really. He's content to use Chrome so that Google can keep perfect track of his every whim, but he knows how creeped-out that makes me and so he helps me keep as uncreeped as possible. I used to be able to just hop in Goldie and drive a couple miles and be here with Jim and Peggy. They put up with the late night death grip chocolate cravings of menopause problem. They let me read every book that lines every wall of this house, even though they've only ever had the time to buy them. They cook me gourmet meals. They serve me fancy drinks. They get me wild birthday presents. They love me even if I'm stranger than fiction to them.

So. We all now must turn our attention to this plug thing....

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OH, man, I really think you oughta bookmark this page. I'm pretty bonkers for this bit here:

When is Freedom Box?

We don't know yet. But all around us, we can see that it needs to be soon.

Doesn't that sound SANE?

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love, 99
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parasite capitalism

[click image]

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Or should we call it cannibalism?

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

[click image]

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

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love, 99
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fears unrest if he leaves now

[click image — the timeline I was asking for — I think this was taken before his last facelift....]

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I guess they've been fighting the whole time I've been in bed, but less fiercely than the night before.

WSJ — ABC News’s Christiane Amanpour, in an interview with Hosni Mubarak on Thursday, reported that the Egyptian president said he would like to leave office now, but can’t, for fear that the country would dissolve into chaos.

“I care about my country, I care about Egypt,” he said in the interview, according to the report. He added that he is troubled by the violence in Cairo of the past few days but that his government isn’t responsible for it.

So don't you feel like a right rat bastard for suggesting he's been anything but the very portrait of a paragon of responsible governance, selflessly sticking to this agonizing grind for our sakes? I could just die of shame for besmirching such a buddha.

I think the demonstrators are winding up for another huge protest tomorrow. But I'm sure it won't kick in till one or two in the afternoon, their time, because of Friday Prayers.

Much is being made of Google's new "speak to tweet" feature they've hurried along for the benefit of the protestors in Egypt. I wonder how swift they'd've been to come out with it if this were AMERICANS uprising....

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In fact, not so much is being made of how we helped Mubarak shut it all down. I'm pretty sure they'd have no trouble being swift with this here....

And, listening to this, has just convinced me that my Genghis Ponzi Yoo label should be changed to BARACKHENATEN. Apt as GPY is, Barackhenaten covers the spectrum better, includes the narcissism and sociopathic and pharaonic angles better....

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You might want to listen to JB's take on the matter. I don't think he's right because Israel will be insisting on a known-quantity, and Suleiman and to a lesser extent ElBaradei fit that bill, but mayhap they have found someone they know for sure they can control well enough and he indeed will emerge as a hero in the next day or two. The thing JB's argument has going for it is the possibility of finding someone young enough that they don't have to go through all this again in just a few years, but they could be grooming someone to "win an election" in the future, and probably more satisfactorily instead. It's key to remember that all elections can be made to come out with completely fraudulent results with astonishing ease nowadays if the populace fails in the first place to fall for all the psyops hype that works even better than thrown elections.

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love, 99
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godmotherfuckingdammityoutwits!

[click image]

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I have screamed and hollered and hopped up and down and bellowed and insulted and gone postal on you over the ABJECT STUPIDITY of participating in all this social media crap. I have reminded you of the horrors inhering such activity. I have BEGGED you! Just enter yer account name in the box at the link and see what pops up. Just enter ANY Twitter account name you know about and see what pops up.

GETAMOTHERFUCKINGCLUEBEFORETHEYHAULMETOTHEBIN!

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love, 99
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fascism seeeeeriously sucks

[click image]

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They are NOT going to take the intertubes away. They're going to use it on us.

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love, 99
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australia swims up for air

[click image — yuh, I switched out images because this one just keeps making me laugh]

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I am sure they'll be dunked again, but at least they're still thrashing.

Robert Stary, Assange's Melbourne-based lawyer, thinks his client's defense should be pretty straightforward, because he considers Assange to be a journalist, protected by U.S. First Amendment guarantees of free speech.

But Stary is worried about some possibilities: "Our main concern is really the possible extradition to the U.S. We've been troubled by the sort of rhetoric that has come out of various commentators and principally Republican politicians — Sarah Palin and the like — saying Mr. Assange should be executed, assassinated."

On her Facebook page, Palin suggests that Assange should be "pursued with the same urgency as al-Qaida and Taliban leaders."

Anyone who incites others to commit violence against his client, even outside Australia, Stary says, is violating Australian law, and can be held accountable for it.

"Certainly if Sarah Palin or any of those other politicians come to Australia, for whatever purpose, then we can initiate a private prosecution, and that's what we intend to do," Stary said.

Poor Sarah. Her bloody rhetoric keeps taking hits lately.

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And, it appears I'm getting some support from a Russian author for my assertions about the intertubes NOT going to be taken away:

Part of the argument I'm making in the book is that authoritarian governments have immensely benefited from the web, and I point to three features. One of them is propaganda; one of them is new ways of censorship; and one of them is increased surveillance, more sophisticated surveillance.

So relax....

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love, 99
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if i keep linking him, you might give up and listen

[click image]

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My life has always had to be a balance of research and creativity. I think maybe I was not as traumatized by school as most people because I could engage with it in stellar ways and ignore it completely, as suited the moment. So I didn't end up allergic to reading and learning and social engagement. I didn't end up afraid not to be an android... or even to fall for the I'm-not-an-android faction of consensus trance. I have spent many years deeply immersed in books and periodicals and lectures and interviews, dipping into intensive periods on one thing or another—a couple decades of the Zen—but mostly just going after the shiny bits that fell into my orbit one way or another. It's not really anything you should call "learning". You should rather think of it as seeing. While it is perfectly true that everything is a teacher, it really is only one's sight that gives rise to the insight that signals learning.

For all the having to learn things the hard way I do, there is one here who knows. She just waits for me to get over myself and I have to keep pounding on my desk with the necessity of that happening completely sooner rather than the already humiliating later going on. I have to get used to the real world not being any more worthy of my serious participation in certain spots than school was, not let that distract me from the stellar part.

I don't know about you, but I am so heartily sick of this rapid succession of nerve movies playing everywhere I turn that not even my fiddling with images is taking care of the creative outlet part anymore. Maybe it's just because it's winter and I spend more time in cyberspace when it's uncomfortable out there, but the regular evidence of insufficiency of even the best we've got begins to drag on me pretty badly. I want to think well of people. They make it very hard. I want to be a reliance for them. It doesn't go well. And I do have to mention that for however long I have been about my doctorate in Out There, one very strange thing keeps popping to mind. Time I mentioned it.

Even the most ridiculous of them is radically more sincere than just about everyone on the tubes, and many of them have genuinely great things to impart, even when it's mixed in with folderol. Who do we love? All kinds of people. But I think the only one who hasn't disappointed me yet is Assange. Paul Craig Roberts only disappointed me a little bit once or twice. Jeremy Scahill really mostly only gets on my nerves by unerringly using "that" when he means "who" and so might be slightly more perfect than PCR. Glenn Greenwald has about 30% needing to step up a few notches, but compensates by manfully engaging with issues instead of just laying back in a bath of punditry. Others have their impressive days. Still others have impressive days if you don't think too hard about what they said.

But mostly, mostly, mostly it's total crap from start to finish. The ones who mean it are so exasperatingly few. Sure, plenty carry on as though they are 100% committed... but it's not the subject matter or our benefit that is the genesis of their commitment. It's popularity. It's money. It's trying to be one of the shiny bits in the bastions of consensus trance, groupthink in designer jeans. I have given my time and quite a bit of effort to a few of them now, the ones I thought had promise or were stumping for a good cause, but it turns out being really a case of me not having any business interfering in someone's nap, or getting so steamed when they keep nodding back off. I remember this! I swore off it when I was thirty!

It was different back then. The oceans of dharma were not part of it. So silly me to take it back up when they were! And then to get decked by that surgery! OMG. I don't think I can describe just how disorienting being clocked by an extraterrestrial neurosurgeon god really is. I've had surgeries before in my life. Not like this. So I can identify with the notion of planetary trauma screwing up the human mind. OUT. GONE. Beyond the beyond anesthesia. Wiped my hard drive. He saved me from spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair, but, heh, the price was really high. I remember I had a bad crush on him for about three months after he strapped me onto a special operating table that would angle properly and started pulling down hydraulic drills and scrapers and cutters and screw drivers to trick me out with a highfalutin titanium plate to hold my head on. I remember thinking decades ago that the thing about sex for a woman has something to do with the animal knowledge that he could actually kill you, maybe even with your consent, but instead makes you feel damn wonderful. It strikes me that perhaps that's exactly why I was mad for my surgeon god for a little while. He had my consent to kill me, and he didn't. He kept me walking around. He also permanently pissed off my already darn grumpy thyroid, but, hey, there are pills for that.

There are no pills for this, though, and so I'm loving listening to Tsarion especially. I like Neil Kramer pretty much, too, but you know what? His accent makes me nauseous. I notice that I can only stand listening to him when he's really on it. When he's just talking, even though I know the guy is no dummy and has good stuff to think about, I gotta snap it off or his accent will make me kick over a chair. I think it's the British equivalent of Ebonics... doesn't improve with the mere insertion of big words. That stuff only fails to rile me badly when the speaker is perfectly genuine about something important, something really good. I guess the point I might already have made but still don't feel I've gotten to is that YOU CAN'T FAKE IT!

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love, 99
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meditation is still a waste of good shopping time

[click image]

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But I wouldn't have known it except for having credited someone for the old link so I could go back and try to figure out what the new link might be. Lucky for all of us that we almost never go back into the archives of blogs, because it's all been turned to mush, man, mush. Weren't we so cute with all our thoughts about keeping records for posterity? I mean, I know I'm maybe the worst blogger on earth for purposes of searching, and then if you've managed to find what you want, the links have probably gone dead and there is usually almost nothing there to help you try to reconstruct it... so... I'm thinking I might do better to lop off the entire back half of this puppy and THEN agonize over how many dead links are still left. Or maybe I should just never look. Or maybe I should go about inventing an internet that doesn't disappear everything on you. Or maybe I should think about doing only posts that expire within 24 hours... or an hour... or... or go to bed....

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love, 99
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if you won't take it from me

[click image]

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Maybe you'll take it from the irascible old fuck who's been at this the longest?

Bradley Manning didn't do it, and they're not going to take the intertubes away from you. No way.

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love, 99
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besides, i don't think you realize how vital china is to your way of life

[click image]

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And, here, they can be seen plainly to be making it more difficult to live without them rather than less. Adolf NWO Einstein has backed himself into a corner here, but while you're whining about the tiered service from your ISP and a general clampdown on our access to anything on the tubes, China is very nearly the only place where any of our electronics are made. If people take it into their heads that our money is useless, which has been the case for many decades, but the perception is seriously imperiled now, we're going to be watching the rest of the world getting iPads while we are staring at our basements full of dead and discarded computers, wondering if we can scrounge enough parts to put one working one together.

I really hope there are free thinkers out there who are planning an escape for us, one not so vulnerable to control by capitalism and by governments, or we may have to learn how to interact with people F2F [face-to-face] again, no?

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love, 99
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rage against the dying of the light

[click image]

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The death of creativity is evident everywhere, especially when you flip on yer fuckin' tube, but everywhere. People reading headlines only and letting that go directly into their personal CPUs. Movies all way heavy to special effects and exploding things and very light on story and script. Formulaic everything. Shit! That drives me nuts!

People freaking that they're gonna take our intertubes away from us, when it has become the PRIMARY implement for actual dissent abatement. ONE guy succeeds transcendentally in using it to free us, and the NWO guys freak, but it isn't ONLY the bad guys, now is it? Nope. All our so-called heroes in this series of pipes are scurrying to place themselves somewhere safe in response to this actual threat of REAL liberation... and, contrary to what you might think, the SAFEST position is the hand-wringing over the mere thought of the loss of our medium.

The internet has already become no place for those whose coping mechanism is ignoring actuality—which would be a minimum of 90% of us—and at least 9 of the other 10% are using this medium to release the pressure of their mounting ire—so, pfeh, snap out of it! Don't be an idiot. And don't mistake the contours of techno goodies for creativity. No. Creativity involves truly stepping out of the dominant paradigms and producing something truly made of valuable insight, which involves genuine courage, NOT the imitation of it, NOT the lip service of it, NOT the constant turning of it into endless strings of cyber glossolalia never involving leaving our seats in the great stadium where humans watch other humans being ground up like hamburger, after being tortured beyond endurance.

The ancients called this world Endurance, but they didn't mean enduring through ignoring, and "ignoring" also includes paying attention as a spectator attends an event, EVEN when you SAY something. I've been hearing from a lot of outposts on this far out plane that people don't WANT to be free, are desperate to have their choices taken away, that the scientific atheists blasting away at the androids for Christ are as eager for adherence to a set of rules as those they so viciously revile, that all those patronizing prig progressives are even more bent on fascism than the conservatives they deride so blindly and smugly, and it's so damn obviously true I'm almost never quit of the feeling my head will explode. Go fuck a robot, the lot of you, or wake the hell up.

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love, 99
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do you believe in this change?

[click image]

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UNbelievable....

Julian Assange in the Honey Trap
How they snared him

by Justin Raimondo, December 08, 2010

Anyone who doubts the unmitigated evil of the US government and its international enablers has only to look at the disgraceful persecution of Julian Assange to see Washington’s brazen malevolence in full flower. As the WikiLeaks web site continues to release daily examples of US incompetence, bullying, venality, and corruption, the response from the Imperial City has been a coordinated campaign of lies, smears, and what can only be described as utter filth.

This outpouring of satanic bile has been disgorged onto the front pages of the world’s newspapers in retaliation for the “crime” of revealing the everyday machinations and cynical maneuverings of the US government as it rampages, loots, and murders its way across the face of the earth. In doing so, Assange and WikiLeaks have violated the first principle of the new world order, which is that they (the governments of the world) have every right to know what we’re saying in the privacy of our own homes: in our emails, our phone conversations, and anywhere else we (falsely) believe we’re free from prying eyes and ears. However, we have no right to know what they are doing, in our name – with our tax dollars – and to believe otherwise is “treason.”

For these people – the scum who inhabit the corridors of power – character assassination is an art, to be practiced with a fine attention to detail: and, to be sure, in this case they have outdone themselves. While sex is a weapon they’ve often used to hunt down their quarry, they can’t nowadays merely expose the intimate details of their victims’ personal life. In a society that resembles the last days of the Roman empire, where what we used to think of as immorality is rife, the smear artists have to give their revelations a more specific character, and in Assange’s case they have given us a textbook example.

The “charges” against Assange, made by two women – Anna Ardin, a “feminist” harridan who works as the “gender equity” officer at Uppsala University, and Sophia Wilen, a sometime photographer and former Assange groupie with stalkerish tendencies – are quite murky. Assange had come to Sweden at Ardin’s invitation, or, rather, at the invitation of the "Brotherhood" a Christian faction of Sweden’s Social Democratic party for which Ardin is the press secretary. He was staying at her home because she was supposedly going to be gone for a few days with her family, but Ardin returned early, for some reason, and they agreed to cohabit on a temporary basis. Ardin avers that she had agreed to (or perhaps – who knows? – even initiated) consensual sex with Assange, and so, as the Daily Mail reported, “they had sexual relations, but there was a problem with the condom – it had split. She seemed to think that he had done this deliberately but he insisted that it was an accident.” Ardin also claims Assange used the weight of his body to keep her immobilized – being a feminist, she likes to be on top.

However, she gave no indication of distress, either that day or the next: instead, she threw a party for Assange at her home. That evening Assange gave a seminar at the Stockholm headquarters of a trade union, and in the front row sat Sophia Wilen, an employee of the local Social Democratic-controlled council in the northern town of Enkoping. Wilen later told police that she had seen Assange on television and had become “obsessed” by him. When she heard he was speaking in Sweden, she called the “Brotherhood” of Social Democratic Christians to volunteer to help at the event, but was turned down: she came anyway, of course, and was soon glomming on to Assange with all the persistence of a blond and very leggy tick – the kind that give you Lyme Disease.

Loitering outside the venue in her shocking pink jumper, she approached Assange and two others who were going to a local café, and managed to get herself invited to join. One of the participants in the ensuing conversation describes her as “certainly an odd character,” who seemed out of place. Aggressively pursuing Assange, she sat there looking at him adoringly, and there was – say witnesses – what seemed to be a mutual attraction. After lunch, the two went out to a movie, and later on, when Assange said he had to go – Ardin was planning a crayfish party for him, a traditional Swedish-style event – she asked if she could see him again. He readily agreed. Later, at the party, Ardin would Tweet to her friends that she was “’Sitting outside … nearly freezing, with the world’s coolest people. It’s pretty amazing!” She later tried to erase this record of her short-lived joy, but the internet knows all, sees all, now doesn’t it?

The honey-trap was nearly sprung, but there were a few more details to take care of. As Ardin was stuffing her face with crayfish and getting drunk, Assange was on the phone with Sophia. They arranged to meet in Stockholm. As the Daily Mail reported:

“When they did meet they agreed to go to her home in Enkoping, but he had no money for a train ticket and said he didn’t want to use a credit card because he would be ‘tracked’ (presumably, as he saw it, by the CIA or other agencies).”

Little did he suspect that was already being tracked. Sophia generously offered to buy him a ticket. When they got to her Enkoping digs, they had sex: he used a condom. The next morning, they again had sex, this time without a condom. They went out for breakfast, with no sign of displeasure or even the barest hint of “rape” coming from her side of the fence: she told him to stay in touch, and he said he would. She then bought him a return ticket to Stockholm, and he was gone – but hardly forgotten.

Here is where the story gets murky: for some reason not readily apparent to me, Sophia called Anna, and the two got to talking: the former confided she had been sleeping with Assange. Anna was furious: here is a woman who had earlier posted on her personal blog a rather scary “Seven Steps to Legal Revenge,” which reads like it might have been written by Valerie Solanis.

Sitting alone in Enkoping, wondering why Assange didn’t call, Sophia had been simmering in her own resentments, and Ardin was more than happy to give her the opportunity to vent. Together they concocted a plan to go to the police: initially the focus was on Sophia’s obsession with the possibility she might have contracted AIDS from the unprotected sex. The two of them went to a police station and asked if it was possible to force Assange to undergo a test for STDs.

It was the weekend, and the regular prosecutor was off duty: a substitute prosecutor listened to their story and decided, on her own authority, to go after Assange. The police combed the entertainment district of Stockholm, looking for him: to no avail. This indictment was later rescinded, however, by the regular prosecutor, due to the fact that, as the office put it, there was “no evidence” a crime had been committed.

The two had leaked the story to the Swedish tabloid Expressen, which relentlessly blared it on their front pages. Pretty professional work for a couple of alleged groupies. Indeed, Ardin is a former Swedish embassy official who served in Buenos Aires, and Havana: she was reportedly asked to leave Cuba after her interactions with Cuban exile groups linked to the CIA.

With those kinds of connections, Ardin was not easily deterred by the dropping of the charges. In order to construct a legal case against Assange, she recruited Claes Borgström, a lawyer and the former “Equal Opportunities Ombudsman” for “gender equity issues.” He has been working assiduously to expand the legislative reach of high feminist theory, including by extending the legal definition of rape. According to this new manifestation of extreme political correctness – which is only possible, one hopes, in dreary, suicide-prone Sweden – rape need not necessarily involve physical coercion. There is also, these professional victimologists believe, a form of “psychological” coercion enforced by the unequal “power relations” between the sexes.

In league with a third prosecutor, Marianne Ny, Borgström succeeded in having the case re-opened in order to advance this unique legal innovation: the concept of “rape” without physical coercion. As Assange’s Australian lawyer, James Caitlin, puts it:

“Consensual sex can be rape, according to Borgström and Ny – but the alleged victims don’t decide – they do.

”The new laws which establish these ‘precedents’ are not yet on the books – but it’s Marianne Ny’s intention to make the Assange affair into a test case for that purpose.

”In other words: Marianne Ny wants to try Julian Assange for something that wasn’t a crime when it took place.”

So much for the “legal” case against Assange. It’s a put up job, pure and simple, so brazen that one wonders how anyone – let alone a sitting judge outside of Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia – can entertain it with a straight face. And yet a British judge has indeed upheld the validity of the international arrest warrant, which went straight to the top of Interpol’s agenda as soon as it was issued: in the new world order, “sex by surprise” is on a par with being a mass murderer. In spite of having pledges of funding from prominent supporters, the judge denied Assange bail: and so the governments of the world have him where they want him – behind bars.

In their quest to destroy WikiLeaks, the Powers That Be are destroying their own credibility – such as it is, or was. This disgusting frame-up discredits them much more than it does Assange, or WikiLeaks. As the corporate extensions of the US government – PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, etc., ad nauseam – shut their doors to WikiLeaks, and COINTELPRO-style disruption of its operations continues unabated, the fact that the site is still up – indeed, it’s much easier to access now than ever before – indicates the battle is far from over.

What this all means is that the future of the internet is being decided, right here, right now: if the worldwide alliance of tyrants and crooks succeeds in shutting WikiLeaks down, the rest of us are doomed. If they can get away with this, they can get away with anything – including legislation regulating content. That’s where we’re headed, unless the authoritarian assault – led by Senators Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein, Fox News (excepting Judge Napolitano, of course), and neocons left and right – is repulsed.

There is no more important task for antiwar activists, civil libertarians, and all those who treasure freedom than the defense of WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange. That’s why the Amazon boycott is so important. That’s why we’ve got to work tirelessly to free Assange. That’s why we must never give in to the Liebermans, the Feinsteins, and the Fox News lynch mob. As the commies would say: No Pasaran!

The extradition of Assange to Sweden would signal the final phase of Britain’s long slow slide into authoritarianism, an outcome that seems nearly inevitable for a society that imposes a draconian “speech code,” and has its population under constant surveillance. From there the plan is obviously to jail him in Sweden until the US can cook up a “legal” rationale to have him extradited for trial in the US – perhaps as a material witness in the case of Bradley Manning, suspected of providing the diplomatic cables – and the Afghan and Iraq war logs – to WikiLeaks.

Truth is on trial – and a conviction would be fatal not only to WikiLeaks, but for the cause of liberty itself. This is an issue that the ruling elite is counting on to plug the giant hole in their armor called the internet. We can’t afford to lose this one – at least without inflicting some pretty heavy damage on the enemy.

Assange is the first high-profile political prisoner is a new age of repression and fear. If he is martyred to the cause of liberty, let his bravery and determination serve as an example and an inspiration to us all. But we don’t need any more martyrs: we need living activists, like Assange, who are willing to take on the States of the world. We must tirelessly work to free him, and in the process free ourselves.

Hear. Hear.

I feel it's very important to keep reminding you that Julian Assange has NOT broken any laws — not even Swedish ones — but the United States and those acting on "our" behalf HAVE.

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love, 99
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okay, not exactly my cup of tea but on the right track

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I just listened to this podcast, and they actually sound as though they really don't have an agenda. Too goofy for me, but they also put in a lot of good commentary on a range of things. I think I heard them playing a clip of Bill O'Reilly bitching about the FBI setting up Muslim kids for thought crimes. Maybe I was dozing off and it was really one of his interlocutors, but, even so, that's GREAT! Depending on when you click this link I guess, you might be able to think you heard it too.

I think you should give it a whirl. What the heck... it's good to hear new voices... it's the weekend... you can putter while they blather.

[Moment of Truth PDF]

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Extra credit....

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love, 99
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this cannot be stressed enough

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Read it!

I have been SCREAMING about this for five years, since almost immediately after getting online and encountering MoveOn and the Ben and Jerry's guy's gig. It was only confirmed the more with the passing of each day it all was IGNORED. I gave my time yonder so long in the "hope" it would free up an activist to be ACTIVE. He's active all right. Where popularity is at stake, but NOT on the plane where EFFECTIVENESS lives. Titanic efforts to convey the truth died in the oceans of the human ego's determination to mistake popularity for effectiveness.

DON'T YOU THINK THE CONTROLLERS GROK THAT ABOUT US?

Are you NUTS?

ONLY activists who cannot be charmed or bought away from their object are effective.

ONLY!

Yeah, it's hard work getting and staying popular. It's like capitalism. There has to be annual growth or the ponzi scheme collapses. People are continually singing the praises of Jon Stewart and Stephen Greatest-Living-Human Colbert, when they merely have opened their yaps at crucial places. Note, you fuckers: THEY TOO WERE IGNORED. They were not effective. They ARE not effective. They will not become effective.

If you weren't already a self-murdered slave, pointlessly terrified for life and limb, you'd've been in the streets in the hour after Colbert and Thomas put out Dubya's lights at the 2006 Correspondents Dinner. But you are, and so Dubya's masters could go on utterly unmolested by the ONLY thing they fear, the ONLY thing that stops them, the ONLY thing that modifies their behavior in any way: The Masses.

I didn't know that it's humanly possible to mistake the incandescent work of Martin and Malcolm, that even killing them could kill the blaze of truth they set lighting the skies for the benighted, forever, but everyone is acting as though they never did that, as though they are deaf, dumb and blind to it, as though pixels were pitchforks, as though noteworthiness itself cuts it, as though bloody murder isn't turning the planet red.

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love, 99
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let me splain something to you

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Why, you might ask, do I refuse to participate on blogs that make you log in? The big excuse for this, of course, was for the ability to better manage trolls and spammers and hackers. This is bullshit, on crack, on its face. It hardly slows any of those things. It has been about demographics, and especially about squeezing more ad revenue out of those who keep their cookie folders resolutely shut.

It gives an edge to "search engine optimization". You know what buzz words to put in your post titles. You know what labels or tags get you the most traffic. You allow your advertisers to know all about your visitors' online activities. You provide the controllers with ever-improving mechanisms to control us and you. All this on top of just giving the individuals who use this feature a vastly better idea of what subjects to stay off and which subjects to hype more heavily in their quests for popularity.

You might forgive them for wanting to be popular. Some of them have important things to say. Well, their importance diminishes when they start tailoring what they say to what you like the most, and when they finally start getting into the really successful zone, they learn very quickly to make sure what they say can give less offense and preserves their popularity. It just flows into packing another once-outside-the-box site into the box we must escape to save ourselves, to save the world.

This also relates to the sites that encourage you to have your own blog on their site, that let you hold forth at any length and attract commentary from the greater community at that site.

And, the social media sites? They don't even bother to be subtle about it.

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I forgot to mention that this includes sites that use the various free commenting platforms available out there. Some sites that use this cookie and flash cookie and other means of identifying your online behavior do allow you to participate without logging in, and content themselves with the basic information about their commenters they can glean from their admin pages for these systems... and, I'm sure, with paid arrangements with those providers.

The same thing is true, not to a personal advancement extent, with Blogger. Google gets yer demographics and shares them with you if you are so crass as to put their ads on your blog, but otherwise, it all really just goes into Google's ocean. So, I also took Google Analytics off my blog. It won't keep them from putting cookies on your machines, but it keeps them somewhat aback from hassling ME to put their ads here and obviates any occasional urge I have to look and see how I'm doing now as compared with then, any trends. I can't care about that and it slows things here and ONLY helps THEM.

Be assured I will get my own page with its own commenting system with all speed the very moment enough manna drops into my lap.

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