when I was a little boy, I remember my parents poking fun at Nixon lying...,

NYTimes | The anti-American violence in the Muslim world demanded a firm push back from President Obama, who finally delivered it on Tuesday in the last United Nations General Assembly speech of his term.

Since the protests, attacks and flag burnings erupted two weeks ago over an anti-Islam video made in California, administration officials have condemned its crude depiction of the Prophet Muhammad and explained that the government had nothing to do with it. Mr. Obama made a similar point at the United Nations.

But he also gave a full-throated defense of the First Amendment right that, in this country, protects even hateful writings, films and speech. “We do so because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities,” Mr. Obama said. He added that “the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression; it is more speech — the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.”

Mr. Obama was right to deliver that message, however foreign it is in much of the Muslim world. The assembled leaders applauded when Mr. Obama said he accepts that, as president, people will call him “awful things every day” and that he will defend their right to do it. But a number of Islamic leaders have recently revived a push for an international ban on blasphemy, which would move in exactly the wrong direction.

Mr. Obama’s more pragmatic challenges to Arab Spring countries trying to build new democratic societies may have more impact. He said all leaders must speak against violence and extremism out of obligation to United Nations norms as well as self-interest. “Burning an American flag does nothing to provide a child an education,” he said, and popular outrage can be turned as easily against Muslim leaders, ethnic groups and tribes as America.

that film, and not washington's predations, have set the muslim world on fire!

lewrockwell | Try to imagine more deluded reporting than this by America’s Presstitute "free press." For 11 years Washington in pursuit of its rightful hegemony has been sending troops, bombers, jet fighters, helicopter gunships, drones, and assassination teams into seven Muslim countries. Two of the Muslim countries, Iraq and Libya, and perhaps more depending on how you see it, have been overthrown by Washington and left in chaos.

Washington’s assaults on seven countries have blown up weddings, funerals, kids’ soccer games, farm houses, hospitals, aid workers, schools, people walking along the streets, village elders, but the Muslims don’t mind! They understand that the well-meaning Americans who love them and are committed to their human rights, are bringing them democracy and women’s rights. The million or more dead, maimed, and displaced Muslims are a low price to be paid for liberation by Washington.Try to imagine more deluded reporting than this by America’s Presstitute "free press." For 11 years Washington in pursuit of its rightful hegemony has been sending troops, bombers, jet fighters, helicopter gunships, drones, and assassination teams into seven Muslim countries. Two of the Muslim countries, Iraq and Libya, and perhaps more depending on how you see it, have been overthrown by Washington and left in chaos.Try to imagine more deluded reporting than this by America’s Presstitute "free press." For 11 years Washington in pursuit of its rightful hegemony has been sending troops, bombers, jet fighters, helicopter gunships, drones, and assassination teams into seven Muslim countries. Two of the Muslim countries, Iraq and Libya, and perhaps more depending on how you see it, have been overthrown by Washington and left in chaos.

Washington’s assaults on seven countries have blown up weddings, funerals, kids’ soccer games, farm houses, hospitals, aid workers, schools, people walking along the streets, village elders, but the Muslims don’t mind! They understand that the well-meaning Americans who love them and are committed to their human rights, are bringing them democracy and women’s rights. The million or more dead, maimed, and displaced Muslims are a low price to be paid for liberation by Washington.

The Muslims understand that liberation has costs and were content with Washington’s liberating violence until some idiot in California produced an anti-Islamic film. This film, and not Washington’s predations, set the Muslim world alive with "hate America."

On the symbolic date of September 11, the US ambassador to Libya and some other Washington representatives were assassinated in Libya. According to the Presstitute media, the assassins did not kill the Americans because Washington destroyed their country and left them in chaos. The assassins killed the Americans because of an anti-Islamic film for which the murdered American representatives were not responsible.

This is the way Washington works and thinks. It is not Washington’s slaughter of Muslims and control over their societies and political life that produces blowback. It is independent film-makers in California!

Deluded politicians in Washington, both Republicans and Democrats and, of course, the bought-and-paid-for "experts," brought these forceful rejections of America upon us all. Washington has not only attacked Muslim countries on the basis of concocted lies – weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, brutal dictators – but also destroyed the secular governments who held the Islamists in check, and prevented their attacks on US representatives and institutions.

In Egypt, long an American puppet states, the US Embassy was stormed and the US flag was torn apart. If only this was all. Washington could again purchase the Egyptian government, as it has since Anwar Sadat’s assassination. But the ongoing news is that Anti-American protests are not only spreading across the Middle East but erupting throughout the world: Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Gaza, Bangladesh, Lebanon, London, and even into Israel.

The Obama administration is blaming al Qaeda, an Islamist group that the administration is currently supporting in its efforts to overthrow the secular Assad government in Syria and the group that the Obama administration used to overthrow the Libyan government, thus leaving a power vacuum in its place. Having destroyed the protection from Islamist attacks that secular Arab rulers provided Washington, Obama, in a show of force, has sent drones, aircraft carriers, Marines, and Tomahawk missile ships to Libya, raising the prospect that more schools and children's soccer games will be mistaken for jihadi encampments and blown up.

Washington’s assaults on seven countries have blown up weddings, funerals, kids’ soccer games, farm houses, hospitals, aid workers, schools, people walking along the streets, village elders, but the Muslims don’t mind! They understand that the well-meaning Americans who love them and are committed to their human rights, are bringing them democracy and women’s rights. The million or more dead, maimed, and displaced Muslims are a low price to be paid for liberation by Washington.

The Muslims understand that liberation has costs and were content with Washington’s liberating violence until some idiot in California produced an anti-Islamic film. This film, and not Washington’s predations, set the Muslim world alive with "hate America."

On the symbolic date of September 11, the US ambassador to Libya and some other Washington representatives were assassinated in Libya. According to the Presstitute media, the assassins did not kill the Americans because Washington destroyed their country and left them in chaos. The assassins killed the Americans because of an anti-Islamic film for which the murdered American representatives were not responsible.

This is the way Washington works and thinks. It is not Washington’s slaughter of Muslims and control over their societies and political life that produces blowback. It is independent film-makers in California!

Deluded politicians in Washington, both Republicans and Democrats and, of course, the bought-and-paid-for "experts," brought these forceful rejections of America upon us all. Washington has not only attacked Muslim countries on the basis of concocted lies – weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, brutal dictators – but also destroyed the secular governments who held the Islamists in check, and prevented their attacks on US representatives and institutions.

In Egypt, long an American puppet states, the US Embassy was stormed and the US flag was torn apart. If only this was all. Washington could again purchase the Egyptian government, as it has since Anwar Sadat’s assassination. But the ongoing news is that Anti-American protests are not only spreading across the Middle East but erupting throughout the world: Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Gaza, Bangladesh, Lebanon, London, and even into Israel.

The Obama administration is blaming al Qaeda, an Islamist group that the administration is currently supporting in its efforts to overthrow the secular Assad government in Syria and the group that the Obama administration used to overthrow the Libyan government, thus leaving a power vacuum in its place. Having destroyed the protection from Islamist attacks that secular Arab rulers provided Washington, Obama, in a show of force, has sent drones, aircraft carriers, Marines, and Tomahawk missile ships to Libya, raising the prospect that more schools and children's soccer games will be mistaken for jihadi encampments and blown up.

The Muslims understand that liberation has costs and were content with Washington’s liberating violence until some idiot in California produced an anti-Islamic film. This film, and not Washington’s predations, set the Muslim world alive with "hate America."

On the symbolic date of September 11, the US ambassador to Libya and some other Washington representatives were assassinated in Libya. According to the Presstitute media, the assassins did not kill the Americans because Washington destroyed their country and left them in chaos. The assassins killed the Americans because of an anti-Islamic film for which the murdered American representatives were not responsible.

This is the way Washington works and thinks. It is not Washington’s slaughter of Muslims and control over their societies and political life that produces blowback. It is independent film-makers in California!

Deluded politicians in Washington, both Republicans and Democrats and, of course, the bought-and-paid-for "experts," brought these forceful rejections of America upon us all. Washington has not only attacked Muslim countries on the basis of concocted lies – weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, brutal dictators – but also destroyed the secular governments who held the Islamists in check, and prevented their attacks on US representatives and institutions.

In Egypt, long an American puppet states, the US Embassy was stormed and the US flag was torn apart. If only this was all. Washington could again purchase the Egyptian government, as it has since Anwar Sadat’s assassination. But the ongoing news is that Anti-American protests are not only spreading across the Middle East but erupting throughout the world: Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Gaza, Bangladesh, Lebanon, London, and even into Israel.

The Obama administration is blaming al Qaeda, an Islamist group that the administration is currently supporting in its efforts to overthrow the secular Assad government in Syria and the group that the Obama administration used to overthrow the Libyan government, thus leaving a power vacuum in its place. Having destroyed the protection from Islamist attacks that secular Arab rulers provided Washington, Obama, in a show of force, has sent drones, aircraft carriers, Marines, and Tomahawk missile ships to Libya, raising the prospect that more schools and children's soccer games will be mistaken for jihadi encampments and blown up. Fist tap Dale.

focus on a "mocking" film has served its purpose...,

medialens | On September 11, four Americans, including the US ambassador, were killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The following day, the BBC's Lunchtime News reported that the killings were part of 'disturbances' which were 'linked to an anti-Islamic video' (BBC News, September 12, 2012). The BBC's News at Six explained that the US ambassador was killed 'in a protest'. This was mild language indeed given that the consulate had been attacked with assault rifles, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. (According to the New York Times, two US security guards were killed by mortar fire).

We can easily imagine the BBC reaction if the killings had happened under Gaddafi, Chavez or some other official enemy. The favoured adjective, 'terrorist', would surely have made an early appearance.

How to explain the BBC's response? The key, of course, is that the current Libyan government owes its existence to Western military intervention. It achieved power because the West exploited UN resolution 1973, which authorised a 'no-fly zone', as an excuse to bomb Gaddafi's forces to defeat. The 'no-fly zone' in fact became a 'no-drive zone' for one side of the conflict. As so often, the BBC was taking its cue from Washington and Downing Street. Obama expressed 'appreciation for the cooperation we have received from the Libyan government and people in responding to this outrageous attack... This attack will not break the bonds between the United States and Libya'.

Like most other media, the BBC instantly concluded that the 'protest' and killings were expressions of religious rather than political anger. As late as September 22, the BBC reported: 'The attack on the US consulate was triggered by an amateur video made in the US which mocks Islam.'

In similar vein, Julian Borger wrote an article in the Guardian under the title: 'How anti-Islamic movie sparked lethal assault on US consulate in Libya.' Kim Sengupta commented in the Independent:

'The US ambassador to Libya and three members of his staff were killed in an attack by an armed mob which stormed the country's consulate in Benghazi in a furious protest over an American film mocking the Prophet Mohammed.'

How, the world asked, could any sane human being kill over a second-rate film, over the idea that a religion had been insulted? Reasonable questions. On the other hand, one might ask how anyone could kill or die for a flag, or an idea like 'the Homeland/Fatherland/Motherland', or for non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Subsequent reporting suggested that the initial media consensus blaming a provocative film was false. The Telegraph noted:

'A security guard wounded in the attack... has insisted it was a planned assault by Islamist fighters, and not a protest that got out of hand.

'The guard, who works for a British firm, said there was no demonstration over a controversial anti-Islamic film before extremists stormed the compound in the eastern city of Benghazi.'

Matthew Olsen, director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs: 'I would say [the four Americans] were killed in the course of a terrorist attack.'

Olsen added:

'A number of different elements appear to have been involved in the attack, including individuals connected to militant groups that are prevalent in eastern Libya, particularly in the Benghazi area. We are looking as well at indications that individuals involved in the attack may have had connections to al Qaida or al Qaida's affiliates, including al Qaida in the Maghreb.'

US Senator Joe Lieberman also questioned the US regime's assertion that the attack was spontaneous:

'I will tell you based on the briefings I have had, I have come to the opposite conclusion and agree with the president of Libya that this was a premeditated, planned attack that was associated with the... anniversary of 9/11. I just don't think people come to protest equipped with RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and other heavy weapons.'

Between June and August in Benghazi, there had been bomb, grenade and RPG attacks on the US consulate, the UK ambassador's motorcade, the Tunisian consulate, and the local headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, with leafleted warnings of more to come. CNN reported that Chris Stevens was 'worried about what he called the never-ending security threats' and 'mentioned his name was on an al Qaeda hit list'.

The attack also gave an insight into the US role in the country it helped 'liberate'. The New York Times observed:

'Among the more than two dozen American personnel evacuated from the city after the assault on the American mission and a nearby annex were about a dozen C.I.A. operatives and contractors, who played a crucial role in conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.'

Their role in a Libya that we are told is 'free' and 'independent':

'American intelligence operatives also assisted State Department contractors and Libyan officials in tracking shoulder-fired missiles taken from the former arsenals of Colonel Qaddafi's forces; they aided in efforts to secure Libya's chemical weapons stockpiles; and they helped train Libya's new intelligence service, officials said.'

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, evidence that the attack was a carefully planned, politically-motivated attack, rather than a spontaneous eruption of religious ire, is the wrong kind of news for the many supporters of Nato's intervention in Libya:

'Critics of the war in Libya warned that the US was siding with (and arming and empowering) violent extremists, including al-Qaida elements, that would eventually cause the US to claim it had to return to Libya to fight against them – just as its funding and arming of Saddam in Iraq and the mujahideen in Afghanistan subsequently justified new wars against those one-time allies.'

The truth of the attack 'underscores how unstable, lawless and dangerous Libya has become'. Indeed, as we noted in July, the media did an excellent job of burying an Amnesty International report which described 'the mounting toll of victims of an increasingly lawless Libya, where the transitional authorities have been unable or unwilling to rein in the hundreds of militias formed during and after the 2011 conflict'.

This post-intervention mayhem is something supporters of Western intervention are naturally keen to hide – focus on a 'mocking' film has served the purpose.

how government is literally in bed with wall st.

RollingStone | The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who've come at the issue from the inside.

We get one of those rare inside accounts in The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, a new book by Jeff Connaughton, the former aide to Senators Ted Kaufman and Joe Biden. Jeff is well known to reporters like me; during a period when most government officials double-talked or downplayed the Wall Street corruption problem, Jeff was one of the few voices on the Hill who always talked about the subject with appropriate alarm. He shared this quality with his boss Kaufman, the Delaware Senator who took over Biden's seat and instantly became an irritating (to Wall Street) political force by announcing he wasn’t going to run for re-election. "I later learned from reporters that Wall Street was frustrated that they couldn’t find a way to harness Ted or pull in his reins," Jeff writes. "There was no obvious way to pressure Ted because he wasn’t running for re-election."

Kaufman for some time was a go-to guy in the Senate for reform activists and reporters who wanted to find out what was really going on with corruption issues. He was a leader in a number of areas, attempting to push through (often simple) fixes to issues like high-frequency trading (his advocacy here looked prescient after the "flash crash" of 2010), naked short-selling, and, perhaps most importantly, the Too-Big-To-Fail issue. What’s fascinating about Connaughton’s book is that we now get to hear a behind-the-scenes account of who exactly was knocking down simple reform ideas, how they were knocked down, and in some cases we even find out why good ideas were rejected, although some element of mystery certainly remains here.

There are some damning revelations in this book, and overall it’s not a flattering portrait of key Obama administration officials like SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami, Department of Justice honchos Eric Holder (who once worked at the same law firm, Covington and Burling, as Connaughton) and Lanny Breuer, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Most damningly, Connaughton writes about something he calls "The Blob," a kind of catchall term describing an oozy pile of Hill insiders who are all incestuously interconnected, sometimes by financial or political ties, sometimes by marriage, sometimes by all three. And what Connaughton and Kaufman found is that taking on Wall Street even with the aim of imposing simple, logical fixes often inspired immediate hostile responses from The Blob; you’d never know where it was coming from.

imf austerity hunger has spaniards foraging in the dumpsters for food...,

NYTimes | On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night.

At first glance, she looked as if she might be a store employee. But no. The young woman was looking through the day’s trash for her next meal. Already, she had found a dozen aging potatoes she deemed edible and loaded them onto a luggage cart parked nearby. 

“When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there is.”

The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still had water and electricity, while collecting “a little of everything” from the garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet. 

Such survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more households having adults without jobs. So pervasive is the problem of scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket trash bins as a public health precaution. 

A report this year by a Catholic charity, Caritas, said that it had fed nearly one million hungry Spaniards in 2010, more than twice as many as in 2007. That number rose again in 2011 by 65,000.

As Spain tries desperately to meet its budget targets, it has been forced to embark on the same path as Greece, introducing one austerity measure after another, cutting jobs, salaries, pensions and benefits, even as the economy continues to shrink. 

Most recently, the government raised the value-added tax three percentage points, to 21 percent, on most goods, and two percentage points on many food items, making life just that much harder for those on the edge. Little relief is in sight as the country’s regional governments, facing their own budget crisis, are chipping away at a range of previously free services, including school lunches for low-income families.

For a growing number, the food in garbage bins helps make ends meet.

imf's call for more cuts irks greece

NYTimes | As Greece enters a pivotal week in its economic crisis, tensions between the Greek government and the country’s international lenders have reached a boiling point. The government is resisting a push by the International Monetary Fund to impose additional austerity measures that Greek leaders fear could destabilize the shaky coalition government.

Although those talks are expected to resume later this week, they have been suspended since an angry exchange last week between the Greek finance minister and the I.M.F.’s top negotiator for Greece.

The impasse has elevated tensions here as Greece braces for a nationwide general strike planned on Wednesday that threatens to bring public services to a halt. The Greek people are increasingly angry over the prospect that public salaries and pensions will be cut again in a last-ditch bid to secure a new loan installment of 31.5 billion euros, or $40.7 billion, from Greece’s creditors. 

The Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, plans to address the nation this week to bolster support for the austerity package. He has already publicly warned his center-right party, New Democracy, that he will oust lawmakers of the party failing to back the package once it comes up for a vote, probably in early October.

Various European leaders have gone out of their way in recent weeks to voice support for the Greek government, which came to power in June. And they have praised the Samaras government’s renewed commitment to taking difficult steps to revamp the economy despite concern that Greece could be a ward of its euro zone partners for years to come. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has joined France in declaring that Greece must stay in the euro union to avoid even the perception that the union would be vulnerable to a wider breakup. 

In this political calculus, Ms. Merkel and others see Mr. Samaras as the last best hope for Greece. They worry that if the government teeters, new elections might be called in which his party could lose power to the increasingly popular leftist party Syriza, led by the political maverick Alexis Tsipras. Mr. Tsipras advocates tearing up the loan agreement with Greece’s international creditors. That would raise the risk of default and an eventual exit from the euro. 

The situation is also being monitored by Chinese officials, who would be reluctant to see a Greek exit from the euro destabilize the European Union, China’s largest trading partner. 

“We want the euro zone to stay intact,” Du Quiwen, the Chinese ambassador to Greece, said in an interview on Monday. “If something in Europe goes seriously wrong, if there’s a major mishap in the euro zone, it would put pressure on the world economy and it would not be in the interest of the world community or China.”

free speech in the age of youtube

NYTimes |  COMPANIES are usually accountable to no one but their shareholders.

Internet companies are a different breed. Because they traffic in speech — rather than, say, corn syrup or warplanes — they make decisions every day about what kind of expression is allowed where. And occasionally they come under pressure to explain how they decide, on whose laws and values they rely, and how they distinguish between toxic speech that must be taken down and that which can remain. 

The storm over an incendiary anti-Islamic video posted on YouTube has stirred fresh debate on these issues. Google, which owns YouTube, restricted access to the video in Egypt and Libya, after the killing of a United States ambassador and three other Americans. Then, it pulled the plug on the video in five other countries, where the content violated local laws.

Some countries blocked YouTube altogether, though that didn’t stop the bloodshed: in Pakistan, where elections are to be scheduled soon, riots on Friday left a death toll of 19. 

The company pointed to its internal edicts to explain why it rebuffed calls to take down the video altogether. It did not meet its definition of hate speech, YouTube said, and so it allowed the video to stay up on the Web. It didn’t say very much more. 

That explanation revealed not only the challenges that confront companies like Google but also how opaque they can be in explaining their verdicts on what can be said on their platforms. Google, Facebook and Twitter receive hundreds of thousands of complaints about content every week.

“We are just awakening to the need for some scrutiny or oversight or public attention to the decisions of the most powerful private speech controllers,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor who briefly advised the Obama administration on consumer protection regulations online.

higher knowledge or "flowers of evil"

orageanvision | That which exists independently of both the carrier and the shaped charge within itself. This is a metaphor relating to a specialized language referring to instruments and processes which are employed in the fracking and perforating of deep wells, the profession of wireline operations, in which Chivo (one of Swarts' 'I's) plays a role.

The carrier is the "gun", oftentimes a simple pipe of various diameters and lengths. If law enforcement were to run across one of these devices lying loose in the street, media would report that a "pipe bomb was found" at such and such a place, and a specialized team was deployed, a robot was sent in, and the device was later "harmlessly destroyed" at an unspecified location. Amongst those who work in this field of wireline including Chivo, there is a common lingua of the hands, but these same hands are taught never to refer to these devices as "guns" when dealing with the uninitiated, because when they (the uninitiated) hear the word "guns" they tend to get a little froggy. So the hands are taught to speak only about "perforating devices" - mystify them with a few extra syllables, works like a charm btw.

A "shaped charge" is the same explosive device used to kill our American soldiers in Afghanistan and elsewhere, where it is referred to as a "roadside bomb" or IED (improvised explosive device). The higher knowledge in wireline is the same higher knowledge necessary to arm one of these IED's in Afghanistan. The only difference is that one is placed near to the surface of the earth and is intended to perforate the human body, releasing the flow of the body fluids in our soldiers; and the other is sent deep within the Earth, is intended to perforate the casing of the wells and release the aged and fermented body fluids of dinosaurs. They even call some of the shaped charges by their trade name - "dinosaur hunters".

Now we have to talk about the role of the engineers. High above the ground, perhaps in some ivory tower someplace, these engineers envisioned all that might occur, might need to occur and, and what could go both right and wrong deep within the earth. It was these engineers that constructed the plans for the every single detail of the rigging, drilling, perforating, steam injection, wireline, and all the other operations of the 'fields. As it was created in minds before constructed in matter, there were many false steps and blind alleys to go down, because everything is a blind alley deep within the earth, isn't it?

Then another group of engineers constructed a whole seperate class of instruments and devices that allowed them to "see" at least partially, deep within the Earth, where no human eye has gone before or since, but the instruments made by these engineers utilizing science was so advanced as to make the sound of the doppler effect like hands passing rapidly over the heads of the common man.

It always astounds Chivo when hillbillies and barmaids want to argue with Pi or Einstein or these engineers of science. Chivo says, 'God bless Pi and Einstein and Science and these engineers'. Raise a glass and let the dinosaur blood flow like rain. Drink up, you bloody children of Chivo's loins, for tomorrow you die!

Ha Ha Ha Steve Swarts

the drums of war

market-ticker | I've received a few lovely pieces of "hate email" over my missives of late related to Muslim extremists and our foreign policy.

Perhaps we should take this morning and reflect a bit on where we are, where we're headed in this regard, and why the policies and positions taken by our current administration, along with the ham-handed garbage coming from the Romney campaign, are so dangerous both to us and on a global scale.

I presume that we all know that we were "sponsors" of the "Arab Spring", right?  After years of funding and protecting the murderous bastard Hosni Mubarak we suddenly "decided" that we'd go along with a civilian uprising protesting (and reasonably so!) his behavior.

Ordinarily this would be an easy sale; after all, freedom is a good thing, right?

There's only one problem -- we had been funding and arming this thug for decades.  When the crowd got a bit rowdy, as a consequence, the tear gas cannisters that started flying had Made In The USA emblazoned on their sides.  This didn't do anything for our international standing among these people, as you might imagine.

Mubarak, for his part, didn't exactly go quietly.  And who would blame him?  Up-armed and up-armored with American funds he used them -- on his own people.  It was illegal for civilians to own a rifle in Egypt, but pistols were lawful.  Soon rifle shots could be heard into the crowd; they were coming from the police shooting from the roofs, not the citizens.

Eventually Mubarak left, but not before the people basically shut down the country.

What wasn't paid attention to was where the tinder came from to get the fire burning nice and hot -- our own Fed and monetary policy were largely responsible by nearly doubling the cost of food commodities in a land linked to our dollar.

Hungry people are pretty easy to gin up into a riotous mob.

You might have thought these pressures had decreased and improved over the last year and change.  You'd be wrong.  Over the last week or so an emboldened Taliban and Al-Qaeda decided to "commemorate" the terrorist acts of 9/11 with a bit of trouble over in the Middle East and Afghanistan, what has been come to be known as "The Suck."  You've probably all heard of the sackings of our diplomatic missions in various countries around the Middle East, including the forcible sodomy and murder of one of our ambassadors.  But you may have not heard much about an audacious raid on a NATO base in Southern Afghanistan.

We killed the attackers in the latter case, but not before they damaged or destroyed eight Harriers, causing $200 million in damage to material and killing two marines.  This was a sophisticated assault, not the act of a "riotous mob."  Likewise, the attacks in Libya and elsewhere showed evidence of significant planning, command and control.  None of these assaults were simple acts of an angry mob of people*****ed off about some video; these were military operations taken against United States soil, men and material and they were coordinated by the parties undertaking them.

Sinkhole: H-Bomb explosion equivalent in Bayou Corne possible

examiner | A possible breach of a butane-filled well 1500 feet from Bayou Corne's sinkhole, the size of three football fields, is so "very serious," it has Assumption Parish sheriff and local residents ordered to evacuate worried about a catastrophic explosion, one according to scientists in an Examiner investigation, would be in the range of one and a half B83 thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs, the most powerful United States weapons in active service.

“The disaster is made all the more worrisome because the hole is believed to be close to a well containing 1.5 million barrels of liquid butane, a highly volatile liquid that turns into a highly flammable vapor upon release,” CNN reported Friday about Louisiana's declared State of Emergency.

Earlier it was reported the butane-filled well is only 1500 feet from the sinkhole and it will not be emptied.

A breach of that well, Assumption Parish Sheriff Mike Waguespack said, could be "catastrophic,” CNN reports.

If ignited, the butane well would release as much explosive energy as 100 Hiroshima bombs, Deborah Dupré's scientist sources told her Sunday.

Friday, officials went door-to-door in the Bayou Corn area to complete questionnaires, including next of kin contact details of locals at home after the mandatory evacuation orders, as Fox News reported, while ABC reported, “If any of the dangers seem to become more imminent,” the present mandatory order will be “escalated to a forced evacuation.”

Some residents of Louisiana's cultural gumbo of Assumption Parish think dangers are more imminent now, despite state Department of Health & Hospitals Office of Public Health officials' letter to parish officials about air and water testing data.

“Based on their testing, it doesn’t appear that chemical exposure of site-related contaminants pose a public health risk in the immediate area of Bayou Corne,” parish officials said.

Since Saturday, disaster workers are required to wear respirators, although the public within the disaster area is not.

Government cover up continues angering residents and elected leaders

"You can give us a straight answer because that's all we want," a woman said at the community meeting Tuesday. "We want to know when we can come home and be safe. Because you all go home after a days work. You're safe, but we're not," she said, expressing sentiments of other locals with whom Dupré has spoken.

in limboland...,

usatoday | Ecuador said Friday it would consider asking Britain to authorize the transfer of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to its embassy in Sweden so that he can respond to sex crimes allegations there.

Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters that there are several possibilities to resolve the standoff with Britain over Assange, including "that his statement be taken in our embassy in London or that Ecuador get authorization to transfer him, if necessary, to our embassy in Sweden so that the case can proceed there with the protection of Ecuador and meeting the needs of Swedish justice."

There was no immediate reaction from British officials.

Assange has been holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London since June 19, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning over sex crimes allegations.

Assange claims the Swedish sex case is part of plot to make him stand trial in the United States over his work with WikiLeaks, which has published large troves of secret U.S. documents. Sweden and Washington reject the claim.

Ecuador granted the Wikileaks founder political asylum on Aug. 15, but British authorities will arrest him if he steps foot outside the diplomatic mission.

nothing just happens, everything is planned..,

how to confuse a moral compass?

Nature | People can be tricked into reversing their opinions on moral issues, even to the point of constructing good arguments to support the opposite of their original positions, researchers report today in PLoS ONE¹.

The researchers, led by Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, recruited 160 volunteers to fill out a 2-page survey on the extent to which they agreed with 12 statements — either about moral principles relating to society in general or about the morality of current issues in the news, from prostitution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

But the surveys also contained a ‘magic trick’. Each contained two sets of statements, one lightly glued on top of the other. Each survey was given on a clipboard, on the back of which the researchers had added a patch of glue. When participants turned the first page over to complete the second, the top set of statements would stick to the glue, exposing the hidden set but leaving the responses unchanged.

Two statements in every hidden set had been reworded to mean the opposite of the original statements. For example, if the top statement read, “Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism,” the word ‘forbidden’ was replaced with ‘permitted’ in the hidden statement.

Participants were then asked to read aloud three of the statements, including the two that had been altered, and discuss their responses.

About half of the participants did not detect the changes, and 69% accepted at least one of the altered statements.

People were even willing to argue in favour of the reversed statements: A full 53% of participants argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitude in at least one of the manipulated statements, the authors write. Hall and his colleagues have previously reported this effect, called 'choice blindness', in other areas, including taste and smell² and aesthetic choice³.

“I don't feel we have exposed people or fooled them,” says Hall. “Rather this shows something otherwise very difficult to show, [which is] how open and flexible people can actually be.” Fist tap Dale and Arnach.

collapse takes no prisoners...,

NYTimes | For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

 The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks. “We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study. The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity in London. Fist tap Dale.

world food situation

FAO | » The FAO Food Price Index averaged 213 points in August 2012, unchanged from the previous month. Although still high, the Index value is 25 points below the peak (238 points) reached in February 2011 and 18 points less than in August last year. International prices of cereals and oils/fats changed little but sugar prices fell sharply, compensating for rising meat and dairy prices. 

» The FAO Cereal Price Index averaged 260 points in August, the same as in July, with some increases in wheat and rice offsetting a slight weakening in maize. Deteriorating crop prospects for maize in the United States and wheat in the Russian Federation initially underpinned export quotations, but prices eased towards the end of the month, following heavy rains in areas hardest hit by drought in the United States and the announcement that the Russian Federation would not impose export restrictions. Renewed import demand sustained international rice quotations.

 » The FAO Oils/Fats Price Index averaged 226 points in August, unchanged from July, thus staying above the ten year trend, although still below 2008 and 2011 highs. Similar to last month, additional gains in soybean oil prices and strengthening quotations for sunflower and rapeseed oils have been offset by persistent weakness in palm oil values.

» The FAO Meat Price Index averaged 170 points in August, up 4 points (2.2 percent) from July. All meat prices rose but most of the momentum came from the grain-intensive pig and poultry sectors, which saw their quotations firming by 4 and 6 percent respectively. The August price increase follows three consecutive months of declines.

» The FAO Dairy Price Index averaged 176 points in August, up 3 points (1.6 percent) from July, sustained by increases in the prices of skim milk powder, casein, butter and whole milk powder, while cheese prices remained stable. Much of the recent strength stems from a firming demand combined with production constraints in those areas affected by drought and rising feed costs. 

» The FAO Sugar Price Index averaged 297 points in August, down 27.7 points (8.5 percent) from July, and 97 points (25 percent ) from August last year. This month’s sharp fall in sugar prices reflects improved production outlook amid more favourable weather conditions in Brazil, the world’s largest sugar exporter, which was supportive to sugarcane harvesting, and recovering monsoon rains in India. 

what to expect when you're expecting war...,

lewrockwell | It looks like war is is coming upon us once again. Aside from the recent eruptions in the Far East and Middle East, I say this because of three basic observations:

1. The financial problems of the major governments are not going away; rather, they are getting worse. That leaves the operators of these systems with a choice: They can either find a foreign devil to blame, or they can take the blame themselves.


2. The people of the modern world have no real purpose in their lives. They live according to scripts promulgated by others and get all their thrills vicariously. War will fill a huge gap in their lives by giving them a 'noble' cause.


3. Big media in the West is the obedient hand-maiden of the state. This has been true for a long time (look up Operation Mockingbird), but never so much as now. Real news is available on the Internet, but the large mass of people still get their news from controlled sources.

These last two points suggest that the rulers can go to war with majority support, provided that the events are scripted well. And since big media is under their control, they can create and insert whatever narratives they like.

And perhaps I should add a fourth point: Lots of people make big money on war... people who are in the habit of employing politicians to secure and increase their profits.

It certainly looks like motive, means and opportunity are all coming together.

conformity

newspaper advertising revenue back to 1950 level...,

businessinsider | Over the past decade, lots of big newspaper companies have gone bust. But when you take a look at what's happened to newspaper advertising over that period, it's a wonder they all haven't. Below, via Mark J. Perry and Bill Gross, is a chart we've run before. It shows inflation-adjusted newspaper advertising revenue over the past 60 years. Thanks to the precipitous decline in the last ~7 years, the industry is now back to where we it was in 1950. And it's only slightly better off when you factor in online revenue. Journalism professor Jay Rosen of NYU observes that the peak year was the one in which blogging software first appeared.

nobody's coming...,

lesterspence | We place too much stock in our leaders. We place too much emphasis on the civil rights movement. We believe too much in the concept of unity. We've increasingly swallowed the koolaid in believing our biggest problem is black culture. We increasingly think that business development, that business logic should be the backbone of any solution we have.

These ideas are politically destructive.

They reduce our capacity for political action. More to the point, these tendencies reduce our ability to take moral responsibility for the practice of democracy. Taking personal responsibility for democracy means making the time and the effort to be aware of current political events. However it also means doing the hard work to figure out contemporary, novel, humane solutions to contemporary problems.

We need to embrace a different set of political ideas in order to devise a new set of political institutions.

The first idea we need to embrace I’ve used as the title of this book—nobody’s coming. We’ve only got ourselves to turn to. Both MLK and Malcolm X are dead and are not coming back to life. There will be no twitter version of the Civil Rights or Black Power Movements.7

The second idea we’ve got to embrace is that while having a black President is something many of us waited our entire lives for, the reality is that whatever responsibility the President has a right to expect from us should be returned. I don’t support the President as much as I support the populations he purports to support. Perhaps we should take responsibility for defending the President against racist attacks, if for no other reason than establishing the legitimacy of non-white citizens to run the country. But as Obama may very well be the closest thing to “our” President that we’ve ever had, his responsibility is to us…not the other way around. Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and a number of other black critics have caught a lot of flack from black elites—Tom Joyner disassociated himself from both West and Smiley after he felt they criticized the President too much—for their critiques. Critique is an important part of democratic practice. Particularly given our love of the dozens we should be much more attentive to the positive power of political critique.

The third idea we’ve got to embrace is the idea that in calling for solutions we need to do more than simply call for “more jobs”. In fact, our entire approach to black labor needs to be rethought given the economy. Similarly we need to rethink the way we talk about, analyze, and prescribe solutions for black families. And we've got to be innovative and creative.

And fourth we’ve got to understand that our attempts to take responsibility have to begin where we are, in our neighborhoods, in our cities and towns, in our states.

In the following pages I dig into various aspects of black politics, as an attempt to begin an honest conversation about what a 21st Century black politics should look like. How should we deal with the fact that an increasing number of black families are headed by single mothers? How can we use tragic events like the Trayvon Martin case to spur our political imagination? Given our high rates of unemployment, is there a way to rethink the role labor should play in our communities? What are we to do with the nigga? And because I not only approach this condition from the standpoint of a social scientist, but also from the standpoint of a victim (I’ve been foreclosed on, I’ve had my car repossessed, I’ve suffered from depression and anxiety), I combine my skills as a social scientist with my experience living in the world. In these pages you will most definitely not read me blame our circumstances on our lack of culture, on the fact that we’re not like [INSERT ETHNIC GROUP HERE], and on the fact that we don’t have enough black businesses. What instead you’ll find is a love of black people, and a deep appreciation for politics, for political action, and for the political imagination.