"All the Stones the Builders Rejected" 
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts
Jackasses
We need a book for children that explains propaganda and media manipulation, from the Pharaoh's pyramids through Edgar Bernays, Madison Avenue and modern "spin doctors". For every seeker of the truth, there's a roomful of advertising executives and media consultants working overtime to create a perception that flatters their client.
Just how persnickety can they get? The Daily Beast has an excerpt from Randall Lane's The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane:
"As part of a public diplomacy program similar to Radio Free Europe or Voice of America, the State Department had allocated more than $4 million a year to launch a magazine about American culture, which would be translated into Arabic and sold across the Arab world.
... One of my favorite sections loosely translated to 'Window on America.' It was a simple conceit: a photo essay showing what America actually looks like, unfiltered. A bass fishing tournament, a breast-cancer walk, the Puerto Rican Day parade—these were exotic images to most Arabs, too often poisoned about the United States by their inflammatory local press. But during one review meeting, held before a star chamber of 10 high-level State Department officials, the co-leader specifically took offense to a photograph from a classic Western scene: campers and pack mules heading out on a rugged weekend expedition.
Our team always remained vigilant about cultural sensibilities, avoiding the bottoms of shoes, or bare arms, or other seemingly innocuous images that could backfire with the Arab audience. This official’s concerns, however, were more parochial. She held up the offending photo, as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell painting, and pointed to a pack mule that, by other names, might be known as a donkey. This has to go, she said. Too pro-Democrat. And out it went."
This sort of report is why I asked to be Cultural Czar after the revolution: Day One, a guillotine set up on Madison Avenue and we'll see how long it takes the media consultants to get the message. Place will look like a berserker's bowling alley.
My fellow revolutionaries may perceive a note of hostility in this plan. Let me make amends with this more pleasant reminder of Miss Betsey Trotwood, the old lady in David Copperfield equally obsessed with trespassing donkeys:
"Janet had gone away to get the bath ready, when my aunt, to my
great alarm, became in one moment rigid with indignation, and had
hardly voice to cry out, 'Janet! Donkeys!' Upon which, Janet came running up the stairs as if the house were in flames, darted out on a little piece of green in front, and warned off two saddle-donkeys, lady-ridden, that had presumed to
set hoof upon it; while my aunt, rushing out of the house, seized
the bridle of a third animal laden with a bestriding child, turned
him, led him forth from those sacred precincts, and boxed the ears
of the unlucky urchin in attendance who had dared to profane that
hallowed ground.
To this hour I don't know whether my aunt had any lawful right of
way over that patch of green; but she had settled it in her own
mind that she had, and it was all the same to her. The one great
outrage of her life, demanding to be constantly avenged, was the
passage of a donkey over that immaculate spot. In whatever
occupation she was engaged, however interesting to her the
conversation in which she was taking part, a donkey turned the
current of her ideas in a moment, and she was upon him straight.
Jugs of water, and watering-pots, were kept in secret places ready
to be discharged on the offending boys; sticks were laid in ambush
behind the door; sallies were made at all hours; and incessant war
prevailed. Perhaps this was an agreeable excitement to the
donkey-boys; or perhaps the more sagacious of the donkeys,
understanding how the case stood, delighted with constitutional
obstinacy in coming that way. I only know that there were three
alarms before the bath was ready; and that on the occasion of the
last and most desperate of all, I saw my aunt engage,
single-handed, with a sandy-headed lad of fifteen, and bump his
sandy head against her own gate, before he seemed to comprehend
what was the matter. These interruptions were of the more
ridiculous to me, because she was giving me broth out of a
table-spoon at the time (having firmly persuaded herself that I was
actually starving, and must receive nourishment at first in very
small quantities), and, while my mouth was yet open to receive the
spoon, she would put it back into the basin, cry 'Janet! Donkeys!'
and go out to the assault."
From Little Acorns a Poison Tree Doth Grow
An ACORN organizer was telling me once that the United Way hates his organization. ACORN works on housing for the poor, you see, and that frequently puts them in conflict with real estate developers-- and a lot of United Way groups are dominated by local real estate interests. "Be good," Mark Twain tells us, "and you will be lonesome."
Now poor little ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been plucked from obscurity to be demonized in the Republican Party's ongoing effort to defame and distort the record of every left to liberal do-gooder in the country.
Gawker has a handy little FAQ on the non-existent scandal. It's fairly simple. ACORN hires people at eight dollars an hour to register voters. ACORN is required by law to turn in every registration form they collect, even the bogus ones signed by Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse. No one, not even the Rovians, really believe ACORN is trying to empower cartoon characters who might (gasp) be predisposed to vote Democratic. Oh, those wicked community organizers...
But in spite of our compromised Justice Department, I don't think of this as an organized cabal against the poor. Republicans operate like the drunken knights who murdered Thomas Becket-- they work themselves into a patriotic frenzy over who the king wants eliminated, if only the king could say so, and they go to work, leaving their masters with plausible deniability . You can almost smell the sulfur surrounding these lies.
Remember What Groucho Said About Military Intelligence?
In both inner city and rural schools, there are always failing students who plan on escaping as soon as possible to embark on criminal careers. (In the inner city, where minors were used to run crack cocaine, they often flashed more money from their pockets than I had). Here's a practical question: why would someone who can't make it through an American high school, the Barney the Dinosaur of learning, think they have any talent as a criminal mastermind? Rural Michigan saves on 4th of July fireworks by watching the meth labs blow up-- why would someone who failed high school chemistry try manufacturing pharmaceuticals? More in sorrow than in anger, my advice to the amoral is practical, not judgmental: "I might not object to you being a criminal if you weren't so bad at it."
And why did a Utah National Guard officer, Captain Jeffrey Porter of the 142nd Military Intelligence Battalion (sic) think he could join the whisper campaign against Barack Obama without getting caught?
The Army Times and Snopes (Hidey, Flem!) have exposed the fraud, and The Salt Lake Tribune has a follow-up on the apparent source of the spam.
Americans who vote on the basis of viral emails deserve whatever government they get, but sadly the rest of us are tied to these morons. In a better world, you'd expect the McCain campaign to renounce these dirty tricks, but McCain himself has already gone over the line of verbal shame with "Apparently Senator Obama, who does not understand what’s happening in Iraq or fails to acknowledge the success in Iraq, would rather lose a war than lose a campaign”-- not once, but three times in one day.
There is nothing in John McCain's record-- despite protestations about "honor"-- to suggest that McCain will grow a conscience. He could still win this thing.
"My God! She makes us die happy." (from One who has Fought and Bled)
A day when so many bloviate about "sacrifice" ought to be a day when we refuse to tolerate waste. Here's a thought for Memorial Day: how about a day of remembrance with, the gods forfend, "nuance"? A day that lets us pause a moment for the men waiting on Little Round Top or in the forest of Ardennes, but also a day when we don't tolerate lies about war, or lie to ourselves about the senseless waste of Fredericksburg or My Lai or the Somme.
The following letter by "A Little Mother" appeared in Britain during World War One, and was widely circulated as genuine. Though now considered the work of a propagandist, the responses praising it appear to be genuine. In The Great War and Modern Memory (one of those world-shifting books that everyone should read at least once) historian and combat veteran Paul Fussell says the “testimonials earned by this famous letter suggest a society for which the only accurate term would be 'sick'”.
***
A MOTHER'S ANSWER TO 'A COMMON SOLDIER'
by "A Little Mother"
A Message to the Pacifists A Message to the Bereaved
A Message to the Trenches
(Owing to the immense demand from home and from the trenches for this letter, which appeared in The Morning Post, the editor found it necessary to place it in the hands of London publishers to be reprinted in pamphlet form, seventy-five thousand copies of which were sold in less than a week direct from the publishers.)
Extract from a letter from Her Majesty
The Queen was deeply touched at the "Little Mother's" beautiful letter, and Her Majesty fully realizes what her words must mean to our soldiers in the trenches and in hospitals.
To the Editor of The Morning Post:
Sir,--As a mother of an only child--a son who was early and eager to do his duty--may I be permitted to reply to Tommy Atkins, whose letter appeared in your issue of the 9th instead? Perhaps he will kindly convey to his friends in the trenches, not what the Government thinks, not what the Pacifists think, but what the mothers of the British race think of our fighting men. It is a voice which demands to be heard, seeing that we play the most important part in the history of the world, for it is we who 'mother the men' who have to uphold the honour and traditions not only of our Empire but of the whole civilized world.
To the man who pathetically calls himself a 'common soldier,' may I say that we women, who demand to be heard, will tolerate no such cry as 'Peace! Peace!' where there is no peace. The corn that will wave over land watered by the blood of our brave lads shall testify to the future that their blood was not spilt in vain. We need no marble monuments to remind us. We only need that force of character behind all motives to see this monstrous world tragedy brought to a victorious ending. The blood of the dead and the dying, the blood of the 'common soldier' from his 'slight wounds' will not cry to us in vain. They have all done their share, and we, as women, will do ours without murmuring and without complaint. Send the Pacifists to us and we shall very soon show them, and show the world, that in our homes at least there shall be no 'sitting at home warm and cosy in the winter, cool and "comfy" in the summer'. There is only one temperature for the women of the British race, and that is white heat. With those who disgrace their sacred trust of motherwood we have nothing in common. Our ears are not deaf to the cry that is ever ascending from the battlefield from men of flesh and blood whose indomitable courage is borne to us, so to speak, on every blast of the wind. We women pass on the human ammunition of 'only sons' to fill up the gaps, so that when the 'common soldier' looks back before going 'over the top' he may see the women of the British race at his heels, reliable, dependent, uncomplaining.
The reinforcements of women are, therefore, behind the 'common soldier'. We gentle-nurtured, timid sex did not want the war. It is no pleasure to us to have our homes made desolate and the apple of our eye taken away. We would sooner our lovable, promising, rollicking boy stayed at school. We would have much preferred to have gone on in a light-hearted way with our amusements and our hobbies. But the bugle call came, and we have hung up the tennis racquet, we've fetched our laddie from school, we've put his cap away, and we have glanced lovingly over his last report, which said 'Excellent'--we've wrapped them all in a Union Jack and locked them up, to be taken out only after the war to be looked at. A 'common soldier', perhaps, did not count on the women, but they have their part to play, and we have risen to our responsibility. We are proud of our men, and they in turn have to be proud of us. If the men fail, Tommy Atkins, the women won't.
Tommy Atkins to the front,
He has gone to bear the brunt.
Shall 'stay-at-homes' do naught but snivel and but sigh?
No, while your eyes are filling
We are up and doing, willing
To face the music with you--or to die!
Women are created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it. Now we are giving it in a double sense. It's not likely we are going to fail Tommy. We shall not flinch one iota, but when the war is over he must not grudge us, when we hear the bugle call of 'Lights out', a brief, very brief, space of time to withdraw into our secret chambers and share with Rachel the Silent the lonely anguish of a bereft heart, and to look once more on the college cap, before we emerge stronger women to carry on the glorious work our men's memories have handed down to us for now and all eternity.
Yours, etc.,
A LITTLE MOTHER
Testimonials:
"Florence Nightingale did great and grand things for the soldiers of her day, but no woman has done more than the "Little Mother", whose now famous letter to The Morning Post has spread like wild-fire from trench to trench. I hope to God it will be handed down in history, for nothing like it has ever made such an impression on our fighting men. I defy any man to feel weak-hearted after reading it...My God! she makes us die happy." (One who has Fought and Bled)
"The "Little Mother's" letter should reach every corner of the earth--a letter of the loftiest ideal, tempered with courage and the most sublime sacrifice." (Percival H. Monkton)
"I have lost my two dear boys, but since I was shown the "Little Mother's" beautiful letter a resignation too perfect to describe has calmed all my aching sorrow, and I would now gladly give my sons twice over." (A Bereaved Mother)
***
This would all be academic and quaint were it not that we again live in a time when to question the morality of any war is apparently a breach of good manners on television, though every other subject is fit for company. After all, as Dr. Johnson cynically observed, "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea", and the war lovers have bullied almost every journalist and politician in the United States into seeing things their way. In 2008, it is better to throw a hundred soldiers into a meat grinder than to question those patriots' wisdom in sacrificing themselves For the Benefit of Mother War, that sow who eats her own babies. Me, I'll leave the last word to a “shell-shocked” Siegfried Sassoon:
You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardors while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops "retire"
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses, blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
... Like the old man in Twain’s The War Prayer -- of whom the crowd declared “there was no sense in anything he said”-- Sassoon’s friends had to conspire together to have him declared mentally incompetent, in order to save him from being shot for treason.
Recommended: The Bobblespeak Translations
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Those of you who can't bear to watch a TV pundit without screaming in rage at one more irrelevant question, be of good cheer: The author of The Bobblespeak Translations: What They're Really Saying When They're Saying What They're Saying watches these well-paid blind men so you don't have to, and then transcribes what is really being said. The Bobblespeak Translations never gets bogged down in horse race reporting, always has the broad reality outside American doublespeak in mind, and offers the most clear-eyed political summary available through the tubes of the internets.
Here, for example, is Tim Russert questioning Ron Paul's patriotism:
Tim Russert: but what will you do when Iran invades Israel??
Ron Paul: Timmy that's not going to happen - Israel has 300 nukes for pete's sake
Russert: do you think Israel has influence on US foreign policy - oh noes!
Paul: yes i do dumbass
Russert: would really cut off aid to Israel?
Paul: of course but the arabs too - let 'em fight it out and put it on pay per view
Russert: how have we provoked Al Qaeda???
Ron Paul: do what Bush says - real their own statements -- we had troops in Saudi Arabia which is their holy land and we overthrew the Iran government and bombed Iraq
Russert: wow you're defending Al qaeda you say the problem is us and not them
Paul: we're stepping in a snake pit do you blame the snake and keep standing in the snake pit??
Russert: but the islamofascists!!!!
Paul: oh please
Russert: you're making moral equiavalency with islamists and white americans!!!
Ron Paul: have you met dick cheney that dood is crazy
***
...Or Russert, obtuse again, interviewing Barack Obama:
Tim Russert: Postpone Pakistani elections?
Obama: slightly delay them to make them more legitimate but not postponed indefinitely - but it's also about a free press and judiciary and need to have a legit government
Russert: did Musharraf protect her enough?
Obama: how the fuck should i know - the point is he's a fucker who won't go after terrorists or support democracy
Russert: but Bush liked him!
Obama: yeah of course he did
Russert: did Hillary Clinton's vote for Iraq war create Bhutto's death?
Obama: no but the media has decided that Bhutto being killed helps Clinton because of her great experience which - forgive me for offending Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post - but that is bullshit
Tim Russert: you used the s-word!
Obama: fuck you fathead
Russert: you don't have enough experience
Obama: says who, you?
Tim Russert: Bill Clinton on Charlie Rose he says we're rolling the dice!
Obama: the real gamble is to elect Richard Mellon Scaife's evil nemesis all over again - btw way she has no judgment and is a triangulating fuckwit
Russert: but you're too young, you skinny handsome dood
Obama: why wait - we've been governed by a bunch of experienced dickwads for 7 years
Tim Russert: but bill clinton says you're too young
Obama: sure he defends his wife hey i have more experience than he did in 1992
Russert: you say Hillary is a broken system lady
Obama: that's right she's hip-deep in all this DC shit - in fact she campaigns on it - well it's an evil system
Tim Russert: but you might employ a lobbyist oh noes!
Obama: Ron Paul was right - you are an idiot
Link here
THE AMERICAN DEMIURGE: In Which Toto Pulls Back the Curtain on Consensual Reality
A great number of Americans no longer live in the real world; they subscribe instead to a false reality, composed by a false creator I would describe as the "American demiurge". The American demiurge is a deliberate distortion of consensual reality, a false idol erected by marketers, lobbyists, editors, advertisers, public relations executives and “spin doctors”.
The ancient Gnostics were troubled by a dissonance between the reality we wish for and the world as it is. If God is good, why make a universe that includes childhood cancer and suffering innocents? They imagined a creature called the demiurge, a “false god”, who created this imperfect, indifferent reality. The true Creator, they believed, exists on a plane beyond the one we can perceive. Humanity worships a cruel deceiver, while the God of the Real languishes unseen, and weeps for our self-inflicted wounds.
Human dictators have always tried to construct a flattering version of reality as a means of social control. The oppressed may comply with the slogans and the rituals, but more than a few know they’re being lied to. Americans, of course, are free to flatter and lie to themselves, to embrace our self-made chains and customize them with charms and ring-tones, too. Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda and advertising, called this “engineered consent”, “crystallizing public opinion”. The techniques were used by Goebells to sell Hitler, and by Bernays to sell cigarettes. The heirs of Bernays and Goebbels, professional illusionists, now dominate our culture.
Imagine our perception of reality as a bead on a wire, with absolute truth represented by a mark at the center of the wire. We adjust the bead this way or that, but because our senses can never hold all the permutations of an event, the best we can hope for is to get the bead a little closer or a little further from the truth. Wander too far from the truth, and the bead slides off the end of the wire and falls to the ground.
Still, mundus vult decipi-- “the World wants to be deceived.” Americans have again and again elected administrations that shape reality by manipulating our perception of what is true. The opposition sputters like a straight man trying to out talk the Marx Brothers; serious men are made to look like fools, and fools elevated to the presidency. We have had eight years of a White House that mocked “the reality based community” and denied the existence of any truth that could not be altered with the proper mental framework. This is an ethic as old as making a lame horse look healthy, or gilding a leaden crown.
When reality catches up with us, when brute fact slaps down our mental constructs, the showmen shout down the dissidents until the rubes doubt the evidence of their own eyes. We have wandered far from objective reality and embraced what will sell. The mainstream rushes to the theatres, swallows the panaceas, votes for the best marketing campaign. The counterculture is likewise compromised; the rebel’s cri de coeur will be used tomorrow as an anthem to market clothing, cars, and retirement plans.
Self-delusion has attached itself to our commercial culture like a virus mimicking the genetic code of a cell. The Fourth Estate currently wallows in celebrity coverage and revels in shame like an alcoholic in the gutter. News executives can no more resist the latest frenzy than a fish can rebel against the sea it swims in.
Marketers and public relations executives, high priests of the demiurge, are as amoral as a weapons engineer who sees each murderous device as an interesting technical problem. They smile, they flatter, they insinuate, they distort, and take great
personal offense if someone calls them a liar. The logic of the marketplace convinces them of the virtue of almost any cause, whether selling toothpaste or a politician or a war.
If our culture has a dysfunctional relationship with reality, the first step would be to recognize that we have a problem. Our task is to insist that simple honesty is recognized as the essential policy in the marketplace of ideas, and warn our citizens that the American demiurge is a god of illusion.
An Irish bishop, George Berkeley, once “proved” that matter did not exist. Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop‘s notion by kicking a stone and saying, “I refute it thus”. The rock that Dr. Johnson kicked has been picked up by the fellaheen around the world, and they aim to put it through our front window and hit someone in the head.
© 2007 by Michael Fountain
The ancient Gnostics were troubled by a dissonance between the reality we wish for and the world as it is. If God is good, why make a universe that includes childhood cancer and suffering innocents? They imagined a creature called the demiurge, a “false god”, who created this imperfect, indifferent reality. The true Creator, they believed, exists on a plane beyond the one we can perceive. Humanity worships a cruel deceiver, while the God of the Real languishes unseen, and weeps for our self-inflicted wounds.
Human dictators have always tried to construct a flattering version of reality as a means of social control. The oppressed may comply with the slogans and the rituals, but more than a few know they’re being lied to. Americans, of course, are free to flatter and lie to themselves, to embrace our self-made chains and customize them with charms and ring-tones, too. Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda and advertising, called this “engineered consent”, “crystallizing public opinion”. The techniques were used by Goebells to sell Hitler, and by Bernays to sell cigarettes. The heirs of Bernays and Goebbels, professional illusionists, now dominate our culture.
Imagine our perception of reality as a bead on a wire, with absolute truth represented by a mark at the center of the wire. We adjust the bead this way or that, but because our senses can never hold all the permutations of an event, the best we can hope for is to get the bead a little closer or a little further from the truth. Wander too far from the truth, and the bead slides off the end of the wire and falls to the ground.
Still, mundus vult decipi-- “the World wants to be deceived.” Americans have again and again elected administrations that shape reality by manipulating our perception of what is true. The opposition sputters like a straight man trying to out talk the Marx Brothers; serious men are made to look like fools, and fools elevated to the presidency. We have had eight years of a White House that mocked “the reality based community” and denied the existence of any truth that could not be altered with the proper mental framework. This is an ethic as old as making a lame horse look healthy, or gilding a leaden crown.
When reality catches up with us, when brute fact slaps down our mental constructs, the showmen shout down the dissidents until the rubes doubt the evidence of their own eyes. We have wandered far from objective reality and embraced what will sell. The mainstream rushes to the theatres, swallows the panaceas, votes for the best marketing campaign. The counterculture is likewise compromised; the rebel’s cri de coeur will be used tomorrow as an anthem to market clothing, cars, and retirement plans.
Self-delusion has attached itself to our commercial culture like a virus mimicking the genetic code of a cell. The Fourth Estate currently wallows in celebrity coverage and revels in shame like an alcoholic in the gutter. News executives can no more resist the latest frenzy than a fish can rebel against the sea it swims in.
Marketers and public relations executives, high priests of the demiurge, are as amoral as a weapons engineer who sees each murderous device as an interesting technical problem. They smile, they flatter, they insinuate, they distort, and take great
personal offense if someone calls them a liar. The logic of the marketplace convinces them of the virtue of almost any cause, whether selling toothpaste or a politician or a war.
If our culture has a dysfunctional relationship with reality, the first step would be to recognize that we have a problem. Our task is to insist that simple honesty is recognized as the essential policy in the marketplace of ideas, and warn our citizens that the American demiurge is a god of illusion.
An Irish bishop, George Berkeley, once “proved” that matter did not exist. Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop‘s notion by kicking a stone and saying, “I refute it thus”. The rock that Dr. Johnson kicked has been picked up by the fellaheen around the world, and they aim to put it through our front window and hit someone in the head.
© 2007 by Michael Fountain
FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS vs. SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC
A group of activists calling themselves The Van Helsings celebrated the anniverary of Slobodan Milosevic's death on March 11 by making sure the son of a bitch stayed dead. Both the UK Guardian and Scotland's Sunday Herald report the group's intention to drive a hawthorn stake into the ground and through the casket into whatever's left of the mass murderer's heart. (The cognoscenti will understand that this anniversary is an important one in vampire prevention.)
Milosevic still has his admirers, even while the World Court at the Hague ponders whether to just say Screw It and put the entire country of Serbia on trial for mass murder. There were more people at Milosovic's funeral than there were at Tom Paine's, which says a lot about our dubious species's choice of role models.
Guards have been posted and outrage has been expressed online against making light of "desecration", though it seems clear that the Van Helsings were never serious about actually attempting to stake the corpse-- for one thing, the casket's buried under a concrete vault. For another, if an autopsy was performed after Milosovic's death, the coroner might have moved the heart around, or stuffed it back inside the cavity in one of those little bags they use for turkey gizzards, and there's no guarantee of a straight shot at the offending organ.
This was political theater, which might be all we have left as a weapon when fighting complacency, silence and chauvinism. Mass media and consensual reality are more and more under the sway of murderous regimes. This kind of theatrical gesture might replace the earnest demonstration as a form of protest-- if we want the world's attention, we're going to have to put on a better show than the competition.
COMMONPLACE BOOK: Current Readings
“As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society.”
(Emile Zola)
***
“You no longer rely on your citizens to make wars; you now rely on private companies.”
(Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, in an interview on C-SPAN)
***
“What to think of a man who would rather believe a member of the Gestapo because he is German than to believe a woman of the Résistance because she is French? “
(“Kiki” posting on the blog Global Clashes)
***
“I wonder if I might offer you some constructive criticism. Among the problems, I think, has been your clarity of precisely why you were fighting me and how you intended to wage that fight. Like when you say: "As the rhythm designed to bounce / What counts is that the rhymes / Designed to fill your mind / Now that you've realized the pride's arrived / We got to pump the stuff to make us tough / from the heart / It's a start, a work of art." Pardon my frankness but what the hell are you talking about there? It rhymes, but what are people supposed to do with that information? If you're trying to fight someone, especially someone like me, you need clear action items. Maybe "Carjack The Power's limousine after an important board meeting" or "Expose The Power's malfeasance in a national publication" or maybe "Propose a better alternative to The Power and let the people decide." Those are just off the top of my head! Look, take this advice or don't, but before dismissing it just remember The Power must know what he's doing, right? Thus the name. Think about it.”
(A Letter from "The Power" to Public Enemy, one of John Moe’s “Pop Songs Correspondences at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)
***
“Propaganda... undermines trust in the source of information, which means that even the truth, when it comes, may not be believed.”
(Magnus Linklater, UK Times )
***
“Image wins out over reality more and more in the battle for attention and belief. Virtually every public event now arrives filtered through a lens, laptop computer, or recording device, and hence nearly all our daily news has been “produced” and woven into some kind of narrative. Old-fashioned, relatively unmediated reality at times appears obsolete. In this environment, [Frank] Rich’s New York Times columns attempt to redress the balance as he rips holes in the scenery of the image manipulators to reveal stagehands frantically hauling on ropes, and drags unwelcome truths onstage.”
(Christopher Lambert on Frank Rich’s shift from theatre critic to political observer in Harvard magazine)
***
“It’s [media manipulation] a cultural pattern now: empirical reality doesn’t penetrate as well as it should... If we can’t agree on what the facts are, then we have no hope. We need to distinguish between facts and showmanship, facts and propaganda. If you can’t agree on the fact that the house is burning down, you can’t put out the fire.”
(Frank Rich)
***
"What are creation's needs for full functioning? Wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work; totality of self."
(Tillie Olsen)
***
“The fallout from Don Imus’s racist and misogynistic remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team has led to one of those periodic and quintessentially American paroxysms of disapproval, contrition and repentance. But the response of the mainstream media—and CBS radio and MSNBC, in particular—is as hypocritical as it is revealing. [Late Wednesday, MSNBC announced that it will no longer broadcast the Imus radio show]. Using stereotypes—about blacks, Jews, women, and gays and lesbians—has been a part of Imus’s act for decades.”
(Marcus Mabry, Newsweek Online)
***
“Incredible how the top dog always announces with such an air of discovery that the underdog is childish, stupid, emotional, irresponsible, uninterested in serious matters, incapable of learning — but for god’s sake don’t teach him anything! — and both cowardly and ferocious […] The oppressed is also treacherous, incapable of fighting fair, full of dark magics, prone to do nasty things like fighting back when attacked, and contented with his place in life unless stirred up by outside agitators.”
(James Tiptree Jr., aka Alice Sheldon)
***
“Americans don’t want to play chicken with the troops.”
(Barack Obama, April 6, 2007)
***
“Some of us are still Pleistocene bipeds, no matter that we like James Joyce and Heidegger.”
(Jim Harrison)
***
“Kurt Vonnegut was a hero to baby boomers, though he was raised in an earlier time. The president he mourned was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not John F. Kennedy. His war was World War II, not Vietnam. Vonnegut was less a peer... than a wise, eccentric and cranky uncle, scorning the world's madness but rarely failing to get some laughs or challenge some minds.”
(Hillel Italie)
***
“One story line that Virginia Tech is emphatically not about is a unique American culture of violence. To tell it that way demeans other massacres by deranged gunmen over the past thirty years in Australia, Scotland, South Korea, Germany. Simply put, such mass shootings have occurred wherever in the world mentally ill and enraged loners had easy access to guns. This is neither a pro- nor antigun statement, just a fact.”
(Bruce Shapiro, The Nation )
“In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.”
(Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator)
***
“As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
(Eugene Debs)
***
"If you are a younger journalist … how are you to know that there's another way to do it? A whole different tradition? That success is not becoming a talking head celebrity, saying what everyone else says?"
(Molly Ivins)
***
“Being Canadian must be like living next door to the Simpsons.”
(Molly Ivins)
(Emile Zola)
***
“You no longer rely on your citizens to make wars; you now rely on private companies.”
(Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, in an interview on C-SPAN)
***
“What to think of a man who would rather believe a member of the Gestapo because he is German than to believe a woman of the Résistance because she is French? “
(“Kiki” posting on the blog Global Clashes)
***
“I wonder if I might offer you some constructive criticism. Among the problems, I think, has been your clarity of precisely why you were fighting me and how you intended to wage that fight. Like when you say: "As the rhythm designed to bounce / What counts is that the rhymes / Designed to fill your mind / Now that you've realized the pride's arrived / We got to pump the stuff to make us tough / from the heart / It's a start, a work of art." Pardon my frankness but what the hell are you talking about there? It rhymes, but what are people supposed to do with that information? If you're trying to fight someone, especially someone like me, you need clear action items. Maybe "Carjack The Power's limousine after an important board meeting" or "Expose The Power's malfeasance in a national publication" or maybe "Propose a better alternative to The Power and let the people decide." Those are just off the top of my head! Look, take this advice or don't, but before dismissing it just remember The Power must know what he's doing, right? Thus the name. Think about it.”
(A Letter from "The Power" to Public Enemy, one of John Moe’s “Pop Songs Correspondences at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)
***
“Propaganda... undermines trust in the source of information, which means that even the truth, when it comes, may not be believed.”
(Magnus Linklater, UK Times )
***
“Image wins out over reality more and more in the battle for attention and belief. Virtually every public event now arrives filtered through a lens, laptop computer, or recording device, and hence nearly all our daily news has been “produced” and woven into some kind of narrative. Old-fashioned, relatively unmediated reality at times appears obsolete. In this environment, [Frank] Rich’s New York Times columns attempt to redress the balance as he rips holes in the scenery of the image manipulators to reveal stagehands frantically hauling on ropes, and drags unwelcome truths onstage.”
(Christopher Lambert on Frank Rich’s shift from theatre critic to political observer in Harvard magazine)
***
“It’s [media manipulation] a cultural pattern now: empirical reality doesn’t penetrate as well as it should... If we can’t agree on what the facts are, then we have no hope. We need to distinguish between facts and showmanship, facts and propaganda. If you can’t agree on the fact that the house is burning down, you can’t put out the fire.”
(Frank Rich)
***
"What are creation's needs for full functioning? Wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work; totality of self."
(Tillie Olsen)
***
“The fallout from Don Imus’s racist and misogynistic remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team has led to one of those periodic and quintessentially American paroxysms of disapproval, contrition and repentance. But the response of the mainstream media—and CBS radio and MSNBC, in particular—is as hypocritical as it is revealing. [Late Wednesday, MSNBC announced that it will no longer broadcast the Imus radio show]. Using stereotypes—about blacks, Jews, women, and gays and lesbians—has been a part of Imus’s act for decades.”
(Marcus Mabry, Newsweek Online)
***
“Incredible how the top dog always announces with such an air of discovery that the underdog is childish, stupid, emotional, irresponsible, uninterested in serious matters, incapable of learning — but for god’s sake don’t teach him anything! — and both cowardly and ferocious […] The oppressed is also treacherous, incapable of fighting fair, full of dark magics, prone to do nasty things like fighting back when attacked, and contented with his place in life unless stirred up by outside agitators.”
(James Tiptree Jr., aka Alice Sheldon)
***
“Americans don’t want to play chicken with the troops.”
(Barack Obama, April 6, 2007)
***
“Some of us are still Pleistocene bipeds, no matter that we like James Joyce and Heidegger.”
(Jim Harrison)
***
“Kurt Vonnegut was a hero to baby boomers, though he was raised in an earlier time. The president he mourned was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not John F. Kennedy. His war was World War II, not Vietnam. Vonnegut was less a peer... than a wise, eccentric and cranky uncle, scorning the world's madness but rarely failing to get some laughs or challenge some minds.”
(Hillel Italie)
***
“One story line that Virginia Tech is emphatically not about is a unique American culture of violence. To tell it that way demeans other massacres by deranged gunmen over the past thirty years in Australia, Scotland, South Korea, Germany. Simply put, such mass shootings have occurred wherever in the world mentally ill and enraged loners had easy access to guns. This is neither a pro- nor antigun statement, just a fact.”
(Bruce Shapiro, The Nation )
“In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.”
(Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator)
***
“As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
(Eugene Debs)
***
"If you are a younger journalist … how are you to know that there's another way to do it? A whole different tradition? That success is not becoming a talking head celebrity, saying what everyone else says?"
(Molly Ivins)
***
“Being Canadian must be like living next door to the Simpsons.”
(Molly Ivins)
'V' FOR VENDETTA IN WASHINGTON DC
A foundation calling itself "We the People" have sponsored first one, then almost 100, and, they hope, 1000 protestors dressed as the Alan Moore character "V" to appear on the streets of Washington DC next year. They wish to present petitions asking for a "redress of grievances" from the government, calling attention to the gross offenses committed against the Constitution by our current government.
This is what happens after fifty years of civics, history and the odious "social studies" teachers whose primary focus is on coaching sports:
".... Some people were interested in conversing with “V,” including a group of 6-10 college age young people who were waiting in a line to tour the Capitol. During the conversation, “V” said he wanted to quiz them on their knowledge of the Rights covered by the First Amendment. “V” asked if they could name the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Two or three immediately said “Speech.” After a moment or two one said, “Worship God.”
“V” restated that freedom for the young man. Then another said “Guns.” “V” corrected him. That was as far as the young people could go in answering the question. “V” then engaged the young people in a discussion of all five of the freedoms and the four outstanding Petitions for Redress. The young people stayed with the conversation, expressing an interest in learning more, until they had to move along in the line."
THANATOS VS. EROS
This morning Saddam Hussein and his cohorts were sentenced to be hanged. The president is congratulating himself, one assumes, on having burnt down the barn and the whole damned farm and provoked a civil war in order to get rid of a handful of rats. This afternoon the inventor Ray Kurzweil is on C-SPAN talking about nanobots the size of a blood cell and machines that can pass the Turing test for artificial intelligence by the year 2029. As Kurzweil is thinking about medical applications and demonstrating a wonderful translation device that will permit you to talk to almost anyone in the world using your cell phone, someone in the American military is dreaming of robot "soldiers" within a decade.
The great Ingmar Bergman described his life's work as contributing a block or two to the great cathedral of human civilization. Myself, I'm only a grunt in the race between Creation and Destruction, trying to hold the line in my small classroom outpost against xenophobia and violence, earnestly introducing children to Shakespeare and Thomas Paine and the Ishtar Gate. And I'm wondering tonight if we're outnumbered, if the busy little hands building bombs and the wagging tongues spreading hate aren't working faster than we are to bring down that cathedral.
They don't even have to work that hard; it only takes a moment for one person to destroy thousands, to put a bullet in Gandhi or blow up the building in which one year old Baylee Almon went to day care. This is a problem inherent in our race, a killer ape intelligent enough to invent a weapon but not smart enough to use it wisely, as the Roman soldier murdered Archimedes while he was drawing circles in the sand.
I'm for scuffling and shoring up and trying to hold the world together with duct tape. But what do we do about the stupid people who think they're smart enough to decide who lives and who dies? Didn't Hussein see himself as "creating" something when he took over Iraq and committed his murders with Stalin as his role model? Tim McVeigh thought he was sparking the third American Revolution, creating a better world for himself. Somebody trusted George W. Bush with the most powerful military force on earth.
Ray Kurzweil is an optimist, and has charts to show the advance of intelligent machines in spite of two world wars and the Great Depression. He looks forward to extending life expectancy with technology, with little thought as to who will take control of that immortality and use it to abuse the have-nots. A student of history, I worry about the collapse of Rome and the suicide of the Greek democracies. I wake up an optimist and go to bed a pessimist. If we are in a race between the forces of destruction and the forces of preservation and creation, which side is running fastest?
The great Ingmar Bergman described his life's work as contributing a block or two to the great cathedral of human civilization. Myself, I'm only a grunt in the race between Creation and Destruction, trying to hold the line in my small classroom outpost against xenophobia and violence, earnestly introducing children to Shakespeare and Thomas Paine and the Ishtar Gate. And I'm wondering tonight if we're outnumbered, if the busy little hands building bombs and the wagging tongues spreading hate aren't working faster than we are to bring down that cathedral.
They don't even have to work that hard; it only takes a moment for one person to destroy thousands, to put a bullet in Gandhi or blow up the building in which one year old Baylee Almon went to day care. This is a problem inherent in our race, a killer ape intelligent enough to invent a weapon but not smart enough to use it wisely, as the Roman soldier murdered Archimedes while he was drawing circles in the sand.
I'm for scuffling and shoring up and trying to hold the world together with duct tape. But what do we do about the stupid people who think they're smart enough to decide who lives and who dies? Didn't Hussein see himself as "creating" something when he took over Iraq and committed his murders with Stalin as his role model? Tim McVeigh thought he was sparking the third American Revolution, creating a better world for himself. Somebody trusted George W. Bush with the most powerful military force on earth.
Ray Kurzweil is an optimist, and has charts to show the advance of intelligent machines in spite of two world wars and the Great Depression. He looks forward to extending life expectancy with technology, with little thought as to who will take control of that immortality and use it to abuse the have-nots. A student of history, I worry about the collapse of Rome and the suicide of the Greek democracies. I wake up an optimist and go to bed a pessimist. If we are in a race between the forces of destruction and the forces of preservation and creation, which side is running fastest?
Silver Tongued Orators: How Can Kerry Lose an Election He's Not Even RUNNING In?
In an orgy of self-destruction ordinarily reserved for the eighth inning of a Cubs game, John Kerry blows a punchline and the Republican chickenhawks spend the next week impugning his patriotism. Incurious George, who had been looking a little ragged lately, finds his mojo again, hooting like a blood-crazed mangani at a dum-dum that today's recruits are "plenty smart".
Oy...
Lost in the noise is the larger issue of whether military recruiters prey on the young and the hapless. Anecdotal evidence suggest that this is so, with friendly video games and friendly recruiters in the high schools. I know two high school seniors already signed with the Marines for a spot "in the Marine Corps band."
There can't be that many slots open, can there? And if they don't make the try-out, I asked?
"Infantry!"
The Heritage Foundation says no, but they would argue that ice water is good for you while standing on the Titanic. They limit their argument to two years with very different social climates, and by focusing their contempt on the remarks of one individual, Charles Rangel. It looks to me as if they only proved that the middle class is suffering in this war, while the people who made the Iraqi war go unscathed.
The National Priorities Project looks at different years, shows the same picture of a middle class fighting Harvard's war, and draws conclusions that contradict the Heritage Foundation.
If we must send soldiers into harm's way, then in the name of all that's holy, let them not be wasted on a fool's errand. When did it become unpatriotic to object to waste? Was Tennyson a traitor to Britain for objecting to the futility of the charge of the Light Brigade? I must side with Henry Fielding's humanism over the patriotic gore demanded by Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld: "To die for a cause is a common evil. To die for nonsense is the Devil."
Oy...
Lost in the noise is the larger issue of whether military recruiters prey on the young and the hapless. Anecdotal evidence suggest that this is so, with friendly video games and friendly recruiters in the high schools. I know two high school seniors already signed with the Marines for a spot "in the Marine Corps band."
There can't be that many slots open, can there? And if they don't make the try-out, I asked?
"Infantry!"
The Heritage Foundation says no, but they would argue that ice water is good for you while standing on the Titanic. They limit their argument to two years with very different social climates, and by focusing their contempt on the remarks of one individual, Charles Rangel. It looks to me as if they only proved that the middle class is suffering in this war, while the people who made the Iraqi war go unscathed.
The National Priorities Project looks at different years, shows the same picture of a middle class fighting Harvard's war, and draws conclusions that contradict the Heritage Foundation.
If we must send soldiers into harm's way, then in the name of all that's holy, let them not be wasted on a fool's errand. When did it become unpatriotic to object to waste? Was Tennyson a traitor to Britain for objecting to the futility of the charge of the Light Brigade? I must side with Henry Fielding's humanism over the patriotic gore demanded by Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld: "To die for a cause is a common evil. To die for nonsense is the Devil."
The Political Power of NoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoiseNoise...
Waiting room at the tire store. Brain empty. That other brain in my stomach, having fed, longs for a nap. When I first was stirring, my mind was alive with theories of education and the arguments to properly back them up, but now that I'm free to write down those thoughts, they've run back into the thickets of the subconscious, my conscious mind being busy with ordering the new tires, getting coffee, then listening with half an ear to what the nearby television thinks is important.
This is how the dominant culture protects itself in the early 21st century, not with a whimper but with a lot of banging in your ear. The writer, philosopher, or naturalist seeks out quiet places, but how does the average person keep his or her thought processes boxed off from the yapping radio and television, the visual lure of the pretty girls on the magazine covers?
The dystopic society described in Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" used physical handicapping to make sure its citizens were truly equal. One of the characters, only slightly more intelligent than his peers, was brought down to conformity by a loud noise that brayed in his ears at regular intervals, interrupting before he could formulate a coherant thought. This story supposes, like a conspiracy theorist, that the dictatorship will be imposed from without, not subscribed to wholeheartedly.
In our modern dictatorship of noise, the sound never stops in our public places. Broadcast reporters who put no more effort into their stories than rolling their chairs over to the AP feed, repeat the same stories as every other news source. We are supposed to believe that the latest sex scandal or some shocking crime are of primary importance. In actuality, these entertainments are of little or no relevance to our lives; we tsk-tsk, express our horror, and move on. News stories that require thought or call the system into question are kept out of the popular news. We know more about poor Jon Benet Ramsey than we do about the president's suspension of habeas corpus. We learn of stupendous drug arrests but rarely why so many people feel they need to get high in the first place. Here in Kalamazoo, the morning news includes a "Survivor" show update.
Pop radio assails us with the same songs over and over again, different stations' playlists beamed down from central locations, the same ideas over and over again. The themes explored in popular music may be of first importance to an adolescent audience, but embarassing or too limited for an adult. What is the larger implication of the oldies station, playing "the music of our lives"-- that we are so emotionally stunted we still express ourselves in sentiments of the late seventies, eighties or nineties?
Our entertainment systems have grown to a level of complexity that they have achieved a kind of primitive sentience, like those super computers of old SF stories that reached critical mass and achieved sentience. This intelligence, "vast cool and unsympathetic", is assembled from promotion, advertising, political cliches, internet memes, genre tropes, and group consensus.
The dominant culture favors celebrities, politicians, business leaders and style makers who conform to that paradigm. They offer simple answers and comforting personas. Even our deviants are"shocking" but not truly revolutionary-- hence the rocker, rapper, or pimp daddy whose "rebellion" consists of perpetuating violence among the poor and showing independence by switching his brand of champagne. These allow us to vent our frustration while standing still for our shearing.
Capitalism has created an aritificial reality, like the gnostic's evil demiurge, that we mistake for the truth. It requires us to consume, to buy, to produce, to consume, to buy, to produce until our replacements-- children throughly indoctrinated into "brand loyalty" and focus groups-- are ready to replace the aging cogs in the great machine. A good many of those children have surrendered completely, and reach for the game control or cell phone as soon as they wake up.
In free-market capitalism the customer is always right, even if he's killing himself.
This is how the dominant culture protects itself in the early 21st century, not with a whimper but with a lot of banging in your ear. The writer, philosopher, or naturalist seeks out quiet places, but how does the average person keep his or her thought processes boxed off from the yapping radio and television, the visual lure of the pretty girls on the magazine covers?
The dystopic society described in Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" used physical handicapping to make sure its citizens were truly equal. One of the characters, only slightly more intelligent than his peers, was brought down to conformity by a loud noise that brayed in his ears at regular intervals, interrupting before he could formulate a coherant thought. This story supposes, like a conspiracy theorist, that the dictatorship will be imposed from without, not subscribed to wholeheartedly.
In our modern dictatorship of noise, the sound never stops in our public places. Broadcast reporters who put no more effort into their stories than rolling their chairs over to the AP feed, repeat the same stories as every other news source. We are supposed to believe that the latest sex scandal or some shocking crime are of primary importance. In actuality, these entertainments are of little or no relevance to our lives; we tsk-tsk, express our horror, and move on. News stories that require thought or call the system into question are kept out of the popular news. We know more about poor Jon Benet Ramsey than we do about the president's suspension of habeas corpus. We learn of stupendous drug arrests but rarely why so many people feel they need to get high in the first place. Here in Kalamazoo, the morning news includes a "Survivor" show update.
Pop radio assails us with the same songs over and over again, different stations' playlists beamed down from central locations, the same ideas over and over again. The themes explored in popular music may be of first importance to an adolescent audience, but embarassing or too limited for an adult. What is the larger implication of the oldies station, playing "the music of our lives"-- that we are so emotionally stunted we still express ourselves in sentiments of the late seventies, eighties or nineties?
Our entertainment systems have grown to a level of complexity that they have achieved a kind of primitive sentience, like those super computers of old SF stories that reached critical mass and achieved sentience. This intelligence, "vast cool and unsympathetic", is assembled from promotion, advertising, political cliches, internet memes, genre tropes, and group consensus.
The dominant culture favors celebrities, politicians, business leaders and style makers who conform to that paradigm. They offer simple answers and comforting personas. Even our deviants are"shocking" but not truly revolutionary-- hence the rocker, rapper, or pimp daddy whose "rebellion" consists of perpetuating violence among the poor and showing independence by switching his brand of champagne. These allow us to vent our frustration while standing still for our shearing.
Capitalism has created an aritificial reality, like the gnostic's evil demiurge, that we mistake for the truth. It requires us to consume, to buy, to produce, to consume, to buy, to produce until our replacements-- children throughly indoctrinated into "brand loyalty" and focus groups-- are ready to replace the aging cogs in the great machine. A good many of those children have surrendered completely, and reach for the game control or cell phone as soon as they wake up.
In free-market capitalism the customer is always right, even if he's killing himself.
COMMONPLACE BOOK of QUOTATIONS for September, 2006
“It makes me wonder what happens when the language of argument and the language of ridicule become the same, when the address of a potentate is voiced no more soberly than the goofings of some rube.” (Wyatt Mason
***
***
“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. ...moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used.”
(Lt. General John Jeff Kimmons)
***
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
Thomas Paine
***
“The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe. (Mark Mazzeti in the NYT
***
“George W. Bush's Sept. 15 outburst - threatening to stop interrogating terror suspects if Congress doesn't let him revise the Geneva Conventions to permit coercive techniques - is part of a pattern of petulance that dates back to even before the 9/11 attacks but has resurfaced as Bush faces new challenges to his authority.
“In summer 2001, less than six months into his presidency while confronting congressional obstacles to his domestic program, Bush told followers that he was ready to "go back to Crawford" if he didn't get his way on legislation....Back then, Republicans framed Bush's "back to Crawford" threats as a sign of his principled leadership as well as a new self-confidence in asserting his authority.” (Andrew Bard Schmookler, author of “Parable of the Tribes”)
***
“Britain's leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change. In an unprecedented step [first time in 364 years], the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence". The scientists also strongly criticize the company's public statements on global warming, which they describe as "inaccurate and misleading".”
(reported in The Guardian UK
***
The Royal Society—the world’s oldest learned society—has publicly taken on Exxon. Just so you know: this is the first time in the Royal Society’s 364 years that they’ve done something like this.
Britain’s leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.
In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”.
The scientists also strongly criticise the company’s public statements on global warming, which they describe as “inaccurate and misleading
***
"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."
Robert A. Heinlein
***
“In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has instituted what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically....
“Paper ballots will not completely eliminate the threat of tampering, of course - after all, election fraud and miscounts have occurred throughout our history. As long as there has been a paper trail, however, our elections have been conducted with some measure of public scrutiny. But electronic voting machines are a hacker's dream. And today, for-profit companies are being given unprecedented and frightening power not only to provide these machines but to store and count our votes in secret, without any real oversight. You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity of our electoral system...” (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
***
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP) -- A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers....
“Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican. Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan....Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.... Democrats want to keep us poor while voting only Democrat...Democrats want us to accept same-sex marriages, teen abortions without a parent's consent and suing the Boy Scouts for saying 'God' in their pledge.... Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution."
***
***
"Cap is about freedom more than anything else. He's about altruism and not being in anyone's pocket. He'd be repulsed by the idea of doing this as a job. He's all about civic duty. He's no lapdog and is bigger than any government, whether it's Republican or Democrat. He represents the ideal.... That said, I live miles away and am quite safe and it all makes great comics. Remember how dull books were under Clinton? Like the 80s, we need a Republican in the White House to react against to make good comics. Well done, Bush. May you reign forever." (Mark Millar)
***
“On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’
“The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen... But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name... As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists....the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.”
(Tony Judt in The London Review of Books)
***
“Avoiding prosecution under the War Crimes Act has been an obsession of this administration since shortly after 9/11. In a January 2002 memorandum to the president, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales pointed out the problem of prosecution for detainee mistreatment under the War Crimes Act....Gonzales also understood that the specter of prosecution could hang over top administration officials involved in detainee mistreatment throughout their lives...
“....To "reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales recommended that Bush not apply the Geneva Conventions to al-Qaida and the Taliban....The administration has apparently decided to secure immunity from prosecution through legislation. Under cover of the controversy involving the military tribunals and whether they could use hearsay or coerced evidence, the administration is trying to pardon itself, hoping that no one will notice.... Creating immunity retroactively for violating the law sets a terrible precedent....A president who knowingly and deliberately violates U.S. criminal laws should not be able to use stealth tactics to immunize himself from liability, and Congress should not go along.” Elizabeth Holtzman, “Bush seeks retroactive immunity for violating War Crimes Act”
***
“One central characteristic of the [9/11 conspiracy] nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous, belief in American efficiency, and hence many of them start with the racist premise that "Arabs in caves" weren't capable of the mission. They believe that military systems work the way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work.”
(Alexander Cockburn in The Nation 9/25/2006)
***
As we are liberated from our own fear, our prescence automatically liberates others.
(Nelson Mandela)
***
"[Marvel Comics’] Civil War" provides problems in spades. The story opens with a reckless fight between a novice group of heroes (filming a reality television show) and a cadre of villains. The battle becomes quite literally explosive, killing some of the superheroes and many innocent bystanders. That crystallizes a government movement to register all super-powered beings as living weapons of mass destruction. The subsequent Registration Act will divide the heroes into two camps, one led by Captain America {against registration, thus criminalized by the Act], the other [pro-government] by Iron Man. Along the way, Marvel will unveil its version of Guantánamo Bay, enemy combatants, embedded reporters and more. The question at the heart of the series is a fundamental one: "Would you give up your civil liberties to feel safer in the world?" ( The Battle Outside Raging, Superheroes Dive In by GEORGE GENE GUSTINES in The New York Times)
***
“So, why did they hate us after all? We sure blew off that question nicely. As with everything else in this country, our response to 9/11 was a heroic compendium of idiocy, cowardice, callow flag-waving, weepy sentimentality (coupled with an apparently bottomless capacity for self-pity), sloth, laziness and partisan ignorance.... We did just about everything except honestly ask ourselves what the hell really happened, and why.”
(Matt Taibbi
***
***
"The first thing a principle does, if it really is a principle, is to kill someone."
Dorothy Sayers
***
"As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place."
Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz
***
“What fears and desires does Civil War reveal? The fear is that we are coming apart; the secret desire is not for social and political unity, but instead for open conflict. The 20th Century hero fought for all of us and for an American Way that everyone supposedly shared. In the 21st Century, superheroes will fight over the very meaning of the American Way. The winners will decide who is an American ... and who is a criminal.” ( Jeremy Adam Smith)
***
***
“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. ...moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used.”
(Lt. General John Jeff Kimmons)
***
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
Thomas Paine
***
“The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe. (Mark Mazzeti in the NYT
***
“George W. Bush's Sept. 15 outburst - threatening to stop interrogating terror suspects if Congress doesn't let him revise the Geneva Conventions to permit coercive techniques - is part of a pattern of petulance that dates back to even before the 9/11 attacks but has resurfaced as Bush faces new challenges to his authority.
“In summer 2001, less than six months into his presidency while confronting congressional obstacles to his domestic program, Bush told followers that he was ready to "go back to Crawford" if he didn't get his way on legislation....Back then, Republicans framed Bush's "back to Crawford" threats as a sign of his principled leadership as well as a new self-confidence in asserting his authority.” (Andrew Bard Schmookler, author of “Parable of the Tribes”)
***
“Britain's leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change. In an unprecedented step [first time in 364 years], the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence". The scientists also strongly criticize the company's public statements on global warming, which they describe as "inaccurate and misleading".”
(reported in The Guardian UK
***
The Royal Society—the world’s oldest learned society—has publicly taken on Exxon. Just so you know: this is the first time in the Royal Society’s 364 years that they’ve done something like this.
Britain’s leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.
In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”.
The scientists also strongly criticise the company’s public statements on global warming, which they describe as “inaccurate and misleading
***
"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."
Robert A. Heinlein
***
“In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has instituted what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically....
“Paper ballots will not completely eliminate the threat of tampering, of course - after all, election fraud and miscounts have occurred throughout our history. As long as there has been a paper trail, however, our elections have been conducted with some measure of public scrutiny. But electronic voting machines are a hacker's dream. And today, for-profit companies are being given unprecedented and frightening power not only to provide these machines but to store and count our votes in secret, without any real oversight. You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity of our electoral system...” (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
***
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP) -- A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers....
“Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican. Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan....Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.... Democrats want to keep us poor while voting only Democrat...Democrats want us to accept same-sex marriages, teen abortions without a parent's consent and suing the Boy Scouts for saying 'God' in their pledge.... Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution."
***
***
"Cap is about freedom more than anything else. He's about altruism and not being in anyone's pocket. He'd be repulsed by the idea of doing this as a job. He's all about civic duty. He's no lapdog and is bigger than any government, whether it's Republican or Democrat. He represents the ideal.... That said, I live miles away and am quite safe and it all makes great comics. Remember how dull books were under Clinton? Like the 80s, we need a Republican in the White House to react against to make good comics. Well done, Bush. May you reign forever." (Mark Millar)
***
“On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’
“The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen... But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name... As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists....the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.”
(Tony Judt in The London Review of Books)
***
“Avoiding prosecution under the War Crimes Act has been an obsession of this administration since shortly after 9/11. In a January 2002 memorandum to the president, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales pointed out the problem of prosecution for detainee mistreatment under the War Crimes Act....Gonzales also understood that the specter of prosecution could hang over top administration officials involved in detainee mistreatment throughout their lives...
“....To "reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales recommended that Bush not apply the Geneva Conventions to al-Qaida and the Taliban....The administration has apparently decided to secure immunity from prosecution through legislation. Under cover of the controversy involving the military tribunals and whether they could use hearsay or coerced evidence, the administration is trying to pardon itself, hoping that no one will notice.... Creating immunity retroactively for violating the law sets a terrible precedent....A president who knowingly and deliberately violates U.S. criminal laws should not be able to use stealth tactics to immunize himself from liability, and Congress should not go along.” Elizabeth Holtzman, “Bush seeks retroactive immunity for violating War Crimes Act”
***
“One central characteristic of the [9/11 conspiracy] nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous, belief in American efficiency, and hence many of them start with the racist premise that "Arabs in caves" weren't capable of the mission. They believe that military systems work the way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work.”
(Alexander Cockburn in The Nation 9/25/2006)
***
As we are liberated from our own fear, our prescence automatically liberates others.
(Nelson Mandela)
***
"[Marvel Comics’] Civil War" provides problems in spades. The story opens with a reckless fight between a novice group of heroes (filming a reality television show) and a cadre of villains. The battle becomes quite literally explosive, killing some of the superheroes and many innocent bystanders. That crystallizes a government movement to register all super-powered beings as living weapons of mass destruction. The subsequent Registration Act will divide the heroes into two camps, one led by Captain America {against registration, thus criminalized by the Act], the other [pro-government] by Iron Man. Along the way, Marvel will unveil its version of Guantánamo Bay, enemy combatants, embedded reporters and more. The question at the heart of the series is a fundamental one: "Would you give up your civil liberties to feel safer in the world?" ( The Battle Outside Raging, Superheroes Dive In by GEORGE GENE GUSTINES in The New York Times)
***
“So, why did they hate us after all? We sure blew off that question nicely. As with everything else in this country, our response to 9/11 was a heroic compendium of idiocy, cowardice, callow flag-waving, weepy sentimentality (coupled with an apparently bottomless capacity for self-pity), sloth, laziness and partisan ignorance.... We did just about everything except honestly ask ourselves what the hell really happened, and why.”
(Matt Taibbi
***
***
"The first thing a principle does, if it really is a principle, is to kill someone."
Dorothy Sayers
***
"As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place."
Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz
***
“What fears and desires does Civil War reveal? The fear is that we are coming apart; the secret desire is not for social and political unity, but instead for open conflict. The 20th Century hero fought for all of us and for an American Way that everyone supposedly shared. In the 21st Century, superheroes will fight over the very meaning of the American Way. The winners will decide who is an American ... and who is a criminal.” ( Jeremy Adam Smith)
The Times Tries to Shut Up Noam Chomsky
Okay, Gray Lady, this is horseshit. An article by Motoko Rich about Hugo Chavez's endorsement of Noam Chomsky's book "Hegemony or Survival" is an attempt to turn Noam Chomsky into just another crazy lady on a bus.
You know how you make a crazy lady on a bus? When she speaks to you, don't answer back. She'll keep trying to talk and look crazier and crazier because no one's listening to her.
Not one comment from someone who thinks Chomsky's book is essentially correct. The facts say he is (although he and I would disagree on the motivation behind American aggression-- he ascribes sinister intent to our foreign interventions, and I think it's unplanned: the inevitable result of human nature and the types of personalities that are attracted to these situations, the "Logic of Empire". But I'm a novelist, and man enough to admit that a professional researcher knows more than I do.)
Click on the "sampler" from "Hegemony or Survival" and we're given two paragraphs of Chomsky's interpretations but not his reasons for reaching those conclusions. Four paragraphs of Alan Dershowitz (insert choking sounds here) deriding Chomsky as being unreadable, but not one word of the book's actual content and not one word refuting Chomsky's facts. (Dershowitz has been shown by better men than I to be a notoriously sloppy researcher and cherry picker himself).
While we're at it, how come the coverage of Chavez focuses on his theatrics and not on his facts? Sure, he called the president a "devil"-- but when I saw the clip I thought, and still think, Chavez was trying to make a joke with a clumsy metaphor. It would be interesting to see an serious public discussion of whether the devil really is in the house. He also called Bush an “ex-alcoholic” who had “a lot of hang-ups” and tried to walk “like John Wayne"; these accusations are all painfully true, and so under-reported by the people who tell us what to think.
Neither does Chomsky defend himself in this hack piece. The article mentions a Thursday interview with the times itself, but no link is provided, a mistake I rectify here
So go back to sleep, everyone. Chavez is a crazy man. Chomsky is an old crank that no one listens to. Nothing to worry about until the next Church commission or the next Oliver North scandal or the next time a plane comes flying from the Third World into Our World.
You know how you make a crazy lady on a bus? When she speaks to you, don't answer back. She'll keep trying to talk and look crazier and crazier because no one's listening to her.
Not one comment from someone who thinks Chomsky's book is essentially correct. The facts say he is (although he and I would disagree on the motivation behind American aggression-- he ascribes sinister intent to our foreign interventions, and I think it's unplanned: the inevitable result of human nature and the types of personalities that are attracted to these situations, the "Logic of Empire". But I'm a novelist, and man enough to admit that a professional researcher knows more than I do.)
Click on the "sampler" from "Hegemony or Survival" and we're given two paragraphs of Chomsky's interpretations but not his reasons for reaching those conclusions. Four paragraphs of Alan Dershowitz (insert choking sounds here) deriding Chomsky as being unreadable, but not one word of the book's actual content and not one word refuting Chomsky's facts. (Dershowitz has been shown by better men than I to be a notoriously sloppy researcher and cherry picker himself).
While we're at it, how come the coverage of Chavez focuses on his theatrics and not on his facts? Sure, he called the president a "devil"-- but when I saw the clip I thought, and still think, Chavez was trying to make a joke with a clumsy metaphor. It would be interesting to see an serious public discussion of whether the devil really is in the house. He also called Bush an “ex-alcoholic” who had “a lot of hang-ups” and tried to walk “like John Wayne"; these accusations are all painfully true, and so under-reported by the people who tell us what to think.
Neither does Chomsky defend himself in this hack piece. The article mentions a Thursday interview with the times itself, but no link is provided, a mistake I rectify here
So go back to sleep, everyone. Chavez is a crazy man. Chomsky is an old crank that no one listens to. Nothing to worry about until the next Church commission or the next Oliver North scandal or the next time a plane comes flying from the Third World into Our World.
FASCIST IS AS FASCIST DOES
If right-wingers are too quick to use epithets against an argument they don't like, the left is just as guilty for throwing the word "fascist" around too quickly.
Now the White House speechwriters are tossing the f-bomb around on a PR offensive featuring the president talking to the VA--tough crowd, gutsy move. Apparently he's asking the rest of us to help him clean up the mess he himself made, a familiar litany in this man's life. The Donald (Rumsfeld) is using it too, talking about "a new type of fascism" and honking about appeasement, the broad hint being that anyone who opposes Rumsfeld must be an appeaser and a Very Bad Person.
Rove’s Republicans must have been concerned that the left still had one powerful word left in their quiver. Now every neo-con from Bush to Rumsfeld to Tony Snow to Rick “I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator”Santorum to Majority Leader Bill “Cat Killer” Frist is evoking the shade of Chamberlain at Munich.
I try to stay close to the word's etymology: those who emulate a bundle of sticks or "fasces", a political organization wherein the individual is subordinate to the state, and things get damned uncomfortable for the sticks that don't quite fit.
The irony is that nothing resembles modern fascism quite so much as the Bush administration’s insistence on a monolithic point of view. The Japanese phrase “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” fairly describes the national dialogue during the rush to invade Iraq. Digby’s Hullabaloo has called them on it, and the Los Angeles Times are drop kicking the analogy as well. The Christian Science Monitor lets the word speak for itself. If this propaganda initiative fails, I wonder what vile phrase the Rover Boys will next tie to their test balloons.
Keith Olbermann has articulated as well as anyone why we refer to this administration as "fascistic”. I first saw Olbermann as a hockey reporter on ESPN, and still miss the phrase “drop the chalupa”, but an essay like this is worth his disappearance into the shadows of MSNBC.
Now the White House speechwriters are tossing the f-bomb around on a PR offensive featuring the president talking to the VA--tough crowd, gutsy move. Apparently he's asking the rest of us to help him clean up the mess he himself made, a familiar litany in this man's life. The Donald (Rumsfeld) is using it too, talking about "a new type of fascism" and honking about appeasement, the broad hint being that anyone who opposes Rumsfeld must be an appeaser and a Very Bad Person.
Rove’s Republicans must have been concerned that the left still had one powerful word left in their quiver. Now every neo-con from Bush to Rumsfeld to Tony Snow to Rick “I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator”Santorum to Majority Leader Bill “Cat Killer” Frist is evoking the shade of Chamberlain at Munich.
I try to stay close to the word's etymology: those who emulate a bundle of sticks or "fasces", a political organization wherein the individual is subordinate to the state, and things get damned uncomfortable for the sticks that don't quite fit.
The irony is that nothing resembles modern fascism quite so much as the Bush administration’s insistence on a monolithic point of view. The Japanese phrase “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” fairly describes the national dialogue during the rush to invade Iraq. Digby’s Hullabaloo has called them on it, and the Los Angeles Times are drop kicking the analogy as well. The Christian Science Monitor lets the word speak for itself. If this propaganda initiative fails, I wonder what vile phrase the Rover Boys will next tie to their test balloons.
Keith Olbermann has articulated as well as anyone why we refer to this administration as "fascistic”. I first saw Olbermann as a hockey reporter on ESPN, and still miss the phrase “drop the chalupa”, but an essay like this is worth his disappearance into the shadows of MSNBC.
CURRENT READINGS
“My favorite conspiracy theory is the one that says the world is being run by a handful of ultra-rich capitalists, and that our elected governments are mere puppets. I sure hope it’s true. Otherwise my survival depends on hordes of clueless goobers electing competent leaders. That’s about as likely as a dog pissing the Mona Lisa into a snow bank.” (Scott Adams, Author of Dilbert)
***
“Buddha had an analogy. Milk is milk. Then it gets churned into butter. Butter is butter. Then it gets processed into ghee. We reach points at where the way we have been for a while no longer fits, it becomes unstable and unable to continue. Then we reach out into the unknown and discover the next way we are to be.” (Thomas Ragland)
***
“[Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid] is offering Senator Hillary Clinton is his total, robust support to succeed him as Senate Majority Leader if she elects not to pursue the Democratic nomination for President.
Many are realizing that the electoral map is not something one can wave a magic wand over and reverse the views of 42% of Americans who believe that they know Hillary Clinton well and have strongly formed views of her and will not vote for her under any conditions -- according to recent polls. Reports are that Senator Clinton herself knows this and that her own enthusiasm for running actually trails that of her husband, her advisors, and her staff -- whose enthusiasm for the race is ranked in that order with Hillary the least enthusiastic.” (Steve Clemons at the Washington Note)
***
“Bill Nevins, a poet, journalist and teacher at Rio Rancho High School in Albuquerque, founded a student writing club for at-risk students and eventually formed them into a poetry team, encouraging students to perform at local open mike nights and over the high school's closed-circuit TV system. In February 2003, a Slam Poetry Team member read her poem "Revolution X" over the school's pubic address system, and shortly thereafter a formal complaint was registered by the school's "military liaison" (no idea), saying the poem was disrespectful to governmental authorities and that it was full of "profanity and incitement to violence" (although the text had neither element). A month later Nevins was suspended from teaching, prohibited from coaching his writing club or the poetry team, and all public readings of student poetry were banned by the school administration. A "multicultural poetry assembly" was cancelled. In May 2003, Nevins was informed that his contract would not be renewed for the coming school year, and on the same day the "military liaison" and the principal of the school, Gary Tripp, raised a flag on school grounds and read out their own poem, telling critics of Iraqi war policy to "shut your faces." Tripp later told the media that this was "a high point" in his career. This is what happens when you let the guy down at the gun shop run the high school.” (reported by Joe Bob Briggs/John Bloom)
***
“In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you're using sex to sell sneakers, then you're not just selling sneakers, you're selling sex as well, and you're contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You're going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they're going to have their moment of gratification, and then they're going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It's almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.” (Alan Moore)
***
“All I am is what I am. I lived seven lives at once. I was power and the ecstasy of death. I was god to a god. Now... I—I'm trapped... on a roof. Just one roof... in this time and this place. With an unstable human who drinks too much whiskey, and called me a Smurf.” (Illyria, in the television series “Angel”)
***
“The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.
"Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.
When Mr. Lieberman told The Washington Post, “I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed,” he actually put his finger on his political problem.” (New York Times editorial, morning after the primary)
***
“... to Guccione's credit, "Caligula" does make you reevaluate your umbrage yardstick. The sex is explicit, yes -- but it is just sex. "Caligula's" gratuitous decapitations and disembowelments -- presumably far less common in everyday life -- are now accepted in everyday cinema, and even then went largely unremarked upon.” (Daniel Kraus in Salon, on the 20th anniversary of ‘Caligula’)
***
“Sweetheart, trust me, this is way more ‘bad boy’ than you’re ever going to be able to handle. So do yourself a favor: go blow a drummer.”
(Dennis Leary’s character Tommy on “Rescue Me”)
***
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." (H.P. Lovecraft)
EDITORIAL NOTE: Never mind the snakes on a plane. Just how motherf*@#$%ing scary is it when H.P, motherf#%^%#ing LOVECRAFT is politically relevant and astute?
***
“Buddha had an analogy. Milk is milk. Then it gets churned into butter. Butter is butter. Then it gets processed into ghee. We reach points at where the way we have been for a while no longer fits, it becomes unstable and unable to continue. Then we reach out into the unknown and discover the next way we are to be.” (Thomas Ragland)
***
“[Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid] is offering Senator Hillary Clinton is his total, robust support to succeed him as Senate Majority Leader if she elects not to pursue the Democratic nomination for President.
Many are realizing that the electoral map is not something one can wave a magic wand over and reverse the views of 42% of Americans who believe that they know Hillary Clinton well and have strongly formed views of her and will not vote for her under any conditions -- according to recent polls. Reports are that Senator Clinton herself knows this and that her own enthusiasm for running actually trails that of her husband, her advisors, and her staff -- whose enthusiasm for the race is ranked in that order with Hillary the least enthusiastic.” (Steve Clemons at the Washington Note)
***
“Bill Nevins, a poet, journalist and teacher at Rio Rancho High School in Albuquerque, founded a student writing club for at-risk students and eventually formed them into a poetry team, encouraging students to perform at local open mike nights and over the high school's closed-circuit TV system. In February 2003, a Slam Poetry Team member read her poem "Revolution X" over the school's pubic address system, and shortly thereafter a formal complaint was registered by the school's "military liaison" (no idea), saying the poem was disrespectful to governmental authorities and that it was full of "profanity and incitement to violence" (although the text had neither element). A month later Nevins was suspended from teaching, prohibited from coaching his writing club or the poetry team, and all public readings of student poetry were banned by the school administration. A "multicultural poetry assembly" was cancelled. In May 2003, Nevins was informed that his contract would not be renewed for the coming school year, and on the same day the "military liaison" and the principal of the school, Gary Tripp, raised a flag on school grounds and read out their own poem, telling critics of Iraqi war policy to "shut your faces." Tripp later told the media that this was "a high point" in his career. This is what happens when you let the guy down at the gun shop run the high school.” (reported by Joe Bob Briggs/John Bloom)
***
“In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you're using sex to sell sneakers, then you're not just selling sneakers, you're selling sex as well, and you're contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You're going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they're going to have their moment of gratification, and then they're going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It's almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.” (Alan Moore)
***
“All I am is what I am. I lived seven lives at once. I was power and the ecstasy of death. I was god to a god. Now... I—I'm trapped... on a roof. Just one roof... in this time and this place. With an unstable human who drinks too much whiskey, and called me a Smurf.” (Illyria, in the television series “Angel”)
***
“The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.
"Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.
When Mr. Lieberman told The Washington Post, “I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed,” he actually put his finger on his political problem.” (New York Times editorial, morning after the primary)
***
“... to Guccione's credit, "Caligula" does make you reevaluate your umbrage yardstick. The sex is explicit, yes -- but it is just sex. "Caligula's" gratuitous decapitations and disembowelments -- presumably far less common in everyday life -- are now accepted in everyday cinema, and even then went largely unremarked upon.” (Daniel Kraus in Salon, on the 20th anniversary of ‘Caligula’)
***
“Sweetheart, trust me, this is way more ‘bad boy’ than you’re ever going to be able to handle. So do yourself a favor: go blow a drummer.”
(Dennis Leary’s character Tommy on “Rescue Me”)
***
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." (H.P. Lovecraft)
EDITORIAL NOTE: Never mind the snakes on a plane. Just how motherf*@#$%ing scary is it when H.P, motherf#%^%#ing LOVECRAFT is politically relevant and astute?
Dead Children of a Lesser God: Why the Terrorists are Winning, #247 in a Series
"What future other than one of fear, frustration, financial ruin and fanaticism can stem from the rubble? Is the value of human life less in Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere? Are we children of a lesser God? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood? Can the international community continue to stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted upon us? Is this what is called legitimate self-defence?"
-- Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora seen here next to Condoleeza Rice, who-- I hope for the sake of her soul-- is covering her face in shame.
She just got out of a meeting in which she tried to explain to the gentleman Why He Can't Have a Cease Fire Right Now, in the name of Another Grand Strategy of the Bush Administration. I wonder how many more of those this country can survive?
The news is awful, with more children, blameless old people and animals being killed and suffering in Lebanon for the simple crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, while men (and some women) who have never suffered such horrors pontificate about other people's suffering and do nothing to stop it.
It should be stated here for the record that the politics of Ormondroyd's Encyclopedia Esoterica have long been encapsulated in this credo by Brendan Behan: "I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer." Everything else is contingent on that goal for better government.
In both Iraq and Lebanon, we see the United States and Israel falling like passenger pigeons into a basket. This continues to baffle me, as I've always assumed this was a truism of terrorist planning:
Step one: attack civilians or soft military targets.
Step two: this provokes a response by the targeted state that's out of proportion to the original offense.
Step three: the logic of violence and the state's inability to surgically control a mass of soldiers and policemen guarantees that there will be atrocities, oppression, "collateral damage" against innocent bystanders.
Step four: this repression will provoke an uprising against the state, cycling into greater and greater violence until--
Step five, the original terrorists appear more sympathetic to the people than the now out-of-control state.
This apparently is too subtle for the saps in power in the US and Israel to understand. Thus Israel and the United States continue to lose the war on terror by doing exactly what Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda want. I don't see anyone explaining this dynamic to a broad audience; perhaps it's so "obvious" that it's invisible.
See Also:
Blue Eyed Body Count
Why We're Losing the War on Terror #3701 in a series
Why They Voted for Hamas
-- Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora seen here next to Condoleeza Rice, who-- I hope for the sake of her soul-- is covering her face in shame.
She just got out of a meeting in which she tried to explain to the gentleman Why He Can't Have a Cease Fire Right Now, in the name of Another Grand Strategy of the Bush Administration. I wonder how many more of those this country can survive?
The news is awful, with more children, blameless old people and animals being killed and suffering in Lebanon for the simple crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, while men (and some women) who have never suffered such horrors pontificate about other people's suffering and do nothing to stop it.
It should be stated here for the record that the politics of Ormondroyd's Encyclopedia Esoterica have long been encapsulated in this credo by Brendan Behan: "I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer." Everything else is contingent on that goal for better government.
In both Iraq and Lebanon, we see the United States and Israel falling like passenger pigeons into a basket. This continues to baffle me, as I've always assumed this was a truism of terrorist planning:
Step one: attack civilians or soft military targets.
Step two: this provokes a response by the targeted state that's out of proportion to the original offense.
Step three: the logic of violence and the state's inability to surgically control a mass of soldiers and policemen guarantees that there will be atrocities, oppression, "collateral damage" against innocent bystanders.
Step four: this repression will provoke an uprising against the state, cycling into greater and greater violence until--
Step five, the original terrorists appear more sympathetic to the people than the now out-of-control state.
This apparently is too subtle for the saps in power in the US and Israel to understand. Thus Israel and the United States continue to lose the war on terror by doing exactly what Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda want. I don't see anyone explaining this dynamic to a broad audience; perhaps it's so "obvious" that it's invisible.
See Also:
Blue Eyed Body Count
Why We're Losing the War on Terror #3701 in a series
Why They Voted for Hamas
"The Peoples be Goin' Crazy."
As we say around these parts, the peoples be going crazy in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, and please God, not Syria. The phrase implies the point in a group dynamic when a crowd of humans has become so violent that the participants no longer act in their own self interest, and are as likely to trash their own property as well as another's, to maim friend and foe alike.
When I was small, the world almost got sucked into World War III because of Cuba-- little Cuba! -- and we owe our lives to Khruschev's willingness to back down. Now we have Putin, an elevated KGB gangster, in charge of Russia, and here-- oh. Possibly the least qualified president in history, a man compared unfavorably with Warren G. Harding, the last person on earth to settle things down. We don't even have the assurance that his advisors are professional, since he despises expertise.
If I were a politician-- defined honorably here as someone who solves conflicts with compromise and benevolent manipulation-- I would stay home every time Cuba or Israel are on the morning news. I would call in sick, invent a doctor's apppointment or a sick child. It is impossible to have a rational discussion about either. I wish someday that a public figure will tell the Cubans in Miami or the Jews in New York to look at a map, choose a country to be loyal to, sit down, and STFU. Stop demanding that politicians prove their love for your provincial arguments and start serving the larger interests of this country and simple humanity instead.
No American politician can speak honestly and openly bout the Palestinian and Israeli conflict without fifty professional hysterics jumping down his or her throat. They all must wrap their comments in ritual obesience to Israel's right to exist, the Palestinians need to renounce violence no matter how many times they are poked in the eye, blah blah blah. I recommend the writings of Alexander Cockburn and Edward Said as a place to start on this subject, and sadly one of them is dead.
I've already done my share of babbling on Peter David's website, but here's a simple thought:
If you kill, marginalize or shout down every moderate voice that speaks for the Palestinians, very soon there will be no one left but extremists and gangsters like Hezbollah and the unmourned Arafat.
The Palestinians have been backed into a corner like the Apache and the Sioux; every move they make will be born of violent desperation, and easy to condemn. The Israelis have made themselves the enemy they deserve, and I hope the rest of us don't get pulled down with them. And God Save Lebanon.
When I was small, the world almost got sucked into World War III because of Cuba-- little Cuba! -- and we owe our lives to Khruschev's willingness to back down. Now we have Putin, an elevated KGB gangster, in charge of Russia, and here-- oh. Possibly the least qualified president in history, a man compared unfavorably with Warren G. Harding, the last person on earth to settle things down. We don't even have the assurance that his advisors are professional, since he despises expertise.
If I were a politician-- defined honorably here as someone who solves conflicts with compromise and benevolent manipulation-- I would stay home every time Cuba or Israel are on the morning news. I would call in sick, invent a doctor's apppointment or a sick child. It is impossible to have a rational discussion about either. I wish someday that a public figure will tell the Cubans in Miami or the Jews in New York to look at a map, choose a country to be loyal to, sit down, and STFU. Stop demanding that politicians prove their love for your provincial arguments and start serving the larger interests of this country and simple humanity instead.
No American politician can speak honestly and openly bout the Palestinian and Israeli conflict without fifty professional hysterics jumping down his or her throat. They all must wrap their comments in ritual obesience to Israel's right to exist, the Palestinians need to renounce violence no matter how many times they are poked in the eye, blah blah blah. I recommend the writings of Alexander Cockburn and Edward Said as a place to start on this subject, and sadly one of them is dead.
I've already done my share of babbling on Peter David's website, but here's a simple thought:
If you kill, marginalize or shout down every moderate voice that speaks for the Palestinians, very soon there will be no one left but extremists and gangsters like Hezbollah and the unmourned Arafat.
The Palestinians have been backed into a corner like the Apache and the Sioux; every move they make will be born of violent desperation, and easy to condemn. The Israelis have made themselves the enemy they deserve, and I hope the rest of us don't get pulled down with them. And God Save Lebanon.
IS ANYONE SURPRISED?
Of course no one-- well, maybe Ted Stevens or Bill Frist, both of whom are sure their tin god had his reasons. Since we already knew this, the question will be how long it takes for the networks to put this in their leads.
Bush Told Cheney to Discredit Diplomat Critical of Iraq Policy by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian UK, Thursday 06 July 2006:
President George Bush directed his vice-president, Dick Cheney, to take personal charge of a campaign to discredit a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence on Iraq, it emerged yesterday.
The revelation by the National Journal, a respected weekly political magazine, that Mr Bush took a personal interest in countering damaging allegations by the former ambassador, Joe Wilson, reveals a White House that was extraordinarily sensitive to any criticism of its prewar planning. It also returns the focus of the criminal investigation into the outing of a CIA agent to the White House only weeks after the senior aide Karl Rove was told he would not face prosecution.
The Journal said Mr Bush made the admission in a July 24 2004 interview in the Oval Office with the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who is leading the investigation into the outing of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Ms Plame is married to Mr Wilson, who says her cover was broken in retaliation after he accused the administration of knowingly using false information on Saddam Hussein's weapons programme....
ITMFA.
Bush Told Cheney to Discredit Diplomat Critical of Iraq Policy by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian UK, Thursday 06 July 2006:
President George Bush directed his vice-president, Dick Cheney, to take personal charge of a campaign to discredit a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence on Iraq, it emerged yesterday.
The revelation by the National Journal, a respected weekly political magazine, that Mr Bush took a personal interest in countering damaging allegations by the former ambassador, Joe Wilson, reveals a White House that was extraordinarily sensitive to any criticism of its prewar planning. It also returns the focus of the criminal investigation into the outing of a CIA agent to the White House only weeks after the senior aide Karl Rove was told he would not face prosecution.
The Journal said Mr Bush made the admission in a July 24 2004 interview in the Oval Office with the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who is leading the investigation into the outing of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Ms Plame is married to Mr Wilson, who says her cover was broken in retaliation after he accused the administration of knowingly using false information on Saddam Hussein's weapons programme....
ITMFA.
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