11/30/2009
It's just not in the cards
I'll see your Izzat IBRAHIM al-Duri and raise you a Uday Hussein,
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Remember the high profile targets in Iraq? Remember how the Department of Defence, in an act of whimsy not unlike those terrorist warning levels that our (the people of Pennsylvania's) ex-governor supervised and oversaw, that is, until election time rolled around and politics trumped security once again, relegated the Iraq terrorists / targets / evil doers to playing card status? Saddam was none other than the Ace of Spades, what else could he be? He tried to kill W's daddy. But, logically shouldn't bin Laden have been the Ace of Spades aka apex predator?
Google has introduced subtle changes in their search engine and now it's harder to find results when they have to do with sensitive security issues or issues that might embarrass any of a myriad of agencies or people laughingly commissioned to make us safe. Instead of saying, like it used to, contents removed or similar wording, that if nothings else, confirmed that we weren't crazy looking for it in the first place. Now they simply say, "Page not found."
My point being that searching for various histories of governmental programs, such as the, "let's humanize the terrorist but not enough to make them sympathetic figures but enough so that people know we fight a real battle when it comes to fleecing them of their tax money," has become an unnecessarily difficult task. I could add something about the redistribution of wealth from the "people" to the mercenaries who act with dispensational impunity but I won't.
So after the deck of Iraqi terrorists have been mostly been killed or captured, the Iraqis hold their fate in their own hands even thought we wrote a substantial portion of their constitution, after 8 years of war, after 3 OUARTERS of a TRILLION dollars, and after Obama decides to expand out role in another unwinnable war in Afghanistan, we have to be safer, right? I mean Dana Perino recently said on Fox that , During the Bush administration there weren't any terrorist attacks on our soil. Perino: "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term" | Media Matters for America
So, we're safer but not safe? No, not that either. Because the world at large really doesn't give a shit that we made a gesture of fighting terrorism, even fighting dirty. I offer two breaking new reports from my inbox:
- Iran's Cabinet OKs building 10 more uranium enrichment plants, state news agency IRNA announces.
- Four sheriff's deputies fatally shot in what officials describe as an ambush in a coffee shop near Seattle, Washington.
The first demonstrates our limits in controlling and combating the nations that we don't like and the second reveals that domestic violence, whether you call it A or B, is still, and will always be, with us. The best we can do is to try to offer opportunity and a fair playing field for the American people and pray that we are doing enough to stop the ever increasing waves of senseless violence that sweeps over us.
As long as we see the problem as "out there somewhere," as if, if we just push the right levers and pull the right knobs we'll somehow stop the infection and ameliorate the cancer that's holding us by the throat and balls.
Being held hostage by the banks and lending institutions that we have propped up with our dwindling resources hasn't been a great help either.
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I hope the Mayan's are right about 2012. I hope the world ends if not ending means a continuation of the policies of lying and plundering. Hold on if you have any faith, you're going to need it either way. Gene
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11/29/2009
Junk science and junk politics
I don't expect much when President Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen next month to participate in a the global climate summit. He'll attend December 9, beat a hasty retreat in order to snatch up his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and then head home or maybe somewhere else where Obama adulation is thick and expectations low. Most of the other 65 world leaders attending the summit are expected to attend the final days of the Dec. 7-18 conference. He hates to eat and run but a presidents gotta do what a presidents gotta do.
Bad time to skirt the issue, in this country where preemption has preempted more reasonable approaches to governance i. e., debate and compromise, the naysayers have begun. Actually they never stopped. Their clear intention has been and still is to debunk the global warming hypothisis. I'm talking about those darlings of the corporate set, our representatives who never entertained a notion, that, as long as there was money and power behind something that it may be wrong to fling it from the parapet walls, like so many vats of boiling oil, on the unsuspecting. I give you, Coal Industry-Sponsored Fake Letters Focus of House Hearing — U.S. Climate Action Network:
According to testimony yesterday ( October 29, 2009) before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, a temp employee of Bonner & Associates forged 14 letters, making them appear as if they came from community groups and sending them to members of Congress. The letters urged the lawmakers to vote against upcoming cap and trade legislation
He was abruptly fired and we're to believe that a temporary employee took it upon himself to write fake letters to members of Congress, even though, the firm that employed him, was Bonner & Associates who were hired as a subcontractor by the Hawthorn Group, which was in turn hired by coal industry advocate American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.
That's regrettable and only involves 14 letters and, unless each included a million dollars in small, unmarked bills with non-sequential serial numbers, I doubt that it's effect could have been substantial.
But, around the same time letters were being forged this too was in the works, Say What? We Need More CO2, Says Oil Industry Exec — U.S. Climate Action Network:
That’s according to H. Leighton Steward, co-author of the “Sugar Busters!” diet books, veteran of the oil industry, honorary director of the American Petroleum Institute, and one of the forces behind the CO2 is Green Web site. His partner in this venture is Corbin J. Robertson Jr., chief executive of and leading shareholder in Natural Resource Partners, an owner of coal resources.
Their argument, in a nutshell: carbon dioxide cannot be a pollutant because we exhale it and plants need it to grow. Their site boasts of a petition signed by 31,478 scientists (9,029 of them with Ph.D.s, the site says), that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be beneficial; more CO2 means better crops, but not necessarily a warmer planet since other factors play a bigger role in heating the planet.
Now comes sanity and reason and science. Dr. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford and winner of the collective 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with his colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, asserts: “Fraud is their middle name. These guys lie with impunity. They’re counting on the media to cover it and the average person not to look it up.” Schneider compares these stalling and dissembling tactics of the oil and coal industries on climate change now to what the tobacco companies did in the 1950s. “They know they’re lying, same as tobacco industry did, and they’re getting away with it again.”
It all sounds to me like that fat, female, German commandant in one of the hundreds of holocaust movies that I've seen telling the jews about to be executed in the gas cambers, "Breath deep, it's good for you!" Gene
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11/28/2009
The world according to Fox
The peoplem, and they haven't shown any biological signs that they aren't actually people, although, I have my doubts, composed this fine Pie Chart. They are so smart that the percentages add up to 193%, Not only do they go the extra mine when reporting the news, they go the extra 93%. The way I see it is; when you're stupid you're too stupid to know you're stupid, just look at Texas.
To the people that think Fox is a News organization, you're just pulling our leg, right? You're just messing around with our heads right? You're just so far right that you always think your right, right? I mean, you got that God thing going and all. Gene
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11/25/2009
The investigation industry
November 24, 2009 Iraq war inquiry: Britain heard US drumbeat for invasion before 9/11 | UK news | The Guardian
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Sir John Chilcot opens the inquiry as protesters demand to know who was responsible for taking Britain to war in Iraq. Source: Press Association Link to this video
Tony Blair's government knew that prominent members of the Bush administration wanted to topple Saddam Hussein years before the invasion but initially distanced itself from the prospect knowing it would be unlawful, it was disclosed at the Iraq inquiry today.
British intelligence also dismissed claims by elements in the US administration that the Iraqi leader was linked to Osama bin Laden, it heard.
Evidence given at the opening day of the inquiry, chaired by the former top civil servant Sir John Chilcot, painted a picture of a Whitehall slowly realising the significance of George Bush's election in November 2000 on US policy towards Iraq ...
Since this, the fifth investigation that the British Government has launched into the events that led Britain into war with Iraq and it's been over seven years since Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair was told in July, 2002 that in the United States, through highly questionable means and unsubstantiated intelligence that "the facts and intelligence were being fixed around the policy," the "policy" being to attack Iraq regardless of any actual threat, it's little wonder that the investigation won't be concluded until 2011.
NIne years and six investigations to tell everyone what they already know, that the United States bullied Great Britain into a trap. How did such an awkward flim flam man manage to pull this off? How did well intentioned people in this country, Colin Powell springs to mind, allow themselves to become party to this outrage, an outrage only in the sense of a smoldering fire waiting to leap into flames unless pissed on by the blathering bladders of the CIA, the military, the press and other viscous, think tank hoards that have become abstract impresarios even unto themselves.
I suppose there are stirrings of investigations here too but the general consensus seems to be, let sleeping rabid dogs lie, besides, bringing the rich and powerful to justice just isn't our thing. We don't do it because A knows B and B knows C and C can maybe someday do us a favor though his third hand association with A and so we look on C with impunity and wait for the graciousness of A to trickle down. A well placed favor raises some ships, ours being the primary one, nay, the only one we care about. It's the way of the world. Go along to get along. I didn't make the system and hosts of other rationalizations and compromises with something that we've heard of but have never personally experienced; principles.
The rich do it for lots of money the reporter for job security the rest for an amorphous idea of "Patriotism" and to avoid the worst of all possible social ills; unpopularity.
Strap your gun to you leg boyz, it's looking like a show down, a slow show down, an unperceivable movement that may or may not be a showdown at all, but why take chances? Shoot to kill, we're at war damn it! Deny that we were attacked on 9-11, go ahead, I dare you! Saddam, bin Laden, what's the difference? And if you think that we're going to try those 9-11 murderers in New York then you're one of them too. I don't know what we stand for but whatever it is it's given to us from God and his son Jesus, And if you think fucking with me is rough, wait until Jesus goes upside your head, Just wait. Gene ... looking for America
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P.S. Funny, but none of the UK stories tha I've searched have even mention the "Downing Street Memo" by name.
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My connection to the guy hanging on the gates of hell wildly swinging back and forth and greeting the condemned in a turrets-like volley of filth and disgusting imagery
Patton Oswald, whom, by the way, I heard of for the first time 10 minutes ago, Is a foul mouthed, irreverent comedian in the mold of Sam Kinison. In short, he's hilarious, but if you have any sacred cows that moo hell and damnation in your ear, your either afraid to like him or can't suspend YOUR wicked beliefs long enough to entertain someone else's wicked beliefs and have a damn good laugh while you're at it.
My daughter's boyfriend did the animation for this Patton Oswald (is that his real name?) cartoon, and damn-it, I'm proud that she's seeing someone that isn't afraid to go outside the mold of normality and as the Holy Sage of Cartoons, Olive Oil once said, "Oh, Popeye, she's a chip off the old block head." Gene, with a little help from my friends ...
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11/24/2009
Aging Gracelessly
Tips For 2010 (Thanks to Bernie)
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1. Stay out of trouble.
2. Aim for greater heights.
3. Stay focused on your job. 
4. Exercise to maintain good health..
5. Practice team work.
6. Rely on your trusted partner to watch your back.
Take your time trusting others.
7. Save for rainy days.
8. Rest and relax.
9. Always take time to smile.
10. Realize that nothing is impossible.
This should make you smile:
3. Stay focused on your job.
4. Exercise to maintain good health..
5. Practice team work.
6. Rely on your trusted partner to watch your back.
Take your time trusting others.
7. Save for rainy days.
8. Rest and relax.
9. Always take time to smile.
This should make you smile:
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11/23/2009
Another casual rant
Someone comes out with a brilliant book exposing:
- The CIA
- The Pentagon
- The executive branch
- The Judicial branch
- Congress
- The limitless ways that the government has expanded its power to snoop into out lives
- Official oppression
Meanwhile in the heartland:
- Although highly controversial in the actual trial details, effectively in 2003, a judge ruled in Fox News' favor that lying is constitutionally protected by the first amendment, the right to free speech.
- Blackwater wantonly kills civilians
- Our cowardly use of drones kill indiscriminately in Pakistan
- The same Goldman Sachs executives that drove the free market into the ground are put in charge of fixing it
- Tax codes are designed for the wealthy and even though they make higher incomes do not always pay a higher tax based on their adjusted gross income
- A neutered, ineffectual Health Care Bill may be passed and if so touted as a success for Democrats
- Illiteracy is on the rise
- Prisons and homeless shelters are bursting at the seams
- Corporations are given sweetheart tax deals nationwide and are viewed with reverence and fervor
- We are living under a self -imposed caste system, only this time, the unclean are you and me
- The religious right has treated the New Testament like a legal document, inserting loopholes, exclusins and perverting its message.
This happens because people don't read and / or don't understand what they do read and if they read, they do it selectively and opt for the quick fix, i.e., Muslims are evil, war is necessary, guns are good, cracking a few heads during a protest is acceptable as long as it's a protest I disagree with.
You won't wake up. You fell asleep with the prostitutes that line K street. Your stench rises to the heavens. The house on C Street is on fire but you refuse to leave. You have been bankrolled by the legal crime families who import poison and death and export, piece by piece, the America we thought we knew.
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Our paid assassins roam the world made acceptable through our cultures of violence, fear and suspicion. There is no shame, no guilt and no atonement. The cancer has metastasised and our pre-existing condition precludes us from salvation.
Is it too late? No. Will we wake up in time to save what's left? I doubt it. Gene
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11/22/2009
DOOMED TO REPEAT, DOOMED TO REPEAT, DOOMED TO ...
Let's face facts. historians aren't going to know what to do about our epoch. There's a burning desire, enflamed by both sides, to fix blame and they do, but historians? They're supposed to deal in objectivity but how can they when every snot nosed pundit, plutocrat and profession prevaricator takes issue with anything that runs contrary to their ideology of self interest? Maybe if we took the stimulus money and spit it up between the politicians and made each of them fabulously wealthy they'd have less interest in acquiring more and more interest in representing someone other than the ones that keep them fat, dumb and happy while we, the American people become fat, dumber and unhappy.
Historians also have a stake in the ever decreasing money pie. Bill O'Reilly, his Bachelor's degree is in History from Marist College, claims to be a historian for Christ's sake. I don't expect any but maybe a few of the people who specialize in dissecting history, to bluntly state that, the terrible financial ruin of our country began with Ronald Reagan and was exacerbated by a series of self serving Presidents, George the II, being the primary deregulator and senseless war monger, threw our country into receivership and along with like minded free marketeers in Congress, plundered the wealth and prosperity of the country in an unprecedented, antidemocratic immoral orgy of selfishness and fuckyouism.
Yes son, at one time people lived in what they called "houses" and had what they called "jobs". These "jobs" paid money and they enabled people to pay their bills and buy things. It was usually an equitable system and the people who were willing to work harder made more money. But none of that matters now, let's go to the dumpster and see what we can find for your mother's birthday if it isn't already picked over by now ... Gene
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It being Sunday and all ...
In Western Hindostan, 400 miles directly north of Bombay, Mount Abu arises abruptly from the desert. Its inaccessible cliffs are 6000 feet high, and the only practicable approaches to its summits are through steep ravines. Away up on the top of the mountain is a fertile region three miles by six in extent and here in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Jains built this temple of white marble. The building was taking form here in India during the days of the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals in Europe. The marble must have been quarried three hundred miles away and brought up the precipitous mountain roads.
The Jains of India are native born non-conformists to the prevailing religion of Brahmanism, and their faith dates back five or six centuries B.C. to the time of their leaded Vardhamana, a contemporary of Buddha. They believe in the transmigration of souls but deny the sacredness of caste. The do not worship any one deity as supreme, but pay direct reverence to certain prophets that taught liberality, gentleness and repentance for sin.
This particular temple (called for its merchant builder, Vimala Sah) is dedication to a saintly prophet called Parswanatha, whose seated image is seen yonder on the elaborately carven shrine. There are fifty five shrines or cells in this one building, all are dedicated to the same saint. Repetition is a favorite ceremonial device among the Jains; this curious structure is sort of a litany in stone.
The patient devotion and wonderful skill shown in the lace-like elaboration of the sculptured ornament can hardly be overestimated. Miniature figures of Parswanatha are used over and over as details of the decoration and are intended to remind the faithful of traditional scenes and acts in his life. They are to devout Jains what the images and pictures of Christian saints are to the faithful in the old churches of Europe.
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11/21/2009
A new feature; old Stereoscope cards that happen to be in my possession
This is only one of nearly seven hundred rooms in the vast palace of His Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Wilhelm II. You are on the second floor on the side towards the beautiful public gardens. This room is sometim called the Rittersaal (Knights’ Hall) ; it is a part of the palace which was added in 1681 to the the original castle (1443) of the Elector Frederick II.
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The sculptured groups over those doors (there
are two more in corresponding positions behind you) represent different quarters of the earth. The magnificent pieces of gold and silver work on that sideboard are chiefly legacies from the early kings of Prussia and are fine specimens of the elaborate decoration for which the old German art workmen were famous. That crystal chandelier hanging fron the ceiling used to belong to the old city of Worms, and hug in the great hall where the Diet or convention met in 1521 to consider the heresies of Martin Luther. It is said that Luther's place was directly under it when he made his celebrated declaration ending, ‘Here I stand. I can do no otherwise. So help me God."
The sculptured groups over those doors (there
are two more in corresponding positions behind you) represent different quarters of the earth. The magnificent pieces of gold and silver work on that sideboard are chiefly legacies from the early kings of Prussia and are fine specimens of the elaborate decoration for which the old German art workmen were famous. That crystal chandelier hanging fron the ceiling used to belong to the old city of Worms, and hug in the great hall where the Diet or convention met in 1521 to consider the heresies of Martin Luther. It is said that Luther's place was directly under it when he made his celebrated declaration ending, ‘Here I stand. I can do no otherwise. So help me God."
About a hundred years ago the Prussian King Frederick William III bough the chandelier from the city of Worms and had it put here in the palace Throne Room.
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Many of the most famous men of the last two centuries have stood in this room and walked about under this gorgeously ornamented ceiling — Frederick the Great Bismarek, Von Moltke, The first Kaiser Wilhelm: the most beautiful women in Europe have blossomed here like flowers in the splendor of court toilettes.
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Many of the most famous men of the last two centuries have stood in this room and walked about under this gorgeously ornamented ceiling — Frederick the Great Bismarek, Von Moltke, The first Kaiser Wilhelm: the most beautiful women in Europe have blossomed here like flowers in the splendor of court toilettes.
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From Descriptive Bulletin No. 1, copywrited, 1904 by Underwood and Underwood.
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