The President's Praetorian Guard

The US President, now and future, has their own Praetorian Guard: a military force which may immediately respond to his commands. The Praetorians are the Drones.

Just as Tiberius and Caligula and Nero were able to conceive and execute an event of violence and compulsion using their own military force, so may the US President, or whoever in the future is given the power to control drones.

Before the Praetorian drones, elements of the Army and the Navy had to be assembled, plans had to be drawn up and orders given, and these steps required many middle men to put into action.

Drones need fewer intermediaries, and they can be dispatched quickly.

The drones will be irresistible temptation to use for oppression.

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New Digs

I am living through a very large change. I think it is rather good; it does discomfit me, but it does not cause pain, rather it seems to alleviate my pains - real and imagined.

The "new digs" are my spiritual rooms, so to speak. I feel like Charles Ryder, and had gotten rooms on the ground floor facing the quad, and my cousin Jasper told me a number of times that I would fall in with the wrong crowd. And so I did, for years and years. Even Sebastian could not save me.

I feel both mellowed and short-tempered, but the temperament is reserved for the truly knavish and stupid and craven, of which we have a good deal to spice up our lives.

It is a little hard to grab on to one concept I want to deal with, so I have not written.

I did introduce my step-grandson to poetry, however, and he introduced me to DJ art with turntables. We get along well, one reason being that I never lost a childish sense of amazement and interest in everything going on about me. In fact, he is much more "set in his ways" than I am.

We touched on death of a parent: he lost his mother last year, I lost my father this year. It was a brief portion of a talk, mostly on my part, saying how utterly unique the experience is.
I did not say things like "If you ever want to talk about death, I'm here." That's for TV and parents.

When you speak of eternity, it echoes endlessly and does not need further comment, for when someone has been with you when you spoke of eternity, they will remember even at the ends of the universe. It is a quantum entanglement type thing

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The Suppression Of Science By Fundamentalist Zealots

 

A 2-Year Old Watches His Father At A Gun Rally

The picture is filled with portent: the angle at which the gun is carried makes us wonder whether it will protect or harm the young child.

Daily Yonder today:
http://www.dailyyonder.com/doctors-view-of-guns/2013/05/18/5987

...Perhaps the only federal measure to come out of the recent bout of attention to gun violence will be lifting of the congressional prohibition on documentation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of patterns of gun deaths including the high rate of shootings within families.

How can a modern society discuss acceptable levels of mortality by weapons when the statistics are suppressed by the fundamentalist priesthood that runs their government?

Our Oklahoma Strategy

The Republican Senator of Oklahoma wants as much disaster relief as he can get his hands on, only he wants to cut someone else's budget.

If that's his attitude, let him go wanting. The people of Oklahoma elected him, now they will get a taste of what happens when politics goes bad.

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Our Syrian Strategy

Invest in foreign wars, obey Netanyahu, bow to Saudi Arabia, support oppression of the Shia people, write-off Christians and other minorities, and.......

...let our society at home go right down the tubes.

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Why I Admire Walmart

From Addicting Info:

...After all, why should Walmart stop ticking people off when it has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build over a sacred Mayan site, which might also be a burial ground

Read more: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/05/18/teotihuacan-how-mexicos-sacred-mayan-site-got-buried-beneath-walmart-video/#ixzz2TwLw2OqV

I am truly in awe of a store that cannot stock #2 coffee filters in my neighborhood store, yet their internet site states that the #2s are definitely in stock at MY store... for 2 weeks now.

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A Tight Squeeze On The Great Lakes

This picture was taken last year, 2012; I think it was towards the end of July. I think the Great Lakes freighter nearest me is an Algoma Central freighter, and the far one may be a Canadian Steamship Lines (CSL) freighter. Both are heading upstream, north up the St. Clair River. Beyond them is Squirrel Island, Canada, which is part of Bkejwanong or Walpole Island Reserve, which is unceded territory occupied by the Walpole Island First Nation.

I noticed the Algoma vessel coming up river and heading directly at me - a very unusual angle. By its direction and speed, it soon became clear it was going to pass the CSL freighter, which it proceded to do.

I have not seen this manoeuver in the St Clair River - which is not all that large a strait between Lake Huron and Lake St Clair - since the 1960s, when freighter were by and large a bit smaller than the present day.

My sister-in-law had her cell phone, and she got a few shots.
It may be the last time I shall ever see that particular juxtaposition of freighters, given reducing lake levels... which is something we do not read about much nationally, but the Great Lakes are at low levels, and have been for an unusually long time. Lake Superior is supposed to increase by 1 inch this year - which is an enormous amount of water given the surface area of Lake Superior - but that is not enough to appreciably change lake levels in Lakes Huron and Michigan and points south.

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Automobile Makers 1899

According to Seeger and Guernsey's Cyclopaedia 

of the Manufactures and Products of the United States

Google Books

http://books.google.com/books?id=u0FgyWc_xcAC&pg=PR11&dq=automobiles+Seeger&hl=en&sa=X&ei=176YUf3bKcHB4AO1toGgBQ&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=automobiles%20Seeger&f=false

PAGE 968

J. C. Blevney, Newark, N. J.

Bramwell-Robinson Co., Hyde Park, Mass.

Canda Mfg. Co., Carteret, N. J.          

Cleveland Machine Screw Co., Cleveland, O.

Crouch Automobile Mfg. Co., Baltimore, Md.

Daimler Mfg. Co., 169 Broadway, New York.

Dovetail Co., Crawfordsville, Ind.

Duryea Wagon Co., Springfield, Mass.

Eaton Motor Carriage Co., Portland, Me.

Elgin Automobile Co., Elgin, 111.

J. Frank Duryea, Springfield, Mass.

Electric Carriage & Battery Co., Cleveland, O.

Electric Vehicle Co., 100 Broadway, New York.

Frantz Body Mfg. Co., Akron, O.

General Electric Co., Lynn, Mass.

Geneva Wagon Co., Geneva, N. Y.

Graef Motor Co., Brooklyn, N. Y.

Holyoke Motor Carriage Co., Holyoke, Mass.

Holyoke Motor Works, Holyoke, Mass.

Lewis Motor Vehicle Co., Philadelphia, Pa.

Liquid Air Power & Automobile Co., Boston, Mass.

Marsh Motor Carriage Co., Brockton, Mass.

W. ,T. McCullough, 122 Massachusetts Av., Boston, Mass.

Mississippi Valley Automobile Trans. Co., E. St. Louis, Mo.

Mobile Co. of America, Irvington-on-Hudson, N. Y.

National Motor Co., Stamford, Conn.

Niagara Automobile Co., Niagara Falls, N. Y.

Olds Gasoline Engine Works, Lansing, Mich.

Olds Motor Carriage Co., Detroit, Mich.

Olds Motor Vehicle Co., Lansing, Mich.

Overman Wheel Co., Chicopee Falls, Mass.

Patton Motor Co., Chicago, 111.

Phila. Motor Wagon Co., Camden, N. J.

Pittsburg Motor Vehicle Co., Pittsburg, Pa.

Poste Bros. Buggy Co., Columbus, O.

Rhode Island Automobile Co., Providence, R. I.

Rochester Electric Vehicle Co., Rochester, N. Y.

C. H. Sieg Mfg. Co., Kenosha, Wis.

St. Louis Gasoline Motor Co., 115 S. nth St., St. Louis, Mo.

C. M. Spencer, Windsor, Conn.

Standard Novelty Co., Port Huron, Mich.

Still Motor Co., Toronto, Can.

Strathmore Automobile Co., Albion Bldg., Boston, Mass.

U. S. Automobile Co., Pawtucket, R. I.

U. S. Motor Carriage Co., Andover, Mass.

U. S. Motor Co. of Pittsburg & Allegheny, Pittsburg, Pa.

Whitney Steam Carriage Works, East Boston, Mass.

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For You Sci Fi Buffs

Even think of the similarity between British Petroleum's Gulf-destroying oil rig Deep Horizon and the film Event Horizon?

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Life After BP

In Stuart Smith's blog on May 16, 2013:

Look anywhere in the Gulf and you’ll find problems — like toxic tar balls
http://www.stuarthsmith.com/look-anywhere-in-the-gulf-and-youll-find-problems-like-toxic-tar-balls/comment-page-1/#comment-21874

Dean Blanchard is as direct as they come so if you need bedside manner, don’t come here. Whether you agree with what he says or not, Dean speaks the truth as he knows it and in my book, he knows some.

When I asked him about the oil on his porch, Dean looked at me as if to say, that ain’t nothin.’ Just the day before, Dean reported, contractors for BP had collected 5,000 pounds of oil at Grand Terre Island.

Over the last year, Dean said that some 200 to 300 residents had left Grand Isle. “They’re too sick to stay,” he told me. “With all kind of respiratory problems…people couldn’t breathe!”

If memory serves,breathing problems increase with proximity to the oil well head, or the proximity to crude hydrocarbons.

The BP disaster has just begun. Just because Big Media ignores it does not mean it has been remedied and gone away. We are just getting past our opening moves and settling into the long, long middle game.

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Thumbs Up?

Gun dudes and gun dudettes! A juxtaposition of events from bizarro world? Or an everyday occurence? You be the judge.

CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/16/justice/louisiana-shooting/index.html

New Orleans (CNN) -- New Orleans police arrested a second suspect in the Mother's Day shooting that wounded 19 people this week, including three still in critical condition, authorities said Thursday.

The two suspects are believed to be involved in gangs, police said. No further details were immediately available, authorities said.

Now the question is: in a properly constituted weaponized society, is this an acceptable statistic... one that is very much regrettable, but in the larger view is all part of the being-in-the-hot-kitchen and breaking-eggs-to-make-omelets?













I think this is a big thumbs up!

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Tiger Moms Again

Data Challenges ‘Tiger Mom’ Parenting Methods
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/05/data-challenges-tiger-mom-parenting-methods/

When Amy Chua sounded her battle cry in 2011, first with the Wall Street Journal article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” followed closely by her tongue-in-cheek parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the advocate of heavy-handed child-rearing met criticism for both encouraging draconian parenting and for reinforcing stereotypes. Slate reports on a recently published study by University of Texas professor Su Yeong Kim, whose research suggests that the methods used by “tiger moms” and “wolf dads” may not promote success in their children:

In March, she published her results; they will no doubt surprise Chua and her admirers. Children of parents whom Kim classified as “tiger” had lower academic achievement and attainment—and greater psychological maladjustment—and family alienation, than the kids of parents characterized as “supportive” or “easygoing.”

And a reprint, since we are talking of education:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
By Anu Partanen

Dec 29 2011, 3:00 PM ET  
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence...

Hmmmm......


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When Did The Modern Era Begin? 2

My first post on When Did The Modern yadda-yadda-yadda opened up an enormous area of endeavor, and I hardly know where to continue. I feel a bit overwhelmed.
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Empires Never Have To Say They're Sorry

A few hours after my post on the Mind of Empire this morning, I came across this in Democracy Now! :

In a Senate hearing today, Pentagon officials claimed President Obama and future presidents have the power to send troops anywhere in the world to fight groups linked to al-Qaeda, based in part on the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

At first I thought of a bizarro world or alternate DC universe galaxy where another form of FDR spoke of bizarro world Four Freedoms:

 ...and freedom of Force... anywhere in the world. 

I am using my FDR imitation for this, and it is very effectively bizarro.

Gosh, I guess we should never have backed Al Qaeda - sending arms and money and what not....... just like some people like John McCain and his crowd want to do right now with the so-called "rebels" in Syria - when they were good old freedom fighters against the USSR in Afghanistan.

Being and Empire means never having to say you're sorry.

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The Teflon Mind of Empire

The Mind of Empire is devoted to self-preservation, usually at any cost. If self-preservation is normally considered to be a matter of fighting and violence, then those segments of society involved with violence and weapons of violence will be most closely identified with empire; other segments of society may be sloughed off or mistreated or amputated with impunity.

I think it is a shame that in so many sciences there is such progress, creativity, and discovery as there is now, and that there is also the realization that the major funding and progress that will be made in most of these fields will be in those which are most clearly able to be "weaponized".

It is the Teflon frame of mind, you see, that is responsible for it.
Teflon early on found important use and substantial funding in the Manhattan Project.
Ever since World War II, we have partially justified enormous military expenditures based on the fact that discoveries used in weaponry "leak" out into the general public in time, and then make our lives better.
(Apparently it never dawned on us that non-military funding on a comparable scale to military funding would accomplish the same discoveries and break-throughs without weapons and war.)

The only common ground present day groups of mankind seem to be able to find is a battle ground.

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Don't Throw A Dipole!

 Throwing A Dipole

It has never been clear to me how the waters and the winds interact. The wind blows upon the water and creates waves, but how does the ocean affect the air? I believe climate models have implied that this relationship exists, but what actions of the waters significantly impact the air?

PhysicsWorld.com
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/may/14/atmosphere-agitated-by-breaking-waves

Ocean waves breaking far from shore impart a greater portion of their energy to the air than they do to the surrounding water. That is the claim of scientists in Italy and Australia who are the first to model the dynamics of the air directly over breaking waves. Although it has not been verified experimentally, the result challenges the previously held belief that most of a breaking wave's energy remains in the water. If verified, the finding could have important implications for our understanding of cloud formation, climate modelling, oceanic circulation, and wave and weather forecasting...

The simulations showed that right before a wave breaks, it accelerates and its crest becomes sharp. As it breaks, the airflow on top of the wave suddenly separates from the crest and forms a vortex behind it – much like the vortices that form behind a spoon pulled through a cup of coffee. When the vortex makes contact with the water surface, it kicks up a second vortex of opposite sign, and the two tangle together in a capsule of counter-rotating air known as a dipole, and get thrown upwards into the atmosphere..

When the scientists investigated just how much of a breaker's energy is lost to this newly recognized dissipation route, they were staggered to find that up to three times more energy is transmitted to the air as is returned to the water. ... this figure relates only to particularly steep waves, but the fact of the energies being comparable in order of magnitude is noteworthy...

An interesting article both for the subject and the insight into how much our knowledge is a good "guesstimate".

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When Did The Modern Era Begin? 1

The Modern Era became evident in the 1980's when the AIDS epidemic first surfaced.
The illness was greeted officially in the USA by the greater part of the political and politico-religious elites seeing it as a sign from their God (who and whatever that deity and idol might have been!)

It has changed now, but the underlying hatred merely morphs and changes it objectives.

Morality is a logical body and grammar of usage and belief which networks a community.
The response to AIDs was an eruption of amputation of parts of the body of society, and casting those parts beyond the pale officially. I believe the President himself sanctioned this view.

Although these parts of society have now been largely allowed re-entry into official society, our underlying fury at communality drives our murderous rampage through Nature and the World.
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The Coming Change

I believe the world of Capitalism as we know it is dying. I do not mean Capitalism is dying, for Capitalism is a concept which can put on a coat of many colors; all ideas changes and evolve. I mean Capitalism as we know it, the Exploitation Capitalism which is divorced from Community and Morality is dying.

What does that mean? Briefly, any form of Capitalism which creates a disaster comparable to the fiscal crisis starting in 2008 in the USA, followed soon thereafter by Europe, is a Capitalism that recognizes no network of bonds and commitments to a community, a community being an extended group that possesses a common moral logic.

Look at Reuter's this morning:

There Is No Sovereign Debt Crisis In Europe
http://blogs.reuters.com/macroscope/2013/05/15/there-is-no-sovereign-debt-crisis-in-europe/

Evidence that Europe’s austerity policies are not working was in ample supply this morning. The euro zone as a whole is now in its longest recession since the start of monetary union. France has succumbed to the region’s retrenchment. Italy’s GDP slump is now the lengthiest on record. And Greece, still in depression, shrank another 5.3 percent in the first quarter.

To understand why this is happening, Brown University professor Mark Blyth says it is necessary to forget everything you think you know about the euro zone crisis. The monetary union’s troubles are not, as often depicted, the result of runaway spending by bloated, profligate states that are finally being forced to pay the piper. Instead, argues Blyth, it is merely a sequel to the U.S. financial meltdown that started, like its American counterpart, with dangerously-indebted risk-taking on the part of a super-sized banking sector...

In other words, revisit the sources of the hit-and-run and see again that it was the recklessness of Exploitative Capitalism that caused the accident. Yet, to amend this, many are saying that not only should the common people pay once for the banks, but they should pay twice, thrice, and four times and more for the folly of the financial and political elites!

In a new book entitled “Austerity: The history of a dangerous idea,” Blythe writes that sovereign budgets have come under strain primarily because taxpayers of various nations have been forced to shoulder the burden of failed banking systems.

The way austerity is being represented by both politicians and the media – as the payback for something called the ‘sovereign debt crisis,’ supposedly brought on by states that apparently ‘spent too much’ – is a quite fundamental misrepresentation of the facts. These problems, including the crisis in the bond markets, started with the banks and will end with the banks. The current mess is not a sovereign debt crisis generated by excessive spending for anyone except the Greeks. For everyone else, the problem is the banks that sovereigns have to take responsibility for, especially in the euro zone. That we call it a ‘sovereign debt crisis’ suggests a very interesting politics of ’bait and switch’ at play.

So why all the misunderstanding? Why has the crisis become conflated with a government debt problem in the public imagination? According to Blythe, this is a convenient way for Wall Street to again saddle the state with massive banking sector losses.

The cost of bailing, recapitalizing, and otherwise saving the global banking system has been, depending on how you count it, between 3 and 13 trillion dollars. Most of that ended up on the balance sheets of governments as they absorb the costs of the bust, which is why we mistakenly call this a sovereign debt crisis when in fact it is a transmuted and well-camouflaged banking crisis.

We are witnessing the birth pains of the Capitalism of the future, but the old first-born Capitalism will fight the arrival of a new heir on the scene.

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L'Age de Foucault !

I just used the word "panopticon" in the previous post.

Suddenly it dawns on me that we saw a very good example of it in the use of the Boston street surveillance cameras during the search for the Boston Marathon bombers: a system where all society is under surveillance.

M. Foucault wrote about the panopticon. I think his time has arrived. Unfortunately, his time is a horseman seated on one of four steeds... sometimes... in my dreams.

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Whom To Vote For

 Panopticon Design Prison

I have previously said that were there the possibility of a third term for presidents, I would not vote for Mr. Obama again.

I think that all presidents, however, become enslaved to the prevailing currents in Washington D.C. The atmosphere and the narratives there are like treacherous rip tides in which politicians swim.

The odds of anyone escaping unscathed are very small.....

I always thought we should move the Capital every 10 years or so. Now in the electronic age, there is no reason why we should allow elected men and women to  be imprisoned in the gilded prisons of Panopticon Washington D.C.

Free the elected!
Move the Capital to Morris, Illinois in 2020 !

--
notes

Panopticon.... Google it.

It is a concept folded like a 10-dimensional quilt... and has many. many shades of meaning to me. I use it to give an impression of a uniformity of thought and an inescapability; i.e., politicians cannot escape from the influence of lobbyists... they are under 24 hour surveillance, just as are prisoners in maximum security.... just as the Intel state has the rest of us under surveillance.

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2011/05/02/privacy-freedom-and-the-all-seeing-eye-the-panopticon/

...Foucault saw the Panopticon as indicative of a shift toward unverifiable observation – where the incarcerated were moved out of dungeons and into the possibility of view. Its unverifiable nature was of most importance. By removing the surveyor (in Bentham’s case the Warden) from sight, the subjects were left to guess if they were being watched or not. The effect was one of mass control through minimal input, with subjects learning to curtail their behavior as an outcome of the environment. If you couldn’t verify the existence of surveillance but knew it was possible at any moment, then the presumption was you were under constant observation. In recognizing the impact of surveillance on the body, Foucault (1977) writes:

The classic age discovered the body as an object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body – to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces.

It is an old concept little used; therefore, it is brand new to us, and it may mean what we wish it to mean. Let us give it good and powerful meaning.
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But...

If there were third terms and I would not vote for Mr. Obama a third time nowise implies that I would vote for a Republican. As I have mentioned, I took an oath never to vote for a Republican again at the time they could not say no to ever increasing spending when Dennis Hasteart was House Speaker, sometime in 2007.

Even Tom DeLay's criminality could not get me to take an oath... oaths being expressly forbidden as written in Matthew's Gospel.

--

I voted For Mr. Obama Twice

I do not regret my vote, for the alternate were appalling.
However, Mr. Obama is beginning to be less and less appealing to me.

If there still were third terms open for Presidents, I would not vote for him.

--

An Adventure In Art (28)

 

Cracked Egg With Spoon

Sarah Sedwick

Sedwick Studio

http://sedwickpaints.blogspot.com/

--

Forgiveness

Hank Jakubowski asked me why I was so strident about Syria.
I told him, briefly, I was tired of the lies.

He smirked and said that he thought us "religious" types (he calls me "religious" since I do mention religion as something more than a socio-political concept) were supposed to forgive our enemies... not constantly complain about them.

I told him he had it wrong. We are supposed to forgive our enemies, but these people were our "friends".
--

Our Syrian Allies Take Heart

A video which appears to show a Syrian rebel taking a bite from the heart of a dead soldier has been widely condemned.

US-based Human Rights Watch identified the rebel as Abu Sakkar, a well-known insurgent from the city of Homs, and said his actions were a war crime.

The main Syrian opposition coalition said he would be put on trial.
The video, which cannot be independently authenticated, seems to show him cutting out the heart.
"I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog," the man says referring to President Bashar al-Assad as he stands over the soldier's corpse...

BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22519770
14 May 2013 Last updated at 08:11 ET 


Right. Say all the right things, do all the wrong things.
In the same edition, there is a report of Mr. Kerry threatening the Syrian regime if they do not attend the peace negotiations scheduled for June. 
Exactly why the Syrian government would negotiate with these groups is not quite clear anymore.

I really became involved in this sham over Syria - the sham being that there are real rebels without backing and finance by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and that Israel is not involved as a way to lessen Iran's influence - when I saw the pictures of the Syrian rebels:  there was a so-called rebel with large tattoos of women on his back.
Since Muslims disapprove of tattoos and representations of the human figure, this was an immediate indication that these rebels were hired mercenaries.

 

Tattoed Muslims?

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/03/tattoed-muslims.html

This entire charade has never been anything more than a conspiracy between the US government, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel to get rid of Syria's Shia influence:  to establish Sunni hegemony in the near Middle East and add to the repression of Shia minorities... as well as Christians, Druzes, Alawi, and every other minority.

Why would our government do this? Why would Mr. Obama, whom we supported for years, do this thoughtless deed? It essentially comes down to Benjamin Netanyahu telling the US government what to do and when to do it. 

By spending the last two years threatening to bomb Iran, Israel frightened the US and I suppose the US government breathed a sigh of relief when everything became an attack on Syria.

And in this time of fiscal cut-backs and reduction of benefits, we are paying full price for it. We have paid for the umbrella of support which covers the violence and atrocities.

I am simply tired of being lied to. I have been lied to about Iraq over a ten year period. I have been lied to about the financial sector in my country and around the world. I have been lied to about the economic justifications of cut-backs that effect me directly.

I frankly am sick and tired, and I am not going to take it anymore!

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We Are Already At War

It is sort of obvious.
One of the first things Chuck Hagel had to do upon being confirmed as the new Secretary of Defense was to go to visit our allies and emphasize our common commitment, rather like Churchill and FDR meeting up around the globe during WW II.

I do not doubt that we are at war. We are only debating where the battles should be and whose children will be killed.

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Chemical Weapons

 Israeli Army's Use Of White Phosporus On Civilian Targets

While some UN observers point to chemical use by the Syrian rebels, and we ignore it because it does not fit our pre-arranged narrative, and the US Congress considers lack of evidence that the Syrian army used such weapons to actually be the evidence required, in Tikum Olam we read more about chemical weaponry in the Middle East:

IDF Agrees to Forego Use of White Phosphorus…Sorta
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2013/05/13/idf-agrees-to-forego-use-of-white-phosphorus-sorta/
by Richard Silverstein on May 13, 2013 · 0 comments

IDF rains white phosphorus indiscriminately on civilian targets

Yesh Din and other Israeli human rights NGOs sued the IDF over its use of white phosphorus during Operation Cast Lead and in similar conflicts. It is deemed by many as a chemical weapon, especially when used as the IDF does. It is not allowed to be used in or near civilian populations, which is precisely how Israel uses it. It also dropped the napalm-like substance directly on civilians targets causing grievous injuries. Scores of Gazans died or were maimed by the toxic, highly flammable material during the 2009 war. The only time it’s legal to use it in combat is to provide smokescreen cover for combat operations. While the IDF maintains that was what it did, the evidence in the form of civilian casualties refutes that...

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Syria's Christians and Other Minorities

 

Damascus Old Christian Quarter

This photo of Old City is courtesy of TripAdvisor

They are almost totally ignored in American foreign policy in the Middle East. American policy does not have much detail and effort beyond support for Israel. One might say that it resembles a policy made up by vicious children, children without a great deal of experience and "street smarts".

On the extinction of Christians - a process which began in a large way with the beginning of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration, see The American Conservative:

How the Iraq War Became a War on Christians
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-iraq-war-became-a-war-on-christians/
And why supporting Syria's rebels may extinguish Christianity in its oldest environs.
By Andrew Doran • May 9, 2013

The recent dedication of George W. Bush’s presidential library in Texas briefly rekindled debate about the defining event of his presidency, the Iraq War. The visceral hatred of many for the war and the man having substantially diminished, a more sober assessment of both seemed to prevail in the coverage. In the same news cycle there appeared a seemingly unrelated event, the abduction of two Orthodox bishops in Syria. In fact, the conflict in Syria and the American invasion of Iraq are linked by a common thread:  the failure of the U.S. to consider the effect of its foreign policy on vulnerable religious communities, especially Middle Eastern Christians...

And also from 2011 we may read and realize that everyone in the area knew that the American policy of allowing Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel to do whatever they wished was dooming minorities sects:

NPR
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/30/137522783/syrias-minorities-fear-sectarian-split-amid-protests

Syria's Minorities Fear Sectarian Split Amid Protests
June 30, 201110:19 AM


If it seems incredible that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel have joined forces, notice that Israel has established a mission in the United Arab Emirates which border Qatar, ostensibly for concerted action against Iran (and, by implication, Hizbullah and Syria).

In Tikun Olam:
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2013/05/13/israel-opens-secret-mission-in-united-arab-emirates-to-threaten-iran/

Israel Opens Secret Military-Intelligence Mission in United Arab Emirates to Threaten Iran

by Richard Silverstein on May 13, 2013 

The latest Israeli budget under consideration in the Knesset reveals that Israel opened a new mission in an unnamed Gulf State in the past year.  Though the identity of the state is supposed to be a secret (the linked Haaretz article doesn’t explicitly name it) given the delicate nature of Israeli relations with Arab countries in the region, my source informs me that it is the United Arab Emirates.  It is one of several Gulf states feeling threatened by the so-called Iranian threat.

Israel is eager to reinforce the sense of isolation and encirclement against Iran and what better way to do this than to make common cause with one of the competing powers in the region.  My source informs me that the purpose of the new mission is to coordinate and plan strategies for containing Iran...

Recently, the NY Times reported... the U.S. was preparing a $10-billion arms package to send advanced weaponry to Israel, the Saudis and UAE in order to battle that Iranian threat.  The notoriously unreliable Times of Israel also reports a so-called “moderate crescent” alliance taking shape among the Saudis, Israel, UAE, Turkey and Jordan.  It too would have the goal of offering mutual defense against Iran.  If this report is credible (given the Times of Israel’s record, that’s by no means guaranteed), then the secret mission could be part of this project, since it would enable Israel and the UAE to coordinate their efforts much more intensively.  Personally, it could be a total crock.  But even if it is, it does indicate the “thinking” of some Israeli strategists who have delusional visions of creating a Middle Eastern version of NATO to deter Iran.

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Today's New Word: Subnivium

Literally, "a place under the snow" as I analyze it:  -ium for "a place", sub- for "under", and -niv-  for "snow".

It is used in the following contexts:

Terra Daily
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Decline_in_snow_cover_spells_trouble_for_many_plants_animals_999.html

Decline in snow cover spells trouble for many plants, animals
by Staff Writers
Madison WI (SPX) May 10, 2013

For plants and animals forced to tough out harsh winter weather, the coverlet of snow that blankets the north country is a refuge, a stable beneath-the-snow habitat that gives essential respite from biting winds and subzero temperatures.

But in a warming world, winter and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere is in decline, putting at risk many plants and animals that depend on the space beneath the snow to survive the blustery chill of winter...
 
"There are thresholds beyond which some organisms just won't be able to make a living," says Pauli. "The subnivium provides a stable environment, but it is also extremely delicate. Once that snow melts, things can change radically."

For example, plants exposed directly to cold temperatures and more frequent freeze-thaw cycles can suffer tissue damage both below and above ground, resulting in higher plant mortality, delayed flowering and reduced biomass.

Voles and shrews, two animals that thrive in networks of tunnels in the subnivium, would experience not only a loss of their snowy refuge, but also greater metabolic demands to cope with more frequent and severe exposure to the elements...

Climate hokum, no doubt.

By the way, here in Southeastern Michigan, the temperature is to fall to freezing tonight, May, 12, 2013.
Possible patchy frosts just after a hot week that thrust the plumules of growing things into the light.

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Apology Accepted?

 

Rios Montt of Gautemala

I hope our apology (cited from the Washinton Post in 1999 below) was accepted back when President Clinto tendered it.

Today:
Al Jazeera:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/05/20135116568195197.html
Guatemalans hail historic genocide verdict
Ex-military ruler convicted of orchestrating massacres of indigenous Ixil people during 1960 to 1996 civil war.

Guatemala City, Guatemala - For the first time in history, a former head of state has been found guilty of genocide for crimes committed in the country itself, marking the biggest successful prosecution in Latin America.

When Efrain Rios Montt seized control of the country in a March 1982 coup, it gave way to the bloodiest period of Guatemala's 36-year-civil war. The violence left 200,000 people dead and more than 45,000 disappeared, mostly people of the indigenous Ixil Maya ethnic group, according to the UN.

On Friday, a three-judge panel convicted the former military leader of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentencing him to a total of 80 years in prison. "Genocide not only happened to the Ixil people. It happened to all of Guatemala because it ruined the country's social fabric," Judge Yasmin Barrios said during her ruling.

"This is why this sentence proclaims that such crimes can never happen again."

The courtroom erupted into cheers, tears and song as the sentence was read for more than two hours.

And then the past:



Washington Post in 1999:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/daily/march99/clinton11.htm
Clinton: Support for Guatemala Was Wrong
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 11, 1999; Page A1

GUATEMALA CITY, March 10 – President Clinton expressed regret today for the U.S. role in Guatemala's 36-year civil war, saying that Washington "was wrong" to have supported Guatemalan security forces in a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that slaughtered thousands of civilians.

Clinton's statements marked the first substantive comment from the administration since an independent commission concluded last month that U.S.-backed security forces committed the vast majority of human rights abuses during the war, including torture, kidnapping and the murder of thousands of rural Mayans...

Genocide is one tough apology to make.

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Pinochet Y La Herencia De Los "Chicago Boys": Why Liberal Has Become A Bad Word

Are there any words describing political and economic persuasion anymore in the USA which are not dirty, vile, and sullied? I don't know. By just adding "neo-" to "liberal" and "conservative", we have conjured up some nightmares.

Anyway, I don't want to think about it.

I have been reading of the contributions of the University of Chicago's neoliberal economists to authoritarian-dictatorial economic systems in Chile:

La herencia de los "Chicago boys"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_3192000/3192145.stm

En 1973, cuando los militares chilenos derrocaron al presidente Salvador Allende, llegaron a instalarse en el gobierno con un plan económico bajo el brazo.

El documento era conocido coloquialmente como "el ladrillo" y había sido elaborado en secreto por economistas opositores al gobierno de la Unidad Popular en los meses previos al golpe de Estado del 11 de septiembre.El general Augusto Pinochet se basó en "el ladrillo" y en la estrecha colaboración de economistas chilenos principalmente graduados en Chicago, los llamados "Chicago boys", para llevar adelante su reforma de la economía.

En su libro "La historia no contada de los economistas y el Presidente Pinochet", el abogado y periodista Arturo Fontaine Aldunate describe "el proceso en virtud del cual un gobierno militar y autoritario -el del presidente Augusto Pinochet- hace rigurosamente suyos los principios de la economía de mercado".

Fontaine, ex embajador del gobierno militar, defiende la tesis de que esta aparente paradoja de libertad económica incorporada a un sistema autoritario evitó que Pinochet cayera en el populismo.El autor subraya en su libro que "el fenómeno empieza a fines de 1973, es decir, antes de las grandes experiencias neoliberales o neoconservadoras de las modernas naciones de Occidente".

También destaca el aporte de profesores de Chicago, como Arnold Harberger, quien visitó Chile por primera vez en 1955 y ejerció gran influencia sobre Sergio de Castro, economista que después estudió en Chicago y fue ministro de Economía (a partir de 1975) y Hacienda (a partir de 1977) de Pinochet...

 I think it is a good read, even for one whose Spanish is so unfluent as mine.
I think there are points of great interest to all of us.

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The Rich Colleges Get Richer

From the hardly radical Bloomberg's:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-08/colleges-soak-poor-u-s-students-while-funneling-aid-to-rich.html

U.S. colleges such as Boston University are using financial aid to lure rich students while shortchanging the poor, forcing those most in need to take on heavy debt, a report found.

Almost two-thirds of private institutions require students from families making $30,000 or less annually to pay more than $15,000 a year, according to the report released today by the Washington-based New America Foundation.

The research analyzing U.S. Education Department data for the 2010-2011 school year undercuts the claims of many wealthy colleges that financial-aid practices make their institutions affordable, said Stephen Burd, the report’s author. He singled out schools -- including Boston University and George Washington University -- that appear especially pricey for poor families.

“Colleges are always saying how committed they are to admitting low-income students -- that they are all about equality,” Burd said in a phone interview. “This data shows there’s been a dramatic shift. The pursuit of prestige and revenue has led them to focus more on high-income students.

 This is all rather hard to believe!

--

My View Of Fracking

I like relatively cheap energy and energy independence as much as anybody else.

Having said that, what do you think my opinion is on a process that is described as :
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/201357123155791818.html

The industry that uses this technology calls its product "natural gas", but there is nothing natural about up-ending half a billion years of safe storage of methane and everything that surrounds it. It is, in fact, an act of ecological violence around which alien infrastructures - compressor stations that compact the gas for pipeline transport, ponds of contaminated flowback, flare stacks that burn off gas impurities, diesel trucks in quantity, thousands of miles of pipelines and more - have metastasized across rural America, pumping carcinogens and toxins into water, air and soil.

Sixty percent of Pennsylvania lies over a huge shale sprawl called the Marcellus, and that has been in the fracking industry's sights since 2008. The corporations that are exploiting the shale come to the state with lavish federal entitlements: exemptions from the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Clean Drinking Water Acts, as well as the Superfund Act, which requires cleanup of hazardous substances. The industry does not have to call its trillions of gallons of annual waste "hazardous". Instead, it uses euphemisms like "residual waste". In addition, fracking companies are allowed to keep secret many of the chemicals they use.

Now I know this is written by someone unfriendly to fracking, but I think I am old enough to handle the emotion-laden wording.

What I truly find troubling are the exemptions from the Clean, Air, Clean Water, Clean Drinking Water Acts, and the Superfund Act.
This indicates that the companies and the regulators and the Congress knew what the deal was right from the get-go, and they went to extraordinary lengths to let fracking continue.

If we combine this with the post yesterday  A Senior Moment  http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-senior-moment.html   wherein the increase in diseases such as Alzheimer's and Dementia, Asthma, Cancers, etc. cannot be correlated to increased age and living longer, rather they indicate there is a complex causality of environment and genetics.

Couple this with the toxic residues of fracking, and knowing full well that only two months ago we were talking about leaks in the Hanford, Washington storage tanks, tanks established in World War II at the Hanford facility which supplied the Manhattan Project

In other words...
What is my view of fracking and a society which allows it?

What do I think of someone who poisons not only themselves, but everyone around them and the governing structures that allow it?

What is there to save us from our insanity?

--

A Senior Moment

 I Forget the Name of this Film... although that is Cyril Cusack on the left.

The phrase "a senior moment" used in such contexts as "Ooops. I forgot. I just had a senior moment." are infuriating, especially when uttered by anyone under 55. You know they are doing the very insulting and bizarre act of patronizing you for their own mistake.

Anyway, a couple of days ago, She-who-must-be-obeyed was taking it easy in the spa-like atmosphere of the steamy hot tub environment called "The Evening News".
I think she just likes having Brian Williams yell at her. He does yell. They all yell. Go back and find a YouTube vid of Walter Cronkite (Hah! Remebered the name!... take that, all you patronizing whippersnappers!) doing the evening news. He did not yell at us.

So there's a segment on the increase of Alzheimer's and Dementia. It pretty much said that the incidence of Alzheimer's and Dementia are increasing.
The modern day narrative into which we usually slip this nugget of information is:

(1) People are living longer through modern medicine;
(2) modern medicine for the elderly is paid by Medicare, and it is too generous and is the cause of the deficit;
(3) as you have people living longer and longer, you will have more incidence of age-related sickness.

Here is where I and everyone else will start there quest:  "age-related", because our interpretation seems to be wrong.

In Science Daily today, we read along the same lines, only much more informative (and scarey):

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130510075502.htm

Brain Diseases Affecting More People and Starting Earlier Than Ever Before

May 10, 2013 —

Professor Colin Pritchard's latest research published in journal Public Health has found that the sharp rise of dementia and other neurological deaths in people under 74 cannot be put down to the fact that we are living longer. The rise is because a higher proportion of old people are being affected by such conditions -- and what is really alarming, it is starting earlier and affecting people under 55 years.

... Professor Pritchard of Bournemouth University says: "These statistics are about real people and families, and we need to recognise that there is an 'epidemic' that clearly is influenced by environmental and societal changes."

... The research highlights that there is an alarming 'hidden epidemic' of rises in neurological deaths between 1979-2010 of adults (under 74) in Western countries, especially the UK.

... When asked what he thought caused the increases he replied, "This has to be speculative but it cannot be genetic because the period is too short. Whilst there will be some influence of more elderly people, it does not account for the earlier onset; the differences between countries nor the fact that more women have been affected, as their lives have changed more than men's over the period, all indicates multiple environmental factors.

Considering the changes over the last 30 years -- the explosion in electronic devices, rises in background non-ionising radiation- PC's, micro waves, TV's, mobile phones; road and air transport up four-fold increasing background petro-chemical pollution; chemical additives to food etc. There is no one factor rather the likely interaction between all these environmental triggers, reflecting changes in other conditions. For example, whilst cancer deaths are down substantially, cancer incidence continues to rise; levels of asthma are un-precedented; the fall in male sperm counts -- the rise of auto-immune diseases -- all point to life-style and environmental influences...

This is very informative.
All of the things we juggle: climate change, toxic pollution, social change, weapons, war, religion...
everything is reaching a critical mass, so it seems.
We could ask our Representatives in Washington to do something about it, but it might sound like it could hurt Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

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The Great Boston Bomb Scare of Aught-Seven ('07)

Before returning to 2007 in Boston, a few words about present day bombs in Boston:

Information is Power... that is why the FBI did not tell Boston authorities about Mr. Tsarnaev's trip to Dagestan: keep the locals dependent on the Feds. I know it sounds like a line from one of the Die Hard scripts (bless Bruce Willis), but it is the reality.

The Leviathan and Behemoth Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Agency we set up at now little expense after 9/11 as the Department of Homeland Security does not even do the one thing that it was really intended to do.
Remember back after 9/11 when it was said that a major problem was the Intel agencies not communicating? Well, $100 billion later and Mum's still the word.

It will never work as it is now conceptualized,  but I do not want to talk about that now.

I want to talk about the City of Boston and its security agencies and The Great Boston Bomb Scare of Aught-Seven (2007)

I had a post back in February of 2007 titled The Terror Of Frylock :



http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/terror-of-frylock.html

By now you must know that the Boston Security people arrested those responsible for:

and this was on an Ad Campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Frylock is the Fries guy. When asked to comment, he said " No Comment."




The Bomb Scare was based on an ad campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, of which Frylock is a member, being the fry guy on the left in the picture above.
The Wikipedia entry says:

The 2007 Boston bomb scare occurred on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 after both the Boston Police Department and Boston Fire Department mistakenly identified battery-powered LED placards resembling the Mooninite characters of the Cartoon Network show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as improvised explosive devices.^[1][2] Placed throughout Boston, Massachusetts and the surrounding cities of Cambridge and Somerville, these devices were part of a guerrilla marketing advertising campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, a film based on the animated television series Aqua Teen Hunger Force on Cartoon Network's late-night programming block, Adult Swim.^[2]

I do not mean to belittle or kvetch or insult anyone. I'm just reporting the facts.

--

Bangladesh Time

Resha Begum, Survivor in Bangladesh Disaster

Reuters / Agence Presse-France

 
O.K. Where do I get a list of the clothing manufactured in Bangladesh, and a list of the stores which sell it, in order to boycott them?

It took 1,080 dead victims pulled from factory wreckage before the one survivor so far, Resha, was found. The dead outnumber the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster, and that business had the advantage of using a toxic gas to infiltrate the town.

If not a boycott, we should have Muhammed Younis talk to us about his ideas at bettering the situation.

I'd rather go naked than wear clothing produced under such conditions. And you may take that as a threat!

--

Ade Ileke 52

Fats Waller

Where's That Jazz?


what is the jazz of the written word?
the poetry,
the confabulation,
the corrugated language roller-coaster
in the areas of my brain;
where is the jazz?


where is the tongue of jazz?
the taste,
the silver spit
of my pavlovian laboratory dog desire
in the areas of my mouth;
where is that jazz?


where's the genius of jazz;
of the genital?
the intemperate,
the ancient yet modern lingua franca
of the orient seaports...
where's that savvy horn?


where is desire's fermentation?
the wine of jazz?
the intoxicating
drink of that undiscovered seashore
with messages in bottles...
where's that jazz?

--

I shall  call this "Ade Ileke  52",

You wonder why is this Ade Ileke? I hear Shakee saying it very clearly!
And Ben Alli, too! Ha!
And our Grandmother... there is no nonsense there! ...

Paradox of Guns

 

I am in a quandary about guns and the Second Amendment.

I am opposed to violence and the weaponized society we live in, yet I have a streak of Libertarian in me, and do not trust the Government...

I trust well trained people who run and administer Medicare and Social Security and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and ever so many other agencies upon which we depend; those people are competent and very helpful.

I do not trust the current politicians and the "elites", as Clarence Thomas, who is a menial Supreme Court Justice... hardly worth calling him "elite"... calls them.

The elite has no conscience and no attachment.

They are - if you know your Ancient Greek - as changeable as Alcibiades, and not to be trusted. We are in the time when cunning men and women look to what they think is their own best interest, and the devil take the hindermost.

Our leaders have M.B.A.s in feathering their nests, and in breaking your backs.

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