Reading the Times (NY)

Shop that sold the guns that killed at Ft Hood, Killeen, Texas

In the last months I’ve been replying somewhat regularly to the spaces in the NY Times that allow for a reader response, beyond Letters to the Editors, which I’ve also tried to no avail.  Part of this is to wedge a little voice into the cacophony of the news and try to, perhaps, leaven the often shrill and ideologically loaded comment with a little intelligence. This past week I replied to two different things, and found one published, and the other not.

The first was to one item on the Fort Hood, Texas, killings, at the column, Homefires, to which I wrote the following which was published:

In the responses there recur certain themes. One is “prayers for the families,” etc.

Prayer does nothing beyond comfort the person praying with the delusion that they are doing something meaningful for someone or thing outside one’s self. Beyond a self-balm, prayer is meaningless.

Another theme is “the innocent” soldiers who were present. There is no innocence in being a soldier. Soldiers are trained to be killers, and sent out to do this job by their political masters, often for venal or evil reasons. America’s military is usually used to advance US business interests.

Another is the “heroic” soldier as opposed to the “cowardly” killer. Contrary to the politically useful myth that soldiers are a country’s “best” the brutal reality is that in our virtually privatized military, soldiers are a mix of those drawn to the pleasures of violence; those driven there by the cultural envelope in which they live; those driven there by economic necessity – the job of last resort.

It appears Mr Hasan, perceived as an outsider before he entered, did so to certify his being “inside,” an American. Once in the military he found himself again an outsider, subject to the prejudices of a system that among other things is highly “Christianized,” and in a way a caricature of all the prejudices of America in general.

Then there are the various snide comments about “the religion of peace” – Islam. I am sure those using this mode of attack are likely to say they themselves are Christian and hence they are the real religion of peace, albeit one that has left a vast trail of corpses where ever it has gone.

Until America ceases to be a self-deluded bastion of militarism, these things, like 9/11, will continue to occur, and doubtless Americans will continue to be puzzled why their world is so out of whack with the self-perception of themselves as the good guys, the white hats.

America remains politically and culturally infantile.

US troops in Afghanistan

Then, in response to another column on the same topic, Room for Debate, I wrote the following, which was not published:

So long as the United States continues its post-WW2 pursuit of world domination in the interest of corporate wealth, now morphed into a lethal combination of military-corporate-media collusion to this aim, the US will continue to live in constant stress, however much political efforts are made to dampen it. For example, we have virtually privatized the military, eliminating the draft as a matter of social friction; thus the stress of actual military service is shunted onto a very narrow minority of primarily economically deprived persons.

But the cumulative stress of our attempt at maintaining an economic empire enforced with military power seeps into our society every day, whether in the form of ever more invasive governmental control over daily life, or the strident shrieking of fear-mongerers, be they governmental or corporate (Bush>Cheney>Limbaugh>Beck et al) or simply the devastation inflicted on people as they lose their jobs, homes, and sense of life as they are sacrificed by this corporate zombie our society has produced.

Lacking a profound and deep shift in our values, in which we relinquish our imagined right to the world’s wealth and to “guiding” others to our imagined enlightened way of living, there is no reason to think the stress lines of today will not multiply and amplify until we collapse in a fractured catastrophe of our own making.

I find myself wondering what was so threatening in the last one that was so different from the other?  Perhaps the shift from particulars to a more general view?  I find it puzzling.

And here’s a letter to the editor which, of course, was not printed:

America – the United States of America – long ago ceased knowing how to speak to itself, how to be honest with itself, and the consequence is a poisoned politics reflecting the myriad profound problems which infect us.  While I am sympathetic to Obama’s attempts to grapple with this, it seems clear he is, whether consciously or not, a captive of the corporate powers and military-industrial interests which essentially control the economy and political processes in this country.  His effects are ameliorative and not real “change,”  as reflective in the saving of Wall Street at the cost of Main Street, to speak in the willfully limited and cliched language of politics. DOJ rulings on secrecy, etc. all show clearly the hands which govern the game; it is the corporate military state apparatus which is pulling all the strings.   Any attempt to genuinely alter this would doubtless result in some inexplicable one-bullet theory death, or modern buildings collapsing as if by magic (or planned demolition) left unmentioned in official white(wash) papers.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the courts there sentenced a number of American CIA agents to prison (in abstentia) for the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan.   President Obama regretted this.  And those involved, now perhaps confined in their vacations to US places of pleasure, were quoted in the following:

In June, Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by the brother of Mr. Berlusconi, published an interview that it said it had conducted via Skype with Mr. Lady, the former C.I.A. base chief in Milan, whose whereabouts are unknown. In the interview, he said of Abu Omar’s abduction: “Of course it was an illegal operation. But that’s our job. We’re at war against terrorism.”

Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady, who was given the harshest sentence of eight years in prison, was quoted in the Il Giornale newspaper in June 2009 as saying: ‘I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors. It was not a criminal act. It was a state affair.’”

Diego Garcia, one of America’s numerous black sites for military and intelligence ops

US Military around the world, 700+ known bases

In the same pages the new “conservative” opinionator, Ross Douthat, waxes lyrically about the end of history, how American Market Capitalism has triumphed, and all is hunky-dory except that we like having a looming threat so we’re unhappy about our “victory”:

Twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with the scope of our deliverance. Francis Fukuyama famously described the post-Communist era as “the end of history.” By this, he didn’t mean the end of events — wars and famines, financial panics and terrorist bombings. He meant the disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.

This thesis has been much contested, but it holds up remarkably well. Even 9/11 didn’t undo the work of ’89. Osama bin Laden is no Hitler, and Islamism isn’t in the same league as the last century’s totalitarianisms. Marxism and fascism seduced the West’s elite; Islamic radicalism seduces men like the Fort Hood shooter. Our enemies resort to terrorism because they’re weak, and because we’re so astonishingly strong.

I’m not sure which happy planet Ross lives on, perhaps the same one as his stockbroker, but his imagined placid world of consumerism and fluid money, and all the world’s problems solved doesn’t seem to be the same one I live on.  As if to underline the schism between those-with-money and those not, today’s Times announced a market leap of some 200+ Dow-Jones points, now levitating a goodly bit above the mystical 10K level.  Why?  Because the dollar has weakened sharply, scrivened the Times.

“A lot of it is sentiment-driven and there the dollar is getting a vote of no confidence,” Mr. Dolan said. “The massive borrowing by the U.S. government is undermining confidence in the longer-term outlook for the dollar.”

…

While the faltering dollar will make imports more expensive for American consumers, it will also make American exports more competitive overseas.

The hitch in this line is that America doesn’t make things to export much anymore.  Uh, except weapons, and food (also used as a weapon), and entertainments.  But then the people in Wall Street, like their money, are transnational and fluid, and if Americans don’t have houses, jobs, or things like that, no skin off their backs.  In fact, in some nice tidy theoretical manner, “it’s all good.”   Some have theorized that a trembling middle-class on the skids are – as statistics prove – in their desperation willing to work more for less, have no unions, and basically surrender everything to their corporate masters in the interests of attempting to maintain their sliding downward life-styles.  Nice submissive worker ants.

Roland Emmerich’s fable for America, only cost half a billion to cheer us up with ….

En Passante

At the ripe age of 100, Claude Levi Strauss, has moved along.  Famed intellectual, academic anthropologist, he influenced a generation and more with his writing and allegedly changed the European White Man’s vision of those others, not European, White, Man or Rich.  I am not so sure it wasn’t really a brand change operation in which the fundamentals remained.

In America, where each new violent assault upon our peace of mind brings new waves of either introspection or blame-gaming, the press is busy now masticating away on many bones:

The killings at Fort Hood have ignited the predictable knee-jerk right-wing impulse to lock up, or better yet kill, everyone with any vague Middle-Eastern name, look or quality that could be tacked on an Islamic person; the same people likely don’t know that most the world’s Muslims don’t even live there, but in South East Asia:  Jakarta, you’re next up on the hate list.  I’m surprised though they’re not taking out the present reason-for-anger on psychiatrists.

America’s finest on patrol at Ft Hood

The same event has brought forward a flush of navel-gazing “oh my, why us?” with lots of prayers aimed at victims and their families, and words of “innocents slaughtered” and “America’s finest” murmured by one and all, and Presidential  condolences given in grave words about the “horrific outburst of violence ” -  the usual verbiage  with which we drape our tiny little minority (these days) of “warriors” who bravely go out to defend Uncle Sam’s domain.  The trouble is all this rhetorical garbage simply isn’t true:  the military is not made up of America’s finest, but mostly of a combination of America’s most economically deprived, and usually also educationally deprived and most easily victimized by the military’s offer of a snazzy uniform, “respect,” glory and a paycheck with medical care attached.  Some deal!  Nor are military people innocent in any way – they are well-trained killers, armed with American technology’s most lethal weapons, sent, usually with overwhelmingly lopsided force, to wreak mayhem on peasants in some third world place possessing some resource or another deemed useful by their corporate masters.  That most of the pawns in this game don’t know or realize this demonstrates only how well the masters have honed their game.  Most of the President’s lamented “horrific violence” is in fact inflicted by the US Army, Air Force, Marines and Navy, who generally compete to see who can do the most.

General McChrystal in Afghanistan, planning a new Disneyland along with Wally.

Lake Lucerne, Orlando, Florida

Over in Orlando, home of one Disneyland, another disgruntled soul made a minor blip on the American killing list, a day later.   Tomorrow will be another, reported or not.

Meanwhile, out Far East, Disney and China have announced that a massive new Disneyland will be built near Shanghai at a cost of 3 billion dollars.  Perhaps the corporate masters at Disney will ship over a boatload of American coolies to do the low-labor that Chinese no longer see fit to do.  It’d be a job….

In order to accommodate local tastes, Disney assures that some elements will be changed to fit the cultural setting.

As in Disney’s concession (after losing money there) to allowing the drinking of alcohol at Disneyland, Paris, in order supposedly to accommodate the region’s culture, the real reason for any concessions from Disney’s morality is that good old All-American one, the bottom line: to maximize profits, a goal for which any supposed corporate morality can be bent like warm rubber, as has been shown by many other American companies in their dealings with China, as well as any other unsavory place.

Meanwhile, back on Wall Street, the wild ride of the last year continues, with the DOW Jones having leaped from its year long swoon down to 7,000 to back above 10,000 a week or so ago, where upon the talking heads of the corporate propaganda ministries of ABNBCBSCNNFOX pontificated, along with high-up economic honchos private and public, that The Great Recession was over.  The following days economic data wasn’t so obliging, and having broken the alleged psychological barrier of the 10K numerological religion, the market nose-dived 200 points and more.  However, then new applications for unemployment figures came in and mere half million Americans had requested aid for their new status as unemployed, on which good tidings, the market jumped ecstatically back over the mystical 10K barrier, making at least Wall Street merry in preparation for Christmas.   But a few days later the government announced another 150,000 job losses, taking the official national unemployment figure to 10.2 percent, the worst official figure in 25 years.  The market has waffled on this news for the moment.  Curiously then the mainstream press decided to make the well-known ugly little secret that official figures aren’t exactly reflective of reality or accurate, and fessed up that the real figure was more in the realm of 17.5%.  Which, naturally means the real real figure is considerably higher.

Broader Measure of Unemployment Stands at 17.5%

By DAVID LEONHARDT of the NY Times

The official jobless rate excludes millions of people who have given up looking for work and part-time workers who want to be working full time.

And today, wandering in off the mystical eathers of the internet, I got my very own private personal message from none other than Mr Timothy Geithner, former employee of Goldman Sachs, presently residing (I suppose) in Washington DC where he serves as Secretary of the Treasury for President Obama.  That I should get such a missive from the Secretary was amazing to me.   To say that it is the deepest of honors would be understating the matter.  I would do virtually anything for this man.

I am Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the United States National Treasury.‏

From:	Mr.Timothy Geithner (f.notification@btinternet.com)
Sent:	Sat 11/07/09 4:22 AM
To:

Good day to you, I am Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the United
States National
Treasury.President Barack Obama nominated me to be the 75th secretary of the
treasury on January 20th, 2009. I am the president's leading policy
adviser on a
broad range of domestic and international economic issues.I have spent most of
my career at the U.S. Treasury, which I joined in 1988 after having
worked three
years in the private sector for Kissinger Associates.

Before going to the IMF, I Geithner was undersecretary for
international affairs at the Treasury Department under then-
Secretary Lawrence Summers.I played a major role in the
Treasury's efforts to contain the Asian financial crisis in
1997 and 1998. A biography, furnished by the New York Fed,
highlights my management responsibilities. I am the director
of the Policy Development and Review Department at the IMF,
which has a staff of 180 people.

As a Treasury official, I Geithner participated in a number
of international negotiations, including agreement on
international banking standards known as the Basel accord,
and an agreement that created the IMF's expanded emergency
reserve fund.I am married and has two children to my Name,
also received my bachelor's degree in government and Asian
studies from Dartmouth College and a master's degree in
economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins
University. Kindly visit the website below to view my
personal profile.

Website: www.treas.gov/organization/bios/geithner-e.shtml

The United Nations have given me due instructions, alongside
with the World Bank to wire the sum of $10Million US Dollars
Only into your Bank Account in a Legal way.

For this reason I have contacted you.  Below is the
Required Documents:

1: United Nations Stop Order Document
2: World Bank Clearance Certificate
3: Proof of Ownership Certificate.

These three documents are needed before i can proceed with
the transfer of the total fund into your Nominated bank account.
The United States Department of Justice, can help you secure
this needed documents,I will furnish with the contact detail
of whom to contact, so that this transaction can be completed
without delay.

In the meantime, I want you to re-Confirm the following
details to me for your case file processing.

Legal First and Last Name:
Complete Residential Address & Age
Direct Telephone No & Fax
Legal Occupation and Position
Address of Occupation

Please get back to me as soon as possible.

Thanks and God Bless you.

Mr. Timothy Geithner
Executive Secretary United States
Treasury Department Main Treasury
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20220

Hot damn !  Now I must stop so I can, as a duty-bound American citizen, do as my Secretary of Treasury has asked.

Tehran (Update)

News from Tehran is, in the American press, skimpy, at best.  Lacking mass demonstrations or other TV- attracting elements, word from Iran is summarized in little supposedly dull reports:

According to the “experts” this is a uranium enrichment plant, dug into the mountains near the religious city of Qum, and on a basiji base.  It suggests that the Iranian authorities are endeavoring to place their facility in a hardened, “safe” setting, which in turn suggests their intentions are less than benign.  Of course another reading is that they are being prudently paranoid, given the behavior of their antagonists, both the USA and Israel, each of which have shown themselves capable of aggressive and damaging actions, sometimes based on less than real or honest information:

Alleged Iraqi Chemical Warfare plant

Powell’s alleged Iraqi chemical factory

Alleged Syrian nuclear bomb building facility, before and after Israeli attack

Given the sources of these recent revelations, one should be reasonably skeptical.  Self-interest is a rather strong distorting lens, and the Israeli’s have shown themselves, along with the US, to have rather curious concepts of “self-interest.”  America’s apparently lies anywhere that there’s money to be made, assets to seize, or anything like that which can be dressed up as “in the national interest.”  Or, Why Are We In Afghanistan?  Why, because it’s in our national interest, you silly child.

Back in Iran, most recently have come reports that three demonstrators, arrested in the upheaval of some months ago, have been tried and sentenced to death.  They were said to be royalists, in support of the return of the/a Shah.  Several hundred others have been imprisoned, apparently beaten, raped, and a few killed, including the son of a high up authority within the clergy.   Homosexuals are also said to be sentenced to death for this supposed crime.

Demonstrators, Sept 28 2009

Imprisoned and raped (and leaving Iran)

[Note: Apparently when same-sex rape is done by a basij, it is justice and not the supposed crime of homosexuality.]

All told, this is thin gruel for making much speculation, but there is a bit.  It seems the basiji – originally a kind of university vigilante militia organized to support the Islamic revolution  but now composed of mostly working-class toughs – has morphed steadily into an altogether different institution.  It now runs many major components within the Iranian economy, and is more a combination of quasi-military force and corporate entity of considerable wealth and power.  It apparently is considering professionalizing its militia forces, perhaps better to enforce its economic diktats.  Depending on one’s point of view it might be considered a kind of mafia.  It seems it is supposedly under the control of the clergy, though this begins to look a bit less clear.  In any event, within the major power players of Iranian culture, it seems unlikely the military would take kindly to an intrusion on its turf of this kind.  Similarly some major economic power-players apparently are chaffing at its fiscal clout.  To say there are internal stresses within the fundamental power blocks which for the most part run Iran.  The addition of the electoral fraud, and the clear unhappiness on the part of a large segment of Iranian society would suggest the future is likely to be grim, at least for the moment.  The heavy-handed behavior of the government suggests not confidence and power, but fear.   As usual with dictatorships on their way out, their is a self-delusion involved which usually finds recourse to brute force:  they’ll love us if we hit them hard enough.  Of course the usual consequence is bloodshed, more violence, repression and, finally, collapse.  Those who do it always seem to think they will be history’s exception.   So while I now imagine my previous six-month guess on when the current Iranian regime will crumble was a bit optimistic, it is clear that whatever the clock, the train is headed over a cliff.

Back in the US(S)of A, one could weave a similar story, albeit it is a bit different.  Here the US military and its “civilian” service industry, of which Republican President Eisenhower severely cautioned us in 1960, has indeed done something like the basiji:  it’s morphed from being a citizen army into a private conglomerate largely dictating just what the national economy may and may not do (afford).  A look at the old facts and figures shows the military-industrial complex is indeed running most of the show:  America spends more money on military things than all the rest of the world combined.  It litters the globe with 700+ bases.  It infiltrates both US culture, and that of other nations – with propaganda, with bribes, with all the usual stuff of a vast bloated and corrupt entity.  Like the basiji.

Basiji

US Basij equivalents

As with the Iranian Basij, the US military is increasingly taking on domestic policing, has its own economic interests (golf courses, “socialized” medical care, retirement pensions, revolving door arrangements with military contractors, etc.) and of course a deep self-interest in expanding its range of influence and assuring its continuation in power.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Speech

This report is a consequence of the fact that Tehran remains a constant high in hits to this site.  I think that indicates something – don’t want to bet on just what but….

For more on Iranian circumstances of the moment see these:

YouTube IDBasiji BBC Iran Focus ParsTimes Autnews (farsi) IranianProgressives

and a few more Iranian blogs:   Madyariran Human Rights Activists in Iran (farsi) HRA in English

Odds & Ends

In today’s New York Times was a little article on Chinese independent filmmakers, springing of the screening of one at the New York Film Festival, Ghost Town by Zhao Dayong.   In it was a little quote which struck a chord in me, and wrote still another Letter to the Editor Sure Not to Be Published:

Sirs:
As a long-time (45+ years) American “independent”  filmmaker, this quote from an article in the NY Times, rang a dissonant bell:

““I feel very frustrated,” Mr. Zhao said. “I’m a Chinese filmmaker, and of course my audience should be the Chinese people, especially since my films are about ordinary working Chinese people.” He added, “That would be more valuable than winning an international film festival.”

As an American – and hardly the only one – I could easily say the same thing, though the politics are different, the effect is the same. In our country the Glorious Market Economy mantra is the shibboleth which dictates what is to be seen or not, as effectively as the Chinese Communist  Party does there.  The end result is the same.  I’ve won my bit of international festival la dee da, but the films remain mostly unseen.  A long list of my peers could say the same.

Sincerely
Jon Jost

The long list could include quite a number of accessible “realists” like Lance Hammer, Eagle Pennell, on back to John Cassavetes or even before.  It could include more experimental real Americans like James Benning.  It could include me.  We don’t need a heavy-handed Chinese Communist Party censorship board to quash us, we have the wonderful make-the-maximum-buck-whatever-the-cost free-wheeling American capitalist system to do the job.  You aren’t interested in making the most money, then go f..k yourself.  This applies to artisans making the things, to distributors to exhibitors, who, if they aren’t aiming for the lowest-common-denominator maxi-dollar deal, are in for an early demise.  Ask Dan Ladely out in Nebraska at the Ross Cinema, under the gun of budget cuts, or ask the myriad small distributors who’ve bitten the dust in the last decade.  Or the theaters that closed.

By way of a minimal compensation for this grave distortion in our communal values, the MacArthur Foundation offers up 25 half-million buck grants each year, to a variety of people, including artists and scientists and writers and others most of whom you probably never heard of before.  Hopefully the big bucks don’t warp them, and they keep on truckin’ doing whatever they were doing.  Given the choices I’d guess that’d be the case.

And then another brief item in the New York Times, conflicting with another a few days ago which gave a number about 100 less, is this

Names of the Dead

Published: September 28, 2009

The Department of Defense has identified 840 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It confirmed the death of the following American on Monday:

GRAHAM, Kevin J., 27, Specialist, Army; Benton, Ky.; Second Infantry Division.

Our guys in Afghanistan winning hearts and minds

Long way from Kansas or Kentucky…  Pressured by his generals, armchair strategists, blow-hard “patriots” and snookered circumstances, Obama is weighing the scales on this one – to stay, to leave, to stay and leave or…

Meanwhile our little orb keeps telling us a few things, probably things we’d rather not be hearing:

Ice loss in AntarcticSydney Opera House this Spring (now)Roughing it at Balad Base, IraqOriginal Mock-up model for Disneyland

And to put it all in a little perspective

On the other hand, somethings never change, though since the experiment about internet search mechanisms was done, CE gets a lot more hits, and increasingly of this kind – more porn poetry from the search engines:

sucking on your own boobs
great french boobs
big boobs
porn postings
bigtites
pics of the big boobed blue bird
big boobs hd pics
cut off penis
erected
helicopter +boobs
mean wife with big boobs
big boobs no hips
big boobs
beautiful boobs
korean big boobs
limp penis
map of boobs
big bobs arabian women
big boobs amateur
cuts off penis
big boobs
teachers with big boobs
erigierter penis
penis in shoe
penis symbol
big boobs
big boob women
philippines girls boobs photo
big boobs ugly
boobs & cars
guys suking boobs
child erected penis
penis erigiert
arab boobs
big heavy boobs
boobs food
cock boot
yoko ono boobs
big boob star
skinny people big boobs
big boops
big mother fucking boobs
banks boobs
3d penis model
chicago big boobs
pretty penis shapes

Tea Leaf Brief

[Before diving directly into the tea leave readings, a little notice: there's a new post on Clara's blog, and I invite you to read it: www.paginasparaclarinha.wordpress.com.]

And then while you can, if in New York go to see Leighton Pierce’s installation, Agency of Time (Outside In) at La Viola Bank Gallery, 179 East Broadway, NY NY 10002. (F Train to E Bwy). Up until Oct 18. It is a wonderful piece which I reported on here when it was up at the Sheldon Museum in Lincoln Nebraska

Agency of Time, (Pt 1); Leighton Pierce

And now to the inscrutable tea leaves.

The other week, as a little experiment in internet structure – I guess I could read a book about it but I’m more inclined to do a hands-on process instead – I posted some lurid words and images, to see if there would be a flood of hits for such things. As I recall, a few weeks after I noted that the avalanche never came (better watch my language). But here it is now a month or more since posting these items and I note an incremental bit of net poetry along this line:

picture of murdered samuel boob penis erigiert big boobs erected penis guy porn bigboobs boobs falling out what to wear with big boobs erected cock free picture of boobs and girls middls porn big bobs and seat girl big boobs for paul red head big boobs sex big boobs penis 3d explicit porn 8 inch penis 3-d model of penis madison scott boobs big juicy boobs big strong boobs

At the same time, the number of hits to Cinemaelectronica took a major leap, though it would seem a sizable number come from interest in either Iran/Tehran, as this consistently gets a high number of hits, often the highest, or maybe interest in various spellings of Molotov Cocktail, of which a how-to diagram was shown on the Tehran Report page.

How to read this is a bit of a question: my guess, certainly an uneducated one in terms of ways-of-the-net, is that there remains a constant interest in what is going on in Iran, however much mainstream US press has lost interest in it. (It perked up again last week when there was a visible demonstration.) Coupled with the interest in cocktails of the non-drinkable alcoholic kind, I’d guess there is some kind of tangible resistance brewing. Perhaps in Tehran, perhaps elsewhere in the world. And also I vaguely suspect that this site, bothering to report at all on matters in Iran, perhaps owing to its title, has slipped by whatever censorship mechanisms might be blocking more obvious sources of information – so perhaps Cinemaelectronica is accidentally a conduit of some useful information for some who can’t get it more directly.

Speaking of which, it certainly seems that in Iran the government is having a much harder time wrestling the opposition into submission that apparently was expected. It seems the hard-line side is somewhat diminished in numbers, and is hence harder on its line. From what I’ve read a sizable number of important members of the clerical element – very important in Iran – have sided with either moderation or the opposition. So the heavy-hand of the authorities, or more exactly, the “authoritarians,” has gotten heavier in customary fashion: if they are hesitant to lock up a big name clergyman or politician they lock up their children or other family members. A sure sign of weakness masquerading as power.

If the very scarce tea leaves I’ve been able to find on this are in the least indicative of anything, I imagine the Ahmadinejad government is likely to collapse in perhaps 6 months. Whether owing to a violent upheaval or to slow termite work, I wouldn’t know, though I would bet on the latter first. It seems in terms of Iranian culture and politics the government has lost all credibility, the prior sanctity of the Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i has been slurried with his crude entry into street politics of the worst kind and the aura is off. It’s now down to vested interests in the military and clergy trying to hold on to what they have – which is evidently a lot of economic control and wealth. Sound familiar?

On that note I must stop and go attend to the real work at hand: editing on Swimming in Nebraska and Piccoli Miracoli as well as trying to think about and organize new film here in Seoul, for which I’ve now 3 actors, plus a few other on-camera people, and a few places to shoot in. We start on Friday with first scene.

And the winner (EX)is

The other night we went to the closing ceremony for the EX-is festival this year.    From the packed-house audience of the opening night the numbers had dwindled rather drastically, with a scattering of souls – many of them festival staff and help – distributed in clumps about the large auditorium.   The comments were duly said, subdued a bit by this diminuition in bodies present, and on we were to prizes given.  The first were lesser, mostly local ones, boxes of DV tapes for this or that.  None of the filmmakers were present to receive their prize.  Then the jury was introduced, and Pip Chodorov got the duty to read the winners and bestow the large blown-up checks to the similarly absent winners: 1 million won, 3 million won and the biggie, 5 million.  That latter is roughly US$4500 these days, though the won is making a comeback from its fall to almost 1600 = a buck.  Now it is 1200, crawling back to its several years ago parity.

In his introductory remarks Pip said it had been a pleasure to work with his fellow jury members and that they’d not argued, and had all agreed on the winning films.  And he said the festival had been well organized and that all of the films had been good, there hadn’t been a bad one in the hours of screenings. With that cheerful note it was on with the show.

And then they projected the 3 winners, which perhaps explained why the crowd had been winnowed down so drastically.

Showing in reverse order as usual, so theoretically the best was shown first instead of being withheld to the last, began a film by Patrick Bokanowski of France, by title of Battements Solaires.  At first glance it dazzles,  a strange shape eluding understanding, glistening with light, the camera jiggling a fair bit, and then a brilliant golden light flickering and in a bit revealing itself to be water, and a double image.  On the soundtrack a somewhat ponderous minimalist music drones.  This goes on.  And on.  Shapes change, the water is more evident, the music swells and subsides, a horseman rides on a beach of flowing water, and the sense of potential mysteriousness evaporates into irritation at the barren truth that despite the razzle and despite the dazzle, and the clever visual trick of a horse seeming to ride on the golden surf, this all goes nowhere.  But it does go on.   And on.    The music swells up and down; the horse trick returns a few times; the sand and light glitter golden.  18 minutes that seemed much longer.    And so f… king what.    My sentiments were evidently shared by the little audience which gave a very tepid minimalist round of handnoise at the ending.

Walking towards the fire. In a ceaseless stream of light, people, landscapes and objects lead us to mysterious regions. French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski’s work is hard to classify – and all the richer for it. Together with his wife Michèle, whose musique concrète compositions form the basis of the sound design, Bokanowski offers a prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today. Difficult to define and locate, its strangeness is quite unique.

Burbled the Rotterdam catalog on this film, which is basically some beach footage at sunset, superimposed here and there, wobbly hand-held and aimless in its mysteriousness.

On to the next one, a far slicker affair coming out of Les Fresnoy, a northern France art factory school, lavishly equipped and in the past at least, manned with “name” teachers.   Title of this was Coagulate, by Mihai Grecu.  Here, rather than sloppy handwaving of the camera, was a cold precision of would-be surreal images: the body of a man underwater, his head absent above the bottom-surface reflections; some things skittering on the surface of the water; a tracking shot along a bland wall, some reverse motion slo-mo water splash.

Technically a “product” of the well-endowed Le Fresnoy, this film in its 5+ minutes strained for some meaning, but one read the strain more than the meaning.  It tried hard to be weird/surreal, but to no evident effect.  Again, the winnowed audience at EX-is gave a mandatory flapping of limp hands, suggesting my jaded view wasn’t the only doubting Thomas in the crowd.

And on we went to the next, last, and very unmercifully longest winner of the night, From Dust to Dust: Chronicles of Women in Naegok-ri, Kyungsang Province, by Hyejong Cho.  This item went on 49 minutes, with home-footage and fake home footage (computer flare-outs happening like clockwork, all exactly the same), along with new color video, all mindlessly haphazard, to support a recorded voice-over of old women telling of their lives.  No pictures on the net, not that the pictures were much.  In fact the imagery, while having an occasional history/sociology interest, were mostly bland shots of rural fields, trees, and old b&w home-footage, all basically used in utterly uncinematic manner to illustrate the recorded talk of the women.  This was not a film, it was a slapdash collection of material left unformed and stillborn by the maker.    During this one a number of people rightly left, doubtless numbed by the far less than bedazzling quality of the “winning” films.  Again a now virtually inaudible patter of hands concluded the screening and those left dragged themselves to the nearby club for some free beer and nibblies.

Afterward Amber complained to a new friend that sitting beside me had been annoying since I heaved sighs of displeasure (Marcella should have told her sitting beside me during a movie is to be avoided if you don’t like tangible signs of displeased viewer, or for that matter very pleased viewer; cuts both ways.)  Amber said she liked the first two films.  I, as you can see above, thought they sucked, and my audience antennae tell me I was with the majority.

With Chodorov’s comment that “no bad films” were shown, we see perhaps one of the problems of the so-called avant-garde, experimental realm which is that those who act as guides – like Jonas Mekas – don’t have a clue and so pass along for the gullible the idea that crap is gold.  Some believe.

This week, at Yonsei, a couple of my students, present and past, who’d been at EX-is for the week, tentatively asked me about the films I’d seen and were greatly relieved to find out I thought most of it sucked like they did.  In some of the courses they have here they get taught the avant-garde academic canon, which is littered with work like this – hence their fear I might be on the other side of the fence.

There are, of course, exceptions – among them Daniel Cockburn mentioned in earlier post.  There is, here and there, intelligence and wit and talent lurking in the dense shit-pile of AG-film.

And here, since I doubt our heroic USA Mainstream Press will bother to do so, is an item by the recently-released from prison fabled Iraqi shoe-thrower.  He was sentenced to 3 years of prison for this alleged offense, and was let go after 9 months (though not without beatings, etc. along the way).  His crime, as you may remember, was to throw a shoe at the war-criminal GW Bush, former US President, who is also, if there were remotely justice in the world, a candidate for numerous other charges, from crimes-against-humanity on down to lesser things like perjury, lying to the US public, etc.

Why I Threw the Shoe

I am no hero. I just acted as an Iraqi who witnessed the pain and bloodshed of too many innocents

By Muntazer al-Zaidi

September 19, 2009 “The Guardian” — I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother, neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral tents.

I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. It humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my Baghdad burned, my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in my head, pushing me towards the path of confrontation. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. I travelled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the screams of the orphans and the bereaved. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I didn’t do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.

© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited

Patriotic Gore

Recently the US Secretary of the Defense, Bush hold-over Mr. Robert Gates, and long time CIA officer, lamented publicly that some photographs of an American soldier dying in Afghanistan had been printed.  He claimed it was an invasion of the family’s privacy and would heighten their grief.

“I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard’s death has caused his family,” the secretary wrote. “Why your organization would purposefully defy the family’s wishes knowing full well that it will lead to more anguish is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right – but judgment and common decency.”

Clearly, as is usual for these things, he wished that the unpleasant and awful truth which is war would be kept well away from the public eye.   Like the Bush policy of not showing flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, Sec. Gates would like a world in which the military is only seen in parades, crisply dressed, or in spectacular sports events fly-overs, and covered with the usual rhetorical clothing which politicians drape upon soldiers:  the nation’s best, heroes, patriots.   Never would they utter, as did Henry Kissinger, the more gruesome reality:

“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

Which is why the world-round soldiers are generally recruited from the very young – younger the better – and from lower (class) and rural elements, usually lacking in many educational possibilities or encouragements.  While they would never say it out loud, as Henry K did, they like them young, reckless, and stupid.   These words are in public utterance shifted to “brave, heroic, patriotic.”

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell

“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”
G. K. Chesterton

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
George Bernard Shaw , “Misalliance”

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson , Journals, 1824

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.
David Hume

Patriotism … is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.
Emma Goldman

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H. L. Mencken

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: The right to criticize. The right to hold unpopular beliefs. The right to protest. The right of independent thought.
Margaret Chase Smith

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.
Sinclair Lewis

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
William O. Douglas

Secretary Gates is about to ask President Obama for further troops for deployment in Afghanistan, where, following the privatized pattern of Iraq, there are more (much better paid) “contractors” of varying sorts than there are military servicemen.   General Stanley McChrystal, previously cited for having participated in the fraudulent Pat Tillman propaganda effort, is the current commander in Afghanistan.

McChrystal’s Zarqawi unit, Task Force 6-26, became notorious for its interrogation methods, particularly at Camp Nama, where it was accused of abusing detainees. After the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal became public in April 2004, 34 members of the task force were disciplined; five Army Rangers were ultimately convicted of prisoner abuse at Camp Nama.^[3][8][9]

McChrystal was also criticized for his role in the aftermath of the 2004 death by friendly fire of Ranger and former professional football player Pat Tillman. The day after approving a posthumous Silver Star citation for Tillman that included the phrase “in the line of devastating enemy fire,” McChrystal sent an urgent memo warning senior government officials not to quote the citation in public speeches because it “might cause public embarrassment” if Tillman had in fact been killed by friendly fire, as McChrystal suspected. McChrystal was one of eight officers recommended for discipline by a subsequent Pentagon investigation but the Army declined to take action against him.^{[3][10][11] Wikipedia}

The general has asserted that with some alterations in strategy, along the line of “winning minds and hearts” the “war in Afghanistan could possibly be successfully prosecuted.”  Whatever.  We’ve heard this refrain before, from Viet Nam to Iraq.  Just give us some more troops, time, political support and we’ll bring the bacon home.

You do see the light at the end of the tunnel, sir?

At the moment, the evidence suggests that Obama will indeed follow orders, and order up another contingent of soldiers for this adventure in Afghanistan.   He is clearly, along with everyone else in our government, in the yoke of the military-industrial establishment, of which it was reported in the last days that our armaments industry, while the world economy is in a slump, took in $38 billion in business,or 68.4% of total global arms sales.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.  

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Speech, 1961

Unfortunately for the past decades this advice was ignored, and slowly American society has been militarized, with the corporations which make these armaments, in collusion with allied corporations in the areas of oil, energy, and communications having in effect bought the government and its members.   The socio-political fluid in which they all work is imbued with the assumptions of a military-industrial-corporate oligarchy, in which any dissent results in expulsion from the community.  You buy into this Weltanschauung or you can pick up your marbles and go home.  Only the big boys are allowed to play.

James Madison, Political Observations, 1795:

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few…. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

US Civil War

WW I

WW II

Korean War Dead

My Lai, Viet Nam

Iraq

Afghanistan

US Military globally

Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard killed on mission in Afghanistan

The Astrology of Tea Leaves

It’s been time enough to take stock of the leaves, and as it turns out porn does not rule the Bushian Tubes.  Or perhaps it does, somewhere else, but not here.  My feeble effort to evoke a flood of dirty inquiries failed, and the only indication is a tired old one, “guy porn.”   Otherwise it’s more or less the usual, which makes me wonder just what it means.  Tehran Report consistently tops the listing.  Then comes London #’s 1 & 2.  And then various painters and artists and architects – Guston, Cornell, Rogers.   And no sudden lurch into lascivious hits.   So I now know, perhaps, a little more about how the nets work, as GW would say. It’s dirty work, but somebody’s got to do it.

So as Tehran is a topic of active concern, some glancing thoughts that way.  Clearly, to the American press, Iran has retreated to the Op-Ed pages, as the visual stimulus of riots on the streets no longer offers the juicy materials for coverage.  Show-trials were passingly mentioned, but being dull affairs, they got their little political mentions from the OpEd guys, but little more.  Iran is left to sort itself out, minus the glare of US TV and pundit-heads.   Which, of course, is not to say there’s nothing going on.  Just that what’s going on doesn’t sell advertising anymore.  Blood and riots and killings, yes; more subtle maneuvers, no.  But, reading the tea leaves we’re given the chance to see it seems there’s a conflict there, one which reveals itself in the statements and machinations of the Ayatollahs of Qum, and the comments of major politicians.  It’s like the old Soviet days of Kremlinology.  Clearly some cat was let out of the bag, and no amount of official obfuscation can hide the truth.  Beneath the surface clearly a lot is going on, though I’d be the last to fathom it. It’s happening discreetly, behind a veil of cultural differences we can’t really pretend to understand.  It just know there’s a consistent interest in molotov cocktails.

Just as I suppose it is hard for those outside America to fathom the reckless auto-destructive actions of the domestic US Right, which is trying its damnedest to make a leap to out-and-out All American Fascism, the old Red White and Blue wrapped around a Bible, and trampling all over the “just a piece of paper” Constitution.  The discord is shrill and the contrast from the Bush-times cordoned “free speech” areas to the present gun-toting shriekers is at the least grimly amusing.  How this is perceived by far away foreign eyes must be something.  About as clear as a sandstorm in Kenya:

Back in the USA summer is over, and the political fires resume.  Obama goes on TV to sell some kind of health care reform, though the waters on this are now so muddied as to have left the field wide open for the Right’s dire simplicities.   Terminating Grandma !  Death panels !  Socialism !   And while it would be useful to have a real discussion on the actualities of so-called health-insurance-for-profit, this pretty much has gone by the wayside.  Just like talking about having a huge population in a desert area lacking in water where certain things are as predictable as sunrise:

One wonders when The Great SoCal Exodus will begin?   The fire department now says they think this fire was started by an arsonist, which seems reasonable.  But then when the official rate of unemployment nationally reaches 9.7% (though this figure is a fantasy), and California’s rate is far higher “officially” and at the same time banks bailed out to the tune of trillions of public money are back in gear, pumping out obscene bonuses to their top honchos, is it any wonder there might be some angry alienation ready to set fire to the national tinderbox?

Bernanke gives the bird?

A bit of unhappy news:  a friend of mine since 1967, Jim Dennett, died on August 28th,  from lung cancer.  He was 75, and had had a good life, working as a production manager and such in Chicago and Hollywood.  He put me up a handful of times when I needed a place to crash, and way early he and Mike Gray let me use their editing bench in Chicago.   And on September 3, Alexis Tioseco and his girlfriend, Nika Bohinc, both film critics – he from the Philippines and Canada, and she from Slovenia, were murdered in their home near Manila.  Apparently an inside-job robbery as motivation.  I’d met Alexis and corresponded with him – a nice guy, smart, and energetic.  He was 28; she was 29.   The story is even sadder than this: Nika was scheduled to return to Slovenia the next day….

Class War

“This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent….  Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.”     Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

In the past years, while the Republicans chronically screamed about “class warfare” as soon as one pointed out the stagnant or falling income levels of the middle-class, or noted that there was indeed a large way-under-middle-class segment of the US population, the oligarchy which controls America – its government, its corporations, its legal system, its economic system, its press – orchestrated the above figures.   More and more of the populace owning less and less, while a thin cream at the top owns and controls ever more.   It happened, as the currently fashionable boiling-frog metaphor would have it, so slowly it wasn’t noticed.

• Main Entry: ol·i·gar·chy
• Pronunciation: \ˈä-lə-ˌgär-kē, ˈō-\
• Function: noun
• Inflected Form(s): plural ol·i·gar·chies
• Date: 1542

1 : government by the few
2 : a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes; also : a group exercising such control
3 : an organization under oligarchic control

Webster’s Dictionary

With the fiscal crash of 2008, and the subsequent bail-out-the-banks “solution,” suddenly class-war is back on the front burner, especially as those trillion-plus bail-out bosses promptly rewarded themselves for their smooth con-job with still more bonuses, while others found themselves retreating to tent cities and waiting on food-lines.   Class war indeed.

Engels, Marx and wives

The present political furor over the matter of health care is basically an extension of this class warfare and its intricate minuet of orchestration from the top.    The shrieking of “Socialist!” and “Nazi!” provides an easily consumed mind-bite diversion, as swarthy gun-toting rednecks of the Fox “news” persuasion, goaded by the NRA, and supported by nice suit-and-tie Republican sorts drown out any discourse with rabble-rousing noise.  Tut-tut the nice liberals say, and health reform gets jiggled like a nice plate of Jello into a glistening political Rorschach test.   Distilled to its essence is that Republicans simply do not want the broad public to be healthy – they prefer them quivering, like the Jello, with fear, popping costly BigPharm mood pills to which they’ve become dependent, rolling their obese bodies in ambulatory vehicles down the supermarket aisles, and so exhausted by their Market Economy hampster-wheel devotion to more productivity with more hours to buy more things, that even under the most dire of circumstances they’re not prone to hit the streets or commence learning themselves the ins and outs of an AK-47, or building home-made bombs.   Fed and medicated into permanent Soma-land, whip-sawed by economic bubbles and bursts, propagandized 24/7, the great American public is pliable and compliant with its own destruction.   No “class warfare” from US:  the big corporations managed to get that one all sorted out.  Dumbed-down with edumacashun, punked out with political shell games, strung out on a plastic line of debt longer than your job, lost in a fog of pharmaceuticals and fine-printed on the insurance that just got canceled, Americans are prime sucker-bait, ripe for the final fleecing before the Titantic “best country in the whole world” (usually spoken by the great unwashed passport-free) sinks and the oligarchy – long ago fled via UBS and other off-shore accounts – counts its casino winnings while moving on to other realms ripe for the picking.

Phil Gramm, former Texas Senator, BoD of UBS, etc. etc.

From Supreme Court Justices who mouth moral obscenities like Scalia and Thomas, to corporate shills like Phil Gramm, the American ruling oligarchy, follows the maxim of Lord John Dalberg-Acton (1887) and is utterly corrupt – morally, fiscally, politically.

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it. “^[3]

Iran: Ahmadinejad Won. Get Over It

[Posted by Rajiv Mudgal.]

BBC Faked Iran Protest

BBC seemed to have engaged in mass public deception by using photographs of pro-Ahmadinejad rallies in Iran and claiming they represent anti-government protests in favour of Hossein Mousavi.

Compare the three images, one is from L.A. Times showing Iranian President Ahmadinejad waving to a crowd of supporters at a public event.The other is by BBC  with the caption  ‘Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi again defied a ban on protests’.