February 4, 2010 archive

Eustace Mullins RIP

Eustace Mullins died today at age 87.

http://www.informationliberati…

Yes he may have been “right wing” but definitely not the lamestream controlled astroturf opposition, let’s say like Rush Limbaugh.  Mullins was the real deal in the anti-establishment community and of course any enemy of mainstream media is a friend of mine.  

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Haiti death toll tops 200,000 as aid anger mounts

by Clarens Renois, AFP

Wed Feb 3, 7:39 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – The death toll in the Haiti quake has swelled to 200,000, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said Wednesday as angry protests over the slow arrival of aid flared on the rubble-strewn streets.

More than three weeks after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake, Bellerive said his tiny Caribbean nation had been ravaged by “a disaster on a planetary scale” and detailed the tragic toll suffered by his people.

“There are more than 200,000 people who have been clearly identified as people who are dead,” he said in an interview with AFP, adding that another 300,000 injured had been treated, 250,000 homes had been destroyed and 30,000 businesses lost.

There is superstitious writing on the wall

IOZ suggests that all this caterwauling about Constitutional issues could be self-deception from a people who historically were born on third and thought they hit a triple.

I have long thought that “American Exceptionalism” could largely be attributed to historical accident, i.e., the convergence of enlightenment thinking, the industrial revolution and a fresh petri dish.  It all must have seemed so manifest, eh?

It is tempting to leave it at that.

On the other hand.

One might further assume that the exactly ambiguous wording of the Constitution, prior English law, the magna carta, etc., were also accidental.  

Then let’s also assume that crying out in pain under the sharp elbows of conspecifics and the “alarm substance” given off by damaged fish scales to fellow schoolers are also accidental nonsense.

All accidental associations by mere contiguity, nothing more than a pitcher wearing his “lucky” socks.  Those fastballs down the tube never really happened.  He never really could throw gas.

OTW: Bienvenidos a Miami Part 1

now cross posted at Wild Wild Left (warts and all…lol)

OTW =  Off the Wall .. my series, the first of which is here, having to do with multi-cultural and diversity topics.

NOTE: I decided to make this Part One because I had entirely too much fun googling related topics & pics, and I got a little lost sidetracked. Lol. I have a certain direction I want to take this, but it may take me another week to actually get there! So there will be a Part Two (at least). Thanks for your patience. Heh.

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In 1960, when the first wave of Cuban refugees arrived in droves in Miami Florida, I was about 4 years old. So were a number of Cuban children who would become my classmates, age-mates, rivals and friends. I was just a regular ol’, you know, American. My WASP Dad was from Ohio and my Irish Mom, western Massachusetts. Miami was, at the time, a blend of New England transplants, retired New York Jews (Miami Beach), and more. I was considered a bit of a rarity in that I was actually born there, a “native”. The huge intake of hundreds of thousands of Cubans in such a short period of time had quite an impact on the city. Since I was only 4 at the time, what do I know? But trust me, it did.

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Deeper Politics: For Profit Government, Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and War

Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.

Scott also talked about an “iceberg” analogy of US politics in which which “the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all

Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we’ve read about in the past – about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target – about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government – and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that “We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I’m not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it“.

To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn’t mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.

JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?

SCOTT: If you don’t mind, I’m going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction,” and that, quote, “military action is needed.” Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I’m not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I’m saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I’m talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.

JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?

SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.

JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?

SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.



Real News Network – February 04, 2010

Full Transcript here


New mindset for US foreign policy? Pt.3

Scott: The military-industrial-counterterrorism complex is beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare

Deeper Politics: For Profit Government, Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and War

Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.

Scott also talked about an “iceberg” analogy of US politics in which which “the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all

Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we’ve read about in the past – about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target – about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government – and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that “We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I’m not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it“.

To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn’t mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.

JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?

SCOTT: If you don’t mind, I’m going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction,” and that, quote, “military action is needed.” Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I’m not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I’m saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I’m talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.

JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?

SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.

JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?

SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.



Real News Network – February 04, 2010

Full Transcript here


New mindset for US foreign policy? Pt.3

Scott: The military-industrial-counterterrorism complex is beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare

Deeper Politics: For Profit Government, Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and War

Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.

Scott also talked about an “iceberg” analogy of US politics in which which “the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all

Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we’ve read about in the past – about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target – about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government – and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that “We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I’m not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it“.

To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn’t mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.

JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?

SCOTT: If you don’t mind, I’m going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction,” and that, quote, “military action is needed.” Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I’m not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I’m saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I’m talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.

JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?

SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.

JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?

SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.



Real News Network – February 04, 2010

Full Transcript here


New mindset for US foreign policy? Pt.3

Scott: The military-industrial-counterterrorism complex is beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare

Is Bipartisanship Good for the Voting Public?

As proposed while still a candidate, President Obama’s version of bipartisanship envisioned a kind of Utopian ideal where reaching across the aisle would be a frequent gesture, not just an occasional product of odd bedfellows.  My own interpretation of the concept is not nearly so pie-in-the-sky as much as it is practical in theory.  Of course, I never expect to see it implemented because legislators hardly ever do anything practical these days, in theory or not.  My modest proposal would seek to level the playing field between parties, particularly on a state-by-state basis, since even though running up the score might be satisfying to some, everyone at heart loves a close game.  True party parity would certainly strike fear into the lovers of the status quo and the current office holders themselves, but the past several months have proven to me that many of the current batch of bumbling idiots are long past their shelf life and need to be thrown out altogether.  

Though a handful of so-called purple states exist in this country, most states give primary allegiance to either one party or the other.  As we know, the South is usually reliably GOP by default and the Northeast usually Democratic.  I recognize that due to recent electoral decisions we know that this is not always the case, but taking into account the whole picture, this statement is largely accurate.  The battles we fight with each other these days are partially a result of how we have dug in, trench warfare style, facing across an literally invisible, but still nonetheless highly perceptible partition.  Purple states are certainly more prevalent now than at any other time before in our history, but their development is relatively slow and since government is indebted most strongly to historical precedent, particular when one observes the tortured and convoluted congressional and state districting schemes, the blue state/red state divide is still very much with us.  Indeed, I cannot for the life of me envision a point where it will give way to something else altogether, though I would certainly rejoice if it were.

When any region or state calcifies around a particular party allegiance, competition for available seats is minimal and new blood rarely gets the chance to serve the people.  In both red and blue states, running for elective office often requires one to wait for an existing Representative or Senator to die, whether they be in the State legislature or the U.S. Congress.  While I of course recognize that my allegiance to the Democratic party is paramount in my affections, I also know that true democracy rarely makes any headway with de facto lifetime appointments of any legislative body.  That sort of arrangement is for something else altogether and if we are to preserve the checks and balances of our Founders, we would be wise to start here.  The bipartisanship I strive for would be something close to equality between each state party in representation, redistricting, and in funds.  Even putting one of these proposals into effect would make a difference.  To be sure, I don’t deceive myself.  This would face stiff opposition from all sides and even if it were seriously considered, likely not much would come of it.  Still, we need to at least contemplate resolutions like this, even if they may not be workable in reality because they are the only way we’re going to be able to begin to get the system to work for us, not against us from here on out.

One of the many ironies is that one would think that Republicans would embrace this plan, since it falls in line with their pro-private sector, pro-capitalist ideal.  In a pure, unadulterated capitalist system, competition and innovation is essential to the success of the market and the economy.  What’s good for the goose must surely be good for the gander. Surely the GOP couldn’t find much objectionable in this, my most modest proposal.  Even so, many entrenched GOP movers and shakers would counter this suggestion by substituting term limits instead.  To me, however, term limits would be a poor substitute and be far from effective, which is why I have always opposed them outright.  If one never changes the political landscape of a state or a region, all term limits would really do is hand the baton off to another person of the same stripes and ideological identification.  In that case it would merely be the latest example of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.      

If we really could manage something close to legislative and party parity, then it would be much easier to hold the feet of politicians to the fire.  Certainly they would have to worry more about losing their seat and undeniably they would need to pay closer attention to constituent needs, but I don’t think either of those outcomes are a bad thing.  As it stands now, we have a still-majority, veteran Democratic caucus in the Senate who seem quite content to place its own needs and priorities above those of the average American citizen.  If every Representative or Senator, regardless of party, recognized that unless Congress or any state legislative body produced clear cut legislative success that they were likely to no longer have a seat, then I daresay we probably would see some real reforms for a change.  If members of both parties had to fear being booted out on not just or or two but every election cycle, we wouldn’t see a constant tit-for-tat between Republicans and Democrats, nor any of these exasperating back and forth power swaps whereby the party in power obtains majority status purely by capitalizing on the mistakes of the opposite party, not by actually doing anything to win control based on merit.  A drawback in this system would be that it would be easier for competent elected representatives to be swept out based on the irrational demands of an angry electorate, one much like the Tea Party members prevalent now, but much of life is some combination of luck and chance and why should politics be any different?        

If we are a massively diverse plurality society of differing and competing points of view, I see more, not less gridlock and more demoralizing legislative defeats in our future.  Arguably a lack of across-the-board equality in so many different areas is responsible for everything from crime to bigotry.  We have underscored and articulated the problem time and time again and have gotten no further to really going after the real causes.  Doing so would require unselfishness and sacrifice, of course, two qualities that are always in short supply.  But what I do know is that we can’t keep doing the same thing we’ve always done and expect a different result.  I do believe in the power of reform, but I do also recognize how change often is a product of desperation and last-ditch-effort; I don’t want things to get that bad before we really act.  I’m not sure how much more dysfunctional our government needs to get before we adopt new strategies that will return power to the hands of an informed citizenry.  The system failed us, certainly, but we are supposed to be the ones whose active hand in the proceedings puts us and everyone back on course.  How we do it is not nearly as important as when we do it.  I hope that day is soon.      

Deeper Politics: For Profit Government, Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and War

Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.

Scott also talked about an “iceberg” analogy of US politics in which which “the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all

Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we’ve read about in the past – about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target – about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government – and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that “We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I’m not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it“.

To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn’t mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.

JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?

SCOTT: If you don’t mind, I’m going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction,” and that, quote, “military action is needed.” Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I’m not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I’m saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I’m talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.

JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?

SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.

JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?

SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.



Real News Network – February 04, 2010

Full Transcript here


New mindset for US foreign policy? Pt.3

Scott: The military-industrial-counterterrorism complex is beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare

Docudharma Times Thursday February 4




Thursday’s Headlines:

Toyota takes $2bn hit from global safety recall

Border fence plagued by glitches, long delays

Criticism of Obama on national security likely to remain big issue

Soaring cost of healthcare sets a record

Iraq overturns ban on election candidates ‘linked to Saddam’

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad plays game of cat-and-mouse with West over nuclear deal

McItaly burger is home-grown but leaves a nasty taste in some mouths

Nazi death camp survivor recognises John Demjanjuk

China censors Oscar nominations

Pakistani Taliban has its work cut out

The Big Question: What would a genocide charge mean for Sudan’s leader and his country?

African countries pledge aid to Haiti, but can they really afford it?

Cocaine trafficking keeps Ecuador anti-drug authorities busy

Krugman: “Obama Wasn’t The One We’ve Been Waiting For”

From Paul Krugman’s blog…

Health care reform — which is crucial for millions of Americans — hangs in the balance. Progressives are desperately in need of leadership; more specifically, House Democrats need to be told to pass the Senate bill, which isn’t what they wanted but is vastly better than nothing. And what we get from the great progressive hope, the man who was offering hope and change, is this:

“I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don’t, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of, to this bill. Now I think there’s some things in there that people don’t like and legitimately don’t like.”

In short, “Run away, run away”!

And more from Krugman…

Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment.

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

“Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view.”

And that’s the whole story of Obama’s miserable Presidency.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning


Streaks

(Click on image for larger view)

Then I thought that needed some oomph and achieved what is inside…

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