Hollywood for the Ugly

Get your outrage on.

Too slight to quote, you just have to click the links.

Glenn Greenwald- Why the Jeremiah Wright story deserves more attention

Rachel Sklar- WHCD: Swanky, Sweaty and Star-Studded

Skeptical about Skeptics? Check this out …

Being skeptical about Global Warming skeptics’ arguments has proven, to date, to be a healthy and sensible way to deal with their truthiness claims and arguments.  The Heartland Institute‘s distribution of a list of scientist supposedly doubting Global Warming yet again verifies the value of being skeptical about Global Warming skeptics.

DeSmogBlog decided to take a look at Heartland‘s list: emailing the scientists to ask them about the situation. From 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares:

  • The Heartland “article purports to list scientists whose work contradicts the overwhelming scientific agreement that human-induced climate change is endangering the world as we know it.”
  • “DeSmogBlog … emailed 122 of the scientists … calling their attention to the list.”
  • “in less than 24 hours – three dozen of those scientists had responded in outrage, denying that their research supports Avery’s conclusions and demanding that their names be removed.”

Hmmm, maybe Heartland should change the title from 500 scientists to 464 scientists maybe have documented doubts of man-made global warming scares until, of course, they are asked whether they agree with this article’s assertion.

DeSmogBlog has some pretty impressive quotes.  For example,

I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite.

Dr. David Sugden. Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh

This ones seems pretty unclear, doesn’t it.  Easy why Heartland could be confused and reverse the understanding of 20 years of a professor’s work.

I have NO doubts ..the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put it there.

Dr. Gregory Cutter, Professor, Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University

Hmmm … Will Heartland remove Cutter from their list?

I don’t believe any of my work can be used to support any of the statements listed in the article.

Dr. Robert Whittaker, Professor of Biogeography, University of Oxford

Evidently Heartland disagrees with Robert Whittaker about how one should understand and interpret Professor Whittaker’s life work.

Skeptical about skeptics.  A pretty good rule of thumb.

All Coming Together To All Fall Apart: Climate Crisis

(Notice: This will not be a pleasant essay to read, and please click the links)

Global Warming, Climate Crisis, Climaticide, whatever you want to call it, is not some future calamity waiting to happen. It is happening even as we speak. It is happening now. Its devastating effects may some day be dramatic enough to be worthy of a Hollywood movie….which is how we are conditioned to think of disaster these days, if it doesn’t have explosions or tidal waves, it is not REALLY a disaster….. But that is not how it works.

That is not the form that this disaster takes. It takes the form of a slow, rolling, building crisis, unnoticed at first, then easily explained away, then easily dismissed as someone else’s problem. Until it is too late. Starting with the worlds poorest people and gradually working it’s way up “the food chain.” The food chain of all of human society, every nation, every state, every city every village, every human. Until the ‘elite’ are finally affected and alarmed…which will be too late.

Oh, there will be explosions…in fact there are explosions right now, as the first of the resource wars rages in Iraq, (please read LithiumCola’s essay) resource wars will be the dramatic face of Climate Crisis. Resource wars started by the very ‘people’ who are denying that there is a crisis now. Denying it in order to ‘steal a march’ on the rest of the world that they are purposefully attempting to keep in ignorance of the future they are creating. All for their advantage. For their profit. In the mistaken belief that somehow this will save them. They know what is happening, and have known for years, their response has been to try to profit off of this knowledge, instead of working to stop the damage. Resource wars will be the dramatic face.

But the face of a starving child will be the real face of Climate Crisis.

Food shortages…

Ban Ki-Moon announced today that the UN must combat food shortages across the globe or risk “widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale.”

and water wars, have already started and will continue. And will get much, much worse.

This is not, as Mr Ban says…

“There is an urgent necessity to address structural and policy issues that have contributed to this crisis as well as the challenge posed by climate change,” he said. “Further research must be undertaken on the impact of diversion of food crops to bio-fuel production and all subsidies to bio-fuels should be reviewed.”

An “as well as” situation, these are the effects of Climate Crisis. And no matter how many light bulbs we change (though we each must do all we can) or how much we recycle….Climate Crisis is not going away. (please read)

In many, many ways…if not in all ways, this is the only ‘story’ that matters.

The web of life…food…water…fuel…that sustains us all on this, our only planet is relatively delicate, and dynamically interconnected. All based on systems that take much longer than a human life-span to adapt, all incredibly vulnerable to “rapid” (in planetary time spans) and “slight” changes. The changes that, even though we are aware of them, even though we have been warned for decades, we not only are not stopping ….thought the consequences are quite clear…we are actually still increasing carbon production at an astounding rate.

Our planet, at the behest of the worlds political and corporate leaders, and in the name of economic expediency, is committing Climaticide….killing the Climate that sustains us all. In other words, suicide.

What can we do about it?

As Patriot Daily eloquently put it in her essay Gore: Crisis of Citizenship Impedes Addressing Environmental Crises:

What we can do to move toward establishing that sense of urgency needed to trigger active citizenship which then triggers solving environmental issues is to understand the facts and analyze the issues. Once we agree upon the facts and analysis, then we must take action to change our political culture. This happened in Australia, which faced such a devastating drought that the people unified in a campaign to “lift the sense of urgency for the people about global warming and drought.”  The campaign included participation by newspaper, TV, radio and the internet, and it created the sense of urgency that led to a changed government with a new prime minister whose first action was to change position on global warming by ratifying Kyoto. Gore warned that we can not wait until we face water shortages like the drought in Australia.

Gore’s road map to resolve an environmental crisis makes sense. We must be informed, understand and agree on the facts of the particular environmental crisis. Acknowledging the environmental crisis has been sufficient to trigger some personal involvement in conservation, but not sufficient to trigger substantial conservation efforts and not sufficient to trigger sufficient political citizen action to change the political culture in DC so that laws are changed.  So, we need agreement on the facts of the environmental crisis + some extreme in-your-face event (like a severe drought) to trigger the sense of urgency that leads to campaigns or movements to change the political culture.

That really is, unfortunately, and aside from the changes we can make in our own behaviors, about the best we can do. And there is literally nothing more important to do. Nothing.

It is, to me, a distressing and depressing reality, to watch the planet being destroyed for short sighted gain and the lust for power. But it is our reality.

As individuals, and here on Docudharma, we can at least take some comfort in the fact that we are working (as hard as you can on a blog) to change the political culture…and the social culture that drives it. Speaking for myself, it is behind everything I do, everything I write, the reason I started blogging in the first place. The reason I have, lol, no patience for the pettiness of the candidate wars. I hate the role of Cassandra, not to mention that it is not an effective tactic to achieve change. But every once in a while there is a convergence that forces me into that role, as happened today, triggered by, as LC put it “NYT Lets the Truth About Oil Slip, for a Second” the truth slipping out. We are in deep, deep trouble…and it is not in some far future, it is now. Everything we do here, big and small…including laughing and flirting with each other, lol….is a part of what Cheney called the “long war.”

Building this community and connecting (at least “in Spirit”) with the growing number of other like minded communities across the planet….to both fight the “old world” which is based on greed and competition and is destroying democracy and freedom and the planet all at once…while we at the same time work towards building a new world, based on equality and cooperation, is to be immodest, noble…and necessary. We are in our small, human way….fighting to save the planet. It may not ‘work,’ it may even be too late, but it is all I can think of to do. Thanks for helping!

I leave you with this oft repeated, hopeful thought:


Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

And a less repeated one, that for some reason, I am quite fond of!

Yell Louder!

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Sanctioning Iran: Foreign Policy 101

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Philip Agee died on 9 January of this year in Havana, Cuba. He was 72.

ageeAgee joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1957 and worked as a case officer in several Latin American countries. He later claimed: “My eyes began to open little by little down there as I began to realize more and more that all of the things that I and my colleagues were doing in the CIA had one goal which was that we were supporting the traditional power structures in Latin America. These power structures had been in place for centuries, wherein a relative few families were able to control the wealth and income and power of the state and the economy, to the exclusion of the majority of the population in many countries. The only glue that kept this system together was political repression. I was involved in this. Eventually I decided I didn’t want anything more to do with that.”

Source

Agee resigned in 1969. His book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was an instant best-seller and was eventually published in over thirty languages. An Agee interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now is available here.

One very important term often used by our government, military and corporate leaders is one which is almost never clealy defined. It hints at noble ideals. As a naive schoolboy in the ’50s or as an indoctrinated enlisted Marine in the late ’60s concepts such as spreading freedom and democracy, and freeing the world of injustice might have come to mind. The term is “US strategic interests”, or simply “our national interests”.

Agee wrote that US interests are defined traditionally (scroll down to the section on “Founding”) as unfettered access to the primary products and raw materials, to the labor and to the markets of foreign countries.

Unfettered access… Ponder this for a moment.

Understanding this is one of the keys to understanding US Foreign Policy, to understanding why we placed sanctions on Iraq and why we currently have sanctions against Iran, and have had since 1979. But this is not the first time we have joined in the sanctioning of Iran, indeed we have imposed sanctions on many countries.

In the past few decades, the institution of economic sanctions has become a widely used method of international governance. Under Article 16 of the the UN Charter, the UN Security Council is able to use economic coercion to address “threats of aggression” and “breaches of peace.” On only two occasions, from 1945 to 1990 did the UN only approve economic sanctions. However, since 1990 the Security Council has imposed sanctions on eleven nation-states, including Libya, Somalia, Haiti, and Liberia. In the last sixty years, the United States has unilaterally or with other nations imposed over forty sanctions on various countries…

What is strange and dangerous about economic warfare is that it is politically safe. In other words, many people seem to think that sanctions are simply a mild form of punishment, an act to persuade without going to war. The majority of the U.S. public supports sanctions against Iran, while opposing a military invasion of Iran. Indeed, economic sanctions is a financially better option for the United States and it is questionable whether a military option is even possible at this point.

Source

The British Oil Concession in Persia – The Early Years

Much of the following sections are summarized from a book by William Engdahl, A Century of War. All blockquotes are from this book unless a link to another source is shown.

In 1901 an Australian geologist, William D’Arcy who had spent years in Persia pursuing his interests in religion and oil, for the equivalent of $20,000 up front, signed a 60 year, exclusive oil concession agreement with the then current Shah. In return Persia would receive a 16% royalty on the sale of any petroleum discovered. In 1905, as D’Arcy was in the process of signing a joint exploration agreement with the French, the British, through their “ace of spies” Sidney Reilly posing as a priest, persuaded the religious D’Arcy to sign over his exclusive rights to Persian oil to a British company, Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later would be part of the transition to BP.

Thus, Britain had secured her first major source of petroleum.

Post WWII Era

In the years following WWII Britain’s empire was in a state of decline. Former colonies gained their independence and so it became necessary to re-prioritize foreign interests. The Suez canal, through which oil flowed from the Middle East to Europe, and the oil in Iran, controlled through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, became top priorities.

In 1947 Iran proposed that Britain increase the share of Iran’s revenue from the Anglo-Iranian oil company. Iran asked for a 50-50 split. The British tactic was to stall but in 1951 Mohammed Mossadegh who, as a member of parliament had led the movement for renegotiation of the oil agreement with Britain, became prime minister. In the meantime the Washington and London began making claims that Mossadegh was an extremist, a communist, a Russian proxy.

Meanwhile:

As for the (US) oil companies, a 1947 planning document entitled “United States Petroleum Policy” put it as follows: the US should seek the “removal or modification of existent barriers to the expansion of American foreign oil operations” and to “…promote…the entry of additional American firms into all phases of foreign oil operations.”

… with the postwar decline of the British Empire and ascendancy of US military and economic power, the US gained control of the lion’s share of Middle East oil. In 1948 the all-US consortium Aramco (Mobil, Texaco, and what became Exxon and Chevron) with exclusive oil rights in Saudi Arabia was formed, after the US government helped Mobil and Exxon back out of an earlier agreement with British Petroleum (BP) and Shell. In 1950 the companies were allowed to meet King Ibn Saud’s demands for a fifty percent share by paying it in lieu of US taxes. This arrangement undercut Britain in Iran, where the government of Mohammed Mossadegh demanded the same fifty percent.

Source

Iran also argued, unsuccessfully, that the Standard Oil Companies of the US had also agreed to a 50-50 split with the Venezuelan Government.

Nationalization and Sanctions

By late April of 1951, after continued British refusals to discuss revisions of the concession agreement, the Iranian Parliament had gone ahead with an earlier movement led by Mossadegh to nationalize with fair compensation, which was fully within Iran’s legal rights. Iran also offered Britain the same level of oil supply as before nationalization.

In British eyes, Iran had committed the unforgivable sin. It had effectively acted to assert national interest over British interests. Britain promptly threatened retaliation and within days British naval forces arrived near Abadan (near Basra in Iraq)… Abadan was the site of the world’s largest oil refinery, part of Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

Sanctions followed, and by September of 1951:

Britain had declared full economic sanctions against Iran, including an embargo against Iranian oil shipments as well as a freeze on all Iranian assets in British banks abroad. British warships were stationed just outside Iranian coastal waters and land and air forces were dispatched to Basra in British controlled Iraq, close to the Abadan refinery complex.

The British embargo was joined by all of the major Anglo-American oil companies. Economic strangulation was London’s and Washington’s response to assertions of national sovereignty from developing states which interfered with their vital assets. (unfettered access denied)

Sanctions took their toll on the economy and the people of Iran. Oil revenues had dropped severely from $400 million in 1950 to an insignificant amount. Mossadegh himself successfully argued his case in the World Court, but as Engdahl writes, “the American and British response was ready”.

The Coup – Operation Ajax

The CIA-with British assistance-undermined Mossadegh’s government by bribing influential figures, planting false reports in newspapers and provoking street violence. Led by an agent named Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, the CIA leaned on a young, insecure Shah to issue a decree dismissing Mossadegh as prime minister. By the end of Operation Ajax, some 300 people had died in firefights in the streets of Tehran.

Source

This was August of 1953. Do these tactics look familiar?

The Shah

Reza Shah Pahlevi was backed by the Americans and the British. Economic sanctions were lifted. The Shah supported women’s rights and allowed them to vote however he resorted to one-party authoritarian rule. Torture, censorship and intense surveillance were used to control the people.

The Shah’s brutal secret police force, Savak, formed under the guidance of CIA in 1957 and personnel trained by Mossad (Israel’s secret service), to directly control all facets of political life in Iran. Its main task was to suppress opposition to the Shah’s government and keep the people’s political and social knowledge as minimal as possible. Savak was notorious throughout Iran for its brutal methods.

Over the years, Savak became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest, detain, brutally interrogate and torture suspected people indefinitely. Savak operated its own prisons in Tehran, such as Qezel-Qalaeh and Evin facilities and many suspected places throughout the country as well. Many of those activities were carried out without any institutional checks.

Source

By 1954 the British, once again, and now joined by the Americans, had access to Iran’s oil. Under a 25 year extraction agreement Anglo-Iranian Oil, which had by then become BP, obtained 40% of the D’Arcy concession and Royal Dutch Shell (despite the name it is a British company) got 14%. The American oil companies divided 40% and a French oil company, CFP, received 6 percent.

During the 1970’s, with encouragement from the US, Iran began pursuing nuclear power.  

President Gerald Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete ‘nuclear fuel cycle’. At the time, Richard Cheney was the White House Chief of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense. The Ford strategy paper said the “introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals”.

From Wikipedia

1978 – Renegotiating the Oil Extraction Agreement

The negotiations between BP and the Shah’s government collapsed in November of 1978. The British had demanded exclusive rights to Iran’s future oil output. Meanwhile Iran was pursuing independence in its oil sales policies and had potential buyers lined up.

Just two months prior, a lead editorial in Iran’s Kayhan International, stated that the prior 75 year relationship with the BP consortium “has not been satisfactory for Iran  … Looking to the future, the National Iranian Oil Company should plan to handle all operations by itself”.

It had become clear. Iran no longer needed the British and American oil companies.

1979 – Toppling the Shah

In the US, also in November, President Carter set up an Iran Task Force under NSC’s Brzezinski. George Ball headed this task force which recommended that the US end support for the Shah and instead support the Islamic fundamentalist, Ayatollah Khomeini, who opposed the Shah.

London was blackmailing and putting enormous economic pressure on the Shah’s regime by refusing to buy Iranian oil production, taking only 3 million or so barrels daily of an agreed minimum of 5 million barrels per day. This imposed dramatic revenue pressures on Iran, which provided the context in which religious discontent against the Shah could be fanned by trained agitators deployed by British and US intelligence. In addition, strikes among oil workers at this critical juncture crippled Iranian oil production.

As Iran’s domestic economic troubles grew, American ‘security’ advisers to the Shah’s Savak secret police implemented a policy of even more brutal repression, in a manner calculated to maximize popular antipathy to the Shah. At the same time, the Carter administration cynically began protesting abuses of ‘human rights’ under the Shah.

Anglo-American intelligence was committed to bringing down the Shah. The government owned BBC allowed the Ayatolla a full propaganda platform while denying the Shah a chance to respond. In January of 1979 the Shah fled Iran and by February the Ayatolla Khomeini had established control in Tehran.

Sanctions Continue

Little has changed. The new bogeyman is terrorism. The major Anglo-American oil companies still do not have unfettered access to Iranian oil.

The United States has maintained various sanctions against Iran since 1979, following the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, on November 4 of that year. In March 2003, President Bush extended sanctions originally imposed in 1995 for another year, citing Iran’s “support for international terrorism, efforts to undermine the Middle East peace process, and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.” In March and May 1995, President Clinton had signed two Executive Orders prohibiting U.S. companies and their foreign subsidiaries from conducting business with Iran. Executive Order 12957 specifically banned any “contract for the financing of the development of petroleum resources located in Iran.”

Source

The great game continues. The latest NIE reports that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. The IAEA has declared that there is no evidence of a weapons program. Just as it seemed that Iran would be given a clean bill of health with respect to its nuclear power program (begun under the Shah) computer data has mysteriously appeared raising further questions about past nuclear related activities.

From Asia Times Online

The George W Bush administration has long pushed the “laptop documents” – 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop – as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear program.

But those documents have also been regarded with great suspicion by US and foreign analysts. German officials identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization.

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad.

Hopefully some will find this diary enlightening in a modest attempt to help understand what “our national interests” are and how they play an important part in establishing US foreign policy. Iran is a strategically important country and is convenient and timely to use as an example. There are plenty of others.

FOX News flunkie gets pwned by Rev. Wright’s friend

Crossposted at Big Orange.

This is a good video…. albeit it’s from April 3. Did any of you catch this? Here’s an unedited exchange between a FOX News producer flunkie Porter Berry and Father Pfleger, friend of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Enjoy.

Why Jeremiah Wright is justified in taking Barack Obama to task.

Last night MSNBC (including Keith Olbermann) was all over Jeremiah Wright for going on a book tour and – gasp! – daring to criticize Barack Obama.  Reading today’s hate-fueled rant on the web site, you’d think he had done something wrong.  Why?  Why shouldn’t the man who was publicly tossed overboard by his former parishioner return the favor?

Reading Kevin Alexander Gray’s assessment of the speech in which the Democratic candidate for president distanced himself from the man who presided over his marriage and baptized his children, I couldn’t help but conclude that Wright had been thrown under the proverbial speeding bus by Obama – who apparently decided long ago to adopt Bill Cosby’s out-of-touch, blame-the-victim rhetoric (an observation echoed by Adolph Reed, Jr., in the May issue of The Progressive).

“His political repertoire,” writes Reed, “has always included the repugnant stratagem of using connection with Black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did – i.e., getting props for both emoting with the Black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victim-blaming, ‘tough love’ message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor Black communities.”  Reed blasts Obama for going “beyond Clinton and rehears[ing] the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made famous.”

Gray pointed out in his April 2, 2008 Progressive online column:

Until the controversy broke about his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama himself frequently played the race card – on black people.

Shortly before the Texas and Ohio primaries, Obama was speaking to a mostly black audience and said, “I know some of ya’ll, you got that cold Popeye’s out for breakfast. I know. That’s why ya’ll laughing. … You can’t do that. Children have to have proper nutrition.”

In South Carolina, he told the state Legislative Black Caucus that a good economic development plan in the black community would be “cleaning up the garbage.”

Now, if white politicians had said these things they would have been pummeled.

And even in his much-heralded speech, Obama went out of his way to criticize welfare, decry “the erosion of black families” and stress the need for black fathers to spend more time with their kids.

This Bill Cosby routine goes down well with white voters, but it further stigmatizes blacks.

Obama managed to weasel his way out of trouble a month ago by dissing his former pastor as a bitter relic of a bygone era.  So who can blame Jeremiah Wright when he goes on the talk circuit to defend himself and retaliate against his betrayer?  For truly, did Obama not merely use his former pastor’s church as a means of establishing ties to a community whose political backing he wanted to strengthen his career (writers at Black Agenda Report and The New Republic certainly seem to think so)?

The point here is not to criticize Barack Obama so much as it is to defend Jeremiah Wright as he gives back what he received.  The danger of dismissing him as an angry, bitter old man whose message is equally ignorable lies in continuing the cycle of racism in this country, and the suppression of very real issues pertaining to U.S. foreign and domestic policy.

The fact is that not only was Wright betrayed, so too was the whole of the Black community, and the legitimate criticisms of imperialist policy that have wrought suffering and devastation upon others.  We may disagree with the reverend’s delivery, but we cannot deny that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were a direct consequence of our country’s meddling in Middle Eastern affairs that resulted in mass death and political oppression in the region.  Nor can we deny that our nation was built on the backs of African slaves, and the genocide of the aboriginal peoples of this continent.  The indignation over Jeremiah Wright’s fiery rhetoric clouds the truths contained in his diatribes.

So let’s cut the man some slack.  He may not be the sort of person we’d prefer to point out these truths, his method of delivery far too blunt for our comfort.  But sometimes we need that in order to face up to unpleasant facts about ourselves and our nation’s history.  We should consider that Mr. Wright may be justified in going public with his side of the story, with his criticisms.

If that happens to hurt Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, whose fault is that?

Nine Days – Still No Resignations or Apologies

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

One of many questions that Chris Wallace failed to ask Barack Obama during his 45-minute interview on Foxaganda Sunday was what the Senator thought about David Barstow’s devastating exposé in The New York Times the previous weekend.

No surprise. What would be the percentage in replacing one of the plethora of Jeremiah Wright questions with an inquiry about the megamedia’s hiring of retired military officers who sexed up the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and then exaggerated, distorted and lied about what was happening when the war and subsequent occupation got underway? Would that help the bottom line? Nah. Hence, none of Wallace’s pals at Foxaganda are talking about this. Indeed, mum’s been the word on Barstow’s bombshell throughout the megamedia. The talking point – or perhaps the memo from on high – seems to be: Don’t talk.

Don’t tell viewers that retired generals and colonels and majors engaged in a war-drumming, flag-waving perversion of patriotism. Or that those in the Pentagon who ordered special briefings for these analysts as part of a domestic propaganda campaign ought to get their mail deliveries slipped between the bars at Leavenworth for the next few years. Avoid the subject and maybe it will go away like so many other stories which have been disappeared as if they were dissidents in some backwater military dictatorship.

No news coverage, no commentary, no questions for any candidates. No abject apologies to viewers from station CEOs who paid double-dippers and triple-dippers to give an official patina to fabrications that have caused the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Americans and other coalition soldiers. Plus millions of Iraqis. Business as usual. Even two days after the Pentagon suspended the briefings last Friday, Foxaganda was still employing retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney without disclosure.

You want to know more about the story, you go to Barstow’s follow-ups, to those of Glenn Greenwald at Salon, to the folks at Media Matters, and to excellent work of Ari Melber at The Nation. As a matter of fact, if you’d like to see Senator Obama’s answer to that question Wallace should have asked, you can find it (and Senator Clinton’s answer, too) at Melber’s blog here.

We’ve arrived at this situation because of three sets of cowards.

First among these are the military analysts themselves, supposedly men of courage who donned the uniform of the United States and swore an oath to uphold its Constitution. As Barstow wrote:

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

Tell the truth on the teevee and say poof! to that lucrative retainer, that seat on the board of some major player in the military-industial complex, that ability to get the Pentagon to assign a favorable contract to the guys who are filling your bank account. What would retirement be like with a lowered cash flow? So, instead of calling government policy into question, instead of acting like an officer and a gentleman, sell the country out and keep the moolah flowing. Spit on the men and women sent to fight. Spit on the Constitution. Spit on the truth. Once, they painted a yellow stripe down the back of cowardly soldiers.

Not merely cowards. As Daily Kos Contributing Editor BarbinMD wrote when this story was new:  “These men willingly deceived the American public to protect their access to power and more importantly, their profits. Perhaps traitor doesn’t even begin to describe them.” Indeed.

The second set of cowards are all those well-coifed news-readers and commentators and interviewers at CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN and Foxaganda who’ve not seen fit to discuss The New York Times story except to briefly note that the Pentagon has stopped giving the briefings.

We know why Bill O’Reilly hasn’t stepped up with a mea culpa. On April 14, less than a week before Barstow’s piece appeared, according to Media Matters:

During the April 14 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Bill O’Reilly declared: “I can’t base my opinion” about the Iraq war “on anything” other than “what my military analysts, people paid by Fox News, say to me.” O’Reilly added that he could trust only Fox military analysts because “[t]he newspapers … all have an agenda” and “only give you a snapshot of the war.” Later in the broadcast, O’Reilly reiterated his position, saying, “I have to base my analysis on what our Fox News military analysts, who I think are the best and always [have] been the best, are saying.” Further, O’Reilly described as “ridiculous” a caller’s efforts to base his view of the war by “reading the Internet and the newspapers and forming a definitive opinion [based] upon what they say.”

No retraction since. No mention at all. Silence from him and his colleagues throughout the industry – how appropriate that word. They didn’t vet the analysts or check out their possible agendas the way any good journalist would do. They ignored sources that might have called into question the claims of Lt. General Disinformation. Couldn’t find the wherewithal to let viewers know that Major Mendacious worked for a military contractor with a stake in the occupation of Iraq. Just broadcast his lies and cut his checks.

Of course, pointing out the cowardice of the megamedia’s on-camera crowd is thoroughly redundant. As Greenwald wrote Monday after a little praise for the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz – one of the few print journalists of note to say anything about Barstow’s revelations:

Kurtz’s specific criticism of the media’s behavior regarding this story highlights a broader and even more important point. In general, the establishment media almost completely excludes critiques of their own behavior, and discussions of the role the media plays in bolstering deceitful narratives is missing almost entirely from media-controlled discourse.

One of the most significant political stories of this decade, if not this generation — the media’s full-scale complicity with the Government in the run-up to the Iraq war — has never been meaningfully discussed or examined on any establishment television network, including cable shows. While piecemeal quibbles of media coverage can be heard (of the type Kurtz typically spouts, or the Limbaugh-driven complaint about the “liberal media”), no fundamental critique of the role the media plays, the influence of its corporate ownership, its incestuous relationship with and dependence on government power — among the most influential factors driving our political life — are ever heard.

And we’re not likely to because of the third group of cowards. The guys who actually own and run the channels who paid the military shills to present the Cheney-Bush administration’s Iraq case for the past six years. Indeed, as Media Matters noted, they refused to appear on PBS last Thursday when the public channel took its look into the role of the military analysts.

In the old days in Japan, so the story goes, bosses who engaged in illegal, destructive or merely shameful behavior made a deep bow to those they had offended and headed off to a private room for a date with the blade of a tanto.

Even for those who’ve betrayed their fellow citizens and helped deliver thousands to their deaths for profit, seppuku‘s admittedly a bit harsh. But if the craven news chiefs and channel owners were the least bit honest and upstanding, they’d be setting aside 15 or 20 minutes of broadcast time to apologize to the American people for acting as propagandists, for their malicious, intentional, long-running disinformation campaign. And they’d end with an on-the-air resignation and a vow never again to head up a media operation.

But then, if they were honest and upstanding, they wouldn’t be who they are. And we wouldn’t be where we are, mired in Iraq with no end in sight.

A hundred years of scrubbing will not remove the blood from their hands.

Did you hear?

.

Forest Gump died.

When he arrived at the pearly gates St. Peter met him and said

“Well Forest, because of the wars and all, there has been a huge increase in the number of souls arriving. We came up with one last test, just to make certain sure that all are worthy of being here.”

“Um, okay.” says Forest.

“It’s three questions, and you don’t have to give your answers immediately. You can go think about it and come back later.”

“Um, okay.” says Forest.

“Alright Forest. Here are the three questions.

#1- How many days of the week start with ‘T’?

#2- How many seconds in a year?

#3- What is Gods first name?

Have you got all that?”

“Yes.” says Forest, “but you’re right, I’ll have to go think about this.”

So Forest goes away. He sits under a lovely tree and thinks hard about the questions St. Peter has given him. Finally, he gets up and returns to the gate.

“I’m ready.” he states.

“Okay Forest. How many days of the week start with ‘T’?”

“Well, that one was a little hard, but I finally figured it out.

Two days begin with ‘T’…. Today and Tomorrow!”

“That wasn’t quite the answer we were looking for, but I must admit you are correct. I’ll give you that one.

Now- How many seconds in a year?”

“That one was really hard! I thought and thought and thought, but finally I got it. Twelve!”

“Twelve?” says St.Peter “How did you arrive at that answer?”

“I just counted ’em up! The second of January, the second of February, the second…”

“Okay, okay! Again, that wasn’t the answer we were looking for, but you are entirely correct. I’ll give you that one too. But Forest this last one has to be exactly correct, okay?

What is Gods first name?”

“Oh that one was easy. Andy is his name.”

“Andy? How did you know that?”

“Me and Momma sing it all the time….”

Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me…

St.Peter laughs and opens the gate.

♥~

My Son.

My 3 year-old son has these moments.

He wants something.

A toy that his sister is playing with or some fragile item he sees in a store or maybe to ride his tricycle around the block when he suddenly wakes up at three o’clock in the morning.

And we have to say, “no”.

That’s when the meltdown hits…

He falls on the ground, feet pointing to the sky, and starts to scream at the top of his lungs or he’ll just repeat the phrase “I want it” over and over again.

If we try to pick him up he goes utterly limp, his body becoming about a hundred pounds of dead weight. This can go on for five minutes or ten, maybe even a half our.

We call this “The Rage”.

After the rage there is “The Calm” which often results in some of the most glorious gifts that come to parenthood.

He’ll sprawl across my lap (or more often his mother’s) and reach up and grab the fat of my earlobe and he’ll twist and turn it. Both of my children did this, actually. Our earlobe became their object of comfort, which is REALLY convenient because… unless one of us goes all Vincent Van Gough… we know we’ll always have an ear when they need it.

But between “The Rage” and “The Calm” is a short window which has often overwhelmed Truman and myself and my wife.

In this thirty seconds Truman will alternate back and forth between asking for something and then rejecting that same something.

“I want a bottle!”

Then I hand him the bottle and… he throws it on the floor. “I don’t want a bottle.”

A moment goes by and then… “I dropped my bottle!”

So, I reach down and grab the bottle and give it back and…

“I don’t want the bottle!” and across the floor it goes.

This can go on for as long as we choose to participate in the madness.

Give the way blogs works I’m sure within ten comments a real life child psychologist will give this emotional boomerang its proper name and explain its function, but until then… I refer to it as “The Terror”. And not “The Terror” meaning he’s being a terror, but he FEELS terror… abject terror because there’s something in the world that he wants very, very badly and yet… someone is saying NO to him. He’s a small kid… he believes the sun and stars and wind all exist for him and yet… there’s something he can’t have… and so, really, he is powerless to manifest his every need.

He is literally terrified and so he bounces between the honest wanting and the false rejection or the imagined emotional safety that might come from a lack of wanting.

But there is no safety… the want is real… and no amount of faux rejection can mask that.

In the end, he realizes that there is no way to pretend the need away and so he ultimately chooses the bottle and the hug and to accept our comfort.

On days when it looks like the political world is not going to grant my wishes its easy to revert to a primal form and I find myself in the terror… both wanting to clutch to the thing I hope for and to throw it across the room.

Then again… I’ve got an earlobe if anyone needs it.

Pony Party….this-n-that

Some days there’s nothing i feel like putting in the pony.  Ok, that’s a lie.  Some days im particularly sensitive to the amount of sports content i put in the morning pony ;), but have nothing of substance to say.  On those days i generally hunt for a news story or some other item on the web i can present for discussion.  But on Monday when i am typing this (like with time travel in the douglas adams books, we need new verb tenses to discuss what we’re typing that wont have published until some time before youre reading it but after im typing it…but we’ll save that topic for another day) i’m horrifically unfocused…the Flyers are playing, and, at the risk of sounding whiny..i just dont feel like it…

So here are some finds from my horribly unfocused web travels…

From the “news you can use” category, is it any wonder that this Yahoo!News article caught my attention???



Chocolate may reduce pregnancy complication risk


Chocolate, especially dark chocolate, is rich in a chemical called theobromine, which stimulates the heart, relaxes smooth muscle and dilates blood vessels, and has been used to treat chest pain, high blood pressure, and hardening of the arteries, Dr. Elizabeth W. Triche of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and colleagues

Apparently after polling new mothers and testing cord blood, researchers found a possible link between higher chocolate consumption and fewer occurrences of preeclampsia.  So I guess all those Peppermint Patties I ate in 1993 were a good idea…  😉  

And then there was this story

Hair of the dog keeps children’s allergies at bay

Having a dog in the house reduces the risk that young children will develop allergies, German researchers said on Tuesday.

The finding, based on a six-year study of 9,000 children, lends weight to the theory that growing up with a pet trains the immune system to be less sensitive to potential triggers for allergies like asthma, eczema and hay fever.

This theory has proven to be helpful for many people. While growing up with dogs can help you fight allergens, it is also important to test your dog for allergies because these canines can also be allergic to many things that they encounter in an around the house. When choosing allergy testing tools, it is always a good idea to look at in-depth reviews of the same from reliable websites like Jack’s Pets.

How’s that for good news???  Dogs and chocolate are good for us!!!  Woot!!

Rounding out my meandery and totally unfocused web journey, please click this link to look at a sample of the work of photographer Stuart Franklin called “In the Time of Trees”.  It contains some breathtaking pictures with beautiful quotes…i enjoyed it immensely.

Docudharma Times Tuesday April 29



And the thought occurred to me

How come that everything you see

Is so bad

So bad

Tuesday’s Headlines: From Chief Prosecutor To Critic at Guantanamo: An Irascible Firebrand, Finally Quieted by Term Limits: Tariq Aziz due on trial in Iraq: Is an Iranian general the most powerful man in Iraq?: China jails 17 over Tibet protests: Drugs for guns: how the Afghan heroin trade is fuelling the Taliban insurgency: Mozambique police ‘kill at will’: Zimbabwe health minister accused as terror campaign reaches hospital wards: A port without shelter: Clandestine migrants stuck in ‘jungle’ by Calais: Supermarket sweep poses threat to French high streets: Cuba walks tightrope of reforms  

Cheney lawyer claims Congress has no authority over vice-president

The lawyer for US vice-president Dick Cheney claimed today that the Congress lacks any authority to examine his behaviour on the job.

The exception claimed by Cheney’s counsel came in response to requests from congressional Democrats that David Addington, the vice-president’s chief of staff, testify about his involvement in the approval of interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo Bay.

Ruling out voluntary cooperation by Addington, Cheney lawyer Kathryn Wheelbarger said Cheney’s conduct is “not within the [congressional] committee’s power of inquiry”.

“Congress lacks the constitutional power to regulate by law what a vice-president communicates in the performance of the vice president’s official duties, or what a vice president recommends that a president communicate,” Wheelbarger wrote to senior aides on Capitol Hill.

USA

From Chief Prosecutor To Critic at Guantanamo

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, April 28 — The Defense Department’s former chief prosecutor for terrorism cases appeared Monday at the controversial U.S. detention facility here to argue on behalf of a terrorism suspect that the military justice system has been corrupted by politics and inappropriate influence from senior Pentagon officials.

Sitting just feet from the courtroom table where he had once planned to make cases against military detainees, Air Force Col. Morris Davis instead took the witness stand to declare under oath that he felt undue pressure to hurry cases along so that the Bush administration could claim before political elections that the system was working.

An Irascible Firebrand, Finally Quieted by Term Limits

LINCOLN, Neb. – The senior senator of Nebraska’s unicameral Legislature is going out just the way he came in nearly four decades ago: obstinately, and with a whole lot to say in his T-shirt and jeans.

It is time to retire from lawmaking, or so the new rules about term limits dictate.

“I have to remind people as they show great sadness that I’m not dying, I’m just getting out of the Legislature,” said the senator, Ernie Chambers, 70. “But a lot of people are going to be very happy when my absolute last day arrives. In fact, there will probably be so much joy in this corner of the world that it will be picked up on the Richter scale. I’m not liked at all.”

Liked or not, Mr. Chambers, a black, divorced, agnostic former barber from Omaha with posters of Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass decorating his office, managed to rise to an ultimate level of power in a mostly rural, white conservative state on little more than sheer determination to do so.

Middle East

Tariq Aziz due on trial in Iraq

Former Iraqi Deputy PM Tariq Aziz is due to go on trial over the deaths of a group of Baghdad merchants in 1992.

Mr Aziz, along with seven other former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime, is accused of involvement in the executions of about 40 merchants.

The merchants were accused of hiking food prices at a time when Iraq was under international sanctions. They were executed after a speedy trial.

One of the co-accused is Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as “Chemical Ali”.

Ali Hassan al-Majid is already on death row after being convicted last year of leading a campaign in the late 1980s in which tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurdish civilians were killed.

Is an Iranian general the most powerful man in Iraq?

BAGHDAD – One of the most powerful men in Iraq isn’t an Iraqi government official, a militia leader, a senior cleric or a top U.S. military commander or diplomat

He’s an Iranian general, and at times he’s more influential than all of them.

Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani commands the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, an elite paramilitary and espionage organization whose mission is to expand Iran’s influence in the Middle East.

Asia

China jails 17 over Tibet protests

Seventeen people have been jailed over the most violent challenge to Chinese rule in Tibet for nearly two decades.

The sentences handed down today, ranging from three years to life, are the first since riots that began on March 10.

The official Xinhua news agency reported that the intermediate people’s court of Lhasa – a Chinese court in the Tibetan capital – announced the sentences at an open session. China’s state broadcaster reported that 200 people attended court.

China has said 22 people died in the riots. Tibetan exile groups say many times that number were killed in the uprising and ensuing crackdown.

Drugs for guns: how the Afghan heroin trade is fuelling the Taliban insurgency

The heroin flooding Britain’s streets is threatening the lives of UK troops in Afghanistan, an Independent investigation can reveal.

Russian gangsters who smuggle drugs into Britain are buying cheap heroin from Afghanistan and paying for it with guns. Smugglers told The Independent how Russian arms dealers meet Taliban drug lords at a bazaar near the old Afghan-Soviet border, deep in Tajikistan’s desert. The bazaar exists solely to trade Afghan drugs for Russian guns – and sometimes a bit of sex on the side.

Africa

Mozambique police ‘kill at will’

Police in Mozambique have been accused of killing and torturing people with near total impunity.

The human rights group Amnesty International has published a report saying the Mozambique police appear to think they have a licence to kill.

The group says officials have responded to rising crime rates with often lethal force, but that they almost never face criminal proceedings.

Police in the southern African nation refused to comment on the report.

Amnesty’s report was published just a day after Mozambique’s League for Human Rights said the country’s human rights situation had deteriorated in 2008.

Zimbabwe health minister accused as terror campaign reaches hospital wards

Dennis was beaten and left for dead with three shattered limbs, but even when he was found and taken to hospital there was no plaster to set his limbs or painkillers to quell the agony.

Jacob was set upon by militiamen who were armed with batons and was struck until he could no longer stand, but when he got to hospital he was told he could not be treated without a police report on his injuries.

When Harold’s house was burnt down and his foot almost cut through with the axe that one of his attackers swung at him he did not bother going to the government hospital at all. “It isn’t safe to be in a hospital where we can be found,” he said.

Europe

A port without shelter: Clandestine migrants stuck in ‘jungle’ by Calais

CALAIS, France: It is midnight, and eight hooded figures slip around the side of a freight truck at a gas station on the outskirts of this northern French port.

They wait in the orange half-light while one tries the locked truck door. It doesn’t give, and seconds later the figures vanish among the dozens of semi-trailers at this, the last truck stop before England.

Most weeknights, a smuggler leads clandestine migrants across the maze of motorways that encircle Calais to parking lots like this, where drivers sleep before catching a ferry to Dover, 33 kilometers, or 21 miles, away.

Truckers like Juan Antonio Santiago of Spain, sipping coffee at a gas station at 1 a.m., face hefty fines or even jail if stowaways are found hidden inside their vehicles, or clinging to the ledge behind the axle. “It’s a fear we all have,” he said. “But the greatest risk is taken by the migrants, because of the danger of falling off.

Supermarket sweep poses threat to French high streets

By John Lichfield in Paris

Tuesday, 29 April 2008

France, the land of the small shop and the thriving small town high street, faces a lurch of commercial power towards supermarkets and hard-discounters. Looked at another way, France, the land of high prices and cosy commercial arrangements, faces a boom in free competition and a drop in prices for food and domestic goods.

A draft law on the “modernisation of the economy” unveiled yesterday threatens, according to its supporters and some of its critics, to revolutionise shopping in France. Other critics suggest the draft law is too timid. Large French shops will mostly remain closed on Sundays.

Latin America



By lifting bans on cellphones and personal computers, Raul Castro is paving the way for open communications, but the regime is intent on avoiding the fate of the Soviet Union.

HAVANA — In a campaign that bears much similarity to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1980s appeal for glasnost, Cuba’s President Raul Castro has been urging the public to investigate social shortcomings, denounce them and propose improvements.

And in concessions to allow Cubans some access to 21st century technology, Castro’s government recently announced the lifting of bans on cellphones and personal computers.

The top-down decisions granting citizens the ability to communicate with one another and to brainstorm solutions have been a hallmark of Castro’s leadership since he took the reins of a nation in crisis 21 months ago from his older brother Fidel.

Muse in the Morning


Sun

Reflections

New dawns

have come and gone

The years assembled

Decades folded

upon themselves

Time dwindles

Could once

just once

before I…

just once

while I…

one precious time

could such a dawn

bring forth

a better day,

one not ending

in horror

Could there be

some glorious light

before darkness

falls again

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–February 5, 2008

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

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Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

I know you have talent.  What sometimes is forgotten is that being practical is a talent.  I have a paucity for that sort of talent in many situations, though it turns out that I’m a pretty darn good cook.  🙂  

Let your talent bloom.  You can share it here.  Encourage others to let it bloom inside them as well.

Won’t you share your words or art, your sounds or visions, your thoughts scientific or philosophic, the comedy or tragedy of your days, the stories of doing and making?  And be excellent to one another!

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