Pony Party: Dali

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Ladies and gentlemen, step right up. Yes. Come, come, come. Come a little closer. I can see, yes. You. And you. Don’t you want to see what wonders await you under the big tent… there is magic there.



           Carousel from Jacques Brel

A glimpse into the bizarre, uncomfortable, and enchanting world of Salvador Dali

h/t masslass for this wonderful link!!!

Irreverent

As kestrel put it, create headspace.  Music usually cures what ails.  But sometimes it’s just not enough…. I’ll usually revert back to comedy to get things moving along.  I know it’s obvious, but it works.  So I’m not about to pretend I’m above it :p

I think that people who have the best sense of humor are those who understand the irony in taking comedy seriously.

Anyone who has talked to me about life or politics for more than, oh…lets say, ten minutes will probably hear me reference Bill Hicks for one reason or another.  He was most definitely a serious comedian.

I wish so much that he was still around today.

*Caution : Loud public access quality audio!

And just think, his comedy is funny.

I’ve noticed there are a bunch of Monty Python and Eddie Izzard fans here.  I’ve also seen a few pick ups on Flight of the Conchords (which is easily one of the funniest shows on the air).  So it would seem I have good company in my sense of humor here.  Not that I’m surprised :p  I think it defines much more about a person than music preferences.  Especially this day in age.

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On occasion political humor upsets me because there is a very fine line between humorously venting real frustration and making light of a seriously fucked up situation.  Sometimes the Daily Show and Colbert Report go too far on the making light end of the spectrum for my tastes.  Although I also think it’s a good way to introduce people into the idea of accepting that the state of things is in a really dark place right now.  You can’t just throw that out at someone all willy nilly.  Either their head will explode or they’ll stick their fingers in their ears.  Need to ease it on into the consciousness and that type of humor makes for a great stepping stone.    

I’m primarily a fan of stand up, but I enjoy a lot of situational comedy because the context allows for really, really dry humor.  Especially sans a laugh track.  Arrested Development and the British version of the Office had this kind of comedy down to a science.  

Arrested Development is….

        ……

well….not really a show that can be described.  It’s best to just start at the beginning.  Don’t worry, there aren’t too many seasons since Fox decided to cancel it prematurely.  I joined an online support group when it went off the air 🙁

Why was Arrested Development canceled?

~Illusions, Michael.  Tricks are something whores do for money.~  

David Cross who was speaking in the video above, was also the “actor” in the first clip from Mr. Show (produced by him and Bob Odenkirk for HBO in the mid 90’s).  Mr. Show, The Upright Citizens Brigade, the State and Kids in the Hall helped define the new breed of irreverent sketch humor post Monty Python.  On this side of the big pond anyways.  None of them gained the notoriety but fortunately many of the members have branched out into more mainstream (and not so mainstream) television over the years.  I’d go into it, but following comedians careers from sketch comedy is a whole other beast…They are out there though!  Influencing comedy everywhere.  Which makes me very happy 🙂 <—– see  

Oh yeah.  The Office.  So, the Office was originally created by Ricky Gervais and aired on the BBC starting in 2001.  There were only 14 episodes, but it was extremely popular and four years later it was picked up in America and is extremely popular here as well.

The first season of the American version tried verbatim to be the same office.  Obviously it didn’t translate well and the season pretty much sucked.  It’s gotten better since then and in its own way is a good show that adapted well for an American audience.  I enjoy Steve Carell, but Michael Scott is no David Brent.

In that clip he was talking with Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm as some sort of promo for Extras.  Ricky Gervais created and co-produced Extras for the BBC and HBO.  It’s definitely worth checking out.  He also has a series of podcasts with his friends/writers/cohorts Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington.  I’m still working at getting and listening to them all.  But so far so good.  If you like Eddie Izzard, you’ll more than likely like Ricky Gervais.      

Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development (and to a similar extent Seinfeld and the Office) all mainly play off the situational buildup and continuity.  Sometimes throughout episodes and sometimes throughout entire seasons or even series.  Usually there are smaller pieces that can be taken out of context and still be funny.  Just not in the same way.

I was never a huge Seinfeld fan, although I completely appreciate and understand what it was able to do for modern sitcoms.  Seinfeld is a very savvy comedian.  Which is why he’s a bajillionare now.  There was some awards show special thing on HBO “honoring” Jerry where Robert Klien, Chris Rock, Gary Shandling and Seinfeld all talk about their views and philosophy on humor and comedy with special host Anderson Cooper.  Yeah, I didn’t get that part either.  But it was really funny and interesting and Anderson Cooper doesn’t talk too much.  Seinfeld’s “acceptance” speech was perfect.  

(Sorry for the super crappy video, it was the only full version of the speech I could find.)

Yes, thank you HBO.  

And thank you serious comedians.

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There is a point.  

Is there a point to all this?  

Let’s find a point.

I sometimes think that people who seem to be driven by anger are actually driven by love….they’re just really frustrated that no one else is playing along.

RIP Bill Hicks.

Send in the Iraqi Clowns

In Baghdad, this troupe of five clowns called themselves the “Happy Family Group.” Their purpose was to bring some entertainment and relief to children whose lives had been scarred by violence and fear. They called their show, “A Child Is Just As Sacred As A Country.” By every account, the show was popular among children, an oasis of laughter in the desert of violence.  Their story over the past six months is tragic and inspiring.  It also highlights the plight of Iraqi refugees.

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The story of the Happy Family Group has received some attention in the press, including the BBC and Menassat.

The sad news

The Happy Family Group began performing in 2004 as a way to help Iraqi children cope with the violence and suffering in their country after our invasion. After nearly four years of performing, the Happy Family Group began to get death threats last August. It was unclear why they had marked for death. Unfortunately, the good clowns did not take the evil clowns seriously. Two members of the troupe failed to show up for rehearsals and were later found to have been murdered as they traveled across Baghdad. Innocent people murdered in Baghdad during the height of the patented surge? Impossible.

The murders convinced the remaining members of the Happy Family Group (Rahman, Ali and Safi) that the evil clowns were serious and fled Iraq. “We don’t know why they targeted us. We were entertaining children,” says Rahman. The troupe made their way to Damascus, joining an estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees living in Syria.

The good news

The clowns were hired by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Their job is to keep the children occupied while their parents register for relief.  Registration for families means retelling the story of how they became refugees, a painful experience.

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The clowns also provide public service announcements from the UNHCR. Less than a third of Iraqi children in Syria attend school. Iraqi refugees are also the target of fraud and exploitation.

One in every five refugees who registers with us is a victim of violence or torture“, says Laurens Jolles, the Dutchman who heads the UNHCR office in the Syrian capital. “This means that the families and the children in particular, are traumatized when they get here.”

The UNHCR also uses the clowns to get children back to school. Only about 70,000 of the 300,000 Iraqi children in Syria attend school. “Far too few,” says Jolles.

The clowns at the UNHCR office continue their show. But their funny performance also contains a warning: watch out for swindlers, stay away from people trying to sell fake UNHCR registration forms.

The 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria are an easy target for petty criminals, says UNHCR official Sybella Wilkes. “It really hurts, after everything the Iraqi refugees have been through; robbery, kidnap and losing their homes, when you see them become the victims of fraud.”

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“Most of the children are traumatized and incredibly scared,” say Rahman, Ali and Saif . “We try to convince them that there is a different future for them.”

“We don’t do it for money but because we’re clowns. We just want to make the children happy in order to remove the fears and memories of bombs and bad days.”

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Corporate Media Clowns

The American corporate media has largely ignored the plight of Iraqi refugees. It won’t sell because these stories will not boost our fragile ego or distract us from our crumbling economy. In one of the rare stories about the Iraq refugee crisis, CNN was careful not to state the obvious – it is the direct result of our invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Population flight has been occurring for years, but the situation worsened after a bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra unleashed sectarian warfare two years.

See? The refugees are running from sectarian warfare, not the chaos and power struggle that ensued as a result of our invasion and occupation.  

The UNHCR is making a push for the world community to help ease the burdens the refugee influx has placed on those nations. Redmond said there is an agreement in the works to bring in more nongovernmental organizations into Syria to address refugee problems.

This is obviously not an American-made mess since the UN is asking the world community to clean it up. It is funny how CNN’s John King last night pounced on Senators Clinton and Obama to admit that the Bush surge and splurge had returned Iraq to near Garden-of-Eden status.

The British press skillfully points the finger at “rich nations” failing to help the refugees. Here is a description from The Economist.

WHETHER they supported the American-led campaign to topple Saddam Hussein or denounced it, all rich countries now agree that the turmoil which engulfed Iraq after the war was a tragedy whose victims should be succoured. But by no means all wealthy countries are prepared to back up those compassionate sentiments with money or hospitality.

Of the 4m Iraqis who have been displaced by conflict at various times, about half are still inside the country. Most of the rest found shelter of sorts in nearby places, like Syria and Jordan. But there is an important third category: people deemed by the United Nations’ refugee agency to be extremely vulnerable and in need of relocation somewhere far from the region.

Some of these people are at risk because they, or members of their families, worked for the American-led administration of Iraq, or for Western humanitarian agencies. Others belong to ethnic or religious minorities: these include Christians, and Palestinians who are seen by some Iraqis as collaborators with the old regime. Also viewed as vulnerable are families with no healthy bread-winners.

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that some 80,000 to 100,000 of Iraq’s refugees are in pressing need of resettlement outside the region. But few have found new homes.

Looks like the “Coalition of the Willing” is unwilling to take any responsibility for the human suffering produced by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Only the damn liberal rags like The Nation dare to put the Iraqi refugee crisis into some context.

The population of Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion was perhaps in the 26-27 million range. Between March 2003 and today, a number of reputable sources place the total of Iraqis who have fled their homes — those who have been displaced internally and those who have gone abroad — at between 4.5 million and 5 million individuals. If you take that still staggering lower figure, approximately one in six Iraqis is either a refugee in another country or an internally displaced person.

Now, consider the equivalent in terms of the U.S. population. If Iraq had invaded the United States in March 2003 with similar results, in less than five years approximately 50 million Americans would have fled their homes, assumedly flooding across the Mexican and Canadian borders, desperately burdening weaker neighboring economies. It would be an unparalleled, even unimaginable, catastrophe. Consider, then, what we would think if, back in Baghdad, politicians and the media were hailing, or at least discussing positively, the “success” of the prime minister’s recent “surge strategy” in the U.S., even though it had probably been instrumental in creating at least one out of every ten of those refugees, 5 million displaced Americans in all. Imagine what our reaction would be to such blithe barbarism.

Back in the real world, of course, what Michael Schwartz terms the “tsunami” of Iraqi refugees, the greatest refugee crisis on the planet, has received only modest attention in this country (which managed, in 2007, to accept but 1,608 Iraqi refugees out of all those millions — a figure nonetheless up from 2006). As with so much else, the Bush administration takes no responsibility for the crisis, nor does it feel any need to respond to it at an appropriate level. Until now, to the best of my knowledge, no one has even put together a history of the monumental, horrific tale of human suffering that George W. Bush’s war of choice and subsequent occupation unleashed, or fully considered what such a brain drain, such a loss of human capital, might actually mean for Iraq’s future.

We could not handle the displacement of several hundred thousand people after Katrina. Imagine 50 million Americans displaced by the actions of a foreign government. It is sad how little sleep we lose when one in six Iraqis have been displaced because of our foreign policy.

No laughing matter

Here is what the UNHCR and the Happy Family Group face in Syria.

The Syrian government does not allow the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria to work legally and an increasing number of refugees have taken up “harmful practices,” from prolonged fasting to prostitution, in order to survive.

“People are finding themselves in extreme situations and at the worst end we’re seeing child labor, early marriage, and survival sex,” said Sybella Wilkes, spokesperson for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Syria. “This is something that these families would never have resorted to in Iraq. They’re facing drastic measures in order to keep some semblance of quality of life.”

[snip]

Iraqi children have in particular borne a disproportionate burden of the harsh economic reality. The United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF) estimates that 80 percent of Iraqi children in Syria do not attend school and that at least 10 percent of Iraqi children are being forced to work for an average daily income of $1 or less.

[snip]

Prostitution and marrying off of young daughters, even for short periods in a practice known as pleasure marriages, are also on the increase with young girls increasingly vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

A clash of clowns

The humanity of the three Iraqi clowns touched me. Their message to the Iraqi children living as refugees in Syria is to hope for a brighter future in the face of overwhelming odds. It comes from three young men who have every reason to be enraged or in despair.

“We are lucky to find a job here, but we are stuck. We cannot leave, and we cannot even develop our work,” says Rahman.

“We want to continue our studies and live safely. I left everything behind, my family and home.”

The group hopes to be able to develop its repertoire, and maybe even travel the world giving performances.

“I miss Iraq but I cannot go back. We are afraid we will be killed… That’s our destiny,” said Rahman.

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On the other hand, these evil clowns continue to spread suffering to the people of Iraq.

This one is worried about his legacy.

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This one is worried about his Halliburton stock valuation.

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This one is worried we will leave Iraq this century.

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These evil clowns recently promised 125 million dollars to help Iraqi refugees, the first significant contribution since the war began. It is only a pledge and it represents less than 12 hours worth of current funding to continue the occupation. It is a drop in the ocean compared to the tax subsidies given the oil, gas, and coal companies.  Meanwhile, Jordan estimates the cost of sheltering about a half million Iraqi refugees for the past three years at 2.2 billion dollars.

Jordan said on Tuesday that it estimated the costs of sheltering hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees over the past three years at more than two billion dollars, and appealed for international help.

“Hosting our Iraqi brothers depletes the infrastructure and has cost the government more than 1.6 billion dinars (2.2 billion dollars) during the past three years,” Planning Minister Suheir al-Ali told visiting UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.

For more information on Iraqi refugees.

Turkey Surges into Iraq?

The US may not be the only country which thinks it can cow native, ethnic insurgencies into submission with temporary displays of force:

Turkish ground forces have crossed the border into northern Iraq to target Kurdish rebels said to be sheltering there, Ankara has said.

It said the raid began late on Thursday after an air and artillery bombardment.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has said the offensive is limited in scale and troops will return as soon as possible.

Although reports on Turkish troop strength vary, Turkish TV says that between 3,000 and 10,000 troops are involved in the operation:

The General Staff did not specify the size of the operation, but released photographs of armed troops in white fatigues walking through snowy, mountainous Iraqi terrain.

A senior military source in southeast Turkey told Reuters: “Thousands of troops have crossed the border and thousands more are waiting at the border to join them if necessary.”

NATO member Turkey says it has the right under international law to hit PKK rebels who shelter in northern Iraq and have mounted attacks inside Turkey that have killed scores of troops. Turkey says some 3,000 PKK rebels are based in Iraq.

The Turks, hoping to hit the PKK rebels in their Winter redoubts before warmer weather allows the insurgents to cross back into Turkey, claim they have advanced 25 km (16 miles) into Iraqi territory.

The US government, self-proclaimed guarantor of Iraqi territorial sovereignty, is staying out of this one.  Instead the Americans are telling the Turks, “Do what you gotta do, just make it quick.”:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has urged Turkey to bring current military operations in Iraq to a swift conclusion, the Pentagon said on Friday.

“We have strongly urged the Turkish government to bring any ongoing operations to a swift conclusion,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters.

The US military, in an ironic plea for restraint, is simply hoping the Turks don’t make too much of a mess.

The U.S. military said it was aware that Turkish forces had launched an offensive into northern Iraq against members of the PKK, considered a terrorist group by Ankara, the United States and the European Union.

Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the operation was understood to be of “limited duration” and specifically targeted at PKK fighters in the largely autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

“Turkey has given its assurances that it will do everything possible to avoid collateral damage to innocent citizens or Kurdish infrastructure,” Smith said in a statement.

The EU has a similarly milquetoast response, telling the Turks to refrain from ‘disproportionate military action’:

“The European Union understands Turkey’s need to protect its population from terrorism and it also says that Turkey should refrain from taking any disproportionate military action and respect human rights and the rule of law.

“We encourage Turkey to continue to pursue dialogue with international partners on this matter.”

Yet while the Turks are blustering about a large scale invasion, and the Americans and Europeans are averting their eyes, the Iraqi foreign minister is denying the whole thing is even happening.

“There has not been any major incursion or land invasion. … What is going on is around a few hundred Turkish forces have crossed the border looking for the PKK or their bases,” Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters by telephone.

Interestingly, the US military, despite its pleas for restraint, is also downplaying the scale of the operation:

A senior military officer with U.S.-led coalition forces based in Baghdad made a similar estimate of the number of troops involved. “A few hundred, at most,” the source said.

For its part, the PKK reports clashing with Turkish regulars.

A PKK spokesman in northern Iraq said rebels were battling the Turkish troops.

“There are severe clashes. Two Turkish soldiers have been killed and eight wounded. There are no PKK casualties,” Ahmed Danees, head of foreign relations for the PKK, told Reuters by satellite phone from an undisclosed location.



So what is really going on here?

On one hand, it seems clear that the Turks have in fact launched some sort of military operation into Northern Iraq in an effort to hit the PKK rebels in their home bases.  What is not clear is just how big the operation really is.

Actually, the Turks themselves may not be sure how big they want to go with this. They say that ‘thousands’ have crossed over and “thousands more are waiting at the border to join if necessary“, but that statement suggests the Turks are merely upping the ante with an initial reconnaissance in force, rather than going all in with a full scale invasion right off the bat. That doesn’t mean the Turks won’t eventually commit the full complement of troops, but it does suggest that the Turks are wary about what they are about to get themselves into.

And as well they should be wary. As the Russians learned repeatedly in Chechnya, launching a winter operation in tank-hostile, mountain terrain against a well armed and experienced guerrilla force is just asking for a bloody nose.  Indeed, the Israeli war against Hamas in hilly Southern Lebanon last Summer shows that even a warm weather operation against a dug in rebel stronghold is a dicey proposition at best.

Meanwhile, the Turks surely remember that they have launched even bigger operations in the past that were failures:

In 1995, the Turkish army invaded northern Iraq, sending some 35,000 soldiers across the border to destroy the guerrilla infrastructure of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) a militant group made up of Turkish Kurds that had found refuge in the lawless mountain region. Operation Steel, as it was called, killed over 500 militants, but still the PKK survived to fight another day. In early 1997, the Turks sent in another 30,000 soldiers – this time as part of Operation Hammer – to finish the job. They didn’t. The Turks had to go in again later that year with Operation Dawn.

Already, it appears the Turks may be having second thoughts about their snowy, Winter drive into the mountains.  Initially declining to state how long the offensive would last, the Turks are now saying 15 days – which is most likely not enough time for the relatively small number of stated Turkish forces to inflict any lasting damage on the PKK.



Bottom line: this highly touted Turkish ‘invasion’ of Northern Iraq appears primarily intended as part of a propaganda offensive by the Ankara government to bolster its sagging domestic political fortunes, rather than a serious attack against the PKK.

So, barring any sudden decision by the Turks to escalate their troop commitment to levels realistically necessary to accomplish anything substantial, we should expect the Turks to be leaving Iraq as soon as they can claim any sort of nominal victory – assuming, of course, that a nominal victory is even possible.  

Four at Four

  1. The Washington Post reports FEC warns McCain on campaign spending.

    McCain’s attempts to build up his campaign coffers before a general election contest appeared to be threatened by the stern warning yesterday from Federal Election Commission Chairman David M. Mason, a Republican. Mason notified McCain that the commission had not granted his Feb. 6 request to withdraw from the presidential public financing system. The implications of that could be dramatic…

    Mason’s letter raises two issues as the basis for his position. One is that the six-member commission lacks a quorum, with four vacancies because of a Senate deadlock over President Bush’s nominees for the seats. Mason said the FEC would need to vote on McCain’s request to leave the system, which is not possible without a quorum. Until that can happen, the candidate will have to remain within the system, he said.

    The second issue is more complicated. It involves a $1 million loan McCain obtained from a Bethesda bank in January. The bank was worried about his ability to repay the loan if he exited the federal financing program and started to lose in the primary race. McCain promised the bank that, if that happened, he would reapply for matching money and offer those as collateral for the loan. While McCain’s aides have argued that the campaign was careful to make sure that they technically complied with the rules, Mason indicated that the question needs further FEC review.

    If the FEC refuses McCain’s request to leave the system, his campaign could be bound by a potentially debilitating spending limit until he formally accepts his party’s nomination. His campaign has already spent $49 million, federal reports show. Knowingly violating the spending limit is a criminal offense that could put McCain at risk of stiff fines and up to five years in prison.

  2. The Guardian reports Turkish forces enter northern Iraq. “The Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, today told Turkey not to ‘violate’ the country after Turkish troops entered northern Iraq to attack Kurdish rebels. Several hundred troops – some reports claimed thousands – crossed the border after fighter jets and heavy artillery bombed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) forces. The PKK said two Turkish soldiers were killed and eight wounded in clashes following the incursion, but Turkey refused to comment on the claim… NTV television reported that 10,000 troops were taking part in the offensive and had penetrated 10km (six miles) into Iraq, although one US officer said the offensive involved only several hundred troops.”

  3. Meanwhile in southern Iran, the Los Angeles Times reports Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites work together, distrustfully. “Both the Sunni and Shiite guards are helping the U.S. military defend Muqdadiya’s Matar district from Sunni extremists who forced the city into a self-styled Islamic caliphate for more than a year. But though the two groups run checkpoints around the corner from each other, each takes every opportunity to convince the Americans that the other is not to be trusted… As the militant organizations have retreated, rival bands of Sunni and Shiite guards have raced to stake claims to the vacated areas, raising the specter of sectarian bloodshed.”

  4. The Los Angeles Times reports another Dolphin dies near sonar site. “A deep-diving dolphin died on the beach of the Navy’s San Nicolas Island late last month during the final days of naval exercises using a type of sonar that has been linked to fatal injuries of whales and dolphins. Although researchers have yet to determine a cause of death, a dissection of the northern right whale dolphin’s head revealed blood and other fluid in its ears and ear canals. The same symptoms were found in deep-diving whales that washed ashore in the Canary Islands and the Bahamas after military sonar exercises.”

As tears roll down my cheeks

cross posted from Sancho Press. http://sanchopress.com/

We spend our time on Sancho Press highlighting problems faced by our troops and veterans. We write articles about the injustices suffered by many who have bravely served our nation.

We point out problems with the VA and DOD policies. We work at joining citizens with the troops and veterans all together on Sancho Press. We want all to unite to get changes made to the many problems faced by those with PTSD, TBI, other mental health issues and the 800,000+ with backed up disability claims.

I stumbled across a few videos on you tube today. I realized that with all the focus I put on the above items I occasionally lose sight of those who didn’t come back and the families they left behind.  

FORTUNATELY THEY ARE NOT ALL SAD STORIES AND THEY DO NOT ALL HAVE BAD ENDINGS.

After I post an article I always hang around to respond to comments. I feel an obligation to respond to every comment made to an article I post. In this case I am sorry, but I can not do so. These videos and my post are not about politics or a debate over the war. I hope nobody will comment in any way relating to these. In fact, nobody even needs to comment. I think the emotions to these will be universally the same.

I have put up a tip jar only to know how many have watched this and you can use this instead of making comments if you would like.

The first two videos on this post are about remembering the troops that we never get to battle for and to assist at Sancho Press.

Women of Afghanistan

I have no understanding of what it is to live like this:::

The belt made a thump when Rasheed dropped it to the ground and came for her. Some jobs, that thump said, were meant to be done with bare hands.

Magnifico asked why Afghanistan as an issue has sunk away faster than an essay on the dKos diary list… he asks this, as I have been thinking about this country and its people, after reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.

Hosseini is, for me, pretty straightforward in his writing. Nothing grand or blazing. Yet, it is shatteringly honest writing. It gathers as you read it. Slow. Until there is this little thing vibrating inside you.  Not anger. fear. hate. It’s that wide-awake connection with one’s own free will.

I wonder. If the fight isn’t just as elemental as safeguarding our free will and therein our innate desire for freedom.

The women of Afghanistan are all of us. The atrocities they suffer belong to all of us. They tell us, scream at us that these things have mutilated earthlings through the ages. None of us are exempt from such horrors.

I don’t know how to help Afghan women wholesale. I humbly take the lesson they give, despite the horrors they endure. Their freedom of will, of thought. The dignity of these women, as captured so well in A Thousand Splendid Suns, is loud, vibrant, inspirational.

The women of Afghanistan fight for all of us. In every act of defiance in deed or thought, they taunt brutes and bullies with dignity and will. One more sentinel is revealed… these beautiful souls, guardians of freedoms unseen.

So here you go, Magnifico. Captain America was sent to save this country, but something funny happened on the way to Kabul. These nameless victims, who are called mother, wife, sister, friend… these women … may very well show us the way to salvation…

The Hidden Half: A Photo Essay on Women in Afghanistan

“The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” Laura Bush said after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. The First Lady added that, thanks to America, women were “no longer imprisoned in their homes.” Six years later, the burka is more common than before, an “overwhelming majority” of Afghan women suffer domestic violence, according to aid group Womankind, and honor killings are on the rise. Health care is so threadbare that every 28 minutes a mother dies in childbirth-the secondhighest maternal mortality rate in the world. Girls attend school at half the rate boys do, and in 2006 at least 40 teachers were killed by the Taliban. For two years, Canadian photojournalist Lana Šlezi? crisscrossed Afghanistan-from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north to Kandahar in the south-to document these largely hidden realities.”

Women under siege in Afghanistan

The good news is that the rights of Afghan women have been enshrined in the constitution. It even asks the government to bring changes in the law to combat traditions that work against them.Women can participate in every walk of life, including politics. Of the 361 members of parliament today, 91 are women. Women have also begun talking about forced marriages, honour killings, abortions and rape in a traditionally male-dominated society. Local human rights groups have begun documenting such atrocities.

The bad news is that the state cannot protect women and ensure that they can go about their work safely. Even an affluent, influential city-bred MP like Ms Barakzai is now tense about her future. Soraya Sobhrang, an MP in her country, says the tribal councils almost always rule against women.”When I leave home these days on work, I am not quite sure whether I will be back [alive]. Life has become so insecure. I am not planning to leave the country yet, but I do have to think about my kids.”

Afghanistan: Women still under attack – a systematic failure to protect

This report highlights the failure of the Afghan state to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of women and girls. It is not a comprehensive study of violations and abuses perpetrated against women in Afghanistan. It seeks instead to provide examples that highlight the inability and at times the lack of will of the government and its institutions – in their current state – to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of women.

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has this, among many many other things, to say…

A rein of terror imposed by the Taliban and the “Northern Alliance” terrorists prevailed across the country and requires fearless struggle. The last five years have given a clear message to our people, particularly the anti-fundamentalists and democratic forces, that neither the US nor any outside force can liberate this ill-fated nation from the fetters of the fundamentalists. Instead we require a decisive and united struggle, relying on our own power, courage, and daring sacrifice as we unite with freedom-loving people around the world.

Human rights violations, crime, and corruption have reached their peak, so much so that Mr. Karzai is forced to make friendly pleas to the ministers and members of the parliament, asking them to “keep some limits”! Accusations about women being raped in prisons were so numerous that even a pro-warlord woman in the parliament had no choice but to acknowledge them.

General Information on Afghanistan

Official Name: Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

Capital and largest city: Kabul

Government: Islamic republic

Chief of State: President Hamid Karzai

Population: 31.89 million

Area: 249,935 square miles; slightly smaller than Texas

Languages: Afghan Persian or Dari, Pashtu, Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen), 30 minor languages (primarily Balochi and Pashai)

Literacy: Total Population: [28.1%]; Male: [43.1%]; Female: [12.6%]

GDP Per Capita: $800

Year of Independence: 1919 (from UK control over Afghan foreign affairs)

Web site: President.gov.af

In south central Asia, Afghanistan has Iran to its west, Pakistan east and south, and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to its north. The Vakhan (Wakhan) extends into northeast along Pakistan and into the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China.

and other news stories about Afghanistan…

Helicopter carrying U.S. senators makes emergency landing in Afghanistan

Taliban militants are increasingly using powerful bombs

Afghan Police Suffer Setbacks as Taliban Adapt

How a ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad

Opium economy will take 20 years and £1bn to remove

Continuing “The Genocide of Matriarchal Societies”

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I wrote The Genocide of Matriarchal Societies in April of last year (2007), and there is some additional information I want to share along those general lines now. We’ll pick up where we left off and the answer to “Where Are All Your Women” will be made chillingly clear as to why they are “Missing In Action” after we recognize that a woman is set to be beheaded for “practicing witchcraft.” First however, we will reread the words of Archie Fire Lame Deer and relish in the scholarship of Barbara Alice Mann.

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Archie Fire Lame Deer had discovered enormous commonalties in terms of visual imagery between those in his father’s Yuwipi ceremonies and the visual imagery of the Black Madonna. Next, he learned that medicine men and Black Madonnas shared the same tragic fate.


..one last example of synchronicity is between the Lakota and a prehistoric cave in France. Archie Fire Lame tells briefly of his travels there with his daughter, while talking to a guide he described as a “spiritual man.”


Archie

Fire Lame Deer & Richard Erdoes. “Gift Of Power.” pp. 277-278.

I found the image of a buffalo carved out of the living rock with water from a sacred spring flowing from its mouth. While I was contemplating this, I heard (his daughter) holler, “Daddy, quick, come here!” – There revealed a face exactly like the one my father always used during his Yuwipi ceremonies –

Then our guide said, “All this goes back thousands of years before Christianity.” – (He) kept the image of a dark-skinned prophetess that nowadays is called the “Black Madonna.” He told me, “They called her and her sisters witches and burned them at the stake.”

“I know all about this,” I said. “They called our medicine men witch doctors and shot them dead for the same reasons.” He went on, “This here has survived. Few have been inside this cave. You have been chosen.”

Next, Barbara Alice Mann has made such valuable contributions in terms of outlining and defining the “Western obliteration of women from the record, (p. 129)” that I don’t think it can be retold too many times.


Unlearning the Language of Conquest Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America. “Where Are Your Women?: Missing In Action,” by Barbara Alice Mann. p. 121, 122, 124.

…in the often fractious discussions of the extent of Native American contributions to modern Euro – American culture, the glaring omission of women continues almost utterly unaddressed…Worse, from the European perspective, was the level of political clout wielded by woodlands women. The sixteenth – century Spaniards in La Florida (the whole American southwest) were nonplussed by matrilineage and the cacicas (female chiefs) with whom they were forced to deal…Spanish frustration was not a little focused on Guale females, who undermined patriarchal tampering with Guale culture…In 1724, the Jesuit missionary Joseph Francois Lafitau recorded in astonishment that Haudenosaunee women were “the souls of the councils…” Judicial affairs so entirely belonged to women that any woodlands man who wished to become a jurist or a negotiator had first to have been “made a woman” in order to be qualified for the job…

Mann then proceeds to outline the methods of genocide and cultural genocide used to destroy “the level of political clout wielded by woodlands women.” She tells how the Spanish forced these women “to scalp their own sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers,” and then Mann outlines “pen – and – ink witchcraft.” “Pen – and – ink witchcraft” can be thought of as deliberately revising history. Mann continues to discuss how the “pen – and – ink witchcraft” was used in attempting to change the character and even the very gender of various entities in creation stories.

Mann ends with the following request, “We need the strong arms of our brothers reinforcing us in this effort.” While I’m not a scholar, this is the best I can do in addition to helping spread the news about Stop(ping) Barbaric Execution of Saudi “Witch”! by Valtin. .


It is over 300 years since the famous Salem witchcraft trials, which ended in the hanging of over nineteen men and women at Gallows Hill. The last execution for so-called witchcraft in England was in 1684. The last woman put to death for the “crime” of sorcery was Anna Göldi, beheaded in Switzerland in 1782. The last execution for “sorcery” in Saudi Arabia was in… 2007!

Now its 2008, and staunch U.S. ally Saudi Arabia is about to do it again. Saudi law courts have sentenced Fawza Fahli for “witchcraft, recourse to jinn [supernatural beings], and slaughter of animals.” Held in Quraiyat Prison, she is to be beheaded…

Concluding, one end to studying about history is to not make the same mistakes again in my opinion.  Barbara Alice Mann and Archie Fire Lame Deer share their scholarship and their experiences out of generosity and wanting to make this world a better place. I think that’s a safe conclusion to draw. And making our world a better place necessitates not allowing this atrocious past to happen again, whether it’s in Saudi Arabia or because these forces

On the website of the National Reform Association one can actually find an artifact, by Daniel Lance Herrick, titled Table of Death Penalty Laws in the Pentateuch which, explains the article introduction, “is a sidebar for Why Execute Murderers? which was published in the May – June, 2000 issue of The Christian Statesman.”

Herrick’s article contains a series of grid boxes that delineate various offenses, per the Old Testament, that are described in the Old Testament as punishable by stoning to death. the “crimes” demanding communal stoning to death according to Herrick are:

• Idol Worship

• Witchcraft

• Blasphemy

• Cursing the Lord

• Violating the Sabbath

• Enticing to Idolatry

• Women who marry but are not virgins

• Adultery

were wholly underestimated.

Crossposted at Native American Netroots

John McLobbyist and the company he keeps

As the right wing extremists continue to try and paint this McCain lobbyist story as about sex when it is clear that even the Washington Post realizes that it is about the “anti-lobbyist’s” surrounding himself with lobbyists.

Meaning his trustworthyness, his double talk, his lack of character, his lack of, well, credibility.

This is the story.  This what John McLobbyist is all about.  As Red Wind says, he has the “straightest talk that money can buy.  But it is more than just lobbyists.  

The recent news about Rick Renzi, Arizona Congressman being indicted on land deals and other charges is telling on a few levels.  You see, Renzi was, up until around noon today, a member of John McCain’s campaign leadership team (a co-chair, nonetheless).  Interestingly, it appears as though Renzi either resigned from the leadership team or was booted from the leadership team right around the time his indictment was announced because Renzi’s name is no longer listed on McLobbyist’s website.

But what about the lobbyists and special interests that he “never did a favor for or gave preferential treatment to”?  Of course, there was the matter of Charles Keating and McLobbyist’s (not to mention Cindy McLobbyist’s) special relationship with him.  There is also the little matter of McCain gave a deposition where he admitted to giving preferential treatment to a lobbyist

Just hours after the Times’s story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff-and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. “No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC,” the campaign said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue,” McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. “He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint.”

And there is Rick Davis, lobbyist and campaign manager as well as McLobbyist’s chief political advisor, Charles Black, Jr.  However, Black and Davis aren’t just any lobbyist though.  According to the WaPo article:

But when McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington’s lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O’ Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae.

A real good summary is in Salon.com by Joe Conason, which also outlines the phoniness that is the “reformer” meme.  In fact, McLobbyist’s campaign team has the most lobbyists on its staff, and he has always surrounded himself with lobbyists.  This is leadership?  This is “change”?  Is this the kind of experience that McLobbyist is going to bring to his administration?  After Cheney’s secret energy team including corporate interests, do we really need telecommunication lobbyists and other corporate lobbyists dominating the policy direction in this country?  Do we want someone who has taken over $100,000 from Charles Keating, written letters on behalf of lobbyists after receiving over $20,000 in contributions and surrounding himself with indicted criminals, corporate interests and lobbyists who are looking to line their pockets instead of helping Americans?

Many of you know the old saying about how you can tell a person’s character by the company they keep.  Based on who has supported John McLobbyist throughout his Congressional career, as well as the people who make up the inner circle of his campaign, not to mention the ones who he relies on for advice, it is very easy to tell what his character is.

This is not a man who cares about this country.  Rather, it is more evidence in a long string of evidence which begins with leaving his first wife after she raised his children for an heiress, runs through the same people who finance his campaigns and advise him.

It is a man who cares only about himself, and about those who pay his way.

Golden Age or Catastrophe: Obama & the Millennials

(thought provoking! – promoted by pfiore8)

Generational scholars Strauss and Howe dedicated their lives to analyzing the four dominant generations of the twentieth century: the GIs, the Silent, the Boomers and the X-ers.  Then, near the end of their collaborations they published Millennials Rising. The thesis of their whole canon of work is that each generation fulfills overall needs or niches from prior ones, and creates problems that future generations must solve.

The concept behind the Millennial Generation is that a national or global crisis will arise unlike anything since the GI’s Depression and WWII, and the millenials will rise to meet it. Or else society itself will falter.  (Can you take a guess at how this thesis is already playing out?)

The range for the Millennial Generation (1982-2000) is that same group of voters that Obama outshined in harvesting. With Clinton showing strong youth appeal in second as by overall votes cast for Democrats.

Why do Millennials prefer first Obama, and then Clinton? Is it enough to say that Millennials are “liberal” and pack up the wagons? I say no.

When it comes to Obama’s “transcendent” nature with Millennials I guess the seeming joke–if you’re cynical–is that Obama is a Gen-Xer or a cusp Boomer either way you look at it.  This really isn’t that unusual (Bob Dylan is clearly a Silent Generationer [Malcolm X, John McCain] who appealed to Boomers) and many people have pointed out how young Obama looks, especially until right before he hit the campaign trail. But enough about Obama in and of himself.

Obama and Millennials are both pegged with much the same complaints: lot of expectations, failure to “step up to the plate” and achieve. Big optimism. A lot of agist/inter-generational fighting here on the intertubes springs from a lack of understanding of generational theory.  Assumptions made on the part of other generations are often less relevant to the one being criticized.

Since each generation has its own context, goes the generational thesis, the summarization of millions of people requires a framework of key words. For Millennials, perhaps the most key word is civic. Not optimistic. Not necessarily whatever your opinion of your teenager is. From civic you can see any number of possible assumptions–nationalistic, more willing to vote, expecting more from their government.

Newsweek ran an article on February 9th about called He’s One of Us Now: Obama embodies my generation’s attitudes and aspirations, for better and for worse, and it explains this civic uniting thread:

We distrust traditional channels of information and prefer to learn from peers (again, often online). We are diverse. After George W. Bush, we believe, as Obama youth-vote director Hans Riemer puts it, “that it matters who’s running the government-and that government is a powerful way to make this country a better place.” And we’re more optimistic than boomers about the possibility of change. According to a January survey by Frank N. Magid Associates, a plurality of boomers (43 percent) believe that the 2008 election will leave the United States unchanged or worse for wear. Only 32 percent of millennials agree-and a full 40 percent say that it will make America stronger.

Since most of the Millennial age range can’t even vote yet, the key if not major section of life for Millenials has been spent under the least popular president since anyone alive today was even born, with a growing sense of threat to national security, the economy and of course the spectre of global warming.

It helps to understand that Strauss and Howe consider generations in groups of four, and that Millennials are the counterpart or echo of the GI Generation.  This suddenly explains the seemingly lofty description of Millennials, exactly how it makes sense, and where this is not a simple adoration to any Boomer or Silent Generationer who was raised by the GI’s.  The GIs are called “Great” or “Greatest” but that is in regards to their achievements, not any individual superiority.

Interestingly, both GIs and Millennials can be described as “morally complacent”–remember the sprawling suburbs? The way the poverty of the 50s was swept under the rug, the stubbornness–racial, gender roles, simple refusal to adapt to new things, the conformity (heavily bolstered, it’s alleged, by Silents) Kennedy’s underside, all of Nixon’s sides, Reagan’s smile fronting Star Wars, dirty wars, Iran-Contra, G.H.W. Bush and his Washington buddies?  

No, Generational Theory does not posit that one generation is merely better than another. It would be besides the point altogether. But it also means no generation can deny another without great friction and struggle, and without this generation the rising national crisis, which happens throughout history, cannot be met. The theory does posit that as Boomers themselves reacted against the problems of the GIs and Silents, they’ve now created social woes, morality wars, identity struggles: a new hole. It is the Millennials’ society role to deal with fill this social vacuum and solve the crisis.

That is why Millennials are so important, without even exhaustively covering the findings of the book. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, trying to circumvent the things you don’t like about Millennials (that’s my upcoming diary). Indeed, the crisis present have not evolved enough for the Millennials to get sucked in–to date there is no draft, no national engagement. No victory gardens. No civic recycling akin to WWII. Incidentally, it was not the GI’s who usually spent their childhood in the Depression–the Silent Generation began in 1925, with GI’s going back to 1900.  In the roaring 20s and the return to normalcy it would have been impossible to forsee how truly transformative that then unnamed generation would be on this country, for good or ill.

Again I write that it is not that Millennials are liberal or progressive any more than any generation is liberal or porgressive. In the short term, sure, but in the long term no generation has the same views of liberalism or conservatism as the past. In the near future Millennials will change it with their own analysis of the problems facing us.

As was said of Strauss and Howe’s complementary book to Millennials Rising, The Fourth Turning:

The Fourth Turning helps us understand the dramatic cultural changes and mood shifts in our times.  Economic and technologic conditions alone, for example, would have told you little about the pessimism of the ’90s.  Surely similar shifts lie ahead, and The Fourth Turning gives us a tool for thinking through possible scenarios.”

WIRED, April, 1997

The Fourth Turning was not even happening in 1997, but rather the signs of the storm. Strauss and Howe called it an Unraveling, the Third Turning to this present one’s Fourth.

There are things coming to fruition that no individual Obama or Clinton can absolve. Climate change is happening, combined with the economic bubble, peak oil and the wars and instability among the nuclear powers. Obama’s use of “we” is perhaps bigger in explaining his generational appeal than it seems.  But it’s the Millennials themselves that are going to be solving or failing at these pan-administration crisis: we are almost at the next decade.  What is on the horizon that’s not in place now?  National service for college? A draft? A new and different war? A nuclear standoff or environmental catastrophe in Indonesia?  Massive conservation works? National urban and rural redevelopment?

In Our Time

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I never thought this would happen, not in our time. Not only is Obama starting to pull away in Texas (Even Now), he is slowly becoming a folk hero. Mythos is very important in Texas, it is what we use to counteract the reality of our insane and chaotic ways. But every once in awhile, Texas will drag itself out of the gutter, dust itself off, and do something great.

Long know as “that bastard ass-backwards redneck fucktard state”, the long lumber giant of Texas progressism and populism is finally awakening. While usually the Lone Star goes for some white hooded off the land hick populist, it appears as if the Big Tex is finally shooting straight again like we did with men like Sam Rayburn.

It appears as if the darkness of East Pine woods is in regression, and the glory of the Hill Country is on the wax. It appears as if the spirit of the Lone Star Republic, who has sent such citizens as Barbara Jordon, Ann Richards and to a lesser extent LBJ, has gone hog wild in the hearts of Texans, turning away from the pity and embracing the hope.

It’s been a long time coming.

As the go to political friend, I have been getting emails from people I had long ago written off as closet nazis, raza nationicalists and jusst your basic garden variety Texas idiot, all telling me about this man, who has done captured their heart and mind.

If Texas is Hillary’s last stand, it will not be the Alamo. It will be the Battle of Gonzales. And when the fighting is done, Obama will lead us to Jacinto, where we will steal McCain’s leg and send him stumbling all the way back to Arizona.

Sometimes, a hero does come dressed in black. Let’s ride cowboy. Let’s ride.

From the Top Down…..Let Slip the Dogs of War

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Humans are funny animals. A very odd collection of consciousnesses, that together form a very odd Collective Consciousness. It may just be that there are cycles to these things, and that they will play out no matter what ….

Or it may be that we…on a level that we don’t fully perceive and certainly don’t understand, are all linked together. It may be that, at a deep primal, level we still contain much of our genetic past, that we are, despite our pretensions, still largely animal in nature. That we humans are pack animals, like our not so distant ancestors and so, at least to some extent, we are a Pack Consciousness. That we take our cues and make our decisions based at least in part on what the rest of the human pack are doing. That there is a pack morality as part of the Pack Consciousness.

More to the point, that we get away with whatever the rest of the pack will tolerate, what the Collective Consciousness will allow.

So it is not much of a surprise, then…that if the Top Dog, the Most Powerful Man In The World….the unconsciously recognized Leader of the Pack….

Is a warmongering bastard

That the rest of the Human Pack…on this deep unconscious level…will follow his lead. That when the Leader says that war is good, that war is allowed, that war is, rah rah rah, what the world needs now, it gives the rest of the Human Pack a subtle kind of permission. Was it Crowley who said, “What is not forbidden….is allowed?” Or is that a much older sentiment, amongst the Pack?

Or…these things could just run in cycles….or perhaps the events and consequences set in motion from one act of wanton lawless, senseless aggressive war making spread…like ripples?

You can certainly say that about this “small” act of war and chaos. Set in the Cradle of Civilization….where war most likely began as well. But in another, oddly? scarily? portentously? familiar location to the dogs of war, Belgrade, the sounds of barking are being heard again.

Standards, of decency, of behavior, of what is allowed…are set at the top. When war is not forbidden, it is allowed. When war is an option, that option will be exercised. When the Pack finally realizes that we do not NEED war, when WE stop allowing them…. perhaps then the pack can start to evolve, to move forward. But as long as we have Leaders who let slip the dogs at the first opportuity, the rest of the pack will follow.

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