Asked To Name Highest Moment In Office, Cheney Comes Up With '9/11'
by Jed L
Sun Dec 21, 2008 at 01:00:04 PM PST
Behold, the first thing to come into Dick Cheney's mind when asked to name the highlight of the Bush Presidency:
Transcript:
WALLACE: Highest moment the last eight years?
CHENEY: Hmmm. Highest moment in the last eight years? Well, I think the most important, the most compelling, was 9/11 itself, and what that entailed, what we had to deal with. The way in which that changed the nation, and set the agenda for what we had to deal with as an administration.
Wallace nudged the vice president to add that 9/11 was also the low moment of the Bush years, but it tells you something about the darkness of Cheney's mind that this was the first thing to come to his mind when looking for bright spots over the past eight years was 9/11.
Monday 22 December 2008
Asked To Name Highest Moment In Office, Cheney Comes Up With '9/11'
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Tuesday 9 December 2008
Story of Blackhawks compassion from http://nhlhomeice.com/wp/?p=1073
Story of Blackhawks compassion
In the middle of a grueling six game road trip where a very young
hockey team is away from home, the third game of the trip ends late on a
cold Canadian Saturday night. This is the only break on the trip and the
three days between games allow them the only break to get back home in
their own beds for a couple of days before going back on the road. A scheduled
commercial flight waits for them at Toronto’s International Airport for the
short flight home; they could be home by midnight. This plane departs on schedule,
but without a single member of the hockey team.
Back in the locker room a vote is taken after the game was complete,
and a unanimous decision is made by this young team to skip this flight and stay one more day.
They make arrangements to check back in the hotel and on a frozen Sunday morning charter two buses that have no heat and begin a journey two hours straight north into a sparsely inhabited Canada, but where hockey is its passion. They arrive at their destination to the surprise of
the teams general manager who is there attending his fathers wake.
After a few emotional hours, this team boards the buses and head back for a two-hour trip back to Toronto. On the way they ask the drivers to stop in a tiny Canadian town because they are hungry.
To the shock of the patrons and workers at this small hockey town McDonald’s, a professional team
walks out of two rickety buses and into the restaurant, which just happens to have pictures of two members of this team on its wall. The patrons know every single one of these players by sight being fanatic fans of hockey in these parts. One can only imagine their amazement of the locals seeing and
entire professional hockey team sit down and have a meal in their tiny little town in the middle of a hockey season. After a while they board the buses and catch their same flight 24 hours later, giving one day to their general manager.
Have I made this up, is this an excerpt from some fictional book? No this a true story of the Blackhawks last Saturday night and they decided to attend Dale Tallon’s fathers funeral. Its amazing that such a good story can be found nowhere on the internet, and not even mentioned in the Chicago
papers.
Had one of the Blackhawks got into a fight and punched some drunken loser in a Toronto bar it would be plastered all over papers and the television.
This being said, its hard to imagine any professional football, basketball or baseball team doing this, but the members of the Blackhawks claim any “hockey” team would have done this. This is one reason I continue to be a big hockey fan, and another reason I am excited about this Chicago
team.
I thought I would share as this story appears to have gone unnoticed.
Sunday 7 December 2008
Wednesday 3 December 2008
Win Ben Stein's mind
The Real piece is found here, this is just a cut and paste, I just happen to love what Roger has written here:
Win Ben Stein's mind
By
Roger Ebert
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.html
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I've been accused of refusing to review Ben Stein's documentary "Expelled," a defense of Creationism, because of my belief in the theory of evolution. Here is my response.
Ben Stein, you hosted a TV show on which you gave away money. Imagine that I have created a special edition of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" just for you. Ben, you've answered all the earlier questions correctly, and now you're up for the $1 million prize. It involves an explanation for the evolution of life on this planet. You have already exercised your option to throw away two of the wrong answers. Now you are faced with two choices: (A) Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or (B) Intelligent Design.
Because this is a special edition of the program, you can use a Hotline to telephone every scientist on Earth who has an opinion on this question. You discover that 99.975 of them agree on the answer (A). A million bucks hangs in the balance. The clock is ticking. You could use the money. Which do you choose? You, a firm believer in the Constitution, are not intimidated and exercise your freedom of speech. You choose (B).
Squaaawk!!! The klaxon horn sounds. You have lost. Outraged, you file suit against the program, charging it is biased and has denied a hearing for your belief. Your suit argues that the "correct" answer was chosen because of a prejudice against the theory of Intelligent Design, despite the fact that .025 of one percent of all scientists support it. You call for (B) to be discussed in schools as an alternative theory to (A).
Your rights have been violated. You're at wit's end. You think perhaps the field of Indie Documentaries offers you hope. You accept a position at the Institute of Undocumented Documentaries in Dallas, Texas. This Institute teaches that the rules of the "$64,000 Question" are the only valid game show rules. All later game shows must follow them literally. The "$64,000 Question" came into existence in 1955. False evidence for earlier game shows has been refuted by scientists at the Institute.
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You look for a documentary subject. You know you cannot hope to find backing from the Main Stream Media, because they all fear reprisals from the powerful Game Show Establishment. You seek a cause that parallels your own dilemma, and also illustrates an offense against the Freedom of Speech. Your attention falls on the persecution of Intelligent Design advocates like you, who have been banished from Main Stream Academia.
This looks like your ideal subject. But where can you find financing for such a documentary? You discover a small, promising production company named Premise Media. You like the sound of that word premise. It sounds like a plausible alternative to the word theory. To confirm this, you look both up in your dictionary:
premise noun. A previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion: if the premise is true, then the conclusion must be true. e.g., if God exists, then he created everything.
theory noun. A system of ideas intended to explain something, esp. one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained. e.g., Darwin's theory of evolution.
Your point exactly! You do a web search for Premise Media. Its co-founder, Walt Ruloff, has observed, "the scientific and academic communities were deeply resistant to innovation, in this case innovation that might revise Darwin's theory that random mutation and natural selection drive all variation in life forms." You could not agree more. Darwin's theory has been around for 150 years, and is stubbornly entrenched. This is a time for innovation, for drawing on fresh theories that life and the universe were intelligently created in recent times, perhaps within the last 10,000 years. How to account for dinosaur fossils? Obviously, dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as human beings.
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Dinosaurs walk the earth at the same time as Alley Oop.
Ben Stein, you are growing more excited. You continue your research into Premise Media. Its CEO, A. Logan Craft, once observed that questions about the origin of Earth and its life forms "are answered very differently by secularists and people who hold religious beliefs." Can you believe your eyes? Craft has depended upon one of your own favorite logical practices, the principle of the excluded middle! This is too good to be true.
By his premise no secularists believe in Intelligent Design, and no people with religious beliefs subscribe to Darwin's theory. If there are people with religious beliefs who agree with Darwin (Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Mormons, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, for example) they are mistaken because they do not subscribe to A. Logan Craft's religious beliefs.
He is certainly right about secularists. You think it's a shame he's right, because then the 1968 Supreme Court decision was correct, and Tennessee's anti-evolution law was "an attempt to blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, taken literally." Therefore, according to the Court, ID was a religious belief and did not belong in a science classroom but in a theology classroom. This clearly would be wrong, because the new approach to teaching ID in schools omits any reference whatsoever to religion. It depends entirely on the findings of scientists who are well-respected within A. Logan Craft's religious tradition. These scientists of course are perfectly free to be secularists, although almost every single one seems to be a fundamentalist Christian. This is America.
You meet with the people at Premise Media. It is a meeting of the minds. At a pitch meeting, they are receptive to your ideas, although with the proviso that you should change the proposed title of your film, "From Darwin to Hitler," because that might limit the market to those who had heard of neither, or only one.
You and Premise Media agreed that the case for ID had not always been argued very well in the past. For example, a photograph of a human footprint overlapping a dinosaur track (proof that Man walked the Earth side by side with dinosaurs) has been questioned by secularists, who say the footprint looks more like the print of a running shoe. If you studied it carefully, it could be argued that they had a point, although skewed by their secularist bias.
What was needed was better use of photographic evidence. For example, in your film, "eXpelled: no intelligence allowed," you document the story of Guillermo Gonzales, who was denied tenure at Iowa State because of his personal premises, after 400 professors signed a petition opposing "all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor." Gonzales was forced to accept employment at Grove City College, an evangelical Christian school in Grove City, Pennsylvania.
In documenting the secularist hysteria and outrage against Gonzales, you use more convincing photographic evidence than the footprint. For example, you use footage showing a newsstand selling copies of the New York Post with this front page headline:
CRISIS:
1. Creationist on the loose
2. Support the Petition
3.Stop Gonzales
The typographical design of the New York Post logo, the cars and store signs in the background, and the clothing of the people in the street establish without question that this footage was filmed in the late 1940s. Gonzales was born in 1963. So your film would prove beyond doubt that his enemies walked the Earth with his parents.
darwinape.jpg
Charles Darwin, caught in the act of evolving from a monkey
Gonzales, trained as an astronomer, cited as proof of Intelligent Design that "Earth is in a prime location for observing the universe." Thus he refutes the theory of elitist secularist academia that the universe "does not have an edge nor center, just as the Earth's surface does not have an edge or center." Since all you have to do is look up at the sky to realize that the whole universe is right up there to be seen, the secularists fly in the face of common sense. Yet for stating such an obvious premise, Gonzales was opposed for tenure at Iowa State. That hit home, Ben Stein. He was a victim like you.
You release your film "eXpelled."As you fully expect from all your experience, it is rejected almost unanimously by the MSM. It receives an 8% rating on the TomatoMeter, earning it a place on the list of the worst-reviewed films of all time. In a review not catalogued by Tomatoes, ChristianAnwers.net writes that your film "has made Ben Stein the new hero of believers in God everywhere, and has landed a smart right cross to the protruding jaw of evolution's elite."
Again, the useful excluded middle. Those for whom Ben Stein is not a hero are not believers in God. It also follows that the phrase "believers in God everywhere" does not extend to believers in God who agree with Darwin. So ChristanAnswers has excluded two middles at one fell stroke.
Let's hope that word doesn't get back to the bosses of the critic named "Yo" at hollywoodjesus.com. Yo takes a chance by saying:
This creator could have been anything of intelligence, including aliens. Intelligent Design is a scientific movement, not a religious one, a fact stated more than once in interviews in this film. Unfortunately, those statements are constantly ignored as 'Expelled' continually brings up the question of God's existence and thereby equates the movement with a belief in God.
And right there, Ben Stein, we can clearly see Yo's error. He has included the middle.
Here is Stein's most urgent question: "How does something that is not life turn into something that is?"
Stein poses this stumper to a jolly British professor who seems direct from Monty Python. He thinks there's a "very good chance" that life might have started with molecules on crystals, which have a tendency to mutate. Cut to a shot of a turbaned crystal-ball gazer. Stein dubs them "joy riding crystals." He wonders what the odds would be of life starting that way.
"You would have to have a minimum of 250 proteins to provide minimal life functions," an ID defender explains. We see an animated cartoon of the Darwinian scientist Richard Dawkins pulling at a slot machine and lining up--three in a row! Not so fast there, "Lucky" Dawkins! The camera pulls back to show one-armed bandits stretching into infinity. To win, he'd have to hit the jackpot about a gazillion times in a row. An Intelligent Design advocate estimates a streak like that would take a trillion, trillion, trillion tries. (That number is a fair piece larger than 3 trillion.)
Quite a joy ride. ID's argument against the crystal theory seems like a new version of its classic argument, "How could an eye evolve without knowing there was anything to see?" Very easily, apparently, because various forms of eyes have evolved 26 different times that scientists know about, and they can explain how it happened. So can I. So can you if you understand Darwinian principles.
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Anyway, the slot machine conundrum is based on an ignorance of both math and gambling. From math we know that the odds of winning a coin toss are exactly the same every time. The coin doesn't remember the last try. Hey, sometimes you get lucky. That's why casinos stay in business.
The odds of winning on a single number at roulette are 37 to 1. The odds of winning a second time in a row are also 37 to 1, because the table doesn't know who you are. Every single winning roll beats the odds of 37-to-1. And on and on. The more times in a row you win, the more times you face 37-1 against you. If Russian Roulette were played with a gun containing 37 bullets and one empty chamber, it would quickly lose most of its allure--by a process explained, oddly enough, by Darwin.
Still, in July 1891 at Monte Carlo, the same man broke the 100,000 franc bank at a roulette table three times. Wikipedia reports, "A man named Charles Wells won 23 times out of 30 successive spins of the wheel...Despite hiring private detectives the Casino never discovered Wells's system. Wells later admitted it was just a lucky streak. His system was the high-risk martingale, doubling the stake to make up losses."
The odds against Wells doing that are pretty high. But as every gambler knows, sometimes you do actually hit a number. You don't have to do it a trillion trillion trillion times to be a winner. You only have to do it once. This is explained by Darwin. If you are playing at a table with other gamblers and you win $100 and none of them do, you are just that much better able to outlast them as competitors. When the casino closes, one person at that table must have won more than any of the others. That's why casinos never close. Of course if you gamble long enough, you will eventually lose back more than the others. Your poor spouse tells you this. You know it is true.
But tonight you feel lucky. If you leave the table still holding your pot, you could become as rich as Warren Buffett. Somebody has to. Look at Warren Buffett. Evolution involves holding onto your winnings and investing them wisely. You don't even have to know to how to hold onto your winnings. Evolution does it for you; it is the bank in which useful genetic mutations deposit themselves. There is a very slow rate of return, but it's compounded. At the end of one eon, you get your bank statement and find your pittance has grown into an orang utan. At the end of the next eon, it has grown into Charles Darwin. Scientists, at least 99.875 percent of them, believe that in the long run only useful mutations deposit in this bank. Those mutations with no use, or a negative effect, squander their savings in a long-running bunko game, and die forgotten in the gutter.
The assumption of "Expelled" is that no one could possibly explain how Prof. Monty Python's molecules and their joy-riding crystals could possibly produce life. As luck would have it, at about the same time as the film was being made, teams of scientists at the universities of Oregon and North Carolina explained it. They "determined for the first time the atomic structure of an ancient protein, revealing in unprecedented detail how genes evolved their functions."
"This is the ultimate level of detail," said the evolutionary biologist Joe Thornton. "We were able to see exactly how evolution tinkered with the ancient structure to produce a new function that is crucial to our own bodies today. Nobody's ever done that before." Unfortunately, this momentous discovery was announced almost too late to be mentioned in Ben Stein's film. It wasn't totally too late, but it would have been a great inconvenience for the editor.
What tools did the scientists use? Supercomputer programs and, I quote, "ultra-high energy X-rays from a stadium-sized Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago to chart the precise position of each of the 2,000 atoms in the ancient proteins." What did you expect? They put a molecule under a microscope and picked off bits with their tweezers?
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Richard Dawkins: Rafting the River out of Eden
Intelligent Design "scientists" in "Expelled" are offended by being called ignorant. When Stein points out that "Catholics and mainstream Protestant groups" have no problem with the theory of Evolution, he is informed by an ID advocate, "liberal Christians side with anybody against Creationists." Now we have the smoking gun. It is the word liberal. What is the word liberal doing here? The Theory of Evolution is neither liberal nor conservative. It is simply provable or not.
Besides, I would not describe the Vatican as liberal. Look how cautiously it approached Galileo. He only claimed the earth revolved around the sun. No big deal like the earth being ideally placed in the universe. There are millions of conservative scientists, and only a tiny handful disagree with evolution, because rejecting scientific proof is not permissive conservative behavior. In that one use of the word "liberal" the Creationist religious agenda is peeking through. I would translate it as "evolutionists side with anybody against a cherished Evangelical belief." Why are they always trying to push evolutionists over the edge, when they're the ones clinging by their fingernails?
Scientists deserving of the name would share the delight of 99.975 percent of his or her colleagues after learning of the Oregon-North Carolina findings. Then, if they found a plausible reason to doubt them, they would go right to work hoping to win fame by disproving them. A theory, like a molecule, a sea slug and a polar bear, has to fight it out in the survival of the fittest.
"Expelled" is not a bad film from the technical point of view. It is well photographed and edited, sometimes amusing, has well-chosen talking heads, gives an airing to evolutionists however truncated and interrupted with belittling images, and incorporates entertainingly unfair historical footage, as when it compares academia's rejection of Creationism to the erection of the Berlin Wall.
Hilariously, the film argues that evolutionists cannot tolerate dissent. If you were to stand up at a "Catholic and mainstream Protestant" debate and express your support of Creationism, you would in most cases be politely listened to. There are few places as liberal as Boulder, Colo., where I twice debated a Creationist at the Conference on World Affairs, and yet his views were heard politely there. If you were to stand up at an evangelical meeting to defend evolution, I doubt if you would be made to feel as welcome, or that your dissent would be quite as cheerfully tolerated.
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Ben Stein and the author of "On the Origin of Species"
In the film, Ben Stein asks predictable questions, and exploits an unending capacity for counterfeit astonishment. Example:
Scientist: "But Darwin did not title his book On the Origin of Life. He titled it, On the Origin of Species."
Ben Stein (nods, grateful to learn this): "I see!"
The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn't even subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we see a makeup artist carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins' face. After he is prepared and composed, after the shine has been taken off his nose, here comes plain, down-to-earth, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.
I have done television interviews for more than 40 years. I have been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Everyone is made up before going on television. If they are not, they will look like death warmed over. There is not a person reading this right now who should go on camera without some kind of makeup. Even the obligatory "shocked neighbors" standing in their front yards after a murder usually have some powder brushed on by the camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to roll while Dawkins was being made up? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on earth would have taped that. That incident dramatizes his approach throughout the film. If you want to study Gotcha! moments, start here.
That is simply one revealing fragment. This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.
And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actually did want to title it "From Darwin to Hitler." He finds a Creationist who informs him, "Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism." He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.
Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one "result" of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. "As a Jew," he says, "I wanted to see for myself." We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. "It's difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place," he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.
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Auth (c) 2005 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reprinted by permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.
Sunday 30 November 2008
Freedom From Speech Editorial Wed. Nov 26, 2008
Freedom From Speech
Editorial
Wed. Nov 26, 2008
http://www.forward.com/articles/14624/
The United Nations saw another shred of its tattered dignity stripped away
November 24, when a committee of the General Assembly approved what amounts
to a direct assault on Western liberal democracy. In an 85-50 vote, with 42
abstaining, the so-called Third Committee adopted a resolution, submitted
by a caucus of Islamic nations, to criminalize expressions deemed to be
“defamation of religion,” with special concern for Islam. All U.N. member
states would be called on to amend their criminal codes accordingly. The
measure’s next stop is the General Assembly, where it is expected to win
handily, probably in December.
The U.N. is no stranger to assaults on decency and common sense. Indeed,
the new ban on religious defamation is essentially a restatement of a
measure approved by the General Assembly last year but barely noticed at
the time.
What makes this year’s resolution different, and more dangerous, is that it
is supposed to move on from the General Assembly to another forum, where it
might acquire real teeth: the second World Conference Against Racism,
Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, scheduled to
convene next April in Geneva.
Many legal scholars believe that the decisions of international conferences
of this sort can be incorporated into international law, putting them under
the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Individual nations
could not be forced to amend their laws, but they might find Interpol
knocking at their doors, serving them extradition requests to hand over
their cartoonists and novelists. Stand-up comics and philosophers might
find they’re unable to cross international borders for fear of being
arrested and remanded for trial in Jordan or Malaysia.
The Geneva conference is planned as a follow-up to the first world
conference against racism, which took place in early September 2001 in
Durban, South Africa. That meeting did some serious work, but it was
memorably upstaged by a parallel gathering of nongovernmental activists,
who staged a noisy show of anti-Israel and antisemitic speech-making,
rallies and parades, all under U.N. auspices. And, of course, a week later,
on September 11, 2001, all hell broke loose.
The years since then have not been kind to the spirit of reconciliation
supposedly invoked at Durban. It has been a decade of intense friction
between the West and the Muslim world, of invasions and terrorism, of
cartoon wars, eavesdropping, beheadings, Guantanamo and intifada. The
religious defamation ban is part of an effort by Muslim nations to retake
the initiative. The resolution, which is being pushed by the Organization
of the Islamic Conference, is seen as winning back some of Islam’s lost
stature in world opinion and offering some protection to Muslim minorities
in increasingly suspicious Western societies. The idea, it seems, is to
reduce Western suspicion of Islam by outlawing criticism.
The Muslim charm campaign also features an escalation of hostility toward
Israel. The package of resolutions prepared for debate and adoption in
Geneva breaks new ground in diplomatic Israel-bashing. It accuses Israel of
crimes against humanity, of practicing “a new kind of apartheid” and —
apparently for the first time in a formal document — “a form of genocide.”
It’s a risky game the Islamic countries are playing. They may have
overestimated the strength of its automatic majority at the U.N. The
resolution on religious defamation, for example, failed to win a majority
in the committee this year and passed only by a plurality. That is, a
majority of U.N. members refused to support the Islamic nations’ proposal,
a rare setback. The 85 votes the ban did secure represent a sharp decline
from last year, when the same measure received 108 votes.
Also facing unexpected resistance is the anti-Israel draft language.
Efforts are underway to organize a Western boycott of the Geneva conference
if the anti-Israel language is not softened. Canada has already announced
plans to stay away. On Capitol Hill, Jewish and black representatives are
working together to line up support in the administration and in various
African capitals to reject the defamation ban. France is flatly threatening
to stay home if the anti-Israel language is not changed, and French
President Nicolas Sarkozy is said to be reaching out to other European
leaders to close ranks.
Surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is leading its own behind-the-scenes effort,
with moderate Arab states, to soften the anti-Israel language and prevent a
Western boycott, according to several close U.N. watchers. Saudi King
Abdullah is said to view the extreme anti-Israel rhetoric as an Iranian
ploy to alienate the West and sabotage the conference. Abdullah favors
cooperation with the West, and he fears Iran. That’s why he’s offered his
own peace plan, convened an inter-religious dialogue and invited Israeli
President Shimon Peres to his recent New York tolerance forum. Abdullah
can’t boycott Geneva, but he can work quietly within the Islamic bloc to
cut out the worst Israel-bashing. But he needs something to show the folks
back home that he is defending the faith. Some diplomats speculate that he
might accept a ban with fewer teeth.
If Europe, America and their close allies were to skip Geneva en masse, the
conference would become a gathering of Third World nations rather than a
world forum, and the proceedings would lose their significance. That would
hurt sub-Saharan Africa, where the Durban process is cherished as a
long-delayed acknowledgement of African suffering under colonialism. The
prospect of a boycott, then, puts pressure on the Africans to find a way of
softening their Muslim allies’ stance.
No one, however, has more to lose than Europe. European leaders view the
Durban process as a form of penance for their role in Africa, and they’re
anxious to see progress at Geneva. On the other hand, Europe is home to
large and restive Muslim minorities, and the clash of cultures puts
tolerance to the test daily. Friction between traditionalist and sometimes
militant Muslims and the freewheeling societies of Denmark and the
Netherlands has already led to crisis and bloodshed. Legislating absolute
protection for religious sensibilities without equal protection for
secular, democratic beliefs would tilt the playing field against the
European democracies as they struggle to defend their values on their own
home turf. But holding firm could undermine Abdullah, arguably the best
hope for reconciliation.
Friday 24 October 2008
The Republican voter fraud hoax
The Republican voter fraud hoax
Donald Duck and the Dallas Cowboys won't steal the election for Obama. Acorn's only crime is registering Democratic voters
Barack Obama and the Democrats are stealing the election. Massive voter fraud is being carried out, even as we speak, by their henchmen, known by the innocuous sounding Association for Community Organisations for Reform Now, or Acorn. Clever bastards.
The only problem? Despite the screaming wall-to-wall coverage of "Democratic voter fraud in 11 swing states" as seen on Fox News and even the once-respectable CNN, none of it's true. None of it.
In just the last week, we've had a phoney stunt raid in swing state Nevada (where Acorn had been cooperating with officials for months, concerning problem canvassers they'd long ago fired); a Republican election official in swing state Missouri tell Fox News that she's being beseiged with fraudulent registration forms from Acorn (in a county where they've not done any registration work since August); a Republican sheriff in swing state Ohio, who, the very next day, suddenly requested the names and addresses of hundreds of early voters (with evidence of exactly zero wrong doing, but lots of Democratic-leaning college student in the particular county, and John McCain's state campaign chair as a partner in the investigation); and a screaming front page headline in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post about a guy who claims he was somehow tricked by Acorn into registering 72 times (but read the article closely to note he says he registered at the same address each time, which, even if true, would allow him - you guessed it - precisely one legal vote.)
It's an old Republican scam, but it's never been carried out with more zeal than this year. The Republicans have been putting so much time, money and resources into the propaganda leading up to this over the last four years, we should have expected no less.
As luck would have it, the Democrats have a man who, as an attorney years ago, actually had the temerity to join the US department of justice in representing Acorn in a successful lawsuit, forcing the state of Illinois to follow the law by allowing citizens to register to vote at the department of motor vehicles. What a scoundrel.
That, of course, was before the department of justice, under George Bush's corrupt command, would itself become politicised by the very Republicans so desperate to keep low-income voters from voting, that they were willing to fire their own US attorneys for failing to bring phoney charges of voter fraud in key swing states like Nevada and Missouri.
So what are the crimes that have caused all the Sturm und Drang on US television and talk radio, and in several otherwise respectable newspapers and even by the McCain campaign itself?
The only actual crime here is that Acorn managed to register some 1.3m low-income (read: Democratic-leaning) voters over the past two years. The rest is, pretty much, just made up.
But in the bloody and desperate trenches of the Republican war on democracy, that's more than enough to kick in a last minute surge of lies that may - with the help of a compliant and lazy corporate US media - wreak enough havoc, scare enough voters, confuse enough people and plant enough seeds to call an Obama victory into doubt on November 4.
If you can't win it, steal it. If you can't steal it, claim the other guy stole it. If you can't claim the other guy stole it (yet), say they're about to and then kick up smoke that maybe someone will believe you. (Heckuva job, CNN.)
Here are the facts. Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic ("fraudulent", "incomplete", et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by Acorn, it's because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming "Acorn is committing fraud" know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.
You'll hear that Donald Duck, Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse and (new this year) the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team have all had fraudulent registrations submitted in their names. That's true. And we know this, why? Because Acorn told officials about it when they followed the law and turned in those registrations, flagged as fraudulent.
What you won't hear is that federal law requires anybody who does not register to vote in person at the county office to show an ID when they go to vote the first time. So, unless Donald Duck shows up with his ID, he won't be voting this November. You needn't worry, no matter how much even John McCain himself cynically and dishonourably tries to mislead you.
If it quacks like a duck, in this case, it's likely another Republican Acorn voter fraud lie. They haul it out every two years.
Just days before the 2004 presidential election, rightwing whack job Michelle Malkin claimed that Acorn was registering terrorists to vote in swing state Ohio. Problem was, that was a lie.
In 2006, again just days before the election, the new US attorney in swing state Missouri (recently appointed, since the one before him refused to bring such charges), filed voter fraud indictments against Acorn workers in the state. Problem was, bringing election-related indictments that close to an election was a violation of the department of justice's own written policy. And Acorn had nothing to do with it, other than turning in the employees to officials.
Getting the picture? It's a hoax. All of it.
But it's been an effective one, as it's served to distract from very real concerns about tens of thousands of voters who have been illegally purged from the voting rolls in dozens of states, as the New York Times reported in a remarkable front page investigative story. That story followed a report the week before from CBS News detailing still more wholesale purges of voting rolls in some 20 states.
That will be the November surprise, when thousands, if not millions show up to vote only to find they are no longer welcome to do so and are forced to vote on a "provisional ballot" which may or may not be counted.
These real concerns of election fraud, such as voting roll purges, electronic voting machines that don't work and so much more that actually matters, have been obscured by the smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand of the Republican party's phoney Acorn voter fraud charade.
And where they can, they'll parlay it all into new photo ID restrictions at the polls (knowing full well that some 20m, largely Democratic-leaning voters don't own the type of ID they'd need to jump over that next Republican hurdle.)
Yet, with all of the unsubstantiated, wholly bogus claims of voter fraud being carried out by Democrats, there remains at least one case of absolutely ironclad, documented, yet still-unprosecuted case of voter fraud that, for some reason, Republicans don't much like to talk about.
We can only wonder why.
Tuesday 21 October 2008
Iraqi MPs demand changes to US troop withdrawal agreement
From
October 21, 2008
Iraqi MPs demand changes to US
The Iraqi Cabinet dealt a blow today to a draft agreement to allow US forces to stay in
The nature of the amendments were not specified, but Iraqi MPs said there are concerns about the lack of a guaranteed date for US forces to withdraw. Another worry is whether Iraqi courts would in practice be able to try US soldiers who commit serious crimes. There are even gripes about differing interpretations in parts of the
The Cabinet's decision, following a five-and-a-half-hour meeting, is a major setback for the Bush administration, which wants to seal the accord before a United Nations Security Council mandate, authorising the presence of foreign forces in the country, expires on December 31.
It is also a problem for
Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi Government spokesman, said: "The Cabinet has agreed that necessary amendments to the pact could make it nationally accepted."
Ministers would continue to discuss the issue over the coming days, he said, adding that they "will give their opinions and consult and provide the amendments suggested. Then this will be given to the American negotiating team". No timeframe was offered on when this would happen.
The draft text, which sets out a conditions-based timeline for US troops to pull out of cities by next summer and leave
The demand for changes further delays the approval process, throwing into question whether an agreement will be finalised by the year-end deadline. The deal should originally have been struck by the end of July. Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister, was quoted saying that it would not be approved by Parliament, which has the final say, before the
As a last resort,
Revealing the extent of concern about the accord, Humam Hamoudi, a leading member of parliament from the majority Shia alliance, said Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, was among those voicing doubts in recent days.
"The Prime Minister said: what [the Americans] have given with the right hand they have taken away with the left hand," Mr Hamoudi told a news conference. "For example, they said the
Another problem was translation. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish MP, said there were different interpretations of certain sections written in Arabic and English. Demands have been made for the Arabic and US translations of the text to match more accurately, he added.
Kurdish MP Adil Barwari, a member of the defence and security committee in the Iraqi Parliament, said that MPs were also worried about the chance of Iraqi territory being used to threaten neighbouring countries, something that
"In addition, there is some ambiguity about some of the articles and we want clarifications from the American side. For example how will a
The only way a
Mr Barwani, like most Kurdish MPs, however, supports the pact in its current form, noting that he wanted "to have it today better than tomorrow".
Admiral Michael Mullen, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
He added: "In that regard there is great potential for losses of significant consequence."
In a show of force against the pact at the weekend, tens of thousands of Iraqi followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shia cleric, marched through the streets of Baghdad , demanding that
All this after the following article days earlier:
Oct 16 Time Online.
US bows to Iraqi demands over troop withdrawal
(Thaier al-Sudani/Reuters)
If a deal is not reached by December 31, US troops will have no legal status
According to US and Iraqi officials, negotiators from the two sides have agreed the wording of a draft document that will redefine radically the relationship between the 150,000
The deal, yet to be approved by Iraqi leaders, the Cabinet and parliament, must be in place by December 31, when the existing UN Security Council mandate expires.
An agreement between the two sides would open the way for a separate arrangement to allow 4,000 British Forces and other smaller coalition members to remain in
The US State Department confirmed that a “text” was being considered but that it was not finalized. “Nothing is done until everything is done. Everything isn’t done,” a spokesman said. “The Iraqis are still talking among themselves. We are still talking to the Iraqis. The process is not complete.”
The document stipulates that US forces must be out of Iraqi cities by mid-2009 and leave the country altogether by the end of 2011, unless the Iraqis ask them to stay. “The withdrawal will be achieved in three years,” Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi government spokesman, said. “In 2011 the government at that time will determine whether it needs a new pact or not, and what type of pact will depend on the challenges it faces.”
By far the most contentious issue is the question of immunity, which American forces and Pentagon civilian contractors currently enjoy. Mr al-Dabbagh said that from January 1 Iraq would be able to prosecute US troops if they committed crimes outside their bases while off duty or on unauthorised missions. They could be held under US custody but would have to appear for questioning by Iraqi investigators and for trial in an Iraqi court.
Iraqis have been enraged by a series of atrocities committed by US forces, who in their eyes appeared to get away with murder. In the most notorious case a 14-year-old girl was raped and killed by US paratroopers and three members of her family murdered in Mahmoudiya, south of
If a deal is not in place by the end of the year, US forces would have no legal status and would be confined to barracks until they could be withdrawn. The other alternative is simply to roll over the UN Security Council resolution, though
While an agreement now seems more likely, it is by no means sure. Hardline Iraqi Sunni and Shia Muslim groups, who want all foreign forces out of the country immediately, are expected to vote against the agreement.
The new agreement reflects the increasingly prominent role played by the 600,000 Iraqi soldiers and police in securing their country. However, American firepower, particularly in the air, remains a decisive weapon in the battle against the insurgency.
Yesterday US forces claimed to have killed Abu Qaswarah, a Moroccan national and al-Qaeda’s second in command in
Later the Swedish police said that a Swedish man of Moroccan origin, who had links to al-Qaeda’s leadership, was also killed in northern
Wednesday 8 October 2008
Money trouble... for whom?
So the worlds Banks are in trouble. Amazing. 1000's, no hundreds of 1000's of intelligent people could not see this coming in every major capitalist country? The IMF, World Bank and more over the Banks of these nations clearly need to anwer how and why we could allow nations to borrow til they lose their shirts.
Or think of it this way. That 1% of the Richest people, who own the IMF, World Bank, they run the Federal reserve and dish out loans to nations allowed this to happen. Like loan sharks knowing that once you've borrowed to much the house and car and everything you own is theirs, these greedy money lenders will own countries and not just Banks soon enough.
Check out from Freedom to Fascism on google video or your tube. Then research the History of the Federal Reserve and how when the economy goes like this wealth flows to the top each time.
After all "money" is just a way for all of us to try and fairly allow each to earn their own keep. So if the "people" of the world said, ok.. no one anywhere has debt, lets start over who would lose? Why only those who own the money.
*****************************And now for the play, the reality they call it.. of news********
http://www.spiegel.de/flash/0,5532,19052,00.html
CAPITALISM IN CRISIS
The Broken Pact with the People
By Dirk Kurbjuweit
Trust capitalism and shun government interference we were told. But irresponsible bankers saw a chance to get rich quick and went for it. Their failure has become ours -- and the promise of a common good has evaporated along with faith in democratic capitalism.
Germany has taken to the skies. It is 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 2 and the Luftwaffe Airbus A310 -- Germany’s equivalent of Air Force One -- took off half an hour ago from Berlin’s Tegel Airport. The plane is heading east, destination Saint Petersburg, Russia. Crew members are serving the usual copious breakfast, including omelets, meat, cold cuts, cheese and honey.
On board are many of the people who determine Germany’s position in the world: the German chancellor and six ministers, the heads of major German corporations like Siemens, Deutsche Bahn and E.on, and a number of journalists. There are no bankers on the plane, but they play the leading role in everyone’s mind and in the discussions taking place.
After breakfast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel invites the journalists up to the front of the aircraft for an off-the-record chat with the press. Everyone squeezes into a small room, 25 people in all, standing, sitting cramped together, some of them even on the floor. “The microphone isn’t working again,” says the chancellor to start things off.
She talks about Russia and then addresses the financial crisis. The sound of a toilet flushing can be regularly heard. The aircraft’s lavatory juts into the conference room. It is an earnest discussion. The journalists ask questions in a serious manner and the chancellor responds in kind. Every word resonates concern.
Poker for the Politicians; Blackjack for the Journalists
At the same time, Economics Minister Michael Glos is conferring with the heads of German companies. Here as well everyone is deadly serious, solemn and concerned. The atmosphere on board this Airbus is enough to imbue an observer with confidence: Germany seems to be in good hands and the problems can be solved.
But we could also paint a very different picture. We could throw out the rows of seats and replace them with gambling tables, poker up front for the politicians, roulette in the middle for the corporate executives, and blackjack in the back for the journalists. Everyone has taken off their jackets and loosened their ties. Beads of sweat have formed on some foreheads and tension fills the air. Nobody wants to land. They will play until they crash.
Would this picture be entirely wrong? Or does it contain a kernel of truth?
One thing is clear: The world seems to be teetering on the brink of disaster because a few people have been on a big-time gambling binge. They have lost their stake on bad loans and now banks are collapsing, companies are facing a liquidity crunch, investors are losing their savings and a recession is looming.
This time around, though, there is more hanging in the balance than just the cyclical ups and downs of the economy. This time fundamental issues are at stake. Is a market economy nothing more than an invitation to engage in excessive gambling? And what about the democratic principles that are so closely linked with the market economy, a concept that was used by the West to achieve dominance over the world? This vision of democracy is also at risk.
Suddenly, everything seems possible. Nobody knows which banks will suffer a meltdown and what will be the consequences for the real economy. Nobody knows how big a risk the Wall Street gamblers have taken. That’s what makes the situation so frightening. It’s as if we were riding in a small dinghy on an African lake. They passengers know that crocodiles are lurking in the water, but they don’t know how many there are, nor can they determine the size of the beasts.
Welfare for Banks
Now the challenge is to keep people from losing all faith in the markets, to prevent panic from erupting. Success here also depends on whether the actors and observers of global events -- company executives, politicians and journalists -- take things seriously or whether they too are basically just gamblers.
These days, it is hard to recognize the world as we thought we knew it. A large number of American financial institutions have sought protection from the state, and now the US government has taken action to keep the country’s entire financial sector above water. An entire country, Iceland, threatens to go bankrupt. In Germany, Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück has had to save Hypo Real Estate in a hastily organized bailout operation, and Josef Ackermann, the CEO of Deutsche Bank -- a man who was once a high-flying champion of capitalism -- has been calling for the government to launch a rescue package, which is paramount to providing welfare to banks.
INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC
The insanity of the situation becomes clear when we look back to the years 2003 to 2005. At the time, then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the center-left Social Democrats pushed through his Agenda 2010 reform package. Long-term unemployment payments were scrapped. Those who lost their job knew that time was short before benefits would shrink to those mandated by the new welfare plan known as Hartz IV.
During those years, the economic debate was dominated by true-blue capitalists who sought to limit government intervention. This was the heyday of a neo-liberal ideology that placed its faith in the strengths of the individual and the free market. The word “government” became virtually synonymous with harassment, suffocation, inefficiency and a lack of freedom. Deregulation was the magic formula of the day.
Trust Us
This was the theme music -- played by politicians, business people and journalists -- that accompanied Agenda 2010, an orgy of black-and-white thinking that glorified the individual and demonized the state.
But Agenda 2010 was the right approach. The reforms didn’t go too far; actually, they should have gone even further. They should have harnessed the political momentum at the time to prepare Germany's healthcare and convalescent care systems for the challenges of the future.
Agenda 2010 was a deal between politicians and industry on the one side and the unemployed and workers on the other side. The deal went like this: It might be painful, we are taking away some safeguards, but you will receive something in return. Waiving those benefits will boost the economy, trigger growth and create jobs. Trust us, trust this deal, said the politicians and the captains of industry.
At first, it looked as if this new deal would be a success. Over the past few years, Germany’s economy has been growing stronger again and the number of unemployed has fallen from 5.2 million in February 2005 to 3 million in September 2008. This success can be attributed to Agenda 2010 and to workers’ willingness to settle for lower wages.
Part 2: The Crocodiles Below the Surface
Nevertheless, doubts started to creep in over the fairness of the deal’s implementation. Real wages stagnated while investment income and corporate profits soared. At the same time, the gap between rich and poor continued to grow, causing the middle class to shrink.
The gamblers have eroded confidence in both capitalism and democracy.
In the German press, the word "American" became shorthand for greed. Many managers demanded “American” salaries of over $10 million (€7.25 million) a year. They targeted “American” earnings for their companies. Ackermann aimed for profits of 25 percent. German savers were recommended to take an “American” approach to their investments. Saving accounts and government bonds were passé and investing and gambling with stocks was all the rage because it held out the promise of higher returns.
German business practices were frowned upon as conservative and narrow-minded. Sexy investments required a no-holds-barred attitude and a willingness to play the markets and take risks. Let’s be like Americans -- that was the guiding principle for German banks and top company executives. They gleefully played along with what was done on the other side of the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, they also purchased those wonderful securities that had something to do with American homeowners and promised such rewarding returns.
A Gigantic Bubble
German bankers became gamblers. They joined the investment game that had begun in America. They bought securities that had long since lost any connection to economic realities. They flourished in their own world, a virtual world of numbers that continuously grew and created a gigantic bubble.
The players in the game lost touch with reality. Many Americans wanted to own homes, although they couldn’t afford them. When these people received loans, it was a dodgy business. That is actually not difficult to understand, but it failed to sound the warning bells for gamblers who were out to make huge profits out of those risks.
INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC
A caller to a Berlin radio station recently ranted about “29-year-old banking snobs.” This immediately calls to mind a certain image: well-dressed people with perfectly styled hair who are intelligent and eager to change the world. But there was so much out there already, all kinds of derivatives and securitizations -- those products that have a direct connection with the real world were, by definition, invented long ago.
Anything new had to be even further away from reality. But it wasn't difficult for those eager new bankers to come up with something new once they set their minds to it -- and soon the world had another product that nobody needs, hardly anyone understands. But one that was floated on the market for the sole reason that it was there -- and, of course, because it promised to generate wealth. That is how a brave new world is created.
What followed, though, was a horror scenario of a globalization process taking place on two levels. There is a real level that consists of a greater exchange of goods which comes along with a more intense competition for jobs, prosperity and the rights to use the world’s resources. This may seem frightening enough for the individual, although it may be unavoidable and legitimate.
Clandestine Masters of Globalization
But the other level is truly uncanny. This is the lake with the crocodiles. You can’t see a thing; the surface of the lake is smooth. But a lot is happening down in the murky water. The banking snobs have surreptitiously spun their web; they have used sales in countries around the globe to forge links -- silently, uncontrolled, electronically. They are the clandestine masters of globalization. They have created another world, a secret one.
It is not until this world collapses that we notice that its existence. By then, of course, it’s too late. Since everything is interconnected, the catastrophe immediately takes on global proportions.
At least some of the banking snobs are brought down by the calamity. There are pictures of them walking out of their office skyscrapers with boxes in their arms. But the bankers who manage to remain quickly adjust. They have learned to be flexible, and what was true yesterday is simply no longer true today. They require protection, they need help from the government and, of course, they have no qualms about asking for it.
A number of German bank managers are outraged that the German government has not immediately launched an initiative to save them all. They have never been modest, so why start now? They of course know that there is an enormous fear of a huge crash. So they brazenly dance on the limb that they themselves have started to saw. And naturally they have no problems with the fact that Depfa, a bank that moved to Ireland to lower its tax bill, should now be saved with German tax money.
Now the greatest skeptics of government intervention will receive state aid, which is probably even a wise move because nobody knows what would happen if a large German investment house were to collapse. Buy why is there no humility, no modesty, no apology for all these monstrosities?
And what does someone think who has lived on a modest income over the past five years and has been unable to shake off his fear of unemployment? He has kept his side of the 2003 deal; he didn't really have a choice. A low income amid rapidly rising energy prices, a life on the edge of Hartz IV, a real hard life.
The End of the Deal
But now the virtual world is flowing into the real one and the crocodiles are crawling onto land. A recession is looming. It could be that the banking snobs have gambled away this man's job. That is tantamount to a deal breaker for an agreement that was already fairly shaky. It would spell the end of the deal of 2003.
What would be the consequences?
This man will never become a friend of globalization. It will remain a total mystery to him, a dark force. Now he won’t want to help shape globalization.
Nor will he agree to a new deal. Why should he? He has lost his faith in the system. But there will have to be another deal because the next recession will throw the budget into turmoil again and increase the cost of providing social services. If there is an attempt at a new deal, he will take to the streets and demonstrate.
It was hard enough pushing through Agenda 2010. But the current crisis is making Germany virtually unreformable. Now nobody will follow politicians who say that you have to do good things for the economy so that everyone benefits. People will laugh out loud should anyone say that freedom leads to the best results.
It is no coincidence that gamblers have created this chaos, people who fabricate unreal worlds where they can seek their happiness. The gambler is one of today’s most predominant types. He is the Internet freak who blasts away in online games or writes love letters under a false identity. He is the athlete who takes performance-enhancing drugs although he knows about the doping controls.
Politicians, though, are also gamblers -- ones who take pleasure in gambling with power. That, though, is particularly worrisome because it is now up to the politicians to clean up the mess left by the financial gamblers.
Political games go like this: Last Thursday in Saint Petersburg, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was unhappy when he came back from the working lunch of the German and Russian delegations: “The protocol of the chancellery has its way, don’t ask me how.” He was upset because he wasn't allowed to sit at the table with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the chancellor.
A Landing in the Real World
Steinmeier felt insulted, and perhaps the chancellery actually did pull a fast one, but don’t they have other problems? Now? In a time of crisis?
Politicians are also very skilled at building their own world, a virtual world of power plays where they feel so at home that progress in the real world becomes difficult. Of course power struggles belong to politics, but with the current governing coalition pairing the Social Democrats with Merkel's conservatives, the ruling parties sometimes give the impression that politics consists of nothing else.
And of course, the criticism comes from a glass house. In the media there are also plenty of gamblers who are not necessarily interested in fairness and accuracy.
While we teeter on the brink of disaster we might reflect on the fact that for politicians, bankers, business people and the media, there is a second challenge more important than that of rising up the career ladder: We also need to secure democracy and the free market economy.
Bringing the state and the world of business and finance into balance with the right amount of control and freedom would be an important step toward attaining this objective. But none of this is possible without a word that is not particularly exciting, and even a bit old-fashioned: seriousness.
So, out go the gambling tables and in with the rows of seats again in the Luftwaffe’s Airbus A310, and fasten your seatbelts for landing -- in the real world.
*******************************************************************************If it were not so serious I could laugh.
Bagdag 5 Years On
| http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1370/60/ |
| Thursday, 07 August 2008 | |
| Produced by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad Source: Brave New Films This video drops a major asterisk on the so-called "success" of the surge in Iraq touted by John McCain, George Bush, and many other conservatives. If violence has declined, it is largely because the U.S. military has carved up cities like Baghdad with miles of 12-foot tall concrete walls. So while there may be stability at the moment, these barriers have separated Sunnis and Shias without improving their living conditions, isolating them in a desperate situation. Which leads me to ask how long such stability can possibly last? Part 2 of this report that looks at a makeshift cemetery and victims of militia violence. One of Baghdad's killings fields on the edge of Sadr City. The scene of thousands of sectarian murders over the last three years, it is a desolate and evil place. "Only the killers and the killed ever come here," says Abdul-Ahad. Here in the thousands of unmarked graves lie the victims of militia gangs. And part 3 focuses on the lost generation of Iraqi children who have been affected by this war. An orphanage in Sadr city, where children speak of their hatred of America. A generation of Iraqi children have been radicalised and anti-westernised by the war. |
Saturday 20 September 2008
Demise Of Al-Qaeda Leader Championed For Second Time
Demise Of Al-Qaeda Leader Championed For Second Time
February 1, 2008 by xxfeareffectxxU.S. government, corporate media celebrate death of man they told us had been captured three years ago, succeed in out-Orwelling George Orwell
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, February 1, 2008
The death of “senior Al-Qaeda leader” Abu Laith al-Libi is being celebrated by Neo-Cons as a reason for continuing the endless war on terror - absent one crucial detail - the corporate media widely reported that another “senior Al-Qaeda leader” named al-Libi had been arrested back in May 2005. The American people have been fooled again in another case of mass public deception.
There was much lip-smacking and high-fiving three years ago about how the capture of “Al-Qaeda number three,” a certain Mr. Al Libi, would lead to crucial information about Al-Qaeda’s plans and even the whereabouts of fabled Goldstein mirage Osama “bin dead for years” Laden, presumably after al-Libi had received the proper welcome from the land of the free in the form of fifty thousand volts shooting through his genitals.
In actual fact, the al-Libi that had been caught was Abu Faraj al-Libi, not Abu Laith al-Libi . Abu Faraj al-Libi was described as Al-Qaeda “flotsam jetsam” by the London Times , ie some semi-retarded goatherder shoved onto the front lines under the threat of a beheading - and not the fearsome Laith al-Libi, third in command behind Al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden. This mattered little to 99% of the corporate media, who enthusiastically championed the arrest as a key victory in the war on terror and justifications that the “arrest of Al-Qaeda number three showed we are making progress” spewed forth from every Neo-Con orifice.
No clarification, no retraction - the American people were fooled into thinking their tax dollars were helping to rip apart the command structure of Bin Laden’s evil terror network and the propaganda was regurgitated ad infinitum for weeks on end.
Fast forward nearly three years to 2008 and the media celebrates the death of the same “senior Al-Qaeda leader” they told us was captured in May 2005, a man third in command behind Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri named al-Libi. Perhaps we should commend them on spelling his middle name correctly this time around, but who knows, maybe al-Libi the third will pop up in a couple of years and we can all listen to Neo-Con hacks rant about how it’s such a defining moment for the war on terror again.
The New York Times reports on “Senior Al-Qaeda leader” al-Libi’s arrest in May 2005.
“Senior Al-Qaeda leader” al-Libi’s demise championed again three years later!
This callous deception and the way in which it just keeps being re-applied boggles the mind. They have succeeded in out-Orwelling George Orwell. At least in 1984, the proles were told they were at war with East Asia one year and the next year they were fighting Eurasia - at least the names changed!
In this hyper-twilight zone dystopia, the architects are quite happy to recycle the same names over and over again without anyone calling them on it. How many times was al-Zarqawi captured or killed before he was finally dead? I ended up losing count.
Why do they resort to such base propaganda? To the average dumbed-down zombie, an al-Libi in 2005 and then another one in 2008 is readily accepted and consumed without question, they are none the wiser. To anyone that actually follows the news however, it acts as a blunt instrument to gradually batter them into propaganda fatigue, to the point where it’s academic to raise a fuss because you know they’ll just pull the same trick again a few years down the line.
We’ve become conditioned to accept logic being turned upside down and reality altered when it suits the propagandists’ timetable.
No matter how many times they claim the same Al-Qaeda leader has been killed or captured, we need to continue to attack this assault on common sense for the farce it is, lest we be continually subjected to the manufactured delusional smoke and mirrors propaganda that veils the reality of the fact that the war on terror is a ridiculous hoax.
Wednesday 10 September 2008
Stay Focused, they bet you won't !
Stay focused. Each day that passes, bills add up. Friends come and go. The boss asks for extra work. The Governments change, the faces fade. The evidence fades, the news moves on and the truth is buried in a mountain of time and experiences of life. But never forget, forever forever remember the 11th of september !!!
Monday 8 September 2008
The Political Cartel Of Republicrats and Democrats
The Political Cartel Of Republicrats and Democrats
Whenever the religious adherent of partisan affiliations attempts to "convert" me to their creed, I direct him or her to a quote from an obscure book entitled Tragedy and Hope. In this book, Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigley writes, "The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea. Instead the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy…It should be able to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which … will still pursue with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."
In truth, the purpose of a two party system is the maintenance of a political cartel. Within such a framework, viable alternatives are overlooked and the same logically bankrupt status quo remains enshrined. To qualify this contention, I will briefly examine one major issue that occupies the mind of the voter: the war. To be sure, this is not the only point of convergence for the Democrats and Republicans, but it is one of the most transparently fraudulent dichotomies on the political landscape. The dominant perception holds that Republicans are "hawks" while Democrats are "doves." However, history does not bear out this dualistic portrait.
It was Republican President William Taft who endeavored to keep America out of unnecessary and costly wars. Now, under the sway of Jacobin-esque neoconservative warmongers, the Republican Party supports militaristic campaigns abroad and a meddlesome interventionist foreign policy. A natural correlative of this ongoing war has been the expansion of an already burgeoning government. Gee, aren't Republicans supposed to oppose Big Government?
Look for more of the same with a McCain presidency. John McCain has candidly stated that the so-called "War on Terror" could last a hundred years. This statement carries with it some truly Orwellian implications. Those who have read 1984 will recall the centrality of perpetual war to the maintenance of a police state. In light of the unprecedented infringements on civil liberties facilitated by the Patriot Act, it would appear that dystopian fiction is becoming an ominous reality. Historically, external threats have provided an expedient pretext for the dismantling of individual freedoms.
This contention was eloquently synopsized by James Madison in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. In that letter, Madison wrote, "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad."
Meanwhile, the Democrats are no more devoted to preventing needless wars than the Republicans. Howard Dean supported the Clinton Administration's military intervention in Bosnia, which represented a blatant violation of the country's national sovereignty. Worse still, Dean advocated further unilateral intervention because he was dissatisfied with the multilateral action taken against Bosnia. Ironically, the same political Left decried America's unilateral initiation of military action against Afghanistan and Iraq after September 11. Oh, yes, and lest we forget, Hillary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq. Now, this Democratic presidential candidate decries the war in Iraq as though she had had nothing to do with it. Hmmm. Methinks such protestations are just a little bit disingenuous, especially when Hillary vows to destroy Iran if it should go to war with Israel.
And, no, Barack Obama will not bring the troops home. To be sure, Obama has promised a lot of things, but America's withdrawal from Iraq is not one of them. In fact, Obama has pledged to maintain a military presence in Mesopotamia to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing a foothold there. Behind Obama's messianic facade is the same imperial hubris endemic to the Republican Party.
Such hypocrisy is nothing new. During his presidential debate with George W. Bush, Kerry chastised the Commander-in-Chief for the quagmire of Iraq. Simultaneously, he admonished audiences about the supposed threat of Syria. Evidently, the antiwar mantras of the Democrats amount to little more than empty rhetoric. They are simply more selective about who they rattle their spears at. One must wonder if the political Left would have objected to the war in Iraq if it had been initiated multilaterally by the United Nations instead of the United States. For some inexplicable reason, in the Leftist mind, war attains a euphemistic veneer when its combatants are adorned with blue helmets and armbands.
In a recent article, Robert Kagan correctly observed that "In 2008, as in almost every election of the past century, American voters will choose between two variations of the same worldview."
What is that worldview? The answer is sociopolitical Utopianism. Both parties are committed to tangibly enacting their anthropocentric vision of "heaven on earth." War represents one point of convergence between the two because, from their Enlightenment universalist perspective, war is an instrument for the exportation of democratism. Many of those Democrats and Republicans who don't subscribe to this worldview attach themselves to those that do for purely pragmatic purposes. In fact, many Democrats and Republicans even share membership in organizations devoted to dismantling national sovereignty and amalgamating America in some form of global governance (e.g., the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission). Of course, they either forget or ignore all those who stand to lose from globalization. Besides, you and I are just uneducated citizens who don't know what's good for us. This paradigm represents the nadir of Utopian fanaticism.
So, who should America vote for in 2008? Here's an idea… someone who will restore the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. What a concept! Such a lofty mandate is conspicuously absent from the party platforms of both the Republicrats and the Democans. Ultimately, the choice is not about left or right, but right and wrong.
About the Author
Phillip D. Collins acted as the editor for The Hidden Face of Terrorism. He co-authored the book The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship, which is available at www.amazon.com. It is also available as an E-book at www.4acloserlook.com. Phillip has also written articles for Paranoia Magazine, MKzine, News With Views, B.I.P.E.D.: The Official Website of Darwinian Dissent and Conspiracy Archive. He has also been interviewed on several radio programs, including A Closer Look, Peering Into Darkness, From the Grassy Knoll, Frankly Speaking, the ByteShow, and Sphinx Radio.
In 1999, Phillip earned an Associate degree of Arts and Science. In 2006, he earned a bachelor's degree with a major in communication studies and liberal studies along with a minor in philosophy. During the course of his seven-year college career, Phillip has studied philosophy, religion, political science, semiotics, journalism, theatre, and classic literature. He recently completed a collection of short stories, poetry, and prose entitled Expansive Thoughts. Readers can learn more about it at www.expansivethoughts.com.
