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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
| Time |
Event |
| 1:11a |
Michael Gordon needs killing
WHICH MILITIA?.... (by Kevin Drum at Political Animal, the Washington Monthly)
Michael Gordon has a piece in the New York Times [Monday] passing along charges from (anonymous) American sources that (a) Hezbollah is in Iran training Iraqi militia fighters and (b) Iran is providing weapons to these militias. Are these charges true? Who knows. Gordon, unfortunately, has a longstanding reputation for repeating official U.S. narratives almost verbatim, so all we really know is that this is something the military and the Bush administration want us to believe… However, Laura Rozen points out … that "the Gordon piece strikingly doesn't tell us WHICH militia the captured Shiite militants who had trained in Iran belonged to." That's true… We're obviously meant to believe that Iran is exclusively training and supplying Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, not the Badr militia associated with the Iraqi government, but if that's the case then why not just say so? There hardly seems to be any reason to leave this detail out unless it's not actually true.
MAKETHEMACCOUNTABLE | | 2:28a |
Boycott Beijing
China to investigate Google for illegal maps: official media
BEIJING (AFP) - China has launched an investigation into online mapping services by Internet giants including Google and Sohu in an effort to protect state secrets and territorial integrity, state press said.
Australia warns China over visa restrictions
HONG KONG (AFP) - China should be aware of the difficulties new visa restrictions could cause for businesses ahead of the Olympics, Australia’s foreign minister said on Tuesday.
Doctors punished in China for mishandling deadly virus outbreak: Xinhua
BEIJING (AFP) - Ten doctors and officials in China have been punished for mishandling a virus that has killed 26 children, state media reported as the number of infected youngsters rose to more than 12,000. | | 2:45a |
Time bandit
Some of these posts aren't synched right - this will come good in time.
Things are pretty dead in the anarchist scene anyway so I'm learning a little basic FTP and HTML stuff.
Thoughts on the present crisis?
Crisis? What crisis? | | 2:56a |
Lady trapped by a tinpot military dictatorship
Years spent under house arrest. Kept locked down by superstitious, paranoid fascist dictators...it can't have been much fun for Laura Bush.
Burma [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
My eyebrows raised, too, when I saw Mrs. Bush yesterday, but I'm not sure it was a sign we're doomed (there are plenty of other much more worrisome signs afoot!). As for why she may have been tapped as spokesFirst Lady on the issue:
Laura Bush told reporters that her deep interest in Burma was sparked by reading the works of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest and has spent 12 of the past 18 years in some form of confinement. She said the president will sign legislation today awarding Suu Kyi the Congressional Gold Medal, a move that could further stoke tensions between the two countries.
Bush said awarding Suu Kyi the gold medal will "let the people of Burma know that the United States is standing with them." END
FREE LAURA!
In Burma they say George Orwell wrote three books about Burma
Burmese days
Animal Farm
and 1984 | | 3:15a |
Three witches fair and foul
Clare Sterling - Laurie Mylroie and Judith, Judith, Judith
Daniel Pipes - '...I met Mylroie in 1984 and we hit it off. We especially agreed on the need to bolster Iraq at a time of Iranian offensives against that country, even writing a joint article in The New Republic in 1987 on this subject, "Back Iraq: It's Time for a US Tilt." As late as 1991, I favorably reviewed her jointly-authored book with Judith Miller, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf.
But the shock of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait left Mylroie with a monomania about the Iraqi dictator that encroached on her judgment and eventually overturned her good sense. After the invasion, she self-hijacked a hitherto-promising career to prove two bizarre assertions: that Saddam Hussein had a hand in virtually every terrorist incident and, conversely, that Islamists and others did not have a part in them. She broke with many friends who disagreed with blaming nearly all problems on Saddam. As Peter Bergen put it in 2003,
In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the ‘93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot...'
PAUL WOLFOWITZ - his Shoddy, Loopy, Zany Theories – Exposed
The debate over who was most responsible for convincing the nation that there was a link between Saddam and 9/11 will probably continue for years but an important piece of the puzzle can be found by zeroing in on a woman by the name of Laurie Mylroie, that most people have probably never heard.
Mylroie had been pushing for an all-out war against Iraq for a decade. In the run-up to the first Gulf war, Mylroie, along with the recently fired New York Times reporter Judith Miller, wrote a book titled, "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf."
The original Iraq war obsession originated at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think-tank that served as a home base for the many neocons who were rendered powerless during the Clinton years such as Richard Perle, who became chairman of the Defense Policy Board under Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz, who moved into the number-2 position at the Pentagon, and Newt Gingrich and John Bolton, to name just a few.
In 2000, at a time when Dick Cheney sat on AEI's board, the group's publishing arm put out a book by Mylroie titled, "A Study in Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America."
In the author's acknowledgement section of the book, Mylroie thanked a familiar case of characters, including John Bolton and the staff of AEI, for their assistance. She also wrote thanks to Scooter Libby for his "generous and timely assistance."
Mylroie noted that Paul Wolfowitz was instrumental to her in writing the book and said, "At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She said that Wolfowitz's wife (at the time), had "fundamentally shaped the book."
Neocon, Richard Perle, described the book as "splendid and wholly convincing,"
If Mylroie is to be believed, Saddam was involved in every anti-American terrorist event that took place since the early 1990s, from the bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which she says may have been "the work of both bin Laden and Iraq," to the federal building in Oklahoma City.
She also accuses Saddam of involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center even though the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the US Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State Department, all determined that there was no evidence of the Iraq's involvement in the attack back in the mid-1990s.
Mylroie has also claimed that the TWA flight 800 which crashed into Long Island Sound is a likely Iraqi plot even after a lengthily investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined that it was an accident.
She maintains that in 2000, Saddam provided the expertise for the bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors, even though no law enforcement agency has ever made such a claim. She even blames Saddam for the anthrax sent through the mail shortly after 9/11.
Once Bush became president, the neocons were brought back into power as either members of the administration or members of the influential Defense Policy Board and war against Iraq became the administration's obsession, with Mylroie and the hawks working hand and hand to promote the theory that Saddam was involved in every terrorist act against the US over the past decade.
After the attacks on 9/11, the race towards Iraq was on, and Mylroie's book was reissued by Harper Collins under the new title, "The War Against America." The foreword for the second edition was written by Woolsey, who described her work as "brilliant and brave."
The book's cover displayed an endorsement from Paul Wolfowitz which stated: "Provocative and disturbing ... argues powerfully that the shadowy mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing ... was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence."
In the book's acknowledgment, Mylroie thanks Wolfowitz for being "kind enough to listen to this work presented orally and later to read the manuscript. At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She also praised the assistance of John Bolton.
Now, a nutcase like Mylroie, if left to her own devices, would probably have been harmless. But when the neocons made her a consultant to the Pentagon, the position granted grossly misplaced credibility to her hair-brained conspiracy theories.
The evidence that the hawks really believed her theories can be seen in their statements and actions following September 11. Shortly thereafter, Woolsey was dispatched to the United Kingdom on an extraordinary trip, apparently sanctioned by Wolfowitz, to check out a key aspect of Mylroie's argument about Yousef. During the early '90s, Abdul Basit, the Pakistani whose identity Yousef had supposedly assumed, attended a Welsh college to study electrical engineering. Mylroie writes that Basit was quite different in appearance from Yousef, thus further proving her contention that Yousef was a substitute, a fact that could be proved by visiting Basit's former college in Wales. As Woolsey has made no comment on his trip to the United Kingdom, it's fair to assume that his efforts to replicate these findings did not meet with success. However, around the second anniversary of 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney continued to echo Mylroie's utterances when he told NBC's Tim Russert that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.
Mylroie's research and expertise on Iraq complemented the big-think strategizing of the neocons, and a symbiotic relationship developed between them, as evidenced by the garlands that the neocons bestowed upon her for her work. Wolfowitz gushingly blurbed Study of Revenge: "[Her] provocative and disturbing book argues that…Ramzi Yousef, was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence. If so, what would that tell us about the extent of Saddam Hussein's ambitions? How would it change our view of Iraq's continuing efforts to retain weapons of mass destruction and to acquire new ones? How would it affect our judgments about the collapse of U.S. policy toward Iraq and the need for a fundamentally new policy?" (How, indeed…) James Woolsey, another prominent Iraq hawk who headed the C.I.A. between 1993 and 1995, also weighed in: "Anyone who wishes to continue to deal with Saddam by ignoring his role in international terrorism…and by giving only office furniture to the Iraqi resistance now has the staggering task of trying to refute this superb work." Study of Revenge was reissued after 9/11 as The War Against America, Woolsey contributing a new foreword that described Mylroie's work as "brilliant and brave."
Witch. When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
2 Witch. When the hurlyburly ’s done,
When the battle ’s lost and won.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair. | | 3:32a |
You were always on my mind How 'Horse Tranquiliser' Stops Depression, According To New Study ScienceDaily (May 6, 2008) — Researchers have shown exactly how the anaesthetic ketamine helps depression with images that show the orbitofrontal cortex – the part of the brain that is overactive in depression – being ‘switched off’.Ketamine, an anaesthetic that is popular with doctors on the battlefield and also with vets because it allows a degree of awareness without pain, is a new hope for the treatment of depression – but the minute-by-minute images produced by Professor Bill Deakin and his team show how the drug achieves this in an unexpected way. The drug deactivates the orbitofrontal cortex – located above the eyes, in the centre – which is thought to give rise to highly emotional thoughts such as guilt and feelings of worthlessness and causes reactions in visceral body parts such as a churning stomach and a racing heart. MORE ON http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080506112416.htmhttp://www.freethinkermatch.com/Atheist link-up site MyFreeImplants.com Offers Free Breast Surgery Website MyFreeImplants.com matches up women who want breast implants with people who want to help fund the surgeries. Malaysian blogger charged with sedition KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - A prominent Malaysian blogger was charged Tuesday with sedition for allegedly implying the deputy prime minister was involved in the sensational killing of a young Mongolian woman. You were always on my mind | | 3:58a |
Stealthnet News - 24th Apr, 2008 - Freenet 0.7.0 release candidate 2 now available Freenet version 0.7 Release Candidate 2 is now available for public testing. Release Candidate 2 features many bugfixes and a number of usability improvements. Freenet is a global peer-to-peer network designed to allow users to publish and consume information without fear of censorship. To use it, you must download the Freenet software, available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other operating systems. Once you install and run Freenet, your computer will join a global, decentralized P2P network. You will be able to publish and consume information anonymously, either through your web browser, or through a variety of third party applications. Freenet 0.7 is a ground-up rewrite of Freenet. The key user-facing feature in Freenet 0.7 is the ability to operate Freenet in a "darknet" mode, where your Freenet node will only talk to other Freenet users that you trust. This makes it much more difficult for an adversary to discover that you are using Freenet, let alone what you are doing with it. 0.7 also includes significant improvements to both security and performance. Freenet 0.7 RC2 can be downloaded from: http://freenetproject.org/download.htmlThis release would not have been possible without the help of numerous volunteers, and Matthew Toseland, Freenet's full time developer. Matthew's work is funded through donations via our website (as well as a few larger sponsors from time to time). We ask that anyone who can help us to ensure Matthew's continued employment visit our donations page and make a contribution at: http://freenetproject.org/donate.html | | 4:14a |
| | 4:35a |
Their morals and ours
Russian proletarian doomsday cult abandoning bunker,"While more than half have left their tomb-like cave and emerged squinting and blinking into the new day, some few remaining continue their litany of strange announcements. Here are just a few...
a) That Lenin saved the feudal imperialist empire during all the wars of 1918-22.
b) That the Bolshevik bureaucracy saved Russia during the same period. ( an obscure book is waved here)
c) That one man dictatorship was forced on comrade Lenin by anarchist plots.
d) That the Red Terror was needed to shock-and-awe the lower class peasants
e) That the CHEKA really saved Russia
f) That the Ukraine was an ultra-left infantile place overrun by bandits when it was liberated by the Red Army of mostly conscripts.
g) That inviting American aid in while selling wheat overseas was Lenin's finest hour in the first Holodomor.
e) That Leon Trotsky was the 'Angel' of Kronstadt.
f) That Nationalism and Bolshevism are the most natural things in the world.
g) And what with both Trotsky and Rosa Luxemberg in favor what could go wrong with farm collectivization?
What was a few million historic exceptions when most were rich Kulaks anyway?
h) When can we have our Red Marxist Kool-Aid back anyway? Four legs good - Two legs bad
We have always been at war with Oceania bin Laden too. Finally Marshall Tuchachevsky only ever used chemical weapons in a nice working-class way." | | 6:32a |
Democrat or Mafia?
Just 16 months into his four-year-term, Ohio's attorney general admitted he was in over his head as he acknowledged an affair with a subordinate and his failure to stop problems that led to a sexual harassment investigation that brought down three of his aides.
Marc Dann apologized to his wife and supporters but insisted he would not step down. He took responsibility for the scandal, saying he was not prepared for the office or to run such a large agency.
"I did not create an atmosphere in my public and personal life that is consistent with the important mission of the Office of Attorney General," the Democrat said Friday after the three aides were fired or forced out in the harassment investigation. "I am heartbroken by my failure to recognize the problems being created and by my failure to stop them."
Dann had punted the probe to a well-respected lieutenant, state Sen. Ben Espy. The investigation uncovered a seedy underside to the office rife with booze, profanity, inappropriate sexual activity, misuse of state vehicles and on-the-job threats involving the Mafia. | | 7:47a |
| | 10:08a |
Government just doesn't work
FBI Raids Home, Office of Office of Special Counsel
By Paul Kiel - May 6, 2008, 1:13PM
From The Wall Street Journal:
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided the Office of Special Counsel here, seizing computers and documents belonging to the agency chief Scott Bloch and staff.
More than a dozen FBI agents served grand jury subpoenas shortly after 10 a.m., shutting down the agency's computer network and searching its offices, as well as Mr. Bloch's home. Employees said the searches appeared focused on alleged obstruction of justice by Mr. Bloch during the course of an 2006 inquiry into his conduct in office.
The independent agency, created by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal, is charged with protecting federal employees and deciding whether their complaints merit full-scale investigation -- a first line of defense against fraud and mismanagement in government. It also enforces a ban on U.S. employees engaging in partisan political activity.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Mr. Bloch had used "Geeks on Call," an outside computer-service firm, to erase his computer and those of two former staff members in December 2006....
The computer erasures became part of that investigation and are one of the reasons behind today's raid, employees said.
To refresh your memory, Bloch's agency is a little known one that is charged with investigating whistleblower complaints, Hatch Act violations, and the like -- but who is himself being investigated for retaliating against whistleblowers and politicizing his office. The Office of Personnel Management's inspector general has been conducting that investigation since 2005. The feds are apparently investigating whether Bloch tried to obstruct that investigation by deleting his hard drive, among other things.
To give you an idea how fraught this investigation is with unique issues, Bloch is not only busily investigating the White House for political briefings Karl Rove and his aides made to various agencies, but he's also conducting an investigation of the politicization at the Department of Justice and issues related to the U.S. Attorney firings -- a probe that he complained was being blocked by the DoJ. Of course, he can't do much to block the DoJ investigation of him.
Update: NPR, also reporting on the raid, reports that the entire's office email system was shut down this morning.
TALKING POINTS MEMO
Steve Bracks call yr custodiats office. | | 10:14a |
Rumster diving
Pentagon Report on Iraq Debacle "Remains Classified"
By Paul Kiel - May 6, 2008, 3:54PM
Earlier this week, I noted an excerpt from the new book by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, where he told how Donald Rumsfeld had ordered a report by the Joint Warfighting Center of the bungled occupation of Iraq, but when Rumsfeld got the results, he'd ordered it squelched.
Sanchez writes that he was told by one of the people who'd done the study that when they'd presented their findings to Rumsfeld, he'd "just shut us down" and said "This is not going anywhere." According to Sanchez, the report validated his account that the entire Pentagon leadership knew that he'd had inadequate support when he'd been in command of the U.S. forces in Iraq after the fall of Hussein. It also showed that Gen. Tommy Franks had discarded the original plan, which called for a twelve-to-eighteen-month occupation deployment.
Sanchez added: "From that, my belief was that Rumsfeld's intent appeared to be to minimize and control further exposure within the Pentagon and to specifically keep this information from the American public."
Susanne Moore, media operations chief at the Joint Forces Command, told me today that the report actually had been finished and published in late 2006 -- but that it "was and remains classified."
So why is a historical report classified? "It has all the earmarks of an abusive classification," Steve Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy Project, told me. "The report has been publicly characterized as an embarrassing document, and an allegation has been made by an informed source that the motive for withholding was to avoid embarrassment and disgrace, which of course is not a legitimate use of the classification system. So it demands further investigation by Congress to get to the bottom of it." - TPM
Its not illegal when Skeletor does it. ' Oh General Myers would you hand me that X report on torture please?...whats that?...the interrogation dog ate it? Sorry congresspersyn X' | | 10:20a |
Bondi trams
And Staten Island ferries
NYDN ...( via TPM )
A hammered Vito Fossella and a stumbling drinking buddy were asked to leave a Washington bar hours before the Staten Island congressman was busted for drunken driving, witnesses said Monday.
...
Employees at the Logan Tavern said Brian, whose last name they did not know, passed out at the bar after arriving with Fossella.
Fossella roused his pal, who made it to the men's room, where he passed out again in a chair outside the bathroom door. Tavern staff woke Brian, who returned to the main room and promptly belly-flopped onto a table, Hahn said.
"The table's base was broken," Hahn said. "They offered to pay for it, but we said, 'That's all right, just leave.'"
Hahn said he helped the men to the street and flagged down a cab for them. It's unclear if the two men got into the cab or walked off, possibly to Fossella's car.
( Where Fossella was arrested for driving drunk while getting his wing-wang squeezed. BLUTO LIVES! ) | | 10:41a |
The last supper
A dozen morons gather around a loser
Yes, I Know [Jonah Goldberg]
In response to my earlier post, about a dozen readers have written to tell me that Rosie O'Donnell's assertion about Tuskegee is inaccurate. Yes, I know. Now which of you freeping goopers is going to email me on my vacation? Which one of you will betray me? | | 10:46a |
L’État c’est McCain
laissez le bon temps rouler President Pepe Le Peu!
Boeing vs. EADS [David Freddoso]
A few months back, I argued that John McCain had done the right thing in stopping a bad Boeing tanker lease deal in 2001, even if that meant the Air Force would ultimately this year award the tanker contract to Airbus's parent company, EADS. Subsequently, Dave Bossie argued the other side of the case. ( Google)
Monsieur Jean-Claude Le McCain c'est bon! | | 10:55a |
22 thousand dead Gooks - thats cute
Half of them should also be cunts - even cuter
Mrs. Bush on Burma [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Cute e-mail:
I think Mrs. Bush spoke out in an attempt to help Hillary by reminding voters how integral the First Lady is to policy in the White House.
Okay, I don't truly believe that. But it's fun to think of Mrs. Bush being part of Operation Chaos. | | 12:14p |
The squirting G-spot located Its not where you think Abstract Fliess, an ENT surgeon, was Freud’s closest friend and confidant. They both believed that sexual problems were the chief cause of neurosis. Fliess postulated that eflex nasal neurosis was based on the important physiological connection between the nose and the genitals. He described specific genital spots located on the nasal inferior turbinate. Fliess’ second preoccupation was with vital periodicities. He believed that the symptoms of his reflex nasal neurosis followed regular 28-day cycles as does menstruation. He further proposed a male 23-day menstrual cycle, that he centred specifically on the nasal turbinate. Clearly, Fliess’ fanciful theories of neurosis based on the turbinates have never held any scientific validity and are presented for their curiosity. This eccentric rhinolaryngologist, however,exerted a profound influence on Freud’s conception of human development, that is often undervalued. (Published Online March 8 2006) http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=402696Key Words: History of Medicine; 19th Cent; Nose; Genitalia. | | 1:03p |
Foucault and Deleuze Default and you lose Foucault and Deleuze considered harmful. The Halley's comet that is John Zerzan sometimes throws a little light down for us...from http://www.primitivism.com/postmodernism.htm'Pessimism'? Or ...The celebration of impotence! Foucault makes no reference to social groups, but focuses entirely on systems of thought. A further problem arises from his view that the episteme of an age cannot be known by those who labor within it. If consciousness is precisely what, by Foucault's own account, fails to be aware of its relativism or to know what it would have looked like in previous epistemes, then Foucault's own elevated, encompassing awareness is impossible. This difficulty is acknowledged at the end of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), but remains unanswered, a rather glaring and obvious problem...' AND '...The topic of power, in fact, was a central one to Foucault and the ways he treated it are revealing. He wrote of the significant institutions of modern society as united by a control intentionality, a "carceral continuum" that expresses the logical finale of capitalism, from which there is no escape. But power itself, he determined, is a grid or field of relations in which subjects are constituted as both the products and the agents of power. Everything thus partakes of power and so it is no good trying to find a `fundamental', oppressive power to fight against. Modern power is insidious and "comes from everywhere." Like God, it is everywhere and nowhere at once. Foucault finds no beach underneath the paving stones, no `natural' order at all. There is only the certainty of successive regimes of power, each one of which must somehow be resisted. But Foucault's characteristically pm aversion to the whole notion of the human subject makes it quite difficult to see where such resistance might spring from, notwithstanding his view that there is no resistance to power that is not a variant of power itself. Regarding the latter point, Foucault reached a further dead- end in considering the relationship of power to knowledge. He came to see them as inextricably and ubiquitously linked, directly implying one another. The difficulties in continuing to say anything of substance in light of this interrelationship caused Foucault to eventually give up on a theory of power. The determinism involved meant, for one thing, that his political involvement became increasingly slight. It is not hard to see why Foucaultism was greatly boosted by the media, while the situationists, for example, were blacked out. Castoriadis once referred to Foucault's ideas on power and opposition to it as, "Resist if it amuses you -- but without a strategy, because then you would no longer be proletarian, but power." Foucault's own activism had attempted to embody the empiricist dream of a theory- and ideology-free approach, that of the "specific intellectual" who participates in particular, local struggles. This tactic sees theory used only concretely, as ad hoc "tool kit" methods for specific campaigns. Despite the good intentions, however, limiting theory to discrete, perishable instrumental `tools' not only refuses an explicit overview of society but accepts the general division of labor which is at the heart of alienation and domination. The desire to respect differences, local knowledge and the like refuses a reductive, totalitarian-tending overvaluing of theory, but only to accept the atomization of late capitalism with its splintering of life into the narrow specialties that are the province of so many experts. If "we are caught between the arrogance of surveying the whole and the timidity of inspecting the parts," as Rebecca Comay aptly put it, how does the second alternative (Foucault's) represent an advance over liberal reformism in general? This seems an especially pertinent question when one remembers how much Foucault's whole enterprise was aimed at disabusing us of the illusions of humanist reformers throughout history. The "specific intellectual" in fact turns out to be just one more expert, one more liberal attacking specifics rather than the roots of problems. And looking at the content of his activism, which was mainly in the area of penal reform, the orientation is almost too tepid to even qualify as liberal. In the '80s "he tried to gather, under the aegis of his chair at the College de France, historians, lawyers, judges, psychiatrists and doctors concerned with law and punishment," according to Keith Gandal. All the cops. "The work I did on the historical relativity of the prison form," said Foucault, "was an incitation to try to think of other forms of punishment." Obviously, he accepted the legitimacy of this society and of punishment; no less unsurprising was his corollary dismissal of anarchists as infantile in their hopes for the future and faith in human potential...' A shabby testimony for deconstruction, considered in any way as a moment of the anti-authoritarian, Zerzan says of Derrida and the De Man scandal - but it applies just as much, if not more to this Sharia-ist, halalist fraud Foucault. As for Deleuze - the fact is his work has already been used to attack anarchists and Palestinians. In a rather longish thread at SF IMC around 2003 about Venezuela a rather florid and violent Leninist style attack was made by Al Giordano ( with 'Nessie' that vile reptilian slithering about in support) against the El Libertario anarchists. Al Geraldo specifically mentioned the 'nomad war machine' as being 'exterior to the state apparatus', and making that a feature, not a bug, of the Peronist/Leninist red army of Hugo Chaves. This thread was lost in a fire at the SF IMC but I have copies that are available on request. It may seem petty to bring up an old 'cyber' polemic like this but what happened then was far more ominous...it turned out the IDF was using this 'nomad war machine' text as a virtual manual for attacking the righteous Intifada! No anarchist should be unaware of the fundamentally reactionary - if not left-fascist - bourgeois ideologies of Karl Marx/ Engels and Sigmund Freud/Fliess. This ideological imperialism permeates post-modernism imho. The same Bakuninist critique of Marxism applies to post-modernism and the same authoritarian bourgeois types are attracted to both rancid ideologies. Trad Marxism has given up on 'scientific socialism' and so the long march through the bourgeois institutions finally gave us this abortion. Thank fuck most academics have woken up to this scam and dumped it. And so long as it remains in the dumster then we may pick over it and detourn the odd phrase of concept. Language is a dynamic business and we have to express anarchist ideas in the best idiom to communicate them. That makes us the scientific socialists. The open source political operating systems experts. Our reputation capital - not positions of authority - is our reward for hard work. To sum up - If Foucault and Deleuze are the answer...then what was the frikkin' question again? | | 1:43p |
Mayday Indonesia Mayday About 200 Anarchist in Indonesia called Jaringan Anti-Otoritarian (Anti-Authoritarian Network) get arrested by the police when they attack the biggest corporate company in Indonesia in front of "Wisma Bakrie", Jakarta. The police was so brutal and arrest them into jail, but the police already let them free on the same night. And another 200 front line Anarchist in Jakarta called Komunitas Bendera Hitam (Black Flag Community) suceed to made a Long March around Jakarta to celebrate World's Labour Day. On the banner written "KAMI TIDAK BUTUH BOS TAPI BOS BUTUH KAMI" (WE DON'T NEED BOSS BUT THE BOSS NEED US). We also yelled out some slogans, like: - MayDay is an Anti-Capitalism Day!! - Down with Authority!! - Smash The State!! - Fair Trade, Not Free Trade!! - Smash IMF n WTO!! The action involved: - Anarchist - Punx - Syndicalist's Labour - Bomber - Street Artist - Slingshoter Here's some pics from our movement: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2008050604370826 Welcome to Infoshop News Wednesday, May 07 2008 @ 12:09 AM CDT MayDay in Jakarta, Indonesia 2008 Tuesday, May 06 2008 @ 04:37 AM CDT Contributed by: joshua_core Views: 82 Anarchist Movement About 200 Anarchist in Indonesia called Jaringan Anti-Otoritarian (Anti-Authoritarian Network) get arrested by the police when they attack the biggest corporate company in Indonesia in front of "Wisma Bakrie", Jakarta. The police was so brutal and arrest them into jail, but the police already let them free on the same night. And another 200 front line Anarchist in Jakarta called Komunitas Bendera Hitam (Black Flag Community) suceed to made a Long March around Jakarta to celebrate World's Labour Day. On the banner written "KAMI TIDAK BUTUH BOS TAPI BOS BUTUH KAMI" (WE DON'T NEED BOSS BUT THE BOSS NEED US). We also yelled out some slogans, like: - MayDay is an Anti-Capitalism Day!! - Down with Authority!! - Smash The State!! - Fair Trade, Not Free Trade!! - Smash IMF n WTO!! The action involved: - Anarchist - Punx - Syndicalist's Labour - Bomber - Street Artist - Slingshoter Here's some pics from our movement: Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket How's MayDay in your scene? please share it to us on anti.otoritarian@NOSPAMyahoo.com TOGETHER WE STAND !!! Cheers.. - Jaringan Anti Otoritarian (Anti-Authoritarian Network) - Komunitas Bendera Hitam (Black Flag Community) | | 4:28p |
Scientific socialism not scientific socialism
Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. The idea is ancient, but first became subject to clarification and mathematical analysis in the eighteenth century. Determinism is deeply connected with our understanding of the physical sciences and their explanatory ambitions, on the one hand, and with our views about human free action on the other. In both of these general areas there is no agreement over whether determinism is true (or even whether it can be known true or false), and what the import for human agency would be in either case.
Madame Curie's discoveries helped undermine causal determinism as close observation of elements like radium and spontaneous decay than led to the discovery of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics. Einsteins theories ,and tests of his theories also led to E=mc2 in which matter was found equivalent to energy. This helped undermine many of the earlier purely materialistic theories of the previous century. Apart from the 'field experiment' of Russia post 1917 these great scientific discoveries helped greatly to destroy the pseudo-science that was 'historical-materialism' or Marxism. | | 6:05p |
Puppets of the last evil empire
THE US Endless-War Department said overnight it approved the possible sale to Australia of AEGIS weapons systems valued at up to $450 million.
The Defence Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees foreign arms sales, said the deal would contribute to US security objectives by bolstering the air warfare capability of an important US puppet regime.
Lawmakers have 30 days to block the sale, but such actions are rare.
Main contractors for the deal would be Lockheed Martin Corporation, Raytheon Co and Northrop Grumman Corporation.
Laura Bush is on TV slamming Myanmar again...shame her lame-duck hubby can't get it up without a Condi. | | 6:51p |
Luke feels the power of the force
MAJOR POLICE RAID on my home!
by Luke Kuhn
Today, Monday, May 5th, Montgomery County Police, seemingly under the command of a detective from the DC police(MPD), raided my home in Maryland while I was not present, seeking to steal any and all electronic devices capable of storing audio or video.
At the same time, in Washington, DC, I was ambushed and searched by physical force by five cops(three park cops backing two MPD cops, and including a detective from "intelligence", Matthew Shinton. They asked questions which I did not answer. They also stole electronic devices from my pack by force. I was not shown any search warrant. It is highly unlikely that anything on these devices will prove a threat to anyone, but others possessing flash drives, etc are urged make sure the same is true of their devices.
The raid lasted from sometime in the morning until about 4PM, maybe later, and caused considerable damage, rendering my sleeping quarters uninhabitable.
The police at my home also stated that they are seeking information on other activists and that harm would come to me unless I provided unspecified information. I am refusing to comply.
In addition, DC Indymedia is down as I write this and has been for several hours. DEVELOPING... | | 7:12p |
Setting an example
Sometimes this means making an example. Take Dave Kerin for example. If every time that some dirt poor peasant in Nandigram or Nepal or Peru or Laos or China or Nicaragua was killed by some red-fascist cop-bureaucrat, then another loud-mouthed red-fascist was locked up for say, six months, then, surely, even these red-fascist Marxist morons would sooner of later take the hint. That communities are as entitled to self-defense as individuals and they're not really welcome in any free democratic society.
If Dave Kerin doesn't like it here why doesn't he simply fuck off to Cuba? | | 11:24p |
The Bush we feel is worth it I felt that 9/11 created the pretext and the incentive to create a new Uber-Nato for dealing with the problem of extremist-Islamism. The terrorist situation involving Islam is similar to a cold war scenario. It's an ideological war. (One that the extremist were losing - thus the need for 911). The whole world stood behind America and waited for positive leadership. All Bush had to do was follow Truman's template and fill the void. Bush could have formed a new Uber-NATO as a reaction to Islamic-Terrorism. Not all members of NATO were Democracies when they joined (Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey) but they are now. Membership list could have been global and included every nation that had a stake in keeping the intenational order thriving: that included NATO members, Russia, Ukrain, Japan, South Korea, China, India, most of S.E. Asia including Malasia, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and so on. NATO brings stability and forces rule of law to be normalized over time. That stability and consistency from rule of law facilitates economic growth by reducing risk and transaction costs - radically. Behind this comes the E.C. moving east out of Europe. A big mistake was made with the fall of the Soviet Union: We should have organized a Marshall plan, sent in advisers from the EU to help them build their political institutions and advisers from Korea and Japan to help them build their Economic institutions. By now that Project would be done and the focus would move on to India and China. Instead we offered them nothing substantial and sent them economic advisers from the Chicago school of thought that brought more than a decade of misery and wealth and power concentration amongst immature political and economic institutions. Huge blunder there. Despite the Republican need for enemies, there is still a chance to move Russia forward but it will take new international leadership. The point of this organization should have been to first contain Islamic radicalism to Southwest Asia and then slowly develop health wedges into it's heartland. If all our attention had been focused and comprehensive on Afghanistan, it would be a booming success by now. If we had spent half of what we've spent in Iraq, in Afghanistan, with our Uber-Nato and EU allies, Afghanistan would be a boooming success by now. That would have created a democratic Archipelago of Islamic nations stretching from Istanbul to Singapore with only Iran and Pakistan as important gaps (and to a lessor extent Burma). The presence of successful India and Afghanistan on both Pakistan's east and west borders would create enormous pressure for Pakistan to follow suit. The presence of successful Turkey and Aghanistan on Iran's boarders would do the same - remember the Iranian people were with us after 9/11 and their was a strong internal reformist sentiment there as well. When those states cracked and moved forward their would then be a whole string of successful muslim (though non-Arab states) from Istanbul to Singapore and beyond. From there its a matter of execution to coordinate similar developments in Arab Muslim states. Meanwhile the global economy is growing and its ability and knowledge for helping nations develop is growing too. Behind the strategic waive of the Uber-Nato should have be attempts to move the EU east (say an Uber-EU) to include Russia and perhaps from there, Japan and Korea with the hope of someday folding in India, China, Canada and yes, U.S. and Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Chile. These last states suffer from too much wealth and power concentration and that really is the problem holding them back. (What's needed isn't deconcentration, but free contract + even/fair bargaining playing fields - of which Japan has developed some fascinating new institutional arrangements that are both equitable, competitive, capatilistic and democratic). Like the cold war precedent, the reaction to 9/11 should have been comprehensive. During the cold war, nearly every academic discipline was involved in the act of try to win that war. There should have been a rush to think through these problems. Islamic nations are facing a crisis in confronting modernism that East Asian and India don't appear to have. The problem has to do with cohesion: Modernism is all about specialization of tasks and fair exchange. Islam is all about the opposite, cohesion: one god, one man, one thought, one community, one law, etc... Their are intellectual ways for Islam to deal with these problems constructively and we need to be able to understand the nature of their problem, help where we can, and leave them space and time to help them where we can't. Essentially they need to adjustments: Separation of mosque and state (which could only be recognized with true freedom of religion, something that didn't exist in Mohammed's time, but which negates the need for religion to control the state, and; acknowledging only internal Jihad (greater Jihad) the internal struggle to be better religious and disavowing external jihad where there is true freedom of religion. (I would go so far as to say internal jihad is the struggle against hate and for love, and manifesting 'external jihad' is capitulating defeat in one's internal jihad) This would create a sort of 'Transcendental Islam': an Islam that can live with the world and modernism and one that the world could live with (and may find very compelling). 9/11 was a gamble by the extremist to try to goad America into making strategic mistake, as the Soviet Union did in invading Afghanistan. No one bombs the world trade center without expecting a reaction. The reaction is what they wanted. As it turns out, the initial action was successful, but then the U.S. shot itself in the foot in Iraq and everything has been set back. We missed a huge opportunity to lead the world towards peace and prosperity. But we can still work towards this model. We know what international institutions have worked and why. We know how to fight a longer term, multigenerational ideological war. We know these things. It just that we let private agenda's supersede over public agendas. Posted by Tim - FROM http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/05/07/burn_the_straw_men/ | | 11:45p |
Foucault reconsidered
I may have been to harsh - Foucault's unusual and idiosyncratic prose fiction, that privileges the use of epistemed language and the radicaly pissed imagination, engages the reader in ways that encourage incontinent disobedience, licensing the reader, as it were, to step outside the elided or effaced texual pub boundaries into their own empirical otherness, and to bring into what Rupert Sheldrake describes as the contiguity of morphic fields that generative and transactional hosed connectivity that is a form of dialogism and an antidote to the essential human condition of dehydration, isomerization and brownian motion.
Bottom line - Foucault can rim me anytime. |
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