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Thursday, May 8th, 2008
| Time |
Event |
| 12:30a |
Urgent appeal for humanitarian aid Rats stick together - sometimes our tails even get tied up Shellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party’s message isn’t good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC’s money. The double shot of bad news had one veteran Republican House member worrying aloud that the party’s electoral woes — brought into sharp focus by Woody Jenkins’ loss to Don Cazayoux in Louisiana on Saturday — have the House Republican Conference splitting apart in “everybody for himself” mode. “There is an attitude that, ‘I better watch out for myself, because nobody else is going to do it,’” the member said. “There are all these different factions out there, everyone is sniping at each other, and we have no real plan. We have a lot of people fighting to be the captain of the lifeboat instead of everybody pulling together.” In a piece published in Human Events, the Republicans’ onetime captain, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, warned his old colleagues that they face “real disaster” on Election Day unless they move immediately to “chart a bold course of real reform” for the country. And in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to “save them” in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves. Although a top House Republican brushed aside Gingrich’s broadside as “hype from a has-been who desperately wants to be a player but can’t anymore,” the harsh words from Cole were harder to ignore. “It was a pretty stern line that he took with us,” said one House Republican. MORE ON http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10138.htmlSeriously folks - if you can spare some cash for Burma... | | 1:20a |
Red-fascist rapists Coathanger politics in Chile and Nicaragua - now this KOLKATA: Three women activists of Bhumi Ucchhed Pratirodh Committee (BUPC) claimed they were beaten up and stripped by CPM cadres in Nandigram for refusing to join Marxist rallies in the run-up to panchayat elections. The women alleged that around 40 to 50 CPM activists came to their houses on Monday and threatened them with dire consequences if they failed to turn up for the meetings and gatherings organised by the party. “CPM cadres told us that we would have to vote for their party in the panchayat polls. When we refused to oblige, they started beating us. - MORE ON http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Women_activists_blame_CPM_of_beating_in_ Nandigram/articleshow/3017013.cms
As clashes continued between CPM and BUPC members in Keyakhali, Maheshpur and Satengabari areas of Nandigram, opposition parties demanded postponement of panchayat elections in the area. Elections in Nandigram were originally scheduled on May 11. | | 1:21a |
Barry the closet Marxist dipshit Election '08: Barack Obama wishes questions about his associations with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and other radicals would end. But maybe the reason they won't is that there's a pattern: Marxism. It's not hiding. When one looks at Obama, it's shocking how radical and anti-American his closest associates are. Taken separately, the black liberation theology of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, or fundraiser William Ayers' unrepentant past as a 1960s terrorist or Obama's openly pro-Che Guevara volunteers in Houston might be dismissed. But taken together, and given Obama's closeness to his friends, it's fair to ask whether Obama doesn't share their extreme-left views. Yet whenever he's asked, he gets mad and avoids the issue. Maybe that's not surprising, given that Obama himself began his career as a Chicago community organizer and worked on projects there influenced by Saul Alinsky. The Marxist Machiavellian of the Chicago scene advised budding revolutionaries in his 1971 book "Rules For Radicals" to conceal their radical affiliations to attain greater power. That works well for Marxists. But Obama's friends seem to be giving him away. If this sounds extreme, take a look at some of the activities of Obama's associates: Wright is an adherent of black liberation theology, an explicitly Marxist interpretation of the Bible whose aim is to stir up class and race hatred to advance communism. Created by a rifle-toting Peruvian priest in the 1960s, it's now discredited in religious circles. "Liberation theology isolates a few verses, takes them out of context, and then exaggerates their meaning," said the Rev. Bob Schenk of the National Clergy Council, on "Hannity's America" last weekend. But Wright clings to it. And recently, he loudly praised the Marxist Sandinista dictatorship of Nicaragua. Not by coincidence, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's president, endorses Obama. "This is not to say that there is already a revolution under way in the U.S. . . . But yes, (Obama and friends) are laying the foundations for a revolutionary change," said Ortega. If that's not enough, Wright's also made pilgrimage to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in Havana in 1984, alongside the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova noted Jackson and his entourage cheered "Viva Fidel" and "Viva Che Guevara" on the $300,000 trip paid for by the Cuban Council of Churches. Then there's Obama's friend ex-Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, another Marxist. Not only did Ayers set off terrorist bombs against "the establishment" with no regrets during the 1960s, he told the New York Times "we didn't do enough." Now it's come to light that he posed for a photo in Chicago magazine in 2001, stomping on a U.S. flag in an article flogging his terrorist memoir, "Fugitive Days." At the time Ayers was touting his anti-Americanism, Obama served with him on the Woods Fund board and Ayers made a $200 donation to Obama's state Senate campaign. Ayers has since lectured the Marxist dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, on using public education as an instrument for advancing "revolution." Meanwhile his stepson, Chesa Boudin, has gone to Caracas as an "adviser" to the anti-American Chavez. Oh, by coincidence, Chavez and Castro are two of the dictators Obama said he'd like to give face time as president of the U.S. It gets worse when one looks at Obama's political organization. Obama's own Web site has held at least 15 favorable mentions of Che Guevara, according to a count by blogger Henry Gomez. When an Obama precinct captain in Houston flew a Cuban flag bearing Guevara's likeness, Obama said only it "disappointed" him and "does not reflect (his) views." He never publicly ordered the flag down, nor rejected Guevara's blood-soaked communism. Another Obama supporter, acting in Obama's name, secretly contacted Colombia's Marxist FARC terror chief Raul Reyes to tell him that Obama would cut off U.S. military aid to Colombia to hinder its war against FARC, as well as deny Colombia free trade, a strategy FARC considers key to overturning Colombia's democracy. If Obama repudiated that secret messenger, we didn't hear it. Some pundits dismiss Obama's ties with radicals as an opportunistic association with Chicago political machines to advance his career. But the depth and breadth of the contacts seem deeper. Obama himself has promised to meet with the hemisphere's Marxist dictators who have systematically dismantled or are in the process of dismantling democracy all across our hemisphere. This stinks, frankly. Why does someone who says he represents "change" have so many Jurassic Marxists in his camp calling the shots? He needs to repudiate this crew now. FROM http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=294880428846293I defend some of Wrights remarks - the true ones and most of Bill Ayers actions, as I believe most anarchists do but also caution most anarchists that getting mixed up with Marxism is revolutionary suicide. Some Marxists say and do good sometimes - so does the CIA at about the same percentage rate. | | 1:49a |
Stormtrooper vulnerabilities
WASHINGTON — The deaths of two U.S. soldiers in western Baghdad last week have sparked concerns that Iraqi insurgents have developed a new weapon capable of striking what the U.S. military considers its most explosive-resistant vehicle.
The soldiers were riding in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protective vehicle, known as an MRAP, when an explosion sent a blast of super-heated metal through the MRAP's armor and into the vehicle, killing them both.
Their deaths brought to eight the number of American troops killed while riding in an MRAP, which was developed and deployed to Iraq last year after years of acrimony over light armor on the Army's workhorse vehicle, the Humvee.
The military has praised the vehicles for saving hundreds of lives, saying they could withstand the IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, which have been the biggest killers of Americans in Iraq. The Pentagon has set aside $5.4 billion to acquire 4,000 MRAPs at more than $1 million each, making the MRAP the Defense Department's third largest acquisition program, behind missile defense and the Joint Strike Fighter.
But last Wednesday's attack has shown that the MRAPs are vulnerable to an especially potent form of IED known as an EFP, for explosively formed penetrator, which fires a superheated cone of metal through the vehicle's armor.
Military officials are still trying to determine whether last week's attack is a sign of "new vulnerabilities (in the vehicle) or new (weapons) capabilities" on the part of insurgents, said Navy Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
U.S. officials don't know if the EFP that pierced the MRAP was larger, redesigned or a lucky shot from an old one. But explosive experts in Iraq are investigating, said Col. Jerry O'Hare, a military spokesman in Iraq.
The attack comes at a precarious political juncture in Iraq. U.S. officials have accused Iran of shipping EFPs across the border and arming militias. They charge that despite assurances from Iran that it would curtail its shipment of EFPs, new weapons have arrived this year.
So far, military officials in Baghdad don't know whether the EFP used in the attack was Iranian-made or if it was shipped to Iraq this year.
Five of the eight soldiers who've died in MRAPs were killed in April, said Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman. Earlier in the month, a soldier was killed when an explosive struck an MRAP and it rolled over. Another two died in April when their MRAP rolled over and they drowned, Morrell said.
(Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel contributed.) McClatchy
In Basra recently the dark invaders lost a tank when it was surrounded and Molotoved. Life finds a way. | | 2:10a |
Heinous quotents
Shallow view of history off base
Mark Milke opinion
Calgary Herald
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Observations based only on recent history are almost useless; it helps to go back beyond just a decade or so. But there's been a rash of such ineffectual analysis as of late.
Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson pontificated last week on how Jean Chretien and Paul Martin "deserve most of the credit" for balancing the federal books back in the 1990s. Most of the credit? Chretien and Martin deserve some kudos. But Simpson is either unaware or ignores the demands for an end to deficit spending started by think tanks and political activists in the West in the 1980s.
Politically, "most of the credit" goes to Preston Manning and the Reform party. Manning and Company spearheaded the drive to cut spending. Meanwhile, Liberals beat up then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Finance Minister Michael Wilson for the shallowest of spending cuts. (In 1990, Martin claimed the Mulroney government had a "preoccupation" with the deficit.)
But a skin-deep approach to history becomes worse when it foments amnesia. In a travel piece on St. Petersburg in Air Canada's May magazine, Noah Richler writes that Peter the Great was "more heinous than Lenin ever was." In another Brave New World rewrite of Marxism, Rob Anders came in for rhetorical flak when the Calgary MP noted China was "the worst human rights abuser in the world." He also compared Beijing's upcoming Olympics to the 1936 spectacle in Adolf Hitler's Berlin. The flak came from Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae. Perhaps feeling some fraternal hurt for his former socialist colleagues, Rae called Anders' comparison to Nazi Germany a "gaffe."
Hardly, and both Richler and Rae are guilty of inadequate historical memories.
The Russian Tsar was a traditional autocrat -- a dictator. But as 1980s-era American ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick famously wrote earlier in her career, traditional autocrats (Peter the Great or Spain's Francisco Franco) are preferable to revolutionary tyrants (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot). That's not because of any moral superiority -- neither traditional nor revolutionary dictators possess any -- but traditional tyrants are the lesser of two evils. Both are ruthless and both kill innocent people. But revolutionary leaders uproot society in every conceivable way to force human beings into their desired utopia. The result, wrote Kirkpatrick, is revolutionaries "create refugees by the millions because they claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society."
They also produce far higher body counts. Those who soft-soap Lenin or think Anders' comment was hyperbole should pick up the Black Book of Communism. Published in 1999, Stephane Courtois notes 20 million Soviets perished thanks to Soviet Marxism and 65 million Chinese died because of the Chinese variety. Courtois, who outraged the French Left of which he was once part, explicitly equated the class genocide of communism with the race genocide of Nazism.
Another author in the Black Book detailed the effect of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution, the attempt to modernize China, which included collectivization. One result was the 1959-1961 Chinese famine. In that artificial, government-created famine, cannibalism resulted. In one village, families even swapped children in order to eat them. Jean-Louis Margolin notes Mao's Great Leap Forward cost between 20 million and 43 million Chinese their lives. I'd say that qualifies China as history's worst human rights abuser.
True, today's Chinese regime (capitalist in economic practice but freakishly communist in political control) moved on from Mao's mass genocidal policies. Tellingly, the regime never distanced itself from Chairman Mao, his portrait being ubiquitous in Chinese public life.
And lest anyone buy Richler's trite dismissal of Vladimir Lenin, another Black Book contributor, Nicholas Werth, writes of how the Soviet dictator made a radical break from tsarist practice with deadly consequences for his citizens. In the entire 1825-1917 period, tsarist courts passed 6,321 death sentences. In comparison, in two months alone in autumn 1918, between 10,000 and 15,000 Russians were summarily executed by Lenin's forces.
Then there were later massacres of the "bourgeoisie" and ethnics. In Lenin's war against the Cossacks between 1919 and 1920, Werth points to reliable figures estimated at between 300,000 and 500,000 people killed or deported out of a population of no more than three million. And on it went in other Soviet regions and with other victims in subsequent years up to and including 1970s-era Soviet gulags written about by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Whether it is a debate about about 1980s-era economic politics at home or the life and death nature of the Chinese regime in Beijing since 1949, history, and its proper accounting, matters.
Mark Milke is author of A Nation of Serfs?
Not the most accurate history - but who cares about a few honest mistakes fighting red-fascism?
The struggle against fascism starts with the fight to the death with Leninism. | | 2:28a |
Terrorist Murder Fox Military Propagandist Promotes Terrorist Murder by Meteor Blades Mon May 05, 2008 at 07:05:14 PM PDT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_kingDoes support of terrorists make one a terrorist? Presumably that depends on whether you take Mister Bush’s squint-eyed November 6, 2001, prescription – "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror" – in a blindly nationalistic fashion or in a moral one. Terrorism isn’t an ideology. It’s a technique. Much as sophists and thugs - such as the late Jeane Kirkpatrick - like to twist the definition to fit who is carrying out a policy, terrorism can't be one thing for them and something else for us. Yet one of the most pre-eminent of the Pentagon’s chosen propaganda team of ex-military-cum-television-analysts, retired Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, not only supports but promotes terrorism against Iran. He's still spewing on Fox News despite having been exposed by David Barstow’s revelations three weeks ago. This isn’t new territory for McInerney. He’s argued for attacks on Iran for as long as Bill Kristol and other neoconservatives have done. As a member of the Iran Policy Committee, McInerney has long argued that the State Department should take the Mujahideen-e Khalq off its terrorist watch list. The group originated as leftwing opposition to the Shah of Iran in 1963 and was involved in various operations, including the taking of U.S. Embassy hostages in 1979 and the bloody suppression of the Shiite revolt in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Although MEK killed Americans as well as Iranians in the past, it has since adopted a public veneer of being a backer of freedom and democracy as soon as the Iranian mullahs are overturned, the idea being to install one of its founders as Iran’s president. Although thousands of MEK fighters based in Iraq were disarmed in 2003 when the U.S. military arrived, the organization has since been implicated in attacks in Iran, including assassinations and bombings in public places. Given Mister Bush’s ordering of clandestine activities in Iran and long-standing White House support for various armed groups along Iran’s borders as – belatedly – reported in the Los Angeles Times three weeks ago, such activity can hardly be surprising to anyone who has followed U.S.-Iranian relations even cursorily. But, just as Max Boot and Robert Kaplan and Stephen Peter Rosen and others argue quite openly for American empire, now we have a well-connected ex-general openly calling for terrorist attacks – excuse me, responses – in Iran. With a Fox News reader cheering him on. McInerney starts one minute into the video linked here. Question: If we do have evidence, and apparently we do, according to officials, that Iran is killing U.S. troops in Iraq or supporting that, why haven't we struck by now? McInerney: It beats me, Greg. I don't know why we haven't. They have killed hundreds of Americans with their explosively formed projectiles [EFPs], and that's why I think we have to take action. And here's what I would suggest to you. No. 1, we take the National Council for Resistance in Iran off the terrorist list that the Clinton Administration put them on, as well as the Mujahideen-e Khalq that are at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Then I would start a tit-for-tat strategy. For every EFP that goes off that kills Americans, two go off in Iran. No questions asked, people don't know have to know how it was done. It's covert action. They become the most unlucky country in the world. And then I would start moving U.S. carrier battle groups into the region, as well as some of our stealth aircraft, just to make sure they understand, don't try to kick off a major insurrection come October and September, October to impact our elections. They are deliberately ratcheting up and we’ve got to counterattack. As McInerney pointed out, this isn’t the first time he has made this proposal. He did it in a March 30, 2007, column, too. And while he suggests that the tactic won’t endanger civilians, this is a detestable lie. IEDs, whether equipped with EFPs or not, kill civilians in Iraq all the time. Deploying McInerney’s monstrous terrorist proposal would mean murdering Iranians - men, women, children - who happen to get "unlucky." * Permalink :: * Discuss (131 comments) KOS 'Tit for tat' is actually better than the so called 'golden rule' in game theory...and everybody knows the last evil empire is a rogue terror state. So if it takes a bloodbath lets get it over with. | | 9:39a |
Protect our pron
VAN NUYS, Calif. — Evil Angel is planning a special collectors’ edition compilation DVD of the company’s best scenes from each one of its directors handpicked by company owner John Stagliano. Proceeds from the sale of the DVD will go to DefendOurPorn.org, a legal defense fund set up for Stagliano’s pending obscenity case.
The as-yet-unnamed DVD releases July 3, the day before Independence Day. Some of the scenes include Sandra Romain from “Cheek Freaks 2,” Belladonna and Lexington Steele from “Cock Happy,” Naomi from John Leslie’s “Naomi: There is Only One” and Belladonna from Jules Jordan’s “Ass Worship.”
Though Jordan has gone on to form his own production company and is no longer with Evil Angel, he wanted to contribute a scene from one of the movies he directed while at the company.
"This will be the first time that Evil Angel will be releasing a compilation that will contain scenes from more than one director, let alone every current Evil Angel director,” Evil Angel publicist Tricia Devereaux told XBIZ. “One of our European directors suggested the idea, and when our general manager Chris Norman brought it up to the other directors, they all immediately said that they would donate whatever was needed for it. I was especially touched that Jules Jordan didn't hesitate to say yes when we asked him if he'd consider donating a scene from one of his movies.”
The DVD also will contain taped statements from Stagliano, adult stars and select Evil Angel directors. Joey Silvera, Belladonna, Sasha Grey and Lexi Love are among those who will contribute their comments.
All the scenes on the compilation have previously been released except for one: John Stagliano’s wife, Evil Angel publicist and former adult star Tricia Devereaux, will film a brand-new solo masturbation scene with toys. She described the scene, slated to film Friday, as having a lot of sexual tension. Male performer Derrick Pierce will appear in the scene in a nonsex role, psychologically dominating Devereaux.
“I've missed being on camera,” Devereaux said. “From my first time being on a stage at a strip club, I realized that I was an exhibitionist. I've been thinking about doing something on camera for a while now, but because I don't do sex scenes anymore, I was a little nervous about what I could do that would be interesting to me. My solo scene and sex scene in ‘Buttman's Toy Stories’ are my favorite scenes I did. It's how I ended my career of sex scenes, so for a long time I was content with finishing on that note.
“I miss getting to do scenes though, and I miss having something new to show my fans. When we decided to do this comp, at first I was going to direct an original scene to donate to the DVD, but then I decided that nothing else could be a better reason for me to do another scene. I won't be having sex with a guy, but there will be lots of toys (both anal and S/M), and if I'm lucky, quite a bit of hair pulling and spanking.”
For more information about the compilation DVD or DefendOurPorn.org, email Devereaux at triciadevereaux@aol | | 9:43a |
Marxist hell-holes top 'worst of' list
WASHINGTON - In a worldwide survey, a democracy watchdog organization said 90 countries respect a broad array of basic human rights and political freedom while 103 countries fail to some degree to observe standards of liberal democracy.
Eight countries were judged by Freedom House, the New York-based organization, to have the most repressive regimes. They were Cuba, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Two restive territories, Chechnya and Tibet, "whose inhabitants suffer intense repression," the organization said, were placed in the lowest category, as well.
Violent repression of protests of food prices in Myanmar, or Burma as it is commonly known, contributed to a further downward trend in the South Asian country, now devastated by a staggering cyclone.
Within the eight countries and two territories "state control over daily life is pervasive and wide-ranging, independent organizations and political opposition are banned or suppressed and fear of retribution for independent thought and action is part of daily life," said Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, in issuing the annual report.
Ranked only slightly better than "the worst of the worst" were Belarus, Chad, China, Equitorial Guinea, Eritrea, Laos, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Zimbabwe as well as the Western Sahara territory of North Africa. They severely suppress opposition political activity, impede independent organizing and censor or punish criticism of the state, Windsor said.
Increased corruption and controls on non-governmental organizations placed Chad on the list for the first time. The African country replaced another, Cote d'Ivoire, in this group while the "worst of the worst" remained the same. END EXTRACT
Almost every Marxist dictatorship is here* so imagine if this many Nazi dictatorships still existed. The fight against fascism begins with the fight against Marxism.
*Cuba, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea. Laos and Zimbabwe. Myanmar survives with trade from Vietnam and aid from China. Red fascist China helps finance the genocide in Darfur. I'm surprised China ,Vietnam are not on this shitlist. Also Belarus, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are all Leninist modeled fascist police states.
There is an order of magnitude difference here up ( or down if you live there) between these states as a bloc derived from Marxism and even the last evil empire. That is if - like me - you regard slavery as worse than war.
I repeat ...'The fight against fascism begins with the fight against Marxism' | | 10:01a |
Post-American's of the world unite The problem I see with much of the discussion of Fareed's book -- and Michael Lind's response in particular-- is that it is so centered on relations and conflicts between nation-states and seems to leave little room for analyzing the conflicts between social and economic groups that exist within nations and extend across multiple nations. Let me jump off from Matt's comment that those attacking China from the left seem to be "focused on finding ways to keep the Chinese population trapped in crushing poverty." Actually, for most of those "bashing China", they are far more attacking the multinational companies-- American and Chinese -- that are getting rich at the expense of the average American and Chinese worker. Since the main leftwing position on trade with China is not to shut down trade but to demand that workers have the right to demand higher wages and to end the confinement of labor union organizers to mental hospitals, this is hardly a demand to confine the population to poverty. In a vision of foreign policy focused on conflicts between nation-states, this is clearly a demand that someone like Michael would see as abandoning the post-1945 norms of sovereignty. Aside from not quite getting when the U.S. ever recognized such a norm of sovereignty, the reality is that sovereignty had a different meaning in the immediate post-war period when global trade was actually far more marginal to the U.S. economy. With mass globalization of the economy, it makes little sense to speak of "sovereignty" in economic terms when the functioning of labor, financial and commodity markets are inherently global. Which means that economic conflict within nations is increasingly globalized as companies use lower labor standards in other countries to undercut unions and labor protection in countries with higher standards. Attacks on "China" are then attacks on U.S. and Chinese multinational taking advantage of that differential in labor rights. A purely protectionist response would just call for shutting down trade, which would actually preserve all elements of sovereignty that a nation-state vision of the world prizes so highly. But most on the left of the trade debate don't call for ending trade but in fact demand greater commerical freedom, including freedom of workers to contract collectively for their fair share of the profits from that trade. What's odd is that demands that other countries protect corporate capital's right to sell their goods without limits by states is labelled "free trade" but demands that other states protect the collective bargaining rights of labor is treated as "protectionist" or worse, an attempt to impoverish the very people who's labor rights are currently being restricted. Of course, that ideological dichotomy does not reflect nation-state versus nation-state conflicts, but reflects a conflict over ideology and power between social groups over what controls on the economy are legitimate or not legitimate. EXTRACT From Nathan Newman @ http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/05/07/bashing_china_and_the_us_from/ | | 10:04a |
Peasants to the slaughter '...To oppose the Chinese model of autocratic capitalism is not racist or meant to hurt Chinese workers. It is to suggest that power over these decisions should not be ceded to such a small group of people. In fact, doing so is an injustice itself. If we care so much for the Chinese, why not advocate for their inclusion on these issues, too? As an aside, it is a bit bothersome that the authors and pundits that advocate this paradigm--drawing indignation at people whom do not wish to give up their job or life--are never making the sacrifice. It is high time that a sense of shared sacrifice is spread. It is also time that TPM featured a greater array of voices. If I am not mistaken, Yglesias, Slaughter, and Zakaria all supported the Iraq war...' - Extract from http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/05/07/bashing_china_and_the_us_from/In order to have an effective labor movemement in China it must improve its human rights record and allow a certain degree of democratization. | | 10:34a |
Her politics may suck
But darlings I think she has the right attitude toward the military-entertainment complex
'...I think we all see the writing on the wall. Obama has plenty of money and there is no great problem if this thing goes on for a couple of weeks. I think everyone should relax about the campaign and start regrouping around the ideas that brought us here --- one of which is the fact that the mainstream media are tools, that Drudge is a Republican pimp and that our nation is not well served by a bunch of corporate whores who all sit around sipping mojitos on Nantucket playing with our politics like they are a rousing game of cribbage.
digby @ HULLABALOO | | 12:57p |
Night riders
Hispanic media coalition calls Limbaugh’s comment ‘nasty, bigoted, racist.’ (Think Progress)
Brian Maloney of the right-wing site Radio Equalizer defends Rush Limbaugh’s comment about Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa being a “shoe shine guy.” “As to Limbaugh’s remark, was it indeed racist? This one’s easy: not at all!” writes Maloney. “There’s nothing race-specific about his comment. Are ‘shoe-shine guys’ usually Hispanic? No.” Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, has quite a different take: “What can I tell you? It’s the same kind of nasty, bigoted, racist type of comment that has become so prevalent in today’s society, as practiced by Lou Dobbs, as practiced by [Sean] Hannity, [Bill] O’Reilly, [Michael] Savage — all these guys who are appealing to a particular bigoted audience, and fanning the fires of bigotry and racism by doing these kinds of things without real concern about the consequences of their words.”
Fuck me - all these arseholes need is coneheads and white-sheets. Look there's no point whinging. We have to get laws enforced against hate speech that incites violence. Also holodomor denial and classist or sexist hate speech. Free speech be fucked - you can't shout 'fire' in a crowded theater.
And if we can't get laws passed and enforced by juries with due process then we gotta take out the trash.
I think you know what I mean. | | 1:19p |
Prawn trawler
I see in the Prawn Weekly that electric fields could repel Platypus
Platypus have an innate ability to detect electric fields, useful for sensing the bioelectric activity of their prey. Prawn self-defense researchers discovered that strong electric fields could repel these predators, most likely by overwhelming their electricity sensors. The RAT Institute is running some follow-up, placebo-controlled, double-blind, field-trials on this in order to head off the threat of albino shrimp consumption competition by mutant deep-sea Platypi around our reserved vents. The very survival of the rat race could depend on this. | | 1:28p |
RAT Institute revives aether
'There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an aether binge. I should know because I was reading up on Planck lengths the other night - nothing to do with my slutty grrlfriend dumping me btw - Planck was as a conservative a rat physicist as they come. It was considered most unusual when he became a tree rat for a time pre-Einstein and went out on a limb reviving Newtons ' bullets'.
The great Isaac had described light as particles. The scientific empirical consensus then emerged that light was a wave or form of energy - and much like the concept of aether was abandoned, so to was the 'bullet' theory. This is now what we call quantum mechanics and depending on the experiment we regard light as either a wave or a particle. Much as I regard my ex-wife actually. But hang on a minute professor, I hear you say, what has all this got to do with the misbegotten firmament?
Well I was coming to that if youse will give me a few rat minutes.
See the so-called 'vacuum' ain't a vacuum, see.
See the so-called 'vacuum' is really more like a 'quantum foam' of virtual particles see.
I don't want to quote a lot of maths at youse see, but this is surely an aether by any other fucking name see?
DEVELOPING...( Tags, Honig, Telsa, De Sade, Black holes, Big crunch, rat pellets, severe suction, etc ) | | 2:16p |
A man alone
If this be a man
Leone film scores
Well-versed in a variety of musical idioms from his RCA experience, Morricone began composing film scores in the early '60s.[4] Though his first films were undistinguished, Morricone's arrangement of an American folk song intrigued director and former schoolmate Sergio Leone. Leone hired Morricone and together they created a distinctive score to accompany Leone's different version of the Western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964).[4] As budget strictures limited Morricone's access to a full orchestra, he used gunshots, cracking whips, voices, Sicilian folk instruments, trumpets, and the new Fender electric guitar, rather than orchestral arrangements of Western standards à la John Ford. Morricone used his special effects to punctuate and comically tweak the action, cluing in the audience to the taciturn man's ironic stance. Though sonically bizarre for a movie score, Morricone's music was viscerally true to Leone's vision.
As memorable as Leone's close-ups, harsh violence, and black comedy, Morricone's work helped to expand the musical possibilities of film scoring.
Ennio Morricone scored all of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns and later films from A Fistful of Dollars to Once Upon a Time in America, including For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once upon a Time in the West (1968). The collaboration is considered one of the exemplary collaborations between a director and a composer.
The team
With the score of A Fistful of Dollars, Morricone started an ten-year collaboration with his childhood friend Alessandro Alessandroni and his Cantori Moderni. Alessandroni provided the whistling on the soundtracks. Alessandro Alessandroni's Cantori Moderni were a flexible troupe of modern singers. Morricone specifically exploited the solo soprano of the group, Edda Dell'Orso at the height of her powers — "an extraordinary voice at my disposal".
Other film scores
Most of Ennio Morricone's film scores of the 1960s were composed outside the Spaghetti Western genre, while still using Alessandro Alessandroni's team. Their music included the themes for Il Malamondo (1964), Slalom (1965), Algiers (1965) and Listen, Let's Make Love(1967). In 1968, Morricone reduced his work outside the movie business and wrote scores for twenty films in the same year. The scores included psychedelic accompaniment for Mario Bava's superhero romp Danger: Diabolik (1968). FROM WIKIPEDIA | | 2:28p |
I allus eats my spinach Frankly with my liver I have to MAD SCIENTIST - '...spinach - despite containing nutrients - builds muscles, but Popeye may have been on to something. A steroid found in leafy greens ramps up protein synthesis in muscles. A team led by Ilya Raskin of Rutgers University in New Jersey extracted phytoecdysteroids from spinach. When they placed the liquid extract on samples of cultured human muscle, it sped up growth by 20 per cent. Rats were also slightly stronger after a month of injections of the extract (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/jf073059z)...' Every time I buy spinach now I sense the suppressed rictus of the sales lady at my green grocers - but darlings my analyst told me 100 times if they told me once - 'don't bottle it up!' So long as youse say it and don't spray it. LINKY LINK! MAGICK RIVER @ Blogger All carelessness and no responsibility. Spontaneous decay can be a bitch my dears. Susskind Interview at New Scientist There’s an interview with Susskind in the latest issue of New Scientist by Amanda Gefter, entitled Is String Theory in Trouble? Susskind makes many of the same points as in his recent book The Cosmic Landscape: mixing up positivism and falsifiability, attacking those who ask for falsifiable predictions as “Popperazi”, and saying that the best he can come up with as a prediction from his ideas is the very long-shot that the negative curvature of space due to its origin in bubble nucleation has not been made vanishingly small by inflation. There’s a discussion forum about the article on the New Scientist site that people might want to contribute to. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=312' Physics was my first love...spinach shall be my last...' | | 2:43p |
Not good
For youse I mean - I'm way past caring and had a pretty good time for the last 48 years, so FUCK YOU!
Rising greenhouse-gas levels and falling sulphate aerosols (that lead to 'Global dimming' like the Pinatubo effect) spell serious trouble for the envisaged rapture of the nerds around 2029. Turns out we need some serious intermediate ' paradigm shift' assassins like Jim Bell otherwise we just ain't gonna fuckin' make it.
' Whats this 'we' whiteman? I hear you say. Well if you don't know that I don't give a fuck by now...just go fuck yr ugly dead-looking Mama. ITS NO SKIN OFF MY NOW SHRUNKEN PENIS SPORT! GO DIE!
Really the death of the human-race at this point can only be a good thing - right? | | 2:56p |
The rush is on
USAToday's new interview with Sen. Clinton ...
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said. ' If Rushbo wants to fuck my ass then I'm bending over praying for it' | | 3:34p |
Shut the fuck up anarchists
Why how dare even one of you worthless hooded crusties even question ANY deeply oppressed half-white man living in a huge mansion in Chicago!
How dare you SUH!
Big-ticket warplane programs run by Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Boeing Co (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research) received a boost Wednesday as the 2009 military budget wended its way through the U.S. Congress.
A House of Representatives Armed Services subcommittee recommended $3.9 billion to buy 15 Boeing C-17 cargo planes, although the Bush administration sought none and the Senate Armed Services Committee did not fund any.
Likewise, the House's Air and Land Forces subcommittee recommended an additional $523 million as a down payment on 20 more Lockheed F-22 fighters in fiscal 2010.
The Bush administration had deferred decisions on both the C-17 and F-22 production lines, leaving the next president, to be elected Nov. 4 and take office in January, to decide their fate.
Doubt not that a few Tammany Hall type thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. | | 3:53p |
Nazi FBI Germany's FBI Examines its Nazi Roots Germany's federal police is admitting that most of its founding members had blood on their hands as active members of Hitler's brutal security apparatus. It's the first time one of Germany's security services is examining its own history. But there may be more to come. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,508857,00.htmlThank fuck for small Thursbies that the Austrian-South Warthlands Neu Kevin Reich has decided against having a Department of Homeland Security...at least for now. The USSA Gestapo is infamous in its own reich for its very own documented record of torture, murder and sex-slavery. Feeling brutally inclined? Well now you know why | | 4:23p |
Hansonites in der Alles NPD, which received €1.4 million in public funds last year, is protected by legal obstacles to outlawing political parties. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,502487,00.htmlWhy the fuck and how the fuck can it be so hard to deny regular free speech to known fascists!? Haven't they all murdered enough innocent people already? They can always mouth off on the net anyway so why not just outlaw all brownshirt (and redshirt )fascists? 'The leader of National Democratic Party of Germany, Udo Voigt, wants to build a new Reich chancellery on the site of Berlin's Holocaust memorial, and he said last week that Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party, the late Rudolf Hess, should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize ...' WHAT MORE FUCKING EVIDENCE DOES ANYONE NEED! | | 5:50p |
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Hillbilly loans
[Hillary Clinton] may continue to "loan the campaign additional money out of her jointly-held assets" — which include more than $100 million in income since her husband left the White House.
Of course, this is just a fundraising pitch by a campaign whose supporters might otherwise become complacent in nerd-victory. But you can also consider the large speaking fees that former President Clinton has amassed since leaving office. Look back at who paid Bill, and that's who will now be financing Hillary as the campaign donations dry up. Amanda Carpenter observed this possibility ages ago and repeats it today:
Hillary Clinton has now dipped into the joint checking account she shares with her husband, largely made up of speaking fees earned in foreign countries, to finance her presidential campaign...
Since leaving the White House former President Clinton has earned millions in speaking fees, mostly from foreign countries like the United Arab Emirates, Dubai and the People’s Republic of China.
This would be more interesting if Hillary had a credible chance of becoming the nominee and had real purty lips. | | 7:26p |
Chief Jimming Bell Oxford Reader on evolution: The mail delivery of 17 June 1858 at Down House, Kent, England, is one reasonable starting-date for the literature of rapid evolution. Charles Darwin (who lived at Down House) then received a letter and manuscript from Alfred Russel [hah!] Wallace, a British naturalist traveling in the Malay archipelago. (The original letter and manuscript are both lost and the 17 June date of receipt is conjectural.) Darwin had invented the theory of evolution by natural selection about twenty years earlier, and since then had studiously avoided publishing a single word of it. He was saving himself to write a Big Work on the subject. Now Wallace, as the mailed manuscript revealed, had invented much the same theory and seemed poised to scoop him. However, an arrangement was made and papers by Darwin and Wallace were presented simultaneously later in 1858 (and printed in 1859). Darwin need not have worried about being scooped. The world ignored the 1858 papers and it was the subsequent 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species that caused the intellectual earthquake. '...ABOUT TWENTY YEARS EARLIER...' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_BellThe pope still upholds the right of governments to kill criminals, even though he restricts it to cases of "absolute necessity" and says that because of improvements in modern penal systems such cases are "very rare, if not practically nonexistent." Evangelium Vitae The new Pope has never said that faithful Catholics may not fight in Iraq, or implement the death penalty. Tim: This was my area - you stole my idea! Jim: May, these ideas are all in the air - there in the air! Tim: Oh, well, then - if that air is coming out of this face, then it is my air and my idea! Jim: You want PAM or not? Tim: Peachy. BREAKING - Bob Barr to Run For President as Libertarian. Barr was calling for assassination politics before 9-11. Acting head of federal police shot dead in Mexico City. http://megagalerias.terra.cl/galerias/index.cfm?id_galeria=30734 |
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