Professor-rat's Blurty

Happy to disappoint you
A question submitted from the online audience asked Bush whether he felt he had been misled about Iraq as he made the decision to go to war.
"`Misled' is a strong word," he said. "Not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was."
So why was Mr Slam Dunk so keen on pushing the nuclear WMD scare button?
He never said anything against all his Orcs gargling Judith Millers poisonous lies.
He was all set to slam dunk Cincinnati till George Tenet got cold feet.
He went ahead with the binary weapon of mass deception in his 2003 SOTU. The 16 words are officially retracted but the other half - the 21 words directly following and without which the famous 16 don't make sense - are still there.
How is this possible oh Chimperor?
Were you criminally negligent... or just criminal?
At least Powell knew when he'd snookered himself and resigned.
Fuck you all to hell with yr flawed intelligence - you either knew and were part of a criminal conspiracy or you were criminally negligent in not checking basic facts. Look I understand the intelligence on hell could be seriously flawed - I'm sure it's like Club Med, no really. Do us all a favor and check it out for us Bushy.
Burn in hell Bush.

Single points of weakness Vs Open source strength
Specific to identity theft, where's the next goldmine after banks and financial services?

We're seeing a lot of activity in the retail sector now with people going out there to get credit card data and personally identifiable information.
Government has always been a pretty big target, so they (criminals) keep expanding vertically - it appears that sites like Facebook offer them these kinds of information.
I think they're going to find their way to healthcare.
The for-profit companies servicing healthcare - pharmaceutical companies, labs and the like - generally have a pretty high level of sophistication and maturity around security but the healthcare institutions themselves, hospitals and doctors, don't necessarily have that type of security.
They're forever strapped for budget and they want to use their money, rightfully so, on new diagnostic equipment or new medical and surgical techniques and operating rooms, but think about the treasure trove of information at a healthcare site, whether it's the equivalent of a Social Security number, name, address, phone number, mother's maiden name, birthdays and even credit card or payment-type information.

It's not that healthcare hasn't been attacked but as we continue to lock down things, whether it's doing a better job at financial services or bringing more attention to social networking sites, these guys are going to keep looking for more and more opportunities.
Universities and road transport authorities which store driving licence details are targets. ( Head of RSA)

Encrypted and distributed translucent data-bases are the obvious way to go imho. SQL and Freenet as opposed to the STASI.

Bloodthirsty Marxists
'...I’m a bit of a student of labour movement history, both Australian and international. This stuff strikingly resembles the atmosphere in the Communist Party at the start of the Third Period, when Harry Wicks, the US police spy who came to Australia as Comintern representative for a year, Stalinised the Australian CP.
That atmosphere and process is described by socialist historian Beris Penrose in her article on Herbert Moxon.
This process also, in an utterly macabre way, resembles the records of plenums of the Soviet Communist Party presided over by Stalin all through the purge massacres in 1937 and 1938: the same pimping, the same twisting of half-heard conversations, with the added nicety of the bullet in the back of the head for the purged.
I doubt if the Boyle bunch have the political understanding to comprehend the political impact of this purge document on the interested radical public who have read it already, or will read it. What socialist in their right mind would even contemplate that bunch being allowed to get anywhere near state power after reading the purge document?
What the document will do, when people like Gerard Henderson get hold of it, as they probably will, is reinforce the image painted by bourgeois opinion that all socialists are at heart bloodthirsty cranks...'

http://ozleft.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/australian-dsp-divides/#comment-627

I think most democratic and libertarian socialists these days have enough essential information to come to the informed opinion that all Leninists are at core bloodthirsty Machiavellian cranks. Most socialists are okay - most Leninists are simply red-fascists and most people know this today.

No dog in this fight.
The Leninist Party Faction can point to Nepal while the DSP can point to Venezuela ...but we musn't let ourselves be distracted by such crass and crude political concerns. Surely now there is virtually a split down the middle that means another excellent chance to deport the Septic Tank, Ema Corro?

'...We must remember that the enemy penetrates everywhere. In Venezuela there is not one space where the enemy doesn’t penetrate. We must realise that the enemy is everywhere and we must be there as well. A comical event occurred about 20 years ago. There was an organisation for the defence of the rights of sex workers, and a lot of homosexuals and transsexuals joined. A member of the North American embassy was the head of the organisation and I began to wonder why. You must realise they do it for the intelligence. Do you think they wanted to participate in the defence of the sex workers? No, They were thinking that through the sex workers, they could obtain information. This is why I say there is no area where the enemy has not been inserted. We must have the firmness and conviction to also do the same, because we are defending our life, our country, and our rights, and the lives of our children, our future and our humanity. We are doubly obliged to do this...' - GREEN LEFT WEEKLY

Taken for chumps
* On April 7, the LPF received notice from DSP national secretary Peter
Boyle lapsing from membership eleven members of the LPF for non payment
of dues or of conference levy. One of these lapsed members included a
comrade who just three years ago had made available $400,000 to the DSP
for special projects, only to get lapsed as unfinancial for non-payment
of a small conference levy!! (Perhaps he'll now be requesting the return
of his $400,000!.)

* On April 7, DSP Sydney branch secretary Alex Bainbridge laid charges
against the five miscreants who attended the AVSN AGM and supported the
setting up of Venezuela Solidarity groups on campuses, and also laid
charges against the LPF /as a whole/.

* On April 9, the Investigation Committee into the crimes of the LPF
that had been set up on March 10 wrote to all LPF members informing them
they had been charged under a swag of clauses in the DSP Constitution.

Would anyone but an idiot try to maintain that a purge was not being
organised?

In fact, if anything, the LPF was rather /slack/ in not registering the
lpf.org.au domain name /before/ April 20, and getting prepared for this
situation a long time ago. We had been given plenty of warning by the
DSP leadership gang, revealing their intentions of purging a
recalcitrant minority years ago (in spite of the 100% hypocritical
crocodile tears of Peter Boyle that they "bent over backwards" to avoid
using any organisational measures): FROM
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/message/53851

Divorce can be such a painful procedure can't it? So what should the anarchist attitude be?
I suggest as default that we support the 'Palestinians' or underdogs...right up till they form any absolutist authoritarian state. Another common anarchist position where two virtual states are at war like this is ' a plague on both yr houses'. Probably the most common attitude will be spontaneous shadenfruede bloc parties or a vigorous, active and healthy apathy/neutrality.

Barnesite
Can be seen roughly in context ( First hit @Google)

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2001/msg00753.htm

The only place the SWP leaders wanted even to acknowledge that it had unionists
was in the Chicago based railroad union, which included only a few people and
was entirely under the authority of Ed Heisler (if I recall his name rightly).
The fact is that there was no work at all during the early 1970s, beyond a few
antiwar leaflets distributed from time to time (in contrast, remember what the
much smaller IS was accomplishing in the IBT). Andrew Pulley, who I personally
liked very much, worked there for a while and was very popular there, but the
SWP yanked him out, if memory serves.

Worse, Ed turned out to be an FBI informant. He had been reporting on SWP/YSA
activities going back years before when he was working for the antiwar movement
in Wisconsin. Indeed, it was later said that the SWP moved him to Chicago in
part because a lot of independents in Milwaukee had decided on some good
circumstantial evidence that Ed was a cop. Rather than listen to what outsiders
said about one of their annointed youth leaders, the SWP shuttled him to another
city.

Anyway, the SWP gave Ed the party franchise to coordinate any and all trade
union work, because he fully supported the "go slow" policy of the Barnes
leadership against the IT and the FPO. Indeed, the SWP of the early 70s used to
refer all members of any union to report on their jobs, their home addresses,
phone numbers, and any contacts on the job to Special Agent Comrade Ed. I knew
Ed somewhat both during this earlier period, and later in the 70s, partly
because he was one of the few majority supporters who'd lift a glass with one of
the proscribed. (In fact, several of us went drinking with the fellow after our
branch organizer already knew he was a cop informant and that he had quit the
SWP. She wasn't telling anyone at that point, simply because it spoke volumes
for the ineptness of the leadership and the dangers of putting all your eggs in
the same institutional basket.)

See also ' More years for the Locust' by Jim Higgins about those charming UK ' Barnesites', Cliff, Grant and Healey.

A liar, spook and crude apologist for fascism exposed
'...Terry Townsend (glparramatta) confirms his role in the new Democratic
Socialist Perspective as a liar, snoop, and crude apologist for the
increasing degeneration of the organisation...'

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/message/53851

This glparramatta jackal was spamming the main Yahoo 'anarchist' list last time I looked. ( a couple of years ago)
I thought his real nym was 'Norm Dixon' but Percy should know. Dirty birds of a feather flocking together...what sweet music they make!
And what a great advertisement for green left Leninism.

Duroyan Duroyan
The story so far. The president of earth has dispatched Barbarousema to search for a valuable missing dog-in-space, Duroyan Duroyan. She tracks him down to Planet DSP where she crash lands and is helped by an eccentric professor. He directs her to a large city called Sogo and after some adventures with love-dolls, leathermen and a hairy customer on a waterbed she bores her way through the planet to a Labyrinth-like shopping mall.
There she meets an angel of a shopping assistant who is also a part time pilot. ( though a bit of a bird-brain)
He flies her out of Fountain-gate across the traffic jams into the heart of the perverted city...to be continued.

Exit Samoza
The blurb
A wildly humorous account of the author's travels across Paraguay–South America's darkly fabled, little-known “island surrounded by land.”Rarely visited by tourists and barely touched by global village sprawl, Paraguay remains a mystery to outsiders. Think of this small nation and your mind is likely to jump to Nazis, dictators, and soccer. Now, John Gimlette’s eye-opening book–equal parts travelogue, history, and unorthodox travel guide–breaches the boundaries of this isolated land,” and illuminates a little-understood place and its people.It is a wonderfully animated telling of Paraguay's story: of cannibals, Jesuits, and sixteenth-century Anabaptists; of Victorian Australian socialists and talented smugglers; of dictators and their mad mistresses; bloody wars and Utopian settlements; and of lives transplanted from Japan, Britain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Korea, and the United States. The author travels from the insular cities and towns of the east, along ghostly trails through the countryside, to reach the Gran Chaco of the west: the “green hell” covering almost two-thirds of the country, where 4 percent of the population coexists–more or very-much-less peacefully–with a vast array of exotic wildlife that includes jaguars, prehistoric lungfish, and their more recently evolved distant cousins, the great fighting river fish. Gimlette visits with Mennonites and the indigenas, arms dealers and real-estate tycoons, shopkeepers, government bureaucrats and, of course, Nazis. Filled with bizarre incident, fascinating anecdote, and richly evocative detail, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a brilliant description of a country of eccentricity and contradiction, of beguilingly individualistic men and women, and of unexpected and extraordinary beauty. It is a vivid, often riotous, always fascinating, journey. END Blurty

I've just got this out from the library and early on there's a quite interesting couple of pages on the Samoza stand. Will rip to blog asap. BTW - two of the libraries three terminals appear to be infected. One keeps firing pop-ups to buy some anti-virus software and the other one has had its home page reset to one of those tiresome petty commercial search sites. I hate to think what the third ones going to do.
I've drawn the attention of the librarians to this but the admin is based in Bendigo or somewhere.
Needless to say its all microcrap and explorer garbage.

Cue the dead-parrot sketch
For the Socialist Alliance. And any faction with that sexist swine David Ratbag Riley in it is obviously nailed to the perch. Clearly there was revisionism here. The Bersteinist, Juaresista types wanted to hive off from Marxism and try being parliamentary imbeciles instead of true blue revolutionaries through and through.
Now its true both statist and revolutionist roaders can both point to recent sucess - Venezuela and Nepal - the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Anarchists have learned through similar splits dating back almost as far that the best solution is diversity-of-tactics doctrine. This posits that basically we all advance together in diversity and try and strike together in unison. We are tolerant of tactics that may even look directly opposed - such as parliamentary roads and revolutionary roads, pacifism and violence. It often doesn't work out that neatly in practice and that accounts for ebbs and flows in anarchism but if you don't have something like this 'Big Tent' approach then the rulers play the oldest game in the world on you - divide and rule.
This is not only a feature of left politics either - the right is just as splintered and riven with Nazis regularly murdering each other. Surely we are better than that. One of the last big success's was South Africa.
That took a diversity of tactics approach to win it. Its a good sound model tested in struggle - lets use it.
Todays spearhead of the people is obviously Jihad. Equally obviously their ' Thabo Mbecki's' are waiting in the wings, but one thing at a time and with baby-steps and the net we have a world to win.

Cloudnet
Prepare to upload
Asher Moses - Forget monster hard drives, backing up your PC and shrink-wrapped software - the future of computing is up in the "cloud" as all of the big technology players jostle to take the "P" out of PC.
Microsoft this week brought the cloud computing concept - whereby all of our data and applications are stored on the internet as opposed to on the PC - a step closer to reality with the unveiling of its Live Mesh platform.
Live Mesh is essentially a web-based operating system, letting users connect all of their devices (home PC, laptop, work computer and, in the not too distant future, handhelds and games consoles) into their own personal mesh. Files and applications can be placed into a "Mesh folder", which lives on the internet and can be accessed by all devices.
The Mesh is updated with any changes made to the files or folders the next time the users is connected to the web.
As the internet supplants the PC as the centre of our digital world, Microsoft suddenly appears far more capable of tackling the Google juggernaut than ever before.
"To individuals, the concept of 'My Computer' will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices - a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole," reads an internal memo by Microsoft's Ray Ozzie, who has been working on Live Mesh since 2005 when he took over from Bill Gates as chief software architect.
"After identifying a device as being 'yours', its configuration and personalisation settings, its applications and their own settings, and the data it carries will be seamlessly available and synchronised across your mesh of devices."
The platform - part of Microsoft's concerted push into the web as its software stranglehold on PC users loosens - is still in beta, but will soon allow users to work with online applications while offline and house their regular offline applications on the web, to be accessed by multiple devices.
It will also, for instance, allow people to remotely control their home PC from their work PC if both are part of the Mesh. Users can give trusted friends access to their Mesh files and folders for sharing and collaboration.
Live Mesh, currently operating in a closed beta of about 10,000 people, is free for now and offers 5GB of online storage. Microsoft is hoping to build the platform by allowing developers to write new applications for it.
Google has long been a major proponent of cloud computing, with all of its services - word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, calendar, email, health care records, search, maps and video - living on the web. END Age article.
Look we all know how totalitarian friendly these big companies are so where is the open source community on this? We got data-banks and Freenet so all we have to do is combine them and popularize them.
(In this regard I must thank the US Air force for recently popularizing cryptoanarchy. Thanks fellas)

The excited and Debord
Victory has a thousand fathers - defeat is an orphan

While awaiting the cloudforest revolution some may need hardware workarounds. In the past I've mentioned Maxtors. There is an article in the Australian IT that mentions Western digital that compares well with Maxtors.
Then there are the new USB dongles around now with plenty of room for most peoples core data ...and all in a key-ring size package too. If yr liberating these from genocidal capitalist run stores please be mindful of scanning devices at said stores exit doors.
These generally don't extend to the feet or the head so use yr head...or give the idea of getting busted the boot. Whatever you do don't slip a tin-foil wrapped zuccini down yr pants. Thats all I ask for surely is it not better to throw a Molotov rather than curse the darkness?

Pork Laden determined to strike in the US
"You're Going to Lose If You Keep This Up" [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

As Sean Hannity issued the above warning to congressional Republicans today on his show, the House — including enough Republicans (100) to amass a veto-proof majority — passed the pork-laden farm bill.

We editorialized on the bill:

The program is nothing more than a massive income transfer from American taxpayers to a small handful of very large producers who grow just a few crops; the program can’t be serving the purposes its defenders claim it does — ensuring a stable food supply and keeping farmers out of poverty — considering that a majority of American farmers do just fine without government aid; and disputes over the large U.S. and EU farm-subsidy programs have opened an apparently unbridgeable divide between developed and developing countries in the current round of multilateral trade talks. The only conclusion one can reasonably draw is that the system is broken and ought to be scrapped.

Brian Riedl wrote earlier today elsewhere on NRO:

With food prices soaring, it takes some gall to force Americans to pay billions of dollars to millionaire agribusinesses. Yet that’s what the latest farm bill would do.
Since the last farm bill was enacted in 2002, the five crops that receive the lion’s share of farm subsidies have also enjoyed massive price hikes: cotton (105 percent price hike), soybeans (164 percent), corn (169 percent), wheat (256 percent), and rice (281 percent). For consumers, these price hikes have caused financial pain domestically and near-riots abroad. For farmers, it’s a sunnier story: Total net farm income has leaped 56 percent in just two years, and helped bring the average farm household’s income to a record $89,434, and its net worth to $838,875.

During this crop-price boom, continuing to subsidize farmers makes as much sense as paying Apple to make another generation of iPods.

Yet instead of cutting, Congress’s answer is to harvest even more farm subsidies. The latest version would increase payment rates for more than a dozen crops and increase conservation subsidies. Although the same farmers already receive massive annual subsidies, plus taxpayer-funded crop insurance, Congress would also layer a new permanent disaster aid program. Release of any disaster aid would require an emergency declaration, so expect Congress to declare an emergency any week that it rains — or doesn’t rain.

Farm subsidies have long been America’s largest corporate-welfare program. Rather than help small, struggling family farmers, the majority of subsidies go to commercial farmers, who report an average income of $200,000 and a net worth of nearly $2 million.

Republican leadership ought to crack down on Republicans who supported the bill. Will it? Unlikely.

Consider, for instance:

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., netted tax breaks for the thoroughbred horse racing industry in the farm bill worth $126 million over the next 10 years, a provision that helped guarantee his support for the hotly debated bill.

The provision ensures that all racehorses are depreciated over three years for tax purposes, regardless of when the horses start training. The current tax code doesn't reflect the entire length of a horse's racing life, according to a National Thoroughbred Racing Association analysis of Jockey Club racing data.

"While many Americans identify the horse industry as one of Kentucky's signature industries, its economic impact extends well beyond the borders of the commonwealth," McConnell said.

Reidl says: " farm subsidies will continue costing taxpayers at least $25 billion annually." Yay! Thanks for the leadership! - OVERHEARD AT WHISPERING GLADES. DEVELOPING...

Workerist triage
If you ever do a first aid course they teach you about triage. Thats when you are early on a multiple accident scene and have to set priorities. Get patient A off the road, apply pressure to patient B's leg-wound, give mouth-to-mouth to patient C and so on. Maybe one day our local Leninists will learn a little revolutionary triage. The local 'working-class' here by world standards is just petit-bourgeois. And they have as much fight in them as a French poodle. This doesn't mean you have to become some 'Third-worldist' bore whose in favor of revolutions everywhere except in their own back-yard. As far as I'm concerned the only real working class elements here worth solidarity are the indigenous and 'white-trash' who are willing to burn cop cars and cop stations, but anyone can get online and do heaps of stuff ' local and or general'. All politics is still local but todays world is a village so 'socialism in one country' never looked stupider.
One of the precious few saving graces of Marxism is revolutionism. In the Marxist tradition that has always come out as red -fascism but without revolutionism Marxism is nothing more than Fabianism.
As I write this I realize its futility - there are a large bunch of Marxists who are total opportunists. They will run with whatever pack looks the largest. Ideas and even deeds mean little to them. They are just herd animals. Triage in that case could mean Halal slaughter, but darlings say a little prayer first.

' From each according to their gullibility - to each according to their greed'

No joy in Gladesville
Mr Joyboy reports some shocking news from Whispering Glades

Staff Sgt. Ronald Blystone, RIP [Rich Lowry]

Very sad news. Army Staff Sgt. Ronald Blystone, who was on the cover of NR in 2005 (it was my "We're Winning" story), was killed by small arms fire while patrolling in Baghdad. He was on his third tour. Read this and this, (links at WG) and you'll get an idea of what an incredible American he was and the sacrifices his family has made for our country (his brother is in Iraq as well, and his mom didn't know which of them had been killed when two officers showed up at her door). He had three children, and the family has set up an educational fund for their children. I'll be contributing and I hope you will too. Donations can be mailed to Blystone Educational Fund, BanCorp South, P.O. Box 4023, Springfield, MO 65808.

I'm also told the good people at the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation will be presenting each of the three children a EE Patriot Bond maturity value of $30,000 each.

05/14 03:34 PM - WHISPERING GLADES PET NECROPOLIS - WE BURN GRUNTS

Supersize my coffin
Inquiring minds at WHISPERING GLADES want to know - How much do seven members of the U.S. Senate weigh?
Eyeing them — Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Jeff Sessions, Saxby Chambliss, David Vitter, Jim Bunning, Richard Burr — I'd guess they probably come in at about 1,300 pounds. These are the Republicans who have signed a hold letter, preventing action on the reauthorization of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Now, how much do 3 million HIV/AIDS-infected people — the treatment goal of a reauthorized PEPFAR — weigh? This is a more difficult calculation. Adults with advanced forms of the disease can weigh about 60 pounds. Children with AIDS are like a shadow falling on a scale. Maintaining weight becomes difficult with vomiting and diarrhea, with tuberculosis and fungal infections, and with cancers such as Kaposi's sarcoma and lymphoma.
Even so, you'd think that a few million of these wasting bodies would weigh more on the moral balance than seven senators. But so far, you'd be wrong. We're always thinking ahead here at WHISPERING GLADES - thats just so you don't have to.

A unified field theory of the net
Exterminating the cyber rats requires Shroedinger's cat - By Neil Mitchell

'...the internet can be a dangerous weapon that gives undue power to anonymous, cowardly people.

This week has shown that because it is anonymous the internet can be used by political "rats" to spread malicious and inaccurate material that would never appear in mainstream media, which can be held accountable.
It has also shown that in the digital age there is no such thing as untraceable and confidential correspondence and that anybody who trusts their private thoughts to a computer keyboard is foolish...'

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23701444-5000106,00.html

Here we have a unified field theory of the net that unites the time dilating relativistic effects of anonymity with the quantum mechanical effects of untraceable communications that are 'killed' as soon as they're looked at . I'm talking about FORM here! I'm talking about FUNCTION! I'm talking about MEANING!
I'm talking about PHASE-WAVE TRANSITIONS IN DOUBLE-SLIT FIELD TRIALS! I'm talking about TRANSCENDING THE DOMINANT NUTCASE PARADIGM! - I rest my case

Ta ta red corridor
The Hindu-Zionist Alliance Springs to Life [Lisa Schiffren]

Whenever they can't think of anything more urgent with which to frighten the population, the Pakistani media summons up the scariest monster of all: the Hindu-Zionist Alliance. The conspiracy theory driven world view common among illiterate Pakistanis (70 percent of the population?) thrives on this stuff, and once you accept that everyone is against you, that particular alliance of enemies makes perfect sense: Hindus on their border; Zionists in control everywhere. And both focused on innocent Pakistan. Forget that for most of the existence of both (post-colonial) India and Israel, Cold War alliances made their own co-operation unlikely.

But now, here we are. Leading weapons manufacturers from each country have just announced a new partnership. Israel Aerospace Industries and Tata Advanced Systems will be co-operating on building unmanned aerial vehicles for the Indian Army. In fact, the Indian businessman who presided over this deal suggests that this partnership could make his country into a regional defense hub.

Of course, considering the dangers on its own borders, among the highly armed Waziris who are perfectly capable of shooting down Pakistani government planes, and the nice al Qaeda folk hiding in those mountain caves, no one needs unmanned aerial vehicles more than the Pakistani military. Bonding over arms sales has a long history as a way of bringing former adversaries together. Maybe the Pakistanis should give IAI a call themselves.

05/14 11:20 AM - The Corner

Whose gonna squawk if the peaceful democratic Indians wanna go all Israeli on the ass of a few red-fascist clowns?
Not me.
Not even the red-fash themselves if the PKK thang is any guide. Marx said the Russians have no honor, but really there's no honor among any of these Marxist scumbags busy white-anting democracy.

Democide in the delta
Government is not the solution to our problem - government is the problem.

re: re: What's Wrong with Conservatism [Andy McCarthy]

Mark's right — conservatism is not the problem, it's conservatives like Gerson.

When Katrina struck, I was horrified by the reports. Of course the voice in my head that said (a) why didn't these people leave when they had the chance, and (b) these people elected the likes of Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco, what did they expect? But like millions of other Americans, I felt an obligation to help less fortunate people who were in need. So I sent money to the Red Cross because the Red Cross is a reputable outfit with a good reputation help to the people who need it.

Afterwards, I got so angry at the boondoggle government spending, which inevitably rewarded (and continues to reward) the worst tendencies, I ended up annoyed at myself for contributing — in the name of "compassion," the government is going to spend goo-gobs of your money anyway, and waste aplenty.

Why does Gerson think that the measure of compassion is whether the government moves when people are hurting? Look at our experience: Katrina, 9/11, or name your overseas catastrophe. Americans pony up more dough than any people on the planet. Government activism causes the dysfunction we saw in Katrina and, at best, it stands in the next Katrina to depress the charitable impulse. That's compassion?

05/14 12:43 PM - WHISPERING GLADES HIGH SECURITY FORMALDEHYDE IMPREGNATED TWILIGHT HOME

A Republican president proposed a $3.1 trillion budget, with the support of his party. We are trillions of dollars in debt, owing mainly to massive entitlement programs supported by both parties. The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

I promised youse
Here it is - the Paraguayan 'Operation Ogre'

FROM Page 27 - 'At the tomb of the inflatable pig'

'...While there is really much space in my Pantheon of heroes for terrorists and communists, I have to confess a sneaking regard for the Argentine Montoneros who dispatched Somoza. They were veterans of the La Guarra Sucia - Argentines Dirty War - three women and four men.
They reasoned that the death of Somoza would send a shock-wave of anxiety through the community of dictators who, at that time, deeply infested South America. ' We cannot tolerate the existence of millionaire playboys,' one said, ' while thousands of Latin Americans are dying of hunger. We are perfectly willing to give up our lives for this cause'.
The leader of the cadre, code name 'Ramon', who'd cut his teeth blasting his way out of a military prison in Patagonia, led them, first to Columbia. There, hidden away in the mountains, he toughened up the team.
He's even bought in a little library to toughen up their minds. Here was ' The spy who came in from the cold', 'The house on Garibaldi st', and - rather symmetrically - ' The day of the Jackal'.
( I might break here from this text and mention a previous description of the dismemberment by chainsaw of a communist suspect in Paraguay and the factoid that the real 'Jackal' had lived long enough to retire to Paraguay - pr)
In a country so deeply bedded in contraband it wasn't difficult to to get their work tools into Asuncion.
They buried two assault rifles, two automatics, two Ingram sub-machine guns, an RP-7 bazooka with two rockets and four fragmentation grenades under their rented patio and awaited their moment.
( To be continued )

Rape dogs of war
Much attention has been paid to water-boarding as an immoral if not illegal technique utilized in the so-called War of Terror. Little attention has been paid to the equally physically harmful and likely more long-term consequential technique of sexual humiliation and terror.
Buried deep in Mark Mazzetti’s Times article is an intriguing paragraph:

That order specifies some conduct that it says would be prohibited in any interrogation, including forcing an individual to perform sexual acts, or threatening an individual with sexual humiliation. But it does not say which techniques could still be permitted. [New York Times, April 27, 2008]

Yes, what “techniques” of sexual humiliation can still be used?

It seems almost impossible to precisely determine these techniques. Reviews of the CIA, Justice and Defense department’s websites reveal little useful information. Email queries to the Justice Department, including Benczkowski and the media-relations office, have not been answered.
An exhaustive search of the internet has provided no further information about sexual humiliation then the oblique Times reference. (An effort for further clarification from Mazzetti has not succeeded.) This is very much in keeping with Bush administration policies to deny, falsify, obfuscate or simply lie about techniques sanctioned and employed in its fictitious War on Terror.
In the absence of the formal specification of CIA’s approved or utilized (and they are not necessarily the same) techniques of sexual humiliation, one must draw upon previously documented U.S. military and intelligence-agency practices and the techniques used by other militaries. These examples illustrate what the CIA and other U.S. agencies are capable of employing to break those they identify as “terrorists”.
Rape is one of the most barbaric forms of sexual humiliation and terror. Since the Civil War, rape has been increasingly integrated into what is known as total warfare. Women, girls and some boys have been increasingly singled out for systematic sexual abuse during civil conflicts and military campaigns. However, rape has only been limitedly employed against adult male captives detained in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo or CIA black sites around the world. [see “’The Hard Hand of War’: Rape as an Instrument of Total War,” CounterPunch, Apri1 4, 2008]
The U.S. has employed (and, most likely, continues to employ) a host of other techniques of sexual terrorization to break male inmates. An act of sexual humiliation serves two purposes: to physically harm and to emotionally scar those subjected to such abuse. Sexual terrorization seeks to inflict both pain and shame, to make the recipient suffer and loath himself. Sexual humiliation is intended to break the victim both physically and spiritually, to leave scars on (and inside) the body and in the psyche.
If (or when) top officials of the Bush administration face either an American or international war crimes tribunal over their conduct related to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, sexual humiliation and terror should not be absent from the indictment.

As should the practice of using trained dogs to rape prisoners imo - this 'Klaus Barbie' technique now revived in the new Forth Reich.

Shades of Prague
Page 27 ( cont)
' I walked back along Espana in the downtown direction. At the junction with Avenida Santisimo Sacramento, some newspaper boys were camped out in front of the kiosk, pawing over some magazines. Back then, one of the terrorists, 'Oswaldo', had joined them, disguising himself as a vendor but all the time watching the gates of 433.
Further on the gang had hired a rather plain-looking mansion that had - since then- been converted into a strangely liver-green Chinese restaurant called La Union. Their cover story this time was musical; they were in town with Julio Iglesias, making a film about Paraguay. This wasn't such a pantomine excuse as it might seem; Julio Iglesias had already released two songs about Paraguay and the landlady was so steeped in flattery that she held her tongue until the big day, 17 September 1980.
As Somoza and his cavalcade set out, Oswaldo sent a radio signal to the men in the house who formed up in the front.
Samoza's Mercedes purred toward the mansion, and as it passed the rocket-man pulled the trigger.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Reinhard_Heydrich#Reichsprotektor_of_Bohemia_.26_Moravia_and_Assassination_in_Prague)
Page 28 to follow - DEVELOPING...

Death of a rodent
Page 28 ( cont)

Nothing happened. Ramon started desperately pumping bullets into the car, and the metallic gale that he unleashed took most of the driver's head off. The Mercedes, now unpiloted, veered into the pavement. The rocket-man extracted the dud projectile, fitted the spare, dropped to one knee and fired.
Even 18 months on, the asphalt still showed the ripples gouged by the explosion. The Mercedes had opened up like a tin of peaches. Somoza and his rodent lieutenant could count themselves immediately departed, and most of Samoza's economic advisor followed, through many holes in the metalwork. The bewildered Nicaraguan primitives in the car behind were firng back, but the Montoneros had gone.

Terror central
Outsourcing torture? Think Sphincter

MILAN, Italy – The wife of an Egyptian cleric taken from a Milan street, allegedly as part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, wept Wednesday as she described her husband's alleged torture in an Egyptian jail.
Heavily veiled and speaking through a translator, Ghali Nabila testified in the trial of 26 Americans charged in Italy with kidnapping in the disappearance of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr in February 2003.
“They put him on a cross, they beat him on the ears and all over his body,” she told the court, citing a letter from her husband and conversations with him.
“They positioned him on a chair, tied up his ands and his feet,” she said before breaking into tears. “And they gave him electrical shock all over his body, even his genitals.”
Nabila, 39, said the torture continued over 14 months.

Mamdouh Habib says ' Tell me about it'.

Saudi Arabia to the Rescue? [Victor Davis Hanson]

Egyptians have been recently rioting over price hikes in their food subsidies and occasional shortages. Four thoughts come to mind:

Since the original Camp David accords, following the Yom Kippur War, the United States in aggregate has given Egypt more than $60 billion in aid, much of it in the form of bulk deliveries of American foodstuffs.

Two, Egypt is one of the most anti-American of the many hostile countries in the Middle East, at least if various opinion polls of popular sentiment have any currency that have consistently shown 60% and more of Egyptians have an unfavorable view of the United States.

Three, the food riots ultimately are prompted by spiraling fuel prices, due to the OPEC cartel price hikes that inflate production costs of almost everything, and the resulting decision elsewhere to divert acreage in the Americas and Europe to produce ethanol.

Four, of the many trillions of dollars that have poured into Iran and the Gulf monarchies following the rise from $23 a barrel to $123 since 2002, very little has been given from brethren Arab states to their poorer neighbors, made even poorer by the petrol-profiteering of those in the Middle East.

It is ironic that we are both paying trillions these past few years in jacked-up oil prices to the Middle East, and still sending billions more in food aid to Egypt at a time when our foodstuffs are in short supply—and still being disliked by those in places like Cairo, whose state-controlled media whips up anti-American sentiment.

What should we do about this? Perhaps a magnanimous speech along the following lines: ‘Because the Arab world has become enriched by spiraling oil prices, the U.S. would like to redirect its food aid to states in the Americas and Africa newly impoverished by soaring fuel and food bills, in recognition that the Middle East now has trillions of dollars in new profits and thus the newfound wherewithal to take care of its own.’

05/13 09:34 PM - ZE WHITE ONLY FUNERAL HOME FOR ZE MASTER RACE! ( The Corner)

This masquerade
Comment by marcus pabian

May 14, 2008 @ 9:08 pm

The central issue that led the DSP leadership on a non-stop campaign for over two years to marginalise and then expel the LPF was our opposition to the DSP masquerading as a broad left party – the Socialist Alliance.

Socialist Alliance has been a DSP front for a long time.

But this put the DSP leadership in a difficult position: to admit the time had not come for a broad-left party implied going back to building a public revolutionary socialist party.

That’s what they no longer agreed with – building a public revolutionary socialist party.

But rather than openly admit it they pretended that SA was actually becoming something more than the DSP and a few active supporters, to avoid going back to being a public revolutionary socialist party.

The opposition of the LPF to this charade was returned with marginalisation of the LPF by the DSP leadership, a campaign of exclusion was conducted for over 2 years – breaking with a tradition of building inclusive leadership teams.

Almost everything the LPF did was turned into a scandal to feed this campaign of exclusion. Eventually a clear message was drummed into the DSP membership – the LPF are a hostile force.

Yet our central proposal was that we return to building the DSP as we did before we submerged into the Socialist Alliance.

Politically the LPF wasn’t a hostile force to the old DSP but hostile to the liquidation of the DSP, its revolutionary politics and traditions, into an empty broad-left party front.

For a thorough analysis of the political and organisational degeneration of the DSP visit www.lpf.org.au
247163

Comment by Linda Waldron

May 15, 2008 @ 1:06 pm

Margarita says “It is unfortunate…it has come to an acrimonious parting of ways”. However her own role in preparing the ground for the purge belies her crocodile tears:

The ruthless and undemocratic nature of the current leadership of the DSP manifested itself in early 2006. Four majority leaders in Melbourne consisting of Assistant National Secretary Sue Bolton, two National Executive members Margarita Windisch and Dick Nichols and one National Committee member Jody Betzien hacked into my personal email account in order to read the internal discussion of the LPF.

After perusing over 500 of my personal emails they stole from the account any emails they found useful in their factional warfare against the LPF and forwarded them to National Secretary Peter Boyle. At no point did they inform me of their violation of my personal privacy or ever apologise for the grievous harm they did me. It was only some two months after the incident when Peter Boyle released the stolen emails to the entire National Committee that I was able to force an admission from the four culprits. While admitting to the crime, no admission of any wrongdoing was made by anyone on the DSP leadership. Instead Peter Boyle told the NC the four comrades had acted ‘responsibly’.

Posted below is a statement on the hacking by the Melbourne LPF at the time. More documents, including responses from the DSP majority have been posted on the Green Left discussion list.

Ironically around the time of this email hacking incident Margarita Windisch was standing as a candidate for SA on a platform of civil liberties and opposition to state espionage…

Linda Waldron
( From Leftwrites)

Why the DSP rump is becoming positively Gouldian mein herren unt dammen. Javohl.

@ndy the fascist scumbag
Slackbastard is really about the most honest thing @ndy has has ever said about himself. For surely it takes a truly slack bastard to make so many 'mistakes', to fall down so many cockroach cracks and to suck up to so many gross crypto-fascists.
Christos Tsiolkas...this is someone who you might think the slack bastard would have down in his oh so ostensible shit-list as an anti-semitic Nazi. Maybe this is just another 'honest mistake' by the little Nazi cockroach cocksucker @ndy?
Maybe.
But on top of his fellating the New Statesman, Dave Antagonism, whatever Neo-Nazi scam or Ddos attack thats on and now this Tsiolkas bs ( leaving to one side his role in the Nazi like purge of myself from anarchobase) I have to wonder - just how much more credibility a rotten little fascist creep like this puke has over say...Greg ablokeimet or that Nazi in Qld that Brian Laver befriended.
I mean seriously people - who the hell really thinks storm-fucking-front is on a par with the pentagon any-fucking-way?
Only loons like Uri Gordon and this creepy little lying piece of shit '@ndy' the slackest flaming arsehole that ever glommed onto anarchism.
Even his 'and's' and ' the's' are lies.
Even his bff thinks he stinks like dead meat.

Blood sausage
Re: what the hell are you talking about ed ?

Ed... I'm not going to let you wiggle out of that so easily. How does
one interpret a phrase like "What's your position on that these
days?". Obviously, you were trying to make some smart remark out of
some imagined memory of what I said in the past. Otherwise asking me
this question in the middle of a discussion about the organisational
conflicts in the DSP is bizarre. I feel like I have been accosted by
a member of the Spartacist league while taking a peaceful walk to my
local Chinese bakery and asked what my position on the withdrawal of
troops in Iraq is.
Of course, I support the immediate withdrawal of all imperialist
troops from Iraq. I have never held another view on this question.
That was my attitude when I marched with a hundred thousand or so
South Australians against the war just as the conflict was getting
underway and I have never changed my view. What a strange question to
ask me (as I said, in the middle of a discussion about something
completely different).

Instead of wasting your and my time trying to make smart remarks
about nothing can I suggest that all you aging Sydneyite and
Melbournite lefties (Bob, you, John, Peter, Doug, Dave, etc. etc.
etc. etc. etc.) get together over a keg of beer and some sausages,
get past all this bullshit and make the last decades of our lives
worthwhile. In Australia, the future of the left is in the hands of
Sydney and Melbourne. The only thing we in the provinces can do is
watch the spectacle.

A matter of taste

Certainly, it’s true that you can eat some pretty alarming stuff in France. My digestion still recalls a banquet near Perpignan whose main course was essentially solid pork fat floating in liquid pork fat. “In LA,” said a visitor from California, “this would be regarded as attempted murder.” I would also resist manouls - sheep’s intestine stew - in the Massif Central, and andouillette, which can surprise you anywhere. But this isn’t bad cooking. The dishes are cooked as they should be. Andouillette is meant to have a “whiff of s***t about it”, as someone once said.

If we British recoil, it’s because we have lost touch with the origins of food. In Britain, the food chain begins, vacuum-packed, in the supermarket. In France, it begins on the land, in the sea and with the animals, in all their gory detail. To an extent unknown here, the French have kept links to a peasant past. Even when they haven’t - when they are, say, Jacques Chirac (whose favourite dish is calf’s head) - they pretend they have.

Peasants ate anything, by season. They had no choice. They didn’t produce much and the best of what they did produce had to be sold off in town. That left them with the innards, ears and trotters. Which they supplemented with snails, frogs, thrushes and pretty much anything else that moved. Titmice were a treat in eastern France. Now life is richer and everyone can afford takeaway pizza, but mainstream French cooking remains rooted in its traditions.

Late last year I joined a family pig-killing in the Cévennes. Earlier in the autumn, we were mushrooming with the neighbours. Lots of people do this. Everyone’s an expert and may talk so endlessly about the nuances of a blanquette de veau that one loses the will to live. But it is this culture that informs chefs (from the neighbourhood bistro to the Michelin three-star) and which they must satisfy.

Of course, other nations have good restaurants, but nowhere else do you eat so well up and down the scale because nowhere else (apart, perhaps, from Italy) has such unbroken links with a culinary heritage. And nowhere else do you eat so variously from region to region. Take a trip through eastern France, stopping at the Maison Kammerzell in Strasbourg for choucroute, the Hotel de la Poste in Charolles, near Macon, for the best charolais steak ever and the Miramar in Marseille for bouillabaisse, and you will see what I mean. But I’d still avoid the andouillette. It truly is disgusting. FROM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/europe/france/1940977/
Vive-la-diff%C3%A9rence-dispelling-French-myths.html?service=print

Sometimes we are called on to make terrible sacrifices...

Suspend judgment
Suspend judgment is surely the only call possible on many of these dynamic situations where there are dramatic revelations emerging all the time in real time. For example no one I know has heard from staunch long-time DSP hack Ema Corro on this latest crisis. This is in spite of her huge donations in DPRK heroin and sex-slave revenue from Thai and Indonesian sex-slaves that she has sold into underground DSP brothels and heroin dens.
An ' arms-length' detached and neutral attitude is called for here in spite of manifest evidence of under-age child-abuse, torture and serial drug-abuse by the long time DSP tool, the American Ema Corro.

Our morals and theirs
It’s Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day. Here’s a quick focus on two blogs/bloggers:

- Burmese Bloggers Without Borders is an independent voice reaching out to the rest of the world. In March they highlighted the case of two Rangoon journalists who were imprisoned. Amnesty International has also taken up the case of Thet Zin and Sein Win Maung.

- Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer has been in prison for over a year now, for writing about political repression, religious extremism and discrimination against women.

Human rights are not ' bourgeois' or ' reactionary peasantry'. They are universal human and civil rights.
If you don't respect them, then you are a prima facie fascist and enemy of the people.

Its never too late
Orthodox Anarchist — Jewish identity not an either-or proposition

I just sat through an hour and a half of infuriating dialogue on Jewish identity (which I will publish to The Telegraph later this evening) that has only further concretized my belief that Jewish leadership is completely out of touch with the greater Jewish public.
Jews and Judaism are moving forward, but many of the panelists in this discussion seem obsessed with keeping us still, or worse yet, moving us backwards.
With rare exception, few of the statements expressed by the panelist seemed to convey an understanding of where we, as the next generation, stand in relationship to our Jewish identities.
They are certainly capable of parsing the data. They have no trouble spotting the trends. But the conclusions they have drawn from this data border on lunacy.
Many of them spoke as if Jewish identity is a monolith and that you’re either with them or against them. With few exceptions, they spoke about fluid identity like it’s a disease. They spoke about individuals expressing their Jewishness in their own way as ignorance and self-aggrandizement. They spoke about Western Liberal values as if they’re anti-Jewish (as opposed to a new paradigm in which to be Jewish). Worse yet, they exposed their contempt for those outside their purview, by claiming that if you are not a Jewish nationalist and if you are not committed to traditional Jewish institutions, then you are uneducated, you are naive, and you have been corrupted by the goyishe world.
In every generation we receive higher revelations of Torah, vis-a-vis the higher revelations of morality that unfold in each new age. And yet, it seems that, in the eyes of these individuals, progress threatens the continuity of the Jewish tradition. There is no acknowledgement that progress — responding and adapting to new paradigms in thought — is itself a Jewish tradition.
They cry that we are disappearing, that Jews aren’t interested in Judaism. Yet they project the impression that the Jewish tradition itself contradicts the values of modern Jewish people. Worse so, they suggest that to feel affection for and solidarity with the non-Jewish world is to abandon our commitment to our own people.
In that regard, they view Jewish social justice ventures that address non-Jewish problems (one of the fastest growing sectors in Jewish communal life) as only a means of moving Jews back towards particularism and tribalism. They do not recognize the value of that service work in-and-of-itself or the concept of service as a Jewish value itself, other than as a means to this end. They do not acknowledge our obligation to love all of G-d’s creation nor our tradition’s imperative to care for the downtrodden whether Jew or non-Jew. They do not see our commitment to the greater world as the logical extension of our tradition, but rather a recipe for our self-destruction.
They pat themselves on the back for their purported forward-thinkingness in bringing young Jewish leadership into the fold, in creating a space for these purportedly “new” forms of Jewish expression, yet they appear only to be co-opting these initiatives with the goal of advancing their unchanging agenda. Indeed, for every dollar they spend on new Jewish initiatives, they spend 10 to fortify the old guard.

I stepped to the microphone and asked (paraphrasing), “Rather than repackaging and rebranding the same old Judaism, what are Jewish institutions doing to make themselves relevant to future generations? If we have new moral revelations in every generation, why are tolerating the panelists’ characterization of Western Liberalism being as anti-Jewish?”
What I have concluded from this panel — and from the utter isolation I felt in response to my challenge to the panelists, as embodied by their avoidance of these questions and the contemptuous looks I drew from the audience members — is that it is not we who have abandoned the organized Jewish community. Rather, it is the organized Jewish community which has abandoned us. - anarchoblogs

Taking an unrealistic optimistic approach there is a swing back to the old profound Jewish common sense of Zimmerman, Bruce, Heller, Roth, the Marx brothers, Mailer, Einstein, Goldman and millions of others - whether it is too late for most of the Jews squatting in occupied Palestine I leave to others to judge.
I would like to save as many as possible - even the 'crazies' who may be de-programmed.

Anarcho-Marxism is an Oxymoron
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2008051416422653

Marx hated all the original anarchists and anarchism. The petit-bourgeois puppet of the Capitalist foxhunter Friedrich Engels wrote lengthy insane polemics against Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin.
Just because some insignificant arrogant Marxist imbeciles basically aligned with anarchism 50 years after Fanelli means nada. And dipshits like ' Not Bored' are no friends of sanity let alone anarchy.
Anarchism as we know it today is largely a reaction AGAINST Marxist bs so there can never be any synthesis.
You may as well look for a synthesis with Brownshirt fascism before this will happen.