Topics

http://world.time.com/2013/01/10/kurdish-assassinations-in-paris-turn-a-spotlight-on-turkey-pkk-talks/

Basically, Turkey was looking to open a dialogue with the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party.  Talks were due to take place in Paris, with senior PKK members.  And then, someone killed them, execution style.

The internet is rife with rumours about who is reponsible already.  Some are laying the blame at the feet of dissident Kurdish nationalists, who feel the PKK is selling them out.  Possible.  Others suggest rogue units within the military and intelligence agencies of the Turkish state - Ergenekon, the "deep state" of far-right radicals - are the culprits.

But no-one seems to be looking at the Kurdish role in Syria's civil war...namely, that Syrian Kurds aligned with the PKK are becoming a serious and credible faction in the war, one which may be able to carve out their own territory from Syrian soil, giving a material base to a future "Kurdistan".

Their enemies in the civil war, such as the Syrian government, would be most delighted to see the PKK paralyzed, and to drive a wedge between them and Turkey, I am sure...

Northern Mali is the target of operations:

President Francois Hollande says French troops are taking part in operations against Islamists in northern Mali.

French troops "have brought support to the Malian army to fight against the terrorists", Mr Hollande said.

He said the intervention was in line with international law, and had been agreed with Malian President Dioncounda Traore.

Armed groups, some linked to al-Qaeda, took control of northern Mali in April after a coup in the capital, Bamako.

The militants said this week that they had advanced further into government-controlled territory.

Mr Hollande said French military action had begun on Friday afternoon and would last "as long as necessary.

The EU has also committed a force of 200 military trainers for the Malian Army.  I don't know what nationality, but this is almost certainly a NATO approved operation, so Italy, Spain etc are all good bets.

Not sure how ECOWAS will feel about this, though. 

So, let's consider...

According to the MLists,

(1) Politics is about struggle between economic classes. The state acts in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole, and arbitrates differences among 'fractions' of capital;

(2) Political ideas (except Marxism-Leninism) are 'ideologies' designed to rationalise class rule;

(3) The masses acquiesce because of 'false consciousness' associated with submission to a dominant or 'hegemonic' ideology.

And according to the PCTists...

(1) Politics is about the struggle between interest groups. The state responds to the pressure of organised interest groups, typically tight coalitions of producer groups. Logrolling between these groups produces an outcome which benefits them collectively at the expense of taxpayers and consumers;

(2) Political ideas (except free-market ideas) are ideologies designed to rationalise policies serving various interest groups;

(3) Voters acquiesce because of 'rational ignorance' which leads them to take little interest in politics and makes them easily subject to manipulation by political interests.

As a consequence:

If ideas do not matter, free speech is at best a luxury and at worst a distraction. Even if speech is not actually suppressed, it is debased. When political debate is seen as a charade by its participants, it naturally becomes one. Furthermore, since the system cannot be changed by reason, some form of 'short sharp shock' is required. The result is a cult of ruthlessness (the catchphrase here is 'tough decisions'). Since opposition to one's policies is interpreted as a sign that interest groups are being hurt, it may be taken as evidence of correctness. The correct response is not to persuade one's opponents, but to override them.

And people say I'm strange for considering Neocons the last Leninists.  No, everyone else is for not.

Is anyone else following this idiocy?

I thought about putting it in the financial fuckery thread, but decided it was stupid enough to warrant its own discussion.

Asia Times:

Visitors to Myanmar these days often encounter young men in T-shirts emblazoned with a red swastika in a circle and the word "Nazi" written above. World War II-style motorcycle helmets decorated with the fascist emblem are also en vogue on the streets of Yangon.

Myanmar's most popular rock band, which has thousands of fans on Facebook and has toured the United States, is named "The Iron Cross," in reference to a German military medal that was bestowed by Adolf Hitler. The band's logo is a Nazi eagle holding an iron cross instead of a swastika in its claws.

Quite a few people seem to be excusing this on the basis that the swastika is a Sanskrit symbol blah blah blah.  Yeah, no shit, but when you're throwing the word "Nazi" above it, while listening to a band called "The Iron Cross" on your Hitler-themed iPod, it's possible that they're actually referring to the Nazi symbols here, and not Buddhist ones.

And lets face it, this isn't the only case of bizarre Hitler worship in SE Asia, as the article itself goes on to show:

In India, Hitler's autobiographical book Mein Kampf, which among other things proclaims the supremacy of the German race, is regularly sold at bookshops next to the biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs and the country's graduate students are snapping it off the shelves, Cooper says.

In Thailand, which was an ally of Germany and Japan during World War II, school children in the northern city of Chiang Mai dressed up as Hitler and in Nazi SS guard uniforms for a school parade in 2011. A local band named "Slur" produced a song and video called "Hitler," in which dancers put on Hitler mustaches and incorporated the Nazi salute into their dance routine.

In Korea, Nazi symbols have even been used to promote cosmetics, Cooper said. "I wish I could tell you it's the first time we've seen this phenomenon pop up in Asia, but it seems to come up too often," Cooper says. "It's difficult to put a finger on why it's happening."

And there is this, too:

While many Myanmar youth might not be familiar with the history of Nazism during WWII, many do have a perspective on the Nazis. In certain circles Hitler is seen by some Asians as a strong leader who fought against colonial powers, including England and France, that ruled and oppressed their nations before achieving independence.

American historian Rosalie Metro, who wrote her doctorate thesis on how history is taught in Myanmar, says that popular opinion of Hitler in Myanmar is generally positive. "I asked a few taxi drivers about history, and they said, 'Yes, Hitler is a good, strong leader,'" Metro said. "People say that sometimes."

Myanmar's government-issued history textbooks contribute to this strong leader perception because they do not describe Nazi atrocities, according to Metro.

"They talk about the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, and that the situation was very bad in Germany, that Hitler was a strong leader, and that many Germans felt that the Jews, who controlled the economy, were responsible for their troubles," Metro, who can read Burmese, said in summarizing Myanmar history textbooks. "That's strange because it doesn't say, 'And they were wrong.' And it doesn't mention the Holocaust."

That portrayal is in stark contrast to how schoolbooks refer to the British and the Japanese, who are described broadly as enemies of the Myanmar people who "sucked the lifeblood out of Burma," she said, referring to the country's former name.

Well, truthfully, it arrived on Monday, though because of our building's inane postal system/registry/authentication thing, I only actually got it today.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present a lost internet treasure from the 1990s (itself mirrored on a now lost host, only recovered via the wonders of Archive.org)

Brother Blue

I'll let BB explain what he is about in his own words:

We are all subject to the culturally-imposed rose-colored goggles of Geordi LaForge when observing what we have come to call the "modern" UFO enigma. Adhering steadfastly and obediently to the Morals and Dogmas of the Holy Church of Science and Technology, as loyal disciples we blindly abide by the Doctrines and Covenants of the Holy Priests thereof. And we caustically toss such deprecating glares at our ignorant and superstitious ancestors for their absurd explanations of this Clearly Scientific and Unmistakably Space-Age Phenomenon.

We laugh at our foolish predecessors who were not savvy enough to recognize as Space Aliens from Mars the elfs, gnomes, trolls, leprechauns, faeries, sylphs, salamanders, elementals, goblins, genies, incubus, succubus, vampires and daemons which haunted them in their day.

Now we are smart enough to realise that the Clever Martian Space Alien Doctors have mysteriously misplaced all their Scientific Petrie Dishes so they are forced to scoop sample after sample after sample of our skin to replenish their ever-dwindling supply of human DNA and take sample after sample after sample of our cum, ostensibly to grow their own bastardized half-breed spawn. We are only just now smart enough to realise they were not merely vampiric Adepts of the Black Lodge (the Vama Marg) -- milking our tantric energies/life-force/vril/orgone/chi to maintain their own pitiful and pathetic existences.

    "As aphids are to ants, so are we to them."
    -George Andrews, _Extraterrestrials Among Us_

For, you see, yesterday's vampires have become today's Rectum Coring Reticulan Space Aliens who, apparently famished after their lengthy interstellar Cosmic Voyage ( Doc Courtney Brown's fine work notwithstanding), have managed to stave off their ravenous hunger by gnawing on bovine assholes, carved out with all the precision their Space Age Martian Laser Beam Butthole Slicers can offer.

It's all very scientific, you see.

Yesterday, Faustian mages conjured interstitial entities to have them fetch wealth, power, intell or enlightenment. Today, CSETI's Doc Stevie Greer (when he's not double-crossing and pissing off every fellow UFOlogist under the sun, or alienating his one-time rich sugardaddy, Laurence Rockefeller) "vectors in the friendly Space Brothers" with powerful flashlights, group meditations/visualisations and other Highly Scientific Procedures such as "Koch-Kyborg" pyramidal visualisations or "Coherent Thought Sequencing."

Yesterday, Queen Elizabeth I inquired of her Enochian mage -- Dr. John Dee -- entreating him to consult with the Enochian Angels in order to obtain tactical military advice and the like. Today those wacky DIA boys employ ... uh ... "Scientific" Remote Viewing Protocols to obtain similar intell. (Please note that our illegally extorted tax dollars also finance a wealth of other Scientific Intelligence Gathering Operations -- crystal ball gazing, skrying, tarot card reading, seances, channelings, etc.)

So you can clearly see that we have come a long way.

And now, the mythological serpent which seduced Eve in the garden of Eden has been replaced with the more time- and culture- appropriate Space Alien Lizards from Alpha Draconis. The word Draconis, BTW, being loosely translated, means "dragon" and has surfaced in such places as the name of the legendary vampire Count Dracu (Dracula) and angry diatribes on the Senate floor, accusing certain seat-sitters therein of passing allegedly draconian legislation.) These clever Draco Reptoids who, we are told by Cosmic Awareness(tm), have recently hidden themselves in that hollowed-out battle planetoid, The Hale-Bopp Special, have for millenia buggered our boys and boinked our women and more recently have met with charismatic Masonic entrepreneurs in Salt Lake City to start new religious cults and design tantric occult underwear.

But wait -- it gets even better!

Yes, today the Space Alien Abductees are routinely bent over in order to facilitate the Space Aliens' shoving odd probes up their asses to "enlighten their consciousness," all the while excusing such bizarre and irrationally perverse behaviour by doling out absurdly irrelevant quasi-spiritual new-agey platitudes on the importance of living "green."

So are clever interstitial entities (read: incubus/succubus) raping our people and mind-fucking them into an absurd "cosmic codependence?" Oddly enough, it appears this damn well might be the case (as in the Schaffer quote above, neo-Nephilim 'n all.)

But the RILLY smart ones among us know that the entire Space Alien mind-fuck meme which has so infected the Jungian collective of our day is nothing more than a cover for Uncle Samuel to hide behind as he controls both our noggins and our very souls with his apparently omnipotent EMF/ELF/GWEN/RHIC/EDOM Delgado gizmos, playing his Diabolical HAARP and thereby forcing us as mere pawns to dance to the maniacal drumbeat of his Insidious Electronic Voodoo.

C'mon, folks, is this not much more a case of "my mythology can beat the shit out of your mythology" more than anything else? Are we truly so terrified of having our own sacred cows tipped that we will stoop to such ridiculous lows to rationalise away those events which defy definition from within the constraints of our myopic and hopelessly culture-bound perspectives?

Sit, PSY-OP, sit. Good dog, PSY-OP!
So does the unconscionable, shit-for-brains military/intelligence community piggyback on the coattails of such bizzare interstitial phenomenologies, employing them to cover many of their hideous and inhumane black ops? Of course they do. One needn't look much further than the infamous Pentacle Memo for verification of this insidious PSY-OP.

But did they spawn the initial phenomena in the first place -- the highly elusive "ghosts in the machine" a la Eph. 6:12? Puh-leeeze, in all of their bureaucratic pomp and splendour, they appear to be capable of little more than tripping over their own clueless ineptitude.

Is the modern "UFO/space alien" mythos, then, about milint mindcontrol ops? Yes and no. Is it about folklore, mythology, cultural memes and magick? Yes and no. Is it about currently inexplicable interstitial and/or paranormal phenomena? Yes and no. Is it about political and socio-religious metaprogramming? Yes and no. In fact, it appears to be about damn near everything but "martians flying around in space ships."

In closing, please allow me to quote an ancient Odinnic prophecy which states that "when the world is pregnant with lies, a secret long hidden will be revealed."

And believe me, the gummint -- in it's infinite wisdom -- will be the very last to know.

Or to understand.

What follows is lots of speculation along the lines of Jeff Wells about how the occult and UFOs intersect.  With a distinctly Discordian tone, if I am not mistaken...

So, as we all know, planned economies are highly inefficient, and helped contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Right?

Well, maybe not.

Around the time of the Soviet collapse, the economist Peter Murrell published an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives reviewing empirical studies of efficiency in the socialist planned economies. These studies consistently failed to support the neoclassical analysis: virtually all of them found that by standard neoclassical measures of efficiency, the planned economies performed as well or better than market economies.

Murrell pleaded with readers to suspend their prejudices:

The consistency and tenor of the results will surprise many readers. I was, and am, surprised at the nature of these results. And given their inconsistency with received doctrines, there is a tendency to dismiss them on methodological grounds. However, such dismissal becomes increasingly hard when faced with a cumulation of consistent results from a variety of sources

.

First he reviewed eighteen studies of technical efficiency: the degree to which a firm produces at its own maximum technological level. Matching studies of centrally planned firms with studies that examined capitalist firms using the same methodologies, he compared the results. One paper, for example, found a 90% level of technical efficiency in capitalist firms; another using the same method found a 93% level in Soviet firms. The results continued in the same way: 84% versus 86%, 87% versus 95%, and so on.

Then Murrell examined studies of allocative efficiency: the degree to which inputs are allocated among firms in a way that maximizes total output. One paper found that a fully optimal reallocation of inputs would increase total Soviet output by only 3%-4%. Another found that raising Soviet efficiency to U.S. standards would increase its GNP by all of 2%. A third produced a range of estimates as low as 1.5%. The highest number found in any of the Soviet studies was 10%. As Murrell notes, these were hardly amounts "likely to encourage the overthrow of a whole socio-economic system." (Murell wasn't the only economist to notice this anomaly: an article titled "Why Is the Soviet Economy Allocatively Efficient?" appeared in Soviet Studies around the same time.)

Two German microeconomists tested the "widely accepted" hypothesis that "prices in a planned economy are arbitrarily set exchange ratios without any relation to relative scarcities or economic valuations [whereas] capitalist market prices are close to equilibrium levels." They employed a technique that analyzes the distribution of an economy's inputs among industries to measure how far the pattern diverges from that which would be expected to prevail under perfectly optimal neoclassical prices. Examining East German and West German data from 1987, they arrived at an "astonishing result": the divergence was 16.1% in the West and 16.5% in the East, a trivial difference. The gap in the West's favor, they wrote, was greatest in the manufacturing sectors, where something like competitive conditions may have existed. But in the bulk of the West German economy – which was then being hailed globally as Modell Deutschland – monopolies, taxes, subsidies, and so on actually left its price structure further from the "efficient" optimum than in the moribund Communist system behind the Berlin Wall.

Via link

This raises, to my mind, two possible scenarios.

The first, and one I have frequently argued for, is that our economic system is closer to the Soviet one than many people would be willing to admit.  Centralised planning aside, there is little difference between a technocrat in the Ministry of Gas and Oil and a manager in British Petroleum.  Because the same techniques of "rational" organisation and management prevail, similar outcomes in productivity are the result.

The second is that listening to mainstream economics wont only not tell you what you need to know, it will actively tell you things which are not so.  It will make you dumber, in other words.  I've also argued this before, but not in the case of the Soviet Union.

It's also worth noting the above two scenarios are not necessarily incompatible.

I never trusted those fake tan bastards:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-20873831

Two men dressed as Oompa Loompas from the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory are being sought by police in connection with an assault in Norwich.

A 28-year-old man was attacked by three men and a woman as he left a kebab house on Prince of Wales Road in the city on Thursday.

Two of the men had painted orange faces and dyed green hair and were wearing hooped tops, as in the 1971 film.

The victim suffered cuts and black eyes, Norfolk Police said.

Police are appealing for witnesses.

I'm going for "grand deal to fuck over Social Security, no middle class tax rises", with a small side bet on "everyone goes over the cliff, world economy goes into recession, Obama doesn't care".

Since this touches on many (oh so many) discussions on PD lately, albeit from a somewhat different POV, I decided it might be worth sharing this link

http://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/who-is-oakland-anti-oppression-politics-decolonization-and-the-state/

The fact that we must specify our identities in advance before making our argument is an index of how powerful, widespread, and largely unquestioned is the premise that arguments always reduce to identity positions. While 21st century anti-oppression politics in the US is an evolving, ad hoc patchwork of theories and practices, we argue for the necessity of identity-based organizing while criticizing how dominant forms of anti-oppression activism have been incapacitated by an unquestioned rhetoric of checking individual "privilege," by a therapeutic idealization of "culture" and communal origins, and finally by the assumption that identity categories describe homogeneous "communities" of shared political beliefs. We argue that left unquestioned these practices minimize and misrepresent the severity and structural character of identity-based oppression in the US.

According to the dominant discourse of "white privilege" for example, white supremacy is primarily a psychological attitude which individuals can simply choose to renounce instead of an entrenched material infrastructure which reproduces race at key sites across society – from racially segmented labor markets to the militarization of the border. Whiteness simply becomes one more "culture," and white supremacy a psychological attitude, instead of a structural position of dominance reinforced through institutions, civilian and police violence, access to resources, and the economy. At the same time a critique of "white privilege" has become a kind of blanket, reflexive condemnation of any variety of confrontational, disruptive protest while bringing the focus back to reforming the behavior and beliefs of individuals. We contend that privilege politics is ultimately rooted in an idealist theory of power which maintains that the psychological attitudes of individuals are the root cause of oppression and exploitation, and that vague programs of consciousness-raising will somehow transform oppressive structures.

This politics assumes that demographic categories are coherent, homogeneous "communities" or "cultures." In Oakland, police, politicians, downtown business interests, and even many "progressive" activists have promoted versions of "community" with radically conservative political content. Communal identity is not automatically a site of political resistance. The violent domination and subordination we face on the basis of our race, gender, and sexuality do not immediately create a shared political vision even though it may create a shared sense of oppression. Identity categories do not indicate political unity or agreement. But the uneven impact of identity-based oppression across society creates the conditions for the diffuse emergence of autonomous groups organizing on the basis of common experiences and a common political understanding of those experiences. There is a difference between a politics which places an idealized and homogenizing cultural heritage at the center of its analysis of oppression, and autonomous organizing against forms of oppression which impact members of marginalized groups unevenly.

Anti-oppression, civil rights, and decolonization struggles clearly reveal that if resistance is even slightly effective, the people who struggle are in danger. The choice is not between danger and safety, but between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence, deprivation, and death.

This touches on some of the things Freddie de Boer has been saying on his blog recently:

Note, first, that the discussion was not just about racism, but rather gun control, and in fact my entire argument was that allowing gun control to be defined as an issue that pits black interests against white interests was a political and theoretical mistake. More importantly: I say that this position is fraught because it indicates the essentialism that I'm reacting against and the avoidance I'm cautioning against. The essentialism rises from the absurdity of speaking about nonwhite people as some sort of unified bloc.

I brought up the fact that, if I'm going to abandon any particular perspective on race myself and merely adopt the positions of nonwhite people, I might choice nonwhite people whose views are deplorable. I brought up Allen West in our conversation. My point about Allen West is simple: when people say "you should give up your racial arguments and simply listen to what nonwhite people say," they are suggesting that all nonwhite people have the same views. Allen West is black, and he is an Islamophobe. So when he says vile things about nonwhite Muslims, am I obliged to keep quiet, because of his greater understanding of race and racism?

Q dug deeper: "I explicitly specified the kind of people that would be valuable to link and implicitly excluded people who've internalized white supremacy to anti-black, racist ends."

Which is to say (explicitly) that no nonwhite person could arrive at opinions on race that Q finds objectionable unless that person had internalized white supremacy. This is the height of liberal essentialism, the need to look on nonwhite people not as people, with individual agency and fully developed consciousness, but as symbols of purity, which dehumanizes and infantilizes them. I will admit to not always knowing exactly what is right or wrong when we talk about race. But I am damn sure that saying that nonwhite people can only disagree with me because they've internalized white supremacy is a terribly ugly idea.

I don't think this person is a bad person. Hell, I'm certain that s/he has a far better take on race and privilege than 99% of people out there. But this call for enlightened silence is a corrosive seduction. The truth is that all of us are involved with race, and white efforts to remove themselves from the racial dialogue-- to say "forgive me, and I'll hold my tongue"-- are really efforts to be rescued from the discomfort of race talk, to be rescued from the possibility of being accused of racism. I understand that appeal, but I think it's ruinous, and based on a host of bad assumptions. Trust me: it would be far safer for me to adopt the company line of defensive avoidance and noncommittal silence that is the common tongue of social liberalism. I risk incurring the wrath of commenters like Q because I think that trying to hide out is a kind of capitulation.

I also like the Oakland Occupy comment (without necessarily endorsing it) because it brings back in material, social and ideological factors into the discussion, and those are the factors that are frequently neglected in American political discourse (I suspect because they are identified, rightly or wrong with Marxism, and because of the predominance of postmodernist thought on the question of identity) in favour of individual psychological factors - which I also agree is a mistake.

Oh, UC Davis and your wacky disdain for human rights:

As reported by Marjie Lundstrom and Sam Stanton of the Sacramento Bee, a 92-page report issued by investigators from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that hospital administrators failed to properly enforce federal regulations regarding the experimental surgeries performed by neurosurgeons Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar, chairman of the department of neurological surgery, and Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot, an assistant professor and neurosurgeon with 13 years experience working under Muizelaar.

The experimental surgeries in question involved opening the skull of and deliberately infecting the brains of cancer patients with the bacterium Enterobacter aerogenes, without FDA or Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, and without compelling scientific evidence in support of the immunological hypothesis that a brain infection in glioblastoma patients could improve outcomes.

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/12/08/5040127/federal-regulators-blast-uc-davis.html#storylink=cpy

The federal watchdog agency went so far as to say the neurosurgeons, Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar and Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot, may have been responsible for "contributing to or causing the death of at least one patient."

UC Davis officials rejected some of the investigators' harshest findings, responding in their "plan of correction" that the agency's findings were incorrect in some areas and that the medical center already had taken steps to correct problems.

"We're confident we're providing excellent patient care," said Ann Madden Rice, the medical center's chief executive officer.

No, I'm not talking about Peter Jackon's overpadded snooze-fest.

I'm talking about Age of the Hobbit:

In an age long ago, the last village of clever, peace-loving Hobbits is attacked and enslaved by the Java Men, komodo-worshiping, dragon-riding cannibals. Now the young Hobbit Goben, along with his father and sister, must seek help from the "giants" (human hunters) to find the Javas' lair and rescue the last surviving Hobbits, Goben's mother among them. In their quest to destroy the Javas, the heroic partnership of humans and Hobbits will transform both species forever.

Oh goddamnit, will you stop living up to your goddamn national sterotype of vodka-obsessed drunkards?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20726939

Two elephants have been saved from the deadly Siberian cold by drinking vodka, Russian officials say.

They say the animals had to be taken out into the bitter cold after the wooden trailer they were travelling in caught fire in the Novosibirsk region.

The elephants, aged 45 and 48, suffered frostbite to the tips of their ears amid temperatures of -40C (-40F)

But they were warmed up by two cases of vodka mixed with warm water, one official was quoted as saying.

"They started roaring like if they were in the jungle! Perhaps, they were happy," the official told Russia's Ria Novosti news agency.

Or maybe, just maybe....they were really, really drunk.

Behold your colonial legacy, America, and despair:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/12/kandahar-airfield-poo-pond-mission

The so-called "poo pond" at Kandahar airfield is one of the few parts of the US and Nato mission in Afghanistan that everyone agreed should go as soon as possible.

A lake of sewage sitting on the indisputably grim-looking intersection of All-American Boulevard and Louisiana Road, it holds the waste produced by 30,000 people using hundreds of portable toilets.

There are few places on the sprawling military camp where the desert wind doesn't carry an occasional whiff of its contents, and locals and soldiers alike were looking forward to the day the smell would finally be removed.

But plans to drain it this autumn have fallen apart.

I can't wait for the future archaeologists to find that one.

http://www.patfinucanereview.org/report/volume01/executive-summary-and-principal-conclusions/

Sir Desmond de Silva has been running an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of the Irish Republican lawyer Patrick Finucane by the Ulster Defence Association in 1989.  While his conclusion is a bit shoddy, the evidence shows what definitely appears to be a conspiracy aimed at his murder.

But in addition to that, it builds up a very unflattering picture of the British security services and how they ran Northern Ireland as their own private fiefdom during the Troubles.  None of the agencies had any frameworks for handling agents or guidelines for what laws they could break to maintain their cover.  In the case of Finucane this is very important, as the head of the UDA intelligence wing was an Army intelligence agent by the name of Brian Nelson, a kidnapper, torturer and murderer par excellence.

In theory, Nelson was meant to identify targets for the British state, allowing arrests to be made.  But the flow of information was in two directions, and the British state ended up letting Nelson know who among the republicans were considered expendable targets, people whose deaths would not be lamented or investigated thoroughly.

One of the men who actually murdered Finucane, Kenneth Barrett, was recruited by Army intelligence after confessing to his role in the murder on tape, and the charges against him were mysteriously dropped.  The attorney general at the time, Sir Patrick Mayhew, was also lobbied by very senior government officials, including the NI secretary and defence secretary, to drop any prosecution against Nelson.  De Silva says there is no evidence to suggest that they knew what kind of man Nelson was, or about the intelligence collusion with the UDA.

Which is hard to believe, to put it mildly. 

Ames has another bit of contemporary political history up

http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/right-to-work (may be paywalled)

Here is a description of Vance Muse, creator of the "right to work" movement, from a book by an old celebrated journalist, Stetson Kennedy, the reporter who famously went undercover inside the KKK and wrote a tell-all in the 40's:

"The man Muse is quite a character. He is six foot four, wears a ten-gallon hat, but generally reserves his cowboy boots for trips Nawth. Now over fifty [this is published in 1946—M.A.], Muse has been professionally engaged in reactionary enterprises for more than a quarter of a century."

Among Vance Muse's "reactionary enterprises": He lobbied against women's suffrage, against the child-labor amendment, against the 8-hour workday, and in 1936, Muse engineered the first split in the South's Democratic Party by peeling off the segregationists and racists from the New Deal party, a political maneuver that eventually led to Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and at last a Republican right-wing takeover of the South, and with it, the collapse of the old New Deal coalition. Which worked out fine for Vance Muse, since he was a covert Republican himself, serving "for years" as the Republican Party state treasurer in Texas.

That first attempt at splitting the Democratic party by peeling away the Southern segregationist-fascists took place in 1936, when Georgia's brutal white supremacist governor, Eugene Talmadge, organized a "grassroots" convention with Vance Muse's help. To stir up anti-FDR and anti-New Deal hate in the South, Vance Muse used photographs he acquired showing First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt being escorted by two African-American professors at Howard University. Muse used that photo to stir up the white supremacists in Georgia, he leaked it to as many newspapers as he could, and he even brandished it around a Senate hearing he was called before in 1936. Those hearings revealed that the anti-FDR "convention" that Vance Muse put on, through his "Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution"— which featured guests of honor like Gerald L K Smith, America's leading anti-Semite and godfather to the modern American Nazi movement — was financed not only by Confederate sponsors like Texan Will Clayton, owner of the world's largest cotton broker, but also reactionary northeast Republican money: the DuPont brothers, J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, Alfred Sloan of General Motors... That unholy alliance of Northeastern and Confederate plutocrat money financed the first serious attempt at splitting the Southern Democrats off by exploiting white supremacism, all in order to break labor power and return to the world before the New Deal — and to the open shop.

Incidentally, Vance Muse's northern donors — DuPont, Pew, Sloan — were the same core investors in (and board directors of) the first modern libertarian think-tanks of the 40s and 50s, including the Foundation for Economic Education. DuPont, Pew and Sloan funds also seeded the American careers of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, among others. In other words, Vance Muse's funders built the first layer of the libertarian nomenklatura that Charles Koch later took control of — no surprise, since Koch outfits are credited with making the Michigan "right to work" law possible.

...Getting back to Vance Muse: In 1936, he incorporated in Texas another union-busting outfit called the "Christian American Association" which was closely associated with the Texas Ku Klux Klan as well as the American Legion, a far-right veterans' group used to bust up unions and terrorize minorities and suspected Communists. It was this same Christian American Association which launched the "right to work" anti-union campaign using that very same euphemism.

The transition to our time has been seamless. Charles Koch's father, Fred Koch, made his name in right-wing politics as one of the leaders of the Kansas Right-to-Work movement. The fight in Kansas was more bitter and protracted than in Texas — Kansas had a strong tradition of populism and farmer socialism — but in 1958, they succeeded and the law passed. That same year, Fred Koch co-founded the crypto-fascist John Birch Society with eleven other industrialists, the most powerful grassroots libertarian outfit of the postwar era until his son Charles raised libertarianism to an entirely new level.

Among other things, the John Birch Society taught that President Eisenhower was a conscious active Communist agent taking orders from Moscow; that the Civil Rights movement was a Communist conspiracy and Martin Luther King took direct orders from Moscow; and that the world was controlled by a group of conspiratorial insiders known as the Illuminati; and that America is "a republic, not a democracy."

Politically, its goal was the same as Vance Muse's: reversing "the whole new-deal march toward state socialism" and expunging "the disease of collectivism," in the words of Bircher leader Robert Welch. In other words: union-busting, stripping government benefits and eliminating taxes on the rich. (To understand why Fred Koch and the Bircher libertarians hated Ike so much, imagine today a Republican like Eisenhower who raised the top marginal tax rate to 91%, who poured massive government investments into building roads and schools, who publicly declared his support for Social Security and denounced any Republican who opposed it — you get the point.)

The founder of the National Right To Work Committee in the mid-1950s, Reed Larson, came from Fred and Charles Koch's base in Wichita, Kansas — headquarters of Koch Industries. Fred Koch teamed up with Reed Larson to pass Kansas' Right-to-Work law, and Reed Larson's "National Right to Work Committee" intertwined itself with Fred Koch's John Birch Society.

Allegedly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20671917

Asia will wield more global power than the US and Europe combined by 2030, a forecast from the US intelligence community has found.

Within two decades China will overtake the US as the world's largest economy, the report adds.

It also warns of slower growth and falling living standards in advanced nations with ageing populations.

Global Trends 2030, issued to coincide with Mr Obama's second term, says it aims to promote strategic thinking.

Published every four years, the report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC) aims to draw together a wide sweep of "megatrends" driving transformation in the world.

'Slow relative decline'

The NIC suggests that by 2030, Asia will have more "overall power" than the US and Europe combined - taking into account population size, gross domestic product (GDP), military spending and investment in technology.

"China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030," the report says.

"Meanwhile, the economies of Europe, Japan, and Russia are likely to continue their slow relative declines."

But the report says it does not anticipate that China will emerge as a superpower in the mould of the US, forging coalitions to take on international issues.

Speaking at a news briefing, Mathew Burrows, counsellor to the National Intelligence Council said: "Being the largest economic power is important... [but] it isn't necessarily the largest economic power that always is going to be the superpower."

Looks like Paul Kennedy has become popular at the NIC once again.  No doubt the neocons are screaming about this return in declinist thinking.  Kennedy's thesis is often overstated - the largest economy, all other things being equal, allows a nation to win a war.  Institutional international arrangements, military training, technology and alliances will still favour the US for a while - it's the obvious fact that America built the post-WWII international system which means that system will benefit it even while it fails to be the largest economic power, as Fukuyama belatedly realized after a decade of drinking neocon kool aid.

But still, in the long run, it does suggest a sizeable power shift towards the Pacific, as people were discussing before the "New American Century" "hyper-power" bullshit of 2002-5.

Taleb has a new book out.

I has it.

Unfortunately, I read the first four chapters while exhausted, and so they did not sink in.  However, the general theme is this: there are things in the world which are fragile, and break easily.  There are things in the world which are resilient, and do not break.  And then there are things which are antifragile, and become better through mistreatment.

Most of the world is built on the first, with some people aiming towards the second.  But Taleb thinks the best way is to go for the third option.

Anyway, more when I get to read it with a clear head.

You can read all four volumes (2000 pages) of the report here

http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc1213/hc07/0780/0780.asp

Note: Leveson is constrained by ongoing trials into criminal practices at News of the World, and in particular has to be very careful when mentioning the government role in the press.  Nevertheless, the report is a good one, a solid piece of investigation and in fact quite brilliant on the issue of the press culture.

Leveson has also strongly recommended some kind of press regulations and an independent regulator to control them.  Which, after four attempts at letting the press regulate themselves only to completely fail to do anything of the kind, seems fair, but does have some worrying implications concerning a slippery slope.

Of course, to listen to the press, said slippery slope is a wide, yawning chasm.  Which demons reside in.  Asylum seeking, pedophile, swan-eating, benefit cheat demons.

...amused by our "self-reliance" "big society" "no to welfare dependency" Prime Minister throwing an absolute stinker of a tantrum over the UK annual EU rebate.

Where's my government monies and VanRompuyfone?
\

Someone has a foot fetish!

I first saw President Reagan as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little ...frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.

That is none other than Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for Reagan and the first Bush, and syndicated columnist.

Who will be chosen to replace David Dreier as the Chairman of the House Rules Committee?

This is a fairly important question because of the way in which the Rules Committee is essentially the master rule of controlling Congress.

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination ─a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish. The official function of the committee is to decide which bills and amendments will be voted on by Congress and also to schedule the parameters of debate. If Rules votes against your amendment, your amendment dies. If you control the Rules Committee, you control Congress.

The committee has nine majority members and four minority members. But in fact, only one of those thirteen people matters. Unlike on most committees, whose chairmen are usually chosen on the basis of seniority, the Rules chairman is the appointee of the Speaker of the House.

Dreier was essentially a human appendage of Tom DeLay, which explains a lot.  He was also a staunch opponent of tax increases for any reason, which could well explain the 112th Congress's militant position on the issue, and how they managed to oppose it so effectively.

But now, he is gone.  The next ranking member is Pete "sponsored by CIA asset and drug money launder Allen Stanford" Sessions*, but of course, that doesn't matter.  It's all down to who John Boehner decides to pick.  And that choice will tell you pretty much everything about how the next two years are going to work in the House.



*Also known for his comments about how the Republicans can learn from the example of the Taliban, his connections to Abramoff, receiver of funds from the fraudtastic Wyly brothers, receiver of bribes from Countrywide Financial and the principal member of government involved in "Blimpgate".  He's not exceptionally corrupt, but only because he hasn't yet managed to become a Senator.

So much, so boring. 

What is more interesting is that Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari was killed only hours after receiving a truce deal from Israel, according to noted peace activist Gershon Baskin.

And by "Hamas leader", I of course mean useful Israeli asset.

Anyway.  The media seems to believe a Palestinian rocket attack on Tel Aviv just came out of nowhere, ignoring the fact there was a pattern of provocation in the weeks leading up to said attack, with Israeli raids wounding or killing civilians.  Hamas, being the dumbfucks they are, took the bait and responded in such a way it made them, and not the IDF look like the aggressors.

Israel has been spoiling for a fight for a while now.  One wonders if this is some kind of substitute for military action in Lebanon, Syria or even Iran (which, due to Obama's reelection, are not likely to happen), but at the moment that remains pure speculation.

As geek meltdowns go, this is fairly impressive.

http://gizmodo.com/5959812/john-mcafee-wanted-for-murder?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_twitter&utm_source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Antivirus pioneer John McAfee is on the run from murder charges, Belize police say. According to Marco Vidal, head of the national police force's Gang Suppression Unit, McAfee is a prime suspect in the murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, who was gunned down Saturday night at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye.

As we reported last week, McAfee has become increasingly estranged from his fellow expatriates in recent years. His behavior has become increasingly erratic, and by his own admission he had begun associating with some of the most notorious gangsters in Belize.

Since our piece ran on last week, several readers have come forward with additional information that sheds light on the change in McAfee's behavior. In July of 2010, shortly before Allison Adonizio pulled the plug on their quorum-sensing project and fled the country, McAfee began posting on a drug-focused Russian-hosted message board called Bluelight about his attempts to purify the psychoactive compounds colloquially known as "bath salts."

Writing under the name "stuffmonger," a handle he has used on other online message boards, McAfee posted more than 200 times over the next nine months about his ongoing quest to purify psychoactive drugs from compounds commercially available over the internet. "I'm a huge fan of MDPV," he wrote. "I think it's the finest drug ever conceived, not just for the indescribable hypersexuality, but also for the smooth euphoria and mild comedown."

Elsewhere, he described his pursuit of "super perv powder" and warned about the dangers of handling the freebase version of the drug: "I had visual and auditory hallucinations and the worst paranoia of my life." He recommended that the most effective way to take a dose is via rectal insertion, a procedure known as "plugging," writing: "Measure your dose, apply a small amount of saliva to just the tip of your middle finger, press it against the dose, insert. Doesn't really hurt as much as it sounds. We're in an arena (drugs/libido) that I navigate as well as anyone on the planet here. If you take my advice about this (may sound gross to some of you perhaps), you will be well rewarded."

http://exiledonline.com/from-the-lost-file-libertarian-party-vice-presidential-nominee-james-gray-is-a-closetcase-republican-and-a-private-kangaroo-court-judge-for-hire/

Last Friday, I tagged along with a friend to a community center/Methodist Church in Hollywood for a documentary screening and panel discussion about California's marijuana legalization movement. The film was a continuous stream of talking heads—interviews with aging hippies, baby-boomer marijuana patients suffering from cancer, former drug addicts, inmates, a few policy wonks, mystical Ibogaine practitioners and a bunch of assorted lefties and new agers involved in the marijuana legalization movement. All in all, it was a predictable set of people, and people in the audience seemed to be of the same activist demographic. But when the lights were turned on and people started talking, a cold chill ran down my spine: it was as if everyone around me had suddenly turned into a libertarian.

There were a bunch of them in the audience, including a quiet, mousy intern from Antiwar.com and her hippy bohemian writer chick friend who had been recently been converted to libertarianism, who admitted that she thought libertarianism was "really cool," as people stood outside on the stairs and passed around a joint. The panel of experts was also stacked with libertarians, including a retired libertarian judge from rightwing Orange County who shared the stage with pot activists spewing new age gibberish about a "spiritual evolution" putting an end to the War on Drugs. New age stoners, crusty lefties and wonky progressives getting along with free-market extremists? Yes, sir. They were on the same team—and proud of it. They had risen above "mere" politics and put aside "petty" ideological differences to engage in a nonpartisan effort for the greater good of Gaia...or something like that.

I knew that libertarians have come to dominate the drug legalization movement, but I had never seen the spectacle up close and personal. And what I saw was deeply disturbing. Because from where I sat, it didn't look like bipartisanship in action: it looked like a straight up con and a perfect example of how America's oligarchy infiltrate the gullible leftie ranks and bootstrap liberal/progressive issues to the freemarket/anti-regulation cause.

Essentially, the "libertarian" position on the drug war, as talked about by the self-identified libertarians (read: former Republicans) in the article was not that "people shouldn't be thrown in jail for smoking pot" but "the states should have control of the drug war".

However, the presentation of their opposition takes the former form, because that is more politically expedient for drawing lefties and liberals into the ranks - and then hitting them with a good dose of "free-market" propaganda while they are there.

....I can get behind such a program.  But I believe there are far worthier candiates for such an award than Christopher fucking Hitchens.

I'm sure such a statue will inspire future generations to their own heroic achievements, "kids, you too can waste an elite education on demanding never-ending conflict and belittling your opponents, dying a bitter and lonely drunk who has driven most of his friends away".

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Great-New-England-Vampire-Panic-169791986.html?c=y&story=fullstory

Though scholars today still struggle to explain the vampire panics, a key detail unites them: The public hysteria almost invariably occurred in the midst of savage tuberculosis outbreaks. Indeed, the medical museum's tests ultimately revealed that J.B. had suffered from tuberculosis, or a lung disease very like it. Typically, a rural family contracted the wasting illness, and—even though they often received the standard medical diagnosis—the survivors blamed early victims as "vampires," responsible for preying upon family members who subsequently fell sick. Often an exhumation was called for, to stop the vampire's predations.

The particulars of the vampire exhumations, though, vary widely. In many cases, only family and neighbors participated. But sometimes town fathers voted on the matter, or medical doctors and clergymen gave their blessings or even pitched in. Some communities in Maine and Plymouth, Massachusetts, opted to simply flip the exhumed vampire facedown in the grave and leave it at that. In Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont, though, they frequently burned the dead person's heart, sometimes inhaling the smoke as a cure. (In Europe, too, exhumation protocol varied with region: Some beheaded suspected vampire corpses, while others bound their feet with thorns.)

Often these rituals were clandestine, lantern-lit affairs. But, particularly in Vermont, they could be quite public, even festive. One vampire heart was reportedly torched on the Woodstock, Vermont, town green in 1830. In Manchester, hundreds of people flocked to a 1793 heart-burning ceremony at a blacksmith's forge: "Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton," an early town history says. "It was the month of February and good sleighing."

Bell attributes the openness of the Vermont exhumations to colonial settlement patterns. Rhode Island has about 260 cemeteries per 100 square miles, versus Vermont's mere 20 per 100 square miles. Rhode Island's cemeteries were small and scattered among private farms, whereas Vermont's tended to be much larger, often located in the center of town. In Vermont, it was much harder to keep a vampire hunt hush-hush.

As satisfying as such mini-theories are, Bell is consumed by larger questions. He wants to understand who the vampires and their accusers were, in death and life. During his Middletown lecture, he displays a picture of a man with salt-and-pepper sideburns and weary eyes: an artist's reconstruction of J.B.'s face, based on his skull. "I start with the assumption that people of past generations were just as intelligent as we are," Bell says. "I look for the logic: Why would they do this? Once you label something 'just a superstition' you lock off all inquiry into something that could have been reasonable. Reasonable is not always rational." He wrote his doctoral dissertation on African-American voodoo practitioners in the South who cast love spells and curses; it's hard to imagine a population more different from the flinty, consumptive New Englanders he studies now, but Bell sees strong parallels in how they tried to manipulate the supernatural. "People find themselves in dire situations, where there's no recourse through regular channels," he explains. "The folk system offers an alternative, a choice." Sometimes, superstitions represent the only hope, he says.

The enduring sadness of the vampire stories lies in the fact that the accusers were usually direct kin of the deceased: parents, spouses and their children. "Think about what it would have taken to actually exhume the body of a relative," Bell says.

All very interesting. In particular, I like this approach:

I start with the assumption that people of past generations were just as intelligent as we are," Bell says. "I look for the logic: Why would they do this? Once you label something 'just a superstition' you lock off all inquiry into something that could have been reasonable. Reasonable is not always rational."

because it tends to be much more interesting than labelling something as "superstition".  That word is a perfect example of a fake explanation.  Assuming ignorance is reasonable, but ignorance is not the same as stupidity or a complete lack of intelligence.  My favourite example of this is the European witch trials - contrary to popular belief, the Church was highly concerned by unfair trials and trial by ordeal in particular.  Furthermore, the understanding of witches did not come from peasant superstitions, but was strongly supported by Biblical evidence and the philosophical writings of the Church Fathers.

The article above strongly suspects tuberculosis was to blame.  The disease causes victims to waste away, like the life is slowly being drained out of them.  The locals themselves rarely used the term vampires, interestingly, but the suspicion was that perhaps a family member was faking death and feasting on the blood and tissue of various victims, perhaps to offset the fatal conclusion of the disease.  Therefore, exhumation was needed to see if there was fresh blood in their system, and decapitation was needed to ensure they were truly dead.

Ah, the eternal bane of the British Far Right - they pick criminals for leaders, and then when they invariably get arrested, ambitious lieutenants attempt to seize control of the organization, leading to it fracturing and splitting.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the pseduonym of "Tommy Robinson" for God-only knows what reason, has been barred entry in the US in the past, due to his criminal record (which has only been added to since his attempt to attend a "Counter-Jihadist" conference there in 2010, which led to him being detained and then deported).

But somehow, Yaxley-Lennon managed to attend a conference held in New York on September 11th, hosted by Pamela Geller.  Some at the time speculated he had an influential friend in the US pull strings to allow him to attend - perhaps by the influential anti-Islamic constituencies there.

However, a far more simple explanation presented itself: he used someone else's passport to enter the country.  According to the charges against him, at least.

Their big London protest also failed to impress, managing to attract a whole 80 people to take part.  The Essex division of the EDL has broken away and another person has declared the creation of the "Real EDL".

It's all falling apart, and no doubt the in-fighting will be spectacular.

Bored, bored bored.  Let's see what stupid stuff is being said at the Weekly Standard which I can mock

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/decline-and-fall_654827.html

When The Decline and Fall of the American Republic is written centuries hence, the date October 17, 2012, will occupy a prominent place in the narrative. On this day, a playoff game between the Yankees and the Tigers in Detroit was called not because of rain, but because of ... the threat of rain. Just as today's "liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism," so, in Obama's America, Major League Baseball cancels games not because of rain but because of trembling in the presence of the threat of rain.

wat

Oh god, I think I am crying from laughing too much.

So, over in the UK we have this thing called the English Defence League.  It's sort of a Teabaggers meets football hooligans, with less libertarianism and more outright fascism.  The EDL claim to be defending England from Muslim extremists....although, when you ask their members, it often seems every Muslims is an extremist, and everyone from the Middle East or South Asia is a Muslim.

Anyway, their hilariously illiterate online rants have led to some wag invented a EDL Literary Division tumblr, where their...unusual prose is broken down and turned into beautiful poetry.  Here is what I consider to the magnum opus of this project:

ANTIC DOTES

illumiati conspiracy theorist gimps of anonymice
any one can threat over a key board sausages
detack you propergander
go back to cockoo land..how dare you be so insilant!!!
EDL is not a righted winged party
we are deemedrs of Englishness
get ya facts right ya soap digging bastard
I hope u get ur come up ons

sheffield newcastle glasgow ext ext ext
essex or surrounding hairier
mouth a protest, shitstare
standing up against Muslim peas rings
Muslim synthesizers, bonified paedos
terarisam, terriny, richeous holycost
The predators are waiting and praying on the vulnerable
Its not rocket salad people

people that read books are fictionist.
all are ill with 10 kids voting sleeps , wake up
IDIOLOGICAL NUM NUTS
i know water and soap is like criptamite to you lot
week trators manovered revolunishnents
YOU'R ARE THE LOOSER ON THE GAME
as a scientist i can tell you your clames are false
EMBRACE BRITISH CULTAR!!

Beautiful ideology, more like an evil colt
they have their own adjendure
they wat stone into b law
they cry racisum, fucking rediculouse!
this is serioas man its not rapin compittion
a bit sinicter, unbaleivable
ACTIONS SPEAK LOADER WORDS
Time for a new Adrians wall!!!

muslimification of britain
Lets wave our rights so as to not offend.
justice aint strongerenough
GIVE THEM SUPERIORITY TREATMENT
deprevation of character, anger breads fast
rasisam , riligiousisam and taotaliterian
it's all got to be about board and lawful
How much is memebership? where can I join

Just another example of how The Man hates on the free market:

A CVS store in Jacksonville, Florida, has been forced to call up customers who purchased ready-to-use enemas earlier this year to inform them that their medical device may have been previously used by someone else.

Ronald Eugene Robinson was arrested in June and charged with tampering with consumer products after it came to light that he allegedly used and returned as many as 12 enemas over the course of two months, claiming the packages had not been opened.

Caveat emptor, bitches.

Western liberals are afflicted by a rather perculiar disease.  This particular disease manifests itself in getting involved in "human rights" causes abroad, especially where photogenic twenty-somethings are activists in the cause, but when the same actions are carried out rather closer to home, they mysteriously become unable to speak - or worse, start ranting and raving in favour of them.

Last month's sentences against Pussy Riot were rightly condemned by Western-based journalists of all stripes and political opinions.  That a blasphemy law is invoked to arrest and detain people taking part in what was clearly a political protest is even more worrisome than the existence of a blasphemy law in the first place.  This was yet more evidence of the "creeping authoritarianism"* of Putin, of how he is committed to jailing his political enemies and ruling Russia with an iron first.

Assuming that logic holds**, what are we to make of the fact that the UK has recently, in the past 12 months, put people in jail for expressing strong opinions on the war in Afghanistan, for badly done jokes that caused no harm and for tasteless jokes and being an all-round tosser?

British security attempted to censor books when Labour was in power, and had people arrested for owning illegal "terrorist" documents, or for writing shitty poetry "glorifying" terrorism.  Control orders, arrests without charge and lengthened detention periods, restricted courts and unlicenced demonstrations being made crimes were the order of the day.  By any reasonable standard, anything one says of Russia and Putin one must also say of the UK, and of Blair-Brown-Cameron.

One obvious conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the western press establishment are not only hypocritical but also insanely aggressive when it comes to anything about Putin.  Which, of course, they are.  Western journalists gave sloppy blowjobs to Russian oligarchs throughout the 90s, many of whom now consider themselves Putin's political enemies and rivals.  Coincidentally, many of them own extensive amounts of property and investments in the UK.  Furthermore, in painting Putin as a real-life Bond villain, they have created a narrative which lazy hacks and "opinion writers" can then reinforce.  Any time something bad happens in Russia, it is because Putin planned it all, most likely while sitting in the Kremlin and stroking a white cat.

However, the truth is more complex, and ultimately depressing than that.  Let's consider the role of public opinion in these prosecutions.  A staggering 65% of Russians are in agreement with the Pussy Riot trial outcomes.  A plurality even think the sentence should have been harsher.  And in the UK, the story is much the same.  Most of these arrests are little more than Facebook and Twitter driven witch-hunts - the mob howling inarticulate outrage because someone offended them.  It's no coincidence that the things people are jailed for in the UK tend to be hot button issues expressed in rather stark terms - whether that's saying all soldiers should die, making jokes about the riots or making off-taste jokes about child abduction and murder.

It is further worth noting how this dialectic between the state and public opinion plays out.  Most of the prosecutions are for "disturbance of the peace" style laws and regulations.  This is an especially sinister piece of logic, because what this means is that people must self-censor in order to not provoke an emotional reaction which will cause people to become offended, necessitating the state intervene to restore order.  Speech must be "reponsible", and what is considered more responsible in today's world than doing exactly nothing to undermine or damage the foundations of existing political power?

Protecting speech only when it is popular or tasteful isn't actually protecting speech at all.


*#creepingauthoritarianism did not, unlike #creepingsharia do so well on Teh Twitter, mostly because it took up too much space.

** it doesn't hold.

You cannot avoid this war.  You're on a computer, so you're a target.  And deleting all your online information and chucking away your computers will not save you, neo-Luddites.  Every company you do business with has digital databases, which can be accessed online.  The government keeps digital records about you, also accessed online.  The power stations and infrastructure you rely on...all comes back to computers.

You, your data, your money or your perceptions of the world are potential cogs in a fast growing and potentially vast cyberwarfare machine which is helping lay down the conditions for a multipolar Cold War. 

Cyberwarfare isn't so bad now, but it has the potential to be.  Let's take something simple, like the power going out.  I'm sure our American posters remember when the power went down in the aftermath of the 2012 summer storms, in Maryland, West Virginia and Washington DC, leaving hundreds of thousands without power.  When the power goes out, things get hairy.  Not straight away, but give it a couple of weeks, maybe even a month....You see where this is going? 

Cyberwarfare's penchant for collateral damage is also worth noting.  Just look how many computers were infected by Stunext, above.  And that was a so-called "surgical" strike (much like the Predator drones in Pakistan and Yemen...).  And then there is the fact that anything you put out there, once it is found can likely be reverse-engineered, altered and then aimed right back at the state, or hacker group, or criminal gang that originated it.  And it's already happening.  Decrypted Stunext files were on HBGary computers that were hacked by Anonymous.  The true source code wasn't released, but there is enough there for a smart group of people to rewrite it to suit their own purposes.

Cyberwarfare, like the covert actions and intelligence operations of the Cold War, wont be restricted to cyber-world effects.  Let's say one wanted to "help" an election go in a certain direction....out of a love of democracy and the irresponsibility of the voters in question, of course.  Well, cutting power to certain areas, as mentioned above, could do a lot to undermine trust in the government.  Especially certain ethnic enclaves.  Messing around with the (rather complex) logistical systems for major food suppliers, be they corporate entities or international aid agencies would be another.  Hacking the computers of party activists and strategists, then making leaks to counter their moves, inserting false stories via hacking into online news sites.....the possibilities are endless.

You can cause riots, destroy nuclear facilities and even collapse governments with this, if you know what you're doing.  Or even if you don't and you're just a very enthusiastic amatuer working in the right political context.  A context as short-sighted and paranoid as the USA or Pakistan...well, I don't think you need a shiny infographic for that, do you?  Much like biological warfare, the possibility for unforseen circumstances that will trigger bigger and even worse things is very possible.

We all need to start thinking about and paying more attention to this kind of thing.

It's a Korean version of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

I feel happier just knowing this exists.

A dozen MC-130H, HC-130N, HC-130P and AC-130U military transport planes and gunships crossed the Atlantic Ocean on Sept. 13 heading eastbound. These aircraft are typically used for a variety of special tasks, including in support for special operations forces. The last known stop for the aircraft was Souda Bay, Crete.

12 U.S. Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets arrived in two waves at Moron air base in Spain on Sept. 24.

100 French special operations troops have been deployed in the sub-Saharan region to counteract militants in northern Mali. Le Figaro reported that maritime patrol aircraft that can be used to collect intelligence will be deployed to the region and that commandos of the French navy will reinforce the French special operations troops.

Italian journalist Guido Olimpio reported in September that U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles are currently tracking militants in Cyrenaica and that U.S. special operations forces were planning to carry out intelligence operations that could be in preparation for surgical strikes in North Africa, including in Libya and in Mali.

All of these could be unconnected, and part of routine deployments for a variety of ongoing military operations.

Or, they could be part of a start of a push into Mali against the Tuareg/Al-Qaeda secession there.

Or it could be that the US is planning a large strike against Al-Qaeda affiliated militants in the region as a response to the assassination of the US Ambassador to Libya.

Or something else entirely (Syria?).

While temporal displacement is not explicitly mentioned as being against the rules, I think it is implied, both by the "altering the function of the forum" thing and by the rules of physics.  As such, I ask that you explain this:

Turner: Do we have plans to invade the Middle East?
Higgins: Are you crazy?
Turner: Am I?
Higgins: Look, Turner...
Turner: Do we have plans?
Higgins: No. Absolutely not. We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do.
Turner: So Atwood just took the games too seriously. He was really going to do it, wasn't he?
Higgins: A renegade operation. Atwood knew 54/12 would never authorize it, not with the heat on the company.
Turner: What if there hadn't been any heat? Suppose I hadn't stumbled on their plan?
Higgins: Different ballgame. Fact is, there was nothing wrong with the plan. Oh, the plan was all right, the plan would've worked.
Turner: Boy, what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?
Higgins: No. It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Turner: Ask them.
Higgins: Not now — then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!
Turner: Boy, have you found a home. There were seven people killed, Higgins.
Higgins: The company didn't order it.
Turner: Atwood did. Atwood did. And who the hell is Atwood? He's you. He's all you guys. Seven people killed, and you play fucking games!
Higgins: Right. And the other side does, too. That's why we can't let you stay outside.

Just saying.

And saying again.

Someone's playing a game with the global oil supply chain (all protests aside, no proof has been given by said companies that this is not affecting their ability to supply the global markets, and they have good reasons not to tell the truth about that).  A previously unknown group is claiming repsonsibility.

The attacks were not widespread, leading me to believe it probably was a nation-state without great experience of cyber-warfare operations, perhaps IRGC officers affiliated with hacker groups, and probably not Russia, as some have claimed.

But, just think about this.  That was a relatively unsophisticated, targeted attack.  What happens when an attack comes that is not so discriminatory, that hits multiple oil companies in geographically disparate regions?  What happens when an attack is coordinated to give the impression of chaos within the globa oil supply chain, affecting the market price? 

Someone has opened Pandora's Box here, and if it is Iran, we can trace this back as likely retaliation for the Stunext attacks.  Dangerous territory.  Cyberwarfare is an unregulated field of violence and manipulation, and right now it seems like nothing is considered off limits.

I don't see this ever going wrong:

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/10/01/professor-drones-will-soon-be-able-to-kill-during-war-without-human-assistance/

Drones could soon operate without the help of humans.

Agence France-Presse is reporting that the Pentagon wants its drones to be more autonomous, so that they can run with little to no assistance from people.

"Before they were blind, deaf and dumb," Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force, told AFP. "Now we're beginning to make them to see, hear and sense."

Ronald Arkin, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that drones will soon be able to kill enemies on their own independently.

"It is not my belief that an unmanned system will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I am convinced that they can perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of," Arkin told AFP.

Arkin added that robotic weapons should be designed as "ethical" warriors and that these type of robots could wage war in a more "humane" way.

Now, why does this sound like the plot of a techno-thriller?

Oh yeah, because it is:

http://thedaemon.com/killdecisionsynopsis.html

It's no secret that America relies on remotely piloted drones to target adversaries overseas. But fifty other nations are developing drones of their own, and the next generation will be much scarier: autonomous machines that acquire and destroy targets without direct human intervention.

Lets just hope that, unlike in the book, no-one gets the smart idea of using behavioural patterns of Weaver ants to program the drones with.

Just thought I'd mention this, since I know we have a few old school CRPG fans out there

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity

Basically, Obsidian, one of the two successor company's to Black Isle (the other being Bioware) are looking to make a game that draws directly from the Black Isle classics - Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment and so on, all critically acclaimed games from back in the day.  They're looking to make an indepth, heavily role-playing/character driven RPG game very much like those, but in its own independent setting so they have more creative control over the series.

But the thing is, Obsidian isn't a massive company, and they're not backed by some huge gaming enterprise like Electronic Arts.  Furthermore, the demand for these kind of games is not exactly huge....they're something of a select market.  So, Obsidian needs money.

And that's where the Kickstarter above comes in.  Not only do people funding the game get the items mentioned at the various tiers of donations, but each milestone reached allows for new elements to be added to the game - extra races, classes, dungeons or factions that every player will benefit from.

The Kickstarter is actually doing amazingly well, reaching its target in only a number of days.  But the more money they have, the better the game will be.  So, if you're a fan of the above kind of games, I strongly recommend checking out their plans and seeing if this is something you'd like to contribute to.

More liek BORDEAUX Broadcasting Corporation, amirite?

The United English Patriots of England are among the last crankish remnant of believers in an old pseudo-historical idea known as the "Norman yoke," according to which the Saxon period in England was a utopia that was completely destroyed by Norman invaders starting with William the Conqueror. Specifically, they regard the Anglo-Saxon people and their descendants as victims of mistreatment that began in 1066 and manifests in the present day in the form of a vast anti-English conspiracy. They are able to back this theory up largely by defining "anti-English" really, really broadly.

For example, when a comedian such as Eddie Izzard pokes fun at English people this is taken as evidence of anti-English bigotry. Interestingly, however, the board has a subforum devoted largely to ethnic jokes, with a disclaimer reading "Offended? don't be. As Bernard Manning would say, 'it's just a fucking joke'". The forumgoers are apparently oblivious to this blatant double standard.

Despite being critical of the culture of victimhood prevalent in today's society, the ASF crew are all too eager to get a slice of the persecution pie for themselves; as such, they're always moaning about the Norman Conquest. What's more, they apparently expect the rest of the country to be equally obsessed with the subject: a number of members cling to the downright surreal belief that their old adversary, the leftist media, is disseminating pro-Norman propaganda.

"I see the BBC are repeating the series of programes about the Normans. Nothing like repeated BBC brainwashing!", says "Woden's Child". "The Normans killed tens of thousands of our kinfolk in the aftermath of 1066", replies a chap named Steven. "They never mention it, could it be the BBC are secret holocaust deniers? They just want people to believe the Normans were a sweet bunch of friendlies who built nice churches. Wankers." "The only Norman I ever liked was Norman Wisdom", adds "Guthlac".

Oh, and look:  hxxp://www.englisc-gateway.com/bbs/index

That's not a misspelling, by the way.  Apparently "sh" is part of the Norman conspiracy, and so has been purged from the language.  Or something like that, it's too hilairous to remember properly.

Is it just me, or is there nothing more annoying than someone treating you like you're really fucking stupid?

Yeah, you're right, it's not just me, though perhaps I have greater sensitivity to it than most, seeing spectacular displays of stupidity on a daily basis.  Nothing is dumber than a teenager with too much money and living far away from home, except the excuses they give you when they get caught out. 

But such stupidity is born of desperation, the need to come up with a reason, any kind of vaguely plausible excuse for why they are doing what they should not be – even if that reason is, objectively speaking, about as likely as David Icke's theories.

In those cases, the act of treating me as stupid is almost forgivable, because the person in question is clearly too dumb to realise how dumb their excuse actually is.  They can't operate at a level above their own intelligence, no-one can, and so they are sadly constrained to "the pet-I-don't-have-because-I-live-in-dorms ate my homework" type of statements. 

No, what is really unforgivable is when people who damn well ought to know better treat you as Thicky Thicko because it suits their current agenda.

I am, of course, talking about the Samuel L. Jackson video endorsing Obama's re-election.

Ooh boy, here we go again...Cain's pissed because he doesn't like Obama .  Time for another snooze-fest about bankers and dead Pakistanis and the NSA wiretapping our dreams other boring shit.  And all while beating up on Samuel L. Jackson, no less.

I dare you.  I double-dog dare you to watch the entire video without wanting to smash your fist into your screen.

Yes, I'm talking about this particular doozy:

"Sorry my friends but there's no time to snore
An out-of-touch millionaire has just declared war
On schools, the environment, unions, fair pay
We're all on our own if Romney has his way"

That's about the point I started thinking about that nice bottle of absinthe I keep on my counter, for times when reality is best viewed via the bottom of a bottle.

I mean, doesn't the sheer brazen hypocrisy, running like a giant red line through that entire paragraph just set your teeth on edge?  Oh no he din't!  Hell yeah he did, girlfriend.

Where do you want to start?  I'm fairly sure those teachers in Chicago have a slightly different opinion on education to the White House, given that Rahm Emanuel is the mayor of the city.  You know, the man who thinks the role of trained educational professionals is to be underpaid and underfunded babysitters.  "Well, you know, we value education so much we want to reduce your pay, benefits and pensions ".

And the environment?  What's that?  Because, you see, I looked all over the Obama campaign website and there isn't even a section for this mythical beast.  It's not even on the issue list.  Sure, there's a bit about preventing oil spills in the energy section, but that's rather like pledging your administration doesn't condone the use of microwaves to dry babies after a bath.  That said, a Republican platform for more oil spills would only be somewhat surprising...

But this fragment, oh fuck this motherfucking line...

"An out-of-touch millionaire".

Now, I will be honest and say I have more right to hate the ultra-rich than anyone.  I was poor, seriously poor, due to the economic crash causing the job market to shrivel up like my penis when confronted with photoshopped pictures of Margaret Thatcher in the nude.  And then, when I did finally get a decent paying job, it involved having to deal with the insane demands and irrational fits of the globally rich on a daily basis.

But you know, from way down here, there isn't much of a dividing line between Obama, Romney and Samuel L. Jackson.   Obama's worth $11.6 million, for starters.  Relatively small fry, for the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, but it's still more than I, or most people reading this will earn in their lifetime.  Romney's worth somewhere between $190 and $250 million, well far beyond what Obama has, but not so far away from Samuel L. Jackson's reputed net worth of $150 million.

There's something ever so slightly hypocritical to my mind that someone can call another person an "out of touch millionaire" before going back to their mansion in their chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce to enjoy freshly imported caviar on dishes made of pure platinum, you know.

Now of course Romney's out of touch.  Hilariously so, his every movement and statement is awkward as fuck, as he desperately tries to show empathy, or indeed any human emotion that doesn't revolve around the acquisition of wealth.

But then, so are the Obamas.  I seem to recall in that "oh so amazing" speech that transcended politics, race, gender, time and transcendence itself, that Michelle told a story about the days when the Obamas were poor Harvard grads, eating out of dumpsters, wearing clothes so thin they could have been used as extras in the "Save the Children" video about starving Africans and...talking about how their student loan repayments were bigger than their mortgage.

Now hold on a minute.  Student loan repayments are determined by income.  If you were that poor, there is no way they could outstrip your mortgage unless...well, either that was a hell of a good deal from the bank or they were doing pretty OK financially. 

But yeah, the Obamas feel your pain or something.  They're just like you, except they get escorted everywhere by elite bodyguards, live in a giant, old mansion, control legions of killer robots and are worth more than you'll ever get to see in your lifetime, unless you're cheating hardcore at Monopoly.  Whatever.

And then you have the reaction of Democrat partisans, who may actually be functionally retarded.  Or, at the very least, suffering from possibly the most severe collective case of cognitive dissonance in history.  They'll sneer at the "politician you can have a beer with" idea in one breath, while going on about how Obama is a Man of The People in the other.  Watching this bunch of hacks and mental midgets pour scorn on "Rmoney" (it's funny because Romney has lots of money!) while sucking up to the guy who gave the banks billions, possibly even trillions in taxpayer money, is the absolute height of absurdity, and the triumph of modern propaganda over common sense.

It's even a better gambit than when conservative pundits pretend to be dumb-as-fuck yokels, because at least wingnuts don't go on constantly about how the fact they accept evolution and basic physics (well done, you are at a level of a 7th grader in scientific understanding) proves they are more logical and too clever to fall for such tricks.

"Wake the fuck up" indeed.  Goddamn how I hate you all.  I hope you get fucked up the arse a rogue Collateral Debt Obligation, no lube.

OK, this is just the latest in a number of disturbing things I am hearing out of Athens

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/28/greek-police-victims-neo-nazi?CMP=twt_gu

Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party is increasingly assuming the role of law enforcement officers on the streets of the bankrupt country, with mounting evidence that Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group, analysts, activists and lawyers say.

In return, a growing number of Greek crime victims have come to see the party, whose symbol bears an uncanny resemblance to the swastika, as a "protector".

One victim of crime, an eloquent US-trained civil servant, told the Guardian of her family's shock at being referred to the party when her mother recently called the police following an incident involving Albanian immigrants in their downtown apartment block.

"They immediately said if it's an issue with immigrants go to Golden Dawn," said the 38-year-old, who fearing for her job and safety, spoke only on condition of anonymity. "We don't condone Golden Dawn but there is an acute social problem that has come with the breakdown of feeling of security among lower and middle class people in the urban centre," she said. "If the police and official mechanism can't deliver and there is no recourse to justice, then you have to turn to other maverick solutions."

Other Greeks with similar experiences said the far-rightists, catapulted into parliament on a ticket of tackling "immigrant scum" were simply doing the job of a defunct state that had left a growing number feeling overwhelmed by a "sense of powerlessness". "Nature hates vacuums and Golden Dawn is just filling a vacuum that no other party is addressing," one woman lamented. "It gives 'little people' a sense that they can survive, that they are safe in their own homes."

Far from being tamed, parliamentary legitimacy appears only to have emboldened the extremists. In recent weeks racially-motivated attacks have proliferated. Immigrants have spoken of their fear of roaming the streets at night following a spate of attacks by black-clad men on motorbikes. Street vendors from Africa and Asia have also been targeted.

Make no mistake, the Golden Dawn is an outright fascist organization, despite the Guardian dancing around it with the "flag that resembles a swastika" hinting bullshit.

Half of the Athens police force voted for the Golden Dawn, so their sympathy for the group is obvious.  The Golden Dawn are also buying up sympathy by distributing food to the poor (so long as they can prove they are Greek) and providing general security on the streets, both from rioting anarchists and leftists and from "immigrant crime" (real or imagined).

Less publically, but still acknowledged, are the night-time armed attacks, beatdowns and murders of the same above enemies of the party.  The Greek state, fearful of political instability, seems to be content to let the Golden Dawn take care of the left, and seems to hope that public opinion will take care of any popularity the Golden Dawn might accrue.

Except, of course, it's not working.  Because the Golden Dawn are thriving off the chaos they are creating through their actions, creating a self-sustaining loop of insecurity and violence which feeds into their political ambitions while giving their group greater cohesion and paramilitary experience.

Unlike other "Eurofascist" parties, the Greek fascists are old school.  It's jackboots on the streets and the physical elimination of enemies.  And with the EU pushing for more and more cuts, because it believes the demented idea that austerity cannot fail (it can only be failed), the Greek state is going to continue to fall apart and rely on paramilitary groups to maintain order. 

OK, sure, why not?

A former beauty queen says she is "pretty well back to normal" after undergoing a remarkable brain surgery in which 25 percent of her skull was stored in her abdomen for safe-keeping.

Personally I prefer to keep a spare set of house keys and a credit card in my abdomen for safe-keeping.

http://everythinglubbock.com/fulltext?nxd_id=121072

One Texas School Board Changes Spanking Policy

The Springtown Independent School District had previously allowed gender-specific paddling of students, meaning female administrators were permitted to paddle girls and male administrators could spank boys.

On Monday, the parents of two teenaged students claimed the policy had been violated. Dena Jorgensen said her daughter suffered "welts, blisters and bruises" when she was paddled by a male school administrator.

Superintendent Mike Kelley acknowledged male employees were paddling female students and apologized for the violation. Following the complaints, the school board voted unanimously to remove the gender-specific rule.

I'm not entirely sure who I hate more here.  I mean, first off there are the parents who are insisting on corporal punishment for their children, only complaining because it's some dude spanking their daughter.

And then there is the school itself, which seems to feel that having male staff spanking teenage schoolgirls isn't entirely dodgy as fuck, but should in fact be policy.

Furthermore, in what kind of mind does the idea that spanking what are almost young adults is going to be conducive to maintaining order and discipline?  I can see arguments for spanking young children - I don't especially like it, but I can certainly why it may occasionally be necessary - but teenagers?  Teenagers who are sometimes physically the equal of adults, and so not as easy to physically intimidate.  I guess what I'm trying to say here is that spanking as a policy would be very low on the list of things to try unless you have a pretty fucked up mind in the first place.


*The title is a lie.  It is, in fact, entirely skeevy.

You may remember this:

http://www.hondurasnews.com/honduras-approves-private-cities-project/

Honduras signed a deal for an initial investment of 15 million dollars to create the first "Private City" in the country. (Also referred to as "Free Cities", "Charter Cities", "Model Cities", or in Spanish, "RED – Regiones Especiales de Desarollo", and "Ciudades Modelo".) The city will be built in Trujillo, in the Department of Colón, where it does not have the full support of the Garifuna people, as they fear that the loss of their land may be on the agenda.

Carlos Pineda, the president of Coalinza, stated that this was not just an agreement, but the most important project for the development of the country in 50 years.

Michael Strong, an executive with the MKG Group that was granted this project, stated that the objective is to create a secure and prosperous community for Hondurans.

The development of the physical infrastructure laid out in phase one of the project will result in 5,000 new jobs, as well as 15,000 indirect new jobs.

Juan Hernández, the President of the Honduran National Congress, stated that this is a giant step forward for the country. Last July, the Honduras Congress passed Decree #123-2011, which in a nutshell, takes care of all constitutional issues related to the creation of these RED zones, or model cities, as we refer to them in Honduras.

Well...a lawyer who was preparing a motion declaring such cities as unconstitutional and claimed they were being used to raise campaign funds for politicians has just been assassinated.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120924/honduras-lawyer-killed/

Now, as the article points out, Cabrera had more than a few enemies, including the powerful Miguel Farcusse, owner of the Dinant Corporation.  He helped workers seize 5000 hectares of land from them last year.  Cabrera has previously said if he is ever to be murdered, Facusse would be the one responsible.

However, there is also this:

Trejo had also helped prepare motions declaring unconstitutional a proposal by the Honduran government and a U.S. company, MGK Group, to build three privately run cities with their own police, laws and tax systems.

Just hours before his murder, Trejo had participated in a televised debate in which he accused congressional leaders of using the private city projects to raise campaign funds.

MGK director Michael Strong said the company is "horrified" by Trejo's killing.

"We believe that Antonio Trejo, had he lived long enough to get to know us, would have concluded that our approach is 100 percent beneficial to Honduras and Hondurans. We are saddened for his family and understand what a tragedy this is for trust and goodwill in Honduras," Strong said in a statement to The Associated Press.

It's worth noting, whoever had him killed, that whatever native companies can get away with foreign businessmen are usually much, much worse.  And if the political/slush-fund aspect is true....well, people have killed over such things before.

http://www.thenewstribe.com/2012/09/15/malcolm-harris-twitter-surrenders-occupy-wall-streets-protester-tweets/

Micro-blogging website Twitter has finally handed over tweets from Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester, to an Occupy Wall Street protester months after trying not to give the posts to the criminal court.

The site gave up the tweets to Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino but they will remain under seal until another appeal by Harris is argued next week, Reuters reported.

In October 2011, police arrested Harris along with hundred others during a mass protest on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Malcolm Harris.  Christ, What An Asshole.

I didn't know this until I started looking into it, but, apparently, Malcolm Harris is the "vanguard" of the Occupy Movement.  A self-aggrandizing twenty something anarchist-marketing-hipster crossbreed, Harris is everything that is wrong with Occupy.

Harris charges $5000 (hotel and travel not included) to talk about anarchism and the 99%.  Harris also describes himself as the "Naomi Klein of the 21st century", which must come as something of a surprise to the (still living, still writing) Naomi Klein.

Harris is in trouble because he wrote a bunch of self-incriminating tweets while on the Brooklyn Bridge.  He then deleted the tweets and went running to the ACLU, presumably because his corporate lawyer and State Dept diplomat parents refuse to pay for this idiot's legal costs (and who can blame them?).  Hell, the ACLU are only getting involved because if the police succeed in obtaining his deleted tweets, the worry is that it will set a bad precedent in cases where protesters aren't necessarily reckless self-promoting dickheads like Malcolm Harris.

Harris is also one of those anarchists who thinks schools are, literally, a prison.  As such, he has been cheerleading attempts to stop the teachers strike in Chicago, because teachers are the moral equivalent of prison wardens.  And prisons are, like, bad maaaaaaan.

Given dickheads like this rose to prominence, is it any surprise Occupy is now another outpost of the militant vegan trustafarian anarchist Borg?

This topic has been moved to Department of Equitable Enmity Distribution..

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=33311.0

So, this is a thing now.

Lynching chairs, I mean

http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/12756/republican-lynches-empty-chair-in-racist-presidential-effigy-in-northwest-austin

http://www.bluevirginia.us/diary/7662/photos-symbolic-lynching-of-nobama-at-bull-run-park-this-weekend

....and I've come across a horrormirthy possibility for the UK's 2015 elections.

Let me lay out my case first, as I see it:

The last election was heavily contested by the Tories.  Economic mistakes made by Labour were seen to have led to and compounded the economic crisis.  In addition to that, the government had seemed to be in a permament state of crisis since Brown, a man with all the charisma of a half-decayed mackeral, took over from Tony Blair.

Equally, the Lib Dems were polling, at times, with their best results in history.  While, as it eventually turned out, this could not be sustained, their inclusion in the first televised debates suggested they were now considered a contender for government, rather than sideshow agitators.

Given this, a crushing defeat for Labour was expected at the hands of the Tories, with the Lib Dems perhaps taking a significant bite out of Labour's supporters.

Instead, what actually happened was the Tories managed to win the most seats in Parliament without winning a Parliamentary majority.  Therefore, they had to forge an alliance with the Lib Dems to have a stable government.

Now, flash foward two and a half years.  The Tories are less popular than they were in 2010.  The Lib Dems have basically halved in popularity in the polls.  And Labour's position in the polls has increased, though they have not actually picked up many extra supporters since 2010.  The 2015 election is shaping up to be yet another potentially deadlocked Parliament, especially since a weakened Lib Dem Party wont be able to shore up enough support for either party to attain a majority.

Now, enter UKIP.  The somewhat hysterically named UK Independence Party are a right-wing, libertarian, xenophobic, scientifically illiterate and frequently anti-Islamic party opposed to the European Union and the UK's position in it.  Recently, UKIP have been capitalizing on right-wing Tory disenchantment with Cameron's government, which is seen as "wet" and far too sympathetic to the Liberal Democrats in general and Vince Cable (one-time Labour Party member and possible next leader of the Lib Dems) in particular.

Because of a recent influx of funding by former Tory donors to UKIP and the ongoing European economic crisis (which is being used as an excuse for federalization) UKIP is now polling equal with the Lib Dems at the moment, at 8%.  This doesn't sound too amazing, of course, but before the 2015 elections, there will be European Parliament elections, where UKIP tend to do quite well.  If they manage an especially good set of results, they could easily capitalize on that for the 2015 elections 

Furthermore, the Tories know their main opponents for votes are UKIP.  If some kind of arrangement could be made between the two, not running against each other in certain districts etc then there is definitely a case that the 2015 government could be a Tory government, not moderated by the Liberal Democrats, but unhinged even further by their dependency on UKIP.

If so, it will be popcorn time.  I, for one, cannot wait.