No Suture!

Quote from Banker...

2012-01-12T03:09:00.003+01:00

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money.”

- Sir Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England (1928).

Harvey Bassett on 'DJing'

2012-01-02T21:40:00.000+01:00

Finn Johannsen: If Digital 'Djing' Carries On Like This, You May Just Push Some Buttons And It All Unfolds.

DJ Harvey: Yeah, you just plug something into your head, you have some file with every record ever made, and you plug in somehow and your thoughts just project your vision and interpretation of every record ever produced. I think that’s a problem with this kind of Serato thing. I own 30000 titles, at least. Now if I had 30000 titles on my Serato I would never be able to choose the next record. I’d be like, “Hmmm, well maybe…hmmm, don’t know”, and then that one runs out. And it’s like “Shit!” So I carry a hundred records and maybe some CDs with stuff that isn’t on vinyl. Limitation is the mother of creativity. To have less selection actually forces you to select better. So now in my record bag every record is amazing. And I could pretty much randomly pick one out, and that would be a great record. Because I can’t carry 500 average records or ones that maybe I’ll get the chance to play this one. I have to actually carry that stuff around, so all records in my bag are good records and I just have to get them in the right order.

Source: Full interview

The Ten Principles Of A Free Society, by Ron Paul‏

2012-01-01T20:22:00.001+01:00

1. Rights belong to individuals, not groups; they derive from our nature and can neither be granted nor taken away by government.

2. All peaceful, voluntary economic and social associations are permitted; consent is the basis of the social and economic order.

3. Justly acquired property is privately owned by individuals and voluntary groups, and this ownership cannot be arbitrarily voided by governments.

4. Government may not redistribute private wealth or grant special privileges to any individual or group.

5. Individuals are responsible for their own actions; government cannot and should not protect us from ourselves.

6. Government may not claim the monopoly over a people's money and governments must never engage in official counterfeiting, even in the name of macroeconomic stability.

7. Aggressive wars, even when called preventative, and even when they pertain only to trade relations, are forbidden.

8. Jury nullification, that is, the right of jurors to judge the law as well as the facts, is a right of the people and the courtroom norm.

9. All forms of involuntary servitude are prohibited, not only slavery but also conscription, forced association, and forced welfare distribution.

10. Government must obey the law that it expects other people to obey and thereby must never use force to mold behavior, manipulate social outcomes, manage the economy, or tell other countries how to behave.

Happy New Year!

NATO’s War Crimes In Libya: Who Grieves For The Fallen Heroes?

2011-11-17T01:15:00.001+01:00

Consequences of the NATO Conquest of Libya
Written by: James Petras

The NATO assault formed part of a general counter-attack designed to contain and reverse the popular democratic and anti-imperialist movements which had ousted or were on the verge of overthrowing US-client dictators.

Political and military considerations were foremost in motivating the NATO invasion: As late as May 2009, the U.S. and European regimes were developing close bilateral military, economic and security agreements with the Gaddafi regime. According the British daily, the Independent (9/4/2011), official Libyan documents found in its Foreign Office described how on December 16, 2003, the US CIA and British MI6 established close collaboration with the Gaddafi government. The MI6 provided Gaddafi with details on Libyan opposition leaders exiled in England and even drafted a speech for him as he sought rapprochement with the outside world.

U.S. Secretary of State Clinton presented Mutassin Gaddafi to the Washington press during a visit in 2009 stating, “I am very pleased to welcome Minister Gaddafi to the State Department. We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya. We have many opportunities to deepen and broaden our co-operation and I am very much looking forward to building on this relationship.”(examiner.com 2/26/2011).

Between 2004-2010 the largest oil and petroleum service multinational corporations, including British Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Chevron, Conoco and Marathon Oil joined with military-industrial giants like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, Dow Chemical and Fluor and signed enormous investments and sales deals with Libya (examiner.com op cit).

In 2009, the U.S. State Department awarded a $1.5 million dollar grant to train Libyan civilian and government security forces. The White House budget for 2012 included a grant for training Libyan security forces. General Dynamics signed a $165 million dollar deal in 2008 to equip Libya’s elite mechanized brigade (examiner.com ibi).

On August 24, 2011 Wikileaks released US embassy cables from Tripoli, which described the positive assessment a group of leading Republican senators had made of US-Libyan relations in during their visit in late 2009. These cables highlighted ongoing security training programs involving Gaddafi’s police and military, as well as the US’ strong support for the regime’s repression of radical Islamists, many of whom are now leading the NATO-backed ‘rebel forces’ now occupying Tripoli.

What caused the NATO countries to shift abruptly from a policy of embracing Gaddafi to launching a brutal scorched-earth invasion of Libya in a matter of months? The key is the popular uprisings, which threatened Euro-US domination. The near total destruction of Libya, a secular regime with the highest standard of living in Africa, was meant to be a lesson, a message from the imperialists to the newly aroused masses of North Africa, Asia and Latin America: The fate of Libya awaits any regime which aspires to greater independence and questions the ascendancy of Euro-American power.

NATO’s savage six-month blitz – over 30,000 air and missile assaults on Libyan civil and military institutions – was a response to those who claimed that the US and the EU were on the “decline” and that the “empire was in decay”. The radical Islamist and monarchist-led “uprising” in Benghazi during March 2011 was backed by and served as a pretext for the NATO imperial powers to extend their counter-offensive on the road to neo-colonial restoration.

NATO’s War and the Phony “Rebel Uprising”

Nothing is more obvious than the fact that the entire war against Libya was in every strategic and material fashion NATO’s war. The casting of the rag-tag collection of monarchists, Islamist fundamentalists, London and Washington-based ex-pats and disaffected Gaddafi officials as “rebels” is a pure case of mass media propaganda. From the beginning the ‘rebels’ depended completely on the military, political, diplomatic and media power of NATO, without which the de facto mercenaries would not have lasted a month, holed up in Benghazi.

A detailed analysis of the main features of the conquest of Libya confirms this assault as a NATO war.

NATO launched brutal air and sea attacks destroying the Libyan air force, ships, energy depots, tanks, artillery and armories and killed and wounded thousands of soldiers, police and civilian militia fighters. Until NATO’s invasion the mercenary ‘rebel’ ground forces had not advanced beyond Benghazi and could barely ‘hold’ territory afterwards. The ‘rebel’ mercenaries ‘advanced’ only behind the withering round-the-clock air attacks of the NATO offensive.

NATO air strikes were responsible for the massive destruction of Libyan civilian and defensive military infrastructure, bombing ports, highways, warehouses, airports, hospitals, electrical and water plants and neighborhood housing, in a war of ‘terror’ designed to ‘turn’ the loyalist mass base against the Gaddafi government. The mercenaries did not have popular backing among Libyan civilians, but NATO brutality weakened active opposition against the ‘rebel’ mercenaries.

NATO won key diplomatic support for the invasion by securing UN resolutions, mobilizing their client rulers in the Arab League, procuring US mercenary trained ‘legionnaires’ from Qatar and the financial backing of the rich rabble in the Gulf. NATO forced ‘cohesion’ among the feuding clans of self-appointed ‘rebel’ mercenary leaders via its (“freezing”) seizure of overseas Libyan government assets amounting to billions of dollars. Thus the financing, arming, training and advising by “Special Forces” were all under NATO control.

NATO imposed economic sanctions, cutting off Libya’s income from oil sales.. NATO ran an intensive propaganda campaign parading the imperial offensive as a “rebel uprising”; disguising the blistering bombardment of a defenseless anti-colonial army as ‘humanitarian intervention’ in defense of ‘pro-democracy civilians’. The centrally choreographed mass media blitz extended far beyond the usual liberal circles, to convince ‘progressive’ journalists and their newspapers, as well as intellectuals to paint the imperial mercenaries as ‘rebels’ and to condemn the heroic 6-month resistance of the Libyan army and people against foreign aggression. The pathologically racist Euro-US propaganda published lurid images of Libyan government troops (often portrayed as ‘black mercenaries’) receiving massive quantities of ‘Viagra’ from Gadhafi while their own families and homes were, in fact, under aerial assault and blockade by NATO.

The main contribution of the mercenary ‘conquerors’ in this grand production was to provide photo opportunities of rag-tag ‘rebels’ waving rifles in Pentagon-style Che Guevara poses riding around in pickup trucks arresting and brutalizing African migrant workers and black Libyans. The mercenary ‘liberators’ triumphantly entered Libyan cities and towns, which were already scorched and devastated by the NATO colonial air force. Needless to say the mass media ‘adored’ them.

In the aftermath of NATO’s destruction, the ‘rebel’ mercenaries showed their true talents as death squads: They organized the systematic execution of “suspected Gadfafi supporters” and the pillage of homes, stores, banks and public institutions related to the defeated regime. To “secure” Tripoli and snuff out any expression of anti-colonial resistance, the ‘rebel’ mercenaries carry out summary executions – especially of black Libyans and sub-Saharan African workers and their families. The “chaos” in Tripoli described by the mass media is due to the ‘self-styled liberation’ forces running amok. The only quasi–organized forces in Tripoli appear to be the Al Qaeda-linked militants, NATO’s erstwhile allies.

Consequences of the NATO Conquest of Libya

According to ‘rebel’ mercenary technocrats, NATO’s policy of systematic destruction will cost Libya at least a ‘lost decade’. This is an optimistic assessment of how long ‘reconstruction’ will take for Libya to regain the economic levels of February 2011. The major petroleum companies have already lost hundreds of millions in profits and over the decade are expected to lose billions more due to the flight, assassination and jailing of thousands of experienced Libyan and foreign experts, skilled immigrant workers and technical specialists in all fields, especially in view of the destruction of Libyan infrastructure and telecommunication systems.

Sub-Sahara Africa will suffer a huge set-back with the cancellation of the proposed ‘Bank of Africa’, which Gaddafi was developing as an alternative source of investment finance and the destruction of his alternative communication system for Africa. The process of re-colonization involving imperial rule via NATO and UN mercenary ‘peace keepers’ will be chaotic given the inevitable strife among hostile armed Islamist fundamentalists, monarchists, neo-colonial technocrats, tribal warlords and clans as they carve up their private fiefdoms. Intra-imperial rivalries and local political claimants to the oil wealth will further enhance the ‘chaos’ and degrade civilian life, in a nation which had once boasted the highest per capita income and standard of living in Africa. Complex irrigation and petroleum networks, developed under Gaddafi and destroyed by NATO, will remain in shambles. As the example of Iraq has vividly proven, NATO is better at destroying than constructing a modern secular state rooted in a modern civil bureaucracy, universal free public education, secular judicial system and modern health services. The US policy of rule and ruin reigns supreme in NATO’s juggernaut.

Motivation for the Invasion

What motivated NATO to initiate a massive, six-month long aerial bombardment of Libya, followed by invasion and crimes against humanity? Civilian deaths and the widespread destruction of Libyan civil society by NATO flies in the face of its claims that the air assaults were meant to “protect civilians” from imminent Gaddafi-led genocide, ‘rebel’ claims which were never substantiated. Bombing Libya’s critical economic infrastructure allows us to categorically conclude that the NATO assault has little to do with ‘economic rationality’ or any such consideration. The primary motivation for NATO’s actions can be found in earlier policies related to a spring counter-offensive against the mass popular movements that overthrew US-EU puppets in Egypt and Tunisia and were threatening client regimes in Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere.

Despite the fact that the US-NATO were already engaged in several colonial wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia) and Western public opinion had been demanding withdrawal in light of the costs, Western imperial leaders felt too much was at stake and calculated that losses could be minimized. NATO’s overwhelming mastery of the air and sea made short work of Libya’s puny military defense capability, allowing them to bomb the cities, ports and vital infrastructure with impunity and enforce a total economic blockade. They calculated that massive bombing would terrorize the Libyan people into submission and bring about a quick colonial victory without any NATO military losses, the prime concern of Western public opinion, and permit a triumphant ‘rebel’ mercenary army to march into Tripoli.

The Arab popular rebellions were the central concern and the motor force behind NATO’s destruction of Libya. These mass popular uprisings had toppled the long-standing pillars of US-Israel-EU dominance in the Middle East. The fall of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and his Tunisian counterpart Ben Ali sent tremors through the imperial foreign offices. These successful uprisings had the immediate ripple effect of inspiring similar movements throughout the region. Bahrain, housing the key naval base for the US navy in the Middle East and neighboring Saudi Arabia (the US key strategic ally in the Arab world), witnessed a prolonged massive uprising of civil society, while Yemen ruled by the US- puppet Ali Saleh, faced mass popular movements and militant resistance. Morocco and Algeria were experiencing popular demands for democracy. The common thread in the Arab peoples’ movements was their demands to end EU, US and Israeli domination of the region, an end to massive corruption and nepotism, free elections and a solution to wide-spread unemployment via large-scale job programs. As anti-colonial movements grew in breadth and intensity their demands radicalized from political to social democracy, from a democratic to an anti-imperialist foreign policy. Workers’ demands were enforced by strikes and calls for the prosecution of repressive police and internal security and military officials guilty of crimes against their citizens.

The U.S., E.U. and Israel were caught by surprise – their intelligence agencies so deeply embedded in the smelly crevices of their clients’ secret police institutions failed to detect the popular explosions. The popular uprisings came at a critical and inopportune moment, especially for the US where domestic support for NATO wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had declined sharply given the economic crises and major social cutbacks to pay for these wars. Moreover, in Iraq and Afghanistan the US-NATO troops were losing ground: The Taliban was, in effect, the real ‘shadow government’. Pakistan, despite its puppet regime and compliant generals, faced overwhelming popular opposition to the air war against its citizens in frontier villages and towns. The US drone strikes killing militants and civilians were answered with the sabotage of vital transport supplying the occupation forces in Afghanistan. Faced with the deteriorating global situation, the NATO powers, decided that they needed to counter-attack in the most decisive and visible manner by destroying an independent, secular regime like Libya and thereby re-affirming their global supremacy, countering the image of defeat and retreat and, above all, re-energizing the “declining imperial power”.

The Imperial Counter-Attack

The US led the way in its counter-offensive in Egypt, by backing the power grab by the military junta led by Mubarak loyalists, who then proceeded to disperse and repress the pro-democracy and workers movements and to end all talk of restructuring the economy. A pro-NATO collective dictatorship of generals replaced the personal autocratic rule of Hosni Mubarak. The NATO powers provided “emergency” billions to float the new regime and ‘derail’ the Egyptian people’s march to democracy. In Tunisia a similar process took hold: The EU, especially France and the US, backed a reshuffling of the ousted regime bringing to the fore a new/old cast of neo-colonial politicians. They plied them with funds, insuring that the military-police apparatus remained intact despite continued mass discontent with the conformist policies of the ‘new/old regime.

In Bahrain and Yemen, the NATO powers followed a dual track, unsure of the outcome between the massive pro-democracy movements and the pro-imperial autocrats. In Bahrain, the West called for ‘reform’ and ‘dialogue’ with the majority Shia population and a peaceful resolution, while continuing to arm and protect the Bahraini royalty – all the while looking for a pliant alternative if the incumbent puppet was overthrown. The NATO-backed Saudi invasion of Bahrain in support of the dictatorship and the subsequent wave of terror effectively showed West’s true intentions. In Yemen the NATO powers continued to support the brutal Ali Saleh regime.

Meanwhile the NATO powers were exploiting internal discontent in Syria by arming and providing diplomatic support to the Islamic fundamentalists and their minority neo-liberal allies in an effort to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime. Thousands of Syrian civilians, police and soldiers have been killed in this simmering civil war, which NATO propaganda presents as a case of state terror against ‘peaceful civilians’, ignoring the killing of soldiers and civilians by armed Islamists and the very real threat to Syria’s secular population and religious minorities.

The Counter-Offensive and NATO’s Invasion of Libya

The destruction and invasion of Libya reversed seven years of accommodation and co-operation with Gaddifi. There were no ‘incidents’ in Libya or elsewhere that had threatened the NATO countries’ economic and military interests. Libya was still an independent country, pursuing a pro-African agenda which had spearheaded and funded the establishment of an independent regional bank and communications system designed to bypass IMF and World Bank control. Libya’s close ties to all the major NATO oil companies and to Wall Street investment banks as well as its ongoing bilateral military programs with the US did not shield it from the NATO’s attack. Libya was deliberately destroyed by a 6-month campaign of relentless bombing by NATO air and naval forces to serve as an example to the Arab popular movements: NATO’s message to the Arab pro-democracy movements was that it was prepared to launch new offensive wars with the same devastating consequences as the Libyan people just endured; the imperial powers were not in decline and any independent anti-colonial regime would suffer the same fate. NATO’s message to the African Union was clear: There will be no independent regional bank organized by Gaddafi or anyone else. There is no alternative to imperial banks, the IMF or the World Bank.

Through the devastation of Libya, the West was telling the Third World that, contrary to the pundits who chattered about ‘the decline of the US empire’, NATO was willing to use overwhelming and genocidal military power to establish puppet regimes, no matter how backward, vicious and regressive the puppets, because they will ultimately obey NATO and answer to the White House.

NATO’s invasion and destruction of a secular modern republic, like Libya, which had used its oil wealth to develop Libyan society, was a stern message to democratic popular movements. Any independent Third World regime can be rolled back; colonial puppet regimes can be foisted onto a devastated people; the end of colonialism is not inevitable, imperial rule is back.

NATO’s invasion of Libya sends a message to freedom fighters everywhere: There is a high cost to independence; acting outside of imperial channels, even if only to a limited degree, can bring swift destruction. Moreover, the NATO war on Libya demonstrates to all nationalist regimes that making concessions to Western economic, political and military interests– as Gaddafi’s sons and their neo-liberal entourage had pursued full accommodation—does not offer security. In fact concessions may have encouraged imperial penetration. The West’s burgeoning ties with Libyan officials facilitated their defections and promised an easy victory over Tripoli. The NATO powers believed that with a regional uprising in Benghazi, a handful of defectors from the Gaddafi regime and their military control of the air and sea, Libya would be an easy victory on the way to a widespread rollback of the Arab Spring.

The “cover” of an orchestrated regional military-civilian “uprising” and the imperial mass media propaganda blitz against the Libyan government was sufficient to convince the majority of western leftist intellectuals to take up the cudgels for the mercenary ‘rebels”: Samir Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Lowy, Juan Cole and many others backed the mercenary “rebels” … demonstrating the irrelevance and bankruptcy of the remnants of the old left.

The Long Term, Large Scale Consequences of NATOs War

The invasion and conquest of Libya marks a new phase in Western imperialism’s drive to reassert its primacy in the Arab-Islamic world. The ongoing offensive is clearly evident in the mounting pressures, sanctions, and arming of the Syrian opposition to Bashar al-Assad, the ongoing consolidation of the Egyptian military junta and the demobilization of the pro-democracy movement in Tunisia. How far “backwards” the process can be pushed depends on the revitalization and regrouping of the pro-democracy movements, currently in ebb.

Unfortunately, NATO’s victory over Libya will strengthen the arguments of the militarist wings of the US and EU ruling class who claim that the ‘military option’ brings results, that the only policy that “the anti-colonial Arabs” understand is force. The Libyan outcome will strengthen the hand of policymakers who favor a continued long-term US-NATO presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and promote a military offensive against Iran and Syria. Israel has already capitalized on NATO’s victory against Gaddafi via its expansion of huge colonial settlements in the West Bank, increasing bombing and missile raids on Gaza, a major naval and army build-up in the Red Sea region adjoining Egypt and confrontational posturing toward Turkey.

As of early September, members of the African Union, especially South Africa, have yet to recognize the mercenary “transition” regime imposed by NATO on Libya. Aside from the Libyan people, Sub-Saharan Africa will be the biggest immediate loser in the overthrow of Gaddafi. Libya’s generous aid, grants and loans, bought the African states a degree of independence from the harsh conditions of the IMF, World Bank and Western bankers. Gaddafi was a major sponsor and backer of regional integration – including the African Union. His large scale development programs, especially oil and water infrastructure and construction projects, employed hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan African immigrant workers and specialists who remitted billions to their home countries, helping the balance of payments and reducing deficits and poverty at home. In place of Gaddafi’s positive economic contribution, Africa now faces Tripoli transformed into a colonial outpost, fortifying US military command in Africa and a new push to strengthen military ties with the empire.

However, beyond the present-day celebrations of their imperial military success in Libya, the war only exacerbates the weakening of Western economies by diverting scarce domestic resources to wage prolonged wars with no decisive victories. Ongoing social cuts and harsh austerity programs have undercut any ruling class efforts to whip up phony mass chauvinist celebrations for “democratic victories over tyrants”. The naked aggression against Libya has heightened Russian, Chinese and Venezuelan security concerns. Russia and China will veto any UN Security Council sanctions on Syria. Venezuela and Russia are signing new multi-billion dollar military co-operation agreements, strengthening Caracas’s military defense in the wake of the Libyan invasion.

For all the ruling class and mass media euphoria, the ‘win’ over Libya, grotesque and criminal in the destruction of Libyan secular society and the ongoing brutalization of black Libyans, does not solve the profound economic crises in the EU-US. It does not affect China’s growing competitive advantages over its western competitors. It does not end US-Israeli isolation faced with an imminent world-wide recognition of Palestine as an independent state. The absence of left-wing western intellectual solidarity for independent Third World nations, evident in their support for the imperial-based mercenary “rebels” is more than compensated by the emergence of a radical new generation of left-wing activists in South Africa, Chile, Greece, Spain, Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere. These are youth, whose solidarity with anti-colonial regimes is based on their own experience with exploitation, “marginalization” (unemployment) and repression at home.

Is it too much to hope that a War Crimes Tribunal could be organized to prosecute NATO leaders for crimes against humanity, for genocide against the people of Libya? Can the brutal link between costly imperial wars abroad and increasing austerity and domestic decay lead to the revival of an anti-imperialist peace movement based on withdrawal of imperial troops abroad and public domestic investments for jobs, health and education for the working and middle class?

If the destruction and occupation of Libya marks a time of infamy for the NATO powers, it also establishes a new awareness that a people can struggle and resist 6 months of intense, massive bombings from all the NATO powers. Perhaps when their heroic example becomes clear and the fog of media propaganda is lifted, a new emerging generation of fighters can vindicate the battle of Libya, as a continuation of the struggle for the definitive emancipation of the Afro-Arab and Islamic peoples from the yoke of Western imperialism.

About the author:James Petras

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Partisan Review, TempsModerne, Le Monde Diplomatique, and his commentary is widely carried on the internet. For more of his writings, check out the The James Petras Website.

Source: Eurasiareview

Libya as a Global Template for Endless Wars

2011-10-21T14:37:00.000+02:00

The savage killing Thursday of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi served to underscore the criminal character of the war that has been prosecuted by the US and NATO over the past eight months.The assassination follows NATO’s more than month-long siege of Sirte, the Libyan coastal city that was Gaddafi’s hometown and a center of his support. The assault on this city of 100,000 left virtually every building smashed, with untold numbers of civilians dead, wounded and stricken by disease, as they were deprived of food, water, medical care and other basic necessities.
This grisly event, which President Barack Obama hailed in the White House Rose Garden Thursday as the advent of “a new and democratic Libya,” in reality only exposes the regional and tribal fault lines that are setting the stage for a protracted period of civil war.

War On Libya Belligerents

Just two days before the murder of Gaddafi, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton staged an unannounced visit to Tripoli on a heavily armed military aircraft. While there, she issued a demand that Gaddafi be brought in “dead or alive”. As the Associated Press reported, Clinton declared “in unusually blunt terms that the United States would like to see former dictator Muammar Gaddafi dead. “We hope he can be captured or killed soon so that you don’t have to fear him any longer’, Clinton told students and others at a town hall-style gathering in the capital city.” The AP went on to note: “Until now, the US has generally avoided saying that Gaddafi should be killed.” Yet in reality, Washington is pursuing an unconcealed policy of state murder. In this case, it has openly advocated and provided every resource to facilitate the killing of a head of state with whom the US government had established close political and commercial relations over the course of the last eight years.

The killing of Gaddafi is the culmination of a criminal war that killed untold numbers of Libyans and left most of the country in ruins. This operation was launched on the pretext of protecting civilian lives, based on the trumped up claim that Gaddafi was preparing to lay siege to the eastern city of Benghazi to massacre his opponents. It has ended with NATO orchestrating a siege of Sirte, where thousands have been killed and wounded in suppressing opposition to the “rebels”.From the beginning, the entire operation has been directed at the re-colonization of North Africa and pursued on behalf of US, British, French, Italian and Dutch oil interests. While over the past decade Gaddafi had curried favor with US, Britain, France and other Western powers, striking oil deals, arms agreements and other pacts, US imperialism and its counterparts in Europe continued to see his regime as an impediment to their aims in the region.

Among the principal concerns in Washington, London and Paris were the increasing Chinese and Russian economic interests in Libya and more generally Africa as a whole. China had developed $6.6 billion in bilateral trade, mainly in oil, while some 30,000 Chinese workers were employed in a wide range of infrastructure projects. Russia, meanwhile, had developed extensive oil deals, billions of dollars in arms sales and a $3 billion project to link Sirte and Benghazi by rail. There were also discussions on providing the Russian navy with a Mediterranean port near Benghazi. Combined with these economic and geo-strategic motives were political factors. The turn by Gaddafi toward closer relations to the West had allowed Washington and Paris to cultivate elements within his regime who were prepared to collaborate in an imperialist takeover of the country. This includes figures like Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gaddafi’s former Justice Minister and now chairman of the NATO-backed NTC and Mahmoud Jibril, the former economics official who is chief of the NTC cabinet.

With the popular upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt—on Libya’s western and eastern borders—the US and its NATO allies saw an opportunity to put into operation a plan that had been developed over some time for regime change in Libya. With agents on the ground, they moved to exploit and hijack anti-Gaddafi demonstrations and foment an armed conflict.To prepare for a direct imperialist takeover, they followed a well-worn path, vilifying the country’s leader and promoting the idea that only outside intervention could save innocent civilians from a looming massacre. The supposed imminent destruction of Benghazi was utilized to win support for imperialist war from a whole range of ex-lefts, liberals, academics and human rights advocates, who lent their moral and intellectual weight to an exercise in imperialist aggression and murder.

Their attempt to portray the regime change in Libya as a popular revolution becomes more preposterous with each passing day. The unstable puppet regime that is taking shape in Benghazi and Tripoli has been installed through relentless and massive NATO bombing, murder and the wholesale violation of international law.

Libya stands as a warning to the world. Any regime that gets in the way of US interests, runs afoul of the major corporations or fails to do the bidding of the NATO powers can be overthrown by military force, with its leaders murdered. Already, the US media, which has staged a hideous celebration of the bloodbath outside Sirte, is braying for NATO to repeat its Libyan intervention in Syria. For her part, Clinton warned Pakistani leaders on Thursday that insufficient support for the US-war in Afghanistan would mean that they would pay “a very big price.”

There can be no doubt that future operations are on the way, with bigger wars coming into focus, posing catastrophic consequences. Gaddafi had provoked the ire of the government of Nicolas Sarkozy in France with his hostility to its scheme for creating a Mediterranean Union, aimed at refurbishing French influence in the country’s former colonies and beyond.
-Although No Suture! does not favor socialism at all, the article's snippets above are here displayed because, contrary to mainstream media, it tells us like it is!
You can find Bill Van Auken full article at the World Socialist Web Site

Not only Gaddafi has been killed, but 60,000 men women and children - nearly all in NATO bombings. And the lizard bitch is laughing and making jokes, comparing herself to Caesar! Check the video here ...

What exactly did she saw? Lybia under Gaddafi?
* Loans to Libyan citizens are given with NO interest.
* Students would get paid the average salary for the profession they are studying for.
* If you are unable to get employment the state would pay the full salary as if you were employed until you find employment.
* When you get married the couple gets an apartment or house for free from the government.
* You could go to college anywhere in the world. The state pays 2, 500 euros plus accommodation and car allowance.
* The cars are sold at factory cost.
* Libya does not owe money, (not a cent) to anyone . No creditors.
* Free education and health care for all citizens.
* 25% of the population with a university degree.
* No beggars on the streets and nobody is homeless (until recent bombing).
* Bread cost only $0.15 per loaf.

Or was she too busy having dinner with the 'rebels'? Let's see ...

But a video proves us that Gaddafi was a hated tyrant. Check it out!

And what does Putin think about all that? See for yourself ...

The thing to remember is that there was no outcry for this assault on Libya (as there was no outcry for war on Iraq and Afghanistan), the overwhelming majority of people are against them.
But this seems to make no even the slightest bit of difference, there is literally no opposition voiced to these western wars in parliament, hardly even an acknowledgment that no one outside of liberal imperialists and media commentators wants them.

Let us examine, what has happened in Libya:
* Destruction of infrastructure; utilities, electricity, roads, bridges, etc.
* Destruction of political constructs.
* Destruction of Libyan forces; army, air force, navy, police.
* Destruction of civil society, and scattering of the processionals to four corners of the globe, much needed for reconstruction.
* Reallocation of topography of tyranny into ownership of new sock puppets. The tasks as yet not completed.
* Revision of the Libyan constitution, and incorporation of Iraq Constitution redux; ala Monsanto seeds only, and here we go whole sale privatisation of Libya included the alphabet that spells it.
* Provisions for a new American Base, all paid for by the Libyan funds.
* Payment for all the help offered to Libya by the concerned belligerents engaged in the humanitarian slaughter of Libyans; ie the $150 billion frozen in the NATO countries banks and US banks. Thanx for the funds Libyan Dudes.
* Setting loose the dogs of profit, and subcontract of Libyan reconstruction to NATO, and US countries at thrice the going market prices, at least.
.
Well that concludes this mission of mercy and liberation of funds, and lands, and resources.

Meanwhile all over the western world millions and millions of peoples living standards are attacked, Britain and USAmerica are bankrupt nations being run for a tiny, tiny majority of people.
In England they have 3 parties with exactly the same policies, one party that lost an election (Nu Labour), one that couldn't win an election (Tories) and one that no everyone regards with total contempt (Lib Dems). A tiny elite rule and the media and liberal commentators are all delighted.
Indeed! Read this final paragraph from the Guardian's Middle East editor:

"With Gaddafi finally out of the picture, the National Transitional Council faces a mammoth task in overseeing the change and forging a better future, with western and wider international support likely to be crucial to long-term success. For Libyans, Arabs and Africans the post-Gaddafi world may be less colorful, and, for a while, far less stable. But it is a case of good riddance: everyone should be better off without him.- Quoted from Ian Black in the Guardian

This is what passes for independent, liberal analysis nowadays!

Someone may remember that the ICC's prosecutor wanted to trial Gaddafi.
That the US/NATO have now allowed his killing just prove that the ICC has yet again been used as a political instrument in the hands of 'the masters' to add to the propaganda needed to wage the war; there has never been any serious intention to trial Gaddafi obviously:
1) he could have revealed uncomfortable truths for the noble liberators
2) the ICC prosecutor should have demonstrated that Gaddafi was actually responsible for those war crimes (mass rapes for example) AI and HRW have themselves admitted never happened
and
3) with Gaddafi alive people could still talk about international law and its implications.

Now the bogeyman has gone and the Libya war is over, we are told.
Journos and commentators should just look back at Iraq and Afghanistan to find the courage for some skepticism.

The Son of Africa Claims a Continent’s Crown Jewels

2011-10-21T12:29:00.000+02:00

On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only “engage” for “self-defence”, says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.

Obama’s decision is described in the press as “highly unusual” and “surprising”, even “weird”. It is none of these things. It is the logic of American foreign policy since 1945. Take Vietnam. The priority was to halt the influence of China, an imperial rival, and “protect” Indonesia, which President Nixon called “the region’s richest hoard of natural resources …the greatest prize”. Vietnam merely got in the way; and the slaughter of more than three million Vietnamese and the devastation and poisoning of their land was the price of America achieving its goal. Like all America’s subsequent invasions, a trail of blood from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq, the rationale was usually “self defence” or “humanitarian”, words long emptied of their dictionary meaning.

In Africa, says Obama, the “humanitarian mission” is to assist the government of Uganda defeat the Lord’s resistance Army (LRA), which “has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa”. This is an accurate description of the LRA, evoking multiple atrocities administered by the United States, such as the bloodbath in the 1960s following the CIA-arranged murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first legally elected prime minister, and the CIA coup that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, regarded as Africa’s most venal tyrant.

Obama’s other justification also invites satire. This is the “national security of the United States”. The LRA has been doing its nasty work for 24 years, of minimal interest to the United States. Today, it has few than 400 fighters and has never been weaker. However, US “national security” usually means buying a corrupt and thuggish regime that has something Washington wants. Uganda’s “president-for-life” Yoweri Museveni already receives the larger part of $45 million in US military “aid” – including Obama’s favourite drones. This is his bribe to fight a proxy war against America’s latest phantom Islamic enemy, the rag-tag al Shabaab group based in Somalia. The RTA will play a public relations role, distracting western journalists with its perennial horror stories.

However, the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. In the world of self-serving, institutionalised paranoia that justifies what General David Petraeus, the former US commander and now CIA director, implies is a state of perpetual war, China is replacing al-Qaeda as the official American “threat”. When I interviewed Bryan Whitman, an assistant secretary of defence at the Pentagon last year, I asked him to describe the current danger to America. Struggling visibly, he repeated, “Asymmetric threats … asymmetric threats”. These justify the money-laundering state-sponsored arms conglomerates and the biggest military and war budget in history. With Osama bin Laden airbrushed, China takes the mantle.

Africa is China’s success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa’s greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China’s most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and Nato backed the “rebels” with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning “genocide” in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30,000 workers in Libya. The subsequent UN security council resolution that allowed the west’s “humanitarian intervention” was explained succinctly in a proposal to the French government by the “rebel” National Transitional Council, disclosed last month in the newspaper Liberation, in which France was offered 35 per cent of Libya’s gross national oil production “in exchange” (the term used) for “total and permanent” French support for the NTC. Running up the Stars and Stripes in “liberated” Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!”

The de facto conquest of Libya by the US and its imperial partners heralds a modern version of the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the 19th century.Like the “victory” in Iraq, journalists have played a critical role in dividing Libyans into worthy and unworthy victims. A recent Guardian front page carried a photograph of a terrified “pro-Gaddafi” fighter and his wild-eyed captors who, says the caption, “celebrate”. According to General Petraeus, there is now a war “of perception … conducted continuously through the news media”.

For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s “defence strategy” plan, America simply wishes to rule the world.

That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the “Son of Africa”, is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in Black Skin, White Masks, what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.

Source: John Pilger

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. No Suture! has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is No Suture! endorsed or sponsored by the originator.

NATO Demo-Humanazitarian Spring for Libya

2011-10-07T02:27:00.000+02:00

The wave of Middle East revolutions was a false flag from the start and the ultimate target for the US was indeed Libya all along, insists Ian R. Crane, an independent researcher and campaigner for political truth and integrity.

Watch Ian R. Crane video interview on LiveLeak

Do like Andrej, wear what you fancy!

2011-09-07T01:54:00.014+02:00

Andrej Pejic models menswear and womenswear,
reads Tolstoy and
was just voted the 98th sexiest woman in the world.

[...]

Back in the Balkans, Pejic says he had already “started to exhibit cross-gender behaviour. I played with dolls and Barbies from an early age. It felt natural, and quite instinctive". Some people have said, ‘Well, because you don’t have a father you were geared towards your mother,’ but my brother grew up in the same environment as me and did very boyish things.”

When he was about 11, Pejic says he “really started seeing the differences in the genders, the barriers, and that I couldn’t really afford to do things as I did as a kid”. Why couldn’t you? “Socially, it was inappropriate. So I tried to make other people happy, to be more acceptable, and more boyish.”

Then, aged 14 or so, the boy who had emerged from the Balkans with a profound contempt for Balkanisation – “I’ve seen the poison of nationalism, seen what it can do. I’m allergic to it now. Basing your identity on race just seems ridiculous” – decided to cease basing his identity on gender.

“I had been depressed for a while and came to a point where I was like, ‘F*** it, do I want to make other people happy or do I want to make myself happy?’ ”

So Pejic started bleaching his brown hair blond, or dying it pink, and wearing jeans tighter than a Beyoncé dance routine.

One day, when Pejic was 16, working in McDonald’s (“That’s a gruelling job,” he muses, “just the primitive capitalist environment that you experience”), a local model agent walked in, ordered a cheeseburger, looked up and spotted his server. Along with the burger he took away a promise from Pejic to come into the office. The agency advised Pejic to finish high school and then have a crack at Europe: “They said, ‘You’re unique, but you’re not going to work here.’ ”

Two years later, in February last year, Pejic arrived in London. He toured the agencies but soon became glum. “They were confused about how to market me. They thought I was too feminine for menswear.” With one appointment left, Pejic feared that he’d wasted the money his mother gave him for the flight.

But that appointment was with Sarah Doukas, the owner of Storm (who spotted Kate Moss at an airport). “She said, ‘I’m going to take him on.’ ”

[...]

Source: Andrej Pejic in The Times magazine

More: Polemic Pejic at New Male Fashion

Conrad Schnitzler gone

2011-08-06T20:31:00.010+02:00

Conrad Schnitzler passed away from stomach cancer in the evening 4-Aug, 2011.

His final work "00/830" was made 4 days before he leaves this world.
Con will stay with us through his music.

Many consider Conrad Schnitzler to be the Grandfather of European Electronic Music. In the late Sixties/early Seventies, it was Schnitzler who convinced Tangerine Dream and Kluster (who would later become "Cluster") to "go electronic", embracing the then-unexplored realm of synthesized sound. Having set those individuals on a new sonic course, Schnitzler went off to pursue a solo career that has lasted over three decades.

During the 1980's, Schnitzler (who has a personal aversion to travel) devised a means for his music to tour without the presence of the musician. Breaking his compositions into individual tracks, he recorded these pieces on separate media (at the time, choosing cassette tapes). When these separate tapes were played in tandem, his music reformed in a manner that would be different each time, depending on start times and the manipulation of the individual components. Through this deconstructive procedure, Schnitzler introduced a freshness to pre-programmed electronic performances.

After innumerable releases (many of which are considered classics of the electronic genre), Schnitzler abandoned conventional and independent record labels during the 1990's, and began to produce limited edition CDRs of his music.

Wolfgang Seidel will take over the contact for order of Con's private works, etc.

Website: CON-tribute
Official: Conrad Schnitzler
Other: The Legendary Electronics of Conrad Schnitzler.
Interview by Carlos M. Pozo
Video Documentary: youtube (German)
Bjørn Hatterud visits Conrad Schnitzler

A Deluge of Simulacra

2011-08-06T18:24:00.004+02:00

Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not understood in order to obtain its full effect.
I think that’s the problem of the mass of today’s creative generation. The reliance on the technique or technology has resulted in a deluge of simulacra which Baudrillard speaks of. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual in nature because art only exists conceptually, but this opening that Duchamp rendered has become a form of exploitation wherein the original conceptualism of Duchamp has been bypassed and replaced by an ignorant aesthetic of post-modernist fashion. The democratisation of technology is a two-edged sword.

…

The prevailing messages of the so-called popular media have lost their relevance because a socioeconomic system that substitutes the profit motive for use value separates man from himself and art from life. When we're enslaved to any system, the creative impulse is dulled and the tendency to imitate increases. Thus arises the phenomenon of commercial entertainment distinct from art, a system of temporarily gratifying, without really fulfilling, the experiential needs of an aesthetically impoverished culture. The mass public insists on entertainment over art in order to escape an unnatural way of life in which interior realities are not compatible with exterior realities. Freedom, says Brown, is fusion. Life becomes art when there's no difference between what we are and what we do. Art is a synergetic attempt at closing the gap between what is and what ought to be.

…

Source: Adi Newton interviewed for Art Cornwall.

How to down a drone…

2011-08-02T22:35:00.005+02:00

This year a UK Home Office backed coalition of regional Police Authorities will embark on a project to extend their national surveillance network by deploying unmanned airborne surveillance drones across the country. It’s planned that in the build up to 2012 the drones will be used to foil potential terrorist attacks, detect illegal immigration planning to cross the channel (by flying over France?), monitor anti-social behaviour and public order situations (demonstrations) and of course to gather intelligence on subversive activities.

The introduction of these drones represents a significant expansion of the surveillance state, planned and delivered by un-democratic consortium of police authorities and loosely regulated by vague and rarely tested laws. With this expansion of the surveillance state should come an equal counter-response probing the legal and practical boundaries of surveillance:

What methods can be used to disrupt or destroy drone technology?

Find out here

Source: Simon Crab's blog, Stalker.

Lev's Quotes on Knuckles' Quotes

2011-06-23T15:46:00.007+02:00

"Too many dj's lack identity.
They should follow their own instinct, not other peoples"
- Frankie Knuckles in Soul Undergound, UK magazine - May 1989.

"DJs now need to first learn how to act with integrity, then maybe they can honestly work on an original identity. Maybe I'm way past my time in understanding this thing, but it's good to know there has always been small minded hacks doing weak imitations. The cause today is simple enough: anyone can spend a few months searching around the internet for good music that you used to have to spend years and years finding in record stores. On top of that, it's free if you play digitally. Then it's only a matter of convincing people that you know something about what you're doing. Eventually someone's gonna buy the bullshit.
So 5 years ago you played drum and bass, then you got into dubstep, then house, now you only play disco, then it will be modern soul, then northern. Sure, the internet's awash in tons of genres to mess with.
The question is will you play them like you mean it?
Like you looked for it for 10 years?
Like you understand it? Like you payed for it?
You can convince as many people as will listen, but the obvious difference is written all over your face."
- probably Jason Lev from Truth is Light records blog - October 2010

Nigeria on Volga

2011-06-21T05:20:00.004+02:00

[…]

Russia faces renewed absolute decline. It is a third world economy, configured around exports of raw commodities, exactly as African countries are. Because commodity, and especially energy, prices are high and likely to remain so, there is a superficial aura of wealth. But because these commodities are exported virtually unprocessed, the employment effects, and thus the distribution of wealth inside the economy, are extremely limited. Russia has oligarchs involved in energy and mineral export. They are unimaginably wealthy. It has a technocratic and labouring class employed in these industries. They are doing well. It has senior officials corruptly gaining from the state interaction with these commodity producers, either through regulation or ownership. They are doing very nicely. It has a limited service economy catering for the above groups.

All of this is the active economy. It just does not spread far enough into Russian society to carry it along. Russia is looking more and more like Nigeria, with a tiny elite, few technocrats, a corrupt officialdom and a few people servicing them, all doing OK, while ordinary people live in squalor.

Like Nigeria, Russia does not make anything. When did anyone reading this last buy a Russian manufactured good? The Soviet system collapsed in large part because it could not provide consumer goods to a population that wanted them. Like Nigeria, Russia makes very little indeed – less than in Soviet times. Russian manufacturing industry as a whole has still not recovered to Soviet levels of production. I am willing to doubt it ever will. Russia just exports commodities and sucks in manufactures – disproportionately for the luxury end of the market, reflecting its crazy wealth distribution. Exactly like Nigeria, in fact.

Of course, government extracts some tax from the commodity industries and puts it into social benefits and funds the bewildered and status diminished professionals in education, healthcare etc. But the government’s tax revenue is exceeded by capital flight, as the oligarchs simply export the mega profits from commodities into numbered bank accounts abroad. No oligarch has ever thought “Wow I made billions from aluminium or gas, now I will invest it in manufacturing expresso machines and cyclone vacuum cleaners in Russia.” They think “Which way is Switzerland? Where do I buy Highbury?”

Foreign Direct Investment into manufacture in Russia is negligible for a country of its size, because there is absolutely no guarantee of a fair rule of law, of redress against a government or that some oligarch will not covet your factory, or local big man decide to shake you down. Democracy has vanished as Putin has made it impossible for opposition groups to operate and tightened his grip on the media. The killing of independent journalists and investigators has become routine. The situation both on human rights and judicial independence is actually worse than Nigeria.

Russia is not a great power in decline. It is a third world country in decline.

Full original post at Graig Murray's blog.

Buy Craig Murray's last book "The Catholic Orangemen of Togo"

Photography: Smoke over the river Volga by Sergei Dorokhovsky, via Wikimedia Commons

Mental disorder? It’s bullshit.

2011-06-20T19:59:00.005+02:00

Every so often Al Frances says something that seems to surprise even him. Just now, for instance, in the predawn darkness of his comfortable, rambling home in Carmel, California, he has broken off his exercise routine to declare that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Then an odd, reflective look crosses his face, as if he’s taking in the strangeness of this scene: Allen Frances, lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV), the guy who wrote the book on mental illness, confessing that “these concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.” For the first time in two days, the conversation comes to an awkward halt.

But he recovers quickly, and back in the living room he finishes explaining why he came out of a seemingly contented retirement to launch a bitter and protracted battle with the people, some of them friends, who are creating the next edition of the DSM. And to criticize them not just once, and not in professional mumbo jumbo that would keep the fight inside the professional family, but repeatedly and in plain English, in newspapers and magazines and blogs. And to accuse his colleagues not just of bad science but of bad faith, hubris, and blindness, of making diseases out of everyday suffering and, as a result, padding the bottom lines of drug companies. These aren’t new accusations to level at psychiatry, but Frances used to be their target, not their source. He’s hurling grenades into the bunker where he spent his entire career.

Read on…

Source: Wired
Image: A Mad Woman by Eugene Delacroix, 1822.

To these delusive 'very open minded' peoples and their idiotic gatherings

2011-04-11T06:05:00.007+02:00

“Open Mind” and “Closed Mind”

[There is a] dangerous little catch phrase which advises you to keep an “open mind.” This is a very ambiguous term—as demonstrated by a man who once accused a famous politician of having “a wide open mind.” That term is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions and granting plausibility to anything. A “closed mind” is usually taken to mean the attitude of a man impervious to ideas, arguments, facts and logic, who clings stubbornly to some mixture of unwarranted assumptions, fashionable catch phrases, tribal prejudices—and emotions. But this is not a “closed” mind, it is a passive one. It is a mind that has dispensed with (or never acquired) the practice of thinking or judging, and feels threatened by any request to consider anything.

What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants—a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear.

Source: Philosophy: Who Needs It - Ayn Rand.
“Philosophical Detection,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 21.

More on topic:
Skeptico - The Appeal To Be Open-minded.
UK Skeptics - The Open Mind.

On U.N. Intervention in Libya and World Government

2011-04-02T01:39:00.003+02:00

The U.N. intervention in Libya is a major political event. The U.N. is intervening inside a country that has not aggressed against another country. Whether or not this is the first time that this has happened, it is surely an important and clear-cut instance of this happening.

The U.N. is intervening to take down the Gaddafi administration and replace it by another, of undetermined nature. This means that the U.N. places its power over that of the Libyan state. The U.N. makes itself the Supreme Governor in the sense that it decides on a critical feature of a State, namely, who has "consent," or who is entitled to rule that State when protests against the existing rule emerge.

[…]

If the U.N.’s actions stand as a precedent, then the world is moving to world government. If the U.N. has the power to decide what each country’s political structure is, as in Libya, then who is going to decide what the structure of the U.N. is when it becomes oppressive?

[…]

The Charter of the U.N. in Article 2 calls for the "sovereign equality of all its Members." Its Members are States (not We the People). Libya is a member. The U.N. intervention is violating its own Charter. The U.S. government violated its own Constitution repeatedly. The U.N. is violating its Charter by disregarding Libyan sovereignty, and by taking it upon itself to determine the nature of that sovereignty.

[…]

Article 2 refers repeatedly to international disputes, i.e., disputes that are between or among States, not within States. It ends up saying explicitly that "Nothing in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state..." The U.N. is violating this provision of its Charter when it intervenes in Libya. Can this organization be trusted?

Full article by Michael S. Rozeff on Lew Rockwell web-site

The Strategy for Destroying Libya

2011-03-25T01:40:00.003+01:00

The judgment against Libya as a sovereign state was signed a long time ago. And the case did not concern the revolutionary movements inspired by Western intelligence services or the recent UN Security Council resolutions, but rather the totality of events that led up to the development and implementation of the strategy for destroying the country. Libya was red flagged on the “big chessboard” many years ago; it was designated as a target to be bombed, and now it is being bombed.

On September 1, 1969, a coup d’état staged by 12 officers led by a 27-year-old communications specialist, Captain Moammar Gadhafi of the Free Unionist-Socialist Officers organization, overthrew the monarchy, and the Western democracies supported him. However, they did not do so out of concern for the welfare of the masses suffering under the monarchy. Washington and London planned to use the young provincial officers, who had neither a serious long-term program, nor a broad social base within the country, nor political authority in the Arab world, to consolidate their influence in the country and in the region. Or as we would say today, their goal was to establish a protectorate. However, their plans failed. The anti-imperialist, anti-Western orientation of Libya’s revolution became manifest within the first few months of the new regime’s existence, and not just in terms of its rhetoric.

Libya’s first serious attack against the West was the October 7, 1969 speech at the UN General assembly’s 24th session by Libya’s permanent representative. That was where Libya first announced that it intended to eliminate all foreign military bases from its soil. Libya’s leadership subsequently informed the ambassadors of the United States and England that it was dissolving the relevant treaties.

I submit that the second and more painful blow against the West, which ultimately became the second line in Libya’s death sentence, was the attack on foreign capital in the country’s economy. That proved much more difficult than getting rid of foreign military bases. First off, all of the banks in Libya were nationalized in 1970 by order of the Libyan government. Then in 1973, Iraq, Algeria and Libya took over their oil industries, and they made sure the nationalization issue remained on OPEC meeting agendas until the end of the 1970s. That resulted in the nationalization of all foreign oil companies. Ironically, the Western companies had previously invested heavily in Libya, whose oil did not need to be shipped through the Suez Canal, in an effort to reduce their dependence on cheap Persian Gulf oil.

The third attack on capital was massive and ideologically grounded, and it affected the interests of the local bourgeoisie. In September 1977, Gadhafi proposed the principle of “self-government in the economy” as the basis for the country’s future economic development. Considering Gadhafi’s close contacts with Tito and way the theory of self-government was evolving in socialist Yugoslavia, I believe Libya’s leadership attempted to adopt those ideas. As a result, Libya began transferring companies to the collective control of their employees. Gadhafi outlined the ideological basis for this reform in the second part of his Green Book, which is fundamentally anti-capitalist. For example, he exposed wage labor as a form of slavery and declared that workers are entitled to the goods they produce. “A person must work according to his abilities and must be able to satisfy their needs, and all surplus should be directed to the accumulation of social wealth. The accumulation of surplus by one person reduces the needs of another person and is therefore unacceptable.”(1)

In addition, the slogan “Partners, not employees” started being enforced in the goods and services sector after November of that same year, and somewhat later the principle of “Real Estate—property of its inhabitant” was implemented. In May 1978, a law was passed prohibiting the rental of dwellings, and former renters became owners of the apartments and homes they had been renting. This nationalization was not tantamount to the direct expropriation that occurred in Russia after 1917 or in people’s democracies after World War II. Things were handled more politely in Libya. In addition to compensation, for example, former owners received the opportunity to participate in managing companies, but as equal partners with the workers. However, the upper and middle bourgeoisie could not accept this, and they regarded Gadhafi’s socialist reforms as expropriation by the people. Some Muslim authorities also opposed the political and economic innovations introduced by Libya’s leadership.

However, despite the resistance that was being actively fueled from abroad and even a number of assassination attempts, Gadhafi succeeded in implementing a significant part of his plans. Before the riots inspired by the West began, everyone in Libya received enough to meet their basic needs: bread and other foodstuffs were cheap; transportation and gasoline were virtually cost-free; and all of Libya’s people were given free housing.

Another reason behind the strategy to destroy Libya was the political course followed by the country’s leadership to create a special, non-capitalist, non-liberal model of development—the so-called “Third International Theory.” The main principles of this theory as outlined in the Green Book, which Gadhafi wrote between 1976 and 1979, were put into practice. A system of “direct people’s democracy” (Jamahiriya) modeled after the democracy of the ancients was based on three principles:

1. Direct government by the people through people’s congresses, where everyone participates in decision-making;

2. Popular ownership of social wealth, which is regarded as the property of all members of society;

3. The transfer of weapons to the people and training in their use with the goal of ending the army’s monopoly on arms. (2)

That last principle is the most difficult for me personally. History has repeatedly shown that bloody revolutions result when the people are armed. However, now is not the time to address that. The very concept of the Socialist People’s Jamahiriya infringed on the exclusive superiority of liberal democracy—that banner of the West that it hoists in territories it occupies and controls. And in contrast to other developing nations, Libya actually became a successful country. The figures speak for themselves.

Before the events of February 2011, Libya’s per capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity was $13,800—more than twice that of Egypt and Algeria, and one half times greater than that of Tunisia. The country has 10 universities and 14 scientific research centers; and it has preschools, schools and hospitals that are up to world standards. Libya is ranked first among African countries in terms of human development and life expectancy—77 years. (By comparison, the average life expectancy in Russia is just over 69 years). Incidentally, Libya made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the country with the lowest inflation rate between 2001 and 2005—3.1%. The advantages of Libyan socialism would make for a long list. The main point is that human rights, if they are understood as the right to a dignified existence, have been realized in Libya to a much greater extent than in democratic Russia, Ukraine or Kazakhstan. So it was not concern for human rights that prompted the Western democracies to topple Libya’s government.

Another impetus for launching the plan to destroy Gadhafi and therefore Libya as an integrated and self-sustaining state was his September 2009 speech at the 64th session of the UN General assembly. Gadhafi severely criticized the policies of the world’s leading powers for 75 minutes instead of the 15 he was allotted, during which he accused them of actual racism and terrorism. In particular, Gadhafi called the UN Security Council a “terror council.” Holding the UN charter in his hands, Gadhafi said that according to it the UN only authorizes the use of military force with the consent of all UN member nations. He pointed out that large countries have waged 64 wars against small ones during the time the UN has been in existence, and the UN has done nothing to prevent them. He defended the right of the Taliban to establish an Islamic emirate and the rights of the Somali pirates, and he called the countries using Somalia’s territorial waters the real pirates. He also said US president George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair personally participated in the execution of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and he left the platform with the words, “You gave birth to Hitler, not us. You persecuted the Jews. You organized the Holocaust!” (3) The West could not forgive such public accusations.

However, I believe the main reason for Libya’s death sentence is its hydrocarbon resources. I would even argue that the virus of “Jasmine revolutions” was inflicted on the Arab world largely with the goal of destroying and dismembering Libya.

When Libya’s last large oil fields were discovered in 1988, the country’s oil reserves were estimated at 3 billion tonnes—meaning it then ranked number one in the world. The largest oil fields—Serir, Bahi, Nafoora, Raguba, Intisar, Nasser, Waha and Samah—are located south of the Gulf of Sidra and are linked to the coast by pipelines. The oil is exported through five oil tanker terminals in the Mediterranean Sea ports of Es Sider, Ras Lanouf, Marsa Brega, Marsa el-Hariga and Ez Zuetina. Libya has Africa’s third-largest natural gas reserves (657 billion cubic meters). Hateiba, with 339 billion cubic meters, is Libya’s largest gas field. New natural gas deposits were found in the Sirte Basin in the early 1990s.

Russia was prominent among the economic factors that interested the West in Libya. The attack on Libya will automatically affect Russia. The destabilization of Libya has already resulted in huge losses for the Russian economy. Here are just a few figures. Russia and Libya concluded several deals for $2.2 billion worth of Russian arms in 2008, and then again in January 2010 for the sum of $1.3 billion. Those deals have now been broken. Several other agreements were being negotiated when the sanctions were imposed. Libya was expected to buy 12 Su-35 multirole fighters; 48 T-90S tanks; and several Pechora S-125, Tor-M2E and Favorit S-300PMU-2 air defense missile systems; as well as Kilo Class Project 636 diesel-electric submarines and other arms. Finally, Russia was planning to sell Libya spare parts and perform maintenance and upgrades on previously acquired military hardware, including its Osa-AKM air defense missile systems and T-72 tanks. The Libyan crisis has cost Russian defense companies alone about $4 billion in profit. In addition, Russia had canceled Libya’s $4.6 billion government debt left over from Soviet times in exchange for large contracts in various areas, including electric power, construction and defense (5). They should also be counted as a loss, as should blown contracts for Gazprom, Russian Railways and telecommunications companies.

Considering the current drama over Japan and the future of nuclear energy, there can be no doubt that traditional hydrocarbons will remain important for the near future. I even suspect that the explosion at Fukushima-1 was the final straw that convinced Western strategists of the need intensify operations against Libya. The fact that Gadhafi was a “tough nut to crack” and did not break when pressure was first applied, as did the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, derailed the strategists’ plans. As we see, however, they did not intend to give up.

UN SC resolutions 1970 and 1973 are less an indication that every international law has been violated—they have been long dead and it would be useless to appeal to them—than evidence that the ideologues and strategists of “manageable chaos” are determined to destroy Libya. As a citizen, I am primarily interested in getting an answer to the following question: in a world where there is only one law—the law of force—are there other morally and politically healthy forces that can prevent the destruction of yet another stable and prosperous country?

I am convinced that such healthy forces exist. They are primarily the countries that did not support UN SC Resolution 1973 and abstained from voting in the Security Council—Brazil, Germany, India, China and Russia. However, it is not enough to abstain—they need to get cracking. Radio, television, news feeds and the Internet are filled with descriptions of the hysteria accompanying preparations to bomb Libya—why are we not hearing the official voices of those who doubt, who oppose all aggression!?

I believe that if Russia’s leadership strongly condemns any aggression and calls for an urgent international conference or summit meeting by the heads of the world’s leading states it could facilitate peaceful resolution of the Libyan issue. If Russia’s Western partners refuse, the point of the open interference in Libya’s internal affairs on behalf of the armed separatists will be clear even to Gadhafi’s staunch opponents. This was how the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was destroyed and the quasi-state of Kosovo created, and how Afghanistan and Iraq were crushed. The main thing is that if most countries tacitly approve and the powerful states are indecisive, virtually any country in the world that is not part of the liberal scene and has any sort of useful resources may be next on the list.

So shall we wait, or shall we do something about it?

Source: Elena Ponomareva at New Eastern Outlook

Liberty and Democracy

2011-03-23T13:37:00.003+01:00

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.

A democratic state may profess to venerate the name, and even pass laws making it officially sacred, but it simply cannot tolerate the thing. In order to keep any coherence in the governmental process, to prevent the wildest anarchy in thought and act, the government must put limits upon the free play of opinion. In part, it can reach that end by mere propaganda, by the bald force of its authority — that is, by making certain doctrines officially infamous. But in part it must resort to force, i.e., to law. One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty. Always they condition it with the doctrine that the state, i.e., the majority, has a sort of right of eminent domain in acts, and even in ideas — that it is perfectly free, whenever it is so disposed, to forbid a man to say what he honestly believes. Whenever his notions show signs of becoming "dangerous," ie, of being heard and attended to, it exercises that prerogative. And the overwhelming majority of citizens believe in supporting it in the outrage. Including especially the Liberals, who pretend — and often quite honestly believe — that they are hot for liberty. They never really are. Deep down in their hearts they know, as good democrats, that liberty would be fatal to democracy — that a government based upon shifting and irrational opinion must keep it within bounds or run a constant risk of disaster. They themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty — liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them. If a law were passed tomorrow taking away the property of a large group of presumably well-to-do persons — say, bondholders of the railroads — without compensation and without even colorable reason, they would not oppose it; they would be in favor of it. The liberty to have and hold property is not one they recognize. They believe only in the liberty to envy, hate and loot the man who has it.

- Source: Henry Louis Mencken, "Liberty and Democracy" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (13 April 1925),
also in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy : New Selections from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit (1994) edited by Terry Teachout, p. 35

A Fake Revolution

2011-02-28T19:36:00.002+01:00

As Washington plunges the Middle East and North Africa into chaos, and city by city collapses into the hands of globalist stooges, many have mistakenly interpreted this "change" as a positive transformation.

On the contrary, the regimes that will replace the embattled nationalistic dictators in each nation the globalists despoil will interface not with the national governments in the service of their people, but will interface with the "civil society" underlay the Western backed NGOs have meticulously built up over decades. This "civil society" will in turn answer to corporate serving globalist institutions, like the IMF, WTO, World Bank and the UN, instituting crushing economic "liberalization."

We have been given a prepackaged ideal of what "revolution" is supposed to look like. So when we see people in the streets battling security forces, waving flags, all within the backdrop of their burning society, we are satisfied that "revolution" is taking place. But the reality is, this is not a revolution by any stretch of the imagination. It is a high-tech, high-speed invasion and subjugation, a corruption of the sovereign state similar to what Tacitus described in Roman conquered Britannia.

[…]

Read on full article at Land Destroyer website

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

2011-02-18T03:16:00.006+01:00

Here's how regulation of Wall Street is supposed to work. To begin with, there's a semigigantic list of public and quasi-public agencies ostensibly keeping their eyes on the economy, a dense alphabet soup of banking, insurance, S&L, securities and commodities regulators like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as well as supposedly "self-regulating organizations" like the New York Stock Exchange. All of these outfits, by law, can at least begin the process of catching and investigating financial criminals, though none of them has prosecutorial power.

The major federal agency on the Wall Street beat is the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC watches for violations like insider trading, and also deals with so-called "disclosure violations" — i.e., making sure that all the financial information that publicly traded companies are required to make public actually jibes with reality. But the SEC doesn't have prosecutorial power either, so in practice, when it looks like someone needs to go to jail, they refer the case to the Justice Department. And since the vast majority of crimes in the financial services industry take place in Lower Manhattan, cases referred by the SEC often end up in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. Thus, the two top cops on Wall Street are generally considered to be that U.S. attorney — a job that has been held by thunderous prosecutorial personae like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani — and the SEC's director of enforcement.

The relationship between the SEC and the DOJ is necessarily close, even symbiotic. Since financial crime-fighting requires a high degree of financial expertise — and since the typical drug-and-terrorism-obsessed FBI agent can't balance his own checkbook, let alone tell a synthetic CDO from a credit default swap — the Justice Department ends up leaning heavily on the SEC's army of 1,100 number-crunching investigators to make their cases. In theory, it's a well-oiled, tag-team affair: Billionaire Wall Street Asshole commits fraud, the NYSE catches on and tips off the SEC, the SEC works the case and delivers it to Justice, and Justice perp-walks the Asshole out of Nobu, into a Crown Victoria and off to 36 months of push-ups, license-plate making and Salisbury steak.

That's the way it's supposed to work. But a veritable mountain of evidence indicates that when it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who's in office or which party's in power. To understand how the machinery functions, you have to start back at least a decade ago, as case after case of financial malfeasance was pursued too slowly or not at all, fumbled by a government bureaucracy that too often is on a first-name basis with its targets. Indeed, the shocking pattern of nonenforcement with regard to Wall Street is so deeply ingrained in Washington that it raises a profound and difficult question about the very nature of our society: whether we have created a class of people whose misdeeds are no longer perceived as crimes, almost no matter what those misdeeds are. The SEC and the Justice Department have evolved into a bizarre species of social surgeon serving this nonjailable class, expert not at administering punishment and justice, but at finding and removing criminal responsibility from the bodies of the accused.

The systematic lack of regulation has left even the country's top regulators frustrated. Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant for the SEC, laughs darkly at the idea that the criminal justice system is broken when it comes to Wall Street. "I think you've got a wrong assumption — that we even have a law-enforcement agency when it comes to Wall Street," he says.

[...]

Full article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone

Magnatune vs Spotify

2011-01-04T20:02:00.005+01:00

"You may have read about how Lady Gaga was #1 for the year on the music service "Spotify" and was paid just $167. Well, Magnatune is a *lot* smaller than Spotify and we just paid out $75,000 (with our top musicians getting thousands of dollars). You can understand why our musicians were happily surprised to see Magnatune's new business direction actually paying them fairly."

Quote source: Buckman's Magnatune blog

Frankie Knuckles on DeeJaying

2010-12-26T02:41:00.005+01:00

In the Disco records there were real drummers and stuff, so the tempo kept changing. And today you have synthesizers and drum machines that keeps the perfect beat all the time. Do you think it's easier now to be a DJ?"

"Yes! Yes, it's easier. Sure! But you see, That's the difference between DJ's now and DJ's 20 years ago, because you had to have enough skill and you had to work. You had to work, you had to stay on top of what you were doing to keep your evening working, you know. You couldn't play the same repetitive beat and tempo all night long without people getting bored. And not every two records sounded the same. You have more music that sounds the same now. So it becomes one continuous tone all night long. You know, if you've got one DJ that plays everything - every record he's playing is a 136 beats per minute all night long. It's all the same."

Yes. it is.

"You know, if the tempo doesn't change anywhere, it doesn't variate anyway what he does. It stay at a 136 bpm all night long. Then there's nothing! I mean, you have a lot of these Trance records, or quasi-Trance records, that are all like a 136 or 140 bpm, and the only thing that about gonna changes is that discs drop-out time. You know, where the beat will stop. You know, Acid producers loves to stop the beat for a while, and then the beat comes back and they all get back into it again. That's the only difference, but I mean, there's nothing really that original about it, I don't think. When you're listening to music like that all night long, you really can't tell where the beginning of a song is and where one ends. That's the difference between what's happening now and let's say 20 years ago. I mean, every song you put on was a completely different song. Somebody different singing each song, even if it was something instrumental EVERYTHING was different. So you were challenged to happen to make these songs fit. There's no challenge for these guys to make anything fit. They all fit!"

From the Frankie Knuckles interview at Disco-Disco

William Donahue of the catholic League can't cope with an old David Wojnarowicz art video

2010-12-11T12:17:00.007+01:00

An already 24 years old video piece from defunct artist David is currently censored at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery!

David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37, used art to keep a grip on the world. He was the quintessential East Village figure, a bit of a loner, a bit crazy, ferociously brilliant and anarchic. He was a self-educated dropout who made art on garbage can lids, who painted inside the West Side piers where men met for anonymous sex, who pressed friends into lookout duty while he covered the walls of New York with graffiti. In 1987, his former lover and best friend, Peter Hujar, died of complications from AIDS, and Wojnarowicz learned that he, too, was infected with HIV.

Wojnarowicz, whose video "A Fire in My Belly" was removed from an exhibition of gay portraiture at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery last week after protests from a right-wing Catholic group and members of Congress, was an artist well before AIDS shattered his existence. But AIDS sharpened his anger, condensed his imagery and fueled his writing, which became at least as important as his visual work in the years before he died.

In the video that has now been censored from the prominent and critically lauded exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," Wojnarowicz perfectly captured a raw Gothic, rage-filled sensibility that defined a style of outsider art that was moving into the mainstream in the late 1980s.

Wojnarowicz's work captures the contradiction, speed and phantasmagoria of a time when it was reasonable to assume that all the political and social progress gay people had achieved in the 1960s and '70s was being revoked - against the surreal, Reagan-era backdrop of Morning in America, and a feel-good surge of American nostalgia and triumphalism.

The image that provoked William Donahue of the Catholic League, a relatively small organization that has leveraged a remarkable amount of influence in the culture wars over the past two decades, was part of a repertoire of Catholic imagery used by Wojnarowicz over his career. Excerpted from the grainy, stream-of-consciousness video with a hard-edged soundtrack was a brief clip of a crucifix with ants crawling on it.

Ants, for Wojnarowicz, were a mysterious stand-in for humanity and part of a lifelong fascination with the natural world that his friend, artist Kiki Smith, recalls was part of a charmingly boyish rapture with creepy, crawling things. When asked what he thought of God, he responded by wondering rhetorically "why ants aren't the things that destroy the world instead of people." There is a host of theological possibility in that thought: Is God as indifferent to humans as humans are to ants? Should we love the small things of the planet as we hope to be loved by God?

Prominent Catholic leaders were also in the forefront of a cultural counterattack on homosexuals in the late 1980s. Buckley, the founder of the National Review who was lavishly praised upon his death as a genial and erudite gentleman, wrote in 1986, "Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals." It was a chilling and apparently intentional reference to Nazi treatment of the Jews, and it was entirely within the mainstream for public commentary on the disease the year before Wojnarowicz found out he was HIV-positive.

"I thought about what I had been taught about Jesus Christ when I was young and how he took on the suffering of all people in the world," Wojnarowicz said in the trial transcript. "And I wanted to create a modern image that, if he were alive before me at that time in 1979 when I made this, if he were physically alive before me in the streets of the Lower East Side, I wanted to make a model that would show that he would take on the suffering of the vast amounts of addiction that I saw on the streets."

Source: The Washington Post

Worth reading too: The Smithsonian, the Cross and David Wojnarowicz by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush (Huffington Post)

Le Conseil de l’UE représenté par le pire clown des 27 ministres de la justice

2010-12-06T00:41:00.006+01:00

Stefaan De Clerck, le ministre de la justice belge qui, en avril 2009, a fait bloquer un minuscule blog hollandais nommé « stop kinderporno » au motif qu’il nommait des pédophiles, a représenté le Conseil de l’Union Européenne sur le filtrage du contenu pédophile sur Internet.

En 2009, De Clerck conseillait aux treize pédocriminels nommés dans le blog, dont à Dutroux, à Fourniret et à leurs épouses, de porter plainte contre l’auteur du blog, pour atteinte à leur vie privée. « Il est inadmissible que la justice soit faite par des gens privés », avait-il expliqué. « Nous avons un système judiciaire qui est capable de faire tout ».

Pour 2010 le Conseil de l’Union Européenne nous choisi le pire clown des 27 ministres de la justice de l’union qui rajoute : « Nous devons trouver le bon équilibre entre la faisabilité et l’efficacité de l’instrument dans son ensemble » !

Alors que la France s’apprête à imposer aux FAI le filtrage des contenus pédopornographiques avec le projet de loi Loppsi, dont l’Assemblée discutera en seconde lecture la semaine prochaine, les eurodéputés de la Commission Libertés civiles et Justice s’est montrée très réservée sur un projet de directive européenne qui étendrait la solution à tous les états membres.
Il n’y a pas que les associations de lutte contre la pédophilie à trouver dangereux le filtrage des contenus pédopornographiques. La Commission des Libertés civiles, de la Justice et des Affaires intérieures du Parlement européen s’est montrée réservée lundi sur un projet de filtrage des contenus pédopornographiques sur Internet, à l’issue d’un débat préliminaire.

En France, l'Association Nationale de Prévention et d'Information Concernant la Pédophilie, plus connue comme L'Ange Bleu, vient également de publier sur son site internet un plaidoyer contre le filtrage de la pédopornographie sur Internet:

"Nous jugeons cette disposition inefficace, contreproductive et dangereuse à l'égard de l'exercice démocratique", écrit l'association dans le billet repéré par PC Inpact "Inefficace en raison de la nature mouvante d'internet et des possibilités de contournements déjà existants (...), contreproductive en cela qu'elle ne pourra que renforcer le traffic de la pédopornographie en le reléguant aux marges du réseau, d'où il pourra prospérer (...) et dangereuse pour l'exercice démocratique en cela qu'elle nous fait prendre un risque non négligeable à l'encontre des contenus légitimes".

"De part notre expérience auprès du public concerné, nous confirmons qu'aucun filtrage d'Internet ne saura répondre aux objectifs visés", prévient l'association, qui explique que "les connaissances et outils techniques dont disposent les consommateurs de pédopornographie et leur soucis de confidentialité les conduiront immanquablement à contourner l'obstacle tout en développant leurs échanges à l'abri des regards".

Contre cet argument, le gouvernement a plusieurs fois défendu que le filtrage n'était pas exercé contre les pédophiles, mais pour protéger les honnêtes internautes qui risqueraient de tomber par hasard sur les contenus pédopornographiques... Ce à quoi L'Ange Bleu répond, très justement, que "le filtrage ciblera les serveurs ou hébergeurs et non les pages incriminées, faisant courir un risque de surblocages et erreurs en grand nombre".

L'association craint que le filtrage de la pédopornographie ne serve de cheval de Troie législatif, et compare la mesure au fichier des empreintes génétiques (le FNAEG). "Initialement destiné spécifiquement aux grands criminels, il a peu à peu été étendu à des catégories de délits mineurs jusqu'à toucher aujourd'hui les sans-papiers, les faucheurs OGM, voire des manifestants", rappelle l'Ange Bleu. A l'instar de Reporters Sans Frontières, elle ne veut pas que la pédophilie soit instrumentalisée pour censurer le réseau.

"Avant d'être un "repère de pédophiles" comme on l'entend trop souvent, Internet est avant tout un moyen d'expression utile aux débats démocratiques que nous nous refusons de voir disparaître pour des raisons plus politiques que raisonnées, nous ne souhaitons pas voir s'instaurer en France - et en Europe - un régime tels que ceux que nous connaissons en Chine ou en Iran".

Plutôt que le filtrage, l'association propose de s'attaquer aux véritables criminels, en poursuivant les individus qui diffusent les contenus, en remettant en cause le secret bancaire pour remonter les filières économiques, en réalisant une prévention en amont, et en soutenant les actions publiques et associatives.

Néanmoins, « le blocage ne semble pas très efficace« , a prévenu le député allemand Alexander Alvaro (ALDE), qui préfère laisse les Etats décider de leurs méthodes. Son homologue Jan Albrecht (Verts/ALE) a aussi raconté comment le site d’une boulangerie irlandaise s’était retrouvé bloqué sans explication, parce que son adresse IP avait été associée à celle d’un site pédophile.

« Nous devons trouver le bon équilibre entre la faisabilité et l’efficacité de l’instrument dans son ensemble« , a reconnu Stefaan De Clerck, le ministre de la justice belge qui représentait le Conseil de l’Union Européenne. « Nous avons besoin de tous types de mesures, afin de pouvoir réagir rapidement pour prévenir les abus sexuels« , a-t-il ajouté.

Encore faudrait-il expliquer comment le filtrage empêche que des enfants soient violés.

Source: Droit Fondamental et
Numerama ( article diffusé sous licence Creative Common by-nc-nd 2.0, écrit par Guillaume Champeau pour Numerama.com )

Crony Capitalism Is NOT Capitalism

2010-11-30T07:57:00.003+01:00

It's all the current fashion to dump on "capitalism."

It was the greedy free market, supposedly, that created both the housing bubble and the housing bust and led, inevitably, to the "great recession." Capitalism, according to most liberal pundits (and even Alan Greenspan in a bad mood), is an inherently risky and unstable system that requires government regulation to correct its flaws and moderate its excesses.

Let me dissent sharply from that conventional wisdom and argue that what talking heads are calling "capitalism" is actually "crony capitalism" and that it is crony capitalism that is responsible for most of our current economic difficulties.

A genuine capitalist economy assumes that each adult individual and business is free to buy and sell anything that they own and then keep the rewards (or suffer the losses) of enterprise. The only legitimate role for government (the political system) is to protect property rights, that is, to enforce contracts and prohibit theft and fraud.

So under capitalism, there would be no price controls on milk or mandates to purchase health insurance; BUT polluters who spill crude oil or corporate bandits like Bernie Madoff who commit blatant frauds would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Crony capitalism, by contrast, assumes a far, far larger role for government in the economy. In this system, government employs various regulations, taxes, and subsidies to encourage or discourage specific economic activity that the political system considers desirable. For example, in crony capitalism, farm prices and outputs could be regulated; selected companies could get TARP money for commercial research projects; states could regulate liability and health insurance companies; and Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae could both exist to subsidize the real estate market.

And most importantly, in crony capitalism private firms that are considered "too big to fail" could be bailed out by government; and a central bank (the Federal Reserve) would exist to “print money” (unrelated to any gold reserve) and regulate the supply of credit in the economy.

It is hard to argue that the current economic malaise was in any way produced by anything resembling pure capitalism. But it is fairly easy to conclude that interventionism, i.e., private markets that were propped up with fraud and funny money was, in fact, the culprit.

First, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates too low for too long (2001—2006) and pumped excess money and credit into the economy. Second, numerous quasi-governmental agencies (Freddie and Fanny) encouraged excessive mortgage lending and home ownership out of all relationship to sound financial practices.

Third, much of the under-capitalized and over-leveraged banking industry collapsed when (federal) credit dried up and housing prices turned downward. And fourth, the federal government taxpayer and international lenders (mostly China) funded the trillion-dollar government "stimulus" plan and the bailout of inefficient business organizations (Chrysler, GM, AIG, etc.) that should have been allowed to go belly-up.

This is free market capitalism? Hardly.

Yet the political class, always absolving itself of all blame, would have you believe that capitalist greed caused the recession and that political regulators need more power. Not so. What we actually require are constraints on monetary growth, more competitive markets, balanced budgets and less output-restricting regulation. But first and foremost, before we spend and regulate further, we require an informed media and an enlightened public that can distinguish real capitalism from phony, crony capitalism.

Copyright © 2010 Dom Armentano - Professor Emeritus at the University of Hartford (CT) and the author of Antitrust and Monopoly (Independent Institute, 1998) and Antitrust: The Case for Repeal (Mises Institute, 1999).

Source: Lew Rockwell website

The State

2010-11-26T21:54:00.005+01:00

While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society.

The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group.

But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls “war,” or sometimes “suppression of subversion”; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls “conscription”; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls “taxation.”

The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.

[...]

Source: For A New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard

Bazooka first British retrospective

2010-10-06T18:46:00.006+02:00

French punk visuals collective Bazooka have their first British retrospective

‘The scene I witnessed was a repetition’ by Loulou and Kiki Picasso and Neville Brody (2010).

The Bazooka show at The Aubin Gallery in London’s East End is the first time the French punk-era collective has been given a retrospective in this country, writes Roger Sabin. Which is a welcome reversal of an injustice, bearing in mind that their work is certainly up there with that of Jamie Reid et al (see ‘Shock tactics’ in Eye 61).

Read more at the Eye Magazine blog

Pieter Giele

2010-09-16T02:54:00.006+02:00

The Giele Skull is a polyester capsule placed on the grave to replace the artist’s black cape that has almost disintegrated in the last six years. Visitors can step into the capsule and lie down, to commemorate the artist and their own mortality. As anticipated, the work met with opposition from the Zorgvlied cemetery management. The capsule could lead to confusion and frightened reactions among other visitors if suddenly someone stepped out of it. After consultation and a few adjustments, Zorgvlied finally agreed to place the work.

The initiative for the Giele Skull came from the Giele Trust Foundation which was set up after the artist’s death and is a sort of continuation of the CGDDK (Cultureel Genoodschap De Donkere Kamer) founded by Giele. The aim of the Giele Trust Foundation is to safeguard Giele’s spiritual and material heritage. Next to the monument is also coming the Grote Peter Giele Boek.
SKOR decided to adopt the plan for a memorial as a homage to Peter Giele, but also with the idea of contributing to the broadening of regular memorial culture in the Netherlands.

Check The Peter Giele Book

Source: Skor

Related:
‘Ab igne ignem capere’ - Peter Giele op zijn eigen houtje

Radical Outlet for the Xenomaniac in You

Magick Daggers - Lions Of Alchemy

2010-08-20T00:06:00.002+02:00

Magick Daggers debut album Lions Of Alchemy.

With a a touch of an evil torch laced with the alter ego of post-punk, they have created a fierce sound unique to their locale of Portland, Oregon.

Formed in 2006 by Jessy Montaigne, (member of Subtonix) and Maxamillion Avila (member of Get Hustle), they released their first EP on Manimal Vinyl in 2007.

Their haunting resonance embodies a diabolical merge of 1920s Weimar Cabaret influences contrasted by horror film shrieks and ether static, but still echoes a swampy rock and roll undertone at their more raw edged performances.

This double LP also contains Magick Daggers first EP Black Diamonds on vinyl for the first time.

More info about the band at EXO Records

La réforme monétaire et les valeurs réelles

2010-05-20T01:03:00.004+02:00

Une interprétation correcte des plans de la haute finance mondiale aboutit à la conclusion que la masse monétaire doit être accrue et dévalorisée jusqu’à ce que toutes les valeurs réelles importantes du monde soient achetées et monopolisées. La haute finance sait bien que son accroissement de la masse monétaire ne saurait passer inaperçu et que, à un moment donné, la confiance en un dollar inflationniste disparaîtra. L’éclatement d’une crise de confiance fera de l’inflation encore contrôlée une inflation galopante, qui aboutira forcément à une réforme monétaire.

• Or, il s’agit d’un avantage dont bénéficiera aussi bien la haute finance que les Etats-Unis:

Préalablement, la haute finance a acheté assez de valeurs réelles avec des dollars pourris, et ces valeurs réelles ne seront pas touchées par la réforme. La haute finance aura ainsi converti à temps de l’argent pourri en patrimoine de valeur. Comme elle a constitué des monopoles mondiaux dans de nombreux domaines, elle peut imposer des prélèvements à tout moment au monde, grâce à des prix de monopole. Les dominateurs du monde auront donc comme revenu non plus des impôts, mais des revenus de monopoles. Personne ne pourra empêcher la haute finance de relever de 10, 20 ou 30% les prix de l’or, des diamants, du cuivre, du zinc, de l’eau, des semences ou de l’énergie et d’imposer ainsi des prélèvements spéciaux à l’ensemble de la population mondiale. Il n’y a encore jamais eu de telle puissance financière dans le monde ayant constitué un tel péril pour l’ensemble de la population.

Rusée, la haute finance des Etats-Unis a principalement déversé ses dollars pourris à l’étranger. Plus des trois quarts des dollars ne sont plus aux Etats-Unis, mais se trouvent dans les Etats créanciers de ce pays. En effet, les Etats-Unis se sont de plus en plus endettés envers l’étranger ces dernières années. L’étranger a livré des produits et reçu en échange des dollars sans valeur. Toutes les banques centrales étrangères sont remplies de dollars pourris. Si ceux-ci sont subitement dévalués, plus des trois quarts du dommage toucheront les banques centrales, les banques, les Etats et les opérateurs hors des Etats-Unis. Les banques centrales européennes pourront alors regretter d’avoir échangé leur or contre des dollars pourris et d’avoir constitué de la monnaie formelle comme base (réserves monétaires) de leur propre monnaie, tels le yen et l’euro. Si le cours de la monnaie-clé, le dollar, s’effondre, celui des monnaies satellites subira le même sort, sa seule base étant un montant en dollars pourris. En d’autres termes: la réforme monétaire qui se prépare déclenchera forcément une réforme de toutes les monnaies mondiales, dont le dollar pourri constitue encore la principale réserve monétaire.

Source: L’escroquerie monétaire mondiale par Eberhard Hamer.

Classic Weapons of Mass Expulsion

2010-03-16T21:35:00.004+01:00

How Britain is using classical music as a form of social control
In recent years Britain has become the Willy Wonka of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace. But our weaponization of classical music—where Mozart, Beethoven, and other greats have been turned into tools of state repression marks a new low.

[…]

The weaponization of classical music speaks volumes about the British elite’s authoritarianism and cultural backwardness. They’re so desperate to control youth—but from a distance, without actually having to engage with them—that they will film their every move, fire high-pitched noises in their ears, shine lights in their eyes, and bombard them with Mozart. And they have so little faith in young people’s intellectual abilities, in their capacity and their willingness to engage with humanity’s highest forms of art, that they imagine Beethoven and Mozart and others will be repugnant to young ears. Of course, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Read full article: Weaponizing Mozart on reason.com

State of the World 2010

2010-01-11T17:32:00.005+01:00

In the past decade we seem to have created two new social classes, unaccountable global moguls with no regulations, and global unlawful combatants with no civil rights.

It's either the penthouse or Guantanamo, and they're both invisible netherworlds out of reach of the rule of law. Both very dangerous to the rest of us.
Not just that they assault us, but that we neglect the issues there.

Putin more or less solved his own mogul problem by picking on one scapegoat mogul and having the guy railroaded into the slammer.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was as crooked as a dog's hind leg, but clearly he's in the Russian Bastille there at the pleasure of the state, so Khodorkovsky's kind of a unique example of a guy who's both an oligarch and an abductee. You'd think this was a pretty likely treatment for oligarchs, actually. Given that they create so much misery, destroy so much wealth, and harm the interests of so many other social classes, why not just car-bomb them? Russian moguls used to car-bomb each other
with great glee. The same goes for mafia chieftains -- anybody with tremendous wealth and influence outside the rule of law ends up in great fear of others with similar characteristics.

Jailing Khodorkovsky sure didn't make anybody more "accountable" to the civil population, though; it's just another example of Putin's political genius for fighting ugly wildfires with dirty water. The Russians sincerely love that guy Putin. I think his policies are spooky and pernicious, but Putin's so much better than the normal run of leaders the Russians get that you have to understand why they genuflect to him.

There are some societies today completely untroubled by moguls, like, say, Sweden. You look at all the statistics that technocrats use to determine where people are doing just great, where society is thriving,
and Sweden's been in the top five percentile for decades. Sweden does everything perfectly from a technocratic policy perspective, Sweden's like Oz, apparently.

And then you ask Swedes about their future and so forth, and they're like: "Bring the razor and the bathtub! When can I die?" There are penniless, vitamin-deprived guys in the Dharavi slums of Mumbai who are upbeat and perky compared to Swedes.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made," as the philosopher used to say.

Source: The WELL Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010

The Haunting Abject

2010-01-05T02:17:00.005+01:00

Our society recognizes the injustices done to women, but men are seen only as oppressors. It is assumed that they are inherently strong. It is also assumed that they do not have emotions and do not feel pain or hurt. However, rather than being oppressors cisgender males are themselves the victims. Behind their numerous masks of masculinity which is imposed on them by the society cisgender males have accumulated layers and layers of suppressed emotions, desires, needs, pain and hurt.

The perceived notions of masculinity are far removed from how nature created men and act as innumerable and unending pressures on them.

These pressures are felt most acutely during adolescence after which period cisgender males comes to terms with these and mostly gives in. But adolescence can make life unbearable for men. One of the ways in which it harms them is by making them vulnerable to contracting diseases like HIV/AIDS and STIs. Like men of all ages, adolescent boys feel the pressure to prove their masculinity by having sex with girls.

This is especially harmful to them because they have very little information about sexuality and male sexual roles treat them as sex machines, rather than objects hermes and aphrodite created to serve (satisfy) women sexually.
They are supposed to have enormous sexual drive for women. The pressure is most acute during their late teens.

Other important aspect of male sexual roles that came out was that while they were expected to exaggerate their sexual interest in girls on the one hand, they felt pressurized to suppress their sexual feelings towards other men. Society deliberately creates an image that ascribes sexual attraction for other males as a feminine quality fit only for effeminate men. This is all that is needed to make men struggle with these feelings.

There is continuous pressure from other boys to show a lot of interest in girls, even to have sex with them to prove that they are real men. Boys, who have sex with girls, or claim that they have had it, treat other boys with contempt and often used words like -xxxxx- to exert peer pressure on them. Nothing hurts a man more than being called a -xxxxx-, or a non-man.

The pressure regarding sex continues all through a cisgender male's life. He is expected to perform and satisfy his woman to be called a man. Men develop a number of insecurities and sexual dysfunction owning to performance anxiety.

The operating principle underlying this wholesale abuse of males with any degree of visible femininity is a perception acquired by very young boys as the result of careful social teaching / indoctrination. Most of them, in fact, are still growing up with perceptions reflecting the historical male-imposed status of females as inferiors to males.

The effeminate boy has been positioned as the "haunting abject" of both gay, and the larger hegemonic culture. the eclipse of the effeminate boy from adult gay discourse would represent more than a damaging theoretical gap; it would represent a mode of annihilating homophobic, gynephobic, and pedophobic hatred internalized and made central to gay-affirmative analysis. The effeminate boy would come to function as the discrediting open secret of many politicized adult cisgender gay men.

Many gay males with a history of being effeminate have been living out the demands of not being who they were/are,
for approval reasons, often because they want others gay males to desire them sexually.
Gay men are strongly prejudiced against feminine men as sex partners.

I have been surprisingly successful at erasing the sissy from my own body. I have employed the technology of the gym with amazing results. I drive a motorcycle and buy clunky, construction-worker-type boots in an attempt to push the limits of "masculinity.
(Boney, Bradley (1996). The Lavender Brick Road)

The expression "adjustment problems" may be an understatement, and I think there is something savage and suicidal about a community which has been waging a war against an attribute so much a part of its members' individual identities. This community attribute may also be especially deadly for the more feminine gay male adolescents who venture into its midst, especially after they have spent a lifetime being abused in the mainstream world because of their detectable "feminine" attributes.

In the final analysis, what Boney (1996) has managed to do with his "femininity" is exactly what the bullies in public schools had not been able to do, and same applies for the misogynous efforts of even more lethal highly sexist bullies (therapists) with feminine boys who also bravely resisted their professional forms of anti-sissy terrorism.

Basically, these bullies decreed that males must be masculine, and the more stereotypically masculine one is - as in making this possible by working out in gyms - the better! Gay community ideology therefore reflects the ideology (and then some) of all who sought to harm gender nonconforming boys as they grew up, meaning that many gay-identified males do eventually identified with their abusers, have become abusers, and they are now essentially working to harm the boys who are as they once were: unacceptably feminine.

About 80 percent of gay or bisexual identified adolescent males and young adults venturing into gay communities have varying levels of often detectable "femininity," with about 25 percent being "feminine".
(Remafedi Gary, Farrow J, and Deisher R (1991). Risk factors for attempted suicide in gay and bisexual youth. Pediatrics, 87(6), 869-75.)

These males have also been at high risk for suicide attempts (35%), the highly "feminine" males having the highest risk (48%), compared to "masculine" gay and bisexual males (11%). However, their venture into gay communities will often be a shock, and a common complaint often voiced by adolescent gay males - the ones with integrity who thought they could now be honest after a history of having to lie for survival reasons - was stated as follows by one such male: "Why do so many lie all of the time." This fact of life applies as much to sugar daddies as if does to average gay males, and one French ethnomethodology study reached a similar conclusion. Most gay and bisexual males lie in one or more ways when meeting each other with a "sex" (maybe "love") objective in mind.

The majority of homosexual males I have met would rather not know the truth (in spite of their professed desire to know the truth)... The very frequent use of lying by cruising homosexual males sometimes causes problems. For example, after sexual pleasure is experienced a love (passion) response may result. Is a relationship possible? Based on what? Being blind? In fact, when we are relating with an entrenched liar, there are no rational ways to detect where the lie end and where truth begins.
(de Luze, 1990: Conclusion - Translated by author. Original text in Note 12).

One of the ways gay males lie, of the many ways listed in four major categories and 34 subcategories, is via in their appearance, and "muscles" headed the list of eleven ways gay males lie physically.

Guy's muscles are a desperate effort to make others believe that he is a real male sure of himself and morally sound, while he is in fact a timid male with a complex of problems, very nervous, and perpetually anxious; this became evident as the evening progressed and alcohol was giving him confidence and making him talkative. The evening ended with Guy reporting that he is constantly depressed and that he has already attempted suicide three times.
(de Luze, 1990: Mensonge du Paraître: Muscles - Translated by author. Original text in Note 12).

Is the suicide problems a "sexual orientation" issue, or it is really a gender nonconformity issue?

The extent that lying by appearance - via muscular development - exists in gay communities is unknown, but some gay males believe what Scott Thompson of "Kid in the Hall" fame noted in a Salon Magazine interview: "...the sissy is the truth. The muscle queen is not. That is a false construct held up by wires, strings, steroids and the gym. It's not real. And if gay men aren't going to accept the sissy, then they're doomed"
(Morgan, Fiona (1998). An audience with the Queen (Interview with Scott Thompson). Salon Magazine, July 23.)

Harris described the situation and some implications:
One would have anticipated that gay liberation... would have significantly changed the way that our culture views effeminacy, providing a new protective environment in which to experiment with unconventionally masculine forms of behavior. A central paradox of the birth of the subculture, however, is that in resisting the effeminate stereotypes and gestural paradigms that have tyrannized gay men of the past, we have created a new Frankenstein - the "good gay," masculine, assimilated, forceful, deliberate... In liberating themselves from effeminacy, homosexuals have taken on yet another albatross, accepted more, not less rigid notions of how they should express their homosexuality, and essentially invented - to borrow a stereotype ridicules in the black community - the gay oreo, effeminate on the inside, masculine without. In the final analysis, liberation has liberated homosexuals into a new totalitarian attitude towards their mannerisms, a new contempt for effeminacy... .
...rather than endorsing effeminacy, gay liberation has led to the institutionalization of its ridicule.
(Daniel Harris, 1991: Effeminacy. Michigan Quarterly Review, 30(2). p. 76)

Homosexually oriented male adolescents at high risk for suicide problems have a cluster of at risk attributes such as being "feminine" to significant degrees, using drugs and alcohol, and running away from home which is often associated with street life and adolescent prostitution.

Although Casey {with a history of eight suicide attempts} reckons he "always knew" he was gay, he became one of the kids who was "forced into doing it". After moving to Sydney, Casey was drawn into a string of abusive "relationships".
Because of his low self-esteem borne of the silence, Casey says he was easy pickings for deeply-closeted homosexual "sick tickets" who found more pleasure in hearing screams for mercy as they held knives to the throats of other parents' sons than in real and open love.
Starved of real love and left with little hope, Casey, like many young gays, turned to chemical "friends" to fill the void. His only human friends became the other youngsters traded by the "sick tickets".
"Of the thirteen of us, I'm one of only three that's still alive today," Casey says. "Most of my friends blew their heads off, some of them OD'd and some of them have died from AIDS. They were all bright kids with talents and promising futures.
(Iain Clacher, 1997 - Silence is where the hate grows: Silence = Death. Campaign Australia Magazine.)

One well known bisexual suicide victim, Bill Clayton, was sexually assaulted at the age of 14 years by a 20-year-old gay or bisexual identified male claiming to be a member of a gay and lesbian youth support group, and Bill had become very suicidal as the result of this experience.

The issue of adolescent and young adult males being raped after they have become integrated in gay communities is generally ignored. Often enough sexual assaults occur after meeting gay or bisexual individuals in a club or a community group, and then finding themselves in a more private location such as a home or an apartment. In such a situation they may discover their loss of right to not have sex with the individual, and a sexual assault results. As a rule, the raped individuals I have interviewed were more "feminine" in nature, and physically not imposing, although this was not always the case. One 17-year-old Calgary male youth of decent physical stature reported that his size became irrelevant mostly because the two gay males (about 40 years of age) he had met at a gay club participated in the rape after he had accepted an invitation to their home. All raped individuals had also not reported the rape to authorities mostly because they did not want their "homosexuality" to be public knowledge, and this fact essentially gives gay and bisexual rapists an open license to rape. The raped individuals had also not sought counseling related to the rape.
(Pierre J. Tremblay in Collaboration with Richard Ramsay - Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary.)

Addressing such issues, however, was precluded by the community ideology related to not airing "dirty laundry," meaning that serious problems will remain unacknowledged and ongoing, including the "gay community" problems of the more feminine gay and bisexual males, and the problems adolescent boys experience in gay communities which often deny their presence and the relationships they often have with significantly older gay-identified adult males. The youngest Calgary case I reported on was 12 years of age when he began having a series of such relationships with adult gay males to the age of 17 years when he was interviewed.

In 1997, a longtime Calgary gay community leader was reading the comments (complaints) made by Weldon, (Eric Weldon, 1997 - The trouble with sex. XY Magazine, 6, February / March, 53.) and Foster, (Marc Foster, 1997. Nineteen. XY Magazine, 6 , February / March, 20-21.) with respect to their experiences of only being sexually used by older gay males as quoted above.

The community leader immediately labeled these responses to be "homophobic," meaning that if anyone does not accept gay community males as they are - a significant number being users, abusers, and liars - and if your are not happy with the situation and maybe even become suicidal as the result of these repeated negative experiences, you will then be branded "homophobic." A similar response would surely apply if the most "feminine" gay and bisexual male adolescents and young adults began complaining about what many gay communities have become ideologically, and if they also reported on the related varied abuses inflicted on them by their own kind.

Our culture continues to view the feminine as less-than and ultimately valueless.

Edits / sources:
Androgyne Online

and

Pierre J. Tremblay in Collaboration with Richard Ramsay: Feminine Males: A Social Construction of Suicide Problems
(The social construction of male homosexuality, related suicide problems and research proposals for the Twenty First Century)
- Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary.

Utopia of Sound

2009-12-20T21:53:00.002+01:00

In relation to music, I read this denial of circumstance - denial of the micro-social and global exploitations inflicted in the name of First World standards of living - into the ideologies framing our transition toward download audio, and the obsolescence of CDs and other product-based media formats. Through downloads, music is gradually being recast as a matter of "pure information," the rhetoric of which makes us further lose sight of the material methods of such information's production and distribution. At the forefront of this misinformation is Jacques Attali, who said at the 2001 Cybersalon Net Music Conference:

Music is very specific for a number of reasons. One economic reason is that music is pure information. In economics, information is a devil - it's impossible to manage. For example, the whole of economic theory is the theory of scarce resources... but it doesn't work for music; it doesn't work for information as a whole. If I have a pot of milk, and I give it to you, I don't have it anymore. But if I give you a piece of information I still have it, I keep it. Which means that if I have something and I give it to you, I create something new: abundance. And this means that economic theory doesn't work for information, when that information can be separated from its material support - a CD, or whatever is the case today.... In an information economy, something has more value when a lot of people have it. For example, if I am the only one to have a telephone, it doesn't mean anything, not if there is no one else to call.... We must be very careful, when we speak about music, not to have in mind the main economic laws.10 Jacques Attali, transcript from "Cybersalon Net.Music" conference, May 2001, printed in The Wire (UK: The Wire Magazine, Ltd., Issue 209 July 2001), p. 70.

Attali sets up a very peculiar argument in which sound, as information, is neither a matter of time nor space. I say peculiar, but not surprising. Since the compressed digital audio file archive's potential for infinite transfer and expansion has eroded the boundary of the album, the length of which has always been bound to physical time restrictions of the recording media of the day, the constricting relationships between duration and media, between time and space, have for the most part been lost. Consider the length of albums prior to the advent of CD's, which averaged thirty five to forty five minutes based on one side of a 33RPM vinyl record being able to contain up to eighteen minutes of audio before the density of grooves causes unacceptable loss of quality, and compare that with the first seventy four minute CD's in the 1980's, and today's eighty minute CD's. This presents a curious labor and wage condition in that during the age of CD's it has already become expected of musicians to produce albums of sixty minutes or more - essentially double albums - under the same financial terms as vinyl-length albums of previous decades. Even from the consumer side, who of us has not bought a CD and been disappointed to find an album was only thirty eight minutes in length? And now, in a post-CD era, audio producers find ourselves having to generate media endlessly for the vacuum of possible internet downloads which frequently pay on a track-by-track basis. We may produce an album of audio, but if only one track becomes a popular paying download we will only receive payment for that fraction of the album's royalty rather than the full royalty if it had sold as a whole. And, just as the cost for labels to manufacture CD's has always been much less than the cost of manufacturing vinyl records despite their being sold for more, digital record labels face even lower overhead costs yet continue to pay artists according to traditional royalty rates of ten to twenty percent. It is a massive widening of the financial gap between those who produce audio and those who own the means of distribution, a gap that is symptomatic of the increasing financial inequity between poor and wealthy seen in most every industry under contemporary global capitalism. It is symptomatic of the same corrupt ethics.

Digital audio finally brings recording and distribution processes in synch with other Modernist archival systems such as museums and libraries. As Foucault described:

Museums and libraries are heterotopias in which time never ceases to pile up and perch on its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, and up to the end of the seventeenth century still, museums were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating every-thing, the idea of constituting a sort of general archive, the desire to contain all times, all ages, all forms, all tastes in one place, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside time and protected from its erosion, the project of thus organizing a kind of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in a place that will not move - well, in fact, all of this belongs to our modernity.11 Foucault.

According to Attali's description of information as something that is always retained, even in the act of giving it away, audio information also becomes perceived as something that spatially will not move, and chronologically is infinite. Of course, in a material sense this is as absurd as the notion that libraries and museums do not crumble or burn. I recently experienced the loss of a 500GB hard disk containing as much audio information as my wall full of CD's, some of which was not reproducible, so I can assure you the death of information only requires the death of the last copy or accurate memory. And in specific regard to memory, when one listens to an album one clearly does not retain all of the information. One only retains an impression of the experience of listening, and any ensuing ideas or feelings of comprehension we associate with our memories of that situation. Information ceases to exist without an object of conveyance, even in the instance of oral traditions where the orator's body becomes the object of conveyance. Thus we find ourselves scouring record shops looking to re-buy a record we had once sold or given away, because we are overwhelmed by an awareness of the gap between our lingering memories and the actual experience of listening. We are compelled by an absence of information, compelled by silence. And, ironically, when we track down the lost treasure it is usually not as good as we remembered.

[…]

When this archival impulse combines with download technology, the scale of our home collections also begin expanding in odd and infinite directions. While looking to download a song using BitTorrent, Limewire or similar file sharing software, how many of us have ended up downloading a hideous discography of ten or more albums by some artist from which we only knew, only wanted to hear, and only will every listen to one song? Although one may attempt to draw parallels between such easy access to file collecting and, say, the carefree collection opportunities offered by one euro used record boxes at flea markets, it seems we as individuals are entering a digital audio heterotopia in which our home collections cease to be the expression of our individual choices in favor of a sort of general archive. It represents an informational dead time of sorts in which we experience our comprehension of sounds not only passing without affect, but often without playback or any possibility of listening to it all... without duration.

Statements such as Attali's which purport all of this access to information marks our entry into a new economic phase are generalizing statements that could only be made by people in those minority of countries such as ours where we have the luxury of excessive access to information archives. Its arrogance becomes apparent when compared to something such as the underground library movement in Cuba, in which disconnected groups of one to thirty people secretly store a small collection of books, any books, only to be periodically raided with the opositors imprisoned and the books burned. Ultimately, the ideological underpinnings of our bold, new information economy are straight in line with the development of traditional capitalist systems in which all experience is reified and regurgitated in the form of abstract relations. As capitalist processes become more refined and unhindered in the post-Soviet era, it seems only logical that we find it difficult not to conceive of abstract information - of our own knowledge - as external commodities of the ether for barter. To paraphrase from Karl Marx's Capital, we might say that information, like use-value, "possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labor and, consequently, a creation of value." But given that information starts in worthless singularity (such as a thought), it can only be traded for its "surplus-value" through transference and replication, in which case it "reproduces the equivalent of its own value [zero], and also produces an excess, a surplus-value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to the circumstances." As information only takes on value in the late phases of surplus-value once it is somehow recorded, it becomes easy to dismiss the materials of information development (such as my home-studio production time), which assumes a corollary use-value of zero. We enter the world of the "no overhead" bedroom studio capable of yielding pure profits, forgetting about the actual costs of studio gear, space and utilities. Economically, the advent of the bedroom studio meant an album's "advances" that were traditionally paid in advance in order to subsidize studio expenses (imagine that), are now typically paid on or after an album's release, and are considered advances strictly on the future sales revenues of the end-commodity itself. Labels act as though the "bedroom musician" produces audio with no raw materials, auxiliary materials, instruments of labor, cost of living, nor any other material expenses. Audio without overhead. Therefore, we can see that the ultimate underpinning of Attali's information economics is no more than the capitalist dream of profits unmitigated by circumstance

[…]

The technology industry refers to this ethereal internet-based information economy as "the cloud," but given its ecological reality it would be more aptly referred to as "the smog." Lurking in the vapor are server storage facilities by companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask.com and AT&T, each currently consuming enough megawatts of electricity to power a town of about 80,000 homes, or the World Trade Center at peak power on a hot summer day. These facilities require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing, just so we can troll through petabytes of data on key words such as some of 2007's most popular searches, "iPhone," "Pavarotti" and "Radiohead." In the US, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.com are all building data centers along the Columbia River, demanding handouts from local officials in the form of tax exemptions, assurance of cheap energy rates from state-owned power facilities, and city-funded fiber-optic connections. As was noted in the March issue of the US magazine Harper's:

The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] estimates that by 2011, US data-center power use will double, but a quirk in its accounting excluded Google from the study.... In 2006 American data centers consumed more power than American televisions. Google... and it's rivals now head abroad for cheaper, often dirtier power. Microsoft has announced plans for a data center in Siberia, AT&T has built two in Shanghai, and Dublin has attracted Google and Microsoft. In all three locations, as in the United States, the burning of fossil fuels accounts for a majority of the electricity. Google is negotiating for a new site in Lithuania, disingenuously described as being near a hydroelectric dam. But no matter where the data center is located, Google will be tapping into Lithuania's power grid, which is 0.5 percent hydroelectric and 78 percent nuclear.17 Ginger Strand, "Keyword: Evil - Google's addiction to cheap electricity," in Harper's Magazine (US: March 2008), p.65.

Clearly, any attempt such as Attali's to represent information as something other than record is an ideological affront. The non-materiality of data, the very idea of engaging our own process of thinking in outer-body ways (as alluring and even vital that may appear to those with a spiritual disposition) is the grandest of social ruses duping First World publics today. It is a lie that drives economic bubbles and market crashes, hammering deeper the wedge between rich and poor, all through the absurd promise that we too might become overnight millionaires or some other mythical figure of late-capitalist freedom. In specific relation to music consumption, who wants to pay for downloads by unknown producers when major acts like Radiohead give away albums for free? And so everyone is eager to give away their commercial-oriented audio for free in search of their "big break." Their chance to be Radiohead. Not Radiohead as the musicians who give away music for free, but Radiohead the artists who are financially capable of giving away their music for free without personal repercussion.

Source: Terre Thaemlitz "Utopia of Sound", May 30, 2008 at Comatonse

The common stink

2009-12-03T13:16:00.001+01:00

This article says it all, or nearly…
An absolute must read in its entirety:

The common stink

Know what time it is

2009-12-03T00:06:00.003+01:00

Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford, who is Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment among other things,
has also very recently being named member of the international advisory board for China Investment Corp., the country's $200 billion Sovereign Wealth Fund.

That's no secret that there is big money involved in that climate change scam.

Treemometers: A new scientific scandal

2009-12-02T21:58:00.002+01:00

The scandal has serious implications for public trust in science. The IPCC's mission is to reflect the science, not create it.

As the panel states, its duty is "assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data." But as lead author, Briffa was a key contributor in shaping (no pun intended) the assessment. A small group was able to rewrite history.

When the IPCC was alerted to peer-reviewed research that refuted the idea, it declined to include it. This leads to the more general, and more serious issue: what happens when peer-review fails - as it did here?

The scandal has only come to light because of the dogged persistence of a Canadian mathematician who attempted to reproduce the results. Steve McIntyre has written dozens of letters requesting the data and methodology, and over 7,000 blog posts. Yet Yamal has remained elusive for almost a decade.

Source: The Register

The Black Dog, Interview With Skrufff

2009-03-20T23:16:00.000+01:00

“I think they want to turn us all into numbers, and know what we are up to 24 hours a day. If you spend something, they want to know about it. If you read a book, they want to know about it. If you send an email, they want to read it.”

Chatting about the parallels between George Orwell’s 1984 and the Britain of today, Black Dog founder member Ken Downie admits he’s alarmed.

“Oh, and they have your individual fingerprints and DNA data in their files, too,” he points out. “Nobody voted for the surveillance society, as I recall. But step by step it has crept into our lives.”

Black Dog’s new album ‘Further Vexations’ is underlined by ‘a dark cynicism of the Orwellian practices being carried out by the Government, the accompanying press release explains, though fellow TBD man Martin Dust is anything but resigned.

“This surveillance society is pretty frightening and the other thing is, it won’t stop “terrorism". “They’ve learnt nothing and they treat people as if they’re stupid though as far as I can see most people are doing nothing about it,” he observes.

[…]

Skrufff: We talked about the dangers of today’s creeping surveillance society, where does it all end if no-body protests?

Black Dog [Ken]: “We will all have a person under the stairs, reminding us that we owe the government money.”

Black Dog [Martin]: “It ends with people moaning on YouTube comments pages probably, unfortunately that’s a close as some people get to forming an opinion. It’s sad times when (talent show) X Factor get more votes and more people are worried about what Jonathan Ross said. How base have we become?”

Skrufff: In George Orwell’s classic 1984, his chief protagonist Winston Smith (wrongly) put his hope in the proles: why do you think the masses can be roused? How?

Black Dog [Ken]: “The masses are being roused, by the far right, people always look for some sort of ’saviour’ when the shit hits the fan. Witness the historical rise of fascism, and the media’s current fawning obsession with America’s new president. All those hopes and fears pinned on one person is a bad thing. Winston Smith (and Julia) made the mistake of trusting other people to act, rather than using their own ability to get the fuck out of there, and escape into the countryside of Airstrip One.”

Black Dog [Martin]: “True, you can’t sit waiting for someone else to do something for you, Winston Smith had a chance to re-write the future, he failed.”

Skrufff:Why do you believe people have become so apathetic in recent years?

Black Dog [Ken]: “People are spoon fed brainwashing pap (rubbish) through their TV, 24 hours a day, and a lot of them believe it.”

Black Dog [Martin]: “The internet hasn’t really helped either, the written word is even more of a lie now, people just Google for an opinion these days, 59 million people asked Google “Who should I vote for” – I mean, FFS. (for fuck’s sake)”.

[…]

Source: TheBlackDogMa

Online networking 'harms health'

2009-03-01T18:44:00.004+01:00

People's health could be harmed by social networking sites because they reduce levels of face-to-face contact, an expert claims.
Dr Aric Sigman says websites such as Facebook set out to enrich social lives, but end up keeping people apart.
Dr Sigman makes his warning in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology.
A lack of "real" social networking, involving personal interaction, may have biological effects,

[…]

In less than two decades, the number of people saying there is no-one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled.

Read whole article at BBC News

Peter Schiff's accurate forecast, people laughed…

2008-12-28T00:11:00.004+01:00

"The United States economy is like the Titanic and I am here with the lifeboat trying to get people to leave the ship ...I see a real financial crisis coming for the United States."
- Peter Schiff, August 2006

The US consumer thinks he's doing the world a favor by consuming what the rest of the world produces. He is quick to point out that this relationship will come to an end, in his view, much sooner than people imagine, and with negative consequences for the US. Schiff has been quoted as saying: "Consumption is its own reward for Production"—meaning that without production, the US cannot indefinitely sustain its ongoing consumption. Schiff, and other adherents of Austrian economics, promote savings and production as "the engine of economic growth -- not consumption".

Schiff has said on numerous occasions that the current economic crisis is not the problem; it is the solution. According to him, the transition from borrowing and spending to saving and producing cannot be accomplished without a severe recession, given the current imbalances of the US economy. But according to him, that transition needs to happen. He also thinks the government is doing no one a favor by trying to "ease the pain" with stimulus packages, bailouts and such. Schiff believes these actions will only make the situation worse and possibly result in hyperinflation if the government continues to "replace legitimate savings with a printing press."

Schiff is a firm believer in reducing government regulation of the economy. Schiff worries that Barack Obama will increase such regulation.

Source: Peter Schiff
On YouTube: Peter Schiff Was Right 2006 - 2007 (2nd Edition)

Operation Sarkozy

2008-08-23T23:23:00.007+02:00

Nicolas Sarkozy should be judged on his actions and not on his personality.

But when his actions surprise even his own electors, it is legitimate to examine in detail his biography and to ask about the alliances which brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan decided to write the truth about the origins of the President of the French Republic. All the information contained in this article is verifiable, with the exception of two imputations, pointed out by the author who assumes sole responsibility for them.

The French people, weary of the over-long presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, elected Nicolas Sarkozy and counted on his energy to revitalise their country. They hoped for a break with the years of immobilism and superannuated ideologies. They have had a break with the principles which form the foundation of the French nation. They have been stupefied by this "hyper president", every day grabbing hold of another new file, drawing the right and the left to him, thus disposing of all the land-marks to the point of creating complete confusion.

Like children who have just done something very stupid, the French are too busy finding excuses to admit the extent of the damage and of their naïvety. This makes them refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy is, which they ought to have realised long ago.

The man is clever. Like an illusionist, he has diverted their attention by offering them his private life as a spectacle and in posing in celebrity magazines, to the point of making them overlook his political history.

Let the sense of this article be fully understood: it is not to reproach Mr Sarkozy with his links of family, friends and professional contacts, but to reproach him with having hidden his links from the French people who believed that they were electing a free man.

To understand how a man in whom all agree they see an agent of the United States and Israel has been able to become the head of the Gaullist party, then the President of the French Republic, one must go back in time. Far back. We must follow a long digression during which we shall introduce the protagonists who are today taking their revenge.

Family secrets

At the end of the Second World War, the USA secret services counted on the Italo-US godfather Lucky Luciano to control the security of American ports and to prepare the allied landings in Sicily.

Luciano's contacts with the US services passed above all through Frank Wisner Sr. then, when the 'godfather' was freed and went into exile in Italy, through his Corsican 'ambassador', Étienne Léandri.

In 1958, the United States, worried about a possible victory of the FLN in Algeria which would have opened North Africa to Soviet influence, decided to give rise to a military coup d'état in France. The operation was organised jointly by the Planning Direction of the CIA - in theory run by Frank Wisner Sr.- and by NATO. But Wisner had already sunk into dementia so that it was his successor, Allan Dulles, who supervised the action. From Algiers, the French Generals formed a Committee of Public Safety which exerted pressure on the civil government in Paris and forced it to give full powers to General De Gaulle without any need to use force.

However, Charles De Gaulle was not the pawn whom the Anglo-Saxons believed they could manipulate. To start with, he tried to find a way out of the colonial contradiction by giving wide autonomy to the overseas territories within a French Union. But it was already too late to save the French Empire since the colonised peoples did not believe in the promises from the metropolis and insisted on their independence. After having successfully led fierce campaigns of repression against the independentists, De Gaulle realised what had to be done. Showing rare political wisdom, he decided to give each colony its independence.

This U-turn was seen as a betrayal by most of those who brought him to power. The CIA and NATO then backed all sorts of plots to get rid of him, including a failed putsch and some forty attempts to assassinate him. However, some of his partisans approved of his political evolution. Around Charles Pasqua, they formed the SAC, a militia to protect him.

Pasqua is both a Corsican crook and a former member of the resistance. He married the daughter of a Canadian bootlegger who made a fortune during prohibition. He ran the Ricard company which, after having dealt in absinthe, a forbidden drink, made itself respectable by selling anisette. However, the company continued to serve as a cover for all sorts of deals in relation with the Italo-New Yorker Genovese family, that of Lucky Luciano. It was therefore not surprising that Pasqua called on Étienne Léandri (Luciano's "ambassador") to recruit strong arm men and build up a Gaullist militia. A third man played an important role in the formation of the SAC, De Gaulle's former body-guard, Achille Peretti -another Corsican.

Thus protected, De Gaulle drew up with panache a policy of national independence. While confirming that he belonged to the Atlantic camp, he questioned the Anglo-Saxon leadership. He objected to the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Common Market (1961 and 1967); he refused the deployment of UNO blue helmets in the Congo (1961); he encouraged Latin American states to break free of US imperialism (speech in Mexico, 1964); he expelled NATO from France and withdrew form the Integrated Command Structure of the Atlantic Alliance (1966); he denounced the Viet-Nam War (speech in Phnon Penh, 1966); he condemned Israeli expansionism during the Six Day War (1967); he supported the independence of Quebec (speech in Montreal 1967) ; etc...

At the same time, De Gaulle consolidated France's power by giving it a military-industrial complex including a nuclear dissuasion force, and by guaranteeing its supply of energy. He usefully separated the troublesome Corsicans from his entourage by giving them overseas missions. Thus Étienne Léandri became the dealer for the Elf group (now Total), while Charles Pasqua became the confidant of the heads of state in French-speaking Africa.

Aware that he could now defy the Anglo-Saxons everywhere at the same time, De Gaulle allied himself with the Rothschild family. He chose as Prime Minister the Director of the Bank, Georges Pompidou. The two men formed an efficient tandem. The political audacity of the first never lost sight of the economic realism of the second.

When De Gaulle resigned, in 1969, Georges Pompidou briefly succeeded him as President before being carried off by cancer. The historical Gaullists did not accept his leadership and were worried by his excessively anglophile attitude. They cried treason when Pompidou, seconded by the Secretary General of the Elyse Eduard Balladur, allowed "perfidious Albion" into the European Common Market.

The making of Nicolas Sarkozy

Having thus described the background, let us come back to our principal personage, Nicolas Sarkozy. Born in 1955, he was the son of a Hungarian nobleman, Pal Sarkösy de Nagy-Bocsa, who fled to France after fleeing the Red Army, and Andrée Mallah, a Jewish lady from Sallonica. After having had three children (Guillaume, Nicolas and François), the couple divorced. Pal Sarkösy de Nagy-Bocsa remarried with an aristocrat, Christine de Ganay, by whom he had two children (Pierre-Olivier and Caroline). Nicolas was not brought up by his parents alone, but passed to and fro in this recomposed family.

His mother became the Secretary of Achille Peretti. After having co-founded the SAC, De Gaulle's body-guard had pursued a brilliant political career. He was elected Député and Mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the richest suburb of the capital, then President of the National Assembly.

Unhappily, in 1972, Achille Peretti was subject to serious accusations. In the United States, the magazine Time revealed the existence of a secret Corsican criminal organisation the 'Union corse ' which was said to control a large share of the traffic in drugs between Europe and America, the famous "French connection" which Hollywood brought to the screen. Based on parliamentary hearings and its own investigations, Time quoted the name of a Mafia boss, Jean Venturi, arrested some years earlier in Canada, who was no other than the commercial representative of Charles Pasqua for the drinks company Ricard. The names of several families were mentioned who were said to run the "Union corse", including the Perettis. Achille denied this, but had to resign from the presidency of the National Assembly and even escaped from a "suicide".

In 1977, Pal Sarközy separated from his second wife, Christine de Ganay, who then linked herself with the number two of the central administration of the Department of State in the United States. She married him and set up home with him in America. The world being small, as is well known, her husband was no other than Frank Wisner Jr., the son of the previous one. The functions of Junior at the CIA are not known, but it was clear that he had an important role there. Nicolas, who remained close to his step-mother, his half-brother and his half-sister, began to turn towards the United States where he "benefitted" from training programmes in the Department of State.

At the same time, Nicolas Sarkozy joined the Gaullist Party. He there met and had contacts with Charles Pasqua more speedily as he was not only a national leader, but also in charge of the local section in the Hauts-de-Seine.

In 1982, Nicolas Sarkozy, having completed his legal training and having been called to the Bar, married Achilles Pretty's niece. His best man was Charles Pasqual. As an Avocet, Maître Sarkozy looked after the interests of the Corsican friends of his mentors. He bought a property in Corsica, at Vice, and thought of making his name more Corsican by replacing the 'y' with an 'I': Sarkozy.

The following year, he was elected Mayor of Neuilly-sure-Seine in the place of his uncle-in-law, Achilles Pretty, stricken by a heart attack.

However, Nicolas did not take long to betray his wife and, from 1984 onward, he had a hidden liaison with Cecilia, the wife of the most famous French television personality at the time, Jacques Martin, whom he had met when celebrating their marriage as Mayor of Neuilly. This double life lasted for five years, before the lovers left their respective spouses to set up a new household.

Nicolas was a witness at the marriage, in 1992, of Jacques Chirac's daughter, Claude, to an editorialist at Le Figaro. he could not stop himself from seducing Claude and to have a brief affair with her, while living officially with Cecilia. The betrayed husband committed suicide by taking drugs. The break between the Chirac's and Nicolas Sarkozy was brutal and permanent.

In 1993, the left lost the parliamentary elections. President François Mitterrand refused to resign and entered into a cohabitation with a Prime Minister from the right, Jacques Chirac. His ambition was to become President and thought of then forming a tandem with Eduard Balladur comparable with that of De Gaulle and Pompidou, and he refused to be Prime Minister again and left the place to his "friend for over thirty years", Eduard Balladur. Despite his dubious past, Charles Pasqual became Minister of the Interior. Even if he kept a firm grip Moroccan marijuana, he took advantage of his position to legalise his other activities by taking control of the casinos, gaming and racing in French-speaking Africa. He also established links in Saudi Arabia and in Israel an became an honorary officer in the Mossad. As for Nicolas Sarkozy, he was Minister of the Budget and government spokesman.

Frank Wisner Jr.

In Washington, Frank Wisner Jr. took over from Paul Wolfowitz as being responsible for political planning in the Defence Department. Nobody commented on the links which he had with the French government's spokesman.

This was when the tension within the Gaullist Party came back as thirty years earlier between the historic Gaullists and the financial right, in the person of Balladur. The novelty was that Charles Pasqua and with him the young Nicolas Sarkozy betrayed Jacques Chirac to come closer to the Rothschild tendency. Everything went wrong. The conflict reached its peak in 1995 when Édouard Balladur put himself forward against his ex-friend Jacques Chirac for the presidential election, and was beaten. Above all, following the instructions received from London and Washington, the Balladur government opened negotiations for adhesion to the European Union and to NATO of the States in Central and Eastern Europe, freed from Soviet control.

Everything went wrong in the Gaullist Party where the friends of yester-year were ready to kill one another. To finance his electoral campaign, Édouard Balladur tried to get hold of the Gaullist Party's black funds, hidden within the double accounting system of the oil company Elf. Hardly had the old Étienne Léandri died, when Judges looked into the company and its bosses were incarcerated. But Balladur, Pasqua and Sarkozy never managed to recuperate the booty.

Crossing the desert

Throughout his first term, Jacques Chirac kept Nicolas Sarkozy at a distance. The man became discreet during this long period of crossing the desert. Discreetly, he continued to make links in financial circles.

In 1996, Nicolas Sarkozy having finally managed to end an endless divorce procedure married Cécilia. As witnesses they had the two billionaires Martin Bouygues and Bernard Arnaud (the richest man in the country).

Last act

Well before the Iraq crisis, Frank Wisner Jr. and his colleagues at the CIA were planning the destruction of the Gaullist line and the rise in power of Nicolas Sarkozy. They acted in three stages: firstly the elimination of the leaders of the Gaullist Party and taking over this body, then the elimination of the principal rival on the right and the investiture by the Gaullist Party for the presidential election, and finally the elimination of any serious challenger from the left in order to be sure of carrying off the presidential election.

For years, the media were kept excited by posthumous revelations by a real property speculator. Before dying of a serious illness, he had registered for reasons never made clear a video confession. For even more obscure reasons, the "cassette" fell into the hands of a highly placed member of the Socialist Party, Dominique Strauss-Khan, who passed it on indirectly to the press.

Even if the confessions of the speculator did not lead to any judicial sanction, they opened a Pandora's box. The principal victim of the successive affairs was to be the Prime Minister Alain Juppé. To protect Chirac, he alone took on all the criminal offences. Putting Juppé out of the way left the way clear for Nicolas Sarkozy to take over the running of the Gaullist Party.

Sarkozy then made use of his position to force Jacques Chirac to take him back into the government, despite their mutual hatred. He was definitively to be the Minister of the Interior. What a mistake! In this post, he controlled the Préfets and the interior intelligence network which he used to put his appointees into the major branches of the administration.

He also dealt with Corsican matters. The Préfet Claude Érignac had been assassinated. Although no-one had claimed it, the murder was immediately interpreted as a challenge made by the independentists to the Republic. After a long hunt, the police managed to arrest a fleeing suspect, Yvan Colonna, the son of a Socialist Député. Without regard for the presumption of innocence, Nicolas Sarkozy announced this arrest accusing the suspect of being the assassin. This news was too good two days before a referendum being organised by the Minister of the Interior in Corsica to modify the status of the Island. However that may be, the voters rejected the Sarkozy project which, according to some, favoured Mafia interests.

Although Yvan Colonna was later found guilty, he has always claimed his innocence and no material evidence has been found against him. Strangely, the man refused to talk, preferring to be found guilty than to reveal what he knows. We here reveal that the Préfet Érignac was not killed by nationalists, but shot by the hit-man, Igor Pecatte, immediately sent off to Angola where he has been taken on by the Elf group. The motive for the crime was closely linked to the previous functions of Érignac, in charge of the African networks of Charles Pasqua at the Ministry of Cooperation. As for Yvan Colonna, he has been a personal friend of Nicolas Sarkozy for many years and their children are in friendly contact with one another.

A new affair came to light: false listings were circulating which untruthfully accused certain personalities of hiding bank accounts in Luxembourg, with Clearstream. Among the personalities defamed: Nicolas Sarkozy. He took the case to court and let it seem that his right-wing rival for the presidential election, the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, had organised this machination. He did not hide his intention to have him sent to prison. In reality, the false listings were put in circulation by members of the Franco-American Foundation, of which John Negroponte was the President and Frank Wisner Jr. the Director. What the Judges did not know and we reveal here was that the listings were made in London by a joint office of the CIA and the MI6, Hakluyt & Co, of which Frank Wisner Jr. is also Director. Villepin fights back against the accusations, but he is charged, forbidden to leave his home and, de facto, temporarily removed from political life. The way is open for on the right for Nicolas Sarkozy.

It remained necessary to neutralise opposition candidates. The membership dues to the Socialist Party have gone down to a symbolic level to attract new members. Suddenly thousands of young people applied for membership cards. Among them are at least ten thousand new members who are in reality members of the Trotskyite "Lambertist" Party (so called from the name of their founder Pierre Lambert). This small extreme left formation has a history of working for the CIA against the Stalinist communists during the Cold War (it was the equivalent of the SD/USA of Max Shatchman, which formed the neoconservatives in the USA). This was not the first time that the "Lambertists" had infiltrated the Socialist Party.

In particular they planted two famous CIA agents: Lionel Jospin (who became Prime Minister) and Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the principal adviser to Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Primaries were organised in the Socialist Party to appoint its candidate for the presidential election. Two personalities were competing: Laurent Fabius and Ségolène Royal. Only the first represented a danger for Sarkozy. Dominique Strauss-Kahn became a candidate with the task of eliminating Fabius at the last moment. This he was able to do thanks to the votes of the infiltrated "Lambertist" militants who voted not for him but for Royal. The operation was possible because Strauss-Kahn, of Moroccan Jewish origin, had been on the US payroll for many years. The French were not aware that he lectured at Stanford, where he had been taken on by the Provost of the University, Condoleezza Rice. As soon as he took office, Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleezza Rice thanked Strauss-Kahn by having him appointed to head the International Monetary Fund.

First days at the Élysée Palace

On the evening of the second round of the presidential election, when the opinion polls announced his probable victory, Nicolas Sarkozy made a short speech to the nation from his campaign HQ. Then, contrary to custom, he did not go to celebrate with the militants of his party, but went to Fouquet's. The famous restaurant on the Champs-Élysées, which had once been the meeting place for the "Union Corse" now belongs to the casino operator Dominique Desseigne. It was placed at the disposition of the elected President to receive his friends and principal donors to his campaign. A hundred or so guests crowded in, the richest men in France were there with the casino bosses.

Then the elected President allowed himself a few days of earned rest. Taken there in a private Falcon-900 to Malta, he rested there on the Paloma, the 65 metre yacht of his friend Vincent Bolloré, a billionaire formed at the Banque Rothschild.

Leaving for Malta soon after elected president

Finally, Nicolas Sarkozy was invested as President of the French Republic. The first decree which he signed was not to proclaim an amnesty, but to allow casinos to be operated by his friends Desseigne et Partouche and increase the number of gambling machines.

He formed his working team and his government. With no surprise, one finds there a very worrying casino owner (Minister of Youth and Sport) and lobbyist for the casinos of his friend Desseigne (who became spokesman for the "Gaullist" Party).

Nicolas Sarkozy relied above all on four men: Claude Guéant, Secretary General of the Élysée Palace. He was the former right arm of Charles Pasqua. François Pérol, Assistant Secretary General of the Élysée. He was a managing partner of the Banque Rothschild. Jean-David Lévitte, diplomatic adviser. Son of the former Director of the Jewish Agency. French Ambassador to UNO, he was removed from his post by Chirac who considered him too close to George Bush. Alain Bauer, the man in the shadow. His name does not appear in any directory. He is in charge of the intelligence services. Grandson of the Grand Rabbi of Lyon, former Grand-Master of the Grand Orient of France (the principal Masonic obedience in France) and former number 2 of the USA National Security Agency in Europe.

Frank Wisner Jr., who had in the meantime been appointed special envoy by President Bush for the independence of Kosovo, insisted that Bernard Kouchner be appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs with a dual priority mission: The independence of Kosovo and the ending of France's Arab policy.

Kouchner, of Baltic Jewish origin, started his career by taking part in creating a humanitarian NGO. Thanks to money from the National Endowment for Democracy, he took part in operations for Zbigniew Brzezinski in Afghanistan, alongside Osama Ben Laden and the Karzaï brothers against the Soviets. He could be found in the 90s alongside Alija Izetbegoviç in Bosnia-Herzegovina. From 1999 to 2001, he was the High Representative of UNO in Kosovo.

Under the control of the younger brother of President Hamid Karzaï, Afghanistan became the largest producer in the world of opium poppies. The juice is transformed on the spot into heroin and transported by the US Air Force to Camp Bondsteed (Kosovo). There the drug is taken over by the men of Haçim Thaçi who distribute it principally in Europe and also in the United States. The profits are used to finance the illegal operations of the CIA. Karzaï and Thaçi are long-time personal friends of Bernard Kouchner, who obviously knows nothing of their criminal activities despite the international reports which have been made on the subject.

To complete his government, Nicolas Sarkozy appoints Christine Lagarde, Minister of Economy and Finance. She had made all her career in the United States where she ran the prestigious law firm of Baker & McKenzie. Within Dick Cheney's the Center for International & Strategic Studies, she co-chaired with Zbigniew Brzezinski a working group which supervised the privatisations in Poland. She had organised intense lobbying for Lockheed Martin against the French aircraft manufacturer Dassault.

A new escapade during the summer. Nicolas, Cécilia, their joint mistress and their children were offered holidays in the USA at Wolfenboro, not far from President Bush's property. The bill this time was paid by Robert F. Agostinelli, an Italo-New York merchant banker, a Zionist and a leading neo-conservative who gives his views in Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee.

The success of Nicolas spreads to his half-brother Pierre-Olivier. Under the Americanised name of "Oliver", he was appointed by Frank Carlucci (who was the number 2 of the CIA after having been recruited by Frank Wisner Sr.) Director of a new investment fund of the Carlyle Group (the joint management company of the portfolios of the Bushes and the Ben Ladens). Having become the 5th deal-maker in the world, he manages the principal assets of the sovereign funds of Kuwait and Singapore.

Sarkozy with Carla Bruni on a trip to the pyramids (Reminiscent of Napoleon, another Rothschild Supported "Emperor")

The popularity of the President is in free-fall in the opinion polls. One of his advisers in communication, Jacques Séguéla, planned to distract the attention of the public with new "celebrity stories". The announcement of the divorce from Cécilia was published by Libération, the newspaper of his friend Édouard de Rothschild, to cover up the demonstrators' slogans during a day of general strikes. Going further still, the communicator organised a meeting with the singer and former model, Carla Bruni. Several days later, her affair with the President became official and the media din again covered up the political criticisms. A few weeks later still and it was Nicolas' third marriage. This time the witnesses whom he chose were Mathilde Agostinelli (the wife of Robert) and Nicolas Bazire, former private secretary of Édouard Balladur who had become a managing partner at the Banque Rothschild.

When will the French open their eyes to see what they should do?

Article written by Thierry Meyssan, translated into English by Robert Thompson, with additional edits from Siv O’Neall.
© Copyright 2008 by AxisofLogic.com (Translation Copyright)
Source: Axis Of Logic

There is Something Very Rotten in Denmark

2008-07-02T00:41:00.000+02:00

Since 2006, when Iceland resumed its illegal whaling activities, it has claimed the killing is only for scientific purposes. The European Commission is dismisses this as a legitimate whaling activity with only Denmark supporting the Icelandic position.

Copenhagen announced in mid-May that it would invoke a rarely used measure, 'Declaration 25' an annex to the Maastricht Treaty. The declaration refers to member states that have territories outside the EU - as is the case with the Faeroe Islands and Greenland - and will allow Denmark not to be bound by the common position.

Mr. Samsing pointed out that the common position actually masks what is more of a mosaic of positions amongst EU member states. Viewing the animals, as with great apes, elephants and dolphins, to be more intelligent and socially complex than other mammals, "there are those member states that do not want any whales to be killed ever - no matter what," said the Danish diplomat.

"But then there are other member states who want to protect whale species from extinction, but once they are not endangered, the would have no problem with a resumption of the whale hunt," he added, "so long as it was done under strict conditions."

As a result, he said, the common position is agreed only for the purposes of this one IWC meeting, and no further.

"But of course, the commission will come up with something similar next year, and then we have to go through the whole rigmarole again."

What Mr. Samsing is saying here is that Denmark does not support the protection of the whales for any reason including if they are endangered.

For its part, the commission dismissed suggestions of imposing its will on anyone: “The common position was made by the highest body [in the EU], and was supported by most member states," said the commission's environment spokesperson, Barbara Helfferich.

Denmark is a major contributor to the destructive exploitation of the world’s oceans. Danish fishing fleets are amongst the most rapacious in the world and their plundering of the seas has not been dampened by the realization that there are serious ecological concerns about the ability of the oceans to survive this ceaseless plundering.

[…]

Source: Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

On the deterioration of sound, mastering and music itself

2008-03-20T14:50:00.001+01:00

We live in a world of technology - exponentially increasing breakthroughs in all things scientific. So fast that we can't even keep up with it. So why is it that the audio quality of music is degenerating? Music 'sounds' worse. We have stopped listening, we don't have time. We only have time to be smacked in the face by the loudest, most attention-grabbing blast of souped-up noise imaginable until ear fatigue sets in and the desire to 'change the record' takes over. Why are the adverts on TV twice the volume of the regular broadcasts?

Alan Wilder (Depeche Mode / Recoil) tells you

No, it’s not you – records do all sound the same these days. Desperate to get their music on the radio at all costs, record labels are employing a new and powerful software to artificially sweeten it, polish it, make it “louder”… and squeeze out the last drops of its individuality. Tom Whitwell reports on what’s wrong with the sound of music

Source:
Side-Line article, Alan Wilder - "Music For The Masses - I think not."
and
The Word article, Why records DO all sound the same By Tom Whitwell

Additional articles:

Loudness War - Wikipedia

Why Music Really Is Getting Louder - Adam Sherwin, Times Online

How CDs Are Remastering The Art Of Noise - Tim Anderson, Guardian Unlimited

Brickwall Limiting - J.J. Blair, EQ Magazine

The Big Squeeze: Mastering Engineers Debate Music's Loudness Wars - Sarah Jones, Mix Magazine

Everything Louder Than Everything Else - Have The Loudness Wars Reached Their Final Battle? - Joe Gross, Austin360.com

Why New Music Doesn't Sound As Good As It Did - Yahoo! Tech

The Loudness War - Mark Donahue, Performer Magazine

The Death Of Dynamic Range - Mike Richter

Imperfect Sound Forever - Nick Southall, Stylus Magazine

Declaring An End To The Loudness Wars - Barry Diament

Tearing Down The Wall Of Noise - Suhas Sreedhar (Multimedia)

Tearing Down The Wall Of Noise - Suhas Sreedhar (Text)

Radio Ready: The Truth - Bob Orban & Frank Foti, with introduction and comments by Bob Katz (from Katz's book "Mastering Audio: The Art And The Science.")

Official, Rock Music Is Too Loud - Thomas Whitaker, The Sun

What Happened To Dynamic Range? - Bob Speer

Pump Up The Volume - Rip Rowan, WIRED Magazine

Over The Limit - Rip Rowan, ProRec.com

Music Gets Louder - Adrian Larkin, BBC Radio

It's Confirmed: Music Is Really Getting Louder - Duncan Robertson, Daily Mail

Experts: Music Is Getting 'Too Loud' - Dave West, Digital Spy

Distorted, Loud Rock Music Is Making Listeners 'Sick' - Adam Sherwin, Independent News

Masters On Mastering - JJ Jenkins, Electronic Musician

Current Trends in Recording: Is Louder Better? - Dan Banquer, Audioholics Magazine

Loudness - Chicago Mastering Service

Whatever Happened To Dynamic Range On Compact Discs? - George Graham

Hot CD Disease - John Vestman

Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression - Wes Lindstrom

Loudness Race Discussed - Bob Katz

How To Make Better Recordings - Integrated Metering, Monitoring, and Leveling Practices - Bob Katz

Ron Murphy obituary

2008-01-13T11:42:00.000+01:00

Ron Murphy — record cutter, mastering engineer and record producer at Sound Enterprises (formerly National Sound Corporation) in Detroit, MI — has passed away.

From Cliff Thomas on Discogs:

"Ron Murphy is probably one of the most instrumental figures in the history Detroit electronic music. All you have to do is take a good look in your record collection and look for the little NSC logo on the run-out groove on the inside of the record. Ron has shaped the sound of Detroit Techno more than just about anybody. There were allot of records back in the beginning that were brought in by people that knew next to nothing about production or mixing down properly and Ron has saved the sound of those records and many of them have went down in history as some of the finest examples of techno ever made.

Ron has been one of the biggest opponents of over-compression in the industry as people have rushed to bring techno music into the ridiculous loudness war that the rest of the record industry is engaged in currently. His mastering is both dynamic and warm and has been praised for it's definition in the low end. A kick drum on an NSC mastered record is a beautiful thing to behold. He's a real living legend in this industry yet he remains humble and is still one of the most interesting figures in this industry that i have ever talked to. A true classic character."

Ron died of a heart attack on 13th January 2008.

Sound Entreprises, "home" of Ron Murphy

Some other links:

An old but interesting article at MetroTimes

Infinite State Machine web-log

Aaron Carl remembers Ron Murphy

SoulfulDetroit Music remembers Ron Murphy

Suenomartino article about NSC

Ron Murphy Discography

A huge loss for the underground and the (nearly lost) Art of gramophone mastering.

R.I.P.

Mel gone to Heaven

2007-12-07T06:25:00.000+01:00

Mel Cheren (Born January 21, 1933 in Everett, Massachusetts and raised in Revere - Died December 07, 2007)

Former Financial Backer of The Paradise Garage, C.E.O. of West End Records,
Trendsetter, Owner Colonial House Inn, Founder and President 24 Hours For Life Foundation, Philanthropist, Painter.

Mel Cheren began his career in the music business in 1959 at ABC-Paramount Records where he eventually became head of the label's production department.
When the company moved operations to Los Angeles in 1970, Cheren left to become head of production for Scepter Records where he forged new territory: forming an early record pool (David Mancuso, Vince Aletti and Steve D’Aquisto inititated the very first one) and the first to release instrumental mixes on 12" B-sides…

When Scepter closed in 1976, Mel co-founded West End Records and soon after signed Karen Young, whose single "Hot Shot" sold 800,000 copies making it one of the biggest selling 12" in history.

Though respected for his record label, Cheren was loved by many for making possible one of the world's most revered nightclubs, The Paradise Garage. He was the financial backer for the club which was owned and operated by his former partner, Michael Brody. Cheren's relationship with the club's influential DJ Larry Levan blossomed, resulting in some of the most memorable records to come out of the late 1970's and early 1980's.

Cheren was a very dedicated AIDS awareness activists in the US, in 1982 he became very actively involved with the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC). Cheren's philanthropic efforts remained an integral part of his life and in 1987 he formed 24 Hours For Life, a not-for-profit organization of media and music professionals which produced fundraising events for AIDS relief and education.

Summer 2000 saw the release of Cheren's autobiographycal book "Keep On Dancin' (My Life and The Paradise Garage)".
Cheren was also an accomplished painter. His art works has been featured on ten different album covers, five of these were nominated for Grammy Awards. All profits from his paintings goes to charity.

In Memoriam - Mel Cheren

"LIFEbeat mourns the passing of lifetime Board member and great friend Mel Cheren, who died December 7. Mel was a tireless activist in the fight against AIDS and a true visionary in the music industry. While Mel is no longer with us, his spirit lives on in the hearts of all who knew or were influenced by him."
Source: LifeBeat

"It is with much sadness that we announce the passing of a true legend Mel Cheren. A founder of West End Records, Mel ushered in the disco generation and was involved with the monumental Paradise Garage. He is both a role model and a truly nice guy who always wanted everyone to be part of the party.

I strongly recommend that everyone pick up a copy of Mel Cheren's book Keep on Dancin': My Life and the Paradise Garage - a truly magical recount of gay history and a wonderful introduction to DJ Culture (you can read where Junior Vasquez and the other first generation New York DJ's got their start)."
Source: DJ Ron Slomowicz About.com (Dance Music/Electronica section)

"Mel was warm, witty, and sweet. He loved music, truly supported artists, and never tired of looking for talented newcomers to promote. He revolutionized dance music, opened one of the greatest nightclubs in history, and used his energies and resources to help in the fight against AIDS for 25 years. When you go out tonight – and you should – blow a kiss to the disco ball and remember a wonderful man."
Source: Chip Duckett at WOW Report

For these out here still ignoring who Mel Cheren incarnated,
check the more detailed biography at West-End Records, one of, if not my favorite dance record label.

The Book: My Life and The Paradise Garage : Keep On Dancin'
The Motion Picture: The Godfather of Disco (2007)
A great interview with Mel Cheren
Dedication Is Your Message : Our Love Is The Answer, is another Interview for In Da Mix Worldwide.
Mel talk about West End Records at disco-disco.com

Other links with articles relating to Mel Cheren from
- The Disco Unusual Social Club
- West End Records Discography.
- About the Film The Godfather of Disco
- Mel talks frankly about his illness
- Obituary at Disco Delivery
- West End Records Obituary
…

*_°

Mel is gone in Heaven!
Leaving us Paradise,
already behind　…
but also the vibes,
supportive spirit,
some art,
some words
and of course the music,
all
Unforgettable.
Rest in peace, Mel.

Examples of how our lives have degraded since we've been in the EU

2007-07-06T21:04:00.001+02:00

In the EU, (which means in Britain) government is above the law.
The EU's corpus juris now pervades right through our legal system. A policeman was let off by magistrates this year (2005) for driving his private car at 159 mph in Ludlow, Shrops. Under Corpus Juris the government are above the law and cannot be prosecuted The judge ruled correctly under EU law. 45,000 police officers got off speed cameras in this way in 2004, although their speeding killed 44 innocent people. (Daily Mail 27.12.05.)

EU "monitoring Officers" have the right to dismiss our Councillors.
The Local Government Act of 2000 empowered the head of the EU government in England, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minster (ODPM) to appoint a monitoring officer to spy on every council. If an elected councillor disagrees with the EU or government line, the unelected "Standards Board for England" can suspend him for up to five years. An example is in Cambridgeshire, where the ODPM has threatened cllr Alex Riley with suspension if he attends any debate discussing the ODPM's plans to build a new town of 20,000 people called Nothstowe on his ward. The ODPM has the conflict of interest here; but its powers are becoming absolute.

We have lost the right to freedom
The EU arrest warrant (signed by the Queen on 18th November 2003) allows us to be arrested without charge and held indefinitely with no right to see a solicitor, make a phone call, or even a right to a trial. You can simply disappear.

Under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) 2005, we can now be arrested and held in the cells by any police officer for any petty offence, like dropping litter. Before it had to be an offense that carried a 5 year jail term. This also applies to all of the EU's 107,000 regulations. Do you know them all?

The Civil Contingences Act 2004 allows government to confiscate anything you possess permanently; you have no right to object. This includes your house. It also gives government the right to forceably move its population around to different locations; you can be left with no place to call your own and live like a refugee. The only check and balance here is a Minister just needs to utter the words "This is a national emergency." If a demonstration or strike government doesn't like is being organised, they can cut off all communications in a town - phones, mobiles, the internet, TV, and block all access to that town including closing roads and railways. It has all the powers and more of Hitler's Enabling Act of 1933.

We have lost the right to free speech
At the Labour Party conference the police held an 82 year old man, Walter Woolfgang, and denied him access to the conference under the EU's "anti terrorist" legislation because he had shouted the word "nonsense" at Jack Straw, who was speaking about Iraq. Terrified the true nature of the laws they have passed on behalf of the EU was escaping too early, the Labour Party stopped the police and begged the man to return to conference.

On October 25th 2005 Miss Maya Evans was arrested under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, for a lone protest at the Cenotaph by reading out the names of the 97 British soldiers killed in the Iraq war. She was arrested by no less than 14 police officers and found guilty at Bow Street Magistrates Court on the 8th December 2005.

Would you hand over our nation, to be ruled by a foreign power, with oppressive laws like these, ? That's what's happening.

We have lost the right to protest
These laws make protest very difficult; if we did hold a General Strike and blockade Westminster it would now require some bravery: the powers the EU has demanded from our government enable it to respond in a way similar to the Chinese government's in Tiaanamen Square should it so wish.

It is no coincidence that since 2004, all MP's offices in Westminster are guarded by police with machine guns, inside and out.

The Governments "terrorism" deception
All these new EU laws, including massive "anti terrorism" acts (recently 2000, 2001, 2005) were passed with the pretence they were only directed at terrorists, or in the case of Asbos, ruffians who terrorise the streets. In each case they are used far more often against ordinary law abiding people, particularly to suppress dissent. (91% of those detained under Terrorism Acts are innocent and have been improperly arrested. Most of the remainder are charged with offences that have nothing to do with terrorism, but cover up over zealous arrests).

We have lost the right to life
Under EU law the "Shoot to kill" policy did not need democratic authorisation. Just two senior police officers authorised the police to kill British people. A democratic vote by Parliament was not required, but even that would not have legalised the killing under British common law. A recent victim was an innocent Brazilian, Jean de Menezes, shot dead in Stockwell underground station, even though he was being held down by police officers at the time of the execution. The police used dum-dum bullets, outlawed under the Geneva Convention because they blow a man to pieces inside.

The police can no longer be convicted for killing innocent people - Philip Prout shot at Lewannick in East Cornwall is just one of 30 people shot dead by police since 1992 when corpus juris crept in. At least one was shot in the back; most were no threat to anyone. Not once since 1992 has a policeman been convicted of any crime for these murders.

Have you noticed this growing police state?
In addition to many more laws than those above, add the 107,000 regulations, and whole bureaucracies such as VOSA building up networks of cameras and databases to record our movements and criminalise us when we can't comply. Persecution is no longer confined to motorists; under EU Corpus Juris our courts have become extensions of government power instead of independent arbiters of justice.

Westminster had passed sufficient of the EU's oppressive laws (the "harmonisation" in the Treaties) by the end of 2004 that we have been living in what is legally a police state since then. But at the moment, its only one per cent enforced. After the Queen signs the sixth Treaty, the EU has the absolute power to enforce 100% of its regulations and laws.

Source: www.eutruth.org.uk

Dumbing Down: Or The Banalisation of Culture

2007-05-02T23:40:00.000+02:00

Does it matter and why?

The concept “dumbing down” can point to a variety of different things. It can, for example, mean programming to avoid any intellectual challenge to one's audience (a classical music radio station that plays individual movements, or no contemporary music, no or little vocal music, etc.). It is a term that is also commonly used used to criticise attempts to reach a wider audience through some kind of presentation gimmicks (laser light shows to accompany classical music, crossover pop/classical shows such as the Three tenors, Andrea Bocelli, etc.) The concept always involves a claim about the simplification of culture, education, and thought, a decline in creativity and innovation, a failure to establish appropriate artistic, cultural, and intellectual standards, or even to uphold the legitimacy of the idea of a standard, and the trivialisation of cultural, artistic, and academic products.

In fact, the evidence for “dumbing down” is everywhere: newspapers that once ran foreign news now feature celebrity gossip, pictures of scantily dressed young ladies, and football; television has replaced high-quality drama with gardening, cookery, and other “lifestyle” programmes; bonkbusters have taken over the publishing world and pop cd’s and internet connections have taken over the libraries. In the dumbed-down world of reality TV and asinine soaps, the masses live in a perpetual present occupied by celebrity culture, fashion, a TV culture of diminished quality and range, an idealisation of mediocrity, and pop videos and brands. Speed and immediacy are the great imperatives, meaning that complex ideas are reduced to sound bites, high culture is represented by The Three Tenors and J K Rowling, people spend their spare time reading text messages instead of Dostoevsky, and listening to rap bands rather than Bartok and Stravinsky.

Commentators have expressed concern about the media's potential for diminishing the quality of our culture for many years. For example, Regis Debray's Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France (1981), is a powerful polemic against the 'media cycle', which, from 1968 onwards, has reduced intellectual thought to bite-sized morsels of fast food. Hannah Arendt in her influential essay 'The Crisis in Culture', published in 1961, was particularly concerned that a market-driven media would lead to the displacement of culture by the dictates of entertainment. The media has increasingly neglected it’s responsibility to provide people with what they need to know in order to better not only their own lives, but society as a whole, in favour of blowing up out of all proportion the trivial, the voyeuristic, and the sensational. Giving people what they want is not necessarily a good idea when they choose to turn away from knowledge and issues that are important and that actually have a major impact on our lives and instead retreat into fantasy and make-believe.

Social critics have deplored Dumbing Down processes and have excoriated the objectives of education oriented toward encouraging egalitarianism in place of excellence, self-esteem in place of real achievement, or pandering in place of discriminating. Such critiques hark back to Plato's, Cicero's, and Horace's criticisms of democracy or Juvenal's comments about "bread and circuses". They recall Toqueville's critique of egalitarianism, Nietzsche's contempt for the popular adulation of Wagner, Le Bon's cautions on the psychology of the crowd, Goethe's criticisms of public taste, Matthew Arnold's call for "the best that has been thought and known in the world," or T. S. Eliot's defence of "the tradition". Similar views have informed Veblen's attack on conspicuous consumption, as well as the analysis by the Frankfurt School of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Benjamin about mass-produced culture. Comparable aversion to the sensationalising, commercialising, and falsifying role of the carnivalesque as analysed by Bakhtin and epitomised by P. T. Barnum have influenced Ortega Y Gasset's book on The Revolt of the Masses; Greenberg's derogation of "kitsch"; and Macdonald's objections to "Masscult" and "Midcult." Recognition of the newly emerging "Culture of Consumption" and of the roles played by marketing, the mass media, and advertising in shaping the required consumption-oriented consciousness have prompted Boorstin's, DeBord's, Lasch's, Smith's, Postman's, and Ewen's analysis on the ascendancy of the image (surface, spectacle, style, surrogate) over reality (substance, content, depth, grounding) in our media today.

It is beyond dispute that there has been a profound change in our cultural and historical reference points in the past thirty or forty years, and this has accelerated in more recent years. In part, this represents the triumph of the Americanisation of culture: film and music more than the other art forms show the dominance of American influences and attitudes and these are part of the new dominance of popular culture that have increasingly defined the only, and delimited, cultural horizons of the young, the horizons of an increasingly culturally uneducated and challenged youth. The Americanisation of culture has increasingly extended beyond these limits of age and also country to become an influence that has displaced and destroyed other alternative cultural influences. What we see today in our cultural landscape is a uniform consumerist whole that has been partly manufactured by the mass media and business interests and also by the privileging of monetary and capitalist structures and influences, but that importantly arises logically and inevitably from the wholesale dismantling of previously existent social and cultural inhibitions and prohibitions on the expression of narcissistic, individualistic, and selfish desires. The replacement of high art and authentic folk culture by tasteless industrialised artefacts produced on a mass scale in order to satisfy the lowest common denominator has occurred. Mass culture, in important ways, represents the cultural equivalent of the politics of mob rule, of democracy run amok. Consumerism and commercialism are merely one aspect of more general social forces that serve to generate and perpetuate the cultural matrix that I attempt to describe below.

Postmodernism's intellectual assumptions have also infected educational philosophy and technique producing an educational dumbing down. Ideas such as that truth is a matter of opinion, there is no real world outside of language and hence no facts independent of our descriptions of them, render postmodernist assumptions entirely inappropriate as a teaching tool in an era of information excess and complexity. When it comes to the facts about events, there is truth and there is falsehood and we need to be able to distinguish between the two. It appears that there is a contemporary confusion that a justifiable desire to avoid imposing one point of view on others requires a wholesale rejection of the idea of truth and an unwillingness to take up a position. Nor are students well enough acquainted with their own cultural traditions for teachers to justify dumbing down the school curriculum by treating all forms of communication (literature, films, E-mails and even conversations) as texts equally worthy of their attention so that King Lear is the pedagogical equivalent of King Kong.

To take one aspect of these changes: our mass entertainment culture has been best at spreading materialistic egalitarianism but in so doing it has undermined old values and authority, and it has led to a homogenisation and degradation of knowledge and cultural literacy. All too often, 'I blame the media' has served as an all-purpose explanation for disintegrative trends in culture and society. This is not entirely my view, however, since I see the mass media as part cause and part reflection of the demise of Western cultural standards.

At the very least, knowledge gives the power to say no and the ability to give reasons for the rejection. The new cultural amnesiac is marooned on an island where only the ephemeral and evanescent matters and there are no signposts to a wider world. On this island discriminatory powers fail and it is then possible for charlatans and the manipulators of common taste to gain power and influence. The act of thought must be severely restricted by limited access to knowledge, a narrow vocabulary, and limited perspectives on the world. "Discrimination", every anti-elitist tells us, is a bad thing, subversive, and elitist. But the whole point of an education used to be to teach discrimination, to get students to discriminate between good art and bad, good writing and bad, sound science and bad. The dictionary, in fact, defines appreciation, first, as "judgment, evaluation . . . critical estimate"; second, as "sensitive awareness . . . recognition of aesthetic values"; and, only third, as "an expression of admiration, approval, or gratitude. The new populist tendency to aim education at the lowest common denominator; to teach misplaced egalitarianism in the service of unmerited self-esteem; or to encourage attitudes toward aesthetic appreciation that, by failing to discriminate, grant equal but undeserved artistic stature to all works of art and entertainment, fails the student and society in general. However, we live in a cultural climate that is against standards and against judgment so that the worst insult you can offer someone is to suggest that he or she is judgmental.

The bogus, the derivative, and the flashy and gaudy now catch the attention of the mass, who, sans sense, are captive to a superficiality of response based on degraded attentional abilities and the need for familiarity and sameness. A nationalised, homogenised culture has been created in the past few generations, moving from a partially commercialised popular culture and evolving into a more fully commodified mass culture, and leading to the creation of a current generation whose minds are more empty than open. The sources of this full-fledged mass culture emerged after the Second World War and have led to the concentration of mass-culture power in ever larger global media conglomerates.

There are no great figures in this contemporary world: where are the Beethoven’s, the Tolstoy’s, the Freud’s? Instead, there is froth and frantic ferment all around, a tidal wave of vapidity. Despite the benefits promised by high technology and mass education and communications, there seems to be a distinct lack of real creativity. Instead, we see only a lacklustre globalised homogeneity, and cultural standardisation across the world.

Source: Dumbing Down topic from nomuzak.co.uk

Secret Confessions and Torture

2007-03-21T02:43:00.000+01:00

Mohammed Sheikh Khalid has now, voluntarily and of his own free will, admitted he masterminded every significant event from the Norman Invasion through the bubonic plague, fall of Constantinople, and Great Fire of London, to the Battle of Little Big Horn, assassination of JFK and the Oklahoma bombing.

Or he might as well have. The extraordinarily comprehensive list of terrorist outrages for which he claims responsibility would be beyond the capacity of any but the most brilliant and inspired mortal; Khalid, I fear, is a more run of the mill thug.

But in truth, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, he has confessed at all. The BBC brazenly reported all of yesterday that while Khalid did allege he had been tortured during his four years of secret detention by the CIA in various locations around the globe, he is now freely confessing under no duress and does not retract any of his confession.

Who says? The proceedings being held in Guantanamo Bay, and which the BBC report so uncritically, are held behind barbed wire, machine guns, gun emplacements, reinforced steel and concrete and combination locks, before an exclusively military panel. Khalid does not even have a lawyer present. For all we know, his confession could be an entire fabrication.

Source: Craig Murray

News from Comatonse and more… (japanese/english)

2007-02-05T18:03:00.000+01:00

皆様、毎度です☆
三つの新しいビニール・リリースが出来ました…
時間があったら、コマトンズのオンラインショップを見てくださいね。

また、Public Record から新しい無料ダウンロードが出来ます

Three new vinyl releases from Comatonse Recordings, including Terre's ambient deep house remixes of Scanner & Pete Lockett!
Please visit the Comatonse online shop for further info here.

Also, Public Record has released new and impressive releases, all available for free download.

Parallax Beat Bros. (Pete Lockett & Scanner): Exhalation EP
C.014 | 12-inch vinyl | Cisco Distribution
アンビエント、エクスペリメンタル作品をTerre ThaemlitzがRMX!
DJ Sprinkles (a.k.a. Terre Thaemlitz) produces a mix of Deep House and Ambient House remixes of tracks by the Parallax Beat Brothers (a.k.a. Scanner & Pete Lockett).

K-S.H.E vs. Juzu a.k.a. MOOCHY: Morning Grow (Melancholy Grow Remixes)
C.015 | 12-inch vinyl | Cisco Distribution
juzu a.k.a. moochyが昨年リリースしたアルバム「momentos」収録の「morning grow」をterre thaemlitz (a.k.a. k-s.h.e) がリミックスしたのがこちらの作品。
K-S.H.E does it again with a gorgeously lush record guaranteed to bring train-spotters to your turntables asking what the hell you're playing.

Terre Thaemlitz presents... You? Again? 3
12-inch vinyl | Kompakt Distribution (Europe)
ミュールエレクトロニックのレーベルから、３番目と最後の「you? again?」シリーズのビニール。（来週か再来週に来ます！）
The third and final installation of the "You? Again?" vinyl series on Mule Electronic

On analogue decay and digital bittiness

2006-12-28T17:24:00.000+01:00

posted by Simon on Blissout:

Wire contributor Sam Davies makes an interesting point:

"I think there's a case to be argued that, increasingly, the spectral or disembodied isn't only to be located in the thematic (names of songs, tracks, albums), but the very way music is experienced. If you look at the all-conquering iPod, it can only function because of compression: whether AAC or MP3, frequencies deemed 'inaudible' by psychoacoustics are left out. Certain sounds are factored out, because it is believed the human brain doesn't really notice them when certain other sound-events are happening, or because they're beyond the range of human hearing, etc. Personally I think I can recognise compression: it does funny things to the human voice, and also acoustic guitars and cymbals. But the point is, people are definitely listening to 'less' of the original recording than before, to a 'disembodied' version. And the iPod is now the only way that many people engage with music - witness those home docking systems, which mean the iPod (and massive compression) is what they listen to whether at home or on the move.

"Admittedly all this does beg the question whether ALL recorded music, vinyl/CD/cassette, partakes of the spectral condition (and I think it does), but 1) I think it's the first time the general drive for higher fidelity has run backwards, towards a greater 'ghostliness', and 2) I think it's hilarious that after years of sales discourse on 'sound quality' and the hi-tech, arguing that CDs are essential and demand-driven, people/consumers have become so obsessed with dematerializing their music collections. The 80s Holy Grail of sound quality has quietly absented itself from the debate."

to which I chimed:

"Actually when i first heard ipods (and also mp3s through my computer) my standard riff-of-curmudgeonly-complaint was "there's something missing in the body of the sound", which is totally akin to your point. this kind of omnipresent spectralisation of sound maybe relates to the syndrome i've been gesturing at with the term "anechronesis"--that sensation you get off cultural artefact neither of this time nor of an earlier period, but somehow stranded in limbo. An undead quality. Sort of spectral but nothing like the "ghostly un-body" that me and David Stubbs used to talk about in re. My Bloody Valentine/AR Kane/Sonic Youth (which might have been our pre-reading-D&G pre-echo of body-without-organs, come to think of it).
MBV in particular used to talk about trying to achieve "the not really there sound," a quality they identified with music that had been recorded over and over, a tape of a tape of a tape. Or that you get in classic-era dub or psychedelia that was recorded on four-track and therefore relied on dumping of tracks onto tracks, "bouncing down" i think is the term they use, resulting in degradation of the sound, the numinous wispiness of that Perry-produced Congos album, say. These kinds of effects really do feel "ethereal" whereas the kind of thinning out of sound that you refer to, the ubiquitous and insidious reduction in the thickness of experience, I would relate that not to Deleuze & Guattari but to Virilio's writings on speed. Mp3s et al, that is the right texture of sonix for a culture based around acceleration, skimming, overload... an age where we're flitting about and processing insane amounts of data and therefore experiencing things in a brittle, flighty, inconstant way, as opposed to immersive listening, aural contemplation, protracted rapture."

to which Sam offered further concurring and elaborating remarks, viz:

"In really out-there dub you feel like there is some presiding spirit moving through the ruins of the original rhythm/arrangement (I've made it sound overly Gothic, but you get the point). Whereas the MP3 effect isn't one of uncanny possession but rather a draining of body and presence: a vampiric sucking dry (even more Gothic, but still . . .)

"Maybe it has something to do with the (trusty old) analogue-digital opposition? With analogue sources (MBV/AP/Lee Perry) you're aware on some level that these sounds are being overlaid on (or erased from) the physical tape. So sounds taped over old sounds can have palimpsest-like effects (Sonic Youth recorded Experimental Jet Set over the Sister master tapes, and I'm assured that on a good pair of earphones you can hear Sister in the silences). Or, transferred from one reel to another, mixdowns through old analogue desks etc), the sound gathers dust and loses definition, acquires that sepia patina . . . Whereas digital still feels like a sense-data stored on a virtual spreadsheet, endlessly re-writable, safely sterilized from the messiness of reification into the real, flawed world. Perhaps the brain is able to register (subliminally) the different signatures of analogue decay and digital bittiness, and we then overlay our own cultural associations. So analogue is acquiring the spookiness of Victorian photography, and digital media are still too fresh and new to have this revenant quality. (But then there's plenty of anxiety about computers having minds of their own, ghosts in the machine, AI . . .)"

"I'm thinking out loud now, so better sign off & decide whether I actually agree with myself."

Hey man, no worries: the motto of this blog is "not fully baked".

Source: Blissout

Former Soviet Dissident Warns For EU Dictatorship

2006-11-18T10:24:00.000+01:00

In a very interesting interview, 63-year old former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky expose confidential documents (from secret Soviet files which he was allowed to read in 1992) confirming the existence of a plan to turn the European Union into a socialist organization. He tells us also why the sooner the EU collapses, the better.
I cannot agree more…

Interview extract:
"It is no accident that the European Parliament, for example, reminds me of the Supreme Soviet. It looks like the Supreme Soviet because it was designed like it. Similary, when you look at the European Commission it looks like the Politburo. I mean it does so exactly, except for the fact that the Commission now has 25 members and the Politburo usually had 13 or 15 members. Apart from that they are exactly the same, unaccountable to anyone, not directly elected by anyone at all. When you look into all this bizarre activity of the European Union with its 80,000 pages of regulations it looks like Gosplan. We used to have an organisation which was planning everything in the economy, to the last nut and bolt, five years in advance. Exactly the same thing is happening in the EU. When you look at the type of EU corruption, it is exactly the Soviet type of corruption, going from top to bottom rather than going from bottom to top.

If you go through all the structures and features of this emerging European monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the Soviet Union. Of course, it is a milder version of the Soviet Union. Please, do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that it has a Gulag. It has no KGB – not yet – but I am very carefully watching such structures as Europol for example. That really worries me a lot because this organisation will probably have powers bigger than those of the KGB. They will have diplomatic immunity. Can you imagine a KGB with diplomatic immunity? They will have to police us on 32 kinds of crimes – two of which are particularly worrying, one is called racism, another is called xenophobia. No criminal court on earth defines anything like this as a crime [this is not entirely true, as Belgium already does so – pb]. So it is a new crime, and we have already been warned. Someone from the British government told us that those who object to uncontrolled immigration from the Third World will be regarded as racist and those who oppose further European integration will be regarded as xenophobes. I think Patricia Hewitt said this publicly.

Hence, we have now been warned. Meanwhile they are introducing more and more ideology. The Soviet Union used to be a state run by ideology. Today’s ideology of the European Union is social-democratic, statist, and a big part of it is also political correctness. I watch very carefully how political correctness spreads and becomes an oppressive ideology, not to mention the fact that they forbid smoking almost everywhere now. Look at this persecution of people like the Swedish pastor who was persecuted for several months because he said that the Bible does not approve homosexuality. France passed the same law of hate speech concerning gays. Britain is passing hate speech laws concerning race relations and now religious speech, and so on and so forth. What you observe, taken into perspective, is a systematic introduction of ideology which could later be enforced with oppressive measures. Apparently that is the whole purpose of Europol. Otherwise why do we need it? To me Europol looks very suspicious. I watch very carefully who is persecuted for what and what is happening, because that is one field in which I am an expert. I know how Gulags spring up."
Full Article and Interview (a must read)

Source: The Brussels Journal

Solid Goldstone

2006-11-07T02:40:00.000+01:00

A Memorial Bacchanal in Remembrance of Adam Goldstone †
Tuesday, Nov 14 8PM - 2AM
Suggested Donation $10
18 Little W 12Th St (Between Ninth Ave and Washington St.) - NYC.
Cielo Club
Advance Tickets Available at Giant Step Store

Why Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Congo was Assassinated

2006-08-17T21:24:00.000+02:00

Dear Dr. Waldron,

All my life I was affected by the tragic end of Mr. Lumumba. My father could not explain why this very intelligent and lovely man who was the incarnation of our socio-political dreams and hopes was killed with the blessing of the USA president of the time, UN general secretary and the local leaders of the time,

My question is why Lumumba was so hated? Why nobody could hear him and understand him objectively? Why king Baudouin who was so intelligent and religious could not take time to discuss with Lumumba to know him better and understand his vision for his home country? From South Africa to Algeria, Egypt to Ivory Coast, I heard similar stories of the best men who were killed to satisfy the international community.

Dear Rev. Doctor,

I don't think anyone in America had anything personal against Lumumba. They did listen to him and they understood very well what he had to say, and that is why Western economic interests killed him.

Lumumba was killed by the European and American mining and banking interests because Lumumba was the only person who could hold the Congo together after Independence, and those economic interests wanted to break the Congo apart for their own profit. In order to justify killing Lumumba, they had to create the propaganda lie that he was a Communist. The assassination of Lumumba also suited the Russians who could not control Lumumba alive, but after his death could wrap their man Gizenga in his mantle.

Lumumba was doomed. If the West hadn't killed him, Russia would have, and Lumumba's Congolese political rivals were equally determined to get rid of him so they could carve out their own little kingdoms within the Congo. This was not just Tshombe in Katanga, but do not forget that Kasa-Vuba originally called himself King Kasa in his election campaign, in which he promised to make his own ethnic group an independent entity.

In the months before Independence, most of the Belgians in the Congo knew perfectly well that the Belgian Government, for the sake of the profits of Union Miniere de Haut Katanga and its other economic interests, was already engineering the conditions in which the Congo could not survive as a unified country. The Royal Family of Belgium were major stockholders in Union Miniere de Haut Katanga, and King Baudouin of the Belgians was just as profit motivated as the notorious King Leopold II was when he set up that company to exploit the mineral riches of the Congo.

Ordinary born-Congolese Whites and those among the provincial administrators who were caring and honest, were outraged by what the government in Belgium was doing, not just to the African Congolese, but to the White Congolese. You can read more about this in the Luluabourg excerpt from my book THE SECRET IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS; The Sabotaged Independence of the Belgian Congo, which is on this Web site

There is a saying in English, that to understand something you "Follow the Money". Therefore, don't look for answers to what happened to the Congo in political ethics, or animosities, or misunderstandings of what Lumumba was saying and wanted to do. Look for the answers in who was planning to profit. The people who were behind the chaos and the murder of Lumumba then looted the Congo of all its resources both through taking them directly and through loans to Mabutu at crippling interest rates to have European companies the lenders designated build (or in many cases not actually build) unneeded huge projects while letting the basic infrastructure crumble, impoverishing the country and depriving the people of the necessities of life to service the debts.

The people of the Congo need peace, good government, and a viable infrastructure, and I do not know how any of these can be attained in the present conditions of corruption, chaos, war and poverty.

A BOOK I RECOMMEND TO SERIOUS SCHOLARS:
THE CONGO CABLES THE COLD WAR IN AFRICA--FROM EISENHOWER TO KENNEDY
Author: KALB, MADELEINE G
MACMILLAN, 1982,

These are the actual cables back and forth between Washington, the Congo and the UN.

Source: D'Lynn Waldron

Fast permafrost melting as you read this

2006-08-17T06:54:00.000+02:00

Ancient woolly mammoth bones and grasslands locked in the Siberian permafrost are starting to thaw and could potentially unleash billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, a team of Russian and American scientists has concluded.

The area involved is vast — 400,000 square miles. If the permafrost continues to thaw and releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide, it could dramatically increase the 730 billion metric tons already in the atmosphere, the scientists said in a study published in today's issue of the journal Science.

"It's like taking food out of your freezer … leave it on your counter for a few days, and it rots," University of Florida botany professor Ted Schuur said in a phone interview from Alaska, describing the process by which decaying animal and plant matter in the soil is converted by bacteria into carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases.
...
Scientists, including this team, are working to document how fast the permafrost is melting. A 2005 study by the U.S. Center for Atmospheric Research estimated that about 10 feet of permafrost would melt in the 21st century, meaning billions of tons of gases could be released if global warming was not slowed or halted.

I don't know if people realise by it's quite frightening,
Read more L.A. Times

Fear of terror to control society is bursting out

2006-08-11T17:23:00.000+02:00

Isn't it amazing that US government officials claimed ignorance of any Bojinka style plans before 9/11 and yet now they re-hash one for a faux terror alert.
Government enforcers and frightened slaves are all hot and bothered about the latest supposed terror plot targeting UK flights inbound to the US.

Ridiculous restrictions have been slapped on travelers, with mother's having to taste baby milk before they board planes and all hand luggage, including liquid drinks, being banned.
The new alert arrives with the 9/11 truth movement on the cusp of a wave of media exposure.

Evidence of government sponsored terror and how they use the fear of terror to control society is bursting out at the seams as editorials nationwide in the US are uniform in attempting to debunk research that questions the official version of 9/11.

Statistical analysis has proven that every time Blair and Bush sag in approval ratings, a fresh terror alert gives them a bounce back up the charts. Every single major terror alert issued by either the US, Canadian or UK governments has proven to be either a manufactured facade, an entrapment sting or an outright hoax.

Recently, a supposed plan to hijack planes and fly them into London landmarks was exposed as a concoction of UK government lobbyists and news chiefs.

The July 2005 London bombings were a British intelligence operation. The alleged ringleader, Mohammed Siddique Khan, was working for MI5.

Never peek at undisclosed info on Free energy

2006-07-08T03:47:00.000+02:00

The Home Secretary John Reid has ruled that Gary McKinnon can be extradited to the USA.
This decision comes despite the large number of people who have personally written to the Home Secretary on behalf of Gary. The next stage in the legal process is an Appeal to the High Court.

Oh and Lucile gave one of the most discerning comment

jultra: America under horrific neocon coup

2006-07-08T00:40:00.000+02:00

America under horrific neocon coup

Bless the Beasts and the Children

2006-06-28T04:57:00.002+02:00

Photographer for White House child sex ring arrested after Thompson suicide
by Tom Flocco

WASHINGTON -- March 13, 2005

Photographer Russell E. "Rusty" Nelson was recently arrested two days after journalist Hunter Thompson reportedly committed suicide four weeks ago on February 10, according to two phone interviews with attorney John DeCamp last week.

Nelson was allegedly employed by a former Republican Party activist to take pictures of current or retired U.S. House-Senate members and other prominent government officials engaging in sexual criminality by receiving or committing sodomy and other sex acts on children during the Reagan-Bush 41 administrations.
Hunter S. Thompson’s death and the news blackout of Rusty Nelson’s simultaneous arrest raise questions that someone may be attempting to limit Nelson’s freedom or threaten him, since according to testimony, both men had allegedly witnessed homosexual prostitution and pedophile criminal acts in a suppressed but far-reaching child sex-ring probe closely linked to Senate and House members--but also former President George H. W. Bush. [In U.S. District Court testimony, Rusty Nelson told Judge Warren Urbom he took 20,000 to 30,000 pictures, 2-5-1999, p.52]

Pedophile victim Paul Bonacci--kidnapped and forced into sex slavery between the ages of 6 and 17--told U.S. District Court Judge Warren Urbom in sworn testimony [pp.105, 124-126] on February 5, 1999: "Where were the parties?...down in Washington, DC...and that was for sex...There was sex between adult men and other adult men but most of it had to do with young boys and young girls with the older folks...specifically for sex with minors...Also in Washington, DC, there were parties after a party...there were a lot of parties where there would be senators and congressmen who had nothing to do with the sexual stuff. But there were some senators and congressmen who stayed for the [pedophile sex] parties afterwards...on a lot of the trips he took us on he had us, I mean, I met some people that I don't feel comfortable telling their name because I don't want to --- ...Q: Are you scared?...Yes..."

Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004 under the DMCA, [TomFlocco.com]. Permission is granted to reprint the first three paragraphs of this story; read the remaining at the source ...

World Cup statistics and more

2006-06-22T02:53:00.000+02:00

While viewers watch scores for the World Cup intently, another type of stats remains unnoticed. Find out how your country scores...

The Key to Stopping World War III

2006-06-19T03:45:00.000+02:00

Resolution Submitted to the 911 Truth Chicago Conference – June 2-4 2006.

Under the Cheney doctrine and the Pentagon’s Global Strike, US forces are now on the verge of a surprise attack, quite possibly in nuclear form, against Iran. As Philip Giraldi wrote last July, the Cheney doctrine prescribes that this attack will come in the wake of a new 9/11 or new Gulf of Tonkin incident. With the US and UK stalled at the UN by Russian and Chinese rejection of their plans for aggression, all indications are that such a new 9/11 is being actively prepared by rogue networks within the US intelligence community of CIA, NSA, DIA, NSC, Pentagon, and State Department, plus allied and privatized capabilities. The neocons, many of whom face early criminal indictment, are opting for a flight forward into war.

With the visits during late May of Israel's Ehud Olmert and Britain’s Tony Blair to Washington, the aggressor coalition seems to be ready. Cheney’s controllers now require only a pretext, a provocation to justify their attack. Will they attack under the cover of the soccer World Cup, to be held in Germany during June? An attack in Europe would help recruit coalition partners. Will they sink a US warship in the Gulf? In this case, a third country could do the job, with the blame going to Iran. As in the case of 9/11, they will manufacture the provocation they need for the next phase of the war of civilizations. Arabs and Moslems will be involved as patsies – under the label of Hezbollah, Iran, etc. An attack on Iran will kill Chinese in the oil fields and Russians in the nuclear reactor sites. It will begin the inexorable slide into World War III. Neocon fascist madmen Lieber and Press, writing in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs, promise that a thermonuclear first strike against Russia and/or China is eminently feasible. The same neocon networks which promised the Iraqi cakewalk are now promising a nuclear cakewalk. This time the result could be the incineration of the US and large parts of the world. The neocons must be driven from public life, even as the September criminals are brought to justice.

The attack on Iran has little to do with unproven allegations that Teheran might acquire a nuclear device. Israel alone has nearly 500 nuclear weapons of all types, plus an ABM system. The insanity of the Anglo-American elites reflects the death agony of the US dollar. As Iran, Russia, Venezuela and even Norway prepare to buy and sell oil in rubles, euros, and through barter deals, hundreds of billions of dollars of central bank reserves are poised to quit the greenback. The result would be a dollar panic, with dollar owners stampeding towards the exits. The US currency might lose between 25% and 75% of its value. With emerging market currencies and stock markets crashing, the tropism of the US-UK elites is toward war in a bid to retain world domination.

Bush retains the support of some 35% of the US population. With this 35% he can resist impeachment and wage war indefinitely. These are persons who have accepted the government’s nightmare vision of 9/11. They are terrorized, literally scared out of their wits. They are relatively impervious to the many valid arguments which can be made against the Iraq war, against Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, torture, secret prisons, illegal renditions, NSA wiretaps, and totalitarian police state policies. These they regard as necessities of a war forced up the US by a foreign aggressor. The only hope of reaching these people, and thus of attrition and erosion of Bush’s base, is to demolish and discredit the 9/11 myth itself. The attacks came from the US secret government, not from Bin Laden’s cave. The Charlie Sheen episode shows that the 9/11 issue offers by far the greatest bang for the buck – it is the ultimate weapon against Bush. Only a sustained series of explosive revelations and exposures of 9/11 truth can cripple the Bush regime, roll up the rogue networks, and block the new 9/11 and October surprise scenarios. It is here that the treachery of the gatekeepers emerges. Left liberal figures like Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Michael Moore, The Nation magazine, and most of Air America have stubbornly parroted the Bush-FBI lies about 9/11. There are right gatekeepers too, like antiwar.com and many of its writers. The gatekeepers must catch up with the truth or enter the dust bin of history.

But what about 9/11 truth? Within the 9/11 truth movement, some still debate unanswered questions, or the incompetence and negligence theory. Others continue to embrace LIHOP, the notion that the Bush regime Let It Happen On Purpose. In our view, these approaches are gravely deficient because they all accept the key point of the government’s demagogy: they assume that some such independent entity as "al Qaeda" really exists, and really has the capability of producing the results seen on 9/11. This is precisely the Big Lie we must reject. "Al Qaeda" could not subsist without the support of CIA (and of Britain’s MI-6, as David Shayler’s reports show). "Al Qaeda" is a wholly owned subsidiary of US-UK intelligence. The true face of "al Qaeda" was that of the psychotic patsy Moussaoui, who was deemed a delusional paranoid schizophrenic by psychiatric experts, or of Richard Reid, the mentally retarded derelict produced by the MI-6 school for patsies at Finsbury mosque in London. Moussaoui claimed they were going to attack the White House with a 747. In reality, this pathetic pair could hardly have hijacked a pushcart.

There is no substitute for MIHOP (the idea that US government forces Made It Happen On Purpose). As David Ray Griffin recently observed, "It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government." Morgan Reynolds and other members of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth also argue this point. Our European colleagues have been MIHOP from the outset. (Please feel free to add other names as indicated.) The 9/11 truth movement should now unite on the basis of MIHOP, and put aside uncertainty.

Anything short of full political MIHOP leaves us with a powerful enemy and the need to wage the fraudulent war on terror in some better form. Anything short of MIHOP is ultimately compatible with support for Democrats who want to continue the Afghan/Iraq/Iran war if they seize control of the Congress this November, or with the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who is running as a bigger and better warmonger than Bush, while promising to extort European troops and European funding which Bush cannot provide. By failing to filibuster Hayden for the CIA, the Democratic Party has again proclaimed itself feckless. The Republican Party may break up over the immigration issue. The Democrats may break up if they attempt to prolong the wars. 9/11 truth can be a catalyst for a progressive outcome of the looming crisis of the political system.

If the new 9/11 comes, it will likely be under the guise of a government drill or exercise. As Operation Mongoose was used to bootleg the JFK assassination, and as Nine Lives was used to conduit the Hinckley hit on Reagan in 1981, we have seen how the 9/11 events were run through the fifteen plus drills going on that morning. We have seen the London explosions of July 7, 2005 carried out under the aegis of Atlantic Blue (UK), Topoff 3 (US), and Triple Play (Canada), plus Visor Consultants. Our movement was able to block Sudden Response 05 in Charleston, South Carolina, last August. It shall be the policy of our movement to monitor, identify, expose, denounce, and shut down WMD drills and exercises which threaten to go live in the form of real attacks anywhere in the world. It is our urgent duty to inoculate populations against this notorious trick of the rogue networks.

The 9/11 truth movement may currently include as many as 5,000 activists. To pull the world back from the brink of general war, it is imperative that this be expanded a thousand fold, to 5 million. Five million activists influencing a periphery of 20 to 25 million activists – leftists, progressives, conservatives, communitarians, independents – could shift the political constellation, starting with the left wing of the Democratic Party. As for conservative 9/11 truth activists, they are the adversaries Bush-Cheney fear most. The Pentagon’s 9/11 tape release has proven a fiasco. The Moussaoui jury refused to execute. Recent calls for 9/11 truth by the late William Sloan Coffin, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and above all the new Zogby poll showing that 42% of Americans reject the 9/11 commission report, with 47% wanting a Congressional probe or an independent international truth commission, show that the massive expansion of our movement is within reach.

Accordingly, we commit ourselves to the following actions over the remaining months of 2006:

· The Vermont Green Party is the first state party to call for the impeachment of Bush-Cheney based on their 9/11 crimes, with the first article against Bush for misprision of high treason. This approach should be replicated everywhere. Our movement is the cutting edge of impeachment, and we must guarantee that the impeachment groundswell includes the 9/11 element without which it will falter.
·
· We will take back the air waves from the corporate media with a relentless barrage of phone calls to C-SPAN, Air America, and to every television and radio talk show in this country and beyond, all for the purpose of placing 9/11 truth at the top of the national agenda. This guerrilla war can bring our message to tens of millions of people every day, circumventing the gatekeepers.
·
· We will support candidates of any party or of no party who embrace 9/11 truth. We will focus national attention on key candidacies like those of Carol Brouillet for Congress in California, Bob Bowman for Congress in Florida, Craig Hill in Vermont, and others. We also wish to direct international attention to the candidacy of Irish 9/11 truth movement leader Morgan Stack to the Dail (Parliament of the Republic of Ireland) for the district of Cork South Central.
·
· We will continue our surveillance of drills and exercises to raise the political price the invisible government must pay if it seeks to carry out new crimes.
·
· While stressing that the MIHOP historical and political analysis of 9/11 is already conclusive, we urge that 9/11 deep throats and whistleblowers come forward, both to testify and to produce additional written or recorded evidence of courtroom quality on the scale of the Watergate tapes that can put the September criminals behind bars.
·
· In the event that Bush-Cheney seek to impose martial law, we will agitate for an open-ended general strike of the civil rights movement, the labor movement, immigrant groups, minorities, students, and all persons of good will to demand the restoration of Constitutional rule.

Source: The Truth Seeker.

The Banking System by David Icke

2006-06-07T07:53:00.000+02:00

You go to a bank to borrow 'money'. Or you think you do. In fact, the 'money' is merely figures typed into your computer account. It does not exist, except as figures in a computer program. The banks are allowed to 'lend' at least ten times what they have on deposit - but this 'deposit', too, is only figures on a screen. There is no 'money', it's all an illusion.

But in return for 'borrowing' this created-out-of-nothing 'money' you must sign over your property, land or business, which is then owned by the bank until you have paid them back the nothing they 'loaned' you, plus interest. If you don't pay back the nothing the banks get your property, land or business.

And even while you are paying back the 'loan' this property - YOUR property - is considered an asset of the bank and they can 'lend' ten times its value to anyone else who wants a loan. In any other language it is called 'fraud'.

Street art portraying Brody Armstrong

2006-05-29T02:43:00.000+02:00

Punk
Originally uploaded by What What.

Originally from Melbourne, now lead singer in The Distillers (USA) (her shoulder tattoo was copied by Kelly Ozbourne).

Gary McKinnon and the advanced power, UFO cover-up

2006-05-09T11:33:00.000+02:00

In 2002, Gary McKinnon was arrested by the UK’s national high-tech crime unit, after being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks.

He says he spent two years looking for photographic evidence of alien spacecraft and advanced power technology.

America now wants to put him on trial, and if tried there he could face 60 years behind bars. […]

BBC Profile - Gary McKinnon
“I found out that the US military use Windows, said Mr McKinnon ”[…]

See also: Hacker fears ‘UFO cover-up’ … Transcript with video interview from Friday, 5 May 2006.

And the quite clever comments at following entry:
“Politricks, UFOs and the hacker-demon” at Blogdial ... "Gary is being punished because if they do not burn him at the stake in a SuperMax, they will have to do a billion dollar security review of all their installations. Better to frighten off everyone than throw out windoze right?"[…]

GaryMcKinnon From Wikipedia
Free Gary McKinnon, or at least try him in the UK.
The Disclosure Project serious resarch about possible UFOs.

Teens say they like vinyl records over CDs

2006-05-02T12:05:00.000+02:00

A Canadian scientist says teens who used to view CDs as superior to older vinyl records now consider vinyl superior to the newer format.
David Hayes of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto says the growing popularity of vinyl might be a form of resistance against the music industry’s corporate taste-makers. While conducting research for his Ph.D. dissertation, Hayes was surprised to discover the young music enthusiasts he was interviewing were fans of vinyl.”This made me wonder why they were interested in something that is, for all intents and purposes, a dead medium,” he said, noting the teenagers had switched from buying CDs to collecting LPs, often seeking obscure recordings.

Hayes research subjects said they liked the visual appeal of LP jackets and the challenge of seeking hard-to-find releases.

In yet another turnaround, teens overwhelmingly insisted the sound quality of LPs was superior to that of modern formats. They characterized LPs and the LP artists of the past as more authentic than the barrage of youth-oriented music being aggressively marketed to them today.

Catherine LaCroix: Sacred Prostitute in Today's USA

2006-04-30T11:05:00.002+02:00

Sylvana SilverWitch: I also asked this question of Carol Leigh last year: What exactly do you think is the problem for most people with prostitution? Is it that people are having sex? Or that money is being made? What part of those things is bad? We don't think its bad to spend money for anything else, or to have sex in other instances; why does it suddenly become bad when put together?

Catherine LaCroix: I wish I knew the real answer to this one, but our access to personal freedom of choice is curtailed in the name of a selective morality at best, one that distinguishes between business transactions solely on the basis of sexual involvement. We can debate the "immorality" of prostitution until we're blue in the face, but the fact remains that this religious censure has no legal standing whatsoever. Would there be prostitution laws if it wasn't for enforced Christian morality? We live in a society that prides itself on the constitutional separation of church and state yet outrageously allows the predominate religious system to jeopardise my freedom and curtail my profession in the name of morality.

All employment or professional service is nothing more than the exchange of energy for material gain. You may exchange your 40 hours or more a week to receive a salary that is simply a substitute for material property potential. Sex work exchanges, between consenting adults, are not essentially different from any other economic activities, particularly those of a similar recuperative nature such as psychological counselling, physical therapy, chiropractic manipulation, acupuncture, licensed massage and even a physician or attorney. In each and every case, a service or energy in the form of knowledge, intellect, judgement or physical touch is traded for cash. The fact that my particular service involves sexuality does not alter the essential nature of the exchange.

Logically, the question is begged whether it is lawful for the state to use obviously discriminatory physical force against those making this wholly voluntary exchange. What's the difference between a man hiring a whore and hiring a physical therapist? Or even a psychotherapist? In either case, the parties are engaged in a voluntary transaction without external coercion. It is not an unusual transactional paradigm, with the exception of sex, since each party openly acknowledges their own self-interest just as with your attorney or accountant. Perhaps what abolitionists resent most is our moral and mercenary lack of regret.

SS: Do you think prostitution as sexual healing should be legalised? How would that look? What might it accomplish?

CLC: I think all sex between consenting adults should be decriminalised, sacred or not, in recognition of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression. It does not distinguish between verbal, sexual or any other form of expression. America repealed the unenforceable Prohibition idiocy but continues the same neurotic principle regarding prostitution: Legislate an individual version of morality, and jail all of those who happen to disagree. Then as now, it only serves to subsidise organised crime in the process of restricting freedom of expression.

However, we need to distinguish in the reader's mind the difference between legalisation and decriminalisation from both a sex worker and non-worker perspective. Legalisation would be the bureaucratic control of sex work by the government. Remember, these are the guys who can't find their ass with both hands.

Decriminalisation means we are treated as any other profession without undue governmental intrusion. It's not enough that we already have police officers abusing, beating, blackmailing, raping, robbing and killing us. Under legalisation, we would then have licensing bureaucrats also abusing, blackmailing, raping and robbing us with paperwork and restrictive regulation. And they would still be backed by the cops. No, thank you. I have no more confidence in a bureaucrat's alleged altruism than I do a cop's. Both have proven extremely unreliable over the past 100 years of protecting us from ourselves, as they put it.

The end result of decriminalisation would be less abuse, violence and coercion of sex workers, happier clients and happier taxpayers who would save the millions of dollars spent annually to arrest us.

SS: Could you speak to the prejudice of people thinking that prostitutes spread disease?

CLC: The U.S. Department of Health consistently reports that only 3 to 5 percent of the sexually transmitted disease in this country is related to both criminalised and legalised prostitution, compared with 30 to 35 percent among teenagers. Although a small percentage of prostitutes are HIV-positive, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control stated there were no proven cases of HIV transmission from prostitutes to clients as of July 1995. There is no statistical indication, again according to the CDC, that prostitutes in the United States are even a measurable vector of HIV infection. Those sex workers proven seropositive have all but exclusively been street whores and intravenous drug users.

The vast majority of non-addicted and non-street sex workers consistently use condoms and practice safe sex because they are keenly aware of the increased risks of multiple partners. The most prevalent STD among sex workers, like the rest of the adult female population in the U.S., is chlamydia. The rate of HIV and hepatitis C infection among sex workers is directly proportionate to IV drug use. Sex workers are far more likely to get a disease from a client than vice versa.

Source: Healer, Witch, and Whore - Catherine LaCroix: Sacred Prostitute in Today's USA, an interview by Sylvana SilverWitch.

The Real Romance in the Stars - Astrology as an enemy of truth.

2006-04-18T03:19:00.000+02:00

"We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun."

"There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out."

"Note, accordingly, how little it means to say something like "Uranus moves into Aquarius". Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here). A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into'."

"The shape of a constellation, moreover, is ephemeral. A million years ago our Homo erectus ancestors gazed out nightly at a set of very different constellations. A million years hence, our descendants will see yet other shapes in the sky, and their astrologer (if our species has not grown up and sent them packing long since) will be fabricating their oracles on the basis of a different zodiac."

"Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles."

- Richard Dawkins

Largest mass extinction in 65 million years underway

2006-04-06T00:13:00.000+02:00

Environmental scientists say they have concrete evidence that the planet is undergoing the "largest mass extinction in 65 million years". Leading environmental scientist Professor Norman Myers says the Earth is experiencing its "Sixth Extinction."

Scientists forecast that up to five million species will be lost this century. "We are well into the opening phase of a mass extinction of species. There are about 10 million species on earth. If we carry on as we are, we could lose half of all those 10 million species," Myers said.

If we do not do more, Myers says, the planet will continue to lose around 50 species per day compared to the natural extinction rate of one species every five years. He projected this rate in the late 1980s to much criticism, but the figure is now widely accepted by scientists. "The whole thing is taking place in what you might call a flickering of an evolutionary eye," said Myers. "It's hard to keep up with unless we damp down on some of the causes of the evolution."

EXTINCT: The Golden Toad of Monteverde, Costa Rica was among the first casualties of amphibian declines. Formerly abundant, it was last seen in 1989.

"The Sixth Extinction"

Scientists are warning that by the end of this century, the planet could lose up to half its species, and that these extinctions will alter not only biological diversity but also the evolutionary processes itself. They state that human activities have brought our planet to the point of biotic crisis.

In 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that the planet is losing 3

Methanol Discovered in Space

2006-04-01T22:06:00.000+02:00

Scientists discovered a huge cloud of methanol in space.
The cloud measures 300 billion miles across, and is emitted from stars as they form.

Methanol, the new laptop fuel?

John Lydon, "What Makes Britain Great?"

2006-02-28T22:20:00.000+01:00

"... anything that doesn’t have open doors is a problem."

"L'islam est judéophobe, christianophobe, infidèlophobe et moi je suis connophobe !"

2006-02-27T22:31:00.000+01:00

Le recours à la tolérance est un argument souvent utilisé par les "encartés des droits de l'homme" pour produire un chantage moral et neutraliser les personnes qui questionnent ce qui est inquestionnable comme par exemple le slogan « l'islam est un message d'amour, de tolérance et de paix ».

Le recours à l'idée de tolérance constitue un argument qui vise à culpabiliser avec le fouet de la morale les empêcheurs de tourner en rond. Cet appel à la tolérance constitue une manière tordue et perverse d'interdire la critique et le travail de la pensée.

Dans cet optique, la tolérance est une valeur sacrée et sacralisée qui est instrumentalisée par les "encartés des droits de l'homme" pour empêcher de les questionner sur leurs responsabilités alors qu'ils sont impliqués dans le désastre que nous constatons aujourd'hui.

Aussi, ces "encartés des droits de l'homme" ne vont jamais reconnaître qu'ils ont été au mieux des idiots compassionnels et au pire des complices. Alors, il ne leur reste plus qu'à discréditer les personnes qui grippent leur belle mécanique rhétorique. C'est ainsi que les "encartés des droits de l'homme" accusent les défenseurs de la laïcité d'être des « laïcistes » ou des «islamophobe », voire des «intégristes de la laïcité » sans oublier : « laïcard », « croisés de la laïcité », «ayatollahs de la laïcité ».

Source: Interview de Messaoud Bouras, Sur le Ring.

Egyptian newspaper printed Danish cartoons in October 2005, Cartoonihad Was Staged.

2006-02-09T20:04:00.000+01:00

THE LYING DANISH IMAMS

By
Michelle Malkin · February 08, 2006 12:57 PM

The Islamists' Bogus Blasphemous Cartoons (Large images here, here, and here)

I just received a tip from a reader in Denmark with more info about the lying delegation of Danish imams who fabricated anti-Muslim artwork and pinned it on the Jyllands-Posten in December to stoke the jihadists. (See Scott Johnson's round-up at Power Line.)

In addition to the fake drawings and photos and the other lies included in the Danish imams' propaganda pamphlet posted over at The Counterterrorism Blog, my reader reports that Danish radio has enumerated additional falsehoods.

The imams reportedly spread lies that the Jyllands-Posten had 120 cartoons, not 12, and that the paper was owned by the government. (There are no state-run newspapers in Denmark.) In addition, the imams reportedly claimed that the Danish government would censor the Koran, burn the Koran, and that Danes were planning to make a blasphemous movie about Mohammed. (Brussels Journal and Jyllands-Posten had initial reports on these lies. See here and here.)

The full in Danish radio report is here.

Meanwhile Dennis at Neander News follows up on how the Danish press is putting the heat on the Danish imams. Here's the cover of Ekstrabladet, which confronted Danish lying imam Ahmed Akkari about the fake pigsnout photo:

Power Line points to another truth-evading interview with Akkari by the CBC.

***
I linked to Paul Belien's post on The Cartoon Hoax yesterday, but it's definitely worth revisiting and quoting at length until the rest of the mainstream media catch up (if ever):

When the Danish press discovered the three false so-called Danish cartoons, the imams refused to say where they had got them. They claimed, however, that the false cartoons were genuinely Danish and had been added to “give an insight in how hateful the atmosphere in Denmark is towards Muslims.”
The Brussels Journal has always doubted whether the cartoons added by the imams were genuine. Whenever we mentioned them we explicitly wondered whether they were not “of the imam’s own making.” Certain Western mainstream media, however, such as the Australian network SBS and the British BBC authoritatively declared that the pigsnout was one of Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons.
Yesterday an American blogger discovered where the “pigsnout Muhammad” comes from. It has no relation to Muhammad whatsoever, it is not even a cartoon, but a fax image of a photo of a French clown performing at a pig festival.
Denmark is being punished at the instigation of radical imams because twelve cartoonists have depicted Muhammad. However, these imams created their own three Muhammad images. They have even presented a French clown as being Muhammad. Because the twelve JP cartoonists are not Muslims, the Muslim blasphemy laws do not apply to them. But these laws do apply to the imams. Consequently, these imams deserve death. They – and no-one else – depicted the prophet as a pig – the highest imaginable insult in Islam.
...Western papers and blogs that published the twelve cartoons were right to do so. If they had not published, no-one would have been able to ascertain that the pigsnout was not among them. If they had not published, the cheating, blasphemous imams would have got away with their lies. The public is served by information, never harmed by it. Let this be a lesson to the cowards of The Guardian, SBS, the BBC and the British and American mainstream media, who “out of respect” for Islam would have allowed blasphemous imams to get away with their gross insult of the prophet, with slander and libel, and with the violent acts which they instigated.

Belien also holds the BBC accountable for its negligence on the matter here. More on the BBC admission of failure from Mark in Mexico.

Departure Lounge

2006-02-02T09:20:00.001+01:00

Started by New York club DJs John Hall and Adam Goldstone, and Perry Brandston --a sound technician who had long been involved with the post-punk art and club world-- The Departure Lounge was originally intended as a freeform outlet for partners' more purely creative record-spinning interests, without regard to such dance floor conventions as familiarity, stylistic consistency, or even danceability. The primary immediate objective of The Departure Lounge was to take what was usually considered back-room, background music (or completely unsuitable for play in any club at all) and place it squarely in the spotlight, and in your face. In short, the idea was to create an environment where it seemed entirely possible that one could, in the words of the club's motto, "hear every record ever made." The result was admittedly sometimes messy, cacophonous, self-indulgent, and even downright ludicrous, but never boring or predictable.

Other features included the Public-Access Turntable, a record player set out in the middle of the room and patched into the DJ booth and main sound system for audience members to join in on (a handful of records whose labels had been removed to add the element of surprise); and Dueling DJs, in which two DJ booths were set up in the same room, allowing the main DJs and their guests to either jam with each other like a jazz band or duke it out sonically like pro wrestlers.

The Queen of the Night

2006-02-02T09:07:00.000+01:00

Regine Zylberberg

Regine Zylberberg was the inventor of the discotheque. She was born in Belgium in 1929 to Polish Jew parents.

Started life hiding from the Nazis in occupied wartime France and later invented the format for "discothèque" (French for Nightclubs). Setting in 1953 the elements of modern day nightclubs, mainly by replacing the use of jukebox by coupled turntables as done for the first time in Paris' 'Whisky-a-Gogo' club that she managed aged 24. This specific setting appeared later in any of 'Chez Regine's ultra selective venues and later in many variations at most Nightclubs around the world.

Aside of inventing and managing "discothéques", she taught a former king of England to do the twist, presided over a multi-million dollar international nightclub empire and had a hit single with the French version of Gloria Gaynor's "I will survive."

In 1957 she opened Chez Regine in the Latin Quarter, which quickly became the place to be seen for playboys and princes. It was here that she introduced France to the 'Twist', having seen the Paris cast of West Side Story warming up to Chubby Checker records.

In the 1970s Regine Zylberberg moved to New York and lived in a suite of the Delmonico Hotel. At her height there were 25 clubs bearing the franchise across three continents and it was said you could party at a Regine's somewhere in the world 17 hours out of every 24, if you could get in.

The American press dubbed her the "Queen of the Night".

Citation du jour…

2006-02-02T00:50:00.000+01:00

« On ne brûle pas encore les livres, mais on les étouffe sous le silence. La censure, aujourd’hui, est vomie par tout le monde. Et, en effet, ce ne sont pas les livres d’adversaires, ce ne sont pas les idées séditieuses que l’on condamne au bûcher de l’oubli : ce sont tous les livres et toutes les idées. Et pourquoi les condamne-t-on?

Pour la raison la plus simple : parce qu’ils n’attirent pas assez de public, parce qu’ils n’entraînent pas assez de publicité, parce qu’ils ne rapportent pas assez d’argent. La dictature de l’audimat, c’est la dictature de l’argent. C’est l’argent contre la culture (…). »

Jean d’Ormesson, Figaro du 10 décembre 1992, article cité dans la préface à Fahrenheit 451.

The Osama Bin Laden Book Club

2006-01-29T19:18:00.000+01:00

How the world's most notorious terrorist just launched an obscure left-wing American author into bestseller stardom.

Watch out, Oprah Winfrey, Osama bin Laden has jumped into the book-promotion game.

On Wednesday, the 72-year-old Washington author William Blum existed only on the fringes of the publishing industry. His 2000 foreign-policy diatribe, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" ranked No. 205,763 on Amazon's bestseller list. Today its number 35 on that bestseller list. His byline rarely appeared in print, he says.

But then the world's No. 1 newsmaker, Bin Laden, showed up Thursday on the Al-Jazeera network to promise another terrorist attack on America, ask President Bush to withdraw American troops saying:

"If you (Americans) are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you. And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book "Rogue State," which states in its introduction: "If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all."

István Mészáros - Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition

2006-01-24T15:03:00.000+01:00

"The apologists of capital are fond of quoting the Keynesian wisdom according to which ‘in the long run we are all dead', as if that kind of frivolous dismissal of concern with the future could settle the matter. The truth, however, is that because of its necessary nihilation [sic] of the future the capital system is locked into the vicious circle of the short run, although its ideologists try to misrepresent such vice as an unsurpassable virtue. This is the reason why capital is incompatible with any meaningful attempt at comprehensive planning, even when the need for it is quite overwhelming in the troubled relations of global capitalist enterprises."
- István Mészáros,
Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), p. 104.

From: "sverre xxx" To: koenig / David Bowie / Memories of a Childhood / the Boys from Brazil ?

2006-01-18T23:18:00.000+01:00

Sverre: Ok, he’s not giving up, so a short history lesson is obviously called for. It was this sort of ’delay’ I was trying to avoid. Up until Crecy -can’t recall the year- very few nobles were killed. They used to just take each other hostage, no big deal, the money and property was merely moved from one branch of the family to another. Nobody really took it that seriously, it was ’just a game’ to them, it ment nothing to them that the peasants were slaughtered, they would soon breed more sons, stupid fools. But the terrain at Crecy, and the weather, ment the nobles in the British Army couldn’t get up front in time, the longbowmen had the time to take out their knives and axes and slaughter the French nobles to a man. Utter carnage. When the nobles fell of their horses etc., their armour stuck to the mud, making them helpless, they couldn’t get up. This has been exhaustively tested by Oxford Dons and is fact. This and the French Revolution frightened ’the establishment’ rigid, it was not ment they get killed! As their wives could only produce so many children and only a few of these survived to reach maturity, let alone those born arse-stupid or mad and of no use, they began to father illegitimate children to make up the numbers. These were kept secret, of course, but they were discretely looked after and, if they showed signs of something that could be of use, they were further helped in their careers and married into the family etc. But they mainly bred ’extra’ children to ensure the line continued despite war and pestulance, and because inbreeding causing impotance etc. This is why the ’Best Man’ came about, Peter, and the ’Honeymoon’. The best man would sleep in the same bed and also shag the wife, just to ensure something happened. This is also why we have ’Godfathers’ and ’honoury fathers’, they were, in those early days at least, probably the real father! And if the father died early these ’extra fathers’ would discretely look after and breed with the wives or married daughters if needed. And if it turned out that the wife or daughter was sterile they just used any girl available, their own children if needs be, taking mistresses or using chambermaids etc. Sex is something they just do to produce heirs, to keep the bloodline going. Anything went. Hence these sex-orgies, they were to get people used to just doing it with anybody available, without flinching. This is why I know they haven’t found anybody powerful-enough to operate The Grail, they would used it to protect themselves from war and the plagues otherwise, but without it they had to hunker-down and survive, come what may. Using these drakonian-methods, they have. They were lucky though, it turns out that today’s medical people think the lice that spread the plague didn’t like the smell of horses and thus avoided chewing on many of the nobility, they being the ones who mostly rode horses. Dratted fussy lice, to think we might have avoided many of those wars if they had PREFERED the smell of horses! The boys would obviously have to reach puberty before being initiated in the orgies. Actor James Robertson-Justice, who I met a couple of times, told me this was also to create a ranking amongst the boys -dogs and baboons do it all the time- I was told ’certain elements’ at the top public schools -he went to Eton and Oxford- would have sex with each other, even though not gay -hence me saying David might not be gay. It might be this that ’changed’ David’ in his early teens, he was only human, after all, a scared, confused young boy.

From: "sverre xxx" To: koenig

Adam Goldstone's Politics of Dancing

2005-12-30T04:29:00.001+01:00

"Dance music is all about black people and white people, gay people and straight people, stripping down and getting sweaty together. And that's very troubling to certain people. Frankly, I find [dance music] a lot more threatening than a lot of the rock music that takes pride in its supposedly anti-authoritarian pose."
- Adam Goldstone

Source: Adam Goldstone's Politics of Dancing By Kurt B. Reighley.

The Big Brother Award 2005: Lifetime Achievement Category

2005-12-29T07:53:00.000+01:00

The Big Brother Award 2005 in the "Lifetime Achievement" category goes to
the (former) Federal Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily
(Social-Democratic Party, SPD).

Otto Schily has this year received the most nominations by far - just like he did in 2001, when he won the Big Brother Award in the "Politics" category for his "Otto catalogue" (a pun referring to the well-known catalogue of Germany's biggest mail order company, as well as a package of security laws introduced by Schily). Within the jury there was wide agreement that this year Schily, as his political career is probably coming to an end, has truly earned the Lifetime award for his "merits" of many years. Still, we are much aware that by honouring him with this negative award we can hardly do justice to a personality as colourful as Otto Schily, or to his complete life effort. We regret that of the wealth of his impressive projects and initiatives, we can venerate only a selection today.
Otto Schily receives the Lifetime Big Brother Award of 2005

for the hasty introduction of biometric e-passports, with immature technology and without parliamentary authorisation;
for his "services" to the extension of European surveillance structures, at the cost of civil rights and liberties;
for his untiring endeavours to undermine data protection and informational self-determination, under the pretence of advancing security and fighting terrorism - see his anti-terror laws or "Otto catalogues" (a pun explained in the first paragraph above);
for his essential contributions to the "Major Eavesdropping Attack" (Großer Lauschangriff, the German name for audio surveillance being used on private homes in the course of state investigations), and
for his assaults on the independence of the Federal Data Protection Commissioner.
Among our laureate's major obsessions is the registration of digitalised biometric features in identity documents. As early as 1 Nov 2005, in other words, in a few days, the Federal Republic of Germany will become the first EU country to include such data in their passports. A contact-less RFID chip that can be read through radio transmissions will store personal details as well as a facial scan, and two digital fingerprints will be added in March 2007. Storing more features such as an iris scan or a genetic fingerprint is possible. The next step will be the introduction of a biometric ID card. (It is a legal requirement to carry one's ID card in Germany.)

With bold disregard of parliaments and data protection concerns and without public discussion, Schily has pushed his favourite project through on the European level - bypassing the German parliament, without a democratic mandate. Rather than giving parliament an opportunity to consider the consequences for data protection and civil rights, he forced a European directive, which achieves immediate legal status in all EU countries. In this way, Schily managed to circumvent § 4 of the German passport law which required the Bundestag (the Lower House in Germany's federal parliament) to pass a law determining the biometric data to be stored.

And it's not just us who regard Otto Schily's actions as deeply undemocratic. When the Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Peter Schaar (of the Green party) criticised this hasty introduction of e-passports through the European back door and called for a comprehensive security concept for protecting the data, Otto Schily accused him of abusing his position. It was not within Schaar's brief to judge the expediency and timing of introducing biometric features, Schily rebuked him via Deutschlandfunk radio and recommended him, overbearingly, to exercise "more restraint", and make sure not to continue abusing his position with uncalled-for objections.

With these self-righteous attacks on the independence of the Data Protection Commissioner, an advice-resistant Otto Schily obviously wanted to silence a competent critic in his own area of responsibility. But it is among the Data Protection Commissioner's duties to make the concerned public aware of the fact that until today there is no open risk analysis assessing potentials of system failure or abuse in biometric passports. A study by the German Authority for Security in Information Technology (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI) says the new technology is neither ready for use nor mature. Face recognition, for example, is very error-prone, if only for the reason that faces change considerably over the years. Thousands of people every day, it must be feared, will be rejected at airports and restricted in their freedom to travel because their digital photos or fingerprints will not be accepted by the software or not pass comparison with their real-life original. The people affected will probably be under burden of proof, and in the worst case come under awful suspicion. Schily is knowingly accepting that risk.

Electronic passports are open to abuse as well as failure. The biometric data can be read at all control points at home or abroad - and the person affected won't know who has access to this sensitive data or what will be done with it. And with the RFID reading process being contact-less, "over the air" and therefore impossible to notice, it can't really be ensured that not only border crossing points but also unauthorised third parties could collect movement profiles from unsuspecting passport holders.

The Green party in the Bundestag has so far managed to prevent Schily's plan of storing all biometric data in one central database. However, a distributed storage structure does still pose risks: With little extra effort, biometric passport data from distributed files could be automatically matched with "wanted" lists, or with fingerprints taken from known criminals or found at crime locations. And digitised facial images could be compared with video footage from public spaces to filter out suspects or wanted persons. A major step towards a general suspicion against all citizens of this country - or all Europeans, because on the EU level there are plans for a central biometric database.

In conjunction with electronic identification documents, a billion-Euro surveillance structure with high risks of abuse is being constructed. The cost of a German passport to the citizen is more than doubling, from 26 to 59 ¤ - what the state subsidy to one e-passport amounts to we won't dare to estimate. But the huge cost is out of any sensible proportion to the alleged gain in security. The e-passport with its biometric features can be manipulated, too. On the other hand, the existing German ID cards and passports are already considered as hard to fake as any in the world. Still Otto Schily presented his biometric project as a great step forward for security and as an important element in the fight against organised crime and international terrorism. With such claims, Schily can achieve no more than nurturing a dangerous illusion of security, because the e-passport does not at all offer an automatic gain in security. Neither the suicide attacks in New York nor those in Madrid and London could have been prevented with the new technology. After all, there is no biometric feature that signals, "This passport belongs to a potential terrorist - please check it before each attempted attack."

Otto Schily has not imposed the e-passport on us as a supposed security instrument, but also as an innovation project to safeguard national industry. Introducing biometrics quickly and before all the other EU member states, he alleges, is in Germany's vital interest. With it "we prove", said Schily in a speech on 2 Jun 2005, "how quickly German companies have adjusted to the new security technology and the future growth market of biometrics." Germany would take a leading role among EU countries in the area of security. However, we regard this scheme as covert subsidy to the industry, for example to Bundesdruckerei GmbH (Federal Printing Office, Ltd), chip makers Philips and Infineon, but also as premature obedience to the US government, which had been exerting massive pressure on European governments on the biometrics issue.

The biometric-digital registration of the whole population is not only a disproportionate violation of informational self-determination but also a declaration of mistrust in the population. They are subjected to a treatment normally reserved to suspects or criminals during police identification. With Schily's biometric obsession, people are degraded to mere objects of state power in the name of assumed security - without this being justified by the individuals' coming even close to being a threat. Otto Schily counters this with the cynical argument of the "dignity of the finger" having no higher value than that of the face (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 24 Aug 2004). He also likes to refer to Spanish ID cards, which already contain (non-digital) fingerprints. But he fails to mention that this measure is a relic from the fascist Franco regime. And he does not discuss the fact that these ID cards could neither prevent the bombings of the Basque ETA nor those in Madrid.

Read more/Full text: Here

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Saturnalia

2005-12-24T15:02:00.000+01:00

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Saturnalia
By Judy Andreas

Thanksgiving is nearly forgotten, Sponge Bob Square Pants has floated off into oblivion and the Santa Maria has been replaced by the Santa Claus. The stores are a symphony of Christmas spirit orchestrated by the shopping elf. The presence of Christmas is, indeed, presents. Everyone goes "buy buy." Tis the season to run up credit card debt.

On Black Friday, the Malls became mauls as the word SALE turned the counters into grab bags. Scraggly Santas coaxed children onto laps while cameras clicked a remembrance of this special occasion.

Every year, brains are racked with the annual Christmas quandary........"who" will receive "what." How much can we afford to spend and how much will we wind up spending. Nobody wants to appear cheap. Don't give cash...it's tacky. Gift certificates are a suitable subtle replacement. And, more importantly, they can be charged.

The children, having been groomed by televisions ads, are no longer merely requesting their "two front teeth, " but rather, they have donated their lengthy Christmas "wish lists" to Santa's surrogates.....Mom and Dad. Visions of X-Boxes, rather than sugar plums, dance in their heads. Billions of dollars will be spent on gifts, wrappings, candy, decorations, and greeting cards in the frenzied spending spree that appears to begin earlier every year.

Christmas trees ride on hoods of cars en route to rooms where they will be adorned, ornamented and lit. Christmas stockings enjoy their yearly hangout by the fireplace waiting to be stuffed.

In the midst of this manic merriment and joy to the world, the more contemplative ponder "What is the reason for this season?" Is it the birth of Jesus the Christ, who was born in a manger in Bethlehem on December 25th? How did Christmas devolve into little more than a mandatory ritual of gift exchanging done under the guise of family togetherness and pleasing the kiddiepoos?

Nowhere in the Bible is there any mention of the disciples singing "Happy Birthday Dear Jesus." Nowhere in the Bible is there a command to honor this day. The Bible is strangely silent. And yet, The American Book of Days, George W. Douglas, p. 658, speaks loudly on the topic. "The observance of birthdays was condemned as a heathen custom repugnant to Christians,"

Some well placed googling reveals that the origins of this holiday date back over 4000 years, centuries before the Christ child was born. The twelve days of celebrating, the Yule log, the giving of gifts and carolers going from house to house can be traced back to the early Mesopotamians.

The Mesopotamians were polytheistic. Their chief god was Marduk. Each year, as winter arrived, it was believed that Marduk would do battle with the monsters of chaos. (I cannot help but wonder if Marduk frequented the Palisades Mall in West Nyack) To assist Marduk in his struggle, the Mesopotamians held a festival for the New Year which lasted 12 days.

The ancient Persians and the Babylonians also had a similar celebration which they called Sacaea.

As daylight grew short and the Winter Solstice approached, the early Europeans feared that the sun would not return. Rituals were held to lure back the "Prodigal Sun." In Scandinavia, the return of that warm hearted orb was celebrated with a festival called Yuletide. A feast would be served around a fire burning with a Yule log.

According to some legends, "Christmas" was invented to compete with the pagan celebrations in December. The 25th of December was a sacred day for both the Romans and the Persians, whose religion was Mithraism, one of Christianity's main rivals. The Church adopted many of the Pagan rituals in their attempt to make the religion more attractive to converts.

Google as one may, there is no record of the date of Christ's birth. However, the computer of logic reveals that it is improbable if not impossible that it would have been on December 25th. Since the Biblical account states that the child was born when shepherds were "abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night" ( Luke 2:8 ), it is unlikely that shepherds in Israel would have been sleeping outside with their flocks during the month of December.

It was not until 350 AD that the Bishop of Rome, Julius 1, chose December 25th as the observance of Christmas. This was obviously influenced by the ancient Romans year end festivities to honor Saturn, their harvest god and Mithras, the god of light. The Roman feast of Saturnalia was a seven-day festival in honor of the deity Saturn. It began on December 17. Saturnalia was considered a fun and festive time for the Romans. As Christianity spread, the Church became alarmed by the continuing practice among its flock of indulging in customs such as this Saturnalian feast. If you can't beat 'em ...join 'em. Slowly but surely, the pagan ritual of using greenery to decorate homes, moved from being prohibited as idolatry to becoming an accepted custom of the festivities. Another tradition at the Saturnalia, involved exchanging candles, clay dolls, and other small gifts.

Did someone say "small?" There's an endangered word and an endangered tradition. "Small" these days describes the size of ones bank account as the calendar flips into January of the new year and people line up at the return counters of their favorite stores.

"Here she goes again, Grinch Andreas"

Not at all. Whether the reason for the season is secular or spiritual, "giving" is a separate issue. With all due respect, however, let's not confuse runaway materialism, avarice and gluttony with the spirit of generosity. Gifts come in all shapes, sizes and elements and are not necessarily located in the material. Gifts need not break the family bank nor the family's back.

Is it difficult to imagine how the gift of time must feel to the lonely?

One year I worked in a soup kitchen in New York City. Watching the endless lines of hungry people coming for their small brown bags broke my heart over and over again. And the only thing I was giving was my time.

Websites such as Giving @ Home suggest a variety of services that provide help for people whose cries would otherwise go unheard. A gift can be something as simple and economical as "listening."

Holidays are Holy Days. There are many ways that we can honor them and one another. Perhaps a little thought might be given to how these occasions can best be spent. A trip to Walmart need not be part of the ritual.

Copyright Judy Andreas.
Source : Judy Andreas' web-site, used with the authors' permission.

Reunited in the home of wickedness

2005-12-24T00:00:00.002+01:00

The man you call virtuous is not good, or if he is good toward you, he certainly is not toward God, who is nothing other than evil, who desires nothing but evil, who seeks nothing but evil. The man you speak of is simply weak, and weakness is an evil. Such a man, since he is weaker than the absolutely vicious being,... will suffer all the more... [But] the more man shall have manifested vices and failures in this world, the closer shall he come to his unchanging goal which is wickedness, and the less will he have to suffer consequently when he is reunited in the home of wickedness which I consider to be the prime matter of the world's formation.

- Donatien Alphonse François de Sade.

Is Big Brother Belgian ?

2005-12-19T14:34:00.000+01:00

Belgium is the first European country with a nation-wide electronic ID card.

Microsoft Belgium on Monday announced a new Electronic ID (eID) Early Adopter program. Under the program, Microsoft will be working with local software vendors to develop eID-based applications. Microsoft's MSN division will develop one such application — an authentication service for MSN, according to Microsoft officials.

Information on MSN's work with the Belgian government around e-ID cards was first reported by the www.mess.be [sic: uninteresting] Web site. Mess.be reported that Microsoft also might add authentication for eID cards to future Windows releases as well.

Sun Microsystems is on it too: The e-ID 'project' is the single largest government deployment of Java Card technology in Europe.

And Adobe is as well.

From Stefan Brands' superb Identity Corner web-site [recommended]:

"Two glaring problems:

The citizen certificates on each ID chipcard contain the cardholder’s name and RRN (the “rijksregistratienummer,” a single government-wide identification number for each natural person). The name and RRN are disclosed whenever a card is used at a relying party. The RRN (which has a simple structure based on the citizen’s birthday) serves as the key to numerous databases containing citizen information; on the basis of this number, all cardholder actions and movements with the eID chipcard can be electronically traced and linked (not merely by the government itself!).
The eID card specifies the following information, both visibly on the card itself and stored within the card’s chip: cardholder’s photo, surname and first names, gender, nationality, place and date of birth, signature, RRN, and the validity period of the card. In addition, the chip also stores the cardholder’s current address. Some of this information is privacy-sensitive, yet the cardholder has no control over its disclosure. (Historically, this is the same information as has always been on Belgium identity cards, and so arguably this does not constitute a reduction in privacy; however, in most countries around the world an information-rich national identity card would not pass in the first place.)

The privacy problems do not stop here. Each eID chip contains two X.509v3 identity certificates (each specifying the citizen’s name and RRN number, one for authentication and one for digital signing), as well as a basic signature key to authenticate the card with respect to the RRN. The certificates and public keys, which are assigned by the central issuing authority, by themselves serve as “omni-directional” identifiers that are globally unique. For a detailed account on the various privacy problems caused by this use of PKI, see, for instance, here.

As reported by EPIC and Privacy International in their 2004 report on Privacy & Human Rights, “the new ID card has been criticized by the Commission and civil liberties organizations as presenting a serious threat to individuals’ privacy.” In many ways, the Belgian eID card is the worst nightmare come true of the smartcard’s original inventor, Ronald Moreno. Moreno came up with the card in 1974 as a means of replacing low value cheques, and repeatedly warned of the slippery slope dangers of the card when used for other purposes. In one famous statement, Moreno warned about the potential of smartcards to become “BIG BROTHER’S LITTLE HELPER”.

At present, only a few government services have been hooked up to the Belgian eID card. Consequently, the privacy implications of the card are relatively minimal. However, as stated on the Web site, over time the eID card will give access to a wide range of government services:

“With the electronic ID card, you will be able: to access the records kept by the local authorities about you. […] to request on-line documents for which you now have to go to your administration personally […]; to exchange information on-line with your administration, private companies or organisations through a secured channel. […] to make statements or transactions (social services, banks, post, insurance…) from a distance; […] Several municipalities are already equipped with electronic windows that enable you to make requests by filling in electronic forms. […] to get in touch with the regional and federal services on the Internet. […] to make secure commercial transactions on the internet (on-line selling and buying); to affix your electronic signature on documents […]. You will also be able to send electronic messages with a legal signature, to sign contracts on the Internet: to use all applications which will be put at your disposal in the future by the State as well as by the private sector. You will be able to make bookings, registrations, payments, to place orders, to terminate contracts as well as many other things, in complete security. Company badges, electronic payment cards, on-line VAT declarations represent other examples of possible applications.

It does not take a PhD to figure out the ENORMITY OF THE PRIVACY IMPLICATIONS of using the current eID card for all these services. Apart from privacy dangers, there are also SEVERE SECURITY IMPLICATIONS, not only for citizens but also for service providers. In the words of the authors of the recent LSE report (see Chapter 18), replacing “today’s local non-electronic identifiers by universal identifiers that are processed fully electronically […] would remove the natural segmentation of traditional activity domains. As a consequence, the damage that identity thieves can cause would no longer be confined to narrow domains, nor would identity thieves be impaired any longer by the inherent slowdowns of today’s non-electronic identification infrastructure. Furthermore, service providers and other parties would be able to electronically profile individuals across all activity domains on the basis of the universal electronic identifiers that would inescapably be disclosed whenever individuals interact with service providers. […] [It] would also eliminate the ability of government service providers to function autonomously, and would introduce enormous security risks to citizens and government alike; fraudulent insiders and successful hackers would have the ability to electronically impersonate citizens across government areas, to cause false denial-of-access to citizens on a fine-grained per-transaction basis, and to cause massive identity theft damage.” The current Belgian eID card suffers from ALL these risks."

Funny post on a Forums:
"Think about it, the session-id of a site replaced by your id-card.
You can only access the internet when you insert your id-card."
...

Another opinion in responses to “The problem with the Belgian eID card” also at Identity Corner web-site:
"How is it possible that a country whose cryptographers gave us, among others, the AES (the Advanced Encryption Standard; see here for details) can field such a horribly bad identity chipcard infrastructure? Are the legislators doing this on purpose, or are they just so asleep at the switch that they don’t think of tapping into the cryptographic talent present within their own borders in order to propose something better?"

A new Belgian electronic ID card contains typos introduced purposely to confound potential fraudsters, Luc Vanneste, General Director Population and Institutions of the Belgian Home Office, proudly announced this week.
To trick fraudsters, the Home Office has introduced three circular arcs on the card - just beneath the identity photos - where you will find the name of the country in the official languages spoken in Belgium - French, Dutch and German, as well as in English. But instead of 'Belgien' in German, the ID card incorrectly uses the name 'Belgine' and instead of 'Belgium' in English, the card reads 'Belguim'. Vanneste has promised other errors will be printed on the card to "further confuse fraudsters". With any luck, these will not be revealed.<= Doofus !

Nationmaster:

All Belgians that are 12 and above are issued a national identification card. Belgians 15 and above are required to always carry it with them unless they are within a 200 meter range of their homes. (Foreigners too must at all times be able to provide identification, either a passport, or an ID issued by the Belgian Government)

Belgians aren't required to show their IDs unless dealing with:

Particular Governmental Agencies
The police
Authorised bus and train personnel

From a Belgian UK resident: An argument that is used against ID cards here is "function creep": the notion that more and more data will be introduced, making ID cards in effect more of an intrusion into personal life and privacy of the individual.

Companies involved in the Belgian electronic ID card project include Zetes (manufacturer of the card), Axalto (ex-SchlumbergerSema, provider of the chip operating system and secure modules), Steria (provider of the exploitation structure in the federal PKI environment), and Certipost (a subsidiary of Belgacom and the Belgian Post Group providing Certification services).

Oh and also Belgium is a NICE country !

A Quote from Emil Mihai Cioran

2005-11-28T07:40:00.000+01:00

« Les hommes travaillent généralement trop pour pouvoir encore rester eux-mêmes. Le travail : une malédiction que l'homme a transformée en volupté. Oeuvrer de toutes ses forces pour le seul amour du travail, tirer de la joie d'un effort qui ne mène qu'à des accomplissements sans valeur, estimer qu'on ne peut se réaliser autrement que par le labeur incessant — voilà une chose révoltante et incompréhensible. Le travail permanent et soutenu abrutit, banalise et rend impersonnel. Le centre d'intérêt de l'individu se déplace de son milieu subjectif vers une fade objectivité ; l'homme se désintéresse alors de son propre destin, de son évolution intérieure, pour s'attacher à n'importe quoi : l'œuvre véritable, qui devrait être une activité de permanente transfiguration, est devenue un moyen d'extériorisation qui lui fait quitter l'intime de son être. Il est significatif que le travail en soit venu à désigner une activité purement extérieure : aussi l'homme ne s'y réalise-t-il pas — il réalise. »
- Emil Cioran : Sur les cimes du désespoir

The Internet and other stupid utopias

2005-11-27T22:23:00.000+01:00

"Over the next decade, computer networks will expand their bandwidth by factors of thousands and reconstruct the entire US economy in their image," wrote George Gilder, the right-wing Timothy Leary of the Internet boom, in 1994. "TV will expire and transpire into a new cornucopia of choice and empowerment . . . Hollywood and Wall Street will totter and diffuse to all points of the nation and the globe. . . . The most deprived ghetto child in the most blighted project will gain educational opportunities exceeding those of today's suburban preppie."

Instead, within ten years the hallucinatory hype ended in a wave of lay-offs, litigation, and consolidation of media ownership. Today the Internet looks less like utopia and more like a battlefield that reflects all the conflicts of the real world.

Source: The Ten Stupidest Utopias!

Rise, from Pulverize !

2005-11-16T14:18:00.000+01:00

The physics of 9/11 — including how fast and symmetrically one of the World Trade Center buildings fell — prove that official explanations of the collapses are wrong, says a Brigham Young University physics professor.

In fact, it's likely that there were "pre-positioned explosives" in all three buildings at ground zero, says Steven E. Jones.

In a paper posted online Tuesday and accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, Jones adds his voice to those of previous skeptics, including the authors of the Web site www.wtc7.net, whose research Jones quotes. Jones' article can be found at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.

Stuart Johnson, Deseret Morning News

"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three (WTC) buildings," BYU physics professor Steven E. Jones says.

Jones, who conducts research in fusion and solar energy at BYU,
is calling for an independent, international scientific investigation "guided
not by politicized notions and constraints but rather by observations and calculations.

"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes —
which were actually a diversion tactic," he writes.
"Muslims are (probably) not to blame for bringing down the WTC buildings after all," Jones writes.

As for speculation about who might have planted the explosives,
Jones said, "I don't usually go there.
There's no point in doing that until we do the scientific investigation."

Previous investigations, including those of FEMA, the 9/11 Commission and NIST (the National Institutes of Standards and Technology), ignore the physics and chemistry of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, to the Twin Towers and the 47-story building known as WTC 7, he says. The official explanation — that fires caused structural damage that caused the buildings to collapse — can't be backed up by either testing or history, he says.

Read on full article: here,
Read Steven E. Jones draft 'Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?' from here.

Moi, m’excuser beaucoup

2005-11-10T09:45:00.000+01:00

"À partir du moment où l’on contredit la pensée humanitaire-majoritaire, cela signifie bien que l’on est un adepte de la théorie de la supériorité d’une race sur les autres, n’est-ce pas ? ... Moi m’excuser beaucoup pour cet oubli gravissime."

C'est un type bien ce Maurice G. Dantec après tout !
You can read his apologies from here

Jean Raspail et Le Figaro sont poursuivis par la LICRA

2005-11-10T09:40:00.000+01:00

Valeurs actuelles révèle que Jean Raspail et Le Figaro sont poursuivis par la LICRA, présidée par le député européen UMP Patrick Gaubert, pour “provocation à la haine raciale” pour avoir publié cette tribune en juin 2004. L’audience aura lieu à Paris le 16 septembre.

"J’ai tourné autour de ce thème comme un maître-chien mis en présence d’un colis piégé. Difficile de l’aborder de front sans qu’il vous explose à la figure. Il y a péril de mort civile. C’est pourtant l’interrogation capitale. J’ai hésité. D’autant plus qu’en 1973, en publiant Le Camp des saints, j’ai déjà à peu près tout dit là-dessus." ...

Lire l'article integral de Jean Raspail: La patrie trahie par la République

93390:mafiaketur:lachervocom:hosgeldinizapanam

2005-11-10T07:56:00.000+01:00

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris

2005-11-09T10:35:00.000+01:00

In it's entirety, a must read article, a prescient prediction written by Theodore Dalrymple for CITY Journal in the Autumn of 2002.

Any of you, read it all now or again: The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris.

Racaille, an UMP major[ity] keyword !

2005-11-09T07:48:00.000+01:00

"Le parti de la majorité confirme avoir mené une campagne marketing en utilisant le système de liens sponsorisés Adwords de Google. Des mots-clés évoquant la situation de violence dans les banlieues pointent vers une pétition de soutien à Nicolas Sarkozy.
En tapant «violence», «émeutes», «banlieue», «voitures brûlées», ou encore «racaille» dans le moteur de recherche de Google, nombre d'internautes ont eu, ce week-end, la surprise de voir apparaître un lien publicitaire pointant directement sur le site officiel de l'UMP. Plus précisément sur une pétition de soutien «à la politique de fermeté» de son président, le ministre de l'Intérieur Nicolas Sarkozy, face aux affrontements dans les banlieues.
Marketing politique ou mauvaise blague d'internautes revanchards (et fortunés...) après la campagne d'e-mailing controversée réalisée par le parti de la majorité début octobre? Renseignements pris auprès de l'UMP, il s'agit effectivement d'une campagne orchestrée par le prestataire technique officiel de l'UMP, l'Enchanteur des nouveaux médias."

Source:ZDnet France

A quote from ZDnet.fr Talkback:

"Ecoutez, vous pouvez pas arrêter de chialer ou de dégueuler littéralement sur sarko, critiquez quelqu'un qui ne fait que son travail, est en plus qui a mon goût le fait bien, et je ne suis pas inscrit dans le parti de l'ump alors je le dit en toute objectivité. Concentrez vous plutôt sur les problèmes concrets, au lieu de vous plaindre "oh mon dieu, il a dit le mot racaille ayez, ayez il l'a dit, on va pouvoir enfin l'associé au FN ayez", moi je trouve justement qu'il est de son temps et non pas dans l'hypocrisie générale, tous le monde utilise se mot pourtant et vous vous arrêtez seulement à ça alors que dans nos rue il y a du racisme envers les blancs, pas que des voitures brûlées car les médias ne le montre pas, dans la rue on se fait raquettés, dans la rue on se fait insulté de "sale français", et dans la rue encore on ne se sent pas en sécurité en temps normal, alors imaginez en ce moment. Je suis lycéens en terminale stt, et le discours s'est installé largement avant ces événements, et je dois dire que nombre de mes camarades, leur sont arrivés la même chose, nombre de mes camarades n'osent pas dire ce qu'ils pensent sous peine de représailles, ou des gens comme vous, les critiqueraient, les jugeraient et se feraient traités de raciste, alors que c'est tout le contraire, réfléchissez un peut regarder et arrête d'être hypocrite, arrêté de vous mentir et de nous mentir, les mots tabous ne sont plus d'ordres aujourd'hui."

Capitaine flames

2005-11-09T00:00:00.000+01:00

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the failures at the top in strife-ridden France

Pourquoi la France brûle.

L'hypothèse d'émeutes "organisées" paraît peu vraisemblable.

Eloquentes expulsions

Clichy-sous-bois, Entre provocations et répressions policières

Le point sur les violences en province

Bouna et Zyed : morts pour rien

Not the answer

We don't all want new mosques - that's only important for a few people, yet that's what the state does.

--
Some readers quotes found on the Nouvel Obs (French only) web-site forum :

"La réalité des chiffres !!

Un "chouffeur" est un ado (13-16 ans) qui gagne 100 euros par jour en surveillant une des entrées des cités "sensibles", pour protéger les trafiquants de drogue.

Faites les comptes, cela fait 3.000 euros pas mois (pour 30 jours de "travail"), soit un salaire de cadre pour un ado sans diplôme ni compétence, et net d'impôts bien entendu.

L'Etat, de Mitterrand à Chirac en passant par Jospin est coupable d'avoir laissé le trafic se développer. L'argent n'ayant pas d'odeur, une partie atterrit dans des caisses électorales, car comment "empêcher" un "jeune" de soutenir un élu local, qui n'a pas forcément envie de savoir d'où vient l'argent ?

Cette criminalité mafieuse est en train de s'insurger contre un projet de Sarkozy: faire des contrôles fiscaux sur les caïds. Voila pourquoi nos voitures brûlent, voila pourquoi nos pompiers, nos policiers sont caillassés, blessés, pris pour cible avec des armesa à feu.

Les caïds ont peur ! Al Capone est tombé grâce à un contrôle fiscal, et ils le savent.

Alors, ils envoient leurs dealeurs, leurs chouffeurs semer le trouble pour faire du chantage: la fin des désordres contre l'abandon des contrôles fiscaux.

PS 1:
"Chouf" en arabe veut dire "regarder"

PS 2:
Le "travail" du chouffeur consiste à glander au coin d'une rue en regardant les voitures qui entrent dans la cité, à utiliser son portable dès qu'une voiture inconnue s'approche (cela pourrait être des policiers en civil), et à sauter sur son scooter pour suivre la voiture suspecte. Pas fatiguant, plutôt rentable, et quasiment sans risque..."

--

"Enfants de Clichy

Les jeunes de Clichy ont été victimisés : ils cherchaient soi-disant à échapper à la police, les pauvres. "Ils ont été suppliciés"... a glapi Libé aujourd'hui. Pour faire sangloter le lecteur, Libé les a appelés des "gamins". Des gamins de 5 ans ? Non, de 18, qui roulent en scooter, font déjà l'amour et peuvent déjà tuer. Des enfants, quoi. Des moutards. Des bébés. Des nourrissons. Quasiment des foetus. Des anges de vitrail. Des nymphes. Des chrysalides. L'innocence à l'état pur.

Il est maintenant juste établi que les "ados" n'étaient pas poursuivis : ils sont morts de leur belle mort. Il est seulement dommage que leurs parents ne leur ait pas appris que le courant industriel à haut voltage, c'est dangereux. Problème d'éducation. On m'a appris ça, quand j'étais petit.

Donc pas de bavure. Et par conséquent, toutes ces émeutes, qui ont eu lieu après ce petit fait divers, ont eu lieu pour RIEN.

Et le quinqua d'Epinay, cogné à mort par des petits truands, c'est pas une bavure puisque les truands ne sont pas flics. Sa mort, c'est rien. La preuve, c'est que la gauche s'en fiche."

--

"Ou l'on découvre que le procureur de république de Saint Denis ment.
Apres nous avoir dit que les jeunes décédés n'étaient pas poursuivis, voici qu'ils nous dit que deux jeunes ont été arrêtés simultanément dans un cimetière proche du transformateur mortel.
Les policiers, dixit le procureur, auraient alors cru qu'il s'agissait des deux jeunes réfugiés dans le transfo.

Mais comment ces flics pouvaient-ils rechercher deux jeunes s'ils ne les poursuivaient pas ?"

--

"la Jungle ? de quel côté ?

Bon c’est sûr qu’à regarder le journal télévisé et écouter certaines radios « la voie de son maître » on devient un peu obtus ?

Pour certains la France c’est l’Irak et pour d'autres les flics sont les défenseurs de la veuve et de l’orphelin et pour d’autre encore certains voyous seraient des moutons conduits à l’abattoir.

La vérité est au milieu, peut-on nier, que dans la police il y ait des flics qui en groupe jouent la provocation (avec la complicité de leur démagogue de ministre, être Calife à la place du Calife au prix d’une petite « guerre civile »), certes non et je l’ai constaté à plusieurs occasions.
Dans ce corps de fonctionnaires il y a une forte proportion de gens qui sont proches de l’extrême droite, ou du moins qui croient aux valeurs rédemptrices de la matraque. A voir l’équipement et leur nombre on comprend qu’ils sont avant tout équipés contre les risques de révoltes urbaines plutôt que contre la grande délinquance.
Les jeunes et moins jeunes qui jouent les caïds et qui pour certains se révoltent à juste titre, ce qui leur manque le plus c’est une conscience politique. Mettre à sac le lieu où ils vivent cela mérite l’arrivée en masse d’un groupe de psychologues. La bonne démarche serait d’aller demander des comptes à l’Assemblée Nationale ou à Matignon, pourquoi 23 % de chômage des jeunes alors que l’on prolonge la durée d’activité des seniors, que la période probatoire avant un CDI passe à deux ans (va justifier d’un emploie stable à ton propriétaire sur un bail de trois – si tu peux te payer un loyer), etc...

On ne peut justifier la mise à mort d’un homme (jeune ou vieux) par des individus au comportement barbare (Orange Mécanique montrait bien les dérives annoncées de notre société néolibérale violente par essence). Mais on ne peut pas plus justifier les discours simplistes d’un ministre repris illico par les médias (faut-y être si « naïf » que ça pour être journaliste ?) qui accuse deux adolescents qui grillent dans un transfo EDF d’être des délinquants patentés.
Ils n’ont jamais eu affaire à la police, la justice, et n’avaient apparemment commis aucun acte répréhensible. Question, se sont-ils fait courser pour le « fun », comme je l’ai vu faire il y a quelques années à Rosny sous Bois ? C’est à la justice de faire la lumière sur cette affaire.

Pour ma part, mais ceci est strictement personnel, je n’ai aucune confiance dans la police de ce pays dont la dérive est voulue et même souhaitée par certains (Chérie, fais leur peur !). Sarkosy le Petit souhaite ces dérives, il provoque l’ensemble des populations des banlieues par des propos indignes d’un ministre de la République, avec la complaisance des médias (Le fameux « parler vrai », le Parisien dans les années 75-80 tenait les mêmes propos anti-jeunes).

Cet homme est dangereux parce que son appétit de pouvoir est immense, ce gouvernement est indigne parce qu’il redistribue les biens de la Nation aux petits copains et effrontément. Ce ministre qui raccompagne les enfants aux frontières, qui laisse des centaines de réfugiés se balader sans aide dans le Calaisis, qui poursuit les associations qui font œuvre d’humanité a supprimé la police de proximité pour la remplacer par des Rambos qui sont une provocation permanente par leur présence auprès des plus démunis.
J'ai habité la banlieue pendant plus de trente ans, je l'ai vu se déliter du temps de Pasqua, Pandrau, les maires de droite, pour la plupart, ont cassé le tissus associatif pour garder plus facilement le pouvoir, ils ont détruit la cohésion sociale et aujourd'hui ils crient au loup. Pour le reste, le café du commerce reste ouvert, bon courage."

--

"Alliance révélatrice

Dans l'affaire du casino d'Amnéville, où un maire tentait d'échapper aux griffes du prédateur au profit de sa commune, Nicolas Sarkozy vient de se ranger derrière Tranchant, en refusant qu'une SEM ne gère un casino. Ce nouveau cathéchisme en faveur d'un affairiste démontre clairement d'où viendra l'argent de la future campagne présidentielle.Cette fois, vous pouvez annoncer au petit Nicolas, qu'il vient de perdre la Lorraine.Tout le reste,gesticulations et visites ministérielles , bavures policières et déclarations,tout le reste donc, est moins révélateur que les alliances: ce monsieur est vénal et cède aux pressions du capital; il n'est pas digne de confiance, il vient de perdre nos voix;il ne sera pas président."

--

we are grovelling in the vomit of our masters

2005-11-04T08:55:00.000+01:00

we are grovelling in the vomit of our masters
Originally uploaded by MatthewBradley.

by Matthew Bradley - Some rights reserved.

Urban Legends

2005-10-31T19:22:00.000+01:00

Has a man has been living at a Paris airport since 1988?