This Summer Could Be A Real Riot
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 24, 2010 by admin in Politics
Saturday, April 24th, 2010They say that when things heat up in this country, all the scum seems to rise to the top.
There’s an old expression in southern political banter that goes something like “seems like when things heat up in this country, all the scum rises to the top“. It does seem like things are heating up lately; everybody from survivalist nutjobs to the New York Times are saying so. That NYT piece talks not only about the tea party movement, but “A Sprawling Rebellion” that seems to be spreading across the entire liberal/conservative spectrum. I’ve mentioned revolution with a little humor for a while, but I usually do so in jest; you have to understand that I live in the state that spawns the weird “Christian” Militias you hear about in the news. This is different though. The unrest in Greece, Thailand and Kyrgyzstan has all been largely driven by economics and employment/labor issues, and aside from the paranoia that some spread about the proposed bill that would supposedly make domestic internment camps possible right around the same time that a US Army Brigade is being deployed on US soil under Homeland Security control, the fact is that when the global investment ratings firm Moody’s is worried about civil unrest in the states, maybe we should take pause too. And it’s not just the possibility of riots in a long hot summer of unemployment to think about. In this Chris Hedges piece, the not-very-popular but always insightful Noam Chomsky points out that “The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen…Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.” In fact, I’d be willing to bet that in spite of his comical appearance and peculiar speech mannerisms, the guy in the video below would have no trouble getting elected if he ran for office today. Read the rest of this entry »
Patriotic In Pink: Jodie Evans vs. Karl Rove
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 19, 2010 by admin in Politics
Monday, April 19th, 2010Pink is the new Red White and Blue
 I’m sorry, but Karl Rove must be gay if being handcuffed by Jodie Evans of Code Pink frightens him that much. |
What’s balding, hideously ugly, and cries like a schoolgirl at the sight of women in pink hats? No, not Sméagol from Lord of the Rings. The correct answer is of course Karl Rove, one of the first people not named Dick to be enough of one to earn his place on Dickipedia. Although while hidden in the fortress of White House security for eight years, he seemed a powerful and confident man eager to endanger America’s own intelligence agents for purely political reasons and hide behind executive privilege when held in contempt by congress, when left to depend on his own manliness, he tends to react like a frightened – if rather ugly – little bunny. As evidence, view the video clip below in which Rove leaps back from the table at a book signing when redheaded, freckle-faced, Midwestern-mom-type Jodie Evans presents him with a set of handcuffs suggesting that she’s going to arrest him for war crimes. In spite of the fact that I am in 100% support of the anti-war efforts of the group Evans co-founded, Code Pink, Evans herself comes across as almost as nutty on the other end of the partisan spectrum. I guess when you’re going after Napoleonic pathological liars whose best friends call you Turd Blossom, more extreme measures are required to achieve your ends. For the record, George Bush isn’t the only person who loves Karl Rove, see iLoveKarlRove.com, a site run by Kat Kinsman until December 2009. Perhaps Kinsman’s love for Rove faded when she found out that he was not only married, but gay. Read the rest of this entry »
Where Do Your Tax Dollars Go?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 15, 2010 by admin in Politics
Thursday, April 15th, 2010Great. You paid your taxes again. So what is Uncle Sam doing with your money?
 This is the simplest and most accurate chart, in our opinion. |
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember a time in America when if someone said they were having a tea party, they were probably under ten years old, and pretending. I guess things haven’t changed that much; these days if someone’s talking about having a tea party, they probably have the intelligence of someone under ten years old, and I suppose being delusional is kind of like pretending. It’s pretty amazing that we get so riled up about taxes at all, we pay significantly lower taxes than most of the world. It’s arguably because of our revolutionary roots, but I think we’ve lost sight of an important detail: American revolutionaries weren’t just protesting taxes, they were protesting taxation without representation. If a contemporary tea partier had a better grasp of that fact, they would have been just as angry at the last (or last several) administrations as they are at the current one. The thing is, the vast majority of these angry people are really just that – angry people. Today’s New York Times Polling the Tea Party survey highlights that fact in an odd way; the majority of tea party supporters are Republican, white, male, married and older than 45. Sounds like a recipe for being angry to me, especially when a black man with an apparent sense of humanity is in office. Respondents also openly expressed that they believe the president is a Muslim socialist. Apparently they’ve never met Rahm Emmanuel or other rabidly capitalist key White House staffers. And in my opinion, the fact that the poll also suggests that many tea partiers are college-educated highlights nothing more than a failure of the educational system. Heh. Had to get that one in. So in honor of you having paid your taxes once again this year, we thought we’d help you figure out where your money went. There are lots of clever graphs and charts out there like Death and Taxes (2.4MB jpg!), which is a little too pictographic for my tastes, but is probably cool to have on the wall to ponder over time. There are also annoyingly distorted charts like this one from Turbotax that not only makes it look like your company’s CEO pays all the taxes, but uses the color pink for the defense budget. Personally, I found this info from the National Priorities Project to be the most straightforward, and they also clarify who’s paying the taxes, not just where your income tax dollars go. Read the rest of this entry »
A Chain Is Only As Strong As It’s Wikiest Link – US Military Video Of Civilian “Collateral Damage”
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 8, 2010 by admin in Politics
Thursday, April 8th, 2010It’s been suggested that I look rather comfortable in a tin foil hat, but even the Icelandic government and Glenn Greenwald agree that sites like WikiLeaks.org and Cryptome.org may be the last hope for journalistic freedom
 This is the point in the video (see below) where a crew member says “yeah, that’s a weapon”, referring to the journalist’s camera. |
The old expression “what you don’t know won’t hurt you” takes on a different meaning when “what you don’t know” is that there’s a trigger-happy American Apache helicopter crew waiting for permission to shoot at you with 30mm cannons and Hellfire missiles because they’ve somehow mistaken your camera for an AK-47 and an RPG. We joked last week that maybe the US military had set up the whistleblower site WikiLeaks as a brilliantly recursive disinformation exercise, but it would be hard to find the disinformation value in releasing a video that clearly shows that you lied publicly and boldly about your role in killing innocent civilians in an urban combat area. If you’re an American, and if you still think we have any kind of credible news media or that our government exercises anything remotely like transparency, I urge you to read Glenn Greenwald’s The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters. In it, he points out that “at exactly the same time that investigative journalism has collapsed, public and private efforts to manipulate public opinion have proliferated“. Which is a fact that, in my opinion, effectively counterbalances any criticism of what the site does, because so far, the site’s developers have only shown alignment with one principle that could be considered political: exposing secret and deceitful programs perpetrated by governments and large organizations. WikiLeaks is getting a lot of support from the Icelandic government to create a “journalism haven”, and God knows journalists need one. Over 800 journalists have been killed on the job since 1992. So why is Iceland behind the idea? The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative explains – among other things – that it was failure of the free press in Iceland that allowed the massive government and banking corruption that brought the country to complete economic collapse. Sound like a familiar setup? I’m sometimes accused of looking rather comfortable in a tinfoil hat, but this isn’t “internet crank” material, this may be the first ripple in a new wave of journalistic integrity. Watch the videos below, if you have the stomach for it. Be warned though, you will see innocent civilians like yourself getting killed. Read the rest of this entry »
Open Source Fearmongering: What If Everything I Told You Were A Lie?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on April 3, 2010 by admin in Politics
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010The Army’s assertion that whistleblower site WikiLeaks.org is a potential hotbed of disinformation makes me wonder if they created themselves. As William Burroughs said, “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on”
You may have seen the episode in the original Star Trek series in which Spock said something like that to a female android, leaving her smoldering in the ears as she short-circuited from the paradox. Recent press about the web site WikiLeaks has left me with a little smoke coming from my ears for similar reasons. I first heard of the whistleblower site a couple of years ago, and as a countercultural, nearly apolitical sort of person thought “Hmmm. That’s a very cool idea”. If you haven’t heard of WikiLeaks, they publish “anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors“, as this Wikipedia entry puts it (don’t be confused by WikiLeaks’ name however, it is in no way connected with Wikipedia). One of the main things that makes it possible for the site to remain in operation is the intentionally unregulated nature of the internet. By spreading the documents across many servers in many locations, the teeth are removed from most countries’ or companies’ ability to file injunctions of any kind against the site. Leave it to the US Military to put the “dis” in “disinformation” though. When WikiLeaks released documents revealing how the US Army was rendering roadside bombs in Iraq useless with radio jamming, the Army was understandably not too happy. In fact, if you believe the information shared on WikiLeaks, the Army assembled this 33 page document (556KB, PDF) assessing the site as a security threat. In its own un-self-conscious doublespeak, it then ironically outlines how the site’s ability to tell the truth and expose corruption is a threat to truth and democracy, going on to point out that the site uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers” and that the “identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action” targeting these people could render the site ineffective. They also point out – letting the paranoid flag fly – that the site itself is a perfect platform to “post fabricated information, misinformation, disinformation, or propaganda and could be used in perception management and influence operations to convey a positive or negative message to specific target audiences“. Which, at the end of the day, leaves me with my own nagging paranoia that maybe Army Intelligence started the site in the first place, and is just playing their part in the elaborate con. What do you think? Should a site like WikiLeaks be allowed to exist and disseminate information so we can assess its truth for ourselves, or do we need a government or agency to assess it for us?