Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find money cannot be eaten. - Cree Prophecy

[Note: A new, insidious, cookie has appeared and this one is more nasty than the previous one. Rather than get into 'what the cookie does,' due to legalese, I will share with you, HOW TO LOCATE and ELIMINATE IT, because your Browser is not equipped to deal with it and OS makes no difference. - Click Here for the Fix and please bookmark the site, and do this on, at least, a weekly basis ~@~]

Franklin to Perform with Torture War Criminal
Martin Rowson cartoon showing Condi saying, "as I was saying Isn't Democracy Wonderful with Iraq and Iran in the background
Martin Rowson
Will Sweet Condi & the Asspirate Neocon Band sing:
"We're Gonna Give Christianity A Bad Name?"

According to a Senate Intelligence Committee Memo, George Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was the first person to verbally approve torture during July 2002.

Aretha Franklin to perform with Condoleezza Rice

Queen of Soul and former US secretary of state join forces for fundraising concert. In other news: Solomon Burke to team up with Colin Powell

Sean Michaels, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 July 2010 10.14 BST, Article history

The "Queen of Soul" is to team up with the, er, former queen of the US state department at a concert in Philadelphia next month. Aretha Franklin will duet with former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, performing songs such as Natural Woman and Say a Little Prayer.

The concert, a fundraising event for inner city children, takes place on 27 July, at the Mann Centre for the Performing Arts. Franklin and Rice will appear as guests of the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Rossen Milanov. Rice will accompany the orchestra for Mozart's Piano Concerto in D minor, before joining Franklin to perform classic soul anthems and a selection of arias.

Rice, 55, served as national security advisor and then secretary of state under George W Bush, and was the first African-American woman to hold either post. But she is also a celebrated amateur pianist, who once considered becoming a professional musician. In 2008, Rice performed for Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

Franklin, 68, is a life-long Democrat who did not vote for Rice's former employer. But the two seem to have put their political differences aside to collaborate for the concert. "Ms Rice is a consummate classical pianist and since I sing the arias, I thought we could do something," Franklin said. "A bipartisan effort for our favourite charities."

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jul/01/aretha-franklin-duet-condoleezza-rice

Condoleezza Rice 'was first Bush official to approve torture of terror suspects'
By MAIL FOREIGN SERVICE, Last updated at 3:40 PM on 23rd April 2009

Rice, Cheney Approved Waterboarding
The Associated Press reports that the highest Bush administration officials signed off on waterboarding

Rice Delivered OK to Waterboarding
Made earliest known [TORTURE] decision while serving as national security adviser

WASHINGTON — As national security adviser to former President George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice verbally approved the CIA's request to subject alleged al-Qaida terrorist Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002, the earliest known decision by a Bush administration official to OK use of the simulated drowning technique.

Stop the Bullshit, else,

The State Department Is Infested With Communists

I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

U.S. Telecoms Caught Illegally Spying On U.S. Citizens

A Steve Bell cartoon on the allegations against Russian spies
Steve Bell on the allegations against Russian spies - Caption: "Good God! He's spying on us!"

Kremlin investigating arrest of 10 people alleged to be part of 'deep cover' network in suburban America - Steve Bell, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 June 2010 01.47 BST

FBI's Russian spy ring claims are 'contradictory'
Updated Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/29/fbi-russian-spy-claims-contradictory

Moscow says it is investigating the arrest by the FBI of 10 alleged Russian spies who were part of a 'deep cover' network

Chris McGreal in Washington and Luke Harding in Moscow, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 June 2010 09.47 BST, Article history

FBI says Russian spies found living in suburban homes Link to this video

Russia today said it was investigating the arrest by the FBI of 10 alleged spies who were part of a "long term, deep cover" network of agents and spent years adopting American identities and gathering intelligence.

In its first reaction to the scandal, Russia's foreign ministry this morning described as "contradictory" FBI claims that the Russian spies had sought out sensitive information on nuclear weapons, the gold market and even personnel changes at the CIA.

"They have not explained anything to us. I hope they will do so. The moment when all this was done was chosen quite smartly," the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said at a news conference today, according to Interfax news agency. [snip]

Mossad’s modus operandi exposed -
from art students to kiosk operators

By Wayne Madsen, Online Journal Contributing Writer, Jan 8, 2009, 00:24
Source: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4210.shtml

(WMR) -- On December 19, 2008, WMR reported on the 9/11-related activities of an Israeli “art student” in the United States. The art students were suspected by federal law enforcement and U.S. intelligence agencies of being Israeli spies.

WMR reported that a ”female Israeli ‘art student’ who lived on an Israeli kibbutz for a year and who is also a British national, told our source in London that in the weeks prior to 9/11 she was ‘selling art in Washington [DC]. Before her arrival in Washington, the Israeli art student said she was in the San Francisco Bay Area attending college as an “art student” but denied selling any art while in the Bay Area. She also said she spent some time in South Carolina prior to 9/11. A leaked Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report on the activities of Israeli art students prior to 9/11 revealed that female Israeli art students were active in Palo Alto and Fresno. The British-Israeli art student said that on the morning of 9/11 she was standing outside the Pentagon. She admitted she never saw a plane hit the building but saw a huge ‘hole’ in the building after an explosion. The art student also said that she was in Times Square in New York the next day, September 12, attending a memorial service for the 9/11 victims. She said she had a ticket to fly out of New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on September 12 but that because commercial planes were grounded she had to find another way to leave the country. The art student sad she ‘had to get out’ of the United States because she did not have a proper visa to continue working in the United States. She said she left the United States over the Canadian border. When quizzed why she left so quickly after 9/11, the art student replied that she ‘had to leave cause the United States Government thought Israelis had something to do with 9/11.’”

WMR has learned that the one-time Israeli art student who was active in selling art in the months preceding 9/11 and was outside the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11 is now operating two market kiosks in London that primarily sell women’s handbags. They are situated in Notting Hill and Camden in two neighborhoods where a number of people from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Arab countries reside.

On December 31, 2008, two Israelis who worked in a hair products kiosk at the Rosengaard Mall in Odense, Denmark, on the island of Funen, were shot and slightly wounded by a Danish assailant who was born in Lebanon and was of Palestinian origin. One of the Israelis owned the kiosk, which sold Dead Sea hair and skin care products, a usual front for Israeli intelligence operations. Apparently, the Israelis’ activities had caught the attention of Middle Eastern youth in Odense days before the shooting and the two Israelis had been harassed. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service was reported to have been notified about the incident by Odense police. The two Israelis, in their 20s, had only been in Denmark for about a week.

Israeli charge d’affaires Dan Oryan said it was disturbing that the two Israelis were targeted merely because they were Israelis. Oryan’s reaction is in keeping with other Israeli denials and obfuscation that their young nationals are engaged in intelligence operations while masquerading as art students, mall kiosk vendors, and moving company employees.

The National Security Agency (NSA) and other U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that Israeli mall kiosks are suspected Israeli intelligence fronts. However, in bust after bust, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau of the Homeland Security Department, headed by Israeli agent-of-influence Michael Chertoff, merely deports Israelis who work illegally on tourist visas. No Israelis are ever charged with espionage or other major crimes in a trial.

Israeli national Ohad Cohen entered the United States multiple times in 2004 to manage kiosks and supervise other Israelis, all working in the United States illegally, at Oakview Mall in Omaha and Gateway Westfield Mall in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nine Israelis were arrested and all were deported without a trial. Cohen was forced to forfeit over $35,000 he made from kiosk sales in Nebraska.

In December 2004, the FBI and ICE arrested 15 Israelis at various Minnesota mall kiosks for selling illegally copied electronic games software. Yonatan Cohen was charged with illegal copyright violations. Also in 1994, ICE agents arrested three Israelis working at a mall kiosk in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Grand Forks and Omaha are home to major Air Force bases.

On October 31, 2001, nine Israelis were arrested by Immigration and Naturalization Service agents while working at a Toledo, Ohio, area mall kiosk selling Israeli toy helicopters called “Zoom Copters.” Seven Israelis were released but two, Yaniv Hani and Oren Behr, were deemed “special interest” cases in a federal law enforcement probe of terrorism activities and the 9/11 attack. Hani and Behr told the Associated Press that FBI agents asked them if they were spies for the Israeli government. FBI agents also asked the Israelis detailed questions about their Israeli military service.

Mark Regev, then a spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington and now a shill for the government of Israel in Jerusalem, denied that any Israelis arrested in the United States were espionage agents.

After 9/11, some 30 Israelis were arrested in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia, Missouri, for being in the United States illegally. Other Israeli kiosk workers were detained in California. The Israelis said they were hired by a Miami Beach-based company called Quality Sales to work at shopping mall kiosks in Missouri.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Steve Bell - The Guardian - Israeli troops confront flotilla activists - Tuesday 1 June 2010

Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug from underneath the feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up one or two synagogues here and there [? 9/11 ?], I don’t care. And I don’t mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal… What you lot don’t understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it. - Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon

Break the Silence - Who Is the Terrorist?
BREAK THE SILENCE - WHO IS TERRORIST - Photograph: Bill Perry, VVAW/VFP/IVAW

Republicans and Democrats are Lying Hypocrites
Who Support Selective Terrorism Against U.S. Military
U.S.S. Liberty Memorial
http://www.ussliberty.org/g/libmemorial.gif
Remember the U.S.S. Liberty
34 U.S. Military Dead, 171 Wounded
http://www.ussliberty.org/

The Assault on the USS Liberty Still Covered Up After 26 Years

By James M. Ennes Jr.
Washington Report On Middle East Affairs
June 1993, Page 19 - CLICK HERE FOR FULL TEXT

Twenty-six years have passed since that clear day on June 8, 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty with aircraft and torpedo boats, killing 34 young men and wounding 171. The attack in international waters followed over nine hours of close surveillance. Israeli pilots circled the ship at low level 13 times on eight different occasions before attacking. Radio operators in Spain, Lebanon, Germany and aboard the ship itself all heard the pilots reporting to their headquarters that this was an American ship. They attacked anyway. And when the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime.

There is no question that this attack on a U.S. Navy ship was deliberate. This was a coordinated effort involving air, sea, headquarters and commando forces attacking over a long period. It was not the "few rounds of misdirected fire" that Israel would have the world believe. Worse, the Israeli excuse is a gross and detailed fabrication that disagrees entirely with the eyewitness recollections of survivors. Key American leaders call the attack deliberate. More important, eyewitness participants from the Israeli side have told survivors that they knew they were attacking an American ship.

Israeli Pilot Speaks Up

Fifteen years after the attack, an Israeli pilot approached Liberty survivors and then held extensive interviews with former Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey about his role. According to this senior Israeli lead pilot, he recognized the Liberty as American immediately, so informed his headquarters, and was told to ignore the American flag and continue his attack. He refused to do so and returned to base, where he was arrested.

Later, a dual-citizen Israeli major told survivors that he was in an Israeli war room where he heard that pilot's radio report. The attacking pilots and everyone in the Israeli war room knew that they were attacking an American ship, the major said. He recanted the statement only after he received threatening phone calls from Israel.

The pilot's protests also were heard by radio monitors in the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. Then-U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dwight Porter has confirmed this. Porter told his story to syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak and offered to submit to further questioning by authorities. Unfortunately, no one in the U.S. government has any interest in hearing these first-person accounts of Israeli treachery.

Key members of the Lyndon Johnson administration have long agreed that this attack was no accident. Perhaps most outspoken is former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer. "I can never accept the claim that this was a mistaken attack," he insists.

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk is equally outspoken, calling the attack deliberate in press and radio interviews. Similarly strong language comes from top leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency (some of whose personnel were among the victims), National Security Council, and from presidential advisers such as Clark Clifford, Joseph Califano and Lucius Battle.

A top-secret analysis of Israel's excuse conducted by the Department of State found Israel's story to be untrue. Yet Israel and its defenders continue to stand by their claim that the attack was a "tragic accident" in which Israel mistook the most modern electronic surveillance vessel in the world for a rusted-out 40-year-old Egyptian horse transport.

Despite the evidence, no U.S. administration has ever found the courage to ever found the courage to defy the Israeli lobby by publicly demanding a proper accounting from Israel.

How Does Congress React to These Complaints?

Most members of Congress respond to inquiries about the Liberty with seemingly sympathetic promises to "investigate." Weeks or months later they write again to report their "findings": "The Navy investigated in 1967 and found no evidence that the attack was deliberate," they say." Israel apologized, calling the attack a tragic case of misidentification, and paid damages for loss of life, injuries and property damage. The matter is closed.

The fact is, however, that the Navy's "investigation" examined only the quality of the crew's training, the adequacy of communications and the performance of the crew under fire. The Navy was forbidden to examine Israeli culpability and Navy investigators refused to allow testimony showing that the attack was deliberate or that Israel's excuse was untrue. [Continue Reading]

Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it. - Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon

John O'Neill
Head Investigator Of The USS Cole Attack - Assassinated

Albright and Bodine Panic as O’Neill Investigation Points to Israel - Albright complains to upper echelons of the FBI about O'Neill.

Bodine wanted O'Neill to drop his bodyguards and he became suspicious of Mossad assassination. Bodine and Madeleine Albright finally went to the Zionist Jewish FBI Director, Louis Freeh, to remove John O'Neill from Yemen.

Then January 2001 came, and O'Neill wanted to go back to Yemen. But, Ambassador Bodine wouldn't give him clearance. In July 2001, O’Neill resigned from the FBI.

On June 24th Judicial-Inc Was Shut Down Again

90% of Judicial-Inc is merely current news links, and the other 10% is just commentary on world events. Judicial's number of 'host-suspensions' may set a record for the most banned website on the internet. So you need to ask - why? Obviously the simple answer is some of the analysis is hitting too close to home. There are probably twenty other websites with the same format, and none of them have been touched. In addition to the internet harassment, the ADL has hired a stalker named Jacob Levy, and it's been made plain that this site will not reopen.

I have to suspect there will be a major event such as a nuke in an American city, followed by an attack on Iran, and this is followed by an economic implosion.

http://judicial-inc.biz/Oneill.htm

People Need to Ask, "Did the FBI Really
Investigate John O'Neill's Assassination?"

BP Swim Warning
Photo gallery: Ripple effects of the BP oil spill

THESE ARE NUMEROUS PICTURES THAT ARE CLOSE-UPS, SO IT WILL TAKE SOME TIME TO VIEW. THEY ARE HEART BREAKING INDEED.

PRAYERS ARE NEEDED NOT ONLY FOR OUR MILITARY, BUT NOW FOR A RESOLVE TO THIS TRAGEDY IN THE GULF AND FOR ALL HURT BY THIS, INCLUDING AVIARY AND MARINE LIFE. via Joe

U.S. corporate media are constantly accused of lying for their government by everyone; including foreign governments.

Oh, you silly people, of course we lie. In this way we can keep the people unbalanced and always facing controversy, which is very helpful to us. Have you not seen the talk show spectacles on FOX?

Some of you believe we are the liberals and the good people are the conservatives. In reality, both serve our purposes. Each camp merely serves with the stamp of our approval, but they are not allowed to present real issues.

For example, consider BP's Oil Spill. By creating controversy on all levels, no one knows what to do. So, in all of this confusion, we go ahead and accomplish what we want with no hindrance. If fact, we teach this within a fraternity in one of your nation's older universities. - continue

Photograph of Mike Wilhelm by Richard Hoyt
MikeWilhelm to play at Tuscan Village
Friday, July 2, 2010 - 6:30 - 8:30 pm

LOWER LAKE - Popular legend Mike Wilhelm will play at Lower Lake's Tuscan Village (Lake County) on Friday, July 2, 2010 from 6:30 - 8:30 pm. Tuscan Village is located adjacent the Post Office on Main St.

Internationally renowned guitarist/vocalist Mike Wilhelm has had a long and varied professional career starting in Los Angeles in the early '60s. In 1964 he was a founding member of the Charlatans, the first of the "psychedelic" San Francisco rock bands who started a movement that swept around the world. He has played venues from L. A.'s Troubadour to San Francisco's Avalon, Fillmore, Winterland and Cow Palace to both the Bottom Line, New York City and the Bottom Line, Nagoya, Japan. In 1997, the Charlatans were invited to play at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and a video of that performance and accompanying interview are enshrined in the museum's archives.

A mannequin dressed in Wilhelm's Charlatans stage clothing is the centerpiece in the current exhibition entitled Something's Happening Here at San Francisco's Museum of Performance and Design in the War Memorial Building on Van Ness Ave. opposite the City Hall. The exhibition runs through August.

Wilhelm has played in many well known venues in Europe including the Roundhouse, London; the Pavilion, Paris; the Paradiso, Amsterdam and (as a member of Flamin' Groovies) the largest of all, the 20,000 plus capacity Sportspalast in Berlin with headliners the Police. - more?

Mount Konocti [Old Volcano] Lake County, CA - Mike Wilhelm on XS Yamaha & Sprung's FXSTS Harley

Keeping It Simple for the Denial Challenged

Lavon Affair -> USS Liberty incident, -> John O'Neill, -> USS Cole bombing, -> Madeleine Albright, -> Zionism, -> Project for the New American Century, -> Barbara Bodine, -> Louis Freeh, -> Larry Silverstein, -> Jerome Hauer, -> WATCH THIS VIDEO -> Rethinking 9/11, -> Inside Job (mp3 instrumental).

George Bush: Worst. President. Ever?

Academic poll ranks George Bush as one of the worst presidents in US history. But was he really as bad as all that?

It's time for another one of those pseudo-serious polls rating the US presidents. This one, from Siena College's research institute, asked 238 presidential scholars to rank the 43 presidents [pdf], and judged that George Bush was among the worst of all time.

According to the survey:

Today, just one year after leaving office, the former president has found himself in the bottom five at 39th rated especially poorly in handling the economy, communication, ability to compromise, foreign policy accomplishments and intelligence. Rounding out the bottom five are four presidents that have held that dubious distinction each time the survey has been conducted: Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren G Harding, and Franklin Pierce.

To no one's surprise, FDR was ranked as the number one best president, followed by Teddy Roosevelt at number two (he's on the rise, it seems) and Abraham Lincoln and George Washington at three and four.

Let's admit straight away that these sorts of polls, while fun, are silly and pointless, and that no real comparison can be made by politicians of different eras.

With that out of the way, let me say that George Bush does not deserve this calumny – although he does deserve some criticism, as most US presidents do. But this just isn't fair or reasonable.

Lies, Lies, Lies - BlackMustache.com

For example, Richard Nixon is ranked 30th, while Bush junior is 39th. Now it seems plain to me at least that by resigning in disgrace, ahead of certain impeachment, as well as his foreign policy in Laos and Cambodia, Nixon should sit below GWB in any ranking. Both men had fairly disastrous economic policies, but Nixon's did far more damage to America, although I'd be open to arguments on that.

The absurdity of these sorts of polls is highlighted by the position of William Henry Harrison, who I have sometimes argued should be counted as the worst US president of all time. If you haven't heard of Harrison, that's because he took office on 4 March 1841 and left it on 4 April 1841. He died of pneumonia and pleurisy, and may have been weakened by insisting on reading the longest presidential inauguration address in history, standing for several hours outdoors in the freezing Washington winter but refusing to wear a coat or hat to reinforce his macho image as a warrior.

So there's real stupidity for you: all he had to do was wear a coat and he couldn't even manage that.

Worse, Harrison's death caused his vice president, John Tyler, to move into the White House, and Tyler was a fool of world-class proportions, one of the string of idiots who held the presidency in the awful years leading up to the Civil War. (Tyler later joined the Confederate government after the war began, so that tells you where he was coming from.) Notably, the others of that era – Filmore, Pierce, Buchanan and Andrew Johnson – are rightly down at the bottom of the pile in these ratings.

While we're on the subject, it's an amazement that Lincoln isn't the automatic number one choice in lists such as this, since he faced challenges like no other president, including FDR. Teddy Roosevelt in second place? Good grief. And what exactly did Bill Clinton do to justify being as high as 13th? And Grant as low as 26th? Bah.

The thing about these lists, once they get you hooked... anyway, here's the full list (and you can see the full rankings here [pdf]:

F. Roosevelt 1
T. Roosevelt 2
Lincoln 3
Washington 4
Jefferson 5
Madison 6
Monroe 7
Wilson 8
Truman 9
Eisenhower 10
Kennedy 11
Polk 12
Clinton 13
Jackson 14
Obama 15
L.B. Johnson 16
J. Adams 17
Reagan 18
J.Q. Adams 19
Cleveland 20
McKinley 21
G.H. Bush 22
Van Buren 23
Taft 24
Arthur 25
Grant 26
Garfield 27
Ford 28
Coolidge 29
Nixon 30
Hayes 31
Carter 32
Taylor 33
B. Harrison 34
W.H. Harrison 35
Hoover 36
Tyler 37
Fillmore 38
G.W. Bush 39
Pierce 40
Harding 41
Buchanan 42
A. Johnson 43

[Geek note: There have been 44 presidencies, but only 43 presidents are ranked here. Why? Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th presidents, since his two non-consecutive terms were interrupted by losing the 1892 election to Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president. No, it doesn't really make sense but that's how they do it.]

via Richard Adams's Blog:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2010/jul/01/george-bush-worst-us-president

Dear Friends,

Some of you are aware FELA On Broadway purchased my Liquid Light to use behind dancers in the Broadway production. They also used several projectors to splash the Liquid all over the house! (Towards the end of the 1st Act, after the audience is asked to stand.)

Some of you may even have seen the Tony Awards Sunday June 13 that featured the FELA ensemble performing WITH my Liquid Light splashing behind them. Yeah, on National Television! To say I am stoked is a severe understatement!

FELA received several Tony's, among them, Mr. T. Bill Jones won for Best Choreography. I am informed by the FELA's Video Director that my Liquid Light ignited and energized the number! So, may I assume a piece of that Tony is for me? ;-)

http://felaonbroadway.com/ & if you are within 100 miles of Broadway, New York City, you don't want to miss this show. It IS awesome!

I don't know how long these clips will remain on the sites below. Check them out now & download if you wish to keep a copy. Please pass among your friends.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/RainbowPuddle

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvMhOd5st6E

Tribe: http://people.tribe.net/83e4076e-8020-44c2-93fa-ebd465f434ac

Thanks, cheers & peace, Hal aka VJ, Rainbow Puddle

Kagan v. Marshall
The GOP’s comparison backfired.

by Dahlia Lithwick, Newsweek, July 03, 2010

When Senate Republicans decided to turn the first day of Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearing into a referendum on her mentor, Justice Thurgood Marshall, they made two mistakes. The first was tactical: most Americans don’t care much about Marshall’s jurisprudential style. They think of him as a lion of the civil-rights movement, and deriding him as a “judicial activist” and “results oriented” served only to insult them. But the real mistake the GOP made in relentlessly tethering Kagan to Marshall was that the comparison illustrated the exact point Senate Democrats were attempting to make all week: that the court has a critical function to play when the other two branches of government let the people down.

It was already clear by the second day of the hearings that efforts to slander Marshall had backfired and several senators raced to clarify that they had never intended to insult the civil-rights icon. But when Kagan was given an opportunity to defend Marshall in her testimony, she said something important: “Justice Marshall’s whole life was about seeing the courts take seriously claims that were not taken seriously anyplace else,” she explained. “In his struggle for racial justice, you know, he could go to the statehouses or he could go to Congress or the president, and those claims generally were ignored.”

What Kagan was saying here was that Marshall believed that the courts had a critical role to play in bringing about justice because he believed—with good cause, to be sure—that the other branches of government would always fail the poor, the disenfranchised, and the powerless. Kagan took pains to distinguish herself from her former mentor, not just by asserting that “if you confirm me to this position, you will get Justice Kagan; you won’t get Justice Marshall,” but also by explaining, again and again, that she believed deeply in deference to the other two branches of government, and to precedent.

Kagan distinguished her own view of the death penalty from Marshall’s, for instance, by explaining that she had “no moral qualms” with it and that it was “settled precedent.” Questioned by Sen. Dick Durbin about Marshall’s approach to capital cases, she clarified that Marshall thought that “the death penalty was unconstitutional in all its applications,” but also saw himself as having “a special role in each death-penalty case to make sure that there were no special problems in the imposition of the death penalty.” Kagan has far more confidence in the capital-punishment system and sees no such special role for herself.

Senate Democrats used the hearings to try to sell the argument that the John Roberts Supreme Court is so beholden to corporate America that it routinely bends the rules to allow Big Money to corrupt elections; Big Business to abuse their employees; and Big Oil to escape liability for their spills. The message was somewhat clouded by their use of the words “judicial activist”—a term they have railed against for years when conservatives hurled it at them—and by the failure to explain why any of this might matter with regard to Kagan. Senate Republicans inadvertently connected the dots for them, however, by repeatedly reminding Americans that sometimes the court needs to step in when the other branches of government are not looking out for its most vulnerable citizens. By bringing up Marshall’s legal legacy, they kept making the point—and better than the Democrats could—that liberal justices aren’t elite or out of touch.

Soon-to-be Justice Kagan and President Obama sometimes appear to be of the view that this is a sweet but generally outdated view of the courts, an approach that had a time and a place in 1954, but is best left behind today. Sen. Al Franken disagrees. He used the hearings to remind Americans that the Roberts Court’s pro-business rulings have “consistently and intentionally protected and promoted the interests of the powerful over those of individual Americans,” when the Supreme Court ought to be doing precisely the opposite.

This doesn’t mean—as it’s fashionable to suggest—that the justices should always have a thumb on the scale for “the little guy.” It does mean, as Franken so deftly illustrated, that when Supreme Court rulings make it all but impossible for the little guy to get through the courthouse door, the little guy sometimes loses his last refuge. Nobody’s life story made that point better than Thurgood Marshall’s. And Nobody reminded us of that fact more pointedly at the Kagan hearings than Republicans of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Source: http://www.newsweek-interactive.org/2010/07/03/kagan-v-marshall.html

Nobody's 4th of July words for intelligent people are:
Federalism and Anti-Federalism.

Shooting the Messengers

By Kevin Drum, Tue Jun. 15, 2010 10:29 PM PDT

You think science has been politicized in the United States? Just feel lucky you're not an Italian seismologist. A geologist friend of mine emails to let me know about an open letter the science community has written to the president of Italy. It starts like this:

Two weeks ago in Italy, the L’Aquila Prosecutor’s office indicted scientists, some of them members of the “Commissione Grandi Rischi” (Commission for High Risks), and civil protection officials for manslaughter. The basis for the indictment is that these people did not provide a short-term alarm to the population after a meeting of the Commission held in L’Aquila six days before the Mw 6.3 earthquake that struck that city and the surrounding area.

300 people died in the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009. The Independent reports:

L'Aquila's public prosecutor Alfredo Rossini said yesterday: "Those responsible are people who should have given different answers to the public. We're not talking about the lack of an alarm, the alarm came with the movements of the ground. We're talking about the lack of advice telling people to leave their homes."

The president of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Enzo Boschi, and the director of the National Earthquake Center, Giulio Selvaggi, are among those under investigation. I have a feeling that Italian geologists may be very reluctant to serve on the Commission for High Risks in the future.

Source: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/shooting-messengers

Seismologists on trial triggers scientific debate

Posted on behalf of Nicola Nosengo - July 01, 2010

The aftershocks of last year’s earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy are not over yet.

After thousands of scientists came out in support of six of Italy’s top seismologists, who are accused of manslaughter for not raising the alarm in the days preceding the earthquake, some are criticizing this solidarity.

Following the indictment of the six, more than 5,000 scientists and other professionals from different countries signed an appeal letter to the President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano. They sought to remind Italian authorities that scientists should not be held accountable for failing to predict an earthquake, something no seismologist in the world can do.

Now dissenting views have appeared on Volcano Listserv, an online forum administered by Jonathan Fink at Arizona State University. (Some of the indicted scientists belong to Italy's INGV – the National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology.)

Criticism of the letter first came from Lalliana Mualchin, a retired chief seismologist at the California Department of Transportations. Mualchin disagrees with the methods used in Italy, as in most countries, to assess seismic hazard. INGV, she explains, uses a method called Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment. In essence, it builds on the assumption that very violent earthquakes in a given area will only occur once every thousand years, and thus designs emergency plans and building codes around less catastrophic scenarios, which are considered more probable. In Mualchin’s view, this method leads to a systematic underestimation of earthquake risks.

Deterministic Seismic Hazard Assessment (DSHA), instead, uses geology and history to estimate the strongest earthquake each area can have, and assumes that it can effectively happen at any moment. Mualchin wrote in a letter to Nature that “PSHA, which originated mainly from California, has been promoted and pushed for years without open debate, through funding and so many publications.”

To her mind, signing the solidarity appeal without discussing the methods used in L'Aquila is a disservice to citizens.
“To indict them [the Italian scientists] on the basis of not predicting the precise time of the earthquake is extremely problematic and most of us will support them,” she notes, “[but] critical seismic hazard estimates by the ‘indicted’ scientists are missing in the letter and must be discussed.”

A different, and more direct, kind of criticism has come from Flavio Dobran, a Naples based volcanologist, formerly at New York University. Dobran has for years criticized INGV for its eruption risk estimations for the Vesuvius volcano, as well as its related evacuation plans, which he consider inadequate.

In a letter to Nature he wrote that last week’s story in the journal “overstates the solidarity” around the indicted scientists. In his view, the L’Aquila tragedy has revealed typical faults in the Institute’s style of hazard assessment, which could result in a “far greater tragedy” in case of a Vesuvius eruption.

“The indictment is an unfortunate result of the way Italian science is being practised,” he says, referring to a strongly politicized academic environment.

About the indicted scientists he says that “any opposition to their methods spells doom for those who dare to question their ways of seismic and volcanic hazard management in Italy”. Dobran says he finds the supporting letter “misleading”.

“What the international scientists fail to understand is that if they support this letter they will be taken for a ride. Independent research on volcanoes and earthquakes will be suppressed even more,” he claims. Two other Italian researchers have posted similar comments on Listserv.

In the end, there is some hope that such divisions might revive a healthy scientific debate. Mualchin has been invited to organize a workshop with the working title of "DSHA, PSHA, nDSHA - what next to mitigate natural disasters?” at the next Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Source: http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/07/_seismologists_on_trial_trigge.html

Italian officials investigate scientists who didn't predict
L'Aquila quake on manslaughter charges

By Elizabeth Weise, USA Today Jul 01, 2010 - 02:20 PM

Top Italian earth scientists who didn't predict an earthquake are now being investigated on charges of manslaughter for failing to warn the Italian city of L'Aquila, which suffered a devastating temblor on April 9, 2009.

The earthquake killed 308 people, left 600 injured and more than 65,000 people homeless. It registered 5.8 on the Richter scale.

The L'Aquila public prosecutor's office issued the indictments on June 3, in part because residents of the town complained that city officials told them there was little danger of a major earthquake based on the scientists' statements.

Now international scientific groups are rallying around the scientists. The American Geophysical Union is calling the charges "unfounded" and notes that "despite decades of scientific research in Italy and in the rest of the world, it is not yet possible to accurately and consistently predict the timing, location, and magnitude of earthquakes before they occur."

The Italian scientists and government officials are employees of the National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology and the Civil Protection Department. They took part in a meeting with the town's Major Risks Committee on 31 March 2009 during which they told city officials that although there had been a series of small quakes in the area, it did not necessarily suggest there would be a major earthquake, which they deemed "improbable, although not impossible."

Several petitions and open letters are circulating among geophysicists and other scientists who work in the field supporting the Italian researchers and suggesting that holding them responsible for not predicting an earthquake could damage efforts to understand natural disasters because fear of lawsuits might keep scientists from working in the field of seismology and seismic risk assessment.

However, there is some dissent in the ranks. Some geologists feel that the method they used, probabilistic seismic hazard analysis, may underestimate the possibility of earthquake hazards. They feel that deterministic seismic hazard analysis offers a more realistic analysis of the potential threats posed by quakes.

Source: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/07/...

When the scientific evidence is unwelcome,
people try to reason it away

Research results not consistent with your world view? Then you're likely to believe science can't supply all the answers

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 3 July 2010, Article history

What do people do when confronted with scientific evidence that challenges their pre-existing view? Often they will try to ignore it, intimidate it, buy it off, sue it for libel or reason it away.

The classic paper on the last of those strategies is from Lord, Ross and Lepper in 1979: they took two groups of people, one in favour of the death penalty, the other against it, and then presented each with a piece of scientific evidence that supported their pre-existing view, and a piece that challenged it; murder rates went up or down, for example, after the abolition of capital punishment in a state.

The results were as you might imagine. Each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views.

Some people go even further than this when presented with unwelcome data, and decide that science itself is broken. Politicians will cheerfully explain that the scientific method simply cannot be used to determine the outcomes of a drugs policy. Alternative therapists will explain that their pill is special, among all pills, and you simply cannot find out if it works by using a trial.

How deep do these views go, and how far do they generalise? Professor Geoffrey Munro took about 100 students and told them they were participating in a study on "judging the quality of scientific information", now published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. First, their views on whether homosexuality might be associated with mental illness were assessed, and then they were divided into two groups.

The first group were given five research studies that confirmed their pre-existing view. Students who thought homosexuality was associated with mental illness, for example, were given papers explaining that there were more gay people in psychological treatment centres than the general population. The second group were given research that contradicted their pre-existing view. (After the study was finished, we should be clear, they were told that all these research papers were fake, and given the opportunity to read real research on the topic if they wanted to.)

Then they were asked about the research they had read, and were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement: "The question addressed in the studies summarised … is one that cannot be answered using scientific methods."

As you would expect, the people whose pre-existing views had been challenged were more likely to say that science simply cannot be used to measure whether homosexuality is associated with mental illness.

But then, moving on, the researchers asked a further set of questions, about whether science could be usefully deployed to understand all kinds of stuff, all entirely unrelated to stereotypes about homosexuality: "the existence of clairvoyance", "the effectiveness of spanking as a disciplinary technique for children", "the effect of viewing television violence on violent behaviour", "the accuracy of astrology in predicting personality traits" and "the mental and physical health effects of herbal medications".

Their views on each issue were added together to produce one bumper score on the extent to which they thought science could be informative on all of these questions, and the results were truly frightening. People whose pre-existing stereotypes about homosexuality had been challenged by the scientific evidence presented to them were more inclined to believe that science had nothing to offer, on any question, not just on homosexuality, when compared with people whose views on homosexuality had been reinforced.

When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate attempt to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken. This is an interesting finding. But I'm not sure it makes me very happy.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/03/confirmation-bias-scientific-evidence

4chan Has Nearly Voted Justin Bieber to North Korea

By Eliot Van Buskirk, July 6, 2010, 4:22 pm - Categories: Crowdsourcing, People

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il reportedly owns the world's largest collection of Daffy Duck paraphernalia. Could his latest obsession be the youthful pop singer Justin Bieber?

As first reported by the Beeb, the Bieb crowdsourced the decision on which country he should tour first as part of his upcoming "My World" tour. With just under nine hours to go, North Korea holds a growing, 9,437-vote margin over Israel and Poland, after which the voting drops off significantly.

At least "Hell" isn't trending.

As with previous artists, from The Beatles to New Kids On The Block, Bieber attracts the lucrative young female demographic, which still generates a significant portion of music industry profits as other segments grow increasingly distracted by other forms of media. It's unlikely many North Korean girls are responsible for their country's popularity in the poll, because they don't have internet access or even electricity, actually.

Instead, this is the work of the pranksters who gather at the 4chan image boards, whose previous targets include the Church of Scientology and AT&T's DSL service. The 4chan hive-mind would evidently love to send the 16-year-old crooner to North Korea, from whence he might not return -- or could even cause the country's infrastructure to deteriorate further, as his voice could be considered a bio-weapon where some older ears are concerned. Many hearts would be crushed by losing Bieber to North Korea forever, while others would fill with joy, given his polarizing effect on music fans.

In addition to nearly having succeeded in voting the pop star to North Korea, 4chan also hacked YouTube on Sunday, using special code to foil Google's safeguards against the embedding of pop-up windows in YouTube comments. The hack led to messages indicating that Bieber had passed away appearing on the site, as well as redirecting to pornographic videos and superimposing "Fail" and other messages over his videos.

A web poll like this is not legally binding, of course, but if North Korea remains ranked first when it closes at 1am ET Wednesday morning, Bieber will likely have to explain why he doesn't want to go -- a success of sorts for the meddling kids at 4chan.

There is no information on where Dear Leader stands on the Bieber issue. But this is a lesson to any company that is contemplating crowdsourcing to choose the parameters with care. Bieber or his people could have eliminated North Korea from the list of options, given the obvious difficulty of touring there, but did not.

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/4chan-has-nearly-voted-justin-bieber-to-north-korea/

July 8, 2010

Filth and Fury, Posted July 7, 2010, Was I right, when the hacked climate emails were released, to call for Phil Jones to resign? By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th July 2010

Steve Bell [cartoon] on withdrawing troops from Sangin - Government announces plans to withdraw UK troops from Sangin area of Afghanistan, handing responsibility to the US military

America's paranoid religious right The Call 2 Fall movement captures the mood among Christian nationalists - that God is punishing America for its sinful ways By Matthew Harwood, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 July 2010 19.30 BST

Herb Speaks It Was & Still Is: Love One Another !!!

(The Coup's) Ride the Fence by Haik Hoisington - BlackMustache.com - NOT WORK SAFE
Oakland Information: KPFA-FM Streaming Audio

Soviet war in Afghanistan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a ten-year conflict involving the Soviet Union, supporting the Marxist government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan at their own request against the Mujahideen Resistance. The mujahideen found other support from a variety of sources including the United States, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and other Muslim nations through the context of the Cold War.

The initial Soviet deployment of the 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 24, 1979 under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The final troop withdrawal started on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989 under the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Due to the interminable nature of the war and the damage it is perceived to have caused the USSR's international standing and military morale, the conflict in Afghanistan has sometimes been referred to as the Soviet Union's Vietnam War - [continue]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan

The Collapse of the Soviet Union and Ronald Reagan

by Ronald Hilton

Several WAISers disagreed with Christopher Jones, who denied Reagan's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Harry Papasotiriou writes: "The Soviet Union certainly collapsed of its own weight, but Reagan helped speed up the process. The following paragraphs are from a forthcoming book that I am co-authoring.

Reagan’s conviction that the Soviet Union was both a dangerous military power and a collapsing economic system derived not from any deep knowledge of the Soviet Union. Yet he proved to be the proverbial right man in the right place at the right time. By whatever means he arrived at his views regarding the Soviet Union, he drew from them policy directions that were devastatingly effective in undermining the rotten Soviet edifice. Because of the high oil prices of the 1970s the Soviet leadership avoided serious economic reforms, such as those that saved Deng Xiaoping’s China. Instead, it relied on oil revenues as a means of keeping its decrepit economy going. By the early 1980s the Soviet Union was becoming a hollow shell, with an unreformed and increasingly backward industrial base producing outmoded pre-computer armaments. Thus it was highly vulnerable to the pressures that the Reagan administration was planning.

From the outset, Reagan moved against détente and beyond containment, substituting the objective of encouraging “long-term political and military changes within the Soviet empire that will facilitate a more secure and peaceful world order”, according to an early 1981 Pentagon defense guide. Harvard’s Richard Pipes, who joined the National Security Council, advocated a new aggressive policy by which “the United States takes the long-term strategic offensive. This approach therefore contrasts with the essentially reactive and defensive strategy of containment”. Pipes’s report was endorsed in a 1982 National Security Decision Directive that formulated the policy objective of promoting “the process of change in the Soviet Union towards a more pluralistic political and economic system”. [The quotes from Peter Schweizer, Reagan's War.]

A central instrument for putting pressure on the Soviet Union was Reagan’s massive defense build-up, which raised defense spending from $134 billion in 1980 to $253 billion in 1989. This raised American defense spending to 7 percent of GDP,dramatically increasing the federal deficit. Yet in its efforts to keep up with the American defense build-up, the Soviet Union was compelled in the first half of the 1980s to raise the share of its defense spending from 22 percent to 27 percent of GDP, while it froze the production of civilian goods at 1980 levels.

Reagan’s most controversial defense initiative was SDI, the visionary project to create an anti-missile defense system that would remove the nuclear sword of Damocles from America’s homeland. Experts still disagree about the long-term feasibility of missile defense, some comparing it in substance to the Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster Star Wars. But the SDI’s main effect was to demonstrate U. S. technological superiority over the Soviet Union and its ability to expand the arms race into space. This helped convince the Soviet leadership under Gorbachev to throw in the towel and bid for a de-escalation of the arms race.

Particularly effective, though with unintended long-term side effects, was the Reagan administration’s support for the mujahideen (holy warriors) that were fighting against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Reagan was determined to make Afghanistan the Soviet Vietnam. Therefore in 1986 he decided to provide the mujahideen with portable surface-to-air Stinger missiles, which proved devastatingly effective in increasing Soviet air losses (particularly helicopters). The war in Afghanistan cost the United States about $1 billion per annum in aid to the mujahideen; it cost the Soviet Union eight times as much, helping bankrupt its economy.

Apart from his defense policies, Reagan also weakened the Soviet Union through economic moves. His supporters’ claims that he brought about the fall of the Soviet Union are somewhat weakened by the fact that he ended Carter’s grain embargo, which had produced alarming food shortages in the Soviet Union. On the other hand Reagan was able to reduce the flow of Western technology to the Soviet Union, as well to limit Soviet natural gas exports to Western Europe. One of the most effective ways in which his economic policies weakened the Soviet Union was by helping bring about a drastic fall in the price of oil in the 1980s, thereby denying the Soviet Union large inflows of hard currency".

Here are two more rebuttals of Christopher Jones' assertion that Reagan had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Miles Seeley writes: "I cannot agree with Mr. Jones that Reagan had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yes, it collapsed mostly from its own weight, but his unrelenting pressure certainly had an effect, as many former Soviet officials have said. I was no fan of Reagan, but you can't just write him off, either. Mr. Jones somehow seems to overlook the obvious. Ronald Reagan was at the helm when the USSR collapsed. I have not heard people say “He won the Cold War,” nor that “he defeated the Soviet Union.”

Randy Black writes: "On Reagan’s watch, the USSR collapsed, and the huge military build up under Reagan after years of decay under Carter, coupled with the failed attempts to keep up with the USA on those issues, contributed to the collapse of the USSR, A decade ago in Siberia, when my Russian associates asked me about the Cold War from my viewpoint I always told them that the US economy simply had more resiliency than the Soviet economy. I dared not expose my complete thoughts on the matter as a guest in Russia. They didn’t need to be reminded that, while equality was the goal of communism/socialism, in practice, there were still rich guys and poor guys, haves and have nots with no concept or hope for anything better, “unless they were connected.”

Certainly, the Soviet system, in its attempt to equalize the workers, must have also had to eliminate various elements of the human spirit. Take away a man’s hope for a better existence and you take away his reason for being, I think a big contributor to the demise of the USSR was the lack of spirit among the proletariat that an individual could make a difference. As such, Mr. Jones is correct that the communist leaders lost touch with the workers.

But contrary to Mr. Jones’ statement, Reagan had much to do with it. One major thought that Mr. Jones and many others overlook is the thought that the USSR truly began to collapse with Nikita K’s famous “secret speech” which denounced Stalin back in the 50s".

Source: http://wais.stanford.edu/History/history_ussrandreagan.htm

Soviet General:
U.S. doomed to repeat history in Afghanistan

by Michael Hughes, December 3, 2:52 AM, Examiner

Obama might be right that the current Afghanistan War bears little resemblance to the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, the last time a superpower tried to win a war in Afghanistan was when the Soviet Union tried and failed - invading in 1979 and hightailing it out of there by 1989. And, ironically enough, the Soviet-Afghan War had been referred to as the Soviets’ Vietnam. Perhaps calling it that was also a misnomer; but, once again, the bottom line isn't about semantics, its the fact that the parallels one can draw between the Soviet’s failed Afghanistan War versus Obama’s Afghanistan War today – are nothing short of eerie.

Click to View CNN Video: Message from Moscow for Obama

During a CNN interview, General Victor Yermakov, who once commanded the Soviet Union's 40th army in the early 80s in Afghanistan, said that he believed history was repeating itself before our very eyes. The Soviets failed to impose their will militarily against an unyielding guerilla insurgency led by the Afghanistan mujaheddin – a group that had ironically been funded, trained and supplied with weapons by the United States in a proxy war. Over 15,000 Soviets were killed over nine years, and the Soviet forces had ballooned to 100,000. 20 years later – Obama’s latest troop surge will take the total number of troops to, um, 100,000.

The Soviets did not invade to conquer Afghanistan, according to General Yermakov, they wanted to provide international assistance to help stabilize the region. (Whatever that means – code for ‘tried to conquer’).

The General indicated that an occupying force will never win, and will never convince the Afghans that democracy is the best form of government. They might tell you that, but they don’t mean it, the 74-year-old former deputy defense minister said:

An Afghan has agreed with you today, at gunpoint, that American democracy is the best thing in the world, just as he was once saying that the Soviet system was the best.

The General also hit on how unconquerable Afghanistan has been throughout its history – although this is arguable depending on what one deems as conquered, because the Soviets did occupy for 9 long years – its not like they invaded and were repelled and left after a few days. Nevertheless, the General sees Obama making a grievous error by sending more troops. Asked what difference the latest troop surge will make:

I can see only one: Obama will be more often going to the airport to pay his last respects to the [airlifted U.S.] soldiers killed in Afghanistan

Yermakov said the U.S. continues to make the same strategic and tactical mistakes that the Soviets made, like after they re-take a village from the Taliban:

Whether it's Tora Bora or Kandahar we would deploy troops, establish order, place a popular government there and render our assistance to it. But when we leave that government or leadership runs away. After all who is the leader of a province? If he's not part of the local tribe then nobody's going to pay attention to him.

Finally, when asked what lessons the U.S. and NATO can learn based on the Soviet experience, the retired general advised them to transfer the money being spent on financing troops to the restoration of Afghanistan itself.

Restoring Afghanistan's economy, its industrial enterprises, its education system, schools and mosques will increase your authority. War can only evoke resistance. Afghans regard war only as an attempt to enslave them.

Call this war what you will, Mr. President, but at the end of the day its all regarded as the same to the Afghan people.

Source: examiner.com

Mike Wilhelm & Hired Guns

Photograph by Richard Hoyt
Sunday, July 11, 2010, 4:30 - 8:30 pm

Photographs by C. Spangler
Riviera Hills Restaurant, Lounge and Recreation Club
10200 Fairway Drive, Kelseyville, CA.

Mike Wilhelm & Hired Guns
Mike Wilhelm - Flamin' Groovies - Canada - photograph provided by Anthony Clark
Mike Wilhelm, Flamin' Groovies Photograph by Anthony Clark

Monday, July 12, 2010, 6 - 9 pm
Blue Wing Saloon & Cafe's Blue Monday
Opening performance By:
Barry "Big B" Brenner
Old School Blues on Acoustic 12, 6, and Slide
Upper Lake, CA.

Your Vain Resistance

When any of you seek to resist us, we have ways of making you look ridiculous with corporate media, as we have done with all your movements to show the world how impotent any resistance is.

Look at what we did near Waco. Did the Davidian's little store of weapons help them?

We have generously taxed you and used that money to make such sophisticated weapons you can in no way compete. Your own money has served to forge the chains we bind you with; especially, since we are in control of all money. [snip]

Your Silly Rebellions Against Us

Some of you have thought you could stop us by placing a bomb in one of our abortion clinics or in a government building.

Silly souls! How can that hurt us? All that does is give us an example to use so that we might place more controls, and heavy burdens, on the population.

We love it when you rebel and blow something up. You are our reason for making more laws against all those things, which might contribute to your freedom from us.

If someone did not blow something up on occasion, we would have no justification in placing more laws on you. Can't you see how impossible it is for you to resist us? The more you wiggle, the more we squeeze. [snip] Full text: Denialist Creed

Sita Sings the Blues
A Benefit Screening Hosted by Nina Paley
Tuesday, July 20, 2010, at 7 PM

Karl Cohen writes: Nina Paley's new short online

Gregory MacNicol writes: EFF animation and party on the 20th:

See Nina Paley in San Francisco on July 20th for a showing of her fantastic feature length opus, "Sita Sings the Blues." A benefit for EFF and the Cartoon Art Museum, Nina will introduce the film and answer questions from the audience. Nina will also screen three "Minute Memes," including the theatrical premiere of the EFF cartoon featured on this page.

Information Source and Animation Video: https://w2.eff.org/ninapaley/

Tuli Kupferberg Nobody for President

Tuli Kupferberg, Bohemian and Fug, Dies at 86

By BEN SISARIO, New York Times, Published: July 12, 2010

Tuli Kupferberg, a poet and singer who went from being a noted Beat to becoming, in his words, “the world’s oldest rock star” when he helped found the Fugs, the bawdy and politically pugnacious rock group, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86 and lived in Manhattan.

He had been in poor health since suffering two strokes last year, said Ed Sanders, his friend and fellow Fug.

The Fugs were, in the view of the longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, “the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.” They were also perhaps the most puerile and yet the most literary rock group of the 1960s, with songs suitable for the locker room as well as the graduate seminar (“Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,” based on a poem by William Blake); all were played with a ramshackle glee that anticipated punk rock.

With songs like “Kill for Peace,” the Fugs also established themselves as aggressively antiwar, with a touch of absurdist theater. The band became “the U.S.O. of the left,” Mr. Kupferberg once said, and it played innumerable peace rallies, including the “exorcism” of the Pentagon in 1967 that Norman Mailer chronicled in his book “The Armies of the Night.” (The band took its name from a usage in Mailer’s “Naked and the Dead.”)

The Fugs was formed in 1964 in Mr. Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore, a former kosher meat store on East 10th Street in Manhattan. By then Mr. Kupferberg, already in his 40s, was something of a Beatnik celebrity. He was an anthologized poet and had published underground literary magazines with titles like Birth and Yeah.

He had also found notoriety as the inspiration for a character in Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” As Ginsberg and Mr. Kupferberg acknowledged, he was the one who “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten,” a reference to a 1945 suicide attempt (off the Manhattan Bridge, not Brooklyn) that had been preciptated by what he called a nervous breakdown.

The fame that episode earned him caused Mr. Kupferberg a lifetime of chagrin and embarrassment. “Throughout the years,” he later said, “I have been annoyed many times by, ‘Oh, did you really jump off the Brooklyn Bridge?,’ as if it was a great accomplishment.”

The Fugs’ first album, “The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction,” was released in 1965. The band became a staple of underground galleries and theaters, as well as antiwar rallies. In concert Mr. Kupferberg was often the group’s mascot or harlequin, acting out satirical pantomimes — an American soldier who turns into a Nazi, for example — or sometimes not singing at all.

On subsequent albums the band changed its lineup many times and acquired a more professional sound, though its scatological themes got it kicked off at least one major record label.

With his bushy beard and wild hair, Mr. Kupferberg embodied the hippie aesthetic. But the term he preferred was bohemian, which to him signified a commitment to art as well as a rejection of restrictive bourgeois values, and as a scholar of the counterculture he traced the term back to an early use by students at the University of Paris. Among his books were “1,001 Ways to Live Without Working” — and for decades he was a frequent sight in Lower Manhattan, selling his cartoons on the street and serving as a grandfather figure for generations of nonconformists.

Beneath Mr. Kupferberg’s antics, however, was a keen poetic and musical intelligence that drew on his Jewish and Eastern European roots. He specialized in what he called “parasongs,” which adapted and sometimes satirized old songs with new words. And some of his Fugs songs, like the gentle “Morning, Morning,” had their origins in Jewish religious melodies.

Naphtali Kupferberg was born in New York on Sept. 28, 1923. He grew up on the Lower East Side and became a jazz fan and leftist activist while still a teenager. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1944 and got a job as a medical librarian.

“I had intended to be a doctor at one point, like any good Jewish boy,” he recalled to Mr. Sanders in an audio interview in 2003. Instead he began to write topical poems and humor pieces, contributing to The Village Voice and other publications.

After the Fugs broke up, in 1969, Mr. Kupferberg performed with two groups, the Revolting Theater and the Fuxxons, and continued writing. The Fugs reunited periodically, first in 1984. Recently, Mr. Sanders said, Mr. Kupferberg had completed his parts for a new album, “Be Free: The Fugs Final CD (Part Two),” and had also been posting ribald “perverbs” — brief videos punning on well-known aphorisms — on YouTube.

Mr. Kupferberg is survived by his wife, Sylvia Topp; three children, Joseph Sacks, Noah Kupferberg and Samara Kupferberg; and three grandchildren.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 13, 2010, on page A23 of the New York edition.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/arts/music/13kupferberg.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Special thanks: Marliese & Karl

Kill For Peace
by Tuli Kupferberg and the FUGS

Kill, kill, kill for peace Kill, kill, kill for peace

Near or middle or very far east - Far or near or very middle east