OT 07-57
Open thread: News and views ...
Posted by b on August 22, 2007 at 4:28 UTC | Permalink
« previous pageWouldn't be surprised if it later comes out that they caught Vick reading Chomsky, or maybe Castro, or Chavez. Or even King or Malcom or Stokely. So they nailed him with the dog rap before he can open his mouth. I'm not claiming this is true, but I'm also sure that we do not know what the true story is. More likely, they decided that he was not going to make it as the #1 QB, so they set up this sting to weasel their way out of the contract. Remember, he has not lived up to expectations as a player.
@catlady:
My cats, if they are in the right mood, will fight on demand for me if I say "fight!" Of course, it is only play-fighting, but they do enjoy performing, and never get tired of putting the same moves on each other, even after all these years.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 26 2007 2:02 utc | 102
Link TV has a daily compilation of independent news items from the Middle East, translated into English, which is useful in that you will get perspectives not often (if ever) shown in the US MSM.
I just discovered this; perhaps others already know of it, but I wanted to pass it along.
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 2:28 utc | 103
Hmmm, the "final assault" redux.
NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon - The wives and children of militants holed up in a refugee camp in north Lebanon have been released after being evacuated and questioned by the army, a cleric said Saturday.
"The process of handing over the group of 63 women and children to their families began overnight," Sheikh Mohammed Hajj, spokesman for a group of Palestinian clerics who acted as go-betweens, said....
The families evacuated on Friday were the last civilians remaining in the bombed-out Nahr al-Bared camp, opening the way for a final assault by the army on the remaining militants.
Early Saturday, military helicopters carried out three raids on the camp, which has mostly been reduced to rubble since the standoff between the army and the militants began on May 20.
The remaining militants, thought to number about 70, have been besieged for the past two months in a small area in the south of the camp, hiding in well equipped underground shelters, according to the army.
The advance of troops has been hampered by the camp's winding streets and booby traps and mines planted by the militants.
The vast majority of Nahr al-Bared's 31,000 residents fled at the start of the fighting, with just the militants' wives and children remaining.
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 2:34 utc | 104
@Malooga--yeah? who wins? what's the point spread? ya makin' book?
Posted by: catlady | Aug 26 2007 5:59 utc | 105
My two cents, and far be it from me to step on a cat person's tail but people can be just as weird about cats as they can about dogs.
Now I heard somewhere that Vick took the deal because there was much worse (use your imagination if you want to) that hasn't come out.
Posted by: beq | Aug 26 2007 12:11 utc | 106
This is an important story:
Abbas Refuses Population Exchange
Ramallah – Ma'an – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday stated his rejection of any Israeli proposal of a population exchange between the West Bank and Israel.
Abbas said he would refuse any proposal to swap Palestinians living in Israel for Israelis dwelling in the West Bank.
Abbas revealed that Israel proposed the idea during recent meetings and he instantly rejected the plan, asserting that if the final status solution included such a stipulation, there would be no solution....
Abbas equally rejected the option of any transitional or interim Palestinian state.
Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported that Israel proposed a population exchange; Israeli settlements would be annexed to Israel and in return, Israel would abandon the 'Triangle' area, which contains around 400,000 Palestinians.
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 12:44 utc | 107
re my #107:
Sorry, the entire text under the link was excerpted from an article and should have been set off in blockquote. I should have previewed it...
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 12:45 utc | 108
Israel proposed a population exchange; Israeli settlements would be annexed to Israel and in return, Israel would abandon the 'Triangle' area, which contains around 400,000 Palestinians.
thanks for posting bea. i read this yesterday when i got lost in haaretz after reading all b's links. i have to give them points for not calling it a property exchange! israel""we will give you some of your country back, if we can have more of your country". wow, what a deal! and by abandon, of course they don't mean abandon, they just mean they won't live there... for now.
Posted by: annie | Aug 26 2007 13:32 utc | 109
people can be just as weird about cats as they can about dogs.
oh beq , surely you jest!
Posted by: annie | Aug 26 2007 13:35 utc | 110
How did Vick run his obscenity for 6 yrs. That's the interesting ?. I've heard they've been investigating it for ~6yrs.
if this is true, the question that has to be asked is how many dogs could have been saved by putting an end to the dog-fighting operation as soon as the authorities found out, rather than 6 years later.
Posted by: jony_b_cool | Aug 26 2007 13:35 utc | 111
Israeli settlements would be annexed to Israel and in return, Israel would abandon the 'Triangle' area
Israel says: "We take the water, aquifiers and agriculture land and you can get that piece of desert in exchange."
U.N. officials and others in Sudan cite a drop in violence and improved healthcare, but say the humanitarian crisis is not over.
**Highly recommended**
I wasn't able to copy any excerpts from this for some reason -- perhaps it is protected. However it is a douzy of a read.
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 15:03 utc | 114
For the first time, Britons' personal debt exceeds Britain's GDP
Britons have racked up so much debt on loans and credit cards that the total borrowed now exceeds the entire value of the economy, new research shows today. The financial consultant Grant Thornton is forecasting that gross domestic product (GDP) will hit £1.33 trillion this year, less than the £1.35trn which was outstanding on mortgages, credit cards and personal loans in June.The symbolic overtaking is the first time that the country's 60 million people owe more to the banks than the value of everything made by every office and factory in the country.
(snip)
My favorite part is where it says,
Responding to the latest figures, the Bank of England predicted debts would remain a "social" rather than an "economic" problem, indicating it believes indebtedness will be contained to individuals rather than threaten businesses.
So when will they officialize the New Economy sans Society?
Posted by: Alamet | Aug 26 2007 15:14 utc | 115
jeez bea, thats one hell of a link on 114
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
Posted by: annie | Aug 26 2007 15:53 utc | 116
Report fraud, get sent to the clink. And tortured.
In-fucking-credible.
That is to say, Business as Usual -- With THIS bunch of Murderous Crooks.
Imagine -- selling weapons to the same gangs the US is supposedly fighting, and the whistleblower is ostracized, imprisoned, and threatened.
HE OUGHT TO BE REWARDED.
JEEz, Up is dowN and Anything Goes ...
Considering the lucrative drugs trade in addition to outright theft and fraud and overbilling, the actual 'costs' to society are simply incalculable, in the hundreds of billions at the very least.
The outrage is so over-the-top it eludes accurate description.
But in 2006, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III overturned the jury award. He said Isakson and Baldwin failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government.Not a single Iraq whistleblower suit has gone to trial since.
"It's a sad, heartbreaking comment on the system," said Isakson, a former FBI agent who owns an international contracting company based in Alabama. "I tried to help the government, and the government didn't seem to care."
Too Much.
What the American public ought to be asking and holding their supposed Reps' feet to the fire over, is HOW have we been bamboozled into accepting our 'leaders' having plunged the US into an illegal, immoral, ill-advised war based on fraud and deceit? HOW have we become complacent with an inefficient, unaccountable government (as painfully evident re: Katrina, 911, unregulated/mismanaged financial market oversight, massive bungling and malfeasance in Iraq and Afghanistan, political & military officials who 'decline' cooperating with official/congressional investigations or presenting sworn testimony, etc.)?
Since WHEN has anything-goes war-profiteering become not just acceptable but a desireable end-in-itself?
Talk about a thoroughly rotton, criminal system!
Where honesty and integrity are punished ...
THAT's our legacy now, esp. after 911, with the Bush Combine fronting for the Globalist Criminal Conspiracy. It's SO in-your-face, how can ANYBODY whose eyes aren't welded shut fail to see it?
Things are so out-of-balance and beyond the fiction of law that I don't see how we can avoid moving from one crisis to another until catastropic failure can't be deflected any longer.
THEN the fan gets dropped into the shit.
How will we THEN be able to avoid realizing, too late, we only brought it upon ourselves because we allowed ourselves to be lied-to and defrauded, we were too complacent and lazy and comfortable to take a stand when it could have made a difference?
Of course this really isn't surprise anyone here. But, Here we are, documenting it only for the archives to be lost, sold, destroyed, or used to twist what happened in the future. Here we are, documenting it and lamenting the loss of our precious democracy - but was it ever really there?
Du Pont chemicals got big and powerful by selling gun powder to both sides of the civil war. We all know about the big companies who did business with the Nazis, etc...
"Opposames," right? Problem->Reaction->Solution, and the real motives underneath patriotic and pseudo-religious talk. I think Marx had something with the dialectic - but Communism ended up being the anti-thesis that allowed the US Empire to grow - the Military-Industrial Complex. Think about it: our present moment has grown out of the Cold War (Bin Laden is a product of that, for Christ's sake).
The neocons had something in their philosopher-prince, whatshisname?, who said a population needed an enemy image to keep the game going. To keep this game going.
I want a new game.
Isn't it obvious that the zero accountability environment is being
used to disperse weapons to CIA/DIA for their mercenary and proxy armies around the world?
At US taxpayer's expense, too. AAAAGGGGHHHHH! And that what is happening will only be accessible --if at all-- on some web pages lost and hidden to the vast majority of people. Is 'truth' always so silent, so insignificant?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 26 2007 16:05 utc | 117
i have to give them points for not calling it a property exchange!
Actually it really is primarily about population -- and about Israel's absolute obsession with demographic superiority, or with having a state that is as exclusively Jewish as possible. (I know that may sound anti-Semitic, but it is simply a very well-established fact.) They have wanted to dump those 400,000 Palestinian citizens, who are clustered right in the heart of the country, for a long time -- in fact since before the country was founded. According to Pappe in his book Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the Arab villages in the Wadi Ara area were among the few that actually successfully resisted Jewish efforts to uproot and expel residents during the 1948-1949 war.
From Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pp. 194-5:
In November and December [1948], Israeli troops attacked Wadi Ara again, but the presence of volunteers, Iraqi units, and local villagers both deterred in in several cases defeated this plan yet again. Villages...succeeded in protecting themselves against a far superior military force....The largest of these villages has grown into the [very densely populated] town we know today as Umm al-Fahm. There, with some training from the Iraq soldiers, the villagers themselves had organized a force that they called the "Army of Honour." This fifth Israeli attempt to occupy these villages was called 'Hidush Yameinu ke-Kedem,' that is, 'Restoring our Glorious Past,' possibly in the hope that such a charged codename would imbue the attacking forces with particular zeal, but it was destined to fail once again.
Background: Living on the Edge: The Threat of "Transfer" in Israel and Palestine
More background (from a debate between Ilan Pappe and Uri Avnery about two states versus one state in Palestine):
Ilan Pappe: In March 1948, under the leadership of Ben Gurion, the Zionist leadership decided that in order to have here a democratic Jewish state it was necessary to expel a million Palestinians. Immediately after the decision was taken, they have embarked on systematically expelling the Palestinians. Cruelly they passed from from house to house, from village to village, from neighborhood to neighborhood. When they were done, nine months later, they left behind them 530 empty villages and eleven destroyed towns. Half the population of Palestine had been expelled from its homes, fields and sources of livelihood - more than 80 percent of the population in the territory they conquered. Half of the cities and villages of Palestine were destroyed, and their ruins planted with forests or settled with Jews.This was the only way in which a demographic Jewish state could have been created - the kind of state which is the common rallying call of the Zionist consensus, from then until the present.
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 16:34 utc | 119
One last post on the issue of transfer of Palestinian citizens out of Israel -- here is an excerpt from the link I posted above Living on the Edge: The Threat of Transfer in Israel and Palestine)
In the spring of 2002, Benny Elon -- who took over as head of the [extremist right-wing Moledet] Party following [Rehavim] Ze'evi's assassination -- launched a campaign based on "transfer of rights." Palestinian citizens of Israel who refused to declare their loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state would be stripped of their citizenship and issued citizenship in another country. Should Palestinian Israelis rebel against these terms -- for instance, by demanding equality with Jews in Israel -- they would be expelled to "their" state. Unlike Elon's plan, the Herzliya participants endorsed a Palestinian state in the West Bank, yet both plans recommend that Palestinian Israelis be given the choice to leave Israel or accept permanent second-class status.On the supposedly opposite [i.e., left-wing, "moderate"] end of the political spectrum, the Zionist left has its own version of the Herzliya Center and Elon plans. Ephraim Sneh, the Labor Party's Minister of Transportation, presented a plan in March 2002 to incorporate areas of the Little Triangle [same area as mentioned above] into a future Palestinian state. Sneh's plan, like the Herzliya and Elon plans, would effectively transfer Israel's Palestinian citizens out of Israel without actually removing them from their homes. This suggests that while Israelis might differ on where to draw Israel's final border, the Zionist right, center and left agree on the need to rid Israel of its Palestinian citizens. Sneh's idea polls well among Israeli Jews, garnering 50-60 percent support. Palestinian Israelis, who were never consulted about the plan, evince less enthusiasm. In a recent poll, only 18 percent say they would agree to live in a future Palestinian state.(16)
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 16:44 utc | 121
I know my tinfoil hat is on too tight when I can't read an article like this one and not think of a biological agent with a Pentagon approved stamp on every molecule.
I mean, that kind of thing is just so 1952.
Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 26 2007 16:56 utc | 122
No, they would never do that Monolycus , for say like a test run or something. Where “The only other major U.S. producer of gluten is Archer- Daniels-Midland Company".
Wait, uncle, are you saying our government would let corporations poison it's own people for profit???
Why, YES, YES I AM.
Not just for profit, --that is merely a side benefit--but for far more nefarious purposes.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 26 2007 17:30 utc | 123
A very recommendable piece my Matt Taibi(?) in the Rolling Stone: The Great Iraq Swindle
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.
...
What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
...read it all - what's missing though is all the waste described therein, is that a very big chunk of that money $18 billion, was Iraqi money. Confiscated by the U.S. and dolled out U.S. contractors ...
@beq: oh, yes, cat-goofiness is as potent as dog-goofiness, i should know. but it's different; i've watched dog people engage in pack behavior with their dogs. cat people do something else. so i was curious how pack identification plays into responses to the vick story, alongside concerns about racism, hunting, commercialized carnivorism.
@Bea & b: i'm going to send the rolling stone article to my conservative father. he watches too much FOX.
@U$, #123: the discussion you link on "Changing Images of Man" from SRI is going to keep me pondering for a while.
Symbols and myth are not the accents of a society, they are its engines. Something to think about before they run us over.
Posted by: catlady | Aug 26 2007 18:50 utc | 125
"cat people do something else."
Lol. Tease.
Bea, I sent it to my mother who will print it and leave it where my father will see it. ;)
Posted by: beq | Aug 26 2007 18:56 utc | 126
re: Rolling Stone piece
Yes, I've sent it out widely too. Every American should read that.
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 19:04 utc | 127
A long Newsweek piece: Into Thin Air -
He's still out there. The hunt for bin Laden.
Nothing really new, but a good recollection of how the "hunt" was botched from the begining.
Brzezinski backs Obama over Clinton
Brzezinski, 79, dismissed the notion that Clinton, 59, a New York senator and the wife of former President Bill Clinton, is more seasoned than Obama, 46. ``Being a former first lady doesn't prepare you to be president. President Truman didn't have much experience before he came to office. Neither did John Kennedy,'' Brzezinski said.Clinton's foreign-policy approach is ``very conventional,'' Brzezinski said. ``I don't think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago.''
``There is a need for a fundamental rethinking of how we conduct world affairs,'' he added. ``And Obama seems to me to have both the guts and the intelligence to address that issue and to change the nature of America's relationship with the world.''
Negotiating With Foes
Brzezinski also sided with Obama, who was criticized by Clinton as being ``irresponsible'' and ``naïve'' for saying he would meet in his first year as president with leaders of adversaries such as Iran and Syria. ``What's the hang-up about negotiating with the Syrians or with the Iranians?'' Brzezinksi said. ``What it in effect means'' is ``that you only talk to people who agree with you.''
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 20:51 utc | 129
ADL reverses itself and recognizes Armenian genocide.
As a result, Israel has come under increasingly heavy diplomatic pressure from the Turkish government to help reverse the decision. The Turkish Foreign minister and the presidential candidate Abdullah Gul registered his "anger and disappointment" at a meeting in Ankara with Israel's ambassador, Pinhas Avivi. Foreign ministry sources described this meeting to the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz as "shrill".
Interesting.
Posted by: Bea | Aug 26 2007 22:24 utc | 130
The comments to this entry are closed.
I keep wondering if Vick isn't the defining poster child for Unca Miltie's Stage of "Dog Eat Dog" Capitalism w/a bit of Am. Slave History thrown in for a distinctive Am. flavor. I'm still uncertain if what he did is any worse than what Arthur Blank does in running Home Depot, or than any owner of a thugball franchise does to their players - send 'em out there to destroy each other for your enjoyment & betting delight, use 'em as long as they're tough enough, then discard 'em. Supposedly there's a pension & compensation system in NFL, but it's come out that that's rigged to give wounded veterans zilch...the sadism is less obvious in this.
Posted by: jj | Aug 26 2007 1:36 utc | 101