Moon of Alabama Brecht quote
June 8, 2008
Flatman Strikes Again

Thomas L. Flatman writes:

Israel’s economic and military power today is entirely dependent on extracting intelligence from its people. Israel’s economic power is endlessly renewable.

Thanks Thomas! Now please explain this to the U.S. taxpayers:

JERUSALEM (AFP) — The United States signed a deal on Thursday to boost its military aid to Israel to 30 billion dollars over the next decade aimed at countering a "resurgent" Iran and its allies.

Comments

What resurgent Iran?

Posted by: Diogenes | Jun 8 2008 16:23 utc | 1

Food Price Spike Threatens 30 Million – World Bank Chief
“World Bank Chief Zoellick said leaders should send poor farmers seeds and
fertilizers and **lift the export bans** that are helping to drive up prices.”
OK, now it’s only 30M, and next week, just isolated pockets of 3M, each
in itself another NeoZi Holocaust, but sheesh, let’s not harsh the buzz!
Absolutely nothing about G8 agriculture tax incentives drowning the world
in dumped agriculture products, cheap relative to local cost of production.
North American farm subsidies and tax incentives alone are larger than the
totality of global aid to indigent food production.
For every $1 you give from your pocket to global food aid, your government
is stealing $10 from your pocket to grift on farming subsidies, and taking
another $5 for the origination fee and administrative expenses, ON TOP OF
the 1/3 of your income they steal every year in taxes. It’s 10:1 against!
Absolutely nothing about G8 corrupted IPR patenting aboriginal plant strains,
inserting GMO willy-nilly without ecological forethought, subsidizing its’
spread, destroying many 10,000s of seed lines carefully hand selected over
the last 600,000 years of human permaculture.
As GMO spreads like plague, they’re putting 10,000 seed lines into deep freeze!
Absolutely nothing about the impact of net BTU-loss biofuels-for-votes, (or $Ts
passive alpha speculation driving up the cost of oil), and with it, fertilizer,
and with it, mechanized farming, and with it, transportation and distribution.
Nothing. Pablum. “Send the poor (GMO) seeds, send them chemical fertilizers”
(yeahh, that’s gonna happen), destroy their groundwater (being increasingly
grabbed by corporations, as India’s Pepsi, for alcohol and soda pop bottling),
destroying their forests, (tropical hardwoods leveled for US:UK patio decking)
drying up their rivers and burning down their forests for biofuels production!
Externalizing blame seems to be the predominent meme of Western Culture today,
and here’s a crystal-clear example:
Industrial nations discuss oil prices
“Eleven nations that guzzle nearly two-thirds of the world’s energy have held
talks to discuss record oil prices. Energy ministers from the Group of Eight
(G8) industrial powers urged OPEC oil producers Saturday to boost their output
to counter soaring prices threatening the world economy.”
Fine. As if oil cartels are withholding supplies, DOUBLING the price of oil YOY!
And it they were deliberately doing so, how retarded to demand they stop!?
http://www.eia.doe.gov confirms that oil production is going just fine, and there
is no way on earth that oil demand could rise 800% in the eight years of Bush.Con.
The production:demand statistics themselves put the lie to Bilderberg declarations.
Absolutely nothing about the impact of delayed Clean Air Standards, nothing about
watered down CAFE regulations, half empty new highrises fully lit, fully HVACd
through the long nights of burning oil like there’s no tomorrow.
Absolutely nothing about the impact of net BTU-loss biofuels-for-votes, or $Ts,
maybe $10Ts in passive derivative speculation driving up the cost of oil, and
any other commodities that show the least little bump in alpha momentum.
Absolutely nothing about . Nothing about stranding oil underground,
catastrophically reducing the lifespan of major oilfields, and order-of-magnitude
cost increases necessary to fracture and gas inject those stranded fields to
get only a fraction of production before the oil was stranded.
Nothing. Pablum. It’s not Wall Street, it’s not Detroit, it’s OPEC. “Bomb Iran”.
I’m convinced that, as long as humans are being driven off the land and into
urban ghettoes, living like rats and cats, externally dependent on their State-
Corporates for their survival, that our politics will increasingly come to
resemble those of a Palestinian prison camp, a gulag, a slaughterhouse, yes, a crematorium … go visit your local nursing home.
We need a national compulsory Agriculture Service Program, every high school
student spending one year on the farm in the US, and one year overseas on a
farm in EU or the 3W. Only farmers understand earth’s ecology. Only farmers
understand you have to get up at 4AM, instead of blogging until noon. The
cows have to get milked. The fields have to get plowed. There is a season
for all things, planting, fertilizing, cultivating, irrigating and harvest.
You can’t put it off, you can’t hold a G8 meeting of idlers to discuss it,
it’s more terrible than any Al Queda if you get behind the work. Agriculture
is the backbone of civilization, but less than 1% of G8 citizens know that.
Until our children grasp in their marrow self-motivation and self-subsistence,
until we wean them off of American Idol and Guitar Hero and Grand Theft Auto
and the Latest World of Warcraft RPG fantasy
they will only be able to survive as 3W colonizing hecto-consumers themselves.
We are creating a culture of vampires. Grasping Gas Guzzling
Geriatric Government Greed for Global Genocide.
G8 Satan. And you can’t blame that on the Zionists.

Posted by: Moshe Sharon | Jun 8 2008 18:24 utc | 2

Matt Taibbi: The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman.

The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.

Posted by: b | Jun 8 2008 19:40 utc | 3

Whereas the US’s power is entirely dependent on sucking intelligence out of its own people to produce collective amnesia.

Posted by: biklett | Jun 8 2008 21:46 utc | 4

Moshae Sharon #2: “G8 Satan. And you can’t blame that on the Zionists.”
Same people, same forces. Zionism itself is an excuse, a means to power and consumption of blood and misery, not something for good, however defined, of Israelis or any of us bottom 99.99999%.
No weaning possible. Veal is tasty.

Posted by: plushtown | Jun 8 2008 22:08 utc | 5

it was sd that doug feith was the dumbest motherfucker in the world – well he is close but surely friedman is sans contest the really dumb dumbest motherfucker who ever existed

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 8 2008 23:07 utc | 6

these scribblers who scratch their semiotic from a place so stupid – you are in a territory where the three stooges – moe larry & curly seem seem like oppenheimer, szilard or bôhm – compared to this cretin – who crawls frop one op ed to another with his haunted friend kristol who can’t see two inched in front of him let alone a world, the world

Posted by: Anonymous | Jun 8 2008 23:14 utc | 7

that was me, evidently

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 8 2008 23:15 utc | 8

biklett: yes, yes, yes, like a national vacuum cleaner sucking out the color and unsavory details from our collective memory.
i remember first learning–5, 6 years ago–about the cia’s initial foray into the nebulous realm of clandestine regime change with iran in 1953 ( wasn’t Kermit Roosevelt one of the major perpetrators responsible for installing the shah?). it’s rather embarrassing to admit, but Michael Moore (yes, that opportunistic, lying, hypocritical piece of shit) in one of his “timely” “documentaries” was the first time i had been confronted with amerika’s involvement in latin countries like Guatemala and Chile.
this might seem scattered, because it’s hard to synthesize a personal confession for a faceless audience, but for me, representing myself here as an amerikan comes with a mixture of guilt and anger. guilt at the privilege i’m reluctant to acknowledge, growing up white and comfortable in suburbia, then anger rising from that guilt when i started figuring out “why they hate us.”
basically what i’ve noticed is i’m becoming a real asshole. i wasn’t kidding about more needles to pop those hope balloons. it’s like i can’t stand to see anyone expressing optimism with such overwhelming evidence pointing to RADICAL change or cataclysm.
there’s a lull right now in amerika, so we can conjure the illusion of strength to prepare for the big ticket rumble. thirty billion dollars in aid? for israel? not even a blip. we’re waiting for the federal checks, the VP announcements, and news on the movement of crude. fuck the food crisis. tv is going digital. february, 2009.
(oh, and after the earthquake in greece, there’s no way i’m taking that $1,000 bet plushtown)

Posted by: Lizard | Jun 9 2008 5:44 utc | 9