Thanks r’giap – I marked the date(s) – hope I’ll be in Hamburg and have time to watch.

Posted by: b | Feb 18 2012 19:28 utc | 4

& to thank you for yr work, which i follow daily

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 18 2012 19:37 utc | 6

Following the Maine “recount” fiasco??? Astounding.
The credibility of the GOP, our electoral process, and the Federal Government has just been SHREDDED by this blatant usurpation of the people’s will. But like abused chioldren, we will clam up, ignore it, and pretend these MOTHER FUCKERS still represent us.

Posted by: PissedOffAmerican | Feb 18 2012 23:51 utc | 8

@ POA #8,
I’m amazed how much Ron Paul has contributed to the discussion. First non-interventionism and a demilitarized foreign policy is no longer taboo. The shenanigans of the Fed and the money printing class are actually popular topics of discussion. Much harder to hide than before.
And now, election fraud. At first it was easy to label us Paul supporters as conspiracy nuts. But now, after Maine (And Iowa, And Nevada, where I caucused for Paul two weeks ago) that topic is out there. And don’t ‘misunderestimate’ how big this is. voting here is the best veil of the state, the one that deludes people into thinking they are “free.” Hey You can vote!!! How lucky are you!!! And I’m amazed at the rubes who buy it. During the caucus an election worker announced how wonderful it is to live in “The only country in the world” where you can vote(!)” Really???? People can’t vote anywhere else in the whole world? Except America?? Boy do I feel lucky.
Anyway. I hope RT runs with this next month when the US tries to pull the “white revolution” BS in Russia next month.
P.S., if you frequent Ron Paul sights, you may have seen this already.
http://eyes-on-elections.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-hampshire-wow.html

Posted by: Lysander | Feb 19 2012 2:59 utc | 10

Update on the oil sale ban to EU states. (The whole article is well worth reading.)
How Iran Changed The World by Sharmine Narwani
…
Early news reports on Wednesday claimed that Iran pre-empted European Union sanctions by turning off the oil spigot to six member-states: the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Greece and Portugal.
The reports were premature. According to a highly-placed source in the country, Iran will only stop its oil supply to these nations if they fail to adopt new trading conditions: 1) signing 3 to 5-year contracts to import Iranian oil, with all agreements concluded prior to March 21, and 2) payment for the oil will no longer be accepted within 60-day cycles, as in the past, and must instead be honored immediately.
Negotiations are currently underway with all six nations. Iran, says the source, expects to cut oil supplies to at least two nations based on their current positions. These are likely to be Holland and France.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/02/18/how-iran-changed-the-world-187222/

Posted by: Unknown Unknowns | Feb 19 2012 7:53 utc | 12

Following up on Colm O‘ Tool‘s post: Iran stops oil sales to British, French companies (Reuters).
On the Syrian front, China Hand has an interesting article about the visit of a Chinese delegation to Damascus.

Posted by: philippe | Feb 19 2012 14:51 utc | 14

Greece.
GR shipping represents about (?) 6% of GDP.
GR has the largest merchant marine fleet in the world. Note: Most cos. are run by families and 3/4 of cos. own less than 10 ships.
They pay no tax on their profits, only a fixed fee per tonnage shipped. (Natch, no tax on their activities outside Greece.) Which is the reason, besides tradition and expertise, why Greece is no 1.
The biggest land owner in GR is the Orthodox Church.
The Gvmt. subsidizes the Church to the tune of about Euro 350 million a year (press), though that isn’t stated correctly as GR does not have a separation between Church and State.
Priests are state functionaries and earn Euro 2K (average) a month. There are something like over 10,000 of them.
What the Church’s properties and businesses are worth is one of those mega questions.
Papandreou proposed a tax – 20% on income, 10% / 5% on donations, plus some property taxes – the Church simply refused to pay.
The Church is also a large investor in ‘the markets’ – sums quoted but merely guessed at are in the Euro 50 to 100 billion range. (? from news.) I’m guessing they own Greek bonds! Compare, though, to the bail out sums.
The Church entertains close relationships with all the political parties, as benediction from the Church sanctifies the vote.
A State within the State… And non-taxable, a unique status in the EU. That status is not traditional, ancient, as one might imagine. Its current form dates from early 2000s.
Previous, from 1949 >, the church paid a tax of 25% on revenues, even 35% under the Colonels, problem being, they never paid, or only a trickle. (Historically, the Church’s fortune comes about because under the Ottoman Empire, everybody gave to the Church.)
Over time, various expropriations and deals have taken place. Around 1850, consequent expropriation > peasants, in return for non-taxable status (waxes and wanes but holds today.) In 1952, another expropriation, in return for Gvmt. salaries for priests, and prime real estate in Athens. (Much of the Church’s revenues are rents from real estate.)
The details are impenetrable, the sums mind-boggling.
Defense.
GR, the highest military spender in the EU (per capita, or as compared to GDP) buys more German weapons than any other nation, and buys heavily from France, as well. The Ginormous Defense budget is not questioned, but one might say, enforced. (Many articles on the net about recent arms buys by GR, goog.)
one link, the Independent:
http://tinyurl.com/5tm69z6
All from news/wiki/etc. I have no personal ‘in’ knowledge but am a little familiar…
What do Merkozy, the Troika, and the present Greek pols, have to say about Shipping, the Church, Defense? If you tot it up = the economic control of the land, the sea, and arms?
Nothing – that I am aware of.
They, collectively, are not trying to repair Greek public finances, or ‘help’ it pay its debts. They have other aims. Wheels within wheels.
Plato called Greece a skeleton of a body wasted by disease (he was a desperate serious Green, that man)…so what do they want from a skeleton? Powdered bones to snort?
Of course, they desire or are coerced into saving EU banks and Finance, or at least bowing down to them. Is that enough of an explanation? I think not.
GR was targeted as small, on the periphery, energy dependent, disorganized, etc.

Posted by: Noirette | Feb 19 2012 18:57 utc | 16

@Noirette
you gave a lot of food for thought …
I only knew about the military spending
and now those sanctions on Iranian oil
we’re next, I’ll post first-hand reportage at MoA when it comes Italy’s turn
the west needs a Roosevelt, but it’s stuck with Obama and Merkel

Posted by: claudio | Feb 20 2012 0:39 utc | 18

US respectlessness bloob in Afghanistan again..


Burned Quran remains found in the garbage from US military base in Afghanistan
Better get the hell out, in a hurry! Pissing on dead muslims is one thing, but, burning Qurans, in Afghanistan is the worst thing they could do.

Posted by: Alexander | Feb 22 2012 5:00 utc | 20

The US NATO-forces burning of the Quran was a horribly thaughtless slip, they should really think about the fact that the people collecting their garbage are muslim.
Not long now till this really hits the news. In about 12 hours, people are leaving mosques after fridays prayrs, and I promise, demonstrations will be massive. Working conditions for the NATO-forces in Afghanistan will be unbearable, not for days, but for the duration of their stay.

Posted by: Alexander | Feb 24 2012 3:32 utc | 22

Does anyone know if the autopilot of the 9/11-planes could be reprogrammed via the remote com-link? Or was/is that only a one-way system?

Posted by: Alexander | Feb 27 2012 12:26 utc | 24

I have to complement you again POA on your mastery of appropriate and well directed scurrility (#36 in “Recent Events…). However, I think it might be appropriate to take lizard’s admonition to heart and not feed the trolls. I know I’m guilty as well but I also realize that my remarks but energize their batteries. I also agree with lizard that there is a remarkable similarity or at least a strong resemblance to the deliberate attempts in the summer of 09 to confuse and reek havoc on b’s exposes surrounding the Iranian election. Control of the ME is of paramount importance to the empire’s hegemonic agenda. Thus so much effort at trying to derail those who get too close to exposing the subversive efforts of the empire’s agents.
So the dilemma. To be totally open and democratic and not stifle opposing opinions, b seems to judiciously not bar even obvious shills. They despoil otherwise considered and intelligent conversations but that is their conscious agenda and function. What to do? Totally ignoring them might be somewhat effective but unlikely because they are masters of the goad and invariably incite someone’s response.
So b, I have thought it might be useful to put the commenter’s name at the beginning of a post as is often done in other blog’s formats. I know that I for one would simply scroll past the derek (great word b, thanks) whenever I recognized the perpetrators names. Don’t know if it would be possible to implement but if so it might be worth a try. If we tended to not read the obvious crap it might avoid wasting a lot of time in writing and reading responses.
Just a thought. Any other ideas? I sure would hate to have b have to close down again.

Posted by: Juannie | Feb 28 2012 21:34 utc | 26

xymphora on Stratfor & the Wikileaks/Anonymous collaboration. 3rd item down.

“Wikileaks Becomes Anonymous’ Publishing Arm with New Intelligence Firm Leak” Wikileaks has had trouble obtaining material. Anonymous is ubiquitous, and has no worries with the current war on whistle blowing. It is a match made in heaven. The Stratfor leak will probably not amount to much, as the Stratfor people are so fucking stupid (the only revelation is that people will pay enormous amounts of money for the crap produced by Stratfor), but the future Wikileaks-Anonymous partnership looks good.

(my bold)
and the Source

Posted by: juannie | Mar 1 2012 0:45 utc | 28

Juannie @ 26.
Resident Zio-trolls are part and parcel of any blog which get too close to the truth. One only has to read the comments at Race for Iran, or Walt’s FP.com, to see how ubiquitous and desperate they’ve become. Ignoring them works for me. I make it easy and amusing by ascribing the faces and names of cartoon characters to my favourite trolls. For example, the most long-winded MoA troll became Cartman in my Troll Roll the day it conflated Iran and A’jad with the Holo-hoax. Homer, Goofy and Sylvester also comment with varying regularity at MoA.
But a Troll Roll needn’t be based on cartoon characters. It could be based on animals such as skunks, jackasses and hyenas; or inanimate objects like dunny brushes, magic wands, door-stops, letter openers, paper weights and dumpsters…

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Mar 1 2012 11:55 utc | 30

Talking about cartoon characters, Mitt Romney reminds me of the hero in the S-F TV series Buck Rogers. I’m half expecting Mitt to arrive at a Back-To-The-Future Presidential bullfest in a starfighter, wearing one of Buck’s Space Patrol outfits.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Mar 1 2012 15:53 utc | 32

Addendum:
A Military Diagnosis, ‘Personality Disorder,’ Is Challenged

“…Military commanders pressure clinicians to issue unwarranted psychiatric diagnoses to get rid of troops.” (via NYTimes). In civilian psychiatry, as well, the status of personality disorder diagnoses is dubious. Especially when applied loosely, these diagnoses are little more than pejorative.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 2 2012 6:01 utc | 34

A bit more looking around reveals that the reasons for the take down of namebase.org are not so obscure after all.
One hesitates to generalize on such limited evidence, but this might tie in with the recent wave of trolling here at MOA. In a sense, it’s nice to see that persistent but essentially innocuous efforts to understand the world around us really are bothersome to some “agents” with far greater means to produce mischief. So, it is with subversive pleasure that I write “Thanks, Cass Sunstein , Samantha is surely proud of you.”

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Mar 2 2012 16:09 utc | 36

@26 if only I could take my own damn advice 😉

Posted by: lizard | Mar 3 2012 16:46 utc | 38

claudio @ 39.
Thanks for that. I too am a big fan of Atzmon.
His “Judea declares war on Obama” is the best short critique of the Jews and their excessively boring Holohoax I’ve seen.
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/judea-declares-war-on-obama-by-gilad-atzmon.html

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Mar 4 2012 14:03 utc | 40

I found Atzmon’s “The Wandering who?” insightful; his main targets are “Jewish identity politics” and “anti-Zionist Zionists”
Atmon’s critique of the Angry Arab doesn’t devalue the latter’s work, but adds an interesting perspective

Posted by: claudio | Mar 4 2012 17:16 utc | 42

@ 43.
Atzmon casts the Holohoax as the (unofficial) Jewish religion – a fairly solid presumption given that educated Jews tend to stay away from the Synagogue and lead non-observant lives apart from a few cherry-picked nods in the direction of supremicism. Ariel Sharon was a good example of this – when gluttonising at the trough he was a serial transgressor of the principles of ‘kosher’ and made no secret of the fact.
My personal opinion of Israel’s recent obsession with regime change in Iran is that it can be traced DIRECTLY back to the Holohoax conference convened by A’jad, circa 2006, in Tehran. It was examined in exhaustive detail and a great deal of irrefutable evidence was presented by a wide range of careful and dispassionate investigators. All of the major papers delivered at the conference were published online and the Jews were, are, and will remain, very angry (and very silent) about that – apart from the occasional foray into angrily aggressive fact-free rhetoric.
The current ubiquitous defensive revival and promotion of the Holohoax mythology, global pursuit of legislation designed to stifle debate, and coercive abuse of legal process to hound “deniers” can also be traced back to the Tehran conference.
(Can you say Blood Libel?)
…………
I’m not a fan of The Angry Arab. Too many mixed messages. His good stuff is as good as his bad stuff is awful.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Mar 5 2012 2:27 utc | 44

Video from Saudi Arabia
Youth stoning armored security vehicle

Posted by: b | Mar 6 2012 18:54 utc | 46

Great piece from the Economist: Israel, Iran and America – Auschwitz complex

Having trapped themselves in a death struggle with Palestinians that they cannot acknowledge or untangle, Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would not be a happy development for Israel. Neither was Pakistan’s, nor indeed North Korea’s. The notion that it represents a new Holocaust is overstated, and the belief that the source of Israel’s existential woes can be eliminated with an airstrike is mistaken. But Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis because, unlike the Palestinians, it can be fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite. With brain-cudgeling predictability, Mr Netanyahu marked his meeting with Mr Obama by presenting him with a copy of the Book of Esther. That book concerns a plot by Haman, vizier of King Ahasuerus of Persia, to massacre his country’s Jews, and the efforts of the beautiful Esther, Ahasuerus’s secretly Jewish wife, to persuade the king to stop them. It is a version of the same narrative of repression, threatened extermination and resistance that Jews commemorate at Passover in the prayer “Ve-hi she-amdah”: “Because in every generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”
Mr Netanyahu is less attractive than Esther, but he seems to be wooing Mr Obama and the American public just as effectively. The American-Israeli relationship now resembles the sort of crazy co-dependency one sometimes finds in doomed marriages, where the more stubborn and unstable partner drags the other into increasingly delusional and dangerous projects whose disastrous results seem only to legitimate their paranoid outlook.
…

Posted by: b | Mar 7 2012 17:13 utc | 48

FBI Director Can’t Answer Basic Question About Due Process If these fucks had any balls, they would say that this is not okay, under a democrat or republican or other party administration.
Welcome to the house of mirrors, madness, delusion and the grim meat-hook reality of 21st century; American Style! USA USA USA! Yee ha!

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 9 2012 7:36 utc | 50

The U.S. destroyed Iraq. This is part of the result:
90+ Iraqi teenagers stoned to death for “emo” haircuts

At least 90 Iraqi teenagers with “emo” appearances have been stoned to death by religious extremists in Baghdad in the past month after an inflammatory interior ministry statement dubbed it “devil worshiping”, activists said.
Iraq’s Moral Police released a chilling statement on the interior ministry’s website condemning the “emo phenomenon” among Iraqi youth, disturbingly declaring its intent to “eliminate” the trend.
“The ‘Emo phenomenon’ or devil worshiping is being followed by the Moral Police who have the approval to eliminate [the phenomenon] as soon as possible since it’s detrimentally affecting the society and becoming a danger,” the statement read.
“They wear strange, tight clothes that have pictures on them such as skulls and use stationary that are shaped as skulls. They also wear rings on their noses and tongues, and do other strange activities,” it continued.
Religious extremists caught onto the interior ministry statement, and have been harassing and killing teenagers with Western or “emo” appearances.
A group of armed men dressed in civilian clothing led the teenagers to secluded areas a few days ago, stoned them to death, and then disposed their bodies in garbage dumpsters across the capital, according to activists.
The armed men are said to belong to “one of the most extremist religious groups” in Iraq.

Emo stands for “emotional”. It can mean anything, long hair, punk look, being gay etc

Posted by: b | Mar 9 2012 14:01 utc | 52

How Grece will cope with the Iran Oil-embargo I can’t imagine.

Posted by: Alexander | Mar 9 2012 23:34 utc | 54

you got to think that israelis are pretty desperate… otherwise the neocons of PNAC (a spinoff of the AEI which is in turn the US arm of netanyahu’s likud party) wouldnt have said they needed a new pearl harbor to get their project started.
*shrug*

Posted by: retreatingbladestall | Mar 10 2012 0:09 utc | 56

it’s pretty obvious that the holocaust persecution myth has done jewishness more harm than good, and we’re just getting started.
after 50 or 60 years of free lunch, psychopaths have emerged as the dominant faction of jewishness… which i spose is only to be expected.
the question becomes: can jewishness save itself from itself? …or will they go out in a blaze of samson option glory?

Posted by: retreatingbladestall | Mar 10 2012 0:35 utc | 58