Whiskey Annex

Open Thread 6 Jul 09

This thread is offered as a backup, if needed, to the current open thread at MoA, and pending repairs to LS. If anyone would like to post on a specific topic please contact me, and I will arrange posting rights for you (some already have these rights, from way back when).

Afternoon of a Fraud

If Senator John Kerry is sincere about winning the next Presidential Election, then why doesn't he use the findings in Chapter 8 of the 9/11 Commission Report to expose George Bush as a fraud in how he really dealt with the "war on terror"?

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Le Speakeasy

Lo, after these many weeks... Everyone is humbly invited to the Speakeasy for the open house/beta test!

The Sanctity of Graves

From a good friend comes this note:

Zeynep Toufe's excellent blog Under the Same Sun comments pointedly on the insanity of arguing, as a Sunday Times piece puts it, that "a thousand lives will have been blotted out for naught" if the US withdraws from Iraq now rather than later. As Toufe says, this amounts to saying that a thousand US deaths (apparently Iraqi deaths are denied meaning under any circumstances) will be meaningless unless a few thousand more are added, at which point all the deaths will have meaning restored to them. Reading this, I couldn't help remembering this wonderful piece by E.M. Forster, still relevant after 82 years . . .

In order to keep this short and sweet, here's a link to the Forster piece, 'Our Graves in Gallipoli' -- proof that the ghastly engineered sentimentality surrounding (shrouding, veiling, justifying) warfare hasn't changed much in the last century or so. Enjoy. My favourite bit: "If a rich man went into the interior of Asia and tried to take more gold or more oil, he might be seriously injured at once. He must persuade poor men, who are numerous, to go there for him." Plus que ça change...

Billmon Sounds Off

This warrrants discussion.

Billmon's LA times op-ed is here.

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We're All Just Bozos on this Bus

The title borrowed from the comedy maniacs of my late teens, Firesign Theatre... I could also quote their: "How can you be in two places at once, when you're not anywhere at all" But I won't.

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Terror, life and death

Dear friends

As I alluded briefly at MoA this week, I have been absent for family problems. I was hoping to come back quickly with good news, but it is not yet to be.

Less than three weeks ago, my four-year-old son was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

I imagine your intake of breath, your shock, maybe feelings of empathy or pity. Well, it is much more than that when it is your beautiful, lively, loving, smiling - and innocent - kid. That bit of information -"brain tumor" - which sounds so deadly - never leaves you again, you start living like a zombie, a permenent knot in your guts and a cloud on your mind, imagining the worst, full of pain if you think about it, full of guilt if you think about something else, daily tasks becoming unreal and unimportant (and yet, with two other young daughters, we have to go on and keep life as normal as possible). We got the news right in the middle of the Beslan hostage situation, and it made it all even more vivid. Now I really know what "terror" means.

He went through surgery last week, an attempt to cut out the tumor. The operation - 7 hours - went well, and he has recovered amazingly quickly, coming home barely 4 days later. The surgeon said optimistic words about full recovery. He is partly paralysed now, but this is expected to subside in the coming weeks, and he is already doing some reeducation for that.
However, a piece of the tumor was left, because it would have caused too much damage to take it out. We were hoping to learn that it was benign, but have just been told that it is partly malignant, and we are back into an uncertain future, with more exams and more treatment(s) likely in the near future.

Google provides a lot of information, of course, a lot of it not precise enough for our needs. The best I can come up with is a 80-90% survival rate after 20 years. That does not sound so bad, but 10% in 10 years is a hell of a lot more than the chance of being hit by terrorists in the same period. Why are we worrying about them again? and putting the world upside down, and killing and maiming thousands (with a 100% certainty, these)? Why do people forget what is important?

The support of people around us (family, friends, school authorities and parents) has been amazing and really helpful - mostly by uplifting our spirits and simply being present. I hope that you guys, whom I don't know but feel close to in many ways, will be around as well. Please tell me: how do you enjoy your life today?

A serious policy against terrorism

I'd like to take this site away from tin foil hat territory, if you don't mind...
Let's also avoid Bush, swiftvets, negative campaigning and the SLCM and actually focus on policy issues...

I wrote back in May the following posts (when I had time to care about substantive issues...) which I bring again to your attention to start the discussion. Their titles are quite explicit:

A policy against terrorism
"It would be a great thing to see Al-Qaeda taking over Saudi Arabia or Pakistan"
The French experience with terrorism

So, how should Kerry wage the fight against terrorism? Do we agree here that it is essentially police action and diplomatic cooperation? So, and maybe more importantly, how should he package it for the public to make it palatable?

Discovering the Truth about 9/11

One of the primary difficulties (other than intentional governmental obfuscations and media assisted distortions) in understanding what happened on 9/11 is the complexity of the overall situation and the ever-growing cast of characters involved. For example, just coming to terms with the sheer amount of evidence alone is noticeably demanding. Fortunately for us, David Ray Griffin has distilled and compiled a good deal of the most credible evidence available into his The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004). As he explains:

"[T]his evidence is so extensive and of such a nature that no individual – especially no individual with very limited time and resources – could check out its accuracy. . .[However, if] a significant portion of the evidence summarized here holds up, the conclusion that the attacks on 9/11 succeeded because of official complicity would be virtually inescapable (xxiii)."

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a minor puzzle

Whiskey Annex

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Open Thread - 17 Aug

A long-overdue open thread.

To start off, I have placed the text of three interesting articles at a new location here.

Continue reading "Open Thread - 17 Aug"

Getting a Grip

I notice that the peak oil event is starting to get a mention in the more daring print media. This would be good news, if it weren't for the relentlessly Pollyannistic, physically clueless responses being printed alongside to defuse any sense of alarm or urgency. Unfortunately the American reading public (and I suspect most of the wealthy industrialised world) is energy-illiterate enough to believe the soothing noises -- "green cars," "hydrogen economy," "clean nukes," "ethanol fuels," "solar panels," and the like. Some of these soothing noises are ridiculous per se -- there is no such thing as a "green" car -- and others are merely oversold, but all of them come down to one basic promise: that Americans (and by extension America-wannabes like the Commonwealth, N Europe, Japan, etc.) can somehow have their cake and eat it too, that is, go on living just the way they (we) do now, except miraculously made clean and green and sustainable.

My personal belief is that this is a big, fat, self-serving, dangerous lie -- a Rapture cult for consumerism. Some may disagree, but this is (for the moment) my thread and I wish to do a bit of (mercifully brief I promise) anecdote, then post a couple of important URLs, then (hopefully) discuss . . .

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PROTESTING

Some interesting stuff on http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/
I want to tell you about my experiences with an oppressing government and I want to know about yours.

Continue reading "PROTESTING"

Who "controls " oil?

I have written a pretty long post to try to describe how the oil industry works and what it means to "control" oil. For the time being, I have posted it here, but I hope that we can discuss it here at the Annex.

It is still a work-in-progress and I would be especially grateful for your questions and comments on items that you find unclear or would like described/investigated in greater detail. This text is a fairly general and theoretical one, and I am planning a second part which would examine concrete projects and countries in more detail. again, questions and suggestions would be helpful to make this more interesting.

A Remarkable Series of Coincidences

A few days ago, I wondered if there had been any attempt to correlate terror alerts from Homeland Security and bad news for BushCo.

Well, ask and ye shall receive (thanks to Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway for pointing me at JuliusBlog's excellent chart and timeline).

Now, if we could just corral somebody with Nexis-Lexus access, to do a numeric breakdown of the frequency of these stories' appearance in the media just prior to and after the alerts...

A tasty quote from Julius Civitatus:

...for the record, we are not claiming that all these alerts are politically motivated. We are sure a considerable amount of these alerts were legit and caused by real and immediate information of potential threats. What is important to note is that many of these "immediate" terror alerts were later on discredited [p.f.: emphasis mine] (in some cases they used old data, in other cases the announcements were less immediate and less urgent that we were lead to believe, as the press reported.) Those are the cases that could be interpreted as politically motivated, especially when they seemed to coincide with political news and events unfavorable to the administration.

Vichy Left -- or Left in Exile?

I observe some of the same phenomena to which Jerome draws our attention in the "Vichy Left" topic; however I place a slightly different interpretation on (at least some of) the infighting we see in (what remains of) the US Left. This is a modified repost of a rantlet I put up at MoA some weeks back, and I guess the moral is that I am not sure the US Left is wholly responsible for the sorry state of the US Left. A lot of its sad condition goes back, imho, to the post-war years and Joe McCarthy's clever con game . . .

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America’s Vichy Left vs. Michael Moore

This article is a couple of weeks old, but makes some interesting points.

"...For years now, America's Leftists have been flogging themselves to death wondering why it is that they remain so weak and disenfranchised. Most Leftists agree that it's all the fault of the right-wing dominated media, and the Republican-infested corporate conglomerates that control the major media outlets. Others blame religion, or advertising, or popular culture, or something inherently base within the genus americanus. Sometimes they even blame themselves, though only in a safe, disingenuous, fake-self-loathing way: we're out-of-touch, too serious, too high-fallutin', we need to get with the times, etc.

In fact, the main cause for the demise of the American Left is much more sinister than that. The American Left is responsible for destroying the American Left. I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean quite literally that anytime the Left starts to get somewhere, you can be sure that a vigilante mob of other Leftists will rise to the occasion to crush it, to make sure they stay as marginalized and ineffective as always. It's a kind of ghetto envy endemic to the Left - the Right is always rooting for its heroes to succeed. Not the Left. The key for them is to sound Virtuous - and oftentimes that means eating their own in order to promote themselves.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the American Left's envy-fueled lynching of Michael Moore, the only Leftist to make it out of the ghetto...

What do you think?

"Man, This is War a Go-Go..."

(channelling Country Joe there)

$1.9 Billion Of Iraq's Money Goes To U.S. Contractors

Halliburton Co. and other U.S. contractors are being paid at least $1.9 billion from Iraqi funds under an arrangement set by the U.S.-led occupation authority, according to a review of documents and interviews with government agencies, companies and auditors.

Continue reading ""Man, This is War a Go-Go...""

Gloomy nation - Emigrants

I am a member of gloomy “nation” of Emigrants. Trough out Cold war Western countries (and USA was leading one) represented “safe heaven” for so many political asylum seekers and rightly. It was all about freedom of speech and democracy and human rights.

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The Further Adventures of Cajones Dem

"Hey, Democratic leadership, come on over here a sec. I need to talk to you."
"And you are?"
"Your party members, remember us?"
"Oh, OK, but I only have a mome...arrghhh what the..what do you think you are doing? Let me go, that hurts!"
"Now that I have your undivided attention, let me tell you what needs to happen. This election is too important for you to let the RNC control and frame the debate (giving a little twist here) you got that. You do not let any pundit speak for the Democratic party who has not been thoroughly rehearsed in countering the Republican smears. You have had years to put together an effective media strategy, what's wrong with you guys? You don't go blindly into a bar fight with nothing but your fist. You know the other guy has a knife, he’s been showing it to you for four years. You bring a gun to a knife fight. Do we understand each other?" (Giving another tiny, little twist)
"Yes..yes, I hear you! I understand!"
"Good. (letting go) And by the way, you got a nice little package there, honey, don't be afraid to use it!"

DOJ Documents Given 11th Hour Stay of Execution

The minions of the Grand Inquistitor AshKKKroft have changed their "mind" about the destruction of Department of Justice docs available to the "little people" at repository libraries, and it appears that pressure from the American Library Association (ALA) was instrumental in the rescision.

ALA welcomes Department of Justice decision to rescind destruction request

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Mothers and Spiders

I told the spiders they had to leave my house.
"But this is our house!" they said. "It is ours by law of the divine cycle."
Yes, I know about the divine cycle, but I'm sorry, I really am, you must go now.
"This is our house." they hissed, "there is no life here."
I'm here.
"For now, yes, but we are strong and this is our house by divine law."
There is life here, you cannot stay.

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Call for Bloggers/Posters

It's time to step up to the front of the line gentle people. The Annex is here to provide more than just a few people access to a forum to pose a thought, ask a question, rouse the rabble. You need to contact Okie via e-mail for access to the Annex. The interface at the Annex is easy. Rest your minds on that. If you've been on-line a while you'll get it fast. It's all WYSIWYG.

It can't just be a few of us here with mouths and fingers to speak, and I have the hunch that there are more of you chomping at the bit to say your piece and ask a question or two. Now's the time. Okie can be contacted at:
glimmung2@yahoo.com

I Have Faith in Prozac Nation

Excerpt: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A campaign worker for President Bush said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better.

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?" said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt.

The comment was apparently directed to a colleague who was transferring a phone call from a reporter asking about job quality, and who overheard the remark.

When told the Prozac comment had been overheard, Sheybani said: "Oh, I was just kidding."

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America at its Finest

I wanted to take some time today to discuss something that has been brewing in my mind lately. Something that was amplified by the speech given by Teresa Heinz Kerry, and even better defined by the speech given by Barack Obama.

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