robinlea

Lisa L Williams, coporate stooge – Bradley Manning, lamplighter hero

Bradley Manning is off limits at SF Gay Pride parade, but corporate sleaze is embraced

First,

while even a hint of support for Manning will not be tolerated, there is a long roster of large corporations serving as the event’s sponsors who are welcomed with open arms.

So apparently, the very high-minded ethical standards of Lisa L Williams and the SF Pride Board apply only to young and powerless Army Privates who engage in an act of conscience against the US war machine, but instantly disappear for large corporations and banks that hand over cash. What we really see here is how the largest and most corrupt corporations own not just the government but also the culture.

The minute something even a bit deviant takes place (as defined by standards imposed by America’s political and corporate class), even the SF Gay Pride Parade must scamper, capitulate, apologize, and take an oath of fealty to their orthodoxies (we adore the military, the state, and your laws).

Thus, while Bradley Manning is persona non grata at SF Pride, illegal eavesdropping telecoms, scheming banks, and hedge-fund purveryors of the nation’s worst right-wing agitprop are more than welcome.

Second,

the authoritarian, state-and-military-revering mentality pervading Williams’ statement is striking. It isn’t just the imperious decree that “even a hint of support” for Manning “will not be tolerated”, though that is certainly creepy. Nor is it the weird announcement that the wrongdoer “has been disciplined”. Even worse is the mindless embrace of the baseless claims of US military officials (that Manning “placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform”) along with the supremely authoritarian view that any actions barred by the state are, ipso facto, ignoble and wrong.

Lisa L Williams’s ‘cowardly, imperious statement that has to be read to be believed’.

It’s not just Gay-Lesbian Inc. of course, it’s Your-name-here Inc. Look at Apple. Look at Google. Both were once under human control. So too was the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco. The Sierra Club, the Green Party … all gone the way of the corporate flesh.

Organization’s begin as our servants inexorably yet inevitably tend toward our domination. Perhaps they ought to have a discard-by date. A date after which they must be dissolved and a new organization created to see to the needs that occasioned the creation of the one just dispatched … if it’s still needed. If it was effective we may well be done with it. One more potential slaver that’s bit the dust.

Natural systems die, our unnatural systems need to taste a little death as well. It’ll improve the breed. Corporate death as the natural course, just as it is with ourselves. Theirs penciled into each corporate charter. Five years ? Ten years ? Certainly no longer than a human lifetime. Perhaps the lifetime of the founder ? If the need is still unmet, ongoing … let a new corporate generation be born(e). Or not. Study the records, write a new charter … and then a public vote. Up or down.

[T]he fact that such lock-step, heel-clicking, military-mimicking behavior is now coming from the SF Gay Pride Parade of all places is indeed noteworthy: it reflects just how pervasive this authoritarian rot has become.

This is THE question before us : how do we ensure human control of human organizations. All of our problems are rooted in free-wheeling organizations run amuk. Free-wheeling organizations staffed by aliens : us.

We have to make the choice every day in every context : go along as aliens with the destruction of the human species, among so many others, via destruction of our habitat; or resist our destruction, as human beings.

left to right Akechai, Darunee, Somyot, Surachai, Tanthawut

One more day is too much !

Akechai Hongkangwarn

was arrested by police on 11 March 2011, and eventually charged under Article 112 – lese majeste – for being in possession of 100 illegal VCDs, a CD writer and 10 Wikileaks documents. He was arrested following a rally by the Red Siam group (on 10 March 2011). He was convicted on 28 March 2013.

Darunee Charnchoensilpakul

was initially sentenced to 18 years in jail on lese majeste charges on 28 August 2009. That trial, conducted in secret in a closed court, saw her receive 6 years for each of three comments she made speaking to a political rally. The case made a mockery of Thailand’s judicial processes.

Finally, in February 2011, the Appeals Court voided the jail sentence handed down by the Criminal Court in Darunee’s closed trial.

Then, in a remarkable demonstration of the injustice and bias inherent in the Thai courts, the Constitutional Court’s verdict was that her secret trial was constitutional! This verdict was read by the Criminal Court on 17 October 2011 and her verdict reading is scheduled for 15 December 2011.

PPT is unsure how her re-trial took place. It seems the judges simply met, considered the original evidence from the voided verdict trial and sentenced to 15 years jail on three counts of lese majeste. Some thought this was a reduction in sentence from the original 18 years. The fact is that Darunee has already served more than 3 years.

The presiding judge who read the verdict was Chanathip Muanphawong, who also read the [criminal,] patently [and tragically] ridiculous 20-year verdict on Ampol Tangnopakul.

Somyos Pruksakasemsuk

At 12 noon on Saturday, 30 April 2011, Somyos was arrested in Aranyaprathet province. He was arrested on allegations of violating Article 112, the lese majeste law. Kept in jail until his trial, often in chains and cages when he made court appearances, on 23 December 2013, Somyos was sentenced to 5 years on each of two lese majeste charges, with an extra year added from a previous suspended sentence for insulting General Saprang Kalayanamit, a leader of the 2006 royalist coup and an activist on lese majeste.

Surachai Danwattananusorn

Surachai was arrested in the early morning hours of 22 February 2011 in Nonthaburi and taken to police cells to be charged on lese majeste for a speech he gave in December 2010. On 28 February 2012, incarcerated but unbowed, and a year after his arrest and jailing, 71 year-old Surachai was sentenced to 15 years in jail for speeches made in late 2010. This was halved for his guilty plea.

On 27 April 2012, Surachai was sentenced to a further 5 years in jail. The court halved this sentence because of his guilty plea on the previous charges.

On 17 May 2012, Surachai was hospitalized and scheduled for a prostrate operation. He came out of jail and hospital to be sentenced on yet one more charge on 28 May 2012 (28 March?). He received a further 5 years, reduced by half, for a speech on 15 December 2008. That’s a total of 12.5 years in jail.

Tanthawut Taweewarodomkul (also known as Num)

was arrested at 5:30 p.m. on 1 April 2010. The 38 year old man in Pathum Thani Province was arrested by police for a video program called “Thailand’s Way Out” (“ทางออกประเทศไทย”) on the www.norporchorusa.com website that was considered lese majeste. In Tanthawut’s case, they used his young son as the “bait” to force a confession. Initially, when he did not confess, he and “his 10-year-old son spent the night at the police station. The next morning, he woke up when someone came into the cell and told him that he did not love the king and he was a dangerous person. The police then resumed the interrogation, and repeated that he should sign quickly so that he could go back to be with his son, or else the social welfare department would come to adopt his son.” He “confessed.”

However, he soon “retracted the confession … and insisted to the court that he was not an administrator of the website and did not post the messages.”

On 15 March 2011, the court found Tanthawut guilty as charged – no surprises there – and sentenced him to a total of 13 years in prison.

What’s the difference between the Royal Thai Lese Majeste Inquisiton and the US Gulag maintained at Gunatanamo and elsewhere?

While the Royal Thai Government feels compelled to perform its ridiculous burlesque of justice to ‘validate’ its imprisonment of innocent people as political prisoners, the United States Government feels no such compulsion, after throwing its innocent victims in prison it merely throws away the key … all the while charging other states with violating human rights. The US is more arrogant than and … marvelous to relate … more hypocritical than the Royal Thai Government.

two peas in a pod, liars murderers war criminals
backed up by the senate the house nato and the eu

In a letter to members of Congress Thursday, the White House declared,

“The US intelligence community assesses with some degree of varying confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria.”

A lie told by straight-faced liars to those who know they’re being lied to … but don’t care.

They have decided that after WW III they will be in the best position to take advantage of worldwide chaos. Just like WW II. ‘cept this time the Axis wins. So they think.

So, together, they say … Bring it on!

The real issue in this conflict is not the nature of the Syrian regime, but the nature of the regimes that rule the US, Britain, France and Germany, which are embarking on another predatory carve-up of the world like those that produced the First and Second World Wars.

Was it George Bush or Barack Obama to whom they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? I forget … but they ought to give other one a Nobel Peace Prize, too. Only fair. Nobel Peace Prizes for Blair, Cameron, Hollande, and Merkel too!

Sardonic joke. These people are getting ready to turn out the lights for real. I hear they used to lock themselves in and party during the Black Death in Europe. I guess they all have their supplies in store now and are ready for a real good time.

1 May

US pledges to arm Syrian opposition as new terror bombing hits Damascus

Senior Obama administration officials announced yesterday that the United States will directly arm the Islamist opposition fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This came as another terror bombing hit the Syrian capital, Damascus, amid a wave of bombings carried out by the US-backed opposition.

aking a page from the Bush administration’s lying “weapons of mass destruction” propaganda in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Obama is using completely unsubstantiated charges of chemical weapons use by the Assad regime as a pretext for an escalation of the US-orchestrated war for regime-change that has already killed tens of thousands of Syrians and turned a million more into refugees.

Late yesterday, US National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden confirmed that Obama “has directed his national security team to identify additional measures so that we can continue to increase our assistance.”

These announcements end Washington’s pretense that it is not itself providing military support to opposition fighters, including the Al Nusra Front, which has pledged loyalty to Al Qaeda, but is only allowing its Middle Eastern allies to do so in its place.

Washington designated the Al Nusra Front a terrorist organization last December, noting that it had already carried out nearly 600 terror bombings in Syria “in which numerous innocent Syrians have been injured and killed.”

It’s been liar, murderer, war criminal in the White House for twelve long years. The kids must think that’s because we’re a nation of liars, murderers, and war criminals.

obama cameron merkel hollande
war criminals all

Four civilians killed in mortar attack in Damascus

In an interview recently broadcast on Turkish television, President Bashar al-Assad said that if the militants fighting against the Syrian government take power, they could destabilize the entire Middle East for decades.

“If the unrest in Syria leads to the partitioning of the country, or if the terrorist forces take control … the situation will inevitably spill over into neighboring countries and create a domino effect throughout the Middle East and beyond,” he added.

That’s exactly what Barack Obama and the Lords of Capital in the US and EU have in mind. Look at Iraq. Look at Afghanistan. Look at Libya. They know exactly what they are doing.

They are war criminals.

if our drones don’t get you our sewing machines will

Huge death toll in Bangladesh factory collapse

At least 3,000 workers were employed in the garment factories that took up six floors of the building, known as Rana Plaza. The exact number of people who were inside when the disaster occurred is unknown.

Thousands were in the building when the upper floors pancaked on top of each other at around 9 a.m. Within a short time, nothing was left standing but the main pillar and parts of the front wall. The structure was reduced to a two-storey pile of broken rubble and concrete blocks. Victims “pinned under debris and choked with cement dust” were shouting for help and water … Workers had found large cracks in the building late on Tuesday, but were ordered back to work after an evacuation.

Whether its drones or sewing machines it’s the West against the rest. Outside its own confines, I guess, the West has always been synonymous with evil.

Put an End to this Parade of Horror

“The Worker Rights Consortium estimates that it would cost brands and retailers less than 10 cents per garment to make their factories safe, but they continue to prioritize the relentless drive for lower costs over the lives of workers.”

It would cost less than nothing, would save hundreds of billions, to shut down the drones.

Alienated life on earth is hideous and expensive. We have never allowed humane and compassionate life on earth to be nurtured and admired; it’s not only priceless, it’s free.

A note from an alien demonstrating his conscientious self-reduction to subhuman, and his pride in his achievement.

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP

‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

—Lawrence Summers

Summers is one of those ‘smart’ guys Obama knuckles his brow before. Last paragraph cuts to the chase : they knew then and know now exactly what they’re doing, What they’ve done. Across the board. And they’re proud of themselves.

The rich are not like us. They have purposefully rendered themselves subhuman.

swap

2013 : ecstatic American fascists

11 May

The taxi cab full of pressure cookers

But if it’s true the brothers assembled the bombs in the apartment, then what was this cab ride all about?

Jim Duggan, 51, has been haunted since his close encounter with brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, thinking maybe he could have unwittingly thwarted the killer plot if he had just driven away.

He told the Daily News on Thursday that the brothers flagged him down April 14 outside a rapid-transit station in the Boston suburb of Malden.

“I tried to put their backpacks into the trunk, but they wouldn’t let me touch them,” Duggan said.

He drove the men to Cambridge, letting them out near Kendall Square — close to where they lived.

Duggan said the brothers gave him a $2 tip on a $38 fare. As he started to drive away, the the older brother, Tamerlan, 26, began pounding on his car and yelling at him to get his attention.

The taxi driver said he immediately stopped and popped the trunk. Before the brothers could stop him, he removed one of the backpacks, which he now suspects held a homemade pressure-cooker bomb used in the attack.

“I said to them, ‘That’s the most packed backpack I ever picked up,’” said Duggan, guessing the bag weighed about 20 pounds.

I’m especially interested in this given Dzhokhar’s reported claim that they were going to hit the July 4th celebration, but finished the bombs early and therefore decided to target the Marathon instead. What if they had picked up the bombs at some location on the commuter rail?

From the presence of The Craft at the Marathon ; the lockdown of Boston ; the contradictory accounts of the actual events that took place ; the history of the CIA vis a vis Moussaoui at 9/11 ; the deep, deep involvement of the CIA with the forces of darkness in the Caucasus ; and the involvement of CIA personnel personally with the Dzhokhar family all make me believe the real terrorists are not yet in custody.

2 May

I don’t know what happened in Boston on Marathon Day. The strongest hypothesis of how the Boston Marathon bombing came about seems to be that the whole Tsarnaev clan were agents of the CIA – the uncle was married to the daughter of a CIA agent, and lived in his house in Virginia – were Jamestown Foundation supported terrorists working against the Russian government in the Caucasus, and that the eldest of the two brothers, at least, turned against them after his Canadian counterpart – William Plotnikov, “Somebody changed his mind in Canada,” – was killed by the Russians in the Caucasus.

The CIA protected their ‘asset(s)’ – from the FBI, from the cops – and thus enabled him/them proceed with and carry out their ‘plan’. Just as the CIA had done with Moussaoui and 9/11.

In short the CIA, ultimately, are the enablers of the terrorists who killed 3, maimed others, and wounded scores more at the Boston Marathon, 2013. It’s OK for them to enable terrorists anywhere, anytime they feel like it – and Barack Obama is busy making it ‘legal’. Syria is the ‘beneficiary’ of Obama’s efforts – the CIA/Jamestown/Chechneyan terrorists billed as the Syrian ‘rebels’ – as we speak.

Obama and the CIA are doing truly monstrously evil things in all around the world and it’s blown back home … yet, remarkably, no one cares.

Mel King and William E. Alberts lay out what to me and many has been obvious for a decade or more : the Boston-Baghdad Connection, but even they are silent on the efficient cause of the Boston Marathon bombine : the CIA.

Obama hails police lockdown, covers up state role in Boston bombings

More plausible, given what is already known, is the likelihood that the brothers, particularly Tamerlan, were being developed as assets for use in US imperialism’s operations in Chechnya, Dagestan and Georgia. Washington has maintained a longstanding relationship with Islamist extremist groups operating in Chechnya. Russia laid siege to the region in two devastating wars following the breakup of the Soviet Union in order to suppress separatist movements. In 2008, the US supported nearby Georgia in a war with Russia over the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

Chechen separatists and Islamic fundamentalists, moreover, have been recruited by the US and its allies to participate in the US-backed war for regime-change in Syria, whose shock troops are being provided by forces linked to Al Qaeda.

The Boston tragedy is but the latest example of US imperialism’s intrigues and crimes around the world becoming the breeding grounds for attacks on innocent people at home.

As on the occasion of 9/11, know one wants to know any of this. So we’ll all squeeze our eyes thight shut and wave our flags – and our sinking spell will continue … until we sink out of sight. Until we are one with the very core of evil, and incapable of further movement or distinction.

29 April

New questions on Boston bombing suspects’ ties to US intelligence

27 April

Military conducts urban warfare exercises in Chicago area

26 April

Questions mount about Boston bombers’ links to US intelligence agencies

I don’t know what happened in Boston on Marathon Day.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde play with the kiddies while school’s out

9fans are aficionados of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system.

GSoC stands for Google Summer of Code, wherein Dr Jekyll pays a stipend to students to write code of interest to Mr Hyde.

[9fans] [GSoC 2013: Replace html generation in wikifs]

lamg Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:06:43 -0700

Hello everybody:

I´m interested in porting a markdown engine (I already got one written in go which is almost working and has less than 300 lines of code). I´m student of University of Pinar del Río (Cuba).

This is the first time I try to participate in GSoC, so I hope the mentor of this project contacts me to tell me how to participate.

Luis Ángel Méndez Gort

[9fans] [GSoC] sorry for the last email

lamg Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:39:26 -0700

Sorry guys, I didn´t know that students in Cuba cannot participate, anyway I will upload the markdown engine when completed to github.com

lamg

Re: [9fans] [GSoC] sorry for the last email

andrey mirtchovski Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:33:40 -0700

> Politics…

“residents and/or nationals of Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma), with whom we are prohibited by U.S. law from engaging in commerce, are ineligible to participate”

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2013/help_page#4._Who_is_not_eligible_to_participate_as

sad but true.

Residents and/or nationals of Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma) … like Luis Ángel Méndez Gort … with whom Google is prohibited by U.S. law from engaging in commerce, are encouraged to open gmail.com accounts however.

The better to spy on those with whom they correspond.

And just out of arbitrary spite ? …

Please also note that any residents of Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Peru, Russia, and the Ukraine that participate in the program will not receive a t-shirt or any promotional items for their participation.

We need to give ourdelves up to the truth

Evil for its own sake

“About a year ago we started receiving demolition orders from the Israeli Civil Administration. Currently 10 electricity installations are under threat of destruction. This would cut more than a thousand Palestinians off from electricity,” [Community Energy Technology in the Middle East (Comet)’s organisational development manager Aya] Shoshan tells IPS.

“Israel as the occupying power is responsible for the welfare of Palestinians living under occupation under international law. Not only is Israel not fulfilling this responsibility but it has threatened to destroy a humanitarian project, funded by international donors, seeking to alleviate the hardships of these Palestinian communities.”

‘Israeli’ was not always synonymous with ‘evil’ and neither was ‘American’, for that matter, but over the course of this century/millennium that is exactly what our two nations have come to represent to most of the earth’s population.

How can it have happened that we have allowed our [in]‘security’ to depend on others’ suffering and on the constant and purposeful injustices we perpetrate upon others ? How came we to depend ourselves on our ever more hardened yet ever more brittle exteriors, to keep the lie we tell ourselves … that we are ‘good’ people … from withering if exposed to the sun’s light?

We are headed for a catastrophic fall. Both of our nations. The longer we keep from acknowledging the inevitability of judgement day the heavier the weight of justice will be when it does fall upon us.

We need to give ourselves up to the truth, and to embrace The White Rose Society in 21st century America, and in Israel.

28 April The Little Country that slid back into the arms of the real pirates

It is a dramatic comeback for the parties widely blamed for Iceland’s economic meltdown in 2008.

The good news is that the Pirate Party has gone from 1 to 3 seats in the Althingi, the 63 seat Icelandic parliament.

	Birgitta Jónsdóttir	Southwest
	Jón Þór Ólafsson	Reykjavík South
	Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson	Reykjavík North

23 April The Little Country that Could

22 April Iceland Project Plays Dice With Nature, And Loses

Siv Friðleifsdóttir has earned life in prison without parole for the pre-meditated, cold-blooded murder of Lagarfljot lake

REYKJAVIK, Apr 22 2013 (IPS) – Since the controversial Karahnjukar dam in East Iceland was brought into operation in 2006, conditions in the downstream Lagarfljot lake have become much worse, according to information gathered by the energy company Landsvirkjun. Some of the changes are irreversible, scientists say.

Lagarfljot lake is 92 km long and is actually a series of lakes with a river running through it. People living in its vicinity have used it for recreational purposes, and it was also a good fishing lake.

Now the salmon stock has virtually disappeared and the trout population has decreased by 80 percent. The colour of the lake has changed and become much darker due to all the sediment and suspended sediment emanating from the glacial river that now runs into the lake. The capacity for photosynthesis by algae and other plants has decreased as so little light penetrates due to the sediments in the lake. And the plant biota as a whole has declined.

Besides the decline in the fish population, some birds are also being affected, both because there is less for them to eat and because their habitats are being destroyed.

Yet most of the changes were foreseen at the time the environmental impact assessment (EIA) was carried out for the plant in 2001.

The Planning Agency, which at that time ruled on whether a development could go ahead or not, said the environmental consequences of the Karahnjukar dam were so great, uncertain and unaccounted for that they would not allow the plant to go ahead.

However, the Planning Agency’s decision was later overruled by the environment minister at the time … Siv Friðleifsdóttir. In 2001, Iceland’s government was right-wing and eager to build energy-intensive industry.

How could one greedy moron like Siv override an entire Planning Agency? We will always have greedy morons among us. We need to limit the damage they can do. Having her and her ilk in prison for life would be cold-comfort indeed … if they were imprisoned.

I’ll wager that just as in the USA, Thailand, and everywhere else on this neoliberal globalized planet … she walks … and does the same greedy, stupid things again, and again, and …

The sociopaths who cause the pain never pay the price, their victims never stop paying.

So when are we gonna wise up? Empty their pockets to pay for the damage they’ve done and then lock ‘em up to keep ‘em from doing the same damn thing again?

The mountain top removers … the frackers … the tar sands strip miners … the dilbit pipeliners … the GMO patenteers … and then get after the banksters, the murderers and war criminals. Or the other way ’round? Better … all at once !

Zein Abu-Mariya (17) with his parents after nine months in Israeli custody. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

‘Tell Us About Jail – Just In Case’

HEBRON, Occupied West Bank, Apr 22 2013 (IPS) – “Three interrogators questioned me for three hours. I was handcuffed. They beat me, slapped me, kicked me, boxed me, accused me of throwing stones; played a video of a demonstration. I denied I was there. So again, they beat me up,” recounts Zein Abu-Mariya, 17, seated on a sofa next to dad.

“They pressured my son to confess,” Hisham chimes in. “‘If you don’t sign, you’ll be treated like an animal,’ they threatened.” Zein acquiesces.

In March 2012, in the dead of night, he was arrested by Israeli soldiers. Thirty-six hours later, he was brought before a judge. He stood at 35 court hearings, spent nine months in the HaSharon jail minors section; yet was never convicted.

In January, his father finally managed to bail him out. Back home, waiting for an impending court hearing, Zein strikes a defiant pose: “I don’t want to go back to jail, but I’m not afraid; I got used to it.”

He’s gone back to school, but he was held back one year. “My friends ask me what jail is like – just in case.”

“Put yourself in their shoes,” U.S. President Barack Obama recently told young Israelis. The issue of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention provides a dramatic example of just how far the U.S. president’s plea is from being fulfilled.

Lying, war criminal sonofabitch. Who’s he think he’s kidding?

Barack the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate / Hyper-hypocrite Obama … who’s he think he’s kidding?

If he were the PM of Israel he’d have vaporized Zein, Zein’s parents, and anyone else in range of his hellfired drones. They’d never have seen it comin’. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Do you think the Israelis would have laughed … too ?

“After lunch I go back to bed for a longer nap and then up for mail call … a time of the day I sometimes shed a few tears at the love and intensity of those who have written to state their support.”

These gargoyles – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Holder – cannot touch Lynne Stewart.
She’s way out of their class.

The Persecution of Lynne Stewart

By 1995, along with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Abdeen Jabara, she was the lead trial counsel for the sheik, who was convicted in September of that year. He received life in prison plus 65 years, a sentence Stewart called “outlandish.” The cleric, in poor health, is serving a life sentence in the medical wing of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina. Stewart continued to see the sheik in jail after the sentence. Three years later the government severely curtailed his ability to communicate with the outside world, even through his lawyers, under special administrative measures or SAMs.

In 2000, during a visit with the sheik, he asked Stewart to release a statement from him to the press. The Clinton administration did not prosecute her for the press release, but the Bush administration in April 2002, the mood of the country altered by the attacks of 9/11, decided to go after her.

Stewart’s 2005 trial was a Punch-and-Judy show. The state demanded an outrageous 30-year prison sentence. It showed the jurors lurid videos of Osama bin Laden and images of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers, and spun a fantastic web of Islamic, terrorist intrigue.

And even Manhattan District Judge John Koeltl instructed the jury more than 750 times that the photos of Osama bin Laden and the 2001 World Trade Center attacks were not relevant to the case. Stewart was sentenced to 28 months.

The Obama administration appealed the ruling. The appeals court ruled that the sentence was too light. Koeltl gave her 10 years. … And now, with stage 4 cancer that has metastasized, spreading to her lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs, creating a grave threat to her life, she sits in a prison cell at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas … She has served three.

Petition To Free Lynne Stewart

After years of post-conviction freedom, her bail was revoked arbitrarily (by President Barack Obama and his AG Eric Holder on November 17, 2009) and her imprisonment ordered, precluding surgery she had scheduled in a major New York hospital.

The sinister meaning of the relentless persecution of Lynne Stewart is unmistakably clear. Given her age and precarious health, the ten-year sentence she is serving is a virtual death sentence.

Since her imprisonment in the Federal Prison in Carswell, Texas her urgent need for surgery was delayed 18 months – so long, that the operating physician pronounced the condition as “the worst he had seen.”

In her current setting, where trips to physicians involve attempting to walk with 10 pounds of shackles on her wrists and ankles, with connecting chains, Lynne Stewart has lacked ready access to physicians and specialists under conditions compatible with medical success.

It can take weeks to see a medical provider in prison conditions. It can take weeks to report physical changes and learn the results of treatment; and when held in the hospital, Lynne has been shackled wrist and ankle to the bed.

This medieval “shackling” has little to do with any appropriate prison control. She is obviously not an escape risk.

We demand abolition of this practice for all prisoners, let alone those facing surgery and the urgent necessity of care and recovery.

Shackles and chains. Death sentences with little or no treatment for cancer patients. The Anti-Islam Inquisition in the USA shapes up remarkably like the Lese Majeste Inquisition in Thailand … with echoes of the Spanish Inquisition itself in the background.

The military … and the Royalists in Thailand and the Zionists in the USA and the Roman Catholic prelates in Spain … are/were in control, pulling the strings of their black robed puppets behind the bench.

HRW and Amnesty International USA screech Pussy Riot galore, and are pointedly and utterly disgracefully silent when it comes to Lynne Stewart. Everything we once held dear is now putrid and rotten.

Sign the petition to free Lynne Stewart. They’re only asking for 10,000 signatures and need just over 2,000 more.

Tim has served his two years in federal prison, and will be released on April 21, 2013.

The ocean that shapes the shore

No one ever told us that this battle would be easy. No one ever told us that we wouldn’t have to make sacrifices. We knew that when we started this fight.

Every wave on the ocean that has ever risen up and refused to lay back down has been dashed on the shore, but it is the very purpose of a wave to rise up, because once it rises up above the horizon it finally has the perspective to see that it’s not just a wave, that it’s a part of a mighty ocean. And the sharpest rock on the wildest shore can never break that ocean apart, they can never wear that ocean down, because it’s the ocean that shapes the shore.

23 April

Tim DeChristopher Speaks Out After 21 Months in Prison for Disrupting Oil Bid

Amy Goodman:

You were arrested during the Bush era, the end of his term.

Tim DeChristopher:

Right, I was arrested during the Bush years, and then the entire course of my legal process developed under the Obama administration.

Amy Goodman:

And so, you were convicted. …

Tim DeChristopher:

Well, I don’t think anybody knows what needs to be done now.

And I think that’s something that we shouldn’t necessarily shy away from telling people, from telling other activists, and especially from telling young people, that, you know, there’s a lot of things that we’ve tried, and most of which hasn’t worked, especially on climate change, and especially on trying to get our government to do something about climate change. So, you know, mostly we need people taking action, and nobody can really tell you what that action should be.

You know, I think most professional activists and most experienced activists, if I had told them what I was going to do beforehand, they would have said, “No, that’s a bad idea.” And, in fact, most professional activists told me afterwards that it was a bad idea. Most professional environmentalists reacted very negatively to what I did.

And yet it had an impact and turned out to be a very positive experience for me. Despite the fact that I had to deal with some negative consequences, it’s something that was a great learning experience for me and something that I’m grateful for.

And so, I think we need to take more of those risks and have more experimentation in this movement.

“How would you feel if your neighbor signed up for a gmail account that they can launch from their web browser, and now Google just flies over not only their but your email all day. How would you feel about it?”

Drones should be banned from private use, says Google’s Eric Schmidt

“How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their back yard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?”

How would you feel if your neighbor signed up for a gmail account that they can launch from their web browser, and now Google just flies over not only their but your email all day. How would you feel about it?

Eric Schmidt, ‘executive chairman of Google and an adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign’, didn’t say a word apparently, about Barack Obama’s string of thousands of drone murders in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and points unknown.

“I’m not going to pass judgment on whether armies should exist, but I would prefer to not spread and democratise the ability to fight war to every single human being. … ”

Keep the ability to murder anyone, anywhere, at anytime in the hands of the totalitarian autocrats, where it belongs?

But as far as spying on individuals’ use of the internet, reading their email, and turning the results over to the ‘tot-aut’s … amassing the evidence used to ‘justify’ such hits … make that the purview of every ‘cybersecurity provider’, like Google for instance. Neither will they be required to tell you when they do it nor will they be held liable for doing so.

CISPA says : When ‘cybersecurity providers’ do it … it’s not illegal.

McCain Obama Levin

US deploys troops to Jordan, prepares to invade Syria

In testimony before the US Senate Armed Forces Committee on Wednesday, top US defense officials announced that they are deploying 200 troops of the 1st Armored Division to Jordan. They will establish headquarters near the Syrian-Jordanian border and plan for a rapid build-up, involving 20,000 or more US troops, awaiting orders from the White House to invade Syria.

Though the US has been fighting a proxy war with Syria since 2011, Hagel’s comments were the first public confirmation that the Obama administration is preparing a direct US invasion of Syria. Launching such a neo-colonial war would be a historic crime against the population of the Middle East on the scale of the Bush administration’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

That such a war is being planned 10 years after the unpopular US war in nearby Iraq—which cost over a million Iraqi lives, tens of thousands of US casualties, and trillions of dollars—is a devastating exposure of the decay of American democracy.

The Obama administration’s official justifications for the war—that war is necessary to secure Syria’s chemical weapons, or to restrain terrorist forces operating inside the US-backed opposition but that are somehow opposed by Washington—are absurd lies. They are contradicted even by the testimony of US officials.

Assad tartly dismissed claims by the US and its European allies that they are waging “humanitarian” war in Syria, noting: “We saw their humanitarian intervention in Iraq, in Libya, and now we see it in Syria.”

Vicious, foolish criminals. McCain to McCreary. Obama to Big Sandy. Levin to Lewisburg.

Smilin’ Mike Rogers

Oh Look, Rep. Mike Rogers Wife Stands To Benefit Greatly From CISPA Passing…

Rep. Mike Rogers, the main person in Congress pushing for CISPA, has kept rather quiet about a very direct conflict of interest that calls into serious question the entire bill.

Rogers’ wife stands to benefit quite a lot from the passage of CISPA, and has helped in the push to get the bill passed.

… all attempts at cybersecurity legislation have always been about money. Mainly, money to big defense contractors aiming to provide the government with lots of very expensive “solutions” to the cybersecurity “problem” …

Rogers accidentally tweeted (and then deleted) a story about how CISPA supporters, like himself, had received 15 times more money from pro-CISPA group that the opposition had received from anti-CISPA groups.

Rogers’ wife, Kristi Clemens Rogers, was, until recently, the president and CEO of Aegis LLC a “security” defense contractor company, whom she helped to secure a $10 billion (with a b) contract with the State Department.

Kristi Rogers recently changed jobs as well, such that she’s now the “managing director of federal government affairs and public policies” at Manatt a big lobbying firm, where (surprise, surprise) she’s apparently focused on “executive-level problem solving in the defense and homeland security sectors.”

Kristi Rogers at Aegis

Kristi Clemens-Rogers – Aegis President & CEO

Kristi Clemens Rogers is President & CEO of Aegis LLC. She brings with her more than 18 years experience in strategic communications, problem solving and senior service in the US Government.

Immediately prior to Aegis, Mrs. Rogers served as an Assistant Commissioner at the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs & Border Protection. As the Assistant Commissioner, she was responsible for creating and implementing the agency’s national strategic communications plan. She was also the senior advisor to the Commissioner and other leadership on their relationship with the media, public and other stakeholders.

Kristi Rogers at Manatt

Kristi Clemens-Rogers – Manatt Managing Director Federal Government Affairs and Public Policy

Prior to joining Manatt, Ms. Rogers was president and CEO of Aegis LLC, a leading risk management and private security company. … Ms. Rogers obtained top-secret facility security clearance for Aegis, created the company’s board of directors and positioned it for future growth and expansion. Ms. Rogers successfully developed and led a two-year pursuit-and-capture strategy to win a five-year, $10 billion contract under the Department of State’s Worldwide Protective Services (WPS) program, which enables U.S. diplomats and government representatives to operate in strained, if not hostile, foreign environments.

After establishing a platform for Aegis LLC’s long-term growth and profitability, Ms. Rogers was promoted to join its board as vice chairman, where she focused on business development and new-market-entry relationship building for Aegis LLC and the worldwide Aegis Group, drawing on her established global network of relationships with key stakeholders in U.S. federal civilian, defense and intelligence agencies …

Before joining Aegis, Ms. Rogers was assistant commissioner of public affairs for U.S. Customs & Border Protection, where, as senior communications advisor to the commissioner and CBP leadership, she managed relationships with the media, third-party organizations and public officials.

Prior to that, Ms. Rogers served in Iraq as Ambassador L. Paul Bremer’s strategic communications liaison to his cabinet of senior advisors, and as the director of strategic communications in the press office of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Before this tour she held several senior positions within the federal government, including in the Department of Transportation and the Small Business Administration.

Ms. Rogers cut her political eyeteeth in Michigan politics, including working for Governor John Engler and in the office of the majority leader of the Michigan Senate, and serving as vice president of government and community affairs for the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce.

Gee … they forgot to mention that her husband was working hard for Manatt in the US Congress ! The women get all the glory.

Kristi Rogers’ … and Hubby Micky’s … paycheck comes from spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and then trashing our freedom … such as it remains in 21st century Amerika … and raking in our loot.

CISPA, the Corrupt In-country Spy-mongering, Perfidious Act

House Passes CISPA Online Spying Law

Ignoring major public opposition from civil liberties groups, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) by a 288-127 margin, greater than last year’s margin and enough to override a veto.

Among other things, CISPA allows companies to bypass existing privacy laws so long as they are sharing information with the US government. Privacy experts warn that the law will allow the government virtually unlimited surveillance of Americans’ online habits.

One down, one to go. Then for BOb’s rubber stamp … a tear in his eye, as always.

Google acknowledges lobbying on cybersecurity bill CISPA

Google acknowledged in its latest lobbying disclosure form that it is working behind the scenes on a controversial cybersecurity bill, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

The bill’s author, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), told The Hill last week that Google has been “supportive” of CISPA, which has angered some of the same Internet activists who joined with Google to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

A Google spokeswoman said that although the company is lobbying on the bill, it has not taken a public position.

There you have it. Google put the P for Perfidious in CISPA.

While …

1. Dr Jekyll takes no public position on CISPA,
2. Mr Hyde, frothing like the madman he is, passes out the text and the bucks

.

The POTUS turning his back on all of us and on our Constitution

Obama won’t send witness to Senate to explain legality of drone war

The Obama administration does not intend to send a witness to testify at a Senate hearing next week on the legality of the U.S. targeted killing program, the White House said Wednesday.

“We do not currently plan to send a witness to this hearing and have remained in close contact with the committee about how we can best provide them the information they require,” Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokeswoman, wrote in an email to McClatchy.

Hayden declined to say why the administration doesn’t plan to provide a witness for the hearing.

The ‘administration’ has declined because even the POTUS cannot find anyone who will go before the Senate and tell them that it is ‘legal’ for Dapper Don Barack Obama to hit whoever he wants wherever he wants whenever he feels like it.

Ask any child above the age of reason anywhere. It’s not ‘just’ immoral … it’s illegal.

good is ↑ bad is ↓
the USA is red

UNESCO has published a comparison of a child’s lot in the 29 richest countries on earth.

Click the graph so you can read it.

The graph measures 5 dimensions:

1. material well-being
2. health and safety
3. educational well-being
4. behaviors and risks
5. housing and environment

Looks like the ‘sole remaining super-power’ can’t win, place, or show in any category. In fact TSRS-P … aka the USA … is in the bottom-most quartile along all dimensions.

We’re winning the race to the bottom!

Think it was exporting all our jobs did it? or all our wars of aggression? our abject capitulation to the plutocrats along every dimension? or the combination of ingredients … not unlike a doctor’s prescription?

Shall we go for the bottom in all categories? show Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Romania who’s The Boss? or have we had enough? Yet?

Linh Dinh drops us a Postcard from the End of America: Los Angeles.

Hillkirk, Fenwick, Sulzberger, Hartenstein, Weymouth
USA Today, WSJ, NYTimes, LATimes, Washington Post

New report documents US war crimes over three administrations

The report relies on publicly available documents, since the Task Force had no access to records kept by the military on the treatment of detainees. Nor could it compel testimony from witnesses or participants, since it lacked the power to issue subpoenas.

Nonetheless, the Task Force amassed an enormous and overwhelming quantity of evidence on US crimes.

“The events examined in this report are unprecedented in US history. In the course of the nation’s many previous conflicts, there is little doubt that some US personnel committed brutal acts against captives, as have armies and governments throughout history.

But there is no evidence there had ever before been the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after September 11, directly involving a president and his top advisors on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain on some detainees in our custody.”

The day-to-day focus is on the nihilist/patsies in chief … Clinton, Bush, and Obama. And they are guilty of giving themselves up, of acting as the willing front men for the corporate/plutocrats pulling their strings in the dark, from above.

But the indispensible function is the one purposefully not carried out by the media wing of the corporate regime, enabled by the obedient gutting of the FCC and the anti-trust wing of the erstwhile Department of Justice by the regime’s nihilist/patsies.

“… the Task Force had no access to records kept by the military on the treatment of detainees. Nor could it compel testimony from witnesses or participants …” yet the evidence has been there … “indisputable” … for a decade and more.

Excerpts from The Report of The Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment Chapter 5 : Rendition and the “Black Sites” dealing with Thailand.

the Trans Pacific Partnership

Australian thinktank outlines US plans for war against China

The US and its allies, in particular Australia and Japan, are engaged in advanced preparations for war with China. A paper released yesterday, entitled “Planning the unthinkable war: ‘AirSea Battle’ and its implications for Australia,” by the government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)[1] has provided an outline of the war plans.

According to the report’s author, ASPI analyst Ben Schreer: “The Pentagon has started to ‘think about the unthinkable’: a military strategy for fighting and winning a potential war against China.”

The “unthinkable” would be catastrophic. The Pentagon envisages a war, largely fought with US warships, warplanes and missiles, that would devastate China’s military infrastructure, without necessitating an invasion of the Chinese mainland, and impose a crippling economic blockade.

As described in the ASPI paper, AirSea Battle would counter Chinese strategies “by withstanding an initial Chinese attack, followed by a ‘blinding campaign’ against PLA command and control networks, a ‘missile suppression campaign’ against China’s land-based systems, and a ‘distant blockade’ against Chinese merchant ships in the Malacca Straits and elsewhere.”

The Pentagon’s AirSea Battle plans are not just on the drawing board. The US has already begun an extensive restructuring of its military in the Asia Pacific. This includes the hardening of frontline military bases to withstand missile attack, the dispersal of forces more broadly in the region, the concentration of 60 percent of US naval assets in Asia, as announced last year, and the development of a new generation of weaponry designed to wage a naval/aerial war off the Chinese mainland.

At the same time, using North Korea as a pretext, the US, in collaboration with Japan, is constructing anti-ballistic missile systems in the region that are designed for fighting a nuclear war with China.

Japan and Australia, designated “key enablers”, are central to the Pentagon’s war plans, which assume that both countries “will be active allies throughout the campaign”. Japan would be on the frontline of any war with China. The Pentagon regards US bases, especially in Okinawa, as a key component of its plans to hem in Chinese warships and submarines, and the Japanese military as an essential supplement to its own forces.

As far as ASPI analyst Schreer is concerned, the Australian government has no alternative but to sign up to the US war preparations.

[1] ‘ASPI was established, and is partially funded, by the Australian
Government as an independent, non-partisan policy institute. It is incorporated as a company, and is governed by a Council with broad membership.’

‘ Before he joined ASPI in January 2013, Ben was the deputy head of
the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) at the Australian National
University (ANU) where he continues to teach a course on strategic studies.’

‘The Boeing Library is a library based at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. The library started in the 1960s and served as a small reading room for the staff of the SDSC, which was then a research centre only. With the assistance of an annual grant by Boeing Australia the library expanded in the late 1980s to include an extensive range of books and journals on defence policy and planning, military studies and regional security issues.’

I’ve always heard there were a lot of sheep in Australia. I dearly hope there aren’t as many in Australia and Japan as there are in the USA … NATO plant, Dr Ben Shreer, wolf in sheep’s clothing, notwithstanding.

Sounds like they’re going to have to change the name of The Axis of Aggression … NPTO, perhaps? North of Australia, anyway. The Japanese could call it NipponTO.

This is NOT funny. This is ALARMING!

Glen Ford speaks with Francis Boyle who recounts the US aggressive ‘adventures’ in the destruction of states of late and voices his fears that the U.S. will bring about World War III. Libya takes up the first 10 minutes. Quick tour after that, ending in North Korea.

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