it seems people in Pakistan
like their Kentucky Fried Chicken..WELL DONE!!

By Ray Kimball

“We will never know the real human cost of these wars on both sides.”

Recent articles in the national press have brought Pat Tillman’s name and memory back into our collective consciousness.
The recent revelations make it clear that much of what the American public was told in the days after Tillman’s death was distorted or an outright fabrication.
The blame for this distortion has yet to be fixed on a responsible individual, and most likely never will be.
All of the news about the cover-up surrounding Pat’s death has a common theme behind it:
immediately after his death, the military and the national press came together to make his story everything he didn’t want it to be.
When Tillman, the Arizona State and Arizona Cardinals linebacker, announced in May 2002 that he was giving up professional football to enlist in the United States Army, the decision was greeted with shock and cynicism. Everyone tried to get the story, the interview, to try and figure out what was behind such a seemingly irrational decision.
Tillman responded with silence.
He simply went about his business, first completing his training as an infantryman, then serving in the initial invasion of Iraq,
then volunteering for Ranger training and serving in the elite 75th Ranger Regiment.
Throughout it all, his family responded to questions about where he was, what he was doing, and how they felt about it.
No interviews from Tillman, no live media specials from desolate Army posts,
none of the trappings we’ve come to expect from celebrities who step off their pedestals and mingle with the common folk.
Then came the announcement of his death, the heroic stories concocted to match it, and the corresponding media blitz.
Tillman’s death was among the leading stories on the day’s nightly newscasts. “20/20” and “The O’Reilly Factor” both featured long segments eulogizing the fallen warrior. Local and national newspapers wrote longing obituaries about sacrifice and honor.
Again and again, the theme was how much Tillman had sacrificed, and how he didn’t have to do what he did.
To which I say, with all due respect to the dead soldier and his family: so what?
What really differentiates Tillman in the end from the more than 1800 other men and women we have lost in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Every one of them was a volunteer.
Every one of them knew the potential risks when they signed up for service.
Every one of them probably would have rather been somewhere else, but they did their duty and lost their lives because of it.
Pat Tillman understood this, and embraced it.
As far as sacrifice, the truth is we will never know the real human cost of these wars on both sides.
We will never know how many future poets, engineers, artists, and leaders died in the dust of Fallujah and Khandahar.
We will never know what kind of contribution these many Iraqis, Afghans, Americans, and others would have made to their respective societies had they lived.
And for that, we mourn the dead equally, and bemoan the horrible loss and waste of war.
Memorial Day is (here).

For many Americans, Memorial Day is the time for that first trip to the beach.
For others, it’s a chance to blow the dust off the grill and enjoy some barbeque and backyard sports.
Some say such frivolity on a holiday remembering America’s war dead is inappropriate. I disagree.
The men and women we remember on Memorial Day gave their lives, in part, so that humanity around the world could pursue…
what Roosevelt called the four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.
So on Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, enjoy that which has been secured for you at such a great price.
But on Monday, take some time to remember the human cost of our freedoms.
Visit a veterans’ cemetery.
Attend a VFW or other civic ceremony.
Write a servicemember and thank them for their sacrifice.
All of these are far more fitting tributes to Pat Tillman and the nameless others just like him.

Ray Kimball is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a blogger for OPERATION TRUTH

By Orson Scott Card
Author of “ Ender’s Game”
one of the ten best science fiction books EVER written

Star Wars fans are legendary for their loyalty. I saw plenty of that in the 9:45 p.m. showing of Revenge of the Sith on its opening day. They had waited in line to get tickets to the very first showing at midnight the night before, and then saw it twice more before the opening day was over.
Many had obviously memorized all the howlingly bad lines. They began laughing out loud just before the line was said, and applauded at the wretched “emotional” moments in the movie.

But then, walking out of the theater, they fiercely defended the movie against anyone who dared to speak against it. It might be badly written, but it’s their badly written movie.

Some fans are so loyal they have even adopted “Jedi” as their official religion on census reports and The Force as their equivalent of a “personal savior.”

In a way, this is kind of bittersweet. It shows that the universal hunger for meaning is still prevalent, even in our agnostic era, which is encouraging; but these true believers will eventually realize that the philosophy behind Star Wars is every bit as sophisticated as the science — in other words, mostly wrong and always silly.

It’s one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person who claimed divine revelation, but it’s something else entirely to have, as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up by a very nonprophetic human being.

How Does the Force Stack Up As a Religion?

As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you’d expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There’s no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on unselfishness and oath-keeping. Power comes from the sum of all life in the universe, and it is manichaean, not Christian — evil is simply another way of using the Force. Only not as nice.

Good and evil are in a constant and nearly equipoised tug-of-war in the Star Wars series. But in the more recent movies, it seems that the goal of good people is not to wipe out evil, but rather for there to be a balance between the Light and Dark sides of the Force.

The new movie itself asserts a kind of equivalence. When the evil Palpatine says, “Good is a point of view–the Sith and the Jedi are almost the same,” we can dismiss this moral relativism as part of the deception of the dark side.

But in a pivotal scene, Obi-Wan says what amounts to the same thing: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

Isn’t that odd? The only thing both sides agree on is that people who believe in absolute good and evil are bad!

I suspect that Lucas realized, after writing “Good is a point of view,” that all his friends actually believed that. So he had to make it clear that moral relativism was the right way after all—so he had Obi-Wan say that absolutism was a Sith thing, even though in the actual story, the best of the Jedis show an unbending commitment to absolute Good.

It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it.

The Jedi: A Ruling Elite

Revenge of the Sith gives us our first chance to see the Jedi council as anything more than an incredibly boring business conference that we were forced to attend between action scenes. Not as if the Jedi masters discussed ideas — it was still a business meeting, in which they told each other obvious things and then made decisions by a sort of instant consensus that is never achieved in the real world except in really scary dictatorships. Clearly they were modeled after an adolescent view of the Knights of the Round Table.
But they aren’t a political or military group, despite the talk of government, of war and peace. They are also monks of a martial order, who have trained each other and who live under a strict religious discipline.

The Jedi may claim to be in favor of democracy, but in fact they function as a ruling elite, making their decisions among themselves. They occasionally submit to the authority of the legislature, and they seem to respect the rule of law, though whose law it’s hard to say. By and large, however, they decide among themselves what they’re going to do and when it’s OK to break the law and defy the civilian authority.

They are, in fact, utterly anti-democratic, like a militia that owes nothing to civilian authority. Eventually there’s going to be a coup.

And even though they train like crazy to learn to master their power, none of their discussions as a council are devoted to considering what is right and wrong. They simply know the rules and, except for those being tempted by the Dark Side, they never question them.

They have way too much power.

There are other ways that the actual story subverts the official “religion” of the Force. Take the idea that you become a Jedi by training. Well, sure — but you are only chosen to train for the Jedity if you have some kind of inborn power.

You can dedicate your life to serving the Force if you want, but you can’t become a Jedi warrior-priest unless you were born with the power and anointed as some Jedi’s apprentice.

In other words, they may seem very inclusive—one Jedi from every species (except for humans, who are way overrepresented)—but in fact they’re a self-perpetuating aristocracy.

Who Are the Bad Guys?

So instead of looking at the storyline of Episode III as a conflict between good and evil, you could read it as a conflict between the entrenched aristocracy trying to preserve their monopoly on power, and an ambitious upstart, who is determined to break that monopoly and take control for himself. The only reason we don’t see it that way is because the other side is so much more evil. But the body count left behind by Jedi knights is — or should be — disturbing.

In other words, despite whatever political message Lucas might or might not have intended, the Jedi are the smug orthodoxy, always congratulating themselves on their rectitude. No wonder the whole senate seems thrilled when the new Emperor announces the fall of the Jedi. They don’t know yet how evil the Emperor will be, but they know they don’t mind having the meddlesome Jedi out of the way.

A Conservative Religion

The overt religion of Revenge of the Sith is a kind of democratic pantheism, but the real religion is for the privileged few, who get to decide what’s best for everybody else and then enforce their own rules, all in the name of “the Force.”

How did a nice Protestant boy like George Lucas come up with an official religion more rigidly hierarchical and doctrinally uniform than Catholicism?

It’s the religion of the people who are Chosen, and you aren’t ready to have a share of the power until we say you are. Quite the opposite of, say, the Quakers or even the Puritans, who eschewed permanent religious hierarchies.

Even the afterlife is reserved for the few, the proud, the Jedi. As we learned at the end of Return of the Jedi, even the most dark-side-serving of ex-Jedi mass murderers can, with a single “good” act like refusing to murder his own son (which even the most evil men generally avoid), earn the right to eternal life as the equal of true saints like Yoda and Obi-Wan.

But not one of the others who died in the war against the evil Sith emperor was similarly granted a life after death—or at least, if they were, they apparently weren’t allowed on camera at the end of Return of the Jedi. Maybe the non-Jedi had to stay in their own segregated section of rock-’n-roll heaven.

No! That’s not fair! The Jedi devote their whole life to the service of others!

But they’re not chosen on the basis of their virtue—for all we know, there are millions of people more virtuous and unselfish than they. And since they alone get to determine what “the good of others” actually consists of (though it does seem to include a lot of killing), how are the Jedi distinguishable from any number of other dictatorial groups that justify their actions by claiming that they do it all for the little guy?

So it might not be such a good thing if the Star Wars films become the first movies to lead to a real-world religion.

Of course, all this quibbling would be moot if, in fact, the Jedi religion actually worked—if people could tap into the Force and do the miracles that the Jedi routinely perform.

But it doesn’t work. No matter how intensely you believe, you can’t leap tall buildings with a single bound or drive a car with your eyes closed.

So if a religion is known to be fictional, trains its exclusive practitioners to be killing machines, and doesn’t actually work in the real world, why do people call themselves Jedi?

As a protest against religion in general?

As a yearning for power?

Or as a dream of a world in which virtue, however it’s defined, can actually do something tangible against the evil in the universe?

“my throat unravels spilling out this hopeless cancer”

I saw a really impressive band last night in Long Bizzle
TWO TON BOA is Sherry Fraser on vox and bass
backed by Brian Sparhawk also on bass (two basses ..DOS fans check it)
and brilliant drummer Dan Rieser (citx does not often compliment drummers)
along with a keyboard player whos identity i cant be certain of..
as album credits for pianos and chord organ go to Fraser and Sparhawk
epic Brecht/Weillian rock with unbelieveable operatic vocals and dense textural madness..
THIS IS A WORTHWHILE BAND..if they play within a gastank of your loc..
do yourself a favor..stop TRYING to convince yourself Blonde Redhead is anything but…(i wont go into it)
SEE TWO TON BOA..get the self-titled EP.
dont accept imitations..this is the REAL.

i got a bead on YOU…son.
nice index hack attempt
no..hacking is not the word
nice TRY.

the phony warning….siteOWNED.jpg

im so terribly sorry..not really..BUT..
THE DEMOCRATS ARE SPINELESS CORPORATE HACKS
the filibuster *agreement* made yesterday in Washington D.C.
IS A FUCKING JOKE
as citizen x understands it:
the coup got the judges they want
and IN ADDITION
procured from the euniched DEMS
a GOP veto power over FUTURE attempts to use the filibuster
please post any comments in defense of these cowards
SO I CAN FLAME THE SHIT OUT OF YOU
or just go to your own blog
and post something about how good your starbux tastes driving to work in your Audi
OH SHIT..and I AM supposed to be the trust-a-farian!!

NO APOLOGIES..CITIZEN X IS A PIMP!!!

went to the Kozyndan opening two weeks ago at SIXSPACE in downtown LA
i love these two
i bought a piece of art from them.
they rock that fine line detail..
reminiscent of the best of Heavy Metal in the 70’s

SCROLL>>BABY>>SCROLL>>BABY>>SCROLL>>BABY>>SCROLL>>BABY>>SCROLL>>BABY>>SCROLL>>BABY>>SCROLL>>BABY>>SCROLL>>BABY>>

OSLO, Norway (AP) — A pioneering commercial wave power plant, producing clean and renewable energy, is to go on line off Portugal in 2006, after a contract was signed this week, project partners announced Friday.

The companies claimed the so-called “wave farm” will be the world’s first such commercial operation.

The power generators, like giant, orange sausages floating on water, will use wave motion to produce electricity by pumping high-pressure fluids to motors, Norsk Hydro AS said. The Norwegian energy company is a major backer of the project.

The generators were developed by Ocean Power Delivery, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, which signed an euro8 million (U.S. $6.25 million) contract with a Portuguese consortium to build three Pelamis P-750 wave power generators next year.

The project will order 30 more generators from the consortium — headed by the Enersis SPGS power company — by the end of 2006, if the initial phase is successful, Norsk Hydro said.

“We believe wave energy will be the new indigenous, renewable resource in Portugal,” Enersis chairman Goncalo Serras Pereira said.

The first, three-generator phase of the wave farm would produce 2.25 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply 1,500 Portuguese homes. Norsk Hydro said producing that much energy in a conventional fossil fuel plant would emit 6,000 tons of climate-damaging carbon dioxide.

“This is a significant milestone for our company and for wave energy,” said OPD Managing Director Richard Yemm. “We see this order as just the first step in developing the Portuguese market, which is anticipated to be worth up to euro1 billion (U.S. $1.3 billion) over the next 10 years.”

The wave generators produce power by using the up and down, and sideways, movements of the ocean swell, moving the flexible, 120-meter (400-feet) long floating cylinders to pump high-pressure fluids to drive hydraulic motors, which will produce electricity in generators.

INTERACTIVE MODEL

A variety of systems, including wave and tidal energy, are being tested around the world as possible environmentally friendly and renewable energy sources. The European Union has said it wants 22 percent of its power to be renewable by 2010, compared to 6 percent now.

Richard Erskine, head of Norsk Hydro’s Technology Ventures unit, said the Pelamis concept is so far the only one recognized as a viable project by the U.S. Electric Power Research Institute, a research consortium of American power utilities.

The floating power plant will be moored about 5 kilometers (3 miles) off Portugal’s northern coast, near Povoa de Varzim, with the electricity brought to land by an underwater power cable.

Norsk Hydro is a major player in offshore oil fields that make Norway the world’s third largest oil exporter, after Saudi Arabia and Russia. It is also involved in developing alternative energy sources, including wave and wind power.

besides being Scottish..like myself AND James Bond

George Galloway is a F@#KIN PIMP!
if you didnt catch his performance LIVE on MSNBC
get RealPlayer and get the highlights HERE
and for those who REALLY want to gloat..check the full transcript HERE

NOW..if there were an American politician with a quarter of this man’s BALLS..(no NOT Hillary)

Remember *British* Petroleum?..now *Beyond* Petroleum…..
You might call it “Extreme Makeover: Corporate Edition.”Or, perhaps, simply “greenwashing.”

General Electric, the conglomerate whose environmental legacy has been dominated by its poisoning of the Hudson River with PCBs—and its reluctance to clean up the damage—is turning over a green new leaf. Or so the company claims.

But even while GE was hosting a glitzy cocktail reception to roll out a new pro-environmental PR and ad campaign, the company was working behind closed doors in Congress to secure another delay in cleaning up the Hudson— a cleanup that is supposed to cost the company half a billion dollars.

Let’s start with the May 9 debut of the company’s “Ecomagination” campaign—a $90 million PR blitz aimed at remaking the company’s soiled image into one colored bright green: Expensive print ads show leaves sprouting from electric power plants; a green airplane floats across a corporate website behind the online greeting by CEO Jeffrey Immelt; a television commercial features buff models posing as coal miners—essentially a mini-music video reminiscent of Madonna’s “Express Yourself.”

The frivolous quality of the advertising undercuts GE’s serious message: “Increasingly for business, ‘green’ is green,” noted Immelt. “We’re at a tipping point where energy efficiency and emission reductions equal profitability.”

The GE executive announced the company would double by 2010 its annual $700 million spending on research and development of eco-friendly products, and would double its revenue from those products by 2015. Included are efforts to develop solar and wind energy, as well as an advanced coal process supported—in concept—by environmentalists.

In a move applauded by environmentalists (particularly the World Resources Institute, a think tank that receives support from GE and helped devise the new corporate strategy), GE promised to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from its operations by one percent by 2012. It said those emissions would increase by 40 percent without the initiative. And Immelt said in interviews that he would like Congress to include “clear milestones” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of energy legislation.

Even though the Bush administration quickly sought to associate itself with the company—”We sort of view G.E.’s pledge as the president’s climate policy put into practice,” DOE Assistant Secretary David Garman told The New York Times —GE does seem to be taking a more proactive position on global warming than President Bush (to whom Immelt made campaign contributions). Likewise for Bush’s chief environmental apologist, James Connaughton, who was a GE lobbyist before becoming chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and who attended the May 9 cocktail reception.

At first glance, the company also seems to be breaking both in style and substance with former CEO Jack Welch, who notes in his most recent book, Winning , that “Business is a game, and winning that game is a total blast!”

However, GE asserts that it really plans is to “build on its legacy of success” with environmental products. There is more than a little truth to that claim: GE has lobbied for years for federal subsidies for nuclear power, “clean coal” and other products, and seems to be positioning itself now to argue that nuclear power should be part of any global warming slowdown strategy. But it’s an unfortunate reference, given the company’s sorry history of dealing with the environment.

For example, in 1986, Congressman Edward Markey, D-Mass., disclosed that while running the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the company had conducted experiments on hundreds of United States citizens whom Markey described as “nuclear calibration devices for experimenters run amok.”

One of GE’s most gruesome experiments was performed on inmates at a prison in Walla Walla, Wash., near Hanford. Starting in 1963, 64 prisoners had their scrotums and testes irradiated to determine the effects of radiation on human reproductive organs.

GE has clashed with the federal government on air pollution policy issues. In 2000, the company hired noted “liberal” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe of Harvard to file a friend-of-the-court brief with the Supreme Court opposing EPA’s clean air standards for smog and soot. Fortunately, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected GE’s dirty-air approach.

But GE is perhaps best known for the Hudson River. From the late 1940s until 1977, GE discharged more than one million pounds of the toxic waste known as PCBs into the Hudson River. Over the years, these chemicals have spread, contaminating two hundred miles of river from the Hudson Falls to just shy of the Statue of Liberty.

Then-EPA Administrator Christie Whitman ordered the company in 2002 to clean up the toxic mess. The cleanup has yet to begin. GE has dozens of other Superfund sites, and has lobbied for years to try to change the Superfund law.

And GE is continuing its efforts to stall the cleanup. In its federal lobbyist disclosure forms, GE notes that one of its lobbying goals is to “support reasonable phasing and performance standards for the PCB Hudson River site remedy.”

That was translated behind closed doors this week into a budget rider—attached to appropriations legislation in the House Appropriations Committee—that would call for a yearlong National Academy of Sciences study to take another look at the project.

Congressional sources said GE was behind the rider, which wasn’t disclosed until after committee members voted to approve the legislation, and that it was inserted secretly at the request of Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the issue.

General Electric now has now separately confirmed its role in pushing the rider. GE gave Taylor $8,250 in campaign contributions during the 2004 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records.

So while GE’s “coal miner” actors preen on television, its lobbyists argue privately for a federal handout and the Hudson remains toxic.

That’s greenwashing, not ecomagination.

Trickery makes us believe creation is external to us

when it is quite the opposite.
The Trickster challenges you
to think
to question everything
to get passed negative emotions
to see the truth about creation and reality.

do you “believe” in luck?

HAVE A NICE DAY - Jacques de Molay

BY TED RALL

One year ago the American media was pushing the Pat Tillman story with the heavy rotation normally reserved for living celebs like Michael Jackson. Tillman, the former NFL player who turned down a multi-million dollar football contract to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, became a centerpiece of the right’s Hamas-style death cult when he lost his life in the mountains of southeastern Afghanistan. To supporters of the wars and to many football fans, Tillman embodied ideals of self-sacrifice and post-9/11 butt-kicking in a hard-bodied shell of chisel-chinned masculinity on steroids.

Tillman’s quintessential nobility, we were told, was borne out by the story of his death–a tale that earned him a posthumous Silver Star. Whether you were for or against Bush’s wars, Americans were told, Tillman’s valor showed why you should support the troops. Young men were encouraged to emulate his praiseworthy example.

Several thousand mourners gathered at Tillman’s May 3, 2004 memorial service to hear marquee names including Arizona Senator John McCain called upon all Americans to “be worthy of the sacrifices made on our behalf.” “Tillman died trying to save fellow members of the 75th Ranger Regiment caught in a crush of enemy fire,” the Arizona Republic quoted a fellow soldier addressing the crowd. Tillman, said his friend and comrade-at-arms, had told his fellow soldiers “to seize the tactical high ground from the enemy” to draw enemy fire away from another U.S. platoon trapped in an ambush. “He directly saved their lives with those moves. Pat sacrificed his life so that others could live.” It was, as the Washington Post wrote, a “storybook personal narrative”–one recounted on hundreds of front pages and network newscasts.

It was also a lie.

As sharp-eyed readers learned a few months ago from single-paragraph articles buried deep inside their newspapers, Pat Tillman died pointlessly, a hapless victim of “friendly fire” who never got the chance to choose between bravery and cowardice. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Washington Post now reports that Pentagon and White House officials knew the truth “within days” after his April 22, 2004 shooting by fellow Army Rangers but “decided not to inform Tillman’s family or the public until weeks after” the nationally televised martyr-a-thon.

It gets worse. So desperate were the military brass to carry off their propaganda coup that they lied to Tillman’s brother, a fellow soldier who arrived on the scene shortly after the incident, about how he died. Writing in an army report, Brigadier General Gary Jones admits that the official cover-up even included “the destruction of evidence”: the army burned Tillman’s Ranger uniform and body armor to hide the fact that he had died in a hail of American bullets, fired by troops who had “lost situational awareness to the point they had no idea where they were.”

“We didn’t want the world finding out what actually happened,” one soldier told Jones. A perfect summary of the war on terrorism.

The weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a figment of Donald Rumsfeld’s imagination. The Thanksgiving turkey Bush presented to the troops turned out to be plastic, as much of a staged photo op as the gloriously iconic and phony toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad by jubilant Iraqi civilians–well, actually a few dozen marines and CIA-financed operatives. So many of the Administration’s “triumphs” have been exposed as frauds that one has to wonder whether that was really Saddam in the spider hole.

We shouldn’t blame the White House for producing lies; that’s what politicians do. But we expect better from the media who disseminate them.

Case study: the Washington Post’s dutiful transcription of the Jessica Lynch hoax. Played up on page one and running on for thousands of words, the fanciful Pentagon version had the pilot from West Virginia emptying her clip before finally succumbing to a gunshot wound (and possible rape) by evil Iraqi ambushers, then freed from her tormentors at a heavily-guarded POW hospital.

Like the Pat Tillman story, it was pure fiction. Private Lynch, neither shot nor sexually violated, said she was injured when her vehicle crashed. She never got off a shot because her gun jammed. As she told reporters who were willing to listen, her Iraqi doctors and nurses had given her excellent care. She credited them for saving her life. In a weird sort of prequel to the shooting of an Italian journalist, they had even attempted to turn her over at a U.S. checkpoint but were forced to flee when American troops fired at them.

In all of these examples, editors and producers played corrective follow-up stories with far less fanfare than the original, incorrect ones. To paraphrase “X-Files” character Fox Mulder, the truth is in there–in the paper, on TV. It’s just really, really hard to find.

Readers of the American press and viewers of American radio and television are likelier to see and believe loudly repeated lies over occasionally whispered truths told once or twice. As a result of the reverse imbalance between fact and fiction, the propaganda versions of the Tillman and Lynch stories, the staged Saddam statue footage, and the claim that Iraq had WMDs are all believed by a misled citizenry that votes accordingly.

For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposés should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories.

citizen x listening to “Nation” by Sepulchura (Jello Biafra on vox)

BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS
WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

May 12, 2005

WASHINGTON — An unchastened insurgency sowed devastation across Iraq Wednesday as experts here said the country is either on the verge of civil war or already in the middle of it.

In the course of the day: Four car bombs detonated in Baghdad; a man wearing explosives at an army recruitment center in Hawija, north of Baghdad, blew himself and many others up; a car bomb exploded in a marketplace in Tikrit, north of Baghdad; and the country’s largest fertilizer plant was heavily damaged by a bomb in the usually quiet southern city of Basra. Meanwhile, U.S. Marines were winding up a remarkable pitched battle against surprisingly well-equipped and determined insurgents on Iraq’s western border. Some 76 Iraqis were reported killed and more than 120 wounded in the one day of violence.

With security experts reporting that no major road in the country was safe to travel, some Iraq specialists speculated that the Sunni insurgency was effectively encircling the capital and trying to cut it off from the north, south and west, where there are entrenched Sunni communities. East of Baghdad is a mostly unpopulated desert bordering on Iran.

“It’s just political rhetoric to say we are not in a civil war. We’ve been in a civil war for a long time,” said Pat Lang, the former top Middle East intelligence official at the Pentagon.

Other experts said Iraq is on the verge of a full-scale civil war with civilians on both sides being slaughtered. Incidents in the past two weeks south of Baghdad, with apparently retaliatory killings of Sunni and Shia civilians, point in that direction, they say.

Also of concern were media accounts that hard-line Shia militia members are being deployed to police hard-line Sunni communities such as Ramadi, east of Baghdad, which specialists on Iraq said was a recipe for disaster.

“I think we are really on the edge” of all-out civil war, said Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor who worked for the U.S. coalition in Iraq.

He said the insurgency has been “getting stronger every passing day. When the violence recedes, it is a sign that they are regrouping.” While there is a chance the current flare of violence is the insurgency’s last gasp, he said, “I have not seen any coherent evidence that we are winning against the insurgency.”

“Everything we thought we knew about the insurgency obviously is flawed,” said Judith Kipper of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It was quiet for a little while, and here it is back full force all over the country, and that is very dark news.”

The increased violence coincides with the approval of a new, democratic government two weeks ago. But instead of bringing the country together, the new government seems to have further alienated even moderate Sunnis who believe they have only token representation.

“That is a joke,” said Sunni politician Saad Jabouri, until recently governor of Diyala Province, in an interview here. “The only people they allowed in the government are ones who think like them,” he said of the majority Shia faction, who mostly come from Islamic parties.

Military and civilian experts said the insurgency seemed designed to outlast the patience of the American and Iraqi peoples.

“I just think this Sunni thing is going to be pretty hard,” said Phebe Marr, a leading U.S. Iraq expert reached in the protected Green Zone in Baghdad. “The American public has to get its expectations down to something reasonable.”

Lang said there is new evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime carefully prepared in advance for the insurgency, with former Iraqi officers at the core of each group. They are well coordinated and have consistently adjusted their strategy, he said.

Now the 140,000-plus U.S. troops in the country are mainly “a nuisance” factor in the insurgents’ overall goal of preventing the new government from consolidating.

“They understand what the deal is here,” Lang said, “to start applying maximum pressure to the economy and the government and make sure it will not work.” Their roadside bombs are intended to keep U.S. forces inside their bases, he said.

All the while the insurgents are gaining strength, he said. “The longer they keep going on the better they will get,” said Lang, a student of military history. “The best school of war is war.”

The Sunni insurgents could win the battle if they persevere long enough to sour U.S. voters, Feldman said.

He said, “There is no evidence whatsoever that they cannot win.”

today two curious headlines appeared:
one detailing Tom Ridge’s claim that terror alert levels were used politically by the B@#h administration
and the other announcing the “brief” evacuation of government buildings as a training cessna was mis-perceived as a terror threat..but proving the air force could indeed scramble interceptors (unlike september 11th)

what senate hearings got interruptted?
why would a distraction be useful today?

do you see the fnord yet?

The Agitator, 1928. George Grosz

This past April citizen x received an invite to attend an art opening at the Transport Gallery in downtown Los Angeles.
The show, titled Mark of the Beast, was scheduled for one night only on April 23rd, 2005,
at the small gallery space located in the Factory Place art colony.

Graphic artist Brandy Flower curated the show, which consisted of recognizable corporate logos that had been reworked to reveal - or unveil - the truth behind the corporate propaganda. The spoof ads ranged from the GAP (transformed into GAG), to the red white and blue CHEVRON oil company emblem (transformed into SHAME ON). The promotional material advertised the show as running from 7 to 11 in the evening. It wasn’t until May 8th that someone told me the Los Angeles Police Department had raided and closed down the exhibit. To my knowledge the raid and closure was not covered by local newspaper, television, or radio news outlets (our free press was no doubt too busy reporting on the Michael Jackson trial and couldn’t be bothered with blatant violations of citizen’s First Amendment rights). Only a few bloggers have caught wind of the story and the LA arts community seems to be blissfully unaware - or unconcerned - that the LAPD has now become the city’s premiere agency for art criticism. Might the police raid have had something to do with the content and objective of the show? Perhaps they read the following from the exhibit’s advance publicity and decided the good citizens of LA needed to be protected from artistic subversion:

“Capitalist Globalization is no longer an evil threat but a dark reality in the 21st century. Multinational companies condition the consuming masses with lies, deception and manipulation in the form of advertising tricks and fetishized logos. These mega-corporations have infiltrated the world’s governments, created legislation in their favor, and become global superpowers. Today, this misappropriation of authority has dealt us states of international conflict, a plundering of nature and its resources, imbalances in the global economy, and a tangled web of disinformation. For one night in downtown Los Angeles, we will hold a conscious happening, aimed directly at the issues of consumerism and alternative globalization. Please come out and support in hopes that together we can find truth amongst the many lies. To further carry our messages to the everyday world, there will be live silk-screening throughout the evening, “arming” guests with protest statements in the form of logo spoofs. Attendees are invited to bring an item of clothing to have silk-screened for free.”

According to the Transport Gallery, towards the end of the night’s festivities at precisely 10:40 pm, the LAPD arrived and closed the event due to the “aggressive and offensive” nature of the show’s content. Witnesses tell of up to four squad cars arriving at the gallery to make sure the venue closed its doors. While this writer was not present at the exhibit, others, including those who run the art space, attest to a calm atmosphere where there were no drugs, guns, or violence of any kind. Photos of the evening’s festivities showing an appreciative crowd enjoying the artworks have been posted to the Transport Gallery’s website and make plain the passive nature of those gathered. Furthermore, no arrests were made, which appears to discount police claims of an “aggressive” incident needing police intervention. What I’d like to know is, just which totalitarian country did I wake up in where police have the power to determine which art galleries and artists have the “right” to exhibit? Or perhaps I’m still asleep and just experiencing another of those reoccurring nightmares where Americans have completely lost their cherished rights while a spineless, complicit, and silent press helps assure that no one will even know. The Transport Gallery is seeking assistance in the form of witness testimony from people who where present at the raid. If you have any information regarding the police action, contact the gallery at: info@transportgallery.com “

being an advocate of law and order
citizen x is happy to report that:

ANOTHER TERRORIST HAS BEEN APPREHENDED!!

Moral of the story: dont bring your autistic friends out on “sensitive evenings”
Alt.Moral of the story: Hummer owners..tick the box for “fire and vandalism” on your insurance app;)

An occupational hazard of dissidence in the Age of Bush is the unavoidable necessity of belaboring the obvious. Again and again, you must ring the same bell; over and over, you must repeat the same blatant fact: that George W. Bush and his minions are lying hypocrites with blood on their hands.

But what can you do? Each week—each day—brings fresh confirmation of this damning truth. And until the American people redeem their lost national honor by rising up in their millions—taking to the streets with the patriotic cry, “These murderous jackals no longer represent us!”—the Bush crimes will go on, and must be documented. So grab the bell-rope: Here we go again.
Last week saw a bumper crop of death-dealing hypocrisy, as the freedom-lovin’, terrorist-fightin’ he-men of the Bush Regime were caught in flagrante delicto with some rough trade indeed: genocidal rape-fiends, diabolical flesh-boilers and tyrannical peddlers of violent, ignorant religious extremism. And no, it wasn’t a meeting of the Republican National Committee.
First the Bushists rolled out the red carpet for one of Osama bin Laden’s former partners, Sudan’s intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, the Los Angeles Times reports. Gosh was Osama’s designated minder in the 1990s, when the ex-CIA ally was comfortably ensconced in Sudan. Gosh is also accused—by members of his own government—of directing military attacks on civilians in Sudan’s Darfur region, where the janjaweed militia is carrying out a government-backed “ethnic cleansing” program of rape, pillage and murder against the region’s black Muslims. At least 400,000 have died in the carnage, with 2 million more driven into exile.
Last year, the Bush Regime itself officially declared the Darfur despoliation a “genocide,” and called Gosh’s gang of terrorist-coddling goons “an extraordinary threat” to America’s national security. But that was before the 2004 election, when Bush had to drag his “compassionate conservative” crapola out of mothballs for a few months to mollify soccer moms distressed at the pictures they saw on CNN of those poor little Ewoks dying in—where was it? Biafra? Burundi? Rwanda? Rangoon? Once Bush had his teeny-tiny mandate in hand, it was back to business.
That’s oil business, of course. Sudan has become one of the chess pieces in the “Great Game” of petropolitics, as the “full spectrum dominators” of the Bush Regime plant their “military footprints” all over the globe in a relentless crusade to stem the inexorable rise of China and India as rivals to “the world’s only superpower.” It just so happens that China has become the leading player in Sudan’s burgeoning oil industry, securing fat concessions in choice fields. Gosh and his goon squads gorge on these oil profits to fuel their mass terrorism in Darfur. Now Bush wants a piece of that action; and if he has to abet the murder of a few hundred thousand desert darkies to get it, who cares? Certainly not those soccer moms, now fretting about high gas prices for their SUVs: “Get us more cheap oil, Georgie, pronto!”
And so Bush has bedded down with Gosh, who for his part is happy to swap a minor league privateer like Osama for a big-time state terrorist with unlimited resources. Gosh was flown to Washington for high-level “consultations” with his new partners in the CIA—just as the Sudanese government was announcing that “abundant” oil reserves have been found in Darfur, the Sudan Tribune reports. At the same time, Bush moved—secretly—to gut legislation that would freeze financial assets of the genocidists and increase international protection for Darfur’s people, The New York Times reports. Happy coincidences all around!
Meanwhile, the killing in Sudan goes on. Just days before Gosh’s extra-special visit, the janjaweed launched a “senseless and premeditated attack” in Darfur, “burning everything in their paths and leaving in their wake total destruction,” Amnesty International reports. What’s more, Bush’s new allies in Khartoum knew the attack was coming and deliberately blocked African Union peacekeepers from intervening. But the cries of the raped and dying never reached Washington, where Gosh and the Bushists were happily plotting “joint security operations”—and no doubt divvying up the new Darfur oilfields.
How is such two-faced cynicism possible? It’s easy: The Bushists don’t regard the people of Darfur as human beings. They’re just counters in the game of greed and power, to be shifted or discarded as the need arises.
The same holds true for the people of Uzbekistan, now being abducted, tortured and boiled alive by Bush buddy Islam Karimov. Last week, Bush’s “strategic relationship” with the Uzbek Boiler was laid bare in rich detail by The New York Times. Bush has lavished more than $500 million on Karimov’s marauding security services. In return, he tortures Bush’s own uncharged, “rendered” prisoners, while providing the Pentagon with a big ole “footprint” for dominating Central Asian oil.
Bush capped Hypocrisy Week by strolling hand-in-hand with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah: de facto ruler of the fiercest religious tyranny on earth; mentor to the Taliban; fount of corruption, bribery and baksheesh and longtime Bush Family business partner. With his embrace of the hereditary despot, Bush gave the lie to months of high-flown jive about lighting “fires of freedom” in the Middle East. As always, Bush’s real message to those longing for liberty, at home and abroad, was clear as a bell: “Tough luck, suckers.”

ANNOTATIONS
Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to US War on Terrorism
Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2005

Oil Found in Sudan’s Darfur
Sudan Tribuine, April 16, 2005

Sudan Becomes US Ally in ‘The War on Terror’
The Guardian, April 30, 2005

Sudan: Continuing Human Rights Violations
Amnesty International, April 13, 2005

Great Gaming Around in Khartoum
The Financial Express, July 21, 2004

Oil Underlies Darfur Tragedy
Zaman, July 7, 2004

Oil and the Civil War in Sudan
Yale Insider, June 28, 2002

US Recruits a Tough Ally to Be a Jailer=
New York Times, May 1, 2005

Day 113 of President’s Silence=
New York Times, May 3, 2005

So We Turn a Blind Eye to Genocide, Again
International Herald Tribune, April 18, 2005

China’s Oil Imports From Sudan Draw Controversy
Voice of America, July 21, 2004

Zoellick’s Appeasement Tour
American Prospect, April 29, 2005

Sudan’s Final Solution
New York Times, June 19, 2004

The Wahhabi Movement
Northfield Mt. Hermon School

The Good and the Bad: Islam and Wahhabism
National Review, Nov. 18, 2002

Los Angeles Compassionate Caregivers “The Yellow House”
RAIDED by authorities Friday May 6th..details are sketchy
apparently police held caregivers and patients while IDs were checked and verified
patients with MCBIP identification cards but WITHOUT the actual prescription copy
were told that they had violated the law..
and were now INELIGIBLE for legal medical cannabis use.

other options remain available in Los Angeles.

story developing………………………………………………