Live Music! It is Good

Last night I succumbed to temptation and ventured into a venue where I knew my ear plugs would be mandatory.

I've always been a keyboard fan. Both rock and jazz piano and organ. Either straight rock or jazz get tedious to me, but the combination of the two is intriguing.

The Mystic Theater in Petaluma was hosting Brian Auger and his Oblivion Express, which plays exactly the sort of fusion I'm talking about. My first thought was, who did I know who might enjoy seeing this with me? Too loud and jazz/rockish for Bonnie, I was sure. I imagine the guitar players I know are pretty much ignorant of or not interested in seeing an old jazz rocking organist. (Just now as I'm writing this I thought of one I should have asked. A day late and a dollar short, so to speak. Sorry, Rob!)

I was terribly afraid that Auger would show up here in Petaluma and no one would come out to see him. I never knew anyone besides musicians who knew about him, and the musicians I play with now aren't into his sort of high energy music.

I finally called a friend, Troy Silveira, a fine pianist and delightful guy I used to play music with. He found me at the Mystic half way through the opening act, Plum Crazy, who turned out to be quite an exciting and talented local band of "kids" (meaning they all looked to be under 40...) who got progressively more far out and interesting as their original set progressed. And they're from Petaluma! Who'd a guessed such things existed. Each of the players is much much MUCH better at their instrument than I am (like they're from a different planet than I am, a planet where musicians practice obsessively, giving up sleeping and eating and other distractions) which is kinda depressing, but at the same time inspiring. (I guess doubling on too many instruments, and being too easily distracted, leads to that sort of realization of mediocrity.)

(Googled the Plum Crazy Myspace site. I see the site that comes up just after theirs on Google is Weird Al's. Interesting.)

When I called down to the ticket office the day of the show to see if there were any tickets left, the person on the phone said, "Yeah, we have LOTS of them left!" I heard the word "LOTS" in capitals, just like that. I had thoughts of this music legend coming to town to find a nearly empty theater. So imagine my surprise when every time I looked behind me (I was in the front row, left corner) there were more and more people there. The place ended up fairly packed. And, except for a couple of small kids, the only folk there under 40 were the opening act. The kids in town don't know what they missed.

Auger had his silver-sparkly Hammand B-3 set on the left side of the stage (as seen from the audience.) On top of it was his equally silver-sparkly Korg SG-X keyboard, from which he played his standard Wurlitzer electric piano sound. (Here's the band in the same setup on YouTube.) Sitting in the front left corner seat, I could more or less follow what he was doing, or so I thought at first. As though it were a Dead Concert, a steady stream of aging rocker couples drifted on to the dance floor between me and the band, until I only caught glimpses of Auger and his band, which includes his daughter, Savannah, on vocals and writhing dancing, and his son, Karma, on drums. Troy commented on how Karma and the bass player, Derek Frank, played so far ahead of the beat it was crazy, and Brian played way way back behind the beat, unless he wanted to jump right into the center of it, which he would then do. The amazing thing was that it all worked just perfectly. I had been focusing on Brian's playing and hadn't noticed how they spread the beat out, but he was right. What impressed me was how Brian totally ignored the almost mandatory Leslie speaker sound, and used the B-3 chorus setting very sparingly. A very stark and signature sound.

Throughout the show, I explained to Troy how these songs, many new to him, were from various Auger LPs from the 60s and 70s. To me, Auger was the most impressive of the rock organists, inflecting his playing with lots of jazz chords and chromatic modulations. I'd like to think I've picked up a tiny bit from listening to him.

The guy is sixty six years old, and he plays with the same fire (if not more) than he had forty years ago. Amazing player.

I picked up a live CD from him after the show (which happens to be from the same venue as that YouTube Video), and I'm playing it right now. It's great. Two entire sets from a live show. And I see it's a $41.99 import double CD at Amazon. Take my advice. Buy it from Auger at his show. He sold it (and autographed it) for $20.

Good Show.

Editorial Board at Purdue Student Paper Wonders

...Why no one investigated whatever it was that was over O'Hare International Airport.

Government fails to look into O’Hare UFO
By Editorial Board
Publication Date: 01/23/07

Earth was visited by aliens in November. Or at least it's possible. Many employees of O'Hare Airport in Chicago have come forward and described a round gray object hovering just below cloud level around 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 7. But since then, there has not been a single probe by the FAA or the government.

It is understandable that every alien spacecraft sighting is not investigated. Simply poking around the Internet for 10 seconds looking for information on UFOs will reveal an astonishing amount of sightings. But there is something different about the O'Hare case. In this instance, many employees and a few pilots have come forward and presented United Airlines (where most of the employees worked) and the FAA with accounts of an object hovering over Terminal C. Six of these individuals have spoken with the media under the condition of anonymity. These individuals, although viewing the aircraft from different vantage points, all describe roughly the same account of the visit, including the object suddenly bursting through the cloud cover and leaving a hole behind.

Both the amount of witnesses and their credibility is extremely high. That is what sets the O'Hare sighting apart from most other sightings. These employees are well-trained mechanics, managers and pilots whose main motivation for reporting the sighting was the safety of airline passengers. But even after such a large amount of people risked their livelihoods and reputations to report a UFO, nobody has taken them seriously.

United refuses to acknowledge that any incident ever occurred, saying there is no record of the event. The FAA has chosen not to investigate, chalking everything up to a weather phenomenon. Why?

By ignoring the statements of a multitude of incredible witnesses, the organizations hope the issue will just go away. It probably will. But this is not a viable course of action. There should be an investigation about the sighting, if for no other reason than the fact that objects flying over restricted airspace could cause accidents killing hundreds of people. Maybe it wasn't a UFO, but the public deserves to know their plane isn't going to be blindsided upon runway approach by a weather balloon. And maybe, during the investigation, we find out what visited O'Hare. The truth is out there.

Deceptive Headline of the Day

Yeah, feeling like you're on fire is absolutely harmless...

ABC News:

Military Shows Off New Ray Gun

Military's new ray gun fires harmless beam that makes targets feel like they are on fire

By ELLIOTT MINOR

MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, Ga. Jan 25, 2007 (AP)— The military calls its new weapon an "active denial system," but that's an understatement. It's a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire.

Apart from causing that terrifying sensation, the technology is supposed to be harmless a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons.

Military officials say it could save the lives of innocent civilians and service members in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said.

During the first media demonstration of the weapon Wednesday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios that U.S. troops might encounter in war zones.

The device's two-man crew located their targets through powerful lenses and fired beams from more than 500 yards away. That is nearly 17 times the range of existing non-lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets.

Anyone hit by the beam immediately jumped out of its path because of the sudden blast of heat throughout the body. While the 130-degree heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make the participants think their clothes were about to ignite.

"This is one of the key technologies for the future," said Marine Col. Kirk Hymes, director of the non-lethal weapons program at Quantico, Va., which helped develop the new weapon. "Non-lethal weapons are important for the escalation of force, especially in the environments our forces are operating in."

Innocent Canadian, kidnapped by US and tortured, wins apology and millions of dollars

But that's not good enough for the US and Gonzales:

The Guardian:

However, the US has refused to remove him from its terrorist watch list, despite repeated entreaties from the Canadian government. Mr Harper said Ottawa would continue to press Washington to remove Mr Arar from the list. "We think the evidence is clear that Mr Arar has been treated unjustly." He added that Washington had yet to provide its reasons for considering Mr Arar security threat.

That standoff may end in the US Congress, now under the control of the Democratic party, which has pressed the Bush administration to explain why it deported a Canadian citizen to Syria. The US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, has said that such information may be revealed privately to members of the Senate judiciary committee. But Mr Arar is taking no chances. "I still avoid US air space," he told reporters yesterday.

Jonathan Schwartz says Read This

And I agree.

Schwartz in Tiny Revolution.com:

Dominion Over The World; Also, Be A Good Person

If you haven't yet, I hereby assign you to read Arthur Silber's on-going series "Dominion Over the World":

Part I: "Iraq is the Democrats' War, Too"
Part II: "Why the Stories We Tell Matter So Much"
Part III: "The Open Door to Worldwide Hegemony"
Part IV: "A 'Splendid People' Set Out for Empire"
Part V: "A Global Empire of Bases"

And if you have it to spare, God will bless you if you slip Arthur a few bucks. There are few worthier causes in the blurfosphere.

Part V, the latest installment, ends thusly:

And let me emphasize a point I have made before. If we had toppled Saddam and installed a compliant, basically well-functioning colonial government within a year or two, almost none of those who have been complaining so vehemently about Bush's "incompetence" and "mismanagement" of this immense catastrophe would have had any objection at all. It is not as if they have moral qualms about our wars of aggression and conquest -- so long as they are carried out "efficiently." The fact that Iraq had not attacked us and the additional fact that Iraq did not constitute a serious threat to our country would have been entirely forgotten. Even in the current debate, those facts are rarely mentioned. This is what I have referred to as "The Missing Moral Center."

We are guilty of war crimes on a huge scale, and of the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people who never harmed us. Insofar as our national debate is concerned, these overwhelmingly significant facts are unworthy of mention. The full truth is still worse: that there might be a moral objection to what we have done never occurs to most people, including most of those who criticize this administration's performance. The administration has executed the war and occupation remarkably poorly -- but that they had no right to execute it at all is the forbidden thought.

According to this worldview, we are the world's sole superpower, and we should be. We are morally entitled to dictate events around the world, and we are right to have our way. And that is the actual root of almost all the current complaints about the parlous state of Iraq: we have not successfully had our way. This failure, made before the entire world, damages our "credibility," and it lessens our influence. Such an outcome is impermissible for our governing class, and for those who support it. Moral considerations find no place in these calculations.

We have power undreamt of in world history -- but our governing elites can never have enough. Our strategy of global dominance causes untold human suffering, it severely (and probably permanently) undermines our economic well-being and causes profound economic dislocation, it increases the threats we face -- and they still can never have enough. After the Iraq catastrophe, one would think that a reassessment of this strategy would be a minimal requirement. But our elites do not agree: we must increase our military budget, and increase the size of our military -- and everyone applauds the further increase of our already immense power.

Occasionally, I have referred to the phenomenon of pathology as foreign policy. When one contemplates these facts, it is very hard to conclude that anything other than pathology is involved. Our strategy is indefensible, irrational and immensely destructive, and yet almost no one questions it. But this particular pathology is so inextricably woven into our myths about the United States and about ourselves as Americans, that we believe this is simply "the way things are," and the way things ought to be.

Thanks for dropping by

A personal note to whoever finds this blog interesting.

As I've written several times (but not recently) I use this blog as an auxilary memory. When I see something I find interesting, I blog it, so later I can find it.

If it also interests someone else, all the better!

This is nothing short of astounding

Physorg.com:

Ultra-Dense Optical Storage -- on One Photon!

First image stored and retrieved from a single photon
(Credit University of Rochester)

Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image's worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.

Diagram of the encoding device. Credit: University of Rochester

Did you get that? An entire image, encoded onto ONE PHOTON? And then stored, and then recalled?

This is mindblowing to me. If you're at all interested in this, read the whole story here.

Can anyone stop the war with Iran?

More to the point, does anyone with the power to stop it want to?

Surely we can look to our Democratic Congressional leaders, riding the crest of a stunning victory at the polls last election, an election marked by the public's urgent desire to call off the dogs of war and support our troops by bringing them home?

Well, no.

Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com:

Last year, the Israel lobby in the U.S. launched a major campaign to demonize the Iranians and ramp us up for a showdown with Tehran. The last AIPAC national convention, held in Washington, D.C., featured lurid exhibits detailing the horrors – and imminence – of a nuclear-armed Iran. Here is what Pelosi had to say about Iran to the 2006 AIPAC conference:

"The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran. For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology. Proliferation represents a clear threat to Israel and to America. It must be confronted by an international coalition against proliferation, with a commitment and a coalition every bit as strong as our commitment to the war against terror."

As the Israelis, and their American lobby, push Washington to take action against Tehran, Pelosi and her fellow Democrats are meekly going along, just as they went along with the President in the run-up to war with Iraq.

The Democrats are trying to cover up their co-responsibility for the Iraq disaster by offering up all kinds of symbolic, non-binding resolutions disdaining the "surge," and calling for "phased redeployment" (which, one gathers, is distinct from simple withdrawal). This is pure show-boating. The only resolutions that matter are H.J. Res. 14, and H.R. 413, introduced by Rep. Sam Farr, which repeals the Iraq war resolution of 2002 outright, and requires the President to start withdrawing the troops. This one has zero co-sponsors – and that ought to tell us everything we need to know about our elected representatives' seriousness when it comes to stopping this war.

[ . . . ]

The groundwork for forcible "regime change" in Iran was laid by both parties: plans even now being hatched in the Pentagon were funded by Pelosi and her fellow Democrats, in alliance with the most pro-war Republicans. Now that the Democrats are in power, at least in Congress, they have no intention of reversing their stance. Democratic party chairman Howard Dean asserts that the great "tragedy" of our involvement in Iraq is that we aren't free to go after "the real enemy," which, says the Screamer, is Iran. And Hillary Clinton, the party's leading contender for the presidential nomination, out-neocons many Republicans when it comes to Iran:

"Let's be clear about the threat we face now: A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, to its neighbors and beyond. The regime's pro-terrorist, anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric only underscores the urgency of the threat it poses. U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal. We cannot and should not – must not – permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons. In order to prevent that from occurring, we must have more support vigorously and publicly expressed by China and Russia, and we must move as quickly as feasible for sanctions in the United Nations. And we cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran – that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons."

For those Kossacks and antiwar Democrats who have placed their hopes in Barack Obama, the supposed anti-Hillary expresses his view on the Iran war question in eerily similar language, averring that all options, including war with Iran, are "on the table." The leading Democrats are expending all their political capital on opposing Bush's "surge," and yet Michael Moran, in a piece posted on the Council on Foreign Relations website, identifies a "surge" of an entirely different sort than the one named in the Democrats' toothless resolutions. It is a surge "in the direction of Iran."

[ . . . ]

The War Party hopes the mullahs can be lured by some provocation into making the first move, and Rep. Ron Paul has rightly warned against another "Gulf of Tonkin incident." Not a single Democratic, or Republican, presidential candidate, aside from Paul, has come out against the administration's warmongering when it comes to Iran. Yet the American people, in their overwhelming majority, oppose another war in the Middle East.

Isn't democracy wonderful?

So, you thought you voted for a new era of diplomacy as opposed to perpetual war? You've been bamboozled, and badly – so what are you going to do about it?

What's needed is a popular outpouring of support for H. J. Res. 14 – and you can do your part by calling the office of La Pelosi, urging her to let the House vote on the Jones resolution, and urging her to support it. That number is: 202-225-4965.

Has Google won the game we didn't even know we were playing?

January 19, 2007

When Being a Verb is Not Enough: Google wants to be YOUR Internet.

Robert Cringely:

...Google loves secrecy. That they've been acquiring fiber assets hasn't been a secret, but the sheer volume of these acquisitions HAS been. Why? One thought is that it kept down the price since people didn't really know it was Google snatching up this stuff (they've done it under a number of different corporate names). But if price was the issue, then why hasn't Google just bought the companies that own the fiber? It made no sense until I scratched my head and thought a bit further, at which point it became obvious that Google wants to -- in its own way -- control the Internet. In fact, they probably control it already and we just haven't noticed.

Google also may be building huge data centers all over the place, in places where they have access to lots of electricity generating capacity.

The theory is that they are planning to be the only logical source of the vast internet bandwidth needed for piping all media into your house. Meaning, Google may be planning to be our defacto supplier of TV, movies, telephone service, as well as email and other internet traffic. Could be big.

Bob Harris deconstructs Hillary's announcement

Bob Harris:

Saturday, 20 January 2007

Hillary's in. Well, whoopty-doo. Forgive me, but aside from huge money and name recognition, which is all usually swell, and as much as I'd like to see the Democrats take the White House, and as badly as the US could use more women holding important public offices, and while I'd enjoy being proven wrong... let's look at the basic math. Everybody must surely realize that 30 to 40 percent of this country -- the same hard-skulled core of lunatics who still support our Criminal-in-Chief -- will simply never, ever vote for Hillary Clinton. Of the remainder who might vote for Hillary, at least half were opposed to the war from the outset. Remember, the Iraq War was never particularly popular; Zogby figured 42% of the US was opposed before the first bomb ever fell; most of these, obviously, were Democrats. And Hillary, these early war opponents will remember, was an active, enthusiastic accomplice to the crime. (See below.) If these numbers are even close, then Hillary has a maximum of roughly 35% of the electorate who could conceivably support her with gusto. In short: if Hillary wins the nomination, the Democrats just ain't likely to win the White House in 2008. I mean, come on -- the GOP death machine could prop up the corpse of Augusto flicking Pinochet and get 35 percent. About that many people still support George W. Bush, for gods' sake, despite Iraq, New Orleans, warrantless spying, and a dazzling array of further crimes and incompetence that could fill this page. Now, I'm not saying Hillary has been treated fairly, or that she's one tenth the hellion she's made out to be. I'm not siding with the contemptible nutjobs who long ago convinced themselves that she's a Chinese communist agent who had a tawdry affair with Vince Foster and then killed him using the lead pipe on the grassy knoll. These same bastards happily call anti-war veterans "cowardly" for merely having a lick of goddam experience and sense, not to mention the occasional three limbs blown off, and they now try to imply Obama might have been on the wrong side of 9-11. They'd frame Bill Clinton for the Fatty Arbuckle case if they could. In their minds, Hillary is part Black Panther, part castrating mama figure, Tanya from the SLA in a Brooks Brothers catsuit, an evil so frightening that no lie can be greater. It must suck to be Hillary sometimes. I get that. But here's what sucks worse: the Iraq war is one of the deadliest, stupidest, and most criminal foreign policy mistakes of our lifetimes. (Just making that list is a major accomplishment, btw, considering Guatemala, East Timor, Cambodia, etc.) And Hillary, despite her recent weaseling -- sorry, triangulation is the term of art -- vigorously supported Bush's Iraq adventure from the start. In the wake of 9-11, it wasn't just George W. Bush telling the world "every nation has to be either with us or against us." It was Hillary, as you can hear for yourself. In October 2002, during the debate about giving Bush authorization to invade Iraq, it wasn't just Dick Cheney telling the world in that Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda. It was Hillary, from the floor of Congress. And in February 2005, it wasn't just John McCain claiming that democracy was taking root in Iraq, and that the insurgency was in its last throes. It was Hillary, standing right at John McCain's side. Yeah. So President Hillary would be soooooo much better about Iraq. Clap louder, everybody. Make it come true. If this were a just world, not one person who authorized Bush to invade Iraq would ever be re-elected to anything, and the prime engineers of this mess would be going to jail instead of Fox News desks. And if this were a just world, Hillary would be held in almost as much contempt by people opposed to this war as Bush, Cheney, and the rest of Team Chimpy. Maybe a lot of people who supported the war early and then turned against it will identify with her more strongly than with people who were right in the first place. So I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. I can certainly imagine Hillary changing the subject away from Iraq, which she'll have to as much as possible. I can picture many Democrats supporting Hillary eventually in the hold-your-nose, best-we've-got, wish-it-wasn't-her sort of way. And with our inherently corrupt campaign finance system in which a big war chest often buys power, yeah, she might have a shot. And maybe I'm a big enough jerk that a year from now you'll see me holding my nose, too. But it seems to me, anyway, that when you're starting as an active accessory to the bloodsoaked mess that your core constituency now deeply opposes, and when you're starting with less than half of the electorate not already actively hostile to you in some way... It's no wonder that Hillary's announcement gives Iraq exactly one sentence, implying opposition but without taking any position whatsoever. If you read closely, you'll notice she instantly changes the subject to liberal-sounding blah about health care, conservation, and Social Security (while falsely adopting the right-wing talking point that Social Security is in financial trouble, incidentally) -- but all cleverly framed as open questions, so she doesn't have to take any position right now. I don't really blame her for that. I mean, we can all see just how wise Hillary Clinton is when she decides to take a clear stand.

India Daily has a Superb Technology Team

It's obvious. Just check the titles to these posts — from just the most recent page of listings...
under TECHNOLOGY ARTICLES...

• The encrypted Military communication channel of NASA deals with extraterrestrial UFOs and alien space ships that are as common in Space as planes in the sky
• Why Gravitational waves cannot be detected although they seem to speed like light?
• Our Galaxy is controlled from the Hyperspace through the central massive black hole
• Echos of Tachyons from higher dimensions – thousand time faster than light and imaginary mass
• newborn, rapidly-rotating neutron stars show evidence of extraterrestrial influnece

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play:

they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumours.

DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

Is it a crime to refuse to fight in an illegal war?

Or, more to the point, is it improper to raise the issue that the war you're being tried for not fighting is illegal?

Raw Story:

Military judge: objector can't raise questions about war legality

01/17/2007

Associated Press

An Army officer cannot try to justify his refusal to report for duty in Iraq by questioning the legality of the war because that is a political issue, a military judge has ruled.

Citing federal court precedents in a ruling issued Tuesday, Lt. Col. John Head also rejected the claims of lawyers for 1st Lt. Ehren Watada who said the his First Amendment rights shielded the 28-year-old native of Hawaii from charges stemming from his criticism of the war.

[. . .]

Head, a military judge who presided over at a pretrial hearing at which both sides made presentations earlier this month at this post south of Tacoma, found that "whether the war is lawful" is a political question that could not be judged in a military court.

Interesting idea. What exactly is a court for? My first guess would be to determine if a law has been broken, and if so, who is guilty.

Isn't "whether the war is lawful" exactly the sort of thing you'd want a court to rule on? And what about a military court exempts it from consideration of whether pertinent actions in a case are lawful or not?

Does the phrase "Nuremberg Defense" sound familiar? Weren't people there accused and found guilty of crimes that their governments said were not crimes at all? And wasn't the judgement exactly that those found guilty had a moral and legal obligation to refuse to agree with their governments?

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

And aren't those judgements endorsed by the US judiciary and military? I thought so, too.

Richard Dreyfuss has a good idea

I saw Dreyfuss on Maher's show a few weeks back, and he was very impressive in his advocacy for teaching civics in US schools. Here's someone else's take on it.

In Praise of Professor Dreyfuss
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Tuesday 16 January 2007

A ton of important news stories got spiked amidst the cacophonous white noise created by the Baker-Hamilton Report and the Bush "surge" plan and reaction thereto.

One of the more important was the effort by Richard Dreyfuss to reintroduce civics to our public schools. The movie legend has launched a personal campaign to urge educators to teach their young students about the US Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, and other government basics.

As a first step, the actor called together a group of school administrators, television producers, writers, and local leaders in Martha's Vineyard to discuss launching a civics pilot program at one of the island community's elementary schools. He told the media he's hopeful the effort will become a model for other schools across the country

Because we are not teaching civics, he said, "our children are not learning about current events and how the government works. They need to be informed on what it means to maintain the system while sharing political space."

Bravo, Professor Dreyfuss! Americans' ignorance of their own history and institutions is no longer a matter of debate. It has been verified in survey after survey.

...and of course there's more.

Jeff Wells: We Are Family

This is long, but Jeff pulls a lot of things together.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

We Are Family

They say prayer has the power to heal
So pray for me, mother
In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell
I'm a-tryin' to love my neighbor and do good unto others
But oh mother, things ain't going well - Bob Dylan

The Manson Mythos, sad to say, seems endlessly relevant.

In The Shadow Over Santa Susana, author Adam Gorightly quotes Preston Guillory, a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff at the time of the Tate-LaBianca slayings, in conversation with Paul Krassner. Guillory shares this revelation:

A few weeks prior to the Spahn Ranch raid, we were told that we weren't to arrest Manson or any of his followers. We had a sheaf of memos on Manson - that they had automatic weapons at the ranch, that citizens had complained about hearing machine guns at night, that firemen from the local fire station had been accosted by armed members of Manson's band and told to get out of the area. Deputies started asking, "Why aren't we gonna make the raid sooner?" I mean, Manson's a parole violator, we know there's narcotics and booze. He's living at the ranch with bunch of minor girls in complete violation of his parole. Deputies at the station quite frankly became very annoyed that no action was being taken about Manson....

Now here's the kicker. Before the Tate killings he had been arrested at Malibu twice for statutory rape. Never got [imprisoned for parole violation]. Manson liked to ball young girls, so he just did his thing and he was released, and they didn't put any parole on him. But somebody very high up was controlling everything that was going on and was seeing to it that we didn't bust Manson.

Manson was left alone, Guillory told Krassner, because "something big was coming down." Krasnner asked "Why were you given such an order?" to which Guillory replied "I don't know. We didn't question our superiors." Krassner pressed: "Did you at least speculate as to the reason?" Yes, Guillory conceded: "Oh, we just figured they were gonna kill Black Panthers."

We were getting intelligence briefings that Manson was anti-black and he had supposedly killed a Black Panther. Manson was a very ready tool, apparently, because he did have some racial hatred and he wanted to vent it. But they hadn't anticipated him attacking someone other than the Panthers.

There's a lot of that these days, though much less speculative than Guillory's thoughts and several orders of degree more complicit. "No one could have imagined them taking a plane" and crashing it into the World Trade Center. No one could have foreseen the severity of Katrina. "No one anticipated the level of violence" in Iraq. But it's irrelevant here whether the celebrity Scientologist went off script or stayed on mission. The point is that Manson and his followers were untouched before the killings because authorities anticipated mayhem, not because they didn't, and for whatever reason they wanted to see some blood shed. In this respect, and almost certainly without suspecting it, the family became an undeputized branch of the LA County Sheriff's Department.

Early in his you ain't seen nothin' yet speech of last week, George Bush sited the bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque as the principal trigger event for Iraq's sectarian violence: "Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq's elections posed for their cause, and they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam — the Golden Mosque of Samarra — in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq's Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked." Yet even though they never made America's front page, there were always compelling reasons to suspect a different calculus, and other hands on the trigger. For instance, Kurt Nimmo noted that "at least two witnesses saw 'unusual activities by the Iraqi National Guard in the area around the mosque.' Two mosque guards reported four men in ING uniforms had blindfolded them and planted explosives. A second witness, Muhammad al-Samarrai, the owner of an internet cafe in the area, was told to stay in his store and not leave the area. From 11 pm until 6:30 am, ten minutes before two bombs were detonated, the area surrounding the mosque was patrolled by 'joint forces of Iraqi ING and Americans,' according to al-Samarrai."

In April 2004 Michael Karem, then special adviser to Paul Bremer, voiced concern over the exceptional corruption and thuggish sectarianism of Bayan Jabr, the Shia Minister for Housing and Construction in Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority pajama parliament. A few days after composing a memo detailing his concern, Karem and senior aide Robert Clay were called to a meeting with the CPA's deputy administrator, Vice Admiral Scott Redd. "We were thrilled at the end of the meeting," said Karem. "Everybody was shaking their head about the corruption. They said that they were going to get rid of the minister."

But something else happened, because some else - somebody very high up, to borrow Guillory's words - had other plans:

Days later, he and Clay were asked to return to Redd's office. They walked in expecting to hear that Jabr had been fired. Instead they were told that their services with the CPA were as of that moment terminated; the minister would stay on. “We were told that we had lost effectiveness because we couldn't work with the minister,” Karem recalled. “We were in shock.”

Jabr was promoted to Minister of the Interior and, according to Harper's Ken Silverstein, his appointment "corresponds almost precisely" to the rise of Iraq's death squads. (A coincidence doubled-up soon after by the arrival of the Death Squad's own Goodwill Ambassador, John Negroponte, as the next Green Zone bully boy.)

Of course the Golden Mosque and Bayan Jabr are already old stories by the measures of Iraq's dissolution and our own time's seeming acceleration, but almost daily new filigrees of outrage are added to them. In Baghdad's latest "pacification" campaign, government-backed militias are withholding food and preventing the evacuation of wounded, while US troops make no effort to intervene. "This military siege is killing us," said Sunni Abu Sady. "The Americans are doing nothing, as if they are backing the militias."

It was evident even before the invasion that the war's intention included making a failed state of Iraq. That that's not yet conventional wisdom shows just how much too many still want to believe bad policy is made in good faith. As Keith Gottschalk gingerly asked Canada's mainstream left last week:

...isn't it even barely possible, although it seems mad, that everything that has happened in Iraq, this “progressive destructive chaos,” has been the plan from the get-go and that civil war was not only expected but hoped for? If you must rule a people or a nation for the benefit of their natural resources and geopolitical value, would it not be a possible tactic to allow them to destroy themselves first without committing too many of your own people to the effort?

Was Bush's speech, as Xymphora speculated, code to enact a Sunni genocide? Will the atrocity about to fall upon Iran become a Shia holocaust? I think the vision from the White House is grander than either proposition. There's a Mansonic logic at play here, and it's been playing since Bush's first stolen election.

Despite multiple offenses and parole violations, Spahn Ranch wasn't raided before Tate-LaBianca because the police were expressly told they should not arrest Manson or his followers. Despite the grievous injuries they've inflicted upon the nation and the constitution, George Bush and Dick Cheney will not be impeached because Democrats have elected, for some reason, to take impeachment "off the table." Like an unmolested Manson sending his family on "creepy crawly" burglaries of canyon homes Bush will not be stopped by the law, because behind the law are the gods of Helter Skelter who are not yet finished with him. As Guillory said of Manson, so Bush is "a very ready tool" who currently enjoys the unprecedented and seemingly unaccountable permission to do the unthinkable. And because he can, something big is coming down.

Only after his chaotic work is done and the last doorpost daubed in gore may he be brought low. Not to justice, because American presidents never are, but perhaps to a singular injustice that has sometimes made their acquaintance. Until then, he may as well tell us as another Texan reportedly did, "I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil's business."

...and just minutes ago, Yahoo posted this story, telling how Iran gets military supplies from the Pentagon.

Paul Craig Roberts doesn't believe Bush

I know. That's a shocker, isn't it?

Counterpunch:

The “surge” gives Congress, the media, and the foreign policy establishment something to debate and oppose, while Bush sets his plans in motion to orchestrate a war with Iran. Suddenly, we are hearing Bush regime propaganda that there are Iranian networks operating within Iraq that are working with the Iraqi insurgency and killing US troops.

This assertion is a lie and preposterous on its face. Iranian Shi’ites are not going to arm Iraqi Sunnis, who are more focused on killing Iraqi Shi’ites allied with Iran than on killing US troops. If the Iranians wanted to cause the US trouble in Iraq, they would encourage Iraqi Shi’ites to join the insurgency against US forces. An insurgency drawn
from 80 per cent of the Iraqi population would overwhelm the US forces.

[. . .]

The only action that can stop Bush is for both the Democratic and Republican leadership of the House and Senate to call on the White House, tell Bush they know what he is up to and that they will not fall for it a second time. The congressional leadership must tell Bush that if he does not immediately desist, he will be impeached and convicted before the week is out. Can a congressional leadership that lives in fear of the Israel Lobby perform this task?

All the rest is penny-ante. Revoking the Iraqi War Resolution as Rep. Sam Farr has proposed or requiring Bush to obtain congressional authorization prior to any US attack on Iran simply lets Bush and his Federalist Society apologists for executive dictatorship claim he has commander-in-chief powers and proceed with his planned aggression. Cutting off funding is not itself enough as Bush can raid other budgets. Non-binding resolutions of disapproval are meaningless to a president who doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.

Nothing can stop the criminal Bush from instituting wider war in the Middle East that could become a catastrophic world war except an unequivocal statement from Congress that he will be impeached.

Honest, if the name Michael Ledeen doesn't ring a bell, read this.

Breaking News: Michael Ledeen Is Dead

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Exclusive: Must credit Jon Swift
According to a confidential source, Michael Ledeen, Pajamas Media's supreme pundit, is dead. Apparently he was not well for some time. I have not been able to get any independent confirmation of what my source is telling me, but I have decided to go ahead with this story anyway because, after all, that is what Ledeen would have wanted me to do.

Tick Tick Tick

Scientists prepare to move Doomsday Clock forward

Fri Jan 12, 3:12 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The keepers of the "Doomsday Clock" plan to move its hands forward next Wednesday to reflect what they call worsening nuclear and climate threats to the world.

The symbolic clock, maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, currently is set at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight marking global catastrophe.

The group did not say in which direction the hands would move. But in a news release previewing an event next Wednesday, they said the change was based on "worsening nuclear, climate threats" to the world.

"The major new step reflects growing concerns about a 'Second Nuclear Age' marked by grave threats, including: nuclear ambitions in
Iran and
North Korea, unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere, the continuing 'launch-ready' status of 2,000 of the 25,000 nuclear weapons held by the U.S. and Russia, escalating terrorism, and new pressure from climate change for expanded civilian nuclear power that could increase proliferation risks," the release reads.

The clock was last pushed forward by two minutes to seven minutes to midnight in 2002 amid concerns about the proliferation of nuclear, biological and other weapons and the threat of terrorism.

When it was created by the magazine's staff in 1947, it was initially set at seven minutes to midnight and has moved 17 times since then.

It was as close as two minutes to midnight in 1953 following U.S. and Soviet hydrogen bomb tests, and as far away as 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 after the superpowers reached agreement on a nuclear arms reductions.

last chance in the northern hemisphere to see comet!

Comet McNaught

I left Bonnie at the anti-Iraq war demonstration in downtown Petaluma and wandered off to find an intersection with a view to the west. It promised to be the coldest night of the year. I was armed with my East German Army Hat and garage-sale heavy coat and gloves and binoculars.

I crossed Washington Street and made my way up to Hill Plaza Park.

Venus became visible—or maybe I finally happened to look in the right spot to see it. I knew from the diagram posted yesterday that the comet should be about half the distance from the horizon that Venus was, and off to the lower right from Venus. I searched with binoculars the pieces of sky visible between houses. Too may houses. Perhaps if I walked up the hill to the west.

At corner of Keokuk and Prospect Streets, I looked down Prospect, which ran almost due west. There it was, barely visible between a distant power pole and a rooftop. Comet McNaught.

I'd just sent my camera off to be repaired, so I was forced to use what's left of my memory to record the comet's appearance. It was certainly bright, but very tiny. I could only imagine how impressive it would have been outside the glare of the recently set sun.

Later, back at Bonnie's, I stole the sky and trees out of an old photograph and photoshopped up this image, which captures the way I remember it. Get back about six feet from your monitor and look at this:


Now that I look at it, maybe three feet away is more like it.

Foreign Agents Found Operating Within US Government!

Unfortunately, this table is two years old. But it's a good indication of what's doubtless going on right now. After it in the link, there's a listing of all congressional contributions in 2004.

2004 Top Ten Career Recipients of Pro-Israel PAC Funds Compiled by Hugh Galford
	House: Current Cycle Hoyer, Steny (D-MD) $37,500 Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana (R-FL) 36,000 Berkley, Shelley (D-NV) 35,100 Lantos, Tom (D-CA) 31,600 Frost, Martin (D-TX) 31,300 Cantor, Eric (R-VA) 23,750 Crowley, Joseph (D-NY) 23,000 DeLay, Tom (R-TX) 23,000 Lowey, Nita (D-NY) 20,650 Pelosi, Nancy (D-CA) 20,650		House: Career Berkley, Shelley (D-NV) $201,455 Frost, Martin (D-TX) 165,414 Engel, Eliot (D-NY) 137,918 Levin, Sander (D-MI) 113,727 Lowey, Nita (D-NY) 109,738 Lantos, Tom (D-CA) 107,250 Hoyer, Steny (D-MD) 92,275 Evans, Lane (D-IL) 87,379 Harman, Jane (D-CA) 86,271 DeLay, Tom (R-TX) 81,050
	Senate: Current Cycle Specter, Arlen (R-PA) $80,350 Boxer, Barbara (D-CA) 73,000 Murray, Patty (D-WA) 72,495 Daschle, Tom (D-SD) 70,500 Reid, Harry (D-NV) 64,999 Bayh, Evan (D-IN) 56,500 Bennett, Robert (R-UT) 55,750 Wyden, Ronald (D-OR) 55,000 Brownback, Samuel (R-KS) 50,850 Shelby, Richard (R-AL) 38,500		Senate: Career Daschle, Tom (D-SD) $533,635 Specter, Arlen (R-PA) 461,973 Lautenberg, Frank (D-NJ) 433,806 Durbin, Richard (D-IL) 326,671 Reid, Harry (D-NV) 318,801 Wyden, Ronald (D-OR) 255,562 Lieberman, Joseph (D-CT) 227,758 Boxer, Barbara (D-CA) 223,794 Dodd, Christopher (D-CT) 221,178 Conrad, Kent (D-ND) 201,939

Oddly enough, I don't see any of the few stauchly anti-Iraq war congressfolk on this list...

It would be an interesting exercise, strictly for fun, to consider the urgency with which a particular congressperson backed the Iraq war, and see if there's any correlation with the amount of money they received from the only country besides Iran to have gained politically from the war.

Tamiflu could be worse than the flu

Tamiflu — isn't that the drug made by Rumsfeld's old company?

Bird flu drug carries a lethal threat Scientists warn that Tamiflu use could devastate wildlife and trigger a second, deadlier pandemic Robin McKie, science editor Sunday January 7, 2007 The Observer Britain faces an ecological catastrophe that could wreak havoc on wildlife populations when the first outbreak of Asian flu hits the country. Scientists say they fear that tons of the anti-viral agent Tamiflu - taken by Britons trying to combat the disease - would be flushed down sewers into rivers and lakes. Natural populations of microbes would be killed off by a deluge of water polluted with concentrated amounts of the anti-viral drug. As a result, birds, fish and other creatures that rely on these bacteria and viruses for their survival could be devastated. In addition, waters containing Tamiflu would provide ideal conditions for the evolution of drug-resistant strains of bird flu virus. These strains would then infect wildfowl and ultimately human beings, triggering a second outbreak of the disease - although this time Tamiflu would provide no protection against the virus. 'Anti-viral drugs are quite new and no one has ever planned to use them in the vast quantities that are now being considered,' said Dr Andrew Singer, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxford. 'However, there are some very alarming environmental implications about giving out millions of doses of Tamiflu in order to combat an outbreak of Asian bird flu. These have not been considered by health authorities. This is unknown terrirory.' The prospect of a pandemic of bird flu sweeping the world is a growing worry for scientists, doctors and health officials. They fear that the deadly flu strain H5N1, which is now established in poultry in many areas of the Far East, could soon mutate so that it infects human beings. A pandemic that would affect hundreds of millions of people could spread rapidly around the world as a result. A vaccine against such a strain could take up to a year to develop and, as a result, most countries are relying on Tamiflu to provide the necessary protection for their citizens. The drug should alleviate symptoms and also limit the spread of the disease from person to person. In Britain, health officials have persuaded the government to stockpile Tamiflu tablets. It is estimated that about 15.6 million doses are now in storage, ready for use. 'The aim is that people will take the drug as soon as the first outbreak is reported,' explained Singer. 'It is estimated that more than 100 million tablets, each containing 75mg of Tamiflu, could be consumed in the first weeks of a flu outbreak. Most of that will pass through people and be released in their urine. It will then be flushed away. Several tons of a powerful drug whose ecological behaviour is unknown will therefore be swept into our waterways, where it will remain active for several weeks in the country's sewers, rivers and lakes.' Computer models developed by Singer and his colleagues at the CEH have shown that large areas of polluted water would quickly be established in many areas, probably within a few weeks of the flu cases first being reported. 'Tamiflu is an anti-viral agent, but is also known to attack bacteria - and that poses real problems for the country,' Singer said. 'Animal species have symbiotic relationships with many kinds of microbes. Human digestion relies on bacteria in our gut, for example. If these bugs are killed off by the tons of Tamiflu being dumped in our waters, all kinds of devastation could be triggered. Fish in our rivers, birds that feed off them and various kinds of river plant life could be seriously affected.' In addition, there will also be serious implications for bird flu. A build-up of Tamiflu in our rivers is likely to cause the avian flu virus - which can infect ducks, swans and other wildfowl - to mutate so that it becomes resistant to the drug. The result will be the triggering of a second wave of the disease, though this time it will be resistant to the only form of defence we will have developed to counter it. The consequences could be extremely serious. Singer - whose work is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council - believes health officials urgently need to tackle the problems raised by his research. 'There are things that we can think about doing,' he said. 'One course of action would be to develop chemicals that could break down Tamiflu once it has passed through a person's body but before it is flushed away. You could simply pour these into toilets to deactivate the drug before it is released into the environment. Certainly, we badly need to do a lot more research into this issue.'

Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012

Well. Isn't this cheery?

Hydrate hypothesis illuminates growing climate change alarm

Compiled by John Stokes

A recent scientific theory called the "hydrate hypothesis" says that historical global warming cycles have been caused by a feedback loop, where melting permafrost methane clathrates (also known as "hydrates") spur local global warming, leading to further melting of clathrates and bacterial growth.

In other words, like western Siberia, the 400 billion tons of methane in permafrost hydrate will gradually melt, and the released methane will speed the melting. The effect of even a couple of billion tons of methane being emitted into the atmosphere each year would be catastrophic.

The "hydrate hypothesis" (if validated) spells the rapid onset of runaway catastrophic global warming. In fact, you should remember this moment when you learned about this feedback loop-it is an existencial turning point in your life.

By the way, the "hydrate hypothesis" is a weeks old scientific theory, and is only now being discussed by global warming scientists. I suggest you Google the term.

[. . .]

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rose by a record amount over the past year. It is the third successive year in which they have increased sharply. Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but fear the trend could be the first sign of runaway global warming.

Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth's remaining resources.

Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelarates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.

Distracting Congress from the Real War Plan

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS in counterpunch.org:

Is the surge an orchestrated distraction from the real war plan?

A good case can be made that it is. The US Congress and media are focused on President Bush's proposal for an increase of 20,000 US troops in Iraq, while Israel and its American neoconservative allies prepare an assault on Iran.

Commentators have expressed puzzlement over President Bush's appointment of a US Navy admiral as commander in charge of the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The appointment makes sense only if the administration's attention has shifted from the insurgencies to an attack on Iran.

The Bush administration has recently doubled its aircraft carrier forces and air power in the Persian Gulf. According to credible news reports, the Israeli air force has been making practice runs in preparation for an attack on Iran.

Recently, Israeli military and political leaders have described Israeli machinations to manipulate the American public and their representatives into supporting or joining an Israeli assault on Iran.

Two US carrier task forces or strike groups will certainly congest the Persian Gulf. On January 9 a US nuclear sub collided with a Japanese tanker in the Persian Gulf. Two carrier groups will have scant room for maneuver. Their purpose is either to provide the means for a hard hit on Iran or to serve as sitting ducks for a new Pearl Harbor that would rally Americans behind the new war.

Whether our ships are hit by Iran in retaliation to an attack from Israel or suffer an orchestrated attack by Israel that is blamed on the Iranians, there are certainly far more US naval forces in the Persian Gulf than prudence demands.

Bush's proposed surge appears to have no real military purpose. The US military opposes it as militarily pointless and as damaging to the US Army and Marine Corps. The surge can only be accomplished by keeping troops deployed after the arrival of their replacements.
Moreover, the increase in numbers that can be achieved in this way are far short of the numbers required to put down the insurgency and civil war.

The only purpose of the surge is to distract Congress while plans are implemented to widen the war.

Weapons inspectors have failed to find a nuclear weapons program in Iran. Most experts say it would be years before Iran could make a weapon even if the Iranian government is actively working on a weapons program. Since the danger, if any, is years away, why is Israel so determined to attack Iran now?

The answer might be that Israel has the chance now. The Bush administration is in its pocket. The White House is working with neoconservatives, not with the American foreign policy community represented by the Iraq Study Group. Neoconservative propagandists are in influential positions in the media. The US Congress is intimidated by AIPAC. The correlation of forces are heavily in Israel's favor.

Part of the Israeli/neoconservative plan has already been achieved with the destruction of civilian infrastructure and spread of sectarian strife in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. If Iran can be taken out with a powerful air attack that might involve nuclear weapons, Syria would be isolated and Hezbollah would be cut off from Iranian supplies.

Israel has two years remaining to use its American resources to achieve its aims in the Middle East. How influential will Israel and the neoconservatives be with the next president in the wake of a US defeat in Iraq and Israeli defeat in Lebanaon? If the US withdraws its troops from Iraq, as the US military and foreign policy community recommend and as polls show the American public wants, the only effect of Bush's Iraq invasion will have been to radicalize Muslims against Israel, the US, and US puppet governments in the Middle East. Extremist elements will tout their victory over the US, and the pressures on Israel to accept a realistic accommodation with Palestinians will be over-powering.

Now is the chance--the only chance--for Israel and the neoconservatives to achieve their goal of bringing Muslims to heel, a goal that they have been writing about and working to achieve for a decade.

This goal requires the war to be widened by whatever deceit and treachery necessary to bring the American public along.

The US Congress must immediately refocus its attention from the surge to Iran, the real target of Bush administration aggression.

Remeber that theory about North Vietnam flooding the world with counterfeit dollars?

Here's a novel idea.

Tom Estes:

Is the CIA counterfeiting dollars and blaming it on North Korea?
Joshua Holland (10:33AM) link

"Super notes" -- forged U.S. dollars of such high quality that even experts have trouble detecting them -- have taken on an almost mythic status among national security watchers. Supposedly, they're part of a plot to undermine confidence in the U.S. economy, and at times they've been called an act of war.

Their origins have tended to shift with the political winds; it was said that they originate in Iran, some have speculated that they come from the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon (where they were supposedly produced by Syria) and lately the consensus has been that they're part of a sinister North Korean plan. Others have accused Israel of printing them.

But according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine, a respected German paper, their source may in fact be far closer to home than most people suspected [Translation by Watching America] …

The American secret service, the CIA, could be responsible for manufacturing the nearly-perfect counterfeit 50 and 100-dollar-notes that Washington pins on the terror regime of North Korea. The charge comes after an extensive investigation in Europe and Asia by the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung of Frankfurt, and after interviews with counterfeit money experts and leading representatives of the high-security publishing industry. […]

The administration of George W. Bush officially accused Pyongyang of the deed in the autumn of 2005, derailing Six-Party Talks on Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. Since then, tensions on the Korean Peninsula have increased considerably. America charges that North Korea is financing its rocket and nuclear weapons program with the counterfeit "Supernotes."

North Korea is one of the world's poorest nations and lacks the technological capability to produce notes of such high quality. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung, North Korea is at present unable to even produce the won [the North Korean currency]. The sources, which do not wish to be identified, allege that the CIA prints the falsified "Supernotes" at a secret facility near Washington to fund covert operations without Congressional oversight.

U.S. officials have not responded to the story.

Thanks for the Memories, Saddam

video from Buzzflash.

Comet Alert!

Space.com

EVENING SKY MAP: Comet McNaught's predicted path as seen from mid-northern latitudes at 5 p.m. local time.

Comet McNaught has become the brightest comet in 30 years, according to the International Comet Quarterly at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Tonight (Wednesday, Jan. 10) may be the best chance for Northern Hemisphere viewers to spot it.

And I was just thinking about getting a passport...

Wired:

All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it. But be careful – tampering with a passport is punishable by 25 years in prison. Not to mention the “special” customs search, with rubber gloves. Bon voyage!

1) RFID-tagged passports have a distinctive logo on the front cover; the chip is embedded in the back.

2) Sorry, “accidentally” leaving your passport in the jeans you just put in the washer won’t work. You’re more likely to ruin the passport itself than the chip.

3) Forget about nuking it in the microwave – the chip could burst into flames, leaving telltale scorch marks. Besides, have you ever smelled burnt passport?

4) The best approach? Hammer time. Hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn’t invalidate the passport, so you can still use it.

– Jenna Wortham

It's just a little Iraqi sandstorm

video here.

The Future, Once Again, is Here Now

LifeScience.com

Self-Cleaning Underwear Goes Weeks Without Washing By Bill Christensen posted: 05 January 2007 09:03 am ET

Self-cleaning fabrics could revolutionize the sport apparel industry. The technology, created by scientists working for the U.S. Air Force, has already been used to create t-shirts and underwear that can be worn hygenically for weeks without washing. The new technology attaches nanoparticles to clothing fibers using microwaves. Then, chemicals that can repel water, oil and bacteria are directly bound to the nanoparticles. These two elements combine to create a protective coating on the fibers of the material. This coating both kills bacteria, and forces liquids to bead and run off. The U.S. military spent more than $20 million to develop the fabric, deriving from research originally intended to protect soldiers from biological weapons.

Just some boring Mohamed Atta news, that's all...

Sander Hicks writes a story about the feds using info from this guy, Daniel Hopsicker, to track down a mysterious guy in the South Seas.

There's even a video interview with Atta's girlfriend.

All very interesting...

The New Dark Age

counterpunch:

All societies have elements of myth, untruths that nevertheless serve to unite a people. But many myths serve as camouflage for evil. One of the greatest myths is that "GIs have died for our freedom." GIs have died for American empire, for the American elite's commitment to England, and for the military-industrial complex's profits. Some may have died in Korea for the freedom of South Koreans, and some may have died trying to save South Vietnamese from the North Vietnamese communists. But it is hogwash that GIs died for our freedom.

There was no prospect of North Korea attacking America in the 1950s or Vietnam attacking America in the 1960s and none today. The Nazis were defeated by Russia before US troops landed in Europe. The US never faced any threat of invasion from Germany, Italy, or Japan.

America's wars have created hysteria that endanger our freedom. Abraham Lincoln shut down the freedom of the press and arrested editors and state legislators. Woodrow Wilson arrested war critics. Franklin Roosevelt interred American citizens of Japanese descent. George W. Bush has destroyed most of the Bill of Rights. In 2006 Congress appropriated funds for building concentration camps in the US.

Recently, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, said that freedom of speech is inconsistent with "the war on terror" If it takes a police state to fight terror, the country is lost even if Muslim terrorists are defeated. Americans have far more to fear from a homeland police state than from terrorists.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com