BENVENUTI NELLA RIPRESA

Traduzione di Gianluca Freda, 28 Settembre 2010:




Tranquillizzato, rinvigorito ed esplicitamente legittimato dalle festanti effusioni che annunciano la fine della recessione, sono uscito sabato mattina per fare una passeggiata. Basta con i profeti di sventura, respingerò, salvo tortura col taser, tutti gli antipatriottici guastafeste che mi additano le fabbriche in rovina, i supermercati vuoti e i mutui bloccati come prove che resteremo al palo per sempre. I nostri ascensori salgono e scendono ancora come yo-yo, grazie, tranne quelli delle fabbriche summenzionate. A proposito di pali, non sembra un piede quello che sporge da quella pozzanghera ghiacciata?

All’angolo tra la 9ª e Washington, c’è un bizzarro cartello: “EVITATE IL FALLIMENTO - 215 543-4941”. All’angolo tra la 7ª e Washington, “ACQUISTIAMO CASE IN CONTANTI – NO BANCHE”. Mentre incedo verso lo Sugar House, il nuovissimo casinò di Philadelphia, passo davanti a un tabellone che promette, a me, personalmente, 23 milioni di verdoni, se solo avrò il magico potere e l’ardire di superare in astuzia la Lotteria della Pennsylvania, Gesù e Satana. La fortuna aiuta i giusti, e noi lo siamo, dopotutto. Ben presto ogni barbone desideroso di sistemarsi con la truffa, da una costa all’altra di questo splendente paese, aprirà il suo casinò personale. Ci saranno più sale da gioco autorizzate che giocatori.

[...]



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Welcome to the Recovery

As published on OpEd News, Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Gianluca Freda BLOGGHETE and Online Journal, 9/28/10:






Soothed, fortified and frankly vindicated by the cheerful effluvium that the recession is indeed over, I set out for a walk on this Saturday morning. No doomsayer, I’ll refute, if not taser outright, all unpatriotic spoilsports who would point to crumbling factories, empty malls and capsized mortgages as evidences that we’re eternally shafted. Our elevators are still yoyoing, thank you, except for those in aforesaid factories. Speaking of shafts, is that a foot sticking out of the frozen puddle?

At the corner of 9th and Washington, there’s a quaint sign, “AVOID FORECLOSURE—215 543-4941.” At the corner of 7th and Washington, “WE BUY HOUSES FOR CASH—NO BANK NEEDED.” Strutting towards Philadelphia’s brand new casino, Sugar House, I pass a billboard promising me, personally, 23 million bucks if only I had the juju and stamina to outfox the Pennsylvania Lottery Board, Jesus and Satan. Luck favors the righteous, and that’s us, all right. Soon, every bum diddling settlement from sea to shining sea will have its own casinos. Do bet on it. There will be more certified dealers than playas.

Speaking of bums, there are more idlers than ever. What’s up with that? According to these gaseous experts, the recession has been over since last June, yet dazed loafers keep sprawling all over town, all over the country, actually. Just look around you. The newly homeless are easily identifiable by all the stuff they’re trying to hang on to. They pull wheeled luggage, push carts with way too much on them. They’re relatively clean, for now. Soon, they’ll let go of everything. On the median of Delaware Avenue, a man walks back and forth with the classic sign, “HOMELESS AND HUNGRY. PLEASE HELP. GOD BLESS YOU.” Poverty isn’t very original, is it? But I’ve also seen “FREE ADVICE. DONATIONS ACCEPTED,” “HELP SUPPORT MY MARIJUANA HABIT” and “NEED MONEY TO GET DRUNK SO 2 WOMEN CAN TAKE ME HOME AND MOLEST ME.” It’s not cool that jokers are mixing with genuine beggars, but we don’t have beggars anyway. That’s so Third World. We only have panhandlers.

A couple months ago, a visibly messed up old man in Detroit said to me, “I need $9.50 for my prescription, Mister. I beg you,” but he wasn’t a beggar. That’s so Third World. Actually, he wasn’t even a panhandler. I started the conversation. On freeway ramps into downtown, people stood with signs, begging, like they do all over America. Just look around you. In Richmond, I talked to a Vincent who grew up in Syracuse, then studied at Penn State. Divorced, with children 22, 16 and 12 years old, he had worked as a registered nurse most of his life. His last job was as a waiter at Red Lobster. Business was bad, so they cut his hours, then let him go. Taking out a title loan, he lost his car, then apartment. Vincent had been on the streets six weeks. His oldest kid was in college, the younger ones had been living with him, until everything fell apart and they had to go to their mom. This last fact humiliated him more than anything else, he said.

I’ve been broke many times, but I’ve never been homeless. More than once, I’ve gone to the supermarket with 26 pennies, the exact price for a packet of instant noodles. I waited until there was no line, so I could brave the cashier alone. Once, getting uppity, I counted out 159 pennies for a can of SPAM. As I added up, a line formed behind me. Once, down to two bucks, I bought a loaf of bread and stick of butter and survived for several days. I’ve made ketchup soup. Thankfully, those days are long gone. I’ve moved to the upper reaches of poverty. Never say never, however, which is, incidentally, the slogan of a new GMC ad. Bumper sticker in Detroit, “OUT OF A JOB YET? KEEP BUYING FOREIGN.” On license plate of the same car, “I WORK FOR FORD. I DRIVE A FORD.”

After a three-mile-hike, here we are, finally, inside Sugar House. Serving up drinks and cleavages, slim waitresses weave through the lardy crowd, made jiggly by decades of transfat and fizzy corn syrup. Baby boomers, most of them. Judging by weight per rear end, we’re not yet a poor country. In the semi dark, gamers are fixated, like dumb infants, by the cartoon characters, blinking lights and bright colors of the slot machines. GOLD RUSH. AFRICAN DIAMOND. FORTUNE COOKIES. CASH FEVER. CASH FOR LIFE. CASH INFERNO. Tired of being mugged, folks can take a breather by glancing up at a football game on TV. From an unseen corner, a live band plays classic rock, evoking nostalgia for less desperate times.

Ads for casinos are always filled with perfect, straight teeth smiles. White, black or beige, they are all tickled stupid by serial windfalls. For mere pocket change, they get to climax over and over, it seems, until Kingdom Come, at least. By contrast, real life chumps are uniformly grim. Suckers only laugh as they walk in, if that. Bored with this spectacle, I head back downtown. On the way home, I would pass a group of “Israelites” railing that the white man is the devil, and that God hates faggots. Next to them, a white guy holds a sign, “FUCK THESE ASSHOLES.” I would chance upon a man evacuating himself on Market Street, one of the city’s two main arteries. By City Hall, I would see a woman coughing so violently that she may not make it through this winter, should she remain on the streets.

This is your America, America, but don’t worry, the recession is over.





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Dan Duffy reviews Love Like Hate

in diaCRITICS, September 26, 2010:




The poet Linh Dinh has written a novel. It is a poet’s novel. Listen to the title: Love Like Hate. How has that not been a proverb for 500 years?

The novel’s most attractive character is such language, dealing from the old Anglo-Saxon and cherry-picking gaudy gems from all the other registers. Nobody talks like that and I can listen to it forever.

If Linh started cranking out novels one would speak of P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler and Henry James, the writers you read to learn the chord changes in English. I don’t think he will become a novelist because you don’t read this one for the genre conventions.

Every character does have an arc, a mild one. There are a mother and daughter and the men in their lives, all in Saigon since about 1950. They go through a lot and notice it somewhat.

If you want a plot summary, god help you. The life of the book is in noodling around like Tom Robbins and in marvelous cameos, with their right names, of contemporary Vietnamese authors.

Let Wikipedia sort it out. I have known and read Linh Dinh for twenty years and want to tell you what he’s up to. Linh Dinh is a disillusionist and a Vietnamese nationalist.

Linh Dinh is here to tell you that life in the United States is not rich and Vietnamese culture is nothing much. He mocks superstition and insists that the observable daily round is greed and lust directed by stupidity.

As he writes he teaches a patriotic creed that you aren’t going to get from the loudspeakers in the Socialist Republic, from foreigners who feel sorry, from exiles who yearn, and travelers who gawk.

It is the way of thinking that motivates my work. It is what is interesting about Viet Nam.

The Vietnamese at home are more gangsters struggling over a state. Vietnamese Americans are more Italians, Napolitani and paisan such as I grew up with in New Haven, dropped into the black and white race war here.

What is interesting is a perspective from a solidly successful anti-colonial struggle that was nonetheless a disaster. Irony right down to the smallest details of daily life.

That quality of history is why I call myself a Vietnamese nationalist as well as a Southern liberal and a French republican. It has powered Linh Dinh through a career of solid intellectual accomplishment which we have made as accessible as we can through his Wikivietlit entry.

That accomplishment is characterized by Linh’s discomfort and ferocious competence in both English and Vietnamese, by his Poundian advocacy of the new and devotion to his colleagues, surging protean productivity, by compassion, by anger.

Since writing the novel he has been roaming the streets of the United States, taking pictures of the abject poor who live there, the working poor who walk there, and the illusions we post on the walls and in the shop windows. Take a look at his State of the Union.

The work of Linh Dinh for the common reader is a pedagogy in realism, in life for most people most of the time. The Vietnamese-language author he most reminds me of in subject, intellect and compassion is the comic novelist Nguyen Ngoc Ngan.

Linh is after all a literary man and Ngan is emcee of Paris By Night so I don’t expect either of them ever to take that comparison seriously. The Vietnamese author in English whose concerns seem to me closest to Linh’s is Bich Minh Nguyen.

Her essays and her novel Short Girls come out of Linh’s Saigon, in the flint tones of a Balzacian Middle West, with characters scrambling for the money and love they need in the grip of illusions about what they want.

Bich does write in generic convention, with strong arcs, so I expect she will crank out novels if she wants to. What she and all literary professionals can get from Linh, the amateur, the translator, the poet is what the whole world of trans-Atlantic moderns got from Pound.

Linh is the man who knows what it all means, where it all comes from, what everyone is saying, who is stupid and who is smart. I think he gets some things drastically wrong, as Pound did.

But you can go to school with him and make up your own mind. I really think you should read the poems and short stories and the translations and the criticism and look at the photos but if you are in a hurry it is all in Love Like Hate.





Love Like Hate
By Linh Dinh
Seven Stories Press, 240 pp., $16.95



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FBI raids homes of antiwar activists

World Socialist Website, 25 September 2010:



The FBI has confirmed that it carried out at least eight raids on the homes and offices of antiwar activists in Minneapolis and Chicago at 7 a.m. on Friday.

The FBI claimed to be seeking “evidence relating to activities concerning support of terrorism.” Though no arrests were made in the raids, subpoenas were issued to those targeted ordering them to appear before a Chicago grand jury on October 12. Federal agents confiscated computers and cell phones, in addition to thousands of documents, books, and letters.

There are as yet unconfirmed reports that other raids also took place in Michigan and North Carolina.

The raids, carried out under the auspices of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), are a transparent attempt to intimidate political opponents of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They come on the heels of a Justice Department inspector general’s report revealing massive police infiltration and spying on antiwar groups and other political dissenters in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. (See: “Report whitewashes FBI political spying”)

Among the groups evidently targeted are the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, Colombia Action Network, the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and possibly the Arab-American Action Network.

The FBI admitted the targeted individuals posed no danger and said it did not intend at this point to make arrests. “These were search warrants only,” said FBI agent Steve Warfield in Minneapolis. “We’re not anticipating any arrests at this time. They’re seeking evidence relating to activities concerning the material support of terrorism... There’s no imminent threat to the community.”

One of six warrants issued for raids in Minneapolis was used to invade the home of Mick Kelly, who said agents kicked his door down and entered with guns drawn Friday morning. The warrant cited as its rationale Kelly’s ability to “pay for his own travel” to Colombia and Palestine, positing possible links to “foreign terrorist organizations including but not limited to FARC, PFLP, and Hezbollah.”

Kelly lives above the Hard Times Cafe in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.

FARC is a nationalist, peasant-based organization at war with the US-backed regime in Colombia; the PFLP is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO; and Hezbollah is a mass Islamic political party in Lebanon with a paramilitary wing that has fought off invasions by Israel.

The political nature of the raids was barely concealed. The warrant to raid Kelly’s home specifically cited his membership in a group calling itself socialist, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). Signed by US Magistrate Judge Susan Nelson at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, it allowed the FBI to take “documents, files, books, photographs, videos, souvenirs, war relics, notebooks, address books, diaries, journals, maps, or other evidence, including evidence in electronic form relating to Kelly’s travels to and from and presence and activities in Minnesota and other foreign countries, to which Kelly has traveled as part of his work for FRSO,” according to an attorney representing Kelly.

Kelly evidently spoke with the Associated Press as his home was being searched. The AP reported the interview in the following way: “‘The FBI is harassing anti-war organizers and leaders, folks who opposed US intervention in the Middle East and Latin America,’ Kelly said before agents confiscated his cell phone.” Kelly said he was “absolutely not” involved in any illegal activities.

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Alexander, 55, of California,

on China:



China is a peace-loving, sovereign, respectable and responsible country shouldering almost one fifth of humanity. China, as well as USA has every right to safeguard its national interests and territorial integrity and not be fooled by some western double standards. The often lopsided, attitudes of some self-serving politicians and western media fantasies and coverage on China issues are timed and intended to destabilize the country, its progress and developments. All peace-loving people of this world should be aware of some media hypocrisy.

China is good. Chinese people also good, some also speak good english like an English man. It sounds good. Made in China is good, sometimes really good. Sounds good too. Thank You very much.

Thank You very much China. Your "Made in China value-for-money products" brought affordability and happiness and benefiting billions of people in hundreds of countries in this world. China, thank you, You and all your hard-working Chinese, are to be congratulated and please keep up the good work and bring more benefits to more people and to even more countries, including America. Thank You again, Thank you..

China is good. Chinese people good too. Some people so poor, but very happy. Some people so rich, but sad, so sad. Those who know, they don't talk. Those who talk, might not know. Bad things can become good, good things will become better and better. Oh," Made in China" is good. Thank You China.

Oh, China is good country. Chinese people is good. Chinese book by Sun Tzu also good. Chinese music nice. Chinese movie is good, Hollywood movie so good too. Made in China is OK. Thank You very much, China.

China is good. Getting better and better day after day after day. Sometimes is best. So, get Gold medal too. So clever too, Chinese people. Thank You very much China.

Oh, I think China is very good. Really good people too. "Made in China" also good, sometimes very good. Thank You very much.

I think China is good. Made is China is also very good. Good, so good. Thank You very much.

Oh, I think all "Made in China" products are so wonderful, especially the clothings we all wear. Right? If not, take them off.

Money, plenty of money, makes the whole world go round and round. Made in China products make so many, many people happy. But politics is so sad, so very sad. Are you happy? A small smile please.

Thank You China. Your "Made in China value-for-money products" brought affordability and happiness and benefiting billions of people in hundreds of countries in this world. China, You and and all your hard-working Chinese, are to be congratulated and please keep up the good work and bring more benefits to more people and more countries.

China is a Peace-loving, Sovereign, Respectable and Responsible country shouldering almost one fifth of humanity. China should safeguard its national security and territorial integrity and not be fooled by western double standards. The often lopsided, hypocritical and shallow minded politicians and western media fantasies and coverage on China issues are timed and intended to destabilize the country, its peace and stability in its region. All peace-loving nations and citizens of this world should be aware because this could happen to your own country too,



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Review of Love Like Hate

by Alexandra Chapman in Elevate Difference, September 24th 2010:




Having left the history of the Vietnam War in the classrooms of my London secondary school six years ago, I delighted in reading the new novel by Vietnamese American author Linh Dinh. Predominantly set in post-war Vietnam, Love Like Hate weaves fact with fiction, giving an historical background to character development.

The novel focuses on the life of rigid and successful entrepreneur Kim Lan, whose popular bar, Paris by Night, sits neatly in “Thanh Dah, north of downtown, by a leafy stretch of the Saigon river.” The reader sees into the thoughts of the protagonist, who wants nothing more than to Americanize and marry off her beautiful daughter, Hoa, to a “Viet Kieu,” one of many Vietnamese who fled to the United States during the war. “Viet Kieu sons-in-law were so desirable that people were actually paying them to marry their daughters,” Dinh notes. Kim Lan’s fixation with the American Dream is just the beginning of the reader’s glance into an increasingly complicated mother-daughter relationship, reminiscent of the female family ties illustrated in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Hoa, a pawn in the game of her own life, has her fate determined from the beginning, as Kim Lan believes the American way of life to be a saving grace for her innocent and malleable daughter. Other characters realize that the US is not everything Hollywood purports it to be; it is, rather, “a country of straight lines and geometric exactness where everything must be qualified: your breasts, your income, your batting average.” Unrest and disappointment with Vietnam is also prevalent in the characters’ actions.

As Vietnam deals with post-war reconstruction, the female characters cope with their tiring and unchanging status as men’s inferiors. As wives, mistresses, and daughters they fall helplessly in love or deal with their ascribed roles as homemakers, child-bearers, and sex objects. Men come and go, often heartlessly.

Dinh does evoke a degree of sympathy for some of his male characters, as some are victims of their own condition. And although not exactly original, sex defines the majority of Dinh’s male caricatures, which highlights an important and fairly depressing future for both men and women. Each male character indulges in extra-marital debauchery (either in thought or practice), a motif powerfully and disturbingly presented by Dinh. So extreme is one male character’s infidelity that his wife dies of shock and despair just moments after she gives birth to their second child.

The author also foregrounds the futility of the Vietnam War, which took so many lives. Chen, a prospective Taiwanese suitor that Hoa’s father earmarks for her, sees Vietnam as an impoverished and confused hell thanks to the contemporary penetration of American capitalism with its unrealizable goals: "He had never known there could be so much capitalist exploitation in a supposedly socialist society."

Dinh has successfully written a classical novel, beautifully painting vivid picture of his characters and their thoughts. More importantly however, he presents the reader with the challenges of a country and its people, with a particular emphasis on women, in the throes of post-war turmoil.




Love Like Hate
By Linh Dinh
Seven Stories Press, 240 pp., $16.95



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Red Capitalism in Vietnam

CHARLES LARSON in Counterpunch, September 24, 2010:




A couple of years ago when I spend some time in Vietnam, I was struck by the country’s virulent form of capitalism. Consumer goods were stacked up everywhere; the people seemed prosperous; the streets were clean and pretty much free of trash; moreover, everyone seemed to be selling something. The expected anger toward Americans was non-existent; a partial explanation from our guide was that more than half of the population was born after the American pull-out from the country in 1975. The Vietnam war (which the Vietnamese refer to as the “American” war) is not in their memories.

Linh Dinh’s novel, Love Like Hate, confirms everything I have just said and takes these remarks several stages further. Several disparate sentences from the first two paragraphs put the entire transformation into context: “Saigon lost its identity in 1975, but by the early nineties had regained much of it back.” “A hodgepodge of incoherence, Saigon thrives on pastiche. Sly, crass and frankly infatuated with all things foreign, it caricatures everyone yet proclaims itself original.” “The worst thing about Communism is not that it stops you from thinking or writing poetry, the worst thing about it is that it can stop you from eating altogether.”

Yes, Saigon is different from the cities in the North, more Western, of course, and more in-your-face, and Dinh confesses to a Dark Age between the years of 1975 to 1986. Vast numbers of people went sent to re-education camps, food shortages were frequent but once petty capitalism was permitted in 1986, everything took off at roller-coaster speed. One of the people to benefit was Kim Lan, who opened a restaurant in Saigon that year which she named “Paris by Night,” and it wasn’t long before she was filthy rich. Her greatest joy is to indulge her daughter, Hao, with luxuries. By the time Hao is fifteen, she has her own Wave motorbike, and she looks “like an actress in a Hong Kong movie. She had learned how to put on lipstick, eye shadow, mascara, shimmer, blush, rouge, greasepaint, lip gloss, pomade and pancake.”

“When she opened her mouth, a dozen English phrases sputtered out, gleaned from Madonna and Britney Spears CDs. Every inch of her was brand named—CK, Revlon, Polo, Levi’s, Adidas—albeit much of it was fake. She was rarely seen without a baseball cap from her huge collection. She bought them compulsively because they were so cool and so American.” In short, Hao is such a “fake” American that her mother will accept nothing less than another fake American as her daughter’s husband.

There’s a Vietnamese term for Vietnamese Americans, those who fled the country at the end of the war, went to the United States, and became fabulously rich: Viet Kieus. Kim Lan is determined that Hao will marry a Viet Kieu. That goal becomes the central conflict in Dinh’s clever story—its elaborate plotting and structure, looping back to the last years of the war and then as far ahead as the time immediately following 9/11. Of that disaster—observed on TV--one of Dinh’s characters observes, “Even your disasters are like Hollywood.”

The fact is that the major tone of the novel is the author’s healthy irreverence—for virtually all his characters, their activities, their country and, of course, for the United States. He questions Vietnamese Buddhism: “The average Vietnamese…had no idea whom he was praying to.” In their rush towards materialism and their value of everything American, he states that Vietnamese “Thought of America as a vast shopping mall to be envied and emulated.” Of the English language, he notes, “By cajoling the rest of the world into learning English, Americans are begging for their own death,” since the result is that everyone in the rest of the world wants to immigrate to the United States.

Perhaps the rampant commercialism in the country is best demonstrated by a minor incident involving a Vietnamese businessman who is conflicted by what he has observed over the years as the country has been transformed: “He had never known there could be so much capitalist exploitation in a supposedly socialist society. It amazed him that many Vietnamese had to work for a dollar a day to make $140 sneakers to be lusted after, and sometimes even bought, by other Vietnamese. If a worker wanted to buy a pair of Nikes he had just sewn, he would have to wait for half a year and not eat at all during that time.” (223)

The title, Love Like Hate, refers to a Vietnamese punk rock group but as much as anything it defines almost all of the major relationships in this revealing novel and, of course, the Vietnamese infatuation with all things American. Linh Dinh is a gifted writer, his talent visible on every page of his dazzling story.


Love Like Hate
By Linh Dinh
Seven Stories Press, 240 pp., $16.95


Charles R. Larson is Professor of Literature at American University, in Washington, D.C.



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The Collapse of Western Morality

Paul Craig Roberts in OpEd News, 9/23/10:




Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless things have gotten worse.

In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities and fire-bombed Tokyo; that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies; that President Grant and his Civil War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians; that the US today enables Israel's genocidal policies against the Palestinians -- policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians; that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.

I don't mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below a majority.

And we have what appears to be a new thrill: American soldiers using the cover of war to murder civilians. Recently American troops were arrested for murdering Afghan civilians for fun and collecting trophies such as fingers and skulls.

This revelation came on the heels of Pfc. Bradley Manning's alleged leak of a US Army video of US soldiers in helicopters and their controllers thousands of miles away having fun with joy sticks murdering members of the press and Afghan civilians. Manning is cursed with a moral conscience that has been discarded by his government and his military, and Manning has been arrested for obeying the law and reporting a war crime to the American people.

US Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, of course, from Michigan, who is on the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, has called for Manning's execution. According to Rep. Rogers, it is an act of treason to report an American war crime.

In other words, to obey the law constitutes "treason to America."

Rep. Rogers said that America's wars are being undermined by "a culture of disclosure," and that this "serious and growing problem" could only be stopped by the execution of Manning.

If Rep. Rogers is representative of Michigan, then Michigan is a state that we don't need.

The US government, a font of imperial hubris, does not believe that any act it commits, no matter how vile, can possibly be a war crime. One million dead Iraqis, a ruined country, and four million displaced Iraqis are all justified, because the "threatened" US Superpower had to protect itself from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that the US government knew for a fact were not in Iraq and could not have been a threat to the US had they been in Iraq.

When other countries attempt to enforce the international laws that the Americans established in order to execute Germans defeated in World War II, the US government goes to work and blocks the attempt. A year ago on October 8, the Spanish Senate, obeying its American master, limited Spain's laws of universal jurisdiction in order to sink a legitimate war crimes case brought against George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

The West includes Israel, and there the horror stories are 60 years long. Moreover, if you mention any of them you are declared to be an anti-semite. I only mention them in order to prove that I am not anti-American, anti-British, and anti-NATO, but am simply against war crimes. It was the distinguished Zionist Jewish Judge, Richard Goldstone, who produced the UN report indicating that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked the civilian population and civilian infrastructure of Gaza. For his efforts, Israel declared the Zionist Goldstone to be "a self-hating Jew," and the US Congress, on instruction from the Israel Lobby, voted to disregard the Goldstone Report to the UN.

[...]






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The end of the world as we know it and the rise of the post-carbon era

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed at Online Journal, Sep 24, 2010:




Only 500 generations ago, hunter-gatherers began cultivating crops and forming their tiny communities into social hierarchies. Around 15 to 20 generations ago, industrial capitalism erupted on a global scale.

In the last generation, the entire human species, along with virtually all other species and indeed the entire planet, have been thrown into a series of crises, which many believe threaten to converge in global catastrophe: global warming spiraling out of control; oil prices fluctuating wildly; food riots breaking out in the South; banks collapsing worldwide; the spectre of terror bombings in major cities; and the promise of ‘endless war’ to fight ‘violent extremists’ at home and abroad.

We are running out of time. Without urgent mitigating, preventive and transformative action, these global crises are likely to converge and mutually accelerate over the coming decades. By 2018, converging food, water and energy shortages could magnify the probability of conflict between major powers, civil wars, and cross-border conflicts. After 2020, this could result in political and economic catastrophes that would undermine state control and national infrastructures, potentially leading to social collapse.

[...]





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Richmond, 9/14/10:

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"commerce of kindness"

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Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'

Arifa Akbar in the Independent, 17 September 2010:



Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

[...]







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Ethiopian egalitarian community thrives

Newsdesk, 08 July 2010:




Nestled in Ethiopia’s rural Debub Gondar Zone exists Awra Amba, a small, utopian community in which men cook supper and religious observance is taboo.

Sixty-three-year-old Zumra Nuru, a longtime promoter of gender equality and religious freedom, founded the society in the 1980s. As a child, Nuru was skeptical of the inequality he observed on a daily basis.

“My mother woke up long before it was dawn and started to mill grains,” he said in an Action Aid report. “My father never helped her. He rather slept until late in the morning. I questioned why things should go this way but nobody had the answer. I kept on inquiring into these and other unacceptable practices for which no one had the answers.”

In Awra Amba, which now boasts four hundred members and a long waiting list, labor is divided equally among male and female residents. Both participate in traditionally gendered tasks, such as plowing and caring for children. Each member belongs to either the development committee, or one of nine sub-committees that specialize in areas including education, care for the elderly, and agriculture.

“This community is a haven for women,” said new Awra Amba member Fantaye Adem in an IPS report. Adem was married at 13, before Ethiopia declared a minimum marriage age of 18 in 2005. Though this recent national law is frequently neglected in other parts of the country, Awra Amba has had a minimum marriage age of 19 for women and 20 for men since its conception.

Additionally, Awra Amba women are granted three months maternity leave and domestic violence is forbidden. In the rest of the nation, female genital mutilation and domestic abuse is prevalent.

“Our men do not oppress us and we have established a tradition of correcting one another’s mistakes through discussions,” an Awra Amba woman told the Ethiopian Students Association.

Religious observance is handled in a similarly unconventional manner. Though Ethiopia is a heavily religious nation, and all community members were previously practicing Orthodox Christians or Muslims, worship is outlawed in the commune.

[...]

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China's dark side: On Yellow River, corpses mean cash

Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers, 9/16/10:



NEAR CHANGPO VILLAGE, China — From his perch on an overhang above the Yellow River, Wei Jinpeng pointed to a fisherman's cove below and began counting his latest catch. He stopped after six, and guessed that perhaps a dozen human corpses were bobbing in the murky waters.

The bodies were floating facedown and tethered by ropes to the shore, their mud-covered limbs and rumps protruding from the water.

Wei is a fisher of dead people. He scans the river for cadavers, drags them to shore with a small boat and then charges grieving families to recover their relatives' corpses. Wei said he kept the faces submerged to preserve their features. Any dispute about identity makes it harder to collect his bounty.

Wei doesn't worry about how they got here, but he's heard tales over the years from relatives who've come to claim the bodies, haunting portraits of average people crushed in the extraordinary stress of China's economic boom.

[...]





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A A Flight Manifests and Passenger Lists

9/11 HARD FACTS:

As the number of strange anomalies and coincidences on the morning of 9/11 pile on top of each other, a reasonable investigator would at some point start to use the sheer force of so many convenient improbabilities against the official narrative. Add to that pile of suspicion the unusually low number of passengers aboard each of the hijacked flights that morning. Flight 11 and Flight 175, both Boeing 767s with approximately 180 available seats, had 76 and 46 passengers respectively. Flight 77 and Flight 93, both Boeing 757s with approximately 200 available seats, had 50 and 26 passengers respectively.

What this 30% passenger occupancy essentially means is that on each of the flights that were hijacked that morning, every passenger on every plane had an entire row to themselves to lie down. Any savvy, experienced traveler knows that when flying a major airliner, on a non-stop cross-country trip, at a commuter friendly morning flight time from one major U.S. city to another, it is incredibly good luck to get a row of surrounding open seats. On the morning of 9/11, every passenger on every plane had, essentially, an open row to themselves. And on Flight 93 that went down in Shanksville, PA, there were 10 more rows than passengers.

9/11 investigators have attempted to compare these numbers to the passenger lists from the same previous Tuesday morning flights the week before, on 9/4/01. But the FBI continues to refuse, without any explanation, to produce that information. It is known, however, that major airliners in the U.S. regularly shift their passengers to other flights and airlines serving the same cities if numbers are too low to justify the flight. But on the morning of 9/11, this protocol, like so many others that day, was not followed.

Furthermore, on the morning of 9/11 on officially released passenger lists provided by the airlines to the media, not one of the alleged hijacker's names appears. In fact, no Arab names appear on any of the four passenger lists. "It has been claimed that the names of the hijackers were on the airlines' flight manifests. However, there is no public evidence of this. Researchers who have attempted to obtain this information from the airlines have been rebuffed." Add this information to the stories that have been told of last minute gate changes, passenger swaps, bizarre cell phone calls, planes disappearing and reappearing on radar screens, impossibly flown aircraft maneuvers, and you would have at least a part of a story worth investigating. But the oddly low numbers of passengers on the planes that morning, and the complete absence of any of the alleged hijackers' names on the original flight passenger lists, is left as irrelevant. Why? What could possibly be more relevant than the fact that the main suspects of the crimes in question appear not to have even been present at the scene of those crimes?

[...]




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An Appeal to Firefighters, Present and Past from a retired FDNY Lieutenant

Fellow Firefighters, A great tragedy befell our community on September 11, 2001, an unprecedented 343 deaths in the line of duty. As horrible as that toll is, if there were a rational explanation for it, we could accept it and mourn. We all understood the risk we accepted when we took the oath of office, that chance might cut short our lives when we placed ourselves in harm’s way in the public’s service. This is what we are paid for and it is our honor. However, in short, the official explanation of the events of that day are not only insufficient, they are fantastic and cannot bear rational examination. We are asked to believe that on that day three structural steel buildings, which have never before in history collapsed because of fire, fell neatly into their basements at the speed of gravity, their concrete reduced to dust. We are asked to believe that jet fuel (kerosene) can melt steel. We are asked to believe that the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, that responded to sixty-eight emergencies in the year prior to 9-11 in less than twenty minutes allowed aircraft to wander about for up to an hour and a half. We are asked to believe that the steel and titanium components of an aircraft that supposedly hit the Pentagon “evaporated”. There is much, much more if anyone cares to look into it. Trade Tower #7 by itself is the “smoking gun”. Not hit by an aircraft, with only a few relatively small fires, it came down in a classic crimp and implosion, going straight into its basement, something only very precise demolition can accomplish, which takes days if not weeks to prepare. The 9-11 Commission didn’t even mention it, and F.E.M.A. actually stated they DIDN’T KNOW WHY IT COLLAPSED AND LEFT IT AT THAT. Brothers, I know that the implications of the above are hard, almost unthinkable, but the official explanation is utter nonsense, and three hundred and forty three murdered brothers are crying out for justice. Demand a genuine investigation into the events of September 11!

-Anton Vodvarka, Lt. FDNY (ret)

Lt. Vodvarka served on FDNY Ladder Co 26, Rescue Co. 3, Rescue Co. 1, Engine Co. 92, Ladder 82 and Ladder 101. He was awarded the Merit Class 1 award, the Prentice Medal.




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Hani Hanjour and Flight 77's Unexplained Expert Maneuvers

9/11 HARD FACTS:




Further suspension in logic exists in the 'official story's' narrative as to who flew Flight 77 so expertly into the Pentagon's west wing. Hani Hanjour is credited with being the airplane's pilot. This is a man who, three weeks before September 11, attempted to rent a Cessna at an airfield in Maryland. Suspicious of his dubious 'pilot's license', officials at the airfield insisted he take a chaperoned test-flight before rental would be approved. He failed his test flight miserably. He could neither control, nor properly land the Cessna. In fact, the instructors at the airfield in Maryland said, "It was like he had hardly even ever driven a car. He could not fly at all." Other source. And yet, the official narrative of 9/11 asks us to believe that Hanjour pulled off a stunt that would press the limits of even the most experienced aviation test pilot.

The official story unfolds something like this. The rather diminutive Hanjour, sometime after take-off, fought his way into the cockpit, and wrestled control of Flight 77 from a 6'4" former Marine combat fighter pilot named Charles Burlingame, a man family members and colleagues say would never have given up his aircraft or the safety of his passengers. After dispatching with the co-pilot as well, Hanjour settled in and turned his attention to the bewildering array of gadgets and devices of a Boeing 757 instrument panel - a panel he was wholly unfamiliar with - in an airplane traveling 500 mph, 7 miles in the air, under the stress of a recently executed hijacking plot. Then, without the help of any ground control or air-traffic controllers providing him information and/or settings, this pilot who could not control a tiny Cessna 3 weeks earlier "would have to very quickly interpret his heading, ground track, altitude, and airspeed information on the displays before he could even figure out where in the world he was, much less where the Pentagon was located in relation to his position." (From the essay 'The Impossibility of Flying Heavy Aircraft Without Training', by Nila Sagadevan, an aeronautical engineer and pilot.)

From the Ohio/Kentucky border, Hanjour then supposedly turned the plane around, set course for Washigton D.C. hundreds of miles away, and successfully entered the most restricted airspace in the world without eliciting a single military intercept - despite the crash of two other known hijacked aircraft into the WTC, and a missing third, being covered on every radio and television station in the country. "In order to perform this bit of electronic navigation, he would have to be very familiar with (Instrument Flight Rules) procedures. None of these fellows (the alleged hijackers) even knew what a navigational chart looked like, or even how to plug frequencies into NAV/COM radios, much less input information into flight management computers (FMC) and engage LNAV (lateral navigation automated mode). If one is to believe the official story, all of this was supposedly accomplished by raw student pilots while flying blind at 500 MPH over unfamiliar (and practically invisible) terrain, using complex methodologies and employing sophisticated instruments."

According to the official account, an unidentified aircraft that somebody randomly decided was 'Flight 77' (remember, the transponder needed to identify the aircraft had been turned off) then suddenly pops up over Washington DC out of nowhere and executes an incredibly precise diving turn at a rate of 360 degrees/minute while descending at 3,500 ft/min, at the end of which "Hanjour" allegedly levels out at ground level. The maneuver was in fact so precisely executed that the air traffic controllers at Dulles refused to believe the blip on their screen was a commercial airliner. Danielle O'Brian, one of the air traffic controllers at Dulles who reported seeing the aircraft at 9:25 said, 'The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.'" (ABC News, 10/24/2001, also archived at www.cooperativeresearch.org)

The official story of Hanjour's flight path continues in an even more bizarre narrative. Having successfully entered D.C. airspace, with no idea how soon fighter aircraft would show up to shoot him down, he finds himself pointed in the ideal direction toward the East wing of the Pentagon, where all the top brass in the military are known to be stationed. But then he apparently changes his mind as to his heading, and pulls off that incredible, sweeping 270-degree descending turn at 400+mph to approach the Pentagon from the opposite direction. There, he inexplicably lines up the less valued West wing, which was miraculously scheduled to receive the finishing touches of extensive bomb-blast retrofitting the next day, September 12, leaving it conveniently empty of most of its military employees. "The section known as Wedge 1 (the West Wing) had been under renovation and was scheduled for final completion on Wednesday, September 12th, 2001."

One year after the attacks, MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield mused, "It's ironic says Pentagon Renovation Manager Lee Evey that the hijacked airliner smashed into the very area of the Pentagon that had just undergone a renovation to strengthen the building against a terrorist attack. The death toll could have been much worse. Evey said the hijacked aircraft hit a portion of the building that had been renovated and reinforced with blast resistant windows, a special reinforced steel construction, and even fire-resistant Kevlar cloth."?(September 9, 2002 Monday TRANSCRIPT: # 090901cb.467) Ms. Manfield chooses the expression 'ironic' to describe these bizarre facts. That's perhaps one word. Absurd and criminally suspicious could easily be two others.

So from a mile out, the man who could not properly land a Cessna at a small airport in Maryland weeks earlier, zeroes in on the conveniently chosen western façade of the Pentagon, flies 20 feet off the ground in a Boeing 757 at 400 mph, clips a number of lamp poles on his way in, apparently providing no adverse interference to his flight path, then runs into a tree and a generator trailer, before depositing the enormous aircraft perfectly in between the first and second floor of the United States' military headquarters. Leaving no visible scratch on the Pentagon lawn, no large sections of airplane, no cars from the adjacent I-395 disturbed by the enormous jet-wake, and no publicly available video evidence of this incredible feat - despite the existence of at least 83 cameras on buildings and lamp posts encircling the Pentagon.

"I shan't get into the aerodynamic impossibility of flying a large commercial jetliner 20 feet above the ground at over 400 MPH. A discussion on ground effect energy, vortex compression, downwash reaction, wake turbulence, and jetblast effects are beyond the scope of this article. Let it suffice to say that it is physically impossible to fly a 200,000-lbs airliner 20 feet above the ground at 400 MPH. The author, a pilot and aeronautical engineer, challenges any pilot in the world to do so in any large high-speed aircraft that has a relatively low wing-loading (such as a commercial jet). I.e., to fly the craft at 400 MPH, 20 feet above ground in a flat trajectory over a distance of one mile. (Remember that when a plane is landing conventionally, it is traveling somewhere around 150 mph, producing SIGNIFICANTLY less wake than a plane traveling at 400 mph.)

"Furthermore, it is known that the craft impacted the Pentagon's ground floor. For purposes of reference: If a 757 were placed on the ground on its engine nacelles (I.e., gear retracted as in flight profile), its nose would be about fifteen feet above the ground! Ergo, for the aircraft to impact the ground floor of the Pentagon, Hanjour would have needed to have flown in with the engines buried in the Pentagon lawn. Some pilot. At any rate, why is such ultra-low-level flight aerodynamically impossible? Because the reactive force of the hugely powerful downwash sheet, coupled with the compressibility effects of the tip vortices, simply will not allow the aircraft to get any lower to the ground than approximately one half the distance of its wingspan - until speed is drastically reduced, which, of course, is what happens during normal landings."

In response to Sagadevan's essay, a pilot contacted the writer to report the following. And while it doesn't reference Flight 77 specifically, surely the comments apply to all flights that morning. Including AA 77:

"Regarding your comments on flight simulators, several of my colleagues and I have tried to simulate the 'hijacker's' final approach maneuvers into the towers on our company 767 simulator. We tried repeated tight, steeply banked 180 turns at 500 mph followed by a fast rollout and lineup with a tall building. More than two-thirds of those who attempted the maneuver failed to make a 'hit'. How these rookies who couldn't fly a trainer pulled this off is beyond comprehension."

Quite tellingly, on the morning of 9/11, before the shock and awe and relentless re-telling and reshaping of the official story had a chance to trump all logic and critical analysis, this following clip shows other expert incomprehension as to the level of skill it would have required to carry out the flight maneuvers displayed in the strikes. It was broadcast on ABC news in the hours just after the attacks. Or consider this early speculation on the failure of navigation systems, before people even considered the unreasonable possibility of untrained pilots being able to fly huge airplanes with such expertise.

Even the director of the flight school at which the supposed hijackers trained found it impossible to believe the expert aviation maneuvers pulled off on the morning of 9/11 could have been executed by any of the alleged pilots. "My opinion is I don't think it is possible. I have spoken to many captains from the airlines and they say there is no way what the planes did could they have done that (sic). They changed altitude. They changed speed. They changed direction. They had to know about the equipment to do what they had to do and there is no way that could have been done." There is, in fact, an entire website and organization of pilots and aeronautical engineers who have banded together to demand an open, public inquiry into ALL the unbelievable flight maneuvers pulled off on the morning of September 11. They have done studies and experiments, and have offered their expert opinions and analyses on many of the events of 9/11. Their aforementioned and excellent website is: pilotsfor911truth.org. These experts and professionals in the field of aviation with nothing to gain from the exposure of 9/11 have concluded that the official story is bogus, and that the officially blamed perpetrators and hijackers had no chance of pulling off the maneuvers we saw on the morning of 9/11.

[...]





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Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque

By the incredible Mark Ames, of Exile fame, 9/10/10:


So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, drawing attacks from the right painting him as a terrorist sympathizer with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

But meanwhile, links between the group behind the controversial mosque, the CIA and U.S. military establishment have gone unacknowledged.

[...]

Whether the Cordoba Initiative ever gets its way with the Ground Zero Mosque, it may well have a lasting legacy at odds with its stated intention: By damaging the very moderates and progressives who actually view New York, and the nation as a whole, as a tolerant melting pot, and strengthening the position [of] demagogues on both sides, it will almost certainly deal a setback to interfaith relations. It will also help to hobble the Democratic party. Which just might have been the point all along.

Either that, or it's merely a coincidence that this controversy has erupted now, during crucial mid-term elections. In which case we can all go back to what we were doing before--either denouncing the Park51 Mosque as an affront to Americans, or championing it as a symbol of our fundamental rights--playing our accustomed roles in a drama that seems too perfect, somehow, to believe.




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READING in Richmond, VA

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Linh Dinh and Sabrina Orah Mark
Tuesday, 9/14/2010--7:00 PM
University of Richmond - Weinstein Hall
Brown-Alley Room



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David Chandler

of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth:

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Scientists for 9/11 Truth, U.S. Military Officers for 9/11 Truth and Actors & Artists for 9/11 Truth:

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www.scientistsfor911truth.org
www.militaryofficersfor911truth.org
www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org

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9/11 ANALYSIS: From Ronald Reagan and the Soviet-Afghan War to George W Bush and September 11, 2001

Michel Chossudovsky, 9/9/10:



"The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings....The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..", (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)

"Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad." (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)

"Bin Laden recruited 4,000 volunteers from his own country and developed close relations with the most radical mujahideen leaders. He also worked closely with the CIA, ... Since September 11, [2001] CIA officials have been claiming they had no direct link to bin Laden." (Phil Gasper, International Socialist Review, November-December 2001)


-Osama bin Laden, America's bogyman, was recruited by the CIA in 1979 at the very outset of the US sponsored jihad. He was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerilla training camp.

-The architects of the covert operation in support of "Islamic fundamentalism" launched during the Reagan presidency played a key role in launching the "Global War on Terrorism" in the wake of 9/11.

- President Ronald Reagan met the leaders of the Islamic Jihad at the White House in 1983

-Under the Reagan adminstration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic "freedom fighters". In today's World, the "freedom fighters" are labelled "Islamic terrorists".

-In the Pashtun language, the word "Taliban" means "Students", or graduates of the madrasahs (places of learning or coranic schools) set up by the Wahhabi missions from Saudi Arabia, with the support of the CIA. Education in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war war largely secular in Afghanistan. The number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.

[...]





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from Washington's Blog:

THE ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11


Don't want to hear this?

Tough. Grow up.

9/11 Commissioners:


* The 9/11 Commission's co-chairs said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements (free subscription required)

* 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says "I don't believe for a minute we got everything right", that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, and that the 9/11 debate should continue

* 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting"

* 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up"


[...]






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Peter Dale Scott on 9/11

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"the rich are a vicious tribe of people"

Matthew Lynn in Bloomberg, Sep 6, 2010:


[...]

There is an increasing amount of evidence that the rich are a vicious tribe of people. One study last year from the University of California, Berkeley, found that the rich are ruder than others. Another piece of research, conducted at the same institution, concluded they were less likely to give to charity than poorer people were. A third study, carried out at the Humboldt University in Berlin, concluded they were “nastier,” in the sense of being keener to punish others.

Top of Tree

Nothing is shocking about that. You don’t get to be rich without being difficult and demanding. You need some sharp elbows to get to the top of the tree, and there is no point in being squeamish about treading on a few toes along the way. And the rich have a lot more to protect than other people: They have to be fierce to hang on to all that wealth.

They have probably been vicious ever since one caveman used a bigger club to take control of the grandest cave on the hill.

In the past, most fortunes were built in association with ordinary people. Factory owners were aware of the shop-floor workers on whom their wealth depended, and that shaped the view of themselves. Carmaker Henry Ford doubled his workers’ average pay to $5 a day in 1913 and shortened their working hours. The Cadbury family of chocolate makers in the U.K. built a small town for many of the company’s workers in Bournville, near Birmingham, in the 19th century. That made them more human.

The growth of the financial-services industry and the bonus culture has changed that. The investment bankers and hedge-fund managers who make up most of the new rich elite don’t have much contact with ordinary people. They assume their wealth is entirely the result of their own brilliance. And they cut themselves off from normal life.

It is an industry that mints billionaires and also breeds arrogance, selfishness and snobbishness.

[...]



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US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies'

Guardian, 9/9/10:



Soldiers face charges over secret 'kill team' which allegedly murdered at random and collected fingers as trophies of war

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

[...]







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Collapsing America

As published on OpEd News, Dissident Voice, South Lebanon, Aletho News, Bear Market News, Portland Independent Media Center, Uprooted Palestinians, Online Journal, Information Clearing House, Signs of the Time, Sabbah Report and American Pendulum, 9/10/10:





All governments lie, kill and misuse public funds, but these calculated habits are amplified manifold during wars. We’re in two now, aiming for a third. Japan, whose land we’re still occupying 65 years after Hiroshima, has just announced sanctions against Iran beyond what the U.N. mandated. South Korea swiftly followed suit. It’s surprising to see these two countries so in sync, until one remembers that they have become American cheerleaders for decades. Rah, rah, bomb Tehran! A murderous chorus is rising, yet again. Countries that aren’t our client states can be counted with two hands, even those missing fingers from an exploding grenade.

Universal outrage has been drummed up over the case of an Iranian woman about to be stoned to death for adultery. She’s also implicated in the murder of her husband, for which she may be hanged. This second, more serious crime has been left out of many news stories. America also executes, but it doesn’t stone, especially for a bit of ticklish fun on the side. We inject, electrocute, gas, hang and shoot our condemned. We’re more humane that way. Forever bureaucratic, we pay attention to procedural niceties.

Our objection, then, is not to capital punishment, but to certain methods. Stoning is barbaric. We don’t stone, period, except during one of our serial wars, where we will stone entire communities back to the Stone Age. But that’s war, buddy. We also use phosphorous and cluster bombs, plant landmines that will last generations. To rectify and avenge the stoning of one woman, someone we don’t really care about, whose name we can’t even pronounce, we’ll flatten Iran, maybe by Thanksgiving.

The United States is concerned about women worldwide. It is touched and outraged by one Afghan woman, Aisha, whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband. To defend her honor, it has killed hundreds of thousands of her brothers and sisters. To protect her, it has destroyed her country. It’s the principle that matters. We care about the individual, at least those who are useful to our agendas. It’s the masses we don’t give a flying whoopee about. How can we not raise our voices, for example, when an imprisoned prostitute—hardly a criminal, really, even less so than an adulterer—is left in a cage, to be baked to death for at least four hours in 107-degree heat? Her captors ignored her pleas for water. They wouldn’t even allow her to use the bathroom, so she soiled herself before passing out. She was still alive, however, when finally taken to the hospital, where doctors allowed her to die. Incredibly, no charges have been filed. Such barbarity and judicial callousness deserve our fullest condemnations, except that hardly anyone has heard of Marcia Powell, 48, who died in an Arizona prison in May of 2009. The mainstream media ignore her, because her abject death cannot be exploited for political purposes. We’re not trying to bomb Arizona.

Needing to kill, a government will lie before, during and after splattering blood. Eschewing subtlety, it prefers to speak in slogans and clipped, cartoonish sentences. They hate us for who we are. We must fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here. We’re trying to root out the bad guys. Adopting this lingo, many Americans are dubbing the community center and mosque near Ground Zero a “jihad mosque” or a “victory mosque.” In Lower Manhattan last week, I saw a man carrying a sign, “EVERYTHING I EVER NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT ISLAM I LEARNED ON 9/11.” Another displayed a caricature of “IMAM OBAMA.” There was an effigy of a tied up Palestinian, complete with keffiyeh, with this placard, “OBAMA: With a name like HUSSAIN we understand. Bloomberg: what the f@&k is your excuse?”

Totalitarianism always breeds idiocy. Lies that go unchallenged lead to more preposterous lies. Idiocy is also the manure from which totalitarianism rises. On September 11, 2001, the entire world saw America symbolically imploded, but our actual collapse is ongoing. It is relatively gradual, unlike the three, yes, three, World Trade Center buildings that tumbled onto their own foot prints. For the last nine years, we have endured an unending stream of lies and idiocy, none more grotesque than the official explanation to what happened that tragic day.

Despite being lied to repeatedly, almost daily, Americans are strangely gullible to incoherent, even ridiculous narratives dished up by their government. Brainwashed by the bromide that their nation is always a force for good, anywhere, worldwide, Americans can’t imagine that Washington could be complicit in the murder of its own citizens. Ignored is the fact that it has done so many times before, and since, 9/11. Using false pretexts to invade Iraq, our government has caused the death of over four thousand Americans, more than the number who perished on 9/11.

I don’t know what happened that day, but it makes no sense to me that World Trade Center #7 fell down without being hit by anything. It makes no sense to me that it collapsed exactly the same way as the twin towers, as if imploding. It makes no sense that the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged hijackers, could be found on the ground, when entire skyscrapers were being pulverized. I also don’t understand how no military jets could intercept any of the three planes that hit their targets that day. The first tower was struck at 8:46AM, the Pentagon at 9:40AM, nearly an hour later, with no effective response from our vaunted military. I used to take buses to and from the Pentagon Transit Center. I knew the building wasn’t very tall, so it struck me as weird how an airliner could hit it from the side. Why fly parallel to the ground, nearly shaving it, to strike such a low target? Why not just dive into it? There are red flags all over this incident, yet many sane, reasonable people will become completely unhinged at the slightest suggestion that the official version doesn’t add up. Our government lies all the time, but when it comes to this one incident, we shouldn’t question anything? Even National Review, of all places, pointed out visa irregularities among the alleged hijackers, how they could enter the U.S. without the proper paperwork.

After Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, his family refused to believe the official explanation. They fought and fought until an assassination conspiracy trial was scheduled in 1999. Presented with extensive evidences, a jury concluded that, yes, the federal, state and local governments all had a hand in Dr. King’s murder, and that James Earl Ray was not the shooter. The King family did what any sane, loving family would do. Coretta Scott King explained, “We had to get involved because the system did not work. Those who are responsible for the assassination were not held to account for their involvement […] It has been a difficult and painful experience to revisit this tragedy, but we felt we had an obligation to do everything in our power to seek the truth.”

On September 11, 2001, someone stabbed America. She’s being murdered right now. As Americans, we need to get to the heart of this, because this madness and deceit are perpetuating themselves. If we don’t have the courage and clarity to confront this evil, we won’t regain our sanity or move forward. We might as well be dead. We’re dying. As with the King murder and so much else, you cannot expect the system to convict itself. It will lie and lie until the truth hardly matters.





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A Forensic Analysis of 9/11

by Graeme MacQueen, March 19, 2008:

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NYC, 9/4/10

Ground Zero.















Murat Nemet-Nejat in red shirt; Amanda Zinoman in black, filming; Next to her, Matthew Sharpe in light green shirt.






Daniel Feinberg in the middle, in jean jacket; Anelise Chen on right, sitting; David Larsen on far right.





Ocean Vuong in the middle, sitting.















After iced tea and whiskey, Daniel Feinberg with waitress at Chinatown bar.

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EVENT OF THE CENTURY!!!--

according to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Obama, Oprah, Entertainment Tonight, Hustler and FOX News.

If you're in NYC on Saturday, September 4th, do drop by the Yitzhak Rabin Gallery, literally a hole in the wall, at 49.5 Orchard Street (South of Grand, North of Canal), at 5PM.

I will exhibit some photos and perform a poetry rant on the sidewalk, wearing these home-made sandwich boards:

[Wearing the above, I will stand in front of the new Goldman Sachs building, at 200 West Street (catty corner to Ground Zero), around 2:30PM.]



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NATURE

I will appear with the mad gentleman above, at an event called
Matthew Sharpe and Linh Dinh, A Literary Friendship, at The Center for Fiction, 17 East 47th Street, New York, NY, at 7PM on Thursday, October 7th.


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The 10 Highest Paid CEOs who Fired the Most Workers

Huffington Post, 9/1/10:




1. Fred Hassan -- Schering-Plough
Total Compensation 2009: $49,653,063
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 16,000*

*Includes all layoffs announced by the firm resulting from merger between Schering-Plough and Merck



2. William Weldon -- Johnson & Johnson
Total Compensation 2009: $25,569,844
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 8,900



3. Mark Hurd -- Hewlett Packard
Total Compensation 2009: $24,201,448
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 6,400



4. Robert Iger -- Walt Disney
Total Compensation 2009: $21,578,471
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 3,400



5. Samuel Palmisano -- IBM
Total Compensation 2009: $21,159,289
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 7,800



6. Randall Stephenson -- AT&T
Total Compensation 2009: $20,244,312
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 12,300



7. Michael Duke -- Walmart
Total Compensation 2009: $19,234,269
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 13,350



8. Alan Mulally -- Ford
Total Compensation 2009: $17,916,654
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 4,700



9. Louis Chenevert -- United Technologies
Total Compensation 2009: $17,897,666
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 13,290



10. Ivan Seidenberg -- Verizon
Total Compensation 2009: $17,485,796
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 21,308





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