You Heard it @ Froomkin's First

Retrieved 09:20 AM PST Thursday 10 April 2008 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/04/09/BL2008040902028_Comments.html#

> imnoman wrote:
> Gen.Odom's Definition of Myth-Jacking:
>
> "And to continue to put the cozy veneer of comfortable half-truth on this is to deceive the American public and to make them think it's not the charade it is."
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 4/9/2008 6:20:38 PM
> Recommend (5)

imnoman wrote:

Today's Lesson in Myth-Jacking: Playing Kick the Can with the Ship of State

On ABC's World News, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulous summed up yesterday's testimony this way:

Gibson: "George, did anything change today?"

Stephanopoulous: "Not much, Charlie. I think this was one, big exercise in kicking the can down the road."

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http://zelikowednomore.blogspot.com/
Myth-Jack THIS

http://knowbuddhau.blogspot.com/
Sound of Divinity, Resounding

http://washingtonpoets.org/owas/view.php?a=1116
online whispers & [Shouts].b-O Brother! My Brother

4/9/2008 6:06:29 PM
Recommend (5)

That Damn Dem Debate, Pt. 1

No audio? Click "Links to this post," scroll up. Only Comedy Central videos seem to be missing the audio track--for now. Don't have a clue why.

That Damn Dem Debate, Pt. 2

No audio? Click "Links to this post," scroll up. Only Comedy Central videos seem to be missing the audio track--for now. Don't have a clue why.

That Damn Dem Debate, Pt. 3

No audio? Click "Links to this post," scroll up. Only Comedy Central videos seem to be missing the audio track--for now. Don't have a clue why.

Applying Koestler's Holarchy to Prof. Lessig's "Net Neutrality"; Myth-Making at the World Bank

Round about 14:00, Sister Amy apologizes for having a slight cold, saying, "I hope you'll bear with me." As Luke Skywalker says in my poem O sister my Sister:

My sister is my Princess
For w h o m
I bear all
S T R R R I F E !!!

Perfection is unlovable, Thomas Mann tells us. Sister Amy sounds very lovable today ;-)

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OMGods! Listen to Prof. Lessig and ask yourself, to which Network is he referring? Our human bioelectric neural nets? or the bioelectronic Internet?

Psychologists call biasing the network in this way "efferent control of afferent stimuli." Our sensory apparatus isn't just sitting here; it hasn't grown in a vacuum, it's going places, doing things.

The shaping of broadcast media to hold the short attention spans of "consumers" -- appetites, not humans -- allows only for the use of our narrow-focus mind. That's the functional equivalent of a modem. The flashes and sounds on our screens grab and hold our attention, right? Even games are advertised as "addictive."

These are mechanical efforts to control us from the Situation Room. A mythical name I would use for the Quantico Circuit: the GodNet, aka NO 1's Land. What used to be called the Commons is now "gov't property, no trespassing."


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More later. Including the great interview with Raj Patel yesterday. I nearly dropped dead when he actually said:

And certainly, there’s a sort of myth-making enterprise within the World Bank that everything they were doing was for the benefit of the poor, whether the poor liked it or not.

O brother my Brother, do tell! Seriously, it's wonderful to hear someone whose mythological awareness isn't rooted in junior high.

Kenotic "Solo" Mondo

**KNOCK-KNOCK**
((who's there?))
**BUDDHA!**
(((buddha who?)))
**KNOW! BUDDHA U!**

How many Buddhists does it take, anyway,
To make a revolution?

NONE: change comes from **Within**. The very same Voice
That is Now
composing these thoughts

Sounds them in your head as you read them.
So who's
This? Or **This**?

A Silent voice that has always spoken
**Louder**, much louder than words.

Our **Voice** now sings the Universe Electric. It is
the stated goal of Western science: to capture this energy in a bottle,
In a nuclear bomb, for example, or a vial full of a life-saving drug.

So who's in charge, Here? Who's Voice **is
this?

The Voice of Divinity, resounding, or**
just a machine?

dp

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In what cosmos, what mythos, do we now live? This is what I see:

[[(Absolute Supremacy)/**NO 1'S LAND**// ((Absolute Subjugation))]]

I call this CELLf-imprisonment: the misconception of our selves as
quantum singularities absolutely and eternally divided from the
Beloved. When we look up into the night sky, we almost always implode
our psyches into black holes by conceiving our selves as dust motes,
infinitesimal and insignificant.

In this misbegotten cosmos, the little slashes represent every Wall of
Denial in existence, especially the ones we hide behind from within.
Our misconception of what it means, to be a human self, is the root of
our problems.

This is the source, I believe, of the First Noble Truth. Humanity,
the Buddha said, is impaled on the twin horns of "Is" and "Is not."
Hidden here is the Law of the Excluded Middle. Our assumption of its
inviolability imprisons us in quantum singularities of PAIN.

That which looks is looking from out of its self, into itself. Since
I am my own source, what is being "birthed"? what is "dying"?

Path there is, NO 1 walking;
sound in your head
there is, NO 1 talking.

Society, I say, is impaled on the twin horns of the following bull:
*Cisterna mystica*, or mechanical receptacle? Being Aware of
Becoming, or mere machine?

{(Vessel) + (Flow)} = BAM!bino
{(hands) + (the will to clap)} = CLAPPING
{(words) + (Beloving)} = Being Aware of our own Becoming

{(Self-filling/self-emptying)} Mystic Vessels, /cisterna mystica/, I
suggest, are the fundamental units of this cosmic field, which I
express as a haiku:

out of the infinite
coalescing, We Stand; We Fall, decaying,
back into the infinite

Which is more famously expressed as *E pluribus, Unum*, Out of Many,
Union. The many grains are gathered by many hands to form one loaf,
which is broken and becomes many again.

{beloved}/UNION/{Beloved} is a "more perfect Union." In Union We Trust!

So, my answer to my question: Being, or machine? is a resounding: HA!

(This blank space is nevertheless not "empty"! It is pregnant with
potential.)


{First posted on Wednesday 16 April 2008 at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sangha/ Comment #57405}

Meeting Amy and David Goodman @ Seattle Green Festival Sunday 13 April 2008

I went to the Green Festival Sunday. I met Amy and David Goodman. And then it happened.

The Main Stage couldn't handle the crowd. I saw Medea Benjamin, then a male host, then Amy herself take the stage--from extreme stage left/ the wings. There she was, with her magnified image behind herself on the HUGE screen, 10' tall at least. HA! Who says you don't see the mythic realm with the waking mind?

I was 3rd in line for the book signing that followed. At the end of her talk, I heard them sing Happy Birthday to someone, I assumed Amy. Perfect!

When I told her and David I had poems for them, Amy stopped me. She picked up the mic of some sort of transmitter. Without looking up, she said something about "could you come up here." As I tried to stretch out the intro, David explained: she's asking the cameraman to join us. We want to hear it, but we want to get it on film. !!!

"Uh, oh, what have I done? I'm entirely BAKED! HA! Don't be a scaredy cat." So I stood there, for an hour, grinning like the wayward fool I am, opposite the signing table, in the background of the filming, as the entire serpentine line of fans had their moments. And then David gave me my cue: "And now knowbuddhau here has been waiting patiently to recite a poem."

I've given better technical performances, but nothing compares with looking all the way into Amy Goodman's eyes, turning to look equally deeply into David Goodman's eyes, and sharing Being Aware of Becoming for the 2 minutes it took to recite my twins, O Sister my Sister and O Brother my Brother.

All I hoped for, was to meet Amy and say, "Hello, O sister my Sister," to her. Holy holy lands, Batman! I entered the Washington State Convention Center, went up three escalators--I didn't climb Mt. Olympus, so how did I come face to face with Athena and Apollo? HA! Heaven and Hell are right here and now.

So I fairly floated outta there, as you may well imagine.

Score that one for Lunatics and Poets! That's the name of the 2004 album by my new favorite band, Red Elvises.
dp

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	"Making love to Venus, talking shit to Mars" --Red Elvises (Lunatics and Poets, 2004)
Date:	Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:09:21 -0700
From:	know! buddha u
Organization:	Completely Different Research
To:	Democracy Now!

Red Elvises: Lunatics and Poets (2004: All songs written by Igor Yuzov
©2004 Shooba-Doobah Music, BMI)

Tchaikovski

Cosmonaut Tchaikovski lost in open Space,
Rocking in his rocket counting down the days.
Son of Mother Russia, Hero of Ukraine,
Dreaming of his girlfriend, calling out her name.

Masha, Masha you driving me insane,
Masha, Masha I'm calling out your name.

Cosmonaut Tchaikovski lost and never found,
Going kind of crazy, jumping like a clown,
Lunatic and poet, prince of yellow stars,
Making love to Venus, talking shit to Mars.

Masha, Masha you driving me insane,
Masha, Masha I'm calling out your name.

Cosmonaut Tchaikovski, out of his mind,
Circling his orbit twenty million times,
Memories of snowflakes, vodka, borsht and babes,
Balalaika music, eggs by Faberge

Masha, Masha you driving me insane,
Masha, Masha I'm calling out your name.

Word! These guys are completely blowing my mind. They'll be in Seattle on 8 July.

dp

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"...[P]olitics was deliberately left out." --Amy Goodman, quoting Seattle Times (dn2008-0415 58:00-30)

The silent violence of anonymous Policy strikes again! Amy Goodman reads from the 11 April 2008 edition of the Seattle Times c.58:00 today.

UW officials last month asked students to submit possible questions for the Dalai Lama's campus visit. About 60 students responded — including about eight who wanted to ask about China or Tibet. But when UW officials hand-picked 14 students to ask questions at the event, politics was deliberately left out.


"Violence they can’t see, we barely have the opportunity even to raise the question." --Darius Rejali (@54:27-32 dn2008-0312)

And with electrical weapons that leave very few marks, it’s very hard to know.

I always ask people, during the Rodney King video, which everybody saw, “Does everyone remember it?” And everyone says, “Yeah.” And then I say, “Well, how much electroshock did he get when that video was running?” And everyone goes, “I don’t remember anything. There was just beating.” I was like, “No, he had a taser in him. He had gotten two bolts of 50,000 volts, and they were emptying out the remains of that charge in him while he was struggling.” Now, everybody can get outraged by violence they can see. Violence they can’t see, we barely have the opportunity even to raise the question.

Remember Zelikow's attempt to keep the Truth Genie bottled up in Michael Ratner's skull, saying, "He doesn't know that, we don't know that, NO 1 knows that"? Smoke & mirrors produce illusions on the physical level; tricks like Zelikow tried to pull work on the mythosociopsychic level. The bastard is on MY court now! Oh yeah, ZeliKOW! rhymes with OW, you can't even run when your adversary attacks from within.

By weaponizing mythic symbols and narratives, the object of torture is to get us to imprison ourselves in CELLves of our own making. I'll bet all the tea in my cupboard that's the "top secret" psychological research going on down at Gitmo. They're learning how to purge the existing mind and reinstall a more compliant model. They have no intention of "winning" hearts and minds, except maybe in the sense that "the West was won:" taken by military violence.

See how they're using a mechanical approach to Psyche? By using weapons to silence our own internal voices of Fear, we only make them fear louder. But that's what we do in a cosmos conceived as Holy War between Good and Evil. We force things into order from the outside, including living things that we simply assume to death before we ever touch them.

Torture is the Order of the Day in this, our official, APA-approved Newtonian psychology. Especially torture by isolation. It's what we do. The APA adopted the point particle as its model of the ego. Turns out, THERE AIN'T NO SECH CRITTER! HA! It's all flowing energy, and "it" is We, dearly beloved listener of this unspoken Voice.

"We having to exempt that part of our selves from our selves...." --Carol Bebelle (dn2008-0411 29:20-25)

WORD! My sister poet said it! Carol Bebelle, Executive Director of Ashé Cultural Arts Center. She is a native of New Orleans and a published poet and writer."

WeeMen have claimed vaginas as occupied territory

AMY GOODMAN: Jane Fonda, remembering her first experience of The Vagina Monologues. Carol Bebelle, do you remember yours?

CAROL BEBELLE:Absolutely. We produced it last year. And though I had read it and I’d seen segments, I had never seen the whole thing. And it’s an absolutely exquisite piece of work. I come out of social service, and so the delicacy with which you get an opportunity to see both exciting and wonderful things about women, as they’ve related to, you know, their vagina and that part of their bodies, as well as the things that have been so distressing, that such a wonderful job has been done in terms of essentially helping the audience to understand how {We} having to exempt that part of ourselves from ourselves in a certain kind of way lays the groundwork for everything else that happens for and to women. And so, it was absolutely very much like Jane Fonda says, that you laugh forever. You know, I mean, these are things that, you know, you sometimes don’t even talk about with your girlfriends. You know, you think about them in your head, and you kind of chuckle about them, and so to have it kind of right there and to be in a community who can kind of experience it with you, and they’re things that just break your heart, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: Like what?

CAROL BEBELLE: Well, when you hear about how women’s bodies are used as the battlefields in war, that these—that’s what’s spoiled, when they talk about the victor and the spoils. It’s the women. That’s one of the ways that the victor has it to be very clear that I’ve managed, you know, to kind of dominate you, is that their men are no longer able to be a protection to their women.

There are two kinds of men in this world: wee men and real men. WeeMen experience only a partial initiation into this limitless sphere of Being Aware of Becoming, whose center is in each of us but whose circumference is NoWhere. WeeMen remain within the egocentric Ptolemaic cosmos of their infancy, trying to clear the world outside their skin of the demons they conceive within. WeeMen who conceive of life as Holy War, and that includes most of us (war is what we do, there's even an absurd "coffee war" in Seattle) have claimed vaginas as occupied territory. WeeMen intend to plant the flag of patriarchy way up inside Gaia's innermost sanctuary. These cosmic pinheads conceive of the human self as a black hole, a mechanical receptacle into which WeeMen may pump whatever WeeMen wish or waste.

[(Male supremacy / {NoMAN'S LAND,aka VAGINAS///[[[{{{Female subjugation}}}]]]]

beloved {UNION} Beloved is "a more perfect Union."

O sisters my Sisters! O NoMan my NO 1!
I bow in the direction of New Orleans.

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Did you hear something?

KNOCK-KNOCK
(who's there?)
BUDDHA!
(buddha who?)
KNOW! BUDDHA U!

O Sister! My Sister

[First voice: Osiris speaks to his beloved Isis; second voice: Luke speaks to his sister, Leia Skywalker; third voice: we all speak with one voice; fourth voice: Being Aware of Becoming.]


My sister is my Goddess;
My sister is my Wife.

My sister is my Princess,
For w h o m I bear all
S T R I F E!

My sister is my Mother!
Beyond w h o m

There is no

Other.

In sum, O Sister! my Sister! my Sister is my
L I F E!

O Brother! My Brother

Washington Poets Association
(First voice: Isis speaks to her beloved Osiris; second voice: a caregiver speaks to a retired pilot; third voice: we all speak with One voice; fourth voice: Being Aware of Becoming.)

My brother is my God; yes,
My brother is my Husband, too;

My brother is my Pilot,
For w h o m I am

Ground c r e w .

My brother is my Pater, He
Who rhymes with Mater in Water;

In sum, O Brother! my Brother! my Brother, He is
Y O U !

This Old God

Washington Poets Association

[To the tune of "This Old Man"]

This old god
He played Man

He played Man
But then began to harden, stiffen--
Lost his Sister soul!
Let's see old god gently
Home

This old god
He played dead

A crown of soulthorns 'pon his head
Hey god! Wake up! Enliven up in there!
All you're suffering is your nightmare.
That's a good god, give that god a bone
Let's see old god gently
Home

This old god
Hurts so bad

He too often
Gets too mad

Hey god! Wake up! Enlighten up in there!
All your suffering is our nightmare
That's a good god, give that god a bone

Let's see old god

gently

H o m e

Sound of Divinity, Resounding

How many Buddhists does it take, anyway,
To make a revolution?

NONE: change comes from Within. The very same Voice
That is Now
composing these thoughts

Sounds them in your head as you read them.
So who's
This? Or This?

A Silent voice that has always spoken
Louder, much louder than words.

Our Voice now sings the Universe Electric. It is
the stated goal of Western science: to capture this energy in a bottle,
In a nuclear bomb, for example, or a vial full of a life-saving drug.

So who's in charge, here? Who's Voice is
this?

The Voice of Divinity, resounding, or
just a machine?

dp

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"But the torch relay itself is essentially a PR invention of the Nazi era." --Minky Worden (dn2008-0410 34:20-35:36)

That's it! Thanks, Sister Minky, I didn't know that myself.

The Torch Relay was invented as a trick of the myth-jacking masters.

And as we all know, the Nazi's took PR to the Next Level, now didn't they? The Olympics are explicitly mythological. It was, of course, more than an ad campaign.

It's all about myth-jacking and gang-raping us all, the body politic, in realtime, right freakin' now

I fear our reductive, mechanistic, lifeless terms, like "train-wreck," "Kicking the can," "ship of state," "PR," only serve unintentionally to keep us locked up in the same mentality from which we seek Release.

We do still call them temples of democracy, don't we? Are we, as a culture, too thoroughly colonized of mind by Mechanism, to recognize our innate Divinity from within? Can we, the nattering nabobs, learn to talk about living beings with terms appropriate to living beings, and not machines? We misbirth our selves each and every time we reduce our shares of Divinity to mere god-forsaken mechanisms. This isn't about "reproduction," it's about Growing & Flowing from within.

For example, 'Congress' is not a cannon-fodder sausage grinder for the fattening of kleptocrats! It's part of a freakin' VERB phrase! To have social intercourse. Note that this does not involve being forced into order from the violent efforts of a Creator/God/King/Priest/Man among men (don't even think of a woman in "His" place). But that's the cosmos assumed by Western science.

Try this exercise: see how long you can go before you turn Life into a machine with the words you use.

AMY GOODMAN:I was shocked in reading last night the history of the Olympic torch relay—you know, the torch itself going back to ancient Greece—but the relay to be Nazi Olympics, 1936.

MINKY WORDEN: There’s a wonderful book, new academic book called Nazi Games, which gives a concise history of this. But the torch relay itself is essentially a PR invention of the Nazi era. And the point of it was to run the torch through parts of Europe that Germany hoped to—that the Nazis hoped to take over, including the Sudetenland.

So it was—it really—I think if the corporate sponsors of the torch relay really knew the history of this, I can’t imagine that they’d want to be associated with it. And those sponsors are Coca-Cola, Lenovo and Samsung. And Human Rights Watch has also spent the last year writing to and communicating with the corporate sponsors about the—you know, they’re literally paying for the Olympics. The Olympics are paid for by the corporate sponsors. But there’s certainly going to be a price to pay in terms of corporate reputation if the torch relay inside China turns into a major human rights debacle.

"[I]t’s just unheard of." --Babak Pasdar, on his discovery of NO'1s LAND (dn2008-0410 12:45-28:00)

Holy Holy Lands, Batman! I just realized what this is: perhaps others aren't as slow. The BushRoveCo MO, I've been shouting from the rooftops, involves the following mythosociopsychology:

[(Absolute Supremacy)/ NO 1'S LAND/// (Absolute Subjugation)]

The Quantico Circuit is NO 1's LAND!

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what do you discern from the—as you were saying, you tried to get a log of interaction with it, but you could not produce a log? What does that mean in terms of what your sense is of what was being done by that?

BABAK PASDAR:Well, everything that security folks do, security experts do, needs to have some transaction around it. We need to know what happened, when it happened, and be able to go back and recreate a scenario from a forensic standpoint, from an evidentiary standpoint, from just knowing exactly what happened when. Logging is critical to that. So whenever we implement a security system, we collect logs, we feed information to a system that preserves log of exactly what the transaction and where, who talked to whom and, you know, with what types of services. When—it’s just unheard of to have an organization, especially at carrier, implement a security system and not log the information.

JUAN GONZALEZ:So, in other words, what was occurring was that someone was deliberately trying to hide whatever transactions or whatever data was going through that particular line?

BABAK PASDAR:Well, they were behaving very unusual and not up to industry standards.

AMY GOODMAN:What was the reaction of your coworkers, of the people you were asking questions of, of the company?

BABAK PASDAR:Well, they were very squirrelly about it.

In this mythosociopsychopathological cage of mind, there is no Commons. As Rev. Huckabee said, there's our political economy, and "not theirs."

Brother Scott Horton has chronicled the legal machinations by which the ship of state has been myth-jacked into this Wasteland. That method involves creating legal "black holes" into which we detainees are meant to fall.

These psychotics believe absolute separability not only to be possible, but in fact to be the essential nature of the cosmos.

Joseph Campbell called this "mythic dissociation." These people are self-terrorized, CELLf-imprisoned, using nuclear weapons to silence the voices of Fear in their heads and hearts, which only makes them fear a nuclear-powered Fear.

Babak Pasdar discovered the Grail Castle, was not intimidated, was not discouraged, was not CELLf-imprisoned; as Tom Devine wisely put it, Babak Pasdar dared commit the Truth that may set us all Free.

Babak Pasdar, you're my hero!

There SHE is, Lady Liberty! (dn2008-0410)

JUAN GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Teguia, a pro-Tibet demonstrator in San Francisco, speaking before the torch relay Wednesday.

JENNIFER TEGUIA: There are some severe human rights violations going on, and they are being perpetrated by China. So I am here to make sure that my voice is heard that I am not OK with human rights violations.

And now live from San Fran, it's Lady Liberty! I love it! Mythic figures taking to the streets. See! Royalty aren't the only ones who can play god! We are all worthy of public acknowledgment of our innate Divinity.

Who says you don't see actual divinities, with the waking mind, has trained their mind's eye to go blind at the sight of Beauty Herself, dancing with her partner, Tender Manliness.

I mean it: as infants, we have to learn to use our sensory apparatus: we train our mind's eye, too, not to see unbearable things. O but we do! we do see them.

Our ability, to ignore the suffering of our kin, who is really our very self only spatially removed, allows all suffering to go on. We need some emotional callous, to be sure. Obviously, though, we Americans need to be far more open to the suffering from which we draw our lives.

BTW, Scott Horton is ending his daily blog, will you be doing a review or feature? If so, please ask ask him about his support and admiration for McCain. I truly admire Brother Scott. I can't fathom this one thing about him.

And the Winner is: GUPTA! by a slam dunk

Arun Gupta sees right through the smoke and mirrors.

ARUN GUPTA: Yeah, I think one of the interesting aspects is that there’s this elaborate dancethat goes on between the media, the Pentagon and the politicians. We all knew what Petraeus was going to say, that he was going to come there and say, well, we can’t draw down troops, but the corporate media treats it as this is some sort of dramatic breaking news, because I think what Petraeus’s real goal is to ensure that the occupation continues unhindered until January of 2009. What the Bush administration’s goal at this point and what it really has been for the last few years is to pass off a raging occupation to the next administration, because it’s going to make it harder for them to withdraw when you have 140,000 US troops, 180,000-plus mercenaries and private contractors, the largest US embassy in the world and enduring US military bases all throughout Iraq. So, you know, there was no real news in that.

And in terms of the candidates, I think one thing that caught me was when Obama was talking about the endpoint. He implied that there would be 30,000 troops. So he is, in a way, calling for an open-ended occupation also; it’s just at a lower level. And when Clinton, when she had her chance, she said we’ll begin the process of withdrawal, which again implies that this could be a many-year process. So it seems to me that this is part of the dancethat even though the Democrats talk about withdrawal, because a large majority of the American public wants this war to end and an overwhelming majority of the Iraqi public wants this war to end, they are all still committed to the continuation and the maintenance of the American empire, especially the occupation of Iraq, because we’ve ended up roiling one of the most strategic countries in the most strategic region in the world in terms of energy production.

ARUN GUPTA: What should happen? A full immediate US withdrawal on one condition: reparations to Iraqis for the devastation we’ve wrought on them for the last seventeen years.

WORD! Compare the weasel words of the other two guests.

Eli Lake's slouch showed his contempt; his rhetoric confirmed it. He opened with the "outdated, provincial, 'outside agitator'" maneuver ("other people in the Left of the Democratic Party") in the process of scapegoating "special groups...who are targeting civilians." A double Bogeyman-at-the-Door! Masterful propaganda, Eli, take a bow.

AMY GOODMAN: Eli Lake of the New York Sun, were you surprised by anything yesterday?

ELI LAKE: Yeah, I mean, I was—I think I would agree that Senator Obama began laying out markers for a policy that wouldn’t betray the Iraqi people to the forces of al-Qaeda, Quds and the remnants of the Baath Party, which apparently other people in the left of the Democratic Party think are the true voices of the Iraqis.

And I think that you also saw an interesting exchange on the Status of Forces Agreement, where we don’t really know the status of this agreement. It’s certainly not going to be a treaty that’s going to be submitted to the Senate. It is, however, going to go to the Iraqi parliament, as I think you played in your clips. And I think that they said at one point that there would be an explicit—or Ryan Crocker said he expected there would be an explicit declaration that the US would not seek permanent bases in Iraq. That was somewhat news to me.

And finally, I think that what you saw also was over and again General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker said that you’re seeing the Iranians supporting these special groups who are—who they said they’ve trained, funded, equipped and so forth. And when you really kind of get on a ground level, I mean, that, you know, the Iranians have a policy of playing many sides in Iraq obviously, but these special groups are people who are targeting civilians. So I think, in that respect, they’ve made it—they think they’ve put it in very crystal relief the sort of role that the Iranians are playing, and I think you heard less—in fact, I hardly heard anything where another bugaboo in the past has been the Syrian—I think you’ve seen the Syrians or fewer of the terrorists coming into Iraq from Syria, who are sort of these, what they call lethal accelerants.

That last sentence is almost incoherent. Incendiary Syrians? "Allah akhbar! flame on!" Human Molotov's? What's he talking about?

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Gareth Porter mythbusts the "special groups" gambit. Go go Gareth!

GARETH PORTER: Well, this whole narrative about the special groups that Eli Lake refers to and which has been referred to repeatedly over the past year and more by the US military in Iraq is essentially dodge. It’s never been true that the Iranians have been selecting out specific splinter groups from the Mahdi Army to support. That idea suggests that the Iranians have much less influence and power in Iraq than they actually do.

And I have to say that, parenthetically, that it seems to me that this has at least as one purpose trying to minimize the difficulty the United States faces in regard to the Shiites in Iraq.

[snip]

I was impressed by just how far both Crocker and Petraeus went in trying to obscure that reality. They’re trying to convey to the congressional committees and to the American people the idea that the United States is somehow really in control. And I’m afraid this line is primarily dedicated to trying to convey that very false idea.

And then he starts sounding like he's standing just this side of Lieberman:

AMY GOODMAN: General Petraeus being questioned by the Democratic senator from Indiana, Evan Bayh. We’re going to get last comments now on where you believe—what should happen next—Gareth Porter, let’s start with you—and what you think will happen next, what should happen next.

GARETH PORTER: Well, you know, just in terms of the impact of these hearings, the problem that I see is that there was never really a focus on, you know, whether the United States has mastered the forces that have been opposed to and will remain opposed to the US occupation and the government forces that the US is supporting. It’s interesting that there’s no discussion in any of these questions to Petraeus about order of battle. No one is asking how many people is it that are opposed to the United States militarily in Iraq now? I think that’s an issue that we still need to take a look at in order to have a realistic expectation about whether this is a viable exercise. So, you know, what is the next step? Well, you know, I think the next step is to elect a new president, and then we can have really a different debate with a different cast of characters.

"Viable exercise"? It's a criminal enterprise, Brother G! What does "order of battle" matter? We were in violation of the international legal system we helped institute; then obtained ex post facto authority by bullying the UN. We need to get out now, AND renounce war AGAIN.

Bonnie Raitt Rocks My World! (dn2008-0409 23:45-25:00)

Thanks for the great clip of Bonnie Raitt's live version of For What It's Worth.

Notice the crowd's reaction: they cheer for their side, yes, then are hushed by the next line: "Mostly say/ 'hooray for our side'"

Sister Bonnie nails it!

Ah, that hit the spot.

"[I]f the definition of success is so high" you can easily give the people the Goerring treatment. BHO & Me (dn2008-0409 22:20-22:50)

Sen. Obama mythbusts Amb. Ryan Crocker, but doesn't bring the boon all the way Home. What makes us think 20-30 years of imperial rule will actually help?

If he had gone on to say, "...you can give the People the Goering treatment," that would have vaulted him up a quantum level, in my cosmos. Imagine that! Isn't that what a temple of democracy is for?

Even Gareth Porter, and many of the Left, seem to think going to war in Afghanistan or Pakistan against our "real" enemies is a our "true" path. Do we increase light by gathering up and "doing away with" darkness? Whence comes this absolute faith in war?

From our mythology, silly! Our fundamental beliefs conceive of life as a holy war. We beget War, then seem to think it will just love being at our beck and call. And only ours. Forever and ever, aMEN.

Two faces; one war. It's what we do.

[Emphasis added @ dn2008-0409 22:20-22:50]

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Obama also had an opportunity to question General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker later Tuesday afternoon, when they testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He called for a timetable for withdrawal and talks with Iran while questioning Ambassador Crocker.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I think what happened in Basra is an example of Shia versus Shia jockeying for power that underscores how complicated the political situation is there and how we still have to continue to work vigorously to resolve it. I believe that we are more likely to resolve it, in your own words, Ambassador, if we are applying increased pressure in a measured way. I think that increased pressure in a measured way, in my mind—and this is where we disagree—includes a timetable for withdrawal. Nobody’s asking for a precipitous withdrawal, but I do think that it has to be a measured but increased pressure and a diplomatic surge that includes Iran, because if Maliki can tolerate as normal neighbor-to-neighbor relations in Iran, then we should be talking to them, as well. I do not believe we’re going to be able to stabilize the situation without them.

If we were able to have the status quo in Iraq right now without US troops, would that be a sufficient definition of success? It’s obviously not perfect. There’s still violence. There’s still some traces of al-Qaeda. Iran has influence more than we would like. But if we had the current status quo, and yet our troops had been drawn down to 30,000, would we consider that a success? Would that meet our criteria, or would that not be good enough, and we’d have to devote even more resources to it?


AMBASSADOR RYAN CROCKER: Senator, I can’t imagine the current status quo being sustainable with that kind of precipitous drawdown.

SEN. JOE BIDEN: That wasn’t the question.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: No, no, that wasn’t the question. I’m not suggesting that we yank all our troops out all the way. I’m trying to get to an endpoint. That’s what all of us have been trying to get to.


And see, the problem I have is if the definition of success is so high—no traces of al-Qaeda and no possibility of reconstitution, a highly-effective Iraqi government, a Democratic multiethnic, multi-sectarian functioning democracy, no Iranian influence, at least not of the kind that we don’t like—then that portends the possibility of us staying for twenty or thirty years.


If, on the other hand, our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo, but there’s not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there’s still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it’s not a threat to its neighbors and it’s not an al-Qaeda base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measurable timeframe, and that, I think, is what everybody here on this committee has been trying to drive at, and we haven’t been able to get as clear of an answer as we would like.

AMBASSADOR RYAN CROCKER:And that’s because, Senator, it is a—I mean, I don’t like to sound like a broken record, but this is hard, and this is complicated.

AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Ryan Crocker being questioned by senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"[Iraq] could become a haven for terrorists to train and plan their operations." --"Bomb Iran" McCain (dn2008-0409)

Could become? How old is that speech he's reading? 1933? Are they just changing the proper nouns and dates in the Goerring & Goebbels playbook?

Goerring Goebbels Rove Zelikow: is that the firm now doing our PR?

McCain was the first of the three to speak. In his opening statement, he said that calls for a rapid withdrawal are reckless and irresponsible. As he spoke, he was interrupted by a protester who stood up holding a banner with the words “There is no military solution.”

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Should the United States instead choose to withdraw from Iraq before adequate security is established, we will exchange for this victory a defeat that is terrible and long-lasting. Al-Qaeda in Iraq would proclaim victory and increase its efforts to provoke sectarian tensions, pushing for a full-scale civil war that could descend into genocide and destabilize the Middle East. Iraq would become a failed state. It could become a haven for terrorists to train and plan their operations. Iranian influence would increase substantially in Iraq and encourage other countries to seek accommodation with Tehran at the expense of our interests.

Somebody tell Congress: The Military is a political tool by definition

All the questions assumed a cosmos in which war is an acceptable means of asserting our interests. All the senators assume a political cosmos in which an ultimate authority forces unruly parts into Order.

Not just any order: the Order of the Great Cosmic Machine. And guess who's the favorite nation-state of the Engineer? Wrong! We all are! What kind of small-hearted god do these people worship, that would love only some of its offspring, and curse the majority to eternal damnation?

Somebody please tell the esteemed senators that war is not the weather, that Generals and Ambassadors are not freakin' meteorologists, and we are not the masters of the great cosmic machine.

Oh, right, as a poet, that's my job. My bad, I keep forgetting. I'm new at this.

Must say: HRC busted Amb. BoyScoutFace on "democracy" for the Iraqis // Executive Agreements for US.

While Clausewitz' extensive histories of the various Napoleonic campaigns are only of technical interest, On War has had a profound influence on modern strategic concepts. Its most significant single contribution is the doctrine of political direction in military matters. In maintaining that “war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with the admixture of different means,” he denied that war is an end in itself.

[emphasis added]

• MLA Style:
  "Clausewitz, Carl (Philipp Gottlieb) von." Encyclopædia Britannica. Standard Edition. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008.

"It was an expression of a people who finally couldn’t take it anymore.” --R. Gere (dn2008-0409 Headlines #5 )

Richard Gere: “This all started on March 10, and it didn’t start about the Olympics. There was a simple demonstration in front of the Jokhang Cathedral, and a vortex opened up, and an enormous amount of energy came out of that, and it’s played into this moment obviously around the Olympics. But I think what is so extraordinary is it was so spontaneous. It was an expression of a people who finally couldn’t take it anymore.”

(Emphasis added.)

WORD! In an interdependent cosmos, we make things happen from within, we are not forced into order by an outside agent, we are not "caused," we Flow, we Grow.

Notice the complete absence of machinery in his words. He's talking about a living Being that is Aware of its own Becoming, and capable of Flowing now there, now here. The protests happened in the same way a ripening fruit or incubating hatchling breaks on through:

From,
Within

dp
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"[B]ecause NoMan should be above the law." --Jamie Leigh Jones and 'Lisa Smith (dn2008-0408 Please forward my comments)

GROOVALUJAH, O SISTERS MY SISTERS!

Listen! You can hear the emergency blinkers clicking like the much-discussed ticking time bomb as Lisa Smith calls in her HERoic testimony (with her right hand over her ovaries, I suppose)! Just background noise? Just electromechanical devices, irrelevant to the Story?

Or Signs of the Times for those who Hear them?

And then it gets louder and louder!

OMG! Now JLJ has said, "No man should be above the law," reminiscent of two myths: Odysseus and Cyclops; and Princess Eowyn and the Witch King (her triumph wins the day for Aragorn in the Battle of Minas Tirith in Return of the King). "NoMan can kill me!" the witch king boasts; hello! "I am NoMan," says Eowyn, shoving her sword into the Void of his face.

And notice how they use a machine (a laptop) to deny her her rights, her access to counsel, in a system of legalistic machinations that would make Machiavelli blush. She's been mythjacked!

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Lisa, a quick question, a quick question. Your computer was confiscated?

LISA SMITH: Yes, my computer was confiscated right after that. I had notified Dan again that global investigations was refusing to give me a copy of the statement. He then issued a letter to KBR, and shortly after I received that letter and responded to a date correction on it, within ten to twenty minutes KBR security came and pulled my computer. At that point, it was confiscated.

AMY GOODMAN: Was this your personal computer or given to you by them?

LISA SMITH: This is a company computer used to do all my daily reports.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did they justify taking your computer?

LISA SMITH: They said they needed it for evidence.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, I want to say KBR declined our request to join us on the broadcast today, but the corporate communications director, Heather Browne, did release this statement. It said, “The safety of all employees remains KBR’s top priority. The company in no way condones or tolerates any form of sexual harassment. Any allegation of sexual harassment or sexual assault is taken seriously and thoroughly investigated. In no way are the allegations publicized recently, an indication of KBR’s treatment of women. The Company’s zero tolerance policy towards sexual harassment is unwavering.” Lisa, your response to KBR’s statement?

LISA SMITH: My response to KBR’s statement is that’s funny. The employee assistance program told me—they gave me an 800 number back in the States to contact for counseling and for advice, because they’re not trained in handling sexual assault. There is no medical protocol on a treatment or proper steps to be taken for sexual assault. There is a medical protocol for treatment of STDs.

AMY GOODMAN: Is it true your twenty-two-year-old son in the US military in the Middle East was the one who encouraged you to make a formal complaint?

LISA SMITH: Yes, he did. He served seventeen months in Afghanistan, and I wanted to discuss with him before I went to CID to find out his opinion. And I really was leery that he would be angry with me because I was naming people that were in his same military. And he was very definite, very much disgusted that somebody who wore his uniform would do that to anyone, let alone his mom, and he encouraged the report to CID.

AMY GOODMAN: Jamie Leigh Jones, does this sound familiar, what Lisa is describing? You worked for Halliburton; she, for KBR.

JAMIE LEIGH JONES: Lisa. If I can do anything at all to help you, please just let me know. You know, a lot of things are similar. My laptop was taken. You know, I was drugged. I just can’t imagine why they just can’t change the situation over there. They’ve known it was a problem. They know it’s a problem, because it happened to me. Yeah, it does. It all sounds familiar. Just now, you know, I’m getting tears to my eyes, because part of the reason why I came forward was to prevent this type of thing from happening. I didn’t think I would get emotional like this, but it makes me very, very sick that it’s not stopping. I mean, what will it take? I don’t know how many women it’s going to take. I—my heart really goes out to you,So I’m just really sick about it.

AMY GOODMAN: And second, how many women have come to you, and what are you doing? How do you deal with the women who come to you?

JAMIE LEIGH JONES: OK. Well, so far, forty women have come through my foundation. We have become a watchdog foundation, so we are pushing for more stringent laws to make sure that these perpetrators have some type of law that they umbrella under, because no man should be above the law.

(Emphasis added.)

What are the chances that, in a context of extraordinary renditions accomplished with druggings, date rape, and rape as a weapon of war, that these outrages are absolutely self-contained and isolated incidents when such a surprisingly widespread "rape rash" is spreading at taxpayer expense? What if these aren't accidents, but a policy of internal terrorization such as Goerring defined?

"There was no human resources on a regular basis." --Everywoman, aka "Lisa Smith" (dn2008-0408)

Today's incarnations of Gaia/Everywoman/"Lisa Smith" are truly heroic. See how limitless is Her capacity for suffering! She suffers the worst kinds of degradation, and gets right back up to honor her own highest Calling, her own obligation to treat.

Many mythologies feature divinities who shed tears of sorrow that wet the earth that give rise to tears of joy.

None have ever done any better, more HERoic service to Divinity than "Lisa Smith" is doing right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And when you were there, did you report to your higher-ups? How did you deal that morning as you came to and realized what was happening?

LISA SMITH: I was physically ill from having feces being placed in my mouth. I had no other option other than to work that day. I was the only medical provider for that site. So I did work. I did have some rectal bleeding for about four days after that. And I had a discussion with camp management, as well as with the military, and was informed at that time that I was not to say a word. Until I left that particular camp, I did not say a word.

Once I was returned to another camp that was larger, that had more people available, as far as human resources and employee relations and the employee assistance program, that is when I chose to report the incident and felt that I was in a safer environment to do so.

The environment that I was in had very limited resources. There was no employee relations there until they came down to start this investigation of other issues in the camp. There was no human resources on a regular basis. There was no employee assistance on any type of basis there, other than traveling through to go to a different other site. So I had no options as far as who I could report it to, nor did we have military police there or American military established. There was a small group of American military there, but that was it.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you worked, you believe, for KBR at the time. Did you, as a medic, have to treat one of your assailants?
LISA SMITH: Yes, I had.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened? What was that situation?

LISA SMITH: I had to treat him after an occupational injury.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you do that?

LISA SMITH: Again, I’m the only—he had a foot injury. I am the only medical provider down there. It wouldn’t matter who came in and was injured; I would have to— I have an obligation to treat.

Shocking the Shockers: A report from Scott Horton's blog, No Comment

From Scott Horton's blog, No Comment, A Tale of Three Lawyers:

Diaz resolved to do something about it. He knew the Supreme Court twice ruled the Guantánamo regime, which he was under orders to uphold, was unlawful. In the Hamdan decision, the Court went a step further. In powerful and extraordinary words, Justice Kennedy reminded the Administration that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was binding upon them, and that a violation could constitute a criminal act. One senior member of the Bush legal team, informed of the decision over lunch, was reported to have turned “white as a sheet” and to have immediately excused himself. For the following months, Bush Administration lawyers entered into a frenzied discussion of how to protect themselves from criminal prosecution.

Sounds like the Shock Doctrine suddenly hit the guy where he lives.

That's an obvious psychophysiological response, right? I think it's the type of response the Shock Doctrine is intended to induce on whole nations at a time. More efficient that way. Can't go around, torturing everyone individually.

For example, let's pick an Iraqi-Canadian to single out for public torture. On Canetti's principle, that should induce a lot of shock for the buck.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002756

It is the first death which infects everyone with the feeling of being threatened. It is impossible to over assess the role played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It need not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership in the group to which one belongs oneself.

–Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht vol. 1, p. 152 (1960)(S.H. transl.)

(Emphasis added.)

"NO 1 is accountable." --Isabel Allende (dn2008-0407 57:40)

AMY GOODMAN: As you live in this country, one of the big issues of war: torture. Your thoughts about that, coming from where you’ve come from?

ISABEL ALLENDE: I do not think anybody in their right mind can approve of torture—nobody. First of all, it’s not effective. When you torture someone, you get the wrong information. The horrible thing about torture is that you don’t need to be a psychopath to torture. Almost anybody can do it, if they are trained to do it. And the victim and victimizer are both horribly traumatized by this experience. We lived that in Chile, and we know that it leaves scars in the society for generations. This needs to be stopped in Guantanamo, in Abu Ghraib, in all the secret prisons that the United States is using today to torture people. No one can approve of that.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you say you come out of a country of torture, whose whole population has been tortured, one way or the other, in Chile?

ISABEL ALLENDE: Thirty years have passed since the military coup, and still there are people traumatized, families that lost children, people that are still looking for their grandchildren or their children that died in torture and their bodies were never found. No one is accountable. There is impunity, you know? And thirty years later, we have democracy, and still there is impunity for the torturers, who are walking in the streets. Michelle Bachelet lived in the same building with her torturer. She would find him in the elevator. This is the president of Chile. This is how traumatized a society can be.

AMY GOODMAN: Isabel Allende, I want to thank you so much for joining us. Her book is The Sum of Our Days

GROOVALUJAH! Isabel Allende is a proper Artist, a true mythologist, aware of her powers to relieve or increase Suffering.

Croppings and scarification are the marks of a cult upon its members, willing or not. We are being herded around like god-forsaken cattle to the slaughter (c.f., the Holocausts that repeat with terrible regularity). The scars left by the Shock Doctrine are purposeful and deliberate. This is how we shape behavior, shape the Behaver, to fit the policies of mad mythologists like Karl Rove and Hermann Goerring.

We reduce our bodies to mechanisms: we think of our physiology as a machine. Who denies their own biochemistry induces gastric distress, right?

Why do we never ADDUCE? Why do we never think of our higher powers, our "better angels?" Why does it sound odd to say, Isabel Allende is a goddess? It's just as true, just as obvious, as the sound of her voice or the sight of her face or the words in ink on paper in her books.

Why do we accept reduction ad absurdio of our very souls? Sister Isabel's evocation of her mother as her soul is cosmic. She lives her life in the womb of her mother's love, as we all live in the Womb of Mother Gaia.

Whence comes this idea of exile? Why the emphasis on division and atomization over Identity? If the Holy Trinity can be a union of three aspects of the same Divinity, why then aren't we?

Cuz we been myth-jacked to Hell, and are being stuck with the Bill!

"Putting a pack of lies together to get to a truth, to the Truth." --Isabel Allende (dn2008-0407 c.45:00)

WORD! That's Prof. Zinn's definition of Art: that which uses lies to get to the Truth.

And the method of BushRoveCo, the method of Goering, is to use LIES to obscure their crimes, which I suggest we call myth-jacking, the Father of all crimes against humanity.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, this is your fourth memoir. Most people write one. Describe memoir writing for you, what a memoir means to you.

ISABEL ALLENDE: I was trying to explain that writing a novel is putting a pack of lies together to get to a truth, to the Truth. Without that truth, the novel doesn’t work. In a memoir, it works like the other way around. You work with the truth, and then you end up lying, because my version of what happened is different from the version of everybody else in the family, you know. And I don’t talk so much about myself as I do about the rest of them, because everybody has an interesting life. But that is my version of their lives. And sometimes they don’t even recognize themselves in the memoir.