December 8, 2010 archive

The coming AO of these Present Wars of Choice

And you’ll never guess just what they found in that dust!!!!

Iraq, Kuwait dust may carry dangerous elements

MC2 Ace Rheaume / Navy Builder 2nd Class Eric Clark, assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 5, is caught in a sandstorm May 4 at Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan. A Navy study suggests that dust from Afghanistan contains metals that may cause respiratory problems and brain damage.

Ding Dong, The Left is Dead! (Warning, very depressing!)

(Okay Kidz! I am in better shape and sat down to write again, yay! This is what happens when my brain is halfway between politics and spirituality, lol, and I just let it flow!)

The political Left that is. Us Dirty Fucking Hippies are still alive…and are or soon will be heading back into insurgent mode. Sniping from the hills, taking what prisoners we can, if we are lucky we may even be able to shoot down a chopper or two.

But from jbou, (haha) to kos and Keith, to Nancy Pelosi and Hollow Reid, and everyone in between, everyone on the political left has just been dismissed from the conversation.

The Macro Worst Godammed Thing about this pivotal moment in political history….is that Obama did not even talk to Pelosi and Reid before making a deal with the Devil Republicans.

He bypassed, and gave nary a thought to not doing it, the entire Left Wing of American Politics in his froth mouthed screaming headlong rush into the arms of the Daddy Party.

It was not just YOU who he emphatically and (breaking The Angry Black Man Rule) angrily called a Sanctimonious Purist, it was, by not even consulting the Establishment Dems, everyone even marginally on The Left. We do not matter. Our positions and policies do not matter. Our opinions, the opinions of the only group of people who have been proven to be continually correct about fucking everything, do not matter.  

Open John Lennon

Instant Karma, perfect song. “Better recognize your brothers, in everyone ya meet”

But John painted Karma as the monster under your bed that just might tear into your leg…. kind of a great warning, eh?

Amen John.

Imagine.

The best heresy ever, becoming the spiritual anti-hymn of generations, surpassing any known gospel music as the definition of a real nirvana.

Rest easy, my brother, your world-family carries you on….

Open Carney

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Something is being born

Mastercard is down, the result of a massive guerrilla attack from thousands of online rebels. It turns out that there is no defense against a sufficiently large denial of service attack. Fittingly, the founders of the Internet wove the possibility of rebellion into its design. We are witnessing the first successful rebellion of an emerging global political movement against the authoritarian corpocracies.

This rebellion will probably be beaten down, but it will be noted as an historical watershed. For the first time in recent memory, abusers of power were punished directly by the people. Instead of paving stones and barricades, DDoS packets were the tools of rebellion. We have waited many years for a new politics to be born on the Internet. Something is being born.

Today’s Cyber War

It’s not a secret: the Internet was always going to radically change the world of information.  That’s nothing new.  What is new, is that the struggle over who controls and possesses information isn’t going to be fought solely in the courts or in the legislatures or the media.  It’s going to be fought out as well on the Internet itself and the weapons are going to be computers.

The present battle, fought between Wikileaks and its allies, on one side, and its well organized adversaries, including financial organizations and governments, on the other, may eventually bring information democracy, in the form of unprecedented and simple access to all kinds of information, even classified or secret information, to anyone with a modem.  Or at the other pole, it may eventually bring unprecedented censorship through even tighter control of information to the Internet and harsh penalties for publication of various kinds of information.

The New York Times reports from today’s digital battlefront:


LONDON – A broad campaign of cyberattacks appeared to be under way on Wednesday in support of the beleaguered antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, which has drawn governmental criticism from around the globe for its release of classified American documents and whose founder, Julian Assange, is being held in Britain on accusations of rape.

Attacks were reported on Mastercard.com, which stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; on the lawyer representing the two Swedish women who have accused Mr. Assange of sexual improprieties; and on PostFinance, the Swiss postal system’s financial arm, which closed Mr. Assange’s account after saying he provided false information by saying that he resided in Switzerland.

At least some of the attacks involved distributed denials of service, in which a site is bombarded by requests from a network of computers until it reaches capacity and, effectively, shuts down.

It was unclear whether the various attacks were independently mounted, but suspicion was immediately focused on Anonymous, a leaderless group of activist hackers that had vowed to wreak revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks and that claimed responsibility for the Mastercard attack.

Anonymous, according to the Times, has expressed its philosophy in two manifestos released this past week, and is battling for nothing less than free information on a free Internet:


The group, which gained notoriety for their cyberattacks…  released two manifestos over the weekend vowing revenge against enemies of WikiLeaks.

“We fight for the same reasons,” said one. “We want transparency and we counter censorship.”

The manifestos singled out companies like PayPal and Amazon, who had cut off service to WikiLeaks after the organization’s recent release of classified diplomatic documents from a cache of 250,000 it had obtained.

In recent days, Gregg Housh, an activist who has worked on previous Anonymous campaigns, said that a core of 100 or so devout members of the group, supplemented by one or two extremely expert hackers, were likely to do most of the damage. Mr. Housh, who disavows any illegal activity himself, said the reason Anonymous had declared its campaign was amazingly simple. Anonymous believes that “information should be free, and the Internet should be free,” he said,

Information, as the law now stands, is anything but free. But the Internet for more than a decade and a half has eroded much of the traditional deference to ownership of information. Napster and its progeny have brought a generation of people who think music and film should all be free.  Readers of Blogs are never disturbed by what amounts to wholesale infringement of copyrighted photos and videos and text. Wikileaks has carried this a step further by publishing enormous amounts of material officially designated “secret”.  The trend on the Internet is toward free and unfettered access to all information.  But those who own the information have no intention whatsoever to allow it to flow without charge and without a fight.

Today’s attacks, I think, mark the Cyber Battle of Lexington and Concord.


——-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles

An Image of Islam

Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque
Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque, Isfahan, Iran

Two gangs of imbecile boys are apparently planning some kind of rumble in the vicinity of Isfahan and other sites in Iran, so it’s probably time for the grown-ups in Iran and America to take charge, before the imbecile boys break something that they can’t fix.  

Redemption Town

(Jacob Freeze asked what of inherent greed in my essay, If Not Us – Who? Redefining Power yesterday. This parable is the result)

Our town used to be called Shit Town back during the fruit wars, which were never really about fruit, but the greego mentality. We renamed it Redemption.

Greegos, is what we call the Apple people now, you know, they have that greed/ego gene that made it impossible to fit into a new society built on love.



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It started with little things, like the idea that apples and oranges don’t mix. I asked one apple peddler why he only hung out with other apple people in the beginning. “Hey, I have an orange grower living next door to me, I’m no fruitist!” I asked if they ever had a beer together, or if their families ever barbecued a meal on a weekend to share. “No, but I say hi to him all the time on garbage day at the curb,” he answered like that was a badge of honor or something.  I told him he should. He stuttered and laughed a nervous forced “Ha,” and said something about not having anything in common and it would be too weird.

By the end? I learned something. We all learned something. I will never trust an apple again, ever. They just aren’t like you and me. Oh, we kept the fruit, we just exiled the greegos.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

I’m coming close to having my fill.

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

–Bernard Berenson



Floristic

Late Night Karaoke

U.S. to host UNESCO World Press Freedom Day

Via Lisa Simeone, the US State Department sent out this magically timed press release:

The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

UNESCO’s home page.

On its Facebook page, World Press Freedom Day states that,

World Press Freedom Day provides an opportunity to defend journalists and media organisations from attacks on their independence; to evaluate the state of press freedom around the world; and to pay tribute to those brave journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession.

Hillary Clinton’s spies at the UN have not yet reported how this message was received by other diplomats, but Joe Lieberman was observed  pumping his fist in the air yelling “Fuck yeah!  America roolz!” in the halls of Homeland Security,just after calling for prosecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act and a criminal investigation of the New York Times regarding its release of diplomatic cables redacted under governmental guidance.

What are those howls of derisive laughter?

Labor’s obligation and opportunity: Philly organizer challenges unions to rally around Greens

In an open letter to the leaders of the Philadelphia labor movement, the young and energetic organizer for UFCW Local 152 Hugh Giordano has challenged the city’s unions to have the courage to support the Green Party.  Giordano ran an exceptionally strong campaign as a Green for state legislature this year, raising almost $30,000 from unions and individuals and capturing over 18 percent of the vote in a three way race.  Now he would like to spread the same movement for honest politics, workers’ rights, and a clean environment (among other things) to the rest of Philadelphia, beyond his single district.

As the members of the party, which I am aiding in every way I can, build the organization for the 2011 local elections, Giordano has seized the opportunity make the area’s union leadership reconsider the popular path of supporting corporate Democrats.  In his words, “Why are we, the strong men and women of the labor movement, bowing down to the corporate bosses and politicians…Union brothers and sisters, when any one of us becomes ‘fearful’ or ‘controlled’ by a political party – it’s time to step down and pass the torch on.”

The full letter is printed, with Hugh Giordano’s permission, below the fold.

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