Future 31 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Afghanistan War, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Israel/AIPAC, Total fucking lunatics, WAR!.63 comments
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Helmand, Afghanistan: US marines walk past a Russian tank left over from the war between the Soviet Union and Afghan mujahideen Photograph: David Goldman/AP
… might as well drink.
For the moment, I am drowning myself in Barry Lyndon. Seems as good a drowning pool as any…..
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Still there… 29 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election.49 comments
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London, UK: Geese preen themselves in St James Park [Andy Rain/EPA]
Richard Seymour, lenin of Lenin’s Tomb, has a piece up in the Comment is Free section of the Guardian… how Qaddafi is stronger. Well, he is certainly still there.
This is the close of the post:
[T]he final justification for this debacle will be that speedy intervention, however half-hearted, prevented a massacre. Now, there may once have been reason to believe this. But there no longer is.
Gaddafi has enough blood on his hands, and deserved to fall to the insurgents, but there’s no reason to submit to war propaganda. In reality, as Amnesty put it, “there is no proof of mass killing of civilians on the scale of Syria or Yemen”. Which is an interesting way of putting it. It’s no secret that the coalition that was supposedly preventing a genocidal bloodbath in Libya was actually behind much of the bloodshed in Yemen. This completely demolishes the last leg of the moral case for war [not that there ever was a legitimate moral basis for aerial bombing and intervention in Libya… – Mcat]. The “humanitarian interventions” of the 1990s left the US in a stronger position, both geopolitically and ideologically. I’m not convinced that this will be the result of the bombing of Libya.
In fact, if there was any idea that the US could offer an alternative model of development for the populations of the Middle East, it now lies in ruins. It is more than unfortunate that Libya had to be reduced to ruins for this to become apparent.
Good luck! 28 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Total fucking lunatics.96 comments
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People lie on a railway line in the area of Rawa Buaya in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the belief that electrical energy from the tracks will cure them of various illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes, rheumatism, gout, obesity and high cholesterol Picture: Nurcholis / Rex Features
Proving that people can always get nuttier.
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In terms of medical conditions and faith healing, I have just heard 2 hours (local talk radio) of overflowing hysteria, jingoism…
Some wept. Some swore up and down that Obama DOES have the cohones to do whatever it will take. He will save us! One said he has the “cohones of the dinosaurs”. Truly, I do not want to know what that means.
Frantic protestations of belief in Our Leader and that the Tea Partiers are “traitors”, who hate Obama and that it is traitorous that they openly declare they want him to fail.
It was EPIC. Fervent declarations that only this set of believers (those prostrate in front of Obama) are holders of the pure flame patriotism, that “the other side” does not love their country (who fucking cares by now). The other side are the “New Ku Klux Klaners”. Yes, one did say that.
We were in Passion of the Christos territory… One of the weepers declared love of country to be the Greatest Love There Is.
Who dispersed the Extra Special Nuttiness Pills?
The “other side” is the craven partisans, the faithful Democrats are the vestals of the temple.
I am not kidding. Stunning.
We are so fucking fucked. And what will those pure believers do when deflation takes place? When the very hot air they are loaded with is sucked from their puffy bodies???
Don’t be downwind, is my advice….
It was amazing.
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Ride 25 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Viva La Revolucion!.55 comments
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Austin, USA: A cyclist rides along a wall at a Texas skateboard park [Eric Gay/AP]
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Chillin’ 24 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in Divertissements.51 comments
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A white Bengal tiger rests on a block of ice at Chengdu Zoo in Chengdu, China Picture: BARCROFT
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Paint 23 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in Divertissements, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, UK.60 comments
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Lucian Freud painting the Queen in 2001 [David Dawson/Government Art Collection]
hmmm I see the reports that Lucian Freud has died at 88… Jeffrey St Clair has a nice piece up about him at Counterpunch…
I wonder, would anyone either really in charge here in the USA!! USA!! or just nominally in charge as a constitutional monarch, sit for such a searing painter and his view? I am unsure it could happen here. In some eras, a captain of industry with an artistic bent or flair would sit for a Lucian Freud…
The world continues to blow up, here in the curious corner that is California – and elsewhere.
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Bee 22 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in Divertissements, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter.57 comments
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A bee full of pollen is pictured in a blossom in Gelsenkirchen, Germany [AP]
At least there is one little bee on earth, still plugging away…
Food 20 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, AFRICOM, Culture of Death, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Somalia, WAR!.51 comments
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Internally displaced Somali women wait for food at a camp in the capital Mogadishu [REUTERS/Omar Faruk]
Y’all be relieved to know Michelle is on. the. job.
Via Mike Allen, courtier to the ever-more-petty bureaucrats, he is on the job too, with this:
BREAKING: First Lady Michelle Obama announcing big commitments by Walmart, Walgreens, Supervalu (Save-a-Lot), and regional retailers to make more health, affordable food available in underserved communities — 2:15 p.m. in the East Room, per a White House official:
“The commitments … will include opening or expanding over 1,500 stores to serve communities throughout the country that currently do not have access to fresh produce and other healthy foods. … Supervalu is committed to opening 250 new Save-A-Lot stores over the next five years in areas with limited or no access to healthy foods … Walgreens – Committed to expanding its food offering to include whole fruits and vegetables, and other healthy options in at least 1,000 stores … Walmart is committing to opening or expanding 275 to 300 stores which will serve more than 800,000 people in rural and urban areas with limited or no access to grocery options. Walmart also estimates that more than 40,000 associates will work in these stores.”
Now that almost all food, whether they slap “Organic” on it or not, has little taste, smell or appeal they in their infinite greatness work their smooth, emollient-enriched fingers to the bone to shovel it out to the poor and underserved…. Or so it would seem.
I see it is called “Breaking”. I’d vote for “B R O K E N”.
The European news services are filled at the moment with images and stories of the starving and displacement in Somalia and the border region with Ethiopia…. more of our fomenting of chaos and death, as I see it. Proxy wars are good business. Of course the reporting, at least some of it, in Europe is gratuitous and self-serving.
How could it not be.
Yes, they die so beautifully for us… and, photographed by artists, seem already to be a “museum quality” art installation.
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A girl looks out of her makeshift hut on the outskirts of the Dagahaley refugee camp [Oli Scarff/Getty Images]
Lost 17 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Total fucking lunatics.58 comments
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Since the 1960s Michelangelo Pistoletto has been an energetically protean figure. A founding father of arte povera, he’s created sculpture from rags, candles and bricks, photorealist paintings, and performances, with people always at the centre of his work. Here, he creates a labyrinth for visitors to wander through, as much a part of the art as the works they’ll find within its cardboard twists and turns. At Serpentine Gallery, W2, London, 12 July to 17 September [Michelangelo Pistoletto, London]
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Sitting pretty 13 July 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, AFRICOM, Divertissements, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Somalia, Total fucking lunatics, WAR!.48 comments
A green tree frog sits on a water lily, Central Florida, United States, 2010 [Joanne Williams / Rex Features]
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Winning the Future!
Was there ever a worse joke?
Democracy NOW had Jeremy Scahill on, about a new prison in Mogadishu that is in plain site, but also a sescret CIA facility. Certainly the ICRC did not know of it…
[A]s far as the interrogations go inside of this basement prison, the U.S. official that was made available to me for this story said that the U.S. does not directly interrogate prisoners, we jointly “debrief” suspects with Somali agents present—again, it’s all a semantic game—and insisted that it’s only happened a few times in the past year.
AMY GOODMAN: And what is the significance of this?
JEREMY SCAHILL: In January of 2009, President Obama signed a series of executive orders that were intended to end the practices that President Bush and Vice President Cheney had implemented in the war on terror that candidate Obama had denounced on the campaign trail: torture, secret prisons, renditions. And CIA Director Leon Panetta said in April of 2009 that the U.S. was in the process of decommissioning all of its secret prison sites. Two months later, Hassan is rendered to a secret prison in Somalia. . . . .
Drum roll, please – and let’s hear that oh-so-energetic exhortation to the voter, about the “lesser of two evils”…
Marisacat 