Hi 14 March 2012
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Total fucking lunatics, UK, WAR!.78 comments
The wave from the balcony | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Definitely not high, 😆
Tho if any one of them did not want, desperately at the end of the day, to go somewhere and ingest, smoke, drink something altering, then even nuttier than they all appear to be…
Flight 27 November 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Divertissements, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, UK.55 comments
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Starlings in the dusk skies above Gretna Green morph into the distinctive shape of a dolphin which is being chased across the sky by a whale with its mouth open
Picture: North News
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Freedom 6 November 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, California / Pacific Coast, Greece, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Iran, Occupy Wall Street, UK, Viva La Revolucion!.45 comments
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A placard between tents at the encampment [Dan Kitwood/Getty Images]
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I hardly ever drop in on the NYT anymore… but I did follow a link in the previous thread and so saw a guest op/ed from Sarah Shourd, one of the three hikers held in Iran… When she, Bauer and Fattal came to Occupy Oakland about two weeks ago, they mentioned they support also the hunger strike that had spread thru Cali prisons over solitary confinement… and I DO see signs at OOcc about prisons, prisoners and incarceration….
[A]fter two months with next to no human contact, my mind began to slip. Some days, I heard phantom footsteps coming down the hall. I spent large portions of my days crouched down on all fours by a small slit in the door, listening. In the periphery of my vision, I began to see flashing lights, only to jerk my head around to find that nothing was there. More than once, I beat at the walls until my knuckles bled and cried myself into a state of exhaustion. At one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realized the screams were my own.
Of the 14 and a half months, or 9,840 hours, I was held as a political hostage at Evin prison in Tehran, I spent 9,495 of them in solitary confinement. When I was released just over a year ago, I was shocked to find out that the United Nations Convention Against Torture, one of the few conventions the United States has ratified, does not mention solitary confinement. I learned that there are untold numbers of prisoners around the world in solitary, including an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 in the United States. According to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, Juan Méndez, the practice appears to be “growing and diversifying in its use and severity.”
Amy Fettig at the American Civil Liberties Union told me: “In the U.S. we use solitary as a routine prison administrative practice. It’s not something that’s used as a last recourse, as it should be.” Last summer, prisoners at Pelican Bay prison in California went on a hunger strike to end the practice of isolating some prisoners for more than 22 hours a day. The strike spread until thousands of prisoners were participating. Only when officials agreed to review the use of solitary confinement did the prisoners accept food. . . . . .
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No shock really… even a nominally Leftischer party must fall.
Agreement reached on Greek unity government
Greece’s two main political parties reached an agreement Sunday evening to form a unity government, giving Europe a steadier partner as it works to avert a larger financial crisis on the continent.
Prime Minister George Papandreou will resign after the new government is formed, officials said, although the timing, and his successor, remained unclear.
Read more at:
WashPo, Washing the Nooz Daily What else is new.
I’ll say it again, shut down the Port of Piraeus.
🙄
Priorities 6 November 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Occupy Wall Street, UK, Viva La Revolucion!.64 comments
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A protester chats to tourists outside St Paul’s Cathedral [Dan Kitwood/Getty Images]
😉
Papa prophylactics! 25 September 2011
Posted by marisacat in Germany, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Total fucking lunatics, UK, Viva La Revolucion!, WAR!.56 comments
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Vestments
Clergy members protect their robes from the rain as Pope Benedict XVI arrives for the celebration of the Eucharist at the Olympic stadium in Berlin on September 22, 2011. TIME Mag:
Isn’t it cute how they need each other to get a fucking rain condom on? (moiv sent me this spectacular photo…. 😆 )
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John Halle, one of the poster/blogger/commenters that I really like over at corrente, was at the Wall St Occupation protest….
Report from the front
[A]s a parent of a small child who I was considering bringing along to this, but thankfully did not, I wasn’t sure how to respond to what seemed to be an act of almost insane recklessness. Initially, I was was appalled, but in retrospect, in revisiting the mental image, I couldn’t help but be moved by the commitment and courage displayed, and by the recognition that finally the stakes of our confrontation are becoming clear. As Marx said “we are now required to compelled to face with sober senses, (our) real conditions of life, and (our) relations with (our) kind.” While few of us will find ourselves capable of this man’s courage, this is the kind of reaction which will be required of us when we face up to the realities we are encountering with sober senses.
A description of the remainder of the march requires the trite but, in this context, altogether accurate phrase, “violently dispersed by the police”, though this is, of course, usually applied to various third world dictatorships. One block south the police began to erect a second set of barriers with the purpose of dividing the march into smaller groups, separated by a block or so, arresting those who refused to get out of the street, and who resisted. The arrests were undertaken with considerable brutality which I was a direct witness to, and almost a victim of. . . . . .
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Madman posted this wonderful link on the last thread and it is well worth carrying over…. a talented and imaginative paper artist is quietly, secretly (til they are found in the stacks or resting upon a far away, forgotten window sill) and anonymously gifting various Edinburgh places dedicated to books, art, cinema etc. with beauteous paper sculpture….
I enjoyed this interesting literary/sculptural mystery … a nice break from all of the depressing stuff. Linked via Balloon Juice.
Race war 10 August 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, UK, WAR!.95 comments
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London riots: CCTV pictures of suspects are released by the Metropolitan Police
Race War
Seems to me that is what the various controlling parties, the government, some leaders, others WANT in the UK. Not that this is news, especially. Here or there….
Media is filled with ME, other immigrants, long time non-immigrant Londoners and, I am sure, second and third generation immigrant as well, coming out of the woodwork… not that the CCTV film of the Malaysian student being supposedly helped to his feet, face bloodied but then he is robbed did anything but hurt…
AND of course, as always, criminals, the variously ‘disaffected but not involved in the issues at hand’ types, join in.
Not only ”Barbarians with Blackberries”, but ”feral rats”, “Pakis”, “black dogs” is heard… Same old same old as here… white ethnics, POC from preferred communities, etc., making headway, while others languish… We have certainly seen decades and generations of that here.
I’ve read reports of Hasidic Jews, among a range of criminals/opportunists, involved in looting, but apparently kept off still shots and film that is being distributed to the press… That happened in LA in the riots of ’92…. Koreans were clearly looting – as well – and a careful viewing of film proved it, but hardly mentioned.
We’ll see what comes next.
As for here, Nose + Dive. I wonder what Friday will look like. Bargain shopping or no desire to hold much of anything over the weekend. Who knows.
Fire 9 August 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, UK, WAR!.54 comments
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A woman leaps from a burning building into the arms of police officers in Surrey Street, Croydon Photograph: Amy Weston
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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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Imperium 19 June 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Afghanistan War, Culture of Death, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Total fucking lunatics, UK, WAR!.66 comments
On 24 May 2011 President Obama made a State visit to the UK. These behind-the-scenes pictures capture him and the First Lady during the three-day visit [PETE SOUZA/THE WHITE HOUSE]
The pic of Obby being presented to the Head House Cat / Mouser-in-Chief at 10 Downing is pretty funny. Larry is not happy to be there…
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Liberal use of the name “Obama” in this piece from Tom Dispatch, so many white liberals seem unable to say the name in conjunction with crimes and misdemeanors…
From the Tom Engelhardt preamble to a piece by Karen Greenberg:
Every time we get a peek inside Washington’s war on terror, it just couldn’t be uglier. Last week, three little home-grown nightmares from that “war” caught my attention. One you could hardly miss. On the front page of the New York Times, Glenn Carle, a former CIA official, claimed that the Bush administration had wanted “to get” Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog devastatingly critiqued the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and who writes regularly for TomDispatch). Not only that, administration officials called on the CIA to dig up the dirt on him.
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In case you think taking down Cole was just a matter of the bad old days of the Bush administration, note that the journalist who revealed this little shocker, James Risen, is being hounded by the Obama administration. He’s been subpoenaed by federal authorities to testify against a CIA agent accused of leaking information to him (on a bungled CIA plan to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program) for his book State of War. It’s worth remembering that no administration, not even Bush’s, has been fiercer than Obama’s in going after government whistle blowers.
In the meantime, in case you didn’t think American law enforcement could sink much lower while investigating “terrorist activity” and generally keeping an eye on Americans, think again. According to Charlie Savage of the Times, a revised FBI operational manual offers its 14,000 agents new leeway in “searching databases,” using “surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention,” and “going through household trash.” Yes, that’s right, if you see somebody at the dumpster out back, it may not be a homeless person but an FBI agent.
And then there was Peter Wallsten’s account in the Washington Post of a nationwide FBI investigation of “prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.” According to Wallsten, news leaking out about it hasn’t sat so well with union supporters of President Obama (or, for all we know, with the president himself), since “targets” include “Chicagoans who crossed paths with Obama when he was a young state senator and some who have been active in labor unions that supported his political rise.” All are (shades of Cole in the Bush years) “vocal and visible critics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South America.” . . . .
That last might be dicey – if US labor had any balls.
All the years the party regulars have spent, arguing in a blizzard of verbiage and TV banter, that the Democrats are the 2% fat milk, or something. “Better for you”…
A waste of breath.
Mouser-in-Chief 30 April 2011
Posted by marisacat in 2012 Re Election, Divertissements, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, Total fucking lunatics, UK.66 comments
Larry, the 10 Downing Street cat, sits on the Cabinet table wearing a Union Flag bow tie ahead of the street party to celebrate the Royal Wedding. Hopefully Larry won’t need to catch any rats during the street party [AFP / GETTY]
I tried to fnd a still shot of the verger who did cartwheels down the red carpet in Westminster Cathedral… Larry is a good runner up however. I say put him in charge of everything.
Did anyone catch the military uniform worn by Harry? Epaulets, stand-up collar and gold swag that managed to look heavy. And lots of it. Obviously, faded empire has too much in common with lunatic tin pot dictators.
Of course, we are not far behind.
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Marisacat 