What It's Coming To

Unfortunately, it's impossible these days to figure out who's the "lesser of two evils" (h/t to Joe Cannon and Dakinikat):

Gallup polled a whole bunch of Texans and found that the folks out there don't really like their governor.[...]

The poll, released Tuesday, showed Perry with a negative approval in Texas: while 45 percent of the state’s voters approve of Perry’s job performance, 48 percent of Texas voters say they don’t approve.

Meanwhile, a Marist poll has similar, albeit slightly worse, figures for President O:

According to this McClatchy-Marist Poll, the president’s approval rating is at 39% among registered voters nationally, an all-time low for Mr. Obama. For the first time a majority — 52% — disapproves of the job he is doing in office, and 9% are unsure.

This is about the time I usually swear I won't bother to vote. Then, when the ballot shows up in the mail... I always fill in the bubbles, falling for the ol' "the Supreme Court balance is in danger of going fascist" argument.

But, really, we're given less and less of a choice any more; politics has become nothing but an overpriced reality show, designed to keep the rabble distracted from its deepening enslavement.

From "Change" and "Hope" to "Cut Off Your Arm"

The betrayal is just sickening -- but if it wasn't Obama, it would be the next person, since the President is nothing but a sock-puppet on the hand of Big Money:

The American ruling class wants--or more accurately, needs--to lower the living standards of American workers. Compared to the people sweating their days and nights in China's iPhone factories, American workers are "overpaid." To compete, the ruling class need us to make do with less--much, much less. And, ideally, they'd like us to believe that this is a good thing.

Like the squabbles over the health care legislation, the budget "battle" between Democrats and Republicans only makes sense in this light. Each side puts up a big "fight" to satisfy their respective bases, but the real outcome is never in doubt. In the case of the budget, both sides have agreed to not really consider taxing the rich, and instead to frame the discussion around which social programs must be cut

The Republicans want to take an arm and a leg. The Democrats have a counterproposal. They're "outraged" that both limbs might be sacrificed.

"Cut off your arm, not your arm and your leg." That will be Obama's campaign slogan for 2012. And we're supposed to feel like he's doing us a favor. Worse, we're supposed to endorse it with a vote.

Dominos Falling?

Has the dam burst?

After Tunisia, ‘Electrified’ Arab World Sets Sights on Brewing Revolt in Egypt

In a sign that an "electrified" Arab world has been inspired by the events in Tunisia to rise up against their governments, opposition leaders in Egypt have called for an open revolt in the country on January 25.

The US branch of the National Association for Change, an umbrella group of activists led by former IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei, issued a statement on Tuesday "urging all Egyptians to take to the streets on January 25th to protest the deteriorating conditions caused by the dictatorial Mubarak regime."

The message places El-Baradei -- a prominent figure in the international community since his role in Iraqi weapons inspections in 2002 and 2003 -- in virtually direct conflict with President Hosni Mubarak, who is generally considered an ally of Washington and whose government receives billions in US aid yearly.

The call for a revolt comes as several Egyptians set themselves on fire in protest this week, apparently inspired by the Tunisian uprising last week that started the same way.

A man set himself ablaze on Tuesday in Cairo and another in Alexandria, Egyptian officials said. The incidents follow a similar one in Cairo on Monday in which a man poured fuel on himself and set himself on fire on a busy street in front of the People's Assembly (see video below).

[...]

It may get worse:

A 16-year-old French boy was rushed to hospital Tuesday in a critical condition after setting himself on fire at his school, officials in Marseille said.

The boy doused himself in a flammable liquid in the toilets of his private school in the southern city and then set himself alight, rescue service officials said.

He has second and third degrees burns over 70 percent of his body, they said. Hospital officials said the boy was in a critical condition.

It's may be a sign that the revolt in Tunisia and brewing unrest across the Arab world may also be part of a "youth uprising" that trends analyst Gerald Celente said last week would come to fruition in 2011.

Young people from industrial societies around the world will unite on the Internet to overthrow increasingly ineffective elements of globalism that have driven their economies into depression, Celente said.

"[The Internet is] exposing the corruptness, the ineptitude and the double dealing going on that [governments] don't want the public to know about," he told RT. "The more freedom of information that goes out, they're going to start using cyber war and the war on terror to take that Internet freedom away from America."

"But in 2011, the game's gonna run out," Celente added. "...On one end, it's a wake-up call and on the other hand it's [an effort to] screw the people."

I think we've all considered the Internet to be a game-changer, and that when the shit truly hits the fan (as it seems to have done in many parts of the world), it will fuel an uprising that the global elites will not be able to contain.

Has that time arrived?

Hearts and Minds, Pt. 3,729....

Seymour Hersh brings disturbing news from the War Against Islam (emphasis mine):

"What I'm really talking about is how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over," he said of his forthcoming book. "It's not only that the neocons took it over but how easily they did it -- how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced."

Hersh then brought up the widespread looting that took place in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. "In the Cheney shop, the attitude was, ‘What's this? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? ... Don't they get it? We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody's gonna give a damn.'"

"That's the attitude," he continued. "We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta."

Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization committed to "defense of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering," according to its website.

"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins," he continued. "They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”"

When Junior first attacked Iraq, it was clear that a New Crusade had commenced -- and the Crusade has continued unabated, despite the Presidential change of guard. Hersh, in fact, says as much in the above article:

Hersh, whose exposés of gross abuses by members of the U.S. military in Vietnam and Iraq have earned him worldwide fame and high journalistic honors, said he was writing a book on what he called the "Cheney-Bush years" and saw little difference between that period and the Obama administration.

He said that he was keeping a "checklist" of aggressive U.S. policies that remained in place, including torture and "rendition" of terrorist suspects to allied countries, which he alleged was ongoing.

People are so deluded, and innocent humans pay with their lives.

When will the notion of peace gain enough widespread acceptance to put an end to this insanity?

Rotten to the Core

This is why we (in the U.S.) are headed toward BIG CHANGE:

Comcast gave money to the vast majority of the 97 members of the US House of Representatives that signed a letter to the Federal Communications Commission urging approval of a merger between cable company Comcast and broadcaster NBC Universal, according to research.

The 5 January letter, linked here [pdf] and circulated by nonprofit group Public Knowledge urged the merger be approved quickly and without conditions that could harm investment. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 84 of the 97 received money from Comcast, Public Knowledge said. The amounts range from token contributions of about $1,000 up to $25,100.

Eighty-four out of ninety-seven.

Most "civilized" countries make some small effort to hide the impression that their politicians are owned and operated by Big Money corporate interests... but here? Pure bribery as everyday business.

How can this continue?

Happy Thanksgiving!

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R.I.P. Gregory Isaacs

Sad news -- I did not know that he was ill. Peace and comfort to his family and friends, and to everyone who paid attention to this man's cry.

Gregory Isaacs — one of the most popular and versatile reggae singers of the late-1970s, and the smooth-voiced dancehall crooner behind the genre's landmark 1982 LP Night Nurse — passed away this morning at his London home following a year-long battle with lung cancer, the BBC reports. Isaacs was 59. "Gregory was well loved by everyone, his fans and his family, and he worked really hard to make sure he delivered the music they loved and enjoyed," Isaacs' wife Linda said. "He will be greatly missed by his family and friends."

Over the course of his prolific career — in which he released an estimated 500 albums within Jamaica, the UK and the U.S. — Isaacs collaborated with reggae, dub and dancehall icons like Lee "Scratch" Perry, King Tubby, Sugar Minott, Freddie McGregor, Dennis Brown and Errol Holt. After spending the 1970s building a reputation as both a top-notch roots reggae singer and a soulful "lovers rock"-style crooner, Isaacs recorded his masterpiece Night Nurse at Bob Marley's Tuff Gong Studios in 1982, the year after Marley's death.

In the olden days I would've fired one up for Mr. Isaacs.

Now, I will meditate and send loving friendship to his traveling soul....

Testimonials

From a Pulse Media post entitled The Shocking Truth:

The following eyewitness testimonies of the Freedom Flotilla massacre were filmed on 11 June 2010 by Shaun Dey of Reel News for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

They say it all in these videos; nothing more for me to say.

Why the Lack of Soul-Searching?

Jonathan Cook gives indispensable insight into why most Israelis are indignant over global condemnation of the IDF attack on the Freedom Flotilla:

Israelis have not responded in any of the ways we might have expected. There has been little soul-searching about the morality, let alone legality, of soldiers invading ships in international waters and killing civilians. In the main, Israelis have not been interested in asking tough questions of their political and military leaders about why the incident was handled so badly. And only a few commentators appear concerned about the diplomatic fall-out.

Instead, Israelis are engaged in a Kafkaesque conversation in which the military attack on the civilian ships is characterised as a legitimate “act of self-defence”, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it, and the killing of nine aid activists is transformed into an attempted “lynching of our soldiers” by terrorists.

* * *

One commentator in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper summed up the feelings of Israelis brought to the fore by the flotilla episode as the “helplessness of a poor lonely victim, confronting the rage of a lynch mob and frantically realising that these are his last moments”. This “psychosis”, as he called it, is not surprising: it derives from the sanctified place of the Holocaust in the Israeli education system.

The Holocaust’s lesson for most Israelis is not a universal one that might inspire them to oppose racism, or fanatical dictators or the bullying herd mentality that can all too quickly grip nations, or even state-sponsored genocide.

Instead, Israelis have been taught to see in the Holocaust a different message: that the world is plagued by a unique and ineradicable hatred of Jews, and that the only safety for the Jewish people is to be found in the creation of a super-power Jewish state that answers to no one. Put bluntly, Israel’s motto is: only Jewish power can prevent Jewish victimhood.

* * *

The angry demonstrations sweeping the country against the world’s denunciations; the calls to revoke the citizenship of the Israeli Arab MP on board -- or worse, to execute her -- for treason; and the local media’s endless recycling of the soldiers’ testimonies of being “bullied” by the activists demonstrate the desperate need of Israelis to justify every injustice or atrocity while clinging to the illusion of victimhood.

The lessons imbibed from this episode -- like the lessons Israelis learnt from the Goldstone report last year into the war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza, or the international criticisms of the massive firepower unleashed on Lebanon before that -- are the same: that the world hates us, and that we are alone.

What will it take for this mass psychosis to resolve?

A Moral Example

My new hero, Ken O'Keefe, who disarmed two Israeli commandos upon witnessing them murder two of his fellow activists on the good ship Mavi Marmara:

Ken O’Keefe, former US Marine, Gulf War veteran, and now survivor of the Mavi Marmara massacre, has issued a remarkable and searing statement from Istanbul. “While in Israeli custody I, along with everyone else, was subjected to endless abuse and flagrant acts of disrespect. Women and elderly were physically and mentally assaulted. Access to food and water and toilets was denied. Dogs were used against us, we ourselves were treated like dogs. We were exposed to direct sun in stress positions while hand cuffed to the point of losing circulation of blood in our hands. We were lied to incessantly, in fact I am awed at the routineness and comfort in their ability to lie, it is remarkable really. We were abused in just about every way imaginable and I myself was beaten and choked to the point of blacking out… and I was beaten again while in my cell.

In all this what I saw more than anything else were cowards… and yet I also see my brothers. Because no matter how vile and wrong the Israeli agents and government are, they are still my brothers and sisters and for now I only have pity for them. Because they are relinquishing the most precious thing a human being has, their humanity.“

O’Keefe was a human shield in Iraq who formally renounced his US citizenship in protest in 2001; he now has Irish as well as Palestinian citizenship. On the morning of the attack, as he describes it, he was “directly involved in the disarming of two Israeli Commandos. This was a forcible, non-negotiable, separation of weapons from commandos who had already murdered two brothers that I had seen that day.” Subsequently brutalised by the Israeli military, he is defiant: “I challenge any critic of merit, publicly, to debate me on a large stage over our actions that day. I would especially love to debate with any Israeli leader who accuses us of wrongdoing, it would be my tremendous pleasure to face off with you. All I saw in Israel was cowards with guns, so I am ripe to see you in a new context“.

This man has followed his conscience where few of us would dare tread... and has already left an example to emulate. I just don't have enough words to express my admiration.

Just what the world needs at this most precarious moment....