4&20 blackbirds

BY WIZARD!

Since all Muslims are potential threats to America, the NYPD has been doing their patriotic duty to find out where these people eat their strange food, and have been closely monitoring the terrorist breeding grounds known as “mosques,” where these people bow to Mecca like 14 times a day.

Interestingly, some of the money to fund this unconventional use of the NYPD came from High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area funds. I know what you’re thinking: Obama is helping police spy on his own people! Crazy, right?

While I’m very glad the NYPD is doing this (and kicking Jersey in the shins just for fun), I think the FBI has been doing a fantastic job busting the terrorist plots they help concoct.

Keep it up, boys. And as you trap those non-threatening lone wolves, and up here in Montana, we’ll keep doing our darnedest to kill some real wolves, even if we gotta put a bounty on their predatory asses.

What was I saying? The thought of dead wolves just got me really excited. Oh yeah, terrorists.

The real threat of course is the big nesting ground known as Iran. As Obama invites the destruction of America with his weakness (the Bin Laden hit was just a PR stunt), Israel is gonna do what it has to do. They can’t wait around for Obama to give another speech, and I’m sure he’ll be doing his craven best before AIPAC on March 4th.

Nope, speeches won’t do it. It looks like the real warrior nation, Israel, a country that always fights honorably, must once again wage war to protect what God has promised them (unlike Obama, God keeps His promises), and they have finally told Obama—and I’m paraphrasing here—“WE AIN’T GONNA TELL YOU SHIT BEFORE WE START BLOWIN’ MECCA STRAIGHT TO HELL“.

Then, when gas gets BIG TIME expensive, Obama will lose the election, and Rick Santorum will reclaim America.

by lizard

I didn’t get to writing this weekend’s poetry series in time, so here’s me catching up. I should also note that, because of a change in my work schedule, this weekly series will more than likely be posting Sunday(ish).

Last Thursday I attended a reading/fundraiser for UM’s literary journal, Cutbank. If I had known about this event earlier, I would have certainly done my part to promote it.

The evening featured Lois Welch reading a piece about her husband, James Welch, and how he went from creative writing student taking classes from poet Richard Hugo, to being featured on the cover of the New York Times book review, and Michael Earl Craig, who read poems from his book Thin Kimono, a weird chapbook, and some brand new poems. It was a great evening.

One of the special treats the audience of the fundraiser got to see (at the Tophat) was a sneak preview of a trailer to Winter in the Blood, a novel by James Welch getting the big screen treatment (and shot mostly on the Hi-Line).

Anyway, Michael Earl Craig is ridiculous in a way the defies explanation. Here is a short poem from his collection, Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006). Enjoy! Continue Reading »

by lizard

Imagine over 2,000 people gathered in a sports stadium to watch some economists give a few lectures. That is what economist Michael Hudson recently experienced in Rimini, Italy, where he was invited, along with several of his colleagues from the University of Missouri in Kansas City, to discuss Modern Monetary Theory.

From the first link:

The basic thrust of our argument is that just as commercial banks create credit electronically on their computer keyboards (creating a bank account credit for borrowers in exchange for their signing an IOU at interest), governments can create money. There is no need to borrow from banks, as computer keyboards provide nearly free credit creation to finance spending.

The difference, of course, is that governments spend money (at least in principle) to promote long-term growth and employment, to invest in public infrastructure, research and development, provide health care and other basic economic functions. Banks have a more short-term time frame. They lend credit against collateral in place. Some 80% of bank loans are mortgages against real estate. Other loans are made to finance leveraged buyouts and corporate takeovers. But most new fixed capital investment by corporations is financed out of retained earnings.

Unfortunately, the flow of earnings is now being diverted increasingly to the financial sector – not only to pay interest and penalties to banks, but for stock buybacks intended to support stock prices and hence the value of stock options that managers of today’s financialized companies give themselves. As for the stock market – which textbook diagrams still depict as raising money for new capital investment – it has been turned into a vehicle to buy out companies on credit (e.g., with high interest junk bonds) and replace equity with debt. Inasmuch as interest payments are tax-deductible, as if they were a necessary cost of doing business, corporate income-tax payments are lowered. And what the tax collector relinquishes is available to be paid out to the bankers and bondholders who get rich by loading the economy down with debt.

Welcome to the post-industrial economy, financialized style. Industrial capitalism has passed into a series of stages of finance capitalism, from the Bubble Economy to the Negative Equity stage, foreclosure time, debt deflation, austerity – and what looks like debt peonage in Europe, above all for the PIIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.

The impressive turnout to hear Professor Hudson and the other economists indicates an increasing desperation among Europeans to seek out alternatives to the neoliberal austerity measures that are being put forward as the ONLY solution to the economic crisis Europe is facing. Greece is the starkest example of how forced austerity is aimed to protect the financial sector, and is not intended to be a solution for the people, people who are being told they must suffer even more austerity for a global financial crisis they had no active role in perpetrating.

So what does Michael Hudson think should happen?

So what then is the key? It is to have a central bank that does what central banks were founded to do: monetize government budget deficits so as to spend money into the economy, in a way best intended to promote economic growth and full employment.

This was the MMT message that the five of us were invited to explain to the audience in Rimini. Some attendees came up and explained that they had come all the way from Spain, others from France and cities across Italy. And although we did many press, radio and TV interviews, we were told that the major media were directed to ignore us as not politically correct.

Such is the censorial spirit of neoliberal monetary austerity. Its motto is TINA: There Is No Alternative, and it wants to keep matters this way. As long as it can suppress discussion of how many better alternatives there are, the hope is that the public will remain acquiescent as their living standards shrink and wealth is sucked up to the top of the economic pyramid to the 1%.

But there won’t be any substantial political will to do anything that doesn’t prioritize the global financial elite over the masses, because, for them, business is doing just fine. With the DOW hitting the magical 13,000 mark for the first time since 2008, and corporate profits strong, why do anything differently?

To counter the comfort those at the top of the pyramid seem to be feeling, there’s a piece in Mother Jones, by Mac McClelland, that is a MUST read, titled I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave. It’s a dismal first-hand account of the awful working conditions in the bowels of a rapidly expanding warehouse industry that major online retailers like Amazon exploit for massive profit. Part of how this is being accomplished is through third party logistic companies, called 3PLs for short. Here is snip from the article:

The computers screening us for suitability to pack boxes or paste labels belong to a temporary-staffing agency. The stuff we order from big online retailers lives in large warehouses, owned and operated either by the retailers themselves or by third-party logistics contractors, a.k.a. 3PLs. These companies often fulfill orders for more than one retailer out of a single warehouse. America’s largest 3PL, Exel, has 86 million square feet of warehouse in North America; it’s a subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL, which is cute because Deutsche Post is the German post office, which was privatized in the 1990s and bought DHL in 2002, becoming one of the world’s biggest corporate employers. The $31 billion “value-added warehousing and distribution” sector of 3PLs is just a fraction of what large 3PLs’ parent companies pull in. UPS’s logistics division, for example, pulls in more than a half a billion, but it feeds billions of dollars of business to UPS Inc.

The gains made by organized labor during the last century are increasingly eroding during this economic crisis, and the result is wealth being vacuumed up at an alarming rate.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

But this is the way it’s going to be, here and abroad, until something happens to reverse it. I don’t know what set of circumstances need to happen to make those at the top realize their own personal well-being will be compromised if a more equitable distribution of resources isn’t achieved, but I doubt it will be non-violent.

People who are working right now probably feel pretty lucky just to have a job, despite low wages and exploitive working conditions, and if they get too uppity and complain, it’s very easy to remind them how many people are waiting behind them, eager to be exploited by a 3PL that offers no benefits or job security whatsoever. In our hollowed out domestic economy, these massive warehouses are sometimes the only game in town for townships struggling to survive in America’s post-manufacturing landscape.

For those of you who shop online, I would urge you to read the whole article. It’s important to understand that companies like Amazon have built their lucrative business model on the exploitive business practices (and plausible deniability) of 3PLs.

And for anyone living in this world, it is going to be very important to understand that the continued imposition of neoliberal fiscal policies is absolutely not sustainable, and will ultimately lead to more global strife, wars, and dislocation as people shift from the idea of earning a living, to simply surviving.

by jhwygirl

Since seeing this article in the Missoulian I’ve been a little perplexed.

President Engstrom is threatening – quite clearly now – to put an end to some annual forester’s ball that’s been around since I-don’t-know-how-long because it (apparently) gets too rowdy.

Drunken students. The shock.

The thing is so rowdy that I’ve never even known when the darn thing’s been held – and apparently the annual soiree just occurred a few weeks ago.

But answer me this: The Griz games are one big drunken booze carnival before hand, only recently cut back to 5 hours of tailgating on campus property, right? I mean, we’re not talking clandestine alcoholic beverages sipped out of paper cups – we’re talking barrels of beer and all that you’d expect of Montana and football and a bunch of crazed Montana football fans from across the state.

But Engstrom’s got his britches in a skritches over a few dozens forestry students having an annual party to raise some money for scholarships?

When we’ve got university sanctioned public drinking on public property?

Football OK, forestry scholarship fundraising once a year, bad?

Yeah – UM has priorities.

Clearly.

by jhwygirl

I’m more disgusted than shocked – it’s no surprise, really, that a court that would side with the sale of our elections to the highest willing buyer determined yesterday that our public waterways can be owned by private corporations, without even payment to use the land.

I won’t pretend to have studiously read the court’s opinon, issued yesterday. I have read through it quickly though, and prior I had read both PPL and the state’s briefs, along with many of the other documents.

My favorite read of the PPL v Montana case was one that I think anyone would enjoy, regardless of their opinion on the case or the court’s recent ruling. Historian Stephanie Ambrose-Tubbs’ amicus brief submitted in support of the state’s position is rich with descriptive language that brings to life the color and visual of early Montana – from Lewis & Clark’s first travels on the Missouri to the steamboat travel days, outfitting and present day fishing and floating.

My favorite television reporter Marnee Banks (Helena’s CBS news) did this reporting on the hearing just before the case was heard by SCOTUS in December.

In the end, the court did not agree with the state that a the PPL dam – one in particular which sits on a series of waterfalls on the Missouri River up near Great Falls (there are other PPL dams involved also) – was on a navigable river.

Montana’s claim to rivers goes back to the law of the Magna Carta – under the principle that the waterways are a primary source of commerce, so important to the state that it is within their interest to control. Here in Montana, rivers have been used to move logs. Here in Missoula people might be interested to know that Ninemile Creek, Lolo Creek and the Rattlesnake were all used to “float” logs. That’s in addition to what most would expect – the Clark’s Fork, the Blackfoot and the Clearwater.

“Lolo?” I said when I was first told that by an old logger smokejumper in problembear’s favorite bar over there in Bonner. Apparently the old guys would cut those logs and stack them through the winter in low lands that would then be flooded by damming the creek to then “float” them down to the mills. Today you can still see the old logs sprouting up like mushrooms on the Blackfoot, now that the dam is gone at Milltown.

Some old old maps of Missoula show a log mill a the bottom of the Rattlesnake, near its confluence with the Clark’s Fork.

In some drainages, you can still see the remains of the log structures used to hold the slats that dammed the creeks.

The courts, though, apparently didn’t find logging a compelling enough of a commerce interest for the state to protect.

Meh. Whatever. Sometime soon when the set the date, I’m heading to DC to occupy the steps of SCOTUS. They still haven’t denied the request to hear American Tradition Partnership v Montana, which challenges Montana’s ban on corporate money in elections – and two court justices are hinting that they want to hear the case – so when they do, I plan to be in DC to at least be there for what I’m sure will be well-directed chaos.

What does SCOTUS’ recent ruling mean for our waterways? Apparently if you can’t float a boat, it’s up for sale to the highest bidder.

That, my friends, is sad – no matter how you slice it.

by lizard

It should be noted that the big banks have gotten away with systemic fraud.

9 million homes have been lost to foreclosure since 2007, and there will be another 9 million before we’re done. Homeowners have lost $8 trillion in home equity (in the last 4 years) and 11 million people are currently underwater on their mortgages. All of this is unprecedented. All of this is the result of fraud.

Ok, now back to snarky commentary about the GOP (scary) clown show.

by lizard

When it comes to state politics in Montana, I’m probably the least informed contributor at 4&20. Twelve years living in this weird bubble called Missoula, with only three years actually paying attention to local politics, doesn’t gain me much unique insight.

BUT, as an outsider, without any investment of time or money in any active campaigns, I can speak as a somewhat average consumer of our state democracy, examining a bit more objectively the packages being sold.

Like Pam Bucy. Apparently the bow on her gift-wrapping is her status as Helena Insider. I infer this from the duplicitous Cowgirl(s) site (no link, you know where to find “her”) and the flak-contagion Pogie received for this post at Intelligent Discontent.

Based on that, and reading that Pam’s been keen on killing Medicinal Marijuana, my vote is more than likely going for Jesse Laslovich.

Denny’s seat I’m having a little more trouble with. Dave Strohmaier’s “social host ordinance” was a waste of time, IMO, and it doesn’t seem like he’s got wider traction outside the bubble, so I’m leaning toward Franke Wilmer, but with reservations.

Franke is touted as informed when it comes to foreign policy. Part of her pedigree in the bio on her website regarding her scholarly work reads:

Franke Wilmer came to Bozeman in 1991 to accept a position on the faculty of Montana State University. Her research has focused on war, ethnic conflict, and indigenous peoples’ self determination. Franke has written three books, numerous articles and been an invited guest lecturer in the US and abroad. She conducted field research in former Yugoslavia during the war and over five years following the Dayton Peace Accords.

After reading the bio, I found the ISSUES button and read the two paragraphs dedicated to foreign policy:

In an age where terrorist attacks pose the greatest threat to national security, the most effective tools are intelligence with a global reach and well-trained and well-equipped U.S. military Special Forces, not 80,000 troops on the ground in two countries. The greatest threat we face today comes from unconventional enemies that will not be defeated by conventional military tactics.

I have visited more than 50 countries to do research or as an invited speaker and am a professor of international relations. I have spent significant time in an active war zone. I know the great personal costs of war to civilians and military personnel. When we are asked to send our young men and women as well as our tax dollars overseas for a military intervention, we need someone in Congress who will ask the right questions and show restraint in supporting those requests.

I think there’s some decent messaging here, but the lead in framing of Wilmer’s stance features the kind of red meat I reflexively gag on. Getting beyond the arguable claim that terrorist attacks pose the GREATEST threat to national security, the following endorsement of the still-evolving Obama doctrine ( light footprint NATO-style regime change and JSOC assassinations) is going to make it difficult for Franke Wilmer to be the kind of congressperson she claims to want to be, someone who will ask the right questions.

One of many “right questions” to be asking: how’s Libya doing? Not so good.

“While the Canadian government celebrated Gadhafi’s overthrow, the countries in the region were feeling the effects.

The Libyan strongman not only had provided aid for many African nations, but employment for their citizens. His demise set into motion a mass exodus of workers back to their original countries.

That, in turn, created a domino effect as those nations struggled to deal with hundreds of thousands of traumatized and impoverished people, according to a recently released UN report for the Security Council.

Crime and drug and human smuggling have spiked in the region and the return of more than one million people to their homelands has worsened an “already challenging, humanitarian, development and security situation,” the report noted.

But Gadhafi’s overthrow did breathe new life into one organization — al-Qaida.

As Gadhafi’s forces retreated from NATO’s relentless air attacks, theyabandoned bases and ammunition depots holding thousands of weapons, including surface-to-air missiles. In the chaos that engulfed Libya, the sites were quickly pilfered, either by rebels or black marketeers.

African nations were the first to sound the warning. In late March, just weeks into the conflict, Chad’s president, Idriss Deby Itno, told journalists that al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM as it is known, had obtained missiles and small arms from abandoned Libyan stockpiles. “This is very serious,” he said. “AQIM is becoming a genuine army, the best equipped in the region.”

Canada was slow to recognize the problem. In April, Canadian Forces spokesman Brig.-Gen. Richard Blanchette said the military didn’t have any information about missing armaments or missiles.

But a month later, Algerian intelligence also was warning that looted Libyan weapons were in the hands of AQIM.

“The region has turned into a powder keg,” Mohamed Bazoum, Niger’s foreign minister, later would tell delegates to an anti-terrorism conference. “Things have changed and degraded since the Libya crisis and the region is on a war path. With stolen weapons circulating, al-Qaida’s total impact is growing.”

There are serious consequences for how the US&Co bumble-fuck around in the Mid-East and Africa. I hope candidate Franke Wilmer is willing to consider the potential blowback of Obama’s preference to use low-casualty humanitarian/terrorist-killing bombing of a half dozen countries to get at those “unconventional enemies”.

by lizard

Here’s a quick hit for your Sunday enjoyment. The following performance is from Guante, a two-time national poetry slam champ who blasts, in ten responses, the phrase MAN UP! Clicking his name will take you to his site, where you can see more, including a free music sampler.

by lizard

Like many Americans, I’ve been absolutely disgusted watching how “conservative” opportunism (read: desperation) has revived the culture war to try and drown out the somewhat encouraging economic trend lines and subsequent bump in Obama’s poll numbers.

But, like Wisconsin union bashing, Republicans have once again overreached, figuratively shooting themselves in the foot by apparently forgetting this important little fact: women vote. Political idiocy? to quote the Queen of political opportunism: youbetchya!

This weekend’s poetry series features a poem from Minnie Bruce Pratt. The poem is from a collection of poetry, titled Crimes Against Nature (Firebrand Books, 1990), and was the Lamont Poetry selection for the previous year (Note: the form of the poem is slightly altered from the original). Enjoy! Continue Reading »

by lizard

This post is a tribute to one of my favorite visual artists, Jess. I am drawn especially to his collage art, which you can see examples of here. I recommend looking at his bio—Jess went from working on Plutonium for the Manhattan Project to focusing on art and settling down to live a long, happy life with one of my favorite poets, Robert Duncan.

Click for more images from my collage tribute Continue Reading »

by lizard

The title of the post comes from statements made by Hillary Clinton, referencing the short-sighted foreign policy of the US arming the Mujahideen against Russia in Afghanistan. It’s a refreshingly candid statement.

But that was over two years ago, plenty of time to conveniently forget how an expedient ends-justify-the-means approach to fighting the Evil Empire (Russia) blew back in our collective faces (9/11).

Is it impossible for this country to learn from it’s blunders abroad?

Apparently so. And as proof, check this out: Obama’s administration is trying to achieve the same goal as Al Qaeda. Let me say that again. Obama and the TERRORISTS WHO ATTACKED AMERICA want the same thing: the destruction of the Syrian Regime.

This point became crystal clear when that new head terrorist guy who took the place of America’s frenemy, Bin Laden, recently called for jihad in Syria.

Gee, how awkward. Too bad Obama has already demanded Assad step down, and declared that America marches in lockstep with Israel. So no diplomatic poker playing here. Instead, US foreign policy seeks to again exploit the R2P for another imposed regime change.

Why? Could the answer be as simple and stupidly short-sighted as Iran?

Because if it wasn’t for aligning with Iran, it seems like Bashar al Assad is totally the kind of secular dictator that America, under different circumstances, could tolerate. To prove I’m not totally nuts in making that assertion, I offer this link showing how Vogue magazine once fawned over his wife, Asma al Assad, then later tried to scrub itself clean.

Getting back to that lockstep with Israel thing, it makes sense the Obama administration has the same goal as the evil terrorists who attacked us, because Israel is all too eager to work with terrorists as well:

Israel is working with an Iranian terror group to kill Iran’s nuclear scientists, U.S. officials have told NBC News. They say Israel is financing, training, and arming Iranian dissidents known as the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, a group designated as terrorists by the U.S. since the 1970s, when members allegedly killed U.S. service members. They later broke with the Iranian mullahs. Five nuclear scientists have been killed since 2007, often by a motorcycle rider attaching a magnetic bomb to the scientist’s car. U.S. officials say the Obama administration is aware of the assassinations.

Diana Johnstone’s featured piece at Counterpunch is very much worth reading. Here is a snip:

And who are these rebels? We simply do not know. Someone who may know better than we do is Osama bin Laden’s successor as head of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is seen on a video urging Muslims in Turkey and neighboring Arab states to back the Syrian rebels.

With uncontrolled armed groups fighting for control, the insistent Western demand that “Assad must step down” is not really even a call for “regime change”. It is a call for regime self-destruction.

As in Libya, the country would de facto be turned over to rival armed groups, with those groups that are being armed covertly by NATO via Turkey and Qatar having an advantage in hardware. However, the likely result would be a multi-sided civil war much more horrific than the chaos in Libya, thanks to the country’s multiple religious differences. But for the West, however chaotic, regime self-destruction would have the immediate advantage of depriving Iran of its potential ally on the eve of an Israeli attack. With both Iraq and Syria neutralized by internal religious conflict, the strangulation of Iran would be that much easier – or so the Western strategists obviously assume.

To approximate what’s happening globally: shit’s getting really fucked up, and there’s an inevitability being actively constructed toward war with Iran.

*

Domestically, the big banks got the handjob of justice with their foreclosure settlement. Good for them. Help piddle down a few billion in principal for a crash that wiped out trillions.

The domestic opposition, OWS, and its subsidiary occupations, are caught in a myriad of difficulties. The big flare up came from Chris Hedges, stirring it up with his piece titledBlack Block: The Cancer in Occupy.

A great response came from this piece, Self-Critical Reflections from the Santa Rita Jail.

Another great response came from this open letter to Chris Hedges.

And then there’s the latest from Hedges, where he says this:

How do we fight back? We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatus of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we will unleash widespread paranoia and fracture the movement. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for agents provocateurs who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets we give authorities an excuse to fire their weapons.

All we have, as Vaclav Havel writes, is our own powerlessness. And that powerlessness is our strength. The survival of the movement depends on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most important assets—utter and complete transparency and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. This permits us, as Havel puts it in his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth. And by living in truth we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates lies and lives in deceit.

This conversation happening about how to resist is absolutely critical right now, because we’re not Greece. Not yet.

But Greece is the future if the methods of squeeze are adopted. And it’s not austerity hawks circling above us, but vultures.

by lizard

This weekend’s love poem comes from a collection by Sharon Olds, titled The Wellspring (Knopf, 1995).

*

TRUE LOVE

In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.

—Sharon Olds

by lizard

LAPD deputy chief, Stephen Downing, has a question for president Obama. As a member of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), officer Downing asks the following YouTube question:

Good question. Meanwhile, the war on drugs chugs along.

Like wherever there’s a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area established.

Missoula’s PD participates in this wonderful program, and if you want to fill out some info about drug dealers, go to the city website and fill out a report.

And thanks to a City Council vote tonight, the city’s participation (via a lease) with HIDTA will only get stronger. Kudos to Wiener, Wolken, Taft, and Jaffe for voting NO. Boo on Copple for voting yes. And does anyone know why Hertz abstained?

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. When it comes to the WAR ON DRUGS!!!, the Feds call the tune, and local officials dance accordingly. Sure, it’s nice to know more and more sane members of law enforcement are seeing the absolute failure of this impossible-to-win war, but when it comes to the Feds, sanity does not appear to be contagious.

**UPDATE:  Adam Hertz abstained because of his matrimonial ties to the Lambros empire, and they are the ones facilitating the lease.

by lizard

A resolution to address the violence in Syria has failed, vetoed by Russia and China. My twitter feed is buzzing with outrage. Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton are buzzing with outrage. Russia and China are now complicit in whatever violence follows, they say.

And without any sense of irony, Susan Rice called Russia’s opposition to the resolution a “cheap ruse by those who would rather sell arms to the Syrian regime than stand with the Syrian people.” (ahem, Bahrain?!)

All week, there has been wrangling over the language of the resolution. This is a direct consequence of the US and its western allies exploiting the UN resolution to establish a no-fly zone in Libya for the real motive of imposing regime change. This from the link:

The resolution referred to “targeted measures” – instead of sanctions – if the clampdown in Syria continued.

But Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said that draft was based on “the philosophy of confrontation”.

He said the threat of an ultimatum of sanctions against the Syrian authorities was “unacceptable” and that the approach went “against the principle of a peaceful settlement of a crisis on the basis of a full Syrian national dialogue”.

He repeated Moscow’s concerns that a resolution could lead to a Libyan-style foreign military intervention in Syria and said pressure should also be put on the Syrian opposition movement to refrain from violence and disassociate itself from “extremists”.

But Mr Churkin added that Moscow would like the Syrian regime to be “quicker with implementing the promised changes”.

China’s UN ambassador Li Baodong said that Beijing opposed the idea of “interference in (Syria’s) internal affairs.”

He added that “sanction or threat of sanction does not help resolve the question of Syria” but “may further complicate the situation”.

Do Russia and China give a shit about dead Syrians? Of course not. But neither does the US. This is geopolitics, and the US is getting its my-way-or-the-highway attitude rebuffed because of past deceits.

It’s also incredibly difficult to determine what’s actually happening on the ground in Syria. Initial reports of 200 dead from last night’s attack are already being revised.

And the opposition to the Assad regime is NOT comprised of relatively non-violent civilians occupying some square. It’s an armed insurrection comprised of military defectors, who call themselves the Free Syria Army. This piece looks at how, in recent months, the Free Syria Army have turned to guerilla tactics against the regular army.

After more than ten months of a deadly crackdown on anti-government protests in Syria, members of the Free Syrian Army – out-armed and out-numbered by Syrian military forces – are now engaging in a classic military manoeuvre by drawing their enemy into urban areas they know well. In neighbourhoods where the population is on their side, fighting in the streets works to their advantage, as they can easily hide inside homes.

Yeah, civilians are going to be getting killed in Syria, just like they’re getting killed across the Middle East. Sometimes, when it serves US interests, those deaths get amplified, and sometimes they get conveniently omitted.

10 years ago Syria was declared to be part of the Axis of Evil by the Bush regime. That hasn’t changed.

And here’s something else that hasn’t changed: Geopolitics is a deadly game played by the leaders of Nations, and civilians are just pawns. In death, civilian body counts can be used as leverage to pressure certain outcomes. That’s what I think is happening here with this UN posturing, and that is what I find to be truly disgusting.

by lizard

I’m going to feature poems this month about the mess of human relationships. I hesitate to use the term “love poems” because love may not always be present, even if the word “love” is used, especially with this weekend’s selection.

The poem below the fold comes from Judy Blunt, creative writing director at that tree hugger school here in Missoula. I may consider the administrative leadership at UM to be a bunch of tone-deaf idiots prioritizing the promotion of burning bio-mass over investigating alleged rapes, but I do respect the creative writing program that continues to draw very talented professors and adjuncts.

Judy Blunt’s star really shot up after her collection of personal essays, Breaking Clean, was published by Knopf in 2002. But though Judy is now more well known for her non-fiction, she proves to be a versatile writer very capable of writing great poems.

The poem I’ve selected comes from a book titled Not Quite Stone, released two decades ago, in 1992, when Judy won the Merriam-Frontier Award. As a dogged hunter of poetry books, I was lucky to stumble across this signed copy (1 of 400 published).

It’s a poem that, two decades later, is still terribly applicable. Read it and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Continue Reading »