Monthly Archives: March 2011

Shaken, stirred, totally Fukushima’d

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Now Fukushima Daiichi means the same in English as in Japanese. Although now apparently “meltdown” no longer means apocalyptic, “radiation” no longer means toxic, and to “exceed the safety levels” no longer means to pose adverse risk to your health. Curious. Because, I suppose, Japan can’t cry REACTOR FIRE in a crowded metropolis. Instead of blaming a Japanese government for being less than forthcoming about the obvious exponential horrors to come, realize they’re in hospice-caretaker mode, with little recourse but to comfort the imperiled population with big white lies. The Japanese are skeptical, but what are they supposed to do? They can no sooner stop drinking and eating than they can stop breathing. Will Fukushima be only a partial Chernobyl or verse visa? Halfway around the world, is the news being broken gently for our unknowing benefit? From across the Pacific, we can fret about the fallout –a word which now apparently means radioactive particles of no demonstrated significance. At least this president is not advising us to grab for duct-tape and visqueen. Leave the Japanese the stiff upper lip indispensable to island nations sin salida. For your own self-preservation, turn off the telly and heed experts who haven’t jettisoned the original nuclear power glossary. To those talking heads and blog comment trolls still shilling for the nuclear ambitions of the “Clean Power” Green Energy scam. Sayonara.

Bahrain King Hamad fells monument at Pearl Roundabout to efface revolution, also so his hanging won’t be iconic

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The prevailing talking point on Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa is that he’s a “good man.” So is his son the Crown Prince, apparently both “good men,” which stands at odds with the ongoing murderous repression of their fiefdom’s pro-Democracy demonstrators and the doctors trying to save them. How genteel an argument, to dismiss reports of massacres, arrests and beatings out of hand, because their reality would simply be too out of character to be believed. Media spokesman for the proto-Saudis and their Western Boyars assure viewers the news is inherently inconsistent with the much-self-beloved royals. How does that square with the sudden calculated move to tear down the monument at the center of the Pearl Roundabout which had become the iconic symbol of Bahrain’s popular uprising and its resilient demonstrators? Oh the sculpture resembled less political symbolism than cake decoration, the usual garish erection by born-in-a-tent nouveau riche. But what are we to conclude was the king’s benevolent motive? A sudden aesthetic enlightenment” I would advise the self-bolstered monarch to fell every structure in Bahrain from which his subjects might be able to string a noose.

In the struggle for Middle East land, Palestinian violence will always win

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Israel can build all the new settlements it wants, take heart, it only takes one horrific Tate-Labianca-like crime scene to curb the Zionist homecoming charade. Israel can terrorize Gaza to smithereens, the Palestinians have nowhere to flee. American Jews on the other hand, are not going to leave comfortable digs, to relocate to Jerusalem where their 11-month-old might be slashed to death in her crib. Such dastardly strategy comes at a price of course, against a military willing to defy international law and exact collective punishment for the deed of one zealot, but Israel knows that even its US billions in weapons cannot compete with one Palestinian knife that finds its mark.

Odd, isn’t it? On the battlefield, Goliath can slay an entire West Bank of Davids, but when the contest is holding ground, you can take it, but if you can’t convince your people to settle it, the land will revert to its rightful inhabitants.

I’ll leave you to decide if the murder of an Israeli settler family is off-limits. They’re moved unto properties appropriated from Palestinians, illegal settlement of occupied land, they’re ferried by armored SUVs in military convoys, their rooftops, front gates, walls and streets are guarded by soldiers, their neighborhoods buffered by “sterile zones” purged of all inhabitants, the persistence of their habitation is used to advertise for more settlers and demoralize the non-Jewish native population in waiting of cleansing. Are settlers “innocent civilians,” irrespective old or young age? Who is to blame for putting settler children into homes whose previous inhabitants have been put out on the street, who can only assail their walls with stones?

Remember too, it’s the Israeli settlers, more than the IDF soldiers, who routinely raid Palestinian homes, orchards and farms, killing their neighbors with impunity. Where does any settler get to pretend they should be considered an innocent civilian?

Arab Palestine is confronted with a slow death by attrition. Israel has never disguised its plan to ethnically purge the entire of what it calls Judea and Sumaria. What does it matter then, if resistance violence begets occupier retaliation, if this brazen home-invasion-family-murder provokes an avenging of deaths ten fold? The Russian Partisans paid fifty to one. The Gaza massacre was 300 to one. The Gilad Shalit prisoner ratio is tens of thousands to one, still well shy of US military disproportional force.

Peace activists want to curb armed resistance in favor of nonviolence, calculating that peace will come when Palestinian martyrdom awakens the Israeli conscience, or whichever comes first, Palestinian blood runs dry. This suits Israel of course, its Apartheid State needs the Palestinians gone, for Jews cannot forever pretend they have a Democray while subjugating an inferior untouchable class. So long as one Palestinian remains who fights back, Israel will never conquer Palestine.

Israel can plan all the settlement construction sites it wants, the more beautiful the better, in the end the people of Palestine can claim them in partial compensation.

Afghans mutilated by US kill teams are then disfigured by Der Spiegel editors

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You’re shot up at random by a US kill team eager to engage Call Of Duty in the full-gore mode, who pose with you for a trophy pic, then when it sees the light of day, photo editors decide it best to shield your identity, they say to not dishonor your survivors, but likely to lessen the damning impact of the image. The US soldiers posing with their bloody victims were not holding the heads aloft intending to pixilate the identity of their kill. Why should Der Spiegel rob the unfortunate Afghan victim of his humanity, and the scarce opportunity he has for redress from the systemic brutality being visited upon his people by an invader culture, whose average interaction with his, might be this glimpse of a candid Kodak Moment?

The US-UN no-fly no-flee free-fire zone

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Forbidding flight is not a pun, but a cruel misnomer –a war crime too by the way– international law forbids shooting a fleeing adversary. Or does aerial flight apply to ground forces and naval vessels? So far enforcement of the Libyan No-Fly Zone extends to flight by tanks, ships, and Command & Control Centers, which may yet be taken to include the C&CC lobes of a dictatorial brain resisting regime change, even if that’s not the UN objective. The first night air-strike on Col. Al-Qaddafi’s home reminded me more of the opening act of Schock N’ Awe Baghdad, than what most expect of a UN peacekeepers’ NFZ. Iraq post Kuwait 1991? Bosnia less Herzegovina 1995? Please! New War Czar Obama trumpeted this declaration of a bombing war on Libya with the same speech Bush used to announce the 2003 Christian Jihad against Saddam Hussein (ongoing). The upside of getting to see a No-Fly Zone for what it is, a military bombing spree in the guise of a UN mission, is for all those humanitarian intervention “activists” who cried for a NFZ in Sudan and Somalia. But those assholes knew what it was obviously because they still never call for one to protect Gaza.

New VIP consular services in Pakistan

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The next time you need consular help oversees and you’re made to take a number, you know the US of A can do better than that. I’m fairly enthused about the US consular services plan unveiled to spring undiplomat Raymond Davis from Pakistani jail. If a plea for diplomatic immunity fails, because you’re a CIA operative for instance, try a bribe of millions to the victims’ survivors, wrapped in US Green Cards. Why deny those impulses to shoot your impertinent foreign hosts, in the back as they flee when it’s safest, or by surprise at point blank range? Fire a dozen bullets, none of them misses, leaving crowds of onlookers mouth-agape thinking you’re MF Bourne. A consular vehicle can rush to your rescue, plowing through motorcyclists in its path. Don’t worry, US drivers will be airlifted before local authorities can learn their identities. In the meantime you won’t languish in jail for long, even with half of Pakistan taking to the streets expecting their government to uphold the law.

Yahoo empire blinks on Libya!

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Saddling up, out of the shadows of covert participation in the Libyan rebellion against bogeyman Gaddafi might be the US misstep which the Arab movement has been looking for. It’s not enough that Barack Obama’s active suppression of public uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen unmasked his administration as anti-Democratic, now he’s deploying the brute force already visited on Iraq. Bombs against Gaddafi will soon enough yield innocent civilian deaths and America’s War on Islam not only expands in North Africa, it pits itself against the entire pan-Arab revolution. The Qatar-based Al Jazeera Network may have its own motives for beating the drums of war against the loose cannon madman Gaddafi, while sparing the House of Saud similar vilification, but AJ has succeeded in goading the Western powers to put their weapons where their oil is, effectively throwing fuel on a fire that was stalling against the firewall of the dictator’s repressive might. Forget Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi, the adversary to unite Arabia will be the USA. And while conventional wisdom for Western governance is to announce unpopular policy during the black hole Friday news cycle, our arrogance shows itself tone-deaf to Islam. We might have figured it out watching what happened in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. The secular week-end in the West can erupt as Days of Rage after the reflection of Friday Prayers.

Van Jones is Obama in Greenface, what our president did for race, Jones wants for the environment, New Jack Shit

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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? He’s Black AND he’s Green, and like his former boss Obama, he’s a neo-eco corporatist pushing… Cap-N-Trade! In Al Gore Nobel Prize circles, Van Jones is the environmental darling who was too hot –we’re to infer principled– for Obama’s centrist administration. In post-Hope America, Jones turns out to have been the spoonful of Aspartame that helped environmentalists swallow just the next neoliberal pill, another pitchman for the bankers whose “Green Collar” remedy for our climate -and economic woes- is to trust in big business –let free trade and deregulated profits deliver mankind! No surprise then Colorado College is foisting the so-called upstart to dazzle the impressionable on Thursday March 3rd at Shove Chapel, 7:30pm. And the asshole (his word, not mine) compounds his offense by presuming to greenwash the few terms American workers have to grasp the real issue, class struggle. The blue and white collars differentiate who works and who keeps the profit, and by the way, who’s made the decisions that led the machine to environmental collapse and who pays the price. Green Collar doesn’t describe a shirt, it’s a leash. Oh but JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and the IMF don’t want to take you out for walkies. Their collar is a yoke of servitude, painted color of the day.