Tag Archives: google

Rebecca Tinsley and Darfur- when ‘Waging Peace’ is calling for imperialist military action

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Rebecca Tinsley, head of a British group called ‘Waging Peace’, spoke this past Tuesday at Colorado College. Her topic was Darfur and stopping a supposed genocide going on there. The report of the meeting in the Colorado College student newspaper neglected to mention that she was also director of this group, ‘Waging Peace’, nor that Tinsley is also a hotshot within the Carter Center.

And who else is hot within the Carter Center right now? Why it happens to be Madelyn Albright, who once told a CBC reporter that the deaths of half a million Iraqis per Clinton’s sanctions ‘were worth it’. Albright was also a featured speaker last year at an American rally calling for ‘action’ against Sudan. ‘Waging Peace’ it seems, is in reality making propaganda in favor of imperialist intervention rather than against it, though they might try to deny it.

I was unable to get to the Colorado College forum on time, but a quick google on Tinsley and ‘Waging Peace’ is quite educational in itself. Here is Tinsley calling for European imperialist intervention into the African country of Sudan from the website of that group she directs. See their Feb. 15, 2007 press release.

Rebecca Tinsley spends much of her time lobbying Tony Balir and George W. Bush to ‘intervene’ in Africa where she is fond of shouting GENOCIDE, GENOCIDE, GENOCIDE in every direction. It seems that she is not that interested in the genocides underway against the peoples of Iraq, Palestine, or Afghanistan, though. She specializes in calling for imperialist action, not for calling to stop imperialist action. She calls this ‘Waging Peace’!

Progressives need to educate themselves more about these NGO types that do as Rebecca Tinsley and the Carter Center associated liberal hawks like Madelyn Albright are doing with Darfur. Edward Herman has an interesting commentary today on Znet about Human Rights Watch, another NGO that is prone to shrill for starting off imperialist ‘actions’ by crying GENOCIDE, while staying rather mum on ongoing genocides by imperialist countries. See HRW in Service to the War Party

Of note: Rebecca Tinsley is also a member of the London Human Rights Watch committee.

Where are they now?

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Whatever became of the children of Baghdad

If you do a Google search for images of Iraqi children, you’re led mostly to pro-war sites where war-bloggers are trying to foster the contortion that our soldiers love the children of Iraq. Operation Iraqi Children is a military sponsored project where concerned Americans can donate school supplies to the needy students of Iraq, for use in their newly painted schools.

Over the Hubbert Peak into war

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Most Colorado citizens probably think that Hubbert Peak might be a fourteener somewhere, and not the reason our country is at war. Fact is, the US led the rush to overmine the world’s most precious resource which is petroleum, so there actually is an oil shortage now. And certainly both Oily Dick and Dubya the Dummy are well aware of that, even if most liberals seem often not to be.
Mount Hubbert

And this shortage is not a temporary one but is becoming most permanent. A shortage that can only worsen, so off to war they took us, all to grab that precious and declining resource. What does the Hubbert Peak mean? It means for one thing, that the Iraqi War is not Vietnam all over again. Vietnam had no important resources, but was a war for political influence and control of a region. It also means that occupying Iraq is not just a ‘clash of civilizations’.

What it does mean, is that those who have taken America into this war feel that they are fighting for their very lives. Yes, Dick and Dubya are fighting for the continuation of profit-making as they know it, and that is their life. With declining world stocks of oil, that means declining possiblities of keeping oil cheap, and declining standards of life for both them, and for us, because of that. That’s why the Republicans, and most of their Democratic Party friends and enablers, are so very hesitant and reluctant to back up and get out of Iraq. If corporations cannot deliver the goods, even the dumbest of ‘We, the People’ will begin to grow dissatisfied with them our supposed leaders. Osama is not the real terrorist for us, it is the lack of oil that is.

Why do the liberal religious peacenics fetish solely focus on American troops dead? That’s not the main point to the Oilies running the show. Cheap oil is. Heck, just having some oil around is most important to them, and really to us too, even if the oil becomes not so cheap. Dick and Dubya think it can only be gotten continually by war, for conservation is off the books for them. That’s an effort they don’t want to make even though it is completely necessary to do so. No Blood for War, should have an additional line to it. Conservation, not Devastation! It is about much more than just the direct killing, as awful as that might be. This war is to maintain our oily way of life.

Exxon-Mobil might pretend that there is no such thing as Global Warming and a Hubbert’s Peak, but that’s all it is really. Pretense. They are not as stupid as they pretend, and are way ahead of most of American society in thinking about the consequences of running short with their precious resource. They are in serious trouble, and so are we, as supplies have begun to dwindle.

If you are reading this commentary and haven’t figured out yet just what I am talking about, then Google ‘Peak Oil’ or ‘Hubbert’s Peak’ on over at Wikipedia, and do yourself a favor and read about it some. Good luck, and try not to get too depressed. Our lives are going to change, and it won’t be much fun at all.

Lockheed and Bush are LunarTicks

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I just love this new Bush plan to militarize green cheese! It’s all very Ray Bradbury even. Let’s put the Pentagon on the moon!
 
The way this is announced is to try to convince people that all their tax payer money is not going for warfare from way up high, but will just be an innocent little moon rock expedition. Of course, none of this will actually go as scheduled. By the time 2020 Space Odyssey roles around, the US will have a national debt of about a google’s google of dollars.

Search engine surveillance

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I remember a ProFiles Magazine story published twenty years ago called Mouse Trap, about a fictional computer program developed to differentiate individual users based on their keystrokes, by identifying the pattern to the rhythm of their typing.

It should be no surprise that your typing signature can be as unique as your handwriting. Since that fictional story, researchers have of course patented exactly such a program. I describe this technology to illustrate that computers are recording more about us than we think we are revealing. Our own computers.

Computers with Windows Operating Systems are notorious for running stealth programs without the specific consent of the user. Microsoft still denies conducting behind-the-scenes activities even when they are observed and documented by computer users. However the internet has made every operating system vulnerable to computer surveillance.

Let’s be clear. Identifying who we are online is the least of the surveillance goals. We are already identified by our unique computer M.A.C. address, our connection IP, our cookies, and our own internet use patterns. It’s not who we are, it’s what we are doing.

By now we all know that our internet search activities are logged and studied. After the accidental release of some Google search records, it became clear that an accumulated history of search queries can be enough to determine a user’s identity. Perhaps this has made us all more careful about what we type online.

I’m going to guess that the sense we are being watched online has made us a little more apprehensive each time we hit the enter key. Let me say that such apprehension is misplaced. We are being observed BEFORE we hit the enter key.

The celebrated cross-platform language called Java, which adds functionality to our browsers and is indeed now required by many webpages, is giving uninvited observers a peek at what we type before we decide to submit it. You can see this in action a couple places.

A first example would be IM. Instant message interfaces record when you start typing, to alert your correspondent that a message is on its way. If you decide to backspace over what you typed, to the beginning for example, your correspondent will be updated that the forecasted message will not be forthcoming. Your IM buddy can confirm that your messages are not delivered until and unless you hit enter. But your computer knows what you’ve typed all along, and the IM interface knows it too. Even if you opted to rewrite your message, the IM interface has recorded every iteration, before you decided you wanted anyone to see it.

Another example would be search engines. I’d like to direct you to Answers.com where the Java enabled suggestion box descends as you type your query. When you first try to revise your search, Answers.com offers suggestions for related searches. You may think that the page returned to you by your browser came bundled with that list of alternative suggestions. But try typing a new query from scratch. You’ll see that you’ve got the full resource of all possible queries coming forward to help out. HTTP didn’t send those to you. Those arrive based on what you are typing in real time. Answers.com is watching what you are asking before you decide what you’d like to be observed asking.

There’s an option on the Answers.com drop down box to “hide suggestions.” At least that is truth in advertizing. Your option isn’t to turn off the suggestions box, only to hide it. Hiding the Java helper will mean it won’t assist you with suggestions. It will still be transmitting your keystrokes.

Ask.com is another search site which openly hopes to entice users with its search tools. These are the same kind of “tools” which record what you are thinking of doing before you’ve done it.

The option to “hide” Java tools should give you a clue about what the other search engines are already doing. With Google and Yahoo, for example, the Java tools are hidden. Unless you have Java completely disabled on your browser, any website can elect to monitor what you are typing.

Big Brother offering suggestions for your search query

Here comes Hurricane Che

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The Red Peril at our shoresGoogle it. “Ernesto.” See what you get: Ernesto the hurricane and Ernesto Che Guevara. This season’s brightest prospect for an action weather spectacular has been given a decidedly un-American name.
 
To me it’s reminiscent of the 2004 season when the National Weather Service would not conceal its election year partisanship. The 2004 hurricane names alluded to three countries which led the opposition to our planned Iraq invasion. Frances, Ivan, Karl. Not to say anything about last year’s villain, invoking a perennial nemesis, “Katrina.”
 
It’s coincidence no doubt, but as Hurricane Ernesto was downgraded to a Tropical Depression, Jeb Bush still kept Florida in a state of emergency because as he said, “a hurricane is a hurricane.” Doesn’t it sound like he’s talking about a commie?

The boogeyman looming in this hemisphere is the growing Latin American sovereignty movement led by Castro, Chavez and Morales. It’s the Red Menace at our shores.

What next from our Minutemen at the National Weather Service? Hurricane Fidel? Tropical Depression [Subcomandante] Marcos?

Israel promises to retaliate 10 to 1

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Civilian victims of Israeli retaliationIn the days when Hitler occupied Europe, the Nazis had a problem with insurgency. At that time it was called the resistance. Resistance fighters, usually ordinary civilians, conducted espionage, acts of sabotage and executions of collaborators or Germans when they could.

Out of frustration, and to deter further acts, the Nazis promised retaliatory measures against the occupied population. Ten citizens from that town, for example, would be shot for every act of sabotage. Sometimes it was fifty. On the Russian front the ratio was even higher. There the insurgents were called partisans.

We witnessed a vivid example in the film Schindler’s List. In concentration camps, the Nazis would punish infractions by lining up prisoners and shooting every tenth man. A friend of mine in Colorado Springs, a camp survivor recently deceased, escaped several of those line-ups before he was traded to Britain for a German officer in a prisoner exchange.

Collective punishment is illegal under the conventions of war. It’s illegal because it is inhumane and unfair. Perhaps you remember back in your schooldays, feeling it was unfair when your coach ordered you to do fifty pushups because of the failings of the weakest team member. But the coach was trying to build your body, not kill you.

The collective punishment strategy didn’t work for the Nazis, not even in the name of protecting the homeland.

Perhaps because of the universal condemnation of collective punishment, our domestic media is not reporting a recent declaration by Israel, regarding its actions against Hizb’Allah in Lebanon. The world is aflame with indignation and the world is calling for an immediate cease-fire.

What is the world hearing that we are not? Two days ago, they heard the Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff General Dan Halutz promise to destroy ten buildings for each rocket. Specifically, Israel will destroy ten residential multi-level buildings in southern Beirut, for every Katyusha rocket that lands on Haifa. Google the headline and see the story that isn’t playing here.

Zidane is not a son of a Harki

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What did you say?Harki is Algerian for collaborator. Zenedine Zindane has publically refutted the accusation before.
 
“Zizou” Zidane could not even speak the word on TV when asked what taunt had provoked his now infamous headbutt in the last ten minutes of the World Cup. He would only say that Materazzi had insulted his mother and sister, three times.

The western press has suggested that the term was “terrorist” whore. Doesn’t make sense, does it? What kind of traction do your mother’s combat boots have anymore? Zidane is the son of Algerian parents who emigrated to France after Algeria gained its independence.

But there’s a word in France that still burns every Frenchman. Collaborator. Use your imagination what it means to insinuate that your mother and sisters were collaborators.

While it still raises a Frenchman’s blood pressure to accuse his family of having collaborated with the Nazi occupation. There is sympathy as well for those accused. Quite a few French families did collaborate or had no choice.

The term that Zidane refuses to repeat, even in defending his action, was in his words, “a grave insult.” His parents speculated that the term might have been Harki. (If you Google: algeria +grave +insult, you get Wikidedia’s definition of Harki.) Harki is the name for Algerians who collaborated with the French against Algeria’s fight for independence. It is a term with which Zidane has a history.

Boy oh boy do I imagine the western press does not like to deal with insults being thrown at colonial sympathizers. At a time when the Iraqi people are trying to fight their American invaders, and Palestinians are trying to throw off their Israeli occupiers, and each repressive government is trying to recruit turncoats for their cause. There on television we’re shown the profund visceral resentment of being accused of betraying your own people.

At the World Cup Final on TV we saw that a person could forego the unblemished legacy of his sports career, even jeopardize the World Cup match for his team, just to repudiate the suggestion that his family slept with the enemy. The enemy being the West.

Ironically, the western press chose to translate Harki as “terrorist.” It wouldn’t seem to be much of an insult at all, unless it accurately referred to the French paratroupers use of state-sponsored terror to thwart the Algerian struggle.

Just as Iraqi resistance fighters are being called insurgents and terrorists. There will be a word to describe those Iraqis who collaborate with the brutal US occupation. Maybe that word will mean “terrorist” after all.

The Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission

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PPJPCYesterday I attended the annual members meeting of the Justice and Peace Commission and felt like there was an inertia of inactivity, or let’s say activity of lesser consequence, which was not to be overcome. As if perhaps the PPJPC were not going to let this war disrupt their good efforts toward promoting sustainable living, fair trade and mass transportation.

The overriding issue this year? Finding a permanent home for PPJPC, instead of renting. That is a very nice goal, but it is my belief that circumstances have not dealt that hand. Our times have been dealt the specter of fascism in the form of undeniable crimes against humanity and the exacerbation of some very cruel domestic policies. Barbarians inside the gates so to speak. Now is not a time for starting a knitting club. At least not for the PEACE AND JUSTICE club!

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. I honor each of PPJPC’s goals, but I have to point to the limited resources. PPJPC has only so much money, so many members and so much energy. To put it another way, we have so many members, and so much energy, let’s direct everybody toward where we can make the most difference!

While I’m being an alarmist, why not look at global warming, which some experts are saying we can no longer reverse, and bird flu, which is spreading faster than you can Google for updates. I certainly do not have any remedies other than what seems to be obvious. Now is not the time to have a moron in charge of our country, particularly such a spectacularly ungifted dauphin whose regents are only motivated to protect and enrich themselves. That’s where we have to start.

2.
Another great concern I have about the direction of the PPJPC is its focus on propagating non-violent communication. This is the quite honorable idea that consensus can always be achieved through non-confrontational discussion.

If teaching non-violent communication should indeed be PPJPC’s mission, then the results become largely internal. Wouldn’t the membership of PPJPC have to increase by hundreds or thousands every month to justify such a meek objective? It can’t be enough to take donations from people who would like to see reform in our prisons for example, only to camp outside the prison walls and teach each other proper prison code of conduct.

To my mind, the pacifism which PPJPC is trying to teach, looks more like passive-ism. If the PPJPC board members want to be Buddhists, to accept whatever comes, to rise above earthly conflict, that is fine. But I would think it is hardly what its members are expecting the PPJPC to do. We can each of us choose the path of passivism, of acceptance, of transcendence, without need of a Pikes Peace Justice and Peace Commission.

Phantom taste

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Nouveaux Tricheurs
News is that PHANTOM OF THE OPERA has now surpassed CATS as the longest running Broadway musical.
 
Is that worthy of celebration? Yes I certainly think it is. It is a milestone of the triumph of crap. Not just style over substance but crap over style and substance. The “style over substance” put-down always grants that a thing has style if little else, when in fact it may have neither. These days you only recognize style because someone’s large budget has declared it so.

Phantom of the Opera is crap. It has three quarters of a good melody at best, and the adaptation is awful. Phantom overtook Cats which had itself one full good song and retold an older story also badly. But don’t take my word for it, Google it!

What do they have in common, beside Sir Andrew Lloyd W? A Manhattan audience that doesn’t know art from something their precocious tyke made for them at school. The triumph that spanned the Reagan era and the present lawless frontier has yielded an audience of wealth mongerers, brokers, marketers, influence peddlers and their retenue that redefines philistine. They would applaud monster truck lap dances, for the irony of course. In the Alanis sense of the word I suppose.

Is Phantom of the Opera, good spectacle? Sure! Maybe like other mega-spawns of Broadway Vulgar, it should seek its own genre to dominate. Or step off Broadway to find its real competitors like Cirque du Soleil or that white lions show.

Operetta doesn’t presume to be opera, the Radio City Rockettes don’t pretend to present American Musical Theater. If we are celebrating the 8000 performance of Phantom on Broadway, that’s a lot of Broadway stage which could have been schlocking art.

This reminds me of the recent literary award given to Stephen King, for popularity.

Does it matter? I think so. It’s like giving the teacher of the year award to Xbox.

Outing the media

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Girlfriend

Tom Cruise is gay. John Travolta is gay. Vin Diesel is gay. I don’t care if you think they are too cute, or have that special tu-ne-sais-quoi that only a heterosexual could exude. They’re actors! And they’re gay!

(If you Google “Vin Diesel”, you’ll see that blog entries abound by guys who’ve hooked up with him at clubs.)

(John Travolta is always the not-easily-placated queen of whichever movie set he’s working on. Ask anyone who works in the entertainment industry.)

(Tom Cruise’s pecadilos stay just outside of the gossip columns. Since the 80s! And so what? It’s fine! He’s gay!)

They’re gay. Nothing wrong with being gay. Nothing wrong with jumping unto a couch proclaiming your love for Katie Holmes. Nothing wrong with staying in the closet…

Unless you are serving a corporate mouthpiece that is simultaneously denying gays equal benefits and human rights, or a corporate media that is advocating homogeneous marriage (pun rejected) and religious worship.

There is something wrong with a media which covers up the normalcy of homosexuality at the same time that it holds gay rights under full frontal attack.

This isn’t about whether Tom Cruise wants to come out or not, it’s whether the media machine which is Tom Cruise the bankable property wants to come out. Very plainly it doesn’t.

Do you care if the media doesn’t want to be outed?

The fight over gay marriage is not about parenting rights or hospital visitation rights, although those are no small things. It’s about benefits, primarily health insurance benefits. If roughly 10% of human males are gay, that’s the percentage of the significant other population which the insurance industry doesn’t want to cover. That’s a lot of money. And outside of the walls of the beancounters in the huge insurance buildings, sitting in Emergicare waiting rooms, or sitting at home because they don’t have a doctor, that’s a lot of people.

If we live in a time when it can be admitted that Alexander the Great was gay, then Tom Cruise can be gay. Perhaps a gay Tom Cruise would still be bankable. Probably not in Asia. Well tough titties.

He can go on boffing Indoneasian hotel stewards to his heart’s content. We just don’t need to see his proto-hetero hystrionics on national TV which the networks use to force-feed white bread religion and marriage down our throats.

When you see such glee on the face of an actress like Katie Holmes, you see her happiness at having signed a fixed term contract to be Tom Cruise’s beard in exchange for the visibility of being the chief accessory to the world’s most bankable star. Tom Cruise is introducing Katie Holmes to Scientology. Could be, he’s not screwing her. Tom Cruise and Co simply set up a contract with the next actress who wishes to take centerstage with him, with specific guidelines and for a specific time period. Nicole Kidman, Mimi Rogers, et al, chose not to renew their options, or vice versa. Nothing wrong with that.

But there is something wrong, Tom, with being used as a tool to oppress others like yourself who do not have the financial resources you have.

And there is something wrong with a media perpetuating myth.

The RealNews toolbar

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The RealNews toolbar (www.newstoolbar.org) as a non-portal frameset which can provide a temporary selection of news sites to your browser, without your having to have the bookmarks, nor even suffer traces of the websites in your browser history.

If you’ve reached this article by clicking on the RN navigation link at the top, then the toolbar should be above this page, pretending to be part of your browser.

The toolbar is comprised of over a dozen categories, each with around a dozen news sites. The collection is not meant to be complete. It is rather a handy selection to provide an objective glimpse of current events. If you know of an invaluable web resource that is not included on RealNews, be sure to contact them.

A number of other options are accessible from the RealNews home page. There are changeable themes for example, to make the toolbar stand out, or alternatively to make it blend in. There are also several hidden groupings, among them a top twenty list.

Simply bookmark the site at whatever configuration you prefer. There are no cookies or javascripts to track your activities. The RealNews Toolbar provides a perfect shield for your reading activities. The browser history will only ever reveal that you have been to the RealNews site, ideal for people browsing at their workplace or at a public machine.

My preferred point of entry for reading each day’s news is at the top 20, with Google News as the initial page, and the Night Vision toolbar theme.

For local news I have bookmarked the Colorado Springs selection.