When Fascism Comes to America…

Posted on Friday, 10 September, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

Place yer bets!

I got an email from Intrade, the prediction market, today that kind of gave me a jolt: “Despite mounting opposition, Reverend Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, is planning to burn copies of the Koran at his church on Saturday – the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” it said. “Will Reverend Jones back down or will he go ahead with the planned book burning? Intrade has a market on this! Click HERE to see the latest market prices.”

Intrade allows you to buy and sell futures on events as opposed to company stocks. It’s like a mix of the New York Stock Exchange and the online bookies (not that different from one another). You can buy shares of “Osama bin Laden will be captured by the U.S. this year” or “there will be a split House and Senate in 2010″ instead of AAPL or GOOG. It’s gambling for people like me obsess about stuff other than sports and don’t have a clue whether Pittsburgh will beat Atlanta on Sunday.

How common place a good ol’e fashion book burnin’ has become in the ol’e U S of A. It’s something to wager on. I haven’t bet using Intrade in years, but still get the newsletter. I’d once put odds on the Taliban ignoring international outcry and blasting those big Buddhist statues to bits, and it paid off okay.

But if I had some disposable income laying around the smart money would be that these Florida backwater hicks aren’t going to go through with it (Update: according to War in Context, they aren’t! Damn me for not placing that bet) now that they’ve got the attention, but there will be no shortage of copycats elsewhere in the U.S. as well. This is the level to which discourse has sunk. In the political battle of the U.S. this year, stupid is on the march.

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PAL JAM: a Palestine Direct Action Fundraiser, Party and Workshops

Posted on Monday, 6 September, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

Pal Jam: Music, dancing, knowledge and fund raising for direct actions for Palestine

“If I can’t dance – I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Thus spoke Emma Goldman (1869-1940) and it’s been variously repeated and attributed since.

PAL JAM is a combination concert, party and workshop to raise funds for Palestine direct action. If you’re in London and you’ve got an empty Saturday the 11th of September laying around, there’s 12 hours of great things to fill it between 4pm and 4am. I know I can’t think of a better way to spend a September 11.

“Direct actions in support of Palestine, such as blockades of Ahava or Carmel Agrexco don’t pay for themselves, van hire, D-locks etc all cost cash money. Therefore a network of people who carry out such actions are putting on a fundraiser to pay for future actions. Come on down, with a banging line up and a great social centre to have a party in (the Ratstar comes with 2 rooms of music, a cinema room and even a roof terrace, oh yes), there has never been a funner way to support a great cause.”

Find out more!

File this one under Do Something, My Palestine crush | Tagged in , , | Now you say something

Panorama’s blurry vision on Free Gaza flotilla attack

Posted on Wednesday, 18 August, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

Those tuning in to Monday night’s Panorama on BBC may have finished the episode under the impression that a Turkish ship had attacked a group of Israeli pleasure boaters somewhere off the coast of Tel Aviv. In fact, it was meant to be an exposé on the Israeli military’s deadly attack on a civilian vessel flying under a Turkish flag in international waters carrying an international crew and passengers and aid shipments bound to Gaza in an attempt to break a siege there that defies international law. See how easy that was? The show’s lead reporter, Jane Corbin wasn’t able to actually explore that in any depth the entire half-hour slot she had.

Corbin is a member of the Panorama documentary team and a self-styled “renowned expert on the al-Qaeda network and Islamist threat” that faces us all. I know this because it’s how she advertises herself. She even wrote a book on it.

Corbin ostensibly set out in Monday’s docu-drama to answer the question of what happened on the ship Mavi Marmara that led to the deaths of nine of its passengers by the guns of the Israeli commandos that stormed it. Spoiler alert: After a half an hour, the viewer is none the wiser. 80% of the program was devoted to commandos who killed 9 civilians while, at the most, 20% was devoted to all other comments. Her lengthy, fawning interviews with Israeli Navy flacks and TV-approved commandos failed to provide a definitive answer. The scant time dedicated to eye witnesses who had been aboard the Mavi Marmara on the night of May 31 also apparently failed to suit her narrative of choice. As a result, what we the TV audience received was pure propaganda.

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File this one under My Palestine crush | Tagged in , , , | 5 are talking about this

Sharing in the era of asymmetric threats

Posted on Wednesday, 11 August, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

Video Assange

Wikileaks editor Julian Assange showing the decrypted military video from Baghdad attacks July 2007. Photo by jenny8lee via flickr

Before launching into the diatribe, I thought I’d accomplish the inverse of what most blog posts do (including those found on this site) and make my point first.

Now that we’ve got that sorted, what to do with it all? I don’t know what to say about the encrypted insurance file yet, no one knows what’s in it. Keep it, though. With the other one, well, have at it. do anything you want.

Be like the Guardian and mash it up in different ways and share how you did it. Crunch the data yourself and post it online. Save it on your hard drive somewhere in case different sites mirroring the information should for some mysterious reason come under attack. Burn it onto CDs and write “Dixie Chicks” on them in black marker. Copy them onto spare USB flash drives and leave them on busses, subways or any of your other preferred means of mass transit (In the UK some government agency workers do this by accident anyway) Make image files out of them and share them. Print them off and make wallpaper.

This is how the web works and it is an example of the web working. 

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Thanks, Brian Baird

Posted on Saturday, 31 July, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

“When the United States is on the side of injustice, it harms our country, it harms our integrity, it harms our principle, it harms our standing in the world. People want to believe that we, as the world’s leading superpower, live up to our highest virtues. And when we fail to do that, it threatens, and endangers, and undermines us.”

— Rep. Brian Baird, speaking at the 9th Annual National Organizers’ Conference for the US Campaign to End the Occupation

Hey Brian,

I hear you’re stepping down from Congress soon. Sorry to hear about it, really. It seems like you’ve finally arrived to a place where I could vote for you again, and now the whole process has to start over and I have to listen to a new representative get it wrong for years upon years. Perhaps you’ve decided that your awakening has come with the unfortunate side effect of being unable to win another election while also saying what you believe. That may be true, but so what?

I think that’s the best time to run for re-election. As much as possible, we need it on the public record how many people actually vote and campaign against rationality. Elections are when these people out and say things which can be recorded. We need that. When need to know which fellow Democrats, Republicans and other parties will or won’t do so, because more importantly than serving democracy for yet another election cycle, we can measure public reaction and see exactly where your part of the United States stands.

So, put it to the test and run again. You’ve got nothing to lose.

File this one under My Palestine crush, Open letters, Politics is everything | Tagged in , , , | Now you say something

Wrong website, lady

Posted on Thursday, 29 July, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share

A lady going by the name of “Angela” sent a message to me via the Committee to Protect Bloggers website contact form. Not only does she not know how to turn off caps-lock, she confused the committee website with Wikileaks and, I guess, me with Julian Assange. I’m flattered, but his hair is way better than mine.

Date and Time: Monday 26th July 2010 18:43:37

IP address: 96.243.197.224 (pool-96-243-197-224.tampfl.fios.verizon.net)

Message: HEY JULIAN — I HOPE YOU ARE PROUD OF YOURSELF. FOR SOMEONE WITH SUCH A BIG MOUTH, YOU ARE PRETTY SLICK IN HIDING YOURSELF. IN MY OPINION, YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE. YOU DON’T CONSIDER OUR BOYS FIGHTING FOR US. NO MATTER WHAT THE COST, YOU HAVE TO FORCE YOUR WAY OF THINKING ON THE WHOLE WORLD. IN MY OPINION, YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A CANDY ASS–JERK OFF. GET A LIFE AND DO SOMETHING WORTHWHILE INSTEAD OF COSTING SOLDIERS THEIR LIVES. YOU ARE A REAL COWARD FOR HIDING. WHY NOT EXPOSE YOURSELF AND YOUR LOCATION TO DEBATE–IT FIGURES WHY YOU ARE HIDING — JUST LOOK IN THE MIRROR.

92,000 documents showing in detail how the U.S. brutally “pushes its opinion” on the world and this is what she comes up with?

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