The Palestinian Situation

I've been hearing of conflicts between Israel and its neighbors my whole life, but the news media never explained enough for it to make sense, and I'm afraid I never took the time to fully inform myself.

I was of course horrified by the Holocaust; the images from the death camps were burned into my brain at an early age, and they and the history that goes with them should never be forgotten. And I read Exodus, which portrayed the founding of the modern Israel in thrilling terms; and I could certainly understand why Jewish people would feel the need for their own state, where they could never again be a persecuted minority.

But from the start, I had trouble understanding why it was fair to force the people already living in those lands to give them up in order to create the new state. If Westerners were so keen to support the project, whey didn't they donate their own lands, instead of taking from others?

The history of this situation is long, with many twists and turns, and I remain embarrassingly ignorant about most of it; but during the last few years, I've come across a couple of items that seemed helpful enough to share.

The first was a video by artist Ursula Biemann, X-Mission (2008) (viewable at the foregoing link), which explores among other things the effects of the division of the Palestinian people among geographically dispersed locations and their partial re-connection via new communications technologies.

The second is the image at left, from Michal Vexler at +972 (click on it for a more legible version), which shows how Palestinians have been divided into five categories of citizenship with different rights and subject to different restrictions.

Since 1980: Your Share of What You Produced

From Alternet:

According to Paul Buchheit, a professor with City Colleges of Chicago and founder of fightingpoverty.org, “if middle- and upper-middle-class families had maintained the same share of American productivity that they held in 1980, they would be making an average of $12,500 more per year.” The size of our economy, he wrote, “has quintupled since 1980, and we all contributed to that success. But our contributions have earned us nothing. While total income has also quintupled, percentage-wise almost all the gains went to the richest 1 percent.” This upward redistribution of wealth “translates into a trillion extra dollars of income every year for the richest 1 percent.”

We don't have a tax problem. We have an employment / wages problem.

If you live in Dallas, TX, see Occupy Dallas.

Our Spending Priorities

Nice visual summary from True Majority. Click on the image for a larger version, or find an even larger one here.

The Time Is Always Now

Live Stream of "Occupy Wallstreet"

UPDATE: If you live in Dallas, TX, see Occupy Dallas.

A few headlines via DU today

("DU" meaning democraticunderground.com.)

Report: Obama top recipient of [Murdoch's] News Corp. donations

Political donations by News Corp., its employees and their families were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with President Obama the all-time leading recipient, according to a report from the Sunlight Foundation. (More at The Hill.)

Cenk Uygur was removed due to "political pressure"; Phil Griffin: MSNBC is "part of the establishment"

After a nearly six-month tryout for the Internet talk show host Cenk Uygur, the cable news MSNBC is preparing to instead hand its 6 p.m. time slot to the Rev. Al Sharpton. . . . Mr. Uygur, who by most accounts was well liked within MSNBC, said in an interview that he turned down the new contract because he felt Mr. Griffin had been the recipient of political pressure. In April, he said, Mr. Griffin “called me into his office and said that he’d been talking to people in Washington, and that they did not like my tone.” He said he guessed Mr. Griffin was referring to White House officials, though he had no evidence for the assertion. He also said that Mr. Griffin said the channel was part of the “establishment,” and that “you need to act like it.” (More at The NYT.)

The "Gang of Six" deficit-cutting plan

Sen. Bernie Sanders warned, "The plan would result in devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and many other programs that are of vital importance to working families in this country. Meanwhile, tax rates would be lowered for the wealthiest people and the largest, most profitable corporations." (More at Common Dreams.)

How to save $2 trillion

There are 23 million Americans who can't find full-time work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There are 50 million Americans who can't see a doctor when they are sick, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

There are more than 15 million American families who owe more on their mortgage than their homes are worth, according to Zillow. That's almost a third of all the families who own homes.

* * * * *
I'll be honest – the federal deficit for the year 2021 is not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, these days. But let's assume – arguendo, as they used to say back in Ancient Rome – that for some reason, there were some compelling, emergency need to work out how to cut $2 trillion from projected federal budget deficits over the next ten years.

I have an idea about how to do that. It's a very simple idea. In fact, I can sum it up in one word, with five letters: PEACE. (More from Alan Grayson at DU.)

New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included is a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

Prior to the filing, Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not." (More at freepress.org.)

(Originally b&w image above by Ansel Adams, Internees Reading Newspapers, Manzanar Relocation Center, from the Library of Congress.)

Movie-Based Gifs

Lots more at iwdrm.

Isao Hashimoto's "1945-1998" Maps Nuclear Explosions

Last Word

A Few Headlines: "Learned Helplessness" in Schools, Missing Billions, & More Media Control

1. At DU, links to info re- "CIA torture theorist working for KIPP charter schools": former American Psychological Association (APA) President Martin Seligman originated a theory re- "learned helplessness" which, if I understand correctly, involves breaking down individuals' autonomy and replacing it with uncritical compliance with authority. Seligman actively assisted in the development of the CIA’s torture techniques, and now his theories are apparently being used on students in charter schools. More at the link and at Schools Matter.

2. At The Fiscal Times, "Billions of Dollars 'Vanish' in Afghanistan." "The United States has spent more than $55 billion trying to rebuild war-torn Afganistan and win the confidence of the people, but most of that money can’t be accounted for or has been wasted on failed projects." More at the link.

3. At HuffPo, "FCC breaks Obama's promise, allows corporate censorship online with fake Net Neutrality"; more at the link.

4. The FCC and Department of Justice may be about to approve a proposed merger between Comcast and NBC Universal. Below, Al Franken explains why this would be disastrous for the rest of us and how you can help stop it.

Pilger on Propaganda in the Media

John Pilger is a journalist and documentary maker who's twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award and whose docs have received academy awards in Britain and the US. This is the first of 7 segments, all currently available on YouTube.



Pilger was relatively early in identifying Obama as a "corporate marketing creation."

Daniel Ellsberg Arrested

The most famous whistle-blower of the Vietnam era hailed the leading figures behind the WikiLeaks document dump as heroes today, before heading off to chain himself to the White House fence as a protest against efforts to prosecute them.

On the day WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made bail to win release from the London prison where he has been held on sexual assault charges, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg defended Assange and his alleged source, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. Manning is being held in a military prison at Quantico, Va.

"I see Bradley Manning as a patriot, and I’m sure Julian Assange is an Australian patriot," Ellsberg said in a press conference today. "To call them terrorists is not only mistaken, it’s absurd and slanderous. Neither of them are any more terrorists than I am, and I’m not."

Afterwards, the 79-year-old Ellsberg headed to the White House to be chained to its snowy gates as part of a protest organized by Veterans for Peace, which also organized the press conference along with GetUp!, an Australian activist group. Ellsberg was one of dozens arrested, the Associated Press reported.

More at the National Journal.

Wikileaks Info Reveals Afghan Meltdown

NYU political science grad student Drew Conway has used open source tools to chart the incidents reported; the trend doesn't look good.

More charts and other details at Wired, including the one from which I made the animated gif at left.

UPDATE to add the following, excellent animation based on the same material:

"What I Learned from the Army": Killology

What I learned from the army about language and dehumanization

It's hard to get people to shoot other people when they aren't in imminent danger. People have the unfortunate habit of seeing other people as fellow humans. They hesitate, they start questioning the ethics of what they are doing. It eats them up and ruins them for battle.

We do two things in basic training to compensate for that. We work on instincts, training people to shoot faster and view their targets as a video game or a measure of our own skill, rather than personalizing them. Silhouettes pop up and down so fast, and they look like people but they are paper with aiming circles printed on them. We start categorizing our targets as not fully human. Colonel Grossman is somewhat of an expert on that [http://www.killology.com].

The other thing we do in basic, in military culture in general, but it's very specifically started in basic training, is we use language to normalize the dehumanization of others and assert our own supremacy. We use slurs against whoever is the enemy de jour, and we do this because normalizing their characterization as lesser than fully human, based on their group identity, is an important step in making violence against them more acceptable.

Haji, the word when it's owned by the people who truly own it, it's nothing offensive. It's people on a pilgrimage. But we use it in the army do identify them as The Other. Commanders understand the importance of Othering the enemy. When Mattis said "It's fun to shoot some people," that wasn't an accident. It's part of normalizing the enjoyment of violence because the people committing that violence need to believe it's normal, in order to stay sane while doing it.

He went on to add: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

That's a great statement if you know your men are going to be killing Afghan civilians in the course of their normal business. It uses language to mark them as different because they are muslim, and it marks them as Lesser Than Real Men. They don't have any manhood, so they are lesser than fully human, in the default (male) sense.

It's genius, really, because he can claim it's about defending women even as he's upholding and appealing to male supremacy.

And it's genius because it shows he understands dehumanizing language as a sort of gateway drug to violence without remorse.

(Thanks, noamnety!)

In Amerika

Facebook Status of a Young Muslim:

"YOU TAKE MY WATER, BURN MY OLIVE TREES, DESTROY MY HOUSE, TAKE MY JOB, STEAL MY LAND, IMPRISON MY FATHER, KILL MY MOTHER, BOMB MY COUNTRY, STARVE US ALL, HUMILIATE US ALL . . . BUT I AM TO BLAME: I SHOT A ROCKET BACK!"

Note the 1st item (you take my water).

(Thanks, Mari333!)

Cindy Sheehan: Camp OUT NOW

Sheehan has announced that on March 13 (which I'm told is the anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq), she will found a new camp across the street from the White House, on the lawn of the Washington Monument. The camp will have two purposes: to protest the U.S. wars in Iraq and A-stan, and to serve as a community for those who have lost jobs and homes during what she terms "the Goldman Sachs Depression." More at PeaceoftheAction.

Still Not Clear Why We're Escalating in A-Stan?

"It turns out that, in April, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India (acronymically TAPI) signed a Gas Pipeline Framework Agreement to build a U.S.-backed $7.6 billion pipeline. It would, of course, bypass Iran and new energy giant Russia, carrying Turkmeni natural gas and oil to Pakistan and India. Construction would, theoretically, begin in 2010. Put the emphasis on 'theoretically,' because the pipeline is, once again, to run straight through Kandahar and so directly into the heartland of the Taliban insurgency. "

More at The Nation, HuffPo, Undernews, CTV, Asset Protection Index, The Nation again, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard, the Project for a New American Century, Wikipedia, and Drillbits & Tailings.

Documentary on the U.S.'s Involvement with Weaponized Anthrax

Five of the world's top few scientific experts in biological warfare using anthrax have met untimely deaths that their family members or respected experts regard as suspicious. Anthrax War investigates these deaths and ultimately points toward the possibility that the 2001 anthrax attack in the U.S. was intended to bring about a massive expansion of the U.S. biological weapons "defense" programs indistinguishable from preparations for offensive biological warfare.

Produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.; directed by Robert Coen. You can watch it on YouTube in segments; find the first one here.

"Twitter Users Heckle Hoekstra En Masse"

From TalkingPointsMemo
By Eric Kleefeld - June 17, 2009, 6:01PM

Earlier today, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) put up this astonishing post on Twitter, likening the oppression of the Iranian people to the plight of House Republicans:

Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.

In the hours since, the Twitter community has responded -- with massive heckling. Here's just a small sample of some of the best ones:

ArjunJaikumar @petehoekstra i spilled some lukewarm coffee on myself just now, which is somewhat analogous to being boiled in oil

chrisbaskind @petehoekstra My neighbor stopped me to talk today. Now I know what it is like to be questioned by the Basij!

luckbfern @petehoekstra I stand in solidarity with the oppressed rich white men of Repub Party in the House. #GOPfail Allah Akbar!

aciolino @petehoekstra Today I poked my finger on a hanger. Now I know what all those aborted babies go through.

ceedub7 @petehoekstra I got a splinter in my hand today. Felt just like Jesus getting nailed to the cross.

netw3rk @petehoekstra Someone walked in on me while I was in the bathroom. Reminded me of Pearl Harbor.

MattOrtega Walked out onto Constitution Ave in D.C. and was almost hit by a taxi. Reminded me of Tienanmen Square.

tharodge @petehoekstra maybe now is a good time to reconsider whether you are ready for national politics?

TahirDuckett @petehoekstra ran through the sprinklers this morning, claimed solidarity with victims of Hurricane Katrina

paganmist @petehoekstra Had to move all my stuff to a new office w/o a corner view. Now i know what the Trail of Tears was like. #GOPfail