As the US Funds Military Dictatorship in Egypt, its Bombs Ensure Military Coup in Pakistan

Not only does the US drone murder Pakistani civilians, it also "accidentally" bombs Pakistani military check-points. 

The United States has always preferred Dictators ruling Muslim nations. The Shah in Iran, Mubarak and the Generals in Egypt, Suharto in Indonesia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and General Zia in Pakistan. They provide "stability". If they step out of line the US can always label them Hitlers, bomb and invade their nations under the guise of humanitarian liberation and maintaining "regional stability". It's advantageous to have well armed despots beholden to the largesse of the Pentagon.

US/NATO policy suppresses democracy in Muslim nations. The United States, UK, and France have all recently announced major military sales to Middle Eastern despots intent on strengthening counter-revolution. Arms sales to states busy crushing peaceful protests does not support the "Arab Spring"(I hate this fucking term. Revolts against US backed despots who have allied themselves with the US in the "War on Terror" are not a sudden awakening. They are not as puerile as a fucking advertising slogan for a Bar of Soap.)


US military and intelligence operations inside Pakistan have exacerbated civilian mistrust of the government. The Government allows US free reign to drone murder hundreds of civilians with impunity. When the United States kills military personnel it enrages them further. They rightly view the so called legitimate government a spineless client state taking orders from Washington, D.C..

All of this uncovers the true aim behind destabilizing Pakistan. The United States wants a military dictatorship in Pakistan. If drone murdering civilians can't bring it to pass, then maybe some soldiers will have to be "accidentally" killed. "Stability" is "worth it" to the US. They weren't above mass murdering nearly a million Iraqis for it.

Classical Shout Out Friday: Empedocles and the Strife of Loving

You look for life, you look and from the deeps of Earth
A fire, divinely gleaming wells up for you,
And quick, aquiver with desire, you
Hurl yourself down into Etna's furnace.
Holderlin, Empedocles.

Double is my account: for at one time it grew to be one alone
from many, at another in turn it grew apart to be many from one.
But double is the coming-into-being of mortals, double their passing away;
for the coming together of all things begets and kills(life),
and as [all things] grow apart again [life] is nurtured, then disappears.
And, continuously changing, they never cease,
at one time through Love all of them coming together into one,
at another in turn each carried apart through the hatefulness of Strife.
                ---Empedocles, Fragment No. 17.

Kalli Kali

Great Mother, fathers have lost sight.  

Patriarchs dig.
They sow terror.
Their seed shames love.
The earth shudders.
It is your time.

U.S. Taxpayer Funded Police Brutality Here, There, and Everywhere

Here

There

Here our tax dollars fund the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. They instructed and aided mayors of various cities to break up Occupy Wall Street encampments and suppress protests with militarized police forces.

There our tax dollars fund the security apparatus of the Egyptian Military Dictatorship. SCAF is almost wholly subsidized by the Pentagon.

Everywhere tactics appear to be the same. Brutalize all protesters with aggressive force. Everywhere, despite the Police's well armed aggression, protesters are asked to remain peaceful. Interesting such requests are never made to militarized Police forces.

Classical Shout Out Friday: Catiline, Enemy of Oligarchs

"Our struggle is for fatherland, for freedom, for life; theirs is a superfluous fight, for the power of a few."
Sallust, Catiline's War.

Even Sallust, a stupendously rich Oligarch, after pages of describing Catiline as a Monstrous Beast displaying every vice at superhuman levels, didn't blush to pen fine sentiment in Catiline's voice.

Cicero once offered to defend Catiline before he, as a Consul, condemned Catiline as a grave threat to the Republic.

Catiline was the worst ingrate to them. Born into Aristocracy, he was a member of the Senatorial Class. He turned against the tyranny of his own. He had to be destroyed.

Over a decade later Caesar took the mantle, with the backing of his Legions, and subjected the Senate to the Imperator's Fasces.

Oligarchs prefer controlled demolition, even Civil Wars between Oligarchs, to sincere rebellion. Better to refine Tyranny than threaten it.



Best sources: Cicero, Sallust---Despite their polemical bent, grains of truth slip through.

Restless Beauty

For the essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance, "Pico della Mirandola".

Masters of Hygiene

Disinfecting Protesters

Clean Up

"I have become increasingly concerned,--as had the park's owner, Brookfield Properties, -that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community."
                --Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City.


"I want to thank everyone for the peaceful demonstration of Frank Ogawa Park tonight, and thank the city employees who worked hard to clean up the plaza so that all activities can continue, including Occupy Wall Street."
               --Mayor Jean Quan, Oakland.


Orders from the top are followed to the letter. Sentiments of those who obey vary in content. Naetheless, concern for civic hygiene remains paramount.

The DHS and FBI orchestrated the "cleansing" of protest camps ordered by mayors in 18 cities to better enforce "sanitation" and "safety" standards. Nothing cleans up messes better than pepper spray, sound cannons, rubber bullets, tear gas, and less advanced forms of Police brutality.

Hymn to Artemis

                  I

Silvery blush of sunless sky
dyes black bruised blue

Lustrous night's virgin halo,
timid brows glow anew

Laughing girls dance circles
Unbroken, she draws true

To you Fair Goddess night falls
In dulcet sways of modest hue.

                II

Night wanes and stills hearths
as heavy eyes seek

Huntress' heart, sure as her eye,
Hones e'ery point's peak

Margins are plots for prey whose
Throats are stopped with ink

For you Fair Goddess we fall
On white fields, quarry for dream.

Recurrent Folly of Demanding Non-Violent Protest When the State is an Enemy in Class War

Peterloo, 1819.

Bloody Sunday, St. Petersburg, 1905.

1. The arrogance of believing the righteousness of one's cause, and the precious manner in which it is peacefully maintained, will magically overcome enemies who have never been ashamed of using brutality is a suicidal form of megalomania. This Liberal messianism is preached in our schools and media via revisionary praise of "peaceful saints" like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr..

2. The stupidity of thinking protest is not a violent reproach to the power which stands to lose legitimacy.

3. The pride that makes one fail to see protest, by its nature, is violent. "We're refined protesters, civil but disobedient. They wouldn't dare attack us."

4. Supine protest invites massacre. Power loves to make a statement with dead bodies(US Resource Colonialism abroad). The above images(and there are countless more) prove this is a constant.

5. Stressing non-violent protest shows obedience to those who sustain a monopoly on violence.

6. The state and its institutions are an enemy in the class war. They have taken a side and are committed to fighting to the death. Prisons are sprouting up all over the country as police forces have been militarized. The past tells us well armed police, be they state operatives or private contractors hired by the state, will not hesitate to murder non-violent protesters.

7. Remove your peaceful heads from your stinking asses and realize if you really want change, you'll have to do more than obediently occupy parks. Our masters are not troubled by efforts to inconvenience them. They'll allow you to string out this morality play long enough to make it tiresome in its futility.

Past Flame

Classical Shout Out Friday: Atomic Bard

I will reveal those atoms from which nature creates all things and increases and feeds them and into which, when they perish, nature again resolves them.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura.

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet of the 1st century BCE. Thanks to him we have the best exposition of Epicurus' philosophy in On the Nature of Things. This great poem is admirable for its clarity and hatred of superstition. Lucretius deftly uses poetic imagery to inspire a greater appreciation for natural phenomena. He dispenses with Superstition* and in its stead sings the glorious naturalism of Epicurus' theory of the universe.  

*Even the opening Prayer to Venus implies the Goddess is revivifying Nature itself and not an anthropomorphic deity, despite the scene with Mars. Plus, as a philosophical poem, he was wise to observe the formalities established by Parmenides, Empedocles, and others. Lucretius wished to open with familiar honey to appeal to readers of his time.

Aragon, Antidote to Armistice Day

...a certain Painleve, Minister of War, signed a monstrous decree the other day: any officer or noncom, any asshole paid to march, from now on has the right to arrest me in the street. The police were not enough. And like them, they are sworn in as of now. The word of this dung is law. Well, agriculture will no longer be lacking for cows. So: since looking at them cross-eyed in the street will get me time in the slammer, I have the honor, in my own home, in this book, here and now, very consciously, to say that I shit on the entire French army.
Louis Aragon, Treatise on Style.

The Valley of Darkness (Allegiance in Sports and Politics)

The ground of an addiction to sports is an archaic spiritual constitution--the possession of the predatory emulative propensity in a relative high potency. A strong proclivity to adventuresome exploit and to the infliction of damage is especially pronounced in those employments which are in colloquial usage specifically called sportsmanship.
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature.
---Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Chapter X.

Sports Institutions, especially popular revenue garnering NCAA Football programs, are the beneficiaries of mass adulation. Sports Merchandise worn by fans become emblems of pride. Many invest great amounts of time and revenue in "their" team. Fans participate vicariously in the triumphs and failures of a sports franchise. This identification is analogous to the nationalism of citizens enjoying the victories of its war machine by unfurling the flag. In short, they are facets of the same Barbarism.

The Penn State scandal starkly represents the absurd lengths such identification can go. A group of students riot to protest the ouster of a revered head coach. A man who participated in a decade long effort to cover up the serial sexual abuse of minors by a colleague at the campus on multiple occasions. Odd that students aren't protesting the ring leaders of the cover up and instead riot for one ring leader to be treated with "dignity".

NCAA Football thrives on exploiting student athletes, revenue hording by schools, and the vicarious triumphalism of its students, alumni, and fan base. Like Nationalism, it is a Cult. The callous barbarism sings the epos of invested allegiance. Who cares about raped children when "JoePa" has won the most games in Division I history and earned the school millions? A corollary in politics: many still "support" Obama despite the fact he's ordered the murder of thousands of women and children with extra-judicial drone strikes because he has a "D" after his name.

Allegiance conveniently accepts evil it'd otherwise condemn. One can easily find a million comments from widely respected thinkers and "good people" celebrating such evil as "pragmatic", "worth the cost", "for the greater good", or, the most common, "Who am I to question? They know what they're doing.".

The rioting of Penn State fans after Joe Paterno's firing was inspired by the same barbarism that had thousands taking to the streets in joy after President Obama announced the US assassinated Osama Bin Laden.

Throughout history allegiance to leaders of powerful institutions has ever darkened valleys with evil.
    

Austerity

Why the long faces? Old and young must unite and pull our ship of state out of this crisis. Stimulating to know so many are sacrificing for the greater good. Reaffirms one's confidence in humanity.  

Classical Shout Out Friday: Illustrious Turn

For it was impossible either to avoid detection by swarms of spies, or if caught to escape death in its most agonizing form. Indeed, even in the company of my nearest relations I felt far from safe.
Procopius, Anecdota(widely published as The Secret History).

Tireless secretary to Belisarius, courtier to Justinian, had another history to write. He had before toiled as the stenographer of War(Gothic, Vandal, Persian) and penned tribute to imperial edifices. Even the favor of Emperor Justinian galled. The titles and sinecures, Prefect of the City, brought shame. His last task was to expose the horrors behind the narrative. Would that we had more like minded insiders now.

Humanity of Markets

The ruling class's vision of shared sacrifice.

Looters of the World Unite and Pillage Nations with Austerity!

Sun Blonde

Canvas the town and brush the back-drop. Are you sleeping?
"Surf's Up", The Beach Boys, music Brian Wilson, lyric Van Dyke Parks.

There are children blonde as the Sun.
   There's music as radiant in tone.


Brian Wilson's an Icarus.


The Beach Boys' "Smile Sessions" was released on Tuesday--a magnificent mess. I cannot sing its sumptuousness sufficiently.


Ont ouvert le printemps dans nos yeux.

Geography Disposed

"Some say that these lands were first known many centuries ago, and that their situation was written down and the exact latitudes noted in which they lay, but their geography and the sea routes by which they were reached were forgotten..."
General and Natural History of the Indies, Captain Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo.



Geography has been digitized, a matter of satellite imagery. Capital busies itself exhausting colonial expropriation. States honor alliances that better serve the effort to extract resources from weaker nations over the sanctity of borders and sovereignty; unless it's a matter of keeping undesirables away or securing the wealth of an insulated elite.
Geography disposes. Its value is in the exchange of data points to augment market hegemony. Surveillance, Security and GPS targeting by high tech weapons are Geography's Golgotha.When colonial epochs peak, geography's end pens the epitaph.