Appalachian Noir

I

Moon's yellow,
a sphere of clouded amber,
shines uneasy over black limbs.

Within,
Pagan Gods are preserved
like amphibians in formalin.

II

Hush. Sirens approach.
Nails of red light scratch our faces.

Time is short.

These bodies must explode.
Our flesh will fuse
forever.

Time is shed.
Nothing shall break us.
In one plot we'll 
transcend together.

The Palestinian Authority=Vichy Palestine

The PA collaborates with Israeli occupiers and killers. They do not represent the Palestinian people. Peruse "The Palestinian Papers" and see how they have always given up nearly everything for crumbs from Israel and the United States. The only good thing to come out of the fake statehood vote in the United Nations is that it may end the "Peace Process", repudiate the roadmap, and stop the United States from helping Israel steal land and brutalize Palestinians in the Territories while doing much worse in Gaza.

Thankfully the ghastly process fashioned at Oslo may also end. If the United States vetoes a yes vote it will alienate itself and its client, Israel, from all of the nations in the Middle East and an overwhelming majority of nations. That would be a good thing. The United States and Israel have arrogantly worked themselves into a dangerous corner.

If the bid fails, it will also undermine any legitimacy the Palestinian Authority claims. They are already unpopular in the Territories and Gaza for the above stated reasons. Much good may spring from an empty gesture at the UN. The two state solution will die a just death.

Monsieur Homais as a Contemporary Journalist

"Yes," said the pharmacist, "no imagination, no wit, nothing that makes a man shine in society."

------Pt. 2, I.

He has more customers than there are sinners in hell; the authorities treat him kindly and he has the public on his side.

He has just been given the cross of the Legion of Honor.

------Pt. 3, XI.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.

As Flaubert's Homais was a concise portrait of the post enlightenment philistine, Thomas Friedman is the present arch philistine of "Globalism". The offhand comments of cab drivers and hotel receptionists the world over are sucked into the vortex of his tireless banality. Billboards and corporate boardroom bon mots are first principles. Ultimately Friedman is the "Ugly American" as an intellectual tourist.

President Obama, bien sur, reads him religiously. Established media in the United States refer to him as a "deep thinker". Our contemporary Homais writes a column weekly for the New York Times.

It is no surprise our Homais is a Centrist. All forms of "extremism" upset him; bottle rockets at a country fair alarmed the 19th century Homais. Like the ass caught between two piles of feed, Friedman can't help braying about the danger of "taking sides".

Unfortunately, he carries and broadcasts the love of his own opinion much further than his literary forefather.

This renders his output less tolerable and culture's adulation("best selling books") of it more troubling.

Under the Exchange

"Electoral democracy greatly resembles the world of the Stock Exchange; in both cases, it is necessary to work upon the simplicity of the masses, to buy the cooperation of the most important papers, and to assist chance by an infinity of trickery; there is not a great deal of difference between a financier who puts grand-sounding concerns on the market, which come to grief in a few years, and the politician who promises his fellow citizens an infinite number of reforms, which he does not know how to bring about and which resolve themselves simply into an accumulation of parliamentary papers. Neither one nor the other knows anything about production and yet they manage to obtain control over it, to misdirect it and to exploit it shamelessly: they are dazzled by the marvels of modern industry and they each imagine that the world is so rich that they can rob it on a large scale without causing any great outcry amongst the producers; to bleed the taxpayer without bringing him to the point of revolt, that is the whole art of the statesman and the great financier. Democrats and businessmen have a very special science for the purpose of making deliberative assemblies approve of their swindling; parliamentary regimes are as fixed as shareholders' meetings. It is probably because of the profound psychological affinities resulting from these methods of operation that they both understand each other so perfectly: democracy is the paradise of which unscrupulous financiers dream."
-------Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, VII, I.

Dick Cheney: The United States Government Made Flesh

"For they illustrate the beginning of this disastrous institution---which Tiberius so cunningly insinuated, first under control, then bursting into an all engulfing blaze."

------- Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome.

It is difficult for "Americans" to gaze upon the living image of their government. Venal, cowardly, heartless, contemptuous of laws, and eager to ostentatiously preen over the glory of snooping, torturing, and mass murdering. They hate this walking mirror. Members of the Punditocracy are seized by a catharsis of slavish infatuation with the power he represents and a cringing abhorrence of his refusal to apologize for the global crime wave it spurred. Cheney, as a proud Patriot, takes pride in its exceptional scope.

If you ask God to bless America, you are asking him to bless Dick Cheney. He is its true spirit made flesh. President Obama is no better. He has a younger, prettier, face, buries the criminality in bromide, and smiles more. The spirit endures though the flesh may unravel.

9/11: Fetishism as Imperial Anodyne

Vain would be all attempts to convey the horror which thrilled the gathering spectators of this piteous tragedy.

---"Postscript to 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'", De Quincey.

A nation has become a somnambulist trying to step out of a nightmare. This nightmare was tailored from its own terror. Imitation was not deemed flattery. Nothing has changed but the exponential rush to fetishism as an anodyne. Exceptionalism is a Neurosis that comforts us in gilded cribs. Security waxes fierce as the noon day sun. It blinds. The United States has never recovered from the audacity of its own violence returning home. It is now a terrorized nation utilizing terrorism to cow its people and murder all enemies. Anodynes are required. A housing bubble, low credit, fraud encouraged, impunity for torturers, and keep shopping!

All to no avail. The mass murder of thousands of poor Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya has not sated our leaders' bloodlust. This war, an Odyssey, must go on. Stop your ears and cover your eyes. Truth is a treacherous Siren.

Every avenue of communication must be monitored for your own protection. People can't have the luxury of privacy. In asserting the right to monitor all citizens the State requires complete secrecy for itself. Again, nothing has changed but imposing complete inability for any citizen to protest State violence and secrecy. Ubiquitous Surveillance has all the legal sanction of Aggressive War.

Incipit an Epic Rant on the "Innocence" of the United States Before 9/11/01

"Outraged chastity avenges itself in continuously fucking."---Blythe Tart

A Nation built on genocide(Native Americans) and exploitation(African Slavery, Chinese and Mexican Slavery on railroads, wage slavery, prison labor, looting through aggressive wars, etc.) has no right to speak of innocence lost. It's birth as a nation established the rule of white male elites who deemed Africans sub-human and Native Americans ripe to be pillaged. THE PAST "INNOCENCE" OF THE UNITED STATES IS THE GREATEST ANODYNE OF ALL. Since the invasion of Mexico in the 19th Century it has embarked on numerous aggressive wars--- Mexico, Philippines, Cuba, Central America, South America, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, etc. Not to mention funding acts of terror and mass murder in Indonesia, Iran, Yemen, Ossetia, Egypt, Lebanon, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bahrain. How many millions have violently perished, before 9/11/01, from the "kinetic benevolence" of this "innocent" nation?

The Atomic Bombs dropped on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki needlessly. Truman admitted he dropped them to send a message to the Soviet Union, not hasten the end of the war.

The cruel medical experiments practiced on poor folks in Central America just after World War 2. This "innocent" nation also infected black men in the "homeland" of "innocence" with syphilis, without their knowledge for a medical study.

Since its inception the United States has labored to make the aphorism, "There is no greater evil than innocence.", a truism.

Jusqu'a l'automne

Legs like ribbons 
brush over ground,



tindering dream's accord. 





Cruel when heaven's 
bright prescience


loses compass 
in meteor showers.



We seek rest, 
wary of umbrous bowers.

Sub specie saeculi

"Times when injustice reigned and a crime was legally sanctioned,....."
---Lucan, Pharsalia, Bk. I, ln. 2.






1. Nobody weeps over the past death of futurism.



2. At no time has so much power been held by so few. Odd those few persistently demand certainty.



3. Anarchists are realists, not cynics. No greater cynicism than believing we need powerful institutions for "the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness".



4. The War on Terror is murderous irony. We are expected to believe the United States and its allies are fighting against Islamic Extremists. No nation has supported and armed Islamic Extremists more than the United States in the past half century. It supported Fundamentalists in Egypt under Nasser. Utilized Iranian fundamentalist support to overthrow Mossadegh. Recruited and armed Wahabbi groups to infiltrate Afghanistan in the late 70's to topple a Soviet backed republic. Armed Iraqi Shiites to topple Saddam Hussein before the last Iraq bombing and invasion. Now the US/NATO is supporting Fundamentalist groups in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi's secular regime. Over 30,000 bombs fell on Libya to support insurgents affiliated with Al Qaeda. The CIA has long supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria. It also arms and supports the Fundamentalist Monarchy in Saudi Arabia. The United States wars on Islamic Moderates by supporting and arming Islamic Extremists. They are useful forces to destabilize social movements in Muslim nations. The United States abhors the "Arab Street".



5. Tell the poor to stop buying lottery tickets. Marketing pipe dreams is evil.



6. Partisans desire betrayal.



7. Political Science classifies the rage of institutional violence.



8. What if we laughed at every manifestation of seriousness? The sobriety of critique never rocks the boat. Sailors should drown seas with laughter.



9. Harpocrates doesn't shine any less because he's forgotten. Don't tell a soul.



10. Ten is more fetish than number. No greater failure than perfection.


11. The nation as household simile is the crassest form of introducing micro-economic fabulism into macroeconomics.

A Message from the President of the United States of AAAmerica(Courtesy of Obamaaa2012)

Keep shopping folks. The recovery's slow, but we're on the right track. Be sure to tune into my speech on jobs. I will say some wonderful things. The theme: "The United States, Forever a Triple A Rated Nation".

Leadership works best when it forges and promotes plans to help everyone. TARP, ACA, and HAMP are glorious examples of free enterprise and the government coming together to serve this great nation and its hard working people. Corporate leaders, Bankers and I have hashed out some wonderful work in the past few years.

What's that? None of this collusion has benefited you?

Well, wait a little. Don't be so fiercely rooted in the now. I won't be so beholden to electoral politics the next term. I'll be free to follow my heart and revisit ties to the community.

Why the concern? It will only be my past. To revisit the War Crimes and widespread Financial Fraud of the past decade would stir up too much trouble. Now is not the time to look back. The recovery is fragile and only a fool would invite more uncertainty. Markets need our vote of confidence. Let's look forward and watch as recovery dawns on tomorrow's horizon.

Until then I gotta raise a fuckload of money to cinch this election. You understand, don't you? Trust me. I am working for all of you. You're all heroes---(dramatic pause)---especially the brave men and women serving this great nation overseas.

God Bless AAAmerica

Obamaaa2012

To donate devote 401k contributions to BAC, GS, JPM, GE, GM, and CXW.

Triumph of the Revisionary Will(Honoring Global Leaders for Peace and Shitting All Over MLK's Legacy)

The most war mongering nation on this planet held a gala to honor those who take the lead in furthering peace and also felt it suitable to honor Martin Luther King, Jr.(a lovely twofer). The image above is of the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright sharing a tender moment with Reverend Jesse Jackson. Did Reverend Jackson absolve her of the half million Iraqi children murdered by sanctions she upheld? Did he ask her to atone for saying their deaths were "worth it"?

It gets much much worse. Dame Albright closed the precedings with a speech and received an award for her past and present efforts to take the lead in furthering peace. This is the woman who cornered Serbia into war with the Rambouillet Accords. She also quipped, "If we're gonna spend so much money on all those fancy weapons we might as well use them." It's a wonder the miniature replica of MLK's Memorial didn't explode contacting her bloody hands.

This festival of unintended macabre humor contained other horrors. It deemed the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, was another Global Leader for Peace. Israel is a warmongering Apartheid state. Gallows humor to have Ambassador Oren speak in praise of a man who'd righteously loathe Israel and anyone who represented it.

The hostess was Mrs. Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell. Her husband thought the Iraq War required no defense. Why? Because, in his words, it was all for oil. That's sufficient!

There were other speakers. The United State Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, especially stands out. He, along with the US State Department, backed the coup in Honduras because the usurper supported US Corporations exploiting laborers with sweat shops and sub-subsistence wages there. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a book extolling the DIGNITY of ALL LABOR. The United States Trade Representative loves "free trade" deals with dictatorships which destroy the rights of laborers to serve transnational corporations. He is an enemy of every laborer on this planet. His sole purpose is to destroy the rights and diminish the wages of laborers. This is a man Martin Luther King, Jr. wouldn't hesitate to condemn. Ron Kirk praising a man who not only spoke against, but also protested fiercely, the wealth inequality our dear Trade Representative daily strains every fibre of his being to uphold.

They attempted to salve the salt in decency's eyes with Reverend Jackson and a musical performance by Stevie Wonder---But, overall, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shabbily used as a front to praise warmongers, apartheid states, and plutocratic vampires as "Global Leaders for Peace".

Feel free to vomit. Then shower.

This Weak in Critique: Zizek Reproaches London Rioters with Left-Wing Infantilism

I POSTURE THEREFORE I AM.

I will not quote his abstruse and meandering clarity of hindsight. Alas, the lack of a manifesto. The inability to mount collective action against a powerful and well armed state. Zizek longed for "a night in which all riots are class conscious". No echoes of Lenin or regret over the loss of "objet petit a". A sad and chaotic affair no studious ideologue could find solidarity with. If only they'd quote Chesterton as good British lads. We pray future rioters will be suitably erudite and crack jokes about cartoons as representational apologetics.

Byron's Scorn

"I have seen some nations like o'erloaded asses
Kick off their burdens - meaning the high classes"

-----Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XI, 84.

The Hell of Uncertainty, a "Free Market" Phobia

"If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty."
-----On Certainty, Wittgenstein, 115.


Uncertainty is killing free markets. Proposed regulation and tax hikes are terrorizing CEO's and investors. Keep in mind they are making record profits and enjoying an unprecedented growth in wealth. But uncertainty is used as a bogeyman to explain the lack of jobs and also to polemicize against regulation and more progressive tax policies. In a time of record income equality, growing unemployment and poverty it seems reasonable to ask more from a class that has benefited the most from tax-payer bail outs. Can they be certain the State will remain their steadfast lackey in the face of rioting majorities?

Economists from Adam Smith to Marx have noted that unfettered markets lead to greater income inequality and uncertainty. In their infinite wisdom the masters of our present day markets want less fetters, more income inequality enshrined in legislation, and greater uncertainty to produce certainty. This is a neurosis born of fear the free ride they are getting from their cronies in government and the people will soon end.

The main fear they have is being held accountable for their fraudulent practices. Since 2006 they have gone on a crime spree largely ignored, and at times staunchly upheld, by our leaders in Government. Fraud continues unabated and is a large part of their success. Will they be able to continue their illegal practices and loot every nation's wealth? Will the lower classes rise up and create conditions making it impossible for markets to sow their own brand of anarchy backed up by the state's monopoly of force? This is the true uncertainty. The elite looters fear the looted. They need the full and unconditional support of every state's security forces. They are getting it in the United States and United Kingdom, for now. The future is not promised.

Inspired by Charles Davis(False Dichotomy)

When a State and its Legal apparatus upholds criminal acts by officials and exacerbates wealth inequality through undemocratic policy, it violates the social contract and loses its right to govern.

The contemporary nation-state is a front for "globalist" cartels(Central Banks, Hedge Funds, Energy Corps, and War Contractors) who loot resources on a worldwide scale for the benefit of an elect few. Law, be it national or international, is willing to overlook financial fraud, torture, aggressive war, and ecological devastation if it serves the power of these privileged cartels.

Valery heralded "The Age of a Finite World" in 1931. Since then wars and wealth disparity have increased globally. It took a half century for the spoliation to return home to nest in nations whose power reaped the greatest rewards. The end, in every sense, of this age necessitates an effort by power to extract more rights and resources from everyone to maintain its "growth".

The National Security State, along with its Central Banking Heart, does not plan on going out with a whimper. It needs blood. The parasite tells the host it's a parasite, i.e. Power tells those it loots to sacrifice more...


I should stop drinking Bhang.
Nevertheless, I stand behind, not hiding, everything above. Mr. Davis is correct about institutions of power being an insular affair amongst elites.

But didn't James Madison establish the insularity of powers in the Constitution?

Godel read the US Constitution and was disturbed because he thought, logically, it contained contradictions that allow for democracy to deteriorate into tyranny--But he didn't marry well.(laughter)

The barbarous vestige of looking for lone heroes in modern "Democracies" echoes the individualistic nihilism of "Free Market" fundamentalism. Nowhere does central planning rig outcomes for so few at the cost of so many as in "Free Markets". Our media always sing about the heroic nature of the lone, sovereign, individual. The entrepeneur, etc It's a great con job. Make the petit bourgeois barnacle feel valorized by pipe dreams Madison Ave microwaves daily in 30 second nuggets......But God forbid people come together, organize, and strive to enact change!(That would be Marxism! Ecrasez l'infame!)

(a response to his post on Institutions of Power)

Cruel Summer, Austerity in the UK

"...but may I, before descending into my grave, see the humiliation of the arrogant bourgeois democracies, today shamelessly triumphant."

----"In Defence of Lenin", Georges Sorel.

One spark sowed a conflagration. The structural violence of Austerity Measures has solely fallen upon the poor and the young. Youth programs are eviscerated as university tuitions rise. All of these cuts and hikes made to secure the wealth and privilege of wealthy rentiers. The media, of course, acts as a handmaiden to cronyist authority by describing the riots as acts of "hooligans", and, when more candid, spouting racist and classist bigotry in commentaries. Their fear is real. They cannot speak the burning truth: Austerity is creating greater divisions, inequality, and inspiring rebellious anomie in the victims. Austerity measures implement looting by upper class "hooligans".

I applaud the rioters targeting shopping districts. It shows a deep recognition of their oppressors. Cameron and his crony regime chose the marketplace over people. In response the people are burning markets down. Sadly Cameron had to cut his summer vacation short to address the firestorm his policies laid out abundant pitch for.

No surprise the igniting spark was police brutality in a lower class, segregated, neighborhood. An "elite" police attack force shot a man needlessly in Tottenham. They attempted to cover it up and justify the murder by planting a gun at the scene and claiming they returned fire. Forensic examination found the "incriminating" bullet found embedded in a policeman's radio was police issue. A small protest at the police station resulted in a 16 year old women being beaten by officers. Police protect property and uphold class barriers. Killing a man and beating young women in a poor neighborhood enforces structural occupation, class division and dissuades the poor inhabitants from asserting their rights.

As inequality grows Police forces become more brutal and work harder to suppress any struggle against institutional attacks. Austerity is a weapon wielded by financial elites to plunder the lower classes. They started this war. The masters had hoped the "peons and parasites", phrases from The Daily Mail comments section, would stay cowered under the heightened brutality of their hirelings(police).

Buildings burn to ashes as rage buoys motes forming dark clouds over English cities.

Epitaph on the Debt Ceiling "Crisis" from an Illustrious Tomb

"Bankers do their best business when governments fail to do theirs."

-----Prince Talleyrand

A Response to Joshua Foust's Piece, "Why the European Right Can't Be Blamed for the Attacks in Norway", in The Atlantic

One is not surprised to see such a "balanced" apologia for Western prejudice against Muslims written from a person who has ties with USAID. Breivik's acts mirror what US/NATO policies do daily in Muslim countries. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Somalia are bombed and subject to internal operations, support of tyrannies, torture, wholesale murder of any who resist occupation, armed, funded and sometimes practiced by Western Intel agencies. Also the US is largely responsible for planting the seeds of Fundamentalism in many areas by funding and arming Wahabbi groups and destabilizing regions to weaken states to secure hegemony over resources(Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Libya,Yemen and Somalia). Does Mr. Foust really think Al Qaeda is not an arm of Western Policy to deligitimize Muslim resistance to Western Resource colonialism? If you look at all the trouble spots in Africa and Asia you'll see two common elements: US/NATO Military presence and Intel Agencies alongside Al Qaeda. The surest sign US/NATO is losing in a region is the disappearance of Al Qaeda. In Afghanistan we are now fighting a Pashtun insurgency. Our patsies have gone. We supported Al Qaeda in Kosovo and Bosnia and we are now supporting them in Libya. The War on Terror is a propaganda bonanza aided and abetted by US NGO's who publish studies and promote the "humanitarian" side of Western Colonialism.

Breivik's insanity is matched by the calculated Islamophobic practice of Western policy. The US, along with NATO, is now bombing 6 nations that "happen" to be Muslim, with a huge military presence throughout NE Africa and West Asia. Is this accidental? Every month drone bombs slaughter civilians in these nations. Breivik's act is no more acceptable than Western aggression. His desire for attention for his greater aims are no more psychotic than Western NGO's analysis of why US/NATO's efforts just need to be fine tuned to work better for the colonized. Mr. Foust himself is an ideological psychotic who fronts the world's largest murder machine and often wrings his hands at the "policy mistakes" it makes. He always argues for a more intelligent and "balanced" colonialism. You'll never see him argue that US/NATO's intervention in these regions is aggressively looting resources and terrorizing people under the rubric of "security".

It's nice to see Joshua Foust defend McCants and other Intel parasites who live off the terror US/NATO inflicts on the people of many nations. Bogus Jihadi groups are infiltrated and guided by Western Intel agencies to provide timely alarm for US Populations as an argument for our growing military expenditures, enhanced security state measures and greater belligerence. Breivik's fears of Muslims are largely driven by Western States consistently warning their people about Islamic Terrorism as they bomb and occupy several Muslim nations.

In the Europe of Le Pen and growing Right Wing Nativism Breivik is not an anomaly. He is the face of Western Aggression towards Islamic nations turned against itself. But Foust grazes over the obvious terror practiced by US/NATO and sheds crocodile tears for his friends in the "Terror Analysis" business. They, like him, live off the terrorism US/NATO nations inflict daily against groups they funded and armed to further colonial aims. It's a good business to get in for people who like to think about how best we can humanely colonize people who resist our resource looting.

Mr. Foust needs to look inwards and examine the psychosis and corruption inherent in his own analysis before he bemoans US/NATO backing drug dealers(Afghanistan), black market human organ dealers(Kosovo), arms dealers and mercenaries. Colonialism can't have humanitarian aims. It can hire NGO's to trumpet its efforts to be more humane. They are promotional hacks attached like barnacles to the terror.

Joshua Foust is a paid ideological courtesan who fervently desires Western Resource Colonialism in East Africa and Asia becomes a kinder, gentler endeavor. He serves what he, in his ardent heart, at times finds abhorrent. I feel sad for the ethical gymnastics his mind must undergo to analyze the looting and mass murder of peoples all in the name of grandiose policies. He wishes to refine terror and oppression of peoples into something humane. Like our Humanitarian effort in Libya--which he, to be fair, is severely critical of. When the bombs stop falling and Gaddafi steps down(who knows?) he might leave his beloved Central Asia(Registan) and start opining on how the West can best serve Libyans. Apply, Rinse, Repeat ad infinitum.

Norwegian Wood: Terrorism Experts Rush to Erect Theories after Oslo Tragedy

"The longer things have been established the more the idioms; the harder times get, the more the idioms increase."



--"Rameau's Nephew", Denis Diderot.





Cable News anchors and invited "terrorism experts" couldn't hesitate to ascribe the bombing and shootings in Norway to Jihadists or Al Qaeda. They cited the level of sophistication and bemoaned Norway's "open society". Another lament, Norway is a peaceful nation unjustly attacked by the madness of "terrorism". Even "prestigious" American publications like the New York Times ran with headlines announcing Jihadist terrorist attacks in Norway. They even reported on a bogus admission of responsibility by a "terrorist" outfit.




The "experts" were convinced Islamic Terrorists were responsible because of the sophistication and scope of the attack. Their analysis concluded it had to be a Jihadi or Al Qaeda operation. Discussions about cartoons depicting Mahomet were given as possible reasons for the "attack". The aerial bombing of Libya by Norway's Air Force was not discussed. Norway's participation in Afghanistan as occupiers didn't garner a peep. Those inconvenient facts did not harmonize with the narrative of a peaceful Norway being unfairly targeted by insane Islamic terrorists.



Within hours of the bomb blast and shooting "experts" had already decided that Islamic terrorists were behind it. They had already depicted Norway as an innocent victim of Jihadi or Al Qaeda barbarians. Does this sound familiar? Their excitement to ascribe blame to those we terrorize daily with remote drone and manned aircraft bombings, invasion, and occupation is not accidental.



It's necessary to inoculate hints of blowback from our terror campaigns elsewhere by falsely stating attacks target "innocent victims". Recall that aerial bombings and drone strikes by the United State and NATO kill many times more civilians than all "terrorist" strikes combined.




A propaganda effort by Western Media went to waste. Only one man has been arrested in the attacks. He admitted to the bombings, was captured at the Labor Party Camp, and identitified as the shooter. A Norwegian man who had a history of writing Anti-Islamic screeds and affiliation with rightwing groups appears to be responsible.





The Western Media has moved on from irresponsibly applying blame to ostentatious grieving. Of course the white Norwegian male charged with the murder of 92 people is not called a "terrorist". When Europeans or US/NATO military operations mass murder civilians it is strategic action striking "terrorist operatives" or, when done by a civilian, the act of a crazed loner.



It's idiomatic. Western mass murderers are heroes or crazed loners. When Muslims resist occupation and the mass murder of their fellow civilians they are evil "terrorists".

Underground

Flash of love
scalds red
a girl's face.

Death's touch
blooms gray
on mother's face.

                                We dance
                                like frightened
                                acrobats.

Mysteries so deep
outlive the bloom
in blush's rebirth.

"Debt Ceiling Apocalypse" (A Deficit Monomania Soap Opera)

The hype surrounding the debt ceiling vote is amusing and alarming. The last time we had an apocalyptic economic crisis Rep. John Boehner wept on the House floor. Those tears were shed to support TARP. It was a handout of almost $800 billion in taxpayer dollars to recapitalize Banks that precipitated the crisis. Debt Ceilings have been raised over 70 times since the 70's. This time is somehow different. Why? There's a bipartisan consensus that something "serious" must be done(except for raising taxes on the wealthiest, increasing inheritance and investment income tax rates or cutting defense spending). When the word "serious" is used by Politicians in Washington, D.C. or corpress pundits, one must know something unpopular to the majority of people in the United States will be done. The majority will have to tighten their belts to insure wealthy treasury bondholders can collect interest.

This crisis is a case of deficit monomania. They must terrify people with economic armageddon to defend cutting Social Security and Medicare. It's the "serious" thing to do. Even President Obama is on board. He'd never dare raise taxes. Cutting defense is not on the table. Taxing investment and inheritance at the same rate as labor? NEVER!

The negotiations will be extended as close to the deadline as possible to necessitate a "serious deal". President Obama wants to do "big things". Speaker of the House Boehner wants to defend the banks and hedge funds, again. They agree more than they differ. The media coverage of the acrimony and focus on process is empty theater to persuade folks there's a real difference and, therefore, a crisis. Nonsense. The debt ceiling, like 70 times before, will be raised. I wouldn't put it past these political marionettes to go over the deadline to let the market crash and allow Wall Street pundits to "seriously" decry "the lack of confidence" and "uncertainty" that has extended the recession and high unemployment rates.

The same Soap Opera as the first TARP vote, when Boehner wept.