1. “End the Korean War
With the sixtieth anniversary of the Korean war approaching, the failure to conclude a formal peace treaty is a major entry in the Encyclopedia of Ridiculous Facts. All these years later we find ourselves upholding, memorializing, and mimicking the crazed behavior of Syngman Rhee, the South Korean dictator who did his best to torpedo the signing of an armistice. As the prospects for a ceasefire brightened, Rhee repeatedly defied the US, and the UN, threatening to withdraw his troops from UN command and go on fighting. Massive bribery and a mutual defense pact that ensures South Korea’s status as a US protectorate-in-perpetuity succeeded in changing his mind, but not before several thousands more had been killed in a war that ground up four million human lives.
On account of Rhee’s stubbornness, and then on account of our own, the Korean peninsula has been enveloped in a time warp: the cold war ended in 1989, but in the land known as the Hermit Kingdom time has stood still. Rhee’s intransigent spirit still dominates the discourse in South Korea. Yang Moo-jin, of Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies, echoed the official view in his response to the North Korean proposal: “We can see [Pyongyang's] concealed intention to soften discussion of its denuclearization.”
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Not to our policymakers, however, who are using this bit of unfinished business to perpetuate our Korean protectorate, which serves no useful purpose aside from being costly. Our present policy also helps perpetuate the North Korean regime, one of the most murderous and tyrannical in the world, and certainly the nuttiest. Pyongyang needs this state of war as much as we do: how else would they justify to their own starving and brutalized citizens the widespread privation and total dictatorship that rules their lives? As long as an official state of war exists, the ruling caste of North Korean party men and military types will retain the loyalty of their base. The day this wartime mentality is relaxed is the day the regime starts to come apart.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/01/12/end-the-korean-war/
2. “President Barack Obama recently expressed a reluctance to send U.S. forces to Yemen and Somalia, two “failed states” where al-Qaeda is active. Obama seemed to realize that such a U.S. military presence might make the terrorism problem worse. If he understands this effect in these two nations, why doesn’t the same principle apply to the war in Afghanistan?
In resisting pressure to send U.S. troops to Yemen in the wake of the underwear bomber’s connections there, Obama commented on sending American forces to places such as Yemen and Somalia. He said that he had “no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground in those regions” while the local governments remain effective partners. Obama also concluded that Washington must ponder “how we project ourselves to the world, the message we send to Muslim communities … the overwhelming majority of which reject al-Qaeda but where a handful of individuals may be moved by a jihadist ideology.” Obama advocates “a larger process of winning over the hearts and minds of ordinary people and isolating these violent extremists.” He had expressed similar sentiments during his famous speech in Cairo.
These are mostly valid sentiments but contrast sharply with his acceleration of the war in Afghanistan. The governments of Yemen and Somalia are no stronger, less corrupt, more competent, or in control of more of their own territory than the Afghan government. Yet more U.S. troops are seen as beneficial in Afghanistan but as counterproductive in Yemen and Somalia.”
http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2010/01/12/politics-gets-in-the-way/
3. “Can personal privacy survive the digital revolution?
Sprint Nextel, for example, provided the government with GPS locations of its subscribers via their cell-phone signals 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. As Soghoian writes, telecom and Internet providers “all have special departments, many open 24 hours per day, whose staff do nothing but respond to legal requests. Their entire purpose is to facilitate the disclosure of their customers’ records to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” Verizon, objecting to a FOIA request by Soghoian, expressed concern that subscribers might start bothering it to provide information dumps that the company only provides for cops. Verizon also worried that customers would ask whether their info was being coughed up to law enforcement. Of course, Verizon would not tell them.
These two stories—Patriot reauthorization and telco cooperation—frame the battlefield on which American privacy is being slaughtered. On one end is a government that wants to suck up as much information as it can with as little oversight as possible. On the other end are private companies—to which we entrust more and more information about what we are saying, writing, buying, and thinking—that in effect act as government information agencies.
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All of these debates about principles and processes seem beside the point in the shadow of two huge structures under construction in Utah and Texas. As NSA historian James Bamford explained in the New York Review of Books in November, the Utah facility will be “a million square feet … one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined …[it will] house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital ‘pocket litter’… . the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.” Their data storage capacity will probably exceed that of every computer in the world; their legal and technical ability to snoop, data mine, and draw conclusions about all of us will be nearly unstoppable.
But the public doesn’t seem concerned enough about any of this to make a political fuss. When I asked the EFF’s Bankston if the change in administrations had made any positive impact on government policy toward privacy and surveillance, he answered quickly, “None.”
http://amconmag.com/article/2010/feb/01/00010/
4. As we already suspected, this proves that most Americans are fools:
“Poll: Most Americans would trim liberties to be safer”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/nation/story/82156.html
5. What a moron:
“Pat Robertson’s Racist Blaming of Haitian Victims; and the Televangelist Misuse of History
6. “Blunder and Plunder: The History of War”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16954
7. “Harold Ford’s warped understanding of “capitalism”
So the rugged individualist Harold Ford — who inherited his father’s Congressional seat at the age of 26 — is a self-proclaimed “capitalist” who believes that people “should lose” if they don’t do well: unless, that is, the people who “don’t do well” are his funders and controllers on Wall Street, in which case they should be propped up by the U.S. Government with bailouts and loans and Federal Reserve tricks until such time that they can pay themselves tens of millions of dollars in bonuses, at which point they should be left alone in the name of “free market capitalism” and keeping the Government out of the affairs of industry and away from their “rewards.” What Ford is advocating, of course, is the exact opposite of free market capitalism: it’s risk-free crony “capitalism,” warped corporatism, the essence of decaying emerging-market nations in crisis, in which the coercive power of the Government is harnessed by a corrupt financial elite for its own benefit and at everyone else’s expense, to ensure that people like Harold Ford can maintain their chauffeurs and weekly pedicures and helicopter rides he strangely boasted of enjoying.
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A primary reason for this acquiescence is probably found in the blatant deceit of Harold Ford’s comments. Americans have been taught for so long that the Joys of Capitalism are unchallengeable even when they result in great disparities, and that those who enjoy its fruits do so because they deserve it. As Ford said: “I believe that people take risk, and there are rewards if they do well.” That would be all well and good if that were actually what was happening. But it isn’t. The people who own the Government operate without risk and with the full protection of the coercive political power they have come to own. The rules are rigged completely in their favor, and (with some rare exceptions) the obscene rewards of today are anything but well-earned, anything but the by-product of “risky” entrepreneurialism. It’s obviously possible to sell some pretty blatant lies to an apathetic and passive public, but the one that Ford and his funders are peddling here — these huge Wall Street bonuses are the joyous by-product of fair and rugged “capitalism” — seems a bit too blatant to be sustained.
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In addition to comments like these, what made Ford’s interview so stomach-turning to read was his willingness to say the exact opposite of what he so stridently said during his unsuccessful run for the Senate in Tennessee just three years ago. He’s hardly alone in that regard — Ford’s likely primary opponent, Kirsten Gillibrand, instantaneously transformed from right-wing, lobbyist-serving House Blue Dog Democrat into Good Loyal Doctrinaire Progressive upon being appointed to her Senate seat — but Ford is particularly unskilled in hiding his soullessness. It’s just a reminder that most national politicians are so desperate for the petty perks of power that they’re willing to publicly humiliate themselves by making it clear that they believe in nothing and are willing to recite whatever will please those around them and those funding them. It’s creepy and ugly and explains a lot about our political class.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
8. “Bush Sr. a ‘Murderous, Zionist Piece of Shit’
For a man whose son became one of the most polarizing, controversial and even hated figures in U.S. history, a mouthful of pizza may not be worth a mouthful of profanity.
At an unidentified pizza shop visited by George H.W. Bush recently, one of the customers decided to give the former president a slice of his mind, replete with generous toppings.
“Murderous, Zionist piece of shit,” the man said as he filmed the scene. Bush’s entourage of guards quickly turned and began walking toward the camera.
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“Murderous, Zionist piece of shit,” the man said as he filmed the scene. Bush’s entourage of guards quickly turned and began walking toward the camera.
“Are you happy for the millions of deaths you’re part of?” the man continued. “People know. People are waking up to the reality of this, Mr. Bush.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24384.htm
