"Comrade Sinan got it right: "The role of the intellectual may be shrinking into that of the micro-blogger or street organizer. To some, that is just fine. “I don’t think there is a need for intellectuals to spearhead any revolution,” says Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi-born poet and novelist who has written extensively on the Arab Spring and now teaches at New York University. “It is no longer a movement to be led by heroes.”" Exactly. It is a good thing. Let the intellectuals be marginalized."Interesting posting on the Valerie Percy murder.
". . . anthropologist and organ trade expert Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who described Israel as a 'pariah' in the organ transplant world, has said in the past that many of the donors were desperately poor immigrants from eastern European countries such as Moldova, Romania and Russia.""‘Guardian’ columnist apologizes for ‘anti-Semitic slur’":
"A Guardian journalist has apologized after being accused of anti-Semitism following an article in which she maintained that Israel’s eagerness to bring home Gilad Schalit was based on a “Zionist” belief that the lives “of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbors.”The thousand-to-one ratio on the prisoner swap just proves the generosity of the Jews. I'll bet they'd give you two organs for the price of one, and even cheaper if they come from a Palestinian prisoner.
Deborah Orr, a columnist for the Guardian, said in an article published last week, titled “Is an Israeli life really more important than a Palestinian’s?”, that the prisoner swap between Hamas and Israel, which led to the release of Schalit, “tacitly acknowledges acceptance of that obscene idea.”"
"The zillionaire investor Warren Buffett has been famous for a long time, and he's always enjoyed superb press, even when he ought to be questioned more toughly -- for example, he owns 20% of Moody's, which was one of the ratings firms that failed so badly in the mortgage bubble.On the 'suicide' of Phil Graham (also here! and here).
Part of the reason for his loving press coverage was that he made so many correct investment decisions (Americans love a winner), partly because he's an excellent prose stylist, and partly because he was sleeping with the owner of the Washington Post and Newsweek, Katharine Graham. I'd heard that mentioned in passing quite a few years ago, but Buffett confirmed it in 2008: He started having an affair with Graham, one of the most famous women in America, when he was 46 and she was 59. This apparently led to Buffett's wife moving to San Francisco with her tennis pro. (I know that sounds like a Joe Esterhazy screenplay, but I've actually seen the rich man's neglected wife takes up with the tennis pro thing happen in real life, so there's good reason why it's a movie cliche).That got me wondering whether there was any connection between Katharine Graham's late husband Phil Graham, the manic-depressive publisher of the Washington Post who killed himself in 1963, and Buffet's mentor, the Columbia finance professor and inventor of "value inventing," Ben Graham. It's all the Lattice of Coincidence, right?In this case, nah. It turns out Ben Graham was born in London and was Jewish. Paul Graham was born in South Dakota and was not. Instead, Paul Graham was the older half-brother of Bob Graham, who was governor or senator of Florida for 26 years."
"Dray, one of the most prominent Jews in France, had been the subject of threats in the past. His palatial villa – which was called Madrid – was considered one of the most secure in the French capital.Reminds me of Safra, who died surrounded by security.
It was regularly surrounded by police and private security guards, and is equipped with anti-intruder measures including cameras and infra-red alarms."
"Ottawa engineer Abdullah Almalki says new documents show the RCMP's assessment of his terrorist threat was both wholly unfounded and clouded by racism.
Almalki, a Carleton University graduate and father of six, spent 22 months in Syrian custody after his arrest on May 3, 2002. He was questioned based on faulty Canadian intelligence and tortured.
Almalki on Tuesday released explosive new documents obtained under federal Access to Information legislation, which reveal that RCMP investigators had found nothing against him both before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In an RCMP memo, dated Oct. 4, 2001, an investigator concludes: "O Div. (Ontario Division) task force are presently finding it difficult to establish anything on him other than the fact he is an arab running around."
Despite that internal finding, the RCMP, in a letter to the Syrian intelligence agency, labelled Almalki "an imminent threat" to Canada's national security and linked him to al-Qaeda.
That letter was issued on the same day, Oct. 4, 2001, that RCMP investigators admitted they had nothing on him."
"In this comment I’ve chosen my words carefully. I’ve called the Palestinian prisoners ‘hostages’ because they’ve been held as leverage for a ransom – the ransom being Palestinian submission. (This isn’t all; they’ve been held also to satisfy the narrative of Israeli innocence and Palestinian criminality). I’ve called the Israeli prisoners ‘terrorists’ because they operated in an organisation which applies physical and psychological violence against civilians for political purposes.It won't be long before a lot of these released heroes and freedom fighters will appear on the first Palestinian stamps.
The Israelis are the ethnic cleansers and the occupiers. The Palestinians are the refugees and the occupied. Zionist propaganda constantly obfuscates these simple facts. The Palestinians are the first victims of the propaganda, but Israeli Jews are also its victims, as the future will demonstrate."
"So my immodest proposal is simply this: Individuals and households in the bottom 99 percent who owe debt to any large financial institution that received federal government support during and after the 2008 crisis should see their debt forgiven."Makes perfect sense, is just, and would fix the economic problems that throwing billions at the banksters made worse. So, it will never happen.
"It all started when a group of masked youths wearing helmets descended on an otherwise peaceful demonstration, smashed storefronts, and set one car ablaze (the one in front of it would later catch fire and be incinerated). How these people were allowed to enter the crowd, how thousands of Italian police were seemingly unprepared for them, how the chaos and violence could have lasted so long while being perpetrated by so few is completely baffling. Unless, of course, these were thugs hired by the government to sabotage the demonstration in order to delegitimize it. In which case it makes perfect sense."
"Williamson County records had also indicated an arrest for possession of a controlled substance, but officials said Wednesday that that was a mistake and Arbabsiar was never charged with that crime."The charge was in March 2010. The normal procedure would be to drop the charges in return for the patsy's 'help' in investigating the Mexican drug cartel. Normally, a guy like Manssor Arbabsiar would never have the opportunity to meet with a high ranking member of a Mexican drug cartel. Who does he think he is, Walter White? The FBI would provide the introduction, to a guy who just happens to be a DEA informant. The sting would be to convince the Mexican that Arbabsiar could provide the cartel with wholesale quantities of Iranian heroin. In the middle of the two weeks of negotiations, the informant managed to make this seem like it was about an assassination plot, something that never would have even occurred to a guy like Arbabsiar (watch the two Gareth Porter videos, and read this). The twist may be that somewhere along the line Arbabsiar decided he could scam his Iranian contacts into paying him a commission for the drug deal Arbabsiar knew would never go through (which would explain the payments made to him from a mysterious source, presumably prepayment of part of his commission for arranging the deal). From Arbabsiar's point of view, the whole thing was about staying out of jail while making a little money on a phony drug deal. The entire assassination plot was fed into the transcripts by the DEA informant. If Arbabsiar went along with it, it was just to keep the drug deal in play long enough to collect money from Iran.
"If you and xymphora are accusing me of being Gabriel . . ."It takes a hell of a lot to get banned around here but one way is to obtusely misread what I've written or put words in my mouth, and the hasbara troll McBride is fatally guilty of both. Gone! I'm leaving the comments that are up, but if I see another one by 'Sean McBride' it will be removed.
"The closet Nazis are coming out of the closetBy the way, by 'reckoning' I don't mean any kind of violence. I mean we'll be able to separate the Evil from the Good. For one thing, the powerful won't be allowed to use phony claims of victimization in order to hide their victimizing. They won't be able to keep tricking us into fighting wars and killing literally millions of people - and millions of dead is the stakes we're talking about here, along with massive suffering, the end of international law, political oppression, etc, etc - so that a tiny group of supremacists may be able to build their ark in the Middle East to protect them from assimilation. That sort of thing. The kind of thing that we creeps don't like.
by Gabriel
No. Not really. They hide their poor little oppressed nordic posterior beneath internet handles, while their aluminum foil hat blocks the mind control exercized by us "cultural marxists" from reaching their mushed brain. The blob of excrement lodged underneath the handle "Xymphora" recommends to put me on a list for now, powerless as he is, for eventual "reckoning." I'm guilty of describing in too much details how Atzmon fabricates history. I am confident I won't be put on the same list with Kevin Macdonald, who graceously found the passage from Mein Kampf that most clearly articulates Atzmon's contribution to the "study" of history.
But Xymphora is wrong. This isn't about the history of National Socialism. It is about the undergrowth of mould and slime that is proliferating in the interstices of modern barbarism, ready to done the blackshirt and do the "recknoning" as soon as the Master finally graces them with the attention to which they feel entitled. Until that happy moment they will have to satisfy themsevles with reading Atzmon. I can barely imagine how depressing that must be.
I'm already on the shitlist. Put me on your list as well, creep. Ii's a distinction."
"U.S. officials, meanwhile, confirmed the Obama administration has had direct contact with Iran over the allegations. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, met with Iranian officials at Iran's mission to the U.N. on Wednesday - a highly unusual contact for two countries that do not have diplomatic relations."
"The truth of the matter is that Israel’s long arm is not necessarily just the Mossad as you may have thought. The title fits nicely to some of our so-called Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist stooges.Atzmon is concerned by the horror of what is being done by Jews to people in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yet note how, through the miracle of 'anti-Semitism', this has been turned into a debate on the history of National Socialism! Appalling. Violent racial supremacists hide everywhere. For now, while the Jews have the power, we need only keep a list of those who use the slur to enable the violence. The reckoning will have to come later.
Predictably, half a dozen Jewish ‘anti’ Zionists, who have been terrorizing the Palestinian solidarity movement and activists for decades are also very unhappy with my new book The Wandering Who. This is understandable for my new book doesn’t just expose Zionist cultural and ideological morbidity, it also exposes the level of duplicity that is entangled with Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist discourse. The book depicts a clear ideological continuum between the ADL and the so-called Jewish progressive cells. In fact, The Wandering Who openly criticises any form of Jewish secular political discourse Zionist and anti Zionist for being racially oriented. Jewish political activism and identity politics are basically nothing but different forms of a racially exclusive political exercise."
"The goal of the settler movement is to destroy any hope of a two-state solution, which is seen as limiting the Jewish people’s right to all of the land promised by God. Egged on by an ever larger number of rabbis, the hardliners in this camp are too blinkered to understand that Israeli leaders, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have already voided the peace process.and:
It was no coincidence that the torching of Tuba’s mosque came in the wake of an application last month to the United Nations by Mahmoud Abbas to recognise Palestinian statehood. The Palestinian Authority president raised the stakes, and so too did the settlers – by this time including Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority, a fifth of the population, in their “price tag”.
The Jewish extremists’ new strategy is apparently to stoke hatred and violence on both sides of the Green Line. As has been noted by Jafar Farah, the director of the Mossawa Center, an Arab Israeli advocacy group, the intention is to drain any residual support among Israeli Jews for a Palestinian state by persuading them that they are in an apocalyptic struggle for survival."
"With no hope of statehood, Palestinians will have to devise their own new strategy for coping with the reality of an apartheid system in which the Jewish settlers become their permanent neighbours. Trapped in a single state ruled over by their occupiers, Palestinians are likely to draw on the experience of their cousins inside Israel.The all-or-nothing logic of the settlers should be turned around to leave them with nothing (although I don't see the game playing out that far, as the Jews will commit another form of suicide first, by starting a war they can't win).
Israel’s Arab community has been struggling with marginalisation and subordination within a Jewish state for decades. They have responded with a vocal campaign for equality that has antagonised the Jewish majority and resulted in a wave of anti-Arab legislation.
The two Palestinian communities, both confronting a harsher future under Israeli rule, have every incentive to develop a unified platform and struggle jointly – and more powerfully – against an overarching regime of Jewish privilege.
Their response could be tit-for-tat violence – that is certainly what the settlers would prefer. But a more effective and likely long-term strategy is a civil rights movement much like the ones that fought against Jim Crow laws in the US and against apartheid in South Africa. A simple rallying cry, voiced to a world exasperated by Israel’s self-destructive behaviour, would be “one person, one vote”.
Netanyahu and the settlers hope to subdue Palestinians with the establishment of a Greater Israel. But as the conflagration of mosques suggests, they may ultimately achieve the opposite. By reminding Palestinians on either side of the Green Line of their common fate, Israel may yet unleash a force too powerful to control. The price tag – this time demanded by Palestinians – will be high indeed for the Jewish supremacists."
"The common representation of Israel’s birth is that the U.N. created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the U.S. governmental establishment supported it. All these assumptions are demonstrably incorrect.She goes on to describe the details. The good thing about Israel's obvious and total illegitimacy is that it will be all the easier to wind the thing up when all the Jewish tricks finally sputter out.
In reality, while the U.N. General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council.
Second, the General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes.
Third, the U.S. administration supported the recommendation out of domestic electoral considerations and took this position over the strenuous objections of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
The passage of the General Assembly recommendation sparked increased violence in the region. Over the following months the armed wing of the pro-Israel movement, which had long been preparing for war, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions throughout Palestine, implementing a plan to clear the way for a majority-Jewish state.
It was this armed aggression, and the ethnic cleansing of at least three-quarters of a million indigenous Palestinians, that created the Jewish state on land that had been 95 percent non-Jewish prior to Zionist immigration and that even after years of immigration remained 70 percent non-Jewish. And despite the shallow patina of legality its partisans extracted from the General Assembly, Israel was born over the opposition of American experts and of governments around the world, who opposed it on both pragmatic and moral grounds."
"One aim of the American invasion here was to establish a moderate center of Shiite Islam, democratically inclined and oriented to the West, that would be a counterbalance to Iran’s system of clerical rule. However, something like the reverse seems to have happened. As Iran has used its political connections to hold great sway over Iraq’s leadership class, and has backed militias responsible for assassinations and attacks on American bases, it has been less successful wielding other mechanisms of power at a grass-roots level."This is the 8th/9th step of the Zionist plan for the Middle East. It is odd to read it in so many words in the New York Times, which consistently suppresses such information (it sounds ridiculous as an American goal when you consider how much money Americans spent on it). Of course, the Times spent a considerable amount of time
"It’s usually assumed that the reason Americans specifically don’t want to see taxes raised on the rich is because, in spite of driving a defunct GM brand four-door, they think of themselves as the “soon-to-be rich.” But a paper published in the National Journal of Economic Research in July suggests otherwise. They offer that it’s not hoping to be on top that makes us not want the wealthier to be taxed more – it’s the fear of being at the bottom. It’s referred to as “last-place aversion.”
The Economist wrote, “In keeping with the notion of ‘last-place aversion,’ the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the ‘rich’ but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves.”
So taxing the rich isn’t about the fantasy that we’re going to someday be rich – it’s about the very real visceral fear of being, well, the poorest. If the government helps those below you, then they’ll be at your level – that’s the unfairness they’re afraid of."More food for thought from that Economist article:
"The differences in attitude towards redistributive taxes are not just between countries but also within them, and economists have several explanations as to why. When it comes to differences between countries, social cohesion plays a major role. Broadly speaking, countries that are more ethnically or racially homogeneous are more comfortable with the state seeking to mitigate inequality by transferring some resources from richer to poorer people through the fiscal system. This may explain why Swedes complain less about high taxes than the inhabitants of a country of immigrants such as America. But it also suggests that even societies with a tradition of high taxes (such as those in Scandinavia) might find that their citizens would become less willing to finance generous welfare programmes were immigrants to make up a greater share of their populations."
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