I love the Onion.

Sure its not been nearly as good since it went on TV, for one thing the blonde lady just isn't as good as many of the actors she turfed out but still, the razor sharp observations persist:

Emmanuel Goldstein is dead Part 2.

Probably to your surprise I am doing a second posting about this today. To start off with I recommend two Alternet articles: This one lays out the more mainstream concerns of the aftermath of Bin Laden's death and this one gives a reasonable assessment of how OBL's death doesn't really improve the lives of most Americans one bit.

Now on to some more speculation.

4)I'm going to couch this in terms of TV but thats because I've been watching a lot of it today. The "death" of Osama Bin Laden, a figure who as aforementioned had been reduced to little more than occasional obscure audio messages of dubious provenance, could've been prompted for another reason. TV shows often have an arc across a season in which the protagonists of the show face a particularly dangerous foe. While some opponents last for longer its general a good idea to cycle through villains. When first introduced a villain has mystery and that leads them to be more scary and unpredictable, so an interesting and engaging character. Over time though a villain will often become well known and, well, familiarity breeds contempt. On top of that if a foe lingers for a long time the show can start to slow down and you have increasing difficulty explaining why your protagonists can't deal with them.

Can you see through my elaborate metaphors? Yes, Osama as a concept of evil, a rallying cry and justification for certain foreign policy decisions had really run its' course and was starting to make the American Empire look weak, with all those trillions of dollars spent on defence they couldn't kill one guy? Plus as has been pointed out Americans now care more about the economy than being afraid of brown bogey men. Obviously the old method of keeping Americans scared has run out and a new one rolled out. Otherwise they might start asking questions the elite don't want asked.


5) Following on from that a similar reason for wrapping up the threat of Bin Laden could well be due to extremely pressing foreign policy concerns elsewhere. After all the song and dance made about the danger he posed until he was dead it was really quite hard to shift foreign policy focus. That may well be why Obama was so focused on killing him, he has shown himself to be a traditional US Imperialist and likely wants to move away from the strange neo-con crusades of the W Bush White house.

With OBL dead there is plenty of excuse to shift to other concerns. The most likely new direction is probably South America. In the past decade it has shifted from being a subdued back yard for America, something it has long been, to a largely leftist region that is rapidly gaining regional solidarity and moving away from Washington's roadmap. Still as Honduras's Coup showed countries in the region can be realigned to US interests. I have no idea if other nations will be retaken so easily but I imagine the Obama Whitehouse strongly desires to regain control of the region and its' natural resources and having an excuse to shift focus to South America from the AFPAK region is mighty handy for them.

6)Of course, just because a course of action seems to be the best one from the outside doesn't mean that is the one that'll be pursued, maybe because of info outsiders aren't privy to or maybe because of regime politics. I have absolutely no inside track or real understanding of how Obama's government functions but I would say the appointment of General Petraeus to head the CIA shows Obama maybe doesn't have total control of the direction his regime takes (to be fair there are compelling arguments for why Obama would actively choose to appoint him but thats not what I want to focus on here.) Petraeus has been a booster for invading Iran for instance which in the US Empire's current weakened state would be tantamount to suicide.

Then again, W Bush's legacy is a wide variety of ways for the US Empire to commit suicide. Going back to the issue of Pakistan I raised in Part 1 while I said it gave the US carte blanche I think that should be clarified via the can should gap. Yes you can do a thing but that does not mean you should do a thing. There are broadly justifiable actions the US could in the near future take in Pakistan but they would be exceptionally unwise to do so. As aforementioned the US is not pleased Pakistan has overthrown their client dictator. This can be rectified, as happened in Honduras and many other places, by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in quite subtle ways that really don't place the US Empire under much threat even if they fail.

There are strong hints however that America is taking a much more dangerous path that OBL's death could justify ramping up. The drone bombings and incursions into Pakistan by ground troops are not subtle and are already having considerable blowback, ramping that up in a country with nuclear weapons and a large population that holds pretty fundamentalist views would be bad at any time, let alone in the midst of two ohther wars and maybe a third in Libya. Oh and of course lets not forget in the Kashmir region Pakistan shares a border with India AND China, spillover that brought those two countries into the mix could be absolutely catastrophic.

Lord knows what will actually happen.

Oh and now you've read all this heres a much more concise and better summary: http://www.explosm.net/comics/2409/ Thanks Jonny.

Very bad news for the US?

I know very little about foreign currency exchange but the way I read this article it really seems like China is starting to move to undermine one of the key pillars of US dominance, the Dollar as the world reserve currency.

Tony Comments:

Actually the general gist of it is correct (Zero Hedge is a great source of information like this). There's not a lot you can do when the biggest lender to you decides you're probably not a good prospect for paying it back, and in this case the writing's been on the wall for a good, long while.

China really doesn't have an incentive to keep financing the US (or the West in general) apart from allowing us to maintain a level of consumerism that buoys their manufacturing. Another reason mentioned in the article is that they need to maintain a stockpile of dollars since they're pegged to it so it makes sense on their end to maintain confidence in it. That being said, no one really believes the west is going to get their houses in order. We've seen small bailouts in the Eurozone but Spain has a potential to really wreck things beyond anything we've seen and no one seriously thinks the US will be fiscally responsible any time soon. For the Chinese, that has historically meant that the dollar is a refuge of last resort but they've known (and said publicly) that given their wealth and manufacturing strength that the yuan should be valued higher which is opposed to the west's wellbeing. They've staunchly refused to devalue (which would be akin to extending our line of credit) and they may continue to hold the line for a while but any chronic debtor knows that this is a dead-end for them since they continue to spend more than they take in.

In the end, this is hardly a surprise move and the effects of it are definitely bad (although I would argue that the predicament we're currently in is just as bad as it inevitably leads to this situation). There isn't really even a way out as the article points out. What will happen as the Chinese reduce debt holdings is that the yuan will be undervalued more and their portfolio grows more robust (less risk + strong capital reserves). As that occurs it will be more and more attractive to move to the yuan as a "reserve currency" as it will be backed by real wealth. While I don't see them moving to float the yuan any time soon (it would destroy the dollar and their primary market), a firm, graduated schedule for higher valuation is almost a certainty which will put great inflationary pressure on the dollar which will drive holdings from dollars to yuan quickly.

Chomsky on the Arab Spring...

...and why the west will likely stop at nothing to prevent democracy in the Arab world.

Read about it here. (Feel free to ignore that random editorialising at the start by someone else.)

A boringly predictable Vietnam reference.

The British government are sending "Advisors" to Libya and whether you wrap it up in faux sarcasm or shock or whatever at the end of the day this is how the troop buildup in Vietnam began.

Oh and remember kids, the Libyan rebel's military leader is almost certainly a CIA asset.

Weekend Watch

Well my second ever weekend watch is two days late. Doing well.

Anyway here is part two of the Power of Nightmares:

Weekend Watch

This is a new feature that is neither innovative nor requiring effort on my part so maybe, just maybe, I'll keep up with it. As you may well be able to infer this feature is about encouraging you to watch worthwhile stuff, generally documentaries and lectures. At least for now I'll try to alternate between the two. For the next three weeks we'll be watching babby's first geopolitics aka The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis. A three part documentary about the similarities between the rise to prominence of the Neo-conservative and Islamist movements.

This is part one.



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1320822957676559056#

I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't before.

First Honduras, now Ecuador?

Things aren't especially clear yet but it looks like the democratically elected socialist president of Ecuador may soon be ousted in a coup. After Bush's focus on the middle east it looks like Obama is returning America's imperialism back on South America, the traditional stomping ground.

"Look at us, look at what they make you give."

Alternative title: Too much is never enough.

So serving in imperialist wars lost you limbs? Stop being such a big baby and get back to it, the super rich elite need more profits! That is to say "the Pentagon says 41 American amputee veterans are now serving in combat zones worldwide." So pretty soon Republicans are going to getting very angry about anyone claiming disability benefits, if these brave men and women can do their part in spite of their injuries why should we give any money to the free loaders eh?

Coming soon, combat wheelchairs that allow IED victims to return to convoy duty.

DO NOT CUT FUNDING TO THE KILLFORCE, YOU WILL REGRET THIS!

little sim city joke for y'all there

British MPs are warning that if funding is cut to the British Military (which is higher than Russia's) then bad things will happen its harder to be clearer than that since it just seems to be general scaremonger on behalf of military interests rather than anything specific. Threats to Britain are mentioned but what on earth threatens Britain these days? We have nukes and even if we don't replace Trident we'll still have them and be able to nuke people in one way or another. Even so no one capable of invading Britain has any real interest in doing so. Occupying Afghanistan seems to cause Islamic terror attacks rather than preventing them and anyway all the expensive helicopters and tanks etc seem pretty unsuited to fighting asymmetrical warfare which in an age of nukes is the only kind of war that seems to take place.

But you kinda give up trying to understand what these "threats" are when you read:

Mr Arbuthnot told Radio 4's Today programme: "We are worried that this process appears to be money-driven rather than driven by the threats to our country which need to be worked out and assessed in order to work out whether, and the extent to which, we can defend against them.

A review of the British armed forces in a long term and ongoing financial crisis is focusing on money?? MY STARS. If we don't give the arms industry a blank cheque we wont win The Great Game. To be serious that this kind of blank cheque, we need even more money to pretend we're still a world power and brutally enforce corporate interests thinking can be printed in a report about a military spending review without it being questioned is pretty depressing.

A more serious 9/11 post.

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.

- Henry Kissinger 1973.

September 11th 1973 is a date which should be remembered by all citizens of the United States but it is unsurprisingly a date brushed under the carpet, unworthy of mention on Wikipedia's front page "on this day section."

September 11th 1973 was the culmination of a 3 year long US plot to overthrow the left leaning democratically elected government of Chile lead by Salvador Allende. During this plot strenuous efforts were made to destroy Chile's economy and to encourage the Chilean military to overthrow civilian government by the CIA and other US government agencies which was accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign both within Chilean and internationally to undermine Chilean democracy.

On that day 37 years ago the military finally moved in to end democracy in the country and Allende killed himself rather than be captured, his death one of around 3200 people killed by the Pinochet dictatorship that ruled the country after the US backed coup. Around a further thirty thousand Chileans were placed in concentration camps and tortured. This is in contrast to the 2977 who died on September 11th 2001. But hey a predictable backlash given US foreign policy is so much worse than the destruction of South America's oldest democracy and replacing it with a Military dictatorship that killed more people.

Predictably for a US backed regime the plight of the poor got worse under Pinochet, with the gap between rich and poor widened and Trade unions banned. Absurdly Chile under Pinochet is held up as an economic success story by Friedmanites, these free market advocates neglect to mention that Chile's biggest source of income and economic growth during the period (as it is today) was copper mining. The copper mines were publically owned, nationalised by Allende and kept hold of by Pinochet. But as ever with rightists, theres nothing wrong with government interference in the market if it benefits them.

You can read a much more indepth summary of this here. I highly reccomend you do.

Happy 9/11

Let us wallow in the deaths of rich asshole bankers and DoD apparatchiks, bemoan how terrible it is a bloodthirsty and imperialistic foreign policy has consequences and then use our deliberate blindess to reality to justify killing 300 brown people for every 9/11 victim. USA! USA!

Protesters force Blair to run away and hide.

War criminal and sycophant to imperialists Tony Blair called off a big signing event in London yesterday because he was afraid of protesters. Sure it isn't much of a victory but at least it made him aware just unpopular he is and prevented him from strutting around wherever he wants to go. Fun fact Blair no longer lives in Britain, so you can tell he left a pretty popular legacy here.

However he did give the topic of yesterday's favoured liveblog Sunrise a quote that shows what hes all about:

Mr Blair earlier told ITV it was "not as if we need" to do signings to sell copies of his memoirs.

Deeply unpopular with the people of the country you lead? Not a problem, dudes just in it to get paid.

Mark Ames on the Anti-I.M.F Protests In Washington D.C. April 20th 2000

Its depressing as fuck but its still interesting to see how the elite stiffle dissent in the US. The IMF and World Bank are evil as all hell and yet they're still getting to impose their wholesale destruction of the poor, just look how they got their tentacles further into Pakistan last week.

Breaking Month old news ahead of nearly everyone.

I really should have my finger more on the pulse and check everything more regularly than I do so I have to apologise that I'm linking this video a month after it was posted:


So yes, those rumblings that Wikileaks is at least tacitly approved as a leak point / dumping ground for getting info out there in overwhelming bulk seem somewhat more plausible but I feel it more likely the novelty of the wikileaks phenomena is what prevents the media from ignoring it as they are so doing with the medical survey of Fallujah.

The Patrick Cockburn article mentioned by Chomsky can be found here. Fun quotes:

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that "to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened".

Yes of course the pacification of Fallujah occurred in 2004.

US Marines first besieged and bombarded Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, in April 2004 after four employees of the American security company Blackwater were killed and their bodies burned. After an eight-month stand-off, the Marines stormed the city in November using artillery and aerial bombing against rebel positions. US forces later admitted that they had employed white phosphorus as well as other munitions.

Hmmery, the same white phosphorous that was used by the Israelis during Operation Cast Lead(page 21, paragraph 48)? Still the Palestinians and Iraqis deserved it eh Amber?

He added that the US commander who ordered this devastating use of firepower did not consider it significant enough to mention it in his daily report to the US general in command. Dr Busby says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: "My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside."

Oh well, all those assurances DU rounds were completely harmless before and during the invasion were wrong, boy are those advocates' faces red (with the blood of Iraqi children) now!

Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. At Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia, but in Fallujah Dr Busby says what is striking is not only the greater prevalence of cancer but the speed with which it was affecting people.

The residents of Fallujah should be grateful the Coalition of the Willing freed them from the oppression of genetic orthodoxy and allowed Iraq to become a future centre for Oncology research. And by doing all this the west has certainly been saved from vague threats to their way of life or something.

Again apologies I'm only posting this a month late but at least I'm beating most of the mainstream media I guess.

Edit Whoops forgot to add this feature by Democracy now about it. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/29/patrick_cockburn_on_missing_billions_in

Its a good thing submarines look like dildos...

...because Caroline Wyatt sure as hell wants to get intimate with HMS Astute. I really hope for Ms Wyatt that all she is doing is printing verbatim a Royal Navy press release because otherwise she really is getting overly enthusiastic about £3.9bn a killing machine that has no real role or purpose in the modern world other than to maintain the delusion Britain still matters on the world stage. It is great to know that while other government departments face cuts of up to 25% the Ministry of Defence can still buy white elephant war toys.

Israel to fight reality's liberal bias.

Two zionist groups have realised wikipedia is full of evidence that Israel's oppression of Palestinians, breaking of international law, war crimes and crimes against humanity on wikipedia making them look bad, which has made them "frustrated" so, they're training up wikipedia editors to "correct" wikipedia. But don't worry kids, they're not going to spread propaganda or anything oh no:

"We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. "We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day."

Controversial options like stopping doing evil things would perhaps work better but just censoring all criticism of Israel seems easier, hell they've already clamped down heavily on media access oh and of course by happy accident the blockade also limits media access and they've blocked aid worker's access to gaza just so the west gets as little info from the Gaza strip as possible. So yeah, why not keep going on the same path.

To finish a chilling and oddly candid announcement they're not simply trying to alter pages to fit their views, they have designs on taking over the community:

"We learned what not to do: don't jump into deep waters immediately, don't be argumentative, realise that there is a semi-democratic community out there, realise how not to get yourself banned," says Yisrael Medad, one of the course participants, from Shiloh.

So look forward to the Holocaust page on wikipedia detailing how the victims of the holocaust were 8 billion jews, a gay person (who was just confused) and a jehvoa's witness oh and the concentration and death camp guards were Palestinians.

A historian you haven't heard of has died.

You haven't heard of this historian because he was an Israeli Jew hebrew speaker who in his youth was part of the Labour Zionist movement, who while remaining a leftist was able to apply critical thinking to its' flaws and the wider failings of the leftist movements in America and Europe from his youth that lead to the rise of neoconservatism. His greatest reason for obscurity though was his well informed and intellectually honest criticism of Israel and calls for a one state policy that lead to him becoming a persona non grata among the US Pro-Israel lobby who ensured the only mentions of him were deeply negative.

Read a sort of obituary for this guy here

How the military deals with soldiers who have a conscience.

An article detailing the various reprisals military people face if they try and alert the media and the wider world to all kinds of absuses and the hollow lie that is the assertion they should've dealt with it through proper channels, the proper channels simply don't care. Rather than the phony silliness that all Troops are heroes, it is, as the article states, these people who risk (and often lose) everything to get the truth out that are the real heroes

The UK Borders Agency is unsurprisingly racist.

However following a government report not much is being done!