On an totally unrelated subject, it appears that the famed Snopes debunking of Michael Moore's claim about the US spiriting Saudis out of the country in the wake of 9/11 has itself been debunked. That's right, they were smuggled out after all.
Just to clear up any lingering doubts about the State being more interested in protecting its subjects than in using fear to herd and manage them.
I'm still bummed out that this damned crud probably means I won't be getting back to the woods this year. Gonna try and make it to the ResistDance fundraiser in Laurelhurst Park tomorrow to see if any friends from the woods are there.
On the plus side, being in town meant I was around to be called for a job interview. Would sure be nice to start earning some regular stream of income again, though I'm far from certain I'll get an offer.
Lastly, the weather forecast for the next several days goes like this: Showers, high 67; Mostly cloudy, high 68; Rain, high 65; Rain, high 65. Could this horrid hot dry summer actually be coming to an end?
Aside from the fact, of course, that I don't perceive much "we" in all of this. The Iraq War was totally a ruling class plot, a product of a flawed and undemocratic plutocracy. Let the ruling class stew in it.
On the downside, it is reminding me that this year is the year I have to replace my bicycling rain gear, as much as I don't want to spend that kind of money right now.
There was no place for politics on Sept. 11, 2001.Okay, Giuliani's actions in the first few days were pretty much apolitical.New York's mayor, a Republican, raced to the inflamed World Trade Center towers. The secretary of transportation, a Democrat, ordered planes out of the nation's skies. Fund-raisers were canceled. Political ads were pulled from TV. Members of Congress from both parties gathered on the steps of the abandoned U. S. Capitol to sing "God Bless America."
Driven by necessity and fear, Americans stood united behind a president who less than a year before had won a bitterly contested election in which he had not received a majority of the votes.
But the president's? Give me a break! "War on terrorism" has always struck me as an extremely questionable and dubious proposition. As I wrote shortly in the aftermath of 9/11:
So, absent further clarification, "war on terrorism" essentially means "giving the government unlimited power to exercise force against anyone it wants to, for an indefinite period of time, and with no end condition specified". Like I said, this creeps me out. I can certainly understand why Ms. Lee felt compelled to cast the lone "no" vote on the recent emergency legislation.Using blind nationalism to stampede the public into buying such a notion, at the expense of other responses to the attacks, and for the express benefit of one's own political cronies is playing politics in the extreme and at its most crude.
Get it straight: 9/11 has been exploited for political purposes almost since the get-go.
I trust that the irony of Emperor George II pleading for favors before the very same UN he proclaimed "irrelevant" a few months ago is obvious to even the most casual observer. Then again, I'm probably underestimating yet again the human capacity for self-deception.
The day democracy died in Chile, courtesy of Nixon, Kissenger, and the CIA.
One of the reasons dictatorships are evil is that they kill; dictatorships, secret police, and mass executions go together like peas in a pod. The Cementerio General in Santiago contains a memorial listing the names of four thousand dead and disappeared, the legacy of the Pinochet years.
Four thousand. As a result of US-backed state-sponsored terrorism, that also took an entire nation of over ten million hostage in a dictatorship for seventeen years. I mention the numbers to put the more famous (to Americans) September 11 atrocities of the year 2001 (approximately 3,000 dead) in perspective.
Kind of puts all that endless "They hit us, we gotta seek revenge for 9/11" rhetoric in perspective, doesn't it?
Seems that another state that did something more liberal than the national norm is about to have the rug pulled out from under it by preemptive federal legislation.
As the article mentions: "The House bill passed 392-30, enjoying wide bipartisan support." And:
"Allowing different state standards will hurt, not help consumers," Rep. Michael Oxley, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told his colleagues from the House floor. "This act protects all consumers uniformly."Ah, yes, uniformity. The old crutch that's always used to help such lame excuses with their performances. Unless, of course, it's a state doing something more conservative than the norm, at which time the GOP suddenly becomes interested in state's rights again.
I'm more than a little touchy on the subject, coming from a state whose marijuana and physician-assisted suicide policies are continually under attack from the so-called "state's rights" crowd.
Until then, go here for a brief summary on the issue. Unfortunately, it leaves out some of the most damning and meaty details, but it'll have to do for now.
It turns out that the American Teleservices Association, a telemarketing industry group (note how their industry is so disliked that they can't even call it by its name), is being besieged by calls after columnist Dave Barry listed their number in one of his columns.
We definitely seem to have made the turn from summer to early autumn: after several days of rainy, cool weather the sun is back but it's not anywhere as warm as before, and the run of dry days isn't forecast to last very long. Yesterday, I made it up to the first mile of Leif Erickson Drive in Forest Park, and the bigleaf maples are starting to turn yellow. (A process no doubt accelerated by the drought this summer forcing trees into early dormancy.) The air was scented with the smells of moisture and decaying leaves.
I remember my first fall here in Portland, after missing two autumns by virtue of living in the Bay Area, taking a walk up to the Arboretum in late October the day after the first frost, and how good it felt to be out in the crisp air, savoring the familiar smells and colors, coming upon shady hollows where the frost and mists of the night before lingered, and appreciating the softer golden color of autumn daylight. It felt so good to be home again.
In a very interesting article in the most recent In These Times, Seth Ackerman comes up with perhaps the best theory of why law enforcement couldn't prevent the 9/11 attacks from taking place. You'll have to read all the way through it to get to the real meaty theory, which appears near the end of the article: namely, the intelligence community was ordered to back off because it looked like they were about to implicate Saudi Arabia.
That's so completely consistent with the long-standing US policy of appeasement towards this extremist government that it gives me a real big hunch that the theory is correct. Just consider the spiriting out of Saudi nationals in the immediately aftermath of 9/11, which was given such a high priority that the flight ban was waived for this favor to the House of Saud. Or how the extremist and totalitarian nature of the Saudi state is pretty much kept out of the national political discourse, which is taken up with more politically acceptable totalitarian states like North Korea (or the late Taliban government). Good grief, those guys even have a Taliban-esque Ministry of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
And remember, it's also completely consistent with that other more famous appeasement promoted by a certain British prime minister. Both were actions that the Establishment was very much in favor of, because they dovetailed with a key goal of the Establishment's so well (anti-Comminusm in the case of Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, and petro-imperialism in the case of the many successive US administrations' appeasements of Saudi Arabia). Appeasement is the bastard stepchild of realpolitik.
The theory that Bush knew that 9/11 (or at the very least an attack of that magnitude) was going to happen and deliberately did nothing so as to give the PNAC crowd in his administration their "second Pearl Harbor" has a critical flaw in it.
There's nothing that would stop the practitioners of statecraft and realpolitik from enthusiastically killing that many civilians in the pursuit of a goal, as long as they are dark-skinned civilians in another part of the world. Heck, just look at all the civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan that don't warrant a peep in the mainstream dialog. Or how many Africans the lackeys of the pharmaceutical industry are willing to sacrifice on the pyre of AIDS rather than let Africans make cheap generic drugs.
Or, for that matter, all the rhetoric about how September 11 was so unprecedentedly bad (it wasn't, what it was was an unprecedently bad killing of white people in the largest and most important city of the world's sole superpower). Had it taken place in some third-world backwater and had most of the victims had black or brown skin, you would have heard nowhere near as big a stink about it. Trust me.
And that's the rub. The very same racism and national chauvinism that would make the civilian casualties an acceptable part of the cost of doing business had they happened elsewhere in the world, the very same racism the resentment of which is part and parcel of the motivation behind the attacks in the first place, makes the cost totally unacceptable for this particular instance of slaughter. The ruling class simply wouldn't be willing to consider killing that many white people and that many Americans for political gain.
Once it did happen, it was of course exploited as a "second Pearl Harbor". But that's more a case of making lemonade from an unexpected windfall of lemons rather than knowing a truckload of lemons is about to wreck and deliberately doing nothing stop it.
One of the catalyzing events in the break-up of the USSR was the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Any system not only unable to protect its people from such a disaster, but to fail even to deal with it initially because of fear of embarrassment over it, obviously was a system with no legitimacy whatsoever. Recall how the only way the world initially learned of the disaster was when nuclear plants in Sweden (yes, Sweden, a thousand miles downwind) had emergency shutdowns initiated because radiation monitors surrounding the Swedish plants were detecting what turned out to be the Chernobyl fallout.
Given the almost total disconnect between the sort of responses that were needed in response to 9/11, and the sort of responses we got, and taking into account that one of the lacking responses is addressing the terrorist threat to nuclear plants, will it take a Chernobyl of our own to serve as a wake-up call?
In some ways at least. On my walk through Washington Park today, I noticed how green and soft the moss was on a bigleaf maple trunk, and there in the moss were the emerging fiddleheads of the coming season's licorice fern fronds.
And the neo-Pagans, mired in beliefs imported from a foreign land and clime, are about to celebrate harvest and preparation for the season of dormancy. And not on the day autumn actually arrives (that was the weekend before last, with the first cold front), but on an artificial date governed by celestial happenings only loosely coupled to the natural world around us.
Not that I'm bashing Pagans here, just explaining why I am not one. It is, all in all, a practice that's too formalized, rigid, and distant from natural cycles for my tastes.
Was al-Qaida behind the operation? Most likely, but not for certain. Secretary of State Colin Powell promised a white paper proving al-Qaida's guilt. It never came.Eric Margolis, one of the few conservative columnists I find worth reading, hits the nail on the head yet again. Full article here.A tape that surfaced in late 2001 purporting to show Osama bin Laden gleefully chortling over the attacks, was seen by many in the Arab and Muslim world as a crude fake.
The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany and Spain, not Afghanistan, by young men, mostly Saudis, who were educated and westernized.
Afghanistan's Taliban regime, until four months before 9/11 a recipient of U.S. aid, had nothing to do with the attacks, but did provide a base for al-Qaida, which numbered only 300 members. Most of the "terrorists" in Afghanistan cited by the U.S. were actually independence fighters from neighbouring Central Asia. Taliban refused to hand bin Laden, a national hero of the 1980s anti-Soviet war, to the U.S. without proof of his guilt in 9/11, which the U.S. declined to provide.
Naturalist Thinkers:Which is mostly correct, though I haven't done much communicating with animals, I do remember a particular spontaneous interaction with a pileated woodpecker in Forest Park (I felt the urge to mimic its call, and he/she became very interested in me, flying down to the trail to have a close look at the giant funny-looking flightless woodpecker).Other Naturalist thinkers include
- Like to understand the natural world, and the living beings that inhabit it
- have an aptitude for communicating with animals
- You try to understand patterns of life and natural forces
Charles Darwin, Jane Goodall, Johnny Morris, David AttenboroughCareers which suit Naturalist thinkers include
Biologist, Meteorologist, Forester, Farmer, Astronomer, Alternative therapist
I guess I'll have more data points on that following my return from a visit to an internet acquaintance's farm on the Olympic Peninsula. Which, of course, means I probably won't be posting updates here for a while.
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