Natalie Gomez Dunker

Colonizes the squat rack. Promptly cuts off the hands of the guy occupying it.

Claims both incline benches in the name of the Queen, who never actually shows up.

Vows to put up 800 lbs. at the leg press but only raises 200. Says “there was a storm on the return trip,” and winks at you like you’re supposed to know what that means.

Does his curls while standing over the dumbbell rack, making it virtually impossible for anyone else to use the free weights.

Brings terror, exploitation, and disease by playing P.O.D.’s “Youth of the Nation” on his cellphone.

Asks an indigenous employee where he “got that sweet T-shirt” and insists on being escorted to the very source of the merchandise. After negotiations go sour at the sales counter, he enslaves the staff.

Deliberately clangs his weights on the extensions of shoulder presses and talks very loudly about three girls he brought over from Portugal, to no one in particular.

Brags that he’s found the elliptical machine while smugly standing next to a treadmill. Stabs you in the stomach when you contradict him.

Is not wearing appropriate shoes.

I’m Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, your senior yoga instructor. From now on, you will not speak unless spoken to—not a single chakra will open until I say so—and when commanded you will bring your focus back gently to your breathing, the sole object of your attention. Do you maggots understand that?

If you complete my yoga class, you will have transcended the material world, which you will see as maya, illusion. Until then, you’re that material world’s lowest form of life: human beings burdened by tension, negative energy, and disorganized thoughts!

Today, you have been issued a yoga mat. You and your mat will be incapable of non-attachment. Now pray with me: “This is my yoga mat. There are many like it with a thin top layer of polyurethane or natural sustainable rubber to wick away sweat, and a super-cushiony textured grippy side for safety and performance, but this one is mine. Before my deity or deities and/or secular value system, I swear this creed. My mat and myself are defenders of prana, the life giving force.”

Get dressed and be seated. Make sure your attire has a relaxed fit and appropriate construction. Between your mats and assholes will be nothing but organic cotton, hemp, or recycled poly fiber. If I see a non-eco-friendly fabric, god forbid one stitched in inhumane working conditions, without even the courtesy of a living wage, you’ll be wearing this as an accessory: my foot, ankle deep in your ass. The only sweatshop I like is the one here in my studio, as it has a temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit with 40% humidity, to facilitate injury prevention and deeper stretching.

Atten-hut! The junior yogis will now instruct you on the correct form for your first asana. Hold it and center yourself. You are not to lose balance or mindfulness without permission.

Private, do you have a name? What? Bullshit! Look at your posture. You call that a Crow pose? You look like a constipated pigeon! Your name is Private Pigeon from now on. Realign your spine. I want fresh oxygenated blood moving to your every organ and fiber! I want to see proper muscle tone and a vibrant glow!

No! Not like that, you disgusting sack of synthetic chemicals! Stand back up. If there’s one thing I hate it’s a pose executed so poorly it completely destroys the healing vibe!

Everyone stand up with your arms in extension upward above your head, like a shooting stem, and feel your spirit growing roots downward. Place your finger on your right nostril. Hut! Now slowly—wait! Private Pigeon, do you not know your right from the side energetically linked to your body’s cooling lunar flow? Drop down and give me five minutes of Downward Dog. Everyone join Private Pigeon. From now on, when someone disrupts the free flow of creative energy, I will punish all of you, because obviously you pukes have failed to float off enough harmonious positivity.

Alright, everyone sound off to my cadence:

I don’t know, but I’ve been told
Bhujangasana is the Cobra pose.
Your head and rib cage elevate
Your viscera won’t constipate!
Breathe in, cleansing breath
Breathe out—three, two…
feel that tension leave your neck…
your shoulders…
picture it leaving through your fingers…
just let it go…
and one.

Let’s return to the Crow pose. Private Pigeon will lead. Build a solid core—align your abdomen, your solar plexus, your sacrum. Stay connected to the sensations, find wisdom in your— Private Pigeon, you’re drooping! Tap into your core more fully. Be ultra-present! Build an emotional rock, and stoke your inner fire, you worthless little shit!

Private Pigeon, get back here, did I say you could leave your yoga mat? Cease all movements toward the civilian gear! Private Pigeon, I said cease—goddamnit, get your disgusting hands out of that bag—and—what the… Private Pigeon, in my studio we embrace an ethos of understanding and non-violence. In the name of all that is worth cherishing in this earthly existence, I invite you to mindfully and intentionally put down your weapon, now!

This article first appeared on TruthOut.

For decades now, Noam Chomsky has been widely regarded as the most important intellectual alive (linguist, philosopher, social and political critic) and the leading US dissident since the Vietnam War. Chomsky has published over 100 books and thousands of articles and essays, and is the recipient of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees by some of the world's greatest academic institutions. His latest book, Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013, has just been published by Haymarket Books. On the occasion of the release of his last book, Chomsky gave an exclusive and wide-ranging interview to C.J. Polychroniou for Truthout, parts of which will also appear in The Sunday Eleftherotypia, a major national Greek newspaper.

C.J. Polychroniou: In a nationally televised address on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the United States, Obama announced to the American people and the rest of the world that the United States is going back to war in Iraq, this time against the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Is Iraq an unfinished business of the US invasion of 2003, or is the situation there merely the inevitable outcome of the strategic agenda of the Empire of Chaos?

Noam Chomsky: "Inevitable" is a strong word, but the appearance of ISIS and the general spread of radical jihadism is a fairly natural outgrowth of Washington wielding its sledgehammer at the fragile society of Iraq, which was barely hanging together after a decade of US-UK sanctions so onerous that the respected international diplomats who administered them via the UN both resigned in protest, charging that they were "genocidal."

One of the most respected mainstream US Middle East analysts, former CIA operative Graham Fuller, recently wrote that "I think the United States is one of the key creators of [ISIS]. The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS, but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the war in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS."

He is correct, I think. The situation is a disaster for the US, but is a natural result of its invasion. One of the grim consequences of US-UK aggression was to inflame sectarian conflicts that are now tearing Iraq to shreds, and have spread over the whole region, with awful consequences.

ISIS seems to represent a new jihadist movement, with greater inherent tendencies toward barbarity in the pursuit of its mission to re-establish an Islamic caliphate, yet apparently more able to recruit young radical Muslims from the heart of Europe, and even as far as Australia, than al-Qaeda itself. In your view, why has religious fanaticism become the driving force behind so many Muslim movements around the world?

Like Britain before it, the US has tended to support radical Islam and to oppose secular nationalism, which both imperial states have regarded as more threatening to their goals of domination and control. When secular options are crushed, religious extremism often fills the vacuum. Furthermore, the primary US ally over the years, Saudi Arabia, is the most radical Islamist state in the world and also a missionary state, which uses its vast oil resources to promulgate its extremist Wahabi/Salafi doctrines by establishing schools, mosques, and in other ways, and has also been the primary source for the funding of radical Islamist groups, along with Gulf Emirates - all US allies.

It's worth noting that religious fanaticism is spreading in the West as well, as democracy erodes. The US is a striking example. There are not many countries in the world where the large majority of the population believes that God's hand guides evolution, and almost half of these think that the world was created a few thousand years ago. And as the Republican Party has become so extreme in serving wealth and corporate power that it cannot appeal to the public on its actual policies, it has been compelled to rely on these sectors as a voting base, giving them substantial influence on policy.

The US committed major war crimes in Iraq, but the acts of violence committed these day against civilians in the country, particularly against children and people from various ethnic and religious communities, is also simply appalling. Given that Iraq exhibited its longest stretch of political stability under Saddam Hussein, what didactic lessons should one draw from today's extremely messy situation in that part of the world?

The most elementary lesson is that it is wise to adhere to civilized norms and international law. The criminal violence of rogue states like the US and UK is not guaranteed to have catastrophic consequences, but we can hardly claim to be surprised when it does.

US attacks against ISIS's bases in Syria without the approval and collaboration of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad would constitute a violation of international law, claimed Damascus, Moscow and Tehran before the start of bombing. However, isn't it the case that the destruction of ISIS's forces in Syria would further strengthen the Syrian regime? Or is it that the Assad regime is afraid it will be next in line?

The Assad regime has been rather quiet. It has not, for example, appealed to the Security Council to act to terminate the attack, which is, undoubtedly, in violation of the UN Charter, the foundation of modern international law (and if anyone cares, part of the "Supreme law of the land" in the US, under the Constitution). Assad's murderous regime doubtless can see what the rest of the world does: the US attack on ISIS weakens its main enemy.

In addition to some Western nations, Arab states have also offered military support to US attacks against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Is this a case of one form of Islamic fundamentalism (Saudi Arabia, for example) exhibiting fear for another form of Islamic fundamentalism (ISIS)?

As the New York Times accurately reported, the support is "tepid." The regimes surely fear ISIS, but it apparently continues to draw financial support from wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and its ideological roots, as I mentioned, are in Saudi radical Islamic extremism, which has not abated.

Life in Gaza has returned to normalcy after Hamas and Israel agreed to a cease-fire. For how long?

I would hesitate to use the term "normalcy." The latest onslaught was even more vicious than its predecessors, and its impact is horrendous. The Egyptian military dictatorship, which is bitterly anti-Hamas, is also adding to the tragedy.

What will happen next? There has been a regular pattern since the first such agreement was reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in November 2005. It called for "a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah for the export of goods and the transit of people, continuous operation of crossings between Israel and Gaza for the import/export of goods, and the transit of people, reduction of obstacles to movement within the West Bank, bus and truck convoys between the West Bank and Gaza, the building of a seaport in Gaza, [and the] re-opening of the airport in Gaza" that Israeli bombing had demolished.

Later agreements have been variants on the same themes, the current one as well. Each time, Israel has disregarded the agreements while Hamas has lived up to them (as Israel concedes) until some Israeli escalation elicits a Hamas response, which gives Israel another opportunity to "mow the lawn," in its elegant phrase. The interim periods of "quiet" (meaning one-way quiet) allow Israel to carry forward its policies of taking over whatever it values in the West Bank, leaving Palestinians in dismembered cantons. All, of course, with crucial US support: military, economic, diplomatic and ideological, in framing the issues in accord with Israel's basic perspective.

That, indeed, was the purpose of Israel's "disengagement" from Gaza in 2005 - while remaining the occupying power, as recognized by the world (apart from Israel), even the US. The purpose was outlined candidly by the architect and chief negotiator of the "disengagement," Prime Minister Sharon's close associate, Dov Weissglass. He informed the press that "The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."

That pattern has been reiterated over and over, and it seems that it is being re-enacted today. However, some knowledgeable Israeli commentators have suggested that Israel might finally relax its torture of Gaza. Its illegal takeover of much of the West Bank (including Greater Jerusalem) has proceeded so far that Israeli authorities might anticipate that it is irreversible. And they now have a cooperative ally in the brutal military dictatorship in Egypt. Furthermore, the rise of ISIS and the general shattering of the region have improved the tacit alliance with the Saudi dictatorship and possibly others. Conceivably, Israel might depart from its extreme rejectionism, though for now, the signs do not look auspicious.

The latest Israeli carnage in Gaza stirred public sentiment around the world increasingly against the state of Israel. To what extent is the unconditional support rendered by the US toward Israel the outplay of domestic political factors, and under what conditions do you see a shift in Washington's policy toward Tel Aviv?

There are very powerful domestic factors. One illustration was given right in the midst of the latest Israeli assault. At one point, Israeli weapons seemed to be running low, and the US kindly supplied Israel with more advanced weapons, which enabled it to carry the onslaught further. These weapons were taken from the stocks that the US pre-positions in Israel, for eventual use by US forces, one of many indications of the very close military connections that go back many years. Intelligence interactions are even better established. Israel is also a favored location for US investors, not just in its advanced military economy. There is a huge voting bloc of evangelical Christians that is fanatically pro-Israel. There is also an effective Israel lobby, which is often pushing an open door - and which quickly backs down when it confronts US power, not surprisingly.

There are, however, shifts in popular sentiments, particularly among younger people, including the Jewish community. I experience that personally, as do others. Not long ago I literally had to have police protection when I spoke on these topics on college campuses, even my own university. That has greatly changed. By now Palestine solidarity is a major commitment on many campuses. Over time, these changes could combine with some other factors to lead to a change of US policy. It's happened before. But it will take hard, serious, dedicated work.

What are the aims and the objectives of US policy in Ukraine, other than stirring up trouble and then letting other forces do the dirty work?

Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the USSR, the US began seeking to extend its dominance, including NATO membership, over the regions released from Russian control - in violation of verbal promises to Gorbachev, whose protests were dismissed. Ukraine is surely the next ripe fruit that the US hopes to pluck from the tree.

Doesn't Russia have a legitimate concern over Ukraine's potential alliance with NATO?

"The US is at the root of the current Ukraine crisis."

A very legitimate concern, over the expansion of NATO generally. This is so obvious that it is even the topic of the lead article in the current issue of the major establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. He observes that the US is at the root of the current Ukraine crisis.

Looking at the current situation in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Ukraine, the China Sea and even in parts of Europe, Zbigniew Brzezinski's recent comment on MSNBC that "We are facing a kind of dynamically spreading chaos in parts of the world" seems rather apropos. How much of this development is related to the decline of a global hegemon and to the balance of power that existed in the era of the Cold War?

US power reached its peak in 1945 and has been rather steadily declining ever since. There have been many changes in recent years. One is the rise of China as a major power. Another is Latin America's breaking free of imperial control (for the last century, US control) for the first time in 500 years. Related to these developments is the rise of the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, China, South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, based in China and including India, Pakistan, the Central Asian states, and others.

But the US remains the dominant global power, by a large measure.

Last month marked the 69th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, yet nuclear disarmament remains a chimera. In a recent article of yours, you underscored the point that we are merely lucky to have avoided a nuclear war so far. Do you think, then, that it's a matter of time before nuclear weapons fall into the hands of terrorist groups?

"Nuclear weapons are already in the hands of terrorist groups: state terrorists."

Nuclear weapons are already in the hands of terrorist groups: state terrorists, the US primary among them. It's conceivable that weapons of mass destruction might also fall into the hands of "retail terrorists," greatly enhancing the enormous dangers to survival.

Since the late 1970s, most advanced economies have returned to predatory capitalism. As a result, income and wealth inequality have reached spectacular heights, poverty is becoming entrenched, unemployment is skyrocketing and standards of living are declining. In addition, "really existing capitalism" is causing mass environmental damage and destruction which, along with the population explosion, is leading us to an unmitigated global disaster. Can civilization survive really existing capitalism?

First, let me say that what I have in mind by the term "really existing capitalism" is what really exists and what is called "capitalism." The United States is the most important case, for obvious reasons. The term "capitalism" is vague enough to cover many possibilities. It is commonly used to refer to the US economic system, which receives substantial state intervention, ranging from creative innovation to the "too-big-to-fail" government insurance policy for banks, and which is highly monopolized, further limiting market reliance.

It's worth bearing in mind the scale of the departures of "really existing capitalism" from official "free-market capitalism." To mention only a few examples, in the past 20 years, the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, carrying forward the oligopolistic character of the US economy. This directly undermines markets, avoiding price wars through efforts at often-meaningless product differentiation through massive advertising, which is itself dedicated to undermining markets in the official sense, based on informed consumers making rational choices. Computers and the internet, along with other basic components of the IT revolution, were largely in the state sector (R&D, subsidy, procurement, and other devices) for decades before they were handed over to private enterprise for adaptation to commercial markets and profit. The government insurance policy, which provides big banks with enormous advantages, has been roughly estimated by economists and the business press to be perhaps on the order of as much as $80 billion a year. However, a recent study by the International Monetary Fund indicates - to quote the business press - that perhaps "the largest US banks aren't really profitable at all," adding that "the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from US taxpayers." This is more evidence to support the judgment of Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times, that "an out-of-control financial sector is eating out the modern market economy from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid."

In a way, all of this explains the economic devastation produced by contemporary capitalism that you underscore in your question above. Really existing capitalism - RECD for short (pronounced "wrecked") - is radically incompatible with democracy. It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive really existing capitalism and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. Could functioning democracy make a difference? Consideration of nonexistent systems can only be speculative, but I think there's some reason to think so. Really existing capitalism is a human creation, and can be changed or replaced.

Your latest book, Masters of Mankind, which came out in September by Haymarket Books, is a collection of essays written between 1969 and 2013. The world has changed a great deal during this period, so my question is this: Has your understanding of the world changed over time, and, if so, what have been the most catalytic events in altering your perspective about politics?

My understanding of the world has changed over time as I've learned a lot more about the past and ongoing events regularly add new critical materials. I can't really identify single events or people. It's cumulative, a constant process of re-thinking in the light of new information and more consideration of what I hadn't properly understood. However, hierarchical and arbitrary power remains at the core of politics in our world and the source of all evils.

In a recent exchange we had, I expressed my pessimism about the future of our species. You replied by saying "I share your conviction, but keep remembering the line I've occasionally quoted from the Analects, defining the 'exemplary person' - presumably the master himself: 'the one who keeps trying, though he knows there is no hope.'" Is the situation as dire as that?

We cannot know for sure. What we do know, however, is that if we succumb to despair we will help ensure that the worst will happen. And if we grasp the hopes that exist and work to make the best use of them, there might be a better world.

Not much of a choice.

 

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Is there a “Plan B” in Barack Obama’s brain? Or in David Cameron’s, for that matter? I mean, we’re vaguely told that air strikes against the ferocious “Islamic State” may go on for “a long time”. But how long is “long”? Are we just going to go on killing Arabs and bombing and bombing and bombing until, well, until we go on bombing? What happens if our Kurdish and non-existent “moderate” Syrian fighters – described by Vice-President Joe Biden last week as largely “shopkeepers” – don’t overthrow the monstrous “Islamic State”? Then I suppose we are going to bomb and bomb and bomb again. As a Lebanese colleague of mine asked in an article last week, what is Obama going to do next? Has he thought of that?

After Alan Henning’s beheading, the gorge rises at the thought of even discussing such things. But distance sometimes creates distorting mirrors, none so more than when it involves the distance between the Middle East and Washington, London, Paris and, I suppose, Canberra. In Beirut, I’ve been surveying the Arab television and press – and it’s interesting to see the gulf that divides what the Arabs see and hear, and what the West sees and hears. The gruesome detail is essential here to understand how Arabs have already grown used to jihadi barbarity. They have seen full video clips of the execution of Iraqis – if shot in the back of the head, they have come to realise, a victim’s blood pours from the front of his face – and they have seen video clips of Syrian soldiers not only beheaded but their heads then barbecued and carried through villages on sticks.

Understandably, Alan Henning’s murder didn’t get much coverage in the Middle East, although television did show his murder video – which Western television did not. But it didn’t make many front pages. Mostly the fighting between jihadis and Kurds at Ein al-Arab (Kobane) and the festival for the Muslim Eid – and the Haj in Saudi Arabia – dominated news coverage. In general, the Arab world was as uninterested in Henning’s murder as we have been, for example, in the car bomb that killed 50 Syrian children in Homs last week. Had they been British children, of course…

But I’m struck by friends who’ve asked me why we are really carrying out air strikes when we won’t put soldiers on the ground. They have noted how the families of American hostages – fruitlessly seeking mercy for their loved ones – keep repeating that they cannot make Obama do what they want him to do. Yet, don’t we claim that our democratic governments can be influenced by individuals, that they do what we want?

And watching David Cameron on my Beirut television last week, I asked myself why it was really necessary for the RAF to bomb the “Islamic State”. He knows very well that our four – or is it two? – clapped-out Tornadoes are not going to make the slightest difference to any assault on jihadi forces. Indeed, he was prepared to delay RAF strikes until the Scottish referendum was over. If so, why did he not defer them altogether to save British lives?

But it was obvious at the Tory party conference that Cameron’s greatest threat came not from a man in Mosul called Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, but from a man in Bromley called Nigel Farage. Thus he waffled on about how Britain would “hunt down and bring to justice” Henning’s killers and do “everything we can to defeat this organisation in the region and at home”, using “all the assets we have to find these [remaining] hostages”. By “all the assets”, he must mean ground troops – because the RAF is already being used – and this we are not, I think, going to do. “British troops held hostage by Islamic State” is not a headline he wants to read. Thus I fear we are going to do nothing except bomb. And bomb. And bomb. Farage can’t beat that.

Like all Western leaders faced with a crisis in the Middle East, Cameron does not want to deal with it – or explore why it happened. He wants to know how to respond to it politically or, preferably, militarily. Our refusal to broadcast the “Islamic State” beheading videos is understandable – absolutely in the case of the actual murders – but by preventing Brits from actually seeing these horrors, the Government avoids having to respond to the public’s reaction: either a call for more air strikes or to demand their annulment.

This secrecy means the hostages do not exist in our imagination; they only emerge from the mist into the horrible desert sunlight when that grisly video arrives. In the region itself, hostages become public property at once, relatives giving interviews and demanding action from their governments. As I write, the families of 21 captured Lebanese soldiers faced with beheading are blocking the main Damascus- Beirut highway. A Qatari envoy has arrived to help (presumably with lots of cash).

Perhaps we need to reframe our understanding of the “Islamic State”. British Muslim leaders have said, quite rightly, that Muslims show mercy, and that the “Islamic State” is a perversion of Islam. I suspect and fear that they are wrong. Not because Islam is not merciful, but because the “Islamic State” has nothing at all to do with Islam. It is more a cult of nihilism. Their fighters have been brutalised – remember that they have endured, many of them, Saddam’s cruelty, our sanctions, Western invasion and occupation and air strikes under Saddam and now air strikes again. These people just don’t believe in justice any more. They have erased it from their minds.

If we had not supported so many brutal men in the Middle East, would things have turned out differently? Probably. If we had supported justice – I hesitate to suggest putting a certain man on trial for war crimes – would there have been a different reaction in the Middle East? In the Syrian war, they say that 200,000 have died; in Gaza more than 2,000. But in Iraq, we suspect half a million died. And whose fault was that?

The “Islamic State” are the real or spiritual children of all this. Now we face an exclusive form of nihilism, a cult as merciless as it is morbid. And we bomb and we bomb and we bomb. And then?

 

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Here you will see a tiny baby elephant struggling mightily to climb a rock outcropping, failing and landing plop on his tiny elephant butt. Three adult elephants then dash to his rescue, and it's so much like watching a human toddler take a spill that you expect to hear him wailing.

Read more...

The world has seen many great artists, but no artist it seems has done what it takes to finally perfect their masterpiece. There’s always something missing.

And it turns out, that something, is Rowan Atkinson’s hilarious mug.

But now, thanks to illustrator Rodney Pike, we can see what various classic paintings would look like if the artist had given their subjects the correct face…

(See more from Rodney Pike)

Everyone loves a good optical illusion. We look at what seems like reality and enjoy discovering that, nope, that’s not reality at all. But usually, the “reveal” doesn’t involve an image completely disappearing.

Thats’s exactly what happens, however, with Troxler’s fading, a phenomena that occurs with certain images when you stare at just one point. As you stare, other parts of the image — sometimes the entirety of the image — completely fade away.

Trick your brain by checking out these examples of this illusion…

Stare at the black cross and the pink dots fade away

A blue-green spot may replace the empty spot in the circle. Moving your eyes away from the image may result in a circle of green spots appearing out of thin air as well…

Stare in the middle and the entire picture disappears

Stare at the red dot and the blue circle will disappear

Stare at the middle and the surrounding dots disappear

Stare at one yellow dot and the other yellow dots disappear

Stare at the black dot in the middle and the gray area disappears

Stare at the black dot and the blue bars disappear

Did all seven of these images disappear for you? Share this with your friends and see if it works for them, too!

In this reinterpretation of The Walking Dead from “Bad Lip Reading,” we get to listen in on a discussion of apples and dolphins as well as hear the hip new song “Carl Poppa (La Jiggy Jar Jar Doo).”

As it turns out, zombies are really good backup singers…

El director las soltó gratis, ya que no le interesa hacer que gasten de nuevo con esa "mierda" de las ediciones extendidas.

Editor's note: On Wednesday night President Barack Obama gave a nationally televised address in which he vowed that the United States would "degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL."

Thirteen years ago, a draft dodger from Texas stood on a pile of rubble in New York City and promised, "The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." Of course, the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center could not hear anybody, as their remains were buried in the rubble beneath Bush's feet. And our government's extraordinary relationship with one of the world's last and most brutal absolute monarchies ensured that any accomplices still in the U.S. were quickly flown home to Saudi Arabia before the crime could be investigated. In 2003, Bush meekly complied with Al-Qaeda's most concrete demand, that he withdraw U.S. forces from military bases in Saudi Arabia.

A month after September 11, Donald Rumsfeld stood at a podium in front of a $2 billion B-2 bomber at Whiteman AFB in Missouri and addressed the aircrews of the 509th Bomber Wing, before they took off across the world to wreak misdirected vengeance on the people of Afghanistan. Rumsfeld told them, "We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal."

Since then, the United States has launched more than 94,000 air strikes, mostly on Afghanistan and Iraq, but also on Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Rumsfeld's plan has undoubtedly achieved his goal of changing the way people live in those countries, killing a million of them and reducing tens of millions more to lives of disability, disfigurement, dislocation, grief and poverty.

A sophisticated propaganda campaign has politically justified 13 years of systematic U.S. war crimes, exploiting the only too human failing that George Orwell examined in his 1945 essay, "Notes on Nationalism." As Orwell wrote, "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." Orwell listed "torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians." The U.S. has committed all these atrocities in the past 13 years, and Americans have responded exactly as the "nationalists" Orwell described.

But some of the horrors of the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan found their way into the conscience of millions of newly war-wise Americans, and President Obama was elected on a "peace" platform and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. To the deep disappointment of his former supporters, Obama has overseen the largest military budget since WWII; an eight-fold increase in drone strikes; special forces operations in at least 134 countries, twice as many as under Bush; and a massive increase in the special forces night raids or "manhunts" originally launched by Rumsfeld in Iraq in 2003, which increased from 20 in Afghanistan in May 2009 to 1,000 per month by April 2011, killing the wrong people most of the time according to senior officers.

Like Eisenhower after Korea and other Presidents after Vietnam, Obama turned to methods of regime change and power projection that would avoid the political liabilities of sending young Americans to invade other countries.  But the innovations of Obama's doctrine of covert and proxy war have only spread America's post-9/11 empire of chaos farther and wider, from Ukraine to Libya to the seas around China. Covert wars are no secret to their victims, and the consequences can be just as dire. The U.S. dropped more tonnage of bombs in its secret war on Cambodia than it dropped on Japan in WWII. As Cambodia imploded in an orgy of genocide, the CIA's director of operations explained that Khmer Rouge recruiting "has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes."

As Western politicians and media breathlessly follow the escalation of U.S. bombing in Iraq, they neglect to mention, or maybe haven't even heard as Orwell suggested, that Obama has already launched more than 24,000 air strikes, mostly in Afghanistan, with the same results as in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Iraq, killing thousands of people and making implacable enemies of millions more. These air strikes are an integral component of Obama's covert war doctrine, but they are only covert in the sense that they are unreported.  

In Libya, the U.S. and its NATO allies launched 7,700 air strikes in a war that killed at least 25,000 people and plunged the country into endless chaos. NATO's illusory and short-lived success in Libya led to airlifts of weapons and fighters to Turkey, where British special forces provided training and the CIA infiltrated fighters into Syria to try and duplicate the overthrow and butchering of Gaddafi.

The sobering experience of watching a CIA operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s lead to the crime of the new century in New York on September 11 should have led U.S. officials to reject new alliances with Islamist jihadis. But the Obama doctrine embraced the use of Islamist militias to destabilize Libya, providing them with weapons, equipment, training and air support. Leadership on the ground came from Qatar's mercenary "special forces," many of whom are veterans of the Pakistani military and its ISI intelligence agency, which works with the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These Qatari special forces are part of the Libyan template that was transposed onto Syria, where they embedded with the al-Nusra Front. They and/or their Turkish allies probably trained al-Nusra in the use of chemical weapons for the "false flag" attack that almost triggered another U.S. bombing campaign in 2013.

With U.S. support, Qatar spent $3 billion and flew 70 planeloads of weapons to Turkey to support its proxies in Syria, while its regional rival Saudi Arabia sent volunteers and convicts, and paid for weapons shipments from Croatia to Jordan. Wealthy Gulf Arabs paid up to $2,000 per day to hardened mercenaries from the Balkans and elsewhere. As first al-Nusra and then ISIS established themselves as the dominant rebel group, they absorbed the bulk of the fighters and weapons that the U.S. and its allies poured into the country.

The chaos that Obama's doctrine of covert and proxy war has wreaked in Libya, Syria and Iraq should be a reminder of one of the obvious but unlearned lessons of September 11, that creating and arming groups of religious fanatics as proxies to fight secular enemies has huge potential for blowback and unintended consequences as they gain power and escape external control.  Once these forces were unleashed in Syria, where they had limited local support but powerful external backers, the stage was set for a long and bloody conflict.  But the U.S. and its allies, the U.K., France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were so committed that they schemed to undermine Kofi Annan's 2012 peace plan and pledged ever more support, funding and weapons to the rebels as the conflict escalated into a full-blown civil war.

The current view of ISIS (or ISIL or IS) in Western media and political debate is distorted by a dangerous confluence of interests between Western propaganda and ISIS' own public relations in playing up its strength and its atrocities. On the other hand, when the U.S. and its allies downplayed the role of ISIS in Syria and pretended to be funding and arming only "moderate" forces, this allowed ISIS to quietly gain strength and eliminate its rivals. So Western propaganda has effectively helped ISIS at every turn.  

This reckless pattern in Western propaganda extends back to the origins of ISIS. When the original leader of its precursor, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the "terrorist mastermind" Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was crowned as America's new public enemy in Iraq in 2004, U.S. military intelligence officers explained his propaganda value to Adrian Blomfield of the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph as follows:

"We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq... Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable to latch on to, and we got one."

After Zarqawi's death in 2006, Al-Qaeda in Iraq was rebranded as the Islamic State of Iraq, but it continued to fulfill the same function in U.S. propaganda, helping to paint the Iraqi Resistance as dangerous, bloodthirsty religious fanatics rather than people legitimately and bravely resisting the illegal invasion and occupation of their country. The Bush administration claimed that ISI was responsible for 15% of violent incidents in Iraq, but this was debunked by a Congressional Research Service investigation in 2007, which held ISI responsible for only 2% of violent incidents. Of course, all such analyses completely ignored the far greater violence of U.S. air-strikes, night-raids and other uses of excessive and indiscriminate force in Iraq, as well as the the root cause of all the violence, the U.S. invasion and occupation itself.

As the Western- and Arab royalist-backed proxy war took hold in Syria in 2012, the rump of ISI, which had been reduced to as few as 1,000 men under arms in Iraq, found a new lease on life. In March 2013, when rebels led by the al-Nusra Front captured Raqqa, a provincial capital with a population of 220,000, ISIS took control of the provincial and local government.  Raqqa was once the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate that stretched from North Africa to Central Asia in the ninth century, so it serves both a symbolic and practical role as the capital of ISIS's new caliphate or Islamic State.

Now that ISIS is once again fighting in Iraq as well as Syria, we have come full circle and Western propaganda and ISIS itself have again found common cause in exaggerating its strength and highlighting its brutality. But its true role in Iraq and its relationship with other Resistance forces there is ambiguous. The gains of Resistance forces, now spearheaded by ISIS, are the result of a political crisis that has been brewing ever since the U.S. invasion. The sectarian Maliki government politically and economically marginalized the mainly Sunni Arab areas of northern and western Iraq, and its security forces have dealt with dissent and political demands from these areas with utter brutality.  

Part of the U.S. response to resistance in Iraq was to recruit, train and direct Iraqi death squads, mostly from the Badr Brigades Shia militia. It unleashed these forces in a reign of terror in Baghdad in 2005 and 2006, torturing and killing tens of thousands of mainly Sunni Arab men and boys and ethnically cleansing most of the city. Deputy Interior Minister and Badr Brigade commander Adnan al-Asadi, who oversaw that campaign, remains in office today and has run the Interior Ministry while the formal position of Interior Minister has remained vacant for years on end. The forces he commands, originally called the Special Police, were rebranded the National Police after their al-Jadiriyah torture center was exposed in November 2005, and then rebranded again as the Federal Police, but these are the same forces that have terrorized Sunni Arabs and other minorities and dissidents in Iraq since the darkest days of the U.S. occupation.  The Interior Ministry has responded to the current crisis with a new upsurge in death squad activity.

During the Arab Spring in 2011, Iraqis took to the streets, held rallies and set up protest camps like their counterparts across the Arab world to protest their repressive, sectarian government. They were met by security forces sealing off public squares, arrests, beatings, torture, snipers firing from roof-tops and U.S. helicopters flying over to dump garbage on a protest camp in a square in Mosul.

A new round of protests broke out on December 21st 2012 after security forces raided the home of a popular Sunni politician, Finance Minister Rafi al-Issawi, and arrested his staff and bodyguards. Dr. al-Issawi was the director of Fallujah Hospital during the two U.S. Marine massacres in 2004 and a vocal opponent of Prime Minister Maliki, and he had already survived an assassination attempt a year earlier. Three weeks after the arrest of his bodyguards, he survived another bomb attack.

Within two weeks, protests shut down major highways near Fallujah and Ramadi, and spread to at least 13 other cities, from Nasiriyah in the south to Kirkuk in the north, while tribal delegations from all over the country traveled to Fallujah and Ramadi to support the main protests. Government security forces responded with typical brutality, opening fire on protesters in Mosul and Fallujah. On January 25, they killed seven protesters and wounded 70 in Fallujah. Tribal leaders in Anbar issued a joint declaration that they would launch jihad against government forces if the killers were not brought to justice, but protests remained mainly peaceful, even as government forces killed more protesters.

In March 2013, Dr. Issawi and Izz al-Din al-Dawla, the Minister of Agriculture, resigned from the government, and Bunyan al-Obeidi, a protest leader in Kirkuk, was killed by a government death squad. In April, after an Army officer was killed in Hawija, near Kirkuk, the government besieged Hawijaand at least 56 people were killed in armed clashes between the residents and government forces.  Peaceful protests gradually gave way to armed resistance across the north and west of Iraq. The government banned 10 satellite TV channels, including Al-Jazeera, to censor news of the uprising. In May 2013, the UN reported the highest monthly death toll in Iraq in 5 years, with hundreds of people killed. By the end of the year, the UN estimated that 7,818 civilians and over 1,000 Army and Interior Ministry troops had been killed.

On Dec. 28, 2013, government forces raided the home of Ahmed al-Alwani, a Member of Parliament from Ramadi, killing his brother and 5 of his guards. Two days later, the government sent in Federal Police commandos to destroy the Ramadi protest camp, and 10 protesters and three police commandos were killed. Forty Sunni members of Parliament resigned, and a general tribal uprising forced Army and Interior Ministry forces to withdraw from Fallujah and Ramadi.

Over the next few days, hundreds of ISIS fighters appeared in Fallujah, Ramadi and around Anbar province, and formed a sometimes uneasy alliance with other Iraqi resistance groups and tribal leaders. As in Syria, they have come to dominate and lead the uprising that has swept through western and northern Iraq in the past nine months. ISIS' main allies have been secular ex-Baathist military officers, still under the umbrella of the Baath Party and formally headed by General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, now aged 72; and tribal leaders led by Ali Hatem al-Suleiman of Anbar's Dulaim tribe and the Anbar Tribes Revolutionary Council. Douri eventually announced a split with ISIS in July 2014 after it launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against Christians in Mosul, but this has only led to a few localized clashes between ISIS and other resistance forces.

Suleiman has claimed that ISIS fighters make up only 5-7% of Resistance fighters in Iraq, and that the resistance could oust ISIS from regions it controls. But he has said it will not do so until government forces withdraw from northern and western Iraq and a political transition grants civil and political rights denied to the people of these regions. Another tribal leader from Anbar, Abu Muhammad al-Zubaai, echoed Suleiman's claims in an interview two weeks ago. Zubaai told the BBC's Jim Muir, "We don't want guns from the Americans, we want a real political solution, which the U.S. should impose on those people it installed in the Green Zone. The IS problem would end. If they guarantee us this solution, we'll guarantee to get rid of IS."

Zubaai described a clash at Garma, near Fallujah, that killed 16 ISIS fighters, but added, "We had to choose between a comprehensive confrontation with IS, or ceding control of that area and keeping a low profile. We decided to stand down because we are not ready to fight IS in the current circumstances—who would we be fighting for?  On the daily bombing of Fallujah and other cities by the Iraqi air force, with heavy civilian casualties, Zubaai said, "Our biggest concern now is a political solution. A security solution will achieve nothing.  The bombing has to stop."

These tribal leaders claim to represent 90% of Sunni-majority tribes in Iraq. They have tried to approach U.S. officials, but without any response. Zubaai sees the options facing the U.S. as a stark choice between solidly supporting a genuine political transition and fueling an out-of-control spiral of violence, "If things stay the same, a new generation will emerge, beyond the control of the U.S. or Iran or Syria-hundreds of thousands of young men will join up with IS."

President Obama's bombing campaign to support a repressive, sectarian government and Kurdish separatists will reduce more Iraqi cities to rubble, kill thousands more civilians and turn ISIS into the unstoppable monster that Zubaai predicts. But, as he says, the President still has another choice. He can provide full diplomatic and political support for a legitimate political transition in Iraq that would honor the civil and political rights of all Iraqis.  This could begin to solve the long-running political crisis caused by the U.S. invasion, which has led millions of Iraqis to see an alliance with ISIS as a lesser evil than submission to the brutal U.S.- and Iranian-backed regime in the Green Zone.  

Like the crisis in Iraq, every part of the current crisis in U.S. foreign policy is amenable to serious diplomacy.  We are on the verge of a diplomatic solution to the phony crisis over Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program.  There is global consensus on ending the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, with only the United States clinging to its effective support for a territorial expansion that the world will never recognize. The framework for a peace process in Syria was agreed on in Geneva on June 30, 2012, more than two years ago, but stalled as the U.S. and its allies reintroduced their precondition that President Assad must resign first. The coup regime in Ukraine and its Western backers may finally be ready to accept long-standing Russian proposals for a political and diplomatic resolution based on regional autonomy and international neutrality.  And ISIS's allies in Iraq are offering to "get rid of" it in exchange only for the basic civil and political rights that the U.S. promised them when it invaded their country.

But as Robert Parry noted recently, there's an "old woman who swallowed a fly" quality to neoconservative U.S. foreign policy.  The proposed solution to any U.S. foreign-policy failure is always some kind of escalation, invariably leading to an even more dangerous crisis.  Instead of developing more rational policy goals in response to their overreaching and failures, neoconservative policymakers instead keep doubling down to take on more powerful adversaries and risk even greater disasters.  Thus a failed CIA coup in 1996 and the impending collapse of the UN sanctions regime led to the invasion and destruction of Iraq; the U.S. defeat in Iraq led to targeting Syria and Iran; and Russia's role in Syria led to a U.S.-led coup in Ukraine and a U.S.-Russian confrontation that has raised the specter of nuclear war: "There was an old lady who swallowed a horse. She died of course."

The U.S. propaganda system presents Americans with a looking-glass view of the world, in which our "shining city on a hill" is a bastion of peace, democracy and prosperity, while the rest of the world is a dreadful mess riven by endless crises and insoluble problems. The dirty little secret that our propaganda system cannot mention is that the current crises are all deeply rooted in U.S. policy. At this point in our history, most of those roots lead back to the fateful decision to respond to a mass murder in New York City with 94,000 air strikes, an opportunistic global military expansion and a doubling of the military budget. So Zubaai's plea for Iraq echoes through the larger crisis in U.S. foreign policy, "Our biggest concern now is a political solution. A security solution will achieve nothing. The bombing has to stop."

 

 

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“Total Eclipse of Descartes”

“Don’t You (Foucault About Me)”

“U Kant Touch This”

“Hit Me Baby Wittgenstein”

“Camus Feel the Love Tonight?”

“Get the Party Sartred”

“Forever Jung”

“I Kissed Hegel (And I Liked It)”

“Ain’t No Montaigne High Enough”

“Pop, Locke & Drop It”

“Bataille Will Always Love You”

“My Milkshake Brings All the Baudrillard”

“Rousseau Vain (You Probably Think This Song is About You)”

“Love Voltaire Us Apart”

“Psycho Schiller”

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

Next Wednesday, Sept. 10, if your favorite website seems to load slowly, take a closer look: You might be experiencing the Battle for the Net’s “Internet Slowdown,” a global day of grassroots action. Protesters won’t actually slow the Internet down, but will place on their websites animated “Loading” graphics (which organizers call “the proverbial ‘spinning wheel of death’”) to symbolize what the Internet might soon look like. As that wheel spins, the rules about how the internet works are being redrawn. Large Internet service providers, or ISPs, like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon are trying to change the rules that govern your online life.

The fight over these rules is being waged now. These corporate ISPs want to create a two-tiered Internet, where some websites or content providers pay to get preferred access to the public. Large content providers like Netflix, the online streaming movie giant, would pay extra to ensure that their content traveled on the fast lane. But let’s say a startup tried to compete with Netflix. If it couldn’t afford to pay the large ISPs their fees for the fast lane, their service would suffer, and people wouldn’t subscribe.

The Internet is protected from this two-tiered, discriminatory practice through regulated “net neutrality,” the fundamental principle of the Internet that allows any user to access Web content freely without any corporation censoring the content or slowing down the connection. Because so much of the world’s Internet traffic passes through the United States, the way that the U.S. regulates the Internet impacts the entire planet. Sadly, the state of Internet regulation in the U.S., under the Obama administration’s Federal Communications Commission, is in crisis. The Obama-appointed FCC chair, Tom Wheeler, has proposed new rules for the Internet that would effectively do away with net neutrality, allowing large ISPs to create these separate fast lanes and slow lanes.

Let’s look further at the example of Netflix. Streaming video depends on ample bandwidth. Customers with Internet at home provided by Comcast were complaining that their Netflix video was streaming poorly, with frequent buffering. So, last February, Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for “paid prioritization,” meaning Netflix Internet traffic would flow to the customers faster than other Internet traffic, on a fast lane. Since then, Netflix has inked similar deals with AT&T, Verizon and Time-Warner. VHX is a small, New York-based video-streaming startup company. VHX’s CEO, Jamie Wilkinson, expressed his concern, writing on the VHX blog: “The companies with which we compete — Apple, Amazon, Google, the cable companies themselves—can afford to pay for a ‘fast lane’ ... We do not have that luxury.” VHX will “live or die” he wrote, based on the strength of net neutrality rules.

Corporate censorship is also a concern. Let’s say you advocate for union rights, in support of striking workers. A large Internet service provider could block your website, denying the public access to critical information. This is not hypothetical. In Canada in 2005, workers at the corporate ISP Telus went on strike. One of the strikers developed a website, Voices for Change, which supported the strike. Telus denied its Internet customers access to the website until the corporate censorship became national news. But if large ISPs get their way, this type of censorship could become routine.

In conjunction with the Sept. 10 “Internet Slowdown,” organizers are promising to “drive record numbers of emails and calls to lawmakers.” The Sunlight Foundation analyzed 800,000 comments already filed on this issue with the FCC. Of those, 99 percent supported strict rules protecting net neutrality. The protest organizers are demanding that Internet service be reclassified as a public utility, like telephone service. Imagine if the phone company were allowed to downgrade the quality of your phone call because you didn’t pay for the premium service. With nondiscrimination rules governing utilities, people get the same service. Currently, the FCC has labeled the Internet as an “information service,” subject to less-restrictive consumer protections.
The FCC has long been considered a “captured agency,” beholden to the corporations it is supposed to regulate. Unfortunately, before becoming FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler enjoyed a long career as the top lobbyist for both the cellular phone industry and the cable industry. In previous battles over Internet governance, massive public outcry has prevailed. If the power of the people fails this time to overwhelm the power of corporate money in Washington, D.C., then the “Internet Slowdown,” far from being a one-day protest, may become a constant condition. Whatever position you take, email President Barack Obama and FCC chairman Tom Wheeler — while you still can.

Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.

© 2014 Amy Goodman / Distributed by King Features Syndicate

Listen to Amy Goodman's column as a podcast on SoundCloud.

Ah, nothing like putting a hilarious voiceover on an already adorable animal video.

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Winnie the Pooh is a diabetic, easily-angered man in his fifties who stocks shelves during the night at a Walmart in Ohio.

Tom is an iguana and Jerry is a hippopotamus. They are working though a divorce.

Garfield is Kierkegaard re-incarnated as a chihuahua with an eating disorder. Odie is a blueberry muffin.

Betty and Veronica are two halves of the same person, but only on weekends.

Mickey Mouse is a spider monkey on meth.

Spongebob Squarepants is a manifestation of all your shattered childhood dreams. Patrick is a lamp post.

Pikachu is an eloquent orator who chooses not to speak in full, clear sentences as a protest of human rights injustices.

Bugs Bunny is a HUGE David Foster Wallace fan.

Scooby-Doo is a 26-year-old mother of three currently enrolled at a community college Massage Therapy program. Shaggy is her AA coach.

 

Thirteen years after the attacks of September 11, and with much said and written about ISIS and the gruesome beheading of James Foley, America continues to misunderstand the roots of Islamic terrorism. We also fail to acknowledge that as long as we remain addicted to cheap oil we will be locked in a war in the Middle East. 

You won’t hear Middle East oil mentioned on the cable news airwaves. You will hear “clash of civilizations,”" religiously motivated terrorism,” and any number of similar phrases that are meant to distract and divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world: we are addicted to the oil beneath their feet, and we intend to dominate the land they stand on.

The Muslim world isn’t as ignorant as Christian crusaders, the military industrial complex and the vast know-nothing right wing would have you believe. After all, what uncivilized, stupid people could produce algebra, geometry and our concept of the rule of law? The Muslim world is smart enough to figure out that America has invested all of the past 70 years into dominating control of Middle East oil supplies. We have propped despotic regimes and brutal dictators, overthrown democratically elected governments and waged three wars in two decades on Muslim soil. All while we fund and are complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian land.

ISIS is the product of our own imagination and self-serving meddling. After we removed Saddam and his Sunni quasi-government, ISIS was the response by those Sunnis blocked from enjoying economic participation in Iraq. 

It’s time to face reality and the monster in the mirror: we are not trying to end global terror, nor are we trying to promote Western secular democracy in the Middle East. Our motivations and desires are no secret. We do everything to ensure that we, and our allies, particularly Japan, have a reliable supply to the region’s liquid gold.

With a total of 44 U.S. military bases in the Middle East and the Central Asia, we have the Muslim world completely surrounded. From Turkey to Saudi Arabia, from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, our bases serve as a constant reminder to Muslims that we control their economic future and we are here to stay. And with an economic future that looks bleak for Muslims, the embers for Muslim rage are stoked.

“Terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease of life,” writes Robert Pape in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

The U.S. State Department has announced that Westerners, mostly British Muslims, are being drawn to ISIS. Media outlets everywhere ask why. The answer is clear. The UK has the greatest concentration of Muslims among Western democracies. Muslims were pulled from former British colonies during the 1940s to provide cheap labor for the reconstruction of Britain in the aftermath of the second world war. The textile and steel mills in the north of England were filled with Muslim migrants from Asia and Africa.

Industrial collapse turned these mills into dust heaps, and today Muslim urban ghettos in the UK now resemble the socio-economic conditions of predominately black urban ghettos in America. For British Muslims, high unemployment is the norm, as is racial discrimination and anti-immigrant violence. For many, economic and social oppression at home looks a whole lot like the social and economic oppression that is occurring in Muslim countries abroad. The collapse of liberal democracies in the face of unfettered capitalism has failed minorities everywhere in the West.

Socio-economic insecurity is at the heart of all self-proclaimed religiously motivated extremism. Where social justice prevails, and the state meets the economic needs of its people, hyper-religious ideologies lack appeal.

French political scholar Oliver Roy argues, “This notion of a globalized Islam is not the product of any specific ‘Islamist’ organization but a broad sociological trend that has developed across Europe as a result of racism, migration, and globalization.” In Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, Muslims have been oppressed and had war waged upon them. “In principle—all the struggles for Muslims around the world were to be regarded as equally important” in this global ummah, Roy writes. This is why we now find Western Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

In returning to the Middle East, and its oil, our posture and actions promise to become even more aggressive, as oil reserves inevitably diminish. In an in-depth look into Saudi oil production over the past 40 years, Matthew R. Simmons warns in his book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy that Saudi oil production is a far cry from the boastful claims long made by the kingdom regarding the robustness of its oilfields. According to Simmons, Saudi oil production peaked at 10 million barrels a day in 1981. Today it is 8 to 9 million barrels and falling. No super giant oil fields have been found in the region since the 1950s.

The very reason U.S. military bases, which are the size of small cities, exist in Saudi Arabia is to ensure our access to this diminishing supply. The oppressive Saudi regime wants us there to ensure neighboring countries don’t eye their oil. The central and founding charter of Al Qaeda was to remove our bases from the Holy Land. It was no coincidence that 17 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.

“We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly, and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both,” warns Chris Hedges. With our addiction to Middle East oil supplies, we can expect the latter, which means 2001 was the start of our endless war with the Muslim world.

 

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• Why Don't the U.S. and U.K. Pay Ransoms for Hostages?
• The Beheading of James Foley and the Daily Horrors of the Internet
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Authorities in the southern Indian state of Kerala outline plans to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol to tackle the state's drink problem.

Who comes up with the idea to get Nick Offerman to read Reddit posts? Whoever they are, they deserve a medal/giant, collective Internet kiss.

Read more...

Since Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, local law enforcement and much of the mainstream media have been playing by an old script, in which the local police use the press to smear Brown’s character and distract from what really happened.

Meanwhile, a lot of people on social media aren’t buying it. They have noted these police propaganda tactics are tragically predictable, and that too many reporters aren’t asking questions, but playing along as police megaphones.

“We need journalism to kick in and start reporting the story,” actor Jesse Williams told CNN last Sunday. “This is about finding justice for a kid that was shot. An 18-year-old that was shot. Period. And this idea that because he stole a handful of cheap cigars, that were what, five bucks from a convenient store?”

Williams, who was assailed by rightwingers for wearing a hoodie on the air—then cut to the heart of the matter. He said there is a double standard where police and mainstream media all too often turn police brutality victims into people who somehow deserved what they got:

“This idea that every time a black person does something, they automatically become a ‘thug worthy of their own death?’ We don’t own drug crimes. We’re not the only ones that sell and do drugs all the time, we’re not the only ones who steal, we’re not the only ones who talk crazy to cops. There’s a complete double standard and a complete different experience that a certain element of this country has the privilege of being treated as human beings. And the rest of us are not being treated like human beings. Period. And that needs to be discussed, that is the story…we’re not making this up.”

According to the most recently available federal crime statistics reported by USA Today, a white police officer killed a black person at least twice a week in the U.S from 2005 through 2012. “The shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, MO., last Saturday was not an isolated event in American policing. Eighteen percent of the blacks killed during those seven years were under age 21, compared to 8.7 percent of whites.” 

Let’s look at what we know about seven key moments or factors that unfolded in the wake of Brown’s death that show how police demonization and media character assassination works. While the full details of what actually happened are not known—that is what the FBI will try to determine—what’s clear is how disinformation from police, spread by an uncritical media, recycles the worst stereotypes.

1. Ferguson Police Quickly Blame The Dead.What happened before Brown was shot six times by Officer Darren Wilson is not fully known. Eyewitness Dorian Johnson told MSNBC that Brown was walking down the street when police drove up and demanded that Brown get into the vehicle and he ignored the order. St. Louis County Police Chief Joe Belmar said Brown fought Wilson and reached for his gun, justifying the shooting. The police did not initially name the officer, although that detail came out a few days later.

Johnson told MSNBC a very different story. He said Wilson drove up in a police truck and aggressively went after the pair. He first demanded that they get on the sidewalk. When they kept on walking, Johnson said that Wilson nearly hit them with his truck, and then yelled and used the truck door to knock Brown down. Wilson then jumped out and grabbed Brown, who resisted being choked, Johnson said. When the pair started to flee, Wilson shot at Brown, who stopped and yelled he didn’t have a gun. Johnson said he saw Brown shot, while facing Wilson, and then collapsing onto the street.

2. Police Release Video Smearing Brown For Alleged Robbery.Before Ferguson police released Wilson’s identity, they released a video that allegedly showed Brown confronting a convenience store employee and taking a package of cigars. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon told NBC’s Meet The Press that neither his office nor the state highway patrol team he deployed to take over local policing were informed beforehand. “Quite frankly, we disagree deeply,” Nixon said. “To attempt to, in essence, disparage the character of this victim in the middle of a process like this is not right. It’s just not right.”

3. Mainstream Media Makes The Video Bigger Than His Death. As the department surely knew, the release of the video would swamp most of the coverage, because any police investigation, whether by that department or outside agencies would take time. The police know the mainstream press will consider them to be an official source, because they are an arm of government, more so than a biased participant. However, as the DailyKos’ Barbara Morrill reported, the video’s release before police identified the shooter meant that much of the media coverage would focus on the robbery.

“Well, that didn’t take long,” she wrote. “Barely two hours after Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson named the police officer who gunned down 18-year-old Michael Brown last Saturday, and the demonization of—you guessed it—Michael Brown is well underway.” She cited half a dozen headlines mixing the officer’s identity with the alleged robbery, and this tweet from @fivefifths: “We officially have more facts about a likely unrelated robbery of a single [pack of] Swisher [cigars] than we do about the execution of Mike Brown.”

4. Police Release Autopsy Detail Saying Brown Had Smoked Pot. The DailyKos’ Morrill concluded, “The victim has become the suspect.” That was before another leak further victimizing Brown—a preliminary autopsy report showing traces of marijuana in his blood. It hardly matters that many scientific studies have found that marijuana doesn’t increase violent behavior. This was more innuendo from police telegraphing that Brown was no angel. Right-wing media took the ball and ran with it. Fox News interviewed the medical examiner who conducted the initial autopsy, who speculated on the air that because of pot, Brown “may have been acting in a crazy way and may have done things to the police officer that normally he would not have done.”

5. Mainstream Media Doesn’t Question Source’s Motives. From a media criticism perspective, what’s incredible is not just that these narratives—the alleged burglary or pot smoking—are far less important than the fact that an unarmed teenager was shot and killed by a police officer. The local police aren’t innocent bystanders. They are not a disinterested source. Neither is the local medical examiner who works with the police. But that conflict of interest does not stop certain outlets from quoting this law enforcement community to again smear Brown.

6. Next Smear: Ferguson Called Crime-Filled Community. As MediaMatters noted, “Right-wing media emphasized the supposed prevalence of ‘black-on-black’ violence in response to the shooting death of unarmed black teen Michael Brown... Such emphasis takes the crime statistics out of context in order to hype the racial aspect.” Actual crime statistics for Ferguson reveal it is both better and worse than national averages, depending on the crime. Nonetheless, commentators at the Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, Fox News and elsewhere are calling it a bastion of bad behavior.

7. Public Defenders Say There’s Nothing New In Police Smears. Public defenders face off in court representing low-income clients against police and prosecutors. Miles Gerety, who recently retired after three decades as a Connecticut public defender specializing in death penalty cases, said he was “not surprised at all” about the Ferguson police. “It’s an unsophisticated albeit primative attempt to justify what seems unjustfiable: ‘The deceased was a bad person and thus deserved to die.’” Gerety also noted that these slurs and character assassinations would not be allowed in a courtrom trial, even though they are getting media play and shape public opinion.

“A crime is a crime. Just because your victim may have been a bad actor at some point, doesn’t make killing that person justifiable,” he said. “In a trial for murder, for instance, the fact that the victim may have committed a crime before being killed would be completely irrelevant unless the defendant knew of the conduct and it somehow related to a self-defense claim. It’s ironic that the Ferguson police resorted to this tactic of blaming the victim when you damn well know they’d blast any defense lawyer who resorted to the same tactic. I’ve found it doesn’t pay to malign the dead.”

The Big Picture: Unchecked Police Brutality

The unrest and protests following Brown’s killing have put the militarization of local police forces in the national spotlight, especially as police who look like soldiers are facing down protesters on Ferguson’s streets. But the most important issue that’s not getting widely discussed transcends the horrible specifics of Michael Brown’s death: the continuing trend of police officers shooting and killing black men, instead of using other tactics to deal with confrontations.

(On Tuesday, St. Louis police shot and killed another man, apparently wielding a knife, several miles from Ferguson.)

 

Related Stories

• Why You Shouldn't Trust Right-Wingers' Sudden Concern About the Police
• Michael Brown's Killing Exposes the Neglect of Black Communities in the U.S.
• 10 Facts About Police Violence in Ferguson Sunday Night

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Photoshoppers there immediately began to work their magic, demonstrating that with those good looks and some hilarious photo editing, this little guy can do anything and go anywhere…

(via E Minor)