Thinksgiving

and Be thankful for what you've got
 

  LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy: A Coalescence of Interests
By Joseph P. Farrell

«Λ»unctuating Hedges' The World As It Is

003	Sheldon Wolin - Democracy Incorporated Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted... Politics and Vision Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought Tocqueville between Two Worlds The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life
014	John Ralston Saul - Voltaire's Bastards
020	Naomi Klein - No Logo 10th Anniversary Edition
023	Daniel J. Boorstin - The Image A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
029	Stuart Ewen - Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer... Pr! A Social History Of Spin
047	Houston A. Baker - Betrayal How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil ...
050	Angela Davis | Dick Gregory | Ishmael Reed | James Hal Cone | Yusef Komunyakaa
050	Thulani Davis

Unimpeachable Perspective

Any questions?

Political Scientology

“Cleaning Up” America Por los Touristas

Priam Rosenberg

Cops only have Tasers for children, the unarmed, the physically or mentally handicapped, and the elderly ... but if you bring a knife to a gun fight ...

In Times Square ... well then it's obviously right and proper that you get sprayed with (twelve!) bullets instead. America: FUCK YEAH!

Kill-shots are so manly. N'est-ce pas?

McGoohan's Mandala

deconstruction of metaphor embedded in parable, wrapped by surrealism

Just Another Day in the House of the Dead

Depends on what you mean by “dead”

So exposing classified national security information is an act of criminal evil when done by a whistleblower to expose high-level error or abuse, or to a court trying to assess the legality of the President’s actions. But it is an act of great nobility when done to venerate the President as a strong and tough warrior. That’s the manipulative, propagandistic game-playing this administration exploits with its secrecy powers and whistleblower prosecutions.

Exculpatory Hawk for Roosting Chickens

M - I - C . . . K - E - Y

lt is only a citizenry; an alert and informed citizenry, which can keep these abuses from coming about. And . . . some of this misuse of influence and power could come about unwittingly but just by the very nature of the thing .... almost every one of your magazines, no matter what they are advertising, has a picture of the Titan missile or the Atlas or solid fuel or other things, there is . . . almost an insidious penetration of our own minds that the only thing this country is engaged in is weaponry and missiles. And, I'll tell you we just can't afford to do that. The reason we have them is to protect the great values in which we believe, and they are far deeper even than our own lives and our own property.

President Eisenhower, in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, Volume 2

If only ...

& h/t Michael S. Sherry's In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930's (p. 235)

“Fun-house” Mirrors of History

The deployment of the B-17s [in the Philippines] and the hopes vested in them revealed American attitudes on the brink of war and during it: a chronic underestimation, rooted in part in racial stereotypes, of Japanese military abilities and a persistent overestimation of American technology. In turn, so opinion polls showed, most Americans seemed to view war with Japan—though not with Germany—eagerly, almost cavalierly. "U.S. Cheerfully Faces War with Japan," Life claimed on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Americans felt, "rightly or wrongly, that the Japs were pushovers," a schoolboy’s word congruent with [Magaret] Mead’s metaphor of a nation placing a chip on its shoulder.⁹⁸ The hope of unleashing its bombers against Japan, perhaps in a surprise attack, also accounted for much of the indignation felt about Japan’s act of "infamy" (as FDR called it) on December 7. What galled American leaders was not simply Japan’s treachery but their frustration at having it occur before the United States could mount its own surprise.
p. 62

Michael S. Sherry - 1995

98. On polls and Life, see O’Neill, Democracy at War, 73.

Catching Up With “Piercing” Disapprobation

Just this morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature about how the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the activities of the lawyers who worked for the assorted shark tanks that ran the world economy into the ditch. The SEC isn't looking into lawyers who were complicit in the fraud. It is looking into lawyers who helped build the stonewalls that went up when the true breadth and depth of the scandal started to come to light. This is a huge and messy legal fight – looked at in a certain way, the SEC may well be going after those lawyers for what they did on behalf of their clients, a tactic usually used against mob lawyers, and one that has been the occasion for a lengthy and brutal battle of the motions — but what it does is illustrate, again, what an utterly corrupt nation the United States of America was in the first decade of the 21st century. The governing elites, all of them, were complicit in massive fraud against the rest of us. Either they participated in it, which would be the bankers and (it appears) their lawyers, or they condoned and celebrated it, which would be the financial press and the elite media, or they shirked their duty to protect the political commonwealth from being hijacked, which would be the members of both parties in the government, and us, for letting so much of the country run on automatic pilot for so long.

This was a banana republic. It was a failed state in everything except the fact that no tanks rolled in the streets. The terrorists were not hiding in Waziristan. They were having lunch at Cipriani's and sitting in luxury boxes at the Meadowlands. The government existed only to increase their profits and to provide a quasi-legal context for organized piracy. There was an extraordinary contempt for the law, for the institutions of government, and for the people the law and those institutions were supposed to serve. The country was cored out. It was a shell of a country and a shell corporation, and it has not recovered yet.

The 'End' of Occupy and the Corruption of Our Country

“catalogue of swindles and perversions”

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.

Contravening Prevailing Othodoxy

From [William Appleman] Williams' efforts to understand American power, four noteworthy points survive. The first is that during the twentieth century the United States came to play a role that cannot be understood except as a variant of empire. That notion, employed in the midst of the Cold War more as an epithet than as an explanation, became by the 1990s almost a statement of the obvious. In the aftermath of the Cold War, references to an American empire or to American hegemony, which formerly came with barbs attached, were no longer fighting words. Though still avoided by government officials, such terms infiltrated the lexicon of everyday discourse about U.S. foreign policy. As even Schlesinger, Williams' particular nemesis, conceded, "who can doubt that there is an American empire?—an ’informal’ empire, not colonial in polity, but still richly equipped with imperial paraphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local collaborators, all spread around the luckless planet."⁶⁸

Beltway Circle-Jerking

Limits? We Don't Need No Stinking Limits

And yes. these are our limits

...[T]he reconciliation of the people and the army turned out to be a chimera. When the chips were down, "supporting the troops" elicited plenty of posturing but little by way of binding commitments. Far from producing a stampede of eager recruits keen to don a uniform, the events of 9/11 reaffirmed a widespread popular preference for hiring someone else’s kid to chase terrorists, spread democracy and ensure access to the world’s energy reserves. In the midst of a global war of ostensibly earthshaking importance, Americans demonstrated a greater affinity for their hometown sports heroes than for the soldiers defending the distant precincts of the American imperium. Tom Brady makes millions playing quarterback in the NFL and rakes in millions more from endorsements. Pat Tillman quit professional football to become an army ranger and was killed in Afghanistan. Yet, of the two, Brady more fully embodies the contemporary understanding of the term Patriot.

The Social Justice “Clean Room”

& Self Imposed Exile

∇

And that, I think, is the problem with pretty much every mainstream model: they are not intellectual constructions that promote thought; they are more akin to cages built out of the remnants of long dead assumptions that are used to entrap the minds of those they are handed to. It is only those of highly independent mind that can wrench themselves from such conceptions once taught them.

Philip Pilkington:
Policing the Economists
from Within Their Own Minds
- ISLM as a Model of Intellectual Control

Throughout, Gessen paints a bleak picture of the “hijacked state media” and the gradual though systematic erosion of freedom of speech. The elimination of those courageous enough to speak or write about injustice reminds us that although the KGB may now operate under a new moniker, its practices remain the same.

How Vladimir Putin Came to Power

We're All “Brothers” Now

No Name In The Street (1972)

I told him that Americans had no business at all in Vietnam; and that black people certainly had no business there, aiding the slave master to enslave yet more millions of dark people, and also identifying themselves with the white American crimes: we, the blacks, are going to need our allies, for the Americans, odd as it may sound at the moment, will presently have none. It wasn't, I said, hard to understand why a black boy, standing, future-less on the corner, would decide to join the Army, nor was it hard to decipher the slave master's reasons for hoping that he wouldn't live to come home with a gun; but it wasn't necessary, after all, to defend it: to defend, that is, one's murder and one's murderers. “Wait a minute,” he said, “let me stand up an tell you what I think we're trying to do there.” “We?” I cried, “what motherfucking we? You stand up, motherfucker, and I'll kick you in the ass.”

James Baldwin

Old Testament Nation

Jai guru deva om

Emphasis is mine.

There are many reasons to be horrified by prison assault — and sexual assault generally — but the degree to which it’s enmeshed in the American consciousness as just part of our system of “justice” is particularly disturbing. While it looks to me like more women than men are sexually assaulted every year, it is clear that entering the prison system greatly increases your chances of being sexually assaulted, regardless of your gender. And however you cut the statistics, it is clear that men in the United States are sexually assaulted in enormous numbers — they’re just men who we don’t care so much about, or who society has decided deserves it.

*

DEF CON Artistry

Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo Echo Delta

	Series		DEF CON huh ?	(Scale) Size		Period	ƒ(x)
1	DGI		Federal National Defense Gross Investment	2	Solid	Q	Chg fYA, Bil $
2	DGIC96		Real National Defense Gross Investmen	3	Solid	Q	Bil Chd2005 $
3	FDEFX		National Defense Consumption Expend. & Gross Investment	2	Solid	Q	% Chg fYA
4	FGRECPT		Federal Government Current Receipts	2	Solid	Q	Bil $
5	FGEXPND		Federal Government: Current Expenditures	1	Solid	Q	% Chg fYA
6	GDP		Gross Domestic Product, 1 Decimal	2	Solid	~A	Bil $
7	FYGFD		Gross Federal Debt	2	Solid	A, FY	Bil $
8	DGIC96/FYGFD		(#2 / #7) Defense Gross Investment / Gross Federal Debt	3	Dotted	A	Bil Chd2005 $ ‡
9	FGRECPT/FYGFD		(#4 / #7) Current Receipts / Gross Federal Debt	3	Dashed	A	x * 100
10	FGEXPND/FYGFD		(#5 / #7) Current Expenditures / Gross Federal Debt	3	Dashed	A	x * 100

‡ (*5000)-6

WFKATGWOT

“... the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism ...”

Furthermore, acting on behalf of the United States, the president exercises this supposed right without warning, without regard to claims of national sovereignty, without Congressional authorization, and without consulting anyone other than Michael Vickers and a few other members of the national security apparatus. The role allotted to the American people is to applaud, if and when notified that a successful assassination has occurred. And applaud we do, for example, when a daring raid by members in SEAL Team Six secretly enter Pakistan to dispatch Osama bin Laden with two neatly placed kill shots. Vengeance long deferred making it unnecessary to consider what second-order political complications might ensue.

“Scoring the Global War on Terror”

But, it's all good, because there is a "bipartisan" group of senators who agree that Assad is a monster and because John McCain, World Leader, is in Cairo, using his well-known diplomatic talents to smooth over relations with another of our important allies in "the war on terror," a phrase that one day is going to send historians spiraling into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

“Waiting For A Friend”

CJR's Ann Cooper: A Real "Kicker"

And fully invested in her own mythology

*

Updated 2012.02.06 Fin 10:05 PM EST

I'm sure Ann Cooper is a decent, hard working, and thoroughly capable journalist. Her faculty bio at the Columbia Journalism School gives an impressive list of accomplishments, accolades, and awards – and I have no reason to doubt their probity nor provenance. But her last post to CJR's The Kicker left me wondering how much thought, balance or effort she employed in rendering a dismissively harsh verdict on RT and its coming attraction with Julian Assange.