Reality v. Beltway Fantasy

 Reality v. Beltway Fantasy 

Could reporters and timid Democrats who think that it’s still 2002 and the country is awash in blind reverence for George Bush please take note of the following facts, and — on every significant issue, from the Alito filibuster to Iraq withdraw to the NSA scandal — adjust your thinking and tactics accordingly: From Thursday’s CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll:

A majority of Americans are more likely to vote for a candidate in November’s congressional elections who opposes President Bush, and 58 percent consider his second term a failure so far, according to a poll released Thursday. . . .

Fewer people consider Bush to be honest and trustworthy now than did a year ago, and 53 percent said they believe his administration deliberately misled the public about Iraq’s purported weapons program before the U.S. invasion in 2003, the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found . . . ..

Fifty-eight percent of those polled said Bush’s second term has been a failure so far, while 38 percent said they consider it a success. A smaller number — 52 percent — consider his entire presidency a failure to date, with 46 percent calling it successful. . . . But 51 percent of those polled said they were more likely to vote for a candidate in congressional elections who opposes Bush, while 40 percent said they were likely to vote for a candidate who backs the president.

And from the same poll, we have this:

Americans’ overall assessment of the country today is fairly negative. Only 35% are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States; 65% are dissatisfied. This is consistent with Americans’ generally dour mood on this measure for the past year.

And then there is this, from the new CBS/New York Times poll:

President Bush’s approval rating is stuck at a dismal 42 percent as he heads into next week’s State of the Union address, according to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll. Fifty-one percent of Americans give him a negative job approval rating. It’s the first time in his presidency he’ll give a State of the Union speech with a majority of the residents of the country saying they disapprove of the job he’s doing. . . ..

At the same time, a clear majority, 64 percent, is concerned that the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism measures could threaten their civil liberties…read on

posted by Glenn Greenwald

BYU professor’s group accuses U.S. officials of lying about 9/11

I don’t think this person is alone in their suspicions.

By Elaine Jarvik
Deseret Morning News, Saturday, January 28, 2006

http://deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,635179751,00.html

Last fall, Brigham Young University physics professor Steven E. Jones made headlines when he charged that the World Trade Center collapsed because of “pre-positioned explosives.” Now, along with a group that calls itself “Scholars for 9/11 Truth,” he’s upping the ante.

“We believe that senior government officials have covered up crucial facts about what really happened on 9/11,” the group says in a statement released Friday announcing its formation. “We believe these events may have been orchestrated by the administration in order to manipulate the American people into supporting policies at home and abroad.”

Headed by Jones and Jim Fetzer, University of Minnesota Duluth distinguished McKnight professor of philosophy, the group is made up of 50 academicians and others.

They include Robert M. Bowman, former director of the U.S. “Star Wars” space defense program, and Morgan Reynolds, former chief economist for the Department of Labor in President George W. Bush’s first term. Most of the members are less well-known.

The group’s Web site (www.ST911.org) includes an updated version of Jones’s paper about the collapse of the Twin Towers and a paper by Fetzer that looks at conspiracy theories. The government’s version of the events of 9/11 — that the plane’s hijackers were tied to Osama bin Laden — is its own conspiracy theory, says Fetzer, who has studied the John F. Kennedy assassination since 1992.

“Did the Bush administration know in advance about the impending attacks that occurred on 9/11, and allow these to happen, to provoke pre-planned wars against Afghanistan and Iraq? These questions demand immediate answers,” charges a paper written collectively by Scholars for 9/11 Truth. The group plans to write more papers, and present lectures and conferences.

“We have very limited resources and no subpoena powers,” Fetzer said. “What you have is a bunch of serious scholars taking a look at this and discovering it didn’t add up. We don’t have a political ax to grind.”

Fetzer has doctorates in the history and philosophy of science. “One of the roles I can play here,” he said, “is to explain why a certain line of argument is correct or not.”

In his original message to potential members last month, Fetzer warned that joining the group might make them the subject of government surveillance and might get them on various lists of “potential terrorists.”

The group’s charges include:

• Members of the Bush administration knew in advance that the 9/11 attacks would happen but did nothing to stop them.

• No Air Force or Air National Guard jets were sent to “scramble” the hijacked planes, which were clearly deviating from their flight plans, although jet fighters had been deployed for scramblings 67 times in the year prior to 9/11. The procedure for issuing orders for scrambling was changed in June 2001, requiring that approval could only come from the Secretary of Defense, but Donald Rumsfeld was not alerted soon enough on 9/11, according to Scholars group.

• The video of Osama bin Laden found by American troops in Afghanistan in December 2001, in which bin Laden says he orchestrated the attacks, is not bin Laden. The Scholars for 9/11 Truth compared the video with a photo of the “real” bin Laden and argue that there are discrepancies in the ratio of nose-length to nose-width, as well as distance from tip-of-nose to ear lobe.

The Scholars group hopes that media outlets around the world will ask experts in their areas to examine the group’s findings and assertions. If this were done, they argue, “one of the great hoaxes of history would stand naked before the eyes of the world.”

The group also asks for an investigation of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, following up on points made in Jones’s paper, “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” That paper, recently updated, has been posted on Jones’s BYU Web site since last November.

Jones argues that the WTC buildings did not collapse due to impact or fires caused by the jets hitting the towers but collapsed as a result of pre-positioned “cutter charges.” Proof, he says, includes:

• Molten metal was found in the subbasements of WTC sites weeks after 9/11; the melting point of structural steel is 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit and the temperature of jet fuel does not exceed 1,800 degrees. Molten metal was also found in the building known as WTC7, although no plane had struck it. Jones’s paper also includes a photo of a slag of the metal being extracted from ground zero. The slag, Jones argues, could not be aluminum from the planes because in photographs the metal was salmon-to-yellow-hot temperature (approximately 1,550 to 1,900 degrees F) “well above the melting temperatures of lead and aluminum,” which would be a liquid at that temperature.

• Building WTC7 collapsed in 6.6 seconds, which means, Jones says, that the steel and concrete support had to be simply knocked out of the way. “Explosive demolitions are like that,” he said. “It doesn’t fit the model of the fire-induced pancake collapse.”

• No steel-frame, high-rise buildings have ever before or since been brought down due to fires. Temperatures due to fire don’t get hot enough for buildings to collapse, he says.

• Jones points to a recent article in the journal New Civil Engineering that says WTC disaster investigators at NIST (the National Institutes of Standards and Technology) “are refusing to show computer visualizations of the collapse of the Twin Towers despite calls from leading structural and fire engineers.”

Neither Jones nor other members of the Scholars group suggests who would have planted the explosives, but they argue that the devices could have been operated by remote control.

Jones says he has received thousands of e-mails from people around the world who either support his ideas or think he’s “nutty,” and he still gets about 30 e-mails a day on the topic.

He continues to do research on cold fusion, which he prefers to call metal-catalyzed fusion “to distinguish it from the claims” of former University of Utah chemistry professors B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann, “which we do not accept as verified.” He reports that his metal-catalyzed fusion work is going well, with three scientific papers published last year.

Jones will present a talk entitled “9/11 Revisited: Scientific and Ethical Questions” at Utah Valley State College at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 1.

Robot bartender

A man enters a bar and orders a drink. The bar has a robot bartender.

The robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, and then asks him,
“What’s your IQ?”

The man replies “150″ and the robot proceeds to make conversation about
global warming factors, quantum physics and spirituality, biochemistry,
environmental interconnectedness, string theory, nano-technology, and
sexual proclivities.

The customer is very impressed and thinks, “This is really cool.” He
decides to test the robot.

He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another
drink. Again, the robot serves him the perfectlty prepared drink and
asks him, “What’s your IQ?”

The man responds, “about a 100.”

Immediately the robot starts talking, but this time, about football,
NASCAR, baseball, supermodels, favorite fast foods, guns, and women’s
breasts.

Really impressed, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot
one more test. He heads out and returns, the robot serves him and asks,
“What’s your IQ?” The man replies, “Er, 50, I think.”

And the robot says… real slowly…. “So,…………… ya gonna vote
for Bush again?”

Still my favorite

This is still my favorite page. I just like the way it looks and the whole presentation. I’ve got too many blogs. I’m going to have to abandon one. I guess bloglines is probably the one I’ll let go of. I still like it as an aggregator. But, there’s not alot you can do with the look of the site. Sorry Bloglines. You guys need to catch up. Yeah, you have one unique feature. You shouldn’t bank on that.

The christian right lie

The Religious Right’s prevailing myth that our country was founded as a Christian nation has always been just that a myth, a lie, a fable, a story in the same company as George Washington’s cutting down the cherry tree. So I thought I would share some great quotes from our “founding fathers” that ought to dispell such sillyness. There are many more like the following but these make the point well enough I think.

“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” – Thomas Jefferson

“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.” – Thomas Jefferson

“Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together” – James Madison

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” – James Madison

“What influence in fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy.” – James Madison

“I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book [the Bible].” – Thomas Paine

“It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils of the Bible.” – Thomas Paine

“The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.” – John Adams

“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” – John Adams and George Washington

Note: I’ve added a few more quotes from Paine and Madison and expanded the second quote from Jefferson. Also, the last “quote” by Adams and Washington was actually written into the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli (Article 11) during George Washington’s presidency and then later signed by President Adams with the following proviso:

“Now, be it known, that I, John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said treaty, do, by and within the consent of the Senate, accept, ratify and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof.”

New Flock extension site

Check it oot, ya feckers

Flock Extension City :: If you build it they will come

Chomsky: ‘There Is No War On Terror’

Chomsky: ‘There Is No War On Terror’

By Geov Parrish, AlterNet. Posted January 14, 2006.

The acclaimed critic of U.S. foreign policy analyzes Bush’s current political troubles, the war on Iraq, and what’s really behind the global ‘war on terror.’

For over 40 years, MIT professor Noam Chomsky has been one of the world’s leading intellectual critics of U.S. foreign policy. Today, with America’s latest imperial adventure in trouble both politically and militarily, Chomsky — who turned 77 last month — vows not to slow down “as long as I’m ambulatory.” I spoke with him by phone, on Dec. 9 and again on Dec. 20, from his office in Cambridge.

Geov Parrish: Is George Bush in political trouble? And if so, why?

Noam Chomsky: George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this. The only gain that they’re getting is that the Republicans are losing support. Now, again, an opposition party would be making hay, but the Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can’t do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, “How can you criticize it? You all voted for it.” And, yeah, they’re basically correct.

How could the Democrats distinguish themselves at this point, given that they’ve already played into that trap?

Democrats read the polls way more than I do, their leadership. They know what public opinion is. They could take a stand that’s supported by public opinion instead of opposed to it. Then they could become an opposition party, and a majority party. But then they’re going to have to change their position on just about everything.

Take, for example, take your pick, say for example health care. Probably the major domestic problem for people. A large majority of the population is in favor of a national health care system of some kind. And that’s been true for a long time. But whenever that comes up — it’s occasionally mentioned in the press — it’s called politically impossible, or “lacking political support,” which is a way of saying that the insurance industry doesn’t want it, the pharmaceutical corporations don’t want it, and so on. Okay, so a large majority of the population wants it, but who cares about them? Well, Democrats are the same. Clinton came up with some cockamamie scheme which was so complicated you couldn’t figure it out, and it collapsed.

Kerry in the last election, the last debate in the election, October 28 I think it was, the debate was supposed to be on domestic issues. And the New York Times had a good report of it the next day. They pointed out, correctly, that Kerry never brought up any possible government involvement in the health system because it “lacks political support.” It’s their way of saying, and Kerry’s way of understanding, that political support means support from the wealthy and the powerful. Well, that doesn’t have to be what the Democrats are. You can imagine an opposition party that’s based on popular interests and concerns.

Given the lack of substantive differences in the foreign policies of the two parties –

Or domestic.

Yeah, or domestic. But I’m setting this up for a foreign policy question. Are we being set up for a permanent state of war?

I don’t think so. Nobody really wants war. What you want is victory. Take, say, Central America. In the 1980s, Central America was out of control. The U.S. had to fight a vicious terrorist war in Nicaragua, had to support murderous terrorist states in El Salvador and Guatemala, and Honduras, but that was a state of war. All right, the terrorists succeeded. Now, it’s more or less peaceful. So you don’t even read about Central America any more because it’s peaceful. I mean, suffering and miserable, and so on, but peaceful. So it’s not a state of war. And the same elsewhere. If you can keep people under control, it’s not a state of war.

Take, say, Russia and Eastern Europe. Russia ran Eastern Europe for half a century, almost, with very little military intervention. Occasionally they’d have to invade East Berlin, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, but most of the time it was peaceful. And they thought everything was fine — run by local security forces, local political figures, no big problem. That’s not a permanent state of war.

In the War on Terror, however, how does one define victory against a tactic? You can’t ever get there.

There are metrics. For example, you can measure the number of terrorist attacks. Well, that’s gone up sharply under the Bush administration, very sharply after the Iraq war. As expected — it was anticipated by intelligence agencies that the Iraq war would increase the likelihood of terror. And the post-invasion estimates by the CIA, National Intelligence Council, and other intelligence agencies are exactly that. Yes, it increased terror. In fact, it even created something which never existed — new training ground for terrorists, much more sophisticated than Afghanistan, where they were training professional terrorists to go out to their own countries. So, yeah, that’s a way to deal with the War on Terror, namely, increase terror. And the obvious metric, the number of terrorist attacks, yeah, they’ve succeeded in increasing terror.

The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It’s a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world’s energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror. And the same with other things. Take, say, nuclear terror. The American intelligence systems estimate that the likelihood of a “dirty bomb,” a dirty nuclear bomb attack in the United States in the next ten years, is about 50 percent. Well, that’s pretty high. Are they doing anything about it? Yeah. They’re increasing the threat, by increasing nuclear proliferation, by compelling potential adversaries to take very dangerous measures to try to counter rising American threats.

This is even sometimes discussed. You can find it in the strategic analysis literature. Take, say, the invasion of Iraq again. We’re told that they didn’t find weapons of mass destruction. Well, that’s not exactly correct. They did find weapons of mass destruction, namely, the ones that had been sent to Saddam by the United States, Britain, and others through the 1980s. A lot of them were still there. They were under control of U.N. inspectors and were being dismantled. But many were still there. When the U.S. invaded, the inspectors were kicked out, and Rumsfeld and Cheney didn’t tell their troops to guard the sites. So the sites were left unguarded, and they were systematically looted. The U.N. inspectors did continue their work by satellite and they identified over 100 sites that were systematically looted, like, not somebody going in and stealing something, but carefully, systematically looted.

By people who knew what they were doing.

Yeah, people who knew what they were doing. It meant that they were taking the high-precision equipment that you can use for nuclear weapons and missiles, dangerous biotoxins, all sorts of stuff. Nobody knows where it went, but, you know, you hate to think about it. Well, that’s increasing the threat of terror, substantially. Russia has sharply increased its offensive military capacity in reaction to Bush’s programs, which is dangerous enough, but also to try to counter overwhelming U.S. dominance in offensive capacity. They are compelled to ship nuclear missiles all over their vast territory. And mostly unguarded. And the CIA is perfectly well aware that Chechen rebels have been casing Russian railway installations, probably with a plan to try to steal nuclear missiles. Well, yeah, that could be an apocalypse. But they’re increasing that threat. Because they don’t care that much.

Same with global warming. They’re not stupid. They know that they’re increasing the threat of a serious catastrophe. But that’s a generation or two away. Who cares? There’s basically two principles that define the Bush administration policies: stuff the pockets of your rich friends with dollars, and increase your control over the world. Almost everything follows from that. If you happen to blow up the world, well, you know, it’s somebody else’s business. Stuff happens, as Rumsfeld said.

You’ve been tracking U.S. wars of foreign aggression since Vietnam, and now we’re in Iraq. Do you think there’s any chance in the aftermath, given the fiasco that it’s been, that there will be any fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy? And if so, how would it come about?

Well, there are significant changes. Compare, for example, the war in Iraq with 40 years ago, the war in Vietnam. There’s quite significant change. Opposition to the war in Iraq is far greater than the much worse war in Vietnam. Iraq is the first war I think in the history of European imperialism, including the U.S., where there was massive protest before the war was officially launched. In Vietnam it took four or five years before there was any visible protest. Protest was so slight that nobody even remembers or knows that Kennedy attacked South Vietnam in 1962. It was a serious attack. It was years later before protest finally developed.

What do you think should be done in Iraq?

Well, the first thing that should be done in Iraq is for us to be serious about what’s going on. There is almost no serious discussion, I’m sorry to say, across the spectrum, of the question of withdrawal. The reason for that is that we are under a rigid doctrine in the West, a religious fanaticism, that says we must believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq even if its main product was lettuce and pickles, and the oil resources of the world were in Central Africa. Anyone who doesn’t believe that is condemned as a conspiracy theorist, a Marxist, a madman, or something. Well, you know, if you have three gray cells functioning, you know that that’s perfect nonsense. The U.S. invaded Iraq because it has enormous oil resources, mostly untapped, and it’s right in the heart of the world’s energy system. Which means that if the U.S. manages to control Iraq, it extends enormously its strategic power, what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls its critical leverage over Europe and Asia. Yeah, that’s a major reason for controlling the oil resources — it gives you strategic power. Even if you’re on renewable energy you want to do that. So that’s the reason for invading Iraq, the fundamental reason.

Now let’s talk about withdrawal. Take any day’s newspapers or journals and so on. They start by saying the United States aims to bring about a sovereign democratic independent Iraq. I mean, is that even a remote possibility? Just consider what the policies would be likely to be of an independent sovereign Iraq. If it’s more or less democratic, it’ll have a Shiite majority. They will naturally want to improve their linkages with Iran, Shiite Iran. Most of the clerics come from Iran. The Badr Brigade, which basically runs the South, is trained in Iran. They have close and sensible economic relationships which are going to increase. So you get an Iraqi/Iran loose alliance. Furthermore, right across the border in Saudi Arabia, there’s a Shiite population which has been bitterly oppressed by the U.S.-backed fundamentalist tyranny. And any moves toward independence in Iraq are surely going to stimulate them, it’s already happening. That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabian oil is. Okay, so you can just imagine the ultimate nightmare in Washington: a loose Shiite alliance controlling most of the world’s oil, independent of Washington and probably turning toward the East, where China and others are eager to make relationships with them, and are already doing it. Is that even conceivable? The U.S. would go to nuclear war before allowing that, as things now stand.

Now, any discussion of withdrawal from Iraq has to at least enter the real world, meaning, at least consider these issues. Just take a look at the commentary in the United States, across the spectrum. How much discussion do you see of these issues? Well, you know, approximately zero, which means that the discussion is just on Mars. And there’s a reason for it. We’re not allowed to concede that our leaders have rational imperial interests. We have to assume that they’re good-hearted and bumbling. But they’re not. They’re perfectly sensible. They can understand what anybody else can understand. So the first step in talk about withdrawal is: consider the actual situation, not some dream situation, where Bush is pursuing a vision of democracy or something. If we can enter the real world we can begin to talk about it. And yes, I think there should be withdrawal, but we have to talk about it in the real world and know what the White House is thinking. They’re not willing to live in a dream world.

How will the U.S. deal with China as a superpower?

What’s the problem with China?

Well, competing for resources, for example.

NC: Well, if you believe in markets, the way we’re supposed to, compete for resources through the market. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the United States doesn’t like the way it’s coming out. Well, too bad. Who has ever liked the way it’s coming out when you’re not winning? China isn’t any kind of threat. We can make it a threat. If you increase the military threats against China, then they will respond. And they’re already doing it. They’ll respond by building up their military forces, their offensive military capacity, and that’s a threat. So, yeah, we can force them to become a threat.

What’s your biggest regret over 40 years of political activism? What would you have done differently?

I would have done more. Because the problems are so serious and overwhelming that it’s disgraceful not to do more about it.

What gives you hope?

What gives me hope actually is public opinion. Public opinion in the United States is very well studied, we know a lot about it. It’s rarely reported, but we know about it. And it turns out that, you know, I’m pretty much in the mainstream of public opinion on most issues. I’m not on some, not on gun control or creationism or something like that, but on most crucial issues, the ones we’ve been talking about, I find myself pretty much at the critical end, but within the spectrum of public opinion. I think that’s a very hopeful sign. I think the United States ought to be an organizer’s paradise.

What sort of organizing should be done to try and change some of these policies?

Well, there’s a basis for democratic change. Take what happened in Bolivia a couple of days ago. How did a leftist indigenous leader get elected? Was it showing up at the polls once every four years and saying, “Vote for me!”? No. It’s because there are mass popular organizations which are working all the time on everything from blocking privatization of water to resources to local issues and so on, and they’re actually participatory organizations. Well, that’s democracy. We’re a long way from it. And that’s one task of organizing.

Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and reporter for Seattle Weekly, In These Times and Eat the State! He writes the “Straight Shot” column for WorkingForChange. Noam Chomsky is an acclaimed linguist and political theorist. Among his latest books are Hegemony or Survival from Metropolitan Books and Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order published by Seven Stories Press.

Multiply

I found a new site that allows you to upload video and music along with the usual blog and forums type stuff. It’s called Multiply.

Fun Ways to Die

Cindy Sheehan | The Opposite of Good Is Apathy

Cindy Sheehan | The Opposite of Good Is Apathy
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010606Q.shtml
Cindy Sheehan: Hold your vigils and marches in relevant places, such as
war-mongering, local congressional offices. So many senators and
congresspeople come to mind. Or, in front of a recruiting station. Or
federal buildings. Or military bases. Then, instead of going home and
cracking open a beer or uncorking a bottle of wine, sit down and say,
“We aren’t leaving until you call for an immediate end to the
occupation of Iraq.” Put your butt on the line for humanity. Change
will not happen until we make it happen. We can’t make change happen by
wishing or praying that it will happen. We actually have to do
something.