and on this note I'm off to bed (perchance to dream)
By Amy Goodman - October 05, 2008
A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team. "Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months...the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks...[T]hey may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control"...The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced "sea-smurf."
Robin Mathews takes aim at the 'Canadian free press' in Vivelecanada.ca. He's not happy and why should he be. It reminds me of a previous post I included here last week by John Le Carre, on the surveillance issue in Britain. He was asked why he was so angry and he said "because no one else was". That's rang a bell for me.
An apparently 'free press' in Canada is almost wholly in the Harperite camp. The October 4 Globe and Mail is an insult to Canadians.
The Fraud of a 'Free Press' in Canada: Flat-Out Campaigning for Stephen Harper
Photo- The Battle of MaiwandCanada's Eric Margolis weighs in on 'talking to the Taliban'. Interestingly, he mentions that Canada's already spent $22 billion there. Haven't heard that figure before. I guess there is more than ideological reasons to cut arts funding. I can't wait to see all the cutting and slashing when he gets back in. Please excuse the violent language.
...Last week, the U.S.-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, revealed he had asked Saudi Arabia to broker peace talks with the alliance of tribal and political groups resisting western occupation collectively known as the Taliban.
[Uruknet 47755 05-oct-2008 18:56 ECT] Time to quit Afghanistan
Saturday Night Live seems to have gotten some of it's mojo back. Tina Fey's Sarah Palin parody is pure delight. If you missed it here's the bit from last night.
By WILLIAM BLUM - Counterpunch Weekend Edition
No American should be allowed to forget that Iraqi society has been destroyed. The people of that unhappy land have lost everything -- their homes, their schools, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their health care, their legal system, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their security, their past, their present, their future, their lives. But they do have their surge.
In this post we look at the state of the fast-growing mobile industry in Africa. This is the second post in our series on Africa's Web (Part 1 is here).
Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man...Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill by Jonathan Raban
In an exclusive interview, Noam Chomksy weighs in on the financial collapse, the election and the power of U.S. propaganda.
Chomsky: "If the U.S. Carries Out Terrorism, It Did Not Happen"
CBC News. The Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada) city council has approved the use of low-speed electric vehicles on city streets.
Under city bylaws, they will now be able to travel on Vancouver streets which have a posted speed limit of 50 km per hour [31 mph] or less, meaning they will be able to travel on most city streets.
A view from Argentina, which had it's own total financial meltdown in '91.
The events of the last two weeks have clearly revealed that the global financial, monetary and banking system imposed on the world by the power structures promoting "globalization" is fundamentally flawed, unviable and immoral in its effects upon the most all of Mankind. After allowing a small cabal of shady characters to illegitimately accumulate vast amounts of wealth and power over markets, corporations, industries, media, armed forces and entire nations, like the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, this entire System is now in free-fall, collapsing into itself in one massive implosion.
For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
Will the Crisis Brings Down the Global Financial System? Go Get Your Dollars Out Now! FAST!!!
Spiegel Online
October 1, 2008The banking crisis is upending American dominance of the financial markets and world politics. The industrialized countries are sliding into recession, the era of turbo-capitalism is coming to an end and US military might is ebbing. Still, this is no time to gloat.
There are days when all it takes is a single speech to illustrate the decline of a world power. A face can speak volumes, as can the speaker’s tone of voice, the speech itself or the audience’s reaction. Kings and queens have clung to the past before and humiliated themselves in public, but this time it was merely a United States president.
Or what is left of him.
In the seven decades since his mysterious death, bluesman Robert Johnson's legend has grown--the tragically short life, the "crossroads" tale of supernatural talent, the genuine gift that inspired Dylan, Clapton, and other greats--but his image remains elusive: only two photos of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. In 2005, on eBay, guitar maven Zeke Schein thought he'd found a third.
Truly one of the most interesting experiments happening on the planet today. After 500 years of exploitation one would surely hope for ongoing success here.
By Noam Chomsky - Znet
Regional integration of the kind that has been slowly proceeding for several years is a crucial prerequisite for independence, making it more difficult for the master of the hemisphere to pick off countries one by one. For that reason it is causing considerable distress in Washington, and is either ignored or regularly distorted in the media and other elite commentary.
