Atheist reinforcement workshops. Death and destruction in the Middle East. Its always racist, violence and excessive. But its holy. Somehow sanctified under some tawdry pretext for the greater good and the glory of the almighty, someone’s almighty of the moment. A world of song and dance men. From Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
DENNIS: Listen — strange women lying in ponds distributing swords
is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power
derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical
aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power
just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went around sayin’ I was an empereror just
because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they’d
put me away!
ARTHUR: Shut up! Will you shut up!
DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
HELP! HELP! I’m being repressed!
ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!
DENNIS: Oh, what a give away. Did you here that, did you here that,
eh? That’s what I’m on about — did you see him repressing me,
you saw it didn’t you?
Like Roosevelt on Nicaragua’s Somoza being an S.O.B. but “he’s our son of a bitch,” …(see link at end)… There were signs everywhere of the retreating opposition, and in one open area amid the rubble there was what looked like a rebel base: a couple of homemade bombs, medical supplies scattered on the tables of a makeshift infirmary. The rebels left in haste after an all-night battle fought simply to open a route to reach the ultimate objective, the school.
—According to Shalom, Hamas thought it would have more freedom to operate from Egypt under the leadership of President Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood movement that spawned Hamas. Instead, Shalom said, Hamas “finds itself exactly in the opposite situation.”
“The security cooperation between us and Egypt is excellent, and is continuing as normal,” he concluded.—Read More:http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=289223
“For torture,” Shaza, the Information Ministry official, said as she pointed to meat hooks and electric wires dangling from the walls. It was hard to know. Perhaps the meat hooks had been used to hang intravenous bags, or perhaps for nothing, but this was the government’s tour, and its version of events. There was a hole in the ground, too. It looked like a well, at the base of a wall.
Shaza said that bodies of Syrian soldiers had been found, dumped in the hole. …Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/world/middleeast/syrian-soldiers-fight-rebels-and-fatigue-in-homs.html
…And in a startling realization, the Obama administration realized that the the age of large mass-market wars is over. Activity and consumption will remain high, but in the form of “boutique” specialized confrontation, factory outlet designer projects.The pump-priming of the economy will be on a permanent basis.Ironically, Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution appropriated to the ends of ensuring liberal democratic values. We will have to pay for our peace dividends. There is a truly dystopic potential here, in which any number of bad actors, Hannah Arendt’s “un-thinkers” can get to play Eichmann acting as dispatcher like the “swatting of flies.” I don’t know why I swallowed the fly…
(see link at end)…Based on interviews with “current and former officials from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies”, Miller reports that as “the United States’ conventional wars are winding down”, the Obama administration “expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years” (the “capture” part of that list is little more than symbolic, as the US focus is overwhelmingly on the “kill” part). Specifically, “among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade.” As Miller puts it: “That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”
Libyan democracy at work. —Pro-government fighters shouted “Bani Walid is free!” as pick-up trucks mounted with weapons poured into the centre of the isolated hilltop town, one of the last to surrender last year to the rebels who toppled Muammar Gaddafi.—Read More:http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/10/24/libya-clashes-bani-walid-idINDEE89N09J20121024
In pursuit of this goal, “White House counterterrorism adviser John O Brennan is seeking to codify the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced.” All of this, writes Miller, demonstrates “the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.” Read More:
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