stuff coming
thanks for int'rest
Israel reopened its border with Gaza on Friday to allow deliveries of humanitarian aid, despite continued rocket and mortar fire from the coastal strip and growing expectations of a large-scale Israeli military campaign against Palestinian militants.(AP)So now people who have not eaten regularly for months, people looking with all credulity at starving to death while the world did nothing, people whose only option was to blow themselves up in a futile and pathetic bid for attention, will finally eat. They will thank God and crowd around trucks, pass bags of rice along lines and discuss how hungry they were and how best to conserve what they are getting, they will indulge in Semitic bombast about impossible extremes of aroma and flavor, they will feed their children and themselves.
[AbeBooks Author's Corner:] Have you been accused of making excuses for inexcusable crimes?
[Mark Ames:] Yes. There’s been an enormous amount of resistance and anger to my book’s thesis. I just saw a blogger who posted a death threat against me for supposedly justifying the Virginia Tech massacre. The infamous bully from Columbine who tormented the two killers before their rampage emailed a death threat to me and my family earlier this year. A writer for The Observer (newspaper in the UK), Ed Vulliamy, accused me of being immoral and “post-modern” which he contrasted to his own genuine tears which he shed for the victims, as if that alone was an argument. Most of the resistance to my book is expressed like Vulliamy’s: Going Postal offends me, therefore it’s immoral, and if it’s immoral it can’t be valid. End of argument. A lot of other people, however, have told me that the book is so obvious and significant that they sort of made it their mission to get as many people as possible to read it.
"the old nonsense about inherent Jew victimhood and the automatic self-debunking of any speculation that blames organized anti-social Jews is no longer something we can carry around now that a small group of anti-American organized Jews have done exactly what Hitler accused them of and fomented a totally unnecessary war through lying. Furthermore the traditional paradigms of antiracist education are lies and we do not need to fear turning into Nazis like Mogwai that were left up after twelve just because we can recognize the Wurmser plan for what it is."So Georgia happened, and for the media that remembers nothing it was like any other distraction, and for the people who remember everything it was a chance to see how serious these media people were about taking things a little more seriously. Of course they had better things to do. Ames was actually in Georgia for the war and, in an unforgivable act of anti-Semitism and pro-Putin propaganda, dared to report what he saw and how far removed it was from what the New York Times wanted to see. Ames's articles on exiledonline here, and here particularly on WaPo, and here on the NYT constitute the kind of necessary useful journalism that would be awarded and feted in a functioning society with unified classes. In our society you might not have heard of it, and we are very sorry to say that our blogging it cannot help much. Ames is welcome to everything we can give him.
After two days of red tape and rigmarole, Shigure entered dry dock. As water was pumped from the dock and the destroyer's bottom became visible, every onlooker gaped in astonishment. In the center of the rudder was a hole at least two feet in diameter. Engineers closely examined the hole with its overgrowth of barnacles and shells and proclaimed that it must have been caused by a torpedo at least three months ago.Why if they were so completely beaten -- there are points at which Germany could've salvaged or turned or cut losses, but there are no equivalent points for Japan that Japan could've actually used -- did they even try it? The answer is their ideology limited their knowledge of Americans. They honestly thought, actually in a form of racism, that Americans had grown so decadent and weak that one terrifying blow would permanently scare them.
"Oh, yes," I recalled, it must be from the Vella Gulf battle of August 6-7. That was the only time torpedoes came near us."
"But," said one of the engineers, "how could you have navigated the ship since then in this condition?"
"The rudder has been sluggish in recent months," I replied...(Hara, pg 253)
"For half a year after Pearl Harbor, this impression of a soft enemy appeared to be true. The huge size of the UK force that surrendered without much of a fight at Singapore was incredible by anyone's reckoning, and the combined US and Filipino army that capitulated on Bataan was twice as large as the Japanese expected. ... [T]o the Japanese, they were months of glorious victory that once and for all confirmed their innate superiority."(pg 260)All of this resembles nothing so much as the perfectly self-defeating Coalition Provisional Authority "led" by Paul Bremer but really representing all the anti-Arab hatred and area ignorance of the Neo-Conservative Zionist war-fomenting douchebags, as described in Patrick Cockburn's necessary book Muqtada.
In the second half of 2003 Bremer repeatedly portrays himself as decrying the timidity of the US military, the CIA, and the British, all of whim hesitated before confronting Muqtada. Their fears were understandable and, as events soon demonstrated, wholly justified.
...Bremer held two beliefs that were dangerously contradictory. For him, Muqtada was at one and the same time a powerful and menacing figure capable of tearing Iraq apart, and so weak that he would tamely submit to arrest, while his following would be too small to make effective protests. Iraqi ministers were struck by the degree of Bremer's hatred and how much he belittled Muqtada. They were told not to refer to the "[Jaysh al-Mahdi]" but to call it "Muqtada's Militia." Ali Allawi, the highly intelligent independent Islamist who was a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, once tried to explain to Bremer how the Sadrists [following Muqtada as-Sadr] were the political representatives of the millions of Shia poor. Bremer furiously retorted that he "didn't care a damn about the underclass and what they [the Sadrists]
represented."(beginning pg 139)