Yahoo! News - Ford Says Pulling Plug on Think Electric Car: due to poor customer demand and lack of government support for the environmentally friendly cars. Ford, which bought Norway- based Think in 1999 for $23 million and invested $100 million in electric vehicle battery technology since then, will instead focus on developing fuel cell and hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles to meet environmental regulations for cars and trucks. Government regulations pushing for so-called zero-emission vehicles such as electric cars, which emit no smog-producing exhaust, have also been pushed back. California's regulations forcing automakers to offer up to 100,000 electric cars and other low-pollution vehicles on the road each year was scheduled to go into effect with the 2003 model year. But GM won a court injunction delaying that order, and automotive executives expect that the state will rewrite its regulations to allow for more vehicles that emit a low amount of exhaust. Another one for my I-told-you-so file. I told you that Ford's positioning itself as the left wing fringe of the auto industry pushing for environmental protection against the other big two was a delaying tactic. The strategy is to claim that progress is being made so it's not necessary to impose laws forcing the industry to reengineer. To that effect, they roll out a prototype clean car every few months to show to the press who all show up with their cameras paid for with the fifteen SUV commercials per hour that punctuate them. I told you that the crash of the economy would serve as an excuse to dismantle the pitiful environmental protection that managed to survive as expedient PR during the boom economy. It is less stressful to believe that the good guys at Ford are trying really hard to figure out a way to impose enormously costly reengineering on themselves than to acknowledge that capitalist auto producers and their oil cartel allies will continue irreparably to destroy the planet until they are forced to stop. While I used to believe that this could be done through the political process once the people collectively got an accurate understanding of the ongoing genocide of their offspring by self interested capitalists, I now believe that the control of global politics by oil and its allies is totalitarian, and the internal combustion engine will continue to smoke until every last drop of oil is sucked out of the planet. The most effective means to maintaining totalitarian control is to convince the population that they are the free citizens of a democratic state. If they get it into their collective head that they are laboring for masters who are destroying them, their productivity is likely to drop off considerably. Therefore, rolling out the electric car prototypes onto the White House lawn from time to time, and press conferences describing progress in moving towards hybrid this and fuel cell that rather than just saying, if you don't like diesel fumes, move to Mars, prevents a political backlash. It's much harder to rig a landslide election, and being forced to do so would expose the totalitarian power of capital to open view.

Mirror.co.uk - IRAQ: THE LYING GAME: THE Blair government was told in January by the Americans that there was no
justification for attacking Iraq in the "war on terrorism" and that their main aim was getting rid of Saddam Hussein who stood in the way of the West's control of Middle Eastern oil wealth. This partly explains why Blair abandoned presenting to Parliament a famous "dossier" in which "the evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction is simply vast". The dossier is no more than a stream of warmed-over assertions and deceptions,
supplied by Washington. According to reliable intelligence sources in another Western country, who were privy to the same communications, the Central Intelligence Agency has made clear that there is "no credible evidence" justifying an attack in Iraq. Good concise analysis of US/British state propaganda justifying Iraq war from the Mirror UK no less. One of the first insights I got as a student of history was that what I had been taught in elementary school about wars was all merely the propaganda disseminated by the aggressive powers calculated to enlist popular support, and that the causes of war were never what those who waged it claimed. That is, not in the modern world. From the early Middle Ages in the West (and other analogous cultural periods backwards), war was its own justification. Barbarian warlords conquered alien peoples because they could. Their superior might was proof of the gods' favor and of their gods' superiority over the gods of their victims. War was fought for spoil, and the subjugation by force, genocide and enslavement of alien peoples was the highest morality and measure of honor. It was, after all, the gods who gave the means and opportunity for victory, and not to use them would be sacrilege and ignominious cowardice. Nature and the cosmos was created and maintained by constant warfare between spiritual forces of light and darkness, summer and winter, order and chaos, and to ride with one's hoard over the face of the known world like Attila, trampling terrified peasants underfoot and effecting regime change demonstrated that we were on the side of light, summer, and order. Gradually, by the modern period, war came to be transvalued as an evil, but one that often was necessary in an evil world. War could not rightfully be waged merely for spoil and conquest, but only if a military state was forced into it as a last resort to defend a higher purpose (as in liberation of the Holy Land from the infidel or liberation of the downtrodden from evil imperialists or preservation of freedom and democracy). Some element of self defense became requisite. The War Dep't. became the Defense Dep't. and while military victory remained as profitable as ever it was for Attila, profit could no longer be the acknowledged motive. Often, in order to claim self defense, imperialist powers armed their own enemies, because economics continued to make war necessary for imperialist powers whose legitimacy was based on their claim to be the world's peace keepers. Right through the bushoilcia Gulf genocide of the last decade, the claims of imperialism to just war were sufficiently supportable to convince those predisposed by nationalism or profit motive. Now, for the first time, a virtual world war is to be waged for economic necessity on claims to legitimacy that even the predisposed can not rationalize. Each transparent claim to self defense or liberating the downtrodden quickly evaporates to be replaced by another so the process of rationalization is eminently visible to all. The mere contradiction of universally acknowledged principles, however, is not sufficient to contradict economic determinism, and the war must be waged regardless of the obsolescence of the available ideological apparatus. The very principles of legitimacy that permitted the current capitalist imperialist regime to militarily crush all opposition, first constructed in the liberation of the Nazi death camps and then used to defeat the movement towards world socialism by trampling terrified peasants and regime change, now prevent it from its means to sure and easy victory over massively inferior forces. The people who have been conditioned to accept the principles of just war claimed heretofore by imperialism are confronted with a series of blatant lies, and whether or not they recognize that they have been lied to less blatantly all along, they will have their collective foot on the brake, while their military leaders are on the gas. This situation does not bode well for a satisfactory outcome.

smh.com--'Ignorant and inept' FBI failed to heed warning of attacks: Bureau chiefs ignored the agents tugging at their sleeves, Philip Shenon writes in Washington. The ignorance and ineptitude of FBI supervisors and lawyers in Washington obstructed agents all over America from pursuing evidence that could have provided them in advance with a "veritable blueprint" of the September 11 attacks, a Senate report has found. The report by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is expected to be made public next month, is the result of an investigation that began shortly after the terrorist attacks. It focuses on the mishandling of the case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged with involvement in the September 11 attacks. Though the blundering mishandling of his case was particularly deplorable, it may be indicative of the FBI's bungling of other sensitive counter-terrorism cases before September 11, the report suggests. In the Moussaoui case, the report found, FBI counter-terrorism specialists and the bureau's lawyers were so ignorant of federal surveillance laws that they did not understand that they had ample evidence to press for a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings. Instead, they aggressively blocked the search warrant sought by desperate field agents, who believed last August that they might have found a terrorist who might use a commercial airplane as a weapon. This is what is known as the incompetence theory and many people like me reject it. It's an attempt to whitewash complicity by factions in the government in the attacks first by watering down complicity to "foreknowledge" and then giving all us malcontents a bone to chew on. Now we can enjoy ourselves calling the government stupid and incompetent (really it's those dang lawyers again), and rather than calling for the prosecution of criminal coconspirators in mass murder, we should all vote to remedy the crippling underfunding of our intelligence services and remove its civil rights fetters.

Reuters--DNA Clears Detroit Man After 17 Years In Prison: Eddie Joe Lloyd, 54, became the 110th person in the United States to be exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project. Lloyd was also the first such person in Michigan, which does not have a death penalty, prosecutors said. A Michigan law that took effect in January last year allows inmates convicted of a felony to ask courts for DNA testing. His lawyers argued police got Lloyd to confess by telling him his confession would help "smoke out" the real perpetrator of the crime. Green and the Innocence Project are also calling for a federal probe of the police officers. Lloyd is lucky that the victim was raped and wasn't just murdered in Texas. If 110 people have been exonnerated (sorry about the seventeen years in hell) on DNA can we infer a number of wrongly convicted people sitting in prison (or their graves) for crimes that didn't involve semen? The police (and John Ashcroft) who constantly complain about the Constitutional rights of the accused protecting criminals should ask themselves why some of their colleagues think it's better to let a rapist/murderer walk around free for seventeen years by railroading an innocent man than to postpone closing the case until they find him. The reason is that law enforcement is largely a matter of appearances. It's the appearance that people don't get away with crime that keeps the crime rate down. So a quickly railroaded and publicized innocent is more valuable to law enforcement than a drawn out and possibly unsuccessful search for the guilty party. When I'm thinking about stealing something, I remember how quickly they caught and locked up all those other guys. The fact that they lock up guys that didn't do it only reinforces the danger of actually doing it. As destroying innocent people's lives is so valuable, protections and rights of the accused should be obsessively adhered to.

CNN--WorldCom exec was told to stop pressing on books: Myers, who was arrested on Aug. 2 on conspiracy and fraud charges, told an employee in a WorldCom London office, Steven Brabbs, on Jan. 22 to stop talking about how to book asset-writedowns with representatives of Andersen. "Do notill talking about asset impairments and facilities. I do not want to hear an excuse just stop." according to one e-mail from Myers. Myers resigned on June 25, the day that WorldCom admitted that some $3.85 billion in expenses were improperly booked as long-term capital spending starting in 2001. That admission eventually forced the No. 2 U.S. long- distance telephone and Internet data mover into bankruptcy. WorldCom later admitted that another $3.3 billion of reserves had been improperly manipulated on its balance sheets and another $500 million in income was wrongly booked. "Don't make me ask again," the Jan. 22 e-mail said. The excuse for letting corporate criminal number one Kenny boy off the hook involves a bottom up model of corruption. But rather than unscrupulous junior executives playing hanky panky below the radar of the naive and gullible top brass, WorldCom embezzlement was clearly a top down affair. Like the mafia, the soldiers were told by the capos to keep their mouths shut (or conveniently shot themselves). But unlike the mafia, there is no tradition of omerta among capitalists, and if they can't buy them off or suicide them, they're bound to roll over at the first good offer of immunity without having to go into witness protection. Kenneth Lay and Pinochet have gone away. Sorry judge; don't feel up to court today.

Rense--Cheney States Case For Pre-Emptive Strike On Iraq: Officials have stressed Bush has made no decisions regarding a possible attack on Iraq, and that he would consult with Congress regarding future steps. The White House has also chastised the media for creating what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called "a frenzy" over a possible Iraq campaign. Yet, senior administration figures have not been shy about their public demands for "regime change" in Baghdad. Bush, whose father was president during the war with Iraq, himself has talked about it at almost every public appearance. Cheney said: "I am familiar with the arguments against taking action in the case of Saddam Hussein. Some concede that Saddam is evil, power hungry and a menace, but that until he crosses the threshold of actually possessing nuclear weapons we should rule out any preemptive action. "That logic seems to me to be deeply flawed. The argument comes down to this: 'Yes, Saddam is as dangerous as we say he is, we just need to let him get stronger before we do anything about it,"' he said. "Yet if we did wait until that moment, Saddam would simply be emboldened and it would become even harder for us to gather friends and allies to oppose him." In Afghanistan, he said, "the world has seen that America acts not to conquer, but to liberate ... We would act in that same spirit after a regime change in Iraq. "With our help, a liberated Iraq can be a great nation once again," he said. After being chided by Bush and Rumsfeld for my obsession with the idea of invading Baghdad, I hesitate to offer a response to Cheney's "logic." Given the multi tens of thousands of troops, equipment, fleets and bases being feverishly positioned around Iraq and the war games in San Diego involving all branches of the service and the specific groups likely to be used in an Iraq invasion, I can't help thinking of an impending "surprise" attack on Iraq as a real possibility. Cheney's logic makes perfect sense. There's a bad guy in Baghdad, and if we leave him alone, he's bound to get stronger with time. Ergo "remove" him now from power. There is however a missing variable in this syllogism. Thousands and thousands of dead people. While I'm less convinced that an attempt to wage urban warfare, something America has always declined to do, in Baghdad, will necessarilly result in Vietnam level American casualties (the bushoilcia eagerness to try out its new generation of weapons of mass destruction on militarily powerless enemies may greatly minimize the voter backlash created by stacked up American flag coffins), there is no way to "liberate" Baghdad without a genocide of Iraqi peasants. While the introduction of this variable into Cheney's deductive logic would not affect the validity of its synthesis, the fact that it doesn't warrant the least mention by a faction that now holds all the keys to all the tools of power and destruction in the world is far more frightening than the worst Saddam I can possibly imagine.

washingtonpost.com--Bush Aides Say Iraq War Needs No Hill Vote: White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Congress "has an important role to play." You don't need a popular vote to take over the Executive branch of the government, and you don't need to consult the popularly elected congress to wage any kind of war you choose against anyone you choose. Congratulations on discovering every flaw in the Constitution.

Yahoo! News - Justice Department Finds Building Criminal Case Against Lay Tough: One possible avenue in Mr. Lay's case would be to charge him with illegally selling company stock based on insider
information, these people say. Michael Ramsey, an attorney for Mr. Lay, called a potential insider-trading case against his client "nonexistent." As for prosecutors' decision on whether to charge Mr. Skilling, that will hinge partly on whether government investigators can obtain statements from people who directly interacted with him to show he had detailed knowledge about Enron's most problematic transactions, people familiar with the matter say. These include a series of off-the-books partnerships overseen by Mr. Fastow. Kenny boy dodges the law; what a shock. Good thing Baxter shot himself after saying he needed a bodyguard.

CNN--TRW in $4.5 bln weather satellite system contract They've got all the venture capital; soon they'll have all the job openings. How do you make a crash into depression look like a sluggish recovery until you can get an imperialist oil grab genocide going overseas? Put my SSI in a nice pine lock box and have six senators bear it to a secure underground location.

The Globe Gazette and AP--Guard Battalion Called To Service: The Iowa Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 194th Field Artillery, will be ordered to federal active duty, the Department of Defense and the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C., have announced. The battalion, headquartered in Fort Dodge, will deploy to locations within the United States for homeland security missions as part of Operation Noble Eagle II. The battalion will enter into federal active duty Sept. 3, King said. They must arrive at Fort Knox, Ky., their mobilization station, no later than Sept. 8. They will receive specialized training to further prepare them for their assignments before moving to their stateside duty locations. The soldiers will provide indirect fire support, using artillery weapons accurate from a distance of 11,000 to 12,000 meters, King said. The battalion's mobilization is critical to the accomplishment of the Department of Defense Homeland Defense Security Plan, said King. The Iowa soldiers will provide security at several locations. They will take their individual equipment, individual and crew-served weapons and all other organizational equipment. They will also use vehicles and other equipment already in place at their duty locations. Fourteen soldiers will return to their armories after they are in-processed at Fort Knox. They will serve as the rear detachment and will be responsible for ongoing unit activities, such as recruiting, family and employer support coordination and providing leadership for non-deploying unit soldiers. The 1st battalion, 194th field artillery, was last ordered to federal active duty in 1950 during the Korean War. The battalion served duty in Germany as occupation forces. Caution: I haven't been able to confirm this through the newspaper or AP, but if it's true, it's highly ominous. What possible use could a field artillery unit which has only ever served as an overseas occupation force be to Operation Noble Eagle II? What kind of threat are they anticipating that might require field artillery? An invading army of terrorists, Taliban, and Iraqis? Why the urgency?

Reuters--Pentagon Plans Expert Probe of Fort Bragg Killings: Despite recent reports that the anti-malaria drug mefloquine was now a target for investigators, Army officials who asked not to be identified stressed on Thursday that there was no evidence that it might have triggered the behavior leading to the killings. "We don't even know for sure if all four of the men involved here took the drug," one Army official told Reuters. "And thousands and thousands of other troops have taken it without any problem." It's funny how many times I heard this reported this weekend with the medication included, but the Army official's disclaimer omitted. Four unexplained acts of violence take place by soldiers returning to the same base from the same duty (the similar incidents in England have also not been mentioned in the corporate press). The first thing to look for is common factors. They took the same medication (maybe) that has some potential behavioral side effects. Possible. Who else took it? Thousands of other soldiers. Any violent incidents on any other bases? None. I should think the press could have ruled this out without the Army's help.

washingtonpost.com--U.S. Deficit Ballooning, but Not as a Hot Issue: If there was any consensus in the contentious 2000 campaign, it was that the budget surpluses that appeared in 1998 would be
sacrosanct. Revenue from Social Security payroll taxes would be devoted to shoring up that program's future. Tax cuts and new programs would have to leave the Treasury a sizable cushion to reduce the debt and prepare for the retirement of the baby boom generation. In one year, all of those promises were demolished. The government had already siphoned off $33 billion in Social Security tax
receipts to fund other programs last year, but the government still ran an overall surplus of $127 billion, the second-largest on record. This year, as the CBO will show, the overall deficit will reach $157 billion, the largest since 1995 and a $284 billion swing into the red. If Social Security taxes were not counted, the government would be $315 billion into red ink. Democrats will try to capitalize on Tuesday. House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) will hold two events in Detroit to highlight the CBO numbers. Lawmakers are flying in to Washington for press events. But so far on the campaign trail, the deficit is the dog that didn't bark. Amy Walter, an analyst at the Cook Political Report, could not think of a single House race where the issue has become prominent. How the capitalists are able to make a crash into depression pass through the corporate media as a sluggish recovery, and why invasion of Iraq must happen regardless of Republicans' public scepticism.

WASHINGTON TIMES reporter and bestselling author Bill Gertz is preparing to begin the fight of his life -- when next week he exposes, in unprecedented detail, America's intelligence failures. Gertz has obtained highly classified documents and dispatches from within the CIA, the FBI and other national security agencies which detail a stunning collapse of intelligence on terrorists. The CIA demanded to meet with Gertz's publisher, REGNERY. The agency pleaded with the publisher not to reprint the leaked documents -- but the context of those docs will remain in the book, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. Gertz is set to preview his controversial work BREAKDOWN on Sunday during ABC's THIS WEEK. This is an obvious whitewash. The aim is to divert attention from the real crime of perpetrating the 9/11 and anthrax attacks by putting up a heavily hyped expose supporting what some are calling the incompetence theory. The upshot of the incompetence theory is that, as we have been feeding the public schools fat while starving the military/intelligence community, we now need to reverse that unwise distribution of resources. It is here being projected by the Washington Times, bought like UPI, by the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon to spread right wing propaganda under the guise of legitimate press. As Rumsfeld is concealing his intentional leaks to the press under an intimidation campaign of lie detector investigations of the Senate Intelligence Committee, it is not likely that the CIA would have to plead with a publishing company to keep classified documents under wraps. The pleading is a performance, just like Rumsfeld's indignation at leaks. There's a lot of this kind of stuff going on in the right wing these days. Judicial Watch, a right wing legal group, has stolen the thunder of legal attacks on the Bush/Cheney regime. Right wingers from Kissinger to Arlen Specter to Dick Armey are making public anti war statements. Along with these strange events and the first public announcement of a decision by the foreing policy court overturning one provision of the Patriot Act before passing all the rest, this book has been rushed out before November to counteract the growing sense that a new fascist imperialism of the corporation is taking over the government and that it is primarily supported by the Republican party.

Chemtrails Over Indianamore fotos

CNN--Bush economic forum unlikely to produce much policy: Other critics are alarmed by the Bush administration's apparent refusal to bend from certain pet ideas -- the tax cut was presented in 1999 as the only logical response to the boom and was re-packaged in 2001 as the only logical response to the doldrums. "They came in a year and a half ago with a set of preconceived notions, and nothing, no event, no conceivable event, seems to get them to modify any aspect of that," said William Gale, senior fellow for economic studies at the Brookings Institution. Leaving aside the bizzaro in Brookings criticizing tax embezzlements for the rich, I only post this because it exactly echoes the ranting I did when the tax cut was passing through congress. The 2 trillion dollar tax payoff to the 200 million dollar investors in the bushoilcia rigged election was first promoted as a benefit to the taxpayer that the eternally booming economy could afford. "We trust Kenny boy with his own money," as though the GDP is created by capitalists rather than the workers who depend on the collective services provided by tax revenues. Those liberals don't trust us, we thought resentfully. When the economy began to tank, the same policy magically became an "economic recovery package." The problem with that piece of capitalist bullshit is that Kenny boy can only use so many PC's, while the working class who now are facing skyrocketing costs for services (eg double digit increases in public university tuitions this year) tax revenues once subsidised will be buying fewer PC upgrades. Nevertheless, the benefit to the bushoilcia in increased campaign financing from the beneficiaries of their embezzlement still outweighs the liabilities of a post election crashed economy they continue to conceal from the public.

Drudge--FCC's Powell Drawing Criticism For Handling Of Telecom Industry Mess: Arguing that telecom's woes are caused by market forces outside the FCC's control, he still pursues his original agenda: Spurring broadband by deregulating the Baby Bells and relaxing rules limiting concentration of media ownership. This pig is a good symbol of current US politics. He is famous (except in the mass media) for responding to a question as to how he will deal with the increasing digital divide between rich and poor access to technological skills and resources with the bon mot that there's a "Mercedes divide" too. His job in the political elite was obviously contingent on his extreme laissez faire policies his belief in which, as with all simple minded capitalists, is unshakeable by any of their negative consequences. As it takes no genius to stick to simple minded endorsement of the interests of transnational corporations, his job was part of the package that also bought his father's collaboration in bushoilcia imperialist agenda about which he seems (who knows?) less than enthusiastic. Together with the Bush dynasty, Clarence Thomas, Phil Gramm, etc., the American Republic is increasingly indistinguishable from the Saudi Sheikdom in the family ties of the ruling class. And as usual, no capitalist has a complaint about the corporate monopolization of mass media which should be recognized as not simply another consumer product, but the medium of collective consciousness, until he starts losing money on the deal.

CNN--More layoffs on the way if economic weakness continues: "We could be poised for a second round of layoffs if we see effective demand [for goods and services] fall off -- and I believe we have," said Jeff Winger, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. "Those are two areas of the economy that should be perking up right now if we were in a recovery mode," So far, at least, most economists don't think this [double dip] will happen. Economy.com expects the jobless rate, which is currently at 5.9 percent, to climb to 6.2 percent by the fourth quarter and to hover there in the first quarter. Of course, that's still pretty low, compared with unemployment's 10.8 percent peak after the 1981-82 recession and its 7.8 percent peak after the 1990-91 recession. One of the flaws in currently accepted reasoning is the assumption that a six percent unemployment rate in 2002 indicates a proportionally better labor situation than a eleven percent in in 82 and eight percent in 91. While all the capitalist economists cited know it, only the left wing tends to call attention to the fact that three jobs without benefits, job or retirement security at $10,000 a year are not better than one job with full benefits, pension and job security at $31,000. An enormous amount of calculation is necessary therefore to guage the real proportional difference (even if the figures themselves actually reflected jobless levels; if they were measured according to European standards, the numbers would be much higher). A spread of five percent between 82 and 02 would ordinarily be sufficient to argue for some degree of improvement without doing all the math, but the last twenty years have been extraordinary in the implimentation of "cost cutting" strategies whose over determined effect has been to shift the burden of cost of living and infrastructure off the value of stock and onto the worker's paycheck. No one would claim that a worker with a decimated 401k, high HMO premiums, no available financial aid for children's education, etc. is as well off as one with the same salary and a guaranteed pension, employer (or state) provided health insurance, and Pell grants. This goes to the heart of classic Marxist theory regarding the inherent self destructive mechanism of the capitalist market. Corporations reduce employees and customers to statistics occupying two separate columns in their spread sheets. They constantly work to cut the cost of one while increasing the revenue from the other. Under free market capitalism, corporations act independently of each other, and the employee overhead they minimize consists mostly of other corporations' customers. The result of the competition for cost cutting, however, obviously is that when it is maximized across the economy, all corporations have 2 million fewer customers a year than their initial revenue expectations calculated, and further cost cutting that begins to affect their production becomes necessary. This is a major factor in the "vicious cycle" referred to in this article and theorized in scientific socialism. The question for Marxists is: is this just one of the repeating recession cycles or is it the big depression cycle these smaller cycles eventually lead into. If the latter, it cannot be pushed into a recovery cycle by supply side manipulation of currencies, interest rates, bailouts, etc. but only by the restoration of the economic power of the working class through full production combined with the increase in the value of labor. The two means to achieve these ends after the last great depression were the New Deal, artificially creating work for US industry, and WWII, driving up the value of labor by removing a large portion of the working class from the market (many never to return) and producing more work for industry. What I find most disturbing about current discourse about the economy is first that almost no one acknowledges that the enormous size and global reach of economic disintigration distinguishes this phase from the mere recessions of ten and twenty years ago (not accompanied for instance by the utter collapse of national economies into virtual chaos) and therefore indicates depression rather than recession, and second that the movement towards world war (i.e. simultaneous open conflict on a national level through the bushoilcia permanent global war together with south Asia and Israel) is always discussed as an independent phenomenon from the crash of the global macroeconomy despite their clear historical relationship. How could the sudden appearance of religious extremist violence as a threat equivalent to Hitler's invasion of Europe have anything to do with tech bubbles and corporate book cooking? Only the failure to recognize the principle of economic determinism and dialectical materialism can make it possible to use Saddam's weapons of mass blah blah blah as a plausible excuse to send tens if not hundreds of thousands of proletarians to their deaths.

Pakistan President Not Convinced Osama Planned 911 Attacks: "I didn't think it possible that Osama sitting up there in the mountains could do it," Musharraf said in an interview in the Aug. 12 edition of the New Yorker One wonders what it might take to return the obvious truth from the outer regions of paranoid conspiracy theory to general acknowledgment. That the anthrax as well as three 9/11 hijackers' pilot training came out of US military facilities does not seem sufficient. Each apparent inconsistency with the consensus (i.e. mass media) version of current events comes with its own little plausible explanation, while the overdetermined confluence of coincidental factors never qualifies for analysis in itself. Musharref's skepticism echoes that of the German intelligence officer who gave the US mass media the repeated info regarding Atta's meeting with an Iraqi official, universally reported by the corporate press, as it provides a semblance of justification for the upcoming Iraqi genocide. The same spy's assertion in the same statement that bin Laden did not plan the WTC attack went universally unreported.

Newsweek: Bush Administration Quietly Planning for Possible War Against Iraq; Rebuilding Arsenals of Smart Weapons, Personnel in Mideast Assessing Need for Airstrips and Wider Roads ---- Dept. Of Energy Working to Get Petroleum Reserve Up to Capacity in Event of Shortfall People who know me (or any odd lost person who has read earlier portions of my archives here) know that I unequivocally been predicting an invasion of Iraq since the economy started its downdraft in 2000. Nobody has ever agreed with me. I trust I can now safely say I told you so. It is disingenuous for the Brits to pose as skeptics, as it was their participation in the systematic bombing of Iraqi anti-aircraft installations for the past two years under the pretext of protecting their monitoring flights of the no fly zone that first made their real intentions clear to me.

Reporters following President Bush this weekend in Kennebunkport were stunned at the appearance of elder Bush -- who sported bright red sores on his cheeks from sun-induced lesions. "I got too much sun, that's all" the former president said. "It looks much worse than it is." Well, the fotos are not as horrific as those of Iraqi birth defects since his liberation of Kuwait (see way below), but almost sufficient poetic justice for making a compassionate soul like me wish a painful death on 80 year old men. These are the arrogant greedy Texas oil "entrepeneurs" and "individualists" who actively sabotaged every attempt to reverse their self-interested destruction of the ecosystem and to protect the ozone layer. Would it put me on one of Poindexter/Ashcroft's watch lists to wish another heart attack on Cheney, and a speedy death by old age of Rumsfeld, Weinberger and the other doddering fogies who are feverishly preparing to send thousands of Americans to their deaths while incinerating more Iraqi peasants?

CNN--Microsoft implements antitrust changes: The software maker said it will begin disclosing more of the source code for various versions of the Windows computer operating system. "Microsoft is obligated as a company to continue to move forward to meet our obligations under the agreement, even as we are waiting for a final decision," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said. The company said it will finish work on a new update to Windows this month that will allow computer users to hide some functions of Windows. What's left for those of us whose passionate political views were defeated over the past two decades by the capitalist power mongers and are not among the optimistic left wing who thinks that all problems remain reparable indefinitely, but to sit back with a margarita and watch the pigs try to squirm their way out of their own arrogant short sighted self interested genius? When MS, once a company of apolitical techies, now of politically pernicious Harvard MBAs and lawyers, says they are obligated (sic) to fulfill their obligations, it should by now be clear that what they intend, after the crash of the economy has limited their power to throw their weight around, is to "voluntarily" reveal the parts of their source code they choose instead of waiting to be forced to reveal what might threaten their monopolistic plans for global domination. The ethical retardation of Gates and Co. also should be clear in the nature of their charitable $500 thousand donation to Peru which is considering restricting government computers to open source operating systems. As the deal is secret, it remains to be seen whether this charity comes in the form of cash or, like other Gates Foundation charity to US public schools, their own software.

WWF International--Green Electricity Scheme to Help Cut EU's Global Warming Pollution: A new report from WWF (The Role of Businesses and Governmental Bodies in Promoting Green Electricity) that accompanies the start of the campaign says that if European businesses purchased an additional 10 per cent of their electricity from clean 'green' sources, emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would be cut by 38 million tonnes per year. As I have to sign off on my company's annual reports, and JP Morgan and Citigroup can't sell me innovative approaches to hiding my debt. As the crash of the global economy makes cost cutting the only means available to prevent a mass exodus by self interested capitalists from my public equities, and I've already laid off every worker I could operate without, the odds of me voluntarily purchasing expensive "green energy" to save some future CEO of some future corporation from trying to do business in a permanent global drought seem about 50/50.

WWF International--How you can help: In your home; In the garden; Shopping; More ways to be planet-friendly When I do my daily bicycle laps around Manhattan on particularly hot days, I get two breaks from the heat: Fifth Ave. from 57th St. down to 50th and Times Square. Here the luxury boutiques and Disney's Manhattanland mass media tourist traps pump out enough air conditioning to cool me off from the 100 degree plus heat index and the unhealthy ozone index. While I run my own air conditioner at a minimum and have always followed the steps identified by the WWF, it's a little irksome to know that I am only helping New York capitalists keep their tourist customers comfy without any backlash demands for less energy consumption especially when their tax contributions have fallen to the degree that the boom economy of the last two decades somehow left NYC with a 5 billion dollar deficit. Environmentalist discourses usually take the form of: if we don't A by B then C. But we don't A even when we're rolling in cash. As the economy continues to crash it doesn't take a crystal ball to know whether we are going to start A-ing now. While I admit that some environmentalists may miscalculate as any scientists may, our lives are almost completely based on technologies born of scientific theory, and I don't think all of the claims that if we don't A by B then C can be wrong. Therefore either prepare for C or prepare for the same kind of surprise that currently characterizes commentary on the crash of the economy.

WWF International--Humans running up huge 'overdraft' with the planet says new WWF report: Standards of living and human development will start to plummet by 2030 unless humans stop using more natural resources than the planet can replace. These fear mongering special interest groups always ignore the good news that sperm counts have dropped by %40 thanks to endocrine disrupting persistant organic pollutants which together with AIDS and other pandemics and permanent world war will keep population from increasing at present rates.

WWF--The Living Planet Index (LPI) is derived from trends over the past 30 years in populations of hundreds of species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Between 1970 and 2000, it declined by about 35%. The LPI is the average of three ecosystem-based indices. The forest species population index declined by about 15%, the marine species population index fell by about 35%, while the freshwater species population index dropped 55% over the 30-year period. the world is currently undergoing a very rapid loss of biodiversity comparable with the great mass extinction events that have previously occurred only five or six times in the Earth's history. The Earth has about 11.4 billion hectares of productive land and sea space, after all unproductive areas of icecaps, desert and open ocean are discounted, or about a quarter of its surface area. Divided between the global population of six billion people, this total equates to just 1.9 hectares per person. While the EF of the average African or Asian consumer was less than 1.4 hectares per person in 1999, the average Western European's footprint was about 5.0 hectares, and the average North American's was about 9.6 hectares. the only sustainable solution is to live within the biological productive capacity of the earth. However, current trends are moving humanity away from achieving this minimum requirement for sustainability, not towards it. future projections based on likely scenarios of population growth, economic development and technological change, show that humanity's footprint is likely to grow to about 180% to 220% of the Earth's biological capacity by the year 2050. First, it is necessary to improve the resource-efficiency with which goods and services are produced. Second, we must consume resources more efficiently, and redress the disparity in consumption between high and low income countries. Third, population growth must be controlled through promoting universal education and health care. And, finally, it is imperative that we protect, manage and restore natural ecosystems...
Timon of Athens (to his gold): O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire!

Apemantus: Would 'twere so!
But not till I am dead.

Judicial Watch--Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes public corruption, today reported that security staff at The White House threatened a process server with arrest over his attempt to serve Vice President Cheney with a complaint filed against him by Judicial Watch on behalf of shareholders of Halliburton. It is a crime to interfere with service of process. “We have served many a lawsuit on Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton when they were in The White House. The Clinton White House accepted the papers. Never before have our process servers been threatened with arrest. If this Bush-Cheney White House is serious about corporate corruption and responsibility, it would not allow the Vice President to improperly hide behind White House security to evade service of process in the Halliburton securities fraud litigation, and it would not threaten the process server with arrest” Real break in the right wing machine or media performance? If the actual approval rating of bushoilcia is so low as to make reelection unriggable, the right wing may just sacrifice them so it can appear to be as anti corporate corruption as the left.

Chemtrails Over Cornwall, England more fotos