Apocalypto, Jean Kirkpatrick, rocket launchers, Rat Dreaming, Honeychile Wilder

smh December 16, 2006
..Another big security breach .. in Victoria. A 53-year-old Puckapunyal Sergeant Read..has been charged with firearms, theft and dishonesty offences. Police have removed truckloads of weapons and ordnance from his home, . .and other properties since Monday.
..items found included shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, 50 hand grenades, 30,000 rounds of ammunition, and more than 50 guns. .. camouflage uniforms. .. confidential army documents were among the cache... enough to fill six freight containers.
[back to the 1920's? when Aus had Fascist private armies?]
....NSW police were searching for eight rocket launchers - which it suspects were stolen from the army - the Defence Force refused to release any details yesterday.
A ninth rocket launcher was obtained by NSW police ..for $50,000 payment to a relative of the Lakemba murderer Adnan "Eddie" Darwiche...66 millimetre rocket launchers.. "something we have in our inventory".

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Robert Parry .. smirkingchimp

Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," a violent capture-and-escape movie set 500 years ago in the territory of a fictional Mayan city-state, ends ironically when European explorers arrive and interrupt the final bloody chase.

Apparently, MG ignores the Mayan developments in Writing,Mathematics and Astronomy.
C9 Mayan astronomy had Venus position better than C16Europe
There is a solar eclipse, sort of like Tin-Tin I suppose.
His thesis is that 'primitive' people need Christian civilisation to drag them out of their morass.
Reality Based: The Mayan civilization crashed around 900CE, way before any Europeans arrived in CentrAm
So we ought to take the message that resource shortages can sink a civilization, not that we need a different sky-god.
The recent (82-3) Mayan massacres were conducted by a Christian fundamentalist, with the blessing of Ronald Reagun.
So Gibson is not just wrong, hes diametrically opposed to the truth.
At least he had it right about who causes the wars in Lebanon and Palestine.
[note the comments on Parrys blog... two USAnians who are angry that Parry has spoiled the movie ending, not that their Govt ordered the murder of 200,000 Mayans]

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vanityfair .. org

.. her fine distinctions between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
Since the point of Kirkpatrick's distinctions was to give intellectual buttress to crude imperial functions like cheering on Guatemalan mass murderers practicing genocide on Mayan Indians, Kristol at least reminded me of what a disgusting creature Kirkpatrick was, at least in the decades when she had measurable influence on U.S. foreign policy, in the Reagan years. As with all the Commentary crowd in the late 1970s the only intellectual challenge they ever offered was the matter of deciding whether they actually believed all the drivel they were writing.

What a pity that Kirkpatrick and Pinochet died without having the flesh ripped from their bodies by a thousand filthy fishhooks.
I cant decide if the USA in Iraq is confused or confusing. Ordinarily the USA buys a dictator, and trains local death squads. IMF loans to plutocrats or bureaucrats vanish into a few privileged pockets, while the repayments are found by collapsing all social programs. This system works in Communist and authoritarian regimes. Poland and KSA-Saudi Arabia are thus suborned.
The presence of USA troops is typically not necessary. Witness the rapidity with which the USA withdrew its troops from KSA upon skinny Bin Laden's demands. Troops in Okinawa and Germany are not mortared much. Why NeoZion feels the need for giant concrete bunkers packed with marines in Iraq is not clear. Why not just go home? Perhaps because Iran is not KSA, and USA doesnt trust that its Shia death squads will continue to serve their proper masters. I suspect that low grade intelligence about Islam, a residual conflicted nostalgia for their former Baathist torture-buddies, and a dread that Devotion based idealogy may override mere Dedication based, has left USA in a dither. One can be dedicated to Capital, but not Devoted, as one may be to the 12th Imam. The dither is not to bothersome to NeoZion. A thousand troop deaths a year may be a deliberate brutalization of the USA public. Such might be tolerated indefinitely, but the impression remains, a whiff of desperation, even as NeoZion pockets the dribble of oil that reaches the Iraq border. It cant last, and USAEmpire appears headed for the rocks.
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Todd calls it micromilitarisme théâtral (theatrical micromilitarism), a doctrine that follows three principles: Choose weak enemies, avoid final solutions to conflicts, and demonstrate U.S. superiority in the everlasting arms race.
foreignpolicy
[bugmenot has foreignpolicy sign-in]
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Southern Lebanon has questioned the U.S. superiority in the everlasting arms race. HA fighters used man-launched double-shaped charge rockets in several ways. Tilted up, they took out troop-carrying choppers, which frightened the IDF so much they failed to fly close support helicopters. The same rockets popped Merkova tanks, the precious troops inside scarpered to nearby cement-block houses, where they were minced-meat when the same small rockets.

So, Todd asks, how can the world manage a superpower that is economically dependent and politically useless?
.. Europe's budding economic superiority and common cultural and social values, which are gradually becoming more distinct, make the continent the only natural political contender to the United States. Europe's economic power can and should be translated into political and military influence sufficient to contain the United States and to reestablish global political equilibrium.
..the possibility of creating a nightmare alliance for the United States "between Russia, a major nuclear superpower, and Europe and Japan, the two dominant economic powers."

[I'm not sure about Japan - there appears to be a demographic stage of decline for low-fertility nations with tight racist anti-immigration attitudes. A German-Russian coupling along gas-pipelines seems more likely]
earthlink
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Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire, one of the most important books of the last few years. Contrary to those Le Monde intellectuals who see the US as a super-superpower, a hyperpuissance, Todd, a French demographer and author of a book correctly foreseeing the fall of the Soviet Union, says the US has become a "big little bully" incapable of picking on anyone its own size. It makes a show of force attacking the weak--dirtpoor countries with no air defences, such as Iraq and Afghanistan--because a "show" is precisely what it is.
"These conflicts that represent little or no military risk allow the United States to be 'present' throughout the world. The United States works to maintain the illusory fiction of the world as a dangerous place in need of America's protection."

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Richard Carlson, author of "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff," died of cardiac arrest at 45 years of age on Wednesday.

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the Apollonian and the Dionisiac
Girl from Martinique (Matisse)
Which litho, the moment I saw it in Brisbane last millennium
flashed a picture of that girl in Jamaica, Nini,
big like Grace Jones, the pair of us on that tiny motorbike,
in the Hills above Mo Bay, finding a little chocolate factory.
I had forgotten her, I had forgotten that Franz Fanon came from
Martinique, (Black Skin, White Masks; The Wretched of the Earth)
I remembered the terror filled nights, watching
fireflies flashing around my room, hearing imagined or real
threats of revenge for a killing, the Ford Zephyr? pulling up
beside me, 4 detectives, "We thought you'd left the Island".
Tiny hummingbirds with impossibly long tail feathers,
Ital fish from tiny tin shacks booming on the beach
"If I could only reach the border, I would surely step across"
The relief when I escaped the Island, even if it was to
death-squad ridden Guat city.

Nini had short hair, possibly because she had recently had an operation on a skull injury
(one cant tell in JA, at times tales are told to terrify)
a Black Honeychile Wilder? with a broken skull, not a broken nose?
We went out one night, she vanished with some large black guys, came back in the morning
I attempted to leave, she smashed 2 pairs of glasses off my face until I went and got her some $.

Across the Island from Negril, I was walking along with a German tourist,
when a local girl approached us, asked us to deliver a message to a guesthouse in Negril,
The message was that a tourist guest was in a psychiatric hospital, having being driven mad by a group of knife wielding thugs. I'm sure the girl was just winding us up. But Lamb's Bread driven Paranoia abounded.
I heard the gunshot, saw my first warm dead man.
For years, the TV ad campaign "Come Back To Jamaica" engendered a frisson of paranoia, as if it was directed just to me.
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"when one reads that after the age of twenty-nine a man can no longer love and that he must wait until he is forty-nine before his capacity for affect revives, one feels the ground give way beneath one" (Black Skin White Masks, Franz Fanon 1952)
What an odd thing! FF was a psychiatrist black from Martinique, died aged 37. Odd how I got married at 50.
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Noel Coward wrote to Fleming, saying that he was slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile's bottom was like a boy's. "I know that we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?"
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nytimes
Rat Dreaming
..The recordings capture dialogue between the hippocampus, where initial memories of the day’s events are formed, and the neocortex,.. conscious thought and contains long-term memories.
..emerged from recordings of rat brains but is likely to occur in much the same way in the human brain, ..Web site of Nature Neuroscience by Daoyun Ji and Matthew A. Wilson, MIT
..during nondreaming sleep, the neurons of both the hippocampus and the neocortex replayed memories — in repeated simultaneous bursts of electrical activity — of a task the rat learned the previous day.
..electrodes inserted into.. hippocampus “place cells” because each is activated when the rat passes a specific location, as if they were part of a map ..
..after running a maze, rats would replay their route during idle moments,.., surprisingly, was in reverse order of travel...
..they detected the same replays occurring in the neocortex as well as in the hippocampus as the rats slept...repeated cycles ..just under a second. ..
..there is no direct connection between the visual neocortex and the hippocampus, suggesting that a third brain region coordinates a general dialogue..
..in the neocortex tended to occur fractionally sooner than their counterparts in the hippocampus, the dialogue is probably being initiated by the neocortex, and reflects a querying of the hippocampus’s raw memory data..
..“The neocortex is essentially asking the hippocampus to replay events that contain a certain image, place or sound,” he said. “The neocortex is trying to make sense of what is going on in the hippocampus and to build models of the world, to understand how and why things happen.”
[Something, a very large mouse, or a very small rat, escapes my attention in my kitchen. It has learned to avoid the gluetraps. I caught one, it looked like a mouse, but twice as big. Maybe a young rat? The current one leaves no droppings, is fast and furtive, I fear its a rat. I dont sleep on the lounge floor anymore.
I have learned to suspect any psychological results from rat experiments - Lab rats are totally psychotic, living in featureless plastic buckets has driven them more loco than David Hicks]

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Apocalypto, Jean Kirkpatrick, rocket launchers, Rat Dreaming, Honeychile Wilder