Lefty Blogs
williampfaff ++ ++
Russian News ++
seaton-newslinks. USA expat in Europe ++
bilegrip Asu spleen ++
us-rockstroh a rant, not a blog ++
aboutmyplanet eco ++
sfgate ++
crookedtimber ++
onthecommons ++
sjlendman ++
....
abutamam freeiraq ++
airamericaradio +
amygdalagf +
angryarab ++
annezook +
antiwar ++
norwegianity
terrorism-news
blogspot
ourtomorrow
politickybitch
welcome-to-pottersville
aviraqi
billmon ++ whiskeyB
consortiumnews ++
dahrjamailiraq
dailywarnews ++
drforbush +
english +
fallujahinpictures
freespeechradio
halcyondays ++
healingiraq
hereticalideas ++
icasualties
maru
om
boxspinning boxes

jamaicaobserver newspaper
jameswolcott +
lefarkins +
liberalgirlnextdoor ++
lonehighlander Libya, not lefty
mahablog +++ solid
maruthecrankpot +
indymedia melbourne
messopotamian +7Apr06
monkey ++
motherjones ++
fisk
nocapital +
norightturn +NZ
peakoil ++
pilger +
politicalhumor +
raedinthemiddle
rafahtoday Feb05?
rense w= wacko conspiracies
rigorousintuition x
hegemon ++
ruckus ++
rudepundit ++
satiricalpolitical +
scaramoucheblog ++
secretsinbaghdad ++15Ap06
Energring
aliveinbaghdad ++
riverbendblog ++
sideshow +++
signs-of-the-times +++
slashdot ++techy
talkleft ++
thinkprogress ++
thismodernworld +++
uncapitalist ++
velorution ++ bicycles
org ++Brazil peasants
warandpiece +
warfare.ru +russia military
greenpeace
allhatnocattle
alternet ++
americanpolitics
antiwar
gbruno ++YT
axisoflogic ++
blackcommentator
bobharris +
bradblog +
buckfush +funnies
buggery +
buzzflash ++
changeforamerica
countercurrents
counterpunch +++
crisispapers
crooksandliars ++?
csmonitor
dahrjamailiraqhref="http://www.dailykos.com/
davidcorn
democracynow
democracyuprising
dissidentvoice
earthfirstjournal
earthstation5
empirenotes
foodfirst
fpif
fromthewilderness
geocities
granta
grist ??
gristmagazine
guerrillanews
gulf
hizbollah
huffingtonpost ++
informationclearinghouse
infoshop +
inthesetimes x
iranmania x
ivaw
jihadunspun
juancole ++
kuro5hin ++ notlefty
kurtnimmo ++
lrb ++ Iraqi?
mahablog
lewrockwell ++
marklynas climate change
mnftiu get your war on comics
motherjones
nilemedia
nybooks
occupationwatch
oriononline
palestine
prisonplanet
rall ++ Ted Rall cartonist
ratical
redpepper
rense
robert
rollingstone
scoop
selvesandothers ++
smirkingchimp
snappingturtle
socialistworker
spiked
tblog
theiraqiroulette
theleftcoaster +
thepoorman +
tnr ++ magazine
tompaine ++ mag
traprockpeace ++
truthout +
boondocks ++
crowning3
. . . helix
Base
rain radar
Weather
worldtribunal +
worldwatch ++ $ required
zaman + Turkish news
youcantmakeitup + ?
youngfox ????????????
bareknucklepolitics videos?
popdrain videos??
discovery videos??
cs videos??
aegisIraq video??
mariyaguchi video??
iwilltryit video..
baghdadtreasure
ahram cairo newspaper
felbers
thepartyline
jfaughnan 28/04/2006 10:25AM
shrillblog +
thinkprogress +
marchforjustice + pictures
messopotamian + Iraqi not so radical, but scared (also see IraqTheModel which was a USA front, but is now also scared)
scaramoucheblog +
counterpunch
.............
blogads liberal blogs by CPM $ per view
malakandsky ++ stolid?
republicoft + black gay parent??
dailykos ++
rawstory ++
democraticunderground ++
atrios ++
workingforchange +
leftinthewest +
dembloggers +
talkingpointsmemo +
firedoglake ++
vastleft ++
pamspaulding +
americablog +
washingtonmonthly ++
mydd +
politics1 +
bartcop ++
politicalwire +
sisterstalk black lesbian?
culturekitchen ++
alternet
wonkette +++
billstclair +
freefreedomtoldhere ++ pipe bomb

......
almuajaha defunct
whynot defunct
winstonsmith defunct
samadams dormant
mquinn02 defunct
iraqblogcount ++14Apr06 suspended
iraqicomments most recent: jan2005
iraqidoctor most recent: Aug2005
georgemustgo + moved?
vialls ++Dormant (joe is dead)
warblogging Defunct
hammeroftruth quiescant?
mediastorm quiescant? +
bushwhackedusa defunct
hamasonline defunct
4Jul06

13 October 2006

Jack Straw, Hamid Dabashi, Vodafone Echelon

Old Jack Straw has demanded that women remove their veils
Tedious Salman Rushdie chips in 'veil sucks'.
Well my response to these flabby old men is to demand they remove their pants.
Lets see their sagging flaccidities, why do they maintain power behind serge?
I have walked the walk, I lived for a time on a Coromandel commune where nakedness was universal, on warm days.
And what a spirit of liberation we enjoyed. Not to be repeated soon, I expect.
I certainly dont expect Jack Straw to be naked on his knees scrubbing dirty clothes, in order that some liberated women can relax in the sunshine.
Its Relative Jack, old boy. Your culture insists on pants, Saudi Culture insists on veils, my culture insists on facing your fears without preparing for war.

3quarksdaily
Hamid Dabashi vs. Azar Nafisi
"A Collision of Prose and Politics: A prominent professor's attack on a best-selling memoir sparks debate among Iranian scholars in the U.S."
weekly.ahram
White men saving brown women from brown men
..three years after the publication of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, and right in the middle of a global concern about yet another American military operation in the region, one can now clearly see and suggest that this book is partially responsible for cultivating the US (and by extension the global) public opinion against Iran
...
Rarely has an Oriental servant of a white-identified, imperial design managed to pack so many services to imperial hubris abroad and racist elitism at home--all in one act. It is thus exceedingly important to read Nafisi not just for her ideological services to the US imperial designs globally, but, equally if not more important, for her reactionary consequences inside the United States as well.

[Can the Subaltern be read anywhere on the web?]

newstatesman speaking of flacidities, those aging Aussies
Robert Hughes & Clive James have cranked out further installments of their life stories (I have read no priors]

flickr Micheal Poliza helicopter over Africa: lotsa buffalo

Two legs
Australia specialises in two legged life
Lizards above Bondi startle away on two legs
Cassowary with killer kick
Kangaroo killer kick
I put forward the proposition for preservation
of two legged mammals
Our cousins, gorillas, chimps & gibbons & such
Also preserve the big things
Blue whales, polar bears
Take cell samples from as many as possible
One day we may have true cloning,
not today's grotesque Frankenstein electric shocking dolly
sad replicants.
I hear that mammals go extinct in cool times
Hard to grasp as vast dry descends on our hot jumped world
Most important:
keep liquid water on earths surface
Folly has it that nature wastes nothing
but oil seeps and chalk cliffs are mighty slow in going back to gas
without mean man monkey grip techniques
Wish I could afford that blue whale trip.

newamericamedia
European journalists and investigators are tracking the mysterious deaths of two security experts -- one in Italy, the other in Greece -- who had uncovered extensive spyware in their telecommunications firms.
viaswedemeat

but
also via swedemeat

Dannatt, Chavez, Iraq, Hopkins, HIV

aljazeera
Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt .. in an interview with the Daily Mail Friday that Britain's Iraq venture was aggravating the security threat elsewhere in the world.
..troops should "get ... out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems".
"The original intention was that we put in place a liberal democracy that was an exemplar for the region, was pro-West and might have a beneficial effect on the balance within the Middle East. That was the hope, whether that was a sensible or naive hope history will judge. I don't think we are going to do that. I think we should aim for a lower ambition."


swedemeat
Why did Chavez buy those useless jets?
[should have bought] antitank weapons (a Russian specialty since 1941) and antitank mines, some of them undetectable by most mineclearing systems. The point is, Chavez didn't buy any of these things.

What he did buy with his $3 billion was 24 Sukhoi Su-30 fighters and 53 helicopters. Against a US invasion, all that hardware would be an instant writeoff. If you want to beat the US armed forces, you don't buy fighter jets, because they'll just get shot down
....
and that brings us to the real reason Chavez is spending all those petrodollars on useless Russian fighters: he's scared of a coup, not an invasion. So he's trying to create a new wing of the air force, trained on non-American hardware and loyal to him. It's the oldest trick in the book, creating a parallel military force to protect yourself from the established armed forces.

[wingnuts do techspeak better]

more from swedemeat:
if however a sufficient objective for the Administration and the interests they champion is to incapacitate the nations of the region by bringing them into a state of chaotic equilibrium that prevents them from furthering any domestic or pan-regional agendas for growth not in lockstep with U.S. interests then a disastrous attack, as defined by a discrepancy between what is promised in selling the war to the public and what is actually achieved, must reasonably be allowed to be considered a significant success.

From this adjusted perspective, Iraq is a success and that success can easily be replicated in Iran.
[you have to consider this seriously: chaos in Palestine , chaos in Iraq, is this the intended outcome?]


et cum spiritu tuo
prophecyheadlines
Pope Benedict XVI is understood to have signed a universal indult ..for priests to celebrate ..the Tridentine Mass
..The Cornell Society blog says that Father Martin Edwards, a London priest, was told by Cardinal Joseph Zen, of Hong Kong, that the indult had been signed.

blogs:
iowahawk funny, despite link from lgf

belgraviadispatch lefty
thedigitaldiplomat lefty

negrop
Libyan laptops
aljazeera
The $250 million deal, reached on Tuesday, would provide the nation with 1.2 million computers, a server in each school, a team of technical advisers, satellite internet service and other infrastructure.

Hopkins Iraq study: the pdf:
thelancet
By Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, Les Roberts
A careful Johns Hopkins study has estimated that between 420,000 and 790,000 Iraqis have died as a result of war and political violence since the beginning of the US invasion in March, 2003.
........................
palestinianpundit
"Add to this the 1.5 million killed as a result of the United Nations imposed (at the behest of the United States and Britain) sanctions—more than 500,000 of them children—and you have a total working its way toward the 3,500,000 killed in Southeast Asia from 1960 to 1973 (see Matthew White’s well referenced Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century).

virusmyth
If HIV caused sickness, then non-seropositives should have a normal death rate.
But non- sero-positive people have a lower than normal death rate.
So sickness causes HIV infection, HIV infection does not cause sickness.
- an interesting argument.

11 October 2006
The population of the United States will pass 300 million today, or tomorrow.

isis (care: pdf)
Tactical nuclear weapons: Europe’s redundant weapons of mass destruction

Australian lack of broadband puts it at a disadvantage in OECD
Asians visiting here are shocked at the pathetic ADSL speeds & prices
engadgetmobile kalimna
Canadians pay $54 per month for unlimited downloads and speeds of 5 megabits per second while Australians pay $99-95 to Telstra for a download limit of 10 gigabytes at 1/4 the speed.
Punishing metering restrictions discourages online music, video, games and interactive services. It also limits broadband use in education, science and trade. It also imposes more basic costs of just communicating. High costs of broadband access lead to low levels of market penetration and low effective network externalities - Australian per capita incomes are 75% of those in the US but levels of broadband use in households is 33% compared to the US's


12 October 2006

Lancet, Hopkins, Iran, Mahdi

.."We estimate that as of July 2006, there have been 654,965... excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population ..
..Lancet study .. Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore
.. estimated deaths in the post-invasion period from March 2003 to June 2006, and compared the mortality before the invasion, from January 2002 to January 2003.
They randomly selected 47 sites across Iraq, comprising 1,849 households and 12,801 people.
..Of the 629 deaths recorded, 547, or 87%, were in the post-invasion period.
..31% of deaths ..by the coalition .

Crude check of these figures:
the Pre period is 13 months, the Post period is 39 months...the expected ratio would be 1:3 ie 209:419 whereas the observed ratio was 82:547
given 82 "normal" deaths in 13 months, then in the subsequent 39 months we would expect 246 deaths. we actually got 547 ie excess deaths of 301 in population of 12,801
.total Iraq population is 26.2 million
so total excess deaths estimate = 301* 26,198,600/12801 = 616,000, roughly what the Hopkins study found
Of course 2002 might be considered a not-normal year . Is an annual death rate of (12/13) *(82 *100/12801) = 0.59% a 'normal" death rate? Doesnt seem all that high
[cf Scotland had 55747 deaths in a population of 5094800 = 1.09%, much higher than Iraq-Pre.
I guess Scotland has a much older population.

Actually the reported Hopkins figures are meaningless as error margins are not mentioned. I am sure the Hopkins study would include such figures, its the news agencies who are at fault for not including them.]


So Cheney & co are prepared to go up against the record of Kennedy|Johnson|Nixon who killed 1.5 million or so Vietnamese. Iran, take note. These USAnians are mass murderers on a Stalinistic scale.

Some suggestions for Iran:
Teach all villagers to recognise invader helicopter sounds so that commando teams can be identified and captured. Consider barrage balloons holding up nets above main roads. USA cruise missiles may still follow optical terrain maps, and cruise wings are flimsy. Get film studios to quickly erect dummy buildings to confuse them. Unroll Al foil corner reflectors over important buildings so laser designators are not diffused into targeting systems. Shine duplicate lasers onto unimportant buildings. Practice city-wide silent periods so that drones can he located with parabolic microphones. Get Russian GPS jammers on trucks. The latest USA bombs rely more on GPS and less on laser designators. In Baghdad the Russian GPS jammers were early targets, so have plenty of dummy trucks with correct thermal signatures (HA had lots of warm fake rocket launchers to confuse the IAF)

Best wishes to the Iranian people as they face down Empire.


Juan Cole startled by Tank loss:
On Sunday, heavy fighting broke out in downtown Diwaniyah between US troops and the local branch of the Mahdi Army. The gunbattle erupted when the US attempted to arrest a prominent Sadrist Shiite leader. RPG and small arms fire echoed through the city for hours and the Shiite guerrillas managed to destroy an Abrams tank. (What? Do they have shaped charges or RPG-28s or what? Ordinary RPG shells just bounce off an Abrams.)
...Altogether, the US military announced the deaths of 9 US troops over the weekend on Sunday

[I believe that 'ordinary' RPG have one shaped charge, you need a double charge to get past reactive layer]
I have a theory that the USAnians death rate is self-limited at 2.4 per day, ie less than 1000 per year. Any more deaths, and they retreat to barracks, any less and they charge into another suburb and start throwing blindfolded people onto trucks, then they lose another 2.4 soldiers, so retreat, etc,etc


11 October 2006

Nuclear fizzer, WTC conspiracy, GLOBAL GUARDIAN., jaguar, schizophrenia, Bolani

thecarpetbaggerreport
Seems the NK nuke was rather a fizzer.
'sub kiloton" according to AEC. (they would say that)
It has been said that no fission bomb has ever failed. There was a Brit fizzer on Xmas island (in the 60s?) but that was probably a layercake fission-fusion-fission test. Amusingly enough, after Ed Teller left Los Alamos for LawrenceLivermoreLab, his first test fizzled (also probably a layer-cake test) It didnt even destroy the tower. Oppie's guys back at Los Alamos said he'd better get "a bigger bomb, or a smaller tower"

gnn
25 Sep 2006 Bill Weinberg "How wild 9/11 conspiracies undermine the left
tedious opinions, with a few little gems:
little-noted report on BBC News that a private (presumably government-contracted) firm called Visor Consultants had been carrying out a test simulating a terror attack on the London Underground July 7—the same day the real attacks occurred.
...
the apparent fact that some employees at the Israeli office (in Tel Aviv, not New York) of the instant-messaging firm Odigo received text messages in the hours before 9-11 warning of an imminent attack on the World Trade Center.

FTW critiques the Weinberg article:
fromthewilderness
and they've uncovered yet another fucking live-fly exercise on 11Sep01:
yet another Air Force exercise was occurring on 9/11 besides the five laid out in Crossing the Rubicon: GLOBAL GUARDIAN.
According to Thompson this exercise, which simulates a “Global Armageddon,” is performed each year in October or November, but for some reason it was rescheduled for the week of September 11th in 2001.3

- how many damn exercises does it take to totally confuse all the airtrafficcontrollers in USA?

jag
jaguar in Arizona.. Drug & people smugglers use the same tracks, often smashing the cameras..
__________________________________________________________
lpl
victoria crater - close ups show opportunity and its shadow

futurepundit
..Tad Patzek at UC Berkeley and David Pimentel at Cornell University claim corn ethanol is not a net producer of energy while Mike Graboski at Colorado School of Mines claims it is. Who is right? I don't know. But I am unenthused by an energy source that will increase the demand for agricultural lands and water for farming to produce non-food products since plants are very inefficient at converting light to useful energy as compared to photovoltaic cells. Photovoltaic cells can produce the same amount of energy using much less land.

Come back Thomas S. Szasz & R D Laing....
theszaszblog
.. Richard Bentall, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Manchester, said the concept of schizophrenia is scientifically meaningless.
..
“If we don’t have some way of distinguishing between patients, then those with bipolar disorder or obsessional disorder would be mixed up with those currently diagnosed as having schizophrenia and might receive treatments wholly inappropriate for them,” said Robin Murray, a professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

He suggested replacing the term schizophrenia with the label dopamine dysregulation disorder, which he said more accurately reflects what is happening in the brain of someone who is psychotic.

[this is the lampost method of science. Whatever the latest technology can image, that is what we study, much as the drunk looks for his keys beneath the streetlight, because thats where the illumination is. When we get MRI with 1 cm resolution we say "aha, theres the 1cm of brain that defines madness! ]
msnbc

mapsofwar
MidEast conquests animation:
download imperial-history.zip -> swf then drop it onto firefox
(of course you use Download express)

Ignoble prizes are out:..Parasitology .Today (1996;12:159), Knols and De Jong have now tested the idea. They constructed traps, with or without air blown over Limburger, and exposed them to hungry mosquitoes. In the same period of time, the smelly traps caught more than twice as many A gambiae as those without the smell.


norwegianity lefty norwegian?
terrorism-news yet another lefty blog

Billmon (still posting):
..for some reason, six months has become the time interval of choice for measuring the Cheney Administration's failures in the Greater Middle East:

NATO's top commander in Afghanistan said Sunday the country was at a tipping point and warned Afghans would likely switch their allegiance to resurgent Taliban militants if there are no visible improvements in people's lives in the next six months.

This raises an epistemological point: Does six months in Afghanistan equal one "Friedman," or does failure in a different country require a different name?

Perhaps Atrios -- who invented, or at least named, the "Friedman" -- can answer the question.


nytimes
young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses;
..It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly.

aljazeera
Iraqi police have new uniforms in an attempt to tackle death squads ..dressing as officers
..Bolani said. "These new garments will not be counterfeited..
.........................................
BAGHDAD, Oct. 9 — Men wearing military police uniforms broke into the house of the brother of Iraq’s Sunni vice president on Monday, chased him onto a neighbor’s roof and shot him in the head,..
Amir al-Hashemi was the third sibling of Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, to be killed since spring...

nasa
choking smoke from Sumatra, as those jolly rich Malaysian pigs burn tropical forests to plant oil-palm.
Topday its trans-hydrogenated for your morning biscuits, tommorow its bio-diesel for your fucking "eco-green car" - well, jerkoff car driver, enjoy your 100kph drive to global extinction.
Do you get it? - there can be no eco-green car that does 100kph
href="http://technorati.com/tag/WTC conspiracy" rel="tag">conspiracy

09 October 2006

North Korea, counterinsurgency, youtube, V-CLICK


Derelict, originally uploaded by NZ domino.


Happy Vally Wellington

What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure;
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure



Aus EDT 9/10/2006 1:00PM
Oct. 9, 2006 4:46 By ASSOCIATED PRESS SEOUL, South Korea
North Korea performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test Monday, Yonhap news agency reported, citing government officials.
South Korean officials couldn't immediately confirm the report.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun has convened a meeting of security advisers over the issue, Yonhap reported.

4Oct2006 giant Well Duh! sound
The United States Army and Marines ..new counterinsurgency doctrine ..
..cautions against overly aggressive raids and mistreatment of detainees.
.. emphasizes the importance of safeguarding civilians and restoring essential services..
..The Army will use this manual to change its entire culture .
The doctrine is outlined in a new field manual on counterinsurgency that is to be published next month. ..
nine paradoxes including:
..The more force used, the less effective it is..
..Tactical success guarantees nothing..
..The more you protect your force, the less secure you are
[chances that USAnian troops will take this on board after all these years: somewhere between Buckly's and SFA]

nytimes
attack videos Iraq style
NY Times reports that youtube is hosting vids of USAnian troops getting theirs,
but on inspection we get
"This video has been removed due to terms of use violation."
and then a truly braindead sign-up failure - who would pay $1B for that load?

geekzone
D-Link Introduces V-CLICK Dual-Mode GSM / Wi-Fi Phone
tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900 Mhz) and 802.11 Wi-Fi (2.4Ghz) 4.17", w 1.73", d .75" ..
Opera Mobile .. 2 inch (176x220 pixels)
"unlocked," .. (WEP, WPA and WPA2) .. US$600
A much better idea than ziggy's Telstra 3.5G+ $100/month crapola service
[what no mini SD?]