Ten reasons why Obama should return the Nobel, posited by none other than The Black Commentator. Several of my non-black friends in the US have expressed consternation over all the criticism there of Obama (i'm assuming mostly from the Glenn Beck squads), but as the ever-insightful RM says, "we have to support Obama unconditionally, otherwise people will think we're racists, too." Since i live on the other side of the Atlantic, i can get away with being blasphemous so long as whatever i say doesn't deride Roma.

People in (shattering) glass houses...

"I refer... to Russia's intimidation of its sovereign neighbours, its use of oil and gas as a political weapon... its threat to target peaceful neighbours with nuclear weapons... and its persecution - or worse - of Russian journalists and dissidents." Thus spake Condoleeeza yesterday, in a speech evidently attended by people who've been living in Western Sahara or the Papuan rain forest for the past 8 years - anyplace bereft of world news feeds. She went on to add, "What has become clear is that the legitimate goal of rebuilding Russia has taken a dark turn - with the rollback of personal freedoms, the arbitrary enforcement of the law [and] the pervasive corruption at various levels of Russian society." One also has to assume that no one in attendance recently spent a week in St.Paul-Minneapolis, where US cops arrested hundreds of political demonstrators along with more than a few journalists.

It seems like a waste of time to deconstruct these remarks, so i'll just note that under Condi's watch, the US has built a wall along its border with Mexico, tried to overthrow the sovereign govt of Venezuela and the democratically elected govt of Palestine (and recently Bolivia as well - or so it appears), succeeded in overthrowing Aristide in Haiti, Saddam in Iraq and the Taliban govt in Afghanistan, maintained its support for Karimov in Uzbekistan - the list of dark turns is long and, after eight years, feels too tedious to type out. i might add that these only touch on the international-level hypocrisy in her speech; when we look at what's gone on inside the US' borders, it just gets more hypocritical - shamefully so. This kind of rhetoric makes americans look like total idiots to the rest of the world; it's no small wonder that Putin's grin won't go away and NATO heads of state are counting the days till Condi & C0. pack up their rolodexes and return to their old jobs in the corporate sector.

Lame Phuck #2

Breaking news on the BBC informs us that Pakistani soldiers have taken a stand against US troops attempting to cross the Afghan border into Waziristan. It's about time someone said NO to the Pentagon, but perhaps the bigger issue here is what the Confounder and Thief thinks he's doing by sending US troops into yet another hostile country. As far as i can tell, the objective of the flailing W Dick administration is to destabilize as many countries as possible before they leave office: Iraq, Iran, Georgia, Pakistan, Afghanistan - hard to say who's next on the list but i wouldn't be surprised to read that Cheney's decided to stop over in Baku on his way back from Georgia. (Enticing more Russian troops to set up camp close to the Iranian border may look like a way to put a wedge in Russian-Iranian relations, but Putin is so much cooler and shiftier than W, the chances of seeing the Russians get buried in a meaningless regional conflict that destroys their ties with Tehran seem pretty slim.) The reason for sending more US forces to Afghanistan is now blatantly clear, even while attempts to start fighting inside Pakistan's territory have surely been pulled out of the Bush dynastic ass. One wonders if this will give Sen. Obama pause the next time he waxes urgent about putting his foot down with the Pakistanis. In the long term, Pakistan probably deserves as much of a political overhaul as the US, but in the short term, this isn't gonna happen at gunpoint - one of the many ironies may be that with US forces now grouping along its border and launching attacks inside the country, Pakistan's many internal divisions may actually dissipate under a common banner: US OUT NOW!

Another irony, pointed out in the Times of India, is that if Little Bush opts to go to war in Pakistan, US forces will be facing their own sophisticated weaponry. " In July, the Bush administration sought to shift $226.5 million in US counterterrorism aid for the F-16 upgrades." Pretty groovy, eh? Nothing like having your own misguided missiles come back to kill your troops. Irony No. 3 is that these raids across the border are inciting Pakistani tribes to join forces with the Taliban - or at least that's what they're threatening, according to this report.

That W still has the cajones to say he's made great progress in the so-called "war on terror" goes far beyond being disingenuous. He's either living in a dream world or just rubbing our noses in the fact that we've all be screwed. Impeachment looks increasingly mild, given the havoc this asshole has wreaked around the world.

Armed Anthropologists

The idea that the Pentagon can win this bogus 'war on terror' by bringing anthropologists into the battlefield seems yet another indicator of the dementia that has permeated Washington since the Bush junta came to power (at least). Writing in this week's issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, my former comrade from Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab protests, Hugh Gusterson, discusses two new programs initiated by Robert Gates, Minister of War: the Human Terrain Team system and Project Minerva. According the Gusterson, the American Anthropological Association has already condemned the first of these and expressed reservations about the second being managed through the war department (as opposed to the National Federation of Scientists, which normally funds social scientists' work on behalf of the federal govt). Anthropologists are widely known to have collaborated with the military during the US-Vietnam war and certainly played a shameful role in the conquest of African and North American territories (et al.) - attempting to quantify savagery in support of colonialism or even genocide - so conceptually and in fact, this is hardly a new idea.... but putting them in military camo and arming them? i know what all my anthropology professors would have said about that: insane, immoral and intellectually infantile.

As Gusterson rightly points out, "Embedded anthropologists are on shaky ethical terrain because they cannot realistically get free consent from their interlocutors while dressed in camouflage and traveling with U.S. soldiers in Humvees. Similarly, they cannot control the use of the information they collect for the military, and thus, cannot ensure it isn't used to harm communities they study." In an illegal war, such activity should put the anthros in the same war criminal category as their counterparts in psychology who "monitor" the torturing of prisoners. It's not anywhere near as sexy as spying on people, which was what happened in Vietnam; imagining how any individual scientist could even consider this to be serious anthropological work on any level boggles the mind.

The Pentagon would be better served by sending anthropologists into AIPAC to gain an understanding of how decision-makers in Washington are so willingly and readily compliant with the zionist agenda. Certainly this falls within the purview of understanding the cultural roots of terror? Discussing terrorism with Arabs, i have always found Israel to be their starting point, and the US' support for israeli terror a close second in justifying the actions of Muslims opting to spread the violence into equal shares for all. That there's never been much equity/balance in this equation is also part of the cultural framework behind it. If i were an Iraqi anthropologist, i'd be very interested in studying how the american military has come to see culture as more operative than history in the current phase of this conflict - or why they believe that culture and history can be separated to promote further conquest and occupation in the Middle East today.

Pepe Escobar Simplifies the Insanity

Escobar's report speaks for itself, so i'm not going to write much. He calls it Full Spectrum Dominance, a term which actually originated with the US SAC (Strategic Air Command) in their Vision 2020 report (late 1990s, early 2000) and detailed the need for the US to control space militarily. Eventually our piping periodista Pepe gets around to this, bringing in the missile defense shield the US is pushing on the new NATO countries (Poland and Czech Republic are to actually get the anti-missile missiles systems, other countries like Hungary and Romania provide related infrastructural needs). Now, before you start having nightmares that Ronald the Raygun has risen from the dead, think back to that period and like John McCain, you'll probably agree: the Cold War geopolitical framework was a lot easier for voters to warp their brains around than the War on Terror for Oil framework. Enough of this elusive taliban shit, snakey Gulf sheikhs and should or shouldn't psychologists be involved in torture. i'm tired of Guantanamo, i want another Cuban missile crisis. White people threatening other white people makes so much more sense, even to the non-white people who are wrecked in the process.

US Money Subverts EU Federation??

This is interesting and certainly worth looking into further.... it would not be the first time that US companies sent money through a back channel to influence foreign referendums or elections in the direction of their own financial interests. Hardly. However, in the case of the Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty, it may also be more convenient for the ever-dogmatic french to blame it all on pesky american neo-cons than to address the real concerns many europeans have about setting up a federated EU government that would usurp states' rights. If you do internet radio, check out this broadcast from the somewhat wacky but often on the mark Finton Dunne. If you can stand the anti-New World Order rants, he makes some deeper points worthy of attention.