Monthly Archives: August 2006

Where have we heard that before?

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pictureWhen Israel initiated its new incursion into Lebanon, it was deja vu at first sight and just hasn’t let up. But it’s not so much to do with Israel’s previous invasion of Lebanon, actually.
 
When Israeli troops prepared their offensive into Lebanon, in self-defense, they had embedded reporters with them. The media didn’t appear to be interested in covering Hizb’Allah or the Lebanese army.

When Beirut awaited Israeli air strikes, a solitary camera fed American networks a view of the Beirut skyline in anticipation of far off explosions and fires.
 
(Do you wonder -with webcams and surveillance cameras literally available at the Dollar Store- why wouldn’t they want to put cameras close in to the action?)
 
When casualty reports came in about military skirmishes, every Israeli soldier’s death was reported. Hizb’Allah casualties were unknown. Sound familiar?

Now Israel is complaining about having to overcome a problem of foreign fighters among the Hizb’Allah ranks. Iranian they were, too, apparently.

Remember how many foreign fighters we found in Iraq?

pictureRupert Murdock’s British SKY NEWS made the mistake of interviewing George Galloway about the notion of foreign fighters in Lebanon.

A security buffer for Israel

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The Bush administration is content to postpone urging a ceasefire in Lebanon until Israel has completed clearing the brush. Israel will be requiring a security buffer between itself and Lebanon, and apparently it has the right to use Lebanese land to make it.

If a man was having trouble with his neighbors, refusing to make some kind of peace with them, and decided his only option was to clear a large area around his house to buffer himself, I doubt the rest of the community would abide his trying to make the no-man’s-land out of his neighbors’ property.

On top of all that, he’s expecting the community to supply the peace keepers. How juvenile a sense of entitlement is that?

Israel has been attempting the same security strategy with the Palestinians. They call it a security fence. It is in reality a colossal wall made to separate white Jews from the darker skinned Arabs. The Apartheid Wall is universally condemned by international judicial bodies and betrays precisely the irrationality of the Zionists’ land claim in the Middle East.

The Apartheid Wall demonstrates that Israel can only sustain itself as a walled colony, supported militarily by the nation from whence came the colonists. US.
 
Israelis are western settlers determined to occupy a foreign land until the last indigenous outcry is silenced.
 
Now they want more of Lebanon for their apartheid buffer zone. 		  See more of the Apartheid Wall

Unfree unfair elections

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Ask a Democrat when you have the chance, to what do they owe their sense of optimism about the upcoming elections? Do they think they can beat Diebold and GOP election administrators this time around?

Really, what went wrong in November 2004, and before that 2000? What could the Democrats do differently this time to win? (If not dismantling black box voting?)

Mexico’s popular candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador expected a clean win in this summer’s election. But the voting machines came up dead even, and then tilted toward the bad guy by a smudge. Sorry Charlie. The Mexican public suspects foul play.
 
Millions of Mexicans are protesting in the street, asking for a recount of the election.
Do the Democrats imagine that they will be able to rally a disenfranchised American public? 		  Mexico City protest

 
Except for Robert Kennedy Jr, a good many ostracized experts, and a growing progressive cognoscenti, few voices in the Democratic Party are even addressing the issue of crooked US elections. When will Democratic candidates and party leaders concede that previous elections have been stolen? How are Democrats to win if they face rigged results?

Instead Democratic Party members are urging us to concentrate on grassroot fund drives.

What kind of idiots do they take us for? To condemn them less cynically, what kind of idots are they? Or, less insulting, are they in collusion with the GOP?

Local Democratic organizers expect the rank and file to do their utmost this time, to walk the streets for the candidates, to contribute their money and their hope. The party is expecting all of us to place our hope in middle-of-the-road issues, nothing too radical for the sake of having a broader appeal in the next election.

Without electronic voting reform, I don’t think we have a chance in the next election. And I think DC Democrats are advocating centrist objectives to keep pertinent issues from the public discourse.

And it looks to me like Democrats are preparing to tell us, after lots of grassroots work, at the close of another lost election, that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

The Tallgrass theme

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Not My Tribe uses the Tallgrass theme, an adaption from Wp-Andreas with a number of modifications, among them: meta tags, artifact ID, single post handling, mouseover.

Tallgrass features an extended header to disguise the blog nature of the architecture, adding tags found otherwise in traditional publishing websites. View the source code to see and borrow them. The meta tags change depending on the hierarchy of the page in question. Tallgrass features improved handling of page descriptions and abstracts.

There’s an artifact ID line to distinguish individually generated reads.

Tallgrass also features links to the previous and next posts, and mention of the author and publishing date beneath the post title.

We’ve also added a post number tag adjacent the post title for providing a temporary url to the article which presents it in the context of recent articles instead of alone.

There is also a mouseover title which uses Javascript but which has introduced a conflict with the WordPress header superfunction.

Laptop essentials

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Hoodman Sun Shade E2000 for PowerbookThis is an essential for the laptop as side arm. If you keep your laptop at the ready to prepare notes or type on impulse, you need to adapt your screen for sunlight. Waiting in the car provides ideal isolation for tackling backlogged projects if you can see the cursor. Early photographers faced a similar problem excluding light and solved it then. Hoods.
 
Targus Traveler CoolpadHere’s another easy remedy for laptops which run hot. This swivel base provides the extra clearance for air cooling, the usual benefits of being able to turn your laptop on an axis without scratching or shaking anything, and it takes almost no additional space in your bag.

White Native Americans

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A branch of our local library is hosting a discussion about a recent work of popular fiction, One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus. I’m thinking of stopping by to puke.

The novel begins by alluding that its unspeakable historical premise has factual merit. ALLEGEDLY the author’s great great aunt, a “May Dodd”, left a journal about her life experience, hidden all these years in shame by her family. The author takes it upon himself to tell her repressed tale, and because it is the untold fate of 999 nameless more, we infer it to be one of the dark secrets of the American national identity.

The story concerns 1000 white women who were traded to the Indians in exchange for resettlement and peace. One thousand white women. The title does grab you. It has undeniable where-the-white-women-at? appeal.

Another prominant White IndianThe phenomena also shares something with the White Indian Series by Donald Porter. That’s a western series for readers who couldn’t be bothered to know about the lives of the Native Americans unless they were WHITE Native Americans. These readers can’t sympathize with Indians as victims, unless they are white Indian victims, and then preferably of course they should be white Indian victims of Indians.

The mythic white Indian abounds on film, and it’s not just Indians. The story of The Last Samurai had to be about a white man in Japan (Tom Cruise) or who would care?

Here you have the fate of 1000 women sold, sacrificed or let loose down the river to become Indian squaws. One part romantic fantasy, several parts feminist grudge, (1000 parts rape fetish?), all at the hands of red heathen.

To be fair, the author does provide a disclaimer that 1000 white women never changed hands. Fergus implies however that an original Cheyenne proposal to be given 1000 white women was real and asks readers to ponder, what if?

If true, it’s a piercing lesson on the embarrassing legacy that can come from sarcasm.

How deeply insulting is it to suggest that Indian tribal leaders would have asked the army negotiators for white women? And as a condition of laying down their weapons? I think it’s indescribably racist to be susceptible to thinking that Indian fathers and braves sought white mates with whom to raise new generations of their tribe.

Neither in-breeding nor poor education are excuses enough for this prevalent self-centered bigotry.