Twenty Years On

I was going through old papers, burning the ones that didn't need saving -- meaning most of them -- and one that was kind of striking was the receipt from the Executive Hotel Pacific in Seattle for a five day stay, 9/10/2001 - 9/14/2001. The total was just over $600, whatever the Government rate was (I think it was $105 in Seattle at the time). The hotel is across the street from the Central Library and my room (on the 5th floor?) faced the construction site. The old library was being demolished in preparation to construct the new gleaming one that stands on the site today. I remember waking up to the sound of what I thought was a pile driver and a wailing siren. It was just about 6am.

I washed up and kept hearing the siren and pile driver. I remember looking out the window at the construction site. Didn't see anything out of the ordinary. The morning was a little bit foggy. I turned on the teevee, and the news on every channel running news was showing the burning World Trade Center Tower, the hairdos and makeup jobs expressing puzzlement, most seeming to think it was an accident that probably involved a small private plane. And then a large, four engine jet, probably a commercial airliner, appeared out of nowhere on the screen and struck the second tower. I think the talking heads were talking with the camera on them when this happened. It may or may not have been split screen. I'm not sure now. 

But suddenly, the talking heads seemed to realize what was happening was no accident. They were still puzzled. But two planes into two towers was no coincidence. Their ear pieces were were no doubt filled with chatter from producers and floor directors and such. I watched for a while, switching channels, and just after 7:00am, I called the office to find out what the plan for the day would be. "Come in," I was told. "We'll do what we can."

What that was, who knew?

I continued watching the news until shortly after the Pentagon was hit, and then I walked to the office a few blocks away.

What we did was watch the news on the big screen and try to get direction from HQ in DC. They initially said continue with our original schedule. I was conducting training classes, so that's what I was to do for the interim. The class was a disaster. Half the students didn't show up, and those that did couldn't concentrate, so we broke up and went into the meeting room to watch the news on the big screen. Everyone was sent home early, the class told to return in the morning to pick up where we left off. 

Surprisingly, or maybe not, we were able to complete the training the following day, and I spent the next two days in Seattle strategizing ways to get home (no commercial flights, remember?) and helping out with office things when I could. Everyone was in a daze, uncomprehending really. No one that I was aware of was in a rage of bloodlust determined to go war-rampaging in the Middle East. The news was on the big screen, but we only watched occasionally. Nobody actually knew what was going on or what would happen, and HQ in DC was not at all communicative. 

Finally, I was able to rent a car from Alamo and a colleague and I loaded up and headed south. Took two days. We were practically silent the whole way, in shock. Much shaking of heads at the news on the car radio. "This will not turn out well." No, no it won't. And no it didn't. One tragic thing has led to another and to many, many others since. 

I applaud getting out of Afghanistan -- even when Trump announced it. It was the right thing to do, as I believed sincerely that going into Afghanistan on the side of myriad murderous warlords was wrong. Afghanistan was not the cause of the 9/11/2001 attacks, and it wouldn't be the cause of the Endless Wars our rulers decided to conduct. Afghanistan wasn't even a side-show to all of that and yet it bled like any other war-theatre, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or they wore the wrong kind of clothes or the war-gamers in Florida wanted/needed a kill for the win. It was a foolish goon show that did nothing at all to lift either Afghanistan or the US or perhaps especially Nato from the mire of neo-imperialism.

It's supposedly "over". We'll see.

I left government service in 2009, fed up with the increasing insanity within. That's what I saw. A creeping but unstoppable insanity that was consuming government and those who served. It became worse, much worse, upon the election of Barack Obama, and that's when I became convinced I had to get out. I know many of my colleagues saw the same trends, and many got out before I did. Some died. 

On the internet we discuss how Bad this or that Leader is, how deeply antithetical Government is to the wants and needs of The People -- however we define that mass -- and how grotesque the Government is and has been, yada-yada, world without end. 

It's team sports. It's a game. Nothing fundamental ever changes. We may rail and argue constantly, but how many have any intent to change anything for the better or even understand there may be something better to change to? We coulda. We shoulda. We didn't.

So here we are.

Biden is providing a pause to the general insanity of Government, but the overall trend remains the same. The continuing hysterics over the withdrawal from Afghanistan shows how deeply compromised and corrupted the so-called "defense" industry and almost all the media has become -- or maybe they always were. To me, it's most stark on BBC where there appears to be a neo-imperial cult in charge, and where nothing at all is ever permitted to counter the Official Narrative that Afghanistan was Wonderful under the rule of the Imperial Powers/USA, and everything has gone to shit under the Taliban, though sotto voce, you might hear something like (shh, it's the way most Afghans want it....shhhh). 

Getting out was a matter of my own sanity. Getting as far away as I prudently could was part of that. And then one day the Madness came silently up behind me and thwacked me solidly on the head. I still have a divot in my brow-ridge where that tomahawk (come on!) hit me. That was a reminder that I'm not that far away from it at all. It can come up behind us at any time and Thwack! 

Twenty years on, everything is different, but nothing really has changed. 

No.

This must be stopped and it must be stopped now.

The entire mass media is gearing up to cheer on nuclear annihilation -- doesn't matter who gets it -- as a late summer diversion from whatever important thing is going on.

This sickens me.

But there you are.

The depravity of our rulers and their handmaidens is boundless.

Normalizing the Spectacle

Summer tends to be the media silly season dominated by sharks and missing white women. But because there is Trump and Republican dominance of government at every level, among other things, the usual summer media obsessions have to take a backseat. In fact, I haven't heard a single missing white woman story this summer, have you?

Something's different. Something's changed.

Without cable news in our house, our media landscape is somewhat different than that of many Americans, but the fact that we watch television news at all means that we're still subject to the propaganda, lies and strict gatekeeping that are big parts of the media landscape. Our preferred television news outlets are Democracy Now! and PBS NewsHour. On Sundays, we tend to watch one or another of the Sabbath Gasbag Shows, though sometimes we skip it. Why bother, right?

It's a rare thing if we watch one of the network news shows or one of the morning shows. (We watch endless repeats of "Laramie" on GRIT instead.)

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! tends to restrict her coverage to those issues and stories she is personally interested in or invested in. She corrals her topics so strictly sometimes that "news" -- as in what's going on now -- is absent while a sort of academic consideration of potentialities and so forth dominates her hour. When you're familiar enough with her ways, this isn't too bothersome, but it can be frustrating.

NewsHour is a more general and standard-model television news program -- with a twist. They have literary pretensions, and they often feature artists and writers who have something to say. Because Ms. Ché is in a creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, she's more than a little interested in that part of the NewsHour.

Both news programs must be conscious of their funders and do what they can, and sometimes what they must, not to cross them.

Amy's funding tends to be somewhat opaque, but it appears to come from Pacifica and a select group of well-off patrons and foundations which seek to ensure that a leftish perspective on the news is at least available to the public if not dominant therein.

NewsHour's funding is much more mainstream. Thus their news is, too, but with that literary/artistic twist that you generally won't find in the typical network or cable news program.

With all that said, it appears that the entire news media industry has collectively decided to normalize the spectacle of Trump-de-do this summer in place of the usual diet of sharks and missing white women.

In other words, whatever he tweets, whatever he does, wherever he goes, and whomever he chitters with will dominate all news cycles of every outlet almost as if he were a shark or missing white woman.  We're supposed to be amazed and appalled, I guess.

It's the spectacle that matters most. And making believe it's like any other summer spectacle. Keep the Rabble entertained and unable to focus on what's really going on.

So long as Trump can do that, so long will he be secure in office.

He seems to be doing that with a kind of sharp-elbowed relish that we haven't seen in presidents for a long time -- most of us alive today have never seen it which is why it's so shocking on the one hand, and so entertaining on the other. Mr. Trump has no sense of noblesse politesse. 

He's a gangster, and a lot of Americans like that.

He's an upper crust twit. Some Americans seem to like that, too.

He's a buffoon. Addled. Clearly out of his depth, but he doesn't care, nor do enough Americans to worry about.

He obviously doesn't have enough handlers to keep him in line, but so what? The presidency has been so jokified during his reign to date, all the handlers in the world wouldn't be able to restore the "dignity" to the office. That's gone. Precedent has been set. Oh well!

From now on, presidencies will have to include a lummox squiring around a surgically remodeled Stepford Wife, A boy that "ain't right." A craven group of toadies. An ultra-craven group of ideologically driven "disruptors." Incompetence and incoherence will be the standard of rule from the Oval Office. There will be no going back.

I always dread the summer silly season because it tends to shroud the important issues that can easily lead to catastrophe after Labor Day. We've been down this road before. But this is different, I think, because more of those issues are out in the open. The precipitated crisis in the Persian Gulf, for example, over Qatar's "support for terrorism" could very easily lead--  stupidly and inadvertently -- to a Guns of August scenario that could touch off the War of the Ages . Who knew that the Balkan Thing and the assassination of an Archduke nobody liked would lead to WWI for example. The Saudi royals simply  aren't very bright, but none of these anachronisms in the Gulf seem to have very much on the ball smarts-wise.

Inject something like the Trump Spectacle into the midst of it, and... whoopsy!

So it goes.

But then, taking advantage of crisis is what it's all about, isn't it? Even if you have to engineer crisis. Somebody comes out on top, no? So let it be...who?

This is all becoming normalized.

I'm such a stick in the mud, I don't like it. Doesn't get my juices flowing.

It's garbage day out here in the wilderness. Have to get m'sef in gear and get the can out to the road. At least we have garbage pick up. A lot of folks around here -- even the fancy ones -- have to shlepp their trash to the transfer station themselves. The way of the world...

The Training

Things up at Standing Rock got pretty odd once the Veterans showed up.

Almost immediately, the ACoE denied the easement to drill under Lake Oahe/Missouri River; Dave Archambault II told everyone to go home; a fierce blizzard came up making it effectively impossible for anyone to go home; the camps split over the order; the police hid behind their barricades; Wes Clark, Jr. and a number of other Veterans knelt and apologized for the numerous atrocities and the genocide perpetrated against Natives by their predecessors; many, perhaps, most of the Veterans left the camps; thousands of other Water Protectors and allies also left the camps when the weather permitted; reports surfaced that the Standing Rock Tribal Council was hoarding supplies meant for the camps; Chad Iron Eyes took the opportunity in the chaos to look after the welfare of those remaining in the camps; it turned out that Dave Archambault's sister served in the Obama White House as an advisor on Indian Affairs; there are still reports that Energy Transfer Partners is drilling anyway; an incident in Bismark went viral when an Anglo confronted an Indian at the Mall and demanded that he explain himself, and within minutes, the Indian was assaulted -- as were several others who tried to protect him -- by a masked Anglo Indian hater (who has since they say been arrested).

Meanwhile the Morton County Sheriff continues to fabulate and lie about the Water Protectors.

Ah yes, the training.

Indeed. I've thought all along that the "law enforcement" operations against the Water Protectors -- which have always seemed to be way out of proportion to the needs thereof -- have been a training exercise for the eventual suppression of a more or less general popular uprising.

Why that might be necessary or desirable didn't become clear until the recent (s)election follies. Oh. Right.

Myself, I don't think there is likely to be a general uprising, whether or not Himself is allowed to ascend to the (no doubt by now gold-plated) Throne. No doubt there will be sporadic disturbances, as there always are, but a general uprising is about as likely as a general strike. Not very.

Nevertheless, prudence indicates that "law enforcement" should be ready come what may, and what better training for them than to go against anarchists and Indians in the wilds of North Dakota? I mean really.

So comes now what amounts to a FEMA training manual for the suppression of protest.

It was sent to the "authorities" in North Dakota in September, no doubt to give them courage and fortitude in the face of the raging savages.

Here 'tis. (135 pg PDF, be warned)

When I get a chance today -- or maybe tomorrow -- I'll try to study it in detail.

Meanwhile, after the incident in Bismark, Chris Lemke and Shiye Bidziil got together at the Standing Rock Casino and posted a YouTube appeal to "both sides" to cool it.



The precipitating incident is referenced in the "White Men Behaving Badly" post from December 6.

Interesting.

So many people are so much better than we might believe from the media depictions and narratives.

In Other News -- The Rise of the Racist Right (Again)

The Summer News Cycle is winding down -- the shark and missing white people stories are being put away (this summer it seemed to be white boys going missing rather than the usual white women), and the presidential campaign for the 2016 election is being given the media's main spotlight.

Bernie, The Donald, Herself... and the wild card of Ol' Joe (Biden)... seem to be sucking out all oxygen from the newsroom.

The Bernie campaign is the one with the most populist energy in that the campaign is drawing large crowds practically everywhere. Some of those crowds are immense. They seem to arise spontaneously. In some ways, the Bernie campaign reminds me of the Howard Dean phenomenon when time was, and I cannot help but recall the real shock the single digit vote results in the primaries were. How could that be, we all wondered, when he had been drawing such enthusiastic crowds? Why could he not even break into double digits -- except in Vermont?

Well, I think Bernie is going to be faced with a similar situation. How such large and enthusiastic crowds translate into such a small vote result is something for a scholarly study I haven't seen yet, but I suspect it will happen to Bernie (though he might do better than HoHo did.)

The #BLM interruptions of his campaign speeches and his subsequent acknowledgement of and policy program to redress structural and institutional racism has been taken as a marker of Bernie's civil rights and progressive cred. But what he doesn't say is the same as every other politician on the national stage. He won't endorse or repeat the principal demand of the protesters: "Stop Killing Us."

Nor will any other politician on the national stage.

Not one.

The killing is apparently something to deal with in the future, the distant future preferably, once the problem of structural and institutional racism is solved. Or maybe the killing isn't to be dealt with at all. It's really hard to say.

The killing, though, is the immediate, emergency problem, and the rate of police killings keeps climbing despite all the protests, inconveniences and interruptions of routines that the protesters engage in.

The message here is that the political class as a whole -- Bernie included -- is not particularly troubled by the killing. Nope. I've seen arguments that it is actually quite a rare thing for someone to be killed by the police (despite a higher rate of police killings than just about anywhere else in the world) and those who are killed for the most part "needed killing" anyway, so the problem of police killings is not really that much of a problem when you really look and sort it all out.

Racism, though, is something else again.

At least that's the political message.

Racism is the issue that we must tackle with all available resources and from every angle. Structural racism, institutional racism, historical racism, personal and private racism, overt and public racism, all must be tackled and dismantled, or we will forever face an intractable, socially destructive  problem of racial injustice and discrimination.

And we're better than that. Or something.

So I was cruising around the interwebs and found a story that said the Prairie View, Texas, city council had voted to rename University Blvd to "Sandra Bland Drive Parkway," and I thought, "well, isn't that something?" Not necessarily progress -- that would be expecting too much -- but at least it was an acknowledgement that her life mattered. And that's something.

The story I read was from Channel 2 in Houston, and the comments on the story were filled with racist invective, literally in every comment I read. Oh my. I've seen this before on the internet. In fact, I see it pretty frequently. Racist invective seems to be a feature of the internet, not a social bug at all. It's built in to the structure of internet commentary somehow, but every time I see it, it's a shock. I thought I was fairly sophisticated about these things, but the sort of racist animosity I've been seeing for the last several years -- and sheer amount of it -- is both bewildering and shocking.

I regard it as specifically an internet phenomenon and not particularly representative of the general feelings and beliefs of Americans, but I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is just the tip of a racist iceberg...

What I saw and read in the comments on the Channel 2 story about renaming the street on which she was manhandled and arrested for Sandra Bland was appalling, but it's not unique.

Apparently since the removal of the Confederate battle flag from places of honor in several Southern -- and some not so southern (ie: Albuquerque) -- places, a certain variety of white racist, incensed at the disrespect for their flag, have taken to arms and are prepared to fight the nigra tide that is sweeping over them... yadda, yadda, yadda. It's just ridiculous, but there you are. OK then. So be it.

The problem with this kind of white racism is that even though it may involve a relatively small minority of white folks -- though I can't be sure of the size of the current racist rise -- it can be very powerful because it taps in to America's original sins -- black chattel slavery and Native American genocide. Both were fundamental for the nation's creation and sustenance. There could be and would have been no United States of America without them.

Every effort to overcome those original sins has been fiercely resisted by some white folks for generation upon generation, and so far, while there has been progress -- chattel slavery has been largely eliminated, genocide renounced if not ended in practice -- these sins are still inherent in the nation's very being. The current level of racist internet trolling may be shocking to me, but apparently there are plenty of white folks who live this racist reality all the time.

It's powerful and it's dangerous.

I suppose that so long as it is largely confined to internet trolling, it's not really a serious problem, but I don't know that the internet actually confines it.

The #BLM movement has forced the issue of disparate justice and violent racist policing into public consciousness (again -- it's really always been with us) but so far has been ineffective in reducing the level of disparate justice and violent racist policing. In fact, the rate of police killings has substantially increased this year over last, and courts will still cheerfully charge, try and sentence black and brown folks far more severely than whites for the same offenses. Those same courts will also overlook police violence and killing.

In other words, nothing has yet positively affected the problem which has long since been identified.

At least superficially things are getting worse, not better.

There are some hopeful signs which I will try to get to in another post. But for the time being, the white racist trolls are having a field day.

Not a pretty picture.

I Saw The News Today, Oh Boy

Well, yesterday. I haven't looked at the news today, so I'm not at all caught up with overnight events, but what I saw yesterday helped illuminate just how far from reality much of our news media typically is.

I was, for example, watching the CBS Evening News and the NewsHour, that PBS stalwart, and CBS and Gwen and Company were quite taken up with events in Ferguson and elsewhere as well they should be, but a good deal of the "news" was wrong, false, lies, and what have you. That's a problem. That has been a problem for many a long year, but came into stark focus during the reports of "rioting" in Ferguson in response to the Grand Jury failure to indict the Warrior Sheepdog and Demon Destroyer Darren Wilson.

First of all, the "rioting" was a construct of Authority and the media working in concert, as my ground-eye  view via Bassem Masri's and Rebelutionary_Z's livestreams amply demonstrated. There was no rioting, not by the demonstrators. And the police, typically, were lying about what was going on.

I also watched Amy Goodman's report from the ground in Ferguson, and she basically confirmed with her own eyes what I was seeing on the livestreams and twitter pictures. There were no police and no National Guard on the streets of Ferguson beyond the police headquarters area on South Florissant which is basically in the White Area of Florissant. The 20-some-odd businesses that burned were on West Florissant, in the Negro District. All of the police (and apparently later, the National Guard, though that's not certain) in Ferguson were deployed to protect "The Fort" as I call it; none were assigned to guard or protect businesses along West Florissant. So businesses burned, and it's sad.

The crowd of protesters was assembled at "The Fort" and they were gassed  and largely driven away by a pincer-action of heavily armed and militarized police. Two police cars were burned. How that happened is still a mystery, but both cars were behind police lines when they caught fire. Those were, so far as I could tell, the only incidents of "violence" in that area of Ferguson, apart, of course, from the extensive use of teargas and flash-bangs by the police.

The crowd initially was several thousand strong protesting in front of "The Fort," but it dwindled to a few hundred, perhaps only a few dozen, after repeated the application of teargas.  The crowd was not violent, they were not rioting. A few individuals were vandalizing one of the police cars, a car someone said was left in the street for just that purpose. Could be. But others pointed out that the vandals were unknown, and at least some were white.

By the time Bassem's phone was stolen -- he said by a "police agitator" -- the crowd was small and relatively dispersed in the area of "The Fort." There were very few people on the streets elsewhere in Ferguson. I saw a few pictures taken at the memorial to Mike Brown on Canfield Drive, for example, and it looked very quiet. Amy Goodman stopped by there too, and there was no sign of riot or crowds.

The fires on West Florissant need to be investigated and explained. I'm sure there is some security camera and other video that would show how they started and who was responsible. It's really quite amazing that so much police presence could be deployed to suppress nonviolent protest at the police station but none at all was available to protect people and property along West Florissant, where vandalism and arson had occurred in August.

That was one thing. According to the narrative pushed by Authority and the media, however, rampaging rioters were battling with police all over. And it simply wasn't true. Police were attacking nonviolent protesters at the police headquarters in Ferguson and they were letting businesses be looted and burned along West Florissant without any police or the fire department. When this fact was noted, it was "copsplained" by saying "it wasn't safe" for police or fire responders to go to West Florissant. Rampaging Negroes and all... Bullshit bullshit bullshit.

Meanwhile, a huge contingent of police, I discovered through Rebelutionary_Z's archived videos from the previous night, had been deployed at the intersection of Grand and Shaw Arsenal in the South County. They fired teargas at the relatively small crowd that gathered there, and apparently they twice fired teargas at the MoKabe coffee house, a designated "Safe Space" Police were out in force in this area of Shaw/Tower Grove, unlike the case along West Florissant in Ferguson,  and were issuing contradictory and absurd commands, arresting people pretty much at random, and having a fine old time with their crowd suppression toys.

Rebelutionary_Z had traveled to this area from the safe house where he'd rested after the freeway shut down. Reports were coming in that that safe house (a church) had been raided by police and tear gas had been used. In the area of MoKabe's, along Grand Avenue, Z documented several broken windows and one pawn shop merchant clearing the broken glass from his place was pissed. He confronted Z for "profiting off his pain" -- I thought that was odd, because it's hard to say that Z is "profiting," but Z did not respond. And he didn't mention the incident again.

Meanwhile, the police were behaving in an arbitrary manner, sometimes appearing in force and riot gear to confront the chanting crowd, other times withdrawing, only to return, firing flash-bangs and tear gas and ordering dispersal -- which for some was not possible because they were trapped.

"Negotiations" were conducted to allow people to leave MoKabe's, but the "negotiations" seemed odd, forced, and largely false. People were told they could leave -- with their hands up -- and head toward the church that had been raided and gassed. That didn't seem like much of a resolution to the dilemma of how to disperse when they were not allowed to, and by this point, few people had any trust in the word of the police, word which had already been repeatedly broken.

Nevertheless, people did leave with their hands up and headed toward the other safe place -- that wasn't safe at all.

There was a "clergy" woman (I don't know who she was, I'd never seen her before) mediating between the crowd and police and she often stood and walked between them, almost always with her hands up as a kind of sacrificial lamb, and I'm convinced that her presence defused some of the potential for police violence.  But she couldn't do anything but shrug about the arbitrary nature of police commands. It's their culture, you know?

I spent all morning yesterday watching that and other archived videos of the previous night's events, and I was quite moved by the dedication and determination of the protesters and their almost completely non-violent militance.

It's clear that these demonstrations, which have now spread all over the country and seem to be focusing actions on shutting down freeways (a time honored way to discommode the apathetic and comfortable), are well-coordinated and planned as opposed to some of the Occupy actions which they sometimes resemble.

The issues being raised in these actions -- police abuse and killing with complete impunity -- are much closer to the reality the victims face in this country than the somewhat abstract though no less destructive issues Occupy grappled and grapples with. The chord that has been touched in so many places with regard to police abuse and murder is one that can't be untouched, as practically everywhere, and every day, people -- often children or completely innocent people -- are being shot down by police, many of whom are terrified of their own shadows.

This has got to stop. The only way for people without power to force this or any other issue is to discommode those with power, and make their voices heard, whatever it takes. That means persistent protest (the Mike Brown protests have been going on daily for three months, after all) and creative discommoding. Shutting down bridges and freeways is a good tactic, but causing financial pain to those in power can be even better.

It's a long haul process. Occupy burrowed in to communities and is now a leading volunteer service outlet in communities all over the country. It's as radical as ever, but not so much a public spectacle. Participants do good works and help enable oppressed communities to take control of their own fate.

In the case of these police accountability demonstrations, it's more difficult to achieve objectives because the police don't work for the people, and there is often no easy way for the people to force change on the institution -- or to withdraw from interaction with it.

The police serve their masters, and that means they behave like an army of occupation because that's what their masters want. The occupation can be lifted, but only when their masters say so. Sometimes the occupation can be subverted or crippled, but that's a long-haul and highly risky endeavor. The actions taking place have a cumulative effect, especially the ongoing national demonstrations, but the result may not be quite what anybody hopes for.


Nevertheless, Onward! and Solidarity!

Just Incredible -- Two Men Shot and Killed by Deputies in East LA

No, it's not really incredible, it happens all the time. Practically every day. Sometimes several times a day, but in this case, the story out of the LA County Sheriff's Office and the CBS Local station is absurd.

"They did indeed shoot two suspects. Both of them died." As if the action is not directly connected with the result.

The story is weirder in that the men who were shot and killed by deputies are called "suspects" in a crime that is never mentioned.

EAST LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Detectives are investigating the circumstances Sunday surrounding a deputy involved shooting with two male suspects.

[Suspects in what crime exactly? Shooting? The suspects were shooting deputies?]

According to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, deputies were sent around 2:40 a.m. to the 5300 block of Verona Street for report of an assault with a deadly weapon.

[Assault?]

Once on scene, a witness flagged down authorities and said two suspects in a vehicle pointed a weapon at him.

[Is this the crime in which the suspects were suspected?]

KCAL9′s Joy Benedict spoke with Lt. John Corina who said the witness did not know the suspects.

[Relevance?]

Around 2:20 a.m. the victim, a 32-year-old man, was walking through a business parking lot in the 1100 block of Atlantic Boulevard when he noticed a light-colored SUV driving through the same parking lot.

[Who is the victim here? The suspects? The deputies? The man claiming that a weapon was pointed at him? How would that make him a victim?]

The suspects drove alongside the victim while pointing a gun, but no words were exchanged. They then drove away heading North on Atlantic Boulevard.

[So how exactly is the "victim" a victim? Of what?]

“They were strangers to him,” Corina explained. “He was a little shaken up that they pointed a handgun at him. That’s why he called 911 to report it, and that’s when deputies picked up the vehicle.”

[Had he known them, would that make him less shaken up? What exactly is the crime for which the victim is a victim? Is he a victim because he claimed a weapon was pointed at him from a moving car, though the car drove off and no one was harmed? Or is he a victim because he called 911?]

The witnesses gave a description of the suspect vehicle, which led officials to locate the suspects.

[The vehicle was the suspect? Or the suspects were the suspects? Of what? Pointing a weapon? Being in a vehicle? Assault?]

Four deputies reportedly pulled over the suspect vehicle and ordered the two men to step out.

Police explained the car continued a short distance and proceeded to park in the driveway of an apartment complex located in the 5300 block of Verona Street.

[How exactly was the suspect vehicle pulled over and yet continued a short distance where the suspects parked in the driveway of an apartment complex? How exactly did that happen? How were the two suspects ordered to step out as the car was proceeding a short distance to the driveway of the apartment complex where the suspect vehicle parked?]

After parking, one suspect exited and pulled a handgun out of his pants, pointing it in the direction of the deputies. The second suspect exited the driver side of the vehicle and stood behind the suspect.

[Ah, the waistband gambit once again. Suspects, even unarmed ones, are always pulling handguns out of their waistbands and getting shot for it. It is routine. Necessary too. Cause you never know, do you?]

Deputies then discharged their weapons at the suspects.

[I see. The deputies -- four of them -- shot the suspects until they were dead, right?]

The two suspects — a 26-year-old passenger and a 57-year-old driver believed to be from the area — were shot and killed at the scene.

[Right.]

They were reportedly drinking at a nearby bar before the incident occurred.

[Well, there you are, then. Drinking Mexicans. Oh. My. God. Better shoot them before they shoot you! Bam!]

Family members told Benedict the younger victim — Eduardo Bermudez, 26, of Hesperia — was dropped off at his sister’s house in Verona for a child’s birthday on Saturday where he had been drinking all day.

[Drinking all day? Clearly the man needed killing. Regardless of whether he was "pointing a weapon" or "reaching for his waistband" or whatever. The drinking alone is reason enough to terminate him. Well, as long as he is a Mexican. It helps that the incident happened in East LA. Gangs you know!]

Bermudez’s family also claimed he had a BB gun with him, not a hand gun.

[Ah ha! So the Drunken Mexican was armed, the scum! Deserved to die! Lucky he lived as long as he did! BB-schmeebee. A gun is a gun.]

Officers have confirmed that the handgun recovered at the scene was found to be a replica of a .45-caliber handgun.

["Replica" or no, there was a gun, on a Drunken Mexican. That's all anybody needs to know.]

Deputies said a containment area was set up in the residential area of Verona Street and Amelia Avenue to further investigate the crime.

[Again, what crime? The Shooting by the deputies? Drunk driving? Pointing a handgun that was actually a replica? Or a BB gun? What crime?]

An initial report from witnesses indicated deputies were searching for a third suspect, however, the search was called off.

[There was no third suspect. Reports of witnesses to be discounted when the deputies have to justify what they did.]

Deputies reported they do not believe the driver was armed.

[Doesn't matter, does it? He was drunk, he was Mexican, and he is dead, dead, dead, killed by police because he was there and they were scared. Right? Right.]

At this time, it is unknown if the incident is gang related.

[What!? What "incident?" The Drunken Mexicans are dead. That is the ONLY "incident" that occurred. Two men were shot to death by LA County Deputies. No one else was harmed.]

No deputies were injured during the shooting.

[Thank. Gawd!!!]

The victim’s identities are being withheld pending family notification.

[Wait. Which victims? I'm all confused again. Are we talking about the dead men as victims now? I thought they were suspects. What happened to the supposed victim who called 911? His family needs to be notified? Or what?]

This is how the stories so many of the police shootings in this country are garbled to the point of complete incoherence. No one can say with any certainty -- barring video -- just what happened, how and when, and to whom. No one can quite figure out who the victims are, or why. These deaths are just due to forces of nature or acts of God it would seem. There is nothing to be done.

What a world, what a world.
-----------------------------------------
I saw part of the Die In in University City, St. Louis, today on the Ustream. (Scroll to about 28:10) It was very effective and affecting, though the wags on the Twitter tried to make believe it weren't nothin'. It was actually one of the most effective Die-Ins I've seen in a while, as the street was slick and wet, snow was falling, and the misery quotient in front of the Tivoli Theatre (Oh, I know that theatre) was high.

Tomorrow, they say, the Grand Jury's non-indictment of Brave Officer Wilson who killed Mike Brown in Ferguson on August 9, because he was scared for his life by this big black bruiser, will be announced and the Riots will commence.

Standard Model Police Shooting Story -- Example #1

Boy, these stories are so standardized, you could write them in your sleep.

[#1643 "Killed by Police" since May 1, 2013]

A New Bedford, MA, man named Luis Roman was shot and killed by Dartmouth police Thursday night after they claimed he armed himself with two guns and opened fire at them when they approached his car.

Could be, who knows?

The issue here is not so much the incident itself -- because we don't know what really happened -- but the reporting of it in the Boston Globe. To wit:

The Globe characterizes Roman right off the bat by claiming in the first sentence that Roman (allegedly) swore he was not going back to jail.

Then in paragraph after paragraph, Roman is further characterized as a violent repeat offender, even though the charges against him were either dismissed or were "continued without a finding" -- all of them. Nevertheless, the Globe's story of this incident presents Roman as a desperado, intent on killing his girlfriend and the police who were called to her apartment when she reported Roman had broken into it.

As happens in almost all mainstream media reports of police involved killings, police statements about the incident are reported as fact, undeniable and undisputable, unless and until significant public push-back occurs, at which time, "there is a debate."  Or even better, "a conversation." The victim is routinely maligned -- typically as a habitual criminal, a drug user, a child sex offender, or some such -- to make clear that, whether or not the victim was armed and/or dangerous, the victim deserved to die.

In this particular case, the victim's long criminal record (despite the fact that there were no convictions) is presented first. His arrogant mug-shot is displayed. The outstanding FTA warrant from 2012 is mentioned.

He is presented as a burglar on the night of his death. He is alleged to have broken into his former girlfriend's apartment and damaged her television and computer. She was the mother of his child and she had taken out a restraining order on him in 2010 alleging that he had attacked and threatened her.

He left the apartment before police arrived to investigate. Whether anyone was in the apartment when Roman allegedly broke in is unclear. He allegedly called the father of his former girlfriend to find out if the police were there, and told that they were, he said (according to police statements) that “he was coming back to the apartment and that he had his gun out, ammunition, and said he wasn’t going back to jail.”

He arrived, the police told him to get out of his car, he started to, then got back in, "brandished" one of two guns and fired two shots at police as they approached the car. An officer fired back. The man was transported to the hospital where, after CPR, the man was pronounced dead. Officer is now on routine paid leave, investigation is continuing. The end.

Not quite, however, because the story goes on to detail the assertions made by his former girlfriend in her restraining order application. Then there is a long section of the report on other allegations against him, as well as the statement that "Roman was well-known to the police." But interestingly:

A long list of charges dating back to 2007 and including assault, assault and battery, breaking and entering, and more drug charges, were all brought against Roman and ultimately dismissed, according to court documents.

All of this detail serves the purpose of impugning Roman and making the case that he deserved to die, as -- according to the standards of the media -- all perps who are killed by police must. Whether Roman actually fired at police officers approaching his car is -- I would say -- an open question. He may have. He may not have, but we should (by now) be skeptical of police statements. Firing, brandishing, reaching... all of these actions and more are routinely used to justify police killings, but without solid corroboration, we can't be sure that any such thing actually happened.

But what we can always be sure of is that the reports appearing in the media regarding the incident will always feature and focus on the victim's alleged "badness."

Always.

This story is one of the purest of its kind.
-----------------------------------------

NOTE: I'll have some things to say about the killing of two deputies in California yesterday when I get a chance later. For now, though, I'll just say that I wouldn't have known about it unless a friend emailed me with a sideways reference... had to look it up.

If There Is An Answer To The Epidemic of Police Misconduct

Some have pointed out that the spate of news about militarized police and the repeated shooting/tasing/beating of unarmed, usually black suspects, and the endless lies the police tell the public has to do with the Summer Shark and Missing White Woman news hole needing to be filled.

Summertime is a strange time for the News Business, as shark stories traditionally proliferate, and finding the missing white woman becomes the primary "news" until Labor Day or even after. It's been this way for decades. There is real news mixed, but often the real news is either buried or over-hyped right along with the stories of shark attacks and white women gone missing.

So the focus on Ferguson -- which has now abated -- this summer fits the pattern of the way "news" is covered during the summer. It became a circus, especially as celebrities like Anderson Cooper took up positions along West Florissant Avenue and declaimed their observations of the goings on among the Negroes. I bet until now few outside the St Louis metroplex knew there was a West Florissant Avenue, but now the whole wide world knows. The world knows about the McDonalds where journalists trying to do their jobs were harassed and arrested. They know about the Ferguson Market where Michael Brown is alleged to have stolen some cigars. They know about the QuickTrip that was the first to be looted and burned and which then became the Public Square for the community. They know about the Canfield Drive location where Michael Brown was shot dead by Darren Wilson and left in the street for hours while police with dogs and assault rifles kept the increasingly agitated crowd back.

All this is known all over the world because the incident of Michael Brown's killing became summertime news fodder and was promoted by news producers everywhere, and for a time, it even bumped the shark and missing white woman stories from the headlines.

But... Black men are killed every day in this country, a large percentage of them by police, and very, very few of those killings get the kind of coverage that Michael Brown did. During the height of the protests in Ferguson, for example, Kajieme Powell was shot -- executed -- on a street in St. Louis only a few miles away from Ferguson, shot dead while witnesses watched in horror and a young man in the neighborhood recorded the whole encounter on his video-phone. There was no such immediate and appalling evidence in the case of Michael Brown, despite the numerous individuals who witnessed what happened to him. The camera evidence all shows the aftermath, not the shooting itself. 

In Powell's case, there's no question about what took place: police drove up, got out of their car with guns drawn, Powell did not immediately comply with commands and was shot twelve times, six after he had fallen to the ground, and then his corpse was handcuffed to protect the officers from his black evil. 

It's all on video.

And though there have been protests in St. Louis over the shooting of Kajieme Powell, they haven't been met with overwhelming force and telegenic police violence like the protests in Ferguson, so they haven't received nearly the coverage of the events in Ferguson.

There were, after all, "riots" in Ferguson, just like the riots back in the '60s. In fact, one of the news stations in St. Louis was hyping the forty-ninth anniversary of the start of the Watts Riots just as things heated up in Ferguson, trying to insinuate that these events were somehow equivalent. 

They aren't of course, but what is similar is the nature of the police oppression that led members of these communities to rise in righteous wrath. 

Observers might say, "Why would they rise? It's such a nice suburban area!" Yes, well. So it may be -- whether Watts or Ferguson or wherever. The point isn't that it's a nice area compared to the inner city, the point is that the police behavior toward the residents is abominable and in the case of Michael Brown, is contemptuous, disrespectful and deadly. 

Any community facing such continual indignities is a potential tinderbox.

If anything, conditions were worse in Ferguson than they were in Watts -- or in many of the other communities that have risen in wrath against police misconduct, contempt and too often deadly disrespect. 

If there is an answer, it involves policing that does not destroy lives and communities but which fosters dignity, justice, community and peace.

In the case of Ferguson and many other police forces around the country, that kind of policing is impossible with the present force. That means the police forces of many, many cities must be disbanded altogether.

It happened in neighboring Jennings and it can happen in Ferguson. 

I was surprised, however, to learn how many police forces have been disbanded recently. 

Among them:

• Gaston, SC

Camden, NJ

Kemp, TX

San Carlos, CA

Millbrae, CA

Half Moon Bay, CA

Maywood, CA

Cornelius, OR

Hoschton, GA

Pewaukee, WI

Mora City, MN

Roanoke, IL

Kilbuck, PA

Highwood, IL(?)

Stillwater, NJ

Paintboro, PA

And apparently many more. Most -- with the startling exception of Camden -- are small towns or villages which had costly, and in many cases highly corrupt, police forces which did not serve and protect their communities but which exploited them for their own profit and gain. Communities simply ran out of money to support police forces of that kind and the councils voted them out of existence, usually contracting with the local sheriff's constabulary to patrol the town or village precincts.

Disbanding police forces is far more common than I would have thought. 

And the reasons for doing so are all too familiar: police forces become corrupt, brutal, murderous gangs exploiting and disrupting their communities, and the sane choice is to get rid of them.

So they do.

The way forward is clear...

Riding the Ukrainian Tiger

There's been little or no mainstream news coverage of Ukrainian matters for many weeks, as the so-called military operations of the Kiev coup-regime continue in the East and South, supplemented by all kinds of militia and "privat-armi" action, including the phenomena of death squads, so beloved of our own government's adventurism abroad.

So far as I can tell, the mayhem and chaos is confined to the "separatist" regions, but it is bloody and nasty and is meant to terrorize the locals into complying with the demands of the Freaks in Kiev -- whatever they may turn out to be. There is, after all, supposed to be a "national election" tomorrow that is intended to endorse and confirm the Kiev Freak-Regime in power, and to assert one or another of the "Western" oligarchs as President, probably the so-called Chocolate King, Poroshenko.

Someone the West can do business with at any rate.

It must be said that Russia has stayed pretty much out of this mess of growing proportions on its western border. Despite all the propaganda and hysteria about "Putin-Hitler" and "Putin-Stalin" and the nonsense about "reviving the Soviet Union" and all the constant baiting of the Kremlin by Anglo-American and EU interests, Putin and the Kremlin have remained remarkably calm and restrained. They have not intervened on behalf of their Russian-speaking Ukrainian brothers and sisters, in fact they seem to have shunted them away as the death and destruction from Kiev continues unabated.

So far as matters can be puzzled out from afar -- and the lack of "news" from the region is as telling as if there were actual news being reported in the mainstream -- the Kiev coup-regime is as freaky as The Saker makes them out to be. Though curried by Anglo-American and EU imperialists, they are massively incompetent to actually govern -- not that anyone else is on tap who might be better.

Since independence in 1991, Ukraine has been ruled by a succession of incompetents and kleptocrats, leaving little or nothing in their wake. I've been struck by the videos I've seen of various parts of Ukraine, from Kiev eastwards. Practically every building is a legacy of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. It appears that almost nothing has been built -- at least from Kiev eastwards -- since independence, and programs on the Vremya Odessa channel continuously highlight the deterioration of housing and other buildings from the Imperial and the Soviet eras -- which are almost the only buildings there are in any case.

The place is falling apart, at least those parts that are not being deliberately destroyed by the Freaks in Kiev and their henchmen.

Of course this civic deterioration and lack of infrastructure construction and maintenance activity is widespread throughout the West as well. In Ukraine, it's no surprise that a handful of kleptocrats, styled "oligarchs" hoovered up all of the valuable properties and industries as soon as they were offered by Kiev and that is a major reason why little or nothing is or has been done on behalf of the public interest, and nothing resembling a government of the people has ever taken root in Kiev. It can't so long as everything of value is in the hands of kleptocrats and oligarchs and everyone's deteriorating well-being is dependent upon them rather than on the will of the People themselves.

While the situation in Ukraine is far starker than what we see in the West, they mirror one another. Oligarchic control isn't as complete in the West, but it is getting there, the goal being more like the Ukraine (minus the civil unrest) than not.

It's dreadful.

But that's the world these global oligarchs and kleptocrats want for the rest of us; what they want for themselves is another matter.

The Ukraine is turning into another Yugoslavia or even (God forbid) another Libya, and this has got to put some fear into the minds and hearts (such as they are) of the oligarchs and kleptocrats and their servants. Profits can still be made, of course, if the situation deteriorates completely, as it did in the Former Yugoslavia and Libya, but the amounts extractable -- and on whose behalf -- are seriously diminished under such conditions than they would otherwise be.

Stability may not be a short term objective, however. More wealth can be looted faster under conditions of chaos and warlordism than under any stable regime, so if the short-term objective is to steal as much as possible from the Ukrainian people -- and to destroy what can't be stolen outright -- then maintaining the current conditions are much preferable to having an actual national government in Kiev. Note, for example, how the sham of national governance is maintained in Baghdad  while the wealth of the nation (such as remains after wars and occupations) is pillaged and what can't be taken is destroyed day in and day out...

Having an unstable Ukraine on the borders of Europe and Russia would not seem to be in the interests of either Russia or the EU over the long term, however. What's there now is a tiger that isn't being ridden very well by anyone, not the Freaks in Kiev, not the oligarchs and kleptocrats, not the Kremlin, and not by the sponsors of the coup.

The mess gets worse daily.

The Ukrainian people are being used and abused badly. Their attempts to take matters into their own hands are understandable, but as we've seen so often elsewhere, the people who are actually capable of taking control of the chaos are the rightists, the Fascists and the Nazis, not the socialists/communists and democrats. This is what happened in Europe during the interregnum between the World Wars, and in a sense, it's what's happened throughout the West and East during the Post - Soviet Era.

In other words, power has devolved since the expiration of the failed Soviet experiment into a re-animation and revision of the supposedly destroyed Fascist/Nazi experiments of the post-WWI era. Since the Soviet version of Communism and the Fascist/Nazi version of Capitalism were essentially mirror images of one another, both totalitarian and in competition with one another -- eventually at war with one another for supremacy (or survival as the case may be) -- the absence of the Soviet model together with the resurgence of the Fascist/Nazi model means gross imbalance at the very least. Specious claims that Putin-Russia are the mirror image of the Soviet Union, and thus the mirror image rivals of the West are ludicrous. Putin-Russia are integral aspects of the Western rightist resurgence. Compared to the EU, Russia today is more like Poland in comparison to Germany in 1937 or 39. Poland was just as Fascist as Germany at that time though not quite as dominance-minded. Their governance and economic regimes were practically the same.

So it is with Russia and the EU; they're hardly distinguishable.

Ukraine is a tiger being ridden by the EU and US, but without grace or skill, and Russia seems content to see it falter and even die.

Putin-Russia have the Crimea and that's sufficient unto the needs of the Kremlin.

There can be no sufficiency, though, in the eyes of the West under its current neo-Fascist/Nazi regime. It's either all or nothing.

"All" means the end of rivals like Russia and China. Not their incorporation into the Western Realm, their extinction.

India has just elected a Fascist government, interestingly enough. Perhaps that assures that India doesn't fall into the "rival" camp. I don't know, but could be. Meanwhile, China is declared a rival and indeed cyber-enemy. While name-calling the West and particularly the USofA "mincing rascals" is cute, I'm sure the Chinese know very well what is up and are taking appropriate steps to protect themselves.

Ukraine is not a rival, it's a resource to be exploited, nothing more or less, and what can't be exploited is to be destroyed. Depopulation is already under way -- has been a feature, not a bug, of Ukraine's independence from Soviet/Russian control.

Russia doesn't seem to be interested in participating in either the destruction or the exploitation of Ukraine and seems content to let the locals fight over the debris, and let the EU/US/NATO axis try to make something other than a giant mess of what's left.

And every time I see the claim that the West is "supporting" Nazis and Fascists in Ukraine, I shake my head and think, "No, the West IS Fascist and Nazi." The Anglo-American/EU Imperial Project isn't something "other than" Fascist/Nazi, it IS the Fascist/Nazi project made manifest once again.

Momentous Shifts in Momentum

When the propaganda shifted suddenly and completely from the deteriorating situation in Ukraine to the suddenly all-important matter of Boko Haram and its captive school-girls in Nigeria, it was obvious that the momentum of making a New Ukrainia using the neo-liberal template had been lost, and the killing spree that the Ukrainian "army" and its auxiliaries were on was not playing well in the media.

It was far too straightforward and ugly in Ukraine, so why not propose something heroic and daring in Africa instead? Rescue the schoolgirls! Yeah, that's the ticket! Others have figured out what the Africa thing is really about is turning loose the death squads (again) in that torn and troubled land, so as to continue colonial control of the resources and people of the continent. Schoolgirls, bah. If they're found and rescued, hurrah, if not, too bad, so sad. Pfft. If it were about them, there would have been much incessant news all along.

What's being instigated in Ukraine is truly disgusting, more so than anything Yanukovych and his kleptocrats engineered in their day. And it's clear that the makers of this mess are playing for keeps. They are relentless in their determination to impose as much hardship on the Ukrainian people -- and as much bloodshed and destruction in the East -- as they can get away with. Greece will seem like Paradise when they're done with Ukraine.

For all the hysteria and belligerence toward Putin-(Stalin-Hitler) and Russia and his "interference" in Ukraine, it appears that the Kremlin has decided to let them fight it out as they will.  If anything, Russia's hands off policies and Putin's endless public efforts at conciliation are driving the Freaks in Kiev and their EU/US/NATO sponsors even nutzier than they were to begin with.

I'm told that Herself, Nuland-Kagan put on quite a show at the Senate Hearing on Russian Aggression the other day, but I haven't seen it yet -- one more thing to catch up on.

Meanwhile, how much longer will it take for Our Valiant Forces to Rescue the Nigerian Schoolgirls and Exterminate Yet Another Foe in Africa?

Stay tuned.

Oh Fer F@*k's Sake

(Via Willy Loman, which you ought to read if you want to know what's up with That Plane and all...;-)

Last week the NYT was all hopped up about the Evil That Is Iran, supposedly building a "non-functional mock up" of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier in their Gachin shipyard in the Persian Gulf. Oh. Noes. What could the perfidious Persians be up to now????

The Evil Non-Functional Aircraft Carrier of Doom!!!

The Times speculated that the Perfidious Ones would blow up the mock up for propaganda value!!!! Eeek!!!!!!. The EVIL!!!!!!

 This is just some of the hyperventilating included in the Times piece:

Navy officials responded that no drones had been shot down by enemy fire, although the Pentagon acknowledged at the time that it had lost a small number of ScanEagles, likely to engine malfunction.

Iranian Navy officials could not be immediately reached for comment as the country prepared to celebrate its New Year festivities on Friday. American intelligence officials cited a photograph taken on Feb. 22 in Bandar Abbas and a brief description in Persian of the vessel on a website for Iran’s Ministry of Industry, Mines and Trade.

For now, Navy analysts and American intelligence officials say they are not unduly concerned about the mock ship. But the fact that the Iranians are building it, presumably for some mysteriously bellicose purposes, contrasts with the fact that the Iranians stepped back from their typically heavy anti-American posture during a recent naval exercise in the gulf.

So. Proof. Proof I say! of Evil Intent. They want to blow it up!!!! For propaganda!!!!

More from the Times story (remember, this was in the New York M-F Times:)

“Based on our observations, this is not a functioning aircraft carrier; it’s a large barge built to look like an aircraft carrier,” said Cmdr. Jason Salata, a spokesman for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, across the Persian Gulf from Iran. “We’re not sure what Iran hopes to gain by building this. If it is a big propaganda piece, to what end?”

Whatever the purpose, American officials acknowledged on Thursday that they wanted to reveal the existence of the vessel to get out ahead of the Iranians.

There you are. That's all you really need to know! Teh EVUL!!!!!

The bullshit was revealed somewhat later. Not by the NYT but by the EA Worldview news site.

The Non-functional Aircraft Carrier of Doom is a... movie prop. Oh. Well. I guess never mind then.

Well, the Iranian model is part of a drama, albeit not one that is supposedly worrying the Pentagon — and the story isn’t that much of a mystery.

If The New York Times had come to EA, rather than the Pentagon, we could have eased their minds while deflating their headline: the “aircraft carrier” is a movie prop — one that we have known about for almost a year. 

In April 2013, Iranian websites announced that a joint Iranian-Canadian production was going to tell the story of Iran Air 655, the civilian jet shot down in July 1988 by the USS Vincennes, killing all 290 passengers and crew. 

include Iranian and American actorsCo-directed by Nader Talebzadeh and Paxton Winters, the film would  include Iranian and American actors.

US officials and analysts forgot or were unaware of all this — or were confident that Schmitt would not discover the truth as they put out their scarier tale:

“It is not surprising that Iranian military forces might use a variety of tactics — including military deception tactics — to strategically communicate and possibly demonstrate their resolve in the region,” said an American official who has closely followed the construction of the mock-up….

“The system is often too opaque to understand who hatched this idea, and whether it was endorsed at the highest levels,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Schmitt wrote of his efforts to check the US claims, “Iranian Navy officials could not be immediately reached for comment as the country prepared to celebrate its New Year festivities.” 

Schmitt did not say if he had tried to confirm the story with The Times’ Tehran correspondent, Thomas Erdbrink. 

Other US media raced to get Washington’s officials and politicians for their own versions of the story. Representative Eliot Engel told USA Today, “We don’t really know what it means, but I for sure don’t trust the Iranians. It’s some kind of a ruse and whatever they are up to, it’s no good.” 

CNN announced that it had “commercial satellite images” and brought out its unnamed US official to declare, “While the purpose of the fake carrier is unknown, Iran may be planning to destroy it in a propaganda move.” 

Meanwhile, Iranian outlets — some of whom have long been noted for their propaganda and scare stories — reveled in The Times’ conversion of the movie ship into a menace. 

Mashregh News laughed at the “quandary of America’s security and intelligence officials”. Alef put on a more serious face:

The issue has turned into a good excuse for another wave of hype against Iran. Without any proof or real basis, the western media have jumped again to paint a negative picture of Iran.

The Times and Schmitt — and their Pentagon and intelligence sources — don’t seem bothered, however. They have not stepped back from their original story:

This is exactly the kind of lie routinely propagated by US and EU media, on their own or by military and government impetus, propaganda that keeps international tensions at a feverish level.

If it's in the Times, of course, it must be true. (Forget about Judith Miller and Michael Gordon and Curveball and all the rest for the moment, these are different times.)

Nevertheless, the debunking of this little bit of hoo-hah is somewhat delicious...

"Cluelessness"

It would be sad if it weren't so stupid, but apparently there is a full-on media war between factions of the ruling class, or that's apparently what we are supposed to think now that the floundering and relatively content-free "Intercept," backed by Pierre Omidyar (eBay, PayPal), is being tweaked by the Big Bullies at Pando, led by Mark Ames and Paul Carr, and backed by a plethora of Silicon Valley billionaires headed by Paul Thiel (PayPal) and Marc Andressen (too many SV software and venture capital endeavors to count). Soon after this supposed media war began, Eric Wemple of the Washington Post chimed in with a mild criticism of disingenuousness at First Look, which had the potential to add the WaPo's owner, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), to the mix, but it seems that for the moment, he has declined. Yesterday, though, Pando published another exposé of monumental Greenwaldian hypocrisy, posting a Bloggingheads video "debate" between Greenwald and Ben Smith of Politico, wherein Greenwald rakes Smith over the coals regarding who finances Politico and what their ("obvious") influence in the newsroom must be.

I saw the "debate" when it happened in 2007, and I read and commented on Greenwald's Salon posts leading up to it. The issue seemed clear enough at the time: big ticket financial backers of media enterprises are likely to influence the way the news is covered -- or if it is covered at all -- simply because they pay the bills and the salaries of their employees. Even if there is no direct contact between the finance side and the newsroom, the influence will be there. As I put it, "Money may not be speech, but it sure talks." (NOTE: Greenwald had only been at Salon for a few months at the time, and tweaking "establishment" media for click bait was part of his "beat" as it were. This was one of the first times at Salon that his goading resulted in a real donnybrook and "debate." Of course, Salon, being the Pioneer in the Online Magazine Field, could accurately be characterized as about as "establishment" as it could get among its internet compatriots. Then again, it was always in financial crisis and needed the clicks... but that's another story for another time.) :-P

The import of this "debate" now is the contrast between Greenwald's questions and certain knowledge then -- that the well known right wing management and funders of Politico must influence the news choices and skew of Politico because they pay the bills -- and the utter cluelessness and disinterest that Greenwald and Marcy have regarding Omidyar and his influence on the virtual "newsroom(s)" at First Look (they know nothing, they care nothing, they have complete "independence" so what their funder and chief does or believes is of no consequence to them.)

In retrospect, it's clear as crystal that not only was Greenwald's 2007 "debate" over Politico's management and funders primarily click-bait, but so were many, many other set-tos between Greenwald and various legal and media personalities. Positions were taken that were for the purpose of the "debate" -- but they did not necessarily have anything to do with personal beliefs or ideology. They were merely taken for the purpose of injecting ideas and getting people to pay attention. Clicks. Forget it, Jake. It's just business.

The pretense of disinterest and cluelessness about Pierre Omidyar's various political and financial operations around the world is extraordinarily -- monumentally -- disingenuous if it is true. To assert that another media outlet's coverage of the news is obviously influenced by the acts and politics of those who fund and operate it, but that First Look is somehow not influenced in any way by Pierre Omidyar's or Glenn Greenwald's positions, acts and interests borders on an absurdist comedy. Of course there is influence, both direct and subtle, and no amount of alleged "independence" can make it go away. As Greenwald rightly noted to Ben Smith all those years ago, journalists "know the work they do ought to be pleasing to the people who sign their paychecks." Of course, it's self-evident. If their work were not "pleasing" to the man or woman with the power of the purse, the journalists in question are not there. Duh.

It was ever thus, it is true everywhere, and it is as true for Greenwald and crew as it is for anyone else in the media business -- if someone else is paying the bills. If their work is not pleasing to the man who pays the bills, their work is not there.  This shouldn't be hard to understand. If one's work is not "pleasing," one is not hired in the first place; if one's work ceases to be "pleasing," one is dismissed. One does not have the option of "displeasing" the boss and staying in one's position, and one knows this -- or at least one should.

"Independence" has nothing to do with it. Or rather, what it has to do with it is that the "independence" being asserted is part of what is found "pleasing" by the boss. Assertion of "independence" is what the boss wants. Got it? What "independence" means in practice is intentionally unstated.

Apparently, for a recent example, cluelessness and disinterest in the boss's (Omidyar's) financial and political activities and interests is pleasing to the boss. When the matter is the financial and political activities and interests of some other media outlet, interfering government agency or targeted organization, however, be it Politico or what you will, cluelessness and disinterest are replaced by dogged investigation, accusation and exposure, which in that case is also pleasing to the boss. You see how this works?

Well of course. It's glaringly obvious.

Pando to Go All Gonzo and S*!t

One of the New Media ventures that have cropped up over the last couple of years is something called "Pando" -- dubbed "the site-of-record for Silicon Valley." It is primarily focused on tech-business news, a topic which has a somewhat limited appeal, but since acquisition of NSFW and its infamous stable of malcontents and dissidents, including Paul Carr, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine (the fate of War Nerd is yet to be determined), and the addition of David Sirota to its reportorial staff last year, Pando has vastly expanded its capabilities and its news content to encompass fierce and pointed media criticism (including New Media), corruption and deceit in ever higher places -- not just in Silicon Valley, and the power politics that is subsuming us all.

Within the last few days, Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr, the commercial and editorial heads of the enterprise, have announced a new and expanded mission for Pando, to encompass the World, I guess, and to do it Full Gonzo. Suckers!

Given what Pierre is up to over at his New Media start up, and given all the other rearrangements of the New Media firmament, if Pando expects to survive, let alone flourish, Going Gonzo is probably the way to do it. Sounds like Ames and Levine chattering away in the background.

But from a strategic standpoint, it makes perfect sense to continue to make as big a splash as possible, with as many OMG! investigative stories as possible, and to make them as hip and shit-kicking as possible, so as to distinguish Pando from the run of the mill New Media sites, some of which, like Pierre's baby, were born out of breath and barely moving.

What the public will gain from all of this media ferment, rearrangement and going Gonzo remains to be seen. Pando and many of the other New Media sites provide pretty decent coverage of particular topics of interest to their specific market/audience segment, though few of them are known for breaking new ground. They rely as much as Legacy Media on the same news wires, and consequently much of their content duplicates the same news that's found everywhere else in the media, sometimes with exactly the same stories.

The main difference between the Old and the New is the splash and the flash and the fact that the New Kids are on the internet more or less exclusively. I say more or less because the internet news sites are more and more integrated with radio and television news and opinion programs as well as more traditional print outlets. There is no real dividing line any more between the internet and ("") Legacy Media. They've long interacted, and now are homogenizing to the point that they are pretty much indistinguishable.

It's just that the traditional media formats are being de-capitalized and the upstarts are being over-capitalized -- on the premise that the Future of News is Online;  that's where the money is to be made in the future.

And there are, of course, The Billionaires, Our Own Private Oligarchs.

Pierre isn't the only one. Far from it. The fashion among the billionaires now is to purchase an already extant media enterprise and remake it into something more suited to Billionaires' tastes, or to create something from (almost) scratch that will appeal to the rubes almost as much as it appeals to the Overclass.

All the yabbering about "independent journalism" from staff is obvious bullshit. When all the media outlets become the private fiefs of particular billionaires, we will hear what they want us to hear, see what they want us to see, believe what they want us to believe. That's the game plan.

No longer will the Rabble be subjected to propaganda and lies that haven't been filtered through the billionaires' lens, and won't it be grand?

Pando has a lot of venture capital (though not even a fraction of the initial funding Pierre has dedicated to his New Media startup, nor is it close to the funding some other New Media ventures have raised), but the billionaires behind the scenes are kept well in the background, and they are said to have nothing to do with the content of the site.

Yet the fact is that one is not truly "independent" when one is dependent on the good graces of someone behind the scenes for one's sustenance and quite possibly one's prominence.

It's silly to claim, as FOX News does, that he who pays the piper doesn't call the tune. It's disingenuous. It's a lie. It's a pious fraud in some cases, an outright deception in others.

A way I've long looked at these matters is that "The Media is not your friend."

Media seeks to identify and exploit your vulnerabilities and fears to sell you something, whether it be products or propaganda. Media wants nothing less than control over your actions and beliefs. Your loyal attention is demanded and soon enough, it looks like it might be required.

In the old Soviet Union, the people were quite aware of the propaganda being fed to them by state media, and they were widely and openly contemptuous of it. They read and watched the official "news" -- but they also knew how to read and watch it in order to suss out the real story, if there was one. They also practiced informal person-to-person news dissemination (the famous "samizdat") that provided something much closer to the truth than could be found in the official media.

Americans are not used to thinking the way Soviets did about their media. In the United States and the West in general, it is an article of faith that there will be at least one major mass media outlet available "that you can trust." Building brand loyalty to that "one" media outlet is a full-time marketing job.

But that's how it's done. So long as enough people believe they are getting unbiased or at least accurate news from a mass media source they trust, all is good, and their loyalty to that outlet is assured.

It was recognized long ago, however, that if your trust is placed in any mass media outlet, your trust is misplaced, because they are all propagandizing, generally propagandizing the same things as their rivals, the only difference is they're doing it in a way that will develop your brand loyalty to them. In the process, they tell you lies.

Consequently, an alternative media developed as a companion to the mass media (sometimes actually owned by the same companies that owned the mass media) wherein it might sometimes be possible to find Gonzo investigative journalism that actually exposed what was really going on at a deeper level than even the most high profile award winning investigations in the mass media.  Nevertheless, it was necessary to remain skeptical of these alternative media stories, because even if they did get closer to the truth, they were still intended to support the agenda of building brand loyalty, though often enough there would be other agendas as well.

"Pando Goes Gonzo" is all well and good, but nevertheless, I wouldn't put any faith in it. It's a marketing tool, one that shouldn't be sneezed at because it often works, but the results may not be any more informative or useful than anything else that turns up in the New Media.

Be skeptical, be critical, be wary.

"The Media is Not Your Friend."

Further Thoughts on the Boy's Club (and a Few Gurlz) Assembled Around The Philanthropic Billonaire

Practically anybody with a Wordpress or Blogspot site produces more content than Pierre Omidyar's flagship entry into the New Media Market.

"The Intercept," so far, has proved itself to be essentially a self-indulgent, self-congratulatory bust. Gawker and Politico, to name but two, easily run rings around them in terms of content, but so do hundreds of thousands of, well for lack of a better word, workaday blogs.

There still is (practically) no "there" there, and it seems that's the point of it. To assemble as large and as previously productive a team of journalists and commentators as possible, to bring along as many of their fans as possible, and to have them all sit around admiring the furnishings, smiling and laughing and telling one another how wonderful they are, recycling stories of past glories, and wondering when the party will start.

Well, it hasn't started yet, that's for sure.

And we must ask why, if "The Intercept" is supposed to be the start of something truly transformational and amazing, it is so very weak and enervated. Almost as if the life had been sucked out of it even before it emerged on the 'Zine scene a little less than two weeks ago.

Was that the point all along? To have a kind of empty vessel, where various media contrarians could be assembled and offered a permanent safe haven to say and do whatever they wanted and get paid for it at whatever the going rate was (or more), and where they could party hardy if they wanted, or just kick back and relax if that was more their inclination, but where they would not be required under any circumstances to do anything they didn't want to, where there would be no schedule, no demands, no production expectations, and no need to... perform?

Is this the transformative media Omidyar and others associated with him in this venture had in mind all along, and are they laughing now that they could so easily bamboozle those awaiting with such breathless anticipation the debut of this Grand New Media Thing?

Well, in a way, pretty much the same thing worked for Obama, didn't it? Gin up a huge body of fans, work them expertly, suggest -- but not really promise -- something new was on the horizon, tell them hope and change was nigh, hold their attention, but either provide nothing at all, or actually take more from the bamboozled than even the flim-flam artists of the Cheney Regime, and call it wonderful?

Is that the model for Omidyar's New Media?

Why not? It works so well in the political realm. Obama neither invented it nor does he do it all that well, though he's better at it than House Cheney has been (viz: Liz's political implosion). It's basic to post modern PR and marketing.

As an experiment, I went back through the archives, my own and at Salon, to explore perspectives on the Citizens United Thing during the hoo-hah over the Supreme Court's ruling overturning a century of campaign finance regulation and permitting unlimited expenditures of luscious cash by corporations in furtherance of 'Free Speech' as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Recall, Greenwald was out front passionately defending the ruling, while dozens of legal minds took exception to his revanchist -- and in retrospect rather juvenile -- arguments in support of the Supreme Court majority opinion. He simply dismissed the weaker dissents out of hand and he ignored the more trenchant ones altogether, choosing to focus instead on the least informed  or least strenuously agued commentary against the Citizens United decision.

What is striking to me about it today, however, is not Greenwald's casual and dismissive attitude toward the dissent -- he never actually addressed Justice Stevens' well-argued and trenchant dissenting opinion at all -- it is rather his astonishing and surprisingly pre-figuring (again in retrospect) support for unlimited corporate political speech, no matter what the result, because "Teh Constitution."

No matter how cogently and succinctly it was pointed out to him that such a thing is NOT "teh Constitution," and how the SCOTUS majority twisted themselves into knots, and actually ruled on something that was not before them to get to the Citizens United decision, and no matter how often and well it was pointed out how truly malignant this thing was, akin in its own way to Plessy v Ferguson or even Dredd Scott, Greenwald dismissed or ignored the arguments, pressing ahead relentlessly with his ideological position that the Constitution and Bill of Rights required granting full corporate free speech rights and the elimination of campaign finance laws restricting those rights -- because (this is the truly juvenile part) the language of the First Amendment didn't specifically exclude corporate speech, aka: "money," from coverage under the First Amendment.

In other words, his self-declared absolutist and unwavering position was in support of the corporation no matter what the outcome, no matter what the arguments against it, no matter what the legal precedent had long been, and no matter how weak his arguments turned out to be. None of that mattered. What mattered was that corporations have unlimited and unfettered free speech rights based on their wealth and power, and that whatever resulted from their liberation from previous restrictions and legal restraints on them was... just too damn bad. Suck. It. Up.

Corporate rights are to be maximized and if the peasants don't like it, tough. It's constitutional!

Is it any wonder a billionaire might sit up and take notice?

Of course, I don't know that that's when Omidyar's gaze first landed on Greenwald, but it wouldn't surprise me if quite a few billionaires took an interest. The internal dynamic of Greenwald's posts on the matter of Citizens United is fairly obviously directed toward making a pitch for corporate/billionaire support of him and his endeavors. He cannot be dissuaded from his belief that corporate rights and interests are fully supported by the Constitution and that they cannot be restricted in any significant way by something as silly as "law."

This is obviously not a "lefty" position on these matters, and the fact that Greenwald was at the time considered by many to be a significant spokesman for "the left"  -- though he would routinely deny any such label -- his tireless (indeed, tiresome) advocacy on behalf of the Citizens United decision was a distinct outlier in "lefty" circles. His advocacy was strident, bizarre and it was unwavering. It was therefore sure to be noticed in the chambers and halls of money and power -- because it was so contrary to much professional legal opinion and to essentially the entire "leftist" political opinion. Greenwald was seriously out of step. And that can get one noticed.

I suspect he'd been "noticed" well before his strident and contrarian advocacy on behalf of Citizens United, however.

Those of us who noted his sudden appearance on the "progressive" blog scene and followed his meteoric rise from obscurity to "lefty spokesperson" seemingly out of nowhere were more than a little perplexed. It was obvious to many of us from the outset that he was no "lefty;" he was a highly verbose legal observer, one whose political inclinations, to the extent they could be characterized, were essentially reactionary and libertarian -- though he denied and decried such labels.

But then many of those who have been involved in the lefty blogosphere for any length of time recognized long ago that many of the prime movers and shakers in the field were almost all ex-Republicans with a strong libertarian/entrepreneurial bent who felt unwelcome in Republican political circles and who recast themselves as "progressives" -- they weren't really "leftists" in any case.  In that context, Greenwald not only fit right in, he was an almost instant celebrity -- because in addition to everything else, he was out and gay and living abroad with his Brazilian lover.

Wow! Perfect!

He was immediately adopted into the "lefty" blogosphere's A-List and heavily promoted therein. His use of sockpuppets and his frequent vicious attacks on all and sundry who didn't share his opinions or who questioned his perspectives, his honesty, and/or his sometimes reactionary legal and political statements and strategies were largely ignored by his more and more rabid internet supporters, including his backchannel ones.  Absolute submission and conformity of thought was one of the most striking aspects of Greenwald's more and more cult-like followers, many of whom, like he once did, seemed to utilize sockpuppets to bulk up the appearance of support and they were quite proud of it.

Once having secured his position in the "lefty" blogosphere, it seemed there was no mountain he could not climb. His career path seemed extraordinarily smooth as he generated an enormous amount of verbiage in his columns -- not to mention several best selling books denouncing the Bush administration's legal overreach, torture, a dysfunctional political system, the hypocrisy of others, and the routinely disparate "justice" system favoring the interests of the well-off.

He was picked up first by Salon media, then by the Guardian, where he used his ever louder megaphone to "inject" (his word) his contrarian, not infrequently reactionary, ideas and political points of view into liberal and lefty consciousness, and where he built a rabid following of internet fans, most of whom were of a similar libertarian and contrarian persuasion. Few of them showed any interest in or knowledge of actual leftist or even progressive politics, politics which Greenwald himself often denounced or declared irrelevant or an out and out failure.

He made his career denouncing the mainstream media (unless it provided him or those he favored an outlet, or otherwise conformed with his interests, in which case it was "doing its job" --  regardless of his denunciations), denouncing politicians and their hypocrisy, denouncing anyone who disagreed with him, denouncing.... well, you get the picture. He was instrumental in setting up numerous non-profits and political action committees, none of which actually accomplished much beyond raising lots of money. The financial and operational transparency of these outfits was close to opaque, so much so that he was given to lashing out at critics rather than providing the kind of transparency he demanded of others.

And then, once he had secured possession of the Snowden Trove of NSA documents, he (along with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras and a stellar media staff) plighted his troth with Pierre Omidyar, the founder and chairman of eBay, whose companies are primary beneficiaries and users of NSA and other (inter)national surveillance state data and security.

And, to a not particularly surprising degree, very little -- some would say nothing -- has come from this union of strange bedfellows. So far, it is barren.

Greenwald maintains a presence on Twitter, but for the most part, his infamous Twitter wars with critics and media personalities have pretty much ceased. He has published very little for "The Intercept," though it is substantially more than Laura Poitras has, as she has published absolutely nothing on behalf of the New Media Transformational Enterprise. Jeremy has posted one piece that rehashes old news about cell-phone targeting of militants -- leading to the occasional "oopsie!" by drone pilots and night raiders in America's endless wars.

"The Intercept" itself (often without attribution) maintains an active Twitter and Facebook presence, generally referring to other media stories about "The Intercept" since "The Intercept's" own content is so very sparse. Self regard and congratulations on how awesome it all is, of course, is de rigueur. 

The few others who have posted at "The Intercept" have broken little new ground, but they have managed a good deal of self-regard and congratulation as well. Most of what is there is recycled from other news sources or opinion about what's appeared elsewhere. Gawker or Politico it ain't.

"The Intercept" would be dismissed as nonsense and piffle but for its claim of being "transformational." If that is so, and this is what the transformation of media looks like, then we can only assume we are looking at the extinction of the genre.

If this is the transformational End of media, it's going out with barely a whimper...



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Ohhhhhhh! Katie Bar The Door!  Now Pierre has picked up Taibbi! (h/t Pathman in comments, or I wouldn't a noticed it at all) Taibbi!!!!!!™ My doG in Heaven! (*Heavy breathing, heavy breathing, heavy breathing... huff huff huff huff...*) /s

Speaking of The Archives, there was a time, going on a decade ago or so, when I really did consider Taibbi, Greenwald and Scahill to be just about the only major media players with (ahem) balls, and I really did look forward to their patented eviscerations of the PTB. Sy Hersh was fading -- apparently due to knowing too much when you got right down to it. These New Kids on the Block (so to speak) were taking up the cudgel. I cheered them, and I sincerely wish they were still on paths of righteousness.

But too many questions have been raised and left unanswered. The work product at "The Intercept" is weak, and it's still almost non-existent. Pierre's (companies') activities in collaboration with and on behalf of the (Inter)national Surveillance/Security State are incompatible with notions of free inquiry, free press, and free speech. It simply doesn't scan, any more than any billionaire's personal financing of media enterprise does. No matter what your "contract" says, you're not going to have what you think you have -- not if you're honest with yourself and your audience.

When it's boiled down, it's not so much that Pierre is buying up so many of the principal antagonists to at least some of the factions of Power, it's the dishonesty and opacity of this operation. It's the near-silencing of the voices bought by Omidyar.

Greenwald himself was called out directly by Alexa O'Brien for his lies about her contacts with him in regard to joining First Look and her questions about Omidyar and the PayPal 14. Scahill's "Dirty Wars" may get an Oscar, but it's been criticized for its focus on Scahill rather than the real stories of the Dirty Wars being conducted by the United States and its allies.

Poitras is absent from Pierre's stage, as is Segura and Wheeler. What? The Gurlz have nothing to say? Nothing to show? Isn't that something...

And now Taibbi has left Rolling Stone to set up his own little shop under Pierre's wing. Given what's gone on so far, we can be all but certain that he won't be saying much for attribution and publication for the next few months, and if "The Intercept" is the model for what's to come, he won't have much to say after his own operation (under Pierre's wing) is up and running, either, nor will those he cajoles and brings along with him.

Many observers speculated that the point of Pierre's operation was to consolidate, tame and partially silence as many of the loudest media voices speaking out against Power and Money as possible, and so far, that seems to be the case.

Which leads me to speculate that others, witnessing the spectacle, will arise and take up the cause.

But that remains to be seen...