That first happened at around 9 p.m., 5 July UK time. I notice now, after returning to the screen at just after 1 a.m., it’s still gone, gone gone. Leaked off the web as it were.

It’s been hit numerous times in the recent past, both in the courtroom and through hack jobs and denial of service attacks.

Wikileaks is, for the rest of you out there, a site that allows whistle blowers to more easily spread classified documents that corporations and governments would rather you not see lest you start to question their allegiance to things like democracy, human rights, the law, etc.

Wikileaks recently tested the limits of the first amendment in the U.S. when it became banned by the American government.

Hopefully, with the recent July 4 news coverage its received it’s more of a bandwidth problem. Though, one can’t really rule out a hack job or another take-down attempt by the regime.

Here’s a link to Portfolio.com’s Secret Seven, “The watchdog and leak sites corporate America doesn’t want you to see.” Wikileaks get’s a prominent mention there. Let’s hope it’s not now an obit.

It’s a site that could do with some more distributed hosting and mirror work going on. Too much there to simply let disappear. Internet Archive of Wikileaks stops with 2007. Some sites really need to be crawled and cached more often. Where else will you find both the counter-insurgency and jihad manuals?

Maybe it’s a server snafu or some sort of developer error, or once again something more nefarious, but either way, it’s an example of how fast information can be wiped out.

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Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences held every other year, bring together interesting thinkers to share ideas on the present and future situation of just about everything. TED recently posted all its conference talks online, which has provided lots of diversion for yours truly. This one is from 2006 and one of my favorites.

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(Associated Press photo: Marchers in New York’s Salute to Israel Parade)

Here in London, we joined a group of Palestinian activists who headed over to the big zionist love-in at Trafalgar Square where they were quickly cordoned off into a side pen across the street from the nationalist event that looked like something the BNP might put on, but with slightly different iconography and color schemes. Six decades of land confiscation later and no plans to declare borders until it gets some more. So much to celebrate!

The coverage of the anti-occupation demonstration by the Associated Press seems based on the amount of space that London police allowed for protest.

Coming from the U.S., the sugar daddy bankrolling the continuing land grab, it just made me wonder when people are going to sober up and lose the beer goggles they seem to toss on every time they look toward the middle east. What will that “morning after” moment look like, when they wake up next to someone who has more in common with Apartheid-era South Africa than the sexy “democracy” they thought they had hooked up with. When they see that they’ve been supporting something akin to Jim Crow Laws and something that shares more in common with the sort of national spirit that shoved Native Americans to the point of extinction, that they’re hanging out with organizations like CUFI and  that have more in common with the fanatics they claim to loathe, maybe they’ll snap out of it.

Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe, is what the Palestinians call this anniversary Israel celebrates. Instead of the continuing fantasy that these celebrations seem to thrive on, I thought I’d thow up some links today of some sources where people can see what’s being wiped out.

• Maps of Palestine before and after the Nakba
• Palestine Land Society
• The Nakba Archive Project
• 50 Years of Dispossession : Essays on the Nakba
• Nakba: A chonology
• Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe (1948): Electronic Intifada
• Al-Nakba Refugees Picture Gallery

Below: Yet another attack on Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. This one had the startling difference from all the others in that is was reported by the BBC.

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So people don’t often believe the stories i tell about Washington state. No, not the birth of 90s alterna music, good coffee and better beer. I’m talking about cults, Sasquatch sightings, people who die while trying to have sex with horses and all the other stuff that makes Twin Peaks look run of the mill. But right now on Channel Five is a documentary called Strangelove, about a Yelm, WA, man’s sex life with his Volkswagen, who admits to cheating on it just the once, with Airwolf. — Link

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This NPR post about The Dude (Jeff Doud aka jeff Lebowwski) includes the recipe for his favorite White Russian (or Caucasian if you will) — Link

The Dude’s White Russian Recipe:

1 shot (free pour) Smirnoff Vodka

2 shots (free pour) Kahlua

Top off with half and half

(Out of cream? The Dude uses powdered creamer in a pinch)

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And once again a group launches on an ambitious project that will eventually lead to another round of debate among those on The Left on the topic of “why doesn’t anyone take us seriously?

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I’d be more willing to stand behind Google’s aggresive appraoch to using content and challenging copyright if Google would remove the idiotic little © from its website.

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I love a marathon. On Thursday, May 15, from Midnight until 6pm (EST), the International Middle East Media Center in Bethlehem (Palestine) participated in an historic international radio reflection of the Palestinian Nakba or catastrophe. This unprecedented 18-hour collaborative radio broadcast included the participation of CKUT 90.3fm in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), CHRY 105.5fm in Toronto (Ontario, Canada), and KBOO 90.7fm in Portland (Oregon, USA), and contributions from Pacifica Radio and Democracy Now!

Click here for complete schedule. The full archives are now available for download as MP3 files, hour by hour segments:

Hour 1 (midnight to 1 am)
Hour 2 (1 am - 2 am) Hour 3 (2 am - 3 am)
Hour 4 (3 am - 4 am)
Hour 5 (4 am - 5 am)
Hour 6 (5 am - 6 am)
Hour 7 (6 am - 7 am)
Hour 8 (7 am - 8 am)
Hour 9 (8 am - 9 am)
Hour 10 (9 am - 10 am)
Hour 11 (10 am - 11 am)
Hour 12 (11 am - 12 pm)
Hour 13 (12 pm - 1 pm)
Hour 14 (1 pm - 2 pm)
Hour 15 (2 pm - 3 pm)
Hour 16 (3 pm - 4 pm)
Hour 17 (4 pm - 5 pm)

Hour 18 (5 pm - 6 pm)

Description of Broadcast:Thursday, May 15th, 2008, commemorates 60 years of the Palestinian Nakba. In 1948 eighty-five percent of the Palestinians living in the areas that became the state of Israel became refugees. More than 500 Palestinian villages were depopulated and later destroyed to prevent the return of the refugees. Today there are a total of 7 million Palestinian refugees, dispersed throughout the world - the largest and longest running refugee problem yet unresolved.

60-years later, Israel continues to occupy and colonize Palestinian land through the construction of Jewish only settlements and the Wall in the West Bank. The Gaza Strip has been turned into one large prison. Israel violates international law and commits ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity. And Palestinians abroad are the world’s oldest refugee population, making-up more than one fourth of all refugees.

The following Radio Stations have confirmed carrying the Nakba-60 Broadcast

United Kingdom
1) Radio Resonance, London

United States
1) KBOO Portland, Oregon
2) WPFW Washington, DC

3) WRNC in Ashland, WI
Canada
1) CKDU Halifax, Nova Scotia
2) CFUV 101.9fm Victoria, BC
3) CHRY 105.5fm Toronto, Ontario
4) CKUT 90.3fm Montreal, Quebec
5) CFRC Kingston, Ontario
6) CILU 102.7FM Thunderbay, ON

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The loathsome smearing of Israel’s critics

Johann Hari
The Independent
Thursday, 8 May 2008

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, “Honest Reporting” claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, “Honest Reporting” will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary … It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.” Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them “Jews For Genocide”, and said they “encourage” the “killers” of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an “artificial” people who can be collectively punished because they are “a terrorist population”. She believes that while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project”. Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government “border[ed] on anti-Semitism.” A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime”. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called “a racist”. Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? H ave you left no sense of decency?

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Comments given anonymously) from survey respondents:

1. “The children are great, teaching is a fantastic career, but I’m afraid I am not cut out for the constant backbiting and hostility that seems to come from many in this profession.”
2. “I am on the receiving end and struggling to get up each day and wishing my life away waiting to get to the weekends and holidays.”
3. “Teachers are afraid to speak out regarding bullying at work as they know they will be forced to leave their jobs. EVERYONE knows it is getting worse but they are terrified for their jobs so it is kept quiet.”
4. “Bullying is supported by SMT, they ALLOW this behaviour.”
5. “Bullying resulted in me going off sick from work.”
6. “I’ve just been diagnosed as being clinically depressed with anxiety. I am beginning to see how the problems that I have had at work relating to negative behaviour, bullying and harassment have been strongly contributive to my recent mental health difficulties.”
7. “I’m single, got a mortgage and I’m in total despair.”
8. “If Head teachers were more proactive in acting upon bullying among staff, many teachers would be far happier in their jobs. Children are not allowed to bully, why are teachers allowed.”

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Archwilio y Teacher Support Cymru canolfan gwybodaeth am cefnogaeth ar faterion gwaith neu personol. Neu cysylltwch a ni ar y rhif cymorth 0800 085 5088.

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Amnesty International’s latest gimmick calls on bloggers to hold an Interweb flash mob on May 15 against government thuggies around the globe:

“On May 15 join tens of thousands of bloggers worldwide in writing about human rights and drawing attention to issues often overlooked by mainstream media.

Human Rights are universally agreed upon ideas – that all people are born with basic rights and freedoms that include life, liberty and justice.

“Bloggers Unite for Human Rights” challenges bloggers to draw attention to urgent human rights issues facing our world today and encourage their readers to take simple actions through Amnesty International’s online action center.”

- link

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During a typical daily trolling of the website BoingBoing, I came across the following interesting nugget about the state where I grew up and attended high school:

“The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.”

What you say? a government body copyrighting their laws and barring others from publishing them? Is this actually legal? Are Orgeon laws some sort of privately held intellectual property that turns some sort of profit?

Legal or not, it’s happened.

Being that copyright isn’t exactly part of the democratic system of government and that laws in Democracies such as U.S. states are generally thought to be, well, not “owned” by anyone exactly, but belonging to the people, I thought this was strange. However, as many strange things go, it turns out to be true. Both Justia and Public.Resource.Org have been served with cease and desist letters from the Oregon state government demanding that their laws be removed from public view on these websites.

Public.Resource.Org’s outlaw law compiler Carl Malamud wrote:

“Oregon is not unique in asserting copyright over state law, but they are definitely one of the more aggressive in this kind of FUD campaign. Justia and Public.Resource.Org have decided this is an important issue to resolve and we’re going to hold firm on this. Anybody else who is making a mirror of the Oregon law should drop me a line and let me know.”

It got me thinking about what the state can actually claim to own. Shouldn’t pretty much anything owned by the state be considered in the commons? If I take a picture of a state park in Oregon’s Columbia River gorge, am I violating the state’s rights by displaying the natural beauty of the state’s land without giving it compensation? If another state wants to enact one of Oregon’s more progressive laws, would they be barred from doing so? How does this effect other community-driven public information tools, like Wikidpedia?

I checked out the section of the Oregon State Legislature website where laws are, and as a web designer, I wasn’t too taken with it. Obviously, matters of personal taste are highly subjective. However, framed in one of the tasty pages here at drew3ooo, I think it’s a stunning work of art, and I prefer to be able to look up drinking ages and various age-of-consent prohibitions in the comfort of my own domain name. So, for all of you who don’t want to go slogging through the ugly, weirdly non-centered, image-heavy and non-web standards Oregon legislatures website to find out what it says about pumping your own gasoline or the the access people have to higher education awards while in internment camps, check out the Beaver state’s laws right here on d3.

My spanking new Oregon State Law page

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I’ve upped my geek status another notch by becoming an admin of the Facebook Large Hadron Collider Appreciation Group, which I’m thinking needs more of a cult following. Parenthood and employment obligations bar me from running off to the Franco-Swiss border to attend the last open-house tour before they fire it up, so the chances of me getting the first mini black hole created there named after my son Jasper are growing increasingly remote, but at least I can visit the thing virtually; Peter McCready has snapped a series of VR panorama tech-porn shots (link via Neatorama) of the CERN beauty.

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Time was mostly spent on de-activating plugins that I started using with Wp2.3 because it was causing havoc with embedding video in posts. So here’s my pithy review based on an initial view of what remains my most favorite content management system to date:

Things that make me giddy

New wysiwyg: The old one kept wiping out html and throwing off video embedding. The wysiwyg editor is, of course, third party work, but it was good to see it included so I don’t have to upload a fancier one myself. I deactivated all the plugins that involve posting. The 2.5 default covers everything I do. Buttons are much better displayed as well.

Add media buttons: Quick, easy and convenient. Library options for photos, video, audio and I guess what could best be describe as “other” offers decent organization options that should have been bundled in long ago. I disabled my own library storage system to use this one.

Interface design: Lighter, cleaner and a dashboard that’s more customizable. The color scheme is a little easier on the eyes as well.

Speed: Loads a lot faster.

Post and comment management: I like the addition of the “related” material in the post editing sidebar. Allows you to manage comments, posts and anything else related to the post that’s open.

Post sidebar: It’s improved and the “save” button is moved to the top, as well as publishing options. This is good as takes out the need to scroll every time you want to make a change or publish.

User management: Multiple user blogs benefit from the new post handling, allowing only one person to open  and edit a post at a time.

Things that could be better

More image editing options: There are some decent additions here, but I’l like to see a padding option in there as well. It’s easy enough to accomplish in the wysiwyg, but it’s better to have to click less than more.

Post Editing Sidebar usage: The top half of the sidebar is used really well, but things sort of stop too early and the rest of the posting options are offered below the text editor. They moved the category selection to far down and under the content editing window. That worked well on the side. Options for trackbacks, disableing comments and pings, and adding a password protection option to a post are moved down there at the bottom as well, and it seems could have stayed on the side well enough.

Wordpress gif logo at bottom looks like ass. It’s a small thing, but it’s ugly. Chances are, no one ever gets down that far to see it, but it’s still there, haunting me with its hidious, low-rez scruffy edges. I will mod it to something better because I am that sort of person.

Users: Just seems like user management should go under the management tab.

Overall

Still the best darn CMS I’ve used or designed with and it has just gotten a lot better. I was amazed at how few of the older plugins weren’t compatible considering what an overhaul in design and layout this one is. Compared to the pay and other open source offerings, I’ve not seen something as extendable and reliable that’s also this easy to get started with.

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I’m constantly enthralled by the intersections between activism and technology. Mostly with the appropriate use of technology within activism. I’m also interested in the flip-side, the strange, sometimes horrifying decisions and their consequences made in the progressive movement. So I’m heading out right away to pick up a copy of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power or Organizing Without Organizations (which also has its companion blog).

Shirky works on open source collaborative applications that you may already be using. People opposed to reflecting on the futility of a lot of tactics going on in a number of social, environmental and political movements out there (hello you anti-war crowd who have yet to stop a single war) should consider the actions used to bring about actual change, such as Shirky’s oft used example, the Passenger Bill of Rights.

At the website for Harvard’s Berkman Center, Clay discusses the themes in his book, focusing on protest culture and the difference between institutional (what Code Pink does) Vs. ad hoc modes (what the WTO protests in Seattle did which shut that meeting down), and the lack of strategies combining singular acts of protest with ongoing movements.

The lack of ongoing strategy or a focus on tangible, achievable goals continues to wound progressive movements. Shirky’s analysis is well worth hearing out by anyone involved in organizing.

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This Post space has been donated to 5 years Too Many Dot Org:

In a little over a month, the U.S. will have been occupying Iraq for 5 years. It’s hard to believe.
Even when looking at the awful numbers — more than 1 million Iraqis and nearly 4,000 U.S. servicepeople killed, 2 million Iraqis living as refugees in other countries, with another 2.5 million displaced within Iraq, more than 1 trillion dollars spent — I find it difficult to grasp what 5 years really means. What is the full sum of the destruction and suffering that has taken place? And what does it mean for the future of our country and our world?

What I do know is that 5 years has also meant 5 years of vigils, 5 years of marching, 5 years of calling, writing and visiting members of Congress, 5 years of nonviolent civil disobedience — every single day, by local groups and individuals like you in every community in the country. The great majority of the people of this country are with us, yet policymakers in Washington have still not used their power to bring the troops home. Every day that war and occupation continues in Iraq and Afghanistan, it becomes ever clearer that we the people are the ones who must compel an end to the war.
That is why we are coming together to mark the 5th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in as powerful a way as possible. We believe that the activities United for Peace and Justice is organizing and supporting — the Winter Soldier hearings, mass nonviolent direct action in Washington DC, and local actions all around the country — have the potential to make a powerful statement … but only with your participation and support.

There are some who want to push Iraq off the table until after the elections
this fall. We can’t let that happen — there’s too much at stake.We must be as active, creative, visible and vocal as possible in order to keep Iraq and our demands prominent in the national discourse throughout the electoral season and beyond. Now is the time to stop funding the war and to bring all the troops home!

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Make a Fireball Shooter! - video powered by Metacafe

— Make Magazine (via BoingBoing)

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Let’s see, we’ve got anarchy running on five years since the U.S. stormed into Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction¹ and basically broke every international law in the book². Now, half a decade on, they’ve got no running water or reliable electricity for the vast majority of the population, daily murder counts in the double digits, suicide bombings, civil war, more torture centers than Saddam himself was operating, theft of natural resources by foreign companies, gangs of military contractors shooting up the place, scared shitless, ill trained and ill equipped U.S. soldiers shooting at anything that moves³, a death toll somewhere in the high hundred thousands to a cool million⁴, and what does the Presidential hopeful let crawl out of her mouth:

Sen. Hillary Clinton: “I have been outlining plans as to what we can and must do to begin bringing our sons and daughters home. I am convinced that we can start within sixty days and do it in a responsible and careful manner, recognizing that the Iraqi government has to take responsibility for its own future, that we have given them the precious gift of freedom, and it is up to them to decide whether or not they will use it. But we cannot win their civil war. There is no military solution.”⁵

Again, that’s the “precious gift” of freedom. Freedom from what? A chance to live? Priceless. Fucking priceless. In the Mastercard ad sense of the word.

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1. There was no proof of a weapons stockpile when the allegation was made, which was known by Congress and the White House. UN weapons inspectors only proved this.
2. There are no preventive wars. GlobalLaw
3. The Winter Soldier testimonies cover this better than any media has. Iraq Veterans Against the War.
4. In determining any resulting death toll, all deaths, including those that may not have occurred if the invasion hadn’t happened must be counted. MWC.
5. Quote can be found all over. Here it is in all it’s glory at Democracy Now.

Siegfried Sassoon: “The Dug out” and “Everyone Sang.”
Reaction: A fan of the satirical anti-war poet. Hands flail about.

WH Auden: “Shield of Achilles” and “As I Walked out One Evening”
Reaction: Pushes head up into hat until eyes covered.

TS Eliot: “The Journey of the Magi” and “A Game of Chess”
Reaction: Smiles. TS Eliot’s voice is a hit.

Ted Hughes: “Pike” and “February 17th”
Reaction: Slight look of discomfort. Possibly due to Ted’s harsh voice or a poo coming on.

Philip Larkin: “The Whitsun Wedding” and “The Trees”
Reaction: Nods off

Sylvia Plath: “Parliament Hill Fields” and “The Applicant”
Reacton: Awake again. Wistful stares at chicken pattern in stroller.

Seamus Heaney: “Death of a naturalist,” “The Railway Children” and “Clearances 3″
Reaction: Hand forms to fist. Fist in mouth.

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1. My wife and I were trying to watch the documentary Jesus Camp but it kept making our baby cry so I put these on instead

More than 125 veterans testified about atrocities they had committed or had seen other U.S. soldiers commit. There’s a decent film about it here. Modeled on that Citizen Tribunal method, Iraq Veterens Against the War has conducted their own public hearing on the atrocities committed by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Strangely, outside of the scant though varied sources of Democracy Now (here and here) and Wired Magainze, I haven’t seen much coverage of this historic event by major media.

Incredibly honest, candid and not for the squimish (or, actually, especially for them) these are the stories from Iraq and anyone in favor of the ongoing war needs to be made to hear. The only problem I have with this is that it’s not at the Hague being used as testimony in a war crimes tribunal against the Bush Administration.

• Watch the testimony at the Iraq Veterens Against the War website
• Watch or listen to them at Democracy Now here and here
• About the My Lai massacre at PBS

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In Olympia today there’s an event going on that I can’t get to, unfortunately, being that it would be an expsive prospect to wrap up the baby and grab the wife and get there from London on short notice. If the U.S. actually is to be involved in any sort of process that could be called “peace” regarding the Middle East, the roadmap won’t lead anywhere near Washington, D.C. There’s nothing peaceful about the place. The industry there is conflict. There’s no money in it for the people working there to actually end conflicts. Most likely it would lead through some place like Oly, a truly peaceful Northwest corner of the U.S.

In honor of the day I’m  including afew of links of best headlines as of late on the issue by people worth listening to, and a recent video interview with Norman Finkelstein. More people interested in actually understanding the situation in the Middle East and related U.S. policies should listen to Norman. He’s a prof. who actually has something to educate people about.

• Some Questions and Answers About the Current Israeli Escalation in Gaza by Steve Niva
• The PA’s hollow protests by Amira Hass
• Rachel Corrie’s Case for Justice by Tom Wright and Therese Saliba

Now: Norman…

[youtube]R5EfmU0XEMQ[/youtube]

Parts 2 through 7 follow

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[youtube]ENXLBjE8ie0[/youtube]

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[youtube]KbwMp0×5Vwo[/youtube]

[youtube]AuE1X94LqlQ[/youtube]

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I mean, c’mon. Let’s look at it. Let’s go from Glengarry Glen Ross and The Postman Always Rings Twice, two classic pieces of writing worthy of admiration and study, to Joan of Bark: The Dog that Saved France (currently in production and soon to be straight to video) with lots of crap in between. One wonders exactly when in his writing career this happened. He hates liberal Hollywood now, eh? Did this occur before or after he tried create the Hannibal Lector franchise which likely led to the dip in phone calls his agent must have suffered. I like that the Internet Movie Database entry on this flick reads “This plot synopsis is empty. Add a synopsis.” Why bother? The first sentence said it all.

And The Unit? Sucked. Bad TV. Bad.

So why should this bother me? Well, like tons of stuff that bothers me, it really shouldn’t, actually. Discounting that, it’s because I like the smart writers. I can enjoy a clever writer, and there are far more of these, but I like the smart ones. For some unknown reason David Mamot gets his name on a few lists of smart writers out there and hasn’t been taken off of them in spite of the fact that he didn’t actually die at the top of his game, but has gone on to get old, cliche, and write some incredibly hack stuff that couldn’t even make that aforementioned clever writer list.

But mostly, I’m pissed off for two reasons; first, it’s as a Samuel Beckett devotee. Sooner or later, when people talk about the Beckett legacy, the drop Mamot’s name¹, and say he’s on the road paved by Beckett. This sort of thing gets on my nerves. Mamot had some early flashes of brilliance. Beckett was brilliant throughout. Note the difference. Mamot writes for the market. Beckett wrote for himself and demanded the market accept it or sod off.

Secondly, it might be agreed in some corners that I’m fairly lefty. And I hate it when people toss up stupid bumper sticker tokens to claim their so-called lefty status: “we stopped Vietnam, man.” No, you didn’t. You’re just an ass coasting on fake laurels. So you boogied to some Fleetwood Mac when Bill Clinton won the White House? Did you pay atteyntion when he essentially killed half a million Iraqi children with economic sanctions? Oh, couldn’t hear the news over the voice of your self-rightious ego blathering on, eh? That happens.

Also, I hate the trend of fake conversions to the right going on among the supposedly brilliant. I dub these fake because conversion implies that the subject was previously the opposite of what they are now. I don’t care what these people were calling themselves, they’ve always been what they are, they’ve just not ready to admit to hypocracy. It’s sort of like how Joe Lieberman calls himself a Democrat. He’s not yet fessed up to his true nature. Many other Democratic congress creatures are similar. You can usually spot them in list like U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 107th Congress - 2nd Session On the Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 114). This one is simple. Where ever you see a Democrat voting “Yea,” cross out the ‘D’ next to her/his name and pencil in an ‘R.’

You can read David spout on about his supposed conversion in the now fake-left NY tabloid, the Village Voice. It’s titled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.” Original, yeah? I now realize who’s been ghost penning screeds for Ann Coulter all this time.

So David Mamet, writer’s block got you down? Hey, switch to the red-baiting crowd that flushed so many writers out of the entertainment business way back when and whose hobbies include vetoing anti-torture resolutions and sparking massacres in South America.

Let’s stop with the fake conversions. You just don’t like paying your taxes. Say it. It’s ok. I’d even admire you for the honesty. The other excuses are just lame. And stop trying to prove how left you really were. You weren’t.

Having been a fan of JFK and NPR doesn’t really get you a lefty pin, Dave. People who list those things along with their stupid hippie-dippy boomer “Woodstock, man!” cred to prove their lefty status should stop talking for a minute and look at how vapid their self-analysis really is. Then they should drink themselves into unconsciousness in order to stop the resulting emotional pain once they realize how pathetic they are.

I love it when he asks, oh so rhetorically, “But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?” Don’t worry dear reader, for the answer follows soon after: “I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to” Great!

This whole “systems don’t function, leave people to themselves, it all just works out” thing doesn’t really qualify as an epiphany. Let’s look at it. Mamet writes:

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

1. So he learned this in a place that couldn’t be a better example of a “schoolroom teaching values.” Governmet regulation seperates church from state and keeps things like religious indoctrination out of public schools. A significant number of people who consider themselves on “the right” in the U.S. are against this. So, coincidentally are most rabidly fundamentalist theocracies in the world. Welcome to the right, David Mamet.
2. The workplace was marvelous before regulation. Just ask those children who were working in meat plants every day.
3. The marketplace was great before there were food safety standards.
4. The jury room: Does he know what sort of things governments are supposed to create? These don’t happen at the mall.
5. The freeway. Which, of course, would lead everywhere if left to the free market.
6. School-board meetings. Again, the question is asked: Does he know what sort of things governments do and what markets do?

It’s not a transformation. It’s called giving up. I think that’s what the rest of the world did when everyone decided that whole Rwanda thing would just blow over. If you want to develop a callous disregard for the world, do that. Just don’t bore us with some tedious justification that it has to do with getting older, or being disillusioned later in life. What a great time to embrace a system that aims at privatizing social security and dismantle all forms of public health care. Oh, wait, you’re rich!

Instead of going on for five pages of sob story about your weird transformation, why not just jot down “I’ve decided that I’m a selfish prick,” and send that in to the Village Voice. Gets the same point across and you’ll have to admit the writing is much tighter.

So the marketplace was actually your classroom instead of a school? One imagines you first learned how to write, the one skill you have to sell, in a school, not a McDonald’s franchise. But your career shows you honed your talents in the marketplace. Maybe that’s why since Ronin (which we can more or less dub John Frankenheimer’s directorial success as opposed to a strictly scripted one under your “ghost name”) your work has taken a big, fat dive. So long as someone’s paying, you’ll write whatever it is they want as opposed to what you thought up.

What a writer you are! You do the tradition really proud, man. Samuel Beckett would rise from his grave, corner you in an ally and shiv you in the gut if he read this crap and knew people considered you in his artistic lineage. I hate that you even dare to start out this piece of election-year propaganda with a reference to him. I don’t know why Harold Pinter isn’t already kicking your ass.

The term “left” never qualified. Unfortunately, the description “brain dead” may suffice.

P.S. “Wag the Dog” made no damned sense. At least admit to this.

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1. this even happens in the commentary segment of the Beckett on Film DVD set