Madeleine McCann: No Stone Unturned?

Same article without highlights here.

Madeleine clues hidden for 5 years

The new prime suspect was first singled out by detectives in 2008. Their findings were suppressed. Insight reports
The Sunday Times Insight team
27 October 2013

THE critical new evidence at the centre of Scotland Yard’s search for Madeleine McCann was kept secret for five years after it was presented to her parents by ex-MI5 investigators.

The evidence was in fact taken from an intelligence report produced for Gerry and Kate McCann by a firm of former spies in 2008.

It contained crucial E-Fits of a man seen carrying a child on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance, which have only this month become public after he was identified as the prime suspect by Scotland Yard.

A team of hand-picked former MI5 agents had been hired by the McCanns to chase a much-needed breakthrough in the search for their missing daughter Madeleine.

10 months after the three-year-old had disappeared from the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, and the McCanns were beginning to despair over the handling of the local police investigation. They were relying on the new team to bring fresh hope.

But within months the relationship had soured. A report produced by the investigators was deemed “hypercritical” of the McCanns and their friends, and the authors were threatened with legal action if it was made public. Its contents remained secret until Scotland Yard detectives conducting a fresh review of the case contacted the authors and asked for a copy.

They found that it contained new evidence about a key suspect seen carrying a child away from the McCanns’ holiday apartment on the night Madeleine disappeared.

This sighting is now considered the main lead in the investigation and E-Fits of the suspect, taken from the report, were the centrepiece of a Crimewatch appeal that attracted more than 2,400 calls from the public this month.

One of the investigators whose work was sidelined said last week he was “utterly stunned” when he watched the programme and saw the evidence his team had passed to the McCanns five years ago presented as a breakthrough.

The team of investigators from the security firm Oakley International were hired by the McCanns’ Find Madeleine fund, which bankrolled private investigations into the girl’s disappearance. They were led by Henri Exton, MI5’s former undercover operations chief.

Their report, seen by The Sunday Times, focused on a sighting by an Irish family of a man carrying a child at about 10pm on May 3, 2007, when Madeleine went missing.

An earlier sighting by one of the McCanns’ friends was dismissed as less credible after “serious inconsistencies” were found in her evidence. The report also raised questions about “anomalies” in the statements given by the McCanns and their friends.

Exton confirmed last week that the fund had silenced his investigators for years after they handed over their controversial findings. He said: “A letter came from their lawyers binding us to the confidentiality of the report.”

He claimed the legal threat had prevented him from handing over the report to Scotland Yard’s fresh investigation, until detectives had obtained written permission from the fund.

A source close to the fund said the report was considered “hypercritical of the people involved” and “would have been completely distracting” if it became public.

Kate and Gerry McCann: now officially not suspects, say the Portuguese authorities. Oakley’s six-month investigation included placing undercover agents inside the Ocean Club where the family stayed, lie detector tests, covert surveillance and a forensic re-examination of all existing evidence.

It was immediately clear that two sightings of vital importance had been reported to the police. Two men were seen carrying children near the apartments between 9pm, when Madeleine was last seen by Gerry, and 10pm, when Kate discovered her missing.

The first man was seen at 9.15pm by Jane Tanner, a friend of the McCanns, who had been dining with them at the tapas bar in the resort. She saw a man carrying a girl just yards from the apartment as she went to check on her children.

The second sighting was by Martin Smith and his family from Ireland, who saw a man carrying a child near the apartment just before 10pm.

The earlier Tanner sighting had always been treated as the most significant, but the Oakley team controversially poured cold water on her account.

Instead, they focused on the Smith sighting, travelling to Ireland to interview the family and produce E-Fits of the man they saw. Their report said the Smiths were “helpful and sincere” and concluded: “The Smith sighting is credible evidence of a sighting of Maddie and more credible than Jane Tanner’s sighting”. The evidence had been “neglected for too long” and an “overemphasis placed on Tanner”.

The new focus shifted the believed timeline of the abduction back by 45 minutes.

The pictures of a man who may have taken Madeleine were drawn up in 2008 The pictures of a man who may have taken Madeleine were drawn up in 2008. The report, delivered to the McCanns in November 2008, recommended that the revised timeline should be the basis for future investigations and that the Smith E-Fits should be released without delay.

The potential abductor seen by the Smiths is now the prime suspect in Scotland Yard’s investigation, after detectives established that the man seen earlier by Tanner was almost certainly a father carrying his child home from a nearby night creche. The Smith E-Fits were the centrepiece of the Crimewatch appeal.

One of the Oakley investigators said last week: “I was absolutely stunned when I watched the programme . . . It most certainly wasn’t a new timeline and it certainly isn’t a new revelation. It is absolute nonsense to suggest either of those things . . . And those E-Fits you saw on Crimewatch are ours,” he said.

The detailed images of the face of the man seen by the Smith family were never released by the McCanns. But an artist’s impression of the man seen earlier by Tanner was widely promoted, even though the face had to be left blank because she had only seen him fleetingly and from a distance.

Various others images of lone men spotted hanging around the resort at other times were also released.

Nor were the Smith E-Fits included in Kate McCann’s 2011 book, Madeleine, which contained a whole section on eight “key sightings” and identified those of the Smiths and Tanner as most “crucial”. Descriptions of all seven other sightings were accompanied by an E-Fit or artist’s impression. The Smiths’ were the only exception. So why was such a “crucial” piece of evidence kept under lock and key?

The relationship between the fund and Oakley was already souring by the time the report was submitted — and its findings could only have made matters worse.

As well as questioning parts of the McCanns’ evidence, it contained sensitive information about Madeleine’s sleeping patterns and raised the highly sensitive possibility that she could have died in an accident after leaving the apartment herself from one of two unsecured doors.

There was also an uncomfortable complication with Smith’s account. He had originally told the police that he had “recognised something” about the way Gerry McCann carried one of his children which reminded him of the man he had seen in Praia da Luz.

Smith has since stressed that he does not believe the man he saw was Gerry, and Scotland Yard do not consider this a possibility. Last week the McCanns were told officially by the Portuguese authorities that they are not suspects.

The McCanns were also understandably wary of Oakley after allegations that the chairman, Kevin Halligen, failed to pass on money paid by the fund to Exton’s team. Halligen denies this. He was later convicted of fraud in an unrelated case in the US.

The McCann fund source said the Oakley report was passed on to new private investigators after the contract ended, but that the firm’s work was considered “contaminated” by the financial dispute.

He said the fund wanted to continue to pursue information about the man seen by Tanner, and it would have been too expensive to investigate both sightings in full — so the Smith E-Fits were not publicised. It was also considered necessary to threaten legal action against the authors.

“[The report] was hypercritical of the people involved . . . It just wouldn’t be conducive to the investigation to have that report publicly declared because . . . the newspapers would have been all over it. And it would have been completely distracting,” said the source.

A statement released by the Find Madeleine fund said that “all information privately gathered during the search for Madeleine has been fully acted upon where necessary” and had been passed to Scotland Yard.

It continued: “Throughout the investigation, the Find Madeleine fund’s sole priority has been, and remains, to find Madeleine and bring her home as swiftly as possible.”

Insight: Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert

Source Sunday Times (paywall)

Madeleine McCann: No Stone Unturned? (Plain Text)

Madeleine clues hidden for 5 years

The new prime suspect was first singled out by detectives in 2008. Their findings were suppressed. Insight reports
The Sunday Times Insight team
27 October 2013

THE critical new evidence at the centre of Scotland Yard’s search for Madeleine McCann was kept secret for five years after it was presented to her parents by ex-MI5 investigators.

The evidence was in fact taken from an intelligence report produced for Gerry and Kate McCann by a firm of former spies in 2008.

It contained crucial E-Fits of a man seen carrying a child on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance, which have only this month become public after he was identified as the prime suspect by Scotland Yard.

A team of hand-picked former MI5 agents had been hired by the McCanns to chase a much-needed breakthrough in the search for their missing daughter Madeleine.

10 months after the three-year-old had disappeared from the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, and the McCanns were beginning to despair over the handling of the local police investigation. They were relying on the new team to bring fresh hope.

But within months the relationship had soured. A report produced by the investigators was deemed “hypercritical” of the McCanns and their friends, and the authors were threatened with legal action if it was made public. Its contents remained secret until Scotland Yard detectives conducting a fresh review of the case contacted the authors and asked for a copy.

They found that it contained new evidence about a key suspect seen carrying a child away from the McCanns’ holiday apartment on the night Madeleine disappeared.

This sighting is now considered the main lead in the investigation and E-Fits of the suspect, taken from the report, were the centrepiece of a Crimewatch appeal that attracted more than 2,400 calls from the public this month.

One of the investigators whose work was sidelined said last week he was “utterly stunned” when he watched the programme and saw the evidence his team had passed to the McCanns five years ago presented as a breakthrough.

The team of investigators from the security firm Oakley International were hired by the McCanns’ Find Madeleine fund, which bankrolled private investigations into the girl’s disappearance. They were led by Henri Exton, MI5’s former undercover operations chief.

Their report, seen by The Sunday Times, focused on a sighting by an Irish family of a man carrying a child at about 10pm on May 3, 2007, when Madeleine went missing.

An earlier sighting by one of the McCanns’ friends was dismissed as less credible after “serious inconsistencies” were found in her evidence. The report also raised questions about “anomalies” in the statements given by the McCanns and their friends.

Exton confirmed last week that the fund had silenced his investigators for years after they handed over their controversial findings. He said: “A letter came from their lawyers binding us to the confidentiality of the report.”

He claimed the legal threat had prevented him from handing over the report to Scotland Yard’s fresh investigation, until detectives had obtained written permission from the fund.

A source close to the fund said the report was considered “hypercritical of the people involved” and “would have been completely distracting” if it became public.

Kate and Gerry McCann: now officially not suspects, say the Portuguese authorities. Oakley’s six-month investigation included placing undercover agents inside the Ocean Club where the family stayed, lie detector tests, covert surveillance and a forensic re-examination of all existing evidence.

It was immediately clear that two sightings of vital importance had been reported to the police. Two men were seen carrying children near the apartments between 9pm, when Madeleine was last seen by Gerry, and 10pm, when Kate discovered her missing.

The first man was seen at 9.15pm by Jane Tanner, a friend of the McCanns, who had been dining with them at the tapas bar in the resort. She saw a man carrying a girl just yards from the apartment as she went to check on her children.

The second sighting was by Martin Smith and his family from Ireland, who saw a man carrying a child near the apartment just before 10pm.

The earlier Tanner sighting had always been treated as the most significant, but the Oakley team controversially poured cold water on her account.

Instead, they focused on the Smith sighting, travelling to Ireland to interview the family and produce E-Fits of the man they saw. Their report said the Smiths were “helpful and sincere” and concluded: “The Smith sighting is credible evidence of a sighting of Maddie and more credible than Jane Tanner’s sighting”. The evidence had been “neglected for too long” and an “overemphasis placed on Tanner”.

The new focus shifted the believed timeline of the abduction back by 45 minutes.

The pictures of a man who may have taken Madeleine were drawn up in 2008The pictures of a man who may have taken Madeleine were drawn up in 2008 (Adrian Sheratt) The report, delivered to the McCanns in November 2008, recommended that the revised timeline should be the basis for future investigations and that the Smith E-Fits should be released without delay.

The potential abductor seen by the Smiths is now the prime suspect in Scotland Yard’s investigation, after detectives established that the man seen earlier by Tanner was almost certainly a father carrying his child home from a nearby night creche. The Smith E-Fits were the centrepiece of the Crimewatch appeal.

One of the Oakley investigators said last week: “I was absolutely stunned when I watched the programme . . . It most certainly wasn’t a new timeline and it certainly isn’t a new revelation. It is absolute nonsense to suggest either of those things . . . And those E-Fits you saw on Crimewatch are ours,” he said.

The detailed images of the face of the man seen by the Smith family were never released by the McCanns. But an artist’s impression of the man seen earlier by Tanner was widely promoted, even though the face had to be left blank because she had only seen him fleetingly and from a distance.

Various others images of lone men spotted hanging around the resort at other times were also released.

Nor were the Smith E-Fits included in Kate McCann’s 2011 book, Madeleine, which contained a whole section on eight “key sightings” and identified those of the Smiths and Tanner as most “crucial”. Descriptions of all seven other sightings were accompanied by an E-Fit or artist’s impression. The Smiths’ were the only exception. So why was such a “crucial” piece of evidence kept under lock and key?

The relationship between the fund and Oakley was already souring by the time the report was submitted — and its findings could only have made matters worse.

As well as questioning parts of the McCanns’ evidence, it contained sensitive information about Madeleine’s sleeping patterns and raised the highly sensitive possibility that she could have died in an accident after leaving the apartment herself from one of two unsecured doors.

There was also an uncomfortable complication with Smith’s account. He had originally told the police that he had “recognised something” about the way Gerry McCann carried one of his children which reminded him of the man he had seen in Praia da Luz.

Smith has since stressed that he does not believe the man he saw was Gerry, and Scotland Yard do not consider this a possibility. Last week the McCanns were told officially by the Portuguese authorities that they are not suspects.

The McCanns were also understandably wary of Oakley after allegations that the chairman, Kevin Halligen, failed to pass on money paid by the fund to Exton’s team. Halligen denies this. He was later convicted of fraud in an unrelated case in the US.

The McCann fund source said the Oakley report was passed on to new private investigators after the contract ended, but that the firm’s work was considered “contaminated” by the financial dispute.

He said the fund wanted to continue to pursue information about the man seen by Tanner, and it would have been too expensive to investigate both sightings in full — so the Smith E-Fits were not publicised. It was also considered necessary to threaten legal action against the authors.

“[The report] was hypercritical of the people involved . . . It just wouldn’t be conducive to the investigation to have that report publicly declared because . . . the newspapers would have been all over it. And it would have been completely distracting,” said the source.

A statement released by the Find Madeleine fund said that “all information privately gathered during the search for Madeleine has been fully acted upon where necessary” and had been passed to Scotland Yard.

It continued: “Throughout the investigation, the Find Madeleine fund’s sole priority has been, and remains, to find Madeleine and bring her home as swiftly as possible.”

Insight: Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert

Source Sunday Times (paywall)

"September 11 - The New Pearl Harbor" Physics Over Fiction

No hype required, for what I must assume, is the definitive 9/11 investigative documentary.

All I will say, apart from mentioning the sheer hubris and audacity of the scheme, is that the "Debunkers" come across as extremely fervent and extremely well funded. But of their arguments? I shall leave you to draw your own conclusions.

And lastly, but still staying with the debunkers, Popular Mechanics is owned by the Hearst Corporation, if you get to wondering.

eta My original title was to be:  "September 11 - The New Pearl Harbor"  Facts  Over Fiction But the term Fact leaves itself open to interpretation and to argument. But not so with our old friend Physics. Physics is fact, undeniable and unarguable.

View here, or view at source, where you will find an index of the film's contents.

The thing is lengthy, five hours in total, but in truth, the time flew by, it didn't seem five minutes, such was the quality of both research and content.

"September 11 - The New Pearl Harbor" is a 5 hour documentary that summarizes 12 years of public debate on 9/11. While aimed primarily at a general, uninformed audience, the film also contains some new findings that may be of interest to advanced researchers.

This film is intended as an educational, non-profit operation, and must remain so in order to fulfill all the requirements for the usage of copyrighted material. As such, the entire film is made available online for free from day one. Any purchase of the actual DVD will be considered as a form of donation to the author, in recognition of the time spent to put together this material. Free duplication and distribution of all DVDs is encouraged.

You can also purchase the 5-hour film in a 3 DVD set. Free duplication and distribution of all DVDs by Massimo Mazzucco is encouraged. Italian and French versions also available.To see the fully indexed film in one page go to  luogocomune.net

Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood: Not Well-Informed That Man

Other than  expanding the text, by way of an introduction, what follows then, is a reader's comment, posted verbatim.

But first, let me borrow a previous observation of mine, a little something to give context to Redwood's drivel.

To assess this case and come come to the only conclusion that one can; that the Doctors McCann are instrumental in the death and disappearance of their daughter, doesn't require great gifts of deduction or intellect, it requires far less; the ability to walk upright and having attained the age of six, is more than sufficient. source

As told by the BBC.

. . . . Det Ch Insp Andy Redwood, who is heading the investigation, said: "The timeline we have now established has given new significance to sightings and movements of people in and around Praia da Luz at the time of Madeleine's disappearance.

"Our work to date has significantly changed the timeline and the accepted version of events that has been in the public domain to date.

"It has allowed us to work with Crimewatch to build the most detailed reconstruction as yet, and highlight very specific appeal points.

"I hope that when the public see our investigative strands drawn together within the overall context of that appeal, it will bring in new information that moves our investigation forward."

DCI Redwood said that police had sought to "try and draw everything back to zero... take everything back to the beginning and then reanalyse and reassess everything, accepting nothing".
Phone records

He added: "The careful and critical analysis of the timeline has been absolutely key. Primarily, we are focused on the area between 8.30pm and 10pm.

"We know that at 8.30, that was the time that Mr and Mrs McCann went down to the tapas area for their dinner, and we know that at around 10pm, that was when Mrs McCann found that Madeleine was missing." BBC

Readers comment verbatim.

He added [DCI Redwood] "The careful and critical analysis of the timeline has been absolutely key. Primarily, we are focused on the area between 8.30pm and 10pm.

"We know that at 8.30, that was the time that Mr and Mrs McCann went down to the tapas area for their dinner, and we know that at around 10pm, that was when Mrs McCann found that Madeleine was missing."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24509235

Not well-informed that man.

The first two Tapas group timelines were written by Russell O’Brien on the ripped off front and back cover of Madeleine’s sticker book, 03/04 May 2007.

Timeline 1

8:45. pm

Matt returns 9.00-9.05 - listened at all 3 - all shutters down

Jerry 9.10-9.15 in the room + all well ? did he check

9.20/5 - Ella Jane checked 5D sees stranger & child

9.30 - Russ. Ella Matt check all 3

9.35 - Matt check see twins

9.50 - Russ returns

9.55 - Kate realised Madeleine

10pm - Alarm raised


Timeline 2

8.45pm. all assembled at poolside for food

9.00pm. Matt Oldfield listens at all 3 windows 5A, B, D ALL shutters down

9:15pm Gerry McCann looks at room A ? Door open to bedroom

9:20pm Jane Tanner checks 5D - [sees stranger walking carrying a child]

9.30 Russell O'Brien in 5D. Poorly daughter

 9.55pm

10:00pm. Alarm raised after Kate

Gerald

http://www.mccannfiles.com/id261.html

Still so into each other? Just wondering.

http://twitpic.com/74jgui

Source for the above: Kate McCann's Book To Be Truthful (and Scathing)

Do try to read. Perhaps a taster will help.

I thought I would take this opportunity to bring together on one page certain discrepancies relating to the night of May third 2007. These discrepancies, or McCann sound bites if you will, are fundamental, nay, they are the cornerstone for the McCann's claim that Madeleine was a victim of stranger abduction.

That this case has progressed to the point it has without these inconsistencies and disparities being addressed, I find not only staggering, but scandalous. That such conflicting and contradictory statements made by the parents have never been investigated by any law enforcement agency in this country, is, as I say, not only scandalous, but shameful. And please, don't give me it's jurisdiction issue.

That parents, in a case of a three year old girl seemingly disappearing off the face of the earth, can make such contradictory statements with impunity, says much for the state of this Nation, it's law enforcement, and not least it's Government.

It matters not that books are written, that documentaries are made, or whatever tripe the press wishes to print in their obsession to sanctify this loathsome pair , it matters not because it is all worthless, it is all utterly without worth until these fundamental questions are answered. more

A Tale of a Whale and Other Such Creatures

A Tale of a Whale
By Randy Malamud
28 September 2013
Truthout Op-Ed


In Blackfish, Gabriella Cowperthwaite's sleeper hit documentary about a tragedy at Orlando's SeaWorld, audiences are tempted (or at least I was) to empathize with Tilikum, the orca who killed his trainer Dawn Brancheau during a 2010 performance. The whale had been abused for decades in the service of mindless human entertainment masquerading as environmental education. ("SeaWorld artfully combines education and entertainment in a way that connects people to the sea and sea life like nowhere else," their webpage boasts.)

I felt a kind of poetic justice in the whale's eventual revolt against the handler, who must have epitomized, for him, the humiliating institutions of captive animal displays where he had had the misfortune to spend his life.

He was a "killer whale," and he killed - what part of this was unexpected?

In nature, actually, orcas are not inherently threatening to people, simply because under normal circumstances, they rarely come into contact with people. They are curious, playful, clever, highly social, keenly emotional and profusely communicative animals. Indeed, their complex social structures and bonds make it all the more debilitating for them to be removed from their natural habitats, from their communities, and cooped up - as Tilikum was - in small, dark, steel aquarium tanks, where they are deprived of their freedom and their roaming and grouping habits. In this claustrophobic imprisonment these whales become very disturbed, and consequently, violent because they cannot conduct their lives as they would choose to do. If they attack humans under these circumstances, it is because we have driven them mad.

"Killer whale," a loaded human label that reveals more about the namer than the named, constructs a human narrative that reflects a human perspective. Consider, along the same lines, "killer bees": like killer whales, the phenomenon is our fault. They didn't start killing us until we started interfering with their natural lives and transforming them from how they were to how we wanted them to be, so that they could be of greater service to us. Africanized bees were interbred with European bees in an effort to generate more honey for people to harvest: a selfish and short-sighted motive with dire ecological consequences. Killer bees were accidentally released in Brazil in the 1950s and have moved steadily north, invading much of South and Central America and the United States. While their stings are no more potent than those of other bees, they are more tightly wound, more defensive, and thus more likely to attack more quickly and in greater numbers.

By calling them "killer bees," we attribute to them a danger, a brutal malevolence, which draws on a lurking paranoia that IT they're all out to get us – IT "they" being, potentially, the entire animal kingdom - in one way or another. It's all we can do to defend ourselves with pesticides, varmint traps, population "management" or "culling," clear-cutting the nasty dangerous forests that harbor killer snakes and killer bats and poison dart frogs and other creepy-crawly spiders and scorpions and "man-eating tigers" and so forth. There's quite a rogues' gallery lurking out there in nature! Like the great American hero George Zimmerman, we are all just standing our ground (with a hair-trigger finger, poised to shoot first and ask questions later) defending ourselves against the insidious threat that all these killer animals pose to our prosperity.

The implication lurking in the denomination of orcas as killer whales suggests the violence that we fear, or imagine, or construct, in these big, "dangerous" creatures; the designation serves to drum up publicity at a place like SeaWorld, where people capture, constrain, dominate and exploit these "killers" to show how much more powerful we are than they. In the words of one Blackfish writer, SeaWorld's mission was "to turn killer whales into killer profits."

("Blackfish" is how native people refer to what the SeaWorld crowd calls "killer whales," and unsurprisingly, their relations toward these animals are much less adversarial and exploitative than SeaWorld's. The Tlingit view the blackfish as a protector of humankind, and many other tribal communities honor the blackfish as their emblematic clan animal, respecting the blackfish's need to have a wide berth rather than trying to capture, own and contain them. Native Americans enact their awe for the animals from afar, rather than demanding, as SeaWorld's audiences do, the proximity that necessitates the whales' painful dislocation from ocean to tank; from wild to captive; from authenticity to a demeaning parody of their natural existence.)

What we do to these animals by kidnapping them and transforming them into crowd-pleasing clowns suggests that, paradoxically, people simultaneously both admire and scorn their power, their natural force. We love to admire that force, finding it exhilarating to bask in its energy. At the same time, we scheme to coopt that force - to take it away from the animal and have it, commodify it for ourselves, as if we believe that the essence of life is zero-sum, and so if we want to experience the cornucopia of nature, we must harvest it, or colonize it. We must take it from them. Apparently, we can appreciate a majestic, dynamic, powerful whale only by depriving him of his whaleness, stripping him of everything that it means to be a whale. Removing him from the ocean, we cram him into a cage in Orlando because we can't see him easily in the ocean: He won't always be there whenever we come by. For our construction (our reconstruction, really our falsification) of his whaleness, he must be there for us to witness him day after day, year after year.

We (SeaWorld administrators, trainers, audiences) demand that he submit himself to our greater power, and we decide how he will manifest this phony, cheesy whaleness that is on display six times a day. Instead of his natural behavior, we would like him to swim in circles, and wave to the crowd, and prance and canoodle with the trainers. Audiences pay (a lot) to see him doing what we would like him to do rather than what he would like to do. We are in control; we're calling the shots. When we say jump, we expect Tilikum to say, "How high?"

(Note: we're not actually in control - the world is in a pretty tenuous state. Animal habitats are being destroyed on an exponentially increasing scale and extinctions, of course, are spiking as a consequence. Toxicities of every kind are rampant as never before in the history of existence. In a perversely fascinating lesson about the marvelous, far-reaching complexities of ecosystemic stability/decline, we are only beginning to see the multitudinous ways in which our global warming will afflict every species of animal, including us - the tip of the iceberg, if you will, though the iceberg is melting quickly. But the people whose job it is to monetize orcas are keenly aware that this tableau of ecological crisis isn't a very cheery spectacle: better to watch prancing whales and sustain the implicit illusion that we've got everything well in hand.)

I am not a violent person, and I do not endorse violence. But it is hard for me to avoid feeling that there is something appropriate, something fitting, something that we might have expected (if we thought more sensibly about our relationship to the other animals with whom we share this planet) when Tilikum attacked Dawn. I've had the same feeling when Montecore attacked Roy Horn (of "Siegfriend and Roy") on the Las Vegas strip, and when Tatiana, a Siberian Tiger (who had been made to reside in San Francisco instead of Siberia), attacked Carlos Eduardo Sousa Jr., a stoned zoo visitor who tried to climb into her cage. Or when Travis, a "pet chimpanzee" (not a good idea, for future reference), tore off the face of Charla Nash, who stopped by to visit him in the Stamford, Conn., home where he was kept.

At the Denver Zoo, a black rhinoceros bit off a woman's finger. The woman was participating in an innovative zoo program (that has since been "indefinitely suspended") in which visitors could feed and touch a caged rhino for $60. Other zoos have similar programs: At Zoo Miami's Rhino Encounter Station, patrons can not only touch, but also brush and smell a rhino.

Google "When Animals Attack": It happens all the time. YouTube is filled with compilation tapes: "Top 15 animal attacks"; "25 worst animal attacks"; "Crazy animals attack!" Again, let me note for the record: They're not crazy; we are. Just move away from the wild animals, please, people. Let them be.

I will transgress the anthropomorphic fallacy (the pronouncement that it is impossible to attribute human emotions to nonhuman creatures) and suggest that all these animals most likely hated the people they attacked. And I hope I will not seem too heartless when I say that I think the victims got what they deserved. They played with fire, and they got burned. What goes around comes around. Choose your cliché - there are lots of them, and they all fit. Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, he eats you (The Big Lebowski). In Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005), Timothy Treadwall got too close to the bears and, indeed, he got eaten. Robinson Devor's 2007 documentary Zoo tells of how Kenneth Pinyan, who enjoyed sex with horses, got anally fornicated to death. And the "Crocodile Hunter": When I heard of Steve Irwin's death, my first thought was what did you expect, messing around with poisonous giant stingrays? "Killer stingrays," we might call them.

These kinds of incidents should be teachable moments: moments when we are painfully, irrefutably shown that we do not understand other animals very well. We don't understand what they are like, or what they feel, or how we can most honestly relate to each other. We don't appreciate them. We don't respect them. We see them as fodder for our amusement.

I walked out of Blackfish thinking that the film's lesson - that captive animal display is a shameful and cruel desecration - applied not just to the ridiculous shows at SeaWorld, but to all zoos and aquariums. (Full disclosure: I walked into the film thinking that already . . . but still, Cowperthwaite's documentary struck me as a vitally incisive argument, universally, against the captivity of animals.) All three SeaWorlds - in Orlando, San Antonio and San Diego - are members of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the entity that presents itself as the authority in maintaining the highest standards of zoo practices and "leaders in the protection of endangered species." What's wrong with SeaWorld is a microcosm of what's wrong with the institution of animal display everywhere.

Numerous effective animal rights campaigns lately have begun to chip away at the unremitting exploitation of animals that is consequent upon our intrusive voyeurism. Various zoos (including Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, the Bronx Zoo, the Detroit Zoo, and, in 2009, every zoo and circus in India) have phased out elephant exhibits. Elephants were perceived as especially unsuitable inmates in zoos: They suffer high rates of death and injury resulting from their captivity, including chronic foot problems caused by standing on hard surfaces and musculoskeletal disorders from inactivity that results from their being constantly penned or chained instead of able to roam freely and widely as they would like to do. The Georgia Aquarium, where many Beluga whales have died already, was recently denied permission to import more of them from Russia (some of whom would have gone into tanks in Atlanta, and others of whom would have been franchised out, dispatched to the circus that is SeaWorld.)

Cutting back on the captivity of elephants and whales is a good first step. I applaud the dawning awareness that certain animals are obviously unhappy in zoos and unfit to be locked up in cramped, inadequate cages. Three centuries after René Descartes pronounced that animals are merely automata, machines to which human beings could have no moral obligations, finally a backlash is growing.

But it's no worse, ethically, to kidnap and ruin the life of an elephant or an orca whale than it is to do so to a smaller animal - a capuchin monkey, a Chinese alligator, an East African crowned crane, a meerkat, a reindeer, a rattlesnake. Each of these animals has an array of needs and desires that cannot be met in captivity: The zoo deprives them of a free range of movement and of a certain climate, and temperature, and light, and proximity to other members of their species and interaction with other species. An environment that the animal desires and needs, comprised of certain plants and waterways and topographies, is rendered inaccessible. It may be a more obvious case to free the whales than to free the alligators, and it's fine to start with the more obvious cases, but please: Keep it going.

There are myriad arguments against zoos; the one that Blackfish amplifies most emphatically is: This is how we develop an appreciation for wild animals - by humiliating them? By "showing" them in this decontextualized, painful condition of constraint and alienation from nature, when the torments of captivity have drawn out the worst physical and psychological strains on them: Hordes of people come to gawk at this? (In the 17th century, paying audiences by the hundreds massed for visiting day at London's Bethlem Royal Hospital - commonly known as "Bedlam" - to gape at the human "Lunatickes," sometimes poking them with sticks; have we become any more enlightened since then?)

We are told (by those who profit from the prosperity of these corporations) that we demonstrate good ecological citizenship by visiting zoos, aquariums, SeaWorlds to connect with other species - to befriend them. Man, those animals must be thinking, with friends like this who needs enemies? And again, please excuse the anthropomorphic fallacy, which I like to think of as the "anthropomorphic fallacy fallacy," the pretence that we can't understand what animals are thinking. We might like to think we're unable to imagine their hopes and fears, because that would make them comfortably "other"; but this is just a convenient self-deception: We are in denial.

In fact, we can imagine very well how captive animals feel about being in cages or tanks, and it's not very appreciative. We have constructed the human-animal contact zone as a degrading spectacle. The physical retribution that Dawn Brancheau, Steve Irwin, Roy Horn and others have suffered from animals who could no longer endure the ridiculous sideshows to which we have relegated them stands as an ominous metaphor for the catastrophic ecological blowback that awaits us if we continue to treat our earthmates like slaves, freaks and fools. Truthout

How long before I get a take-down notice? Wiki

Randy Malamud is Regents' Professor of English at Georgia State University and chair of the department. He has written eight books, including Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (1998), Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (2003), A Cultural History of Animals in the Modern Age (2007), and An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture (2012). He is a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and a patron of the Captive Animals' Protection Society.

American Woman said - US Exceptionalism

Sometimes something comes along and you think, oh my! I've got the cream to go on those peaches.

The peach in this case, a fifteen minute video on the subject of US Exceptionalism and the American psyche.

Although the video is embedded below my chosen text, might I recommend you watch it first, in order that the true significance of the text can be truly appreciated.

Layla Anwar - Arab Woman Blues is an Iraqi blogger and she's pissed, mightily so in fact, and as you might imagine, she has every right to be.

I have featured Layla in the past, you will find her in the sidebar. But for the purposes of this post, it's not Layla Anwar per say that concerns us, but rather the comments of  "American Woman" responding to one of Layla's articles. Two of which can be found at the link below.

The link for for the original, can be found here, for what, in actual fact, is a bit of a mega-post: 

Behold: The U.S. God Of War. A Brief Statement of Hate and Hypocrisy Writ Large

Where you will find the relative article: God Bless America

American Woman said...

Awwwww you hate me Layla? That really breaks me up!!! Good God, how pathetic can you get? Let that hate consume you...go ahead, let that hate flow...do it for me.

You know, this blog entry should be the automatic response sent to every American who agrees with anything you have to say. You know, the ones who kiss your ass, begging for forgiveness of their sins. I am talking about the Americans who don't think they are included in your hate-speak - when, in fact, you have more contempt for them than anyone else. You make my skin crawl.

Hate me - I still have electricity
Hate me - I have running water
Hate me - I have a job & money
Hate me - I have law & order
Hate me - I don't spend my life stand in line
Hate me - I have Medicine & insurance
Hate me - I own a house
Hate me - I have a big family who love me & I love them
Hate me - I live in my own country
Hate me - I am a Christian
Hate me - I can walk down the street without fear
Hate me - I am laughing at you
Hate me - IT'S AN HONOR!!!

Face it, Americans are far more innocent than Iraqies. Iraqies relate perfectly to their so called fearless leader, Saddam - a cold, indifferent murderer himself. What is so lovable about you? You are purple fingered traders, liars, cry-babies, backward shits, cowards, sectarian & tribal assholes, fundimentalist nuts, pedophile worshipers, crooks & criminals, rapists, pimps, whores & torturers.

I need to take a bath just thinking about you people....while you enjoy wrapping yourself up in that new American flag you invented....you sick fuck...

17/3/08 3:06 PM

How lovely.

How Exceptional Are You? by Scooter Rockets

No link as yet for Scooter Rockets, other than his debut Youtube video.

H/T http://southweb.org/lifewise/

Verdict First Trial Later: Edward Snowden

Just another day in week then.

A Shameful Day to Be a US Citizen

By Dave Lindorff
July 28, 2013

I have been deeply ashamed of my country many times. The Nixon Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was one such time, when hospitals, schools and dikes were targeted. The invasion of Iraq was another. Washington’s silence over the fatal Israeli Commando raid on the Gaza Peace Flotilla--in which a 19-year-old unarmed American boy was murdered--was a third. But I have rarely been as ashamed and disgusted as I was Saturday reading that US Attorney General Eric Holder had sent a letter to the Russian minister of justice saying that the US would “not seek the death penalty” in its espionage case against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, promising that even if the US later brought added charges against Snowden after obtaining him, they would not include any death penalty, and vowing that if Snowden were handed over by Russia to the US, he would “not be tortured.”

So it has come to this: That the United States has to promise (to Russia!) that it will not torture a prisoner in its control -- a US citizen at that -- and so therefore that person, Edward Snowden, has no basis for claiming that he should be “treated as a refugee or granted asylum.”

Why does Holder have to make these pathetic representations to his counterpart in Russia?

Because Snowden has applied for asylum saying that he is at risk of torture or execution if returned to the US to face charges for leaking documents showing that the US government is massively violating the civil liberties and privacy of every American by monitoring every American’s electronic communications.

Snowden has made that claim in seeking asylum because he knows that another whistleblower, Pvt. Bradley Manning, was in fact tortured by the US for months, and held without trial in solitary confinement in a Marine military brig for nearly a year, part of the time naked, before being finally put on trial in a kangaroo court, where the judge is as much prosecutor as jurist, and where his guilt was declared in advance by the President of the United States -- the same president who has also already publicly declared Snowden guilty too.

It is incredibly shameful that we US citizens have to admit that we live in a country that tortures its prisoners, that casually executes people who are mentally retarded, who are innocent, who had defense attorneys who slept through their clients’ trials, whose prosecutors slept with the judge, who were denied access to DNA evidence that could have proven their innocence, or who were convicted based upon the lies of prosecutors and prosecution witnesses.

This country’s “justice” system has become so perverted and politically tainted that the rest of the world, including Russia, knows that Snowden is telling the truth when he says he cannot hope to receive a fair trial here. Indeed, Congress has passed laws, and the President has signed laws, giving this government the power to lock someone like Snowden up indefinitely without trial, to torture him, and even to kill him, not through a jury decision on capital punishment, but simply on the basis of a secret “finding” by the President that he has aided or abetted terrorism.

No wonder Russia and several other countries, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, have offered or are considering offering Snowden asylum.

And no wonder that, in its obsession with getting its tyrannical hands on him, this government is willing to promise not to kill him or torture him (for what a promise from the US government is worth, especially since when Holder makes his promise of "no torture" we have to remember that Holder and the US don't define such horrors as waterboarding, stress positions, keeping someone naked in an unheated cell, or employing prolonged sensory deprivation are not "torture").

Shame and anger are the only appropriate responses to that letter from Holder.

If this were a country that honored the rule of law, Attorney General Holder would not need to promise not to torture. He would need only to point to the US Constitution, with its ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” He would not need to promise a fair trial to Snowden, with no capital punishment on any charges. He could point instead to the Constitution’s promise of a presumption of innocence and of a public trial by a jury of the accused’s peers, to make the case against the granting of asylum.

In such a country, someone like Snowden, with the help of a crack legal team, would have a fair shot at proving to a jury his innocence of the government’s frivolous espionage charges. He’d have a fair chance of convincing at least one juror of his absolute innocence of any crime, making his conviction impossible.

But that is not what this country is, especially today.

In today’s US courts, we know the “Justice” Department would seek to bar testimony about Snowden’s motives in leaking the documents he downloaded from the NSA’s computers. They would ask the judge to limit defense arguments and testimony in the case to the narrow issue of whether or not he downloaded and leaked files, not to whether those files exposed Constitutional violations and needed to be brought to the public’s attention. Our judges, nominated by presidents and confirmed by senators, Democrat and Republican, who want jurists who favor government secrecy and who generally side with the government against the people, can be counted on to grant the government’s motions.

In such circumstances, a defendant like Snowden, facing charges of espionage or theft of government secrets, has no ability to defend himself. The trial would be like in a Lewis Carroll event: “Verdict first, trial later!”

Hopefully President Vladimir Putin will not be pressured by the US into pretending that Snowden has nothing to fear in going back to face “justice” in the US.

It is bad enough that we Americans have to hang our heads in shame as our Attorney General pretends, against all evidence to the contrary, that there is still a fair legal system operating in the US, and that the US respects human rights and the rule of law.

We should not have to also endure yet another kangaroo court trial, this time of Edward Snowden.

Snowden should be granted asylum in Russia, or should be allowed to travel to one of the other countries of his choice that have had the courage to offer him asylum.

If we’re going to have trials on the issue of spying in the US, let them be of Holder himself, and of President Obama. This Can't Be Happening

Puttin’ the Pressure on Putin

Puttin’ the Pressure on Putin
By Ray McGovern
July 28, 2013

Exclusive: The Obama administration continues to compound the diplomatic mess around former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The latest blunder was announcing that the U.S. wouldn’t torture or execute Snowden, a reminder to the world how far Official Washington has strayed from civilized behavior, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

The main question now on the fate of truth-teller Edward Snowden is whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will see any benefit in helping stop the United States from further embarrassing itself as it prances around the globe acting like a “pitiful, helpless giant.” That image was coined by President Richard Nixon, who insisted that the giant of America would merit those adjectives if it did not prevail in South Vietnam.

It is no secret that Putin is chuckling as Attorney General Eric Holder and other empty-shirts-cum-corporate-law-office-silk-ties – assisted ably by White House spokesperson Jay Carney – proceed willy-nilly to transform the Snowden case from a red-faced diplomatic embarrassment for the United States into a huge geopolitical black eye before the rest of the world.

Reminding the planet how out of step the United States has been from most of the civilized world, Holder offered a written promise to the Russians on July 9 (and released on Friday) that Snowden would neither be tortured nor put to death for disclosing secrets about how the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans and pretty much everybody else on Earth.

Holder assured the Russian Justice Minister that the U.S. “would not seek the death penalty for Mr. Snowden should he return to the United States.” Holder also saw fit to reassure his Russian counterpart that, “Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States.” Wow, that’s a relief!

The United States is so refined in its views on human rights that it won’t torture or execute a whistleblower. Of course, that only reminded everyone that the United States is one of the few advanced societies that still puts lots of people to death and was caught just last decade torturing detainees at CIA “black sites,” not to mention the brutal treatment of other prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

And, there was the humiliating treatment afforded another American whistleblower, Private Bradley Manning, whose forced nudity and long periods in solitary confinement during eight months of confinement at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. prompted international accusations of torture.

Holder’s strange promise may have been designed to undercut Snowden’s bid for asylum, but it also reminded the world of America’s abysmal behavior on human rights. And, even if the United States promises not to torture someone, government lawyers have shown how they can play games with the definition of the term or just outright lie. Holder’s reputation for veracity is just a thin notch above that of National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who admits he has chosen to testify under oath to the “least untruthful” things.

Perhaps no one has told Holder how shockingly out of step with other civilized nations the U.S. finds itself on the issue of capital punishment. Just calling attention to that is a diplomatic gaffe of some proportion. The global trend toward abolition of the death penalty is unmistakable and increasing. The United States even is the outlier on this issue when compared to “brutal” Russia. In Russia, there has been a moratorium on executions since 1996, although it is still technically lawful.

The European Union holds a strong and principled position against the death penalty, and the abolition of capital punishment is a pre-condition for entry into the Union. The U.S. enjoys the dubious distinction of joining a list with China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia as the leaders in executing people.

Closing the Barn Door Too Late

Holder’s high-profile push to get the Russians to hand over Snowden damages the United States in other ways, too, such as reminding the world how the U.S. government has violated the privacy rights of people everywhere, including in allied countries. There is a reasonable argument to be made that the smartest U.S. move would be to simply leave Snowden alone.

Depending on your perspective, Edward Snowden has already done his damage – or, in my view, accomplished his patriotic duty of truth-telling – demonstrating with documents how the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have trashed the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Moreover, Snowden apparently had the foresight to handle his revelations in such way that, to the degree there are still more genies about to be let out of the bottle, it will be near impossible to stuff them back in. Indeed, he has said as much, in indicating how easily he can accede to Putin’s condition that he does “no further harm” to the U.S. Snowden has even been specific in acknowledging that he cannot prevent journalist Glenn Greenwald and others from publishing more of the material he made available.

So why the hue and cry from Washington? While the Obama White House has utterly failed to honor Obama’s earlier promises to run a transparent administration, there is one area in which it has been as transparent as Saran Wrap. And that is its fixation with pursuing whistleblowers “to the full extent of the law” … and then some.

The administration has been transparently vindictive, revengeful and determined to exact retribution on “leakers” as a warning to others whose consciences might trouble them enough to reveal war crimes, as Bradley Manning did, or crass violations of our rights as citizens, as Edward Snowden did.

But the recent thrashing around — demanding and cajoling Putin to turn over Snowden — has further made the United States look petulant and inept. Meanwhile, Putin has demonstrated a much more deft touch in handling this delicate international incident.

After making it clear that “we do not extradite,” Putin has had the good sense to put some distance between himself and the Snowden affair. As Secretary of State John Kerry bemoaned (from Saudi Arabia, of all places) about “standards of behavior between sovereign nations,” and (of all things) “respect for the rule of law,” Putin said the issue is simple:

“Should such people [as Snowden] be extradited to be jailed, or not? In any case, I would prefer not to deal with such issues, because this is just the same as shaving a piglet – too much noise but too little hair.”

Will Putin Cave?

Do the feckless folks running President Barack Obama’s foreign policy really think they can force Putin to back down? Can they actually believe they can achieve that by putting into play what they apparently consider a diplomatic “nuclear option”? The thinly veiled threat surfaced ten days ago that Obama will snub Putin by canceling their planned tete-a-tete before the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg in September.

Can they possibly think that by pouting, jibing and stamping their feet, they will frighten Putin into “behaving” as obediently as the malleable Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Austrians did when they forced down Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane for inspection? Morales was en route home from a visit to Russia when someone provided the U.S. with a “tip” that Snowden was hiding on Morales’s plane.

I find myself wondering who provided Washington with that great tip, and whether it is no longer the practice among U.S. intelligence agencies to take rudimentary steps to verify such tips before they let their masters get greasy diplomatic egg all over their faces?

Finally, how many more times does Putin have to say, as he did through his spokesman again Friday that: “Russia has never extradited anyone, and will not extradite [Snowden].”

Months ago, former UK MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon coined the term “asymmetric extradition law” referring to U.S. policy, which, in the vernacular, might be called “pick-and-choose.” While there is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Russia, there has been one between the U.S. and Italy for 30 years. Yet, Washington has turned a deaf ear to Italy’s appeals to extradite convicted kidnapper Robert Seldon Lady, former head of the CIA worker bees in Milan where the CIA mounted an “extraordinary rendition” against the Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar off the streets in 2003. Omar was given over to the tender mercies of Egyptian intelligence interrogators.

In 2005, when Lady got a tip that the Italian police were coming for him, he reportedly fled his villa without destroying sensitive files on the CIA’s mission. Italy convicted Lady and 22 other U.S. operatives in absentia and gave them hefty jail sentences. Last December, Italy’s justice minister signed a warrant for Lady’s arrest. On July 18, Lady was identified and detained in Panama, but slipped away the next day on a plane headed toward the U.S.

Few were surprised that Panama was pressured into joining the servile company of the four U.S.-crony European countries that had already embarrassed themselves as accessories to the Washington’s latest Excellent Adventure regarding Evo Morales’s plane – a fiasco code-named OARR (for Operation Airline Rest Room) after the suspected place where Snowden was believed stowed away.

But when it came to extraditing a convicted kidnapper from Panama to Italy? Puleeze. Great powers don’t have to do that kind of thing, treaty or not. Except for Russia, you see. Moscow must surrender Snowden, even absent a U.S.-Russia extradition treaty. And Putin should understand that, no?

It must have been that kind of superpower-think that prompted Jay Carney on July 12 to add insult to injury, as he jibed at the Russian government to “afford human rights organizations the ability to do their work in Russia throughout Russia, not just at the Moscow transit lounge.” That kind of comment is sure to endear the White House to the Kremlin.

Vladimir Volokh, head of the Russian Migration Service, seemed to welcome a chance to retaliate in kind. Rubbing in the awkwardness of Snowden’s present status because of actions by Washington, Volokh told the Interfax news agency Friday: “We know that he is Edward Snowden only from his words. The passport he has has been canceled. … He is under protection in the transit area for his safety. He is an individual being pursued and his life is in danger.”

The Russians, and pretty much everyone else, are smart enough to realize that, given Washington’s transparent motives, there is nothing to be gained by serving Snowden up to American “justice,” such as it has become. Russia is no banana republic, so it beggars belief that President Putin will follow the supine example of Panama. Nor is the fawning example of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal something Putin would wish to emulate.

Russian History more

You Wouldn't Hang it on Your Wall - Ink

You wouldn't hang it on your wall, why on earth would you hang it on your body?

Why tattoos make my flesh crawl

The tattoo has always been a mark of powerlessness, not individuality. And now everyone’s got one.
By Neil Davenport.
September 18 2012

Joanna Southgate’s heavily tattooed arms caused a stir at Royal Ascot last week. Apparently, the 34-year-old sneaked in and avoided being told to cover them up. In a discussion piece last Sunday, an Observer journalist argued that tattoos like Southgate’s can be beautiful and a work of art in their own right. Novelist and journalist Rachel Johnson, however, declared that they simply lacked style and elegance. If they’re not good enough for actress Kristin Scott Thomas, she declared, they’re not good enough for any stylish woman. In the Mirror, Tony Parsons also declared that tattoos were a depressing eyesore and that Britain has become a ‘tattooed nation’.

For once, I’m with Parsons. In Britain, when the sun comes out, so do the tattoos. Acres and acres of flesh vandalised by grubby-looking ink daubings: martial-arts symbols, nude dancers, flowers and roses, Guns’n’Roses, dolphins, dogs and loved ones’ names scrawled in Sanskrit. Tattoos used to be a subcultural expression of criminals, sailors and hard men. Now everyone, from footballers to the prime minister’s wife, has their body adorned in artwork last seen on a Prog-Rock album sleeve. To describe them as lurid would be an understatement, which is a word probably hated and feared in tattoo parlours everywhere.

So what’s going on? How did we arrive at a situation whereby not having a tattoo is now a sign of daring rebellion? While sitting in a pub garden recently, I realised I was about the only person whose flesh could be considered a blank canvas. Nor will I be getting my arms mutilated anytime soon. Apart from tattoos looking hideously ugly, they are also indicative of a person’s insularity. No doubt having a tattoo is widely seen as a mark of individuality and personal expression; that is, you have altered your body’s appearance to demonstrate something about yourself. As one blogger put it recently, ‘a tattoo is a life story. And with a virgin skin you obviously don’t have a life.’

Yet there’s more going on here than questionable aesthetic tastes. With tattoos, the emphasis is all on the self, and the centrality of the self, rather than anything outside of the body. You may not be in a position to make a mark on the outside world, or even on your local community, but at least you can leave a mark on your own body. In a deeply narcissistic age, self-aggrandising tattoos have become the body badge of choice for thousands. But by enlarging ourselves with tattoos, we’re belittling ourselves in the process. It’s a sign of our low expectations that having control over flesh decorations is considered to be the limit of our capacities as an individual. So while shaping the outside world seems near impossible, you can at least shape barbed-wire patterns on your arm.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Historically, tattoos have long been part of subcultures in which fundamental social change was dismissed. During the postwar period, tattoos were associated with rock’n’roll outlaw chic: the greaser, the rocker and the Hell’s Angels. In other words, tattoos were associated with an ‘outsider’ form of ‘cool’. And yet, the original definition of ‘cool’ was to be decidedly icy about the struggles between left and right, socialism and conservatism, workers and bosses. It was to be cool about the possibilities of human progress achieved through social transformation. To display your tattoos was to elevate the self over any commitment to engaging with and changing society.

Of course in an age where human progress has little positive meaning, it’s not surprising that ‘cool’, in its anti-political sense, has become so widespread. But the emptying out of politics has also gone hand-in-hand with a rejection of civilised mainstream values, too. Increasingly, universal standards in public life, from formality of speech to ‘dressing for an occasion’, are seen as irritating, even offensive, reminders of stuffy Old Britain. Anyone who questions the dismantling of such universal standards is seen as an out-of-touch reactionary who needs to ‘chillax’.

Public displays of tattoos, such as swallows on hands to denote having ‘done bird’, were often a sad display of self-loathing by marginalised individuals in society. In the early 1980s, lumpenised punks and skinheads would also have a ‘cut here’ tattoo dotted around their throat. A mixture of personal degradation and outlaw status has, historically, provided tattoos with their shock value.

In recent years, such shock value has now taken the form of the neck tattoo, where huge ink daubings have no place to hide. The comedy writer Armando Iannucci recently said on Twitter that neck tattoos must be ‘the worst sort of career move going’. But that is exactly why some individuals have them; it is a defiant rejection of the formalised dress codes required to advance in most workplaces, a tattooed sneer at the uptight world of white-collar work and ‘office drones’.

Imagining yourself on the margins, and not at the centre of society, is why tattoos have become so popular. Whether it is refusing to hold down a job or, in the middle classes’ case, rejecting bourgeois values, significant sections of society want to vacate the public sphere. Just like the historically isolated social groups with which tattoo wearers seek identification, today a lot of people want to be outside contemporary society. In effect, tattoos are a celebration of powerlessness and marginalisation. Getting tattooed up is simply a way of putting ourselves down.

Neil Davenport is a politics teacher based in London. He blogs at The Midnight Bell.

From hero to zero: Lewis Hamilton. Not only that, he's got Jesus.

John Pilger: Forcing Down Evo Morales' Plane Was An Act Of Air Piracy

First of all, a message to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals generally: ‘Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.

Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency.

Once a whore, always a whore.’ -  George Orwell  1 September 1944

Forcing down Evo Morales's plane was an act of air piracy

Denying the Bolivian president air space was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world
By John Pilger
4 July 2013

President Morales arrives back in La Paz, Bolivia. ‘Imagine the response from Paris if the French president's plane was forced down in Latin America.’

Imagine the aircraft of the president of France being forced down in Latin America on "suspicion" that it was carrying a political refugee to safety – and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale.

Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the "international community", as the governments of the west call themselves. To a chorus of baying indignation from Whitehall to Washington, Brussels to Madrid, heroic special forces would be dispatched to rescue their leader and, as sport, smash up the source of such flagrant international gangsterism. Editorials would cheer them on, perhaps reminding readers that this kind of piracy was exhibited by the German Reich in the 1930s.

The forcing down of Bolivian President Evo Morales's plane – denied airspace by France, Spain and Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement while Austrian officials demanded to "inspect" his aircraft for the "fugitive" Edward Snowden – was an act of air piracy and state terrorism. It was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world and the cowardice and hypocrisy of bystanders who dare not speak its name.

In Moscow, Morales had been asked about Snowden – who remains trapped in the city's airport. "If there were a request [for political asylum]," he said, "of course, we would be willing to debate and consider the idea." That was clearly enough provocation for the Godfather. "We have been in touch with a range of countries that had a chance of having Snowden land or travel through their country," said a US state department official.

The French – having squealed about Washington spying on their every move, as revealed by Snowden – were first off the mark, followed by the Portuguese. The Spanish then did their bit by enforcing a flight ban of their airspace, giving the Godfather's Viennese hirelings enough time to find out if Snowden was indeed invoking article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."

Those paid to keep the record straight have played their part with a cat-and-mouse media game that reinforces the Godfather's lie that this heroic young man is running from a system of justice, rather than preordained, vindictive incarceration that amounts to torture – ask Bradley Manning and the living ghosts in Guantánamo.

Historians seem to agree that the rise of fascism in Europe might have been averted had the liberal or left political class understood the true nature of its enemy. The parallels today are very different, but the Damocles sword over Snowden, like the casual abduction of Bolivia's president, ought to stir us into recognising the true nature of the enemy.

Snowden's revelations are not merely about privacy, or civil liberty, or even mass spying. They are about the unmentionable: that the democratic facades of the US now barely conceal a systematic gangsterism historically identified with, if not necessarily the same as, fascism. On Tuesday, a US drone killed 16 people in North Waziristan, "where many of the world's most dangerous militants live", said the few paragraphs I read. That by far the world's most dangerous militants had hurled the drones was not a consideration. President Obama personally sends them every Tuesday.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel prize in literature, Harold Pinter referred to "a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed". He asked why "the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities" of the Soviet Union were well known in the west while America's crimes were "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged". The most enduring silence of the modern era covered the extinction and dispossession of countless human beings by a rampant US and its agents. "But you wouldn't know it," said Pinter. "It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened."

This hidden history – not really hidden, of course, but excluded from the consciousness of societies drilled in American myths and priorities – has never been more vulnerable to exposure. Snowden's whistleblowing, like that of Manning and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, threatens to break the silence Pinter described. In revealing a vast Orwellian police state apparatus servicing history's greatest war-making machine, they illuminate the true extremism of the 21st century. Unprecedented, Germany's Der Spiegel has described the Obama administration as "soft totalitarianism". If the penny is falling, we might all look closer to home.

www.johnpilger.com

An Interview with Vince Emanuele.

US Iraq War veteran speaks out before Australian tour
June 25, 2013

Question: What attracted you to enlist in the US military as a marine?

Answer: I think the process was long and quite complex. First of all, I was a product of American culture which is, of course, an extremely violent culture. In other words, like many American children, I grew up playing “Army.” Specifically, we would pretend-shoot our friends with plastic guns, watched countless movies that glorified warfare and played very violent video games in our spare time. In short, I was trained to be a murderer for American Empire from a very young age. I think this is a very important component to the process of indoctrinating America’s youth with militaristic ideologies. No matter what, without the process of early-age cultural indoctrination, many young Americans would be much less inclined to join the US military.

For the sake of time, I’ll mention a second component to this process. To me, it’s quite obvious that the US military provides a unique space for expressing and, more importantly, bastardizing gender roles. So, in my case, I was simply fulfilling the traditional “masculine” role of the big, tough, angry, murderous, bar-fighting, heavy drinking, womanizing asshole who cares about nothing more than superficial cultural practices and killing people. You know, the perfect American. In this context, I fell into the trap of performing expected gender roles with murderous results. There is nothing “tough” or “cool” about imprisoning, torturing or killing people. I learned this lesson quite quickly.

Now, while those are my experiences, I must also mention that the process is much more complex, especially for Americans coming from Native American, African American and Latin American backgrounds.

In those particular communities, joining the US military provides a conduit to decent paying job-training programs, housing, healthcare, education and so forth. Remember, here in America, we went through the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression of 1929. So, unfortunately, now, we have what many have called an “economic-draft.” Thus many individuals join for college money, medical benefits or job opportunities. More

Fukushima: I Hate To Say I told You So But . . .

And where is America and the International Community on this? Where they have always been, nowhere to be seen.

Do I see this news having any effect? No. Too many vested interests, and as we know, vested interests always before the interests of the planet.

"And I told you so?" See tags:  Japan - The Planet is Fucked

But what will really piss me off about the whole thing, it won't be the dying of people by the millions, the next great extinction if you will.  It won't be the collapse of the global economy, of world society and all the other associated ills that have yet to come. Those things are inevitable, without irradiating the planet, those things are already in motion and upon us.

No it won't be any of these things. What it will be is this:

That we have done for this ubelievably unique, throughout the Universe planet. This extraordinary pale blue dot, this one in a trillion trillion planets whose very creation is so miraculous, that philosophically speaking, our first act upon waking should be to genuflect ourselves and kiss our Earth Mother and thank her for the life she gives us.

Unfinished.   

Holy Fukushima – Radiation From Japan Is Already Killing North Americans

Radioactive isotopes of the type released from Fukushima have a half-life of 30,000 years. This means that we must permanently change the way we prepare our food.
By Jeromie Williams
Intellihub.com
June 6, 2013

If you live on the west coast of Canada or the United States, you’re pretty much already screwed at this point thanks to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Radiation levels are already increasing in the food and water, babies born with thyroid issues linked to radiation are rising quickly and governments in Canada and the United States are raising the “acceptable levels” of certain toxic substances in the food being shipped in from Japan.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is happening and it’s happening right now.

The fancy little picture at the top of the article isn’t showing you the flow of happy fun time thoughts from Japan back in March of 2012, it’s showing you the flow of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant after the devastating earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Yes, that sharp pain you just felt in your chest is the sudden realization that the image shows the radiation reaching almost past Hawaii more than a year ago.

Do the math – If that radiation screamed across the Pacific Ocean that far in one year, just how far do you think it has gotten since then? Look at what World Truth TV is saying and then you decide.

Samples of milk taken across the United States have shown radiation at levels 2000 percent higher than EPA maximums. More

Note: Not too sure about some of the figures in the article data, I was going to check it out, but this is as far as I got.

Louisiana Overhauls Fucked Up (The Arse) Laws

Previous: Louisiana's Fucked Up (The Arse) Laws Opinion

Louisiana Overhaul of Discriminatory Law: Hundreds Cleared from Sex Offender List

Community groups and lawyers deal blow to the state's over 100 year-old 'Crimes Against Nature' law
Sarah Lazare
June 13, 2013

Over 700 people accused of selling or soliciting sex for money were wiped from the sex offender registry in Louisiana last night after a historic settlement to beat back the state's archaic 'Crimes Against Nature' laws.

The development marked a huge victory for sex workers, members of the LGBTQ community, poor people, and women, who disproportionately bore the brunt of a law that slapped heavy punishments on accused sex workers.

The victory came after Women with a Vision, BreakOUT!, and the Center for Constitutional Rights worked with affected communities to file a class action lawsuit.

"Yesterday when I heard, I was so excited. This was a grassroots, queer-led, effort. People were screaming for change, and they won," declared Deon Haywood, executive director of New Orleans-based Women with a Vision.

Louisiana's Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS), was created in the late 1800s to criminalize sexual devience, and today targets the selling of oral or anal sex for a fee.

Before 2011, police had full discretion over whether to charge accused sex workers with prostitution, which results in a misdemeanor, or CANS, which mandates registration as a sex offender.

Salon reports:

In practice — and particularly in New Orleans, whose police department is currently under a federal consent decree for discriminatory practices — that has meant the disproportionate charging of people of color and LGBT people for “crimes against nature.” The Department of Justice report on discrimination in the New Orleans Police Department noted that “in particular, transgender women complained that NOPD officers improperly target and arrest them for prostitution, sometimes fabricating evidence of solicitation for compensation. Moreover, transgender residents reported that officers are likelier, because of their gender identity, to charge them under the state’s ‘crimes against nature’ statute — a statute whose history reflects anti-LGBT sentiment.”

"There is a thing called guilty of walking while transgender," explained Haywood.

The Center for Constitutional Rights explains that sex offender status heavily penalizes already marginal communities.

People affected by this law have been barred from homeless shelters, physically threatened, and refused residential substance abuse treatment because providers will not accept registered sex offenders at their facilities. As in the earlier case, all plaintiffs in this action proceeded anonymously for fear of retaliation.

A federal judge last year ruled that forcing people convicted of CANS to register as sex offenders violates their constitutional rights. Yet, when hundreds remained on the registry after this federal ruling, community organizations worked with the affected community and lawyers to file the class action lawsuit that was settled last was settled last night.

Community groups explain that the victory was won by people directly affected by the law. "This case would move forward by people standing in their truth and sharing their stories," explains Deon Haywood, whose organizatin takes on issues of Sex Worker Rights, Drug Policy Reform, HIV Positive Women’s Advocacy, and Reproductive Justice outreach, according to their website.

"We did something people said we couldn't do," says Haywood. "They said we couldn't organize the population represented in this case. They said we couldn't win because of who we were. People say change doesn't happen in the south. But it just did." Common Dreams

 - - - - -

The Centre For Constitutional Rights has this, endorsing as it does, everything I said in my previous article.

In Louisiana, people accused of soliciting sex for a fee can be criminally charged in two ways: either under the prostitution statute, or under the solicitation provision of the Crime Against Nature statute. This archaic statute, adopted in 1805, outlaws “unnatural carnal copulation,” which has been defined by Louisiana courts as oral and anal (but not vaginal) sex. Police and prosecutors have unfettered discretion in choosing which to charge. But a Crime Against Nature conviction subjects people to far harsher penalties than a prostitution conviction. Most significantly, individuals convicted of a Crime Against Nature are forced to register as sex offenders.

The registry law imposes many harsh requirements that impacts every aspect of our clients’ lives. For example, they must carry a state driver’s license or non-drivers’ identification document which brands them as a sex offender in bright orange capital letters. They must disclose the fact that they are registered as a sex offender to neighbors, landlords, employers, schools, parks, community centers, and churches. Their names, address, and photographs appear on the internet.

Many of our clients have been unable to secure work or housing as a result of their registration as sex offenders. Several have been barred from homeless shelters. One has been physically threatened by neighbors. And another has been refused residential substance abuse treatment because providers will not accept sex offenders at their facilities. more

News From Spain: Exorcism

I think yer man and I are equally unimpressed with the Catholic Church's mumbo jumbo, but unlike myself, he takes the piss far more subtly than I ever would.

This is not the first time that exorcism, and Father Gabriele Amorth, has received my attention. Links below.

Exorcist squad hired to fight Satan in Madrid
Steve Tallantyre
24 May 2013

The church has selected eight recruits who will undergo special training to combat what has been described as an "unprecedented rise" in cases of "demonic possession".

The Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid, Antonio María Rouco Varela, has taken the unprecedented step of selecting eight priests to lock horns with Satan as expert exorcists.

Press agency EFE reports that the exorcists' specialist ghostbuster training will be led by Cesar Franco, one of the Spanish capital's three auxiliary bishops.

According to online website 'Religious Freedom', the decision was taken personally by Archbishop Rouco Valera to meet an avalanche of requests for help from the faithful to fight their otherworldly foe.

Many alleged victims of demonic possession and evil influence claim to have opened the gateway to hell with occult practices such as black magic, palmistry, Ouija boards and fortune telling.

Sources close to the Archbishop would confirm only that the issue is "being studied".

No priests are currently licensed to perform exorcisms in the Madrid area, and all would-be banishers of evil must be personally approved by the Archbishop himself.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that : "When the Church asks publicly and authoritatively in the name of Jesus Christ that a person or object be protected against the power of the Evil One and withdrawn from his dominion, it is called exorcism."

Church rules say that a "Major Exorcism" can only be performed by a priest authorized by the bishop.

Seasoned exorcists are said to begin with the textbook Rituale Romanum but improvise somewhat once the tête-à-tête with Satan is underway.

Author José María Zavala, whose book, 'This is how you beat the Devil', will be used to train the rookie damned-busters, said that only 18 active exorcists are currently registered in Spain.

Zavala named Father Salvador Hernández Ramón of Cartagena in Murcia, as the Spanish priest generally considered most fit to battle Beelzebub after years of doing regular exorcise routines around the country .

He noted: "Father Salvador spent a year in Rome exorcising with Father Gabriele Amorth. Father Salvador is the top exorcist in Spain, very famous within the church but barely known outside it." The Local Spain's news in English

The Devil Made Me Do It. But Isn't it the 21st Century? Catholic sex abuse scandals are 'evidence the Devil is in the Vatican', says Pope's chief exorcist (How convenient the "Evil One" not pervy priests) Link

Buggery Club To Start Witch Hunt Pope's exorcist squads will wage war on Satan Link

Texas: More School To Prison Pipeline

I had thought to write a few words on this latest perversion, for it can be called nothing other, this latest perversion to come out of America, specifically Texas. But it would appear that I said all that needed saying back in January last year.

What begins immediately below is just as applicable to the latest report as it was to the original, published under the same header.

Texas: How Many Kids Lives Can We Destroy Today?

I have in the past ran a similar story: Texas: Ticket The Children Not but that article didn't come anywhere near this one below, inasmuch that this story delves into the implications of the consequences of receiving a ''ticket'' or being arrested within the Texas school system.

Simply put, if the child holds his hand up in court and pleads guilty to behaving like a child, then his academic career is as good as over. To say nothing of the rest of his life being marred by a criminal conviction.

Or in the case of the very young, primary school kids, who refuse to answer charges, (because they are not legally binding) will find themselves arrested when they turn seventeen, effectively resulting in, the end of a productive life and career.

But it is the same American psyche running through this over-reaction to childhood behaviour, that runs through every walk of American society, punish, punish, punish, destroy all the lives we can. That they do so for trifles, (destroy lives) matters not one iota.

The whole society is perverted and sick, it's on par with the backward theocratic states of the middle east. In fact it's worse, it's a western industrialised nation, it should know better.

When you read on, just take note of the pettiness of some of the ridiculous things that constitute misdemeanours/felonies that are applied to these kids. Stroll on!  Just what kind of society is it that  does this to its children? link

The crux of both this and the previous article.

The complaint also adds that the problems often don’t end there. If students fail to appear in court, or if their parents can’t afford to pay fines, then the state issues an arrest warrant for them when they turn 17. Thus, these tickets “can follow students past high school into their adult lives with many of the same consequences as a criminal conviction for a more serious offense, including having to report their convictions on applications for college, the military or employment.”

In Texas, Police in Schools Criminalize 300,000 Students Each Year

The "good guy with a gun" seems to do a lot more policing than protecting.
By Steven Hsieh
April 12, 2013

In Texas, hundreds of thousands of students are winding up in court for committing very serious offenses such as cursing or farting in class. Some of these so-called dangerous criminals (also known as teenagers) will face arrest and even incarceration, like the honors student who spent a night in jail for skipping class, or the 12-year-old who was arrested for spraying perfume on her neck. These cases have at least one thing in common in that they were carried out by special police officers walking a controversial beat: the hallways and classrooms of public schools.

As political pressure from both sides of the aisle mounts to increase police presence in American schools, evidence suggests adding armed guards will only thrust more disadvantaged youth into the criminal justice system. Civil rights groups say policing our schools will further the institutionalization of what's known as the "school-to-prison pipeline."

To understand the potential consequences of putting police inside public schools, we can take a look at Texas, where students face one of the most robust school-to-prison pipelines in the country. According to the youth advocacy group Texas Appleseed, school officers issued 300,000 criminal citations to students in 2010, some handed to children as young as six years old.

As the New York Times notes, Texas Appleseed and a local NAACP chapter filed a complaint in February against a school district with a particular knack for criminalizing children, especially minorities. The complaint says Bryan Independent School District of Texas’ Brazos County, disproportionately ticketed black students for misdemeanors, potentially violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Black students accounted for 46 percent of tickets issued in 2011 to 2012, despite only making up 21 percent of the student body.

Most of the criminal citations levied against students were for “Class C” misdemeanors, compelling them to miss classes in order to attend court, and often face addition disciplinary action from the district. As the complaint notes, “These students can then face sentences including fines, court costs, community service, probation and mandatory participation in ‘First Offender’ programs.”

The complaint also adds that the problems often don’t end there. If students fail to appear in court, or if their parents can’t afford to pay fines, then the state issues an arrest warrant for them when they turn 17. Thus, these tickets “can follow students past high school into their adult lives with many of the same consequences as a criminal conviction for a more serious offense, including having to report their convictions on applications for college, the military or employment.”

Advocacy groups add that many behavioral problems warranting tickets in Texas schools seem to be rather trivial for something that can lead to a criminal conviction. For example, some “Class C” misdemeanors under the state’s penal code include using profanity, making offensive gestures, creating “by chemical means” an “unreasonable odor” and “making unreasonable noise in a public place” In other words, yelling, farting, wearing Axe body spray and generally being a teenager is officially illegal in Texas.

Many commentators and several Democratic lawmakers scoffed when NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre suggested in the wake of the Newtown shooting that armed guards in schools is “the one thing that would keep people safe,” notoriously adding that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Yet, not long after LaPierre’s press conference, the White House released a plan calling for an additional 1,000 “specially trained police officers that work in schools.” And just last week, an NRA task force released a report fleshing out its proposal to put armed guards in every school. The head of that task force, former GOP Congressman Asa Hutchinson, announced his intentions to run for Arkansas Governor days after the report was released. Go to page two

Needless to say, there is much in a similar vein throughout this blog and can be found under the relative tags.