I am looped in the loops of her hair

penny informant388


...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not...
Milton, Areopagitica





Saturday, February 18, 2006  
The United States has asked the Palestinian Authority to return $50 million in US aid because Washington does not want a Hamas-led government to have the funds.
Aljazeera.Net 17.Feb.06

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 BEYOND CHUTZPAH

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 Heavy rains induced by La Niña blamed
An old woman in white was seen warning residents of Barangay Guinsaugon about an impending disaster days before a landslide buried the town of Saint Bernard, many survivors said yesterday.
No one in the community knew her and her warnings went unheeded.
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WEATHER was the easy target for blame in Friday's devastating landslide in the eastern Philippines, but survivors also were pointing at illegal logging as a contributing factor.
The area has been pelted with heavy rains for two weeks. Fears of a landslide had led local officials to order evacuations of several villages a week ago.
But with the rains tapering off and the sun coming out in recent days, many people had started going home to take care of their crops and animals. It was a deadly mistake.
With a rumble, Mt. Guinsaugon sent a wall of boulders and mud cascading down its side, burying the village of Guinsaugon as if it had never existed. Southern Leyte province Governor Rosette Lerias said the area had been inundated by 27 inches (68 centimeters) of rain over the last two weeks -- double the average for the period.
"The ground has really been soaked because of the rain," Lerias said.
"The trees were sliding down upright with the mud." But officials and residents also blamed illegal logging that started in the 1970s.
"It stopped around 10 years ago," Roger Mercado, a member of Congress who represents the area, told dzBB radio. "But this is the effect of the logging in the past."
Heavy rains, illegal logging blamed

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 Why use them? Why show them?
Arab nations said Thursday that new photos of US troops abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib would only fuel the fury among many already angry over the publication of cartoons that depicted the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist.
Agence France-Press reports many Iraqis were angered and shocked by the photos, but many Iraqi newspapers chose not to run them because they would humiliate the Iraqis shown in the pictures. ABC News reports the Iraqi government condemned the new photos, but also noted that those responsible had already been punished.

Tom Regan/csmonitor 16.Feb.06
One reason might be to gloat, to remind, the equivalent of the crowd screaming and kicking at the captured enemy as they're led into camp. Back in the old days. Now it all happens in the semi-abstract world of images, and reflections of images that are images themselves.
One reason might be to humiliate not just the Iraqis shown in the pictures but Muslim men everywhere.
If you start from a different point of view than the given, then obviously everything's going to look different, too. If you start from the idea that this is happening to gratify lust for revenge and hunger for empire - the nucleus in a constellation of motives that include raw greed and religious delusion as well as simple-minded patriotism, but that the real driver, the core, the engine, is that greater long-time hunger - it makes as much sense, in fact more, than the official version and its shadow twin.
Those versions would be the in-this-context nonsense phrases of "democracy" and "freedom", and shadowing them the knowing explanations of "oil" and "corruption".
We're asked to believe, by both sides in the polarity, that what's happening in Iraq now is the result of incompetence, entirely and solely the inability of the invading powers to manage what they took away from Saddam. One version says the incompetence is poor planning, the other that it's the backwash of unbridled greed.
The result no matter what being chaos and a fragmented infrastructure.
The result also being, intentionally or incidentally, a broken nation that will be no threat at all to the frightened and psychotically-charged little country to its northwest. A broken nation that sits on top of what may be one quarter or more of the last accessible reserves of oil this world will ever see.
In that light - enmity, vengeance, scorn, vendetta, harnessing the dupes of self-interest to their chariots - the consistent goading of Islamic fundamentalists to get them to prove their violent irrationality - before the watching eyes of basically decent people who are still a little undecided about all this - makes strategic sense.
Those basically decent people are bankrolling the whole enterprise after all.
Consider the possibility that the immediate p.r. goal is to refute the humanity of the Muslim world, then add the vindictive kick of shoving these images of degradation into the faces of the already outraged and enflamed, who will then prove their inferiority by violence and rioting - thus justifying the scorn and derision, as well as the clampdowns and denials of freedom and democracy in what's purportedly the "free" and "democratic" West, and building support for further attacks against these violent fundamentalists, in people aghast at murderous rioting over a few cartoons.
What argues against it? Common sense?
Common sense is so far out of the mainstream now it sounds like beatnik poetry.