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Fleas biting an elephant’s skin: that’s the image that comes to mind when I read all the negative criticism being lobbed at Gunter Grass’s revelation that as a teenager he was a member of Hitler Youth. What is noble is that no book─in politics as well as in fiction─has done more than The Tin Drum to advance the creation of a freer and progressive Germany. Also, it is hard to imagine magic realism without Grass’s prototype: Oskar Matzerath, the boy who willed himself to stop growing. The influence that Grass had on Rushdie,

I received an email today, obviously part of an orchestrated PR campaign to counter the bad press Israel has been getting of late, with the subject line, "Photos of Israel that will never make the news". Here's a sample:

When a fish dies in the water it goes belly up. This is a law of physics having to do with center of gravity. When battle is imminent and one contender sees no chance of victory, he too may go belly up. You can often observe this trait literally in a pet that rolls over deliberately displaying its lack of defenses when its master approaches. Physics is not given credit for this phenomenon but in a sense perhaps it should receive at least some credit, because going belly up during a contention is a survival trait. It is pretending to be dead to protect oneself from really being dead. This strategy of going belly up does not always work; especially if the conqueror considers the conquered food, but it must have worked often enough to have become part of our survival strategy. You may ask what going belly up (pretending to be dead) and going belly up when really dead has in common. For the rational person they, of course, have nothing in common. Mythologically (something not true that has truth in it), however, a connection can be made. For the defense mechanism of pretending to die to be truly affective, the contender must truly die. Again this is a mythological statement. To the logical mind it is complete and utter nonsense, but to the irrational (the intuitive) self it is comprehensible. The defeated must truly assume himself dead to convince his adversary. For survival purposes the conqueror must believe his opponent is dead, otherwise he must render his adversary truly dead to assure his own survival. I assume that goal was originally in dispute for there to be a violent confrontation.

Now that we have more than 2,700 dead American soldiers in operation Iraqi Freedom, I think it's time to focus on an issue that seems to have shriveled into thin air here at home, the tragedies of 9/11. The Administration no longer dangles the terrifying 3-digit carrot to evoke panic and fear. It's almost like they read the polls and the newspapers, not that they would admit to changing rhetoric to improve poll numbers. But honestly, when was the last time you heard the mention of the date in the MSM. Personally myself today was the first time in a long time. And my sorrowful reminder of one of the saddest events in American history was this headline, "State Agency Goes Ahead With 9/11 Memorial." The families of 9/11 victims are finally going to get their memorial. Will this be a beacon of closure signaling the suffering of these tortured souls has reached its end? Can a Nation now mourn in person, as we remember that fateful day? Well sort of.

As part of immigration reform, the Feds are about to put in place an employment verification system that, if abused, could turn any American into an untouchable unable to find gainful employment in the United States. Sadly the phrase "You'll never work again in this town..." is about to take on a sinister new meaning.

Read the rest at Blognonymous.

Good old Yankee common sense tells us that it is dangerous and wrong for a foreign government to be in charge of any of our seaports.

But common sense, and truthful motives, are in short supply in the Bush administration. We are now in a tornado of Dubai World Ports and United Arab Emirates spin by the Bush administration.

We are being told that Americans who object to this deal are Arab and Muslim bashing bigots. That we are destroying our trade relations with the Middle Eastern world. That Dubai Ports World used to support terrorist states, but since 9/11 they are our fast friends (see my "UAE Not US Supporter Since 9/11" and "Portsgate: Public Outrage be Damned" blogs). And most absurd, that there are more important issues.

Here is the headline of a piece in the WaPo written by Josh White:Detainee in Photo With Dog Was 'High-Value' SuspectOne might get a sense that maybe just a little torture might be okay if he really was a "high-value" suspect, eh? The second paragraph reads like this:

Although officials characterized the other detainees who appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs as common criminals and rioters, the orange-clad detainee seen cowering before the dog was different. Detainee No. 155148 was considered a high-value intelligence source suspected of having close ties to al-Qaeda. According to interviews, sworn statements from soldiers and military documents obtained by The Washington Post, Ashraf Abdullah Ahsy was at the center of a military intelligence "special project" designed to break him down, and was considered important enough that his interrogation was mentioned in a briefing to high-ranking intelligence officials at the Pentagon.

Gee, I feel my resolve weakening, maybe just the dogs, but nothing more okay? At least he was a "high-value" suspect so he had it coming.

A week later, the results of Haiti's first ostensibly "democratic" presidential election since the ousting of democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide are still indeterminate. Why is that?

I have had the worst consumer experience of my life with Tata Indicom. Their broadband service is atrocious. This week I had 50 hours downtime. I befriended some of the company's local engineers, who I think are highly skilled and hard-working. They told me that Tata's head office in Hyderabad is refusing to give them permission to install a new server and replace the faulty one. They also told me that Hyderabad did not know what it was doing and admitted that head office just gives meaningless excuses.

Initially, I thought it was an anti-Kolkata thing, that Tata Indicom was deliberately concentrating all its resources in the "IT hubs" of Bangalore and Hyderabad. But 50 hours downtime is just absurd. How can anyone run a business with such atrocious service.

This first published on Two for Tea
The government will announce plans early 2006 for a national zero
tolerance campaign against kerb crawlers and street prostitution see here from
the Guardian.
See also the BBC on the subject here.
Previous position
In July 2004 the Home Office launched a consultation document,
initiation what could have been radical rethink on prostitution laws in
the UK. Ministers were saying they were “open-minded”

The document (here) estimates 80,000 people are involved in
prostitution, the vast majority of them women who were addicted to hard
drugs.

The then Home Secretary David Blunkett said the rethink aimed to do three things:
Prevent girls being coerced onto the streets.
Protect those already in the sex trade
Bring to justice criminals controlling the lives of these women.

The proposals in the document were mostly based on methods used in
other countries. They included creating "managed tolerance
zones", areas of a city or town where prostitutes are allowed to work
while also being targeted with appropriate support in getting out of
the trade. Other ideas included licensing brothels and
registering sex trade workers.

All Change
That has now changed. Ministers are now expected to rule out overhauling the 50-year-old prostitution laws.

The Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart told the Guardian that
effective policing rather than an overhaul of the laws was the
answer. But she does not explain what the question now is, or why
and how it has changed in the last 6 months

Ms Mactaggart wants a national zero tolerance campaign against kerb
crawlers and street prostitution. She observers that “The power
to confiscate driving licences already exists. We want the police to
use that power more."

The police are expected to be encouraged to set up safe houses and
other schemes to help the women involved get out of the trade. Greater
efforts will also be made to close brothels masquerading as massage
parlours and saunas.

She said tough measures were needed to tackle the markets for
prostitution. "I'm not tolerant of the view that prostitution is the
oldest profession in the world and there's nothing we can do to reduce
it"

She may or may not be able to reduce prostitution, but she will certainly push
it further underground, making prostitutes more vulnerable. But
out of sight is the same as reduction if
you only worry about opinion polls.

You Can Not Be Serious
Ms Mactaggart says she wants to ensure her good work on trafficking is
joined-up with a prostitution strategy that helps women out of
prostitution but also deals with the demand for prostitutes,"

Basically she plans to “join up” trafficking which is illegal and
prostitution which is not, without any new legislation.
So avoiding any parliamentary scrutiny. It is hardly
surprising she wants to avoid parliamentary scrutiny. Her
arguments so far are not impressive.

She points out that men who choose to use prostitutes are
indirectly supporting drug dealers and abusers. The same thing could be
said of any one who employs a drug user in any way. Does she
intend to use this as an excuse to crack down on any one unknowingly but legally
employing a drug user?

Nor does she explain how she plans to rehabilitate 80,000 hard drug
users or
how she expects all these hard drug users to fund their habits once
there customers have been removed. She does not seem to
appreciate that these peoples problem is the drugs not prostitution.

Most worryingly she claims prostitution is a form of child abuse, as
most women who are prostitutes started being prostitutes at the age of
13 or 14.

It is a crime to sexually abuse a child of 13 or 14 whether or not
money is involved. This should be reason to act in itself.

An adult choosing to sell sex is not committing a crime. There is
no legal or moral basis to equate the two. She seems confused as
to what is illegal and what is not.

Someone Who Actually Knows What They are Talking About
Carrie Mitchell, of the English Collective of Prostitutes, told the BBC
that while the Home Office was talking about crime and drugs, women
became prostitutes because of poverty - and punitive measures would do
nothing to help.

"The plan goes against all the evidence that shows that criminalisation
and crackdowns make sex workers more vulnerable to rape, other violence
and even murder," Ms Mitchell told BBC News.

"In Sweden legislation introduced to criminalise the buying of sex has had a devastating effect on prostitute women.

"Neither the poverty that forces women into prostitution to support
themselves and their families - or any of the grave injustices in the
existing legislation - have been addressed."

Ms Mitchell said the use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and prison
sentences against women were counter-productive as they made it more
likely they would return to prostitution rather than leave it behind.
She also attacked an increase in immigration raids on brothels run by
international gangs, saying the women ultimately deported at the end of
the process were extremely vulnerable.
We Know What’s Best For Everyone

Ms Mactaggart for her part says she considers it was wrong to regard
those involved in prostitution as sex workers. Although
there was no report as to how she does regarded them. Not to be
trusted with making decisions as to what to do with there own bodies
obviously.

These proposals are expected to form a key part of the next phase of
Tony Blair's drive against antisocial behaviour. Further
reinforcing the perception that anti-social behaviour is now defined as
any kind of behaviour that Tony Blair does not personally approve of.

If the government has decided to outlaw prostitution on moral grounds
then it should come out and say so, and legislate accordingly, rather
than use anti-social behaviour orders in its latest attempt at moral
engineering.

A good post and comments on the subject can be found at
samizdata.net where I found some interesting background on the
Contagious Diseases Acts. Which was all new to me.

Technorati tags : ASBO, New Labour, prostitution, sex

Hasn't it occured to anyone that Bush doesn't make these decisions? Isn't it true that he is just a puppet?

The Grindstaff Chronicles

From President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the NationJanuary 17, 1961:

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

2005 September 2

Age of unReason

In an environment where blind ideology increasingly seems to trump reality, it is discouraging to see that medicine is not immune to arbitrary politicization. Dr. Susan Wood, director of the Office of Women's Health at the Food and Drug Administration, resigned yesterday over the agency's refusal to certify the emergency contraceptive "Plan B" for over-the-counter sales, in opposition to the opinion of its own medical experts.The reason given for the indefinite postponement, which is functionally a rejection, was that the agency could not create rules to govern the sale of the drug by pharmacies to persons under the age of 17. The fact that the same pharmacies are licensed to sell alcohol and tobacco, which have been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths annually, is enough to dispel such a flimsy pretext. A rebuttal from FDA is available here.At a time when the integrity of the FDA's drug approval policy has been called into question, it stretches the imagination that any organization would further damage its credibility with such an obviously political decision. The politically powerful extreme right wing apparently has contraception in its sights, aiming to turn women into society's reproductive slaves. It is in the interests of all who do not want to see the United States become a third-world country to act to reverse the theological domination of science and medicine.

Jojo
Chicana

“Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged”.
“Get back, get back, get back Jojo, get back to where you once belonged”.
Lennon/Mcartney

Jojo was already in line at
the last of her bus stops,
doctored in the in’s and out’s
of all those sliding doors that have
the distinctive smell of disinfectant,
vomit, urine, shit and the protective
silence imposed on those lucky children
who found a helping hand in that
monstrous autocratic system that jerks us
all off with what they call “charity”.

Her face was harden with the expression of
a thirty year old woman child beaten far
to0 many times by far too many people.
Mother’s last pimp had entered her room
silently with the putrefied intention
of proposing the family business and something else,

a lesson she would never forget.
That was the day of her twelfth birthday.
Much to Jojo’s surprise she had discovered
her body had the strength of a man
and her soul was chained to a dragon
marred by the irrational fury caused
by that tumbling effect of parents
that abandon their children as easy prey
to packs of roaming vultures.

It took five police agents, the protectors of Jojo’s
rights, to rescue the mothers dying pimp,
while she herself was rapped around the hands of the
vengeful dragon unable to breath, the dragon
consuming every thought with its’ rage, setting
fire to all that laid hidden in her woman child memory
until there was nothing but two bodies place carefully
in a in a forensic freezer Downtown Tucson.

All five of the police agents ended up in the emergency
room of some hospital either laughing or crying.
none of them believing that this had been
the day Jojo had gotten in touch with the child
lost inside her. Judged and condemned to death
at the age of thirteen
she laughed as she walked handcuffed out of the
courtroom where Lorretta Mendoza Duchess of all

Those “New Age” meetings had promised herself that
never would something as barbaric as this happen again
in her precious back yard, her lovely city, Tucson She found the perfect solution, a shelter for
children molested by unconscious parents lost
In the sport of re-creative drug use that consume the lights of reason.

“Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged”.
“Get back, get back, get back Jojo, get back to where you once belonged”.
Lennon/Mcartney

Pat Robertson, the American televangelist (of the "700 Club" fame, or rather infamy) has issued a fatwa for the assassination of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela for "spreading communism and Islamic extremism." The "free press," those obsequious hired hands of the highest bidders for their services, will doubtless laugh it all off, and refuse to discuss the serious implications of the issue.  Robertson has quite bluntly stated that the reason he wants Chavez dead is that the Venezuelan government, according to Robertson, poses a threat to US economic interests. In today's US politics, it is apparently quite acceptable for a religious leader like Robertson constantly to meddle in purely political and economic affairs. On the other hand, when the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued his call for Salman Rushdie's assassination on purely religious grounds, as the latter had, among many other indiscretions, called the Prophet of Islam a whoremonger, Western liberals didn't lose any time in joining their conservative brethren in condemning the fatwa.  Robertson's fatwa came only a couple of days after Pope Benedict's call on Moslem leaders (while visiting Germany!) to fight terrorism (as if real religious leaders were in the business of promoting anything other than religion), without once mentioning the terror inflicted by the US on the people of Iraq for their oil. It is clear that whereas religion in the East is a component of nationalist resurgence against capitalism and imperialism, religion in the West is increasingly a handmaiden to the interests of the Empire.  http://alse.blogspot.com

This piece is being crossposted from Comments From Left Field.

Many thanks to Mark Crispin Miller for posting the full audio of a speech given by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at a private party in Georgia on August 2. I have clipped out the relevant two minutes of this speech and transcribed it for everyone to see. Bottom line, Schumer admits to, in effect, a new Democratic strategy whereby he and the DSCC leadership will choose who will run against vulnerable Republicans. The case he uses is our own fight for the seat held by Rick Santorum. Here is the audio clip in mp3 format.