And that is all.

Click Me! Support The Keith Richards Home For Aging Sluts

Saturday, April 18, 2009

WFRL: Prophet Zimmytime ~


The Prophet Zimmy
When He Returns
Massey Hall, Toronto
20 April 1980


The iron hand it ain't no match for the iron rod,
The strongest wall will crumble and fall to a mighty God.
For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears
It is only He who can reduce me to tears.
Don't you cry and don't you die and don't you burn
For like a thief in the night, He'll replace wrong with right
When He returns.

Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through,
He unleashed His power at an unknown hour that no one knew.
How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice?
How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness?
Can I cast it aside, all this loyalty and this pride?
Will I ever learn that there'll be no peace, that the war won't cease
Until He returns?

Surrender your crown on this blood-stained ground, take off your mask,
He sees your deeds, He knows your needs even before you ask.
How long can you falsify and deny what is real?
How long can you hate yourself for the weakness you conceal?
Of every earthly plan that be known to man, He is unconcerned,
He's got plans of His own to set up His throne
When He returns
~ The Prophet Zimmy

Hitler's Co-Conspirators


Nazareth
Don't Judas Me
New histories reveal that the Nazi Regime deliberately insinuated knowledge of the Final Solution, devilishly making Germans complicit in the crime and binding them, with guilt and dread, to their leaders.

Hat Tip: Chief Defiant Serf of Nanuk

Hitler's Co-Conspirators
by Benjamin Schwarz

The past two years have seen a flood of major works on Nazi Germany, books that include Life and Death in the Third Reich, Peter Fritzsche’s analysis of everyday life; Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, a collection of essays focusing on social history, by Ian Kershaw, the author of the definitive biography of Hitler; Germany and the Second World War: German Wartime Society, the multiauthored, 1,000-plus-page English translation of the ninth volume of the gargantuan, quasi-official chronicle of the war issued by Germany’s Research Institute for Military History; and, just published in March, The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans, the third and concluding volume of a work that will almost certainly be for a generation the authoritative general history of Nazi Germany in English.

The Final Solution is at the heart of all these books. This focus may seem obvious now, but 30 years ago, study of the extermination of the Jews hadn’t yet entered the mainstream of scholarship on Nazi Germany. In fact, the standard single-volume history, Karl Bracher’s analytical The German Dictatorship, devoted a mere 13 of its 580 pages to the subject. Also all but ignored 30 years ago were the attitudes and opinions of Germans toward the Jews and toward the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi regime, an issue that today’s historians consider central. Most striking is these books’ consensus: despite their authors’ different aims and methods, and despite their contending interpretations of a host of questions, they all agree that, contrary to claims made after the war, the German people had wide-ranging and often detailed knowledge of the murder of the Jews.

None of the authors uses that conclusion to render easy moral judgments, nor to argue that the population fervently embraced the regime’s lethal anti-Semitism (pace Daniel Goldhagen’s now largely discredited Hitler’s Willing Executioners). But both indirectly and explicitly, these books make clear that just as the Final Solution itself is now understood to inform so many aspects of Nazi Germany, so too the Germans’ knowledge of the murder of the Jews influenced and altered the history of the Third Reich and the war it started.

Three decades of scholarship (a good deal of it undertaken by Kershaw, as well as by the historian David Bankier, in his innovative study The Germans and the Final Solution) reveal that from the very onset of the war, it was impossible not to know the Jews’ fate. Soldiers and officers wrote home of mass shootings (one letter explicitly details the massacre of 30,000 Jews in a single town), and when they returned on leave, they spoke of the murders in private and in public. Reports of the killing squads, which detailed the number of murders, were routinely routed to midlevel bureaucrats in various departments in Berlin. The “White Rose” student resistance movement in Munich declared in its 1942 manifesto that 300,000 Jews had been killed in Poland, a crime “unparalleled in the whole of history.” News of Auschwitz—the death camp within the borders of the expanded German state, exchange 2258 on the German telephone system—reached the diarist Victor Klemperer in March 1942, and by that October he was describing it as “a swift-working slaughter-house”; another diarist recorded hearing an official of the SS security service on a suburban train brag about the number of victims killed at that camp every week. When the BBC beamed detailed descriptions of the workings of the death camps to Germany in 1942, the Viennese diarist Ludwig Haydn said that “with regard to the mass murder of Jews, the broadcast merely confirms what we know here anyhow.”

The Final Solution, too vast in scale and scope to be comprehended fully, was also too vast to be kept secret, as Evans explains:

Railway timetable clerks, engine drivers and train drivers and other staff on stations and in goods yards could all identify the trains and knew where they were going. Policemen rounding up the Jews or dealing with their files or their property knew as well. Housing officials who reassigned the Jews’ dwellings to Germans, administrators who dealt with the Jews’ property—the list was almost endless … The mass murder of the Jews thus became a kind of open secret in Germany from the end of 1942 at the very latest.

Summing up the evidence he has weighed and sifted for 30 years, Kershaw concludes:

Hard information, not just vague rumor, was being brought back to the Reich and was available. Its extent was considerable, the information itself often impressive in its detail. Only those anxious to shut their ears … could have been utterly ignorant. And only the willfully ignorant could have imagined a drastically different fate for the Jews than was actually in store for them.

Germans responded to this knowledge in various but all-too-predictable ways. True, Nazi rule had penetrated and altered popular attitudes, so by 1939 most Germans believed that Jews should be segregated or removed from the “folk community.” But the anti-Semitism of most Germans stopped far short of genocide—only a small minority overtly approved of the Nazis’ war against the Jews. Of course, an even smaller number publicly condemned Nazi policy and were prepared to help the Jews: whatever their private feelings, most Germans responded outwardly with indifference, and with an attitude nicely characterized by Bankier as knowing “enough to know that it was better not to know more.” Although certainly not a commendable stance, it’s hardly surprising. For one thing, as Kershaw writes, “the vast majority of Germans had plenty of other things on their mind.” The Final Solution reached its height just as Germany’s military fortunes began to ebb. Severe wartime privations, ever-mounting death tolls, growing anxiety about the fate of loved ones engaged in a savage and increasingly desperate struggle on an ever-retreating Eastern Front, the disintegration of everyday life caused by an ever-intensifying Allied bombing offensive against Germany’s cities—all crimped human empathy, to say nothing of collective action.

So, obviously, did fear. Throughout his history, Evans has chronicled the corrosive effects on German society of the Nazis’ network of surveillance and intimidation. In this latest volume, he perceptively highlights the effectiveness of the Nazi state’s coercive methods of winning and sustaining popular compliance, and the constrictions thus imposed on even the most innocuous individual action.

Retrospective condemnation is easy—this was a largely anti-Semitic population that had embraced the psychological and material benefits bestowed by a homicidal regime, and that remained inert in the face of what we now call genocide. But Kershaw’s analysis of a still-obscure study done by Michael Müller-Claudius, a German psychologist, at the very time the Final Solution was being implemented is illuminating. Müller-Claudius prompted 61 longtime Nazi Party members (all had joined the party or the Hitler Youth before the Nazi seizure of power) to discuss anonymously their views of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies. Five percent applauded the notion of exterminating the Jews—but the same percentage fully rejected anti-Semitism. Twenty-one percent displayed a degree of moral sensibility (advocating, for example, a future Jewish state). The remainder, 69 percent, showed what Müller-Claudius called “indifference of conscience”—an attitude that could contain some sympathy for the Jews but was at best resigned and at worst callously uninterested. Many of the respondents in this group linked their indifference to the risks inherent in adopting another, more sympathetic, view: “The Gestapo is very sensitive about it. Talk about the subject is not wanted.” If even longtime party members—people presumably unusually committed to Nazi ideology and well-insulated from the regime’s suspicions—were so cowed, one can imagine the constraints the general population felt.

As the social historians of the Reich probe more deeply, it’s increasingly clear that although knowledge of the Final Solution prompted action by only a heroic few, that knowledge—and Germans’ accompanying quiescence—nevertheless loomed large in the mind, and in many cases the soul, of the nation. This was deliberate on the part of the regime. In their public pronouncements Hitler, Goebbels, and Alfred Rosenberg married the bluntest language about an exterminationist policy toward the Jews with a complete absence of detail regarding implementation of that policy. Or the regime would wink at the population, as in a famous speech Goebbels made in 1943: when describing Nazi plans for the Jews, he said “exter—” and then theatrically corrected himself with the word exclusion. By establishing the murder of the Jews as an open secret—open enough that awareness of it pervaded society but secret enough that it couldn’t be protested or even openly discussed—the Nazis devilishly nudged the nation into complicity, and further bound the population to its leaders.

The crime revealed and concealed by that open secret became for many Germans the central psychological fact of the war. For those with the exceedingly rare courage to support an acute and active conscience—most notably, the conservative aristocratic officers, including Claus von Stauffenberg, behind the July 1944 plot against the Nazi regime—the war of extermination was the Third Reich’s irredeemable disgrace. It was a crime that demanded the Nazis’ overthrow and brought upon Germany a “blood guilt” (the term used almost ritualistically) that could not be expunged. The members of that humane, honorable, retrograde bunch embraced political attitudes ranging from the romantic reactionary to the quasi-corporatist to the quasi-authoritarian. They “bore some of the responsibility for the rise of Nazi rule,” as the historian Winfried Heinemann remarks in Germany and the Second World War, but “they also produced the only resistance that presented any real threat.” (For those dedicated to liberal democratic values—and aren’t we all?—history provides few better lessons of the fact that we must take, and embrace, our heroes where we can find them.)

But the letters, diaries, and SS reports on the popular mood reveal that even for the many who possessed a more commonplace sense of their own interest, the Final Solution emerged as their nation’s defining act, one that would provoke a terrible retribution. This dread was no doubt in part, as Evans maintains, “an unexpected by-product of the continuing Christian convictions of the great majority.” But it was also rooted in a matter-of-fact understanding that, as a soldier who had witnessed the massacre of a village of Jews on the Eastern Front put it, “God forbid we lose the war. If revenge comes upon us, we’ll have a rough time.” The foreboding arose, too, out of virulent anti-Semitism. Even if the Jews had started the war and were therefore responsible for their own suffering, so the thinking went, they would nevertheless thirst for revenge, so the Germans didn’t dare surrender. Indeed, they came to see the Allies’ relentless bombing offensive (which incinerated, suffocated, or blew apart some 600,000 Germans) as, variously, an act of divine justice, an act of righteous retribution delivered by the U.S. and Britain, or the revenge directed by an international Jewish conspiracy. But whatever the force animating this vengeance, its agency—Allied air power—was clear, and Germans seem to have agreed on its cause: what Germany had done to the Jews. The air war, which brought the front to the heart of Germany with increasing terror, seemed to serve as “a link,” as Fritzsche puts it, between “what happened to Jews and what was happening to Germans.” For a very few Germans, this conclusion led to a wish for Germany’s defeat. For most, it spurred a desperate commitment to fight on.

And here the open secret of the Final Solution was pivotal. By 1943 at the latest—the year that inaugurated the most terrible phase of the air war, with the firebombing of Hamburg, and the year in which the Wehrmacht’s back was broken at Stalingrad and Kursk—the war was lost for Germany. Yet for nearly two more years the Germans would continue the struggle. With its fighter force obliterated and its cities naked before the Allies’ fire from the sky, Germany saw civilian deaths in air raids increase nearly tenfold in 1945.

The army, already bled white in a series of desperate retreats, would suffer more battlefield deaths in the final 10 months of the war than it had in the previous five years combined. Many factors help explain the ferocious tenacity of German soldiers and civilians. One of them was a justifiable terror of the Red Army. But the suffering that the German civilians endured came preponderantly from the western powers’ slaughter from the air, and until the very end, German soldiers fought as hard in the west as in the east. Surely, one factor—one whose power cannot ultimately be determined—was the Germans’ fear of the terrible reckoning that must follow from their open secret, a secret Goebbels obliquely but unmistakably shared with the nation in a grim 1943 exhortation to fight to the bitter end: “As for us, we’ve burned our bridges behind us … We will either go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or the greatest criminals.”

The Final Solution had given the Germans no way forward but Armageddon.


Muse
Stockholm Syndrome

I won't stand in your way
let your hatred grow
and she'll scream
and she'll shout
and she'll pray
and she had a name
yeah she had a name

Friday, April 17, 2009

WFRL: That's the Way It's Got To Be


The Poets
That's the Way It's Got To Be

Floatin' Powa News Service vs the Drooling Sycophants of Masterflation


The Rockets
Oh Well!
Now, when I talked to God
I knew He'd understand.
He said, "Stick by me,
I'll be your guiding hand.
But don't ask me what I think of you
I might not give the answer
that you want me to"
Oh well....
MASTERFLATION: (Term Coinage Credit to Q-Burn) ~ The masterful conflating of things or people that have only marginal connections, for purposes of manipulation and / or ego gratification.

Blog 1 ) LOOK! He said THIS about ME! Erroneous! Unheard of! Absurd!
Blog 2 ) LOOK! They said THIS about ME! Slander! Libel! I'll show you! (runs off crying & playing a bongo)
Blog 1) They are in the same room with Freak A & Freak B therefore, TADA, squared!
Blog 2 ) MASTERFLATION x 10 + infinitude, BACK!
Blog 1 ) I am so falsely derided and put upon, wah, look at me, LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEE, dammit!
Blog 2 ) No, No, NO! It is WE who are the authentically derided and oppressed, not you! LIES! Look at Usssss!
Blog 3) WHO GIVES A MFing RATS ASS?

Blog 1 ) Me Akbar! And yet everyone talks shit about me endlessly, oh the huge manatee, wah!
Blogs 2, 7, 9, 11, 13, 22 & 88 ) Talks some shit about him, endlessly.........
Blog 1 ) Ahhhhh HA! SEE? Wah! Wah! I am the grand high exalted virtual martyr!

Blog 1 ) And furthermore, my asshole friends are better than your asshole friends.
Blog 2 ) Oh Yeah? My delusions are better than your delusions!
Blog 1 ) Your delusions are delusional. Only my delusions are correct!
Blog 2 ) My half assed idea of reality is the right one, and you are a [REDACTED]!
Blog 1 ) I GOT MAIL!
Blog 2 ) My good name was besmirched. I have a right to defend it!
Blog 1 ) BESMIRCH!
Blog 2 ) My good name was besmirched. I have a right to defend it!
Blog 1 ) BESMIRCH!
Blog 2 ) Oh Yeah? Well.....BESMIRCH, ALSO... TOO! Plus ten!
Blog 1 ) My good name was besmirched. I have a right to defend it! And all my little dingbats, too! Plus eleventy!
Blog 2 ) MASTERFLATE, TADA, INFINTY to the nth power!
Blog 1 ) NO YOU!
Blog 2 ) NOooooooooOOooo, YOOOOoooooOOOOOUUU!!
Various & Sundry Smaller Blogs of Associated Peanut Galleries)
Wah Wah Wah Wah Wah Wah Wah Wah Waaaaaaaaaaah!!
Masterflate, spit, infinity, repeat!

Blog 3) OYMERTA, already, with this crap!

Blog 1 ) It's not fascism when I do it! I rock! Me akbar, infinity deluxe!
Blog 2 ) My fascist friends are not fascists. Some of their best friends are Jews. I'm not an unwitting beard for their nefarious intent, really, I am not!
(BTW that BabbaZee is BAD, bad, BAD! Please GOD don't ever let her post here!)
Blog 1 ) Freak A + Freak B = TADA, so there, and only our fascism is correct. Yours is not. No, I will not explain.
BTW, that BabbaZee is an unhinged lunatic.
Oh shit....wait a minute..... did I just agree with you?
(runs off crying & playing a bongo)
Blog 2 ) MY GOOD NAME HAS BEEN BESMIRCHED AGAIN! BabbaZee whoOOOooooooOO?
Blog 1 ) I GOT MAIL!
Blog 2 ) I didn't send it! I have class. That horrible loon from the Bronx BabbaZee is behind it!
Blog 1 ) Bullshit! Someone who looks just like you did it, and remember minions, there is no more GOD, the new superhooplewanky turbo deluxe electrotwanky is about to come out, and the DHS would never, ever lie to us! Ron Paul! TaDa!
Blog 2 ) MASTERFLATER! Ta-Daist! Infiltrator!
Superhooplewanky turbo deluxe electrotwanky? WTF?
Blog 1 ) Noodly shitty FUSION music interlude and possibly a quote impugning something or other by snotty tangential inference.

Blog 3) CLUNK !

Earthquake felt in northern Israel
An earthquake hit northern Israel on Friday afternoon. Many Ynet readers – from Haifa to Kibbutz Kfar Blum – reported feeling the earth move for several seconds. There were no reports of injuries. The Geophysical Institute of Israel (GII) confirmed that a series of 10 mild earthquakes hit southern Lebanon Friday afternoon. The strongest tremor, which was felt in northern Israel, erupted at 2:04 pm and measured 4.2 on the Richter scale.
Lieberman: Israel still forming its foreign policy

Obama wants Israel to hold parallel talks with Palestinians and Syria

Straight outta the Baker Plan, it was precisely what GWB & Condi pressed for as well.

US sees Arab peace plan as part of Palestinian state push

The "Arab Plan" is virtually identical to the Baker Plan, just a different REGIONAL BRAND NAME.

Yossi Melman: I would advise attacking Iran
Yeah, me too.

Saudi Gazette: ‘Isms' have no place in Islam
DaWahin-g for Sharia Finance.

Donors pledge $5 billion aid for Pakistan
Financing for Sharia.

Bailed cleric calls for Islamic order in Pakistan
The most radical mosque in Islamabad reverberated Friday with calls for jihad as a cleric released on bail asked thousands of people to make sacrifices to turn Pakistan into an Islamic order.

Maulana Abdul Aziz, captured two years ago during a siege on the radical Red Mosque, was freed from house detention Thursday after the Supreme Court granted bail on a surety bond worth 200,000 rupees (2,500 US dollars).

The elderly cleric faces around two dozen cases involving terror, abduction and abetting the seizure of government property, but has yet to stand trial.

"We will continue our struggle to enforce Islamic order in the country," said Aziz, delivering the main Friday sermon to nearly 4,000 worshippers overflowing from the Red Mosque.

"Will you render sacrifices?" he cried to a unanimous response of "yes".

WILL YOU?

Iran to hold OIC investment conference late April

WSJ: Speaking Truth to Muslim Power
'The United States is not at war with Islam and will never be. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject."

So spoke President Barack Hussein Obama in Turkey last week. Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, Mr. Obama wants to avoid labeling our enemy in religious terms. References to "Islamic terrorism," "Islamic radicalism," or "Islamic extremism" aren't in his speeches. "Jihad," too, has been banished from the official lexicon.

But if one visits the religious bookstores near Istanbul's Covered Bazaar, or mosque libraries of Turkish immigrants in Rotterdam, Brussels or Frankfurt, one can still find a cornucopia of radical Islamist literature. Go into the bookstores of Arab and Pakistani immigrant communities in Europe, or into the literary markets of the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent, and you'll find an even richer collection of militant Islamism.

TURKEY: Obama in sync with Alliance of Civilizations:

US President Barack Obama reinforced the aims of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) when he said in a speech to the Turkish Parliament that the United States is not and will never be at war with Islam, State Minister Mehmet Aydın said yesterday.
Americas leaders head for summit
Leaders from across the Americas are gathering for a summit which will see most of them meeting US President Barack Obama for the first time. The global economic crisis and US-Cuban relations are expected to dominate the summit in Trinidad and Tobago.

All eyes on Trinidad and Tobago ahead of summit

Commentary: Obama treating Mexico as an equal

Police uncover alleged plot to kill Evo Morales
Alleged being the operative word. Sometimes an alleged assasination attempt is intentional propaganda.

Expelled UN nuclear inspectors leave North Korea
U.S. State Department spokesman Robert Wood said their departure would be "a step backward."
YA THINK?

Gorbachev: US military power blocks `no nukes'
President Barack Obama's call for a nuclear weapons-free world is welcome, but the huge U.S. defense budget may prove an "insurmountable obstacle" to reaching that goal, former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said Thursday.
Yeah, well, one can only hope so.

RUSSIAN / US ARMS TALKS TO BEGIN NEXT WEEK
Russian and U.S. officials will begin negotiating a new deal next week to cut strategic nuclear weapons, the Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

The deal aims to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and has been billed as part of an effort by Moscow and Washington to reset relations that hit a post-Cold War low under former U.S. President George W. Bush.

"The first official contact on this theme will take place on April 24 in Rome," chief ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko told a news conference.
Obama's Nuclear Weapons Plan
Early this April, President Obama unveiled his vision for strengthening the world’s nuclear non-proliferation regime: renewed arms reduction talks with Russia and the creation of an international fuel bank in Kazakhstan to provide fuel services to non-weapons states.
Barak to Russia: Don't sell advanced missiles to Iran
Russia to Barak: Die Jew! DIE, already!

Ex-PM warns of economic chaos, revolution in Russia
Anarchy! Atonal music! A six of Bud will cost you $80,000 rubles!

Chechnya move worries Russian press

Worries me too. OooOO, wait, Masterflate = I'm a commie, TADA!

Russia angered by NATO exercises
Angering Russia? Provocateurs! Unheard of! Absurd!
Russia has asked Nato to cancel or postpone military exercises that it plans to hold in Georgia next month. Moscow's envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, described the exercises, expected to involve 1,300 troops from 19 countries, as "absurd and a provocation".

RUSSIA: NATO exercises 'a dangerous move'
Don't make Vlad get his flying monkeys, see?

Further Provocations!
Georgia and Russia accused each other on Thursday of building up troops and armour at the de facto borders between their forces, and preparing "provocations."
PUTIN TO IGOR: All their Stans are belong to us!
We need to maintain close contacts and coordinate all our actions with our strategic partners. ... I mean Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan," Putin told Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin and Gazprom chief Alexei Miller at a meeting. "Please, don't forget about this work."
President of Turkmenistan meets with US State Secretary

US in Afghanistan transit talks with Turkmenistan

US seeks transit deal with Turkmenistan
Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher says he discussed the possibility of overland cargo transit and overflights in Wednesday's talks with President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov.

The United States has already managed to secure agreements on sending nonmilitary supplies overland through Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan also shares a border with Afghanistan. Worsening security on the Afghan border with Pakistan has forced NATO allies to seek safer transit routes.

Boucher also said Thursday the new U.S. administration is placing a greater emphasis on Central Asia.

Iran, Turkmenistan discuss gas issues
Gas issues? I recommend BEANO

International silk road rally for Kazakhstan

China to allocate to Kazakhstan $10 billion

PetroChina May Pay $1.4 Billion for Stake in Kazakh Oil Company


China & Kazakhstan vow to boost bilateral enterprises

Kazakhstan's President arrives in Hainan for Asian Forum


TIMELINE: China tots up $45 bn of "loan-for-oil" deals in 2009


Mike Morgan files federal lawsuit against Goldman Sachs

A Jensen Beach man who in March launched Web sites critical of Goldman Sachs & Co. this week filed a federal lawsuit against the banking behemoth, after being warned by its attorneys the Internet domain names amount to trademark infringement.

In Michael Morgan’s lawsuit, he rejects claims that his Web sites, goldmansachs666.com, and goldmansachs13.com violate the company’s trademarks, or constitute unfair competition or cyber-piracy.

After receiving a warning letter April 8 from a Sachs attorney threatening legal action if he didn’t stop using the disputed domain names, Morgan sued in federal court, requesting that a judge determine who may claim a legal right to the names.

At Morgan’s Web site, he describes it as “an open forum for facts and discussion about what part Goldman Sachs and their executives played in the current Global Economic Crisis.”

AIG Chief Owns Significant Stake in Goldman
SHOCKA DELUXE WITH SPRINKLES, NOT!

Goldman Gets Europe Going
Higher-than-expected Q1 profits from the bank send European equities up.
Dr. Doom: The 'Stress Tests' Are Really 'Fudge Tests'
OK, but WTF is a "fudge test"?
Ohhhh fudge, as in LIE. Gotcha:
The spin machine about the banks' stress test is already in full motion. Some banking regulators have already served up--to The New York Times--their spin that all 19 banks that are subject to the stress test will pass it. In other words, not one will fail. But let's look at the actual data. The macro data for the first quarter on the three variables used in the stress tests--growth rate, unemployment rate and home-price depreciation--are already worse than those in the U.S. government baseline scenario for 2009. They are, in fact, even worse than those for the stressed scenario for 2009.

Call to make bank stress tests public
Good luck with that.

Bernanke: ‘Fundamentally Optimistic’ About Economy
Hmmmmm, where have I heard that utter crapola before? Oh Yeah! Here and There and Everywhere. However, the empirical evidence begs to differ. But who you gonna believe, prole, your own eyes? Or our fearless leaders?

Latest Roubini Interviews On Bloomberg and Forbes

WSJ:Veterans a Focus of FBI Extremist Probe
Never Mind. Go back to sleep, Igors, only unhinged loons like me are speaking about this, right? Of course right! ZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Blogs have gone from eccentric to essential financial reading


Minnesota fighter squadron wins Raytheon Trophy

Raytheon to Provide Providence, RI, with Improved Port Surveillance

EPA to Propose Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Can't we just put BEANO in the Greenhouses? No?
The GREEN they are interested in preserving with this bullshit goes CHACHING.

Plouffe Daddy Bloviates at Harvard

Palin applauded at anti-abortion event in Indiana
Put her on the FUSION list, she's a terrorist!

Fed to invest $13B in US high-speed rail

ALL THE BETTER TO TRANSPORT YOU TO GULAG, PROLE!

NJ nuclear plant probes possible radiation release

Blind Lemon Paterson Introduces Same-Sex Marriage Bill


How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Obamanable
by Bobby Jindal
“I don't think we should question President Obama's patriotism or his intentions.”
Is that right? IT'S NEVER FASCISM WHEN WE DO IT!

Shitload of articles concerning Obama covering the Name of Jesus at Georgetown


Control of Cybersecurity Becomes Divisive Issue
The National Security Agency has been campaigning to lead the government’s rapidly growing cybersecurity programs, raising privacy and civil liberties concerns among some officials who fear that the move could give the spy agency too much control over government computer networks.
Role of Bush NSA Plan Under Review
The Bush administration planned last year to direct the National Security Agency, which specializes in spying electronically on foreign adversaries, to take the techniques it has employed to defend military computer networks and use them to protect U.S. government civilian networks, according to current and former officials.
5.5 & 5.1 rock eastern Afghanistan

6.0 Strikes Mentawai

Italian mafia looks for earthquake cash

TA-DA!
You have now arrived at the end of the internet!

Thank you, Mask Man!



NFL (Nice Fuckin' Life)
Anthrax

WFRL: Two For The Road


Low Rawls
Tobacco Road



The Animals
Tobacco Road

WRFL: Tea For Two...


Tea For Two
Lester Young - Tenor Sax
Nat King Cole - Piano
Red Callender - Bass

Los Angeles California ~ July 15, 1942


... and two for tea!
Yeah that's right we're havin some fuckin' tea here....
Wasamatta?
Youse ain't never seen two gentlemen at tea before?

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Tea & Sympathy ~


The Teapacks
Push The Button

AMERICAN INFIDEL, CHICAGO:

Let me begin by saying that both republicans & democrats were nailed for their taxing & spending...

This was not an event that singled out a political party, both parties were bashed equally.
This event was about peoples $$$ & the fact that they have had it with "big government, its runaway spending, taxing and constant grabs of power resulting in the loss of their GOD GIVEN RIGHTS”.

99.9% of the people present were quite aware of their Constitutional rights, there were a few nuts (maybe only a handful) that were 9-11 Truthers’ & Anti-War Activists - they did not disrupt the protest & spent the majority of their time passing out flyers. I saw no evidence of CODE PINK or any other more violent Gramscian Whore Organizations (GWO's).

People of all stripes were there:
-The young (pre-teens)
-The teenagers
-The 20 something’s
-The tattooed
-The tattooed & pierced
-The 3 piece suits
-The jean wearers
-The middle aged
-The old

Majority male, majority white (very few Blacks or Hispanics) but they were represented in tiny numbers. Women were well represented, but definitely not in the same numbers as men. From what I was able to see there were no Black or Hispanic women in attendance, though I was not in the center of the crowd but on its periphery.

The protest was being held in the Loop, at the plaza just north of the Dirksen Federal Building (the building itself was designed by Mies Van Der Rohe. Found on the plaza is a sculpture by Alexander Caldwell, a Flamingo – it’s that red/orange metal thing you see rising over the crowd in the pictures). I think I saw one camera & one of Chicago’s MSM personalities, but since I haven’t watched the news in ages I couldn’t say for sure.

Police were present but they had little to concern themselves with, except to keep a portion of the sidewalk clear so people passing by wouldn’t have to walk in the street. I am not sure how to estimate the numbers, I would say at least 1000 (a poor showing for Chicago, but I am sure you all can understand why - this is not only ObamaLand but GWO land & the well oiled Democratic Chicago Machine is ON at all times).

Personally I was disappointed by the size of the crowd, especially in a city that has close to 3 million residents & a few more million people in the surrounding suburbs, but this is ObamaLand after all… I am looking forward to my next protest…

GRAMMY CRACKER, MICHIGAN:

I shot hundreds of photos today, Crumb Crunchers...these are but a few. I won't have time to review and sort them all until tomorrow, but I wanted you to have a feel for what went on here today as soon as possible.

It was AMAZING! The State Police aerial surveillance estimated the crowd at 4,000 to 4,200. As you can see from some of the pictures, the place was ROCKIN'! I hope you had as much fun at your location as I did at mine.

I haven't done any fancy editing or cropping, I just resized these so they would upload here. Look for more and even better stuff tomorrow.




A 'Cast of Thousands'!





Looking East on Michigan Avenue





Ha! Great Sign!







Socialism. I see a theme here.





It was a VERY diverse crowd.





Joe 'The Plumber' and our own Joan Fabiano





Ya think?


URBAN INFIDEL, NYC:


I went to the New York City Tax Day Tea Party downtown this evening. I knew that there was going to be a lot of people, but I never expected this many!According to NYPD reports, there were 12,500 people! Go to Parcbench for details. Congratulations to Kellen Guida at Parcbench who organized it.


I have never seen so many people turn out for an event like this before here in New York City.


It was a beautiful evening. Lower Manhattan is quite beautiful.



It was completely peaceful and orderly. The mood was excited and positive. As far as I could see there were no 'right wing' extremists. There were a tiny fringe faction of Paulians and a minuscule smattering of the sadly prerequisite troofers milling about afterward but none of the 'infiltrations' that were warned about. Just regular people.




























A woman drew this sign in her truck with her husband on the way from Texas. There were so many great handmade signs that I wanted to take pictures of but it was so crowded, moving around freely as I normally do was impossible.


"I HOPE things CHANGE in 2012"
Yes. Me too!

SEE ALSO FROM MARCH 12:
Talkin' Kamel: Tempest at a Tea Party



Janis Ian
Tea & Sympathy

When I have no dreams
to give you anymore
I'll light a blazing fire
and wait within the door
And throw my life away,
"I wonder why?" they all will say
And now I lay me down to sleep,
forever and a day

Pass the tea and sympathy,
for the good old days are dead
Let's drink a toast to those
who best survived the life they've led
It's a long, long time 'til morning,
so build your fires high
Now I lay me down to sleep,
forever by your side