Blog-IT-o ergo sum

	7/18/2004

Freedom Watch

I bet you didn't know you could be arrested for playing chess in the wrong country.

(It does look like chess can be dangerous to your mental health as well.)

Update: Not a bad suggestion here that Mr. Fischer's arrest coincides with Japanese government efforts to re-unite a kidnapped Japanese woman with the husband she gained while in North Korea captivity - a husband who just happened to be a American army deserter still being sought for extradition to face charges in the US.

9:00:25 PM

comment []

Real News

The three top news stories getting little coverage or discussion in the mainstream press:

1) The Foreign Policy and preemptive war policies of the United States will not be changing measureably under a Kerry adminstration.

2) The planned merger of the USA into an supra-national EU type system of governance.

3) The economic recovery in the country is being done with smoke and mirrors and mountains of mortgage debt.

6 months from now we will revist these "stories."

3:10:07 PM

comment []

Fringe or Frontier?

On the admonition of Ed Cone, just to make sure I am not being mislead by by the tin foil hat crowd, I've gone back through the whole Hersch ACLU speech video from its intro at the 1:06 mark. This is what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears:

Hersh is introduced as having been called a terrorist by Richard Pearl. He comes on then and says the government has been taken over by the neocons - "a cult." (one that others have put Richard Pearl in) In this cult, he calls Wolfowitz the "genius in the background." Three seperate times throughout speech he links Wolfowitz to Trotsky and in fact directly says, "Paul Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our time."

Hersh also says that the neocons have succeeded in silencing all the checkpoints in our Democracy, including the mass media, which are supposed to avoid this kind of takeover and the results that follow.

Now along comes a review that honestly covers this major thread in Hersh's speech and Ed would like to dismiss (in the comments box) the journalist as a "crackpot. Not fair!

Also, while I know the name of their site bumps their traffic way up, on Raimondo we are talking about the lead journalist at a site whose #37 Amazon Alexa popularity rating is just behind the Associated Press.

The antiwar.com people are are not on the fringe they are on the frontier.

(get the whole transcription of the Hersh speech compliments of johnathan@pastpeak.com)

9:23:51 AM

comment []