Over at Salon today, Glenn Greenwald has posted a terrific, take no prisoners rebuttal (more a demolition) to an article published in the NY Times about how the citizens of Pakistan harbor dark and paranoiac thoughts about the United States, and of course, Israel (and India). It’s a well-established fact that some absolutely insane conspiracy theories are widely believed by the Arab man in the street. Even elite media types—people who travel a lot for work—fall prey to and propagate such memes—like the long discredited anti-Semitic text Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was made into a TV mini-series in Egypt. Yes, it’s safe to conclude that utterly false, and quite unhelpful conspiracy theories about the USA are common currency in the Arab world… but… but what about the batshit crazy stuff Americans believe about the Middle East, Islam and Arabs?

From Greenwald:

Initially, it’s worth asking how these “conspiracy theories” compare to this: from the front page of The New York Times, September 8, 2002: 

More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today. . . . In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. . . . An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons. An Iraqi opposition leader also gave American officials a paper from Iranian intelligence indicating that Mr. Hussein has authorized regional commanders to use chemical and biological weapons to put down any Shiite Muslim resistance that might occur if the United States attacks.

*Ahem*

He goes on to give example after example of mind-numbing misstatements of fact, fear of the other—and just plain awful reporting—all courtesy of America’s chattering classes, i.e. the folks who are supposed to be better informed than the public, the media elites.

It’s not hard to conclude that there are extreme misconceptions on both sides of the equation. If you watch, say, Al Jazeera in English (which is all we really have access to) it’s a pretty measured news organization, much more BBC than Fox News, that’s for sure. But look at our media here and the flouting of woefully misinformed—just fucking stupid—people like Sarah Palin as opinion makers. There was an article I came across just today about how the CIA was planning to make a phonied up video of Saddam Hussein screwing a little boy (before abandoning the idea because they realized it wouldn’t have the same taboo shock value over there as it would here!). I mean, this is the shit the CIA admits to! Is there any wonder at why the average Pakistani citizen would feel that the United States is the Great Satan and not trust us?

Paranoia? Or rational fear?

I highly suggest reading Glenn Greenwald’s entire piece, this is just a teaser for it.

Those irrational, misled, conspiratorial Muslims (Salon)
 
In conclusion, here’s a lovely bit of homegrown convoluted thinking… the maker of this video actually seems to believe in his heart that this man is a liberal plant at a Tea party! The Democrats sent him! Blame Obama! (To be clear, the guy is right to fuck with the idiot, but to call him a Democrat plant is quite a leap, I think you’ll agree! Can’t just be a conservative idiot, can he, he’s got to be a liberal plant? Or ACORN! WTF?)
 

 
And no, Taco Bell does not count. Lest anyone foolishly believe this to be a racist prank let me emphatically state that this is obviously a pointed reaction to Arizona’s hideous new xenophobic, institutionalized racial profiling law. Nicely done !
 
Freeway Sign in Florida Hacked: No Latinos, No Tacos

 
It’s been fascinating—and fun—watching Republican Tea party favorite, Rand Paul implode this past week. In my never so humble opinion he’s a straight up nut job—no wonder the teabaggers love him so much—who’s a card carrying member of the tin foil hat brigade. Did you see the stuff about him warning against the “NAFTA Superhighway” and the “Amero” on TPM? When someone starts talking about the fucking Amero, trust me, it’s time to get off the bus and wait for the next one! (He even warned of a Hitler-style dictatorship coming to America at a speech at a “machine gun shoot” last year)

But aside from the culturally unsophisticated Paul bringing the funny, which as I say, I enjoyed very much, one of the commenters about him on YouTube got me noticing how ready the media is to rip this guy apart. The poster wrote some typical “They’re just trying to tear a brave man down” BS. Well, brave or not—I think Rand Paul is an absolute moron—the guy did have a point: The media IS trying to tear Rand Paul down. This is not a conspiracy, it’s an easily observable fact. It’s not just about him saying some dumb shit and then it dies down, the members of the media actively want his blood. Look at the video below from Meet the Press. The sharks are circling Rand Paul.

I’d argue that this is an entirely appropriate reaction to a guy who espouses the brand of dangerous horseshit Paul does. This is a case, right before our very eyes, where the media—and I remind you that the media is made of human beings with opinions and feelings, I work at the LA Times myself—is acting like white blood cells trying to rid the body politic of a cancer.

A cancer named Rand Paul. Fuck this guy!
 

 
Mobile, Alabama-based traveling evangelist, Anthony Hopkins, who authorities say terrorized his family while preaching the gospel was sentenced to life in prison, plus 51 years after being convicted of killing his wife and hiding her body in a home freezer for three years. Circuit Judge John Lockett imposed the sentence Thursday on Anthony Hopkins in Mobile. Assistant District Attorney Ashley Rich called Hopkins “evil of the worst kind.”

Prosecutor told jurors that Anthony Hopkins terrorized his wife and young children, isolated them and used the Bible to manipulate them. “He was the supreme commander of his own little army,” said Assistant District Attorney Jill Phillips.

After 90 ,minutes of deliberation, the jury in Mobile also found Hopkins guilty of sodomy, rape, incest and sexual abuse of a child between the ages of 12 and 16.

From an April 6th, 2010 article on the Black Christian News website, prior to the trial’s conclusion:

People who heard traveling evangelist Anthony Hopkins deliver sermons in the rural Southern towns where he preached sometimes called him a psychic or even a prophet.

But prosecutors say the former soldier kept dark secrets while spreading God’s word. They accuse him of killing his wife, storing her body in a freezer for years and raping and molesting a young female relative.

Opening statements in his trial were expected to start Tuesday.

Hopkins, 39, was arrested in 2008 while preaching a rural revival in Clarke County. A teenage relative allegedly pregnant with his baby led police to the body of 36-year-old Arletha Hopkins, a mother of eight ranging in age from an infant to late teens.

Investigators say Hopkins killed his wife in 2004 after she caught him having sex with a female relative, then stuffed her body into a freezer at the Mobile home he shared with her, six children and two stepchildren.

Nicholas L. Jackson Sr., pastor of a small church in Jackson where Hopkins sometimes preached, told a local newspaper in 2008 that many who heard him considered him a prophet with psychic abilities.

“When he told you something was going to happen, you could pretty much count on it,” he said.

Then Hopkins should have seen his own sordid fate. May he rot in hell.

There’s one slightly amusing note to this tragic story: When asked if ministers should be held to a higher standard than laymen, one of the potential jurors is said to have replied “Yeah, they should practice what they preach!” Amen, brother.
 

WKRG.com News

(above image: Van Nuys Police Station 1951 via Valley Relics)
 
As our fair city continues to scramble to find more jobs and programs to cut due to massive budget shortfalls it strikes me as more than a little counter-productive to shutter hundreds of thriving, law-abiding small businesses. It’s amazing to me that in 2010 there are those who still fear the demon weed as if it’s anything more than a simple plant capable of providing relief to the ill and inspiration and tranquility to the healthy. People are dumb.
 

Los Angeles has lost over 150,000 jobs in the past year, is on the brink of bankruptcy, and experienced an unexpected 16 percent decline in sales tax revenue last year. And it’s located in a state with its own dire fiscal situation that is also facing unexpected gaps in tax revenue. Yet this week the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office made a move that’s certain to make things worse for its citizens: forcing over 400 functioning businesses to close shop, under threat of jail time.

Don’t worry, though. It’s no big deal. Those businesses are only selling medicine.

Medical marijuana, that is. As detailed in my May Reason magazine cover story, Los Angeles struggled for years with regulating medical marijuana storefronts—which thrived in L.A. as in no other city. In January the city finally came down with an ordinance imposing a variety of new restrictions, including how the businesses handled cash, provided security and lighting, and paid their employees, as well as insisting that the shops were not technically allowed to make a profit.

But the ordinance’s most important effect will be to reduce the 500-plus functioning storefronts serving the city’s medical marijuana community to a mere 70 (with some possible grandfathering that might bring the eventual total higher).

 
Reason.com: Los Angeles Destroys Functioning Businesses in a Recession
 
thx Giga Granada Hills !

 
I read with interest this article from Salon about a new squatters movement starting to manifest itself in New York, obviously owing to our present economic conditions. In 1983-84, I lived in a succession of squats, first in Amsterdam and then London. London in the early 1980s had a noticeable number of squatted houses in certain areas. In the south London district of Brixton, where I was at the time, I can recall entire apartment buildings and even one entire city block being occupied by squatters. It was a very interesting thing to be a part of. (I have actually been awakened by police. I don’t recommend it!)

“If you think a property might be vacant, because its windows are boarded up and so on, you have to stake it out for a while. You check out the address on the Department of Finance database to see who owns it. Ideally, it would be a bank or the city. You have to watch the building, especially at night, to make sure no one’s going in and out. After a couple of weeks you can get a pretty good idea if it’s empty or not,” said Morales, whose thick black hair, slim, fashionable goatee and athletic figure far belie his 60 years.

He expounded on the further steps for successful squatting. Safety is paramount; Morales advises all potential squatters to check the structural stability of any building, to look for rot or drooping ceilings. Only when a building’s structural integrity is verified should a group of squatters take the next steps and put their own locks on the doors and secure other possible entry points, like windows. Then, according to Morales, they should black out the windows.

“For the first month, at least, you want to stay under the radar—go in late at night, leave early in the morning,” said Morales, who also stressed the importance of having mail sent to the address with the squatters’ names on it. “If you’ve had mail delivered there for a month, and the police turn up, you use it as proof that you’ve been living there for a while, that you’re a valid resident. They usually leave you alone if you can show them that.”

There is a lot of empty property all across America and a lot of people without a place to lay their head. A building cannot be left boarded up for a long period of time. The plumbing gets messed up, vermin take up residence and so do insects. Apparently after about 18 months, a house left completely empty will become uninhabitable.

The amount of overbuilding done in America over the past decade—most of it fueled by Chinese loans—was obscene, A lot of real estate is going to get abandoned by “underwater” debtors. And there sure as hell is going to be an awful lot of commercial real estate that will get defaulted on during the next five years. Local governments should start thinking about how they can legitimize the residents’ claims to some of these abandoned buildings, because it’s probably going to get worse before it gets any better. If the squatters keep the buildings and yards up, why not let them stay there as long as they’re going to be empty otherwise? Maybe they can pay a small rent to the government for a license? It’s time to get creative with one in every eight Americans on food stamps!

You don’t know squatting: A movement returns (Salon)

Squatters turn £5m building into art galleries and cinema (London Evening Standard)

Councils show squatters where they can find out how to break in (Daily Mail)

 
Sad—and also disturbing—news about DJ Kutmah, the popular record producer, visual artist and record spinner for the Dublab collective. Reports from the LA Weekly and elsewhere indicate that Kutmah, a.k.a. Justin McNulty, a British national born of a Scottish father and Egyptian mother, had been taken into custody by U.S. immigration officials last week and is being detained in a facility in New Mexico.

Kutmah was to be a part of Flying Lotus’ live band during a performance this week at the Echoplex, but obviously will not be able to attend the event. Over the weekend, news of his troubles began to make the rounds via Twitter.  Fellow DJs J. Rocc, Flying Lotus and the Gaslamp Killer tweeted their support, urging friends and fans of Kutmah to sign an online petition on McNulty’s behalf and to add the above graphic to their Facebook pages.

Xeni also posted at Boing Boing about this and there are some interesting comments there.

A limited edition of his DJ set from the Erykah Badu show mentioned in Xeni’s post will be for sale as a fundraiser within a couple of weeks.
 

 
I’ve noticed that little of the news reporting in America about Faisal Shahzad, the would be Times Square bomber, has compared his intended act to that of suicide pilot Joseph Stack, the fellow who flew a plane into the IRS building. Starck was at his wit’s end and saw suicide—and taking down as many people with him as possible—as his only way out. He’d lost everything and needed someone or some entity to blame for his broken life to make sense to him. Clearly he was a confused and overwhelmed man.

And this is the angle to the Shahzad story that’s getting short shrift here, as if the media is afraid to touch it: The death of Shahzad’s American dream. The media is selling this as another nutty Islamist who “hates our way of life” but that’s not all he is and it’s a very one-dimensional view of what motivated him. He’s also a guy—like Stack—who saw himself screwed over by the system. If he was going to go down, he would go down spectacularly, becoming in some quarters, a hero. A self-perceived loser reborn as an Islamist icon in an instant.

Three British reporters went digging a bit deeper in the pages of the Telegraph:

For answers to the mystery of what drove Faisal Shahzad to try to turn downtown New York into a fireball, a poke among the rubbish in the backgarden of his former home in Connecticut offers some torn and crumpled clues.

Blowing around last week on the overgrown lawn was a discarded cache of personal mail, dumped there during a clearout when he abruptly vacated the house last year.

The tale they tell, though, is not of contacts with shadowy terrorist groups or plots against the West, but a narrative that millions of ordinary Americans can identify with since the financial meltdown of 2008.

One is a letter from the Connecticut Superior Court, demanding he attend a repossession hearing on his home; another is from a debt collection agency, saying he owed them more than $15,000. A third message is friendlier in tone, but reveals just why his financial woes might have worried him so much - it is a pink greetings card addressed to him and his wife, Huma, which reads “Congratulations on your new little girl!”

Did hard times create the Times Square bomber? (Telegraph)

The biggest stock market crash in history and Greece falls apart, shaking the core illusions that prop up the US and EU…. Sweet fuck what a week.

In the US we have the ultrablack humor of seeing how illusory our “system” really is; the Zeitgeisters of the world have been bonkering on for years about how the fact our system is based on greenbacks “magically” produced by the Fed makes our economy an illusion. Well, yes, but if anything, Wednesday showed how understated they were being: the entire global economy, apparently, can be brought down by somebody’s finger missing the “m” on their keyboard and hitting the “b” instead. Magic tricks indeed. Meanwhile, in the EU, the continued disintegration of Greece is calling the series of bluffs that underpin the stability of the European Union like it’s 1968 all over again but without the clothes.

It all feels like a big joke that people are tired of perpetuating. “Let’s play hypercapitalism” is getting a bit old from the looks of how people are reacting to it. It’s been old for generations but now the promised payouts seem to be hardly worth the pretense; why stay at the table when all you’re likely to win is the new Usher album and maybe, if you work really hard, a good three years at some point in your life where you can pretend you’re living the house-cars-kids American Dream before they fire you and take all their toys back and leave you with the bill?

Yes, I propose that what we’re seeing is people calling the bluff. It’s less a failure of a system that we all know was broken anyway and more a lurch towards something better, towards simpler living and a refocus on the really important parts of being alive – like building a soul instead of more mini-malls. (I may or may not have crunched the detailed astrological math on the stock market crashing in order to back up this statement. That shit’s for hippies anyway.)

So welcome again to 2010, the year of vomiting up as much as we can of the last 2000 years of this utter bullshit patriarchal woman-hating child-hating life-hating nature-hating nonsense. You’ll want an empty stomach when you’re coming up at the party anyway, so have a few glasses of water and here’s hoping you have somebody to hold your forehead while you yak.

In the meantime, watch this small masterpiece from German death diva Billie Ray Martin (via Loki23). It’ll make you feel much better.

 
Christ on a crutch !
 
via MassLive.com :

NORTHAMPTON - A 20-year-old Pittsfield driver was cited by police Tuesday after she ran down Lord Jesus Christ in a marked crosswalk at Main Street and Strong Avenue, police said.

Brittany E. Cantarella was cited for a crosswalk violation, said Northampton police Capt. Scott Savino.

Christ, 50, of Belchertown, was taken to Cooley Dickinson Hospital for treatment of minor injuries following the 3:30 p.m. accident. He was treated at the hospital and then released.

Cantarella was making a left turn from Strong Avenue onto Main Street when her car, a 2005 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, struck Christ.

Christ was in a marked crosswalk at the time of the accident, Savino said.

Savino said officers checked Christ’s identification at the scene and confirmed it was his legal name.

Lord Jesus Christ suffers minor injuries in downtown Northampton crosswalk mishap
 
thx Ned Raggett !