I’m gone until March 12, so…

When I address you today I do not presume on the fact that we have known each other for 60 years, or that we have been to the same school, been members of the same political party and that we have before now, been fairly good comrades and friends.

The minute I heard of the Hariri assassination, two terms popped into my head… P2OG and Mossad. Some coincidences are just too damned convenient.

Up to 27 fascist troops belonging to Charlie Company of the Philippine Army 45th IB were killed and three seriously wounded in an ambush by NPA Red fighters on January 24 in Sitio Kayangading, Dicamay Uno, Jones, Isabela, according to belated reports from the NPA Benito Tesorio Command operating in southern Isabela.

Contrary to its assertions of deep concern about the domestic security of the United States, the Bush administration has substantially degraded “homeland security” since September 11 while facilitating a massive transfer of public and private wealth into the coffers of the energy industry. The Bush administration, itself composed predominantly of energy industry insiders, has cynically invoked (information) “security” to conceal this degradation of domestic security, to attack government and corporate whistleblowers, and to protect the enormous energy conglomerates from accountability.

In 1992, I was involved in a kind of pilot project — the details of which would land me in jail — to develop capabilities in the military that had previously been the province of the Central Intellignece Agency and, on a more limited scale, the Defense Intellignece Agency. It had to do with building certain kinds of… relationships.

In spite of the secret war that has raged for years between the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency — a war that the Pentagon won — the CIA’s new PR chief (since they are now out of the intelligence business) Porter Goss and Pentagon tzar Donald Rumsfeld are singing off the same sheet of [...]

I was deployed to Iraq in April 2003 and returned home for a two-week leave in October. Going home gave me the opportunity to put my thoughts in order and to listen to what my conscience had to say. People would ask me about my war experiences and answering them took me back to all the horrors-the firefights, the ambushes, the time I saw a young Iraqi dragged by his shoulders through a pool of his own blood or an innocent man was decapitated by our machine gun fire. The time I saw a soldier broken down inside because he killed a child, or an old man on his knees, crying with his arms raised to the sky, perhaps asking God why we had taken the lifeless body of his son.

An ensemble of somatic elements, rapidly evolving owing to the marked selection advantage conferred by human nature: a relatively huge brain, elaborate voice box, opposable thumb, upright posture, and the like, providing the material substratum of specifically human ways of being.

Of special importance was the emergenc e of language as the specific human mode of communicating and representing the world. This involved ‘hard wiring’ of the evolving brain, coordination with the evolving speech apparatus, and, decisively, integration with evolving forms of sociality, the result being that the powers of individuals could be combined.

The blog-based revelation that Jeff Gannon, aka James Guckert, a journalisic shill for the Bush adminstration may have worked as an internet-advertised, gay call-guy is reminding me of an old Jerry Jeff Walker song – Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother. This tune, adapted from a song written by Ray Wylie Hubbard, goes:

He was born in Oklahoma,
His wife’s name’s Betty Lou Thelma Liz
And he’s not responsible for what he’s doin
‘Cause his mother made him what he is.