© Unknown
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| ©Unknown |
They're all here - and they're all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates - John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.
Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference this week in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.
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| ©Unknown |
| The bridge of the USS Bon Homme Richard, January 1964. Just months later, the guy on the right would guide his ship into the Tonkin Gulf, and the young man on the left would begin a remarkable transformation into a brooding rock god. The Bon Homme Richard, by the way, was launched on April 29, 1944, under the sponsorship of Catherine McCain, the grandmother of a certain presidential contender. |
Until around 1913, Laurel Canyon remained an undeveloped (and unincorporated) slice of LA - a pristine wilderness area rich in native flora and fauna. That all began to change when Charles Spencer Mann and his partners began buying up land along what would become Laurel Canyon Boulevard, as well as up Lookout Mountain. A narrow road leading up to the crest of Lookout Mountain was carved out, and upon that crest was constructed a lavish 70-room inn with sweeping views of the city below and the Pacific Ocean beyond. The Lookout Inn featured a large ballroom, riding stables, tennis courts and a golf course, among other amenities. But the inn, alas, would only stand for a decade; in 1923, it burned down, as tends to happen rather frequently in Laurel Canyon.
"I mean, fuck, he auditioned for Neil [Young] for fuck's sake."
Graham Nash, explaining to author Michael Walker how close Charlie Manson was to the Laurel Canyon scene.
During the ten-year period during which Bruce, Novarro, Mineo, Linkletter, Stevens, Tate, Sebring, Frykowski and Folger all turned up dead, a whole lot of other people connected to Laurel Canyon did as well, often under very questionable circumstances. The list includes, but is certainly not limited to, all of the following names:
Graham Nash, explaining to author Michael Walker how close Charlie Manson was to the Laurel Canyon scene.
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| ©Geffen |
During the ten-year period during which Bruce, Novarro, Mineo, Linkletter, Stevens, Tate, Sebring, Frykowski and Folger all turned up dead, a whole lot of other people connected to Laurel Canyon did as well, often under very questionable circumstances. The list includes, but is certainly not limited to, all of the following names:
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On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells. There were also reports of rapes and mutilations. The Irgun was joined by the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who subsequently succeeded Begin as prime minister of Israel in the early '80s, and also by the Haganah, the militia under the control of David Ben Gurian. The Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah later joined to form the Israeli Defense Force. Their tactics have not changed.
Comment: It is interesting to notice that Israeli historian Benny Morris - quoted in the article above as one of the sources revealing crimes against Palestinians - will not condemn Zionism in spite of his findings. The following fragment of an interview speaks volumes:
When ethnic cleansing is justifiedThat is Benny Morris. For him, the goal of establishing a "Jewish state" justified any atrocities against the Palestinians.
Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?
There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.
We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society.
A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy.
There is something chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.
If you expected me to burst into tears, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I will not do that.
So when the commanders of Operation Dani are standing there and observing the long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?
I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don't think they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn't have felt pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state would not have come into being.
You do not condemn them morally?
No.
They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.
There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing.
And that was the situation in 1948?
That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.
The term "to cleanse" is terrible.
I know it doesn't sound nice but that's the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.
What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You sound hard-hearted.
I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.
Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.
And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?
That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.
And in our case it effectively justifies a population transfer.
That's what emerges.
And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakba?
You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that's peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that's chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well.
For the Nazis, the ideal of the greatness of the "Fatherland" and the "Germanic Race" justified the extermination of Jews and others. They probably also thought that it was 'unfortunate' for those others, but that they had no choice.
It seems that for some people learning the facts is not enough to develop real empathy and conscience.
"He was great, he was unreal - really, really good."
"He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing. I thought he really had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet."
[Today's first trivia question: both of the above statements were made, on separate occasions, by a famous Laurel Canyon musician of the 1960s era. Both quotes were offered up in praise of another Laurel Canyon musician. Award yourself five points for correctly identifying the person who made the remarks, and five for identifying who the statements refer to. The answers are at the end of this post.]
"He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing. I thought he really had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet."
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| ©Steven Johnson |
[Today's first trivia question: both of the above statements were made, on separate occasions, by a famous Laurel Canyon musician of the 1960s era. Both quotes were offered up in praise of another Laurel Canyon musician. Award yourself five points for correctly identifying the person who made the remarks, and five for identifying who the statements refer to. The answers are at the end of this post.]
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| ©Unknown |
| Ted Bundy and George Bush. Seperated at birth? |
The research of Dr. Hervey Cleckley and Dr. Robert Hare exploring the personality and character traits of psychopaths, when applied to George Bush, shows that Bush fits exactly the profile they developed for the psychopath. Demographis show that Republicanism is much worse than psychopathy.
An excerpt from the book Blood Relations, by Eric Konigsberg, about his great-uncle Harold, a convicted murder:
Hervey Cleckley in his book, The Mask of Sanity, describes the psychopath as a certain type of cruel manipulator whose harmful actions are accompanied by an absence of delusion. The psychopath, he wrote, "does not hear voices. In theory, he can foresee the consequences of injudicious or antisocial acts." A psychopath is a person who knows full well the difference between right and wrong and yet, without compunction, chooses to do wrong. Checkley cited the protagonist of The Incredible Charlie Carewe, a novel by Mary Astor, as a quintessential psychopath. "Charlie is a genius in reverse with dangerous charm. Sisters lie for him, parents defend him, friends obey him. While calmly and casually, Charlie Carewe literally gets away with murder."
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| ©Unknown |
| Frank Zappa: Pro-war, authoritarian, and what else? |
"There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear"
Join me now, if you have the time, as we take a stroll down memory lane to a time nearly four-and-a-half decades ago - a time when America last had uniformed ground troops fighting a sustained and bloody battle to impose, uhmm, 'democracy' on a sovereign nation.
It is the first week of August, 1964, and U.S. warships under the command of U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under attack while patrolling Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf. This event, subsequently dubbed the 'Tonkin Gulf Incident,' will result in the immediate passing by the U.S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which will, in turn, quickly lead to America's deep immersion into the bloody Vietnam quagmire. Before it is over, well over fifty thousand American bodies - along with literally millions of Southeast Asian bodies - will litter the battlefields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The Doomed and the Blind
As politicians sit squabbling in Washington, deliberating and deciding, an asteroid 4 kilometers across is thundering through space at 15 miles per second. It was forged in a galactic maelstrom millions of years ago from molten metal, and now it tumbles through space with malevolent indifference. People sit unaware of an impending disaster, carrying on their daily activities while extinction encroaches. It won't just be the extinction of a few species, or a few million people, but all life will be wiped off the face of the earth within hours. Our planet will become a barren waste for millions of years, void of vibrant life and wonder.
Is an awful scenario like this really plausible? The answer is yes. The threat is very real and the evidence is in the scars our earth bears on the surface, the massive craters on the moon, and the giant wounds on Mars. You would expect that something so catastrophic and horrible for our species and planet would demand attention from lawmakers; wrong. Although our government is well-informed by agencies like NASA, it has neglected to properly fund Near Earth Object (NEO) programs, and it could lead to our destruction. An asteroid impact is a natural disaster we can actually prevent, and if our representatives don't take steps to improve our warning systems, we will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs.
As politicians sit squabbling in Washington, deliberating and deciding, an asteroid 4 kilometers across is thundering through space at 15 miles per second. It was forged in a galactic maelstrom millions of years ago from molten metal, and now it tumbles through space with malevolent indifference. People sit unaware of an impending disaster, carrying on their daily activities while extinction encroaches. It won't just be the extinction of a few species, or a few million people, but all life will be wiped off the face of the earth within hours. Our planet will become a barren waste for millions of years, void of vibrant life and wonder.
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| Itokawa asteroid |
Is an awful scenario like this really plausible? The answer is yes. The threat is very real and the evidence is in the scars our earth bears on the surface, the massive craters on the moon, and the giant wounds on Mars. You would expect that something so catastrophic and horrible for our species and planet would demand attention from lawmakers; wrong. Although our government is well-informed by agencies like NASA, it has neglected to properly fund Near Earth Object (NEO) programs, and it could lead to our destruction. An asteroid impact is a natural disaster we can actually prevent, and if our representatives don't take steps to improve our warning systems, we will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs.
If history is any indication, we may be on the road to violent revolution. We got here because of the conservatives' war against liberal government.
"Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." -- John F. KennedyThere's one thing for sure: 2008 isn't anything like politics as usual.
Comment: Continue to parts V & VI