The Great 'Splainin' Cometh
3 hours ago
"All The News You Never Knew You Needed To Know ...Until Now." August 11 2009 Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Acting Against Their Own Best Interests - The Current Town Hall Health Care Demonstrators Are 'Lemmings Marching To The Sea' And No Matter Who's Leading They're STILL Lemmings Prefer An MP3 Playlist? It's Here: [192kbps VBR 12:00 Minutes] Other Audio Formats Available [ Here ] Twitter This Commentary |
July 21, 2009Back to the index
Summary
These files include formally highly classified US government communications about the Dasht-e-Leili massacre in Afghanistan. The massacre killed thousands of Taliban prisoners of war. The files were released earlier on two websites maintained by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) but are of significant historical importance.
PHR has asked that WikiLeaks house the documents to assure the widest journalistic and public access to the documents. WikiLeaks reaches an audience different than PHR's and having the documents on WikiLeaks' servers helps to ensure that the documents' availability does not depend solely on PHR's web infrastructure.
On July 10 there was a front page New York Times story detailing new allegations that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into the Dasht-e-Leili massacre. President Obama has responded to the news on a nationally aired CNN interview with Anderson Cooper. There continue to be new developments in the story to which the FOIA documents continue to add relevant context and information.
In November 2001, as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners are believed to have been killed in container trucks by US-allied Afghan troops and buried in a mass grave in Dasht-e-Leili, Afghanistan. These Afghan troops were operating jointly with American forces, who were allegedly present at the scene of the crime.
[Documents and Details In Full @ WikiLeaks]
It's especially ironic that given our preoccupation with numbers, we have arrived at the point where numbers just can't be comprehended anymore.Back to the index
This week, outstanding world derivatives were declared to have reached the 1 quadrillion mark.
Commentators lately -- e.g. NPR's "Planet Money" broadcast -- have struggled to explain to listeners exactly what a trillion is in images such as the number of dollar bills stacked up to the planet Venus or the number of seconds that add up to three ice ages plus two warmings.
A quadrillion is just off the charts, out of this world, not really subject to reality-based interpretation. You might as well say "infinity...
...The number problems we face are now hopeless. America will never be able to cover its current outstanding debt. We're effectively finished at all three levels: household, corporate, and government.
Who, for instance, can really comprehend what to do about the number problems infesting Fannie Mae and the mortgages associated with her?
There's really only one way out of this predicament: to get ready for a much lower standard of living and much different daily living arrangements.
We can't wrap our minds around this, so the exercise du jour is to play games with numbers to persuade ourselves that we don't have to face reality. We're entertaining ourselves with shell games, musical chairs, Chinese fire drills, Ponzi schemes, and Polish blanket tricks (where, to make your blanket longer, you cut twelve inches off the top and sew it onto the bottom).
Now that Newsweek Magazine -- along with the mendacious cretins at CNBC -- have declared the "recession" officially over, it's a sure thing that we are entering the zone of greatest danger.
Some foul odor rides the late summer wind, as of a rough beast slouching toward the US Treasury. The stock markets have gathered in the critical mass of suckers needed to flush all remaining hope out of the system.
The foreign holders of US promissory notes are sharpening their long knives in the humid darkness. The suburban householders are watching sharks swim in their driveways. The REIT executives are getting ready to gargle with Gillette blue blades. The Goldman Sachs bonus babies are trying to imagine the good life in Paraguay or the archepelego of Tristan da Cunha.
While extremely allergic to paranoid memes and conspiracy theories, I begin to wonder about the impressive volume of World Wide Web chatter about an upcoming bank holiday -- meaning that the US government might find itself constrained to shut down the banking system for a period of time to deal with a rapidly developing emergency that might prompt the public to make a run on reserves.
God knows, there are enough black swans crowding the skies these days to blot out the sun....
[In Full @ James Howard Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation]
I B Bad. I'm The 897,186,093 Richest Person On Earth! Discover how rich you are Here! |
No comments:
Post a Comment