Christopher Hitchens Catches his Death of Cancer

I'm not some kind of droog kicking drunks in the street. One's opponents should be sober at least and preferably in good health also. But it's hard to avoid this remarkable statement from Hitchens:

I'm glad we're not having an inquest now, as we would be, into why we allowed a Rwanda or a Congo to develop on the Gulf, an imploding Iraq right in front of our eyes, a vortex of violence and meltdown, a whole society beggared and fractured and traumatised, waiting to fall to pieces.

But that is exactly what happened in Iraq, as a direct result of the illegal and criminal invasion which you, the traitor Hitchens, aggressively supported. Surely you, Hitchens, cannot be unaware of this fact?


Hitchens:

One of the bitter aspects of that is, well, I put in 60 years at the coalface, I worked very hard. In the last few years I've got a fair amount of recognition for it. In my opinion, actually, rather more than I deserve. Certainly more than I expected. And I could have looked forward to a few years of, shall we say, cruising speed, you know, just, as it were, relishing that, enjoying it.

Hitchens sold his soul to the devil to get his reward of money, fame, success and recognition. Instead, he got terminal cancer.

Truly pitiful.

Hitchens decided to switch his support to the US Empire over the criminal, baseless, counterproductive, disastrous, genocidal Iraq war.

It's like someone who decides to support Soviet Russia, not during the 1917 Revolution or the 1941 Great Patriotic war, but during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia or the 1979 Afghanistan invasion.

You would have thought even the slowest of them would know better by then.

God didn't strike Hitchens down with cancer over his atheism or imperialism, he did to to give us a bitter, ironic laugh at this World-Historical clown figure.

I'm not some kind of droog kicking drunks in the street. One's opponents should be sober at least and preferably in good health also. But it's hard to avoid this remarkable statement from Hitchens:

I'm glad we're not having an inquest now, as we would be, into why we allowed a Rwanda or a Congo to develop on the Gulf, an imploding Iraq right in front of our eyes, a vortex of violence and meltdown, a whole society beggared and fractured and traumatised, waiting to fall to pieces.

But that is exactly what happened in Iraq, as a direct result of the illegal and criminal invasion which you, the traitor Hitchens, aggressively supported. Surely you, Hitchens, cannot be unaware of this fact?


Hitchens:

One of the bitter aspects of that is, well, I put in 60 years at the coalface, I worked very hard. In the last few years I've got a fair amount of recognition for it. In my opinion, actually, rather more than I deserve. Certainly more than I expected. And I could have looked forward to a few years of, shall we say, cruising speed, you know, just, as it were, relishing that, enjoying it.

Hitchens sold his soul to the devil to get his reward of money, fame, success and recognition. Instead, he got terminal cancer.

Truly pitiful.

Hitchens decided to switch his support to the US Empire over the criminal, baseless, counterproductive, disastrous, genocidal Iraq war.

It's like someone who decides to support Soviet Russia, not during the 1917 Revolution or the 1941 Great Patriotic war, but during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia or the 1979 Afghanistan invasion.

You would have thought even the slowest of them would know better by then.

God didn't strike Hitchens down with cancer over his atheism or imperialism, he did to to give us a bitter, ironic laugh at this World-Historical clown figure.

Christopher Hitchens Catches his Death of Cancer

Blair Planned Iraq Invasion Nine Months Before War

link

Further evidence to the Chilcot report adds to that already existing that the decision to attack Iraq was made first and the pretext prepared afterwards.

This means that the war was a crime and the corporate media is a propaganda network. Hardly anyone would refute that these days, but it is not reported very much, not discussed, and no action is planned or taken.

Western culture has a blind spot on the reality: we have told big lies and committed major war crimes. One day civilization may advance to the point where this is no longer tolerated.

link

Further evidence to the Chilcot report adds to that already existing that the decision to attack Iraq was made first and the pretext prepared afterwards.

This means that the war was a crime and the corporate media is a propaganda network. Hardly anyone would refute that these days, but it is not reported very much, not discussed, and no action is planned or taken.

Western culture has a blind spot on the reality: we have told big lies and committed major war crimes. One day civilization may advance to the point where this is no longer tolerated.

Blair Planned Iraq Invasion Nine Months Before War

Chomsky compares US to Weimar Republic

Anyone who has watched Fox 'News' for five minutes, or read or heard anything from Rush Limbaugh or Anne Coulter and the like, or watched the bizarre 'tea party' movement, could be forgiven for being alarmed at the degenerate state of political discourse in the United States.

Chomsky:

I'm not really thinking about the entertainment aspect of the media, though, yes, it's significant. I'm thinking about the part that has substantive content, crazy content. But it is substantive. It does give answers. I mean, the people who for the last 30 years have seen their wages, income stagnate or decline, their benefits decline, services decline, there's nothing for the children. World's out of control. These are the people who on polls maybe 80 percent of them say the country's going in the wrong direction. The government's run by the few and the special interests not the people and so on.

You know, they're not wrong. This is all happening to them, and the answers that they're getting from say Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, the rest of them, are, "Well, we have an answer. The rich liberals own everything. They own the corporations. They run the government. They run the media. And they don't care about people like you. They don't care about the flyover people between the east coast and the west coast. They only care about giving everything you work for away, to, you know, to illegal immigrants or gays or something. So we gotta protect ourselves from them. And furthermore, they run the government. When they put up a health program, it isn't to give you health. It's to kill your granny, you know." And that's an answer to something. It's a terrible answer, but it is an answer. And if you do suspend this belief, you forget about what's happening in the world really, it's a coherent answer.

Now they're not hearing anything else. And the memory that comes to my mind - again, I don't want to press the analogy too hard - but I think it's worth thinking about - is late Weimar Germany. There were people with real grievances. The Nazis gave them an answer: "It's the fault of the Jews and the Bolsheviks and we've got to protect ourselves from them, and that'll take care of your grievances." And we know what happened. Germany in the 1920s was you know the most civilized, at the peak of Western civilization, in the arts, in the sciences, highly democratic, functioning democratic institutions. A decade later, it was, you know, the pits of human history.

Again, the analogy is not, it's not close, but it's frightening. And unless an answer can be given to these people, unless they can be led to understand what's really happening to them, we could be in for trouble.

Ironically, the person who posted this piece appears to be one of these very right wing loons, as he comments: "Actually, Noam, we're already in trouble because people like you get paid to voice such invective. Be afraid, America. Be very afraid."

Sometimes it's hard to believe or understand how people can be so out of touch. First of all, unlike Rush Limbaugh, he's not getting paid to say stuff. Need we go further?

Anyone who has watched Fox 'News' for five minutes, or read or heard anything from Rush Limbaugh or Anne Coulter and the like, or watched the bizarre 'tea party' movement, could be forgiven for being alarmed at the degenerate state of political discourse in the United States.

Chomsky:

I'm not really thinking about the entertainment aspect of the media, though, yes, it's significant. I'm thinking about the part that has substantive content, crazy content. But it is substantive. It does give answers. I mean, the people who for the last 30 years have seen their wages, income stagnate or decline, their benefits decline, services decline, there's nothing for the children. World's out of control. These are the people who on polls maybe 80 percent of them say the country's going in the wrong direction. The government's run by the few and the special interests not the people and so on.

You know, they're not wrong. This is all happening to them, and the answers that they're getting from say Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, the rest of them, are, "Well, we have an answer. The rich liberals own everything. They own the corporations. They run the government. They run the media. And they don't care about people like you. They don't care about the flyover people between the east coast and the west coast. They only care about giving everything you work for away, to, you know, to illegal immigrants or gays or something. So we gotta protect ourselves from them. And furthermore, they run the government. When they put up a health program, it isn't to give you health. It's to kill your granny, you know." And that's an answer to something. It's a terrible answer, but it is an answer. And if you do suspend this belief, you forget about what's happening in the world really, it's a coherent answer.

Now they're not hearing anything else. And the memory that comes to my mind - again, I don't want to press the analogy too hard - but I think it's worth thinking about - is late Weimar Germany. There were people with real grievances. The Nazis gave them an answer: "It's the fault of the Jews and the Bolsheviks and we've got to protect ourselves from them, and that'll take care of your grievances." And we know what happened. Germany in the 1920s was you know the most civilized, at the peak of Western civilization, in the arts, in the sciences, highly democratic, functioning democratic institutions. A decade later, it was, you know, the pits of human history.

Again, the analogy is not, it's not close, but it's frightening. And unless an answer can be given to these people, unless they can be led to understand what's really happening to them, we could be in for trouble.

Ironically, the person who posted this piece appears to be one of these very right wing loons, as he comments: "Actually, Noam, we're already in trouble because people like you get paid to voice such invective. Be afraid, America. Be very afraid."

Sometimes it's hard to believe or understand how people can be so out of touch. First of all, unlike Rush Limbaugh, he's not getting paid to say stuff. Need we go further?

Chomsky compares US to Weimar Republic

Public Broadcasters Threat to News Ltd

"There is a land grab going on - and it should be sternly resisted. The land grab is spearheaded by the BBC. The scope of its activities and ambitions is chilling." (James Murdoch, 'Put an end to this dumping of free news', Guardian, August 29, 2009)

Murdoch made a noble plea for press freedom:

"Above all, we must have genuine independence in news media. Independence is characterised by the absence of the apparatus of supervision and dependency. Independence of faction, industrial or political. Independence of subsidy, gift or patronage. [...] people value honest, fearless, and independent news coverage that challenges the consensus."

Murdoch wrapped up his speech with "an inescapable conclusion":

"The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit."

link

No, this isn't The Chaser or Onion News Network, apparently it's real.

I don't think public broadcasters have had it in mind to cause the ruin of News Ltd. On the contrary, that surely would have been the last thing on the mind of John Howard, Janet Albrechtson or Keith Windschuttle.

But an unexpected opportunity presents itself here. If in coordination with Murdoch's carefully planned suicide public broadcasters like the ABC were to suddenly increase their online content by 50 or 100% over the next year or so, perhaps News Ltd would indeed pass from the earth. Something greatly to be wished for.

"There is a land grab going on - and it should be sternly resisted. The land grab is spearheaded by the BBC. The scope of its activities and ambitions is chilling." (James Murdoch, 'Put an end to this dumping of free news', Guardian, August 29, 2009)

Murdoch made a noble plea for press freedom:

"Above all, we must have genuine independence in news media. Independence is characterised by the absence of the apparatus of supervision and dependency. Independence of faction, industrial or political. Independence of subsidy, gift or patronage. [...] people value honest, fearless, and independent news coverage that challenges the consensus."

Murdoch wrapped up his speech with "an inescapable conclusion":

"The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit."

link

No, this isn't The Chaser or Onion News Network, apparently it's real.

I don't think public broadcasters have had it in mind to cause the ruin of News Ltd. On the contrary, that surely would have been the last thing on the mind of John Howard, Janet Albrechtson or Keith Windschuttle.

But an unexpected opportunity presents itself here. If in coordination with Murdoch's carefully planned suicide public broadcasters like the ABC were to suddenly increase their online content by 50 or 100% over the next year or so, perhaps News Ltd would indeed pass from the earth. Something greatly to be wished for.

Public Broadcasters Threat to News Ltd

Arthur Silber finally comes out

Arthur Silber, the right-libertarian who, I believe, knew and worked personally with Ayn Rand, has finally admitted he has become an anarchist. A leftist-anarchist no less.

Well, join the crowd. Actually, it has been obvious for some time that Silber was drifting into anarchism. I even began to suspect he was secretly reading Chomsky.

In my case, it was Chomsky that stimulated the interest in anarchism, and I would guess, countless others as well. In fact one of Chomsky's many great contributions had been the popularisation of anarchism as a political philosophy. As far back as 1971 (if not earlier), with his essay Notes on Anarchism, Chomsky has been revealing his debt to anarchist philosophy, or libertarian socialism as he calls it. And it has been a strange, sometimes comical spectacle to observe the endless string of witless critics who attack Chomsky for being "totalitarian", "bolshevik", "stalinist", "maoist" etc. Don't these fools know there is a difference between anarchism and bolshevism? Obviously not, meaning they never read any Chomsky either.

It's a shame, however, that Chomsky was not able to do the same job of elevation and popularisation of another neglected, important philosophy: that of Henry George and his 'Georgist' movement. This, I humbly submit, is worthy of the honour.

By coincidence, the brain dead corporate media columnist Paul Sheahan writes a useless, misleading and uninformative article on the Obama/Wright controversy at the same time as Silber's vastly superior piece appears in my sitefeed. In such a way the internet has exposed the flank of the corporate media.

The rubbishy propaganda produced by corporate hacks like Sheahan, Gerard Henderson, Andrew Bolt etc is presumably the best that money can buy, but is easily outclassed by dozens, if not hundreds of articles in the blogosphere every day. As soon as people learn to construct their own 'newspaper' using sitefeed software like google reader, I cant see these people earning their keep.

Justice seeks Vengeance against the evil of corporate media, and is bounding like a huge, slavering hound toward the exposed flank of a previously invincible foe. Revenge, when it comes, will be swift and deadly.

Or, as they say, go read the whole thing, including the links.

Arthur Silber, the right-libertarian who, I believe, knew and worked personally with Ayn Rand, has finally admitted he has become an anarchist. A leftist-anarchist no less.

Well, join the crowd. Actually, it has been obvious for some time that Silber was drifting into anarchism. I even began to suspect he was secretly reading Chomsky.

In my case, it was Chomsky that stimulated the interest in anarchism, and I would guess, countless others as well. In fact one of Chomsky's many great contributions had been the popularisation of anarchism as a political philosophy. As far back as 1971 (if not earlier), with his essay Notes on Anarchism, Chomsky has been revealing his debt to anarchist philosophy, or libertarian socialism as he calls it. And it has been a strange, sometimes comical spectacle to observe the endless string of witless critics who attack Chomsky for being "totalitarian", "bolshevik", "stalinist", "maoist" etc. Don't these fools know there is a difference between anarchism and bolshevism? Obviously not, meaning they never read any Chomsky either.

It's a shame, however, that Chomsky was not able to do the same job of elevation and popularisation of another neglected, important philosophy: that of Henry George and his 'Georgist' movement. This, I humbly submit, is worthy of the honour.

By coincidence, the brain dead corporate media columnist Paul Sheahan writes a useless, misleading and uninformative article on the Obama/Wright controversy at the same time as Silber's vastly superior piece appears in my sitefeed. In such a way the internet has exposed the flank of the corporate media.

The rubbishy propaganda produced by corporate hacks like Sheahan, Gerard Henderson, Andrew Bolt etc is presumably the best that money can buy, but is easily outclassed by dozens, if not hundreds of articles in the blogosphere every day. As soon as people learn to construct their own 'newspaper' using sitefeed software like google reader, I cant see these people earning their keep.

Justice seeks Vengeance against the evil of corporate media, and is bounding like a huge, slavering hound toward the exposed flank of a previously invincible foe. Revenge, when it comes, will be swift and deadly.

Or, as they say, go read the whole thing, including the links.

Arthur Silber finally comes out

Blogger Awards: Andy Stephenson

I dont usually pay much attention to these things, but Deltoid makes a case that a vote should be made this time. First, some background. William Rivers Pitt delivers a eulogy for Stephenson:

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

- Words inscribed on the gravestone of Brandon Lee

It was late July 2004, and it was a hot day for Seattle. The park was filled with activists, organizers and regular folks, there to hear a battery of speakers who had come together for this stop on the Rolling Thunder Democracy Tour. I spent a couple of hours that day in a crowded tent with election reform activist Andy Stephenson, running a teach-in on electronic touch-screen voting machines, corporate control of the vote, and what could be done about it.

I threw in my two cents here and there, but this was Andy’s show. He had thrown his entire life into the fight for election reform, he had crisscrossed the country a dozen times, he had raided the offices of public officials with camcorder in hand to ask questions and demand answers, he had run for the office of Secretary of State in Washington on a platform of reforming the way we run elections in this country, and on that hot July day in Seattle, he was despondent.

As we sweltered in the tent, Andy ticked off all the problems we were sure to face in the coming November presidential election. There was no independent vetting of these voting machines, he explained, so there was no way to tell if the hardware and software within was counting things properly. There were no paper ballots involved, so recounts were a thing of the past. Votes tallied on these machines wound be transferred via unsecured modem to central processing computers – which were basically PCs with Windows software – that had no security and could be easily tampered with. The companies distributing these machines and counting the votes were run by men who gave money to, and in some instances actively worked for, the Bush for President campaign.

I watched the crowd slump lower and lower into their seats as Andy rattled off the grim news. Meek hands were raised here and there. “What can we do about it?” people asked. Not much more than I’ve done, I could feel Andy thinking, and what I’ve done hasn’t fixed this damned situation one bit. He squared his shoulders and replied, “Get in touch with your Secretary of State and explain the situation. Write letters to the editor. Let people know this is happening. Do what you can.”

Flash forward to a cold day in January 2005. I walked the route of the Bush inauguration in Washington DC, counting the protesters and the Bush supporters who were squaring off in shouting matches on every corner. It wasn’t Boston cold, but it was cold enough, the chill in the air enhanced by the overwhelming police and military presence. I made my way down to the main protest gathering point, and there in the crowd was a familiar face.

Andy Stephenson stood off to the side, red hair sliding out from under a black wool cap, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pea coat, ruddy face downcast as he watched the parade go by. We looked at each other a moment, no words available to capture the bottomless depths we felt yawning before us, and then turned to watch the show. When Bush went by in his rolling cannonball of an armored limousine, Andy and I and everyone gathered on that corner turned our backs.

Later that night we sat together with a large crew of activists in a bar that had come to be our gathering point for post-action decompression in DC. I looked over at one point and saw Andy weeping silently, shoulders shaking as all of the frustration and anger poured out of him. Everything he had warned us about in July had happened – in Ohio, in Florida, in New Mexico – and on that night he felt like an utter failure.

Several of us gathered around him to console him. I took his hand and said, “You know, Andy, it could be worse.” He looked up at me and asked, “How on Earth could it be worse?” I looked at him with straight-faced solemnity and said, “You could be straight.” He smiled that utterly incomparable Andy Stephenson smile and laughed until he was fit to split.

That was the last time I saw him.

Andy Stephenson passed away Thursday night from complications due to pancreatic cancer. A series of strokes caused by the cancer in his bloodstream and a post-operative infection carried him to his rest. At his side were his family and Ted, his partner of nineteen years. All across the country, thousands and thousands of people who had rallied to help him heard the news, and bent their heads, and wept. He was 43 years old.

The story of Andy Stephenson’s life and death carries with it all the brightness, and all the unspeakable darkness, that exists today in modern American politics. Here was a man of rare passion, an activist who poured his life into a cause, who continued fighting for this cause even after stricken with his disease, who encompassed the death of his sister and kept working, who never stopped believing that one person could make a difference.

Still, there is that darkness. It has been said that you can best know a person by knowing his enemies. In Andy’s case, his enemies rank among the foulest, most despicable sub-humans ever to draw breath. A small cadre of graveyard rats..

Now at this point I feel I have to break off Pitt's otherwise eloquent eulogy. Ordinarily, in a eulogy some restrained and dignified language is used to respect the occasion and memorialize the departed.

Pitt's peroration:

Andy will be remembered by his friends and family in Seattle this coming weekend. We will gather, we will sing his songs and tell his stories. We will remember the life of a man who gave of himself far more than he received, who was a patriot in the best sense of the word, whose smile could outshine the stars. We will rededicate ourselves to the causes he espoused, and we will prevail with his spirit as the wind at our backs.

Andy believed he had failed that night in January. If I could have one more chance to speak with him, I would tell him how wrong he was that night. You won, Andy. You were the best of us.

This is well said. One of the solutions to the problems of humanity is democracy. Not the only thing, but important nonetheless. And if we are to have democracy, then integrity in the voting systems and the counting is of course essential. Stephenson and others were fighting the good fight, and have not failed, but like Viking Heroes, go to Valhalla because they fought, not because they won.

A Sadly No commenter provides some useful information into pancreatic cancer, which took Stephenson away:

My father hates the pancreas, as every good surgeon does. It is a nasty little organ, full of awful things and prone to falling apart horribly under stress. It is necessary to be profoundly delicate with it under normal circumstances.

Pancreatic resection is among the worst surgical nightmares remaining in this modern world, where most surgeries can be done with little bitty cameras and servos in a gas-inflated cavity. Doing a pancreatic resection requires that the stomach be sliced open from stem to stern, the entire bowel - that is, everything below the stomach - be pulled out, and then you can finally do what you need to to the pancreas.

That is, cut off a tiny little piece of it, very delicately and sloooowly.

The whole time, this requires a superhuman effort from all involved. Nurses keeping intestines in place outside of the body, monitoring heartbeat and breathing and keeping them niiiice and stable during the most traumatic experience a normal human body will ever endure. It is a long surgery, so there is a substantial amount of commitment from people who could as well just leave the room a lot of the time - anesthesiologists, scrubs.

Pancreatic resection has a morbidity rate, depending on the skill of the operating techs and the equipment available, of as little as 70%. That is, within six months, you get one of those suckers done and chances are very good you will be dead - and for good reason. You’ve had a team of tired, agitated professionals slinging around a shit-filled tube in your torn-open gut for hours on end, trying to get at the most bilious little asshole of a gland in your body and poke it and cauterize it. There are so many things that can go wrong, something not going wrong is almost cause for alarm.

It says a lot, then, that there are near to no cases where pancreatic resection is refused.

Pancreatic cancer is a death sentence, a horrific death sentence; it’s a spreading, consuming horror in one of the nerve-blood-and-flesh-richest area of the body you don’t use to screw. If you survive six months without the surgery, you’ll wish you hadn’t. It is so bad that dying horribly of massive sepsis is a step up.

Everyone knows that cancer treatment has its best chance of success if diagnosed and treated early, pancreatic cancer especially so.

Stephenson had no medical insurance, like millions of Americans. So friends of his launched an Internet campaign to raise the funds ($50,000) necessary for surgery, using tools such as blogs and Paypal.

Elizabeth Ferrari - central to the fundraising effort - is quoted by Sadly No to explain the difficulties they had with this process:

What followed was a coordinated effort to block Andy [Stephenson]’s medical care or his benefit from the medical care we could secure for him. In specific, the Bush right had its agents make small donations so they could then call Paypal with allegations of fraud that froze Andy’s account. They also called Paypal, misrepresenting themselves as the hospital to “verify” that this effort was a scam.

And it got more vicious from there. Due to the frozen funds and the confusion it caused us all, Andy’s surgery date was cancelled by Johns Hopkins. It was with great difficulty that we were able to persuade the doctor to be put Andy back into the surgical rotation. That cost him two weeks while he suffered from the most aggressive, invasive form of cancer.

[…]

After Andy was admitted to the hospital, the rumors turned into threats. A bounty was offered by the Bush right for anyone who could sneak into his hospital room. It was said he was getting a face lift. A telegram was sent just to see if it could be successfully delivered. The harassment was nonstop. And we tried to shield Andy from it, with less success than we would have liked.

[…]

Andy left the hospital and spent two weeks recovering at a friend’s house, learning how to eat again, learning how to move, weaning himself from the morphine that he’d needed post surgery. During this time, one of his supporters in Baltimore had her car vandalized – a message was sent. Shortly after he left to return to Seattle, his second East Coast hostess was stalked to her home and watched as someone tried to open her front door. His supporters everywhere were systematically intimidated and all the while, they tried to keep it from Andy.

Andy then went back home to Seattle, looking forward to a medical course of chemotherapy and radiation. Once he arrived, he found that an anonymous tipster had managed to get his Medicaid shut down. It took us two weeks to get him back in the system. Andy had anaplastic pancreatic cancer and was again forced to wait weeks for follow up care.

By this time, Andy’s stalkers had set up a website. It purported to be concerned that the funds for his surgery were raised fraudulently. Thankfully by this time, Andy spent very time on line. But it wore on his core advocates who were repeatedly attacked, defamed and baited.

[…]

As late as week before Andy died, we couldn’t keep the poisonous campaign from him. He felt well enough to log into to his email and found a multipage denunciation, supposedly being filed with his state’s attorney general. He called me, not so much in a panic. Panic was no longer a speed Andy had. He called me in despair, because he could no longer fight the barrage of hatred being leveled at him. I don’t remember what I said to him but I hope it helped for a moment.

The attack from the Bush right never paused, not even through the agony of Andy’s last days. Not at all. Even the fact of his death is being disputed. Two days after his passing, his advocates are still being harassed, still receiving anonymous hate calls, “It was a scam.” The friend planning his service was visited by two men impersonating sheriffs on the morning after Andy passed. They were there to ask about fraud, they said.

Andy’s physical death has not stopped the attack, has not slowed the hatred, has not stemmed the steady stream of intimidation.

John Le Carre famously said ahead of the Iraq invasion that "the United States has gone mad." Yes it has, and not in a funny way, in a terrible and frightening way. Not to mention Karl Rove and neo-confederacy, American political discourse in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Free Republic and the like is appalling. Not just the lies, the bad policy and arguably criminal activity of modern government - the utter immorality, the deranged, hateful rhetoric, the total disregard for truth, justice, compassion and human decency of these enablers, propagandists and cheerleaders is what is shocking. These people are cyber-stormtroopers. And they show dangerous signs now of donning the brownshirt and hitting the streets, causing real hurt to those who dare to oppose.

One of the brownshirt blogs, DUmmie FUnnie, is in the running for 'Funniest Blog' category. ha ha. Go now to Weblog Awards and vote for Sadly No to prevent the brownshirt victory.

I dont usually pay much attention to these things, but Deltoid makes a case that a vote should be made this time. First, some background. William Rivers Pitt delivers a eulogy for Stephenson:

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

- Words inscribed on the gravestone of Brandon Lee

It was late July 2004, and it was a hot day for Seattle. The park was filled with activists, organizers and regular folks, there to hear a battery of speakers who had come together for this stop on the Rolling Thunder Democracy Tour. I spent a couple of hours that day in a crowded tent with election reform activist Andy Stephenson, running a teach-in on electronic touch-screen voting machines, corporate control of the vote, and what could be done about it.

I threw in my two cents here and there, but this was Andy’s show. He had thrown his entire life into the fight for election reform, he had crisscrossed the country a dozen times, he had raided the offices of public officials with camcorder in hand to ask questions and demand answers, he had run for the office of Secretary of State in Washington on a platform of reforming the way we run elections in this country, and on that hot July day in Seattle, he was despondent.

As we sweltered in the tent, Andy ticked off all the problems we were sure to face in the coming November presidential election. There was no independent vetting of these voting machines, he explained, so there was no way to tell if the hardware and software within was counting things properly. There were no paper ballots involved, so recounts were a thing of the past. Votes tallied on these machines wound be transferred via unsecured modem to central processing computers – which were basically PCs with Windows software – that had no security and could be easily tampered with. The companies distributing these machines and counting the votes were run by men who gave money to, and in some instances actively worked for, the Bush for President campaign.

I watched the crowd slump lower and lower into their seats as Andy rattled off the grim news. Meek hands were raised here and there. “What can we do about it?” people asked. Not much more than I’ve done, I could feel Andy thinking, and what I’ve done hasn’t fixed this damned situation one bit. He squared his shoulders and replied, “Get in touch with your Secretary of State and explain the situation. Write letters to the editor. Let people know this is happening. Do what you can.”

Flash forward to a cold day in January 2005. I walked the route of the Bush inauguration in Washington DC, counting the protesters and the Bush supporters who were squaring off in shouting matches on every corner. It wasn’t Boston cold, but it was cold enough, the chill in the air enhanced by the overwhelming police and military presence. I made my way down to the main protest gathering point, and there in the crowd was a familiar face.

Andy Stephenson stood off to the side, red hair sliding out from under a black wool cap, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pea coat, ruddy face downcast as he watched the parade go by. We looked at each other a moment, no words available to capture the bottomless depths we felt yawning before us, and then turned to watch the show. When Bush went by in his rolling cannonball of an armored limousine, Andy and I and everyone gathered on that corner turned our backs.

Later that night we sat together with a large crew of activists in a bar that had come to be our gathering point for post-action decompression in DC. I looked over at one point and saw Andy weeping silently, shoulders shaking as all of the frustration and anger poured out of him. Everything he had warned us about in July had happened – in Ohio, in Florida, in New Mexico – and on that night he felt like an utter failure.

Several of us gathered around him to console him. I took his hand and said, “You know, Andy, it could be worse.” He looked up at me and asked, “How on Earth could it be worse?” I looked at him with straight-faced solemnity and said, “You could be straight.” He smiled that utterly incomparable Andy Stephenson smile and laughed until he was fit to split.

That was the last time I saw him.

Andy Stephenson passed away Thursday night from complications due to pancreatic cancer. A series of strokes caused by the cancer in his bloodstream and a post-operative infection carried him to his rest. At his side were his family and Ted, his partner of nineteen years. All across the country, thousands and thousands of people who had rallied to help him heard the news, and bent their heads, and wept. He was 43 years old.

The story of Andy Stephenson’s life and death carries with it all the brightness, and all the unspeakable darkness, that exists today in modern American politics. Here was a man of rare passion, an activist who poured his life into a cause, who continued fighting for this cause even after stricken with his disease, who encompassed the death of his sister and kept working, who never stopped believing that one person could make a difference.

Still, there is that darkness. It has been said that you can best know a person by knowing his enemies. In Andy’s case, his enemies rank among the foulest, most despicable sub-humans ever to draw breath. A small cadre of graveyard rats..

Now at this point I feel I have to break off Pitt's otherwise eloquent eulogy. Ordinarily, in a eulogy some restrained and dignified language is used to respect the occasion and memorialize the departed.

Pitt's peroration:

Andy will be remembered by his friends and family in Seattle this coming weekend. We will gather, we will sing his songs and tell his stories. We will remember the life of a man who gave of himself far more than he received, who was a patriot in the best sense of the word, whose smile could outshine the stars. We will rededicate ourselves to the causes he espoused, and we will prevail with his spirit as the wind at our backs.

Andy believed he had failed that night in January. If I could have one more chance to speak with him, I would tell him how wrong he was that night. You won, Andy. You were the best of us.

This is well said. One of the solutions to the problems of humanity is democracy. Not the only thing, but important nonetheless. And if we are to have democracy, then integrity in the voting systems and the counting is of course essential. Stephenson and others were fighting the good fight, and have not failed, but like Viking Heroes, go to Valhalla because they fought, not because they won.

A Sadly No commenter provides some useful information into pancreatic cancer, which took Stephenson away:

My father hates the pancreas, as every good surgeon does. It is a nasty little organ, full of awful things and prone to falling apart horribly under stress. It is necessary to be profoundly delicate with it under normal circumstances.

Pancreatic resection is among the worst surgical nightmares remaining in this modern world, where most surgeries can be done with little bitty cameras and servos in a gas-inflated cavity. Doing a pancreatic resection requires that the stomach be sliced open from stem to stern, the entire bowel - that is, everything below the stomach - be pulled out, and then you can finally do what you need to to the pancreas.

That is, cut off a tiny little piece of it, very delicately and sloooowly.

The whole time, this requires a superhuman effort from all involved. Nurses keeping intestines in place outside of the body, monitoring heartbeat and breathing and keeping them niiiice and stable during the most traumatic experience a normal human body will ever endure. It is a long surgery, so there is a substantial amount of commitment from people who could as well just leave the room a lot of the time - anesthesiologists, scrubs.

Pancreatic resection has a morbidity rate, depending on the skill of the operating techs and the equipment available, of as little as 70%. That is, within six months, you get one of those suckers done and chances are very good you will be dead - and for good reason. You’ve had a team of tired, agitated professionals slinging around a shit-filled tube in your torn-open gut for hours on end, trying to get at the most bilious little asshole of a gland in your body and poke it and cauterize it. There are so many things that can go wrong, something not going wrong is almost cause for alarm.

It says a lot, then, that there are near to no cases where pancreatic resection is refused.

Pancreatic cancer is a death sentence, a horrific death sentence; it’s a spreading, consuming horror in one of the nerve-blood-and-flesh-richest area of the body you don’t use to screw. If you survive six months without the surgery, you’ll wish you hadn’t. It is so bad that dying horribly of massive sepsis is a step up.

Everyone knows that cancer treatment has its best chance of success if diagnosed and treated early, pancreatic cancer especially so.

Stephenson had no medical insurance, like millions of Americans. So friends of his launched an Internet campaign to raise the funds ($50,000) necessary for surgery, using tools such as blogs and Paypal.

Elizabeth Ferrari - central to the fundraising effort - is quoted by Sadly No to explain the difficulties they had with this process:

What followed was a coordinated effort to block Andy [Stephenson]’s medical care or his benefit from the medical care we could secure for him. In specific, the Bush right had its agents make small donations so they could then call Paypal with allegations of fraud that froze Andy’s account. They also called Paypal, misrepresenting themselves as the hospital to “verify” that this effort was a scam.

And it got more vicious from there. Due to the frozen funds and the confusion it caused us all, Andy’s surgery date was cancelled by Johns Hopkins. It was with great difficulty that we were able to persuade the doctor to be put Andy back into the surgical rotation. That cost him two weeks while he suffered from the most aggressive, invasive form of cancer.

[…]

After Andy was admitted to the hospital, the rumors turned into threats. A bounty was offered by the Bush right for anyone who could sneak into his hospital room. It was said he was getting a face lift. A telegram was sent just to see if it could be successfully delivered. The harassment was nonstop. And we tried to shield Andy from it, with less success than we would have liked.

[…]

Andy left the hospital and spent two weeks recovering at a friend’s house, learning how to eat again, learning how to move, weaning himself from the morphine that he’d needed post surgery. During this time, one of his supporters in Baltimore had her car vandalized – a message was sent. Shortly after he left to return to Seattle, his second East Coast hostess was stalked to her home and watched as someone tried to open her front door. His supporters everywhere were systematically intimidated and all the while, they tried to keep it from Andy.

Andy then went back home to Seattle, looking forward to a medical course of chemotherapy and radiation. Once he arrived, he found that an anonymous tipster had managed to get his Medicaid shut down. It took us two weeks to get him back in the system. Andy had anaplastic pancreatic cancer and was again forced to wait weeks for follow up care.

By this time, Andy’s stalkers had set up a website. It purported to be concerned that the funds for his surgery were raised fraudulently. Thankfully by this time, Andy spent very time on line. But it wore on his core advocates who were repeatedly attacked, defamed and baited.

[…]

As late as week before Andy died, we couldn’t keep the poisonous campaign from him. He felt well enough to log into to his email and found a multipage denunciation, supposedly being filed with his state’s attorney general. He called me, not so much in a panic. Panic was no longer a speed Andy had. He called me in despair, because he could no longer fight the barrage of hatred being leveled at him. I don’t remember what I said to him but I hope it helped for a moment.

The attack from the Bush right never paused, not even through the agony of Andy’s last days. Not at all. Even the fact of his death is being disputed. Two days after his passing, his advocates are still being harassed, still receiving anonymous hate calls, “It was a scam.” The friend planning his service was visited by two men impersonating sheriffs on the morning after Andy passed. They were there to ask about fraud, they said.

Andy’s physical death has not stopped the attack, has not slowed the hatred, has not stemmed the steady stream of intimidation.

John Le Carre famously said ahead of the Iraq invasion that "the United States has gone mad." Yes it has, and not in a funny way, in a terrible and frightening way. Not to mention Karl Rove and neo-confederacy, American political discourse in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Free Republic and the like is appalling. Not just the lies, the bad policy and arguably criminal activity of modern government - the utter immorality, the deranged, hateful rhetoric, the total disregard for truth, justice, compassion and human decency of these enablers, propagandists and cheerleaders is what is shocking. These people are cyber-stormtroopers. And they show dangerous signs now of donning the brownshirt and hitting the streets, causing real hurt to those who dare to oppose.

One of the brownshirt blogs, DUmmie FUnnie, is in the running for 'Funniest Blog' category. ha ha. Go now to Weblog Awards and vote for Sadly No to prevent the brownshirt victory.

Blogger Awards: Andy Stephenson

Henderson: Unseen faces on the ABC 'board'

Henderson on the ABC 'board': "Bob Hawke's Labor government clashed with the ABC over its lack of balance in covering the first Gulf War. Hawke maintained that the ABC was criticising his government from the left."

'Critising the government from the left' could serve as a useful definition of the very purpose of genuine journalism.

If its not doing this, then journalism is 'stenographing' government lies and propaganda, or worse, 'criticising it from the right', as in Michael Ledeen's infamous 'Faster, Please' demand for more war, death, chaos and destruction in the Middle East.

Henderson on the ABC 'board': "Bob Hawke's Labor government clashed with the ABC over its lack of balance in covering the first Gulf War. Hawke maintained that the ABC was criticising his government from the left."

'Critising the government from the left' could serve as a useful definition of the very purpose of genuine journalism.

If its not doing this, then journalism is 'stenographing' government lies and propaganda, or worse, 'criticising it from the right', as in Michael Ledeen's infamous 'Faster, Please' demand for more war, death, chaos and destruction in the Middle East.

Henderson: Unseen faces on the ABC 'board'

Henderson: Al-Qaeda, not US, is to blame for Iraq disaster

Blinkers on in the killing fields - smh.com.au Henderson makes the best case he can for the war in this article, critiquing the 'left' for its opposition and lamenting the horror of Al-Qaeda terrorism. Its very much in the grand style of condemning the historic crime of Hitler's Holocaust (not to mention the shocking acts of Genghis Khan) but having nothing to say about the evils for which we today, right now, are responsible, and could stop if we were minded to.

I suppose the most interesting thing about it is that he no longer seeks to deny the war has slaughtered 650,000 (and counting) Iraqis, he just attempts to pin the blame on Al-Qaeda and the insurgency. The US and its miserable Anglo-Saxon 'allies' Blair and Howard, who are just valiantly striving to promote democracy, apparently don't have anything to do with it.

Lets hope he's reading UK General Rose, who bluntly declared the war is lost, we have to admit defeat and leave, and that the insurgency is right to attack US forces. Henderson might get a clue but I doubt it. He long ago sold his soul to the neo-liberal, neo-conservative, pseudo-fascist governments we labour under. Henderson is billed as the 'executive director of the Sydney Institute', one of those phony academies cum-propaganda-outfits that are a defining feature of the right wing reaction to the sixties. Usually described as 'think tanks', these places have degenerated into being all tank and no think. Naturally a tool like Henderson doesn't know exactly who or when the next country it is that is going to be attacked, only that when the attack comes in, he has to propagandise for it as best he can.

The Iraq war is a modern watershed. There were those who recognised it as an immoral, illegal act of aggressive war and thus opposed it, even before it started; and then there were those who recognised it as an immoral, illegal act of aggressive war and supported it, to the bitter genocidal end. There were only 25 million people in Iraq to start with. We are now heading towards one million killed and another four million refugees. Another ten or twenty years and the place will be depopulated.

Perhaps that is the plan? Genocide the natives and work the fields with imported slave labour. Its reminiscent of the Irish famine: why don't these people just die or can I put them on a coffin ship to the New World? Capitalism wont be able to advance if we can't clear the land and make a profit from modern farming.

If democracy is to be saved and psuedo-fascism defeated, this latter category of war supporters will have to be driven out of public life and public discourse. People who really believed or still believe the silly lies about weapons of mass destruction, links to Al-Qaeda, and promotion of democracy are an insignificant minority. These lies would have done Himmler and Heydrich proud, which is exactly why no decent person these days would want to admit being duped by them.

A word about Pilger: he is one of Australia's great journalists, simply because he takes a moral stance, unlike Henderson who is nothing but a propagandist hacking away in a modern day Ministry of Propaganda. Certainly Pilger is correct in assessing the influence of the insurgency. They have halted the Bush plan of aggressive imperium, for which much of the world might be thankful. Another way of putting it is that 650,000 Iraqi people have paid with their lives so that Syria and Iran could be spared attack (sorry about Somalia).

However the phrase 'supporting the insurgency' is problematic. What exactly is meant by this? That one should send money and guns, perhaps volunteers, to the insurgency? I doubt many antiwar people (or Pilger) would actually agree with this, unlike warmongers of the Henderson variety who are doing all they can to keep the flow of political support, guns, money and soldiers into the warzone. Pilger's use of the word 'support' is probably more like the meaning of 'barracking' for the underdog in a movie at the cinema. You want to see the military machine defeated so that it cannot kill again. Ideally, the American people exercising democracy would halt the war and dismantle the Pentagon themselves, finishing the job Bin Laden started (non-violently, of course). But where democracy and the Republic have failed and been replaced by militarism and imperialism, the only check is military defeat and moral, political, and financial bankruptcy, which, for the sake of the world, cannot come quickly enough.

A couple of other points about Henderson's article: the whole theme of this article is that the immoral 'left' does not condemn terrorist killing, and yet in the very statement from Pilger that Henderson himself quoted Pilger says "we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq". No decent and fair minded person would doubt that that is the genuine motive and feeling of John Pilger. So what is this, cognitive dissonance? Henderson or his propaganda line manager need to review this crap before it goes to print lest it collapse under its own self-refuting idiocy.

Secondly, Henderson say baldly: "Whatever a person's position on the invasion of Iraq, the fact is that most Iraqi deaths are being caused by members of the Iraqi insurgency - Sunni and Shiite alike - as well as by the radical Islamists who comprise al-Qaeda in Iraq." Evidence please? Even if this were true, it does not absolve the US and its allies of responsibility for the disaster which the invasion has imposed on Iraq. But, IIRC, the Lancet guys indicated that most of the deaths were caused by airpower - the vast, great unpunished warcrime of the modern world.

From the slaughter of the Germans (600,000) to the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuking of two other cities, to the monstrous Indo-China bombardment, to the slaughter of 200,000 Iraqis in the First Gulf Massacre, through to this contemporary Second Gulf Massacre, what would Henderson know or care about that? Picasso's Guernica is nice, but its ok if we do it. The shame is revealed, however, when they put a blanket over it.

Blinkers on in the killing fields - smh.com.au Henderson makes the best case he can for the war in this article, critiquing the 'left' for its opposition and lamenting the horror of Al-Qaeda terrorism. Its very much in the grand style of condemning the historic crime of Hitler's Holocaust (not to mention the shocking acts of Genghis Khan) but having nothing to say about the evils for which we today, right now, are responsible, and could stop if we were minded to.

I suppose the most interesting thing about it is that he no longer seeks to deny the war has slaughtered 650,000 (and counting) Iraqis, he just attempts to pin the blame on Al-Qaeda and the insurgency. The US and its miserable Anglo-Saxon 'allies' Blair and Howard, who are just valiantly striving to promote democracy, apparently don't have anything to do with it.

Lets hope he's reading UK General Rose, who bluntly declared the war is lost, we have to admit defeat and leave, and that the insurgency is right to attack US forces. Henderson might get a clue but I doubt it. He long ago sold his soul to the neo-liberal, neo-conservative, pseudo-fascist governments we labour under. Henderson is billed as the 'executive director of the Sydney Institute', one of those phony academies cum-propaganda-outfits that are a defining feature of the right wing reaction to the sixties. Usually described as 'think tanks', these places have degenerated into being all tank and no think. Naturally a tool like Henderson doesn't know exactly who or when the next country it is that is going to be attacked, only that when the attack comes in, he has to propagandise for it as best he can.

The Iraq war is a modern watershed. There were those who recognised it as an immoral, illegal act of aggressive war and thus opposed it, even before it started; and then there were those who recognised it as an immoral, illegal act of aggressive war and supported it, to the bitter genocidal end. There were only 25 million people in Iraq to start with. We are now heading towards one million killed and another four million refugees. Another ten or twenty years and the place will be depopulated.

Perhaps that is the plan? Genocide the natives and work the fields with imported slave labour. Its reminiscent of the Irish famine: why don't these people just die or can I put them on a coffin ship to the New World? Capitalism wont be able to advance if we can't clear the land and make a profit from modern farming.

If democracy is to be saved and psuedo-fascism defeated, this latter category of war supporters will have to be driven out of public life and public discourse. People who really believed or still believe the silly lies about weapons of mass destruction, links to Al-Qaeda, and promotion of democracy are an insignificant minority. These lies would have done Himmler and Heydrich proud, which is exactly why no decent person these days would want to admit being duped by them.

A word about Pilger: he is one of Australia's great journalists, simply because he takes a moral stance, unlike Henderson who is nothing but a propagandist hacking away in a modern day Ministry of Propaganda. Certainly Pilger is correct in assessing the influence of the insurgency. They have halted the Bush plan of aggressive imperium, for which much of the world might be thankful. Another way of putting it is that 650,000 Iraqi people have paid with their lives so that Syria and Iran could be spared attack (sorry about Somalia).

However the phrase 'supporting the insurgency' is problematic. What exactly is meant by this? That one should send money and guns, perhaps volunteers, to the insurgency? I doubt many antiwar people (or Pilger) would actually agree with this, unlike warmongers of the Henderson variety who are doing all they can to keep the flow of political support, guns, money and soldiers into the warzone. Pilger's use of the word 'support' is probably more like the meaning of 'barracking' for the underdog in a movie at the cinema. You want to see the military machine defeated so that it cannot kill again. Ideally, the American people exercising democracy would halt the war and dismantle the Pentagon themselves, finishing the job Bin Laden started (non-violently, of course). But where democracy and the Republic have failed and been replaced by militarism and imperialism, the only check is military defeat and moral, political, and financial bankruptcy, which, for the sake of the world, cannot come quickly enough.

A couple of other points about Henderson's article: the whole theme of this article is that the immoral 'left' does not condemn terrorist killing, and yet in the very statement from Pilger that Henderson himself quoted Pilger says "we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq". No decent and fair minded person would doubt that that is the genuine motive and feeling of John Pilger. So what is this, cognitive dissonance? Henderson or his propaganda line manager need to review this crap before it goes to print lest it collapse under its own self-refuting idiocy.

Secondly, Henderson say baldly: "Whatever a person's position on the invasion of Iraq, the fact is that most Iraqi deaths are being caused by members of the Iraqi insurgency - Sunni and Shiite alike - as well as by the radical Islamists who comprise al-Qaeda in Iraq." Evidence please? Even if this were true, it does not absolve the US and its allies of responsibility for the disaster which the invasion has imposed on Iraq. But, IIRC, the Lancet guys indicated that most of the deaths were caused by airpower - the vast, great unpunished warcrime of the modern world.

From the slaughter of the Germans (600,000) to the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuking of two other cities, to the monstrous Indo-China bombardment, to the slaughter of 200,000 Iraqis in the First Gulf Massacre, through to this contemporary Second Gulf Massacre, what would Henderson know or care about that? Picasso's Guernica is nice, but its ok if we do it. The shame is revealed, however, when they put a blanket over it.

Henderson: Al-Qaeda, not US, is to blame for Iraq disaster

10 Institutions That Ruin The World - #5: Lord knows how I came across this, but here we have an authentic rightie who thinks that the Social Justice movement, the Peace movement and the Environmental movement are among the top 10 institutions that ruin the world but the Pentagon (which has MILLIONS of victims to its credit) and the fossil fuel industry (which is literally killing the planet) don't even rate a mention.

Perhaps this line sums up better than anything the utter wrongheadedness of the writer: "Try finding a mainstream media organisation that hasn't bought into the Global Warming debate on the side of 'the science is settled'."

The science IS settled, and has been for some years now; and it is the corporate media which has been retailing the 'jury not in' line for many years in the face of the scientific consensus.

In the case of governments like the Bush/Cheney administration or corporations like Halliburton (hey, its that man Cheney again!), greed and lust for power conventionally provide and explain the motive for their criminal and inhuman acts. But in the case of the these righties and warbloggers, who presumably get none of the spoils in either riches, power or glory, what excuse or explanation is there for moral depravity? Do they ENJOY war and mass killing as a spectator sport, and LOOK FORWARD to the destruction of the planet?

Update: Language of post modified.

10 Institutions That Ruin The World - #5: Lord knows how I came across this, but here we have an authentic rightie who thinks that the Social Justice movement, the Peace movement and the Environmental movement are among the top 10 institutions that ruin the world but the Pentagon (which has MILLIONS of victims to its credit) and the fossil fuel industry (which is literally killing the planet) don't even rate a mention.

Perhaps this line sums up better than anything the utter wrongheadedness of the writer: "Try finding a mainstream media organisation that hasn't bought into the Global Warming debate on the side of 'the science is settled'."

The science IS settled, and has been for some years now; and it is the corporate media which has been retailing the 'jury not in' line for many years in the face of the scientific consensus.

In the case of governments like the Bush/Cheney administration or corporations like Halliburton (hey, its that man Cheney again!), greed and lust for power conventionally provide and explain the motive for their criminal and inhuman acts. But in the case of the these righties and warbloggers, who presumably get none of the spoils in either riches, power or glory, what excuse or explanation is there for moral depravity? Do they ENJOY war and mass killing as a spectator sport, and LOOK FORWARD to the destruction of the planet?

Update: Language of post modified.

A 'warblogger' repents

What Went Wrong?: Normally I dont read these 'warbloggers' - even when 'repenting' it is virtually unreadable, delusional nonsense. But I struggled through to the end of the article and a few of the comments.

The Iraq war was an illegal, criminal act of aggression based on a pretext of ludicrous lies against a virtually defenceless nation the purpose of which was to establish a reliable client state and seize direct control of the region's oil reserves.* There were no weapons, no links to Al-Qaeda, and no concern for democracy in Iraq (or anywhere else for that matter). The propaganda was fixed around the policy decision to invade which had been taken somewhat earlier in the piece.

All this was obvious at the time to any observer with a computer and a modem connection, and if a person could not or cannot perceive this (either then or now) then that is a subject worth examining. Anyone familiar with either history (especially war and imperialism) or political science (especially either clasical liberalism or anarchism - not to mention common sense understanding of human nature) could see at once what was happening and how it could not be any other way.

Its back to elementary education and a probable 'deprogramming' if an intelligent, educated person did not or cannot see this.

* Yes that's right. After reading or skimming the article and comments I did a search on 'oil' and could not find a single mention, either in the article itself or in the comments. How can anyone think like this? We've got 15,000 plus words of twaddle on the biggest international issue of the modern world, and not a single mention, direct or indirect, or even by way of denial, of the crucial factor underlying the whole affair. How's that for ideological discipline?

What Went Wrong?: Normally I dont read these 'warbloggers' - even when 'repenting' it is virtually unreadable, delusional nonsense. But I struggled through to the end of the article and a few of the comments.

The Iraq war was an illegal, criminal act of aggression based on a pretext of ludicrous lies against a virtually defenceless nation the purpose of which was to establish a reliable client state and seize direct control of the region's oil reserves.* There were no weapons, no links to Al-Qaeda, and no concern for democracy in Iraq (or anywhere else for that matter). The propaganda was fixed around the policy decision to invade which had been taken somewhat earlier in the piece.

All this was obvious at the time to any observer with a computer and a modem connection, and if a person could not or cannot perceive this (either then or now) then that is a subject worth examining. Anyone familiar with either history (especially war and imperialism) or political science (especially either clasical liberalism or anarchism - not to mention common sense understanding of human nature) could see at once what was happening and how it could not be any other way.

Its back to elementary education and a probable 'deprogramming' if an intelligent, educated person did not or cannot see this.

* Yes that's right. After reading or skimming the article and comments I did a search on 'oil' and could not find a single mention, either in the article itself or in the comments. How can anyone think like this? We've got 15,000 plus words of twaddle on the biggest international issue of the modern world, and not a single mention, direct or indirect, or even by way of denial, of the crucial factor underlying the whole affair. How's that for ideological discipline?

A 'warblogger' repents

New Lancet Survey: Massive Death toll in Iraq following invasion: They are now calculating 655,000 'excess deaths' - 500 per day.

The dismal reality is that the US/UK/Aus war and occupation is worse than Saddam's regime - Saddam's regime under sanctions, that is. But what could one expect from the 'supreme crime' of aggressive war? That is why it is called the supreme crime.

Hopefully this incident will put an end to the concept of 'humanitarian war', or 'war for democracy', one of the most cynical ideas ever inflicted on the population by the decadent, corrupt and violent Anglo-saxon 'democratic' governments.

New Lancet Survey: Massive Death toll in Iraq following invasion: They are now calculating 655,000 'excess deaths' - 500 per day.

The dismal reality is that the US/UK/Aus war and occupation is worse than Saddam's regime - Saddam's regime under sanctions, that is. But what could one expect from the 'supreme crime' of aggressive war? That is why it is called the supreme crime.

Hopefully this incident will put an end to the concept of 'humanitarian war', or 'war for democracy', one of the most cynical ideas ever inflicted on the population by the decadent, corrupt and violent Anglo-saxon 'democratic' governments.

Iran linked to Lockerbie bomb: This story, that it was Iran, not Libya's Gaddafi, that was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, has been around for a long time. If true, it means the Libyans were framed and the UK Justice process is a corrupt charade. Unfortunately, such things are possible. Back in the day, Gaddafi was the 'new Hitler.' It will be interesting to observe whether the charge is revived in the media system ahead of the planned war on Iran. Somebody once said 'the struggle against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Most people would not remember Lockerbie, much less who was responsible. If history were rewritten to put Iran in the frame, would anybody notice?

Iran linked to Lockerbie bomb: This story, that it was Iran, not Libya's Gaddafi, that was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, has been around for a long time. If true, it means the Libyans were framed and the UK Justice process is a corrupt charade. Unfortunately, such things are possible. Back in the day, Gaddafi was the 'new Hitler.' It will be interesting to observe whether the charge is revived in the media system ahead of the planned war on Iran. Somebody once said 'the struggle against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Most people would not remember Lockerbie, much less who was responsible. If history were rewritten to put Iran in the frame, would anybody notice?

Royal Society Tells Exxon: Stop Funding Climate Change Denial: Misled by Governments and corporations, there are still many people who are unaware that there is a scientific consensus on the subject of global warming, ie, there is no serious doubt in the scientific community that global warming is occurring, and that it is caused by human activity. In years to come people will surely look back in anger and amazement at the disinformation spread by governments, political figures, corporations and media institutions and personnel about this crucial matter. For what? What was the motive? Simply, short term corporate profit, political and personal advantage and an unwillingness to think of the future.

In fact the corruption of democracy and its institutions is far more serious than many people realise, although with the Big Lies about Iraq, 'terror' etc it is increasingly obvious.

Royal Society Tells Exxon: Stop Funding Climate Change Denial: Misled by Governments and corporations, there are still many people who are unaware that there is a scientific consensus on the subject of global warming, ie, there is no serious doubt in the scientific community that global warming is occurring, and that it is caused by human activity. In years to come people will surely look back in anger and amazement at the disinformation spread by governments, political figures, corporations and media institutions and personnel about this crucial matter. For what? What was the motive? Simply, short term corporate profit, political and personal advantage and an unwillingness to think of the future.

In fact the corruption of democracy and its institutions is far more serious than many people realise, although with the Big Lies about Iraq, 'terror' etc it is increasingly obvious.

Norman Solomon on the debacle of the Iraq war: and how the corporate media, seemingly undeterred, is going through all the motions of preparation for a war on Iran.

Eric Margolis discusses how badly the forgotten war in Afghanistan is going. The imperial powers look to be headed for inevitable defeat there as well.

Norman Solomon on the debacle of the Iraq war: and how the corporate media, seemingly undeterred, is going through all the motions of preparation for a war on Iran.

Eric Margolis discusses how badly the forgotten war in Afghanistan is going. The imperial powers look to be headed for inevitable defeat there as well.

The cruelty of denial: Robert Manne savages Andrew Bolt over the stolen children issue. Bolt demonstrates a contempt and indifference for compassion, humanity, fact and truth that is shocking. This new breed of journalists - the Bolts, Devines, Akermans, Hendersons, Windschuttles and the like - are nothing but blatant propagandists for an ugly and ascendent right.

The cruelty of denial: Robert Manne savages Andrew Bolt over the stolen children issue. Bolt demonstrates a contempt and indifference for compassion, humanity, fact and truth that is shocking. This new breed of journalists - the Bolts, Devines, Akermans, Hendersons, Windschuttles and the like - are nothing but blatant propagandists for an ugly and ascendent right.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad did not say the Holocaust was a myth or call for the annihilation of Israel: Mistranslations have been repeatedly circulated in the corporate media, obviously in order to raise the possibility of war with Iran. Its remarkable the extent to which this propaganda is circulated and the complacency with which it is regarded. Most sane people agree that a war on Iran would be a bigger disaster than the Iraq war.

However, former CIA analyst Ray Close makes an argument that in spite of the obvious and great dangers, Bush will be driven to attack Iran before the end of his term.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad did not say the Holocaust was a myth or call for the annihilation of Israel: Mistranslations have been repeatedly circulated in the corporate media, obviously in order to raise the possibility of war with Iran. Its remarkable the extent to which this propaganda is circulated and the complacency with which it is regarded. Most sane people agree that a war on Iran would be a bigger disaster than the Iraq war.

However, former CIA analyst Ray Close makes an argument that in spite of the obvious and great dangers, Bush will be driven to attack Iran before the end of his term.