A Supreme Schadenfreude Moment

In what was called a "bombshell" denunciation, Senator Feinstein accused the CIA of conducting an illegal search and seizure of her Senate committees offices and work-product in, what she said, was an attempt to intimidate a legitimate congressional investigation. 

Senator Feinstein is an incurable safety freak and security hack.  She is that kind of psychotic who sees "potential risks" in just anything and is willing to batten down everything in the illusory and interminable pursuit of total safety, "as in a dream where our pursuer cannot catch us nor can we escape…" (Iliad,  Bk XXII.) 

During Senate hearings after the Oklahoma City bombing, Feinstein asked rhetorically and plaintively, "the First Amendment doesn't include the right to teach someone how to make a bomb, does it?"

Actually Dianne, the First Amendment does encompass chemistry. 

It was a small, passing remark but one that provided a glimpse into Feinstein's interior cosmos.  The remark did not come from some yahoo on a bar-stool but from a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  One would think that a person serving on one of the Government's highest law-related bodies would have some fundamental understanding of the First Article of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. 

The First Amendment does not protect a conspiracy to make a bomb but that is not what Feinstein asked; and, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, one is entitled to expect that she understands the difference between teaching and conspiring. 

What she evidently does not understand is what the First Amendment entails and requires.  James Madison, the principal author of the Bill of Rights put it this way in Federalist Paper No. 13 

"It could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes [divisive] faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency."

Although Madison was talking about political liberty and partisan animosities, he might as well have been talking about the Amendment which most primarily guarantees that liberty.

FREEDOM CARRIES RISKS. This is something Feinstein simply does not understand.  Her unwavering dedication to eliminate risks is in fact an equally unflinching crusade to exterminate freedom.

Given this security craving disorder, it is hardly surprising that Feinstein should have been the Senate's foremost champion of CIA/NSA snooping. 

She was among the first to accuse Snowden of being an enemy of peace, safety and virginity.   As the depth and scope of NSA snooping was revealed, Feinstein fought tooth and claw to allow the safety-spying to continue under the most cosmetic window dressing conceivable.  All, of course, in the name of protecting our precocious children from drugs, terrorism, and endangerments of every sort. 

It is thus supremely satisfying to watch Feinstein squeal in indignation and pain as the shoe gets shoved onto her foot.  How dare the CIA spy on her staff!!!  Do they think that they are mere ordinary, common Amurkans? The gall!

It is better still. To the schadenfreude one may add a kind of political slapstick as the CIA sues Feinstein for leaking information damaging to national security while she counter-sues the CIA for violating her (no longer-existent) Fourth Amendment rights.

We wish them both the best of luck. May they rip one another to shreds.

©

Direct from the Jawbone of an Ass

The United States seems to be having a bargain basement sale on astroturf -- otherwise known as stirring up phony grass-roots protests in order to destabilize a "target" government. 

The denouement in the Ukraine has hardly abated before Uncle Sam is busy rolling out the turf in Venezuela. 

This requires the usual sound-track from on high.  Arriving in Chile, Vice President Biden, declaimed:

 Confronting peaceful protesters with force and in some cases armed militias, limiting freedom of the press and assembly … is not in line with the solid standards of democracy that we have in most of our hemisphere ...

Really Joe? 

You real mean that?

Not content with one asinine comment Biden went on to say that President Maduro  "should listen to the Venezuelan people."  Evidently despite access to the CIA's best intelligence, Biden hasn't bothered to look at the polls from Venezuela.

In fact he has.  He's just a shame-faced two-faced sum-bitch liar who pimps for an out-of-control, crazed government that infiltrates and suppresses protest at home while infiltrating and provoking protests abroad. 

Someone was On Board.

BREAKING NEWS:  A passenger jet has disappeared into thin air...  uh...  deep water, without a trace.   N'ary a frantic last transmission; n'ary a beeb ... just a soft and almost silent blurp.

When this sort of thing happens, the first thing to do is: check the passenger list.

We have no idea who was on board; but someone was.

©

UPDATE 15 MARCH:  According to BBC News, investigators of the missing plane said today "in light of the new evidence, the investigation had "entered a new phase" and would focus on the crew and passengers on board."    You read it first in BARFO.   >lolsmirk<
 

An Ensnaring Irony

As a pure graphic, we thought the WOLFANGEL was kinda neat.  In our opinion, the most grabbing graphic symbols are always composed of a simple, sharp angularity.

Jung would probably have something to say about it; but it seems rather obvious that the cross and the swastika have an attractive power independent of the ideologies they represent

We knew the that the wolfangel was a runic letter but we were curious what it stood for and how it came to be.  Enter Wiki.

We learned that the rune was derived from a double metal hook, attached to a chain and a post which was used to ensnare and kill wolves.  Bait would be stuck on either end of the hook.  When the wolf ate the bate and then tried to withdraw the hook would pierce into the animal's throat.  The more the wolf pulled, the more he killed himself.  If, as was unlikely, he simply stood still, he would starve to death.

In German the word is not a wolf-angel but a wolf-angle and it stands for an incredibly cruel and malicious form of killing.  (As in fact, does the cross.)  The graphic suddenly appeared not so neat.

There is an irony in the Ukrainian nationalists' use of the wolfangel as their symbol; for, if they get their wish, they will only find themselves ensnared and choked by I.M.F. loans which will bleed their country to death.

©

Thinking Inside the Box

In viral news, Estonian foreign minister, Urmas Paet, was caught on tape telling Lady Ashton, the EU foreign affairs minister, “There is now [a] stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition."  Ashton replies, "Gosh."

The remark was seized by opponents of the usurper regime in Kiev as further proof of a conspiracy to bring the Ukraine into the fold of Western hegemony.  But that is not the real story behind the taped conversation.  Or, put another way, proof of a hegemonic conspiracy came from Lady Ashton herself.

During the conversation, Ashton talked at length about her discussions with various protest leaders and members of various civic associations.  She told Paet that, in these discussions, she discussed the financial and technical help that the West could offer Ukraine in "changing" its "political economy."  According to Ashton, the West has had experience and success in bringing about these changes in other former Eastern Bloc countries.  The same assistance and investment  could be forthcoming to the Ukraine but none of it would materialize unless the West had someone to "partner" with.  It was therefore, said Ashton, essential that there be a responsible government in Kiev for the West to deal with.


What was astonishing about Ashton's remarks was her conviction and sweetness of tone in the way she said these things as if it were the most obvious and natural thing in the world.  It was quite clear that an alternative political economy -- one which did not involve debt servitude to the I.M.F. or penetration by foreign investors -- was simply not in Ashton's conceptual cosmos.  But of course, we assume you want to be our vassals!  What else?

Ashton's sweetness and light was simply the Fetish of the Commodity on a global scale.  The West is absolutely and zealously certain of its Mission in Plunder and that history is on its side. Unfortunately too many Ukrainians are eager to crawl into the box


©Barbo 2014

Worse than Pogey Bait

New depths of shamelessness and hypocrisy are reached every day with the U.S. response to the Ukrainian crisis.   Secretary John Kerry fluttered into Kiev yesterday "with $1 billion in loan guarantees meant to support the country’s efforts to integrate with the West and offers of technical assistance."   (NYT)

Are we supposed to choke up with tears at heart warming magnanimity of Amurka?  Last we read, the Ukraine was something like 40 billion dollars in the hole.   The Russian Federation offered in the vicinity of $15 billion.   And now flieth in Washington's John Kerry doing a very weak parody of St. Francis with an offer of what amounts to little more than a pignata of dried fruit and nuts.

Actually, the U.S. gesture is far worse.  It is a sordid ploy to hook the Ukraine on western credit.  When Foreign Minister Hague took to the foyer the other day to announce the West's willingness to work with the IMF in providing loans to the Ukraine what he was promising was to turn the Ukraine into a debt slave.

Has anyone notice how IMF loans are never repaid but always rolled over?  IMF loans are a pure and outright credit card scam.  The borrower is enticed into the promised land of cornucopia only to find himself on a fees-and-interest treadmill.  With each "rollover" more "austerity" and "privatisation" is demanded until the whole country is reduced to economic vassalage.  And vassalage is a polite way of saying a slum surrounding glittering towers of corporate ownership and control.

This is what the word "integrate" means.

©barfo, 2014

Going Back to Which Century - The Return of the Boyars

The inimitable Kerry-Obambi team have wagged their boney fingers at Russia, accusing the erstwhile Soviet Union of "going back to the 19th century."  If diplomacy were vaudeville the Blustering Duo would walk away with the prize.

The original problem, of course, is that the US elite are about as ignorant of history as their own peasants. It is evident, that neither Kerry nor Obambi have heard of the Boyars.

The Boyars were that class of the slavic aristocracy ranked just beneath royal nobility.  The term does not have an exact equivalent in western hierarchies but it is fair to say that the Boyars were a class of chiefs who ruled vast estates like little kings.  They were the prop and the bane of those kings who ruled (at least nominally) the entire realm … although where "the realm" began and ended was often a matter of dispute.

In the 17th century, Peter the Great sought to curb the power and influence of the Boyars.  In truth, he simply westernized them into a superficially European aristocracy.  It was not until the Great October Revolution that an end was put to Boyardism.

In 1991, the Soviet Union was politically dissolved.  Equally dissolved was the centrally planned communist economy.  It is not too simple to say that the economic turkey was simply carved up into juicy pieces given to well connected individuals who became billionaires overnight.

What malicious idiots like Samantha Powers and Dinesh d'Souza call "liberalization" consists in this: the ordinary slob is allowed to run amok politically while the economic foundations of society are turned into "privatized" fiefs belonging to and run by Oligarchs.

The reason for this is also, basically, simple.  A modern mass society of 100, 200, 300 million stomachs cannot be run on the basis of little shops and carts, making shoes and delivering apples.  Sustaining those magnitudes of people requires commensurately large and coordinated infrastructures.  In fact, virtually everything becomes an infrastructure.  Walmart is no less an infrastructure than Gazprom.  

Anarchist pipe dreams aside, economic engines cannot be operated with the freedom and chaos of nominal politics. The paradigm of any large company is hierarchical and military.  This is a meta-political truth and it applies to any system.  Even within the planned soviet economy, large economic units were, in terms of their functional operation, autonomous divisions were run by economic colonels and generals.  "Privatisation" meant simply that these "division chiefs" were allowed to keep the profits for themselves rather than depositing them in the National Kitty.

In short, what happened in 1991 was the Return of the Boyars.   This was a return not to the 19th century but to the 16th.  With this in mind, the Kerry-Obambi exercise in chastisement can be seen for the utter imbecility it is.  What leaders of the neo-liberal global economy are in fact advocating, under the banner of "free trade" is simply a universal reverse march into the pre 19th century past.

©