glasscastle - August 15, 2005 @ 9:43 pm
· Politics
Actor
Declares for Presidency
"Our
great country is in a terrible downward spiral. We’re outsourcing jobs,
bankrupting social security, and losing lives at war. We need to focus
on what’s important– paying attention to our children, our citizens,
our future. We need to think about improving our failing educational
system, making better use of our resources, and helping to promote a
stable, safe, and tolerant global society. It’s time to be smart about
our politics. It’s time to get America back on track."
www.nk-news.net boasts of having nearly every KCNA article
since December 1996 — "over 50 megabytes of hard-core Stalinist propaganda
… each article written in the unique and indelible style of the KCNA."
Readers can get a taste of that KCNA style from recommended key word searches,
such as "burning hatred," which turns up 18 articles. The targets
of that hot wrath include Japan, Yankees, "U.S. imperialist ogres" and "class
enemies."
Our posting last week, "We’re
All Texans Now" congratulating the oil industry on the biggest,
billion-dollar (a DAY) boondoggle in history, basically pulling a larcenous
assault, in broad daylight, on THE ENTIRE WORLD, and trying to make it
out to seem they are also unfortunate victims of the situation, garnered
many more comments than our usual reader response (sepulchral silence).
But what none of those who challenged our contentions explained, and
what we have yet to hear in a coherent form from any commentator, industry
spokesperson or talking head, is an explanation of exactly WHERE the extra
billions are going. Twenty extra cents on every gallon, this month alone,
multiplied by hundreds of millions of fill-ups every day, just seem to
be vanishing into the impenetrable complexities of the energy industry.
We have been hearing fumbling folderol about increased extraction costs,
oil industry cost crises, investment in exploration, simple supply and
demand, processing and production bottlenecks, cut profit predictions
and supply-side strain. Chaff and misdirection all. We may not have a
degree in Economics (well, actually we do), but we know that most of the
time capitalism is pretty simple. If normal, educated, intelligent people
can’t understand what is going on, its usually because someone is pulling
the wool over their eyes.
Obviously, the people who designed the scam want to obfuscate and distance
themselves from the true path of this extraordinary and unprecedented
flow of raw capital into carefully constructed and concealed black holes
of untraceable equity. Who could possibly penetrate the arcane inner workings
of this vast oil-drenched conspiracy? We doubt the press, as presently
constituted, have either the skill or the stomach for the job.
This
one is just plain weird. Our linking to it in no way indicates
approval of violence in general or violence involving women in particular.
Think of it, rather, as an animated slapstick of contortionistic applied
anatomy, on the part of a shockwave programmer with too much time on
his hands…
glasscastle - August 15, 2005 @ 1:37 am
· Serious News
Quito/EFE
– El ministro ecuatoriano de Gobierno, Mauricio Gendara, dijo que se
investigara
a
EPI Security
and
Investigation,
empresa
que tiene una oficina en el oeste de Ecuador y que recluta a colombianos
para tareas de seguridad en Irak.
La empresa funciona en Manta, a 390 kilometros al suroeste de Quito,
en la misma ciudad donde desde 1999 se encuentra un centro de operaciones
de Estados Unidos (FOL, por su sigla en inges) para luchar contra el
narcotrofico
en la region.
El propietario de la empresa es el estadounidense Jeffrey Shippy, un
ex bombero a quien "los 4.200 dolares que le pagaban en la FOL por su
trabajo
no le alcanzaban y por eso decidi instalar esta compa?a para enviar a
colombianos a Irak’, dijo su esposa, la ecuatoriana Martha Cararte.(translation
below)
The Ecuadorian Minister of Government, Mauricio Gendara,
said that an investigation is underway of EPI Security and Investigation,
a company with an office in Western Ecuador and which is recruiting Colombians
for security work in Iraq.
The company is based in Manta, about 250 miles southeast
of Quito, in the same city which since 1999 has been the center of operations
of the United States fight against drug trafficking in the region.
The owner of the business is an American, Jeffery
Shippy, an ex-fireman for whom "the $4,200 dollars that he was paid
in the FOL
wasn’t enough to live on, so he decided to start a company to send Colombians
to Iraq", said his wife, Ecuadorian Martha Cararte.
This is exceedingly strange. Manta,
as regular readers will note, is the picturesque Ecuadorian vacation
hideaway and
fishing port where the Dowbrigade is carefully feathering a nest for
our approaching retirement. For the last six years, since the Panamanians
gave the boot to the Southern Command, it has been the eyes and ears
of the US intelligence community in Latin America. It is also the fastest
growing city in Ecuador, the best deepwater port on the Pacific Coast
of South America and home to 200,000 happy souls.
But who is Jeffery Shippy, and what is he up to in Manta
that $4,200 a month can’t provide? One of the many ways in which Manta
is a paradise is the comparative value of the local currency, which happens
to be US Dollars; a good hotel costs $15, a good bottle of wine can be
had for $3.00 and a dozen roses go for $1.49. The
Mayor only
makes $3,000 a month.
And what, Jeffery woke up one morning and decided it
was time to grow up, quit pretending to be a "fireman" and start recruiting
Colombians go work security in Iraq?
The "fireman" line is kind of an “in” joke around Manta. The
number of spooks at the base is, of course, classified, but there must
be hundreds of them. You see them all over town; young strapping
farm boys horsing around, drinking the cheap, good beer, enjoying the
duty, but careful, polite and always in control. The mid-range
officers, trim, pale, serious cowboys and southern gentlemen in their
30′s and 40′s talk sports and watch everything without seeming to be
too interested.
There are obvious gearheads, human archetypes recognizable
in any uniform or casual dress, geekily squinting from behind glasses,
and hotshot pilots bombing around town on motorcycles and nice cars,
and muscular marine security types. The only thing they all have in common
is that if you ask them what they do at the base, they invariably say,
"Fireman." It’s clear everybody got the memo.
The brass are rarely seen
in public. They hang out at the base, a prickly forest of antennae,
comfortable barracks, long low buildings of indeterminate use, windowless
hangers and immaculately maintained runways, built over an old Ecuadorian
Air Force base acquired on a 99-year lease, or at an isolated private
club or one of a number of local walled estates which are worlds unto
themselves.
But why hire Colombians? And why do it in Manta
rather than in Colombia? And why send them to Iraq as security? Good
questions all. Let’s take them one at a time.
Sociologists, Latin American scholars and politicians
still argue about whether Colombians are
by nature more violent than other Latin Americans. What is certain
is that their modern history is bloodier and far more violent than their neighbors. The recent
tradition of Colombian violence is ironicized by the fact that during the
pre-Colombian
period the Indians of the area were less violent than, and often dominated
by, their blood-thirsty brethren to the south.
Nowadays, everybody in Colombia is armed at all times. Even babies have miniature machetes to slice off the fingers of clumsy kidnappers. People are
continually on the lookout for kidnappers, assassins, hidden bombs, automatic weapons,
knives up sleeves, suspicious packages, improvised explosive devices, organized groups of
people pretending they don’t know each other, irregular traffic patterns,
quiet ticking sounds, unnatural silence, etc. In short, they were born to security
work. And, as unskilled workers from an underdeveloped country,
they come cheap.
This operation is probably based in Manta due to it’s
proximity to spook central, and because despite "Plan
Colombia" that country is
still a dicier place to run a business, especially if you are fronting
for the US military. The government in Ecuador really likes the
US, which is why the base is where it is. Shippy
Actor![](http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/static/dowbrigade/<br />
uglydog.jpg” width=”336″ height=”450″ align=”left”>SANTA BARBARA – Some may call it a tale of beauty<br />
and the beast. But Sam, a 14-year-old pedigreed Chinese crested, and<br />
a three-time champ in the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest, is the dog of<br />
Susie Lockheed’s dreams.</p>
<p> Lockheed, 53, enjoys massaging Sam’s fleshy, thin, potato-chip ears and<br />
running her fingers through the small patches of white hair on his head.</p>
<p> She likes kissing Sam’s hairless frame, littered with blackheads, brown<br />
warts and moles. Even his hindquarters have a large hernia lump. </p>
<p> Then there’s his right eye, left a reddish-purple from cataracts, which<br />
stands out from the other, which is a milky white. </p>
<p> "<br />
I’ve never had a dog this much in love with me," Lockheed said. "I<br />
really baby Sam, and kiss him a lot. He’s a toad [that's] going to turn<br />
into a prince."</p>
<p> Sam is one of four hairless dogs that love to groggily lounge on the couch<br />
in Lockheed’s Santa Barbara home, where she operates a beauty salon.</p>
<p align=)
Of course, she operates a beauty salon. Somebody – Few can denounce the "imperialist<br />
ogre" or "kingpin of evil" as well as the writers at North<br />
Korea’s official news agency, and a California graphic artist is now<br />
cataloging their rhetorical masterpieces on a Web site.</p>
<p> Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA, is the only regular<br />
source of the views of the secretive government of Kim Jong-il available<br />
to diplomats, journalists and scholars.</p>
<p> But there was no way for them to search the archives of KCNA until Geoff<br />
Davis, fighting boredom during a rainy San Francisco spring, decided to<br />
hone his Web design skills on a topic he had followed in news reports on<br />
the North Korean nuclear crisis."Their propaganda is often unintentionally<br />
hilarious and I couldn’t find an existing searchable database of the KCNA<br />
on the Web. Thus, NK News was born," Davis told Reuters.</p>
<p> Launched in May, <a href=)
www.nk-news.net boasts of having nearly every KCNA article
Gas
This
Quito/EFE
