Nowtopian

Yes, I am in the daze… already a ridiculous number of parties, gatherings, events, and still lots more ahead… Good stuff appearing here and there in the blogosphere that I wanted to link to before I go to my picture gallery… Rebecca Solnit wrote a wonderful essay “The Age of Mammals” about the first quarter of the 21st century looking back from a hundred years on. Billmon returned from a few weeks off to post a telling retrospective of the Iraq War as seen through his own blog entries dating back to 2003, showing how often and correctly he and many others predicted what would happen throughout the years that supposedly no one was aware of how bad it was “becoming”. Absolutely sickening how self-referentially pigheaded and willfully blind and ignorant the punditocracy and ostensibly professional journalists (paid propagandists) have been and continue to be… W. Joseph Stroupe continues to write very interesting pieces about the new landscape of global geopolitics at Asia Times, well worth checking out. John Robb’s Global Guerrillas is an ongoing must-read too. His latest describes how the insurgency has destroyed the electrical grid serving Baghdad; it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how easily this tactic will be adopted and spread far and wide in coming years. The precariousness of so-called modern life is increasingly staring us in the face. Efforts to go local and low-tech are not just ecologically smart, they’re probably the key to living well as the cascading failures of the Long War guerrilla attacks finally start to appear in North America…

Continue reading Holidaze

A short entry to point to an article on the increasing militarization of our daily lives (out of sight, out of mind)… Peter Byrne used to publish a very good investigative newsletter here in SF before eventually being hired by the SF Weekly, where he did some good investigations and some that seemed like hatchet jobs (but I can’t remember now which ones so we’ll leave that aside). Anyway, in spite of thinking that not ALL his pieces in the Weakly were worthwhile, I always think of Byrne as a good journalist, and worth checking out. Via another old friend came a link to this article on Bohemian.com, a north bay paper where he’s got a column now.

I note too on FireDogLake a link to the former NSA analyst William Arkin’s blog on the Washington Post wherein he emphasizes Bush’s language yesterday:

Extremist-in-chief George W. Bush yesterday continued along his merry way, going over the heads of the wise men and defying Washington moderation and the glories of bipartisan centrism to remind the American public that he is also the protector.

“The only way to secure a lasting peace for our children and grandchildren is to defeat the extremist ideologies,” the president said.

Mark his words: the only way.

Put that together with the neocon Dead-enders running the government, their increasing detachment from any accountability or even reality, and domestic military surveillance and planning takes on even more sinister implications. I can always get paranoid about martial law and camps, being shaped politically by the Nixon era, but I find it hard to imagine that the military and National Guard would actually follow orders to impose it on major U.S. cities. Unless they’ve segregated brigades of fundy xtian soldiers to carry it out, I think most would mutiny before carrying out a desperate martial law declaration from the madmen running the government for two more years… Hopefully we won’t get to find out!