In honor of Memorial Day, some photos from the family trip last summer to Normandy would be in order.

Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial - Wikipedia

American Battle Monuments Commission: NORMANDY AMERICAN CEMETERY AND MEMORIAL.

Here's the battle plan wall from the memorial area:

The matrix of headstones gave us a visually harmonious, but emotionally daunting, pattern to walk through.

Many graves were anonymously marked:

Entrance to one of the German bunkers seized by the Allies on D-Day:

An obelisk on the top of the ridge memorialized some soldiers:

Here's a view looking upwards from the landing beach, towards the bluff and the cemetery:

One of the more striking elements were the Jewish soldiers' graves: they had Star of David headstones:

The sky was impressive that day. The jetstream had unseasonably shifted over northern France, so weather patterns came blasting over us, with brief rain at the Normandy cemetery. This weather anomaly also played a role in the mass flooding that was striking the United Kingdom, and the extreme dryness generating fires across the eastern Mediterranean basin. However, it produced really amazing skies for us.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

--Attributed to Plato *

*[more on that debate]

Alright, I'll cop to this one because it was just too dumb. For months, I've had a typo, 'contraditions' instead of 'contradictions' in the banner, and i didn't notice. Someone politely commented months ago and I didn't even notice.

There's a lot of appalling typographical errors out there, but the banner has to take the cake! (and what better way to conclude the mea culpa than a barrage of cliches. Yes!)

If Firefox is too pokey, and Safari annoying, you should try Camino, which is another fork of Mozilla that is more streamlined for the Mac than Firefox. It's got pretty good performance, really. Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style

You can get a lot of usual Firefox plugins into Camino, as well.

Open source rules. For more details on the latest version, see:

Camino. Releases. 1.6.1

YouTube - Bill O'Reilly Flips Out — DANCE REMIX

Sublime! FCC Warning: contains expletives used as a beat and/or rhythm

What can I say?!

How will Obama change the structure of the Democratic Party: is it progressive or autocratic? Etc??! Matt Stoller: Obama's Consolidation of the Party - Politics on The Huffington Post and The Obama Squeeze | The Agonist.

Meanwhile over @ No Quarter they are pretty grumpy b/c they've been in the Hillary camp for a dang long time: I Call a Spade a Spade : NO QUARTER

PSYOPS update: here's your raw data: John Stauber: Pentagon Propaganda Documents Go Online: But Will the Media Ever Report on Them?

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated US law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers -- most of them with financial ties to war contractors -- into the TV networks as "message surrogates" for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences.

News of the Pentagon's online posting of the documents came from Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who notes that NSNS provided the New York Times "limited information about a military office early in the reporting process."

Here is the official Pentagon website with the 8,000 pages of documents, the most interesting and revealing of them previously secret and only available to the Pentagon and the New York Times:

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/

More than two weeks after the New York Times reported on the Penatgon's military analyst program to sell controversial policies such as the invasion of Iraq, the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program are hoping to tough out the scandal by refusing to report it. Recently Media Matters of America (MMA) reported that, according to a search of the Nexis database, "the three major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have still not mentioned the report at all."

Keep running the airtight ship, guys!

Meanwhile, General Electric didn't have a dog in that media game, did they? Hmmm.... The Raw Story | Chris Matthews: MSNBC bosses were 'basically pro-war'

As previously noted on this website, the Pentagon has had an extensive agenda to manipulate mainstream media in order to promote the war, via PSYOPS strategies that make the American population a "strategic" target for brain spoofing. Controlling elite opinion and mass ideas has been the big picture, which is prety obvious. But actually reading all those strategic emails about how to spoof the news via 'military analysts' is another matter altogether.

This was reported in the New York Times and then obviously deleted from the A-story media agenda because it raises too many questions about news oversight and industry-wide management practices.

Meanwhile the paranoid thread digs parallel concerns: Pentagon Secretly Goes To War With The Internet with exciting new systems designed to help the powers that be do... something.

It is not a surprise: the Pentagon's ever-expanding system of total rationality would see the off-message resistance to the war agenda as a kind of distributed evil/terrorist network. Ensuring the primacy of war and top-down information control as the organizing principles of our 21st century society would be a primary goal. True? Probably, even if the various individual humans in the system can't actually see or understand this.

WIRED adds: What's Up with the Secret Cybersecurity Plans, Senators Ask DHS | Threat Level from Wired.com

Why might citizens be worried about privacy and civil liberties? Consider that the whole initiative appears to have been launched after the Director of National Intelligence told the President Bush that a cyber attack might wreak as much economic havoc as 9/11 did.

Consider that the NSA, which currently protects classified networks, wants to expand into protecting all non-classified federal government networks. Consider that Congress is set to legalize the NSA's monitoring rooms in the nation's phone and internet infrastructure.

For its part, the FBI says it also needs access to the internet's backbone, while the Air Force is hyping its own efforts at cyber defense and offense. Meanwhile, THREAT LEVEL's sister blog Danger Room reports that DARPA is getting in on the hot cyber-action, with a project to make a fake internet to develop new cyber attacks and defenses.

It's been said many times that if the government knew what the internet was going to become when it grew up, they would had never let it out of the lab.

Now it seems the only question is whether the government will be able to turn the net into a controllable, monitorable and trackable pre-internet AOL-type service or whether the chaotic net will live on as just another frontier for the military-industrial complex to start an arm's race and rake in billions of government dollars.

Meanwhile the paranoia side also blames the schemes of the Bilberberg Group for the gas pump disaster. I'd say, well, this kind of thing wouldn't surprise me anymore. Goldman Sachs: Bilderberg Target Of $200 Dollar Oil Nears.

And why not some more stuff: Military and Homeland Security Dictate Who Lives And Who Dies In A Pandemic

Rational Annihilation. Of ideas, sick old people, whatever. The ominous specters continue, and blog posts go up apace....

Pigs!

God Damn... pigs!

Potbelly... pigs!

Punch-drunk... pigs!

Take money, money... pigs!

Loudmouth... pigs!

Wide load... pigs!

Let's make a deal...

--Aesop Rock , "Coffee" from the excellent new album "None Shall Pass"

A delicious press release arrives:

STATEMENT

For Immediate Release

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Contact:

Matt Burns - 651-925-7208

mburns@gopconvention2008.com

GOP CONVENTION COORDINATOR RESIGNS

SAINT PAUL, Minn. -- The 2008 Republican National Convention today accepted the resignation of convention coordinator Doug Goodyear. Mr. Goodyear issued the following statement on his resignation:

“Today I offered the convention my resignation so as not to become a distraction in this campaign. I continue to strongly support John McCain for president, and wish him the best of luck in this campaign.”

###

What ever could be the matter? Oh damn, their chief Convention Flack took a ton of cash to work promoting the Burmese junta in Washington.

Exactly like Duke's excellent work for Berzerkistan on Doonesbury:

I mean, exactly like Duke. $348,000 buys a lot of sleep, I bet.

Yeah, the chief RNC St. Paul organizer guy worked for that torture-insanity-what-the-hell Burmese military Dictatorship. Newsweek shook it loose!

McCain's Convention Chair Worked for Burma's Military Junta | Newsweek Periscope | Newsweek.com:

After John McCain nailed down the Republican nomination in March, his campaign began wrestling with a sensitive personnel issue: who would manage this summer's GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn.? The campaign recently tapped Doug Goodyear for the job, a veteran operative and Arizonan who was chosen for his "management experience and expertise," according to McCain press secretary Jill Hazelbaker. But some allies worry that Goodyear's selection could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists. Goodyear is CEO of DCI Group, a consulting firm that earned $3 million last year lobbying for ExxonMobil, General Motors and other clients.

Potentially more problematic: the firm was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma's military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today. Justice Department lobbying records show DCI pushed to "begin a dialogue of political reconciliation" with the regime. It also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta's image, drafting releases praising Burma's efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing "falsehoods" by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses. "It was our only foreign representation, it was for a short tenure, and it was six years ago," Goodyear told NEWSWEEK, adding the junta's record in the current cyclone crisis is "reprehensible."

Another issue: DCI has been a pioneer in running "independent" expenditure campaigns by so–called 527 groups, precisely the kind of operations that McCain, in his battle for campaign-finance reform, has denounced. In 2004, the DCI Group led a pro-Bush 527 called Progress for America, which was later fined (along with several other 527s on both sides of the political divide) for violating federal election laws. Goodyear, however, says that DCI is "not in the 527 business anymore."

Ironically, Goodyear was chosen for the post after the McCain campaign nixed another candidate, Paul Manafort, who runs a lobbying firm with McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis. The prospect of choosing Manafort created anxiety in the campaign because of his long history of representing controversial foreign clients, including Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. More recently, he served as chief political consultant to Viktor Yanukovich, the former Ukrainian prime minister who has been widely criticized for alleged corruption and for his close ties to Russia's Vladimir Putin—a potential embarrassment for McCain, who in 2007 called Putin a "totalitarian dictator." "The Ukrainian stuff was viewed as too much," says one McCain strategist, who asked not to be identified discussing the matter. Manafort did not return calls for comment.

Then: Stumper : McCain Convention Manager Resigns After NEWSWEEK Reveals Burma Ties

Andrew Romano

Around noon today, the powers-that-be at NEWSWEEK posted "A Convention Quandary" on our website. In the story, investigative ace Michael Isikoff reported that the man chosen by John McCain's presidential campaign to run this summer's GOP convention--Arizonan Doug Goodyear--was causing some headaches within the ranks. The problem? Goodyear is CEO ofDCI Group, a consulting firm that earned $3 million last year lobbying for ExxonMobil, General Motors and other clients--not the most convenient association for a candidate who's already struggling to reconcile his reputation as an anti-special interests crusader with the sizable number of lobbyists on his senior staff. Further complicating matters: Isikoff's revelation that DCI was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma's military junta, leading "a PR campaign to burnish the junta's image, drafting releases praising Burma's efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing 'falsehoods' by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses." Ouch.

Apparently, Goodyear agreed.

Shortly after 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, the Republican National Convention announced that it had accepted Goodyear's resignation, setting a new land speed record for shortest time lapsed between the "story breaks" and "ax falls" phases of a political scandal. "Today I offered the convention my resignation so as not to become a distraction in this campaign," said Goodyear in written statement. "I continue to strongly support John McCain for president, and wish him the best of luck in this campaign." Asked later by the Politico whether Team McCain had given him the boot, Goodyear said no. "My decision," he added. "[It was] unambiguously the right thing to do."

Nice.... Say what you will, who could possibly be more evil than a public relations strategist for an evil, corrupt Asian dictatorship?!

NY Times exposes the PSY OPS Pentagon campaign against your brain: (i should have posted this earlier!)

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

The Nation on it: NYT Investigation Exposes Pentagon Pimps & Propaganda Operation

Horrible PSYOPS. justifies everything I have ever said about the PSYOPS and manipulating yr brains @ the Pentagon, in great detail with many grumpy ex-talking heads speaking out about how the Pentagon fabricated news and nursed sweetheart military industrial lobbyist relations . (Including Ken Allard, who always seemed extra awful to me)

Pentagon Conduits (from the Old Right)

Read this and freek out: A Pentagon's Who's Who of Your Life - by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt

If you buy it via this link, you'll support antiwar.com (which is more deserving than I): Amazon.com: The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives: Nick Turse: Books:

A mind-boggling investigation of the allpervasive, constantly morphing presence of the Pentagon in daily life—a real-world Matrix come alive Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex—an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives.

From iPods to Starbucks to Oakley sunglasses, historian Nick Turse explores the Pentagon’s little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with the products and companies that now form the fabric of America. Turse investigates the remarkable range of military incursions into the civilian world: the Pentagon’s collaborations with Hollywood filmmakers; its outlandish schemes to weaponize the wild kingdom; its joint ventures with the World Wrestling Federation and NASCAR. He shows the inventive ways the military, desperate for new recruits, now targets children and young adults, tapping into the “culture of cool” by making “friends” on MySpace.

A striking vision of this brave new world of remote-controlled rats and super-soldiers who need no sleep, The Complex will change our understanding of the militarization of America. We are a long way from Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex: this is the essential book for understanding its twenty-first-century progeny.

People are talking shit about Douglas Feith again. He got fired from his sweet college prof gig, so it's a rough turn. Good times, once upon a time I had that shit cornered. Right Web | Profile | Douglas Feith

Dana Milbank - Iraq War Is Everyone Else's Fault, Feith Explains - washingtonpost.com

TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | The Banality of Evil: What Would Hannah Arendt Say About Doug Feith?

The American Conservative » Israeli Spy Case Will Name More Spies

Sweet: ccMixter - Welcome to ccMixter. open source culture - creative commons!! featuring free music from the Beastie Boys and everyone else in the RemiX Generation!

FBI wants to move hunt for criminals into Internet backbone

Here is some more tasty stuff: cryptogon.com: The American Culture Bomb: Satire from the Onion and a Long Forgotten U.S. Army War College Essay

cryptogon.com » Archives » CBOT Resembles Carnival Act as Billion Dollar Black Box Operators Move In

Deadly Greed: The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

SurvivalBlog.com it's time!!!

cryptogon.com » Archives » Raw Milk and Lifting the Veil that has Been Pulled Over Our Eyes

cryptogon.com » Archives » NATO Forces Supplied Food, Water and Arms to Taliban Forces in Southern Afghanistan

Three States Subjected To "Martial Law Sweeps" More fancy marketing for the Big Evil Machine!

Big oil to big wind: Texas veteran sets up $10bn clean energy project | Environment | The Guardian

FT.com / In depth - Rice traders hit by panic as prices surge

Aboriginal children 'injected with leprosy' | The Daily Telegraph

Hear the Six Best Minutes of Tim Robbins' Controversial NAB Speech - Advertising Age - News

Monsanto's Harvest of Fear: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

Pure Fantasy: Colombia's Laptop Revelations- by Justin Raimondo More fake neocon intel from our South American rich cocaine trafficker friends! Classic!!

Mother Jones Exclusive: Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups. Mercenary spies against lefties!!!

Dumb old Council on Foreign Relations: Globe With Multipolar Disorder in Need of Prozac Says Expert | The Agonist

I like the sound of this: Chalabi, RAND and the Iraq War

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Event Video/Audio) | Berkman Center

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Rupert Murdoch's Black Ops hit squad: NDS Group Tried for Tech Sabotage - Portfolio.com

Software as a service: The next big thing | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2006-03-20 | By Eric Knorr

That's all for today, thanks for visiting!!

Antiwar.com Blog · Did Israelis Leak New Spy Info to Thwart War?

Things in the Middle East are always too thoroughly linked together, backwards, forwards, each way through the hall of mirrors. And it's going to be the traditional 'summer fightin' months' all around the region soon enough.

Deadlock in Afghanistan, Negotiations in Pakistan | The Agonist

There's a certain preamble of mega-spin going on right now. Hillary makes these weird statements about obliterating Iran, and McCain is chuckling all the way to the Big Red Button.

As usual, the rationality of the Baby Boomer generation drifts towards paranoia, incoherence, rage and infinite debt. Whether or not the American people get it together and block the Middle East mega-war from blowing up out of control seems to be the big question.

Iran gets blamed for killing American soldiers occupying Iraq. Not surprisingly, the guys selling this line never acknowledge that the arms market is quite a free market over in Iraq, with many busy arms dealers working all directions. And people are buying weapons that come from Iran. Is that some kind of surprise? "FREE MARKET WEAPONS FOR IRAQ: ALWAYS PLENTY OF DEALS!" That's a motto which the Iranians should try... Then remind everyone which country is importing the most weapons into Iraq, handing them over to parties unknown...

British dealers supply arms to Iran: The Observer

As you may have noticed, there has been a lot of extra buzz about possible American conflict with Iran in the news (after cooling for a couple months prior).

Is War With Iran Imminent?- by Justin Raimondo

A couple weeks ago, the story from last fall about the mysterious Israeli bombing of a purported nuclear-or-something site in Syria came back strong into the news: exciting tidbits that the North Koreans were propagating some nuclear research at the Syrian location. Very exciting stuff for the news.

For example, Stratfor.com is all over this case and its exciting murkiness:

What is important to note is this information is not new. It is a confirmation of the story leaked by the administration shortly after the attack and also leaked by the Israelis a bit later. The explanation for the attack was that it was designed to take out a reactor in Syria that had been built with North Korean help. There are therefore three questions. First, why did the United States go to such lengths to reveal what it has been saying privately for months? Second, why did the administration do it now? Third, why is the United States explaining an Israeli raid using, at least in part, material provided by Israel? Why isn’t Israel making the revelation?

It has never been clear to us why the Israelis and Americans didn’t immediately announce that the Syrians were building a nuclear reactor. Given American hostility toward Syria over support for jihadists in Iraq, we would have thought that they would have announced it instantly. The explanation we thought most plausible at the time was that the intelligence came from the North Koreans in the course of discussions of their nuclear technology, and since the North Koreans were cooperating, the United States didn’t want to publicly embarrass them. It was the best we could come up with.

The announcement on Thursday seems to debunk that theory, at least to the extent that the primary material displayed was U.S. satellite information and the Israeli video, which was said to have been used to convince the United States of the existence of the reactor and of North Korean involvement. So why didn’t the administration condemn Syria and North Korea on Sept. 7? It still seems to us that part of the explanation is in the state of talks with North Korea over its own program. The North Koreans had said that they would provide technical information on their program — which they haven’t done. Either the United States lost its motivation to protect North Korean feelings because of this or the Bush administration felt that Thursday’s briefings would somehow bring pressure to bear on North Korea. Unless the United States is planning to use these revelations as justification for attacks on the North Koreans, we find it difficult to see how this increases pressure on them.

More interesting is the question of why the United States — and not Israel — is briefing on an Israeli raid. Israeli media reported April 23 that the Israelis had asked the Americans not to brief Congress. The reason given was that the Israelis did not want the United States to embarrass Syria at this point. As we noted on April 23, there appeared to have been some interesting diplomatic moves between Syria and Israel, and it made sense that revealing this information now might increase friction.

Meanwhile another more original story got lost in the sea of buzz: some old defense engineer, 84-year-old Ben-Ami Kadish, got caught by the FBI stealing secret documents from his top secret research lab during his career, and has admitted everything. Antiwar.com broke that to me:

Pollard's Ghost- by Justin Raimondo. Check this out for a well-linked background in the case, though I'm not totally sold on Raimondo's spin...

Kadish would smuggle out the papers, photograph them, send 'em over to his foreign spy handler, and bring them back to the lab, no one the wiser. A pretty classic scheme which should have gotten a bit of news bounce in the War on Terror, but of course it didn't. The engineer was passing secrets to Israel. Uff da...

This raises the question of how big the Israeli espionage thingy really gets. It's a big question especially since two AIPAC officers are supposed to go on trial this summer for circulating secrets between neo-con Pentagon staffer Lawrence "Larry" Franklin and the Mossad officers over at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

In the Fed's case for this "big" AIPAC scandal, everyone pretty much got caught red-handed, so the AIPAC defense strategy appears to be "graymailing" the Justice Department into disclosing all kinds of classified stuff. (The idea is that the feds' tummies turn sour and they give up because they don't want to cough up the docs. This is the traditional strategy DC lawyers for Oliver North / Elliot Abrams type guys use to get their guys off the hook in scandals like Iran-Contra.)

But let's go back to the beginning of the "big" AIPAC scandal. How did it start? The FBI was already spying on the AIPAC officers when Franklin wandered up to them at a DC restaurant. The Feds already wanted AIPAC on espionage. Why? The short speculative answer: the FBI has continuously been looking for a high-level spy/mole known by code name MEGA.

MEGA was the secret guy somewhere in the U.S. government in the 1980s who (among other things) provided extremely secret document numbers to the Israelis. In turn, the Israelis sent a more disposable spy, Jonathan Pollard, the low-level Pentagon staffer, as a gofer to get the documents. Pollard got caught; he's still in a U.S. jail. (There's a rumor Bush might pardon him, ugh). MEGA never got caught. So we could speculate that officially the FBI was looking to see if MEGA sends AIPAC messages, enter Franklin accidentally.

Ok ok... this is pretty baroque spy stuff. Why did this engineer get exposed? How did the FBI catch him? Well, they got a tip. A tip from somewhere in Israel.

Reportedly, someone in Ehud Olmert's government tipped off the FBI about the engineer spy because they wanted to prevent the expanding middle east war. In other words, an Israeli exposed an old engineer spy in order to damage the neocons / hawks' chances of ginning up the war with Iran.

Old school ex-CIA dude Phil Giraldi spilled it:

"Israeli sources are reporting that the FBI investigation of the Ben-Ami Kadish spy case resulted from a leak coming from inside the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The information on Kadish and on a number of other Americans who have spied for Israel was provided to the FBI anonymously, leading to the Bureau's opening of a full investigation. One source reports that the National Security Agency was provided with Yosef Yagur's current phone number and address and was able to obtain corroborating information on the case by tapping the phone."

It was interesting to read that, in a change-up, some Israeli military officials would not brief the U.S. Congress about the big bad Muslim threats because the Congress would now grill them over that just-exposed Israeli espionage.

Sounds like a good time to put out some fun stories about evil Syrians and bombing their weird shacks of shadiness.

Interesting stuff I suppose... If you're into that kind of thing. Beyond that, there is of course the Sibel Edmonds scandal, which involves a certain network of nuclear secrets traffickers, intersecting with heroin and Washington lobbyists, or something.

Someone speculated that MEGA was really Marc Grossman, a longterm DC hack who is certainly in well over his head on this scandal. Grossman also has been rumored to have tipped off the Turks and Pakistanis that Valerie Plame's front company, Brewster Jennings, was really a CIA front. But he got caught on an FBI wiretap which Sibel Edmonds probably had to listen to, while she worked there.

So there is that angle. Good luck figuring it out, kids! There's a good chance this stuff will get some sunlight during the summer. I'll drink to that!!

********

Some more awkward PR that had to get drowned out: Carter calls Gaza blockade a crime and atrocity | World | Reuters