Are We Winning Yet? Led Astray By Metrics

Are We Winning Yet? Led Astray By Metrics

Early discussions about a theoretical framework suggested a common way of assessing our historical case studies: identify the political goals that were to be obtained by the war, then identify the benchmarks that the military in question used to measure its progress toward that goal.  Then we were to look at the information that the military collected to determine if those benchmarks had been reached.  Finally, we were to consider the incentives that the desire to collect this information created for the military.  Often those incentives were perverse, as in the case of the body counts in Vietnam.

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Interesting article, but all its special pleading about data collection and secrets vs mysteries and the forest vs trees stuff is overcomplicating and obscuring the reality of warfare. Warfare is an ancient human practice. Therefore, it is easy, not difficult, to assess whether we're winning or losing. It is easy, not difficult, to assess whether the people waging the war intend to "win" anything, or merely destroy the fruits of human labour continuously, forever, as described in George Orwell's 1984.

In the case of the USA and its current wars, it's fairly obvious that since each of them turns into a snark hunt for phantom islamic terrorists the point isn't to conquer territory, throw third world savages and their worthless leaders into the dirt that spawned them, or change countries to more closely resemble anglosphere civilisation. The point of the USA's current wars is merely to create a war economy, which can be used to justify any amount of spending, as well as directing some of the most useless of the ever expanding American underclass into a weeding out culling process through the agency of external violence. Those who survive return as Nazi style veterans, able to access law enforcement jobs where their military training- largely the conditioning to follow orders and ask no questions- is totally at odds with what a civilian police force should be about.

Machiavelli recommended that when the type of government changes, the new government staging the coup should keep the outer appearance of the old government. Keep the old names even when the rulers occupying the positions are nothing at all like what those names once described.

Likewise with warfare. All these "metrics" used in American warfare are smoke and mirrors. In a genuine war, the answers come easily: is the enemy still shooting back? has the target country surrendered inconditionally? is any surviving enemy too scared to fight back?

But then the current enemy, "al qaeda" is a total fiction anyway. Islam is the real enemy.

Bunyipitude: Arts Minister Heidi Victoria wants to hear from you

Bunyipitude: Arts Minister Heidi Victoria wants to hear from you

One could try calling the office of the Arts Minister Heidi Victoria and register a protest, but she holds her seat of Bayswater by a very comfortable 21 per cent, so the odd whiner is unlikely to be blessed with more than the cooing voice of sympathetic electoral officer and the sound of telephone going dead.

But just imagine that Ms Victoria received a message from her office -- the news that callers had been promising to contact schools, clubs, civic organisations and alert them to the fact that their MLA had just given $50,000 to a St Kilda gallery that was closed by the police after an exhibiting artist was charged with producing child pornography. Unlikely to go down well, you would think.

Twilight Language: The Peter Pan/Hook Deaths

Twilight Language: The Peter Pan/Hook Deaths

Loren, you've sent a shiver down my spine which NO blog by ANYONE's ever hitherto done.

First of all I was born 6 Feb, my younger brother 28 April, but get this: in the '60s, (in Liverpool, in the UK), when I was 8, my school, Tiber Street Junior's, made this great display of installing what was SUPPOSED to be a brand new cloakroom.

Anyway, not long after this took place, I found myself alone in this cloakroom with a pair of twin boys from the year below, celebrated throughout the school for having extremely trendy Beatle-style haircuts.

Anyway, that day we started playing tick, and ducking out of the reach of one of the "Terrible Twins", (as me and my younger sister'd dubbed them), I inadvertently smacked into one of the coat hooks.

To the amazement of the three of us, the whole section the hook was part of seemed to momentarily come alive with cold fury and loathing - almost as if, if only it could, it would've ripped itself up by its foundations and chased us off down the street - at which point a sort of miniature lightning bolt, about two-and-a-half to three inches long arced out of the hook and shocked my hand.

Then, even as we us stood there, jaws gaping and paralysed on the spot, keeping one eye on the coat hook and glancing back and forth at each other wondering what to do next, the three of us were terrified to hear this coat hook, in the utterly hideous voice of a thoroughly nasty old man snarl, "Ah, now you didn't know we could do that, did y', y'little sh*t!" at which point I ran back to class, shaking like a leaf, and the twins ran straight out the school, their parents subsequently refusing to bring them back.

Now, whatever you make of that story, it's all very well for some people to say oh, people're always seeing and hearing things that aren't there, as if somehow that's both the explanation and the 'cure', but I'm aware of adults who, under the well-intentioned onslaught of "it's all in your head", went on to kill themselves over far milder experiences than that; but - God! - until now, it'd never occurred to me kids might be taking that option, too, (if not something far worse, given other data available to me).

alanborky 

Ira Einhorn, Earth Day's Dirty Secret > Hawaii Free Press

Ira Einhorn, Earth Day's Dirty Secret > Hawaii Free Press


Ira Einhorn, Earth Day's Dirty Secret
By Ken Anderson Apr 22, 2006  Magic City Morning Star

On this, the 36th anniversary of Earth Day, it is only fitting to speak of one of its founders, Ira Einhorn.
You won't find Ira Einhorn's name listed in any of the Earth Day promotional literature, as the organizers have taken great pains to distance themselves from this man, at least since he became better known for composting his girlfriend in a trunk in his closet for a couple of years in the late 1970s.

Earth Day organizers and publicists don't want to have anything to do with Ira these days. Since he was convicted of murder, he hasn't been very useful to them. But that wasn't always the case. In 1970, during the first Earth Day event, which was televised throughout the globe, Ira Einhorn was on stage as master of ceremonies.
Or so he claims, and it seems likely that he was.

A friend and contemporary of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and acquaintance of authors Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Timothy Leary, Alvin Toffler, and Isaac Asimov, Einhorn held the floor for a half hour, during the first Earth Day celebration, in Philadelphia, kissing Edmund Muskie on the lips before surrendering the microphone to the Senator from Maine. There is no evidence that Muskie rejected his advances, or that anyone associated with the event had ever voiced any disagreement with Einhorn's place as a key organizer until after his arrest for the murder of Holly Maddux.

  Holly Maddux
Ira Einhorn knew all of the right people. Executives from Sun Oil and AT&T showered him with support, financial and otherwise. Ira Einhorn was the man who could make Earth Day happen as, it seems, he did, denials notwithstanding.
Due in large part to his influence, Einhorn escaped punishment for his crime for a quarter of a century.
After bludgeoning his girlfriend of five years to death, fracturing her skull in a dozen places, Ira stuffed her body into a trunk, which he packed into a closet where it remained until discovered by the police nearly two years later.





  Police photo of Maddux’ remains.
When Holly Maddux disappeared in the fall of 1977, Einhorn was named as a suspect by the girl's parents, who knew that Einhorn had threatened their daughter with violence. Yet, after briefly questioning him, while the body of his murdered girlfriend lie decomposing in a trunk stored in a closet of his apartment, police accepted his denial of any knowledge of her whereabouts.
When she failed to reappear, the murdered girl's parents hired an investigator who very quickly came up with sufficient evidence for a warrant to search Einhorn's apartment. A downstairs neighbor told of a liquid leaking from Einhorn's apartment into the kitchen below, describing it as being dark in color and smelling of putrefaction. He also testified to hearing a scream, as well as "several sharp thuds", at the time of Holly's disappearance.

When the private investigator presented this evidence to the police, they finally obtained a search warrant, which was served on March 29, 1978.

The battered and partly mummified body of Holly Maddux was found in a trunk in a bedroom closet, packed in styrofoam, newspaper, and air fresheners.

Arrested, Einhorn's attorney was considering a run for the Senate. His name was Arlen Spector, of Pennsylvania. The darling of New Age society, politicians, Ivy League professors, and corporate executives alike, Einhorn had no shortage of friends during his bail hearing. With his great love for the earth, surely Ira would not have murdered anyone. Released on a mere $40,000 bail, of which he had to pay only ten percent, Einhorn fled to Sweden, remaining as a fugitive in Europe until 1997, when he was found living in France under another name.

While a fugitive, Einhorn was convicted in absentia in 1993, and sentenced to life in prison. The government of France, however, refused to extradite Einhorn unless the death penalty was taken off the table and he was promised a new trial. Eventually, this was agreed upon. Ira Einhorn, the founder of Earth Day, was once again convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Today, we celebrate Earth Day, sacrosanct, proclaimed by none other than our Republican President George Bush, and every president since 1975, when President Ford first proclaimed and urged observance of Earth Day on the March equinox.

We're living in a time where wacky is in, and life doesn't mean very much.

While it is likely that Einhorn's violent history is not shared by other Earth Day founders, the observance is nevertheless bizarre.

Underlying the themes of Earth Day is a call for mankind to align itself with nature, and against itself, enlisting human beings to take part in a battle that seeks to place humanity under the control of an enlightened elite, one that values the interests of nature above that of people.

The process of our destruction is termed sustainable development, a destructive scheme that is in direct opposition to Christianity, which holds that man is to have dominion over nature, which is given to us for our use.
Ira Einhorn took the life of one woman, while the movement that he had a hand in founding seeks to steal the life from all of us.

Ira Einhorn, Master of Ceremonies, Earth Day Rally on Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park, Apr. 22, 1970. Maicher, Michael J., photographer.
Resources:

• www.courttv.com/onair/shows/mugshots/indepth/einhorn/
• www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/langlab/powelton/profiles/einhorn1.html
• http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/08/14/einhorn/
• www.themesh.com/eday.html
• www.earthday.net/
• www.earthsite.org/

© Copyright 2002-2007 by Magic City Morning Star

The Shape Of Forms Unseen

Why do some people, years before they "become famous", show up on our television screens? What is the process at work that selects one person over another? Sometimes there's nothing mysterious about it- it's simple nepotism from one of the "connected" media insiders, arranging things for a sibling, a child or a relative. But other times it's a lot weirder than that- a bell ringing reoccurrence of a certain person, from a very young age.

Some researchers make a lot out of the child abuse / music industry factory that churns out abused starlets who follow the same meteor-like trajectory from jailbait star to burnt out mother to freeze dried cautionary tale. I think that it's pretty well proven that the paedophile network exists, that like Terry's extraordinary work on Son of Sam, it is proven that the network interlocks with Satanists who run organised crime and with Organised Crime that exploits the trappings of satanic cults. I also think, given the now proven pedophilia network - because it is not isolated people, they all knew eac hother- in the media that is time to wonder why some children seem to get air time over others. The most extraordinarily ugly and talentless people are pushed so incredibly relentlessly for such a pointlessly long time, it begs a question. It can't all just be the Melbourne media mafia or jewish family members in the echelons of the television stations or any of the other quietly acknowledged reasons why some people are superglued in front of TV consumers eyes like a particularly unattractive test pattern.

For different reasons, we see the perenniality of the gatekeeper.

The gatekeeper needs to work both sides of the fence, as I have pointed out before it was exquisitely renedered by Bud Flowers in They Live- an apparent hobo, outspoken but reassuring... Turns out to have been on of "them" all along, a traitor to his own people. His justification: everyone sells out and everyone wants a taste of the good life.

They Live is one of those must-see films that, when people bother to "must-see" it, the dialogue whooshes over their head. Most key scenes are packed not only with symbolism, but with dense text, as though the film maker, John Carpenter, was concerned to pack every single message he could into every line. Rewatching it, and "reading" the dialogue, makes for a very interesting experience.

Flying Tiger Comics: Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation

Flying Tiger Comics: Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation

The dominance of the cartoon in a declining civilization « Jon Rappoport's Blog

The dominance of the cartoon in a declining civilization « Jon Rappoport's Blog

For a glimpse behind the cartoon, here is a statement George W Bush made in 1989, to the Midland Reporter Telegram, five years before he won his first election and became governor of Texas: “You know, I could run for governor and all this but I’m basically a media creation. I’ve never really done anything. I’ve worked for my dad. I worked in the oil industry. But that’s not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office.”