ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

Total Information Awareness was recently re-named Terrorist Information Awareness; but such an exercise in surrealism simply pales when compared to the brainchild of Pentagon DARPA chief, Adm. John Poindexter, the man who has caused such a ruckus for the past few weeks. The bureau under his supervision had begun to set up what is called the Policy Analysis Market, a subsidiary of of a division called, Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP). (A good description of this mechanism is found in a California weblog: Byrd's Brain). An online futures market would take bets on specific terrorist scenarios; it was meant to establish a speculative kind of game, based on probable currency of assassinations, regime changes, and a whole gamut of political violence. Poindexter's pet project would have been financed with $8 million of Pentagon money. "The Policy Analysis Market would work much like other financial markets, with investors buying 'futures' they think are likely to happen, and selling off futures as they believe events become less and less likely to happen"(Byrd). A CNN.com article also names private-sector partners in this enterprise: "Net Exchange, a market technologies company, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of The Economist magazine". Soon Poindexter began to feel a wave of derision, ridicule, and plain incredulity moving toward him. Both within and outside government, a consensus seemed to form. There was no question that Poindexter had gone off the rails, had left reality altogether. The uncertainty could only relate to exactly when this departure might have taken place.

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The full post of this article by Copeland Morris appeared August 04, 2003 in politx.

copeland morris SONG OF EXILE

Promise me exile if, as Camus says,
You slink to it. I am the better half
Myself, hooked up to wires in my own land.
And I am the lesser half and free in some way;
Well past the Pillars of Hercules I rival myself,
I read in the fine print that the borders are closed.

I quote my deliberate, foreign land.
The sky is flat, the scar is well hidden;
The shout of cicadas, the thirst of exile
Stranger than solitude or lopsided moons.
And cornered by Athena Nike in silence
I order coffee beside the old men.

This E-Mail Just In From Grayson: To Be Marked URGENT

"there is a petition circulating by Move-On to your reps in Congress to get them to investigate Bush's lies about WMDs. Already they have 350,000 signatures. Go to Move-On and sign the petition".

If you're an American, don't get left out in the cold. Ask your Congress to demand accountability from an Administration that scoffs at accountability. Nixon didn't stand so tall after he committed his special crimes. Bush and his cronies had better read the Constitution again, in case they forgot a little detail. In the Watergate debacle it was demonstrated, as it may need to be demonstrated again, for the benefit of those who seem confused, that Congress is the Supreme Law of the Land. Even high officials in the Executive are subject to impeachment. We've been hearing reports in the news for quite a long time and officials in the Administration have gone about as far as their evasions can take them. It is time now for our Representatives to assemble the evidence and ask intelligent questions.

The Interregnum Revisited by Copeland Morris

"The absence of objection on the part of the American public and the American media suggested that the truth did not matter, that motive was irrelevant, that the Bush Administration was free to do as it pleased".
--Lewis H. Lapham (From NOTEBOOK, the demonstration effect, Harper's Magazine, June 2003)


Conscience is blunted by silence. And corruption is swift to advance in American public opinion, through an unapologetic indifference to lies. "Disasters sent by the gods cut short our follies in a flash", Robert Fagles writes, in his translation of Antigone. And under the shameful circumstances, reluctant citizens may admit that the Bush Administration has lost all respectability, and has been evasive, mendacious, and incapable of moderation. It does not escape the public mind that there has been ballot tampering, judicial connivance, invisibility of suspects under detention, and a war in Iraq which was made possible by cynical misrepresentations to Congress and the people. This White House has now become both transparent and sinister; and it stands to reason that catastrophe is its best friend, that havoc on the heads of immigrants and the hijacking of our personal lives into databases are only a few of its trespasses.

The Interregnum is an essential concept: a political term familiar to Roman Antiquity. It describes an interval of time when the legitimacy of government has broken down.It may be a metaphor in our present situation; otherwise it could be a long, dark night for many of us. Moral validation is absurd if it makes fanatics of us. But it can happen here. We can stumble if we are unwary. In more ways than one, it's possible to repeat the history that has not been learned. We are potentially Roman and we should admit that much. Like them we might contemplate a regime that has passed away and nervously await the legitimacy of government, as it returns to us. We don't want to mourn the loss of our Republic or feel ashamed when we consider the moral incoherence of preventative war. Dissenting voices will seem more poignant in retrospect if we fail to hear them now. Unspeakable recognition occurs most clearly at the instant when The Interregnum is understood as real.

The Abyss Of Hysteria, Be Warned

In a story that was run in Alternet, entitled The Silencing of Dissent on Graduation Day, By Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges, Democracy Now! (May 22, 2003) Hedges' address to the class at Rockford College, Illinois, was cut short by the antics of a handful of the graduating class. Hedges, a long-time War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winner, who reports for the New York Times, was soon speaking without a microphone (it was cut). His address had to be curtailed; and out of concerns for his safety he was escorted from the hall by campus police.

In the Goodman/Hedges article, Hedges answered a question about the response of The New York Times in this way: "Well, they're looking into questions of whether I breached protocol in terms of my very pointed statements about the Iraqi War. I mean, that's something that makes them uncomfortable". He goes on to say that he didn't think his book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (on which his address was based) , was a problem for them in itself.

The reader who takes a look at the text of his speech (in The Rockford Register Star Online) will more likely come to the conclusion that the response of his editors was odd and disturbing.

Athena's Temple at Delphi

Window Of Conscience

I've got a good book to suggest: Chris Hedges' autobiographical, contemporary history, "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning". In this book he says, among other things that, "War leaves behind not memory but amnesia". There is that violence that remains in the psyche and a legacy of pain that is impossible to calculate. But people try to bury and revise history. They forget. Some have already begun to forget the crimes, the lies. But Chris Hedges' book reminds us of the pity of war.

FREE BURMA COALITION

"Even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man" --Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom From Fear


"Sometimes it is better to have the people of the world on your side than the governments of the world" --Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

FREE BURMA COALITION

"Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and to uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society." --Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom From Fear

***

"My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity" --Wilfred Owen

copeland morris DRAFTEES (for Wilfred Owen)

Near sunrise they lean back. As headlights blink,
A bus pulls out. Inside, the boys still shivering,
Still slumped, withdraw into silence in their coats.
While dawn is red the color seems to flee
Invisible flesh and scandalize December.

And it would be better if there were secret messages
To capture the misgivings of these sombre children.
Draftees who suffer obscurity, uncomprehending,
Begin with nothing else; but they don't cry
Or disarm those who will never be recovered.

"Letters from the next of kin to newspapers
Arrive each week"...