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ruling classes
Rotten Elites
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I have never been much of a revolutionary. Even when I was young I tended to cringe at any kind of earnest, "to the barricades" kind of thinking. I tend to think in smaller strategic and tactical terms rather than large sweeping movements. However, I have come to realize that this is one of those times when something has to happen from the ground up. Washington has become a kind of aristocrisy, with all the attendant inbred, insular, corruption that eventually befalls a ruling elite.
The biggest sickness in our politics is this top down, elitist mentality in which people are fed a diet of information, entertainment, products and ideas that are focus grouped, soulless and commercial --- and which are then filtered through a ruling media class that is so psychologically cramped, so emotionally sterile, so stuck in their own feedback loop that they are presenting a totally distorted version of reality. It's important that we look elsewhere for wisdom and leadership.
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photography
Thorsten Schimmel
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thanks to Conscientious
iraq
Slouching Towards the Islamic Republic
by Billmon
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I predicted a few days ago that the American proconsul in Baghdad would soon find it expedient to throw President Bush's high-flown promises to the women of Iraq off the constitutional train. And, according to Reuters, that moment now seems to have arrived:
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What Does Democracy Really Mean In The Middle East? Whatever The West Decides
Sometimes I Wonder If There Will Be A Moment When Reality And Myth, Truth And Lies, Will Collide
by Robert Fisk
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It makes you want to scream. I have been driving the dingy, dangerous, oven-like streets of Baghdad all week, ever more infested with insurgents and their informers, the American troops driving terrified over the traffic islands, turning their guns on all of us if we approach within 50 meters.
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The Iraqi constitution: DOA?
Angry and marginalized, Sunnis are threatening to torpedo Iraq's constitution. Disaster looms, and the Bush administration's blunders are largely to blame.
by Juan Cole
Iraq on Brink of Meltdown
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The credibility of Iraq's political process was in danger last night as parliament again failed to vote on a draft constitution which a Sunni politician said was "fit only for the bin".
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Hypocrites and Liars
by Cindy Sheehan
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The media are wrong. The people who have come out to Camp Casey to help coordinate the press and events with me are not putting words in my mouth, they are taking words out of my mouth. I have been known for sometime as a person who speaks the truth and speaks it strongly. I have always called a liar a liar and a hypocrite a hypocrite. Now I am urged to use softer language to appeal to a wider audience. Why do my friends at Camp Casey think they are there? Why did such a big movement occur from such a small action on August 6, 2005?
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Casey
by CindySheehan
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When I arrived at Camp Casey II this afternoon I was amazed at what has changed since I was gone. Now, we have a huge tent to get out of the sun; caterers; an orientation tent; a medic tent (with medics); a chapel, etc.
The most emotional thing for me though was walking through the main tent and seeing the huge painting on canvas of Casey. Many things hit me all at once: That this huge movement began because of Casey's sacrifice; thousands, if not millions of people know about Casey and how he lived his life and the wrongful way in which he was killed; but the thing that hit me the hardest was how much I miss him. I miss him more everyday. It seems the void in my life grows as time goes on and I realize I am never going to see him again or hear his voice. In addition to all this, the portrait is so beautiful and moving and it captures Casey's spirit so well. I sobbed and sobbed. I was surrounded by photographers, I looked around until I finally found a friendly face, then the news people crushed in on me and I couldn't breathe. I didn't mean to have such a dramatic re-entrance to Camp Casey, but the huge portrait of Casey really surprised me.
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Something's Happened
America Has Turned Against the War
Of Kurds and Crips
by Billmon
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Tony Shadid and his colleague Steve Fainaru -- last seen at this blog cruising the Sunni Triangle with a bunch of Saddam-loving Iraqi Army recruits -- have a long story in today's Washington Post that reviews the transformation of Iraq into the new, juiced-up Lebanon:
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Under US noses, brutal insurgents rule Sunni citadel
Guardian gains rare access to Iraqi town and finds it fully in control of 'mujahideen'
Iraq: The unseen war
The grim reality of Iraq rarely appears in the American press. This photo gallery reveals the war's horrible human toll.
Settling All Family Business
by Billmon
Sadr tips his hand
Yes, President Bush, I'm playing your balls like a violin
by Steve Gilliard
photography
Julie Blackmon
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thanks to Conscientious
Gaza Evacuation Should Be Americans' Last Straw
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As I watched the extensive, plainly sympathetic coverage of Jewish settlers being evicted from their Gaza homes, I couldn't help but take note once again of the striking double standard applied by American news media as well as the U.S. government.
I cannot recall any sympathetic coverage of Palestinians being evicted from their homes. No interviews with weeping mothers or fathers. No discussions of whether the evictions were right or wrong. This is obviously a deliberate policy on the part of America's television networks, for after all, they had 4,170 opportunities to report on Palestinian evictions since September 2000. That's how many homes were destroyed, and, of course, doesn't count the orchards and olive trees bulldozed by the Israeli army or Israeli settlers.
Of course, Palestinians were not evicted by sympathetic soldiers or promised huge amounts of money to relocate. No, they were brutally told to get out of their houses, which were then blown up or bulldozed into rubble by decidedly unsympathetic Israeli soldiers. What little they had was destroyed, and they were offered nothing except verbal abuse by the Israelis and invisibility by the American media.
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The remaining 99.5 percent
by Amira Haas
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"I want to ask you as a Jew to a Jewess," the young man said a few days ago. In these days, a beginning such as this invites a dialogue of the kind in which we have been drowning for several weeks now - a dialogue in which the definition "Jew" has been appropriated to describe some type of unique entity, one that is set apart from the other human species, a superior one. Sometimes it's the Jewish boy with his arms raised from the Warsaw Ghetto; sometimes it's the young girl whose orange shirt bears the slogan, "We won't forget and we won't forgive;" and sometimes it's the soldier who refuses to evacuate a Jew. A unique entity of ties of blood, sacredness and land.
"As a Jew to a Jewess," said the young man, who turned out to be a tourist from South America who has family in Israel and also understands Hebrew. It was at the Erez crossing, among the barbed-wire fencing, the locked gates, the revolving gates, the intimidating guard towers, the soldiers using special cameras to keep an eye on the handful of individuals passing through, and the booming loudspeakers through which they bark out their orders in Hebrew to women who have been waiting in the heat for five hours to go visit their sons imprisoned at the Be'er Sheva jail.
"Is it possible," he continued with his question, "that the Israelis, who are so nice and good - after all, I have family here - are unaware of the injustice they have caused here?" The images of destruction left behind by Israel in Palestinian Gaza and witnessed by him in the past few days have left a look of shock in his eyes. "I am a Jew, and my father is a Holocaust survivor, and I grew up on totally different values of Judaism - social justice, equality and concern for one's fellow man."
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thanks to Antiwar.com
The Shame of It All
Watching the Gazan Fiasco
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A great charade is taking place in front of the world media in the Gaza Strip. It is the staged evacuation of 8000 Jewish settlers from their illegal settlement homes, and it has been carefully designed to create imagery to support Israel's US-backed takeover of the West Bank and cantonization of the Palestinians.
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"They Should All Rot in Hell - I"
The City of the Dead - Part 4
by Aron Trauring
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I try to avoid as much as possible reading articles or listening to reports about the dismantlement of the settlements in Gaza. But you can't seem to avoid it. The amount of news coverage is astonishing.
It is almost impossible for me to look at this event from a political perspective. For one thing, I don't think anyone, least of all the architect of the event, Arik Sharon, has a clue what the ultimate consequences will be. Will this be the beginning of the end of the settlement project? Or is this one more tactical move in a bloody game that has been going on for decades?
More than that, this is an intensely personal story for me. It brings me back to my days in Hebron, the city of the dead.
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"They Should All Rot in Hell - II"
The City of the Dead - Part 5
by Aron Trauring
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There is one last story I want to recount. It's actually a finish to the story of the Settlers' calling my friend a Nazi so many years ago in Hebron. I was standing next to another soldier from another unit, a short Moroccan Jew who no doubt was a firm supporter of the Likud. As he listened his face got redder and redder until he burst out and said: "These Settlers should all go rot in hell." As I watch from afar the evacuation of Gaza, those are my thoughts exactly
And I know exactly the perfect hell. Somewhere in another universe, there is a beach chair with the name of every settler, along the coasts of Gaza. And when their day of judgment comes, they will lie bound to those chairs, unable to move. Transfixed in horror, they will listen to the rising trance music, and watch as Gil and Mahmoud give each other a high five, and with boards in hand rush into the surf, for one last ride before the party begins.
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Week's end in Israel
pinhole
I've been very frustrated in my efforts to make a pinhole camera.
I keep getting flare on most of my images. The only thing that would eliminate the flare was a lens hood and I started on one of those but, with the way the shutter worked, it was turning into a very clumsy affair. The plus side was that the images were very sharp for pinhole images and I was very excited about that. That project has been languishing because it just wasn't working and I was focusing on my lensed cameras. Then I came across a site where they used an old large format shutter to mount the pinhole.
Speed-i-o-scope Pinhole Shutter
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I just happened to have the shutter off of my Agfa Isolette II. It is the one that I tried to clean and now the shutter leaves won't always close. I was going to get it fixed but had someone give me a good one. I think I will have to get it fixed after all
I gently removed the old pinhole from the lens mount. I need to chip out the rest of the bondo and then mount the Prontor S shutter (on the left) in the old Mamiya lens mount and mount the new pinhole in the Prontor S shutter. I think this is going to work out very well. I think I will be able to do some handheld pinhole by pushing some Delta 3200. It could be most interesting. I also found a source for better pinholes. The pinhole I had was pretty amazing. These new ones are even better. My old one was micro-drilled. These are done by lasers on even thinner stock.
Lenox Laser Pinhole Photography Products
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I'm getting excited about the pinhole again.
oil
Delusion and the Media
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Delusional thinking about oil was everywhere in the media last week -- as thick as advertising. Early in the week, Yahoo Finance ran a story with a headline (I paraphrase): "DOW Up Fifty Points as Oil Prices Plunge." The plunge they referred to was oil going from $63.90 a barrel to $63.30. Some plunge. This was after five days of oil ratcheting up out of the high $50s. (It ended the week around $65.
NPR's Marketplace show and a separate wire story piece on the web offered similar headlines (or lead-ins) which said (again I paraphrase) "US Economy No Longer Affected By Oil Prices." Of course, this is exactly the kind of magical thinking you'd expect to see in a public on extended leave from reality, despite the ubiquity of "reality television." The accepted idea is that since America outsourced most of its heavy industry to China and elsewhere, we now have an economy that runs just fine on Tic-tacs and Diet Pepsi, and oil is not in the picture anymore.
Wrong. America consumes one-quarter of the world's daily production of 84 million barrels of oil. More than half of our share is burned in cars and trucks. In fact, our economy now amounts to little more than running 200 million motor vehicles around the suburban metroplexes in the service of ever more slapped-together McHousing developments, big box stores, and fried chicken huts. That's our economy. That's all we do anymore.
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OIL WOES WEIGH LIKE A FEATHER
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As oil prices climbed to nearly seventy dollars this week, unrest grows. At one gas station, a self-centered man decided to become a criminal so he tried to steal the gas, his feeling of entitlement, I suppose. When the station owner ran out to stop him, he ran him over, killing him. This story is a metaphor for America.
For we are running over a lot of people in our quest to secure oil.
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leica and coffee
I sat down and had a cup of coffee with my grandfather's 1949 Leica IIIc before I packed it up and finally sent it off to Oleg in Russia for new shutter curtains and a clean, lube, and adjust. I was going to send the lens off to Sherry Krauter but I'm low on money and the lens is not that bad. A hint of haze but otherwise OK. Someday it will get it's CLA, too. I very excited about getting this camera working again. It's such a sweet shooter!
loserman
Put A Fork In Him
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To me, it is very significant when a Gallup Poll shows that Bush has finally dropped to the 40% mark in job approval, and that’s just what happened when Gallup released their latest poll today. In a poll taken through last night, Bush has now fallen to only 40% approval, with his disapproval rating now up to a staggering 56%.
These are the worst marks of his presidency in a Gallup poll, and reflect a slippage of five points just in the last two weeks, a period where Bush has been on vacation, raising money, ignoring Cindy Sheehan, and still trying to justify the Iraq war as being connected to 9/11 by making appearances before Stepford crowds in safely GOP states. I can’t wait to see how these numbers look when he returns to Washington and tries to sell us Social Security privatization again with the Fitzgerald indictments pending. Worse yet for Bush, consumer confidence has headed downhill this month over gas prices.
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filmholders and stuff
I had a fine birthday party. Zoe still hasn't downloaded the pictures. I will post some when she does. I was also sidetracked by the latest Harry Potter book. I couldn't control myself! My darkroom stuff arrived: bottles, mixers, measuring devices, trays, etc. I will be getting the darkroom sink/tub in place within the week. My film holders arrived, too.
A new 5x7 film holder is around $40. I bought this pile for $38. 14 5x7 holders, 10 4x5 holders, and 10 3.25x4.25 holders. They are all old wood film holders and all needing cleaning. Only one is obviously warped and the others look pretty good. I will have to check them all out more closely. I had 4 4x5, 3 3.25x4.25 and no 5x7 film holders. I'm set for film holders now!
birthday
It's that time of year again!
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