Ground acquisition.
And that’s what football is, football’s a ground acquisition game.
You knock the crap out of eleven guys and take their land away from them.
Of course, we only do it ten yards at a time.
That’s the way we did it with the Indians — we won it little by little.
First down in Ohio — Midwest to go!
– George Carlin

(Illustration found here).

Genocide of US native peoples was/is no game.
And today, the accumulation of such a media frenzy creates a shame there’s no real merit or even worth in the entire enterprise — this has got to be one of the most-dumbest days of the year, created for a way-low common denominator amongst dumb-ass Americans.
Of course, for my liquor store Superbowl Sunday is a financial way-uptick in the down-days of winter — in fact, this weekend will be the best we’ll see until Spring Break, or until the weather gets warmer, which ever comes first — plus the event comes on the heels of ‘the first,’ when not-only poor peoples, but all financial/situational peoples get ‘checks,’ either from state/federal governments, or insurance companies, pension funds, a dozen other institutions.
If the 49ers had made the game, sales would really have gone out the roof, but…

And, of course, when I express my total disregard for the “Big Game,” and don’t even know the teams involved, I’m viewed as a freak — people are put on a momentary pause, and you can actually see confusion wash across their faces as they cannot comprehend such crazy talk.
A ‘secular high holy day‘ as the ABC news guy says this morning — freaks, dude, nothing but freaks.
And I ain’t the only one — this from Gawker for other things to do on Stupid Bowl Sunday:

The great thing about the Super Bowl is that 100 million heathens are placed on their fat asses on their couches with a beer in one hand, the remote in the other, tortilla chip crumbs all over their shirt, and a stain from some taco dip on their upper lip.
Yes, everyone I hate is watching the Stupid Bowl, that means it’s my time to play.

One would surely hope that’s a cultural caricature, a TV sit-com image of the Super Bowl watcher, not reality, but alas, most-likely not far off the mark — as shown by store patrons before, during and after the game.
Not a pretty sight.

The Gawker post also listed other shit to do during the big game, especially like going to the movies and or taking in a popular restaurant, where there’d be almost no lines or other patrons (100-million fat-ass heathens on the couch at home, remember), or read a book.
Or maybe just take time to be alone — a way-shitload of people have a lot of trouble spending time alone with themselves — and what better time to do it when millions of other people will be joined at the ass for one giant bowel movement.

Some overriding health issues have caused me to have not a good night, thus, creating less-ability to compose coherent thoughts, and way-harder to transfer to blog lines (was about to write paper, but that’s so 1970s).
There’s plenty out yonder in the big, wide world to write about, but there’s a small imprint in the brain that wants to scream ‘Who Gives A Shit!’ except for those under barrage of that particular shit found in all corners of the globe.

Ugly unrest is on the peppered lips of today — the Occupy protests are getting not pretty, from the mess in Oakland, to a drive-in plunge in London, to more stun-gun episodes in Washington, DC.
People are only going to get even-more pissed.

(Illustration: “Extrangement of Vision — Edgar Allan Poe’s Optics” via M.C. Escher’s ‘Hand with Reflecting Sphere‘ found here).

One item did catch my blurred, Poed eyeball — in one of those Internet video “hangouts” yesterday on Google’s social network, Google+, also streamed live on YouTube, President Obama talked about a rare subject — the drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Via the BBC:

Asked about the use of drone strikes, which have increased in intensity during his presidency, he said “a lot of these strikes have been in the Fata”, or Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
The strikes target “al-Qaeda suspects who are up in very tough terrain along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr Obama added.
“For us to be able to get them in another way would involve probably a lot more intrusive military action than the ones we’re already engaging in.”

A shitload of innocent people have been killed and wounded during these strikes, and folks in Pakistan are pretty-much getting pissed about the whole operation.
Obama, though, bypassed some important questions:

In a previous town hall-style event hosted by Facebook, the White House was criticised for ignoring one of most popular questions: Mr Obama’s stance on legalising marijuana.
He did not answer questions on drug policy in Monday’s event.

Dude, what’s the deal?

Poe knew.

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Poem found here.

Today is a kind of watershed moment when the Internets respond to attempts to censor shit by banging down the back door, but a load of ‘Net peoples have chosen instead to go black.

Daily Kos  has an action line to protest the twin online-control orbs SOPA ‘Stop Online Piracy Act,’ (US House) and PIPA ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act” (US Senate), which reportedly are designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods, but like a lot of other surveillance-state-of-affairs, there’s more than just bullshit flying.
Copyright law can be a step away from censorship: “Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking U.S. companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday.

And today (Wednesday) Google has a black band over its name on its search site, and Wikipedia leads to a Gothic-looking spot which proclaims “Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge,” in protest of the upcoming Congressional bills.
Along with Wiki, Reddit and Boing Boing, among others were also going black for awhile to protest.
Even HuffPost had a huge, black box at the top of his home page (where a photo/headline usually appears) early Wednesday, and supplies a factoid page here.

All authority hates freedom — one wonders how the popular uprisings in the Middle East, even the Occupy movement here in the US would fare under these laws, and how would freedom really be effected because as it is now, the real freedom is in the ability to get the truth out there.
Even in the most totalitarian regimes on earth, a little iPhone camera can change the outlook of the whole, entire world — in a real sense, currently there can’t be a total news black out and we need to keep it that way.

An understanding via the LA Times:

Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, said the bills set “a horrendous precedent globally” and that much of the content users put online — such as open publishing, crowd-sourced information gathering or comments sections — could all become “incredibly dangerous” if the bills passed.
“We would end up in a situation where we’re trying to do needlepoint with harpoons,” he said.
“You can’t target only pirated information, content or media without getting tons of collateral damage that removes entirely legal content.”
As a screenwriter, East Hollywood resident Steven Darancette, 40, uses Wikipedia often for background information. But he isn’t too concerned about the website going dark Wednesday, saying he supports the protest.
“If I need to get research, I’ll just Google,” he said.
“There are also these things called books.”

The way-big problem, though, is once that door is opened, then locked back again by SOPA/PIPA there’s no going back, the freedom of pure communication will be lost in an Orwellian influenced society, and that ain’t good at all.

Yes, Steve Jobs is dead.
Two things there — one, life is really, really fleeting, he was only 56, and two, all the money in the world can’t make you live one minute longer.
In the long run, however, the world will not lament the guy’s passing, but all the techno-bullshit his company spewed out the last three decades, which in one way or another helped contribute to the quick-approaching end of an age.
The other side of the coin is always ugly.

Nearly buried by all the Apple-talk-news yesterday was another story which has been knocked about for weeks, and in its coming, brings to an inglorious end one of the most-crazed, unbelievable sagas in US political history.
Sara Palin ain’t running.

(Illustration found here).

Palin reflected an extreme-hideous side of Americana, which only in its loudness within an unhinged, ignorant babble caught the attention of first the easily-swayed news media and then a certain portion of the public.
Anyone with a dab of sense knows she’s never, ever been much more than trailer trash.

From Palin’s last political will and statement:

After much prayer and serious consideration, I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States.
As always, my family comes first and obviously Todd and I put great consideration into family life before making this decision.
When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country.
My decision maintains this order.
…
I will continue driving the discussion for freedom and free markets, including in the race for President where our candidates must embrace immediate action toward energy independence through domestic resource developments of conventional energy sources, along with renewables.
We must reduce tax burdens and onerous regulations that kill American industry, and our candidates must always push to minimize government to strengthen the economy and allow the private sector to create jobs.

Such is bullshit.

If one considered it, John McCain should be held greatly accountable for hoisting Palin on an unsuspecting US landscape in 2008 when he snatched the Alaskan governor up to be a partner in the presidential race — once on board, however, the shit really hit the fan.

“Our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of.”
—Sarah Palin, on her foreign policy experience, CBS News interview with Katie Couric, Sept. 25, 2008

Also in that same interview:

Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?
Palin: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —
Couric: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
Couric: Can you name any of them?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.

You betcha!
And because that Couric talk was such a horrifying disaster, Palin never goes anywhere now except Fox News, which by the way, has made its own news.
In a confirmation of all this crap was made by Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman, who had Palin on the network not for her great brain.
Via Raw Story:

In an interview celebrating the 15th anniversary of Fox News, Ailes told The Associated Press that he hired the former Republican vice presidential candidate “because she was hot and got ratings.”
According to one Republican who is close to the Fox News chairman, Palin certainly wasn’t hired because Ailes respected her intellect.
“He thinks Palin is an idiot,” the insider told New York magazine earlier this year.
“He thinks she’s stupid.
He helped boost her up.
People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement.”

And Ailes himself is a sexist asshole:

In a 2008 prologue to his planned book, former Fox News executive Dan Cooper recalled that Ailes liked to “talk macho and compare the anatomies of women in the office.”
“I was too scared to make salacious comments about women in the office,” Cooper wrote.
“Like everyone, I had taken classes in workplace behavior.
Not Roger.
‘How about those bazookas on that Indian girl, or whatever the hell she is!’
Squirm squirm.
‘Pussy masala on the menu today?’”

No wonder the US is finished.

The rise of Palin allowed the rise of political lying — and the getting away with it.
I’ve always knew she was a complete phony and ignorant beyond belief, and didn’t give a shit — this is my first post on her. (And the last).
Somebody at The Daily Dish said it best yesterday: It is hard to describe the relief of this awful person finally going away.

You betcha, again.

(Illustration found here).

Early Tuesday here on California’s northern coast and listening to neighbors act like loud assholes at this early hour makes me want to scream, lash out into the dark, pierce the clear, clean air with a shitload of curses.
Although I’ve been awake awhile, and I’m fully awake right now, the disturbance to the quiet upsets the creative juices — hard to be innovative when there’s anger.

And this is one of those morning when I can’t come up with any decent, well-meaning subject in which to post, despite a ton of weird, frightening, sad, and more than just a little bat-shit crazy news out there, from that simple seamstress mutilated in Syria, to the dangers of selling booze in Iraq, to Michele Bachmann knowing for an absolute certainty President Obama is a one-termer.
Plenty of news, but nothing overwhelming as unique or even beyond the ‘new normal.’

And apparently if there wasn’t bad news, there’d be no news at all.
US peoples are glum, too, feeling bad about everything — in a new Harris Poll:

Looking at the President’s ratings, just one in five Americans (21 percent) give him positive ratings on his handling of the economy while 79 percent give him negative ratings.
In July, 26 percent of U.S. adults gave the President positive ratings while 74 percent gave him negative marks.
When it comes to his handling of the economy, even large majorities of Democrats (58 percent) and Liberals (64 percent) give President Obama negative ratings.
…
In July, one-quarter of Americans (23 percent) expected the overall economy to improve in the coming year, two in five (41 percent) thought it would stay the same and a little over one-third (37 percent) thought it would get worse.
This month, 45 percent think the economy will stay the same, 34 percent believe it will get worse and 21 percent think it will get better in the coming year.
…
Two-thirds of Americans (67 percentage) rate the current job market in their region of the country as bad, one in ten (11 percent) rate it as good and 22 percent say it is neither good nor bad.
In July, 64 percent of U.S. adults said the job market was bad, 12 percent said it was good and 24 percent said it was neither good nor bad.

Misery and no end in sight.

In all this woe, the economic situation for the non-rich is making more and more US peoples to ‘double up:’ This spring, there were 21.8 million “doubled-up” households across the nation, a 10.7 percent increase from the 19.7 million households in the spring of 2007, the Census Bureau said. That means 18.3 percent of all households were combined households.

And maybe there’s no loud, obnoxious neighbors because more and more US peoples live on the street: “The economic downturn and the government’s deep cuts to welfare will drive up homelessness over the next few years, raising the spectre of middle class people living on the streets, a major study warns. The report by the homelessness charity Crisis says there is a direct link between the downturn and rising homelessness as cuts to services and draconian changes to benefits shred the traditional welfare safety net.”

And man-folk can’t find work, the worse male jobs situation since WWII: “Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man. Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. After accounting for inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a year— from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by Michael Greenstone, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “That takes men and puts them back at their earnings capacity of the 1950s,” Greenstone says. “That has staggering implications.”

(h/t AlterNet)

People much wiser than I am said,
“I’d rather have my son watch a film with 2 people making love
than 2 people trying to kill one another.
I, of course, can agree.
It is a great sentence.
I wish I knew who said it first.
I agree with that but I like to take it a step further.
I’d like to substitute the word Fuck for the word Kill in all of those movie cliches we grew up with.
“Okay, Sherrif, we’re gonna Fuck you now, but we’re gonna Fuck you slow.”
– George Carlin

(Illustration found here).

Have a most-tantalizing Tuesday.

(Illustration found here).

In the reckoning of things, this is a massive news cycle I’m leaving for awhile as everything is hitting the fan, from the US and world economies, to weather, to war, and even a well-received revival of the ‘Ape’ movies.
The news will just have to cease for at least five days.

I’m traveling via AmTrak to central California to visit with three of my daughters — one coming from Tennessee — and hopefully it should be a good time had by all.
And to the scant handful of peoples who visit this site on any kind of regular basis — please don’t forget me.

Have an awesome week!

The crying, finger-pointing, wailing — i.e., John ‘The Boner‘ Boehner telling his beloved own to “get your ass in line” — comes from the complete horror-disarray caused by those ignorant Tea Baggers, who apparently rule the GOP nowadays.
To the anguish of all US peoples.
(Illustration found here).

One could single out Jackboot John McCain for allowing the Tea Party to emerge — when he appointed Sarah Palin as his VP choice in 2008, the move allowed dumb-ass stupid to become part of the national political discourse.
Stupid touched a deep chord with the stupid, who most times has a much bigger mouth than the norm.
And why would the words “death panels” cause so much trouble during the health care debate?
A little stupid goes a long, long way.

From Science Blog:

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.
…
“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas.
It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer.
“Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”
…
An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working.
In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

So we can see it doesn’t take much to make a lie a truth.
And the Tea Party can just ruin a good get-together.
Matt Taibbi, most-likely near-about the best in covering US political bullshit, posted the ultimate view of the Tea Party last September: Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them.
And in the debt ceiling pout match, even the GOP is tied to the nasty Tea Baggers as The Boner right now has his mitts full of trying to keep the whole shebang from blowing up in his cry-baby face.
From TPM: That’s because the GOP is teetering on the brink of a debt-based civil war. More traditional Republicans and big business types are desperate to avoid a recovery-crushing default. But their Tea Party colleagues are leading a rebellion of epic – perhaps even galactic – proportions.

Thus it is.
From Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics via The Big Picture:

“The Speaker is in office, but not in power, because the Tea Partiers do not respect party discipline. They argue that they are standing up for principle, but the principle they have chosen to defend is the idea that the only thing that matters is rapidly and substantially shrinking the government.
This, we respectfully submit, is nuts.
According to polls, it’s not even what most Republican voters want, never mind the country as a whole. Moreover, the first thing you learn from studying the aftermath of financial crises is that premature fiscal tightening is extremely dangerous.”

So tighten-up the old seatbelt, the bullshit could run the fuel-starved truck of state right off the cliff , then only thing to do is SCREAM.

In fact, any private aspect of our daily lives is open to be scrutinized, filmed, recorded and posted on some government watch list just in case there’s a need, any need at all.
And the shit part is that you don’t have to be a terrorist, a criminal, or even a bad person who kicks puppies, or slaps little babies hard in the face — you just have say or do something the powers-that-be, or in our particular case nowadays, the right-wing hard-cases, do not like or agree with and whim-wham, thank-you ma’am, you’re under surveillance.

(Illustration found here via Google Images).

A case in point is from the illustration link above (Wired magazine) which details a situation reported from September 2007 where a co-founder of the AIDS Housing Network is placed under an unknown government observation routine.
As if:

Flynn is a co-founder of the AIDS Housing Network.
One day before an AHN rally, she went to New Jersey to visit her parents.
She noticed a car with New York plates parked outside their house.
When she drove home to Brooklyn that night, the car followed her — and was joined by two others.
She did all the detective story check-your-tail maneuvers: making random turns, changing lanes, parking. They continued to follow.

And when Men-In-Black like cars followed her home, two other vehicles were already there with occupants watching laptops — even at 4 a.m. the assholes were still there.
Despite a personal investigation, Flynn could not discover the IDs of the culprits.

Since her experience, Flynn has continued to organize, though she says she’s not so enthusiastic before, and has seen other activists pull back.
Was she really followed?
We might never find out.
But when we hear stories about political activists losing their civil liberties, we shouldn’t assume that they’re potentially violent folks bent on smashing Starbucks and the capitalist state.
They might just want a cure for AIDS.

One sad, fearful tale.
Similar to this story reported in early March: An Egyptian-American college student who says he has never done anything that should attract the interest of federal law enforcement officials filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI for secretly putting a GPS tracking device on his car.
And, of course, the FBI replied that they were just following “well-established Department of Justice and FBI guidelines,” which should tell you everything.

And to unsettle one’s self, there’s the government’s use of biometric technology, which in its actual defintion is freakin’ frightful – The word “biometrics” is derived from the Greek words ‘bios’ and ‘metric’ ; which means life and measurement respectively. This directly translates into “life measurement.”
No shit, Sherlock.
From Raw Story:

A recent announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigations detailing plans to embark on a $1 billion biometrics project and construct an advanced biometrics facility to be shared with the Pentagon has the American Civil Liberties Union on red alert.
…
The FBI’s forthcoming biometrics center will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and part of that system is already operating today in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Starting with fingerprints, and creating a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images, the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification.
To help ramp up the amount of data flooding into this center, the FBI said that electronic fingerprint scanners would be sent to state and local police agencies, which would be empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven’t been arrested or convicted of a crime.
…
“That’s what we’re really talking about here: a shift in American values, from a place where you can live your life unencumbered by government scrutiny to one where you really have to worry whether the government is watching you either through a video camera, or a police officer who could step up and potentially ask you for a fingerprint at any time,” (Chris Calabrese, an ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington, D.C.).
…
“What we have instead is secret watch lists, where people don’t know they’re on the list, they don’t know the standard for putting them on the lists and there’s no way to get off the lists,” Calabrese said.
“That’s a serious problem.”
“We’re not opposed to technology, but we are seeing technology advancing rapidly and often times legal protections aren’t keeping up.
When it’s now technologically possible to do things like capture a facial recognition image and use the various cameras across a city to track somebody using that image automatically … When that’s technologically possible, the only barrier between us and widespread mass surveillance is legal protections.
They don’t exist right now, in many cases.”

And what got me interested in this shit this morning was a Monday column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman, who flashed on the recent situation where a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin started a blog on the nefarious doings of the state’s GOP.
The historian wrote the Republican governor, the infamous Scott Walker, has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

So what was the G.O.P.’s response?
A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.
If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point.
The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.
…
Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.
What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down.
It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.

Shades of the AIDs worker, huh?
Just watch that camera angle, and don’t use e-mail.

Asked what most viewers and observers of Fox News would be surprised to learn about the controversial cable channel, a former insider from the world of Rupert Murdoch was quick with a response: “I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up.”

Scripted news coverage, not unique to Winston Smith.

(Illustration found here).

Anyone who pays any attention to Fox News and has any sense at all knows this already: “It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”

And apparently, the viewing public does comprehend.
According to Public Policy Polling, Fox’s viewer-ship has greatly declined in the past year, and PBS is now the most trusted news operation in the US.
Liars are in their lairs.

Madness in media is apparently on the upswing and the right-wing is the nastiest of the bunch.
In a study by Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences the use of “outrage talk” is getting more and more prevalent in recent years.
Via Science 2.0:

The term ‘outrage talk’ refers to a form of political discourse involving efforts to provoke visceral responses, such as anger, righteousness, fear or moral indignation, through the use of over-generalizations, sensationalism, misleading information, ad hominem attacks and partial truths about opponents.
If you are left wing, think Michael Savage.
If you are right wing, think Keith Olbermann.
…
“Our data indicate that the right uses decidedly more outrage speech than the left.
Taken as a whole, liberal content is quite nasty in character, following the outrage model of emotional, dramatic and judgment-laden speech.
Conservatives, however, are even nastier.”
…
It isn’t just television and radio.
They found outrage language is now common among the nation’s leading newspaper columnists also.
But is it different now, or do older people in journalism and the population simply romanticize the past? Sobieraj and Berry studied 10 widely syndicated columnists during 10-week periods in both 1955 and 1975. They chose these dates to see if the tumultuous period of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War protests and the Watergate scandal led to greater outrage in newspapers at that time.
They found the answer was no.
“Outrage is virtually absent from both the 1955 and the 1975 columns, in contrast to the columns of 2009 which contain, on average, nearly six instances of outrage per column,” said the Tufts scholars.
“The titans of American journalism in 1955 and 1975 remained restrained in their language despite the impassioned politics of protest.”

One major factor not part of the past: There was no nasty, lying, rumor-mongering Fox News, the direct and biggest outrage outlet in all of history.

Watch and listen to Mississippi asshole Haley Barbour on Fox News this morning and get way-outraged.
Or maybe watch Hadley elucidate and be tickled.

“These events should not have come upon us with the surprise that they did,” the committee‘s chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, said in an interview.
“There should have been much more warning” of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, she said, in part because demonstrators were using the Internet and social media to organize.
“Was someone looking at what was going on the Internet?” she asked.

No surprise here.
In reality, US intelligence is really not worth a shit — Stuff we should have known in advance: An entire meltdown of the governing/social order in North Africa and the Mid East, or maybe even from a few years back, another major CIA ineptness on nowhere-near predicting the collapse of Soviet Russia.
Are these people worth the $80 billion budgets?

(Illustration found here).

And to cover their intelligence-gathering asses, a mentally-unalert spokesman went whining:

“Did anyone in the world predict that a fruit vendor in Tunisia would light himself on fire and spark a revolution? No,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor.
“But had the diplomatic and intelligence community been reporting for decades about simmering unrest in the region?
About demographic changes including a higher proportion of youth?
About broad frustration with economic conditions and a lack of a political outlet to exercise these frustrations? Absolutely,” Vietor said.

What about on-the-ground human intelligence?
Jason Ditz at antiwar.com puts the mess into perspective:

The massive surveillance of social media and record intelligence budgets have given rise to the belief that this sort of thing should have been predicted, but might speak not so much to officials’ lack of attention as their lack of understanding for the notion that average citizens are just generally unhappy to live under oppressive “president-for-life” dictators.
This would explain not just the intelligence failures but the continued US funding for such regimes.

Being ahead of the curve is what ‘intelligence gathering‘ is all about, is it not?
And Hillary Clinton’s acute analysis of the Middle East caught in a “perfect storm” of awsome, groundbreaking shit — a most-useful phrase/analogy these days, ‘perfect storm,’ original words, “perfect situation“ as in meaning the coming quickly together of different phenomena, creating a perfect platform of circumstance for mega-disaster (except ‘perfect situation,’ doesn’t have the drama, wouldn’t be as catchy, wouldn’t make a nifty book title).
Hillary’s words sound really, really bad, as in ‘we’re casting stones in hypocritical hindsight‘ because the US has known all along of these festering environments, these ‘situations,’ which are now coming together big time in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and other places.
In places where life is so overwhelmed by vicious government — if the boss is a mean, nasty asshole, then most-likely people who work for him will be mean, nasty assholes, all the way down to the lowest level of mean, nasty asshole of a municipal inspector — a 26-year-old fruit vendor, whose meager income supported his mother, uncle and five brothers and sisters at home, would douse himself with paint thinner and set himself afire.

In Egypt, the US knew what a mean, nasty asshole-operation Hosni Mubarak operated.
Late last month, WikiLeaks released some US diplomatic cables pertaining to life in Mubarak’s Egypt.
From the Guardian:

“The police use brutal methods mostly against common criminals to extract confessions, but also against demonstrators, certain political prisoners and unfortunate bystanders.
One human rights lawyer told us there is evidence of torture in Egypt dating back to the time of the pharoahs. NGO contacts estimate there are literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone,” one cable said.
Under Hosni Mubarak’s presidency there had been “no serious effort to transform the police from an instrument of regime power into a public service institution”, it said.
The police’s ubiquitous use of force had pervaded Egyptian culture to such an extent that one popular TV soap opera recently featured a police detective hero who beat up suspects to collect evidence.

The Internet and Egyptian bloggers also get high play in the WikiLeak cables.
In one cable (via the Guardian) an observance: Bloggers’ discussions of sensitive issues, such as sexual harassment, sectarian tension and the military, represent a significant change from five years ago, and have influenced society and the media.
A country wanting to be free.

And where is the US/Egypt going from here.
Omar Suleiman, as a person, might be even worse than Mubarak.
Suleiman, one remembers, is now Egypt’s vice president, former head of the intelligence service, appointed by Hosni and who has now come up with a transition plan to ease Mobarak out of the picture.
Even Hillary endorses Suleiman’s plans, blubbering today in Germany: “There are forces at work in any society, and particularly one that is facing these kinds of challenges, that will try to derail the process to pursue their own agenda. That´s why it´s important to support the transition process announced by the Egyptian government headed by Vice President Suleiman.”

Egypt might horribly be caught in the old ‘frying pan into the fire’ routine.
Suleiman is one piece of work.
He was the go-to guy for the CIA’s infamous rendition program in the Global War on Terror, and, he was on the scene getting the US its needed ‘intelligence’ to invade Iraq.
According to Jane Mayer at the New Yorker:

Technically, U.S. law required the C.I.A. to seek “assurances” from Egypt that rendered suspects wouldn’t face torture.
But under Suleiman’s reign at the intelligence service, such assurances were considered close to worthless. As Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. officer who helped set up the practice of rendition, later testified before Congress, even if such “assurances” were written in indelible ink, “they weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.”
UPDATE: Further documentation of Suleiman’s role in the rendition program appears in Ron Suskind’s book, “The One Percent Doctrine.”
Katherine Hawkins, a sharp-eyed human-rights lawyer who did legal research for my book, points out that, according to Suskind, Suleiman was the C.I.A.’s liaison for the rendition of an Al Qaeda suspect known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi.
The Libi case is particularly controversial, in large part because it played a role in the building of the case for the American invasion of Iraq.
…
In particular, the Egyptians wanted Libi to confirm that the Iraqis were in the process of giving Al Qaeda biological and chemical weapons.
In pushing this line of inquiry, the Egyptians appear to have been acting in accordance with the wishes of the U.S., which wanted to document its case for going to war against Iraq.
Under duress, Libi eventually gave in.
Details from his confession went into the pivotal speech that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations in Feburary of 2003, making the case for war.
Several years later, however, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq turned up no such weapons of mass destruction, or ties between Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, Libi recanted.
When the F.B.I. later asked him why he had lied, he blamed the brutality of the Egyptian intelligence service. As Michael Isikoff and David Corn first reported in their book, “Hubris,” Libi explained, “They were killing me,” and that, “I had to tell them something.”

And most-likely Suleiman was on the scene.
From AOLNEWS:

“He has a long history of doing all the dirty work that needs to be done in Egypt. Both domestically, and we also know that he was involved with the infamous rendition affairs with the United States,” Rime Allaf, a Middle East expert at London’s Chatham House think tank, told AOL News.
Allaf was referring to an alleged CIA program under the Bush administration in which terror suspects were secretly transported, imprisoned and tortured by U.S. allies like Egypt.
The U.S. has publicly denied the existence of any such program, but President Barack Obama nevertheless signed an executive order outlawing rendition torture in the opening days of his presidency.
“We’ve heard a lot of stories where he [Suleiman] would take a personal interest, either in the renditions or in anybody who was caught who he thought had links to Islamist groups. He was said to be personally involved in the interrogations and the torture,” Allaf said.
“He’s not a civilian, and he’s not a pleasant person.”

Intelligence has its own instability.