The graphic above shows you where the United States is (profitably) scattering weapons of mass destruction conducting arms sales to our brave Allies.

The graphic comes from a story in the NY Times, which notes that “the Department of Defense has agreed so far this fiscal year to sell or transfer more than $32 billion in weapons and other military equipment to foreign governments, compared with $12 billion in 2005.”

But rest assured, my friends, that distributing powerful weapons is certainly the path to peace! Just ask the Air Force Deputy Under-Secretary who’s in charge of some of their largest deals: “This is not about being gunrunners. This is about building a more secure world.”

And speaking of building a more secure world… while the U. S. military publicly warns Israel not to attack Iran, the U. S. military is also quietly approving the sale of 1,000 GBU-39 “bunker buster” bombs to the Israeli Air Force. The article from Ha’aretz, an Israeli daily, notes that the GBU-39 is “a special weapon developed for penetrating fortified facilities located deep underground.”

(My, my. We’d certainly hate for the Israeli Air Force to do anything rash, like, try to bomb suspected Iranian nuclear sites! We’d better hurry up and approve that shipment of bunker-busting bombs!)

Tying together the above chart with this weapon sale, it’s useful to note that Israel received more than 2.5 BILLION DOLLARS from U. S. taxpayers (i.e., you, me, and everybody we know) in 2007 alone, explicitly earmarked for weapons purchases; that deal for the GBU-39 bombs means $77 MILLION of those dollars are coming back to the U. S… well, actually, they’re going directly to Boeing, the weapon’s manufacturer. The icing on the cake? Unlike you, me, and everybody we know, Boeing doesn’t pay taxes! Not bad, considering that Boeing also was awarded $24,125,934,746 in direct contracts from the U. S. Department of Defense during Fiscal Year 2007 alone!

And so it goes.

The Center for Tactical Magic engages in extensive research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical Magic. A fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and the private investigator, Tactical Magic is an amalgam of disparate arts invoked for the purpose of actively addressing Power on individual, communal, and transnational fronts. At the CTM we are committed to achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through community-based projects, daily interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation.

They’re based in Oakland…Check ’em out!

Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency.

“Less taxes and more war,” he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should “bomb the hell” out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.

Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country’s resources.

“We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money,” he said. “We deserve reimbursement.”

A few hours after the interview, an unknown woman helped herself to Schwartz’s resources.

The Schwartz in question was a Colorado delegate to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. After Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech, he met a woman at the hotel bar, invited her back to his $319-a-night room, she told him to get naked while she fixed the drinks… and that’s the last thing he remembers; he awoke to discover she had taken, among other things,

…a $30,000 watch, a $20,000 ring, a necklace valued at $5,000, earrings priced at $4,000 and a Prada belt valued at $1,000

The whole article is worth a read…

(h/t: Jed)

This is The Image Mill by Robert Lepage, a film about the history of Quebec.  It’s projected on a complex of grain silos.  More video here.

Many families facing foreclosure due to predatory lending practices and plummeting home values may be energized to try to do something about it… maybe they’d even want to vote the bastards out that led us into this sorry mess.

Not so fast! The Republicans who brought you the current financial disaster have a backup plan! If you’re a facing foreclosure… they’ll prevent you from voting at all!

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week.

I’m sure the first thing I did, if my family and I were forced from our home, would be to run down to the county board of elections and register the transitional shelter as my new address, so I’d be sure to maintain my eligibility to… Oh, wait; you can’t vote if you don’t have your own permanent address, either!

It’s amazing… we think we have a universal franchise in our country for citizens of majority age; and yet, when you get into the details, you find out — prisoners can’t vote (> 1% of the entire population); ex-prisoners can’t vote in many states; anyone without a permanent address can’t vote, including people living in shelters, people who stay with relatives, people displaced for a variety of reasons, and even some students; and, if you live in a poor county or state where the Republicans control the voting process, you might find out that there’s a nine hour wait to vote, or your local polling place has been moved, or there aren’t any more absentee ballots available; and finally, even if you do manage to get into a voting establishment, satisfy the registrar that you’re legally entitled to vote in that location, and get your hands on a ballot, you might never have your vote counted!

U! S! A!

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our tee-vees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything’s going crazy. So we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my tee-vee and my hair-dryer and my steel- belted radials, and I won’t say anything, just leave us alone. Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad!

And,

And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this tube? So, listen to me! Television is not the truth! Tele- vision is a goddamned amusement park, that’s what television is! Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion- tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business! If you want truth, go to God, go to your guru, go to yourself because that’s the only place you’ll ever find any real truth! But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We’ll tell you Kojack always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker’s house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry: just look at your watch — at the end of the hour, he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear!

We deal in illusion, man! None of it’s true! But you people sit there — all of you — day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds — we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe this illusion we’re spinning here. You’re be- ginning to think the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We’re the illu- sions! So turn off this goddam set! Turn it off right now! Turn it off and leave it off. Turn it off right now, right in the middle of this very sentence I’m speaking now —

From the film Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky, 1975.

An oldie but goodie — and possibly the best beat boxing I’ve ever seen. Hilarious!

The UK Telegraph posted this collection of 20 of the most memorable doctored images.