SAMOSAMO:  I really like your poem!  Thank you very much for sharing it.

Neoliberal jerks like Joe Conason are the very enablers who lead us into this endless stream of so-called ” humanitarian interventions.” Conason, the Clintons , Samantha Power and their ilk are just as insidious and deadly than the evil neocons were.

****************

****************
This was put here maybe a year ago, but still appropo.

“The Game”

There’s an owl in the valley fixing his prey
He’s not counting the tally
It’s down to what comes up before the day
And the trees in the orchard were taken from a narrow view of
time
Where the minds of the tortured perpetuated patron saints of
crime
Oh civilisation. 

I can fit into your puzzle but it’s hardly, hardly ever a hold
And I’ll tell you, yeah yeah, tell you the trouble
The habits I’ve got are more than 10.000 years old
And we cannot sell our souls to learning morals
Big brother is no place for us to slide
We cannot live by numbers or on laurels
And hardly on how far from death we hide.

And it’s not a case of rampant paranoia
But just an age I’d love to see unborn
Not that I’d be missing playing Goya
More like I feel awkward passing on
Civilisation, civilisation down to my children
Without a question.

While the prophets of freedom, battery farming brains for
narrow minds
Have decided, yes they decided that meaning is far beyond the
lives they left behind
As two thirds of the population dine
On scraps in shadow lengthening with time
While propaganda spreads the same old theme
You is me and we can change the game, bullshit.

Oh but how many times have we written these lines
And delivered these signs and not made it happen
Walking the tightrope of taking our head off
Losing the rhythm, idealising and all criticising
And not realising that we’ve changed and left and we’ve gone.

And sad to be leaving the things we believe in but time has a
way and we fly
The next age is born and the old hands are gone and done in
the wink of an eye
No point in passing bad reason good guessing, no time for
massing much more than can flourish with love.

And right now, my darling, I’m lying here dreaming of feeling,
no daylight between us
So wherever you are and whenever I’m there is someplace
we’ve got to be ours
Can we right-heartedly stand in this light and see what might
turn out to be crazy enough, enough to be we ?

When we’ve had a past sad enough to last for sometime into
the future
These storms have torn and true love is alone and the past is
almost a failure
Consciences burn in the programme turn, computing the
social behaviour
But yoke revolts, the foundation bolts and cries for yet another
saviour.

And I’d pack my things on a pair of wings and tomorrow I’d be
parting
With the summer birds and the winter herds for a place to face
a new heart in
But it makes no difference, where I am I’m in the game first
hand
There are no certain answers and no time to understand
The rules are set to paradox, coercion and blind faith
The goal’s a changing paradise, a moment out of date
The dream is righteous grandeur fit to flood the universe
The fact is more than meets the eye but less than runs the
earth, running the earth.

And the prisoner of the present paces up and down inside his
cell
He’s the living replacement, somersaulting from this psychic
well
Screaming : ‘I’m the sponsor of a hell’
Voices like the sea inside a shell
Telling me I cannot stake a claim
Possession is a clue but not the game
So please leave this world as clean as when you came.

It has been stated, recently, that the rebel Libyan insurgents may possibly have a religious agenda as part of their reason for wishing to overthrow Muammar Gadaffi, which may have been put about by Gadaffi supporters, and yet there may be some truth in it.
It would appear that everything has been thought of except the effect that regime change will have over the whole of Libya, especially if religious/al Quaeda fanatics are able to exert any influence on the people of the Country.
Say what you like about Saddam Hussein, but there was no al Quaeda influence in Iraq to speak of, while he was running the Country prior to regime change.
Let’s hope this latest interference in a sovereign Country doesn’t have unforeseen side-effects as recent escapades have uncovered, with devastating consequences for the populations of those Countries involved.

Compared with the Sheer/Kucinich radio interview, Mr Conason, at the very least, attempts to establish a perspective that is comprehensive. Every country in th ME making a push for liberity and an end to despotism presents individual complexities. It rather shallow to assume that because we entered the Libyan fracas that we ought to delve into every other conflict regardless of our national interests.

It is reasonable that we should not have gone to the fore in Libya on grounds that it is not our fight. It is also reasonable to say that Libya had presented a precipitous situation and that the consequences of inaction were so loathsome and contrary to our notion of humanity that our “assumed” best face to the world, that is to say our proffered credibility, however tainted, would be irrevocably damaged. It is not difficult to imagine how Ghadaffi’s mercenaries would have exacted revenge.

Keep in mind, we have a long history with Gaddafi and that an opportunity to decapitate his power is no small factor. Gulf of Sidra, W. German disco, Pan Am 103 and Pan Am 73. We do have skin in this conflict.

Resorting to guns is always a failure of diplomacy.  Nonetheless, without the force of arms we’d be subject to every despot that makes it plain to use them against us. As is turns out, our attempts at reproachment with Gadaffi was derided as hypcrisy.  Diplomacy, by the time he was at the door of Benghazi, had evaporated. It was time to adapt to the circumstances. “All things are changing and we are changing with them.” [omnia mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.]

Libya is different from Bahrain, Yeman, Saudi Arabia. Yes, in principle the go contrary to our notion of freedom. However, in none of these do we have an international concensus. In every one of these situations we would be on our own. Only in Libya do we have an “asserted” limited role. In none of these were the rebels as successful nor as compelled to show resolve.

Paradox and Principle in the New Mideast? Heres one priciple everyone should think about:
Last week, the world was stunned by a crime so heinous that it shook the nation to its core. It was so barbaric that Prime Minister Netanyahu broke with the usual procedure and released crime scene photos to the world. Just hours into the Sabbath, intruders—presumably Palestinian—broke into the home of Udi and Ruth Fogel in the West Bank town of Itamar. They brutally murdered, by slashing and stabbing, the father, the mother, and their three-month old baby girl, Hadas, as she slept beside her father. They then entered the room of two of the Fogels’ sons, Yoav, 11, and Elad, age three. As the murderers held the young boys down, they stabbed them repeatedly, then slashed their throats.
They apparently didn’t realize that two more sons were asleep in another room. When the Fogels’ daughter, Tamar, 12, returned home from a Sabbath youth group meeting, she found her two-year-old brother, Yishai, standing over them screaming for them to wake up.
To call this outrage a crime… to even call it a tragedy does not do it justice. It’s more than either of those. This is pure, unadulterated evil incarnate. Whoever would slash, then practically behead a three-month-old baby girl, is below human. You don’t have to be a theologian to realize who motivates that kind of hatred.
Yet the world has hardly taken notice. In fact, The New York Times put some effort into deflecting the blame back toward Israel and its ‘settlement policies.’
But the Palestinians themselves took notice. In fact, they were so overjoyed that in Gaza, they danced in the streets and passed out sweets to celebrate.
These are the people the world wants Israel to accept as a “peace partner.”
As Prime Minister Netanyahu told CNN’s Piers Morgan, “What am I going to negotiate with them? The method of our decapitation?”
While all eyes are on Libya and the West’s befuddled military adventure, growing numbers of demonstrators have been protesting in Syria. But unlike the Egyptians, the Syrians are responding with live ammunition! They’re still protesting in Jordan, too, and even Hamas is beginning to feel the heat in Gaza. Frustrated Gazans have taken to the streets to protest the disunity between Hamas and Fatah, the party of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

So Hamas launched 53 rockets into Israel in an effort to provoke Israel into retaliation, thus rallying the Gazans behind the Hamas government.

We see things through what we perceive is our own self interests and through what we wish to believe can happen.  As we expand our limits, we we can see the beauty of our times.

“All the changes taking place in the world are creating awareness in people, who have decided that enough is enough; they have a right to be free and to enjoy life. They no longer want to be conditioned by politics, religion or commercialization.
Life has to be balanced, and we have to be aware of the Self in the heart.
It has taken Maitreya to release this awareness into the world. No politician came forward to say “Let the voice of the people be the basis of democracy”. They all hid behind their ideology. They did not talk about harmony, said the associate.
The light, the bible, the prayer for one and all from now on, is the awareness that Maitreya is in you and you are in Him. His vibrant teachings are stirring the world now, and the politicians are silent.”
- World Teacher Maitreya through an associate as reported by Share International

It is in the best interests of the US that we support incipient democratic movements wherever they exist in the world, in the hope that they become successful and powerful enough that someday they will be able to assist a movement toward democracy here in the US.

“Indeed, if we are truly responsible under U.N. doctrine to prevent the massacre of innocents by their governments, then we should probably be preparing for a massive invasion on Sudan, whose regime continues to oppress and kill the people of Darfur.”
“... as the president has said many times, that human rights and the desire for self-determination are truly universal. We should begin by making sure that the billions of dollars we permitted to be stolen by the likes of Gadhafi and Hosni Mubarak are recovered and restored to the people of those nations.”
====================================================
Well, here we go again! Few days ago, we heard from the “brilliant” Scheer suggesting that we invade Saudi Arabia. And now we are hearing from another “brilliant,” Joe Conason suggesting that we should invade the Sudan for violating human rights and self-determination.

Here again we notice the great hypocrisy and split vision of those irrelevant journalists who aspire to mold public opinion. But no s.o.b. ever dares to suggest that we invade Israel, with its sixty plus years of terrorism, murder, occupation, disposition, and human rights violation of the native Palestinians whom Israel stole their lands, with the help of tax-payers like Mr. Scheer, Mr. Conason, you and me.

Why don’t those “brilliant” writers suggest that we invade Israel to achieve three goals:

1. To liberate the oppressed and dispossessed Palestinians from the yoke of a colonialist entity who stole their land, freedom and dignity and continue to do so on the watch of those self- righteous pundits such as Scheer, Conason and thousands of others who sold their souls for the cheap price of pandering to Zionism.

2. To free the American tax-payers from the burden of continued support for the evils and wrongs of Zionist Israel, a burden that costs tax-payers untold billions of dollars every year.

3. To liberate American politics from the oppressive yoke of Zionist blackmailing and control that make America looks like a paper tiger and the most hypocrite nation on earth!

Another final point, why now invoke and use the United Nations to selectively advance Western evil schemes to interfere here or there, when Israel and the misguided United States are on record as the two entities that has shown most scorn and disregard for respecting UN resolutions!

Actually, what we may be seeing is the failure of two time-worn aspects of governance—violence (whether for suppresson or conquest) and autocracy (whether relatively “democratic” as in the US and Britain or repressive).  Universal technologies and universal needs for cooperation to prevent wholesale slaughter due to corporate pollution, and worldwide slavery due to corporate/autocratic domination have bred a worldwide taste for freedom and universal human rights.  Mismanagement has come home to roost.
  One reason why we can’t be helpful is that we aren’t helping ourselves, but instead are sponsoring the decay of human freedoms right here at home. We are a house divided against itself, a democracy in pretense only, trying to preach our way of life at the same time we are committing suicide. Our hypocrisy is evident to all but ourselves.