Fallon Resigns As Mideast Military Chief

“The top U.S. military commander for the Middle East resigned Tuesday amid speculation about a rift over U.S. policy in Iran,” the AP reports.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that Adm. William J. Fallon had asked for permission to retire and that Gates agreed. Gates said the decision, effective March 31, was entirely Fallon’s and that Gates believed it was “the right thing to do.”
Fallon was the subject of an article published last week in Esquire magazine that portrayed him as opposed to President Bush’s Iran policy. It described Fallon as a lone voice against taking military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

Fallon, who is traveling in Iraq, issued a statement through his U.S. headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

“Recent press reports suggesting a disconnect between my views and the president’s policy objectives have become a distraction at a critical time and hamper efforts in the Centcom region,” Fallon said.

“And although I don’t believe there have ever been any differences about the objectives of our policy in the Central Command area of responsibility, the simple perception that there is makes it difficult for me to effectively serve America’s interests there,” Fallon added.

Gates described as “ridiculous” any notion that Fallon’s departure signals the United States is planning to go to war with Iran. And he said “there is a misperception” that Fallon disagrees with the administration’s approach to Iran.

“I don’t think there were differences at all,” Gates added.

They just don’t give a fuck about you:George Carlin on Education

IT’S CALLED THE AMERICAN DREAM AND YOU HAVE TO BE ASLEEP TO BELIEVE IT.

and (Why America (the World) Sucks…They got you by the balls!)

This entry is part 1 in a series of entries exploring monetary systems with regards to public knowledge and awareness in the United States and Canada, its origins and history, and present day status. What better place to begin than with a video from George Carlin, about the state of affairs today…

From MatthewGood:

http://www.matthewgood.org/2008/03/you-have-to-be-asleep-to-believe-it-pt1/ 

Meeting Links: US Election Funding, Project Ideas, Machines Blog, Videos

Hey folks, here are some links relevant to our first meeting of 2008:

Let’s try and make this post an ongoing list for any other stuff people feel is relevant.

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Who’s Next?

Campaign Finance 2008 USA Election:

Here’s a website, I realize its cnn, but it’s an easy start for finding general numbers.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/money/dems.html

NYtimes is good also….
http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/finances/index.html

Project Ideas:

Asian American Video Oral History Tutorial

http://thewhalehunt.org/

Michel Gondry’s Please Be Kind Rewind and “How to Swede”:

Machines and Movements: Deleuze and Guattari
Michael Hardt’s Reading notes on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus
My Blog: Desiring-Machines

Instead, it’s all about machines—desiring machines: “Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections”. (AO 1)

“Everything is a machine” (AO 2):
In the first section of the first chapter process and desire are defined in relation to both production and machines.
“A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupres)…related to a continual flow (hyle) that it cuts into…like a ham slicing machine, removing portions [prelevement] from the associative flow: the anus and the flow of shit it cuts off, for instance” (AO 36).
Hyle: “designates the pure continuity that any one sort of matter ideally possess” (AO 36).
The break or interruption of flows is not a rejection of that continuity; instead, it is constitutive of it—“it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity” (AO 36). Thus with each machine there are other machines that are connected to it and the form of that connection is conditioned by how (and which) breaks-flows function in that relation. Also, there is always a “third machine” that perpetually produces an infinite flux. This scope of these processes are essentially the law of the production of production at work; machines connected to other machines, producing and encountering breaks-flows.

The notion of desire that emerges in the first chapter is still somewhat unclear. This has much to do with the fact that I continually find myself clinging to desire as something that emerges from a subject-object relationship: the individual who tries in his life to satisfy his desires by seeking, projecting, working towards, discovering the objects of desire. This also brings out my second confusion, what it means to displace subjects and objects—the implications of situating the subject adjacent to(/outside?) of and after desiring-machines…as products of production.

noam chomsky: distorted morality

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4054523048548733881

we watched this chomsky lecture filmed at harvard last night. The man really does his research! Check it out

Don’t want to be a War Criminal

AWOL U.S. soldier seeks refugee status

American finds hope in NDP MP Libby Davies’ lobbying efforts

Andy Ivens

The Province

Monday, December 03, 2007

CREDIT: Nick Procaylo, The Province American soldier Brad McCall, 20, arrived in Vancouver in early October as a conscientious objector.

Uncle Sam wants Brad McCall.

The U.S. Army wants the AWOL private from Kentucky to go to Iraq to fight George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” but McCall’s conscience won’t allow it.

He applied to be a conscientious objector, but as his date to ship out approached, McCall realized that, like many other “COs,” he’d be in the war zone before a decision came down.

So, in early October, the six-foot-two GI followed the route of an estimated 50,000 previous American war resisters to Vancouver and applied for refugee status, which at least delays his possible extradition to the U.S., where he’d likely be tried for desertion.

“I don’t want to go to Iraq because I don’t want to be a war criminal,” McCall, 20, said yesterday.

“Any participation in the war in Iraq can be punishable as a war crime. The war is a criminal act, in my opinion and many countries’ opinion.”

McCall thinks the army recruiters who convinced him to sign up last year stretched the truth.

“We were told we probably wouldn’t be going to Iraq because [the war] was ending,” he said.

While posted at Fort Carson, Colo., “I heard the atrocities being committed on innocent people and soldiers laughing about that.”

That prompted him to apply for conscientious-objector status.

“They just laughed at me,” he said. “So I took the necessary steps and took off.”

His family has virtually disowned him, but he has found an esprit de corps in Vancouver.

“My parents and I don’t really communicate much,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of people here who have given me a lot of support.”

He’s been put up in the east Vancouver home of Colleen Fuller.

“I called the War Resisters Support Campaign [www.resisters.ca] and she volunteered her house for [an AWOL] soldier. I’ve been here ever since,” he said.

If he returned to the U.S., McCall figures he’d face a court martial and be ordered to serve “a few years” in the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Asked what he would like the Canadian government to do with the growing number of war resisters in Canada, McCall said: “Take us in. Do what Canada used to do in ’70s. Be a haven from militarism.”

Last month, the first two American military deserters to ask Canadian courts to allow them to stay in this country — Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey — received bad news from the Supreme Court of Canada.

The high court declined them leave to appeal a decision by the Federal Court of Appeal on their application for refugee status.

One crucial difference between the deserters who fled north during the Vietnam War and today’s resisters appears to be the evolution of the U.S. Army from a conscript force to today’s all-volunteer service, the court noted in its reasons.

“I was shocked,” said McCall, who remains “optimistic” that Canadians will convince their federal politicians to amend the refugee provisions of the law.

He has Vancouver East NDP MP Libby Davies in his corner.

“With their legal avenues pretty well exhausted, that’s absolutely the right direction to take — lobbying for change to the law to allow resisters to apply for landed-

immigrant status,” said Davies.

“We [New Democrat MPs] have a motion right now before the Citizenship and Immigration Committee that, if approved, would create a special category for war resisters that would allow them to stay in Canada.”

The motion — “to allow conscientious objectors and their immediate family members . . . who have refused or left military service related to the war in Iraq, to apply to remain and work in Canada and be eligible for permanent resident status” — will go before the committee later this week.

If the committee endorses the motion, said Davies, “we would then get that into the House [of Commons] and get the House to adopt it. There are many, many well-known Canadians who have made amazing contributions to this country who came here as war resisters.”

She suggested people write Citizenship and Immigration Minister Diane Finlay, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and their own MPs to voice support for the motion.

Colleen Fuller urged others to join the war-resisters campaign.

“The [Hinzman and Hughey] decision is bad for anybody, not just Americans,” she said. “Normally, Canada goes by the United Nations. That’s why we didn’t go to Iraq — because the UN didn’t see that as a legal way to go.”

The U.S. Pentagon refused to comment on McCall’s case.

aivens@png.canwest.com

Imperialism blamed for Pakistan’s woes

News Features By Travis LupickPublish Date: November 15, 2007Hari Sharma knows how to piss off a government. In 1965, he left India forwork in the United States. Three years later, he was asked to leave for”fraternizing” with Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers,and other iconic groups of that era.After relocating to Canada, SFU hired Sharma as a professor. Over the nextfew years, political activity resulted in his Indian passport beingrevoked and a year-long battle for Canadian citizenship.Today, Sharma is 74 years old and president of the South Asian Network forSecularism and Democracy. His view on the present situation in Pakistanhas been shaped by a life of activism for secularism and peace.“Get the fucking Americans and Canadians out of Afghanistan and thatproblem would be solved forever,” Sharma said, answering a question on howto control Pakistani Islamists.