I.The quintessence of “humanitarian intervention” has rarely been displayed so completely than in a recent post by Hullabaloo contributor David Atkins: “The bloody work of hairless monkeys.” Much like Martin Amis — who at some point in the early 21st century realized that Joe Stalin was one bad hombre and then wrote a book informing the world of this revelation — Atkins has apparently just now discovered that human tribes and religious groups have been senselessly killing each other for, like, forever. Not only that: Atkins has also uncovered the hitherto unsuspected notion that “people everywhere are essentially hairless monkeys

The turbulent ramifications of last week’s New York Times story detailing the operations of Barack Obama’s White House death squad continue to reverberate across the country today, sending shock waves through Washington and bringing crowds of outraged protestors to the …. Just kidding! As we all know, there have been no “ramifications” at all from this shocking story, no scandal whatsoever surrounding the fact that the President of the United States and his aides meet every week to draw up lists of people to be killed all over the world — even people who are completely unknown, who might simply

“Conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma.” — Dante, Purgatorio Singing in the ashes, trying to escape the circus, drinking in the light while it’s here, before it’s gone …. A field holler captured in Glasgow, Scotland, circa May 2011.

In honor of Mitt Romney’s nomination victory this week, we reprise below our last look at the man who might very well be the next temporary manager of the domination-and-despoliation machine belching mephitically on the banks of the Potomac. In this earlier glimpse, we saw in Romney the quintessence of the bipartisan ruling elite — and an avatar of the rabid psychopathology that lurks always behind the bland facade of normality our masters try so frantically to project. Time has proved the observations below to apply equally to both wings of the big bloated chickenhawk of our ruling class, of

I must, at last, admit defeat. I simply have no words, no rhetorical ammunition, no conceptual frameworks that could adequately address the total moral nullity exposed in Monday’s New York Times article on the death squad that Barack Obama is personally directing from the White House.  (“Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.”) It is not so much a newspaper story as a love letter — a love letter to death, to the awe-inspiring and fear-inducing power of death, as personified by Barack Obama in his temporary role as the manager of a ruthless, lawless imperial

(UPDATED BELOW)   “The winds in ChicagoHave torn me to shreds; Reality has always Had too many heads.” — Bob Dylan, “Cold Irons Bound”   So now we know the grand plan of the Peace Laureate (and his wag-tail pack of lapdogs in NATO) for the people of Afghanistan: civil war.   As many have observed, the NATO summiteers sent out an array of mixed messages at their meeting this week in Chicago: the Afghan war is over, the Afghan war is going forward, NATO forces are withdrawing from Afghanistan, NATO forces are staying in Afghanistan for years to come.

Gary Younge and Bernard Harcourt have good pieces in the Guardian about the “new normal” of America’s militarized society, as exemplified by armed occupation of Chicago by a staggering array of “security” forces. Younge notes the bitter irony of the word “security” in a city where the poor are being subjected to ever-increasing levels of violence both from private predators and public “protectors”: The dissonance between the global pretensions of the summit this weekend and the local realities of Chicago could not be more striking. Nato claims its purpose is to secure peace through security; in much of Chicago neither