Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Tori

 Annie Zaleski (GUARDIAN) writes:


My childhood best friend introduced me to plenty of cool musicians: Nine Inch Nails, Shakespears Sister, Suzanne Vega. But I remain eternally grateful for the moment in the mid-90s when she slipped me a dubbed cassette of a Tori Amos album, its song titles spelled out in purple and green pen on the J-card in loopy handwriting.

I was certainly familiar with Tori: the pianist’s flame-red hair and inscrutable, mischievous singles such as Cornflake Girl were impossible to miss on MTV. Even during a decade in which musical weirdness bubbled to the surface, the way she contorted her voice around piano, synths and other keyboards – an anguished howl one moment, a knowing growl the next – were striking.

Before diving into her music, my listening tended to be framed from male perspectives (REM, the Smiths), or driven by aggressive, extroverted angst. I vividly remember blasting Nirvana’s Territorial Pissings, with its shearing noise and guttural screams, when I was upset. Connecting with Tori albums such as Under the Pink and Boys for Pele nurtured a more personal and introverted fandom experience; being a Tori fan became part of my identity.

And while her singles were everywhere, listening to her albums was an intense, deeply private experience. When I finally heard her debut, Little Earthquakes, I was floored by the way she paired brittle piano with thundering rock instrumentation and unsparing lyrics. I sobbed on the rust-coloured carpet of my bedroom floor as several lines from Winter (“When you gonna make up your mind? / When you gonna love you as much as I do?”) ripped through me.

Tori seemed to be speaking directly to my teenage insecurities, crystallising hard truths about self-worth I wasn’t ready to face. I worried that a physical disability made me a burden and unlovable. As a result, I felt awkward, perfecting the art of pining instead of dating, and deeply uncomfortable trying to navigate womanhood. I physically couldn’t wear high heels or any other traditionally feminine shoes anyway, which only added to my feelings of alienation.


I'd love it if Tori would do an accessible album again.  THE BEE KEEPER was probably the last one that appealed beyond the fan base.  I loved UNREPENTANT GERALDINES and pretty much everything in Tori's canon.  But if she wants to maintain an audience, she needs to do albums like TORI AMOS, UNDER THE PINK, SCARLET'S WALK and THE BEE KEEPER every now and then.


Her audience is dwindling.  ABNORMALLY ATTRACTED TO SIN, for example, spoke to me and maybe twenty other people in the US. 

Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 

 Monday, March 22, 2021.  Theme of this snapshot?  Fake Asses, we see you -- and we name you.


The Iraq War anniversary came and went and little bothered to note it.  18 years of ongoing war.  Medea Benjamin did manage to note it . . . for a single Tweet.


Much love to the people of Iraq, whose lives were upended and destroyed by the horrific US invasion of their country 18 years ago. “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people,” as Howard Zinn said.
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1:14 PM · Mar 19, 2021



Is this US out of Iraq?  No.  And it never will be if this is what passes for a peace leader.  And she uses an old picture, years old, and she uses an old quote.  Coward Zinn died in 2010.  Remember 2008?  When Coward and Noam Fake-sky endorsed Barack Obama?  And the response was one of disgust and shock so quickly one rendorsed Ralph Nader and the other endorsed Cynthia McKinney?  And then Coward and company used Barack's January 2009 inauguration to throw their own little gala and fundraiser?  Yeah, I do too.  Those who were children then may not remember, but the adults in the room do.


We also remember that CODESTINK was in the midst of two Iraq actions one summer -- a hunger fast in DC and a trip to Iraq to meet with peace activists in that country -- and both got put on hold when they dropped Iraq as an issue to rush over to the topic of Palestine.


CODESTINK and Medea have never dedicated themselves to anything other than getting press attention for themselves.


Self-proclaimed peace activist Medea Benjamin's Iraq War 'action' on the 18th anniversary is . . . a single Tweet.  


We call out the fake assery of AOC but we don't pretend she exists in a vacuum.  She's as fake as as Medea Benjamin, as Norman Solomon, as, yes, Noam Chomsky.  


Fake ass Norman Solomon, by the way, couldn't even be bothered with a Tweet to note the Iraq War anniversary.  That's surprising only if you didn't grasp what a fake ass Norman is.  He exposed himself, this 'media critic,' when he spent 2008 on KPFA over and over, sharing how Barack Obama was a great candidate and the others were garbage.  He presented this assertion on one KPFA show after another pretending to be an unbiased critic.  In his columns of the same period, he disclosed that he was a Barack Obama delegate -- a fact he left out on KPFA.  Repeatedly.  In fact, KPFA listeners had to repeatedly complain before norman was finally forced to make that disclosure on air.


The term is: Whore.


He wasn't going to risk losing his syndication money so he disclosed it in the column but he pretended like it iddn't exist and didn't require a disclosure when he was on air.  He was assisted by many whores in the know.  Aimee Allison, we're looking at you.


See some whores had enough friends to help them over the hump -- others 'in the life' -- but some had to be sacrificed and Aimme -- Green Party activist and peace activist saw her whoring end her career.  It pissed off KPFA listeners and when they had the chance they urged that she be dumped and KPFA had to do just that.  She's repeatedly attempted to come back from that sad whoring but no one will have her.  And, honestly, that tape she made for Oprah was a laugh and it owuldn't have resulted in a job even if some of us hadn't already warned Oprah about how fake ass Aimee truly was -- warned her with receipts.


She's just a little whore for the Democratic Party today and if some are stupid enough to embrace her, heed my warning, she'll betray you as well.  She Tweets regularly.  If you're wodnering?  No, not a single Tweet on Iraq's anniversary. At the start of the Iraq War, she couldn't shut up about Iraq as she tried to get as much media attention as possible.  She was all over the place back then, as a Green and as a conscientious objector in the First Gulf War.  Remember that?  Or maybe you knew that she co-authored a book with David Solnit where they urged people to resist?  ARMY OF NONE: STRATEGIES TO COUNTER MILITARY RECRUITMENT, END WAR AND BUILD A BETTER WORLD.  We not only remember that book, a THIRD ESTATE SUNDAY REVIEW roundtable was done on the book and the publishers used a quote from Betty in that roundtable as a blurb on the cover of the book.  When the book cme out, both the authors and THIRD focused on the Iraq War.  All these years later, THIRD still does.  Aimee?  She's just a whore.  


And please remember that her most shocking moment on KPFA will probably always be when she called, on air, for burning THE NEW YORKER.   Yes, that's what a whore she became, she was actively calling for book burning if she didn't agree with a magazine cover.  


There are a lot of people who, right now, promote these whores, have them on their YOUTUBE shows.  They need to grasp that it limits their audience because it causes people to wonder if they're whores as well?  In most cases, they're just uninformed.  They've bought into the self-promoters public relations spin.  They've never actually examined the self-promoters actions -- or lack of them.


For the record, I didn't make a penny off the war.  I've spoken on campus -- in person until the pandemic -- by zoom now -- over and over against the Iraq War starting in February of 2003 when a friend who had booked a college tour had to back out because she got one where she could reach even more people.  So I took her earlier tour for her and it never stopped.  I charged nothing.  I didn't ask to be reimbursed for travel or for lodging.  At this site -- or at THIRD -- we have never have asked for money.  I've turned down media requests -- which were nothing but efforts to get me to self-promote, no thank you.  I didn't try to make a name off the war or to make a buck off the war.


All those whores can't say the same thing.


And despite making money off the war, raising their recognition off the war, they walked away and they do nothing to this day.


Whores -- and lazy whores at that.


Saturday's entry here was "Et tu, ANTIWAR.COM?" and we're going to reproduce it in full:


Late, last night, the Iraq War hit the 18 year mark.  Did any US outlet really register that fact?


Visit THE PROGRESSIVE this morning and find nothing about Iraq.  THE NATION?  Their big story is Dave Zirin's latest bad column on the NFL.  Along with that (the main story on the main page of the alleged political weekly), there are 37 other stories.  Guess what?  Not one of those stories is about the Iraq War.   20 stories on the main page of IN THESE TIMES' website.  How many are about Iraq?  Zero.


DEMOCRACY NOW! hailed itself from the start as "the war and peace report."  If you missed it, Goody Whore now calls itself "the quarantine report."   Good because, despite having a full hour on Friday, they didn't bother to cover Iraq.


MINT NEWS PRESS can't seem to find the Iraq War.  


COUNTERPUNCH and CONSORTIUM NEWS do the best -- COUNTERPUNCH offers Vincent Emanuele's "The Iraq War: 18 Years Later" while CONSORTIUM serves up Ann Wright's "18 Years Ago Today the US War on Iraq Began."


COMMON DREAMS does have two pieces, yes.  Only one is worth reading.  They offer Jared Keyel's "After 30 Years of War Against Iraq, Americans Must Make Reparations" and the idiotic "On 18th Anniversary of Iraq Invasion, Activists Renew Calls for US Reparations."


 

No, you f**king dabblers, Iraq does not need reparations.  Not until they have a functioning government.  The officials now fleece the government, austerity measures are being imposed upon the people.  You do not give a corrupt government money for the people.  It will never get to the people.  All handing over money will do is buy off your own guilt, it's not helping the people of Iraq.  Stop being such idiots and start calling for real and meaningful measures for Iraq -- like US troops out.  And if that means the US-imposed puppet government collapses, so be it.  


Worst of all is ANTIWAR.COM.


Not only is their no essay or blog entry on the Iraq War, there's not even a section for Iraq today.


antiwar


Margaret Griffith's daily roundup of violence in Iraq?  It appears under "Middle East."  On the 18th anniversary of the ongoing Iraq War, Iraq doesn't even rate its own section.  

Why does ANTIWAR.COM even exist now?  It might as well have died with Justin Raimondo if this is the level of 'coverage' we can expect from it now.  That's hideous.


It is awful that THE NATION serves up click bait instead of addressing real news like the Iraq War.  But it hypocritical for a site calling itself ANTIWAR.COM to fail to seriously note the 18th anniversary of an ongoing war.


This illegal war continues and it does so because a lot of lazy asses are in charge of media outlets in the US.



Seems like there are a lot of people who need to slice themselves off a piece of the blame pie.  A lot.


Kelley B.. Vlahos isn't one of them.  She managed to reTweet about the Iraq War on the anniversary and her pinned Tweet at the top of her feed, from December, is about the Iraq War:


Nightmare: What it looks like when you “liberate” a country that hasn’t asked for it and unleash a violent chain of events creating the conditions for an even worse tyranny than before. My latest on #Iraq: responsiblestatecraft.org/2020/12/29/ira


So not everyone is a fake and a fraud and a whore.  But so many are.  


And though they've exposed themselves repeatedly with the Iraq War, they still think they can fool people today.  And, let's face it, so many of them do get fooled -- a large number get fooled, in fact, because they want to be fooled and they live to be played for suckers.


Caitlin Johnstone (at SCOOP) notes:


It has now been eighteen years since the Iraq invasion, and I'm still not done raging about it. Nobody should be.

The reason it's so important to stay enraged about Iraq is because it's never been addressed or rectified in any real way whatsoever. All the corrupt mechanisms which led to the invasion are still in place and its consequences remain. It isn't something that happened in the past.

The Iraq invasion feels kind of like if your dad had stood up at the dinner table, cut off your sister's head in front of everyone, gone right back to eating and never suffered any consequences, and everyone just kind of forgot about it and carried on life like it never happened. The US-centralized empire is full of willful amnesiacs pretending they don't remember Iraq because it's currently politically convenient, and we must not let them do this.

No institutional changes were made to ensure that the evils of the Iraq invasion wouldn't be repeated. It's one of those big, glaring problems people just decided to pretend is resolved, like racism.


There's this weird implicit default assumption among the political/media class that US government agencies have earned back the trust they lost with Iraq, despite their having made no changes whatsoever to prevent another Iraq-like horror from reoccurring, or even so much as apologizing. The reason nobody responsible for the Iraq invasion suffered any consequences for the great evil they inflicted upon the world is because the western empire had no intention of changing and has every intention of repeating such evils. The lies and killing continue unabated.

No changes were made after the Iraq invasion to keep the US government from deceiving Americans into war. No new laws were made, no policies changed; no one was even fired. And indeed, the government did deceive Americans into war again: the Libya and Syria interventions were both based on lies. It's happened since, and it will happen again unless the murderous US war machine is stopped.


George Galloway Tweeted yesterday:


I was one of the leaders of the mass movement against the invasion and occupation of #Iraq exactly18 years ago. Everything we said was right everything our opponents said was wrong. Those responsible for the disaster remain unpunished. Indeed they have prospered. #IraqWar
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7:42 AM · Mar 21, 2021



George Galloway is still speaking against the Iraq War.  The frauds that attacked him?  Nope.  The worst attacks came from two frauds: Marc Cooper of THE NATION worked with whore Tom Hayden.  They worked overtime to attack Galloway.  


Tom Hayden was a joke.  Well, he was a whore and he was a thief who blackmailed the woman who supported his lifestyle for years -- what did Jane say, she felt like he drove a Brinks truck up to the divorce settlement? -- and then spent his final years wallowing in sexism.  He's very lucky his pathetic life ended before the rise of #METOO and he's very lucky the Rocky Mountain outlet that featured a look at him -- that included his asking his young female assistant to twirl for the reporter and show her 'goods' -- went under.  Tom was a pig.  And he went out like the coward he always was.  You had Barack Obama on the campaign trail openly mocking him ("Tom Hayden Democrats") and yet you had Tom exposing his belly and whoring.  Because that's what Tom always was.  He didn't call out Barack in March of 2008 when Samantha Power had to leave the campaign because the BBC was about to release her interview saying that Barafck didn't mean it when he claimed he would pull all US troops out of Iraq in ten months.  He knew then.  I know because we talked about it.  I called him out on his islence.  I told him he was a coward and he was disgusting.  (I'd already called him out over his correspondence with Wally and his failure to acknowledge Cedric -- the two were doing joint-posts then and still do -- but Wally was White so Tom would communicate with him while Cedric was African-American so Tom would ignore him -- that's the reality of Tom Hayden by the way and Troy can self-deceive all he wants but that is the reality of his father.)  Tom and Marc worked overtime to whore for Barack and they worked overtime to attack someone genuine like George Galloway.


Tom was always a sexist pig.  But there was a brief time when he was also a true peace activist.  A very brief time as evidenced by the fact that he cheered on Israel's attacks on the Palestinians.  He was always a self-promoter and by the late 70s, he was just a whore.  I think Joni Mitchell captured people like Tom Hayden very well in "Dog Eat Dog."



 

Where the wealth's displayed
Thieves and sycophants parade
And where it's made
the slaves will be taken
Some are treated well
In these games of buy and sell
And some like poor beasts
Are burdened down to breaking

Dog Eat Dog
It's dog eat dog ain't it Flim Flam man
Dog eat dog you can lie cheat skim scam
Beat' em any way you can
Dog eat Dog
You'll do well in this land of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers
You could get to be
a big wig financier

Land of snap decisions
Land of short attention spans
Nothing is savored
Long enough to really understand
In every culture in decline
The watchful ones among the slaves
Know all that is genuine will be
Scorned and conned and cast away


She captured people like Tom Hayden very well in that song and there were a lot of whores who probably felt stung by the song and that's probably why they lashed out at the album.  DOG EAT DOG remains a Joni classic.  But it sure did upset a lot of whores in real time as Joni held a mirror up to what they'd become.


In Iraq, the people continue to suffer from the war and from the fraudulent government that the US government has imposed upon them.  Yesterday, Sura Ali (RUDAW) reported:


Iraqi security forces arrested journalist and lawyer Ibrahim al-Sumaida'i late on Friday, acting on an arrest warrant on the charge of "publicly insulting public authorities" issued by the Al-Karkh Investigation Court in Baghdad.
 
The warrant was issued following “his attack on official institutions, describing them with bad words (which are not appropriate to mention) that go beyond the limits of the freedom of expression," according to a statement from the Supreme Judicial Council on Saturday.
 
The statement also accused Sumaida'i of being paid for his attacks on public institutions. 

The law Sumaida'i is charged under, Article 226 of the Iraqi Penal Code, states that "Any person who publicly insults the National Assembly, government, courts, armed forces, public authorities, official or semi-official departments, or statutory bodies shall be punished with imprisonment for a period not exceeding seven years or a fine or both."

Sumaida'i is a political analyst known for his outspoken views and opposition to the government of Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi.

His arrest was criticized by the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, which expressed "grave concern" that the warrant was issued without regard for humanitarian and legal guarantees. It is a "flagrant violation of human rights," the commission stated, calling for Sumaida'i’s immediate release. 


Mohammed Tawfeeq reported, in a CNN syndicated article, that Ibrahim was one of two activists with arrest warrants, the other being Yahya al-Kubaisi.  Mohammed Tawfeeq notes:



Lawmaker Mohammed al-Sudani also expressed his regrets, saying that penalizing the expression of critical opinion is a "very dangerous matter." "This is taking place at a time when murderers, criminals, and corrupt Individuals enjoy their full freedoms," al-Sudani tweeted Saturday.

Last year, the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for the Iraqi government to reform its penal code in a report that stated: "Iraq's Penal Code, which dates back to 1969, includes numerous defamation 'crimes' such as 'insult[ing] the Arab community' or any government official, regardless of whether the statement is true."

"Although few people serve prison time for defamation, the criminal process itself acts as a punishment. Reporting on abuses by the security forces or about corruption is especially risky," the organization wrote in the June 2020 report.

Al-Sumaidaie's final tweet prior to his arrest had marked the anniversary of the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.


But safe in the US, little Aimee Allison, the ultimate war whore, couldn't be bothered to Tweet about Iraq.  Some have no skin in the game, clearly.


We'll note this Tweet:


Iraq Media Outlet: A family member of the Iraqi political analyst Ibrahim Al-Sumaida’i reported that he has been arrested by a security force in the capital, Baghdad for unknown reasons.



Speaking of Tweets, let's note one more failure: Naomi Klein.  Not a single Tweet about the Iraq War.  For those not aware, Naomi blew her post-Seattle bump.  She was back to being the Mall Girl joke that she'd grown up as.  The Iraq War provided her with some actual material before she walked away.  Now she can't even note it, despite it making her image and making her bank.  "Baghdad Year Zero" was a great article.  The book was really one rip off after another -- non credited which is part of the reason Anthony Lappe slammed it so in real time.  Naomie the fake ass.



The following sites updated over the weekend:


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