Last week, President Obama declared the official end of combat operations in Iraq.

Sure. Whatever.

by Dark Wraith via the Cheezburger Network

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And finally, in the interest of providing fair and balanced disdain...



Readers interested in reposting any of the above images can click on the graphic to get the code at the Cheezburger Network. You can also vote to favor the graphic, there, too. While you're at it, you can see all of my demotivational posters and other creative visual commentary at my main graphics page at the Cheezburger Network.

The Justice Department has just secured indictment against yet another federal employee for leaking secret information to the press. This makes at least four individuals in short order that federal prosecutors have sought to imprison for disclosing what the government thinks the American people have no right to know. The latest target in this aggressive campaign by the Obama Administration is Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, who allegedly told a reporter that the CIA had determined that another round of sanctions against North Korea might trigger the regime in Pyongyang to conduct a third nuclear weapons test.

According to the Associated Press, the 43-year-old Mr. Kim was a State Department contractor in the Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implementation from the middle of 2008 until September of last year. Mr. Kim penned the introduction to Korea and the United States through War and Peace, 1945-1960, by Henry Chung (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, ©2000), and authored Master of Manipulation (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, ©2001), among other activities establishing at least some credentials of knowledge about intelligence activities on the Korean Peninsula.

Assistant U.S. Attorney General David S. Kris blustered that the indictment against Kim would "...serve as a warning" to would-be leakers of government secrets.

Perhaps the indictment will also serve as a warning to those still thinking that Barack Obama is something other than the latest fist of authoritarianism. The list of formally accused includes at least one soldier, PFC Bradley Manning, who delivered devastating combat video and documentation to Wikileaks, a Swedish organization founded by Julian Assange, who is beyond the reach of U.S. authorities. In their frustration at not being able to use American law to wreck Mr. Assange, a Swedish tabloid seems to have been the tool by which elements in the American government attempted to humiliate and discredit him with a claim in June that he was being investigated for two separate sex crimes. Unfortunately for the disinformation specialists, a day after the sleazy story was plastered across the headlines, Sweden's chief prosecutor summarily and publicly declared that Mr. Assange was no longer wanted on any such charges.

That failed operation aside, the U.S. has still obtained indictments against Americans who are alleged to have leaked classified information, including one against Bush-era National Security Agency executive Thomas A. Drake, who disclosed to a reporter at the Baltimore Sun embarrassing information about staggering cost overruns, mismanagement, and other problems at the NSA, particularly in a massive construction overhaul of the nation's signal intelligence infrastructure.

While the Obama Administration's law enforcement instrumentalities have adamantly refused to indict even one principal of the Bush Administration programs that crafted, implemented, oversaw, concealed, and cynically justified under color of legal counsel the systematic torture of detainees in violation of both American statutory law and international treaty obligations, the current top officials at DoJ are militating to imprison a resolutely up-standing, long-time member of the national security community who disclosed outrageous failures that cost the American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and delayed the implementation of modernization of the nation's antiquated intelligence-gathering capabilities.

Returning to the latest individual caught up in the government's ramped-up efforts to cork the flow of information the Obama Administration deems secret, U.S. Attorney Kris went on in his press conference about the indictment of Steve Kim to assert, "The willful disclosure of classified information to those not entitled to it is a serious crime."

The timeline of circumstances surrounding the document Mr. Kim leaked to the press is interesting, if not downright telling, about how President Barack Obama and his inner circle of advisers conduct foreign policy and manage information in multilateral negotiations.

After North Korea carried out its second test of a nuclear device in late May 2009 (a test considerably more successful than its first several years earlier), the Obama Administration swiftly and publicly took a lead in spearheading work on a new set of multi-nation sanctions against Pyongyang, ruled by the reclusive and rather odd Kim Jong-il, son of the equally reclusive and rather odd former strong man Kim Il-sun.

Like his father, Kim Jong-il is so resilient to outside pressures that he has let his own people go through one mass starvation after another rather than capitulate to demands from the international community on matters of nuclear non-proliferation. The best hope of getting any traction with sanctions against North Korea would not be through the toughness of the punishment so much as with the endorsement of the punishment by China, the only nation to which Kim Jong-il will even marginally listen, given China's cross-border trade with and stream of welfare to North Korea.

Apparently, at the same time Obama was conducting this very public, multi-nation campaign to further economically isolate Pyongyang, his own intelligence community had produced an information product that assessed a good likelihood that those very sanctions Obama and his foreign policy advisers wanted would have the highly undesirable effect of spurring the Pyongyang regime to test yet another nuclear device. Each such test is costly to North Korea in terms of weapons-grade nuclear fuel spent but also extraordinarily valuable in terms of wide-ranging technical know-how in nuclear bomb construction.

Obama's negotiators were whipping up international support for new sanctions against North Korea at the same time the Central Intelligence Agency was reporting its judgment that those sanctions would probably induce the Pyongyang regime to test another nuke: presidential diplomacy on the public stage to construct a concert of nations imposing sanctions on a rogue state, while that president's own, presumably trusted, analysts were back stage advising in a written document that success of the public diplomacy could backfire at 180 degrees to intended effect.

Then, throwing a monkey wrench into this interesting situation, federal contractor Steve Kim, on assignment to the State Department from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, leaked the classified report to a journalist, unnamed in the indictment against Kim but probably a reporter at Fox News. According to an updated Reuters release, somewhat unclear in its connection to the pending criminal case, Mr. Kim had also "...briefed former Vice President Dick Cheney and other top U.S. officials." Whether this was during the Bush Administration or after is not stated in the Reuters update.

On June 12, 2009, the United Nations passed Resolution 1874, which imposed sanctions against North Korea cumulative to those in Resolution 1718 of 2006, the latter resolution punishing the Pyongyang regime for its nuclear bomb test in May 2009, the former for its first bomb test.

North Korea has not tested a nuclear device since the one in the late Spring of last year. At the close of 2009, the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a South Korean government think tank, issued its 2010 outlook, in which defense analysts found "a high possibility" that North Korea would conduct its third nuclear bomb test during 2010, in part to strengthen the Pyongyang regime during the anticipated transition of power to the son of Kim Jong-il, and in part to bolster its case that the nations of the world should accept North Korea as a legitimate nuclear state.

The U.S. issued no criticism of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses for its December 2009 public report, which directly discussed North Korea and which essentially paralleled in its findings the prior, secret CIA document leaked to the press without directly naming North Korea.

Notwithstanding claims by the State and Justice Departments that Stephen Kim compromised sources and endangered national security, it would at least appear that the difference between the U.S. government's outrage over the leak by Kim and the later, open report published by South Korea was that the Obama Administration had, in the second instance, already achieved its objective of securing the desired United Nations resolution in the context of a written American intelligence community conclusion that success at the UN against North Korea would be short lived and counterproductive.

It is quite likely that during the run-up to the UN vote on Resolution 1874, most nations with even marginally capable intelligence analysis capabilities had come to the same conclusion about the risk of new sanctions against Pyongyang, which means the Obama Administration seems to share the view of the previous regime in Washington that, given a choice, secrecy is preferable to transparency, regardless of its value to national security. Assistant Attorney General Kris put it succinctly: "...disclosure of classified information to those not entitled to it."

Label it "classified," and thereby make it an entitlement.

As the Central Intelligence Agency puts it, "Information is the most dangerous weapon of all."

In the view of a succession of diverse American rulers, including the current President, information is not a right of a free people, but is, instead, an entitlement, one reserved for those who must ensure that freedom is not taken literally by the governed.

Click on the graphic above to go to this motivational poster at my Cheezburger Network site and get the code to post this on your own Website. Otherwise, click on the poster so you can go and vote for the graphic.

Spread the word: the Right-wing extremists of this country get no more tolerance for their lives of cynical hypocrisy. The emperors of moral superiority have no clothes, and it's time to let them know that their nakedness is at once grotesque and laughable.

As promised in my last post, given that the GOP has cranked up the hate machine time and time again, recently with an ugly, sexist, misogynist video comparing Republican women to Democrat women, your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums is taking up the challenge of demonstrating his Photoshop skills. The Minnesota GOP thought it would be just hilarious to produce and publish a video in which altered pictures of Democrat women were presented one after another to the song, "Who Let the Dogs Out?"

Setting aside the likelihood that the juvenile-minded Republicans behind this video were clueless about the actual meaning of that song's title, it seems the Right-wing party boyz were inviting a war of Photoshop skills. The motivational poster above, from my personal collection of creations at the Cheezburger Network, is a light and airy first salvo in what will become in later installments a veritable fusillade of withering graphics provided for the amusement of readers here at Dark Wraith Publishing online properties.

Be disturbed by my harsh, perhaps even unfair graphics, but know this: our nation does not benefit one iota anymore from the mealy-mouthed Democrats who appease Right-wing extremists, accommodate hateful demands from GOP know-nothings, and whine about vicious Republican tactics. The unrepentent little bullies who now control the Grand Old Party will never grow up until they have had a consistent, hard leather belt taken to their undisciplined, childish rear ends. As I have cautioned again and again and yet again, not only am I old school, I'm old-school conservative, maybe a little bit like a James Kilpatrick, a literate fellow who could throw acid with his tongue and his scowl, except that I can do it with the technologies of modern disinformation, too.

Stay tuned for more fun later, good readers.

It seems that the extremists who now run the Republican Party want a Photoshop war. Dark Wraith Publishing is more than happy to take that declaration of war and run with it.

With thanks to the Atlantic for getting the word out on this latest, vile trash from the Republicans, I offer this fabulously sexist, droolingly misogynistic advertisement produced and published by the Minnesota GOP. Enjoy the kicky music and the altogether tasty photos featured in the first half of the show. At 2:54 into the video, the real fun begins.

(NOTE: The copy of the video I published here last night was pulled by YouTube, ostensibly for copyright infringement, so I located another, identical version that has survived since last April on YouTube.)

Rock on, all you progressive, Democrat, liberal, and otherwise ugly women out there. This video is really about you.



It seems that the extremists who now run the Republican Party want a Photoshop war. Dark Wraith Publishing is more than happy to take that declaration of war and run with it.

Stay tuned for a series of posts here at The Dark Wraith Forums and Big Brass Blog that will constitute my turn at demeaning, degrading, insulting, nasty, harsh, hurtful, downright uncharitable imagery of the luminary loonies of the Party of Hate, otherwise known in polite circles as the GOP.

I went to the state fair to take pictures, and I got some, by golly. I might share more later, but this one captures so much of the essence of all that a good state fair should be.



I didn't get a picture of the sign where some Romanians were selling deep fried Coca-Cola smothered in Cola syrup and whipped cream (with a cherry on top), but I did get other good pictures, mostly of performers, vendors, and other wonderful contributions to the tapestry that is Midwestern America. I even got a couple pictures inside the Democratic Party tent before I introduced myself as the Dark Wraith, who just wrote perhaps the most scathing of my attacks on President Obama and his lackeys. The lady in charge was not at all impressed by me.

Go figure.

I tried to talk to the Libertarians at their booth, but they were being too weird, and I forgot to take the lens cap off my camera. It's just as well; I'm not sure what would have shown up in the shots.

I didn't bother to go into the Republican Party tent because standing outside the entrance were what appeared to be some Teabaggers handing out stuff, and I was afraid of getting cooties on my Nikon.

I took lots of other pictures, though, and as I noted, above, I might eventually share some of the good ones here.

In the meantime, please think about the chocolate covered bacon. I was given a sample. It was actually pretty darned good... for about 15 minutes; then the effects of 98° heat with 60 percent humidity, mild dehydration, a previously consumed sample of home-made root beer (Lord! but that stuff was strong), and the walk by the farm animals exhibitions all kicked in.

Fortunately, I made it to the air-conditioned agriculture and crafts building before I ended up hosing my groceries. I saw many great displays in that building, but the greatest of all was the tribute to Spam.



Simply awesome: All things Spam in a display case.

It was a good day.

Especially now that I've carved some emotional distance between the flavor of chocolate covered bacon and my used food hurl trigger.

In a recent interview with The Hill, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs condemned what he called the "professional left" for criticizing President Barack Obama: "I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested. I mean, it's crazy... They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."

Writing here as an old-fashioned conservative who has deep, abiding disdain for the failed, hateful Right-wingers posing these days as conservatives and just about as little use for dysfunctional, self-loathing Democrats who never saw a chance for appeasement of the GOP extremists they didn't take, suffer me this brief, pointed, and less-than-diplomatic response directed to Mr. Gibbs.

Mr. Gibbs, if you think the "professional left" is somehow being unfair to Barack Obama, you and the chief executive are profoundly detached from any grasp of just how far from the promises of the 2008 presidential campaign Mr. Obama has fallen. He is not the "hope" and the "change" he was elected to deliver to the nation.

Furthermore, Mr. Gibbs, it is neither that "professional left," which has finally begun to understand Mr. Obama for the neoliberal he really is, nor even the obstructionists, the hate mongers, and the just plain venal of the New Right who are Mr. Obama's problem.

Take note, sir. The President's problem is, in fact, Mr. Obama, himself: a weak, inexperienced, hide-bound, Cold War-era thinker in a nation of vastly more sophisticated, more powerful individuals and interests than he, continuing as he so obviously is in pursuit of already failed paths set down for him by the previous administration and the instrumentalities of Congress, politics, laws, decisions, and personnel he does not have the will to dismiss, abandon, and repudiate.

Mr. Gibbs, I would genuinely prefer to see this nation spend several more presidential terms suffering the ugly failure of a Right-wing Republican in the White House than to see Mr. Obama there past 2012.

Yes, it is that bad, sir. Far too many Americans apparently have not yet suffered enough to know Right-wing failures and neoliberal appeasers for the disasters they individually and collectively are to the future prosperity of this nation. Instead of humiliating itself any further with inadequacy to the task embodied in the what the Democrat Party offered up as false hope and insubstantial change, your party power brokers need to be roundly and permanently driven into the wilderness so that new, fresh, powerful, uncompromising men and women can take the helm of the party and lead it to the strength needed not merely to break the back of the extremism of the New Right, but more importantly, to save what will be left of this nation by the time Obama and his Republican successor have fully crafted the catastrophic policies first set forth by George W. Bush.

As such, Mr. Gibbs, go straight to hell before your inadequate boss, President Obama, allows this country to be taken there for lack of bold, uncompromising leadership into the light of a new, prosperous era and away from the twilight of Empire.

I should know better, I really should.

Posting comments at sites that are not in my Dark Wraith Publishing network is perilous business. Something about what I express and how I write seems to set off one or another group of folks looking for someone to attack.

A long time ago, it was usually the Right-wingers who went after me, but in recent years, it's been the Leftists who have taken up the call of duty. In my experience, the Right-wingers attack as loners, even when more than one of them takes exception to me and perhaps my very existence.

Leftists, on the other hand, more often than not attack in packs. They grab a thematic approach, and each plays the same tune on a slightly different chord. That happened at GroupNewsBlog; at Shakesville (formerly Shakespeare's Sister); BlondeSense; and, fairly recently, at Pundit Kitchen, the last of which got me in so much trouble that I received ugly e-mail threats and open comments that included wishing me to go to a Nazi death camp. That brutality all started because I stated my disgust at an old man whose grandkids talked him into doing a YouTube video of the family disco dancing at Auschwitz. Never mind that I had tried rather gently to explain that he was not a "death camp" survivor: were he to have been in camp II, the Vernichtungslage of the Auschwitz complex, he would not have been a survivor; that was the death camp. For his grandkids to get their viral YouTube video mojo fame is one thing, but to degrade the horror of the millions who were butchered because they weren't useful enough to be put in the slave camp is quite something else, especially when the "ghosts" of the murdered are shown in the video dancing to the idiotic beat of "I Will Survive," as if any lyric in that pop-moron jingle, other than the title, has anything whatsoever to do with the victims of the most genocidally efficient regime cum slaughterhouse in modern history. Perhaps next we can have Alexandr Solzhenitsyn do an interpretive dance at a Soviet gulag to the tune of "That's the Way (Uh-Huh) I Like It," by KC and the Sunshine Band.

Forgive me if I sound cruelly curmudgeonly on this matter, but I have no quarter in my tolerance when Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, and others get slaughtered because they have nothing to offer as slaves to monsters, while someone who was an able-bodied young man decades later lets his kids show him how to "celebrate" and represent that the millions murdered are cool with his survival by random advantages he had over their frail lives.

Judge that one for yourself. The link to the page at the Pundit Kitchen is here, and you can find my comment (as Dark-Wraith) not far down in the attendant thread. Although the sub-thread from my comment is pretty pleasant (in fact, it got a little weird at one point), the main thread contains the scattered and concentrated parts of the pack-wolf attack, generally from the hate world's Leftist/liberal sector, always ready to declare their total fealty to the god of Anything That Makes Me Look Sensitive and Hip.

Before and since that dust-up, I have been torn asunder in one way or another and in one venue or another for such heresies as these:

• I've been pilloried for pointing out that Google is not only a dirty, information-collecting snoop, but also no better than any telecom when it comes to that much-vaunted "Net neutrality" ruse. Google was all in favor of Net neutrality because its server farms for search engines and blogs chew up unbelievable bandwidth, but now that it's in the catbird seat of market power, it's going to play every angle of the pseudo-sovereign card, from not worrying too much when it's caught dragnet spying to worrying even less about working with the telecoms and the FCC to end the era of Net neutrality for all of us unimportant, trifling Web masters of the out world.

• I've been sneered at for daring to point out that FireFox, aside from using false trickery with caching to make anti-Microsoft folks think FireFox is better, is actually a sideshow of W3C, which has some really bad people who work with the National Security Administration in its coven. Perfectly standardized code is the friend of aggregators who have to gather up, store, process, analyze, and ultimately use the information of the Internet to manage us and convince us that our future is in the "Cloud," where even rudimentary rights against undue search and seizure are diminished by specific statutory law (passed during the Clinton era, mind you) and, in practice, just plain don't exist at all.

• I was deemed a "racist" and other filthy things for pointing out that candidate and then President Obama was nothing more than the latest authoritarian to pose to leadership of a nation plunging ever further into the twilight of Empire afraid not only of its own shadow, but of its own citizens' right to privacy.

• I was called an advocate of the sexual mutilation of boys because I dared to criticize the high-and-mighty enlightenment of the no-circumcision crowd. The sometimes violent and sick language used by those who think that they are blessed by some overarching enlightenment is appalling, and it is even more disconcerting to the idealist when people with some degree of education think they have the heads-up on all that is truth. The accusation that I want children sexually mutilated was about as vile as it gets, and that attack, which first arose at BlondeSense, then showed up again much later on my own darned Website, Big Brass Blog! Talk about bringing the war home.

• Although I still have publishing rights (I think) at Pam's House Blend, I don't even bother to post articles there anymore, given that I apparently offended a gay and a lesbian Zionist, whose umbrage spread to others of their sentiments. Lordie! Here I thought the straight Zionists were punk, what with the e-mail and DDoS action after my post about the attack on the USS Liberty, but I was totally unprepared for what happens when the GLBT wing of Zionism gets riled.

• Just a few weeks ago, Austrian hackers took advantage of a security failure at the Web host of The Dark Wraith Forums and put malware into my contact form, here. They then "alerted" a spyware site called "OpenDNS," which now, along with "Web of Trust," blocks access to my site under the ruse that The Dark Wraith Forums is a "phishing site" (and has a "bad reputation," as Web of Trust puts it). Now, if you don't know how OpenDNS works, you might be disconcerted to find out that, quite possibly without your knowledge, your Internet connection settings in your computer might be set in such a way that everywhere you are going on the Internet is filtered through a proxy that is supposedly "protecting" you from bad places. Yes, the entirety of your surfing, searches, visits, and everything else in cyberspace might be getting funneled through a single node, making aggregation of everything (and I mean everything) you do that has a connection to the Internet a one-stop shopping spree for those who want to know all about you. I'll bet you didn't know how those "protection" services work, and I'll bet that you didn't exactly sign up for that conveniently installed nose-job right inside your machine. More to the point, I'll double-down that you can't get rid of it, either, given that manually extricating it is a real pain and most anti-spyware programs are afraid to take on these supposedly helpful little agents that get into your computer. (If you want to block malware on sites you visit, I recommend Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware. There's a free version that's sweet and a pretty cheap premium version that's even sweeter.)

By the way, as a fun aside, there's even a name for malware that poses to be helping but is, in fact, itself problematic: it's called a false white knight. Perhaps the most famous false white knight was a fascinating piece of work that went out in the hours after the virus Melissa was unleashed; the white knight ran through networks chasing down and killing Melissa, then apparently committing suicide as evidence of its benevolence. Unfortunately, right before it killed itself, this white knight would kick open an obscure port to make a future exploit a breeze.

Sheesh. You just can't trust anyone, these days.

The hurtfulness just never ends, and I become so dispirited when people who call themselves "conservatives" but are not call me some kind of Leftist, and some who really are liberals (or, more accurately, neo-liberals) and Leftists heap the juice of over-the-top condemnation on me. (Not that I am always within the bounds of temperance in commentary, myself, mind you, but that obviously doesn't count.) On balance, it seems, though, that in the scope of the bruising slugs of the rough-and-tumble Blogosphere, the liberals and Leftists have been my most frequent critics.

Imagine how refreshing it was just a few days ago, then, when an honest-to-goodness Right-wing Teabaggot freak attacked me on a comment thread at GraphJam (which, like Pundit Kitchen mentioned above, is a site within the Cheezburger Network, where I publish posters and other graphics as Dark-Wraith). It was downright refreshing; and even better, the subject that started the attack was none other than the famous "quadratic formula"!

I kid you not: the quadratic formula.

The title of the graphical post at GraphJam was this: "About As Useful As Advanced European History," and the picture was this:



A whole lot of engineering types went after this howling display of ignorance about the uses of the venerated quadratic formula, but I found it pretty interesting that almost no one knew just how extensively this silly little way of finding the roots of a second-degree polynomial in the form ax²+bx+c=0 can be applied.

The fact of the matter is that I have used and taught uses for this formula in economics, finance, quantitative operations management, and even marketing, where a very cool, very useful application to price point location brings economics to very real-world optimal product pricing, which feeds into the realm of consumer psychology and right back into microeconomics and macroeconomics (as in, when to change a price that consumers in sufficient numbers already accept versus when to change package size to conceal a price change caused by something like wholesale cost inflation).

Anyway, here is what I wrote in comments:

I am a professor who teaches finance and economics. I also teach math, computer science and software skills, along with business law. I also used to teach English grammar and composition. A long time ago, I was a canon fire direction specialist. I've been a business consultant, too.

To claim that the tools and formulae of elementary algebra (and the quadratic formula is quite elementary in the huge scope of algebra, specifically, and math, more generally) is to display the profound satisfaction of those who are so ignorant that they know not their ignorance.

Compounding that, to proudly display the anti-intellectualism that asserts the uselessness of European history (or any other history, for that matter) is to declare imbecility from the stilts of FAIL Kingdom.

Ignoring, contorting, rewriting, dismissing, and otherwise sneering at history and the broader traditions of thought brought forward to invite use and invention is from the realm of fools and neoconservatives. (But I repeat myself.)

The author of this post has befarted the Cheezburger Network.

(Wait. What? "Befarted”?!)

Enough. Someone find the poster of this article a job with the You-Betcha Girl. It's a match made in Heaven.

Or someplace.

Although I received a most complimentary reply from one commenter, sure enough, my oblique reference to Sarah Palin, she who needed five colleges to get a fluff degree in sports journalism, caught the attention of a Teabaggot, one of the rather unusual kind who is semi-literate. He wrote this:

spoken like a true liberal who's never had a job that wasn't paid for by the tax payers. It's the "intellectuals” like you that are teaching our kids mediocrity is best and that they shouldn't ever hurt anyone's feelings unless they are republican or white males who aren't in some victim group. If you move out of the ivory tower of academia and get a real job you wont use this equation again the rest of your life.

While we're at it can you explain the logical fallacy to Keynesian economics? probably not since you believe that for every dollar the government takes from the economy to spend in the economy will generate 3 or 4 dollars because you're a tard.

Now, that hurt.

Yes, it hurt deeply.

Okay, it didn't hurt. Being attacked by a Teabaggot is actually edifying. In my case, it's even more so because I thought my detractors on the Left were the only ones who cared, these days.

I was wrong, though. The Right-wingers still have within their ranks some who are too stupid to leave me alone to worry about where they are, what they're doing, and if they're eating right, getting eight hours of sleep every night, and abstaining from sex for any purpose other than procreation.

Now, I know. The Right-wing imbeciles are still out and about, trolling for critics of their failed, hypocritical leaders with even less caution than progressives voting for Democrats like Obama as agents of real change.

Who could ask for more than the abundance that is mine in the presence of mine enemies? Some think I am a Luddite because I don't "Get FireFox," some think I'm a racist because I don't love myself some Barack Obama, some think I support sexual mutilation, some even think The Dark Wraith Forums is unsafe to visit and has a "bad reputation."

And now I know that the Teabaggots don't like me.


It's all good, tonight.

In comments to a recent Big Brass Blog article by Father Tyme, fellow blogger Peter of Lone Tree quotes the Cryptogon headline: "The U.S. Government Is 'The Largest Criminal Organization In The World'."

This is for Peter and all who would be dismayed by the power of the sovereign that is Empire.

Notwithstanding the artificial trappings of "international law" invoked by modern victors as they hang with grave oration and high ideals their vanquished enemies, the word "criminal" cannot apply directly to the sovereign or to the agents acting under sovereign immunity. I can cite directly to statutory and/or constitutional law for each of the following.

The sovereign can kill you (even if you have done nothing wrong), but it is not murder.

The sovereign can put you in fear of your safety (even if you were not in danger), but it is not assault.

The sovereign can torture you (even if you have nothing to reveal), but it is not battery.

The sovereign can take from you (even if you have nothing), but it is not theft.

The sovereign can lie about you (even if you are actually innocent), but it is not defamation.

The sovereign can collect and save pictures of you naked (even if you are a minor), but it is not sexual abuse.

The sovereign can break any promise to or agreement with you, but it is not breach of contract.

The sovereign can govern you (even with malfeasance or malice), but it is not oppression.

The sovereign carries at its discretion the power of immunity, and it uses that discretion as a matter of consistent course rather than rare necessity, notwithstanding the "natural law" invoked by modern victors as they overthrow with grave oration and high ideals their vanquished oppressors.

From the shamans of the grasslands to the ascetics ascended to the Throne of St. Peter, from the Pharaohs who stood by the waters of the Nile to the bejeweled monarchs of Medieval Europe, supreme infallibility dismisses the pain of exacting accountability, even as the mortal world labors under the burden of the unending legion of those who pose in fact or in deed as gods among us to serve above us.



And the only gain in the death of god is the rise of another.

Wage war wisely. We might not yet be safely in our graves when our children figure out what we did to their world.

At its annual convention in Kansas City, the NAACP on Tuesday issued a report stating that the loose alliance of Right-wing interests collectively known as the "Tea Party" had "racist elements" within its ranks. Putative leaders of the movement roundly denounced the allegation. Sarah Palin, often seen as the unofficial representative of the new American Right, asserted that the NAACP's accusation of Tea Party racism was "...false, appalling and is a regressive and diversionary tactic to change the subject at hand." Mark Williams, billed as the "Tea Party Express spokesman," refused to say that the Tea Party does not welcome racists, instead asserting, "Racists have their own movement. It's called the NAACP."

Even as the Tea Party's media representatives were denying the charge leveled by the long-standing civil rights organization, its own members seemed to be working at cross purposes to the benignly non-racist image Palin and others were trying to set forth. The Right-wing Washington Times, owned and controlled by the shadowy ex-convict Sun Myung Moon, founder and head of the global cult known as the Unification Church, headlined an editorial attacking the NAACP with the title, "Kill the Crackers," apparently accusing the NAACP of trying to incite murderous violence against Whites. Further depleting the credibility of denials from Tea Party officials, White supremacy Websites quickly published their own attacks on the NAACP in particular and, in some cases, Black activists more generally. A number of Right-wing commentators and officials brought up a case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party as exemplary of African-American racism targeting Whites.

As if the rank-and-file factions had not already offered troubling evidence contrary to denials of racism within the Tea Party, the seemingly official "North Iowa Tea Party" bought ad space on a billboard in Mason City, Iowa, and posted an appalling sign associating U.S. President Barack Obama with Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin.



Despite the claim by North Iowa Tea Party founder Ben Johnson that the sign would 'remain up for a month,' it was hauled down within a day as national Tea Party personnel scrambled to distance the movement from a (quite literally) towering example of its members' troubled mentality and outrageously preposterous hyperbole.

The NAACP accused the Tea Party of having racist elements in its ranks. Notwithstanding the furious denials of this allegation by Sarah Palin and other inspirational forces within the movement, the actions, words, and behavior of Tea Party members provide ample evidence that the Tea Party, for all its apparent lack of central command and control, does in fact have powerful undercurrents not only of racism, but also of nativism and generalized vitriol.

From the daily, appalling statements—both direct and in coded language—of Right-wing extremists like radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh to the vile racial epithets hurled at Congressmen of color during last year's run-up to passage of national health care legislation (with the Tea Party claiming that these distinguished men were lying about the ugly incident), from gun owners openly parading firearms outside buildings where President Obama was speaking to racist diatribes published on Websites of White supremacists and their militias, the hate directed against Blacks, against immigrants, and against the United States government, itself, is palpable.

To the extent that the Tea Party cannot meaningfully change the values of its membership, the movement has yet to demonstrate its fitness to assume national power, given that it has not yet summoned the courage to openly embrace its character.

Suffer here a brief post that begins with the juxtaposition of quotes from two men of different eras:

"You look like a f***ing pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n***ers, it will be your fault."

Mel Gibson
Oral statement to ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, 2010

"[Y]our persons, fortunes, wives, and daughters, shall be subject to the wanton and unbridled rage, rapine, and lust of Negroes, mulattos and others, the vilest and most abandoned of mankind."

Benjamin Franklin
Plain Truth, 1747

Readers interested in Mr. Franklin's race-bating about Negroes and claims about Jews, Swedes, Germans, and others of "swarthy" skin or other suspect features diminishing the Anglo-Saxon nature of the emerging American society can read Chapter 12 of the Vernon Johns Society's analysis of structural racism in America or go to the relevant referential material in Franklin of Philadelphia, by Edmond Wright (1986: Harvard University Press).

Readers interested in Mr. Gibson's race-bating, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and other distasteful leanings can find references in a July 1, 2010, radaronline.com article and may listen to the two-minute audio recording of his offending conversation with Ms. Grigorieva in a subsequent, July 11, 2010, article.

Notwithstanding the possibility that civilizations can evolve deepening understandings of rightful thought and action, the people of the present era should not be held to a standard of enlightenment any more refined than the people of the past, certainly not within the cabin of the broad and long-lived arc of Western Civilization. Cruelty, inhumanity, hate, and injustice swiftly emerged as undesirable and were understood as such well before the time of our Founding Fathers. Hate to advance personal will, Mel Gibson's choice, is no different in dimension than hate to promote political agenda, Benjamin Franklin's choice, although the scope of damage wrought by the latter can be staggering, especially to the extent that it allows for those of generations long afterward to believe that a place for intolerance exists within a society that poses otherwise to be kind, humane, good, and just.

The great and venerated are no less immune than the small and vile to the blackness of hate, be it for private injury or public consumption. Station in life and time of word and deed make no exception and, far more importantly, provide no excuse.

Rightly, loudly, and unrelentingly condemn and ostracize the hateful little men of our day—each in his own way, the Mel Gibsons, the Glenn Becks, the Rush Limbaughs, and their equally ugly kind—but at considerable peril ignore the venerated leaders who spoke and wrote with equal brutishness: the future will be no better if we seek unflinching inspiration from those who chose to lead by reprehensible words in the time when words were not merely expressive of sentiments, but formative of a nascent country.