Download and burn the entire Cleaves site -
including all attachments and pics - to Disc or Stick.
The burn will result in a browsable ready
resource you can access on or offline
anywhere anytime you wish!
We are closing contributions to the site; so either participate now or FOREVER hold your lost opportunity!
That’s right! The site will (very) soon close down as an OPEN publishing medium.
We were initially encouraged to OPEN the site to the world, which we did! But only the original core group continued to publish to the site – reposts were a matter of news gathering from other sites.
Five years we waited patiently for frustrated journos, ‘edited to death’ commentators, independents and other smothered voices to participate but hardly a murmur from outside Oz! So, in view of the unfair workload that has fallen on the shoulders of the few remaining diehards maintaining the site I regret to inform our avid readers that the site will soon cease to accept contributions. However, it will remain online and available for reference purposes.
We are pleased to learn that the experiment with distributing browesable CDs of the entire site has met with moderate success, approximately three thousand CDs from sources we monitor have been distributed on a ‘burn and distribute as many as you wish’ basis. Valuable HISTORICAL, strategic, tactical, ideological, and cultural information is conveniently preserved and continues to be disseminated thereby!
We are also considering posting the browseable ‘file’ and making it available for download; however, bandwidth and other restrictions prohibit that occurrence at this stage. No doubt the entire free world is straining to assist in that regard – we won’t hold our breath!
We do not subscribe to the ‘shock and awe’ methodology of demented American military leaders, though the current ‘Delta-Force’ leadership prefers assassinations over combat and diplomacy. The 'Phoenix' assassination Program failed in Vietnam and it will fail in Afghanistan -- in fact arbitrary murders by special forces serves to UNIFY resistance across the GLOBE!
A convenient list, for some Afghani factions, has been compiled for Stanley McChrystal and his amphetamine crazed indiscriminate killers – it’s a damn shame the assassination program will result in defeat for the Americans and their servile allies -- déjà vu Vietnam!
The Afghan resistance is already a formidable force, imagine unification! America fails to learn from history to its very great cost! So it may take a little time to ‘wind the site down’ from its current ‘frenetic activity’ -- the demands of a very good story are also difficult to resist!
Nevertheless, we take this opportunity to thank everyone that kindly donated their time and energy to the up-keep of the Cleaves site. In the process the free-form journalism characteristic of this site seems to have gained in popularity and has been adopted by many writers around the globe. Call it what you will but ‘new journalism’ it is not; emotive free-form, journalism existed long before our writers were let loose on the digital world. So to everyone concerned, our readers included, it was great, a total success! Ed.
Consider the stark REALITY of FAILED US policies based on insatiable GREED and UNNECESSARY violence and destruction. Now understand how the USA would have been better served obtaining its much needed resources via normal non-violent business practices, like China and Russia pursue as a matter of course -- two nations that have far greater energy and resource needs than America!
Invading, murdering, occupying and stealing the valuable resources of other nations is bound to incur a very costly retaliatory response from tradition owners, no rocket science required for that conclusion. History has taught us time and again that people in occupied nations always mount vigorous campaigns against invading foreigners; campaigns which ALWAYS end in invading forces withdrawing and returning to their homeland!
America’s antiquated, unimaginative, current strategies are doomed to fail for OBVIOUS reasons! [They are failing as I write!]
Today the USA is unravelling at speed and has nowhere to go with its current policies but DOWN! Surely, corporate robber barons, religious millennialists, Wall St. rogues and the political puppets in their employ are NOW transparent to ALL!
Why would an entire nation allow itself to be led to destruction and possible annihilation/obliteration by a tiny group of sick, witless, visionless geriatrics and avaricious pigs that have never seen or experienced the hard edge of life?
These trembling jellyfish and the psychopaths in their employ are no match for even a small group of skilled intellectuals/operators and/or a determined group of blue and whiter collar workers or the millions of mothers, fathers and grandparents that make up this great nation!
The tiny UNREPRESENTATIVE elite that currently rule this nation, serve only themselves -- via THEIR financial and military-technological complexes. However, their CIRCULAR strategy to make war machines for wars we neither need nor want must necessarily END in SELF-DESTRUCTION!
Their plan is nothing more than the inner need/longing of all sociopaths to end their inner suffering and anguish; however, those sick bastards have imposed their destructive psychopathology and violent course onto ALL of us!
The world currently faces many challenges – most created by those self-serving elitist fuck’s -- we can ill-afford constant wars at this critical time in our collective history. It is plain that the only REAL solutions must be arrived at co-operatively and peacefully if long-term viability/sustainability is to be achieved.
Plunging the entire world into 'PNAC’ protracted (manufactured) wars is INSANE and reflects the lunacy of its American criminal planners! It is time to remove these sick fuck’s from all positions of responsibility and hold them to account – WE HAVE SEEN THEIR ‘SOLUTIONS’ OF DEATH, CHAOS AND RUINATION and we emphatically reject them!
The following repost from ‘The American Conservative,’ is newsworthy for a number of reasons not least its secondary discourse. It also serves to highlight the fact that not all conservatives are incapable of creative thought; enjoy!
Perpetual War for Perpetual War
By Jeff Huber
U.S. Army Col. Timothy R. Reese says it’s time for the U.S. to “declare victory” in Iraq and “go home.” It was time to declare victory and go home in January 2007, when the Bush administration decided to ignore the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and charged off on its cockamamie “surge” strategy.
The original stated objective of the surge was political reconciliation in Iraq. By September 2007, when it was clear that the political objective was not in sight, Gen. David Petraeus pulled a bait-and-switch and announced that the military objectives of the surge were being met. Petraeus hagiographer Thomas E. Ricks slipped Freudian in February 2009 when he confessed that Petraeus’s goal was never to end the Iraq conflict but to trick Congress and the American public into extending it indefinitely by achieving short-term results though bribing Iraq’s militias.
According to Colonel Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, the surge’s real objectives still haven’t been met and never will be. In a recent memorandum, Reese asserts that “the ineffectiveness and corruption” of Iraq’s government ministries is “the stuff of legend.” The government is “failing to take rational steps to improve its electrical infrastructure and to improve their oil exploration, production and exports.” There is “no progress towards resolving the Kirkuk situation,” transition the Sons of Iraq into the Iraqi Security Forces “is not happening” and “the Kurdish situation continues to fester.” Violent political intimidation is “rampant.” Iraq’s security forces are a disaster. The officer corps is corrupt. Enlisted men are neglected and mistreated. Cronyism and nepotism are rampant. Laziness, lack of initiative, and absence of basic military discipline are endemic. Iraq’s military leadership is incapable of leading; it can’t plan ahead, it can’t stand up to the Shiite political parties, it can’t stick to its agreements.
The U.S. military in Iraq has accomplished “all that can be expected,” Reese says.
Gen. Ray Odierno’s propaganda officer, Lt. Col. Josslyn Aberlem, told the New York Times that Reese’s memo “does not reflect the official stance of the U.S. military.” The memo “Reflects one person’s personal view at the time we were first implementing the Security Agreement post-30 June,” Abaelem said. “Since that time many of the initial issues have been resolved and our partnerships with Iraqi Security Forces and [government of Iraq] partners now are even stronger than before 30 June.”
Right. We shaved our monkey in Iraq for six years and change, but since June 30 everything’s gone hunky dory.
Oddly enough, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on July 29 that the relatively low levels of violence in Iraq might allow commanders to “moderately accelerate” troops reductions. He added, though, that Odierno would have to recommend speeding up the withdrawal before any decision is made. That pretty much tells you how things work in the Department of Defense. Gates isn’t in charge of his four-stars; they’re in charge of him.
Odie is on record as wanting to keep 35,000 U.S. troops in Iraq through 2015, so, predictably enough, on August 4 he rejected the idea of an accelerated pullout, saying that the surge hasn’t reached its goals yet and we need to “stay the course.” (Yes, he really used that moronic Bush-era mantra.) The Desert Ox doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the Status of Forces Agreement that requires all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki doesn’t appear to be overly committed to the agreement either. In a July 23 appearance at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, Maliki opened the door for indefinite U.S. presence in his country, saying, “If Iraqi forces need more training and support, we will reexamine the agreement at that time, based on our own national needs.”
Even Reese isn’t all that committed about U.S. forces leaving Iraq. In his memo, he says that during the withdrawal period the U.S. and Iraqi governments “should develop a new strategic framework agreement that would include some lasting military presence at 1-3 large training bases, airbases, or key headquarters locations.”
Lasting military presence. That’s been the objective of the neoconservatives all along. In their September 2009 manifesto Rebuilding America’s DefensesCheney’s pals at the infamous Project for the New American Century argued, “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” The neocons’ Pax Americana vision has translated into the Pentagon’s “long war,” a strategy that does not seek to win wars but rather to create a sequel to the Cold War in which Islamofacism substitutes for communism and puny Iran, whose defense budget is less than one percent of ours, replaces the Soviet juggernaut.
That might be justified if military applications overseas were making us safer from terrorism, but they are not. In 2008 the highly respected national security analysts at Rand Corporation released a report titled How Terrorist Groups End. The study involved a comprehensive analysis of terror organizations that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006. 83 percent of the groups ended as a result of policing and political action. Military force accounted for a mere 7 percent of success against terrorists. Rand analysts recommend that the best course of counterterrorism actions should involve “a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.” We’re almost certainly, as Donald Rumsfeld suspected in 2004, making multiple new terrorists for every one we capture or kill. We have discovered a new style of warfare: reverse attrition. The more enemy we attrite the more enemy we have.
All the talk about withdrawing from Iraq is an Orwellian card trick. Reese says our “lasting military presence” should not “include the presence of any combat forces save those for force protection needs or the occasional exercise.” Why would we need to leave noncombat forces behind? So they can cook and clean for the combat forces that provide them force protection? The exercises we might do with the Iraqis would involve practicing for the invasions of Iran and Syria, which is the real reason the warmongery wants to keep an enduring base of operations in Iraq. There’s no need to conduct defensive exercises. None of Iraq’s neighbors is capable of invading and occupying it or crazy enough to try.
President Obama’s promise to remove all U.S combat troops from Iraq by August 2010 was also a see-through canard. As Gareth Porter revealed in March, the “advisory and assistance brigades” that will remain after that date will in fact be combat brigades augmented by a handful of advisers and assistants. The Cold War justified defense spending for a half-century. Now, the Pentagon is trying to validate its existence with another long war in the Middle East.
Sun Tzu famously said, “No nation ever profited from a long war.” The 27- year Peloponnesian War ended Athens’ reign as a superpower. The Thirty Years’ War Balkanized the Holy Roman Empire, dividing German power among multiple smaller states. The 46-year Cold War forced the Soviet Union to change its name back to Russia.
Don’t expect us to withdraw from Iraq or the Bananastans any time soon. The American warmongery, a confluence of Big War, Big Energy, Big Jesus, Big Israel, Big Brainwash, and Big Brother, is trying to entangle us in a state of constant armed conflict that will carry on into the next American century. There’s no need for anyone to challenge our hegemony; all they have to do is sit back and watch us collapse under the weight of our own stupidity.
15 Horrifying Reasons to Never Let Anyone You Love Near a McDonald's
The Golden Arches: the ultimate American icon. Super Size Me taught us that fast food culture brings obesity, heart disease, hypertension and a whole slew of other problems. How bad do you really want that Big Mac? Here are 15 reasons you’ll never let anyone you love get near those Golden Arches.
1. Real food is perishable. With time, it begins to decay. It’s a natural process, it just happens. Beef will rot, bread will mold. But what about a McDonald’s burger? Karen Hanrahan saved a McDonald’s burger from 1996 and, oddly enough, it looks just as “appetizing” and “fresh” as a burger you might buy today. Is this real food?
2. You would have to walk 7 hours straight to burn off a Super Sized Coke, fries and Big Mac. Even indulging in fast food as an occasional treat is a recipe for weight gain…unless you’re planning to hit each treadmill in the treadmill bay afterwards.
3. Containing less fat, salt and sugar, your pet’s food may be healthier than what they serve at McDonald’s.
4. In 2007, the employees of an Orlando-area McDonald’s were caught on camera pouring milk into the milkshake machine out of a bucket labeled “Soiled Towels Only.” That particular restaurant had already been cited for 12 different sanitary violations. Though McDonald’s proudly stands by its safety standards, and not every restaurant has such notorious incidents, the setting of a fast food restaurant staffed with low-paid employees at a high turnover rate arguably encourages bending the rules. (McDonald’s isn’t alone in this, of course – Burger King is actually ranked as the dirtiest of all the fast food chains.)
5. McDonald’s supports the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Much of the soy-based animal feed used to fatten fast-food chickens is grown in the Amazon. Are those chicken nuggets really worth acres of irreplaceable trees? (Especially considering how important carbon sinks like the rainforest are to halt global warming!) Fast food supports a completely unsustainable system of agriculture. It’s cruel to animals, unhealthy for humans, and bad for the planet.
6. Even Prince Charles, while touring a diabetes center in the United Arab Emirates, commented that banning McDonald’s is key to health and nutrition. Don’t let the salads and chicken breasts fool you. The “chicken” at McDonald’s, by the way, comes with a whole lot more than chicken.
7. As if feeding children high-fat, high-sodium, low-nutrition “food” weren’t bad enough, some Happy Meals in 2006 contained toy Hummers. It’s as if McDonald’s was encouraging a whole generation of kids not only to guzzle food, but to guzzle gas as well. Would you like a few barrels of petroleum with that?
8. The processed fat in McDonald’s food (and other fast food) promotes endothelial dysfunction for up to 5 hours after eating the meal. Endothelial tissue is what lines the inside of blood vessels.
9. For those who enjoy sex, take note: erectile dysfunction is connected to endothelial dysfunction. Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me commented that his normally healthy sexual function deteriorated in just one month when he ate only food from McDonald’s. Even his girlfriend commented on camera that “he’s having a hard time, you know, getting it up.”
10. How many cows does it take to keep the world loaded with Big Macs? I had to do a some research and a little math, but according to a brief video inside one of McDonald’s 6 meat processing plants, about 500,000 pounds of beef is processed per day, per plant. If an average beef cow weighs 1,150 pounds, that means 2609 cows a day are turned into burgers. That’s 952,285 cows per year. And that’s just in the United States. Eating a hamburger may not be worse than driving a Hummer, but it’s bad. One hamburger patty does not necessarily come from one cow. Think about that. You’re eating bits of hundreds of cows.
11. Maybe you just pop in for an inexpensive latte. Watch out for the caramel syrup(Sugar, water, fructose, natural (plant source) and artificial flavor, salt, caramel color (with sulfites), potassium sorbate (preservative), citric acid, malic acid) or the chocolate drizzle(Corn syrup, water, hydrogenated coconut oil, high fructose corn syrup, glycerin, nonfat milk, cocoa, cocoa (processed with alkali), food starch-modified, disodium phosphate, potassium sorbate (preservative), xanthan gum, artificial flavor (vanillin), salt, soy lecithin). Please don’t put that stuff into your body. Eat healthy cheap food instead – you can be well and still save cash.
12. Are you a vegetarian with a French fry craving? You better skip McDonald’s because their fries actually contain milk (and wheat) and though they’re fried in vegetable oil, the oil is flavored with beef extract. (McDonald’s famously misled customers for years.)
13. Do you want high blood pressure? Hit the drive-through. Eating a McDonald’s chicken sandwich (any of “˜em, take your pick) will give you about 2/3 of the recommended daily amount of sodium. And if you actually do have high blood pressure, that’s way more than you really need.
14. Finally unveiled: the secret of the Big Mac’s 'secret sauce.'
Yum. Cheap oil and cheap syrup. Many people depend upon cheap food such as the sort offered at McDonald’s, whether due to the economic conditions we currently face or low incomes. So shouldn’t we be examining regulations that subsidize corn syrup but consider fruits and vegetables – the building blocks of a healthy body and green planet – to be “speciality” crops? Shouldn’t we be promoting urban gardening, community gardens and spreading information about low-cost farmers’ markets and CSAs? And focusing on the abundant choices of cheap food that are tasty and green?
15. Still not convinced? Maybe this 1970s trip through McDonaldland will give you enough nightmares to keep your loved ones away forever.
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