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The Pentagong Show
United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Monday, September 30, 2013

The "T" for Terrorism Party.

Obamascare.


The US Christian right, the mirror image of its Islamic counterpart in Syria and many other Islamic countries, is further proving it is the greatest tool for driving infidels into the alms of Allah as it heads down the path of holding the economic system of the US, and consequently, the world, as hostage to their demands. This party, the core of which derives from congressional representatives who insist on their 'Christian' ideology, has readily endorsed a collection of atrocious armaments spawned in the USA, and used by the USA, that consists of:

Depleted Uranium
Phosphorous bombs
Biological Weapons
Napalm
Drone Warfare
Stealth technology
Predatory Weapons
Cyber Warfare

is now shrieking that it will destroy the credit worthiness of the Treasury Bond infrastructure on the edge of which the entire global economic system teeters if the President dares to offer to the citizens for whom they work nothing more than what they(the Congress) already have themselves: Healthcare Coverage. In fact, as the T party is currently demonstrating, they demand that the citizens of the US pay the Healthcare costs of members of Congress, although a great deal of them are in fact millionaires and every one of them makes far more than necessary to afford to pay for their own health insurance, yet, rather than allow that coverage to be extended to their fellow citizens, they will, not in secret, not as part of any 'conspiracy theory', but right out in the open, destroy the Creditworthiness of the country and topple the global economic system into the abyss over which it teetered but a few years back, saved only by throwing a TARP over the problems, which have since been papered over with government debt. Debt they have shown themselves determined to demonstrate to the world they have no willingness to pay. And this time, the abyss over which we dizzily totter is yawning wide beneath us not because of incompetence and untrammeled greed gone wild, but has instead been opened up deliberately and maliciously.

This is not governance, this is fanaticism. A fanaticism that doesn't cry for social justice, for economic equality, but a Christian retributive justice that demands the poor and unfortunate of the country be left to die in their own deserved penury. This is as pro-Islamic as the GW Bush administration giving the Taliban $45 million in April 2001, even as they shielded Al-Qaeda in the hills of Afghanistan.
 
This is nothing short of financial terrorism, using the same financial weapon of mass destruction that Bin Laden chose. His attack on 9/11 was designed, not simply to bring down the WTC, and make the Pentagon gone, but to wreak financial havoc and destroy the center of Capitalism: the exact same outcome that the T party so fervently desires.

You may agree with them that the US is too heavily indebted already, but as we look around the globe at the most prosperous countries in the world, they are actually already formed into a little union via IMF designation, called The OECD countries, consisting mostly of Europe, Japan and the United States, all of which, as is now known by pretty much everyone, are the most hopelessly indebted nations ... ever. And, while BofA has released a list of the 'unintended consequences' of a shutdown, that is a designation, like 'collateral damage', that is specious and deceitful. For, as in collateral damage, where you know civilians will be killed, but you launch a military attack anyway, making it planned, not collateral, damage, 'unintended' consequences, when they are known beforehand, can no longer be referred to as unintended, as they are quite clearly intentional. You know full well going in what will ensue consequent to your threatened action, you simply don't care (or secretly wish that to happen, and prepare, by buying credit default swaps, to enrich yourself on what will impoverish everyone else). What you can't do, however, is deny culpability for those consequences when they result directly from your actions.

Thus has the very nature of  US foreign policy now invaded the institutions that are held hostage to them. We as a country have adopted Madeleine Albright 's attitude that "What's the use of having all these weapons you're always talking about if we can't use them?" which in one sentence, from a sitting US Secretary of STATE, proved the USSR correct in their assessment of Reagan's SDI initiative, not as defensive at all, but, by cloaking the US behind a shield of invincibility, made previously unthinkable weapons, the ICBM in particular, usable, and therefore, offensive weapons. And what this has done to the psychology of the country is that it's corrupted us more than we know, and to such an extent that it makes us unwilling, and now it appears, unable, to negotiate on anything like equal terms with anyone, which includes,  apparently, even ourselves. We have become so besotted with having our own way or the highway, that we take an uncompromising stance on everything, as though the country has been transformed into a nation of comic book heroes who simply fight for truth, justice, and the American Way, now with the proviso that what that boils down to is My Way, and to hell with truth and justice.

As we continue to wage our War of Terror all around the globe, we have rallied around the cry of Democracy and Fukuyama's concept of "The end of History" wherein liberal democracy is hailed as the final form of governance. Yet here, in the citadel of said governance a small minority is holding the entire country, and really that means the whole world, hostage to their demands for the repeal of a law they've had more than five years to get repealed, and failed. But rather than admit defeat to their rabid constituency, they threaten destruction of the government they've sworn to uphold in their oath of office. An oath, as god-fearing Christians, they swore to deceitfully, having run on the platform that the government is evil. That a group of terrorists should be able to connive their way into the heart of power and pervert it this way may indeed prove Fukuyama correct. This may well  indeed be the end of history. Because this isn't a game, and to state we dangle over a precipice is no hyperbole. The very power of our country depends on its creditworthiness, and to toy with that yet again, in the span of just a couple of years, tells holders of US debt that the pillar on which they think it stands is made of sand, which can suffer liquefaction, not by an act of god, nor an accident of nature, but by deliberate malfeasance by the very government sworn to pay it. Somehow this seems to me to make that debt, a debt that already can't be sold unless the FED buys it up to the tune of $45 billion/month, somewhat less attractive.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Chemi-kill Weapons of Mass Construction.

The ICE-man's Comet.


As I look over many of the charts that depict the warming trends around the globe, including the dramatic thinning of the ice in the Arctic, and then read, in a description of the Bakken "oil play" (as the speculators like to refer to it as): entrepreneurs armed with breakthrough drilling technologies solved the geological puzzle of the Bakken's "tight rock," and in so doing unlocked billions of barrels of oil.

This Oil exploitation which, sans pipeline infrastructure, then flares natural gas into the atmosphere (giving the US the dubious position of being 2'nd only to Russia in the amount of energy it must "burn to burn"), and then burns coal and oil to transport it to distant east coast or southern refineries where it will be cracked to produce gasoline and myriad other byproducts, some of which will be made into the poly-molecular chains used to manufacture plastics. So, as we wring our hands as to what to do with all the plastic in the world, with some cities, such as San Francisco, coming up with 'solutions' of their own, such as banning plastic grocery bags, necessitating the manufacture and transportation of millions of paper bags that we burn tons more fuel to transport (Paper is HEAVY), and then 'recycle' by shipping to China, pouring yet more CO2 into the atmosphere, making even more of the raw material which we've come up with no other use for than to make even more plastic, we dig up more oil to make tons more of it. And more and more of that oil as it comes from places farther and farther than where it's needed and requires more and more energy to get to and extract, the amount of energy expended to get energy keeps increasing, in a kind of positive feedback loop that ends with creating more Fukushimas in order to provide the energy to dig up more oil, coal and Natural Gas.

And then we call the resulting weather phenomena that occur because of this frenetic activity "natural" disasters, when they are quite obviously nothing of the sort. Hurricane Sandy was no more a natural disaster than the Deepwater Horizons debacle was.

Now why I bring all this up is because, when I was considering the rate at which global climate change is accelerating, and then considered that the Kyoto protocols were first drafted in 1997, the graphs demonstrating much of the increase look more as though we decided to burn more fossil fuels and increase the rate at which the globe was heating up rather than the other way around. And, if you take a look at, or listen to the rhetoric of, Capitalism, that is exactly what you would expect to happen, especially as the rate of increase in growth of all the OECD economies indicated not an easing of fossil fuel use, but an acceleration of it. And what this in turn indicates is, as competitiveness increases, so does fossil fuel use, as competition drives resource use to the extreme end of the scale, gutting any efforts at conservation of resources and encouraging instead a War-like despoliation of the planet.

But just as Chalmers Johnson's trilogy of books warning about US military Keynesianism has been ignored completely, even as the US economy becomes more and more hollowed out until it remains nothing but an arms manufactory, replacing Basil Zaharoff as the world's Merchant of Death, Michael Klare's books are similarly ignored as he points out the Resource Wars that the Kyoto protocols, far from stifling, have, because of the refusal of the US and China, the two largest offenders of unmitigated fossil fuel combustion, and one could almost simply say THE largest, as they are embraced in a carbon-spewing orgy, contrarily, been used as though they were a starting gun for the race to dig up and burn the world's store of carbon at the fastest pace possible.

And to further inflame the Gutterdamerung we've built our Valhalla to emulate, as the economies around the globe thrashed and then crashed, not having the wherewithal to withstand the premium imposed upon them by $147/bbl oil, the reaction to that collapse has been to stoke the manufacturing engines of all the most intensive carbon-spewing economies on the globe to red-hot levels so much so that Germany, the world's Poster-boy for Wind-generated energy, is now in the process of constructing more coal-burning power plants to replace all those nasty nukes it shut down after Fukushima demonstrated the impossibility of storing spent fuel rods in any way that could be even remotely deemed 'safe'.

And aside from the fact that the industries being stoked were, in each and every one of those economies, not only export-oriented industries, but the export of the one machine most responsible for the anthropomorphic-induced warming of the entire planet in the first place: the darling of the internal combustion engine, the Automobile. Because although it's never talked about, and because we're so enamored of it, the fact that 95% of the oil used around the globe is to fuel said machine, is completely ignored. If this one product were to lose its attractiveness and become anathema, the entire problem of global warming, as induced by mankind's activity, would simply go away.

It's not a popular meme, but the automobile, the internal combustion engine (ICE) in general, by producing poison gasses that shorten lives and afflict children with respiratory ailments, is, in fact, a chemical weapon of mass destruction.  Cars, together with the industries and factories that build and fuel them, has, chemically, changed the very climate of the entire planet. In our heart, We know this. Mankind begins to understand. These Machines will claim all life. You know this. You have foreseen it. In the gathering dark, the will of the Machine grows strong. It works hard now driven by the hands of men. Men, who are so easily seduced by its power. The icesheet of Greenland has but to slide off its land, take the Arctic for its own and the world will fall. It is close now, so close one's blood runs cold. For Machines now have dominion over mankind, and by extension, all life on this Earth, even unto the ending of the world. Yet our response is to keep building more and more and more of them and have no intention of stopping. Ever.

Happy motoring.