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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Call a Code Blue: The Reds Care.


Marilyn Monroe doctrine: "Talk softly but carry a lipstick."


I thought of Velikovsky's, "World's in Collision", the other night.

I was watching the DNC's extravaganza of a convention. And with The Red Party's Donald's promise, shallow as it is, that,  "I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens", coupled with the Blue Democratic Party's nomination of everybody's favorite War-monger, Hillary Clinton, the two party's have apparently swapped stances.

Neither of our three female Secretaries of State have walked softly. Preferring the pleasure of swinging a big stick to walking softly, the latter being rather difficult in heels, given their clickety-clackety nature.

This is a perfect demonstration of the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine, the thesis that women, like men of small size who are therefore more aggressively in your face, purportedly to compensate for their diminutive stature and the resultant dismissive consideration given to their concerns, the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine is defined as the female propensity to overcompensate in a like manner for their lack of male bravado.

Thus does the equation Hawkish = Manly come into play in their dealings with foreign affairs, resulting in the appearance that instead of a Secretary of  State and a Secretary of  War Defense, we had instead two Secretaries of War Defense.

But despite the fact that it might be easier to see the ridiculousness of it when your opponent is more familiar with batting an eyelash than a baseball, the US and its much-vaunted military is in much the same position. It postures more and more unconvincingly behind a wall of nukes it can never use. A female posturing in the same way as a male would is very similar to how we wield our nuclear arsenal as an instrument of Terror, which none other than Condoleeza Rice did, only, rather than threatening foreign states with it, she aimed it directly at the head of the American public by ominously asking: "We wouldn't want that smoking gun to come in the shape of a mushroom cloud, now would we?" She thereby used the prospect of a nuclear nightmare to hold the US citizenry hostage to her monomaniacal intent to attack Iraq. An obsession spelled out in the PNAC, to which she was a signatory and which strongly urged an invasion of an already prostrate (from a decade of sanctions that included US-enforced No-Fly zones) Iraq. Similarly, with the death of half a million children from sanctions, a figure with which the then-Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, found no reason to quibble, while she opined that yes, yes she believed the sanctions were worth it. On the subject of what exactly they accomplished that made them worth it, however, the good Secretary was less forthcoming.

Now we're faced with the prospect of having a President who, while holding the position of Secretary of State watched as Syria became unhinged, Egypt turned into a military dictatorship, and  cheered Libya's descension into chaos, its leader ignominiously murdered by the howling dogs of War. Yet her only comment from her august position of power was, "We came, we saw, he died", while she laughed as though the murder of foreign heads of state was oh so much fun. Perhaps it is simply my lack of imagination, but I can't think of one male Democrat that would have the sangfroid to make such a heartless comment.

Don't get me wrong. It isn't that she's female that I protest.  It's the childish illusion proffered that by electing a female leader we will become a kinder gentler nation. But it's not females that die in vast numbers during War, it is always the men. The women suffer more, but that's because - oh yeah - they're alive! Unlike The Don, Hillary not only wants the job, she's qualified and she's worked hard for it, and there's something to be said for a candidate that wants to actually run the government, as opposed to all these Republican pseudo-reformers with their evangelical zeal to sweep into office and fix it.

So perhaps the most frightening aspect of a Hillary victory, over and above having to look forward to more coverage of daughter Chelsea (a female of repellent aspect remotely attached to miseducation), is the precedent she sets. After all, Senator, presidential candidacy, Secretary of State, candidacy again, then  Presidency, is a sequence currently potentially shared by only one other Democrat - shudder- John Kerry!




















Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Black Dogs of the AMG (American Military Government).

                           
"What's the point of having such an overly militarized police force if we can't use it?"

Ian McEwan describes two dogs that were not only vicious, but trained by the SS to be that way, and how one day, as purportedly witnessed by two drunks, and that was denied by the female owner of the hostelry at which two English ladies were staying, had been trained to have sexual congress with women diabolically restrained so as to be made available for their canine depredations.

Theses black dogs, a metaphor/euphemism for dark depressions supposedly coined by Churchill who suffered from them are, in McEwan's novel of the same name, said to be likened to one dog as being a personal depression, whereas two dogs represent a kind of cultural depression, “civilization’s worst moods”, and symbolizes the deep hatred branded in to the human heart that usually lies dormant, but that can be, by an act of senseless violence or planned torture, arise and consume not only the object of its rage but the host as well:

"That day I came face-to-face with evil - these animals were the creatures of debased imaginations, of perverted spirits no amount of social theory could account for. This evil lives in us all ... a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within themselves. Then it sinks back and waits. It is something in our hearts. If human nature/consciousness/the spirit/soul does not develop and expand, the sum of our misery will never diminish. This change is possible. It is within our power. We need to find the answer within ourselves if we are ever to be at peace with each other. Not that it will ever happen, but it is our only chance."

Of survival, one assumes.

The unanswerable rebuttal to this is, "Try having an inner life on an empty stomach, or without clean water, or while sharing a single room with seven other people."

Analogous perhaps to the shamelessly wasteful way we use energy, no matter how derived, and how we share existence, on the only sphere capable of sustaining life, in an unsustainable manner while our fellow living, breathing creatures, our Earthly relatives, the only kind we have, or will ever have, we regularly abuse and disabuse - even to the level of complete eradication.

And as the DNC (Democratic National Convention) gets under way, it is obvious that it is not The Donald and his cohort of deranged Nationalists bearing their arms and brandishing their childish, churlish demand he Make America, by which we're meant to presume he means the United States thereof, Great again, there was little, if any, mention of, even from the recalcitrant Ted Cruz Missile, any Revolution.

Yet here are the youth, protesting outside the DNC, who are members of the Democratic party (you know democratic, as in the majority, of which they are not a part, rules), calling for a Revolution, even as the target of their rancor and intransigence is the very person charged with fomenting revolutions in the Middle East, specifically Syria, which  is now, like Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen, ungovernable and wracked by daily violence precisely because of  Revolution. And this is what the protesters want for the US?

As the cavalcade of horrors known as the Republican debates rolled on, it became increasingly evident from the lack of the same on the Democratic side, that the nominee was already decided, despite the sideshow Bernie provided, and that it was for some unknown reason previously decreed that that nominee would be the person who for decades has been known to be the most divisive candidate the Democratic party has ever put forward.

Many of those who are calling for said revolution were either not, or only barely, alive during Mrs. Clinton's first residency in the White House as first Lady, so are perhaps unaware of the rabid response of the Republican Party to the election of her husband, and the subsequent escalation of that anger to a white hot fury when the then First Lady decided that Universal Healthcare was something the US should and could provide for its citizens as a kind of sop thrown them to assuage them for the damage done to their livelihoods by the combination of Neo-con War-mongering and Neo-Liberal globalization that was funneling the profits of a great industrial nation to bureaucrats, absentee CEO's, and a financial "industry" that was intent on privatizing every public asset our Great Society had amassed.

So they can be forgiven their altruistic demands that their voices be heard. For, like the supporters of Donald Trump, to whom he gave absurd assurances via his, "I am Your voice" nonsense, they feel abandoned, their voices muted, by their country, their Party, and their government. Hence, both constituencies have expressed their preference for someone outside of the Party structure. Bernie, like Trump, is a member of the party that nominated him only by necessity, there being no other avenue in the land of the free to be nominated other than by membership in one of the only two permissible National Parties ... Let freedom Wring out ... every chance that the AMG (American Military Government) that both parties are intractably invested in, from ever being challenged ... or even mentioned ... even by Bernie; as though the US is ruled by its civilian facade rather than by its military Rulers who coyly hide behind them like revelers at a masked ball. They peer through their flimsy disguise with a cynical smile on their lips, because they know that we know that they know that we know that their cardboard effigies are so tattered and crumpled that the bleary eyes of a bloated War Party no longer feel the necessity of even a drop or two of Visine to disguise their jaundiced plans for continued misrule of an electorate that chooses to continue to pretend they don't know it is the Joint Chief of Staffs, far more than any elected representatives, who decide what is good for the country.

It is this mask The Donald lets slip. Like Dubya before him, whose "I'm here for the haves and the have-mores" speech let it be known that he no longer felt the need to even pretend he represented anyone other than the rich and well-positioned within society, Trump likewise feels that the time for pretense is over, and we might as well face the fact that the AMG that's been in place since WW2 is now in its zenith, and further obfuscation of that fact is no longer productive. Is in fact, counter-productive. Because whereas the US speaks of Democracy, one need merely look at the list of its allies that are Militarily ruled to see who really runs things in Washington. Every single one of the regime change victims of the US military over the last generations have all been thinly disguised military dictatorships, until the disguise merely slips away, as it its doing today in Turkey, the country whose president most nearly reflects the image of dictatorial rule proclaimed as now necessary in the US by The Donald.

Hillary insists we keep the farce going. I tend to agree with her. But I know that cynicism such as this is corrosive. With nothing to stop the continued militarization of not only the world's governments but of the world's economies, there is nothing left to stop the inevitable crack-up that is baked into the yellowcake when every country is encouraged, by the "Sole Superpower" that brags it has brought about the very "End of History" as though that were a good thing, to ask themselves the same question Madeleine Albright, who believes there's a "special place in hell" for you if you don't vote for Hellary, posed to an earlier Clinton administration (whose "Commander-in-Chief" was publicly humiliated, his orders flagrantly flaunted when the Pentagon made it clear, when told to stop discriminating against its gay personnel, just who would decide military issues):

"What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

That signals the end of diplomacy. The end of Democratic rule. The end of civil discourse.

I suspect we're all dead.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Very Bad Things.


The die is cast and the cast will die.

In the  under-rated movie, Very Bad Things, there are, as illustrated in the above picture from the picture, many analogies drawn to quite weighty subjects, and I feel that they are not simply figments of my imagination. However, having said that, I must admit that the one drawn by the scene from which this still is taken suggested a very specific current incident that couldn't've been intended by the movie's creators.

What is going on in this snapshot is that behind the door they're blocking is a black security guard who Christian Slater has stabbed in the neck repeatedly with a corkscrew. He is going through his death agony and his piteous pleas for help as he bangs on the door and thrashes about inside (wherein lies, in mute testimony to the fate awaiting him, the dead body of a hooker killed accidentally by Jeremy Piven) is what is causing the grimaces of remorse and horror on the faces of our cast.

Having already decided to forgo the formalities of calling the police after Piven has snuffed the life out of the naked prostitute, deciding amongst themselves to instead bury the dead body that JP has impaled on a hook while screwing her in the bathroom, the group was trying to explain to hotel security why there was a dead body in the bathroom, the door of which they had inadvertently left open in their hurry to answer Security's increasingly insistent knocking on their hotel room door, when CS, impatient with his co-conspirators' ineptitude, pushes them aside and brutally attacks the hotel employee with the aforementioned corkscrew.

To get the full impact of the scene, the video should be watched, but what it contained for me was a cinematic version of the countries of NATO, as represented by the grimacing cast, as they hold back the flood of refugees from the hemorrhaging MENA countries, while the cries of the victims of their bombing sorties and the release of a coiled Arab spring, for which they share responsibility, reaches their ears. They recoil in horror at what they have wrought, but like the cast in Very Bad Things, once they have turned down the path of mayhem, they have no idea how to change it's direction without bringing opprobrium down on their own heads, even as the cries for help grow more desperate, the insistent banging on the doors of Europe, more thunderous.

The leading Christian among them, Mr. Slater, is the one who first decides they can forgo the Law by surreptitiously burying the body in the desert (Who'll know? Why ruin our lives? She's already dead anyway. All we have here is a one hundred pound problem we need to dispose of), and then, pushing aside their mamby-pamby concerns, plows ahead to eliminate the one obstacle to their plans, the security guard whose murder, from his perspective, was made necessary by the idiots he's been thrown in with who left the bathroom door wide open as they ushered a witness into their little chamber of horrors. His quick action and dismissal of their misgivings as he pushed them aside said, "Deal with the realities now, wrestle with how to reconcile your actions with the fact that you're Christians later" (ie, The Republican nostrum that it's better to ask for forgiveness later than permission now).

Watching the spectacle of the GOP convention this week brings that all back to mind, as they retain no memory of their fellow Republicans' crimes, assume no responsibility for the state in which we find the world today. Everything is Obama's fault. The enemy of the people is somehow Hellary Clinton. And let's face it, they all but scream, "She's a WOman, fer crissakes. A FEmale Commander-in-Chief? I don't think so".

And this brings up the other subplot in Very Bad Things. You see, the relatively recent movie, The Hangover, is a more naive, less politically suggestive, less dark, redo of Very Bad Things, although I'm sure the producers of it would deny that. But the plot is the same. The men, getting away from their wives, go off to Vegas for a boys' weekend, which in Very Bad Things is a stag party, the buddies' last fling together before one of the guy's gets married. A fling that goes, you might say, horribly wrong.

When they try to return to their normal lives after burying the hooker and the security guard in the sands outside of Vegas somewhere, what went on in Vegas most emphatically does not stay in Vegas. As the groom visibly sweats beads of anguish, soon-to-be-married Cameron Diaz muses about what color the bridesmaids' dresses should be and whether they ordered enough folding chairs for the number of guests, leaving one with the distinct impression that this is a purposely drawn parallel between the horrors experienced by returning vets and the trivial pursuits of the citizenry their sacrifice is meant to enable. How can you reconcile the fact that just a month ago you watched a twelve year old's life oozing out of him from a bullet wound you inflicted, as he was about to shoot into a Hummer full of your compatriots, with the banalities agonized over by your fellow Americans who don't want to hear about the Bush wars or the drone killings when there's money to be made, there's a sale at Macy's, and ESPN is carrying the game live?

In the movie though, the analogy is reduced to the simpler, more familiar male/female antagonism, but the fact that the schism is between normality and bloody horror makes the war analogy unmistakable. But as we draw the parallel not just between civvies and vets, but also between male and female and the relative weightiness of their problems, the director lets us draw our own conclusions at the time, but he's not done with us yet, he's just planted the seed.

I say this because by the end of the movie, none of the males from the Vegas trip have been left unscathed. Most are dead, two are permanently disabled, while the two boys from one of their failed marriages have been bequeathed to she of the trivial pursuits; yes, the now-married Cameron Diaz.

So while the men who wreaked havoc do not exactly get away with their crimes, the takeaway, for me, was that it is the woman who gets stuck with the repercussions of their rampages. If that is not an analogy of War, I don't know what is. Yet at the end of the movie, as Cameron stumbles out of the backyard in a stupor of overwhelming despair, the camera pans on the scene from which she's fleeing where the two boys, one of whom has been permanently disabled in a car accident, are fighting, while her husband drags his torso across the grass, because now he's without legs from injuries sustained during a head-on collision with another car while riding shotgun as his buddy drove them back from burying Christian Slater, his buddy whose in the wheelchair over there that he has to operate - Hawking's-style - by blowing into a straw, it's apparent from the scene what precipitated Cameron's flight: that they haven't the slightest awareness that it was their own actions and their own decisions that led them into the nightmarish cul-de-sac in which they squirm around in their agony of existence, like a nest of vipers with no other purpose in  life than to torture each other.

As one Republican speaker after the other started their fear-mongering speech, painting the same picture of a maddened Islam readying itself, because of Obama's fecklessness, for repeated assaults on the US and the world, there is also apparently no memory, let alone mention, of the fact that  the CIA, blinded by its ambition to bleed the Soviet Union's economy until it swooned, wan and anemic, to its knees, funded the most virulent form of the Muslim religion because that was precisely the sect they could most easily manipulate to the glorious task of dying to destroy godless Communism in the name of Allah, since American Christian fundamentalism had failed to deliver American youth to do it, as Vietnam so drastically demonstrated. Unmentioned is that it was the Republican administration of GW Bush (Did you hear his name mentioned in the debates even once?) that declared an unwinnable War on Terror, a stance that doesn't - can't - destroy Terrorism, because it enables it; ennobles it even, by raising its perpetrators to the level of Warriors.

Because of the VERY Bad Things that the Bush administration did, not only to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the entire Mideast, but to the entire global economy, such that it is a miracle it is even running, given the level of pillaging it endured under the auspices of the Bush/Cheney junta. And yes, junta is the right term. As few people are aware, the US Constitution specifically forbids the President and Vice President from harking from the same state. Cheney however, lived in Texas, and merely changed his address to Wyoming after someone pointed out this oversight to him. But the Party that now mourns the death of its "Original Intentions of the founding fathers" hero, Scalia, can't pretend that merely changing an address, or even moving to said address, is in keeping with the Original Intentions of those same founding fathers they pretend to revere so much. It is the action of a scoundrel, a palace intriguer that wishes to pretend he is abiding by the law when in actuality, considers himself above the spirit of the law, otherwise known as the Original Intention of that lawwhich his legerdemain, instead of covering up his cynical plot, lays bare. The decisions the President and Vice president would make during the Bush administration were favorable to the state of Texas, specifically the actions, or inaction, of FERC while Enron, run by Bush family friend and campaign contributor, Kenneth Lay, was, quite volubly, raping the State of California, thereby demonstrating both  that the founding fathers' original fears were justified and that the word junta is appropriate.

But the GOP  has no truck with these realities, instead blaming Obama, who was thrown into this cul-de-sac created by the war-mongering Neo-Con hawks, all still profiting nicely from the convulsions they've set into motion, leaving Obama to thrash about valiantly in an effort to keep our heads above water in this stagnant economy that was not of his making. Which is not to excuse Obama from his failings, but to expose the Republicans' two-faced, serpent-tongued, bare-faced lies. All told to sweep under the rug the Horribly Bad Things they did in eight short years. And yet Newt Gingrich can stand in front of the entire country and, without a trace of irony, say, "Keeping America safe is the first responsibility of the American president". And it was in that NUMBER ONE duty that GW Bush and the Dick Cheney failed in the most spectacular of ways. Yet the Newt has not the least bit of sense of that fact. That is why the Republicans are so visibly disappointed that no foreign attack by ISIS has occurred during the Obama administration because that means it'll be during a Republican one ... Again.

 And that's their whole offer.

 To make America grate again.

By doing Even Worse Things.








Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Permission Granted:


May I?



It was in the summer of 1976, a short six months since I'd moved to San Francisco, that raucous capital of exhausted hippydom, when I experienced a strange event whose occurrence offers an analogy of much of what's transpiring today, I think.

We were walking along Haight street when we saw a mural we'd not seen there before painted on the wall of a building whose windowless exterior was begging for it:

Oh, Look, a new eyesore, Scott sneered. We howled, as the painter of the monstrosity before us was revered in the neighborhood as a resident saint.

What'd he paint it with ... sponges?, Stephen asked ... We roared anew.

Well, actually, Harold intoned, That's exactly what he DOES use, speaking in that special manner he had, his English accent and superiority in years lending him a position of absolute authority and clarity in comparison to our habitual herbally intoxicated waywardness, so we listened as he went on to explain how he had seen the artist expound in an interview. Harold went on to depict him as a pretentious artist wannabe, substituting rhetoric for talent, painting a picture of him as being more of a huckster than a painter.

Tim, the main focus of our story, was a blond who hearkened from the vicinity of a lovely city to the North of San Franciscan, Santa Rosa, who was following the conversation in a sort of rapture of mental synapses going off in his head like sparklers, dazzling him mentally the way sparklers do visually when they're held too closely, but also confusing you, as was the effect on Tim at being in the company of such a competitively quick-witted group, since, typical of a surprising  number of Californians, despite the existence of Hollywood in their midst, he was not used to the rapid fire wit of East Coast, urban, gay repartee, resulting in this particular neo-San Franciscan becoming inflamed with an idea on how to make a triumphant impression on them in a spectacular way, and who just happened to live in the building right next to the location of the mural. That's what enabled him, in the deep of the ensuing night, to make furtive raids upon said mural with a roller loaded with white paint, not totally eliminating, but badly defacing, not only the mural, a moral outrage in itself, but, something in his hippy-like simpleness he never even considered, the private property of the building's owner.

The next day the Haight was in an uproar about the desecration. They were practically carrying pitchforks through the streets in their search for the culprit, vowing to not only beat the crap out of him, but to have him thrown into jail in the bargain.

But since the Timmer was up so late, the next day he didn't manage to drag himself into Harold's studio until after the initial hubbub, which he had therefore totally missed, had died down.

So he was completely unabashed as he related how he had secreted a pan of paint in the stairwell of his apartment building while he made mad sorties out onto the sidewalk to take determined swipes at the mural with his paint roller, being careful, lucky for him, not to spill a single drop that would've, shades of Hansel and Gretel, led back to the source of the outrage he was perpetrating.

As he was relating to us his tale of derring-do, however, he was becoming increasingly uneasy as the guffaws of incredulity and congratulatory howls he'd been expecting were not forthcoming. Instead his little tattle tale was met by looks of opprobrium and scowls of disbelief, as well as warnings that he had better be sure not to advertise his little escapade outside of our company or else he just may well be lynched, such was the level of anger his act of vandalism had aroused.

A shadow flit across his face as he quickly realized the power over him his confession had given to anyone in our group who should decide that it would be appropriate to let it be known just who had been the doer of the dreadful deed. Paranoia jolts like an electric shock. It zaps the subject, but they go on thinking that was the end of that; but beneath the surface something fundamental has changed. Trust has been compromised. And without trust, friendship becomes impossible unless trust can be restored.

That is how group behavior, often times raucous and unsavory, can be translated by someone anxious to prove he's worthy to be, not simply included in the group, but invited into the cadre of its elites, by doing something beyond the beyonds. Something that, when that group is a racist band of cowardly lynchers or a post-deployment group of vets ragging on the uselessness of civilians, can turn ugly when one of these insider wanna-be's conflates rhetoric with a call to action for one of its members to do something the group, in the mind of the would-be perpetrator, secretly wants done, but lacks the determination to actually carry out.

Both the Timothy McViegh and the more recent Black Lies Splatter incidents reek heavily of this kind of mistaken idea that, like Timmer from decades ago, inspire an action its perpetrator may never have considered before, but that now seems sanctioned by those who they  hold in esteem, and therefore, despite its illegality and immorality, encourages them to do it regardless (Oliver North is another one who comes to mind). The sanction of the group, often as not a religious group, such as in Brokeback Mountain's murder of a homosexual by a posse of church-going men eager to prove their Machismo to other men, something always approved of in sermons and backrooms by religious zealots. overrides their desire of inclusion in the larger group called society, (which Neo-con dogma insists doesn't exist, so neither do its rules nor norms of behavior), with whom they've become discouraged of ever being held in esteem by anyway.

And in a country and a world that has been transformed such that nothing matters but how much money you have, how flashy a car you drive and how nattily you dress, while simultaneously depriving you of any hope of attaining any of those things without either plunging yourself into intractable debt in order to receive the entry ticket into the workplace represented by a diploma or outright criminality, the instances of such attempts to be hailed as a hero, or a martyr, or a foot-soldier for Christ, will naturally increase. Even as we publicly scratch our heads in wonder as to how such atrocities can happen. And although other factors also come into play whenever making such a life-and-death decision, it is often the need for inclusion in a country that has no place for you, despite the fact that, as far as you know, it is Your country too, lends the aura of permission to their actions. At least in their own minds.

But in this rabidly, at least by their rhetoric, "Christian" country, there is no room for compassion. Empathy is spit on as being a trait of the weak,  dealing from a position of Power is seen as America's right. And, America being the sole Superpower, the rest of the world has now been taught by us that that's all that matters: Power.

Morality. The rule of Law. Justice. All these have been trashed by the actions of the Superpower to be the province of the weak-willed and womanish. What first Reagan, then Bush and now Trump, to an escalating degree have rallied their constituents to feel is a sense of America as a land that is exceptional, making laws other must bow to but that we can safely ignore, as we transcend such arbitrary notions as an International Criminal Court, a United Nations, or any action on Climate Change that would even minutely affect the sacrosanct American Way of Life. You know, the one that masturbates while screaming  Guns, Guns, Guns!  Drive, Drive, Drive! Drill Drill Drill! Faster Pussycats, Kill Kill Kill!
















Friday, July 8, 2016

Open-Carried ... with Children.



Capped in America
                                                               


                                                                    Sweet William's.

When I get murdered, losing my face, 
At a firing range, 
Will you still be firing guns as fun and play?
Still belong to the NRA?

If I'd been killed by some enemy
Wouldn't you lock the door?
Once you conceived me, now you bereave me, 
When you're sixty-four.

You'll be older too, 
And if it weren't absurd, 
I could pray for you. 

I could be handy, singing the blues 
But you've fired your gun. 
I've been hit and it's because you fired wide 
Now encoffined, off for a ride, 
Firing a semi, teachin' my boys, 
Who could ask for more?

Once you conceived me, now you bereave me, 
When you're sixty-four.

Oh what a dummy is Papa Brumby  
Never was too bright, if it's not too clear 
He aimed to inspire 
His Children's "Gun Safety",
Ready, Aim, Fire 

Send a postmortem, drop me from view 
with your .22 
Indicate precisely where you mean to spray 
Yours sincerely, blasted away 

Giving no answer, face full of lead 
Dead for evermore 
Once you conceived me, now you bereave me, 
When you're sixty-four.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Blair hat immer recht. He Blares, it is a "Fabelhaft Neue Ordnung", weiss Gott WE are Die nummer eins, glauben sie mir, lob und ehre sei Gott!



Fried und freiheit für alle, das ist Blairism!


“We do not agree that hindsight is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and Al-Qaeda activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion.”

And by none other than Dick Cheney who knew it would be a quagmire (using the word they have since so assiduously avoided because it brings up visions of the lost Vietnam War). But Der Dicke is the perfect incarnation of greed, a creature so swept away by its impulses that reason has no power to check him. Because, although America likes to tart up Greed as a virtue, putting lipstick on its ovine snout to make it look less repulsive in the name of a "Getting Government out of the way of Capitalism",  it is now, as it has ever been, one of the Deadly sins, and in fact, the deadly sin, as all the others are merely greed made more specific, as in lust being greed for sex, gluttony greed for food, etc.

Private or publicly listed firms received at least $138 billion of U.S. taxpayer money for government contracts for services that included providing private security, building infrastructure and feeding the troops. And not always our troops, as pallets loaded with hundred dollar bills were flown in to Iraq, munitions valued in the millions have disappeared in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing up in the hands of Isis, Yemen, and other terrorist organisations. but who cares,? Profits are profits, and the US taxpayer is too benumbed and too afraid of being branded 'compassionate' or 'soft on security' if they object to money flowing out of the DOD like water from a sieve.

“We do not agree that hindsight is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and Al-Qaeda activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion.”


Chilcot says Blair also overlooked the threat the invasion would pose to Britain. He emphatically did not overlook it, he looked it over and decided it would be highly profitable and career-enhancing. The risk was worth it, he wouldn't be putting his life on the line, just a few soldiers', and that's worth the price of the profits the war would enable him to rake in. War, as it suspends the rule of law, always enhances politicians' power and ability to generate profits via deficit spending ... deficit spending the polity may not approve of without being instilled with the correct amount of Fear. And Blair knew that Victors, and he was assured he would be victorious, always make the rules, they do what they please, and call it justice, but it's mere Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy to camouflage the West's primitive barbarism using all the techniques of modern science.

Only Chalmers Johnson dares to make the connection, via his coining of the term Military Keynesianism, between artificially and unsustainably stimulating the economy via military adventurism and arms production. America has become what every German gunmaker  during the spell of Nazism dreamed of: a country pouring everything into armaments; reducing wages and lengthening the hours of all its workers. And bidding its munitions men to build. Birth control advocates are shut up and abortionists are prosecuted. American and British leaders were warned that the Iraq War would INCREASE Terrorism, but that is what the US military has been doing ever since the second world War, putting US citizens in far more jeopardy by their actions than, as 9/11 should have so exactly demonstrated, it 'protects' them from what General Butler said is the Racket of War (a loud one that we silence by keeping it safely offshore). But, of course, as we now know, that is exactly what they want. The AMG: America's  Military Government, absolutely requires it, and The president, named the Commander-in-Chief of that military government, needs war to adopt the full mantle of power to which he has come to believe he is entitled, and, ensconced in the White House, that he now uses as his own personal Berchtesgaden, he "hat immer recht" (is always right).

For those of you who weren't around during the triumphalist nineties after the destruction of the Soviet Union, there were many soul-searching editorials, including a cover piece in Time Magazine, that bewailed, "Who can be our enemy Now?", as they sought ways, led by the Iron Guard known as AIPAC, the Jews for Jihad, for ways to justify not only "defense" spending at then-current levels, but keeping the escalation of defense spending, specifically, US defense spending that AIPAC feels the rest of the country needs to maintain, not for the defense of the USA, but for he Defense of another, sovereign State. If the Semites calling for such robbery from their fellow citizens were Muslim instead of Jewish, they would be branded, have now  been branded by Trump, as traitors. But vanity has become the glory of this new Master Race, determined to subject all others to its will, and it has no compunctions against using the military force of the US, putting all of its citizens in jeopardy for the sake of a dogmatic religious State, that, despite Lewis Black's comedy routines telling Christians that the Bible, or at least that part of it called the Old Testament, is their book, so Christians shouldn't be interpreting Noah's flood, for example, as history, yet the Jewish state, by using it as title deed to a land they have no claim to otherwise, are indeed responsible for the rise of Theocratic states in the middle east. 

Remember, there never was a War where right was all on one side, And remember that in every war both sides lie like hell! Truth is whatever you can get believed. The average army officer looks up to the Big Business crowd. the execs, those who have good manners and the right sort of homes to invite him to: the same sort of people who put the Neocons Blair kowtowed to in power and who'd bring them back tomorrow if they could, The most elegant and perfectly legal forms of bribery exist wherever business touches government or government touches business, and the military is nothing if not the interplay of Big Government with Big Business. And in the US that means it is never called to explain its expenditures in any real way. Which is why DC's crawling with lobbyists and lawyers representing every form of wholesale greed.  Never before in the history of mankind have private interests collected such sums of money from public bodies. Every member of the MSM knows what's going on, but simply get in line to be embedded and collect their cut. 

And speaking of cuts, here's Upton Sinclair quoting the British: ...."what good would be the dreams about liberty, democracy, or other sorts of ideals, if we failed to get our share of a product for which there was no substitute?" All over the world the British were grabbing the territories in which there was any chance of oil; they were holding these as reserves and buying our American supply for immediate use - it was a deliberate policy of Blut und Eisen (Blood and iron) for oil. Blair merely wanted to upgrade this strategy to the 21'st century by using the US version of the Wehrmacht to further his ambitions, after all, geschaft ist geschaft: business is business, and business is Capitalism  and Capitalism is War, and what it calls peace is merely time to get ready for the next conflagration, and Washington, like Goring, will have no "dishwater internationalism" in the Fatherland, unless it's to form a coalition of the drilling, whether men for battle or rigs for oil.

But even Washington cannot go on piling up public debt indefinitely; and when you have to stop, there'll be a smash-up, and that'll be their chance. The very freedom we're so proud of is their assurance of success; we're made impotent by it, and can't imagine taking action against those who use their freedom to destroy ours, so we let them use it to destroy others'.

Even before the Soviet Union's collapse, Gorbachev had opened it up so much that no one was more sharply interrogated than Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, who Soviet viewers saw subjected to an unrelenting parliamentary inquisition during a five-hour debate on National television, who admitted, "In the end you have so many weapons, mountains of weapons, and you can become a prisoner of those weapons", just as Upton Sinclair warned, "but we must perceive combat readiness not in an abstract way but in comparison with other states and blocs."

One of these states, the only one really, is the United States, where there is only one party: the War Party. And that party has never seen a weapon system it didn't like. We  pile them up higher and higher until they threaten to crush us under both their weight and costs, such that a US Secretary of State, sounding more like a war mandarin, can wonder aloud with nary an objection raised, "What's the point of this superb military you're always talking about if we can't deploy it to project our power across the globe over those who don't take all their citizen's money in order to develop 'smart' bombs so dumb they bomb the Chinese embassy 'by mistake'?" (that's not even close to the exact quote, but I thought I'd make her meaning more explicit).

Millions of men and women and even children have been convinced (not a difficult job, actually) that they were superior to the rest of the world, and that it is their destiny to remake that world, and that anyone who opposes them is a scoundrel, a criminal, or a fiend out of hell. And this is the mentality Blair got right on board with, and that's why he remains unrepentant. Because militarism is the new Religion, same as the old religion, and it is used for the same purpose: subjugation of a willing populace that has convinced itself that its position of entitlement is sacrosanct, come the hounds of hell or high water. Or, as is becoming increasingly clear, even unto Thermonuclear War.


Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Lexus Nexus and Brexodus.


 Realpolitik: It's just another name for Conspiracy against the people.


Although 21'st century man seems to prefer to think of this life as a chunk of time unrelated to anything that happened during the previous millennia, the fact is that, to resurrect an old theory promulgated during the Vietnam War era, there is such a thing as a domino effect. What they left out of their description of such a scenario, however, is that dominoes, like everything else these days, come wrapped in plastic. The only time they fall in any kind of a sequence is when they have all been carefully set  up so as to allow no other possibility by someone or some group of someones who have a desire to see them fall in a pre-designed order: a group that relies on what Kissinger called Realpolitik to make it appear that the outcome was independent of them; it simply happened as a matter of inevitability.

I was reminded of this by a screaming headline that announced Jeremy Corbyn was going after Tony Blair with the intention of labeling him as a War Criminal. That reminded me of the nexus between the Bush Family's criminal activities and the War in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not the current war in Afghanistan, but the one that Russia was enticed into intervening in, per Brzezinski, by the US becoming involved in it first with the CIA's provisioning of "secret" aid to the Mujahadeen.

Whereas it has now become fashionable to open ones eyes and rail against the Corporate rule of the US, and thereby, the globe, in those days any such suggestion, despite the above-referenced and well-known involvement at the highest levels of government in secret intrigues labelled 'Realpolitik', (which in any other world would be simply referred to by their proper name of conspiracy), would be scoffed at as just what they were, conspiracy theories. But as Mr. Brzezinski so kindly admits, such conspiracies, plans of actions deliberately kept outside the purview of the public, are routinely entered into at the nexus of government/industry and the DOD, along with its alphabet soup of secret agencies, all busily setting up dominoes so that events in the world will fall out in a certain order which they have pre-conceived.

Why the nexus is your Lexus is that what is at the heart of these domino set-up scenarios is what is at the heart of all modern industries, modern societies and modern war: that great unmentionable underlying the entire Western infrastructure of global domination: Oil. The getting it, the distribution of it, and finally the suicidal burning of it to the very last drop.

Now the Reagan administration employed three notoriously greedy bastards: the future CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, as well as GHW Bush, the man who would appoint this Dick as his Secretary of Defense, and whose son would appoint the Dick's best friend, the third member of this nexus of evil, in his turn as his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. The plans they conceived of for the future of the country, and the dominoes that they set up to fall for the eventual aggrandizement of their own personal fortunes, all dovetailed around that same commodity of which there was nary a dot of concern about its burning or looting of from the rest of the world: yes, that would be oil.

Having jettisoned the Carter idea of conservation of resources and learning how to live with less, the Reagan administration and the unholy Triumvirate it housed set out on a path of unparalleled militancy, on which they were determined to destroy the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republiks in the name of "fighting Communism", even as they built up their trade with the largest single Communist country in the World: Communist China, suggesting it was mere subterfuge, one which no one cared to see through, because the US polity wanted to believe that they could drive and drive and drive, even if it meant a Thelma and Louise finale, because life without cars and modern transport, i.e. That Inviolable American Way of Life, is simply not worth living ... something we still believe.

But this requires something the US had stopped being able to provide for itself a decade before: that nasty word again: oil.

This is where the nexus with the Brexus starts to wheedle its way into our foreign policy, industrial activity and war plans as Ronald Reagan's love affair with Margaret Thatcher blossomed: the US and Great Britain would use the resources of their national treasuries to provide the tax relief and research facilities to provide the oil companies with plenty of incentive to develop far-flung and risky deposits of hydrocarbons in the Alaskan wilderness and the cold North Sea so as to flood the world with oil, crash its price, and destroy the only source of Russian foreign exchange: oil revenues. Thereby manipulating the economies of the world, along with its most precious commodity, all the while advocating a return to "Free" market economics; Central planing more secretive and diabolical than any of the Central Planning done by the Soviet 'enemy', whose oil was more the target than any communist threat, because they knew, thanks to the work of Andrei Almarik, that the Soviet Union, despite the CIA's protestations to the contrary, was on its rickety last legs. They used to joke about the SDI acronym, laughingly suggesting that what it really stood for was, "Soviets' Destruction's Inevitable".

But the arrangement of the dominoes is never quite accurate, and sometimes, the party that arranged them and then invites someone else to participate, doesn't really care how the dominoes fall for them, and such was the case with the US and Great Britain, as the drop in oil prices, on oil that was being harvested under the onus of huge amounts of debt, like fracking today and North Sea oil then, has to keep pumping to service that debt, at an ever-increasing amounts in order to make up in volume what's lost in per unit price, crashing the price even more until it hits rock-bottom, bargain-basement levels, toppling the Soviet economy, but cratering GB's as well. But not to worry, we'll make it up to you by escalating that price right back to where it was before by crippling one of its major suppliers: Iraq.

But a major flaw happened in the plan as the election of Bill Clinton ousted the entire triumvirate from the White House in 1992, setting off the most intense furor over losing the presidency in modern history, because now all the well-laid plans and unfulfilled opportunities of the Oil men looked to be falling apart. But they soon conceived of a plan to Tripp up the President and bring about his impeachment, resulting in a shoe-in, via a little help from the stacked Supreme Court, of the Bush that would hedge his bets by bringing in all of Daddy's henchmen to finish where they had left off, bringing Full-Spectrum Domination to the heart of Washington's hegemonic Sole Superpower strategy as outlined in the PNAC, a document with the signatures of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld on it, that would serve as a suitable camouflage, just as anti-communism had served as his father's before him.

But the economy was flailing, the price of oil, so precipitately dropped, was not so easy to manipulate back up again, especially with a Democrat in office, so that need to be rectified. It's price sat, upon Bushes ascension to the throne, at around $10.00/bbl: this could not continue, and the dominoes were reassessed, and re-positioned, and Iraq was slated, once again. to be taken out. Under any pretext.

And this is where the Blair witch projects his image onto US foreign policy and enters into the alliance with the Americans, having been promised a seat at the table, in the form of BP, when the sand had settled, and guaranteed a hefty increase in the price per bbl of that precious resource from the North Sea that was still selling for less than its production costs. So as the rest of the World, specifically the rest of Europe, were protesting the illegal cakewalk across the hot sands of Dune, Tony Blair,  as the Bush's lapdog, yipped his enthusiastic support and joined the coalition of the drilling and backed the destruction of Iraq as a modern State, electing to "Bomb it back into the Stone-age", a war cry that gets little play these days, but then it was triumphantly bellowed in order to win support for a war to destroy those dangerous enemies of the people, the Iraqis.

In this regard, the Bush junta had knowledge of three facts they kept from the public:

1) There were, or course, no WMD's,

2) The discovery of that fact would matter not a whit,

3) The war, far from enabling increased output from Iraqi oilfields in such torrents that we could, as Cheney cynically described, use the hydrocarbon output of the Iraqi nation to pay for its own destruction, would contrarily, allow  Iran, (its mortal enemy whose government Bush's grandfather helped destroy via his CIA intrigues with Allen Dulles in the fifties, bringing down the duly elected presidency of Mossadegh and replacing it with the malleable autocratic Shah, eventuating in not only the Iranian Revolution, but the Iran/Iraq War),  to wreak havoc with the recumbent Iraq and destroy its ability to keep its oilfields pumping.  And such was the mission of Paul Bremer when he was dispatched to  Iraq to disband the entire Army (apply Marco Rubio's "tell" here: Everyone says GW didn't know what he was doing ... but George Bush knew Exactly what he was doing).

The Blair witch was quite aware of this too, and was counting on it to fill Labor's coffers with tax revenue from the rising price of hydrocarbons providing the added pounds he needed on his waste lines of increased privatization of the public's resources, pouring money into the coffers of the MNC's that had enabled his ascension to power.

It is for this reason that Corbyn is decrying him as a War criminal and it is for this reason that the Brexit is intricately connected with Mr. Blair. Because the chaos in the Middle East, although it didn't start in Iraq, was inflamed there by the first Iraq War, and then bellowed to its current red-hot state, wherein it has now embroiled the entire region, by the second one, all of which Tony Blair saw as a plus for the oligarchs of England, regardless of the deadly consequences for its people. And therein lies the irony of the Brexodus from the EU, inflamed by the specter of thousands of Muslim immigrants waiting in Calais to flood, via a mass Brenter, from the countries of the Middle East: that the very country, the ONLY country in Europe, to sign on for the wanton rampage of American militancy, is the one that, once the consequences of its playing with the big boys threatens to come home to roost, is the first to start whimpering and threatening to pick up its dominoes and go home because, yet again, they're not falling where they were supposed to.








  

Friday, July 1, 2016

Global Lies: Living Through Traub'led Times.


Enduring Freedom



In a story published in Zerhoedge, James Traub, parsing the meaning of the Brexit referendumb, explains that "It’s not about the left vs. the right; it’s about the sane vs. the mindlessly angry..."

Not the helplessly disenfranchised, not the hopelessly unemployed, or the jobless parents, or the muddling middling classes, just the "sane", by whom he means those with means, vs. well, why mince words?, the insane, (I mean what else could he mean by mindless?).

Is it because, "When we stop burning oil we start burning corpses?"

And that every one of the elites, even Bernie Sanders, give nary a passing comment on the fact that, regardless of whether we stop or keep burning it, the consequences in terms of human population destruction, are horrific, we simply go the easy route of "build it and they will come", (which Bernie's insistnece on 'infrastructure projects' dovetails so nicely with) because it's already built, but is this a sane path?

Mike Ruppert tells a story in the movie about him, wherein a group of monkeys has been relocated by the US Army to one of the pacific islands on which a hydrogen bomb had been detonated in the fifties.

And he told the story of those monkeys on the radioactive isle. They were taught to wash coconuts to free them of the radioactive particles on their husks. Soon two, then 4 then 20 monkeys were washing coconuts, but after the hundredth one started washing coconuts, all of a sudden everybody, all 10,ooo of them, was washing coconuts. His dream was to find that hundredth monkey.

 My objection to this parable is that there would then be no one left to remember exactly why we're all washing our nuts, and the why is important. What if the fact that we're all washing our coconuts means we're thereby concentrating the radioactivity into our only water supply (it is, after all, a small island) so that now, not only are the husks of coconuts radioactive, but the entire fruit, nurtured on radioactive water it used for its photosynthetic-enbled production, binding the meat of the coconuts with the carbon atoms torn from the atmosphere's CO2 now bonded to a radioactive hydrogen atom ripped from its oxygen buddies, possibly making the very air breathed radioactive.

Soon, the entire 10,000 all die instead of a few dying perhaps years later, from radiation -induced cancer. All because no one knew the reason everyone was doing something that looked to me, as an outside observer, to be, quite frankly, nutty behavior. Had they known the reason, they would have, hopefully sooner rather than later, questioned the sagacity of washing all those radioactive particles into their only water supply. Because, the part of me that's even more depressed than Mike, I guess, looms from the gloom and wonders, "So that's the solution? Isn't the socially-enforced adoption of the same practice by an entire population just Totalitarianism?" (If that's the case, we're doin' just fine).

As Traub says, after all, "The schism we see opening before us is not just about policies, but about reality."

Yes the reality that we have waited so long for someone to listen to us, that there was no other way to get your attention! As the elites deny Climate Change, pretend there's no end to the flow of oil, continuing to sell six thousand pound ICE machines because, as tutored by their leaders, they deny science, which they do every day they use the atmosphere the way the monkeys used their water supply, poisoning it, even though they know they are poisoning it, and then labeling opposition of their right to inflict environmental disaster not only on humanity, but on all sentient lifeforms, as "denying reality". Of course the hoi polloi deny reality!  What else can they do when the elites do it on a globalized scale and have their mouth pieces known as the media, of which the populace have been robbed, to proselytize for them? Because, after 2008, although it had been going on for decades, the polity just began to see the man behind the curtain. They gave them the benefit of the doubt, but now doubt has since been proven a certainty: there is a Ruling Class, and they have nothing in common with those over whom they hold sway. In a Democracy, that's what's called


Betrayal.

The elites all knew
As early as '72,
When the US went off the gold
Standard

That on American soil
we'd reached peak oil;
And they intended to leave us all
Stranded.

Soon they backed RR
for our Commissar,
He, was, let's say, less than
Candid.

He and Bush père,
Made the White House their lair
And did many things most
Underhanded:

Suppressed the work of Hansen,
Realpoliticked like Charles Manson,
Flooded the world with oil, leaving the Russkies
Disbanded.

And ever since that time,
As world temperatures climbed,
Claimed, "Natural variation did more than
Man did."


Because it's not about globalization per se, but about energy and it's horrendous costs, only one of which was 9/11, directly related to the Bush invasion of Iraq, the first invasion that is, and the real reason for which was the same as the second one: energy. The first to keep it flowing from a desert kingdom without whose oil the US economy would crater, the second Bush invasion, to make sure Iraq's oil stayed in the ground, escalating its price until fracking was profitable and we could make believe the United States of Saudi Arabia was so flush with reserves that it could begin to export it again, after more than a 40 year embargo (all during which it was the loudest advocate of "free trade", even as it restricted its own companies from trading the most valuable and irreplaceable commodity in the world).

But it was the elites, the Bush-labelled "have-mores" (although they have no mores consistent with noblesse oblige anymore, so what mores he is referring to, other than the rape and pillage his administration enabled, I don't know), who put both Bushes in office, again and again and this year offered up to the American electorate yet another Bush. Yet Traub can insist that, "It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them." What, by pouring money into a 3'rd Bush presidency? Who exactly is deluded here?

 It is leadership that has failed on such a colossal scale because it cannot undelude itself. While they sit in their Davos or Bilderberg or Copout-21 grand theaters for the public, the delusions they entertain about the future come from the very quality he derides the have-nothings of: ignorance.

Because stating that  "it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history" even while demonstrating his uter lack of all of the above, he insists that, "the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the party of denying reality", thereby showing the true blindness of his position. The French aristocracy and the French peasantry, just like the masses of disenfranchised citizens vs. elites today, each had a separate, albeit intricately-linked, reality; and to think that one of those realities is the "correct one", which is to say that the position of the privileged should be accepted as one they deserve, whereas our position of penury is the one that WE deserve, is to say that our reality really doesn't matter. Only the reality of the Ruling class even matters.

To believe otherwise just proves us deluded. Wassa matter You!?