‘Fear’ of the US
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Gone is that so-called “light on the hill” and that old-time “huddled masses” routine as the good-old US of A is now known as the hypocritical epicenter of life on the planet — if American authorities can’t arrest you, then you’ll be hunted down like a dog and assassinated, and if you are captured, you’ll be waterboarded until you scream out some sort of confession.
Julian Assange was released on bail from an UK jail Thursday and confessed his ultimate dread:
Speaking to reporters in London after his release from custody, Assange said: ‘I do not have too many fears about my extradition to Sweden. The much bigger fear is about extradition to the US.’
And into the hands of those without any sense of humanity.
(Illustration found here).
Maybe Assange has gotten wind of Bradley Manning’s situation.
Manning is the 23-year-old US Army private who has been changed with, but not yet convicted of passing classified information to Assange’s WikiLeaks operation — Manning has been held in horrible conditions since his arrest last May.
Another notice of US reality.
Via Raw Story:
Coleen Rowley, a former special agent/legal counsel at the FBI’s Minneapolis division, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Wednesday that it appears Manning was receiving the same type of harsh treatment reserved for terrorism detainees.
“I’ve never heard of punishing someone pre-conviction like this in solitary confinement,” she said.
“It really sounds vindictive and in a way, it seems like some of the harsh interrogation tactics have kind of bled over now into the criminal process, which is just shocking.”
Read Glenn Greenwald’s most-excellent post on Manning’s position within the US legal system — it ain’t pretty.
And all this despite the law.
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the House judiciary committee, said Thursday that the prosecution of Assange and WikiLeaks goes against the standard of what the US has stood for and maintained for the last 200-plus years.
Again, via Raw Story:
“As an initial matter, there is no doubt that WikiLeaks is very unpopular right now.
Many feel that the WikiLeaks publication was offensive,” Conyers said, according to prepared remarks.
“But being unpopular is not a crime, and publishing offensive information is not either.
And the repeated calls from politicians, journalists, and other so-called experts crying out for criminal prosecutions or other extreme measures make me very uncomfortable.”
…
“But let us not be hasty, and let us not legislate in a climate of fear or prejudice,” Conyers closed, referring to the calls for new laws criminalizing the actions of Wikileaks.
“For, in such an atmosphere, it is our constitutional freedoms and our cherished civil rights that are the first to be sacrificed in the false service of our national security.”
The House Judiciary Committee itself heard from legal experts on Thursday that going after Assange and Wikileaks is not only illegal, but also that ‘excessive government secrecy is a serious problem that needs to be fixed.’
The biggest impact from WikiLeaks is the exposure, once again, of how morally-corrupt the US has become, and the fear rest of the planet has of America.
A most-horrifying shame.
Hillary Hilarious
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
UPDATE BELOW
In the ugly aftermath of the WikiLeaks doco-dump. the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blubbered like a baby: “This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community,” Clinton said, following talks in Washington with Turkey’s foreign minister. “We are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information” and to prevent future disclosures, she added.
Going even further, Hillary continued: “Every country, including the United States, must be able to have candid conversations about the people and nations with whom they deal. And every country, including the United States, must be able to have honest, private dialogue with other countries about issues of common concern.”
(Illustration found here).
Of course, the operative words here are ‘honest, private dialogue,’ which is in direct contradiction to what the Wiki-Wiki diplomatic cable release revealed — a whole slew of bullshit and illegal activities mired in massive incompetence.
In direct violation of the 1946 United Nations’ convention on UN personnel, Hillary went to spying on everybody.
From the UK’s Daily Mail:
Hillary Clinton ordered American officials to spy on high ranking UN diplomats, including British representatives.
Top secret cables revealed that Mrs Clinton, the Secretary of State, even ordered diplomats to obtain DNA data – including iris scans and fingerprints – as well as credit card and frequent flier numbers.
All permanent members of the security council – including Russia, China, France and the UK – were targeted by the secret spying mission, as well as the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon.
…
The secret ‘national human intelligence collection directive’ was sent to embassies and consulates around the world.
The request could break international law and threatens to derail any trust between the U.S. and other powerful nations.
Requests for IT related information — such as details of passwords, personal encryption keys and network upgrades — could also raise suspicions that the U.S. was preparing to mount a hacking operation.
Although official Washington is all blustered about the WikiLeaks dump, no one anywhere near the top of the chickenshit-pecking order has even mentioned the obvious UN illegalities — diplomacy as spying.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said in an interview with Time magazine that Hillary should resign if it turns out she ordered spying at the UN: “But she should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that.”
Assange himself, however, is an international fugitive, hounded by everybody.
Interpol is after him for supposedly sex crimes in in Sweden and US Attorney General Eric Holder has reported his department has “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into Assange and WikiLeaks — Fox News mouth-face Mike Huckabee called for nothing “less than execution” for those involved and twit/liar Sarah Palin Facebooked in wonder why Assange was “not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?”
Assholes complete.
Noam Chomsky, renowned American linguist and political dissident responded: “What that reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership and of course the Israeli political leadership.”
Malou Innocent in a commentary on the reality of the WikiLeaks leaks:
For years I have told anybody who would listen how U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan contribute to Pakistan’s slow-motion collapse.
Well it appears that my take on the situation was not so over-the-top.
Amid some 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables released by online whistleblower Wikileaks, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne W. Patterson warned in cable traffic that U.S. policy in South Asia “risks destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and the military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis without finally achieving the goal.”
…
I’m all for less government secrecy, particularly when U.S. officials are doing bizarre things like tabulating the biometric data of various UN officials, the heads of other international institutions, and African heads of state.
That these supposedly “confidential” communications were so easily leaked highlights the appalling ineptitude of our unwieldy national security bureaucracy.
Indeed, the phenomenon of Wikileaks says as much about government policy as it does about government incompetence.
Hear, hear Hillary.
UPDATE
This morning a bluster of lying bullshit — and from the White House.
Obama front man Bob Gibbs was on NBC’s Today show and offered that the WikiLeaks exposure of Hillary and Assange calling Hillary to resign for spying at the UN was “are both ridiculous and absurd” and US diplomats don’t do spy work.
Who to believe — the US government or all of our collective lying eyes?
Such funny, funny people.
Celebrate Slaughter Day
Filed Under Bullshit, Double Standard/Religious | Leave a Comment
Another day set aside for perpetual lying.
(Illustration found here).
As always, Mark Twain notedly recorded the festivities:
“Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians.
Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments.”
As some US peoples sit down to tables stacked with fatness, to gorge themselves, watch TV for several mind-bungling hours, and supposedly give thanks for the fat-ass and arrogant bounty which came via blood and horror.
US history is a shitload of lies wrapped in fuzzy feelings easily embraced by a population underwhelmed by what the last few hundred years has really wrought and live in a vapor of desire to understand, or maybe even care.
Not all US peoples are so swell: 17.4 million households won’t have such a holiday dinner and nearly 15 percent have had problems sometime during the year with “food insecurity” and food stamp use is at a record 40.8 million folks.
Food stuffs is in the eye of the beholder.
Arthur Silber, who can utilize words that cut like a buttered knife through a bird carcass, has a good recent post titled “A Cause For Genuine Thanksgiving” in response to a new upcoming Wikileaks release reportedly coming this week.
Silber’s money bit:
It must be noted that the U.S. government has yet to offer the smallest particle of evidence that any Wikileaks release has damaged “national security” or jeopardized even a single life.
In starkly unforgiving and murderous contrast, the U.S. government and its military have unleashed an immense amount of suffering, brutality and widespread death in country after country over endless, blood-drenched decades.
The constant, but for most people almost entirely muted, soundtrack of our existence is a howling scream of pain as countless lives are mutilated, deformed and ended.
The overwhelming majority of Americans fail even to notice it.
This is simply the way we live — and die.
When unbearable pain is the never-ending theme, we learn to diminish it or ignore it altogether. For most people, the only “solution” is to deaden their souls more every day — or to slowly go mad.
Most Americans choose to murder themselves in slow motion. In this manner, the world — your world — becomes more brutal with every hour that passes.
Black Friday is tomorrow — a recipe for greed.
Gobble-gobble.
‘Drink Up, Shriners’ — Booze Worse Than Crack
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Musings | Leave a Comment
“Incredible. Fifty percent of all traffic deaths, no, yes, that’s about 25,000, right. Forty percent of all arrests, traceable. Fifty percent of all first admissions to mental institutions traceable to alcohol. And then, of course, there’s diabetes, gout, high blood pressure, heart disease, insanity, divorce.
So I always say “Drink up, Shriners!” whenever I see a couple of ‘em.”
– George Carlin, on ‘What do you think about the dope problem,’ 1972
As no stranger to alcohol — currently manager of a liquor store and a former brown-bag drunk — I’m not shocked at a new study out of the UK that found that booze is far worse for society than all the usual suspects, like heroin, crack and crystal meth.
(Illustration found here).
Although the usual suspects were bad for the individual, alcohol was far worse for the unwashed masses.
From the BBC:
The findings run contrary to the government’s long-established drug classification system, but the paper’s authors argue that their system — based on the consensus of experts — provides an accurate assessment of harm for policy makers.
“Our findings lend support to previous work in the UK and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm,” the paper says.
“They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy.”
…
The new more complex system ranked alcohol three times more harmful than cocaine or tobacco. Ecstasy was ranked as causing one-eighth the harm of alcohol.
The study was conducted by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs and published in the Lancet, the Brit medical journal.
This little report comes in time for Prop 19 here in California — making marijuana legal — and anyone with any decent-enough sense can see that a doobie is far-less harmful than a few fingers of Jack Daniels.
Pot sets the standard for a double-standard asshole view for people in regards to booze.
The AP examines the study:
Experts said alcohol scored so high because it is so widely used and has devastating consequences not only for drinkers but for those around them.
“Just think about what happens (with alcohol) at every football game,” said Wim van den Brink, a professor of psychiatry and addiction at the University of Amsterdam. He was not linked to the study and co-authored a commentary in the Lancet.
When drunk in excess, alcohol damages nearly all organ systems. It is also connected to higher death rates and is involved in a greater percentage of crime than most other drugs, including heroin.
…
Experts said the study should prompt countries to reconsider how they classify drugs. For example, last year in Britain, the government increased its penalties for the possession of marijuana. One of its senior advisers, David Nutt — the lead author on the Lancet study — was fired after he criticized the British decision.
“What governments decide is illegal is not always based on science,” said van den Brink.
He said considerations about revenue and taxation, like those garnered from the alcohol and tobacco industries, may influence decisions about which substances to regulate or outlaw.
“Drugs that are legal cause at least as much damage, if not more, than drugs that are illicit,” he said.
This past July made it 15 years since I’d had an alcoholic drink — I wish it’d been 30 years.
One of my favorite drinking tricks was to put liquor — beer wasn’t my forte — into the freezer and after a little while the shit went down so smooth, and quick.
Never a mixed-drink fan, I chased it with a bit of water.
What a waste.
A late bloomer with marijuana, I was a senior at the University of Florida when I discovered its most wonderful qualities — I can even remember the date, May 15, 1974, because after I left a friend’s house, stoned as a critter for the first time, went home and watched transfixed as CBS News’ Roger Mudd reported on the Ma’alot massacre terror attack on an Israeli school that killed 16 teenagers — and welcome to real reality.
Pot is a much-weaker sister, however, if combined with booze — you didn’t get higher, you just got more drunk.
And from Saturday’s Sanity Rally was my most-favorite sign: “Why Can’t We Just Get A Bong” — number 47 on a top 100 signs at the gathering found here.
Why not: ‘Toke up, Shriners.’
The Day After
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, history, Scratching Sounds, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
What a complete, horrible mess the US nine years and some 24 hours following the attack on the World Trade Center, an event apparently which has become a turgid line drawn in the sands of time — we’ll always be caught nasty-faced in the before and after.
In the front-page explosion off the San Francisco Examiner, pictured to the left there, are the impressions slapped on the tragedy by all the subsequent death, dying and bullshit, which in the long, perilous run, most-likely worst than the actual horror of 9/11/01 — the word ‘Bastards‘ in a huge headline, and way down below, the real page turner, ‘A Changed America.’
On Monday morning, the day before that Tuesday, I was driving my then-21-year-old daughter to work.
She was living at home during a transition: Her fiance was in the US Navy, stationed at Norfolk, Virginia, and she was concerned about how life would be in the military.
And in a moment of true wisdom, I replied (and in paraphrase), the military is cool right now, not much going on, there’s a lot of benefits, and it’s pretty-much like any other job, then smiling at her with some sarcasm (as I recall), and said, “unless there’s a war.”
(Illustration found here).
Although the memory on the rest of that early-morning conversation is cloudy, those last few words are remembered fairly distinctly — words played and re-played over a near-decade, starting the very-next day.
Damn, didn’t I just open mouth, insert feet, and ass.
What has come to pass since, was-then beyond my imagination.
Not only did the US get attacked that day nine years ago, the entire planet shifted somehow, causing a kind of horrific clock to begin ticking, gearing for a wind-down in the now-an-extreme-near-future.
Back then, I didn’t even know of the term, “blowback,” or of Osama bin Laden/al-Qaeda, and for damn-sight sure, didn’t even consider how dangerous and crazy was George Jr.’s operation.
In the process of history, who’s been more-worse for the US, Osama and his boys, or the Decider and his Dick?
Ted Koppel, a fairly-decent MSMer, in an eloquent piece for the Washington Post this morning, seemed to sum up the vast, overwhelming problem the past near-decade.
Koppel says Bin Laden baited a nasty rat trap, George Jr tried to snatch the cheese, and presto, bad shit hit the fan.
Some good bits:
And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another.
Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves.
Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.
…
Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan.
Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, “black sites,” extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it — more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead.
Our military is so overstretched that defense contracting — for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence — is one of our few growth industries.
…
Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald’s.
Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?
Read the whole piece — worth it.
Of course, Koppel is concerned with national security and US foreign policy, but George Jr. did so, so much more to create, indeed, a changed America.
And of whom did they (at the Examiner) write in such bold lettering, which bastards?
The US has become a divided, nasty, mean-spirited place, and with the ugly rise of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., this twisted narrative is without-shame spattered across the airwaves, especially with the non-event, so-called ‘ground-zero mosque’ non-controversy.
Via RawStory:
“Here’s the chilling proof that Ground Zero stretches well beyond the boundaries of the World Trade Center site,” Murdoch’s New York Post boasted.
“The map was obtained by The Post from sources after the Fire Department did not respond to requests to review it. It shows that remains were found just 348 feet to the south of the mosque site at 45 Park Place.”
Although the Post article does not make it clear how the map was obtained, it appears that the Fire Department was opposed to its release.
An even more ominous version of the same map, with lurid red dots glowing like puddles of freshly-spilled blood against a dark background, was deployed by the hosts of Fox News’ Fox & Friends on Friday morning.
There’s a video at the RawStory link of Fox and Friends — bastards.