Pissing Bullshit
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Some of the righteous posturing:
“…utterly deplorable…” — U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
“…wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history…” — Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos
“…deplorable, reprehensible and unacceptable…” — White House spokesman Jay Carney
“…absolutely inconsistent with American values…” — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
(Illustration found here).
Of course, these clowns were commenting on a video splayed online this week of some US Marines apparently in Afghanistan taking a piss on some dead Taliban, but all these high-sounding forms of indignation are in reality just a mule-shit-pile of hypocrisy.
All this comes on the 10th anniversary of Gitmo opening — the US has its own Gulag and its own horror despite a so-called 200 years of freedom and piety.
The US the last decade has done absolutely nothing but piss on the entire planet.
From Gawker:
War is horrible.
War is sickening.
Wars started for supremely righteous causes are just as horrible and sickening in their consequences as wars started for less than righteous causes.
Politicians who sit in office chairs and start wars and wave flags as young men and women go off to kill and die and be psychologically and emotionally damaged for life are the most sickening of all.
Politicians start wars and are rewarded with an appearance on weekend talk shows and Very Respectable Discussions with Very Respectable media figures and jokes at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner and appearances on Leno and ghostwritten self-glorifying memoirs and lavishly catered fundraising parties with corporate executives.
They should be rewarded with outrage.
They should be rewarded with scorn.
Starting a war is a monstrous, monstrous crime against humanity, as we know when it begins that no matter how cleanly it is conducted it will result in thousands upon thousands of bullets smashing men’s skulls and arms and legs blown off by shrapnel and mothers and children incinerated by high explosives.
And every extra day that a war is perpetuated unnecessarily is a crime anew.
The most-eloquent comes from the always-eloquent Arthur Silber, who touches upon the truth that will almost never be spoken:
The ruling class of the United States pisses on the entire world, just as it pisses on every human being who is not favored by privilege and power.
…
Rank these items in terms of the disgust you think they merit:
-The systematic destruction of a series of nations and their peoples over a period of many decades.
-The murder of more than a million innocent people in a criminal war.
-The ongoing murders of people who do not (and most commonly could not) threaten the U.S., in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and on and on and on — in 120 countries around the globe.
-The claim that the U.S. Government has the “right” to murder anyone in the world for whatever reason it chooses — a “right,” I remind you, which the U.S. Government has actualized.
-Pissing on three dead bodies.
Read Sibler’s entire post, most-emotional.
And this is true — the pissing comes from the top.
From the LA Times and the power-elite in 2006 having a good chuckle at the good life:
Instead, concerns about a housing bust were largely dismissed by most officials, according to meeting transcripts released Thursday.
“We believe that, absent some large, negative shock to perceptions about employment and earned income, the effects of the expected cooling in housing prices are going to be modest,” said Timothy F. Geithner, the current Treasury secretary, who then was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
When Geithner was finished, Bernanke asked, to a round of laughter, “Anything to report on co-op prices in Manhattan?”
“As in many cases, I am not sure what you can take from the anecdote, but I guess some people say that you see a little of the froth dissipating,” Geithner replied.
“But I don’t think the adjustment is acute.
“If you see hiring at the New York Fed go up substantially in the market, that will be a good leading indicator of housing prices reverting somewhat,” he said, prompting more laughter.
A year later, the financial shit hits the fan — millions of jobs, homes, lives lost as the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression slapped 99 percent of the world’s peoples right up side the face.
Pissed off yet?
Fog of Truth — ‘Bugsplat’
Filed Under Bullshit, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
As the new year grinds on, politics has taken the edge off the nearly unnoticed pullout of US troops from Iraq, ending a segment in one of the most-horrible of episodes.
And the most lied about military adventure in US history.
“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
– US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, June 5, 2008
Despite the obvious, none of George Jr.’s entourage has ever even been threatened with criminal prosecution.
(Illustration found here).
In a new view of the Iraqi horror is the word, “bugsplat:” One definition is a software for scanning your computer for registry errors; another is the lack of humanity in warfare.
The US military’s invasion was a nasty example of the latter.
In fact, ‘Bugsplat‘ was the name of a computer program in 2003 used to determine collateral damage inflicted by American bombs.
HaHaHaHa — bugsplat, anyone/anything squashed on the US windshield.
Robert Koehler took a look at this line of bullshit yesterday morning at the Baltimore Sun:
“But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians,” journalist Allan Nairn told Amy Goodman in a “Democracy Now!” interview last year.
“The Pentagon has a word for that, too,” he went on.
“They call it ‘bugsplat.’
In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid.
On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that 22 of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat — that is, more than 30 civilian deaths per raid.
Franks said, ‘Go ahead. We’re doing all 22.’”
And this is the foundation of our national security.
Koehler concludes:
Project Bugsplat is the name of every war, at least from the planners’ point of view.
A winnable war is waged from above, invisibly, with godlike impunity.
Such wars, especially in today’s political order, cannot be effectively opposed with acts of equally brutal counterforce; they can only be prolonged.
“Bugsplat” is a term of ultimate disrespect and indifference, and it begins with a state of mind.
The global Occupy movement, with its humane and nonviolent core certainty, is tipping the balance. Finally it comes down to this: Occupy consciousness.
Without such, death comes by indifference.
This indifference can be applied to the US MSM — news organizations who have turned its eyes and ears away from exposing a rot now fully grown within the American soul.
Watch and listen here to the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter’s emotional outrage at the Iraqi war — he expresses horror at his own country (the UK) for being involved with such a crime.
And despite the US supposedly being gone, the blood still flows – from Bloomberg on a new report from London-based Iraq Body Count:
“The rate of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by U.S.-led coalition forces has declined steadily from 2009, while the rate caused by Iraqi state forces has increased,” the group said in an e-mailed news release.
Recent trends point to a “persistent low-level conflict in Iraq that will continue to kill civilians at a similar rate for years to come,” Iraq Body Count said.
“Time will tell whether the withdrawal of U.S. forces will have an effect on casualty levels,” the group said.
The US media, however, has been most quiet about any bad vibes coming off a war that tore apart the world’s thin fabric and left a country in a position beyond misery – a verbal snapshot of one Iraqi woman seems to sum it up: “Today is better than tomorrow.”
And tomorrow is the Iowa caucuses where the war party starts its machine rolling — horror of ugly horrors, though Newt Gingrich whined and took a bugsplat: “No, I feel ‘Romney-boated.”
The dogs of war fight amongst themselves — bug splatting everybody.
Sounds of Dumb
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Politics, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
The nastiest catfight right now is taking place in the frozen wastelands of Iowa — and it’s all bullshit and way-dumb.
Top-of-the-hat, ‘fer instance — Newt Gingrich thinks Sara Palin rocks and would a most-excellent running mate:
“She is certainly one of the people you would look at,” he responded.
“I am a great admirer of hers and she was a remarkable reform governor of Alaska, she’s somebody who I think brings a great deal to the possibility of helping in government and that would be one of the possibilities.”
(Illustration found here).
Anyone hearing that babble would blow chunks in the direction of the twitchy, no-brainer Rick Santorum, who claimed that poverty comes from being gay — one needs to marry in the “normal” way because then there’s only a small, small chance you’ll end up poor: “If you graduate from high school, you get married before you have children, and of course you work — that’s sort of a given, you have to work — you do those three things, there’s a 2 percent chance you’ll be in poverty.”
Of course, twitch Rick has it back-ass backwards.
Michele Bachmann is a laugh, and she’s so hilarious, her state chairman suddenly defected to support Ron Paul, just hours after appearing at a campaign event with her.
Hahaha from one Iowa voter: When asked if she’d support Bachmann this time around, she said hesitantly, “Yea, I guess. I would support her.”
Love those strong endorsements.
And Mitt Romney went history — from HuffPost: “When the president’s characterization of our economy was, ‘It could be worse,’ it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: ‘Let them eat cake,’” said Romney.
The DNC responded:
“It is actually laughable that the ‘Quarter-Billion-Dollar Man’ would call President Obama out of touch — and use the example of a French monarch to make the point,” DNC spokeswoman Melanie Roussell said in a statement to The Huffington Post on Thursday evening.
“This is the same guy who joked that he was ‘unemployed,’ offered a $10,000 bet as casually as one might buy a cup of coffee, and said ‘corporations are people.’
He’s also the same person who, as a former corporate buyout specialist for Bain Capital, made his fortune firing thousands of workers, cutting benefits, bankrupting American companies and outsourcing jobs overseas.
He’s the one who won’t release his tax returns — most likely because we would all learn that he pays a lower tax rate than middle class wage-earners.
Laughable.”
Keep laughing and laughing.
Politics is so full of shit it’s hard to find the toilet.
This is only the GOP and there’s not a one who’s worth any salt of US history and they act as if the world revolves their words.
The US in 2011 is not all that funny.
Dear George Carlin nailed:
Forget the politicians.
They are irrelevant.
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice.
You don’t.
You have no choice!
You have OWNERS!
They OWN YOU.
They own everything.
They own all the important land.
They own and control the corporations.
They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.
Now try to giggle.
Gloom Before the Doom
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Everything | Leave a Comment
Last night on CBS News, an interview with US Defense head Leon Panetta took place on what’s called “the doomsday plane,” a modified Boeing 747, termed an E-4B by the miltary, and tricked out with a shitload of science-fiction-sounding gear to aid in evading a Judgment-Day scenario.
Panetta’s blubberings as usual were nonsensical, but the aircraft was what peaked an interest.
When bad shit hits the fan — even a zombie apocalypse — the president, military types and other important folks will be saved to carry on while the rest of us run for the burning hills: The $223 million aircraft is outfitted with an electromagnetic pulse shield to protect its 165,000 pounds of advanced electronics. Thermo-radiation shields also protect the plane in the event of a nuclear strike.
Nice ride in an era of gloomy doom-speak.
(Illustration found here).
Scary is the events unfolding now in North Korea — even as everybody on the planet have their panties in a bind over Iran’s so-called nuclear ambitions, another way-more serious situation lies via Pyongyang — and the fright is the secrecy.
Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket without anybody outside a few North Koreans knowing about it, and all despite billions of dollars worth of all kinds of high-tech gear.
From the New York Times:
For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.
Asian and American intelligence services have failed before to pick up significant developments in North Korea.
Pyongyang built a sprawling plant to enrich uranium that went undetected for about a year and a half until North Korean officials showed it off in late 2010 to an American nuclear scientist.
The North also helped build a complete nuclear reactor in Syria without tipping off Western intelligence.
…
“ ‘Oh, my God!’ was the first word that came to my mind when I saw the North Korean anchorwoman’s black dress and mournful look,” said a government official who monitored the North Korean announcement.
What bullshit — the Korean peninsula is a tender box waiting for a match while the rest of the world sits in the dark.
The Washington Post: “It is scary how little we really know,” said one administration official who closely follows the region and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. “I don’t think you can overstate the concern.”
When one takes a truthful view of the world nowadays, there’s much to be alarmed about and gloomy, but it’s only a respite before the doom arrives, and it will.
According to all the data, we (the planet) can’t avoid a coming horror — between climate change, energy depletion, worldwide financial collapse, and just plain old war, amongst a host of lesser calamities — although apparently the world sits willingly in the dark.
Last weekend, the UK’s The Guardian ran a detailed piece on this age of destruction — titled, “The news is terrible. Is the world really doomed?” — and presented all the gloomy evidence to support a coming implosion/explosion of civilization.
A few key points:
“The apocalypse,” wrote the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1978, “is aphrodisiac, nightmare, a commodity like any other … warning finger and scientific forecast … rallying cry … superstition … a joke … an incessant production of our fantasy … one of the oldest ideas of the human species.
Its periodic ebb and flow … has accompanied utopian thought like a shadow.”
…
This autumn, as the estimated world population passed seven billion, an earlier prophet of doom, Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 60s and 70s bestseller The Population Bomb and professor of population studies at Stanford University in California, resurfaced in the British press to warn that demand for the planet’s resources would soon decisively exceed supply.
“Civilisations,” he reminded this newspaper, “have collapsed before.”
…
In July, the word “apocalypse” appeared 60 times in British national newspapers.
In August, 70 times.
In September, 92 times.
In November, 100 times.
Usually calm Guardian columnists have started to ponder armageddon.
After the chancellor George Osborne’s bleak autumn statement on the economy, Zoe Williams discussed the pros and cons of food hoarding.
In November, Simon Jenkins declared: “Today’s [economic and political] predicament is unquestionably worse than the 1970s.”
The same month, Ian Jack wrote: “Build a bunker with a vegetable plot on some high ground and leave it to your grandchildren: dangerous levels of climate change now look all but inevitable.”
…
Meanwhile, for westerners who instinctively look to other countries or big political ideas for inspiration, the possibilities seem to be withering.
The US appears economically declining and politically dysfunctional.
The EU is damaged and possibly disintegrating.
The social democracy of Europe’s postwar golden decades seems unable to modernise itself.
The ability of Thatcherism and its international variants and descendants to rescue countries from national decline — if that ability ever truly existed — seems to have run its course.
Žižek argues that over the past five years the west has suffered a form of bereavement.
To describe the resulting mindset, he uses the famous “five stages of grief” model devised in 1969 by the Swiss-American psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The current combination of public doominess and desperate-looking political summits certainly seems to feature the middle three.
Gray sums up the prevailing mood more succinctly: “People are afraid – for good, practical, experientially based reasons.”
The entire post covers all the ugly angles.
A nagging truth, however, is there’s not much the average-guy-on-the-street can do about it.
As I sit here in the comfort of my apartment on a clear, pre-dawn morning, the world outside is quiet and still — I can hear the slight roar of the Pacific Ocean — and the coming horror seems so far remote and so Horn of Africa.
Time is a much flexible measure, although time never changes, slows or changes direction.
A downer indeed if one doesn’t have the ears to hear.
Mid-Week Wonder
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Madness | Leave a Comment
“Holy shit it’s only Wednesday.”
– George Carlin
(Illustration found here).
In surfing the news this morning, a lot of Dookie spills off the rim of the Net, but the world’s bat-shit crazy goings-on continues unabated, although with a flourish of zero finesse.
One of the titular events that would drive a Wednesday’s slurping up a quart of Jack Daniels, is major bullshitter Leon Panetta’s double-lying bullshit on the happy-wonderful state of the horror of Afghanistan.
Panetta, the US defense honcho, was in country to spread goodwill via bullshitting, in this particular case, to American troops at a base near the Afghan border with Pakistan.
From Aljazeera English:
“We’re moving in the right direction and we’re winning this very tough conflict,” he said.
…
Panetta told reporters that Washington would continue to back Pakistani efforts to secure its border regions.
“This has been a difficult and complicated relationship as all of you know, but it is an important relationship, and it is one that we have to continue to work at,” he said.
The dispute between the US and Pakistan is also beginning to raise some concern from the Afghani government, Smith reported.
Panetta also played down concerns about Afghanistan’s future, saying 2011 had been a “turning point” for the country, citing lower levels of violence and the successful turnover of portions of the country to Afghan control.
“Clearly I think Afghanistan is on a much better track in terms of our ability to eventually transition to an Afghanistan that can govern and secure itself,” he said.
However, in the same story:
Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith reported from Kabul that while the US and its allies are arguing that progress has been made ahead of the 2015 withdrawal, UN statistics that violence has peaked in 2011 contradict this assertion.
“In the east of Afghanistan, NATO’s own figures say there’s been a 21 per cent increase in what it calls enemy attacks,” he said.
However — again!
Leon makes no mention of the possibility of Afghanistan might spiral into a similar situation Iraq blundered through five years ago — the horror of sectarian violence.
Especially after this week’s suicide bombing of a shrine near Kabul.
At least 56 people were killed in a blast in Kabul on the Shia holy day of Ashoura. A second near-simultaneous strike killed four people and injured 21 in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif as a convoy of Shias was driving past.
It was not immediately clear who carried out the attacks but suspicion centred on Sunni armed groups based in neighbouring Pakistan.
“Without any doubt, the enemies of Afghanistan are trying to separate the Afghan people,” Karzai said in a statement.
He did not blame any specific group, but when he uses the phrase “enemies of Afghanistan,” it is widely believed that he is referring to countries, including Pakistan, that he suspects are backing fighters in Afghanistan.
Until now, the decade-long Afghan war has largely been spared sectarian violence.
Although the US (and its NATO allies) are supposed to be out of the country in two years, there’s considerable evidence, some troops will remain until maybe 2025 — the Afghan war may never have an end.
A couple of other events seem noteworthy this morning — horrible violence in places that usually don’t encounter such things — one in Belgium, the other in Italy.
First, in Liege, Belgium, where a guy lobbed hand grenades and fired indiscriminately into crowds near a Christmas market, killing four people, wounding more than 100 and creating panic before killing himself.
Police later discovered a woman’s body at a storage facility used by the shooter/lobber, which raised the death toll to six — including an 18-month-old baby.
Meanwhile, in Florence, Italy, another guy opened fire in a crowed market, killing two Senegalese traders and injuring three others — this guy also apparently killed himself later, his body found in an underground car-park.
The mayor of Florence: “These are the actions of a lone killer – a lucid, mad and racist killer,” Matteo Renzi said, adding that such behaviour was out of character for the city and had shocked it to its core.
No doubt.
And Carlin’s note from above was aimed at drinking booze: “And this should go without saying. That’s why I’m going to say it: Drinking and driving don’t mix. Do your drinking early in the morning and get it out of the way. Then go driving while the visibility is still good.”
Oh, yeah.