Terminal Death
Filed Under Bullshit, Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Understatement on the crazed shootings yesterday in Afghanistan: It is believed that, some time before the killings, the soldier suffered a nervous breakdown.
In a bad situation getting worse, the incident only makes it near-imperative the US and NATO get the shit out of that country, and like way-now.
US peoples know, but the powers-that-be don’t, or don’t care: Sixty percent of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth its costs, and nearly the same number advocate an early US pullout from the country, a new poll showed.
(Illustration found here).
Although on the surface apparently, the shooting hasn’t yet stirred the ugly pot of unrest, but it might be just building up steam.
From the New York Times this morning:
Early on Monday, with the attacker in the custody of American forces, the public mood in Kandahar and Kabul seemed subdued with no immediate sign of protests on the streets.
But social networking sites such as Facebook and Afghan blogs were filled with angry postings, some of them accompanied by graphic photographs of what appeared to be children slain in the attack.
“This is a clear crime and will only add to the people who hate American in Afghanistan,” said one online posting.
“You can’t give their lives back to them with apologies.”
The shooter, an US Army staff sergeant, had from all indications, more than a passing experience in the ways of war:
Another senior military official said the sergeant was 38 and married with two children.
He had served three tours of duty in Iraq, this official said, and had been deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in December.
Yet another military official said he has served in the Army for 11 years.
War effects everybody and these George Jr.-affiliated conflicts seem to pack a wallow with those actually doing the killing — the shooter yesterday was from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, a place in 2010 considered “the most troubled base in the military” by the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
Overall, suicide in the US military jumped 80 percent from 2004 to 2008 — four real-bad years for a lot of killing.
Two years ago, four Lewis-McChord soldiers were convicted in the deliberate thrill killings of three Afghan civilians, and the military would like to sweep all that bad shit under some kind of happy rug in order to save money.
CBS News:
In the past five years, about 300 patients at Madigan Army Medical Center at the base had their PTSD diagnoses reversed by a forensic psychiatry team, The Seattle Times reported this month.
The Army is reviewing whether those doctors were influenced by how much a PTSD diagnosis can cost, in terms of a pension and other benefits.
At Coffee Strong, a coffee shop near the base that doubles as a resource center for soldiers seeking to leave the Army, executive director Jorge Gonzalez said he was not surprised the shooter was from the base.
“Joint Base Lewis McChord has been bombarded with bad stories,” said Gonzales, who served in the Army in Iraq in 2006.
“We’re not seeing the true costs of war, we’re seeing soldiers committing suicide … murder and domestic violence.”
Richardson said the vast majority of the tens of thousands of soldiers at the base were professionals.
“It’s unfortunate that these things keeping ending up at Joint Base Lewis-McChord,” he said.
“I promise you, not even a percent of those people are like this, but unfortunately it keeps happening.
Things like this will continue until there is no more war.”
The war on terror sucks the terror homeward.
Despite reality, President Obama continued the official line of bullshit: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”
Barry, are you out of your mind.
Even as he meets with his UK counterpart today.
This nugget from the Guardian:
Such is the bleak reality facing Barack Obama and David Cameron when they sit down in Washington to discuss Afghanistan on Monday.
The shared narrative they have presented to their nations on how the Afghan war will end has been relentlessly eroded by the death toll among their soldiers and the daily headlines about the Karzai government’s seemingly incorrigible venality, like the Wall Street Journal report over the weekend that the US-funded Afghan air force was using its planes to smuggle narcotics and illegal weapons around the country.
Afghanistan is indeed the ‘graveyard of empires‘ and the US is most-likely at the end of its run as the world’s top dog — what a fitting place to end the American Dream.
Hopefully, not, but yet….
Warmonger Us — ‘A population under stress’
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Pornographic war creates sweet dreams:
“I laughed as I heard a story,” said Ryan Endicott.
“One of the platoons had strapped dead bodies from a gunfight on the hoods of their Humvees and then drove around the city for hours. . . .
One (day) they brought in a car that had just been shot up.
The driver’s fully intact brain was sitting in the back seat of the car.
I walked over to the body bag with the passenger in it.
The bag began twitching and we could hear his body still attempting to breathe.
We laughed as we stomped the bag.”
(Documentary “On The Bridge” via the Chicago Tribune).
(Illustration found here).
History’s most-worse coincidence — Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush alive at the same time.
How the shit did Osama know George Jr. would go nasty-faced, bat-shit crazy after Sept. 11, 2001?
Maybe the late al-Qaeda leader was versatile in gothic writings, i.e., the Project for the New American Century, or maybe he knew about the asshole line-up of warmongers that had been waiting with shark’s breath for a spark the World Trade Center conveniently provided at no expense.
Catch the rapid on-going financial expense of this useless, but perpetual war here.
A reminder from Everett Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
And real death and misery.
Another study, another finger in the eye:
The study, an analysis of data from the Army Behavioral Health Integrated Data Environment, shows a striking 80 percent increase in suicides among Army personnel between 2004 and 2008.
The rise parallels increasing rates of depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions in soldiers, the study said.
The high number of suicides are “unprecedented in over 30 years of U.S. Army records,” according to the authors of the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Injury Prevention.
Based on the data and the timing of the increase in suicide rates, the authors calculated that about 40 percent of the Army’s suicides in 2008 could be associated with the U.S. military escalation in Iraq.
“This study does not show that U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan cause suicide,” said Dr. Michelle Chervak, one of the study’s authors, a senior epidemiologist at the U.S. Army Public Health Command.
“This study does suggest that an Army engaged in prolonged combat operations is a population under stress, and that mental health conditions and suicide can be expected to increase under these circumstances.”
Dr. Amir Afkhami, a professor of psychiatry and global health at George Washington University:
“But the higher number of suicides is a rock-solid indicator that we do have a problem,” he said.
“There’s no question about it.”
(ABC News)
And it just keeps keeping on.
President Obama ain’t much difference than George Jr. when it comes to killing people.
Mary Dudziak, University of Southern California law professor, on the US and its not-only perpetual, but permanent state of war.
Via Raw Story:
“The idea of wartime is doing a lot of work in American politics,” she said.
“The way we think about history is history passes through two different kinds of time, from wartime to peacetime to wartime et cetera.”
“That’s the way we learn about it in school, that’s the way that we imagine it.
When we use to concept of wartime, we assume that wartime is by definition temporary.”
But Dudziak noted that over the past 100 years, there had been few times when the United States was not engaged in a some sort of military conflict.
“And let me just tell you the Obama version of this,” she added.
“Obama comes into office having campaigned on ending two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but then it morphs into a war on terror.
He says we are at war with al Qaeda.
We have lost the limitation of countries and it is now formulated as a war without end.”
One day it will all end, but I really don’t want to be anywhere in the area.
Silent Screaming
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Irony is today’s word.
Just as ‘The Artist,’ an ode to silence, won Best Picture at last night’s Oscars, the organization known for anti-silence, WikiLeaks, dumped another load of classified files onto the public — this batch emails from US-based intelligence firm Stratfor, supposedly depicting the company’s “web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods.”
Thus to become more than a quiet riot.
(Illustration found here).
From WikiLeaks:
The Stratfor emails reveal a company that cultivates close ties with US government agencies and employs former US government staff.
It is preparing the 3-year Forecast for the Commandant of the US Marine Corps, and it trains US marines and “other government intelligence agencies” in “becoming government Stratfors”.
Stratfor’s Vice-President for Intelligence, Fred Burton, was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and was their Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division.
Despite the governmental ties, Stratfor and similar companies operate in complete secrecy with no political oversight or accountability.
Stratfor claims that it operates “without ideology, agenda or national bias,” yet the emails reveal private intelligence staff who align themselves closely with US government policies and channel tips to the Mossad — including through an information mule in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Yossi Melman, who conspired with Guardian journalist David Leigh to secretly, and in violation of WikiLeaks’ contract with the Guardian, move WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel.
An example of Stratfor’s use of so-called ‘methods:’
“[Y]ou have to take control of him.
Control means financial, sexual or psychological control… This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase”
– CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on the medical condition of the President of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez.
What a noisy mess.
Even worse, contrary to public disclosures, maybe bordering on near-sarcasm:
Ironically, considering the present circumstances, Stratfor was trying to get into what it called the leak-focused “gravy train” that sprung up after WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan disclosures :
“[Is it] possible for us to get some of that ’leak-focused’ gravy train ?
This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing.
And we have something to offer that the IT security companies don’t, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know better than anyone on the planet… Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of ´leak-focused’ network security that focuses on preventing one’s own employees from leaking sensitive information…
In fact, I’m not so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution.”
These files will be pored over in the coming days and a lot of disturbing, and most-likely illegal stuff will surface, and will once again display how ugly Americans can be when they think their shit doesn’t stink, or worse, they have no shit.
And it’s this American attitude that’s fueling the chaos in Afghanistan right now — seven US servicemen were injured this weekend in not-quiet-at-all riots over the supposed burning by American personnel of the Islam holy book, the Qur’an.
Although President Obama has publicly apologized for the Qur’an burnings, the GOP presidential nit-twits jumped Obama hard on it — Rick Santorum slobbering the move “shows weakness;” Newt Gingrich proclaiming the apology is akin to “surrender;” and Mitt Romney called it an “enormous error.”
Between them there’s not even a bird-sized shit for brains.
And there’s always more to a story that smacks the ears.
From the New York Times, though buried way down in the story:
Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.
“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.
“They always admit their mistakes,” he said.
“They burn our Koran and then they apologize.
You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”
Sorry.
Glenn Greenwald adds this kicker-thought on the subject:
Along those lines, just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump.
Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them?
Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?
Indeed again.
And the shooting on Saturday of two US military officers in a supposedly secure Afghan government ministry has also displayed US compassion — NOT!
Juan Cole this morning enlightens a bit:
Two US military advisers to the Ministry of the Interior were shot dead on Saturday by an Afghan security man.
It turns out, according to recovered security tapes, that they were watching footage of the protests and cursing out the protesters, then speaking badly of the Qur’an.
The Afghan argued with them that they should be more respectful, and when the argument escalated, he drew on them and shot them both dead.
If this story is true, it distills the arrogance and bigotry of some US personnel in Afghanistan (they are in someone else’s country).
They didn’t deserve to meet that end, but cursing the Qur’an in a Muslim country in front of a local Muslim is about the most foolhardy act I can imagine.
The strong evangelical element in some parts of the US military makes it particularly unsuited to more or less running a largely illiterate Muslim nation that is deeply religious.
Evangelicals are the American group that has the highest disapproval of Islam.
Is the GOP listening, or in a cone of don’t-give-shit silence.
And what makes the whole Afghan situation even worse is the horrible horse shit heaved up by hard-case military assholes.
In this instance, Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who called the shooting of the two officers as “outrageous,” without any background on it.
And claimed in his air of authority, the incident reveals the “shallow impact [the United States] has on this primitive society.”
A total jerk — one must remember McCaffrey was among those so-called ‘military analysts‘ that bullied the fog-brained US public into supporting the Iraq invasion — the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for exposing the Pentagon Message Machine, on which Barry was a major player.
From the NYT story on the good general: Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.
Silence as we can see is not golden, though, one has to be an artist of some type in order to keep a lid on, or maintain the DL, of any news that might filter down to the US’ unwashed, near-ignorant masses.
Do we live in a vacuum, and if so, can anyone hear us screaming?
Negative Funny
Filed Under Bullshit, Politics | Leave a Comment
There’s something way-perverted here — happiness is a warm gun.
Best. Parent. Ever. Tommy Jordan for president.
That’s the response Jordan is getting from tens of thousands of people on the Internet after a YouTube video featuring the North Carolina dad shooting up his 15-year-old daughter’s laptop with a .45 went viral this week.
Sure, there’s a shitload of frustration out there, but dude WTF — that freakin’ laptop ain’t the problem.
(Illustration found here).
As a single parent who raised five kids — four them daughters — the whole scene is demanding, but at least one parent has to be an adult.
And one don’t need to be a gun-slinging asshole to make a point.
This crazed frustration is also warming up the workplace — even on the eve of heart-love day.
Economics and the sense of either drowning or maybe just treading water in a most-unequal financial situation could lead to all kinds of bad shit:
A tight job market, combined with stagnant wages and less upward mobility can leave workers feeling frustrated.
In this environment, animosity between coworkers stemming from personality conflicts, differing work styles, or competition can be amplified, resulting in a wide variety of workplace problems, from lost productivity to increased and open hostility, according to the workplace experts at global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
“It is no secret that as the economy continues to recover from a deep recession many workplaces are understaffed and overworked.
“With the pace of hiring still relatively slow, a lot of workers feel stuck and may be more sensitive to the negative aspects of their jobs,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
“It might be a stretch to call workplaces a ‘powder keg,’ but managers should be on the lookout for signs of worker hostility and be prepared to act.
Often in situations where managers are aware of a problem between two or more coworkers, they merely look the other way, letting the employees work it out amongst themselves.
This may work in some situations, but in others, this hands-off approach can have disastrous results,” said Challenger.
One just needs to chill the f*ck out.
And some phoney frustration, and a lot of drama-queen anger will be coming quick today from Republicans as President Obama unveils his 2013 federal budget, a big cha-chang will be an aim to tax the wealthy, making the rich pay their “far share,” however: But given the intense acrimony in Washington, especially on budget issues, few provisions in the document are likely to ever become law.
Especially upsetting the rich — the GOP won’t have it.
So says nasty-tongued US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on TV yesterday — McConnell is so full of himself, he’ll introduce the budget bill himself:
“I offered President Obama’s budget, since the Democrats didn’t seem to want to develop their own budget and didn’t want to vote for his. His budget was defeated 97 to nothing,” McConnell said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
…
“Senate Democrats haven’t passed a budget in a thousand days, even though the law requires it,” said McConnell.
Mainly because Republicans say NO to everything that comes from anywhere near Obama.
And it’s all dumb, as witnessed by a speech this weekend by pollster Scott Rasmussen at the GOP CPAC crazy show, who told the knotty crowd they’re way too nasty.
From Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:
Rasmussen had put his finger on a major problem for Republicans in 2012, and conservatives in particular:
At a time when the national mood has begun to improve, they remain nattering nabobs of negativism.
At CPAC, any hint of a “positive step” was buried in vitriol.
And Paul Krugman in his post this morning at at the New York Times says about the same thing, but calling the GOP problem as ‘Severe Conservative Syndrome.’
The money bit:
How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality?
For it was not always thus.
After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!
My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad.
For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.
When one has a mean spirit, it’s hard to soften the edges.
History Whacked
Filed Under Cloud gazing, history, Media | Leave a Comment
Old men, they are now — the big three of the scandal of scandals.
The Washington Post blog The Reliable Source reported on a chance encounter in late January of John Dean, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., and the quick whiplash of history — this June will be 40 years, a generation in Biblical terms, of the infamous Watergate burglary which changed the face of American life.
(Illustration: Bob Woodward, John Dean, Carl Bernstein — found here).
According to the Post, Dean was in California for a legal conference and with Cleveland attorney Jim Robenalt (who has credit for the above pix) decided to visit the Nixon Library:
Well, soon as they walked in, who should they see in the lobby but Carl Bernstein.
It was too crazy of a coincidence, so Robenalt blew his pal’s cover and approached the former Washington Post journalist.
“I said, ‘You don’t know me, but I’m here with John Dean.”
Bernstein grabbed Dean and walked him around the corner to. . . Bob Woodward.
The reporting duo who broke the Watergate story 40 years ago this spring (which, ultimately, sent Dean to prison for a couple months), were in the neighborhood for a speaking gig and also happened to drop by.
The guys sat down and talking about the old days, consulting a timeline display nearby — and it sounds like their fellow tourists felt like it was worth the price of admission:
“There was practically a flash mob around us,” Robenalt said, “everyone taking photos.”
Celebrities of history, with a nowadays touch (‘flash mob‘), but maybe this is a history far, far away and long, long ago.
Most everybody has heard about Watergate — of course, ‘Gate‘ has been added to just about every kind of scandal since then, i.e., Troopergate (Sara Palin shit), Bumpergate (a NASCAR uproar), and even Nipplegate, sometimes called Boobgate (Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl) — but the reality behind the event has most-obviously been lost in the fog of time.
Immediate history appears to mirror a conclusion that the actual Watergate scandal was nothing compared to the nowadays.
In the words of ‘gonzo journalism‘ originator and one of the most interesting of US writers ever, Hunter S. Thompson: “I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal.”
Thompson was talking about George Jr. and his bunch — even commenting in one of his last articles, that Nixon was the “good old days.”
Currently, however, it’s a horror.
Right now, there’s not much to journalism itself with newspapers folding and national (and even local) media becoming a horn for government, with few exceptions.
And government is headed into a direction Nixon and his cronies couldn’t even imagine.
(Illustration found here).
In 2012, the shoe has found its way to the other foot.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week revealed that apparently Democrats have become Republicans.
The survey shows that 70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
He pledged during his first week in office to close the prison within a year, but he has not done so.
Even the party base appears willing to forgive that failure.
The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of President George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.
Glenn Greenwald expanded on the poll in a post last Wednesday.
The money quote:
Repulsive liberal hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo.
A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist — even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. whacked
But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process.
As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?”
That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.
A shame history has twisted back even more nefariously via a guy who gained hearts and votes on the concept of ‘change.’
During the opening stages of the Watergate scandal I was in J-school at the University of Florida.
Teachers and classmates watched the drama unfold (during the Senate Watergate hearing, where John Dean made his big splash — his comment, there’s a “cancer growing on the presidency,” became infamous — I had the mumps and spent a great deal of time in front of the TV) and wondered how it would all play out in the end.
One conclusion was that it was way-good for journalism.
In fact, after graduation and employment at a newspaper in Alabama, I kind of fashioned myself as a reporter after Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Carl Bernstein in ‘All the President’s Men‘ — looking sloppy and chain-smoking cigarettes.
And I was good, taking to a newsroom like a duck to water.
However, that was long, long ago in a weird place far, far away — the really, truly ‘good old days.’