Pass This On…
Filed Under Orwellian, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment
Must-read on the twisted-horror of the US Senate health care bill at FireDogLake.
Politics and the human condition.
Lyin’ through his ass
Filed Under War & Politics | Leave a Comment
The Iraqi saga is a horror-eyed bristle of lies.
In the run-up to the invasion, all kinds of fear-mongering lies created a sense of urgency, which quickly evaporated when those woeful tales of woe were shot-to-bits by reality.
We’re familiar with George Jr. and Dick Cheney’s intentional falsehoods — “deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate” — but what about others involved in the criminal and immoral enterprise.
Today in the UK’s Sunday Telegraph:
Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled MPs and the public throughout 2002 when he claimed that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change” and that there had been no planning for military action.
In fact, British military planning for a full invasion and regime change began in February 2002.
The need to conceal this from Parliament and all but “very small numbers” of officials “constrained” the planning process.
The result was a “rushed”operation “lacking in coherence and resources” which caused “significant risk” to troops and “critical failure” in the post-war period.
Operations were so under-resourced that some troops went into action with only five bullets each.
Others had to deploy to war on civilian airlines, taking their equipment as hand luggage.
Some troops had weapons confiscated by airport security.
Commanders reported that the Army’s main radio system “tended to drop out at around noon each day because of the heat.”
One described the supply chain as “absolutely appalling,” saying: “I know for a fact that there was one container full of skis in the desert.”
…
The leaked documents bring into question statements that Mr Blair made to Parliament in the build up to the invasion.
On July 16 2002, amid growing media speculation about Britain’s future role in Iraq, Mr Blair was asked: “Are we then preparing for possible military action in Iraq?”
He replied: “No.”
Twisted-Tony Blair just lied through his ass.
In the pile of leaked documents to the Telegraph — classified verbatim transcripts, reports and papers — was the actual situation of the British forces: The analysis of the war phase describes it as a “significant military success” but one achieved against a “third-rate army.” It identifies a long list of “significant” weaknesses and notes: “A more capable enemy would probably have punished these shortcomings severely.”
Reminds one of Donald Rumfeld’s reply to all those young US boots-on-the-ground who were getting killed or blown apart by inadequate military equipment: “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
He added: “If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up.”
Pity the heartless lie.
And one does wonder if any of these lying bastards on both sides of the pond will ever pay the piper for creating a horror story for the ages.
Blog Thyself
Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment
“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903
Writing in this modern age is still the same as in Twain’s day, only quicker and with a lot more adjectives, a word-group the Huck-n-Tom author found abhorrent.
However, we much-so live in an multi-adjective world (notice the much-used hyphen modifiers) as the data and information availability defies the imagination — the red links in this post testifies, but whether any kind of truth is at those links so poses the real question.
Truth is in the eye of the reader and should be in the mind of the writer — even authentic, good fiction is just truth self-created.
(Illustration found here).
Nowadays, writing takes two forms — no longer just the piece of paper/book held in one’s hand, but there’s also a virtual version, found only online.
And having now performed in newspapers and online, the latter is the more personal, especially since no financial compensation is part of the literary mix and no deadlines other than the inherent, obsessive desire to write and have at least one dumb-ass read it, but sadly, has no newsroom — blogging is most likely the equivalent of a professional diary in the form of journalism practiced under the auspices of some-type literature.
Of course, I speak of real writing/journalism/literature — anyone can get a blog, currently there must be a hundred-quadrillion blogs with even a blog for bloggers — but there’s a fairly-insufficient, short-list (how about that for adjective-hyphenated modifiers) of readable blogs where there’s decent writing and good journalism.
If one seeks current events in a somewhat fervent way, there’s only about a dozen blogs or so to be visited on a daily basis and maybe twice that number on a semi-regular basis — I tend to favor those sites with an emphasis on reality, which are few in number.
The MSM has to be verified and most of the time, that’s found strictly online (one extremely-glaring example is the New York Times Pentagon pundit story, on which the MSM’s TV side performed a near-complete black-out).
Blogging is what I do — and it fits.
According to that most-massive of information sites, Wikipedia: Blogging is not a full-time job for most bloggers, nor is it their main source of income. A blogger can also be a doctor, a mechanic, a lawyer or a musician, and thus bloggers typically maintain a variety of professions for which the act of blogging is their communicative outlet with the public.
My “full-time job” in this so-called “variety of professions” is with a northern California liquor store and currently I’m in a kind of the OJTing manager — our long-time manager suffered a stroke and I was tapped to take her job.
She’s doing fine and recuperating well, but not coming back.
Hence not many blog posts the past two weeks — way-too tired to do much more than surf the major news sites.
And, of course, since there’s not many visitors here, not a great crowd has been disappointed when they arrive at Compatible Creatures and it’s the same old shit.
But what the heck?
I’m a freakin’ blogger!
From Andrew Sullivan in a September 2004 piece in Time magazine:
The critics of blogs cite their lack of professionalism. Piffle. The dirty little secret of journalism is that it isn’t really a profession. It’s a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience, and you’re all set. You get better at it merely by doing it — which is why fancy journalism schools are, to my mind, such a waste of time.
Indeed.
Although a graduate of the fairly-prestigious University of Florida’s J-school (In 1974, supposedly listed second behind number-one Columbia), I OJTed my first journalism job as police reporter — J-school didn’t really teach real-life and the only thing I got from UF was the sheepskin.
One doesn’t really need a telephone to be a good journalist (either print or online), but you sure-as-shit require “a conscience.”
Journalism movies are rare, and those portraying a conscience, rarer still — at least one, Shattered Glass, displayed none at all.
And just last night, I watched a DVD version of the newest, State of Play, a real-enjoyable twisting thriller set in a big-time MSM newsroom with a kind of subtext of new media vs old — and in this case ending happily, the veteran print journalist leaving a late-night, on-deadline newsroom nearly hand-in-hand with the newbie blogger.
Damn-good film, fun to watch and kind of neat to see a reporter as a character in what is way-more an action movie, or shoot-’em-up whodunit then the rigid journalism-first kind of flick, such as, All the President’s Men, or Good Night, and Good Luck.
Read a review of “State of Play” from HuffPost if you wish.
Print guy and blogger gal: Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams
One disappointment in “State of Play” was lack of any kind of detail in the actual professional working-together of blogger and print journalist — a most-valid point if the newspaper is to survive into the Internet age.
McAdams’ blogger character seems more on site just as a tag-along to Crowe’s version of ace newspaper reporter — spunky for the newsroom — and in a near-final sequence, allows the blogger to click “send” on the big story.
Yippe do da!
The movie also seems to view blogs (and supposedly the Internet at large) as more for trash, tabloid-fueled gossip then any serious presentation of current events — wrong!
The conscience of “State of Play” is that newspaper guys, print journalists, want the last thread in the needlework of a story to be all laid bare — the end is worth what it took to get there.
And what would Mark Twain say about all this media?
He’d most-likely have viewed it as weird, but inevitable.
From 1880’s A Telephonic Conversation:
Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, — a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer.
You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return.
You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay.
You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.
Extra! Extra!
Now everyone is the other end of the wire.
Moral Slaughter
Filed Under Overview | Leave a Comment
End of the week and bad war-related shit.
Beyond the US domestic horror of Joe Lieberman, military exercises in the Middle East are becoming way-more frightening than any paranormal or blair-witch fantasy could envision, creating a deep hole-drain in anything that remains of a moral fiber in the facade of a so-called American Ideal.
The righteous, or “just war,” is a lie perpetrated since day one — no such thing as a good murder, despite all the literary and artistic rhetoric babbled-out by political people and pundits pointing at the dire need to make the planet collateral damage.
In March 2003, at the time of the Iraq invasion, I was an editor/writer at a twice-weekly in Central California and responsible for the lay-out (and content) of several pages, including ones for religious activities, church services, specials and the like — after interviewing some local preachers/lay people on the religious/moral grounds for the war, I came away with the distinct impression that anyone with any sense of ethics would know the Iraqi endeavor was near-pure bad and appeared to signal a significant schism in history.
Of course, not that many people truly and fully understood back then (I didn’t) the true terror of George Jr.’s White House — the near fabrications, the outright ‘Curveball‘ lies, the twisted-torture of the US Constitution — and only some gut instinct told me these assholes were so-full of shit.
However, what I really didn’t comprehend was US-home-grown war criminals on a grand scale spawning two horrifying endless wars in faraway places as part-and-parcel of a long, freakin’-ass long war on terror — a worldwide and timeless conflict created by the US that feeds off itself.
And history is indeed now rampant, one would have to be a total dumb ass not to realize 9/11 and its after-effects of Afghanistan and Iraq made the world a much-more strange and violent place.
Even a pastor within George Jr.’s own supposed Christian denomination, Methodist, told me the Iraqi invasion did not fall under the premise of the “just war” doctrine — in fact some Texas Methodists crafted a petition/letter of complaint against George Jr. (“a member of Park Hill United Methodist Church (UMC) in Dallas, Texas”) and his boss, Dick Cheney (“local membership unknown”) for being “undeniably guilty of at least four chargeable offenses…crime, immorality, disobedience to the Order and Discipline of The UMC, and dissemination of doctrine contrary to the established standards of doctrine of The UMC. For these offenses, we the undersigned call for an immediate and public act of repentance by the respondents. If the respondents do not reply with sincere and public repentance for their crimes, we demand that their membership in the United Methodist Church be revoked until such time that they sincerely and publicly repent.”
Hahaha…gotcha! Hell first will freeze way-over.
Meanwhile, back up to speed: Bad wars getting way-badly worse, especially in the nefarious Af-Pak zone of insanity.
Wednesday morning, Taliban gunman staged an explosive pre-dawn raid on a guest house in Kabul, shooting-to-death six UN workers and a couple of Afghan security people — the scene was anti-pretty.
According to the New York Times:
The police said one of the victims, a woman, had been shot in the head, and another burned to death.
A cellphone video taken by a security official and seen by a reporter showed just the head and torso of a third victim, apparently cut in half when one of the attackers detonated his suicide vest.
And to add JP4 to an already-roaring fire, the Times has also reported the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, has been on the payroll of the US CIA the past eight years — since the October 2001 invasion.
WTF!
Key long-range quote from the brothers Karzai story:
“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.
No shit sherlock!
And says it all for Gen. Stan McNasty (oops, sorry, I always do that) McChrystal’s big, bright idea of a counterinsurgency program — the so-called ‘population-centric strategy’ — to turn the tide of an already-lost operation, to give the US a victory in that endless war on terror.
The good general is all mouth and no brains — even with all the NATO troops (about a 100,000) and the vaporous-like Afghan forces (from 50,000 upwards to 200,000, but mostly not many at all according to some experts) against the suspected 25,000 (tops) Taliban, a 12-to-one ratio in favor of NATO, there is still no sign of any kind of tide turning.
And what’s worse, dumb-simple bombs are beating the shit out of the most-powerful military in all of history — IEDs killed eight US GIs on Tuesday in several incidents in south Afghanistan.
From Wired’s Danger Room blog on these “dumb-down” devices:
We’ve become accustomed to the idea that a weapon’s potency grows with its sophistication: “Smart” munitions are more effective than dumb ones; supersonic jets can shoot down slower planes.
But Afghanistan and its IEDs are proving the exception to that rule.
Couple dumb with bad terrain and you’ve got the mixing of a hell-hole.
Due to the asinine US military set-up in a rugged, jagged, mountainous Afghanistan, placing outposts way out in country, nearly-non-accessible except by air — by helicopter.
As insurgents plant sometimes up to 100 IEDs a day, and although the military is throwing a lot of money and time to figure how to better detect booby-traps (the Danger Room post above goes into some detail on that aspect), the only way to move troops and supplies is by whirlybird.
A good look at this dangerous situation — three choppers went down on Monday (two collided) killing 14 Americans — can be found at a Popular Mechanics piece from last April, which proclaimed: “Afghanistan is hell on helicopters: Temperature swings can ruin seals and gaskets; towering mountains with low air density sap power from spinning rotor blades and engines; dusty deserts gum up hydraulics; and enemy combatants pepper the machines with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire.”
A terrible place to be right now.
And right now, President Obama is deciding what to do with Afghanistan — in reality he’s weighting how much of an troop escalation should be allowed — as McNasty (oops) McChrystal wants at least 40,000 additional US troops, and up to 80,000 to do the job right, but now it seems the tortured nitwit general will end up getting far less fodder for his foolish fancies.
Obama, according to reports, will attempt a less ambitious plan in which 10 population centers and the Helmand River Valley in the south will see an increase in troops, a “compromise” it’s been called instead of trying to beat the Taliban out of the bushes all across the country — supposedly about 16,000 new GIs.
Much to Obama’s extreme-near-future misfortune, the only real course for the US in Afghanistan is withdrawal, a concept the White House has said is not even an option, which in turn creates a self-defeating, no-way-out strategy into a box canyon without exit signs or doorways — expect horror stories from there soon.
(Obama will have to curtail activities like his heartfelt photo op this morning at Dover AFB as the bodies of US peoples killed overseas were returned home — there will be way-too many of them).
One new twist in the ugly Afghan saga is Matthew Hoh, the first publicly-known U.S. official to resign in protest over the Afghan war.
“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel.
“I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”
Much has been made of Hoh’s resignation, which paints not a good picture of the US/Afghan scenario and a lot of commentators, politicians and other sorts have lofted Hoh way up high as a banner for getting the US out of the country.
He was on PBS’ News Hour this evening, saying “I don’t believe al-Qaeda is coming back…” in addressing the fear the terror group would return and set up camp if the US pulled out, and a troop increase would only “fuel the insurgency” — good talk, though nothing really new, for the US getting the shit gone (I didn’t take notes).
One former Afghan legislator called Hoh “A Great American Patriot”.
Glenn Greenwald gets in on the act with a post found here.
Even Garrison Keillor came out of the smooth-voiced woods in honor of Hoh, ending an opinion piece in The New York Times: Time to move on. Tell the others. It’s a brand-new day. Let us start making our way on out of Afghanistan, Mr. President.
What’s been missed is the moral slaughter involved in these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was criminal and immoral from the get-go.
One quote from Hoh in the original Post story has not been much touched upon in which he discussed his time in Iraq and there were no qualms about killing, death and destruction there:
“There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
“I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”
Nothing immoral and bad about Iraq — a complete criminal enterprise.
No one seems to feel anything about the Iraqi invasion being a war crime, immoral and really, really bad.
I didn’t catch that deeper, much-more scarier vein of verbiage in that last quote of Hoh’s until I read Chris Floyd’s most-excellent post on the subject.
Floyd always looks at stuff at a more truthful, less hampered way (he’s one of my daily reads — or when he posts, which is just about daily) and his take on Hoh begins first with an examination of an interview with Jane Mayer, which appeared in the New Yorker online, and concerned the use of unmanned drones and its effect on Pakistan.
Meyer replies that although about 10 top bad al-Qaeda guys have been killed, a shitload of ordinary folks have been slaughtered to get them.
Floyd counters:
What is astonishing about this is that the interview doesn’t end there, in a roar of outrage from Mayer and her interviewer: “They’ve killed hundreds of civilians!”
Hundreds of Pakistani civilians, men, women and children with no involvement whatsoever in war or terrorism; just ordinary people living their lives as best they can — just like your neighbor, just like your mother, just like you…or just like the people killed on September 11, whose deaths are used as an eternal justification for war and bloodshed on a global scale by the American state.
But these drone-murdered Pakistanis — these human beings, these fathers and mothers, these grandparents, these toddlers, these brothers and sisters — their lives are just statistics to be coldly weighed in the calibrations of imperial policy.
The “bad news” about their deaths is not that they were murdered, not that these utterly defenseless men, women and children were blown to shreds without warning, without the slightest chance of escape, by flying robots controlled by unseen hands a world away; no, the “bad news” is that these that these killing might possibly hamper America’s “counterinsurgency program”…
And Floyd’s take on Hoh:
Hoh doesn’t like the war crime in Afghanistan because it doesn’t seem to be working out too well — not because it’s wrong.
Mayer doesn’t like the CIA Predator program of targeted assassination and massive “collateral damage” because it’s too unregulated, too opaque, and we need to find ways to make it work better — more like the Pentagon program of targeted assassination and massive “collateral damage.”
Floyd pulls insight from another most-excellent writer, Arthur Silber, who blogs at Once Upon a Time… and although he can really become involved in his subject matter, he also cuts to the bone of reality.
In his post regarding Hoh and the US, Silber nails the bottom line:
The critical facts are few in number, and remarkably easy to understand: Iraq never threatened the U.S. in any serious manner.
Our leaders knew Iraq did not threaten us.
Despite what should have been the only fact that mattered, the U.S. invaded and occupied, and still occupies, a nation that never threatened us and had never attacked us.
Under the applicable principles of international law and the Nuremberg Principles, the U.S. thus committed a monstrous, unforgivable series of war crimes.
Those who support and continue the occupation of Iraq are war criminals — not because I say so, but because the same principles that the U.S. applies to every other nation, but never to the U.S. itself, necessitate that judgment and no other.
While it may be true that some “dudes” threatened Hoh’s life and the lives of those with whom he served, Hoh could never have been threatened in that manner but for the fact that he was in Iraq as part of a criminal war of aggression.
In other words, he had no right to be in Iraq in the first place.
And if he had not been, he would never have been in a position to “whack[] a bunch of guys.”
Highly recommend both Floyd and Silber — both more intelligently-eloquent than I.
‘Net Virus Hoax as Hoax
Filed Under Media | Leave a Comment
A few scant seconds can mean the difference between truth and a lie.
Such as the case of Desiree Jennings, a 25-year-old training to become a Washington Redskins cheerleader, who has claimed the noted swine-flu vaccine she took last August gave her a rare, but terrible disease.
And from that came the “flu girl hoax” that spread across the Internet — see one example here.
A big problem, however, might lie in some kind of lie.
Sharp-eyed blogger Eric Metze might have uncovered a glitch:
I’ve used a web service called Splicd to highlight these five seconds of the original two minute piece from Inside Edition.
In this clip, you will see/hear a glitch in the video.
This glitch causes the narrator to say, “Doctors say what happened to Desire should [glitch] discourage people from getting a flu shot.”
Now listen to this longer clip so you can hear the glitch in context.
It’s obvious that the doctors say that even though this happened to the young woman, people should not be discouraged from getting the flu shot.
But considering how that clip is edited, it’s not exactly clear what they mean unless you happen to catch it.
…
What does this mean? It means that someone took the original Inside Edition article, chopped out the word “not”, and provided physical copies for people to upload. There are dozens (hundreds?) of people actively spreading an obvious propaganda virus that was edited by an anonymous person and injected into the veins of the internet.
Another Fox News moment — Run with a falsehood no matter the facts.