Afghan villagers who witnessed the recent massacre in Kandahar province say that it was not a lone marine, but rather a group of drunken marines.”They were all drunk and shooting all over the place,” Reuters cites Agha Lala, a villager in Kandahar’s Panjwayi district.

Lala’s neighbor Haji Samad lost all of his 11 relatives in the rampage, including children and grandchildren. He claims Marines “poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.”

The Pentagon reflexively lies about these things, and will spend far more money and time covering up the incident than investigating. The “lone gunman” notion is quaint.
Continue reading “USA: The planet’s lone nut” →

Courtesy Juan Cole:

We are spending the next month in Phoenix, Arizona, in a house that backs up to South Mountain Park. It was an impulsive move I made a couple of months ago as I grieved the loss of my two brothers. I thought – “To hell with it! Live!” All three of my brothers died before reaching 70 (Joe 58, Steve 67, Tom 69 years and 11 months). I’m going to break that record, shatter the 70 barrier. It’s an eight year stretch ahead of me. *

We’ll be hiking the desert, taking in spring training. Two sets of Bozeman friends have houses down here, and a third couple will be spending a week with us. Does it get any better than this?
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*I had a physical last week, and the doctor told me that parents of daughters tend to live longer than others. I have four, so maybe I should shoot for age 100?

This exchange caught my eye, from 4&20 Blackbirds. It’s in the comments after a post by Lizard regarding a Montana candidate for Denny Rehberg’s House seat, Franke Wilmer. Wilmer had claimed, as is so easy to do without evidence, that the number one threat to our national security are terrorist attacks.

Turner: I’m not sure what your quibble with Wilmer is. Is there a greater threat to national security (if we understand this to mean an action leading to the deaths of large numbers of Americans) is terrorist attacks?

What would that threat be? What is Franke missing?

lizard19 terrorism is a tactic, that’s my first quibble. it’s used both by foreigners and by US citizens, so it’s a threat that shouldn’t be relegated solely to the area of foreign policy, where terrorism is used to justify projecting US imperial ambitions. in terms of actual deaths caused, not having access to affordable health care is a bigger threat than terrorist attacks.

and I thought I was pretty clear in voicing my concern over Franke’s endorsement of Obama’s military doctrine. obviously my opinions are perceived as pretty radical to some when it comes to criticizing Obama and the whole left’s obsession with humanitarian interventions, but if terrorism is such a concern, then actions taken by this administration to actually STRENGTHEN the boogemen [sic] in al-Qaeda should be examined just a bit more closely, don’t ya think?
Continue reading “Inconceivable …” →

From John Cleese

I think the problem with people like this [he was asked about Christine O’Donnell, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck] is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are. You see, if you’re very very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you are. There’s a wonderful bit of research by a guy named Dunning at Cornell, (who’s a friend of mine, I’m proud to say), who has pointed out that in order to know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. Which means, and this is terribly funny, that if you are absolutely no good at something at all, that you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely no good at it. And this explains not just Hollywood, but almost the entirety of Fox News.

I might add that the people he refers to are baseline stupid, barely sentient, but that there are higher degrees in this knightly order that are cloaked in better jargon.

In the map above, the blue area in the middle is not sea or ocean, but rather Iran. It is surrounded by hostile forces, Each star representing a US military base (I count 41), and this does not take into account the US Fifth Fleet, comprised of 25,000 personnel and twenty vessels. There are also reports that a US nuclear submarine and destroyer are on their way to the Gulf. Iran gets testy, now and then, as we all know they are warlike and irrational, right? One might say that Iran presents a serious threat to all of those hostile bases, troops, weapons and naval forces aligned against it.

From Alex Cockburn (Olivia Wilde’s uncle) at Counterpunch (“Or your lying eyes”):

Meanwhile, on another front, the networks are ready. A CounterPunch informant reports:

“I was visiting ABCNews the other day to see a friend who works on graphics. When I went to his room, he showed me all the graphics he was making in anticipation of the Israeli attack on Iran; not just maps, but flight patterns, trajectories, and 3-d models of U.S. aircraft carrier fleets.

“But what was most disturbing – was that ABC, and presumably other networks, have been rehearsing these scenarios for over 2 weeks, with newscasters and retired generals in front of maps talking about missiles and delivery systems, and at their newsdesks – the screens are emblazoned with “This is a Drill” to assure they don’t go out on air – (like War of the Worlds).

“Then reports of counter-attacks by Hezballah in Lebanon with rockets on Israeli cities – it was mind-numbing. Very disturbing – when pre-visualization becomes real.”

Another CounterPuncher emails us:

“Just a quick possible scoop for the news room – I have a neighbor who bounces for a Seattle bar, and he had some very rowdy US service men in the bar the other night. When he asked them what was up, they told him they were being deployed to the mid-east as a front-running group for an operation in Iran.”

The whole piece is disturbing, as Cockburn describes the utter chaos and brutality going on in Libya; the efforts to arm and undermine the regime in Syria (please, if anyone counters by saying the the Syrians are oppressive and that the US cares about that, the door is right to your right); and the virtual certainty that the US has given Israel the green light to attack Iran.

I have to say that I am feeling fear right now for the millions of people the US is about to kill in cold blood, and revulsion in the delight that so many Americans will take in it. This will include Democrats, as it is Obama who will be overseeing this slaughter.

The advertising industry learned decades ago that there is no money to be made by appealing to our outer selves. All advertising is subliminal. The surface message, the croaking frog, merely conceals the underlying appeal to some primal motive.

It is no different with the political parties. We only have two, and they are not ideological camps. They are merely brands. I clipped this yesterday from Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the state of mind of liberals in supporting Obama as he has morphed before our eyes into the new Bush. GG cites Tom Paine from The Age of Reason:

[I]t is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

We are not honest in ourselves. We profess to believe things we do not believe, and do not examine our own motives. Consequently, as I stand off with (mostly) Democrats who profess to know that their party is ideologically superior to the other, I marvel at the impenetrable shield they have built. It’s a fortress against reason, a means of validation, and a tribute to the innate irrationality of our species.

But there are 7 billion of us, so it works. If we really thought for ourselves, as we all profess to do, we’d probably not be here to do that thinking.

There is no Drug War – I don’t know why people cannot see that. In foreign policy, the War merely another name for counterinsurgency, as used in Colombia. That’s known as “murder” for the people of Colombia, as this country uses the Drug War as a cover for operations designed to murder rebels down there. Since all of that started before 9/11, it’s still considered part of the Drug War. Had it started after that date, it would be called part of the “War on Terror,” equally phony. (The Colombia operation is all nicely summed up in a book by Doug Stokes, “America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia”.)

Domestically, the Drug War serves other purposes, such as invasion of privacy and control of minorities. For instance, even though we know that marijuana is not harmful and is widely used, marijuana laws are still vigorously enforced … against certain groups. The popular HBO TV series The Wire highlighted this very well – use of drug laws to target blacks for surveillance and imprisonment, never beginning to stem the flow of drugs, but allowing police to keep a wire on their activities. This is a byproduct of the Civil Rights era, when law enforcement wanted to curtail protests. Imprisonment of black leaders was a good tool. (Suppose that drug enforcers were concerned about cocaine use … would they have wires all over Wall Street? Not likely. That is not a targeted group.)
Continue reading “Missoula adopts Cuban surveillance techniques” →

The US military us a massive organization with an unlimited budget. It is too big to comprehend. If its building has five sides, one of those sides must house the people whose job it is to manage public opinion – the lie factory. The US Military is on a mission and has clear objectives. The dissembling branch is tasked with the job of making up cover stories.

WMD’s in Iraq was such a cover story. They knew they did not exist. If they did, they would not have attacked. Saddam Hussein, as it turns out, was a stupid man. He disarmed his country, literally inviting a US invasion.
Continue reading “The lie factory” →

Two types of events that should always raise eyebrows in national and international politics: Important people killed in small plane crashes, and convenient suicides*.

A Washington Post story about an anthrax settlement case (Stevens v. US) that was settled by the government with a $2.5 million payment. After settlement, the Justice Department tried to file a notice of errata seeking to correct evidence it had presented that contradicted its own findings in the case of Bruce E. Ivins, the dead man who was pinned with the 2001 anthrax killings. One part of the justice department claimed that Ivins’ work could not have been related to the attacks, and that the strain used bore much more similarity to a strain developed by laboratories in Ohio. I would have said Iowa. Typo? How many fricking anthrax production facilities do we have?

Bruce Ivins was accused of being the anthrax killer, and then committed suicide. Case closed.
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*The reader might note with this link that the Boston Globe is doing easy journalism by speculating on mischief in a suicide in Russia, a place known to harbor evil people.