Which reminds me: There is speculation around about the reason for shutting off cell service while flying. The official reason is that it might interfere with airline navigation, which is complete hogwash. The real reason is obvious, to me anyway. The regulation came about after 9/11, and most likely is there so that people could not learn for themselves that cellular communication is impossible from moving aircraft.

Have a nice day, frightened nation! The TSA today will be fingering countless ball sacks in search of box cutters.

Here’s a riddle, the answer to which might clear up a whole lot of foggy thinking. It is this: Why is there a prison at Guantanamo?

I don’t know the answer, but do know some non-answers:

• It is not there to hold dangerous prisoners. The US routinely kills people it thinks dangerous. If they thought these people represented a true danger, they would have murdered them.
• It is not due to alleged crimes. There are no such things as crimes in this current system, only punishment. The detainees are indeed being punished, but we do not know for what purpose.
• They are not being held there for torture. They might indeed have been tortured, they might be running experiments on more effective techniques (in making lamp shades?), but if they wanted to torture these people, they would not choose a publicly known location. They would have done so at a secret site, and probably have.
• They have not been sentenced, and will only stand trial under extreme publicity. Trials cannot be public! as they might talk about their treatment, or worse yet, the fact that they had no military intelligence value, calling into question, again, the real purpose(s) for the existence of this facility.

Given what we know it is not, what could it be?

• Precedent – it could be that Gitmo was set up to establish the sovereign right to capture and detain people and hold them without judicial proceeding. This is an important element of fascism – the all-powerful state cannot be held accountable.
• They screwed up. They had ideas about running a secret torture facility there, but word got out and they had to operate it as a semi-public facility.
• Training – it could be that the prisoners there are mere window dressing, and that the real purpose is to serve as a training facility for terrorists, agents provocateur, bomb specialists and infiltrators. (If a terrorist incident happens and appears to have no strategic or tactical consequence – say a market square bomb in Beirut – the odds are that western agents are behind it. Then it does make sense – to stir unrest, scare people, and justify intervention. Most of what we call terrorist bombings originate in Langley or MI5-6 or Tel Aviv and are pulled off by low-intelligence dupes like Shoe Bomber, acting under management of western intelligence.)

It must be clear here that I do not know the answer and if it is ever revealed will probably be as surprised as anyone. Furthermore, it could be a combination of factors, all of the above and then some.

The one constant is this: They lie. We are not told anything true about anything. So speculation, even if idle, is useful.
____________
Sara Flounders, the head of the International Action Center, says Washington’s series of overseas prisons helps the US sidestep the Geneva Convention on the use of torture against prisoners.

“The idea of holding prisoners around the world in secret detention was that they were therefore, according to their twisted logic, immune to any international law, human rights law or conventions that the US had signed,” Flounders said. “The UN report said 27,000 prisoners had been held by the US in secret prisons in of course Afghanistan, Iraq, countries throughout Middle East, countries throughout Europe, in Africa; on more than 17 US ships there were secret prisons,” she added. “So this is really part of a vast scale, of thousands of people being held with absolutely no rights whatsoever and being subject to horrendous torture.”

The U.S. is indeed over.

From an interview with Jeremy Scahill and Richard Rowley about their new documentary, Dirty Wars. the two have gone underground to view the War of Terrorism first hand:

JEREMY SCAHILL: … So we had read about this night raid that took place, and it was a horrible massacre. And what happened in Gardez was that U.S. special operations forces had intelligence that there were—you know, a Taliban cell was in a—was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid this house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and another person that they killed in the house, Mohammed Daoud, turned out to be a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the U.S., including by the mercenary—or the private security company MPRI, Military Professional Resources Incorporated. They weren’t even Pashtun, the dominant—the almost exclusive ethnicity of the Taliban. They spoke Dari. And they’re—and what was happening that night was not preparing a suicide bomber; they were celebrating the birth of a child. And they were dancing and had music, and they had women without head covers on.

And they—and so the soldiers raid this house, and they kill these people. And instead of realizing that they had made a horrible mistake and that the intelligence was wrong and it resulted in these people being killed, they actually covered up the killings. And we interview the survivors of this raid, including a man who watched, while he was zip-cuffed, soldiers, American soldiers, digging bullets out of his wife’s dead body. And they then tried to—

AMY GOODMAN: And they did that because?
Continue reading “As an economy move, Americans recover used bullets for future use” →

Posting will be light here as I am off in another city visiting my new grandbabies. I am jotting this down between awakenings.

The bankruptcy of American party politics is on parade here. Here are the fatal flaws in the system:

• There is a presumption among all Democrats who post there that the people who are elected have any concern about public good once elected.
• There is no reward for such behavior, quite the opposite, people who actually swim upstream once elected are punished by loss of financial backing, bad publicity, and even well-financed primary opponents. Since wiretaps are common and every member of Congress is spied upon, most are subject to some kind of blackmail.
• But these Democrats are so emasculated as to think that weakly challenging an office holder in a primary is enough to set a bad guy like Baucus straight. He laughs about that, as do I.
• There is massive denial of the role of money in politics. You cannot get them to focus on it. I take that to mean that they know, recognize they are gelded, but would rather pretend to matter than not to matter at all.

Their only response is who, who who is my alternative to Baucus, but Baucus does nothing but respond to the punishment/reward system, as would his replacement. The bottom line in Washington is that moneyed interests punish good behavior and reward bad. All of the talk about who they are going to back, as if a new face is a remedy, makes them fools, strutting and fretting …

Somewhere in the comments far below our friend Big Swede brought us an article from Heritage, said that I would not look at it due to its source, which of course meant that I had to go look at the damned thing. Its conclusion (in 2005) was that European economies were suffering from too much government spending. It was a farce, as the authors could not separate and isolate variables, but that was also its strength. Dealing as they were with a massive data set and no meaningful way to manipulate it, the authors were free to insert their ideology to force their conclusion. The report was garbage, the science behind it the “Natelson method”, named after the self-proclaimed constitutional scholar who also self-validated in neoclassical economics. He introduced new depth and rigor into the field of confirmation bias.

Neoclassical economics is bullshit that persists due to its ideological utility. It serves power well, and so is the only economics taught at our most prestigious universities. Max Plank said that new scientific truth only triumphs because old scientists die off. The current bankruptcy of economics will persist until the Geithners, Summers and Greenspans join Milton Friedman in slumber, and that cannot happen soon enough.

Look what they are doing to us! Austerity, the “fiscal cliff” are political agendas that have their roots in bullshit economics. The stealth target is to gut our great social programs, and Democrats, please smell the coffee: your Obama is as filthy stealthy as any of them.
Continue reading “The stealth agenda of debt-based currency systems” →

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. (Voltaire)

I looked this up on the Internet to assure its validity and wound up at Ask.com. Indeed it is a genuine quote, and the following exchange took place:

Question: i couldnt understand thi thought..what does it mean?..u guyz pls explain to me this in simple words?..thanks in advance!! [sic]

Best answer chosen by voters: He is saying that people who are persuasive enough to make you believe something all logic tells you is untrue can also make you do things that your heart tells you not to do.

Take Hitler for instance. …

I stopped there thinking “Aye carumba! Bring it a little closer to home and the present, friend.”

The Rundown with Michael Brown and David Sirota on KHOW, AM 630 Denver
The Glo Show with Gloria Neal on KKZN, AM 760 Denver

Without fanfare, David Sirota has left the Denver talk radio scene. Neither he or his former bosses at Clear Channel are willing to talk about it. I have mixed emotions about this, but Budge will certainly be happy to learn of his demise, having long ago had an icy me moment with him.

Sirota is one of those voices that grates on me, like Thom Hartmann, on and on and on and would you get to the point? But I liked his morning show here in Denver, as he was not standard fare. He took Democrats to task as easily as the mirror party, and had controversial guests on like Chomsky, sports writer David Zirin, science journalist Gary Taubes and many others. He was no Democrat, and though it was never said out loud, I assume he went down at 760 because of his repeated attacks on Senator Michael Bennet, who steered the local schools into a financial disaster when employed there; and Governor John Hickenlooper, a Republican who ran as a Democrat and whom Sirota called “Howdy Doody.” I loved it when he played that theme music. I could just see “Hick,” as the Denver Post affectionately calls him, steaming.
Continue reading “David Sirota leaves AM 630 KHOW” →