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” →

On February 13 President Obama will address the nation on the State of the Union. It will be a television show, constricted in time due to short attention spans, and include some vox populi features such as real praise for fake heroes and fake praise for one or two real ones. It all adds to the illusion that we are self-governed. He’ll throw crap on the wall.

Vladimir Putin recently gave his own Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. It took a long time to read, so I imagine it must have taken well over an hour to deliver, maybe two. I cannot begin to describe its content and do it justice. But most of it could never be spoken here. I did not find any applause lines. He did say “There can be no place in politics for criminals.” If Obama were to utter that line, there would be cold, malevolent stares. He might fear for his life.