Tuesday, July 31, 2012

9/11: Journey for Truth

Written by Marta Nielsen

[Original here: http://ae911truth.org/en/news-section/41-articles/649-911-journey-for-truth.html]

Orcas Island resident Rena Patty embarks today on the journey of lifetime – a bicycle ride across America. Patty, with traveling companion Pamela Senzee from Phoenix, AZ, expects to take 90 days to reach their destination New York City. Both women are Action Group Team Leaders for the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth). Their journey is dedicated to all who have died and suffered loss on account of 9/11. Their mission is to educate the public about the scientific forensic evidence of the destruction of the three World Trade Center (WTC) hi-rises on 9/11 and to introduce people to the experts at AE911Truth.

The women have concern about the accuracy of reports produced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the government agency tasked to analyze the destruction of the WTC hi-rises on 9/11. WTC building 7 was the third hi-rise to collapse on 9/11. At 5:20 p.m., WTC 7 collapsed suddenly into its own footprint in about 6.5 seconds, the first 2.25 seconds at a rate indistinguishable from free-fall. NIST claims the building fell because of normal office fires. Structural engineers from AE911Truth requested to see the computer model used by NIST to explain the sudden collapse of WTC 7. NIST refused, saying that to release the computer model would “jeopardize public safety.” More than 1700 credentialed architects and engineers have signed the AE911Truth petition calling for an independent investigation into the destruction of the WTC hi-rises on 9/11.

On their journey, Patty and Senzee are distributing a new documentary, “9/11: Experts Speak Out.” The documentary features interviews with the most highly credentialed AE911Truth petition signers. Experts like Richard Humenn, former chief electrical engineer for the WTC complex, and Roland Angle, a civil engineer who was responsible for designing blast resistance of the Minuteman Missile silos. Patty says, “This bike trip is not about us, it’s about introducing people to these experts.” The idea of a bike ride arose two months ago as Patty and Senzee brainstormed ideas of possible legal nonviolent actions to bring attention to this issue. Patty says, “My college degree is in science. The scientific evidence presented by AE911Truth looks extremely important to me. We wanted to do something big enough to let people know how important this issue is to us.”

Anticipating traveling 40–80 miles per day, the women will cross the North Cascades on Highway 20 and continue across the Rockies in northern Montana. They expect to arrive in New York City by late October. Patty visited the WTC site in October, 2011, while participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zucotti Park in New York City.

The two are carrying basic camping gear. Connections for places to stop are drawn from the AE911Truth petition signer list. They also are carrying video equipment to film the ride. To learn more and follow their journey, visit their blog at www.911journeyfortruth.org. Donations to support the ride will be accepted through the website.

You can learn more about the tour and contribute to their effort at www.911journeyfortruth.org.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Important stuff that's not getting reported

There's a lot of it!

Bandar Bush -- looks like the Syrians killed him.

Voltaire Network says this was in retaliation for the July 18 attack that took out several Syrian generals. "His death constitutes a serious blow to the whole system of Western covert action in the Muslim world. It took Syria only eight days to mount this spectacular reprisal operation." This reportedly happened on the 26th, still no mention on CNN ...

You'd also think the media would warn us if they found out the equivalent of lead paint was deliberately being put in our toothpaste and drinking water. But here's this new study from Harvard that says fluoride lowers IQ, and hardly a peep from the lamestream media.

Few people are talking about the riots in Anaheim. There are also huge protests in Mexico over a scandalous presidential election, but you'd never know it if all you do is watch TV.

There's still a lot of talk about the Colorado shootings, but one thing you're not likely to hear much about is that Aurora's Police Chief Was Giuliani's Head of NYPD Intelligence in back in 2001. I find this rather interesting, myself.

You'd think any investigative reporter worth his salt would be all over the fact that the alleged "Batman shooter" James Holmes's father is FICO scientist Robert Holmes, and is set to testify at the LIBOR banking scandal hearings. According to this site, "He is the lead programer that created the algorithms to calculate FICO and other risk assessments. Those algorythims traced down the top 100,000 off shore bank accounts where the Tarp money went, by name and account number." Do I have independent verification on this? Unfortunately, no. I don't do this for a living. All the "real" reporters are over in London covering the Olympics right now.

Enjoy your bread and circuses!

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Let us never forget

[I saw this post at Washington's Blog today, it was like a wake-up slap in the face.]

Largest mass shooting in US history? Try three massacres on Native Americans by Carl Herman

The US government committed the largest mass shootings in national history by opening fire on peaceful families of children, the elderly, women, and men at Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, and Bloody Island. These followed repeated US treaty violations to remove Native Americans by armed military force from their lands.

Each mass shooting killed about 150 innocent people.

But the US government also averages war-murdering 500 human beings every day since 2001.

This is relatively good news because the average since 1945 is 1,000 to 1,500 every day. This totals to 20-30 million since war law made armed attack by military unlawful.

Corporate media is lying in commission and omission when they claim the recent event is the “largest mass shooting in US history.”

Had enough of these psychopath 1% liars in corporate media, government, and finance?

Demand their arrests. War-murder and lying about it is a good place to start the criminal argument.

Monday, July 23, 2012

More on the Batman Shooting

Forgive me for being a bit fixated on something that was obviously meant to be a major distraction. When something like this hits the news, you can be sure something ultimately much more important is taking place behind the scenes. But what can I say? Probably for personal reasons, MK Ultra, Manchurian Candidate type stuff fascinates me, and what went down (or *didn't* go down) in Aurora fascinates me.

I'm not a big Batman fan, but I was surprised when I discovered through a comment at VC that Batman's parents were actually killed outside the Monarch Movie Theatre. Here's what this site has to say about the Monarch Theatre: "While originally named after the Monarch Playing Card Company; a name of the factory which contributed to Joker's birth in 1951, and used to contribute to the nature of Batman and the Joker being mirror images of each other for the film, the theatre became a prominant part of Batman's origin mythos for the comics and games."

Of course, "Monarch Programming" is an extension of MK Ultra, which is an umbrella term used for the "mind control" programs conducted by the CIA.

Be sure to check out these fascinating articles about the shooting:

Was the “Batman Shooting” a Ritualistic Murder Carried Out by Mind Controlled Patsy?

TRAINING EXERCISE ON SAME DAY AS DENVER SHOOTINGS

A crazed gunman kills three in a theater in the 1986 comic “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.” Note the red (as opposed to green) hair:

Friday, July 20, 2012

I See a Dark (K)Night Rising ...

Well, well, well, what a coincidence. Only a few miles away from Columbine high school we have another lone nut, who was obviously very clever and well-informed (or at least very lucky) to have come bursting in at the exact time during a premiere movie so as to cause the maximum amount of confusion (during a violent gunshot portion of the movie), who caused even more confusion by using tear gas, and of course the whole place was dark, but immediately the authorities "just know" there was only one person involved (Manchurian Candidate type instances usually have handlers around, or use real professional killers whose handiwork is blamed on a patsy, to make sure things go down the way they are supposed to). And the movie just happened to be the premiere of one of the most widely anticipated movies of the year, already suspected to be connected with the Illuminati, Batman's Dark Knight Rising.

see: The Dark Knight - an Illuminati subliminal mindf**k!
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=50923.0

Secrets of Dark Knight Rising: Batman Blockbuster or Illuminati Mind Control Psy Op?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWlZboI5Zl4

Are we going to have to go through TSA-type searches just to go to the movies now?

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Persistent Myths of Combat

[Original here: http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/chris_hedges_war_soldiers_army_military_suicides_ptsd.php]

JULY/AUGUST 2012

War Is Betrayal

Persistent Myths of Combat

by Chris Hedges

-----------------

We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites.

The poor embrace the military because every other cul-de-sac in their lives breaks their spirit and their dignity. Pick up Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or James Jones's From Here to Eternity. Read Henry IV. Turn to the Iliad. The allure of combat is a trap, a ploy, an old, dirty game of deception in which the powerful, who do not go to war, promise a mirage to those who do.

I saw this in my own family. At the age of ten I was given a scholarship to a top New England boarding school. I spent my adolescence in the schizophrenic embrace of the wealthy, on the playing fields and in the dorms and classrooms that condition boys and girls for privilege, and came back to my working-class relations in the depressed former mill towns in Maine. I traveled between two universes: one where everyone got chance after chance after chance, where connections and money and influence almost guaranteed that you would not fail; the other where no one ever got a second try. I learned at an early age that when the poor fall no one picks them up, while the rich stumble and trip their way to the top.

Those I knew in prep school did not seek out the military and were not sought by it. But in the impoverished enclaves of central Maine, where I had relatives living in trailers, nearly everyone was a veteran. My grandfather. My uncles. My cousins. My second cousins. They were all in the military. Some of them—including my Uncle Morris, who fought in the infantry in the South Pacific during World War II—were destroyed by the war. Uncle Morris drank himself to death in his trailer. He sold the hunting rifle my grandfather had given to me to buy booze.

He was not alone. After World War II, thousands of families struggled with broken men who, because they could never read the approved lines from the patriotic script, had been discarded. They were not trotted out for red-white-and-blue love fests on the Fourth of July or Veterans Day.

The myth of war held fast, despite the deep bitterness of my grandmother—who acidly denounced what war had done to her only son—and of others like her. The myth held because it was all the soldiers and their families had. Even those who knew it to be a lie—and I think most did—were loath to give up the fleeting moments of recognition, the only times in their lives they were told they were worth something.

"For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!'" Rudyard Kipling wrote. "But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot."

Any story of war is a story of elites preying on the weak, the gullible, the marginal, the poor. I do not know of a single member of my graduating prep school class who went into the military. You could not say this about the high school class that graduated the same year in Mechanic Falls, Maine.

• • •

Geoff Millard was born in Buffalo, New York and lived in a predominately black neighborhood until he was eleven. His family then moved to Lockport, a nearby white suburb. He wrestled and played football in high school. He listened to punk rock.

"I didn't really do well in classes," he says. "But that didn't seem to matter much to my teachers."

At fifteen he was approached in school by a military recruiter.

"He sat down next to me at a lunch table," Millard says. "He was a Marine. I remember the uniform was crisp. All the medals were shiny. It was what I thought I wanted to be at the time.

"He knew my name," Millard adds. "He knew what classes I was taking. He knew more about me than I did. It was freaky, actually."

Two years later, as a senior, Millard faced graduation after having been rejected from the only college where he had applied.

"I looked at what jobs I could get," he says. "I wasn't really prepared to do any job. I wasn't prepared for college. I wasn't prepared for the workforce. So I started looking at the military. I wanted to go active duty Marine Corps, I thought. You know, they were the best. And that's what I was going to do.

"There were a lot of other reasons behind it, too," he says. "I mean, growing up in this culture you envy that, the soldier."

His grandfather, in the Army Air Corps in World War II, had died when he was five. The military honor guard at the funeral had impressed him. As a teenager, he had watched the burial of his other grandfather, also with military honors. Millard carried the folded flag to his grandmother after receiving it from the honor guard.

The pageantry has always been alluring. "We marched a long time," Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who fought in World War I, writes in Journey to the End of the Night:

There were streets and more streets, and they were all crowded with civilians and their wives, cheering us on, bombarding us with flowers from café terraces, railroad stations, crowded churches. You never saw so many patriots in all your life! And then there were fewer patriots . . . . It started to rain, and then there were still fewer and fewer, and not a single cheer, not one.

And nearly a century later it is the same.

When Millard told his mother he wanted to be a Marine, she pleaded with him to consider the National Guard. He agreed to meet with the Guard recruiter, whose pitch was effective and simple: "If you come here, you get to blow shit up."

"I'm seventeen," Millard says. "I thought being in the military was the pinnacle of what coolness was. I was just like, oh, I get to blow up stuff! I signed up right then and there on the spot. But the interesting thing he didn't tell me was that the 'shit' that he referred to would be kids.

"They don't teach you when you're in land mine school that the overwhelming percentage of victims of land mines are little kids. Because, like, in the States, a little kid will chase a soccer ball in the streets. And overseas, a little kid will chase a soccer ball into a minefield. Whether, you know, it happens in Korea or Bosnia or Iraq, kids get killed all the time by land mines. They get maimed by them. And that's just a reality of our military industrial complex. We put out these mines. We have no concern for what they do."

Not that this reality intruded on his visions of life in the military when he began.

"I just thought of it like this stuff you see on TV where cars blow up and stuff like that," he says.

For Anthony Swofford—author of Jarhead, a memoir about being a Marine in the first Gulf War—the tipping point came when the recruiter, who assured him he would be "a fine killer," told him he could book a threesome for $40 in Olongapo in the Philippines. "I'd had sex three times and been the recipient of five blow jobs and fourteen hand jobs," he writes. "I was sold."

But sometimes there's no need for a recruiting pitch. The culture does enough to make war, combat, and soldiering appealing.

Ali Aoun was born in Rochester, New York. His father is Lebanese. His mother is from the Caribbean. He says he wanted to be a soldier from the age of nine. He was raised watching war films. But even antiwar films such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket celebrate the power and seductiveness of violence. He wanted this experience as his own. He says no one pushed him into it.

"I enlisted," he explains. "It was something I always wanted to do, although I got more than I bargained for. You never really know a woman until you jump in bed with her. It's just like the Army: you never really know about it until you enlist. It's not about defending the country or serving our people. It's about working for some rich guy who has his interests."

• • •

At first Millard liked the National Guard. He was able to enroll in Niagara County Community College as a business major, where he signed up for an African American studies class thinking it would be an easy A. He read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. He read Frederick Douglass.

"It was the first time I'd really started to read," he says.

He was in the African American studies class when the attacks of 9/11 occurred. His wrestling coach came into the room to tell him he had been activated. He went home. He packed his bags. He thought about combat.

"I was pissed," he says. "I was like, they attacked us. I was ready to go to war."

But he was confused from the start.

"I really wanted to go to war with somebody, because we were attacked," he says. "But the one question I couldn't answer was, who were we going to go to war with?"

At first he did military funerals. Then he was called up for Iraq. He was by then a sergeant and was assigned to work in the office of a general with the 42nd Infantry Division, Rear Operation Center. He became, in military slang, a REMF—a rear echelon motherfucker. He was based in Tikrit, where he watched the cynical and cold manipulation of human life.

He relates the story of a traffic-control mission gone awry when an eighteen-year-old soldier made a bad decision. He was sitting atop an armored Humvee monitoring a checkpoint. An Iraqi car approached, and the soldier, fearing it might be carrying a suicide bomber, pressed the butterfly trigger on his .50 caliber machine gun. He put two hundred rounds into the car in less than a minute, killing a mother, a father, a four-year-old boy, and a three-year-old girl.

"They briefed this to the general," Millard says. "They briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says: 'If these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'

"If you lift your rifle and you look through the sights and you see a person, you can't pull the trigger," Millard says. "But if you lift your rifle and you look through the sights and you see a fucking Hadji, then what's the difference.

"That's a lot of what I saw in Iraq," he says. "These officers, high-ranking officers, generals, colonels, you know, the complete disregard. They knew all the stuff that happened. They got all the briefings. They knew what happened. And they either didn't speak up, they didn't say anything about it or they openly condoned it. When Iraqis got killed, to them, it was one less fucking Hadji around."

Millard's thirteen months in Iraq turned him into a passionate antiwar activist. He is the cofounder of the Washington, D.C., chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and served as its president for three years. He has taken part in numerous antiwar demonstrations around the country, was one of the organizers of the Winter Soldier hearings, returned to Iraq on a humanitarian aid mission in 2011, and now directs a homeless veterans initiative.

The briefing that Millard and his superiors received after the checkpoint killing was one of many. Sergeant Perry Jeffries, who served in the Fourth Infantry Division in Iraq after being called out of retirement, said the killing of Iraqi civilians at checkpoints was routine.

"Alpha troop and Balad Ruz shot somebody at least once," he says, referring to a troop detachment and to the soldiers manning a checkpoint in a small Diyala Province village. "Somebody else on what we called the Burning Oil Checkpoint, they shot somebody with a .50 cal, shot a guy once, and then several times."

Killing becomes a job. You do it. Sometimes it unnerves you. But the demons usually don't hit until you come home, when you are lying alone in bed and you don't dare to tell your wife or your girlfriend what you have become, what you saw, what you did, why you are drinking yourself into a stupor, why you so desperately want to forget your dreams.

The disillusionment comes swiftly. It is not the war of the movies. It is not the glory promised by the recruiters. The mythology fed to you by the church, the press, the school, the state, and the entertainment industry is exposed as a lie. We are not a virtuous nation. God has not blessed America. Victory is not assured. And we can be as evil, even more evil, than those we oppose. War is venal, noisy, frightening, and dirty. The military is a vast bureaucratic machine fueled by hyper-masculine fantasies and arcane and mind-numbing rules. War is always about betrayal—betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians.

"The biggest misconception about the war is that the soldiers care about politics," Jeffries says. "The right thinks the soldiers want support. They want to feel good. They want everybody to fly their flag and have a bumper sticker and go, 'Rah! Rah! Rah! I support the troops. Yay, thank you! Thank you! Thank you!' The left thinks the soldiers all want to run off and get out of there, that they're dying in a living hell. I think that most of the soldiers are young people that are having a decent adventure."

But, he goes on, "They may be having a very hard time. They're frustrated about the amount of resources they have been provided—how many hours of sleep they get, how nice their day is, whether they get to play their PlayStation or read their book at night or whatever. Like any human, you'd like to have some more of that."

Yet, while soldiers don't want to be forgotten, the support-the-troops brigade only maintains the mythology of war on the home front by pretending that we're actually all in it together, when in fact it's overwhelmingly the poor, powerless, and adrift who suffer.

Jeffries has little time for lawn chair warriors: "I remember hearing that somebody said, 'Oh, we're going to have a barbecue to support the troops.' I heard about this when I was in Iraq. I said, how the hell is that going to support me? It's not doing anything. Don't drink beer. Send me the beer. It's not doing me any good to have you drink it. I still don't like the yellow ribbons."

It is no surprise that soldiers sometimes come to despise civilians who chant patriotic mantras. Those soldiers may not be fans of the remote and rarely seen senior officers who build their careers on the corpses of others, including comrades, either. But to oppose the machine and risk being cast out of the magic circle of comradeship can be fatal. Fellow soldiers are the only people who understand the psychological torment of killing and being shot at, of learning to not think at all and instead be led as a herd of animals. Those ostracized in war have a hard time surviving, mentally and physically, so most service members say and do nothing to impede the madness and the killing.

Jessica Goodell came to understand that torment only too well, as she relates in her 2011 memoir Shade it Black: Death and After in Iraq. Goodell wasn't poor. She grew up in a middle-class home near Chautauqua Lake in upstate New York. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother worked at home. But her "universe fractured" when she was sixteen and her parents divorced. She could barely continue "the motions of everyday existence." She was accepted at Ithaca College her senior year, but just before graduation a uniformed Marine came to her high school. He told her he had come to find "tough men."

"What about tough women?" she asked.

By that afternoon she was in the Marine recruiting office. She told the recruiter she wanted to be part of a tank crew but was informed that women were prohibited from operating tanks. She saw a picture of a Marine standing next to a vehicle with a huge hydraulic arm and two smaller forklift arms. She signed up to be a heavy equipment mechanic, although she knew nothing about it.

Three years later, while stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in the desert town of Twentynine Palms, California, she volunteered to serve in the Marine Corps' first official Mortuary Affairs unit, at Al Taqaddum Airbase in Iraq. Her job, for eight months, was to "process" dead Marines—collect and catalog their bodies and personal effects. She put the remains in body bags and placed the bags in metal boxes. Before being shipped to Dover Air Force Base, the boxes were stored, often for days, in a refrigerated unit known as a "reefer."

Her unit processed six suicides. The suicide notes, she told me in an interview, almost always cited hazing. Marines who were overweight or unable to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and physical abuse. They were called "fat nasties" and "shit bags." They were assigned to other Marines as slaves. Many were forced to run until they vomited or to bear-crawl—walk on all fours—the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by sets of monkey fuckers—bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching like a baseball catcher, and then standing up again—and other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed.

Goodell's unit was sent to collect the bodies of the Marines who killed themselves. They usually blew their faces off with assault rifles in port-a-johns or in the corners of abandoned bunkers or buildings. She and the other members of the Mortuary Affairs unit would have to scrape the flesh and brain tissue from the walls.

Goodell fell into depression when she returned home. She abused drugs and alcohol. And she watched the slow descent of her comrades as they too tried to blunt the pain with narcotics and self-destructive behavior. She details many of her experiences in Shade It Black, a term that refers to the missing body parts of dead Marines, which she colored black on diagrams of the corpses.

In a poignant passage, she talks about what it was like for her and a fellow Marine named Miguel to come home and see all those yellow ribbons:

We'd frequently pass vehicles displaying the yellow ribbon 'support-our-troops decal,' but we never once mentioned it. We probably passed a hundred or more decals—two hundred if you count the multiple decals decorating the cars of the more patriotic motorists—and yet neither of us even once said, 'Look, more support from the citizenry. Let's give the 'thumbs up' as we pass.' . . . I knew that these people on their way to work or home or dinner had no idea what it was they were supporting. They did not have a clue as to what war was like, what it made people see, and what it made them do to each other. I felt as though I didn't deserve their support, or anyone's, for what I had done. . . . No one should ever support the people who do such things.

Stateside "support" not only reflects the myths of war, but it also forces Goodell and her comrades to suppress their own experiences:

Here we were, leaving the ribbons behind us as we sped up on our way to Hell, probably, where we would pay for the sins these magnetic decals endorsed. There was an irony of sorts shaping the dynamic between our ribbon decal supporters and us. They were uninformed but good people, the kind whose respect we would welcome—if it were based upon something true. It was when we were around them that we had to hide the actual truth most consciously.

• • •

Those who return to speak this truth, like Goodell or Millard, are our contemporary prophets. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. The words these prophets speak are painful.

As a nation we prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys and girls, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? It is simpler and more comfortable not to hear, to wish only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. This is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions. Not long ago Goodell received a text message from a Marine she had worked with in Mortuary Affairs after he tried to commit suicide. "I've got $2,000 in the bank," the message read. "Let's meet in NYC and go out with a bang."

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans; calls for sacrifice, honor, and heroism; and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. From a distance it seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a bit part in the great drama of history. It promises to give us identities as warriors, patriots, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion, and pain. Human decency and tenderness are crushed, and people become objects to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naïvely blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, becomes stark. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It might let us see, although the cost is tremendous.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

End This War (video)


[h/t: Washington's Blog]

Pray for rain

One thing they're definitely not telling us is how bad this nasty drought is. Here's an article from the Examiner: Largest natural disaster in U.S. history declared today

All I can say is you sure wouldn't know it if you watched CNN! They're still talking about stupid stuff, like Tom and Katie's divorce. Nobody has their priorities straight, nobody. The world just doesn't make sense to me anymore. Condaleeza Rice for Vice President? Really?

Condi shows her lack of response to my fellow Code Pinker, Desiree Fairooz.

Hope you have some extra food stored up. Prices are bound to skyrocket.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

It's not fun being paranoid, esp. when you're right

Over the past 10 years or so, many people have accused me of being paranoid. I wish experience didn't bear me out so many times, but my track record for predicting the future far outperforms those of less suspicious people. Who would have guessed that we would have been lied into a war based on phony claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction (I modestly raise my hand). Who would have thought, years ago, we'd have drones spying on us from overhead (I slowly wave my hand again). Who could have imagined that the president might keep a kill list and claim the right to kill Americans without due process of the law (my hand is getting tired)?

Anyway, be sure to read the American Dream's mind-blowing article 14 Incredibly Creepy Surveillance Technologies That Big Brother Will Be Using To Spy On You. [Hat tip to Snippets and Snappits.]

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Wake up call

Shortly after my last post, the electricity cut out in the library and we were all herded into the basement for a tornado warning. Fortunately, it was only a severe storm, but it knocked out power for most of the town and the library was closed for a few days. I'm sure there were quite a few people in town who wish they had a generator and adequate food stores for this occasion -- all the stores and restaurants were closed down for some time, and there are *still* people who don't have power in my area, and have to suffer through a record heat wave. I myself was left rather nonplussed when they kicked us out of the library after it finished raining. Would the bus still be running? How the hell am I going to get home?

It was a severe reminder of how much each and every one of us rely on each other, the grid, and basic civilization. I consider it a huge blessing for this area, because I'm sure a lot more people will be better prepared for when a *real* catastrophe hits, which I see as inevitable. There are such things as EM Pulse weapons that can wipe out the electric grid for keeps. I'm pretty glad I had some extra food stores waiting for me at home when I finally got back from the library, I would have gone hungry a few days without it. Of course there's a limit as to what I can store in a motel room! :) For those of you who missed it, here's an article that lists the items that disappear first during a disaster. You might want to get them ahead of time!