Tag Archives: Fire

DUI gone postal

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News 5 is trying metaphorically to crucify the Postal Service and especially the Postal Workers union because a mail-carrier wasn’t fired for being convicted of DUI. So I thought to myself (as I often do) “Self, I bet Freedom Communications has literally hundreds of people working for them who have DUI convictions”.

Their piss-and-moan about it is (allegedly) that the Postal Service is losing money. This from minions of a Corporation that’s in bankruptcy. And one of their subsidiaries, the Colorado Springs Gazette, has just laid off half their employees.

But whenever a person takes the stand in court, either as a witness or a defendant, he has to state where and for whom he works. So, fair being fair, posting a partial list of the employees of their Corporate Masters who have criminal convictions would perhaps be in order. I thought of doing it myself, look up the transcripts and report thereof…

Leaving out the names of those who work labor jobs for them, drivers, warehouse, the temps who stuff the circulars into the Sunday and Wednesday papers and assemble the mailings… cut those guys a lot of slack. They already are in wage bondage to a hostile employer anyway. Edit to add… they were the first to go in the layoffs.

On the other hand, there’s a TV reporter from Dallas and who I believe works for one of the Denver stations now, Leeza Gibbons., who was convicted of joyriding on I 30 from Grand Prairie to the west side of Ft Worth at 110 miles an hour and leading the po-pos from 8 different municipalities, 2 counties and the State Department of Public Safety on a high speed chase. And this kind of event isn’t really all that rare. That would be the type to publish. Also any who would fit into a suit and tie on a regular basis.

The ones who slither in and out of their corporate boardroom. The ones who are serving up the Union-bashing and the ones who ordered it done.

It’s also convenient that the Union Bashing is done at a time when two of their Loyal Corporate Partners are demanding that the Grocery Workers Union accept a really arrogant “Last and Best Offer” contract.

Israel sends deputy consul general to CC

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End the occupationThe Israel Today event changed the speakers on us, instead of the Israeli Consul General to Los Angeles, it’s the Deputy Consul Gil Artzyeli. But the act’s still on. Get to Gaylord hall sometime before noon, it’s the conference room at the Southeast corner of the Worner Center building. We’ll stand outside with our repudiation of Mr. Artzyeli’s message, then go inside to assure the discussion steers toward being honest. I found this quote by Artzyeli, addressing the Denver Jewish community earlier this year about the Gaza incursion:

“This is not a war for territory … The first war is to protect the citizens of Israel, the second war is against Iran and the third war is against lies and disinformation.”

Any takers? My first question, if I’m given the chance: Mr. Artzyeli, are you here only to speak, or will you listen?

Cyndy Kulp put together a handout for the occasion:

Human Rights Issues in “Israel Today”

Israel is a pariah nation condemned by the UN and much of the international community for its multiple violations of international human rights law, including:

• Continuing the occupation of the Palestinian people

• Building housing settlements on confiscated land

• Seizing additional land and property from Palestinians to build “The Wall”, highways for the exclusive use of Israelis, and military areas, etc.

• Using extremely disproportionate and indiscriminate force in the invasion of the Gaza Strip during “Operation Cast Lead” in Dec. 2008

• Inflicting heavy casualties on Palestinians, many civilians and children with no way to escape the bombing

• Refusing to compensate the 5.8 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants who were displaced from their homes and properties during 1948

Israeli Diplomats, like our speaker today, should not be given a public platform from which to promote their views as long as they refuse to recognize and cooperate with international laws.

HERE ARE FURTHER DETAILS:

? In June 1967, the Israeli military invaded the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. These areas of historic Palestine under military control are the “Occupied Territories,” comprising some 3.5 million Palestinians, and they are systematically being incorporated into the state of Israel in violation of international law.

? Life under occupation is very harsh. The Palestinians have virtually no human or civil rights. Unemployment is rampant. In order to go about their daily lives, the people in the Occupied Territories must line up and go through multiple checkpoints manned by the Israeli army. Proper paperwork, including Palestinian ID’s, and permits are required to pass through, and many people are denied entry, even into East Jerusalem which is Palestinian territory and home to many hospitals, schools, and employers.

? Israel has built 200+ settlements in the West Bank, and over 400,000 Israelis have moved onto Palestinian land. Many of the settlers are armed and aggressive extremists, and their actions are regularly protected by Israeli Defense Forces.

? Israel has seized a majority of the West Bank land as military bases, settlements, security areas, “land reserves,” by-pass roads linking settlements with Israel, and other areas forbidden to Palestinians. Palestinians are confined to small fragmented areas resembling Bantustans in an Israeli version of Apartheid.

?? Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem is questioned by the international community, and contrary to what the Israelis would like you to believe, Jerusalem does not belong to Israel. This is why other nations have their embassies in Tel Aviv instead.

? East Jerusalem was declared as an occupied territory in UN Security Council Resolution 242 which specifically emphasized the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” Yet Israel continues to seize homes and land and allow Israeli settlers to move into East Jerusalem.

? Over 10,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed, leaving 30,000 people homeless. Housing demolitions and displacement are common for Palestinian families, and they are powerless to protect their properties or get legal permission to build homes.

? The Gaza strip remains under siege today. Despite the withdrawal of Israeli settlers in 2005, Israel still controls entry into Gaza. People cannot leave and cannot get the goods and services they need. They are literally locked into a ghetto.

? In Dec. 2008, Israel invaded the Gaza strip, causing massive destruction and Palestinian causalities. The vast majority of the Palestinians killed in Israel’s operation were innocent civilians rather than combatants, according to a new report by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Of the 1,387 deaths, 773 were non combatants. 320 of these were under the age of 18, and 109 were women.

? Nine Israelis were killed during the Gaza war — four by rocket fire on southern Israel, including three civilians and one soldier, while the other five were soldiers killed in combat, primarily from “friendly fire” incidents.

? The Goldstone Report which investigated the Gaza Invasion for the UN concluded that both Israel and the Palestinians had committed violations of International Law, but that Israel because of it’s huge army and sophisticated weaponry was more culpable and guilty of Crimes Against Humanity in it’s 2008/09 Gaza onslaught.

? U.S. aid has made Israel’s army one of the most powerful military forces in the world. Israel is using U.S. F-16 fighters and Apache helicopters in attacks against Palestinian civilians. This violates the U.S. Foreign Arms Export Act. Over $3 billion in US foreign aid is given to Israel, and most of it is used for military operations.

There Will Be No Security For ISRAEL Until There Is Justice For PALESTINE.

Resources For more information:
• Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
• B’tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
• Bethlehem University
• Mazin Qumsiyeh
• Machsom Watch
• Breaking the Silence
• Women in Black
• Sabeel

• Stop the Wall Campaign

• US Campaign to End the Occupation

–END THE OCCUPATION
–COMPLY WITH INTERNATIONAL LAWS
–FREEZE SETTLEMENTS
–NEGOTIATE AN EQUITABLE SOLUTION ON LAND AND WATER

The US claims to be an “honest broker” –fair to both sides– in the so-called peace process. At the same time, the U.S. proclaimed itself the unswerving ally of Israel. These roles are contradictory. Massive U.S. aid funds the occupation. Since 1949, the U.S. has given Israel well over $100 billion in grants, loans and other assistance. This amounts to over $15,000 per Israeli citizen. ?
A genuine peace with a minimum of justice requires an independent and viable Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem). Jerusalem should be shared as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Palestine should be an equal neighbor alongside Israel with peace and security for both peoples. ?

You have forgotten what to remember

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You are not forgottenCan someone please explain to me what it means to fly this flag? The POW-MIA flag is ubiquitous these days around veterans. Our town hall flies this black flag halfway below the Stars and Stripes. When the latter is at half mast, the former hangs indecorously low. Which reminds me of a pirate ship stalking a wavering Old Glory.

I understand POW and MIA, and “you are not forgotten.” But there is no flag for the veterans, the dead or wounded, to whom does this lone flag speak and why?

Since the Gulf War, the US military maintains that it loses track of none of its soldiers. We’ve had POWs but they’ve been returned, and we’ve had MIAs whose bodies have been found. One was recovered even recently, though it was the body of a pilot lost over Iraq, understood to have died. Casualties at sea are still sometimes unrecoverable, but at least something about American war-making proficiency now permits us to confirm deaths even sans corpus. Supposedly.

US military engagements between those wars, and later, have been kept outside public scrutiny, or not officially admitted. As a result, they’ve added no POWs or MIAs for the home front to worry over.

Which leaves Vietnam, from whose era comes the dark silhouette of a bent inmate in the shadow of a prison guard tower. According to the last report, there remain 1728 American soldiers missing in action in Indochina. They are unaccounted for — it might be more fair to say–not missing persons, expected to turn up.

During the Vietnam War, the MIA list gave hope that your soldier wasn’t among the fallen. It was a hope that loved ones could cling to for even years after the fall of Siagon. On the radio, a Dick Curless hit from 1965 continued to resonate even as the war receded from memory. “Six Times a Day” told of a bride in post-WWII Germany who met the trains every day, awaiting the return of her German soldier, held by the Soviets in war-reparation labor camps until the Russians considered them to have atoned. Was this what we expected Vietnam was doing?

Six times a day the trains came down from Frankfort
The night he came ten years were almost through
She held him close and said I knew you’d be here
He said I had no doubt you’d be here too

American wives were determined to wait even longer, except evidence of post-war prisoners never came. There was speculation of a cover-up, suspicions which politicians like John Kerry and John McCain do little to assuage. After the war, some believe that prisoner GIs were left behind, whom the North Vietnamese hoped to exchange for war reparations. Instead of paying, it’s conjectured that the US government chose to deny the existence of those men. No American diplomat has ever confirmed the scenario, and no surviving GI has ever surfaced.

The closest we’ve come to rescuing POWs was at the movies, when Rambo went back for a jailbreak and to do-over America’s lost war.

Even as the rumor persisted, the fate of the abandoned POWs is assumed to have been execution at the hands of their former foe, presumed so exasperated and bitter. The general consensus today, no matter the theory, is that no veteran is anticipated to step alive from the sad lists of the Vietnam MIA.

If they are presumed dead, then what separates an MIA from the dead, who we honor together with all veterans? The Vietnam MIA have been added to the Vietnam Memorial. How now is their memory any different?

Even recently I’ve seen relatives of those MIA conduct special ceremonies on Memorial Day, with the empty place setting, the chair, the vase and rose, etc. It looks to me as though the family members have even passed the ritual down to grandchildren who would not even have know the missing soldier. But this ceremony isn’t conducted for the regular dead, who are also missing from the family table, it’s reserved for the missing dead. And so I wonder at the distinction.

MIAs represent casualties who fell off the books. If a soldier’s capture is confirmed, his status changes to POW, otherwise soldiers come up missing through desertion, treason, malfeasance, or physical obliteration. Mother nature can dispose of bodies, but the most common cause of disappearance is owed to the inhuman scale of mechanized war. As weapons grew more powerful, physical bodies more frequently disintegrated. Missing bodies today, even looking back retrospectively, are the result of human beings eclipsed by machine violence. In the engagements America has chosen from Vietnam onward, usually the technology for the big violence is our side’s alone. Which is not to implicate friendly fire. Often USAF air strikes are called in over battlefields strewn already with GI fatalities.

At first the act of flying a POW flag was aimed at the Vietnamese, to remind all around us, with a sideways glance at our enemies, of our concern for our soldiers. Perhaps the MIA component was an urging to Vietnam as well, after the war, to put effort into recovering US soldier remains. Over the decades, I’m not sure that Vietnam could have shown itself more cooperative. If archeological digs are today able to unearth more evidence, it’s not because the Vietnamese weren’t trying.

Who today are we addressing with the POW-MIA flags? I see these flags usually paired with the Red, White and Blue. But those are directed at our foes.

If a soldier’s relation has question to suspect their soldier is an MIA, isn’t that a beef to take up with the US military? The POW-MIA flag seems to say, we don’t trust you, don’t lie to us about our boys in uniform. We don’t want you smashing their bodies to smithereens, or leaving them behind and not telling us. The POW-MIA flag is a renegade message which says: we support the troops, but not their mission. Give them back.

Flying the POW-MIA flag is so unpatriotic, it’s patriotic.

Major Abu Nidal Hasan to meet Jack Ruby

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So who was the Fort Hood shooter, do we know? The media’s got the back story all lined up for it to be Nidal Malik Hasan, he has three names like all assassins (and sound bites), and now the Army is trotting out witnesses to point their fingers at the Muslim Major. Addressing reports of multiple gunmen, the Army says “there was only one shooter.” Although five of the victims may have fallen to friendly fire. So there was a “friendly shooter?” Which one was Hasan?

I’m thinking the multiple shooter stories came out of the Army deciding the shooter was Hasan, but witnesses insisting it was another soldier. Sooner than contradict what they’d seen with their own eyes, Investigators and victims agree to disagree, until a uniform narrative can be worked out.

With a mess of dead soldiers, all dead by PTSD, who the hell cares which killed which? But poor Major Hasan’s name had the right evildoer pedigree, with an Abu Nidal ring to it, which could bring Americans to a boil.

What’s going on right now, by the way, big picture wise? Is the American public vacillating about sending more troops to Afghanistan? It took a 9/11 surge of Muslim-hating to send our invaders off in the first place.

The Army must have shit bricks when it turned out that Hasan was still alive. The fall guy they’d chosen wasn’t dead. It’s hard to pin the tale on someone who can still tell. But who am I kidding? Either we’re going to see a Jack Ruby pay a visit to Hasan in the hospital, the end, or the military’s going to control Mr. Hasan with its usual heavy hand. And that’s the New World Order MO. I can already see Jose Padilla being shuttled between tortures and deprivations, losing his mind as the government confounds him with accusations.

Hasan is already as cooked as Padilla. No matter what happened, we’ll see confusion and confession and absolutely no access to civilian lawyers or the press. Hasan is this year’s American Taliban, the caricature John Walker Lind painted as America-hating wuss.

The Army’s having nobody think this is PTSD. Did you see the JAG lawyer on CNN, ruling out PTSD because Hasan was an officer?

Antiwarriors can laud the shooting as “fragging” but it’s not. Fragging means to kill your superior officer. At Fort Hood, the only dead were grunts.

Antifada antiwarriors can hope this was Islam striking back, hitting Americans with their own MO. But where was the collateral damage? Where were the wives and children, the innocents among the dead soldiers? Nope, none of those. The evidence indeed points to a principled Mujahadeen who wanted to kill only the US killers, or the soon to be deployed killers.

The Fort Hood shooter might have been sparing the readying soldiers the horrors of Afghanistan, and the DU poison they’d bring back to their families.

The real story is that this is what PTSD looks like, and it may have played out as Russian Roulette, it wouldn’t matter who pulled the trigger. But of course the big worry for the Pentagon is that this sort of thing could be infectious. The expression “going postal” doesn’t have to morph very far to become going PTSD.

In Vietnam, the GIs started fragging their lieutenants. In Afghanistan and Iraq, in the age of the suicide bombers, the American rebel is killing himself.

War on Islam brought home to Ft Hood

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Says President Obama of the Fort Hood shooting that claimed 12 US soldiers: “It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil.” Where does Obama think we are killing our adversaries? On their home soil, actually the majority of them in their own homes, with their family members.

According to Army spokesmen at Ft Hood, the shooter has been identified as an Islamic-named man, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, himself now slain. Confusion persists among witnesses that there may have been several shooters, in part because the civilian police officer who shot the shooter was himself then killed.

How convenient the shooter bears a name that infers an al-Qaeda sleeper cell operative, and not a corn-fed PTSD case gone postal. Twelve soldiers lay dead, among them the killer. How do you know which it was. We have only the Army’s word, the Army which misreports, whether it’s fired a missile, whether it’s raped a village, or whether a whole truckload of female US soldiers has been blown to bits, but the Army believes it more prudent to tell the public about it one gal at a time. So why believe the Army?

I’m not going to suggest that Major Hasan’s body was kept on ice for just such an eventuality, but I do believe he is among the November 6 casualties of Ft Hood, and he may not be the triggerman at all. I believe the Army might have looked over the mess and decided that Hasan would make a far better villain than a good old Baptist jock. Who’s going to know the difference? This would certainly explain why witnesses and wounded cannot agree on who did the shooting.

His very Muslim name notwithstanding, the FBI is already telling the press that the Ft Hood killings were not terrorism. In an act of sheer Zionist defiance, NPR is second guessing that statement. They believe everything else they’re told, but when the government want to make sure that the public isn’t roused to acts of racist violence, NPR decides to be skeptical. In news reports tonight, they’re letting the audience decide for itself, if Major Hasan’s suicidal gunman mission wasn’t an act of terrorism.

USS NY apt reincarnation of WTC steel

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USS New York of World Trade Center steelFinally the USS New York, famously built from the steel of the fallen twin towers, sails into NY for a photo-op near the site of the WTC, looking every bit to me like a fortified extension of the official 9/11 cover up.

The wreckage of Ground Zero was carted off before forensic engineers could test the material and explain the mysterious collapse. Now the steel is back, albeit just two army trucks’ weight worth, in the bow of a floating fortress whose foreboding facade informs us, with a wicked armored smirk, that its secret will be remain off-limits to civilians forever. New Yorkers have to look across the water and be reminded the military laughs at the police and firemen, who bravely ascended buildings which should never have vaporized, who died on September 11, 2001 for reasons forever to remain unexplained.

The USS NY sailing up to NYC is gunboat diplomacy against America’s own people.

I’m no naval engineer, but the USS NY’s twin funnels are the most grotesque mimicry of the now iconic towers.

But how fitting a tribute, that the WTC remains –we might pretend even the dust of its victims, if military contractor shoddy standards follow precedent, are concealed in the steel– were used to build an amphibious transport ship, whose only military purpose is offensive. Unless you count America’s questionable dominion in the Pacific and Caribbean, to where would we need to ship troops in defense of our homeland. Lamentably, the USS New York is the perfect reincarnation of the World Trade Center, which engaged in relentless attacks on economies overseas, until cut brutally short by boxcutters and Third World anger. Of late, Americans may have glimpsed from the financial crisis that the WTC was also waging war on our own domestic economy. As these revelations dawn, so too will the USS N.Y. turn its guns against us.

Army offers Mental Resiliency Training to harden the conscience against PTSD

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What do you make of the VA study indicating that more stateside military drone operators suffer higher Post Traumatic Stress Disorder than soldiers in actual combat? It may point to the obvious, that PTSD comes less from being shell-shocked under fire and more from committing deeds to haunt the conscience. If our troops weren’t being asked to act inhumanely, perhaps we’d see fewer suicides, or homeless and maladapted vets. Instead the Army has announced it will give all its soldiers “mental resiliency training.” This might inoculate their fear of coming home to face their loved ones, but will it steel them against redemption?

Three meals away from revolution

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Brochure from ready.govThe phrase is oft quoted, but no one knows who originated it –or, even if it’s true. It could just be an old pharah’s wives tale. But Obama buys it: from the people who brought you hope.gov we’ve now come to ready.gov. Where the White House assures you there is no need to fear coming plagues and pestilence so long as you “Prepare. Plan. Stay Informed.” and be sure to have food for three days.

Is it three meals or nine? Is the consequence anarchy or revolution? The “truism” is commonly sited as being an old Russian expression, but it’s so pithy, others guess it has a literary source like Dumas. A contemporary scholar placed it back much further:

The Romans believed that civilization is never more than three meals away from anarchy.

Of course, when Stalin or Trotsky are thought to have said it, the dire consequence for civilization is revolution. Which is where the saying catches the popular imagination. Internet sleuths are eager to credit the wisdom to a BBC situation comedy. “[Arnold] Rimmer said it in Red Dwarf.” Although two decades before, Science Fiction authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote in Lucifer’s Hammer, that civilization is “only three meals removed from savagery.”

Doubtless in earlier times, you ate well if you could rely on one solid meal every day, which no doubt holds true for the majority of the world still. In the developed nations of course, we cannot see ourselves subsisting on less than three.

The makers of the documentary King Corn interviewed Senator Chuck Grassley about America’s food supply, which is where the expression piqued my interest. Grassley explained: “A society is always nine meals away from a revolution. If you have people going without food for three days and there are enough of them out there, they will revolt.”

Like the “300 pound gorilla” which has now become 900lbs, the units have indexed with man’s inflated prosperity, likewise the vicarious sense that salvation from inequity might come by revolution. A better educated Briton is thought to have coined the nine meals abstraction. At the height of last year’s food crisis, it was recalled that Lord Cameron of Dillington, in his capacity of head of the UK’s Countryside Agency, coined version 2.0 “nine meals from anarchy.”

The distinction between anarchy and revolution was noted by Fredick Upham Adams in 1896, unearthed by Wikiquotes, who speculated on the veracity of the concept:

…I realize that the spirit of liberty does not exist in hungry men. People talked about a day coming when the people would become so hungry and desperate that they would rise in a revolution and sweep all before them. Such a day will never come. Hungry men may fight, but it will be for a bone—not for liberty. The perpetuity of liberty rests with those who eat three square meals a day.

Of course, Maslow would later quantify this with his hierarchy of needs, but I think modern man clings to the revolutionary idyll over anarchy because it gives him imaginary elbow room to believe right could prevail over the totalitarian misrule of the state. For the common man, it grants him reprieve from the likelihood that Orwell was correct to imagine that the future of mankind will be a soldier’s foot on your face forever. For the affluent, thoughts of a revolutionary cleansing assuage their guilt.

But Obama’s crew appears to be taking no chances. They’ve unveiled a website at www.ready.gov which expands on George W. Bush’s plastic and duct tape. Actually, the plastic and duct tape are still there, but at the top Obama wants us to be sure to get our three squares, for three days.

Ready
Prepare. Plan. Stay Informed.

EMERGENCY SUPPLY LIST

Recommended Items to Include in a Basic Emergency Supply Kit:

– Water, one gallon of water per person per day for at least three days, for drinking and sanitation
– Food, at least a three-day supply of non-perishable food
– Battery-powered or hand crank radio and a NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert and extra batteries for both
– Flashlight and extra batteries
– First aid kit
– Whistle to signal for help
– Dust mask, to help filter contaminated air and plastic sheeting and duct tape to shelter-in-place
– Moist towelettes, garbage bags and plastic ties for personal sanitation
– Wrench or pliers to turn off utilities
– Can opener for food (if kit contains canned food)
– Local maps
– Cell phone with chargers

Additional Items to Consider Adding to an Emergency Supply Kit:

– Prescription medications and glasses
– Infant formula and diapers
– Pet food and extra water for your pet
– Important family documents such as copies of insurance policies, identification and bank account records in a waterproof, portable container
– Cash or traveler’s checks and change
– Emergency reference material such as a first aid book or information from http://www.ready.gov
– Sleeping bag or warm blanket for each person. Consider additional bedding if you live in a cold-weather climate.
– Complete change of clothing including a long sleeved shirt, long pants and sturdy shoes. Consider additional clothing if you live in a cold-weather climate.
– Household chlorine bleach and medicine dropper – When diluted nine parts water to one part bleach, bleach can be used as a disinfectant. Or in an emergency, you can use it to treat water by using 16 drops of regular household liquid bleach per gallon of water. Do not use scented, color safe or bleaches with added cleaners.
– Fire Extinguisher
– Matches in a waterproof container
– Feminine supplies and personal hygiene items
– Mess kits, paper cups, plates and plastic utensils, paper towels
– Paper and pencil
– Books, games, puzzles or other activities for children

Through its Ready Campaign, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security educates and empowers Americans to take some simple steps to prepare for and respond to potential emergencies, including natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Ready asks individuals to do three key things: get an emergency supply kit, make a family emergency plan, and be informed about the different types of emergencies that could occur and their appropriate responses.

All Americans should have some basic supplies on hand in order to survive for at least three days if an emergency occurs. Following is a listing of some basic items that every emergency supply kit should include. However, it is important that individuals review this list and consider where they live and the unique needs of their family in order to create an emergency supply kit that will meet these needs. Individuals should also consider having at least two emergency supply kits, one full kit at home and smaller portable kits in their workplace, vehicle or other places they spend time.

That’s how many Black Hawk Down?

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COLO. SPRINGS- A spectacular migration of Army attack helicopters traversed the city sky yesterday, flying south to Ft Carson where they will catch trains to faraway winter fear-breeding grounds in the news.
cos-helicopter-convoy-south-ftcarson

cos-helicopter-convoy

It took only one Black Hawk Down to terminate US ground operations in Somalia. If you’re hoping such a milestone could be a benchmark for Iraq or Afghanistan, unfortunately “hawk” also denotes the plurality. How many Black Hawk have to go down before Americans cry uncle? This week we are nearer to finding out.

I know I’m mixing Apaches with Chinooks, but I’m grouping all multi-million-dollar vertical-flight aircraft together obviously to note that the US lost three over the weekend in Afghanistan, with a commensurate record setting loss of US soldiers. Which will prove the more alarming?

Earlier in the week, Brazilian paramilitary forces lost a helicopter in a gunfight over a Rio slum, where a war is suspected to have been declared on the poor in preparations for the 2016 Olympics. The significance of sophisticated weaponry downed by common insurgency tactics is not going uncelebrated.

Isn’t it interesting how the official reaction, whether you’re a spokesman for the Brazilian military or Israel’s is to deny any possibility that the aircraft might have been struck by enemy fire? Uniformly that it the denial, which almost always proves untrue. As if even the cause of the crash matters. What’s probably critical to military strategists is that opponents not receive accurate feedback about the effectiveness of whatever tactics they used.

Meaning armchair strategists have no reliable information to go on, other than to keep a tally.

Armed UAS drones need no defending

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Predator Unmanned Attack VehicleI was curious about the etymology of the term “drone” applied to military (& DHS) Unmanned Aerial Surveillance aircraft, these days, mostly Armed. Obviously Armed UAS are not named after the stingless unproductive bees whose task it is to impregnate the queen, nor lazy idlers, nor clueless computer sales techies, nor thankless menial worker drones. Anyone who’s been around Radio Controlled model planes knows drones are named for the sound they make, a steady drone as they labor across the sky. While military aerial surveillance predates the Wright Brothers, and RC model airplanes have been around for half that time, it took the advent of asymmetric warfare to open the window to military drones. Their constant buzz offering the most intractable reason.

By “asymmetric” I do not mean the US intelligence code for off-textbook warfare, for counter-insurgency methods outside von Clausewitz etiquette. I mean the inherency they obscure, war between foes lopsided.

Look at a drone’s design. It’s more Gossamer Condor than military aircraft. Obviously an unmanned vehicle comprises fewer mechanical systems because it doesn’t need to propel, nor sustain, a crew of human beings. It might need less armature for the same reason, except of course, today’s drones are of high value in their own right. So why no armament?

Why too, no powerful jet engines or swept wings for aeronautic superiority? This drone looks about as robust as a paper glider. Laymen can distinguish bombers from jet fighters, as they can trucks from a race cars. I’d say the military drone resembles more a stick insect than its accidental namesake the bee. Do Armed UASs have no need for evasive maneuver capability?

I’ll ask another obvious question, why do drones carry no customary insignia designating to whose side it belongs? In particular this element would be of primary importance when encountered by other aircraft.

But a drone doesn’t encounter enemy aircraft, nor allied aircraft who might confuse it for belonging to an adversary, because drones operate where aerial supremacy is already absolute. The key to a drone’s military usefulness is that there is no opponent to shoot it down.

An Armed UAS can drone all it wants, taking its sweet time laying siege to defenseless objectives and other targets of opportunity. The US Predator or Reaper models can glide when they want to surveil in silence, although otherwise their motors project their presence with the deliberate imposition of a school hall monitor. It is more efficient to deter the placing of IEDs than to try to catch insurgents in the act.

Meanwhile all civilians are terrorized by the sound, associating it with sudden, unpredictable and often unjustified destruction and death.

The WWII German Stuka dive bomber had inverted gull wings which were thought to produce a horrifying wail as the notorious aircraft attacked city populations, Guernica among them. In fact the sound was produced by a siren the Nazis called Jericho’s Trumpet, mounted purposefully to spread fear on the ground. Like modern drones, the Stuka were not designed to fend off attackers from the sky.

Before the fighter planes of WWI, artillery spotters would rise in balloons to survey the enemy trenches. From these tethered balloons, artillery strikes could be directed with increasing accuracy. These remote eyes in the sky were the rudiments of aerial surveillance, the precursors to today’s Armed UAS. The balloons were manned obviously, and they weren’t armed, but the spotters they held aloft were despised much as drones are today. When WWI biplanes eventually came along to pick off the balloonists like sitting ducks, the soldiers in the trenches were jubilant.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had been fortified by the US military. We’d helped the Taliban destabilize the region, to force Russia’s hand in rushing to restore order to its southern neighbor. We wanted to draw the Russian troops in before we assisted the Afghan insurgency with the real weapons it needed to combat their invaders’ superior fire power. When Bin Laden’s Mujihadeen and the Taliban got US Stinger Missiles, the Russians could no longer deploy their helicopter gunships with impunity and the end drew near.

Eventually whoever drew the US into its war on Islam, is going to start distributing the means to take the US out. It might be Stinger Missiles or a modern equivalent. Eventually someone will develop sympathy for the victimized Muslims of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza (add Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc) and help them flick the killer drones from the sky.

Would attacking the drones provide retribution enough, knowing that the real operators are safe in virtual cockpit command centers located safely within US homeland borders. Would it be sufficient to keep clearing the skies of drones, or will our victims have to weed US drones from the roots?

Will the drones prove as easily replaceable as GIs? The American Public keeps count of its lost soldiers, but in no way has this stanched the flow of fresh reinforcements. We do not count expended ordnance, or expensive equipment fallen casualty. Would such tallies discourage the war mongers or encourage weapons industry stockholders?

The American public has shown itself mostly contemptuous of the economic-draft soldiers who man today’s volunteer army, the deaths accumulate, but working poor are expendable. What about those who joined the military to clean up their act? We don’t want those back. After years of war, the public is already seeing too much PTSD, without contemplating bringing all of it home.

Perhaps instead Americans will react to a casualty list of aeronautic losses, maybe for reasons of pure economics. How many helicopters and jets we are losing adds to the federal deficit. But the losses of big equipment might offer the same decision making information we glean from the higher value chess pieces. Rooks and knights represent offensive capability. Hopes for victory or a draw hinge on which of those you have left. No one capitulates based on a count of their pawns. The cumulative tallies will reflect which way the tide is going. Military drones may be worth zero lives, but their destruction will signal an insurgence indomitable.

Owl City writes lyrics most foul, shitty

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owl-city-adam-young-lyricsThat’s it, I’ve hit my generation gap with new music. Jonas Brothers I could abide, and Hannah, Britney, Hanson and the boy bands, because pop is fun. But holy mother of god Owl City’s lyrics are AWFUL.

Generations older than mine have taken issue with hair length, drugs, promiscuity, and noise. We’ve even hit insipid before, usually disguised by unintelligible enunciation and drowned in amplitude. But webroots Owl City takes stupid to a nails-on-chalkboard low, dubbing over loops of mechanical saccharine, with a prominent emo-sensitive vocal track.

OC’s Adam Young wines like James Blunt impersonated by a digital clone. The singer’s voice is not helped by being equalized to imitate the shrill tin of skype. But maybe he is. The vocal effects improve pitch, and perhaps producers know their tween audience these days hear their Romeos through the disembodied voices of computer chat. This is new territory. Imagine Leif Garrett trying to croon through a tracheostomy mike.

But the insanely awful lyrics are where Owl City really breaks ground. Neither David nor Shawn Cassidy’s songs were ever this embarrassing, and much of their sentimentalism was tongue in cheek. Adam Young’s Cave In, for example, could benefit with a laugh track.

Yeah, I’ll ride the range / and hide all my loose change
In my bedroom,
Cause riding a dirt bike / down a turn pike
Always takes its toll on me.

Fireflies suggests to me that someone’s developed a plugin for Garage Band which sorts random cliches according to rhyme. But the grammar’s still a rudimentary, this ’cause that.

It’s hard to say / that I’d rather stay
Awake when I’m asleep,
‘Cause everything / is never as it seems
Because my dreams / are bursting at the seams.

Vanilla Twilight throws metaphors into a mixer:

I’ll find repose in new ways / though I haven’t slept in two days,
‘Cause cold nostalgia chills me to the bone.
But drenched in Vanilla twilight, / I’ll sit on the front porch all night,
Waist deep in thought because
when I think of you I don’t feel so alone.

He had to have pulled “repose” out of the thesaurus. But “waist deep in thought” is too honest to be contrived. Obviously no thoughts here rise above the neck, except the stench of what we usually measure by increments of leg bones as we wade: ankle, knee…

My visceral gag reflex to these lyrics has everything to do with Owl City’s populist ascent through our idiot’s meritocracy. Our cultural figures, counting even our professional class of opinion shapers, are no dullards, but they will exploit any dim light for which there are moths. If pop music is candy, this treacle is pharmaceutical quality lithium. Young minds eager to stretch their realities on poetry, will have their spark of vitality mucked in industrial effluent.

To me, this dreck is worse horror than Kafka could devise. New world order, failed education, twilight of Democracy, now idiocracy for eternity. Vanilla’s Twilight streams past and future tenses in real time.

As many times as I blink / I’ll think / of you tonight.

When violet eyes get brighter, / and heavy wings grow lighter,
I’ll taste the sky / and feel alive, / again.
And I’ll forget the world that I knew, / but I swear I won’t forget you.
Oh if my voice could reach back through the past,
I’d whisper in your ear: / Oh darling I wish you were here.

Slash and burn urban redevelopment?

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Sao Paolo neighborhood Diogo Pires fire
Were the Brazilian squatter settlements destroyed by Oct 13 fires located too far west of expected 2016 Olympic beautification projects? Not all of Brazil’s Olympic venues will be in Rio. But before we accuse neighboring metropolis Sao Paulo of slash and burn redevelopment, we’ll have to see if the displaced poor of Diogo Pires are permitted to rebuild their shantytowns, or whether they will be part of migration programs into the Amazon.

Military drones mirror public retreat

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CLOSE GUANTANAMO is being interpreted literally, meaning close just the facility, but move the detainees to illegal incarceration elsewhere. Likewise, BRING THE TROOPS HOME means pacing a withdrawal with an increased deployment of military drones to keep up the killing. That’s what the antiwar voice gets for pandering to the American preoccupation with only our own casualties. The latest Adbusters juxtaposes these surrogate killing machines with the western public’s retreat into virtual communities.

Pblks‘ Douglas Haddow had this to say in the latest issue, about the increasing use of surveillance attack drones, while the US withdraws “troops” from its militarized war zones.

…when we remove the humans from the equation — when war becomes literally inhuman — what’s left to debate? War crimes will become guiltless: a mere twisting of knobs. Slowly, with each OS update, innocent casualties will be curbed to an acceptable level. The Marine will be replaced by the computer programmer — a meek nerd so far from the action as to be absolved completely of its consequences.

With robots off fighting our wars for us, we’ll have nothing left to do but quietly sip our lattes and liten to our iPods. While somewhere, far off in the distance, a drone may or may not be dropping 50kg units of hellfire on some yet-to-be-named combatants. It’s not even post moral … it’s a Zen algorithm that melts steel.

This is a strange indicator of our retreat into the virtual when you consider that our so-called enemies are willing to sacrifice everything, their own bodies and very existence for a chance to kill one or two of our soldiers. We see their tactics as irrational, and they see us perhaps as we already are: machines.

US Senate represents Insurance, Israel

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Are you represented by a US senator? I doubt it. Today the Senate Finance Committee rejected Public Option amendments to the health care reform legislation; continued to vilify ACORN based on fraudulent accusations hyped the MSM; and thirty two senators signed a letter drafted by AIPAC, to urge Secretary of State Clinton to block further investigation of Israel for its crimes in Gaza based on the findings of the Goldstone Report.
 
Abolish the Senate! Does America have any use for a House of Lords?

Today five Democrats joined the ten Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee to reject a PUBLIC OPTION. The senators voting no were: Max Baucus (D-MT), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Thomas Carper (D-DE), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), John Ensign (R-NV), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Jim Bunning (R-KY), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Pat Roberts (R-KS), Mike Enzi (R-WY), John Cornyn (R-TX)

Senator Rockerfeller promoted his public option saying that “the public option is on the march.” There should be more pitchforks than that on the march. Who are these rich bastards who lord over our representatives in Congress? It’s a House of Lords, representing America’s moneyed interests, against the needs of the common people.

Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga) collected signatures last week to urge the GAO to investigate ACORN. I mention this letter because of similar source of today’s letter.

Isakson and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) circulated the letter to block the UN from taking action against Israel. The other senators, among them 16 Democrats, are: Charles Schumer (D-NY), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Carl Levin (D-MI), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Tim Johnson (D-SD), David Vitter (D-ND), Evan Bayh (D-IN), Mark Begich (D-AK), Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Dan Inouye(D-HI), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Arlen Specter (D-PA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), James Risch (R-ID), Pat Roberts (R-KS), Susan Collins (R-ME), Jim DeMint (R-SC), John Ensign (R-NV), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Mike Johanns (R-NE), Roger Wicker (R-MS), John McCain (R-AZ), John Thune (R-SD), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).

Do these people represent the American People? Here is their letter sent on behalf of Israel:

Dear Madam Secretary,

We appreciate the State Department publicly raising significant concerns about the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone. We believe it is critical that the U.S. continue to work very hard to block any punitive actions against Israel that this report mentions, whether at the Security Council or other U.N. bodies. The loss of innocent lives is unfortunate wherever it occurs – in Israel or in Gaza. But this biased report ignores many of the key facts, and this should be recognized by the international community.

We commend the State Department statements criticizing the one-sided mandate directing the Goldstone report and highlighting the real causes of the war between Israel and Hamas. In particular, we are gratified that the Department has very serious concerns about the report’s recommendations, including calls that this issue be taken up in international fora outside the Human Rights Council and in national courts of countries not party to the conflict. As the United Nations Human Rights Council moves toward a resolution on the Goldstone report, we trust you and your team will denounce the unbalanced nature of this investigation.

There are many serious flaws with the Goldstone report and the investigatory process. The Goldstone mission’s mandate was problematic from the start. The fact that the mission exceeded this mandate by also criticizing some of Hamas’ activities does not diminish the problem that the vast majority of the report focuses on Israel’s conduct, rather than that of Hamas. The report further fails to acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism and other external threats, a right of all UN Members under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The report ignores the fact that Israel acted in self-defense only after its civilian population suffered eight years of attacks by rockets and mortars fired indiscriminately from Gaza. Furthermore, the report does not adequately recognize the extraordinary measures taken by the Israel Defense Forces to minimize civilian casualties, which frequently put Israeli soldiers at risk.

As the State Department has stated, Israel is a democratic country, like the United States, with an independent judiciary and democratic institutions to investigate and prosecute abuses. The Israel Defense Forces have a reputation for investigating alleged violations of international law and its internal military code of conduct. As a law-abiding state, Israel is in the process of conducting numerous investigations for which it should be commended not condemned.

We hope you will succeed in your efforts to ensure that consideration of the report at the current meetings of the UN Human Rights Council will not provide an opportunity for Israel’s critics to unfairly use the Council and the report to bring this matter to the UN Security Council.

Sincerely,

Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand

Senator Johnny Isakson

For the record, here also is Isakson’s letter trying to bring heat to the poverty-rights advocacy group ACORN:

The Honorable Gene L. Dodaro
Acting Comptroller General
U.S. Government Accountability Office

Dear Mr. Dodaro,

I am writing to request that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) undertake a review of ACORN, otherwise known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. For purposes of this letter, the term ACORN shall mean the organization itself, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, and the employees of all such organizations.

Any such investigation should:

(1) Analyze the business structure and organizational management of ACORN.

(2) Analyze ACORN’s compliance with state, local and federal law.

(3) Examine ACORN’s tax structure focusing on a delineation of what activities fall under their 501(c)3 umbrella and what, if any, do not.

(4) Compile a comprehensive list of all federal funding that ACORN has received since its inception; including, but not limited to, contracts, cooperative agreements, grants, appropriations and emergency funding.

(5) Examine grants or payments for services made by ACORN, its subsidiaries or affiliates.

(6) Examine grants or payments for services received by ACORN, its subsidiaries or affiliates.

Current voter fraud investigations in several states, prior fraud convictions, and new video showing apparent illegal activity by ACORN employees suggest that at the very least the organization warrants a top to bottom investigation on behalf of the taxpayer. Taxpayers deserve nothing less than a thorough and transparent accounting of ACORN’s activities.

Iraq slipper thrower killed outright

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US-patrol-fallujah-fallouja-falluja-iraqPoor Ahmed Latif, killed in Fallujah this week for throwing his slipper at a US patrol. News reports are calling Latif a copycat of Muntadhar al-Zaidi, on the occasion of the Iraqi shoe thrower’s release from custody. Reporters are also suggesting Latif was “mentally disturbed,” instead of simply profoundly disturbed, by a development that might disturb you too.

First however, a disturbing aspect of this incident which reporters are downplaying and which Latif lived but only briefly to experience. The US soldiers fired on Latif because they thought he’d thrown a grenade. What he threw never exploded, and in fact we only know it was a slipper because bystanders saw it, and because Latif had only one slipper when he was taken to the hospital. The American soldiers couldn’t confirm the account themselves because they hadn’t even looked for whatever came at them that didn’t explode. When the soldiers fired on Latif, he ran. Eventually their bullets overtook him.

What disturbed the now late Latif, enough to prompt him to defy the US soldiers with his slipper, was seeing an American patrol drive down the streets of Fallujah.

Maybe we think that indignation at US occupiers is commonplace in Iraq, and that Iraqis should be practiced by now at repressing their proud urge to throw down insults at hair-trigger Americans. Why now? Why Latif?

The thirty two year-old Latif was so angry to see the American patrol in Fallujah, because he thought that Iraqi cities were no longer under the jurisdiction of American troops. You probably thought that too.

Yet here they were patrolling Ahmed Latif’s neighborhood. Have you been told the US soldiers are still patrolling Fallujah? If Latif’s death can count for something, it can at least serve to alert you that American in Iraq have not moved out of the cities. But the media telling of the late slipper-thrower’s deed, are not elaborating on that detail.

Attack Drones: Freedom is so fucked

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Armchair freedom fighters like me count on there remaining some parity between the forces of oppression and man’s inexorable drive to be free. Masses can repel the few, nonviolence can shame the hesitant, terrorism can haunt the genteel, IEDs can pick off the occupiers, training can dispatch the sentries, but how to overcome automatons? We’ve confronted impregnable drones in scifi movies, and now such drones have become reality. They’re bits of nothing in the air really, but a literal boatload of firepower has got their back.

The Economist reports that drones can monitor the activity of shoeboxes from an altitude of near-space, beyond the range of an RPG fired from a hot air balloon. A drone’s vulnerability remains its communications channels, but even intercepting those is outside the realm of non-military technology.

While drones reduce the exposure of real soldiers to harm’s way, they increase a military force’s effectiveness. Drones are lauded as cheaper to operate as conventional jet fighters, but in reality their functionality draws on greater resources. The Economist writes of a drone the size of a corporate jet called a Global Hawk, which requires a staff of 20 to 30 to operate. Many more than would be necessary inside a C130 gunship, but of course, almost all of them manning new killing devices.

So long as the empire has an unlimited budget to spend, Freedom Fighters are fucked, and terrorists will be the only recourse. The only target available to the adversary of a drone, is the command center which controls it. Be it in America, or a distant military base, that’s where the enemy will have to strike.

Or the American public will have to renounce the budget which affords this technology.

You may not be bothered by the notion that remote-operated drones can monitor human activities and rain destruction upon them when appropriate. The old, “what have I to fear if I’m doing nothing wrong?” Wait until you are the wrong side of the oppressors. Coca Cola kills union organizers in Colombia. Walmart would probably like to kill you in their parking lot if you are leaving with a shopping cart filled insufficiently relative to you debit card balance. They already know it, but a drone in their hands will give them the ability to find you.

IDF targets al-Jazeera on West Bank

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Al Jazeera reporter targeted by IDF in West Bank

Al Jazeera reporter Jackie Rowland is targeted by IDF in West BankDid you catch it on Democracy Now? Al-Jazeera reporter Jackie Rowland, broadcasting live from the West Bank covering the weekly Palestinian protests of the Israeli Apartheid Wall at Bil’in, was interrupted by the IDF. The protesters were accustomed to being shelled with tear gas, but this time the Israeli soldiers targeted the reporter.

Al Jazeera reporter targeted by IDF in West BankWhile she was on the air, the IDF soldiers repeatedly fired gas canisters, until she could no longer speak, and a cameraman had to come to her rescue with a spare gas mask.

Here’s the original footage:

Speak 2 x 4 to power, just do it.

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Nike inspired assault on WTCFound this brilliant submission in the Start-Propaganda collection. The Reichtag Fire false- flag attack will have nothing on the debris of the WTC. For your 8th commemoration of the enigmatic event which is still used to justify the occupation of Afghanistan, check out the Italian documentary ZERO. My favorite segment is George Bush on the perpetrators of 9/11: “It’s hard for Americans to imagine how evil the people are who are doing this.” Less and less so.

In keeping the anniversary of 9/11, we also revisited the sentimental documentary by the Naudet brothers, whose video had captured the impact of the first plane, and the ensuing action of the firefighters inside Building One. Excised from the final cut were the firehouse discussions of other explosions they’d heard and their observations that the collapses resembled demolitions. Those clips are accessible online, and now you’ll recognize the individual firemen. Perhaps those details were deemed inappropriate for the CBS audience in 2004.

It’s also sad to look upon these interviews of men who later worked ceaselessly at Ground Zero, often without masks, and wonder how many are now dead, or dying of respiratory ailments, victims of the government fraud about the safety of the environment in the aftermath of the disaster.

Watching the doomed firemen ascend into the WTC without a thought that the towers might collapse, and being shown the buildings vaporize, narrated by uncritical newspeople, we cannot wonder now but did they take American viewers for idiots?

Among the many documentaries which question the official version of events, Italian Telemaco’s ZERO: an Investigation into 9-11 takes the least sensational approach. Italian celebrities, a laughing physicist (and Nobel laureate), and Gore Vidal shrug off the sheer pretense of the USA narrative.

Watching the original 911 exposés like 911 Loose Change and 911 Conspiracy – In Plane Sight gets old doesn’t it? Not because their presentation is shrill, but because unanswered, what can they do but repeat themselves?

The mainstream response has only been to dismiss the 911 Truth movement as Conspiracy Theory. Throw Alex Jones’ Prison Planet TV into the mix with his 9/11 The Road To Tyranny and alternative versions of September 11th, 2001, begin to look paranoid.

For a fresh perspective from the UK, check out 911 and the British Broadcasting Conspiracy.

Remember, the mainstream media which dismisses 9/11 truth seekers as conspiracy theorists, is the same media which is now telling us that the American public does not want universal health care.

The same media which has been “questioning” Global Warming now puts the onus for change on whether an American public will believe Global Warming.

The same corporate media is owned, and speaks for, big agra, big pharma, big oil, and the arms industry.

Is there a Monsanto/Cargill/Archer-Daniels-Midland conspiracy to monopolize the food supply? Is there a military industrial conspiracy to foment war and instability? Is there a globalization conspiracy to harness developing world resources while enslaving all peoples?

Who is the corporate media to defend the 911 myth against accusations of conspiracy?

What the impregnability of the accepted 9/11 story means to me, is that the 911 Truth Movement clings to an outdated notion that what the population knows matters. In a post-democratic world it doesn’t. The people can believe their feudal overlords to be ogres, so long as it isn’t uttered with intent to dethrone. Then it’s heresy.

Atomic’s one handed coders rebrand Fallujah game as Six Hours in My Lai

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virtual rapeNMT has obtained screenshots from Atomic Games ‘Six Days in Fallujah,’ traded p2p and remarketed as Six Hours in My Lai. There was no budget to modify the OIF coalition uniforms to resemble the Vietnam GIs, but who’s looking at the clothing? Nostalgic vets will find the rape reenactments unremarkably familar. In reality the mayhem of My Lai and My Khe lasted 28 hours, not six, but industry research indicates that cyber ejaculators rarely have more than a six hour window before a landlady looks in on them.

Gaming studies remain inconclusive about whether virtual sex stimulation augments with cumulative scorekeeping. It will require a scientific leap before computer health levels can fortify a real-world refractory period. Otherwise virtual serial binges cannot build on themselves like the longer pyramid games of Civilization or World Of Warcraft.

okinawa schoolgirl rapeJapanese game publisher Konami, forced by civilian outcry to drop a distribution deal for Atomic’s Fallujah first person shooter, is pleased that the salient gangbang modules will find their way to end-user Marine Corps wannabes. Konami already has a bestselling Raper II title, an Okinawa schoolgirl adventure for American servicemen. Konami’s own one-handed programmers are set to adapt the Atomic code for the Japanese market. The human trafficking of Iraqi orphans into US contractor Army brothels becomes Korean Comfort Women; US combat depravity becomes The Rape of Nanking.

Deprived of being able to cash in on the Fallujah atrocity allure, Atomic Games is looking for sympathy from the Support the Troops crowd. Atomic laid off the soldiers on its staff, issuing this statement:

“We wish to assure the dozens of Marine veterans who have collectively invested hundreds of hours in this project that, while we have been badly wounded, we will fight on. The stories of your brothers’ courage and sacrifice in Fallujah must be shared with the world.”

By historical accounts, are they referring to the virtual sequences between the levels of action which act like silent movie inter-titles to link the running and jumping to a bigger story? Where the plot points are inviolate can be the only teaching moments in an otherwise chose-your-adventure killing spree. Where will there be opportunity for gamers to show courage and sacrifice with only a menu of rape and murder?

Let’s be clear. The Fallujah video game was not about soldiering. It did not mean to replicate the experience of 99.9% of the American soldiers who served in the battle for Fallujah. A first person shooter is not about following orders, falling in, or self-sacrifice. An FPS is about four wheeling a personal path of personal destruction. Atomic’s Six Days in Fallujah was a spring break for Grand Theft Auto sex tourists.

NMT is equally concerned about the lost Fallujah stories which may have been the narrative of the gameplay. The world should hear of the turning back all male refugees, of the White Phosphorous and sniper Free Fire Zones. The lost Fallujah action sequences no doubt exploited the armored vehicles crushing the Iraqi wounded, and the role of the helicopter gunships over the river, Red Bridge and the Fallujah hospital.

Lockerbie bomber(s) get away for good

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Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi has been imprisoned in the UK since 2000, for the 1988 bombing of PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland. Libya paid restitution for the act, but maintain their –and al-Megrahi’s– innocence. It was announced yesterday that Al-Megrahi is being freed on humanitarian grounds, because he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and not in exchange for his dropping the appeal of his conviction. Thus ends further inquiry into who else was suspected of responsibility for the suitcase bomb.
Cockpit of Flight103

–which resulted in the deaths of 270 people.

Scottish MP Tam Dalyell has cause for suspicion, as documented in the 1995 The Maltese Doublecross. Prevented from being widely screened, its first venue fire-bombed, the documentary was successfully quashed by the US and UK governments. Lockerbie victim survivors opposed evidence that threatened the compensation they were seeking from Libya.

Maltese Doublecross director Allan Francovich survived attempts to run him off the road, for two years. In 1997 Francovich died while in the custody of US customs agents in Houston, age 56.

Let’s just say that Francovich’s findings bore the same elements and cast of characters as the investigations of award-winning also-dead journalist Gary Webb, found suicided in 2005, with two gunshots to the head.

We cannot afford universal health care

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Obama faced friendly fire at his health care town hall, and so fared well telling the audience, what–is that all you got? He dispatched the teabag canards until he had seemingly exhausted the surrogate-public’s straw man objections.

The issue of a single payer system came up. Not from the mouth of an advocate, but framed by a critic, a Republican (“I don’t even know why I’m here.”), who wanted to confront the president about a his past public endorsement of a single payer remedy. Thus, he loaded the question with the assumption that such an naive suggestion must be repudiated.

The president did not denounce a single payer ideal, but instead explained his new moderate view: America wasn’t ready, the country would be destabilized by a sudden changeover to universal health care. Obama gave the example of someone accustomed to health coverage now having to deal with another office, and another set of paperwork.

Changing insurers happens all the time to individuals of course, who learn they’ve been dropped, or whose policies lapse, or who lose their jobs and with it their coverage. Of course that sudden shock is amplified by the uncertainty of finding another insurance policy at all. And then, the other shock when the new premium is three-fold increase.

Switching to a universal insurance plan would introduce no uncertainty, or sticker shock. But certainly the president is talking about the shock to the insurance industry.

Their jobs would be gone tomorrow.

The drawback to immediately trimming the 30% of medical expenses which go to insurance companies, is that those livelihoods will be shattered. The insurance companies are not just about the quarter-billion dollar a year CEOs. There are reps and adjusters and office staff behind the people who deny you disbursements for your health expenses. Not many of them are going to be needed by the expanded Medicare offices. So their jobs are gone.

And the insurance companies advertise on the major media outlets, and hire lobbyists, talking heads and teabag mobs. Universal Medicare isn’t going to need any of those to sway its public beneficiaries. Except to encourage preventive health and wellness.

Insurance companies finance political campaigns. No, our system couldn’t stand the shock of rocking that boat.

Most of all, I’m fairly certain America cannot afford universal health care because it cannot weather the shock of bringing the populace to better health. America has been killing its citizens with far too systematic efficiency to make an about turn. The American public is too far gone down the path of cancer, obesity, diabetes, and neuro-pathological disorder to be turned back affordably. A boat floats on its own with very little effort, but one half-sunk requires almost endless human resources.

In addition to lost insurance jobs, would be lost medical jobs and malfeasance jobs.

When the government is paying all the medical bills, auditors would have to seek out where it was also paying for the pathogens, to eliminate the redundancy. An auditor will spot the guys putting sawdust in the flour, and the guy hired to sift the impurities from the flour. If it stops the first, it can lay off the second.

Where we can eradicate the poison, we can forgo antidote.

America will have to reexamine its food supply, and its industrial byproducts, and its environment despoilers, with an eye to stop their fouling the national health.

That would be too much a shock to the system. I agree.

India terror suspect arrested then shot

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chongkham sanjitA photographer in Manipur, India documented the arrest of terror suspect Chongkham Sanjit on July 23, and wound up witness to an execution. The pics are SFW: the death squad ducked their victim into the adjacent pharmacy. A red circle indicates the arrestee, the arrow in the photo below shows which way he is led to be killed.

chongkham sanjit

chongkham-sanjitNote the soldiers already blocking off the killing spot. The trigger man waits at far right in camouflage cap.

chongkham-sanjitSanjit is following cooperatively.

chongkham-sanjitAn officer pulls out his handgun.

chongkham-sanjit

chongkham-sanjit
Arrestee is suddenly pushed into vacated shop.

chongkham sanjitSanjit’s body is dragged from the shop.

chongkham sanjitDisplayed in military pickup truck, beside body of Rabina Devi, victim of the minutes earlier police crossfire.

Official story: Sanjit wounded four and killed bystander while resisting arrest.

SFSG special forces have no use for armor

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Supacat Jackal MWMIK
Three British paratroopers died Friday when their Jackal High Mobility Truck exploded over an IED in Afghanistan.

Fortunately Supacat UK, manufacturer of the Jackal HMT400 4X4, supplies an exploded view for our safer perusal.

To complement the MWMIK, or Mobility Weapons Mounted Installation Kit, Supacat added a BALLISTIC PROTECTION KIT (brown), a MINE BLAST PROTECTION KIT (red), and MINE BLAST PROTECTED SEATS (orange).

None of which helped the soldiers of the Special Forces Support Group, who were all killed by the mine blast, before the Taliban fighers advanced with a coordinated attack of gunfire. So much, perhaps, for the mine blast protection. But in actuality, it doesn’t take a diagram to reveal that the Jackal offers very little cover for its occupants.

Let’s guess this open air design is for maximum range of fire, so that the three big guns of the MWMIK can most effectively be brought to bear upon the less special forces of the Afghans. Remember the high caliber machine gun on the little jeep in the British Rat Patrol? Multiply that times three, minus the hood or dash.

UK Jackal High Mobility Truck for SFSGDoesn’t the holey thing look like a dune buggied version of the robotic cargo loader in Aliens? Ripley’s unlikely, erotically vulnerable cage from which she slammed hydraulics into the Alien Queen.

It probably isn’t all that difficult to convince macho SAS brits that the best defense is a high speed offense, and anyway, three fewer survived to get wise.

US journalists! Visit scenic Kurdistan!

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Sulaimania Sulaimaniya Kurdistan Iraq Irak
US media correspondents, reporters, tv anchors and news directors, get yourselves to scenic Kurdistan asap, visit the mountains of Sulaimania, the waterfalls of Ahmed Awa are apparently recommended. Embeds, lead the way! It may be the only way all you war propagandists will reap what you so justly deserve.

I can’t imagine there’s a single corporate media journalist who wouldn’t be hard pressed to defend the pro-war filter he or she puts on the news for US domestic consumption. Corporate tools? They’re military industrial pitchmen. Advocating death and dismemberment without restraint. Let them plead ignorance. Bullshit. I’d love to see Bill Clinton make a case for all of them.

Antiwar voices are split on whether to charge MSM collaborators for war crimes, for selling the Anglo world on patently illegal wars. But how else are we to be rid of them? America remains locked in a Vulcan mind meld with these impudent, immoral careerists. Perhaps apprehension by the Iranians, and a trial by revolutionary council, is the only justice they might ever meet. Dispatch them to Kurdistan: Assignment Iran! Let the Persians teach Americans the only way to deal with poisonous snakes.

The media song now, to spin the recent errant three in the best light, is that Kurdistan was not an unthinkable destination for tourists such as they, and perfectly safe too. Unless you venture toward the Iran border, where US commandos have been raiding Iranian infrastructure, while the US Navy taunts the Iranian coast in full force. Alas, Kurdistan, quite happy with its undeclared sovereignty from Iraq, has proven to be a safe haven for Anglos.

I remember a most heartbreaking scene from the first month of the war, recorded by an independent American photographer as he worked his way through Kurdistan. Perhaps you recall it.

Do I mean the friendly fire, or accidental, I’m not sure which to put in quotes, bombing which killed coalition troops, but also took out a Kurd ally who may have turned out to rival a more favored ally? No, not that one.

Our photographer was making his second entry into Iraq as I recall, and documented a personal incident thus. He was traveling with a Kurd escort, when an Iraqi combatant broke through with a grenade, determined to blow himself up next to the American.

And I should clarify, I was not rooting against the photographer, but– here’s what happened.

The Iraqi was being held off by a Kurd fighter, but he had pulled the pin on the grenade, and leaned against his opponent, dooming both of them if the Kurd dared to shoot him. The scene unfolded in the progression of stills the photographer snapped as he hastened away. The Iraqi was chest to chest with the Kurd, pleading to be let to get the American. I interpreted his entreaties to say: Brother let me pass, I must reach the American, I have no quarrel with you, let me die with the infidel. The Kurd seemed for a moment to consider the words of his Iraqi brother. American deaths counts many hundred fold, we are brothers fighting the American aggressors, I have committed to die for this act, help me, please let me just reach him.

I could be wrong, he may have been cursing the filthy Kurd for blocking his way. But his locked eyes and sweated brow reflected an earnest human being.

I cannot be sure how long this went on, but the Kurd kept the desperate man at bay, and as soon as the Kurd had wrestled control of the grenade, he shot the would-be assassin point black. The Iraqi fell unceremoniously into the tall weeds. The last image showed his body collapsed in the ditch beside the road. The photographer and his Kurd entourage moved on.

There were honest, unembedded journalists in the early stages of the war. A record number were killed by the US military until none report independently anymore. Journalists working for foreign news agencies are detained in secret US prisons, under the same pretext that we protest of Iran or North Korea.

If we do not have the resolve to string up these blood-thirsty yellow journalists, promulgating lies to justify the continued slaughter of countless innocents, let the Iranians have at them.