Murka's Church-Going Face-Kickers

From Brian Cloughley, Bush's Herds: Ready to Kick Anyone in the Face:

Reuters, March 7: "Soldiers depicted in the new video would not face criminal charges, the Pentagon said. One section of the video showed a bound and wounded prisoner sprawled on the ground, and showed his bullet entry and exit wounds. At one point, a US soldier kicked the prisoner in the face. Army documents quoted a soldier at the scene as saying he 'thought the dude eventually died. We weren't in any hurry to call the medics'."

This is no surprise, because there are energetic Christians in America who applaud the murder of wounded prisoners. They think it is wonderful to kill them. They are proud that US soldiers kill helpless people. Doubt me? Read on.
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"You asked the question 'What was the reaction of most of the American people to the murder of a wounded, unarmed Iraqi lying helpless and barely conscious on the floor of a mosque in his own country?'

I think, based purely on the exit poll results of the recent Presidential election, re-affirming the current administration's stance on the war on terror, including Iraq, that most of the Americans, or at least 65 some odd million of them again based on the election results would be like mine; "Sucks to be him, he should not be fighting for an evil regime like Saddam Husseins, that aids and supports terrorists and has killed thousands of his own people with chemical weapons, and if said man does fight for Saddam, he risks death, even if he's wounded and lying on the floor of his mosque. I only hope that someone shared the good news of the saving grace of Jesus Christ with him before he died. You asked. May God Bless your liberally challenged mind!" [Emphasis in original.]

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LtCol Jeremy Martin of the Pentagon has no conscience. He is a robot, poor fellow. He is doing his duty as he sees it, of course, in the same fashion as the Army face-kickers and the Guantanamo Bay torturers and the Marine who murdered the unarmed, wounded prisoner lying semi-conscious on the floor of a mosque in Iraq last November, to the approval of millions of Americans.

He is a performing puppet, an unthinking, manipulated, rag-doll-in-uniform who does his best to please his masters, like countless other grey people for whom individual thought is a terrifying concept.

And this is the big problem for America. It is the little people, the Jeremy Martins of the uniformed brothers and the Todd Hales of the church brothers, who lead the populace in endorsing and actively supporting evil. They are just folks like other folks, of course. They live down the street or on the next block and they have 1.7 kids, an SUV and a couple of bicycles, a liking for the local baseball team, clean living and Church cookouts, and a deep and terrible ignorance of humanity, history, and tolerance.
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Bush has plunged America into the abyss of everlasting war, and the parallels between what Bush America is becoming and what Hitler's Germany became in the 1930s are as startling as they are repellent.
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It was the "little men", the ordinary people of the country, who first allowed and then encouraged Hitler to thrive in the moral sewer that he made Germany become in the Thirties. On March 3, 1934, in a speech in Frankfurt, his vicious associate, Herman Goering declared: "Fellow Germans, my measures will not be crippled by any judicial thinking. My measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. I won't have to worry about justice, my mission is only to destroy and exterminate."

The modern Goering, John Bolton, nominated by Bush to be ambassador to the United Nations in a calculated insult to the entire world, believes "It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so." Beware, all those who seek justice, because, as Bolton wrote earlier, "Treaties are 'law' only for US domestic purposes" and have no meaning otherwise.
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Bush "freedom" is based on the belief of Cheney, Bolton, Rice, Rumsfeld, and other warped figures in the Nazi creed that "We are strong and we will get stronger". The catchword has caught the attention--the worship--of the deluded crowds, the herds, the millions who have been brainwashed by patriotic persuasion that if they disagree with national policy they are traitors, no matter how immoral that policy might be.

Hitler's sycophants applauded his insane ambitions to dominate the world, and in Bush Washington the same type of people bow and scrape and applaud his voodoo schemes to impose "freedom" by the bomb and the bullet. America has lost all international moral authority it ever had, courtesy of a messianic ninny who seeks to construct an ethically corrupt system that encourages the strong to persecute the weak, the rich to despise the poor, and credulous bigots to triumph over common sense and decency. If someone doesn't agree with you, then go kick him in the face. It doesn't demand thought, and millions of people will think you're a great patriot.

cf: CIA 'too cautious' in killing terrorists

Washington, DC, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- Despite the broad new authorities to use lethal force it was granted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, critics say the CIA continues to be too cautious in employing the ultimate sanction against the terrorist enemies of the United States.
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"There needs to be a compact between Congress, the agencies and the White House," he told UPI. "We are going to make mistakes. We are even going to kill the wrong people sometimes. That's the inherent risk of an aggressive counter-terrorism program."

Cressey added there was growing concern amongst frontline agents that they would be made to carry the can for such errors. "What we need is everyone to understand that it is being done with the best of intentions and not go running to the press whenever it becomes politically expedient to do so."
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cf: Rondo I
cf: Zombie Pedagogy

'Politicians are more deadly than any weapon.'

Perhaps the most important, depressing article I've read in a long long time...GlobalCorp. Michael C. Ruppert tells it like it is.

Here are a few choice excerpts:

Politicians come in varieties. They are in business. They are sometimes activists. Many pose as journalists. Some are economists and academics. They work in think tanks and manage the editorial decisions of major press outlets. Many average citizens behave and think like politicians because they accept as their primary mantras: "Don't rock the boat," and "Don't offend anyone." Politicians are more deadly than any weapon. They see their primary mission as building consensus to improve outward appearances.

For a politician the questions are always: "How can I superficially address an immediate problem without going to its root causes? What is the least amount of work I have to do to make this go away while I'm on duty? How can I deal with this problem without burning bridges?" Lately, economists, business and religious leaders, and everyday people have been behaving more like politicians than politicians themselves. Much like the incestuous, sealed-off, fetid Bush administration, the politicians are going to other politicians to make policy - when they dare even to do that. Refusing to make policy is also a policy.

In fact, most people have become politicians and it may well be that political correctness (including the fear of speaking out) - to whatever degree it is observed - will be the sword on which we now (not tomorrow) impale ourselves.

Bridges are burning all around us; bridges to responses that might have mitigated the already brutal (and just beginning) ravages of Peak Oil; bridges to reduce the likelihood of war and famine; bridges to avoid our selectively chosen suicide; bridges to change at least a part of energy infrastructure and consumption; bridges to becoming something better than we are or have been; bridges to nonviolence. Those bridges are effectively gone.

Stan Goff was right when he warned activists that "the gun," in all its forms, would be brought out before this was over. It was inevitable. False flag terror attacks, a fake war on terrorism, routine political murders, stolen elections, and Republican traffic in pedophilia remain causes for outrage and defiance, but they can no longer be useful avenues to justice: the legal system is broken. It's broken for reasons far greater than what used to be called corruption. And it cannot be fixed when a world war and unprecedented economic and ecological collapse are smashing down every wall between humanity and the unthinkable.

Politicians are creatures of economics. Their success has always been measured first and only by what economic benefits they returned to constituents or themselves. The victim has been the future. We have all told the politicians what we really want them to do for us while speaking platitudes from the other side of our mouths. As I have said for so many years, we are all prisoners of the way money works. Until we change that, any solution is only temporal and illusory. No electoral change is possible now that elections all over the world have sworn their allegiance to privately owned software programs and obvious manipulation.

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It is the ultimate testimony to the madness of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney that there are no more tomorrows left to fix anything. Since 9/11, and especially since a second presidential election was stolen four months ago, the setting for a real Armageddon has been locked in place. It may well have been for years before that.

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These people always find ways to eke profits from a system that is in meltdown. They make money on the way up. They make money on the way down. Their appalling justification, their pact with the devil that makes this all possible, is that "As long as we're making money then everything must be OK." This is what the real PTB (Powers That Be) believe. This is the final distilled definition of "the bottom line".

The problem lies in the definition of "The Powers That Be." Most people still think in terms of nation states. I always think in terms of money, even to the point of looking at money (the way it functions now) as the PTB without attachment to a human or national identity.

Not too long ago I had a dialogue with Catherine Austin Fitts after which an epiphany struck. As the human race blows itself into extinction, or destroys the climate, or starves itself to death, the last corporate merger and acquisition will take place. And at the same moment as mankind dies, the CFO of "GlobalCorp" will be shouting, "Hooray! We did it!"

Those who win in a rigged game get stupid. We have all played this game (to one degree or another). And compared to the rational, far-sighted humanitarians that Jefferson and Whitman hoped for and expected, we are all frightfully stupid.

In spite of all the warning signs that demand and energy use must be curbed immediately, the only commercial effect of Peak Oil has been to increase consumption as much as possible - so as to get as much "money" as possible, as quickly as possible. This before the instant, possibly only months away, when money - because of a lack of energy - becomes valueless. Solutions that should enable a reduction in oil consumption are only functioning as an insane rationale for using more. The pity of this utterly unnecessary disaster is matched only by the arrogance that created it.

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The only way to curb demand is to pull the plug on global economies, starting first with the already partially cannibalized US economy. Our manufacturing has been stolen or given away for "spare parts." So have our savings, our Constitution, our resources, our credit, our credibility, our confidence, our manufacturing base, our jobs; and soon our houses, our personal bank accounts and ultimately our hope. The United States is being liquidated after a fait accompli merger and acquisition.

The bottom line turns out to be the suicide of the human race as mergers and acquisitions lead to the final moment of malignant capitalism: "the last corporation standing."

GlobalCorp becomes Global corpse.

Hurray, we did it!

Today's been a really bad day for me. Seems like it's been a bad day for quite a few people I know, especially the intuitive, insightful ones. Something in the air, maybe a kind of barometric collapse of our biorhythmic frequencies...who knows. But I felt a shift today, a sense of loathing and disgust and hatred that I couldn't put my finger on, much of it directed towards de Sade's acolytes running the world, particularly those heinous, Thanatic fuckers called BushCo.

Then I read Ruppert's article, which seemed to put things into some sort of perspective for me, and served as confirmation of what I've been thinking and feeling lately.

I'm going to be hugging my wife and kid a lot in the next few days...

Maybe Tasing Restrained, Sub-Human Scum Will Teach 'Em To Pee on Command!

What do you get when you cross a police state, an ethnic drug user asserting his constitutional and medical rights, and "attitude"?

Police Accused Of Tasering Suspect To Get Urine Sample

POSTED: 6:26 am EST March 9, 2005
UPDATED: 10:39 am EST March 11, 2005

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A police officer twice used a Taser stun device on a drug suspect who was restrained to a hospital bed because the man refused to give a urine sample to medical staff, authorities said.

Antonio Wheeler, 18, was arrested Friday on a drug charge and taken to an emergency room after telling officers he had consumed cocaine, police said.

Because Wheeler said he had used the drugs, Florida Hospital officials wanted a urine sample. A police affidavit said Wheeler wouldn't provide a sample on his own, so workers tried to catheterize him to get one.

The police document said Wheeler was handcuffed to a hospital bed and then secured with leather straps after he refused to urinate in a cup. When medical staff tried to insert a catheter to get the sample, Wheeler refused and began thrashing around, the affidavit said.

At one point, police officer Peter Linnenkamp reported, he jumped on the bed with his knees on Wheeler's chest to restrain him. When Wheeler still refused to let the catheter be inserted, Linnenkamp said he twice used his Taser, which sends 50,000 volts into a target.

"After the second shock (Wheeler) stated he would urinate and calmed down enough to be given the portable urinal," Linnenkamp wrote.
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In a Tuesday interview at the Orange County jail, Wheeler acknowledged that he aggressively resisted efforts to insert the catheter because he was scared it would hurt. He said the police officer told him the catheter would be necessary if he wouldn't or couldn't urinate on his own.

"I feel I was basically raped," Wheeler said.

Said Amnesty International USA spokesman Edward Jackson: "If this had taken place in China, it would be an egregious violation of human rights, and the public would be outraged.

"I hope that they don't allow the fact that it happened on U.S. soil deter from the fact that this may very well be a case of torture."

I was going to make some snide remarks speculating about who owns your body in Murka, or about what's good enough for Iraqis at Abu Ghraib is good enough for you, but I don't see the fucking point. Murka is just too fucked up for words. I mean, what do you expect when the nation's top spots are filled by apologists for the sociopathic architects behind death squads, torture, imperial wars of aggression, and corporate crime as the normalized tools of doctrinal policy? The future of Murka is already here and this is just a hint of what it's going to look like. Get used to it.

Good luck guys. Just do as you're told, don't ask questions, don't do drugs, go shopping, pay your bills on time, when they tell you to jump just ask how high, and watch more Fear Factor and The Apprentice and you've got nothing to worry about.

(Max Headroom? Meet the Marquis de Sade.)

Some Recent Masterpieces From The Blogosphere

There are some really smart people out there. That such people now have a venue to broadcast their thoughts without having to first go through some sort of official gatekeeper is perhaps the greatest, most powerful feature of the blogosphere. Of course it seems that one gatekeeper's "unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar" writings are another's arsenal of welcome, "dangerous thoughts" that dare challenge the status quo. The democratic explosion of voices that is the blogosphere is a potent and powerful advance in humanity's history: it's taken Guttenberg's revolution — which ignited a flurry of political awareness with a profusion of pamphlets produced by literate people who now had a means to disseminate their ideas — and propelled it forward an order of magnitude. And now that the toothpaste is out of the tube, as it were, there's no way to put it back.

What a great treasure it is to be able to read people's thoughts without extraneous filters, polishing, and seals of approval!

And blogs, as with other expressive media, have their own genres that exploit the vocabulary of the medium in their own uniquely expressive ways. Thus I want to briefly recognize some outstanding recent political posts from the left part of the blogosphere...


The denizens of Wealth Bondage uphold the high-brow satirical/classical/liberal humanist tradition with its contemporary incarnation of the Commedia del'Arte, transposing the Renaissance characters of Il Capitano, Pantalone, and Isabella into corporate globalization's Captain Blowtorch, Smoky Joe, and Candidia Cruikshanks. It is consistently entertaining, insightful, informative, civilized, and thought provoking; an oasis of Culture amidst the pharisees and philistines. Blogging just doesn't get much better than this.

Here, in its entirety, is a masterpiece from The Happy Tutor, WB's sole voice of conscience...

How to Write like a Liberal Sack of Garbage

Liberals in the broadest sense are those who write plain and candid prose on the assumption that those to whom they write, or in whose presence they write, are gentlemen and ladies who share a common commitment to fairness, truth, evidence, good humor, good sense, and courtesy. This style goes back to Horace writing epistles from his Sabine Farm as a pal of Maecenas and Augustus. It was picked up and perfected for English by Dryden in the essays drawing on the conversational style of the English coffee house. You see it in the virile plainness of Ben Jonson, and is reflected in news writing of Addison and Steele, who again wrote as if for good citizen friends around a beer or a coffee. You saw the style again in the heyday of the New Yorker in the Talk of the Town columns of E.B. White. And that style with some footnotes and academic starch, dominated Anglo-American arts and letters in figures like W.K Wimsatt, G.E. Moore and J.L. Austin. You see it defended in Swift for sermon oratory, and you see it in the blog of AKMA, in the same easy going high church style, brought down to daily doings of the parsonage, as if Sterne still wrote, awaiting his birth as his father winds the clock. The liberal writes as an honest man or woman to other members of that club, assumed in some sense to be universal. Now, of course, that plain style can be faked. Nothing is easier. The spy can write like an honest man, as can the Terrorist, or CIA plant. Information presented with a counterfeit of openness, trust and candor can be disinformation, as when provided by marketers, lobbyists, politicians, or as a public service by think tanks. The plain style is the mark of Knave and Dupe alike.

I am struck and appalled that so much candor has crept into blogs. My liberal friends play poker with all their cards turned face up. No wonder they are held in contempt by those who are building the case against them, or others like them, for Treason - though of course the case builder would plainly and candidly deny such an interest, except in those growing number of cases where the writer's animosity and tendency to gloat gets the better of his strategic discourse and fake honest-man-persona.

The prose of poisoned air. I learned it, or refused in those days to learn it, at Yale from Paul de Man who wrote under the Occupation in war torn Europe. With what contempt must he have considered his old school Yale colleagues who wrote with the candor of grown children. In fact I wonder if he might not have held even his acolytes in contempt, knowing that for them the dark style he wrote was never to be accessible, not as a living tradition, but only as jargon, since they had not lived a riven life, as he had, and would never play a double game with their own lives as table stakes. Vitia, AKMA, and so many others who should know better write the virile (c.f., Dick Minim) plain style still, the authentic article in age of counterfeits. They have read all the right post-Enlightenment books, but the message of aporia, or the hermeneutics of suspicion, the darkness of bare life beyond reason and justice, while duly noted and commented upon at length, did not penetrate to the core, where style is the man. They are good men and open men still, untouched by the knowledge that grows from the Tree of Good and Evil. They take for granted, as their patrimony, what is now passing away, the liberal tradition of tolerance, of our respective rights to be wrong. They will murmur a mild reproof, only after long consideration, and hedged round with diffident apologies for their self-assertion. They will set a better example all the way to gallows. (May we all.) Not for them the raised voice; the strong rebuke, rather an awkward silence, or a fair minded account, ending in no conclusion, ranged against those who engage - literally - in torture and the repeal of the laws protecting us from it. What our current leaders learned from Nietzsche, Strauss and de Man was far more than the liberals. The businesslike students learned the language of power to achieve power, within a theory that says that all truth is a lie, so who cares, so long as the fiction sticks, like a Brand, or a Party in Power, or a libel undefended.

Darwinian selection will take its toll on the fair-minded. Candor and capitulation are a fine pair. First one, then the other. So Mandelstam having denounced Stalin in a poem, was rounded up and made to write in prison a poem in praise of the President, or whatever his title was, between periods of torture, leading to the poet's death. Treason is not to be tolerated under conditions of ordered liberty and the march of freedom.

Lies in high places? No big deal. Freedom Pens? No big deal. Special Renditions, no big deal. Patriot Act and secret Tribunals, no big deal. No rights for those alleged - I said alleged - to be Terrorists, no big deal. A database of liberal funders, Patriots all, presented with their pictures on a page with Terrorists by a flunky intellectual close to Bush, a hireling in the pay of Bradley Foundation, no big deal. His disingenuous coded speech, gloating in his cruelty and denying it at the same time - no big deal. His mock surprise at liberal reaction to blood libel presented by innuendo - no big deal. (I will assume this characterization is accurate, unless I hear otherwise from Mr. Horowitz. I want this site to be both accurate and fair in the best traditions of liberalism and its ancillary satirical tradition. Happy to make whatever revisions to my portrait of him that he feels are needed. The last thing I want to do is to get on the wrong side of the next Joseph McCarthy, or wannabe.)

What is a big deal? Not your death. Not mine. The fat sewer rat crossing the drawing room with a human hand in its jaws, not to be noticed. One does not notice such things.

So Darwinian Selection will weed out those unfit to survive under our changed conditions of Terror coming and going. May the candid, among them my liberal friends, survive if only because they are deemed harmless dupes, on the irrefutable evidence of their blogs.

Of course what do I know? Tossed out on my ass from Wealth Bondage for kissing the Wealthy ass I am paid to spank. Trying even now to correct the habits and morals of the Rich pro bono publico. Living in a Dumpster, a Pimp without a Think Tank, surrounded by Whores who write like the Gentleman and Ladies of the Street, drinking their tea from a tomato can, while sitting on a sack of garbage. If we take up a collection perhaps we can make $6.50 to purchase a pint of Thunderbird at the local Store of Convenience.

My Fellow Consumers! Here's to Freedom. May it pass us in our misery untouched. History is not for the squeamish. It will be written in whatever style they choose, preferably candid and complacent, by the victors, and liberals are not in the running. Their era is over. Their style is dead for any honest public purpose. They will follow meekly enough, or rise above, whether on the cross or the gibbet - or fall short, when the moment comes. My fellow Liberals, Welcome to the Dump. Here at least we can write like friends, God's spies, as Lear said to Cordelia. Let us cherish these moments together. Let come what may, a Band of Brothers and Sisters, speaking out candidly whatever the cost. Thank God, no one is listening. Are they?

Catalytic Converter has a series entitled "The Sliding Scale of Paranoia." He's up to part 3. This is articulate writing coming from someone with their eyes open, filtered through an excellent mind. I particularly appreciate those phenomenological gleanings he shares of the effects his awareness of politics has on him.

One of the more dangerous tasks on earth is to effectively demonstrate to humanity that there are other options, other means of engaging with the universe, other perspectives on reality. If you do so in an engaging, energetic, intelligent manner, and demonstrate that non-violence is an option for change then you are in big trouble.
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There is little that is more threatening to the Control Structure then people growing in awareness and taking creative action based on that awareness. To do so non-violently, in an honest straight forward manner is the worst. If you are engaged in such an activity set the scale on high and never lower it.

Control thrives on violence, it cannot have people becoming creative individuals with the realization that they can stand up for themselves and a principle and allow the universe to reform around them.

Such threats have to be eliminated for the control structure to remain in place. The Control Structure is based on a rather flimsy pretext: That you will remain an idiot sheep for the rest of your life, and insist that anyone within your sphere of influence does the same. A lot of people make good money creating distractions or reinforcing the status quo to help you remain in the herd, contently chewing cud until it is abattoir time.
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Every once in a while...an academic is trying to convince you that you shouldn't trouble yourself with thinking for yourself; just put all your faith and trust in those arbitrators of reality - the mass media.

"Its okay, you don't have to think," he soothes, "join me in mocking those who think that people may act out of their own self interest and conspire to alter reality for their personal benefit rather than your own. Trust power. Trust authority. I do, and look how I turned out," he emotes while stroking his chin beard on C-Span.

I wonder if he can really be so juvenile in his thinking? This supposedly learned individual wants us to believe, with all our heart, that once people gain power they become honest and trustworthy? He wants us to believe that the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc., despite bus loads of evidence, always have our best interests at heart, and would never conspire against anyone?

Well, they do conspire, he may admit, but only against the bad guys.

Who determines the bad guys? Those in power decide who the bad guys are. The bad guys are anyone who stands in their way. The mass media report back to us what they are told to report.

You can't get out of saying there are no conspiracies. It is the only reality here on earth. Of course, an unbalanced individual can take that too far. Every once in a while, a plane crash is just a plane crash.

His work is damage control. The worst thing that could happen to the Control Structure is for the American public to wake up and understand the why behind the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, Wellstone, etc. We continue to pull the trigger by ignoring reality.
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Rigorous Intuition is always thought provoking. Whereas the best political bloggers are able to scratch the surface and examine the muscles and sinews of what's going on (and the best of those personalize it in meaningful ways), RI goes deeper, examining the very marrow of political power. What he explores may seem very far-fetched to those who rely for their understanding of the world from the insta-pabulum propaganda of mainstream reportage, but to those in the know he is a fount of information, drawing deep connections that can prompt one to gasp as they scratch their head in disbelief.

Here's one of his typically paradigm-shifting snippets:

It may feel good to call Bush and his team miserable failures, yet they've stolen two presidential elections and a midterm, have dug into Iraq and the Caspian basin, and are looting the Treasury without obstruction. They may be failures in our eyes, but we're judging them on the terms of our values, while theirs can appear to us upside down. And we need to regard more than the surface of things, to make sense of their actions, and how they judge success.

For instance, the Bush White House is clearly bankrupting America: is that by accident, or design? Does it demonstrate incompent management, or is it the intentional manufacture of a crisis, to crash the system and create a larcenous Year Zero?

What makes us feel better, and which is more likely true: that they don't know what they're doing, or they do?

He's also got a great peanut gallery. Here are a couple of snippets from the comments section for the above article:

Are they bankrupting the country by design? Definitely. It appears the plan is to bring the American people to their knees ableit slowly.Why? Two reasons. One, as the economy slowly implodes, there will be deals aplenty in foreclosures, and business sellouts, for the top one percent to scoop up. Two, a greatly weakened fearful and desparate populace will be easier to control.Not to mention a ever growing supply of unemployed desparate youngsters for cannon fodder for perpetual imperialism. They want to remove every safety net, every shred of protection offered to the peasantry so they can rule us totally. Outsource as many jobs as possible, and insource cheap illegal and guest workers to take whats left.Put the squeeze on us with ever higher energy and health costs. They want a feudal system with two classes: a ruling aristocracy and masses of poor. I wring my hands at how this country will ever get out of this mess.

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As far as Bush's incompetence. What incompetence? They control every image, every question, every statement. I never think they don't know exactly what they're doing.(anymore) Remember when they referred to us as "Crusaders"? No mistake. Remember when they neglected to cover the escape route by sea out of Afghanistan, through Pakistan? (that would seem sorta easy, no?) No mistake. These people don't make mistakes. It's hard to follow their logic sure. They're nuts after all. But I don't believe they just don't notice the dumb things they do. It's like they are thumbing their noses at the world while standing behind the backs of the American people. A lot of the reason they won the last election is because many Americans resent being put-down by those foriegners. The Rethugs made that happen. The gay marriage thing, which I suspect they funded, was pretty obvious. Getting the world to hate us as an election ploy...well, Rove is a very, very good, very bad, bad boy.

xymphora is one of those rare people who employs a combination of logic, common sense, and political awareness to assess current events, and his sense of injustice is as deep as his political knowledge is wide. His recent assessment of the attempted assassination by Murkan troops of the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena is an excellent example. Some highlights:

Had everything gone as planned, an American sniper would have assassinated Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena with one shot, following the sniper's code of 'one shot, one kill'. The only independent witness to what happened would then be dead, as both her guardian, the heroic Nicola Calipari, the driver of the car, and the other two passengers were Italian secret service agents, thus worked for Berlusconi, and would be unable to say anything...The Americans obviously could have killed everyone in the car by simply blowing it up, but it would then have been impossible to claim that this was just another mistake made by a panicking speeding driver at a checkpoint. By firing lots of rounds, but with only one shot killing anybody, it is clear that either the Americans are terrible shots, or all the flying ammo was simply a ruse to hide the only shot that mattered, the one that would kill the person with the information on what happened in the chemical warfare attacks on Falluja. All the Americans, except for the sniper, were shooting to miss. The sniper had her lined up, only to be foiled by the heroic sacrifice of Nicola Calipari. Ironic that the neocons are stymied by a combination of altruism and duty, things they cannot possibly comprehend
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It is illegal and immoral to use incendiaries on civilians, and there is increasing anecdotal evidence that the Pentagon did just that in the assault on Falluja. It starts to get a little tiresome to hear the same quibbling about what the Pentagon would or wouldn't do, given cluster bombs, DU, 'shock and awe' bombing of civilians, and the general attack on Falluja itself. The human rights standards of the Pentagon - and thus of the United States - are so incredibly low that it is impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt on anything. It is also odd that the Pentagon has clearly been blocking access of journalists to interview civilians in Falluja - the reason Sgrena was so important is that she is one of the first to be able to do so - and that there are claims that American soldiers have been taking steps to 'sanitize' the city by removing evidence. We also know that after an initial outraged lie denying Pentagon use of napalm in the attack on Iraq, Pentagon officials eventually admitted that they did use a napalm-like substance, but it was not technically 'napalm' so their lies were not technically lies. You really can't believe anything they say. Let's face it: the Pentagon was 'going medieval' on Falluja, both as a punishment for its failure to kowtow to Empire and as a warning to others, and they were attacking Falluja without restraints. Napalm or other incendaires would have fit right in. So would killing anyone who might be 'unembedded' long enough to discover the truth.
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Reverend Mykeru is a take-no-prisoners juggernaut of righteous political anger, his invective filled diatribes serving as mitigating correctives to the incessant blare of the Mighty Wurlitzer. Here's an excerpt of his recent excoriation of wingnut hack Michelle Malkin:

...this isn't your father's Republican party. In fact, one can argue that the Republican party hasn't been the "party of Lincoln" since they deployed the Southern Strategy in the 1960s and started playing for the other team in the game of racial politics. As often happens, the right-wing had to make a choice between holding onto their principles or acquiring power. They chose power and seem now to be entirely liberated from principle. Malkin, like so many other right wing extremists, demonstrates the difference between having a consistent set of values and merely being "anti-liberal" because liberalism stands in the way of power or, more accurately, because well-funded right wing interest groups finance her workaday anti-liberalism. Should she accidentally contract a bad case of integrity or consistency, she can kiss her job good-bye. Without the right wing hook, she is neither a technically proficient nor insightful writer. In fact, Malkin's entire career consists of tapping into and dutifully writing on the right wing zeitgeist that week without the paranoid freeform creativity of someone like Coulter...
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Wondering how Malkin can be so wrong when she links to the very quote that disproves her point misses the point itself. The purpose of Malkin and other right-wing pundits isn't to make any specific arguments, or to hold any particular principles, or to defend a position, except in the most shallow theatrical terms. Their purpose is to promote whatever is the current power play of the right wing while denigrating liberals in any way they can.
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But Coulter is completely transparent in her day job of demonizing liberals and is fairly one-dimensional and crude in her lying. What Malkin has done in her own slightly behind the curve way, is a purely Coulteresque move done one better: Make an accusation, provide a link or reference for evidence, hope that no one actually reads the cite and discovers that it has nothing to do with what one was trying to prove or, even better, refutes the claim made. Coulter's book Slander has almost 700 footnotes in this vein. Some sort of support her claim. Some are irrelevant to her claim, and some prove the opposite. Coulter is the kind of author who knows her readers either don't follow references or couldn't understand them anyway, and anyone who criticizes her is just a liberal anyway.

Here Malkin is absolutely brilliant in her Coulter gambit if, by "brilliant" one means "could be beaten at checkers by a trained capuchin monkey addicted to huffing model airplane glue".
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Auguste of MalkinWatch rightly points out Malkin's factual inaccuracy, which is so blatant that she is either a liar, an idiot or a functional illiterate. Then he leaves it at that, being a guy too smart to go diving into the swirling blue water after a turd. Still, beyond the simple factual inaccuracy of the accusation against MoveOn, Malkin manages to pack a whole lot of lies, distortion, and propagandistic selectivity into one short paragraph.

It almost cries out for an explanation. I mean what Malkin has done here is obviously an untruth and due to the simplicity of the error giving her any benefit of the doubt for having a functional brain would force us into the next assumption, that she is engaging in deliberate untruth. After all, she wasn't just reciting this off the top of her head. She immediately linked to a Memory Hole article that refutes her very claim. So not only is it a lie, but it's a pretty stupid lie, the sort of lie that does double duty a a general insult against the intelligence of her readership.

Why just make shit up?

Because that's what Malkin and right wing pundits do, many of whom are graduates of schools of advanced bullshit like The Heritage Foundation, get money straight from Richard Melon Scaife, or take part in some other food stamp program for integrity-challenged right-wingers drummed out of some decent job in journalism.
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The job that Malkin has accepted for herself, and in this she is just an example of the entire right punditocracy, is something she is well compensated for. It's the same job Coulter has. Both are in the business of promoting extremist right wing views so extreme that the Venn diagram of what they are promoting and straight fascism has a very thick overlap. Malkin and Coulter take all the sick cousin fucking ranting of the Christian Identity people, the Militias, the Patriot movement (not to be confused with ordinary patriotic Americans), the Birchers and other lunatics, clean it up a bit and spew it back out in more acceptable form. Malkin may even be more effective at this than Coulter. Not only does Malkin seem relatively more stable than the angry, drunk, chain smoking spinster that is Coulter, but she has the advantage of being able to dress up her form of xenophobic race-conscious fascism in the apron of a nice little suburban Maryland mommy. Between episodes of explaining to her toddler why Christina Aguilera is a skank for showing skin on the cover of Rolling Stone and, not incidentally dating black men, she lays down the pseudo-scholarly framework for racial and religious pogroms. The only difference is that Malkin isn't a firebrand. There's something dutiful about her writing, as if she just picks up her wing nut writing assignment in the morning and cranks out what is expected by early afternoon.

...Whether a whore or a true believer the net result is the same. Like Coulter and other right-wing pundits, for all their outrage there's an underlying timidity to them, after all. When they are right and especially when they are wrong, they snuggle up to the powerful and never ever bite the hand that feeds them. They save up all their courage to attack those people too weak or marginalized to adequately defend themselves.

And, finally, this from Netaloid, a master of the tactless segue connecting topical abridgements. Here is an example that ties two articles together concerning the recent overhaul of the bankruptcy laws in Murka:

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But creating a scenario where only almost half of Americans are racking up the penalty payments, accelerated interest and late fees is just not good enough for the mosquito-like credit-card vampires.

Now they've gotten their bribees in the House to pass a law making it near impossible to obtain Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in the event of insurmountable credit card debt. No, the poor shits no longer will have the option of giving their house and car and clothing to the credit card vampires. No more wiping out debt and starting over. The Republicans have created a law that will force poor people to become indentured slaves to banks and credit-card companies or face prison.

And unless the few people in the U.S. Senate who still possess a soul are successful in filibustering this bill, slavery will become legal in the United States once again. You still have a chance to help stop this sadism, but act quickly, because the shit's about an inch away from hitting the fan:
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I, for one, find it very heartening to see that I am not alone — that we are not alone. Perhaps the greatest gift of the blogosphere is that it lets one know that there are many out there who agree with you, whatever your point of view is. It is helping people realize that there are far more of us out there than we thought; and that, paradoxically, the more we sing with our own voices the more the chorus sings in harmony, and the more it will be heard. (And we are being heard!)

And, lastly, I want to briefly give thanks to some of my other favorite bloggers, those whom I count amongst my friends and allies as we explore this new medium together: Harry, et alia, the Continental Op, Bruce, Thivai, Jon, Brian, Rick, Michael, and Nick — companions who all make the trek easier, more enjoyable, and more rewarding. Thank you.

Tomorrow Should Be Better

You're not reading the book are you.


Must crush town!


Tomorrow should be better.

Maybe Inflicting Intense Pain to the Masses Increases Our Freedoms as Much as it Protects Us!

Q: What do you get when you mix a police state, evil scientists getting large tax-payer subsidized research grants, the need for enhanced freedom of assembly crowd control, and just plain sadistic leaders?

Maximum pain is aim of new US weapon

19:00 02 March 2005
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
David Hambling

The US military is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away. Intended for use against rioters, it is meant to leave victims unharmed. But pain researchers are furious that work aimed at controlling pain has been used to develop a weapon. And they fear that the technology will be used for torture.
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The research came to light in documents unearthed by the Sunshine Project, an organisation based in Texas and in Hamburg, Germany, that exposes biological weapons research. The papers were released under the US's Freedom of Information Act.

One document, a research contract between the Office of Naval Research and the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, is entitled "Sensory consequences of electromagnetic pulses emitted by laser induced plasmas".

It concerns so-called Pulsed Energy Projectiles (PEPs), which fire a laser pulse that generates a burst of expanding plasma when it hits something solid, like a person. The weapon, destined for use in 2007, could literally knock rioters off their feet.
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...PEPs produced "pain and temporary paralysis" in tests on animals. This appears to be the result of an electromagnetic pulse produced by the expanding plasma which triggers impulses in nerve cells.

The new study, which runs until July and will be carried out with researchers at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, aims to optimise this effect. The idea is to work out how to generate a pulse which triggers pain neurons without damaging tissue.

The contract, heavily censored before release, asks researchers to look for "optimal pulse parameters to evoke peak nociceptor activation" - in other words, cause the maximum pain possible. Studies on cells grown in the lab will identify how much pain can be inflicted on someone before causing injury or death.
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Amanda Williams, a clinical psychologist at University College London, fears that victims risk long-term harm. "Persistent pain can result from a range of supposedly non-destructive stimuli which nevertheless change the functioning of the nervous system," she says. She is concerned that studies of cultured cells will fall short of demonstrating a safe level for a plasma burst. "They cannot tell us about the pain and psychological consequences of such a painful experience."

Yes, folks, some of the Marquis de Sade's acolytes have assumed control of the world's most powerful state. What a great idea — create a "non-lethal" weapon that will inflict great pain while leaving no scars. As any gangster will tell you, leaving telltale signs of physical trauma, like scars, is proof of assault. (Hey, if you can't "see" the pain someone's feeling then it can't be real.) It wouldn't be good publicity for Murka to have its citizens walking around with such visible evidence of State oppression, would it?

This goes beyond just simple crowd control. This enters the realm of the gleefully sadistic. This is even worse than butterfly mines — at least those had a strategic purpose (ie: maiming kids to demoralize an enemy). This EMP weapon crosses a line in which the goal itself is to inflict the greatest amount of physical pain on the greatest number of people in the shortest span of time. It is communal torture without any strategic purpose, other than to implant in people's minds that they are compelled, on pain of torture, to obey and conform. This reveals, with crystalline clarity, one of the few formulaic truths of political science: the less legitimate the authority, the more it resorts to violent repression. After all, violence is the ultimate foundation of any political order, and the more that order resorts to displays of its power the less legitimate it is.

Elaine Scarry. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

In the very process it uses to produce pain within the body of the prisoner, it bestows visiblity on the structure and enormity of what is usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer's body. It then goes on to deny, to falsify, the reality of the very thing it has itself objectified by a perceptual shift which converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power. The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of "incontestable reality" on that power that has brought it into being. It is, of course, precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used.

This remarkable quote succinctly reveals the alchemy that transmutes one's subjective experience of pain into the seductive appearance of state power. And alchemy such as this becomes a downward spiral of addiction to the state: Power becomes addicted to its own displays of power, the moreso to mask its ever increasing fears of vulnerability. Power does this to convince itself of its power by instilling the proper fear and respect in those it lords over. The more Power feasts on fear and trembling, the greater its appetite for it becomes. And so Power must continue to drown out its growing awareness of its illegitimacy by displaying its power with ever increasing displays of its omnipotence.

Robert Jay Lifton. Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World.

The world's only superpower is haunted by a fear of weakness. From psychiatric experience with individuals we know that underneath expressions of megalomania and claims to omnipotence there tend to be profound feelings of powerlessness and emptiness. Feelings on that order may affect our leader's projections of world control. These could take the form of fear of the political fragmentation of our society, with accompanying death anxiety related not just to 9/11 but to the potential collapse of the superpower entity itself. Underneath our leaders' arrogant certainties concerning the world, there may lie profound doubts about our own social and national integration, about America's control of itself. Fear of being out of control can lead to the most aggressive efforts at total control of everyone else.
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Fear of weakness is, of course, bound up with related feelings, of vulnerability, with a superpower's sense of being a very visible target, and with its unrealizable requirement of omnipotence. The world's only superpower has become a target not just because it is so dominant but because its recent policies and attitudes, emerging from superpower syndrome, have antagonized just about everyone. Its unrealizable omnipotence has caused its leaders to embark on an aggressive quest for absolute security via domination, which is another form of entrapment in infinity.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, coming out in support of the Bush administration, made a case for invading Iraq based on a principle of "ultimate national security." But as the political scientist David C. Hendrickson pointed out at the time, Kissinger seemed to have forgotten his own earlier criticism of the "absolute security", sought by revolutionary powers, noting then that "the desire of one power for absolute security means absolute insecurity for all the others." In this sense and in the way that the present administration has sought to overthrow world diplomatic procedures and restraints on war-making, the United States has certainly become a "revolutionary power" in pursuit of absolute security and absolute invulnerability. But the fear of weakness will not go away.
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The dynamic takes shape around a bizarre American collective mindset that extends our very real military power into a fantasy of cosmic control, a mindset all too readily tempted by an apocalyptic mission. The symptoms are of a piece, each consistent with the larger syndrome: unilateralism in all-important decisions, including those relating to war-making; the use of high technology to secure the ownership of death and of history; a sense of entitlement concerning the right to identify and destroy all those considered to be terrorists or friends of terrorists, while spreading "freedom" and virtues seen as preeminently ours throughout the world; the right to decide who may possess weapons of mass destruction and who may not, and to take military action, using nuclear weapons if necessary, against any nation that has them or is thought to be manufacturing them; and underlying these symptoms, a righteous vision of ridding the world of evil and purifying it spiritually and politically.

We are talking about a serious syndrome, one that is profoundly harmful, even fatal, to the national body it inhabits as well as to the world in which that body lives...

And yet I can't help but feel that there's more going on than neurotic displays of omnipotence. This feels different, more malevolent, more than simply power for power's sake.

I can't help but wonder if maybe we haven't crossed some kind of threshold into something eschatological with this, something satanic...

Now I'm no religionist — except for some vaguely held notions I harbor about taoism and animism, religion all seems like painfully stupid bunk to me, just a bunch of mythological and historical writings recorded by our ancestors to make sense of a world they were trying to understand, writings which have been turned into unassailable cultural "Great Truths" people need to believe to comfort themselves for whatever reason. (That's not to say that there aren't profound, archetypal psychological truths contained in such myths — but that's a very different thing.)

But I know that religion is one of the most common sources of zealotry, and zealots are dangerous. A zealot's manicheaen belief-system convinces them that they alone know the truth, and everyone else are infidels. Zealots in power (particularly amoral, criminal zealots) produce nothing but disaster and misery, whether the zealotry derives from religion or not. And if there's one truth about BushCo, it's that they're definitely comprised of zealots.

Are they religious zealots? There are some excellent arguments that BushCo is not religious, that their religion is simply a "cover story" at the "expense of the faithfully deceived." ("Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." —Seneca the Younger)

Well, if they are religious, it's most likely not in the WWJD sense...

"The Hangman equals death, The Devil equals death, Death equals death!" It's weird to think that the two men who are now contesting the most powerful job in world politics, both apparently went through an occult ritual that involved dressing-up and chanting the words above, prostrate in front of a fellow student wielding a butchers' knife and dressed in animal skin.

John Kerry and George Bushs junior and senior were members of the secretive Skull and Bones society at Yale university. The final words of the initiation ceremony, according to the intrepid New York Observer journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who has secretly recorded the secret incantations, centre around the command, "Run neophyte!"

from Skeleton key to the White House

There are definitely lines that tie a variety of unwholesome players together. Finding direct connections between BushCo and the Nazis is relatively easy. Finding the connections between the secret societies they belong to and their occult practices isn't that much more difficult.

The fact that I don't believe in Jesus or Satan, however, doesn't mean that others don't. Maybe there's something more going on here than meets the eye.

I don't want to come right out and say that maybe BushCo are, deep down, occultists serving their master Satan. Such an assertion strikes me as ridiculous on the surface.

But then again, we're dealing with people who don't share our notions about "reality" — no less ethics. Unless you're part of their clique one can only speculate what the fuck they really believe since any public pronouncement they make is automatically suspect. But one thing is certain — they do not think like you. Given that the people in power are known to watch the snuff films coming out of Abu Ghraib for their own pleasure (they did make the videos for a reason, after all) nothing should be off the table regarding their beliefs. I mean, who gets off watching tapes of young boys being raped in front of their own mothers? (Feel like dipping your fingers into the looking glass? Check here, here, and here.)

These guys get off on power, and there's no greater symbolic display of power than torture. And what could be a greater display of such power than inflicting immense pain on a great number of people all at once, like the casting of some monstrous spell, a kind of hi-tech modern-day incantory sacrifice to the Dark Lords?

It doesn't take a great leap to imagine that a leader imbued with the psycho-pathology of Power may adopt religious notions about the power they possess as a way to justify and explain it to themselves.

Besides — after all, they really do seem to be going out of their way to bring hell to earth, don't they?

When understanding is demented, destruction is near.
   —Sanskrit proverb

Maybe Tasing Dad Will Set a Good Example For The Kids!

What do you get when you mix a police state, a guy maybe stealing salad at a family restaurant, and poor conflict resolution skills a cop's warm glow of perfect rectitude?

Man Tasered By Police In Salad Bar Dispute

Aurora Police Say Proper Procedures Followed At Chuck E. Cheese

AURORA, Colo. -- Aurora police have reviewed a weekend incident in which a man accused of stealing salad from a Chuck E. Cheese salad bar was hit with a stun gun twice by officers and said that proper procedures were followed.

The incident began at 4:05 p.m. Sunday when officers were called to the restaurant at 145005 East Exposition on a report of a larceny in progress.

Police talked to the Chuck E. Cheese manager who told them that a customer had refused to show proof that he had paid for food. The manager said the man was seen "loading" his plate at the salad bar.

The officers confronted Danon Gale, 29, who was at the restaurant with his children, aged 3 and 7. Patrons said the popular kids pizza parlor was packed with children and families at the time.

According to police, Gale was asked to step outside to discuss the incident.

"According to witnesses (Gale) refused to cooperate with police and a struggle ensued," said Larry Martinez, a police spokesman. He said that Gale became argumentative and shoved one of the officers, a fact disputed by another patron.

"One of the officers kept poking the gentleman in the chest," Felicia Mayo told the Rocky Mountain News.

She was there with her 7-year-old son. She told the newspaper that Gale told the officer "You don't have to do that." She said Gale never put his hands on the officer who was confronting him

The argument escalated until Gale was shoved into the lap of Mayo's sister, who was sitting two booths away, holding a 10-month-old baby. That's when police pulled out a Taser stun gun to subdue him.

"They beat this man in front of all these kids then Tased him in my sister's lap," Mayo told the newspaper. "They had no regard for the effect this would have on the kids. This is Chuck E. Cheese, you know."

Gale's two children were "screaming and hollering and crying" as Gale was tasered two times with the stun gun.

Police arrested Gale as his children and other customers watched. They took him outside, leaving his children inside the restaurant.

Gale was arrested for investigation of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and trespassing.

His two children were picked up by a relative.

The manager of the restaurant declined comment and Gale said he couldn't talk about it, after hiring an attorney.

An Aurora Police spokesman said that the sergeant on the scene wrote a report on the incident and forwarded it to his commander who determined that proper police procedures were followed relating to the use of the Taser.

Hey, if you don't immediately and unquestioningly obey some guy in uniform in Murka you get what's coming to you!

Oh, and that bitch who dare contradicted the officer's story is currently enrolled in a "volunteer" federally-sponsored program for some "re-education." Her 7-year-old son was placed in protective custody pending the discovery of real Americans who will raise him right.

And the 10-month-old baby was never in harm's way, so what's the problem?

Besides, it was a great lesson for the kids — teaches them to have a healthy respect for authority to see their dad beaten and tased by cops subdued like that!

OK, there's nothing to see here, return to your shop & spend obligations...

Speaking of Shit Hitting the Fan in a World of Smoke & Mirrors...

The Last Waltz? The Coming End of the American Superpower [5/1/05]

The US economy is headed toward crisis, and the political leadership of the country--if it can be called leadership--is preoccupied with nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

The US economy is failing. The afflictions are serious. They could be fatal even if diagnosed and treated. America is losing the purchasing power of its currency and its ability to create middle class jobs.
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A venal and self-important Washington establishment combined with a globalized corporate mentality have brought an end to America's rising living standards. America's days as a superpower are rapidly coming to an end. Isolated by the nationalistic unilateralism of the neoconservatives who control the Bush administration, the US can expect no sympathy or help from former allies and rising new powers.

NOTE: the author of the above article, Paul Craig Roberts, was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and an Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of the National Review. Hardly a raving, tinfoil-hat lefty — although, judging by Murka's political doppler shift to the far very far fascist right, he might as well be.

cf: from William Rivers Pitt on the The Project for the New American Century [from 2/25/03]

The American economy will be ravaged by the need for increased defense spending, and by the aforementioned "constabulary" duties in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Former allies will turn on us. Germany, France and the other nations resisting this Iraq war are fully aware of this game plan. They are not acting out of cowardice or because they love Saddam Hussein, but because they mean to resist this rising American empire, lest they face economic and military serfdom at the hands of George W. Bush. Richard Perle has already stated that France is no longer an American ally.

As the eagle spreads its wings, our rhetoric and their resistance will become more agitated and dangerous.
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This is the price to be paid for empire, and the men of PNAC who now control the fate and future of America are more than willing to pay it. For them, the benefits far outweigh the liabilities.

cf: Wolfowitz [PNAC architect] on shortlist for World Bank top post [5/1/05]

Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy secretary of defence, has emerged as a leading candidate to replace James Wolfensohn as the president of the World Bank.
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The nomination of Mr Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war and a former US ambassador to Indonesia, would likely be highly controversial, and could raise new questions about the process by which the World Bank chief is selected. One administration official said his nomination “would have enormous repercussions within the development community”. [Yeah, no shit...]

Fighting fire with gasoline, assigning the fox to guard the chicken coop, sharpening Jack the Ripper's blade, hiring a pedophile rapist as your babysitter — whatever you want to call it, it's a great strategy for the endtimes...

I mean, why wait? Let's put this baby into overdrive!

It's just getting weirder, nastier, more surreal, and more darkly comic with each passing day. ("We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are." —William Gaddis)

In fact, with each passing day I'm thinking more and more about BushCo's assertion that they're "creating other new realities, which you can study" and seeing just how true it is. To me this is most amazingly exemplified by the most inconceivably mind-boggling, awesome magic trick in human history: the fact that there is no conclusive proof — either for or against! — that a 757 passenger jet actually smashed into the Pentagon, one of the largest, most famous buildings in the world, in the middle of a major urban area, and most likely surrounded by all sorts of cameras and radar. How can such a thing even be credibly debated? And yet it is. This fact alone signifies that BushCo are magicians of the first order, truly able, as they claim, to "create our own reality." It's enough to make one wonder if maybe there's something to the theories tying Aleister Crowley/Black Magick/Illuminati/Skull & Bones/Thule/etc. together. It seems human history has entered a period in which the monumental storm front containing the world of smoke and mirrors has engulfed us in its fury; it seems that those of us who live in the "reality-based community" and "believe that solutions emerge from [our] judicious study of discernible reality" really may be at a loss for how to understand just what really is going on. Reluctant as I am to do it, we may need to follow Alice into the Looking Glass to figure out just what the fuck is going on...

However, before plunging into the mirror I'll stick with my "reality-based" assumptions that what's commonly called "conspiracy" is really nothing more nor less than the covert implementation of boardroom policy as determined by a self-perpetuating, secretive executive class with lots of power...I'll believe this until things such as The Montauk Project grab hold of me and yank me in...

Some archetypal food for thought:

There is a familiar scene in many fantasies and great epics: when it comes time for the hero to slay the dragon or beast that is his enemy, he inflicts upon it a mortal wound. The one reading or watching the story longs to breath a sigh of relief at this point when it grows clear that the dragon will die. But when a strong beast is wounded, it becomes violently angry. The wounded dragon seems to lash out with ten times more strength and fury, causing us to wonder if the hero will survive the conflict. Although the dragon is dying, it rears up, determined to take others down with it, wounding as many as it can before it breathes its last.
[from Ravi Zacharias International Ministries]

And speaking of The Great Beast...

For these fools of men and their woes care not thou at all! They feel little; what is, is balanced by weak joys; but ye are my chosen ones. (1:31)

To me! To me! (1:65)

These are dead, these fellows; they feel not. We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk. (2:18)

We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world. Think not, o king, upon that lie: That Thou Must Die: verily thou shalt not die, but live. Now let it be understood: If the body of the King dissolve, he shall remain in pure ecstasy for ever. Nuit! Hadit! Ra-Hoor-Khuit! The Sun, Strength & Sight, Light; these are for the servants of the Star & the Snake. (2:21)

I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy. If I lift up my head, I and my Nuit are one. If I droop down mine head, and shoot forth venom, then is rapture of the earth, and I and the earth are one. (2:26) [cf: de Sade]

If Power asks why, then is Power weakness. (2:31)

Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown; & all their words are skew-wise. (2:32)

Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not: I hate the consoled & the consoler. (2:48)

I will give you a war-engine. (3:7)

With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you. (3:8)

Mercy let be off; damn them who pity! Kill and torture; spare not; be upon them! (3:18)

There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt. (3:60)

   —Aleister Crowley. The Book of the Law

Sounds almost like the gameplan for BushCo, doesn't it?

For some fun speculation on Crowley's relation to Murka's National Security State go here and here and here. Like it or not, coincidence or not, red herring or not, Crowley's name keeps cropping up in the strangest places...