perpetual state of blissful contentment

“We know more about Tom and Katie than we do about global warming. We’re the most entertained, least informed people in the world.”
- Robert Kennedy Junior [link]  talking pollution.

But it is far worse than pollution. We live in a state of death by entertainment;  a perpetual state of blissful contentment and apathy. Our rights are being taken from us and we are too busy to take a stance or even bother to read about what we are being stripped of.  We talk of fetuses and higher gas prices and gay marriages, fake discussions that give the illusion of democracy and vibrant discourse, when in reality it is all a diversion from the truths we are all afraid to face.  We are dying, but we will die with a blissful smile on our stupid faces, leaving behind us a world where fragile freedom has been destroyed because we were too busy to protect it.

driving mr. sistani

According to the president, “one of the most difficult aspects” of preparing Iraqi security forces “to be able to operate independently,” is “because that means they have to be able to drive themselves” as well as “maintain their vehicles.”

So the big problem in Iraq isn’t really the terrorists or the sectarian hatred between Shiites and Sunnis. It’s the lack of Driver’s Ed and a good mechanic. Apparently, if we want to prevail in Iraq, we need to get rid of Don Rumsfeld and replace him with Mr. Goodwrench. Or Morgan Freeman — Driving Mister Sistani.

This is Ariana Huffington from the Huffington Post writing an article entitled ’06 Delusion Alert’ which is certainly more apropriate than my own ‘moron alerts’ on this blog [link].

Thanks Ariana!  I am in tears of laughter right now.

humane rape

We will be split into two groups, one on horses, one on camels…
The aircraft went ahead of the Janjaweed. We saw the smoke, we saw the fire, then we went in…
Whenever we go into a village and find resistance we kill everyone. Sometimes they said wipe out an entire village…
We hear kill! Kill! Kill! And we shoot to kill…  Most were civilians – most were women…
Innocent people running out and being killed including children. And those who escape will die of thirst.
There are many rapes. But they don’t do it in front of others. They take the victim away and rape them.

These are the words of a Janjaweed ’soldier’ now living in London. [link]  So very humane of them really not to rape the women in front of others.

The BBC does not really elaborate on who this person is  nor why this person is in London, but regardless of whether this particular report is true, there is no doubt that there are major atrocities committed in Darfur and that they are perpetrated by the Sudanse government.

A more accurate report on those atrocities and in particular on the rape of the women and girls is found here also on the BBC [link]

What an outrage!! Shame on the Sudanese government.

top moron alerts: on cat meat, hugs and good fakers, transgressions, and eight times

Here are the top moron alerts for this week:

1. “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?”
   - Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly in a Ramadan sermon in Australia, comparing women who wore make-up and dressed immodestly to meat that attracted cats.
2. “If we can’t win, I’ll pull us out. If I didn’t think it was noble and just and we can win, we’re gone. I can’t — I’m not going to keep those kids in there and have to deal with their loved ones. I can’t cover it up when I meet with a family who’s lost a child. I cry, I weep, I hug. And I’ve got to be able to look them in the eye and say, we’re going to win. I have to be able to do that. And I’m not a good faker.”
   - President Bush on ‘are we winning in Iraq’ to Salon.com
3. “By taking deliberately malicious positions vis-a-vis Tunisia, Aljazeera has broken all limits and transgressed the moral rules on which journalism is based”.
   - Statement issued by Tunisian Foreign Ministry upon closing its embassy in Qatar. It also added  that the embassy closure was directed at Aljazeera and did not reflect on Tunisia’s relations with Qatar, which it called a “brother nation”.
4. “Well sure, to be fair, the President did say ‘Stay the Course’ eight times.”
   - Tony Snow, White House spokesman at a press conference. The President said it 28 times [thanks to crooksandliars.com and Ketih Olbermann's careful watchful eyes!]

FEEEEETUS vs humans

I caught myself – yet again - swearing at the radio. It seems I am becoming as insane as the world we live in.. but then if you live in an asylum, don’t other insane people rub on you eventually? My son reasures me though, that talking to my computer or radio is fine – as long as we do not start ‘having a conversation’. Umm.. that would be problematic, he says.

As the US elections campaigns are heating up these day, every candidate is of course trying to draw on his/her stengths, or, in the case of the Republicans, their lies and cover-ups and fear-mongering, in order to make a lasting impression on the voters.

In South Dakota though, the issue is not war. Ok this is sort of acceptable. The issue is not the economy either. Umm.. oookay… still surprising but acceptable. The issue is not security either. Umm… oookay again… now that is realllly surprising.

So what are the South Dakotans concerned about when casting that vote? Yup.. Abortion. In interviews with several of them, they all announced in very ‘heartbroken’ words that tey will vote based on the candidate that is ‘pro-life’… ie. does not support abortion.

One man very slomenly announced that ‘just the thought of taking away the life of one single human is unacceptable and is murder.’ With emphasis on ‘one single human’… a pause… then the announcement: murder. Hmmmmmm…

One single human life. The man is, of course, referring to the FETUS – or fetuses, or feti.  Nope.. Iraqis don’t matter. Palestinians don’t matter either. Nor do the Lebanese. It is the fetus of one single person living in these United States. In fact, the report on the radio was specifically talking about a law passed recently denying abortion even to rape victims and incest victims. They cited a 13 year old who is a victim of incest and who did not know whether it was her father’s or two brothers’ baby she was carrying. She is featured in their campaign ads… as ‘what did the child do?’ ie. the child who was yet to be born, not the 13 year old. The 13 year old is now stuck with a baby for the rest of her life as a reminder of the incest lest she forgets. Mothers came out with their children asking in horror ’how can anyone ask me to murder my child?’

Without getting into the long debate about abortion [which should NOT be a political decision], my point is: what about the thousands – the millions dying because of this administration? if they don’t care about Iraqis, Palestinans and Lebanese, what about the US soldiers dying? isn’t that murder too?

Fetus vs Iraq/Lebanon/Afghanistan/Palestine/US soldiers. Makes plenty of sense.

I just swore at the radio again. Soon.. me and my radio just might have a two way conversation. Who knows?

the oil factor and the killing of the children of iraq

Two excellent documentaries: the first is John Pilger’s Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq, and the second is from Free Productions entitled The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror [link to the official Oil Factor site]. Both are MUST see videos. Pilger’s video is about the sanctions and is a pre-9/11 documentary which aired in 2000. The second is new and is equally stunning in the revelations that it makes.

To view The Oil Factor, click here.
To view Paying the Price, click here.

attacking iran

The Union of Concerned Scientists has created this flash animation to show the effect of a nuclear attack on Iran’s nueclear facilities with a bunker buster bomb. Read also the Statement by Dr. Kurt Gottfried, Chairman, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Emeritus Professor of Physics, Cornell University, entitled Administration’s Nuclear Saber Rattling on Iran Threatens Global Security.

Plans to use nuclear weapons against Iran also fail to recognize the immediate dangers inherent in the use of nuclear weapons. The administration is reportedly considering using the B61-11 nuclear ‘bunker buster’ against an underground facility near Natanz, Iran. The use of such a weapon would create massive clouds of radioactive fallout that could spread far from the site of the attack, including to other nations. Even if used in remote, lightly populated areas, the number of casualties could range up to more than a hundred thousand, depending on the weapon yield and weather conditions.
“Threatening to use nuclear weapons against Iran provides the strongest of incentives for nuclear proliferation, since it would send the message that the only way for a country to deter nuclear attack is to acquire its own nuclear arsenal. The administration cannot have its cake and eat it, too—it cannot have a viable nuclear non-proliferation policy while continually expanding the roles for its own nuclear weapons.” [link]

This is a must see animation [click on image for link]:

managing perception in this brave new world

The United States is not suffering from some collective personality disorder called compassion fatigue. We are suffering from the most well-funded thought-control experiment in history, more sophisticated and deadly by many orders of magnitude than anything contrived by Kim Jong Il – the latest bete noir of American public discourse, and we are suffering from the complicity of journalistic hacks like Judith Miller and the anodyne intellectual narcotics of policy think tanks.
It is our empathy that is under attack, because if it is aroused to a point where Iraqis or Afghans or even our own imperial soldiers become real people (and not a yellow-ribbon magnet), the jig is up. [link]

Those are the words of Stan Goff, a retired veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces and father of a soldier deployed in Iraq. In this excellent article entitled Reflecting on Rumsfeld, Goff describes in agonizing detail the behind-the-scenes chilling similiarities between  Vietnam and Iraq,  and dissects the characters-in-action in the Bush administration and their doctrines regarding war and empire, from Powell to Rumsfeld.

It is a frightening insider view of how those minds work, how nothing is what it seems and everything is what ‘they’ want us to think it is. Here is yet another chilling fact:

On Feb. 19, 2002, more than a year before the American military entered its Iraqi quagmire, The New York Times ran a story about the OSI. The purpose of said office was “developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations … to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries.”

Amid the publicity about this publicity management organization, the OSI was killed.

Rumsfeld, in a fit of arrogant pique at reporters in November of the same year, railed at them:

There was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And “Oh, my goodness gracious, isn’t that terrible; Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall.” I went down that next day and said, “Fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done’ and I have….”

It was not dismantled, but rather ‘repackaged’ and sent out again as the Information Operations Roadmap” (IOR).

Perception management is about killing empathy, and replacing it with some cultural entertainment convention. Our society has been trained to want to be entertained, and entertainment is the highest form of happiness. It costs a lot of money to entertain us, and it costs a lot of money to snuff out our empathy.

Perception management programs are extremely well planned and employ an army of public relations experts and professional spin-masters. That is why they are hugely expensive.

Can we really sleep at night?

dat google is da bomb, dude – eeeha!!

The Prez was asked if he ‘googled anybody’ or if he ever used Google. Of course with any question, you would expect one of his historic brilliant responses. This one will go down in history, along with all the others:

“Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see that. I forgot the name of the program, but you get the satellite and you can — like, I kind of like to look at the ranch on Google, reminds me of where I want to be sometimes. Yeah, I do it some.” He added: “I tend not to email or — not only tend not to email, I don’t email, because of the different record requests that can happen to a president. I don’t want to receive emails because, you know, there’s no telling what somebody’s email may — it would show up as, you know, a part of some kind of a story, and I wouldn’t be able to say, `Well, I didn’t read the email.’ `But I sent it to your address, how can you say you didn’t?’ So, in other words, I’m very cautious about emailing.”[link]

 

blank checks to the President that imperil us all

Now, when Keith Olbermann speaks, we listen. Here, he addresses the Military Commissions Act in a Special Comment [link] on October18th.

We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived as people in fear.
And now – our rights and our freedoms in peril – we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.
…
“With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?” 
Wise words.   
And ironic ones, Mr. Bush
Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.
You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.
Sadly – of course – the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.
…
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that “the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values” and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy combatants” and ship them somewhere – anywhere – but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “unlawful enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere – anywhere.
…
Your words are lies, Sir.
They are lies that imperil us all.