Deck: Cyber Curmudgeon

Invade one of the poorest weakest countries on earth with 30,000 more troops -- in addition to the 70,000 troops and thousands of mercenaries you already have there -- and win the Nobel Peace Prize.

OK, OK, Obama hadn't actually sent troops at the time he got the Nobel Peace Prize. While running for president he had only promised to do more fighting in Afghanistan. Which, of course, made him the 'peace' candidate.

You can't make this shit up.

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I read an article about blogging and online news some time ago that wailed: "But what is missing is the credibility that comes with that message coming through the mainstream media."

I don't know the provenance of the quote now, I can't tell you who said it, but it is pure nonsense to suggest that the corporate "mainstream" media has any credibility at all.

While individual reporters can be accurate, discerning, courageous, the corporate management, the corporate climate, means that those reporters have to toe the line, to write what management has determined is the proper approach.

In war, we just have to look at what the corporate media did in the run-up to the Iraq war, and is now doing in Obama's run-up to expanding the war in Afghanistan. The hard questions are simply never asked, the lies are never exposed, the horrendous cost in lives and us dollars is never examined, the ethics and morality are never considered worthy of attention.

In politics, all we have to do is look at the deification of George Bush, and then Obama. The media worships at the altar of Washington power, the status quo, the ruling elite.

The media has never ever truly questioned the ruling elite, but when I was in the business an eon ago, we could nibble at the edges, raise questions. In the last two or three decades, with rare exceptions, it has not only been impossible to question the ruling elite, the powers behind the scenes, but the media is afraid to even question the government itself. If the government said it, it is true and it is disloyal, even treasonous, to raise doubts .

'Stenographers of power' is a brilliant description of modern corporate media, and I wish I had coined the phrase.

The corporate media has no credibility and not much is going to be lost with the disintegration of the news media as we knew it.

I don't know what's going to replace newspapers and the on-air media as we have known them, but even though I spent my professional life as a newsman, I no longer regret their passing.

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Off to Orycon.

I have been passively studying UFOs for 50 years, including the 46 years since President Kennedy was assassinated.

In all that time I never came across any suggestion that JFK's assassination might have been connected to UFOs -- or more specifically, to someone's desire to keep the secret files on UFOs secret.

Only the terminally naïve believe that Kennedy assassination was not the result of a conspiracy, but the list of the possible conspirators is nearly endless -- Castro, Cuban exiles, the Mafia, Vietnam War hawks, Federal Reserve Bank officials, LBJ, etc.

But a new DVD of a presentation at the 7th Annual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference suggests that President Kennedy's efforts to declassify UFO files was a direct factor in his assassination.

As Spock would say, "fascinating."

Moreover, the DVD suggests that President Eisenhower briefed Kennedy about the dangers of the military-industrial complex and he was concerned that corporate control of technologies retrieved from UFOs would ultimately lead to threats against civil liberties and the American Republic by the military-industrial complex.

UFOs and corporate malfeasance? I might just have to buy that DVD.

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To my delight, Dr. Jacques Vallee is going to be a guest blogger on Boing Boing.

Jacques Vallee is the rarest of the rare, a serious researcher who doesn't buy the simplistic theory that UFOs are simply extraterrestrial aliens coming here in their versions of the USS enterprise. He has written numerous books on the subject and suggests that the UFO phenomenon is extraordinarily complex and we are a long way from understanding it, if we even can understand it.

One of his suggestions is that they are somehow involved in guiding our evolution as a species.

When I'm introducing people to the subject of UFOs, I usually start with one of his books, which include Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, Messengers of Deception, and The Invisible College.

He is a computer scientist as well as a UFO expert so I don't know what he will be blogging about at Boing Boing, but I hope it will be UFOs at least some of the time.

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LiveJournal's gear_halo answered my previous post with this: Don't know what kind of Veteran's Day you're familiar with, but it's always been about giving a day of appreciation to those who've served so others didn't have to and remembering those who've served and are no longer with us, not some cartoonishly diabolical propaganda event.

But Veterans Day is cartoonish. He might better have faulted me for suggesting that Armistice Day celebrated peace. In the beginning, it did, but by World War II it was already being used to glorify war. When it became Veterans Day, that became the standard.

You can hardly go wrong quoting Kurt Vonnegut, a World War II veteran and author of Slaughterhouse Five. In another of his books, Breakfast of Champions, he said the following about Armistice Day:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy... all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep.I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

Veterans Day is used by politicians and generals to give speeches about the necessity for great sacrifices such as those made by men who have fought in wars. It is not honoring them, it's using them to support present and future wars.

And the speeches are often a rewriting of history.

Obama made a speech this Veterans Day containing this gem: "Ninety-one years ago today, the battlefields of Europe fell quiet as World War I came to a close. But we don't mark this day each year as a celebration of victory, as proud of that victory as we are..."

Victory? The armistice that ended World War I was not seen as a victory but as an end to slaughter. Only in the minds of little politicians can the ending of one of the most brutal wars in history be seen in terms of glorious victory.

If Obama really wanted to honor veterans, particularly those wounded in combat, he would see to it that all vets who need help can find it. But this would require massive new expenditures and draw attention to the fact that our wars have a terrible cost. Obama and the other politicians are not willing to do that.

So we'll mark Veterans Day with speeches about the honored dead, paying no attention to the fact that almost always they died not to protect our freedom, but to protect the profits of our corporations.

Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler, at the time of his death in 1940 the most decorated Marine in U.S. history, said it better than I can:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Things haven't changed since Gen. Butler's day.

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I much preferred the Armistice Day we once celebrated, than today's Veterans Day.

Armistice Day, at least in theory, celebrated peace, the end of the slaughter of WW1.

Veterans Day glorifies war, making it easier to sell people on accepting eternal wars like the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq that kill our soldiers and thousands of innocents, cost us trillions in tax dollars while people lose their homes and die of inadequate health care as the bomb makers get obscenely rich.

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Paul Craig Roberts correctly identifies The Evil Empire in a powerful piece on Antiwar.com.

It's the kind of piece you will rarely or never read, see, or hear in the American corporate media because it would force us to examine some of our most cherished beliefs about ourselves -- and see them for the delusions they are.

He discusses the 'peace' president who is giving us more wars, the 'reform' that will give more profits for insurance companies in place of health care for Americans, the Goldstone vote that shows the U.S. House "is nothing but the servile, venal, puppet of the Israel Lobby," the report of a UK ambassador describing how people were raped with broken bottles and boiled alive to get "proof of the vast al Qaeda conspiracy" for the American and the British goverments.

Read the article, if you have the stomach, at:
http://original.antiwar.com/roberts/2009/11/06/the-evil-empire/

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That $400/gallon war gas is only one small sign of our financial madness. You need to take a look at this real-time national debt clock to see the scope of U.S. insanity.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

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"      ...There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the ... House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.
.      ...the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way."
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

We won't end the war because it is immoral, illegal, unconstitutional, insane, and based on the assumption that the US has the absolute right to invade any country anywhere anytime.

Can we at least end it because it is financial madness?

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On Larry King, Michael Moore mused on a CIA scandal involving the brother of the president of Afghanistan. Citing a story in The New York Times about how the CIA is bankrolling the man suspected of being involved in the opium trade which funds the Taliban, Moore said:

"So we're paying the guy who's helping to create the money that's funding the Taliban that's killing our soldiers. Are we, like, an insane country?"

War is always insane -- but also insanely profitable for the military-industrial alliance which owns America.

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Michael Moore told Larry King that it's time for Obama to wind down the war in Afghanistan. "It's unwinnable. It's immoral. It's illegal. It's wrong." 

Deckishly put, as Deck has been saying since we first launched a blitzkrieg on one of the world's weakest and poorest nations to attack mythical terrorists. 

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The Organic Bytes newsletter reports that the  government has gone after Dr. Andrew Weil, one of the most trusted doctors in America, in support of the swine flu scam ... errr.... excuse me, "the swine flu emergency."

A joint warning letter from the FDA and FTC was sent to websites and companies demanding they stop making 'false' claims about their products or they will face criminal charges. Dr. Weil was forced to remove information about a supplement which contains astragalus, "traditionally used to ward off colds and flu and has demonstrated both antiviral and immune-boosting effects in scientific investigation."

The irony is that under the the declaration of a national swine flu emergency, the FDA can authorize "the emergency use of certain unapproved and uncleared products" and it has already authorized the emergency use of the untested drug peramivir. Peramivir side effects have included diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and neutropenia (a white cell disorder.)

Leave it to the FDA to 'protect' the public from natural herbal supplements while rushing untested pharmaceuticals to market.

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I love CNN's 'Quick vote' poll:

"Which public insurance option should Congress include in health care legislation?"

The choices:
    * Opt out for states
    * Trigger mechanism
    * No public option

That's it. No other choices.

Want single-payer? You can't vote.
Want public option without either 'opt out' or 'trigger'? You can't vote.

If you won't vote as you are told, you don't get to vote.

Voting in the corporate media world.

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I've just discovered another reason I like Ralph Nader, that guy I voted for in the last several elections.

My favorite sitcom of all time was Barney Miller, and my favorite character in the show was the smart guy/smart ass Arthur Dietrich. In a piece written for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tony Norman said that Nader deserves more respect than he gets and added the following observation:

"He also has a very dry sense of humor and laughs easily and generously. He reminded me of the droll Arthur Dietrich character played by Steve Landesberg on the sitcom 'Barney Miller'."

So, not only is he honest and principled and right about the corporate destruction of America, but he's got a good sense of humor too.

Right on.

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Our health care 'reform' debate is all about statistics and money and lies ('death panels' anyone), never about people. We never hear any of the stories of the 45,000 people (Harvard study) who die preventable deaths each year because of lack of health insurance.

Like the story of 24-year-old Jenny Fritts. Jenny, seven-and-a-half months pregnant, who was turned away from a for-profit hospital because she did not have health insurance. Her husband Sean rushed her to another hospital and lied about having insurance to get her in the door. She was placed on a respirator in intensive care, but didn't make it. She and her daughter both died.

You can find Jenny's story at www.guaranteedhealthcare.org, a project of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, and patients and community groups around the country.

I think our senators and congressmen should be forced to read the stories of all 45,000 victims of our broken health care system before they vote.

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'The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One'
by former bank regulator William Black

A book you might want to read while thinking about the fact that US banks and securities firms plan to give their employees about $140 billion in bonuses this year while gleefully counting the trillions of dollars you generously gave them.

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The massive welfare bill for the health insurance industry has passed the Senate Finance Committee.

It will force you to buy the health insurance you haven't been carrying because you couldn't afford it, assuring millions of new customers for the insurance companies. If you don't buy it, the government will make you pay a big fine. Neat, huh?

But don't worry, if you can't afford the premiums, the government will help you out so the insurance companies don't lose any profits.

And oh, that public option? Not there.

Which you'll find out if you read to the last paragraph of the AP story.

By the way, this is called healthcare "reform." Honest.

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When Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace prize for killing a couple of million Vietnamese and 50,000 American soldiers, Tom Lehrer said satire was dead.

Apparently the Nobel committee wasn't sure, so they ran over the grave with a tank.

Giving President Obama, the world's current foremost warmonger, the peace prize was an act of cynical contempt for truth and logic.

Peace?

The politician ran a campaign vaguely promising to end the Iraq war, sort of. Nine months after taking office, the war and the American occupation continues with no end in sight, only another vague promise of pulling out a few 'combat' troops. someday.

Obama was more honest about the Afghanistan war -- he said he'd concentrate on it -- i.e. keep fighting there forever, killing more civilians and 'insurrectionists' (Afghans fighting against a foreign invader.) A few days ago he renewed his promise of a perpetual Afghanistan war.

Since gaining office, he has increased the remote-control killing by aerial drones in Pakistan, threatening a wider war there.

And he is constantly threatening Iran because there are fears it might want to get a nuclear weapon or two to counter Israel's 200+ nuclear bombs. The fact that Iran stopped its nuclear weapon program years ago is unimportant.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran. Three wars and a threat = peace?

In what universe?

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