Bravery Of The Real Kind

I don't think I would have the guts that a young Iranian student has.

He criticized the leaders of Iran in public:

Mahmoud Vahidnia is a math student at Tehran’s Sharif Technical University where he recently won the gold medal at the country’s National Math Olympics (yes, geeks have an Olympics of their own). Vahidnia, however, has become a political icon in Iran after he publicly chastised the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the brutal crackdown of protesters.

At first, Vahidnia was blocked by organizers from speaking and then one of the organizers tried repeatedly to cut him off. However, to the surprise of many, Khamenei allowed him to speak in a televised encounter. The government is now using the incident to show that freedom thrives in the Islamic republic, which is being described as “The revolutionary leader’s fatherly response to critical youth.”

The exchange lasted 20-minutes and Khamenei appeared taken aback at first. The criticism followed Khamenei denouncing the questioning of the presidential results as the “biggest crime” since he personally found Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be the winner.

Mahmoud then raised his hand and launched into a criticism of the crackdown with such memorable statements as “I don’t know why in this country it’s not allowed to make any kind of criticism of you . . . In the past three to five years that I have been reading newspapers, I have seen no criticism of you, not even by the Assembly of Experts, whose duty is to criticize and supervise the performance of the leader.”

(J. Turley). It is scary enough to criticize the military industrial complex power brokers in the United States, but to do so in Iran takes the real stuff.

Employment Improves Dramatically!!!

If you are employed in the lovely Pentagonia, capital city of Bullshitistan, then your employment rates are going up as more and more soldiers and contractors with no-bid contracts are hired.

But if you live in the United States of America the opposite is true, because your unemployment rate is up to 10.2% now.

There is only so much theoretical money, so as one side goes up the other side goes down.

James Madison, the "Father of the United States Constitution", pointed out that war is our worst enemy.

Have you noticed that our enemy has been getting fat these daze? Two wars have been going for longer than World War I and World War II added together.

Thus, soldier employment is going up Up UP while civilian employment is going down Down DOWN into record unhappiness numbers.

Hello Obama! Hello Gates! Hello Congress!

Get the hell out of Pentagonia, Bullshitistan, "propaganda capitol of the world", and get back home Jo Jo, get back home Loretta!!!

Death vs Glorious Death vs Life

The fake journalists from the Pentagon (e.g. Col. Jack Jacobs of MSNBC) are out again proclaiming that "a political motive will come out as the reason" a Major in the Army gunned down soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas.

Never mind the psychologists or criminologists, the scores of suicide and other shootings at Fort Hood historically; never mind that psychologists are high in the death by suicide statistics; and never mind anything else.

The Pentagon needs to generate some fear so their campaign to continue to drain the federal treasury of money (that could be used to help Americans, yes drain the money from the people who need it to live) then use that treasury money to kill people in foreign lands.

They are presenting an argument for one kind of death vs another kind of death, so we can only hope it falls on ears that will not hear it.

The fake journalist version will boil down to a "discovery" that politics rather than insane criminal behaviour is at the bottom of this story. It is no more than a notice that they will repeat propaganda over and over again until they think we believe their version of the script.

The facts are that military suicides are up because the idiotic wars have gone on longer than World War I and World War II combined.

Each of those wars generated mental problems, so it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that a war twice as long or longer will do even more than mental damage.

The suicidal state of mind problem is serious enough that the largest study in history has been commissioned by the military to study and to document the problem. The military's scientific statement on this state of affairs is:

This event speaks to the fact that we do not yet have the science or the clinical tools at our disposal to predict these kinds of violent acts. It is why your work here at the university is so important to our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines and to their families.

(USUHS, 11/09, emphasis added). As the right wing propaganda escalates into an exact and scientific or political reason the killings took place, then a criticism for not preventing this killing, remember the official position is that they do not know while the unofficial wingnut position is they do know.

El Cid vs. Joe Six Pack - 3

The MSM (main stream media) is not following The United States of Europe in as serious a manner as it should be followed.

We should be monitoring the healing of our seriously damaged reputation in the world, furthermore we certainly should especially be doing so with regard to the new and united Europe.

The Joe Six Pack series shows us why that is so in one serious area of foreign relations - international criminal law.

On that score, one criminal case is ongoing in one of The United States of Europe, while another case has already resulted in the criminal conviction of 23 Americans.

Since the Obama Administration is continuing the policies that at least two European nations so far deem criminal, this is likely to further strain foreign relations at a time when we do not need any more strain on those relations.

MSNBC covered it on Morning Joe, Jonathan Turley, and Newsweek covered it, so it may be getting around. Still, only Turley is giving it the gravity it should be given.

Elections Followed The Status Quo

In Virginia and New Jersey the voters did what they have done in each gubernatorial election following a presidential election for several decades now.

It has become routine for those two states to vote out the candidate from the party of the current president, thus to vote in the opposing party's candidate.

In this case the opposing party was the Republican Party, so today there are two new GOP governors.

I look at these gubernatorial results for indications that the Democratic Party is capable of revolutionary change, change we sorely need and can believe in.

Since they could not change the gubernatorial election status quo, have not changed the economic status quo nor the war status quo, I will conclude that the democrats are not the party that can do revolutionary change in foreign relations, economy, or health care.

The Democrats are a status quo party, while the Republicans are the current revolutionary party.

But the revolution the republicans want is destructive to life, limb and economy, as we saw in the republican Bush II years of debacle after debacle.

The New York district 23 race for the House (where neoCons Pawlenty and Palin put forth their revolutionary candidate) upheld the status quo too. I mean the status quo of the last election, where the revolutionary ideology of the conservative republicans was soundly rejected. A democrat won the 23rd district seat which had been held by republicans for decades.

Thus, the only hope for a progressive revolution, from the stand point of countering the Republican's ongoing destructive revolution, or from the standpoint of rejecting the status quo, is the Independent party or parties; those who are neither Republican nor Democrat.

The New York 23rd district House race is positive in that sense, because the voters rejected the republican neoCon revolutionary ideology, having to stick with the status quo party because the independents had no viable candidate.

This election should be seen as a good sign for independents who do not accept the status quo and who want a positive progressive revolution.

But those independents have to find a way to advance good candidates before they can step through the open door.

National Schizophrenia & The Id

In an interview concerning, among other things, his new book Our Choice, Al Gore pointed out an interesting contrast:

They [China] will soon be number one in wind, number one in solar; they are building an eight-hundred-kilovolt super-grid that promises to be the most advanced in the world in less than a decade. And yet they are still opening a new, inefficient, dirty, coal-fired generating plant every eight or nine days.

(New Yorker). If an individual did that we would probably apply this to that individual:

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have normal emotional responses, and to behave normally in social situations ... Schizophrenia may have a variety of symptoms ... [a sufferer] can become isolated and withdrawn, and have trouble making or keeping friends.

(Google Health). The U.S. became withdrawn and isolated by choice over the last 8 years of Bush II.

Nations have had trouble making friends over the past century, witnessed by three world wars and a plethora of smaller wars.

Nations are heading for catastrophe if they try to cling onto the very things that are steering us toward those catastrophes.

Thus, I am inclined to be sceptical of Al Gore's premise that it is "our" choice, because the essence of mental illness is that the infected one can no longer make the proper choices.

For example, in the U.S. the people can not make the correct choices any more, not because the people do not know what is proper, but because the government will not do what was promised during the election cycle; they will not do what they were elected to do.

Nations Id what they Id, and once the corruption reaches a certain point the land of reality is so long gone that the land of catastrophe seems to be the more certain destination.

Newsy On Karzai Karzai Klan

The Afghanistan debacle is back in the news in terms of fraudulent elections a la Stalin.

Stalin is reported to have said "the voters decide nothing, the vote counters decide everything" or something close to that.

The Toxins of Power blog has a post that theorizes that this form of corruption emanates from a sort of national "Id" of the Freudian type.

We discussed the purple finger of fake elections in a previous post some months ago.

Rosa over at Newsy requested that I embed one of their video pieces to enhance the Dredd Blog post CIA Stars In New "Karzai" Movie, so here it is:

Unamericanizing Us To Americanize Us

In the debacle called the Vietnam War they used to "destroy a village in order to save it".

Now the government is getting into the official habit of unamericanizing us in order to americanize us.

Behold our Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

(Cornell Law School). Americans ("the people"), due to the Fourth Amendment, assume that their government is leaving their privacy alone.

The thing that is secured by the supreme law of the land is the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" from the government.

We are not to be spied upon.

The supreme law of the land tells the government not to spy on us, unless a government official can swear under oath before a judge that they have evidence of a crime one of us has done or is about to do.

The administration of the law requires that an independent judge, who took an oath not to issue a search warrant unless it is done legally, must approve spying on "the people".

Newsweek reports that the Obama Administration is swallowing whole the wholly right doctrine of spying on Americans for "security" reasons.

In other words they steal the right of the people to be secure by calling the removal of that security "security".

It is classic Orwellian double speak.

I can believe that they initially deceive themselves into thinking that, however, it does not take long to see it is a ruse of propaganda.

I question whose security it is they hypothesize they are securing, and who are they spying on to "secure that security"? Newsweek reports as follows:

If anything, the Obama administration, citing the threats of computer hacking and cyberterrorism, is now moving to involve the NSA more deeply in domestic security issues. The growing role of the NSA—a Defense Department agency with thousands of military personnel—in domestic matters was on semi-public display on Friday. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano visited a nondescript office complex in Arlington, Va., for the formal opening of a new high-tech command post called the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC, pronounced "en-kick").

(Newsweek). I can think of an end kick that would do better for Americans, and it would be a swift boot to the butts of the Nixonian / Bush - Cheney type neoCons who love to practice this type of corruption.

Dredd Blog did a post a while back that shows the de facto dark history and purpose of domestic spying. It isn't what the government says it is.

The Toxins of Power blog has a post that theorizes that this form of corruption emanates from a sort of national "Id" of the Freudian type.

The United States of Europe

The European Union is doing better and better these days.

One can't help but wonder if it is the future home of the United Nations.

Or perhaps the new home of the new world currency which could replace the U.S. dollar.

Some of the myths about Europe we cling to are falling by the wayside:

As the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall arrives next week, Europe finds itself more united, prosperous, and secure than at any time in history. EU members have become some of the planet's most adroit globalizers, opening themselves to the world while keeping in place their extensive social services—Germany alone exports as much as China. The continent has also fared better than expected in the downturn. Europe's unemployment rate now bests America's, and France and Germany managed to escape the recession faster than the United States.

Things look almost as good on the political front. In the years since communism ended, the EU has doubled in size, and its population will pass 500 million next year. The Union, often decried as dysfunctional, has reached another important milestone: the Lisbon Treaty, a quasi constitution that streamlines decision making, has just been approved by the last of the 27 members. Its passage will curtail the veto that gave even tiny members the ability to block major projects, and will create a new post of EU president, who will be empowered to speak on the Union's behalf.

(Newsweek [link removed, so see Wayback Machine version (stop page load after photo loads so it does not jump), or go here, here, here, and/or here], emphasis added). Germany alone (1 out of 27 members of the EU) exports as much as China? Time to start to think about French Fries again instead of Freedom Fries wouldn't you say?

The next post in this series is here.