Democrats Pay How Much For War? - 2

Not so long ago Dredd Blog had occasion to wonder just how much the democrats would have to pay for the wars they have not attempted to halt.

That post was not concerned with the dollar amounts they willingly and without question paid the warmongers, the pig banks, and others drooling while lusting greedily after the public trough.

No, that post was concerned with the democrats finding themselves on the wrong end of the angry American voters, because the issue was stated as:

I mean in the upcoming elections, since they have shown, up until this point, that they will pay any amount for war, but very little for domestic needs.

The people have polled against the wars for years now, to no avail. The people overwhelmingly voted the neoCon republican hawks out, to give the democrats a chance to do what the people want.

Nevertheless, the wars continue, now having lasted longer than WW I and WW II combined.

(How Much Will Democrats Pay For War?). The discourse in that post was downstream from a Dredd Blog reminder to the democrats about what had been rejected in the two elections that had given them control of the House, Senate, and the White House:

In the first article the critical issue of the campaign was mentioned, which was the fact that it was a rejection election. The people rejected something.

That subject is all important to understanding what went down, so in the article we answered the question by saying that it was the Bush II status quo mentality and politics that was rejected.

The Bush II regime's despotic ideology does not sit well with Americans, and in fact it does not sit well with humane people across the globe. Not surprisingly then, it was soundly rejected.

Understanding and remembering that factor is equally important to understanding what will go down in various circumstances during the first term of the Obama Administration.

(What Was Rejected In The Election). It seems that the cows have come home, if we take note of the usually extremely accurate 538 dot com musings:

And what if, for example, the Rasmussen case comes into being? Rasmussen has the Democrats losing the generic ballot by 9 points (and has had similar numbers for awhile). A 9-point loss in the House popular vote would translate into a projected 65-seat loss for Democrats. Or, if we adjust the Rasmussen poll to account for the fact that the Democrats' performance in the popular vote tends to lag the generic ballot, it works out to a 12.4 - point loss in the popular vote, which implies a loss of 79 seats!

The point is not necessarily that these are the most likely scenarios -- we certainly ought not to formulate a judgment based on Rasmussen polls alone, as the jury is still out on whether the substantial house effect they've displayed this cycle is a feature or a bug. But these sorts of scenarios are frankly on the table. If Democrats were to lose 50, 60, 70 or even more House seats, it would not totally shock me. Nor would it shock me if they merely lost 15, or 20. But their downside case could be very far down.

(Generic Poll Points to 50+ Loss For Democrats). I cite to 538 because they were perfectly accurate in the last election.

As I said in Yes They Can!, it would be totally insane, and a clear indicator that this nation has gone over the edge, but that also can happen.

U.S. Mythology Trance - Military Justice

MOMCOM's little helper, the Bush II regime knew that innocent people were imprisoned at GITMO. They were afraid it would be bad for catapulting the propaganda if they failed to cover up the fact they were torturing innocent people. Dredd Blog posts going back a while have wondered at the barbarianism of the Bush II regime, and of the seeming inability of the Obama administration to do anything differently, even though Obama has expressed a willingness to do so. Accusations are being revealed in Britain, by former Bush II regime members, that the barbarian injustices were widely known during the Bush II regime:

The allegations were made in a document by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to Bush's first secretary of state, Colin Powell, in a lawsuit filed by a former Guantanamo inmate and published by The Times in London. Colonel Wilkerson alleged Bush's vice-president, Dick Cheney, and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew most detainees held at the US detention camp in 2002 were innocent but believed it was "politically impossible to release them". They were also keen to avoid revealing the "incredibly confused" detention operation, Colonel Wilkerson said, claiming prisoners were often rounded up by Afghan and Pakistani forces in return for cash, with little or no evidence as to why. He alleged then-vice-president Cheney "had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it."

(Herald Sun, emphasis added). Now we know why they do not want to try them in federal court where this will all be revealed, or at least much more difficult for MOMCOM to cover up any longer. The MOMCOM "courts" will do a better job of covering up the torture of innocent victims tortured by the Bush II evil masters, but at what cost to the reputation of the American people? This is another one of the costs of war that should pop the mythology that wars are free. One's reputation is one's most valuable asset in has been said, but the U.S. reputation has been ruined by "the pew, the loud, the latrines".

The U.S. Mythology Trance - Free Wars

I went over the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) website to look at some of the numbers, after a CBO official said that our debt is "unsustainable".

I forgot that the Congress & President do not seem to like to keep in their thinking any notion that wars cost money.

I forgot also that republicans complain about the cost of domestic programs, but never mention that wars are the most costly of all expenditures, beating out even peacetime domestic spending on the weapons of mass destruction.

But since I knew that wars devastate economies, I searched for the words "war" or "wars" wanting to know the cost of the wars, not even beginning to think that they are cost free.

The word "war" only appeared on that page in one sentence about the budgets since the end of World War II.

The utter delusion of thinking that the most costly items of government, the military budget, and the military budget on steroids, the wars, is beyond the pale.

Remember that economyspeak, a subsection of doublespeak, forgets that huge bureaucracies such as Homeland Security are war related ... you know ... "thuh war on turrur".

There is little wonder that since the republicans began to spend the nation's wealth on war almost ten years ago, causing great economic disasters and death everywhere, the congress has dropped to its lowest popularity numbers.

The graph shows military spending activity on a steep climb since MOMCOM got Bush II into office, and a decline in domestic activity during the same time frame.

There is little wonder why the people do not like the congress, and like congressional republicans even less, since they are the ones who began to give unlimited funds to the military and their banks.

They are the ones who at the same time will not even give unemployment benefit extensions to those whose homes and jobs the congress & president have destroyed by supporting the stupid wars.

What a wonderful job you have done Washington, making banks, big oil, and Karzai fat and very sassy, while destroying lives of your own people, those you said under oath you would properly represent.

Anyway, I kept searching, and finally found the "wars" mentioned on the page I was sent to from the "mandatory spending" link, where it said:

In 2002, defense outlays rose by 14 percent ... outlays continued to climb as military operations began in Iraq, with increases of 16 percent and 12.1 percent recorded in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Growth in defense spending ... 2005 to 2009, averaging increases of 8 percent. CBO projects that, under current law, outlays will rise from $656 billion in 2009 to $690 billion in 2010, an increase of 5.2 percent.

(CBO Spending Outlook). Pollsters of MOMCOM likewise have mental warts when they discuss these issues.

One MOMCOM poll, asking about your congressional vote this year, had separate categories for "economy", "unemployment", and "Afghanistan war" (like they are not all economy related).

Even one of the CBO lists had "economy" and "budget" listed as separate items at one location.

If you read Dredd Blog posts brought up by the keyword "economy" you will see that on Dredd Blog "war" is considered a part of the notion of economy, as is unemployment, deficit, and budget.

The MOMCOM war against coherent cognition, being fought word by word by MOMCOM's propaganda masters, has not gone unnoticed by Dredd Blog readers and commenters:

One tell tale sign of dementia is an inability to articulate or speak clearly.
...
This national speech impairment has not gone unnoticed by the scientific community. One professor calls this doublespeak, and has written a book "Why No One Knows What Anyone Is Saying Anymore". He points out:

With doublespeak, banks don't have "bad loans" or "bad debts"; they have "nonperforming assets" or "nonperforming credits" which are "rolled over" or "rescheduled." Corporations never lose money; they just experience "negative cash flow," "deficit enhancement," "net profit revenue deficiencies," or "negative contributions to profits."

(William Lutz, Rutgers University). What is forgotten is that this propaganda is not harmless but is toxic, and those who use it are doomed to eventually become deceived by it.

(Etiology of Social Dementia). The problem with dementia in terms of national dementia, is that the demented one cannot heal themselves.

We must look to the guidance of wise nations as well as our own history when we were quite sane, before we became demented during MOMCOM's spree of the rape of our sanity during the Bush II infestation years.

The reason it continues even to this day is that we cannot trust the sick to heal themselves.

Washington Blog quotes Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who sees the damage war does to the economy:

War is widely thought to be linked to economic good times. The second world war is often said to have brought the world out of depression, and war has since enhanced its reputation as a spur to economic growth. Some even suggest that capitalism needs wars, that without them, recession would always lurk on the horizon.

Today, we know that this is nonsense. The 1990s boom showed that peace is economically far better than war. The Gulf war of 1991 demonstrated that wars can actually be bad for an economy.

(Washington Post Idiocy: Calls For War With Iran). The greastest entitlements go to the military who have gorged themselves to become slovenly fat over the past decade, along with their many mercenary corporate leeches.

What Happened To The Domino Theory?

Will the overthrow of the government of Kyrgyzstan, by dissenters in the streets, have a domino effect on the Afghanistan war?

The U.S. base in Kyrgyzstan is used in the Afghanistan war, and some think there is reason for concern, but most foreign policy experts seem to think the nation will stay pro U.S. because of the money we spend there:

U.S. rent on the Manas base, which was hiked last July from $17.1 million a year to $60 million, plus an additional $117 million for economic development, upgrading the airport, and fighting drug trafficking in the country, makes up a significant chunk of the nation's income. And it's unlikely that the incoming opposition leaders, who include former foreign minister Roza Otunbayeva and veteran activist Temir Sariyev, will take an anti-U.S. stance. Indeed the U.S. Embassy criticized the imprisonment of Sariyev and his supporters over the last year, and the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Kyrgyz service remains the most trusted source of news for most Kyrgyz people ...

(Newsweek, italics added). One of the more interesting parts of the story is how the people are able to remove despots.

It gives new meaning to "tea party" I suppose.

Nuclear Sanity Signals

The news conference between Obama and Medvedev about the agreement concerning nuclear warhead reduction is a signal of sanity.

Finally.

I was beginning to wonder if we would ever see another one of these kinds of major treaties that makes good sense and is well received.

Now the cameras will turn toward the Senate and the party of no, to see if they will try to ruin it with psycho fear talk.

Clearly we need to send a message to the world that the United States of America is still here.

It is just that some of our leaders temporarily lost sanity some time back and the voices of reason have been fighting to get the ship of state back on course.

The news conference from Prague was like a breath of fresh air, and hopefully it will begin to reassure the other nations.

Congratulations to the Russian government and the U.S. government for setting a better course.

Doing the Right Thing - Mithraism

A blogger made a good comment yesterday in the comment section of yesterday's post titled Isolationism - What Is It To Mean?, because the commenter was thinking that I could be "underestimating" the conservative hard right, and was kind enough to share that concern:

I think you underestimate the conservative hard right. They'll support war with their dying breath and blame any ill-effects elsewhere."

A bit surprised, but interested, I replied:

That is not something I would expect many people who read Dredd Blog to conclude.

"Underestimate" is a meaningless word in this context.

I really do give them full "credit" for their madness almost everyday in almost every post.

Diagnosing a disease is not a matter of degree that has to do with overestimating or underestimating, it is a matter of simple recognition.

Recently I gave them full credit for having the ideology that is bringing on the extinction of the human species.

I also pointed out that they glory in the inglorious addiction to war and oil as pointed out in recent Dredd Blog posts.

(ibid). The interesting part (for today's post anyway) is that I had studied Mithras along with its meme-complex (Mithraism) some time back, so since the commenter disaffected had made a good point about the right wing political faction's way of thinking, I could not avoid the link in my mind to Mithraism.

In the excitement of commenting I goofed up and wrote way too much, which generated a "error more than 4096 characters" in my message. When I tried to break it up into segments, I goofed even more from there, eventually having to remove my scribblings because some of them were duplicate sections mixed together out of order.

But the beat goes on, so back to the story.

People like to compare empires to other and older empires of history.

For example, some writers have been comparing the declining empire of the United States to the Roman Empire of old.

Mithraism was a well known religion of the Roman Empire, just prior to its final demise:

Mithraism ... was a mystery religion centered on the god Mithras, [which] became popular among the military in the Roman Empire, from the 1st to 4th centuries AD.

(Wikipedia, emphasis added). There is general agreement about that part of the history, the fact of Mithraism being a religion of soldiers and their commanders.

Then another commenter, on the Dredd Blog post we were talking about, went on to comment:

There is lots of debate on the origins of Mithraism, but as far as it went in the Roman Empire, where some scholars believe it originated (others do not) it clearly is a militaristic religion:

"Upon enlistment, the first act of a Roman soldier was to pledge obedience and devotion to the emperor. Absolute loyalty to authority and to fellow soldiers was the cardinal virtue, and the Mithraic religion became the ultimate vehicle for this fraternal obedience. The Mithras worshippers compared the practice of their religion to their military service."

(quoting David Fingrut, emphasis added). Remember recently that in Afghanistan U.S. soldiers were killing Muslims with rifles with Christian New Testament verses on their gun sights?

This version of "Christianity" practiced by U.S. military religionists is far more like Roman Mithraism than was the religion the Christians were thrown to the lion's dens of Rome for practicing.

The religion which Emperor Constantine made the state religion of the Roman Empire, circa 300 AD, was called "Christianity", but it was Mithraism more than anything else.

We should not underestimate the right wing Mithras religion of the imperialists in the U.S. government military, because they are fanatics like those who brought down the Roman Empire, as blogger disaffected pointed out.

Their Roman era thinking was centered around "control", naturally, because they saw the empire's "things" getting out of control (meaning out of their control), as do their modern counterparts in our midst.

Today, in that sense, really is like the times were when the Roman Empire was going down.

Many people were pointing out just that, as imperialism, along with the military's Mithras ideology, was becoming the political status quo.

The Mithras worshipers demand loyalty, unquestioned obedience to authority, and have a fanatical zeal.

The ultimate incarnation of their foundational world view is well represented in the control statements "the king can do no wrong" and "the Pope is infallible".

The problem is that they do not know what they are talking about, and like their ancestors did to the Roman Empire, they will do to the U.S. empire what was done to Rome.

We have a clear record over the past presidency of the High Priest of Mithras himself, Bush II, as an example of the devastation their ideology brings to us.

The next post in this series is here.

Isolationism - What Is It To Mean?

The "word morphs", those fog of war inducing folks who learned deceit and propaganda in the war colleges, now want to create a new meaning for a phony debate.

The word "isolationism" will be the vehicle for the propaganda.

They need it to mean something different than what it once meant in accurate academic circles.

They need to change it into something they can use to generate more propaganda in an attempt to keep the stupid wars going.

They know the people are sick and tired of MOMCOM's stupid wars, sick and tired of MOMCOM's brutal killing, maiming, and destroying other nations around the world.

The people are sick and tired of this being done in the name of the people of the United States.

The people are just sick and tired of the loser MOMCOM warmonger mentality.

So what is "isolationism" going to be changed into, if the media lackeys of MOMCOM have their way?

When the people do not want to fight stupid wars, but the corrupt powers that be do want to continue those stupid wars, "isolationism" in the past has been changed to mean something conjured up by associating it with demonized metaphorical creatures such as "peaceniks", "hippies", or "pinko lefties" who do not know "the real world".

It may well be that this time they will try to associate "isolationism" with "liberals", "socialists", "weak on terrorism", or "elitists".

The typical MOMCOM rot.

But the real state of mind politically relevant at this time is that the people are "tired of the stupid foreign policy of the High Priest In Chief Bush II and his neoCon cronies who have severely damaged the United States".

The people want a simple policy of minding our own business and shutting down MOMCOM's thug imperialism that has ruined our reputation and our economy.

In short, the people want to "be a good neighbour to the rest of the world, and want to take care of the people at home".

Once upon a time "isolationism" meant:

the policy or doctrine of isolating one's country from the affairs of other nations by declining to enter into alliances, foreign economic commitments, international agreements, etc., seeking to devote the entire efforts of one's country to its own advancement and remain at peace by avoiding foreign entanglements and responsibilities.

(Dictionary). It is not the left or center who want to do away with treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions, which outlaws, among other bad things, the Bush II policy of waterboarding.

No, that would be the neoCon right who love torturing people, as Cheney has boasted about in public, which has been carried by television around the world.

The left and center want us to have home spun renewable resources to the maximum extent possible, not to recoil from good relationships with the world, but to remove the temptations nations can have to use resources and military power to change national policies.

The people want to be independent of undue foreign influence, free from debilitating wars, but that does not really translate into being isolationists in any bad sense.

The bottom line is that isolation is not the same as self induced solitary confinement.

It is good to be isolationist to the extent it means not meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations, to the extent it means not invading sovereign nations for bogus reasons, and to the extent it means lending a helping hand.

It is bad to be isolationist to the extent it means being a recluse, to the extent it means not being diplomatically active, and to the extent it means not being a friendly nation.

The Left & Right To Life

The defendant Scott Roeder testified that he stalked, then shot and killed Dr. Tiller because the doctor was doing late term abortions.

Roeder's testimony went on to say that only God can take human life.

Two deductions may be taken from his position:

1) Roeder is a god (because he took a human life) ...

2) a foetus (a.k.a. fetus) is a human life at some point in time.

Whether either of those two are true or not, Roeder was sentenced to life in prison without any parole possibility for at least 50 years (he will be 102 yrs. old then).

Roeder's belief system comes from far right ideology which denies the notion that humanity can harm the earth's ecosystem.

They tend to be climate change and global warming sceptics or deniers, at least when it comes to the anthropogenic (human caused) portion of the equation.

Far worse than that are those who believe in the anthropogenic origin of climate change and global warming, but continue to do those things that are bringing on the deaths of millions of people anyway.

MOMCOM is part and parcel of the global climate murder, through the oil baron members of the complex.

The federal government is an accomplice to the global climate murder, through the kowtowing and slavery to the oil addiction they have helped take hold and expand to nations around the planet.

Clearly these people do not understand that the earth is the foetus (fetus) of the human species, and they are doing a mass abortion for no cosmic reason whatsoever.

UPDATE: President Obama gets the nuclear weapon reduction logic, contrary to his failure to get the drill baby drill lack of logic.

When President Kennedy was given a list of options for how to destroy another nation, he had an observation that also applies to the killing of millions by anthropogenic environmental disaster:

After a briefing on the SIOP on Sept. 14, 1962, President John F. Kennedy turned to his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, and remarked, "And they call us human beings."

(Newsweek). How can we consider ourselves to be cosmic adults, with a mature view towards the lives of millions and billions of people, yet continue down the path of utter extinction?

They call that being human?

UPDATE 2: The Great Barrier Reef, said to be the earth's largest single organism, may have had its right to life taken:

"If this ship was to break further apart, if there was another very significant oil spill, then we would not only see tonnes of oil into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park but modelling shows it is likely to come up onto the beaches of Shoalwater Bay, which is a national park area."

(The Age). Get ready east coast of the United States.

Katrina Karzai Conspiracy Theory - 2

The conspiracy theory hot off the griddle is that our good and forever faithful friend and "president" Karzai, of the once sovereign nation of Afghanistan, said he might have to join the side of the Taliban because the U.S. kids did a no-no.

The military has already begun doing that (investigating into buying off Taliban warlords like they did with the Sunni in Iraq) so is he just following orders?

Karzai has family members on the salary of the CIA, so even if he does we will get plenty of "intel".

It will all have been worth it the neoCons will say in their monastic warmonger mantra.

It is just that Karzai does diplomacy and politics about as well as he does elections.

He is a bad actor because he does not follow the script that has been written for him.

He even invited the president of Iran over for a visit where they both bad mouthed the U.S. in public.

But aren't we supposed to be there protecting him from Iran, The Taliban, insurgency, or is it al Qaeda this week?

Not too long ago when the Bush II man Gates came over, Karzai said U.S. troops would have to be there for 30 years.

Karzai has been acting up as this blog has indicated in these past posts.

Don't you just wonder if the propagandists speech writers were up all night, and by now there is a big pile of bunched up papers torn up and thrown on the floor?

I can't wait to hear the final version of the gloss over speech telling us what good news this is because yada yada blah blah yada yada.

Just bring the economy home stupid.

Open Thread

Have an open mind with an open thread.