The War Whores Ride The War Horse

The Queens of Stalingrad have been riding the war horse just because.

What better way to divert attention from the coup (A Tale of Coup Cities - 4) against the Fourth Amendment, exemplified by the military NSA spying on all Americans (ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller) as well as spying on the rest of their "friends" around the world.

When the words of doublespeak failed to instill a war chant orgy anywhere other than in the presstitutes (In the Fog of The Presstitutes), the low hanging fruits of war lust in the congress was the next boudoir the regime looked to peddle a promiscuous war.

They were giving out Freedom Viagra along with free "how to tempt your constituents" pamphlets to any congress wieners still suffering from the Iraq-STD syndrome, and who therefore couldn't get it up with just the regime's sexy war whoops.

Those congresspersons who, because of Iraq-STD syndrome, have a hard time whooping it up and sticking it into yet another "primitive" in yet another dirty bed in yet another pimp's territory.

Thus, the regime's effort to subvert the peace has gone over, so far, like Tricky Dick Nixon as lead singer in a Lead Zeppelin jam at a rest-home tea-party.

So the regime switched to the old Magic Teflon Vagina Juice rap (NeoCon Planet: Magic Teflon Vagina Juice), which also pained all groins.

In a prepared joke at the G-Spot, where the War Pimp in Chief demonstrated his vision for proper love dynamics (Obama Stands Firm), the invasion advocate failed to stand his ground when he offered a military NSA joke to soothe the gathering.

The joke was about a U.S. President who went into a G-20-spot bar, where the bartender asked him "have you heard the German joke about ...", when the president promptly interrupted her, then said "Yes."

Which was yet another flop because oppressing the privacy of other nations is no funnier than oppressing the privacy of one's own citizens.

Becoming desperately horny, the President then informed everyone that "the first one's free":

Secretary of State John Kerry said at Wednesday’s hearing that Arab

counties have offered to pay for the entirety of unseating President Bashar al-Assad if the United States took the lead militarily.

“With respect to Arab countries offering to bear costs and to assess, the answer is profoundly yes,” Kerry said. “They have. That offer is on the table.”

Asked by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) about how much those countries would contribute, Kerry said they have offered to pay for all of a full invasion.

“In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing the way we’ve done it previously in other places, they’ll carry that cost,” Kerry said.

(Kerry: Arabians Offered to pay for Invasion). Free condoms, flowers, and batteries for the boy-toys are also included.

Opponents of the Assad orgy offered a free novel to some to read during the upcoming nights of chains and hope, nights of shock and awe, yes, offered to those who are resisting the foggy sacraments of The Virgin MOMCOM.

That virgin novel has a plot something like this:

America has been at war in Afghanistan for the entire adult life of any voter under 30. For still younger Americans, every living memory is of a country with troops in combat overseas—and for what? The wars haven’t brought prosperity: just the opposite. They haven’t reaffirmed traditional sex roles or Christianity or family values, all of which are challenged by veterans coming home with missing limbs or mangled minds. The cultural resonances of this decade of war are the opposite of those of Vietnam; they’re closer to those of Great Britain after World War I. Britain, too, won its war and wondered what that meant.

Republicans split over Bush’s wars as deeply as Democrats once split over

D.C. Children of War

Vietnam. The raw numbers aren’t similar—the antiwar right is not as numerous as the antiwar left once was—but the philosophical depth of the divide is as great. And it’s a generation gap. Boomer Republicans are still refighting old wars—Benghazi is the new Khe Sanh, and they’ve adopted Israel not only as avatar of the lost South Vietnam but as symbol of the Providential favor and military virtue our nation lost in the 1960s. Yet even the younger evangelicals—let alone Ron Paul’s youthful supporters and the neo-traditionalist “crunchy cons”—don’t buy it.

The GOP never learned to talk to the post-Vietnam generation in the first place; over the last decade, it compounded the problem by launching wars that, far from resolving the unfinished business of the Vietnam era, only made clear that those who are refighting the conflicts of that time are oblivious to today’s realities.

(The Waning of the War Whores, emphasis added). Some of the regime's mouth madams are wearing new combat boots like they wear their new god of war (Your God Wears Combat Boots).

They are planning to do some boot scooting while wearing them at the president's Ho!Down! sermon to "the government of the people, for the people, and bypass the people" (a.k.a. the teleprompter) on National Psychotic Day (Deja Voodoo: The September 11 Psychosis).

The next post in this series is here.

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A famed editor's take on the work of a Master of war Songs:

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Etiology of Social Dementia - 10

Semper fee fi fo fum

There are various ways to look at the dynamics of national policy.

The two basic categories of national policy are domestic policy and foreign policy.

The elite corporate news media look at these categories economically, politically, and sometimes academically.

Those media members are trained and commanded, by and large, to see through their rose colored glasses provided by their elite lords who feel that they are exceptional, and even feel that the nation is likewise exceptional in and of itself.

They believe in that exceptionalism no matter what the nation does to other nations and peoples, including but not limited to, Latin America, Vietnam, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran.

But then there is that pesky notion of a global community, a United Nations working together to improve the lot of all of humanity.

That global community sentiment is fostered in part by the fact we are the human species living on a planet with finite resources.

Which is an insight that has a psychological impact on all nations within the global community or civilization which our species has made:

"If the evolution of civilization has such a far reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization — or epochs of it — possibly even the whole of humanity — have become neurotic under the pressure of the civilizing trends?" - Sigmund Freud

(MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact - 5, emphasis added). The well known "father of psychoanalysis" indicated that our species, even in his day, had developed a species-specific neurosis.

Since Freud attached our species' neurosis to "the pressure of the civilizing trends", let's take a look at what "neurosis" conjures up:

There are many forms of neurosis: obsessive–compulsive disorder, anxiety neurosis, hysteria (in which anxiety may be discharged through a physical symptom), and a nearly endless variety of phobias as well as obsessions such as pyromania. According to C. George Boeree, professor emeritus at Shippensburg University, effects of neurosis can involve:

... anxiety, sadness or depression, anger, irritability, mental confusion, low sense of self-worth, etc., behavioral symptoms such as phobic avoidance, vigilance, impulsive and compulsive acts, lethargy, etc., cognitive problems such as unpleasant or disturbing thoughts, repetition of thoughts and obsession, habitual fantasizing, negativity and cynicism, etc. Interpersonally, neurosis involves dependency, aggressiveness, perfectionism, schizoid isolation, socio-culturally inappropriate behaviors, etc.

(Wikipedia, "Neurosis"). Other famous observers in our midst have also perceived some systemic psychological flaws in our civilization:

“One would say that [man] is destined to exterminate himself after having rendered the globe uninhabitable.” - Lamarck (1817)

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it's very unlikely that we'll find any [extraterrestrial intelligence]. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let's take a look at Earth. And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation ... you're just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won't find it here for very long either because it's just a lethal mutation" - Dr. Noam Chomsky paraphrasing Dr. Ernst Mayr

“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

(Quotes Tab). One current observer, who is not a user of the rose colored glasses, also sees the dynamic in action:

Evidence also seems to indicate that the leaders of a superpower, when not countered by another major power, when lacking an arms race to run or territory and influence to contest, may be particularly susceptible to the growth of delusional thinking, and in particular to fantasies of omnipotence.
...
Just as still water is a breeding ground for mosquitos, so single-superpowerdom seems to be a breeding ground for delusion. This is a phenomenon about which we have to be cautious, since we know little enough about it and are, of course, in its midst. But so far, there seem to have been three stages to the development of whatever delusional process is underway.
...
... no one can look at Planet Earth today and not see that the single superpower, while capable of creating instability and chaos, is limited indeed in its ability to control developments.  Its president can't even form a "coalition of the willing" to launch a limited series of missile attacks on the military facilities of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.  From Latin America to the Greater Middle East, the American system is visibly weakening, while at home, inequality and poverty are on the rise, infrastructure crumbles, and national politics is in a state of permanent “gridlock.”

Such a world should be fantastical enough for the wildest sort of dystopian fiction, for perhaps a novel titled 2014. What, after all, are we to make of a planet with a single superpower that lacks genuine enemies of any significance and that, to all appearances, has nonetheless been fighting a permanent global war with ... well, itself -- and appears to be losing?

(Alone and Delusional on Planet Earth, emphasis added). The neurosis and delusions come from insecurities posing as securities (When You Are Governed By Psychopaths, Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of The Plutocracy).

The next post of this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Deja Voodoo: The September 11 Psychosis

One was Texas Medicine

In the recent Dredd Blog post Deja Voodoo we remembered some of the "voodoo" spectacles of previous times.

Today as we near September 11 we also approach another invasion of another Middle Eastern country.

This time some of our allies have had to cut the U.S. Wartocracy trance loose, and go with the sensibilities of their citizens.

A majority of American citizens have cut it loose too, but nevertheless it hangs around like a voodoo medicine man making deja voodoo war over and over again.

Our warmongering Wartocracy, which the feudal lords like to call "government of the people, by the people, and for the people", is a constant lie storm like a haboob that migrated to their homeland from the deserts in the east.

The deserts they have bloodied with their spells and fits of blood-oil-lust for a century (Universal Smedley - 2, Viva Egypt - 2).

Congress is being sold on the Railroad Gin again, as if it was Texas Medicine.

Sold on it by the rainman, the Pentagon ... those who rain down fire and brimstone but call it "peace."

Sometimes a musical riff describes a government caught in a trance, and sometimes lyrics will help to do the job competently:

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"Now the rainman gave me two cures,
Then he said, "Jump right in."
The one was Texas medicine,
The other was just railroad gin.
An' like a fool I mixed them
An' it strangled up my mind,
An' now people just get uglier
An' I have no sense of time.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again."

--Bob Dylan

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Sometimes the stark truth will do the job nicely too, so you fill in the blanks in this speech given prior to another war in a previous time:

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this resolution.

I am deeply troubled that lives may be lost without a meaningful attempt to bring [nation x] into compliance with UN resolutions through careful and cautious diplomacy.

The bottom line is I don’t trust this President and his advisors.

Make no mistake, we are voting on a resolution that grants total authority to the President who wants to invade a sovereign nation without any [conclusively proven] act of provocation. This would authorize the United States to act as the aggressor for the [nth] time in our history.

It sets a precedent for our nation - or any nation - to exercise brute force anywhere in the world without regard to international law or international consensus.

Congress must not walk in lockstep behind a President who has been so callous to proceed without reservation, as if war was of no real consequence.
...
What is most unconscionable is that there is [inconclusive] evidence to justify the certain loss of life. Do the generalized threats and half-truths of this Administration give any one of us in Congress the confidence to tell a mother or father or family that the loss of their child or loved one was in the name of a just cause?
...
Aside from the wisdom of going to war as [president ???] wants, I am troubled by who pays for his capricious adventure into world domination.

The Administration admits to a cost of around [$$,$$$,$$$,$$$,$$$.$$]!

Now, wealthy individuals won’t pay. They’ve got big tax cuts already.

Corporations won’t pay. They’ll cook the books and move overseas and then send their contributions to the [politicians].

Rich kids won’t pay. Their daddies will get them deferments ...

Well then, who will pay?

School kids will pay. There’ll be no money to keep them from being left behind - way behind.

Seniors will pay. They’ll pay big time as the Republicans privatize Social Security and rob the Trust Fund to pay for the capricious war.

Medicare will be curtailed and drugs will be more unaffordable. And there won’t be any money for a drug benefit because [president ???] will spend it all on the war.

Working folks will pay through loss of job security and bargaining rights.

Our grandchildren will pay through the degradation of our air and water quality.

And the entire nation will pay as [president ???] continues to destroy civil rights, women’s rights and religious freedom in a rush to phony patriotism and to courting the messianic Pharisees of the religious right.

The questions before the members of this House and to all Americans are immense, but there are clear answers. America is not currently confronted by a genuine, proven, imminent threat from [nation x]. The call for war is wrong.

And what greatly saddens me at this point in our history is my fear that this entire spectacle has not been planned for the well being of the world, but for the short-term political interest of our President.

Now, I am also greatly disturbed that many [political party] leaders have also put political calculation ahead of the President’s accountability to truth and reason by supporting this resolution.

But, I conclude that the only answer is to vote no on the resolution before us.

(The Stark Truth, 2009). Hear hear!

Deja voodoo all over again -- CONGRESS -- snap out of the trance of Glory Daze.

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"Once upon a time in the West"  (lyrics here):

Yes it's no use saying that you don't know nothing
It's still gonna get you if you don't do something
Sitting on a fence that's a dangerous course
Ah, you could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force
Even the hero gets a bullet in the chest
Oh yeah, once upon a time in the west

Mother Mary your children are slaughtered
Some of you mothers ought to lock up your daughter
Who's protecting the innocenti
Heap big trouble in the land of plenty
Tell me how we're gonna do what's best
You guess once upon a time in the west

-Mark Knopfler

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American Feudalism - 4

Serfs break dancing out on Highway 61

Heretofore in this series we have looked at the origin of feudalism, which is war (American Feudalism).

We also looked at the morphing dynamic within the feudalism of Europe that developed after Rome fell.

There, a morphed form of feudalism emerged which fused the older secular feudalism with the Church to form the new Holy Roman Empire version of feudalism which eventually made a vassal out of that church (American Feudalism - 2).

Later in this post we will see some detail about how feudalism eventually made a vassal out of the Church, which added the notion of jihad or holy war to the feudal mix (see Crusades).

Then in the most recent post, we looked at how those dynamics are alive in the upper classes today, operating "successfully" with impunity in modern day America (American Feudalism - 3).

Now, since one more main pillar of feudalism remains to be discussed, "serfdom," let's take a look at that pillar of feudalism:

Serfdom is the status of peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.

MOMCOM (Maggie) & Hoi Polloi

Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the Lord of the Manor who owned that land, and in return were entitled to protection, justice and the right to exploit certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence.
...
A freeman became a serf usually through force or necessity. Sometimes freeholders or allodial owners were intimidated into dependency by the greater physical and legal force of a local magnate. Often a few years of crop failure, a war, or brigandage might leave a person unable to make his own way. In such a case a bargain was struck with a lord of a manor. In exchange for protection, service was required, in cash, produce or labour, or a combination of all. These bargains were formalized in a ceremony known as "bondage" in which a serf placed his head in the lord's hands, akin to the ceremony of homage where a vassal placed his hands between those of his overlord.
...
To become a serf was a commitment that encompassed all aspects of the serf’s life.

Moreover, the condition of serfdom was inherited at birth. By taking on the duties of serfdom, serfs bound not only themselves but all of their future progeny.

(Wikipedia, "Serfdom", emphasis added). The somewhat voluntary enslavement of the peasant class into the service of the lords and vassals -- the upper classes -- was serfdom.

This lowest class was another aspect of the wars that created all classes in the dynamic we call feudalism:

"Warfare was endemic in the feudal period, but feudalism did not cause warfare; warfare caused feudalism." - American Feudalism
...
"And as war begat the King and the military noble, so it also begat the slave." -American Feudalism - 2

We described a tiny bit of the details of modern U.S. serfdom in the first post of this series.

In other Dredd Blog series we have made reference to how modern serfs are controlled by information the lords and vassals gather by keeping a spy's eye on the peasants:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

(The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy). The knowledge gathered and studied by that vast military NSA spy realm, knowledge about our private lives, allows the lords to use "persuasion" to keep all the underlings properly controlled (The Queens of Stalingrad - 3, The Queens of Stalingrad - 2, The Queens of Stalingrad).

To do so they are granted a very large budget, a secret budget up until now, which we serfs pay for with our taxes:

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ­intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.

(Black Ops Spy Budget). Serfs can keep some of their money, but they must work the vassal or lord's "lands" [the corporations of the lords] so the ruling class lords, the 1%, can also perform and strengthen their machinations of war and thereby increase the power of their lordship (A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA - 4) while weakening the people (The Greatest Source Of Power Toxins?).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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One nickname for "serfdom" might be "Maggie's Farm" ...

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This is the religious sentiment required of serfdom:

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A Day of Labor

Why not

Happy Labor Day 2013.

We have seen better.

The graph shows that the U.S. is the only major nation that does not have mandatory paid vacations for workers.

The inequality of opportunity is glaring and obvious.

It is also quite damaging according to economist Joseph Stiglitz and others, who do not hesitate to point out:

The sum of the average paid vacation and paid holidays provided to U.S. workers in the private sector ― 16 in total ― would not meet even the minimum required by law in 19 other rich countries.

The lack of paid vacation and paid holidays in the United States is particularly acute for low-wage workers, part-time workers, and for employees of small businesses. Employees of small businesses in the United States are less likely to have any paid vacation (69 percent) than those in medium and large establishments (86 percent). Only 49 percent of low-wage workers (the bottom fourth of workers) have paid vacation, compared to 90 percent of high-wage workers. Part-time workers in the United States are far less likely to have paid vacations (35 percent) than are full-time workers (91 percent).

The new report revisits an analysis originally performed by CEPR researchers six years ago. Since the 2007 CEPR study, the United States has made up none of the gap with the rest of the major economies that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“It is striking that six years after we first looked at this topic absolutely nothing has changed. U.S. law and U.S. employer behavior still lags far behind the rest of the rich countries in the world,” said Schmitt.

(CEPR). The attitude which the 1% has about workers is the same one Ayn Rand had, and is damaging:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of America's most prescient voices, wrote an article for Vanity Fair several months before Occupy Wall Street was born. "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" called attention to the widening gap between rich and poor and its deadly impact on our society and its democratic institutions. In his newly released book, The Price of Inequality, Stiglitz returns to this theme of a divided society, delving into the origins and consequences of economic unfairness.

(Exclusive Interview: Joseph Stiglitz Sees Bleak Future for America If We Don't Reverse Inequality). Stiglitz points out that the danger inherent in a plutonomy is a danger to all:

... Stiglitz explains, while those at the top enjoy the best health care, education, and benefits of wealth, they fail to realize that “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”

Stiglitz draws on his deep understanding of economics to show that growing inequality is not inevitable: moneyed interests compound their wealth by stifling true, dynamic capitalism. They have made America the most unequal advanced industrial country while crippling growth, trampling on the rule of law, and undermining democracy. The result: a divided society that cannot tackle its most pressing problems.

(The Price of Inequality). Author Stiglitz liked what the Occupy Movement stood for, but the powers that be did not:

New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves – was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

(The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy - 8). Regular readers know that Dredd Blog calls a spade a spade, and calls the U.S. what it is: a Plutocracy with a plutonomy:

First let's address the notion of plutonomy, a description re-coined by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ):

... the U.S. is becoming a Plutonomy – an economy dependent on the spending and investing of the wealthy. And Plutonomies are far less stable than economies built on more evenly distributed income and mass consumption.

(The Graphs of Wrath, quoting WSJ). What that means is that the state of the economy (including jobs), good or bad, can be, and is, controlled by the 1% wealthy.

(The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy). Dredd Blog has also pointed out that we also exhibit key aspects of feudalism (American Feudalism - 3, American Feudalism - 2, and American Feudalism).

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Working Class Hero

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