Deja Vu - Guns v. Butter Election Looms - 2

The Military's War Against Americans

The year 2014 is an election year that is taking shape to be a repeat of the ad nauseam type.

The deja vu issues that are taking shape are symptomatic of what we like to symbolically call MOMCOM, an entity that is out to plunder the nation all over again.

The negative side of this political reality is that the military establishment portion of MOMCOM is out to suck the life out of social insurance systems such as Social Security Insurance, Health Care Insurance, Medicare Insurance, and other requirements for any stable and humane civilization to continue to exist or to improve.

The warmongering political statute of the past decade, which is aligned against civility of all kinds, is not even required for civilization, rather, it is required for more barbarism and more decadence.

The Senate Majority Leader sees Military v The People taking shape and coming to a neoCon near you:

"I would like to suggest that maybe the Republicans aren't too happy with next year's sequestration. Who does it hurt, non-defense? I get an extra billion dollars this year compared to [last] year. Defense? They lose $23 billion," Reid said, referring to the Pentagon. "So I would think there should be some people among the Republicans in the House and Senate who would say we should take a look at that."
...
Reid also said that he would make sure to protect Social Security against attempts to trade cuts for sequestration relief, calling such a bargain "a stupid trade."

"That's no trade. We are going to affect entitlements so we can increase defense spending? Don't check me for a vote there. I'm not interested in that," he said.

"It is the most successful social program in the history of the world. The program is not about to go broke, so take it easy on Social Security," Reid said.

(Harry Reid: Hiking Defense Spending / Cutting Social Security). The military needs many more billions to spy on every human being on the planet, including all Americans.

At least the demented Queens of Stalingrad and the neoFeudalists think so:

Then-defense secretary Robert M. Gates stopped bagging his leaves when he moved into a small Washington military enclave in 2007. His next-door neighbor was Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, who had a chef, a personal valet and — not lost on Gates — troops to tend his property.

Gates may have been the civilian leader of the world’s largest military, but his position did not come with household staff. So, he often joked, he disposed of his leaves by blowing them onto the chairman’s lawn.

“I was often jealous because he had four enlisted people helping him all the time,” Gates said in response to a question after a speech Thursday. He wryly complained to his wife that “Mullen’s got guys over there who are fixing meals for him, and I’m shoving something into the microwave. And I’m his boss.”

Of the many facts that have come to light in the scandal involving former CIA director David H. Petraeus, among the most curious was that during his days as a four-star general, he was once escorted by 28 police motorcycles as he traveled from his Central Command headquarters in Tampa to socialite Jill Kelley’s mansion ...

Holy Wars for the Big Bucks

The commanders who lead the nation’s military services and those who oversee troops around the world enjoy an array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards and aides to carry their bags, press their uniforms and track their schedules in 10-minute increments. Their food is prepared by gourmet chefs. If they want music with their dinner parties, their staff can summon a string quartet or a choir.

The elite regional commanders who preside over large swaths of the planet don’t have to settle for Gulfstream V jets. They each have a C-40, the military equivalent of a Boeing 737 ...

(American Feudalism - 3). The military NSA that has been spying on all Americans (ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller) also has the support of an additional spy army that also targets Americans:

* 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.
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[with an additional secret budget not printed on the normal budget]
...
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.

(American Feudalism - 4). Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has been pointing out this utter madness which has been and still is bringing down our nation constitutionally and economically:

It is an old saying, nearly a dozen centuries old, that "war begat the king". It is no less true that war ... begat feudalism.
...
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied: and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

(American Feudalism - 2). The barbarian appetite of the rogue military distorts their thinking until they consider your health care to be their number one threat:

Pentagonia, capitol of Bullshitistan, well aware of the current political climate, has declared who its greatest enemy is, believing it is health care:

The U.S. military keeps searching the horizon for a peer competitor, the challenger that must be taken seriously. Is it China? What about an oil rich and resurgent Russia?

But the threat that is most likely to hobble U.S. military capabilities is not a peer competitor, rather it is health care.

(The Enemy the Pentagon Should Fear Most: Health Care, National Defense Magazine, emphasis added). We have been pointing out this very strange ideology for a while now, using "MOMCOM" symbolism to isolate the militant energy fighting against the middle class and poor in the United States.

(Your Health Is Their Number 1 Enemy?!). For those interested in reading more about this, here are a few of the many other posts on this issue: Entitlement Wars - Guns vs. Butter, The Reds Want Butter Too, Why Is The Government Conditioning Us To Austerity? - 2, The Graphs of Wrath.

The previous post in this series is here.

An Ocean Of Governmental Awareness - 2

On this date in 2009 we blogged about a government that held a governmental meeting under water to emphasize the point that their nation was sinking slowly beneath the waves.

Like Atlantis, but slowly.

Today a strange thing is happening in Alaska, Sarah Palin can see a hurricane from her house -- a hurricane that is battering the Alaskan Islands, yes, hurricane winds from one (Wipha) of a couple of typhoons that hit Tokyo, Japan recently:

PKZ177-180300-
ADAK TO KISKA

400 AM AKDT THU OCT 17 2013

HURRICANE FORCE WIND WARNING TONIGHT
TODAY...S WIND 35 KT BECOMING SW 50 KT IN THE AFTERNOON.
SEAS 17 FT. PATCHY FOG. RAIN.
.TONIGHT...SW WIND 65 KT...EXCEPT 55 KT BERING SIDE.
SEAS 33 FT BUILDING TO 43 FT AFTER MIDNIGHT. RAIN.
.FRI...W WIND 55 KT BECOMING NW 45 KT IN THE AFTERNOON. SEAS 35 FT SUBSIDING TO 27 FT IN THE AFTERNOON. RAIN.
.FRI NIGHT...NW WIND 35 KT. SEAS 21 FT.
.SAT...NW WIND 30 KT. SEAS 15 FT.
.SUN...W WIND 25 KT. SEAS 10 FT.
.MON...NW WIND 25 KT. SEAS 10 FT.

(NOAA). Anyway, let's move on to the main theme today, which is the post on this date in 2009:

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The government of the Maldives is alive and well, even as the ocean they worry about is not so healthy:

The government of the Maldives has held a cabinet meeting underwater to highlight the threat of global warming to the low-lying Indian Ocean nation.

President Mohamed Nasheed and his cabinet signed a document calling for global cuts in carbon emissions.

Ministers spent half an hour on the sea bed, communicating with white boards and hand signals.

The president said the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen this December cannot be allowed to fail.

At a later press conference while still in the water, President Nasheed was asked what would happen if the summit fails. "We are going to die," he replied.

(BBC News). The Ecocosmology blog has a post detailing a very recent scientific paper which shows that the Maldives officials are saavy.

Will the governments of the larger nations get it, or are they too corrupt?

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Resist Oil-Qaeda.

Wilde Life

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde would be 159 years old today, thus, he is our guest so let's reflect on his wit.

First, his message to the T-party lost souls in the U.S. House of Representatives might be: "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

To the rest of us, who are observing our national crisis from afar, he might say: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" even as he notes an interesting historical observation about our politics:  "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

Let's now reflect upon his witty sayings without further editorial comment:

"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

"True friends stab you in the front."

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."

"A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally."

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

"I can resist everything except temptation."

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike."

"If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism."

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

(Oscar Wilde). You might also like Ah, The Raven and/or The Poet Laureate of MOMCOM - 2.

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"Wild Life", by Paul McCartney

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The Government Catastrophe Has Already Happened

All the talk about a looming default and various catastrophic economic results misses the point that a catastrophe has already happened.

That catastrophe is the collapse of the way the House of Representatives is supposed to work and has tended to work for a long time.

A book by Chris Matthews shows that, historically, conservatives and liberals have generally been able to do what they are elected and paid to do.

That is, to do the business of government in a civil manner that is beneficial to the nation and to its citizens.

The extreme right wing of the GOP has thrown a temper tantrum after losing two presidential elections, and is now using historically forbidden tactics which many observers see as a catastrophic failure and defect:

Remember, if the debt ceiling isn't lifted by Oct. 17, then the Treasury Department will only bring in enough tax revenue to pay about 65 percent of the bills that arrive over the next month. And it won't be able to borrow any more money to pay the rest. That means some of the government's bills will go unpaid.

(Washington Post). Other nations are calling for a "new world order" where the rest of the world is not dependent on the U.S. dollar:

Upset that the fiscal stalemate in Washington is threatening the global economy, China called for the U.S. dollar to be replaced as the international reserve currency as well as for broader steps to create a "de-Americanized world."

China also called for an end to the "pernicious impasse" in the U.S. over the raising the debt limit and ending the partial government shutdown, saying the world needed another reserve currency so nations could protect themselves "from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States."

Most countries hold their foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollars because the currency is viewed as the world's most stable. China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, with about $1.3 trillion in Treasury bonds, and is concerned about the impact of a U.S. failure to raise the debt limit on those holdings.

(LA Times). This ongoing loss of the U.S. reputation is a catastrophe in itself, however, if this failure of the GOP political mind gets too crazy, the U.S. may experience losing the currency wars that Dredd Blog has been warning about for years:

China’s central bank governor has issued a bold proposal to overhaul the global monetary system and one day replace the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency with the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Special Drawing Right

(First Shots Fired In The Currency Wars, 3/23/09, quoting The Times). We also noted the loss of reputation taking place due to the alleged reason the GOP is holding us hostage: "ObamaCare" (ObamaCare: Good Foreign Policy, see also Phase Five Of The Currency Wars? - 3).

These unwise, risqué, hostile, and unprofessional tactics (of an emotionally infantile gang within the House of Representatives) are foolhardy at best.

The ideology is not unlike the ideology of feudal nations of long ago, and such ideology at work is creating and perpetuating American Feudalism (a.k.a. neoFeudalism).

American Feudalism - 5

One of the most prevalent American products, in the domestic market at least, is revisionist history.

There are many products from that industry which seek to move the reality of what war does away from open view and put it into the fog of war.

The previous episodes of this series fully explain the societal realities that would stimulate an elite movement to erase those realities of the history of feudalism from the memory in our minds.

Further, since the U.S.eh? or America has produced the greatest vacuum cleaners of historical memory ever devised, and then has put them into full production, not only should the revision of that history be expected, it should also be fully "studied."

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog is well aware of even the deepest nefarious MOMCOM schemings of the brain washing sort (A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA - 4).

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has (and will continue to) put that brainwashing down on the "ink and paper" of the blogosphere sort.

Yes, regular readers know that Dredd Blog will continue to put it all down in blog posts one after the other.

So, for today, let's look at the efforts of a nefarious revisionist movement to erase the concept of American Feudalism from our minds.

And we will, in this series, also make an effort to explain the very simple reason "why?" we were thrown into the Maytag.

But first, for example's sake, let's explore and reflect upon another major subject matter area that also "had to be revised" inside "the Maytag" for about a decade.

That example of revisionism is the nomenclature of Darwinian biological evolution:

The modern evolutionary synthesis is a 20th-century union of ideas from several biological specialties which provides a widely accepted account of evolution. It is also referred to as the new synthesis, the modern synthesis, the evolutionary synthesis, millennium synthesis and the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

The synthesis, produced between 1936 and 1947, reflects the consensus about how evolution proceeds. The previous development of population genetics, between 1918 and 1932, was a stimulus, as it showed that Mendelian genetics was consistent with natural selection and gradual evolution. The synthesis is still, to a large extent, the current paradigm in evolutionary biology.

(Wikipedia, "Modern Evolutionary Synthesis"). That is one example of "Hey you guys, get your story straight and consistent!"

It was also an example of historical revisionism of massive proportions.

Leaving that example behind, the revision of the history of feudalism is also very interesting:

So many theories, revisions, and counterrevisions have been proposed to explain the term feudalism that it has become like Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: we may not know what it is, but we know it when we see it ... Feudalism ... was essentially the extreme privatization of the government functions of defense, administration, and justice. The mechanism for putting these functions into private hands and paying for them was the fief, usually an estate with dependent peasants to work it, granted to the holder, or vassal, by a lord, or seigneur, in return for military service.

(Feudalism, Reader's Companion to Military History, Houghton Mifflin, 11/12/04, from the Wayback Machine, emphasis added). We have heard the word "privatization of the government" (e.g. "privatization" of Social Security) before (see e.g. Wikipedia, "Privatization").

In the next post of this series we will continue the story of American Feudalism and the attempt to extinguish the knowledge of its essentials from American history (see e.g. Wikipedia, "Feudalism revisionism").

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