Friday, August 30, 2013

The Police State is here and now

In Florida , the Prosecutor could add another charge: "resisting arrest without violence."
Be sure to watch the video.

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Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Incompetence rules


The outrageous scandal of NSA and CIA intel collection and use is a serious problem but, even  more serious, is the growing violence in the Middle East.
The Bush invasion of Iraq was not the cause of this violence but it was the catalyst.  The consequential uprisings from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Syria were labeled the Arab Spring.  That always sounded like a marketing term, a typical American approach to a serious undergrowth of religious and political resentment.
President Obama couldn't keep from involving our country in all of these conflicts.  He has bungled every intervention.
The latest error was approving the shipment of 1300 cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia. What are they for and who will use them?  And against whom shall they be used?
Now there is talk about firing weapons at or in Syria.  Why?
Another war for America.   Just what we need.
Eight years of George Bush.  Five years of Barack Obama.  Two of the most incompetent and dangerous Presidents I can remember.  And Obama has three more years to go.  What will be left to pick up and rebuild with?
Question: where did Syria get the chemical weapons? 
UN inspectors are in Iraq to assess the truth of the matter.  Some American officials say we can't wait for a report.  Secretary of State Kerry says it doesn't matter what the report might be.  We must act.
Where have I heard this before?  Oh yeah, the WMD's in Iraq.  Remember the mushroom cloud?

Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind 

Unhappy country, what wings you have!  Even here,
Nothing important to protect, and ocean-far from  the
nearest enemy, what a cloud
Of bombers amazes the coast mountain, what a hornet-
swarm of fighters,
And day and night the guns practicing.

Unhappy, eagle wings and beak, chicken brain,
Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for the terrible
magnificence of the means,
The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the bloody and
shabby
Pathos of the result.

Robinson Jeffers (American poet)
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Friday, August 23, 2013

Vignette

Her daughter in shorts and sport bra sits victoriously on the floor, her arms raised above her head, a mouthpiece dangling from a crooked smile.  Victory over a young boy in a cage fight.  The mother leaves her seat in the stands with a bouquet in hand to present to her daughter.  As she nears the ring she pulls back hair from her unsmiling face, a face reflecting confusion, the clash of her ethics with those of her youngest girl.
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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

What is Conventional Wisdom?

Conventional Wisdom is a euphemism for Collective Ignorance.
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Oh no. That word again.

Reobert Sheer has wrtten a column at Truthdig from which column I gleaned this section:

AP/Vincent Yu

By Robert Scheer
How do you justify criminally charging a government contractor for revealing an alarming truth that the public has every right to know? That is the contradiction raised by President Obama now that he has, in effect, acknowledged that Edward Snowden was an indispensable whistle-blower who significantly raised public awareness about a government threat to our freedom.
Unfortunately, the president didn’t have the grace and courage to concede that precise point and remains committed to imprisoning Snowden instead of thanking him for serving the public interest. But Julian Assange, no stranger to unrequited integrity, nailed it. “Today, the president of the United States validated Edward Snowden’s role as a whistleblower by announcing plans to reform America’s global surveillance program,” the WikiLeaks founder said in a statement posted Saturday, the day after Obama’s remarks.
While boasting, “I called for a review of our surveillance programs,” Obama avoided the obvious fact that this review was compelled not by a sudden burst of respect for the safeguards demanded by our Constitution but rather Snowden’s action in making the public cognizant of the astounding breadth and depth of the National Security Agency’s spying program.
Once again, Obama managed to blame not those responsible for government malfeasance, himself included, but instead the rare insiders driven to do their duty to inform the American people. “Unfortunately, rather than an orderly and lawful process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate but not always fully informed way,” he said.
How disingenuous, to put it mildly. Without the leaks, there would be no reforms. We, the voters, couldn’t initiate a debate about the wisdom of this extensive spying because the government officials who authorized it, from the president on down, kept us in the dark.
 There it is again, that word 'disingenuous' applied to the thinking of President Obama.  In an earlier post I commented on this word so commonly applied to the President.
I say again, this is not the President being disingenuous.  He is too intelligent to make such a common mistake so often.  When the President speaks like this he is using what I call "CIA Speak."  In other words, he is mis-informing, he is re-defining history, he is lying.
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