Saturday, March 10, 2012

Fighting Terrorism For 200 Years - 2

Johnny Depp as Tonto
In the first post of this series we touched upon a case where the descendants of Geronimo have been terrorized for many years by grave robbers, of the robber baron sort, at a "decent" university.

The photo of Johnny Depp (left), as Tonto in the movie "The Lone Ranger", still being filmed, may capture how the Native Americans feel about frat boys toying with the remains of their ancestors after having terrorized Native Americans.

It was Noam Chomsky who said "terrorism is what other nations do", meaning the government of the U.S.eh? calls terrorism something else when they do it to others.

It has come to light that the government of the U.S.eh? may also not be willing to do anything about Saudi Arabian terrorism either.

At least that is the case if one gives credence to multi-district litigation taking place in the federal district court in Manhattan, concerning the 9/11 attacks, accusing Saudi Arabia of bankrolling that terrorism.

Saudi Arabia is being sued for taking part in 9/11 by various insurance companies, the estate of a high ranking FBI agent, and family members who say Saudi Arabia conspired to kill their relatives on 9/11/01.

The MSNBC videos at the bottom of this post contain, first, discussions of the case between Chris Matthews of Hardball, ex-CIA agent Baer, and NY Times investigative reporter Lichtblau.

They discuss the sworn testimony of two U.S. Senators, one of whom was a commissioner on the 9/11 Commission, the other was the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee overseeing the 9/11 issues.

Chris Matthews asks CIA agent Baer why the U.S. government did not go after Saudi Arabia back then, and why they still are not doing so now.

Agent Baer replied that it is because we needed Saudi Arabia to be on our side in the Iraq war then, they had big oil then, and still have big oil now.

Did you notice that there is a problem with Baer's comments in response to Matthew's question, about why the Saudi's were hurriedly spirited out of the United States on 9/11?

Baer says Saudi's were allowed to fly their planes out of the U.S. (when all U.S. civilian aircraft were grounded) on 9/11/01, because we needed Saudi Arabia as an ally in the Iraq war, plus they have oil that we needed then and still need now.

The problem with Baer's attempted explanation is that, for quite a while after 9/11, the Bush II regime said they had not made up their "minds" about whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, in the sense of whether or not Iraq would be invaded.

So, is Baer saying that the Bush II administration was lying about Iraq, i.e., is he saying that they had their minds made up to invade Iraq on or before 9/11?

Be that as it may, others, including Richard Clarke and General Wesley Clark have said that an invasion of several nations, including Iraq, had been planned before 2001, by oil barons wanting Iraqi oil.

Iraq was invaded in March of 2003, ~2.5 years after the Saudi's were protected on 9/11/01, so as to keep them as allies, even though they were conspirators in 9/11?

The discussions on Morning Joe reflect the same general flow, which really boils down to:
The U.S. government allows its citizens to be killed en masse by foreigners, without repercussions so long as the country doing it has more oil than any other terrorist country involved?
It is not like it would be hard to find the Saudi agent who got money from the Saudi Embassy, then gave it to two of the hijackers in San Diego, nor would it be hard to locate the Sarasota, Florida, Saudi Agent:
A Saudi Arabian accused of associating with several of the September 11 hijackers and who disappeared from his home in the United States a few weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, is in London working for his country’s state oil company.

Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his wife Anoud left three cars at their luxurious home in a gated community in Sarasota, Florida — one of them new — and flew to Saudi Arabia in August 2001. The refrigerator was full of food; furniture and clothing were left behind; and the swimming pool water was still circulating.

Bush II Holds Hands with Saudi King
Security records of cars passing through a checkpoint at the Prestancia gated community indicated that Mr al-Hijji’s home, 4224 Escondito Circle, had been visited a number of times by Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 19-strong hijack team, who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in 2001.

The logs also indicated that Marwan Al-Shehhi, who crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower, and Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, had visited the house.

All three men had trained to fly at Venice Airport, which is 19 miles from Sarasota.
(Telegraph, 2-18-2012). No, logistics has nothing to do with it, because it looks more like a cover-up than anything else, to this blogger anyway.

The federal government is asking the federal court in Manhattan to dismiss the case against Saudi Arabia, no matter what victims of the attack think.

The U.S. Department of Just Us says it wants the case against Saudi Arabia dismissed because Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation that is immune, even if they are guilty.

Besides, they have lots of oil and the Saudi King held hands with Bush II (which renders 3,000 American deaths on 9/11 irrelevant?).

Hardball, March 1, 2012:



Morning Joe, March 1, 2012:


The next post in this series is here.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Mother Nature Is An International Woman

Today Dredd Blog remembers International Women's Day like we did some years ago in the post Happy International Women's Day 2009.

The following text is from that post:

International Women's Day has been observed since sometime in the early 1900's.

Originating during a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrialized world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies, it has become a modern national and international fixture.

According to Raw Story:
One of this year's key events was a massive Women's Day meet this weekend in Liberia, hosted by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, which focused on the future of women in the world.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are among 400 leading women, several of them heads of state, who were expected at the gathering -- which also marks a milestone for Liberia, still recovering from its 1989-2003 civil war and hosting its first such high-profile event since the late 1970s.
(Raw Story). You have come a long way baby, but don't even think of stopping until you read Why Women Should Rule The World.

We wrote about an especially noteworthy item a while back, concerning Michelle Obama.

For the first time in history a wonderful black woman is The First Lady.

She descends from slaves who built her new home!


Today Dredd Blog also remembers that Mother Nature is characterized, in American culture, as a woman.

But she is disrespected by the right wing politicians, the neoCons.

Not only do the misogynist psychopaths, who generally belong to the republican Tea Party at this time, treat American women unfairly lately, they are also on a long term path to destroy Mother Nature as well.

Here is the text from a Dredd Blog post on this date some years ago, showing that, even with favorable efforts, we only have a 50/50 chance of reversing global warming:

We have talked about big time which refers to our sun, our star.

We have talked about little time which refers to the time our planet has left to keep giving us life.

We have talked about our wrongfully interfering with that time by accelerating the time for disaster.

The resistance to the reality in our solar system or on our planet is futile, because time is a focused amoral machine.

The US Congress during the Bush II regime, and to a lesser degree now, does not understand that even our greatest efforts will not guarantee we will avert disaster:
The world's best efforts at combating climate change are likely to offer no more than a 50-50 chance of keeping temperature rises below the threshold of disaster, according to research from the UK Met Office.
(Independent, italics added). If they could put the clock in their eyes when they look at the children, tears of hope might appear from the jaded matrix.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Bush II Turned NASA Into A Propaganda Engine

In recent posts, one of the subjects Dredd Blog has covered is the propaganda engines of the dirty oil barons (see Is A New Age Of Pressure Upon Us? - 3).

We have gone back to the very beginning of that propaganda where we have seen that the propaganda organs were originated by psychopaths (see The Exceptional American Denial), and on occasion we have pointed out that even the Associated Press (AP) has complained that the Bush II regime turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine:
This series began with a post which quoted the head of the Associated Press (AP) who had made a dramatic statement about the American press: "The Bush administration turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine" (Warriors Press For Propaganda).

If you think about it, that journalist was blaming the government for the fact that the press allowed itself to turn into a propaganda publishing profession.

The U.S. main stream media (MSM) was in bed with the military (remember "embedded journalists" in Iraq and Afghanistan?) publishing what the military propaganda masters told them too.

That is an abrogation of the duty of the free press, which is protected by the First Amendment.

They have a duty not to carry the water for the propagandists, yet they willingly did so and still do.
(Warrior's Press For Propaganda - 2). Today we add another realm of propaganda that was brought to us by the Bush II regime.

The following speech is by James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, and Adjunct Professor of Earth Sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

In the speech he mentions the censorship of science, during a time when he was forbidden to say anything about global warming, as well as other instances of propaganda generated by the oil baron Bush II.

He also mentions that the Earth is being heated each day with the equivalent heat of 400,000 Hiroshima type nuclear explosions:


Wednesday, March 7, 2012

We Are Not In Toto Anymore Kansas

The phrase in toto means totally, completely, and in full measure.

The olde notion of The American Dream is now laced with Establishment LSD, and that dream is no longer around in toto, whether or not Kansas believes it is.

The subject matter of today's post is voter power (as shown by the graphic of the Wizard of Oz behind curtains, smoke, and mirrors, used to represent today's voter in a voting booth, hoping like the wizard hoped, to be able to make things happen in a certain way).

In the Dredd Blog post The Election of Pontius Pilots, we visited upon the growing reality that The American Dream Voters can only chose from a list of candidates forced upon them by the John Galt Establishment's two political parties.

The fact that money is now the harbinger, for determining who can become a candidate to inhabit a public office, also strongly militates against any grass-roots candidates, from the 99%, ever becoming real, electable candidates.

That is why the government is now identified as a Plutocracy (money is the foundation for choosing politicians who will become inhabitants of government offices).

In that sense, the voting booth is in toto a fantasy every bit as much as the fantasy the Wizard of Oz was acting out in the movie The Wizard of Oz.

Yes, we voters in the U.S.eh? Plutocracy are now the wizards of odds, laboring under the illusion of control via elections, while actually being servants to the establishment status quo system we no longer have control over.

It remains to be seen, I suppose, whether or not Huxley was correct when he said that a time will come when Americans will love their servitude to the governing plutocrats.

Anyway ...

Once upon a time in a Kansas Haboob:


Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of The Plutocracy

Shruggie Poot
It is no longer a secret or hidden in plain sight that the U.S.eh? is a Plutocracy running a Plutonomy.

Thus, the 1% were the targets of nationwide demonstrations by The Occupy Movement, who represented the sentiments of the 99%, and still do.

How conditions got to be this way is a question many must ponder, so today we will take a look at the ideology that fuels the politics of the Plutocracy.

In yesterday's post we looked at the high number of psychopaths on Wall Street, and elsewhere, so today we will refine the data down to show more of that psychopathology, which is now embedded within the ideals that converted the constitutional republic with a middle-class oriented economy, into a Plutocracy running a Plutonomy.

One source we will use to help identify the ideology of the plutocrats is Ayn Rand, whose ideas are aptly described by a fellow across the pond, one George Monbiot.

Mr. George Monbiot had some succinct observations recently, which I will pass along in today's post:
Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats ...

It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.

Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.

Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers. The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with the result that the nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt.
(Ayn Rand ... new right's ... Marx, emphasis added). Her book Atlas Shrugged was fiction in every relevant sense of the word, as well as being distinctly contrary to traditional American values.

Nevertheless, the GOP presidential candidates constantly express a modified version of her ideas, fused together with a religious version of her ideology, which in large part recently gave birth to The GOP Tea Party.

That religiosity portion of this neoCon stew, stems from two chapters in the Old Testament books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, known as "the blessing and cursing" chapters (see Leviticus 26:3-13; Deuteronomy 28:1-14).

The sentiments of wealth and health vs. poverty and disease, based upon the degree of a believer's good behavior, have been lifted from those Old Testament chapters, then morphed, then finally grafted into a modern movement whose leaders have medieval comprehension.

That ongoing movement, populated with zealots, is not generally well known, but once recognized is described by various labels:
Prosperity theology (sometimes referred to as the prosperity gospel or the health and wealth gospel) is a Christian religious doctrine which claims the Bible teaches that financial blessing is the will of God for Christians.

The doctrine teaches that faith, positive speech, and donations to Christian ministries will always increase one's material wealth.

Its proponents teach that the doctrine is an aspect of the path to Christian dominion over society, arguing that God's promise of dominion to Israel applies to Christians today.

The doctrine emphasizes the importance of personal empowerment, proposing that it is God's will for his people to be happy. The atonement (reconciliation with God) is interpreted to include the alleviation of sickness and poverty, which are viewed as curses to be broken by faith.
(Prosperity Theology, emphasis added). This is why billionaires of the 1% fund these types of movements, which are composed of religious zealots who have mystical beliefs about "economy", therefore are not able to recognize the difference between plutonomy and economy.

That unholy matrimony also fits into the 1%'s warmongering ideology, thus we hear of Christian v Muslim, a rebirth of another abysmal pursuit made infamous during The Crusades.

The purpose for the use of religion by the plutocrats, beyond using it as an opiate for many people, is to psychologically put those ruling 1% plutocrats in a good light, and to make Ayn Rand's secular ideology a religious dogma:
"God has ordained the wealth of the 1%, because they are good, and God has cursed their enemies, the poor and disadvantaged, because they are evil."
Add Social Darwinism and Exceptionalism into this poisonous brew, and you have the right wing foreign policy of nuke first, ask questions later (or as the left-right wing says, later we will kill you if you ask "questions").

The next post in this series is here.

The lyrics to this song are here.


Monday, March 5, 2012

When You Are Governed By Psychopaths

"The Earth is our bitch"
Recently Dredd Blog has criticized the dialogue that characterizes the deniers of climate change, who have been deceived by oil company operatives.

That characterization, which I have complained of, has been one of using financial analysis to fathom their motives, instead of using an analysis based on principles of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis of both the deniers, as well as those who misinform the deniers about the consequences of their "the Earth is our bitch to do with as we please" state of mind and philosophy.

This post today will sorta combine and condense the work of several Dredd Blog System series that deal with the subject.

The way we will do that is by using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, but additionally, as a starter, we will sprinkle in this tidbit:
One out of every 10 Wall Street employees is a clinical psychopath, the CFA Institute (an investment and financial analysis organization) reports in the latest issue of CFA Magazine. That makes psychopathy 10 times more prevalent among New York’s financial elite than among us plebeians, for which the accepted statistic is a more palatable one in 100. [Update]
(Huffington Post books about Psychopaths, emphasis added). This type of analysis and critique of the 1% elite (who are leading us over the edge of a war / ecocide cliff into catastrophe), is a move in the proper direction.

The Dredd Blog System series-sources include, but are not limited to the following example posts:
Thin Ice
The Etiology of Social Dementia
MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact
The Peak of Sanity
The Damage Has Been Done
The Damage Cannot Be Undone?
Shadow of Time Governs The Earth
State Crimes Against Democracy
The Germ Theory of Government
Any other poignant posts, besides those, will be added when needed to zero in on particular subjects or situations (see also A Culture of Mania).

Now let's consider the checklist for psychopathy:
Factor 1: Personality "Aggressive narcissism"

Glibness/superficial charm
Grandiose sense of self-worth
Pathological lying
Cunning/manipulative
Lack of remorse or guilt
Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
Callousness; lack of empathy
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Factor 2: Case history "Socially deviant lifestyle"

Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
Parasitic lifestyle
Poor behavioral control
Lack of realistic long-term goals
Impulsivity
Irresponsibility
Juvenile delinquency
Early behavior problems
Revocation of conditional release
(Hare Psychopathy Checklist, Wikipedia, links added). These traits define MOMCOM accurately, but also note the differences between a sociopath and a psychopath.

MOMCOM has enough WMD to destroy life on the planet 50 times over, and is viciously destroying the ecosystem of the Earth even as we blog.

Meanwhile, MOMCOM's propaganda arms preach about how peaceful and caring MOMCOM is.

The blog Serendipity encourages readers of one of its posts to also read this current Dredd Blog series and provides links at the bottom of that blog's post (Be sure to read "Bush Is Not A Moron").

The next post in this series is here.

New song by Springsteen & E-Street Band about the plunder barons: