Useful idiots

Greetings good citizen,

Once again I apologize to my faithful readers for the scant postings of late but adjusting to this 3rd shift schedule at my age is proving quite the feat.

You don’t know what to do when (and you pay dearly for your mis-steps) you are also perpetually playing catch-up in the sleep department. (No matter how much you get you still wake up addled!)

I thought I had outgrown the wish that someone would bottle ‘rest’ but there it is!

This constant state of fatigue isn’t conducive to writing coherently and I deal in that which is barely coherent on a good day!

I am tempted to throw in the towel but after two decades I refuse to let a small thing like a change of shift defeat me.

That said, I am praying for your forbearance as I adjust my internal clock to its new schedule.

But enough with the ‘excuse shirt’, my inability to remain lucid does nothing to alter the predicament faced by our civilization.

Although some curious ‘background music’ has come to mind and it makes one reflect upon the world stage with a renewed sense of alarm.

IF we ‘assume’ a global capitalist take over (a coup if you will) then the world’s nuclear arsenal is all in the hands of a single ‘team’ so to speak.

This goes a long ways towards explaining the nuclear ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (aside from the ‘useful idiot’ argument we are currently expected to swallow.)

So what does Putin’s third term say to us?

Odd how we immediately return to the ‘useful idiot’ argument, don’t we?

Even more disturbing is the question of who is behind these ‘meat-puppets’?

Undoubtedly the one percent but who among them has the clout (to both remain anonymous AND push these otherwise powerful leaders buttons as well?)

Naturally the quick response would be to point out that NO ONE on the world stage is what we could traditionally call a ‘leader’.

And the one calling the shots is too smart to step into the limelight. (It means instant death.)

(See what I mean regarding the product of an exhausted mind? But these are the thoughts that occupy my weary head of late…)

So, are the men with their finger on the button really so spineless as to defy their lord and masters?

I suppose you’d be chicken too considering what these entities are capable of.

Which brings me to the darker still side of my musings…do these fools realize what they are unleashing upon themselves if they continue on their current course?

Even anonymity won’t save them! (Because the beast is mindless and can’t be reasoned with once it is loose!)

So these fools are relying on ‘luck’ (or worse, money) to save their sorry backsides.

We can only hope Darwin was right…(the stupid will eliminate themselves from the gene pool!)

How sad is it that these fools will take a lot of good people with them?

On that note my feeble powers of elucidation are giving it up…so I will (once again) thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Dirty (Republican) Deeds

Greetings good citizen,

Most of us (now graybeards) draw a straight line from our current troubles to the ‘Imperial Presidency’ of ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon and his hapless follow-up act, Ronnie Reagan (a lifelong ‘paid corporate shill’.)

What disturbs us (graybeards) most is the ignorance surrounding the criminal activities of both administrations

The corporate owned media still lionizes both men as ‘great (albeit misunderstood) leaders’ serving during ‘difficult times.’

But the evidence shows otherwise:

Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.

Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed him of the existence of the file containing national security wiretaps documenting how Nixon’s emissaries had gone behind President Lyndon Johnson’s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris Peace Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam War in fall 1968.In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.

What do you suppose happened to that (and countless other) ‘files’, good citizen?

Everybody knows the rubric of ‘National Security’ is regularly abused to shield the guilty from prosecution.

Can you think of a more bullet-proof office than that of the presidency?

When your justice system breaks down to the point of protecting criminal wrongdoing as a subset of guarding the faux‘honor’ of elected office, then your justice system is indeed FUBAR.

When national security trumps justice you find yourself living in an ‘anything goes’ society…where the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of man.

I don’t think I sit on my ‘high horse’ when I opine that most of us want no part of an unjust society.

Especially one that favors the criminal element so brazenly (in the interests of commerce [and against the interests of our species!])

While our first ‘anecdote’ points to Nixon’s mischief as ‘commander in chief’ even before he was one, let’s look at how Saint Ronnie’s ‘handlers’ manipulated the voting public to elect an ‘unlikely’ candidate:

At the start of the Iran-Contra investigation, Attorney General Edwin Meese had set the time parameters from 1984 to 1986, thus keeping outside of the frame the possibility of a much more serious scandal originating during Campaign 1980, i.e., whether Reagan’s campaign undermined President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran and then paid off the Iranians by allowing Israel to ship weapons to Iran for the Iran-Iraq War.

So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981

If you didn’t live through these times and these particular incidents, you are likely ignorant of them. Worse, it plainly shows evidence that ‘somebody’ had control they shouldn’t have had BEFORE either (hand-picked meat puppet) was elected.

(In case any of you were ‘wondering’ where I come up with some of my crazier sounding ideas! [Like the entrenched wealthy ‘conspiring’ to kill off as many of us as they can get away with.] We’re dealing with some first class, above the law ‘sickos’ here good citizen!)

But the corporate owned media maintains its silence regarding this conspiracy that hides ‘in plain sight.’

If we don’t acknowledge it, it doesn’t exist.

Which is to ask, do you really need to be told (by Oprah) that the bear poops in the woods?

With that chilling thought I leave you to yours...

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Terrorists

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘nonsense markets’ are off to a fine start, you can’t explain/justify the Dow being over 14,000 but it’s there regardless.

Which only sends up one more ‘red flag’ concerning the stability of our civilization.

So it is that today’s offering once again asks the question of ‘why are they telling us this?’

On the outskirts of Shanghai, in a run-down neighborhood dominated by a 12-story white office tower, sits a People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors.

The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower.

An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.

Further along the article explains how Coca-cola was hacked by these, er, ‘professionals’…which might give us a clearer picture of why our ‘proxy’ in the Far East is ‘keeping an eye on the competition’.

Yes, the conspiracy to destroy our civilization is global but no, it is not (yet) universal…and you’d think the guys at Coke would be on board but I guess some companies were too successful to suborn quickly and quietly…thus the subterfuge.

But it still doesn’t explain why they are pointing to this particular situation.

Does our shadowy global elite ‘own’ the Chinese government? Of course it does! (At least the parts that matter.)

So why give the unwashed rabble a ‘peek under the skirt’?

So when the ‘surprise’ cyber-attacks begin we can rule the Chinese out…because everybody knows about them?

Um, it is disconcerting to sit here and ‘speculate’ about an obvious global conspiracy but there is NO OTHER ‘explanation’ for what’s going on.

History’s ‘accidents’ are anything but.

It if waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s not a mongoose!

But that’s not what the conspirator owned media is going to tell you.

In fact the ‘truth challenged media’ has become a standing joke among anyone paying attention, making us all ‘conspiracy theorists’.

We all know something nasty is afoot and it’s not ‘state sponsored terrorism’ as our truth challenged media would have you believe.

While the pundits sit and complain about the effects of money in politics, we have done nothing to reign in this ‘loose cannon’ on civilization’s decks.

(Because the conspirators OWN the media!)

Here’s a news flash to no one: we won’t enjoy ‘factual reporting’ until NOBODY ‘owns’ a media outlet!

The owner has an agenda and gets to decide what is and isn’t news!

Until that stops we are all well and truly…

So why did the ‘conspirators’ decide to share the source of cyber attacks on US companies?

I suspect it is so they can hide ‘in plain sight’…or more sinisterly, so when someone reports an attack they can pooh-pooh it pointing to the news article and saying, would they do that since we know they’re doing it?

And the answer is YES!

Just because we know doesn’t mean they are going to stop!

Just as the ‘war on terror’ is being executed by the world’s largest terrorist group!

No irony should be lost on that (bad) joke!

When a recruiting commercial for the Armed forces comes on do you look in the face of that earnest young person and imagine it barking at you to lay down or I’ll blow your head off from the other side of your living room window?

Just as YOU can’t make informed decisions without accurate information, neither can they.

So what do you think they are going to do when their superiors ORDER them to arrest innocent civilians whose only crime is to protest their abusive treatment at the hands of some corporation?

What would YOUR kid do if he or she were on the team that comes to get YOU?

Talk about ‘scarred for life’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

White-washed

Greetings good citizen,

As I have opined before, nothing will be ‘fixed’ if we rely on the fools who broke it in the first place to cobble up the repairs.

So we have this story, served up cold by the Corporate Owned Media, thereby making it suspect from the get-go…

Fair Game
Making Them Pay (and Confess)
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Mary Jo White, the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has a chance to scuttle the practice of letting companies settle cases without admitting fault.

Talk about your voice in the wilderness, I haven’t hear that complaint from any sector of the C.O.M. over the past couple of years, even while there has been a rash of ‘wrist stinging’ fines doled out by federal regulators. Who let the perps just walk away afterwards without admitting guilt…although since they paid, I don’t think anybody needed to sign a ‘confession’, the check is its own guilty plea.

Which is to ask, is saying ‘sorry’ enough?

I mean if sorry was enough we wouldn’t have anyone in prison! They’re all ‘sorry’ (they got nailed, ‘dead to rights’.)

Which is to go one step further and opine that we won’t see ‘justice’ done until the ‘responsible parties’ are handed STIFF prison terms.

(Or in the case of a simple plan, exile. ASP doesn’t condone imprisonment (It’s inhumane...to the prisoners AND the guards!)

Exile, which is a sort of ‘you made your bed now you’re gonna lie in it’ deal.

This is justice, served very, very cold.

Exile is one-way trip that you make the same way you arrived in this world, buck-naked.

The theory is most people won’t survive exile because exiles are usually lacking in the ‘cooperation’ department.

The concept of having to be a friend to have a friend is lost on them. These rugged individuals try to go it alone.

And should they try to win the cooperation of their fellow inmates, they have nothing to offer in return and these people usually don’t have a ‘normal’ sense of value. If you could smuggle some gold in one of your body cavities you may be able to strike a bargain…So, how much gold can you stuff up your poop chute?

But the guards would have to be mighty dumb not to scan you before placing you on the departure table.

Did I mention exiles are rendered unconscious before being released into a world where they are free to do whatever they want?

How did you think we were going to get ‘em naked? We’re going to cut their clothes off and scan (and surgically remove if necessary) any metal from their bodies before they are placed in the release pen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, am I not?

Our reporter with her thumb on the pulse of global business has asked that the newly appointed prosecutor MAKE THE CRIMIANLS ADMIT THEIR GUILT!

Apparently this will be enough. All we have to do is ‘SHAME’ a few of them and the rest will fall into line!

Now I can sympathize with her position. She can’t be too aggressive because the criminals she’s railing against cut her paycheck.

I have already pointed to the ‘propaganda machine’ as a ‘primary target’ come the revolution.

Those whose power relies on lies NEED the re-enforcement of officialdom!

Without the lie machine the criminals are lost!

But I digress again!

The focus of the article is the White-washing of Wall Street and they have wheeled out a hand picked patsy to do the job.

The people responsible for breaking the global economy have no interest in fixing it. At best we will see some mock trials and some small time players thrown under the bus while the investigation leaves criminals like Paulson, Geithner and Greenspan unmolested.

Worse, it will also stop well short of the politicians who executed the orders of the captains of industry and swept their dirt under the rug of National Security.

How sad is it good citizen that the goal of creating (and sustaining) a nation where justice prevails and freedom reigns remains so elusive?

How successful were the founders, who met in secret to draft the constitution? You don’t think they realized even back then that they were dooming their heirs to live under a web of lies?

Which leads us to wonder what the ‘original’ constitution actually says as opposed to the one we’ve all read that doesn’t seem to have any basis in reality?

Why do these elected chuckleheads keep defying the constitution they are ‘sworn to uphold’?

Maybe the real deal is so contemptuous of the common people that it has never seen the light of day.

Because sometimes it sure seems just like that…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tar & Feather

Greetings good citizen,

Either tonight at midnight or tomorrow night and it’s ‘game over’ for the world as we know it…

But Mayan jokes aside, we keep letting this bullshit slide and it won’t be long before we find ourselves cheering on a world ending catastrophe!

Like the, er, ‘unfortunately worded’ Second Amendment, it seems the givers of ‘corporate person hood’ (our thoroughly corrupt judiciary) have decided that ‘freedom of the press’ rests solely in the hands of he who OWNS the press.

How frightening is it good citizen to live in a society that seems to have developed an insatiable appetite for ‘secrecy’?

What is it that they are so intent on ‘hushing up’?

Or are we back to the now ancient argument that only the (proven incompetent) can be trusted to judge what is ‘good’ for society.

Well if Citizen’s United and our recent string of unfunded and unsupported foreign adventures are any indication of our ‘betters’ social superiority then we are well and truly good citizen.

Perhaps more telling is a goodly percent of the average citizenry is already hoping for some type of catastrophe (which they and theirs will escape unscathed, of course!) that will remove THEM from being a ‘bug under the glass’ (fuck the rest of you!)

(Did I mention selfishness is a primary driver behind the lack of action we’ve seen as our entire society is swept into it’s own cesspool and nobody lifts a finger to stop it?)

Who me?

I’m doing my part…and keeping my powder dry until the time is right…

Anyway, on with the story…

Tuesday in California, the Federal Appeals Court ruled against a group of journalists at the Santa Barbara News-Press who had been fired for demanding editorial integrity and a union. Rather than uphold their rights both to unionize and to speak out against bad editorial practices, the federal court instead said their dismissals were protected by the publisher's First Amendment Rights to print whatever she wanted.
The dispute began in 2006, when nearly all the top journalists and editors at the Santa Barbara News-Press quit because the paper's owner and publisher Wendy McCaw was interfering in the editorial content. As Melinda Burns, one former journalist at the paper wrote in the Santa Barbara Independent about that period:

"Spring had barely turned to summer that year when Editor Jerry Roberts and four other editors resigned, citing what they said was McCaw’s unethical interference in newsgathering and reporting. A dozen reporters quit, too, including one who had been covering a neighborhood dispute over the development plans of Rob Lowe, an actor friend of McCaw’s who wanted to build a mansion on a vacant lot in Montecito. Following standard newsroom practice, the reporter reported the address of the lot. Lowe’s assistant called the paper to complain, saying Lowe was going to cancel his subscription. McCaw fired off harsh letters of reprimand to the reporter and three editors, who all eventually resigned. Those of us who chose to stay in the newsroom knew we needed a written contract to protect our job security and integrity as journalists from McCaw’s arbitrary attacks."

Looks like a tempest in a teapot, doesn’t it? But the ‘precedent’ is set…owners rule and workers can go pound or better, quit if they don’t like it!

Which is to opine that ‘ownership’ is a terrible way to decide anything, yet our whole legal system is founded on that idea…

Which is to opine that for more than three hundred years, we’ve been DOING IT WRONG!

But not according to the ‘owners’ (and if you don’t ‘own’ then you don’t even belong at the table never mind deserve a seat!)

That’s how the game has been played for all of these centuries…but now there’s nothing left to own, all of the good stuff is gone…so a vast majority of us are on the outside looking in...

And the owners don’t give a fuck!

So here we sit, wondering just what ‘secrets’ they are keeping from us?

Could it be as petty as the example of ‘journalistic harassment’ given in this article or do you suppose the cloak of ‘national security’ could be covering up some major ‘errors in judgement’ that could make the One Percent look very bad indeed.

Didn’t Bush the First comment (like the founder Washington) that if the people knew what they had been up to they would ‘tar and feather’ us (and run us out of town on a rail!)

Oh and in case you didn’t know, tar and feathering (which sounds benign) was often fatal. (The tar would block the skin’s pores, killing them and causing gangrene to set in.)

So, when you’re sitting there, wrongly thinking ‘live and let live’ as far as the One Percent are concerned, don’t be foolish enough to think the feeling is mutual.

As far as they’re concerned you are the biggest threat to their continued mastery of the world’s resources. (Which they will continue to dole out as benefits THEM the most and the rest of us can go do the anatomically impossible!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

No Men

Greetings good citizen,

Today will be one of my ‘free form’ pieces where I don’t use any Corporate Owned Media reference points…although I will use topics I found in today’s online posts, both friend and foe.

Let’s start with the not too helpful observation that, to date, all ‘rampage shooters’ have been male.

So instead of outlawing guns maybe we should just outlaw men and be done with it…

No men, no killing. (Which ignores a long and tragic history of murderous women, but the author doesn’t hold woman blameless, she merely points out the obvious, that women ‘don’t prefer’ to go on shooting rampages (although they might learn to like it if they only gave it a try…)

A couple of articles later and the teachers (unionized teachers no less) are declared the ‘heroes’ of Sandy Hook…

Um, apparently tragedy provides the opportunity to drape your favorite hobby-horse in the cloak of ‘heroism’ when, at the end of the day, there were NO heroes at Sandy Hook, just frightened people doing whatever occurred to them during moments of extreme duress.

No heroes, only victims and survivors. This compulsion to glorify the participants in what was really a tragic social backlash borders on the sociopathic…

It is not the kind of behavior you need or want to encourage.

If we start celebrating ‘victim hood’ the next thing you know we will be taught to ‘cherish’ our slavery (as a proud part of who we are…in the minds of the >One Percent!)

Short hops or as the Soviets liked to call it, ‘gradualism’.

Which only belabors the obvious on my part, we must be very wary of the ‘for profit’ media.

Look at the mess they have made of the relatively benign playground politely called ‘entertainment’.

Nothing ‘too intellectual’, we don’t want them to think…or worse, ask questions! Then we don’t want them to, er, ‘dwell’ on their own wretchedness so we have to have reality shows drawn straight from the casting couch of ‘the Beverly Hillbillies.’

How ironic that most viewers of the relatively new ‘Alaska, the last frontier’ watch it with a degree of ‘envy’.

More ironic is how the show Yukon men displays what happens when too many people decide to live ‘off the grid’…

Mother Nature can’t support that many predators, which is why the farmer supplanted the hunter/gatherer.

Now we need to take farming to the next level…because we didn’t stop growing.

IF there is a second season of Yukon men it will show the ‘rugged individual’ choking on his ‘self-sufficiency’. If you watched the first season with a jaded eye you can see it is happening already.

Then there are the, er, comedic escapades of the Gold Rush crews…I wouldn’t follow Todd Hoffman across the street, never mind to the Klondike!

Like Sr. in American Chopper, apparently Fred (the claim jumper of Porcupine creek) doesn’t care how he comes across on TV.

Or maybe reality TV runs on assholes…it’s hard to tell.

I don’t think I’m alone in believing that in order to have your own ‘reality show’ you must first be a selfish jerk…which is not true on all cases. Otto on Alaska the last frontier and the rest of the Kilcher clan are not ‘full of themselves’…(although the bozoes of the Amish Mafia appear to be.)

Parker Schnaubel is the only worthwhile figure on Gold Rush (even in the throws of ‘gold fever’ he retains his sense of self and what’s important (far better than many of the so-called adults on the show! And his Grandpa is the true ‘salt of the earth’ type who is always pleasant to deal with.)

But you don’t need me to expound upon the wasteland that has become ‘primetime TV’…you see it for yourself.

And these days everybody with a keyboard is shaking the finger of shame at the corporate owned media…which is having zero effect, in case you didn’t notice.

What I find particularly disturbing is the trend of ‘off-shoring’ (so far mostly ads) to Bollywood, although there are some ‘test ballons’ flying right now of Bollywood produced ‘sitcoms’…as if they weren’t already pitiful enough!

(Take a closer look at the stars if you don’t know which ones…)

Um, the NYSE has opened since I started writing this, let’s have a peek at how the other end of the ‘entertainment industry’ is faring…

And the US market opened and headed straight for the basement…must be time for some ‘profit taking’ (given the recent irrational rise in share prices…)

Yurp is still in the green and the markets to the South of us haven’t tanked…yet, but it’s still early.

Um, this is why I don’t do ‘unscripted’ very often…it produces rambling pieces…which is not a good thing if you consider the range of my ‘normal’ posts…

Um, that said I will leave you to parse this mess as best you can,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Justice?

Greetings good citizen,

Here it is fifteen minutes before markets open and I’m back to old tricks of posting first thing (Well, it’s not the VERY FIRST thing I do…) and, as usual, today’s top story, a veritable outrage, is reported without rancor, in fact, it has become so common that it now seems this is how what passes for our ‘justice system’ operates.

Pay the fine and PROMISE to NEVER do it again…although, if memory serves this is the umpteenth time this particular miscreant has been fined for fiscal ‘wrong-doing’…

Which is to ask, good citizen, Where does it stop?

TOP NEWS
DealBook
UBS Is Reported to Be Near a Deal on Rate Rigging
By BEN PROTESS and MARK SCOTT

The Swiss banking giant UBS is expected to pay American and British fines of more than $450 million to settle claims that it reported false rates to increase its profit, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Worse good citizen, the ‘whopping’ 450 million dollar fine is just a fraction of the damage their falsehood has inflicted, so calling this justice is really a stretch.

Push come to shove they should pull the bastard’s charter and lock the doors!

Which, naturally, shines the spotlight on the other side of this situation, a society being held hostage by obvious criminals because of the JOBS that would be lost if justice were served!

But wait good citizen, it gets better!

Robert Greenwald, head of the progressive internet video and documentary film company, Brave New Films, recently traveled to Pakistan, supported financially by hundreds of BNF donors, to witness first hand the stories of families who have had innocent loved ones killed by U.S. drone attacks. Greenwald is challenging both the morality and the factual effectiveness of the U.S drone program as we learn more about the failures and questionable policies. The U.S. claims that drone missiles are aimed at potential terrorists but because the ground rules of who can be targeted is both vague and has been loosened, the number of innocents being killed has risen sharply. Furthermore, the information that is used to target people appears to be the result of a system of bribery at the local level, which is of questionable reliability.

It wasn't until April 2012 that John Brennan, White House counter-terrorism adviser admitted for the first time publicly, that our government has been using drones in Pakistan, and later Yemen, to attempt to kill those they consider as potential terrorists. This was the first public acknowledgment, despite the fact that the program had been going for at least several years. Still far more information was withheld in Brennan’s announcement about the program, than was revealed.

So we have bankers playing ‘pick your own fine’ and we have the military, whacking people indiscriminately and calling them ‘terrorists’ after the fact.

Worse, the average individual is powerless to ‘gainsay’ any of this, the eight hundred pound gorilla of ‘national security’ is wheeled out and paraded up and down the square and nothing gets done about it!

Which, if you have even one oar in the water, displays what a disturbing degree the ‘lack of accountability’ has taken on.

How long can you hide atrocities behind the veil of ‘national security’?

And at what point does it become, er, ‘unsafe’ to remain a member of such a society?

(Asked the man who is already living in a society that has suspended his right to review the evidence against him (habeas corpus.)

Hell while we’re shoveling dirt into the Republican’s grave we should include the other thing ‘Bush the lesser’ will go into the history books for and that is for abolishing the federal statute against usury!

But if we decide to document the crimes of the conservo-whackos we will need a lot more space and time than I’m willing to devote to the task!

But the real issue here is how it has become a ‘non-crime’ to be murdered by remote control…which weirdly started with the Israelis and their use of helicopter gunships to ‘assassinate’ political opponents.

The fact that they ‘bought’ those gunships from the US is just a massive coincidence…(or so they’d have you believe.)

Which is to roll this dialogue back to yesterday’s post and speculate just how many members of the political process as well as those in the military who would be found ‘unfit to serve’ if they were to be tested for the genetic markers that indicate psychopathy?

The idiots in charge of the drone program are most definitely ‘emotionally hard of hearing’ if not completely deaf…an accusation that could be fairly leveled at all who have ‘gone along’ with this atrocity in silence as the program has expanded.

Well, before a Scud come cruising through my window I’m going to post this bad boy so YOU get to consider it and it doesn’t remain a sordid bit of mental masturbation.

You know and I know something needs to be done to put a stop to this!

This is a fine time to realize that neither you nor I have the tools to put that action in motion.

Go ahead and call your congressman, let me know how that works out for you…

It won’t…and I’m not psychic (proven fact given my numerous failed predictions!)

The system, no matter how you slice it, don’t work…but you didn’t need me to tell you that.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The yoke of Stalinism

Greetings good citizen,

Social obligations pressed yesterday, I apologize for the lapse. Seems many of you are on vacation if my traffic meter is any indication (although most of the time I can’t make heads nor tails of what it tells me with any degree of confidence.)

Um, looks like the foxes have turned in to dogs again, at least they are this morning as stock markets around the globe are mostly posting red ink.

I know it’s only funny the first time…yet the ‘fit’ is still so there!

Which is to state that the destruction of our civilization is indeed proceeding unabated.

The spectrum across which this destruction is taking place is breathtakingly wide as we can see from today’s offering

The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union

It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that's awful enough). It's also that they've taken control over -- and put serious limits on -- our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live, and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives are being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals, and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.

With tongue only somewhat in cheek, here are a few ways in which Americans are now becoming a new lumpenproletariat, subject to the whims and diktats of our new Soviet-style corporate overlords.

Reduced Choice and Big-Box Censorship

We see it most evidently when we go to the store. Back in the 1970s, the American retail landscape was still mostly dominated by mom-and-pop stores, which in turn carried merchandise also made by small manufacturers (many of them right here in the US). Not only did this complex economy sustain tens of millions of comfortable middle-class jobs; it also produced a dazzling variety of retail choices. Every store on Main Street carried somewhat different merchandise, bought from a different group of preferred suppliers. A shoe store might carry 20 different brands. The shoe store down the street might differentiate itself by carrying 10 of the same brands, and 10 different ones. The result was a very wide range of consumer choices -- though you did have to go from store to store to find it -- and a rich variety of stores that competed aggressively for their customers' attention. And if you visited a different part of the country, the selection might be very different from what you'd get back home.

Now, every Macy's in America carries the same dozen or so lines of bland, middle-of-the-road women's clothing. You'll find exactly the same stuff on the racks in Long Island as you do in Long Beach. If you're looking for something that hasn't been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, you probably won't find it at the mall.

Yes, good citizen, even the Great Marketplace is wearing the blinders and muzzle fashioned for it by the ‘monopolists’.

You don’t see it because our useless media has also been ‘monopolized’. It doesn’t point out the one note song because its part of that one note song.

Going to start your own business and show these deep-pocketed morons how to, er, ‘do it right’?

You’d better be able to set up shop in an area where your customers have plenty of free cash…because everyone else buys on price.

Welcome to [Libertarian] free market hell.

Where the average customer can’t afford ‘different,’ they buy what they buy so they can still eat without running around naked.

Nothing like ‘dominating’ the alleged ‘free markets’, is there?

Buy my mass produced dreck or go naked, those are your choices.

Same thing with food, if they don’t stop ‘value enhancing’ the product, we’re all gonna explode!

And like the article points out, this new ‘totalitarianism’ doesn’t stop at the limiting of choice in the marketplace, it limits where you can work which in turn limits where you can live.

That’s why this capitalism bullshit has to be abandoned, tomorrow!

And the crafty capitalist would agree (while snickering that ‘tomorrow never comes, it’s always today!)

So let me modify my plea and say we need to eliminate capitalism (and all of its structures) NOW!

Better a planned withdrawal than the chaotic collapse we’re headed for!

Let me briefly go off the reservation to share this observation with you.

The pundits are all worried sick that once the violence starts, it won’t stop until the losses become ‘catastrophic’.

They preach peace while we can all see that the other side is clearly girding itself for war.

Why are our leaders (such as they are) taking this pseudo-pacifist stand?

Are we supposed to be ‘reading between the lines’ here?

There are those who want change and those who want more of the same…

There’s your ‘thought to ponder’ for this hot, muggy Monday.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

'Unnewsworthy'

Greetings good citizen,

Hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday in as much as they weren’t too disappointed with how things have turned out.

Once again it was a semi-eventful holiday respite with Mr. Geithner’s Treasury providing the bankster community with a special Christmas ‘present’. A present in the form of removing the ‘cap’ from Fannie & Freddie’s ‘balance sheets’ so these two mortgage cesspools holding tanks can expand their holdings of toxic paper…in essence making investors ‘whole’ at 100 cents on the dollar at, what else? Taxpayer expense!

Um, if you missed this little gem that’s okay, you were supposed to, that’s why the press release was scheduled for Christmas Eve sometime after 5:00…

Um, this sort of brings us to tonight’s offering which deals with ‘news items’ you may not have heard anything about… [Hat tip: Cryptogon]

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009


* #1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
* # 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
* # 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
* # 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
* # 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
* # 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
* # 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
* # 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
* #9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
* # 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
* # 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
* # 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
* # 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
* # 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
* # 15 Worldwide Slavery
* # 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
* # 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
* # 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
* # 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
* # 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
* # 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
* # 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
* # 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
* # 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
* # 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

Quite a little ‘litany of woe’ there good citizen, it seems there are a lot of things your, er, ‘overlords’ would like you to remain ‘ignorant’ of.

The good news is each of these ‘bullet points’ are actual links to the associated press release regarding the story…that you very likely didn’t see.

Naturally, to get the links you need to follow the only link in tonight’s story.

Hmmn…I don’t like to leave you with such a heartstoppingly brief article but sometimes it is what it is.

I’ve noted that other blogs are compiling ‘year in review’ or various ‘top ten’ lists but my missives are strident enough without beating you over the head with my opinions…because sadly, that’s all I’ve got. I don’t ‘know’ anything, all that I share here are hunches and guesses, albeit, some pretty bizarre ones.

I take the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ path of ‘deductive reasoning’…once you’ve eliminated the impossible and the improbable, whatever’s left, regardless of how unlikely, is the answer.

Um, the situation ‘as I see it’ has an extremely ‘unlikely’ cause and a particularly nasty outcome.

I may not ‘nail’ the precise cause but I think I’ve got a good handle on the symptoms and outcome…but then again, maybe I don’t.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner