USA and Global Mass Murder

Another fact that Americans can’t be proud* of is knowing that the most warring nation on earth just since World War II alone has murdered up to 30 million people around the globe with an estimated 90% of them being civilians.

Although I use the above sentence as a teaser, it is in fact one of the few points I might take exception to. Not I add, the figure of thirty million, but that Americans actually give a toss.

Understand as you read, Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer, so the article carries a little more weight for my money.

*Rhetoric only.

Says it all really don't it?

It’s Time to Stop “Supporting Our Troops”

By Joachim Hagopian
December 13, 2015

With the 115 year old tradition of the annual Army-Navy football classic on Saturday, the so called “America’s game” and “rivalry for the ages” is now once again upon us. This occasion never fails to pay reverent homage to America’s so called “cream of the crop” elitist military academies and always from the president to celebrities Americans give tribute to our armed forces. At this time we hear that familiar patriotic mantra “support our troops” mindlessly repeated. So it seems appropriate now to take a cold hard look to examine what it actually means to “support our troops.”
As both a West Point graduate and critic of the American Empire, to me the “support our troops” sentiment has long outworn its propagandized welcome. US Empire has been using that contrite expression to brainwash Americans and justify its wars and violence for far too long. It sprang up during this last decade’s protracted war losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never was it ever heard during the Vietnam War when our combat veterans returned home feeling defeated and suffering from untreated PTSD symptoms, shunned by a nation that had bitterly turned against them and their war, particularly by their own peer group. Fast forward to four decades and three war defeats later, and our government is still sending Americans off to fight and die in Afghanistan (9800 currently) and Iraq (3500 with another 100 on the way), and now in Syria (50 just proposed with more on the way while war-hawk Bobbsy twins McCain and Graham are calling for 20,000 more troops in Syria). But this century's wars we keep hearing red, white and blue, flag waving Americans urging us to “support our troops.”

Over the long haul, supporting our troops has resulted in the United States being the most warring, aggressive nation on earth, bar none. As we’re about to enter 2016, our ultraviolent country will be killing other human beings somewhere on this planet for 223 out of the last 240 total years the US has been in existence. That’s 93% of our time as a nation-turned-Empire we’ve been destroying human life. That’s certainly nothing to be proud of. Yet it’s “our troops” who’ve been the murdering culprit. No compassionate, rational person could possibly place blindly obedient support behind such rampantly wanton disregard and contempt for fellow human life.

Another fact that Americans can’t be proud of is knowing that the most warring nation on earth just since World War II alone has murdered up to 30 million people around the globe with an estimated 90% of them being civilians. Having initiated 201 out of the total of 240 armed conflicts from the end of WWII to 2001, it then follows that between those years the US Empire of Chaos and Destruction has murdered 27 million innocent people whose lives have tragically been cut short through no fault of their own for simply living in the wrong place at the wrong time belonging to the wrong ethnic nationality targeted by America’s full spectrum dominance and global superpower hegemony. And that was before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And what does it take to be targeted as a US foreign enemy? Any country whose leaders choose to support their own citizens’ well-being, independence and quality of life over US Empire’s fascist transnational corporate interests is attacked economically through sanctions and embargos, politically through propaganda lies and threats, or militarily though unnatural disasters/weather warfare, occupied invasions involving long term bloody conflict or acts of terrorism, coups and assassinations. Just ask Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, Panama, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Congo North Korea, Donbas, Palestine or Russia just to name more than a dozen.

People around the world have been victimized for well over a century by American Empire’s willful rape and pillage of their lands in the name of stolen natural resources and inhumane forced slave labor, and those are the nations whose puppet dictators willingly succumbed and acquiesced to US demands and pressures. In fact in the tradition of the British Empire, North America’s entire domestic and foreign history has been made of genocidal killing, enslaving, stealing and subjugating other darker-skinned races into death and submission. Given this context with the bigger picture perspective, “supporting our troops” is really supporting mass murder around the world. So bearing that sobering, grim reality in mind, it’s time for Americans to cease and desist with their jingoistic rah-rah that only adds insult to injury to the rest of the victimized world.

In 2008 the US spent more money every 5 seconds to wage an immoral, unlawful war in Iraq than the average working American earned all year long. 80% of America’s taxes are earmarked towards funding the annual Pentagon budget to wage war around the world. When that kind of war investment misappropriating US citizenry’s hard-earned tax dollars places such lopsided priority over the well-being of its own people, with over a decade of wearing down an overextended military forced into fighting three, four and even five consecutive combat tours on two simultaneous warfronts, it also overburdened and decimated America’s middle class. And now for the first time in nearly a half century, the US middle class is no longer a majority in the United States. A large chunk of it died when sinking into an expanding lower class of impoverished, poverty-stricken Americans barely making ends meet. Half the respondents in a recent survey say they either break even or make less than their cost of living expenses. As an oligarchy the US federal government no longer acts in the best interests of its citizens.

But considering the costs of war to victim nations where since 2003 the US has killed over a million people in Iraq alone, this figure released from a study earlier this year is admittedly a conservative estimate. The study concludes that up to two million in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been killed by America’s wars. These colossal crimes against humanity constitute supporting the US federal government as well as its military troops a moral crime. America’s complete and utter destruction of the world’s second and third largest oil producers in Iraq and Libya, turning them into failed states because their one time US allied leaders moved away from the US petrodollar is unconscionable, yet that’s the tragic outcome of blindly supporting our troops. More than any other single country, the US today is responsible for allowing ISIS to make billions in profit from stolen oil from Iraq and Syria financing the biggest terrorist group on the planet. And US partners-in-crime Turkey and Israel are the two biggest buyers of terrorist oil. So in effect supporting our troops is also supporting both crimes against humanity as well as worldwide terrorism.

Supporting our troops has contributed to the world becoming far more armed and dangerous today than at any prior time in our recorded human history. Our nation is also responsible for spearheading the biggest arms race in history where it’s not just the US Empire spending so many billions on weapons of mass destruction but due to Empire aggression it has forced Russia and China to answer by also significantly increasing their military spending. A dozen years ago the US defense budget nearly equaled the rest of the world combined. But during this century’s two protracted US wars plus smaller secret ones around the world, America’s military expenditures have soared to $682 billion in 2012 from $417.4 in 2003. The exponential rise of American aggression likewise has pressured the unilaterally declared US enemies Russia and China to significantly increase their military spending as well. The US has gone from spending near half (46%) of the world’s military amount in 2003 to just 35% in 2014 due to Russia and China dramatically expanding their military budgets. In fact following America’s lead, both the world’s annual arms sales as well as its military budgets have exponentially skyrocketed amongst dozens of countries all seemingly gearing up for “the big one.” Not surprisingly, at 31% the US is also the biggest arms dealer on the planet followed by Russia’s 27% with China accounting for 5% during the period from 2010-2014 that totaled a 16% increase from arms sold from 2005-2009.

Events and developments have escalated tensions and confrontations between the US and Russia and China in recent weeks. With the US backing NATO member Turkey recklessly shooting down a Russian fighter jet resulting in a Russian rescue helicopter also brought down last month, in addition to the probable ISIS bomb taking down the Russian airliner killing all 224 onboard a month and a half ago, the US Navy destroyer skirting inside the twelve nautical mile range of built up Chinese islands in the South China Sea, the United States and the West appear to be baiting Putin and the East into World War III. And with nuclear powers going directly head-to-head in Syria, Ukraine and Asia, self-annihilation of the human race becomes a very real and grave risk culminating after a quarter century of US Empire belligerently operating as the sole global superpower and "global village" bully.

Out of nearly 200 countries no other nation on earth has more than a few military bases outside its own country except the United States. In contrast to the rest of the world, the US sends 1.5 million military occupiers on active duty to over a thousand military installations on every continent throughout the globe. Just this week the Pentagon announced a worldwide expansion of military bases without specifying a total number under the auspices of secrecy. West Africa, East Africa and Afghanistan are slotted for full scale bases. Meanwhile US Special Forces that covertly operate by stealth surprise often at night in guerilla-type, fast strike operations are busily secretly committing acts of terror in over 135 nations globally, that’s about 75% of the all world’s nations.

Let’s look at the way our federal government supports our troops. After sending over 6800 US soldiers (along with 7000 civilian contractors) to their early graves fighting in America’s two longest running wars in the nation’s history, leaving one million wounded personnel filing VA claims ranging from life threatening physical injuries to emotionally crippling PTSD traumas and scars, the feds have betrayed our patriots serving our country by treasonously targeting all returning combat veterans as the biggest enemy threat on American soil. Indeed veterans, gun owners and dissidents are deemed to pose a greater danger than even the feds' own created terrorist monster ISIS that Obama's open border policy facilitates easy access to establishing terrorist cells inside America.

Those veterans seeking help are customarily snowed under by lethal Big Pharma poison, fast becoming addicted and even more unstable. Many are haplessly waiting and dying on lists for medical services that often don’t come soon enough. Exposing forty veterans who died awaiting services on invisible lists at the Phoenix VA hospital alone triggered a major scandal last year. For several years running on average twenty-two veterans have been killing themselves each and every day in the United States. The overloaded Veterans Administration has been caught grossly ill-prepared to adequately deal with the sheer enormity of the problem with so many severely damaged ex-soldiers in dire need of long term assistance and care. One study predicts that up to nearly a half million veterans will end up with criminal cases in the court system.

With nearly half (44%) of Congress millionaires and so few (19%) ever serving in uniform now, the DC warmongers are ever-at-the-ready to send young men and women from America’s lower class into harm’s way fighting Obama’s dirty little secret wars in multiple combat zones around the world that the public never even hears about. Yet you’ll see next to none of their own sons or daughters fighting in some far off war. The way our own government has used, abused and not supported our troops is despicable.

And then a sizeable percentage of those Americans who are so vocal in their claims of “supporting our troops,” are too frequently disingenuous. Often hypocrites merely mouth the same banal platitudes year after year from their ivory-towered, pretend world, living so far removed and disaffected from actual war conditions or even knowing anyone who wears a military uniform. Never fathoming the tragic insanity or bloody lifelong consequences that US wars ravage on millions worldwide, permanently damaging all involved, Americans who haven’t a clue will glibly pay lip service, “We owe so much to our soldiers who fight to keep us safe and free.” What bubble, planet or century are they living on or in?

Since the inside coup of 9/11 was perpetrated, US citizens have become the murderous neocons’ war on terror victims as well, terrorized by their own international crime cabal government and militarized police state that’s effectively stolen their freedom and civil liberties while the guilty treasonously continue violating sworn oaths to uphold and protect both the Constitution and American people. Yet too many brainwashed, dumbed down and clueless in America don’t seem to get it. Maybe it’s because they’re bombarded 24/7 by MSM lies and disinformation that never expose the ugliness of war as it really is. The ruling elite controls all aspects of mass media, engaging in widespread censorship of films, television and video games where violence and war are only glorified. Military, CIA and FBI liaisons control every aspect of what comes out of Hollywood these days.

But over four decades of a volunteer army comprised of less than half of one percent of the total US population also contributes greatly to the widening disconnect between the 99+% civilian population and the less than 1% Americans in uniform. The atrocities and horror that the imperialistic Empire’s killing machine has inflicted on Third World nations half a world away may as well be billions of miles away on another planet or galaxy. Out of sight, out of mind goes many civilians’ insulated, tunnel version reality.

Those currently in uniform need to be reminded that they have a sworn duty to protect America from domestic and foreign enemies. As citizens who no longer live in a democratic republic but now a totalitarian police state, they need to recognize that their federal government has a diabolical agenda to enslave and eliminate fellow Americans. Instead of criminalizing dissent, the real domestic enemy has become the federal government and all Americans need to accept this tragic development. Therefore, both those already in uniform as well as those ready to sign up and allow themselves to become their crime cabal’s latest cannon fodder in the elite’s wars need to stand up and be counted as patriots loyal to their nation and fellow citizens rather than adhere to blind obedience to their psychopathic masters. It’s no longer okay to support the troops when they’re misdirected into committing treason against their own citizenry. Military personnel need to take responsibility for their actions and do what’s right by both their Constitution as well as humanity.

2015 has been a tumultuous year when by globalist design terrorism has expanded to all corners of the earth, spreading death, war and destruction in its wake. Meanwhile, feeling its economic prowess slipping away in the face of the emerging power of Eastern rivals China and Russia, the United States government has already conceded losing its war to retain the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The DC crime syndicate knows its days in power are numbered. Since the psychopaths ruling the planet are unwilling to relinquish their ruthless power of absolute control, they realize that using their Manchurian puppet president and his overstretched US Empire to recklessly do their dirty planetary bidding to successfully destroy the world’s most powerful nation sending Empire into rapid freefall decline on the way to one world government can only be achieved by igniting World War III against the Eastern powers just as their Ponzi-rigged, house of cards, debt-based global economy implodes on itself. So this late in the power elite’s endgame when we’re still hearing “support the troops,” in actuality it’s time to fight for our lives in support of humanity’s struggle for survival and good ultimately triumphing over evil.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/.

Chris Hedges Looks at Nick Turse's Book "Kill Anything That Moves" American War Crimes in Vietnam

It was after watching a Democracy Now piece, back in January of this year, "Kill Anything That Moves": New Book Exposes Hidden Crimes of the War Kerry, Hagel Fought in Vietnam that I tried to write a follow up article. But for reasons I mention here,* it never got off the ground. However, not all is lost, for Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has taken up the challenge and produced a much better and far more comprehensive report than I could ever hope to achieve.

Firstly, and before moving on to horrors and inhumanity that are describe in the article, let me offer up in Hedges' quite polite words, his observations of the American psyche. I say polite, because in normal circumstances, if it is I that writes about such things, I can't get much further than employing such words as Cant and Hypocrisy, not to mention the  total indifference Americans have to the suffering of others. And not least, wrapping the whole thing in sugar-coated religious piety that I, and many Europeans alike, find truly nauseating; it is after all, the American way.

Turse’s book (Kill Anything That Moves) obliterates the image we have of ourselves as a good and virtuous nation. It mocks the popular belief that we have a right to impose our “virtues” on others by force. It exposes the soul of our military, which has achieved, through relentless propaganda and effective censorship, a level of public adulation that is terrifying. Turse reminds us who we are. And in an age of expanding wars in the Middle East, routine torture, murderous air and drone strikes and targeted assassinations, his book is not so much about the past as about the present. We have worked, consciously and unconsciously, to erase the terrible truth about Vietnam and ultimately about ourselves. This is a tragedy. For if we were able to remember who we were, if we knew what we were capable of doing to others, then we might be less prone to replicating the industrial slaughter of Vietnam in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

Should you wish, you can meet the author Nick Turse, "Kill Anything That Moves" in this Democracy Now clip, about fifteen minutes.

Don't Look Away: We Must Confront the Horrific Industrial Violence the American Military Is Capable of

Nick Turse's Vietnam War book, 'Kill Anything That Moves,' shows how the trauma that plagues most veterans is tied to the horrors they inflicted.
by Chris Hedges
March 14, 2013

Nick Turse’s “ Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare. It captures, as few books on war do, the utter depravity of industrial violence—what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar.” It exposes the sickness of the hyper-masculine military culture, the intoxicating rush and addiction of violence, and the massive government spin machine that lies daily to a gullible public and uses tactics of intimidation, threats and smear campaigns to silence dissenters. Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did. This trauma, shame, guilt and self-revulsion push many combat veterans—whether from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan—to escape into narcotic and alcoholic fogs or commit suicide. By the end of Turse’s book, you understand why.

This is not the book Turse set out to write. He was, when his research began in June 2001, a graduate student looking at post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans. An archivist at the U.S. National Archives asked Turse whether he thought witnessing war crimes could cause PTSD. He steered Turse to yellowing reports amassed by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. The group, set up in the wake of the My Lai massacre, was designed to investigate the hundreds of reports of torture, rape, kidnapping, forced displacement, beatings, arson, mutilation, executions and massacres carried out by U.S. troops. But the object of the group was not to discipline or to halt the abuses. It was, as Turse writes, “to ensure that the army would never again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.” War crimes, for army investigators, were “an image management” problem. Those charged with war crimes were rarely punished. The numerous reports of atrocities collected by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group were kept secret, and the eyewitnesses who reported war crimes were usually ignored, discredited or cowed into silence.

Turse used the secret Pentagon reports and documents to track down more than 100 veterans—including those who had reported witnessing atrocities to their superiors and others charged with carrying out atrocities—and traveled to Vietnam to interview survivors. A decade later he produced a masterpiece. Case after case in his book makes it painfully clear that soldiers and Marines deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded or killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children, with impunity. Troops engaged in routine acts of sadistic violence usually associated with demented Nazi concentration camp guards. And what Turse describes is a woefully incomplete portrait, since he found that “an astonishing number of marine court-martial records of the era have apparently been destroyed or gone missing,” and “most air force and navy criminal investigation files that may have existed seem to have met the same fate.”

The few incidents of wanton killing in Vietnam—and this is also true for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—that did become public, such as My Lai, were dismissed as an aberration, the result of a few soldiers or Marines gone bad. But, as Turse makes clear, such massacres were and are, in our current imperial adventures, commonplace. The slaughters “were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military,” he writes. They were carried out because the dominant tactic of the war, as conceived by our politicians and generals, was centered on the concept of “overkill.” And when troops on the ground could not kill fast enough, the gunships, helicopters, fighter jets and bombers came to their assistance. The U.S. Air Force contributed to the demented quest for “overkill”—eradicating so many of the enemy that recuperation was theoretically impossible—by dropping the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. And planes didn’t just drop bombs. They unloaded more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, 3 million white phosphorus rockets—white phosphorous will burn its way entirely through a body—and an estimated 400,000 tons of jellied incendiary napalm. “Thirty-five percent of the victims,” Turse writes, “died within fifteen to twenty minutes.” Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for U.S. troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper,” Turse writes.

Page 2

Murder is an integral part of war. And the most disturbing form of murder, because it is so intimate, is carried out by infantry troops. The god-like power that comes with the ability to destroy anything, including other human beings, along with the intoxicating firepower of industrial weapons, rapidly turns those who wield these weapons into beasts. Human beings are reduced to objects, toys to satiate a perverse desire to dominate, humiliate, control and kill. Corpses are trophies. Many of the Vietnamese who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse, gang rape, torture and savage beatings. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’ ” Or they “were chained with their hands over their heads, arms fully extended, so their feet could barely touch the ground—a version of an age-old torture called the strappado. Untold numbers were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten. Fingernails were ripped out. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.” Turse found that “detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the Central Intelligence Agency “organized, coordinated, and paid for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.”

“All that suffering,” Turse, writes, “was more or less ignored as it happened, and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.”

Turse, in one of many accounts, describes a string of atrocities committed in the Duc Pho/Mo Duc border region in spring 1967 by Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry under the command of Capt. James Lanning. A wounded detainee, Turse writes, was dumped into a boat and pushed into a rice paddy where he was riddled with bullets and finished off with a grenade. A wounded woman was covered with a straw mat and set on fire. Paul Halverson, a soldier and military combat correspondent who accompanied the unit, when asked about the total number of civilians killed by Lanning’s force, stated in the book: “The entire time I was over there—just by Charlie Company—I’d say it would be in the hundreds.”

Maj. Gordon Livingston, a regimental surgeon with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, in 1971 testified before Congress that he witnessed “a helicopter pilot who swooped down on two Vietnamese women riding bicycles and killed them with the helicopter skids.” The pilot, after being grounded briefly and investigated, was soon exonerated and allowed back in the air.

Soldiers and Marines, as is common in all wars, collected body parts of dead Vietnamese—heads, noses, scalps, breasts, teeth, ears, fingers, genitals—and displayed them or wore them in necklaces. “There was people in all the platoons with ears on cords,” Jimmie Busby, a member of the 75th Rangers during 1970-1971, told an Army criminal investigator. Corpses were dressed up and twisted into comic poses for photographs or gruesomely mutilated. Severed heads of Vietnamese were mounted on pikes or poles in Army camps. The dead were lashed onto Army vehicles—which at times ran over Vietnamese civilians for sport—and driven through villages.

Go to page 3

* Were you to follow the link, a series of John Pilger "Outsider" interviews will be revealed. Interviewees include: Jessica Mitford, Wilfred Burchett, Martha Gellhorn and Costa-Gavras. Recommended.

What Does a Trillion Dollar Defense Budget Actually Look Like?

Firstly let me apologise for the Americanese, but it will be 'defense' not defence, that will be the primary search term. And if you think I'm being pedantic, well, you just don't understand the English do you?

I also thought about calling it the attack budget, but I guess there won't be too many searches under that term either.

Just a brief intro to this contemporary article and then on to a re-up for a previous post that looks at the physical properties of a million, a billion, and a trillion dollars respectively.

The Mindboggling Sum We Actually Spend on National Security

If you've heard a number for how much the U.S. spends on the military, it's probably in the neighborhood of $530 billion. But that's merely the beginning of it.
By Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer
May 22, 2012

Recent months have seen a flurry of headlines about cuts (often called “threats”) to the U.S. defense budget. Last week, lawmakers in the House of Representatives even passed a bill that was meant to spare national security spending from future cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other social programs.

Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?

In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion -- a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged. more

Are The Good Times Really Over?
June 21, 2011

Only until the second coming.

This was to be a post on Iraq's missing $6 billion, which has every chance of turning out to be a missing $18 billion. Story and video Al Jazeera. Which in turn got me to thinking, just how large physically is a billion dollars?

Well, judging by the photo below, (12 pallets) depicting one billion dollars in hundred dollar bills, it's not something you would want dropping on your toe. And if the report is to be believed and the figure is accurate, multiply that lot by eighteen.

So with my interest piqued, I started looking at other figures, specifically a trillion, and what that figure means in relation to the US national debt, now running at over fifteen trillion dollars.

Time is of the essence this evening, so I have taken advantage of the the work done by others, which is duly posted below.





One billion dollars in hundred dollar bills, and if you that's an eye opener, just wait until you get to the trillion dollar related data. But first, a short musical interlude.





From the man himself, Merle Haggard.




Or a studio produced Wynonna Judd cover.

How much is a million, billion, trillion?
Wise Young PhD MD
The W. M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8087

We often speak casually of millions, billions, or even trillions. We are accustomed to thinking of cities with millions of inhabitants, government agency budgets that add up to billions, and even the United States debt that that is now close to $9 trillion. Most people don't appreciate these numbers.

Let's start with a million.

• A million minutes is nearly two years (1 year, 329 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes). Put in another way, it will take you nearly two years to spend a million dollars if you paid a dollar a minute.

• A book called "How much is a million?" tried to explain the concept of a million to children, pointing out that it would take a person 23 days of non-stop counting to count a million anything, including dollars (Source).

• If you walked a million steps, you can walk to Boston from New York (approximately 200 miles), assuming that each of your steps is a bit longer than a foot (a million feet is 189 miles).

• Since each dollar bill weighs about a gram and each pound has about 454 grams, a million dollars in one dollar bills weighs about 2202.6 pounds (Source). In 20 dollar bills, a million dollars would still weigh 110 pounds. In 100 dollar bills, it would weigh 22.0 pounds.

• A stack of 1000 bills is about a foot tall. Therefore, a million dollar stacked on top of each other would be 1000 feet tall. The Empire State Building is 1250 feet tall. A dollar bill is about 6 inches by 2.5 inches (15.7 cm by 6.6 cm) or about 0.10 square foot. So one cubic feet of $1 bills has about $10,000. A million dollars would take up about 100 cubic feet.

A billion is of course 1000 million. You can multiply every thing above by 1000 but using $100 bills is a bit more practical.

• A billion minutes ago is about the time of the birth of Christ.

• A billion steps is more than 200,000 miles. The circumference of the earth is only 25,000 miles. Therefore, one can walk around the earth at least 9 times and possibly 10 times.

• A billion dollars in $100 bills would weigh 22,000 pounds, over 1,100 cubic feet of bills.

• A stack of $100 bills for a billion dollars would be 10,000 feet tall, taller than the tallest building in the United States and taller than any mountain east of the Rockies, including Mt. Washington (6288 ft, the tallest mountain in Northeast United States).

• It would take 230 days to count the 10 million $100 bills. That is to count $1 billion.

• On September 7, 2003, President Bush asked Congress to grant an additional $87 billion to continue the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The $87 billion would cover a whole football field with $100 bills to the depth of 6 inches. By September 2007, the United States will have spent $315 billion on the war (Source). The Senate is working on adding another $50 billion. The $365 billion would fill a football field to a depth of 2 feet with $100 bills.

• Filling a football field with $100 bills may seem sort of silly but it is not far from what the Bush Administration did. During Paul Bremer's tenure as administrator of Iraq, the United States shipped bales of cash to Iraq. The total amount cash sent was over $12 billion, requiring a football field size warehouse to store the cash. A special inspector general for the Iraqi reconstruction said that $8.8 billion is unaccounted for after being given to the Iraqi ministries. But more interesting, illustrating the physical dimensions of the cash shipped, $4 billion of the cash is missing, some 363 tons of it.


"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and sixpence, result misery." Mr Micawber


A trillion is an mind-boggling number, well beyond the capability of most of us to imagine. The following will illustrate.

• A trillion minutes ago is 31,688 years ago, close to the beginning of human history. In other words, if you spent a dollar per minute, you could barely spend a trillion dollars during all of known human history. Even if you spent $100 per minute, you would not be able to spend $1 trillion in 300 years, virtually the entire history of the United States.

• Packed in bales of $100 bills (each weighing a gram), a trillion dollars would be 10 billion $100 bills, or about 10 million kilograms, 22 million pounds, or over 10,000 tons of cash (at 2000 pounds per ton). A trillion dollars in $100 bills would occupy a million cubic feet of space. It would fill a football field 6 feet deep. Before the end of 2008, the United States is likely to have spent over a trillion dollars on Iraq. conclusion

H/T and thanks for effort, Wise Young.

Toward The Sound of Bullshit US Marines Latest Propaganda Clip

I can see it now, this will be the number one clip playing at every NASCAR race this year.

Where do we sign up solja boy? Fuck me! you couldn't make this shit up.

And even though I'm in danger of wearing it out, what better vehicle could there be for upping my 'America in one picture' graphic.

Don't be fooled by Afghanistan massacre: US Marines are saints says new army video

After the massacre of 16 civilians in Afghanistan, the US Army has released a new video to restore the true image of US marines as dedicated servants of humanity opposing tyranny and injustice.
By Robin Beste
Stop the War Coalition
17 March 2012

Within days of a US marine massacring 16 civilians in Afghanistan, the United States Marine Corps released this sensitive 60-second video, titled Toward the Sound of Chaos, to help remove any misunderstanding about the mission of US marines in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

In the words of the film's commentary:

"Where chaos looms, the Few emerge. Marines move toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair—with the courage and resolve to silence them. By ending conflict, instilling order and helping those who can't help themselves, Marines face down the threats of our time."

To which Marine Staff Sgt. Kody Lindsey adds:

"When you show this video in towns where marines aren't stationed, it puts a positive image of the Marine Corps. Not only do we protect and defend the nation, we also protect and defend those who can't defend themselves."

Of course, the dead Afghans who were filmed in January 2012 urinating on the bodies of Afghans they had just killed, aren't around to appreciate the humanitarian principles of the US Marines.

But the video will help the Afghan people avoid getting the wrong impression from the pictures in February 2012 of US marines posing in front of a flag displaying the logo of the notorious Nazi SS.

And seeing the video will correct any negative views there are of the night raids, often carried out by marines, that terrorise on average 40 families each night -- countering, it is hoped, a NATO report which concluded, “The escalation in raids has taken the battlefield more directly into Afghan homes, sparking tremendous backlash among the Afghan population.”

The video won't only be welcome in Afghanistan, but also by the people of Iraq, many of whom may have a completely false image of the US Marines and their mission "to help those who can't help themselves".

Like the people of Fallujah, where in April 2004 US marines -- no doubt implementing their commitment to "ending conflict, instilling order" -- participated in the slaughter of 2000 Iraqis, including hundreds of women and children, the injuring of thousands more and the driving of hundreds of thousands from their homes.

Or like the survivors of the 24 civilians slaughtered in Haditha in November 2005 -- once again many of them women and children. The video will help clear up the reasons why only one of the marines responsible for this atrocity was ever brought to trial and he was only found guilty of "negligent dereliction of duty", receiving a rank reduction and pay cut but avoiding jail time.

Toward the Sound of Chaos is a welcome antidote to the rash of articles and comments suggesting that US soldiers are systematically savage who bring nothing but mass murder and destruction everywhere they are deployed across the globe.

It will restore the true image of US marines as dedicated servants of humanity "moving toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair—with the courage and resolve to silence them".

However, if you're an Iraqi, Afghan, Yemeni, Somali, or Pakistani civilian who is not convinced by this message, your answer to the question which ends the film, "Which way would you run?", will be -- the other way, and quickly. www.stopwar.org.uk/

Good eh? I prefer Bill Hicks' version myself.

The Afghan Village Massacre

No story, just a graphic.

The Ever Invading Creep of The American Talibangenical

A far better article than might first appear, and not just because it embraces two pet hates of mine, Jesus in the military and Jesus in the US Air Force.

Far more than highlighting the sanctimony and hypocrisy of those particular bunch of hired killers, the article exposes the degree to which these groupies for God have infiltrated every walk of life. But in fairness, I have edited out some of the more esoteric links that were included in the original article.

If you haven't read my two previous posts, the 'US Army' and the 'USAF', links below, you really should, because to read is to believe, what might otherwise be considered unbelievable.

This paragraph should give you a taste of things.

I spend (sic) over 20 years of my life as an evangelical Christian, and during that time these behaviors seemed benign, even laudable to me. Today, as a psychologist who creates resources for former fundamentalists, I find them disturbing. Even so, I am sympathetic to the moral conundrum fundamentalism can cause for genuinely decent people. After I watched the documentary Jesus Camp, a friend commented, “Wasn’t that horrifying?” I had to confess that it seemed kind of, well, normal -- and that I could relate to the woman running the camp.

How the Fundamentalist Mind Compels Conservative Christians to Force Their Beliefs on You

Good people are willing to subvert the U.S. Constitution and even violate human decency in their quest for converts.
Valerie Tarico
March 7, 2012


Many evangelicals wear their religion on T-shirts and around their necks and on car bumpers and eye-blacks. They hand out tracts on college campuses and stage revival meetings on military bases. They use weddings and funerals to preach come-to-Jesus sermons. In their resolve to spread the good news that Jesus saves, some also do things that are more morally dubious.

In Tucson, nice young couples cultivate relationships with lonely college students without disclosing that they are paid to engage in “friendship missions.” In Seattle, volunteers woo first- and second-graders to afterschool Good News Clubs that the children are incapable of distinguishing from school-sponsored activities. In Muslim countries, Christian missionaries skirt laws that ban proselytizing by pretending to be mere aid workers, putting genuinely secular aid workers at risk. In the U.S. military, soldiers bully other soldiers into prayer meetings or the Passion of the Christ and then send bizarrely profane emails to people who try to stop them.

Perhaps the most devastating consequence of evangelical zeal in recent decades has been millions of unnecessary deaths in Africa. Many evangelicals saw the HIV epidemic as an opportunity.

“AIDS has created an evangelism opportunity for the body of Christ unlike any in history,” said Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse. Another group that pursued HIV dollars has its mission built right into its name: Community Health Evangelism. Christian ideology ultimately redirected billions of U. S. aid dollars away from science-based results-oriented interventions such as contraceptive access and safe-sex education and into programs that espoused traditional Christian values: monogamy, evangelism, and compassionate after-the-fact care for the sick.

I spend over 20 years of my life as an evangelical Christian, and during that time these behaviors seemed benign, even laudable to me. Today, as a psychologist who creates resources for former fundamentalists, I find them disturbing. Even so, I am sympathetic to the moral conundrum fundamentalism can cause for genuinely decent people. After I watched the documentary Jesus Camp, a friend commented, “Wasn’t that horrifying?” I had to confess that it seemed kind of, well, normal -- and that I could relate to the woman running the camp.

To explain why Christians will sometimes violate their own commitment to compassion or truth in the search for converts, it helps to consider the psychology of fundamentalist religion.

Religion has a set of superpowers—ways it shapes or controls human thinking and behavior. Chief among these is the fact that religions take charge of our moral reasoning and emotions, giving divine sanction to some behaviors and forbidding others. Because there are many kinds of “good,” all of us make moral decisions by weighing values against each other. For example, most parents place a value on not hurting their children and yet get them immunized because long-term health trumps short-term pain. Religion can alter the way we stack those competing values, adding emotional weight to some, removing it from others.

The relationship between religion and morality is complicated. Religion claims credit for our moral instincts. It channels them via specific prescriptions and prohibitions. It offers explanations for why some things feel right and others feel so wrong and why we find the wrong ones tempting. It engages us in stories and rituals that bring moral questions to the fore in day-to-day life. It embeds us in a community that encourages moral conformity and increases altruism toward insiders. It creates the sense that someone is always watching over our shoulder.

When religious edicts align with the quest for love and truth, religion’s power can encourage us to be more compassionate, kind, humble or act with integrity. But religions also assert moral obligations that have little to do with love or truth, harm or wellbeing. Consider, for example, sacramental rituals, pilgrimages, circumcision, veiling, vows of silence or rituals of purity. Some demands of piety have little human or planetary cost. But other times, divine edict compels adherents to do harm in the service of a higher cause that to outsiders simply doesn’t exist. The Aztec and Inca practice of human sacrifice to appease gods was one of these. To outsiders it was a horrifying moral violation; to insiders more analogous to a community vaccination; the young men and women who were sacrificed gave their lives for a greater good—the wellbeing of the whole society.

Since religions add to an adherent’s bucket of moral obligations, they can create moral dilemmas or tradeoffs where none would otherwise exist. Should I spend my days studying Torah or working to feed my children? Should I drive my daughter to the hospital even though it’s Friday? Should I give the little I can spare to the poor or to the nuns? Should I wander with a beggar bowl or help my father tend the fields so my sisters can go to school? Should I encourage my poor African parishioners to wear condoms to prevent HIV or tell them to entrust God with their family planning?

Sometimes the tradeoffs are a matter of life or death, as when Saudi girls may have been forced to remain in their burning school rather than flee unveiled. Or consider the case of a young Arizona mother who had to choose between her own death and the abortion of a 12-week fetus her church deemed a person. She chose to live so she could continue raising the children who waited for her at home. But her bishop, who saw the abortion as premeditated murder, excommunicated a nun who helped her, claiming the more moral path was to allow the death of both woman and fetus as God’s will.

Evangelical Protestants who believe the Bible is the literally perfect word of God take as one of their highest mandates a verse they call the Great Commission. I have seen it emblazoned in letters two feet high on the wall of a megachurch: Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. (Matthew 28:19, NIV). The word evangel means good news, and the name evangelical identifies Christians whose beliefs center on spreading what they think is the best news ever to reach the human race: that Jesus died for our sins and anyone who believes can be saved from hell. (One of my deep secrets as an evangelical teenager was how much I hated trying to sell other people on the Four Spiritual Laws that laid out the plan of salvation.)

Follow me, says the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel, and I will make you fishers of men. For evangelical Christians, fishing for souls is an obligation that can trump all others. What good does it do to feed the hungry or tend the sick if you leave their souls to eternal torture? Catholic Christians typically believe that good works are of value in their own right. Universalist Christians believe that the death of Jesus on the cross ultimately redeemed all of creation. Modernist Christians believe the Bible is a human document and that the life of Jesus is more important than his death. Evangelical Christians believe they have a moral obligation to proselytize.

Beliefs have consequences, and one consequence of evangelical belief is that decent people end up doing ugly things in order to recruit converts and save souls. It is because they care about being good that they do harm. In the much quoted words of Steven Weinberg, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” The mechanism by which this happens is that religion creates a narrative in which the evil serves a higher good.

A new book by Mikey Weinstein, No Snowflake in an Avalanche, offers a window into how corrosive the Great Commission can be. It chronicles a harrowing decade in, what is to Weinstein, a fight to the death for religious freedom. You may be familiar with fragments of the story. When fundamentalist Christians at the Air Force Academy began goading and harassing Weinstein’s cadet son, Curtis, they awoke a grizzly bear.

Weinstein assumed at first that the harassment was an anomaly and would be addressed quickly. Alas. The more pressure he applied using his own standing as an Academy graduate and former Reagan administration attorney, the more he uncovered an entrenched network of fundamentalist Christians that ranged from cadets to chaplaincy to brass, and that pressured all others to convert: Clubbish Bible-believing cadets bullied Catholics, Muslims, Jews, nontheists and even mainline Protestants (who, after all, weren’t real Christians to them). Evangelical chaplains brazenly told supporters they were missionaries on the public dime and the armed services was their mission field. Righteous officers pulled rank and pressured subordinates to participate in Bible studies and prayer meetings –and covered up abuses. Middle Easterners complained that America’s troops were Christian crusaders, and outside organizations fanned the flames by providing tracts and Bibles so that combat soldiers could work on converting Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

Livid about violations against the U.S. Constitution and livid about the personal violations and added dangers being endured by America’s soldiers because of the crusade mentality, Weinstein formed the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). Since then, thousands of phone calls, letters and emails have poured in from all arms of the services--not only from the academies but from men and women whose lives are on the line in war zones. The MRFF has fought like a cornered lion on their behalf—fierce, muscular and unpredictable—leaving fundamentalist perpetrators convinced that Weinstein and his colleagues are agents of Satan.

As exposure after exposure has demonstrated, the evangelizers are legally in the wrong. They also are in violation of well-established moral and ethical principles including, often, humanity’s most central moral principle, the Golden Rule. They would be outraged if adherents of other religions solicited their children or exploited their collegial relationships in the quest for converts. So why don’t they give it up? They can’t. Their beliefs require that they push as hard as they can to implement their understanding of God’s will.

In recent years, evangelicals have expanded their outreach in the military, public grade schools, "faith-based” community services and international aid programs, leveraging existing structures and secular funding streams when possible to support their work. To qualify for grants or gain access to public facilities, they argue that they are social service providers, not missionaries. From a personnel standpoint they argue that they are churches, exempt from civil rights laws. America’s Supreme Court has been remarkably willing to let them speak out of both sides of their mouths, which means this trend will continue. Evangelical organizations like Officers Christian Fellowship, Child Evangelism Fellowship, Prison Fellowship Ministries and World Vision will proselytize as much as they are allowed to, diverting as many public dollars as they can, because that is what their reading of the Bible demands.

Inside and outside of Christianity, vigorous debate is challenging the pillars of fundamentalist belief, like the idea that the Bible is literally perfect or that Jesus was the ultimate human sacrifice. But the evangelical quest for converts will be constrained only by whatever moral limits the rest of us set. AlterNet

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Previous:
US Army: Bible Bashing For Jesus

USAF: A Most Ungodly Organisation

Afghan Kill Team Fail The Spiritual Fitness Program

Plenty more under the Armed Forces tag.

US Troops Heading For Libya?

It would hardly come as a surprise if they were, I can't see the US, having orchestrated a clusterfuck in the region, sitting back and letting them get on with it, (the descent into chaos) not with all that oil at stake I can't.

Why is President Obama sending 12, 000 U.S. troops to Libya?
By Cynthia McKinney
January 13, 2012

It is with great disappointment that I receive the news from foreign media publications and Libyan sources that our President now has 12,000 U.S. troops stationed in Malta and they are about to make their descent into Libya.

For those of you who have not followed closely the situation in Libya, the resistance to rule of the National Transitional Council is strong. The National Transitional Council (NTC) cast of characters has about as much support on the ground as did Mahmoud Abbas before the United Nations request for Palestinian statehood or Afghanistan’s regal-looking but politically impotent Hamid Karzai or for that matter, George W Bush after eight years. The NTC not only has to contend with a vibrant, well-financed, grassroots-supported resistance, but the various militias of the NTC are now also fighting each other. I believe this “sociocide” of Libyan society, as we previously witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan before it, is part of a carefully crafted plan of destabilization that ultimately serves U.S. imperial interests and those of a Zionist state and its US agents who are bent on Greater Israel’s suzerainty over huge swaths of Arabic-speaking populations. Pakistan is also on the list for neutering in Muslim and world affairs, saddled with its own unpopular civilian leadership that finds itself in the hip pocket of the United States for survival, often getting sat upon by its fiscal guarantor.

The “Arab Spring” has sprung and the indelible fingerprints of malignant foreign financed operations must be erased if the people are to have a chance to truly govern themselves. Unfortunately, these foreign-inspired organizations are present and operating in just about every country in the world. The threat is ever-present like sleeping cells–all that is needed is that the right word to “activate” be given. Both Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez can write tomes on the impact of the *National Endowment for Democracy in the political life of their countries.

In other words, those who create the chaos have a plan and in the midst of chaos, they usually are the ones who will win. Those who wrote the plan of this chaos were affiliated with the Project for a New American Century–read A Clean Break if you already haven’t. General Wesley Clark told us of the plan to invade and destroy the governments of seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. “These people took control of the policy in the United States,” Clark continues. He concludes, “This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and . . . collaborators from the Project for a New American Century: they wanted us to destabilize the Middle East.” Richard Perle, Bill Kristol publicize these plans and “could hardly wait to finish Iraq so they could go into Syria,” Clark goes on. “The root of the problem is the strategy of the United States in this region. Why are Americans dying in this region? That is the issue,” he finishes. More ICH

* US Hegemony Exposed: The War on Democracy

* It Still Smells of Sulphur Polly

Pissing On The Taliban

Update: UK taxi driver chunkymark has a word or two to say. Philosophy from a black cab. (Only it's not a black cab.)




I thought I would get this one in before the next round of faux moral outrage starts up, if it ain't already, over the video showing US troops pissing on the corpses of Taliban some men with a wheelbarrow.

"If verified as authentic, the video shows behavior that is totally unbecoming of American military personnel'' abc news - video

Don't people talk fucking shite?

A quick hit of Bill Hicks and then a few words from the inimitable Fred Reed.

If I had to choose one image out of all the images in all the world, that described America, this is the one.

On Patriotism
Examining the Firmware of War
Fred Reed
May 23, 2011

Patriotism is everywhere thought to be a virtue rather than a mental disorder. I don’t get it.

If I told the Rotarians or an American Legion hall that “John is a patriot,” all would approve greatly of John. If I told them that patriotism was nothing more than the loyalty to each other of dogs in a pack, they would lynch me. Patriotism, they believe, is a Good Thing.

Of course the Japanese pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor were patriots, as were the German soldiers who murdered millions in the Second World War. The men who brought down the towers in New York were patriots, though of a religious sort. Do we admire their patriotism?

Of course not. When we say “John is a patriot,” we mean “John is a reliable member of our dog pack,” nothing more. The pack instinct seems more ancient, and certainly stronger, than morality or any form of human decency. Thus, once the pack—citizenry, I meant to say—have been properly roused to a pitch of patriotism, they will, under cover of the most diaphanous pretexts, rape Nanking, bomb Hiroshima, kill the Jews or, if they are Jews, Palestinians. We are animals of the pack. We don’t admire patriotism. We admire loyalty to ourselves.

The pack dominates humanity. Observe that the behavior of urban gangs—the Vice Lords, Mara Salvatrucha, Los Locos Intocables, Crips, Bloods—precisely mirrors that of more formally recognized gangs, which are called “countries.” Gangs, like countries, are intensely territorial with recognized borders fiercely defended. The soldiers of gangs, like those of countries, have uniforms, usually clothing of particular colors, and they “throw signs”—make the patterns of fingers indicating their gang—and wear their hats sideways in different directions to indicate to whom their patriotism is plighted. They have generals, councils of war, and ranks paralleling the colonels and majors of national packs. They fight each other endlessly, as do countries, for territory, for control of markets, or because someone insulted someone. It makes no sense—it would be more reasonable for example to divide the market for drugs instead of killing each other—but they do it because of the pack instinct.

Packery dominates society. Across the country high schools form basketball packs and do battle on the court, while cheerleaders jump and twirl, preferably in short skirts (here we have the other major instinct) to maintain patriotic fervor in the onlookers. Cities with NFL franchises hire bulky felons from around the country to bump forcefully into the parallel felons of other cities, arousing warlike sentiments among their respective fellow dogs.

Fans. Fans.

Such is their footballian enthusiasm that they will sometimes burn their own cities in delight at victory or disturbance at loss. Without the pack instinct, football would hardly matter to them at all.

It’s everywhere. The Olympics, the World Cup, racial groups, political parties—Crips and Bloods, all.

Part of patriotism is nationalism, the political expression of having given up to the pack all independence of thought.
Patriotism is of course incompatible with morality. This is more explicit in the soldier, a patriot who agrees to kill anyone he is told to kill by the various alpha-dogs—President, Fuehrer, emperor, Duce, generals.

Is this not literally true? An adolescent enlists, never having heard of Ruritania, which is perhaps on the other side of the earth. A year later, having learned to manage the Gatlings on a helicopter gunship, he is told that Ruritania is A Grave Threat. Never having seen a Ruritanian, being unable to spell the place, not knowing where it is (you would be amazed how many veterans of Viet Nam do not know where it is) he is soon killing Ruritanians. He will shortly hate them intensely as vermin, scuttling cockroaches, rice-propelled paddy maggots, gooks, or sand niggers.

The military calls the pack instinct “unit cohesion,” and fosters it to the point that soldiers often have more loyalty to the military than to the national pack. Thus it is easy to get them to fire on their own citizens. It has not happened in the United States since perhaps Kent State, but in the past the soldiery were often used to kill striking workers. All you have to do is to get the troops to think of the murderees as another group.

If you talk to patriots, particularly to the military variety, they will usually be outraged at having their morality questioned. Here we encounter moral compartmentation, very much a characteristic of the pack. If you have several dogs, as we do, you will note that they are friendly and affectionate with the family and tussle playfully among themselves—but bark furiously at strangers and, unless they are very domesticated, will attack unknown dogs cooperatively and kill them.

Similarly the colonel next door will be honest, won’t kick your cat or steal your silverware. Sshould some natural disaster occur, work strenuously to save lives, at the risk of his own if need be. Yet he will consciencelessly cluster-bomb downtown Baghdad, and pride himself on having done so. A different pack, you see. It is all right to attack strange dogs.

The pack instinct, age old, limbic, atavistic, gonadal, precludes any sympathy for the suffereings of outsiders. If Dog pack A attacks intruding dog pack B to defend its territory, its members can’t afford to think, “Gosh, I’m really hurting this guy. Maybe I should stop.” You don’t defend territory by sharing it. Thus if you tell a patriot that his bombs are burning alive thousands of children, or that the embargo on Iraq killed half a million kids by dysentery because they couldn’t get chlorine to sterilize water, he won’t care. He can’t.

The same instinct governs thought about atrocities committed in wartime. In every war, every army (correctly) accuses the other side of committing atrocities. Atrocities are what armies do. Such is the elevating power of morality that soldiers feel constrained to lie about them. But patriots just don’t care. Psychologists speak of demonization and affecting numbing and such, but it’s really just that the tortured, raped, butchered and burned are members of the other pack.

I need a drink. On Patriotism

h/t Maren

US 'Space Warplane' May Be Spying on Chinese Spacelab

Why this story? Because I have covered it before:

'Ere, Anybody Seen Our Spysat: X-37B Up To No Good?

And one does have to keep one's eye on those Yankies, because whatever they are up too, they are up to no good.

US 'space warplane' may be spying on Chinese spacelab
Is X-37B's secret mission watching Heavenly Palace?
by Brid-Aine Parnell
Jan 06, 2012

The US Air Force's second mysterious mini-space shuttle, the X-37B, could be spying on China's space laboratory and the first piece of its space station, Tiangong-1.

Amateur space trackers told the British Interplanetary Society publication Spaceflight that the black-funded spaceplane seemed to be orbiting the Earth in tandem with Tiangong_1, or the Heavenly Palace, leading the magazine to speculate that its unknown mission is to spy on it.

"Space-to-space surveillance is a whole new ball game made possible by a finessed group of sensors and sensor suites, which we think the X-37B may be using to maintain a close watch on China's nascent space station," Spaceflight editor Dr David Baker told the BBC.

America has refused to come clean on exactly what the X-37Bs are meant to be doing up there, but the line on the plane has always been that it's a test prototype of a reusable spacecraft that can carry experiments into and back from space.

According to the Air Force's fact sheet on the project, which was funded from the classified budget:

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is the newest and most advanced re-entry spacecraft. Based on NASA's X-37 design, the unmanned OTV is designed for vertical launch to low Earth orbit altitudes where it can perform long duration space technology experimentation and testing.

Upon command from the ground, the OTV autonomously re-enters the atmosphere, descends and lands horizontally on a runway.

As well as being winged for re-entry, the OTV also has a strong heat shield, both perfectly in tune with the (vaguely) stated purpose of the craft.

However since people don't even know how much the things cost, exactly where either one was headed and with what payload when they took off in April 2010 and March 2011 respectively, or for how long they're supposed to be up there, it's assumed the spacecraft have naturally been assigned some sort of clandestine military purpose.

The doomsayers in the Iranian media dubbed the X-37B a "secret space warplane" before the first one went up, adding that it was the first generation of US space Predator drones that would build up the US' space armada.

Slightly less alarmist is the hypothesis suggested by El Reg and others that the mini-space shuttle's purpose has something to do with spy satellites. That could be a spot of sat-napping - grabbing or disabling other countries' satellites while leaving the owners to assume some sort of space accident. Or it could be picking up their own eye-poppingly expensive sats for repair or recycling back at home.

This newest theory, that it might be spying on Tiangong-1, is also a possibility, but it does have a couple of holes in it.

First off, the Chinese spacelab wasn't launched until September 2011, some time after the second X-37B hit Earth's orbit. Of course, the USAF's gizmo is supposedly reprogrammable from the ground so they could conceivably have sent it off in search for the lab once the Chinese got their gear up, but that doesn't explain what it was doing before that.

Secondly, you'd have to wonder why it's worth spying on the Tiangong-1. The lab is unmanned for the moment, so all there'd be to study is the technology of the craft and what experiments it's doing. Still, the US is hugely suspicious of China's space endeavours, so it's more than possible that they'd want to get a look at Tiangong-1 just in case it's doing anything unexpected.

Brian Weedon, a technical adviser to the Secure World Foundation and former orbital analyst with the USAF, told the BBC he thinks that the X-37B is spying on the Middle East and Afghanistan, possibly with new kinds of sensors.

"A typical spy satellite is in a polar orbit, which gives you access to the whole Earth," he said.

"The X-37B is in a much lower inclination which means it can only see a very narrow band of latitudes, and the only thing that's of real interest in that band is the Middle East and Afghanistan.

"Is it spying on Tiangong-1? I really don't think so. I think the fact that their orbits intersect every now and again - that's just a co-incidence. If the US really wanted to observe Tiangong, it has enough assets to do that without using X-37B," he added.

Wilder theories have also reared their heads, such as that both Tiangong-1 and the second X-37B spotted "something else" in space and went to have a look at it - but that seems a little bit like wishful thinking from ET-loving dreamers.

The latest edition of Spaceflight, complete with the X-37B hypothesis, will be published this weekend. The Register

When a Child Is Abused by a War Veteran

To be honest, I wasn't going to run with this when I first started reading.

When a Child Is Abused by a War Veteran
by David Swanson
29 December 2011

I'm torn between the pleasure of having just read a brilliant and moving first-person stream-of-consciousness account of a true story of one woman's childhood, and the deep sadness that comes from learning about the absolutely horrific hell that this woman is extremely lucky to have survived — a hell that many others have known and will know, despite the ease with which it might be prevented.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies — captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly." Set aside the old-fashioned metaphysical vocabulary and the sexism. Factor in the world-changing force now developing called self-publishing. Emerson is being proved right, and there is no better example than "This Girl's Life: Being the Child of a War Veteran," by Michelle Brown.

Brown begins her masterpiece thus:

"I lived a rough life with my dad. He abused us physically all the time. There were four of us who lived in our home, my brothers and sisters, along with my mom and dad. My older sister had already left home. She'd had enough. My dad took a lot of my life from me, and I still have nightmares about the things that went on in that home. We were afraid to tell anyone, afraid of what would happen to us. My dad was a war veteran and we really did not know how to treat someone like that."

The treatment that Brown received as a girl, by her account, rivals in my estimation that meted out to prisoners of the CIA. She was starved, sleep-deprived, forced to stand endlessly, denied access to a bathroom, and beaten almost daily with all manner of objects. She was terrorized, physically damaged, cut, bruised, sight-impaired, brain injured, and of course denied medical care or pain killers. This girl grasped at every shred of possible explanation why, and the evidence pointed strongly in one direction: war.

"My dad would tell us all the time that he beat us because he thought we were the enemy. Well, if that was the case, why didn't he beat up people outside the family?"

Brown's primary response toward her father was and is hatred. "I hated my father — and hate is such a strong word, but I did. I really wanted to love him, but the Vietnam War ruined him and his family. … I was so afraid of my dad. I was even afraid to get the story out, thinking he would get mad at me and haunt me, even though he was dead."

Where did such a frightening father come from?

"My mom, Della, told me that Rico wasn't violent until he went into war. Rico would sometimes tell us about when he was in the war watching all his friends get their heads blown off. Rico would say he had to eat rats over there. In fact, my dad had his foot bitten by a rat. He had Agent Orange sprayed on him. He would say that the Army would teach them to be heartless, but I still say he didn't have to take those things out on us, his children. … In Vietnam, the Army would give the men medicine to take so they wouldn't get horny and want to have sex. … My father told my mom he couldn't love his children, because what if we died on him? He said his family looked like the enemy. … My mom says my dad would send her pictures when he was in the war of men with their heads blown off, no legs … dead. Just horrifying pictures.

"… My dad would get up in the middle of the night, wake everybody up, and talk about his experiences in the war, about how he had to kill men in the war. … I talked to one of the guys who was in the war with my dad, and he told me that my dad had to kill women and kids over in Vietnam."

So, in fact, beating women and kids was actually an improvement on the behavior this man had engaged in previously, behavior for which he was trained and praised.

How, year after year after year, was the constant beating of a wife and all of his children kept quiet? Brown's grandmother knew. Brown's grandfather and uncles knew:

"My mom said my dad put a knife up to her dad's throat and said he would kill him if they didn't get out of his home. My dad chased her brothers down the street."

The author's school knew, despite lots of lies about falling down, and lots of staying home until bruises healed:

"My father even came to my classroom at school and whipped me in front of all my friends. That made me so damn mad, because he was hitting me in public now."

A friend knew:

"My dad had a best friend who would come to our house and my dad would tell his friend, 'Watch how I treat my wife and kids.' After that day Rico's friend came over and saw how my dad treated us, he never spoke to my dad again. I never saw him again. He was so mad that he left my dad's home and never returned."

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) knew enough. Brown's father lied to the VA that he had no children, but the VA diagnosed him with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and as suicidal and homicidal, bipolar, schizophrenic, and personality disordered, as well as depressed and cocaine addicted. You'd think something in that toxic stew might have triggered a procedure that would have involved counseling for the father and/or an investigation into whose lives he might be destroying. You'd be wrong.

Books are flying off the shelves claiming that we are leaving war and violence behind us. But these books calculate Vietnam War deaths and injuries without including the Vietnamese, and without including anything that happens back home or after the official end of the war. Here we are dealing with damage from the Vietnam War that we are just now learning about in 2011, almost 2012. Imagine how much more is beneath the surface. Imagine the horrific suffering coming out of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that we will be learning about in the 2040s and later if we last that long. Imagine the suffering from our current wars of children not yet born.

Personally, I could barely stand to read what Michelle Brown recounted, and I doubt I could have survived it myself to tell about it. That she has both survived it and gone on to warn others about it so eloquently is a double miracle. Yet I am going to quibble with two aspects of how Brown views her own story.

First, she overlays it with religion:

"I wish things could have turned out differently, but like my mom always says, there is God's plan and yours, and God's plan always wins."

Frankly, if I could make any sense out of the notion of God or out of the notion of a God who planned for Brown to be tortured every day of her childhood, I would condemn that God and dedicate myself to opposing him or her or it.

Belief that all things, good and bad, are part of a master plan does not stifle all efforts to make the world a better place. Brown is trying to warn others and to advise them to leave abusive relationships. Yet she is also very understanding of the idea that one has a duty to tolerate the intolerable:

"To put up with a man like my dad because of her wedding vows had to be hard. I think I would have broken my wedding vows under those same circumstances, but that just goes to show you what a strong black woman my mom really is."

Secondly, Brown condemns her father's abuse of a woman and her children in the United States, but decidedly not his murdering of women and children in Vietnam. In fact, she praises this man whom she hates for the crimes that made him a criminal:

"I understand men and women having to fight for our country, but why did I have to be the enemy in the end, when I hadn't even been born when my dad came home?"

"… I am not trying to bash anyone who has ever fought in a war, because there are good men and women who have fought for this country. They deserve good honors. I'm not saying my father didn't do a good job of fighting for this country, but it's what he did when he came home that was so bad."

Is that true? Was killing Vietnamese people in huge numbers a "service," a heroic act, a duty, something to be proud of, something with a positive effect on the world, something that can be sensibly characterized as "defending the United States"? Shouldn't questioning of what we are taught as children extend to these areas as well?

I was honored that Brown sent me an early copy of her book. I was dismayed to see that she had included with it a letter praising it, a letter from the Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, a man who of course has been, in Congress and in the White House a key supporter of the making of war. Brown wishes her father could have been punished and believes with some satisfaction that he is being eternally punished in an imaginary world. "The person who inflicts pain needs to be punished," she writes. But would she include Lyndon B. Johnson on the list of people who inflict pain? Richard M. Nixon? Barack Obama?

When will we ever move beyond seeking to help veterans and their families to seeking to avoid producing more veterans?

When will we ever learn? truthout

David Swanson is the author of "War Is A Lie."

It Was Never a War. It Was an Invasion and We Are the Empire.

It Was Never a War. It Was an Invasion and We Are the Empire.
By Jeff Gibbs
December 18th, 2011

“War” is not over.

There never was a war.

There was an invasion.

An unleashing of mega-violence by an Empire upon a people who were no threat to them. Zero.

A unilateral assault by the United State of America on a small nation that had nothing to do with 9/11, that in fact despised and were threatened by the Saudi fundamentalists that perpetrated 9/11 just as much as us.

No, what happened in Iraq was no war.

It was a crime.



And if the United States weren’t the armed to the teeth and the economic bully of the world, we would be held accountable.

If you had any doubts whether this was a “war” or something else, all you had to do was watch the sad spectacle of the new leader of our Empire standing up there ALONE declaring “war is over.”

News flash: it takes two side to have a war. Where was the “enemy?”

No surrender, no peace treaty or armistice, no enemy bowing before us — or alternately if they had won preening and primping in victory.

The second clue this was not a war is that you cannot end a war by unilaterally stopping. That's how you end an invasion or attack, not a war.

A war ends when someone wins or loses. If we won, what did we win? Who did we defeat? Where are they?

In fact trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of dead later we lost by creating a nation where none before existed now open for business for violence, tribalism, lawlessness, fundamentalist extremists, and now full of people who hate us to the core and would most certainly harm us if they could.

A war ends when two sides make moves or come to terms.

An attack ends when the rapist stops raping, the murderer stops murdering, the bully stops bullying, or in this case when an Empire who cannot even admit it is an Empire tires of beating a tiny nation to a pulp.

The third clue that this was an invasion, an attack by an Empire, not a war, is the decision of the Emperor that the other side “doesn’t count.”

Evil genius!

No more guilt over innocent people’s brains blow out, arms and legs flying across the street into someone’s yard, children incinerated as they slept, babies dead in a dead mother’s arms. Simply decide they “don’t count.” By not counting them.

Our “war president” a guy who will go down in the annals of history with other stupid, violent, rulers of empires as a tragic character, who decided in his insanity that the way to deal with our slaughter was to pretend it doesn’t exist.

And we, the people of Empire, went along with it.

They do not count. But our people do.

We know the names and numbers of the 9/11 victims 2,997.

We know the names and number of our own troops killed: 4,484 in Iraq.

We know the names of number of those killed in the chaotic carnage of Vietnam, of World War II, and World War I, the Korean War, the Spanish-American conflict, the Civil War, and even the Revolutionary War.

We know how many were killed in the Titanic, roughly how many Jews were lost, how many people were gassed by Saddam, how many have been slaughtered in Syria.

Those people count, so we try to count them.

But in Iraq the most technologically-advanced, wealthiest Empire there ever was claims we have no clue or estimate as to the number of Iraqis killed. Umm, killed by us.

The lowest estimate I could find for civilians alone was 100,000, the highest, 1,000,000.

Killed for our benefit, or more accurately our collective delusion we are in a “war.”

And do the good People of Empire clamor for this accounting, to make sure that Iraqis “count” as much as people from Brooklyn or Oakland or Chapel Hill?

No.

It’s not too late. More Michael Moore.com