Tuesday, January 31, 2012
THe Truth Is... not what you are being told on yer teeeveees and radio ppl
Despite Gingrich’s claim that “supply-side” economic theories have “worked,” the truth is that America’s
three-decade experiment with low tax rates on the rich, lax regulation of corporations and “free trade” has
been a catastrophic failure, creating massive federal debt, devastating the middle class and off-shoring
millions of American jobs.
three-decade experiment with low tax rates on the rich, lax regulation of corporations and “free trade” has
been a catastrophic failure, creating massive federal debt, devastating the middle class and off-shoring
millions of American jobs.
385 civilians killed by USA Drones of death...if only that were true
Last summer, the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism argued that since America began drone strikes, at least 385 civilians had been executed in US-led attacks. Of those statistics, the Bureau added that around half of the dead were children under the age of 18.
If 385 civilians were killed by Arab drones of death in say Kansas or Haifa you would never hear the fucking end of the gnashing of teeth and wailing! the fucking sloganeers would be bursting with lets kill them all slogans and blood dripping proclamations.
gawd I hate the whitey exceptional-ism!
but our retarded leaders blather on like its a just a Sunday fucking picnic rainstorm what killed them
If 385 civilians were killed by Arab drones of death in say Kansas or Haifa you would never hear the fucking end of the gnashing of teeth and wailing! the fucking sloganeers would be bursting with lets kill them all slogans and blood dripping proclamations.
gawd I hate the whitey exceptional-ism!
but our retarded leaders blather on like its a just a Sunday fucking picnic rainstorm what killed them
Pain medications and adverse drug reactions are the 4th leading cause of death in the U.S.... only behind heart disease, cancer and strokes!
Israel's never-ending Holocaust
The issue that should have sparked panic in last week's poll on religion is the total consensus among Israeli Jews that the 'guiding principle' for the country is 'to remember the Holocaust.'
By Merav Michaeli
Haaretz appeared to be gripped by panic after the Guttman Center-Avi Chai Foundation poll on religion came out last week, as could be seen in the frenzied front-page headline in Friday's paper: "Survey finds record number of Israeli Jews believe in God." But the newspaper wasn't panicking about the right thing.
Yes, there has been an increase in Israelis' attachment to Judaism over the past decade, but that means the situation has more or less returned to what it was two decades before that.
This same poll was first conducted in 1991, and its results were similar to those of the latest survey. A second one was done in 1999, after the bulk of the immigrants from the former Soviet Union had arrived in the country, but had yet to completely assimilate; this explained the dip in Israeli Jews' attachment to religion at the time.
A decade later, those immigrants have internalized the cultural codes of Israeli society. Throw in an enlarged Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox population that has counterbalanced the secularism the Russian-speaking immigrants brought with them, and the proportion of Israelis who subscribe to traditional Jewish beliefs remains virtually unchanged over the past 20 years.
The issue that should have sparked panic in the survey is the total consensus among Israeli Jews - regardless of religious, ethnic or political differences - that the "guiding principle" for the country and for Judaism itself is "to remember the Holocaust." Ninety-eight percent of the respondents consider it either fairly important or very important to remember the Holocaust, attributing to it even more weight than to living in Israel, the Sabbath, the Passover seder and the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people.
The Holocaust is the primary way Israel defines itself. And that definition is narrow and ailing in the extreme, because the Holocaust is remembered only in a very specific way, as are its lessons. It has long been used to justify the existence and the necessity of the state, and has been mentioned in the same breath as proof that the state is under a never-ending existential threat.
The Holocaust is the sole prism through which our leadership, followed by society at large, examines every situation. This prism distorts reality and leads inexorably to a forgone conclusion - to the point that former Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau announced at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony three years ago that Moses was the first Holocaust survivor. In other words, all our lives are simply one long Shoah.
As a country, as a nation, Israel has never confronted the trauma of the Holocaust. The shock from the terrible tragedy and the guilt feelings of the pre-state Yishuv leadership for not being able to save the Jews of Europe - plus the presence of the men and women who survived and were constant reminders of both traumas - prompted Israel to repress the Holocaust at first, and then to turn it into a placard in the service of the national trauma, to reinforce the constant existential fear and the aggressiveness that comes with it.
The survivors themselves have never been treated right. Just yesterday it was reported, once again, that half of Israel's Holocaust survivors are dependent on welfare stipends and that the government has once again reduced its support of them.
At the same time, the "Hitlers" are always there: Just a week ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said for the nth time that there is no shortage of those who want to exterminate us completely. In other words, there is no lack of reasons to continue to reinforce the fear of the Holocaust - which, according to his father, historian Benzion Netanyahu, has never ended.
So it is that we don't have any rivals, adversaries or even enemies. Only Hitlers. This is how the Holocaust is taught in school, this how it is that Israeli students are taken to visit death camps - and how it came to be that, as Haaretz reported on Friday, just 2 percent of Israeli youth feel committed to democratic principles after studying the Holocaust and 2.5 percent identify with the suffering of other persecuted nations, but 12 percent feel committed to "significant" service in the Israel Defense Forces.
That's the way it is with traumas. Because of our human limitations, a trauma that is not dealt with make us constantly see yet another trauma approaching - even when whatever is coming has no connection to the previous trauma and may even be a good thing. Trauma leads to belligerence and a strong tendency to wreak havoc on one's surroundings, but first and foremost on oneself.
What we consider rational is actually a frightened, defensive, aggressive pattern. Our current leaders have made Israeli Judaism just a post-traumatic syndrome, while they lead us to self-destruction.
Rexw January 31, 2012 at 8:52 pm - Reply
One thing that Merav Michaeli said above is that 'Israel has never confronted the trauma of the Nazi holocaust and has “turned it into a placard in the service of the national trauma" This is best seen in the hundreds of Holocaust sideshows peppered throughout the world.
It has become the practise in Australia for various groups to attend the Israeli infamous "Leadership Conferences" in israel which always seems to have a component of politicans, always anxious for a freebie or two, to be indoctrinated by such visits , a mandatory visit to some Holocaust Museum or the like to top it all off. As I said, a Holocaust sideshow.
Then as in the case of our current feckless Prime Minister, albeit temporary, such people become an advocate for the Zionist cause and we find very expensive reports being produced by influencial Jewish lawyers, such as the recent report on Indigenous people by Mark Leibler and another on Eduation by yet another dual-passported Jew, David Gonski.
I am sure that in the hidden files of any one of the overt Jewish organisations and many of the covert ones as well resident in this country, we would find a document from Prime Ministers past on the agreement to support Israel at any cost in return for electoral support and funding. A common practice in the rest of the world as well.
One only has to look at the recent comment by that most stupid of all Republican candidates, Gingrich and his statement to a Jewish network that 'Palestine was an invention'. What must he have been paid in kind for that little gem; advertising dollars, manpower for electoral benefit and just plain cash to get him over the line. The one gratifying thing (I think) is that the American people saw him for what he was after such a statement and he will never make it. No voters could be that naive not to see him for what he is and has been for decades.
It is interesting to note.that Russia had possibly six times more deaths under Stalin and his purges and yet not one Museum, Sideshow, Circus or Research Centre has been enabled in that country or the satellites of the Russian state to 'glorify' such happenings. They chose to move on. But witrh the evil Zionists they turned a 'guilty' world into a recipient of a holocaust marketing campaign and have been living off the back of it for seventy years. It has lost its impact so they have resorted to terrorism, bribery, corruption, political influence using any means available. The result……a Jew, once meant a religious follower has now become a Zionist, the most hated group of people in the history of the world.. Rightly so!
By Merav Michaeli
Haaretz appeared to be gripped by panic after the Guttman Center-Avi Chai Foundation poll on religion came out last week, as could be seen in the frenzied front-page headline in Friday's paper: "Survey finds record number of Israeli Jews believe in God." But the newspaper wasn't panicking about the right thing.
Yes, there has been an increase in Israelis' attachment to Judaism over the past decade, but that means the situation has more or less returned to what it was two decades before that.
This same poll was first conducted in 1991, and its results were similar to those of the latest survey. A second one was done in 1999, after the bulk of the immigrants from the former Soviet Union had arrived in the country, but had yet to completely assimilate; this explained the dip in Israeli Jews' attachment to religion at the time.
A decade later, those immigrants have internalized the cultural codes of Israeli society. Throw in an enlarged Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox population that has counterbalanced the secularism the Russian-speaking immigrants brought with them, and the proportion of Israelis who subscribe to traditional Jewish beliefs remains virtually unchanged over the past 20 years.
The issue that should have sparked panic in the survey is the total consensus among Israeli Jews - regardless of religious, ethnic or political differences - that the "guiding principle" for the country and for Judaism itself is "to remember the Holocaust." Ninety-eight percent of the respondents consider it either fairly important or very important to remember the Holocaust, attributing to it even more weight than to living in Israel, the Sabbath, the Passover seder and the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people.
The Holocaust is the primary way Israel defines itself. And that definition is narrow and ailing in the extreme, because the Holocaust is remembered only in a very specific way, as are its lessons. It has long been used to justify the existence and the necessity of the state, and has been mentioned in the same breath as proof that the state is under a never-ending existential threat.
The Holocaust is the sole prism through which our leadership, followed by society at large, examines every situation. This prism distorts reality and leads inexorably to a forgone conclusion - to the point that former Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau announced at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony three years ago that Moses was the first Holocaust survivor. In other words, all our lives are simply one long Shoah.
As a country, as a nation, Israel has never confronted the trauma of the Holocaust. The shock from the terrible tragedy and the guilt feelings of the pre-state Yishuv leadership for not being able to save the Jews of Europe - plus the presence of the men and women who survived and were constant reminders of both traumas - prompted Israel to repress the Holocaust at first, and then to turn it into a placard in the service of the national trauma, to reinforce the constant existential fear and the aggressiveness that comes with it.
The survivors themselves have never been treated right. Just yesterday it was reported, once again, that half of Israel's Holocaust survivors are dependent on welfare stipends and that the government has once again reduced its support of them.
At the same time, the "Hitlers" are always there: Just a week ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said for the nth time that there is no shortage of those who want to exterminate us completely. In other words, there is no lack of reasons to continue to reinforce the fear of the Holocaust - which, according to his father, historian Benzion Netanyahu, has never ended.
So it is that we don't have any rivals, adversaries or even enemies. Only Hitlers. This is how the Holocaust is taught in school, this how it is that Israeli students are taken to visit death camps - and how it came to be that, as Haaretz reported on Friday, just 2 percent of Israeli youth feel committed to democratic principles after studying the Holocaust and 2.5 percent identify with the suffering of other persecuted nations, but 12 percent feel committed to "significant" service in the Israel Defense Forces.
That's the way it is with traumas. Because of our human limitations, a trauma that is not dealt with make us constantly see yet another trauma approaching - even when whatever is coming has no connection to the previous trauma and may even be a good thing. Trauma leads to belligerence and a strong tendency to wreak havoc on one's surroundings, but first and foremost on oneself.
What we consider rational is actually a frightened, defensive, aggressive pattern. Our current leaders have made Israeli Judaism just a post-traumatic syndrome, while they lead us to self-destruction.
Rexw January 31, 2012 at 8:52 pm - Reply
One thing that Merav Michaeli said above is that 'Israel has never confronted the trauma of the Nazi holocaust and has “turned it into a placard in the service of the national trauma" This is best seen in the hundreds of Holocaust sideshows peppered throughout the world.
It has become the practise in Australia for various groups to attend the Israeli infamous "Leadership Conferences" in israel which always seems to have a component of politicans, always anxious for a freebie or two, to be indoctrinated by such visits , a mandatory visit to some Holocaust Museum or the like to top it all off. As I said, a Holocaust sideshow.
Then as in the case of our current feckless Prime Minister, albeit temporary, such people become an advocate for the Zionist cause and we find very expensive reports being produced by influencial Jewish lawyers, such as the recent report on Indigenous people by Mark Leibler and another on Eduation by yet another dual-passported Jew, David Gonski.
I am sure that in the hidden files of any one of the overt Jewish organisations and many of the covert ones as well resident in this country, we would find a document from Prime Ministers past on the agreement to support Israel at any cost in return for electoral support and funding. A common practice in the rest of the world as well.
One only has to look at the recent comment by that most stupid of all Republican candidates, Gingrich and his statement to a Jewish network that 'Palestine was an invention'. What must he have been paid in kind for that little gem; advertising dollars, manpower for electoral benefit and just plain cash to get him over the line. The one gratifying thing (I think) is that the American people saw him for what he was after such a statement and he will never make it. No voters could be that naive not to see him for what he is and has been for decades.
It is interesting to note.that Russia had possibly six times more deaths under Stalin and his purges and yet not one Museum, Sideshow, Circus or Research Centre has been enabled in that country or the satellites of the Russian state to 'glorify' such happenings. They chose to move on. But witrh the evil Zionists they turned a 'guilty' world into a recipient of a holocaust marketing campaign and have been living off the back of it for seventy years. It has lost its impact so they have resorted to terrorism, bribery, corruption, political influence using any means available. The result……a Jew, once meant a religious follower has now become a Zionist, the most hated group of people in the history of the world.. Rightly so!
Monday, January 30, 2012
They are getting ready to destroy our way of life...
Right here in the USA. the criminal cabal is readying their army to kill you and your disobediant neighbors!
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
The reality is that World War II was fought to make the world safe for usury – to ensure the permanent enslavement of mankind through debt and interes
Both the Bank of Japan and the German Reichsbank8 with their systems of state creation of the money supply at zero interest
– and the inevitability that those systems of finance would be replicated by other countries, in particular those of the proposed Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere – posed such a serious threat to the private investors of the US Federal Reserve Bank, that a world war was deemed to be the only means of countering it.
Industrial workers, wives and children targetted
'They [the British Air Chiefs] argued that the desired result, of reducing German industrial production, would be more readily achieved if the homes of the workers in the factories were destroyed; if the workers were kept busy arranging for the burial of their wives and children, output might reasonably be expected to fall... It was concentrated on working class houses because, as Professor Lindemann maintained, a higher percentage of bloodshed per ton of explosives dropped could be expected from bombing houses built close together, rather than by bombing higher class houses surrounded by gardens.' Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P. Veale.
They had lost 600,000 of the flower of French youth in the defense of Verdun on the Somme.
World War I broke out in the summer of 1914. There are few people here my age who remember that. Now that war was waged on one side by Great Britain, France, and Russia; and on the other side by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.
Within two years Germany had won that war: not only won it nominally, but won it actually. The German submarines, which were a surprise to the world, had swept all the convoys from the Atlantic Ocean. Great Britain stood there without ammunition for her soldiers, with one week's food supply -- and after that, starvation. At that time, the French army had mutinied. They had lost 600,000 of the flower of French youth in the defense of Verdun on the Somme. The Russian army was defecting, they were picking up their toys and going home, they didn't want to play war anymore, they didn't like the Czar. And the Italian army had collapsed.
Not a shot had been fired on German soil. Not one enemy soldier had crossed the border into Germany. And yet, Germany was offering England peace terms. They offered England a negotiated peace on what the lawyers call a status quo ante basis. That means: "Let's call the war off, and let everything be as it was before the war started." England, in the summer of 1916 was considering that -- seriously. They had no choice. It was either accepting this negotiated peace that Germany was magnanimously offering them, or going on with the war and being totally defeated.
Within two years Germany had won that war: not only won it nominally, but won it actually. The German submarines, which were a surprise to the world, had swept all the convoys from the Atlantic Ocean. Great Britain stood there without ammunition for her soldiers, with one week's food supply -- and after that, starvation. At that time, the French army had mutinied. They had lost 600,000 of the flower of French youth in the defense of Verdun on the Somme. The Russian army was defecting, they were picking up their toys and going home, they didn't want to play war anymore, they didn't like the Czar. And the Italian army had collapsed.
Not a shot had been fired on German soil. Not one enemy soldier had crossed the border into Germany. And yet, Germany was offering England peace terms. They offered England a negotiated peace on what the lawyers call a status quo ante basis. That means: "Let's call the war off, and let everything be as it was before the war started." England, in the summer of 1916 was considering that -- seriously. They had no choice. It was either accepting this negotiated peace that Germany was magnanimously offering them, or going on with the war and being totally defeated.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
"...the church to keep the populace passive and fearful..."
Since the church leaders knew this kind of information was potentially available, they engineered a deal between the financiers and the science researchers.
"You can have the funds you need for scientific research if you don’t question the church’s basic assumptions."
This arrangement made it possible for the church to keep the populace passive and fearful, while powering the transition from Renaissance science to the Industrial Revolution.
"You can have the funds you need for scientific research if you don’t question the church’s basic assumptions."
This arrangement made it possible for the church to keep the populace passive and fearful, while powering the transition from Renaissance science to the Industrial Revolution.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Apathy is not an excuse on the Day of Judgement!
Saturday, January 21, 2012
follow along as we lose massive amounts of money on yuropean futbol!!!
"Belgium - Pro League, Soccer
Kortrijk/Anderlecht 21-January-2012 8:59 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 for Game"
"Belgium - Pro League, Soccer
Beerschot Antwerp/Cercle Brugge 21-January-2012 10:59 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2 and 2.5 for Game"
"Germany - Bundesliga, Soccer
1.FC Nürnberg/Hertha BSC Berlin 21-January-2012 6:30 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 for Game"
"Germany - Bundesliga, Soccer
TSG Hoffenheim/Hannover 96 21-January-2012 6:30 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 for Game"
"Germany - Bundesliga, Soccer
Home Teams (Saturday 6 Matches)/Away Teams (Saturday 6 Matches) 21-January-2012 6:30 AM PST
Total Goals Over 16.5 for Game"
"Netherlands - Eredivisie, Soccer
Excelsior/NAC Breda 21-January-2012 10:44 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 and 3 for Game"
"France - Ligue 1, Soccer
Lille/Saint Etienne 28-January-2012 11:59 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2 and 2.5 for Game"
"Italy - Serie A, Soccer
Roma/Cesena 21-January-2012 9:00 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 for Game"
"Spain - La Liga, Soccer
Home Teams (Saturday 4 Matches)/Away Teams (Saturday 4 Matches) 21-January-2012 9:00 AM PST
Total Goals Over 9.5 for Game"
Kortrijk/Anderlecht 21-January-2012 8:59 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 for Game"
"Belgium - Pro League, Soccer
Beerschot Antwerp/Cercle Brugge 21-January-2012 10:59 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2 and 2.5 for Game"
"Germany - Bundesliga, Soccer
1.FC Nürnberg/Hertha BSC Berlin 21-January-2012 6:30 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 for Game"
"Germany - Bundesliga, Soccer
TSG Hoffenheim/Hannover 96 21-January-2012 6:30 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 for Game"
"Germany - Bundesliga, Soccer
Home Teams (Saturday 6 Matches)/Away Teams (Saturday 6 Matches) 21-January-2012 6:30 AM PST
Total Goals Over 16.5 for Game"
"Netherlands - Eredivisie, Soccer
Excelsior/NAC Breda 21-January-2012 10:44 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 and 3 for Game"
"France - Ligue 1, Soccer
Lille/Saint Etienne 28-January-2012 11:59 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2 and 2.5 for Game"
"Italy - Serie A, Soccer
Roma/Cesena 21-January-2012 9:00 AM PST
Total Goals Over 2.5 for Game"
"Spain - La Liga, Soccer
Home Teams (Saturday 4 Matches)/Away Teams (Saturday 4 Matches) 21-January-2012 9:00 AM PST
Total Goals Over 9.5 for Game"
Friday, January 20, 2012
“attempts by conspiracy theorists to tie Israel to 9/11 are the greatest security threats to the United States”…..Cass Sunstein, Obama Regulatory Czar
The Commission found that it had not been allowed to investigate properly, that evidence had been withheld and that crimes were committed by government and military leaders including, not only the destruction of evidence but perjured testimony. The findings of the 9/11 Commission were simple, they found evidence of a criminal conspiracy that prevented an honest investigation.
Monday, January 16, 2012
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
” We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge ~ even to ourselves ~ that we’ve been so credulous. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.”
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan
Saturday, January 14, 2012
“I just don’t think being handcuffed, photographed and fingerprinted is really a behavior-modification tool to keep me from being poor.”
gamblers are not concerned with the welfare of the people.
WHAT sin does a dice player commit? Said Rammi ben Hamma: Because the game is a speculation, and a speculation cannot be binding by law, and thus he receives ill-gotten money. Rabbi Shesheth said: It is not a question of speculation. The reason is, that gamblers are not concerned with the welfare of the people.
Friday, January 13, 2012
According to the intelligence officer, a senior administration official vowed to "take the gloves off" with Israel, but ultimately the U.S. did nothin
g
"It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,"
Foreign Policy quoted an intelligence officer as saying. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought."
well duh you fucks!
well duh you fucks!
Thursday, January 12, 2012
The final report of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan said that somewhere between $31 and $60 billion has been lost...
through contract waste and fraud in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Put another way, war profiteers took as much as $60 billion from taxpayers and didn't give us anything in return.
- "No Success in Iraq - Unless You're a War Profiteer" by Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe
- "No Success in Iraq - Unless You're a War Profiteer" by Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
We have, in a phrase, confused ends with means. A banking system is supposed to serve society, not the other way around.
The Book of Jobs
Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz Illustration by Stephen Doyle
Link
Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz Illustration by Stephen Doyle
Link
Monday, January 09, 2012
...A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims;...
and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism.”
Saturday, January 07, 2012
Former CIA Agent Exposes How Al-Qaeda Dosen't Exist
Friday, January 06, 2012
“You are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.”
Killing Kids is So American
January 5, 2012
According to news reports, 15-year-old eighth-grader Jaime Gonzalez, who was shot and killed yesterday by police in his middle school in Brownsville, TX, was hit at least two times: in the chest and once "from the back of the head."
Police say they were called by school authorities because Gonzalez was carrying a gun, which turned out, at least according to the police, to be a "realistic-looking" pellet gun, a weapon that uses compressed air to fire a metal pellet which, while perhaps a threat to the eye at close range, does not pose a serious threat to life.
There is now a national discussion going on in the media about whether police used excessive force in the incident, and there is, in Brownsville and at Gonzalez’s school, and of course in the Gonzalez family, both anger and mourning. The boy had reportedly been a victim of bullying.
Let me say unequivocally from the outset that, yes, whatever police authorities may say about "justified use of force," the cops in this instance used excessive force (American cops these days are in military mode, and justify just about any firing of an officer's weapon). Unless there were other children who were being held hostage by Gonzalez (there were not), or who were near him and being threatened (there were not), the police had no reason to kill him. For one thing, a pellet gun has such a tiny muzzle opening it would be pretty hard to mistake it for the muzzle of a Glock, as police are claiming, unless Brownsville police have very low vision standards. Furthermore, there is the question of why three shots were fired, why they were fired at the chest of a child with clear intent to kill, and of course, there’s that shot to the back of the head, which is simply unjustifiable under any circumstances.
But having said that, I want to call attention to another point, that gets beyond this one case of overkill by police: the double standard of concern when it is an American kid and when it is foreign kids who are killed.
Child victim of the US "collective punishment" assault on Fallujah in November 2004
I’m referring here to Iraq and Afghanistan, where thousands of kids even younger than Jaime Gonzalez, most of whom were not even armed, have been killed by American bombs and by the guns of American soldiers, and whose deaths evoke not the slightest word of sympathy or regret from either the killers themselves or the leaders, military and civilian, who issue the orders that led to their deaths. Nor is any concern about this slaughter of innocents expressed by the millions of Americans whose taxes pay for this ongoing atrocity.
Take Fallujah, a city of 300,000 in Iraq that in 2004 was the scene of one of the most brutal and brutish fighting of the US invasion of Iraq.
In what was clearly a war crime to rival anything the Nazi Wehrmacht engaged in during World War II, the Bush/Cheney administration and the Pentagon ordered the leveling of Fallujah in retaliation for the killing by resistance fighters of four Blackwater mercenaries in the city, and the hanging of their burned bodies from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The assault on the city was a pure case of "collective punishment," a tactic which is expressly declared a "war crime" by the Nuremberg Charter, drawn up and approved by the Allies at the end of World War II, and encoded in the Geneva Conventions in 1949.
The assaults on Fallujah, first in April, when the onslaught was called off because of nationwide protests in Iraq over the massive civilian casualties, and then in November when a larger and even more devastating assault was mounted that leveled nearly half the buildings in the city, also featured more war crimes, including the deliberate attack on and bombing of hospitals, and the executing of captured and wounded enemy fighters.
One of the first actions in the November attack on Fallujah was a war crime: a Marine raid to shut down the city's hospital, which the Pentagon accused of being a "source of rumors about casualties"
One of those crimes though, well documented by American reporters (though none of those from the mainstream press ever labeled what was happening as a war crime), was the deliberate entrapment of all "combat-aged males" in the city before the assault began. Under the Geneva Conventions, all civilians must be allowed to flee the scene of a battle or impending battle. Furthermore, since 1970, all those under 18, even if they are armed fighters, are defined as having "protected status" and must to be offered special protection by military forces.
Instead, as AP reporter Jim Krane wrote at the time, the US military ordered a cordon of Marines and members of the British Black Watch regiment to be placed around Fallujah in mid-October, three weeks ahead of the announced assault on the city. Civilian residents were urged to flee. But they had to pass through checkpoints, before being taken to heavily guarded refugee camps, and at these checkpoints, all males between the ages of 15 and 55 were turned back (some accounts said that boys as young as 11 were being turned back as potential "combatants"). Since the Pentagon was estimating the number of insurgents in the city at only about 4000 (and concedes that many of them had slipped away from the city before the attack began), it was clear that most of those boys and men trapped in the doomed city were civilian non-combatants. Krane, asking about this, quoted a 1st Cavalry Division officer who declined to be identified as saying of those who were denied safe passage from the future free-fire kill zone, "We assume they’ll go home and just wait out the storm or find a place that’s safe."
Easy words, but with over 10,000 buildings flattened in the ensuing US blitz on the city, finding safety would have been quite a challenge, and in fact well over 6000 civilians were killed in the nine-day attack in November. Bodies are still reportedly being pulled from the wreckage seven years later.
There was no remorse expressed at this slaughter, which included many 15-year-old boys just like Jaime Gonzalez, and younger kids too. Not by President Bush or Vice President Cheney, not by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or L. Paul Bremer, the jack-booted proconsul who headed up the US occupation administration in Iraq at the time, or by any of the commanders on the ground who set the rules of engagement for the assault. Nor was there any outrage expressed by the bulk of the American people in whose name this slaughter was conducted. Instead, the "victory" was cheered and the Marines were dubbed "heroes."
Apparently for Americans, murdering young Iraqi boys and civilians in general is no big deal, any more than it is a big deal when helicopter gunships mow down young boys collecting wood on a mountaintop in Afghanistan, or execute sleeping high school students in a night-raided compound.
An exception is Ross Caputi, a Marine who was part of that assault on Fallujah, who in a powerful message of contrition last month published in the British newspaper, the Guardian (but not in any major US publication), wrote movingly that, "As a US marine who lost close friends in the siege of Fallujah in Iraq seven years ago, I understand that we were the aggressors."
Caputi, who hails form a military family, wrote:
I understand the psychology that causes the aggressors to blame their victims. I understand the justifications and mechanisms. I understand the emotional urge to want to hate the people who killed someone dear to you. But to describe the psychology that preserves such false beliefs is not to ignore the objective moral truth that no attacker can ever justly blame their victims for defending themselves.
The same distorted morality has been used to justify attacks against the native Americans, the Vietnamese, El Salvadorans, and the Afghans. It is the same story over and over again. These people have been dehumanized, their God-given right to self-defense has been delegitimized, their resistance has been reframed as terrorism, and US soldiers have been sent to kill them.
History has preserved these lies, normalized them, and socialized them into our culture: so much so that legitimate resistance against US aggression is incomprehensible to most, and to even raise this question is seen as un-American.
History has defined the US veteran as a hero, and in doing so it has automatically defined anyone who fights against him as the bad guy. It has reversed the roles of aggressor and defender, moralized the immoral, and shaped our society's present understanding of war.
As a society, it is time for us Americans to stop condoning all this violence, particularly against children. No amount of rationalizing by police and by their bloody-minded supporters can justify the killing of Jaime Gonzalez and other children like him, and no amount of rationalizing by the purveyors of fear in government and media or by the rabid neo-cons and neo-liberals who back them and urge them on can justify America’s endless brutal imperial wars and the the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, many of them children, that are such an integral part of those wars.
Jaime Gonzalez, 15, killed in school by police bullets for holding a pellet-gun pistol
According to news reports, 15-year-old eighth-grader Jaime Gonzalez, who was shot and killed yesterday by police in his middle school in Brownsville, TX, was hit at least two times: in the chest and once "from the back of the head."
Police say they were called by school authorities because Gonzalez was carrying a gun, which turned out, at least according to the police, to be a "realistic-looking" pellet gun, a weapon that uses compressed air to fire a metal pellet which, while perhaps a threat to the eye at close range, does not pose a serious threat to life.
There is now a national discussion going on in the media about whether police used excessive force in the incident, and there is, in Brownsville and at Gonzalez’s school, and of course in the Gonzalez family, both anger and mourning. The boy had reportedly been a victim of bullying.
Let me say unequivocally from the outset that, yes, whatever police authorities may say about "justified use of force," the cops in this instance used excessive force (American cops these days are in military mode, and justify just about any firing of an officer's weapon). Unless there were other children who were being held hostage by Gonzalez (there were not), or who were near him and being threatened (there were not), the police had no reason to kill him. For one thing, a pellet gun has such a tiny muzzle opening it would be pretty hard to mistake it for the muzzle of a Glock, as police are claiming, unless Brownsville police have very low vision standards. Furthermore, there is the question of why three shots were fired, why they were fired at the chest of a child with clear intent to kill, and of course, there’s that shot to the back of the head, which is simply unjustifiable under any circumstances.
But having said that, I want to call attention to another point, that gets beyond this one case of overkill by police: the double standard of concern when it is an American kid and when it is foreign kids who are killed.
Child victim of the US "collective punishment" assault on Fallujah in November 2004
I’m referring here to Iraq and Afghanistan, where thousands of kids even younger than Jaime Gonzalez, most of whom were not even armed, have been killed by American bombs and by the guns of American soldiers, and whose deaths evoke not the slightest word of sympathy or regret from either the killers themselves or the leaders, military and civilian, who issue the orders that led to their deaths. Nor is any concern about this slaughter of innocents expressed by the millions of Americans whose taxes pay for this ongoing atrocity.
Take Fallujah, a city of 300,000 in Iraq that in 2004 was the scene of one of the most brutal and brutish fighting of the US invasion of Iraq.
In what was clearly a war crime to rival anything the Nazi Wehrmacht engaged in during World War II, the Bush/Cheney administration and the Pentagon ordered the leveling of Fallujah in retaliation for the killing by resistance fighters of four Blackwater mercenaries in the city, and the hanging of their burned bodies from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The assault on the city was a pure case of "collective punishment," a tactic which is expressly declared a "war crime" by the Nuremberg Charter, drawn up and approved by the Allies at the end of World War II, and encoded in the Geneva Conventions in 1949.
The assaults on Fallujah, first in April, when the onslaught was called off because of nationwide protests in Iraq over the massive civilian casualties, and then in November when a larger and even more devastating assault was mounted that leveled nearly half the buildings in the city, also featured more war crimes, including the deliberate attack on and bombing of hospitals, and the executing of captured and wounded enemy fighters.
One of the first actions in the November attack on Fallujah was a war crime: a Marine raid to shut down the city's hospital, which the Pentagon accused of being a "source of rumors about casualties"
One of those crimes though, well documented by American reporters (though none of those from the mainstream press ever labeled what was happening as a war crime), was the deliberate entrapment of all "combat-aged males" in the city before the assault began. Under the Geneva Conventions, all civilians must be allowed to flee the scene of a battle or impending battle. Furthermore, since 1970, all those under 18, even if they are armed fighters, are defined as having "protected status" and must to be offered special protection by military forces.
Instead, as AP reporter Jim Krane wrote at the time, the US military ordered a cordon of Marines and members of the British Black Watch regiment to be placed around Fallujah in mid-October, three weeks ahead of the announced assault on the city. Civilian residents were urged to flee. But they had to pass through checkpoints, before being taken to heavily guarded refugee camps, and at these checkpoints, all males between the ages of 15 and 55 were turned back (some accounts said that boys as young as 11 were being turned back as potential "combatants"). Since the Pentagon was estimating the number of insurgents in the city at only about 4000 (and concedes that many of them had slipped away from the city before the attack began), it was clear that most of those boys and men trapped in the doomed city were civilian non-combatants. Krane, asking about this, quoted a 1st Cavalry Division officer who declined to be identified as saying of those who were denied safe passage from the future free-fire kill zone, "We assume they’ll go home and just wait out the storm or find a place that’s safe."
Easy words, but with over 10,000 buildings flattened in the ensuing US blitz on the city, finding safety would have been quite a challenge, and in fact well over 6000 civilians were killed in the nine-day attack in November. Bodies are still reportedly being pulled from the wreckage seven years later.
There was no remorse expressed at this slaughter, which included many 15-year-old boys just like Jaime Gonzalez, and younger kids too. Not by President Bush or Vice President Cheney, not by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or L. Paul Bremer, the jack-booted proconsul who headed up the US occupation administration in Iraq at the time, or by any of the commanders on the ground who set the rules of engagement for the assault. Nor was there any outrage expressed by the bulk of the American people in whose name this slaughter was conducted. Instead, the "victory" was cheered and the Marines were dubbed "heroes."
Apparently for Americans, murdering young Iraqi boys and civilians in general is no big deal, any more than it is a big deal when helicopter gunships mow down young boys collecting wood on a mountaintop in Afghanistan, or execute sleeping high school students in a night-raided compound.
An exception is Ross Caputi, a Marine who was part of that assault on Fallujah, who in a powerful message of contrition last month published in the British newspaper, the Guardian (but not in any major US publication), wrote movingly that, "As a US marine who lost close friends in the siege of Fallujah in Iraq seven years ago, I understand that we were the aggressors."
Caputi, who hails form a military family, wrote:
I understand the psychology that causes the aggressors to blame their victims. I understand the justifications and mechanisms. I understand the emotional urge to want to hate the people who killed someone dear to you. But to describe the psychology that preserves such false beliefs is not to ignore the objective moral truth that no attacker can ever justly blame their victims for defending themselves.
The same distorted morality has been used to justify attacks against the native Americans, the Vietnamese, El Salvadorans, and the Afghans. It is the same story over and over again. These people have been dehumanized, their God-given right to self-defense has been delegitimized, their resistance has been reframed as terrorism, and US soldiers have been sent to kill them.
History has preserved these lies, normalized them, and socialized them into our culture: so much so that legitimate resistance against US aggression is incomprehensible to most, and to even raise this question is seen as un-American.
History has defined the US veteran as a hero, and in doing so it has automatically defined anyone who fights against him as the bad guy. It has reversed the roles of aggressor and defender, moralized the immoral, and shaped our society's present understanding of war.
As a society, it is time for us Americans to stop condoning all this violence, particularly against children. No amount of rationalizing by police and by their bloody-minded supporters can justify the killing of Jaime Gonzalez and other children like him, and no amount of rationalizing by the purveyors of fear in government and media or by the rabid neo-cons and neo-liberals who back them and urge them on can justify America’s endless brutal imperial wars and the the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, many of them children, that are such an integral part of those wars.
Jaime Gonzalez, 15, killed in school by police bullets for holding a pellet-gun pistol
KM - What do you see for the future?
AS - Chaos, confusion and ultimately a battle between the individual and the State. The individual is the stronger; and will win. The state is a fiction sanctified by Hegel and his followers to CONTROL the individual. Sooner or later people will wake up. First we have to dump the trap of right and left, this is a Hegelian trap to divide and control. The battle is not between right and left; it is between us and them.
Thursday, January 05, 2012
The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame [for the financial crisis].
The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame [for the financial crisis].
Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”
Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”
Monday, January 02, 2012
"I want to use all my strength, to resist the notion that I can run your lives,
or run the economy, or run the world. I want to use that strength to repeal and reject that notion, and stand up and defend the principles of liberty." -Congressman Ron Paul
Those who pride themselves in winning the Cold War have done only a mediocre job organizing the peace that followed.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
Mankind now is structured like a satanic secret society.
The masses are fooled and controlled by specious platitudes ("excuses.")
Only dupes and those who agree with the diabolical agenda rise to power.
Only dupes and those who agree with the diabolical agenda rise to power.