Indifferent Decadence
Topic: State Of The Union
For the deaf, dumb and blind amongst us who actually believe that our country is the most benevolent in the world,

"The United States promised $2.5 million
in emergency aid; the European Union
granted $3.8 million"

This in response to a major earthquake in Indonesia that has already killed 4300 people. It absolutely makes me sick that the economically arrogant nation that I live in does so much of all the wrong things and way to little of the right things. Spend $300 billion in blowing up a country, no problem, help poor, suffering farmers who just lost large chunks of their family and we throw them the tiniest of bones.

Just remember that the soldiers that have died for our freedom didn't do so, so that we could live in indifferent decadence.


Quake in Indonesia Kills at Least 4,300


Happy Memorial Day.

Please pick up the slack and make a donation to the RED CROSS.

Preempting Ignorance
Topic: Foreign Policy
As part of a recent academic discussion it was proposed that the articles ("Say No to Tehran's Gambit" and "It's Time to Engage With Iran") represent opposing viewpoints.

What do you think?

The major problem facing U.S. foreign policy is the recurring theme of blatant hypocrisy. The fundamental assumptions of either unilaterally, bilaterally or multilaterally negotiating with the Iranians to further the goal of ceasing Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions is an argument that the U.S. can't win. It's the classic "do as I say, not as I do" argument. The U.S., through programs like "divine strafe," are testing battlefield nuclear weapons with the implicit use to be on sites like underground Iranian Uranium enrichment facilities. It is initiatives like this, coupled with undying support for Israel and U.S. unilateralism and intervention in the past that is part of the impetus for states like Iran seeking nuclear weapons. However, the truth of the matter is that Iran is a minimum of 10 years away from processing enough fuel to have the basics required for nuclear weapon. The point is, THERE IS NO IMMINENT CRISIS.

For the sake of intellectual folly let's argue this question of unilateralism, bilateralism or multilateralism under the assumption that our ignorant political representatives, with the support of a full-frontal assault by the mediocre and ill-informed minds of the press (and often academia,) in this case Krauthammer and Ignatius, will provide us all with a sudden urgency on the matter of Iran, especially now that it looks like the American public is growing weary over the last thing that they were manipulated into believing they should fear.

The real question then becomes what does the U.S. have as a bargaining chip with Iran? The threat of military force? I don't think so.

Here's why:

Limited air strikes that target Iranian infrastructure, nuclear or otherwise, would provoke a response from Iran and an Iranian invasion of Iraq would most likely be the outcome. That would directly imperil the lives of 135,000 U.S. soldiers based in Iraq, not to mention countless civilians. The U.S. military leadership would certainly bring in reinforcements from the surrounding areas like Afghanistan, who can't afford to be stressed further. Ships in the gulf would provide air and missile cover, nations around the world would choose sides and things would get very hairy, very quickly.

The true strength of the U.S. military is not what our political leaders have convinced the population it is. Despite budgets that are basically more the entire world put together, our forces are overstretched and as recent polls show, demoralized, to the point of wanting extraction from the so-called "war on terror" in Iraq. The general public, despite not having to sacrifice anything in the invasion of Iraq has had its will seriously degraded and are solidly against a draft, which would be the only logical solution to a full-scale invasion of Iran. In the long term, Americans would only support a military action against Iran if it meant that they would not have to change any aspect of their lifestyle, including becoming a part of our democracy through direct military sacrifice, having to pay increased taxes for the war machine and the inevitable rise in not only gasoline prices but also consumer goods.

Another problem with using military action to resolve conflicts like this is that it only seems to limitedly work on countries that are weak and powerless; it especially helps when there's less than 25 million people, half the population is under the age of 15 and there has been full scale destruction of armaments in the preceding years, suffocating sanctions and claustrophobic no-fly zones repressing the country in every facet of its existence. The point is Iran ain't Iraq. A military conflict with Iran would be exponentially more difficult then the relatively minor skirmish presently taking place in Iraq.

Even if the U.S. used a force 10 times the size that which invaded Iraq the 2nd time, the military wouldn't just roll over Iranian forces. An occupation would be longer and more drawn out than what is taking place in Iraq and an air war alone would certainly bring Israel into the mix. Israeli involvement would bring other Arab and Muslim states into what could then become a major war. These likely realities tangled with the U.S. military and the public's inability to see that "will" wins wars and not technology and the Iranians would clearly have an advantage. Iranians surely realize that to fight a war like this against U.S. forces conventionally would be suicide and inevitably, if they haven't already, would reach the conclusion that a "terrorist" type insurgency would ensure that a U.S. occupation would not persist. A drawn out occupation would have the not-so-incidental affect of radicalizing the citizenry of other Arab and Muslim states in a more extreme fashion then the occupation of Iraq already has and could provoke at a minimum increased regional instability, a likely full-scale regional insurgency and/or a major world war.

The truth is that while these assumptions could be completely wrong and the U.S. could accomplish its military goals quickly and without provoking regional destabilization it can’t ensure that Iran wouldn’t acquire nuclear weapons. The crux of this entire argument is the flawed assumption that if Iran possessed a weapon they would use it. The only country in the world that has ever had the dubious distinction of being able to use nuclear weapons without equitable retribution was the U.S. in 1945. The likely possible targets of hypothetical Iranian nuclear attack either possess their own nuclear weaponry, like Israel, or have the pledged support of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Any pre-emptive attack by the Iranians would be, if you'll allow the use of an analogous quote from Condoleeza Rice in referring to North Korea and Iraq in JANUARY 2000,

"These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence --if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring NATIONAL OBLITERATION."

The Iranians know this, we know it and the world knows it. The only logical conclusion we can be left with, barring a radical departure from previous U.S. foreign policy, namely the end of hypocrisy, unilateralism and failed violent intervention, is that our country has to accept the fact that countries like Iran are going to acquire weapons we don't want them to have and the resulting costs from attempting to stop this inevitability would far outweigh any military successes. The U.S. cannot stop war by creating it, can't stop violence by perpetuating it and can't stop violent preemption by being violently preemptive.

Yet again it seems that the only characteristics required to solve this problem is patience and diplomacy but only time will tell if the U.S. will have the foresight and wisdom to possess them.

A Quicke...
Topic: Hopefully Humorous
Dick Cheney and George W. Bush were having breakfast at the White House.

The attractive waitress asks Cheney what he would like, and he replies, "I'd like a bowl of oatmeal and some fruit."

"And what can I get for you, Mr. President?"

George W. replies with his trademark wink and slight grin, "How about a quickie this morning?"

"Why, Mr. President!" the waitress exclaims "How rude! You're starting to act like Mr. Clinton! ''

As the waitress storms away, Cheney leans over to Bush and whispers...

"It's pronounced "quiche."



(Thanks Maura!)

GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY!
Topic: Misc.
The scumbags who ran Enron, Kenny "Boy" Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, are finally going to jail!!!

That's all. Carry on.

Not quite.

P.S. The law needs to change so that scum like Lay and Skilling have all their assets seized, sold at fair market value and the proceeds returned to the hard working people who trusted these assholes with their jobs and livelihoods. (There should also be a mandatory prison gangbang law but let's keep it clean.)

It should also be said that it is crimes like these that law enforcement should concentrate on and instead of the white, middle class racists waking up in the middle of the night dreaming about a dark colored thief or some illegal immigrant, they should worry about the incredibly more likely scenario that some white, anglo-saxon, protestant millionaire is going to dissolve or outsource their job, flatten their pension, poison their parents, mutilate their religion and send their children to be maimed and killed in needless wars over oil and economics.

These crimes are the type that truly hurt large numbers of people and they go on in every industry in America, everyday.

P.P.S. I wonder how Bush is going to manipulate 9/11 after his close personal buddy, Kenny Boy, is sentenced to 45 years on September 11th. 9/11 was a horrific day but the fact remains that this type of terrorist act has only occurred once and guys like Lay and Skilling who have hurt much greater numbers of people are a dime-a-dozen in our nation's history.

DYING FOR NIXON, DYING FOR BUSH
Topic: By Paul Loeb
“I didn’t want to die for Nixon,” said a man I met recently in a Seattle park. He’d served on military bases in a half dozen states, then had a car accident just before being shipped to Vietnam. “The accident was lucky,” he said. “It was a worthless war and I didn’t want to go.”

I agreed. I admired those who fought in World War II, I said. We owe them the debt of our freedom. But to die for Nixon’s love of power, fear of losing face, deception and vindictiveness—to die for him was obscene. Nixon’s war, the man said, had nothing noble about it. And neither did Iraq.

What does it mean to die in a war so founded on lies? Bush may lack Nixon’s scowl, but he’s equally insulated from the consequences of profoundly destructive actions. He came to power riding on the success of Nixon’s racially divisive “Southern Strategy,” which enshrined the Republicans as the party of backlash. He won reelection by similarly manipulating polarization and fear. Like Nixon, he’s flouted America’s laws while demonizing political opponents. His insistence that withdrawing from Iraq would create a world where terrorists reign echoes Nixon’s claim that defeat in Vietnam would leave the U.S. ''a pitiful, helpless giant.''

While Bush assures our soldiers they fight for Iraqi freedom, and to “make America safer for generations to come,” 82 percent of Iraqis, according to a British Ministry of Defense poll, say they’re "strongly opposed" to the presence of American and British troops, and 45 percent justify attacks against them. This creates what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton calls “an atrocity-creating situation.” Lifton first used the phrase during Vietnam. He now uses it to describe a “counterinsurgency war in which US soldiers, despite their extraordinary firepower, feel extremely vulnerable in a hostile environment,” amplified by “the great difficulty of tracking down or even recognizing the enemy.” This sense of an environment out of control has seeded the ground for Abu Ghraib and for massacres, at the villages of Haditha and Mukaradeeb, already being compared to My Lai. Former Army sniper Jody Blake recently described his unit keeping extra spades on their vehicles so that if they killed innocent Iraqis in response to an attack with an Improvised Explosive Device, they could throw one next to the corpses to make it appear those killed were preparing a roadside bomb.

Last December Bush called the Iraqi election “a watershed moment in the story of freedom.” But if our invasion and occupation has created a watershed moment, it’s one whose rivers of resentment and bitterness may poison the global landscape for decades to come. And when Bush talks of promoting freedom, the world sees the freedom of America to do whatever we please, no matter how many nations oppose us. America’s Vietnam-era leaders made much of their embrace of freedom as well, while overthrowing elected governments from Brazil to Chile to Greece. The war they waged in Southeast Asia killed two to five million Vietnamese, plus more deaths in Laos and Cambodia. And as with Iraq, those making the key decisions were profoundly insulated: Out of 234 eligible sons of Senators and Congressmen, only 28 served in Vietnam, only 19 saw combat, only one was wounded and none were killed. In Iraq, as we know, the chickenhawks led the march to war, and the sole Congressman or Senator with a son who initially served was Democrat Tim Johnson, who the Republicans still attacked as insufficiently patriotic. While the sons of Republican Senator Kit Bond and three Republican congressmen have since also volunteered and been deployed, most who initiated this war have never been intimately touched by it.

Counting Eisenhower's first deployment of soldiers and CIA agents to Vietnam in support of the French, Kennedy’s further commitment, and Johnson’s major escalation, the United States fought there for over twenty years. We’ve now been in and out of Iraq for nearly forty, since the 1963 coup when the CIA first helped the Baath Party overthrow the founder of OPEC. (And intervening in Iran since our 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, who we replaced with the dictatorial Shah). With the administration promising no immediate end in sight, Bush now tells us it will be up to “future presidents” even to consider withdrawing our troops. Who wants to be the last man or woman to die for George Bush?


Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and winner of the Nautilus Award for best social change book of the year. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.PaulLoeb.org.

It's Not The Intelligence, It's Intelligence
Topic: State Of The Union
I'm watching these fools in the Senate hold hearings for Hayden's CIA confirmation. It's amazing to watch Senator Roberts and General Hayden recreate the reality of post 9/11 and the lead up to our invasion and occupation of Iraq. The problem wasn't foreign intelligence i.e. the CIA, simply put, it was intelligence, period.

Watching a couple of morons attempting to recreate reality to suit their present deluded version of it is absolutely infuriating. And if I was a member of the CIA I would be fuming over the constant barrage of blame and criticism for not giving our war criminal President a rational reason for invading a country that was under brutal sanctions for 12 years, menaced by our war birds on a regular basis, possessing a starving population and 2 no-fly zones in the North and South of their country. Reasonably informed people don't need the Downing Street memos to tell us this.

The fact is that this administration cherry-picked pseudo-evidence to make their case for something that they wanted in a pre-9/11 world (and there is more than sufficient evidence to prove that). Couple this with the reality that anyone even remotely familiar with Iraq knew that they weren't even a threat to their neighbors and any senate report and criticism's of the CIA to the contrary are absolutely bogus.

How can anyone reason with people like this when they don't live in reality?

Here It Comes....
Topic: State Of The Union
Possible Cheney Indictment Looming, Impeachment....?

Axioms
Topic: Misc.
ax•i•om A self-evident principle or one that
is accepted as true without proof as
the basis for argument; a postulate

I was prompted to write this when I received an email about illegal immigration from one of my friends. The email was just one of many that I regularly receive from friends and family that can instantly be pegged for what they truly are when read skeptically but unfortunately for most people the author's goal of eliciting a visceral response is usually attained, which incidentally causes the reader to immediately forward it on to me. If you listen closely you can hear the "ooohhh's," "ahhhh's" and "oh my god's" of people all around you who are opening email just like the one I received.

The problems is that the "facts" found in these emails are much like "facts" found in a Bush State of the Union address. They're dangerous and they can get people hurt especially when the author cobbles together cherry picked pseudo-facts that sound incontrovertible. Undiscerning readers fall into this perception trap because they have yet to learn that sometimes the words they read are written by people whose goal it is to manipulate them. The danger with this delivery of information is that it plays on the reader's "conventional wisdom" in such a way that they start to base their realities on these materially false axioms.

co-de•pen•dent Of or relating to a relationship in
which one person is psychologically dependent
in an unhealthy way on someone who is
addicted to a drug or self-destructive behavior...

It is because of this that I have struggled for quite some time with the thought of writing an article that utterly destroys the fundamental underpinnings of the popular conservative movement that is so prevalently destroying America and indicative of a much greater problem. The problem that I keep coming up against in writing this piece is that I can't seem to find a way around the obstinacy with which most people hold on to their perception of reality. I would literally have to destroy so many things that so many people hold dear and which have been indoctrinated in them by their parents, their family and their friends that they just wouldn't accept it and they certainly wouldn't accept me telling them. They would condemn me as a "radical" for destroying their precious worldview that has been cultivated over a lifetime without any attempt at objectively analyzing reality but by forming their perceptions through codependent relationships. They wouldn't believe me because reality is so contrary to their conventional wisdom that it would literally blow their minds. The main reason why I haven't written such an article is a line from the movie "The Matrix" that continues to ring in my ear like a Robert Schumann A-note,

"... That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around.
What do you see? Business people, teachers, lawyers, carpenters...
You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.
And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent
on the system that they will fight to protect it. "

As disturbing, as evil, as devoid of compassion and humanity as their worldview is, "they will fight to protect it" and many will fight to the death. It may come as no surprise to many of you reading this that it doesn't matter how many facts you use or how tight your arguments are, they won't believe you. In fact, some of them are so smart that they can literally justify through logical rationalization, the wholesale destruction of other people's lives for their own gain.

Make no mistake about it, the only difference separating you from them is that you have taken the proverbial red pill. Never, ever, think that you are in some way better than they are. You may not have reached the end of the rabbit hole yet but you are aware that the way in which you perceive reality may not be how it actually is. You may also be aware that at times your ego directs your logic to convince you of what you want to be convinced of. The degree of separation between you and them is miniscule and can be defined simply as self-awareness. But be warned "there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path."

The Indy File
Topic: State Of The Union
The "Cafferty File" on CNN asked the question tonight, "What does it mean when the Iraq war is more unpopular than Vietnam was at this point?"

It means that not everyone who opposed this war from the beginning is a anti-American, un-patriotic, pinko-commie hippie. It means that those of us that were clearly correct when we questioned the motives of our President and the lies, half-truths and hidden agendas of this administration should have a much greater forum for our views and should be given the respect we deserve. It also means that if we really lived in a sane world, guys like Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage and everyone at Fox "news" would be out on the streets panhandling for what their opinions are truly worth.

The Wizard of Odd...
Topic: Hopefully Humorous
From Indy's hometown newspaper,

Walt Handelsman's,
"No place like home"


Thanks Brian!!!