We must continue to kill them at every opportunity. Death and war are all they understand. We must give those to them nonstop by unleashing hell upon them at all times … Fund the military and slash the budgets of all other agencies, departments and programs … Americans must commit to this struggle for the long term. It will take years, possibly decades …
Nugent has never fought in a war although he is mighty fond of machine guns. He avoided Viet Nam through deferment and was not, in fact, a draft dodger.
The progressive professes that they know right from wrong but in fact deny Him that is right. How can this be, the Republicans and the Democrats today have failed to understand the Scriptures …
I believe separation of Church and State with its doctrine will be placed on center stage in 2012 with the Christians again showing their ignorance of scripture and the Biblical teachings. They will be supporting some Heathen claiming to be a Christian; all the while the so call Christian Voter ignores the Constitution and the essences of Romans 13:1-6 and what the civil magistrate should be doing.
The understanding of the Bible and God’s law is imperative if we are to know how to separate church and state, and knowing the true meaning of what a theocracy is. Neither the church nor the state can take away conscience or man’s right to property as given to him by God. All spheres of life are under God and owe their boundaries, as fixed, by Him and His sovereignty; this then becomes a true theocracy under Godly men …
As we drift away from God and His law we see 70 years later, the devastation done to the social fabric, the people and their freedom.
It remains for us to rightly divide the Word if there is going to be a correction and that correction will only come if God has mercy on us if we understand salvation is through Jesus Christ, and not the State …
Obama’s response thus far has been to offer compromises to a movement that does not compromise, and to argue facts with a movement that hates facts. Between now and November 2012, however, Obama’s audience isn’t that movement; it’s American voters. In a year when economic distress should doom his reelection chances, Obama’s best shot is to cast the election not as a choice between two competing visions of governance, but as a choice between democracy and theocracy. And a particularly nasty theocracy at that.
He won’t use that framing, of course …
The results were on painful display Monday night’s Tea Party debate. Our task for the next year is to remind Americans at every turn that almost all of us are not pure enough to have any place in the theocratic vision of the United States on display there …
The routine of another regretful Republican, Sarah Reidy, Facebooking:
“I am seriously thinking of logging off of Facebook until November 2012. I am embarrassed by how red meat our Tea Party has become. For years I have tried to prove the GOP isn’t the party of elitist, stereotypical people that lack compassion. When did creativity and growth become secondary to hate? Hearing the debate crowds go crazy over things like executions and the uninsured dying makes me sick and sad …”
In addition to the philosophical differences with encouraging government funding for private companies, critics say the Department of Energy gave Solyndra favorable treatment in the loan approval process due to its tight relationship with administration officials.
They point out that one of the company’s main financial backers, billionaire George Kaiser, is also a big Democratic campaign donor.
Now the company’s bankruptcy has become a case study on an issue likely to gain increasing attention: Should the government be investing taxpayer dollars in promising — but risky — startup companies?
All of the mainstream media will play dumb. Propping up crappy firms with taxpayer dough! Heresy!
Lots of people will stupidly act like it’s rare, or should be.
They will conveniently ignore that one of the primary functions of the Department of Homeland Security, over the past decade, was to do the same thing. And for most of the time we were under GOP rule.
The taxpayer propped up hundreds, maybe thousands, of small businesses promising technology to fight the war on terror. Most of it either totally flopped or has never paid off in any big way.
WASHINGTON — A $36 million anti-terrorism program designed to detect bombs on airline passengers by shooting air blasts to dislodge explosive particles is being scuttled because the machines proved unreliable at airports.
The “puffer” machines — glass portals that passengers enter for checkpoint screening — are being removed after the Transportation Security Administration spent $6.2 million on maintenance since 2005. Removing them will cost nearly $1 million, TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said.
Problems emerged after the TSA bought 207 puffers for $30 million starting in 2004. Ninety-four were installed in 37 airports. The other 113 machines stayed in storage.
Dirt and humidity in airports led to frequent breakdowns, Payne said. The TSA has removed 60 puffers and will pull the rest but has no deadline. The puffers, costing $160,000 each, attempted to identify bomb residue on clothing. They were used as added screening on passengers who had gone through metal detectors.
Some of the machines had trouble detecting bombs, said Hasbrouck Miller, a vice president of puffer manufacturer Smiths Detection. “It was a torturous four years,” Miller said, describing repair efforts …
One can make the argument the only reason the company hasn’t gone out of business is because of continuous taxpayer funding courtesy of multiple federal agencies.
And dead Jack Murtha’s career was virtually defined by it during the big years of the war on terror. When he died, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity lost its government fixer and its effort to get a big bioterror defense vaccine production center slowly collapsed.
DHS’ latest bulletin, issued Sept. 3, warned the group has been using social media networks to urge followers working in the financial industry to sabotage their employers’ computer systems.
Reflecting the lingering impact of the recession, the U.S. poverty rate from 2007-2010 has now risen faster than any three-year period since the early 1980s, when a crippling energy crisis amid government cutbacks contributed to inflation, spiraling interest rates and unemployment.
Measured by total numbers, the 46 million now living in poverty is the largest on record dating back to when the census began tracking poverty in 1959 …
Bruce Meyer, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago, cautioned that the worst may yet to come in poverty levels, citing in part continued rising demand for food stamps this year as well as “staggeringly high” numbers in those unemployed for more than 26 weeks. He noted that more than 6 million people now represent the so-called long-term unemployed …
He can’t help smiling every time he sees each shiny new Grand Cherokee, one of Chrysler’s top-selling models, roll off the line. Still, it’s tough to accept that his entire annual salary of about $30,000 is not enough to afford the least expensive Jeep made at Jefferson North.
“It would be a shame to work at Chrysler,??? he said, “and not be able to drive a Chrysler.???
Research that took place in the US – no comment on why the US would be interested in studying unrest – used millions of articles as a feed for a computer and found that if you gave it enough information about unrest it could tell you that there was unrest.
In this case the analysis was carried out retrospectively, but according to those involved it could also be used to spot upcoming problems, which in the context of US backed research starts to sound a little bit sinister.
I am no fan of Rick Perry.Its Ron Paul or no one.The fact of the matter is gobal warming caused by human activity is a fraud. Do the research.Deliberate falseifing of weather data was exposed in 2009. Scientific knowledge is great but it should not be used to take away our freedooms.
Here’s my ten year anniversary reminisce on the war on terror, one drawn from expert perspective. And it’s simple.
The bad guys won.
I don’t mean bin Laden or al Qaeda.
My view deals with the US mechanism, the security and threat assessment machine that was part of the post 9/11 Bush boom in the tools of war.
Today there’s no visible mechanism in the nation looking at things from the perspective of a devil’s advocate. There is nothing acting to put the breaks on a function where the only purpose is to find new enemies.
It hardened into this all things terror all the time half a decade ago.
Arms control agencies, any public information source that didn’t directly serve the war on terror by finding new threats, any threats, went silent, were marginalized or ceased to exist.
It’s a matter of economics and capitalism. There is no money in not feeding the fear.
We did this to ourselves. The worst parts in the paranoid reptile brain, convenient for a national business model based on a constant state of fear, were allowed to take over.
Over the years I’ve known a number of good people who did practice reason and criticism, individuals who fought against the making of terror stories and information into commodities, planted p.r. for political recognition and increased funding. If they went into the apparatus, and some did, they were silenced.
Purchase for service and work in the government destroyed all the value of formerly public critical thinking.
Of course, we still have it. It just has no place now.
From my experience, it’s useful to look back at how I got into looking at terrorism. The idea was to be rational. And that doesn’t seem too unreasonable even when printed today.
This occurred when I was contacted by British defense counsel in the infamous London ricin trial. I had been researching “recipes” for ricin and how and where they had circulation worldwide. I published on the web through GlobalSecurity.
And these recipes were going to be part of the trial. The prosecution’s case was initially aimed at linking a recipe found in England with other recipes found when the US overturned the Taliban and routed al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The reasoning was that it would prove a linkage and an operation that had been interrupted.
And I was familiar with all the original ricin recipes and where and when they had been published.
Kamel Bourgass’s jewelry tin of castor seeds, used to help grease the Iraq invasion. “The prosecuting authorities effectively [stood] accused of suborning justice to shore up support for an unjustifiable war,” wrote a columnist for The Telegraph in April of 2005.
Take a close look at that photo of a jewelry tin of castor seeds.
In September of 2002 until January of 2004, British anti-terrorist branch men were engaged in a dragnet for suspected terrorists in the north and east of London. In one operation on January 5, the plant poison ricin was claimed to have been found in an apartment above a pharmacy in a place called Wood Green. The news flashed around the world.
Tension was high and TIME International wrote in a story entitled “Poisonous Plot:” “Watching the police officers come and go, some of them in protective white suits and masks, and seeing the long hours they spent in the top-floor apartment above a local pharmacy, neighbors in North London’s multiracial Wood Green section knew that something big was up.”
Several suspected terrorists were arrested. One at Wood Green, others connected to a raid at the Finsbury Park mosque and one, Kamel Bourgass, a week later, in Manchester. Bourgass stabbed and killed a police officer in the Manchester raid. At the apartment in Wood Green — a “residue of ricin” was said to have been found. “A presumed al-Qaeda terror lab had been shut down.”
The residue of ricin eventually turned out to be a false positive, news suppressed until the trial of accused suspects in 2004. As for anything deadly — 22 castor seeds, most of them in the tin shown above, were the best that could be produced.
When I was first contacted by a representative of the defense counsel, document specialist/expert Duncan Campbell, the opinion was that a crew of terrorists bagged in the London raids were going to be sent over.
Most still believed there was some substance to Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council, a now totally discredited piece of theatre that ended his career. It was a show in which one of the government slides focused on a nefarious network allegedly linking al Qaeda in Iraq to plots in Europe.
Now — replace that ominous-looking and shadowy “UK Poison Cell” with the silly photo of a jewelry tin of castor seeds.
It’s impossible to take even half seriously as any basis for even one plank of an argument for taking the US into a disastrous war in Iraq. That it was used in such a way is criminal.
Nevertheless, that’s what our leaders did.
In England and before a jury, the prosecution’s terror case collapsed. There was no way to link a scrap of a ricin recipe found in England with material taken off al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The British recipe had been actually been copied from a server in California.
The British jury would convict only Kamel Bourgass. And he was already in prison for life. The ricin trial charges were only icing on the nasty cake.
The jury did not buy that the people in the dock with Bourgass were part of an al Qaeda poison ring. They were exonerated although the British government would continue to make things miserable for them in subsequent years. A trial of more men swept up in the original counter-terror operation was canceled. It had been predicated on the idea that a jury would find evidence of a poison ring and convict all men in the first trial.
I realized early that this would be of some news in the US.
The British government had embargoed the trial in the UK, but not here. So, under the rubric of Globalsecurity, American news agencies were approached.
No one would have it. So we published on site.
Then they started to call.
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post was perturbed. The information, he growled over the phone, put the paper in a difficult position. This meant having to scramble for confirming anonymous sources in England.
Harrumph! Such things disturb the digestion.
Somebody from 60 Minutes called. What did my sources in the government, the intelligence agencies, tell me? What did Colin Powell have to say?
That’s what I was asked. I didn’t have any sources in the government and intelligence agencies. Colin Powell? Surely, 60 Minutes had to be joking! I never heard from them again.
The mixed outcome dismayed U.S. counterterror specialists who were convinced that Bourgass and his four codefendants were in fact acting as part of a broader international terror plot …
“This is very disturbing …” [said a] a government consultant on international terror cases about the acquittals in the ricin-plot case. “These are dangerous people …
The [al Qaeda poison ring] news was too terrible and repeated too often to easily replace as common wisdom. Indeed, there will be many convinced that justice was not served, that a poison plot was foiled and that convictions would have been certain if only the right evidence had been presented and taken seriously. They will think that the case of Bourgass and others was a defeat in the global war on terror.
Others, however, will view it as a victory, an affirmation that specious intelligence, fear, stupidity and suspicions cannot forever trample on reality.
That hesitant optimism was unwarranted. Things were only going to get worse.
The number of people hired to search for and analyze threats exploded.
Today it’s a fact there there are a lot more people working in this capacity alone, paid for by the taxpayer, than there are actual members of al Qaeda worldwide.
And you can define the number of times in the last decade even one of them has come forward to offer public reason and perspective contrary to the usual mantra of everything being at threat at any time, simply by using the index finger and thumb to make a big zero.
That’s none in the ten years since 9/11.
This has resulted in very many bad things.
For example, at a micro level millions of dollars a year have been thrown away on not one, but two, experimental ricin vaccines for a decade. It’s been enough to support one pharmaceutical business and one government operation, the former of which has not brought one product to market in the time since 9/11.
Just multiply that kind of thing tens of thousands of times throughout the country.
Another result is that at the local level, nationwide, the belief has been embedded nationwide in many people, including those ostensibly involved in counter-terrorism, that al Qaeda men are everywhere, ready to spring from behind any bush to spray Americans with germs or poisons.
And yet another, the worst: The cynical monetization of all information and news on terrorism.
It’s always good business to have it for your new book’s publicity or your big news scoop. Or to manipulate it, leak it, massage and exaggerate it for political purpose, for improving the career or expansion of manpower and funding to search for always more threats.
Indeed, much of it has been written about here, at GlobalSecurity, and at other venues. Almost a decade’s worth of work on what now looks like historical documentation for the inexorable downward slope.
After bin Laden was killed there was a week of celebration. However,
what was the benefit? Seven days later it was back to more business as usual.
All the people who died ten years ago are not honored by this machine, this gigantic thought-destroying mechanism erected because of one very bad day. One wonders what some of them might say to us if they could have just one look at the way things are now.
[Pass your mouse over the link — “do we need another dumb texan“] Not entirely rhetorical. A lot of Americans would say yes.
The degree was in “Animal Science” which sounds legitimate until you view the transcript. Note all the watering down from a standard undergrad degree in biology or chemistry.
If the grades are any indication Perry needed the dilution.
As a young man he got a D and an F in two semesters of organic chemistry, a D in trigonometry, a C in physics, a C in freshman chemistry, a D in “feeds & feeding,” a D in basic accounting, a D in economics, a D in an animal anatomy class.
It’s a hopeless transcript, the record of someone who eked one out.
So where did he come up with Galileo? A staffer pre-debate?
In any case, for Perry’s demographic the transcript couldn’t be any better. Now it’s an asset, showing you don’t need no steenkin’ learnin’ to be president of the United States.
From a historical and practical viewpoint this is true. You don’t need any education to run the United States. One can lead it so even the most learned elite snobs have no effect.
Passing article on the web on the best countries for vices.
Moldova is first in the world for power drinking, closely followed by old eastern Euro nations and other places formerly in the Soviet Union:
According to [a] WHO report, the country topping the list for annual alcohol consumption per person is Moldova. The average Moldavian consumes 18.22 liters of alcohol annually, almost three times more than the global average of 6.1 liters. Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Europe and a major wine producer. Many of its people drink cheap homemade wine, vodka and other spirits.
The English and the Germans have some work to do if they wish to burnish their reps as paralytics drinkers. It may also help to have a smaller population so that any percentage of the folks that don’t get into the spirit of the thing don’t dilute the rankings.
And DD has a tune for this.
Walkin’ for Bumwine in Pasadena
Sadly, the US is no competition. I’d assume because there’s too much fundamentalist Christian religion embedded in half the country. Teetotal is the way to be when damning everyone else while you’re in service to Jesus and Mammon.
Now — gluttony — that’s where we’ve got it going. Second only to Mexico, according to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development:
The U.S. (68%) is ranked second behind Mexico (70%) in the proportion of adults who are overweight …
As for highest rate of fatness in the completely developed western world? We own that.
Nothing so illustrated the deep failure plaguing the country and the collapse of intellect than Rick Perry invoking Galileo in defense of GOP disbelief in science and global warming.
You see, when DD was a kid I was assigned to read Bertolt Brecht’s play, “Life of Galileo,” in its original German in an advanced language class. This was in high school in backward Schuylkill County, PA, in the early Seventies. (The above illustration is obviously not the original Deutsch edition. It was the closest-looking thing to it I could find on the web.)
The play tells the story of Galileo’s clash with the Catholic church, one brought upon him by his use of a telescope and his subsequent belief in Copernicus’s view of the solar system. The church threatens Galileo and, fearfully, he recants these beliefs. They put him under house arrest.
It’s all very depressing.
Last night, Perry trotted out a short incoherent dodge implying his “scientists” — scientists the referees of the debate couldn’t get him to identify — had the truth — global warming was “unsettled” science.
Then he unexpectedly blurted out that even Galileo “got outvoted.”
It illustrated, too, why it’s impossible to debate the GOP. Even semi-intellectual arguments are of no use when the “refs” — Brian Williams and someone from the Politico — can’t enforce any rules to penalize or discourage the emission of outrageous balderdash. The Republican Party employs tactics which nullify reasoned argument. This gives them a significant and very real advantage.
And this is what Rich Perry also apparently specializes in.
The very idea that he would liken Galileo’s suppression by the Church to the GOP dogma/disbelief in science is flabbergasting. In the eyes of anyone with intelligence throughout the world, the conclusion would be that the United States could easily become an unstable pariah nation because of the nature of its potential political leadership.
Rick Perry insults anyone with a scientific education, even anyone with just a vague memory of old Galileo from grade school many years ago.
When the US has evolved to a position where someone like this can be the governor of Texas, or even aspire to the Presidency, it only provides ample proof the country’s system has so changed it richly rewards and promotes only the incompetent but forceful.
Perry could easily be President. The rage vote against a powerless to do anything President can work.
Relatively speaking it’s difficult to muster any confidence that people will be able to distinguish a serious qualitative difference in 2012 between a man who made speeches that never delivered on jobs and the economy and a different man who firmly projects the image of a strong, assertive guy from Texas who professes absurdly that, like Galileo, his opinion is suppressed.
I’ve actually been avoiding thinking about the latest Obama cave-in, on ozone regulation; these repeated retreats are getting painful to watch. For what it’s worth, I think it’s bad politics. The Obama political people seem to think that their route to victory is to avoid doing anything that the GOP might attack — but the GOP will call Obama a socialist job-killer no matter what they do. Meanwhile, they just keep reinforcing the perception of mush from the wimp, of a president who doesn’t stand for anything …
[Tighter] ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point! And with corporations sitting on lots of idle cash, the money spent would not, to any significant extent, come at the expense of other investment.
“Sometimes I Wonder … When Obama was a little kid if the big kids didn’t bounce basketballs off of his head in gym.” — from EZSmirkzz
There are “unacceptably high levels of mental illness in the United States,” said Ileana Arias, principal deputy director of the CDC. “Essentially, about 25 percent of adult Americans reported having a mental illness in the previous year. In addition to the high level, we were surprised by the cost associated with that — we estimated about $300 billion in 2002.”
“About half of Americans will experience some form of mental health problem at some point in their life, a new government report warns, and more must be done to help them,” it reads.
Eric Cantor immediately suggested the deficit could be helped by cutting health services and the Centers for Disease Control budgets by 25 percent or more.
Let’s see.
Ten years of war shouldered by a small percentage of the nation’s young men and women. A national atmosphere predicated on the propagation of fear. Mass unemployment. Poverty. Economic instability that causes people to worry about losing their job permanently, all the time. Universally hostile corporate workplaces. Gross inequality and wage stagnation. Inability to get adequate healthcare when one most needs it, unless wealthy.
Whatever pressures could be causing widespread mental illnesses in the USA?
“It isn’t clear why so many Americans suffer from mental illness, Arias added,” the piece continues. “This is an issue that needs to be addressed …”
