“Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Long Lost Rock and Roll??? is the most depressing documentary about popular music. And that’s because of our part in it, yes America’s, which I’ll get to in a bit. It’s also the best documentary on rock and roll this year.
In a nutshell, it’s about the evolution of pop music in Cambodia prior to Pol Pot and the genocides in the killing fields.
After independence from France, Cambodia had a small prospering middle class in Phnom Penh, the capitol of a nation that was primarily rural, it’s people rice farmers in the fields. An emerging prosperity literally amplified people who considered music part of the soul of the nation. Encouraged by the monarchy of the Sihanouk regime, it built a music scene around the National Radio, city dance halls and bars …
I watched “Spymasters: CIA In the Crosshairs” last night, Showtime’s new documentary about the CIA’s conversion into a paramilitary operation, rather than an intelligence and spying one, in the war on terror. Naturally, I stole it. [1]
Near the end, all the CIA’s directors, including Obama’s, insist the US can’t kill its way to victory. And that droning doesn’t work because it makes more enemies, even in countries that aren’t droned. At this point, it’s rather like telling us that eggs come from a chicken.
One woman, a senior counter-terrorism analyst named Gina Bennett, says at the end that terrorism isn’t even a threat to the existence of the US.
But no one explains if that’s what they believe, why do they keep ordering up more now that they’ve destabilized most of the Middle East? Your head would explode if it hadn’t been dynamited several times years ago over Iraq. Which they concede they screwed up big time, too.
There’s one fellow in it who rides a big motorcycle. I’ll omit his name and you’ll see below why I don’t want him Googling me.
He organized all the waterboarding for the CIA and looks like he wants to smash your face with a set of bass knuckles all the time he’s on screen.
He’s is softened somewhat by Leon Pannetta, one of Obama’s CIA directors, who works hard to create the impression that he’s a good Catholic and snuck off to church to work through his rosary a couple times after each drone strike he OK’d.
I also learned our waterboarding was not like Nazi waterboarding because we used a third less water, or something.
And you’ll see a quick shot of what might have been bin Laden’s coffin, with a brass plate labelled “Geronimo,” although according to Seymour Hersh the special forces men threw his remains out over the mountains.
Plus, George Tenet is a big and permanently angry churl, America’s grizzly bear. And you’d be like that, too, one supposes if you’d messed up as often and as big time as he did. Although, actually, it was apparently good for his career. Which is also why it’s good to be at the top of the CIA athough we are told CIA director wives don’t think so. It’s great job security. You can set the world ablaze, cost hundreds or tens of thousands of lives, never get fired (well, except for David Petraeus and that was over a girl), be world famous and do very well.
1. I’ll review just about anything. Just send it or suggest where it can be stolen.
Three years on, almost to the day, and gun massacres are the US of Fail’s locked groove. Of all angry white male America’s obsessions, hoarding ridiculous amounts of assault rifles (sanitizingly referred to as “long guns”) and ammunition is about the strongest. So powerful, it scares the civilized world.
Growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania, my neighborhood had many gun owners. No one in my family owned one but I didn’t have a problem with anyone who did.
Four decades on, that’s all changed. News stories that reported gun background checks through the roof on Black Friday show the expanse of the raging white gun nut revolt at everyone else’s expense. Now everyone expects gun sales to explode after a massacre. The people in this story on the front page of the New York Times aren’t your friends.
They’re the enemy, a collective hive mind that’s insane.
“It is all part of a weapons boom that has been building for weeks,” reads the newspaper.
And the people behind it look in the mirror each morning and never see the nuts person staring back at them. Nothing reaches them except twisted alarms and stories inspiring them to buy more.
So, by all means, go, go, go to more gun shows. Buy more. Say you’re afraid, real afraid, to reporters. Make a “political buy,” just to show your solidarity in defiance of the president, the “gun grabber” who’s never actually grabbed any.
I’m glad I don’t know any of you. You have an incurable mental illness. And if, by chance, I bump into any of you in the future I’ll cut you a break and silently go the other way.
You could hear a swarm of helicopters off to the west (agh!) east from before lunch until just a little while ago. About an hour in, it hit the news.
Despite what the President will say, no matter what comes from politicians and the famous, this is our normal, our exceptionalism, the thing for which we are best known. We’re trapped with it.
First off, technical problems from my hosting service. Those of you who’ve been reading long enough know the provider sometimes springs these on its clients. Then it denies the problem. And after it’s badgered enough with screen shots of error messages, it slowly responds.
It’s the way of American corporate business, especially on the net. Now that I’m old I’m less inclined to deal with it in a timely manner.
Justice, not escalations or state-sanctioned atrocities rationalized as helping an ally. Piecemeal WWIII isn’t a strategy. It’s a description, worth thinking about as in how to undo. Either that or continue to reap the whirlwind.
The economy of the corporate dictatorship has come home to roost for a portion of white America, and it’s class based, a factor the New York Times linked piece doesn’t really get around to until near the end of the piece. Affluent middle class whites haven’t show up in the awful statistics so much. (Yet.)
Nevertheless, the life expectancy for this slice of America’s white tribe is still above that for African Americans, who’ve never faced anything but the grinding wheel of the national economy. However, life expectancy for the same classes in other Western developed nations is on the rise, It is only here where we are so exceptional.
None of this can really be much of a surprise although one of the doctors interviewed by the Times concludes, “It seems so sad.”
I’ve written about the bleak trends in WhiteManistan for a couple years. The Forty Year Slump entry sums up much of what I thought, having experienced it, first hand:
When I was entering college, Alcoa aluminum closed the biggest extrusion plant in the world in Cressona, PA, where my father worked. He escaped lay-off and was transferred to a small soda bottle-cap manufacturing plant outside Lancaster, a three hour drive every day.
The metal-working plants closed. A recession was in full swing when I graduated from college in Reading, PA. There were no jobs so I enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Lehigh.
During the Reagan years, the nation’s economic policies destroyed Bethlehem Steel. The center of Allentown and the south side of Bethlehem turned into slums. I saw it happen. The people voted for the man who was killing their future. So did the rest of the country…
When you rip the economic heart out of a community it takes a lot down with it.
I’ve never known a time when the road wasn’t downhill. I suspect most people have the same impression unless they’re of the top slice. The better educated, and with more good fortune, were better at clinging to the diminishing number of seats in the country’s economic version of musical chairs.
But give the statistics a little more time. As more scientists begin looking into the matter, we’ll see more. And in the next few years, perhaps even a little sooner, the same thing is going to come for the college-educated white class. The plutocrats are going to winnow them out and part with even less to those left over, for the privileged work of keeping the lights on and the toilets clean.
And then, like those described in this week’s news, they, too, will self-medicate until death with drink, drugs, suicide and other causes of mortality when masses are permanently ejected from ways to make a living. Dispair and distress will tighten their grip as the country descends into a paradise of all against all. Politically, there’s no reason to expect any change, no radical steps taken to reverse the serious systemic problems that have led us to this point, and certainly not in the next eight years, even if the not-insane party takes the White House.
The average age of the homeless people who have died this year has been 48. Most have been male and white. There were 12 deaths in January, more than in any other month.
Forty-four of the deaths have been by accident or natural causes, seven by suicide and four by homicide. There were 20 deaths classified as involving drugs, alcohol or both.
Murray and Constantine attributed homelessness here to several factors, including what the mayor described as a heroin epidemic “across this nation and in this city.???
The mayor also mentioned, “jobs lost during the Great Recession that have never returned??? and inadequate state funding to help people with mental illnesses.
In his last book, Wollin described the United States as an example of inverted totalitarianism.
Reads the Times, in its final paragraph on the man:
With time, he took the view that corporate power and political power were becoming so closely intertwined in the United States, and the public so apathetic, that genuine participatory democracy was at best a remote possibility, expressed in rare “fugitive??? expressions of the popular will.
“Democracy in the late modern world cannot be a complete political system,??? he wrote in a 1994 essay, “and given the awesome potentialities of modern forms of power, and what they exact of the social and natural world, it ought not to be hoped or striven for.???
His last book reflected this dark interpretation of politics in the United States. It bore a sobering title: “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.???
Perhaps Wollin would say, too, that the decline in life expectancy of America’s white tribe is not at all unexpected, given his analysis of where we are.
A short video explains what universities and community colleges have been polishing since when I left with a doctorate thirty years ago. In fact, my first job straight out of school was in this developing mechanism.
Now it’s a nationwide parasitic machine, one that reduces a majority of the teaching staff to penury, migrant workers hired and let go at will, serving at school after school, never getting anywhere. And it’s all for the sake of those at the top and the handfuls of full tenured research stars. Make no mistake, though, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. The greed and hubris in the privileged faculty had much to do with it, too.
This has never been a secret and its one of the cold, hard facts that shows the common bleats about America facing a shortage of scientists and engineers, or that Americans are not educated enough and must be prepared for a life of constant retraining are self-serving falsehoods.
Another atrocity, or My Lai moment, has arrived for the US military in what was described superciliously as its pointless bombing wars last week.
Whether the American government will actually do something about it other than issue the usual get-out-of-jail-free card as it has done with every single hit job in the last decade remains to be seen. Personally, I’d bet against anything more than the equivalents of shit happens and/or they had it coming.
The Army Green Berets who requested the Oct. 3 airstrike on the Doctors without Borders trauma center in Afghanistan were aware it was a functioning hospital but believed it was under Taliban control, The Associated Press has learned …
A day before an American AC-130 gunship attacked the hospital, a senior officer in the Green Beret unit wrote in a report that U.S. forces had discussed the hospital with the country director of the medical charity group, presumably in Kabul, according to two people who have seen the document.
The attack left a mounting death toll, now up to 30 people.
Separately, in the days before the attack, “an official in Washington” asked Doctors without Borders “whether our hospital had a large group of Taliban fighters in it,” spokesman Tim Shenk said in an email. “We replied that this was not the case. We also stated that we were very clear with both sides to the conflict about the need to respect medical structures.”
The hospital was destroyed by the gunship and is now abandoned.
“Doctors without Borders has said it was frantically calling Kabul and Washington during the attack, trying to make the U.S. aware of what was unfolding as patients died in their beds,” rreports AP.
“Presumably, the gun camera video from the plane would show whether anyone was firing from the hospital.”
Although the gun camera video has not yet been made available, in the past the US military has not been particularly reticent about showing AC-130 gun ships hosing down buildings, vehicles and alleged terrorists. There are exampleson YouTube, often accompanied by quite a bit of bragging about its merciless power.
A week ago, there was a great deal of excuse making and assertion that if a war crime had been executed, it would be hard to prove.
From NPR:
John Bellinger, a former legal adviser to the State Department, says the bombing of the hospital was a terrible tragedy, but he believes it would be a rush to judgment to call it a war crime.
“The mere fact that civilians are killed, that a hospital is damaged, doesn’t automatically mean that there has been a war crime,” he says. “It only becomes a war crime if it is shown that the target was intentionally attacked.”
If the AP’s report is good, there goes that argument.
Before I get to the substance of the title today, intentionally amusing quotes from an editor of the Toronto Sun, why our neighbors to the north axed Harper and instated Trudeau. What it boils down to — they got sick of the nasty party. But it took awhile because, you know, angry old white guys who live in the country-side and want revenge.
It’s too simple to say that Mr. Harper was trying to Americanize Canada. That is rather insulting to Americans(no, not really — me), and anyway Mr. Harper, no internationalist, seemed bored by Americans, although he tagged along with them on their pointless bombing wars.
In the United States, divisions between, say, regions or parties seem reasonably matched. Mr. Harper was doing something different. He was enabling bullying on a national scale.
Ultimately Mr. Harper’s problem in this election was that he couldn’t win nationally with just an older, white male, rural base. He had to extend his reach, was weirdly unwilling to do that and ended up holding tiny rallies of Conservative voters, while Mr. Trudeau was meeting everyone, anyone …
The scroll of what Mr. Harper didn’t like grew longer as the years passed. It comprised scientists, environmentalists, returning veterans, urbanites, immigrants, then immigrants with accents, refugee claimants, then claimants needing health care, and so on. Bubbles of despised people began popping up. At some point the bubbles would have joined up and made Canada a vast blister for Mr. Harper to target.
Which is a definition of what the Republican Party wants to do, one we ought to adopt as short and to the point. The rest of the country, to the GOP, is a large boil.
The Turner Diaries is one of this country’s premier pieces of white supremacist, and anti-Semitic, gun nut hate fiction. It’s a thin paperback on a white revolt from the violent right, seen through the eyes of its narrator, Earl Turner. A bloody insurrection is triggered when the government tries to confiscate the guns and put the resistance in camps.
An excerpt, from near the end, with freedom fighters triumphant:
“It was like the Gun Raids of four years ago, only in reverse — and the outcome was more drastic and more permanent for those raided. One of two things happened to those the troops dragged out onto the streets. If they were non-whites — and that included all the Jews and everyone who even looked like he had a bit of non-white ancestry — they were shoved into hastily formed columns and started on their no return march to the canyon in the foothills north of the city. The slightest resistance, any attempt at backtalk, or any lagging brought a swift bullet.
“The Whites, on the other hand, were, in nearly all cases, hanged on the spot.”
This, as the book narrates, during an operation to leave Los Angeles “utterly and completely pacified,” after urban crowds “were chanting ‘racism must go’ and ‘equality forever’ and other slogans the Jews had taught them.”
“It reminded me of the mass demonstrations of the Vietnam era,” Earl Turner continues.
The radical left is getting much louder, much more shrill, and much more insistent in their desire to use force to get their way and impose their ideas on the American people.
If they try such a radical path it would end poorly and quickly.
The military and local law enforcement agencies in the United States that the radical left has been trashing in public since the Vietnam War until now will not take part in any plot to disarm American citizens.
Soldiers, Marines and sheriffs may even defect to actively resist any federal officers from a pool of just over 100,000 who would take on the suicidal task of taking on the military, local police, and a hundred righteously-angry million gun owners, led by over a thousand angry Green Berets that warned President Obama in 2013 not push his luck…
We do not want a civil war against the radical left wing of the Democrat Party, but let it be made abundantly clear that if they start one, they will be utterly destroyed by armed free citizens, as the Founders intended.
