A scheduled Harperectomy . . .

SOCIAL MEDICINE:
People like the Koch brothers, Stevie and Rob Ford are actually mentally-ill from the POV of rational humanist social norms.

By their lights, though, their greed is 100% rational and desirable, regardless of cost to others. The sad truth of history is that other people who think like that have managed to do a lot of damage before they were stopped.

THE POLITICAL SCALPEL:
Unfortunately, the Koch brothers stubbornly persist, but Canada is scheduled for a Harperectomy in 21 months or so, may the patient survive.

For pre-op conditioning, we've got to think nationally but act locally. Your vote is your blade.

Suckage . . .

FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY are steadily eroding, it seems, which has prompted Alex Henderson at AlterNet to post “10 Ways America Has Come to Resemble a Banana Republic”. It's a fascist's wish-list come true.

In the post-New Deal America of the 1950s and '60s, the idea of the United States becoming a banana republic would have seemed absurd to most Americans. Problems and all, the U.S. had a lot going for it: a robust middle-class, an abundance of jobs that paid a living wage, a strong manufacturing base, a heavily unionized work force, and upward mobility for both white-collar workers with college degrees and blue-collar workers who attended trade school.

• • •

In contrast, developing countries that were considered banana republics—the Dominican Republic under the brutal Rafael Trujillo regime, Nicaragua under the Somoza dynasty—lacked upward mobility for most of the population and were plagued by blatant income equality, a corrupt alliance of government and corporate interests, rampant human rights abuses, police corruption and extensive use of torture on political dissidents.

• • •

But 50 years after King’s "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963, poverty has become much more widespread in the U.S.—and the country has seriously declined not only economically, but also in terms of civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Click on the link to ponder the list and listen to Jimmy's observations.

If you haven't seen it . . .

GO GET A COPY of “Iron Sky”. It's about a Nazi Flying Saucer invasion from the dark side of the Moon. At least, that's what the trailers show.

Set in 2018, it is actually a sizzling satire on the GOP and US presidential politics. Ya gotta see it, I don't want to tell you any more, because the MacGuffin arrives in the first 5 minutes.

Marvelous. The flick even takes a parody on the “Hitler tantrum” scene that you have probably seen parodied on YouTube, like this one, which has some delightful copywriting:

Constitutional violations . . .

DIGITAL JOURNAL has a disturbing report, "Bush-Cheney began illegal NSA spying before 9/11, says telcom CEO". According to Ralph Lopez,

Contradicting a statement by ex-vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday that warrantless domestic surveillance might have prevented 9/11, 2007 court records indicate that the Bush-Cheney administration began such surveillance at least 7 months prior to 9/11.

And he calls Ed Snowden a traitor . . . perhaps he is, to the American Fourth Reich.

A look behind the curtain . . .

THANKS TO ED SNOWDEN, we have a look at the Bush-Cheney paranoia, and it's scary, a GOP/neo-con attempt to create a fourth Reich with a Stasi on steroids. William Saletan has an article in SLATE that's a fascinating read, "The Taming of the Spook", click on the link to check out the whole thing. According to him, it could have been much worse.

On March 24, 2009, the National Security Agency’s inspector general issued a 51-page draft report on the President’s Surveillance Program, the warrantless authority under which NSA had collected phone records and email since 2001. This year, the report, classified as top secret, was leaked to the Guardian by NSA defector Ed Snowden. On Thursday, the Guardian published it.

The Guardian’s correspondents, Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman, see the report as further evidence of runaway government surveillance. They note that the program extended data collection to U.S. persons, that its use of email metadata went beyond billing records, and that surveillance continued after President Bush left office. “NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama,” says the Guardian’s headline.

But in many ways, the story told in the report is really about the mellowing of the surveillance state. An ill-defined, unilaterally imposed, poorly supervised spying operation was gradually brought under control. The surveillance program didn’t just become domestic. It became domesticated.

Domesticated means built-in, won't go away, and that's the danger. Thanks to Ed Snowden, we have a chance to look at how this bundle of snakes came to be.

Two years ago . . .

AS THE PERSECUTION of Julian Assange was getting organized, things were in their early stages, and on 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between Julian and Eric Schmidt, who is the CEO of Google. Wikileaks has the complete transcript. It gets a bit technical, but you can get through that, and ponder.

This meeting discusses the current state-of-things, and gives an interesting look at the facets of the Wikileaks effort around the world. It discusses the power and the vulnerability of the surveillance state, and what concerned citizens might do about it. Mobile phone network freedom may be the key to freedom in the future:

During these revolutionary periods the people involved in the revolution need to be able to communicate. They need to be able to communicate in order to plan quickly and also to communicate information about what is happening in their environment quickly so that they can dynamically adapt to it and produce the next strategy. Where you only have the security services being able to do this, and you turn the mobile phone system off, the security services have such an tremendous advantage compared to people that are trying to oppose them. If you have a system where individuals are able to communicate securely and robustly despite what security services are doing, then security services have to give more ground. It's not that the government is necessarily going to be overthrown, but rather they have to make more concessions.

Well, Julian wound up in the London embassy of Ecuador, as US pressure built up. A key component has been to deny Wikileaks access to the banking system, especially credit cards. This means that you can't support Wikileaks, because you can't donate any money. Well, according to NPR, that's changed:

Iceland's most recent move that lent support to WikiLeaks was an April Supreme Court decision that "ordered Valitor hf, the Icelandic partner of MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc., to process card payments for [the] anti-secrecy website ... within 15 days or face daily penalties," Bloomberg News says. So, as other nations have tried to put roadblocks in WikiLeaks' way by cutting off its access to funds, Iceland has gone the opposite direction.

Maybe getting one of those mobile phone base stations might be a worthy consideration, but even passing them a few bucks might be crucial; these guys have some heavy lifting to do.

Right to work . . .

RIGHT TO WORK got its start in Texas in the early 1940's. It's the malignant creation of a particularly odious American, Vance Muse. According to Mark Ames at Not Safe For Work Corporation, in an article "You Hate "Right To Work" Laws More Than You Know. Here's Why", Vance Muse was quite a piece of work. Click on the link to get a fascinating explanation of the rise of the fascist Right in America.

Vance Muse was a racist political operative and lobbyist from the state of Texas — the native habitat for all America’s vermin —as Satanically vile as "Turd Blossom" Rove, a racist smear-peddler like Andrew Breitbart, only without Breitbart’s degenerate heart and fondness for blow.

Here is a description of Vance Muse, creator of the "right to work" movement, from a book by an old celebrated journalist, Stetson Kennedy, the reporter who famously went undercover inside the KKK and wrote a tell-all in the 40’s:

"The man Muse is quite a character. He is six foot four, wears a ten-gallon hat, but generally reserves his cowboy boots for trips Nawth. Now over fifty [this is published in 1946—M.A.], Muse has been professionally engaged in reactionary enterprises for more than a quarter of a century."

Among Vance Muse’s "reactionary enterprises": He lobbied against women’s suffrage, against the child-labor amendment, against the 8-hour workday, and in 1936, Muse engineered the first split in the South’s Democratic Party by peeling off the segregationists and racists from the New Deal party, a political maneuver that eventually led to Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and at last a Republican right-wing takeover of the South, and with it, the collapse of the old New Deal coalition. Which worked out fine for Vance Muse, since he was a covert Republican himself, serving "for years" as the Republican Party state treasurer in Texas.

• • •

To understand why Fred Koch and the Bircher libertarians hated Ike so much, imagine today a Republican like Eisenhower who raised the top marginal tax rate to 91%, who poured massive government investments into building roads and schools, who publicly declared his support for Social Security and denounced any Republican who opposed it. 

Is it any wonder that the Right has a problem with Obama?

The spark . . .

FABIUS MAXIMUS has a thoughtful site, worthy of your perusal. "Attention Americans: the Revolution has begun. You must choose a side." is a post that discusses how important WikiLeaks has been to the resistance to America's fascists.

The first sparks of Revolution are invisible to the Proles and considered insignificant by the Outer Party. Only the fierce reaction by the government reveals their importance. The combination of power and ambition gives senior government officials a clarity of vision we lack. Watch these sparks. The opportunity to take sides might not last long, before they get snuffed out. 

• • •

You might sneer and laugh at Wikileaks and Anonymous as quixotic — foolish and vain efforts. But the government knows better, and devotes great effort to stamp out these sparks. Without wider support our ruling elites will successfully suppress these movements. With our support these can mature into powerful engines of reform.

Fabius also has another post you should check out: "On Counterinsurgency: How We Got to Where We Are", which looks at the history of repression and suppression.

The greatness of a nation depends as much on its ability to learn as much as its power. Failure to learn can prove fatal. As with German’s refusal to learn from its defeat in WWI, substituting resentment for wisdom. As with America’s refusal to learn from its defeat in Vietnam, and belief that the doctrines of counterinsurgency could win if tried again. This required ignoring clear analysis showing the folly of this, explaining the inherent flaws of foreign armies fighting entrenched local insurgencies.

Hanging Insurgents at Cavite,
from the Philippines War circa 1900

As the first phase (Iraq, Af-Pak) winds down of our 21st century mad foreign wars — and the second phase expands — we can still learn and turn from this path. So today we look at one such analysis, by Martin van Creveld — one of the West’s greatest living military historians.

The most astonishing aspect of this paper is that after 60 years of failed counterinsurgencies by foreign armies, ten years into our second wave of failed counterinsurgency, it lists simple facts that remain unknown to so many Americans — including a large fraction of our geopolitical gurus.

Follow the money . . .

OWEN GRAY'S NORTHERN REFLECTIONS has a post you should ponder, with links to a disturbing article by the Toronto Star's Richard Gwyn, and the Tax Justice Network.

An important and quite stunning study has just been published by an organization called the Tax Justice Network. It has surveyed the holdings of the tax havens around the world, from Switzerland to the Cayman Islands and the rest.

According to the Tax Justice Network, the holdings in these tax havens now amount to an incredible $21 trillion. That sum is equal to the gross national product of the U.S. and Japan combined.

That unimaginable horde is owned or controlled by just 92,000 people in the world. They constitute not Occupy Wall Street’s 1 per cent of all taxpayers but a mere 0.001 per cent of them.

And there won't be consequences?

The struggle continues . . .

98 YEARS AGO, on April 20, 1914, it was not a good day to be in Ludlow, Colorado, when the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards started shooting a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families, killing between 19 and 25 people. According to Wiki,

Ludlow after the shooting stopped
and the fires were extinguished.

sources vary but all sources include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent. The deaths occurred after a daylong fight between militia and camp guards against striking workers. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, lasting from September 1913 through December 1914.

And this incident, known as the Ludlow Massacre, was merely one of the highlights in the struggle against the fascist plutocrats that were running the American economy. Kind, sensitive people, like Jay Gould, who was seen as the archtype of the Robber Baron. 

During the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886, he hired strikebreakers. According to labor unionists, he said at the time, "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."

All over the US, working people were getting a raw deal. In the industrial East, working conditions were lethal, as Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 so graphically showed.

It was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. It was also the second deadliest disaster in New York City – after the burning of the General Slocum on June 15, 1904 – until the destruction of the World Trade Center 90 years later. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling to their deaths.

Out of these challenges and outrages came the relatively benign polity of consensus that we have today. But the Jay Goulds of this world are eternal, only today, they are way, way more dangerous, with computerized money. Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous and WikiLeaks, the dream of an equitable society has not perished. The challenge, for those who care, is to reach the couch potatoes and get the lumpen proletariat involved. With the obesity epidemic we have, there's a lotta lumpen out there.

Shine the lights of freedom . . .

 — Know Thy Enemy —

THE TRAPWIRE surveillance system has connected state and federal law enforcement agencies with a vast intelligence infrastructure, that is scary to contemplate.

RT is a Russian site that proclaims itself  to be operated by Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”, and it has a page worthy of attention, as it seems that somebody from Anonymous has figured out a cheap and easy way to de-fang TrapWire. As well, the RT page has links to other aspects of the TrapWire danger. And thanks to YouTube, we can see how to go about it. Maybe Tilleys will bring out anti-TrapWire hats, but until then, you'll have to brush up on your soldering skills.

Even paranoids have enemies . . .

ONE AND A HALF BILLION ROUNDS OF AMMO — and more — have been acquired by various domestic US Government agencies.

That's enough ammo to shoot every American 5 times. Really. According to The Daily Caller's article by Major General Jerry Curry, USA (Ret.), "Who Does The Government Intend To Shoot?", US government agencies of all kinds are in on it:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) confirms that it is purchasing 174 thousand rounds of hollow point bullets to be delivered to 41 locations in major cities across the U.S.
• • •
If this were only a one time order of ammunition, it could easily be dismissed. But there is a pattern here. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has ordered 46,000 rounds of hollow point ammunition.
 • • •
In the war in Iraq, our military forces expended approximately 70 million rounds per year. In March DHS ordered 750 million rounds of hollow point ammunition. It then turned around and ordered an additional 750 million rounds of miscellaneous bullets including some that are capable of penetrating walls. This is enough ammunition to empty five rounds into the body of every living American citizen. Is this something we and the Congress should be concerned about?

NOAA? Go figure. Scary stuff, indeed. And it causes one to ponder why. According to George Washington, at ZEROHEDGE, there are covert players at work: a secret government.

This may sound like a conspiracy theory … But remember that Senator Daniel Inouye said in 1987:
There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.



For the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of a secret, unaccountable U.S. military force … Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is an unwieldy private army at the command of the President, and him only. And they conduct military and spy missions all over the world, never receiving formal congressional approval ….

More about JSOC later.

H/T — Helmut, thank-you, sir.

American Spring . . .

AMERICAN SPRING is a blog created by Paul Ellison, a concerned American, which itemizes most of the nefarious activity that Uncle Sugar is up to.

Whether you are a donkey or an elephant, when the music stops and we look around, all of us see the same truth.

They are not working for us. They are working against us.

Fact: Together, they have passed the NDAA, allowing for the indefinite detention of Americans. It has legalized the use of propaganda against us, in order to hide what they have done and what they are doing.

Fact: Together, they have passed HR 347, which makes gathering together in protest a felony offense. It enables an ever more aggressive paramilitary police force to arrest those who dissent openly.

Fact: Together, they cash checks from Wall Street criminals, and allow them to go unpunished for crimes that have brought our nation to the brink of financial ruin.

Fact: Together, they continue to fund a never-ending war machine that has brought both drones and a totalitarian surveillance state to our shores.

Fact: Together, they have sold our country out to their corporate benefactors, while laughing all the way to the bank.

Fact: Together, they have enabled the most invasive surveillance state this side of Orwell.

Fact: Together, they have made sure there will be no dissent.

Fact: Together, they have turned our Congress, our judiciary, our Presidency, into a joke.

Fact: Together, they are profiting from this.

We do not have a political problem, we have a systemic one.

We do not have a political problem, we have a systemic one.  And the system is getting more complex, as covert activities center on "social media" as the way to win hearts and influence minds. That's the view of Project PM, a wiki on the major players. 

The purpose of Project PM's wiki is to provide a centralized, actionable data set regarding the intelligence contracting industry, the PR industry's interface with totalitarian regimes, the mushrooming infosec/"cybersecurity" industry, and other issues constituting threats to human rights, civic transparency, individual privacy, and the health of democratic institutions.

Their areas of interest give an idea of how pervasive the fascist effort is: Romas/COIN,  Endgame Systems, Cubic Corporation, Booz Allen Hamilton, Archimedes Global, In-Q-Tel, TASC, Northrop Grumman, Mantech, SAIC, C5i, Raytheon

It's hard to decide what's the most dangerous to our democracy, when there's items like Operation Earnest Voice. Operation Earnest Voice (OEV) is an ironically-titled program run by CENTCOM which is known to make use of Persona Management software. Persona management entails the use of software by which to facilitate the use of multiple fake online personas, or "sockpuppets," generally for the use of propaganda, disinformation, or as a surveillance method by which to discover details of a human target via social interactions. 

H/T — Daniel, merci.

Putin prevails . . .

PUTIN PREVAILS . . . for now. Great picture. Here's a couple of posters, too.

Big Brother IS watching . . .

ACCORDING TO WIKILEAKS, the organs of state security have started wiring all the CCTV surveillance cameras in areas of interest. So says David Seaman at BUSINESS INSIDER, in his article, "WIKILEAKS: Surveillance Cameras Around The Country Are Being Used In A Huge Spy Network".

"Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology—and have installed it across the U.S. under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community.

What to do? My advice is, "sheep, look up". What do you see? CCTV cameras? Take a roll of electrical tape or even some PostIt notes and cover the lens. That way, it's useless, but you have not destroyed property, and Candid Camera is thwarted. Then there's disguises, and useful items like reversible coats and hats and all that Lon Chaney stuff. Nothing like a good gorilla mask to keep 'em wondering who it is that enjoys target practice on CCTV cameras . . . high-quality .177 air pistols are so delightfully accurate, and they're not firearms.

Now, what are the chances that Big Vickie's Gestapo is either already part of this, or is about to put Canada under Big Brother's surveillance?

More than students . . .

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE, and like Bob Dylan observed, a lot of folks just don't understand, but sometimes, most of the patriots are found in the gang out of uniform. Like Junius wrote, "The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures."

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that while Canadians are slow to rile, Canadians don't do "submit" very well. The next election is scheduled for October 19, 2015 — 1,232 days from today, according to DaysUntil. Coincidentally, that's Mother Teresa Day, just so's ya know. With God on our side . . .

The costs of democracy . . .

Charles and David Koch.

THE KOCH CRITTERS are going to make this Fall's American election something really special. According to Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson, who has a report on Reader Supported News, "The Billion-Dollar Mitt Machine" that should be of concern.

Led by the billionaire Koch Brothers, forces allied with the GOP are now planning to spend a record-shattering $1 billion to put Romney in the White House.

The biggest news is that the Kochtopus - the shadowy network of political advocacy groups funded by industrialists Charles and David Koch - is alone planning to spend $395 million to defeat Obama.

One billion dollars: the Rule of the Rich. At least, that's what they believe. Maybe, just maybe, the American voter believes differently. We'll know in November. The Democrats have been expecting this, and Obama's people are doing their best to find alternatives to this bullion barrage, organizing a volunteer army. It ain't over 'til it's over.

High crimes and misdemeanors . . .

— The Holy Goat of Sincerity —

DUBYA AND THE NEO-CONS have got a lot to answer for, according to SLATE's Larry Siems, whose article, "How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners", is a fascinating over-view of the whole criminal process of this sad slide to fascism. High crimes and misdemeanors, indeed. The question remains: will anybody ever be called to account?

Our highest government officials, up to and including President Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them.

When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. “The law has been changed,” detainees around the world were told. “No rules apply.”

Then they tortured. They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

And they conspired to cover up their crimes.

Just like Stevie and Vickie and Airshow and the rest of the CON chimps.

Skin game . . .

NAOMI WOLF IS RIGHTLY CONCERNED, with an article in Reader Supported News, "Sexual Humiliation, a Tool to Control the Masses", about the liability of anybody in the US to summary strip-searching. Worth a moment of your time.

“History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.”

Big Victor . . .