Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Homeland Terrorism & Instability We Can Believe In?

Dredd Blog has had several series of ongoing posts for years which point out that more Americans are killed by Americans at home than in any wars or terrorist attacks.

One such post is Terrorism We Can Believe In?, dealing with the effects of medical treatment, which links to an update concerning this issue, and confirms that this unfortunate reality continues unabated:
If a Jumbo Jet crashed and killed 280 people everyday ... 365 days a year ... year after year ... would you be concerned about flying??

Would you question the Federal Aviation Administration? Would you demand answers??

Think about it! ...Sounds Ridiculous??!! ... people maimed and disabled every year ... year after year from modern medicine ... would you believe it??

Well these may be my words ... but read the following articles from the most respected medical journals and institutions (Journal of the American Medical Association, Harvard University, Centers for Disease Control, British medical journal The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine and national news (New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, US World Report) and you be the judge.
(Medical Detective, cf. PDF of JAMA article). And on the financial front, a series of Dredd Blog posts (e.g. The Homeland Big Brother Plutonomy - 3) point out that 1% of Americans are wiping out the income and assets within the 99% of fellow Americans.

Other writers declare that this is destabilizing the country, and that it always destabilizes countries who fall into that trap:
During the past 30 years, a growing share of the global economic pie has been taken by the world's wealthiest people. In the UK and the US, the share of national income going to the top 1% has doubled, setting workforces adrift from economic progress ... It is this concentration of income – at levels not seen since the 1920s – that is the real cause of the present crisis ... The effect of this consolidation of economic power is that the two most effective routes out of the crisis have been closed. First, consumer demand – the oxygen that makes economies work – has been choked off. Rich economies have lost billions of pounds of spending power. Secondly, the slump in demand might be less damaging if the winners from the process of upward redistribution – big business and the top 1% – were playing a more productive role in helping recovery. They are not.
(Economic Inequality Leads To Collapse, Guardian, emphasis added). Dredd Blog has also pointed out that this reality is in sharp contrast with government and business propaganda which has resulted in mad military policy abroad as well as a mad spy on Americans syndrome here at home.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

A Tale of Coup Cities - 2


In the first post of this series Dredd Blog hypothesized that a coup had taken place in the U.S.

The stated reason given for this notion of a coup was that the will of the people, as expressed in poll after poll, was that they did not want the Afghanistan, Iraq, Libyan, and other wars, but nevertheless those wars were not only happening, they are going on longer than WW I and WW II put together.

"Oh sure Dredd, a coup, so what pacifist told you that?" you might wonder.

No one told me that, it is obvious.

But let a 4 star general tell the story of "a coup, a policy coup" that was planned since at least 1991, but only began to be carried out in 2001:


Monday, February 6, 2012

Warriors Press For Propaganda - 4

Three years ago on this date, I published the first post of this series.

Perhaps some regular Dredd Blog readers thought this subject matter might be a bit over the top, since the religion of nationalism is stronger than any other "ism" these days.

However, I still think that most Dredd Blog readers, who also read later posts dealing with American propaganda, even though they may find it difficult to swallow, can't deny the evidence:
I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.
(Truth, Lies, and Afghanistan, Armed Forces Journal, by Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis). The last post dealing with the subject was just as shocking, just as true, and only a short while back ("Exceptional American Propaganda Inspired NAZI Goebbels").

The previous two posts in this series are here and here, but the following text is the original post from three years ago:

We covered psychological operations (psyops) in an article last month.

Bloggers responding to that thread mentioned that psyops are illegal if they are conducted on Americans (wink, wink - as if making bank robbery illegal stopped bank robbery).

The Mainstream Media (MSM) has now come clean and said what we have been blogging for years:
The Bush administration turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine while imposing tough restrictions on journalists seeking to give the public truthful reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley said Friday.

Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because "we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable."
(Huffington Post, emphasis added). That begs the question "don't we have rules that prevent the military from being a propaganda machine which uses the American press to promulgate its propaganda"?

Our current national schizophrenia would produce the "answer" yes and no, which is what a past president warned us about.

The next post in this series is here.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Why The Right-wing Is Anti-Education

Ex-senator Rick Santorum is a right-wing politician who was defeated in his last bid for the U.S. Senate.

He recently declared that he is against education in the U.S.A. because the left uses education to indoctrinate students, presumably an indoctrination into left-wing ideology.

This is a perversion of reality because it turns reality upside down.

It is a propaganda technique the right-wing uses for a very specific purpose, which will be exposed in this post.

Let's begin by focusing in on an excerpt from the text of his speech, which will give you an indication of the tenor and flavor of his public speech:
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Wednesday that "the left" uses universities to indoctrinate young people for the purpose of "holding and maintaining power."

After saying "we've lost, unfortunately, our entertainment industry," Santorum told a Naples, Florida, audience that "we've lost our higher education, that was the first to go a long time ago."

"It's no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college," said the former Pennsylvania senator. "The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure that there wasn't one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?"

He continued: "If they taught Judeo-Christian principles in those colleges and universities, they would be stripped of every dollar. If they teach radical secular ideology, they get all the government support that they can possibly give them. Because you know 62 percent of children who enter college with a faith conviction leave without it."
(CBS). Obviously, he does not want American kids to go to universities to learn to become lefties.

That sentiment is in accord with everyone else who would prefer an education based on anything but politics.

The following video shows the reality, the problem with higher education, and that the problem is not on the same planet that Rick Santorum is on.

The problem with our system in the U.S. is that we are educating other nations via the H1b visa program, but we have no fix in place to correct the problem.

Listen to an explanation in the following video by one who is aware of the problem:


The import of this problem is that we have been educating, and will continue to educate, too many students from foreign nations who go back to their home nations to then compete against us in world markets.

There is no fix in place, in my opinion, because the lower levels of our system do not have the ability to produce enough university ready, top notch students, like the foreign nations do.

We would be better off if we could educate our pre-school, elementary, and high school students in the educational systems of other nations, so that they would be ready for our universities.

That won't happen, so lets get back to Mr. Santorum and wrap up this post.

Evidently, Mr. Santorum is aware that the opposite of what he is saying is the case,  i.e., U.S. children who have low cognitive skills in the U.S. are not improved by lower level education.

And in terms of left-right politics, the less they are capable of deductive reasoning and other beneficial thinking skills, the more likely they are to end up as right-wing political voters (Bright Minds, Psychological Science Journal, February 2012, vol. 23 no. 2, 187-195, free PDF download available).

The U.S. students do end up in "college" though, which is likely to be one of the government's several, fully subsidized War Colleges.

Then, upon graduation, those students are assigned to various MOMCOM HQ divisions located in foreign nations.

Upon deployment to one of those 132 foreign nations, they will use their "education" to oversee upwards of a thousand military bases.

MOMCOM bases being used to dominate the world of oil rich nations (where many of those educated in our universities will be back at home competing economically with us).

When the right-wing finishes with education it will be destroyed, whether at home or abroad:
As a college professor, I have a special interest in what happened to Iraqi universities under US occupation. The story is not pretty.

Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students -- churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country's burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women [PDF], who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. (This is, incidentally, better than Princeton was doing as late as 2009.) With a reputation for excellence, Iraqi universities attracted many students from surrounding countries -- the same countries that are now sheltering the thousands of Iraqi professors who have fled US-occupied Iraq ... In just 20 years, then, the Iraqi university system went from being among the best in the Middle East to one of the worst. This extraordinary act of institutional destruction was largely accomplished by American leaders who told us that the US invasion of Iraq would bring modernity, development, and women's rights. Instead, as political scientist Mark Duffield has observed, it has partly de-modernized that country. In the words of John Tirman, America's failure to acknowledge the suffering that occupation wreaked in Iraq "is a moral failing as well as a strategic blunder." Iraq represents a blind spot in our national conversation, one that impedes the cultural growth that stems from a painful recognition of error; and it hobbles the rational evaluation of foreign intervention. Is it too late to look in the mirror?
(Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists). That is "life" in a Wartocracy guided by a Big Brother Plutonomy.