To The US Military, Afghans Are Just Cattle

Under a headline suggesting Afghan loyalties can be purchased, like a quilt or heroin: "Afghans’ hearts and minds swayed by money", the story describes how the US Marines are giving Afghans cold hard cash, part of something called the Commander Emergency Relief Program, to pay for their cold dead family members and blown-up possessions.

This is supposed to be yet another American effort at "winning" hearts and minds, while it really sounds a lot more like a thoughtless bumbling to compensate poor Afghan victims of American imperialism. For example the article tells us:

"A slain civilian translates to $2,500 in compensation to a family. A dead cow goes for nearly the same amount, because they are so hard to raise in southern Afghanistan's barren countryside and are crucial to a family's well-being."

So, in the view of the US military, in its understanding of what Afghans count as valuable, a dead husband or wife or child is worth about the same to Afghans as their dead cow.

And, hey, I am sure if the US Marines pulled into a village to win its hearts and minds, and gave the people a choice about what they wanted killed, their kids or the cows, maybe half those stupid barbarian Afghans would trot out their kids to be shot.

Or at least that's how the Marines have it figured.

And of course, when they blow up or seize anybody's heroin stash, that's contraband, and no compensation is given. How would you like it if someday some alien nation invades your country, kills your family, blows up your town, and then takes all your drugs!! because they don't like you having them. But hey, they'll give you some money for your dead kid and the damaged wall to your house. That's going to make you love them, right?

One Marine is quoted as saying: "We're trying to show him and others that we're not bullies."

You know, by pointing out to Afghans how their lives are worth the same as cattle.

Americans are sure some dumbass motherfuckers.

And when God is fed up with morons like that, he lets them think it's a smart idea to invade Afghanistan...and you know...Iraq.

(jk)

Baby Steps To Monsterhood

So, we got yet another release of formerly secret data detailing the perpetration of war crimes under the Bush regime in its Terror Wars. Whereas Bush regime chief defender Dick Cheney, who is apparently so defensive he's even slamming his former boss for being too weak when it came to staying the course into oblivion, had told us the secret stuff would totally make the case for torture working, that's not how it actually reads or plays.

But the thing is, the USA is so bored and really exhausted to its core listening to accusations (and facts concerning) all the war crimes it's been committing, and is likely still committing under its new Terrror Wars chief, Obama, that the last thing it cares a whit about is more stuff about just what a terrorist state is the USA. Americans now take the fact they are from a killing, torturing, terrorizing state in stride. It's just part of what they do, of what an empire has to do, to conduct business in a dangerous, crazy world.

So, no real protests are heard except from the usual crowd of liberal loonies, blathering about "law", like that matters any longer except as a sop to the animal-slaughtering proles when somebody like Michael Vick tortures some dogs or something.

We, after all, realize we do not live in a country with any actual rights and freedoms, but just some crap about that written on old, rapidly fading, sheepskins. Far more important than that junk are the privileges naturally obtained by money and its co-habitant, power. Americans witnessed, and paid very close attention to who got the bailouts, the continued big bonuses, the emergency trillions—and it was the rich, the powerful, the very worthless scum whose scumming created the catastrophe in the first place. That's because they matter, and you don't. At least we're all clear on that now.

And so, getting to our point here, it is not so surprising when we read that, contrary to all the propaganda the Bush regime spewed about how only "renegades" and "bad apples" did really bad stuff during America's reign of terror over poor Islamic peoples, the CIA was clinically engaged with managing torture right from the start and right to the deadly finishes.

Why clinically? Oh, you know, like you can't just waterboard people, like a bunch of amateur thugs on a Mexican mafia holiday. Fuck that. No, in the CIA's version of torture, clearly copied in great detail from the records of the Spanish Inquisition, they jotted down every single nuance of suffering and feedback imposed upon and extracted from its victims. And that's so, when it comes time to expand the torture regime from HVD's to CTB's (citizens thinking badly), the CIA and its death panels will be ready.

Now, you might say, well they're a bunch of spies and Bourne-type fanatics, and normal Americans don't really stand for all those torture shenanigans.

Except, then you have to explain how even in the heartland, in Iowa!!, in their efforts to quantify the behaviors of their most cherished possessions (after big-screen televisions and iPhones), Americans are funding and being paid for the torture of their children at the hands of academic professionals.

As we see, the study discussed here paid parents to bring in their babies to be abused by psychologists, who were curious about just how upset a tiny child would get if you conned him into believing he had just done a terrible thing—like breaking a very valuable toy or possession of the shrink-scumbag. Of course, after the child got through suffering for a couple of minutes, so each and every detail of its torture could be recorded, and the valuable data extracted from the tiny victim, then the shrink-scumbag would tell the child it was all just pretend, and nobody was at fault for anything—happy, happy!

I had thought maybe John Tierney, not always a very bright light, was just being incredibly sarcastic when he wrote "No harm, no foul, no guilt" at the conclusion of his article. But it seems he was sincere, and was taken aback when some readers actually questioned the morality of the testing. He searched for an answer from the lead "researcher", Dr. Grazyna Kochanska, who replied that "the children’s average unease or discomfort was very mild"—you know because they have a special device invented by the Gestapo for monitoring that sort of thing. The point is, Dr. Kochanska, the children's "average unease or discomfort" shouldn't have been increased by being tortured by you. Not for science, not because the parents said it was OK (because they wanted the $700), not for any good reason!

But the notion that it's OK, and even should be financially lucrative, for parents to donate their babies for psychological torture assessments, all in the name of learning how to hammer the kids into more manageable pawns in the hands of the war-mongering monsters running things in the year 2030, should not surprise us.

We live, and many of us thrive, in a charnel house. All the crap we learned about, that supposedly made the USA and the world it runs such a good and desirable place, so much better than others who had tried and died at imperializing, is shown to be papier mâché, a piñata of pomposities, begging to be bashed into a billion bits of karmic payback.

In the USA, every day, every week, every month, every year, it becomes a little more comfortable to be a monster.

(jk)

The Loonies Are Guided By Moonies, Madness & Goober Culture

And when they say "euthanasia", they really mean "abortion".

This article in the New York Times today highlights that the current idiotic and utterly false allegations raised about Obama's health care plan advocating euthanasia, were started by the usual nutjobs, including the Moonie-run Washington Times.

The Washinton Times ran an editorial all the way back on November 23, 2008, warning about Obama being in favor of euthanasia and that he would likely set up some kind of Nazi-like program forcing Americans to accept the "mercy" killings of those deemed unworthy to live. Their reasoning was based on the notion that if people favor abortion rights for women, which of course most Dems and most Americans do, they are euthanasia advocates.

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The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.—Sarah Palin

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It was this editorial that raised a concern, recently voiced by Sarah Palin during her "death panel" rant, that children with Down Syndrome, such as her own, might be forcibly euthanized, especially since, as the editorial pointed out, "God's design", that "40,000 or more newborn infants with Down syndrome" be born, was being impiously whittled to a mere 5,500 because of "choice" rights of women aborting fetuses with the Down mutation.

Understanding the religious subtext of the "death panel" corps is an important point, because fundamentally many people opposing health-care reform, or liberals, or Obama, or any of the changes that will naturally be coming as the demographics of the USA change, do so out of a religious view that "God's design" is being threatened by these changes. Conveniently, "God's design" also ordains the continued authority of American Goober culture in all its idiocy and viciousness.

It is a racist, hateful and utterly stupid ideology.

And growing in support in the USA.

The election of Barack Obama scared the Gooberites down to their last cartridges, and they went on a gun-buying, bullet-hoarding, militia-joining frenzy that has grown as Obama has signed off on more of his supposedly "socialist" agenda. Many Gooberites allege they are protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States from an attack by an alien power—presuming Obama to in fact be a Muslim working surreptitiously for Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to lead the USA into some kind of Islamic-Socialist dictatorship—no doubt run by married homosexuals. Some of these Einsteins have even organized their own private Star Chamber or Kangaroo Grand Jury, to indict Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, whatever intelligent and educated people are left in the USA seem to be incredulous at the sheer stupidity of so many of their fellow citizens. Realizing they cannot reason with irrational idiots, they basically keep their opinions to themselves—hey, otherwise you might end up with a swastika painted on your house, or maybe shot or something—and are giving full sway to the marauding forces of barbarian fools.

Unfortunately, these extremely troubling developments are occurring in the most heavily armed nation in the history of the world, which in full dysfunctional distemper, wherein civil war might be the most civilized expression of the fall, will unleash ghastly amounts of destruction upon the entire world.

And yet, we're told to worry about North Korea, or Iran.

Uh-huh.

(jk)