Well, first of all, Christmas is cancelled for Americans (remember, Santa lives at the North Pole and will be a foreigner passing into the US via loose Canadian immigrant-loving borders). Santa has been barred from entering the US. For the past 18 years, John Fulton has done a charity surf across the Niagara river as a fundraiser for the homeless — I'm sure some of you reading it must recall seeing it on the news. It's not a guerrilla event or anything. In any case, this year Homeland Security, identifying him as a potential threat, was the end of his mission.
Yeah, some freezing wet 42-year-old white guy surfing for charity is really a threat to the USA. Give me a break. Also, make sure you don't give toys to any Iraqi children — you could go to prison for a long time or be fined.
Read this article which starts by describing how the “Ring Around Washington“, a nuclear detection shield project, absolutely failed:
Under some conditions the neutron and gamma ray detectors failed to identify dangerous radiation signatures. In other conditions they raised false alarms over low-grade medical waste and the ordinary background emissions of stone monuments.
It's a simple fact: getting high power weaponry into place isn't hard. Manufacturing high power weaponry isn't hard — nor is stealing it. The fact is that if terrorists decide to blow something up, if they're willing to sacrifice a few of their loyalists in the process, the attack will happen, and it will happen successfully. So address the root of the problem, not the symptoms.
I'm going to give some excerpts in a second, but I highly recommend Counterpunch's When the War Hits Home: U.S. Plans for Martial Law, Tele-Governance, and the Suspension of Elections.
[After 9/11] Dick Cheney was hustled into a bunker and ultimately ended up in a cave running the Shadow Government... As F-16s patrolled the skies, government officials lauded the protection they were providing despite the fact that the fighters were there to shoot down commercial passenger planes.
The American public fell for this act from a "government" whose inserted president and appointees are the wealthiest Americans ever to oversee a US populace.
The Bush family has managed to involve the United States in two wars; two invasions in Latin America; ...[lots snipped]... and making the wealthiest Americans and U.S. corporations richer while at the same cutting federal health, education, and welfare budgets and offloading those tasks to the overburdened states.
One incident, one aircraft hijacked, a "dirty nuke" set off in a small town, may well prompt the Bush regime, let's say during the election campaign of 2003-2004, to suspend national elections for a year while his government ensures stability.
Well, at least I'm not the only kook out there pointing out there's a good chance that there won't be another election in America.
I have enormous respect for soldiers that fight for their nations to protect their homes, and I also feel, as a pacifist, that a person absolutely has the right to raise arms to protect their own (although I strongly disagree with standing armies; I feel a nation needs a well-armed populace, coupled with a small number of elite strike forces). But what I can't say I think highly of is people who join the military because it's a job with good perks. First, people going in with that thinking make poor soldiers when the shit hits the fan (as we've seen), and second, because it's morally wrong. It's no better than becoming a hit man for the mafia “because the pay is good”.
Killing is an extreme act, and should only be sanctioned in the most dire of circumstances. That should be obvious to any decent person.
| ROCK THE CASBAH |
| A pile of people have been messaging me saying I should be putting Joe Strummer of The Clash on the cover of BME or making a posting of some kind on his recent passing. While I appreciate he did some remarkable things, changed many lives, and wrote some great music, due to the recent corporate sellout it would not be appropriate. My condolences to any touched by this loss. |
Goodbye gun sales in Jersey!
As the Heineken ad points out, we've already forgotten about Enron (the giant financial scam the administration was recently caught up in, remember?). Most corporate executives seem to be predicting hard times… Unless of course you're in the arms business. If you're up to it, here's a giant report on The Role of the Arms Lobby In the Bush Administration's Radical Reversal of Two Decades of U.S. Nuclear Policy. Some excerpts (it's really long and rather dry):
Critics [of the current nuclear policy] have been particularly concerned about three elements: Expanding the Nuclear Hit List, Lowering the Nuclear Threshold, and Creating 'Usable Nukes'... The Bush approach would replace the "previous doctrine of deterrence" with "unilateral-assured destruction, American-style," resulting in "a runaway nuclear arms race."
More than any administration in recent memory, the Bush administration has relied on corporate officials to staff key policymaking positions in the White House and major federal agencies. The administration has even more extensive ties to the arms industry [than to the oil and energy industry]. A World Policy Institute review of major Bush appointees found that 32 major policy makers had significant financial ties to the arms industry prior to joining the administration, as compared with 21 appointees with ties to the energy industry.
The companies that will benefit from the Bush nuclear policy are particularly well-connected within the administration, with numerous former executives, consultants, and shareholders in key positions involved in the implementation of nuclear weapons and missile defense policies.
Defense contractor contributions of $13.5 million in the last election cycle favored Republican candidates by a margin of almost 2 to 1 (65% to 35%), and by more than 2 to 1 for the 2001/2002 cycle, when 68% of the industrys $6.1 million in contributions has gone to Republican candidates or committees.
The report is very long, but if you think you're up to it, do bookmark it for later reading. It's absolutely exhaustive and rather damning of (through being revealing into) everything that's going on right now. Remember — Forbes just named murdering bastards Northrop Grumman “Company of the Year”. If you're not sure who they are, they builld the B2, the F-18, the X-47, the JSF, and so on. They also (publicly) handed nearly ten million dollars to politicians to make things happen. Not only that, but they're totally tied in with the government; the secretary of the Air Force is a former NG president.
When you cast your vote in elections, are you just deciding who's gonna get the bribes? Because that sure is what it seems like from up here…
Now let's point out why the above is particularly scary: Rumsfield is already planning the next war, saying the US is “perfectly capable” of launching military action against North Korea, clearly the greater threat, at the same time as Iraq. North Korea continues to enhance its nuclear weapons program, all the while making threats to “vaporize” cities like Los Angeles and Anchorage. Pat Buchanan's prediction for 2003: a year of wars:
Though 60 percent of the American people do not believe the president has made the case for war, nine in 10 believe war is coming. They are almost surely right.
Afghanistan is far from pacified. Al-Qaida elements are back in the country. Iran plans to build two new nuclear power plants that produce weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. Its missile-building program is far ahead of that of Saddam Hussein's. In Pakistan, anti-Americanism is pandemic, and Islamists have taken over two of four provinces. This disintegrating nation is but one assassin's bullet away from being a rogue state with nuclear weapons.
Buchanan goes on to quote retired US General Barry McCaffery:
The North Koreans are a huge, immediate and unpredictable threat to the security of South Korea, Japan and U.S. military forces in the region. A million-man army, which has in uniform 20 percent of the military-age male population, consumes 31 percent of the GDP in this land of misery and starvation. The 10 million innocent people of Seoul live within the potential range of 11,000-plus North Korean artillery weapons.
North Korea already has hundreds of missiles that could spew biological toxins, nerve gases, deadly chemicals and a few atom bombs across South Korea, Japan and every U.S. base in the Western Pacific. The North Koreans are going to use this coming year to rush nuclear weapons into production and operational deployment. We must attempt to forestall this WMD proliferation through direct diplomacy or else we may be forced into pre-emptive military action within the next five years.
And don't forget about China, that overpowerful giant that grows stronger every day, and has the sense to keep its mouth shut and mind its own business. What happens when the US eventually butts heads with China? It's only a matter of time.
Missile defence: it's all about speed. If you are going to build a missile that shoots down another missile, your missile has to dramatically outperform (speed and maneuverability) your enemy's. Which, by definition, means that any nation that has a functioning missile defence shield also has weapons that can penetrate any other nation. Which in turn means that they will be forced to develop similar weapons, which in turn means that shortly after deploying the missile defence shield, it becomes useless and the spiral into madness repeats.
Lasers would work, but realistically it would mean massive space-based lasers and insane targeting systems. But lasers would work — so the end result of “missile defence” is a world where the terrible eye above can instantly convert anyone walking the surface of the earth into a small pile of ash. Do you trust your leaders enough to give them this power?
PS. Am I writing these entries for my health?
