90-percent
90-percent's JournalThese commercials irk me greatly
The root cause of our newest generation of wounded warriors is the illegal invasion of Iraq based on deliberate lies.
We American taxpayers spent what, over THREE TRILLION DOLLARS for an unnecessary war that was driven by traitors and war criminals?
You can take my wounded warrior donation from my portion of those THREE TRILLION tax dollars the MIC squandered on themselves. The goddamned war was engineered by a club of WAR PROFITEERS. The entire MIC is WAR PROFITEERS. The psychopaths that have captured our government are just bad ass MF’ers. Think of what kind of a human monster you have to be to create all this death and sorrow and suffering for so many families merely so you can make a lot of money? And do it by an all the way to the top conspiracy of a deliberate BIG LIE. The callous brazenness astounds! How do these animal-humans think? Is their capacity for reason no better than a rabid dog’s?
And it’s all in the name of profit, which takes trainloads of churned cash to distill down to the net profits the titans of the MIC put in their own pockets. We have to donate 95% in taxes, which gets churned into spending for military goods and all the vast other things like bases and planes and housing troops, etc., , so they can take the remaining 5%. Why don’t we just give them the 5% directly in cash instead of having to conduct all this fake wasteful war stuff just so these guys can end up with the same profits in the end?
Think of it as a bribe to the MIC to end this continuous stream of wars and invasions and terrorist producing drone attacks and our autocratic surveillance state. If we can convince them they will all end up more rich by taking direct bribes from the American public instead of concocting a false front war to get to the same result?
Protection money to our Corporate Overlords to get our Democracy back.
-90% Jimmy
A huge mistake?
It's only a huge mistake if you think the POWERS THAT BE that actually run America have any interest what so ever in maintaining the USA as a Democratic Republic as envisioned by the founding fathers and maintained thusly from 1776 to around 1980 or so.
The utter dismantling of our Democracy began in earnest on September 11, 2001. That's when the PTB's decided it was all clear to turn the USA into a totalitarian fascist police state.
They rolled out THE PATRIOT ACT and signed it into law in less than EIGHT WEEKS after 9-11 happened! Our Fascists have foresight, don't they?
Do any DU mates know of any source that can provide an accurate inventory of how many of our Constitutional Rights have been nullified since 9-11? It's a damn shame we've lost so many of them, considering the millions of servicemen we lost in all those Wars that died defending the American Way of Life. Their service was all for naught. We gave away everything they sacrificed for so the PTB's could "keep us safe". I only wish the PTB's were equally earnest keeping us safe from cancer, heart disease, suicide, murder, auto accidents, and all the other deadly hazards out there that kill 2.5 million American's per year. (We're all going to die someday. My point is there's natural causes of death and preventable causes of death. If a lot of mortality in America is preventable, then why isn't our HELL-BENT-ON-KEEPING-US-ALL-SAFE Government also do something to bring that number down by means other than warrentless wiretapping or a militarized police force?)
And while I'm ranting, a little item that has slipped down the memory hole. To this day, I contend that only perhaps .1% of all Americans even know that GWB was business partners with one of Osama's older brothers?
http://www.bollyn.com/the-family-ties-between-bush-and-bin-laden-2
To be fair to GWB, Osama and Salem's dad had a lot of wives and produced a lot more siblings for Osama than usual, so that increases the probability that any of us would associate with Bin Laden family members. And the Bin Laden family that found themselves in the USA immediately after 9-11 were the only people in the United States allowed to use U.S. airspace in the days immediately following 9-11. I want to know who in our government made that happen and why did they do it?
-90% Jimmy
I listened to him on MSNBC last night
Really condescending, and he calls it like it's a sporting contest. It's not a sporting contest. It's Oligarch's purchasing politicians and thus our Democracy to make the formerly illegal perfectly legal again.
And for most Americans, the crash of 2008 was not about the indignity of having to use taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street to cover their bad bets and lavish upon themselves their own self imposed multi-million dollar bonuses for doing God's work.
It was about the actions of these greedheads directly triggering the GREAT RECESSION OF 2008. We narrowly averted another GREAT DEPRESSION and there's a lot of foreclosed and laid off Americans and American's just one paycheck away from bankruptcy that can now clearly understand that our government serves the ultra-wealthy by screwing over the rest of us.
This despicable trick shows just how craven and morally bankrupt the Republicans in Congress really are. And how they don't represent the people that elect them in any way shape or form.
-90% Jimmy
We do have one person involved in torture imprisoned for his misdeeds
http://www.defendjohnk.com/wordpress/John Kiriakou has been in prison for perhaps a year now, not for committing the torture, but for BLOWING THE WHISTLE AND GOING PUBLIC ON THE ENTIRE AMERICAN TORTURE SYSTEM.
So the only person our entire land of the free home of the brave country punishes for our official policy of torture was an honorable man trying to stop something he knew was wrong and it was his sworn duty to do what he could to stop it.
YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE of how much it sucks to be a government whistle blower these days and also how much the people that run our country have completely lost all sense of honor, duty and basic human decency. Not to mention stupid because it only takes ten minutes on the google to learn how ineffective and low quality torture is for gaining intelligence.
Not only did they squander every principal our country used to stand for since the Revolution, but they were too stupid to comprehend that torture doesn't even fucking work!
It's amazing the magnitude of evil the MIC is capable of, all in the name of fomenting wars so they can make gazillions of dollars. We need a Truman style prosecution of our modern WAR PROFITEERS. A good starting point would be arresting every person that ever served in the GWB White House during his two shit stained terms.
"We don't want the smoking gun to come in the form of a warrant for my arrest for war crimes." - hopefully Condi Rice's next public comment.
-90% Jimmy
Just what the hell did Frank Zappa have to do with all this?
"But Zappa has a lesser known legacy: He inspired revolutions." - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/news/legends-and-legacies/frank-zappa-revolutionary/1726/#sthash.Kz7PoSWQ.dpuf
As Frank has been an inspiration in my life, apparently he was also an inspiration to people in oppressive Communist Countries yearning for freedom. He did not know until decades later he helped inspire what it took to "watch communism die".
Just a pertinent and little known piece of info about my hero.
-90% Jimmy
Hunter S. Thompson article from Sept 12, 2001
This is the Jesse Ventura link I found the HST link at:
http://www.ora.tv/offthegrid/article/uncover-911-hunter-s-thompson
Here's the HST link;
http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751
"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives."
"It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy."
Yes indeed, the self perpetuating Military Industrial Congressional Surveillance Complex Ike warned us about in 1960/61 is playing this ISIL fiddle and the entire world is dancing to it! ISIL is doing a great rope a dope job getting our best and brightest military volunteers to go over and get killed and maimed fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. We will start another war to sacrifice our patriotic young volunteers to ISIL as per their wants.
Doesn't take much to play the American public like marionettes, does it?
Our state of perpetual war will not end in the lifetimes of anybody reading this.
We are truly "dumb all over, and maybe a little ugly on the side"
Hunter was remarkably insightful and perceptive, wasn't he? I need to re-read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972" again soon. It's been decades and I devoured HST as a young person.
-90% Jimmy
The root cause compressed into a bumper sticker
We're not all self absorbed selfish mean scumbags. That's only the bullies that run everything now.
The rest of us are pretty normal and have been responding well to the corporate conditioning we're swimming in designed to make us all believe we are all utterly powerless.
So we are.
In spite of what the great Chris Hedges has said, something like; "It only takes engagement of ONE PERCENT of the population to trigger a revolution." Chris should know, he's covered such revolutions in Eastern Europe before he got canned by the NY Times cuz he was anti-2003-Iraq-invasion.
-90% Jimmy
The Dumb War
Now there’s a meme applicable to the current Iraq debate, huh?
I recently attended my Congressman’s Town Hall Meeting, where Iraq 2014 was the agenda.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025142323
Congressman Larson’s opinion on the 2003 Iraq Invasion; The policy makers did the most appropriate thing given the intelligence available to them at the time, is a laughable and embarrassing position to make in public, given the easily accessible historical record available in 2014.
“The case for war wasn’t wrong, it was a lie.” – Rachael Maddow, 6-27-14
The show, in Rachel’s normal MSNBC time slot on June 27, 2014 ,was a repeat of her production of “Hubris”, with an important and noteworthy addition; The commentary by Rachel at the beginning was recorded recently, in the context of the recently renewed “how to fix Iraq this time” national debate. The people that lied us into this ill-conceived and stupid-well-beyond-the-point-of-treason invasion still walk free and are still a part of polite society. If not life in prison, they should at least be ostracized from all of civilized society.
The tricky thing about this video is that it is not very easy to find and play, compared to most TRMS shows. So I do my part to prevent her profound preamble from slipping into an easily forgotten rabbit hole. My personal transcription of part of that is below. If somebody can find this or put this on youtube, that would be great! At least the first five minutes or so.
http://now.msnbc.com/show/The%20Rachel%20Maddow%20Show/291312707660/0/TRMS%3A%20Hubris%20June%2027%2C%202014
The Rachel Maddow Show
TRMS: Hubris June 27, 2014
Season 2014 Episode 140627 Aired 6-27-2014
@1:35 – “...... it's more important than that even to remember that they just weren’t wrong. The Iraq war gets shorthanded now as an intelligence failure. U.S. policy makers were just acting on bad information. That is not what the Iraq war was. It was a deception and this is important; it was the deliberate manipulation of intelligence in order to deceive and it worked and a decade later we owe it to ourselves to not only learn from our mistakes as a nation so we do not repeat them, we owe it to ourselves as a nation to hold to account and treat accordingly the voices that snookered us into that war in the first place. Especially since they are now trying to drag us back in. Investigative reporter Michael Isikoff and Mother Jones’ David Corn co-authored a book called Hubris that detailed exactly how that war was sold to the American people. How intelligence was purposely distorted to make the case for war. The case for war wasn’t wrong, it was a lie."
How's that "We must look forward, not backward" doctrine of War Criminal forgiveness working out for yah, fellow Americans?
-90% Jimmy
thanks radiclib
If I have posted worthwhile things on DU, it's because I have stood on the shoulders of DU giants. To be self critical, most of my stuff I consider to be mediocre regurgitation of ideas and info found elsewhere.
As I strive to channel the writing styles of Frank Zappa and Hunter S. Thompson, I adhere to FZ's approach to his career; "First don't stop. Second, keep going."
And one thing I recently understood better is the Nazi/Fox News BIG LIE technique of repeating something enough times and it becomes true. If that can work with lies, imagine the impact when you do the same thing with truth, reason and facts!
And there's so much that bears repeating. I think I repost George Carlin's "Corporations Own You" every six months and it always scores over 5 rec's every time.
And I've learned that such profound classic thinking is not necessarily included in the set of root concepts every DU member includes in their core P.O.V. So it's lot more constructive than I realized that there's so much info out there that bears repeating and reinforcement.
And DU is preaching to the choir, so I've recently been doing a lot of DU type posts over at Facebook, where some of my best friends are Conservative. And I try to engage those types in the manner of Thom Hartmann, respectful and dignified but firm on where I stand. Which results in comments like this: "Jim...you're one of the few liberals I've engaged who can conjure a critical thought and write it down...I think the others can agree...which is why we're engaging you." I'm sick of the divide and conquer tactics of the Oligarchs and it's my belief we have more in common than our differences.
And, as long as I'm blathering, one of the most hurtful things I experienced on DU was when I posted a link to a drudge or a newsmax type item to discuss oppo research. And I was shut down 5 to 1 by a DU jury. Tried and convicted by a jury of my peers for being a right wing troll. My feelings were really hurt by that one, as it happened less than a year ago, after I'd been here perhaps nine years. Like I spent nine years and 4,500 posts to go deep undercover so I could slip in one subversive piece of righty propaganda.
And while I'm being so self absorbed, one thing I'm most proud of with my half assed activism is when I went to the September 10, 2009 Tea Party Rally at the state Capital in Hartford carrying a sign that read; "Tea Baggers are astroturf puppets of fascist corporations." That could not suck enough, as I did not run into one single counter protester. And I have never seen a pic of myself on the internet. I was hoping to become the right wing version of the "Get a brain Morans!" guy.
And I was happy to go see Chris Hedges speak at Central CT State University in New Britain last March. I spoke to him after the talk, and as disappointed to find out, although he was there reporting the Czechoslovakia Velvet Revolution, he had no awareness what so ever of Frank Zappa's role in helping that revolution come to be in the first place. Oh, well. At least Frank got to pal around with Vaclev Havel for a while.
A very interesting point about Chris speech. During the Q&A, (which was not part of this recording) a lawyer spoke to Chris about why the legal profession is utterly impotent about righting any of the legal wrongs that have been piling up over the years. He had participated in some Occupy cases, and he got the word from somebody up high in the Bar Association, or whatever Guild all lawyers belong to, with the chilling message that was something like; "Nice law practice you have there. Wouldn't want anything to happen to it if you continue to represent these OWS people, would you?"
And I mention that because doesn't the legal profession have an important Constitutional Role to insure checks and balances are working properly to keep our Democracy a Democracy? Most of the legal profession has remained utterly mute as our Constitutional rights have continued to be rendered inoperative since 9-11. Just one more of the checks and balances dismantled over the last thirty years as the Oligarch's reshape our country into a Middle Ages Paradise for the elites, and drudgery and suffering and hopelessness for the rest of us.
Chris has covered Revolutions and he said all that's needed is for one percent of the population to be engaged in the profound change that triggers a revolution. So if us Revolutionary 1%'ers want to git 'er done, we better bone up on Chris' body of work. He's got the roadmap.
-jim
Congressman Larson's West Hartford Town Hall on Iraq, Sunday June 22,2014
I did more prep for attending this Town Hall than usual. I implored the DU community for some insight on things I could not find answers to on the internet, and here’s the link for the always high quality DU responses.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025125650
I also PM’ed Octafish here, cuz he knows everything and sources it well. And he helped me. I’m passionate about the current state of Oligarchy and all the sociopaths running and wrecking everything, so it’s hard to focus on what others had to say. So I sound more self-absorbed than usual here, cuz it’s all about what I had to say, only.
I said that if you were to take fifty of the best geopolitical minds in the world and lock them together in a room for a month, their recommendations stand as much success as where we are at now. My point being that all the wisdom in the world ain’t gonna fix this.
Which leads into; how did we get here in the first place? I said I remember being in that very town hall back in late 2002 or early 2003, before the invasion, telling John the White House rationale for invasion was bogus, and I would have preferred to have the people that run the MAFIA in the White House, because they are more honorable than the GWB lot at that pre-invasion time.
John had said earlier that the invasion was the result of well-intentioned people that acted on the best intelligence they had to work with at the time. I told him they knew they were lying and the lot of them should be tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and prosecuted for murder. I told him I also said that to him at a previous TH meeting in Bristol, CT last winter. I have to write his office and substantiate that, because he is so on the wrong side of history on that it’s embarrassing. Here’s some recent vids that are just a portion of the thousands of hours of pre-war proof-of-mendacity these freaks got away with.
http://billmoyers.com/content/buying-the-war/
He praised the Keystone Pipeline, so I shared my understanding of it; It will provide America with fifty jobs total after it’s up and running, and the refined oil will be shipped out of the Gulf and will do almost nothing to satisfy America’s thirst for oil, and will benefit nobody except Big Oil Corporations. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t understand how either John or I could get it so wrong???
Which lead into my comments on global climate change. It’s too late. It’s over. The world is doomed and the only question is when do the mass extinctions start and how long humanity can survive on this planet. Global warming is a runaway train that humanity is trying to stop with a butterfly net. And we aren’t really doing even that. We’re just starting to consider it as the first solution slightly better than nothing.
Lastly, I asked him what I asked on DU – just who is ending up with the oil rights, and, thanks to the responses from my DU post, I told him if the citizens of Iraq exercise the possibility of nationalizing the oil and taking it away from the big oil multi-national, America would reinstate the draft and start a hot war to get it back. (Wasn’t Gulf War 1 really about Saddam going off the dollar for the dinar, which means we could no longer simply print more money to buy more oil? (A concept I got from a wiser DUer))
FWIW. What else can a poor solitary little half assed activist do, anyway? Not much, except in the words of my hero Frank Zappa; “First, don’t stop. Second, keep going.”
From the article;
Although the event started calmly with a brief opening statement by Larson, tensions rose in the room during the question period, with those who said they oppose intervention repeatedly shouting down those who suggested they might be in favor of it. <There was shouting. But it was provoked by a speaker that monopolized the floor with stale debunked talking points for a lot longer than average manners would allow>
Others rose to offer their speculations on topics ranging from the Quran to conspiracy theories involving American foreign policy in the past two decades, <a speaker recited some Alex Jones claptrap> including repeated calls for various American leaders to be tried in international courts on war crime charges. <And I was one of them among many>
It amazes me to see people recite a list of anti-Obama talking points, as if there was some sort of factual basis for them. There were maybe 2 out of the 15 or so points on the Fox viewer’s laundry list of grievances against the President that had factual merit. The other points would have made Darryl Issa beam with pride.
http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-larson-iraq-hearing-06-20140622,0,2271908.story
And how about those comments after the article. John seems despised among his Constituents. I don’t think he’s that bad a guy, as far as career politicians go. He deserves a lot of credit for being so gracious sincerely responding to questions I would find loathsome and beneath contempt. John did get amped up about Sandy Hook and the resultant lack of new background check laws, which he said were favored by 91% of America. (Which is true. BUT, such laws were not passed because Dems overplayed their hand and thought they could do a sweeping overhaul of a bunch of related laws in that brief moment of opportunity, and thus played a lousy game of political chess.)
John was also fired up on Republican obstructionism – just give us a vote, he implored. I’m amazed that Republican obstructionism is actually working out quite well for them. They prevent anything from getting done and then blame Obama for it. And the quagmire in DC as Obama’s fault seems to be the conventional wisdom in all of America. It’s like only DU readers know the first thing about the back story of DC intransigence! Well played, Republicans. You do seem to be fooling most of the people most of the time.
-90% Jimmy
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Name: JimGender: Male
Current location: Barkhamsted, CT
Member since: Sat Jul 3, 2004, 08:36 AM
Number of posts: 6,829