Even so, I’m not surprised. Many of the Mormons and devoutly religious people I’ve known have had this brainwashed, stepford wife attitude. We live in a nation of the walking dead and the half-alive. Overworked, sleep deprived, senses and minds dulled. Wake up!
Society
13
Mar 03
Operation Eduring War Erection
The military sends troops armed with big budgets and 38 lb. cameras to film that good old American propaganda. Make no mistake, these are not journalists. They’re trained parrots. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. They’ve gone through the rigorous conditioning perfected by our armed forces. Coming to a theatre near you, 4-minute displays of American machismo, self-righteousness, and down home, simple-minded ‘patriotism’. I can just see all these credulous 19-22 year olds: “This is for you mom and dad! We’re fighting for freedom!” as they load munitions worth more than they’ll ever earn in a lifetime onto jets, tanks, and missile batteries. Stupid, so stupid.
13
Mar 03
Turkey reconsiders US proposal: Turkey
13
Mar 03
Markets don’t like war
The Dow jumped nearly 3.6 percent today with the news of delays to Bush War 2. As US Rep. Ron Paul points out in an previous post, war is actually harmful to the economy. This is not even to mention the waste involved with destroying valuable property, people, families, and internationational relationships.
13
Mar 03
AP: Bill would automatically register
13
Mar 03
A Texas original
The Myth of War Prosperity by Rep. Ron Paul
There is a commonly-held myth that war creates prosperity. Many believe that World War II ended the Great Depression. Unemployment went down because hundreds of thousands of men were drafted, and factories at home busied themselves with war production. This provided the illusion of a bustling wartime economy. But in truth the economy shrank and GDP plummeted. The hidden costs were enormous, because so much human energy and human capital was expended fighting the war rather than doing productive, specialized work back home. …
The greatest economic cost of war, however, comes from the expansion in the size and scope of government. Government always grows during wars and other crises. As economist Murray Rothbard noted, government uses crises to “Engineer the great leaps forward,” in the size of the state. When the crisis ends, government never returns to its former size. As government expands, individual liberty necessarily shrinks. True prosperity cannot exist without individual liberty and its corollaries of limited government, property rights, and free markets. Ultimately, war leaves us with less freedom at home. The sad irony is that while our soldiers have fought for the freedom of Europe, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, and Iraq, the government uses war to steadily diminish freedom here at home. While we fight a war in Iraq, we must also fight to maintain and restore individual liberty in America.
13
Mar 03
MTV: Anti-war groups ‘loathsome’
From Antiwar.com: MTV Refuses Antiwar Commercial: Mtv has refused to accept a commercial opposing a war in Iraq, citing a policy against advocacy spots that it says protects the channel from having to run ads from any cash-rich interest group whose cause may be loathsome.
Most networks and media spigots have policies of non-advocacy yet they run advertisements for the military and promote all sorts of ‘patriotic’ ie. nationalist crap. It’s hypocrisy.
12
Mar 03
Elizabeth Smart found alive, but too late to save innocent man
I wouldn’t normally find this very newsworthy just for my own personal reasons, but I wanted to point out how they tried to pin this to that Ricci guy who had a brain hemorrage and died in jail. So, I’m glad the Smart girl has been found, but this just goes to show how ‘justice’ is often delivered by zealous prosecutors and police, on the backs of the hapless and innocent. Shame.
Police earlier had focused on 48-year-old handyman, Richard Ricci, calling him “a possible suspect. He was later imprisoned for a parole violation stemming from burglary charges related to the Smart family. Ricci died in the Utah State Prison August 30, 2002, when he was taken off life support following a brain hemorrhage three days earlier.
I have to wonder if he did indeed even take anything from the Smarts. Authorities can often find laws that have been broken and will even go so far to plant evidence.
11
Mar 03
Things can only get better
- Ashcroft Unveils DNA Proposal: Which political donors are gonna get the fat contracts for this jobby job?
- Drug habits die hard: Cocaine and amphetamine drug users struggle with the residual effects of their drug habits for up to a year after going cold turkey – much longer than previously reported.
- Cool art, via Metafilter
- ‘Superbomb’ Video Will Be Sent to Scare Iraq: I’m upset. You mean we’re not using nucular bombs to shed innocent blood anymore?
- US Secretly Urged Israelis to Walk Out of Peace Talks
- Movie Men Add Special Effects to Media War
- Bush apologizes to Afghan leader Karzai: Interesting timing considering Afghanistan’s puppet president has been talking to Russian officials and diplomats. If Afghanistan’s government came out against the Iraq war it would be a huge black eye for the American war establishment.
11
Mar 03
Whipping up the proles
When the Germans were the ones we were supposed to revile during WWI and WWII government propagandists changed hamburgers into Salisbury steak, sauerkraut into ‘liberty cabbage’, German measles into ‘liberty measles’, and liverwurst into ‘liberty sausage’. Germans became huns. It was necessary to the war machine to foster hatred and mistrust of anything foreign, so that when you saw or heard anything German your mind would close up and your brain would go into a paroxysm of fear.
This is happening now to the French because their government is opposing our government’s movement towards war. Americans are peace-loving and independent yet we allow our emotions to be swayed by slander and emotional appeals and insults against the French people? Now the French, who helped us against the British empire during our seminal moment, are our sworn enemies? Now they are ‘smelly, cheese-eating, surrender monkeys’? This only makes Americans look like uneducated assholes and does nothing to build support for American interests if that’s what you’re after. To this end, our ship of fools in Congress has passed a ‘symbolic’ measure to rename French fries “freedom fries.” When will the Orwellian irony stop? I’d like one bottle of Victory gin please.