JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalSince time immemorial...
it is also true, is it not, that armies invading and occupying subjugated peoples have subjected such peoples to extremes of violence, cruelty, humiliation and denial of humanity. No? That's sure what this case sounds like - the gratuitous destruction of the family's computers and scrawling of threatening hate graffiti say as much.
And if they'd wanted to avoid being shot at while shitting, all they had to do was to stay home and not start the war in the first place. If war is even the word for a collective punishment initiated and carried out by an overwhelming force against a largely helpless, occupied population.
The police problem is not about "a small percentage" of bad cops.
No. This is a matter of top-down policy, politics, money, impunity, and a culture sanctioned from the top. Policy, like "broken windows" and "zero tolerance" policing, preemptive surveillance, the use of SWAT teams tens of thousands of times a year across the country, the militarization of the police that has also borrowed from the military the philosophy of overwhelming force and viewing all citizens as potential enemy. Politics, as in elected leaders and appointed officials going along to get along, fearful of challenging these policies even if they wanted to. Money, as in the enormous budgets these policies justify, and the measurement of "performance" by the likes of CompStat and arrest totals, the data-driven assumption that arrests must be kept at a certain level. Culture, as in for the cops, the "blue wall of silence" and automatic rallying around the bad apples, the feeling they are besieged; and among the people, the constant promotion of fear and exaggeration of the threats of crime and "terrorism." And impunity, of course. The NYPD just announced that, contrary to the video evidence and the coroner's report (which ruled a homicide), no chokehold was used against Garner. Think of all those administrative non-punishments and juries (in the rare cases when cases come to trial) letting off cops in the most egregious of cases, like Diallo. All this happens to privilege the presumably small percentage of particularly brutal cops, but also serves to make them more brutal, to sanction brutality. A great deal of it is stomp-your-door-in business as usual, a system at work.
Palestinians returning home find Israeli troops left faeces and venomous graffiti
Source: The Guardian, UK
When Ahmed Owedat returned to his home 18 days after Israeli soldiers took it over in the middle of the night, he was greeted with an overpowering stench.
He picked through the wreckage of his possessions thrown from upstairs windows to find that the departing troops had left a number of messages. One came from piles of faeces on his tiled floors and in wastepaper baskets, and a plastic water bottle filled with urine.
If that was not clear enough, the words "Fuck Hamas" had been carved into a concrete wall in the staircase. "Burn Gaza down" and "Good Arab = dead Arab" were engraved on a coffee table. The star of David was drawn in blue in a bedroom.
"I have scrubbed the floors three times today and three times yesterday," said Owedat, 52, as he surveyed the damage, which included four televisions, a fridge, a clock and several computers tossed out of windows, shredded curtains and slashed soft furnishings.
(MORE AT LINK)
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/07/palestinians-return-home-israeli-troops-faeces-graffiti?CMP=twt_gu
Some of the graffiti Ahmed Owedat found on returning to his home in the town of Burij. Photograph: Harriet Sherwood
It goes on. At a wrecked school, the occupying forces left the graffiti "You will be fucked here" and "Don't forget it's time for you to die."
State Dept under Clinton subverted public health in Cuba - for freedom!
The AP offers a new story on how USAID gave cover for covert agents recruited from among Venezuelans and others, and sent them to Cuba. There they posed as fake health specialists doing HIV work. Their real mission was to recruit Cuban agents to stir up an uprising. The plan was hatched while the State Department was under the direction of Hillary Clinton. The main contractor was "Creative Associates," who also devised the fake Cuban Twitter program.
This is just as reprehensible as the fake vaccination program in Pakistan. The criminal practice of subverting medical programs for covert operations endangers legitimate aid workers everywhere and threatens the credibility of public health programs generally. It also criminally misuses the poor people who show up to these organizations expecting help for their problems.
By the way, check out the leader of this operation on the ground:
Just another freedom loving guy, no thug to him at all!
This illustrates more generally the insanity of allowing secret agencies that can employ the cover of other agencies and organizations. As soon as you do so, within any government, you create an unaccountable, separate, secret power center. Secrecy is a form of awesome leverage.
And why should anyone in the world who meets anyone from "USAID" or State Department or American NGOs (or who knows which American company) not fear that they are dealing with the CIA or some other spook outfit? After episodes like these, you really want to dismiss people as paranoid when they don't trust the U.S. government or, worse, American NGOs?
This kind of behavior gets uninvolved, innocent people killed. Not surprisingly, Cubans that these stupid fuckers tried to recruit are appalled at the manipulation.
"How would you feel if you offered your sincere friendship and received this kind of news?" Baranda asked.
These people are fucked in the head and THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE THEY SAY THEY WANT TO FREE. They don't give a flying shit, those are pieces on a chessboard.
Luckily in this case, the operation fell apart because of utter incompetence and, apparently, stinginess with the wages for recruits. But that's apt, given that these people are trying to turn Cuba into a happy capitalist paradise, like Honduras.
It really illustrates the ideological anti-communist fanaticism that still motivates many of these actions. These people are prepared to see innocents die in their effort to restructure the world in an "American" image. (It's not really the America that many or most Americans would want to see, but that's how it's conceived.)
Check out the rationalizations and successful ideological self-indoctrination offered up by this loser:
Does she seriously believe her own bullshit? That would go a long way to explaining why she would participate in such a harebrained and wrongful scheme to inject U.S.-made chaos into a stable island society that never wronged her, never did anything against her country or the U.S.
At $5.41 an hour!
This is what the CIA has to offer Cuba (I use this as a general term for the covert operations national security wing of the foreign policy apparatus, which is the most important). They'd like to turn it into Ukraine, or Libya.
FUCK THE CIA.
USAID discrediting medical programs...
The example of Venezuelans dispatched by USAID to pose as fake health workers while attempting to stir an uprising in Cuba is just as reprehensible as the fake vaccination program in Pakistan. Absolutely criminal, this endangers legitimate aid workers everywhere and threatens public health.
It illustrates more generally the insanity of allowing secret agencies that can employ the cover of other agencies and organizations. As soon as you do so, within any government, you create an unaccountable, separate, secret power center. And why should anyone in the world who meets anyone from "USAID" or State Department or American NGOs (or who knows which American company) not fear that they are dealing with the CIA or some other spook outfit?
This kind of behavior gets uninvolved, innocent people killed. Not surprisingly, the Cubans that these stupid fuckers tried to recruit are appalled at the manipulation.
"How would you feel if you offered your sincere friendship and received this kind of news?" Baranda asked.
These people are fucked in the head and THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE THEY SAY THEY WANT TO FREE. They don't give a flying shit, those are pieces on a grand chessboard.
It really illustrates the ideological anti-communist fanaticism that still motivates many of these actions. These people are prepared to see innocents die in their effort to restructure the world in an American image.
Check out the rationalizations and successful ideological self-indoctrination offered up by this loser:
Does she seriously believe her own bullshit? That would go a long way to explaining why she would participate in such a harebrained and wrongful scheme to inject U.S.-made chaos into a stable island society that never wronged her, never did anything against her country or the U.S.
At $5.41 an hour!
This is what the CIA has to offer Cuba (I use this as a general term for the covert operations national security wing of the foreign policy apparatus, which is the most important). They'd like to turn it into Libya, or the Ukraine.
FUCK THE CIA.
I find it interesting that "GMO" usually prompts a swarm
of usual suspects claiming they practically embody Science and everyone thinking otherwise is a fool and only GMOs can solve world hunger and those who oppose them are literally going to cause millions to starve, etc. etc.
Start a thread with a focus on the politics behind GMO and Big Ag, however, and how these fit into the food system generally, and the societal as well as the ecological impacts, not to mention the international politics... crickets from that side.
The big picture can't be addressed, because the role of GMOs as actually applied within the corporate business models is so decisively indefensible. They'd rather hype a few words from some icon who's a great astrophysicist and teacher of science but not a biologist or an economist, who threw off some blinkered smug comments that altogether avoid these issues.
Carter actually tried.
Hundreds, probably 600-800, were let go from the operations divisions (the covert interventions, the major crimes), in the wake of all the bad image that had been exposed by Church, Pike, etc. in the 1970s. But these operators weren't identified, the history didn't come out, there were no prosecutions, and they had their backers all over politics. So most of them found their spots in the private sector or as mercenaries, kept tight, got behind Bush, and roared back in with Reagan to conduct the new round of excessive criminality in grand fashion under Wild Bill Casey.
The only way to uproot is to also expose, and prosecute, and let the full history be known. And that's only the beginning: the whole system of incentives that drives this culture has to be radically dismantled, which has implications for whole industries.
So if I've understood your two points...
1) The story starts without any prior chapters with Hamas rockets, which appear completely out of nowhere, like Pearl Harbor or something, and which have nothing to do with the aggression the IDF had already initiated in the West Bank. These rockets then retroactively caused the Israeli invasion which, luckily, had been planned, prepared and announced well in advance. These are also what's forcing Israel to bomb little boys playing ball on a beach and UN refugee shelters, rubble whole neighborhoods, etc. etc. and to declare 40% of this densely crowded territory into a no-go zone, pushing the Palestinians into the sea.
Now, as for your second point... wait a minute, I just got a friendly tap on the roof, be right back...
Phew! Right, so we were saying...
2) Hm, this one's tougher. Let's see... Genocide and occupation are okay since that's what the U.S. did. Or wait, that can't be what you mean. They're okay long as it's the U.S. or Israel doing it? No, I don't think that's what you want to say either. Oh! I get it! You just don't want anyone to speak of these, since "we" who live today are responsible for the historic genocidal treatment of Native Americans, therefore, um... right. Denial, that's what you're looking for. Let's just not talk about unpleasant things in the now, or the past, what's the difference?
Except for rockets. Hamas very bad.
Thanks for the adventures in logic.
After World War II, Hitler was dead.
We're talking about the wholesale adoption of scientists and spies who had worked diligently in the programs and agencies of the defeated Nazi regime by the U.S. government into the CIA and other programs, as well as the creation of the West German intelligence agencies out of the Gehlen Organization, after the war. Some were Nazis, some were loyal technocrats, all had participated willingly and operationally in the regime and its war.
After the war.
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