I'm pretty amazed at the volume of treasonistic activity within the WH.... and the guy is still there.

technology against people in third world countries which "superseded their military field tactics and so bloody carnage ensued".

We use high tech MQ-9 Reapers costing $17,000,000 carrying four AGM-114 Hellfires costing $110,000 each, all of which is operated by some drone pilot sitting in a comfortable air conditioned office operating using what amounts to an advanced PlayStation® video game. After a few hours of "bug splatting" poor Afghani families living on two dollars a day along with any of their friends who come to the rescue after the first strike, our brave warriors return home to enjoy a quiet evening with the wife and kiddies.

American 'exceptionalism' indeed.

The Bullying of US Militarism Pervades the Entire Society
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Bullying is woven into the very fabric of the military. Using violence and aggression to impose its will on others is the fundamental purpose of the military -- even if it presents itself as a defender, a paragon of moral virtue, and the protector of the weak. In the schoolyard, the weak who resist the protection of the bully face his full wrath. The military behaves in similar fashion. Consider the brutality that confronted people in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq who resisted America's protection or the lot of the colonial peoples who resisted the civilization offered them by white America or Britain. Empires cannot survive without the military, whose role is to bully weaker nations into submission. No wonder, then, that President Obama promised, "So long as I'm commander in chief, we will sustain the strongest military the world has ever known."

The United States openly views itself as the world's police force, morally ordained to impose its interests and values across the rest of the globe and justified in whatever it does, be that bombing villages, killing civilians, or overthrowing governments. America committed genocide against the Native Americans; raided Africa in search of slaves; seized about half of Mexico's territory; conquered Hawaii and the Philippines; and invaded Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The victims may have viewed these acts as brutal bullying, and we shall see that they reflect the core values and dominance of the schoolyard bully. The US government claimed its actions were morally justified under the doctrine of manifest destiny or for several other reasons: for instance, it had an obligation to bring civilization to the savages; it was the duty of the strong to protect the weak; and it was a matter of self-defense on a global scale -- all themes that, as we show shortly, also reflect the implicit mindset of bullying kids. After World War II when the United States gave itself the world's sheriff 's badge, it renamed the Department of War as the Department of Defense. The term defense may sound less aggressive than war, but war is sporadic whereas defense is permanent. It can be argued that small countries such as Switzerland and Sweden need defense, but in dominant empires such as the United States, the military plays a very different role.

American capitalism revolves around the military. The Pentagon underwrites many of the largest corporations through weapons contracts, and it protects US-based corporations as they abandon American workers in favor of plants abroad and as they secure foreign raw materials and markets. America's militaristic empire cannot exist without people who support it and are even willing to kill and die in its battles. Accordingly, it must transmit militaristic values, which are essentially forms of violent bullying values, either through the military itself or through other institutions.
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and starving civilians in Yemen. Look up the photos of the emaciated victims.

If America is humanity's last, best hope, then we are truly screwed.

I think our last best hope is currency collapse, so that the war pigs starve (for awhile).

Did not know that it had been overtaken by weeds created by dumped phosphates that now make it un-swimmable. That's tragic.

The rustic nature of that hamlet always held an allure for me. With the Lake and the Carmans River and a lack of curbs, it had a different feel that was so unlike the rest of that area of LI, which was mostly those typical suburban tracts the cropped up post-1950's-60's all over the country. By the the end of the 80's, LI had pretty much sadly been decimated by greedy developers who ripped out the last vestiges of woods we played in for more of those dumbed-down commercial strip plazas and more developments and "condos."

Sadly, all of this, the saber-rattling, business's polluting natural resources and over-development by realtors, can be directly connected to greed, which is the fuel of capitalism - the pursuit of evermore through deregulation, damn the consequences, with no justice to be found in the courts for the people who are then left on their own to deal with the wreckage.

As many folks commented already, nobody does that better than the Exceptional Americans, whose god is money. We need more whistleblowers, like that of John Perkins, of "Confessions of an Economic Hitman," who CB mentioned in the first of his two excellent comments.

I think of the great sage George Carlin, who ended one of his most brilliant, clear-eyed diatribes about all this by concluding, "it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."