@Pluto's Republic here is another one and this one gives me hope in that the younger
generation is waking up.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/04/14/chocolate-cake-the-moab-and-hexav...

APRIL 14, 2017
Chocolate Cake, the MOAB and Hexavalent Chromium: Let the Good Times Roll!
by VINCENT EMANUELE

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“It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning. They shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid the general applause from all the wits who believe that it is a joke.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

What can I write about war that I or someone else hasn’t already written?

After all, people have been writing about war for centuries. I think it was Vonnegut who once said that trying to stop a war is like trying to stop winter. Turns out, he was half wrong: winter can be stopped – just ask climate change. Wars, on the other hand, persist, with no end in sight.

When I first sat down to write this evening, I aimed to write a rousing essay calling for people to organize and mobilize against U.S. Empire and global militarism, but I can’t. It just wouldn’t be honest. And writers should be honest, if nothing else.

In the post-9/11 world, war is an omnipresent force. To be fair, for some populations, that’s always been the case. Today, however, people around the globe, from Europeans ravaged by austerity to Palestinians ravaged by colonialism, are feeling the immediate impacts of never-ending war.

Refugees drown in the Mediterranean and starve in makeshift camps, while bombs are dropped by over 24 different nations throughout the Greater Middle East. Since 9/11, the U.S. alone has bombed Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Libya. And that list will continue to grow with time.

Writing about the horrors of war seems beyond redundant at this point. I’ve written and talked about killing people, picking up dead bodies, watching dead friends get loaded into helicopters and flown away, never to be seen again, the smell of burning flesh, what it was like to watch my fellow marines take pictures and play with corpses. I’ve written and talked about the dozens of decapitated bodies I’ve seen, and the marines who purposely drove over them in our HUMVEEs, always smiling, sometimes taking pictures.

Remember, my generation was the first generation to go to war with the internet. And in a society that loves bright lights and superficial entertainment, it only makes sense that those fighting Uncle Sam’s wars in the 21st century would pack digital cameras along with our AR-15s and MREs.

Speaking of hollow displays of patriotism and the worship of state violence, how about those beautiful missile strikes? There’s nothing like a majestic missile soaring through the desert air! It’s a damn shame Brian Williams and Rachel Maddow weren’t on the receiving end. Fuck them, and every other yuppie-liberal who works at NBC. They are directly responsible for Trump’s victory, and everything that follows. Our billionaire-rapist-chickenhawk president who likes to eat chocolate cake while firing cruise missiles couldn’t have won the White House without the help of CNN and MSNBC. Always remember that.

In the meantime, who will the U.S. bomb next? And how long before the world is drawn into what could become the most devastating war in the history of humanity: WWIII? Those are the most important questions of the day.

But who’s asking those questions? I turned on CNN earlier tonight and Anderson Cooper and his panel of vapid morons were bantering on about Trump’s approval ratings. I can imagine future headlines reading: “What does a nuclear strike mean for Trump’s chances in 2020?”

I hate to rehash old wounds, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t upset with my liberal friends who disappeared after Barrack Obama was elected in 2008. They went home, and never returned. Today, the world is paying the ultimate price for liberal hypocrisy.

Remember, Barrack Obama’s first major foreign policy decision was to escalate the war in Afghanistan (the longest war in U.S. history) when he sent an extra 30,000 troops to Western Asia. For 8 years, liberals said absolutely nothing about Obama’s war in Afghanistan, his deadly and illegal drone program, or his use of special forces operations throughout the world, including the continent of Africa, where the U.S. has averaged over 3 operations a day for the last three years.

All of the power that went unchecked under Obama will be exploited by Trump and his team of corporate bandits. That’s the real world price the world will pay for liberal double-standards.

Earlier today, the U.S. dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal in Afghanistan, a peasant nation ravaged by decades of Russian and American imperialism. Without question, the situation in Afghanistan is worse today than at any point in recent memory, with no end in sight.

Yet, no one will pay for those crimes. While Obama yucks it up with billionaire scumbag Richard Branson, George W. Bush paints pictures of wounded veterans. To be honest, I don’t know which is worse. What I do know is that these people should, at the very least, spend the rest of their miserable lives in solitary confinement.

One of the darker lessons I learned in the war is that psychological torture is much worse than physical torture. While physical torture can create psychological distress, simply playing with someone’s mind is the best way to completely destroy their physical being. Give me a prison cell, control over the temperature, florescent lights and loud music, and I can obliterate a human being in less than a month.

Indeed, human beings are capable of unimaginable levels of cruelty and barbarism. Undoubtedly, that’s the most important thing I learned during the war. Human beings are capable of anything and everything under the right circumstances.

That being said, if things don’t change, and soon, Syria is the future for all of us. The situation in the U.S., for instance, is ripe for madness and extreme violence: income inequality, racial segregation, collapsing public institutions, lack of trust in the media, social alienation, abrupt climate change, drug addiction and 330 million weapons, one for every man, woman and child in the good ole’ US of A.

Yet, I’m too stubborn to give up. Even if we’re doomed, and according to folks like Guy McPherson, we are indeed fucked, I’m still going to fight, resist and record my thoughts until the very end.

It’s hard to balance being a writer and an activist. On the one hand, as an activist, my primary goal is to motivate people and to encourage and guide them to become more involved. As a writer, my task, as I said above, is to simply tell the truth and to express what I’m feeling in the most honest way possible. Sometimes, those two things don’t match up.

Again, for me, it’s less about remaining “positive” and more about coming to terms with reality. I spent too many years involved with institutions and people who refused to see the writing on the wall. I promised myself years ago that I wouldn’t allow that to happen again. And I won’t.

So, here we are, sitting at the edge of extinction with all the toys and entertainment in the world, from live-streaming videos and handheld electronic devices to on-demand violence and virtual realities, yet some of us can’t even access fresh drinking water – just ask my friends in East Chicago, Indiana, or Flint, Michigan.

Oh, and let’s not forget the living world. Two days ago, U.S. Steel, the company that built Gary, Indiana (then destroyed it) dumped an unknown amount of hexavalent chromium — a toxic byproduct of industrial processes, into our beloved Lake Michigan. The week prior, more than 3,000 dead perch were found in a former U.S. Steel boat slip on the South Side of Chicago.

If the U.S. government was truly concerned with the safety of its citizens, it would send the next MOAB to 600 Grant St., Pittsburgh, PA 15219.a

#2

This is the first bit of pure sanity I've read today.

Thank you very much.

@Ellen North

if they kept themselves informed and aware, which is the duty of a citizen, none of this would be happening.

And, unless they make a dedicated effort to become informed and aware, it will get worse. When people swallow the propaganda, when they don't stand up and demand their rights, democracies become plantations and capitalists run amok. What's worse, they are footing the entire bill for the US global murder and mayhem and the rotting of the nation's core, from their paychecks. And the blowback will hunt them for the rest of their lives.

Politics is too corrupt and comprised to change anything. There's no place else for the blame to go.

#2 #2

I think we all feel much the same - but it isn't really America doing it. It's a relatively small group of psychopaths and their lackeys ruining the world on the wealth and power they've stolen from America and Americans and the myriad other peoples and countries they and their ilk have attacked, bullied, defrauded and stolen from in so many ways, even to our possibility of a future which they're in the process of destroying as well. All for profit and the world well lost.

But it's not their world, their lives, their future to dispose of, and we have to make this point stick. The lunatics don't get to burn down the asylum in the hope of collecting the insurance, just because they're too reality-deficient to realize that they have nowhere else to go either.

Edit: I'd written the above last night, delayed posting it, having had no sleep the night before, then groggily posted it today after finally getting at least some, to have it post just below the masterpiece above - and wow! read it.

For a very long time, after the Nazi's were so narrowly defeated, everyone wanted to know why the German people failed to recognize the signs and deal with their pathological government before much of the world had to band together to stop the monster it had grown into, which was at the time thought by many impossible to stop.

I suspect that the real answer was the one we have now, despite having the benefit of historical record - we don't know how to deal with it.

Psychopaths have been born into/created within human populations probably from the beginnings of humanity, since they are simply people having the 'human' portions of their brain missing/non-functional/warped via life experience/neurotoxicity and most societies have no idea how to deal with them. (Some more isolated cultures simply quietly disposed of them as they revealed themselves via their destructive characteristics - all we need to do is to keep them out of positions where they can gain power over others to use/harm them.)

Because they typically do not have the capacity* for human emotions such as empathy or allied properties such as conscience, and are missing essential personal human emotional inter-linkages integral to civilization, they operate on self-interest, ruthlessly because of this mental lack, and too-often may come to perceive the ability to hurt others in ways they cannot empathize with as an enjoyable power over others.

And they may devote themselves to the accumulation of money/power as an endless end in itself, as we've seen occurring, where in their perception there's never any 'enough' and anything - money, rights, property - any other may possess has been somehow taken from them.

They typically cannot be reached on a human level because it generally does not exist within them. They do not appear to even feel fear the way we do, having a whole section of essential over-all species survival mental capacity missing, while running on the experience of an isolated ego where only what they want matters, at whatever cost to others, but surely never to them.

And this leaves us bewildered - enabling their increases in power and influence every time they are not curtailed/suffer no real negative consequence, which they use against us to achieve their own ends.

Others are not real to them; the sufferings of people and animals cannot matter to them; 'the other' isn't real to them and exists only as useful to them or not.

We compare the psychopathic to 'lizard people' because reptiles (and insects), which do not raise young and simply abandon eggs to hatch alone, have no species-survival requirement for a strong empathetic capacity which, together with the allied tendencies which make people human, enabled us, as well as other herd/pack/troupe animals in the wild, to survive - and humans to form societies, civilization and the democracy detested by the psychopaths stealing our power and other resources.

And so they remind us of lizards, due to what they have more in common with them than with us, because, past a certain very distant point, we have completely different evolutionary histories with entirely different survival requirements, species characteristics and entirely different social structures and emotional needs.

Up until now, we've overall survived the psychopaths in our midst - but this is no longer possible, with the destructive technologies and methods now available to those who have infiltrated government as well as industry. And they are at war with life itself.

I'm feeling pretty groggy and no doubt phrasing all of this badly, but do vaguely recall having previously read some interesting work on successfully raising children who were identified early as having been born psychopathic, their being raised to live within society by having their deficiencies (which are not their fault and only incidentally form hazard to others) recognized and their lack of empathetic/perceptive and other senses alleviated by consistent training appealing to such as self-interest and the need for admiration, which they do feel, to encourage better behaviours and to prevent the development of sadistic tendencies, which are not necessarily present in psychopaths (this condition being basically an absence of/inability for essential human feeling, not a deliberate evil) but all-too-easily developed under the wrong circumstances.

However, at this late point, we are looking at government - especially in the US, but wherever powerful psychopaths have been enabled to gain political buying power through great wealth too-often amassed via blatant abuses of people, animals and the environment - essentially made up of, by and for psychopaths.

Trump seems to some extent be an outlier because it appears that many of his sociopathic excesses/much of his lunacy is likely rich-kid-culturally-imposed/learnt and due, at least in part, to life-long spoiling within a wealth-worshiping culture and financially-based protection from consequences. He rather tellingly has poor impulse control, among other indicative issues, but he is susceptible to appeal and to pressure, unlike Pence and others, who (admittedly based on a very superficial impression) strike me as more focused psychopathic types.

Unfortunately, he is being pressured by psychopathic types intent on global hostile corporate/military take-over and the destruction of the global life-support system, which, being reality-deprived, some billionaires and others appear to believe they will survive and profit from, perhaps in mechanical bodies... They don't 'believe in' biological science either, any more than other reality-based... anything they don't want to be true.

So, we can see that psychopathic crazy-people, self-identified by their beliefs and behaviours, are filling government and are set on global destruction of life on the planet so that they can achieve 'full-spectrum dominance' over the lifeless ruins.

And we don't know what to do about it.

Do we let it be settled by the onrushing Mutual Assured Destruction they're pushing for?

(*Caveat here: people made psychopathic by life experience may have capacity for some degree of empathy, which may be limited to specific persons, groups or animals. There are also shades within the psychopathic personality, especially within families/surroundings/a culture in which psychopathic tendencies are revered and encouraged in the otherwise normal,e.g., Wall St., polluting industries, certain wealthy families and the institutions existing for/to support them or to mould society in a psychopathic culture, as with certain schools and universities - much of the propaganda-imposed and propaganda-warped 'get rich quick and the devil take the hindmost' wealth/power-worshiping American culture.)

@Ellen North

          A few years ago I read something not to dissimilar and I got very angry. After a few moments I noticed a tenseness just as a flake of tooth broke off. Spitting teeth is something I know about.

          Many of the articles here I tend to skim then come back to read later when I can control myself.

#4

This part right at the end of the article was interesting:

... A previous attempt at mutual evacuations failed in December when rebels burnt coaches due to be sent to the towns.

Especially since the deaths of children previously (I've read) triggered Trump's daughter to pressure Trump to fire off missiles, emboldening waiting terrorists against Syrian civilians and Syrian government forces and this was so clearly aimed at killing/injuring specifically children.

Going to stop now, before I start spitting teeth...