Crying about soldiers' remains going in the landfill

The US public is treated to an endless litany of heartbreaking disclosures involving practically every item of admiration and affection. Today it reaches to the sacred realm of the remains of dead soldiers, which we learn were disposed of in a most disrespectful and callous manner:

Air Force chief questioned over war dead's remains | Reuters: ""I'm deeply troubled by the reports about what's happened at the mortuary at the Dover Air Force Base. And I'm sure you would agree with me, this is outrageous that remains of our soldiers would be put in a landfill," said Senator Kelly Ayotte.

The Washington Post, which first reported those details, quoted one widow saying she was "appalled and disgusted" to learn what happened to her husband's remains in a letter from the Air Force earlier this year. He died in Iraq in 2006.

"My only peace of mind in losing my husband was that he was taken to Dover and that he was handled with dignity, love, respect and honor," Gari-Lynn Smith told the Post. "That was completely shattered for me when I was told that he was thrown in the trash.""

The tear-jerking mechanism thus received many vigorous exertions as the story of how our military establishment deals with these inconvenient detritus. Since the bulk of the remains had already been delivered to families, the military simply disposed of additional matter located subsequently in the most efficient manner available.

While it is the least the nation can do to treat these remains with respect, is all the hand wringing and complaining really accomplishing anything for these people, who for the most part died in needless and illegal wars having nothing to do with national defense, and everything to do with perpetuating the business of perpetual warfare in which the US now wages on behalf of its corporate masters?

Rather than suffering paroxysms of grief over their mismanaged remnants, shouldn't we save the outrage and demands for a change in procedure to the actual cause of these peoples' deaths, an out-of-control militaristic culture that consumes lives like so much raw material in an infernal killing machine?

The US media-molded culture has elevated the "troops" to a higher level of being than ordinary people, but along with this near-veneration we strip them of their plain humanity. We venerate them in some abstract sense, without reckoning the loss of their lives, or the loss of lives of those they ended abroad, consigning them to the consumerist version of Valhalla that lies beyond the reach of any moral calculus. Their death is an abstraction, just like the nature of their adversaries or the alleged object of the wars themselves.

This is a perversion and a travesty, being perpetuated by a media machine that can examine any irrelevancy or tangential issue in endless detail, while glossing over and completely missing the main point. It's not a few carelessly handled body parts we should be livid about, but the waste of these young lives for such a demented purpose.

Obama’s Influential Mideast Turd Resigns

The number of cynical and Machiavellian foreign service operators on the US state department payroll is about to decrease by one, it was just learned:

Obama’s Influential Mideast Envoy to Resign - NYTimes.com: "WASHINGTON — Dennis B. Ross, a seasoned diplomat who has been one of President Obama’s most influential advisers on Iran, the Middle East peace process and the political upheaval in the Arab world, will leave the White House in December, a senior administration official said on Thursday."

The Ross dude made his announcement "at a lunch with Jewish leaders," the NYT story continues, showing their subject in his most comfortable milieu. Among Jewish leaders, listening to their instructions and giving an affirmative response to any and all requests is the perfect characterization of a US envoy in the Middle East.

The US at one time attempted to present itself as an "honest broker" in the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, but as the right-wing PR machine grew and perfected its techniques, and the essential lubricant of political influence flowed from the Zionists to US politicians, facades and appearances ceased to be of much concern to the political establishment and its sycophants in the corporate media. It was then that an imposter like Ross could operate at peak efficiency as Obama's butt-boy emissary to Tel Aviv.

No stone has ever been left unturned in the Israeli campaign to remake the region in its image and interests. The plight of Palestinians has grown progressively desperate with Dennis Ross and his cohort putting the entire resources of the US government in the service of Israeli expansionist and colonialist designs.

"What a shame it is to lose one's mind," as GW Bush famously remarked, and he could have been speaking of those who would assert that the US deals evenhandedly with the parties in the Mideast. It is because of guys who are eager to follow the orders of their patrons, however immoral and illegal, that makes the process of oppression and exploitation so effortless and lucrative for corrupt governments in today's world.

So it's not hats off, but we drop our drawers for Dennis Ross, and wish that he kiss our arses with the relish he reserves for the guys who sign his paycheck -- may he find himself buried alive under pallets of benjamins!

The Iranian nuclear fantasy

Is this all you got? After all the build up and hoopla about Iran's nuclear program on the verge of a great breakthrough, and how it'll be bristling with atom bombs by breakfast tomorrow, all we get is a big fart and no shit:

Iran may be researching nuclear warhead, claims watchdog | World news | The Guardian: "The UN's nuclear watchdog on Tuesday expressed "serious concerns" that Iran had been carrying out research work on the construction of a nuclear warhead, and said the effort could still be underway.

In its report on Iran's nuclear programme, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it had accumulated more than 1,000 pages of documentation that had let it to believe that suspected nuclear weapons work was done under a "structured programme" up to 2003, and that "some may still be ongoing"."

The Israelis and their puppet in Washington are chomping at the bit, looking for the barest pretext to launch a full-scale attack against the Iranian nuclear program, when all the smoking gun turns out to be is more like a puff of cigar smoke instead of a mushroom cloud.

Iran MAY be researching a nuclear bomb? Since when the FUCK have they been required to hide their heads in the sand, while the US and Israel and the Gulf dictatorships surround the Persians with nuclear firepower, as they gradually assume an offensive posture?

Say what you will about the Iranian regime. At one time, a saner Israeli leadership understood that if they simply left well enough alone, the mullahs would fall as a result of their own inertia in the face of a young and restive population. Once the Zionist maniacs took power, however, their methods began to mirror their madness.

Israel's Likud government sees itself as the inheritor of the mantle of manifest destiny by which the European settlers eventually overran the north American continent, exterminating the native population in order to ravage the land and its resources. Since the rest of its neighbors have been bought out or brought under the thumb of Washington, there is but one obstacle to the realization of the Zionist conquest of historic Palestine -- and the way lies through Tehran.

For the US and its corporate oligarchs, the matter is simpler: bring the Iranian oil and gas under control of Western corporate control, and make the economy an appendage of the IMF and international banking cartel. The payoff is so great, and the banks so desperate for additional sources of liquidity in which to float the great debt ponzi we all live under.

Such is the confused panoply of interests that drive the Iranian anti-nuclear crusade, which at its heart is nothing about nukes and everything to do with seizing what Iran has and that others covet.

When the pretext is this flimsy, is there any limit to what the great corporate oligarchs and the interests they represent may contrive to do? Iran is being condemned for a collective thought crime, since there's an absence of any evidence of an prohibited work on a nuclear device.

It's absolutely staggering the depths of depravity that the self-appointed defenders of truth, justice and the American way will stoop to for the advancement of their sleazy agenda.

Tell us how you feel...

It's hard to believe that this has attained "critical mass" enough to be propelled to the top headline in the Google news machine:

Sarkozy overheard telling Obama that Netanyahu is a liar - CTV News: "PARIS — French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has laboured to improve French relations with Israel, said he "can't stand" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called him a liar in a chat with President Barack Obama."

Tell us how you feel, dude!

By all accounts, and if you take a broad view of his activities, it's pretty clear the Netanyahu is a jackass. If he were just another asshole, no biggie, but being in command of the world's 3rd largest nuclear arsenal, even a dickhead has a certain amount of gravitas.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and we are in on the secret, what to make of the new news that Sarkozy doesn't like the Nyetenyahoo? Or for that matter, the Obama rejoinder that he has to deal with the man every day?

Our thin-skinned counterparts in the Israel amen chorus will take it as a sign of disaffection with the state of Israel, rather than simply a knock against their belligerent and noxious leader. What the Israeli electorate sees in the guy, the admiration sure isn't shared by a large swath of the world's other "leaders" (or shall we say, their butt boys?). The Israeli state is pretty much a given. Whoever wants to wish that someday it will go away, as many nations have gone away before it, is not necessarily making a direct threat. No one loves everybody, but we somehow usually manage to get along without resorting to murder.

It actually would be healthy to learn more of the true feelings behind the diplomatic niceties that are lavished upon regimes that can't stand one another. People deserve to know what the real deal is, instead of the pleasantries that are endless peddled in the corporate propaganda machine.

This is why the Wikileaks phenomenon was so fascinating and promising in its time. It has pretty much been suffocated by relentless systemic pressure, but for a while there, many of the closely held, frank discussions regarding the machinations of the cat with the mice was seen in a broadly unfiltered way. There were no deep, dark secrets revealed, just the daily grind of diplomatic trickery and counter-trickery that is the currency of diplomatic cartels.

A fresh blast of oxygen has now been replaced by the stale old farts of conventional communications, but we still like the occasional expression of how our "leaders" "really feel about one another. It hardly humanizes them, since their character traits are all too common to be truly shocking or astounding. We enjoy the illusion that we're such an advanced civilization guided by rational and scientific principles, when the fact is we'd be clubbing one another with zest with dinosaur bones in the Garden of Eden, if only to get first dibs on the apple.

Do as I say, not as I do

The Israeli regime has showed its true colors once again, by making threats to attack others without provocation -- a simple act of aggression:

Israeli Minister Warns Iran Strike Is Possible - ABC News: "Israel's defense minister warned on Tuesday of a possible Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear program and rejected suggestions the Jewish state would be devastated by an Iranian counterattack.

Ehud Barak spoke a day before the United Nations' nuclear agency was expected to release a critical report on the Iranian program. The report is expected to implicate Iran in bomb building and erase any doubts about the nature of the program, which Iran says is designed to produce energy, not weapons."

Imagine if the Iranian PM had declared that Iran was being driven to attack Israel because it objects to Israel's nuclear weapons program. Not the bogus translation which is frequently repeated about "wiping Israel off the map," but a specific threat to attack Israeli military and strategic installations.

The Israelis would be jumping up and down, and the US would be in the UN security council proposing the most bellicose resolutions against the Iranian regime imaginable.

That would never fly, obviously. Nor do the Iranians make such threats, since they are never taken as idle bluster. Rather, depending on who's speaking, the threat of an attack is usually considered an act of war.

Still, the US can piously condemn the Iranians for their nuclear program while they and their Israeli pit bull make saber-rattling a daily affair, in preparation for the inevitable main event.

While the Israelis accuse the Iranians of bad intent, its the Israeli government that will be the one that attacks -- guaranteed. And when it does, it will be the Iranians who are condemned for not being sufficiently deferential to their masters in Tel Aviv and Washington.

The only hope is that Russia and China make such a move costly for the West. As this seems like only a remote possibility, one can assume that an attack will go down, and that once Netanyahu makes up his mind, there's no turning back. No wonder Sarkozy can't stand him.

As for Iranian counter-attacks, they really don't have much firepower compared with their nemesis, which in spite of all the protestations of vulnerability is armed to the teeth and backed up by US firepower, which guarantees no significant military response. About Iran's worse gambit, as far as the West is concerned, is if the Strait of Hormuz is closed for any length of time, which drives fuel prices up to crippling levels.

If the Iranians are serious at all about making this gambit painful for their antagonists, they'll go for where it hurts the multinational oligarchs the most -- in the wallet!

Leave my poor blog alone!

Unlike the rest of the world, I am unconcerned about driving traffic to my blog. I have virtually no readers, and have never made any attempt to interest readers in visiting. I simply enjoy the exercise of writing it, and the discipline required to keep posting.

If someone finds it through a web search or referral from some other site, that's okay, too. I'm just not actively soliciting visitors.

I do, however, get a bit of a kind out of the "stats" function in Blogger, where I can see where the few visitors came from, and what the referring site was. I admit, it sounds a bit self-contradictory to be interested in the statistics while not making any attempt at self promotion, but maybe that reveals something about how my mind works (such as it does...).

All this is a tedious lead-in to my point, which is traffic which originates from various sites selling blog-promotion or web-optimization or other web-based services. While this blog might on an average day generate two or three apparently genuine hits, it could register as many as 20 for some of these crap vendors.

For a while, the biggest offender was pu.gg, which seemed to be an aspiring "pirate bay"-type operation. Today, it's some other shit-pumper that has a software application that supposedly can help people make lots of money blogging.

I know how it is: everybody wants to get rich. In light of the fact that the world economic system is in really, really precarious condition, and people are more likely to become poorer rather than rich in the days ahead, this leaves me sad for them -- and for all the other strivers who think that they've played the game and deserve cash back for all their sacrifices.

Tough luck, bitches. We're all fools, and everyone who thinks that more possessions are the key to happiness will be hurting a lot worse than the ones who've learned to live on as little as possible. They're the only winners in this game.

China needs to go one step further on Iran

Sometimes China makes sense in its diplomatic pronouncements, but usually they prefer a bland, waffling approach that basically cedes decisions to the US and its proxies.

As in Libya, where it had negotiated extensive business deals, only to have NATO come in and tear up all the contracts in order to pass them along to its own multinationals, we see the Chinese position themselves for a similar humiliation regarding Iran, which is under threat of attack by Israel and the US:

China urges Iran flexibility, but opposes force - CNN.com: "China's stance is an important element in the diplomatic focus on the nuclear issue because of China's permanent U.N. Security Council membership. Even though China has supported some sanctions on Iran over the years, Beijing and Russia have not been as hard-line toward the Islamic republic as the other members of the Security Council -- the United States, Britain and France.
Hong said disagreements with Iran should be resolved through "dialogue and cooperation," Xinhua reported.
"The IAEA should positively clarify relevant problems by cooperating with Iran in an impartial and objective manner" and "Iran should be flexible and sincere when cooperating with the IAEA," Xinhua reported, citing Hong.
China warns against the use of force but will promote "dialogue and cooperation and play a constructive role" in dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue."

It's all very nice to tell the international community to act nice and get along, but these exhortations by China are taken as a joke in Tel Aviv and Washington. Despite the extensive commercial ties between Beijing and Tehran, and the considerable interest of China in securing future oil supplies, the regime seems totally lacking in resolve when it comes to defending its interests -- and its friends.

Face it, once the bombs start falling, it's too late for China to assert itself. If China wants to be respected and step up to the next level as a world power, it had better start showing a little more backbone in its dealings with the fading powers in the West. Washington is played out. It is like a body builder full of anabolic steroids -- muscle-bound but dickless. Its economic power is sapped, and all it has is a big arsenal, operated by half-wits and misfits, with which to obtain its will.

Since the US dropped even the pretense of standing for enlightenment values, and instead exports kleptocracy and exploitation globally, there's no point in maintaining the fiction that the international organizations like IAEA are impartial observers of NPT compliance -- the non-proliferation regime is rigged, and is used by non-signatories to pummel those who have abided by it in good faith.

If China wants to be a leader and play a role in maintaining some semblance of global law and order, it's time for Beijing to step up and put their money where their mouths are, and explicitly make it clear that an attack on Iran will be looked upon very unfavorably by China, and at the very least it must make clear that it will never support the US in the UN in any drive to legitimize an aggressive war on the Iranians.

Enough of this pussy-footing around. This is all about oil, and power, and China -- or somebody -- needs to stand up for a more enlightened system of international affairs than the barbaric regime coming out of the US.