Is it torture? Lets permanently keep the statue of liberties head dunked under water,

Is it torture?

Fuck yea it is. Are they kidding me? How can people have the gaul to attempt to defend this? If it tastes, smells, and sounds like torture, its fuckin torture.

Is this still America? I am changing my blog's name to the fuckin twighlight zone.

Some great America In this great American book that i read part of, had this line about america if our nation is not strong enough to get through crises like 9/11 without selling our soul, without changing who we are, without becoming just like the terrorists, than maybe this nation is not worth saving.

Oh but it was only a catapillar. 

Oh its only water, Do you get mad when you get wet at the beach, its the same thing at guantanimo. 

But i can think of a million reasons why it would be valuable to torture.

Dick Cheney can prove it works.

We cant torture POW's, when you give them a different title you can torture. 

It just aggressive techniques, we only slapped the guy a couple of times. 

What should we do, hug them?

Bullshit, Bullshit, and more Bullshit. You have these weasels coming on tv agreeing to be waterboarded? Sure i bet its done with the same intensity. 15 seconds of waterboarding is pretty comparable to 150 times being waterboarded. 

You have john mccaain, a man who was tortured saying it does not work. 

Did you know we prosecuted japanese post wwII for torture, guess what they did, waterboarding. 

This is so infuriating, that my fellow citizens can come up with a million and one good reasons to torture another human being. Could any of you weasils become the torturer? 

And the news is reporting see, we told you, all those guys we tortured in guantanamo have went back to join the taliban. Really? It had nothing to do with us creating a terrorist, by, umm, what that word, oh yea, fuckin torturing them.

This is the true test of a nation. Will our elite let these lowest forms of life who approved these techniques breath free air, or will they throw them in jail where they belong. 

You can cry all you want about how they want to kill us and our kids and grandma's and that this is the only way to stop them, but that is bs.  and deep down you know it. 

So thanks to the damn elites who run our nation. Now we are in a class along with North korea, Iran, Saddam's Iraq, all those cooks. No wonder why Bush found it so easy to find the axis of evil, it takes one to no one. 

We shoudl hang the statue of liberty upside down, with her head submergerd, that would be a more acurate welcome sign.

Modern History of Somalia

Chris Floyd is another amazing journalist i read on the web. He does amazing amazing work on issues you cannot find information on anywhere else. If you want to learn the back story of the Somali pirates go to Chris's blog. 

Did you know that in 2006 the country was organized and stable for the first time since the 80's, and the United States decided to fund and arm the ethiopian army to overthrow this stable government? Nice. 

I was going to summarize Chris but his words say it better than anyone, go check out archive of articles on the abuse, torture renditions, destabalization of governements in the name of the USA,

 The United States was directly involved in the invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in late 2006: a murderous "regime change" operation by forces funded, armed and trained by the United States. The invasion and occupation, which ended in January 2009, killed thousands of Somalis, ruined and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of others, and plunged the already broken country even deeper into chaos, civil war and ruin. American forces bombed fleeing refugees, launched missile strikes into villages, captured refugees and "renditioned" them to Ethiopia's notorious torture chambers, and, perhaps most chillingly,sent in death squads to "clean up" after missile attacks. 

The savage Ethiopian-American invasion was "justified" under the usual rubric of "fighting terrorism." It was ostensibly intended to oust a broad coalition of Islamic groups which had given Somalia its first semblance of stability in many years. The results of this "counter-terrorism" operation were entirely predictable: it weakened or destroyed moderate forces, while radicalizing many Somalis and empowering the most extreme and violent groups, led by the al-Shabab faction. In the end, the Terror Warriors had to admit defeat; the hand-picked, American-backed interim government, which included former warlords in the pay of the CIA, collapsed -- and the leader of the ousted Islamic coalition government became the new president, with the West's reluctant blessing. The entire war had been for naught.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1741-emotional-rescue-praise-for-sea-victory-could-presage-carnage.html

Somali Pirates

Allison Kilkenny has a great blog post up on the huffingtonpost.com about the somali pirates.

Basically its not as clean cut as the corporate news media lets on, but you knew that right?

When I hear the word pirate I think of those bad johnny depp movies. Huge ships, with gangs of criminals roaming around, causing trouble.

Allison points out this is far from the case in Somalia. That the case in Somalia, get this, might be a result of the western nations shitting on Somalia and forcing their hand.

WHAT?

I dont believe it. Could it be? The Western super powers taking advantage of a small third world nation? Yes its true.

In Iraq the people we liberated thought it was ok to kill our soldiers based on how our soldiers treated them after the liberation. The people we liberated in Afghanistan have turned on us after we killed so many innocent people with our unmanned drone planes. Osama and his whole movement attacked us on 9-11 because of the way we abuse the middle eastern world. Their might be a pattern here. Too many people hate us for our freedom. At what point do say maybe its not the entire world that has the problem maybe it is us?

Some people, we shall label them republicans, think these are necessary evils. "They want to kill us all shouldnt we defend ourselves?", they chant. Yes we should. But dropping bombs on entire villages to kill a hand full of terrorists might not be the best approach.

US government reports have determined that our war in Iraq has created more terrorists, yet so many people still refuse to look at themselves and their own countries habits in the mirror. Are we lazy, are we scared to face our skelatons?

What makes someone say look at impoverished, violent parts of the word and choose bombs as the solution over schools, war over job creation? It really does seem like we want the war, the violence, the hate, the retaliation.

Go read Naomi Kleins book right now, the shock doctrine. She argues the shock of violence, bombs, war, violence, poverty, lawlessness, chaos, leads to corporate profit. And Republicans love to talk up their stock portfolio.

So where were we, oh yea, Somali Pirates. So I just laid out a pattern of the whole world attacking us for some reason or another, and the US media still arguing its all of them that have lost it, not us, we had nothing do with it.

Allison Kilkenny goes deeper. Pointing out two issues that have crippled the lives of the Somali people, both resulting from the inability of the nation to form a stable government after 1991.

The first issue is overfishing of its seas by western nations, leaving few fish left for the native somali population.

The second is the dumping of nuclear waste in the waters(documented by the UN) which has been washing on shore and making many people sick. The dumping has occured, get this, to save money on disposal fees.

I know what your thinking, western corporations, hurting people to save a buck, thats sounds crazy. I know I know, I would find it hard to beleive too if i got my news only from corporate media.

Guess what the pirates have been asking for, money to clean up their waters. Sounds like something a crazed terrorist would want. And even though many experts agree that the somali pirates have never mistreated their captives, we chose to escalate the issue by killing some of them this week.

Am I saying kidnapping should be allowed and what the pirates did was ok, no way. Im am just saying their are many perspectives, and one powerfull is that we have a pattern of pissing people off and them biting us in the ass, than we bomb their neighborhood and they build an international terrorist network.

Also of interest, TPM is a news website who posts clips on you tube every day, corporate news roundup in 100 seconds. Check out the day after the killing of the pirates, and see how violent our corporate media appear.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIgu-YNe3Ys

Exxon Valdez 20 years later

Greg Palast, one of the top muckraking journalists of our time has a great, short peice on the exxon spill off the coast of Alaska, 20 years later.

http://www.gregpalast.com/stick-your-damn-hand-in-it-20th-birthday-of-the-exxon-valdez-lie/#more-2357

Some major points:

• The cause of the spill was not the captain being drunk, the true reason was the captain was asleep, and the third mate was navigating without radar becaue exxon never fixed the broken sysem.
  
• Protocal was not followed that would have allowed the spill to be much less catastrophic.
  
• Just in case of a spill all vessels are required by law to have on a board a tool that goes in the water and circles the spill to contain it. This tool was not on the boat at the time of the spill.
  
• Greg palast built a very large case of fraud against exxon, with the help of native population. The natives backed off when exxon threatened to hold back the money it planned on giving the natives to help cleanup. And guess what? Exxon still refused to pay.
  
• The natives lost their source of food, the ocean. When land animals began to eat the poisened vegitaion around beach areas, they also died out. So exxon flew in canned seal to eat, even though the can's were labeled not fit for human concumption. Thats because they were food for zoo animals.
  

And when the ceo of the company retired, his retirement package was 400 million dollars.


Thanks exxon, thanks corporate world, thanks congress, thanks supreme court. How do i belong to the same species as these people. Do they love money that much. Without the earth supllying humans with air, food, shelter and water we would not be alive. Yet somehow people deem it ok to poison what gives them life.

Could it be the same thinking of smokers who choose to poison their own bodies? But most times the smoker does not hurt anyone else. In this case Exxon ruined the lives of entire communites. Communities that fished for their food for who knows how many hundreds of years, in the same body of water. People committed suicide in these communites. Many have become alcohalics in these communites.

Am I the weird one becaue this cuts through me? Am I the wierd one becuase i get exited when republicans talk about more oil drilling in the few remaining prestine national parks?

Pakistan drone strike figures

Chris Floyd reports on his blog empire burlesque,http://www.chris-floyd.com/, some new figures coming out of Pakistan regarding the death resulting in the unmanned drone missile strikes.

Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent....

In just a few months in office, Obama has managed to raise the average kill rate achieved by Bush from 32 to 38 per month


So it took 687 dead Pakistani civilians for us to kill 14 al-Qaeda targets. At what point does are military deem the risk too large. 1000 civilians per target, 10,000 civilians per target? Would our military ever believe the cost is too high?

Phage Therapy

I just read an interesting article on Phage therapy. It is a way to naturally heal antibiotic resistant infections. The story follows a doctor in the US who searched for a way to help a patient and came across this idea used in Eastern Europe since the 1920’s. It had been used here in the states until the 40’s when the more convenient penicillin took over.

The phages virus is the most abundant naturally occurring organisms on earth. They can be found virtually everywhere-in soil, drinking water, sewage and in our bodies. As living organisms, phages are constantly changing and adapting in tandem with their host bacteria to kill them more effectively. Phage therapy could therefore eliminate the vicious cycle in which bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics, necessitating the development of new, even more powerful drugs, at which point the process begins all over again.

The article goes to Georgia in Eastern Europe and talks about the Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology, and Virology, where Phages as a medicine is trusted like aspirin. Since the founding of the facility they have successfully treated millions of patients and have had over 100 research abstracts at international conferences attesting to its clinical value.

Each prescription produced at the facility was custom made for each patient.
Phages are species-specific—-different strains attack different bacteria. Since some wounds can harbor hundreds of different types of bacteria, physicians there first culture a tissue sample of the infection to determine its precise bacterial composition. The next step is to brew a custom cocktail of sometimes hundreds of phages selected from the institute's vast library of thousands. This whole process can take up to four days. The treatment—often administered through an IV bag that drips phage liquid directly into patients' wounds for 24 hours a day—can last up to two weeks.

The problem in the states now is strict, expensive fda standard for drug approval. And since each prescription is tailor made of hundreds of different species of the phage bacteria, out of thousands of strains, it would be extremely costly and almost impossible to have the hundreds of thousands of different combinations of prescriptions approved.
The other thing the FDA is worried about is that the virus is living and is constantly changing and evolving. This leaves the FDA with a big unknown of what could happen.

But the odd thing is that today in the US the phage virus has been approved for use, just not for humans as a drug. It has been approved for deli meats. You read that correctly. The article points out that Phage therapy is used on deli meats to keep them safe from bacterial contamination. The difference is merely technical, spraying a phage on a deli meat is called a food additive, while using it to heal people, is called a drug.

This last part is the funniest part for me. Its funny how semantics is what prevents people in the US to use the most effective drugs. I wonder what it would be called if I put the deli meat on my leg infection, food additive or drug? If we ingest the food additive it must be safe right? Well not necessarily. One of my first posts I talked about how shady the FDA is when I saw them answering questions on capitol hill. They were talking about how they allow beef to be sprayed with the same carbon monoxide that exits a cars exhaust. The same stuff that can kill you if you lock yourself in the garage and turn the engine on, is ok when its sprayed on our beef. But they admitted the don’t test it because semantically it falls in a category where no testing is required by law.

Check out the full article:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/next-phage

Gietner and Bernanke on Capitol Hill

This past week the crooks Tim Geitner and Ben Bernanke answered questions during congressional testimony. They both should be in jail. But One of the better questions of the day was, When the american taxpayers have lost up to 50% of their retirement pensions why are they funding a bailout of AIG so that AIG can in turn pay those who insured their retirement losses. 

Of course you should be payed if you insured your retirement investments. Buts its ironic that when the company cant pay, and should be declaring bankrupcy, thus no insurance is payed out, the taxpayer is tasked with helping someone recoup their lost retirement investment, when the taxpayer themselves have no such help and must suffer the losses.

Oh, and when asked is this the case, niether Geitner no Bernanke would say yes. In fact Bernanke had the gaul to say if the taxpayer did not step up to help AIG they would have suffered up to 70% losses in their retirement accounts instead of only 50%. 

What a cocky SOB.