Synderesis Identified As Cause of Wrecked Brain Syndrome

"Future soldiers may operate in encapsulated, climate-controlled, powered fighting suits, laced with sensors, and boasting chameleonlike “active” camouflage. “Skin patch” pharmaceuticals help regulate fears, focus concentration and enhance endurance and strength."

Rebuilding America's Defences, P.N.A.C. Report, Sept. 2000

A friend of the Gazette, called to say that he thought he had discovered the cause of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, an identified mental illness affecting more and more soldiers returning from their multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The symptoms of PTSD can range from subjective psychological disorders like fidgetiness, insomnia, distraction, and alcoholism to more paranoid behaviours such as suspicion, hostility, and bad tempers to outright anti-social conduct like rape and murder. As one Army psychologist put it simply but cogently, "basically your mind is broken."

Most of the psychological studies on PTSD have focused on its symptoms -- which ends up being a fancy way of saying that much of the studying has spent time and effort cataloging the many ways in which a mind can be broken. Since the mind is an incredibly versatile faculty, it is hardly surprising that it can be broken in hundred of ways that range from "a little out synch" to "exploding into a hundred pieces."

Neurological studies have identified various bio-chemical changes "associated" with PTSD behavioural symptoms, such as lower cortisoid levels, hippocampus shrinkage and so on. But in the end, these too, while they may lead to new generations of useful psychotropic drugs, are simply physiological symptoms. The only known cause, is some kind of traumatic stress.

But life is full of stress, some of which is no less shocking, pulse-raising, stomach-tensing or grief-inducing than conditions on the field of battle. This has led people, especially people in the military, to doubt the existence of war-related PTSD. Besides, it hardly helped recruitment efforts to admit that your healthy proud son who marched off to war would come back with a brain turned into swiss cheese.

During the Great War, people spoke of "shell shock" -- a more of less physical state of exhaustion and trembling paralysis. Considered to be a variant of "fatigue," the military had no great objections to recognizing the symptoms seeing as they weren't anything that weren't curable by a swig of brandy, a day's pass, and maybe a good sleep-in followed by a hot shower.

During the World War, perhaps due to absence of trench warfare, shell-shock was less of a phenomena in the public mind. It was replaced by "the gitteries" made famous by General Patton's famous slap. And it is fair to say that most people felt Patton had been right to "put a little backbone" into someone who couldn't "get ahold of himself" and control natural fears that were felt by everyone. If World War veterans felt bad about what they had seen or done, they tended not to talk about it.

"Oh tell us Mr. Winslow, tell us, did you kill any Nazis? C'mon tell us," we boys squealed delighted to find out that our history teacher had been a real life Sergeant in the war. "C'mon..tell us."

"I never saw anyone fall from any shot I fired," came the terse and disappointing reply.

The Vietnam War was different. Returning veterans did not keep things tersely inside. Still, the official reaction at first was that the Baby Boom generation was just a bunch of babies who didn't have the discipline and fortitude of their fathers. Although the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration ultimately recognized PTSD as a real battle-related casualty, it was still treated much in the vein of syphillis or a foot fungus. The Government's efforts went into (1) not making a very public deal about it and (2) commissioning studies to identify symptoms (i.e. symptom levels), to establish "early identification procedures," "preventative" (ie. ameliorative) measures, counselling resources, "stress management" programs and so on. Soldiers with syphillis got the better deal. By and large, veterans with wrecked brains were criminalized or left to sink or swim on their own.

By the end of the first year of the Iraq/Afghanistan war, though, Wrecked Brain Syndrome loomed as an immense dark cloud on the horizon. Although the Neocon Administration which had engineered the war was hopeful the compliant press would down-play any story, the Pentagon's own statistics began to paint a frightening picture. Two years into the war, and the cat was out of the bag. Soldiers returning from Iraq and soldiers being sent back to Iraq for second and even third tours of duty were showing elevated symptoms of Wrecked Brain Syndrome.

One Army study found that after one, two and three tours, 12%, 18% and 27% of soldiers showed PTSD symptoms. A Rand study conducted earlier this year found that nearly one fifth of US military personnel who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan had suffered some symptom of PTSD. "Our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it," said one general.

Our friend said he had been reading reports about these cases and was struck by how the authorities claimed not to be able to "identify" any singular cause. The studies hopped around from personal issues such as "difficulties readjusting" to military issues such as "diminished mission effectiveness." They mixed up symptoms, talking in the same breath about "signs of depression or PTSD;" and, of course, they talked about the effect of "multiple tours" and "insufficient" recovery time, as if it were all simply a question of over-training. It seemed, he said, as if they wanted the cause to remain fuzzy and tentative.

So I asked my friend to explain what he thought was causing this battle-related PTSD, and he replied that he thought it was caused by soldiers encased in the latest high-tech killing armor being called upon to repeatedly blast away at and kill a supposed "enemy" who was indistinguishable from ordinary men, women and children and who at best was so poorly armed as to be practically defenseless.

It was quite odd my friend should have brought this up, because just the other day I had occasion to check up on Thomas Aquinas's definition of "conscience." Most people think of "conscience" as the little birdie on your shoulder that tells you what's wrong and what you really, really must do. However, the matter may not be quite as simple.

In Latin, the word con-science is comprised of "cum+scienter" -- that is, "with knowledge of..." In St. Thomas' view, conscience has two parts: the passive part which has knowledge of something and the active part which brings that knowledge to bear on conduct in practical situations. The key question is: knoweldge of what? Synderesis.

The best way to understand idea of synderesis is to put morality aside for a moment and turn to geometry. Everyone will remember that all geometry is based on certain very fundamental axioms, such as "Two things each equal to a third thing are equal to each other." In Thomas' view, such axioms were more primary and root-level than even our most basic "concepts" or "principles". Such axioms were actually part of the mind's (the soul's) structure. A person simply cannot think at all if he thinks against these axioms. The mind simply won't work.

"I see where you're going," my friend said.

Yes. St. Thomas was of the view that in addition to these purely "logical" or "mathematical" axioms, the soul (or the mind) also had built-in moral axioms. An example would be our innate sense that it is unfair to punish a person twice for the same one offense. It is impossible to explain why that is wrong, we simply cannot think that it is right to do otherwise. These innate moral axioms he called synderesis.

Conscience begins by becoming aware of, "opening up to," and having knowledge of these axioms. Once we are infused with knowledge of such an axiom, we cannot but act accordingly.

"Did I ever tell you about my friend Larry...?" my friend asked.

Larry P. had been a Navy pilot in the Phillipines in the 1960's, a time in which the U.S. was waging an undeclared and unpublished war against the Huks and Moros, primitive native rebels. Larry P flew aerial missions against these savages and on one such mission he caught a Huk in his site. The rebel looked up and began to run for dear life through the waving brush of the field toward the cover of the thick dense jungle. But Larry P's AD-6 with its mounted 50 calibre machine guns was gaining on him and the Huk knew he wouldn't make it. He turned around, and in his loin cloth and bare chest, drew an arrow into his bow and fired up at the plane. At the same time, Larry P. pressed a button and let loose a barrage of ballistics that pulverized the rebel fighter in a ball of fire, as his arrow fell hopelessly short of its target.

Larry P, flew back to the base, got out of the plane and tendered his resignation. "You can't do that!" "Court martial me, do what you want. I'm not doing this anymore." There was nothing at all to bargain.

Well of course; that was it. Larry P. had acquired conscience of a moral axiom; an axiom that soldiers have known about for centuries; an axiom even boys know. A fight between equals is fair; a fight between unequals is not.

Kill the poys and the luggage! 'tis expressly

against the law of arms: 'tis as arrant a piece of

knavery, mark you now, as can be offer't; in your
conscience, now, is it not?

Fluellen, Henry V.

Interestingly enough, modern science has rather born out St. Thomas's idea of synderesis. Several years back, some animal behaviorists at Emory University conducted an experiment with capuchin monkeys, in which the monkeys were had to do some sort of work, at the end of which they each got paid a cucumber. Needless to say, in capuchin society a cucumber functions like money, at least in the sense of pay or reward for work. So the experiment went on for several weeks, the monkeys doing the work assignment (whatever it was) and getting paid a cucumber when it was over. One day, with no lead up or explanation, at the end of the work-day, the scientists only paid cucumbers to half the crew. The monkeys went nuts. All of them were quite upset and even the capuchins that had been paid refused to work.

I was quite excited when I read this, because it was evident that the monkeys were operating from some axiom of fairness that said: equal pay for equal work. What was exciting about this, was not that the simians had "achieved" some "human level" of consciousness, but rather that, as monkeys, they had this built into their monkey-minds. What this meant was that this axiom of justice was not a relative human construct. It was something that existed in the monkey soul millions of years before man ever existed himself.

Skeptics would perhaps argue that the only thing that had upset the monkeys was the breaking of a learned and habitual routine. But to me, that doubts too much.

And, it doubts too much even for the very evil people that are currently operating the U.S. Government; for in the depths of what passes for their souls they are aware that they are forcing our soldiers to engage in unnatural acts.

A recent article in Time magazine, “The Military’s Secret Weapon,” disclosed that “for the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that is only half the story. The real story is that such reports are just a step in the process of acculturating the country to accept having its young men turned into doped-up killers.

Why did the people who wrote the P.N.A.C. report for the "New American Century" write that our soldiers of the future would wear "“skin patch” pharmaceuticals" in the climate-controlled, powered fighting suits? Why such a vision? Because their policy of global "full specturm dominance" requires our military to engage in so-called constabulary missions in what the report calls "zones of democratic peace." Iraq is such a zone, and the mission is none other than to engage in continual "shaping of the security environment."

This "shaping" consists in intimidating, kicking in doors, randomly arresting, and generally brutalizing the civilian population. According to the P.N.A.C. report these "constabulary missions" are "likely" to "generate" violence. How so? Because it is expected that some people in the occupied zone of democratic peace will resent being abused in this fashion and will fight back with whatever inadequate means they have at their disposal... at which point they will simply be blasted away by some computer guided drone, sidewinder, or gross-calibre weapon.

It was entirely according to plan, that upon occupying Baghdad, U.S. soldiers started randomly rounding up young teenage males, parading them through the streets (naked) and giving them a "taste of detention". It was entirely according to plan, the the U.S. phosphorized "the enemy" civilian population in Falljuah. And it is entirely according to plan that U.S. drones are currently blasting away the "gooks" in Afghanistan, just as we practiced napalming and defoliating the Taliban networks in Vietnam.

Our neocon military understands that American soldiers will be asked to repeatedly kill an unequal opponent. They even have a word for it: "asymmetrical warfare." Thus when one prisoner in Guantanamo tried to commit suicide, the commanding general called it an act of asymmetrical war.

The listed authors of the P.N.A.C. report are a roll-call of neocons: Perle, Feith, Kagan, Kristol, Wolfowitz and yes Donald Rumsfeld. These morally cancerous malevolents understood full well that their work was "as arrant a piece of knavery, as can be offer't in your conscience"

They understood full well that such asymmetrical war would break eventually break the human mind because the mind would be called upon and forced to act against its most axiomatic structure... It is a evil-minded distraction to waste time cataloging the hundreds of ways it can break down, the fact is that it is broken and useless because it has been forced to act against its conscience.

The people who have taken over the U.S. Government are the devil's spawn. There is no other name for them. They understood that the only way to get human beings, young American men, to engage in these brutal "constabulary" wars of oppression against civilian populations would be to turn them into doped up, semi-human, semi-android killers. With or without drugs, their souls would be dead.

©WCG, 2008

.

It's Time for Punitive Voting

It’s time to start punitive voting.

The concept of punitive voting is very simple: If we loose, YOU loose.

As things are now run, Democrats (like Pelosi, Franks, Feinstein, Biden, and even Boxer) think they’ve got Progressives in a corner. After all, who else are we going to vote for? So they toss us the occasional chicken feed while they

vote billions for war and destruction

vote billions for insurance companies that deny health coverage

vote billions for the banksters that rob and plunder America, all

while they deny bankruptcy protection for people who loose their homes because they committed the crime of falling ill,

while they deny environmental protection for a poor earth that is whitering and dying under the unslaught of naked greed

while they do nothing of any serious importance to assure people a life of wellbeing and freedom.

The senawhores and pimprasentatives who do this figure we’ll vote for them anywyays because what are we going to do, vote Republican?

Hey, the way I see it, if you act like a Republican you should be treated like a Republican. We loose anyway, so we might as well kick your sorry ass out.

It may take a cycle or two, but that is the only way to work for change. You can’t plant until your clear.

VOTE PUNITIVE.

P.S. Call up your local congressoid’s office and tell them about the concept. and listen to the stunned silence at the other end. Oh shit......

©WCG, 2008

The New Constables

Don't say Chipster didn't tell ya' -- Constabularism has arrived in uh'Murka.  The crowd control scenes from the Republoscum convention  show that the only difference between the Goon Staat thugs in Iraq and those in St. Paul is the colour of the Keflar.

As this article shall explain the militarization of domestic police forces is the necessary correlative of the constabularization of the military abroad.  Both are aimed at maintaining a state-of-seige in which the civilian population is regarded as a “suspect enemy”.  The result is the brutalization of everything. 

Constables in Minneapolis & Baghdad

For those who haven't been diligently following this blog: What is Constabularism?

"Constabularism" is Neo-con double-talk for imposed regimes of ongoing state-intimidation and oppression.  The word was first forged on the anvils in Smirky Billy Kristol's Cave known as Project for the New American Century, to describe a military strategy formulated "to secure and expand the 'zones of democratic peace."   In case anyone didn't quite get it, this entails equipping and training the military to "shape the security environment in critical regions.”  The shaping entails a blend of military, intelligence, propaganda, policing, and provocation simultaneously working externally from the zone and internally into it.  This "full spectrum" military blurs the distinction between military and civilian, war and peace.   And don't think that "the Homeland" isn't a "critical region."

In order to grasp the malignant perverseness of everything Neo-con scum do, it is necessary to understand what is meant by "zones of democratic peace."  Although claiming lofty antecedents in Kantian idealism, the phrase denotes a post- World War ("II") sociological wackjob which "argues" that states adhering to so-called democratic values tend not to go to war against one another; ergo world peace can be maintained by extending zones of democratic peace! 

Of course, the "hypothesis" is prima facie ridiculous.  "Democracy & Peace!"  Sounds great.  But even to those inculcated with our cultural prejudices, the vexing question arises: what is "democracy"?  The prevailing view among the Zones Crowd is that a "democracy" is any kind of elected government where at least 10 percent of the population votes.  Oh Wow!  By that definition neither Athens nor the Roman Republic would ever have lifted a finger against their neighbours. When it comes to "what is peace?" the whole hypothesis collapses as sociologists make attempts at arguing international law only to peter out into unscientifically reaffirming certain "self-evident" contemporary, plati-truths which may be summed up as "Hitler started it". 

Without pressing the matter too hard, the zones of democratic peace theory is the simply the catch-phrase for a polemic that seeks to extend capitalist materialism as a way of life.  This is nothing particularly new.  It was, after all, the "Liberal Agenda" throughout the 19th century. The Monroe Doctrine was the first Zonal Declaration used to "mark out" the Spanish Empire for the extension of Anglo-American political liberalism and free trade.  If anyone wants to get an idea of what zones of democractic peace look like, they need only go to Latin America.  The post-War neo-liberal agenda simply trumpets an old tune; and it bears remarking that every US president at least since Wilson has blown this horn in one fashion or another.  In other words, the Zones Theory simply asserts that Free Trade and a Global Market Economy will bring peace and prosperity to all but a few.

The best that can be said for this theory is that anyone is free to  proselytize his favorite snake oil.  The murderous neo-con perversion consists in advocating the extension of democratic peace through war and semi-war. Scumbag Kristol's core tenet is that the United States should  “preserve and extend” its military “preeminence” by simultaneously fighting “multiple theater wars” in order to “shape the security environment" and "extend zones of democratic peace."  What Kristol and his PNAC gutter-buddies have done is to fuse "liberalism" with "preeminence" and "extension" with "conquest". It is one thing to commercially compete, to argue,  tempt and persuade; it is quite another to bring "democratic values" at the tip of a sword and under the heel of a boot.


Under the heel of a boot -- because constabularism is the necessary next step in "securing" the peace once democracy has been "extended".

The September 2000 PNAC Report (Rebuilding America's Defenses) emphatically urged that "constabulary missions" were not to be confused with traditional "peacekeeping" roles.  Why not?  Because "peacekeeping", as it has been understood in international law, is basically a question of buffering between belligerents or maintaining basic services and public order during an occupation.  When armed belligerents are involved, the military peacekeepers (like the U.N. White Hats) simply position themselves and patrol between them.  It's a very basic proposition.  In terms of occupation which presupposes a conquest of territory, the peacekeeping basically amounts to being a big proctor over society.  The military stand guard, while the country's normal and domestic police, postal and hospital services continue to operate as usual, reporting to the occupying military authority instead of the erstwhile government.

But taking Israel's "pro-active peacekeeping" in the West Bank as a paradigm, the neocon Report insisted on dispensing with U.N. auspices and limits.  "Shaping the security environment" meant more than patrolling the streets. It included "maintaining" such things as "no-fly zones," conducting its own intelligence operations and be configured with "combat service support personnel with special language, logistics and other support skills."

What has to be understood (and few have) is how the word-drones in the neocon workshop interwove traditionally distinct and even exclusive categories.  The technique was to speak in conjunctives and then to cross over categories which didn't match.  A perhaps key example was their speaking of "extending" and "securing" zones while maintaining operative intelligence capacities. Military intelligence needed for extending (i.e. conquering) territory is one thing, police intelligence for securing occupied (i.e. no longer hostile) territory is quite another.

Traditional military intelligence consists in finding out where the opposing forces are and what their game plan is so that you can go out and kill them before they kill you.  But what is involved in police intelligence, conducted by the military, in an zone which is no longer the theatre of hostilities and the occupants of which are supposedly peaceable (if resentful) civilians?  Traditional police intelligence, even in the 20th century, has been fairly limited.  It involves undercover work with organized crime or drug dealing, keeping tabs on specific suspects and maintaing contacts with various snitches and other  unpleasant people.  None of this is particularly useful in terms of occupying and "securing" a "zone of democratic peace."  Nor was it anything the PNAC needed to fuss about since the use of existing police forces by the occupying authority is well established in practice and under international law. 

No.  Although the PNAC was intentionally confusing issues for those not cued into their neocon speak, they were not in the least concerned with anything that a normal person would think of as "constabulary."  What they meant was that the occupying army would continue to presume that the entire population within the new "democratic zone of peace" was in fact hostile and therefore suspect. But unlike an opposing army or even opposing guerillas, ordinary civilians do not wear uniforms and are not in any particular place "over there" to be shot at.  Unlike ordinary criminal elements, ordinary civilians under occupation aren't doing anything suspect other than being a "potential enemy" in an asymetrical situation.  Of necessity, the mission of the so-called constabulary forces would comprise security-shaping actions against anyone on an ongoing basis.  These actions would include random searches and arbitrary detentions not guided by any constitutional limits; the use of snitches, double agents, to penetrate and provoke;  the use of "turned" locals to act as propagandists or spreaders of disinformation.   In short, in the militarization of civil police procedures and the reduction of civil society to a new form of battlefield. According to the PNAC report itself these "constabulary missions" are "likely" to "generate" violence. Gee.... why would that be?  The purpose of all of this has nothing to do with policing or "intelligence" and everything to do with letting those we have "freed from tyranny" know who their new master is. 

Welcome to Abu Grahib

Thus, under the infected language of the neocon bacillus "securing and extending zones of democratic peace" meant turning a liberated country into a vast terrorized and degraded concentration camp.

 

“Suspect enemy.”  We no longer hear the cynical ambiguity. A suspect is someone who might be something, or might not. Conjoined with “enemy” it does not mean that the person is an enemy, only that he might be.  But the phrase has come to sound and mean the same as “enemy suspect” -- ie. a definite enemy who might be doing something wrong. But in war being an enemy is the “wrong.” What the phrase does is to destroy the concept of civil society.  Societas means and is founded on a principle of unsuspecting fellowship. I see you - you see me and we are friends.  The Fiend's “shaping the security environment”  destroys this principle.

Smirking Billy Kristol and his Gutter-Buddies, understood that such constabulary missions could not be carried out with traditional military hardware alone.  Maintaining no-fly zones and blitzing rural villages off the map can only go so far.  For that reason, the PNAC report called for using "transformation technologies”  and for taking the battle to the internet itself.

What are some of these technologies?  Spy drones, developed by the Israelis, some almost as small as an insect that can fly into homes and hovels to "monitor" and -- hey, why not? -- kill the inhabitants. Sonic Cannon (Long Range Acoustical Device -LARD), which make noise so loud it prevents thinking and turns you into a stupid,  passive zombie.  Slippery Goo, a slick ground spray that is so hyper-slick that it prevents even the minimal friction required to stand.  Not only are you brain-blasted dead, you are become a flopping fish on the ground, if that.  Lastly, there are laser burn rays, that will give you the exquisite feeling of being burned alive, without leaving a mark. All of this is nothing super-secret.  It has been reported quite openly here and there on the internet.  But they are facts that do not exist in the weltanachauung of the New York Times and other official media.

As for the internet, the PNAC Report chapter “Space and Cyber Space” says it all.  The rebuilt mission of the U.S. military was to dominate inner and outer space.  Needless to say, outer space will include more domestic and military spying and inner or cyber space will include proactive disinformation actions, aka “controlling the narrative.”

When any of this is disclosed in the press it is usually done under the myth of developing "more humane or effective" battle-field weapons. Some of it is. But a lot of it is really designed to be used in constabulary missions against essentially defenseless civilians in order to disable them when they get restless and terrorize them thereafter.  

That, in brief, is the New American Century's Global Dystopia.   It ought to be of some concern, therefore, when the following picture appeared in 2004

Is that the sort of Baghdad in Manhattan we want to see?  Not me.  But I did not hear or read a single expression of shock.  On the contrary.  Murkans were relieved that their security was being protected from the never seen but ever potential evil one. 

Cartoon, Le Monde, March 2003

It ought to be of some concern when it gets announced that the LAPD started experimentally using "spy drones" in its "fight against crime."  But the average Americaw is too goddamn stupid to put two and two together. What is taking place is the creation of a full spectrum police force that is a mirror image of the full spectrum military.

The coverage of the "riots" in St. Paul are a case in point.  It is essentially irrelevant who started it, whether the rioters were peaceably assembled until provoked or whether they were lawless anarchists.  It is also not particularly important whether the protesters or the police got out of hand. Riots happen, have happened and always will happened. They are a routine and uninteresting phenomenon. 

What is far more menacing is simply the fact that the police were decked out in body armour, no different from our constabulary forces in Iraq.  This, in itself, indicates a planned level of over-reaction that is not consistent with crowd in control in a civil society.  

But there was more.  The broadband farts that pass for mainstream news aren't worth mentioning.  Speaking duely and dully of 'pepper gas'and mass arrests, even the leftist  or "liberal" press glossed over some salient facts.  The police used used sound canon and stun grenades. They used police intelligence service to invade and disrupt entirely peaceful groups.

The neocon occupation forces that have taken over government are slowly inuring us to accepting the Thug Staat as a normal variant of civil society.  The presence of Borg-Units mechanically stomping down the street, is  seen as "normal".  Tasers are standard equipment, and standard equipment get used as standard operating procedure.  Four years on from 2004 and we now allow stun grenades and sound bombs to be used (at low levels for now to be sure).  Slowly but surely, and with hardly a whimper, we are being trained to live in a zone of democratic peace.

That this brutalization of society is taking place to varying degrees throughout the world is not to say that it is inevitable or desireable.  It is neither, but it does go to show the extent of global corporate police state, the undergirds the glitzy world of malls and consumer glitter.

Some may say that you can't arrest a person without a choke hold or taking him down.  Some may argue that there is no reason to expose our valiant Donutheads to being hit by bricks and bottles.  Some may argue that there is no way to effect mass arrests without herding people like cattle into holding pens.  But all of this misses the point.  Crowd control does not require militarization of government and the  employment of the most intimidating and thuggish means possible.  The message being sent is simply  "Our Boot.  Your Face"

It is a total canard to say that protestors are getting more cunning and violent.  They are not. Most protest assemblies are peaceable, and the scenes from St. Paul show ordinary people of all ages in ordinary clothes.  It was the police who were dressed for violence. 

It is nothing but cowardly ignorance to palaver about "lawn'order" and the intolerability of riots.  Riots are the price of freedom. 

“There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

“It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”  (Federalist Paper No. 10.)

That was James Madison, the chief architect of our Constitution.  All freedom runs risks.  Risks that people will abuse it or take things too far.  Any assemblage can get rowdy and when it does, it is entirely normal for the police to respond.  If it gets uglier, then the police can respond more forcefully.  But there is no need in a free society to preemptively cage and beat up protestors.  None.

Comparing pictures of Baghdad and St. Paul, of Iraq and Afghanistan and the U.S. it is misplaced to think that "what goes around comes around."  What is seen are aspects of the same underlying phenomenon taking place simultaneously. 

Some may wonder why we use such insulting language against neo-cons.  We do it because it is the only way to approach truth-in-reporting.  The neocons shaping external and domestic policy  are not "political opponents" they are malignant, corrosive, utterly evil excrescences on the body politic.  In their cunning but morally-mindless way they are out to destroy all civic good and will leave a brutalized wasteland where civilization once stood.

©2008 Woodchipgazette

You can't Out-Pander a Palin

For years -- since McGovern or at least Carter -- Demorat electoral strategy has been based on the mousy notion that if they just toned down the "librul" parts of their platform they could attract enough of the DumbFuck vote to win. The Republoscum lie low and let the Demorats tone themselves down. Once the Demorats have self-gutted, the Republoscom come up with some freak-of-nature dumbo whom not even the Demorats in their most craven self-abasement could out-down . Plus ça change.

©WCG, 2008

United States Atones for Monroe Doctrine.

Attending a meeting of Euro-leaders at Lake Como in Italy, Vice President Cheney offered official mea culpas for the United States' unilateral embargo of Cuba. "That is no way for a responsible power to conduct itself,” Mr. Cheney said. “And it reflects the discredited notion that any country can claim an exclusion zone of authority, to be held together by muscle and threats.”

©WCG, 2008