The American people are not the only dupes to be patronized and bullied by the Empire’s congressional-military-media complex. According to RawStory.com, “A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of Afghans surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to ‘destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan.'”
As the report would have it, these silly people simply don’t understand that the entity we call NATO, but is really the US, needs to be in Afghanistan for their own good; the good of the Afghan people. For example, to destroy their only source of income: the poppy fields.
And so a reeducation program must commence. “‘We need to explain to the Afghan people why we are here, and both show and convince them that their future is better with us than with the Taliban,’ ICOS lead field researcher Norine MacDonald said in a statement.”
Remember “Radio Sawa”? You should. If you are a tax payer, you pay for it. Part of the neocon’s democratic deal in Iraq was that we got to pipe into Iraqi ears pro-American propaganda interspersed with J. Lo’s caterwauling and Jay-Z’s gutter grunts. The idea was to make them both love us and want to be like us.
Why don’t we do the same for the Afghans? We could buy them all little radio transistors, and pipe “Radio Sawa” type propaganda into their long-suffering ears.
But first, let them get high on opium. Where I do agree with the think tank is in its proposal “that Afghanistan license the growing of opium.”
In December 24, 2001 I advocated, “Freedom and choice – not prohibition, incarcerations and coerced treatment – are the best salve for a people that has been infantalized and brutalized for too long. In a country with a poor infrastructure, the ‘relatively stable value of opium and its nonperishability means that it can also serve as an important source of savings and investment among traders and cultivators.'”
UPDATE: For those of you who are new to my opinion on America’s foreign policy, please read up on the term “Reeducation.” After you have searched my Articles Archive under the relevant categories, of course.
MAUL MALIA; SCAN SASHA. NO, DON’T. Having seen the children down whose miniature trousers TSA goons have been reaching; having witnessed heroic little Mandy Smith’s ordeal (and her father’s reprehensible abdication); being in possession of a keen sense of justice and rights—I could never-ever condone such futile, en masse, state sadism and fascism. Not ever. Not against innocent adults. And most certainly not against children, not even the president’s kids, who seem sweet, and whose only flaw is to have been born to a miserable excuse for a human being.
Make that two.
The First Lady has seemingly not experienced a visceral reaction against what is being done by her husband’s administration (begun under his predecessor) to the American people. She has, at least, failed to give voice to a gut reaction to this mass contagion; this moronity, if indeed one was experienced.
This is the same FLOTUS of the “Fat-Based Initiatives”; the woman who so cares for America’s bloated kids. In this post I asked, “Why no white butterballs?” Even Michael Savage hasn’t dared to ponder what would Michelle say if more kids who looked like hers were being mauled by malevolent state workers.
As a mother—as a human being with a heart—I cannot stand to see kids being subjected to the cruelty of strangers. What a miserable excuse for a mother is this woman, Michelle Obama.
SAVAGING THE SAVAGES:
MORE PUTRID, PUSHOVER PARENTS
UPDATE I (Nov. 22): WHERE ARE THE MEN? This is no country for men, any men. You emasculate them, feminize them, make them over in the image of woman, and they’ll offer up their own children as sacrifice. Liberal men have been “liberated” from the natural instinct to protect their own. You can’t blame them. Women most certainly can’t blame men. This is what modern women have worked for; the state as parent and protector.
UPDATE II: RADIATION REALISM. Every doctor I’ve known has tried to persuade me that his particular brand of diagnostic radiation was just dandy for my health. When quizzed about the cumulative effects from the radiation prescribed by his colleagues to keep me in good shape, the medical man would become less cocksure. A cursory perusal of the literature on the additive effects of any radiation confirms that it is anything but safe. The issue here is that no innocent human being should be made to choose between “the Scylla of the scan and the Charybdis of the ‘enhanced pat down,'” even if the first boosts his health (as if). It’s a matter of choice. I have always chosen skepticism when it comes to invasive modalities when used liberally on healthy people.
Now comes a scholarly study, first reported in the The Daily Mail, according to which “full-body airport scanners are just as likely to kill you as a terrorist’s bomb blowing your plane out of the sky”:
Peter Rez, from Arizona State University, said the probability of dying from radiation from a body scanner and that of being killed in a terror attack are both about one in 30 million.
He said: ‘The thing that worries me the most, is not what happens if the machine works as advertised, but what happens if it doesn’t.
A potential malfunction could increase the radiation dose, he said.
Rez has studied the radiation doses of backscatter scanners using the images produced by the machines. He discovered that the radiation dose was often higher than the manufacturers claimed.
Rez suggested that the statistical coincidence means that there is really no case to be made for deploying any kind of body-scanning machine – the risk is identical.
But he added: ‘They’re both incredibly unlikely events. These are still a factor of 10 lower than the probability of dying in any one year from being struck by lightning in the United States.’
Critics say the low level beam used delivers a small dose of radiation to the body but because the beam concentrates on the skin – one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the human body – that dose may be up to 20 times higher than first estimated.
A number of scientists have already written to to the Food and Drug Administration to complain that the safety aspects have not been properly addressed before the nationwide rollout of the scanners.
UPDATE III: TSA THEME SONG, again. I still think that “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” best captures the TSA’s mission, conduct, and the mien of its mindless supporters. Do you disagree?
UPDATE IV: I’ve been remiss, and so have you for not pointing this out to me: even if you choose what to you is a lesser evil, the photons as opposed to the fondle (as Myron puts it), your TSA dominatrix could still pull you over for a once-over. It’s not like your decision between “the Scylla of the scan and the Charybdis of the ‘enhanced pat down'” is honored:
After “electing to go through the airport’s new full-body scanner,” “a bladder cancer survivor from Michigan who wears a urostomy bag that collects his urine,” “was pulled to the side to be patted down by a TSA agent.”
The 61-year-old retired special education teacher said he asked to be examined more discreetly.
Sawyer told WLNS correspondent Jessica Maki that after being taken to a private area, he alerted the TSA agents about his urostomy bag and the danger of its lid being undone, but they didn’t listen.
And when the pat-down began, Sawyer says the agent was so rough, the cap on the urostomy bag came off, spilling urine on him.
“No apology, no recognition – Is that urine? – no nothing, no offer to help me,” Sawyer said. “And I had to face the fact that I had to walk through the airport with urine.”
Do the hos who support this—other than the Fox blond squad, and polls point toward a majority in favor—detect a critical mass in the incidence of abuse travelers have experienced?
[Myron, do not expose Anna to this. Traveling for a wedding is not an emergency. Take a stand.]
When you hear the usual suspects on Fox wax about the land of the free we’re so blessed to live in; switch off. America is a fascistic state by any other name.
UPDATE V: REMOVING A PROSTHETIC BREAST. CBS: “A flight attendant and cancer survivor said she was forced to remove and show her prosthetic breast to a TSA agent during a security pat-down.”
However, what I’ve termed “sectional interests” have piped up again. Instead of arguing for the rights of all customers who purchase an airline ticket constrained by a state-monopolized system—cancer survivors are engaged in special pleading. Ditto airline pilots, flight attendants, etc.
UPDATE VI: As to Myron’s suggestion about special permits; I’ve been trying to make the point that special interests-based rights to pass without pain are bad for everyone and wrong. No one other than the suspicious should be searched. Why do you think Israeli security gives out special permits to those with cancer, the elderly, the pilots, the pretty… They don’t. See “TSA: Home Grown Terrorism (& Cretinism).” They do not molest people as we are doing; they question them politely.
“… In the words of a horrified Israeli aviation security expert, speaking to a Fox News crew: ‘You cannot allow the security personnel to see, and show the entire world, images of naked bodies of women and men!’ Amid ongoing American insanity, this laconic Israeli, Isaac Yeffet, has been making the rounds on CNN, PBS, Fox News—has been doing so for a decade, at least.
Yeffet is a former member of the Israeli Secret Service, and was once in charge of security for El Al. Almost a year has past since Fox News probed him for his opinion about the ‘full body scanners.’ Nearly ten years have gone by since the man testified before an equally idiotic Congress.
No other western country is a bigger target for terrorists than Israel. Yet no other nation runs a better (largely privatized), less invasive, smarter, security system, whose able agents simply talk to travelers. These profilers understand that 99.9 percent of fliers are ‘bona fide’ (Yeffet’s favored bon mot). ‘Shoes aren’t removed, passengers aren’t body scanned, and there are no pat downs,’ confirms the New York Times. A ‘hand search’ is seldom conducted, and only with probable cause.
Fox News wanted tough answers; Yeffet gave them smart ones. In countless news interviews over the years, Yeffet has implied that there is no substitute for intelligence—intelligence as in smarts; as in that dreaded G Factor. (No, Cosmo Magazine readers, that’s not the same as the G Spot.) …”
UPDATE I (Nov. 19): This country follows a mushy-headed maxim whereby to be a victim (of crime, terrorism, one’s own stupidity) is to be automatically conferred with oracular wisdom. This nonsense has been applied to any relative of those murdered on 9/11.
Two such Delphic creatures have praised the TSA home-grown terrorism and quipped that it would be far more productive to go long with the probe and grope routines.
I give you “Mary and Frank Fetchet, whose son, Bradley James Fetchet, was killed on Sept. 11. [They] have also issued a statement in support of the new measures, citing the failed Christmas Day plot last December as a reminder that ‘comprehensive security measures’ are still needed.”
Mary Fetchet appeared on FoxNews this morning, with a member of the (honey) Blond Squad, who herself quipped that news people are featuring a small noisy bunch of travelers which is in a minority.
Another believer is Alice Hoagland. The fact that her son was killed in the Twin Towers gives her the ostensible authority to recommend the inflicted rogering and radiating routines.
UPDATE II: In the footage of the agents feeling up every day Americans the mug of the offender is always concealed. Why? Isn’t it the victim who should remain anon? Even the people broadcasting these assaults on flying America have their head screwed on like Linda Blair’s in the Exorcist.
And it’s so imbecilic. They’re going thorough the motions knowing full-well that they’ll never meet a terrorist; 99.99999% of the individuals they violate are “bona fide.”
UPDATE III (Nov. 20): I call the liberal neocon Judy Miller Mrs. Chalabi. She was one of the “presstitutes” who enabled the invasion of Iraq from her perch at the New York Times. She’s no journalist. She’s a media person. Big difference.
During her tenure at the Gray Lady, promoting Bush’s war, Judy made sure to exclude all analysis (including from highly regarded experts) that didn’t comport with the Bush “thesis” about Iraq. Her preferred sources of information were corrupt parties like Egypt, Jordan, ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin, and Ahmad Chalabi, the man who fed a willing administration phony intel on Iraq so as to fire-up the War Party.
Today, on Fox News Watch, Judy the non-journalist, said that the American media had not covered the Israeli airports security methods.
Nothing mainstream media write is original. We guerrilla journalists and writers are always ahead of the pack, but Ms. Miller, like her colleagues, does not consider that a story/angle has been covered in earnest until she or her colleagues have stumbled upon it.
Imagine: Judith Chalabi being a respected panelist on a program about media bias.
On the same stage, Kirsten Powers, a liberal member of the Fox News Blond Squad, expressed her satisfaction with the porn protocol at the airports, and wept in sympathy for TSA workers. Yeah, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”
(Rep.) Ron Paul does the right thing with characteristic brevity. As WND.COM reports, Paul’s H.R. 6416 “is just two sentences long, stating:
No law of the United States shall be construed to confer any immunity for a federal employee or agency or any individual or entity that receives federal funds, who subjects an individual to any physical contact (including contact with any clothing the individual is wearing), X-rays, or millimeter waves, or aids in the creation of or views a representation of any part of a individual’s body covered by clothing as a condition for such individual to be in an airport or to fly in an aircraft. The preceding sentence shall apply even if the individual or the individual’s parent, guardian, or any other individual gives consent.
“‘We have seen the videos of terrified children being grabbed and probed by airport screeners. We have read the stories of Americans being subjected to humiliating body imaging machines and/or forced to have the most intimate parts of their bodies poked and fondled,’ Paul said.”
“‘This TSA version of our rights looks more like the ‘rights’ granted in the old Soviet Constitutions, where freedoms were granted to Soviet citizens – right up to the moment the state decided to remove those freedoms.'”
UPDATE II (Nov. 18): I agree with Myron that the Paul bill must provide for probable cause searches, as the Israelis do. More in my WND column, tonight. Does Paul exclude those provisions? I would have preferred a reiteration of the Fourth Amendment.
