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July 22, 2013

Be very afraid: What happens when the other bad guys get drones too?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 2:30 pm

OMG! What if American neo-cons aren’t the only imperialist bastards to start developing and using drones! What if some other imperial bastard bad guys also start using drones too? Or Goldfinger or the NSA or the phone company gets them? Then, obviously, what would happen next is that wedding parties in Oregon and Ohio and women and children in New Hampshire and New Mexico will also have to keep their eyes on the skies 24/7 too — just like they now do in Pakistan and Palestine!

And when (not if) this happens, we can realistically expect to see a whole new 9-11-style fear-and-loathing scenario being played out every day on every quiet, peaceful suburban street in America.

Yes, thanks to drones, war might easily be coming to America soon — just like the Pentagon has already generously brought war to the doorstep of almost every other country on the planet.

When the American neo-con military-industrial complex began developing and using drones, it obviously opened a whole new can of worms. And are we any safer now because of these drones? NOT. What goes around comes around. Thanks a lot, War Street.

“But, Jane,” you might say, “you’re acting just like Chicken Little here. No one else is gonna be able to develop drones — or be able to use them either.” Hey, why not? Drones are basically model airplanes with payloads. How hard can it be to develop one of those? All that the other bad guys have to do is just infiltrate some model-airplane rally in Ohio — and it’s Goodnight Cincinnati.
Someone just informed me that Monsanto is currently also developing drones. Dare to plant some heirloom tomatoes in your back yard and you’re toast! “Step away from the tomatoes!” That is, if you get any warning at all.

And I also just learned that in Afghanistan the Taliban are now able to bring American imperial bad guys’ drones under radio control and then use them to strike back. What if DuPont seized Monsanto’s drones? Or the Mafia seized control of your friendly local police department’s drones? Or psychopathic child-stalkers in Florida got their hands on one. Or if they started having drone wars on “Big Brother” or “Survivor”? Or what if those mean girls at your old high school got “droned” by the science nerds. Fox News could use them to knock off us liberals. Scouting could even offer a “I built a drone!” merit badge. And I bet that those same National Rifle Association marketing executives who brought us Sandy Hook and Stand Your Ground would just be creaming their jeans at the thought of selling every household on every block in America its very own drone.

The possibilities for death from the skies are endless here. And you don’t even need to have access to yellow-cake or reactors or cyclotrons to kill people either!

Be very afraid.

PS: The National Security Agency should also start being very afraid too — but for a different reason. If the NSA truly is listening in on all of our phone conversations and reading all of our FB pages and e-mails, then it must surely know for certain what billions of people all over the world are currently saying about their outrageous spying operations — and not one of these billions are hitting the “Like” button either.

It must be really scary for the NSA to eavesdrop on so many of the world’s party lines — only to discover that everyone who is anyone is talking trash about THEM http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18094-richest-300-persons-on-earth-have-more-money-than-poorest-3-billion.

PPS: And speaking of national security, I just went to see The Lone Ranger — and loved it. It seems that the Lone Ranger and Tonto were actually keeping the Old West safe from corporate corruption! http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bob-patterson/50444/dalton-trumbo-rides-again So where are they now when we really need them?

Then I went to see “World War Z,” a biology-gone-wild thriller that you just gotta love http://www.worldwarzmovie.com/# But then on the way home, I tripped on a broken sidewalk, broke my arm and ended up in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, giving a whole new meaning to the term, “blockbuster”.

And another summer blockbuster that I’m all excited to see is “Elysium,” with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster. “In the year 2154, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy, who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined planet.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvGE2nP4ga8 This is the logical extension of what is currently happening on our corporatized planet — except that in Elysium in 2154, the American imperialist bastards of the future have even awesomely hotter-looking robots and drones than they do now.

 

April 10, 2013

America: Always searching for new and better ways to kill people

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 3:27 pm

It’s not at all hard to believe that our most popular national priority right now is to see how many more new and effective weapons of death we can supply our troops with, supply foreign dictators with, supply our cities’ paramilitary police with, supply every rabid gun-nut and gangsta in the country with and/or also supply ourselves? Geez Louise!

And can you also believe that we just spent over 300 billion dollars on developing a F-35 bomber which, despite its crappy design, construction and performance, is still an ultra-deadly weapon of mass destruction on a post-Godzillian scale? http://www.warisboring.com/2010/11/01/kill-the-f-35/

What ever happened to knives, shivs, nunchuks, baseball bats or even fists? If you really want to kill someone that badly, shouldn’t you be required to do it with just your bare hands?

Over in this pile on my left we have all kinds of stuff we could be spending our money on that would make us healthy, happy and safe. And over in that pile to my right we have all kinds of stuff to kill people with. If you were to compare these two piles right now, one pile would about the size of a wedding cake — maybe. And the other pile would easily dwarf the Empire State Building or even the Twin Towers — the one that all the gazillion weapons we own couldn’t save. How misguided (or even sick) is that!

We Americans need to get a hold of ourselves. We need to put our blood-lust in check.

On the one side we have drones, robo-cops, tasers, lasers, assault weapons, white phosphorus, torture chambers, chemical weapons, biological weapons, gun shows, Blackhawks, Bradleys, hummers and atomic bombs.

And on the other side we have ballet. The symphony. Arts and crafts and music in the schools. Yawn. To most Americans, this side is a joke. “All that sissy stuff won’t protect us from The Enemy,” you cry. But guess what? With almost all our wealth and experience and knowledge and intentions going toward developing even newer and better ways of killing people, the enemy is already within our own walls. We ourselves are the ones who are slowly but surely destroying America — physically, financially and morally.

And we ourselves have now become all those scary nightmares in the closet, angels of death, schoolyard bullies, serial killers, relentless attackers and masters of our own doom that we fear so much.

That’s beyond sad. That’s psychotic.

Imagine if we had spent seven or eight trillion dollars on stuff like healthcare, jobs, schools, food and parks — instead of on constantly inventing new and better ways to turn human beings into fetid and rotting corpses and cadavers? Sure, we might all have been murdered in our sleep by the Bad Guys. But at least we would all die happy. And there wouldn’t have been all that many bad guys to begin with either. Or we could have just bought them all off.

Not only that, but having all these nasty cold-blooded weapons instead of having adequate healthcare, decent housing, infrastructure improvement, etc. is already killing us on a gargantuan scale. More Americans die of hunger, homelessness, untreated diseases, unregulated firearms, domestic violence, child abuse, corporate greed, agribusiness pesticides and GMO epidemics, Wall Street shadiness, prescription drug “side effects,” over-the-top industrial pollution, improper nuclear waste disposal, prison-industry callousness, heartless pension cuts, bankster housing scams, etc. than have ever died as a result of any “enemy” action.

And according to journalist Mark Karlin, the NRA is currently trying to sponsor legislation that supports selling guns to terrorists on our watch list, violent abusers of women, and the legally blind! How many Americans would that kill in a year? Osama bin Ladin woulda been so proud. http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17893-gun-guys-support-selling-guns-to-terrorists-on-watch-list-violent-abusers-of-women-and-the-legally-blind-carrying-handguns

Despite all our good intentions, bravery, wisdom and even common sense, America’s largest and most popular industry right now is still designing, manufacturing and selling weapons that kill men, women and children.

America today is not a country I can be proud of.

PS: I am currently reading Peter Barus’s new book, “Matters of Life and Death” — all about Japanese sword-fighting and the honorable philosophy and art of “engagement” with an opponent http://www.amazon.com/Matters-Life-Death-Essays-Budo/dp/1481204432. But guess what? No one is ever “engaged” by a nuclear weapon. No one is ever “engaged” by a drone. There are no heroics involved in wholesale murder and slaughter. Just ask the surviving victims of Hiroshima and Auschwitz.

PPS: And speaking of Auschwitz, my very favorite holocaust museum ever is located in Terre Haute, Indiana. Founded by Eva Kor, a survivor of the Mengele twins project, this museum is based on Kor’s heart-felt philosophy, “Forgive your worst enemy. It will heal your soul and set you free”.

We have seen again and again in places like Bosnia, Congo, Kosovo, Israel, Afghanistan and Rwanda, how victims of brutality then turn around and become victimizers themselves — how quickly prey learns to become predator. So let’s try something new and end this vicious cycle. “Let there be,” as Kor herself says, “no more wars, no more experiments without informed consent, no more gas chambers, no more bombs, no more hatred, no more killing, no more Auschwitzes.” http://www.candlesholocaustmuseum.org/index.php?sid=44

Someday I hope to visit this inspiring museum myself.

PPPS: I’m still taking my month-long involuntary tour of cheap places to stay in Berkeley while my apartment is still getting re-habbed — although a friend of mine just commented that I should say “renovated” instead because re-hab sounds too much like someone has just sent me off to the drunk tank.

But the house-sitting/dog-walking gig ended yesterday and now I’m renting a SRO up on Parker Street for three nights. Hopefully I’ll be moving back home on Monday, although who knows? They just discovered black mold in the apartment above me and that might take some more time because they gotta call out the haz-mat guys in white suits. But that’s okay. I’m sort of actually starting to enjoy being pseudo-homeless and constantly “On the Road” — just like that other Berkeley resident, Jack Kerouac.

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