sparrow chat

Seventy-five percent of Americans were in favor of the Iraq invasion, back in early 2003. Surely, this country must contain some of the most ignorant, inhumane, egocentric, human beings alive on the planet?

Seventy-five percent. That’s three-quarters of the population.

And why did they support the Iraq invasion? Because they were fired up by revenge and hatred and self-aggrandizement, used by a bunch of criminal politicians and their lackeys who utilized the events of 9/11 to manipulate their, oh, so compliant, masses into accepting a strategy that would have seen American politicians standing trial for war crimes, had they been leaders of some other, less militarily powerful, nation of the world.

No-one in this country has so far mentioned the hypocrisy of George W Bush, standing in the United Nations this week bleating about the dreadful antics of the military junta in Burma, while his own military junta continues to ravage a nation it has been raping and pillaging for the last four and a half years. No-one so much as whispers about that.

Those seventy-five percent of Americans have now convinced themselves the occupation is all about assisting Iraqis to stop killing each other, rather than admitting their occupying military started the problem, catalyzed the problem, and is now systematically prolonging the problem. All with a little help from the wonderfully sympathetic media, ready and all too willing to saturate the American brain with tales of individual heroism and good deeds – “Making a Difference”, and designed to smother any hint of shame or guilt that might just attempt to break surface, if ever managing to struggle through that huge, all-engulfing bubble that is the American ego.

A study by the Association of Psychologists of Iraq (API) early in 2006 discovered that:

[children] “are seriously suffering psychologically with all the insecurity, especially with the fear of kidnapping and explosions.”

“The only things they have on their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the US occupation,” said API spokesman Marwan Abdullah when he released the report.” [my bold]

Let’s not pull the punches. If three-quarters of Americans had not wished to vent their avenging bloodlust on someone, anyone, it is unlikely this war would ever have occurred. Never was there any evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11. Only the lies of Dick Cheney and his accomplices; lies the American people never called on him to verify.

Today, those seventy-five percent have changed their views somewhat. Most now consider the invasion and subsequent occupation was not worthwhile. When asked why they have changed their minds, almost without exception they cite the US military losses, the huge financial costs. They still don’t give a tinker’s cuss for what has been done to another nation in their name. The Iraqi losses, against which the US dead are insignificant, are of no concern to them. They may as well not exist. In truth, they don’t anymore. What does still exist are the millions displaced; the thousands of orphans; mothers without children; fathers without families; some, without anyone.

All thanks to seventy-five percent of Americans who wanted to get their own back, and weren’t bothered whom they destroyed in the process.

THIS is just a small part of what they did.

Filed under: Always in the right

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According to a report in the Independent newspaper:

“US soldiers are luring Iraqis to their deaths by scattering military equipment on the ground as “bait”, and then shooting those who pick them up, it has been alleged at a court martial. The highly controversial tactic, which has hitherto been kept secret, is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of a number of Iraqis who were subsequently classified as enemy combatants and used in statistics to show the “success” of the “surge” in US forces.”

Full Independent report HERE.

Filed under: Man’s inhumanity to man

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It looks like the US Department of Energy has dropped a rollick to the tune of possibly $58 billion.

When George W Bush approved proposals for a new nuclear waste dumping site back in 2002, it seems the DoE hadn’t bothered to rush out and check the seismology of the terrain in Nevada where the site was to be built.

In fact, they never rushed at all to do anything, until just recently.

Now it seems, the biggest and most expensive public works project in American history has been thrown into turmoil by the discovery that a faultline thought to have been hundreds of meters west of the site, actually passes directly under it. Or, to be exact, as a report in the British newspaper, the Guardian states:

“The fault is now thought to run beneath a storage pad where spent radioactive fuel canisters would be cooled before being sealed in a maze of tunnels inside the mountain.

Bob Loux, the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, expressed amazement that the US Department of Energy had only just carried out the “11th hour” drilling tests.

“It certainly looks like DoE has encountered a surprise out there, and it certainly speaks to the fact they haven’t done the technical work they should have done years ago,” he told the [Las Vegas Review-Journal].

“It’s going to have to cause some change of the design in the final analysis. It’s going to impact the safety case.”

The site is at Yucca Mountain, an area well known for seismic activity:

“Since 1976, there have been 621 seismic events of magnitude greater than 2.5 on the Richter scale within a 50-mile radius of Yucca Mountain.”

Apparently undeterred, the DoE is continuing “…..to develop repository design, construction and operating plans…..” for the site.

Well, what the hell? They won’t be the ones who have to live next to it, will they?

Full Guardian article available HERE.

Filed under: Criminal negligence

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Evo Morales wants this to be the millennium that brings us all together to save human lives.

No wonder Western capitalist politicians are scared to death of him.

Filed under: Evil leftist regimes

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THIS has to come close to the epitome of bad taste?

^{Thanks to “Dependable Renegade” for noticing it.}

Filed under: Cheap and nasty

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Below is a graph of casualties in Iraq over the last three years. The success of “The Surge”, as depicted by the American administration, is shown to be a pack of lies.

The graph is courtesy of “Mother Jones”, and can be viewed in greater detail HERE.

Filed under: Who’s kidding who?

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“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” ~ Lee C Bollinger, President of Columbia University addressing the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Sept 24th, 2007.

Thus began the opening remarks of the man who invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, to speak at his university. In many ways it sums up the attitude of a nation buried in hypocrisy and media/corporate indoctrination that a man is assessed, condemned, and insulted by his host even before he has begun to speak.

Whatever one’s personal viewpoint of the Iranian president he undoubtedly displays a quality sadly lacking in his American counterpart. That attribute is personal courage. George W Bush has not even the backbone to stand up and face his own American critics. Every speech, every engagement, every opportunity for George W Bush to speak before his countrymen, is screened and ticketed, with invited guests scrutinized by secret service police before ushered into his hallowed presence. Wear the wrong T-shirt, and you’re out on your ear. If you’re not a member of “the Party”, you’re barred.

Freedom of speech, the great right this country hollers from the rooftops, is not available in the presence of the United States’ president.

The greatest sadness, the depths to which this nation has plummeted, is in the mis-information filling the heads of so many US citizens. Read any of the forums relating to Ahmadinejad’s visit, and you’ll find them filled with hatred and violent response. Most, are from people repulsed by his being allowed to set foot on American soil. They are completely unaware of their country’s obligations as permanent host of the United Nations. This is the level of their ignorance, yet they choose to vent hatred and hypocrisy against a man and a nation of whom they lack any knowledge, except for the putrid claptrap emanating from a moribund “free press” long degenerated into a platform for the biased, the petty (Time magazine managed to describe him as both ‘naive’ and a ‘dark genius’ in one sentence), and egocentric. (Today, J. Scott Carpenter’s article in the New York Daily News was entitled, “How Can We Bring Him Down?”)

Why should anyone in the West wish to bring him down, Mister Carpenter? What would it achieve? A greater sense of American pride and patriotism?

It is sad this nation has once again taken to its breast the act of warmongering as a talent and asset to be lauded. From the event now known as 9/11, an occurrence perpetrated by a small group of deluded fanatics mostly of Saudi Arabian origin, and allowed to happen by a US political system long grown fat, idle, and corrupt, has been born a monster that ravages the world like some international King Kong, or Creature from the Black Lagoon. That monster is America, and those presently ravaging the world are Americans.

Blindness is not normally contagious, except in the United States, where millions are unable to see anything but the propaganda spewing forth from Washington:

“Iran is building a nuclear bomb and must be stopped at all costs. Such actions endanger the whole world.”

What has endangered the whole world more than the occupation of a Middle Eastern nation by a foreign power; more than the support of the most powerful nation on earth for a country that has steadily eroded the rights of its Arab neighbors for the past sixty years?

Is a nuclear armed Iran more dangerous than that?

Iran states it has no interest in building a nuclear weapon, but challenges its right to do so, should it wish. After all, it argues, Israel, Pakistan, India, and most Western nations have oodles of nuclear weapons. The UK alone has enough plutonium, around 100 tonnes, to build fourteen thousand bombs. If a small island like the UK has that amount, how much is stockpiled by the US?

Would an Iran with a couple of nuclear devices really be the threat US politicians are so fanatical about posturing? Or, does the truth have more to do with corporate-American interests in the Middle East, its furtherance of empire?

As for the hysteria self-righteously whipped up over Iran’s alleged involvement in the bombings of US forces in Iraq, would not Canada come to America’s aid if it was being militarily occupied by foreign forces? Americans still have this totally stupid idea that somehow the US is doing something good in Iraq; that the Iraqi people want them there, cling to a desire to be ‘Americanized’. Imbibe anything other than the American press or Fox News and realization engenders a situation vastly different from that promulgated by the US media.

Wake up, America!

No-one in the Middle East wants you there. You are the enemy. You are occupying someone else’s country by force of arms. Those who tell Americans anything else are liars.

The leader, or mouthpiece, of these lies, the one from whom most of the falsehoods and iniquities issue, is presently residing in the White House. No-one is allowed to question his ideals. Only the ‘faithful’ are invited to his soirees. He lacks both moral fiber and basic courage. He sends his own countrymen to die for a cause few, but he, believe in.

This week, Ahmadinejad has been likened by Americans, to Adolf Hitler. No-one is suggesting he is a virtuous man, or anything other than a power-mongering politician, but he believes his country has a right to that which others have, but deny him. The regime he represents may not be democratic, it may be loathed by some, but it is Iran’s sovereign government and only Iranians have the right to change it, as only Iraqis had the right to topple Saddam Hussein.

For all his faults, Ahmadinejad displayed certain qualities just by being at Columbia University yesterday. As stated earlier, they were virtues lacking in the United States ‘Commander-in-Chief’.

No-one will ever get the opportunity to stand before Mister George W Bush and say:

“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

Filed under: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

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You’ve just got to hand it to those slick Florida advertising execs, this time they’ve come up with a real winner.

Miami’s Downtown Development Authority have just given the go-ahead to a new logo, in black and hot pink, designed to publicize the downtown area. It seems the logo is specifically aimed towards attracting the ‘less educated’ tourists.

According to yesterday’s Miami Herald:

“DDA board members voted 9-2 Friday in favor of the new logo, created for the agency by local branding and advertising company República LLC. Within months, the logo could show up on banners, T-shirts, billboards — all over downtown.

Critics of the design worry it will project an image of Miami as a city of illiterates, and might also go over the heads of foreign tourists, leaving them unimpressed and confused.

But Miami Beach branding expert Mauricio Giammattei was optimistic most people would understand the new downtown logo, despite a couple of missing vowels.

The object of all this attention? A simple spelling mistake:

DWNTWN MIAMI

Though, according to Giammattei, it was no mistake:

“It took some getting used to, but it’s a smart logo……..you’re not asking a 70-year-old to move to downtown. You’re asking a 24-year-old to move to downtown.”

I guess the inference being 70-year-olds are better educated than today’s generation?

Well, ok, who needs vowels anyway?

RJ DMS

SPRRW CHT

Filed under: Vowelfully inadequate

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