Yeah It’s Good For Some

Tags

corporations, drones, economy, Individual Rights, North Korea, Scalia, SCOTUS, wealthy

The Stock Market hit a new high.

Corporate profits are probably at all-time highs as well.

The people who do the work? Not so much.

Between 1979 and 2007 59.9% of gains in income went to the top 1%, 36.7% alone going to the top 0.1%. During that period, gains by the 90%? A mere 8.6%.

Productivity has increased since 1950 by 254%. During that same period, wages went up 113%, and most of that increase occurred by 1975. Productivity, on the other hand, has risen steadily and continues to rise.

The response of the corporate board room to the recession has been to find more efficient ways to accomplish their target goals. They devote their R and D to the purpose of creating a cheaper way to make their product. Cheaper never involves hiring workers. They would make their products devoid of human workers if that were possible. Machines don’t require health care benefits and pensions. They don’t need money devoted to safe working conditions and lunch breaks.

Don’t tell me, please that corporations are job creators. They are profit creators, and hiring is now the last resort to accomplishing that goal. That’s why Wall Street is doing so well, and yet the unemployment figures are still so high. It’s got zero to do with regulations or very little. It’s got very little to do with “uncertainty” about what the buffoons in Congress are going to do. It’s got to do with profit. There is no morality here. It’s not part of the capitalistic model.

Meanwhile, there was this farcical drama in North Korea.

The pity is that the media thought any of this worthy to report upon. Dennis Rodman is a delightful entertainer. As an intellectual, well, he leaves a great deal to be desired.

His “opinion” is about as useful as that of a three-year-old. And I like the dude. He’s had a tough life as a kid, and he’s managed to make a good life for himself. I give him credit.

Kim? Oh good lord, he never got spanked as a child, that is certain. And I’m not much for corporal punishment either.

But he definitely needed spanking. In fact he needs spanking now. He’s always in the middle of a tantrum.

And dude, find a new barber. That haircut is silly. Seriously.

It’s hard to judge this Supreme Court. I’m not sure if we haven’t had this kind of horror before, when the Court was filled with really nutty people who make a mockery of the Constitution.

The Dred Scot Court comes to mind. That must have been an awful one.

But it would be hard to argue that this one is close to the top of the list of really awful benches.

Scalia is an intellectual joke, playing word games about original intent of the Framers, when all it comes down to is his personal disgusting beliefs.

Calling the right to vote a “racial entitlement”. And then suggesting that instead of testing a law against the Constitution, he has a new job–doing the dirty work for Congress, meaning that Congress is too beholden to special interests and can’t do the “right” thing because it might cost them an election.

So Scalia to the rescue. Doing the “right” thing. What a douche.

Let me get this straight.

Some Republicans are all upset at the use of drones against US citizens.

Got that.

No Republicans ever raised this issue when Bush starting using them.

Don’t get that.

In American courts, EVERYone, citizen or not, is gets the same rights.

Got that.

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith is arrested in Turkey. He is moved from Turkey to Jordan (Turkey prohibits the extradition of prisoners to those few countries that still practice the use of the death penalty and we are one of THOSE countries) and then transported from Jordan to the US for trial.

Got that.

Republicans are incensed because he can’t be interrogated properly except at Guantanamo (he was interrogated by an elite force of experts in Turkey and talked to the tune of some 20 pages), and because he is a bad dude and has no right to the rights granted him in our civilian courts.

Don’t get that.

Morality sure winds a crooked course in the Republican mind. And incidentally, in a good many Democratic ones as well.

Just a word about something I care about.

I am now the Sunday morning cat adoption “cleaner” for Pet Smart. I do this through a local adoption group in my area called A.W.A.R.E. What I learned is that Pet Smart joins with local animal groups across the country to adopt out animals. That’s a good thing.

My job is to clean the cages, feed and water where these cats live, and to play with them as much as I wish while I’m there. This is done twice a day, seven days a week, all serviced by volunteers.

My only point here, is that if you are interested in adopting a kitten, think of them as a source. You are not getting a “kitten” mill animal, but one that has been rescued and needs a good home. Prices are typically $50, and all animals are already spayed or neutered and have all their shots. In some cases the animals may come from the local shelter. You will probably get a bit better animal, since these kittens get more socialization than those typically housed in shelters.

I have no agreements of any kind with Pet Smart or A.W.A.R.E. in return for these statements. It’s only because I care about the animals. Perhaps other pet stores do the same. I haven’t inquired.

 

Related articles

• Scalia Calls Voting Rights Act ‘Perpetual Racial Entitlement’ (crooksandliars.com)
• Why Scalia’s ‘Racial Entitlement’ Quote Is Even Scarier Than You Think (thinkprogress.org)
• Voting is no ‘racial entitlement,’ Justice Scalia (tv.msnbc.com)
• Dennis Rodman Puts The New Abnormal Into Absurd Perspective (zerohedge.com)

 

I Need Two More Feet!

Tags

Donald Trump, drones, GOP, life in the foothills, Military, Obama, tea baggers

Wandering into the kitchen in the middle of the night for a glass of water, my toe met its Waterloo. No I didn’t trip up to Iowa, rather my toe met the corner of the wastebasket container, and my toe lost the battle. At first I figured it for merely another stubbing with searing pain for about two minutes, and then chalk it up as another of those miserable toe meets _________stories.

Twas not to be. As I turned from the sink, and began to walk, a tingling was felt that was definitely harbinger of much worse to come. I sat upon the sofa and manipulated the fourth digit and heard/felt a distinctive popping, which suggested that all was not kosher.

I moaned and hobbled off to  bed, where I moaned again. The Contrarian sat up.

“I broke my toe,” I groaned.

“Where?” he asked.

“On the way into the kitchen,” I quivered.

“On the wastepaper container?”, the specifics somehow of great importance here.

I squelched the question, “are you going out there and beat it up?” and merely said, “yes.”

He got up. I tried to get as comfy as possible. A few minutes later, I heard him coming into the room.

“Still awake?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

He turned on the light, and stood there with an ice pack. He got one of the decorative bed pillows and laid it in place with the ice, and fixed my foot upon said pillow. “The internet said to keep it elevated and iced to prevent swelling.” he advised as he climbed back into bed.

“Thank you dear, it’s really not hurting.”

Which would all not be so terrible were it not for the fact that the other foot sports something we have called a stone bruise, which has lasted for about three weeks on my heel. I have tried to ignore it and “walk it off” but it hovers between getting much better, and then being horribly painful and hobbling. That leaves me with no good feet.

With flip-flops, and my toe taped in friendly buddy camaraderie with the bigger middle toe, there is just enough padding to my bruised heel foot to get around. Oh and with a healthy dose of some prescription ibuprofen given to me by the dentist to assuage sore gums from my teeth cleaning last week.

Diego, I might add, is bummed.

Meanwhile. . . . .

This kinda sums up my concerns about drones.

Whether for surveillance or for attack, they pose a serious intrusion on our lives. Nobody thinks it wrong that they are snooping at the border, because we don’t want “them” coming across.

Probably few in America would object if they patrolled in high drug trafficking areas within some of our cities, because we want “them” stopped.

How many other areas are we prepared to accept drones as a part of modern law enforcement?

How many are prepared to have them used in a more aggressive form?

There is an old Star Trek wherein constant war between two planets resulted in an agreement that each side could “score” computer attacks, and “casualties” would be generated. People would then march dutifully to disintegration chambers. Thus each country could preserve its infrastructure and life could go on. This had gone on for five hundred years.

Proof that what we get too far from, we find more palatable. Making war nice and easy and unmessy, has unintended consequences.

It was predictable.

We knew they would.

They can’t help it.

They hate with a viciousness and wild fresh-meat smell that is scary, funny, and as I said, oh so predictable.

They claimed we would never see a picture because he never had shot skeet, or as one Blazey Boob put it, “I have shot lots of skeets and he ain’t shooting any skeets that I ever seen.” Yes skeets indeed.

When they produced the picture, if was of course, doctored, like his birth certificate, his college transcripts, his law license, and well, his “I’m a human being” card.

He kills over three thousand Muslims with drones, and is called a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood, intend on bringing Sharia law to Merika.

Go figure. They are nuts. It shows.

On the other hand, watching the GOP engage in a mmmm, Tea People taste good, feeding frenzy is most entertaining.

I mean you go to bed at night a card-carrying conservative Republican, and wake up the next morning an RINO, to be heaped on the pile of derision by the reactionary right-wing. NOT CRAZY ENOUGH ARE YOU screams Yoda.

Some don’t think the Tea Bibbers have the stomach for a long fight against rational Repubs who just want to win a damn election. Some don’t think they have the numbers or will to start their own third party and linger in the basement with Ralph and the other groups that vie for a place on the ballot. HERE WE ARE ↓ IN THE BASEMENT. I think remnants of the old Communist Party still dust off the buttons every four years and give it go for the Bolshevik cause.

Rush and the folks at Foxy Noise are in a tither, not knowing what to do, while Karl insists that if you will just give him more money, he will use it and WIN this time. He promises. Rush has made a living off of cheating and double-dealing all his miserable life. He’s so very prepared to continue.

Meanwhile the Tea bibbers no longer have a clue what they were about in the beginning. It had something to do about banks they think, though what it was, nobody recalls. They look down and find a KJV bible in one hand and an AK-a5 in the other, and look longingly at the Bud on the table. I may not have two good feet at the moment, but they need another hand immediately. The Bud eases the cognitive dissonance of what is in their hands.

Donald is suing.

You see, Bill said that he was the spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.

Donald whipped out his birth certificate to prove him wrong.

Bill, smilingly suggests that old Hair-do misses the point.

Donald wants Bill to donate some money to charity.

Bill smiles.

Donald sues.

Donald has nothing to do.

All those Apprentices run his business.

He can’t spend all day trying on toupees.

He can’t spend all day looking up all the words that people call him, that would take forever. And besides, things like Asshat aren’t even in the dictionary yet. But the word has been submitted to the Oxford English Dictionary committee with his picture.

Have a glorious day, and don’t stub your toe. Because I will laugh if you do. Really i will. Misery loves company.

To Drone Or Not to Drone

Tags

drones, foreign policy, warfare

Let’s just start out by saying: I’m conflicted here.

So don’t expect answers, just a lot of questions.

Under the Obama Administration, drone attacks of a lethal nature have increased from something less than fifty under Bush to something over 350 under President Obama. Some of this undoubtedly has to do with better technology, but more has to do with an increasing willingness to use predator drones as a means of assassinating so-called “enemy combatants.”

My moral sense, informed by my faith, tells me that drones are simply wrong, because war in general is wrong, and killing people deliberately is wrong. I find nothing in the teachings of Christ which can make war appropriate; indeed his life and death suggest that it is never appropriate. That said, my own church, and most Christian denominations support the concept of war in limited circumstances–something called “justified” warfare. That includes, but is not limited to wars of self-defense to repel an invader. The trouble is, the term just is pretty broad, and although there are a series of elements to it, in the end, each is big enough to drive a truck through. It ends up meaning, war is acceptable when we think it is.

Still, I could go much further than the Church and stick to my basic belief that the way to stop wars is to stop warring.

Yet, I live in a real world with real threats. Innocents around the world are dying by the hundreds each day due to the evil of lethal aggression from a variety of sources. There seems to be a duty to intervene to stop it. When and how and for whom tend to be the stumbling blocks. Sadly our intervention seems more determined by how “strategic” the country involved is. Do we want or need something from it? If we do, we are inclined to do what’s necessary to bring it to stability.

That stability, sadly, has little to do with what is morally right or wrong. It is the main reason we find ourselves hated by large numbers of people throughout the globe today. That is true of every continent. We have supported vile dictatorships in the name of that stability and the consequent protection of our “interests”. The people have not forgotten. Some, perhaps most, recognize that the American people at large don’t make these decisions–they hate our government but not necessarily us.

So, if we life in a world where war is going to go on regardless of our moral objections, where do drones fit in?

First, let’s set the record clear. There is nothing wrong with using drones on the actual battlefield. It is no different from a large cannon or a tank. Nobody argues that the use of drones should be prohibited here.

The area of contention is the use of lethal drone strikes in otherwise “neutral” territory. Best estimates suggest that the number of people killed by drones issued by the US, amount to somewhere between 2,000 and 3200, give or take. Somewhere between 18-23% of those killed were non-combatants or as we like to cleanly call them, “collateral damage”. This should give pause by itself.

There seem to be several points of inquiry about their use in general:

1. Who decides?
2. What are the standards by which decisions are made to identify a target?
3. Should Americans be subjects of attack?

Some argue that it is unseemly or somehow wrong that the President signs off apparently on each of these targets. They claim he should be more divorced from the action. Since he is undeniably accountable for the program and what it does or doesn’t do, I find this argument specious. In fact,  am slightly comforted that I can trust that a sane head is making the ultimate decision.

By the way, the very fact that President Obama has expanded the drone program so dramatically during his tenure in office, suggests that the Tea Party reactionaries who claim that Obama is in love with Muslims and is secretly working for them, are as we would expect, crazy as loons. Yet of course the Tea Party does not laud the President either for his actions, suggesting that their motives as we always suspect are more racial than rational.

The standards, we understand are largely revealed in documents released. They suggest that the following must be met:

1. The target must be an imminent threat to US citizens safety and lives.
2. There must be no reasonable way to capture the target alive.
3. There must be no other rational alternative.

Since most if not all of those killed by drones have occurred in foreign countries, it is hard to explain how the first standard is ever met. One can only conjure up claims that this target was the one to give the “go” to a plot ready to be employed but for the target’s okay. I suspect that such a situation is rare.

The second standard would seem to be regularly ignored as well, since we know that special ops alternatives can and are used on occasion, and it is unclear when they cannot be used as opposed to when they can.

The third standard seems redundant.

The third issue, regarding Americas being targets seems to be the one that causes all the wringing of hands and hysterics. I find the claim that American citizens are citizens and therefore “different” completely bogus. If we contend that American citizens should not be subject to drone attack because it violates their constitutional rights to life and liberty absent due process efforts to remove them, than I think the same applies to foreign targets.

We claim that our “rights” are nothing less than human rights. We tell the world that they too should give their citizens nothing less, because it is simply morally right. We often attempt to interfere in other countries precisely in an effort to help the people there “obtain” their human rights. We maintain sanctions against countries that we find in violation of “human rights.”

Given all that, how can we treat those we capture and claim to be “enemy combatants” anything less than the right to be charged as such, and to be afforded due process. Guantanamo is a hideous example of the ugliness of American policy toward non-citizens. Before somebody suggests that it is no different from a POW camp, think again. Most  all POW’s wore UNIFORMS. Their ACTIVE engagement in warfare against us was not in dispute.

Many at Guantanamo dispute their designation. Some have been released years later because it was determined they were arrested in error. We have held some of these people for nearly 14 years not. It is immoral, period. To suggest that they are not entitled to  the basic right of having an impartial judicial determination of their “guilt” is inhumane in its narrowest sense. To suggest that we cannot “safely” conduct trials in this country is ludicrous and makes Timothy McVeigh and other terrorists who were tried here, some kind of “special case” which they were not.

At present, polling in the US suggests that 83% of the country approves of the drone program. Close to 2/3 believe that it is appropriately used against American citizens. There seems to be no real divide between Democrats and Republicans; this is one area where partisanship apparently does not play.

That is what I know. I’m sure there is much I don’t know. If you can assist me in my quandary, please do. I’m still not sure where I come out with all this.

You may way to take a look at the following:

The American People Love Drones

The International Law of Drones

Related articles

• US Government Says Drone Striking Americans Is Legal (earththreats.com)
• Watch: License to Kill: Government Authorizes Drone Strikes on US Citizens (abcnews.go.com)
• Leaked Memo: How Obama Justifies Drone Killing of Americans (atlantablackstar.com)
• The Debate on Drones: Away from the Politics, the Nameless Dead Remain (world.time.com)
• 10 Questions Congress Should Ask Killer Drone Policy Architect John Brennan (alternet.org)
• Predator Drone Hypocrisy (uscapostasy.wordpress.com)
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