Foto by tgw, "A Photographic Look Into Our God's Eye," New York City, March 2012--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shouldn't We GET THE HELL OUT OF AFGHANISTAN--NOW! I mean a crazy MF American soldier killed 16 innocent Afghans including little kids--what an insane war this is--the Afghan people had nothing to do with 9/11--all they did was give shelter to bin Laden who our military and CIA put in Afghanistan in the first place to fight the Mujaheddin--the Afghan people didn't ask for him--and then this CIA agent bin Laden ended up in Pakistan anyway--so why didn't we invade and occupy Pakistan? And once bin Laden was assassinated, why are we still turning Afghanistan into a killing field? AMAZING! I think the American people should demand Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Warmonger Obama get us the hell out of there! Our military is insane--a bunch of high-ranking idiots running that show over there. First some idiot ordered the burning of the Koran in public. Now this poor insane soldier--taught by our military to kill or be killed--goes on a killing rampage! Will he get a slap on the wrist--or maybe a Medal of Honor? I mean, come on, he wiped out 16 enemy combatants--what a hero! Obama is a fool to continue this G.W. Bush (that lying son of a bitch) War on Terror--in revenge for some Saudi Arabians making what to me was a miraculous military attack on the USA being they were drunk the night before, never learned how to land one of those big planes, and took over planes full of hundreds of passengers with only boxcutters--I mean come on, doesn't this all sound suspicious? We are idiots. Certified idiots. We are doomed. Our military is commanded by a bunch of dipsticks. Obama is a fool to continue this warmongering. Except our economy is now solidly a war economy! We are still the biggest arms dealers in the world. Why isn't Obama being challenged in debates?
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NYC's Billionaire Mayor Blames Pension Funds for This City's Economy on the Downward Slide
From the NYTimes:
“We really are up against it,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said during a recent trip to Albany, urging the state to reduce pension benefits for future public employees. In a radio interview on Friday, Mr. Bloomberg noted the spreading financial woes of local governments, saying, “Towns and counties across the state are starting to have to make the real choices — fewer cops, fewer firefighters, slower ambulance response, less teachers in front of the classroom.”
Cutting services to the Citizens of NYC is our Billionaire Mayor's solution to our economic woes. So much for economic recovery, President Obama.
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Contemplating Suicide
My last post got many interesting replies from Growler readers and my own roster of good friends. I tried to explain that I'm a fictional character in an ongoing fictional effort at reality. I know that doesn't make sense, but to me it does. As a writer, I find myself forced to write about all aspects of the reality of my life. Yes, I had a heart attack. Yes, I almost died. Yes, in my current condition, I was forced to at least delve into the subject of my own suicide. Suicide is in my relative blood. My nephew who committed suicide, though a bit on the edge all his life, called me many times before he did it trying to talk rationally to me. Trying to get answers to his quandaries from me. Answers I couldn't give him. Answers that he started demanding with phone calls in the dead of some of my nights. And when he didn't get those answers he desperately wanted from me he turned to accusing me. Accusations that soon turned into off-the-wall insults. Me his favorite uncle now devilized as a hater of him. The last insulting phone call I got from him, and I remember it so well, so pissed me off, I turned on him and forbade him from calling me anymore. It was in thinking back on that moment that compelled me to consider if anything, a rejection or a crashed love affair or the fact that I may be ruined by this pay-or-die healthcare system, would cause me to contemplate if not actually do it my own suicide.
The continuing present in my life has a way of leveling things out. Back at Bellevue for another coumadin clinic this time I was waved on through without having to go through a finance person. So I wasn't charged another $220. In fact, I saw that finance woman and I grinned at her and told her I hoped she was having a nice day.
Tonight I feel much better, lighter on my feet, and feeling capable of navigating my way through these narrows I suddenly find my life's ship channeled into. I've been thinking of the Larry Graham song from his Graham Central Station album "Release Yourself"--"You've got to go through it to get to it"--and that sing-song rather chant-able line keeps rocking through my head. I do have to go through this to get to that other side where I can start living reality again. [This album, by the way, is one of the greatest r&b-rock-drive albums ever recorded. I was absolutely pissed off to see two White fools reviewing it putting it down by saying it was supercilious--ignorant White people who wouldn't know great music if they heard it, these two White fools listing that god-damn copycat White Eric Clapton...forgive me, but these Brit fop bastards so turn me off when I hear them ripping off my USA original musics--I hate Eric Clapton the same way I hate the god-damn overrated copycatting Beatles--you know how nauseating seeing Sir Fucking Paul at our Grammy Awards was to me? Sorry, I'm getting irrational.]
One of my Sociology heroes, Charles Horton Cooley, wrote:
"One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide."
Ladies and Gentleman, I do not have a tired mind even after my ordeal; therefore I cease contemplating my own finalization of self criticism. Hemingway and Hunter Thompson felt they had lost their ability to write--in that form of self criticism, they took the only way out for a tired mind.
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The Backwards-Thinking Fools Persist
I see the idiots of Repugnican Kansas have chosen Rick Santorum as their choice to be President of the idiotic USA. President Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is continuing to beat his loudest war drums--now suddenly against Syria (a rebellion some say was instigated by our CIA infiltrating that country) and surely now at Israel's insistence (are you as amazed as I am of the power Israel has over our Presidents and Congresses?) we are going to invade and try to occupy Iran. The Iranians are a great people; great minds; rational thinkers; yet, they are subject to a nutjob Islamic rule that keeps them suppressed. Now we are threatening along with the nutjob Israelis to annihilate them--why? Because of what? How about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Again the same ole G.W. Bush insane lies are leading us into yet another War on Terror. In order to get revenge for the 3,000 who were killed in the insane attack on the World Trade Center (and not all of those victims were US citizens)--an incident by the way that could have been prevented had our Air Force that was alerted by American Airlines done its job and immediately scrambled fighter jets into the skies that day--we are now killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, some say by the millions--and look at the messes we have created in Iraq and Afghanistan. And look at the continuing fucked up mess we caused in Libya--and the killing we are still doing with our unmanned drones in Pakistan--because they are unmanned drones we tend to think we are not really involved in those killings. Our President stupidly says these drones are so accurate, they're incapable of killing innocent people, only al-Queda terrorists. I'm puzzled. How is al-Queda still such a force against us when I read constantly that there are only a handful of these Islamic nutjobs still around? We the People of the USA are killers. Our Nobel-Peace-Prize-Winning President is a killer. Did you hear the totally dumbass explanation of why our President is allowed to assassinate his own people by our truly dumbass Justice Department head, Eric "Hat in Hand, Lips to the White Man's Ass" Holder? I mean these fucking power-mad fools are jeopardizing not only our economy but our very lives. And now you better believe these mad killers are going to do something absurd and rash to Iran--an innocent people who there's no proof positive that they have Weapons of Mass Destruction. Except every day you hear a new horn-blowing alert coming from Israel or our military on how Iran now is capable not only of flinging nukes over into Israel but also flinging them over and into our glorious country--and why would the Iranians be so insane to do anything like that?--and why would they want to nuke countries like Israel and the US that have huge nuclear weapon arsenals, Israel's arsenal provided to them by the country with the largest number of nuclear weapons on earth, the good ole USA.
And fuck these "improving economy" figures the government is throwing out at us every day--more jobs created--the economy is recovering--BUT, slowly now, folks; always watch for those "BUTS" in everything our government says, which, according to H.L. Mencken and me are all LIES adjusted to seem as though truths.
I leave you today as I have in many past posts with a excerpt from C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite. You decide after reading this if this country is on a suicidal course, one sliding us off into Hell because we never challenge or debate any of these militarists's calls for wars and rumors of more wars.
The military pursuit of status, in itself, is no threat of military dominance. In fact, well enclosed in the standing army, such status is a sort of pay-off for the military relinquishment of adventures in political power. So long as this pursuit of status is confined to the military hierarchy itself, it is an important feature of military discipline, and no doubt a major source of much military gratification. It becomes a threat, and it is an indication of the growing power of the military elite today, when it is claimed outside the military hierarchy and when it tends to become a basis of military policy.
The key to an understanding of status is power. The military cannot successfully claim status among civilians if they do not have, or are not thought to have power. Now power, as well as images of it, are always relative: one man's powers are another man's weaknesses. And the powers that have weakened the status of the military in America have been the powers of money and of money-makers, and the powers of the civilian politicians over the military establishment.
American 'militarism,' accordingly, involves the attempt of military men to increase their powers, and hence their status, in comparison with businessmen and politicians. To gain such powers they must not be considered a mere means to be used by politicians and money-makers. They must not be considered parasites on the economy and under the supervision of those who are often called in military circles 'the dirty politicians.' On the contrary their ends must be identified with the ends as well as the honor of the nation; the economy must be their servant; politics an instrument by which, in the name of the state, the family, and God, they manage the nation in modern war.' What does it mean to go to war?' Woodrow Wilson was asked in 1917. 'It means,' he replied, 'an attempt to reconstruct a peacetime civilization with war standards, and at the end of the war there will be no bystanders with sufficient peace standards left to work with. There will be only war standards ... ' American militarism, in fully developed form, would mean the triumph in all areas of life of the military metaphysic, and hence the subordination to it of all other ways of life.
There can be little doubt but that, over the last decade [1946-1956], the warlords of Washington, with their friends in the political directorate and the corporate elite, have definitely revealed militaristic tendencies. Is there, then, in the higher circles of America 'a military clique'? Those who argue about such a notion-as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and General of the Army Omar Bradley have recently done - are usually arguing only about the increased influence of the professional military. That is why their arguments, in so far as they bear upon the structure of the elite, are not very definitive and are usually at cross-purposes. For when it is fully understood, the idea of a military clique involves more than the military ascendancy. It involves a coincidence of interests and a co-ordination of aims among economic and political as well as military actors.
Our answer to the question, 'Is there now a military clique?' is: Yes, there is a military clique, but it is more accurately termed the power elite, for it is composed of economic, political, as well as military, men whose interests have increasingly coincided.
thegrowlingwolffor The Daily Growler
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