Ogre-oid: No Charges in Destruction of Interrogation Tapes

Once again proving that justice has left this country no charges have been brought in the deliberate destruction of criminal evidence by the Bush administration.  Appalling.

Modus Operandi Podcast episode 35

episode 35 10/8/2010  

Show notes and links:
Coal ash spill.
Pakistan.  [not "kinder" pass, Khyber Pass]

Le Show (Harry Shearer)

Military and oil.
"Membrane Dynamic" (I was close - AM)
Your house burned while the fire department watched?  HATE HATE HATE HATE 
read the comments and tell me we're not a nation of hateful mother fuckers.

Internet doomed.
Dark fiber.
Greater Tuna

Waterboarding is torture.

Alan On The Spot last week:
Kentucky v Ole Miss:  16-45  35-42
  Murray v Reidland:  21-27 49-7
  CCHS v whoever:  Lakers win by less than three points. 31-25 Lakers
  Arizona Cardinals v San Diego:  lose by less than 7  10-41
  Will UK students be camped out for UK tickets:  yes yes
  Saints v Panthers:  win win

Commonwealth Games.
Fed may ask any question of applicants for employment, perhaps.

The Week in Ogre-oids

Afghanistan - June was the deadliest month yet for coalition troops in our endless, stupid war in Afghanistan.  I can find no mention of how many civilians were killed but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it was a fucking lot of people.

The deaths of 102 servicemembers included a record 59 Americans. Nine of the 46 nations in the U.S.-led coalition suffered fatalities, the most countries to lose troops since the conflict began nearly nine years ago.  via

GOP Blocks Extension of Unemployment Benefits - After more than a decade of spending like drunken sailors with a pocket full of stolen credit cards, GOP Congress members have blocked an extension of unemployment benefits because it would add to the deficit.  War is fine with them, tax cuts for the ultra-megas are fine with them, but helping people out whose jobs have been lost thanks to the Republicans' reckless behavior?  Not a chance.  I think I'm going to print myself a bumper sticker that says, "Fuck the Poor! vote GOP."  more


Proof Our Newspapers Are Too Chickenshit to Call Torture Torture - Worst offender?  The NY Times which virtually stopped referring to waterboarding by Americans as torture after Bush/Cheney decided it was hunky dory while still calling it torture if other countries do it according to a new study by Harvard’s Kennedy School (pdf).

Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator. via

NPR's Continued Practice of Allowing It's Correspondents to Also Work For Fox News - Fox News is not a news organization.  They follow no rules of journalistic ethics.  They are a propaganda service for the far right of American politics and anyone in their employ is damaged goods.  NPR and Fox's Mara Liasson manages to insert some Fox bullshit into every article aired on NPR and she once again managed it by noting, for absolutely no reason other than to sound the fascist dog whistle, that President Obama was "reading from a teleprompter" during a speech in Louisiana.  It's utterly disgusting that any organization that claims to report facts would allow these hacks to sully its broadcasts.

Here's an exchange I had with the ombudsman's office.

Continuing Ogre-oid: Obama Most Aggressive President Against Whistleblowers Ever

I don't know about you but I'm still hoping for change.  Obama, our first black Republican President, continues the anti-democratic, anti-American, anti-freedom policies of the unelected George W. Bush with the kind of gusto usually seen only in the evil dictators our government has installed in so many countries.  Secrecy, back room deals with the ultra-megas at the expense of the rest of us (the majority of humans), continued use of secret prisons and "extraordinary rendition" (properly called kidnapping), refusing to press for prosecution of the enormous federal and international crime of torture, and now he has surely surpassed GWB/Cheney by becoming, in his first term, the most harshly punitive President in history against those who leak information to the press.  Who are we?

Dick Cheney Not Dead: Nation Mournes

 Don't worry, Dick.  They're still keeping your room in hell nice and warm for ya.

America Is Lucy

MODUS OPERANDI BLOGPOST2

Dr. Overbey, 27 January 2010

Since I’m not feeling well today and I am even more pissed off than I usually am all the time, I’m going to keep going.

America is Lucy.

What the hell am I talking about? You know damn well what I’m talking about. I’m talking about Lucy, the Peanuts character. There’s this on-going episode where Lucy is holding a football for Charlie Brown (I should write a short story about Charlie Brown trying to get a medical marijuana script in Los Angeles). And what does Lucy do right when Charlie Brown is about to kick the ball, his momentum irreversibly as his kicking foot flies upward? That’s right! She lifts the ball up so Charlie Brown is denied the satisfaction of completing his goal, and, to add injury to insult, loses his balance and falls on his ass.

Now, why does Lucy do this? Because she’s afraid?

No, because she gets off on it. She loves it!

It is simple sadistic joy that motivates Lucy to do this over and over (CB’s gullibility doesn’t make Lucy’s pathology any less pathetic). She loves it and cannot help herself. It is this same disposition that reflects the majority of Americans. I do not believe for a second that Americans behave as they do because of fear. Americans’ problem is not fear, but its Aristotelian opposite: foolhardiness. Americans are not afraid of what they should fear. You ought to be afraid of a totalitarian, corporate government that refuses to give its citizens health care and instead corrals the largest prison population in the history of civilization; but most Americans love it. You ought to be afraid of spending half your waking life in a four-ton piece of medal travelling upwards of 75 mph at close distance to 18 wheelers going even faster; but for most Americans, their love affair with the automobile is an American birthright more sacred than the First Amendment or even life itself (which is why so many Americans die in cars!).

And war. This idea that America has to always be at war because we’re so afraid is a joke. The only reason not to be in a war is that you are afraid. You fear the inevitable widespread death (often of young adults and children, which is especially a waste), relentless misery (but at least diverse, ranging from emotional anguish to malnutrition or even starvation), torture, mutilation, and destruction that comes with war, that is war. If these conditions do not inspire fear, there never has been or will be any justification for not being at war all the time (not that Americans need a justification for anything they do or don’t do; they are, after all, Americans). September 11 didn’t horrify people and turn them off of war and violence; it energized the entire nation and gave the whole country a machine-gun sized hard-on. “Navy seals rock!” exclaimed CBS journalist Katie Couric to the nation in the immediate aftermath, her vagina juice gushing with ovulating glee. Never in my life have I seen this country more motivated and galvanized than in the early Bush-Christ years following the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. Never will I or any living human see the day when efforts at improving health care or education remotely approach that level of focus and togetherness.

But the majority of Americans never seem to tire of war or the relentless fear that it ought to induce in a sane human being who was not raised by baboons. Instead, war is the power of pride, the fight for freedom, and other abstract nonsense. The last thing it is is the obliteration of the human body and soul. The last thing it is is what it really is, in other words.

Fools rush into situations that are obviously dangerous, pose great risk, and offer no meaningful reward should the fool be lucky and avoid the probable death or injury looming over them. Fools entrust greedy pigs who are complete strangers with their life savings—then continue to believe in the same people and the same system even after they have wrecked the economy and put the fool out of work. After all, there is always someone out there who has it even worse, and when times are tough, Americans can rub one out watching on TV while the next Charlie Brown gets fucked over. “Better you than me!”

Just as Americans don’t live in fear, they are also not stupid, at least in an epistemological sense. Most Americans have jobs (or they did until the collapse of 2008), know how to get what they want, make money, get their W2s filed, and conform in typical compliant American fashion. They know how to manipulate the media and sabotage anything or anyone they don’t like. What motivates Americans is not fear and their flaw is not ignorance but the puerile obsession of having to be better than the other person. And since intuitively most Americans know they are not going to make it rich, they are not going to live the American Dream (which is repugnant as much as it is illusory), but the one thing that can get them through the day is to see the other person punished, humiliated, and shut down. Night after night I see the reflection of blue lights on the walls of my apartment; yes—praise the Fox—another person is off to jail! Hallelujah!

It is also foolhardiness—not fear—that sustains Americans’ appetites for the utterly banal and quotidian—gossip about celebrities, sports games, what people wore to church last week, the latest bullshit digital gadgets that they can finger themselves with. Don’t we have it so great that in America we can just push the enter button after typing in the first three letters of the current month instead of having to spend all that time just typing out the date itself! Wow! Just when you thought life couldn’t get any better! So no one gathers in public space—only fools are not afraid of overlords who want to stamp out public space and make the infrastructure sterile and completely out of proportion to the human body—and makes the time to have an intelligent conversation with one’s neighbors and fellow citizens about the fact that war is a complete waste and an obvious sign of a nation in crisis that has deliberately destroyed its own imagination, that war is bankrupting the country, that our schools are a joke, that our whole way of life sucks. Instead the topic turns to how teachers don’t do real work, anyone can get rich if they work hard enough, liberals sympathize with terrorists, scientists hate America, the planet is bogging down our already-collapsed economy, and Tiger Woods is a fuckaholic . . . which is OK as long as he hits that golf ball good. Bottom line: the majority of Americans are assholes, and they can suck my cunt.

There. I still don’t feel better.

Until next time . . . remember, “nothing good is ever going to happen again.”