Bio-Engineered Penis Transplants: A Coming Growth Industry

In what could be the growth industry of the future, scientists are close to finalizing development of penises grown in laboratories. The breakthrough is the culmination of years of studies on the penises of rabbits and after receiving FDA approval human testing will commence.

According to a story reported by The Guardian entitled “Scientists ready to test lab-grown penises on men” I excerpt the following:

Penises grown in laboratories could soon be tested on men by scientists developing technology to help people with congenital abnormalities, or who have undergone surgery for aggressive cancer or suffered traumatic injury.

Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are assessing engineered penises for safety, function and durability. They hope to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and to move to human testing within five years.

Professor Anthony Atala, director of the institute, oversaw the team's successful engineering of penises for rabbits in 2008. "The rabbit studies were very encouraging," he said, "but to get approval for humans we need all the safety and quality assurance data, we need to show that the materials aren't toxic, and we have to spell out the manufacturing process, step by step."

The penises would be grown using a patient's own cells to avoid the high risk of immunological rejection after organ transplantation from another individual. Cells taken from the remainder of the patient's penis would be grown in culture for four to six weeks.

Opponents of wasteful government spending on frivolous medical studies should note that according to the Guardian story that the program was underwritten by the military, specifically The Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine or AFIRM. The purpose would be to deal with injuries to sexual organs incurred on the battlefields such as in the looming generations long war against extremist Islam that is in the early stages now in the Middle East. While anything that restores a degree of normalcy to the maimed members of America’s armed forces is a good thing it will soon expand into the domestic market where there is much money to be made.

Once the capability of creating new, bigger and better penises has been perfected, the market will literally explode as men with small dicks and lots of money will be lining up for replacements of their original equipment. By the time that this procedure is fully tested, tweaked and becomes widely available there will be companies and individuals who are going to grow extremely wealthy from it.

War Pigs at Pentagon Squeal Over Snowden Leaks

The whining continues over the outing of unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining programs by former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Today's bleating is over the release of a report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, at least the condensed, classified and excerpted version - the rest is of course Top Secret which means that everyone will just have to trust a government that lies about everything about the "grave" damage done by Snowden's leaks. The report, 19 pages of which were procured by The Guardian under a FOIA suit filed earlier this year states that “the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering”. To this I say good, had the NSA and it's private affiliates not been conducting warrantless spying on tens of millions of law abiding Americans then there would have been no need for Snowden to have performed his valuable public service.

When it comes to the Pentagon an institution that has as its primary function the murdering of people across the planet there is zero credibility as far as I am concerned about the self-serving claims of such damage. Were the grave warnings of the danger of the military industrial complex by outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower been taken to heed the swords long ago have been beaten back into plow shares and the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that has been stolen and fed into that murderous five-sided satanic sewer of death and graft we would not be at the most perilous point in US history today.

The story in the Guardian about the keening wail of the war piggies is entitled "Pentagon report: scope of intelligence compromised by Snowden 'staggering'" and I excerpt the following:

The Guardian has obtained a copy of the Defense Intelligence Agency's classified damage assessment in response to a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) lawsuit filed against the Defense Department earlier this year. The heavily redacted 39-page report was prepared in December and is titled “DoD Information Review Task Force-2: Initial Assessment, Impacts Resulting from the Compromise of Classified Material by a Former NSA Contractor.”

But while the DIA report describes the damage to US intelligence capabilities as “grave”, the government still refuses to release any specific details to support this conclusion. The entire impact assessment was redacted from the material released to the Guardian under a presidential order that protects classified information and several other Foia exemptions.

Only 12 pages of the report were declassified by DIA and released. A Justice Department attorney said DIA would continue to process other internal documents that refer to the DIA report for possible release later this year.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, questioned the decision to withhold specific details.

"The essence of the report is contained in the statement that 'the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering'. But all elaboration of what this striking statement means has been withheld," he said.

Mr. Aftergood is correct but far too kind in his comments, in layman's terms the Pentagon is full of horseshit and is just resorting the the standard tactic of bemoaning the damage of the leaks that put Americans at risk of "terrorist" attacks but never bother to reveal any specifics. Hell, it's now like the number one cause of "terrorist" attacks on Americans isn't due to the ongoing war on Muslims and the plethora of other murders undertaken by our precious imperial stormtroopers under the domain of The Pentagon. Nothing seems to be going well for the criminal political class as of late, a brief review of some of the comments on The Guardian piece is evidence that the sock puppets and paid government shills are out in force as they wage their information war to keep the truth from spreading even further than it already has. They have their work cut out for them because it seems like the resistance is building - I have noticed how so many comment sections are quickly censored or shut down once they are overwhelmed by those who are calling bullshit on this entire charade.

While the psychopathic blood barters over at The Pentagon were caterwauling and doing their song and dance the greatest enemy that exists in terms of the ongoing jihad against the US Constitution and American people was busy plotting the ongoing demise of the USA. In the US Congress today the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which is to the fascist rulers of this country since September 11, 2001 what the Enabling Act was to Hitler and his Nazis was given the seal of approval once again in preserving the cash cow of the phony war on terror and defending their own hides in an election year. The House of Representatives, a wretched hive of scum and villainy had one hell of a day in that they also succeeded in passing a gutted version of an NSA "reform" bill that does nothing to end the mass surveillance and storage of the communications and other data of law abiding Americans for some vague future use that has all the hallmarks of totalitarianism. The scumbags can now return home to showboat and enjoy their long Memorial Day weekend having done their damned level best to have pissed on the sacrifices of all who died in this country's past wars to "defend freedom".  

The Business of America is War

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel spoke on Tuesday in defense of the American war machine and while not explicitly mentioned during his remarks during a speech for The Chicago Council of Global Affairs in defense of the obscene profits generated by America's ongoing global crusades. What would a defense of the Empire and the permanent war be without one of those cherished references to World War II aka "the good war" and Hagel invoked the neoconservative talking point of "isolationism" like a professional card shark dealing dirty from the bottom of the deck. The term is steeped in innuendo to conjure up mental images of Hitler's Nazi war machine and most importantly for maximum emotional value the millions of murdered Jews who were slaughtered along with millions of others because of the disgraceful "isolationism" of the United States. Never is it ever permitted to have an honest debate about non-interventionism and minding our own goddamned business, this is the real reason why the two party criminal syndicate and their whores in the media are so relentlessly trying to keep Rand Paul out of any sort of a position where he may pose this question.

A brief synopsis of SecDef's remarks is excerpted from the organization's website as below:

Despite war-weariness among the American people, the United States faces new and complicated challenges, not least “Russia’s blatant aggression in Ukraine,” and must remain strong and engaged militarily in the world, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told The Chicago Council Tuesday morning.

“We must remain a nation of big shoulders,” Hagel said in a rhetorical tip of the hat to the 500 Chicagoans who turned out for his breakfast-time speech. “America must not succumb to the temptations of looking inward…We must never just return to the garrison.”

And

The nation’s active involvement after World War II and especially its embrace of alliances around the world led to an unprecedented era of prosperity–an era that still exists, he said. Americans may be “increasingly skeptical of foreign engagements,” he said, but this misses the point, because Americans themselves are the greatest beneficiaries of this policy.

As 13 years of war come to an end, Hagel said, America’s military faces “new threats, challenges, and opportunities” created by a “fractured” global landscape. Among these, he said, are the rise of China and other Asian powers, the increasing youth population in the Middle East, new technologies including the possibility of cyber warfare, an increased global economic interdependence, increased nationalism, new sources of energy, and the impact of climate change on such strategically vital regions as the Arctic.

But as these new challenges arise, “history and geography still matter,” Hagel said. As examples, he cited the war in Syria, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the “dangerous provocations” of North Korea, the “simmering tensions” between China and Japan, and “Russia’s blatant aggression in Ukraine.” The secretary suggested no solutions for any of these problems, but indicated that no solution would be possible unless the US plays a role, diplomatically and militarily.

As an example, he cited the commitment of the US and NATO to NATO members among Russia’s neighbors, such as Poland and the Baltic, who are upset about Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine.

Oh lord how the money rolls in when the bodies pile up, cue up The Battle Hymn of the Republic, grab some Kleenex and snap to in saluting our glorious flag for the business of America is war and will always be war until there is no more America. 

The latest cash cow is the US instigated growing bloodbath in Ukraine, one that is being cynically used now to justify the escalation of military spending as well as shilling for the Keystone Excel pipeline as one Senate Democrat, Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu is doing and big energy is salivating over the wet dream of replacing Russia as the top supplier of energy to Europe thanks to the fracking boom. The warmongers in Congress are foaming at the mouth in denouncing Obama’s lame sanctions and becoming restive as it is an election year and more war machine dollars rolling into their states and districts is job security.  The corporate vultures were circling Ukraine even before the ousting of the democratically elected president – see State Department figure Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland’s appearance before assembled corporate interests boasting of the $5 billion taxpayer dollars that had been invested to destabilize the government in Kiev and open the doors for US businesses. Murder industry profiteers such as Lockheed are ecstatic in booming sales thanks to the chaos unleashed by the installation of the "Yats" occupying government and it's neo-Nazi/fascist muscle and are counting on being able to lure Putin into Ukraine to juice arms sales.

Sick and immoral but that's just the way that we roll in the USA, USA, USA!  

War Propaganda Goes to the Dogs

The Ideological Cornerstone of U.S. Foreign Policy

With the state media going all in to use the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia as an excuse to scare the hell out of the average American with a ludicrous daily diet of 'terrorist' threats a second front has been opened to fire up folks against those dirty Taliban bastards in Afghanistan. The news is spreading that according to sources that there has been a canine member of the military occupiers captured and have posted the video of the animal online. According to some sources the dog is a Belgian Shepherd named "Colonel", this is certain to tug at the heart strings of dog loving Americans who may not get riled up over the actual human casualties of the unending war nor give a rats ass about the permanently maimed military members coming home to bleak futures but animal abuse is a different story.

First off it should probably be said that this animal is not your average house pet, military dogs are trained killers and are often used during the no knock night raids that have spread terror through Afghanistan among the locals. There is nothing quite as unsettling as having the door kicked in by a squad of heavily armed trained killers with their vicious snarling beasts. What is never noted in any of the stories is any reference to cultural perspectives regarding the dog which is an animal while revered as 'man's best friend' in the U.S. of A and other western countries is actually a food source in others. Generally speaking and largely through no fault of their own Americans are by far the most culturally ignorant people on the planet, they have indoctrinated by institutions like the government, the media and a good part of the educational system to view the world through the twisted lens of the John Wayne mythology of American whup ass. The idea of the dog as "man's best friend" also doesn't seem to get in the way of profits though as retailers have little qualms about selling expensive clothing items made with the fur from the animals.

There is no shame when it comes to finding tricks and angles to assist in selling the ongoing fleecing of the American taxpayer into supporting the permanent wars of Oceania at the expense of using the money on anything that even remotely benefits them in the course of their increasingly miserable daily lives. They will be whipped up into an anti-Muslim rage over the plight of "Colonel" though and much like Pavlov's famous dogs they will largely respond to this latest blatantly over the top coordinated propaganda campaign by lining up to salute their blessed flag and payback against the 'ragheads'. I must admit that I feel a bit sorry for the captured animal myself, more than I would for a captured member of our imperial storm troopers who actually have a choice on whether they are going to engage in the ongoing murder, rape, destruction and plunder needed to ensure that American corporations can reap their obscene profits off of war. Nobody has ever put it better than decorated USMC General Smedley D. Butler when he famously declared that "war is a racket".

In an interesting development as of early Friday there has been a slight shift of reportage on the Taliban's capture, while it was reported yesterday that the dog was American there are now emerging stories that it is actually British. Perhaps some within the war mongering establishment felt that following up the ludicrous scare-mongering of the toothpaste bombs with this farce was a bit too obvious and are now slightly backing off. In the end though it won't matter, if the dirty Taliban bastards already posted video of their prized captive and it has elicited outrage just imagine how ready for war that the public will be when the inevitable You Tube video surfaces of them actually dining on the poor, doomed animal at their next tribal buffet.

Forked-Tongue McCain Calls for Congressional Investigation of NSA

Surfacing again on the Sunday morning state propaganda circuit, blood-thirsty Arizona Senator John McCain, the politician best loved by the corrupt media made an appearance where he routinely calls for U.S. military action. On CNN's State of the Union with Candy Crowley 'flipper' shockingly commented that there has been "overreach" by the NSA and suggested that a select committee be formed for Congress to investigate the agency. It was a rare moment of rationality for "bomb, bomb Iran" McCain and should be taken with the necessary grain of salt. Firstly, any sort of select committee culled from the ranks of this corrupt and lamentable legislative body would be inexorably tainted and more likely than not to provide a nice coat of whitewash on the unconstitutional surveillance programs. Let's face it, we aren't exactly talking about the second coming of the Church Committee here, especially given the ongoing defense of the programs by the likes of Mike Rogers, Di Fi, Dutch Reppersberger and McCain's little buddy Lindsay Graham. Even Obama's vaunted, insider packed panel of which El Presidente is to speak on Friday as to recommendations for reform was filled with half-measures that fail to do what truly is necessary which is to dismantle the NSA and put those responsible for its actions, such as former General Michael Hayden on trial and send them to prison. McCain will probably change his mind again by lunchtime today like when he suggested that NSA boss General Keith Alexander should resign in an interview with Der Spiegel and then rapidly denied it.

Were McCain serious which is doubtful then it would at least show some sort of pushback from a Congress that is being spied on by the NSA and seeks to reestablish some oversight but it is such a collection of liars, charlatans and self-serving asses it is only window dressing. As anyone who watches the ongoing train wreck of American democracy can clearly see the Congress only functions in a unified bipartisan manner when it comes to matters of war, threats of war, undermining diplomacy in the interests of more war and mass police state spying to compile a massive database containing the names and information of all who would dare to oppose war. There will be absolutely nothing done to restrain the NSA Stasi with the exception of cosmetic changes that will appease the public and you can rest assured that the agency is going to be very damned careful in limiting access to information after it was burned by former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden. McCain also made a remark during his appearance that  "when one guy who works for a contractor is able to reveal all this information -- and supposedly there's much more that he hasn't -- then there's something wrong with the system right there." He is absolutely correct on that one but there is not one damned thing to be done about it because the millions of "contractors" that have been hired by the government at extravagant rates being bilked out of the American taxpayer should not exist, these should be government jobs if they are deemed necessary so that there can be some control implemented over the massive costs associated. However, guys like John McCain are so dependent on the campaign financing provided by the military-security industrial complex that they are not about to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

While the investigate the NSA comments got the headlines the rest of the interview was vintage Sunday morning McCain as he once again used the forum to present himself as a foremost expert on U.S. foreign policy and take pot shots at Obama (the man still can't get over losing to the black guy in 2008) as well as engage in his standard pandering. Doing his part to advance the ball with the "stabbed in the back" narrative of Fallujah falling to al Qaeda (an overhyped term for all Islamic militants rather than a unified force) and doubled-down on the vaunted General Petraeus led "Surge":

The president of the United States said the surge wouldn't succeed, and it did. And he wanted out of Iraq. We're out. And now you've seen increasing Iranian influence. You're seeing Maliki being very -- persecuting the Sunni minority. The Iraq/Syrian border is now becoming a haven for al Qaeda. And now, of course Fallujah.

You know, the battle of Fallujah -- the second battle of Fallujah, Candy, we lost 95 American soldiers and Marines, and 600 wounded, the bloodiest battle of the war. Now we see Fallujah, vehicles driving down the main street with al Qaeda flags.

It's very distressing to those veterans who fought so hard.

And this president wanted out. We got out. They would never say the number of troops that they wanted to have there, so Maliki decided to go his own way. And we are now seeing dramatically increased Iranian influence there in Iraq.

You would think that he was talking about the battle of Iwo Jima rather than a savage Lidice style revenge attack to avenge the gruesome murders of four Blackwater mercenaries where the U.S. used chemical weapons on civilians. John McCain is a career flip-flopper who is utterly devoid of scruples, loyalty and the basic level of morality that should keep politicians from sending off American servicemen and women off to die and be maimed in unnecessary battles that take place in illegal wars in lands where the only national interest is the plunder of resources for corporations. The whole of America should shun this man like he were a leper - the Maricopa County Republican party just censured the bastard and this country would be a far better place were others to do likewise. 

Foreign Policy Holiday Follies

The sheer incompetence of the Barack Obama administration and the corrupt duplicitous swine in the U.S. Congress are on full display for the world this weekend. Like some bizarre form of diorama in the front window of Macy’s set up to perform a weird holiday spectacle the wheels are coming off in a very ugly way so let the planet be placed on warning that 2014 could bring our national stupidity full-circle in a very serious apocalyptic manner.  First and foremost the once promising P5+1 talks with Iran on ending the nuclear problem are now on life support, stick a fork in any prospect for a peaceful and rational resolution. This was inevitable with many in congress working on behalf of foreign powers to sabotage negotiations with additional crushing sanctions. The two-pronged assault at pushing a collapsing empire into another war was being led in the Senate by right-wing Israeli lackey Senator Mark Kirk and New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, he who recently was alleged to have been frolicking with underage prostitutes. In the House which is chock a block with fanatical Christian Zionists hellbent on triggering Armageddon to bring Jesus back and launching them skyward like so many ballistic missiles dirty, nasty naked to sit at the foot of God’s throne and watch all of us heathens suffer plagues and nuclear fallout  Eric ‘Iranium’ Cantor is the point man. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum and the Obama administration themselves beat the treacherous anti-Americans to the punch by imposing new sanctions on their own sending Iranian leaders into fits and for the time being they have left the table.

With the talks on life support it will be a joyous Christmas indeed for the war freaks and the military industrial complex who are both salivating over the billions of dollars in arms spending and singing joy to the world. This country is so screwed at this point thanks to the poisonous addiction to war and profiting obscenely off of human misery that there is no way to avert that which is inevitable: collapse. There will never be peace again in our time, the culture of corruption is just dug in too deeply and the average American psyche has been permanently altered to accept war as our national birthright. The jobs have gone overseas to low cost shitholes where workers toil like slaves in hideous conditions for a pittance, the markets cannot function without a never-ending infusion of government created money to gamble with and inflation is eating the average schmuck alive no matter how much the shills lie about the lack of such a thing.  I was pretty shocked when the war with Syria was averted despite the best efforts of Obama and Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry to lie the country into attacking Damascus. The entire reason for war, the Assad regime gassing civilians has been exposed as total horseshit most prominently last week in a London Review of Books piece by journalist Seymour Hersh that the was radioactive to the state-corporate media here in The Homeland. It was always a dubious claim that the radical Islamic fanatics that were being backed by the U.S. could be trusted and it was likely elements amongst them, backed by Bandar Bush and the Saudis who were responsible for the gassings. The other shoe has yet to drop on that one but we were spared a war in Syria for the time being.

The latest violation of the national interest that has torpedoed the Iran talks is consistent with the militarized state. We have never really scaled down after the end of World War II and the defeat of Hitler and the Japanese Empire only made it necessary to create new enemies to feed the war machine and the blood barters whose bottom line is tied to death and destruction that can never, ever end.  I was recently forwarded a long essay by liberal blogger Bob Alexander and would recommend it to everyone whatever their philosophical leanings may be. What Alexander does is connect the dots by boiling down the trajectory of the victorious post-war U.S. into today’s fascist surveillance state, where the Constitution is as George W. Bush so eloquently put it “nothing but a goddamned piece of paper” and the Obama Stasi spies on everyone and everything, the only thing that prevents them from spying on people’s thoughts is that the technology does not exist yet. I excerpt the following:

In 2008 Barack Obama said everything we wanted to hear, and after being swept into office dutifully did everything he was told. I can only assume his life-long ambition was to be a footnote president - the guy with an asterisk next to his name. And at the bottom of the page it’ll say, “The First African-American President.” In a few more years Hillary Clinton should be able to join the pantheon of footnote presidents.

The major differences between the current and previous governments should be alarming … but they don’t seem to concern the public very much if at all.

Presently, Americans have a Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don’t-Constitution. Remember when Keith Olbermann on MSNBC crossed off the Bill of Rights one by one after the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts were passed? It was more than just a civics lesson. He was telling us that what we took for granted didn’t exist anymore. Americans now live in a country where extra-ordinary rendition and extra-judicial decisions can leave them extra-crispy.

Americans recognize coups when they happen in other countries but remain oblivious to the ones that have occurred in their own. Why? The answer cannot be as simple as they weren’t told about it in the papers or on television. That is a part of it, I’m sure but it’s a topic scrupulously avoided everywhere, even among ourselves. Even though massive changes have occurred right before our eyes we treat this current iteration of the government as if it has always been The Government we read about in history books. This present government, among other things, spies on 5 billion cell phones every day. The President of The United States has boasted, “I’m really good at killing people.” How does that jibe with the notion that America is the land of the free and home of the brave? Is it just too goddamned scary to admit to ourselves that the government, supposedly of, by, and for the people, is completely out of our control?

Mr. Alexander’s essay is entitled "The Flag Remains the Same"  and can be read at either OpEd News or TV News Lies.  Often pieces such as this tend to get bogged down in too much detail and as a result too many people who would benefit from such reading would be discouraged.  Some may disagree with certain interpretations of history but for the most part the important thing to understand is that the entire country has changed into something very ugly with the exception of our blessed symbol of the flag. Children pledge allegiance to it, anyone who refuses to stand during the obligatory rendition of the national anthem at a sporting event risks harassment or worse yet there is never a question asked as to whether such enforced worship of a national symbol would be accepted in a truly free country.

With the Iran war back on again and Barry and the boys full of piss and vinegar after the repair of the Obamacare website, the establishment Republican Night of the Long Knives purge of the so-called tea party and Helicopter Ben’s successor, the bankster friendly Janet Yellen standing on the brink of confirmation and the continuation of the 85 billion dollar a month heroin injections into Wall Street banks it is breaking that there will be no reform of NSA Stasi surveillance practices. Not that it could have been expected with a pack of traitors in Congress providing cover for the unconstitutional programs nor the committee that Obama empaneled that included notorious schemer Cass Sunstein and shadow government figure Richard Clarke. It was as packed with fixers, liars and defenders of the national security state as either the Warren Commission or the Kean Commission. There was an expectation of at least cosmetic changes to warrantless surveillance but the establishment is now going to give Americans the big red, white and blue middle finger.

But what would foreign policy shenanigans be without American’s foremost warmonger the deranged old bastard John McCain? McCain just cannot keep himself away from travelling across the pond to whichever country that at the time happens to be on the brink of war to conduct media dog and pony shows and act as a whore to the arms industry. This time it is in Ukraine where he is holding court with the anti-government protesters who were only a few days ago set upon by government goons wielding truncheons and chainsaws. It was a brutal act of a desperate regime but really is none of our business here in the United States, any notions that we can't act as the global policeman have long been cast aside when there are defense industry dollars to be harvested, just like General Smedley Butler put it, "War is a Racket" and Senator McCain has been it's top sales rep for a long time now. I haven't seen the schedules for tomorrow's Sunday morning state propaganda shows but don't be surprised if the old man just happens to drop by either live or from satellite hookup to act as Santa Claus for Raytheon, General Electric and hundreds of others looking to gain market share in Kiev.

It all just continues to rot but Americans just couldn't be bothered, after all, the flag remains the same.

Flipper McCain Calls for NSA Commandant's Resignation Then Denies It

He was for it before he was against it. In what would have been a huge breakthrough in the fight against Obama’s Stasi Senator John McCain of Arizona gave an interview to Der Spiegel in which he called for the head of NSA Commandant General Keith Alexander.  The statement, on being asked by the German publication of the NSA and in particular it’s head: “Should Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, resign?” and I quote crazy train McCain from the article: “Of course, they should resign or be fired. We no longer hold anybody accountable in Washington.” It would have been yet another fork in the ass of the dying state-corporate propaganda machine that is the domestic media with said media’s longtime love object to go off in the foreign press. It could have been devastating coming in the aftermath of the 60 Minutes Benghazi fraud, a shot to the head delivered to a corrupt and fraudulent press that would resonate for quite some time and herald the arrival of the recognition that the only truth in media lies outside the star spangled lemming colony.

But alas, it was not to be. In a vintage McCain move the straight talk express has been thrown into reverse and the tires are smoking. This never would have happened on David Gregory’s Sunday morning show in that no such combination of questions would have been directed at “the maverick” therefore befuddling the old man, he sounded as confused as Reagan used to when confronted in his later years in power. The McCain camp will of course blame it on the Germans and launch into another ridiculous diatribe as he did when Putin pissed on the gauche and laughable concept of American exceptionalism a few months back from the New York Times editorial page. While I despise McCain simply because he is charlatan, media whore and human windsock whose comments change sometimes by the hour when it happens to be politically expedient I was stunned to see any such comments and ready to actually give the man some props for going all “mavericky” again.

Hell even a broken clock is right twice a day and the additional comments aside from the call for Alexander’s head there were several other salient points within the Der Spiegel piece which I now excerpt:

SPIEGEL: Are the intelligence services out of control?

McCain: There has not been sufficient congressional oversight, and there has been an absolutely disgraceful sharing of information that never should have taken place. For many years, we had an absolute provision that any classified information, which was going to be shared, is based on need-to-know information. I was a Navy pilot and had Top Secret clearance because I was in a squadron that in case of war with Russia would carry nuclear weapons. But that did not mean that I was privy to everything to do with all of our war plans in case of a nuclear war.

SPIEGEL: That means that you only knew what you absolutely had to know.

McCain: Yes. Then along came 9/11 and we said, "Oh, one of the reasons why we didn't know about 9/11 is that we didn't do enough information sharing." So now we have a private in the Army with access to most secret cables.

SPIEGEL: You mean Private First Class Bradley Manning, now Chelsea, who leaked thousands of secret documents to Wikileaks.

McCain: And now we have a contractor employee, not a government employee, who has access to information which is, when revealed, most damaging to the standing prestige of the United States and our relations with some of our best friends. Why did Edward Snowden have that information? And what are we doing as far as screening people who have access to this information? It's outrageous, and someone ought to be held accountable.

SPIEGEL: Who must be held accountable?

McCain: The head of the NSA, the president of the United States, the Congressional Intelligence Committees, all of these contractors we pay that were responsible for performing the background checks. There should be a wholesale housecleaning.

Now if I am reading this correctly, the ultimate Pentagon Rolodex man is actually expressing more than a bit of dismay over the tens of thousands of “contractors” who have descended on Washington as a swarm of money-eating locusts post September 11, 2001.  This is spot on but again, more than a bit peculiar from a man like Manchurian McCain who has been a key defender of the privatizing of military/intelligence functions for years. The amount of taxpayer money that is utterly wasted by this sort of crap is an abomination and should have mobs of pitchfork bearing peasants marching on D.C.  While it was awhile ago but not that long ago that I myself served in the armed forces we had actual military personnel cooking meals, doing laundry etc. as a part of their jobs. Then there is the case of “contractor” access, it is no small bug up the asses of the beltway establishment that Edward Snowden gathered his materials on the obscene degree of NSA overreach while employed by government “contractor” Booz Allen Hamilton. There are just some jobs what should not be entrusted to outsiders and Christ knows what sort of monstrous abuses have been undertaken in the name of profit from “contractors” who unlike Snowden did not have a conscience nor a respect for patriotism. And the money that is extracted from taxpayers at the expense of the needs of real Americans is far worse than the proverbial $500 screwdriver. Ike was so dead on when he warned of the rise of the Military Industrial Complex in his 1961 farewell address.

But then the influence peddlers began to fornicate with insiders like McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Cheney and others to turn those run of the mill jobs performed by actual American servicemen and women into lucrative sources of campaign funds that could be siphoned off. The whole privatizing of the basic functions of the military, whether it be mess cooks or mercenaries is an outrage but when McCain is asked tomorrow (if he hasn’t been already) he will accuse the German press of taking his words out of context. This is the key problem for our swinish political class, the pocket media has their back here in The Homeland while the concept of investigative journalism has not been turned into a near criminal activity in other parts of the civilized world.

When will Senator McCain just go away, resign, be committed to a mental institution or just simply kick the bucket and remove himself from a position of influence. He actually for a very brief time made some sense with his comments but once again flip-flopped – how the American media gives this man any respect or credibility is a textbook example of the greater problem the presstitues. McCain is a fool who has become a cartoon of himself and it is just not amusing any longer. Then what can be expected from a deranged, senile old bastard whose idea of “country first” was to put the Wasilla nincompoop Sarah Palin within a heartbeat of the nuclear launch codes.  This man is the strongest argument for term limits that I have ever seen.

Serial Perjurer Clapper Plays the Fear Card

The establishment is beginning to grow restive over the failure of our political buffoons and narcissists to rescind the partial government shutdown and increase the debt ceiling. While it is still a dead bang certainty that a last minute agreement will materialize, primarily to save the reckless bets of the Wall Street gambling casinos other elements of the overstuffed fascist police state are playing the fear card to ensure that none of their money sucking programs suffer cuts. On the same day that it was revealed that Obama’s NSA Stasi is using their lawless impunity to vacuum up the email address books of millions of law abiding Americans a story ran in McClatchy blaming Barry for “putting the country at risk” for not cutting the inevitable deal with House Republican insurrectionists. The story in question, a fine puff pastry piece of state propaganda entitled Shutdown Misstep: How Obama Plan Put the Country at Risk, written by some payroll weasel who goes by the name of  Anita Kumar bestows state media legitimacy upon Obama’s Director of National Intelligence and serial perjurer James Clapper as well as other high level U.S. Stasi swine.

The Kumar piece spent a good amount of time bemoaning that the partial shutdown put thousands of government teat sucking bureaucrats and the operatives of the most invasive and oppressive spying system in human history out on furlough. For good measure it interjected the warmed over Bush-Cheney rhetoric (since adapted by Barry) was putting the country at risk. The piece as well as serving as a mini-hagiography of Clapper goes on to cite a good number of 'experts' who obviously have much riding on their well paid gigs within the disinformation sphere that protects the NSA and other intelligence agencies from too much scrutiny here in Der Homeland. No mention whatsoever was given to the story in The Guardian (where else?) that featured the very creator of the USAPATRIOT Act, Congressman James Sensenbrenner denouncing the monster that he created and leading efforts to drive a stake through it's rotten black heart. Sensenbrenner also appropriately tabbed Clapper as the professional fibber that he is and called for his prosecution. But in going with the way that we honor our criminals here in the rotting republic of greed and wanton stupidity the perjuring bastard is treated as some sort of hero. Especially when he is trotted out to scare the bejesus out of the lemmings to preserve the funding for his precious authoritarian voyeur programs. 

These bastards have no shame whatsoever, these out of control fascist agencies need to be broken into millions of pieces and scattered to the winds not given free reign to enslave American taxpayers using their own tax money. Citing “The Clapper’s” testimony at a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing the man who would in a decent society currently be cooling his heels in the iron bar hotel  dissembled that “each day that goes by, the jeopardy increases”.  The sheer disingenuous nature of the piece is made even more obvious when that insipid, corrupt blathering sow Diane Feinstein is quoted as well “our country is at heightened risk of terrorist attack” slobbered Di Fi, stressing out over the very thought of her hubby’s portfolio taking a ding without the endless flow of taxpayer money sluicing into the defense-surveillance industrial complex that they both profit immensely from.  Rather than dig much more into the article, which isn’t suitable for bird cage liner the remaining days until that financial doomsday clock strikes 00:00 will be filled with much of the same idiotic nonsense from those who have the most at stake money wise in the metastasizing of the U.S. security colossus.

The coming days will see more fear-mongering and nonsense by the high criminals who have burrowed deeply into our most corrupt of governments and have like the junkie gamblers on Wall Street have become as addicted to their ill gotten gains.  It is the continuing hope of this writer that the tea party insurgents, who I have absolutely nothing else in common with are successful in dealing a blow to this monstrous system by allowing all of the schemes to implode by allowing the debt ceiling to not be raised again. The only way that Clapper, Feinstein and their trough feeding cohorts will stop sucking off of the unsustainable system will be if the credit limit is restricted and they can go and make a decent living as anything other than the fascist parasites that they are. 

Spinning the Botched Seal Team Six Raid

Politicians never hesitate to hide behind “the children” when it comes to seeking cover, the little ones are right up there with old glory and the troops.  This week while spinning the botched Somalia raid by the hallowed  Seal Team Six, a military unit that is critical to the phony war on terror mythology the establishment quickly went to the well. After the most ass kicking military unit in the land was run out of Barawe with their tails between their legs under heavy fire it was sold as a strategic retreat so as to not harm “the children”. Funny that I don’t recall any such considerations for the safety of "the children" when it comes to drone strikes, cruise missile attacks, incendiary bombings or any of the other bravery of being out of range actions undertaken against the brown-skinned, non-Christians who are the targets of our imperialist policies. The Obama administration is certainly not shy about using “the children” for political purposes, this time it is to cover their asses for batting .667 over the weekend in black ops renditions but only weeks ago it was “the children” who laid dead at Ghouta, the victims of sarin gas and last year it was the Sandy Hook victims. Pretty damned shameless but dignity and grace have never been Barry’s strong points being the calculating political animal that he is.

Despite the triumphalism exhibited over the two successful renditions over the weekend, one being the kidnapping of the alleged perpetrator of embassy attacks back in the 20^th century, after which Secretary of Skull and Bones Kerry crowed “they can run but they can’t hide” in a rather eerie reinvention of the unspoken  “kill everything that moves” Vietnam  dictum the administration now is in damage control mode. Kerry, the windsurfing elitist who married into the Heinz ketchup family fortune after parlaying his Vietnam era experience into a national political platform conjured up memories of the fascist Bush administration by warning critics of our now firmly entrenched policies of kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings that “I think it’s important for people in the world not to sympathize with alleged terrorists.”  This of course speaks volumes about the rogue Obama regime’s ongoing war on journalists.  Now if you are a dissenter from the imperial policies you will be marked in some manner, the NSA Stasi sees everything and is warehousing all of that surveillance data in a gigantic complex in Utah where one day in the near future it will be used to retroactively identify enemies of the state and as in all authoritarian states their associates and families. Hitler, Mao and Stalin would have drooled over such capabilities.

The failed Seal Team Six raid will now join the list of taboo subjects in The Homeland and will be washed clean of the stench of illegality and failure by reliable state shills like NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski among many others. It will then be flushed down the memory hole once and for all. I suspect that at this very moment that the Pentagon planners and the narcissist in chief are concocting another series of commando raids to dominate the news cycles and divert attention from their enormous list of policy failures that have destroyed the economy and dragged America from the moral high ground it had occupied for decades – and sadly it did not go kicking and screaming when it was driven down. The new raids will be free of “the children” other than those who end up as “collateral damage”, Seal Team Six will be lionized once more and Obama and Kerry can prance around on the world stage, their complete and utter hypocrisy evident to all but themselves and the majority of their exceptional  people.

The Push to Attack Iran Continues

“Real men go to Tehran"

-Anonymous Bush Administration Official

With the Syrian attack relegated to the back burner for the immediate future thanks to Putin’s brilliant humiliation of Barry and Kerry it has become incumbent for the warmongers to once again try to sell an attack on Iran. This has been ongoing for at least a decade now, it ebbs and flows but is always the apple of the eye of neocons, the weapons industry, oil and natural gas cartels and the entourage of millions on their payroll to push for this most lucrative and ultimately disastrous of wars.  While the strikes on Syria despite weeks of political class hysteria over the gassing of civilians at Ghouta was a deal that Barry and the boys just could not close and one that could have potentially lead to WW III at least Assad had no real ability to militarily threaten the Empire. With Iran that is not the case, it would be an unbelievably stupid, ugly and rapidly escalating series of reactions and counter-reactions that only a lunatic would risk. The bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities would lead to attacks on U.S. ships in the Straits of Hormuz that could effectively close down that key transit point and quadruple oil prices virtually overnight - futures traders would love this. There would be the radioactive fallout from the strikes as well, poisoning thousands of Iranian civilians in ways that would make the still mysterious sarin gassings at Ghouta seem humanitarian by comparison. There is nothing like the damage wrought by radiation poisoning and it lasts, does not dissipate and causes deformations upon the as yet unborn. The Muslim world would immediately be galvanized against the west and Russia and China would not likely be bystanders. Only a lunatic would risk something like this.

Enter one Benjamin Netanyahu, current ruler of Israel and a megalomaniac paranoid with an eye on history and visions of Sir Winston Churchill dancing in his head.  Bibi spent last week engaged in a public relations campaign on American soil to pander to the political foot soldiers who could make that attack on Iran a reality. While difficult to follow up last year's United Nations speech with that ridiculous cartoon bomb the Israeli leader denounced newly minted Iranian president Hassan Rouhani as a "wolf in sheep's clothing" before the world body. Never mind that Rouhani has toned down the incendiary Holocaust denial rhetoric that his predecessor, the freakish Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  used to bait Bibi and which the big man never failed to bite on while in the process legitimizing Ahmadinejad with large percentage of Islamics.  The greatest fear of Netanyahu, a man who relies on the threat of war for his own political survival is that there would be a more moderate approach towards Iran under the new leadership. Obama and Rouhani's much hyped phone call scared the hell of Netanyahu and the tantrum toward's Barry's failure to adequately condemn Iran royally pissed off Israeli officials who have along with their boss spent years trying to get the U.S. to do the heavy lifting as well as bear the burden of any of the blowback of the attack.  Obama's waffling has resulted in the Netanyahu regime's attempt to line up support for an attack by creating an alliance of other Gulf countries, a first strike that would inevitably suck the U.S. into the conflict and trigger the global conflagration that was avoided thanks to Putin's intervention last month.

I would imagine that any such alliance would of course include the aforementioned Bandar Bush and the House of Saud who were reportedly apoplectic that they were unable to goad Obama into attacking the Assad regime in Damascus and are also chafing at a moderated stance towards Iran. The propagandizing will continue in the U.S. corporate-state media which never calls Netanyahu on his horseshit, such as this whopper that Iran is building ICBM's to launch nukes at the American Homeland - this is about as credible as Saddam's trans-Atlantic fleet of chemical weapon spewing drones. There was the rare column this time that Bibi had finally overreached, notably columnist Roger Cohen in the New York Times in the piece entitled Bibi's Tired Iranian Lines from which I excerpt:

Never has it been more difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to convince the world that, as he put it in 2006: “It’s 1938. Iran is Germany.” He tried again at the United Nations this week. In a speech that strained for effect, he likened Iran to a 20th-century “radical regime” of “awesome power.” That would be the Third Reich.

Among those who question this approach is David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee. Referring to the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, he wrote in the Israeli daily Haaretz that, “Simply implying, for instance, that anyone who sits down with Rouhani is a modern-day Neville Chamberlain or Édouard Daladier won’t do the trick. To the contrary, it will only give offense and alienate.”

When Netanyahu’s staunchest supporters — the leaders of the American Jewish community — question his approach to Iran, the Israeli prime minister needs to stop calling Rouhani “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” his favored epithet, and start worrying about crying wolf.

I suppose that it's at least something but the disproportionate amount of coverage to non-Israeli regime friendly reportage in this country is astounding - I read Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post quite regularly and there is no shortage of reporting and viewpoints that aren't in lockstep with the extreme right-wing Netanyahu government. I am also pretty sure that the New York Times ombudsman will be getting a call from Alan Dershowitz or some other deranged war pimp threatening boycotts and smearing for Cohen's intransigence. This is yet one more example of the shameful enabling of the dumbing down of America that the mass media has been culpable in and it really isn't getting any better considering that as of this afternoon some of the top 'stories' being promoted are Tiger at Zoo Bites Woman's Arm, 9 Year Old Boy Sneaks onto Flight to Vegas and 2,000 Lashes For Nude Dancing. The last one is of interest only because it took place in Saudi Arabia, our 'partners in peace' and the paragon for a tolerant society as well as the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. weapons deals. With friends like these who needs enemies?

And of course the genesis of the entire U.S.-Iran problem as it actually exists is that 1953 coup d'etat that the CIA and the Brits engineered to overthrow democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh giving way to decades of tyranny by the U.S. backed despot the Shah of Iran and his SAVAK goon squads. Despite the CIA itself's recent copping to this and the subsequent documentation released it is always through the lens of the 1978-1980 Iranian hostage crisis that is used to portray Iran as an enemy of American freedom (not that we actually have any), mom and apple pie. The Ayatollah Khomeini is a scary looking guy, just like Ahmadinejad and it is always easier to boil down historical and geopolitical issues of enormous complexity into easily digested gruel to feed to the sheeple when you have that ready made devil that can be trotted out.  

The business of America after all is war, we are addicted to it but like all doomed junkies the only endgame is sorrow and self-destruction.