“I have 21 years of Army service going back to the Vietnam War. My loyalty to the government should be a given. It is gone. I am certain it will never return regardless of how long I might have lived.”
How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs.
James Ridgeway, 12 July 2011
Al Jazeera
Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.
Phi Beta Iota: The industrialization of agriculture, and the industrialization of “medicine,” have poisoned the Western population, the USA most of all. The degree to which toxins and other poisons are allowed by law is now criminally insane.
President Obama in trouble at home and around the world. The common denominator in his problems is a failure to follow through on expectations he recklessly excites … while this mismatch is clear in the mounting alienation of his domestic political base in the United States, it is also evident his plummeting popularity abroad, particularly in the Arab World, as shown in the attached survey by Zogby International for the Arab American Institute Foundation.
ARAB ATTITUDES, 2011
Conducted by Zogby International, Analysis by James Zogby
After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran's favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia).
The continuing occupation of Palestinian lands and U.S. interference in the Arab world are held to be the greatest obstacles to peace and stability in the Middle East.
While many Arabs were hopeful that the election of Barack Obama would improve U.S.-Arab relations, that hope has evaporated. Today, President Obama's favorable ratings across the Arab World are 10% or less.
Obama's performance ratings are lowest on the two issues to which he has devoted the most energy: Palestine and engagement with the Muslim world.
The U.S. role in establishing a no-fly zone over Libya receives a positive rating only in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, but, as an issue, it is the lowest priority.
The killing of bin Laden only worsened attitudes toward the U.S.
A plurality says it is too early to tell whether the Arab Spring will have a positive impact on the region. In Egypt, the mood is mixed. Only in the Gulf States are optimism and satisfaction levels high.
I've enjoyed The War Nerd for years. Great, colorful writing. The author of the column, “Gary Brecher,” was never on the same page as me when it came to warfare. However, that's changed.
He now thinks, and makes an excellent case for global guerrilla thinking. In short: that blood and guts warfare is counter productive and that systems disruption (hiting network systempunkts/nodes to generate high ROI‘s and publicity) is a potential path to long term victory for guerrillas. In short: in the modern context, if you keep the blood/guts to a min, and keep the cost ratio massively in your favor while staying alive, you will eventually win.
To demonstrate this, he has a great article on how the IRA eventually adopted systems disruption:
“In 1994, they took the idea of non-lethal warfare a notch up by doing one of the most revolutionary things any guerrilla army has ever done: IRA mortar teams dropped shells on the runways at Heathrow Airport, totally stopping air traffic… but the shells weren’t even designed to explode. Intentional duds. That’s amazing; I’ve never heard of anything like that. It shows how far they’d come by that stage, away from the simple Al Qaeda maximum-blood crap I bought into in that earlier article. In contemporary urban guerrilla warfare, at least in Western Europe, killing civvies is counterproductive. What you want to do, what the IRA had mastered by the 1990s, was messing with the incredibly fragile and expensive networks that keep a huge city going. Interrupt them and you cost the enemy billions of dollars, and they don’t even have any gory corpses to shake in your faces. Fucking brilliant, and I was too dumb to see it!
While the U.S. government may be described as a massive wealth transferring scheme, looting the middle class for the elite, I’d suggest that ‘wealth’ and ‘elite’ are not precisely correct. The transformation in Western power structures over past three centuries is such that the ‘elite’ was formerly indistinguishable from the government, which is the hallmark of feudal government; whereas now, the locus of power is the government itself, not any particular group of people.
We still find the old system at work in dictatorships – Libya, N. Korea – in which the government is indistinguishable from a small group of people and for whom wealth accumulation is the primary goal.
But wealth isn’t the primary goal of western governments; they have a nearly unlimited ability to create their own wealth (debt and printing money) – or destroy it (debt and printing money). The primary concern of these supposedly post-feudal governments is stability and power, and their primary means to securing these ends is patronage.
Patronage existed in feudal governments, but it was a means to an end (wealth accumulation), and not the end in itself. As such, it’s then not surprising that the primary purpose of most government endeavors – the education and court systems, intelligence communities, healthcare – is to employ the greatest number of people, thus securing widespread government support. Critical mass is reached when a simple majority of the voters earn >50% of their income from government sources – there are people who work for a living and people who vote for a living, and once the latter reaches >50%, the former becomes politically irrelevant.
The great part about starting out small, simple, and a little cheesy is that it can only get better from there. Using that logic, my friends and I have launched a wiki called Miiu (pronounced me-you). Miiu is a visual wiki. Essentially, a catalogue of things (products, tools, etc.) and places (homes, businesses, gov't buildings, etc.).
To start off, our goal is to do what lots of people have asked me to create: a wiki that catalogues everything related to resilient communities. We'd like to create a visual catelogue of the things (from DIY solar stills to an inventory of homes, farms, businesses in your community) that will be useful in the development of resilient communities.
Lulzsec has some claims to being an open source insurgency. It operated as a foco by generating a plausible promise: its hacks were high profile and successful, proving that it's possible to successfully attack/damage all big organizations despite the billions they spend on computer security. This promise has also generated copycats/clones around the world. Finally, it is now disbanding (forgoing any formal leadership role). If they can disband in a way that lets them escape unscathed, that only adds to the promise. Quote from their website:
“For the past 50 days we've been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us. The support we've gathered for it in such a short space of time is truly overwhelming, and not to mention humbling. Please don't stop. Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve.”
Phi Beta Iota: We asked Col Stu Herrington, USA (Ret), Army counterintelligence officer/interrogator with successful interrogation experience in three wars, what he thought of the matter of General Patraeus opening the door on torture, and here is what he thinks–we have to concur.