Grim Reaper On Seal Of Government Agency Funded By Thee & Me

Not a parody -- believe it or not, this is the seal of this taxpayer supported government program.

If you've ever taught middle school, you've seen a lot of margin doodles that looked like studies for this cartoonish yet chilling logo. Hey, maybe one of your former students got paid to design it. Maybe your admonishments not to draw scenes of violence on schoolwork fell on deaf ears because the kid knew he, not his teacher, was the one swimming in the mainstream.

The Nazi party and the Bolsheviks had a lot better graphic designers, that's for sure.

Why would a US government agency have a logo of the grim reaper? Because we are super proud of our Grim Reaper Unmanned Aerial Vehicle aka UAV aka drone. It can kill a LOT of people by remote control, and it costs a ton of money to manufacture and operate, thereby ensuring that the 0.01% -- military-industrial complex top executives -- don't fall on hard times.

Above we see what they call the PEO (rhymes with CEO) handing over command of this branch of our military. How to feel proud of being in charge of killing people without risking your own safety? Have a spiffy uniform with lots of ribbons on it! And make sure you get the lucrative consulting and/ or media jobs (like retired Gen. Wesley Clark on the new rah-rah war "reality" show Stars Earn Stripes). Wonder where outgoing Rear Admiral William Shannon is headed? He looks pretty happy about it.

A photo that's making the rounds on facebook puts some of this in perspective:

Meanwhile the Pentagon is doing the lobbying work of its corporate patrons, crying poverty if sequestration budget cuts go through. From The Hill: 

Pentagon warns sequester cuts will lead to ‘unready, hollow’ force by Jeremy Herb

A top Pentagon official warned Congress on Wednesday that sequestration would be a “major step” to creating “an unready, hollow” military force, as lawmakers and the Obama administration spar over a plan to avert the looming automatic spending cuts.

Testifying at a long-awaited House Armed Services Committee hearing on sequestration cuts, Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter began laying out some of the impacts of the $55 billion cut facing the Pentagon in 2013 if the sequestration cuts are not reversed.

Carter said the across-the-board cuts would require the Pentagon to “substantially modify and scale back the new defense strategy,” which was crafted last year as the Defense Department prepared for $487 billion in budget reductions already scheduled for the next decade.

Carter and acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jeffrey Zients told the committee Wednesday that sequestration would be devastating and should never go into effect, bluntly telling Congress to fix the cuts before they hit on Jan. 2, 2013...

But it's not all about hardware. Even if bombing gets done mostly by robots in the wet dreams of the Pentagon's future, somebody's still got to go in and kick those doors down in the middle of the night. Thus the announcement this week on USA Today's front page: Army to expand citizen soldiers' training periods.

Joyce Raezer, executive director of the National Military Family Association, said the wars went on for so long, that fewer people remember the peacetime schedule. 

Just as the picture at the beginning of this post was worth a thousand words, I'll end with a different eloquent image. Caption: a soldier holds his newborn prior to boarding his flight back to the endless state of war that U.S. citizens now find themselves in. Isn't war fun?