Help Kickstart World War III!

How I wish I had made this video. So hilarious, so scary.

Culture Of Violence Consumes Its Own Young

Someone I just tried to friend on facebook (I hope he accepts) posted this treacly propaganda 

along with a correction:

I like the phrase "replaced their conscience with brand loyalty" as that is a good way to describe why people who were once vehemently anti-war under Bush continue to excuse the warmongering of the current occupant of the White House.

Included in the comments section were facts about children killed by the president via flying killer robots following weekly meetings with his advisers to go over the kill list:

2009-01-23: Aaz-ur-Rehman, 14, Pakistani
2009-02-14: Noor Syed, 8, Pakistani
2009-08-11: Ibad Ullah, teenager, Pakistani
2009-08-11: Mohammad Arif, teenager, Pakistani
2009-08-11: Abdul Qadeer, teenager, Pakistani
2009-08-11: Hazrat Ali, teenager, Pakistani
2009-08-21: Syed Wali Shah, 7, Pakistani
2009-08-21: Naeemullah,?, Pakistani
2009-08-21: Faizullah,?, Pakistani
2009-08-21: Rahima,?, Pakistani
2009-08-21: Shaista,?, Pakistani
2009-11-20: Sakeenullah, 15, Pakistani
2009-12-31: Zaenullah Khan, 17, Pakistani
2009-12-17: Nasser Mohammed Nasser, 6, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Arwa Mohammed Nasser, 4, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Fatima Mohammed Nasser, 2, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Afrah Ali Mohammed Nasser, 9, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Zayda Ali Mohammed Nasser, 7, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Hoda Ali Mohammed Nasser, 5, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Sheikha Ali Mohammed Nasser, 4, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Asmaa Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye, 9, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Salma Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye, 4, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Fatima Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye, 3, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Khadije Ali Mokbel Louqye, 1, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Hanaa Ali Mokbel Louqye, 6, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Mohammed Ali Mokbel Salem Louqye, 4, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Jawass Mokbel Salem Louqye, 15, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Sheikha Nasser Mahdi Ahmad Bouh, 3, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Soumaya Mohammed Saleh Mohammed, 9, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Shafika Mohammed Saleh Mohammed, 4, Yemeni
2009-12-17: Shafiq Mohammed Saleh Mohammed, 2, Yemeni
2010-01-03: Wajid Noor, 9, Pakistani
2010-01-08: Ayeesha, 3, Pakistani
2010-02-24: Naila, 10, Pakistani
2010-05-21: Fatima, ?, Pakistani
2010-05-21: Nisar, ?, Pakistani
2010-05-21: Naeem Khan, ?, Pakistani
2010-10-18: Naeem Ullah, 10, Pakistani
2011-06-15: Shahzada, ?, Pakistani
2011-10-14: Abdel-Rahman Anwar al-Awlaki, 16, American
2011-10-14: Ahmed Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki, 17, Yemeni
2011-10-31: Tariq Aziz, 16, Pakistani
2011-10-31: Waheed, ?, Pakistani
2012-08-21: Osama Haqqani, 13, Pakistani
2012-09-02: Mabrook Mouqbal Al Qadari, 13, Yemeni
2012-09-02: Daolah Nasser, 10, Yemeni
2012-09-02: AbedalGhani Mohammed Mabkhout, 12, Yemeni

Obama is worse than any school shooter yet.
May his victims rest in peace.

And in more school shooting related news, my friend Bruce Gagnon had an excellent blog post about a hyper violent film series being made by teenagers in Maine who see themselves as future Navy officers. The fact that young men raised on violent video games make these films of imaginary murders didn't surprise me, but the news that Brunswick taxpayers are funding viewings on school time did.

Some kill for profit, some for prestige. Some pretend to kill in order to impress their friends. Some kills because they are black-and-white thinkers who believe in "good guys with guns" and have not had a chance to develop much of their critical thinking abilities -- what we naively thought education was about, in my youth.

Sometimes the false dichotomy model goes so far over the edge that it is downright hilarious. I'll leave you with this photo I took a couple of days ago of a church in my neck of the woods that routinely advertises gun safety classes on site. My husband has been calling it "The Church of the Concealed Carry" but even he cannot fully deconstruct this marquee message:

Three Season Catalog of Stuff Obama Supporters Say

No October surprise here -- the president's apologists keep saying they support him no matter how deep the bullshit gets. Bradley Manning? Dr. Jill Stein? They don't know who you're talking about.

If the president is in favor of nuclear power, fracking and the Trans-Pacific Strategic Partnership then they must be good -- right?

If you're not a terrorist, why should you be worried about the NDAA and indefinite detention?

Why does the president use so many drones to kill people around the globe? To keep you safer. That's all you need to know.

Sh*t Obama Supporters Say On Summer Vacation

Supporters of the Warrior in Chief pause in their summer vacation long enough to catalog some of their current justifications.

Spoiler alert: No one mentions Bradley "Who?" Manning.

Or Anaheim.

Source: Daily Kos

It's Happened: Paramilitary Police vs Civilians in Anaheim

Slideshow on Flckr

What Do You Do When Your Country Goes Around Killing Children At Night In Their Beds?

This will be my campaign poster. It ran on Reuters yesterday with the caption:

Nancy Mancias, of the anti-war group Code Pink, looks into U.S. President Barack Obama's campaign headquarters during a vigil in the wake of a massacre of 16 villagers by a suspected rogue American soldier in Afghanistan, in Oakland, California March 12, 2012.

Debate raged on the Afghanistan Working Group listserve yesterday regarding the best response to the massacre, as news trickled out of the soldier's repeated deployments, marital problems, and brain injury. Ralph Lopez reminded peace activists of the campaign they had waged to stop deployment of injured soldiers back into the battlefield. Some wanted to write letters of apology to Afghanistan and wondered where they could be sent. The terrific Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers were nominated; even though they live in a different part of the country, they've reached out repeatedly to hold conversations with people around the globe in the belief that connecting leads to love.

My good friend CODEPINK staffer Janet Weil pointed out that such an apology might seem as insincere as those issued by the Commander in Chief with depressing regularity lately, upon news of each new atrocity or offense against decency. She suggested we instead contact our own government officials and demand: troops out now. Also that we blog or write op eds to communicate with our fellow citizens about the mess in Afghanistan.

I decided to combine the two suggestions, sending a copy of my blog post about the incident to the Youth Peace Volunteers. In the post I named names of just some of the officials I hold responsible for the wanton destruction endured during our decade long war against the people of the region. President Obama topped the list; he has made Afghanistan his war in way that Iraq never was. Of course he has also started bombing and sending Special Forces and assassins into other countries: Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Uganda, Bahrain. It is sickening. My taxes help pay for it. It has to stop.

Now that Obama has signed HR374 -- which has been called "the CODEPINK law," referring to my organization's penchant for speaking up -- I will no doubt be a felon soon, for demonstrating at the White House, or at a campaign stop of the death dealing Obama. (See you in Portland on March 30!) If convicted, I would lose my right to vote. Oh well.

Truth Is Behind the Lies People Tell Themselves About Their Empire

Source: Al Jazeera Witness "Four Days in Guantanamo"

A lot of angry responses to the satirical video my husband and I made about the rationalizations people tell themselves in order to continue to support their naked emperor, and some of them mistook us for actual Obama supporters. Stuff Obama Supporters Say has 13,000+ views after a couple of days on YouTube, and 100+ comments in a lively debate where it was posted to Common Dreams (thanks, Abby Zimet).

As one critic of the video put it, "But some of those things are true." In celebration of the success of stop SOPA/PIPA blackout day yesterday, I have used the Internet and yes, Wikipedia, to unearth some nuggets of truth alluded to in the video. It was our intention to lampoon those in denial; the ugly facts of detention in Guantanamo or Bagram, where our tax dollars support the torture of kids as young as 15, are out there just waiting to be discovered. But the mainstream media feed in the U.S. will, as a matter of policy, not help people discover many facts. Instead, it will enable the skewed priorities of valuing organic gardening over drone attacks on civilians.

Inverted priorities have been typical of affluent imperial citizens throughout history. What did "good Germans" mainly do to support the Nazi's genocidal plans? They looked the other way.

Quite possibly they were afraid -- and rightly so -- of becoming the victims of indefinite detention.

Feeble thinkers, they believed that the rule of law was not important to them, because they were not criminals (or Communists, or trade unionists, or terrorists, etc.). A basic failure to understand why the writ of habeas corpus is the cornerstone of equal access to justice goes hand in hand with the failure to understand why the rights outlined in the first ten amendments to the Constitution are worth struggling to uphold.

Source: Mother Jones article on Iranian government's plan to send Obama a pink toy model of the U.S. drone that landed in that country last month.

If I don't see any drones patrolling my skies (yet) then they must not be a problem for me -- right?

Source: http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com reprint of Al Jazeera article UK: Campaigners Seek Arrest of Former CIA Legal Chief over Pakistan Drone Attacks

(Obama thinks he is such a good father, he can joke around with his pals about ordering Predator drone strikes against boys that might be interested in his daughters.)

And who is Bradley Manning anyway?

Logan Price, a 27-year-old activist, said he went up to the president and asked why he hadn’t addressed the concerns of the protesters. “I thought that Bradley Manning was the most important whistleblower of my generation..."

Source: Politico

( Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images / March 14, 2011 ) via CODEPINK blog PINKTank