Sunday, April 20, 2014

The View

English: Troy Yocum hikes accross America to r...English: Troy Yocum hikes accross America to raise money for Iraq War veterans. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
iraqiraq (Photo credit: The U.S. Army)
Dancing to Queen

Shared from Kirtana Sings Happy Ishtar Everyone! : -)

Watch rescue dog's rehabilitation

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Lap Dancers, the CIA and BP

The BP executive was explaining to me how the CIA, MI6 and British Petroleum engineered a coup d'état, overthrowing an elected president of a nation who was “not favorable to BP.” The corporation's former Vice-President, Leslie Abrahams, is pictured here, holding an AK-47 in front of BP headquarters in Baku, Azerbaijan.  
To understand what really happened in the Gulf of Mexico, and how BP became a corporate creature beyond the reach of the law, British television network Channel 4 sent me on a four-continent investigation through a labyrinthine funhouse of bribery, lap-dancing, beatings, Wikileaks, a coup d'état, arrests and oil-state terror.
 The conversation was far from the weirdest I had in my four-continent investigation of the real story of the Deepwater Horizon.

Star-Spangled Baggage: How America's Wars Came Home With the Troops  care2

at Common Dreams


 Kit B

....a Fort Hood mass killing, the second in four and a half years, was committed by a man who was neither a religious nor a political “extremist.” He seems to have been merely one of America’s injured and troubled veterans who now number in the hundreds of thousands.

Some 2.6 million men and women have been dispatched, often repeatedly, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and according to a recent survey of veterans of those wars conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly one-third say that their mental health is worse than it was before they left, and nearly half say the same of their physical condition. Almost half say they give way to sudden outbursts of anger. Only 12% of the surveyed veterans claim they are now “better” mentally or physically than they were before they went to war.

The media coverage that followed Lopez’s rampage was, of course, 24/7 and there was much discussion of PTSD, the all-purpose (if little understood) label now used to explain just about anything unpleasant that happens to or is caused by current or former military men and women. Amid the barrage of coverage, however, something was missing: evidence that has been in plain sight for years of how the violence of America’s distant wars comes back to haunt the "homeland” as the troops return. In that context, Lopez’s killings, while on a scale not often matched, are one more marker on a bloody trail of death that leads from Iraq and Afghanistan into the American heartland, to bases and backyards nationwide. It’s a story with a body count that should not be ignored.

War Comes Home

During the last 12 years, many veterans who had grown “worse” while at war could be found on and around bases here at home, waiting to be deployed again, and sometimes doing serious damage to themselves and others. The organization Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) has campaigned for years for a soldier’s “right to heal” between deployments. Next month it will release its own report on a common practice at Fort Hood of sending damaged and heavily medicated soldiers back to combat zones against both doctors’ orders and official base regulations. Such soldiers can’t be expected to survive in great shape.

Immediately after the Lopez rampage, President Obama spoke of those soldiers who have served multiple tours in the wars and “need to feel safe” on their home base. But what the president called “that sense of safety... broken once again” at Fort Hood has, in fact, already been shattered again and again on bases and in towns across post-9/11 America -- ever since misused, misled, and mistreated soldiers began bringing war home with them.

Since 2002, soldiers and veterans have been committing murder individually and in groups, killing wives, girlfriends, children, fellow soldiers, friends, acquaintances, complete strangers, and -- in appalling numbers -- themselves. Most of these killings haven’t been on a mass scale, but they add up, even if no one is doing the math. To date, they have never been fully counted.

The first veterans of the war in Afghanistan returned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2002. In quick succession, four of them murdered their wives, after which three of the killers took their own lives. When a New York Times reporter asked a Special Forces officer to comment on these events, he replied: “S.F.’s don’t like to talk about emotional stuff. We are Type A people who just blow things like that off, like yesterday’s news.”

Indeed, much of the media and much of the country has done just that. While individual murders committed by “our nation’s heroes” on the “home front” have been reported by media close to the scene, most such killings never make the national news, and many become invisible even locally when reported only as routine murders with no mention of the apparently insignificant fact that the killer was a veteran. Only when these crimes cluster around a military base do diligent local reporters seem to put the pieces of the bigger picture together.

By 2005, Fort Bragg had already counted its tenth such “domestic violence” fatality, while on the West coast, the Seattle Weekly had tallied the death toll among active-duty troops and veterans in western Washington state at seven homicides and three suicides. “Five wives, a girlfriend, and one child were slain; four other children lost one or both parents to death or imprisonment. Three servicemen committed suicide -- two of them after killing their wife or girlfriend. Four soldiers were sent to prison. One awaited trial.”

In January 2008, the New York Times tried for the first time to tally a nationwide count of such crimes. It found “121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.” It listed headlines drawn from smaller local newspapers: Lakewood, Washington, “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife”; Pierre, South Dakota, “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress”; Colorado Springs, Colorado, “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

The Times found that about a third of the murder victims were wives, girlfriends, children, or other relatives of the killer, but significantly, a quarter of the victims were fellow soldiers. The rest were acquaintances or strangers. At that time, three quarters of the homicidal soldiers were still in the military. The number of killings then represented a nearly 90% increase in homicides committed by active duty personnel and veterans in the six years since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Yet after tracing this “cross-country trail of death and heartbreak,” the Times noted that its research had probably uncovered only “the minimum number of such cases.” One month later, it found “more than 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or [fatal] child abuse in the United States involving service members and new veterans.”

More cases were already on the way. After the Fourth Brigade Combat team of Fort Carson, Colorado, returned from Iraq later in 2008, nine of its members were charged with homicide, while “charges of domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault” at the base rose sharply. Three of the murder victims were wives or girlfriends; four were fellow soldiers (all men); and two were strangers, chosen at random.

Back at Fort Bragg and the nearby Marine base at Camp Lejeune, military men murdered four military women in a nine-month span between December 2007 and September 2008. By that time, retired Army Colonel Ann Wright had identified at least 15 highly suspicious deaths of women soldiers in the war zones that had been officially termed “non-combat related” or “suicide.” She raised a question that has never been answered: “Is there an Army cover-up of rape and murder of women soldiers?” The murders that took place near (but not on) Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, all investigated and prosecuted by civilian authorities, raised another question: Were some soldiers bringing home not only the generic violence of war, but also specific crimes they had rehearsed abroad?

Stuck in Combat Mode

While this sort of post-combat-zone combat at home has rarely made it into the national news, the killings haven’t stopped. They have, in fact, continued, month by month, year after year, generally reported only by local media. Many of the murders suggest that the killers still felt as if they were on some kind of private mission in “enemy territory,” and that they themselves were men who had, in distant combat zones, gotten the hang of killing -- and the habit. For example, Benjamin Colton Barnes, a 24-year-old Army veteran, went to a party in Seattle in 2012 and got into a gunfight that left four people wounded. He then fled to Mount Rainier National Park where he shot and killed a park ranger (the mother of two small children) and fired on others before escaping into snow-covered mountains where he drowned in a stream.

Barnes, an Iraq veteran, had reportedly experienced a rough transition to stateside life, having been discharged from the Army in 2009 for misconduct after being arrested for drunk driving and carrying a weapon. (He also threatened his wife with a knife.) He was one of more than 20,000 troubled Army and Marine veterans the military discarded between 2008 and 2012 with “other-than-honorable” discharges and no benefits, health care, or help.

Faced with the expensive prospect of providing long-term care for these most fragile of veterans, the military chose instead to dump them. Barnes was booted out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, which by 2010 had surpassed Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, and Fort Carson in violence and suicide to become the military’s “most troubled” home base.

Some homicidal soldiers work together, perhaps recreating at home that famous fraternal feeling of the military “band of brothers.” In 2012, in Laredo, Texas, federal agents posing as leaders of a Mexican drug cartel arrested Lieutenant Kevin Corley and Sergeant Samuel Walker -- both from Fort Carson’s notorious Fourth Brigade Combat team -- and two other soldiers in their private hit squad who had offered their services to kill members of rival cartels. “Wet work,” soldiers call it, and they’re trained to do it so well that real Mexican drug cartels have indeed been hiring ambitious vets from Fort Bliss, Texas, and probably other bases in the borderlands, to take out selected Mexican and American targets at $5,000 a pop.

Such soldiers seem never to get out of combat mode. Boston psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, well known for his work with troubled veterans of the Vietnam War, points out that the skills drilled into the combat soldier -- cunning, deceit, strength, quickness, stealth, a repertoire of killing techniques, and the suppression of compassion and guilt -- equip him perfectly for a life of crime. “I’ll put it as bluntly as I can,” Shay writes in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, “Combat service per se smooths the way into criminal careers afterward in civilian life.” During the last decade, when the Pentagon relaxed standards to fill the ranks, some enterprising members of at least 53 different American gangs jumpstarted their criminal careers by enlisting, training, and serving in war zones to perfect their specialized skill sets.

Some veterans have gone on to become domestic terrorists, like Desert Storm veteran Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma federal building in 1995, or mass murderers like Wade Michael Page, the Army veteran and uber-racist who killed six worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in August 2012. Page had first been introduced to the ideology of white supremacy at age 20, three years after he joined the Army, when he fell in with a neo-Nazi hate group at Fort Bragg. That was in 1995, the year three paratroopers from Fort Bragg murdered two black local residents, a man and a woman, to earn their neo-Nazi spider-web tattoos.

An unknown number of such killers just walk away, like Army Private (and former West Point cadet) Isaac Aguigui, who was finally convicted last month in a Georgia criminal court of murdering his pregnant wife, Sergeant Deirdre Wetzker Aguigui, an Army linguist, three years ago. Although Deirdre Aguigui’s handcuffed body had revealed multiple blows and signs of struggle, the military medical examiner failed to “detect an anatomic cause of death” -- a failure convenient for both the Army, which didn’t have to investigate further, and Isaac Aguigui, who collected a half-million dollars in military death benefits and life insurance to finance a war of his own.

In 2012, Georgia authorities charged Aguigui and three combat veterans from Fort Stewart with the execution-style murders of former Private Michael Roark, 19, and his girlfriend Tiffany York, 17. The trial in a civilian criminal court revealed that Aguigui (who was never deployed) had assembled his own private militia of troubled combat vets called FEAR (Forever Enduring, Always Ready), and was plotting to take over Fort Stewart by seizing the munitions control point. Among his other plans for his force were killing unnamed officials with car bombs, blowing up a fountain in Savannah, poisoning the apple crop in Aguigui’s home state of Washington, and joining other unspecified private militia groups around the country in a plot to assassinate President Obama and take control of the United States government. Last year, the Georgia court convicted Aguigui in the case of the FEAR executions and sentenced him to life. Only then did a civilian medical examiner determine that he had first murdered his wife.

The Rule of Law

The routine drills of basic training and the catastrophic events of war damage many soldiers in ways that appear darkly ironic when they return home to traumatize or kill their partners, their children, their fellow soldiers, or random strangers in a town or on a base. But again to get the stories we must rely upon scrupulous local journalists. The Austin American-Statesman, for example, reports that, since 2003, in the area around Fort Hood in central Texas, nearly 10% of those involved in shooting incidents with the police were military veterans or active-duty service members. In four separate confrontations since last December, the police shot and killed two recently returned veterans and wounded a third, while one police officer was killed. A fourth veteran survived a shootout unscathed.

Such tragic encounters prompted state and city officials in Texas to develop a special Veterans Tactical Response Program to train police in handling troubled military types. Some of the standard techniques Texas police use to intimidate and overcome suspects -- shouting, throwing “flashbangs” (grenades), or even firing warning shots -- backfire when the suspect is a veteran in crisis, armed, and highly trained in reflexive fire. The average civilian lawman is no match for an angry combat grunt from, as the president put it at Fort Hood, “the greatest Army that the world has ever known.” On the other hand, a brain-injured vet who needs time to respond to orders or reply to questions may get manhandled, flattened, tasered, bludgeoned, or worse by overly aggressive police officers before he has time to say a word.

Here’s another ironic twist. For the past decade, military recruiters have made a big selling point of the “veterans preference” policy in the hiring practices of civilian police departments. The prospect of a lifetime career in law enforcement after a single tour of military duty tempts many wavering teenagers to sign on the line. But the vets who are finally discharged from service and don the uniform of a civilian police department are no longer the boys who went away.

In Texas today, 37% of the police in Austin, the state capitol, are ex-military, and in smaller cities and towns in the vicinity of Fort Hood, that figure rises above the 50% mark. Everybody knows that veterans need jobs, and in theory they might be very good at handling troubled soldiers in crisis, but they come to the job already trained for and very good at war. When they meet the next Ivan Lopez, they make a potentially combustible combo.

Most of America’s military men and women don’t want to be “stigmatized” by association with the violent soldiers mentioned here. Neither do the ex-military personnel who now, as members of civilian police forces, do periodic battle with violent vets in Texas and across the country. The new Washington Post-Kaiser survey reveals that most veterans are proud of their military service, if not altogether happy with their homecoming. Almost half of them think that American civilians, like the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan, don’t genuinely “respect” them, and more than half feel disconnected from American life. They believe they have better moral and ethical values than their fellow citizens, a virtue trumpeted by the Pentagon and presidents alike. Sixty percent say they are more patriotic than civilians. Seventy percent say that civilians fail absolutely to understand them. And almost 90% of veterans say that in a heartbeat they would re-up to fight again.

Americans on the “home front” were never mobilized by their leaders and they have generally not come to grips with the wars fought in their name. Here, however, is another irony: neither, it turns out, have most of America’s military men and women. Like their civilian counterparts, many of whom are all too ready to deploy those soldiers again to intervene in countries they can’t even find on a map, a significant number of veterans evidently have yet to unpack and examine the wars they brought home in their baggage -- and in too many grim cases, they, their loved ones, their fellow soldiers, and sometimes random strangers are paying the price
*****

By: Ann Jones | Tomsdispatch | Common Dreams |

Ann Jones, a writer and photographer, has reported extensively from Afghanistan since 2002 and is the author of several books. Her most recent book is, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars— the Untold Story (2013, Dispatch Books). Her previous books include: War Is Not Over When It's Over, Kabul in Winter, Women Who Kill, and Next Time She'll Be Dead. Jones has worked with women in conflict and post-conflict zones, principally Afghanistan, and reported on their concerns. An authority on violence against women, she has served as a gender adviser to the United Nations. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Nation. For more information, visit her website. 


Syd H

Here is a huge reason why there is conflict at all in the world:

http://www.alternet.org/world/americas-coup-machine-destroying-democracy-1953?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark

Greed & we are not paying attention, just letting it all happen, thinking we are being represented... :(

Meanwhile, our children, siblings, aunts & uncles, cousins, are being forced into the military due to manipulated economics to play taxpayer-funded security for corporate interests (including Monsanto in Iraq no less). :( 


   Deb E

As we approach the end of this year, the time when we were supposed to not be in any wars anymore, many soldiers have just been given redeployment orders that are for nine months. That isn't within the time frame of the end of this year. And, it does look like the agreement will be reached which will "allow" for troops to remain past the end of the year. The soldiers haven't a clue when they will next be sent into a war zone. This has never been the case for our soldiers in the past. How can anyone expect soldiers, who are repeatedly sent into war zones, to ever get out of "war mode"? It just isn't a hat you put on and take off. When you know that you will repeatedly be put into a war zone, you cannot just be a "normal" person out of it.

The article said, "suppression of compassion and guilt" is drilled into them, and I know first hand how well they drill that into soldiers. It is the only way they can survive in a war zone. How can anyone expect for them to just drop that in between tours? The minute they do try to drop the suppression of those two emotions, everything that happened top them while at war floods back into their minds and then you have classic "PTSD" symptoms. Many cannot live with what they saw or did and they commit suicide because of it.

My son goes back for his 3rd tour soon.


Ros G
Was reading the other day in an Aussie newspaper that America will reduce the land troops in future conflicts..sounds like good news on the face of it...but they will increase their Navy and Airforce.. the article went on to say that all the Naval vessels that are currently in the South/East China Seas have just recently been fitted with new laser combat technology. We have a US Naval Base in Darwin, Northern Territory..there were 900 marines permanently stationed there..that number has increased to 2000 now and a provision for 7000 more...the question Australians are asking can the US lead a strike from our Country without our permission???...the silence is deafening...for those that are unfamiliar with Australia...please Google Darwin..it will give you a better understanding of what I'm saying.  

B Mutiny

US Special Ops Forces Committing Suicide in Record Numbers
Offbeat (tags: Army, USA )
Ray - rt.com
US special forces have been committing suicide at record levels for the last two years, the head of the US Special Operations Command (SOCom) admitted in a speech on Thursday. He blamed the high numbers on the length and difficulty of combat.

http://www.care2.com/news/member/725222209/3762997

MORE soldiers die of SUICIDE than in Combat, now...

All our supposed "enemies" have to do, is just harass our troops, and hide, and WAIT.... for our troops to kill THEMSELVES...

Our troops are killing themselves because of MORAL PAIN, they CAN'T LIVE WITH THEMSELVES after what they have done and participated in and seen done.... to men, women, children, unarmed people, civilians..... atrocities and war crimes and senseless killing with no purpose...

This was NOT SO for example during WWII, which was considered a JUST WAR, fought for GOOD REASONS...
In the present US Imperialist wars of INVASION, there is NO GOOD REASON {the "reasons" the govt. gives change all the time, "WMDs", to "Liberate" the people, etc.} - and therefore, being in that country where they are NOT WANTED, it becomes ONLY a matter of staying alive at any cost, and keeping your friends alive, there is NO IDEALISTIC PURPOSE for making a "worthy sacrifice" like in other wars....
which, whether it was true or not, these Ideals were BELIEVED IN....
MORAL INJURY: a New Term we must make ourselves aware of:
' ....the swamp of moral confusion and contradiction so familiar to returning veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is what experts are coming to identify as a Moral Injury: the pain that results from damage to a person’s moral foundation.
In contrast to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which springs from fear, Moral Injury is a violation of what each of us considers right or wrong.

The diagnosis of PTSD has been defined and officially endorsed since 1980 by the mental health community, and those suffering from it have earned broad public sympathy and understanding. Moral Injury is not officially recognized by the Defense Department.
But it is Moral Injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families.
Moral Injury raises uncomfortable questions about what happens in war, the dark experiences that many veterans have always been reluctant to talk about. Are the young Americans who volunteer for military service prepared for the ethical ambiguity that lies ahead? Can they be hardened against Moral Injury? Should they be?'

David Wood, HuffPost, March 18, 2014
=============================
It is my belief that NEARLY ALL Veterans returning from combat are suffering from MORAL INJURY, and that PTSD is not the same thing, altho Veterans can have BOTH. PTSD is from the stress and hardship of combat ITSELF. But, again, MORAL PAIN is from KILLING FOR NO GOOD REASON.
I believe that MORAL PAIN BE SO EXTREME, IT CAN DRIVE SOME VETERANS INSANE - so can PTSD, and they can combine. But, the Military Establishment DOES NOT EVEN WAN TO ACKNOWLEDGE the fact of Moral Injury. [They'd have to STOP FIGHTING IMPERIALIST WARS!]

Moral Injury:The Grunts - Damned If They Kill, Damned If They Don't/ HuffPost
Society & Culture (tags: PTSD, Moralinjury, Moralpain, Morality, MoralityofWar, JustWars, Imperialism, Pentagon, DefenseDepartment, ImperialistWars, Afghanistan, Troops, Suicide, USmilitary, WarCrimes, insanity )
BMutiny - projects.huffingtonpost.com
"He was just a kid. But I'm sorry, I'm trying not to get shot and I don't want any of my brothers getting hurt, so when you are put in that kind of situation... it's shittty that you have to, like... shoot him. You know it's wrong. But, you have no choice."

The URL for this C2 News Item:
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http://www.care2.com/news/member/911530155/3763370
====================
The term "MORAL INJURY" is a good one to add to our Language....
IT NAMES SOMETHING THAT HAS BEEN DELIBERATELY OVERLOOKED up till now.
NAMING THINGS BY THEIR PROPER NAMES, IS IMPORTANT.

John F
A financial ploy http://tradingsim.com/blog/stop-loss-orders/ as a new standard operational policy. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-05-army-troops_x.htm
Scroll down for Stress http://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/communityproviders/docs/deployment_operational_experiences.pdf
Looking at the effects https://www.facebook.com/StopLossMovie
One of those 'losses' http://www.startribune.com/local/123693849.html
Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
http://216.107.145.127/amazon_store/item/1594204993
The shock when troops realize their real assignment is seldom mentioned. Guarding poppy fields and harassing farmers barely surviving while interdicting cheap opium* supplies to Indian hospitals was not in the recruitment brochure. Neither was Depleted Uranium or Water Warfare.

*( the painkiller morphine )



Back in the day, it was a big deal for a soldier to do two tours in Nam, and even that was the exception. Now, 6 or more tours is the norm. Combined with more effective training (brainwashing) designed by disreputable psychologists to make killing innocent men, women and CHILDREN more palatable, it is no big surprise that veterans are returning with higher rates of PTSD and other assorted mental health issues... The veterans I work with, the ones with a conscience, are wracked with guilt. Guilt for participating in and facilitating war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the guilt of falling for the lies and BS (as I did 43 yrs. ago) prior to enlisting. The socio/psychopaths who return on the other hand are doing fine....
Meanwhile 22 veterans and 1 active duty soldier commit suicide every single day...
ALL while the slaughter of innocent men, women and CHILDREN continues on a daily basis...
veteransforpeace.org



"...but it was a gutpunch to me to read that 90% of them would do it all over again."
Not sure of the 90%, but here's the thing. It becomes a self reinforcing, self perpetuating, self replicating meme to continue doing the same thing. Otherwise, they would have to admit and come to terms that they participated in and were complicit in the war crimes and crimes against humanity. The human psyche can only take so much, and process only so much before it is fried.... So, for many vets it is easier to continue the false narrative of "fighting for our freedoms"... than it is to accept that they allowed themselves to be used and abused...
I was more fortunate than most, I was only 17 and became CO in short order. But even then, for many years, even while protesting against war and SOA, I still took some pride in having served and attempted to rationalize it for some time...



"Only 12% of the surveyed veterans claim they are now “better” mentally or physically than they were before they went to war."
While thus far, the outbreaks of carnage (as well as suicide) likely come from the group that self-identifies as worse off since successive "tours" of combat; the fact is, I think this group--of 12% are FAR more sinister. And that's because it's one thing if the current wars were based on legitimate objectives consistent with an honest National Defense.
Since they are largely shows of big muscle on the part of the Empire, and the means from which to obtain access to other nations' resources, the despicable merciless killing underway is all a tragic farce. And human beings, if they ARE human beings, should feel awful about such senseless exploits and casual mass murder.
Therefore, the 12% that thinks they are BETTER off represents the demographic that would appear to be natural-born killers.
Those who FEEL broken still have working consciences. Those that have no remorse, are the ones likely to sign on for the next set of sexed up foreign wars. And that is hardly a good thing for any sovereign people within the sights of the U.S. war machine.





We are having this and all the other problems related to it for some very disturbing reason. It's the diet served. To fully understand how deep and far reaching the consequences of a certain type of diet are, requires a much deeper look into the subject and it must be objective beyond the usual shoulder shrugging. All too often we are paying attention to the shit that comes out of the horse, without ever paying attention to what goes inside. That is our misery/dilemma.
Now, if the majority of the masses would get what is done to them, there may be an alternative route - a route back towards sanity for all. As it stands now, this 'incident' is nothing else but the result of a diet that is customized to produce highly submissive characters that lack empathy and average cognitive abilities.
Please read on about this utterly important correlation between our society's most prevalent diet and its effects on the brain. To read further into it follow the link:
"The role of sugar in mental health has been well documented, with recent research linking intake with cognitive deficits.
In the study of 737 participants without diabetes in the Boston Puerto Rican Health Study, higher sugar intake was significantly associated with lower cognitive function, as indicated on the Mini–Mental State Examination (Br J Nutr, 2011;106:1423-32).
Another recent study involving 937 initially cognitively normal adults aged 70 to 89 years linked higher intake of carbohydrates with a risk of developing mild cognitive impairment that was as much as 3.6 times greater than those on low-carbohydrate diets, and the risk was also greater in those with diets high in simple sugars (J Alzheimers Dis, 2012:32)."
http://www.medscape.com/viewar... ff.




A well-researched and supported article, which should be widely distributed in public media.
Related problem:
Yesterday I was trying to describe how antidepressant drugs operate on cognitive circuits; portions of the brain are not affected and processes of perception actually remain in what we might call a loped mode (neurotransmitter circuits, while somewhat separate, are connected to our environmental senses - vision, hearing, etc. - and some processing which naturally leads to the useful-in-survival emotional responses of depression (or other normally appropriate response).
Thus suicidal (and importantly, homicidal) impulses and ideation remain rather undiminished when neurotransmitters/modulators, are artificially changed within the specific circuits where they dominate neural communications.
In some cases, those violent responses are enhanced, rather than diminished.
Stress is a holistic response, and targeted exogenous control must include psychosocial retraining.
As youths, we always noticed that police who had been relatively recent vets were far less ethical and far more threatening and uncontrolled in their violent tendencies.
Police forces and military are essentially incompatible occupations - except for violent tactical forces to be used only in extreme circumstances, enlisted soldiers and perhaps any who have had behaviors enhanced and others highly suppressed by boot camp, might best be excluded from pursuing any armed civilian career.
Many psychosocial experiments are not regarded as ethical to perform on humans, yet the more sophisticated training to kill now utilized by military (there is much literature on the reluctance of those trained in older methods to kill within the military framework, and specific training to overcome this reluctance since the Viet Nam era), along with the failure to sufficiently resocialize individuals following combat, is one such uncontrolled and highly unethical experiment.
Some indigenous Indian tribes understood the problem, and created very important ritual disciplines to bring their youth home. This now highly paranoid culture in which we live, does not.




Informative and important piece, but Jones fails to make the connection between the increasingly militarized police forces in this country, and the mindset of the veterans hired to fill their ranks.
They get to continue to play with their toys, and fuck with "the bad guys"
While those in power draw the cordon sanitaire ever more tightly around themselves as their system implodes.

'Captain Picard' on PTSD violence - from his childhood

since when does violence create peace , it creates a circle of revenge and hatred. . it happens world wide.
REMEMBER WACO!
Remember the 82 men, women, and children that the Feds killed on 19 April 1993. It has been 20 years with no justice.

IM
…for nearly a decade, the American media has so demonized Putin that we’ve lost sight of him, and we’ve obscured the possibilities that are there and that he’s offered to enhance, through some kind of steady, calm cooperation, American national security.…
The U.S., Russia, the EU and Ukraine all met in Geneva, where all sides agreed to halt all violence and provocations in Ukraine. But the news media are still taking an antagonistic stance toward Vladimir Putin and Russia....
dailyreckoning.com

About three- quarters of what Russia is now doing in Ukraine is a bitter joke at the expense of the ‘West’, writes PETER HITCHENS.
Daily Mail

19 hrs ·
EXCLUSIVE: "Neither in Yugoslavia, where Russia supported the unity of the country, nor in other countries, that I can remember, during the last decade have the authorities, that were fighting for the unity of the country, used Nazi slogans, Nazi paraphernalia, an openly racist ideology."
VoR’s political analyst Dmitry Babich points out that the people responsible for conducting the military operation in the east of Ukraine, that targets activists who support federalization of the country, are real neo-Nazis. For instance, the Secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine Andriy Parubiy.
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/2014_04_16/Ukrainian-authorities-are-faulty-in-their-ideology-political-analyst-9198/
Follow latest news from Ukraine in our LIVE REPORT: http://voiceofrussia.com/2014_04_14/Ukraine-crisis-Kiev-calls-for-full-scale-antiterrorist-operation-in-south-east-LIVE-UPDATES-0336/
Photo: People participating in a rally in support of Ukraine's federalization, on Freedom Square in downtown Kharkov.

It appears that they are planning to conduct a series of attacks on Ukrainian military bases in...
thedailysheeple.com

18 hrs ·
 

18 hrs ·

 
Robert Koehler: "What if, instead of organizing ourselves around the concept that we have enemies to subdue - "survival of the fittest" - we explored the complexity of our connectedness to one another and the whole of creation, even when the connections were barely visible?"
"What would our civilizations look like if we believed in the depths of our beings that they were not distinct from but part of nature?"
Truthout
18 hrs ·
PROGRESS:
Pets in France are no longer considered 'furniture' thanks to their new legal status as 'sentient beings': http://bit.ly/1eQO6Dz
This law declares them beings with RIGHTS! 
( Meh. Think it will do a better job for them...than for us ? )
on justice and equality
www.a-revolt.org : digital anarchy

21WIRE | MSNBC tried to spin the Bundy Ranch story but ends up getting hammered by Nevada Assemblywoman Michelle Fiore.
21stcenturywire.com

13 mins ·
Alternative medicine?
Why did the mainstream turn its back on this safe and effective cancer treatment?
A Florida oncologist reported that in 30 of his 40 patients with stage 4 cancer, this common compound shrunk tumors by half or more. But you'll...
pro1.inhresearch.com
17 hrs ·
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