All Aircraft Are Not Involved

At a time when the global economic situation has hit a perilous, downward cycle, it is important to understand how much the military-industrial complex is one of the biggest factors in this situation. We were not put on this earth to struggle. Life should not be about survival of the fittest. It would take relatively little effort to save the planet. All that is preventing peace on Earth is U.S. military propaganda. It is in their selfish interests for strife and injustice to persist. Let's take a look at the numbers.



{Courtesy of War Resisters dot org}


http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm









There is a strange juxtaposition in the air as the U.S. Military propaganda machine both encourages their troops to astroturf pro-military ideology, while at the same time denying such people full access to all parts of the marketplace of ideas.


http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/usaf-blog-respo.html
Air Force Releases 'Counter-Blog' Marching Orders
By Noah Shachtman
January 06, 2009

{excerpt}

Bloggers: If you suddenly find Air Force officers leaving barbed comments after one of your posts, don't be surprised. They're just following the service's new "counter-blogging" flow chart. In a twelve-point plan, put together by the emerging technology division of the Air Force's public affairs arm, airmen are given guidance on how to handle "trolls," "ragers" -- and even well-informed online writers, too. It's all part of an Air Force push to "counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force," Captain David Faggard says....

Yet, on the other hand, such Air Force personnel are blocked from viewing much of the blogosphere. How is one to argue a viewpoint if not all information is available? How are such military personnel any different from astroturfing hacks who will do anything to receive a paycheck? In short, why does the U.S. Military hate America, knowledge, democracy, and freedoms of speech and association?


Some of the greatest thinkers to emerge in the twentieth century were from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. They basically took the best from the big three of Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber and brought it up a notch or a hundred. Criticism of Durkheim was that he focused too much on culture at the expense of economic variables. The flip side of that equation was Marx. Max Weber is considered the greatest social theorist of all time because he was able to utilise both approaches. An example of that synthesis can be found with his groundbreaking treatise on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber showed how the cultural values of frugality and discipline led to an accumulation of wealth in early America. Yet unfortunately, the initial spiritual values were lost resulting in an iron cage.

Most if not all of the critical theorists from the Frankfurt School were forced to leave Nazi Germany for the West. They were very excited. Many ended up in America. But when they arrived, they were soon disappointed to find a cultural wasteland dependent on vacuous mass consumerism and the war industry. One such person was Herbert Marcuse.

http://www.alternativeinsight.com/One_dimensional_man.html

If we attempt to relate the causes of the danger to the way in which society is organized and organizes its members, we are immediately confronted with the fact that advanced industrial society becomes richer, bigger and better as it perpetuates the danger. The defense structure makes life easier for a greater number of people and extends man's mastery of nature. Under these circumstances, our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appears to be the very embodiment of Reason.

One major problem we are faced with in America is the near total disdain for higher levels of thinking. The greatest American social theorist in history was C. Wright Mills. Despite his pure brilliance, he was ostracised and forced to the fringes of Columbia University. One profound theory he explained was that of the Iron Triangle. That refers to how power in America is insulated from dissent. The three points of the triangle are the military, the executive, and the corporate. Mills went on to show how the three groups oftentimes rotate. So you have a guy like Eisenhower who becomes President. You have a guy like Cheney who has corporate ties to Halliburton.

Shallow folks, on the other hand, tout Talcott Parsons with his dreadfully boring Grand Theory as the great one. Parsons simply had attempted to turn Sociology into a natural science. Mills believed in the Sociological Imagination, that Sociology is not a natural science, that we need to get a feel for history and society in order to know what the heck is truly going on. What we are confronted with, in short, is the epic battle between positivism and humanism, of the Enlightenment versus Counter-Enlightenment. One is aligned with the status quo of greed and blood, while the latter is aligned with social justice and peace for all.

For those interested, here is an hour devoted to exploring the ideas of Herbert Marcuse.

uctelevision wrote:Andrew Feenberg discusses his new collection of essays by Herbert Marcuse. The most influential radical philosopher of the 1960s, Marcuse's writings are noteworthy for their uncompromising opposition to both capitalism and communism.

The Essential Marcuse



Even David Letterman knows that right is right, and wrong is wrong.

CBS wrote:Dave and Bill discuss what's going on in Iraq.

Dave and Bill O'Reilly

Soldiers committing suicide
US troops are killing themselves in record numbers
By JASON NOTTE
March 17, 2009

FORT HELL: Retired Army staff sergeant Andrew Pogany suffered from hallucinations and panic attacks while on active duty in September 2003 — the result, he says, of mandatory medication administered by the military. Since then, 17 of his fellow servicemen from Fort Carson, Colorado, have committed suicide.

Upon returning from Iraq, 23-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Jeffrey Michael Lucey suffered episodes of such intense war-induced rage that he'd often need to be consoled by his parents, who would rock him back to normalcy in their laps. On July 22, 2004, unable to handle the intensity anymore — the daily vomiting, the feeling that he was a murderer, the fear that none of his military higher-ups even cared — Lucey wrapped a garden hose around his neck in the basement of his family's Belchertown, Massachusetts, home and hanged himself.....

Culture wars- The Army's controversial anthropology program
By PETER PIATETSKY
March 16, 2009

DEADLY DUTY: Paula Loyd (left) and Michael Bhatia — two anthropologists with Massachusetts roots — have been killed serving in the Army’s Human Terrain Teams program.

On November 4, 2008, American anthropologist Paula Loyd was in Afghanistan's Kandahar province, discussing living costs with a local man named Abdul Salam, when suddenly he doused her with fuel from a jug he was carrying and set her on fire. The Wellesley graduate, who succumbed to her injuries on January 7, was neither a civilian nor a soldier, but a member of one of the US Army's controversial Human Terrain Teams (HTT).

HTTs — which are currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and are being planned for the Pentagon's African Command — are military units that embed anthropologists into war zones to collect intelligence, ostensibly to smooth the military's relations with the locals. While the Army's military objective is to take out enemies with bombs and bullets, HTTs are tasked with helping soldiers bridge cultural divides, and differentiate friend from foe, thus lowering American casualties.

The program is seemingly well intentioned, but critics have called it too small, disorganized, ill-prepared, and, most disturbingly, unethical. The HTT program has suffered withering criticism from many anthropologists, with the American Anthropological Association blasting the program as a "violation" of ethics and an "unacceptable application of anthropological expertise." .....