Ayn Rand and Chicken Hawks. Cowards and hypocrites.

Hardly surprising that invoking Ayn Rand is avoided by conservatives - her non-credibility as the promoter of the hard-assed "rugged individual" has been firmly established. Rand was a fervent skeptic of welfare for the poor and the elderly. However, when it came to walking the walk, she was not that great at it... she gladly accepted government provided welfare while castigating others who did.

Ayn Rand's terminal duplicity is reminiscent of the Chicken Hawk brigade: those privileged, well connected cowards who advocate sending others to war, while demonstrating their own yellow-livered hypocrisy by deliberately avoiding military service, or dodging the draft. In their mindset, its right and proper to order others to front line, as long as their own butts are not on the line. 

Oddly, the majority of blatant chickenhawks are those who pretend to be so "pro national security". Indeed, the list in the ChickenHawk Hall of Shame covers most of the Bush Administration's Iraq and Afghanistan neoconservative war hawks... Many in the war-hungry corporate media and even some the "entertainment" (?!) industry also qualify. Recipients of the "Distinguished Fleeing Cross" include such folks as... here's a random list:

Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Pat Robertson, Doug Feith, David Koch, Roger Ailes (Fox News), Ted Olson, Michael Ledeen, Trent Lott, Joe Lieberman, Richard Perle, Newt Gingrich, Wolf Blitzer, Andy Card, Elliott Abrams, Clarence Thomas, John Bolton, Frank Gaffney, William Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, Ted Nugent, Britney Spears, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Brit Hume, Antonin Scalia, Gary Bauer and Rudy Giuliani....   and Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Skeletons rattle the closet, and the public remain selectively deaf. Ayn Rand is a liability is any argument posed by conservatives in this area.

Iran's next in line... when will the rain of terror start?

.... most likely courtesy of the US and/or UK. The terrorist group Jundulluh has claimed responsibility for the attack which killed some 30 people including 6 senior Iranian military personnel. 

What is Jundullah anyway? Even the sanitized wikipedia entry lists alleged international support and funding, from countries including the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Pakistan. Iran is already accusing the US and UK of involvement in this latest bombing, and this history of US/UK etc involvement appears solid. The degree of US funding appears to be around $400,000,000. Even the very establishment-friendly Daily Telegraph national newspaper published an article in 2007 in which links between CIA and Jundullah, as well as black operations to destablize Iran's government were approved and sanctioned by the Bush Administration. Significantly, this group is not included in the State Department's FTO (foreign terrorist organization) list, even though it is far more active in bombing outrages and other incidents of terrorism than most of the other organizations listed. 



Then there is this article in the UK Daily Telegraph. A quote extracted:

Quote:

The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime. In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.

So, what is the difference between the activities attributed to "al Qaida' and those associated with Jundullah? Bombings and assassinations are all terrorist acts, regardless of the identity of the perps are. But is "al Qaida" any less involved with the US government than Jundullah? Maybe not. Osama bin Laden is (was?) is alleged to be the leader of "al Qaida", but the sworn testimony of whistleblower and former FBI Turkish-American translator Sibel Edmonds alleges that Osama bin Laden was working for the US Government right up until 9/11. Ms Edmonds' direct quote:

Quote:

“I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban - those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.”

Of course the mainstream US media has not reported on this story, presumably because it makes the "boogeyman out to get us" which they have been promoting 24/7 for 8 years appears more like the "boogeyman who is fighting for certain interests within the US government".

So, there is a welter of evidence that the US (UK and others) supports and funds terrorist groups, on the tax payer...(that makes us all guilty of funding terrorism). It's yet one more in thousands of similar pieces of evidence that the "war on terrorism" is nothing of the kind, and should be viewed with the utmost skepticism. It appears that the previous administration were controlled by thugs, and by default, so is the current one, in that the groups we accuse of doing terrible things are doing it on our dollar.... and we're being fed the usual pack of lies to justify the continuation of state-sponsored thuggery.

I have to add that despite the fact that the Iranian government under Ahmadinejad and the fundamentalist clerics is not exactly a paragon of decency (!!), it remains inappropriate that the nation of Iran remains singled out as the target for the next Israeli/Neocon demand for a war of aggression. As with Iraq and Afghanistan , it will not be the *government* of that country which will face a rain of terror from the skies.... it will be the blameless Iranian people.

Iranian election, and the events of 56 years ago...

One banner which reappears time and again in the recent election protests: "Coup 1953, Coup 2009". Iranians (who like other middle easterners appear to have longer attention spans than we westerners) haven't forgotten how 56 years ago, their parliamentary democracy was violently overthrown in CIA led coup, Operation TP-AJAX, to be replaced by a vicious dictatorship, in order to further the profit margins of private US and European (oil) corporations. 

Obama even acknowledged this event in a recent speech in Cairo to the world's muslim community where he maintained that the US "isn't at war with the world's Islamic community" ...  honestly... (!!). But then he admonished Iran regarding "behaving themselves in the global community", as regards their alleged (but unproven) program to manufacture nuclear weapons. Such a flagrantly duplicitous statement doesn't go down well with Iranians, makes the US appear even more arrogant and is more of a diplomatic faux pas than helpful. The US (and Iranian) people would obviously prefer stable relations between the two countries, but as far as the US (and current Iranian powers-that-be) are concerned, that seems to be entirely a different matter.

Its probably more about flowing testosterone on both sides, and the paranoia of "losing face", or seen to be "weak".... not to mention the recurring problem of hardline religious conservatives such as Iranian president Ahmedinejad, and others who shall remain nameless

Auditing the "Federal" Reserve....

HR 1207, introduced by Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has now got 224 sponsors, with Rep. Kucinich (D) OH being the 218th, thus taking HR 1207 out of Committee to a full debate in Congress. All indications are that this Bill is going to have a rough time, especially in the Senate, and will probably get defeated, and Federal Reserve is marshaling all the lobbying power at their disposal to keep this bill from becoming law.

This bill is seeking accountability and transparency re. the "Federal" Reserve. Why would such a standard concept in an official institution be seen as such a threat? What kind of practices might be threatened (or even stopped) by the legal requirement of such accountability?

My speculation on this, is that because of the (private, non-Federal) nature of the "Federal" Reserve Bank, it will be ruled that Congress has no jurisdiction over the rules and laws governing how the "Fed" works, and the Bill will be quietly dropped for such technical reasons. Of course, the national media will ignore the issue and accuse those who level any criticism of the "Fed" as being wacko conspiracy theorists. Such is the current state of play in the corporate media arena.