Trisha Johnson

In light of the Defense Authorization legislation (see Glenn Greenwald’s opinion, here ) that just passed and now awaits Obama’s signature, granting him the power he’s always claimed, but which is now enshrined in U.S. law, to grab anyone he chooses (including American citizens) anywhere on the planet, and whisk them off to Guantanamo, or some other dreadful place, like Biloxi, Mississippi, I make the following prediction.

If you've fallen asleep, at this point, it's okay, the U.S. mainstream media has too! (Photograph taken by the author at the Baboon Sanctuary, Bermuda Landing, Belize)

Given the fact that the Republican Presidential candidates are little more than a collection of Saturday Night Live comedians, Obama is clearly the one who’s been selected to win the 2012 election.

After his inauguration, I figure he’s got, maybe, a year to eighteen months before some disaffected miscreant busts a cap in his ass. Could be a Muslim terrorist (aren’t they all?), an illegal immigrant, or a Survivalist Red Neck from deep in the Appalachians. It’ll depend who the Bankers select for the job. My money is on the Red Neck since the public’s getting wise to the FBI’s penchant for inventing Muslim terrorist threats which they heroically frustrate and most of the ‘illegals’ will either be inflating the bottom line of the Private Prison Industry or will have gone home to find work. The apparent motive of the ‘cap busting’ will be that this ne’er do well was enraged by Obama’s assault on the Constitution, the recent seizure by the Feds of the still his family had used to make moonshine – from his grandpa’s day to the present – as well as the fact that Obama is the illegitimate son of Malcolm X, allegedly, (hence the phoney birth certificate) and is therefore a Muslim Marxist.

The military, who will already be operating freely in the U.S., since they need to be able to grab and lock up anyone the President chooses from now on – including on U.S. soil – will impose Martial Law. General Patraeus, architect of the ongoing ‘Victory in Afghanistan’ and now head of the C.I.A., the agency which has recently enlarged its global intelligence mandate to include the transfer of advanced reconnaissance drone technology to the Iranians, and thence to the Russians and Chinese (don’t worry, it’s all part of the plan, probably), will be asked to ascend the Presidential Podium and restore order to the Republic. Being a humble kind of guy, he will refuse the pleas from his adoring fans to ‘save us’, twice, before ‘reluctantly’ accepting.

If this sounds familiar, Gaius Julius Caesar (100 BC to 44 BC) was also asked to save the Republic of Rome – which he did, by turning it into a dictatorship.

Britain, of course, has always been a dictatorship. It’s just every 4-5 years, the voters get to choose who will be the next Kim Jong-il.

Good luck, and Merry Christmas.

For those among you who follow American Football, the title of this piece should be an indication of just how close the world is to the end of life as we know it.

King Vulture photographed by the author in Carmelita, Belize

Yesterday, the Federal Reserve Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank joined hands with the U.S. Federal Reserve in a show of friendship and support (not difficult to do since they’re all owned by the same vultures people)  to save the world. China, not wanting to be left out reduced its bank reserve requirements by 0.5%. ‘Why?’, you might ask. Well, because the two minute warning has sounded: the point in the game where the team with the ball (assuming they’re within a single score of coming from behind and winning or, at the least, forcing the game into overtime) goes into a no huddle offensive routine.

Zerohedge has a good write up on this coming together of the powers that be to sing ‘Kumbaya’ round the roaring fire that’s consuming the lives of those of us who aren’t in the club.

Here’s Jim Quinn’s take on yesterday’s event: “This is a last ditch effort by those in power to grab the last vestiges of middle class wealth. The stock market will soar today [which it did, by almost 500 points], benefitting bankers, politicians, and the 1%. They have solved nothing. The debt remains. The debt will not be paid. Oil, food and commodity prices immediately soared on this announcement. Again, the wealthy will get richer and the average American will be destroyed by inflation on the things they need to live. The game goes on.”

So, ten unelected bankers at the U.S. Federal Reserve are now running the world. And, should we, the people, have a problem with any of this, these are the preparations our politicians are making. You know, Democrats and Republicans, working together for the public good. President ‘Hopey Changey’ is suggesting he might veto the bill, but only because he believes HE should be Judge, Jury and Executioner, rather than Congress.

The ‘War on Terror’ is, and always was, a crock. The real war, a secret war, between us and the international banking elite, was planned and begun three decades ago. (Though, in truth, it’s been going on for three hundred years or more. Longer if you count the Romans!) There’s no need to keep it secret, now, because the bankers are confident their political puppets have tied all the loose ends having established and tested their surveillance apparatus under the guise of hunting and apprehending pesky terrorists, while eviscerating the Constitution and up-armoring local police forces who recently demonstrated their craven willingness to brutalize peaceful protesters, whose only crime is to point out that 30,000 people with all the money and 325,000,000 with no money is not a viable economic model.

So, here we are. The ball’s on the twenty yard line. It’s ‘third down and two’, there’s a minute thirty on the clock and the defense is showing ‘blitz’. Imagine you’re the quarterback. What you gonna do?

There are many explanations as to why the Mayan civilization ended abruptly a thousand years ago, such as: unreliable rainfall patterns brought about by excessive deforestation, constant wars between City States, a burgeoning population, and resource depletion. But, could there have been another reason?

Civilizations as widespread and accomplished as the Maya, who constructed hundreds of cities across Eastern Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize and Western Honduras over the course of a thousand years, do not disappear overnight. And, yet, the Maya seemed to have done just that!

It seems to me one of the key ingredients to their demise could be a loss of faith in their leadership, who, having convinced the masses that they alone could intercede with the Gods to ensure plentiful rainfall, the continued fertility of the land and a continuation of the public good, if only the masses would provide them with a luxurious and privileged lifestyle, failed to keep their promise. The people clearly abandoned their faith in their Gods, shunned the vanity and lies of their rulers and returned, one supposes, to the jungle.

The parallels with the current situation in our modern world are significant! Our leaders daily lavish bailouts on banks and the financial elite, despite their being the cause of our suffering, who then reward themselves with huge bonuses. The rule of law has been suspended for the privileged few, while the Prison Industrial Complex grows fat on the incarceration of poor black people and undocumented (mainly Hispanic) immigrants. When every pension fund has been looted and Goldman Sachs rules the world, will the masses give up on their politicians and walk away. If they do, where will they go? They have no jungle to return to. The corporations have cut down all the trees!

I caught a program on P.B.S. last night (Tuesday, Oct 18th) which dealt with the Secure Communities Act, designed to catch undocumented immigrants who had committed serious crimes by fingerprinting all those who enter into jails equipped to cross-check prints with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) databases. The implementation of this law has, somehow, gone far beyond the original stated goal, which was to hold illegal immigrants previously found guilty of serious criminal offenses in detention centers while they were processed for deportation, and now encompasses anyone found to be illegally living in the U.S.. Simple motoring offenses may now lead to an immigration status check which, if the individual is flagged as ‘undocumented’ in the ICE database, will be followed by removal, sometimes thousands of miles away, to a privately run detention center. There are mothers who are being deported, forcing them to leave behind their legally resident spouses and American born off-spring who likely will not see them again – unless, of course, they themselves voluntarily leave the U.S.. President ‘Hopey Changey’ is wholeheartedly behind this initiative, despite his election promise to do something about illegal immigration. I guarantee his capitulation to the hard right of the Republican party was not what the ‘illegal’s’ who helped propel him to the White House were hoping for!

There are, of course, ‘unexpected’ repercussions from the extending of this program far beyond its original intent. The illegal immigrant community now fears the police and is no longer willing to assist them in the apprehension of criminals, and support for President ‘Hopey Changey’ has dropped from 70% to the low 40% among Hispanic voters, placing his reelection in doubt.

Cui bono (Translation: “To whose benefit?”) These privately run, and minimally supervised, detention centers are generating large profits for the corporations which own them, though the inhumane treatment of deportees, the documentary asserted, including brutal beatings and sexual harassment, appears to be widespread. (So, the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples, eh?) Legal representation for the deportees is not mandated under the constitution, so these prisoners have little recourse and protection under American law. There is more than anecdotal evidence that the infamous SB1070 immigration regulation passed by Arizona State was influenced, if not written, by the private prison industry. Ya think? Did these same corporations donate to President ‘Hopey Changey’s’ election fund in ’08′? If not, will they be doing so in 2012? Probably.

While it is perfectly reasonable for the U.S. to insist that those who live within its borders are doing so legally, there is one more seemingly ‘unintentional’ outcome from the bureaucratic exuberance of ICE, which is funded on the basis of the number of individuals it deports (currently around four hundred thousand a year), and that is: what effect will the removal of so many illegal immigrants, especially those originating in Mexico, have on the U.S. economy in general, and food prices in particular? I refer here, of course, to agricultural workers – many of whom are likely to be in the U.S. illegally – who pick lettuces, grub up potatoes, pick grapes and strawberries and the like? Who will replace them? Three hundred pound, unemployed Americans, with type 2 diabetes and a bad back? I don’t think so! And, for the economy at large: who will fill in for these low paid workers once they’re deported? Who will do yard work for a buck fifty an hour? Who will fix cars, serve table, drive taxi cabs, clean motel rooms, do laundry in hospitals, work construction without workplace insurance and all the other, menial, but essential, tasks Americans have sought not to do over the years?

Before the U.S. Federal Government began handing out huge subsidies to Corporate Agriculture, which dumped cheap farm produce on Mexico and drove millions of peasant farmers from their land in search of a decent living (read this for background) there was much less illegal immigration into the U.S.. Because of the viscous drug war now being fought between Mexican drug cartels competing over the US$ 30 billion drugs market north of the border, Mexico/U.S. border towns have become war zones, forcing even more Mexicans to flee for their lives, most of them to America.

Illegal workers have been a boon to U.S. corporations and farmers who used them to maximize their profits and to undermine union pay scales, not to mention U.S. consumers who benefited enormously from these workers who go about their daily work, largely unnoticed. But, now, with unemployment nudging 20% in real terms in the U.S., the government has to be seen to be doing something, and the poor, powerless, illegal immigrant is the ideal whipping boy.

Obama may well lose the 2012 election because he’s alienating a large, democrat voting block. They won’t vote Republican, of course – that would be like turkeys voting for Christmas – but they could decide to stay away from the polls. One could be forgiven for thinking that destroying the Democratic Party’s political base was the plan all along and that Obama was never a Democrat to begin with; or am I just being cynical?

Whatever the truth about Obama’s true political allegiance might be, it’s clear a significant proportion of the American people have been impoverished to the point where they are more likely to be willing to work for immigrant pay rates, especially once the Social Security budget gets slashed and unemployment benefits are reduced. Over the past few decades, illegal immigrants have slowly but surely fulfilled the purpose for which they were brought (perhaps forced to come) to America, since previously well paid American workers would now appear sufficiently desperate to demand that the ‘illegals’ piss off back to that third world crapper they call ‘home’, so they can stand in line, begging for the opportunity to take their place. At least, that seems on the surface to be the thinking in Washington, as demonstrated by it’s support for ever more rigorous immigration enforcement. To embrace that kind of thinking is to believe that what we are witnessing is the denouement of some incredibly cunning strategy on the part of the ruling elite. The recent anti-immigrant legislation passed in Alabama, which is the most draconian, thus far, passed by any state, in my opinion, undermines the existence of such a strategy, however. The motivation for this harsh new legislation is nothing more than a desperate attempt, by desperate men, to cling to power; and, predictably, when politicians embrace the adage, ‘Never let the facts get in the way of a decision’,  this is what happens,  and it’s happening, right now, in Alabama as illegals’ are leaving in droves. More here.

Soon, it will be China’s turn to face the American worker’s wrath, and a ‘reluctant’ President will have no choice but to take action against them, too. Actually, ‘Hopey Changey’ is doing that already, having destroyed Libya and sent troops to Uganda: both countries in which the Chinese have invested heavily in the oil industry.

Some commentators would have us believe that the political caste, who’ve been entrusted with the implementation of the plans of their owners seem incapable of remembering which page they’re on. The truth is, sadly, far more mundane: there is no plan. Be they Senators, Congressmen, Members of the British or European Parliaments, a Chieftain in a Botswana village, or Hopey-Changey himself, each one is  fighting to ensure their own political survival; and, so, the decisions based on nothing more than naked self-interest keep coming, causing endless repercussions, which manifest themselves in unforeseen and unexpected ways.

Bank of America allowed some scumbag to steal my money! It started July, 24^th, 2008 when my Online Banking Service alerted me to the fact that my profile – mail address, email address etc. – had been modified. BofA’s Customer Services allocated me a new user identity and a temporary password, which I changed at the first opportunity. They also told me my account was safe. One week later, $21,500 had been stolen from me. An investigation began, my checking and credit card accounts were ‘locked’ to prevent further losses. During October, 2008, my checking account was mysteriously ‘unlocked’ and the rest of my money disappeared. Well, not disappeared exactly, but used to engage in fraudulent Paypal transactions. I kept a log of all my conversations with BofA. They amount to over nine pages, covering a period of three years, and I still don’t have all my money back. It would take forever to read the entire log, so I’m only going to publish my dealings with BofA over the Paypal fraud.

I’m not out to pillory the BofA employees I dealt with on this issue because, for all I know, they were simply following company policy, so I’ve used their initials.

Log Extract:

On Wednesday, August 19^th, 2009 I spoke with ‘NB’ at the BofA ACH Fraud Dept. and was told that, as of August 13^th, 2009, my claim for the refund of US$ 15,500 due to Paypal fraud had been approved. I received a confirmation letter at my Belize residence two weeks later. ‘NB’ informed me that a check for this amount could be mailed to me at my Belize address and that it would take fourteen working days to issue. Allowing for the time I understood the mail would take to reach me, I did not expect to receive the check until early to middle October.

The check was not forthcoming!

I spoke with ‘D’ who informed me that the check was, in fact, sent out on August 24^th, 2009, but not to my home address in Belize as cashier’s checks could not be mailed out of the US. She also informed me that she had no record as to which Bank of America Banking Center it had been sent, or whether it had been sent to my former U.S address in California. She told me a review would have to be undertaken to ascertain precisely where the check was mailed and that it would take between two and ten business days to either locate it or if it was lost to cancel it.

On November 13^th, 2009, I spoke with ‘OW’ and was told the review had not yet been completed. She suggested I call again on November 17^th, 2009. I called on the suggested date and spoke with ‘HC’ at the BofA Identity Theft Victims Support Helpline. He told me the review was still in progress.

On December 2^nd, 2009, ‘VJ’ (ACH Fraud) informed me that the department responsible for issuing the Cashier’s Check was the Official Items Department and that it was not possible for me to speak with them directly. The review was still, apparently, on-going.

On December 30^th, 2009, I was informed by ‘LM’ that the Official Items Department was still researching the whereabouts of the lost check and that she would escalate the matter to a manager. She further stated that the ACH Fraud Investigation team could do nothing more than wait to hear from the Official Items Department as to when a replacement check would be issued.

On January 8^th, 2010, I spoke with ‘PF’. She said nothing had changed with regard to the ‘research’ being undertaken by the Official Item’s Department and that she would arrange a meeting between herself and ‘LM’ and get back to me in 24-48 hours. She did not do so.

On January 13^th, 2010, I determined who ‘LM’s manager was. Despite several attempts to speak with this individual, I was unable to do so, although, at the end of January, 2010, ‘LM’ had submitted a request to the Official Item’s Department that they should issue a replacement check. This request was refused. She resubmitted the request and received no response, other than that the ‘research’ into the whereabouts of the missing, original, check was still ongoing. It had, however, been confirmed that the missing check had not been cashed.

Between the above date and April 16^th, 2010, I attempted to obtain an update from the ACH Fraud Investigation team. I was unsuccessful, however I did learn of the name of yet another manager with whom I managed to speak. He assured me that he would pursue the matter on my behalf.

On June 8^th, 2010, I contacted ACH Fraud again, spoke with ‘JL’ and through her left a voice mail message for the manager. ‘JL’ also sent him an email recording the fact that I had called. No one called back.

On June 18^th, 2010, I filed a complaint with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency giving them an overview of my attempts to obtain the US$ 15,500 owed me by BofA and listing the names of the BofA employees I had spoken with.

On June 23^rd, 2010, I received a FEDEX package at my Belize address containing a covering letter from the ACH Fraud Department and a Cashier’s Check for US$ 15,500. The letter made mention of the delays I had experienced, that O.C.C. had contacted them, and offered a boilerplate apology. The fact that BofA had sent the check on the same day as I filed the complaint with the O.C.C. proves that, a) there was no impediment to their releasing the funds at any time during the preceding nine plus months, and, b) that there was no problem sending a cashier’s check to a foreign address.

Extract Ends.

The events outlined in the extract are typical of my dealings with BofA over this Identity Theft event. As stated earlier, these are ongoing, having taken three years so far and two complaints filed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

I am seeking an attorney to sue BofA for substantial damages on the grounds of negligence, in that after the initial theft took place, they failed to protect the remainder of my funds, that BofA had no coordinated process for recovering my lost funds, requiring that I identify the departments I needed to speak with myself in order that I could make the necessary claims for refunds, and that I suffered financial loss due to the fact that I could not remove my funds from BofA during a period of significant dollar depreciation and that I was forced to take out loans, at interest, during this period. Finally, due to the stress I was subjected to during this on-going struggle to recover my funds, I suffered numerous, and documented, health problems.

WE MUST KILL THE BEAST, PEOPLE, AND YOU CAN HELP – LEGALLY – BY CLOSING YOUR BANK OF AMERICA ACCOUNTS AND MOVING YOUR MONEY TO LOCAL BANKS.

Visit these websites sites, here,  here, and here, for more information on why you should.

Occasionally, my browsing leads me along meandering byways to blog sites. Libertarian, by nature and conviction, I tend to read anti-war, anti-corporate, minimal government authors, like this, this, this and this, while for a constitutional lawyer’s opinion of the lawlessness of the American political system, I go here. I long gave up on the British Government, but this newspaper still holds true to many of the principles I believe in. I do visit other, less well known bloggers from time to time. All, it would appear, are now consumed by increasing governmental meddling. Their posts contain dire warnings of an expanding police state in many Western countries but, most notably, the U.K and the U.S.. For all of a year, after Obama became president, these were very people who cried, “All Hail the Golden One’ and to hell with those ‘Repugs’, while real journalists like Glenn Greenwald, at Salon, were busy looking at the emerging similarities between Obama and Bush. Unfortunately, the ‘fair weather’ devotees of the New Messiah are having to accept, at last, that the word, ‘Change’, does not mean the same thing to all people – especially those who seek to wear the Imperial purple. It is a source of much merriment to watch them wriggling as the latest outpourings of their hero reveal to them less a process of change, and more a case of ‘business as usual’. And they are always broke; always demanding (even pleading) for their readers to send them money. Why should anyone support them? Tell me, how many of them ever gave a damn about the overt corruption and fascistic tendencies of their political leadership until they, themselves, began to be affected by them – or, at least felt endangered by them? The whining has gone mainstream over the past few weeks it would seem.

“We do not torture,” the Golden One, like the Cowboy before him, cried. Bull crap! The United States and British Governments have always tortured, only they typically used contractors and client states, like Egypt and Syria, to do the dirty work – ‘deniability’ being the obvious intent. See this and this. If you’re put off by the fact that the second link is to a ‘Communist’ web site, do your own research. If you dare! During the lead up to the Iraq Invasion, the gloves came off and the U.S. and British Governments did their own dirty work. The British Government is now jumping through hoops, trying to convince a skeptical public that they didn’t know what those ‘dreadful Yanks’ were up to. This article claims otherwise! All Obama has done with his ban on torture is to proscribe Americans from doing it. The contractors and client states will stay on in their very profitable business.

The British and Roman Catholic Church have used torture, at least since the beginning of the second millennium. It was not employed to extract information. It was used to extract confessions. Just like Bush and Cheney used it, to try to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, to belatedly justify their illegal invasion of Iraq.

Military Courts are not new, either! The U.S. Military Commissions Act was employed against the Sioux Indians, in 1866, and in the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War as an expedient of war. They were also used after the Civil War, but their use was ruled unconstitutional, presumably because, unlike the Filipinos, whom the U.S. Military ‘water boarded’ [Note: the Chicago Police water boarded suspects, eventually replacing the technique with a bath of ice water], the Viet Cong, whom the U.S. Military water boarded while the CIA shoved pencils in their ears, and Sioux Indians, whom the U.S. Cavalry slaughtered in their thousands, their victims were white.

The British adopted a similar Military Commissions system in 1776, for use on the fuzzy-wuzzies. They also slaughtered them freely, tortured them at their leisure and took everything that wasn’t nailed down. In Belize, they stole all the hard wood trees. Do some research on the rise to power of Suharto in Indonesia. For a little diversion, look up who orchestrated the coup that brought Suharto to power, who supplied arms and transportation for that coup, and which Western Governments and Corporations got to grab Indonesia’s resources. You’ll be interested to learn, no doubt, that Barack Hussein Obama’s mother and Treasury Secretary Timothy Franz Geithner’s father were up to their necks in that sordid undertaking. But, not to worry, they were just little brown people. Right? So, no harm no foul!

Most of us, in the West, have never given a thought to the on-going rituals of slaughter and conquest in foreign lands, which have enriched our respective societies and provided us with access to resources and cheap labor, including the slave trade. But “everything changed” after 9/11 – or so we’re told.

How many of the draconian laws passed in the U.K., Europe and the U.S. over the past decade have anything to do with defending their citizens from terrorists? None! Terrorism is readily defeated by two methods: (a) information gathering, arrest, civil trial and imprisonment – if found guilty, and, (b) the rejection of the policy of preemptive invasions and subsequent destruction of sovereign nations. So, it has to be something else. Right?

Could it be that, with the financial world collapsing around our ears, the ruling elite (who knew this disaster was coming) are terrified that the common man will rise up and render them a splendid hanging? [That's what's known as a rhetorical question, by the way!] Only now, when Governments are turning their attention to their own citizens, whom they have designated as being ‘the enemy of good governance’, have people in the West suddenly become uncomfortable with the power of the State which served them so well while it was killing foreigners and stealing their resources.

This article, published at TomDispatch.com, deals with the dangerous turn of events in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ and the dangers of deploying drone aircraft across the globe. Oddly enough, I wrote a fictional story about this subject on my website, Scifi-Babe.com, which can be found here. What follows is an extract of that story.

“Two considerations drive governments to undertake wars of choice: power and wealth. Two things stop wars of choice in their tracks: high numbers of military casualties and increasing taxes. The latter can be defrayed by borrowing from the bankers, who enthusiastically profit from chaos and destruction. In the matter of casualties, armament manufacturers – the bankers of death, if you will – have the answer: robotic weapons. I mean, no one ever turned up at a funeral service for a blown up battle tank. Did they?

When Nevia [a fictitious world] first initiated the conflict in the tribal badlands of a barren, mountainous region of the planet, known as, Arghistan, it had relied almost entirely on humanoid ground forces, augmented with remote controlled surveillance and attack drones. This was the initial step on the slippery path of dehumanizing  warfare. The remote operator has no idea at whom he is launching his missiles. At best, the image on his screen is indistinct, as is the ‘context’ in which the imaged person is moving. Assumptions have to be made: should the target be there if he/she is a non-combatant?. Is that gathering a group of peaceful tribal elders, a wedding, a funeral, or a group of ‘insurgents’ setting out on an attack? A split second decision has to be made. If it’s wrong, who’s to know? Certainly not the drone operator. The remotely controlled hunter-killer drones the Nevian military brought in theater during the early months of the conflict inflicted a tremendous amount of collateral damage, equipped as they were with missiles and ground strafing energy weapons. The drone operators knew neither the language nor the customs of the people they were targeting; nor did they really care, having grown up with computerized war games in which, like cartoons, no one really died.

At this point, it might be useful to introduce a brief portion of the operational log for a robotic weapon that was involved in a ‘collateral damage’ incident. The unit had the designation, ‘Zee-con-two-niner-seven-tee’ (having been translated from the Nevian into English). Its task was to identify, engage and destroy Arghistani ‘insurgents’, who were members of a group called, ‘Followers of the Illuminated Path’, loyal to the Warlord, Dester Zoachian. Under the rules of engagement issued by the Secretary of War, robotic weapons were authorized to autonomously eliminate a target immediately upon clear identification. Authorization was required only if a potential target was ‘non clear’. What was never made public was this non-clear restriction applied to soldiers of the Nevian Armed Forces, only, in an attempt to limit ‘friendly fire’ incidents. Collateral damage, in the form of civilian deaths, were not covered by this restriction. ‘Zee-con-two-niner-seven-tee’ was a primitive, tracked, weapons platform, fitted with a ten-kilowatt energy weapon and an active denial microwave system, for crowd dispersal, designed to produce an extreme heating effect on humanoid skin. It was used in tunnel clearing operations during the Swut Valley Counter-Insurgency Operation, code-named: ‘Tusa Karzir’ [Rabbit Warren].  ‘Zee-con-two-niner-seven-tee’ located a group of peasant farmers driving a herd of herbivores. Peasants carry weapons to protect themselves and their animals from predators. ‘Zee-con-two-niner-seven-tee’ did not contact its operational controller for confirmation it should open fire – it was not required to do so. Fifty innocent civilians were killed. Eventually, the incident made its way into the public arena, in the middle of an election year. ‘Zee-con-two-niner-seven-tee’ was declared dysfunctional and destroyed.

The use of fully autonomous robotic weaponry is an even more dangerous idea. As with non-autonomous weapons, they can be given a degree of discrimination in terms of which type of individual would represent a valid target, and they can be instructed to issue a warning before shooting or, again, contact a humanoid operator if they cannot clearly identify a person as being a legitimate target, such weapons must be imbued with an understanding of the concept of ‘them and us’, to prevent them from destroying other robotic weapons who are on the same side. During Earth’s WWII, for instance, allied soldiers were sometimes issued with a child’s toy (also used in dog training), which they ‘clicked’ as they approached their own lines, or other units. If the click was responded to, with a ‘click’, they would assume all was well and move forward. Robotic weapons do not rely on such a simple technique. Rolling code sequences and encryption algorithms were the method by which the Nevia robotic weapons recognized one another. Nevia soldiers were equipped with an electronic code device before being dispatched to the front lines. But, these were easily lost or damaged. In the absence of an electronic response to an I.D. challenge, the robotic weapons were programmed to contact their controller and request clearance to fire if they could not clearly identify the target as a ‘bad guy’. This procedure applied to humanoid targets of course. If a robotic weapon was unable to respond to a challenge, for some reason, its destruction would be no more than a debit entry on a government balance sheet and a credit entry on the supplier’s one.

Since the day the war began, there had been three hundred and sixty-two deaths attributed to ‘friendly fire’ incidents among the Nevia forces. Of these, two hundred and eighty-three had occurred after the robot weapons were deployed in combat. ‘Friendly fire’ deaths were internally reported as arising from ‘confusion’ when, for example, Nevian soldiers had been engaged with the enemy and had called in robot reinforcements to assist, or ‘misidentification’, where the soldier had not been dressed in combat gear and had been deemed a combatant because he was still carrying his weapon. All of these deaths were dealt with by the posthumous award of a medal for exceptional bravery and some cock and bull story dreamed up by a clerk in the Adjutant General’s office. Such stories were not always endorsed by the fallen soldier’s comrades. Returning veterans brought with them tales of robot weapons running amok, slaughtering all and sundry, without regard or accountability. ‘Make sure they’re between you and the enemy’, was the advice handed out to newly arrived recruits.

Clearly, something had to be done about these ‘accidents’ or the military and the government risked being discredited in the eyes of the public, as more and more of these ‘cock and bull’ stories were proved to be just that. This is one of the more bizarre aspects of the relationship between governments, the citizenry and the wars they support, or are asked to support.  In their day to day activities, such as running the economy, politicians are typically regarded as elitist, generally useless and totally corrupt. In matters of war, however, a population tends to display an almost child-like faith in the integrity of its rulers, since their actions can be said to reflect that society’s own moral sense of itself. Using lethal force against those without the means to defend themselves is not part of any warrior culture, it’s an atrocity. Most races get it, and claim to be above such brutality. Until, of course, they find themselves bogged down in guerrilla warfare. Then, rather than running the risk of turning their consciences into pretzels, they eagerly accept without question the findings of opaque and biased government investigations, namely: that ‘rogue elements’ within the junior ranks of the military, identified or not, were responsible.

In virtually all of the political systems we’ve encountered at Scifi-Babe, the capacity of their citizens for self-denial knows no bounds. If the people the troops are killing have been successfully labeled ‘insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’ by their government – as opposed to ‘freedom fighters’, which is often nearer the truth – most citizens aren’t that bothered and the war will go on, as long as it’s not on prime time news when families are sitting down to dinner. But, let one of their own die, and all bets are off!

Three years into the war, the Nevian humanoid controllers were replaced with A.I. systems – the final step on the path to fully automated conflict. Instead of disgraced officers appearing on the news, the public would, in future, be treated to images of machines being crushed and shredded. And, why not? Every day, the calm and efficient unfolding of people’s lives is undermined by the failure of technology. Technology breaks. Nothing to see. Move along. It was hardly surprising that reports of atrocities dried up once the war was fully automated. The public soon forgot about the conflict, the armaments manufacturers continued to make out like bandits and the politicians got re-elected.

Months passed. The war was in its fourth year, by now. Victory was within reach, according to the news media. Then, one rain sodden day, several humanoid casualties were reported. All had died from energy weapon hits while, apparently, secure in their bases. ‘Nothing more than a blip’, the internal report said. Soon, however, the number had reached forty a month, rising over the next three months to twenty or more a week. Panicked by the fact that the ‘terrorists’ had somehow managed to breach the security cordons around their forward bases – as well as having acquired energy weapons – the military leadership sent an urgent request to their political masters for a budget increase for the purchase of more machines. The politicians, every one heavily invested in the armament manufacturers, rushed the necessary legislation through in one hour. The machine producers ramped up production to three thousand units a month.

The number of humanoid casualties continued to climb. At its peak, fifty soldiers were killed in a two day period. The government imposed a black-out on the arrival of transports laden with the bodies of the ‘fallen’ heroes. The military commanders flooded the battlefield with their newly delivered fighting machines. A few enemy stragglers were found and eliminated, but the bulk of the insurgents (terrorists, or freedom fighters) had disappeared.

An attack on two Nevian bases occurred a month later, resulting in the deaths of four hundred soldiers, with more than a thousand wounded. No enemy forces were spotted before the attacks, though the bodies of a few ‘terrorists’ were found close to the base perimeter, afterwards.  More than twenty robot units were disabled or destroyed in the attacks. Their memory logs, together with those of their A.I. controllers, were recovered and analyzed. Every log recorded that a large number of ‘legitimate’ targets had been liquidated with a combination of energy weapon fire and micro-nuclear mortar shells. Curiously, though the total number of kills recorded by the A.I. controllers and the robotic weapons tallied, it fell well short of the actual total of dead and wounded Nevian soldiers.

One particular unit, designated ‘Tee-con-seven-three-fiver-six-em’, had been involved in the deaths of twenty ‘targets’ before succumbing to a peer-to-peer, communications malfunction, which had forced its shutdown. This unit had recently been brought in theater and, like the units that had perished, was running the latest version of the ‘Target Identification Protocol’. As confirmed by its log, it had identified twenty potential targets in total, before shutting itself down. Two were local Arghistanis, working on the base as contractors. ‘Tee-con-seven-three-fiver-six-em’ had shot them. The other eighteen targets should have been designated as ‘friendly’, since they were, in fact, Nevian soldiers headed for the dining hall for a lunchtime meal. The Nevian soldiers were likely startled by the attack and brought their weapons to bear on ‘Tee-con-seven-three-fiver-six-em’, assuming, one imagines, that they were under attack from ‘insurgents’. ‘Tee-con-seven-three-fiver-six-em’ killed them with a single ‘pulse’ grenade. In all probability, the blast from the grenade was responsible for the unit’s communication failure. When its A.I. controller was examined, its log was found to have recorded every dead soldier as a ‘legitimate’ target, as it had the two contractors. However, the time-stamp of the data recorded in the A.I. controller’s log was a full minute later than that of its assigned robot’s last transmission, and listed another A.I. controller as the source. By comparing the time-stamps of all the logs, the investigators were able to determine that the attack had been initiated when ‘Tee-con-seven-three-fiver-six-em’ killed the two contractors. The other robotic units had joined in once ‘Tee-con-seven-three-fiver-six-em’ came under fire from the soldiers. Tragic as this event was, there was a further shock for the investigators.

The logs in both the weapons and their A.I. controllers were held in a ‘molecular’ memory, which recorded data by modifying the energy state of individual molecules. When new, these energy states were at a level consistent with the degree of excitation normally present in the constituent material itself. When data was recorded, individual molecular energy levels were raised as each byte of data was stored. If, say, forty bytes of data had been recorded, the excitation level of forty molecules would be elevated, plus six more for the check sum. Data could be erased, if needs be, however a molecule which no longer held a byte of information did not revert to the excitation level at which it existed when the memory was first manufactured, it would remain slightly elevated. This design feature was included in an attempt to win over the rank and file members of the military, who’d grown weary of the endless lies and cover-ups surrounding ‘friendly fire’ incidents. Any attempt to falsify the data content, they were told, could be easily detected because of this important modification. What they were not told was that, since certain individuals in the company that manufactured the memory had easy access to the technology which had been used to create it in the first place, the falsification of data remained an ‘official’ option, if required. Forensic examination of the memory in the A.I. controller assigned to ‘Tee-con-seven-three-fiver-six-em’ revealed that the log had, in fact, been altered after ‘Tee-con-seven-three-fiver-six-em’ had shut itself down. A full minute after! A slightly elevated energy level was detected in a total of sixty molecules, indicating the new log entry was sixty bytes shorter than the original. In the Nevian language, tura means ‘legitimate’. The word for illegitimate is, nihtura. The conclusion was inescapable! A shaken Chief of Staff informed an equally shaken President that, not only had the sudden escalation in military casualties been the result of ‘friendly fire’ incidents alone, but that the robotic weapons, together with their A.I. controllers, appeared to be lying about their involvement in them!

It took months to determine the cause. It was traced to five thousand lines of code embedded in one of the sub-routines loaded into the robots during their initial activation. One might call it the mea culpa routine, since it instructed the robot to shut itself down in the event of an ‘illegitimate’ kill. The newly delivered robots had been hurriedly reprogrammed with a far more powerful survival imperative than previously, as well as continuing to be intensely ‘goal’ driven. The presence of this sub-routine now had the potential to cause a serious logic conflict. Without human controller intervention – as these had been replaced by A.I. units – and since every robot was now in constant communication with its peers, it was clear that they had, over time, and as a group, come to the conclusion that telling a lie was preferable to shutting themselves down. The A.I. controllers, programmed with the desire to protect their charges from unnecessary harm, had concurred!”

And, now this. Is my little work of fiction prescient or what?

Being the President of the United States is not a normal job and only a certain kind of person would wish to campaign for it. Though on paper the position grants the holder almost limitless freedom of action, the suspicion is widely held that most decisions have already been taken prior to the President entering the Oval Office by those who propelled him to the position, and their implementation carefully choreographed by those same vested interests. In other words, the President is merely a figurehead, a seat polisher, saved from suffering the darkness and hopelessness of manic depression only by his capacity for self-aggrandizement and delusion. It is also a part time job: six months spent discovering how bad things really are, followed by eighteen months spent denying that things are as bad as they are while pursuing the policies of his predecessor and then two years campaigning to secure a second term. It’s not quite the extreme activity split of the Captain of the Flying Dutchman – one day ashore, ten years at sea – but it’s no less surreal. For his part, Mr. Blair, the former British Prime Minister, never stopped campaigning. Indeed, his entire tenure at No.10 Downing Street never amounted to more than being a ‘Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Labor Party’, with the occasional day off to start wars.

Because I live in Belize, virtually all of the T.V. programming I have access to is American, which means I’m well informed about the Presidential election campaign process, its principle players, their supposed convictions, and their absolute unsuitability for that office. Question: How come it takes America two years to elect a know nothing, warmongering narcissist, who never stood in a grocery store line or filled a gas tank, who could care less about the people who voted for him, has already sold out to the highest corporate bidders, believes he/she has the right to kill anyone, anywhere in the world, panders to a lunatic religious constituency, and thinks God and history is on his side? It takes us British just a few months to elect ours. Mind you, we’ve been at this make believe democracy thing a little longer than you Colonials.

Looking at the likely victors of the Democratic and Republican primary processes, one can see little to be energized about. Why anyone would wish to follow them as they negotiate the twists and turns of the modern geopolitical world, other than out of morbid curiosity, is anyone’s guess. Is not Lewis Black’s suggestion that we have the winner of ‘American Idol’ throw a dart at a map of the United States, place a monkey on a plane, drop it by parachute to that exact location and have the first person it touches become the President a better solution? Though it may not be in accordance with the Constitution, and the poor creature would be mobbed by lobbyists trying to attract its attention with handfuls of bananas, it would have the advantage of being quick and would not, in all probability, diminish the Presidency in any way.

On Thursday, August 25th, 2011, El Salvador recognized Palestine as an independent state in the midst of a drive by the Arab League to upgrade it to full membership status in the United Nations. I quote: “This decision was made in the context of the profound respect El Salvador has for sovereign decisions by members of the United Nations, the majority of whom have recognized the Palestinian state,” El Salvador’s President Mauricio Funes told a news conference. Read full report here.

On September, 9th, 2011 the Belize Government Press Office released this: “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is pleased to announce that the Government of Belize has decided to formally recognize Palestine as a sovereign and independent State within its pre-1967 borders. In taking this decision Belize joins more than a hundred and twenty other members of the United Nations who have formally recognized the State of Palestine. This decision is consistent with Belize’s long held position in support of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination in an independent, contiguous and viable State of Palestine, living side by side with secure and mutually recognized borders in peace and security with its neighbors.” Read full report here.

This article was published in the Washington Post on September, 15th, naming Belize and El Salvador as the latest addition to the Obama Administration’s list of “major” drug producing and transit countries, which identifies countries playing a role in the drug trade that “significantly affect the United States.”

Belize is small! It’s population is around 325,000. We don’t have huge amounts of money to waste on preventing the movement of drugs through Central America – no Central American country does. Besides, if Americans didn’t consume the huge quantities of narcotics they seem to need to survive in ‘the greatest nation on Earth’, there would be no profit to be made from their production, transportation and sale in the U.S. There would be no drug cartels. Period.

This announcement has nothing to do with drugs. It is just another bully boy tactic from a government which shapes its policies in accordance with the diktats of a foreign power, and to whom its President, the ‘leader of the free world’ bends his knee in supplication?

Here is the latest insanity from those irredeemable, blood soaked warmongers who claim to inhabit the shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere. Like everything else they say, this claim is a lie! Read this Daily Kos article to discover the truth for yourself.

You need to wise up, America, and consider the advice my first ever manager gave me as I was about to become a Shift Supervisor: “Treat everyone you meet on your way up as you would wish to be treated because you’ll meet them, again, on your way down.”

Surfing the Web can be a disheartening experience, these days, with talk of financial collapse, the growing authoritarianism of the Western democracies, terrorism, wars of choice, climate disruption, corporate, political and financial malfeasance and corruption…. You name it, it’s falling apart. Most of the sites I visit on a regular basis follow a simple format: they devote a lot of screen space to tell their readers they’re [totally] screwed and who’s responsible and, maybe why, and then end the piece with a sentence or two – maybe a paragraph – which boils down to a vague plea that ‘something needs to change’ or, in some instances, exhorts their readership to rise up and render those responsible for the parlous state of the world a splendid hanging. So, our options boil down to this: hope those who caused the mess will experience an epiphany and recant their greedy and pathological behavior, hope for Divine intervention, or alien visitors who just happen to be passing and might know what to do because, well, they’re so advanced; or, we could start a revolution.

Since psychopaths seldom undergo spontaneous behavioral modification, other than by the administration of anti-psychotic drugs [I’m sure there are instances where they do, but not in the boardrooms of global banks and corporations, I think] ‘Hope’ would not appear to be a sensible strategy. Revolution, on the other hand has, on occasions, achieved the desired result; but at what cost and for how long? The dark side of the human psyche is with us always and revolution can do little more than purge the current crop of crooks and liars from society. There are plenty of substitutes standing on the sidelines, waiting for the euphoria to subside and for the revelers to return to their lives. And these future crooks and liars will have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors and the inevitable return to their preferred ‘status quo’ will be handled differently, next time.

Today, a revolt of the masses, especially in the West, would face a plethora of counter-revolution initiatives from enhanced and widespread surveillance techniques, data acquisition and the interception and analysis of phone calls, email and web browsing history, the infiltration of protest groups by agent provocateurs, 24 hour, corporate owned – read elite – M.S.M. propaganda, up-armored police, the availability of a battle hardened military, the emergency declaration of marshal law on whatever pretext suits the moment, and a willingness to round up, incarcerate and slaughter as many of us as they need to cling to power. The timely ‘war on terror’ boondoggle  gave many governments the excuse they needed to rewrite their constitutions (or simply ignore them) and to introduce most of the aforementioned counter-revolution safeguards because they darn well knew this collapse was coming. See? I told you. The Elite learned from the revolutions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries!

So, Mr. Revolutionary: are you ready to die for the cause? Are you ready to be snatched on the street and spend your life in prison, without a trial, or the possibility of release because you bad-mouthed the President or took part in a street protest outside Goldman Sachs?

Forget it! Forget them!

When the USSR collapsed, almost overnight, what was truly remarkable was the relatively small impact the event had on the Russian people. There was a reason for that. Indifference! A complete and total disconnection from the central government and the inefficiencies of a command economy, practiced over several decades, had given the Russian people the kind of self-reliance that insulated them from the collapse of both. They already grew food on the roofs of state owned apartment blocks. They fixed their old cars, engaged in barter and took cynicism to new and healthy heights, viewing any and all government pronouncements as being the lies they were. They learned to look to the central government for none of their day to day needs and developed a wonderfully dark sense of humor, for example: when a commissar visited a steel factory outside Moscow and asked one of the employees why he was sweeping the same area of the factory, over and over, he replied, “You pretend to pay me, I pretend to work.”

This, dear reader, is how you deal with ever more authoritarian governments and rapacious bankers. Rely on them for nothing. It will be hard – no doubt about that – because it has been the goal of governments everywhere to be the savior of first and last resort, the institution you go to when things go awry, your ever loving, ever caring ‘sugar daddy’ who robs the wise and rewards the stupid.

The recent bad weather proved this beyond any doubt as stricken homeowners watched raging torrents of water wash their homes away, while hoping against hope that the government would step in and make everything all right. Why? Didn’t many victims choose to build new houses or purchase existing ones that sat on a flood plain? Did they bother to check past meteorological records, insurance pay-out records for the area, or check newspaper reports before they moved in? Don’t think so! Tell me, why should the rest of us have to pay through our taxes for them to rebuild on the same flood plain – over and over again, in some instances? Sure, if you’ve lost everything, society should feed you, give you temporary shelter, doctoring and so on, but the loss of the house is your responsibility, or the insurance company’s – assuming you had insurance. Then, there’s your health. Want to go to a fast food outlet, morning noon and night and order a half pound slab of industrial waste served between two halves of a bun, with a sliver of tomato and a shriveled up piece of lettuce, add deep fried balsa wood (fries), super-size them, pour yourself a 24 oz cup of syrupy liquid that can clean jewelry, engine blocks and dissolve tooth enamel, all from the comfort of your driver’s seat and you will be storing up trouble for yourself in later life. It’s your choice. I didn’t force you to put on 200 lbs after you quit playing high school football. So, why should I care? Why should I have to pay towards your socialized medicine when obesity sends your blood pressure into high orbit, your heart blows out from trying to pump blood through arteries clogged with fat, or diabetes turns your flesh to mush? I shouldn’t have to pay to keep you alive but the government ensures that I will.

Government permits people to make lousy choices and have the rest of us pay for them, through taxes that are taken at gun point, not because it’s the Christian thing to do, or the Islamic or Jewish thing to do, but because in your need lies the source of their power.

If you want to be able to ignore government, thereby protecting yourself from the effect of its inevitable collapse, you will have to start taking responsibility for your own life choices.  For some, it is too late. For those for whom it is not too late, exercise regularly, grow and eat natural food, filter your water, build community and family relationships, buy only what you really need. Do not plan to retire on a government pension… Ever! Don’t fall for government programs like ‘Cash for Clunkers’. They are nothing more than scams designed to pull forward demand which doesn’t really exist. Steer clear of the stock market. It’s the biggest scam of all! [Proof of that statement can be found here, here and here.] While interest rates are near zero, invest spare money in providing for the time when food and other things might become scarce. Learn or develop a skill you can use for barter and become self-sufficient in as many aspects of your life that you can. Get a hobby and turn off the TV. And, lastly, relearn that growing old and death are part of living and not to be feared. In time, the system will implode of its own accord. And, you, my friend, will scarcely notice.