"McCain graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958 and was commissioned into the United States Navy. He became a naval aviator and flew ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers.
During the Vietnam War, he was almost killed in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. While on a bombing mission during Operation Rolling Thunder over Hanoi in October 1967, he was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a prisoner of war until 1973.
He experienced episodes of torture and refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer. The wounds that he sustained during the war left him with lifelong physical disabilities. He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981 and moved to Arizona, where he entered politics.
In 1982, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served two terms. He entered the U.S. Senate in 1987 and easily won reelection five times, the final time in 2016." -Wikipedia
I.
He certainly must have felt like a god while soaring through the sky like a god and dropping bombs on the people below.
An evil god.
An actual, real life Iron Man– that is pretty crazy to think about– like fifty years ago, but instead of fighting some terrible villain, he finds one of the world's poorest, most backwater countries where no one speaks English, and just starts blasting farmers and burning the entire forest to the ground, for real, and saying that's what they get for electing a communist government.
After we elected Lyndon B Johnson.
II.
Pop quiz: What could you do to a man who was going around dropping bombs on your neighborhood?
The US government has estimated that 30,000 civilians were killed in total as a result of Operation Rolling Thunder. So that's like 10x 9-11s that John McCain participated in causing.
III.
And Vietnam's just lucky we didn't elect Barry Goldwater, who was talking about nuking them:
Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), running for the Republican Party nomination in the upcoming presidential election, gives an interview in which he discusses the use of low-yield atomic bombs in North Vietnam to defoliate forests and destroy bridges, roads, and railroad lines bringing supplies from communist China. During the storm of criticism that followed, Goldwater tried to back away from these drastic actions, claiming that he did not mean to advocate the use of atomic bombs but was “repeating a suggestion made by competent military people.” Democrats painted Goldwater as a warmonger who was overly eager to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Though he won his party’s nomination, Goldwater was never able to shake his image as an extremist in Vietnam policies. This image was a key factor in his crushing defeat by opponent Lyndon B. Johnson, who took about 61 percent of the vote to Goldwater’s 39 percent. -History.com
IV.
Lyndon B. Johnson was the lesser of two evils.
He had John McCain bomb these people with napalm instead.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/politics...
via: DailyKos
Holy shit these men are just bombing people.
Does anyone else think that's weird?
V.
May 22 2018 - Casey Research:
Justin: Doug, how will wars of the future be fought differently than today?
Doug: War’s evolving in several ways. For starters, we won’t see as many nation states fighting each other. There will, instead, be more conflict between nation states and non-state entities like so-called terrorist organizations.
Over the last 30 or so years terrorism has become a buzzword, supposedly one of the greatest evils of our era. But “terrorism” is simply a method of warfare. So you can’t fight terrorism. It’s like saying you can fight artillery barrages, cavalry charges or frontal assaults. Terrorism isn’t a thing, it’s a tactic.
Terrorism is essentially a form of psychological warfare, intended to sway the minds of the enemy. As such, it’s much cheaper, much less destructive, and potentially much more effective than conventional warfare. As Napoleon said, in war the moral is to the physical as three is to one.
I should also mention Sun Tzu in this light. He’s become very fashionable in recent years. This isn’t the time to discuss his views on warfare, but there’s no question he would have been a huge advocate of terror as a method.
VI.
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| Photo by: River Bissonnette |
Aug 28 2018 - Rolling Stone - Matt Taibbi:
McCain never changed his mind about Vietnam, in particular, and it colored his opinion of every war that followed. Here’s what McCain wrote in 2003, months into the invasion of Iraq:
"We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting and because we limited the tools at our disposal."
Between 1963 and 1974, we dropped two million tons of ordnance on Laos — not North Vietnam, but Laos — which works out to “a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours per day, for nine years.”
The death toll from that one country is said to be 70,000 (50,000 during the war, 20,000 who died later from unexploded bombs).
Similar operations in North Vietnam are said to have killed 182,000 civilians, and estimates about bombing deaths in Cambodia range from 30,000 to 150,000.
Add another 400,000 maimed and an additional 500,000 gruesome birth defects chalked up to the use of Agent Orange, and you start to get a sense of the scale of civilian suffering caused by our invasion of Indochina.
I bring this up because the McCain view of what happened there — that we “lost” in Vietnam only because we were “limited” to, say, 2 million tons of bombs and 580,000 air missions in places like Laos — continues to this day to be a mainstream belief.
VII.
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| eBay's football ad on this makes it so special |
"Abstract
Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are "one of many" in a much greater problem.
Why does this occur? The answer to this question will help us answer a related question that is the topic of this paper: Why, over the past century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide?
Every episode of mass murder is unique and raises unique obstacles to intervention. But the repetitiveness of such atrocities, ignored by powerful people and nations, and by the general public, calls for explanations that may reflect some fundamental deficiency in our humanity - a deficiency that, once identified, might possibly be overcome. One fundamental mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes of mass-murder neglect involves the capacity to experience affect, the positive and negative feelings that combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions.
I shall draw from psychological research to show how the statistics of mass murder or genocide, no matter how large the numbers, fail to convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The reported numbers of deaths represent dry statistics, "human beings with the tears dried off," that fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action.
Recognizing that we cannot rely only upon our moral feelings to motivate proper action against genocide, we must look to moral argument and international law. The 1948 Genocide Convention was supposed to meet this need, but it has not been effective.
It is time to examine this failure in light of the psychological deficiencies described here and design legal and institutional mechanisms that will enforce proper response to genocide and other forms of mass murder." Paul Slovic, Decision Research and University of Oregon, Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 2, no. 2, April 2007, pp. 79-95.
VIII.
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| The Irish Times |
IX.
X.
I'm amazed, but not surprised at the American people's entirely misplaced sense of decorum at this hour.
When Charles Manson died no one had a word to say against any one who celebrated as they pointed out the obvious about him– that he was a menace to the world, who ordered people under his spell to carry out murders in cold blood.
The only difference between Charles Manson and John McCain is the sheer scale of the mayhem and murder orchestrated by the U.S. Senator from Arizona, who just like Manson, ordered people under his spell to carry out murders in cold blood.
The unambiguous agenda of the United States is perpetual violent conflict and war, with a staggering human cost. And John McCain has made a career out of being one of its most extreme advocates for that agenda, at the vanguard of the most extreme militant wing of an extremely militant regime.
In the West we have a superstition against speaking ill of the dead– De mortuis nihil nisi bonum– Of the dead say nothing but good. Remember, it's a superstition. In an essay regarding the horrors of World War I that had devastated his continent, Sigmund Freud had this to say of the old Roman superstition:
"We assume a special attitude towards the dead, something almost like admiration for one who has accomplished a very difficult feat. We suspend criticism of him, overlooking whatever wrongs he may have done, and issue the command, De mortuis nil nisi bene: we act as if we were justified in singing his praises at the funeral oration, and inscribe only what is to his advantage on the tombstone. This consideration for the dead, which he really no longer needs, is more important to us than the truth, and, to most of us, certainly, it is more important than consideration for the living."
Indeed for most it is.
The white knights coming to John McCain's defense at this moment– those second rate peddlers of war propaganda, and of course the outrage mongers and virtue signalers– they accuse someone who speaks as I do of lacking decency, compassion, and humanity. "What about the grieving families!" they cry as they beat their breasts in a sickly tone of fevered sanctimony.
A friend of mine asked me, "Would you want people celebrating your death, Wesley? Have some human decency." I was amazed at his ability to willfully ignore the context. "Would you want people planning yours? Where's your human decency?" I asked in return.
Where is the love and consideration in their hearts– the decency, compassion, and humanity– for the many innocent dead around the world, ordered to be massacred, and slated for death by John McCain and his ilk? How can honoring such a man be a sign of decency and compassion? There are many still grieving their loss, missing their dead family members, murdered in acts of cold blood at the command of John McCain and so many, too many others like him in the United States government.
If you have the stomach for it, Google "deformed Iraqi babies," and look at them. They were born that way because of the radioactive depleted uranium shells left all over Iraq by the U.S. Department of Defense, the fruits of John McCain's life's work.
Only in a lunatic society can honoring such a man be a sign of decency, while condemning the sum of his life's work is regarded as callous. Only with a social psyche marred by the pernicious effects of political propaganda, could this be possible.
George Orwell rightly said, "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."
Dare point out– as the uncorrupted child in the old Danish tale– that the emperor has no clothes, and people will be so embarrassed by the enormity of the lies our political system is based on, so afraid that they are unable to accept such a disheartening truth, to believe that so many "respectable" men could do so much evil and base it on such preposterous lies, that they will attack the one who points out the obvious in a spectacular display of enraged fake conviction.
But what would you do if you woke up last November and found the majority of society speaking in tones of great respect, honor, and admiration for Charles Manson at the hour of his death?
I would tell them to stop acting like lunatics. And warn them that we will have hell to pay if they can't stop.
