THE MORE IT CHANGES...,

...the more it's the same thing. 

(q:plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose), an aphorism by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.

"Thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold, 
Gave mischief birth, and made that mischief bold: 
And double death did wretched Man invade, 
By steel assaulted, and by gold betray'd,
Now (brandish'd weapons glittering in their hands)
Mankind is broken loose from moral bands;" 


The Iron Age, Metamorphoses by Ovid - 8 CE




Chomsky explains who U.S. leaders work for and what they have done.

The Killing Didn't End With Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Before U.S. officials dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they fire bombed Japanese cities. But what few people know is that AFTER the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. officials carried out even more fire bombing of several Japanese cities.

Incredibly, there was a "1000-plane raid five days after Nagasaki on what remained of major Japanese cities, a triumph of military management skills designed to be "as big a finale as possible," the official Air Force history relates; even Stormin' Norman would have been impressed. Thousands of civilians were killed, while amidst the bombs, leaflets fluttered down proclaiming: "Your Government has surrendered. The war is over." General Spaatz wanted to use the third atom bomb on Tokyo for this grand finale, but concluded that further devastation of the "battered city" would not make the intended point. Tokyo had been removed from the first list of targets for the same reason: it was "practically rubble," analysts determined, so that the power of the bomb would not be adequately revealed. The final 1000-plane raid was therefore dispersed to seven targets, the Air Force history adds." p 238 Year 501 Noam Chomsky

NOAM CHOMSKY: Strategic reasons. I mean, economic and strategic, which are impossible to distinguish. But since the Second World War, I'll quote the State Department, the Middle East oil producing regions have been regarded, I'll quote the words, "a stupendous source of strategic power." George Kennan, State Department, head of the planning section said control, not access, control over the Middle East oil gives us "veto power" over what our rivals might do, other industrial powers. You control the spigot, have your hand on the spigot, you have a lot of world control. It's not even access to oil. The first, roughly, 30 years after the Second World War, the U.S. was - North America was the major oil producer. It wasn't using Middle East oil, never the less we had to keep an iron hand of control on Middle East oil and if the U.S. were to go to solar energy, they'd still want to control Middle East oil because that's a lever of world control. Everyone understands it but we're not allowed to think about it.

Book Details Bush/Big Oil Negotiations With Taliban Before WTC


"At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,'"
[This threat was made in August 2001 when negotiations for oil pipeline rights in Afghanistan  collapsed] 


Jean Charles Brisard: co-author BIN LADEN: THE FORBIDDEN TRUTH 

Gulf War III Is Not an Option

We’ve heard this quickening drumbeat before. Last time, it led to the tragic invasion and occupation of Iraq. This time, if we let the drummers provoke us into war with Iran, the consequences will likely be far worse.

Rat-ta-tat-tat. Weapons of mass destruction. Boom-shakka-boom. A madman in charge. Thump-thump-thump. Mushroom clouds.

Tune out the anxiety-inducing percussion and think for a minute. Yes, there are good reasons to be concerned about the Iranian nuclear program. But it doesn’t follow that launching a military attack — or providing support for an attack by Israel— would necessarily be effective, let alone wise. The evidence suggests it would be neither.

Obviously, Iranian officials are lying when they say that their nuclear program is entirely for peaceful purposes. But it is clear that Iran does not yet have the ability to build a nuclear weapon — and unclear whether the Iranian government, if and when it does achieve that capability, will take that final provocative step.

Covert operations believed to have been carried out by Israeli intelligence agents, perhaps with U.S. assistance — a diabolically clever computer virus that crippled many of Iran’s enrichment centrifuges, along with the targeted assassinations of key Iranian scientists — have significantly slowed Iran’s progress toward being able to make a bomb. It is reasonable to assume that such actions, and their effectiveness, will continue.

Read Eugene Robinson's entire column at the Washington Post.

New Tools In The Box - BURDMMXII (Feb. 21. 2012)

The World's Spookiest Weapons

Cyborg animals, psychotropics and flying lasers are just some of the terrifying weapons government labs have cooked up over the years

Atom bombs are just the beginning. In the last half-century, the greatest military minds on Earth have developed an arsenal of weapons to make mutually assured destruction seem tame.

Terrifying Weapons Mushroom cloud from the 1970 French Polynesian Licorne test.

Whether these masterpieces of destruction come from miles above Earth or millimeters below the skin, they have one thing in common: they're spooky as hell.

Can turning animals into cyborgs ever end well? Should lasers really be strapped to planes? Is dispersing humans with the worst smell ever created a better alternative to doing it by burning their skin? You be the judge. Launch our gallery of the world's spookiest weapons—some decades away and others already implemented—and marvel over what humans can create when they work apart.

OPSCI (May 09, 2008)