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By Jason Miller

10/8/07

Cluster B Personality Disorders

1776.0 Americanistic Personality Disorder

The essential features of Americanistic Personality Disorder include pervasive patterns of extreme self-absorption, profound and long-term lapses in empathy, a deep disregard for the well-being of others, a powerful aversion to intellectual honesty and reality, and a grossly exaggerated sense of the importance of one’s self and one’s nation. These patterns emerge in infancy, manifest themselves in nearly all contexts, and often become pathological.

These patterns have also been characterized as sociopathic, or colloquially as the “Ugly American Syndrome.” Note that the latter terminology carries too benign a connotation to accurately describe an individual afflicted with such a dangerous perversion of character.

For this diagnosis to be given, the individual must be deeply immersed in the flag-waving, nationalistic, and militaristic fervor derived primarily from the nearly perpetual barrage of reality warping emanations of the “mainstream media,” most commonly through the medium of television. Typically indoctrinated from birth to believe that they are morally superior, exceptional human beings, these individuals suffer from severe egocentrism, a condition further engendered by the prevalence of the acutely toxic dominant paradigm known as capitalism.

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‘I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of being like the good German Joneses who said nothing while their Jewish German neighbors were shipped off standing-room only on cattle cars to be slaughtered like . . . cattle . . . ‘

By Adam Engel

9/26/07

“To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He’s a good man to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble-making person . . . . A Johnson minds his own business. But he will help when help is needed. He doesn’t stand by while someone is drowning or trapped in a wrecked car.”

~ William S. Burroughs, “The Adding Machine”

William Burroughs, that nasty, ex-junky, queer (and what are YOU gonna do about it?), gun enthusiast and satirist, that–horror of horrors–FREE MAN, had a word for the decent, peace loving folk of the world. He called them Johnsons, or The Johnson Family, an expression he first encountered in a book, You Can’t Win, by Joe Black.

While Burroughs described what it means to be a Johnson quite well, he neglected to mention the other family in this Manichean contest: The Joneses.

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by Stephen Lendman

9/26/07

What do you call a country that glorifies wars and violence in the name of peace? One that’s been at war every year in its history against one or more adversaries. It has the highest homicide rate of all western nations and a passion for owning guns, yet the
two seem oddly unconnected. Violent films are some of its most popular, and similar video games crowd out the simpler, more innocent street play of generations earlier. Prescription and illicit drug use is out of control as well when tobacco, alcohol and other legal ones are included.

It get’s worse. Its society is called a “rape culture” with data showing:

– one-fourth of its adult women victims of forcible rape sometime in their lives, often by someone they know, including family members;

– one-third of them are victims of sexual abuse by a husband or boyfriend;

– 30% of people in the country say they know a woman who’s been physically abused by her husband or boyfriend in the past year;

– one in four of its women report being sexually molested in childhood, usually repeatedly over extended periods by a family member or other close relative;

– its women overall experience extreme levels of violence; an astonishing 75% of them are victims of some form of it in their lifetimes;

–domestic violence is their leading cause of injury and second leading cause of death;

– statistically, homes are their most dangerous place if men are in them as millions experience battering by husbands, male partners or fathers;

– for most women with children, there’s no escape for lack of means and because male assailants pursue them causing greater harm;

– adding further injury, its society is often unsupportive; it affords women second class status, privileges and redress when they’re abused so many suffer in silence fearing coming forward may cause more harm than help;

– its children are abused as well; millions suffer serious neglect, physical mistreatment and/or sexual abuse; many get relief only through escape to dangerous streets; they end up alone, more vulnerable and at greater danger away than at home where there,
too, families act more like strangers or predators forcing young kids to flee in the first place.

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By Jason Miller

9/11/07

“The other kids were all into black power,” Oprah told the Tribune in the mid-1980s. But “I wasn’t a dashiki kind of woman … Excellence was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy.”

Excellence indeed. Few would deny that Oprah Winfrey has achieved an extraordinary degree of THAT, at least by our society’s warped standards. Witty, articulate, attractive, beloved by tens of millions, and fabulously wealthy, she is the “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps” queen of a vast media empire. Oprah is a living embodiment of the American Dream. What is perhaps most inspiring to her genuflecting disciples is that Oprah rose to her stratospheric position of wealth and influence from an impoverished start in a socioeconomic hierarchy still largely dominated by white males.

Oprah Winfrey ostensibly possesses the mythical Midas Touch, a generous spirit, deep spiritual wisdom, and, in the eyes of those blinded by their adoration, the credentials of a saint. Yet despite appearing destined for canonization, Oprah injects heavy doses of infectious pus into the already deeply abscessed wound of the American psyche.

How could anyone who’s noted for having said, “Let your light shine. Shine within you so that it can shine on someone else. Let your light shine,” have such a pernicious effect on our culture?

Let’s “count the ways…with a passion put to use.”

To truly understand the depth of the damage Oprah inflicts on our society, we need to step outside of our bourgeois indoctrination and see her for what she truly represents. Manifesting the Horatio Alger Myth on steroids, Oprah is a wet dream come true for our criminal class of ruling elites sometimes referred to as the plutocracy. She provides them with “irrefutable” and ubiquitous anecdotal evidence which “proves” the idiotic delusion that America is a meritocracy where everyone has a realistic chance of getting rich, if they just work hard enough. The reality is that the richest 20% of US Americans own over 80% of the wealth and the long-term trend has been toward an ever increasing concentration of treasure into a smaller number of strong-boxes(1).

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By ADAM ENGEL

8/15/07

So then, another gaggle of reactionaries skilled in a certain brain Judo (crude street version practiced in rough-and-tumble Think Tanks of D.C.), mourn the passing of Yesterday’s sun. Unravel the nonce of dream: strands of dead hair tied in noose-knots. The Dead are dandruff tumbling, or rigor mortis oddities caught in the tar of Liberty’s mussed pompadour. String theory, etc.

Witnessed days before tumors pocked all flesh. Diaries kept by The Missing. LOSD (Losing Our Sons and Daughters), the agency that tracks and codifies gross theft of person-hood, believed, oh! — Dead, dead, regardless of when or if found and returned, hungry, living, The Missing are, were and will remain quite dead to friends, family, creditors (not to imply excuse of debt). LOSD opportunities: accept, adjust, return.

Witness to airplanes, all that fly me I’m Linda, fly me, I’m Gail. Beware physicians and their hypodermic –

“Needless overhead,” said the CFO, a CPA, to the CEO who related their calculations to the bored, board, boredom a Kharma tax Cosmically imposed upon obscene wealth. Blasé omnipotence of digital transactions: nine figures, ten figures, eleven (yawn), twelve. No cold steal like cash or coin. No gold jewels or pills.

The next Great Train Robber walking off with someone’s — dare I say whose? — wireless laptop and personal digital assistant (who’ll offer no resistance, unlike buxom Gal Fridays of corporate yore).

What’s with these Yankees of today all hard-bone-cold-and-snot-marrow?

All is not completely lost. You – assuming you are – must do what your “Mother” Nature’s been on your case about (”The case is all there is,” Wittgenstein or Clarence Darrow said) and “clean your damned room!”

Adieu.

Adam Engel is a contributing editor with Cyrano’s Journal Online and can be reached at

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By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor

Originally published at Online Journal

Aug 9, 2007

I was a little boy on August 6, 1945, when President Harry Truman decided to drop the first nuclear weapon ever on the ill-fated Hiroshima.

The weapon in fact was nicknamed “Little Boy,” a cruel irony. More so was the dropping three days later of the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb over Nagasaki, which unlike Hiroshima had no military installations. To make matters worse, on my seventh birthday, September 17, 1945, Hiroshima was hit by the Makurazaki Typhoon (Ida), which added 3,000 deaths and injuries to the first two disasters, the dark magic of three’s.

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Commentary written by Vi Ransel and edited by Jason Miller

Verse by Vi Ransel

8/7/07

It seems you’ve been able to unite liberals, progressives, conservatives, libertarians and even whacka-wacka Americans not in a righteous condemnation of the Iraq War, illegal dictatorial legislation, the wealth gap, lack of health care, vote fraud, dumbed down education, a bought-off/wholly-owned media and Congress, but simply by reminding them of where the meat they eat comes from. Would that we could inspire such passion over any of the aforementioned topics!

And while comments on well-reasoned pieces by eminent authors such as Chalmers Johnson are slim to none, DEAD ANIMALS got 29 comments - some VERY scary, many of them cartoons of hysteria and caricatures of sentient debate - on its first day up. (at 54 today)

While the author does drive himself right over that cliff of “going-so-far-you-have-a-hard-time-getting-anybody-to-go-along-with-you”, most of us probably agree that concentration camps and torture are wrong in any context, that mistreatment of the least of us leads inevitably to mistreatment of the rest of us and has nothing at all to do, ultimately, with meat, the food chain or population growth, but the ethics (or the lack of) on which we base our actions and the fully-aware acceptance, or denial, of what is being done in our name.

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By Jason Miller

7/25/07

A few days ago, one of my closest friends hit me with a heavily loaded question.

“Are you a Communist?” she queried.

To which I replied:

I do not belong nor militate in any formal communist party in the U.S. Nor do I belong to any other political entity or party. Furthermore, I do not subscribe to a specific doctrine, ideology, or dogma. My allegiance is to my core principles and values, which are premised on honesty, justice, humanity, responsibility, critical thinking, open-mindedness, egalitarianism, compassion, a belief in a Higher Power of my understanding, and many of the teachings of Christ.

My personal beliefs aside, communism is an incredibly loaded word. Our infinitely mendacious educational, social, and media infrastructures begin inculcating reflexive rejection of “all things communist or socialist” into US Americans from the moment they draw their initial breath.

Why is the establishment so desperate to vaccinate us against the “disease” of communism?

Because at its hopelessly rotten core, capitalism, which is manifested most strongly in the United States, is about exploitation, hyper-competitiveness, “rugged individualism”, survival of the fittest, concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, profits above all, property over people, greed, and selfishness. Perhaps worst of all, this pyramid scheme masquerading as a “moral” economic system inevitably leads to wars fueled by its insatiable demands for new markets, more resources, and cheaper labor. Why else would 350 million out of 6.5 billion people spend a trillion dollars a year on a military that has the capacity to destroy our planet thousands of times over, dwarfs the combined firepower of the rest of the world, and plagues over 130 countries with its “benign” occupations? We in the United States maintain a carefully crafted façade as the “benevolent champions of democracy”, but will quickly install ruthless tyrants and commit mass murder (euphemistically labeling our victims as “collateral damage”) if sovereign nations dare to resist our economic rape and plunder.

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“BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq - The airplane is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet. It’s outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles.

The Reaper is loaded, but there’s no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.

The arrival of these outsize U.S. “hunter-killer” drones, in aviation history’s first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill.” — Associated Press, July 16, 2007.

(http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,142437,00.html?ESRC=dod.nl)

By Adam Engel

7/25/07

So BushCo solved the PR problem that might possibly have grown into a credible anti-war movement by alleging to guarantee less American casualties which, let’s face it, is all Americans really care about anyway. Otherwise, we would have protested the massacre of the first “Gulf War” in which Iraqi soldiers and civilians were slaughtered in their cars while trying to escape Baghdad. Forget all that “military honor” nonsense. What kind of monsters fire on retreating troops AND fleeing civilians? Despite all the movies and TV shows referring to “American casualties” in 1991, including that movie with Meg Ryan, only about 200 Americans died in that war as opposed to 150,000+ Iraqis, mostly civilian. The movie, JARHEAD, unique among Gulf I movies, depicts burnt corpses on a highway crammed with cars and trucks bombed fleeing American air power and “smart bombs.”

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Originally published by The Rec Report / Citizens for Legitimate Government

By Michael D. Rectenwald, Ph.D.

7/19/07

Only a small minority in the United States maintains an unwavering faith in the administration of George W. Bush. Most of the country has finally discovered Bush and his ilk are liars, thieves, incompetent hacks, and mercenary madmen. Only a few true believers remain. These few are reflected in the unwavering statistical minority of 30%-33%, who still support Bush, and apparently will support Bush, no matter what he does. This remnant, or as Steven Colbert called them, “the backwash,” will never sway. Like the Christian martyrs of old, they will go to their deaths swearing allegiance to their master. One might wonder who this faithful remnant is, and just where its members might be found. Well, a narrow and vociferous margin can be found screeching on Freerepublic.com. There, they are apparently alive, but judging from what they hold to be ‘reality,’ not so well.

On Freerepublic.com, we find those who still believe in the Bush agenda: the war, the insurgency, the domestic agenda, and yes, even in the reliability of the Bush propaganda machine. Here we find the few who find no irony in the language of the Bush regime. They see nothing ironic about the fact that the original name for the war in Iraq was Operation Iraqi Liberation, the acronym for which is O.I.L.–that is, before it was changed to cover up the inauspicious and inadvertent revelation of its true purpose. They see no irony in the idea of liberating a country from a dictator, and then using his former prisons to torture its citizens. They see no irony in calling the ‘enemy’ ruthless killers, even as they have bombed and ruthlessly killed many times more people than the enemy. They see no irony in trumpeting a war against terrorism, even as their state terrorism has precipitated a bloody civil war that has drastically added to terrorism’s ranks. They see no irony in the fact that they no longer know who the enemy is, and instead hope to secure the enemy from the enemy’s enemy. They see no irony in the administration’s demands that Iran not “interfere” in the affairs of Iraq. They see no tragedy in the report that over 2 million former Iraqis are now refugees in nearby countries and another 2 million are now homeless inside Iraq. They see no irony in the fact that Bush now claims a need to stay in Iraq, lest it become the safe-haven for terrorism that he claimed it was before he attacked, but which it has only become since he attacked. They see no irony in decrying the supposedly undemocratic regimes in Venezuela and elsewhere, even as their own elections have been notoriously and egregiously flawed, indeed probably rigged, so much so that human rights watch groups would refuse to monitor them. They see no irony in their “pro-life” agenda, even as they kill tens of thousands of innocent, walking and talking children and adults. They see no irony in the fact that the latest media spokesman for the regime is named “Tony Snow,” as if an admission that the message delivered will be part of a “Snow job.”

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