A DEGREE IN HOMELAND SECURITY?

Anybody else seen this ad?



I clicked through and gave some bogus information to get to where they tell you what programs they offer and it took me to a University of Phoenix page, but there was no "Homeland Security" listed in the pulldown menu of degree offerings.

Is this shit really necessary? I find it interesting that the model in the ad is surreptitiously looking through some blinds, but you aren't shown who he's spying on. I imagined he was spying on vegans and antiwar protesters, but I got the feeling you were supposed to imagine him spying on "terror cells" made up of brown people.

I wonder what the courses are in the Homeland Security degree program. Gestapo 101?
Advanced Police State Tactics 403? False Flag 311 with a controlled demolitions lab? Do they have a "summer abroad" program at Guantanamo Bay?

Where could graduates of this program even find work? I'm guessing private "security firms" like Blackwater. Because that's what America needs--a bunch of goons validated with an online degree selling their "security" to the highest bidder. Yeah, that's gonna be a big help.

THESE GUYS ARE PLAYING IT RIGHT




They know the cops have nothing on them. If anything, they've got a great case against the city for arresting them. I still haven't heard exactly what laws they've broken. They rightfully made a mockery of this whole thing.

Boston police commissioner Davis had this to say:

"“People can be smug and say all you have to do is look at this and know this is not an explosive device, but the truth of the matter is that you can’t tell what it is until it’s disrupted,” Davis said."

Are we to believe that some kind of post-modern terrorists with a sense of humor are going to encase their bombs in some sort of blinking Lite-Brite tribute? And put them all over the city in some haphazard fashion? I thought terrorist attacks had to be clandestine so no one ever knows what's happening until it's too late--you don't want to draw people's attention to blinking lights that might say "Hey, look over here! Check me out to see if I'm a bomb!"

A post-Gulf-of-Tonkin-incident world. And a post-Operation-Ajax world and a post-Operation-Northwoods world. It's a post-"Iraq has WMD"-world

This whole "post-9/11 world" meme drives me up a wall. It's used to condemn everything after the fact--i.e., "you can't be allowed to do x, y, or z--after all, this is a 'post-9/11 world.'"

It's just like the "we're at war" excuse the neocons like to drag out--"you can't criticize/protest/have freedom because we're at war and we can't allow anyone to 'embolden the enemy.'"

It's all very convenient for the authorities, isn't it? And yet people go right along with it. In a post-9/11 world, apparently, any act someone in power doesn't approve of (whether it's legal or not) can be condemned just because it's being done after a particular date on a calendar.

Well, you know what? It's also a post-Gulf-of-Tonkin-incident world. And a post-Operation-Ajax world and a post-Operation-Northwoods world. It's a post-"Iraq has WMD"-world.

In other words, we know that our government has, does, and will try to pull the wool over our eyes and fool us and abuse our trust, and not for our own good. In fact, it's pretty much always to our detriment. Why would we then enable the taking of our freedom to, I don't know, put up promotions for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, just because we've been told that over and over again that Osama bin Laden got the better of us? The FBI doesn't seem to think so.

ARRESTING ARTISTS?

So now the ATHF story gets weirder...they've arrested "an artist" supposedly for putting up the ATHF displays...I just heard Anderson Cooper announce that...he said "an artist has been arrested" or words to that effect. That's the headline of the story I linked to: "Artist arrested for planting marketing figures" (is that really "planting" something--isn't that kind of a loaded word?).

Not something you like to hear in the U.S., especially considering that these displays were harmless. I don't know if they violated city ordinances or what have you, but even if they do, I would imagine that such things normally involve the writing of tickets or the levying of fines, not ARREST!

This sounds like they're sending a message to the Freeway Blogger and like-minded individuals.

But back to the harmlessness of this act--this was a legitimate ad campaign for a legal product. The advertisers cannot be held responsible for people's perceptions of their ads, particularly when their ads (at least the one picture I've seen of one) don't have words, they don't depict anything that actually even exists. People are freaking out about ART and they shut down a city and arrested an artist because of it.

Buck Fush

It's like the situation that Sam Seder talked about on his show recently with a kid who was thrown out of class for a "Buck Fush" T-shirt. Seder's argument was that there is nothing wrong with the words "Buck Fush." And he's right--the kid can't be responsible for other people's interpretations of completely innocent words. It doesn't say "Fuck Bush," it says "Buck Fush."

What kind of country will it be when you can be arrested or cited or fined because someone interpreted your words as something other than what you said? Because that's the principle that's at stake here.

TERRORISTS FROM SPACE!!




So Ignignokt and Err scared the hell out of Boston. I saw this story this morning but didn't read it because it just said something like "suspicious packages" in Boston. I was like, "Yeah, some more fake terror crap that'll be announced all over the news for a day or two then revealed two months from now as a 'mistake' or a 'misunderstanding' or 'not a real terror plot' or whatever."

I had no idea that the ATHF was involved. I admit, I haven't watched the show in a while--but man, a few years ago, I couldn't get enough of MC Pee Pants--and now I'm interested again! So I guess the takeaway lesson here is that if you want loads and loads of free publicity, try to do something completely harmless that can get mistaken for some sort of terror plot by a populace purposely and continuously freaked out by the government about terrorism.

The campaign worked, though--I now realize that there is an ATHF movie coming out in March. Before today, I had never heard that and I am a fan of Adult Swim in general and Aqua Teen Hunger Force in particular(and Metalocalypse rules!).



But this article indicates that the ads have been up for two or three weeks without this kind of furor. As my wife just pointed out--good thing it wasn't a real terror plot!

HATE AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Reading Arthur Silber's take on the Newt Gingrich free speech fiasco...

Silber points out that we've been told that "they hate us because of our freedoms." Silber correctly points out that this is utter nonsense and that "they hate us because we kill them."

I have long argued that we need to bring the frightened sheep in this country to the realization of the true cause of terrorism, which is simply other nations' or peoples' grievances against us, whether real or perceived. The cause of terrorism is not jealousy or hatred of our "freedom."

But when the popular perception is that we must give up our freedoms so that terrorism will stop, we have people like Newt Gingrich and George Bush who will gladly sacrifice those freedoms. And they have done and will do so in vain, because their terrorizing of us won't stop until we stop our terrorizing of them.

Gingrich's remarks remind us that we have to make sure our fellow citizens understand why people would want to hurt us. Instead of trying to score political points with Christofascists and their sympathizers by expressing a desire to end free speech as we know it, Gingrich should be advocating the end of imperialistic impulses and our attempts to control the rest of the world to our benefit and the world's detriment.

If You Think About It

Because if you think about it, from the very beginning, the history of the United States is the history of oppression and overthrow, naked agression and plundering. All of which is cleverly done under the guise of being dedicated to freedom and equality.

Howard Zinn does a good rundown of this history in an interview with (shudder) Dennis Prager:

HZ: Well, probably more bad than good. We’ve done some good, of course; there’s no doubt about that. But we have done too many bad things in the world. You know, if you look at the way we have used our armed force throughout our history: first destroying the Indian communities of this continent and annihilating Indian tribes, then going into the Caribbean in the Spanish-American War, going to the Philippines, taking over other countries, not establishing democracy but in many cases establishing dictatorship, holding up dictatorships in Latin America and giving them arms, and you know, Vietnam, killing several million people for no good reason at all, certainly not for democracy or liberty, and continuing down to the present day with the War in Iraq—we’re not bringing democracy to Iraq, we’re not bringing security to Iraq, and we’re responsible for the deaths of very large numbers of people, I mean, 2500 Americans, tens of thousands of Iraqis....

Just sayin'...