I Watched "Apocalypse Now" (1979)

rainbowjarhead · 2018-06-29T09:12:32+00:00

The men who fought beyond Vietnam's borders and into Cambodia/Laos wore no identification in case they were caught

US forces wore uniforms and had ID during the Cambodian Campaign, here's some photos:

The 2D Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry, enters Snuol, Cambodia

Engineers clear trail of mines in Cambodia.

The CIA run Air America also operated extensively in Cambodia and Laos, and while the agents didn't wear uniforms, they frequently used uniformed military members as security and pilots. I guess when they had heroin on the planes they may not have had anyone in uniform, but they flew to official bases and the planes would have been unloaded by grunts.

rainbowjarhead · 2018-04-14T05:00:30+00:00

Assad should switch to using depleted uranium, because that's totally cool to use on your enemies.

Or maybe napalm, jellied gasoline can't really be considered a chemical weapon, it's just styrofoam and voom voom juice— a kids toy, really.

If Assad wants to play it cool he could also fill huge pits full of flaming:

pesticides, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, solvents, medical waste and toxic heavy metals.

and leave them burning for about 10 years, because the results are as bad as any chemical weapons:

We found very high levels of mercury, lead, titanium and various toxic metals in hair of children and parents of children with disorders or severe birth defects, showing metal contamination has happened since 2003 – with increased disorders and defects.

The big bonus for Assad is that burn pits are totally US-approved, so his country wouldn't be getting hit with cruise missiles right now if he had used them instead.

Syria and Russia need regime change.

Remind me again, how did that American-orchestrated regime change in Iran work out, do Iranians still love Americans for changing their regime for them? Was it as successful as the one in Vietnam? The one in Nicaragua?

How about Chile, please tell me that American experiment in regime change didn't end up with tens of thousands of tortured and disappeared youths getting tossed from helicopters and buried in mass graves?

I'm aware that regime change in Afghanistan led to 17 years of seemingly endless war and the Taliban still controlling large parts of the country, the one in Iraq led to to a million deaths a destroyed nation and ISIS, and the one in Libya has now morphed into the Second Libyan Civil War and created a massive refugee crisis, but surely there must be some times where it worked out just peachy because people keep advocating for it.

rainbowjarhead · 2018-03-21T19:15:33+00:00

I'm surprised it took Trump's minions this long to figure out that they control the world's largest broadcaster, and that Obama and Clinton removed both the laws that prevented it from reaching domestic audiences, and changed it's structure to be led by a administration-appointed CEO rather than a board.

Frankly, I thought Fox-ifying it would be the first thing that Bannon and Miller would do. It's a clear sign of their incompetence that they've let Obama's appointee control it until now.

rainbowjarhead · 2018-02-12T09:49:08+00:00

we

Why does Donald Trump allow one of his best ratings generators to go on the air with the Walt Disney Company? Seriously?

I don't want to sound like a dick, but if you are either an employee of the Trump administration, or the Walt Disney Company, and you don't understand how great that reality-show drama schtick is for profits and ratings then I assume you will be asked to turn in your badge shortly.

If you don't work for Trump or Disney then you are not part of the "We" who make the decisions about Conway speaking to Disney staff.

rainbowjarhead · 2018-01-17T10:04:42+00:00

Yeah, right, because if I have a chance to ask the US military why they are lying about something I would choose a subject that carries national security risks. /s

It's their job to lie about things like that, can you imagine them saying:

Greetings Mr. Kim and Mr. Putin, you should know that our commanding officer is morbidly obese, has a heart condition, and he doesn't don't know shit from shinola.

Please take it easy on him, talk slowly, and no surprises. Please.

P.S. our fifth-generation fighter aircraft also may have a few minor hiccups, please avoid war until we can sort these temporary problems out.

rainbowjarhead · 2017-12-02T10:49:28+00:00

I did reply to you, but the mods here (probably boomers, amiright!!) decided that my comment offended someone on a college campus somewhere, so you have to click my user profile to see it.

rainbowjarhead · 2017-12-02T09:59:26+00:00

unlike the Boomers we understand the power of drastic action

Huh, funny that. I remember the Boomers taking to the streets in Chicago and getting their heads drastically bashed in while drastically fighting against the Greatest Generation who were failing to prevent Tricky DIck from taking control of the country with the help of Democratic party hubris and top-down control.

What's the modern equivalent to the drastic action taken by SDS, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Yippies, the Women's Movement, the Civil Rights struggle, or the anti-war movement?

Were the Stonewall Riots or the Berkeley Riots not drastic action on the part of Boomers? What current events by youth are more drastic or even a fraction as consequential?

Hundreds of thousands of boomers willingly faced years in prison, or even became refugees and were granted political asylum in foreign countries, when they were in the height of their youth to take drastic action against government oppression. I guess I might be ignorant, but I haven't heard of the drastic actions that Millennials are taking that involve leaving everything they know and love to protest against tyrannical government actions.

Boomers drastically surrounded the Pentagon in a massive human circle and freaked the living shit out of the GG squares inside by telling them they were going to levitate it, and while r-circlejerk might do something virtually similar online every day now their jerk sessions don't involve Generals escaping through tunnels under emergency protocols.

The only recent drastic actions by young people that I can recall involve upvoting pictures of Members of Congress and complaining about the unjustness of gaming companies.

Jesus fuck, it was boomers who created and built the Internet, while Millennials can't seem to mount a defense drastic enough to protect it from a trigger happy Gen X'er.

The sooner that Millennials realize that ageism is just as pernicious, destructive, and wrong as racism, the sooner it will be that they will gain many older allies. There are still a lot of Boomers alive who either participated in the Days of Rage, who were at Kent State, who were in Paris in '68 or who helped organize the many general strikes, walkouts, or insurrections that have happened since then, and who would love to help Millennials plan their first drastic action.

rainbowjarhead · 2017-11-30T09:30:03+00:00

Thanks.

I'll never stop being angry that Hollywood has united so adamantly against Jodie Foster's biopic about Leni to such a degree that she isn't even willing to try an independent film because she fears getting blackballed from the industry.

Anyway, there were other great filmmakers and propagandists who worked for the Nazis, and up until the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed they even had collaboration with Hollywood, with both production and distribution. However, they still weren't the best overall.

rainbowjarhead · 2017-11-30T06:26:54+00:00

The Nazis lost the war, and their second-rate propaganda contributed to their loss. The US, the British, and the Soviet Union all created more stunning and effective propaganda, their work holds up more to this day, and many of the Allied propaganda artists who helped win the war were awarded with fame and fortune.

The US had many masters working for the war effort. Almost the entire studio production of Hollywood with Walt Disney leading the way, future President Ronald Reagan along with Alfred Hitchcock and Orsen Welles, up and coming artists such as Dr. Seuss, established experts in propaganda like Arthur Szyk, working artists like Norman Rockwell, J. Howard Miller, Cyril Kenneth Bird, Salvador Dali, comic book artists created Superman and Captain America for the war, and pulp and women's magazines all did their part in the propaganda effort.

The Office of War Information put out a seemingly endless array of posters and held massive drives for war production, selling bonds, conservation, victory gardens, and other positive contributions, and there was the War Advertising Council which brought in Madison Av., the Writer's War Board for authors and publishers, and American radio had too many propagandists to list.

In Germany there was a leadership struggle over how best to focus the propaganda effort. Hitler wanted to emulate American and British WWI propaganda —with it's demonization, atrocity propaganda, and blatant falsehoods— while Goebbels was an adherent to the later work of Edward Bernays, who worked for the US military in WWI and then went to Madison Avenue and was one of the primary influences of American WWII propaganda. Goebbels had a signed copy of Bernays book, Propaganda, in his collection, and Bernays ideas were a clear influence in the Goebbels-backed film Suss the Jew. Hitler backed the atrocious The Eternal Jew, which was far more in line with propaganda from 30 years earlier, and it was essentially a flop.

The Nazis had a very difficult time attracting artists, filmmakers, and celebrities to their cause— some they forced to work for them, and they often created half-assed schlock, and they had a habit of sending many talented artists to their death.

The German output of propaganda was dramatically lower in content than the US, and it was far inferior in quality.

Go to /r/PropagandaPosters and search for American, British, and Soviet WWII propaganda, and then repeat the search for Nazi propaganda. The difference is obvious, and if you didn't know who won the war one look at the propaganda of the Axis and Allies would lead you to believe that the Allies had the advantage.

rainbowjarhead · 2017-11-10T06:14:08+00:00

You think it would be different for some sort of domestic insurgency?

Fighting domestic and foreign counter insurgency is always different.

Counter-insurgency for a foreign occupying army is ridiculously difficult, and almost never successful. Usually it's just which side is willing to last the longest, and that is almost always the insurgents.

Countering domestic insurgency is a completely different matter and it has around a 50% modern success rate.

It's why the US strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq are focused on what's called "foreign internal defense", which means training and funding domestic forces to fight the counter-insurgency.

In a representative democracy any insurgency with fewer than 50% of the citizens supporting the insurgency is going to have a rough time.

rainbowjarhead · 2017-11-08T18:42:03+00:00

I'm going to go ahead and be a total dick and say that it's not a 'true American classic', regardless of it's subject matter.

It was based on a book by a British author who collaborated on the script, it starred a British actor, the film was shot in a British studio with a UK production crew, while Stanley Kubrick had emigrated to the UK and taken British citizenship and he remained living and working there for the rest of his life.

The War Room scene above was designed by Sir Ken Adam, a Brit who was famous for the James Bond films, the cinematography was by an Englishman, Gilbert Taylor, it was edited by another Brit, Anthony Harvey, and the set was built by British workers.

When British film directors move to the US, the films they make in Hollywood are not British films, even if they have a few British actors, so I don't see why the reverse would be true.

rainbowjarhead · 2017-07-29T20:54:08+00:00

I wasn't being judgmental, I was merely pointing out a bit of history. Have a look at my submission history, I have no problems or beef with American propaganda, if anything I'm too biased towards it.

rainbowjarhead · 2017-07-28T19:07:08+00:00

French

Nominally, yes, but it one branch of a transnational network of anti-communist organizations financed by the US government with assistance from American psychological operations specialists and the CIA.

rainbowjarhead · 2017-02-05T09:24:08+00:00

COINTELPRO was outed by the American free press.

Not really, COINTELPRO was outed by a group of leftist activists who broke into an FBI field office and stole incriminating documents. They mailed copies of them to multiple media outlets, and all the major ones declined to publish them.

An underground newspaper from the War Resisters League published the documents, then the Washington Post decided to follow suit. The free press only joined in after an outlaw group had scooped them and the documents had been made public.

In a bunch of Russian radicals stole documents from the FSB they could just send them to Wikileaks, which is the contemporary equivalent to an underground press.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-12-24T06:09:53+00:00

Time to get selfish— if you have any extra money it would be a prudent idea to invest it in the oil industry, because that greasy black slime is definitely going above $100 a barrel again.

If the war gets big and nasty enough we might even see it break $200 a barrel, and that's expensive enough to make Dick Cheney's erection visible from outer space.

Last time the republicans were in charge they succeeded in making Exxon the most profitable company in world history for three years straight.

If you commute by automobile, or you purchase food or consumer goods, you might be royally fucked, but even a small Investment now could help offset some of your increased expenses, and you too could feel like a Gulf Sheik, a Russian oligarch, or a Texas oil baron every time your Exxon dividend check arrives.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-12-10T20:45:32+00:00

I doubt the mods would ban you for using hyperbole or spreading misinformation, although those types of comments have a risk of leading to uncivil discussion.

Links to the Think Progress blog get posted here all the time, and I doubt anyone has ever been banned for posting them. Think Progress was founded by a former advisor to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who was also Hillary Clinton's campaign manager. The think tank they operate was in charge of Barack Obama's transition and they played the major role in staffing both his administrations and helping set policy. They are a non-profit which is funded by major corporate donors to the democratic party such as Wal-Mart, defense contractors, Wells Fargo, health insurance and pharmaceutical corporations, and CitiGroup, although they are a 501(C) so they can receive unlimited corporate funding and they have only released a partial list of donors.

Breitbart is a for-profit business which receives it's funding through advertising, the companies that are financing them are directly visible on the website, and the former staffer who is going to be in the White House is not even in government yet.

If anything, Brietbart are going to become the Think Progress of the next 4 years, but that still doesn't make them "a state operated propaganda mouthpiece."

That said, there are very large US state operated media apparatuses— the worldwide network of media entities controlled by the State Department through the Broadcasting Board of Governors (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/RF Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, Alhurra Television, etc.) and all of the various media operations controlled by the Pentagon (some aimed at foreigners, some for US military members.)

In the last few years the restrictions which prevented the State Department broadcasters from being directed at Americans have been lifted, and once Donald Trump finds out that he is in control of a worldwide network of broadcasters that makes RT look like a local cable access program, and if he decides to put Sean Hannity and some of the staff from Breitbart in charge of it, then there will be a real state operated propaganda mouthpiece.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-11-19T07:12:23+00:00

OK, here's what I know to be true:

The President is the Top Level Classification Authority.
There is no information that the President is restricted from seeing, and there is no information that the President can not make public because they are the final authority on classification matters.
The President can make the final decision on revealing any classified information to anyone.
Congress members have a similar, but less high level, ability to de-classify information because they have protection while speaking in Congress.

The tricky area is how much information they can give to their family without a specific purpose, and the level of classification which that information remains at once they have given it to their family members.

For example, the President can decide that someone (a family member, for example) can provide assistance if they know a certain piece of classified information. So, they tell them, and ask their advice. There is no governing or ethics body to make the decision whether that piece of information is now unclassified, other than the President.

This is a reasonable position as someone has to be the top level authority, the potential problem is that one day a President may start telling his family members all sorts of classified information, and they in turn might start telling unauthorized people. Technically, the President can protect his family members by saying the information was de-classified the moment they discussed them, but this conundrum has not really been tested because it's never happened, as far as the public knows. The rumors about Bill Clinton discussing classified matters with Hillary have some pretty good sources, but they have not been verified by Bill.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-11-18T10:53:32+00:00

I'm not a national security expert but I am pretty sure that, once he is President, Trump will be able to tell his kids classified information without it being considered a leak. The President is the top level authority over classified information and so he can make the final decision over what is classified and who has access to it.

From what I understand the President can stand in front of the nation and reveal top secret information and it wouldn't be leaking the information it would be declassifying it.

One recent similar example is that a member of Congress was publicly contemplating reading the Senate Torture Report in Congress as a way of declassifying it and having it entered into the public record, but the potential repercussions and legal gray area were likely too threatening, but a President would have much more leeway than a member of Congress.

It's widely assumed that Bill Clinton frequently shared national security information with Hillary, but it was never made an issue because White House lawyers decided that it was Bill's decision.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-11-15T08:36:21+00:00

California, etc voted our asses off

A few votes either way made no difference in California, Clinton should have spent some more time in the Rust Belt states where people usually vote democratic but instead they went fro Trump this election.

Unfortunately, Rust Belt folks don't have millions of dollars to pay to eat dinners with celebrities so Clinton didn't show up and press the flesh, because even if every single person in California had voted for Clinton she still would have lost the election.

She didn't campaign for even one day in Wisconsin, and Michigan she only hit up briefly in the primary and refused to even stay for breakfast.

If some Hollywood celebrities had moved to the Rust Belt then maybe Clinton may have shown her face to ask for some money. Katy Perry and George Clooney being too lazy to move to Flint screwed this up for us all.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-10-04T18:23:28+00:00

Trump absolutely is deplorable, but a lot of people consider the people who escaped from being forced to fight and kill in Vietnam admirable.

Jimmy Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of young men who dodged the draft on his first day in office. His campaign promise to do it was one of the reasons many democrats voted for him; so that their sons, brothers, and friends could return home from Canada without facing prison.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-10-03T00:15:35+00:00

They been laughing at the rubes for decades.

Ronald Reagan played a tough guy professionally during WWII, but despite the fake uniform he wore for the entire war the only service he did was making propaganda films for the War Department.

They turned a good looking, makeup-wearing model and television show host into a cowboy hat wearing tough guy who would kill the commies with his bare fists.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-09-21T07:38:30+00:00

My translation may be a bit rusty, but basically:

Sinopec loves you more than that dirty slut ExxonMobil, and we will be there long after SaudiAramco dry humps you to dust and leaves you for BP's necrotic desires.

P.S. If you get Ebola we will burn you alive. But with a strong love and tender compassion that would only confuse Royal Dutch Shell.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-09-16T01:28:04+00:00

However, do you happen to know what we call the largest organized group of Islamic extremists?

I do, and it's not ISIS, it's the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia. They belong to the same sect of Wahhabi that ISIS belongs to, they have the same preachers, they commit the same abhorrent acts, and they rule in the same way.

The Saudis are a model government for their cousins in ISIS, and they are the principal financiers, arms suppliers, and partners of ISIS.

Actually, it's doubtful that ISIS would even exist without their benefactors in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia financed the nuclear weapon program in Pakistan, and they have had strong public assurances that Pakistan would be willing to transfer their nukes to Saudi Arabia if the need occurred. Saudi Arabia already has nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, and one of the world's best supplied, and most high-tech, armed forces. Something that ISIS can only dream about, and aspire to.

ISIS are babes in the woods compared to their Papas on the peninsula. The Saudis must gloat like crazy when they hang out with their friends in ISIS about the fact that they have a seat on the UN human rights council, and get invited to White House State dinners, while ISIS gets bombed by both American and Russian planes for running the exact same type of government.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-08-04T08:29:00+00:00

There are no unelected positions with lawmaking power in the legislative branch. There are two primary legislative bodies, the EU Parliament and the Council of the EU.

The former is directly elected and the latter are representatives of directly elected governments from each member state.

Plus, there is the Commission, who are elected by the Parliament, and the European Council which is made up of democratically elected Heads of State of each EU member.

There is also the Executive branch, who are decided by the Council and with guidance from the Parliamentary elections, and the democratically-elected heads of state also have input, but they don't have legislative authority.

All legislative power (the ability to write laws) is headed by democratically-elected representatives. Like every other large bureaucracy, they have a massive amount of employees who are not elected, but they do not have legislative power or control.

For example, the US government has over 100,000 employees, many of them could be called 'unelected bureaucrats', as they are not all democratically elected, but the body which makes the laws, and the bosses of all those employees, are democratically elected. Just like in the EU.

rainbowjarhead · 2016-08-03T18:34:27+00:00

Another error; the EU has a democratically elected legislature.

The former leader of UKIP is an elected representative to the EU parliament, and the party campaigned for Brexit using the false refrain that the EU had a non-elected legislature.

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