Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Unanswered Questions About Raids in Libya and Somalia

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catch-and-release

Today marks the 12th anniversary of the Invasion of Afghanistan, so perhaps it’s no coincidence that there happens to be many news reports about two raids against alleged terrorists which took place over the weekend. The raid getting more attention took place in Libya and resulted in the capture of Abu Anas al-Liby, who is allegedly linked to the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Interestingly, al-Liby was reported captured at least twice in the past, once in the late 90s and a second time in January 2002.

The goal of the raid in Somalia was to capture a man named Ikrimah who, according to anonymous U.S. senior officials, claimed responsibility for the Westgate Mall massacre in Kenya. The force carrying out the mission was SEAL Team Six, the same team that allegedly killed Osama Bin Laden and has had a string of suspiciously bad luck ever since. According to other anonymous officials interviewed by the Washington Post and NYT:

[…]troops retreated after an intense gunfight unfolded, fearing that escalating it could result in civilian casualties.

[…]Witnesses described a firefight lasting over an hour, with helicopters called in for air support.

Read the full article here: http://allafrica.com/stories/201310070803.html

An early leaked report posted at the New York Times website on Saturday stated the SEAL team had succeeded in seizing a “senior leader” of al Shabaab. But 45 minutes later, the Times said officials had “backed off” that report.

According to yet another anonymous senior official quoted in a CNN report with the headline Official: Navy SEAL team pulled out when it couldn’t capture suspect alive :

Their mission was to capture him. Once it became clear we were not going to [be] able to take him, the Navy commander made the decision to withdraw.

[…]Another U.S. official told CNN the Navy SEALs reported seeing children at the compound, part of the reason the mission was stopped during the firefight.

It seems unlikely they withdrew due to safety concerns, but it’s also unusual that they attempted a live capture, given how quick they were to drone bomb alleged terrorist leaders (and innocent civillians including children) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, etc.

Life Imitates “They Live”

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Obama-They-Live

Melissa Melton of Truthstream Media recently posted a story about former wrestler and actor Roddy Piper going public about his Libertarian and pro-Second Amendment beliefs via twitter. Quoting from the tweets:

They can’t have my Guns! Nobody! If you try and take my Gun, I’d be all out of Bubble Gum!

[…]I need to clean something up! When I say you take my gun I’m all out of gum….I’M NOT TRYING TO BE FUNNY!! It’s a FREEDOM STATEMENT!

[…]They Live is a documentary!!

For those who haven’t seen the film They Live, this is the famous “bubblegum scene” Piper is referencing:

They Live is a cult classic sci-fi/action buddy film based on the short story Eight O’Clock in the Morning by Ray Faraday Nelson (who happened to be one of Philip K. Dick’s closest friends). Roddy Piper plays Nada, a drifter searching for work during a recession who accidentally stumbles across an alien plot to take over the world by programming the masses to obey and consume using subliminal messages. Widely considered one of director John Carpenter’s best and smartest films, it was also part of a late 80s sub-genre of films containing as a subtext sharp critiques of U.S. government policies and the Reagan administration in particular. Other films include Wes Craven’s “The People Under the Stairs”, Paul Verhoeven’s “Robocop” and Dan O’Bannon’s “Return of the Living Dead”.

Just this past May, John Carpenter did a Q&A for a 25th anniversary screening of They Live as part of The Hero Complex Film Festival in Los Angeles. He had this to say about the film:

By the end of the ’70s there was a backlash against everything in the ’60s, and that’s what the ’80s were, and Ronald Reagan became president, and Reagonomics came in,” Carpenter told the sold-out theater at the Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood. “So a lot of the ideals that I grew up with were under assault, and something called a yuppie came into existence, and they just wanted money. And so by the late ’80s, I’d had enough, and I decided I had to make a statement, as stupid and banal as it is, but I made one, and that’s ‘They Live.’ … I just love that it was giving the finger to Reagan when nobody else would.

Read the full article here: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/john-carpenter-they-live-was-about-giving-the-finger-to-reagan/#/0

Unfortunately, since the release of They Live, the state of the union has regressed to the point where the systemic criminality of the Reagan era seems mild and quaint in comparison. In certain ways, They Live does seem like a documentary because it contains images and ideas straight out of the headlines. Scenes of the protagonists’ tent city being bulldozed look exactly like the destruction of Occupy Movement encampments and forced closures of tent cities for the homeless across the country. Images of the aliens’ secret surveillance drones are prescient as well.

Melton’s Truthstream Media post also included this analysis of subliminal messages eerily reminiscent of They Live embedded in an old video clip used as nightly “sign-offs” for national television networks:

Read the full post here: http://truthstreammedia.com/?p=6717

Why Generation Y Should Be Unhappy

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The reason why young people are so unhappy, as explained by Tim Urban of "wait but why"

The source of youthful discontent in a nutshell, according to Tim Urban of “wait but why”

Pseudo-sociological trend pieces are a dime a dozen these days, but a recent one called Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy stands out because it’s apparently been the center of much intergenerational debate on social media. I found it interesting because many of the critiques of “Generation Y” are similar to those used against previous generations such as “hippies” and “slackers” (and also just about anyone who questions the status quo).

To set up the argument, author Tim Urban constructs a strawman caricature called Lucy who’s a member of Generation Y, “the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She’s also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.” Given that the middleclass has been in decline for some time now, I’m not sure why anyone would think yuppie culture makes up a “large portion” of Gen Y. He even created a pejorative acronym for people like Lucy: “Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.” The reason for the unhappiness is reduced to an equation: Happiness=Reality-Expectations

Though overly reductionist, the equation makes sense because one can increase happiness by raising one’s reality or reducing expectations. However, like most people who support the status quo and/or get all their information from corporate sources, Tim mostly focuses on why Lucy needs to lower expectations because to raise reality would take collective action and systemic change (and no, “picking yourself up by the bootstraps” is not enough). It’s much easier to condemn the individual with typical attacks leveled against young people and idealists who voice grievances: you’re overly ambitious, you think you’re special, and you have a faulty perception of the world.

To be fair, he seems to be trying to describe not an entire generation, but a specific type of person of the generation (perhaps an annoying coworker?). However, at a time when tuition rates and student debt are at an all time high and so many people just out of college are unemployed, underemployed, or stuck in unfulfilling dead-end jobs they’re overqualified for, it’s easy to see why such an article might strike a collective nerve. And funny pictures with trite platitudes like “The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success” or “You can become special by working really hard for a long time”, won’t make them feel any better.

There are countless better explanations for rising levels of unhappiness and discontent not just among Generation Y, but for 99% of the country. The biggest factors are explained succinctly in the videos below:

Fukushima: The Curse That Keeps on Cursing

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Today The Internet Post brought to my attention a series of updates on Fukushima that paints a grim picture of the scope of ongoing radiation hazards (a story which gets relatively little coverage in corporate news outlets).

On this clip from 10/1, thousands of Japanese are reporting recurring nosebleeds while doctors are forced to keep quiet about suspicions of radiation sickness:

Also, today a new radioactive water leak was found at the Fukushima plant and radioactive Bluefin Tuna was caught off the California coast.

At Energy News, they highlighted these excerpts from an interview with Tetsuro Tsutsui, an engineer of industrial tanks such as the ones used in Fukushima:

[…]the latest problem was emblematic of how TEPCO runs the precarious plant. He said it was “unthinkable” to fill tanks up to the top, or build them on a tilted ground without building a level foundation.

“That’s only common sense,” Tsutsui, also a member of a citizens group of experts proposing safety measures for the plant. “But that seems to be the routine at the Fukushima Dai-ichi. I must say these are not accidents. There must be a systematic problem in the way things are run over there.” […]

Podcast News Updates

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There’s been another string of relevant news podcasts in the past few days so it’s time for another roundup post.

Last week Rob Kall of OpEdnews.cominterviewed Peter Ludlow a professor of linguistics and philosophy, on topics including systemic evil, whistleblowers and hacktivism:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rob-kall-bottom-up-radio-show/id359765013

On Friday, Abby Martin of Breaking the Set did an excellent job deconstructing the corporatocracy on Coast to Coast AM with John Wells:

http://www.mediaroots.org/abby-martin-deconstructs-the-corporatocracy-on-coast-to-coast-am/

On Monday Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report covered a wide range of important topics including an update on the corporate plan for Detroit (an American apartheid), the struggle to raise the minimum wage in Seattle, and Dave Swanson’s (of WarIsACrime.org) analysis of the multitude of lies in Obama’s recent UN speech : Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 9/30/13.

From Traces of Reality there were two great consecutive shows. On 9/30 host Guillermo Jimenez interviewed Kevin Gallagher, director of Free Barrett Brown.  Brown is the journalist who faces a 105 year sentence, the bulk of which is related to charges associated with pasting a link in a chat room. On the 10/1 episode, Guillermo is joined by Vice President of The Future of Freedom Foundation, Sheldon Richman. They cover topics including the “government shutdown”, the national debt, taxation, private property, the “social contract,” and the fallacy of the “consent of the governed.”:

9/30

10/1

Government Shutdown: Hate the Players, Hate the Game

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Today marks the first day of the latest government shutdown due to failure of the House and Senate to agree on a spending bill. The main point of contention was Obamacare, which Republicans fought to repeal or delay. This conflict can be seen as a symptom of political polarization which, as multiple studies have shown, increases as economic inequality increases. This might seem counter-intuitive to those aware of how both parties receive money from the same corporations. Still, they get paid varying amounts from different corporations and they need to at least appear to be responsive to needs of constituents. Differences between the majority of Democrat and Republican representatives are analogous to differences between neoliberals and neoconservatives. There’s subtle differences in approach and emphasis but both ultimately serve the corporate-security state.

Many will blame the shutdown on Republicans who oppose Obamacare, but will it really increase access to affordable healthcare? It may have been better to delay implementation in order to work out glitches in the bureaucracy and computer systems. Obamacare has already had the unfortunate side-effect of businesses replacing full-time positions with part-time positions, and without any controls over the rising cost of premiums we should expect to see further rate increases. There may be minor improvements but far less than what would have been provided through single-payer and public option alternatives. If we had a Medicare-for-all system as Green Party candidate Jill Stein proposed, we’d have a system people already support providing comprehensive coverage with far less bureaucratic waste and at a fraction of the cost.

One of the many sickening aspects of the government shutdown is that government agencies that truly need to be shutdown, like the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA, etc., remain essentially untouched. What will be shutdown or reduced are services related to health, work safety, food assistance, housing, education, parks and museums, regulatory agencies, and labor. Once again, money junkies in power have demonstrated their incompetence at doing things they care little about (ie. providing jobs and services that actually help poor and working class people). However, they have proven to be extremely good at funneling more money to themselves and their cronies while consolidating power. On the surface, the shutdown may appear self-defeating, but both parties can benefit by blaming the other side and can more easily push through questionable legislation in an atmosphere of crisis. Just like the sequestration last Spring, it’s a form of austerity which benefits big banks while screwing over average citizens.