It's such a shame that the bigoted security apparatus doesn't have a 2nd grade understanding of US history or civics. As everyone else knows, the US Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that states can ban people from voting for belonging to a group that promotes antisocial behavior and beliefs.
It's a national disgrace that the security apparatus has traditionally hired so many avowed bigots. It's no wonder that these agencies constantly undermine US national security.
When I moved to Montgomery County in 2008, I was struck by how the middle class had largely been driven out and how the morons in Takoma Park drove everywhere. Well, things have just gotten worse. From 2005 to 2022, the county added 88,000 low-income residents and lost 26,000 middle class ones, with the middle class shrinking to 18% of the county's population. Meanwhile, the median household income hasn't kept pace with inflation since 2005, and the county ranked dead last in income growth among 30 countries with similar population across the country.
The security apparatus hates a strong middle class because they know it is the foundation for a strong democracy that opposes their evil.
The bigoted spooks at the CIA love torturing people to undermine national security.
"Guantanamo Naval Base, Cuba - a forensic psychiatrist testified this week that a 9/11 defendant's incriminating statements to FBI agents on Guantanamo Bay were the product of fear drilled into him by the CIA during years of prior harsh treatment and isolation....
Morgan testified, however, that the CIA fear-conditioned al Baluchi into being compliant and that the detainee could not "meaningfully distinguish" between his new interrogators and prior ones.
"At this point in time, he's already exhibited more than enough symptoms to have PTSD that caused him pain and distress and psychological despair," Morgan testified on Wednesday. "They are interviewing a person who's been traumatized and a person who suffers from a significant mental illness...."
Morgan testified this week that, as part of his research work, he began studying the effects of SERE training on participants in the late 1990s. The data collected over many studies showed conclusively that the stressors in the SERE program led to dramatic impairments of cognition and memory, he said. Under both direct and cross examinations, Morgan recounted warning Mitchell about using SERE-based methods when he encountered him at a CIA location in 2003.
"Why in the world would you be creating false memories?" Morgan recounted asking Mitchell. "Because once you do, it's a rabbit hole. You can't tell the difference between a true or a false memory."
Under redirect examination by Pradhan Thursday morning, Morgan also recalled a CIA employee involved in the RDI program expressing concerns to him at his office within the agency several years later. He said the person was "terrified" and sat in his office "and cried."
"These people are Nazis," Morgan testified the employee told him. "I don't know how to get away from them because I'm afraid of what they will do...."
The security apparatus, being bigoted morons, loves to project its thoroughgoing bigotry onto saintly types who properly oppose their atrocities. For example, let us suppose that a neo-Nazi hate group sent tens of thousands of young people out to proclaim that "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was not only an authentic historical document instead of an obvious malevolent fraud but also a divinely inspired work that confirmed that Nazism was God's one true religious and political movement. Obviously, everyone would properly condemn such action as the most despicable atrocity imaginable and heinous anti-Semitism. And yet, the incompetent and depraved CIA eagerly hires horrible bigots who have done far worse regarding the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It's even more disgusting given that plenty of Mormon groups such as the Community of Christ have properly condemned such bigotry and that the US government itself committed genocide against indigenous peoples.
I'm sure my mother is ecstatic that women in Utah and Idaho can no longer access basic health care.
"A woman experiencing dangerous bleeding was not admitted by doctors at an Idaho hospital until her fourth emergency room visit in one week, due to fear and confusion over the state's abortion ban, an Idaho doctor said in testimony on Tuesday.
The "heavily bleeding" patient was told the pregnancy would not survive, but she had not been counseled on abortion, Dr. Julie Lyons, a family physician in Idaho and plaintiff in a lawsuit over the state's abortion bans, said on the stand....
"I was working with some amazing nurses and we decided as a team that we were going to break our hospital's rules and admit her, even though she wasn't 20 weeks pregnant because I just couldn't send her home again and hope for the best," Lyons said."
In 1913, Charles Steele Davidson dramatically burned his Episcopal vestments and prayer book at the gates of Monticello to protest the spiritual corruption of the church there -
"I charge that the Episcopal Church is the gentleman's church in general, and in Virginia in particular. It is powerful financially and socially, stupid intellectually, and spiritually dead. It needs a change of heart, repentance or utter obliteration. It favors the rich and the cultured and has no vital interest in the poor and the common. It either segregates the poor in missions on the back streets or relegates them in churches to the back pews. In Virginia, the Episcopal Church is a mere relic of the old social feudalism and stands for a dry-rotted conservatism that bars the progress of the kingdom. Virginia, after her long depression, is aroused and is marching on, but the church is slowly retreating to the citadel of tradition and materialism.
It is taking up the matter of physical uncleanness and is leaving vile the inner man. It is wasting time on eugenics and putting no time on soul development."
Bruce Jessen, who co-developed the CIA's completely ineffectual and thoroughly unethical torture methods, went to Ricks College, the Mormon junior college in Rexburg, Idaho for LDS kids who couldn't even get into Bigot U. His contractor company was paid $81 million by the spooks for techniques that acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo described as "sadistic and terrifying."
In 2012, he was called to be a bishop in a Spokane ward through prophetic inspiration. He stepped down the following week.
Ante Pavelic was the fascist monster who led the Nazi puppet state of Croatia during World War II and committed genocide against Serbs. He also exterminated Jews and Roma. He fled to the Vatican after the war disguised as a priest and was given refuge there for several years. He escaped to Argentina and served as a security advisor to Peron.
It's really rather remarkable how Ronald Demos Lee completely destroyed the life's work and legacy of Harvey Weinstein by using NIH funding at Berkeley to ritualistically replicate the horrific medical atrocities and psychological torture of Ewen Cameron. I hear the horrific movie producer tells people in prison that he's not that Harvey Weinstein!
"The Center for Human Rights and International Justice recently screened the film Eminent Monsters, a Hopscotch Films documentary tracing of Western psychological torture. Eminent Monsters uncovers the roots of government-sanctioned torture practices, from the establishment of a human torture laboratory in Montreal in the 1950s and the terror of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, to the "Hooded Men" of Belfast seeking justice and reparations at the European Court of Human Rights. The film sheds light on the failure of the international community to take action against the use of inhumane interrogation practices.
The film was prefaced with a brief introduction from Dr. Harvey Weinstein, a Senior Research Fellow at UC Berkeley Law School's Human Rights Center and retired Clinical Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Weinstein, who appears in the film, said, 'It's an important film because it's about what happened in the past and what's happening now.'
The screening was followed with a discussion from a panel of experts who discussed the ramifications of psychological torture. The discussion was moderated by Adam Kochanski, a Postdoctoral Fellow in International Relations at McGill University and a research fellow at Stanford's University Center for Human Rights and International Justice.
Regarding the collusion of health professionals with governments, Weinstein described the role of psychologists in developing and participating in torture methods to be 'terrifying to me as a physician.' He then explained how the authorization, routinization, and dehumanization of acts of torture have allowed individuals to justify torture despite the fact the practice 'has never been proved to be effective.'"
When I was in grad school, over-the-hill professors wasted a lot of NIH funding trying to find evidence and claim that there were no limits to human life expectancy. It obviously did not make a bit of sense and wasn't remotely true. Twenty years later, still no one has come remotely close to Jeanne Calment's Beamonesque lifespan, so much so that Russian demographers have proposed fairly crackpot conspiracy theories to try to explain it. And only four of the 100 oldest women ever (#21, 49, 51, and 100) and two of the men (#57 and 84) are currently living.
Maitland Baldwin, NIH neurosurgeon, branch chief, clinical director, and human and chimp torturer, would have been so proud.
The National on a film about CIA torturer Ewen Cameron -
Indeed, the film takes its title - Eminent Monsters - from that chilling nickname given to Cameron and those like him. All were psychiatrists and psychologists engaged in experiments on patients that helped devise systems of torture employed by military and security services across the globe, from Northern Ireland and Guantanamo Bay, to the CIA's dark sites like that at Bagram.
In the course of developing his own barbaric practices, Cameron would sometimes destroy the lives of his unsuspecting patients while changing the course of psychological torture forever.
As has now been proven, Cameron's techniques were to have no therapeutic validity whatsoever, and often, following his "treatments", patients were unable to function, having been reduced to a state of infancy even years after the experiments were finalised.
Given this horrendous impact on people, would it be accurate then to compare what the Scottish-born doctor did to that of Nazi medical atrocities during the Second World War, I asked Bennett?
"Absolutely, Cameron was in effect a Scottish Mengele," he unstintingly replies, referring to the Nazi SS physician Josef Mengele, himself nicknamed the Angel of Death, who conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz concentration camp.
In contrast to Jerry Fogarty's greenface buffoonery, Marquette history professor emeritus Michael Phayer has written serious books about the Vatican's relationship with fascists -
"As a new world war loomed, the Vatican believed it had to make a choice between communism and Nazism. Reluctantly, both Pius XII and his predecessor chose the Nazis as the lesser of two evils. In the balance rested the genocide of European Jews. As difficult as his wartime behavior is to accept, nothing demonstrates Pius's fear of communism more than his misguided and unethical attempt to thwart its growth in South America by abetting the escape of Nazis and Ustasi war criminals. The story of these Vatican "ratlines" adds another facet to the complex picture of Pius XII and the Holocaust."
I once took a mediocre class on US Catholic History at mediocre UVa. The professor was a Jesuit and a buffoon. He spent most of his time complaining about criticism of the church's actions, or lack thereof, during World War II, even though bishops and priests in the Vatican played the key role in helping Nazi and other fascist war criminals escape from Europe, often to Peron's Argentina. He spent the rest of the semester boring undergrads by talking about obscure 19th century immigrant bishops while never once mentioning decades of abuse of children by clergy.
It's rather remarkable how the security apparatus always doubles down on glorifying anti-intellectualism, even though we all know it is the root cause of bigotry in the US. David Masciotra on "Anti-intellectualism is back - because it never went away. And it's killing hundreds of thousands of Americans":
"If anti-intellectualism is a common characteristic of American life, it has mutated into a particularly asinine and lethal form in contemporary politics. A majority of Republicans now believe higher education is "bad for America." Suspicious of anyone with an advanced degree, they are increasingly likely to view anyone with academic credentials as alien from the "real America," where people work with "their hands," as conservative commentators often suggest from their computer terminals or talk-show studios, or to believe that reading books - other than unless the Good Book - is likely to turn true-believing patriots into "globalists" who hate God and love dark-skinned people."
