HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE YOU HAVE SEEN A SNUFF FILM?

A recent cat snuff film that is on YouTube I find very disturbing.   A cat is coaxed into a cardboard box at the top of the stairs with a laser – the box appears to have a small flash charge in the front of the box – The box slides down the steps with the cat in it and then explodes in a burst of flames.    I have watched it a couple of times and the explosive fire ball does seem to emanate from the box.  You have to ask yourself, did the cat die in the explosion or later from burns. 

There is something really sick about people who torture animals.   I have known a dysfunctional family with five kids: the oldest in jail for hitting a teenager in the head with a hammer; the second oldest, a daughter, was sent to juvenile detention for attacking a girl with a knife; the eight and ten year old were told by their parents to kill  a litter of unwanted puppies, so they stuck a stick in the anus of the puppies and use the stick as a catapult to hurl the puppies against trees – then had batting practice with the dead or almost dead puppies; the ten year old was later sent to juvenile for beating a classmate girl with a stick,  and the eight year old shot his six year old brother in the hip with a 22 rifle in an argument over a video game.

I think the most telling thing about this family was their callousness for cruelty against innocent animals.   It is an indicator of dangerous antisocial tendencies.

I know there is a visceral dislike by many people for cats – mostly men; and I believe it comes from a need to control – cats being the only domestic animal that will not bend its will to please a ‘master.’   Men sometimes have such strong dislikes for certain animals that they will kill them; but torture for fun is another step beyond the mere unacceptable.

We are omnivores, descendants of scavengers, so meat eating is part of our heritage.   People no longer need to hunt for food, but still kill animals for ‘sport.’    However, hunters kill fast and do not torture.

 As omnivores we still scavenge for food, except now we go to McDonald’s for a triple cheeseburger instead of feasting on the carcass of a dead wildebeest left by a lion pride.   

It does speak to the callous nature of the human race when we see kids or animals allowed to get hurt so that it can be filmed and placed on social media; but torturing an animal for fun is a whole other aberrant behavior beyond our omnivore or calloused instincts.  It speaks to a twisted and dangerous personality. 

the Ol’Buzzard

 

1984 REVISITED

I urge anyone with time for books to read or reread George Orwell’s 1984.   The similarities to our government is astounding.   It is obvious to the observer that science fiction writing has predicted advances in real science; and we might say George Orwell has predicted our present.

The story, of course, is the extreme of an individual’s manipulation by a government; but the underlying picture of our government’s manipulation of facts and reality is strikingly familiar.

(Note: the movie sucks)

EXCERPTS FROM 1984 FOR CONSIDERATION:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

“The enemy of the moment represents absolute evil.”

“If all others accepted the lie which the party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became true.”

Mission Accomplished

“Who controls the past, ran the party slogan, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

George W Bush Presidential Library

“Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version.  A great deal of the time you were supposed to make them up out of your head.”

“The aim of the high is to remain where they are.   The aim of the middle is to change places with high.   The aim of the low, when they have an aim – for it is an abiding characteristic of the low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives – is to abolish all distinction and create a society in which all men shall be equal.”

U.S. Congress

“Imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public execution, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and deportation of whole populations not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”

“In the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.”

“The essential act of the party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.   To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient…”

Weapons of Mass Destruction

“The Proles (people) are only intermittently conscious of the war.   When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening.  

What War?

 It is in the ranks of the party, and above all the inner party, that the true war enthusiasm is found.”

Republican Neo-Cons

“We know that no one ever seized power with the intention of relinquishing it.  Power is not a means; it is an end.”

Partisan Politics

NEWS SPEAK: (news released designed to diminish the range of thought.)

DOUBLE THINK: (to successfully manipulate the mind to the point that people think the opposite of what is true.)

The correlations are obvious.  

the Ol’Buzzard

A BUZZARD EGG OMELET #11

Happy Easter

All right, I get it.   A twelve year old girl was impregnated by…..  and had a baby that three hundred years later was declared a god at the Council of Nicaeae.    The religion that formed from this following venerates human sacrifice and proudly displays the icons of the event (a human being cruelly tortured to death through crucifixion) as its logo.   Even more disturbing, to me, is that some sects of this religion practice ritual cannibalism, claiming to actually eat the flesh and drink the blood of this two thousand year old dead individual during their communion.  

All of this I have grown up with and, though bizarre, have come to accept as part of the culture.  

But the thing that I don’t understand is the egg laying rabbits.

Really – egg laying rabbits?

   

I’m just asking?

The Ol’Buzzard

ENHANCED INTERROGATION

THE GREATER GOOD

Dick Cheney has been all over the news lately justifying the atrocities committed during the Bush administration: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, enhanced interrogation and the death of thousands due to an unnecessary rush to war. He keeps posing the administrations action as for the greater good. Unfortunately many conservatives blindly buy into this philosophy.

The problem is that propounding the greater good of a society always leads to the sacrifice of rights and liberties of a few. Using the argument of the greater good we could justify slavery: a situation where a few slaves are worked for the pleasure and well being of the rest.

Deductive reasoning is an essential component of logical argument. Deductive reasoning simplified states: A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, therefore A is greater than C.

An argument can be logically valid but unsound if it contains false premises; in such a case it will lead to a false conclusion.

Republicans are masters of false premise: their political arguments have always been premised by the manipulation of facts: half truths, false statements, innuendoes and appeals to patriotism. They spin every situation with sound bites meant to enrage their uninformed base to illogical protest. (We have witnessed that the whole purpose of the tea party was to be outraged.)

Morality is a complicated issue: it boils down to how we treat each other. Cheney argues that the ends justify the means. He constantly poses the quandary of the terrorist bomb set to explode as justification for enhanced interrogation. However, it has been documented that there was no eminent attack concerned with the water boarded victims – it was a fishing expedition to confirm information already in CIA possession.

Cheney hides the dirty secret of U.S. torture with the noble sounding phrase “enhanced interrogation.” But, once you cross the line into torture of prisoners where do you draw the line? The progression is unimaginable for most civilians: isolation, white noise, sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings, water boarding, psychotic drugs, rape, electric shock, surgery, amputations, burning…

Using deductive reasoning, if we can justify enhanced interrogation techniques in one case we can logically carry that scenario further: enhanced interrogation techniques could be used by police on criminal suspects and anyone suspected of contemplating or having knowledge of a crime (the optimum word here is suspect.) Once a government justifies this type of action it tends to become normal ops.


A post script by the Ol’Buzzard


For eight years of my military career I was a U.S. Navy S.E.R.E instructor; so, I am familiar with enhanced interrogation techniques (torture) of which all are outlawed by the Geneva Convention.