Why? Six years on from the invasion of Afghanistan

Sometimes it takes the stupids many years to wise up. Fortunately it does happen, usually.

Six years after a war was launched to overthrow the Taliban, British solders are still being killed in bloody skirmishing in a conflict in which no final victory is possible. Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan by the US, Britain and allies, an operation codenamed Enduring Freedom. But six years on, Britain is once again, as in Iraq, the most junior of partners, spending the lives of its soldiers with little real influence over the war.

How many dead does it take? How many fucking dead?

I'm so sorry. I've been remiss in not acknowledging the sacrifices the "coalition of the willing" has made and that's not acceptable. American lives are valuable as are Iraqi lives, but so too are the British lives and all the other lives lost in a hopeless morass of bloodshed which will never solve anything.

Grow some balls, Democrats, and get us the fuck out of the Mid-East.

Via The Independent.

British Army deploys new weapon based on mass-killing technology

Jesus H Christ playing X-Box, I hope you haven't eaten recently. If you have, please read this later. It is teh nauseating.

A new 'super-weapon' being supplied to British soldiers in Afghanistan employs technology based on the "thermobaric" principle which uses heat and pressure to kill people targeted across a wide air by sucking the air out of lungs and rupturing internal organs.

The so-called "enhanced blast" weapon uses similar technology used in the US "bunker busting" bombs and the devastating bombs dropped by the Russians to destroy the Chechen capital, Grozny.

Such weapons are brutally effective because they first disperse a gas or chemical agent which is lit at a second stage, allowing the blast to fill the spaces of a building or the crevices of a cave. When the US military deployed a version of these weapons in 2005, DefenseTech wrote an article titled, "Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon."

According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released a study on thermobaric weapons in 1993, "The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.… If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents."

A second DIA study said, "shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue... it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate."

Its sometimes unbelievable what humans are willing to do to each other.

Via Black Listed News.

US doles out millions for street cameras

Big Brother just keeps getting bigger.

The Department of Homeland Security is funneling millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a "surveillance society" in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost, privacy rights advocates warn.

Well, if its good enough for China and Britain, its gotta be OK in the US, right?

Some civil rights activists contend the cameras in China and Britain violate privacy entitlements contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.