Army: Be all your Higher Power can be

Happiness guru Martin Seligman, who first allowed ideas from his learned helplessness discovery to be psychologically reversed engineered as the basis for the CIA's torture program, has now gone one step further.

Calling soldiers his 1.1 million guinea pigs, he now wants the Army to "be all its Higher Power can be," in essence, claiming that "spirituality" will help troops overcome PTSD.

Hogwash:

Bryant Welch, who also served as APA president, said, "personally, I have not been able to find a meaningful distinction between [positive psychology] and Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking. Both emphasize substituting positive thoughts for unhappy or negative ones."

"And yet the US military has bought into this untested notion to the tune of [$125] million," Welch said.

PTSD "is is not a mental state that can be treated by suggesting to the patient that he or she simply re-frame how they think about the situation, as Dr. Seligman suggests," Welch added.

And, it's just part of a trend. Seligman has previously sold out to corporations. Now, it's our increasingly corporatized military.

What would really help PTSD in the military? Adequate head protection and armaments would be a start. Not fighting unnecessary wars would be better yet.

Update, Jan. 7: Here is a sample of specific questions; by asking about things like religious service attendance, it's clear this goes beyond "spirituality" and ventures into the realm of unconstitutionality.

More here noting how these questions, AND other issues behind them, are clearly a religious test, and therefore unconstitutional. It looks like the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers is eventually going to have to sue.

Wanted: 30,000 skinheads and neo-Nazis

No questions asked, to join the U.S. Army, since it’s not screening them out right now.

Has US used white phosphorus AGAIN?

After the U.S. Army was accused of using Willy Pete in the battle for Fallujah, Iraq, and, as an offensive weapon, not just a battlefield illumination, it strenuously denied it. Well, now, it faces the same allegation, only in Afghanistan this time.

Sure, Afghan doctors could be lying about “strange burns,” but why?

And, we should also remember, vis-à-vis the Army, the old “fool me once” vs. “fool me twice” issue, especially when the Army claims the Taliban could have used the WP.

Real questions about Obama’s Iraq withdrawal

Jeremy Scahill asks the questions the mainstream media hasn’t, like:

· What will be done with the 163,000 “contractors,” err, mercenaries?
· Will all the U.S.bases be closed?
· Will the Pentagon find a way to rip off taxpayers for “withdrawal” costs? (To which I add my own sidebar, “Will KBR do the same”?)
· Will Obama classify even more combat troops as non-combatants? (A number of brigade combat teams will be relabeled as parts of a “transition force headquarters” in August 2010.)
· After the last three coalition partners – Australia, Britain and Romania – withdraw in July, what will the U.S. do differently? Will public perceptions change?

Scahill, the author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” has plenty more questions where those came from.

Army busted Photoshopping four-star’s pic

And, not just any four-star, either, but Photoshopping Ann E. Dunwoody, the Army’s first female four-star.

Why? It’s PR to make her look better in some way, that’s why.

Then, it got busted in a lie, for claiming the editing, which changed the background of the pic, which also hid that it was an old three-star uniform she was in, didn’t alter the picture in any material way.

And, since it’s not the first itime recently the Army has been caught Photoshopping PR pics, the AP is going to stop using DoD PR pics for now.

Read for yourself; from my background as a newspaper editor, this was a HUGE no-no.

Ignorant Army faults Sun for global warming

Flogging already refuted non-science on sunspots’ and other sun factors’ alleged role in global warming the life and times of Phil Gramm.

In an advisory to bloggers entitled “Global Warming: Fact of Fiction [sic],” an Army public affairs official promoted a conference call with West about “the causes of global warming, and how it may not be caused by the common indicates [sic] some scientists and the media are indicating.”

In the March, 2008 issue of Physics Today, West, the chief scientist of the Army Research Office's mathematical and information science directorate, wrote that "the Sun’s turbulent dynamics" are linked with the Earth's complex ecosystem. These connections are what is heating up the planet. “The Sun could account for as much as 69 percent of the increase in Earth’s average temperature,” West noted.

Next up: The sun made “weapons of mass destruction” disappear from Iraq!

Atheist soldier sues Army

Thank doorknob, if not amen, to Spc. Jeremy Hall. The Iraq vet is suing the Army for violating his First Amendment rights:

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

Indeed, Hall was sent home in November. So now, he is suing, with the help of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Welborn, for his part, says, “I’d love to tell my side of the story because it’s such a false story.”

Right. As the story points out, this is part and parcel of military culture. Hey, Welborn, you want to be part of a religiously propagandizing military? I think Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army is recruiting.

The story notes that civilian courts have been reluctant to intervene in military affairs. That is ridiculous, and I hope this changes that.

For more on the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, visit its website.

Be all the criminal you can be

Time to update that old Army commercial. Sexual assault? Not a problem. Manslaughter? You’re in.

Nine people with sex crimes convictions and six with manslaughter or vehicular homicide convictions got into the Army and Marines last year.

Now, yes, that’s a piddling amount of the 180,000 people the two services recruit, but it is above zero. Of course, the coming recession may change that.

The Army can instead recruit house and vehicle arsonists.