On the wall of George Orwell's Ministry of Truth from his novel 1984 there were three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It occurred to me that these apply just a little bit too well to the way the Washington, DC establishment operates.

War certainly is peace: just look at how peaceful Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine have become thanks to their peacemaking efforts. The only departures from absolute peacefulness which might be taking place there have to do with the fact that there are some people still alive there. This should resolve itself on its own, especially in the Ukraine, where the people now face the prospect of surviving a cold winter without heat or electricity.

Freedom is indeed slavery: to enjoy their "freedom," Americans spend most of their lives working off debt, be it a mortgage, medical debt incurred due to an illness, or student loans. Alternatively, they can also enjoy it by rotting in jail. They also work longer hours with less time off and worse benefits than in any other developed country, and their wages haven't increased in two generations.

And what keeps it all happening is the fact that ignorance is indeed strength; if it wasn't for the Americans' overwhelming, willful ignorance of both their own affairs and the world at large, they would have rebelled by now, and the whole house of cards would have come tumbling down.

But there is a fourth slogan they need to add to the wall of Washington's Ministry of Truth. It is this:

Defeat Is Victory

The preposterous nature of the first three slogans can be finessed away in various ways. It's awkward to claim that American involvements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria or the Ukraine have produced "peace," exactly, but various lying officials and assorted national teletubbies still find it possible to claim that they somehow averted worse (totally made-up) dangers like Iraqi/Syrian "weapons of mass destruction." What they have produced is endless war financed by runaway debt which is leading to economic ruin. But ignorance helps a lot here.

Some congressional staffers walked off their jobs Thursday afternoon to show their support for the families of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in the wake of the decision by two grand juries not to indict the police officers responsible for their deaths, according to three staffers who planned to participate in the event.

The planned walkout came after days of protests across the country, including in Washington, D.C., where demonstrators have marched through downtown, blocking roads and bridges on an almost nightly basis since last Wednesday's decision by a grand jury in Staten Island not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Garner.

"We're proud to have this moment of solidarity with the families of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the thousands of peaceful protesters around the country who are telling this country that black lives matter," said one staffer who was helping to plan the event.

The Congressional Asian Pacific American Staff Association and the Congressional Hispanic Staff Association was expected to join black staffers and the Congressional Black Associates in planning the event. A staffer who planned to attend the protest said it was important to show support across racial lines.

The Islamic State militant group has released a guide to the capture, punishment and rape of female non-believers. It outlines how to use them as their sex slaves and also justifies child rape.

The guide appears in the form of questions and answers about how to capture and subjugate woman of other beliefs.

The sickening list appears to have been printed on December 3 by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in-house publishers for their "Research and Fatwa Department".

The document has been translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, an NGO based in Washington DC.

Researchers from the anti-extremism think tank Quilliam told the Independent that they believed it "can be traced back to some of ISIS's most active propagandists."

A northern California police chief joined a protest Tuesday against police brutality.

Chris Magnus, chief of Richmond police, held a sign that read "#BlackLivesMatter," a Twitter hashtag used by civil rights advocates, as other officers joined in the peaceful protest, reported the Contra Costa Times.

"I've never seen anything like it, not in Richmond, not anywhere," said resident Mary Square. "All these police, and the police chief, holding signs calling for an end to police violence."

Magnus has been hailed for his approach to community policing, which has helped reduce the city's crime rate and the use of force by police.

"I spoke with my command staff, and we agreed it would be nice to convey our commitment to peaceful protest and that black and brown lives do matter," Magnus said. "And to help bridge the gap that we understand sometimes exists between police and community around certain issues."

Daily Show host Jon Stewart dissected Fox News Andrea Tantaros' argument that the discussion surrounding the CIA's torture of detainees was being fueled politically to cast the U.S. as not being "awesome."

"First of all, this administration doesn't want us to have this discussion," Stewart said. "And also, that's the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard."

On Tuesday, Tantaros and her fellow Outnumbered panelists accused Senate Democrats of releasing the report detailing abuses levied against detainees following the 9/11 attacks in an effort to make the country look bad.

"The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome," Tantaros said at the time. "But we've had this discussion. We've closed the book on it, and we've stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we're not awesome."

In the space of nine days, two grand juries in two different towns found it unassailable for a cop in one town to shoot and kill an unarmed man 12 times, and for a bunch of cops in another to brutalize an unarmed man as one of the cops put him in a fatal chokehold. In both cases the murdered men were young and black. In both cases their killers were white cops. And of course in both cases the prosecutors who were supposed to get an indictment from the grand jury used the proceedings instead to run interference for the cops they work with every day.

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight reports that in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available, federal grand juries declined to return indictments 11 times - out of 162,000 cases. In other words, grand juries failed to return an indictment 0.007 percent of the time. But two prosecutors walked off with a 100 percent whitewash rate for their cops. They covered for them. They gave them a pass. And killers walked free, because they had a badge, and because their victims were, after all, just black. That tells us where we are in this color-blind society. Blind is right: it's the blindness of the smug.

We have a black president, but that's been the irony in chief of a decade when too many whites take it as proof of their favored delusion: that we're in a post-racial society. This in a country where the wealth gap between whites and blacks is wider than it was in South Africa under apartheid, and has gotten 40 percent worse since Nixon became president, and in a country where young black men without a high school diploma are more likely to be in prison than at a job. (Nicholas Kristoff outlined the facts you'll never hear on Fox's nightly hours of white self-pity in his "Whites Just Don't Get It" series.)

Of course it's blacks' fault. They're the jobless. They're the moochers. They're the criminals. There's some truth to that when looking at the raw numbers, but only if you choose to cherry-pick and limit your historical perspective to yesterday's brown-shirted version of talk radio. There's more damning truth in the fact that blacks get sentenced to far longer terms than whites do for the same crimes, that a presumption of guilt shadows a black man far more than it does whites. What white person has experienced the assumption of threat that every black man has to live with in most whites' eyes when they see him on the sidewalk, entering the elevator, waiting his turn at the ATM? None of that has changed in half a century of civil rights gains and Martin Luther King holiday sales, gains that effectively went into reverse, along with so much else in what George Packer calls America's "unwinding," since the Reagan years. Whether they're a Harvard professor or a fat man selling cigarettes on a street corner, Blacks are still three-fifth suspects first and human beings last.

That's what led to the killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island in July, Michael Brown in Ferguson a few weeks later, and of course Trayvon Martin in Sanford in 2012 and Jordan Davis in Jacksonville the same year. At least a man was convicted for the killing of Jordan. And to appease the cynics, let's concede that there was some ambiguity in the homicides of Martin and Brown, in the sense that only their killers really knew what happened. But there was no such ambiguity in the killing of Garner, which was caught on a clear and indisputable video.

A Texas mother suspected something was wrong with her toddler son when she saw him stumbling around the backyard. Instead of ignoring this and other symptoms, Whitnie Strauss reportedly brought her two-and-a-half-year-old son Reid to a doctor - and then to 19 more doctors - until he was finally diagnosed with a rare disorder.

Strauss says she refused to believe her son's problem was an allergy, autism, a seizure disorder, a gastrointestinal problem or an immunodeficiency, reports Yahoo! News. Instead of accepting doctors' suggestions, the mother of three reportedly drove two hours with Reid, from outside of Austin to Houston, to get him to an emergency room.

After spending two days at Texas Children's Hospital, a pediatric neurologist named Dr. Michell Holick said she wanted to work with the family to figure out what was making Reid sick.

A Utah state trooper helped an elderly woman travel nearly 200 miles to visit her ailing son in a hospital after stopping her for a traffic violation.

Trooper Jeff Jones pulled over 87-year-old Helen "Skeeter" Smith on Friday night after she passed a stopped police cruiser with its light flashing on the side of Interstate 15 in Millard County, authorities said.

Utah law requires drivers to slow down and move away from stopped police vehicles to prevent crashes.

Jones issued the Panaca, Nevada, woman a verbal warning, but the trooper said Smith accidentally backed into his patrol car as she attempted to drive away.

Smith told the trooper she had very bad eyesight and could hardly see, and the trooper told the woman it would probably be unsafe for her to continue driving.

Some of you may have missed (or not!) the "very special episode" of Eaten Alive this past Sunday on the Discovery Channel, where a man named Paul Rosolie intended to be eaten alive by an anaconda and have it filmed for the world to see. I'm going to spoil the end result for you right now: he did not in fact get eaten alive.

What the viewing public got to see was a man, dressed up like Darth Vader, provoke a poor snake into attacking him and then 15 minutes later call it off when the pain from the constriction became too much (for the man, not the snake). Yes, amazingly, the snake at first wanted nothing to do with Paul. In his own words:

"When I went up to the snake, it didn't try to eat me right away. It tried to escape. And when I provoked it a little bit, and acted a little more like a predator, that's when it turned around and defended itself."

You couldn't really blame the snake, Paul. You're a member of the human race, that is collectively responsible for the extinction of thousands of animals and killings of untold snakes. This particular snake probably realized that you aren't exactly dinner material. But that doesn't matter, because advertising slots must be sold! So Paul attacked until the snake finally decided it had enough and fought back.

Two teenagers who allegedly fed a live cat to two dogs, videotaped the attack and posted it online have been arrested in Kern County on suspicion of cruelty to an animal.

The Bakersfield Californian reports that while the incident apparently occurred over the summer, Animal Control wasn't contacted until Dec. 4 after a person reported receiving the graphic video on a social networking site.

Sheriff's deputies said the video appeared to show two large dogs being fed a live cat while voices in the background encouraged the dogs to attack.

Detectives last week arrested a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old. Both teens were booked into Juvenile Hall.

The investigation is continuing.