Vintage New York Street Skyline wallpaper
Interesting personal take on the North Korean missile tests. A Korean Story…
My students tell me not to be scared. They laugh and say these flare-ups happen all the time. They’re used to it. They’ve been dealing with this shit all their lives. Most of them are still pre-occupied with the suicide of the former Korean President over the weekend. So they help calm me down a bit. And then I watch the news and find out we’re at security level 4. Security level 5 only happens after the first bullet is shot. And when I hear news like this, all my carefully collected tranquility and reason flies out the window, once again replaced with sheer panic.
I am nervous. Hell, I’m scared. It doesn’t help when you see a CNN poll with over half of Americans saying we should engage North Korea militarily. It also doesn’t help when supposed friends back in the US are posting their jingoistic wet dreams as status-updates on Facebook, proclaiming from their armchairs that we “should level Korea.” (Notice no distinction made between South and North?) You guys either don’t get it, or just don’t fucking care…
Perspective is not exactly the Right’s virtue. Many of us, especially after the last eight years wonder if they have one, virtue that is. We managed to live through the Cold War with multiple Soviet warheads pointed at us for forty years. China, the Maoist communists boogieman had theirs pointed our way too, they still do. That doesn’t or hasn’t stopped all those with a warped sense of patriotism from shipping American jobs there so that in turn the same armchair warriors can get their cheap sweat shirts and TVs made in China, from their local discount store.
From Edward O. Wilson’s great 1978 book, On Human Nature
The one form of altruism that religions seldom display is tolerance of other religions. Their hostility intensifies when societies clash, because religion is superbly serviceable to the purposes of warfare and economic exploitation. The conqueror’s religion becomes a sword, that of the conquered a shield.
Talk about dire tragedies, apparently Dubya’s leash broke and he’s out making a fool of himself. I thought the deal was he get free socialized health-care, Secret Service protection and a healthy pension in return for not torturing the American public,
Former President George W. Bush on Thursday repeated Dick Cheney’s assertion that the administration’s enhanced interrogation program, which included controversial techniques such as waterboarding, was legal and garnered valuable information that prevented terrorist attacks.
Bush told a southwestern Michigan audience of nearly 2,500 — the largest he has addressed in the United States since leaving the White House in January — that, after the September 11 attacks, “I vowed to take whatever steps that were necessary to protect you.”
Which just happens to coincide with a story they are rerunning from 2008 at Buzzflash, General Accuses WH of War Crimes
The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.
In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” He called the abuse “systemic and illegal.” And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.
Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.
The new report, he writes, “tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual’s lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.
“The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted –both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.
“In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. . . .
Bush, the MBA president that run the US economy off a cliff is equally delusional about his super hero powers. Funny, in a nauseating way, Bush failed to mention to the audience that he completely failed to uphold his oath of office.
The Long Goodbye 