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 1 Mar 2005 @ 17:20, by jazzolog. Violence, War
Old River Mountain a slab of rock
that blue heaven's swept to paint on
and written there an ancient poem
green letters worked in moss.
---Li-Po
And 'tis my faith that
every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
---William Wordsworth
It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees.
---Arabic Proverb
The photo shows Glenn Miller setting up the Army Air Force Band at the Yale Bowl in July 1943.
This really is an open letter to an old friend of mine. If he replies and permits me, I'll post it...and perhaps we may have a little forum. My friend is about my age, went to college with me, and even shared a dorm room for a time. We also shared an abiding love of jazz music---a devotion that has carried our friendship through thick and thin for 45 years. Over the past decade we have parted company politically, a much more extreme move on his part than mine. He has voted for Bush and supports the war effort, I guess, wherever it takes us. He has kept me abreast of conservative thought---and I am not going to make a wisecrack there, because he and I both know how daunting profound conservative philosophy can be. He suggested that if I would agree not to send him anything by Arianna Huffington, he would respond by not bothering me with Ann Coulter. He thought it might be better for the serenity of both of us if we stayed away from those women. We've kept that bargain...although since California deemed the brilliant Arnold Schwarzenegger what they needed for that state's salvation, Arianna has fallen rather more silent than she used to be---whereas Coulter is calling Helen Thomas an "old Arab." I'm not sure the deal is even anymore. More >
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23 Jan 2005 @ 21:08, by bkodish. Violence, War
David Horowitz writes:
"A little noted fact about virtually all liberal criticisms of the Bush policy in Iraq is that they have a common theme. That theme is appeasement. Appeasement in the first instance of the outlaw regime of Saddam Hussein, and in the second of the jihad that terrorist armies in the Middle East are waging against us." More >
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4 Jan 2005 @ 22:17, by nemue. Violence, War
This problem isn’t new to Asia (and many other countries and regions as well to be fair to Asian countries) but one of my fears was that this ugliness would raise its head and it appears it has if the following report is anything to go by. Unfortunately now the children have even less protection.
[link]
For any people who read this and who are based in Australia please support Youth Off The Streets and Father Chris Riley who is flying to Samatra today to establish a temporary refuge for homeless children. Millions of dollars have been pledged to the bigger charities but YOTS doesn’t have the clout of some and their focus is on children only. This will not be a short-term initiative by Father Chris. You can make a donation on-line by visiting the following link.
[link] More >
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2 Jan 2005 @ 22:48, by swanny. Violence, War
It is a little to late for about 150,000 people or more to be
finally throwing money, though welcome, at the problem and
problems of the disparity of the human condition.
We can now poignantly see ourselves for our global
deficiencies and hypocrisy towards our fellow humans
and the well touted but unpracticed religious golden rule.
If this is what it takes to move us to care for those less
fortunate than us then it does not bode well for our future
and yet now it seems the sad truth is the best we can do,
is throw money after the fact, as if money can make up for the laxity of
the mutual responsibility we should and must have towards
the health and well being of one and other.
The damage is done though folks, so let us eat our humble pie
and admit and accept our shallowness, vanity and unconscious
hypocrisy and learn and pray that we can evolve, change and do better
the next time when G O D or nature takes us to task.
Alfred Jonas
Red Deer
Canada More >
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 31 Dec 2004 @ 17:01, by ming. Violence, War
I can't really add much to the Tsunami coverage, as it is already all over all the media. It is tragical and devasting of course. I don't know how to deal appropriately with over 100,000 dead and many more personal tragedies. Strange that I can't personally even relate to it before I read that there are still around 500 Danish people missing. That's about a 10 times bigger chunk of Denmark than 9/11 was to the U.S. And 1500 Swedish people. But the much bigger disasters were for many faraway villages that can't even be properly accounted for, and many of which no longer exist.
Otherwise the only thing I can say is that it shouldn't have happened. Well, you can't stop the biggest earthquake in memory from happening. But it took several hours for the tsunami to hit the beaches it hit. It is an example of terrible communication systems that most people had no clue. The U.S. military and the State Department knew, and secured the Diego Garcia military base. But it succeeded in alerting only two foreign governments. The top meteorologists in Thailand knew, but they decided to not tell anybody, to not disturb the tourist industry. As if an unexpected tsunami isn't a lot more disturbing. And, anyway, there wasn't much of a system in place to warn anybody in most places. The people who knew didn't quite know who to contact.
Interestingly, the animals knew, even if nobody told them in advance. There were largely no dead animals, because they can sense stuff like that coming, and instinctly get themselves to safety. More >
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 27 Nov 2004 @ 23:59, by ming. Violence, War
I just finished watching the third part of a BBC series called The Power of Nightmares: Baby It's Cold Outside, broadcast in the past three weeks. It was made by Adam Curtis. I'm sure it must have been difficult to get such a controversial thing on the air. The series makes a compelling case for concluding that the world has been seriously misled by fanatics who have painted a nightmare picture that has nothing to do with reality. And that they have done so merely to serve their own political and religious ends.
We track two movements: the U.S. Neo Conservatives and certain militant radical muslim factions. The videos do a good job at laying out their histories and philosophies and key players.
Ironically, their aims are very similar. They are groups that were horrified by the path that free societies seemed to take. What they deemed to be the moral corruption that they observed around them. Which they blamed on a society where anything goes and there were no uniform moral values. The moral decay of a liberal society. They first thought the fault was with the leaders of their societies. But they found that even when their own kind managed to seize power, it didn't change things. So they blamed the people in their regions. It was simply that everybody were too dumb and corrupted to see the truth of how they were supposed to behave. Too much freedom, and too little to guide them. So they came up with the solution. Invent a battle between good and evil. Find an enemy and paint the most nightmarish possible visions of their sinister motives and the extent of their power. Mobilize your people against the enemy, driven by the fear of what they can do to you.
But in the late 90s it wasn't really working for any of those groups. They had essentialy failed and had little public support anywhere. Until 2001 where both groups got an enormously lucky break. Somebody brought down the WTC. One group suddenly has the evil sinister enemy they had been seeking, and the other suddenly has the attention of millions of people, where before they didn't.The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of something else, the rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 50s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America's unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss's certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defence secretary. They came to prominence by talking up the Russian threat during the cold war and have applied a similar strategy in the war on terror.
As Curtis traced the rise of the "Straussians", he came to a conclusion that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism: from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both movements have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way, Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the "fantasy" of the war on terror.
Which the film also provides quite some support for. There wasn't much of an Al-Qaida before 9/11. Bin-Ladin had to actually rent camouflage-clad gunmen for some of his videos, and tell them to bring their own guns. Because he didn't have much of a group. And there wasn't really much of an Al-Qaida after. A lot of middle-eastern looking folks have been detained for often very silly reasons. Accused of being sleeper cells because they took tourist videos in Disneyland. No fancy bunkers were found in Tora-Bora. Very few people have been charged with anything at all. Not that there aren't fanatical militant groups who'd love to attack the United States. And some of them might succeed. But the fantasy is the existence, extent and organization of one unified evil network.
You can see the series here:Or, get a more high quality bit torrent version from sites like this. More >
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 28 Sep 2004 @ 23:59, by ming. Violence, War
Not that I'll make a habit of it, but it is not the kind of thing the media tend to cover much, so somebody might have missed it. A chilling way of getting a sense of some of the routine activities of the U.S. military forces in Iraq is to watch some of the leaked videos taken from helicopters while they essentially fly around and murder fairly random and sometimes unarmed people who happened to be walking in the wrong place. The latest from Falluja. Video. The audio is the most chilling part. The pilot reports that a large number of people are walking on the street and asks over the radio if he should "take them out". And the instant answer is "yes". Not armed people, mind you, just people. A rocket makes an end to them, whoever they actually were, and he exclaims "aw, dude!".
And an older one from January which actually appeared once on ABC. An Apache takes out three people, which to me look like farm workers walking around between a tractor and a truck. I'm of course not trained in quickly determining what some grey shadows seen through a night vision camera really are doing. I'm not sure the people in the helicopter are either. I do understand some things about body language, though, and it is obvious that the people on the ground didn't seem to think they had anything to hide from before the helicopter started shooting at them. And blowing away wounded people who're trying to crawl to safety certainly isn't according to the Geneva convention, if any of the rest of it is.
It shows the horror war easily becomes, particularly when one side is hovering in the air with high tech weaponry, but only a fuzzy b&w image on the screen, and the other side is unknown. It easily becomes to just kill anything that moves that looks a little suspicious, anything that possibly, potentially, maybe could be somebody who might have hostile intent. Because they maybe live in the general area where somebody else blew up somebody from your side the day before. But a lot of the time they're just farmers mounting their plough or parents taking their kids to school. War is never going to make sense. More >
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 19 Sep 2004 @ 20:34, by quinty. Violence, War
We recently had a beautiful day here in Providence, Rhode Island, and Ellen and I thought it would be nice to take the ferry out to Newport. The sky was blue and clear and as we waited for the ferry to start we saw a large brown military helicopter circling above the nearby rooftops. As it slowly turned its repetitive circles it had that familiar determined aspect of seeking something or someone out below. But everything seemed peaceful and the only disturbance nearby was caused by some seagulls fighting over a fisherman’s scraps on the edge of the dock. More >
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 23 Jun 2004 @ 10:52, by ming. Violence, War
If you wanted to hand over a set of nuclear missiles to a volatile middle-eastern government, where would you do it in suitable secrecy? The answer is the remote island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. If you remember, that's where the Bush administration equipped Israel's submarines with nuclear armed harpoon missiles last year. story.
So, what if you wanted a place to quietly store top terrorists you had captured, being free to use any methods you can think of to squeeze information out of them? Including torture, drugs and hypnosis. Diego Garcia is again a good answer. Article here at Globe Intel.
What is convenient is for one thing that the island is very remote, and that its previous inhabitants have been forcefully removed, so there's nobody there to complain. But secondly it is that the island is a British colony. Apparently a key U.S. legal ruling states that violations of American statutes that prohibit torture, degrading treatment or violations of the Geneva Convention will not apply "if it can be argued that the detainees are formally in the custody of another country". Convenient, eh. So if these guys are housed by the British, the Americans don't have to play nice any longer.
A problem is of course that the British laws certainly don't either allow for using torture against bad people. Distribution of nuclear weapons is probably not particularly kosher either. Anyway, it is Tony Blair's problem, not George Bush's, as it is done on British soil. Could be an embarrassing situation if it got a lot of publicity. But so far they're getting away with it. More >
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