Scares me to think that maybe Trump will never go away...
He has a heart attack and dies...his supporters don't believe he's dead, create a cult following, and produce endless Donald pictures, statues, etc.
He is impeached or declines to run in 2020...his supporters cry foul and insist that Pence rename the Republican party as the Trumpian party and continue carrying out the Donald's platform.
He serves two terms...his supporters push for the election of a Trump child to continue the dynasty.
I'm really starting to wonder if the United States is the country that turned into a TV show.
One difference, though, is that today's wars aren't just about seizing and maintaining territory. They are about the ability to prevent peace and to keep besieged nations from participating in global business because of a lack of local security.
Even though ISIL no longer controls regions of Iraq, there are still daily car bombings and general lawlessness. If Islamic state fighters can continue to make daily life insecure, Iraq will struggle to provide for its citizens.
Developers need a certain level of security before they will build international projects. The Hyatt Regency Sulaymaniyah was supposed to open in 2017; as far as I can tell, that project has been stalled by violence.
I side with Ti Charles on this. Horse breeding farms were not public entities for trade on the stock market in the early 1900's. Our current market system is a tool for innovation and stagnation. The stagnation comes when shareholders will not allow a company to change its business plan or experiment with new technology for fear of losing stock value. The downside of being publically traded is that your actual enterprise (the research you want to do or products you want to make) are not the first priority. The first priority is return on investment (ROI).
Exxon shareholders voted to jettison the company's solar division in 1984 after it was projected that solar would not be viable until at least 2012 and not ROI for some years after.
CEOs of public companies must please shareholders or they will be fired. On the market, the mere whisper of an unexpected business plan change may spook investors and cause share value to plummet. Exxon cannot admit or act as if oil is no longer viable; it's risky for it to even open divisions in renewables because analysts might spook. The need to please the market and to maintain corporate worth is the elephant in the room.
A CEO will not risk collapsing the company and can only make stealthy moves to transition. We saw this when oil companies became energy companies.
Our government should be helping energy companies make responsible transitions and private forums should address this crucial issue.
The Sonesta Sint Maarten posted a Hurricane Irma Update which has a rather stark typo (I certainly hope it is a typo!): "Due to the damages the resorts suffered, all further reservations from now through the end of 2417 will be cancelled."
They happily listen to scientists when predictions tell them things they want to know, like where to dig for oil or when the tides will provide the best surfing or the days to not go sailing because a tropical storm is expected.
But the moment that science might threaten their business interests, then they denounce reports created by scientific method as being unreliable and "fake".
It can't be stated enough that most major human population centers are either on or close to the sea or near a waterway connected to the sea.
Consider New York City, Tokyo, Sydney, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Alexandria. All of these cities (and many more major metropoles) must either spend billions in sea walls or get lost beneath the rising tides.
Think of how your community is structured around your current local climate. What will happen if you live in a ski town and the snow ends? What will happen if you live in a desert town like Phoenix and the temperature shifts to Death Valley ranges? What will happen if you live in farming community and the rains never come? What will happen to the global economy when there is no good zone to grow coffee or grapes or hardwood trees?
We humans need to get to work both on lowering CO2 and on survival contingency plans. Could we make our cities as hermetically sealed as spaceships if the surface of the Earth becomes as hostile as outer space? How can we preserve human knowledge before the famine and war now raging through nations around the world arrives at our door?
We must plan to mitigate the worst if we want our children and grandchildren to have a future.
We also need to re-green our planet and create more urban forests. If you are ever in the Los Angeles area, I recommend visiting TreePeople. They have a beautiful park with a Drought Solutions Tour that contrasts an eco-friendly home and landscaping with an eco-devastating home and landscaping.
A very expensive show. Estimates in the news were around 16 million for one MOAB as that is the cost of another massive bomb, the MOP.
But isn't the weight around 20,000 pounds (10,000 kilograms)--not 1100?
At any rate, as far as military tactics go, the use of such a bomb on rag-tag militias in mountain caves is a colossal waste of money. The latest estimate from the Afghan army is that 36 militants died and 3 caves collapsed.
So we spent about $40,000 per dead fighter...in a region where each day 3000 young boys cross the threshold of child to man, becoming old enough for the Islamic State to try to recruit, and some 300 foreigners arrive each month looking to join IS.
One would think that a $16 million bomb would be used on something in the Middle East with a value equivalent to the Pentagon, a complex with 20,000+ employees and millions of dollars’ worth of high tech equipment.
An MOAB dropped on the center of a major city would be a game changer as nuclear bombs were when dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But when dropped in an area where most of the force is expended on mountain shrubs, grasses, squirrels, birds, and metamorphic rock, well, what could be more stupid?
The militants can recruit new people within a few months, move operations to another set of caves, and get more funds from wealthy Arab backers so they can purchase more guns and ammunition.
They probably don't need to spend more than $20,000 to replace what our 16 million+ investment (and that doesn't include the millions more spent on planes, fuel, troops, etc.) destroyed!!!
Anyone know if that is still the case? I can't imagine the majority of Syrians being pleased. For a taste of Mr. Ghadry's political stance, see posts on his blog at the Times of Israel: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/farid-ghadry/
The only people who "paid a price" were the Syrians killed and wounded (and their loved ones). And how much you want to bet that they are people with next to no control over Assad's war?
How does murdering some poor Joe who is a mechanic or a guard at the air station and some farming family that tends fields only a couple of miles away from the air base change anything?
All these centuries of humans writing about the stupidity of war, and yet, here we are, still persisting in humanity's stupidest iteration of warfare.
Those missiles tipped with sarin must have also made beautiful, beautiful trails through the air...before they hit the earth.
Ugh.
Am I the only person who gets a graphic visual in my mind when I read about the flight of 59 US Tomahawk missiles? I picture the eight dead soldiers at the airfield and 9 dead civilians (4 civilians from the village of Shayrat and 5 civilians from the village of Al-Hamrat). And I picture the 7 injured civilians in the village of Al-Manzul which is 2 and 1/2 miles away from the air base.
I don't need photographers on the ground to see in my mind's eye the torn bodies and the weeping family members. Apparently, no one else has the brain that I have.
When my fellow Americans read that some missiles hit an airfield, they think only of vapor trails and the rocket's red glare.
If presented with photos of blackened potholes in a cement runway surrounded by a vast wasteland of dirt, they are incapable of transferring that violence to the violence done to human bodies.
The babies we just killed apparently never existed because the West didn't publish the photos of their mangled bodies.
One of the three areas of interest (the Levant Margin Reservoirs Assessment Unit) includes land and ocean area that belong to Syria.
Afek, a division of Genie Energy Ltd, would like to drill on land contested by Syria. With Al-Assad out of the way and a US/Israel friendly leader installed, wouldn't it be easier to conduct such drilling?
Top Ten Places Where Trump Supporters Should Direct Blame for Lost Jobs
10) A preference for “maximizing shareholder value” that took off in the 1980’s and made companies get valued for stock, not quality of service or skill.
09) The rapid mechanization and automation of industry that removed and/or changed jobs faster than workers could re-train.
08) The continuing flow of young people from rural communities to big cities.
07) An increase in global trade and global corporations so that a garment worker in Cleveland, Ohio who makes $12.00/hour is competing with a garment worker in Shenzhou, China who makes $3.00/hour.
06) The emergence of labor contractors who can find workers around the world and bring them to the United States on H1B and H2B visas.
05) The creation of job “pipelines” that exist within closed systems where foreign contractors provide legal foreign workers—farm workers from Honduras; IT workers from India; mall kiosk salespeople from Israel; etc. The American citizens who are outside those pipelines will never get those jobs; there is no system to apply for them.
04) The preference for Human Resources staff to hire locally when possible; most workers are reluctant to move without the promise of a job, but if they don’t move, they won’t get a crack at local jobs.
03) The use of computers (applicant tracking systems) and detailed background checks to weed out most resumes, so it’s almost impossible to make a cold-call job pitch to a real human.
02) The need to use networking for most hiring; if you don’t know the right people, it doesn’t matter that you have the right degree or skill; if you are trying to move into a new field, you may lack the contacts to make the transition.
01) Hiring manager niche bias, i.e. young and attractive college kids for wait staff and retail sales; tall males for management positions, etc.
Undocumented immigrants have next to nothing to do with the above. If the Donald succeeds in chasing out millions of undocumented folk, there will be labor contractors on the other side of the border with schemes to get those folk back over to the states as indentured servants with legal work visas.
Trump comes off as a 4th grade student who didn't read his history assignment (a brief introduction to the Israeli / Palestinian conflict), so he's come up with something vague and amiable that he hopes will satisfy the teacher.
Maybe Trump has never read a single thing about the Middle East. Maybe he hears "Israel and Palestine" and he thinks, "Oh, yeah, that region where they keep fighting over the land. Someone ought to fix that."
It is so hard for me to conceive of adults who never get beyond a 5-year-old's comprehension of politics and history...
A colleague at work who has relatives in Iran told me that her aunts (educated globe trotters who work in the travel industry) have cancelled their U.S. vacation that had been planned for March. Even with the reversal of the ban, they have decided to wait and see if the U.S. is going to "settle down".
How many other foreigners are doing the same thing? How many hard-working Americans will earn less money or even lose their jobs because of Trump?
I remember people that I knew when I lived in Los Angeles and taught English as a Second Language: Sawsan from Iraq; Manal from Syria; Zaman from Afghanistan; Tahmina from Tajikistan--and so many more.
If I were president, I'd create a program to pay for every American to travel around the world for one year after high school.
I don't think a Trump or a Pence or a Bannon would be elected or in power if each U.S. citizen had friends around the world.
Hello, Juan--
Yes, what you say about Japan being reluctant to naturalize foreigners is certainly true. But when I used to teach English classes to young people from Japan, I found many of the younger generation more open to the idea. Here's a website with some statistics about Japanese international marriage trends: http://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00096/
Necessity may prompt the Japanese--and many other nations--to open their doors. I hope that will happen in a gentle way around the world instead of the door-slamming that we saw this week in the U.S.
Whenever I read that a country (like Japan) is worried about having a graying and declining population, I always think—what’s the issue? There are young people in populous nations all around the world who would be happy to move to Japan and make their lives there.
That is what humans have been doing for millennia. We migrate. We mix. After a few generations, we have a more diverse genetic make-up even if we have managed to pass along the same set of traditions and call our regional “tribe” by the same name.
The people that we consider traditional Anglo Saxon Brits today have the blood of Germans, French, Spaniards, Italians, Turks, etc. flowing in their veins—just watch the current PBS Masterpiece show “Victoria” to remind yourself of the true nature of the British royal bloodline.
As for population, consider that during the time of Christ, the entire human population across the whole planet was about the same as the current population in the United States.
In 1964, when the Beatles came to America, the U.S. population was around one-half of what it is now. Even if some terrible plague swept our country and killed 50% of the population, we would only be set back to 1964.
That white supremacists fret about white people dying out—when far more white people exist today than ever existed in the history of Earth—shows only that the white supremacists have no idea how numerous humanity is and that there are plenty of people, of every color.
Trump and his minions didn't even have the decency to create a transition period for his mad decree. People who were merely transiting through the United States on to other nations have been sent back to the airport of origin and must come up with money for a new ticket in order to get back home.
A man as wealthy as Trump probably can’t even imagine what is required of an ordinary person on a limited income who purchases a $2000.00 plane ticket. That person may have worked for two years, putting aside $100.00 a month into savings, before he or she could purchase a ticket. And what happens if that person is returned, not to the place that they just left (as in the case of the Iraqi man who had flown from Stockholm, Sweden where he had been in a refugee center), but back to a country where they haven’t been for years? What happens if that person has no credit card and only a few hundred dollars in a bank account? Now, he or she must find work in a nation that is hostile or offering no opportunities and must save all over again.
All because Trump is so rash that he didn’t even create a grace period to implement his radical decree—he wanted it to happen immediately because all he thinks about is his petty self and how he wants the personal satisfaction of seeing his word made law. What a callous bastard.
Or maybe Trump has only one "introducing me" script filled with banal flattery that he is using on his first call with all the "big league" leaders of the world, and he doesn't know Pakistan from Peru.
Trump is surrounding himself with strident, paranoid hawks who, in contrast, make hawkish Hillary Clinton look like Mother Teresa.
If Trump supporters like Retired General Thomas McInerney have their way, our military will invade and bomb both Iran and North Korea.
Re North Korea, McInerney has said, "We must be prepared to win a war, not execute a strike," and re Iran, he has drafted a plan for a full-fledged, pre-emptive air attack.
Trump comes across as a guy who likes excess and will sign off on a war campaign if it's as "yuge" as fire-bombing Dresden or nuking Hiroshima.
Investors apparently think that mass deportation will require more prisons...
Deportations currently take months, if not a year or more in some cases. I imagine Trump will try to speed up the process.
For the past several years, about 400,000 people have been deported each year.
Given that we already have a deportation system in place, I suppose it would not be that difficult (expensive, yes), but not that difficult for Trump to supersize the operation.
But boy, oh, boy, is he going to get a lot of pushback from upset people.
There’s another elephant in the room. The familiarization of celebrity. There are many Americans who pay very little attention to the news or to politics. They watch sports and game shows and reality TV. The rest of the time, they are busy with their jobs and families.
So, when a familiar figure like Trump comes along, they immediately are predisposed to view him favorably. Celebrity has an extraordinary ability to both normalize and exalt a person. Celebrity grants the status of kinship. A neighbor of mine (whose heritage is Hispanic and Native American) voted for Trump. Why? “Oh, I like him,” she said. “From way back, I remember him being on TV. He’s good at business, very successful. It’s time someone ran the country like a business.” Then she listed the usual talking points about why not to like Hillary Clinton (Benghazi, email, Clinton Foundation).
Once a celebrity is gifted with an anointment of fame, his/her fans will defend that person to the death. He or she has become a member of their family. Trump won in the way that Coca-Cola sells: extreme familiarity from years of marketing—along with the extreme repetition in the right-wing sphere of Clinton’s flaws. Racism plays a role, but I wouldn’t discount the hurricane-like force of sheer celebrity.
I must confess that I was very successfully whitewashed by all the children’s literature that I read as a child.
Almost every illustrated book with human characters (from A Child’s Garden of Verses to the Dick and Jane series) depicted a world of fair-skinned and often blonde-haired children. Children of other ethnicities appeared infrequently as exotic secondary characters.
I was left with the impression that the majority of people on the planet looked like the characters in these books and that, in various parts of the globe, there were small populations of “exotic” people who looked otherwise.
It was an absurd impression as it didn’t mirror the reality of the town where I lived, but I carried this unthinking impression that the civilized majority on the planet were white until I reached junior high school and learned more about the size and population of other nations.
I recall having a profound epiphany when it struck me that the default human color was brown! The human race, I realized, was pale white on one end, a broad band of various shades of brown all the way across the center making up the majority, and an ebony black at the other end.
At the time, I felt this as a profound shock. My perception of the skin tone variants of the human population of the world was completely wrong. Even though I had been raised to consider all humans equal, I was like someone who walked into a paper store expecting that most of the paper would be white with only some specialty papers coming in other colors, only to find out that it was the white paper that was the less common specialty shade. It felt like the world had been turned upside down!
To John Wilson:
My understanding is that no one sits down and personally clicks through thousands of emails during an investigation of possible professional misconduct!
A search parameter is created of email addresses and of key words from topics that are pertinent to the matter (in this case, national security) and then the emails are scanned by a computer.
If the computer flags specific emails, then those emails are pulled and reviewed in more detail. A computer can run the initial scan within a matter of minutes.
If no suspect email addresses or key words are found (and several random sample emails are reviewed and found to be benign), then the search can be concluded very quickly.
The American poet James Ragan likes to tell a story about Bob Dylan. Back in 1985, Bob Dylan, Robert Bly, and James Ragan were three Americans among a group of international writers invited to read at the First International Poetry Festival in Moscow.
The event was held in a stadium and thousands of people attended. Ragan, who often read to small groups in coffee houses and university classrooms, was thrilled at the sight of so many people gathered to listen to poetry.
Bob Dylan, as he stood on the stage, however, was rather discomfited. Looking at all the literary greats, including Irish poet Seamus Heaney, he remarked, "I don't belong here."
Of course, he did. And it's a testament to the strength and influence of his writing that he was invited by President Mikhail Gorbachev to that poetry festival.
I think Trump would be bored stiff with the amount of high-level reading, detailed discussion, and teamwork involved. He likes to be the sole cock of the walk, someone who issues orders and lets other people do the hard work.
Can you imagine him reading through stacks of legislative briefings or having a give-and-take discussion where he actually listens to other people?
If he did find himself elected, I think he'd either quit within the month or be so uninvolved in day-to-day work that his staff would be forced to run the nation without him.
The daily work of the president is often tedious and unglamorous. Conducting a hard-nosed negotiation with a single-minded focus on not paying more than
$500/square foot for a property is nothing like the kind of multi-level, cross-partisan discussions that must happen to get a bill to pass.
Month 1: Trump announces that all U.S law enforcement is obliged to carry out federal law and check immigration status during routine traffic checks. Thousands of undocumented people clog the prisons and states struggle to find enough planes and buses to carry out the mass deportations. Protests pop up all across the nation, then get out of hand and lead to major riots. The National Guard is deployed to quell the unrest. Local criminals take advantage of the chaos and begin looting.
Month 2:
Conservative and liberal militias spring up and openly do battle on U.S. streets. Car bombs and IEDs explode across the nation. The drought on the West coast intensifies and the cost of water skyrockets. Multiple Southwestern states have to ration electricity. Numerous small businesses go under.
Month 3:
Mexico gets upset over cuts in their water supply from the Colorado River. Trump tells the Mexican president that he doesn’t give a damn. Mexican drug lords organize a raid and take over the Imperial Dam on the Colorado River near the Arizona/Mexican border. Donald sends US troops to protect the dam. The Mexican president sends his own troops to protect Mexican citizens near the border. The Mexican cartels blow up the Imperial Dam and divert all the water across the border to their thirsty citizens. The fighting spreads from Yuma along the border, going west up to San Diego and east to Tucson.
Month 4:
People living in Yuma and Tucson are forced to flee, both to get away from fighting and because they are no longer getting water from the Arizona Canal. The water crisis intensifies and nervous business owners start to relocate away from Los Angeles, San Diego, Tucson, and Phoenix. The stock market plummets. In all the confusion, a team of Islamic State terrorists carries out simultaneous attacks that disable communication hubs for air traffic across the US and also trigger a severe multi-state electrical grid blackout.
Month 5:
The conservative and liberal U.S. militia groups blame each other and declare open war. The U.S. economy tanks as masses of Americans flee the fighting. A group of U.S. soldiers defect to form their own Neo-Patriot Army. They steal fighter planes and conduct bombing raids on universities, which they call hotbeds of liberal radicalism. The Presidents of China and Russia get together and insist that everyone come to the table and stop factional fighting. No one listens to them.
Month 6:
China, Russia, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia form an alliance and launch a set of blistering attacks on major U.S. military bases. The U.S. military is caught off guard as much of the U.S. military is either overseas, battling the Islamic State or is at home caught up in local civil fighting. China disables US computer systems with a cyber attack, then Russia drops a nuke on Washington, DC and a nuke on New York City, completely wiping out all the citizens that live there. The four allies then divide up the United States among themselves. The Mexicans get back all the land that they lost after the Mexican-American War including the southern half of California. The Russians take Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The Chinese administer the rest of the country and send over settlers from China to restore the farmland in the Midwest. The Saudi’s make arrangements to run all the U.S. oil and natural gas concessions. President Trump flees with his family and hides himself in a mansion on a remote island somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Water is another big factor in the region's stability. Given the confluence of poor agricultural practices in raising cotton, the desertification of the Aral Sea, and anthropogenic global warming (all within a landlocked nation), there is a high risk of environmental crisis.
How foolish we humans are to be bombing and shooting and exploiting each other while the threat of massive global drought keeps growing and growing...
Sounds like what we have is global gang banging--where it's hard to know who is allied with whom. See the article at the link below for parallels to the 600 odd gang factions in Chicago getting so decentralized that no one knows who is fighting whom.
Such a clothing ban is also difficult to enforce. How is a police officer supposed to determine that he can't fine one woman because her covering is for sun protection, but he should fine another woman because her covering is to indicate that she is pious?
If overt religious reference in public is considered wrong, then the officer must go after the covered-up Amish tourist as well as the French Muslim citizen.
Go look at the sun protective swimwear at this website: http://www.sunprecautions.com/ A woman could wear the swim shirt, the skirted swim leggings, and either the shade cap with cross over drape or the headkini--all outfits not designed for religious expression but for sun protection--and meet the requirements for conservative Islamic dress.
I live in Southern California, and I see far more runners and swimmers who cover up because they don't want their skin to look like an old leather bag splotched with stains, and they don't want skin cancer.
Imagine the police officer harassing someone whose body was burn-scarred or who had skin cancer all because he thought her clothing looked like an Islamic burkini!
The police have better things to do with their time than force women on the beach to take off their cover-ups. I think most of the French would prefer that their police were apprehending murderous terrorists.
Since we can't convince our fellow humans to avoid a mass die off (of homo sapiens and perhaps as much as 90% of the current flora/fauna on the planet), maybe we should focus on creating ways to archive the best of human achievement so that any surviving humans don't have to start all over again at caveman level...
I agree with you 100%. If I had been president on 9/11, I would have pursued the attack as a horrific criminal case and followed the usual procedures of indictment, extradition, arrest, trial, etc. that are at the heart of civilized justice.
My point is that terrorism is a tactic of war; one terror attack makes people worry that more terror attacks are coming and that the nation COULD be destabilized as a result. Terror awakens people's personal nightmares about the possibility of war--even if you live in a nation that is well-protected by broad oceans and that is not in any eminent danger.
The "what if" nightmare of terrorism turning over time into war has enabled political and corporate leaders to scare people into spending billions.
But no one would be easily scared by a "what if" scenario of a couple of dog attacks leading to dogs everywhere attacking humans. That would be considered ridiculous!
We need to find a way to show people why a fair judicial system is the best way to deal with ALL kinds of criminals. A suicide bomber who would blow apart strangers is at the same level of evil as a serial killer who murders stranger after stranger.
Judicial procedure removes those who would use indiscriminate harm from the streets without causing additional destabilization and damage. That is the best way to break the cycle of violence.
I get the point, and I agree that using war to stop a technique of war is absurd, but I don’t think that merely comparing numbers of deaths by different agents is a good way to understand the impact of a death.
Per the CDC, as of Feb. 16, 2016, the annual death rate in the United States is 821.5 deaths per 100,000 people. Of a population around 300 million, about 2.6 million people die each year. That is a lot of deaths, but these deaths don’t threaten the stability of the nation, and they don’t have the same impact as do deaths caused by terrorism or by war.
Losing 50 people in a terrorist blast in an airport has a greater impact than losing 50 people in an ordinary train wreck. The terrorist message is that 1) we can hurt you anywhere 2) we would hurt you this way every single day if we could and we’re working on that.
It’s the part 2 of the message that gets everyone panicked. A lighting strike or a dog bite has never been the initial “shot heard round the world”. Lighting storms and aggressive dog attacks don’t threaten to increase to the point at which a society could collapse. Terrorism does. It threatens to turn a functioning nation into a failed state. It would take a monumental number of crazed dogs to destroy human civilization. But we have seen nations collapse under the impact of small armed groups progressing from terror attacks to gang warfare to outright civil war.
Until we’ve seen an Alexander the Great Dane lay waste to cities and conquer kingdoms, people are not going to get that anxious about dog bites!!
Silly Wabbit. War is for wealth! The U.S. uses endless military force to give multi-national corporations the freedom to move through the airspace, across the lands, and over the territorial waters of the Middle East on their way to acquiring natural resources and setting up lucrative business deals. War is used to “crack open” countries, encouraging them to accept foreign loans, to participate in global commerce, and to turn government-owned and/or private companies into globally-traded, public entities that make money for global investors.
If you look at Iraq today, one of the big changes to the nation since 2003 is the insertion of multi-national corporate products. Iraqi children watch Tom and Jerry cartoons (courtesy of a Pentagon project) and Western businessmen are working hard to ensure that they will soon eat at Pizza Hut and McDonalds while their parents buy Ecco and Timberland shoes. Believe it or not, that is why our soldiers died; so an Iraqi child could eat a Burger King hamburger and increase the wealth of BK CEO Daniel S. Schwartz.
The endgame can be illustrated by following one company in Kuwait: the Zain Group. Kuwait became a British protectorate in 1899 and was modernized under British direction. After independence, Kuwait continued to have close affiliations with the West. A U.S.-educated emir oversaw the development of a telecommunications company, MTC (Mobile Telecommunications Company), which became Zain in 1983. In 2002, when the Kuwait government divested the company, it was sold to a wealthy, private family firm in Kuwait: the Al Kharafi Group. This firm grew into a powerful multi-national company with holdings in 8 nations in the Middle East. And who is the current CEO? Scott Gegenheimer, an American born in Chicago.
So, my guess is that we will keep fighting iWar 1.0, iWar 2.0, iWar 3.0 and so on until the entire world has been McConquered.
If Trump wins the Republican nomination, it will be because of looters’ logic.
When people get angry enough to go on a rampage, they will burn down the only grocery store in the neighborhood, along with the only bank and the only gas station. Out of frustration, they will hurt themselves. There is no logic behind a temper tantrum. What we are seeing is a “Trumper tantrum” where some people are voting for Donald Trump and rationalizing it with the logic of the looter: “Burn it all down!”
It shouldn’t be a surprise. American citizens have been lied to and mistreated. They’ve lost their sons and daughters to illegal wars, their savings and homes to banking fraud, and their jobs to greed. And the government has failed to defend them.
That’s why this election is not about selecting the best person for the job. A number of angry voters care only about selecting the best person to burn the Republic to the ground.
I worry that Trump's extremism will inure Americans to fascist views, so that if Jeb Bush or Ben Carson becomes president, the general public will think that policies just a little bit less extreme than Trump's aren't so bad.
When inflammatory rhetoric is heard everyday, people become desensitized.
Worst of all is the lack of any thoughtful dialogue about how to wage a kind of jujitsu against terrorist violence.
I want to hear conversation from leaders about how to...
There are nuanced actions that can be taken to protect a nation while righting old wrongs and not making a bad situation worse. That is what we need to be talking about.
In September 2002, I sent letters to multiple heads of states, including President George Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and even President Saddam Hussein, urging them each to resolve their issues with civil negotiation and not war.
I received a few responses. Blair's office was notable in that he didn't even send out a form letter with his signature on it. His response came from Stuart Mortlock of the Direct Communications Unit at 10 Downing Street and gave no explanation of the Prime Minister's position, saying only, "He [Mr. Blair] does appreciate the time people take to write to him and has asked me to assure you that the points you make will be carefully considered."
President Bush didn't respond for quite a few months, until after the war was underway, but at least he gave his reasons, writing, "In Iraq, we sought to remove a threat to our security and to free the Iraqi people from oppression. Saddam Hussein's regime has ended and the Iraqi people are regaining control of their own country and future. Pockets of resistance still remain."
Ah, yes. Just a few pesky pockets to button up, and then all will be right with the world...
It makes me cry to look at my original letter--and see that every concern that I had about war against Iraq happened--exactly as I was afraid that it might...
Israel's Arab population is roughly 20% of the nation. 2012 statistics state that there are 5.9 million Jews and 1.4 million Arabs.
Around 82% of those 1.4 million Arabs are Sunni Muslim.
The median age of the Arab population is 21.1 years of age.
That means that Israel has a very large population of young Arabs. If only a fraction of them are as angry and frustrated as the brothers profiled in this article, they have the potential to seriously destabilize Israel.
43.3% of male Arab workers in Israel are employed at low wage jobs in essential fields like construction, agriculture, and industry.
Israel could easily be rocked by protests in the form of mass strikes or campaigns of subtle sabotage of infrastructure. Considering that 6% of Israel's GDP comes from tourism, any unrest that scares away tourists could have a serious impact on Israel's economy.
Israeli leaders really need to come to grips with the reality of the unhappiness of their own Arab citizens and the growing solidarity felt among young Arabs across the Middle East.
Blanket oppression and imprisonment of one's own citizens is not a great recipe for the future of any nation.
But maybe the more relevant question is will globalization destroy the traditional nation-state? In the age of outsourcing, maybe nations are becoming obsolete.
The oil companies are from nations all around the world, the UK, China, Russia, Japan, and others are all able to do business with Iraq even as it struggles with war and even as Iraq's government is largely ineffectual as far as its citizens are concerned.
International corporations have continued to do work in Iraq (oil companies, private security firms, development groups, fast food chains, etc.) while the Iraq government has floundered around and been largely inept.
Maybe the new world will be a network of global trade exchanges--and national entities won't be that important anymore.
We ought to take responsibility and help the refugees.
The US didn't dig the Middle East fire pit, but the US threw fuel on the embers of past colonial/tribal history and started the latest conflagration with its invasions and infusion of weapons, troops, funds, and incompetent managers.
Our 2003 invasion of Iraq sent over 1 million displaced Iraqis into Syria—adding to the destabilization. When Syria began to come apart, we funded militancy more than diplomacy, and sent incompetent managers interested primarily in regime change as a way to access Syrian oil/natural gas with little care for how to maintain a functioning and safe Syria while getting Al Assad to either implement reforms or hand power over to a new president.
Imagine how the United States might have been torn apart in the 1960’s if China had sent money and weapons to the student protesters and insisted that the brutality of Vietnam and of the Kent State shooting were indications that the 'tyrant' President Nixon must step down and leave the United States and that a new political system (shaped according to Chinese institutions) should be put into place?
Texas alone can hold two Germanys. The population density of Texas is only 34.8 people per sq. kilometer versus Germany’s population density of 226.87 people per sq. kilometer. Wyoming and Montana also have far more room than crowded Europe.
George W. Bush can fund a New Baghdad outside of Crawford, Texas for all the Iraq refugees.
Donald Rumsfeld can fund a New Kabul outside of his property in Twin Bridges, Montana.
Dick Cheney can fund a New Damascus outside of his ranch in Jackson, Wyoming.
And Paul Wolfowitz (who recently purchased a $1 million dollar condo in St. Petersburg, FL) and all the other architects of ME disaster with billions in retirement loot can fund all the other refugees fleeing what they built.
Ironically, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (which brings the oil that increases global temperature as it is burned) is threatened by the thawing of permafrost as the pipeline is much more likely to buckle as the soil sinks and then burst.
Something similar (albeit unofficially) has been happening in the US.
Many Iraqis are trying to immigrate to the US, but apparently it is mainly the Christian Iraqis who are getting through all the bureaucratic hoops.
There are now 60,000 Chaldean Iraqis living to the east of San Diego, CA in El Cajon. An American-Iraqi, Mark Arabo, has set up an 'underground railroad' and is working with human smugglers to get Christian Iraqis to the United States where they can petition for asylum. He has over 70,000 applications from Iraqis desperate to escape Iraq:
The sad fact is that more than 4 million people in Iraq need refuge. But few nations, in the Middle East or in the West, are willing to help them.
It's a tragic state of affairs that so little is being done to quickly help all refugees who are the innocent victims of war, regardless of their religion.
If you drive across this country, from sea to shining sea, you'll witness a lot of new poverty.
From CA farmers whose fields have turned to dust and Wyoming ranchers who've had to butcher their starving cattle and oil workers in North Dakota who've been laid off by the thousands to high-paying refinery and construction jobs getting replaced with minimum wage service jobs in Louisiana and across the South and work vanishing in every arena from publishing distribution to dairy production in Central New York, there is profound economic misery.
Trump = A Vision (Mirage?) of Prosperity. Some Americans look at Trump and think, "He knows how to make money. That's what we need."
Most of the presidential candidates live in comfortable bubbles and aren't experiencing the horror of turning on the tap and getting clots of mud or seeing the big company in town (the one that supported the community for the past 50+ years) closing its doors.
Whoever becomes president will need to offer a vision of how the people are going to get bread. If Trump is able to convince people that he can do that, he could have a shot at the presidency.
Trump's celebrity is the glitter of fool's gold. But his business record and bank account have the shine of flecks of real gold. That magnetism could make voters overlook all the other hideous shortcomings.
A very big problem with the current change in customary climate patterns is the speed. With such rapid change, wildlife and wild vegetation can't evolve and adapt; instead, animals and plants die out.
In California, we see areas of killed soil--where back-to-back searing wildfires have burned deep into the ground and killed the root systems and buried seeds that would normally survive such events and rejuvenate.
We have barren earth that is either going to function like blacktop and encourage winter rain to flood away into the ocean or that will become water-soaked and form mega-mudslides.
The other big problem with the loss of a customary climate is that the timing of weather events is all wrong. A vineyard can get the same amount of rain versus sun over the course of a year, but if it doesn't come in the pattern that is optimal for the vine, then the grapes won't flourish.
It wouldn't be so bad if one kind of climate could simply be exchanged for a different kind of thriving climate. If, for instance, San Diego was to go from a Mediterranean to a humid tropical climate, but we can't wave a wand and transport entire ecosystems that will fit the new climate. Instead, the existing ecosystem dies because of the abrupt introduction of the wrong temperature/precipitation and leaves behind a lifeless moonscape.
In a worse case scenario, the Southwest will be swept with monster dust storms because the vegetation will die off so quickly that there will be nothing left to hold down the topsoil. October brings fierce Santa Ana winds. If we are unlucky this year, and the strong winds coincide with a period of very low humidity and very high temperatures, and if the winds blow steadily for more than four or five days straight, we have the making of the greatest mega-wildfire disaster ever seen in the US.
As a resident of San Diego, I'm seriously scared. No firefighters can stop the head of an Santa Ana driven firestorm. All people can do is get out of the way. Given the topography, it is possible for a city like San Diego to get completely overrun with fire as it is laced with brush-filled canyons that run down to the sea, functioning like lines of detonation cord.
The shame is that so few people understand this. It's as if they imagine that a region can swap climates the way that a model can change clothes.
Like gmoke, I want to know what the police would say under "Insight Policing". Instead of "What did you see?" and "Who did this?", what was said?
Did they start with statements, "A call came in that shots were fired at the corner of X and Y; we need your help to catch the shooter." Or "I understand that people don't want to get involved, but all these shootings will continue if no one speaks out. We're looking for some tips to help us solve a report of shots fired that happened tonight at the corner of X and Y." Or???
I'd like to see a specific dialogue, line by line, that shows how officers can reduce intimidation and get legitimate feedback, helping everyone to be safer.
Trump is the GOP's inner child. The more that the GOP attempts to disown him, the more that Trump pushes the GOP out from behind the curtain and reveals the party's true face.
Travis - I don't understand your remark: "People will adapt and proliferate as they always have."
The point is that if we can run through so much bounty in less than 200 years then we will be facing mass starvation within the next century.
If you spend more than you make, you will face bankruptcy. If you consume the bounty of the Earth faster than the Earth replenishes it, then you will face famine.
Quite simply, we need to balance our eco-budget. A number of correctives (improving living conditions so that poor people aren't compelled to have huge families in order to survive; making it culturally acceptance to choose to be childless and put energies into helping others raise their kids; choosing sustainable foods to grow and eat; selecting fuel sources that are sustainable; and so on and so forth.
The staggering loss of flora and fauna should be a wake up call that our current habitual way of living needs to be modified. That does NOT mean that we need to live in caves. Quite the contrary. We need to use our technology to mimic what works well in Nature and to fit ourselves into a cyclical way of life that is enduring.
The majority of undocumented immigrants crossing our southern border come from Central American (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), but people from Mexico are still making the journey. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the number of unaccompanied alien children from Mexico (from October 01, 2014 to June 01, 2015) was 7487 as compare to 15,634 in the same time period in 2014.
It’s not that fewer young people from ages 0-17 are trying to leave Mexico; the decline is due to the US government demanding that Mexico step up and stop more immigrants on their side of the border. We have seen an across-the-board drop in migrants (of all ages and from all areas to the south of our border) of around 50%, but that is only because Mexico is apprehending those migrants before they get to the US border.
The same drought that is scorching California has been scorching Mexico and Central America. Mexico has historically reported a fairly low unemployment rate, but that is because it counts all of its rural citizens, who survive on subsistence farming, as employed. Well, those rural citizens are really suffering now as wells and watering holes dry up. Take a look at these recent photos in Ensenada: https://bajadock.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/ensenada-drought-2015/
We are focusing on corralling humans, not on fixing the root cause: ending our self-inflicted climate woes by a) lowering carbon emissions b) creating a sustainable life-style that allows us to live within the means of the planet.
We need to elect a president who understands this.
Much of Jerusalem is composed of sedimentary limestone, dolomite, and dolomitic limestone, so I'd say that the inhabitants that enjoyed the area for the longest time were ancient fish and mollusks.
The Cenomanian age during the Cretaceous period was a good 100 million years ago. We modern humans have been around for only 200,000 years. The fish and mollusks will probably get the last laugh--and enjoy swimming through the temples and over the streets--long after humans stop squabbling over the city.
Given our impermanence, isn't it a pity that we are too petty to share a lovely land while it exists?
As far as nations that consume oil and natural gas are concerned, the ME countries involved are NOT “becoming more worthless”. They are being fought over precisely because they possess two very valuable things:
1) Resources
2) Routes
ROUTES
The importance of ports on the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea—and the need to keep roads open and pipelines flowing—can’t be overstated. Without secure routes, the oil and natural gas resources can’t be accessed and sold.
Google “Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline” versus the “Qatar-Turkey pipeline” for more insight into what feeds the fighting.
Remember the scandal when it was discovered that former NATO official Brian Sayers (hired by the DC-based Syria Support Group) was NOT working to help the Syrian opposition but was instead working to set up Syrian oil deals—as if the US had already conquered Syria and was empowered to handle its resources?
Money is pouring into the fight because a lot of money is at stake. It doesn’t matter to Big Oil and Gas if cities are bombed into rubble, artifacts are looted, and civilians are living in caves, as long as—at the end of the fray—their companies get lucrative contracts.
Add the political/religious dimension on top of the financial incentives—and you get the mess that we see today.
Benjamin Netanyahu is like Mark Twain's cat that once sat on a hot stove lid--and afterwards, would never sit down on a hot stove lid, but also would never sit down on a cold one either.
Netanyahu's hot stove is the history of his people; it's the Holocaust and the 1967 war where he fought as a soldier and the loss of his brother in a 1976 IDF raid.
Netanyahu wants to live in a house where the stove is always cold. If that means never having a warm supper, he is OK with that.
Perhaps he has PTSD and re-lives horrors every night when he tries to sleep. That is why he will never trust Iran. He believes that Israel will only be safe if it is surrounded by weak nations that could not possibly, no matter what deranged cretin comes to power, ever be a threat to Israel.
He wants to have what the United States got: the last of the Mohicans. Only he wants it to be the last of the Palestinians (and Iranians, Lebanese, and anyone else who might pose a possible threat).
Years of psychotherapy would probably not persuade him that his view may discourage Arab neighbors from maturing into fellow nations more interested in commerce and development than in war--and that his view may bring about precisely what he most fears.
He is, alas, deeply traumatized. He doesn't have the vision that many of the rest of us have, of a world where Arab and Jew and Christian all live side by side, worshiping as they please, and focused on improving life for all of us together, as kinfolk within the larger shtetl called Earth.
In a nutshell, the "bombs away" folk believe that Iran either won't retaliate or will only make futile gestures.
Such a belief is rather ironic. If Iran is truly too poor and too weak to respond to bombing raids, then why would nuclear weapons encourage it to launch a first strike against far superior opponents? Any first nuclear strike would immediately bring about nuclear retaliation. Iran has no shield from Israel's nuclear missiles and nowhere to hide
We are supposed to believe that building nuclear weapons will make Iran suddenly become wildly suicidal. And that without nuclear weapons, Iran will remain a docile pussycat that won't raise a single claw in self-defense when it gets bombed. That makes no sense.
It looks to me like the warmongers just want to see if they can turn Iran into a failed state and a looter's paradise. And they are eager to do that before Iran gets a nuclear weapon; not because a nuclear Iran would be a danger, but because a nuclear Iran would no longer be easy to topple and easy to loot.
Gruesome killings are bait. ISIS wants to tempt its enemies to put its forces into harm’s way; the best way to do that is to make the enemy very, very angry. ISIS would like opposition soldiers on the ground where it can have a chance to hit them. Former President Bush had it all wrong. ISIS’s motto is “Goad them into coming over here to get killed, so we don’t have to go over there to kill them.” ISIS needs only to keep recruiting enough young blood to form strike teams of 20-200 fighters. If it does that long enough, it will bleed nations like the U.S. dry because we must spend millions of dollars to annihilate a dozen fighters who can be replaced the very next day. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/24/372168736/u-s-strikes-have-killed-1-100-isis-fighters-and-cost-1-billion
The West needs to wake up, realize that it is getting suckered into a war strategy that grows terrorists, and treat groups like ISIS as criminal street gangs. Now that a big mess exists, and ISIS has gained power, the West needs to get creative. ISIS knows our weaknesses. Do we know theirs? We need to identify the weak points in their chain of command, their lines of recruitment, and their supply chain—and identify the most cost effective and sneaky ways to disrupt their plans. We need to think of what they have (not about what we have and want to use) and craft strategies that match the threat.
Perhaps the insertion of a Special Forces unit to capture one high value target would be more productive than bombing an apartment complex suspected of housing dozens of fighters. Perhaps a weakness in how ISIS resupplies with water could be exploited. And so on. It makes no sense to use bombs, missiles, and troops on the ground simply because that is our image of how wars are won. Shipping over tons of weapons and turning cities into rubble only creates the kind of broken environment that allows ISIS to thrive. We need to honestly look at the situation on the ground, including local politics, culture, religion, logistics, environment—and be innovative. If we don’t get away from the idea that we must fight with the latest and greatest of our military “toys”, we will waste time, treasure, and troops on the wrong strategies.
You raise some good points. What the roads will look like depends on the percentage of people who continue to purchase their own vehicles and on the percentage willing to use shared cars. If individual car ownership drops, there could be a decrease in the total number of vehicles in circulation. But if people who would normally have stayed home or taken mass transit decide to get out more in self-driving cars, then they could bring the total number of vehicles in circulation back up.
What I picture is a better mix of transportation choices. Buses, trams, subways, etc. would still be the least expensive, followed by self-driving taxis that make multiple stops, followed by self-driving vehicles that go point-to-point. If there are fewer individually-owned cars parked on the streets or in lots, then self-driving cars could take those empty spaces. I think basic driving activity (commuting to work, running errands, etc.) probably wouldn’t change dramatically, but I have no idea what percentage of people would switch from buses, walking, etc. to using a self-driving car if it was available. Within a city, I imagine that a self-driving car would be only a few blocks away, so it shouldn’t add too much extra mileage to any given trip. Just this morning as I left for work, I saw two parked Car2Go vehicles, one on the street a mere three feet from the edge of the driveway into my apartment complex and the other 1 ½ blocks away, so that’s the scenario that I picture for self-driving cars. Human-driven taxis spend a fair amount of time roaming and need to hover around popular areas (airports, downtown districts) to make money; self-driving vehicles would not need to return to the driver’s home or to a taxi lot, so that could provide some reduction in traffic.
It will be very interesting to see how all of this plays out in the future.
Here in San Diego, I see far more people using Car2Go. (www.Car2Go.com). These little electric cars are parked all around the city; all you have to do is hop online, find the nearest little car, drive it to your destination, leave it, and repeat this exercise when it's time to go back home.
What will completely change the face of car ownership is when electric cars drive themselves. My prediction is that there will be a vast decrease in car ownership. Why purchase a car that spends about 90% of its time sitting parked somewhere waiting for you? When you need a car, just send out a text and the nearest car will be on its way to pick you up.
I'm really looking forward to such a future where I can call up the kind of electric car I need (pickup for a camping trip; little car for downtown; larger sedan for road trip) and have it arrive at my doorstep.
Even better will be when all those many acres of blacktop reserved for parking cars will be converted into parks and gardens!
How do we teach each other to understand that scapegoating is illogical and only creates more of the violence that we want to stop?
Rupert Murdoch's tweet is classic scapegoating: "Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible."
I bet Murdoch would NOT support the following statements:
"Maybe most Christians are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing fundamentalist cancer, they must be held responsible for the murder of abortion provide, Dr. George Tiller."
OR
"Maybe most men are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy testosterone-fueled male aggression, they must be held responsible for all rapes."
Isn't it obvious that Murdoch's statement is as ridiculous as the above two statements?
If the far right in France pushes for scapegoating laws, I hope that the French people refuse to fall for such illogical thinking.
An excellent post, but how is it satire? There is no exaggeration of Cheney's corrupt soul, his evil deeds, or of the nature of a proceeding in court. There is no humor in the catalog of crimes. It is a wistful fantasy of justice, a ghost of the future that could be...
I'm feeling so sad as I see this video; Jacob David George recently took his own life. I wish I had met him. He comes across as someone who was willing to try anything to learn how to keep living with PTSD. His heartfelt desire to make sense of what he had become--a morally wounded man--and his poignant questions deserve to be witnessed and heard by every single American. His quest needs to be continued; there are a lot of soldiers thinking "red, white & blue, I trusted you" and wondering what went wrong.
General Kelly says that the migrants (5-6 black men) on the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua had flown into Trinidad. The implication is that they flew from West Africa to Trinidad, and then traveled up to the Costa Rica / Nicaragua border which would be a logical way to emigrate from West Africa. Travelers from Liberia, Costa Rica would not have flown into Trinidad--that's the opposite direction from their intended final destination, New York City.
The over-the-top fear mongering is silly, but It would not surprise me to see people leaving West Africa; not only is there the threat of Ebola, but food prices have doubled and businesses are struggling. So folk who have enough money to get out would have every incentive to do so.
And migrants could fly from Dakar, Senegal (with stops in Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, & Panama) and land in Port of Spain, Trinidad. So it is a possible migration route.
Still, it's rather absurd to picture thousands of fleeing West African migrants coming to the U.S. given the extreme poverty and the distance. It's a lot easier to get away from West Africa by heading to another part of the African continent.
As to whether there are "lots" of suicide bombers out there, well, all I know is that, per the news, they keep on coming...so it doesn't look like we're about to run out of volunteer martyrs...
Bill Maher really needs to get out more. How does anyone live in any cosmopolitan city in the U.S. and NOT meet neighbors, colleagues, etc. who are practicing Muslims?
I don't have a huge social circle, but I've met people of all faiths--including practicing Muslims--in my college days, at the various apartment complexes where I've lived in Los Angeles and San Diego, and at work.
There's nothing like an ordinary friendship or two to make it obvious that the practice of Islam (which has much in common with the practices of Christianity and Judaism) does not require adherents to run around beheading non-believers.
Is there any hope that conservatives will realize that the possibility of global epidemics (whether from Ebola, flu, or other disease) is a really good argument for universal healthcare?
President Obama and other leaders have been reassuring Americans by pointing out that Ebola is unlikely to spread within the United States because we have a "world-class health system".
Well, we do have world-class medical facilities, world-class medical research, world-class medical procedures, and world-class medical treatments, but we do NOT have world-class access to health care.
In an epidemic, what's needed is ACCESS. If citizens avoid seeking healthcare because they lack access (no insurance; can't meet the deductible if they do have insurance; afraid of deportation; no local clinics and hospitals; etc.), they are more likely to not get treated and to spread their illness to others.
Detroit's lack of hospitals is a serious problem if residents and/or visitors get ill. And Detroit is just one of many cities in the U.S. that has been shuttering hospitals. Add that to the continuing problems of access (despite the gains of the Affordable Care Act), and the reality is a health system that has a long way to go before it is truly world-class.
So you take a little kid and you deprive him of food until he's crying with hunger (sanctions), you deprive his family of medications and he watches his big sister die of a simple infection (sanctions), and his little brother die of dirty water (sanctions), and his father leaves (Gulf War) and never returns (Highway of Death), and the little kid experiences the terror of plummeting bombs while hiding under a table (Shock & Awe), and his cousin gets raped and killed by American soldiers (101 Airborne Division), and his remaining relatives lose their jobs (DeBa'athification), and his great aunt has miscarriage after miscarriage (depleted uranium poisoning), and he never learns to read because all the schools are closed (Iraq War), and his best friend is killed by a car bomb (Iraq War), and his next best friend is shot by American soldiers at a checkpoint (Iraq War)--and, after all these years of positive reinforcement and exemplary role models, he grows up to be a man who tortures and beheads people. Baffling. I simply can't understand it!
It's a shame our founding fathers didn't require members of Congress to pass a course in basic logic. One Bachmannstrosity that's common among her ilk is the idea that there's no need to worry about adding CO2 to our atmosphere because 1) CO2 is natural and already exists in the environment and 2) the amount of CO2 added by human activity is small.
My favorite analogy to combat such ignorance is to compare CO2 to salt. Yes, salt exists in the natural environment. Yes, salt is an essential part of a normal diet just as some CO2 is a normal part of the air that we breathe. But excess salt is a killer. If you drink a 16 oz. glass of water to which someone added 1/8 of a teaspoon of salt, it will taste salty, but it will be drinkable. But if you drink a 16 oz. glass of water to which someone added a tablespoon of salt, you will most likely throw up. And if someone were to force you to drink nothing but salty water, you'd get severely dehydrated, suffer kidney failure, and die.
I've got to wonder if Bachmann ever baked a batch of biscuits in her life. If the recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, but the cook reverses the portions; the biscuits will bake up as nasty, flat lumps and be almost inedible.
That baking powder and baking soda are only a small portion of the total mass of the ingredients of a batch of biscuits is not what matters. What matters is whether the right proportion of the right ingredients is available to produce the desired effect.
Straying from the proven recipe for our atmosphere is a good way to end up with an inedible planet.
RC--
I agree with you on your point about the role of Western aggression and interference. I see the main focus of colonialism as resource acquisition.
The length of time that people have lived in the Middle East, cultivating the land and using the waterways, has meant that the natural resources of the area have been stressed by human habitation for longer than similar resources have been stressed in areas of relatively more recent habitation.
In addition, the location of abundant oil and natural gas has drawn other nations as carrion draws wolves and coyotes.
I see this entire scenario as driven by humans using resources faster than such resources can be produced by the Earth.
I'm not blaming the ME for having the misfortune of being in the center of this tug-of-war for wealth. I'm interested in seeing all human beings able to understand and confront how our behavior (whether as colonizers or colonized) is shaped by a basic struggle over resource consumption.
Hisham Melhem's dismay over what is happening in the Middle East is understandable. But he is looking at history with a narrow and blinkered focus; he is truly "unable to see the forest for the trees".
It is the entire human species that is on the brink of collapse. That the unraveling has started where civilization itself began is not that surprising. It's often the oldest part of an old mechanism that goes first.
We need to see ourselves not as Westerners or Middle Easterners, Christians or Muslims, Iraqis or Americans--we need to see ourselves as human beings.
There are some 7.1 billion people on the planet. We are on this finite globe together. And, as curious and clever beings, it is our ability to use resources faster than the Earth can replenish those resources that underpins the current upheavals around the world.
The West is only another economic downturn away from becoming as factional and war-torn as the Middle East. We have as much divisiveness here as there is in Arab society. The only thing keeping us from turning on each other is the luck of being, for now, at the top of the global economic food chain.
To move forward, we need to stop talking about problems in terms of us versus them. We need to talk about humanity as a whole. When is the last time that you heard a political leader refer to "humans"? I.E. - "Today, all human beings face the challenges of a resource insecure future. We need to come together, as a species, and work to create sustainable models of living before we become so insecure (in food, water, and energy) that we begin to turn on each other."
That is what we need to hear: a focus on how we (and that includes ISIS) are all in this together. United we stand. Divided we fall.
Perhaps we have few whistleblowers today because organizations are so huge and jobs are highly specialized. If a worker is a tiny cog in a corporate or political organization that has 10,000+ employees, he or she is likely to have a highly specialized job that provides only a peephole view into what the organization as a whole is doing.
A U.S. intelligence worker may be an IT systems analyst who spends his or her whole career on one component of one particular project. It’s like working in a forest spending your time inside a tent placed at the base of tree where you shift through a 6” by 6” patch of soil to find and list types of microscopic bacteria. If that is all that you do, and if, when you lift your head, you see nothing beyond you but the grey paneling of your cubicle “tent”, then you can’t see what the greater “forest” of the company is doing.
In fact, you may know only as much about the overall scope of the company as what the public knows because that’s all HR gives you during your introduction to the workplace. Many Americas work like ants or honeybees, each busily doing a highly specialized little job, with only a general idea of how their work fits into the greater mission of their company and with no ability to provide meaningful input to employers at higher levels. (Cue Pink Floyd’s song “Another Brick In The Wall”)
How can a worker blow a whistle if it’s impossible for that worker to see the larger misdeed that their work makes possible?
ISIL seems very familiar to me because it seems a lot like the street gangs here in the Southwest where I live. In many ways, ISIL's action mirrors the brutal behavior Los Zetas, MS-13, the Bloods, the Crips, and the dozens of other gangs that are in the United States and across the border in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. See this link about MS-13: http://www.samuellogan.com/articles/recruitment-redemption-in-the-ms13.html
Note what the Director of US Programs for World Vision says, "You don't move people out of gangs, people move themselves out of gangs."
What does our "Gang" of the West offer the young people who have been "jumped in" to ISIL? People who often lack family (i.e. father killed in tank during Shock and Awe; mother shot at U.S. checkpoint?), lack jobs (thanks to sanctions and war), and lack education (thanks again to sanctions and war) are not likely to be intimidated by the threat of more random death raining down from the heavens; after 13 years, they have learned to live with the uncertainty of death. What we need to offer is an alternative path for youth so that ISIL isn't their only option for finding a social network and support.
Many of today's 20-year old militants were scared 7-year-old kids when we blew into Iraq in 2003. Their lives were turned upside down. Many of them were pulled out of school and never learned to read or write. What can we expect of human beings who were thrust into hell on earth? That they should somehow come out of such horror as grounded, productive, and decent human beings?
And now we plan to kill them for becoming Hellboys in the Babylonian Crucible of Hell?
I've tutored former gang kids, helping them study to get their GEDs. They struggle to find a path out. The gangs offer family, security, work, and clear-cut objectives. The best way to beat gangs is to provide a healthier option that also offers family, security, work, and clear-cut objectives. You see the right path in organizations like conductor Gustavo Dudamel's musical program El Sistema where the "gang" is a new musical family. You see it in programs in the U.S. where urban kids dance in hip hop groups, compete in spelling bees, or participate in science competitions.
Rather than bombing we should be asking Saudi Arabia and Qatar to form moderate schools of progressive Islamic learning and institutes that teach the best traditions of the artistic and cultural heritage of the Arab world as well as the latest in modern thought. They should be recruiting just as heavily as ISIL.
If there is somewhere else for disaffected youth to go, it will be hard for ISIL to exist. If we don't help to create that somewhere else, we shouldn't be surprised if lost people continue to look for meaning in the arms of ISIL.
BACK to war footing? I thought we were still in the War on Feeling Very Scared Something Very Bad Might Happen.
The family and friends of Brian K. Arsenault (listed as the latest casualty of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan on 09/04/2014) would be surprised to hear that his death by "hostile small arms fire" happened in a moment of peace.
I would say that we have five branches of government: executive. legislative, judicial, military/intel, and corporate. And it is the military/intel and corporate big wigs (fluttering back and forth from one branch to another to maintain maximum control) who oversee the three traditional branches that we like to think of as "our" government. So, alas, we're ruled by the war suits of a military-industrial oligarchy.
Oh, my goodness. I looked at this young woman and I thought, she looks so much like Anne Frank! And just like Anne, she is suffering because humans are foolish and generalize about each other.
Anne Frank had nothing to do with the figures used to frighten her fellow Germans (the Bolshevik anarchists throwing bombs, the war profiteers like the Barmat brothers who cheated others via shady investment schemes, etc.); yet she, along with millions of other Jewish people, was scapegoated as being like all the "dangerous Jews" of the Weimar Republic headlines.
Sadly, we seem to have learned nothing. People continue to generalize, blaming and fearing entire groups when they are scared by the behavior of a few.
As a young teen, Anne continued to trust in the basic good of humanity. The least that we can do is try to teach each other to believe it, too.
The majority should not be seen as responsible for what is done by specific individuals. Only those individuals are responsible. Palestinian toddlers (and the majority of their 1.8 million neighbors) don't shoot rockets. Afghan toddlers (and the majority of their 31 million neighbors) don't run militant training camps.
I look again at the picture of the girl retrieving her books, and I can hear Anne Frank's voice: ""Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?"
In human folklore, all around the world, people tell stories about the suffering and unexpected triumph of the underdog.
Here's a list of just a few underdogs who are well-known in the West: David versus Goliath. Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader. Captain Stephen Hiller versus Alien Invaders. Harry Potter versus Voldemort.
Historically, the Jewish people were the underdog, chased from place to place around the globe by a never-ending list of "giants" who forced them to develop the resilience and creativity that is the hallmark of the underdog's unexpected success.
But, today, Israel is the giant. The Palestinians are the underdog. And Israel is dismayed to discover that many see it as a mash up of Goliath + Darth Vader + Alien Invaders + Voldemort.
When you get power, the only way to not become a figure of evil is to be magnanimous and treat all others very well, even better than they deserve, simply because you are powerful enough to do so.
A familiar heroic example is of The Lone Ranger who was powerful enough that he could have used his gun to shoot foes through the heart, but who instead wins our favor by treating each enemy with dignity (even the baddest of the bad) and by shooting the gun out of his opponent's hand.
The lesson for Israel? Security measures like the Iron Dome along with restraint, compassion, mercy, and dialogue are the only way to achieve peace and to be respected as a figure of power. To do otherwise is to cross to the dark side.
One thing that also goes unmentioned is that the tactics used by the fighters in Gaza are typical of asymmetrical warfare (not anomalies employed only by Hamas).
When fighters have no gunboats, submarines, tanks, F-16 fighter planes, and the like, the only possible way to fight is to use guerrilla warfare and the only way to survive is to fight out of the areas that Israel is less inclined to hit. Israel (and supportive media) imply that such a tactic is monstrous and bestial and shows that Palestinian fighters are "less human" than Israeli fighters.
But this kind of fighting is par for the course among any groups where the playing field is uneven. Israelis should know this as their fighters used guerrilla tactics against the British back when their forces were vastly inferior.
The media's bias shows when pundits don't discuss the normal differences between fighters of vastly disparate strength and what that means for trying to end the combat.
As someone who lives in the U.S. Southwest, a region of big states with vast open spaces, I often find it hard to comprehend the size of other parts of the world.
To the north of me, up in Oceanside, CA, is Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corp Base Camp. The entire Gaza Strip at 139 square miles would actually fit INSIDE Camp Pendleton, which measures 200 square miles.
I was born in Flagstaff, Arizona. To the north of my hometown is the Navajo Nation. The Navajo tribal land is 27,413 square miles. So how many Gaza Strips would fit inside the Navajo Nation? 197. That is not a typo. One hundred and ninety seven Gaza Strips would fit inside a single Native American reservation located in northern Arizona. (Note: The total number of Native American reservations across the state of Arizona is 22.)
Excellent post. The media also should do a much better job of comparing the weapons used by the Israeli army (guided missiles, white phosphorus, DIME bombs dropped from fighter jets, etc.) with those used by individual Hamas fighters (unguided, short-range rockets that travel 9-14 miles).
If a lone nut built a crude rocket from a bunch of Fourth of July fireworks and then fired it from your neighborhood toward a local police station so that it hit on the ground outside, shattering the precinct windows, would it make sense for the police to respond by requesting that the US Military go in and drop GBU-28 bombs (5000 pound bombs with laser and GPS guidance systems) throughout your neighborhood in the belief that this will terrify you into locating the lone nut and convincing him not to fire more homemade rockets?
The majority of people in Gaza have no control over Hamas operatives. They have no more control than you and I have over crazed gunmen or criminals of all sorts who kill within our communities. It makes no sense for Israel to attack the general Gaza populace whenever a few Hamas fighters shoot off crude DIY missiles that travel about 9 to 14 miles. Israel has a missile shield that intercepts many of these simple rockets. It has the ability to move settlers near the border regions into more protected areas away from the range where these rockets fall. Israel has many, many choices.
Given that most Gaza rockets do nothing more than land in fields, Israel could scoot people out of range and sit back and laugh at the pathetic "firecrackers" that fall harmlessly without effect. Full military attacks by the IDF serve as recruiting tools for Hamas and encourage Palestinians to be militants. If the IDF focused instead on shielding Israelis without retaliation, it would make it clear to Hamas that their use of violence is a completely impotent way to try and improve their situation.
I've seen more hardline articles coming out of Israel where the writers are essentially saying, "Israel needs to annex the West Bank (Judea and Samaria being the preferred term by the right) and remove all the Arabs."
How Mr. Meltzer envisions removing the majority Arab population from the West Bank he declines to say, other than wishing for an "alternate or creative solution".
Particularly alarming is a renewal of remarks like that of former Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai who once stated: “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” That some in Israel are willing to consider a "shoah" (Holocaust) of Arabs as the final solution for the Palestine / Israel conflict is sobering indeed.
Netanyahu's current strategy looks like a piece-by-piece push to get all the Arab population to go to Jordan, Egypt or elsewhere in the greater world.
Unless a Palestinian Mandela and an Israeli Mandela come up with a whole new vision, it looks like the incremental dispossession of the Palestinians will continue.
It could be argued that al-Baghdadi is “our” Frankenstein monster. He was born in 1971, so he was only nine years old when the Iraq-Iran War began in 1980 (a war that the U.S. indirectly supported by giving Iraq financial aid and selling Iraq the components needed to make weapons, including chemical munitions).
After growing up with the hardship and deprivation of the Iraq-Iran war, he was 19 or 20 when we bombed Iraq during the First Gulf War in 1991. Then he experienced the deprivation of sanctions, followed by the horror of the U.S “Shock and Awe” attack in 2003, and the ensuing bloodbath that has run from that year until today.
One account says that he was a farmer living in the north of Baghdad when he was picked up during a mass sweep by U.S. forces in 2005 and held as a “civilian detainee”. Another account says that he was a hard-line Salafi Sunni imam and lecturer who was detained by U.S. forces on June 04, 2004. He spent four years in Camp Bucca prison, a U.S. facility that often came under heavy militant rocket fire, and he was released when the center was closed in 2009.
I’ve yet to find a clear explanation of why al Baghdadi was arrested and held. This vagueness indicates that our military prison record keeping is deeply flawed. Per the Washington Post, Camp Bucca was “viewed by many as an appalling miscarriage of justice where prisoners were not charged or permitted to see evidence against them.” (“In Iraq, Chaos Feared as U.S. Closes Prison” by Anthony Shadid, 03.22.2009)
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appears to be a textbook example of how the strategy that we’re using in our War on Terror is actually a Factory for Terror. After experiencing so much carnage and possibly torture at the hands of outsiders, is it any wonder that al-Baghdadi has turned on his creator? Uncle Sam deserves a new name: Uncle Samenstein.
Ah, but according to the White House, the new and improved definition of "boots on the ground" = regular American military troops doing a tour of duty.
Special forces and mercenaries from companies like Academi are apparently something else altogether. Perhaps we could call them "shadows on the ground". These "shadows" can be sent into combat without notifying the American people of their deployment or of their return in boxes, which puts an end to that pesky thing known as the anti-war protest. If we don't know we're at war, we can't protest. Right?
And you can join the thousands of other shadows on the ground who are already in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and who knows how many other places.
Back in Sept of 2002, I sent letters (via snail mail) against the Iraq war to President Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Barbara Boxet, Thomas Daschle, Dianne Feinstein, Susan A. Davis, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair.
It's so painful to re-read today what I wrote in 2002. I took such pains to make clear arguments against invading Iraq (setting up an analogy of how the win-win doctrine used in business could be used to avoid war), but I only received in return the most insipid, form responses.
Tony Blair's "Direct Communications Unit" wrote: "Mr. Blair receives many thousands of letters each week. It is impossible, therefore, for him to respond personally to the great majority of them....he has asked me to assure you that the points you make will be carefully considered." George W. Bush responded in April 2003 after the war was underway with the assertion, "Saddam Hussein's regime has ended and the Iraqi people are regaining control of their own country and future. Pockets of resistance still remain."
Ahh, yes. Those annoying little "pockets" that merely need to be sewn shut with a bit of tactical bombing...
In a second 2002 letter to Bush, I wrote, "The U.S. would take Baghdad, but the fact that we attacked first and the sheer destructiveness of the battle would make us appear as the bad guys--upsetting our allies and incensing many people within the Muslim world...beyond this, we would have the difficult task of stabilizing a shattered country which would be at the mercy of opportunistic warlords and dissenting factions. All this turmoil might only encourage the growth of extremist groups--especially if we do not have the support of surrounding Arab states".
Seeing my old letters reminds me that it was very clear at the time that the war on Iraq was wrong and would make things worse. What remains unclear (then and today) is how to get any of the people in power to listen...
So after all these years of a War on Terror to stop foreign suicide bombers, we now have a rash of domestic suicide shooters.
Like the suicide bombers, the suicide shooters intend to intimidate the public and to demonstrate that civil government can't protect the people. Inflammatory hate TV and hate radio delivered by fearful commentators serve the same purpose as radical Friday sermons delivered by extremist imams: the goal is to stir up the masses, persuading the disturbed and susceptible to kill themselves and innocent others to instigate a revolution against the state.
What is the responsibility of the US media and of US political organizations? Shouldn't we discuss how, at the very least, we ought to act like adults, be ladies and gentlemen, and demonstrate civil discourse, dropping the hysteria of click-baiting headlines and hyperbolic posturing over political platforms, and conduct our lives with a common sense restraint that won't encourage the vulnerable to embrace suicide shooter martyrdom?
The FOX pundits don't seem to realize that not all countries have free speech like we have in the United States. They also seem to think that "speaking out" means rioting in the streets.
But, in repressive countries, protests where people take to the streets are often organized by government and/or religious authorities. So, street protests are more likely to measure what a few powerful authorities care about, not what the majority of people believe.
FOX also ignores the many articles, essays, and books where Muslim thinkers make arguments for a more secular vision of Islam. For example, "A Religion, Not A State" by Souad Tagelsir Ali. Or "Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a" by Abdullahi Ahmed Ah-Na`im.
It's a pity that FOX doesn't invite the authors of such books to be guests so that viewers could see the diversity of opinion across the Middle East.
The slow pace of solar power development is absolutely maddening. You would think, for instance, that Phoenix, Arizona would have built the first commercial solar plant decades ago and that the entire state would be solar by now, but, in Arizona, the first solar facility was built in a much smaller city--Flagstaff (my hometown).
The above is good, but unfortunately, APS has the monopoly on power in the state, so it continues to hang on to old sources of power while developing solar very slowly.
On top of that, in 2013, the Arizona Corporation Commission eliminated corporate incentives for solar and reduced residential incentives.
Actually, there were lots of black cowboys and several who ran large cattle operations. One of the more famous black cattle ranchers was Daniel Webster Wallace; he worked as a cowboy and, in 1885, he purchased 1280 acres in Texas where he later ran his cattle. When he died in 1939, his estate was worth more than 1 million dollars. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fwaah
If you Google “black cowboys”, you’ll see lots of great images from the frontier days!
Given that a number of Black Americans (like boxer Muhammad Ali) converted to Islam in the 1950’s and 1960’s, it’s certainly within historical possibility that there could have been a black ranching family who’d run cattle since the late 1800’s and converted to Islam in the 20th century.
Imagine that the Bundy ranching family in Nevada, instead of being white and Mormon, are all black and Muslim. And imagine that they, too, believe not only that the federal government should have no jurisdiction over the public land adjoining their ranch, but also that a second revolutionary war should topple the U.S. government.
Imagine that, just like Mr. Bundy, they lost two court decisions and are expected to either pay one million in overdue fees or have their cattle seized to pay the debt. Imagine that they send out a call, via Facebook and Twitter, for all like-minded thinkers to take up arms and prepare to fight the agents sent to collect the cattle.
How would the media describe some 2000 black, Muslim men, armed with automatic rifles and shotguns, who drive from all across the country to show up in Nevada ready to kill government officials?
How would the media portray those black, Muslim men when they used their guns to shut down I-15, a major interstate freeway, forcing hundreds of travelers to bake in the hot desert sun until the road could be re-opened?
What would right-wing pundits say about those black, Muslim men who were crouched on overpasses training their sniper sights on the cowboys and drivers hired by the federal government to move the cattle?
Would they agree with those black, Muslim militants who planned to put their wives and girlfriends on the front lines so there would be news footage of federal agents shooting women?
Would Nevada politicians, senator Dean Heller and Governor Brian Sandoval, still throw their support behind a Bundy who said, “. . . I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing,” if he were Muslim and black?
Try as hard as I can, I can’t see people on the right using any word other than "terrorist" to describe homegrown, black, Muslim militants who are willing to use violence to support their belief that the U.S. government is meaningless.
And that shows us exactly how far Americans have to go before we define each other by character, not race or religion.
Ironically, Cliven Bundy has been hoist by his own (the cowmen’s) petard. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 was created in response to the demands of Western ranchers just like Mr. Bundy. The act made it possible for ranchers with money and connections to exclude others from what had been open range.
Before the BLM-administered act, Mr. Bundy would have competed and possibly feuded with anyone else who wanted to run livestock on the open range next to his 150-acre ranch in Nevada. In the late 1800’s, when folk like the Bundy’s moved to the West, they faced grazing competition from Spanish ranching families who’d been in the area since the 1500’s along with many others (Native Americans and immigrants including the Basque, the Germans, and the Irish) who also wanted to feed their sheep, goats, and/or cattle.
A grazing allotment is generally good for ten years and buys the purchaser freedom from feuding with neighbors, freedom from land turned to desert by overgrazing, and freedom from doing repairs (water improvements, noxious weed removal, wildfire prevention and recovery, etc.) that are done by the feds.
If the BLM was not providing the services that Mr. Bundy purchased, then he should have kept records and taken them to court for their delinquency. Suing them for removing the competition makes no sense.
I’d be willing to bet that if the public lands where Mr. Bundy has his cattle were scorched by a severe, national-disaster level wildfire, he would be more than happy to see federal crews arriving to restore the native flora for his cows.
On my way to see relatives in Arizona over the holidays, I drove past the recently commissioned Solana solar thermal power plant near Gila Bend, Arizona. It’s an impressive achievement in renewable energy. During testing in October 2013, using molten salt thermal energy storage, the plant provided power for a record six hours without sunlight:
With a goal to provide 15% of its power from renewable sources by 2025, Arizona has set its sights low, but technology like Solana’s could easily provide a much higher percentage of energy given Arizona’s sunshine and vast open spaces.
So what innovative company, you ask, designed and built this marvel of solar collection, perhaps some industrious homegrown Arizona engineering firm? Nope. Abengoa is a company from Spain! http://www.abengoa.com/web/en/index3.html
How is it that the United States, a nation that prides itself on being on the cutting edge of technology, is not the birthplace of this innovation?
If you’re a student and considering careers, please look seriously into becoming an engineer who will shake up this country and get us as excited about sustainability as we once were about exploring outer space.
The storm surge (at least 15 feet high and as far inland as five miles) has caused horrific devastation across the Philippines.
Coastal dwellers need to understand that the threat of "wipe-you-off-the-map" surge flooding is likely to destroy cities long before the oceans rise enough to permanently cover coastal land.
Many of our biggest U.S. urban centers (New York, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco) are on or very near the coast.
Imagine the impact if these cities were washed over by 15 foot high waves that ran five miles inland.
Imagine if all our military capability could leap into action to provide rescue assistance with the same speed with which it now leaps into war.
Military cargo planes would already be dropping thousands of buoyant packets of water and food across Haiyan's devastation (just as we scatter PSYOP leaflets) and cargo drones would be going back and forth from offshore naval ships to lower goods into inaccessible areas.
Imagine that. Drones bringing aid instead of drones bringing death.
I’m puzzled by the assessment (from Professor Cole and Joe from Lowell) that the Westgate mall attack is a sign of “weakness” and will have only a negligible effect. Isn’t terrorism a concern precisely because it requires such a minor effort (in terms of money and training) on the part of the terrorist group?
Kenya relies heavily on its tourism industry. If only ½ of one percent of all tourists who were planning to visit Kenya in the coming year decide to cancel their plans, that is still a significant economic impact. A four-day act of terror arranged for only a few thousand dollars could wipe out a year of million-dollar advertisements for the adventure of a lifetime on safari in Masai Mara.
Isn’t that one reason why, after 9/11, our country embarked on a war rather than a fugitive hunt? If the members of Al Shabab figure out that their survival depends on learning how to remain fragmented, to become better ghosts, to hit and disappear, hit and disappear, couldn’t they rebound and continue to wreak havoc?
The video from Channel 4 showed that there was a lot of local support for the Al Shabab fighters. I find that worrisome. Also, the report that a number of Americans may be among the terrorists in the Westgate mall is a big concern. What is happening to make refugees leave our land of opportunity for the wastelands of war? ...
Why is it that the U.S. is having a strident debate about striking Syria, while Israel simply carries out hit after hit without provoking much international comment? If Al-Assad is already having his capabilities degraded by Israeli missile strikes—and these strikes have not deterred him from continuing to fight—why should U.S. strikes be any different? Furthermore, if Israel is carrying out strikes, why does the U.S. need to get involved? It appears that Israel is capable of targeting sensitive military / research sites and can hit Al-Assad by launching missiles/bombs from its submarines, fighter planes, and air bases. Since Israel has already been hitting Syria (and apparently isn’t hindered either by public approval or by international law), why haven’t they stepped up their attacks in response to the sarin gas? Also, why did the Israeli populace rush to buy gas masks at the thought of U.S. strikes when their nation is already at war with Syria? If Al-Assad doesn’t hit back when Israel bombs, why he is more likely to hit back if the U.S. bombs?
The following strikes are described in articles at http://www.israelnationalnews.com and at http://www.nytimes.com as well as other major media.
Friday, July 26, 2013 – Israel bombed Syrian military base near Quneitra.
Friday, July 05, 2013 – Israel bombed the Syrian port of Latakia to destroy a suspected shipment of Russian-made Yakhont anti-ship missiles.
May 05, 2013 – Israeli missile strikes hit the outskirts of Damascus, targeting the bases of the elite Republican Guard and storehouses of long-range missiles, in addition to the Jamraya Center for Scientific Research on Mount Qassioun that American officials have called the country’s main chemical weapons facility. Other targets were a paragliding airport in the al-Dimas area of Damascus and a site in Maysaloun. (Per photos below, they also hit a chicken farm.) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2319645/Israel-attacks-Syria-Scenes-devastation-left-rockets-Syria-pledges-retaliation-declaration-war.html
May 03, 2013 – Israel bombed advanced, long-range ground-to-ground missiles stored at a warehouse at Damascus International Airport.
January 29, 2013 Israel bombs may have hit the following targets: a convoy of sophisticated Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles (per Israel) or the Jamraya Center for Scientific Research outside Damascus.
November 12, 2012 Israel bombed mobile artillery units on the Syrian side of the Syrian/Israel border in the Golan Heights.
September 06, 2007 Israel bombed a site in Syria alleged to hold an underground nuclear reactor in Al-Kibar. The Syrians insisted that it was not. (Per an article “The Silent Strike” by David Makovsky in The New Yorker, in March 2007, the Mossad stole plans about the facility from the computer of Ibrahim Othman, the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, by sneaking into his Vienna home. In September, they inserted commandos to assist with setting the laser guidance for the Israeli missiles and carried out the bombing.) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/17/120917fa_fact_makovsky
That the U.S. is ready to go to war without waiting to gather evidence is very suspicious. Doesn't this sound like Iraq Redux? Listen to the news. Note the lack of detail.
Doctors Without Borders doesn't have staff at the three hospitals in Damascus; the hospitals are ones to whom they send supplies so they know the workers there, but none of their staff have been able to visit and see the patients. So the full extent of evidence is photos and video and the reports of survivors who say that they don't know who fired the missiles.
We need to get blood samples and autopsy results. The area needs to be combed for debris to see if pieces of the missiles and canisters can be found. It makes no sense to go in hurling bombs when for all we know there are chemical weapons stockpiles hidden in places that we might hit. Anyone with half a brain gathers all relevant data first before embarking on a mission that could make things worse.
All this reminds me of the 2007 interview from Democracy Now where Amy Goodman interviewed General Wesley Clark and Clark says, "So I came back to see him [another general] a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
With leaders that Machiavellian, it's no wonder Americans distrust their government.
This reminds me of a news article that I read over ten years ago. It was an obituary for a U.S. solider who had returned home from a tour of duty and then committed suicide. A family member (a sister, I think?) said that he had come home changed, suffered terrible nightmares, and had told her that he was haunted by having to bulldoze bodies into mass graves. She then made the curious remark that she didn't believe what he said about mass graves because "we [the U.S.] wouldn't do that." At the time, I remember thinking, poor fellow. His own sister didn't believe him. And I wondered why the sister had such complete faith in the integrity of the U.S. and so little faith in the word of her brother...
Ah, but the question is why did Trayvon Martin decide to hit George Zimmerman? No one witnessed the start of the confrontation between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. We only have Zimmerman’s side of the story. So we cannot know whether or not Martin was justified in hitting and knocking down Zimmerman. If Zimmerman reached toward his holster or attempted to pull his gun out, then Martin would have every reason to think that he was about to be shot and that he needed to hit Zimmerman to stun him and take away the gun. If Zimmerman was simply standing and asking questions, then Martin did not have a right to step forward and hit him.
This is the truth: at the most crucial moment, we do not know what happened. We don’t know if Zimmerman blocked Martin’s path. We don’t know if Martin jumped Zimmerman. We don’t know who grabbed first, shoved first or swung a fist first. We don’t know if Martin realized from Zimmerman’s body language that Zimmerman had a weapon.
Many a policeman has shot someone and claimed self-defense because the person who was killed “made a furtive move like he was pulling out a gun.” Did Zimmerman make a furtive move that Martin interpreted as pulling out a weapon? We don’t know. It’s even possible that Zimmerman doesn’t know either. In the heat of the moment, when each man was anxiously eyeing the other, it’s possible that Zimmerman reached back and felt for his holster without even being aware that he had done so.
There is a fog of war even in fistfights. I recall a fight that happened in a hallway back in high school. A conversation became a debate became an argument became shoves became fists within the space of a few seconds. Afterwards, each of the two teens claimed that the other one started it. And those of us who were standing right there, within feet of the tussle, were unable to say who was to blame. The whole thing happened too fast with each young man reacting negatively to the other. The principal ended up lecturing both students that they were equally responsible, that each man could have walked away, and that was the end of it.
In the initial police interview, Detective Chris Serino makes it clear he believes that Zimmerman is exaggerating how hard he was hit and that he was “slammed multiple times” into the pavement. Serino says, “That’s why we’re here today. Once again, these can be interpreted as capillary-type cuts or whatever, lacerations, uh, not really, um, coinciding with being slammed hard into the ground. OK? That’s skull fractures is you happen with that. I’ve seen ‘em all, you know.” https://www.txantimedia.com/?p=1025
Per the medical report of the Altamonte Family Practice, George Zimmerman suffered two scalp lacerations (one 2 ct. and the other 0.5 ct.) which did not require stitches and mild bruising on the back of his head. The scalp is filled with blood vessels and even a minor cut will bleed profusely. Getting slammed multiple times into solid pavement would have produced far more swelling, deep bruising, and most likely skull fracture. Look at pictures of boxers after fights if you want to see how much the human head will swell and bruise under severe trauma.
Just because Martin ended up on top of Zimmerman and struck him does NOT prove that Martin was the guilty party. Imagine if you thought a man with a gun was about to shoot you, wouldn’t you fight back? And wouldn’t you keep hitting him, trying to stun him, until you secured his gun?
Back in the mid 1990's, when I (as a young single white woman) was living in Los Angeles, I used to take the city bus to work. One morning, as I stood within a covered bus shelter and watched a stream of cars going past, I was baffled that virtually every driver who glanced toward me and the bus stop, gave a hard stare or even looked downright angry.
There was a traffic light a few feet past the bus shelter. As vehicles stopped at each red light, and various drivers again looked my way, face after face inexplicably darkened. I heard the "thunk, thunk, thunk" of door locks clicking down as drivers locked their doors. "What is going on?" I wondered. I was used to seeing a variety of gazes as I waited at bus stops, some indifferent, some friendly, some clearly checking me out flirtatiously, but never had I felt such a wave of universal hostility.
"Has something crazy happened in Los Angeles? Did every Angeleno get up on the wrong side of the bed?" I wondered. It was a very unpleasant feeling. At last, the city bus pulled up. The doors opened and as I stepped out of the shelter, a young black man stepped forward and went up the steps into the bus ahead of me. He had been standing, hidden from my view, on the other side of the bus shelter.
In a flash, I realized, given the angle, that all those hard glances, all those abruptly darkened gazes, all those hammered down door locks were quite likely directed at him.
It was the darkest epiphany. He was otherwise absolutely unremarkable. Just a tall young black fellow in jeans and a t-shirt. "My God," I thought. "Is that what he always faces? Looks of suspicion, fear, and outright anger? I'd be depressed if I had to face such universal hostility day after day." It was a true eye opener--the only time I ever felt that I had slipped into another person's skin and known the world as that person did.
For a few moments, I had intensely felt what had always been a rather abstract realization: that we each experience the world quite differently, according to the first impression reception that we receive from others. I can't begin to fathom how such an ongoing hostile reception might change and shape who I would be. It's no wonder there's such a huge gulf between white and black experience; we walk the same earth, but we live on separate planets.
Growing up in Northern Arizona, I heard a great deal about the many difficult problems facing the Navajo Nation, but I would guess that most Americans know far more about Palestine and Israel than about the Navajo / Hopi land dispute and native rights issues which impact fellow citizens.
President Shelly traveled to Israel last December and again in March. As much of the Navajo Nation is arid, he wanted to learn about desert farming techniques used by the Israelis. But his trip offended many natives who identify strongly with the Palestinian plight.
Since Israeli politicians have since made a reciprocal trip to the Navajo Nation, I wonder if that visit made any of them consider the similarities between the experience of the Palestinians and the Native Americans? Does it make them realize that, at the very least, Palestinians ought to have what the Navajo have?
The Navajo are U.S. citizens and Navajo tribal citizens; they have a voice as Navajo and as Americans. Their situation is not perfect, but the Navajo are certainly not stateless--and that in itself gives them hope for a better future.
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Scares me to think that maybe Trump will never go away...
He has a heart attack and dies...his supporters don't believe he's dead, create a cult following, and produce endless Donald pictures, statues, etc.
He is impeached or declines to run in 2020...his supporters cry foul and insist that Pence rename the Republican party as the Trumpian party and continue carrying out the Donald's platform.
He serves two terms...his supporters push for the election of a Trump child to continue the dynasty.
I'm really starting to wonder if the United States is the country that turned into a TV show.
"You never get a second chance to make a first impression."
America, think about this. Whatever Trump says and does will be forever associated with the USA. He is shaming all of us.
Can we please fire Trump now before he does even worse damage?
One difference, though, is that today's wars aren't just about seizing and maintaining territory. They are about the ability to prevent peace and to keep besieged nations from participating in global business because of a lack of local security.
Even though ISIL no longer controls regions of Iraq, there are still daily car bombings and general lawlessness. If Islamic state fighters can continue to make daily life insecure, Iraq will struggle to provide for its citizens.
Developers need a certain level of security before they will build international projects. The Hyatt Regency Sulaymaniyah was supposed to open in 2017; as far as I can tell, that project has been stalled by violence.
I will celebrate when I stop reading news like this bombing that happened on Friday, Dec. 9th:
https://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/seven-civilians-killed-injured-two-bomb-blasts-west-ramadi/
I side with Ti Charles on this. Horse breeding farms were not public entities for trade on the stock market in the early 1900's. Our current market system is a tool for innovation and stagnation. The stagnation comes when shareholders will not allow a company to change its business plan or experiment with new technology for fear of losing stock value. The downside of being publically traded is that your actual enterprise (the research you want to do or products you want to make) are not the first priority. The first priority is return on investment (ROI).
Exxon shareholders voted to jettison the company's solar division in 1984 after it was projected that solar would not be viable until at least 2012 and not ROI for some years after.
CEOs of public companies must please shareholders or they will be fired. On the market, the mere whisper of an unexpected business plan change may spook investors and cause share value to plummet. Exxon cannot admit or act as if oil is no longer viable; it's risky for it to even open divisions in renewables because analysts might spook. The need to please the market and to maintain corporate worth is the elephant in the room.
A CEO will not risk collapsing the company and can only make stealthy moves to transition. We saw this when oil companies became energy companies.
Our government should be helping energy companies make responsible transitions and private forums should address this crucial issue.
Awful to see all the devastation.
The Sonesta Sint Maarten posted a Hurricane Irma Update which has a rather stark typo (I certainly hope it is a typo!): "Due to the damages the resorts suffered, all further reservations from now through the end of 2417 will be cancelled."
https://www.sonesta.com/sx/maho-bay/sonesta-maho-beach-resort-casino-spa-st-maarten
Wonder what the whole planet will look like in 400 years...
Yes, the deniers are indeed odd.
They happily listen to scientists when predictions tell them things they want to know, like where to dig for oil or when the tides will provide the best surfing or the days to not go sailing because a tropical storm is expected.
But the moment that science might threaten their business interests, then they denounce reports created by scientific method as being unreliable and "fake".
It can't be stated enough that most major human population centers are either on or close to the sea or near a waterway connected to the sea.
Consider New York City, Tokyo, Sydney, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Alexandria. All of these cities (and many more major metropoles) must either spend billions in sea walls or get lost beneath the rising tides.
Think of how your community is structured around your current local climate. What will happen if you live in a ski town and the snow ends? What will happen if you live in a desert town like Phoenix and the temperature shifts to Death Valley ranges? What will happen if you live in farming community and the rains never come? What will happen to the global economy when there is no good zone to grow coffee or grapes or hardwood trees?
We humans need to get to work both on lowering CO2 and on survival contingency plans. Could we make our cities as hermetically sealed as spaceships if the surface of the Earth becomes as hostile as outer space? How can we preserve human knowledge before the famine and war now raging through nations around the world arrives at our door?
We must plan to mitigate the worst if we want our children and grandchildren to have a future.
We also need to re-green our planet and create more urban forests. If you are ever in the Los Angeles area, I recommend visiting TreePeople. They have a beautiful park with a Drought Solutions Tour that contrasts an eco-friendly home and landscaping with an eco-devastating home and landscaping.
They have a lot of wonderful advice about what you can do to re-green your own community. Here is their website: https://www.treepeople.org/visit/park-info
A very expensive show. Estimates in the news were around 16 million for one MOAB as that is the cost of another massive bomb, the MOP.
But isn't the weight around 20,000 pounds (10,000 kilograms)--not 1100?
At any rate, as far as military tactics go, the use of such a bomb on rag-tag militias in mountain caves is a colossal waste of money. The latest estimate from the Afghan army is that 36 militants died and 3 caves collapsed.
So we spent about $40,000 per dead fighter...in a region where each day 3000 young boys cross the threshold of child to man, becoming old enough for the Islamic State to try to recruit, and some 300 foreigners arrive each month looking to join IS.
One would think that a $16 million bomb would be used on something in the Middle East with a value equivalent to the Pentagon, a complex with 20,000+ employees and millions of dollars’ worth of high tech equipment.
An MOAB dropped on the center of a major city would be a game changer as nuclear bombs were when dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But when dropped in an area where most of the force is expended on mountain shrubs, grasses, squirrels, birds, and metamorphic rock, well, what could be more stupid?
The militants can recruit new people within a few months, move operations to another set of caves, and get more funds from wealthy Arab backers so they can purchase more guns and ammunition.
They probably don't need to spend more than $20,000 to replace what our 16 million+ investment (and that doesn't include the millions more spent on planes, fuel, troops, etc.) destroyed!!!
I recall that the neocons were interested in having Syrian exile Farid Ghadry as their preferred puppet:
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/nov/28/news/OE-WEISMAN28
Anyone know if that is still the case? I can't imagine the majority of Syrians being pleased. For a taste of Mr. Ghadry's political stance, see posts on his blog at the Times of Israel:
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/farid-ghadry/
And his website: http://reform4syria.org/
Heaven help Syria if this vengeful man becomes their new leader...
The only people who "paid a price" were the Syrians killed and wounded (and their loved ones). And how much you want to bet that they are people with next to no control over Assad's war?
How does murdering some poor Joe who is a mechanic or a guard at the air station and some farming family that tends fields only a couple of miles away from the air base change anything?
All these centuries of humans writing about the stupidity of war, and yet, here we are, still persisting in humanity's stupidest iteration of warfare.
Those missiles tipped with sarin must have also made beautiful, beautiful trails through the air...before they hit the earth.
Ugh.
Am I the only person who gets a graphic visual in my mind when I read about the flight of 59 US Tomahawk missiles? I picture the eight dead soldiers at the airfield and 9 dead civilians (4 civilians from the village of Shayrat and 5 civilians from the village of Al-Hamrat). And I picture the 7 injured civilians in the village of Al-Manzul which is 2 and 1/2 miles away from the air base.
I don't need photographers on the ground to see in my mind's eye the torn bodies and the weeping family members. Apparently, no one else has the brain that I have.
When my fellow Americans read that some missiles hit an airfield, they think only of vapor trails and the rocket's red glare.
If presented with photos of blackened potholes in a cement runway surrounded by a vast wasteland of dirt, they are incapable of transferring that violence to the violence done to human bodies.
The babies we just killed apparently never existed because the West didn't publish the photos of their mangled bodies.
Juan, it would be much appreciated if you and your staff could dig further into the oil/gas issue on Syria...
Note who is on the advisory board for Genie Energy, a company that is doing exploratory drilling in northern Israel: Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, R. James Woolsey!
https://genieoilgas.com/about-us/strategic-advisory-board/
And check out this USGS assessment of undeveloped eastern Mediterranean oil and gas resources:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3014/pdf/FS10-3014.pdf
One of the three areas of interest (the Levant Margin Reservoirs Assessment Unit) includes land and ocean area that belong to Syria.
Afek, a division of Genie Energy Ltd, would like to drill on land contested by Syria. With Al-Assad out of the way and a US/Israel friendly leader installed, wouldn't it be easier to conduct such drilling?
Here’s a detailed post about the January 10, 2017 startup of a division (Atid) devoted specifically to drilling for oil and gas in the Golan Heights:
http://investors.genie.com/profiles/investor/ResLibraryView.asp?ResLibraryID=82883&BzID=2100&g=485&Nav=0&LangID=1&s=0
Cui bono? Cui bono? Cui bono?!
Good essay. When I get discouraged about the USA heading backwards, there is one person who cheers me up: Elon Musk.
Here are two great links about what he is doing to bring about a coal-free future:
https://www.wired.com/2015/05/tesla-batteries/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/10/elon-musk-i-can-fix-south-australia-power-network-in-100-days-or-its-free
May the next president be as forward-looking!
Top Ten Places Where Trump Supporters Should Direct Blame for Lost Jobs
10) A preference for “maximizing shareholder value” that took off in the 1980’s and made companies get valued for stock, not quality of service or skill.
09) The rapid mechanization and automation of industry that removed and/or changed jobs faster than workers could re-train.
08) The continuing flow of young people from rural communities to big cities.
07) An increase in global trade and global corporations so that a garment worker in Cleveland, Ohio who makes $12.00/hour is competing with a garment worker in Shenzhou, China who makes $3.00/hour.
06) The emergence of labor contractors who can find workers around the world and bring them to the United States on H1B and H2B visas.
05) The creation of job “pipelines” that exist within closed systems where foreign contractors provide legal foreign workers—farm workers from Honduras; IT workers from India; mall kiosk salespeople from Israel; etc. The American citizens who are outside those pipelines will never get those jobs; there is no system to apply for them.
04) The preference for Human Resources staff to hire locally when possible; most workers are reluctant to move without the promise of a job, but if they don’t move, they won’t get a crack at local jobs.
03) The use of computers (applicant tracking systems) and detailed background checks to weed out most resumes, so it’s almost impossible to make a cold-call job pitch to a real human.
02) The need to use networking for most hiring; if you don’t know the right people, it doesn’t matter that you have the right degree or skill; if you are trying to move into a new field, you may lack the contacts to make the transition.
01) Hiring manager niche bias, i.e. young and attractive college kids for wait staff and retail sales; tall males for management positions, etc.
Undocumented immigrants have next to nothing to do with the above. If the Donald succeeds in chasing out millions of undocumented folk, there will be labor contractors on the other side of the border with schemes to get those folk back over to the states as indentured servants with legal work visas.
Trump comes off as a 4th grade student who didn't read his history assignment (a brief introduction to the Israeli / Palestinian conflict), so he's come up with something vague and amiable that he hopes will satisfy the teacher.
Maybe Trump has never read a single thing about the Middle East. Maybe he hears "Israel and Palestine" and he thinks, "Oh, yeah, that region where they keep fighting over the land. Someone ought to fix that."
It is so hard for me to conceive of adults who never get beyond a 5-year-old's comprehension of politics and history...
Look here for statistics on the decline in travel to the United States since the inauguration of Donald Trump:
https://qz.com/904883/the-effect-trump-is-having-on-international-tourism-and-air-travel/
A colleague at work who has relatives in Iran told me that her aunts (educated globe trotters who work in the travel industry) have cancelled their U.S. vacation that had been planned for March. Even with the reversal of the ban, they have decided to wait and see if the U.S. is going to "settle down".
How many other foreigners are doing the same thing? How many hard-working Americans will earn less money or even lose their jobs because of Trump?
This article breaks my heart.
I remember people that I knew when I lived in Los Angeles and taught English as a Second Language: Sawsan from Iraq; Manal from Syria; Zaman from Afghanistan; Tahmina from Tajikistan--and so many more.
If I were president, I'd create a program to pay for every American to travel around the world for one year after high school.
I don't think a Trump or a Pence or a Bannon would be elected or in power if each U.S. citizen had friends around the world.
Hello, Juan--
Yes, what you say about Japan being reluctant to naturalize foreigners is certainly true. But when I used to teach English classes to young people from Japan, I found many of the younger generation more open to the idea. Here's a website with some statistics about Japanese international marriage trends: http://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00096/
Necessity may prompt the Japanese--and many other nations--to open their doors. I hope that will happen in a gentle way around the world instead of the door-slamming that we saw this week in the U.S.
Whenever I read that a country (like Japan) is worried about having a graying and declining population, I always think—what’s the issue? There are young people in populous nations all around the world who would be happy to move to Japan and make their lives there.
That is what humans have been doing for millennia. We migrate. We mix. After a few generations, we have a more diverse genetic make-up even if we have managed to pass along the same set of traditions and call our regional “tribe” by the same name.
The people that we consider traditional Anglo Saxon Brits today have the blood of Germans, French, Spaniards, Italians, Turks, etc. flowing in their veins—just watch the current PBS Masterpiece show “Victoria” to remind yourself of the true nature of the British royal bloodline.
As for population, consider that during the time of Christ, the entire human population across the whole planet was about the same as the current population in the United States.
In 1964, when the Beatles came to America, the U.S. population was around one-half of what it is now. Even if some terrible plague swept our country and killed 50% of the population, we would only be set back to 1964.
That white supremacists fret about white people dying out—when far more white people exist today than ever existed in the history of Earth—shows only that the white supremacists have no idea how numerous humanity is and that there are plenty of people, of every color.
Trump and his minions didn't even have the decency to create a transition period for his mad decree. People who were merely transiting through the United States on to other nations have been sent back to the airport of origin and must come up with money for a new ticket in order to get back home.
A man as wealthy as Trump probably can’t even imagine what is required of an ordinary person on a limited income who purchases a $2000.00 plane ticket. That person may have worked for two years, putting aside $100.00 a month into savings, before he or she could purchase a ticket. And what happens if that person is returned, not to the place that they just left (as in the case of the Iraqi man who had flown from Stockholm, Sweden where he had been in a refugee center), but back to a country where they haven’t been for years? What happens if that person has no credit card and only a few hundred dollars in a bank account? Now, he or she must find work in a nation that is hostile or offering no opportunities and must save all over again.
All because Trump is so rash that he didn’t even create a grace period to implement his radical decree—he wanted it to happen immediately because all he thinks about is his petty self and how he wants the personal satisfaction of seeing his word made law. What a callous bastard.
Don't forget green roofs! Check them out here:
http://www.greenroofs.org
Or maybe Trump has only one "introducing me" script filled with banal flattery that he is using on his first call with all the "big league" leaders of the world, and he doesn't know Pakistan from Peru.
Trump is surrounding himself with strident, paranoid hawks who, in contrast, make hawkish Hillary Clinton look like Mother Teresa.
If Trump supporters like Retired General Thomas McInerney have their way, our military will invade and bomb both Iran and North Korea.
Re North Korea, McInerney has said, "We must be prepared to win a war, not execute a strike," and re Iran, he has drafted a plan for a full-fledged, pre-emptive air attack.
Trump comes across as a guy who likes excess and will sign off on a war campaign if it's as "yuge" as fire-bombing Dresden or nuking Hiroshima.
CoreCivic LLC (a private prison company) had their stock jump up over the past few days in response to the election. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/cxw/stock-chart
Investors apparently think that mass deportation will require more prisons...
Deportations currently take months, if not a year or more in some cases. I imagine Trump will try to speed up the process.
For the past several years, about 400,000 people have been deported each year.
Given that we already have a deportation system in place, I suppose it would not be that difficult (expensive, yes), but not that difficult for Trump to supersize the operation.
But boy, oh, boy, is he going to get a lot of pushback from upset people.
There’s another elephant in the room. The familiarization of celebrity. There are many Americans who pay very little attention to the news or to politics. They watch sports and game shows and reality TV. The rest of the time, they are busy with their jobs and families.
So, when a familiar figure like Trump comes along, they immediately are predisposed to view him favorably. Celebrity has an extraordinary ability to both normalize and exalt a person. Celebrity grants the status of kinship. A neighbor of mine (whose heritage is Hispanic and Native American) voted for Trump. Why? “Oh, I like him,” she said. “From way back, I remember him being on TV. He’s good at business, very successful. It’s time someone ran the country like a business.” Then she listed the usual talking points about why not to like Hillary Clinton (Benghazi, email, Clinton Foundation).
Once a celebrity is gifted with an anointment of fame, his/her fans will defend that person to the death. He or she has become a member of their family. Trump won in the way that Coca-Cola sells: extreme familiarity from years of marketing—along with the extreme repetition in the right-wing sphere of Clinton’s flaws. Racism plays a role, but I wouldn’t discount the hurricane-like force of sheer celebrity.
I must confess that I was very successfully whitewashed by all the children’s literature that I read as a child.
Almost every illustrated book with human characters (from A Child’s Garden of Verses to the Dick and Jane series) depicted a world of fair-skinned and often blonde-haired children. Children of other ethnicities appeared infrequently as exotic secondary characters.
I was left with the impression that the majority of people on the planet looked like the characters in these books and that, in various parts of the globe, there were small populations of “exotic” people who looked otherwise.
It was an absurd impression as it didn’t mirror the reality of the town where I lived, but I carried this unthinking impression that the civilized majority on the planet were white until I reached junior high school and learned more about the size and population of other nations.
I recall having a profound epiphany when it struck me that the default human color was brown! The human race, I realized, was pale white on one end, a broad band of various shades of brown all the way across the center making up the majority, and an ebony black at the other end.
At the time, I felt this as a profound shock. My perception of the skin tone variants of the human population of the world was completely wrong. Even though I had been raised to consider all humans equal, I was like someone who walked into a paper store expecting that most of the paper would be white with only some specialty papers coming in other colors, only to find out that it was the white paper that was the less common specialty shade. It felt like the world had been turned upside down!
Perhaps Ann Coulter never had that epiphany.
To John Wilson:
My understanding is that no one sits down and personally clicks through thousands of emails during an investigation of possible professional misconduct!
A search parameter is created of email addresses and of key words from topics that are pertinent to the matter (in this case, national security) and then the emails are scanned by a computer.
If the computer flags specific emails, then those emails are pulled and reviewed in more detail. A computer can run the initial scan within a matter of minutes.
If no suspect email addresses or key words are found (and several random sample emails are reviewed and found to be benign), then the search can be concluded very quickly.
The American poet James Ragan likes to tell a story about Bob Dylan. Back in 1985, Bob Dylan, Robert Bly, and James Ragan were three Americans among a group of international writers invited to read at the First International Poetry Festival in Moscow.
The event was held in a stadium and thousands of people attended. Ragan, who often read to small groups in coffee houses and university classrooms, was thrilled at the sight of so many people gathered to listen to poetry.
Bob Dylan, as he stood on the stage, however, was rather discomfited. Looking at all the literary greats, including Irish poet Seamus Heaney, he remarked, "I don't belong here."
Of course, he did. And it's a testament to the strength and influence of his writing that he was invited by President Mikhail Gorbachev to that poetry festival.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/james-ragan
Go through the photos in this "day in the life of the president" http://www.businessinsider.com/president-normal-day-obama-photos-2013-2 and imagine Trump in each shot.
I think Trump would be bored stiff with the amount of high-level reading, detailed discussion, and teamwork involved. He likes to be the sole cock of the walk, someone who issues orders and lets other people do the hard work.
Can you imagine him reading through stacks of legislative briefings or having a give-and-take discussion where he actually listens to other people?
If he did find himself elected, I think he'd either quit within the month or be so uninvolved in day-to-day work that his staff would be forced to run the nation without him.
The daily work of the president is often tedious and unglamorous. Conducting a hard-nosed negotiation with a single-minded focus on not paying more than
$500/square foot for a property is nothing like the kind of multi-level, cross-partisan discussions that must happen to get a bill to pass.
The First Sixth Months of a Trump Presidency
Month 1: Trump announces that all U.S law enforcement is obliged to carry out federal law and check immigration status during routine traffic checks. Thousands of undocumented people clog the prisons and states struggle to find enough planes and buses to carry out the mass deportations. Protests pop up all across the nation, then get out of hand and lead to major riots. The National Guard is deployed to quell the unrest. Local criminals take advantage of the chaos and begin looting.
Month 2:
Conservative and liberal militias spring up and openly do battle on U.S. streets. Car bombs and IEDs explode across the nation. The drought on the West coast intensifies and the cost of water skyrockets. Multiple Southwestern states have to ration electricity. Numerous small businesses go under.
Month 3:
Mexico gets upset over cuts in their water supply from the Colorado River. Trump tells the Mexican president that he doesn’t give a damn. Mexican drug lords organize a raid and take over the Imperial Dam on the Colorado River near the Arizona/Mexican border. Donald sends US troops to protect the dam. The Mexican president sends his own troops to protect Mexican citizens near the border. The Mexican cartels blow up the Imperial Dam and divert all the water across the border to their thirsty citizens. The fighting spreads from Yuma along the border, going west up to San Diego and east to Tucson.
Month 4:
People living in Yuma and Tucson are forced to flee, both to get away from fighting and because they are no longer getting water from the Arizona Canal. The water crisis intensifies and nervous business owners start to relocate away from Los Angeles, San Diego, Tucson, and Phoenix. The stock market plummets. In all the confusion, a team of Islamic State terrorists carries out simultaneous attacks that disable communication hubs for air traffic across the US and also trigger a severe multi-state electrical grid blackout.
Month 5:
The conservative and liberal U.S. militia groups blame each other and declare open war. The U.S. economy tanks as masses of Americans flee the fighting. A group of U.S. soldiers defect to form their own Neo-Patriot Army. They steal fighter planes and conduct bombing raids on universities, which they call hotbeds of liberal radicalism. The Presidents of China and Russia get together and insist that everyone come to the table and stop factional fighting. No one listens to them.
Month 6:
China, Russia, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia form an alliance and launch a set of blistering attacks on major U.S. military bases. The U.S. military is caught off guard as much of the U.S. military is either overseas, battling the Islamic State or is at home caught up in local civil fighting. China disables US computer systems with a cyber attack, then Russia drops a nuke on Washington, DC and a nuke on New York City, completely wiping out all the citizens that live there. The four allies then divide up the United States among themselves. The Mexicans get back all the land that they lost after the Mexican-American War including the southern half of California. The Russians take Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The Chinese administer the rest of the country and send over settlers from China to restore the farmland in the Midwest. The Saudi’s make arrangements to run all the U.S. oil and natural gas concessions. President Trump flees with his family and hides himself in a mansion on a remote island somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Water is another big factor in the region's stability. Given the confluence of poor agricultural practices in raising cotton, the desertification of the Aral Sea, and anthropogenic global warming (all within a landlocked nation), there is a high risk of environmental crisis.
How foolish we humans are to be bombing and shooting and exploiting each other while the threat of massive global drought keeps growing and growing...
Sounds like what we have is global gang banging--where it's hard to know who is allied with whom. See the article at the link below for parallels to the 600 odd gang factions in Chicago getting so decentralized that no one knows who is fighting whom.
Seems like the same kind of fracturing is happening in Syria and across the Middle East. Is it a kind of evolutionary response in warfare? If each person can be an army of one against the larger world, who needs armies affiliated with specific nations?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-violence-gangs-20160728-story.html
Such a clothing ban is also difficult to enforce. How is a police officer supposed to determine that he can't fine one woman because her covering is for sun protection, but he should fine another woman because her covering is to indicate that she is pious?
If overt religious reference in public is considered wrong, then the officer must go after the covered-up Amish tourist as well as the French Muslim citizen.
Go look at the sun protective swimwear at this website: http://www.sunprecautions.com/ A woman could wear the swim shirt, the skirted swim leggings, and either the shade cap with cross over drape or the headkini--all outfits not designed for religious expression but for sun protection--and meet the requirements for conservative Islamic dress.
I live in Southern California, and I see far more runners and swimmers who cover up because they don't want their skin to look like an old leather bag splotched with stains, and they don't want skin cancer.
Imagine the police officer harassing someone whose body was burn-scarred or who had skin cancer all because he thought her clothing looked like an Islamic burkini!
The police have better things to do with their time than force women on the beach to take off their cover-ups. I think most of the French would prefer that their police were apprehending murderous terrorists.
I would change "his psychotic break came from being jilted at the club" to "his psychotic break came after being jilted at the club".
People get jilted all the time without having psychotic breakdowns!
Since we can't convince our fellow humans to avoid a mass die off (of homo sapiens and perhaps as much as 90% of the current flora/fauna on the planet), maybe we should focus on creating ways to archive the best of human achievement so that any surviving humans don't have to start all over again at caveman level...
I agree with you 100%. If I had been president on 9/11, I would have pursued the attack as a horrific criminal case and followed the usual procedures of indictment, extradition, arrest, trial, etc. that are at the heart of civilized justice.
My point is that terrorism is a tactic of war; one terror attack makes people worry that more terror attacks are coming and that the nation COULD be destabilized as a result. Terror awakens people's personal nightmares about the possibility of war--even if you live in a nation that is well-protected by broad oceans and that is not in any eminent danger.
The "what if" nightmare of terrorism turning over time into war has enabled political and corporate leaders to scare people into spending billions.
But no one would be easily scared by a "what if" scenario of a couple of dog attacks leading to dogs everywhere attacking humans. That would be considered ridiculous!
We need to find a way to show people why a fair judicial system is the best way to deal with ALL kinds of criminals. A suicide bomber who would blow apart strangers is at the same level of evil as a serial killer who murders stranger after stranger.
Judicial procedure removes those who would use indiscriminate harm from the streets without causing additional destabilization and damage. That is the best way to break the cycle of violence.
I get the point, and I agree that using war to stop a technique of war is absurd, but I don’t think that merely comparing numbers of deaths by different agents is a good way to understand the impact of a death.
Per the CDC, as of Feb. 16, 2016, the annual death rate in the United States is 821.5 deaths per 100,000 people. Of a population around 300 million, about 2.6 million people die each year. That is a lot of deaths, but these deaths don’t threaten the stability of the nation, and they don’t have the same impact as do deaths caused by terrorism or by war.
Losing 50 people in a terrorist blast in an airport has a greater impact than losing 50 people in an ordinary train wreck. The terrorist message is that 1) we can hurt you anywhere 2) we would hurt you this way every single day if we could and we’re working on that.
It’s the part 2 of the message that gets everyone panicked. A lighting strike or a dog bite has never been the initial “shot heard round the world”. Lighting storms and aggressive dog attacks don’t threaten to increase to the point at which a society could collapse. Terrorism does. It threatens to turn a functioning nation into a failed state. It would take a monumental number of crazed dogs to destroy human civilization. But we have seen nations collapse under the impact of small armed groups progressing from terror attacks to gang warfare to outright civil war.
Until we’ve seen an Alexander the Great Dane lay waste to cities and conquer kingdoms, people are not going to get that anxious about dog bites!!
Silly Wabbit. War is for wealth! The U.S. uses endless military force to give multi-national corporations the freedom to move through the airspace, across the lands, and over the territorial waters of the Middle East on their way to acquiring natural resources and setting up lucrative business deals. War is used to “crack open” countries, encouraging them to accept foreign loans, to participate in global commerce, and to turn government-owned and/or private companies into globally-traded, public entities that make money for global investors.
If you look at Iraq today, one of the big changes to the nation since 2003 is the insertion of multi-national corporate products. Iraqi children watch Tom and Jerry cartoons (courtesy of a Pentagon project) and Western businessmen are working hard to ensure that they will soon eat at Pizza Hut and McDonalds while their parents buy Ecco and Timberland shoes. Believe it or not, that is why our soldiers died; so an Iraqi child could eat a Burger King hamburger and increase the wealth of BK CEO Daniel S. Schwartz.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/world/middleeast/fueled-by-oil-wealth-malls-rise-in-baghdad.html?_r=0
http://www.iraq-businessnews.com/2014/03/19/us-franchise-opportunites-in-iraq/
The endgame can be illustrated by following one company in Kuwait: the Zain Group. Kuwait became a British protectorate in 1899 and was modernized under British direction. After independence, Kuwait continued to have close affiliations with the West. A U.S.-educated emir oversaw the development of a telecommunications company, MTC (Mobile Telecommunications Company), which became Zain in 1983. In 2002, when the Kuwait government divested the company, it was sold to a wealthy, private family firm in Kuwait: the Al Kharafi Group. This firm grew into a powerful multi-national company with holdings in 8 nations in the Middle East. And who is the current CEO? Scott Gegenheimer, an American born in Chicago.
So, my guess is that we will keep fighting iWar 1.0, iWar 2.0, iWar 3.0 and so on until the entire world has been McConquered.
If Trump wins the Republican nomination, it will be because of looters’ logic.
When people get angry enough to go on a rampage, they will burn down the only grocery store in the neighborhood, along with the only bank and the only gas station. Out of frustration, they will hurt themselves. There is no logic behind a temper tantrum. What we are seeing is a “Trumper tantrum” where some people are voting for Donald Trump and rationalizing it with the logic of the looter: “Burn it all down!”
It shouldn’t be a surprise. American citizens have been lied to and mistreated. They’ve lost their sons and daughters to illegal wars, their savings and homes to banking fraud, and their jobs to greed. And the government has failed to defend them.
That’s why this election is not about selecting the best person for the job. A number of angry voters care only about selecting the best person to burn the Republic to the ground.
I worry that Trump's extremism will inure Americans to fascist views, so that if Jeb Bush or Ben Carson becomes president, the general public will think that policies just a little bit less extreme than Trump's aren't so bad.
When inflammatory rhetoric is heard everyday, people become desensitized.
Worst of all is the lack of any thoughtful dialogue about how to wage a kind of jujitsu against terrorist violence.
I want to hear conversation from leaders about how to...
Protect (but don't provoke).
Shield (but don't slaughter).
Defend (but don't destroy).
Engage (but don’t appease).
Arrest (but don’t abuse).
Respond (but don't revenge).
Obstruct (but don’t oppress).
There are nuanced actions that can be taken to protect a nation while righting old wrongs and not making a bad situation worse. That is what we need to be talking about.
Please pass along this idea! Thank you.
In September 2002, I sent letters to multiple heads of states, including President George Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and even President Saddam Hussein, urging them each to resolve their issues with civil negotiation and not war.
I received a few responses. Blair's office was notable in that he didn't even send out a form letter with his signature on it. His response came from Stuart Mortlock of the Direct Communications Unit at 10 Downing Street and gave no explanation of the Prime Minister's position, saying only, "He [Mr. Blair] does appreciate the time people take to write to him and has asked me to assure you that the points you make will be carefully considered."
President Bush didn't respond for quite a few months, until after the war was underway, but at least he gave his reasons, writing, "In Iraq, we sought to remove a threat to our security and to free the Iraqi people from oppression. Saddam Hussein's regime has ended and the Iraqi people are regaining control of their own country and future. Pockets of resistance still remain."
Ah, yes. Just a few pesky pockets to button up, and then all will be right with the world...
It makes me cry to look at my original letter--and see that every concern that I had about war against Iraq happened--exactly as I was afraid that it might...
Israel's Arab population is roughly 20% of the nation. 2012 statistics state that there are 5.9 million Jews and 1.4 million Arabs.
Around 82% of those 1.4 million Arabs are Sunni Muslim.
The median age of the Arab population is 21.1 years of age.
That means that Israel has a very large population of young Arabs. If only a fraction of them are as angry and frustrated as the brothers profiled in this article, they have the potential to seriously destabilize Israel.
43.3% of male Arab workers in Israel are employed at low wage jobs in essential fields like construction, agriculture, and industry.
Israel could easily be rocked by protests in the form of mass strikes or campaigns of subtle sabotage of infrastructure. Considering that 6% of Israel's GDP comes from tourism, any unrest that scares away tourists could have a serious impact on Israel's economy.
Israeli leaders really need to come to grips with the reality of the unhappiness of their own Arab citizens and the growing solidarity felt among young Arabs across the Middle East.
Blanket oppression and imprisonment of one's own citizens is not a great recipe for the future of any nation.
But maybe the more relevant question is will globalization destroy the traditional nation-state? In the age of outsourcing, maybe nations are becoming obsolete.
Here's a link listing all the oil companies currently operating in Iraq: http://www.iraq-businessnews.com/list-of-international-oil-companies-in-iraq/
The oil companies are from nations all around the world, the UK, China, Russia, Japan, and others are all able to do business with Iraq even as it struggles with war and even as Iraq's government is largely ineffectual as far as its citizens are concerned.
International corporations have continued to do work in Iraq (oil companies, private security firms, development groups, fast food chains, etc.) while the Iraq government has floundered around and been largely inept.
Maybe the new world will be a network of global trade exchanges--and national entities won't be that important anymore.
We ought to take responsibility and help the refugees.
The US didn't dig the Middle East fire pit, but the US threw fuel on the embers of past colonial/tribal history and started the latest conflagration with its invasions and infusion of weapons, troops, funds, and incompetent managers.
Our 2003 invasion of Iraq sent over 1 million displaced Iraqis into Syria—adding to the destabilization. When Syria began to come apart, we funded militancy more than diplomacy, and sent incompetent managers interested primarily in regime change as a way to access Syrian oil/natural gas with little care for how to maintain a functioning and safe Syria while getting Al Assad to either implement reforms or hand power over to a new president.
Imagine how the United States might have been torn apart in the 1960’s if China had sent money and weapons to the student protesters and insisted that the brutality of Vietnam and of the Kent State shooting were indications that the 'tyrant' President Nixon must step down and leave the United States and that a new political system (shaped according to Chinese institutions) should be put into place?
Texas alone can hold two Germanys. The population density of Texas is only 34.8 people per sq. kilometer versus Germany’s population density of 226.87 people per sq. kilometer. Wyoming and Montana also have far more room than crowded Europe.
George W. Bush can fund a New Baghdad outside of Crawford, Texas for all the Iraq refugees.
Donald Rumsfeld can fund a New Kabul outside of his property in Twin Bridges, Montana.
Dick Cheney can fund a New Damascus outside of his ranch in Jackson, Wyoming.
And Paul Wolfowitz (who recently purchased a $1 million dollar condo in St. Petersburg, FL) and all the other architects of ME disaster with billions in retirement loot can fund all the other refugees fleeing what they built.
Let justice be served.
Ironically, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (which brings the oil that increases global temperature as it is burned) is threatened by the thawing of permafrost as the pipeline is much more likely to buckle as the soil sinks and then burst.
Here's a link to a detailed article about the great expense of maintaining oil/gas pipelines: http://www.dnvusa.com/Binaries/gasliquid_tcm153-378807.pdf
Something similar (albeit unofficially) has been happening in the US.
Many Iraqis are trying to immigrate to the US, but apparently it is mainly the Christian Iraqis who are getting through all the bureaucratic hoops.
There are now 60,000 Chaldean Iraqis living to the east of San Diego, CA in El Cajon. An American-Iraqi, Mark Arabo, has set up an 'underground railroad' and is working with human smugglers to get Christian Iraqis to the United States where they can petition for asylum. He has over 70,000 applications from Iraqis desperate to escape Iraq:
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/aug/22/fleeing-isis-chaldeans-el-cajon/
The sad fact is that more than 4 million people in Iraq need refuge. But few nations, in the Middle East or in the West, are willing to help them.
It's a tragic state of affairs that so little is being done to quickly help all refugees who are the innocent victims of war, regardless of their religion.
If you drive across this country, from sea to shining sea, you'll witness a lot of new poverty.
From CA farmers whose fields have turned to dust and Wyoming ranchers who've had to butcher their starving cattle and oil workers in North Dakota who've been laid off by the thousands to high-paying refinery and construction jobs getting replaced with minimum wage service jobs in Louisiana and across the South and work vanishing in every arena from publishing distribution to dairy production in Central New York, there is profound economic misery.
Trump = A Vision (Mirage?) of Prosperity. Some Americans look at Trump and think, "He knows how to make money. That's what we need."
Most of the presidential candidates live in comfortable bubbles and aren't experiencing the horror of turning on the tap and getting clots of mud or seeing the big company in town (the one that supported the community for the past 50+ years) closing its doors.
Whoever becomes president will need to offer a vision of how the people are going to get bread. If Trump is able to convince people that he can do that, he could have a shot at the presidency.
Trump's celebrity is the glitter of fool's gold. But his business record and bank account have the shine of flecks of real gold. That magnetism could make voters overlook all the other hideous shortcomings.
Never underestimate the power of hunger.
A very big problem with the current change in customary climate patterns is the speed. With such rapid change, wildlife and wild vegetation can't evolve and adapt; instead, animals and plants die out.
In California, we see areas of killed soil--where back-to-back searing wildfires have burned deep into the ground and killed the root systems and buried seeds that would normally survive such events and rejuvenate.
We have barren earth that is either going to function like blacktop and encourage winter rain to flood away into the ocean or that will become water-soaked and form mega-mudslides.
The other big problem with the loss of a customary climate is that the timing of weather events is all wrong. A vineyard can get the same amount of rain versus sun over the course of a year, but if it doesn't come in the pattern that is optimal for the vine, then the grapes won't flourish.
It wouldn't be so bad if one kind of climate could simply be exchanged for a different kind of thriving climate. If, for instance, San Diego was to go from a Mediterranean to a humid tropical climate, but we can't wave a wand and transport entire ecosystems that will fit the new climate. Instead, the existing ecosystem dies because of the abrupt introduction of the wrong temperature/precipitation and leaves behind a lifeless moonscape.
In a worse case scenario, the Southwest will be swept with monster dust storms because the vegetation will die off so quickly that there will be nothing left to hold down the topsoil. October brings fierce Santa Ana winds. If we are unlucky this year, and the strong winds coincide with a period of very low humidity and very high temperatures, and if the winds blow steadily for more than four or five days straight, we have the making of the greatest mega-wildfire disaster ever seen in the US.
As a resident of San Diego, I'm seriously scared. No firefighters can stop the head of an Santa Ana driven firestorm. All people can do is get out of the way. Given the topography, it is possible for a city like San Diego to get completely overrun with fire as it is laced with brush-filled canyons that run down to the sea, functioning like lines of detonation cord.
The shame is that so few people understand this. It's as if they imagine that a region can swap climates the way that a model can change clothes.
Like gmoke, I want to know what the police would say under "Insight Policing". Instead of "What did you see?" and "Who did this?", what was said?
Did they start with statements, "A call came in that shots were fired at the corner of X and Y; we need your help to catch the shooter." Or "I understand that people don't want to get involved, but all these shootings will continue if no one speaks out. We're looking for some tips to help us solve a report of shots fired that happened tonight at the corner of X and Y." Or???
I'd like to see a specific dialogue, line by line, that shows how officers can reduce intimidation and get legitimate feedback, helping everyone to be safer.
Trump is the GOP's inner child. The more that the GOP attempts to disown him, the more that Trump pushes the GOP out from behind the curtain and reveals the party's true face.
Travis - I don't understand your remark: "People will adapt and proliferate as they always have."
The point is that if we can run through so much bounty in less than 200 years then we will be facing mass starvation within the next century.
If you spend more than you make, you will face bankruptcy. If you consume the bounty of the Earth faster than the Earth replenishes it, then you will face famine.
Quite simply, we need to balance our eco-budget. A number of correctives (improving living conditions so that poor people aren't compelled to have huge families in order to survive; making it culturally acceptance to choose to be childless and put energies into helping others raise their kids; choosing sustainable foods to grow and eat; selecting fuel sources that are sustainable; and so on and so forth.
The staggering loss of flora and fauna should be a wake up call that our current habitual way of living needs to be modified. That does NOT mean that we need to live in caves. Quite the contrary. We need to use our technology to mimic what works well in Nature and to fit ourselves into a cyclical way of life that is enduring.
The majority of undocumented immigrants crossing our southern border come from Central American (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), but people from Mexico are still making the journey. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the number of unaccompanied alien children from Mexico (from October 01, 2014 to June 01, 2015) was 7487 as compare to 15,634 in the same time period in 2014.
http://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-border-unaccompanied-children
It’s not that fewer young people from ages 0-17 are trying to leave Mexico; the decline is due to the US government demanding that Mexico step up and stop more immigrants on their side of the border. We have seen an across-the-board drop in migrants (of all ages and from all areas to the south of our border) of around 50%, but that is only because Mexico is apprehending those migrants before they get to the US border.
The same drought that is scorching California has been scorching Mexico and Central America. Mexico has historically reported a fairly low unemployment rate, but that is because it counts all of its rural citizens, who survive on subsistence farming, as employed. Well, those rural citizens are really suffering now as wells and watering holes dry up. Take a look at these recent photos in Ensenada: https://bajadock.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/ensenada-drought-2015/
Our nation needs to focus on reality. The number of climate refugees is likely to climb. Right now, the US has pledged 86 million to Mexico for “upgrading Mexico’s checkpoints, roadblocks and naval bases.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/29/mexico-immigration-crackdown-fewer-child-migrants-central-america
We are focusing on corralling humans, not on fixing the root cause: ending our self-inflicted climate woes by a) lowering carbon emissions b) creating a sustainable life-style that allows us to live within the means of the planet.
We need to elect a president who understands this.
Much of Jerusalem is composed of sedimentary limestone, dolomite, and dolomitic limestone, so I'd say that the inhabitants that enjoyed the area for the longest time were ancient fish and mollusks.
The Cenomanian age during the Cretaceous period was a good 100 million years ago. We modern humans have been around for only 200,000 years. The fish and mollusks will probably get the last laugh--and enjoy swimming through the temples and over the streets--long after humans stop squabbling over the city.
Given our impermanence, isn't it a pity that we are too petty to share a lovely land while it exists?
As far as nations that consume oil and natural gas are concerned, the ME countries involved are NOT “becoming more worthless”. They are being fought over precisely because they possess two very valuable things:
1) Resources
2) Routes
RESOURCES
Syria - 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil (January 2013); shale oil (50 billions tons); natural gas 8500 billion cubic feet.
http://www.ogj.com/articles/2007/06/syria-begins-licensing-round-for-offshore-blocks.html
http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=sy
Iraq – “Iraq holds about 18% of proved crude oil reserves in the Middle East and almost 9% of total global reserves.”
http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=IZ
http://www.ogj.com/articles/2015/01/shell-iraq-ink-deal-for-petrochemicals-complex.html
ROUTES
The importance of ports on the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea—and the need to keep roads open and pipelines flowing—can’t be overstated. Without secure routes, the oil and natural gas resources can’t be accessed and sold.
Google “Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline” versus the “Qatar-Turkey pipeline” for more insight into what feeds the fighting.
Remember the scandal when it was discovered that former NATO official Brian Sayers (hired by the DC-based Syria Support Group) was NOT working to help the Syrian opposition but was instead working to set up Syrian oil deals—as if the US had already conquered Syria and was empowered to handle its resources?
Money is pouring into the fight because a lot of money is at stake. It doesn’t matter to Big Oil and Gas if cities are bombed into rubble, artifacts are looted, and civilians are living in caves, as long as—at the end of the fray—their companies get lucrative contracts.
Add the political/religious dimension on top of the financial incentives—and you get the mess that we see today.
Benjamin Netanyahu is like Mark Twain's cat that once sat on a hot stove lid--and afterwards, would never sit down on a hot stove lid, but also would never sit down on a cold one either.
Netanyahu's hot stove is the history of his people; it's the Holocaust and the 1967 war where he fought as a soldier and the loss of his brother in a 1976 IDF raid.
Netanyahu wants to live in a house where the stove is always cold. If that means never having a warm supper, he is OK with that.
Perhaps he has PTSD and re-lives horrors every night when he tries to sleep. That is why he will never trust Iran. He believes that Israel will only be safe if it is surrounded by weak nations that could not possibly, no matter what deranged cretin comes to power, ever be a threat to Israel.
He wants to have what the United States got: the last of the Mohicans. Only he wants it to be the last of the Palestinians (and Iranians, Lebanese, and anyone else who might pose a possible threat).
Years of psychotherapy would probably not persuade him that his view may discourage Arab neighbors from maturing into fellow nations more interested in commerce and development than in war--and that his view may bring about precisely what he most fears.
He is, alas, deeply traumatized. He doesn't have the vision that many of the rest of us have, of a world where Arab and Jew and Christian all live side by side, worshiping as they please, and focused on improving life for all of us together, as kinfolk within the larger shtetl called Earth.
Here's a link to an older article that shows the warmonger argument: http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1709/it_won_t_be_the_end_of_the_world_if_israel_strikes_iran/page/2
In a nutshell, the "bombs away" folk believe that Iran either won't retaliate or will only make futile gestures.
Such a belief is rather ironic. If Iran is truly too poor and too weak to respond to bombing raids, then why would nuclear weapons encourage it to launch a first strike against far superior opponents? Any first nuclear strike would immediately bring about nuclear retaliation. Iran has no shield from Israel's nuclear missiles and nowhere to hide
We are supposed to believe that building nuclear weapons will make Iran suddenly become wildly suicidal. And that without nuclear weapons, Iran will remain a docile pussycat that won't raise a single claw in self-defense when it gets bombed. That makes no sense.
It looks to me like the warmongers just want to see if they can turn Iran into a failed state and a looter's paradise. And they are eager to do that before Iran gets a nuclear weapon; not because a nuclear Iran would be a danger, but because a nuclear Iran would no longer be easy to topple and easy to loot.
It's sad. How did we go from "Speak softly and carry a big stick to "Speak crudely and swing a big dick"?
Gruesome killings are bait. ISIS wants to tempt its enemies to put its forces into harm’s way; the best way to do that is to make the enemy very, very angry. ISIS would like opposition soldiers on the ground where it can have a chance to hit them. Former President Bush had it all wrong. ISIS’s motto is “Goad them into coming over here to get killed, so we don’t have to go over there to kill them.” ISIS needs only to keep recruiting enough young blood to form strike teams of 20-200 fighters. If it does that long enough, it will bleed nations like the U.S. dry because we must spend millions of dollars to annihilate a dozen fighters who can be replaced the very next day.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/24/372168736/u-s-strikes-have-killed-1-100-isis-fighters-and-cost-1-billion
The West needs to wake up, realize that it is getting suckered into a war strategy that grows terrorists, and treat groups like ISIS as criminal street gangs. Now that a big mess exists, and ISIS has gained power, the West needs to get creative. ISIS knows our weaknesses. Do we know theirs? We need to identify the weak points in their chain of command, their lines of recruitment, and their supply chain—and identify the most cost effective and sneaky ways to disrupt their plans. We need to think of what they have (not about what we have and want to use) and craft strategies that match the threat.
Perhaps the insertion of a Special Forces unit to capture one high value target would be more productive than bombing an apartment complex suspected of housing dozens of fighters. Perhaps a weakness in how ISIS resupplies with water could be exploited. And so on. It makes no sense to use bombs, missiles, and troops on the ground simply because that is our image of how wars are won. Shipping over tons of weapons and turning cities into rubble only creates the kind of broken environment that allows ISIS to thrive. We need to honestly look at the situation on the ground, including local politics, culture, religion, logistics, environment—and be innovative. If we don’t get away from the idea that we must fight with the latest and greatest of our military “toys”, we will waste time, treasure, and troops on the wrong strategies.
You raise some good points. What the roads will look like depends on the percentage of people who continue to purchase their own vehicles and on the percentage willing to use shared cars. If individual car ownership drops, there could be a decrease in the total number of vehicles in circulation. But if people who would normally have stayed home or taken mass transit decide to get out more in self-driving cars, then they could bring the total number of vehicles in circulation back up.
What I picture is a better mix of transportation choices. Buses, trams, subways, etc. would still be the least expensive, followed by self-driving taxis that make multiple stops, followed by self-driving vehicles that go point-to-point. If there are fewer individually-owned cars parked on the streets or in lots, then self-driving cars could take those empty spaces. I think basic driving activity (commuting to work, running errands, etc.) probably wouldn’t change dramatically, but I have no idea what percentage of people would switch from buses, walking, etc. to using a self-driving car if it was available. Within a city, I imagine that a self-driving car would be only a few blocks away, so it shouldn’t add too much extra mileage to any given trip. Just this morning as I left for work, I saw two parked Car2Go vehicles, one on the street a mere three feet from the edge of the driveway into my apartment complex and the other 1 ½ blocks away, so that’s the scenario that I picture for self-driving cars. Human-driven taxis spend a fair amount of time roaming and need to hover around popular areas (airports, downtown districts) to make money; self-driving vehicles would not need to return to the driver’s home or to a taxi lot, so that could provide some reduction in traffic.
It will be very interesting to see how all of this plays out in the future.
Here in San Diego, I see far more people using Car2Go. (www.Car2Go.com). These little electric cars are parked all around the city; all you have to do is hop online, find the nearest little car, drive it to your destination, leave it, and repeat this exercise when it's time to go back home.
What will completely change the face of car ownership is when electric cars drive themselves. My prediction is that there will be a vast decrease in car ownership. Why purchase a car that spends about 90% of its time sitting parked somewhere waiting for you? When you need a car, just send out a text and the nearest car will be on its way to pick you up.
I'm really looking forward to such a future where I can call up the kind of electric car I need (pickup for a camping trip; little car for downtown; larger sedan for road trip) and have it arrive at my doorstep.
Even better will be when all those many acres of blacktop reserved for parking cars will be converted into parks and gardens!
How do we teach each other to understand that scapegoating is illogical and only creates more of the violence that we want to stop?
Rupert Murdoch's tweet is classic scapegoating: "Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible."
I bet Murdoch would NOT support the following statements:
"Maybe most Christians are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing fundamentalist cancer, they must be held responsible for the murder of abortion provide, Dr. George Tiller."
OR
"Maybe most men are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy testosterone-fueled male aggression, they must be held responsible for all rapes."
Isn't it obvious that Murdoch's statement is as ridiculous as the above two statements?
If the far right in France pushes for scapegoating laws, I hope that the French people refuse to fall for such illogical thinking.
An excellent post, but how is it satire? There is no exaggeration of Cheney's corrupt soul, his evil deeds, or of the nature of a proceeding in court. There is no humor in the catalog of crimes. It is a wistful fantasy of justice, a ghost of the future that could be...
I'm feeling so sad as I see this video; Jacob David George recently took his own life. I wish I had met him. He comes across as someone who was willing to try anything to learn how to keep living with PTSD. His heartfelt desire to make sense of what he had become--a morally wounded man--and his poignant questions deserve to be witnessed and heard by every single American. His quest needs to be continued; there are a lot of soldiers thinking "red, white & blue, I trusted you" and wondering what went wrong.
General Kelly says that the migrants (5-6 black men) on the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua had flown into Trinidad. The implication is that they flew from West Africa to Trinidad, and then traveled up to the Costa Rica / Nicaragua border which would be a logical way to emigrate from West Africa. Travelers from Liberia, Costa Rica would not have flown into Trinidad--that's the opposite direction from their intended final destination, New York City.
The over-the-top fear mongering is silly, but It would not surprise me to see people leaving West Africa; not only is there the threat of Ebola, but food prices have doubled and businesses are struggling. So folk who have enough money to get out would have every incentive to do so.
And migrants could fly from Dakar, Senegal (with stops in Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, & Panama) and land in Port of Spain, Trinidad. So it is a possible migration route.
Still, it's rather absurd to picture thousands of fleeing West African migrants coming to the U.S. given the extreme poverty and the distance. It's a lot easier to get away from West Africa by heading to another part of the African continent.
There was a triple suicide bombing reported by ISIS bombers against bases used by Kurdish security forces:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/10/triple-suicide-attack-hits-kurds-iraq-2014101295710614574.html
And here's an article about Kurds doing a suicide attack against ISIS: http://sofrep.com/37100/pkkypg-launch-suicide-attack-isis-tanks/
As to whether there are "lots" of suicide bombers out there, well, all I know is that, per the news, they keep on coming...so it doesn't look like we're about to run out of volunteer martyrs...
Bill Maher really needs to get out more. How does anyone live in any cosmopolitan city in the U.S. and NOT meet neighbors, colleagues, etc. who are practicing Muslims?
I don't have a huge social circle, but I've met people of all faiths--including practicing Muslims--in my college days, at the various apartment complexes where I've lived in Los Angeles and San Diego, and at work.
There's nothing like an ordinary friendship or two to make it obvious that the practice of Islam (which has much in common with the practices of Christianity and Judaism) does not require adherents to run around beheading non-believers.
Is there any hope that conservatives will realize that the possibility of global epidemics (whether from Ebola, flu, or other disease) is a really good argument for universal healthcare?
President Obama and other leaders have been reassuring Americans by pointing out that Ebola is unlikely to spread within the United States because we have a "world-class health system".
Well, we do have world-class medical facilities, world-class medical research, world-class medical procedures, and world-class medical treatments, but we do NOT have world-class access to health care.
In an epidemic, what's needed is ACCESS. If citizens avoid seeking healthcare because they lack access (no insurance; can't meet the deductible if they do have insurance; afraid of deportation; no local clinics and hospitals; etc.), they are more likely to not get treated and to spread their illness to others.
A 2013 article http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/story/hospital-closures-will-leave-medical-deserts/2013-11-11 states:
“Over the past 50 years, Detroit has gone from 42 hospitals serving 1.5 million people to four hospitals serving 700,000 people, many of whom are uninsured or unable to pay for treatment.”
Detroit's lack of hospitals is a serious problem if residents and/or visitors get ill. And Detroit is just one of many cities in the U.S. that has been shuttering hospitals. Add that to the continuing problems of access (despite the gains of the Affordable Care Act), and the reality is a health system that has a long way to go before it is truly world-class.
So you take a little kid and you deprive him of food until he's crying with hunger (sanctions), you deprive his family of medications and he watches his big sister die of a simple infection (sanctions), and his little brother die of dirty water (sanctions), and his father leaves (Gulf War) and never returns (Highway of Death), and the little kid experiences the terror of plummeting bombs while hiding under a table (Shock & Awe), and his cousin gets raped and killed by American soldiers (101 Airborne Division), and his remaining relatives lose their jobs (DeBa'athification), and his great aunt has miscarriage after miscarriage (depleted uranium poisoning), and he never learns to read because all the schools are closed (Iraq War), and his best friend is killed by a car bomb (Iraq War), and his next best friend is shot by American soldiers at a checkpoint (Iraq War)--and, after all these years of positive reinforcement and exemplary role models, he grows up to be a man who tortures and beheads people. Baffling. I simply can't understand it!
It's a shame our founding fathers didn't require members of Congress to pass a course in basic logic. One Bachmannstrosity that's common among her ilk is the idea that there's no need to worry about adding CO2 to our atmosphere because 1) CO2 is natural and already exists in the environment and 2) the amount of CO2 added by human activity is small.
My favorite analogy to combat such ignorance is to compare CO2 to salt. Yes, salt exists in the natural environment. Yes, salt is an essential part of a normal diet just as some CO2 is a normal part of the air that we breathe. But excess salt is a killer. If you drink a 16 oz. glass of water to which someone added 1/8 of a teaspoon of salt, it will taste salty, but it will be drinkable. But if you drink a 16 oz. glass of water to which someone added a tablespoon of salt, you will most likely throw up. And if someone were to force you to drink nothing but salty water, you'd get severely dehydrated, suffer kidney failure, and die.
I've got to wonder if Bachmann ever baked a batch of biscuits in her life. If the recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, but the cook reverses the portions; the biscuits will bake up as nasty, flat lumps and be almost inedible.
That baking powder and baking soda are only a small portion of the total mass of the ingredients of a batch of biscuits is not what matters. What matters is whether the right proportion of the right ingredients is available to produce the desired effect.
Straying from the proven recipe for our atmosphere is a good way to end up with an inedible planet.
RC--
I agree with you on your point about the role of Western aggression and interference. I see the main focus of colonialism as resource acquisition.
The length of time that people have lived in the Middle East, cultivating the land and using the waterways, has meant that the natural resources of the area have been stressed by human habitation for longer than similar resources have been stressed in areas of relatively more recent habitation.
In addition, the location of abundant oil and natural gas has drawn other nations as carrion draws wolves and coyotes.
I see this entire scenario as driven by humans using resources faster than such resources can be produced by the Earth.
I'm not blaming the ME for having the misfortune of being in the center of this tug-of-war for wealth. I'm interested in seeing all human beings able to understand and confront how our behavior (whether as colonizers or colonized) is shaped by a basic struggle over resource consumption.
Hisham Melhem's dismay over what is happening in the Middle East is understandable. But he is looking at history with a narrow and blinkered focus; he is truly "unable to see the forest for the trees".
It is the entire human species that is on the brink of collapse. That the unraveling has started where civilization itself began is not that surprising. It's often the oldest part of an old mechanism that goes first.
We need to see ourselves not as Westerners or Middle Easterners, Christians or Muslims, Iraqis or Americans--we need to see ourselves as human beings.
There are some 7.1 billion people on the planet. We are on this finite globe together. And, as curious and clever beings, it is our ability to use resources faster than the Earth can replenish those resources that underpins the current upheavals around the world.
The West is only another economic downturn away from becoming as factional and war-torn as the Middle East. We have as much divisiveness here as there is in Arab society. The only thing keeping us from turning on each other is the luck of being, for now, at the top of the global economic food chain.
To move forward, we need to stop talking about problems in terms of us versus them. We need to talk about humanity as a whole. When is the last time that you heard a political leader refer to "humans"? I.E. - "Today, all human beings face the challenges of a resource insecure future. We need to come together, as a species, and work to create sustainable models of living before we become so insecure (in food, water, and energy) that we begin to turn on each other."
That is what we need to hear: a focus on how we (and that includes ISIS) are all in this together. United we stand. Divided we fall.
Perhaps we have few whistleblowers today because organizations are so huge and jobs are highly specialized. If a worker is a tiny cog in a corporate or political organization that has 10,000+ employees, he or she is likely to have a highly specialized job that provides only a peephole view into what the organization as a whole is doing.
Here’s a link to an investigation by the Washington Post on the size of the US intelligence apparatus:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
A U.S. intelligence worker may be an IT systems analyst who spends his or her whole career on one component of one particular project. It’s like working in a forest spending your time inside a tent placed at the base of tree where you shift through a 6” by 6” patch of soil to find and list types of microscopic bacteria. If that is all that you do, and if, when you lift your head, you see nothing beyond you but the grey paneling of your cubicle “tent”, then you can’t see what the greater “forest” of the company is doing.
In fact, you may know only as much about the overall scope of the company as what the public knows because that’s all HR gives you during your introduction to the workplace. Many Americas work like ants or honeybees, each busily doing a highly specialized little job, with only a general idea of how their work fits into the greater mission of their company and with no ability to provide meaningful input to employers at higher levels. (Cue Pink Floyd’s song “Another Brick In The Wall”)
How can a worker blow a whistle if it’s impossible for that worker to see the larger misdeed that their work makes possible?
ISIL seems very familiar to me because it seems a lot like the street gangs here in the Southwest where I live. In many ways, ISIL's action mirrors the brutal behavior Los Zetas, MS-13, the Bloods, the Crips, and the dozens of other gangs that are in the United States and across the border in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. See this link about MS-13:
http://www.samuellogan.com/articles/recruitment-redemption-in-the-ms13.html
Note what the Director of US Programs for World Vision says, "You don't move people out of gangs, people move themselves out of gangs."
What does our "Gang" of the West offer the young people who have been "jumped in" to ISIL? People who often lack family (i.e. father killed in tank during Shock and Awe; mother shot at U.S. checkpoint?), lack jobs (thanks to sanctions and war), and lack education (thanks again to sanctions and war) are not likely to be intimidated by the threat of more random death raining down from the heavens; after 13 years, they have learned to live with the uncertainty of death. What we need to offer is an alternative path for youth so that ISIL isn't their only option for finding a social network and support.
Many of today's 20-year old militants were scared 7-year-old kids when we blew into Iraq in 2003. Their lives were turned upside down. Many of them were pulled out of school and never learned to read or write. What can we expect of human beings who were thrust into hell on earth? That they should somehow come out of such horror as grounded, productive, and decent human beings?
And now we plan to kill them for becoming Hellboys in the Babylonian Crucible of Hell?
I've tutored former gang kids, helping them study to get their GEDs. They struggle to find a path out. The gangs offer family, security, work, and clear-cut objectives. The best way to beat gangs is to provide a healthier option that also offers family, security, work, and clear-cut objectives. You see the right path in organizations like conductor Gustavo Dudamel's musical program El Sistema where the "gang" is a new musical family. You see it in programs in the U.S. where urban kids dance in hip hop groups, compete in spelling bees, or participate in science competitions.
Rather than bombing we should be asking Saudi Arabia and Qatar to form moderate schools of progressive Islamic learning and institutes that teach the best traditions of the artistic and cultural heritage of the Arab world as well as the latest in modern thought. They should be recruiting just as heavily as ISIL.
If there is somewhere else for disaffected youth to go, it will be hard for ISIL to exist. If we don't help to create that somewhere else, we shouldn't be surprised if lost people continue to look for meaning in the arms of ISIL.
BACK to war footing? I thought we were still in the War on Feeling Very Scared Something Very Bad Might Happen.
The family and friends of Brian K. Arsenault (listed as the latest casualty of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan on 09/04/2014) would be surprised to hear that his death by "hostile small arms fire" happened in a moment of peace.
I would say that we have five branches of government: executive. legislative, judicial, military/intel, and corporate. And it is the military/intel and corporate big wigs (fluttering back and forth from one branch to another to maintain maximum control) who oversee the three traditional branches that we like to think of as "our" government. So, alas, we're ruled by the war suits of a military-industrial oligarchy.
Oh, my goodness. I looked at this young woman and I thought, she looks so much like Anne Frank! And just like Anne, she is suffering because humans are foolish and generalize about each other.
Anne Frank had nothing to do with the figures used to frighten her fellow Germans (the Bolshevik anarchists throwing bombs, the war profiteers like the Barmat brothers who cheated others via shady investment schemes, etc.); yet she, along with millions of other Jewish people, was scapegoated as being like all the "dangerous Jews" of the Weimar Republic headlines.
Sadly, we seem to have learned nothing. People continue to generalize, blaming and fearing entire groups when they are scared by the behavior of a few.
As a young teen, Anne continued to trust in the basic good of humanity. The least that we can do is try to teach each other to believe it, too.
The majority should not be seen as responsible for what is done by specific individuals. Only those individuals are responsible. Palestinian toddlers (and the majority of their 1.8 million neighbors) don't shoot rockets. Afghan toddlers (and the majority of their 31 million neighbors) don't run militant training camps.
I look again at the picture of the girl retrieving her books, and I can hear Anne Frank's voice: ""Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?"
In human folklore, all around the world, people tell stories about the suffering and unexpected triumph of the underdog.
Here's a list of just a few underdogs who are well-known in the West: David versus Goliath. Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader. Captain Stephen Hiller versus Alien Invaders. Harry Potter versus Voldemort.
Historically, the Jewish people were the underdog, chased from place to place around the globe by a never-ending list of "giants" who forced them to develop the resilience and creativity that is the hallmark of the underdog's unexpected success.
But, today, Israel is the giant. The Palestinians are the underdog. And Israel is dismayed to discover that many see it as a mash up of Goliath + Darth Vader + Alien Invaders + Voldemort.
When you get power, the only way to not become a figure of evil is to be magnanimous and treat all others very well, even better than they deserve, simply because you are powerful enough to do so.
A familiar heroic example is of The Lone Ranger who was powerful enough that he could have used his gun to shoot foes through the heart, but who instead wins our favor by treating each enemy with dignity (even the baddest of the bad) and by shooting the gun out of his opponent's hand.
The lesson for Israel? Security measures like the Iron Dome along with restraint, compassion, mercy, and dialogue are the only way to achieve peace and to be respected as a figure of power. To do otherwise is to cross to the dark side.
One thing that also goes unmentioned is that the tactics used by the fighters in Gaza are typical of asymmetrical warfare (not anomalies employed only by Hamas).
When fighters have no gunboats, submarines, tanks, F-16 fighter planes, and the like, the only possible way to fight is to use guerrilla warfare and the only way to survive is to fight out of the areas that Israel is less inclined to hit. Israel (and supportive media) imply that such a tactic is monstrous and bestial and shows that Palestinian fighters are "less human" than Israeli fighters.
But this kind of fighting is par for the course among any groups where the playing field is uneven. Israelis should know this as their fighters used guerrilla tactics against the British back when their forces were vastly inferior.
The media's bias shows when pundits don't discuss the normal differences between fighters of vastly disparate strength and what that means for trying to end the combat.
As someone who lives in the U.S. Southwest, a region of big states with vast open spaces, I often find it hard to comprehend the size of other parts of the world.
To the north of me, up in Oceanside, CA, is Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corp Base Camp. The entire Gaza Strip at 139 square miles would actually fit INSIDE Camp Pendleton, which measures 200 square miles.
I was born in Flagstaff, Arizona. To the north of my hometown is the Navajo Nation. The Navajo tribal land is 27,413 square miles. So how many Gaza Strips would fit inside the Navajo Nation? 197. That is not a typo. One hundred and ninety seven Gaza Strips would fit inside a single Native American reservation located in northern Arizona. (Note: The total number of Native American reservations across the state of Arizona is 22.)
It boggles the mind.
Excellent post. The media also should do a much better job of comparing the weapons used by the Israeli army (guided missiles, white phosphorus, DIME bombs dropped from fighter jets, etc.) with those used by individual Hamas fighters (unguided, short-range rockets that travel 9-14 miles).
Here is a link to a 2009 Alternet article which describes the DIME blasts:
http://www.alternet.org/story/120197/gaza_is_a_concentration_camp?page=0%2C0
If a lone nut built a crude rocket from a bunch of Fourth of July fireworks and then fired it from your neighborhood toward a local police station so that it hit on the ground outside, shattering the precinct windows, would it make sense for the police to respond by requesting that the US Military go in and drop GBU-28 bombs (5000 pound bombs with laser and GPS guidance systems) throughout your neighborhood in the belief that this will terrify you into locating the lone nut and convincing him not to fire more homemade rockets?
The majority of people in Gaza have no control over Hamas operatives. They have no more control than you and I have over crazed gunmen or criminals of all sorts who kill within our communities. It makes no sense for Israel to attack the general Gaza populace whenever a few Hamas fighters shoot off crude DIY missiles that travel about 9 to 14 miles. Israel has a missile shield that intercepts many of these simple rockets. It has the ability to move settlers near the border regions into more protected areas away from the range where these rockets fall. Israel has many, many choices.
Given that most Gaza rockets do nothing more than land in fields, Israel could scoot people out of range and sit back and laugh at the pathetic "firecrackers" that fall harmlessly without effect. Full military attacks by the IDF serve as recruiting tools for Hamas and encourage Palestinians to be militants. If the IDF focused instead on shielding Israelis without retaliation, it would make it clear to Hamas that their use of violence is a completely impotent way to try and improve their situation.
I've seen more hardline articles coming out of Israel where the writers are essentially saying, "Israel needs to annex the West Bank (Judea and Samaria being the preferred term by the right) and remove all the Arabs."
Here's an example by Joel Meltzer of The Jerusalem Post) http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Demographic-nonsense-341246
How Mr. Meltzer envisions removing the majority Arab population from the West Bank he declines to say, other than wishing for an "alternate or creative solution".
Particularly alarming is a renewal of remarks like that of former Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai who once stated: “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” That some in Israel are willing to consider a "shoah" (Holocaust) of Arabs as the final solution for the Palestine / Israel conflict is sobering indeed.
Netanyahu's current strategy looks like a piece-by-piece push to get all the Arab population to go to Jordan, Egypt or elsewhere in the greater world.
Unless a Palestinian Mandela and an Israeli Mandela come up with a whole new vision, it looks like the incremental dispossession of the Palestinians will continue.
It could be argued that al-Baghdadi is “our” Frankenstein monster. He was born in 1971, so he was only nine years old when the Iraq-Iran War began in 1980 (a war that the U.S. indirectly supported by giving Iraq financial aid and selling Iraq the components needed to make weapons, including chemical munitions).
After growing up with the hardship and deprivation of the Iraq-Iran war, he was 19 or 20 when we bombed Iraq during the First Gulf War in 1991. Then he experienced the deprivation of sanctions, followed by the horror of the U.S “Shock and Awe” attack in 2003, and the ensuing bloodbath that has run from that year until today.
One account says that he was a farmer living in the north of Baghdad when he was picked up during a mass sweep by U.S. forces in 2005 and held as a “civilian detainee”. Another account says that he was a hard-line Salafi Sunni imam and lecturer who was detained by U.S. forces on June 04, 2004. He spent four years in Camp Bucca prison, a U.S. facility that often came under heavy militant rocket fire, and he was released when the center was closed in 2009.
I’ve yet to find a clear explanation of why al Baghdadi was arrested and held. This vagueness indicates that our military prison record keeping is deeply flawed. Per the Washington Post, Camp Bucca was “viewed by many as an appalling miscarriage of justice where prisoners were not charged or permitted to see evidence against them.” (“In Iraq, Chaos Feared as U.S. Closes Prison” by Anthony Shadid, 03.22.2009)
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appears to be a textbook example of how the strategy that we’re using in our War on Terror is actually a Factory for Terror. After experiencing so much carnage and possibly torture at the hands of outsiders, is it any wonder that al-Baghdadi has turned on his creator? Uncle Sam deserves a new name: Uncle Samenstein.
Ah, but according to the White House, the new and improved definition of "boots on the ground" = regular American military troops doing a tour of duty.
Special forces and mercenaries from companies like Academi are apparently something else altogether. Perhaps we could call them "shadows on the ground". These "shadows" can be sent into combat without notifying the American people of their deployment or of their return in boxes, which puts an end to that pesky thing known as the anti-war protest. If we don't know we're at war, we can't protest. Right?
And if you want to become a "shadow on the ground", just go to this website for a list of all the available positions:
http://careers.academi.com/index.php?m=portal&a=details&jobOrderID=3386323&portalID=7401
And you can join the thousands of other shadows on the ground who are already in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and who knows how many other places.
Back in Sept of 2002, I sent letters (via snail mail) against the Iraq war to President Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Barbara Boxet, Thomas Daschle, Dianne Feinstein, Susan A. Davis, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair.
It's so painful to re-read today what I wrote in 2002. I took such pains to make clear arguments against invading Iraq (setting up an analogy of how the win-win doctrine used in business could be used to avoid war), but I only received in return the most insipid, form responses.
Tony Blair's "Direct Communications Unit" wrote: "Mr. Blair receives many thousands of letters each week. It is impossible, therefore, for him to respond personally to the great majority of them....he has asked me to assure you that the points you make will be carefully considered." George W. Bush responded in April 2003 after the war was underway with the assertion, "Saddam Hussein's regime has ended and the Iraqi people are regaining control of their own country and future. Pockets of resistance still remain."
Ahh, yes. Those annoying little "pockets" that merely need to be sewn shut with a bit of tactical bombing...
In a second 2002 letter to Bush, I wrote, "The U.S. would take Baghdad, but the fact that we attacked first and the sheer destructiveness of the battle would make us appear as the bad guys--upsetting our allies and incensing many people within the Muslim world...beyond this, we would have the difficult task of stabilizing a shattered country which would be at the mercy of opportunistic warlords and dissenting factions. All this turmoil might only encourage the growth of extremist groups--especially if we do not have the support of surrounding Arab states".
Seeing my old letters reminds me that it was very clear at the time that the war on Iraq was wrong and would make things worse. What remains unclear (then and today) is how to get any of the people in power to listen...
So after all these years of a War on Terror to stop foreign suicide bombers, we now have a rash of domestic suicide shooters.
Like the suicide bombers, the suicide shooters intend to intimidate the public and to demonstrate that civil government can't protect the people. Inflammatory hate TV and hate radio delivered by fearful commentators serve the same purpose as radical Friday sermons delivered by extremist imams: the goal is to stir up the masses, persuading the disturbed and susceptible to kill themselves and innocent others to instigate a revolution against the state.
What is the responsibility of the US media and of US political organizations? Shouldn't we discuss how, at the very least, we ought to act like adults, be ladies and gentlemen, and demonstrate civil discourse, dropping the hysteria of click-baiting headlines and hyperbolic posturing over political platforms, and conduct our lives with a common sense restraint that won't encourage the vulnerable to embrace suicide shooter martyrdom?
The FOX pundits don't seem to realize that not all countries have free speech like we have in the United States. They also seem to think that "speaking out" means rioting in the streets.
But, in repressive countries, protests where people take to the streets are often organized by government and/or religious authorities. So, street protests are more likely to measure what a few powerful authorities care about, not what the majority of people believe.
FOX also ignores the many articles, essays, and books where Muslim thinkers make arguments for a more secular vision of Islam. For example, "A Religion, Not A State" by Souad Tagelsir Ali. Or "Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a" by Abdullahi Ahmed Ah-Na`im.
It's a pity that FOX doesn't invite the authors of such books to be guests so that viewers could see the diversity of opinion across the Middle East.
Matt Cohen's piece has the winning headline: "Operation American Spring Misses Projected Attendance By About 9,999,850" at http://dcist.com/2014/05/photos_operation_american_spring_fa.php
Hah!
The slow pace of solar power development is absolutely maddening. You would think, for instance, that Phoenix, Arizona would have built the first commercial solar plant decades ago and that the entire state would be solar by now, but, in Arizona, the first solar facility was built in a much smaller city--Flagstaff (my hometown).
Here's a link to the APS website which includes a video celebrating the 16th anniversary of the APS solar facility in Flagstaff. http://www.azenergyfuture.com/blog/october-2013/aps-solar-plant-in-flagstaff-celebrates-sunny-swe/
The above is good, but unfortunately, APS has the monopoly on power in the state, so it continues to hang on to old sources of power while developing solar very slowly.
On top of that, in 2013, the Arizona Corporation Commission eliminated corporate incentives for solar and reduced residential incentives.
We all need to speak out and push for more solar!
Actually, there were lots of black cowboys and several who ran large cattle operations. One of the more famous black cattle ranchers was Daniel Webster Wallace; he worked as a cowboy and, in 1885, he purchased 1280 acres in Texas where he later ran his cattle. When he died in 1939, his estate was worth more than 1 million dollars.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fwaah
If you Google “black cowboys”, you’ll see lots of great images from the frontier days!
As for today…
Here’s a video of Charles Sampson (1982 World Champion bull rider)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR8W5LSJrjA
And here’s another “Black Cowboys In Texas” featuring rodeo riders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khPtg99I96U
Given that a number of Black Americans (like boxer Muhammad Ali) converted to Islam in the 1950’s and 1960’s, it’s certainly within historical possibility that there could have been a black ranching family who’d run cattle since the late 1800’s and converted to Islam in the 20th century.
Imagine that the Bundy ranching family in Nevada, instead of being white and Mormon, are all black and Muslim. And imagine that they, too, believe not only that the federal government should have no jurisdiction over the public land adjoining their ranch, but also that a second revolutionary war should topple the U.S. government.
Imagine that, just like Mr. Bundy, they lost two court decisions and are expected to either pay one million in overdue fees or have their cattle seized to pay the debt. Imagine that they send out a call, via Facebook and Twitter, for all like-minded thinkers to take up arms and prepare to fight the agents sent to collect the cattle.
How would the media describe some 2000 black, Muslim men, armed with automatic rifles and shotguns, who drive from all across the country to show up in Nevada ready to kill government officials?
How would the media portray those black, Muslim men when they used their guns to shut down I-15, a major interstate freeway, forcing hundreds of travelers to bake in the hot desert sun until the road could be re-opened?
What would right-wing pundits say about those black, Muslim men who were crouched on overpasses training their sniper sights on the cowboys and drivers hired by the federal government to move the cattle?
Would they agree with those black, Muslim militants who planned to put their wives and girlfriends on the front lines so there would be news footage of federal agents shooting women?
Would Nevada politicians, senator Dean Heller and Governor Brian Sandoval, still throw their support behind a Bundy who said, “. . . I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing,” if he were Muslim and black?
Try as hard as I can, I can’t see people on the right using any word other than "terrorist" to describe homegrown, black, Muslim militants who are willing to use violence to support their belief that the U.S. government is meaningless.
And that shows us exactly how far Americans have to go before we define each other by character, not race or religion.
Ironically, Cliven Bundy has been hoist by his own (the cowmen’s) petard. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 was created in response to the demands of Western ranchers just like Mr. Bundy. The act made it possible for ranchers with money and connections to exclude others from what had been open range.
Before the BLM-administered act, Mr. Bundy would have competed and possibly feuded with anyone else who wanted to run livestock on the open range next to his 150-acre ranch in Nevada. In the late 1800’s, when folk like the Bundy’s moved to the West, they faced grazing competition from Spanish ranching families who’d been in the area since the 1500’s along with many others (Native Americans and immigrants including the Basque, the Germans, and the Irish) who also wanted to feed their sheep, goats, and/or cattle.
A grazing allotment is generally good for ten years and buys the purchaser freedom from feuding with neighbors, freedom from land turned to desert by overgrazing, and freedom from doing repairs (water improvements, noxious weed removal, wildfire prevention and recovery, etc.) that are done by the feds.
If the BLM was not providing the services that Mr. Bundy purchased, then he should have kept records and taken them to court for their delinquency. Suing them for removing the competition makes no sense.
I’d be willing to bet that if the public lands where Mr. Bundy has his cattle were scorched by a severe, national-disaster level wildfire, he would be more than happy to see federal crews arriving to restore the native flora for his cows.
On my way to see relatives in Arizona over the holidays, I drove past the recently commissioned Solana solar thermal power plant near Gila Bend, Arizona. It’s an impressive achievement in renewable energy. During testing in October 2013, using molten salt thermal energy storage, the plant provided power for a record six hours without sunlight:
http://phys.org/news/2013-10-arizona-solar-hours-sun.html
With a goal to provide 15% of its power from renewable sources by 2025, Arizona has set its sights low, but technology like Solana’s could easily provide a much higher percentage of energy given Arizona’s sunshine and vast open spaces.
So what innovative company, you ask, designed and built this marvel of solar collection, perhaps some industrious homegrown Arizona engineering firm? Nope. Abengoa is a company from Spain! http://www.abengoa.com/web/en/index3.html
How is it that the United States, a nation that prides itself on being on the cutting edge of technology, is not the birthplace of this innovation?
If you’re a student and considering careers, please look seriously into becoming an engineer who will shake up this country and get us as excited about sustainability as we once were about exploring outer space.
Juan,
Thanks for your long hours of work. Amidst so much trivial and thoughtless media commentary, your site is an oasis!
The storm surge (at least 15 feet high and as far inland as five miles) has caused horrific devastation across the Philippines.
Coastal dwellers need to understand that the threat of "wipe-you-off-the-map" surge flooding is likely to destroy cities long before the oceans rise enough to permanently cover coastal land.
Many of our biggest U.S. urban centers (New York, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco) are on or very near the coast.
Imagine the impact if these cities were washed over by 15 foot high waves that ran five miles inland.
Imagine if all our military capability could leap into action to provide rescue assistance with the same speed with which it now leaps into war.
Military cargo planes would already be dropping thousands of buoyant packets of water and food across Haiyan's devastation (just as we scatter PSYOP leaflets) and cargo drones would be going back and forth from offshore naval ships to lower goods into inaccessible areas.
Imagine that. Drones bringing aid instead of drones bringing death.
I’m puzzled by the assessment (from Professor Cole and Joe from Lowell) that the Westgate mall attack is a sign of “weakness” and will have only a negligible effect. Isn’t terrorism a concern precisely because it requires such a minor effort (in terms of money and training) on the part of the terrorist group?
Kenya relies heavily on its tourism industry. If only ½ of one percent of all tourists who were planning to visit Kenya in the coming year decide to cancel their plans, that is still a significant economic impact. A four-day act of terror arranged for only a few thousand dollars could wipe out a year of million-dollar advertisements for the adventure of a lifetime on safari in Masai Mara.
Isn’t that one reason why, after 9/11, our country embarked on a war rather than a fugitive hunt? If the members of Al Shabab figure out that their survival depends on learning how to remain fragmented, to become better ghosts, to hit and disappear, hit and disappear, couldn’t they rebound and continue to wreak havoc?
The video from Channel 4 showed that there was a lot of local support for the Al Shabab fighters. I find that worrisome. Also, the report that a number of Americans may be among the terrorists in the Westgate mall is a big concern. What is happening to make refugees leave our land of opportunity for the wastelands of war? ...
Why is it that the U.S. is having a strident debate about striking Syria, while Israel simply carries out hit after hit without provoking much international comment? If Al-Assad is already having his capabilities degraded by Israeli missile strikes—and these strikes have not deterred him from continuing to fight—why should U.S. strikes be any different? Furthermore, if Israel is carrying out strikes, why does the U.S. need to get involved? It appears that Israel is capable of targeting sensitive military / research sites and can hit Al-Assad by launching missiles/bombs from its submarines, fighter planes, and air bases. Since Israel has already been hitting Syria (and apparently isn’t hindered either by public approval or by international law), why haven’t they stepped up their attacks in response to the sarin gas? Also, why did the Israeli populace rush to buy gas masks at the thought of U.S. strikes when their nation is already at war with Syria? If Al-Assad doesn’t hit back when Israel bombs, why he is more likely to hit back if the U.S. bombs?
The following strikes are described in articles at http://www.israelnationalnews.com and at http://www.nytimes.com as well as other major media.
Friday, July 26, 2013 – Israel bombed Syrian military base near Quneitra.
Friday, July 05, 2013 – Israel bombed the Syrian port of Latakia to destroy a suspected shipment of Russian-made Yakhont anti-ship missiles.
May 05, 2013 – Israeli missile strikes hit the outskirts of Damascus, targeting the bases of the elite Republican Guard and storehouses of long-range missiles, in addition to the Jamraya Center for Scientific Research on Mount Qassioun that American officials have called the country’s main chemical weapons facility. Other targets were a paragliding airport in the al-Dimas area of Damascus and a site in Maysaloun. (Per photos below, they also hit a chicken farm.)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2319645/Israel-attacks-Syria-Scenes-devastation-left-rockets-Syria-pledges-retaliation-declaration-war.html
May 03, 2013 – Israel bombed advanced, long-range ground-to-ground missiles stored at a warehouse at Damascus International Airport.
January 29, 2013 Israel bombs may have hit the following targets: a convoy of sophisticated Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles (per Israel) or the Jamraya Center for Scientific Research outside Damascus.
November 12, 2012 Israel bombed mobile artillery units on the Syrian side of the Syrian/Israel border in the Golan Heights.
Also, note that in December 2012, Israel asked Jordan for permission to hit some of Al-Assad’s chemical weapons, but Jordan refused to grant permission: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/12/israel-asking-bomb-syrias-chemical-weapons/59549/
September 06, 2007 Israel bombed a site in Syria alleged to hold an underground nuclear reactor in Al-Kibar. The Syrians insisted that it was not. (Per an article “The Silent Strike” by David Makovsky in The New Yorker, in March 2007, the Mossad stole plans about the facility from the computer of Ibrahim Othman, the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, by sneaking into his Vienna home. In September, they inserted commandos to assist with setting the laser guidance for the Israeli missiles and carried out the bombing.)
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/17/120917fa_fact_makovsky
That the U.S. is ready to go to war without waiting to gather evidence is very suspicious. Doesn't this sound like Iraq Redux? Listen to the news. Note the lack of detail.
Doctors Without Borders doesn't have staff at the three hospitals in Damascus; the hospitals are ones to whom they send supplies so they know the workers there, but none of their staff have been able to visit and see the patients. So the full extent of evidence is photos and video and the reports of survivors who say that they don't know who fired the missiles.
We need to get blood samples and autopsy results. The area needs to be combed for debris to see if pieces of the missiles and canisters can be found. It makes no sense to go in hurling bombs when for all we know there are chemical weapons stockpiles hidden in places that we might hit. Anyone with half a brain gathers all relevant data first before embarking on a mission that could make things worse.
All this reminds me of the 2007 interview from Democracy Now where Amy Goodman interviewed General Wesley Clark and Clark says, "So I came back to see him [another general] a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
With leaders that Machiavellian, it's no wonder Americans distrust their government.
This reminds me of a news article that I read over ten years ago. It was an obituary for a U.S. solider who had returned home from a tour of duty and then committed suicide. A family member (a sister, I think?) said that he had come home changed, suffered terrible nightmares, and had told her that he was haunted by having to bulldoze bodies into mass graves. She then made the curious remark that she didn't believe what he said about mass graves because "we [the U.S.] wouldn't do that." At the time, I remember thinking, poor fellow. His own sister didn't believe him. And I wondered why the sister had such complete faith in the integrity of the U.S. and so little faith in the word of her brother...
Ah, but the question is why did Trayvon Martin decide to hit George Zimmerman? No one witnessed the start of the confrontation between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. We only have Zimmerman’s side of the story. So we cannot know whether or not Martin was justified in hitting and knocking down Zimmerman. If Zimmerman reached toward his holster or attempted to pull his gun out, then Martin would have every reason to think that he was about to be shot and that he needed to hit Zimmerman to stun him and take away the gun. If Zimmerman was simply standing and asking questions, then Martin did not have a right to step forward and hit him.
This is the truth: at the most crucial moment, we do not know what happened. We don’t know if Zimmerman blocked Martin’s path. We don’t know if Martin jumped Zimmerman. We don’t know who grabbed first, shoved first or swung a fist first. We don’t know if Martin realized from Zimmerman’s body language that Zimmerman had a weapon.
Many a policeman has shot someone and claimed self-defense because the person who was killed “made a furtive move like he was pulling out a gun.” Did Zimmerman make a furtive move that Martin interpreted as pulling out a weapon? We don’t know. It’s even possible that Zimmerman doesn’t know either. In the heat of the moment, when each man was anxiously eyeing the other, it’s possible that Zimmerman reached back and felt for his holster without even being aware that he had done so.
There is a fog of war even in fistfights. I recall a fight that happened in a hallway back in high school. A conversation became a debate became an argument became shoves became fists within the space of a few seconds. Afterwards, each of the two teens claimed that the other one started it. And those of us who were standing right there, within feet of the tussle, were unable to say who was to blame. The whole thing happened too fast with each young man reacting negatively to the other. The principal ended up lecturing both students that they were equally responsible, that each man could have walked away, and that was the end of it.
In the initial police interview, Detective Chris Serino makes it clear he believes that Zimmerman is exaggerating how hard he was hit and that he was “slammed multiple times” into the pavement. Serino says, “That’s why we’re here today. Once again, these can be interpreted as capillary-type cuts or whatever, lacerations, uh, not really, um, coinciding with being slammed hard into the ground. OK? That’s skull fractures is you happen with that. I’ve seen ‘em all, you know.” https://www.txantimedia.com/?p=1025
Per the medical report of the Altamonte Family Practice, George Zimmerman suffered two scalp lacerations (one 2 ct. and the other 0.5 ct.) which did not require stitches and mild bruising on the back of his head. The scalp is filled with blood vessels and even a minor cut will bleed profusely. Getting slammed multiple times into solid pavement would have produced far more swelling, deep bruising, and most likely skull fracture. Look at pictures of boxers after fights if you want to see how much the human head will swell and bruise under severe trauma.
Just because Martin ended up on top of Zimmerman and struck him does NOT prove that Martin was the guilty party. Imagine if you thought a man with a gun was about to shoot you, wouldn’t you fight back? And wouldn’t you keep hitting him, trying to stun him, until you secured his gun?
Back in the mid 1990's, when I (as a young single white woman) was living in Los Angeles, I used to take the city bus to work. One morning, as I stood within a covered bus shelter and watched a stream of cars going past, I was baffled that virtually every driver who glanced toward me and the bus stop, gave a hard stare or even looked downright angry.
There was a traffic light a few feet past the bus shelter. As vehicles stopped at each red light, and various drivers again looked my way, face after face inexplicably darkened. I heard the "thunk, thunk, thunk" of door locks clicking down as drivers locked their doors. "What is going on?" I wondered. I was used to seeing a variety of gazes as I waited at bus stops, some indifferent, some friendly, some clearly checking me out flirtatiously, but never had I felt such a wave of universal hostility.
"Has something crazy happened in Los Angeles? Did every Angeleno get up on the wrong side of the bed?" I wondered. It was a very unpleasant feeling. At last, the city bus pulled up. The doors opened and as I stepped out of the shelter, a young black man stepped forward and went up the steps into the bus ahead of me. He had been standing, hidden from my view, on the other side of the bus shelter.
In a flash, I realized, given the angle, that all those hard glances, all those abruptly darkened gazes, all those hammered down door locks were quite likely directed at him.
It was the darkest epiphany. He was otherwise absolutely unremarkable. Just a tall young black fellow in jeans and a t-shirt. "My God," I thought. "Is that what he always faces? Looks of suspicion, fear, and outright anger? I'd be depressed if I had to face such universal hostility day after day." It was a true eye opener--the only time I ever felt that I had slipped into another person's skin and known the world as that person did.
For a few moments, I had intensely felt what had always been a rather abstract realization: that we each experience the world quite differently, according to the first impression reception that we receive from others. I can't begin to fathom how such an ongoing hostile reception might change and shape who I would be. It's no wonder there's such a huge gulf between white and black experience; we walk the same earth, but we live on separate planets.
A group of prominent indigenous scholars recently wrote a letter of protest to Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly (http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/04/06/indigenous-scholars-oppose-navajo-president-becoming-partners-israel-148645)
Growing up in Northern Arizona, I heard a great deal about the many difficult problems facing the Navajo Nation, but I would guess that most Americans know far more about Palestine and Israel than about the Navajo / Hopi land dispute and native rights issues which impact fellow citizens.
President Shelly traveled to Israel last December and again in March. As much of the Navajo Nation is arid, he wanted to learn about desert farming techniques used by the Israelis. But his trip offended many natives who identify strongly with the Palestinian plight.
Since Israeli politicians have since made a reciprocal trip to the Navajo Nation, I wonder if that visit made any of them consider the similarities between the experience of the Palestinians and the Native Americans? Does it make them realize that, at the very least, Palestinians ought to have what the Navajo have?
The Navajo are U.S. citizens and Navajo tribal citizens; they have a voice as Navajo and as Americans. Their situation is not perfect, but the Navajo are certainly not stateless--and that in itself gives them hope for a better future.