Gena at Deadly Stealth Frogs has an interesting post about the repeated cover ups of the rapes and murders of female soldiers. It’s worth a read and worth writing to your elected representatives about.

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting little article on the melting polar ice caps. It looks like we’ve drastically underestimated the rate at which the ice is melting. The polar seas may be navigable in summertime before too long. They may be ice free in the summer by 2050. That stuff is the focus of the article. At the end of it, though, is some info that may explain why the Europeans are so much more serious about cutting back CO2 emissions than the US is. April was the 8th straight month of warmer than usual temperatures in Germany, the 13th in France. April 2006-April 2007 was the warmest 12 months in England in the last 350 years. I’ve seen this even better explained in some temperature maps that I’ve seen online in the last year. The U.S. has certainly had some weird and warm weather at times over the last couple of years, but nothing that’s really out of bounds for us and not nationwide. Based on what Europe has seen over the last couple of years, it’s not unreasonable to think they’re at the beginning of a permanent climate change. While the early phases of that are hot, we have no way of knowing yet how that will play out long term. Climate is so complex and depends on the interplay of so many factors, that it’s hard to predict how things will end up. One theory says that global warming could bring the end or the significant decrease of the Gulf Stream system, ultimately resulting in a colder, dryer UK and western Europe. Whatever the end result, significant climate change in Europe would devastate the region’s agriculture and agribusiness.

What are these awful animated Fox commercials about? I’ve seen three. Two appear to be pointless, mean, stupid, outdated attacks on Rosie O’donnell and Donald Trump. Why now? The other two are horribly racist depictions of some middle eastern person making broken English references to detention and his lawyer. The cartoon character looks just enough like the current president of Iran that I can’t believe it’s not meant to be him. Seriously, WTF?

Today is the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King. The following is excerpted from a speech that King gave a year before he died. This is not the Dr. King that our media celebrates, but this is the Dr. King that should be taught in our schools.

“In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

*This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations.* These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. *We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.*

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.” “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.”

Life and my job have consumed most of my time lately. I kept wanting to write something about the Edwards’ announcement, but couldn’t find the time to put anything together. I watched their 60 Minutes interview with Katie Couric. That left me more convinced that this guy should be our next president. I honestly can’t recall being as excited about the candidacy of anyone at any point in my life. After the interview, I signed up to give an automatic monthly donation to the campaign for the duration.

I’m still finding time to read the occasional article here and there, but I’m not finding much time to comment on them. This article on the GOP field almost entirely misses the point until the final paragraph where John Zogby is quoted. Forget national polls. Giuliani needs something other than memories of 9/11 to carry him to the nomination. His social issues positions aren’t going to serve him well in the southern states. McCain will have to run a truly incompetent campaign not to get the nomination.

Here’s an interesting piece on the latest attempt to create a power sharing government in Northern Ireland.

It was a big week. Hillary and Obama are in. China’s blowing satellites out of space by missile and perhaps threatening an arms race. I couldn’t be here to cover any of it. I was at my work team’s annual meeting/retreat thing in Atlanta. Our days were mostly scripted from 8:00am to 10:30pm or later with workshops, seminars, meetings, group lunches and dinners, and enforced fun and socializing. Combine that with the jet lag feeling of waking up at 3:00am every day on my body’s time and one night of too much drinking and, well, you get the picture. Here’s my quick take on what I think were the three biggest news stories of the last week.

Clinton: She’s the presumptive front-runner for a reason. She’ll be hard to beat, but she can be beat. I think of myself as a pretty die hard liberal, but Hillary represents some of the worst of what I think about liberals. Hillary is the kind of liberal who thinks she knows best for all of us on damn near everything and is willing to legislate it if she can. I’m the kind of liberal who wants individuals to be free to live their lives how they see fit and believes in using government power to regulate industry, taxes, public spaces, and public spending to do enable them to do so. I won’t vote for her in the primaries, period. If she gets the nomination, I’ll vote for her, but I doubt I’ll work for her. In order to win both the nomination and the general election, she’ll have to run a radically different campaign than anything we’ve seen before. I have no doubt she can do that and see some signs already that she is doing it. The money environment just shifted dramatically for the other candidates, too. That was expected, but now it’s here.
Barack Obama is an empty slate for most people. Don’t take that to mean I’m saying he’s an empty suit. I think he’s a smart guy with a lot of charisma. He actually reminds me more of Bill Clinton than any other politician in the Democratic Party. But I think the man-on-the-street exclamations about Obama aren’t backed by any realistic experience with the guy. I think a lot of people are projecting what they want him to be. His brilliant use of rhetoric in public speeches and appearances lends itself to that. I’d also bet there’s a certain level of fake enthusiasm for a black guy by folks who would never actually vote for one.

China can blow satellites out of the sky. The satellites that we use to surveil them, the satellites we’d need to get the pictures of troop and equipment deployment, etc, fly right at the altitude that China has proven itself capable of hitting. We’re not in a new arms race. We’ve been in an arms race with China for years. We were just so far ahead that we weren’t hyping it here. If you look at US policy moves on space during the Bush administration (and possibly further back), you see the clear arrogance of hegemony by our government. I believe that some sort of major showdown between the US and China is inevitable in my lifetime. I don’t know if it’ll be military or economic. I wouldn’t want to bet on the outcome, but I’d put slight odds on the Chinese winning it unless the US foreign policy establishment develops a multi-decade strategy for dealing with China that is as clear and comprehensive as how we managed the cold war. Preferably we do that without as much stumbling and stupidity as we displayed along the way in that one.

For the last few years, we’ve had to listen to self-righteous right wing assholes try to tell us that the war in Iraq isn’t about oil. No more.  Bush must be just about ready to wash his hands of Iraq if it’s finally time to push this law through. If the collaborationist government in Baghdad had any support left among the population, it’ll be gone after this. There’s little chance that this law will be upheld by whatever government(s) emerge from the Iraqi civil war. I doubt that Iraq will be in the same position to muscle their way out of it that Russia has been. There’s no doubt that the oil companies will be able to extort something pretty damn valuable from Iraq in the process.

Seriously, WTF is wrong with this country?

Thanks to Kristine for passing along this article which gives a nice, introductory level overview of how the US’s lower and middle class are among the biggest losers of globalization. The general theme ought to be somewhat apparent to anyone who knows me, reads me elsewhere online or reads this blog closely.

You may have read that Pat Tillman’s brother Kevin has spoken out about the war that took his brother’s life. You may even have seen a widely excerpted quote. I highly recommend reading his short, heartfelt statement about this country, its leadership, and the war. I’ve reprinted it below as it appears at www.truthdig.com.
After Pat’s Birthday

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601019_after_pats_birthday/

By Kevin Tillman

Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.