Killer dies
6.30.2012 Leave a comment
It is a shame he did not live another century.
Hope is given for the sake of the hopeless
11.3.2011 1 Comment
The Pittsburgh General Assembly passed this statement on 11.1.2011.
The public source for the Statement can be found here. I have included a copy below.
6.6.2011 Leave a comment
Ralph Nader channels a new kind of bacteria:
My name is E.coli 0104:H4. I am being detained in a German Laboratory in Baveria, charged with being “a highly virulent strain of bacteria.” Together with many others like me, the police have accused us of causing about 20 deaths and nearly five hundred cases of kidney failure — so far. Massive publicity and panic all around.
You can’t see me, but your scientists can. They are examining me and I know my days are numbered. I hear them calling me a “biological terrorist,” an unusual combination of two different E.coli bacteria cells. One even referred to me as a “conspiracy of mutants”.
It is not my fault, I want you to know. I cannot help but harm innocent humans, and I am very sad about this.
I want to redeem myself, so I am sending this life-saving message straight from my Petri dish to you.
This outbreak in Germany has been traced to food — location unknown. What is known to yo
u is that invisible terrorism from bacterium and viruses take massively greater lives than the terrorism you are spending billions of dollars and armaments to stop in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Malaria, caused by infection with one of four species of
Plasmodium, a parasite transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes destroys a million lives a year. Many of the victims are children and pregnant women. Mycobacterium tuberculosis takes nearly three million lives. The human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) causes over a million deaths. Many other microorganisms in the water, soil, air, and food are daily weapons of mass destruction. Very little in your defense budget goes for operational armed forces against this kind of violence. Your agencies, such as the Center for Disease Control, conduct some research but again nothing compared to the research for your missiles, drones, aircraft and satellites.
Your associates are obsessed with possible bacteriological warfare by your human enemies. Yet you are hardly doing anything on the ongoing silent violence of my indiscriminate brethren.
5.8.2011 1 Comment
Dowd’s latest sees her opining:
I don’t want closure. There is no closure after tragedy.
I want memory, and justice, and revenge.
When you’re dealing with a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.
We briefly celebrated one of the few clear-cut military victories we’ve had in a long time, a win that made us feel like Americans again — smart and strong and capable of finding our enemies and striking back at them without getting trapped in multitrillion-dollar Groundhog Day occupations.
But for the nay-sayers, Dowd would be all aglow with the sense of entitlement and efficacy she believes to be her due as a member of the American elite. She thus takes after the Republicans here and the leaders abroad for criticizing the bin Laden assassination. What she fails to grasp is that killing the Boogeyman was a political spectacle that will only justify the “multitrillion-dollar Groundhog Day operations’ she dislikes and the kind of Presidents that will start them and see them through to the end. The bin Laden assassination was an instance in which the American empire practiced the propaganda of the deed.
Capturing and trying bin Laden was the only civilized response, at least for those individuals for whom the rule of law is a key component of a civilized society.
5.4.2011 Leave a comment
This one issued from Mike Whitney‘s keyboard:
What does the assassination of Osama Bin Laden have in common with Guantanamo Bay?
They’re both intended to send a message that the United States has sunk deeper into savagery and abandoned any commitment to conventional norms of behavior. That’s the message, and we hear it “loud and clear”.
We don’t need our Harvard-educated president to crow about his latest gangland “hit” to know that America has turned into a moral swamp. That’s obvious in every area of policy, foreign and domestic. It’s just that certain incidents draw more attention than others, like when a drone incinerates a home full of women and children in the Pakistani outback or when F-16s reduce a city of 300,000 (Falluja) to rubble leaving behind a legacy of birth defects, cancer and grinding poverty. These are the real “headline grabbers”, like shrugging off the sovereign rights of an ally, invading their airspace, and deploying special ops to conduct a Rambo-style massacre in a civilian section of town.
Booyah. You go America! U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A.
Is this what American actually wants?
8.8.2012 Leave a comment
Do Americans want the normalization of slaughter; of war preparation, perpetration and socio-political penetration in the United States and around the world? America is quickly completing a transition to a Spartan culture. “This is the American era of endless war,” Craig Jaffe reports.
Soon peace in America will be as rare as inexpensive food and water.
Filed under Commentary Tagged with Austerity Politics, Class War, Endless War, Famine, Identity Politics, Militarism, Neoliberalism, Race Politics