Bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon

4.15.2013 Leave a comment

This is Patriot’s Day, Marathon Monday; it is also Tax Day — but otherwise insignificant.

There were at least three explosive devices in Boston; two detonated near the Marathon’s finish line. The police disarmed the third.

At this moment the perpetrators have not been identified. Their grievances remain private. They targeted no one person in particular. The Marathon enjoys worldwide fame; it lacks political significance, however. Mercifully, the death count seems low. But these killings and maiming are intolerable.

One point is clear, however: The extensive security-surveillance apparatus which emerged after the 9.11 attacks failed to deter this attack. Trillions of dollars were spent, allegedly to secure the nation against attacks like this one.. The apparatus thus constructed impinges upon civil life every single day. Americans now lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in their personal affairs. Yet this effort and expense failed to save those now dead or maimed.

A secure peace originates only from a just and reasonable kind of human solidarity.

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Oops

3.29.2012 Leave a comment

Global Post reports that:

Mohammed Merah, the gunman who killed seven people including three Jewish children, may have been a protected asset of French Intelligence, Il Foglio, an Italian newspaper reported today, raising further questions about whether authorities may have had a chance to prevent the attacks.

The 23-year-old, who was a French citizen of Algerian origin, also killed three Muslim soldiers, before being killed at the end of a 32-hour standoff in an apartment in Toulouse.

Benard Squarcini, the head of the Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI), claimed Merah was not in the employ of his agency.

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Quote of the day

2.8.2012 Leave a comment

Glenn Greenwald drew this conclusion from his discussion of the Federal government’s fear- and terror-mongering:

The central linchpin of Endless War and civil liberties erosions is keeping fear levels high. Foreign Al Qaeda villains once served that role, and Homegrown Terrorists have now replaced them. That they are, in fact, a “miniscule threat to public safety” seems to have no force in even slowing down, let alone grinding to a halt, the never-ending war mentality imposed on the citizenry even though we are now more than a full decade away from the last successful Terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

If I were asked to choose a government institution that best illustrates bureaucratic-monument building and excessive resource usage, I would select the security-surveillance apparatus. What is truly disturbing about the apparatus is that it is a network of related institutions which would have no reason to exist if the United States were not an empire. But it is an empire, one struggling to remain so for an indefinite future.

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Quote of the day

6.6.2011 Leave a comment

Ralph Nader channels a new kind of bacteria:

Escherichia coli: Scanning electron micrograph...

Escherichia coli

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.

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Maureen Dowd — Moral idiot

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.

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