Foreign policy
Maddow – Veterans suicide rates climbing
Suicide rates for veterans returned home are sometimes exceeding the casualty rates in combat. War is hell!
Futility of war in Aghanistan – intense video footage
One year to gain 12 miles. In light of the Wikileaks revelations about life on the ground in Afghanistan, this video helps to confirm the hopelessness of war and the suffering of war. As a nation, we have to be informed before sending our troops, sacrificing our youth, on such a course.
This video reflects the lives of our military grunts, the life my son lived during two tours in Iraq, and the great suffering and heartache they endure. The warrior in the picture was mortally wounded.
Shot by Sean Smith embedded with US Marines.
Wikileaks releases 6yrs classified data – Afghanistan is a mess
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/the-war-logs/
Read the spin then read the data
Maddow – Nation building not for the military
Excellent rationale for exiting Afghanistan. Our military are not nation builders and there is little hope of shoring up a stable local government. Is American blood worth risking on the fleeting hope of a fragile foreign government? No.
The Daily Show – Respect my Authoritah
“Barack Obama thinks he can be trusted with the power, but he’s being stalked by a strange and twisted creature who wants to take the precious away.” The president has ticked off progressives for a lot of reasons including his lame ass speech last night about the oil spill. Today he toots his horn that he got BP to commit to more than the $75M cap on damages.
Memorial Day tribute the men of USMC 2/5 who died in Ramadi 2004
These images were taken by the Marines with cell phones and digital cameras during my son’s deployment to Ramadi. Many men died and many more were wounded and more, like my son, suffer from traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder. Some of these men died close by my son and one died in his arms and each one’s passing have left a deep mark.
The child at the end of the video has a special place in my heart and my son will never forget her. The video may take a while to load and I will try to encode it for streaming later if time allows.
If the player doesn’t work you can down load it here
Here is part of my son’s story and a little bit of how war impacts military families
Colbert – Julian Assange editor of Wikileaks
“Julian Assange entitled the Apache helicopter video “Collateral Murder” in order to get maximum political impact. ”
I am one of the 90% who could not watch the entire video. WikiLeaks is another example of the steps necessary to compensate for the sorry state of investigative journalism today.
Democracy Now investigates the Wikileaks video of US troops firing on civilians
As the mother of an Iraq combat veteran these video confirmations of what many know to be a common occurrence in any war zone is painful to watch and painful to write about. Yet, it is critically important that we as a nation fully understand what is we are asking our youth to do and what we are asking them to become. The WikiLeaks video at the bottom was released Monday and I preferred to wait for calmer and more thoughtful heads to evaluate it because I may not be as objective as I would like but it is imperative we get past the DOD suppression of these events and evaluate the rules of engagement.
When you send people into horrible situations they will often do horrible things. When they come home they have to live with it. There are some well written pieces on this shocking video but the important thing to know is it is not uncommon, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in any war zone. The Pentagon goes to great lengths to hide this from the public. Thankfully, Pentagon staff and others working for the Department of Defense leaked this video to provide the truth to America.
Democracy Now has some exclusive interview footage taken the day after the massacre.
My son, John, who served two tours in Iraq saw the first few moments of this video and believed the young Reuters photographer’s camera lens was an RPG. Nevertheless, the order to fire was given before the twenty two year old photographer took up his camera and people were not firing at anyone as originally reported by the Pentagon and there were no troops beyond the helicopter gunship nearby to fire on anyway. This is painful viewing but it should be watched.
The young soldiers involved in this massacre will have to live with this the rest of their lives, just as my son is living with his experiences.
Americans fear debt to China more than terrorism
A new Zogby poll indicates Americans are wisely beginning to question the manner in which we have financed the war against terrorism. Meanwhile China engages in female infanticide.
More than twice as many U.S. adults (58%) say that debt owed to China is a more serious threat to the long-term security and well-being of the U.S than is terrorism from radical Islamic terrorists (27%).
Interestingly there was little variation by party identification with a majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents all agreeing that the debt owed by the United States to China poses the greater threat.
Meanwhile, in a painful snapshot of the social values of Americas largest creditor ‘gendercide’, discarding infant girls at birth, is still practiced in China to bad effect.
XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’
“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’
The result of the male female imbalance is that unpartnered young adult males turn to crime and violence.
Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence—especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble.
The crime rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of women, rape and prostitution. A study into whether these things were connected† concluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime. In India, too, there is a correlation between provincial crime rates and sex ratios. In “Bare Branches”††, Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer gave warning that the social problems of biased sex ratios would lead to more authoritarian policing. Governments, they say, “must decrease the threat to society posed by these young men. Increased authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth can be one result.”
Gender discrepancy is happening all over the world with a corresponding rise in violence… boys need girls and we girls need boys in equal numbers or all hell breaks out.
Also, while on the subject of China, South Africa is now accepting major investments in energy and rare earth mining and refining from China. Like America, they hope to develop jobs and improve the South African economy. Relying heavily on China hasn’t worked out so well here.
Olbermann – Rove rewrites history
Not a surprise that Karl Rove, ‘Bush’s brain’ would have a view of the lead-up to the Iraq war totally out of sync with proven facts.
Maddow – Liz Cheney flips the scoop – her dad is ‘al Qaeda’
Liz Cheney through her ‘Keep America Safe’ political action committee has connected the dots from al Qaeda to her dad, Dick… No wonder Bush ignored the intelligence memo alerting him to the 9/11 attacks! This would be funny if it weren’t for the almost 5,000 Americans killed in Iraq and 30,000 plus wounded
The Hurt Locker – Not such a great movie for those who have been there UPDATED
In the seven years since my son first left for war as part of the initial invasion of Iraq, I have found that my stomach for detail has greatly diminished. In the beginning, I wanted to know everything, understand everything, know what it was to be a warrior, know the sound of mortars and strong metallic scent of blood and the stench of burning bodies. Knowing these things, I believed, were important so that I could help my son, John, who after a second tour in Iraq is permanently disabled suffering from debilitating PTSD and TBI.
John wouldn’t cooperate, wouldn’t share much of what happened except occasionally almost by accident. As the war has worn on I find I can’t bare to go to Icasualties.org anymore. The painful individual stories of the soldiers and Marines I have met are too hard for me to take now. Believe me I still care but the motivation previously induced by the senseless suffering of the kids we send to war now just hurts too much that accomplishing anything is almost impossible. for now anyway, I won’t be watching the documentaries ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’, or ‘Body of War’, they are just too painful and I will not go to see The Hurt Locker, and at least one Marine blinded in Iraq feels the same way.
“The Hurt Locker” and all the other movies I mentioned, whether they are good or bad as entertainment, are still war movies and war movies glorify the acts of violence that I described above. How do you feel about that? Would you bring your children out to the battlefield to witness it live and in person? There is no happy ending. Kelly does not get the gold, Stryker does not make it to the top of Mount Suribachi and 8-Ball gets cut down by a sniper. Please remember that when you watch a war movie you are watching stories about young Americans who went far from home and risked their lives; some of them died there with only their brothers in arms to witness. Hollywood is now taking our money by walking on their graves.
Maybe that’s extreme. Of course I understand why people watch war movies. I watch them, too. But I have seen my friends die and most of the movies just bring up very painful memories.
Apparently, more than one veteran is unhappy with The Hurt Locker – from the Atlantic
In his self-published book, Stolen Valor, Vietnam veteran B.G. Burkett exposes scores of men who pass themselves off as war heroes. He digs through stacks of military personnel records and outs city councilmen, prominent businessmen and even presidents of veterans groups as frauds. Some had served in the military and finagled paperwork that bumped them up several ranks and turned them into battlefield legends. Purple Hearts, Silver Stars, Medals of Honor. Others hadn’t spent a day in uniform but conjured equally dramatic tales of daring and sacrifice. The imposters, he says, had become some of the most vocal and visible veterans. They influenced the public’s perception of war and even guided legislative agendas, a disservice to those who did the fighting and the bleeding.
How could they get away with that? Moral authority. So few Americans have actually walked and sweated on battlefields that they defer to those who say they have, and assume those men and women speak the truth.
This also explains why The Hurt Locker is up for a Best Picture Oscar. And why it shouldn’t win.
Rare earth shortages may put China in the drivers seat on green energy
As I have been writing for some time, China controls the rare earth magnet market. With the push for more wind farms and electric vehicles and China’s own growth in these industries, China may stop exporting except within a completed manufactured product.
“Countries and companies that have or plan to develop industries that need rare earth minerals to make products are concerned about China’s growing consumption, which they fear will eliminate China’s exports of rare earths,” said W. David Menzie, chief of the international minerals section at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
China has also encouraged companies that use rare earths to locate their manufacturing facilities in China, Menzie told TechNewsDaily. But some companies fear moving because of concerns about intellectual property protection, he added.
China is fast becoming known, rightly or wrongly, as the king of IP ripoffs and few companies want to take the chance of partnering with them, especially on their own turf. Then, of course, for socially conscientious companies that want to create manufacturing jobs in the US, moving to China is not an option.
There is some pressure on Congress to provide incentives to support the mining of existing rare earth deposits in the US but the technology to process it still lies with the Chinese. Some are speculating the next resource wars will not be held over oil but rare earth metals.
Rare earth neodymium magnets are critical to the wind industry, including the V-LIM, and while there are plans to reopen Mountain Pass in California for rare earth mining, there is no ready solution in sight despite neodymium being a critical part of all weapons guidance systems and homeland security.
As one of the worst polluters on the planet, knowing the future of green energy, homeland security and the weapons and guidance systems on everytank, fighter jet and aircraft carrier relies on foreign relations with China is a bit scary.
Olbermann – Special Comment – Get out of Afghanistan
Obama cannot persuade us that more blood and treasure should be spent in Afghanistan, bring our troops home. Olbermann, of course, says it much better
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