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Showing posts from September 13, 2007

The World’s Ingredients: Injustice, Hypocrisy, and Hope

The World’s Ingredients: Injustice, Hypocrisy, and Hope One part injustice. One part hypocrisy. One part hope. Imagine this as the recipe that makes up our world, with the proportions free to change but with no part free to vanish. Injustice is a priori the product of a competitive world. Hypocrisy is the rational response to injustice by the strong. Hope is the irrational response to injustice by the weak.

Al Jazeera English - News - Ethiopia Receives Somali Ultimatum

Al Jazeera English - News - Ethiopia Receives Somali Ultimatum : "Somali opposition leaders have formed a new political alliance, warning Ethiopian troops to 'leave now or never' at the conclusion of a conference in the capital of Eritrea. The group, which includes the Islamic Courts' Union, is called The Alliance for the Liberation of Somalia and has vowed to overthrow the current transitional government."

Good riddance.

The greedy tribal Sunni leader who shook the hand of the terrorist George W. Bush was eliminated! How sweet it is! How an Iraqi makes a deal with an evil man who destroyed his country and killed millions of his fellow citizen is beyond my belief. Good riddance.

Stupid Americans 2.

Bush rating on Iraq improves, new poll finds - Yahoo! News : "Just 30 percent of Americans approve of Bush's handling of Iraq, but that was an 8-point jump from July, said the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll."

Al-Jazeera man 'close to death' at Guantanamo Bay - Independent Online Edition > Americas

Al-Jazeera man 'close to death' at Guantanamo Bay - Independent Online Edition > Americas : "An al-Jazeera journalist captured in Afghanistan six years ago and sent to Guantanamo Bay is close to becoming the fifth detainee at the US naval base to take his own life, according to a medical report written by a team of British and American psychiatrists"

World Blog : Baghdad combat hospital busy again

World Blog : Baghdad combat hospital busy again : "A sophisticated trap They had been working in one of the Baghdad neighborhoods considered a hotbed of insurgents. At 3:30 a.m. they took up positions in a house to observe the area. Toward daybreak they heard somebody break in the house. When they went to check if the person was carrying a weapon, they saw a man with a gun run out. It turned out to be a sophisticated trap. Just as the men went out to pursue the armed man, one of the soldiers stepped on a hidden bomb that had been placed right where the insurgents knew the troops would go. He was the one with the extensive injuries. Many others were knocked unconscious from the blow."

Reason Magazine - The No-Exit Strategy

Reason Magazine - The No-Exit Strategy : "We can't leave, because the civil war will escalate, terrorists will be emboldened, and Iraq will break into hostile fiefdoms. We can't stay, because the U.S. occupation is inciting violence, discouraging political accommodation, draining our treasury, straining our armed forces, and costing the lives of American soldiers. Yet those are the only two options, and there is little reason to think they will look any better in one year or five or 10."

Evidence of torture used in Iraq | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics

Evidence of torture used in Iraq | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics : "The Foreign Office says the 'government, including its intelligence and security agencies, never use torture for any purpose' ( MI5 and MI6 to be sued for first time over torture, September 12). The evidence in the public domain from the court martial into the death of Baha Mousa and the serious abuse of 10 other Iraqi civilians is clear in establishing this is not true. UK armed forces went into Iraq with a written policy that allowed hooding, and with a policy of training interrogators to use hooding, stressing and sleep deprivation to gain intelligence. Iraqi civilians were routinely hooded in up to three sandbags - and even old plastic cement bags. When Baha Mousa died in September 2003, partly as a result of abuse while hooded, common sense dictates that at least at that point those in positions of responsibility within the civil service and military would have acted to change the poli

What the Warfare State Really Costs by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

What the Warfare State Really Costs by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. : "Estimates of the cost of the Iraq war continue to escalate to levels well beyond what its optimistic architects once promised. Most notable, perhaps, has been the estimate of Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz, who, in a January 2006 paper with Harvard’s Linda Bilmes, put the full cost at around $2 trillion. By the end of the year, the two had grown even more pessimistic: The $2 trillion number – the sum of the current and future budgetary costs along with the economic impact of lives lost, jobs interrupted and oil prices driven higher by political uncertainty in the Middle East – now seems low."

The Coming U.S. Hard Landing

The Coming U.S. Hard Landing : "The utterly ugly employment figures for August (a fall in jobs for the first time in four years, downward revisions to previous months’ data, a fall in the labor participation rate, and an even weaker employment picture based on the household survey compared to the establishments survey) confirm what few of us have been predicting since the beginning of 2007: the U.S. is headed towards a hard landing. "

Bush plots a coup

: "Do you know what this (expletives deleted) Bush is trying to do now?' growled Mustafa, my walking partner as we made our way around the block one warm evening. ‘He is trying to sell us $20 billion worth of arms that we don't need. And to top it off, he is using his taxpayers' money to fund Israel with $30 billion in the same bill. Now what does this region need with more arms?'"

Here’s the Smell of the Blood Still

Here’s the Smell of the Blood Still : "When Martin Luther King Jr. publicly referred to “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government,” he had no way of knowing that his description would ring so true 40 years later. As the autumn of 2007 begins, the reality of Uncle Sam as an unhinged mega-killer haunts a large minority of Americans. Many who can remember the horrific era of the Vietnam War are nearly incredulous that we could now be living in a time of similarly deranged official policy."

Pigs of War

Pigs of War Pigs of War come in both political colors of red and blue. We are all unfortunately very familiar with the red pigs. The pigs of war who manipulated, cherry-picked, stove-piped and manufactured intelligence to suggest to the world that Saddam had mushroom cloud producing WMD and something to do with the tragic events of 9-11 that occurred six years ago now. Many blue politicians are pigs of war and they willingly went along with the deceptions and even parroted red pig talking points whenever they got a chance but now claim that the “fiendishly clever” George fooled them into believing the nearly unbelievable. I don’t know about you, but I take small comfort in that excuse. When we have a system of government where our supposed public servants can profit off of war along with the corporations that pad their bank accounts both blue and red pigs benefit and young people needlessly lose their lives sometimes killing other humans in the process.