Tag Archives: Schools

Policing by America’s Reich

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Last week it was news about a woman named Hope in New York, whose cousin had called the police because another cousin had sexually molested her. When the police came they ended up arresting the victim, taking her to jail, then assaulted her again with 7-8 heavy and thuggish cops jumping on her, stripping the clothes off her, and leaving her naked in a jail cell!
 
Just yesterday, millions of Americans saw police dump a paralyzed man out of his wheelchair onto the floor of the police station, like he was just so much trash. Where do these attitudes and policing methods come from? How did the cops get to think that this sort of stuff is normal in the US?

These attitudes come out of the airports, out of Guantanamo, out of the Colorado Springs city council, where similar policing attitudes and methods were glossed over when used against elderly St Pat’s Day paraders in the city last year.

I remember Elizabeth being hauled across the pavement just an hour or so after having given her a ride to be there. She could not walk to the area where we were to start the parade and I had had to ask a cop to let my car though the barricade just for her to get to the Bookmobile. Later, after being assaulted by the cops, she had to face the city bringing criminal charges against her in the aftermath… for supposedly being part of a plot to block the parade from going on!

These police attitudes come as the American Reich has begun an electrical arms race across the country, with Taser International being the Lockheed of police weaponry. Our city and county governments think nothing about now spreading these devices into the schools!

These attitudes come from Iraq and Afghanistan, where our bombers drop ordinance down onto children below, just as if they were so much trash. This is policing today, in the American Reich. This is a new system in place, that uses torture on POWs even as our own local city flies flags about American POWs once held in Vietnam from the flag masts of the downtown post office right here in The Springs.

The American Reich doesn’t see the incongruence in their idiotic national pride about being the supposed repository of all democracy as they police as they are now doing. They have become more thuggish in simple increments, and now do not see the distance downhill they have actually traveled.

We live in a scary place and in scary times, but unlike in New York with Hope and here in The Springs with Elizabeth, at least in Florida these cops who dumped the paralyzed man on the floor from his wheelchair are now facing some troubles of their own. Yet, there are many more places where those in charge are totally complicit in the Reich style policing. Foremost among these hot spots of official complicity, is the Congress of the US.

Roller derby nostalgia for a lifestyle?

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Broads, Quads, Bruises and Brawls, the PPDD Slamazons versus the Muencas MuertasI enjoyed the buzz over the past decade as the Pikes Peak Derby Dames built their DIY franchise, as if a regional roller derby team had simply been an oversight of misplaced heritage. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why the WWWF of the 70s had gone the way of the spitoon.
 
This poster appears to depict a supine woman relishing the attentions of leprechaun droogs intent on mayhem, or -dare I suspect- her own rape murder?

I heard one Dame interviewed on local radio. She joked about a cat fight at the City Auditorium event the night before. Asked what being a roller derby queen meant to her, she answered “Everything! It’s a lifestyle!”

To be fair, she is probably referring to the full time job the dames have undertaken to enliven this city. At local events the Derby Dames always make an appearance to promote their upcoming bouts. The message is no more ever than frivolity and empowerment. But is the gladiator ring the greener pasture for those across the gender gap?

We can joke about mud wrestling, but marauding gangs of teenagers already cross our streets and schools intent on violence. Hair pulling being the least of the injury.

Did the zeitgeist of the 70s, newly health conscious, concerned for the environment, and sensitive to social issues, lose interest in the roller derby for its cartoon violence and promotion of an adolescent gang banger ethic?

The sport might have lost its television coverage, but roller derby teams have sprung up a quarter century later all on their own. As much as we might hold ourselves to higher standards, and hope to discourage gang violence, the ape urges are strong. You can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl. The Salvation Army knows this struggle better than anyone, you can’t always keep a bad man up.

What makes a good teacher?

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What makes a good teacher? The Bush Adminstration and the various school adminstrations in Colorado Springs think that they have the answer to that simple question. They think that a good teacher is one that is bullied by themselves, and that is forced to follow fixed curriculums that somehow are to make them ‘accountable’ for what they are doing in the classroom. They think that constant testing is an integral part of the teacher bullying process, where local school boards have to be bullied by the federal government who in turn bully the teachers, who in turn bully the students who in turn take ‘tests’.

All this is rather sad and pathetic, especially when students are taught a nonsensical course called ‘bully proofing’! Comical is it not? Oh, and did I forget that part where the school boards tend to bully parents that might not be so behind the bullying of ‘No Child Left Behind’? That is important, too. All this bullying from up on high is to convince all of us below that we are powerless people.

‘Do as you are told!’

But there is another approach than this authoritarianism masked and disguised and packaged to us as educational theory. It is allowing the teacher, hence the students, some freedom. See… What makes a good teacher?

America currently has few good teachers and few educated students. What we do have is ‘No Child Left Behind in Being Screwed by the Public Schools’ program. Another reason to be less than proud of what America has become.

Spook Steve Recca wants us to feel safe

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Commander Steve Recca, of the new DoD endowed UCCS Center for Homeland Security, told his Shove Chapel audience last night that Homeland Security is about being safe. That means everything to him from keeping his daughter safe at school to keeping the streets safe from excessive snow fall. Does the DHS want a crack at Climate Change?

Recca also explained that Homeland Security is about community. Yes, community: the local community and the global community. Whatever does he think “homeland” refers to? Manitou? Planet Earth? Before Bush and Ashcroft I’m pretty sure “Homeland” had only ever meant Nazi Germany, needing to be kept safe from Fascist-haters like socialists, anarchists, discontents and others who objected to Nazi land grabs. In the Soviet Bloc security would have been about community: the community of neighbors ready to rat on you.

Steve Recca kept Homeland Security affairs out of Greg Mortenson’s presentation until the end. Then, to cap off the questions from the audience, from the darkened anonymity of the public microphone, Recca asked for everyone’s patience while he read an “email from a Marine at an FOB (Forward Operating Base) in Afghanistan.”

In this “email” a soldier explained how protecting one of Mortenson’s schools was the most important goal of his mission, etc, etc.

The inattentive audience may have become too accustomed to visualizing boiler room letter writing sessions assigned to soldiers in the field, or soldiers laid up in VA hospitals with nothing else to do but hand-write form letters dictated to them by military PR specialists. Those Letters to the Editor sent to newspapers across the country, or emails to Dr Greg in this case, may be outsourced to India for all we know. In any case, the Colorado College audience was bored of it.

I’d like to see Recca explain what role propaganda or jingoism plays in Homeland Security.

Commander Steve Recca is a career spook, now pioneering the post-graduate studying of keeping white America safe. I can understand that DHS might require information sharing with the Intelligence Community. Does it have to be part of that community? Is that the “community” Recca was talking about?

Will Homeland Security be training its airport shoe-sniffers to conduct surveillance and torture too? Steve Recca doesn’t bring transportation or border guard experience to his job. His background is entirely about spying.

1983- graduate (with honors) of U.S. Naval Academy
1990- Master of Arts (with distinction) from Naval Postgraduate School
1990 to 1993- tours on USS YORKTOWN, USS TEXAS, USS AMERICA
1993- Staff, Commander Naval Forces Europe (CNE), in London
    Intelligence Watch Officer, Head of the Current Intelligence Branch.
1994- Certificate in International Political Affairs
    from University of Zurich
1995 to 1997- Special Assistant and Speechwriter
    for the Secretary of the Navy
1997 to 1998- Office of the Director of Central Intelligence,
    speech writer, member on Director’s Long-Term Planning Board
1998 to 2001-American Embassy in Oslo, Norway,
    as Assistant Naval Attaché,
    Joint Staff and Office of the Secretary of Defense
2001- Inman Intelligence Chair, Naval Postgraduate School,
    Senior Intelligence Officer and Intelligence Programs Coordinator
2003- Department of Defense Chief Liaison
    to the German Federal Intelligence Service.
2005- United States Northern Command’s Interagency Coordination
    Directorate, policy planning and technology consultant
2007- UCCS Center for Homeland Security

Here is Steve Recca quoted in the August 24, 2007 Colorado Springs Business Journal about a newly formed COLORADO HOMELAND DEFENSE ALLIANCE:

“The whole point behind the alliance is creating partnerships, networking — collaboration with government, military, university and corporations in the aerospace, defense and security industries.”

Sukey take it off again

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Polly put the kettle onOne of the greatest blogging joys is giving a post a title. I favor arcane, abstruse or esoteric titles, mainly because it’s fun to take disparate notions and weave them together, if only in the tapestry of my mind. I think obscure titles draw potential readers into what might be easily-ignored prose by eliciting in them the type of curiosity that would lead them to utter something akin to “what the hell does that mean?”

I wrote a recent post called Not my three cups of tea wherein I questioned the motives of Greg Mortenson’s supporters. The hagiography surrounding Mortenson, who had managed to build a few schools and co-write an incredibly crappy book, Three Cups of Tea, smacked of neocon propaganda.

However, upon finishing the book, I decided that without a doubt Mortenson was the bravest, most caring and compassionate soul on earth and, if there were any nefarious motives to be found, they were definitely not his. I felt a need to set things straight so I wrote a clarification and entitled it Polly put the kettle on, which seemed an obvious choice to me.

Apparently it was not obvious to others (Eric).

Polly Put the Kettle On was a rhyme written in 1797 by a father of five children, two boys and three girls. The boys liked to play loud and rambunctious games, while the girls played more quietly. When the girls had had enough of their brothers’ obnoxious ways, they would pretend they were going to have a tea party, an event that the boys would likely be required to attend. “Polly put the kettle on” was threat enough to send the boys running outside leaving the girls to talk and play in peace.

My title was meant to convey that I no longer wish to hear any noise about Greg Mortenson being a tool for the government or being an interloper in doing-just-fine-without-him Pakistan. I will chase you noisy boys (Eric) out the door so I can admire the intrepid and visionary man in peace.

See, I told you it was obvious.

Not my three cups of tea

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Attentive Pakistani CAI convertsI remember a time, not so long ago really, perhaps last month, when I was blissfully unaware of a wayward mountaineer named Greg Mortenson. After nearly reaching the summit of K2, and having lost his porter and his way on the descent, he limped, hungry and cold, into a tiny town in northeast Pakistan called Korphe. After several days spent recovering from his misadventure, Greg Mortenson stumbled from the village leader’s hut into the rarefied Himalayan air.

I am only halfway through the book Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time which attempts to tell of Mortenson’s journey through Pakistan and Afghanistan, and his quest to build schools for impoverished children. A brave and noble mission no doubt.

I must say, however, that the book is the most poorly written of any I’ve read since my Fabio days. I imagine Mortenson’s adventure was dangerous and thrilling, likely rivaling fellow climber Jon Krakauer’s Everest adventure. Krakauer’s tale was a positively riveting account of the experience, and Into Thin Air remains one of my all-time favorite adventure stories. Three Cups of Tea, on the other hand, well, sucks. I say this not to be unkind, but because I am wondering how on earth it ended up on the New York Times bestseller list.

Here is but a small sample of the creamy pablum co-author David Oliver Relin dishes out:

…Why couldn’t the flag of crescent and star lead these children such a small distance toward “progress and perfection”?

After the last note of the anthem had faded, the children sat in a neat circle and began copying their multiplication tables. Most scratched in the dirt with sticks they’d brought for that purpose. The more fortunate…had slate boards they wrote on with sticks dipped in a mixture of mud and water. “Can you imagine a fourth-grade class in America, alone, without a teacher, sitting there quietly and working on their lessons?” Mortenson asks. “I felt like my heart was being torn out. There was a fierceness in their desire to learn, despite how mightily everything was stacked against them….I knew I had to do something.”

That something became a big something, and Greg Mortenson will share his story at Shove Chapel on January 15.

In Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson, besides being of impressive stature, a point made on every page of the book, is portrayed as little more than a socially stunted somewhat incompetent drifter. So how did this guy, who couldn’t find a decent ghost writer, suddenly become a master of self-promotion? A book tour, magazine covers, even promotional materials sent home in my child’s school backpack. It’s pretty amazing.

I am, as I said, only halfway through the book but I’ve not read anything about Mortenson’s mission of peace. Korphe’s village leader confided to him that, although he ran his fingers reverently over its pages, he couldn’t actually read his treasured Koran, and did not wish the same terrible fate on his children. Mortenson’s mission appears one of education and literacy. I found a copy of the book with a previous title, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations…One School at a Time. Vanquishing terrorism and nation building are the pet projects of neocons, aren’t they? I guess peace promotion is easier to market.

A final note. Greg Mortenson’s lecture at Shove Chapel is sponsored by the UCCS Center for Homeland Security. I really don’t get the connection. I feel like this guy is an unwitting pawn in some greater game. What that game is I don’t know. So I’ll finish the book, go to the lecture, and see if I can connect the dots.

Greg Mortenson’s own cup of tea

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In his own words, Greg Mortenson is quite a bit more revealing about his motives in Pakistan. Pax Americana is definitely a subtlety lost on him.
 
Central Asian regions where CAI has financed constructionThis map is from the Central Asia Institute‘s own brochure. It shows the parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Greg Mortenson’s CAI has helped finance community building projects. I thought the shaded area formed an interesting buffer zone along the border to… CHINA! Is that region of greater interest peacewise than the war-torn borders facing Afghanistan or India?!

The current Independent features a cover story on Mortensen, to promote his Jan 15 Colorado College appearance. It turns out he’s as inarticulate as his dictation of Three Cups of Tea suggests. Here’s how Mortenson regards his unwitting Islamic accomplices:

…we bring in mullahs who support girls’ education. We have two ex-Taliban who are now teaching in our girls’ schools and have become some of our biggest proponents. It’s somewhat similar to an ex-smoker or an alcoholic who has changed and becomes very against smoking or drinking.

Here Mortenson describes how his schools convince Muslim communities to enroll their girls:

We even use good old-fashioned Western capitalism. We go and tell a mullah: If I want to marry a girl in your village, how many goats do I owe you? He might say five goats. If she has a fifth-grade education, how many goats would I then have to pay you? And the answer would probably be 15 to 20 goats. A goat is usually $30 to $40 each.

And then we tell the mullah: If all the girls are educated, just think of how much more wealth you’d have. Then you can see his eyes get bigger.

At least Mortenson is up front about the Capitalist invasion for which he plays scout. Evidently the untapped region’s girls are for sale, and once educated they’ll have value-added for mercantilism.

American society tends to glorify education for its own sake. What “education” is CAI providing to the Muslims exactly? Do CAI’s texts teach that secular culture is intent on the eradication of spiritual culture? Is the CAI curriculum simply favoring western indoctrination over an Islamist counterpart? I’ll let Mortenson show his hand:

perhaps the most controversial, is our Islamic studies for about two or three hours every week. It’s very tempered, and we include in that learning the differences between Sunni and Shia. We’ve also added what you might call religion studies, or learning about different faiths or religion.

In a monotheistic society you need that like emperor penguins need tap dancing lessons. Imagine the uproar if we tried to teach New Life Church kids that the faith of their parents was only one extreme of many! A good idea no doubt, but unlikely to provoke a peaceful reaction.

POSTSCRIPT
Our junior high student came home yesterday with three promotional pieces about Three Cups of Tea in advance of Mortenson making an appearance at her school. Do you wonder how he’s getting such press? One of the pamphlets instructs the children about how they can “Help Three Cups of Tea (3CT) surge:” (My emphasis, their slip of the forked tongue)

1. Recommend 3CT to at least one person or place: family, friend, colleague, book club, professor and teacher, student, and places of worship. It also makes a great gift! (You’ve got to be kidding me! 3CT practically screams you’re illiterate.)

2. Visit 3CT website…

3. Recommend 3CT for ‘One Book – One Read’ at http://www.loc.gov/loc/cfbook/one-book.html (please don’t).

4. Recommend 3CT as a University or college-wide… read http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070607/7summer.htm (YGTBFKM)

5. Ask bookstores without 3CT to stock the book, especially airport bookstores. (?)

6. Send 3CT with a personal note to your Senators and/or Representatives (US legislators, why?)

7. Write a ‘letter editor’ [sic] to suggest 3CT and to support education and literacy… to promote peace, economic development and prosperity. (Emphasis mine. Co-opting Muslim girls for Capitalism promotes peace how?)

8. Ask magazines, newspapers, or radio station [sic] to review 3CT (they suggest sending a copy)

9. Learn about the power of girls’ education… in What Works in Girls Education (by Neocon think tank author Barbara Hertz)

10. Learn about grassroots book promotion…

11. Suggest 3CT to Oprah: http://www.oprah.com/email/reach/email_showideas.jhtml

12. Suggest 3CT to C-Span 202-737-0580.

13. Write a book review on Amazon.com, bn.com… (No need, it’s getting slammed! Too bad my Junior High principle isn’t getting a clue. Are our teachers illiterate too?)

14. Start Pennies For Peace in your school, library, or place of worship… http://www.penniesforpeace.org

Billions for war, but apparently we need only pennies for peace.

Hopefully 3CT’s proceeds are going toward peace. (Marie reports their financials say it’s “up to 7%,” so hey, they do mean single-cent figures!) Perhaps Mortenson can earmark some of the Coins for Cultural Sensitivity.

POST-POSTSCRIPT
The Amazon reviews are uproarious! But 3CT trolls are loading the funniest with bad marks where it asks Do you find this review helpful, so you’ll have to look fast. I’ll reprint a couple below.

By the way, Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… was originally released as Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations. It wasn’t selling the mission?

I’ll work up my own slipcover for Mortenson’s speaking engagement, with help from the comments below. Hopefully he’ll be good-natured enough to sign it:
Three Cups of Tedium: One Man’s Mission to be a Dhimmi
-A Condescending Westerner who attempt to “educate” Muslims.

(This is part 2 of 3 pieces: a review of the 3CT book, the promotion around the book tour, and Mortenson’s public appearance.)

On JAN 14 let us not expand Ft Carson

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Less military equals more prosperityPlease attend the upcoming Fort Carson expansion town hall meeting at the Antlers Hilton on January 14. Let the pro-military, pro-business representatives know what you think about making Colorado Springs even more dependent on poor paying jobs, predatory businesses, and skyrocketing social problems. Only developers, car-dealers, pawn shops, strip clubs, liquor stores, social workers, jails and mortuaries benefit from a higher soldier population. The rest of us suffer increased crime and their children’s behavioral problems in our schools. Plus can you imagine the Army is going to use an expanded Ft Carson as pretext to seize Pinon Canyon for their maneuvers?
 
Has there ever been a city to prosper by hosting military bases? Colorado Springs is awash with Defense Department facilities and look where it’s got us! El Paso County is cutting services left and right. Soldiers reduce the tax base, they pay fewer taxes, they register their vehicles out of state, and their spouses require more social services. As a result, El Paso is scaling back its County Health Department. For starters they’re closing the STD clinic by next year. More soldiers = fewer STDs? I don’t think so.

Stealing Muslim women from terrorists

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What is Greg Mortenson teaching the children of Pakistan?I’m afraid my Neo Liberal roots are showing. Greg Mortenson is delivering a lecture at CC on January 15th and I hardly know how to object. I too believe that the fate of mankind depends on education.

However, where have I the right to hold such a belief system, mine, above others? You can call Islam a religion for uneducated poor people, and be mostly right, as indeed the same applies to all fundamentalist absolutists. But that is only to regard education in the liberal sense, with its belief that a secular utopia awaits man’s bettering himself through progress. Technology, medical advances, and the celebration of the individual lead mankind where exactly? To a healthier, more antiseptic life certainly, civil discourse often, but to chaos and nihilism so far, quickly.

Fundamentalist Luddite religious systems may not take man to the moon, but they do ensure spiritually grounded lives, full families, and the same for all foreseeable descendants. Which model is likely the more sustainable? If we posit that the greater percentage of mankind need such intellectual tethers, to whom do you entrust their guidance? Allah or Coca Cola?

The West may think it offers salvation to the women of Islam, but is it true? Are the middle class advocates of women’s rights prepared to take in their rescuees? A Muslim wife’s life is at the mercy of Muslim males, and we’ve been treated to horrific accounts. How do they compare to what capitalism has to offer? Those liberated from the Koran can look forward to the certainty of exploitation by globalization bosses be they man or woman, regulated by amoral corporations and corrupt officials, now without the comfort of leading lives of spiritual purpose.

Isn’t the jury still out on the West’s liberated women? They’re having fewer children, that’s for certain.

White knights like Mr. Mortenson offer a gift horse that indeed cannot deliver. Meanwhile of course our soldiers and free trade carpetbaggers quietly pile on inside. Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea has been requisitioned by the Defense Department and issued to our counter-insurgency forces, probably to teach the Hearts and Minds lingo, hopefully not worse.

Mortenson’s visit to Colorado Springs is being sponsored by a new department of UCCS, the Center for Homeland Security, I kid you not! It’s a major now offered by UCCS, established with funding from the Pentagon, staffed with retired military instructors, and chaired by career CIA officer Steve Recca. Look him up, his name is tied completely to CIA activities. As they say in the intelligence biz, he’s totally “mobbed up.”

The tag line to Mortenson’s book tour is to use education outreach as an alternative means to combat terrorism. While it is a refreshing change-up to our direct war making against terrorism, I can’t imagine behaving cavalierly toward Islam is going to endear us greatly. Osama didn’t want US feet on the ground in Saudi Arabia. Do Muslims in general want westerners building schools for their girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Could stealing their young women be seen as anything but a provocation for a terrorist response?

The iron fist of the marketplace

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Burmese priests protestThink you’re the only one who’s come to the conclusion that the average person can be relied upon only as far as you can drag him by the ear? Do you lament that the common sense of common heads put together adds up to a hill of beans?

If you think you know better, your challenge might be to cajole or inform, in hopes of motivating the herd, where others high on the food chain would simply ride roughshod.

Burmese monks leave their sandals behindI find it odd to use animal kingdom analogies to explain human behavior when Homo Sapiens comprise neither competing species, genus, class or phyla stalking each other.

Of the nurture versus nature, I mean carrot versus stick herd management option, which approach do you observe governments most often employ? In public schools it’s authoritarian, on the streets it’s civility so long as people submit appropriately to their fleecing. But as recent events have shown, dissent has meant government reaction with black gloves, masks, armor padding, truncheons, and low tech brutality. Every aspect something you’d expect more from those traditional masters of persuasive communication, the mobsters.

The people most alarmed by totalitarian repression are the educated class who over the centuries have fought for every liberty their overlords were forced to yield. The working classes represented the leverage used to negotiate each concession, and thus came along for the ride. But its muscled ranks have always served as the labor pool for the thugs the governors would use to fight any progressive reformers.

Your police departments all have riot gear to don in the event of civil disturbances. Can you say you’ve approved of their harsh measures in the event of your getting hysterical? That equipment isn’t for soccer hooligans, it’s to break strikes and beat back political assemblies.

We’ve seen police around the world fire on crowds assembled peaceably in Burma, Mexico, Tibet and Iraq. In New Orleans we’ve seen police taser crowds of people just like us, who wanted to protest a public meeting where the decision was being made to condemn their houses.

If you think massacres are beyond the pale for our corporate overlord class, think again. If they can do it without inciting a mass rebellion, they will. The independent minded people of East Timor were massacred with US weapons and the tacit complicity of a media which let it happen off camera. So long as you don’t see it, it doesn’t bother anyone’s conscience apparently. Children labor as slaves in Bangladesh, Africa and Asia for our corporations. You don’t see it, so it’s not a problem. For the profit-mongers all corporate genocide is OK, be it by economic starvation, accident, contamination, or pollution. If you could understood the depravity inherent in their exploitation of world poverty and its resources, can you doubt they’d hesitate to fire live rounds into a crowd who threatened their rule?

Christmas ornaments from child labor

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Children making ARTIC FUN Christmas ornaments for Walmart
Walmart is in trouble again. It’s selling Christmas ornaments which an investigation by the National Labor Committee has determined are produced in sub-standard conditions. Chiefly, that the young workers who produced the ornaments, in an 8,000 person factory in Canton China, are being paid piecemeal instead of the minimum 55¢/hour, resulting in wages as low as 26¢/hour.

Not to trivialize the monetary difference, but there were other workplace details for which Walmart was not being flagged. Could this imply that these factors might apply to other Chinese or third world products still being made for Walmart, Target and the other big-box retailers?

Ready? The assembly line workers were often children, some as young as 12 years old, loaned to the factory by their schools, who worked 15 hour days, seven days a week. Workers taking a day off were docked two and a half days pay. Also the children were working with paints and chemicals without protective gear such as gloves or masks.

Destroying the evidence of US government torture of POWs

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Our despicable national government has just admitted that it destroyed the video taping of its use of torture on prisoners held at the Guantanamo concentration camp for US captured POWs. See article… CIA destroyed video of ‘waterboarding’ al-Qaida detainees

What a group of liars and hypocrites the Bush Administration has assembled at the head of power in the US. First they deny that torture is being advocated, then they say that certain torture methods are in their eyes not actual torture, and then they destroy the evidence of the torture actually already being used on POWs in their hands.

And our local governments follow this type of misleadership straight on down the line. Don’t believe that? Then go and try to get a municipal resolution passed stating local opposition to the US use of torture in our domestic jails and military concentration camps. See what the reaction would be like down at the city council meetings here in Colorado Springs?

Speaking of torture…. do you know that the El Paso County has its school police force equipped with taser guns at middle schools and high schools? Do you know that the city police of Colorado Springs has used these devices on people already, even as some divisions of the United Nations says there is strong evidence that these weapons are being used as instruments of torture in an increasing manner?

Just recently I saw the downtown post office flying the black POW/MIA flag that became so promoted by the US Right Wing post Vietnam War. Apparently the concern about POWs is pretty damn selective in the US.

When is the US public going to say enough is enough about our government using torture on US held POWs, as it has been doing? Are we all too damn scared now to have POW/MIA bumperstickers on our cars and/ or a flag that demands that all human beings have rights to ethical treatment… even if the US government authorities presume them guilty of some crime or other?

We need some symbols like this, and they need to be flown from government buildings in place of that garbage accusing the Vietnam government of torturing US soldiers in secret. The Right Wingers in charge of our municipality prefer to promote war and the use of torture on US held POWs instead of speaking out for human decency though. And currently this city hasn’t had enough local citizens oppose this city government-military-industrial complex led by Mayor Lionel Rivera and his corporate backers like Lockheed, et al.

The people who ordered destroyed the tapes of the water boarding of POWs held by the US military are war criminals and need to be jailed and tried for their crime of destroying evidence. And then they need to be jailed for ordering the torture of POWs in the first place. Are Americans proud to have a government like this? All of us should be deeply ashamed for not doing more to stop these thugs. Get out and make your voice heard! Go to the local government meetings held downtown and put some pressure on the local officials to stop going along with it all.

Sign this petition in support of the East Morton High School students who protested The War!

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Our country is disgraceful under the direction of its current misleaders, and no more so than in what has become of the public schools under George Bush’s control. Parents Urge High School to Reverse Expulsions for Students Who Held ‘Day of Dead’ Iraq War Protest

Please sign their petition, and go to as many District 11 School Board meetings as you can, and give the jerks running Colorado Springs public schools hell for the crappy job they are doing.

Next school board election we need some much better candidates to choose from. I still have the ballot in my hand for the current election and it makes me want to cry. Is this really the only local material we have to choose from at this time?

Thank God for the high school students at Morton East High School in Cicero, Illinois and the ones in Boulder, Colorado, too! They deserve all the support we can give them. We need to send these dumb ass administrators a petition with a million or so names on it. Educate the ‘educators’ now!

An economy gasping for air

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Fed move risks long-term pain for short-term gain More cheap credit issued by the Federal Reserve was what drove the stock market rally yesterday. The US has an economy gasping for air.

The Iraq War has been a boondoggle that allowed the major international corporations to loot the American economy while providing no real service to either the Iraqi people or the American.

An economy based on allowing the real estate firms to loot America’s housing stock with cheap and crappy development, allowing the medical supply-insurance firms to loot funds needed for the elderly and the sick, and allowing the War contractors to loot funds from all of our society, but especially funds needed by children and their schools is an economy that can go absolutely nowhere except toward bankruptcy for the majority of the population.

The easy war is no longer going to be so easy for Americans as they now begin to lose their jobs, their mortgaged houses, and their ‘national security’. Why? We let ourselves be suckered into allowing the super rich to direct all our affairs without any brakes on their power.

The Bush family cash cow

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Curriculum on castorsDespite having no experience in education, Neil Bush is the founder of a Texas-based company called Ignite! Learning, which, since 1999 has peddled strange little devices called “Curriculums on Wheels” (COWs) to schools state and nationwide.
 
Rather than anything bovine, COWs actually resemble bright plastic droids or office chairs gone terribly wrong. Described as “computer/projectors,” it’s not really clear what they do or how they work, and a cursory look at the company’s website does not help. (Apparently it involves swivel action.) Regardless, there are COWs for different subjects: the Math COW, the Science COW (“the ultimate classroom sidekick!”) and the Social Studies COW. No sign of a sex-ed COW. See the complete alternet article

In District 11 Colorado Springs, this sort of robotic device goes by the name ‘the success maker‘. It too, is a cash cow that is a bright ‘droid’ that doesn’t profit the kids at all, but kills them slowly with non-teaching designed to kill the brain. This crap from these corporate vampires is sick, sick, sick…. In fact, it is a form of child abuse pretending to be education reform.

Check out Neil Bush’s website and the lovely Musak he uses to push this nonsense.

Department of Defense and History

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A Pack O Lies NowBush is invoking the lessons of Vietnam as a reason to persevere in Iraq, highlighting opinions of historians apparently. The media describes them as heroic revisionist historians who are opposed by anti-war historians. Has academia betrayed history?
 
Who is historian Mark Moyar, author of Triumph Forsaken (how we could have won in Vietnam etc)? Associate professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University.
 
Who is historian Lewis Sorley, author of A Better War, Honorable Warrior (and other favorable accounts of Vietnam)? Civilian official of the Central Intelligence Agency, then Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Army Historical Foundation and Executive Director of the Association of Military Colleges and Schools of the United States.
 
Who are the anti-war historians? Everybody else.

The g-factor

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sat1.jpg 
 
My courtship with Dave went something like this. “Hi.” “Hi.” “What did you get on the SAT?” “XXX on math. XXX on verbal. You?” “800 on both.” “Combined?” “Ha.”

That conversation, which occurred at Bennigan’s on North Academy in 1984, as I sat at a table holding hands with my cute-but-inferior tennis pro boyfriend, sealed our fate. Dave and I were less than crazy about each other. Our DNA, on the other hand, fell fast and hard. Over the moon in fact. Our double-stranded helices batted amino acids at each other, wanting to intertwine forever in a heart-shaped petri dish. Messenger RNA played Yenta. We were both far more concerned about the g-factor, inherent ability to learn, IQ for you old schoolers, than the g-spot, which I still don’t understand that well or care about that much. Really.

Our top colleges had traditionally drawn from the spawn of the affluent. Students from northeastern prep schools such as Exeter and Andover were the incoming freshman class. Higher education was not for the many, but for the privileged few. Thank goodness that a rebel Rockefeller or Carnegie daughter defied her parents and married a cowboy from Wyoming. The rich began to question the system. “How can I get my dung-covered grandson into Princeton? I know he is far more brilliant than some of these Vermont yahoos. I know! Let’s create a test that shows off the Mayflower genome. Diamonds in the American rough.” Thus the SAT was born.

For many years the SAT served a noble purpose. Intelligent hardworking children from mediocre schools, from up-and-coming western states, from blue collar families, could distinguish themselves as better than their circumstances would normally allow. Stanford, the “Harvard of the West,” helped America meet her Manifest Destiny.

But the rich are not comfortable with a level playing field. Perhaps they fear that too many trophy wives have diluted their genetic purity. I don’t know. But, predictably, they began to climb back up Mount Superior. What was designed to be a test taken after a good night’s sleep, by anyone, became a game to be won. Expensive review courses and other manipulations once again favored the privileged few. Not about to give up flagship universities to the underclass, they changed the rules of engagement.

Educators say that the SAT tells us nothing much. Yes, a certain segment of society has an inherent superior ability to learn, to achieve what they’ve been asked to achieve. No surprise there. But it is a limited quest. A limited vision. And a poor indicator of future success. Superiority for its own sake is a dead end. Our kids can walk around now with pride but not purpose. They can achieve but not accomplish. The SAT has become the measure of a person. Works aside. That’s sad. I feel for my children, being raised in this environment. They want to do well, and achievement is what it takes. I rue the pressure they feel, but I am unable to remove them from the competition.

Abolish the SAT. Abolish the ACT. Abolish the CSAP. Let the measure of a person be what they DO. If they work hard to attain good grades, let us honor that. I think it was Jesus who said, “Pretty is as pretty does.” Or maybe he said, “If they won’t work, let them also not eat.” I made a mistake when I thought that good genes were the loftiest goal. Not so.

No Child Left Behind

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The Army wants to leave no child behindIt’s a double entendre. It describes the Army plan to salvage our education slogan, to harvest the dummies from our scuttled schools, who have no other job prospects than to serve as cannon fodder for greedy big oil.
They’re also leaving no home unturned in Iraq and Afghanistan, turning the children against us, to be eradicated soon enough when they’re big enough to lift a gun and be labeled combatant.

Maybe too they mean that apres le deluge, none of us will be children again.

Take the Potter taste test challenge

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Harry Potter jumps the sharkMy comments about JK Rowling were mean spirited naturally, but the reaction was like I’d made a snotty put-down of something exalted. Was my criticism limited by subjectivity?
 
This is not Fancy Feast versus the same thing in an economy brand can. Do you think quality is a matter of subjective taste? In such case you are confused by the hyperbole of marketing. A Coke tastes like its commercials, a Pepsi like theirs. That’s not taste. In many things involving our senses, the human being was designed to judge quantitative differences.
 
Why raise the subject at all? No one expects a symphony from an ice cream truck. But when promoters want to drive an ice cream truck unto the stage at Carnegie Hall, naturally some of us want to intone.

To me, you know literature when you see it. You’re reading along, and before you know it you become distracted by notions not linearly related to the physical events of the plot, musings, asides, descriptions which express larger truths. They don’t stand out necessarily, except you find yourself reading more slowly, lost in thought. That’s literature. It’s more to chew.

Of course everything doesn’t have to be literature. I can appreciate a Big Mac, even praise it, without having to pretend it’s filet mignon. I’m not defensive either way. But I’ll also add that if you were to serve me the same Big Mac reconfigured as Haut Cuisine on an oversized plate with pepper and Special Sauce cast about artfully, I could easily delight myself confusing it for something nutritious. Though it be the same poison.

And here is my point. My palate is not very sophisticated about food. I can enjoy a claret or a cheap Shiraz equally. I’m uneducated and inexperienced with them. Similarly I can’t tell a saxophone from the hydraulic exertions of a garbage truck.

Just as we fall short teaching critical thinking in our schools, might we also raise readers lacking discernment for meaningful writing? Readers who might confuse writing of nutritional value with writing that can give you heart disease?

Abuse, or politically motivated false allegations?

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Occupational Hazard: False Allegations of Child Abuse Against Educators
By Brian Barrido, Esq. and Jay Mykytiuk
A school custodian was accused of sexual abuse by five girls. The charges were later dropped when the girls admitted that they had fabricated the story because the custodian had reported them for vandalizing a restroom. An Assistant Superintendent jumped off a bridge to his death after being accused of abusing a student. He had been cleared of any wrongdoing earlier that day.

A social studies teacher was accused of molesting a student during a school field trip. Eleven months later, his name was cleared when his accuser recanted. A nine year-old girl offered to pay each of her friends one dollar if they would accuse her teacher of abuse.

False allegations of child abuse against teachers and other school employees can be economically, emotionally, and financially devastating. It can lead to criminal prosecution and long jail terms. And it is a real phenomenon. One school administrator claims to receive 10-12 false accusations of abuse against teachers every year. Multiplied across the country, this number is staggering and disturbing.

Because crimes against children are so horrific, naturally accusers are taken seriously. What this means for accused teachers, is that they are usually presumed guilty—a presumption that can be very difficult to overcome. The most common motive of students who falsely accuse their teachers is to punish teachers who either disciplined them or give them poor grades. A false accusation of physical or sexual abuse will usually ensure that the targeted teacher is, at the least suspended or fired, and at worst, brought up on criminal charges. If an investigation is not properly handled, or the accused educator is not adequately represented by legal counsel, they may lose their careers and their freedom.

Some schools are addressing the issue before the problem arises. School handbooks advise teachers not to have any physical contact with students. Others discourage teachers from ever being one-on-one with a student in a classroom. But despite these precautions, educators remain vulnerable to abuse charges due to the nature of their positions.

The consequences of a guilty plea or conviction for physical or sexual abuse are potentially disastrous. Besides substantial jail time, the convicted abuser will lose his teaching license. If convicted of sexual abuse, one must register as a sex offender, and have their name and residence publicly posted. The convicted abuser will be barred from certain types of jobs, and will often be forced to undergo psychological treatment. This adds up to a steep price for simply choosing a career in education.

An educator accused of physical or sexual abuse against a child should seek counsel immediately. A competent attorney will investigate your case, gather character witnesses, and argue your case to the District Attorney. Your attorney should secure expert witnesses in the area of child psychology. In general, it is crucial that your attorney prepare a comprehensive legal strategy to combat the false accusations and prove your innocence.
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What if you had protested the Iraqi War? What if you were an Iraqi War vet who had recently spoken out publicly against an unpopular war? What if you had repeatedly protested The Iraqi War on a street corner near to the school where the accusations came about? What if you had spoken out at your city council’s meeting in front of the mayor and then been covered on multiple channels of the local news and had spoken out against a police attack on a pro-peace group at the local St Patrick’s Day Parade?

You do the math…

See Solidarity

Kurt Vonnegut goes

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Kurt Vonnegut lectures at HarvardM and I just read Harrison Bergeron together two nights ago. I remembered the story from high school, where we also read Slaughterhouse Five to my father’s consternation. I like to think it was just the language he objected to.
 
My favorite essay of KV’s at In These Times was about governance guesswork.
 
Kurt Vonnegut could say it all and I don’t think he was through.

I just came across an excerpt someone posted from Jailbird:

“What could be so repulsive after all, during the Great Depression, especially, and with yet another war for natural wealth and markets coming, in a young man’s belief that each person could work as well as he or she was able, and should be rewarded, sick or well, young or old, brave or frightened, talented or imbecilic, according to his or her simple needs? How could anyone treat me as a person with a diseased mind if I thought that war need never come again–if only common people everywhere would take control of the planet’s wealth, disband their national armies and forget their national boundaries; if only they would think of themselves ever after as brothers and sisters, yes, and as mothers and fathers, too, and children of all other common people–everywhere. The only person who would be excluded from such friendly and merciful society would be one who took more wealth than he or she needed at any time.”

And this from an interview with Joel Bleifuss in 2003:

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is “The Mask of Sanity ” by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

Medicine for profit is a world disaster in march

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Medicine for profit is a march down a blind alley and the reason why is quite simple to understand. ‘Care’ for an individual for an individual fee, is the ultimate non-holistic approach possible since health is so absolutely connected to the environment that people live in.

To treat the individual in an effective manner, doctors have to also treat the environment as well. But just go and try telling this to your average numbskull private-profit doc that the American medical schools turn out so in mass. These think-they-know-it-all degreed idiots are sure they know what’s best for you, but the medical machine they are part of never does jack shit to treat the environmental conditions that make people sick. Logically and scientifically it makes no sense. But that is medicine for profit for you, is it not?

Take as just one tiny example, the cathedrals where many of these doctors often practice in; the hospitals. The doctors often stroll in with their coats and ties on, while the patients and medical worker peons that the doctor boss around are most often passing their days in areas more nasty than your home toilet area. Most of these doctors are cynical bastards that almost entirely identify with the corporate structure they have melded and immersed themselves into. They say they care about the patients they take in for a fee, but the ‘care’ most often stops when the bucks stop. Or it never begins in the first place.

Don’t believe me? Then try going into an average doctors office without medical insurance cards in hand. What’s the first thing one gets asked when they show up half dead into the ER? It is always, ‘What’s your coverage?’ And if you got none, you most often will get sent packing. ‘Dumped’ is the word now used, and that’s not exactly treating the patients holistically. Not at all.

Truth is, the medical doctors are not allowed (nor allow themselves to even contemplate) to treat the environment. That is seen as the terrain of the corporations and their government alone. The average American doctor concedes that area without even a bleat of protest. But why? Public Health is certainly important in the treatment of disease, isn’t it?

Why treat the farm worker, say, after his exposure to deadly pesticides? Why not treat the environment to prevent the disease, Doc? No money in it for you? Why not treat the lack of food, the lack of clean drinking water, the lack of a decent living space, the lack of a decent wage, instead of just treating the now already sickened individual who comes to you with insurance card in hand, Doctor? Too scared to fight disease? Too bought off by the hundreds of thousands you are often making?

You are a fraud, corporate medicine and corporate model doctors. You turn all of us in your medical factories into dehumanized entities with only titles and employee numbers in hand, and not even our own humanity which you strip away from us bit by bit, same as you strip away the sick and elderly folk’s dignity. You turn us all into an Evil Empire that churns out your profits, and destroys people’s health. You destroy the environment same as your corporate cousins in agriculture, mining, and military goods production do, alsdo.

You are strip mining world health, not bettering it, all to make bucks. And the US doctors are all aboard this gigantic con game on society, hiding behind a facade of being all high tech and scientific. Instead, you business doctors are as nasty as an MRSA sore, a Vancomycin resistant diarrhea, a brain dead corpse in the ICU, a multi drug resistant TB, and all the other products of made by your corporate medical model and your human devolution as system into monster. All you hold now to bedazzle the crowd with, is some sort of future tech fix that is the pie in the sky you always promise. Meanwhile, you turn our environment into cesspool. You are turning all of us into ‘medical waste’, Corporate Doc.

From Dallas to Dubai, Oh Why?

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How was it that my former employer, Halliburton, has floated from Dallas to Houston to now, Dubai? JR, where are you? You left the ranch!

Youngsters might not have ever seen the US’s favorite soap opera of all time, ‘Dallas’, where JR Ewing was owner of Ewing Oil? For years fans made pilgrimage’s to the ranch, Southfork (read South forked tongue), where JR reigned supreme in this sappy TeleFantasy. JR is now our vice presdent (in real life) and his company is called Halliburton, a major source of corruption throughout the world as well as in the White House.

When Dick Cheney was getting his start, it consisted of buying up Dresser Industries in Dallas, where I worked as a production machinist way back in the early ’80s. The company made oil field equipment and used a lot of asbestos in its production. Cheney gobbled up the company for Halliburton at cut rate prices, thinking for sure that his high connections would get the company off very easy from all the workers and their families suing the outfit for exposing them to this deadly substance. He was right, the injured workers had to settle for pennies as they begin to die off. Halliburton had filed for bankruptcy!

As we all well know, this evil company headed by Satan (Dick Cheney) has risen from Hell to infect the world once again with its sin. Most notably in Iraq, where it has taken the US tax payer to the cleaners, as literally billions have disappeared under its watch. Might there be liability of some form ahead? Plus, the company has ripped off various cleanup funds for hurricane hit areas, most notably Katrina, but also including other storms. Halliburton is corruption personified.

But wait! This All American company has just relocated to Dubai, one of the 9 emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. You might think this all logical, as so the company maintians due to Dubai being the center of the world’s major oil producing region? But only about 7% of the economic activity of Dubai is related to oil. The main source of income is from tourism! Yes, tourism.

I know, I know. You are probably sick of visitng Disneyland and Las Vegas, and have suggested to yoour husband or wife or Significant Other,

‘Hey, why don’t we vacation in Dubai this year?’

And they might have whined n response. ‘Dubai?’

Yes, Dubai. Let us tell you why, Dubai!

You see, Dubai is about 1 million population, making it 1/3 of the population of the UAE’s 9 emirates. But there are 3 times more men than women living there. What gives? And who are these folk?

Well, only less than 20% of them have citizenship. Huh? Well, basically Dubai’s small citizenry live in a gated community like those gated communities found in upper class enclaves in Dallas and Houston. The 80% plus of other residents are ‘servants’. Or to be more exact, many of them are basically slaves. It’s kind of like Texas, but even more Texas than the original.

Dick Cheney and his cohorts at Halliburton will feel just fine there. English is the language of the schools, and also the language of business. It’s a dictatorship, theocracy, and a Kingdom. Plus, the banking laws are just right! What liability?

But most of all, it is the sex capital of the region! Non citizen ‘guest workers’ automatically have their passports confiscated by the police upon entering The Emirate. That includes female ‘guest workers’ especially. That’s what makes tourism supreem in Dubai! ‘Businessmen’ come from worldwide for Dubai’s beaches and its uh?, nightlife. Got the picture?

Check out this documentary on Dubai’s trade in slave flesh. Made by concerned Armenians, no less.
‘Desert Nights‘. It is 45 minutes long, more or less, and gets more interesting as it goes. Perhaps you wanted to visit Bangcock? But why not follow the Halliburton executive crowd and get to know the slaves of Dubai instead?

Afghanistan, Land of Accidents

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It seems that yet another ‘accident’ has occurred in Afghanistan. Whole weddings, whole schools and whole villages seem to routinely get demolished by ‘accidents’, yet this time an ‘accident’ has occurred to a US military chopper. As a result, at least 8 US soldiers have ‘accidentally’ lost their lives, while many more were ‘accidentally’ wounded. Afghanistan, Land of Accidents. We hope that the rest of the troops get ‘accidentally’ brought home, like yesterday.

Where are they now?

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Whatever became of the children of Baghdad

If you do a Google search for images of Iraqi children, you’re led mostly to pro-war sites where war-bloggers are trying to foster the contortion that our soldiers love the children of Iraq. Operation Iraqi Children is a military sponsored project where concerned Americans can donate school supplies to the needy students of Iraq, for use in their newly painted schools.