war

How Movies Teach Manhood: Colin Stokes

More about this TED Talk:

When Colin Stokes’ 3-year-old son caught a glimpse of Star Wars, he was instantly obsessed. But what messages did he absorb from the sci-fi classic? Stokes asks for more movies that send positive messages to boys: that cooperation is heroic, and respecting women is as manly as defeating the villain.

Why you should listen to him:
Colin Stokes divides his time between parenting and building the brand of Citizen Schools, a non-profit that reimagines the school day for middle school students in low-income communities in eight states. As Managing Director of Brand & Communications, Colin helps people within the organization find the ideas, words and stories that will connect with more and more people. He believes that understanding the human mind is a force that can be used for good and seeks to take advantage of our innate and learned tendencies to bring out the best in each other and our culture.

Before starting a family, Colin was an actor and graphic designer in New York City. He starred in the long-running off-Broadway musical I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, as well is in several musicals and Shakespeare stagings. But he jokes that he seems to have achieved more renown (and considerably more revenue) for his brief appearances on two Law & Order episodes.

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Rolling Stone: The Great Iraq Swindle

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From the five page long Rolling Stone article, just a small section that will ruin your morning:

Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home, take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the little woman. . . . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your president’s administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485 million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now ­assessed at $929,974, and you’re sure as hell not giving it back to anyone.
“Yeah, I don’t know what I expected him to say,” Van Hollen says now about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the money back. “It just shows the contempt they have for us, for the taxpayer, for everything.”
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted.

I really don’t understand why there’s only one Cindy Sheehan. I don’t understand why thousands of parents of dead soldiers aren’t standing outside the White House with pitchforks and torches.

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Al-Qaida has rebuilt, U.S. intel warns

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded al-Qaida has rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, The Associated Press has learned. The conclusion suggests that the group that launched the most devastating terror attack on the United States has been able to regroup along the Afghan-Pakistani border despite nearly six years of bombings, war and other tactics aimed at crippling it.
Still, numerous government officials say they know of no specific, credible threat of a new attack on U.S. soil.
A counter-terrorism official familiar with a five-page summary of the new government threat assessment called it a stark appraisal to be discussed at the White House on Thursday as part of a broader meeting on an upcoming National Intelligence Estimate.

I thought we were “fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here”? Is that not working? Gee, I wonder why.

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The Bushes are “suffering”

On the Today Show this morning:

ANN CURRY: Do you know the American people are suffering… watching [Iraq]?
LAURA BUSH: Oh, I know that very much, and, believe me, no suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this. And certainly the commander-in-chief who has asked our military to go into harm’s way.
AC: What do you think the American people need to know…
LB: Well, I hope they do know the burden of worry that’s on his shoulders every single day for our troops. And I think they do. I think if they don’t, they’re not seeing what the real responsibilities of our president are.
AC: It must be hard for you to watch him in this.
LB: It’s hard. Of course, it’s absolutely hard.

Yes, the dead and wounded soldiers, the families of the dead, the Iraqi people; none of them suffer as much as the president and his wife. Let them eat cake, indeed.

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Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

So according to our own intelligence agencies, we are not “safer but not safe” as President Bush says. We’re actually much less safe that we were on September 11, 2001. That is, the country in general is less safe. Here in Indiana, we’re still in Indiana. You’re in more danger from Christian terrorists than Islamic ones. Meanwhile:
From the L.A. Times:

Army Warns Rumsfeld It’s Billions Short
The Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.

And we’re over eight trillion dollars in debt. The estimated population of the United States is 299,573,166 so each citizen’s share of this debt is $28,343.67. Pay up, kids, the Army needs to blow up more people.

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Chertoff: We Can’t Protect the Ports. Scientists: We Must Protect the Ports

At the same time that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is telling a Senate committee that we can’t afford to protect our ports from terrorist attack, and that we shouldn’t because Osama’s goal is to drive us into bankruptcy (New York Times article)….
Scientists are telling us that our biggest terrorist threat is a stolen nuclear weapon coming through the U.S. Ports system, and that to not recognize that this is a danger is an “ongoing failure of imagination” (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists).
Meanwhile, we’re all still taking off our shoes at the airport and throwing away our shampoo, while our goverment spends $100 billion dollars a year in Iraq.
This is the bit where the hero’s supposed to chime in with “I’ll protect the ports!” and we all say “my hero.”
What, that’s not going to happen?

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Democracy in Iraq is a fading idea

(Via Shakespeare’ Sister). In a NY Times article on the increased violence in Iraq, and the looming shadow of a civil war there, this revelation shows up at the very end — Bush officials are preparing to abandon the idea of a democracy for the country.

Bush administration officials now admit that Iraqi government’s original plan to rein in the violence in Baghdad, announced in June, has failed. The Pentagon has decided to rush more American troops into the capital, and the new military operation to restore security there is expected to begin in earnest next month.
Yet some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq’s democratically elected government might not survive.
“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.
“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

So… our troops are getting kill for what now? Since the old reasons are being abandoned?

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Gay People in Iraq sentenced to Death

From the Times Online UK:

THE death threat was delivered to Karazan’s father early in the morning by a masked man wearing a police uniform.
The scribbled note was brief. Karazan had to die because he was gay. In the new Baghdad, his sexuality warranted execution by the religious militias.
The father was told that if he did not hand his son over, other family members would be killed.
What scares the city’s residents is how the fanatics’ list of enemies is growing. It includes girls who refuse to cover their hair, boys who wear theirs too long, booksellers, liberal professors and prostitutes. Three shops known to sell alcohol were bombed yesterday in the Karrada shopping district.
In this atmosphere of intolerance and intimidation, the militias have made no secret of their hatred of homosexuals.

This is what we started a war to promote? This is our vision of a free Iraq?

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Stuff we could have bought with Iraq War money

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Courtesy my friend Lori — this link to Something Awful’s list of stuff we could have purchased with the money we’ve spend blowing the crap out of Iraq. Like….
454 of the Tallest Building in the United States
more than 80,000 of the world’s biggest truck
156,250 episodes of Arrested Development
298,412,466 Sony Wega 23″ LCD HDTVs (one for every person in America)
Full ride 4-year college scholarships for 7,260,000 students
They forgot one, though — a future for your kids.

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