Know your Enemy

Read the transcript of the latest Al Qaeda tape. These guys aren't stupid. Like Goebbels, they know all about the big lie. The problem is, with the kind of incompetence and invective so prominent at the highest levels of our government, lies like this sound reasonable. Bin Laden (if he's still alive) has no illusions about his goal. He wants to rule the world. Basically, he wants him and his fellow lunatics to take the place of corporations and governments at the pinnacle of power. But because of the way that western governments and multinational corporations do business, he can easily claim to be acting in the interest of the downtrodden. We're giving him ammunition for his propaganda with every day that genocide continues in Darfur or malaria goes untreated in Malawi. It doesn't matter that a jihadist world government would usher in a holocaust unlike the world has ever seen. So long as the west has the resources to fix world problems, without actually doing so, the jihadist manifesto will sound like a good alternative to desperate people.

Bedazzled by Stars

It seems that as long as someone has stars on their lapel, their word gets taken as gospel truth. It just seems to me that there's too big of a bubble placed around diplomats and top brass for them to get any real idea of what the deal is. Instead of listening to them, maybe we should start taking the word of actual soldiers at face value. I know many of them think things are working, and I certainly can't contradict them from my apartment in Cambridge. But I can offer the view of people like Alex Horton who make a lot of sense. Maybe the soldiers who say they're making a difference and we've "turned the corner" in Iraq are right. I'd love to believe it, because whatever the reactionaries say, no American has a defeatist agenda except the sleeper cells. No one wants to see Iraq end up as another failed state. But then, there might not be anything we can do about it. Improvement in isolated areas is not enough.

If you still use Yahoo. . .

Stop.

Calm Like a Bomb

So I went to see Rock the Bells yesterday, on Randall's Island in NYC. I'm no fan of the Big Apple, and I'll spare you the details of my trip to and from. Suffice it to say that, despite the heat, humidity, and long line for water, the show was a blast.

Of course the reason I went to Rock the Bells was to see Rage Against the Machine. And as the brilliant reporters at Fox News discovered earlier this year, Rage love controversy. But Zack and Rage, unlike so many self-righteous reactionaries and government cheerleaders, stand up for what they believe in and do so consistently. The real reason Fox hates Rage is not because, as uber-reactionary Ann Coulter puts it, "they think they can shoot the president," but because they hold all people to the same standard and don't think anyone is above or below the law. Rage would avoid a lot of controversy if they would just admit that American lives are worth more than African or Iraqi or Vietnamese lives. Of course, Rage being consistent in their beliefs and all, I'm not holding my breath for that.

Oh, and the quote in question, in full text, is below courtesy of Wikipedia who got it from MTV:

"...if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II [...] every single one of them, every last rich white one of them from Truman on, would have been hung to death and shot - and this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be. But the challenges that we face, they go way beyond administrations, way beyond elections, way beyond every four years of pulling levers, way beyond that. Because this whole rotten system has become so vicious and cruel that in order to sustain itself, it needs to destroy entire countries and profit from their reconstruction in order to survive - and that's not a system that changes every four years, it's a system that we have to break down, generation after generation after generation after generation after generation.... Wake up."

Man, if only I had a billion dollars. . .

. . . I could get away with murder like Bechtel.

Having worked as a laborer for most of my adult life (the exception being a summer spent in the blissful air conditioning of the University Library) let me tell you, if you screw up a couple times, you're gonna get yelled at. Do it again and you get thrown off the work site. And I've never heard of a company getting out of responsibility for all the defects in its contracted work as part of a deal to avoid criminal charges. But then, I guess I never had $1,000,000,000 to throw around (of course, it's just 1/15th of the total cost of the Bechtel contract) after someone died from my shoddy work. Incidentally, we now know what a human life is worth to a multinational corporation (at least when they fear prosecution).

Why do these self-styled patriots hate America?

Usually I try not to attack groups that are obviously trying to help wounded soldiers failed by their government. However, Blackfive seems to have forgotten that we're all Americans, whether Democrat, Republican, Communist or Corporatist. We all have certain rights, and if you're going to attack someone, do it for their words, their actions and not their political allegiance. Calling people who want to see fewer Americans die policing a civil war "cut-and-run, pro-losing protester" (as opposed to "stay-and-die, pro-stagnation cheerleaders?") is just being an asshole.

A little old lady, presumably living in a in a predominantly "stay the course" community, hung her flag upside down in protest. Sure, I don't like that, because it is a legitimate symbol of distress, a visual SOS. On the other hand, given that our executive branch is criminally insane and blatantly hypocritical while our congress is full of spineless ninnies I think distress is the right emotion to feel. Would I hang the flag upside down? Hell no. But it's not the most disrespectful thing I've seen done to the flag. I've seen Hummer Patriots (those who drive the least fuel efficient cars and who balk at the idea of personal sacrifice, while sporting half-a-dozen yellow ribbons and a big "support our troops" T-shirt) who drive 80mph down the highway with those little window flags flapping wildly, getting torn to shreds. I've seen gravel pits that leave a massive flag displayed on a mound of dirt, exposed to the elements. I've seen countless examples of a flag going up and being left to shred, fade, and deteriorate. And that's all from armchair patriots. That's a hell of a lot more disrespectful than flying Old Glory upside down to protest the failure of our country to live up to its founding principles.

One last thing. How American is it to have a "patriotic and political expression policy" for a community? I thought we welcomed diversity here. Oh wait, if you're a "stay-and-die cheerleader" then you only welcome diverse opinions identical to your own. The shoe on the other foot pinches, eh?

How are we fighting this war?

Forgive me for being a little rusty on my modern military strategy. I studied it, but somehow missed the part where you capture the enemy and then let him go. All this time I thought the purpose of patrolling the streets in Iraq and detaining insurgents and militia members was to keep them from fighting and killing innocent Iraqis and coalition troops. Apparently it's really to give them a little R&R before they move on to the next town.

You know, a little bird once told me that we have the best military in the country. Now I've met a lot of soldiers and I think they are the best, true citizen-soldiers who are well trained and carry out their orders no matter what the opposition. But someone higher up clearly has their head so far up their ass that it's coming back out the other side.