Bill Moyers praises common sense
Bill Moyers comments on the Obama Administration's decision to not bomb Syria, at least for now: >
The moral burden on the United States
Barack Obama: “For nearly seven decades, the United States has been the anchor of global security. This has meant doing more than forging international agreements; it has meant enforcing them. The burdens of leadership are often heavy, but the world’s a better place because we have borne them.” Matthew Rothschild responds at Common Dreams:
Was the U.S. an anchor of global security and an enforcer of international agreements when it overthrew the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, or the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954? Is the world a better place because the U.S. helped overthrow Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in Chile almost exactly 40 years ago? Is the world a better place because the United States killed 3 million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and because we dropped 20 million gallons of napalm (waging our own version of chemical warfare) on those countries? Is the world a better place because the United States supported brutal governments in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s, which killed tens of thousands of their own people? Is the world a better place because George Bush waged an illegal war against Iraq and killed between 100,000 and a million civilians? And what international agreements was the United States enforcing when it tortured people after 9/11?Bill Maher:
Forget the Syria debate, we need to debate on why we're always debating whether to bomb someone because we're starting to look, not so much like the world's policeman, but more like George Zimmerman -- itching to use force and then pretending it's because we had no choice.
Your extremely low odds of dying in a terrorist attack
What are the odds of you dying in a terrorist attack. Extremely, absurdly low. You are NINE times more likely to die by choking in your own vomit. Six times more likely to die due to hot weather. 87 times more likely to die of drowning. We can easily fix most of our terrorism problem is we merely fix our innumeracy problem. Related topic: Here are eight ways to allow 3,000 people die.
Glenn Greenwald and Bill Maher discuss violence and religion
At the tail of this 10 minute video, Glenn Greenwald discusses violence and religion with Bill Maher. This is well worth watching. I admire both Bill Maher and Glenn Greenwald, but Greenwald has the more accurate view in this lively exchange.
Kokura, Japan: a wrenching story about luck
I recently stumbled across an article about the fate of Kokura Japan near the end of World War II. In a sentence, cloudy weather saved the people of Kokura from being consumed in the world's second nuclear bomb attack. Those same clouds doomed the people of Nagasaki.
A young man named Kermit Beahan peered through the rubber eyepiece of the bombsight, and he could see some of the buildings of Kokura and the river that ran by the arms factory, but the complex itself was blocked by a cloud. So Bock's Car gave up on Kokura and went on to its secondary target, Nagasaki. Clouds also partly obscured Nagasaki, but not quite enough of it. The plutonium bomb killed somewhere around 100,000 people in Nagasaki, and it was the most powerful blast the world had ever seen, significantly more so than the one three days earlier when a uranium bomb destroyed Hiroshima. Nagasaki was destined for the history books, and Kokura was forgotten.