How would Jesus fight a nuclear war?

CNN reports that the U.S. Air Force has just scrapped a long-running program that taught nuclear missile launching officers that the Bible is OK with nuclear war:

The Air Force has suspended an ethics briefing for new missile launch officers after concerns were raised about the briefing's heavy focus on religion. The briefing, taught for nearly 20 years by military chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, is intended to train Air Force personnel to consider the ethics and morality of launching nuclear weapons - the ultimate doomsday machine. Many of the slides in the 43 page presentation use a Christian justification for war, displaying pictures of saints like Saint Augustine and using biblical references.
This program had been taught for two decades before the recent change.

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No surprise that the bloated military budget was spared.

Tom Englehart discusses the military's profligate use of $400/gallon (and even $800/gallon) gasoline in the Middle East. It's a symptom of a much bigger problem:

So here’s a question at a moment when financial mania has Washington by the throat: How would you define the state of mind of our war-makers, who are carrying on as if trillion-dollar wars were an American birthright, as if the only sensible role for the United States was to eternally police the planet, and as if garrisoning U.S. troops, corporate mercenaries, and special operations forces in scores and scores of countries was the essence of life as it should be lived on this planet?
How many military bases does the United States have, by the way? Gloria Shur Bilchik of Occasional Planet does her best to provide an answer to this straight-forward question:
You can’t get a consistent answer from news stories, that’s for sure. Recent articles, media reports and op-eds peg the number variously at 460, 507, 560, 662 and more than 1,000 . . . According to the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report, as of 2009, the US military maintained 662 foreign sites in 38 countries around the world. . . . the official US military tally underreports our presence by nearly 500 bases.
Why not cut the military budget at this time of purported austerity? It's about what you'd expect from a bunch of psychopathic leaders, people not like you and me, people who cease serving as representatives of the People soon after hitting Washington D.C. and getting high on a non-ending hit of campaign cash.

Continue ReadingNo surprise that the bloated military budget was spared.

One year ago, Wikileaks documents showed us why we must leave Afghanistan

But we're still in Afghanistan, for no good reason at all. Greg Mitchell of The Nation tells us what we should have learned and discussed about Afghanistan one year ago, in light of the Wikileaks release of classified U.S. documents regarding Afghanistan:

[The Wikileaks release] not only recounts 144 incidents in which coalition forces killed civilians over six years. But it shows just how deeply elements within the US’s supposed ally, Pakistan, have nurtured the Afghan insurgency. . . . The Guardian carried a tough editorial on its web site, calling the picture “disturbing” and raising doubts about ever winning this war, adding: “These war logs—written in the heat of engagement—show a conflict that is brutally messy, confused and immediate. It is in some contrast with the tidied-up and sanitized ‘public’ war, as glimpsed through official communiques as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting.”

Continue ReadingOne year ago, Wikileaks documents showed us why we must leave Afghanistan

People readily go to war, though they claim they don’t want war

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Hermann Goring

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Double standard

The media is engaged in a stunning double-standard regarding the Norwegian terrorist--except that he's not being called a "terrorist."  As Glenn Greenwald points out, the term "terrorist" is reserved for special kinds of people who wreak destruction:

[N]ow that we know the alleged perpetrator is not Muslim, we know -- by definition -- that Terrorists are not responsible; conversely, when we thought Muslims were responsible, that meant -- also by definition -- that it was an act of Terrorism.

As usual, Greenwald has done his homework and offered plenty of links.   When is the word "terrorist" appropriate?

Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target . . . if it turns out that the perpetrators weren't Muslim (but rather "someone with more political motivations" -- whatever that means: it presumably rests on the inane notion that Islamic radicals are motivated by religion, not political grievances), then it means that Terrorism, by definition, would be "ruled out" (one might think that the more politically-motivated an act of violence is, the more deserving it is of the Terrorism label, but this just proves that the defining feature of the word Terrorism is Muslim violence).

Greenwald also gives detailed proof that when there was no evidence that the perpetrator was a Muslim, many media outlets we happy to assume that the perpetrator was Muslim from the Middle East.  This was a total lack of critical thought on behalf of the New York Times and other major outlets, as documented here. None of this is surprising these days, given that the news media so often sees its job as promoting government objectives.   And consider that uttering the phrase Al Qaeda, which was done more than a few times recently, gives the federal government yet more chances to give us nightmares so that we feel that we need the government as our warmongering protector against terrorists, meaning Muslims.

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