A most unusual museum in Cambodia

Have you ever been to a landmine museum? Neither have I, but two friends just returned from incredibly beautiful country of Cambodia, which is still feeling the effects of horrific periods of war and unrest. And one can still find live landmines--there are millions of them in Cambodia, many of those landmines being "found" by current amputees. Which leads to the story of the Cambodia Landmine Museum, founded by a man named Aki Ra. His goal: "I want to make my country safe for my people."

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Sudden right-wing pacifism

At Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi has noted a huge split amount conservatives. Not all of them want to be seen as hawks anymore:

It’s been interesting, watching the seamless transition many conservatives seem to be making now, from brainless war-drum-beating to Randian isolationism. Six or seven or eight years ago, I seem to remember, anyone who even hinted that not using military force to resolve any foreign policy dispute, no matter how trivial or how imaginary the justification, was to be considered a traitor.

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Our amazingly screwed-up budget priorities

You all know how NASA eats up a huge portion of the federal budget, and that's why we need to cut lots of NASA fat, right? Actually, that's a misguided public perception--many people assume that NASA accounts for 20% of the federal budget. In reality, NASA only accounts for half of one-percent of the federal budget; for this past year, the NASA budget amounted to $20 billion. What else can you get for $20 billion? How about this? According to Steve Anderson, a retired Brigadier General who was General David Petraeus’s chief logistician in Iraq, the United States spends $20 billion every year air conditioning U.S. military tents and other temporary living quarters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two starkly unnecessary wars, and even a small portion of the expense of these wars equals the total budget for NASA, which, for decades, has inspired all rational-thinking people with its space exploration missions. Priorities like this force me to conclude that our leaders are functional psychopaths.

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What happened to the little Vietnamese girl running from the napalm?

I spotted this article on Reddit.com today.   The little Vietnamese girl who was photographed running, terrified, naked and burned from the napalm attack recovered, grew up to become a doctor and is now living in Canada.  She has lived quite an interesting life.

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War on What’s Next?

Americans don't seem to understand much of anything unless we restate it in a war-metaphor: War on Drugs War on Terror War on Poverty War on Science War on Democracy And now there is a "War Against Floods," which we battle with the "Army Corp of Engineers." And I forgot to mention some of the other wars: [More . . . ]

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