United States attacks Canada to seize tar sands region

Let’s see. What oil rich region should the United States next invade? Hmmm. Politicians and oil companies are increasingly telling us that our future oil lies in the tar sands of Canada.   Only one thing lies between the United States and that oil: Canada might not simply give us their tar sands.  Problems like these, however, are ready-made for the United States military solutions. Hence, today I imagined that we might soon see the following news story.

I don't really believe that the United States has any plans to invade Canada, but I am trying to make a few serious points with this image. We all know how to pull this sort of land grab, because Americans are well-practiced in simply taking land from other people (ask Mexico and native Americans, and check out the size of the American Embassy in Iraq).  We are experts at inventing the need to go to war.  Here's a simplified version of the plan:  We claim that there are weapons of mass destruction in Canada.  We claim that there are French terrorists threatening America; we are good at inventing stories that serve as excuses to go to war.  Our mass-media goes along with the ploy because they are amoral conflict-mongers.  Eventually, the United States simply takes over the tar sands region of Canada.   Or at least that's how it goes in my imagination. It’s increasingly clear we have entered peak world-wide oil production, but American politicians don’t not dare to urge American citizens to cut down on their use of energy. Conservation is widely seen as un-American because it is usually framed as an approach that deprives Americans of their life-style, even though conservation and renewable energy makes far too much sense on many levels. And all of this crazy framing of the debate takes place while reputable scientists are offering solid evidence that with current technology and reasonable conservation measures we could now begin replace much of American fossil fuel usage with renewables. If I had to place a bet, though, I would put my chips on a future where Americans continue, as long as they are financially and militarily able, to engage in profligate oil usage (we use more than 9,000 gallons per second, enough to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool every minute of every day).  They will do this despite the fact that tar sands oil is an environmental disaster in the making .

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Messing with the site . . .

In case DI has been looking strange lately, I am trying to configure a new skin (called Elegance) on top of our WordPress platform. I'll be making tweaks for the next few days (and, OK, years. It never stops). Hopefully, this will lead to some cool new features. I'm also experimenting with new plugins, including the ability to subscribe to the comments of a particular post. That feature is installed already. If anyone has trouble making it work, let me know. I can already see some issues, so don't complain about the new site design until I get it relatively finished, which might be about another week. Then feel free to comment here or write to me by email to let me know what's not working and what's still ugly.

Continue ReadingMessing with the site . . .

On bad guys

From Christopher Hayes discusses the use of the phrase "bad guys" at The Nation:

The phrase is self-consciously playful but also insidious. An adult who invokes it is expressing a layered set of propositions. What “bad guys” says, roughly, is this: “I’m an adult who has considered the nature of the moral universe we live in and concluded that it really is black and white. I’ve decided that my earliest, most childlike conception of heroes and villains is indeed the accurate one, which only later came to be occluded by nuance and wishy-washy, bleeding-heart self-doubt. I reject that more complicated, mature conception as false. I embrace the child’s vision of the world.”

“Bad guys” was a phrase that channeled our rawest emotions in the wake of 9/11, emotions that we collectively mythologize.

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Photographs will end these wars

Jon Stewart has had it with these expensive, gory and secret wars. Secret? Yes. There are no photos. The wars fought by America are covered-up wars. They are wars we don't care about because there are no photos of our gristly business of war. Nor do we see any photos of the alleged good things that have been going on for the past year in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wrote about this lack of war photos previously in a post I titled "Where are the Photos of Good Things Supposedly Happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our media is doing its damned best to make these happy wars, bloodless wars.   We are therefore supposed to trust the government that we have made ten years of progress in Afghanistan for our $2 Billion dollars per week.  Bullshit.  I'm equally angry at  our federal government, including both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, and our patronizing mass media.   Where are any headlines that the only reason that we can't afford to build 100 new $20 million schools across the U.S. is that we blew that much money in Afghanistan this week. We also blew that much money last week and the week before.  And we do it week after week without even one photo of the violence or deaths making it onto any of the newspapers of America.  Week after week after week, for ten years and counting. PoliticusUSA sums up Jon Stewart's points nicely:

Later The Daily Show host said that more pictures of all of the elements of these wars need to be released so people can see what is really going on, “The best reason in my mind for releasing the pictures is that we have been fighting this war for nearly ten years, thousands of US deaths, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis have died, and we’ve seen nearly zero photographic evidence of it. Remember how long the media had to fight to show military coffins returning from overseas? You probably don’t remember, because you saw pictures of it the day they won the case and not since.”

Jon Stewart concluded, “Maybe we should always show pictures, Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war, if we see what war actually is and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin, which from what I understand is going up. By the way, the White House announced today that they have officially decided not to release the Bin Laden photo. Instead to keep it a secret they are going to airdrop it into an affluent Pakistani suburb, so it won’t be found for years.”

I am not surprised that many of the stories on this have discussed Stewart’s argument for releasing the photos, but have omitted the media criticism. The media has been complicit in keeping the American people in the dark on these two wars. Don’t buy for a minute that they don’t show the American people what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan because it is an issue of access. The footage is shown every day in the Middle East, but the US corporate controlled media has decided that we don’t need to see that here.

Everyone who writes a story about Jon Stewart and the Bin Laden pictures who doesn’t discuss the media blackout on these wars is complicit in the cover up. Jon Stewart’s logic for releasing the Bin Laden photos applies to all war coverage.

Continue ReadingPhotographs will end these wars