Amen...

Lies, Lies, Lies... Very popular these days. On the news, the internets, the mouths of the pettiest of Presidential candidates. As true now as it was then- make them big enough, repeat them often enough... and people will fall in line to follow.

Not as loud, or convenient or as popular, there are always the facts. And for that, we can always give thanks, thanks for that increasingly rare opportunity to glimpse through the window of sanity...

Addendum: And speaking of truth in advertising...

"We Need To See Them...

Because we created them."

Army Spc. Jerral Hancock sits for a portrait with his son Julius. It is believed that Hancock was trapped under the wreckage of his Army tank in Iraq for half an hour before he was rescued.

Courtesy of David Jay/Unknown Soldier

And for what? We're all made to feel guilty for not "supporting our boys" once the shit hits the fan- but we're never, ever asked to question why we put them in harm's way to begin with.

There are now countless people in and around Iraq who hate us; perhaps because they had nothing to do with 9/11, and yet had to suffer the revenge and full onslaught of the world's foremost military might. An yet the thousands we killed and maimed there for no good (or sane) reason will never get even this most perfunctory of acknowledgements.


Addendum:  David Guttenfelder also has an amazing essay on the plight of vets w/PTSD who are taking their own lives at home- an alarming 22 suicides each and every day! (via: PetaPixel)

Hugh Thompson- Hero, Role Model, Rebel

Talk about the ultimate unholy trio of overused, overrated buzz words in existence- made only the worse (if humanly possible) by using them in tandem! Yet, there is no question that Hugh Thompson owns the whole lot in every way imaginable for the actions he executed one insanely murderous day in Viet Nam. Namely, it was his direct intervention that prevented even more people from being butchered that infamous afternoon in 1968 at a hamlet called My Lai. And it was his basic sense of common decency that ignited his moral outrage into action- not the wanton blood lust of a rampaging Rambo, but the righteous indignation that allows someone to assume the role of one who saves lives, no matter the cost.

Thompson was the man responsible for turning US arms in the direction of... US troops, and threatening to shoot them down should they advance to kill one more baby, one more innocent human being. With the temporary cessation of the slaughter, he then went about rescuing whoever was still alive, reporting what he had seen, and in so doing so, possibly saving countless other innocent lives in similar operations to come.

He received many a death threat (and many a dead animal on his doorstep) for his courage to speak out; and his partner revealed that his four chopper crashes in the following two months after My Lai may have not all been attributable to the Viet Cong. Ironically, it was Thompson who proved that at least some Americans were, in fact, still the good guys- by his ability to think beyond the myopic xenophobia of "My country, right or wrong," by his willingness to call out Nazi atrocities, no matter who conducted them. Rather than shirk from a showdown with authority, as had innumerable others who diligently murdered with military approval (and dutifully remained silent)- he made it live up to its stated moral obligation.

This humble helicopter pilot, who a whole nation should look up to with pride, has no streets or schools, stadiums or ships named after him, there are no statues standing nobly in his honor. And Clint Eastwood will never have the balls to make a movie about him- but he damn well should, someone should...

Operation Tomodachi

The Fukushima catastrophe changed the world. Nuclear reactors melted down on live television and twice as much radioactive material was released as during the Chernobyl accident in 1986. The disaster drove 150,000 people from their towns and villages, poisoned entire landscapes for centuries and killed hundreds of thousands of farm animals.

AFP/US Navy

There's an old Saturday Night skit in which a Black janitor (Garrett Morris) is ordered to get his mop and bucket and clean up... a radioactive spill at a nuclear power plant. It was one funny skit- it's also basically what  Navy Captain Thom Burke told his crew to do on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan when they entered the radioactive plume dispersed by the critically damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. Not so funny...

Many of those sailors lived and worked well within that radioactive plume for days, cleaning radioactive fallout without protective clothing, drinking contaminated water. Hundreds of them are now suffering from advanced cancers and "unexplained" debilitating diseases that the Navy says they cannot explain, and for which they take no responsibility and admit no accountability. Of the 500 sailors stricken ill, 247 are now attempting to sue Tepco (the Japanese power company that ran the plant in question), they're legally prohibited from suing the US Military itself due to the Feres Doctrine).

 

 How much of this have you heard or read about on the news???

'71

One of the best "war is hell" flicks ever- and in my All Time Top 20 Movies. All traces of war rhetoric sentimentality are left at the Hollywood door; no right and wrong, no justice, truth or grand ideologies. Everyone gets turned into something they don't wanna be, save for those who already started as such. When everything around you is compromised, everyone on every side is expendable.

So we're left to deal with the uneasy realization that we create our own problems, and contrary to present day mythology- shooting our way out just prolongs and worsens them. Super heroes do not save the day, no miracle man vanquishes the evil doers with his magic gun. And we never do learn...

Honesty And Mass Murderers

On one hand you have those that kill innocents seemingly for the hell of it, sometimes even killing themselves in the process- then there are those who claim to be beyond such outright barbarism, kill anyway- then proclaim innocence. I'd say they're both small minded, murderous bastards- and very much deserving of each other. But one is definitely the bigger liar.

But... Stan! Over a dozen innocent people were just slaughtered in Paris- where's your so called compassion for them!? And over 2 thousand more in Nigeria- and don't forget the hundreds of thousands we're personally responsible for in Iraq for no good reason (making Sniper doesn't count), not to mention our ongoing drone collateral recruitment program... that never does gets mentioned. The point is, it's time we stop playing whack-a-mole throughout the world and start addressing this global problem as a human one, one that can not be addressed, let alone solved strictly by military means... Ours, or theirs.

And another thing's for damn sure- Houdini in all his greatness could not have pulled off what the US of A claims these three did one night (in their zeal to get back at us)...

Cannon Fodder

It's amazing (ie- disgusting, outrageous, blatantly criminal) how our military continues to treat its very own as subhuman expendables, time and time and time again... From marching them straight into atomic bombs, to Gulf War Syndrome, to Fukushima. I damn well saw this coming, why didn't their commanding officers have the basic human decency to prevent such an obvious threat to the health and well being of their own men and women?

And then you have the chorus of lying hypocritical bastards crying out about how many lives Edward Snowden may be responsible for!?!? Why do we live in fear of an Al Qaeda dirty bomb when our very own leaders jump to send their own countrymen ill informed and unequipped into a radioactive danger zone- and then deny them basic medical care for the years of pain and suffering that was guaranteed should they live to tell the tale???? You don't have to spend millions to send drones to far off Yemen to find monsters that will gleefully kill Americans- they live right here in our own ranks...