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The Connection Between ‘Pulp Fiction’ in Istanbul and ‘Lock Her Up’ in Iowa

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A columnist for the Washington Post was apparently murdered in Istanbul, Turkey. This was no robbery, not a drive-by shooting. Officially, Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi is a missing person. 

This is a story with implications going beyond the unbridled cruelty of the Saudi regime. It goes beyond the 11 journalists currently being detained in Saudi Arabia and the rising tide of violence aimed at the news media worldwide. It should come as no surprise that there are threads back to the Trump administration woven into this story.

There is security cam footage of him walking into the Saudi Consulate, but no evidence that he left. His fiance waited outside the building for 10 hours.   [Read more…]

I’ve Been Seeing Ghosts Lately | Dear Ohio, Part 10

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I’ve been seeing ghosts lately. Ghosts of people I’ve known and never known. They rise from visions of pure white teeth climbing the mouths of rolling hills, erupting in rows along grassy plains. Teeth, in a mouth that grows bigger with each passing year, teeth more numerous with each generation.

Out of these teeth rise the spirits of men and women, young and old, all colors, races, all religions and origins. These spirits once lived in a sharecropper’s shack in Kentucky, a brownstone in New York, a mobile home in Lancaster, a walk-up in Chicago. They once picked fruit in California, harvested grain in Kansas, mined coal in Virginia, raised cattle in Texas. In more recent years, they babysat a neighbor’s children in Arizona, graduated from a community college in Colorado, clerked in a grocery store in Hawaii, cleaned rooms at a resort in Alaska.

These spirits evaporated from the arms of their mothers and fathers, watched their spouses and children slip away while waving to them across the growing gap of land or water, swallowed their tears of loneliness and grasped onto their fellows as a lifeline of family.   [Read more…]

The Miramar Air Show Glorifies War: Just Don’t Go

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By Dave Patterson

The US war spending, now approaching $1 Trillion annually, directly impacts how we pay for schools, Medicare, Medicaid, social services and our poor and elderly. We at the San Diego Veterans For Peace take the position that the resultant $22 Trillion national debt created by lavish spending on war making is pitched as a good thing at the Miramar Air Show. War made palatable with glorious pageantry and emotional thrills that can’t be topped. This is why we ask the public to just stay home.   [Read more…]

Miramar Airshow Sells War: Just Don’t Go!

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By Gil Field / San Diego Veterans for Peace

Local veterans, friends and supporters from the San Diego Veterans For Peace are in their third year of a five year educational outreach encouraging the public to stay home and not attend the annual Miramar Air Show this month.

Veterans believe that the Miramar Air Show glorifies war with an exciting show of speed, power and noise. It celebrates the skills and machinery that exist to kill, maim and destroy. The show is very dangerous …. 10% of all Blue Angel pilots have been killed in shows or accidents. Miramar jets have already crashed in San Diego neighborhoods. Lastly, the show is a misleading recruiting tool for our youth and exists to allow defense contractors to showcase and sell their latest tools of death.   [Read more…]

“Earth Will Be Annihilated”: On 73rd Anniversary of Hiroshima Bombing, a Warning Against Nuclear War | Video Worth Watching

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From the Democracy Now! YouTube page:

[Monday marked] the 73rd anniversary of the United States’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which killed 140,000 people and seriously injured another 100,000. In remembrance, we turn to the words of a Hiroshima survivor, or hibakusha. Koji Hosokawa was 17 years old when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His 13-year-old sister Yoko died in the bombing. He gave us a tour of the city when Democracy Now! was in Japan in 2014. He spoke to us near the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, one of the few structures in the city that survived the atomic blast.

  [Read more…]

Hibakusha and Hope in the Nuclear Age

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The threat continues to this day fueled by a new nuclear arms race initiated by the United States proposal to spend upwards of $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to rebuild our entire nuclear arsenal

By Robert Dodge / Common Dreams

This week marks 73 years since the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, ultimately resulting in the deaths of more than 200,000 people. With the dawn of the nuclear age, the term “hibakusha” formally entered our lexicon. Atomic bomb survivors are referred to in Japanese as hibakusha, which translates literally as “bomb-affected-people”.  The bombings and aftermath changed the world forever and threaten the very future of mankind to this day.

According to the Atomic Bomb Survivors Relief Law, there are three hibakusha categories. These include people exposed directly to the bomb and its immediate aftermath, those people exposed within a 2 kilometer radius who entered the sphere of destruction within two weeks of the explosion and people exposed to radioactive fallout generally from assisting victims and handling bodies, and those exposed in utero, whose mothers were pregnant and belonging to any of these defined categories.
  [Read more…]

How U.S. Involvement In Central America Led To a Border Crisis | Video Worth Watching

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So many of the recent asylum seekers along our southern border are from the Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Is this just coincidence? Hardly. For anyone that’s used the term “Banana Republic” without being clear how that term originated (actually, even if you do know how the history of that term), here’s a brief look back at how U.S. involvement In Central America led to our current border crisis.   [Read more…]

Number 7 | 1968

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By Douglas Rawlings

NUMBER 7

I was a
Good Humor Man.
I lost my job
I got drafted.

I can never
go back again.
I lost my
Good Humor.
I lost $80.00 a week
I can never
have it again

You gain goodwill
being a Good Humor man.
You establish a route.
You make friends.

I lost them all:
my bike my cart
my bell
are all gone now.
My smile too.
All my friends
cried
on the Last Day.   [Read more…]

Leaving the Induction Center | 1968

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By Douglas Rawlings

LEAVING THE INDUCTION CENTER

We were now
all riders
on those olive drab
government buses

trying to make some sense
out of this thing
they called military justice.

Still a bunch
of minors
digging about
in our own little ruins   [Read more…]

Do Not Ever Question the Fuhrer’s Orders

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Complacency is our enemy. Anyone that does not embrace the @realDonaldTrump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake. – Ronna McDaniel, Republican Chair, June 13, 2018

Beachtung !   BEACHTUNG !   BEACHTUNG JEDER !

Manner in der schlange hier druben …..!
(and be marched to the slave-laborer’s barracks)

Frauen und kinder schlange hier ….!
(and proceed directly to the crematoria) …   [Read more…]

War and Moral Injury

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Veterans often wrestle with the things they’ve done in war. When will ordinary Americans do the same?

By Saurav Sarkar / OtherWords

“As a sniper I was not usually the victim of a traumatic event, but the perpetrator of violence and death,” recalled Garrett Reppenhegen of Iraq Veterans Against the War in an essay for Salon.

“My actions in combat would have been more acceptable to me if I could cloak myself in the belief that the whole mission was for a greater good,” he reflected. “Instead, I watched as the purpose of the mission slowly unraveled.”

These words illustrate the concept of moral injury — where a soldier’s conscience has been shaken by what he or she has done, resulting in lasting trauma.

For so many of us, war is something that happens somewhere else. It’s a television news update or a click on the screen, at worst. The real costs of U.S. wars happen to other people, in other places.

Will ordinary Americans ever have to reckon with moral injury?   [Read more…]

Bill Withers – I Can’t Write Left Handed | Video Worth Watching

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For the Memorial Day observation here’s Bill Withers’ plaintive and matter-of-fact “I Can’t Write Left-Handed”.   [Read more…]

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