Sunday, October 10, 2004

Posted here Sunday, October 10, 2004 at 6:28:45 PM     Another view of military life http://www.benturner.com/soapbox/  excerpt The third and final week, or Jump Week, finally came. I had become more and more apprehensive about it. I'd get off training in the evening and walk around outside, only to see a bunch of guys stumbling about with bandaged or casted legs and crutches, people who'd had horrible accidents when they'd jumped out of the plane and landed. I had dinner with one guy before Jump Week who landed wrong on his third jump out of five. He knew he busted his ankle when he landed, and when a medic cut his boot off, his foot just fell over with nothing stopping it. But when he went to the hospital, x-rays concluded he'd already broken the end parts of his right fibula and tibia! Encouraging for me! Most of Jump Week is spent in an ominously named place called the Harness Shed, which sounds like a fucking Iraqi prison and seems to come close at times. All of us would don our chute harnesses and reserve chutes and sit for hours and hours until it was our turn to get on the C-130 to jump. During that waiting time, you're not allowed to drink water, go to the latrine, or touch any of your equipment, since it's been inspected by a sergeant airborne and you touching it might mess something up. The sergeants' airborne inspections are called JMPI's and they consist of a lot of holding things, checking snaps, arching your back, lowering and raising your chin, and bending over. In typical military fashion, this activity invites a lot of homophobic humor. If you don't adjust your leg straps correctly, your harness will be too tight and your testicles will be smashed against your groin. Ever seen otherwise tough brickhouse guys buckle in pain and want to cry? I have! The harness also cuts into your collarbone because of all the weight. You can't stand up straight sometimes. The day of our first jump, my stick waited ten hours (!!) to jump. We were the last stick of all to go, and this was after a two hour rain delay. It was an agonizing wait. Everyone would be trying to stay awake, my ass would get sore from sitting on saddle straps on a wooden workbench, and not being able to talk also made time pass slower. Not to mention a sergeant airborne watching the room from above and making cruel and demoralizing demands of us the whole time. My stick's turn to jump finally came and we were guided out behind the parked plane outside. Its prop blast buffeted us with hot jet fuel fumes which made us want to hold our breaths and close our eyes. We'd be packed on the plane, hip to hip, looking at each other not with fright, but with apprehension and nervousness about performing all our points of performance correctly. I don't think many guys were scared to jump out the door -- they just didn't want to get banged up against the plane, or fucked up on the landing. We'd heard stories about one guy who smashed his face against the side of the plane because he didn't jump out far enough. And then there's the person the week before us whose chute was right above someone else's: he entered the vacuum above the lower person's chute and free-fell 50ft to the ground. Broke a lot of shit. There's also a story of a beheading of someone because the guy before him didn't pass his static line off properly, so it got tangled around the next guy's neck. Don't know if I believe that. I believe the story about the severed bicep muscle from the same thing though. As soon as the plane takes off, we're already getting ready, ..... ********

	Thursday, August 19, 2004

Posted here Thursday, August 19, 2004 at 4:00:57 PM       Pasted from <http://www.zwire.com/site/news.asp?brd=2318&;pag=460&dept_id=483214> Throwing down the gauntlet By Sean-Paul Kelley       Indian activist Arundhati Roy pursues her indictment of globalization in thoughtful conversations with David Barsamian   What I remember most about India is the heat and the crowds. It's the kind of heat that claws at your lungs and squeezes every last drop of sweat from your pores. All the while, you're fighting crowds of loud, exuberant people. Sadhus and snake charmers dance around while shopkeepers shout and rickshaws dodge the cows meandering in the streets: It's the kind of unrelenting urban raucousness that either drives a person insane or to a higher level of consciousness. This is the environment that Arundhati Roy, the controversial Indian activist and writer, grew up in. Perhaps this is why she is, in her own words, "an extremely troublesome citizen."   The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile is a new a collection of interviews with Roy conducted by David Barsamian, producer of the award-winning syndicated radio program Alternative Radio. His subject will challenge and assault the reader's well-guarded assumptions, but The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile is not a polemic: It is a thinker's book, one sadly out of place in today's jingoistic and ideologically driven politics. It's full of passion, nuance, and insight. It's also an easy read. The prose is smooth, conversational, and rich with the sugary colloquialisms of Indian English.   The four interviews that form this compact book take place over the course of three years, beginning in February 2001 and ending shortly after the "major combat operations" phase of the Iraqi-American war. Barsamian is a skillful interviewer, drawing out the most engaging and provocative aspects of Roy's character. His questions are open-ended enough to allow Roy to move effortlessly from corporate power and personal responsibility to the market's impact on democracy, following it up with a stirring observation about her experiences in the U.S.   There is one key issue to which Roy continually returns. "The further and further away geographically decisions are taken, the more scope you have for incredible injustice," she says. She details many examples, including the 56 million people displaced by India's dam-building project, in a country with no official resettlement policy.   The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy Interviews by David Barsamian South End Press $16, 178 pages ISBN: 0896087115 Befitting an Indian in the tradition of Gandhi, Roy is at her most eloquent when discussing personal responsibility versus power in the framework of globalization and its institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization: "How do you break down this [increasingly] centralized and undemocratic process of decision making? How do you make sure that ... people have power over their lives and natural resources?"   Roy accuses Americans of ignoring the world at large and the implications of our foreign policy by oversimplifying them into pieties such as "they just hate our freedoms." As Roy describes us, our lives revolve around work, reality TV, Fox News, and sleep. "You don't know what the American government is up to and most ordinary people are too tired to make the effort," she says. She argues that terrorism is a political act, moored in strategy, not only hatred, and that to settle the conflict in which we are now engaged will require more politics and less bombs.   Roy's book ultimately challenges us to be better citizens: not docile and obedient, but independent and informed. Conservative or liberal, this book asks you to think more, do more, and try to understand the consequences of your actions, no matter how insignificant you might think they are. •   By Sean-Paul Kelley ********

	Friday, July 16, 2004

Posted here Friday, July 16, 2004 at 11:30:21 PM     This is a courageous column. Jesus and Jihad By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/opinion/17KRIS.html?hp f the latest in the "Left Behind" series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left and toss them into everlasting fire: "Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again." These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing," which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes. ********

	Friday, May 21, 2004

Posted here Friday, May 21, 2004 at 10:10:29 AM     From yesterday's www.washingtonmonthly.com FRENCH HEALTHCARE....The Economist provides a capsule summary of healthcare in France: Its hospitals gleam. Waiting-lists are non-existent. Doctors still make home visits. Life expectancy is two years longer than average for the western world. ....For the patient, the French health system is still a joy. Same-day appointments can be made easily; if one doctor's advice displeases, you can consult another, a habit known as nomadisme médical. Individual hospital rooms are the norm. Specialists can be consulted without referral. And while the patient pays up front, almost all the money is reimbursed, either through the public insurance system or a top-up private policy. For family doctors too, liberty prevails. They are self-employed, can set up a practice where they like, prescribe what they like, and are paid per consultation. As the health ministry's own diagnosis put it recently: “The French system offers more freedom than any other in the world.” ********

	Monday, April 26, 2004

Posted here Monday, April 26, 2004 at 8:37:38 AM     Bush on the press. Quoted from http://www.bopnews.com/archives/000614.html#614 And the reporter then said: Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking? And Bush, without missing a beat said: You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that. Which is a powerful statement. And if Bush believes it (a possibility not to be dismissed) then we must credit the president with an original idea, or the germ of one. Bush's people have developed it into a thesis, which they explained to Auletta, who told it to co-host Brooke Gladstone: That's his attitude. And when you ask the Bush people to explain that attitude, what they say is: We don't accept that you have a check and balance function. We think that you are in the game of "Gotcha." Oh, you're interested in headlines, and you're interested in conflict. You're not interested in having a serious discussion and, and exploring things. Further data point: The Bush Thesis. If Auletta's reporting is on, then Bush and his advisors have their own press think, which they are trying out as policy. Reporters do not represent the interests of a broader public. They aren't a pipeline to the people, because people see through the game of Gotcha. The press has forfeited, if it ever had, its quasi-official role in the checks and balances of government. Here the Bush Thesis is bold. It says: there is no such role. The press certainly has moved from serious reporting. The good reporting is now to be found more in the comentators and bloggers who either have better access or some distance from the press corps. Especially time to think. Bush's comment suggests that a rel exploration of the issues would be welcomed. Big assumption, but it does suggest that the details and difficulties of say Iraq are not being explored. "gottcha" rules every sentence. A friend once said "Doug, remember, every story has only one hero: the reporter." ********

	Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Posted here Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 8:19:29 AM     Billmon asks this morning (the them in the quote is the nazi's). The question is whether the average American is more like them or more like us -- and which way he or she might lean if the war against terrorism continues to degenerate into a war against the Islamic world. That's one question I really don't want to see put to the test. ********

	Monday, March 22, 2004

Notes from today. Posted here Monday, March 22, 2004 at 4:47:37 PM     On Edinburg http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/03/21/enlightenment_edinbureh_a_suide?m... While Hume was busy remaking the intellectual map, Edinburgh itself was made over in the middle decades of the 18th century. In a wave of improvements (which Buchan copiously records), the old crammed city expanded into a classically inspired new town of bridges and squares, banks and courts. For many thinkers, the city became a laboratory of modernity. The cash nexus and commercial relations slowly dissolved ancient tribal ties and old wavs. A new culture of sentiment and feeling was born. on Israel http://amconmag.com/2004_03_29/print/articleprint.html In the 1920s, Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky called for Israel to rule "from the Nile to the Euphrates," as the famous slogan went, by smashing the fragile mosaic of its Arab neighbors into ethnic fragments, then seizing the oil riches of Arabia. and, the same, on Iraq Winston Churchill, authorized the RAF to drop poison gas on 'primitive tribesmen," meaning Iraq's Kurds and Afghanistan's Pashtun, a fact conveniently forgotten by Tony Blair and George W. Bush\\ the U.S. is now trying to block direct Elections At the same time, Iraq's Kurds, who now have two virtually independent mini-states in the north, are determined to create an independent nation in northern Iraq that controls the rich Kirkuk oilfields. They are dead set against losing their newfound political and economic autonomy,,,,rurks are not about to countenance the emergence of a Kurdish state ^solution to Iraq's ethnic problems defies easy answers. A Swiss-style system, with a weak central government and powerful cantons, is probably the best solution. But long-term, Iraq's dissolution into three nations may be inevitable. Tiat should the U.S. do? The most sensible course: hand Iraq to the UN and pull out If a total pullout is not in the cards, then the best option is to co-operate with Iraq's Shia majority and show that the U.S. can work fruitfully with an Islamic regime. Co-operation with Islamists in Baghdad opens the way to good relations with Tehran and a major lessening of anti-American feelings across the Muslim World. SURPRISE, SECURITY, AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE By John Lewis Gaddis http://www.nytimes.eom/2004/03/21/books/review/2 lMATLOCT.html?pagewanted=print&... . Gaddis argues that pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony remained persistent features of American behavior until World War II, when they were modified by Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Roosevelt acted to extend American hegemony beyond the Western Hemisphere, he discarded unilateralism. Rather than going it alone, the United States took the lead in creating a series of multinational institutions. Gaddis writes. Multilateralism was used to ensure American hegemony, not to undermine it. ...Roosevelt also discarded pre-emption, refusing to approve actions that violated his agreements with Stalin, even though Stalin was reneging on his commitments. Roosevelt, Gaddis believes, ...)ne can argue that the United States emerged from the cold war as the unquestioned global hegemon precisely because it had been willing to mute its traditional unilateral tendencies and to avoid the temptation of preventive war against its principal adversary. of two cold war legacies in the international environment: "the declining authority of the international state system, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." ...A. preventive war is a different matter, since its justification rests on the perception, often questionable, of a potential rather than actual threat. ..Bush's decision to place the burden of today's wars only on those who do the fighting -- and on future generations that must pay the bills. One has to wonder whether the administration's fiscal and energy policies are consistent with the goal of maintaining American global predominance. [or are driven by an economic agenda of protecting the wealthy while they take their money out of the economy ] Unfortunately, there are no magic potions or certain cures, despite the tendency ot both sides in the political debate to pretend that there are. On revolution and the emregence of cells in the US http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=::modload&;name=News&fi]e=artic1e&sid=46&mode-... There is no democratic process alive today that provides sufficient hope for the downtrodden. ..And speaking of gated communities, I'm reminded of the castles invoked in William S. Lind's "Why They Throw Rocks" (www.counterpunch.com/lind03122004.html) wherein he re'minds'others that cities rose up around 1500 for reasons that had virtually zero to do with capitalism, democracy or freedom. He underscores the point that people bonded together (as per Hobbes) to better protect themselves. ...' Is this why Mike Whitney is writing with such passion about revolution ( www.counterpunch.com/whitney03182004.html)? ...how we can't afford the luxury of ignoring their demands.       ********