D U: an issue that has never been completely resolved or rebutted … now new data out of Falluja

 

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago. The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns.

 

I’ve been asking for years why our big bad shock and awe machine can’t do the job without resorting to nukes for years.

Our defense budget bigger than the rest of the global defense budgets combined?

 

And our sabre rattlers think that the ultimate nuke solution is the one you bring out first?

 

Until we have absolutely firm proof of DU’s supposed harmless “side effects,” no war we Imperialistically invoke will ever be a “just war” a phrase the constitutes the ultimate blood-based oxymoron.

 

Research Links Rise in Falluja Birth Defects and Cancers to US Assault

• Defects in newborns 11 times higher than normal • 'War contaminants' from 2004 attack could be cause

The findings are likely to prompt further speculation that the defects were caused by depleted uranium rounds, which were heavily used in two large battles in the city in April and November 2004. The rounds, which contain ionizing radiation, are a core component of the armories of numerous militaries and militias.

Their effects have long been called into question, with some scientists claiming they leave behind a toxic residue, caused when the round – either from an assault rifle or artillery piece – bursts through its target. However, no evidence has yet been established that proves this, and some researchers instead claim that depleted uranium has been demonstrably proven not to be a contaminant.

The report acknowledges that other battlefield residues may also be responsible for the defects. "Many known war contaminants have the potential to interfere with normal embryonic and foetal development," the report says. "The devastating effect of dioxins on the reproductive health of the Vietnamese people is well-known."

63% … is that true? Then please Mr. President, tell us what you know that we don’t.

63% of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan

If our majority opinion is that we should not be there, our government must present arguments, logic and reveal information that will convince us of our erroneous majority opinion.

Otherwise wikileaks is where it’s at … it’s the best source of unspun truth we have.

The Shallowest Minds in the Country Lurk in Venues like this.

 

 

Society becomes poorer, not richer and the quality of life and dreams deteriorates more rapidly when we reduce to “us” and “other.”

 

“The state has no business telling the local school board what to teach,” says Roberto Rodriguez, a professor at the University of Arizona and member of the district’s Mexican-American studies advisory board. “The state superintendent is overreaching – meddling, literally.”

 

 

Christian Science Monitory: Ethnic studies classes illegal in Arizona public schools as of Jan. 1

Much of the controversial Arizona immigration law remains tied up in court, but a law banning ethnic studies in Arizona is set to take effect Saturday. A Tucson school district vows to fight it.

 

Happy New Year to all those real-time kind of wise cynics … all opinion with no solutions.

 

The same war continues. We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives, our lungs are pocked with it, the mucous membrane of our dreams coated with it, the imagination filmed over with the gray filth of it:

Often in my self-defined weariness of civic activism, I tend to buy into what most of those with whom I have shared concerns, passions and activities now are want to say:

“All politicians and their parties are the same, all taking money from lobbyists possessing financial resources far beyond what any collection of citizens can raise. We the little people have no power.”

Then we can continue our own slippery slide into acceptance as if the five stages of grief have become culturally, mentally and intellectually engraved in our hearts … becoming now no more than mere excuse to stop trying.

Do your slogans and my slogans merely hide our civic laziness, or worse, our civic cowardice.

Reference Michael True, US at War Since 1950: A New Year's Meditation at Truthout.org

Is our grandest action donning a too-large coat of pessimism, calling it our pragmatic view of reality and retreating further into mindless consumerism and addiction to broadcast entertainment … our current drug of choice?

I hope not. I also agree with Andrew Bacevich who observes that in so doing we “ become complicit in the destruction of what most Americans profess to hold dear."

But I fear that we will continue chasing our tails into national disaster so long as we hide behind our apathy, not to mention our commonly non-sensed stupidity.

“Ironically, the deficit-reduction commission appointed by President Obama intimates that social security, rather than a trillion-dollar war on Iraq and uncapped military spending in Afghanistan, is to blame for the deficit. And Congress has succeeded in extending Bush's tax cuts for the super-rich, which will increase the deficit.” – Michael True

Collectively we seem to care little that that silliest among us can screech the loudest and force themselves into positions of responsibility they are not qualified to handle. Collectively we seem to tired to do other than let the noisiest, most obnoxious and poorly-informed sloganeers defined our future for the rest of us …

Do what you want guys, just don’t turn off our games and circuses

We need fewer humans of courage stepping up to the plate against alien invaders who want to destroy our way off life and more stepping forward to push for schemes even more scarier than death rays, destroyer space ships and human eating ghouls.'

How about finding heroes for Michael True’s terrifying plan to save the human race for us here and now and our defenseless prosperity who need more than gadgets and games:

So what must be done to alter this discouraging scenario and help the US regain the confidence of its own people and the world community?

1. Cut the US military budget in half for 2011.
2. Increase taxes on the filthy rich, the 1 percent of the population that owns at least 23 percent of America's wealth.
3. Rebuild roads, bridges and other infrastructure that remains in a state of disrepair.
4. Encourage policies that put people to work addressing the dangers of global warming.
5. Strengthen our education system at every level, providing skills for meaningful work for all citizens.

Or just keep pretending to every one you meet that you are some real kind of wise cynic … all opinion with no solution … we won’t appreciate you any less than we do now.

If you’re not too busy figuring out the next gew gaw to purchase from your junkies at the big box tent, the next TV rerun or football game to watch, pause for five minutes and read the following slowly enough to think about who you are. It was not written recently … but things have not changed … only gotten worse.

POEM
Life at War

BY DENISE LEVERTOV

The disasters numb within us
caught in the chest, rolling
in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough

weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though

its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.’
The same war

continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it:

the knowledge that humankind,

delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,

whose music excels the music of birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifests designs
fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

still turns without surprise, with mere regret
to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines mercy,
lovingkindness we have believed one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Vietnam as I write.

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;

our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

Surely the Founding Fathers would want to see this civic ideal come to pass.

An informed citizenry would be the best counter-influence against lies, videos, and outright demagoguery. An informed citizenry will be one of those civically-intended checks and balances ...

Right?

Not if there is a failure to take into account a need for citizens to learn critical thinking. If that doesn't happen ... this is the sad failure we all have to live with .... dimwits who don't know they are dimwits living among us.

Fox News viewers are much more likely than others to believe false information about American politics, a new study concludes.

The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, judged how likely consumers of various news outlets and publications were to believe misinformation about a wide range of political issues. Overall, 90% of respondents said they felt they had heard false information being given to them during the 2010 election campaign. However, while consumers of just about every news outlet believed some information that was false, the study found that Fox News viewers, regardless of political information, were "significantly more likely" to believe that:

• --Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)
• --Most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
• --The economy is getting worse (26 points)--Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
• --The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
• --Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
• --The auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
• --When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
• --And that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

In addition, the study said, increased viewership of Fox News led to increased belief in these false stories.

 Of course the obvious conclusion may be even scarier

... the unfortunate intersection of a dimwit with unlimited funds with which to self-entertain forms a group of broadcast dimwits who are in truth no more critically thoughtful than their gullible broadcast targets.

The blind leading the blind with all of them forcefully trying to insist there are no skid marks in their underwear.

Rather be part of the global bully club than admit that we could and should do much better?

Well ... are you a blow hard patriot who thinks what's good for America better by-god be good enough for the rest of the world? Are you offended by folks like wikileaks who reveal our darkest side to public view?

... Or are you a patriot of courage, willing to learn about the hard stuff and publicly oppose it so that an end to national shame might come closer?

Iraq's Secret War Files is the only television documentary to have advance access to the biggest Wikileaks release ever

Tea-Patriot question: Cut taxes where and how much?

Seattle Times: Did voters favor 'cheap soda' over health care for poor?

Washington voters in November rejected new taxes, including one on candy and carbonated beverages.

The title of this article asks an acutely moral question with implications across the greater societal spectrum in America where civic sounding fluff against taxes comes hard against society's ability to care for it's most vulnerable members.

In the Darwinian Survival-of-the-Capitalistic-Fittest cartoon world beloved of those who profess that shallowest sort of conservative thoughts a gigantic moral question arises.

Does free market priority (of which there is nothing sacred, holy or indisputably the best economic form)  supersede  the priority of the highest good of all concerned?

Why do so many equate Christian attitudes to moral hypocrisy? Well ... sometimes it's better to resist the urge to speak.

Writing about the beliefs of Elizabeth Edwards, who passed away this week and who did not believe in the Christian version of salvation and the hereafter, Donald Douglas and his religious/political observance again demonstrates why Christians are equated with moral hypocrisy.

Clearly Elizabeth Edwards wants to put her faith in something, be it hope or strength or anything. But not God.

I wonder if it's just bitterness, that's she's been forsaken by more than just her estranged husband --- that's she's been forsaken by Him.

And imagine if she'd have become First Lady. Americans generally expect outward expressions of faith in our presidents, Christian faith especially, and thus in our First Ladies as well.

... Being anti-religion is cool, so Edwards' non-theological theology gets props from the neo-communists. Still, at her death bed and giving what most folks are calling a final goodbye, Elizabeth Edwards couldn't find it somewhere down deep to ask for His blessings as she prepares for the hereafter? I guess that nihilism I've been discussing reaches up higher into the hard-left precincts than I thought.

Douglas refers to Elizabeth Edwards' Facebook goodbye.

... they can see how pathetic a society we are ... and it amuses the rest of the world

You will not find a more accurate dependency- intervention essay this year ... blunt, crude, brutally honest and should be required reading for everyone who still lives in the "it's not too late crowd."

The rest of the crowds in mamby-pamby land and the arena of pretend patriots wouldn't understand it.

If you are insulted by the import of this essay and its title, bite your proud lip, gird up your loins and find the courage to read, ponder and start asking questions.

If you are content to have someone already giving you answers to questions you have not really asked and ignoring the ones you might ask, you just might be the dumb subject yourself. You wouldn't DARE read Joe Bageant all the way to the end now ... would you?


AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM?
Ignorance and courage in the age of Lady Gaga

By Joe Bageant


Excerpts:

... digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?

... Doubting readers may consider America's health institutions, the insurance corporations, hospital chains, physicians' lobbies. Between them they have established a perfectly legal right to clip you and me for thousands of dollars at their own discretion. That we so rabidly defend their right to gouge us, given all the information available in the digital age, mystifies the world.

... Purposeful ignorance allows us to enjoy cheaper commodities produced through slave labor, both foreign, and increasingly, domestic, and yet "thank god for his bounty" in the nation's churches without a trace of guilt or irony.

... Americans fail to grasp this because the most important fact (that a helluva lot of folks can't afford to bid, and therefore get to die early) never gets equal play with capitalist political propaganda, to wit, that if we give free medical attention to low income cleft palate babies, a wave of Leninism will seize the nation. That is cultural ignorance. We breathe the stuff every day of our lives.

But when Americans too poor to buy health care nevertheless vote to retain the corporate auction process, that is cultural stupidity.

... Cultural ignorance dictates that the best way to stop foreign terrorists flying into the country is by humiliating American citizens flying out of the country. Go ahead, grope me, X-ray my dick and for god sake don't let anyone bring a large bottle of shampoo on board. In an obedient, authority worshipping police state, physical insult and surveillance are proof of safety. 

It's profitable too, and not just for scanner manufacturers. The brouhaha over body scanners and crotch groping provide media with titillating fuel for ratings, thereby driving up TV advertising rates, which is passed on in the price of products we buy.

So we pay to be insulted, have the hell scared out of us, and to unknowingly have our behavior shaped. Under American style capitalism, this mobius strip of cultural ignorance is called a win-win situation for everybody. 

This also conveniently distracts us from the everyday human insult we practice on one another, as a result of state manufactured cultural misinformation -- fear.

... Societies declining into obsolescence understandably resist looking forward, and hang onto their past mythologies. Consequently, both liberals and conservatives in America feed on myths of political action which died in Vietnam. The results are ludicrous.

Tea Partiers attempt to emulate the 1960s protest gatherings by staging rallies sponsored by the richest beneficiaries of the status quo. For the average TP participant, the goal, near as I can tell, is to "start a new American Revolution," by wearing foodstuffs, screaming, threatening, and voting for nitwits. Media pundits proclaim the Tea Party "a historic populist movement."

... Progressives also fancy a revolution, one in which they participate through the Internet petitions, and media events such as the risk free Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity, where no one risked even missing an episode of Tremaine. Seeing people like themselves on television was proof fighting the good fight.

The Stewart rally was nonetheless culturally historic; we will never see a larger public display of post modern irony congratulating itself. 

To my kids and grandkids: It's YOUR future not mine. People of my generation in charge have done nothing to disprove the dumbness. Besides, why would you take serious the opinions of past-their-prime oldisters while you are convinced that you are just now moving into yours?

It's time you stopped fiddling around in the on-deck circle while aging never-were-stars keep swinging in vain for the fences with your lives and treasures.

If it's not already too late, turn your cute little cap around, drop your cell phone, turn off your HD, forget about who can dance, who can survive and whose birth certificate is in the Smithsonian.

Come on!

Step up to the plate and take charge.

Meddling: Arrogant ignorance swabbed with naivete defines human fondness for prejudice

Reference the legal jousting around whether or not the right to marry is the property of nosy and meddling churches.

A speaker hired by a church tells a judge the intentions and reasons behind what God does, When God does it … and why.

 

The key reason that marriage has existed at all in any society and at any time is that sexual relationships between men and women naturally produce children.

Society has no particular interest in a platonic relationship between a man and a woman no matter how close, no matter how committed it may be, or emotional relationships between other people as well.

But, when a relationship between a man and woman becomes a sexual one society immediately has a vital interest in that for two reasons - one, society needs the creation of new life for the next generation.

But secondly, [society’s vital] interests are actually threatened by the possibility that unintentional and unwanted pregnancy will mean that the child is born out of wedlock and raised by, in all likelihood, its mother alone and that directly implicates society’s vital interests. – Charles Cooper, a mere lawyer pretending his is the opinion of the Law-Giver, arguing in support of Proposition 8

I agree with the judge who responded that the legal scribe’s presumptive logic about the mind of God better applies as a reason to prohibit divorce.

 

Sorry … but the notion that God loses sleep in his own bedroom because of what happens in another bedroom … and that God awakens and stirs up dull and delirious biblicists and tells them to go meddle has long ago crossed over into the venue of ridiculous.

 

I support the right of anyone to marry anyone else … nothing more, nothing less … we have no business meddling.

The most beloved conservative commentator in Republicanistan still thinks his adoring listeners are stupid.

From the hallowed 11/24/10 broadcast from Premier Radio Network's The Rush Limbaugh Show:

   How many native americans were killed by the arrival of the white man through disease and war?

   ... how many people have died since the wm arrived due to lung cancer, thanks to the Indian custom of    smoking? 

  Who are the real killers here?

Where are our reparations?

PZ Meyer gave the best response ... one I challenge any adorer of Limbaugh to refute point by point or logic of argument ... that is of course if Limbaugh is wrong about how dumb his listeners are.

The white man nearly exterminated all of the native peoples of this continent by infection and execution and confinement.

Conversely, the European invaders have thrived, have suffered no general deprivation of life or liberty at the hands of the native population (although there were transient local flareups of violence that did cause suffering in white populations, but which were always followed by imposing greater torment on the natives).

White peoples: massive net gain. Native peoples: massive net loss. Fat privileged jerks like Rush Limbaugh do not get to play the persecution card.

And don't even get me started on the smoking comment.

Watching your children die of smallpox, seeing your friends gunned down by cavalry, having your land stripped from under you, watching your way of life eradicated, and seeing your descendants condemned to a life of poverty does not quite stack up against lighting a stogie and sipping brandy with your over-privileged pale-skinned buddies.

And who, I ask, is profiting from tobacco? I don't think it's the native Americans.