Dec 22 2009
Yes, this is a very personal, and internal, essay.
The title states what I feel, “It is time for me to die”.
My best days are behind me.
Surviving two warzones. Surviving the minefields of Iraq. Surviving my time as a cop.
I knew, from the time I was 18 and had joined the military as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Specialist, that my time on Earth was limited.
That, however, didn’t prove to be true…
Dec 22 2009
By now you no doubt read that U.S. Army General Cucolo has issued a policy statement concerning U.S. troops in Iraq; “get pregnant, face possible courts-martial“.
For the first time in history, our troops are to face a courts-martial for getting pregnant?
This begs the question; just who IS in charge in Washington, DC????
Dec 22 2009
Luck: Couple of months ago, my husband's stepmother's niece, 18 years old, wants heated windshield wipers. Can't find them online, files a patent and now Walmart wants the rights. True story. (seriously)
Why I am the Mom of the Year: If your five year old finds your vibrator and thinks it's a light saber, running around the house swinging it with both hands zroom-zroom, you might want to downsize or at least choose a different color. (no comment)
Best Drinks Ever: Eiswein and Chocolate milk made with dark cocoa.
I am a veteran, a mama of three and soon starting my junior year pursuing a degree in Microbiology, then on to PA school (please science gods). I am a eco-socialist libertarian progressive atheist who also happens to have a single economic thought progressives hate so you will have to be in the dark about because unlike vibrator stories, its personal. Proud Moment: I met Howard Dean in Iowa the week he made both the Newsweek and Time covers. I would have a picture if not for some asshole who bumped my husband as he took the picture. Because we were with Sen. Johnson people, we were able to hang around in the background with Dean and his people after the event. Pelosi's daughter was filming. I hope I am not on film. I haven't watched her documentary for just that reason. Stupid, I know.
My Favorite Joke:
Hi! -Christina
Dec 22 2009
This will certainly not be the deepest or most analytic essay I’ve ever published and I apologize to the people I’ve moved down, but it needs to be said and I’ll just say it briefly-
The only things the Versailles Villagers care about are money, and approval.
Don’t give them that.
Don’t pay for their shit. Spit on them!
Don’t watch their shows or vote for them or pay for their products. Tell them in the Mega-Mart when you meet them that they are hurting America, that they are nothing but failed novelists and stenographers.
I’m not asking for the world here or advocating pitchforks and torches or even that you stop doing what you need to do to provide for yourself and your family.
What I am saying is that you have to give up pretending that everything is normal.
That those bruises of yours are just because you are clumsy and “undiplomatic”.
It is well past time for you to take a good look at your life and decide if you are better off than you were 4 years ago.
Or even last year.
Oh Rose, have something to eat.
Two hundred thousand years in the future he’s dying, and there’s nothing I can do.
Well, like you said, two hundred thousand years, it’s way off!
But it’s not! It’s now. That fight is happening right now! And he’s fighting for us, for the whole planet, and I’m just sitting here eating chips!
Listen to me! God knows I have hated that man, but right now I love him, and do you know why? Cause he did the right thing, he sent you back to me!
But what do I do every day, Mum? What do I do? Get up, catch the bus, go to work, come back home, eat chips and go to bed, is that it?!
It’s what the rest of us do.
But I can’t!
Why, cause you’re better than us??
NO, I didn’t mean that! I just… But it was. It was a better life!
And I don’t mean all the travelling, and seeing aliens and spaceships and things, that don’t matter.
The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. You know, he showed you too!
That you don’t just give up! You don’t just let things happen!
You make a stand, you say no, you have the guts to do what’s right when everyone else just runs away.
Dec 22 2009
Have we become too comfortable, sitting behind our keyboards and silently typing away our anger? Has the progressive movement embraced the wonderful technology of the internet at the expense of real world activism and organizing?
I’m afraid this might be so. And it’s time to turn that around. On Bill Moyer’s Journal this past Friday, economist Robert Kuttner brought up a striking fact that is missing from nearly all of the plethora of analyses – ranging from Obamapologist to Obama hater to everything in between – that I’ve seen of this presidency:
ROBERT KUTTNER: The other thing that’s missing, if you compare him with Roosevelt or LBJ or Lincoln, the other thing that’s missing is a social movement. In all of these great periods of transformation, you had social movements doing a complicated dance with the president, where sometimes they were working with him, sometimes they were beating up on him. That certainly describes the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson. It describes the abolitionists and Lincoln. It describes the labor movement and Roosevelt. Where’s the movement?
Dec 22 2009
h/t to Huffington Post
This will be relatively short as my outrage meter seems to be peaking again.
As the next wave of defaults is churning its way through the prime mortgage market our saviors in Washington have come up with a new way to scam the general populace. Its called bailing out the banks, part II.
Dec 22 2009
“I don’t think the White House recognizes how much trouble they’re in,” said one former Democratic official. “I think they’re miscalculating what’s happening with progressives and the left.”
Failing to understand the intensity of progressive anger, dismissing it with condescending arrogance is bad enough, but that’s not all they’re miscalculating. Obama and Democrats seem to think they’re securing the long-term support of the corporate establishment, they think they’re consolidating their power, but they’re walking right into a trap. They’re being set up to fail, they’re being set up to take the blame when everything implodes. The corporate masters of America and their GOP enforcers expect that this trap, this setup will result in a Presidency so disastrous and unpopular, in a Congress so despised, in a political system so divisive and dysfunctional that when General Petraeus arrives on his white horse to save America in 2012, he will win every state, Republicans will take Congress back, and the Permanent Republican Majority will be here to stay after a rather unsuccessful first attempt.
If that doesn’t happen, it won’t be because the designated scapegoats with the (D) after their names in the White House and Congress didn’t play their assigned roles. They are. To clueless, halfwit, suicidal perfection. Democrats are jubilant that they’ve managed to clusterfuck their way to 60 votes in the Senate, but they won’t be quite as jubilant when the healthcare crisis keeps intensifying and unemployment keeps getting worse and banks keep failing and the dollar tanks and the war in Afghanistan keeps getting bloodier and the commercial real estate market implodes and takes what’s left of the economy down with it.
Obama isn’t playing 12 dimensional chess, he’s playing Russian Roulette with a bullet in every chamber.
He loaded the Wall Street Bailout bullet, he loaded the not enough stimulus bullet, he loaded the Bernanke back to the Fed bullet, he loaded the deficits are bad bullet, he loaded the Afghanistan escalation bullet, he’s loaded every bullet the corporate masters of this country handed him and keeps pulling the trigger.
Dec 22 2009
Dec 22 2009
Chalk up yet another reason why we have two wars going right now — the U.S. Military is one of the biggest consumers of petroleum products in the world.
And because of this, it is also one of the world’s leading producers of CO2.
As pointed out in this incredible essay, this is the proverbial “elephant in the room”.
(And don’t even get me started on the share of the budget defecit, and the ongoing collapse of the dollar, that the Pentagon is responsible for. )
Sara Flounders writes:By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.
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The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon’s aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world.
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Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.
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This information is not readily available … because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change” …
Bryan Farrell in his new book, “The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism,” says that “the greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency … the Armed Forces of the United States.”
More inconvenient facts:
Professor Michael Klare noted in 2007:
Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis — either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.
And there’s more:
And in 2008, Oil Change International released a report showing that:The [Iraq] war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year.
Between March 2003 and October 2007 the US military in Iraq purchased more than 4 billion gallons of fuel from the Defense Energy Support Center, the agency responsible for procuring and supplying petroleum products to the Department of Defense. Burning these fuels has directly produced nearly 39 million metric tons of CO2 Just transporting 4 billion gallons of fuel to the military in Iraq consumed at least as much fuel as was delivered nearly doubling overall fuel-related emissions.
Emissions from the Iraq War to date are nearly two and a half times greater than what would be avoided between 2009 and 2016 were California to implement the auto emission regulations it has proposed (but that the Bush Administration struck down).
If the war were ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do, more than 60% of all countries on the planet…
Wow, no wonder the Powers that Be don’t want to put the brakes on this thing. It’s a paradise for the oil companies, a dream come true. They take over a country with oil, then spend gargantuan amounts of oil in order to keep the Army there, then when things settle down a bit they just gear up ANOTHER “war” so that they can pump even more and more, all the while charging it to the United States taxpayer.
What a racket.
The wars are rackets.
