n a t b s

Here’s a great story that seems to be getting almost no play in the main-stream-media. Apparently all west coast ports were closed today as thousands of dock workers stayed home to protest the war. This is great because it’s a serious protest. This is the kind of protest that gets attention because all the ports on the west coast aren’t functioning today.

Powerful people feel this kind of protest, they feel it in their wallets. If they struck for more than one day it would start to have a serious toll on the country. And frankly, politicians don’t listen to simple peaceful protests. The pre-Iraq-war protest in 2003 was maybe the biggest ever, and it did nothing. We need more people to be brave like these dock workers and then maybe something will actually change in America. Godspeed dock workers, godspeed.

Peace

There’s this new trend lately, to blame the Iraqis for the problems over there, and I think it’s kind of disgusting. This is from an article in BBC News:

Limited patience

The reconstruction of Iraq also relies heavily on US money, while Iraqi oil revenues are growing, with a surplus estimated at $30bn in US banks according to Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat and chairman of the armed services committee.

Democrats want to try to push legislation that would force Iraq to spend those revenues on reconstruction and in that there seems to be unusual bi-partisan agreement. Republican senators also asked why the Iraqis were not using more of their own money.

Republican Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming said: “We’re a generous people but our patience is not unlimited.”

Unless you control a country, you can’t really force it to spend it’s own money can you? But I guess it’s easy when you’ve installed it’s government, occupy it, and have all it’s money in your banks. Hey, why aren’t they using their own money? I mean, we’re generous, but come on.

Also, we’re generous? In some cases we are, but not with respect to Iraq. You can’t say that with respect to Iraq. That’s as absurd as it is offensive. We’re the aggressive invaders who now occupy and control their country with no mandate. Except, of course, that we’re bringing democracy to them as a gift from God. But other than that, no mandate.

It’s just crazy to lay the blame at their feet. They’ve inherited an impossible situation from us. Kind of like the next president is going to from Bush. I hope he can handle it. Speaking of Obama, he just said today: “it is time to bring them home, and to ask the Iraqis to take responsibility for their country.” That’s edging into this territory and it makes me uncomfortable without also adding, “and we need to take responsibility too, and help them with aid” or something. You’ve got to say that too because otherwise, you’re kind of being a dick. Sorry, I love Barack, but it’s true.

So in closing, all the problems in Iraq are the Iraqi’s fault! No need to worry Americans, no blame can be placed at our feet. Even though we did elect George Bush, twice.

And god help us if we elect McCain.

Hillary’s latest desperate move? Trying to define herself as the sole anti-war candidate:

One candidate will continue the war, one candidate only says he’ll end the war, and one candidate is ready, willing and able to end the war [source]

Umm…fuck you. Seriously. This is almost as bad as the “McCain and I are more experienced” line. It’s a little better because she’s not saying McCain is better than Obama in this case, she’s just saying they’re the same. She has to stop giving McCain sound bites for ads, and she has to stop kneecapping her colleague. And this is coming from the woman who voted to authorize the war! She’s just like Bush: say one thing, do another. You know Hillary, if you continually lie about something it doesn’t make it true.

Her basis for that assertion, by the way, is “Senator Obama says he will get American troops out in 16 months, but his advisor[sic] says you can’t count on that.” [source] It is true that recently some of his advisers have referred to his plan as a best case scenario that might not play out exactly as planned, and it is. Getting out of Iraq is going to be very difficult, and if Hillary is trying to suggest that it’s going to be easy than she’s flat-out lying to us. At least Obama’s campaign is honest.

Has anyone seen this ad out there on the internets? It starts as a picture of an American city, then the entire website goes black and you see this message:

Is this the military’s best recruitment effort? Here’s why it sucks: first of all it’s really annoying, as any ad that takes over the whole screen is. Secondly, what the hell does the air force have to do with preventing a cyberattack (that’s apparently a new word) exactly? Are we going to bomb the hackers? And thirdly it’s a bit fear-mongery. It doesn’t seem like an effective recruiting tool, but maybe it’ll freak people out a little. It also makes me think, has there ever been a cyberattack related blackout in America? Not to my recollection, so it’s kind of über-paranoid also.

“Join the air force where we fight hackers!” Sigh, I really don’t want the person who joins the air force because of this ad flying a 250 million dollar bomber. It’s like a filter that only let’s morons through.

The three domains of the air force:

Air. Sure.

Space….ok I guess.

Cyberspace. Well, you can’t spell cyberspace without space, which I’m not so sure you protect anyway.

The National Priorities Project recently released their annual report on how American tax dollars were spent over the past year. Are you ready for this? 42.2% of every tax dollar went to military spending. Specifically, 28.7 cents went to current military operations, 10 cents went to interest on military debt, and 3.5 cents went to veterans benefits. By the way, 4.4 cents went to education, and 2.6 cents went to the environment and science. So yeah, military spending is almost half of all spending, and we spend almost ten times as much on our military as we do on education. I can’t imagine why we have so many problems in this country.

I find these figures to be not very surprising, but completely appalling. Our priorities are completely bass ackwards. I mean, if we had some sort of real enemy that required spending more on our military than all other countries combined, I guess I’d learn to accept it. Maybe this kind of spending made sense during the cold war, but in the “war against terror,” aka the war against disgruntled people with box-cutters, I just don’t see the need. To protect ourselves from terrorism we don’t need stealth bombers and fancy nukes, we need intelligence (in both senses of the word). I see it as a law enforcement battle, not a military one. I also see it as a pr battle; when people really fucking hate you it might be a good idea to try and figure out why, and then try to make them like you.

Anyway, isn’t it great to know where your taxes are going? And it’s almost tax time again, yay! Maybe we should all only pay 57.8% of what we owe as a form of protest. The scary thing is that it’s going to be so hard to get that number down because there are so many entrenched military-industrial-complex interests that will scream bloody murder if we try to cut military spending. Maybe our only hope is to stop increasing the military budget (lord knows we’ve increased it plenty in the past 8 years) and thus the amount we spend will go down, relatively speaking, as inflation increases.

On closing, can we just reflect on the fact that our country is putting a huge percent of it’s productivity and effort towards killing people? How did we get to this point? What kind of horrible aberration is this? Why is there money being deducted from our paychecks to kill innocent people halfway around the world? Doesn’t that just make you sick? I know I don’t want my efforts, my labor, perverted like that. You can check out the whole pdf here.