Reconciliation

Sometimes I am forwarded emails of a political nature. Recently I got one about US soldiers in Iraq. Perhaps you've seen it? The images all have clever little captions underneath, sarcastic in nature. Is this so I feel shame in not supporting our troops in this war? I've put them side by side with other images that have stuck with me over the years, complete with their captions as well.

The problem is, how many acts of humanity are needed to erase our barbarism in Iraq? Is it a number you can quantify? So 4 million hugs by American soldiers to Iraqi children = death of an Iraqi child by the hands of Americans?

How do I reconcile these images?

Soldiers Force Children to See Saw Until They Give Up Information! vs An Iraqi child killed by US bombing

Child Bites Soldier in Self Defense vs An Iraqi prisoner of war tries to calm down his child

.

Soldiers Lack Body Armor; Forced to Use Childen as Shields vs US soldier holding a dying child

Soldiers Vent Anger by Throwing Children Around vs Victims of US air-strike, Balad, March 2006

Rations Shortage; Soldiers Begin Eating Children vs 20-month old Iraqi baby girl, named Shams (means "Sun" in Arabic). Victim of car bomb in Sadr City, Baghdad. Her mother was killed in the attack.

Children Thankful Soldiers Didn't Open Fire On Soccer Game vs Manadel al-Jamadi was killed in Abu Ghraib while being interrogated. His son and wife pose in this picture with a photograph of their dead father with Spc. Sabrina Harman giving the "thumbs up".

The Tickle Torture is Unbearable vs A son receives a flag instead of his father.

Soldiers Force Children to Do Their Dirty Work vs She's four years old. The blood is that of her parents. They made the mistake of driving at night when our "liberation forces" were out and about

Soldier Forces Child to Hang By Fingertips - Just for Fun vs Ali Abbas lost his parents, fourteen family members and his arms after a US missile attack.

Maybe its my fault for not finding enough Family Circus moments.

~Lila Schow

Because Responsible Citizens Clean Up After Their Government

http://goodusgov.org/

Alternative Energy Doesn't Grow On Trees

Don't kill us with the solution. Alternative energy, namely biofuels is, on the surface, wonderful. No oil. Green fuel. Using the land instead of mining it. Right? Wrong.

Agricultural mining is not the eco-friendly practice we'd like to believe when we shop for our food at the farmer's market. They aren't growing crops off a platform in the south seas or sucking them up from a cavern underground.

No, my friends, to make biofuel you have to grow biomass. And even though you should be able to grow plants on all but one continent, it seems the biofuel industry's favorite place to grow our miracle solution to oil dependence is in fragile rain forests. Or, more specifically, in a field of recently cleared fragile rain forest.

I've seen Jane Goodall speak on a few different occasions, and during her last visit to my hometown she commented that part of the reason she succeeded where Dian Fossey did not, was that she included local people and their lands in her conservation strategy. So it is no surprise to me to discover that she is against biofuels as well.

We're cutting down forests now to grow sugarcane and palm oil for biofuels and our forests are being hacked into by so many interests that it makes them more and more important to save now...Biofuel isn't the answer to everything; it depends where it comes from.

I know one place it comes from. Brazil.

See, rainforest.
Yes, now valuable forest can be burned for a few years of farming, until the soil is depleted and more forest has to be burned. But who am I to play doom and gloom? I'm sure Monsanto is working on a special fertilizer to compliment their genetically engineered seeds.

You know where else we get biomass for biofuel? Indonesia. (Hey look, more rainforest!)

Which is funny because Indonesia is a huge producer of Liquid Natural Gas (LNG). We use LNG for energy, pulling it up from caverns underground. We also use it for fertilizer. That's right, most fertilizer use nitrates culled from petroleum. Neat. We're just adding another barrier to getting oil into our vehicles.

Which is why when I find stories like this in my local paper, I don't jump up and down with glee. Instead I wonder, what generation am I killing so that I can pretend to be environmentally nice?

~Lila Schow
Because Responsible Citizens Clean Up After Their Government

http://goodusgov.org/

You fools! It's not Real!

Just perusing the headlines this morning and I found this little gem:

U.S. Declares Victory Over Al Qaeda In Iraq

The hell you say. We can invade a country for a fictional reason that -- because of our invasion becomes fact -- and then WIN!?

I didn't know it was Condi Rice News Day. Must have missed that memo.

~Lila Schow
Because Responsible Citizens Clean Up After Their Government
http://goodusgov.org/

Hello Kettle? This is Pot...

Oh this is just priceless. Apparently the irony is completely lost on everybody's favorite Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. After a recently completed trip to Russia and a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, Secretary Rice had this to say...

"The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow's commitment to democracy."

I wonder if Condi has ever once used her keen intellect and powers of observation to voice concern over a certain branch of government that's amassed so much authority and grabbed so much power that it threatens democracy say... closer to home?

Nahhhhhhh... probably not.Secretary Rice went on to say...

"I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma."

Funny, I think all of that could be applied not just to Russia, but to say... the United States? There is definitely too much concentrated power in the White House, we all most definitely have serious doubts about the independence of our judiciary, especially all of those right-wing assclowns currently sitting not just in the federal courts, but on the Supreme Court as well. And being that the Bush Administration has been caught several times, by the GAO, running domestic propaganda, I'd say we probably all have very serious questions about our media and given the spineless nature of our Congress and the way they piddle themselves every time Bush says "boo," I'd say we probably have some questios about the strength of Congress. Yup. That entire quote seems pretty tailored to the good ol' United States these days. But we're more concerned with the Russians? Interesting.

Condi also had this little nugget of brilliance to impart...

She hoped the efforts of rights activists would promote universal values of "the rights of individuals to liberty and freedom, the right to worship as you please, and the right to assembly, the right to not have to deal with the arbitrary power of the state."

Priceless! Hey Condi... don't you think it would be really nice to have those things secured here, in this country before we start lecturing other countries about liberty and freedom? Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, we should ensure that the rights and freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution are adhered to by the government before we run around the globe telling other people how to live and how to govern their lands? Maybe?

I mean listen to this, Condi. Alexander Brod, head of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau had this to say...

"Not all is ideal in America, either. We see protests against the war in Iraq and violations of human rights on the part of security services and violations of human rights in countering terrorism."

Okay, anytime the Russians can hold the moral high ground and tell us that we're quashing human rights, we're in trouble. How terrible is it that countries like China, North Korea, Iran, Russia and a whole host of others can point to the United States now, lecture us on properly observing human rights and be right about it???

There was a time in this country's history where we were the example, where we set the bar on human rights, where we had the moral high ground. Yes, unfortunately, those were before the dark days of the Bush Administration. We are now a country that quashes the rights of citizens at home, tortures, murders and violates all sorts of basic human rights. That shining city on the hill we are, no longer. Thanks, Georgie.

Secretary Rice, I just have to say that you've got one enormously huge, cast-iron set of gonads to lecture the Russians about democracy, liberties and freedoms. Cast-iron ones, I tell you. How about you and your little friends in the White House try putting democracy back into our own country before you open up that gap-toothed piehole again. Otherwise, you may just look like an arrogant, ignorant, condescending idiot. Oh oops. Too late.

~Kevin S.

Who's Laughing Now?

It's not often that a news article about the US failures in Iraq makes me laugh, but then today I read this headline:

Iraqis to Pay China $100 Million for Weapons


Huh, I thought. I wonder what that's all about. The summary of the article said:

Robin Wright and Ann Scott Tyson for The Washington Post report that "Iraq has ordered $100 million worth of light military equipment from China for its police force, contending that the United States was unable to provide the materiel and is too slow to deliver arms shipments."

I can't help it. That's funny. The US gave plenty of equipment to Iraqi police forces. The problem was that it ended up in the hands of insurgents who'd infiltrated the police units and then used against the Americans.

For Iraq to spin the issue so that the US is to blame, ahh, irony. It knows no nationality. It's too bad the only measure of success we've had in the country we've liberated from the evildoers is such a cerebral one.

Oh, and by the way, in case you were wondering Baghdad is now down to two hours a day. Last year at this time it was six. Now that's progress!

~Lila Schow
Because Responsible Citizens Clean Up After Their Government http://goodusgov.org/