Vive la France!
Death to all terrorists. It’s really that basic. Multiple terrorist attacks in Paris will not crush the spirit of the French people.
We stand with you.
War of the Worlds: Are people just smarter now?
Shortly after 8 p.m. on the Halloween Eve, 1938, the voice of a panicked radio announcer broke in with a news bulletin reporting strange explosions taking place on the planet Mars, followed minutes later by a report that Martians had landed in the tiny town of Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Although most listeners understood that the program was a radio drama, the next day’s headlines reported that thousands of others plunged into panic, convinced that America was under a deadly Martian attack. It turned out to be H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds, performed by 23-year-old Orson Welles.
77 years ago today, at around 8 pm, thousands of Americans pushed the proverbial panic button, loaded up their cars and drove off in a panic, convinced that they had moments to live because of an invasion. It’s hard to believe, nowadays, that people were that naïve–or is it?
Never Forget: 9-11-2001
There doesn’t seem to be much on TV this year about 9-11. I suppose 14 years does make a difference. However, I want to see live footage. I want to feel the rage and the resolve I felt that day. I fear that if I don’t use this day, 9-11-15 and every 9-11 moving forward, I will grow complacent and sloppy.
I don’t want to get over it. I need my refresher course of outrage dished out yearly. I will never forget watching TV that night, after being sequestered away from TV that entire day, and thinking out loud, of all the gall! the nerve! the effrontery! Then a slow anger came over me that I don’t want to dissipate over the years.
9-11-2001 changed how Americans do business forever. Our travel will never be the same. Just getting a driver’s license is different. Our entire way of proving who we are will never go back to the way we did things on 9-10-2001. We are a nation now on our guard against terrorism in everything we do. I so resent that disturbance.
The day before yesterday our house mate came in and told me he saw a woman who was wearing a full burqa strolling her baby down the street. I didn’t see her but I was outraged over his sighting. I don’t like the lack of security–I want to know who is walking up and down my street. I don’t like people hiding their faces. I see no difference in wearing a burqa and wearing a stocking mask. If I saw someone walking down the street in a stocking mask, I would call the police. Why should my risk assessment be different in this case?
Please share your feelings. Mine aren’t particularly rational but they don’t have to be. 9-11 wasn’t a rational day and no, those of us alive on 9-11-2001 will never forget!
WWII: A data visualization
These numbers are simply amazing. Estimates suggest that over 60 million military and civilian lives were lost during this conflict that began September 1, 1939 and ended in August, 1945. The Soviet Union suffered the hugest losses. Comparisons are staggering.
Perhaps when the cable news just seems too depressing, it might be uplifting to see the progress we have made in the “peace department” since WWII.
Visit the Washington Post following this link to see the world map.
D-Day: June 6, 1944
Every D-Day I am humbled by the accomplishments of those who served our great nation and their allies. They performed what many thought was the impossible. I am humbled by the bravery of our troops, many who lost their lives that day. I am humbled by those who served on the home front by sacrificing those daily comforts that we who came after them accept as routine necessities.
How could the Allied Forces get that many men, that many vehicles, that many supplies and support services across the English channel to begin the nearly year-long trek towards victory? The risk involved seems almost insurmountable.
Colonel Morris Davis: Guantánamo’s Charade of Justice
Colonel Davis’s op-ed piece appeared Friday in the New York Times.
Guantánamo’s Charade of Justice
LAST week, we learned that, only months into the job, the official in charge of the military courts system at Guantánamo Bay was stepping down, after judges ruled he had interfered in proceedings. The appointment of an interim replacement was the sixth change of leadership for the tribunals since 2003.
This is yet another setback for the military commissions, as they tackle two of their highest-profile cases: the joint trial of the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and four alleged co-conspirators, and the trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole.
That’s not all. Besides the revolving door at the convening authority’s office, six military attorneys have served as chief prosecutor for these courts over the same period. (I was the third.)
President Obama: Selma Speech
It would be difficult to find fault with this speech. I am quite confident that a certain portion of Americans are up to the task because of their intense dislike of this president.
President Obama hit a homerun out of the ball park with this speech. It just kept getting better.
Netanyahu: Should he be speaking before Congress?
Too late now. Netanyahu is scheduled to speak before Congress at 11 a.m. today. Many Democrats will not be in attendance. President Obama will not meet with the Israeli prime minister while he is here.
Many Americans feel he broke protocol by accepting an invitation from Congress to speak. In fact, many Israelis want him to cancel also. The chart above gives the break down.
At the heart of the matter is talks with Iran. Netanyahu doesn’t like our stance. Perhaps there are two sides. Who knows. The issue has gotten all tangled up in American politics and probably in Israeli politics also. Israel has elections in 2 weeks. Could this visit have any bearing on those elections?
The Plague: Black rats exonerated–blame the gerbils
Just when we found out that the hype about the Crusades was partially a myth, now we have another millennial myth blow up in our faces. Rats have been exonerated for having killed a hundred million people with the Black Plague. Instead, scientists have discovered that this deadly recurring scourge was caused by rat cousins, the gerbils. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the Washington Post reports:
After nearly eight centuries of accusing the black rat for spreading the bubonic plague, scientists say they have compelling evidence to exonerate the much-maligned rodent. In the process, they’ve identified a new culprit: gerbils.
It’s always the cute ones you have to watch out for, isn’t it?
According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate data dating back to the 14th century contradicts the commonly held notion that European plague outbreaks were caused by a reservoir of disease-carrying fleas hosted by the continent’s rat population.
Auschwitz Liberation 70th Anniversary: The Guardian Point of View
The facts are, wrote Hannah Arendt in 1946, “that six million Jews, six million human beings, were helplessly, and in most cases unsuspectingly, dragged to their deaths”. Human history, she added, “has known no story more difficult to tell”. In the years since those facts first became known, the story of the Holocaust has been told and retold, yet it still remains obdurately difficult to tell.
Scholarly inquiry, the search for causation, the most meticulous reconstruction, the grave questions of theologians and of thinkers like Arendt herself, the wrenching accounts of survivors, the discovered testimony of victims like Anne Frank – it all goes only so far. The unknowability of the Holocaust was famously, if inadvertently, expressed by the guard at Auschwitz who curtly told Primo Levi: “There is no why here.” We cannot in the end explain the Holocaust: it is beyond explanation.
The converse is not true. We cannot explain the Holocaust, yet, in large measure, it explains us. The Holocaust set the moral, ethical and geopolitical parameters within which the western world lives, influenced international institutions, sits balefully on the shoulders of writers and artists, and is never entirely absent from our minds.
U.S. representatives absent from million person march against terrorism
The news shows today are all warbling about how wrong it was that there were no US representatives in the line up of dignitaries leading the million person march against terrorism. Yes, it was noticeable. Kerry was in India. Holder was at a terrorism meeting in Paris. Obama didn’t go and biden was in Delaware. There were no senators or congress folks there.
Yes, it looked bad. Did we not get the memo? I can’t really think of a good reason why NO one from the USA went to stand tall with the other dignitaries from Europe and the middle east to sent the strong message that we don’t tolerate terrorism. The lack of an American delegation sent a really bad visual to the rest of the world.
Was the White House and Congress wrong not to send a delegation? Did we look weak, uncaring or scared in the eyes of the world?
Ebola Czar and quarantines?
DALLAS — President Obama raised the possibility on Thursday that he might appoint an “Ebola czar” to manage the government’s response to the deadly virus as anxiety grew over the air travel of an infected nurse.
Schools closed in two states, hospitals and airlines kept employees home from work, and Americans debated how much they should worry about a disease that has captured national attention but has so far infected only three people here.
A federal official said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had broadened its search for contacts of Amber Joy Vinson, the second nurse infected with Ebola at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital here, after interviewing family members who gave a different version of events from Ms. Vinson’s. The nurse had said she had a slight fever before boarding a flight from Cleveland to Dallas on Monday. But family members said she had appeared remote and unwell during her trip to Ohio over the weekend.
CDC to run fever screenings at 5 airports in USA
Several weeks ago Rick Bentley sounded the alarm over Ebola right here on this blog. I think it’s fair to say most of us thought he was being somewhat of an alarmist. Is he? How do pandemics start? How many rats did it take to host a flea carrying the Black Death back a few centuries ago? The Plague spread like wildfire.
No, there is no war on women….
As the Islamic State marched through Iraq and Syria this summer, its refrain was “convert or die.” For many, refusal to swear fealty to the Islamic State and adopt its violent, repressive ideology meant a bullet to the head.
But some women and children imprisoned by the Islamic State who refuse to convert have been dealt a fate some might consider worse than death.
By the end of August, the Islamic State had abducted up to 2,500 Iraqi civilians, most of them women and children, according to a new United Nations report based on more than 450 interviews with witnesses.
Some have been awarded to fighters, others sold as slaves in markets in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.
There were several reports of an office in Mosul where women and girls are tagged with a price and offered for sale to buyers.
Some women have reportedly been sold to young men to entice them into fighting for the Islamic State
ISIL can run but it can’t hide
An angry president addresses a sad nation over the death of James Foley at the hands of ISIL. It sounds like it’s game on. President Obama needs to unleash the fury of the US arsenal on these brutal bastards.
