Letters to the Editor
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Pink Floyd had the right idea for these people:
The Fletcher Memorial Home (Waters)
Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere
And build them a home, a little place of their own.
The Fletcher Memorial
Home for Incurable Tyrants and Kings.
And they can appear to themselves every day
On closed circuit T.V.
To make sure they're still real.
It's the only connection they feel.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Reagan and Haig,
Mr. Begin and friend, Mrs. Thatcher, and Paisly,
"Hello Maggie!"
Mr. Brezhnev and party.
"Scusi dov'รจ il bar?"
The ghost of McCarthy,
The memories of Nixon.
"Who's the bald chap?"
"Good-bye!"
And now, adding colour, a group of anonymous latin-
American meat packing glitterati.
Did they expect us to treat them with any respect?
They can polish their medals and sharpen their
Smiles, and amuse themselves playing games for awhile.
Boom boom, bang bang, lie down you're dead.
Safe in the permanent gaze of a cold glass eye
With their favorite toys
They'll be good girls and boys
In the Fletcher Memorial Home for colonial
Wasters of life and limb.
Is everyone in?
Are you having a nice time?
Now the final solution can be applied. -
@Iokannan in the Well
Have you read Martin Gifford's page? Not to pick on Martin, I'm trying to cut down, but...
http://www.worldwidehappiness.org/
Imagine the Bush Doctrine from a tree-hugging, GAIA loving, dirty fucking hippie. Flower Power with a gun.
These are wonderful goals, he has some nice ideas but then there is that thing called reality. Utopia is Greek for "no place".
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@Martin Gifford
Some people tried this already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Earth_Battalion
http://ejmas.com/jnc/jncart_channon_0200.htm
Keep trying, Martin. The world doesn't have enough well meaning fools and incurable optimists. Slaughter is a well meaning fool.
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Shorter Martin: Be Happy!
Or we'll make you!
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And, folks, let's remember this IS NOT about future history.
Its about the ongoing, unfolding, inescapable tragedy that is the US occupation of Iraq.
We can debate whether it is the single worst strategic blunder in American history or just one of the Top 10.
We can debate the quantitative measures of that measure for now until we're all collecting Social Security.
But such debates are cold comfort and frankly irrelevant to the families of the following:
The 3,996 US service members KIA
The 50,000+ US service members WIA
The 145 US service members dead of self-inflicted wounds
The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians KIA
The 2 million Iraqi civilians displaced and presently refugee
sources:
http://icasualties.org/oif/
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS22537.pdf
http://www.refugeesinternational.org/content/article/detail/9679
Those are the quantitative measures that we should care about now. At least if any of us actually cared about what's happening today.
I get the sense some of commentators here don't.
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Gads. I was gonna address a Easter bunny...
The Carolines was a 1625-1660 time that preceded the Bach musicians. (banjos players too who comment here also)
Lycidas ~
What through the German drum bellow for freedom and revenge, the noise,
Concerns not us, nor should divert our joys. Nor ought the thunder of guns,
Never let the noise drown the sweet air of our tuned violins. Believe me.
Friend, if there prevailing powers Gain them a calm serenity like ours,
They'll hang their (killing) arms upon a olive bough. And dance and revel,
then, as we do now. (apologies for some liberties) Well. Yes.
`
My love is a birth as rare,
As 'tis for object strange and high,
It was begotten by great despair
Upon the impossibility. ( I forget. It's paraphrased.)
Magnanimous despair can teach people such a divine thing.
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Left this off
By the 1950s, polling had spread to most democracies. Nowadays they reach virtually every country, although in more autocratic societies they tend to avoid sensitive political topics. In Iraq, surveys conducted soon after the 2003 war helped to measure the true feelings of Iraqi citizens to Saddam Hussein, post-war conditions and the presence of US forces.
Scientific polling was born in the 36 election. It didn't become prevalent until the 1950's. By then it was ubiquitous. To say it has been around since the 1930's is accurate but misleading. Men have walked on the moon since 1969. All 12 of them but none since 1972.
GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: I would say that the 1936 election really put the so-called scientific pollsters on the map -- my father, George Gallup, Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper -- because it was a very dramatic demonstration of the power of -- rather, the accuracy of scientific polling versus other kinds of surveys that relied on sheer numbers or, you know, samples that weren't representative.
BEN WATTENBERG: The Literary Digest went out of business. Gallup became the leading evangelist for the new science of polling. In his 1940 book, "The Pulse of Democracy," Gallup outlined a utopian view of its potential. Polling, he said, would become the national equivalent of the New England town meeting. It would give a voice to the views of the common man.
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funny. Settembrini @ 8:42 is today's good Easter honey bunny....
Wendell Berry
`
On the ongoing Holy War against Evil.
`
*Stop the killing, or,
I'll kill you, you
God-damned murderer! *
_______________
(no confuse us) Darn it.
Settembrini is Confucian in a holy K-Mart bath-robe?
I wager that he has stinky mismatched socks with holes.
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Being very very very careful who we blow away in air strikes would seem a capital place to "improve our performance" ...
those with memories (long or otherwise) will recall this weakness has been a source of "friction" with the "native population" ... We have this embarrassing history blowing away wedding parties and family reunions, toppling whole buildings, blowing up cars full of people to get at an individual "target" or two, etc.
Most recent: We apparently blew away TWO Sunni Awakening checkpoints ... checkpoints that apparently had been visited by American personnel a day or two earlier ...
A U.S. airstrike struck two checkpoints manned by U.S.-allied Sunni fighters north of Baghdad on Saturday, killing six and injuring two, Iraqi police said.
The U.S. military denied the checkpoint it attacked in the Tigris River city of Samarra was manned by friendly members of the so-called awakening councils and said those killed were behaving suspiciously in an area recently struck by a roadside bomb.
[snip]
A police officer said six members of the awakening councils were killed and two were wounded when the airstrike in Samarra hit two checkpoints about 100 yards apart. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
[snip]
The airstrikes in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, came some two hours after U.S. soldiers stopped at the two checkpoints to meet with the Sunni fighters, according to a local awakening council leader.
oh yes, first we don't pay them and then we -- since we apparently are still learning to coordinate intelligence -- our left hand blows them away after our right hand gives them a courtesy welcome wagon visit. In the past, the usual drill has been deny, deny, deny until the story is buried, send around someone with lots of cash, and then maybe admit there was an "unfortunate incident" about 2 weeks later when no one is paying attention.
Y'might think we don't value Iraqi lives much ...