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Monday, September 19, 2011

NPR Morning Edition story about a 2000-year-old book by Lucretius, described by the author of SWERVE. All Things Considered on sex trafficking and erasing CO2.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

@SMShow Why am I hearing jokes about Kinko's? They are so 90's; Fedex took them over from within! Fed. govt. still demands faxes. NMB, FL

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Lessons of 9/11; Sins of the Father

Saturday, September 10th's coverage of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 had a weird comment from NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED that 9/11 marked a generational conflict.  It's true for the wrong reasons; this all started with Bush #41's illicit basing of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia during and after Operation Desert Shield/Storm.  It is Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz and others who did not see combat in Vietnam trying to show actual veterans of that undeclared war and of WWII how to run a neoconservative war without enough troops/equipment/cause while threatening to fire any general who sought post-war planning like the Marshall Plan did.

If you are not going to any 9/11 events, I suggest these movies:

  1. Charlie Wilson's War (with Tom Hanks as the Congressman who helped free Afghanistan)
  2. Rambo III (Afghan rebels fight off the Soviet Union) and maybe all Rambo movies, about vets etc.
  3. Flight 93 (the one considered by the Oscars, not the knockoff)
  4. Jarhead (about an infantryman in the 1991 Persian Gulf War)
  5. Recount (Kevin Spacey as Al Gore's lawyer and Laura Dern as Katherine Harris; 2000 election theft)
  6. The Path to 9/11 (despite Harvey Keitel, a complete fiction); Wag the Dog for GOP's view of Clinton
  7. W. (scarily accurate about Bush #43)
  8. Silver City (a more fictionalized movie about Bush #43)
  9. Fair Game (the recent one about ex-diplomat Joe Wilson and exposed spy Valerie Plame-Wilson)
  10. An Inconvenient Truth (with Al Gore, who won the Presidential election) 11th Hour, The Corporation

Remember:  9/11 = oil.  The real tie between Iraq and Osama was that Osama wanted to defend Saudi Arabia from Iraq rather than have American troops there.  The real weapon of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein was his cheap oil once the murderous oil embargo ended, probably ending the dollar's supremacy in valuing oil.  William Krystol should be in jail for fraud for telling everyone that Iraq had no history of sectarian violence, forgetting Saddam's power requiring that the minority Sunni suppress the majority Shiites, not to mention Saddam's slaughter of Shiites who tried to overthrow him after Bush #41's vague promise to help despite a treaty letting Saddam fly military helicopters.

Between Bush #43's selection by The Supreme Court and 9/11, sure we had the Gary Condit / Chandra Levy scandal, but also the April 1st crash of a Chinese military pilot and Americans held prisoner before their plane was chopped then returned, America's withdrawal from the International Court, and the U.S. refusal to sign the Kyoto Accords despite action by individual states and cities.  I call today Four Planes' Day, not Patriot Day.  Read Anthony Cordesman's The Buffy Paradigm and visit www.9-11commission.gov to read the official report,, flaws and all.  Peace out.

P.S. also see the movies STAR TREK, the remake where actions and vengeance affect other generations in strange ways, and all three SPIDER-MAN movies by Sam Raimi where average New Yorkers help the exhausted hero in #1 & #2; #3 has the hero nearly becomes the villain.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Sorry, NPR: the best music for 9/11 includes Superman (It's Not Easy) by Five for Fighting and Time by Enya. We Are The Champions by Queen?

Monday, September 5, 2011

Lessons of 9/11: Sins of the Father

Many recollections of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 are just that, memories of a day and the events that followed, including Operation Infinite Justice in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), an unfortunately titled crusade quickly renamed Operation Iraqi Freedom.  It became a way to settle unfinished business with Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who did have one Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD):  cheap oil ready to unleash after a decade of embargo and food-for-oil after the Persian Gulf War's Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm.  In 1990, the President George H. W. Bush (#41) Administration told diplomat April Glassby to relay a message to Saddam Husseini; his dispute with Kuwait was not a U.S. concern.  This became Saddam's excuse to invade Kuwait, which gave Bush an excuse to get Saudi Arabia to accept American troops on its soil; movie director Spike Lee had a hard enough time getting non-Moslem Americans on Arabian territory to make MALCOLM X, but this would trigger Osama bin Laden's wrath.  So far, Osama's plan worked:  force America to spend itself into oblivion just as the Soviet Union did in the late 80's, while inflating oil prices by having Christian crusaders and Islamic jihadists fight over oil fields and pipelines.  There are many lessons to be learned about 9/11:  visit www.9-11commission.gov for the valid-if-flawed Commission Report, and read then-Senator Bob Graham's (FL-D) book INTELLIGENCE MATTERS.  Watch movies like FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR and maybe RAMBO III as a reminder of what can happen when an unwanted superpower sends troops to a guerrilla's playground.  The movie W. is sympathetic, but brutal in its comparisons between the two wars on Iraq by different Bush presidencies.  Television shows like THE PATH TO 9/11 and W.'s remembrances of 9/11 are forgettable except to track right-wing delusions.  Young Winston Churchill switched the British Navy from coal to oil; today's soldiers are switching from one-use batteries to rechargeables with solar panels.  Also, look for Anthony Cordesman's post-9/11 essay THE BUFFY PARADIGM which analogizes terrorists to various supernatural villains.
Testing my options.

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