It would seem to me that the current, quite justified uproar about sexual violence in the US armed forces sheds a very bright light on the cognitive dissonance produced by America’s view of itself as a democratic, enlightened and inclusive society that serves as a model for the world to emulate, which contrasts with the reality of a worldwide empire which is maintained by the most powerful military establishment in history and that has been at war continuously for over ten years with no positive results.

Transforming the military’s entrenched culture of sexual violence will require new approaches and a much stronger effort than what the Pentagon has done so far. That is the depressing truth of a Defense Department study released on Tuesday estimating that about 26,000 people in the military were sexually assaulted in the 2012 fiscal year, up from about 19,000 in the same period a year before. Those who thought that the crisis could not get any worse have been proved wrong. As in other years, only a small fraction of assaults were reported — 3,374 in 2012 compared with 3,192 in 2011. The study, based on anonymous surveys, suggests that the great majority of sexual assault victims do not report the attacks for fear of retribution or lack of faith that the military will prosecute these crimes. Just two days before the report’s release, the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, was arrested in Arlington County, Va., and charged with sexual battery, compounding the sense that the military is incapable of addressing this crisis. Editorial – New York Times

I would suggest that the sexual violence should be viewed in the same context as the suicide epidemic in the US armed forces:

A 2009 U.S. Army report indicates military veterans have double the suicide rate of non-veterans, and more active-duty soldiers are dying from suicide than in combat in the Iraq War (2003-2011) and War in Afghanistan (2001–present). Colonel Carl Castro, director of military operational medical research for the Army noted “there needs to be a cultural shift in the military to get people to focus more on mental health and fitness. Wikipedia

An astonishing 6,500 former military personnel (…) killed themselves in 2012, roughly equivalent to one every 80 minutes.(…) Contrary to widely held assumptions, it is not the fear and the terror that service members endure in the battlefield that inflicts most psychological damage, Nash has concluded, but feelings of shame and guilt related to the moral injuries they suffer. The Guardian

What is our armed force’s job, what do they do?

Simply put, they kill people and blow things up.

What is the object of our armed forces killing people and blowing things up?

The object of war is to force an adversary by violence or threat of violence to do something they would otherwise not wish to do except to avoid that violence: in short to violently bend the will of the adversary to suit our interests.

Let us now look at a rough and ready definition of “rape”, from Wordnet:

1. rape, colza, Brassica napus — (Eurasian plant cultivated for its seed and as a forage crop)
2. rape, rapine — (the act of despoiling a country in warfare)
3. rape, violation, assault, ravishment — (the crime of forcing a woman to submit to sexual intercourse against her will)

I think, then, that without forcing the metaphor, you could say that the United States armed forces have, for example, “raped”, Iraq, Panama and Vietnam in recent memory (all for their own good of course).

Now, who are the soldiers?

For hundreds, for thousands, of years soldiers have been very young men, brimming with testosterone, horny as chimpanzees, taught to kill people and blow things up, who spend most of their time bored to death and short periods frightened to death, and often just plain dead.

General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said that “war is hell”.

Here is picture of what he meant.

This is a famous picture, but what is on view is nothing that extraordinary in the context of war, simply that latter-Afghanistan is the first war in history where soldiers carry cellphones with cameras that can upload pictures to Internet… imagine if somebody had had a cellphone at the My-Lai massacre.

Now use your imagination and try to visualize American women soldiers urinating on dead Taliban and you get an idea of how complicated it is to fit women into this culture… as much physically as anything else. Awkward to say the least. You would ask yourself why any woman in her right mind would want to be there and do that. To which a feminist could quite rightly ask in turn why any man in his right mind would want to either. Why indeed?

Which brings to one of the sorest points in the entire business: in the increasingly immobile American class structure, practically the only way a young person from a poor family can access to higher education or first class vocational training is to join the armed forces. In most developed countries all these things can be obtained for free without having to risk death or physical and mental mutilation.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

Mayday - Margaret Scott

“Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize…”

The first of May, commemorating bloody labor unrest in Chicago, is celebrated all over the world as the universal holiday of labor… except in the USA of course.

The same USA where “red”, the eternally universal color of the world’s left, is now, unlike the days of Joseph McCarthy, the color of the Tea Party driven, ultra-conservative, Republican party… Often America’s love of deceptive language and euphemism is beyond parody.

It’s no wonder then that many Americans are more than a little confused by now about what the left is actually about and have it confused with many worthy, but traversal, social issues.

In case anybody is interested, the left is really about worker’s rights and worker’s needs: everything else follows from that.

Most men and women in this world spend most of their lives working, if they can find work, and have little or nothing but their labor to exchange for the necessities of life, therefore: unemployment or bad working conditions + poor pay = a bad life for most people in the world. The left was born to change that equation.

Since the industrial revolution began, working men and women have joined together to force the owners of industry to give them better pay and working conditions, better schools for their children, affordable housing, medical care and pensions. Almost all betterment of working conditions, pay, pensions and all the rest come from that joining together and pressuring, often at the cost of blood. Little or none of it was ever given up gladly by those with the power to grant it.

This joining together and applying pressure is called “the Left”. This struggle for better conditions is really what separates the “Left” from the “Right”. Other things, however worthy, are mostly extraneous to this division.

For example: if you quizzed many wealthy followers of Ayn Rand or libertarians such as Rand Paul, I’m sure that you would find most of them either supportive or indifferent to gender and racial equality, to gay marriage and legalizing marijuana, but totally opposed to raising the minimum wage, regulating industries and the financial sector or raising the taxes of the one-percenters: and very much in favor of “right to work” laws.

One of the best encapsulations of  this confusion as to what the left is and what it is not was in a marvelous, near-poetic rant; one that touches all the main points in a few lines, posted by the blogger, Kurt Sperry the other day in Firedoglake under the title, “Dear Left, Enjoy Your Pot and Gay Marriage Because That’s All You’re Getting“.

The establishment right has pretty much come around to the position that you may get gay married or smoke some pot without government interference, but at the same time we’ll steal your retirement, move your job to China, see that the bank can illegally foreclose you out of your home, give all your tax money away to criminal fraudsters who by the way are also our largest campaign contributors, oh and you’ll be put under microscopic total government surveillance and imprisoned or even killed without trial if that’s what we really want in the new police state we’ve created because dark Muslims booga booga. Kurt Sperry – Firedoglake

Today labor unions are weak and much of the new economy appears difficult to organize and millions of jobs have gone overseas, to previously non-industrialized, non-union, rural areas. This movement actually had begun quite some time before the jobs finally left America.

Way back in the 1960s, the company my father worked for, a Philadelphia carpet manufacturer, moved most of their production from mills in Pennsylvania, buildings that had been in constant occupation for over a hundred years,  all the way down to north Georgia, to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

These “runaway factories” were looking for tax breaks and unskilled, rural workers, men and women without unions willing to work for much less than the union men and women of Pennsylvania. This was before the worldwide deregulation of globalization, which you might call the “Capitalist International” made moves farther afield possible or even imaginable.

That move to Georgia was a sample of the beginning of a process that has led from American north to the American south, later to Mexico and then to Asia.

The process is just beginning to give the first signs that it might finally be running out of planet.

An event occurred a little over a hundred years ago that was a key for the American left and America’s workers achieving many of the improvements in pay and working conditions that the right is doing its best to take away from them to this very day:

Read the rest of this entry →

The greatest singer of the Great American Song Book was born on the 25th of April 1917

With Count Basie

Gershwin by God

One Note Samba… Delirium

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

As the Spanish and British can attest since the Madrid and London attacks of 2004 and 2005, homegrown terrorism is tougher to anticipate than plots from outside. Edward Luce – Financial Times

The word “homegrown” is not really applicable to Islamic terrorism. Islam even in its most benign manifestations is always “homegrown”: a simple, universally applicable, multinational, text-based, hierarchy-less, easy to understand, ideology that governs every aspect of life.

When, finally the worldwide Muslim community or Uma, using the essential, cheap and ubiquitous, communication tools of the Internet comes to a simple consensus as to who their enemies are, and there exist simple devices like pressure cookers filled with black powder for expressing their anger, no hierarchy in the shadows is needed. We can expect many individual actions similar to 19th century anarchism to follow.

What Americans need to pray for is that the millions of alienated, American born, young, black, men, who overflow their prison system, do not turn to Islam to express their anger and sense of oppression.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

Federal investigators are hurrying to review a visit that one of the suspected bombers made to Chechnya and Dagestan, predominantly Muslim republics in the north Caucasus region of Russia. Both have active militant separatist movements. Members of Congress expressed concern about the F.B.I.’s handling of a request from Russia before the trip to examine the man’s possible links to extremist groups in the region. New York Times

It looks like this bombing was organized from Chechnya.

Why in Boston?

Because of their previous successes, planting a bomb in Moscow is very hard for the Chechens to pull off anymore and even if they are successful, killing dozens of Russians, as they often have before: that doesn’t even rate more than a line or two in the world press.

But set off a homemade Chechen bomb in the USA, where nobody is expecting it, one that only kills three people… and suddenly it will dominate the world media for many days on end, with exhaustive coverage, something which, in effect, puts Chechnya and the Chechen cause right back on the map.

Probably…  but it also could have been just as easily organized by Russian intelligence, who, tired of being ignored, used agents provocateurs posing as Chechen extremists to recruit Tamarlan Tsarnaev, who in turn recruited his little brother.

Why would Russian intelligence do something like that?

Because Chechen nationalism is a very big problem for the Russians, but hardly on America’s radar. Now instead of just being another tool for the Americans to potentially weaken Putin with, it has suddenly become a common enemy demanding intense cooperation with Putin. The Tsarnaev brothers would have been the last ones to know.

We will probably never know the truth either.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

I live in Madrid, Spain, and at this moment we are enjoying a (momentary?) respite from nearly 40 years of constant terrorist attacks, mostly by Basque separatists, with the one monumental attack by Al Qaeda in March 2004 with nearly 200 dead.

I remember once, many, many years ago, being in an office meeting and hearing through the open window a very close by,  “ratatatatat” followed by a “boom“, followed by the most total of silences, followed minutes later by sirens, which was the machine gun burst and grenade chaser that killed a Spanish admiral, the direct descendent of  Christopher Columbus and his chauffeur, a poor recruit.

The daughter of a friend of ours lost an eye in an Eta bomb attack… she was just passing by.

The only consolation I can give the people of Boston is that if it goes on long enough, you finally get used to it… almost.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

When I was a child, back in the 1950s, I spent many a summer in my grandmother’s tiny village about 1/2 hour’s drive from Hannibal Missouri on the Illinois side of the Big Muddy.

Neighbors would come into your house without knocking… they’d suddenly be there without any warning… there was no privacy and you had to be very careful what you were seen doing and what you said to anyone about anything… in no time at all all your doings and sayings would be all over town. The telephone was even a “party line”, so there was no privacy there either….

We seem to be recreating this scenario with the new technology.

Is this what Marshall McLuhan meant by the “Global Village”? … Complete with global “old wives”?

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

My private theory of Margaret Thatcher is not as kind as most of the opinions expressed in the media. Cutting to the chase. I believe that British industry (Britain “invented” industry and was once the “workshop of the world”) if properly reformed and restructured could have easily rivaled Germany’s and Japan’s; giving Britain a powerful and balanced economy. And I believe that this was not done because Thatcher’s primary objective in creating a financial and services economy was in fact to destroy the labor unions and that she did that not out of any rational calculation of the benefits that this would bring Britain, but rather out of the primitive, visceral, petit bourgeois, class hatred of a small shopkeeper’s daughter.

Whew… That’s better out than in.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

I began my journalistic endeavors by simply juxtaposing snippets from the press in an electronic collage, hoping that in the end result the total effect would be more than just the sum of the separate clippings. With the quotes below I return to my origins…

According to the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel, 87 percent of Holocaust survivors who request financial aid live on less than NIS 5,000 a month, while 58 percent live on NIS 3,000 or less. Meanwhile, 70 percent of survivors who turn to the foundation cannot afford dental care, and 18 percent need financial aid to pay for eyeglasses. Haaretz

One of every five Holocaust survivors said that he or she had skipped a meal at least once over the past year for financial reasons, and five percent of the survivors said they skipped meals often for that reason. One of every eight Holocaust survivors cited financial difficulty as the reason they had gone without medication at least once over the past year.(…)  Commemorations for Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Day, or Yom Hashoah Vehagvurah, will begin next Sunday night April 7. Haaretz

As soon as next year, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., could feature holograms of elderly Holocaust survivors that answer questions from visitors.(…) When the holograms are ready for the museum, each one will be accompanied by a voice-recognition program that researchers, led by the University of Southern California, are developing. The program will recognize what museum-goers ask and provide answers, a bit like Siri does on the iPhone, except that all the answers must come from the person the hologram represents.(…) For Holocaust survivors, whose estimated average age is 79, this may be taxing work.  So far, however, no one has declined to work with the project, the Associated Press reported.The technology team wants to preserve Holocaust survivors’ memories and experiences for future generations, hopefully long after the survivors are gone. Tech News Daily

There is little that I could add to the total effect of the above except to say that I am sure that for the price of one (maybe two?) Cruise missiles or the cost of one museum, every single Holocaust survivor in the world could be housed for the rest of their lives in five star hotels, with full board and a personal nurse in 7/24 attendance. In fact I think that the sufferings of a group of poor, old people, who have had the hardest of lives is being “pimped” by a very cynical clique of political manipulators in order to justify apartheid and ethnic cleansing and through them the tragedy of the Jewish people is being turned into Disneyland.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

Dennis Rodman has shown us the way!

Here is the secret: Kim Jong Un is secretly in love with the USA and all things American.

You’d really have to be madly in love with the idea of America to invite a freak like Dennis Rodman to your country and hang out with him … But the young dictator needs to be taught the ways of my people at first hand.

The poor people of North Korea are skinny and starving … This is NOT the American way!

In America, the poor people are fat and have diabetes. We must Americanize North Korea, not bomb them.

I don’t think North Korea should be “taken out,” that is a strategy that in the process might very well tip the entire world economy into depression. Quite the contrary, I think they should be “taken in,” they should be given more food than they can possibly eat, if possible containing lots of corn syrup.  Kim Jong Un should be invited to Hollywood, visit Disneyland, have his picture taken with Mickey Mouse, see a Laker’s game and eat a hamburger in the company of Barack Obama and Michael Jordan. Let him party with the cheerleaders — the works.

I’m perfectly serious. I really think that it might be that simple with this kid. My reading is that his grandfather fought the Japanese and created North Korea and started the Korean war, Kim Jong Un’s father lived all that and the consolidation of the regime as a young man. These were serious grown ups, but Kim Jong Un is probably a spoiled brat with no idea of anything, living in a dream world. Make his dreams come true!

So, cutting to the chase, my plan is to treat Kim and his people like our own: we idiotize the North Koreans with video games, Bruce Willis films and smartphones and wind up by giving them free dialysis for diabetes-2 related kidney failure induced from ingesting massive quantities of our junk food … then we’ve got them hooked … eating out of our hands so to speak … easy, like feeding super size Cokes to a baby.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com