Dec 8, 2012

Envoi


"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust.

You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded.
Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time.

They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today." --Lawrence M. Krauss


Nov 17, 2012

Arc of a diver, effortlessly...


“Arc of a diver, effortlessly... ”

Old age, said General de Gaulle, had nothing good to be said about it. The catalogue of disasters and humiliations waiting for you at the end of your rainbow arc across the light is even more detailed in the Bible: "When your are young you will gird your loins and go wherever you want, but when you are old another shall gird your loins and take you where you would not go." "Praise therefore your creator in the days of your youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when you will say 'I have no pleasure in them.'"

(Pretty grim, huh? What advice can we offer? Only that in the Ballad of John and Yoko, "Last night the wife said Oh boy when you're dead You don't take nothing with you but your soul."

Keep your soul in good shape, all else is shadows, and it's the only thing to go with you when you go, like a suitcase packed and ready.)


Not only do the old revert to being like babies in many ways, they also return to the animal nature and outlook of young babies. They become more sensitive to weather, to air, to other living beings in the largely unknown jungle around them. The whole process might be described as a multi colored rainbow over the light of the fire as we come out of the darkness, fly a short time across the light, and then plunge back into the darkness, with the first ten per cent and the last ten per cent of the rainbow being mirror images in reverse of each other.

The immediate question that arises in contemplating this spectacle of human existence is "Is there any point, any reason, any logic, any purpose, to this process? What's the point of the whole thing?" Well, for those like Buddhists who think the purpose of your existence (in the process of achieving, as the Lotus Sutra says, "To enjoy yourself at ease," which is why you were born) is exactly that the trials and tribulations and battles of this life are the purpose of your existence, they are what build your character, making you what you are, leading you on the path of Buddhahood. Enjoy it! say the Buddhists.

“In the "Ongi Kuden" (Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings), the Daishonin says, "One should regard meeting obstacles as true peace and comfort" (Gosho Zenshu, p. 750). You may wonder how encountering obstacles could be a source of peace and comfort. But the truth of the matter is that through struggling against and overcoming difficulties, we can transform our destiny and attain Buddhahood. Confronting adversity, therefore, represents peace and comfort.” (President Ikeda's Guidance for Aug 14.)

Indeed Buddhists tend to be much happier confronting adversity. (For those who think of Buddhists as wimpy tree huggers, remember all the martial arts were invented by Buddhist monks forbidden to carry weapons by the local warlords. The martial arts remain. The warlords are long forgotten. So it goes.)

“The German author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) writes that the more one matures, the younger one grows. And certainly there are many people who, as they age, become increasingly vigorous and energetic, more broad-minded and tolerant, living with a greater sense of freedom and assurance. It is important to remember that aging and growing old are not necessarily the same thing.” (President Ikeda’s Guidance.)

So when the body is shoveled back into the waiting arms of Mother Earth, the corpse of the enlightened one is somehow better quality cardboard than other corpses? Pretty much, yeah. ("Heads of the characters hammer through daisies, And Death shall have no dominion." Dylan Thomas.)

The Buddhist would consider this a triviality compared to what you got done, whether you dust your hands and say “Well, that was an interesting life,” at the end of it. What do you want? We come and we go. Do your best while you’re here.

The author of the words to "Amazing Grace" is established, but the melody was written by a guy who was the master of a slave ship to the Americas, and the source of the tune, the melody, is just stated to be "Unknown." The chances that he actually used the tunes from the Africans in the hold become overwhelming if you watch a really good black singer (think Harry Belafonte, Paul Robeson, Muddy Waters,) to sixty thousand black men of the Promise Keepers in a stadium and the entire audience humming and moaning the melody with the singer.

So the only question, the only area where anyone has any choice, is what you do with this body for the short time you’re driving it?. Correct. Try to do stuff that’s beneficial to your soul, and build up your psychic bank account.

The reference to the Bible in the first paragraph signaled “Christian.” The Koran would have signaled “Moslem.” Buddhists don’t really have a “Holy Book,” just scads of writings, and are more concerned with the people who are Buddhists, and what they achieve, than in holy books. Some Buddhists, usually gurus, or teachers, rather than ordinary folks, preserve, literally embalm the living body, by switching slowly to a diet consisting entirely of the bark of a certain tree, and their mummified bodies, usually in caves, are still being found and put on National Geographic TV documentaries. For what? I dunno. Sort of a memorial for the local people, to remind them of the teachings, and maybe reassure them that there are beneficent beings around, and they’re still there looking after them?

“Life is the fool of hope, till one last morning
Sweeps all our schemes away, without a warning.”

“The soul of the dead man comes next to the realm of the wrathful deities. If he fears them they will attack him and he must seek for rebirth. But if he knows the wrathful deities as coming from himself, they cannot harm him, and he may proceed peacefully on his way.”
Bardo of Rebirth, Tibetan Book of the Dead

Oct 27, 2012

Walpurgisnacht


Christmas Eve, the e’en of Christmas, is December 24. November 1 is All Saints Day, and according to an old German superstition, on the eve of All Saints Day, the powers of darkness, the headless horseman and others, are given one last chance to riot. This is Hallows eve, or Hallowe’en.

All Saints Day, All Hallows, is calm and peaceful. The night before, October 31, the dark hour before the dawn when the evil powers are allowed one last time of liberty, is Walpurgisnacht.


New Zealand Plate Stack cloud



World map













Jane’s Fighting Ships


The three inventions that drove the engine of the western industrial revolution, gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, and the movable type printing press, were all three Chinese inventions; we’ve been stealing ideas from them since the year dot!

(If you add that China now owns the wages and salaries of our yet to be born U.S. great grandchildren, and that the Chinese citizen has enjoyed a doubling of income every ten years over the last thirty years, that supplies the outcome of the financial attacks on China.)

Among the resources of the British Royal Navy is Jane’s Fighting Ships, a record of all the world’s military vessels, their tonnage, weapons carried, home port, current location, and so forth.

At approximately the same age as the USA, of about 236 years, Jane’s Fighting Ships has a record of accuracy not challenged by the US military, whose pronouncements too often, alas, are not very accurate.


The British yellow, i.e. popular, press has already had loads of harmless fun at the expense of the know-it-all Americans, over the last couple of years, with the Chinese capability for silent running, on their batteries, a capability not available to any US or NATO nation, allowing a submarine to surface ‘coincidentally’ inside the screen surrounding a fleet, with several capital ships clearly in their sights. The Chinese laugh it off as ‘coincidence.’

Some few months ago, dear me, over a year, a Chinese Song class submarine, arrived just off the coast of California close to Los Angeles. It fired one ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) of which it carries a dozen, back to a prepared site in Western China.

It does not require in depth military knowledge or experience to notice that the ICBMs could equally well reach New York or Tampa, FL.

Jane’s Fighting Ships kindly tracked the progress of the submarine from its home port to Los Angeles. Check their web site.

Meanwhile, the Pakistanis, who have a border with China, are less and less likely to take the side of the bombers of their womenfolk gathering sticks for firewood, [it does little to endear one] and much more likely to side with their powerful neighbor; that much seems obvious.

Water


At Antarctica, yes, the opposite pole from the Arctic, down past New Zealand, lies around twenty per cent, one fifth, of all the fresh water on earth, in the form of massive ice sheets. That’s quite a lot of fresh water, by anybody’s reckoning. The Antarctic ice sheet shows distinct signs of breaking up, however. Two massive chunks, each twice the size of Manhattan, broke off a few days ago, a week ago? And the experts (cough) are unanimous that the entire Antarctic ice sheet will disappear, i.e., melt, within a single year, though they are not willing to specify which year.

The news out of Durban, which was reported in this country as, "There is no news out of Durban," is that the Antarctic Ice Mass is due to come apart within the next few years, and change the sea level by 80-100 feet within a single year. Here are a few city elevations for comparison:

Washington, D.C., elev. 72'

New York City, elev. 26'

Boston, MA, elev. 13'

Miami, FL, elev. 7'

Houston, TX, elev. 52'

New Orleans, LA, elev. 3'



Shanghai, China, elev. 17'

Mumbai, India, elev. 33-49'

Bangkok, Thailand, elev. 7'

Singapore, elev. < 49'

Hong Kong, China, elev. sea level

Dubai, U.A.E., elev. 25'

Reassuring that Washington, DC will be around longer than any one else? All of Hong Kong goes under right away; that’ll save Mr. Xi Jinping a few problems!

('Don’t worry about the Sacred Mother. She is a living entity. She will take care of herself. She has but to shrug and things will be righted.')

The TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership.)


The Trans Pacific Partnership has been developed in secret by the Obama administration over the last two years; the secrecy was necessary, explained one spokesman, because the plan openly differs from the declared aims of the Obama administration.

Briefly the plan invites countries to join the scheme, which will openly hand control of every country’s economy to the corporations, who will be able to impose huge fines on countries that put them to the unnecessary trouble of dealing with anti pollution regulations, for example.

‘Ah, a form of world government,’ someone says. Well, not really, because the rights of individual sovereign countries, to write legislation controlling, or preventing, air or water pollution, for example, will no longer exist.

(The USA may of course have claimed exemption from the strict implementation of the TPP; who knows? But as it stands the USA has no more right than any other – previously sovereign – country from making any regulation the corporations decide against, the true masters of everything, it turns out, at least in the imaginings of their own hearts. There will be no appeal. )

Now the claims of terrorist penetration emanating from Washington have become steadily more ludicrous, almost all FBI ‘sting’ operations, but at the same time the demands that this claptrap is accepted and implemented ASAP have become steadily more menacing, and are now in the terminal ‘Agree or we’ll kill you’ stage.

See ‘Right to kill anyone, anywhere’ below:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/02-10

Published on Tuesday, October 2, 2012 by Common Dreams Judge: Obama Administration Can Indefinitely Detain Anyone

Stay issued on Tuesday afternoon deals blow to civil liberties - Common Dreams staff

On Tuesday afternoon an appeals court stopped an order blocking indefinite detention, siding with the Obama administration's right to indefinitely detain terror suspects.

First, in its memorandum of law in support of its motion, the government clarifies unequivocally that, 'based on their stated activities,' plaintiffs, 'journalists and activists[,] . . . are in no danger whatsoever of ever being captured and detained by the U.S. military.'

Second, on its face, the statute does not affect the existing rights of United States citizens or other individuals arrested in the United States. See NDAA § 1021(e) ('Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.').

Third, the language of the district court's injunction appears to go beyond NDAA § 1021 itself and to limit the government's authority under the Authorization for Use of Military Force...

Last month U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest declared the law unconstitutional, giving what Chris Hedges, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, described as "an unqualified victory for the public."

But the victory was short lived. The Hill notes that "the Obama administration responded with an emergency motion to stay the injunction, arguing that the court ruling 'threatens tangible and dangerous consequences in the conduct of an active military conflict.'"

The ruling today extends that temporary stay.

Note: A claim (French pretendre, to claim) is not the same as established ownership; anyone can claim anything. Under President Bush, the USA claimed ‘ownership of space,’ including one assumes the moon and stars, indeed the entire universe.

Smoking Helps Protect Against Lung Cancer by Joe Vialls


Every year, thousands of medical doctors and other members of the "Anti-Smoking Inquisition" spend billions of dollars perpetuating what has unquestionably become the most misleading though successful social engineering scam in history. With the encouragement of most western governments, these Orwellian lobbyists pursue smokers with a fanatical zeal that completely overshadows the ridiculous American alcohol prohibition debacle, which started in 1919 and lasted until 1933.

Nowadays we look back on American prohibition with justifiable astonishment.

Is it really true that an entire nation allowed itself to be denied a beer or scotch by a tiny group of tambourine-bashing fanatics? Sadly, yes it is, despite a total lack of evidence that alcohol causes serious harm to humans, unless consumed in truly large quantities. Alas, the safety of alcohol was of no interest to the tambourine-bashers, for whom control over others was the one and only true goal. Americans were visibly “sinning” by enjoying themselves having a few alcoholic drinks, and the puritans interceded on behalf of God to make them all feel miserable again.

Although there is no direct link between alcohol and tobacco, the history of American prohibition is important, because it helps us understand how a tiny number of zealots managed to control the behavior and lives of tens of millions of people.

Nowadays exactly the same thing is happening to smokers, though this time it is at the hands of government zealots and ignorant medical practitioners rather than tambourine-bashing religious fanatics.

Certain governments know that their past actions are directly responsible for causing most of the lung and skin cancers in the world today, so they go to extreme lengths in trying to deflect responsibility and thus financial liability away from themselves, and onto harmless organic tobacco instead.

As we will find later in this report, humble organic tobacco has never hurt anyone, and in certain ways can justifiably claim to provide startling health protection.

Not all governments around the world share the same problem.

Japan and Greece have the highest numbers of adult cigarette smokers in the world, but the lowest incidence of lung cancer.

In direct contrast to this, America, Australia, Russia, and some South Pacific island groups have the lowest numbers of adult cigarette smokers in the world, but the highest incidence of lung cancer.

This is clue number-one in unraveling the absurd but entrenched western medical lie that "smoking causes lung cancer".

The first European contact with tobacco was in 1492, when Columbus and fellow explorer Rodriguo de Jerez saw natives smoking in Cuba. That very same day, de Jerez took his first puff and found it very relaxing, just as the locals had assured him it would be. This was an important occasion, because Rodriguo de Jerez discovered what the Cubans and native Americans had known for many centuries: that cigar and cigarette smoking is not only relaxing, it also cures coughs and other minor ailments.

When he returned home, Rodriguo de Jerez proudly lit a cigar in the street, and was promptly arrested and imprisoned for three years by the horrified Spanish Inquisition. De Jerez thus became the first victim of the anti-smoking lobbies. In less than a century, smoking became a much enjoyed and accepted social habit throughout Europe, with thousands of tons of tobacco being imported from the colonies to meet the increasing demand. A growing number of writers praised tobacco as a universal remedy for mankind’s ills.

By the early 20th Century almost one in every two people smoked, but the incidence of lung cancer remained so low that it was almost not-measurable.

Then something extraordinary happened on July 16, 1945: a terrifying cataclysmic event that would eventually cause western governments to distort the perception of smoking forever.

As K. Greisen recalls:

"When the intensity of the light had diminished, I put away the glass and looked toward the tower directly. At about this time I noticed a blue color surrounding the smoke cloud. Then someone shouted that we should observe the shock wave traveling along the ground. The appearance of this was a brightly lighted circular area, near the ground, slowly spreading out towards us. The color was yellow.

The permanence of the smoke cloud was one thing that surprised me.

After the first rapid explosion, the lower part of the cloud seemed to assume a fixed shape and to remain hanging motionless in the air. The upper part meanwhile continued to rise, so that after a few minutes it was at least five miles high. It slowly assumed a zigzag shape because of the changing wind velocity at different altitudes. The smoke had pierced a cloud early in its ascent, and seemed to be completely unaffected by the cloud. "

This was the notorious "Trinity Test", the first dirty nuclear weapon to be detonated in the atmosphere.

A six-kilogram sphere of plutonium, compressed to super criticality by explosive lenses, Trinity exploded over New Mexico with a force equal to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT.

Within seconds, billions of deadly radioactive particles were sucked into the atmosphere to an altitude of six miles, where high-speed jet streams could circulate them far and wide. The American Government knew about the radiation in advance, was well aware of its lethal effects on humans, but bluntly ordered the test with a complete disregard for health and welfare.

In law, this was culpable gross negligence, but the American Government did not care.

Sooner or later, one way or the other, they would find another culprit for any long-term effects suffered by Americans and other citizens in local and more remote areas.

Get this:

If a single microscopic radioactive fallout particle lands on your skin at the beach, you get skin cancer.

Inhale a single particle of the same lethal muck, and death from lung cancer becomes inevitable, unless you happen to be an exceptionally lucky cigarette smoker.

The solid microscopic radioactive particle buries itself deep in the lung tissue, completely overwhelms the body’s limited reserves of vitamin B17, and causes rampant uncontrollable cell multiplication.

How can we be absolutely sure that radioactive fallout particles really cause lung cancer every time a subject is internally exposed?

For real scientists, as opposed to medical quacks and government propagandists, this is not a problem. For any theory to be accepted scientifically, it must first be proven in accordance with rigorous requirements universally agreed by scientists.

First the suspect radioactive agent must be isolated, then used in properly controlled laboratory experiments to produce the claimed result, i.e. lung cancer in mammals. Scientists have ruthlessly sacrificed tens of thousands of mice and rats in this way over the years, deliberately subjecting their lungs to radioactive matter. The documented scientific results of these various experiments are identical. Every mouse or rat obediently contracts lung cancer, and every mouse or rat then dies.

Theory has thus been converted to hard scientific fact under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. The suspect agent (radioactive matter) caused the claimed result (lung cancer) when inhaled by mammals.

The overall magnitude of lung cancer risk to humans from atmospheric radioactive fallout cannot be overstated.

Before Russia, Britain and America outlawed atmospheric testing on August 5, 1963, more than 4,200 kilograms of plutonium had been discharged into the atmosphere.

Because we know that less than one microgram (millionth of a single gram) of inhaled plutonium causes terminal lung cancer in a human, we therefore know that your friendly government has lofted 4,200,000,000 (4.2 Billion) lethal doses into the atmosphere, with particle radioactive half-life a minimum of 50,000 years.

Frightening?

Unfortunately it gets worse. The plutonium mentioned above exists in the actual nuclear weapon before detonation, but by far the greatest number of deadly radioactive particles are those derived from common dirt or sand sucked up from the ground, and irradiated while travelling vertically through the weapon’s fireball.

These particles form by far the largest part of the "smoke" in any photo of an atmospheric nuclear detonation. In most cases several tons of material are sucked up and permanently irradiated in transit, but let us be incredibly conservative and claim that only 1,000 kilograms of surface material is sucked up by each individual atmospheric nuclear test. Before being banned by Russia, Britain, and America, a total of 711 atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted, thereby creating 711,000 kilograms of deadly microscopic radioactive particles, to which must be added the original 4,200 kilograms from the weapons themselves, for a gross though very conservative total of 715,200 kilograms.

There are more than a million lethal doses per kilogram, meaning that your governments have contaminated your atmosphere with more than 715,000,000,000 [715 Billion] such doses, enough to cause lung or skin cancer 117 times in every man, woman and child on earth. Before you ask, no, the radioactive particles do not just "fade away", at least not in your lifetime or that of your children and grandchildren.

With a half-life of 50,000 years or longer, these countless trillions of deadly government-manufactured radioactive particles are essentially with you forever.

Circulated around the world by powerful jet streams, these particles are deposited at random, though in higher concentrations within a couple of thousand miles of the original test sites. A simple wind or other surface disturbance is all that is needed to stir them up again and create enhanced dangers for those in the vicinity. The once-innocent activity of playfully kicking sand around on the beach in summer could nowadays easily translate to suicide, if you happen to stir up a few radioactive particles that could stick to your skin or be inhaled into your lungs.

Stop poking fun at Michael Jackson when he appears at your local airport wearing a surgical mask over his nose and mouth. He may look eccentric, but Michael will almost certainly outlive most of us. Twelve years after the cataclysmic Trinity test, it became obvious to western governments that things were getting completely out of control, with a 1957 British Medical Research Council report stating that global "deaths from lung cancer have more than doubled during the period 1945 to 1955", though no explanation was offered.

During the same ten-year period, cancer deaths in the immediate proximity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up threefold.

By the end of official atmospheric testing in 1963, the incidence of lung cancer in the Pacific Islands had increased fivefold since 1945.

Having screwed your environment completely for 50,000 years, it was time for "big government" to start taking heavy diversionary action. How could people be proved to be causing themselves to contract lung cancer, i.e. be said to be guilty of a self inflicted injury for which government could never be blamed or sued?

The only obvious substance that people inhaled into their lungs, apart from air, was tobacco smoke, so the government boot was put in. Poorly qualified medical "researchers" suddenly found themselves overwhelmed with massive government grants all aimed at achieving the same end-result: "Prove that smoking causes lung cancer".

Real scientists (especially some notable nuclear physicists) smiled grimly at the early pathetic efforts of the fledgling anti-smoking lobby, and lured them into the deadliest trap of all.

The quasi-medical researchers were invited to prove their false claims under exactly the same rigid scientific rules that were used when proving that radioactive particles cause lung cancer in mammals. Remember, for any theory to be accepted scientifically, it must first be proven in accordance with rigorous requirements universally agreed by scientists.

First the suspect agent (tobacco smoke) must be isolated, and then used in properly controlled laboratory experiments to produce the claimed result, i.e. lung cancer in mammals. Despite exposing literally tens of thousands of especially vulnerable mice and rats to the equivalent of 200 cigarettes per day for years on end, "medical science" has never once managed to induce lung cancer in any mouse or rat.

Yes, you did read that correctly.

For more than forty years, hundreds of thousands of medical doctors have been deliberately lying to you. The real scientists had the quasi medical researchers by the throat, because "pairing" the deadly radioactive particle experiment with the benign tobacco smoke experiment, proved conclusively for all time that smoking cannot under any circumstances cause lung cancer.

And further, in one large "accidental" experiment they were never allowed to publish, the real scientists proved with startling clarity that smoking actually helps to protect against lung cancer. All mice and rats are used one-time-only in a specific experiment, and then destroyed. In this way researchers ensure that the results of whatever substance they are testing cannot be accidentally "contaminated" by the real or imagined effects of another substance.

Then one day as if by magic, a few thousand mice from the smoking experiment "accidentally" found their way into the radioactive particle experiment, which in the past had killed every single one of its unfortunate test subjects. But this time, completely against the odds, sixty percent of the smoking mice survived exposure to the radioactive particles.

The only variable was their prior exposure to copious quantities of tobacco smoke.

'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Vishnu, Bhagavad-Gita

Government pressure was immediately brought to bear and the facts suppressed, but this did not completely silence the real scientists.

Tongue in cheek perhaps, Professor Schrauzer, President of the International Association of Bio-Inorganic Chemists, testified before a U.S. congressional committee in 1982 that it had long been well known to scientists that certain constituents of tobacco smoke act as anti-carcinogens (anti-cancer agents) in test animals.

He continued that when known carcinogens (cancer causing substances) are applied to the animals, the application of constituents of cigarette smoke counter them.

Nor did Professor Schrauzer stop there. He further testified on oath to the committee that "no ingredient of cigarette smoke has been shown to cause human lung cancer", adding that "no-one has been able to produce lung cancer in laboratory animals from smoking."

It was a neat answer to a rather perplexing problem. If government blocks publication of your scientific paper, take the alternate route and put the essential facts on the written congressional record! Predictably, this hard truth drove the government and quasi medical "researchers" into a frenzy of rage. By 1982 they had actually started to believe their own ridiculous propaganda, and were not to be silenced by eminent members of the scientific establishment.

Quite suddenly they switched the blame to other "secret" ingredients put into cigarettes by the tobacco companies. "Yes, that must be it!" they clamored eagerly, until a handful of scientists got on the phone and pointed out that these same "secret" ingredients had been included in the mice experiments, and had therefore also been proved incapable of causing lung cancer.

Things were looking desperate for government and the medical community overall.

Since the anti-smoking funding had started in the early sixties, tens of thousands of medical doctors had passed through medical school, where they had been taught that smoking causes lung cancer.

Most believed the lie, but cracks were starting to appear in the paintwork. Even the dullest of straight "C" doctors could not really make the data correlate, and when they queried it were told not to ask stupid questions.

"Smoking causes lung cancer" converted to a creed, a quasi religious belief mechanism where blind faith became a substitute for proof. Even blind faith needs a system of positive reinforcement, which in this case became the advertising agencies and the media.

Suddenly the television screens were flooded with images of terribly blackened "smoker’s lungs", with the accompanying mantra that you will die in horrible agony if you don’t quit now.

It was all pathetic rubbish of course.

On the mortuary slab the lungs of a smoker and non-smoker look an identical pink, and the only way a forensic pathologist can tell you might have been a smoker, is if he finds heavy stains of nicotine on your fingers, a packet of Camels or Marlboro in your coat pocket, or if one of your relatives unwisely admits on the record that you once smoked the demon weed.

The black lungs?

From a coal miner, who throughout his working life breathed in copious quantities of microscopic black coal dust particles.

Just like radioactive particles they get caught deep in the tissue of the lungs and stay there forever.

If you worked down the coal mines for twenty or more years without a face mask, your lungs will probably look like this on the slab.

Many people ask exactly how it is that those smoking mice were protected from deadly radioactive particles, and even more are asking why real figures nowadays are showing far more non-smokers dying from lung cancer than smokers.

Professor Sterling of the Simon Fraser University in Canada is perhaps closest to the truth, where he uses research papers to reason that smoking promotes the formation of a thin mucous layer in the lungs, "which forms a protective layer stopping any cancer-carrying particles from entering the lung tissue." This is probably as close as we can get to the truth at present, and it does make perfect scientific sense.

Deadly radioactive particles inhaled by a smoker would initially be trapped by the mucous layer, and then be ejected from the body before they could enter the tissue. All of this may be a bit depressing for non-smokers, but there are probably one or two things you can do to minimize the risks as far as possible.

Rather than shy away from smokers in your local pub or club, get as close as you can and breathe in their expensive second-hand smoke.

Go on, don’t be shy, suck in a few giant breaths. Or perhaps you could smoke one cigarette or small cigar after each meal, just three a day to build up a thin boundary mucous layer."

More research info:

Yale Research on lung cancer:

"...A similar result was obtained by Feinstein, in a study conducted at the Yale University School of Medicine, and published in September, 1986, in the Archives of Internal Medicine 26 . Researchers at Yale obtained records on 3,286 adults who had died between 1971 and 1982. 153 of these patients were found, upon autopsy, to have died of lung cancer. The researchers then went back and obtained the death certificates for these 153 patients and attempted to obtain information about their smoking habits. For 13 patients, adequate smoking information was not available, so they were thrown out of the survey. The researchers reported, however, that out of these 13 patients, seven had been correctly diagnosed as having lung cancer during life, but 6 had not.

Working with the remaining 140 cases, it turned out that there were 37 "surprise" cases of lung cancer, i.e., cases which had not been correctly diagnosed during life. 57% of these cases involved non-smokers; 30% involved moderate smokers; but only 16% involved heavy smokers. The researchers concluded that there was a detection bias; that doctors were very ready to diagnose lung cancer in a smoker; very reluctant to make the diagnosis in a non-smoker."

I know, these above not to be all documented and referenced facts as you and I would like to see. But there is enough information above to make your brain "look" at reality, at least for the time being, in a different way.

Dismissing every non-standard view of reality is antiquated as burning Giordano Bruno or Galileo as they ventured to differ in their views of how things really were.

So, the goal here, is not to uncover a conspiracy against us by world governments, but to question and challenge the assumed view we have on this reality issue from a radically different angle.

Exercising your brain and questioning your sacred and deepest mental views on reality, is always healthy. The more so, if you are trying to understand, anticipate and possibly change the future to come.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/02-10


Published on Tuesday, October 2, 2012 by Common Dreams Judge: Obama Administration Can Indefinitely Detain Anyone

Stay issued on Tuesday afternoon deals blow to civil liberties - Common Dreams staff

On Tuesday afternoon an appeals court stopped an order blocking indefinite detention, siding with the Obama adminstration's right to indefinitely detain terror suspects.

First, in its memorandum of law in support of its motion, the government clarifies unequivocally that, 'based on their stated activities,' plaintiffs, 'journalists and activists[,] . . . are in no danger whatsoever of ever being captured and detained by the U.S. military.'

Second, on its face, the statute does not affect the existing rights of United States citizens or other individuals arrested in the United States. See NDAA § 1021(e) ('Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.').

Third, the language of the district court's injunction appears to go beyond NDAA § 1021 itself and to limit the government's authority under the Authorization for Use of Military Force...

Last month U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest declared the law unconstitutional, giving what Chris Hedges, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, described as "an unqualified victory for the public."

But the victory was short lived. The Hill notes that "the Obama administration responded with an emergency motion to stay the injunction, arguing that the court ruling 'threatens tangible and dangerous consequences in the conduct of an active military conflict.'"

The ruling today extends that temporary stay.


There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost 60 years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”




This too will pass












Jul 28, 2012

Abolishing war

http://my.firedoglake.com/davidswanson/2012/07/14/abolishing-war-one-last-step/

Abolishing War: One Last Step By: David Swanson Saturday July 14, 2012 7:30 pm Remarks delivered at Peacestock 2012

I want to thank Bill Habedank for inviting me here and everyone who’s been involved in setting up this wonderful event, which ought to be replicated all over this country. Almost our entire population claims to favor peace. At least three quarters of us favor getting the U.S. military out of Afghanistan and ending that particular war, which by the way isn’t ending. When carefully surveyed and shown what the federal budget is, a large majority of U.S. residents favors cutting huge amounts of money out of the military and putting it to better use.

But those doing anything about peace as part of a peace movement are a tiny fraction of a percent of the country. I have been lucky enough to see some of my cousins from this part of the country on this trip, and one of them referred to me as her famous cousin who speaks at events and writes books. There are others here much more famous than I within our little movement. But I’m willing to bet at least 99% of the country has never heard of any of us. Maybe the wonderful Coleen Rowley who made it onto the cover of Time Magazine. Maybe a few others.

Thank you also to Veterans For Peace for being the best peace organization I know of, and to its president Leah Bolger for being here. Leah and I and some others here were occupying Washington, D.C., last fall, and I’ve just now finally had criminal charges that were brought against me for speaking in a public hearing in the U.S. Senate dropped this week, just in time to hang out with the good people of Peacestock, which brings a certain risk of arrest in itself. Raise your hand if you’re an undercover law enforcement officer.

That’s all right. But please pay attention, because I’m going to be talking about some laws that are going unenforced. When I say our movement is small, I don’t mean it’s entirely without influence. And it was much bigger back in 2005 and 2006, when those who oppose wars had, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us, those who oppose Republican wars. There is a big gap, however, between those who oppose all wars, and those who oppose particular wars, be it for partisan or other reasons. President Obama used to oppose dumb wars. We came to find out he favors imbecilic wars, because there are more syllables involved. The thing is, people who oppose particular wars don’t usually put as much energy into it as people who oppose all war. Perhaps they’re hoping that a bad war will evolve into a good war, perhaps by escalating it, perhaps by electing a different president — or maybe they just have other priorities.

The title for my remarks today is “Abolishing War: One Last Step.” I’m willing to bet that even we in the peace movement are fairly unaware of some of the previous steps. In St. Paul, Minnesota, there’s a house listed as a National Historic Landmark because Frank Kellogg lived there. There’s also a Kellogg Boulevard in St. Paul. But Kellogg’s grave is in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Frank Kellogg had a long career, but there is one thing he did, and only one thing he did that made his house historic, named a boulevard for him, and put his ashes in the National Cathedral. I’m willing to bet most people living near St. Paul don’t have the slightest idea what it was. Do you? Raise your hand if you know. And please don’t say he invented corn flakes.

Well, this is not a typical crowd. All the children are above average here. And yet, some of us don’t know.

Frank Kellogg was a pudgy, five-foot-six, Republican lawyer with a glass eye and hands that shook. He was not one to turn down a drink, prohibition or no prohibition, and he was best known for his fiery temper and the use of language that the FCC would not have tolerated. Kellogg was 70 years old in 1927. He’d been a trust buster. He’d been president of the American Bar Association. He’d been a U.S. senator from the great state of Minnesota. He’d voted in favor of entering World War I and against the League of Nations, but in support of pulling U.S. troops out of Russia.

Come 1927, when Kellogg was 70 years old, he was the U.S. Secretary of State. During his tenure, the U.S. Marines went into Panama, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and Kellogg threatened Mexico with war in the interest of U.S. corporations. Kellogg lacked any big following of supporters among the people or the elites. H.L. Mencken called him –quote — a “doddering political hack from the cow country.” I apologize to all the cows around here. Kellogg himself had unkind words for others. In 1927, he called the French a bunch of bleep bleep fools. But Kellogg added that those he hated most were the bleepity bleep bleep pacifists.

In 1928, Kellogg worked night and day to do exactly what the pacifists told him to do. He brought most of the powerful nations of the world together and created a treaty banning all use of war. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, known as the Kellogg-Briand pact. (The vote was 85-1, with the 1 being a senator from Wisconsin who apparently wanted a stronger treaty, but who was censured by the Wisconsin legislature for his vote.) Briand was the French foreign minister, with whom Kellogg had worked on the treaty.

Frank Kellogg was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Briand already had one. This was in the pre-World War II days when the Nobel Committee still paid some attention to the requirements of Alfred Nobel’s will, including that recipients of the prize have worked for the abolition or reduction of standing armies. Quick, can you name the last Nobel Peace Prize recipient who had worked to abolish standing armies? I think there have only been a handful in recent years who would have even stood for the idea, even in theory, much less have worked to advance it in reality.

Most groups, clubs, projects, etc., that promote peace today propose finding peace in our hearts. I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s remark: I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. Well, I don’t want to achieve peace through my heart. I want to achieve peace through ending war and abolishing armies.

Left to his own devices, Frank Kellogg would have had nothing to do with peace. But in 1927 there was a major peace movement in this country, united around an idea pushed by a Chicago lawyer named Salmon Oliver Levinson. The movement was called the Outlawry Movement, and the goal was to outlaw war. As slavery and blood feuds and dueling had been abolished, so would war be. And the first step would be stigmatizing war as no longer legal. Remember, war was not against the law. Nobody was prosecuted for World War I or any other war, because war making was not a crime. Particular atrocities could be crimes, but not war itself. Levinson opposed what we might call anachronistically the NATO model of banning war, in which the primary tool for preventing war is, of course, war. There were isolationist strains in the U.S. peace movement after the disaster of World War I that echo in some of today’s libertarians. Agreeing with various allies to all go to war if one of them went to war was not a recipe for peace. The Outlawrists’ plan was to make war illegal, to establish written international law and courts for settling international disputes, and to move world culture beyond acceptance of war.

Duelling had been done away with, said Levinson, and not just aggressive duelling. We didn’t keep defensive duelling around. We set the whole barbaric procedure behind us. Thus must it be with war. The Outlawrists did not distinguish good or just wars from bad or unjust wars, any more than we distinguish just cases of rape, good uses of slavery, or humanitarian cases of genocide. War was the most evil thing created, and arranging to end war by means of war left everyone preparing for more war. So, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced all war.

There’s a song from 1950 — maybe we can sing it later — that begins “Last night I had the strangest dream I’d ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room, and the room was filled with men….” That scene had actually happened on August 27, 1928, with the signing of the Peace Pact. It was probably the biggest news story that year. This is not secret CIA history I’m describing. Raise your hand if you’re with the CIA. Well, thank you for coming anyway. No, this is forgotten history, intentionally buried history. Frank Goetz, who may be here, and others are pushing to have August 27th made a holiday.

After the Pact was signed, nations stopped recognizing claims of war, gains of territory made through war. Wars were prevented and halted. The world turned against the horror of war, at least war among wealthy nations. Colonizing poor nations was still very much acceptable. And when World War II happened, Roosevelt directed that the Kellogg Briand Pact be used to prosecute the Germans and the Japanese for the brand new crime of making war. And they were thus prosecuted. And the rich nations never went to war with each other again, at least not yet. Europe, amazingly, finally stopped attacking itself. But the common interpretation became the bizarre notion that Kellogg-Briand had been erased by its failure to prevent World War II. Imagine setting up a legal ban on anything else, and then tossing it into the trash the first time it was violated, and while simultaneously enforcing it. I suppose the Ten Commandments, by that logic, must have been erased by being violated quite some time back now. After World War II the Peace Pact was twisted to prosecute aggressive war, rather than simply war, and it was imposed as victor’s justice. But the Kellogg-Briand Pact, as written, remained on the books, as it remains on the U.S. State Department’s website. Ssh. Don’t tell Hillary.

This week Ralph Nader published a list of 11 books that he thinks everyone should read, and one of them was my book “When the World Outlawed War,” which tells this story. It’s probably the shortest on the list, too, so you can read it tonight and only have 10 books left to go.

World War II was the worst event that has occurred on planet earth, but trends away from war and violence observable in recent centuries continued. New institutions and cultural habits reinforced this. But legally, the U.N. Charter took a step back from Kellogg-Briand by sanctioning wars if they are defensive or U.N.-approved. An example of a defensive war would be the 2003 attack on the impoverished unarmed nation of Iraq thousands of miles from our shores. An example of a UN-approved war would be the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of its government. The UN had authorized a cease-fire, and NATO decided that was the same thing as authorizing bombing of the capital until the president was killed. In other words, the two loopholes opened up by the UN Charter have permitted unlimited warmaking and erased from our culture the idea that war is a crime.

The Geneva Conventions played their part as well, by establishing the idea that wars could be legal if conducted in a particular manner. The Conventions of 1949 look absurd today, as they distinguish participants in war from civilians. Wars today are not fought on distant battlefields, but in inhabited towns. Should those who fight back really lose legal protection? The Conventions do outline permissible conduct for occupying armies, but they require that the occupiers care for the occupied population much better than our governments care for their own populations back home. Of course, nobody takes seriously the idea of complying with this. Governments are permitted to kill huge numbers of civilians, but the killing has to be an accidental, even though foreseeable, byproduct of an effort to kill even bigger numbers of non-civilians or to accomplish some other military objective, such as gaining control over the civilians and non-civilians alike, should they manage to remain alive. Under this rigorous legal standard, José Luis Moreno Ocampo, prosecutor for the ICC — or what I like to call the ICCA, the International Criminal Court for Africans — found the U.S. slaughter of Iraqis to be legal, regardless of the fact that the United Nations had found the invasion of Iraq itself, the greater purpose at stake, to be illegal. The Catholic Church no longer sells indulgences, I suspect because it just can’t compete with the United Nations.

And if the Geneva Conventions weren’t bad enough, we created the CIA and NATO. While the world has turned against war, the United States has created a war-based economy with huge permanent standing armies standing in our own and most other countries around the globe. We’ve empowered a military industrial complex beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmares. In the 1920s war could be blamed on Europe. Now opposing war is almost treasonous. We’ve given presidents such powers that the Declaration of Independence would have to be three times as long if we were to attempt a new overthrow of tyranny. We’ve legalized election bribery, concentrated almost all our wealth in a very few hands, and in most cases swallowed whole the obvious lie that activism can have no impact. We face collapse of representative government, of civil liberties, of our natural environment, of our culture. We face nuclear apocalypse, weapons proliferation, and a vicious cycle of countering terrorism with precisely the policies that produce terrorism.

Last fall I helped organize a conference of experts on various areas of damage being done by the military industrial complex, resulting in the book, “The Military Industrial Complex at 50.” We concluded that this monster, guarded by patriotism, McCarthyism, and financial corruption, is the number one opponent of most campaigns for things decent and good, certainly of campaigns against poverty, for education, against homelessness, for civil rights, against environmental destruction, for peace and prosperity. It’s not a coincidence that the United States spends several times the next approaching country on the military while trailing a great many countries in measures of education, health, security, and happiness. If every movement that should rightfully be targeting the military industrial complex were to do so, it would fall. We would convert, retrain, retool, and prosper. But it’s difficult for narrow interests to act on the big picture. Why should the ACLU oppose the military funding that produces the drone strikes and torture cells, when it can oppose the drone strikes and torture cells indefinitely? Why should the Sierra Club oppose the single largest consumer of oil when it can oppose institutions completely lacking flags and hero-worship?

When we tried to impeach or prosecute Bush or Cheney, well, two things. First, one of the best activists we had was Daniel Fearn who is now doing poorly in a hospital in Minneapolis. I bet a bunch of you know him. I hope you’ll visit him. Can we all applaud the great work that Daniel Fearn did?

Second, when we tried to impeach Bush and Cheney, we were often told we hated those men or acted on partisan interests, and I always replied that if Bush was not punished for his crimes, the next president would do worse. It wouldn’t matter whether the next president was black or white, male or female, Republican or Democratic. It would only matter whether power still corrupted and whether absolute power still corrupted absolutely. As it turns out, nothing has happened to change that rule. The illicit abuses of Bush are now open and official policy. We’re spied on without warrants and can be locked up without charges, tortured without consequences, and sent to war without Congress. Our president keeps a list of nominees for being murdered. It includes Americans and non-Americans, children and adults. He works his way down the list. He says it costs him not a moment’s worry. He jokes about it to the White House Press Corpse, and they laugh it up. And we run around like chickens with our heads cut off and our souls ripped out registering voters for him because we don’t want to risk having a racist put in charge of our national program of murdering dark skinned Muslims. Even while peace activists have their homes raided by the FBI. Sometimes when we speak out we’re told that we must be in the pay of the Mitt Romney campaign. The irony of the you’re-trying-to-help-Romney-win response to criticism of our current government is that if Romney does win then the people using that line will themselves start objecting to presidential abuses, but it will be too late.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is bigger than ever, in more nations than ever, more privatized than ever, more profitable than ever, more secretive than ever, more at odds with more of the world than ever, and more recklessly than we’ve seen in decades antagonizing both Russia and China for no good reason whatsoever. I don’t consider the fact that Russian fossil fuels with which to destroy our atmosphere will become more readily available as our destroyed atmosphere melts the ice a good reason. Nor do I consider the fact that China owns our grandchildren’s unearned wages a good reason. We just discovered how large a part the U.S. is playing in destroying the nation of Mali when three U.S. Special Forces troops drove off a bridge, killing themselves and three prostitutes. Have you ever wondered what makes special forces special? The only thing I can see that makes them special is that someone whispers in their ears: “You don’t have to obey any laws.” But that’s becoming less and less special in Washington these days.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was just over in Laos helping to expand the U.S. Asian presence, but — as Fred Branfman pointed out — not seriously attempting to pick up the 80 million cluster bombs the U.S. left in Laos where they continue to kill and maim. Clinton opposes signing the Cluster Bomb Treaty, even though 111 countries have signed it, and cluster bombs serve very little humanitarian purpose, unless you count blowing the legs off children as humanitarian.

Alliant Tech Systems, which as moved to Virginia but is also still here in Minnesota, makes money off cluster bombs. It could make that money off something decent if it chose.

Clinton met a young man in Laos whose hand she couldn’t shake. Phongsavath Souliyalat lost both his hands and his eyesight when a friend handed him a cluster bomb on his 16th birthday while walking home from school. These bombs have killed 20,000 farmers and their children since the bombing ended in 1973. Clinton is lobbying other nations against the treaty banning cluster bombs. The United States has used cluster bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and as recently as June 7, 2010, when we used them to kill 35 women and children in Yemen. A journalist reported on that horror, and Obama ordered the president of Yemen to lock him up, calling into question why Obama doesn’t order other people in Yemen locked up rather than killing them and whoever’s too close to them with missiles.

In Laos this week Clinton said, “We have to do more. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here today, so that we can tell more people about the work that we should be doing together.” But she’s not investing a fraction in bomb clean up of what she’s putting into a new embassy in Laos. The lesson of 1927 is that what she does next was not determined by the genes she was born with. Clinton could be Kissinger or she could be Kellogg, depending on what we do. Kellogg, after all, would never have been Kellogg if peace activists hadn’t forced him to.

We have a harder task today, I admit. We’re up against the military industrial complex, and we’re up against the idea of humanitarian war.

Humanitarian war makes as much sense as a benevolent hurricane or a charitable looting. Humanitarian war is based on the following premises:

1. There are evil things happening in the world.

2. We can do nothing or we can bomb people. There are no other options.

The conclusion, of course, is that we must bomb people. But the second premise is faulty. Nonviolent assaults on tyranny are far more successful and long-lasting than violent ones. Even more effective is refraining from funding and empowering the tyrants for decades prior to switching sides, or what is called “intervening.” Turning to violence amounts to deciding that the times have gotten tough and we must therefore resort to a less effective tool much less likely to succeed. That many want to do so suggests other motivations, some of them not very flattering. The same is suggested by blatant inconsistency. In Bahrain we send over our top cops to lead the skull-cracking. In Syria we aid murderous terrorists and child soldiers in the name of human rights, working with such models of democracy as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. By “we” I mean, of course, the regime in Washington. Governments are beyond reproach, and regimes can be overthrown, so we should probably call them all regimes. Washington is quite open about wanting to overthrow the Syrian government or regime because of its ties to the Iranian government or regime. It is much less forthcoming, however, about how doing so would work out any better than Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Cambodia, South Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Philippines, and so on.

That wars must be marketed as humanitarian is a sign of progress. That we fall for it is a sign of embarrassing weakness. The war propagandist is the world’s second oldest profession, and the humanitarian lie is not entirely new. But it works in concert with other common war lies, some of which used to be more dominant. I tried to collect them all in my book “War Is A Lie.” A few major themes are:

First, that only war will address the incredible evil of the chosen enemy, almost always an enemy made more evil by racism and other forms or bigotry and distancing.

Second, that war is a form of defense, even if we provoked the enemy’s attack, even if the enemy hasn’t attacked, even if the enemy is incapable of attacking, even if the enemy hasn’t yet thought to develop the capacity to attack. We’re one step ahead, that’s how smart we are.

Third, that war is a generous sacrifice, the noblest deed imaginable, something so beautiful it ought to be multiplied a thousand fold, and so we only go to war as an absolute last resort in order to benefit the evil dark people who need to be wiped off the face of the earth.

It doesn’t matter if the reasons for war conflict. It doesn’t matter if they change through the course of a war. If an individual believes that the war makers mean well — these being the same politicians that nobody would trust as far as they could throw them on any other topic, and if he believes that warriors are heroes who must be cheered for no matter what they do, and if he takes some vicarious pleasure in the primitive notion that lashing out makes him safe, then it doesn’t much matter what the pretense is. Let some back war as philanthropy and others as enlightened genocide, as long as enough of them back it or tolerate it, it will get started. And once started, it must be continued for the sake of the soldiers doing most of the killing and a little bit of the dying.

In Afghanistan, the top killer of U.S. troops is suicide. Continuing a war so that our troops will not have been killing themselves in vain brings a new level of blindness to the question of what types of destructive madness are simply and unavoidably in vain. Of course, U.S. troops are in Afghanistan to spread democracy, while the vast majority of U.S. residents oppose keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the casus belli has been assassinated and given a proper Muslim sea burial, according to our president, who occasionally brags about such killings while refusing to officially say whether they exist. He has said, however, that we’re leaving Afghanistan, and the primary way in which we’re leaving is, oddly enough, by staying, at least for the next two and a half years, after which we’re staying in an unspecified smaller way for another 10 years. Then we’ll see.

Will the third poorest nation in the world be able to keep fighting off our loving embrace, night raids, and drone strikes for 12.5 more years? It will if we keep paying for it. Imagine how many of that last 25 percent of Americans would turn against this war if they knew they were paying for both sides of it while their schools and fire stations and ecosystems collapse. A report by the congressional Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Rep. John Tierney, found that $360 million per year was being handed over by the Pentagon to insurgent groups or their warlord front men for the safe passage of truck convoys carrying US military supplies, from one trucking contract alone. We’re paying for permission to drive down roads without being shot at. What a war! Imagine if the British had thought of that in 1776. Maybe we could still be colonies.

We don’t need to abandon Afghans, or Libyans, or Syrians, or for that matter Bahrainis or Saudis. But effective financial aid and reparations would support nonviolence and independence. As Ralph Lopez has been pointing out, there are good examples of humanitarian programs in Afghanistan that could be built on. Most foreign aid, however, is a scam, with 40 to 50 percent never reaching Afghanistan. Aid profiteers rival war profiteers in their greed, while 60 percent of Afghan children are in various stages of starvation and 23 froze to death last winter outside Kabul. And half the so-called aid money has gone to training soldiers and police. I remember the late Richard Holbrooke telling Congress that civilian operations in Afghanistan were subordinate to the military. That dooms them to failure, and Afghans to suffering.

I went to Afghanistan last year with Kathy Kelly and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. I met there a man named Hakim who has organized a group called Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. Last week I heard from Kathy that he wanted to visit the United States but had been denied a visa. So, Voices and Global Exchange and Fellowship of Reconciliation and the group I work for RootsAction.org flooded the State Department with emails and calls. And they reversed their decision and gave Hakim a visa. He’ll be here soon. Sometimes our voice is loud enough. Other times it’s just one tiny little whisper short and we imagine it’s nowhere close.

Our voice was loud in 2005 and 2006. It was loud enough to prevent an attack on Iran in 2007. We’ve been helping to hold off an attack on Iran for years, since our 1953 overthrow of its government and our aid to Iraq in killing Iranians in the 1980s. Now we hear that Iran may have nuclear weapons, or nuclear weapons facilities, or nuclear weapons program capabilities, and Iran was behind 9-11, and Iran is criminally threatening to put up a fight if attacked again, plus Iran hired a Mexican drug gang to assassinate a Saudi ambassador in D.C. and then called it off just to make us look bad for catching them. There’s no limit to the Iranians’ evil, which is why we should take an action that the war proponents themselves say would fail on its own terms. Bombing Iran would do no more than the murderous sanctions already in place or the assassinations of scientists already committed to overthrow the government. And for the U.S. to allow Israel to attack Iran would only fool people in a single nation: ours. Iran would strike back at U.S. troops, and it would be a U.S. war by day two.

War is not just reserved for poor nations now, but it has — in other ways — changed almost beyond recognition. Mostly the elderly and children die in wars now, mostly civilians. The wars happen where they live. Almost entirely non-Americans die in U.S. wars. Sometimes the U.S. warriors are seated in air-conditioned offices in the United States. Drones are better than armies, someone told me recently, because with drones nobody gets killed. Imagine the terror produced by the buzzing of a drone over your house night and day, able to take your life and the lives of your loved ones at any moment. But don’t bother to protest. You’re nobody. You’re not listed in the war casualty reports in U.S. newspapers. When drones kill, nobody dies, and you — you 95 percent of humanity — you are nobody. Harold Koh says that bombing houses is neither a war nor hostilities, under the War Powers Act. Unless Americans are under the bombs, they are not hostile bombs. Perhaps they are friendly bombs, or bombs that are good for people whether they know it or not.

The military now wants to give medals to drone pilots. I picture them as bronzed joy sticks. I actually think there’s something unfair about this idea. I think our brave drones themselves should be getting the medals. They show the absolute least hesitation to kill. Or what about the ants fighting in my back yard? They sacrifice their lives and abandon their comrades with complete efficiency. If we’re handing out medals for desk jobs, what about the guys who pay the protection fees on Afghan roads? Or the guy who catches Petraeus when he faints in Congressional hearings? Why should some people get medals and others not? “War will exist,” wrote John F. Kennedy, “until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.” Therefore, I say, scrap all the medals except for those who refuse to fight.

The key, I think, to getting to that distant day when resisters are honored and warriors are not, is that we stop justifying or ignoring mass-murder. The deaths of 95 percent of the victims of our wars are the most closely guarded secret. The deaths of so-called civilians, of those not understood to be fighting back in defense of their homes, of those not male or fighting age. (Fighting-age males are posthumously declared combatants whenever our government kills them). This is the most forbidden information, because it brings down the war machine. The war machine depends for its existence on being something other than murder on a larger scale, even as it strives to reduce itself to exactly murder on a recognizable scale. Our sacred troops are the war machine’s best defense, since whatever they do must be brave and therefore good. And yet some of those troops are the gravest threat, not only because they can refuse to fight, or can speak out in opposition, but because some of them persist in producing videos and photos of themselves posing with, mutilating, and urinating on the bodies of people they kill.

And then we’re told to be outraged by the urination. But when you get outraged that someone has peed on the body of a man they just murdered, what does that convey about your attitude toward the murder itself? Surely most of us would object more to being killed than to being peed on after we’re dead.

The forbidden thought is that all killing is regrettable, immoral, and criminal. This is the thought of which Lockheed Martin, David Petraeus, General Electric, Buck McKeon, and your neighbors are frightened.

It’s all right to call a war a failure and the failure a SNAFU and incompetence the order of the day. The military money machine can generate even more money out of that. It could have done better with another trillion or two to spend.

It’s all right to point out the injustice, hypocrisy, and shame in our society’s treatment of veterans after they’ve served their war-making purpose. People can devote their time and energy to bake sales for veterans’ needs. That only furthers the acceptance of war in many minds, while a few are awakened. And the Pentagon can shift to fighting its wars with robots.

It’s all right to point out the economic trade-offs at stake, the standard of living we could have if we gave up some bombers and some billionaires. I make this point all the time. A few will understand, but the military industrial complex will counter by calling itself a jobs program and threatening congress members with unemployment in their districts.

What is not all right is finding out that our wars are one-sided slaughters of helpless families, and that over a million Iraqis lie dead in a devastated society where the first question any mother asks in areas poisoned by our weapons is “Is it normal?”

Veterans For Peace put out a statement last week in response to a United Nations communication to the U.S. government expressing concerns about our country’s treatment of children in war. Included were concerns about the recruitment of children into the U.S. military, the U.S. killing of children in Afghanistan, the U.S. detention and torture of children labeled “combatants,” and the provision of weapons by the United States to other nations employing child soldiers. I suspect it is the senseless killing of children abroad that will ultimately sway the most minds, but recruitment — or at least the cost of it — if an issue that is gaining traction.

Congresswoman Betty McCollum of Minnesota has won bipartisan support and passed through the Armed Services Committee a measure blocking the military from spending $80 million on sponsoring NASCAR drivers. We have a campaign at RootsAction.org to keep that measure in the bill. The U.S. Army says a third of its recruits come from motorsports sponsorships. Recruitment stations at racetracks help. But how does the Army measure the impact on our culture of sponsoring race cars? Dale Earnhardt, Jr., whom the National Guard has paid $136 million over the past five years to put a National Guard sticker on his race car and wear the logo on his uniform, predictably opposes cutting the funding, as do the biggest recipients of weapons money in Congress, none of whom have agreed to plaster their bodies with the logos of their sponsors. Military race cars have been featured in music videos, movies, and the shelves of toy stores. How can something so pervasive be measured? Well, we do know this: the total cost of advertising and recruitment per recruit is so much that we could have taken that money and simply given that young person and a bunch of his friends jobs doing something productive.

Those of us over on the left tend to think of cuts as bad and spending as good. For libertarians, cuts are good and spending is bad. This conveniently erases from the discussion the question of WHAT cuts and WHICH spending. We need to stop shouting “Jobs Not Cuts” and start shouting “Jobs Not Wars.” The U.S. military is so well funded, that it could be cut by half, remain far and away the best funded military in the world, and fund with those cuts every program any progressive group has ever dared to dream of for clean energy, education, housing, etc., and quite a few programs nobody has yet dared to dream. Or we on the left could make a deal with libertarians: we work together. We cut a half trillion out of the Pentagon — and I mean each year, not “over 10 years” as they like to say — and we put a quarter trillion into tax cuts and a quarter trillion into useful spending.

A massive urgent program, or what people unthinkingly like to call “a war,” is needed right now to prevent catastrophic climate change. Another is needed to rid the world of nuclear weapons and power. Another is needed to pull government out of the hands of plutocracy. And these aren’t movements aimed at making life a little bit better. Jeremy Brecher wrote recently of the need for a human preservation movement. This is what we need, a survival movement, part of which will be the full abolition of war.

The Occupy movement is a good start at bringing important issues together. But of course we need to carry with us into the occupy movement the distinctly minority understanding that war can and must be completely eliminated. We can learn from the Outlawry movement. It was moral, educational, non-electoral, and long-term with no expectation of succeeding even in a generation, and no trigger to collapse into despair if it didn’t.

We need to recognize that war is not in our genes. It’s a relatively new creation, sporadically present and absent in various societies, avoided when we choose and not otherwise. It’s not created by mystical forces of history or population or resource shortages or testosterone. It’s created by a culture’s tolerance for it, or tolerance for an unrepresentative government that engages in it. That’s our situation. War is a creation of the 1 percent that recruits members of the 99 percent to support it, as well as to do the dirty parts. War and the weapons barons and the oil oligarchs and the Wall Street banksters and the corporate media and the big business lobbies and the crowd of court jesters and sycophants in Washington who claim to be our government: they look more powerful than they are. They’re afraid of their own shadows. Six years ago they were secretly telling each other to end the wars before we gained more strength. Instead we switched parties and went home, while they breathed a sigh of relief. Yet, now, again they are scared of everything we do. They’re spying on every word, comprehending little. What they understand is resistance. Frank Kellogg never understood the Outlawry of War, but he didn’t have to. He just had to do what the people demanded. There are more of us in any small town than there are of them in the whole country. We need to realize our strength.

“And these words shall then become,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley,
“Like Oppression’s thundered doom
“Ringing through each heart and brain,
“Heard again – again – again -
“Rise like Lions after slumber
“In unvanquishable number -
“Shake your chains to earth like dew
“Which in sleep had fallen on you -
“Ye are many – they are few.”


Abolishing war


http://my.firedoglake.com/davidswanson/2012/07/14/abolishing-war-one-last-step/

Abolishing War: One Last Step By: David Swanson Saturday July 14, 2012 7:30 pm Remarks delivered at Peacestock 2012

I want to thank Bill Habedank for inviting me here and everyone who’s been involved in setting up this wonderful event, which ought to be replicated all over this country. Almost our entire population claims to favor peace. At least three quarters of us favor getting the U.S. military out of Afghanistan and ending that particular war, which by the way isn’t ending. When carefully surveyed and shown what the federal budget is, a large majority of U.S. residents favors cutting huge amounts of money out of the military and putting it to better use.

But those doing anything about peace as part of a peace movement are a tiny fraction of a percent of the country. I have been lucky enough to see some of my cousins from this part of the country on this trip, and one of them referred to me as her famous cousin who speaks at events and writes books. There are others here much more famous than I within our little movement. But I’m willing to bet at least 99% of the country has never heard of any of us. Maybe the wonderful Coleen Rowley who made it onto the cover of Time Magazine. Maybe a few others.

Thank you also to Veterans For Peace for being the best peace organization I know of, and to its president Leah Bolger for being here. Leah and I and some others here were occupying Washington, D.C., last fall, and I’ve just now finally had criminal charges that were brought against me for speaking in a public hearing in the U.S. Senate dropped this week, just in time to hang out with the good people of Peacestock, which brings a certain risk of arrest in itself. Raise your hand if you’re an undercover law enforcement officer.

That’s all right. But please pay attention, because I’m going to be talking about some laws that are going unenforced. When I say our movement is small, I don’t mean it’s entirely without influence. And it was much bigger back in 2005 and 2006, when those who oppose wars had, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us, those who oppose Republican wars. There is a big gap, however, between those who oppose all wars, and those who oppose particular wars, be it for partisan or other reasons. President Obama used to oppose dumb wars. We came to find out he favors imbecilic wars, because there are more syllables involved. The thing is, people who oppose particular wars don’t usually put as much energy into it as people who oppose all war. Perhaps they’re hoping that a bad war will evolve into a good war, perhaps by escalating it, perhaps by electing a different president — or maybe they just have other priorities.

The title for my remarks today is “Abolishing War: One Last Step.” I’m willing to bet that even we in the peace movement are fairly unaware of some of the previous steps. In St. Paul, Minnesota, there’s a house listed as a National Historic Landmark because Frank Kellogg lived there. There’s also a Kellogg Boulevard in St. Paul. But Kellogg’s grave is in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Frank Kellogg had a long career, but there is one thing he did, and only one thing he did that made his house historic, named a boulevard for him, and put his ashes in the National Cathedral. I’m willing to bet most people living near St. Paul don’t have the slightest idea what it was. Do you? Raise your hand if you know. And please don’t say he invented corn flakes.

Well, this is not a typical crowd. All the children are above average here. And yet, some of us don’t know.

Frank Kellogg was a pudgy, five-foot-six, Republican lawyer with a glass eye and hands that shook. He was not one to turn down a drink, prohibition or no prohibition, and he was best known for his fiery temper and the use of language that the FCC would not have tolerated. Kellogg was 70 years old in 1927. He’d been a trust buster. He’d been president of the American Bar Association. He’d been a U.S. senator from the great state of Minnesota. He’d voted in favor of entering World War I and against the League of Nations, but in support of pulling U.S. troops out of Russia.

Come 1927, when Kellogg was 70 years old, he was the U.S. Secretary of State. During his tenure, the U.S. Marines went into Panama, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and Kellogg threatened Mexico with war in the interest of U.S. corporations. Kellogg lacked any big following of supporters among the people or the elites. H.L. Mencken called him –quote — a “doddering political hack from the cow country.” I apologize to all the cows around here. Kellogg himself had unkind words for others. In 1927, he called the French a bunch of bleep bleep fools. But Kellogg added that those he hated most were the bleepity bleep bleep pacifists.

In 1928, Kellogg worked night and day to do exactly what the pacifists told him to do. He brought most of the powerful nations of the world together and created a treaty banning all use of war. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, known as the Kellogg-Briand pact. (The vote was 85-1, with the 1 being a senator from Wisconsin who apparently wanted a stronger treaty, but who was censured by the Wisconsin legislature for his vote.) Briand was the French foreign minister, with whom Kellogg had worked on the treaty.

Frank Kellogg was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Briand already had one. This was in the pre-World War II days when the Nobel Committee still paid some attention to the requirements of Alfred Nobel’s will, including that recipients of the prize have worked for the abolition or reduction of standing armies. Quick, can you name the last Nobel Peace Prize recipient who had worked to abolish standing armies? I think there have only been a handful in recent years who would have even stood for the idea, even in theory, much less have worked to advance it in reality.

Most groups, clubs, projects, etc., that promote peace today propose finding peace in our hearts. I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s remark: I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. Well, I don’t want to achieve peace through my heart. I want to achieve peace through ending war and abolishing armies.

Left to his own devices, Frank Kellogg would have had nothing to do with peace. But in 1927 there was a major peace movement in this country, united around an idea pushed by a Chicago lawyer named Salmon Oliver Levinson. The movement was called the Outlawry Movement, and the goal was to outlaw war. As slavery and blood feuds and dueling had been abolished, so would war be. And the first step would be stigmatizing war as no longer legal. Remember, war was not against the law. Nobody was prosecuted for World War I or any other war, because war making was not a crime. Particular atrocities could be crimes, but not war itself. Levinson opposed what we might call anachronistically the NATO model of banning war, in which the primary tool for preventing war is, of course, war. There were isolationist strains in the U.S. peace movement after the disaster of World War I that echo in some of today’s libertarians. Agreeing with various allies to all go to war if one of them went to war was not a recipe for peace. The Outlawrists’ plan was to make war illegal, to establish written international law and courts for settling international disputes, and to move world culture beyond acceptance of war.

Duelling had been done away with, said Levinson, and not just aggressive duelling. We didn’t keep defensive duelling around. We set the whole barbaric procedure behind us. Thus must it be with war. The Outlawrists did not distinguish good or just wars from bad or unjust wars, any more than we distinguish just cases of rape, good uses of slavery, or humanitarian cases of genocide. War was the most evil thing created, and arranging to end war by means of war left everyone preparing for more war. So, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced all war.

There’s a song from 1950 — maybe we can sing it later — that begins “Last night I had the strangest dream I’d ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room, and the room was filled with men….” That scene had actually happened on August 27, 1928, with the signing of the Peace Pact. It was probably the biggest news story that year. This is not secret CIA history I’m describing. Raise your hand if you’re with the CIA. Well, thank you for coming anyway. No, this is forgotten history, intentionally buried history. Frank Goetz, who may be here, and others are pushing to have August 27th made a holiday.

After the Pact was signed, nations stopped recognizing claims of war, gains of territory made through war. Wars were prevented and halted. The world turned against the horror of war, at least war among wealthy nations. Colonizing poor nations was still very much acceptable. And when World War II happened, Roosevelt directed that the Kellogg Briand Pact be used to prosecute the Germans and the Japanese for the brand new crime of making war. And they were thus prosecuted. And the rich nations never went to war with each other again, at least not yet. Europe, amazingly, finally stopped attacking itself. But the common interpretation became the bizarre notion that Kellogg-Briand had been erased by its failure to prevent World War II. Imagine setting up a legal ban on anything else, and then tossing it into the trash the first time it was violated, and while simultaneously enforcing it. I suppose the Ten Commandments, by that logic, must have been erased by being violated quite some time back now. After World War II the Peace Pact was twisted to prosecute aggressive war, rather than simply war, and it was imposed as victor’s justice. But the Kellogg-Briand Pact, as written, remained on the books, as it remains on the U.S. State Department’s website. Ssh. Don’t tell Hillary.

This week Ralph Nader published a list of 11 books that he thinks everyone should read, and one of them was my book “When the World Outlawed War,” which tells this story. It’s probably the shortest on the list, too, so you can read it tonight and only have 10 books left to go.

World War II was the worst event that has occurred on planet earth, but trends away from war and violence observable in recent centuries continued. New institutions and cultural habits reinforced this. But legally, the U.N. Charter took a step back from Kellogg-Briand by sanctioning wars if they are defensive or U.N.-approved. An example of a defensive war would be the 2003 attack on the impoverished unarmed nation of Iraq thousands of miles from our shores. An example of a UN-approved war would be the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of its government. The UN had authorized a cease-fire, and NATO decided that was the same thing as authorizing bombing of the capital until the president was killed. In other words, the two loopholes opened up by the UN Charter have permitted unlimited warmaking and erased from our culture the idea that war is a crime.

The Geneva Conventions played their part as well, by establishing the idea that wars could be legal if conducted in a particular manner. The Conventions of 1949 look absurd today, as they distinguish participants in war from civilians. Wars today are not fought on distant battlefields, but in inhabited towns. Should those who fight back really lose legal protection? The Conventions do outline permissible conduct for occupying armies, but they require that the occupiers care for the occupied population much better than our governments care for their own populations back home. Of course, nobody takes seriously the idea of complying with this. Governments are permitted to kill huge numbers of civilians, but the killing has to be an accidental, even though foreseeable, byproduct of an effort to kill even bigger numbers of non-civilians or to accomplish some other military objective, such as gaining control over the civilians and non-civilians alike, should they manage to remain alive. Under this rigorous legal standard, José Luis Moreno Ocampo, prosecutor for the ICC — or what I like to call the ICCA, the International Criminal Court for Africans — found the U.S. slaughter of Iraqis to be legal, regardless of the fact that the United Nations had found the invasion of Iraq itself, the greater purpose at stake, to be illegal. The Catholic Church no longer sells indulgences, I suspect because it just can’t compete with the United Nations.

And if the Geneva Conventions weren’t bad enough, we created the CIA and NATO. While the world has turned against war, the United States has created a war-based economy with huge permanent standing armies standing in our own and most other countries around the globe. We’ve empowered a military industrial complex beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmares. In the 1920s war could be blamed on Europe. Now opposing war is almost treasonous. We’ve given presidents such powers that the Declaration of Independence would have to be three times as long if we were to attempt a new overthrow of tyranny. We’ve legalized election bribery, concentrated almost all our wealth in a very few hands, and in most cases swallowed whole the obvious lie that activism can have no impact. We face collapse of representative government, of civil liberties, of our natural environment, of our culture. We face nuclear apocalypse, weapons proliferation, and a vicious cycle of countering terrorism with precisely the policies that produce terrorism.

Last fall I helped organize a conference of experts on various areas of damage being done by the military industrial complex, resulting in the book, “The Military Industrial Complex at 50.” We concluded that this monster, guarded by patriotism, McCarthyism, and financial corruption, is the number one opponent of most campaigns for things decent and good, certainly of campaigns against poverty, for education, against homelessness, for civil rights, against environmental destruction, for peace and prosperity. It’s not a coincidence that the United States spends several times the next approaching country on the military while trailing a great many countries in measures of education, health, security, and happiness. If every movement that should rightfully be targeting the military industrial complex were to do so, it would fall. We would convert, retrain, retool, and prosper. But it’s difficult for narrow interests to act on the big picture. Why should the ACLU oppose the military funding that produces the drone strikes and torture cells, when it can oppose the drone strikes and torture cells indefinitely? Why should the Sierra Club oppose the single largest consumer of oil when it can oppose institutions completely lacking flags and hero-worship?

When we tried to impeach or prosecute Bush or Cheney, well, two things. First, one of the best activists we had was Daniel Fearn who is now doing poorly in a hospital in Minneapolis. I bet a bunch of you know him. I hope you’ll visit him. Can we all applaud the great work that Daniel Fearn did?

Second, when we tried to impeach Bush and Cheney, we were often told we hated those men or acted on partisan interests, and I always replied that if Bush was not punished for his crimes, the next president would do worse. It wouldn’t matter whether the next president was black or white, male or female, Republican or Democratic. It would only matter whether power still corrupted and whether absolute power still corrupted absolutely. As it turns out, nothing has happened to change that rule. The illicit abuses of Bush are now open and official policy. We’re spied on without warrants and can be locked up without charges, tortured without consequences, and sent to war without Congress. Our president keeps a list of nominees for being murdered. It includes Americans and non-Americans, children and adults. He works his way down the list. He says it costs him not a moment’s worry. He jokes about it to the White House Press Corpse, and they laugh it up. And we run around like chickens with our heads cut off and our souls ripped out registering voters for him because we don’t want to risk having a racist put in charge of our national program of murdering dark skinned Muslims. Even while peace activists have their homes raided by the FBI. Sometimes when we speak out we’re told that we must be in the pay of the Mitt Romney campaign. The irony of the you’re-trying-to-help-Romney-win response to criticism of our current government is that if Romney does win then the people using that line will themselves start objecting to presidential abuses, but it will be too late.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is bigger than ever, in more nations than ever, more privatized than ever, more profitable than ever, more secretive than ever, more at odds with more of the world than ever, and more recklessly than we’ve seen in decades antagonizing both Russia and China for no good reason whatsoever. I don’t consider the fact that Russian fossil fuels with which to destroy our atmosphere will become more readily available as our destroyed atmosphere melts the ice a good reason. Nor do I consider the fact that China owns our grandchildren’s unearned wages a good reason. We just discovered how large a part the U.S. is playing in destroying the nation of Mali when three U.S. Special Forces troops drove off a bridge, killing themselves and three prostitutes. Have you ever wondered what makes special forces special? The only thing I can see that makes them special is that someone whispers in their ears: “You don’t have to obey any laws.” But that’s becoming less and less special in Washington these days.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was just over in Laos helping to expand the U.S. Asian presence, but — as Fred Branfman pointed out — not seriously attempting to pick up the 80 million cluster bombs the U.S. left in Laos where they continue to kill and maim. Clinton opposes signing the Cluster Bomb Treaty, even though 111 countries have signed it, and cluster bombs serve very little humanitarian purpose, unless you count blowing the legs off children as humanitarian.

Alliant Tech Systems, which has moved to Virginia but is also still here in Minnesota, makes money off cluster bombs. It could make that money off something decent if it chose.

Clinton met a young man in Laos whose hand she couldn’t shake. Phongsavath Souliyalat lost both his hands and his eyesight when a friend handed him a cluster bomb on his 16th birthday while walking home from school. These bombs have killed 20,000 farmers and their children since the bombing ended in 1973. Clinton is lobbying other nations against the treaty banning cluster bombs. The United States has used cluster bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and as recently as June 7, 2010, when we used them to kill 35 women and children in Yemen. A journalist reported on that horror, and Obama ordered the president of Yemen to lock him up, calling into question why Obama doesn’t order other people in Yemen locked up rather than killing them and whoever’s too close to them with missiles.

In Laos this week Clinton said, “We have to do more. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here today, so that we can tell more people about the work that we should be doing together.” But she’s not investing a fraction in bomb clean up of what she’s putting into a new embassy in Laos. The lesson of 1927 is that what she does next was not determined by the genes she was born with. Clinton could be Kissinger or she could be Kellogg, depending on what we do. Kellogg, after all, would never have been Kellogg if peace activists hadn’t forced him to.

We have a harder task today, I admit. We’re up against the military industrial complex, and we’re up against the idea of humanitarian war.

Humanitarian war makes as much sense as a benevolent hurricane or a charitable looting. Humanitarian war is based on the following premises:

1. There are evil things happening in the world.

2. We can do nothing or we can bomb people. There are no other options.

The conclusion, of course, is that we must bomb people. But the second premise is faulty. Nonviolent assaults on tyranny are far more successful and long-lasting than violent ones. Even more effective is refraining from funding and empowering the tyrants for decades prior to switching sides, or what is called “intervening.” Turning to violence amounts to deciding that the times have gotten tough and we must therefore resort to a less effective tool much less likely to succeed. That many want to do so suggests other motivations, some of them not very flattering. The same is suggested by blatant inconsistency. In Bahrain we send over our top cops to lead the skull-cracking. In Syria we aid murderous terrorists and child soldiers in the name of human rights, working with such models of democracy as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. By “we” I mean, of course, the regime in Washington. Governments are beyond reproach, and regimes can be overthrown, so we should probably call them all regimes. Washington is quite open about wanting to overthrow the Syrian government or regime because of its ties to the Iranian government or regime. It is much less forthcoming, however, about how doing so would work out any better than Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Cambodia, South Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Philippines, and so on.

That wars must be marketed as humanitarian is a sign of progress. That we fall for it is a sign of embarrassing weakness. The war propagandist is the world’s second oldest profession, and the humanitarian lie is not entirely new. But it works in concert with other common war lies, some of which used to be more dominant. I tried to collect them all in my book “War Is A Lie.” A few major themes are:

First, that only war will address the incredible evil of the chosen enemy, almost always an enemy made more evil by racism and other forms or bigotry and distancing.

Second, that war is a form of defense, even if we provoked the enemy’s attack, even if the enemy hasn’t attacked, even if the enemy is incapable of attacking, even if the enemy hasn’t yet thought to develop the capacity to attack. We’re one step ahead, that’s how smart we are.

Third, that war is a generous sacrifice, the noblest deed imaginable, something so beautiful it ought to be multiplied a thousand fold, and so we only go to war as an absolute last resort in order to benefit the evil dark people who need to be wiped off the face of the earth.

It doesn’t matter if the reasons for war conflict. It doesn’t matter if they change through the course of a war. If an individual believes that the war makers mean well — these being the same politicians that nobody would trust as far as they could throw them on any other topic, and if he believes that warriors are heroes who must be cheered for no matter what they do, and if he takes some vicarious pleasure in the primitive notion that lashing out makes him safe, then it doesn’t much matter what the pretense is. Let some back war as philanthropy and others as enlightened genocide, as long as enough of them back it or tolerate it, it will get started. And once started, it must be continued for the sake of the soldiers doing most of the killing and a little bit of the dying.

In Afghanistan, the top killer of U.S. troops is suicide. Continuing a war so that our troops will not have been killing themselves in vain brings a new level of blindness to the question of what types of destructive madness are simply and unavoidably in vain. Of course, U.S. troops are in Afghanistan to spread democracy, while the vast majority of U.S. residents oppose keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the casus belli has been assassinated and given a proper Muslim sea burial, according to our president, who occasionally brags about such killings while refusing to officially say whether they exist. He has said, however, that we’re leaving Afghanistan, and the primary way in which we’re leaving is, oddly enough, by staying, at least for the next two and a half years, after which we’re staying in an unspecified smaller way for another 10 years. Then we’ll see.

Will the third poorest nation in the world be able to keep fighting off our loving embrace, night raids, and drone strikes for 12.5 more years? It will if we keep paying for it. Imagine how many of that last 25 percent of Americans would turn against this war if they knew they were paying for both sides of it while their schools and fire stations and ecosystems collapse. A report by the congressional Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Rep. John Tierney, found that $360 million per year was being handed over by the Pentagon to insurgent groups or their warlord front men for the safe passage of truck convoys carrying US military supplies, from one trucking contract alone. We’re paying for permission to drive down roads without being shot at. What a war! Imagine if the British had thought of that in 1776. Maybe we could still be colonies.

We don’t need to abandon Afghans, or Libyans, or Syrians, or for that matter Bahrainis or Saudis. But effective financial aid and reparations would support nonviolence and independence. As Ralph Lopez has been pointing out, there are good examples of humanitarian programs in Afghanistan that could be built on. Most foreign aid, however, is a scam, with 40 to 50 percent never reaching Afghanistan. Aid profiteers rival war profiteers in their greed, while 60 percent of Afghan children are in various stages of starvation and 23 froze to death last winter outside Kabul. And half the so-called aid money has gone to training soldiers and police. I remember the late Richard Holbrooke telling Congress that civilian operations in Afghanistan were subordinate to the military. That dooms them to failure, and Afghans to suffering.

I went to Afghanistan last year with Kathy Kelly and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. I met there a man named Hakim who has organized a group called Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. Last week I heard from Kathy that he wanted to visit the United States but had been denied a visa. So, Voices and Global Exchange and Fellowship of Reconciliation and the group I work for RootsAction.org flooded the State Department with emails and calls. And they reversed their decision and gave Hakim a visa. He’ll be here soon. Sometimes our voice is loud enough. Other times it’s just one tiny little whisper short and we imagine it’s nowhere close.

Our voice was loud in 2005 and 2006. It was loud enough to prevent an attack on Iran in 2007. We’ve been helping to hold off an attack on Iran for years, since our 1953 overthrow of its government and our aid to Iraq in killing Iranians in the 1980s. Now we hear that Iran may have nuclear weapons, or nuclear weapons facilities, or nuclear weapons program capabilities, and Iran was behind 9-11, and Iran is criminally threatening to put up a fight if attacked again, plus Iran hired a Mexican drug gang to assassinate a Saudi ambassador in D.C. and then called it off just to make us look bad for catching them. There’s no limit to the Iranians’ evil, which is why we should take an action that the war proponents themselves say would fail on its own terms. Bombing Iran would do no more than the murderous sanctions already in place or the assassinations of scientists already committed to overthrow the government. And for the U.S. to allow Israel to attack Iran would only fool people in a single nation: ours. Iran would strike back at U.S. troops, and it would be a U.S. war by day two.

War is not just reserved for poor nations now, but it has — in other ways — changed almost beyond recognition. Mostly the elderly and children die in wars now, mostly civilians. The wars happen where they live. Almost entirely non-Americans die in U.S. wars. Sometimes the U.S. warriors are seated in air-conditioned offices in the United States. Drones are better than armies, someone told me recently, because with drones nobody gets killed. Imagine the terror produced by the buzzing of a drone over your house night and day, able to take your life and the lives of your loved ones at any moment. But don’t bother to protest. You’re nobody. You’re not listed in the war casualty reports in U.S. newspapers. When drones kill, nobody dies, and you — you 95 percent of humanity — you are nobody. Harold Koh says that bombing houses is neither a war nor hostilities, under the War Powers Act. Unless Americans are under the bombs, they are not hostile bombs. Perhaps they are friendly bombs, or bombs that are good for people whether they know it or not.

The military now wants to give medals to drone pilots. I picture them as bronzed joy sticks. I actually think there’s something unfair about this idea. I think our brave drones themselves should be getting the medals. They show the absolute least hesitation to kill. Or what about the ants fighting in my back yard? They sacrifice their lives and abandon their comrades with complete efficiency. If we’re handing out medals for desk jobs, what about the guys who pay the protection fees on Afghan roads? Or the guy who catches Petraeus when he faints in Congressional hearings? Why should some people get medals and others not? “War will exist,” wrote John F. Kennedy, “until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.” Therefore, I say, scrap all the medals except for those who refuse to fight.

The key, I think, to getting to that distant day when resisters are honored and warriors are not, is that we stop justifying or ignoring mass-murder. The deaths of 95 percent of the victims of our wars are the most closely guarded secret. The deaths of so-called civilians, of those not understood to be fighting back in defense of their homes, of those not male or fighting age. (Fighting-age males are posthumously declared combatants whenever our government kills them). This is the most forbidden information, because it brings down the war machine. The war machine depends for its existence on being something other than murder on a larger scale, even as it strives to reduce itself to exactly murder on a recognizable scale. Our sacred troops are the war machine’s best defense, since whatever they do must be brave and therefore good. And yet some of those troops are the gravest threat, not only because they can refuse to fight, or can speak out in opposition, but because some of them persist in producing videos and photos of themselves posing with, mutilating, and urinating on the bodies of people they kill.

And then we’re told to be outraged by the urination. But when you get outraged that someone has peed on the body of a man they just murdered, what does that convey about your attitude toward the murder itself? Surely most of us would object more to being killed than to being peed on after we’re dead.

The forbidden thought is that all killing is regrettable, immoral, and criminal. This is the thought of which Lockheed Martin, David Petraeus, General Electric, Buck McKeon, and your neighbors are frightened.

It’s all right to call a war a failure and the failure a SNAFU and incompetence the order of the day. The military money machine can generate even more money out of that. It could have done better with another trillion or two to spend.

It’s all right to point out the injustice, hypocrisy, and shame in our society’s treatment of veterans after they’ve served their war-making purpose. People can devote their time and energy to bake sales for veterans’ needs. That only furthers the acceptance of war in many minds, while a few are awakened. And the Pentagon can shift to fighting its wars with robots.

It’s all right to point out the economic trade-offs at stake, the standard of living we could have if we gave up some bombers and some billionaires. I make this point all the time. A few will understand, but the military industrial complex will counter by calling itself a jobs program and threatening congress members with unemployment in their districts.

What is not all right is finding out that our wars are one-sided slaughters of helpless families, and that over a million Iraqis lie dead in a devastated society where the first question any mother asks in areas poisoned by our weapons is “Is it normal?”

Veterans For Peace put out a statement last week in response to a United Nations communication to the U.S. government expressing concerns about our country’s treatment of children in war. Included were concerns about the recruitment of children into the U.S. military, the U.S. killing of children in Afghanistan, the U.S. detention and torture of children labeled “combatants,” and the provision of weapons by the United States to other nations employing child soldiers. I suspect it is the senseless killing of children abroad that will ultimately sway the most minds, but recruitment — or at least the cost of it — is an issue that is gaining traction.

Congresswoman Betty McCollum of Minnesota has won bipartisan support and passed through the Armed Services Committee a measure blocking the military from spending $80 million on sponsoring NASCAR drivers. We have a campaign at RootsAction.org to keep that measure in the bill. The U.S. Army says a third of its recruits come from motorsports sponsorships. Recruitment stations at racetracks help. But how does the Army measure the impact on our culture of sponsoring race cars? Dale Earnhardt, Jr., whom the National Guard has paid $136 million over the past five years to put a National Guard sticker on his race car and wear the logo on his uniform, predictably opposes cutting the funding, as do the biggest recipients of weapons money in Congress, none of whom have agreed to plaster their bodies with the logos of their sponsors. Military race cars have been featured in music videos, movies, and the shelves of toy stores. How can something so pervasive be measured? Well, we do know this: the total cost of advertising and recruitment per recruit is so much that we could have taken that money and simply given that young person and a bunch of his friends jobs doing something productive.

Those of us over on the left tend to think of cuts as bad and spending as good. For libertarians, cuts are good and spending is bad. This conveniently erases from the discussion the question of WHAT cuts and WHICH spending. We need to stop shouting “Jobs Not Cuts” and start shouting “Jobs Not Wars.” The U.S. military is so well funded, that it could be cut by half, remain far and away the best funded military in the world, and fund with those cuts every program any progressive group has ever dared to dream of for clean energy, education, housing, etc., and quite a few programs nobody has yet dared to dream. Or we on the left could make a deal with libertarians: we work together. We cut a half trillion out of the Pentagon — and I mean each year, not “over 10 years” as they like to say — and we put a quarter trillion into tax cuts and a quarter trillion into useful spending.

A massive urgent program, or what people unthinkingly like to call “a war,” is needed right now to prevent catastrophic climate change. Another is needed to rid the world of nuclear weapons and power. Another is needed to pull government out of the hands of plutocracy. And these aren’t movements aimed at making life a little bit better. Jeremy Brecher wrote recently of the need for a human preservation movement. This is what we need, a survival movement, part of which will be the full abolition of war.

The Occupy movement is a good start at bringing important issues together. But of course we need to carry with us into the occupy movement the distinctly minority understanding that war can and must be completely eliminated. We can learn from the Outlawry movement. It was moral, educational, non-electoral, and long-term with no expectation of succeeding even in a generation, and no trigger to collapse into despair if it didn’t.

We need to recognize that war is not in our genes. It’s a relatively new creation, sporadically present and absent in various societies, avoided when we choose and not otherwise. It’s not created by mystical forces of history or population or resource shortages or testosterone. It’s created by a culture’s tolerance for it, or tolerance for an unrepresentative government that engages in it. That’s our situation. War is a creation of the 1 percent that recruits members of the 99 percent to support it, as well as to do the dirty parts. War and the weapons barons and the oil oligarchs and the Wall Street banksters and the corporate media and the big business lobbies and the crowd of court jesters and sycophants in Washington who claim to be our government: they look more powerful than they are. They’re afraid of their own shadows. Six years ago they were secretly telling each other to end the wars before we gained more strength. Instead we switched parties and went home, while they breathed a sigh of relief. Yet, now, again they are scared of everything we do. They’re spying on every word, comprehending little. What they understand is resistance. Frank Kellogg never understood the Outlawry of War, but he didn’t have to. He just had to do what the people demanded. There are more of us in any small town than there are of them in the whole country. We need to realize our strength.

“And these words shall then become,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley,
“Like Oppression’s thundered doom
“Ringing through each heart and brain,
“Heard again – again – again -
“Rise like Lions after slumber
“In unvanquishable number -
“Shake your chains to earth like dew
“Which in sleep had fallen on you -
“Ye are many – they are few.”