Some quotes on war and such from people who are/were wiser than me

"The great error of nearly all studies of war...  
 has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies,  when it is (almost always) an act of interior politics."  ---   Simone Weil
       
"War is a racket."  --  Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC, twice awarded Congressional Medal of Honor

"All victories are cover stories for the hidden crimes." -- Ana Popovic   

"The first casualty of war is not truth, but perspective. Once that's gone, truth -- like compassion, reason, and all the other virtues -- truth wanders around like a wounded orphan."
 Ente Grillenhaft --  "Treatise on Reason and Hysteria"

"Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt." -- Robertson Davies

"All fanaticism is a strategy to prevent doubt from becoming conscious." --H. A. Williams


"...they were appalled by Strongbow's assertion that any military expedition was merely a disguised sexual   sickness, more specifically a profound fear of impotence... Thus armies were raised, he said, because it was   likely their raisers could raise nothing else."
                       Edward Whittemore in Sinai Tapestry

"Patriotism is the religion of hell." -- James Branch Cabell


"Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off." -- Paul Brodeur


"If you get to it and you can NOT do it, there you jolly well are, aren't you?"  --- Lord Buckley

It's a moral issue?

I think the only reason it's ok to morally oppose using tax money for abortion is because the people it will hurt are young scared women


And it's not ok to morally oppose spending our tax money on military adventures, because the people who will be hurt by are all pissed off people with weapons.

It's a moral issue, right.

The game is afoot ... The Press dusts off its old Hysteria-manual for the Fort Hood shootings

I'd hoped to never see it again, but of course, here it is.

This isn't about the terrible events at Fort Hood. They are what they are.

This is about the phenomenon described by the late poet Charles Olson in which the element that drives society and history is mythology and mythology is, literally, he says, from muthalogos i.e.,"That which is said about that which is said."

Meaning the event is only a factor and the press reports describing it is a secondary event..What drives history is what is said ABOUT the description of the event. And that's important because THAT is what we connect directly to our own lives.

It's been 31 years since I have seen the press so excited, slavering in anxious joy, November 27, 1978, when Dan White murdered  Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Member Harvey Milk in City Hall.

And the press? Same crap --

Then: "How could this happen HERE, inside City Hall? How could we think a City Supervisor would go a-murdering in this place that should be safe?

Now: "How could this happen HERE on a military base here in America? How could an Army Officer -- a Major, a doctor, a mental health professional -- go a-murdering in this place that should be safe?"

(It would probably be inappropriate and tasteless to point to the fact that the business of a-murdering is what they all do for a living.

BUT WAIT!

The next day, right now, I'm listening to the LIVE press covering shootings in the Gateway Center in Orlando Florida..

NOW how much insanity and panic can the scribblers and chatterers create?

Of course, in 1978, the magnitude** was in the other direction --

Only 9 days earlier, more than 900 people were killed in the Jonestown mass murder with cyanide-laced grape Flav-R-Ade***. It was a gigantic Deathday cake. And many people knew some of the people who went to - -and died -- in Jonestown.

I have MSNBC on right now -- and the excitement and weird creepy joy in the voice of the woman reporting from Orlando?  Rings a strange bell. I've heard that voice before --- and so have you -- but in a different and much more enjoyable context:

"Oh yes, oh yes, I'm coming, I'm coming --OH MY GOD! AHHHHH! I love you I love you."

And what they're saying is what is being said.

And even now, they're already up to saying what is being said about what is being said:

"No place is safe."

"An OFFICER?! And a Doctor?! A Psychiatrist?! You can't trust anyone!!"

and of course, playing with his name but not explicitly saying what they mean, although mentioning that it sounds Arabic, but not explicitly saying what THAT must mean -- and what everyone else knows they mean. His name?

Nidal Malik Hasan

Do any of us need to have someone spell out what is being said about what is being said when they mention his name?

And the fact that it took place in the Fort Hood Deployment Center, where he and the others were being vetted for their shipping out to Iraq or Afghanistan and that Major Hasan didn't even like to go to the firing range --  that's the ironic grist in the mill.

*********************
And oboy oboy -- the shooter in Orlando has an Hispanic name -- more grist for the panic mill, for the "THEY DON'T BELONG HERE" mind-set (the fact that many many Latin American people are at least partly Native American doesn't register-- not in a world where pictures of Jesus show a man with blue eyes and blonde hair and an aquiline nose)
*************************

*Other sites
Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson: Projective Verse
Charles Olson: Life and Work
Charles Olson


**On the other hand, given that EVERYONE in the San Francisco knew who Moscone and Milk were, their celebrity might make the magnitude of their deaths increase. Admittedly, more than 900 people dead is a true monstrous massacre, and even though it was a sensational melange of men, women, and children, they were more or less anonymous people. Compare that to TWO locally and internationally known and loved men with the murderer -- a clean-cut American Boy -- looking them in the eye and pulling the trigger. The Moscone-Milk Murders were the icing and the cherry on the top of that Deathday cake.

*** Flav-R-Ade, NOT Kool-Ade

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Mr Bloomberg has set the price..

How much does it cost to make yourself king?

Apparently, 100 million dollars ($157 per vote) buys you a change in the law and a slight edge over your opposition (who spent $13 per vote.)

I remember Bloomberg thinking he could actually run for president but 3 seconds after he announced his search for the nomination, he gave us that smile -- the one that makes him look like the demented beast, come up into daylight from the basement, where he eats boiled babies.

I don't know what he sees when he looks in a mirror, but apparently, it took $100 million to make some of the voters of New York City decide to ignore the fact that he was one of those Wall Street people who was party to the destruction of the USA economy for his own personal gain, overlook the fact that he was one of the bad guys, shrug their shoulders and say "What the fuck..."

What a hideous little Rumplstiltskin.

The return of Scott Ritter -- just in time -- we need sanity more than ever

I remember Scott Ritter on the Bill Maher "Politically Incorrect" show back in 2001 or 2002, talking about how, based on all possible information, he had concluded "there are no WMDs in Iraq."  And Dennis Miller, looking more and more like a young Richard Nixon was revealing his true sub-comic personality as a malignant mental dwarf who throws esoteric references around, references that are almost always misused -- wrong context,wrong definition, etc.

He mocked Ritter mercilessly, trying to parody Ritter's cautious phrasing.

That was the last time I ever saw Dennis Miller on TV and didn't instantly change the channel.

No one wanted to actually think about what Scott Ritter was saying, since most were all dead set on going to war against Saddam Hussein, George H.W.Bush's old bribe-monger.

Today, he was on CNN with Rick Sanchez, who not only was presenting him for his warning about playing in Afghanistan, but also copping to having been one of the many journalists who dissed Ritter back in 2001.

I watched until the show turned over to Wolf Blitzer, whom I have watched more than enough to realized he has never listened to anyone's answer, reveling only in his cleverness at having asked the question.

Rick Sanchez asked Soctt Ritter about General McChrystal's request for an additional 40,000 troops, to which Ritter said, "That a solution, but no one is asking the question it's supposed to solve -- what is our mission?"

Going on, Sanchez asked a followup if Ritter thought McChrystal was right to make his request in public.

Ritter said it straight out -- "NO. Obama is his superior officer, his commander-in-chief. Any personal opinion -- or professional one -- should be made privately. What McChrystal has done is call 'insubordination.' "

Hurrah!!!

He did what Dugout Doug MacArthur did -- trying to overturn the president's authority. Truman had the legal right to bust MacArthur to Corporal and sentence him to 15 months in the stockade. Obama has that same authority --- anyone who is familiar with the UCMJ (Universal Code of Military Justice) knows what to call that sort of play -- it's call SEDITION (same thing being done by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, et al, except they're not in uniform -- never HAVE BEEN in uniform.).  If actual war had been declared, it could be called TREASON.

McChrystal should resign.(Which he has threatened to do if he doesn't get his 40,000 troops. Threatened to hold his breath until he turns blue, lie on the floor and kick his heels on the carpet, and then resign.)

It's bad enough he trampled sense and decency to give Pat Tillman a Silver Star the day after he died, ignoring the fact that everyone concerned knew his fellow soldiers had shot him, whether accidentally or not.

McChrystal has an ego suitably large enough to be a general, but needs to watch out lest it become too loarge for him to continue to be a soldier.

Thank you, Scott Ritter, for saying it right out.