This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • If that is being disrespectful.

    One of the stories that is going around is this one. It seems that the group that contracted the picture decided that it should be removed. Many people at a loss as why, can you guess why?

    But it is clear that this is just a obvious case of censorship.

    Several art bloggers denounced the museum’s act as censorship, comparing it to the recent removal of David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” video from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

    Daniel Lahoda, founder of LA Freewalls Project downtown and one of the few people to photograph the work as it was being removed, said that the street art community is “really upset by this — everyone is talking about it.”

    “If you’re planning on mounting the largest graffiti show in a major institution, you’ve got to give the artists the freedom to do the movement justice — so there’s a big failure in what just happened,” he says. “The last thing we want is an art institution, someone supposed to support creativity, to destroy it.”

    Except that the museum paid for it and guess what, the people paying your commission have a big say into what they want painted. So do not act shocked that they painted over a painting that they paid for on their property. But it gets better because “L.A. Museum’s Destruction of Anti-War Art Disrespects Veterans”

    Much of the anti-war movement is led by veterans, who’ve seen firsthand that these wars aren’t making us safer and aren’t worth the cost. If Deitch talked to more veterans rather than making blanket assumptions about their viewpoints, he might be surprised to find that many, many veterans stridently oppose the wars being fought by the U.S. at present. For example, the video Rethink Afghanistan published on Veterans Day featured veterans denouncing the war in Afghanistan as an unjust war.

    Except considering the past “veterans” that have been coming from the anti-war camp and considering how stories in how returning vets, are used as prompts, one has to wonder what their idea of respect is.

    Here’s an interesting thought experiment: imagine if Blu had painted a mural celebrating, rather than dissenting from, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What if the mural had depicted the war in Afghanistan as a conflict that served American interests, where our team, including our allies in Kabul, were the Good Guys and our adversaries the Bad Guys. In other words, if Blu had lied through his art, rather than using it to tell the truth, would Deitch have painted over it? Maybe, but I doubt it.

    Except that they still do no get it, it does not matter what the subject is. If the person that is paying you to paint says that they do not like it, they have a right to reject it. Regardless of what the theme or subject matter is.

    But do not try to use our name when you are upset about it when the owners paint over you picture that they paid for on their own building.

  • Dahlia Wasfi, ditz

    At the risk of attracting the folks who have a crush on Iraqi-born Dahlia Wasfi, who we’ve been told is “scary smart”, one of my ninjas took this screen shot of one of her brilliant comments on Facebook last night;

    Of course, she’s referring to the flag in her Facebook avatar as if it’s some brave statement. The flag is Iraq’s Saddam Hussein-era flag. Obviously, Wasfi, whose family fled Hussein’s Iraq when she was a child, misses the Iraq she never knew. And what the old Iraq flag and the old Iraqi oppressor has to do with Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza two years ago is too “scary smart” for me to figure out. I doubt any of the 48 people who “liked” her vacuous statement could explain it either.

  • South Korea vows retaliation

    South Korean President Lee Myung-bak announced today that South Korea’s military “must respond relentlessly when they come under attack” from the North. He went on to say that South Korea isn’t afraid of engaging in a war with the hermit kingdom. This following a statement from the North indicating that their roly-poly pompadoured leader is a bit irrate over the South’s continued war exercise.

    Kim’s military chief threatened last week to launch a “sacred” nuclear war against the South.

    The North’s main newspaper issued a warning Monday that South Korea’s recent exercises are “reckless military provocation” that could lead to the South to face a self-destruction. “There is limit in our patience,” said the Redoing Sinmun commentary carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

    Well, in my opinion, Myung-bak had better worry about a war with the North. Not because of any particular strategic reason, but because of the world’s Leftists.

    Look at Israel. They were condemned for erecting walls that have since ended homicide bombings. When they retaliate against missiles launched from Lebanon or Gaza, the weight of world opinion crushes an effective response. Hell, right now there’s another flotilla headed for Gaza. Does anyone remember any condemnation when Israeli commandos were attacked on the last effort?

    Yeah, if an ally of ours tried to save the lives of several million dregs living under the Stalinist regime of North Korea, the Left would twist themselves up in knots even with credible mitigation.

    We’ve got VFP still protesting the Korean War. Some of them were waving “US Out of Haiti” signs the last time I went to one of their protests. Of course, I’d kick in a coupla bucks to send a plane load of them to North Korea to be human shields.

  • NYT: cut our military during this war

    In the New York Times this weekend was an opinion piece written by a journalist Nicholas Kristof who advocates cutting military spending while we’re engaged in a war beyond our borders. Now I read Mr. Kristof’s biography and I don’t see a thing that qualifies him to make such a statement…well, other than the fact that he’s a journalist, spent his whole adult life as a journalist as so he thinks he knows every thing there is to know about…well…everything. Now he wants to be heard on our global strategy;

    • The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.

    And the problem is? I wonder if Mr. Kristof has noticed that the rest of the world is more than hesitant to use their military. While Serbs murdered Bosnians, the world stood around with their hands in their pockets. While hundreds of thousands of Africans died, the world stood by and watched. While terrorists attack in almost every European country, they’re resistant to send their own military to where the terrorists are being trained.

    • The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?

    You do realize that we’ve drawn down our forces substantially in Europe right? It should also be noted that much of the underlying infrastructure in our Europe-based force supports operations in the Middle East. And, yes Russia is becoming a bigger threat to Europe every day.

    • The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.

    Having a top secret clearance doesn’t make someone a member of the intelligence community. Sometimes just being in the same grid square as mundane, routine classified information requires a clearance. You’d think someone as worldly as Mr. Kristoff would know that. But he probably does and he wants to scare the folks who don’t.

    • The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

    Hmmm. I wonder why a high tech war which depends on gee-whiz gadgets would cost more than every war we ever fought with cap and ball weapons while we were mounted atop horses?

    “Republicans think banging the war drums wins them votes, and Democrats think if they don’t chime in, they’ll lose votes,” said Andrew Bacevich, an ex-military officer who now is a historian at Boston University.

    Hardly, dimbulbs two. it’s not Republicans who beating war drums. It’s people like Ahmadinejad and Il who beat war drums. Do we want to be unprepared when they finally make their move?

    Let me be clear: I’m a believer in a robust military, which is essential for backing up diplomacy. But the implication is that we need a balanced tool chest of diplomatic and military tools alike. Instead, we have a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service — and that’s preposterous.

    Yeah, because we’ve seen how well the “foreign service” has performed over the last hundred years or so. Even before we had a large standing army. Kristoff is probably home right now Windexing his Rhodes scholar scroll, so proud of how he stood up for an intellectual foreign policy in favor of a brutish military solution to all of our problems. But, he neglected to take into account that we’re not talking about existing in a civilized world like when diplomacy actually worked in the mid-19th century in Europe briefly. Diplomacy actually caused the problems with Iran and North Korea. Diplomacy caused the Iraq War.

  • Brad Manning: These blankets are scratchy like torture or something

    Like I wrote several months ago, the organization which calls itself “Courage to Resist” is raising money for Bradley Manning, the former PFC who released several hundreds of thousands of documents to Wikileaks. From the New York Times;

    Bradley Manning T-shirts, buttons, bumper stickers — even whistles — are for sale.

    Jeff Paterson, the project director of the organization, which has supported dozens of service members who have refused deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan, said the group began to raise money for Private Manning’s legal defense after he was arrested in May.

    WikiLeaks was not supporting the 23-year-old private first class “who gave them all this information,” said Mr. Paterson, 42, a lanky former Marine, who was himself jailed for refusing to board a plane bound for Saudi Arabia after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

    Yeah, a guy who refused to deploy to Kuwait for the Gulf War would belong to an organization called Courage to Resist, wouldn’t he?

    How about this doofus;

    “He has supporters all over the world,” said Adam Seibert-Szyper, 39, a staff member who deserted the Marine Corps in 1996.

    In 1996? Really? What was the Marine Corps doing in 1996 that would cause this courageous soul to desert? Toys for Tots?

    BBC gets right to the torture aspect of Manning’s imprisonment;

    [Manning] complained to Mr House last week that the blankets he is given are so heavy and uncomfortable they feel like carpet squares.

    “He said he would frequently wake up in the morning with carpet burn, a problem exacerbated by the fact that he is required to sleep in his boxers,” the journalist said.

    Ay, Dios mio – pobrecito…it’s just like Guantanamo. I sleepin my boxers, so am I torturing myself?

    Of course, Salon’s resident drama queen, Glen Greenwald is still apoplectic over the tortuous descriptions coming from Guantanamo del Norte en Quantico;

    In addition to confirming the facts I reported, Maj. Coombs added several disturbing new ones, including the paltry, isolated terms of Manning’s one-hour-a-day so-called “exercise” time (he’s “taken to an empty room and only allowed to walk,” “normally just walks figure eights in the room,” “if he indicates that he no long feels like walking, he is immediately returned to his cell”); the bizarre requirement that, despite not being on suicide watch, Manning respond to guards all day, every day, by saying “yes” every 5 minutes (even though guards cannot and “do not engage in conversation with” him); and various sleep-disruptive measures (he is barred from sleeping at any time from 5:00 am – 8:00 pm, and, during the night, “if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him”).

    So, suppose they ease all of these restrictions and Manning is killed or injured when he attempts suicide or gets his ass assaulted by another prisoner. Will the UN, which is threatening to investigate Manning’s condition, or Greenwald admit that they were responsible? Yeah, that’ll be the day.

  • IVAW in your hometown

    Yesterday, a young soldier home on leave to his hometown for the holiday season found this article in his local newspaper;

    Iraq War veterans Aaron Hughes of Chicago, Scott Kimble of Champaign, and Brock McIntosh of Normal spoke about Operation Recovery, which opposes sending troops with PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury, and Military Sexual Trauma back into battle. Operation Recovery insists that traumatized veterans have the right to heal.

    “I think it’s morally abhorrent to send mentally traumatized soldiers back to battle where they use heavy weapons and armor,” McIntosh said. “Many of these soldiers are on psychotropic drugs and are a danger to themselves, to fellow soldiers and everyone else.”

    Twenty percent of troops deployed repeatedly have PTSD, Hughes said. Suicide rates among active-duty troops are twice as high as that of the civilian population, and veterans with PTSD are six times more likely to attempt suicide, according to the IVAW.

    Hughes said that Military Sexual Trauma is a major problem for female soldiers, one third of them suffering sexual assault. Ninety percent of women soldiers seeking help from the Veterans Administration report sexual assault from fellow soldiers, he said.

    “Women have to go to their commander to prove their case first,” Hughes explained, and often their complaints are dismissed. “Women are expected to return and serve with the same soldiers who assaulted them,” he said. The actual number of cases of MST is difficult to verify, as many sexual assaults go unreported. According to a 2004 study cited by the Service Women’s Action Network, 71 percent of women veterans seeking help from the VA had been sexually assaulted.

    The young trooper, after writing to Blackfive (who forwarded the email to us) fired off this letter to the author of the article;
    (more…)

  • They should have dragged him by his feet

    I just got back from spending a day with the great medical folks at Walter Reed and some parents of wounded warriors and found these pictures in my inbox (from one of my ninjas). The first thing that popped in my head is that they should have picked Matthis up by his feet and dragged him on his face to see if he’d dig that mug into the snow.

    Someone told me that Matthis was wearing a VFP pin or patch, so he’s a Geezer For Sitting On Our Hands.

  • A midweek pick-me-up

    Things that make me happy; Matthis face-down in the snow wearing handcuffs.

    I’ll leave the obvious jokes to you guys.

    Thanks to one my ninjas for the picture. No, I really mean thanks.