It's the Guns - But We All Know, It' Not Really The Guns

... a note from Michael Moore  I did not want you to miss

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

Friends,

Since Cain went nuts and whacked Abel, there have always been those humans who, for one reason or another, go temporarily or permanently insane and commit unspeakable acts of violence. There was the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who during the first century A.D. enjoyed throwing victims off a cliff on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Gilles de Rais, a French knight and ally of Joan of Arc during the middle ages, went cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs one day and ended up murdering hundreds of children. Just a few decades later Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, was killing people in Transylvania in numberless horrifying ways.

In modern times, nearly every nation has had a psychopath or two commit a mass murder, regardless of how strict their gun laws are – the crazed white supremacist in Norway one year ago Sunday, the schoolyard butcher in Dunblane, Scotland, the École Polytechnique killer in Montreal, the mass murderer in Erfurt, Germany … the list seems endless.

And now the Aurora shooter last Friday. There have always been insane people, and there always will be.

But here's the difference between the rest of the world and us: We have TWO Auroras that take place every single day of every single year! At least 24 Americans every day (8-9,000 a year) are killed by people with guns – and that doesn't count the ones accidentally killed by guns or who commit suicide with a gun. Count them and you can triple that number to over 25,000.

That means the United States is responsible for over 80% of all the gun deaths in the 23 richest countries combined. Considering that the people of those countries, as human beings, are no better or worse than any of us, well, then, why us?

Both conservatives and liberals in America operate with firmly held beliefs as to "the why" of this problem. And the reason neither can find their way out of the box toward a real solution is because, in fact, they're both half right.

The right believes that the Founding Fathers, through some sort of divine decree, have guaranteed them the absolute right to own as many guns as they desire. And they will ceaselessly remind you that a gun cannot fire itself – that "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

Of course, they know they're being intellectually dishonest (if I can use that word) when they say that about the Second Amendment because they know the men who wrote the constitution just wanted to make sure a militia could be quickly called up from amongst the farmers and merchants should the Brits decide to return and wreak some havoc.

But they are half right when they say "Guns don't kill people." I would just alter that slogan slightly to speak the real truth: "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people."

Because we're the only ones in the first world who do this en masse. And you'll hear all stripes of Americans come up with a host of reasons so that they don't have to deal with what's really behind all this murder and mayhem.

They'll say it's the violent movies and video games that are responsible. Last time I checked, the movies and video games in Japan are more violent than ours – and yet usually fewer than 20 people a year are killed there with guns – and in 2006 the number was two!

Others will say it's the number of broken homes that lead to all this killing. I hate to break this to you, but there are almost as many single-parent homes in the U.K. as there are here – and yet, in Great Britain, there are usually fewer than 40 gun murders a year.

People like me will say this is all the result of the U.S. having a history and a culture of men with guns, "cowboys and Indians," "shoot first and ask questions later." And while it is true that the mass genocide of the Native Americans set a pretty ugly model to found a country on, I think it's safe to say we're not the only ones with a violent past or a penchant for genocide. Hello, Germany! That's right I'm talking about you and your history, from the Huns to the Nazis, just loving a good slaughter (as did the Japanese, and the British who ruled the world for hundreds of years – and they didn't achieve that through planting daisies). And yet in Germany, a nation of 80 million people, there are only around 200 gun murders a year.

So those countries (and many others) are just like us – except for the fact that more people here believe in God and go to church than any other Western nation.

My liberal compatriots will tell you if we just had less guns, there would be less gun deaths. And, mathematically, that would be true. If you have less arsenic in the water supply, it will kill less people. Less of anything bad – calories, smoking, reality TV – will kill far fewer people. And if we had strong gun laws that prohibited automatic and semi-automatic weapons and banned the sale of large magazines that can hold a gazillion bullets, well, then shooters like the man in Aurora would not be able to shoot so many people in just a few minutes.

But this, too, has a problem. There are plenty of guns in Canada (mostly hunting rifles) – and yet the annual gun murder count in Canada is around 200 deaths. In fact, because of its proximity, Canada's culture is very similar to ours – the kids play the same violent video games, watch the same movies and TV shows, and yet they don't grow up wanting to kill each other. Switzerland has the third-highest number of guns per capita on earth, but still a low murder rate.

So – why us?

I posed this question a decade ago in my film 'Bowling for Columbine,' and this week, I have had little to say because I feel I said what I had to say ten years ago – and it doesn't seem to have done a whole lot of good other than to now look like it was actually a crystal ball posing as a movie.

This is what I said then, and it is what I will say again today:

1. We Americans are incredibly good killers. We believe in killing as a way of accomplishing our goals. Three-quarters of our states execute criminals, even though the states with the lower murder rates are generally the states with no death penalty.

Our killing is not just historical (the slaughter of Indians and slaves and each other in a "civil" war). It is our current way of resolving whatever it is we're afraid of. It's invasion as foreign policy. Sure there's Iraq and Afghanistan – but we've been invaders since we "conquered the wild west" and now we're hooked so bad we don't even know where to invade (bin Laden wasn't hiding in Afghanistan, he was in Pakistan) or what to invade for (Saddam had zero weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with 9/11). We send our lower classes off to do the killing, and the rest of us who don't have a loved one over there don't spend a single minute of any given day thinking about the carnage. And now we send in remote pilotless planes to kill, planes that are being controlled by faceless men in a lush, air conditioned studio in suburban Las Vegas. It is madness.

2. We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, #1 in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take better care of each other (here's a good example of what I mean).

Those are my thoughts about Aurora and the violent country I am a citizen of. Like I said, I spelled it all out here if you'd like to watch it or share it for free with others. All we're lacking here, my friends, is the courage and the resolve. I'm in if you are.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com
@MMFlint
MichaelMoore.com

Do I Feel Safer Now?

Just read - as my morning 'treat' - how my government is going all out to keep me safe.

(From an article by Chris Hedges published on Monday, April 2, 2012 by TruthDig.com)
"The Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M. Arken that there are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011. Investigative reporter James Bamford wrote in the latest issue of Wired magazine that the National Security Agency is building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program code-named “Stellar Wind.” Bamford noted that the NSA has established listening posts throughout the country to collect, store and examine billions of email messages and phone calls.

So it is going on and on. Is that what "creating jobs" is all about? And, actually, I feel more threatened than safe ... go figure.

What is There to Hope for?

So much going on in my head. Raging debates with myself and anybody else who will listen. My poor wife is a captive audience. She gets to hear the raw ideas and the initial angry reactions. They need to be vented here.

What is the subject I am talking about? I chose the title because I am asking myself many times a day "what is there to hope for, for the rest of my life (not very much longer), for my children's life (a whole lot of living ahead) and for my grand children (whose lives have barely begun)?"

Where shall we start? Politics? Environment? Wars? Local Issues? Religion? Any of the currently debated sub-issues under those headings can quickly make me throw up, throw in the towel, explode in fury, or disappear into the woods. With the last option really being my favorite. But it does not answer the question.

Shall I hope that our current president or a new one will stop making war all over the world? Or give us all decent healthcare? Or come up with a budget that is sustainable and funds only projects which will help all of us to live decent lives? Or swing into real action on any one of his promises, like alternate energy development, cleaning up the lobbyist situation, get money out of politics, make the Supreme Court into a true institution of justice rather than an enforcer of one or the other political party, make all the Departments in his government be true to their charters, keep religion in all forms out of government ...

I have been made to believe that I as a citizen have an influence over how the people I elect will act on my behalf. The truth is, they act on behalf of who pays them the most money. I was lead to believe that political campaigns are about real issues and open debate not about who can pay for the most advertising that is either presenting an outright lie or totally misleading or plainly promising something the candidate has no intention to ever fulfill, if it is not all about the opponent's horrible record, horrible private life, horrible gaffes and horrible flip-flops.

Vote for the lesser of two evils? Evil is evil. War is war, greed is greed, lies are lies. Who do I turn to? Hope? Hope for What?

Connecting the Dots

If you read a book about the history of the Ottoman Empire and the fact that in the battle for Constantinople 30,000 civilians were raped, beaten, hacked to death and left to rot is very upsetting to you - brutality unworthy of the human spirit inflicted on innocent civilians -- and you have earlier in your life been actively involved in the firebombing of Dresden - which intentionally burned to death 30,000 civilians in one night, motivated entirely by the intent to "break the will of the German population" -- would you somehow connect the dots and tell yourself "I was part of the same brutality I am abhorred by reading about the Turks"? And that was my country doing it.

Well, that did not happen in that conversation. And I find this more often than not in civilized, intelligent conversations - an inability to connect the dots. Is it an unwillingness to see because it is uncomfortable? Is it just plain lack of knowledge of current developments and recent as well as ancient history? Mental paralysis? A media-propaganda-induced accumulation of blind spots?

One current example:

Israel has 300 to 500 nuclear warheads, unacknowledged, undeclared, un-inspected, ready to be shot off at anybody who dares to threaten Israel. Iran is enriching Uranium and most probably has some wish to develop nuclear weapons because it feels threatened, but does not have any of the aforementioned capabilities, neither now nor in the foreseeable future. We, the Western bully nations keep parading our military and economic threats before Iran. Never around Israel. The dots here are not even far apart, in geography and in time. And yet very few people are able or willing to connect them. What happened to intelligence?

The Naked Man and the Hotel Maid from Guinea

Last night I happened onto a European TV newscast that described in great detail the plans the defense lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn had to discredit the immigrant maid who was the victim of his alleged sexual assault.

The most ludicrous effort, I thought, was that some people flew to her native village (which she left four years ago and had no contact with since), to dig up any dirt and gossip which would make her less credible. Another venue of attack was her immigration papers. "We will comb through every entry on every document she ever filled out, because people lie to some answers since they are desperate to be admitted to the US and that is a crime" said the comfortable, heavy bodied lawyer, lodged into a couch. "We will interview all of her co-workers, boyfriends ... I am sure there are some stories we can find and use."

It went on and on, until I had to shut it off. How disgusting and totally irrelevant to what happened in the $3000 a night hotel suite. Apparently Mr Strauss-Kahn has practiced this sort of behavior before, as we come to find out from previous victims speaking up now, so who's life needs to be examined first?

Now he absolves his "house arrest" in a 14 Million Dollar mansion awaiting court action. The poor maid is scared out of her wits in face of that much money and power. I am not holding my breath until justice is done.

Will Common Sense prevail?

What You Should Know About Drones

I am quoting from Kathy Kelly's article on www.commondreams.org because it reminded me of my own experiences in Austria during WWII walking home from school after an air raid. The bombs then were a little more "benign," if I may call it that way, and I was in the shelter when they fell. But seeing the destroyed houses and knowing that people had died in them was enough for me. Here is her story (you can read the full article at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/09-5).

"I’m reminded of an encounter I had, in May, 2010, when a journalist and a social worker from North Waziristan met with a small Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation in Pakistan and described, in gory and graphic detail, the scenes of drone attacks which they had personally witnessed: the carbonized bodies, burned so fully they could be identified by legs and hands alone, the bystanders sent flying like dolls through the air to break, with shattered bones and sometimes-fatal brain injuries, upon walls and stone.

“Do Americans know about the drones?” the journalist asked me. I said I thought that awareness was growing on University campuses and among peace groups. “This isn’t what I’m asking,” he politely insisted. “What I want to know is if average Americans know that their country is attacking Pakistan with drones that carry bombs. Do they know this?”

"Truthfully,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

One more interesting fact: "As of now, worldwide, 49 companies make 450 different drone aircraft. Drone merchants expect that drone sales will earn $20.2 billion over the next 10 years for aerospace war manufacturers. Who knows? One day drone missiles may be aimed at us."

Good Luck, to all of us!

Does Anybody Care About Our Health?

Two stories on today's Common Dreams website raised alarm bells for me about governments caring at all about their people. First there is more and more evidence of the health risks following the oil gusher in the Gulf: Many residents along the Gulf Coast are exhibiting symptoms that clearly look like reactions to chemical exposure. Read the article and come to your own conclusions. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/20-10 Unfortunately the article also points out that there is no concerted effort (and no funds) to collect the data needed to prove what is happening.

Then there is the little story of the well water near natural gas 'fracking' activity in rural Pennsylvania that can be set on fire because it contains methane gas. One of the wells recently blew out and spilled toxic chemicals over fields, pastures and into waterways. http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/20-8

Last but not least we have the situation in Japan where nobody seems to know "officially" how bad the radioactive contamination actually is and will be as the leaks keep leaking radio active water and who knows what else into the sea, air and into the soil.

What we keep hearing about these catastrophies is mostly that the Gulf is on its way to return to normal, deepwater drilling is safe and will continue, natural gas extraction is going fine with the fracking process, and atomic power plants are really safe ... very little is being said about the poor people who live, work, fish and farm in these areas. Their livelihood and their health and the health of their offspring (maybe for generations) is at risk, and the public efforts to disseminate accurate information and to organize the tracking and alleviating of the health risks are in sad shape. Any kind of public acknowledgement of the situation (other than empty words and promises)is sorely missing. Do our governments care about human beings? Not only do they kill them off by the hundreds of thousands in unjustified wars they also keep endangering them by the millions through unregulated and unsavory practices to maintain our "standard of living" - I guess that standard only goes to the (so far un-radiated)survivors. Common Sense? Where?

The Libyan Charade

George Orwell could not have put it better ... read what Glenn Greenwald posted today on Common Dreams News. I do not want to paraphrase one word. The whole story speaks for itself. What are we to do with a government like that, a world like that? http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/16-2

Please comment - even if just very briefly!

Eight Million per Day for War in Libya

The US is spending about $8 Million per day on its war on Libya. This of course in addition to the exorbitant amounts we are paying for our other ongoing wars. "Remarking last week on the deal he struck that slashes $38.5 billion in federal spending, President Obama said the agreement “between Democrats and Republicans, on behalf of all Americans, is on a budget that invests in our future while making the largest annual spending cut in our history.” With an untouched defense budget and no end in sight for our wars - where - what is our future? Definitely not better education, not better healthcare, still no jobs other than those making weaponry and flipping burgers. Future? Think about it. Thank you.

The Profitability of Wars - even little ones like Libya

Just found a great article by Robert C. Koehler, A Vortex of Death and Wealth, published today at CommonDreams.org He makes a case of how we -and other weapons manufacturing countries - make money off killing and destruction. He writes "And Libya is small potatoes compared to — no surprise — Saudi Arabia. Last year, according to Spiegel Online, the U.S. announced the largest arms export deal in history with the Saudis. The oil-rich kingdom will buy $60 billion worth of U.S. aircraft over the next five to ten years. “Money is no object,” the article informs us, “and the Saudi air force is to receive F-15 fighter-bombers, Apache attack helicopters, missiles, radar equipment and bombs. All together, according to the Wall Street Journal, the order is large enough to guarantee 77,000 jobs at Boeing.” So maybe this is the much taunted "Job Creation Program" of our current administration - let's go to war and sell weaponry - not only use it but also destroy it so we can eventually replace it. Since the US is not producing much else, there is our future. Unending war, unending arms sales. “This” — the Libyan no fly zone — “is turning into the best shop window for competing aircraft for years. More even than in Iraq in 2003,” said Francis Tusa, editor of the UK-based newsletter Defense Analysis, quoted in a recent Reuters article by Tim Hepher. For instance, enforcement of the no fly zone pitted two European-made jet fighters, the Typhoon and the Rafale, against one another for world leaders to view, and France, Tusa pointed out, “is particularly desperate to sell the Rafale.” This is the generally unstated truth about Western intervention in the Middle East and anywhere else in the world. The headline-generating acts of murderous repression by dictators, whether we love or abhor them, are made possible by weaponry and equipment they purchased from us. And then, when the time comes, we may have to attack our former business partners with the same weaponry we sold them." Common Sense apparently has no place in this game unless you apply it to the job creation program. Good luck to all of us.

The Goldstone Report Still Stands!

We are being deceived again. Judge Goldstone's OpEd in the NYT is reported as recanting the report. None such thing if you read the fine print. The Report (on the Cast Lead War by Israel in the Gaza Strip) stands as is, minus a few semantic 'corrections'. Time and again we are fed headlines based on a tiny part of the news story, hiding the true message and/or truth. Who are these people who publish this kind of misleading copy, who are they answering to? An honest journalist - objective as s/he should be - could never stoop as low as to distort a straightforward story. Why is it left to us to dig and find out what is really behind a misleading headline? And the majority of readers will of course not do that to begin with. They will go out and believe the headline, retell it, distribute it and thereby make it much more believable. Do I want to be part of this system? NO. I will hang on to my Common Sense!

Libya - Japan - and our Readiness to "Help"

Have you counted the number of nations sending their war machines to bomb Libya? Within two days of the UN Resolution there were at least eight of them. We, the US, of course in the lead. 125 Tomahawk missiles have been launched so far, at a cost of one million dollars each, to keep Ghaddafi's forces from 'killing' civilians. So we are killing to prevent killing. Makes great sense, does it? This is not genocide, where such an intervention would make sense and where we usually keep our eyes and forces averted until it is too late.

And what about the catastrophe in Japan? How many nations, ships and planes full of food and blankets and tents for half-a-million or more freezing and starving people without shelter are on the way? And written about? Zero, from what I can see. The 125 million or so dollars that went up in fire and smoke, destroying people and goods in Libya could have been sent the other way and done some good. NO? That makes too much sense for our "freedom"(= oil)loving and oh so moral leaders.

This morning I found an article by Pablo Ouziel on my favorite news site (www.commondreams.com) where he writes "The time has come to break our silence and judge them and their allies for crimes against humanity. Only when we have wiped clean the blood spilled in the name of our false morality, by confronting the crimes committed in our name, might we find ourselves in a position from which to ethically judge the crimes of the foreign petty dictators our leaders often called friends." My sentiments exactly!

Please read the whole article and others on that site. They are all eye-opening and not always hopeful, but they tell it as it is.

Fuel Fools

I have been aware of the fact that the military is one of the biggest users -if not THE biggest user- of motor fuel, think jets, planes, tanks, trucks etc. Now I read that 80% of the cargo that the US military hauls around .. is fuel. So, we go to war to ensure the fuel for the military so they can .. umm, lug it off to the war zones? Is that it? Unfortunately, yes, that's it.

Where is the common sense?

Don't Let Them Scare You!

As more and more slightly insane terrorist "bombers" appear on the scene, please be alert and read more than the initial story. From the Sears Tower plot (Chicago) to a conspiracy in Florida, from shoe to underwear bomber all these stories have big holes and plenty of proof how these plots did not have much of a chance to work and were hatched and executed under very suspicious circumstances. The Nigerian underwear bomber, for example, boarded the plane without a passport, was shephearded by an unidentified official through security and placed on the plane. Before that his father had appeared at the US Embassy and warned the authorities that his son had radical connections and might plan a terorist act. Of course, nobody followed up on that ... draw your own conclusions.

The latest scare, the Oregonian Christmas bomber story does not seem to pan out very logically. What struck me most was the following:

The Oregonian newspaper quoted Oregon US Attorney Dwight Holton as saying: "This defendant's chilling determination is a stark reminder that there are people - even here in Oregon - who are determined to kill Americans." I ask aren't there Americans who not only have the chilling determination to kill Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis but also have been doing so for many years?

Nothing makes sense any more. I am giving up - but not quite yet. Keep on reading and digging deeper. The truth is out there.

Read an article with details here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/25-0

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"Thou Shalt not Kill" Applies to All?

Yesterday I received an email asking me to sign a petition to save Sakineh Ashtiani, an Iranian woman accused of adultery, rescued from stoning by an international outcry and now threatened to be executed. Of course, I signed immediately. Anything I can do to save a life, I will do, gladly.

But this noble effort made me think of the non-effort in this country to stop the killing in the wars we keep going. Who raises awareness about the women (and children) who are not accused of anything, whose only "crime" is to live in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan and who get killed either by our over-zealous soldiers or by indiscriminant missiles fired from drones or other aircraft? Are we as a nation already totally numb to this constant wiping out of innocent lives?

When somebody else does the killing - in this case the Iranian government - our government's elected boogieman of the hour - we are being pushed to react, to rally and show our concern -- is it mainly because we want to magnify the bad image of the "enemy" rather than over the concern about the poor woman's life?

Wherever I look these days, double standard rules, applied without much thought but with great enthusiasm. I find it disheartening, disillusioning and actually quite disgusting. If I do it, it's ok. If you do it, it is a crime. We are not moving along the path of enlightenment that way. Peace!

Democracy? Where?

Did you hear Mitch McConnell's speech before the American Enterprise Institute? It's not the only Republican post-election rhetoric that lacks the common sense that I am defending here. He said very clearly, with a straight face and full of blistering conviction (if his sad face can convey that at all), that the priority of his House majority is to roll back every legislative progress that has been passed during the last two years. He also said that if Pres. Obama does not do what they want, they will have somebody in the White House in 2012 who will not yield the Veto pen.

Is that the essence of Democracy? Or just hateful, spiteful, narrow-minded semblance of governing? Old Russia anyone? Isn't that something the Republicans accuse President Obama of - ramrodding change down the poor populace's throat? I am confused, but also angry and deflated. What has this country come to? Can there be no reasonable discourse? Civility? Winning a landslide of House Seats is not a mandate to disassemble the whole works. Especially by the Party that has ZERO plans on the table to do anything positive. Hear, hear!

Does this Nation not have important problems to solve? Like Economy, Jobs, Environment, real reform of the Financial Industry, maybe even Election Reform? Could they be at least mentioned or addressed? No, that would definitely be too much common sense. Good luck to all of us.

The Jesters Give us the Truth

Just listened to the parting remarks made by Jon Stewart (http://www.youtube.com/watchv=jXmbzLI3pnk&feature=player_embedded will get you there) at the Washington DC Rally for Sanity and was reminded of my history lessons. Were not the court jesters the ones who could tell the absolute truth -or maybe just the inconvenient truths - to the King or the Queen without being punished? The Courtiers had to make things look good and flatter the ruler in order to be kept on and maintain their influence.

The sadness over this state of affairs- that comedians have to step up for SANITY and the truth, while all the supposedly free carriers of the news and the truth are feeding us IN-sanity, comprised mostly of spin and lies, is only outweighed by the comments posted following the youtube clip. How so many people -who apparently read and write well- can miss the point of the rally altogether by such a wide margin is rather incomprehensible to me. Read them and see for yourself.

Case in point on the media's reliability over the last few days, the parcels supposedly filled with explosives sent by freight plane from Yemen (who knows?) and promptly intercepted by our vigilant homeland security department long before they arrived here. If you poke around a bit in the independent news sites you will see that this is an entirely ridiculous story that can be proven wrong and inconsistent very easily. Purpose? To install fear in our not so informed populace - exactly the fear-mongering Stewart's rally was pointing out.

Please inform yourself and THINK. And if you have not voted yet, please do so on the correct side of the ballot. (I know that's hard, but maybe reading Michael Moore's latest essay can help you out.

PBS Really Not "Public" Any More

For some time now I have been very disappointed and displeased with PBS’s news coverage. Very mellow, non-controversial, no-balance reporting – as opposed to the recentlly discontinued Bill Moyers Journal hard-hitting pieces. The only difference to the commercial stations is the lack of reports on local fires and babies falling out of windows.

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
“A multi-part FAIR exposé of PBS's most prominent news and public affairs programs demonstrates that public television is failing to live up to its mission to provide an alternative to commercial television, to give voice to those "who would otherwise go unheard" and help viewers to "see America whole, in all its diversity," in the words of public TV's founding document.”

Among other rather troubling findings, this one irks me the most.

“-- On segments focusing on the Afghan War, though polls show consistent majorities of Americans have opposed the war for more than a year, not a single NewsHour guest represented an antiwar group or expressed antiwar views. (Emphasis mine) Similarly, no representative of a human rights or humanitarian organization appeared on the NewsHour during the study period.”

Published on Tuesday, October 19, 2010 by FAIR

$80,000 to Kill or Miss- Poof ... Gone

Here is a thought: How much common sense does it make to use a high-tech, high-priced piece of U.S. weaponry, a huge shoulder-fired rocket called Javelin, in Afghanistan? “Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.” (from Sebastian Junger’s book WAR, see below))

In the article Publish or Perish: Getting a Read on American War Nick Turse reviews writings on the current wars and compares them with the literature on the Vietnam war. He writes “… there is much to be learned from Junger’s in-print version of Americans-at-war. His blow-by-blow accounts of small unit combat actions, for instance, drive home the tremendous firepower American troops unleash on enemies often armed with little more than rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Page after page tallies up American technology and firepower: M-4 assault rifles (some with M-203 grenade launchers), Squad Automatic Weapons or SAWs, .50 caliber machine guns, M-240 machine guns, Mark-19 automatic grenade launchers, mortars, 155 mm artillery, surveillance drones, Apache attack helicopters, AC-130 Spectre gunships, A-10 Warthogs, F-15 and F-16 fighter-bombers, B-52 and B-1 bombers, all often brought to bear against boys who may be wielding nothing more than Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles -- a state of the art weapon when introduced. That, however, was in the 1890s.”

Check out the whole article at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/14-7 published by www.CommonDreams.org

With a fraction of the moneys spent on these deadly toys, how many jobs could we “grow”, how many hungry children could we feed, here and the world over, how many homeless people could we help? Too much horse sense, probably! And not really profitable.

There are Alternatives to War

Common Sense: Wars do not solve problems, they create more problems and more severe ones!

Michael Nagler, president of the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Berkeley, California, writes in today's Common Dreams News (go to http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/27-2). I want to draw your attention to the three points listed below.

"I encourage anyone who hasn’t already done so to familiarize him- or herself with the alternatives to war that fall into three broad categories: 1) living more lightly on the earth, since most wars today are fought over its diminishing resources; 2) diplomacy, mediation, and international institutions that can keep disputes from turning into wars, and 3) nonviolent mechanisms to deal with the wars that nonetheless break out, like the unarmed interventions just mentioned that are helping to reduce violence in trouble spots all over the world now. I recommend that we all learn about these things and talk about them with family, friends, and our congressmen or women. You may not get anything but raised eyebrows at first, but remember what Gandhi said about a real innovation: “First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you – and then you win.” Provided you have learned to fight nonviolently. That must be the subject of another article."