@patriot1: There is no argument individuality is quashed in the military IN THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR DUTIES, hence the scorn onto the Abu Graiab reporter. But individuality outside of gang activity or hate crime activity is not so constrained. When on liberty and especially with alcoholic disinhibition involved, individuality reasserts itself mightily.
@patriot1: Sorry, people in the military are people first and military members second. I worry about people who do not interact--we call them sociopaths and I don't want them in my military, thank you. "Social experiments" from integration of the armed forces at Truman's direction to elimination of DADT and soon fair and appropriate prosecution for crimes including rape all serve a single-minded military goal: to get the best contributions to the mission from each and every serving military member. Furthermore, a larger benefit accrues to society when an exemplar exists showing minorities do good things (think, Tuskegee Airmen), women make contributions and deserve respect and worlds do not explode when gays coexist with straights.
Sadly, the Bangladeshi collapse is but the latest in an ongoing saga of exploitation of one group by another which was most memorably foretold over 600 years ago in the Canterbury Tales:
"Radix malorum est cupiditas" (The root of evil is greed)
The list is long and includes such items as:
The Bangladeshi collapse
The child soldiers of Africa
Migrant farm labor ("The Harvest of Shame")
Slavery from 1700's to the present day
The Triangle Shirtwaist fire
Construction of the pyramids of Egypt
Whether done by a CEO, a warlord, an emperor or a pharaoh, the use of power for profit never comes out well.
The real issue is not the lamentation of yet another tragedy--there will always be more--but what we do about it individually and collectively. If we are stuck with production of goods through exploitation, how do we act? After gloating over a $10 shirt, do we send $1 to an effective NGO or a local food bank to lessen the time these workers might be at risk? Or do we just whistle in the dark?
Congress seems fixated on the concern the GTMO detainees will "return to the battlefield" but forgets the detention itself makes more terrorists more effectively than they could ever be if released save such clearly evil people as KSM.
Others still believe these detainees have some valuable secrets. Information is valuable when fresh and useless when old. Gee, they might be able if so inclined to tell us Bin Laden is in Tora Bora. True then, false now and clearly valueless.
It's past time to close the facility, release the chaff and move the wheat to one of the nameless prisons in the Federal system.
Before we ever go to war, we need to have a clear understanding of what victory would be. Our rationale for war in Iraq was manufactured and was itself a shape-shifter: secure oil (the first Pentagon term for the war was to have been Operation Iraqi Liberation until someone wrote out the short version, O-I-L), find WMD, regime change/remove Saddam, bring democracy to the people of the region, etc...
Iraq was and is a hodgepodge of tribal loyalties, created by the arbitrary lines drawn by a British surveyor in the early years of the last century. "Countries" were defined by lines, not people or their histories. Kurds were chopped up between Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, for example, creating now restive minorities in each country. The elusive stability of the country of Iraq was created by the installation of an autocrat, Saddam, whom everyone feared. We removed him all right, but unleashed the latent enmity between Shi'a and Sunni.
Listening to the punditocracy, it seems we have not learned from this lesson in history, even with a $3T price tag.
@joneses et al.: Forgetting for the purpose of discussion the large impact of caravans of heavy trucks tearing up the land, huge quantities of water used for the process and the resultant noise and air pollution at the wellheads (some of the most polluted air in the US is found at fracking sites in rural western states), the trouble with fracking is that no one knows what goes down the hole. Toluene and benzene have been used (both flammable and toxic). A truly unscrupulous operator could use the well as an opportunity to get money on the side for the dumping of PCBs, radionuclides, dioxins or whatever down the wells.
One thing I have learned is simple: if you think you can "throw something away" you are wrong. There is no "away" anymore. Everything is interconnected and sooner or later we will reap what we sow.
Finally, we may need more energy but even if we became hermits and went "off the grid" we would always need water. Water than burns or ignites or is suffused with radioactive elements is not good for human health.
In the course of my work (doctor), I have had to tell a family one of their own is dead or paralyzed or brain-dead and unlikely to ever recover, so I am no big fan of guns or what they do but I am in agreement with TQ (gasp!) about some of the trouble mixing mental illness, guns and physician disclosure of information to government.
First, if you know I might 'rat you out', you will not share information with me which might be essential for your care but which might trigger disclosure.
An even greater concern surrounds definitions. How sick is sick? Sadness affects us all from childhood on (Think: "nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I'm going to eat worms!"). If, TQ, you came to my office and said you were sad, would that be enough? How 'bout if you admitted slapping your wife around--would that do it? The line between normal if bad feelings and mental illness is fluid and fuzzy. Juvenal's warning applies: "Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" {But who shall guard the guards themselves?)
Our struggles about reporting are not new--when does corporal punishment become child abuse? On balance, I do believe the additional struggles we might have are worth anything which might reduce the terrible consequences eminating from the barrel of a gun.
@GlacierClipper: "Gun Control will never keep the guns from the criminals." Half credit. Gun Control will never keep the guns from ALL the criminals. Seat belts in cars, airbags and crash-resistant design will never prevent all auto deaths, but I am thankful we have them now.
@Fairmon: Sorry. There's no equivalency between succession of leaders in North Korea to our own. Compare your own words: "Daddy made him..." and "We took...". There's a chasm between one man choosing his successor and some 300 million of us choosing our President.
And, despite your desire for a president to have "worn a uniform, had a real job, worked on a budget": you know there are only two requirements to be president: 1. age 35 2. natural born citizen of the United States. Anyone who can convince 270 electors as chosen by their states' population will become president.
Military Justice
@patriot1: There is no argument individuality is quashed in the military IN THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR DUTIES, hence the scorn onto the Abu Graiab reporter. But individuality outside of gang activity or hate crime activity is not so constrained. When on liberty and especially with alcoholic disinhibition involved, individuality reasserts itself mightily.
Military Justice
@patriot1: Sorry, people in the military are people first and military members second. I worry about people who do not interact--we call them sociopaths and I don't want them in my military, thank you. "Social experiments" from integration of the armed forces at Truman's direction to elimination of DADT and soon fair and appropriate prosecution for crimes including rape all serve a single-minded military goal: to get the best contributions to the mission from each and every serving military member. Furthermore, a larger benefit accrues to society when an exemplar exists showing minorities do good things (think, Tuskegee Airmen), women make contributions and deserve respect and worlds do not explode when gays coexist with straights.
The Warning Label
Sadly, the Bangladeshi collapse is but the latest in an ongoing saga of exploitation of one group by another which was most memorably foretold over 600 years ago in the Canterbury Tales:
"Radix malorum est cupiditas" (The root of evil is greed)
The list is long and includes such items as:
The Bangladeshi collapse The child soldiers of Africa Migrant farm labor ("The Harvest of Shame") Slavery from 1700's to the present day The Triangle Shirtwaist fire Construction of the pyramids of Egypt
Whether done by a CEO, a warlord, an emperor or a pharaoh, the use of power for profit never comes out well.
The real issue is not the lamentation of yet another tragedy--there will always be more--but what we do about it individually and collectively. If we are stuck with production of goods through exploitation, how do we act? After gloating over a $10 shirt, do we send $1 to an effective NGO or a local food bank to lessen the time these workers might be at risk? Or do we just whistle in the dark?
The Detainee
Congress seems fixated on the concern the GTMO detainees will "return to the battlefield" but forgets the detention itself makes more terrorists more effectively than they could ever be if released save such clearly evil people as KSM.
Others still believe these detainees have some valuable secrets. Information is valuable when fresh and useless when old. Gee, they might be able if so inclined to tell us Bin Laden is in Tora Bora. True then, false now and clearly valueless.
It's past time to close the facility, release the chaff and move the wheat to one of the nameless prisons in the Federal system.
Marriage
Ok, the guns are safe. The children, not so much.
It's the laws that shape a civilization, not who has the biggest stick. The great Paul Scofield says it best: http://youtu.be/PDBiLT3LASk
The Crusade
@WWWTW: "latent enmity" only because Saddam's thumb suppressed the conflict between these two arms of Islam.
The Crusade
Before we ever go to war, we need to have a clear understanding of what victory would be. Our rationale for war in Iraq was manufactured and was itself a shape-shifter: secure oil (the first Pentagon term for the war was to have been Operation Iraqi Liberation until someone wrote out the short version, O-I-L), find WMD, regime change/remove Saddam, bring democracy to the people of the region, etc...
Iraq was and is a hodgepodge of tribal loyalties, created by the arbitrary lines drawn by a British surveyor in the early years of the last century. "Countries" were defined by lines, not people or their histories. Kurds were chopped up between Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, for example, creating now restive minorities in each country. The elusive stability of the country of Iraq was created by the installation of an autocrat, Saddam, whom everyone feared. We removed him all right, but unleashed the latent enmity between Shi'a and Sunni.
Listening to the punditocracy, it seems we have not learned from this lesson in history, even with a $3T price tag.
Fracking
@joneses et al.: Forgetting for the purpose of discussion the large impact of caravans of heavy trucks tearing up the land, huge quantities of water used for the process and the resultant noise and air pollution at the wellheads (some of the most polluted air in the US is found at fracking sites in rural western states), the trouble with fracking is that no one knows what goes down the hole. Toluene and benzene have been used (both flammable and toxic). A truly unscrupulous operator could use the well as an opportunity to get money on the side for the dumping of PCBs, radionuclides, dioxins or whatever down the wells.
One thing I have learned is simple: if you think you can "throw something away" you are wrong. There is no "away" anymore. Everything is interconnected and sooner or later we will reap what we sow.
Finally, we may need more energy but even if we became hermits and went "off the grid" we would always need water. Water than burns or ignites or is suffused with radioactive elements is not good for human health.
Obamaphobia
In the course of my work (doctor), I have had to tell a family one of their own is dead or paralyzed or brain-dead and unlikely to ever recover, so I am no big fan of guns or what they do but I am in agreement with TQ (gasp!) about some of the trouble mixing mental illness, guns and physician disclosure of information to government.
First, if you know I might 'rat you out', you will not share information with me which might be essential for your care but which might trigger disclosure.
An even greater concern surrounds definitions. How sick is sick? Sadness affects us all from childhood on (Think: "nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I'm going to eat worms!"). If, TQ, you came to my office and said you were sad, would that be enough? How 'bout if you admitted slapping your wife around--would that do it? The line between normal if bad feelings and mental illness is fluid and fuzzy. Juvenal's warning applies: "Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" {But who shall guard the guards themselves?)
Our struggles about reporting are not new--when does corporal punishment become child abuse? On balance, I do believe the additional struggles we might have are worth anything which might reduce the terrible consequences eminating from the barrel of a gun.
@GlacierClipper: "Gun Control will never keep the guns from the criminals." Half credit. Gun Control will never keep the guns from ALL the criminals. Seat belts in cars, airbags and crash-resistant design will never prevent all auto deaths, but I am thankful we have them now.
White House Tour
@Fairmon: Sorry. There's no equivalency between succession of leaders in North Korea to our own. Compare your own words: "Daddy made him..." and "We took...". There's a chasm between one man choosing his successor and some 300 million of us choosing our President.
And, despite your desire for a president to have "worn a uniform, had a real job, worked on a budget": you know there are only two requirements to be president: 1. age 35 2. natural born citizen of the United States. Anyone who can convince 270 electors as chosen by their states' population will become president.