Tannishblog

While our Great Democratic Empire is bankrupting itself buying munitions, plumbing the depths of corruption and exploring the permutations of profiteering, the European Space Agency is investing in humanity’s future. For a mere $140 Million, they designed and tested a new space drive in their tiny craft SMART-1, operated it for almost two years by remote, and finally impacted the craft into the surface of the moon to gain data on the mineral composition of a crater aptly named Lake of Excellence.

For the price of The War Against Terrorism (aka TWAT) America could have launched thousands of similar probes, hired an army of remote operators and invented a new industry. Doing so would advance scientific knowledge, scoured our solar system for resources and put to good use money that is otherwise wasted on destruction. It could bring in a new era of exploration, help design systems that could mine planets by remote control, thereby easing the strain on Earth’s diminishing stores.

But no. Our leaders are not so daring. They pretend to herald in a New American Century through failed military tactics of the last century while lining their stock portfolios with paper from the same defense contractors whom are grafting the government dole to benefit shareholders. Mass Murder for Immediate Gains v. Risky Expenditure for Future Profit.

Hmm…Is there such a word as Nationcide?

As reported in The Independent:

Another Miserable Milestone for Bush’s War

A miserable milestone was passed the other day. America’s (and Britain’s) disastrous war in Iraq has now lasted longer than the US involvement in the Second World War. Yes, this conflict has outlasted a war that ended with total victory over Nazi Germany. Hitler declared war on the US on 11 December 1941. Exactly 1,244 days later, on 7 May 1945, Germany surrendered. The US invaded Iraq on 19 March 2003, and this weekend it is 1,267 days later, with no end in sight.

Sticklers among you will have noted that the interval between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender on 2 September, 1945 was 1,364 days. But even that record will tumble at the start of December. And if you do measure Iraq against the longer American war with Japan, the contrast is even starker. Victory in the Pacific was even more conclusive than in Europe. It produced no post-war entanglement with the Soviets and no Berlin airlift. The Iraq war unfolded the other way round: Baghdad fell barely three weeks after the invasion. Since then, however, it’s been downhill all the way.

[…]

(I)f you start a war that lasts as long as the Second World War, you’d better have something to show for it. George Bush does not.

Truth hurts, don’t it?

It’s a beautiful morning - sunny, warm instead of hot, a bit hazy, quiet. Through the picture window I see some leaves edged in brown; I welcome the thought of Autumn. I grab a coffee and sit in my armchair, laptop ready, hearing the crickets in the forsythia bush outside the window.

Today’s news is warmed-over, almost like the world is holding it’s breath or sleeping in like my family is this morning. Either trying to catch a few more moments of blessed sleep or waiting for the next big story to hit. My bookmarks are a mess. I begin organizing them and stumble across a link I’ve not visited in a while: Baghdad Burning. One click and I’m in another world. I catch up on the last few post by Riverbend. I feel her despair, applaud her spirit, cheer her bravery. I’m grateful for the Internet as an uncensored conduit of information human’s need to hear,  pondering the irony of how tools of empirical Capitalism work to expose atrocities committed for the sake of greed and gain.

Words leap from the page:

(On the Lebannon war)
And the world wonders how ‘terrorists’ are created! A 15-year-old Lebanese girl lost five of her siblings and her parents and home in the Qana bombing… Ehud Olmert might as well kill her now because if he thinks she’s going to grow up with anything but hate in her heart towards him and everything he represents, then he’s delusional.

[…]

(On the Haditha rape-and-slaughter)
It’s like Baghdad is no longer one city, it’s a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It’s gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, "civil war… death… killing… bombing… rape…"

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don’t report rapes here, they avenge them. We’ve been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can’t believe their ‘heroes’ are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

In the news they’re estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes… Raise your heads high supporters of the ‘liberation’ - your troops have made you proud today. I don’t believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an ‘independent investigation’, ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn’t his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It’s been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can’t bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can’t bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can’t bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can’t bring myself to care because it’s difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they’ll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

Now, the sublime sunlight is strained. I get more coffee and glance at the newspaper open to an almost-finished crossword. The facing page celebrates a local theatre’s upcoming program of music, dance and comedy revues. It’s surreal. Am I on the same planet as Riverbend? Certainly mine is a different world. As I breath the welcome weekend breeze, resting up from another five-day episode of sweat, toil and backache that barely keeps the family fed, I read what others must live through so I can have the privilege of driving to work.

Oil fuels my world; oil is bought with blood. Therefore, oil is blood. We gather the blood of innocents and burn it for electricity, for logistics, for gasoline. Because of death, I can type on my computer, drive to the store and ogle the latest consumer gadgetry. My food is brought to me by blood-burning trucks; my home is cooled by generators fueled by blood; my comfort is assured by the blood of others.

The sun is not-so-bright, now. The haze outside a sign of pollution, not moisture. The weatherman says it might get up to 92 degrees today - the average temperature of fresh blood. Surreal.

The Plot sickens…

David Farber of interesting-people.org shares with the world another assessment of the implausibility of the airline terrorist plot. It seems Perry E. Metger has been studying his chemistry and share his insights with us ignoramuses who might be buying into the propaganda ministries fictions. As he bigins:

A disclaimer, I'm working entirely off of news reported by people who don't know the difference between soft drinks and nail polish remover, but the information I've seen has the taste of being real. As near as I can tell, it is claimed that the terrorists planned to make organic peroxides in situ on board an airplane and use them to destroy the plane.

This seems, at least given my initial examination of the idea, implausible.

He continues with a primer on basic chemistry as it pertains to the alleged liquid explosives, specifically how astronomically difficult it would be to produce inside a "jittery" airliner lav.

So, lets say you have your oxidizer mixture and now you are going to mix it with acetone. In a proper lab environment, that's not going to be *too* awful — your risk of dying horribly is significant but you could probably keep the whole thing reasonably under control — you can use dry ice to cool a bath to -78C, say, and do the reaction really slowly by adding the last reactant dropwise with an addition funnel. If you're mixing the stuff up in someone's bathtub, like the guys who bombed the London subways a year ago did, you can take some reasonable precautions to make sure that your reaction doesn't go wildly out of control, like using a lot of normal ice and being very, very, very careful and slow. You need to keep the stuff cool, and you need to be insanely meticulous, or you're going to be in a world of hurt.
So, we've covered in the lab and in the bathtub. On an airplane? On an airplane, the whole thing is ridiculous. You have nothing to cool the mixture with. You have nothing to control your mixing with. You can't take a day doing the work, either. You are probably locked in the tiny, shaking bathroom with very limited ventilation, and that isn' going to bode well for you living long enough to get your explosives manufactured. In short, it sounds, well, not like a very good idea.
If you choke from fumes, or if your explosives go off before you've got enough made to take out the airplane — say if you only have enough to shatter the mirror in the bathroom and spray yourself with one of the most evil oxidizers around — you aren't going to be famous as the martyr who killed hundreds of westerners. Your determination and willingness to die doesn't matter — you still need to get the job done.

His conclusion?

Anyway, from all of this, I conclude that either

1) The terrorists had a brilliant idea for how to combine oxidizer and a ketone or ether to make some sort of nasty organic peroxide explosive in situ that has escaped me so far. Perhaps that's true — I'm not omniscient and I have to confess that I've never tried making the stuff at all, let alone in an airplane bathroom.

2) The terrorists were smuggling on board pre-made organic peroxide explosives. Clearly, this is not a new threat at all — organic peroxide explosives have been used by terrorists for decades now. Smuggling them in a bottle is not an interesting new threat either — clearly if you can smuggle cocaine in a bottle you can smuggle acetone peroxide. I would hope we had means of looking for that already, though, see below for a comment on that.

3) The terrorists were phenomenally ill informed, or hadn't actually tried any of this out yet — perhaps what we are told was a "sophisticated plot" was a bunch of not very sophisticated people who had not gotten very far in testing their ideas out, or perhaps they were really really dumb and hadn't tried even a small scale experiment before going forward.

Finally, he can't help poke fun at all the Hollywood Hysterics involved in this bogus political stunt, by listing all the ways a reasonably smart person (himself, I presume) can think of to sabotage an in-flight movie. If it wasn't so serious a matter to commit pathological fraudulence of information for political gain, I would laugh.

All terror, all the time. Our News corporations are having a field day with the newest episode of the continuing drama of BushCo V. the World. Q: What do the War on Terror and the War on Drug have in common? A: Neither achieved what they intended. The moral: Beware the Law of Unintended Consequences.

One of the tenets of my life’s experience is this: "You can’t idiot-proof something. The idiots will always out smart you." To begin confiscating water bottles and baby formula on all flights is to try to idiot-proof airport security. The fact that we feel the need to ban liquids as a result of the latest developments of the failed "War on Terror" shows how the idiots have again won.

How far will we go? An article in Slate asks just that, as well as pointing out the obvious. Read the Liquid World. Envision, if you will, a world where cat scans, human x-rays, and MRI devices are required to enter an airport. Sacrifice the known dangers of gamma rays to insure the illusion of safety in the friendly skies. Frequent fliers earn Chemotherapy points. The contents of your bowels are posted as public information, deep inquiries about your orifices occur in unadorned rooms. Strip searches include penetration as standard procedure.

Naturally, Al-Qaida, boogeyman du jour, is being blamed. They don’t even have to take credit these days, it’s given freely. As the NY Times reports:

“It has all of the earmarks of an Al Qaeda plot,” said Mary Jo White, the former United States attorney whose office successfully investigated and prosecuted the so-called Bojinka plot to bring down airliners over the Pacific in 1995.

What exactly is an earmark? Perhaps that statement has all the earmarks of  an administration in terror months before a mid-term election? The real issue, probably, is more like this quote from the same article.

“The great problem is that Al Qaeda has moved far beyond being a terrorist organization to being almost a state of mind,” said Simon Reeve, author of a 1999 book on Osama bin Laden and his associates. “That’s terribly significant because it gives the movement a scope and longevity it didn’t have before 9/11.”

I cannot believe that Al Qaida is the only American-hating Muslim group capable of thinking diabolically. Contrary to the Redneck Agenda, Middle-Easterners have the same amount of gray cells as anyone else. The one thing the world should have learned from the Iraqi debacle is that murder is an art form in hues of red and brown.

Folly, however is a science.

I’ve been silent about Israel’s new war. Considering my quick condemnation of the Iraqi conflict, this silence is perhaps conspicuous. I’ve failed to speak up because I’m conflicted.

I hate war. Systemized aggression is the providence of the weak. The Path of Peace is one of resolve and courage, thus so few tread there. It’s too hard. But destruction is ridiculously easy; that’s why conflict is so commonplace.

On the other hand, how can one deal with the pathological collective neurosis that characterizes the Arab-Jew divide? As the saying goes: One cannot reason with a sick mind. If any militant group decides to lob missiles into any sovereign nation, how should the afflicted government react? Such actions represent mental illness either of individuals or of a group. The situation worsens when the aggressors compound their villainy by using the backyards of innocents to fire their munitions. Reason cannot prevail. Diplomacy likewise is insufficient.

Obviously, I side with the Israelis. Too, I’m being inconsistent with my core beliefs. All war is wrong, even this one, but I cannot help agreeing with Israel’s right to defend against such reckless cowardice. What they know that the Western media often forgets is that Hezbollah or Hamas cannot be dealt with any other way.

There’s something unsettling about a culture that values sand over blood. This applies to all Middle-eastern groups. Land has more value there than life. In that regard, both sides in the conflict are wrong. Yet I feel for the Israelis partly because of what I’ve seen them do to help the desert bloom, mostly because they don’t want to fight. Israel hates fighting. They begrudge being forever on guard, so when they do fight, they fight to win. In the hearts of the average Israeli, they pray this war will be the last. They’ve been praying for this a long time.

Knowing this, having seen and heard how such intolerance without can damage a nation and its people within, I nod my head sadly and watch the unforgivable take place. Both sides are wrong, but only one side has a choice in the matter. That’s why I side with Israel despite my hatred of war - because they don’t want to fight. And that makes them more right than the other guys.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed concern yesterday that the Israel-Lebanon conflict will become "a major humanitarian disaster." Talk about stating the obvious!

What makes this war different from any other? I don’t recall him saying this about the US forces in Iraq, even though America all but wiped its ass with the Geneva Conventions. Over 100,000 Iraqi citizens die and not a peep out of him. Did he say the same when Russia was in Chechnia? Or when anyone was in Afghanistan?

All war is a "humanitarian disaster." All. Not some wars and not others, not some wars more than others. All.

Unless war itself is outlawed in the human consciousness, then we are all in grave danger. With more nations obtaining the Pandora’s Box that is atomic weaponry (thanks again, USA,) all mankind is threatened. Now that the box is open, we need to rethink the tried-and-true method of gun-barrel diplomacy. Until we do, the future has only one resolution: mutual annihilation.

As Albert Einstein noted: "If we don’t eliminate war, war will eliminate us."

With all the warfare happening today, I find an appropriate quote from the Tao Teh Ching:

In the army, the Lieutenant Commander stands on the left.
While the Commander-in-Chief stands on the right.
This means that war is treated in a par with a funeral service.
Because many people have been killed, it is only right that the survivors should mourn for them.
Hence, even a victory is a funeral.

There is nothing in warfare to gladden the heart. All eventualities express the frailty and the limitations of humanity. Whatever God you may worship, war is a failure of faith. In our current state of technological warfare, too easily can the situation get our of hand. While many bemoan the deaths of civilians caught in the crossfire, any whom ignore the violent among us is as culpable as if she pulled the trigger herself.

In light of our current focus on Israel and Lebanon (and our ignoring Iraq and Afghanistan), I bring to you, via my weekly email from Dzogchen.org , a Buddhist perspective on war. This may explain why I'm so "far-left" on the issue, or why there's never been a war to enforce or to indoctrinate people into Buddhism.

……. At the end of the talk someone from the audience
asked the Dalai Lama,
"Why didn't you fight back against the Chinese?"
The Dalai Lama looked down,
swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us
and said with a gentle smile,
"Well, war is obsolete, you know."
Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said,
"Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back…
but the heart, the heart would never understand.
Then you would be divided in yourself,
the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you."

 How refreshing!

Blogging on politics is playing hell with my Buddhist practice. I feel myself regressing into the angry man I want to overcome. sometimes, during my meditations, my thoughts latch into a point my subconscious brings to fore, and I try to phrase it into a coherent post. Then I realize what is happening, and I return to my breath, chagrinned at myself.

In the context of blogging, it is impossible to hold a conversation. Bloggers can only trade virtual punches through their posts, with a time lapse while the sparring partner takes aim. Such sparring is often without virtue. Anonymity make people tactless, bold and sometimes stupid. When I suffer from such ailments, I do so because I slip into familiar patterns I know are dangerous. I do so because I forget the Dharma.

I find reading the news causes frustration that turns into anger which, when the steam runs out, gives way to despair. I believe this is common. Much anger and disparagement is evidence in Blogopolis. I have a familiarity with anger and despair. They’re old friends. One on each shoulder, they’re sometimes mistaken for chips, sometimes for boulders. The very act of scrounging for content, tempting my muse, is my downfall.

There’s a saying in the Dharma which I’ve always liked: "Will it matter in one hundred years?" If the answer is "no," as it likely is, then the reasoning is that it doesn’t matter now. This works fine on a person scale, but with the confluence of crises happening in the world, I find it hard to answer "no" to that question. I cannot help but believe that what happens now will affect the next hundred years dramatically.

It’s hard to see the nation one lives in become an empirical war machine. People don’t want that. But in America, the average person has no say. Gone is the illusion of the power of individual vote. Gone is the fallacy of rule of the people.Gone is any say in the matter at all. We are told lies, spoon-fed fear, and condemned as traitors if we dare question. Karl Marx, Adolph Hitler, and George Orwell are all laughing in glee.

Humanity must turn away from this path. Between war, disease, hunger, pollution, religious conflicts, and the widening imbalance of wealth, the road before us is dark, indeed. I’ve heard much lately how my views are unrealistic or naive. I keep hearing the same thing from dissenters - that the world "doesn’t work that way."  These otherwise intelligent people miss how that kind of thinking is part of the problem, how by doing nothing to change the status quo they are enabling mankind to escalate atrocities. Acceptance of what many call "human nature" is a failure to understand that humanity must rise above the base instincts that we live under: murder; hatred; greed. Responding to our faults by reciprocating them is not the answer to our global issues.

To me this is obvious, to many it is not. As a result I despair, then I get angry, then frustrated at myself for internalizing such anxiety. The cycle repeats. As there seems no end to outward strife, there is also no solace from inward strife. The extremes are not reconcilable.

 I am sometimes paralyzed between seeking inner peace and the outer manifestations of conflict I read about daily. While I know that humans are intrinsically good beings, I cringe at what is going on in the world. Even as people profess to intimate knowledge of a loving God, they fire missiles at each other. While the affluent, educated minority of the world have an unprecedented technological power to aid the poor, feed the hungry, and heal the sick, instead they control government to find ways to hoard their wealth. Such is the dichotomy of our age.

I struggle to find peace within when there is none to be found without.This blog exacerbates my distress. It’s tempting to quit Tannishblog, re-bury my head as I did for many years, pretend nothing’s wrong and quietly age. Instead I speak out, try to turn a few minds, to enlighten however feebly, thereby doing what little I can to aid others to question the madness. If people cannot overcome our penchant for self-inflicted injury, then we are doomed. Until that is determined I will continue to offer an alternative. And you thought all we Buddhists did was navel-gazing…