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From Grandfather’s Diary: WWII, Ulysses, and Proust

31 Jul

This is how things look and feel when the world is falling apart. In this case the falling apart was the run up to World War II and into the War. Not so different from now, is it? Life goes on. But for how long?

My paternal grandfather, Axel Benzon, was a Dane. He and his wife, Louise, immigrated to America early in the 20th Century. He was educated as an engineer and knew Greek sufficiently well that he wrote poetry in Greek. He ended his professional career as chief engineer, I believe, of the main US Post Office in Manhattan.

And he kept a diary, the pages of which are generically entitled: “Leaves from my diary.” It’s not a handwritten affair, kept in one of those blank books one can buy at a stationary store. It’s typed on ordinary 8.5 by 11 paper. I’ve got a photocopy of much or most of it, but, judging by his index, not all.

Here’s the opening paragraphs from the entry for 14 April 1940:

Sunday and cloudy with occasionally a little snow-a good day to remain indoors and listen to the war news from Europe. These news are coming in frequently but are most confusing and it is difficult from the british and german dispatches to a form a true picture about the situation in all parts of Norway.

The Danish goose is cooked – there the germans are in possession of all parts and are now fortifying points of vantage, especially the northernmost part of Jutland from where they can dominate a great port of Skagerak and Kartegat.

The invasion of Norway was a masterstroke, no matter how it turns out. It gave evidence of the usual german thoroughness and precision and coupled with the fact that the german navy is so much inferior to that of the English it has been most successful and must have taken the English by surprise.

As you can imagine, his reflections are much occupied by the war. But not entirely so. For example, he also talks of his fondness for the game of golf and playing it on public courses in New York City—he lived in Jackson Heights at the time. I rather imagine that THAT land has long since been given over to building of one sort or another. In fact, at one point he mentions exactly that. Continue reading →

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Whales Show Signs of Coping With Man-Made Noise Underwater – NYTimes.com

17 Jul

Have we no shame?

Scientists have long known that man-made, underwater noises — from engines, sonars, weapons testing, and such industrial tools as air guns used in oil and gas exploration — are deafening whales and other sea mammals. The Navy estimates that loud booms from just its underwater listening devices, mainly sonar, result in temporary or permanent hearing loss for more than a quarter-million sea creatures every year, a number that is rising.

Now, scientists have discovered that whales can decrease the sensitivity of their hearing to protect their ears from loud noise. Humans tend to do this with index fingers; scientists haven’t pinpointed how whales do it, but they have seen the first evidence of the behavior.

“It’s equivalent to plugging your ears when a jet flies over,” said Paul E. Nachtigall, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii who led the discovery team. “It’s like a volume control.”…

The noise threat arises because of the basic properties of seawater. Typically, light can travel for hundreds of feet through ocean water before diminishing to nothingness. But sound can travel for hundreds of miles.

The world’s oceans have been getting noisier as companies and governments expand their undersea activities. Researchers have linked the growing racket to deafness, tissue damage, mass strandings and disorientation in creatures that rely on hearing to navigate, find food and care for their young

via Whales Show Signs of Coping With Man-Made Noise Underwater – NYTimes.com.

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War is Betrayal: The 1% lures the 99% into doing the fighting

16 Jul

The poor embrace the military because every other cul-de-sac in their lives breaks their spirit and their dignity. Pick up Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. Read Henry IV. Turn to the Iliad. The allure of combat is a trap, a ploy, an old, dirty game of deception in which the powerful, who do not go to war, promise a mirage to those who do.

I saw this in my own family. At the age of ten I was given a scholarship to a top New England boarding school. I spent my adolescence in the schizophrenic embrace of the wealthy, on the playing fields and in the dorms and classrooms that condition boys and girls for privilege, and came back to my working-class relations in the depressed former mill towns in Maine. I traveled between two universes: one where everyone got chance after chance after chance, where connections and money and influence almost guaranteed that you would not fail; the other where no one ever got a second try. I learned at an early age that when the poor fall no one picks them up, while the rich stumble and trip their way to the top.

Those I knew in prep school did not seek out the military and were not sought by it. But in the impoverished enclaves of central Maine, where I had relatives living in trailers, nearly everyone was a veteran.

When soldiers return home: Continue reading →

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Let’s Draft Our Kids – NYTimes.com

11 Jul

An interesting proposal. But I’d like it better if it was coupled with a commitment to NO MORE WAR.

A revived draft, including both males and females, should include three options for new conscripts coming out of high school. Some could choose 18 months of military service with low pay but excellent post-service benefits, including free college tuition. These conscripts would not be deployed but could perform tasks currently outsourced at great cost to the Pentagon: paperwork, painting barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around, and generally doing lower-skills tasks so professional soldiers don’t have to. If they want to stay, they could move into the professional force and receive weapons training, higher pay and better benefits.

That is, the fighting would be done by those who volunteer to do it.

Those who don’t want to serve in the army could perform civilian national service for a slightly longer period and equally low pay — teaching in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, or aiding the elderly. After two years, they would receive similar benefits like tuition aid.

And libertarians who object to a draft could opt out. Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.

via Let’s Draft Our Kids – NYTimes.com.

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Jill Stein Needs Your Help, Running Green, Running for Peace

26 Jun

URGENT!  PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY!

FROM: David Swanson, Medea Benjamin, Leah Bolger, Bruce Gagnon, Chris Hedges, George Martin and Kevin Zeese

Dear Friends in the Peace Movement,

We can’t afford to let this opportunity slip by. By taking action over the next five days the peace community has a chance to inject a compelling and courageous peace advocate into the 2012 presidential campaign, to have a voice in the national debate over war, militarism, and military spending.

You know what is going to happen if we leave this election up to the two major party candidates. President Obama will defend his troop surges, his excessive Pentagon budgets, his preparations for war with Iran,  his escalation of the drone wars, his crackdowns on whistleblowers, his indefinite detention policy, and his new role as manager of the White House assassination list. Mitt Romney will not question these policies, but will promise to pursue them with even more enthusiasm. In debates and interviews, the American people will have the Big Lie drilled into their consciousness: that our nation must accept escalating military engagement and must visit worldwide violence against all who defy the U.S. government. Continue reading →

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New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims – 9/11 – Salon.com

20 Jun

Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

via New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims – 9/11 – Salon.com.

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Drone Warfare…Medea Benjamin’s new book reviewed by Lynn Feinerman | Tikkun Magazine

18 Jun

Illuminating the pivotal reason why her articulate book is so very timely, and so very much needed, she informs us that drones themselves are not silent like the press. They are not voiceless. They have a vocal advocacy group in Congress: The Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus. Yes, these machines have their own Congressional caucus!

“It seems that, like corporations, robots are people too…” quips Medea Benjamin. That quip cuts deeply, to the underlying reality of our nation: Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned us about it. He warned us back in the ’50′s that the US was not disarming after World War II. We chose instead to militarize in order to jump start a lagging post-war economy, sucking our taxes into obscene military budgets, with rampant corporate profiteering from “endless war” manufacture, and with a Congress and Executive branch going right along with the program.

The US is hooked on war. Its so-called “economy” is so tied into the vicious cycle of ravaging the world for oil, feeding the war machine with that oil and our taxes, then going out to ravage again for oil, that the problems of any number of innocent civilians it harms don’t really amount to a hill of beans in most media …as Bogart said in CASABLANCA.

via Drone Warfare…Medea Benjamin’s new book reviewed by Lynn Feinerman | Tikkun Magazine.

Too Much Power for a President – NYTimes.com

15 Jun

The Times article points out, however, that the Defense Department is currently killing suspects in Yemen without knowing their names, using criteria that have never been made public. The administration is counting all military-age males killed by drone fire as combatants without knowing that for certain, assuming they are up to no good if they are in the area. That has allowed Mr. Brennan to claim an extraordinarily low civilian death rate that smells more of expediency than morality.

via Too Much Power for a President – NYTimes.com.

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International – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Kill List – The Atlantic

31 May

The US Presidency is governed by a logic that swallows Presidents and spits them out. We are becoming the rogue nation we fear in other states.

The Obama administration considers any military-age male in the vicinity of a bombing to  be a combatant. That is an amazing standard that shares an ugly synergy with the sort of broad-swath logic that we see employed in Stop and Frisk,  with NYPD national spy network, with the killer of Trayvon Martin.

Policy is informed by the morality of a country. I think the repercussions of this unending era of death by silver bird will be profound.

via International – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Kill List – The Atlantic.

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International – Robert Wright – Do Obama’s Drone Strikes Imperil America? – The Atlantic

31 May

Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence until May of 2010, gave the Times a simple analysis of Obama’s penchant for drone strikes: “It is the politically advantageous thing to do–low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

Tuesday night’s Frontline episode on Al Qaeda in Yemen didn’t add much substance to the Times-Post analysis, but it lent a visual dimension, showing us the craters left by lethal drones and the al Qaeda forces who are energized and expanded by the strikes. ‘We’re at war with America and it’s allies,” says an al Qaeda footsoldier.

via International – Robert Wright – Do Obama’s Drone Strikes Imperil America? – The Atlantic.

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