How can we stand to live in a country where this exchange is shown live on tv and nobody comments? REPORTER: [I]n Marja there are reports -- credible reports -- of intimidation and even beheading of local people who work with your forces. Is that your intelligence? And if so, does it worry you? GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah. It absolutely is things that we see. But it's absolutely predictable.

I'm sorry. If it is predictable that people who work with you are going to have their heads sliced off, STOP FUCKING DOING THAT KIND OF WORK. After all, the work you are doing consists primarily of BLOWING other people's heads off.

STOP IT.

NOW.

It's not your country. You're not welcome there. People who try to help you are seen as enemies of their country. They get their fucking heads cut off. And your puppet president thanks you on their behalf.

STOP IT.

NOW.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Black smoke billows from burning tires in the streets, creating small volcanoes fed by angry Red Shirt protesters armed with Molotov cocktails, slingshots and fireworks against trained snipers and inexperienced troops.

Survival amid Bangkok's worsening chaos and violence is making many people increasingly nervous, as more Reds and other civilians are shot and fires blaze.

A flaming barricade of tires spread to a nearby convenience store on Sunday (May 16) along Rama 4 Road, burning it to charred wreckage despite efforts by Reds and residents to douse the fire.

Many people fear hard-line protesters might intentionally set luxury hotels, malls, condominiums and offices ablaze if the army attacks the Reds' central rally site at Ratchaprasong intersection, equivalent to New York's Times Square.

Those concerns, coupled with the danger widespread civilian casualties, has kept security forces from storming the Reds' heavily barricaded Ratchaprasong stronghold, preferring to surround its outer streets and try to starve protesters into submission.

Money is power. Each of us has it to varying degrees. Our challenge is to use our spending to advance worthy goals. Right now we see economic power being used against the state of Arizona because of the awful legislation recently passed that makes it all too easy for police there to seek proof of citizenship from virtually anyone they choose. Many groups and government entities have already cancelled conferences and other activities in Arizona, sending state and business leaders into a frizzy. They deserve to suffer as do the vast majority of Arizona citizens that supported the legislation. Every American that professes love and respect for the Constitution should avoid spending their tourism and other kinds of spending in Arizona.

This is what happens sometimes when you play God:

“Birds dropped from the air. The sky rained mud. And, as men from the rig struggled to save themselves from the aftermath of (the) explosion . . . the Gulf of Mexico itself caught on fire.”

The Washington Post, covering a federal inquiry into the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, summarized the scene, described by witnesses on a nearby supply ship, as “almost Biblical” — which is sort of a comic-book expression these days, but conjures up a moment of superstitious awe that, God knows, seems appropriate. This is love of nature stood on its head: nature as (wow!) spectacle. What a symbol for the profound alienation of our times.

So, we elected a president who promised a withdrawal from Iraq that he, or the generals who tell him what to do, is now further delaying. And, of course, the timetable he's now delaying was already a far cry from what he had promised as a candidate.

What are we to think? That may be sad news, but what could we have done differently? Surely it would have been worse to elect a president who did not promise to withdraw, right?

But there's a broader framework for this withdrawal or lack thereof, namely the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement), the unconstitutional treaty that Bush and Maliki drew up without consulting the U.S. Senate. I was reminded of this on Tuesday when Obama and Karzai talked about a forthcoming document from the two of them and repeatedly expressed their eternal devotion to a long occupation.

When the Soviets concluded their pull out from Afghanistan in February 1989, the United States government abruptly lost interest in the country. A devastated economic infrastructure, entrenched poverty, deep-rooted factionalism and lack of international aid caused the country to descend into complete chaos. Internal violence also worsened, but it was no longer an American concern. All that mattered was that the Cold War rival had been defeated. Mission accomplished.

Afghanistan remains the starkest illustration of how poor countries are used, then betrayed when their usefulness runs out. But Afghanistan is not an exception; US relations with many other countries, including Pakistan, Somalia and the Palestinian Authority remain hostage to this very model.

Historians living within their own nations develop within the mythology peculiar to their nation, in which "various spheres of memory coalesced into an imagined universe representing the past." The historian is a combination of his own personal experiences and the larger societal "instilled memories." Recognizing that, Shlomo Sand very capably steps away from the created mythology of Israel, of the national myth of the wandering people for two thousand years before finding home again, in a land that belonged only to that people even though others had lived there during the same two thousand years. The Invention of the Jewish People is his groundbreaking historical study of the nature of the Jewish "nation" and its created mythologies.

As you read this, the life of our bodies, nation and planet is being blown out a corporate hole in the Gulf of Mexico and into a Dead Zone of no return.

The apocalyptic gusher of oily poison pouring into the waters that give us life can only be viewed---FELT---by each and every one of us as an on-going death by a thousand cuts with no end in sight.

Yet our government---allegedly the embodiment of our collective will to survive---has done NOTHING of significance to fight this mass murder.

As it did while New Orleans drowned downstream from a willfully neglected levee system, our most potentially effective counter-force dithers on the other side of the world, in the wrong Gulf.

We squander our treasure on the largest conglomeration of people and weapons the world has ever seen. It's bloated with hardware designed specifically to destroy and kill. Hundreds of thousands of Americans sit on our dime in more than a hundred countries, rotting in the outposts of a bygone empire.

Why aren't they in the Gulf of Mexico, fighting for our truest "national security"?

Isn’t it time to call what Congress will soon vote on by its right name: war escalation funding?
Early in 2009, President Barack Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan with 21,000 "combat" troops, 13,000 "support" troops, and at least 5,000 mercenaries, without any serious debate in Congress or the corporate media. The President sent the first 17,000 troops prior to developing any plan for Afghanistan, leaving the impression that escalation was, somehow, an end in itself. Certainly it didn't accomplish anything else, a conclusion evident in downbeat reports on the Afghan war situation issued this month by both the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon.

So it seemed like progress for our representative government when, last fall, the media began to engage in a debate over whether further escalation in Afghanistan made sense. Granted, this was largely a public debate between the commander-in-chief and his generals (who should probably have been punished with removal from office for insubordinate behavior), but members of Congress at least popped up in cameo roles.

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