Twitter This Commentary In The News: Travus has the news day off, but there IS commentary. Yours truly, being the newsbuffalo.. umn... 'hound' he is, has assembled some recent new that you may need to know, but have not read... First, in light of the commentary... Let it be known:
In full, with a history, at the Industrial Workers of the World website: "Not Supposed To..." times two - One of the primary rules of Journalism... "The journalist IS "NOT supposed to" become part of the story..." has been broken by Associated Press, apparently not on purpose, but because they 'violated' a 'rule' of American social mores... Associated Press has published a picture of a dying US Marine, Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard.
Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard is tended to by fellow U.S. Marines in Afghanistan. Photograph: Julie Jacobson/AP Astonishing! If you thought the pictures of soldier's caskets coming into Dover AFB raised a shitstorm, you ain't seen nuthin'. It IS notable that it took a FEMALE photojournalist to push this limit. What's ALSO notable is that Photobucket violated my TOS over this picture, NOT due to AP's insistence, but due to it's graphic nature, despite MANY pictures of dead and dying Iraqis and other third world folk in my album, including THIS gruesome and heartbreaking photo: It's nice to know that PhotoBucket.com cares more about American soldiers and their privacy-in-their-dying-moments than about an INNOCENT BLOOD-SPATTERED IRAQI CHILD SCREAMING IN GRIEF OVER THE MURDER BY US SOLDIERS OF HER FAMILY WHILE SHE WAS SITTING NEXT TO THEM IN THE FAMILY CAR. Censorship is NOT Dead in America. The Guardian UK put it like this:

It is a graphic image of the harsh realities of war: the fatally wounded young marine lying crumpled in the mud, his vulnerable face turned to the camera. And it is one the US defence secretary would rather you did not see. Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard, pictured being tended by comrades in southern Afghanistan, died of his injuries soon after. Now the release of this record of the 21-year-old's last moments has divided America, prompting furious debate over the sanitisation of war at a critical time for the military offensive. [In Full]

Whereas Tom Ricks, EX-Washington Post War Reporter, now ensconced as a pundit for CNAS (Neo-Liberal Think Tank) affiliated Foreign Policy magazine Headlined it this way: "The dying marine: What the hell was the AP thinking?" Yours truly responded to Mr. Ricks, as have others...

I'm just surprised... stunned really, that it made it to copy at all in the current milieu of 'embedded' reporting and "'sanitized' for the discerning media consumer who doesn't want their conscience bothered" war reporting by the majors. . . . If the Pentagon, and your peers at CNAS want to continue these worthless wars Tom... Better stop the lying, the dissuasion from the belief that we're not vulnerable to the mayhem and non-culpable for it.. and hiding our deaths (incl the mundane, such as the returning caskets @ Dover AFB) in these wars IS a particularly creepy, Big-Brotherish, semantically corrupt, way to lie to the citizens of the country. I feel for this soldier and his family, but "War Is Hell", whether one wins OR loses, as a nation, and as an individual human. Condolences from AP is in order... Maybe they should MAKE SURE that the soldier's family gets every single benefit due them, because the Pentagon sure won't. But they DO NOT owe an apology. The last so many presidential administrations INCLUDING the current regime owe his family that. . . . ([Should we] Publish this picture...) To a nation full of children raised on video game and fantasy movie violence? Whose parents who often don't let those children out of their sight to the age of majority A nation who's media panders them and tells them they NEED the trinkets sold them (and often produced by what amounts to 3rd world slave labor)at behaviour controlled shopping malls where they lose the ability to socialize or empathize with anyone besides people just like them (consumers of products we destroy countries like Afghanistan to obtain the extractive resources for..) YES! Absolutely. [Join the discussion, or just read the opinions @ Tom Rick's Blog, The Best Defense]

The bright side of economic depressions... Government lobbyists 'tank' along with the rest of America's workers: Lobbyists Feel the Pinch As Downturn Hits "K Street" The Social Costs Of Homelessness On America's Future: "Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools"... There are "...more than one million students without stable housing" If you have been paying attention it becomes obvious the "Drug War" IS "Class War": An exhaustive analysis by someone with the perfect CV for the job, Anonymous @ Tremble The Devil (Ex-DoD Analyst):

Anonymous received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, where he studied Comparative Middle Eastern Government under some of the university’s most renowned professors and minored in Arabic He was employed by the Department of Defense for five-years, and worked in some of the DoD's most sensitive and salient missions. He finished his career in Counterterrorism, where he produced analysis on some of the most ruthless and well-trained terrorists in the world. He left to write Tremble the Devil, to help every American understand the true face of terrorism.

September 03, 2009 how the war on drugs is a war on class As our financial crisis deepens and the schisms between the haves and the have-nots continue to open, American drug laws are beginning to gather an increasingly harsh spotlight. But so what, it's not like the War on Drugs has done anything to increase the growing level of economic disparity in America... does it? A lot happened in 1973. It was a few years after Nixon slammed the gold window shut, the waning hours of a decapitated Civil Rights movement, when the kindling of an energy crisis was beginning to pile up, and the year that marks our disentanglement from Vietnam. But it also marks the year the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed, and the precise year that the income gap between black and white begins to widen back out, instead of closing - as it had been up until that year. Is that just a coincidence, or is there demonstrable cause-and-effect at work? Drug laws in America, after all, "have originally been based on racism... all of these laws are based on the belief that there is a class in society that can control themselves, and there is a class in society which cannot."1 The popularly cited motivation for the War on Drugs is that it was a response to the growing numbers of military serviceman who were getting hooked on heroin and other narcotics while serving in the Vietnam War. Although that was a troublesome issue, when you know the history of all past American drugs laws it quickly becomes apparent that there's no way in hell that was the only impetus behind this wave of anti-drug legislation, and that Nixon was using soldiers' addiction as opportunistic displacement. Following the Civil War the earliest anti-drug laws were passed in some states, banning the consumption of alcohol. But not, of course, for everyone. Whites could drink as much as they pleased - as well as use opiates and cocaine, but if you were a minority in much of antebellum America you were prohibited from imbibing or using any drug at all. At the time it was a widely held belief in American politics that some races, bless their brown souls, simply couldn't control themselves. Furthering the codification of this perception, in 1901 Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded a law in the U.S. Senate banning the sale of liquor and now opiates as well to all "uncivilized races." In this case, "uncivilized" was synonymous with "dark."... [In Full @ Tremble The Devil]

And finally, because all the kiddies are returning to school and the parents of college students begin to feel that 'empty nest'... "Twitter... Facebook... Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids". Below the fold... In the "Notes:". [After the commentary, from DailyMotion and Da Buffalo's personal collection. Something old (Phil Ochs, Joe Hill, from 1968), something new, something 'Rocker' (Joe Grushecky & The House Rockers, 'American Babylon'), Something 'Blue' (Todd Snider & The Nervous Wrecks, 'This Land Is OUR Land'), courtesy of the respective artists and DailyMotion.] -30-
Creative Commons Copyright Courtesy of Cabale News Service, KPIG Radio, and KVMR Radio. Listen to KPIG, Listen to KVMR Recorded & transcribed by The Buffalo Amongst Wolves @ Razed By Wolves

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews