Op-Ed
I lived in Iraq during the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing. On April 1st, about two weeks into the aerial bombardment, a medical doctor who was one of my fellow peace team members urged me to go with her to the Al Kindi Hospital in Baghdad, where she knew she could be of some help. With no medical training, I tried to be unobtrusive, as families raced into the hospital carrying wounded loved ones. At one point, a woman sitting next to me began to weep uncontrollably. “How I tell him?” she asked, in broken English. “What I say?” She was Jamela Abbas, the aunt of a young man, named Ali. Early in the morning on March 31st, U.S. war planes had fired on her family home, while she alone of all her family was outside. Jamela wept as she searched for words to tell Ali that surgeons had amputated both of his badly damaged arms, close to his shoulders. What’s more, she would have to tell him that she was now his sole surviving relative.
David Swanson
Natural disasters and mass shootings, like the ones last Monday make me sad. Certainly the loss of life and reasonless destruction involved are always horrible, and I say my prayers/pour one out as best as any concerned citizen can. But there's another, less unsavory reason, that they give me a case of the feels. Upon first reaction, they tend to mess up all of my great perfect-in-theory anarchist ideas and the inherent oppressive nature of the police and military.
Police brutality is a problem. The militarization of the police is a problem. Our surveillance state is a problem. A country on a permanent war footing is a problem, and the problems are a direct result of what we understand the function of a state or of a government to be.
Dear Lady Monster,
I'm curious why my girlfriend will suddenly pee on me sometimes during sex. I'll either be going down on her or having sex or masturbating her and then all this pee comes out and everything gets wet. She's not that freaked out by it cause it happens to her all the time. She claims it's not pee. It doesn't smell like pee either. What is it?
Signed,
Oh My Gush!
Dear OMG,
It is not pee. It is female ejaculation.
The anatomy of a woman's vaginal canal is an extraordinary landscape, filled with nerves, ducts and spongy tissue. This phenomenal architectural network becomes engorged when aroused, like a penis becomes engorged with blood. Some of that network also fills with fluid from the Skene's glands. It is an anatomical feature in every woman.
The urethral sponge is where the G-Spot is located. It can be felt through the vaginal wall, as a harder texture. The location is considered mysterious because it is not stationary. It can shift positions, expand and contract.
2. "It took the awful carnage of two world wars to shift our thinking." Actually, it took one. The second resulted in a half-step backwards in "our thinking." The Kellogg-Briand Pact banned all war. The U.N. Charter re-legalized wars purporting to be either defensive or U.N.-authorized.
3. "[P]eople are being lifted out of poverty," Obama said, crediting actions by himself and others in response to the economic crash of five years ago. But downward global trends in poverty are steady and long pre-date Obama's entry into politics. And such a trend does not exist in the U.S.
He combined it with work — a staff meeting, planning for the multiracial Poor People’s March, where we made plans to occupy the National Mall. He spoke to us of the need to march to demand an end to the War in Vietnam and to push for a full commitment to the War on Poverty.
This week — four-and-a-half decades later — the U.S. Census Bureau reported that “the nation’s official poverty rate in 2012 was 15.0 percent, which represents 46.5 million people living at or below the poverty line.” That’s up from 46.2 million in 2011, and translates to a poverty rate of 15 percent — one out of every seven Americans. The Census Bureau says that number includes about 16 million children and almost 4 million seniors. Is anybody listening?
Thank you to Elizabeth Barger and the Nashville Peace and Justice Center and to all of you, and happy International Day of Peace!
From a certain angle it doesn't look like a happy day of peace. The U.S. government is engaged in a major war in Afghanistan, dramatically escalated by the current U.S. president, who has been bizarrely given credit for ending it for so long now that a lot of people imagine it is ended.
Reader Question:
What is Ecosexuality?
Thank you reader for your question. I would like to introduce you to my friends, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, the founders of the Ecosexual movement.
“We're changing the metaphor from 'Earth as Mother' to 'Earth as Lover'”
Elizabeth Stephens, Artist, Ecosexual, Professor
“We aim to make the environmental movement more sexy, fun and diverse.”
Annie Sprinkle, PhD, Artist, Ecosexual, Sexologist
On May 17, 2008 I attended Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens' Green Wedding To The Earth, performed outdoors on the University of Santa Cruz campus.
I-71 really doesn't seem like a green line. Even with the new sound barriers, it's as pastoral a tank-moving thoroughfare as there could be in a major metropolitan city. I certainly don't ever remember going through any checkpoints as a kid, though I do remember never being able to play with my friends because they lived on the “other” side.
The particular nature of Columbus's segregation is something that I had always intuited but never consciously realized, until I saw the census map released by a research center from the University of Virginia a couple of weeks ago. The map shows a few things, such as how much more densely populated the “W” side of the Mississippi is as opposed to the “K” side, but its main goal is to graphically illustrate the nature of American segregation, blue dots for white people, red dots for Asians, orange dots for Hispanic, gray dots for “other” and green dots for black.
(see the map at: http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html)
The United States is not now bombing Syria.
Let’s savor that again: for the moment at least, the United States is not now bombing Syria.
That alone qualifies as an epic, unprecedented victory for the SuperPower of Peace, the global movement to end war, win social justice and somehow salvage our ecological survival.
Will it mark a permanent turning point?
That a treaty has been signed to rid the Assad regime of its chemical weapons is icing on the cake, however thin it proves to be. We don’t know if it will work. We don’t know if the restraint from bombing will hold.
But in a world that bristles with atomic weapons, where the rich get ever richer at the expense of the rest of us, and where stricken Japanese reactors along with 400 more worldwide threaten the survival of our global ecology, we must count any victory for peace---even if potentially fleeting---as a huge one.
Let’s do some history.
In last week’s cover story, Bob Fitrakis described the “command and control” nature of Columbus’s all At-Large City Council structure that came from the great industrialists of America in the 1890s – 1920’s. (“We want to make car, you screw bolt.”)
The article stated that Columbus and Seattle are the only two remaining At Large councils of the 50 largest American cities: three years ago, Detroit voters went to Districts, last year Austin voters went to Districts, and this year, even Seattle voters have initiated a reform effort to move toward Districts and which – if passed – will leave us all in our lonely backwater selves among major cities in America.