Global

Book Review: Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex.

   By Pete Johnson

Richard S. Ehrlich's book, "Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. -- Tibet,
India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York," is a
compilation of his experiences as an American foreign correspondent
based in Asia.

Ehrlich's introduction says his "news stories portray fragments of
people and their distant voices."

As a result the book is fragmented.

Although it is divided into four chapters, the chapters are not
related to each other, so it is really four stories.

The four stories -- the title of the book, "Rituals. Killers. Wars. &
Sex" -- are related to each other geographically, as they are stories
originated in Asia.

The four stories are interesting, they are a window into the dark
underbelly of Asia.

Chapter 1 "Rituals" describes four specific bizarre Asian rituals
involving death.

This reader was completely unaware of all four of these practices,
which are driven by geography and, of course, religion.

The August 9 hour-long CNN program Being… AOC about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a case study in how corporate media covers – or, rather, covers up – socialism. The reddest or pinkest thing about this debut of CNN’s new Being… series were AOC’s lips. More time was spent bantering about the 31-year-old’s lipstick, fashion sense and being a magazine cover girl than her leftwing politics.

CNN’s Dana Bash was positively bashful about asking America’s most famous living female socialist about her ideology. The only time socialism per se was actually alluded to at all was in a clip from a Fox News show that referred to the leftist congressmember as a “socialist” in a chyron. And when AOC and Bash trod down a Bronx street an older white male passerby booed Ocasio-Cortez, denouncing her as a “communist.”

Rome is scorching hot. This beautiful city is becoming unbearable for other reasons, too. Though every corner of the beaming metropolis is a monument to historical grandeur, from the Colosseum in Rione Monti to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in San Giovanni, it is now struggling under the weight of its own contradictions. 

 In Via Appia, bins are overflowing with garbage, often spilling over into the streets. The smell, especially during Italy’s increasingly sweltering summers, is suffocating. 

There is an ongoing, but hidden, Israeli war on the Palestinians which is rarely highlighted or even known. It is a water war, which has been in the making for decades. 

On July 26 and 27, two separate but intrinsically linked events took place in the Ein al-Hilweh area in the occupied Jordan Valley, and near the town of Beita, south of Nablus. 

In the first incident, Jewish settlers from the illegal settlement of Maskiyot began construction in the Ein al-Hilweh Spring, which has been a source of freshwater for villages and hundreds of Palestinian families in that area. The seizure of the spring has been developing for months, all under the watchful eye of the Israeli occupation army.

In the United States we now live under a government that largely operates in secret, headed by an executive that ignores the constitutional separation of powers and backed by a legislature that is more interested in social engineering than in benefitting the American people. The US, together with its best friend and faux ally Israel, has become the ultimate rogue nation, asserting its right to attack anyone at any time who refuses to recognize Washington’s leadership. America is a country in decline, its influence having been eroded by a string of foreign policy and military disasters starting with Vietnam and more recently including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the Ukraine. As a result, respect for the United States has plummeted most particularly over the past twenty years since the War on Terror was declared and the country has become a debtor nation as it prints money to sustain a pointless policy of global hegemony which no one else either desires or respects.

Back when Paul Weyrich partied like it was 1999, he made a monumental admission that explains the ferocity of today’s evangelical right.

In an open letter to his extreme conservative cohorts, he acknowledged that they “probably had lost the culture war.”

Yippie!!!

He was right. And today that reality means that American democracy – and the human race – may actually survive.

Weyrich was mourning …

… a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics … the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture.

The counter-cultural heathens against whom Weyrich ranted were shaped by the Vietnam war, rock music, LSD, and so much more … a ‘60s Boomer generation (76-million-strong) that utterly shattered the established mores on which the right wing depended.

The “alien ideology” Weyrich feared was feminist, LGBTQA+, post-White Supremacist, and at war with Trump misogyny, sexual Puritanism, imperial arrogance, fascist autocracy, and ecological insanity.

Another Irradiated and Charred Victim of the Nagasaki Bomb

77 years ago (August 9, 1945) an all-Christian bomber crew dropped an experimental plutonium bomb on Nagasaki City, Japan, instantly incinerating, asphyxiating and/or vaporizing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, mostly women and children. Very few Japanese soldiers were killed by the bombs.

Japan’s major religions are Shitoism and Buddhism, but a disproportionate number of the dead at Nagasaki were Christian. The bomb also wounded uncounted tens of thousands of other victims who suffered the blast trauma, the intense heat and/or the radiation sickness that killed and maimed so many of the survivors.

Jonah Goldberg and Michael Ledeen have much in common. They are both writers and also cheerleaders for military interventions and, often, for frivolous wars. Writing in the conservative rag, The National Review, months before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Goldberg paraphrased a statement which he attributed to Ledeen with reference to the interventionist US foreign policy.

MEK is a curious hybrid creature that pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians.

One might ask if Washington’s obsession with terrorism includes supporting radical armed groups as long as they are politically useful in attacking countries that the US regards as enemies? It is widely known that the American CIA worked with Saudi Arabia to create al-Qaeda to attack the Russians in Afghanistan and the same my-enemy’s-enemy thinking appears to drive the current relationships with radical groups in Syria.