Global
Original at Reader Supported News: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/48453-why-are-we-still-i…
It’s so easy to paper over the real American security void with verbiage about strength vs. weakness and the endless need to upgrade the military.
Here’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, for instance, quoted the other day in The Guardian: “It is incumbent upon us to field a more lethal force if our nation is to retain the ability to defend ourselves and what we stand for.”
Mainly due to Warren Beatty’s classic 1967 movie, most film fans know who the “Barrow Gang” was - Bonnie and Clyde Barrow’s band of bank robbing desperadoes who roamed the Midwest during the 1930s. But thanks to the Pan African Film Festival, now I know who Errol Walton Barrow was - the independence leader who became Barbados’ first prime minister. I had never heard of him until I was lucky enough to catch Marcia Weekes’ docu-drama Barrow - Freedom Fighter at a PAFF screening, narrated on and off camera by America’s first Black Attorney General, Eric Holder (who has Barbadian heritage).
Anna Baltzer’s amazing book Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories has been updated over the years, and I’ve just read it for the first time. Rather unfairly, and — as it turns out — wrongly, my first response upon turning the initial pages was: Do we really need another one of these? Jewish person believes pile of myths. Jewish person confronts reality. Jewish person tries to open the eyes of others. It’s become as familiar as “Dog Bites Man.” Couldn’t we all just share one book around instead of everyone writing his or her own, and then pool our money until we can afford a television station so that people can be made to wake up in large numbers?
35% of U.S. mass shooters are military veterans, as compared with 14.76% in the general population for the same gender and age. See documentation of this below.
First a couple of Tweets:
Before reading the timeline of the aftermath of the Mt Polley disaster, please go to the following site where there are a number of photos of the consequences of the breach of the lagoon dam (which was 130 feet tall) when a portion of it dissolved and failed.
The remains of the state-of-the-art tailings ”pond” at Mount Polley still holds 80% of the original toxic waste from the massive, adjacent open pit copper mine. “Only” 24 million cubic meters of the sludge (only 20%) was discharged over the few hours of the dam failure.
The enormous flow of the toxic mixture of sludge and liquid permanently - and drastically - eroded the downstream, originally “tiny”, Hazeltine Creek that emptied into Quesnel Lake. The sludge permanently contaminated the now huge creek bed and severely eroded the adjacent forest land and, of course, filled the bottom of the once pristine Quesnel Lake with highly poisonous and carcinogenic heavy metals and other toxic materials.
Those who have been lucky enough to visit the Pacific Islands and to even be blessed by the opportunity to live there (as this “Native” New Yorker was for 23 years) continue to frequently feel the lure of the isles. I still regularly dream of Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii and Micronesia and am constantly patting myself on the back for having had the foresight at the tender age of 21 to move to Oceania. One way transplanted indigenous and local people, former tourists and residents have for replenishing their roots and love of those far away islands is by attending Pacific-oriented cultural events when they are available.
