Global

The accepted story in the United States of what's happened in Syria is just that, a story told to make narrative sense of something completely un-understood.

In Southern Sweden a giant round rock lies on flat farmland, and the lovely story my ancestors used to tell to explain how it got there came down to this: a troll threw it there. As evidence, in a nearby castle, one can find a horn and a pipe that come into the story. The horn contained what today would be called chemical weapons, which burned the back of a horse when the hero of the story was smart enough to dump it over his shoulder rather than drinking it. Man and horse got away by riding across the furrows of a field, because everyone knows that trolls must run back and forth the full length of each furrow, which slows them down tremendously. The facts all fit. Some fringe conspiracy theorists may question the very existence of trolls, but such arguments need not be taken seriously.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- A two-year-old baby's head containing only 60
percent of her brain is now being cooled by liquid nitrogen in
Arizona, the youngest person to undergo cryonic preservation for
possible revival, thanks to her parents here in Bangkok, the U.S.
Embassy, and Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Matheryn Naovaratpong's case redefines the controversial phrase
"right-to-life" and takes it to a completely different level -- beyond
the grave -- while her parents try to extend her existence even though
most people regard the baby as deceased.

She also adds to the debate about euthanasia, and the way some people
can now control their life and death during an illness.

Spiritual belief, and its relationship to medical care, are also
involved in this baby's unusual fate.

Matheryn's Thai Buddhist parents paid Alcor $120,000, hoping their
baby's preserved brain will one day be heated up, cured of cancer, and
have its missing 40 percent regrown.

Matheryn's parents also hope she will be able to produce a new body,

Signers of this statement are listed below.

“The U.S. and NATO occupy my country under the name of all the beautiful banners of democracy, women’s rights, human rights. And for this long time, they shed the blood of our people under the name of the war on terror…” —Malalai Joya

There's a view of Syria, common even among peace activists in the United States, that holds that because the United States has been making everything worse in Syria and the entire Middle East for years, Russian bombs will make things better. While the actions of the United States and its allies will lead to victory for ISIS, horror for millions of people, and chronic chaos in Syria along the lines of post-liberation Iraq and Libya, Russian bombs -- this view maintains -- will destroy ISIS, restore order, uphold the rule of law, and establish peace.

When the United States is identified as an empire, albeit of a different sort than some others, it's common to point to the fate of ancient Rome or the empires of Britain, Spain, Holland, etc., as a warning to the Pentagon or even to CNN debate moderators.

But a closer analogy to the current United States than ancient Rome, in a certain regard, might be the Vikings. The United States doesn't create colonies in the places it wages war or wields influence. It raids. It pillages. It plunders resources. It manufactures smart phones. It fracks. It sets up isolated settlements, heavily fortified, also known as military bases, embassies, green zones, safe zones, and moderate rebel training camps. It sails for home.

What ever happened to the Vikings anyway?

I'd like to see a survey done on that question. I'm afraid many people would answer that the Vikings died out or got themselves slaughtered or slaughtered each other. That would certainly be an anti-imperial moral for the Viking story. It would also fit with the idea that violence controls people rather than the other way around.

“Those who take oaths to politically powerful secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic.” -- John Quincy Adams

Most of us Americans have our own simplistic methods of evaluating candidates for political office during our uniquely perpetual, very costly, time-consuming, energy-wasting and exhausting campaign seasons. Increasingly, state and national politicians are out of reach for most voters. Local candidates for mayor, city council and school board are increasingly the only politicians that can be personally approached by average voters.

When my book ‘Searching Jenin’ was published soon after the Israeli massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, I was quizzed repeatedly by the media and many readers for conferring the word ‘massacre’ on what Israel has depicted as a legitimate battle against camp-based ‘terrorists’. 

The interrogative questions were aimed at relocating the narrative from a discussion regarding possible war crimes into a technical dispute over the application of language. For them, the evidence of Israel’s violations of human rights mattered little.  

This kind of reductionism has often served as the prelude to any discussion concerning the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict: events are depicted and defined using polarizing terminology that pay little heed to facts and contexts, and focus primarily on perceptions and interpretations.  

“The Pentagon said on Saturday that it would make ‘condolence payments’ to the survivors of the American airstrike earlier this month on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan, as well as to the next of kin of those who died in the attack.”

Such a small piece of news, reported a few days ago by the NewYork Times. I’m not sure if anything could make me feel more ashamed of being an American.

Turns out the basic payout for a dead civilian in one of our war zones is . . . brace yourself . . . $2,500. That’s the sum we’ve been quietly doling out for quite a few years now. Conscience money. It’s remarkably cheap, considering that the bombs that took them out may have cost, oh, half a million dollars each.

If we valued human life, we would never go to war. Everybody knows this. It’s the biggest open secret out there, buried under endless public relations blather and — since the bombing of the hospital in Kunduz on Oct. 3, and the killing of 22 staff members and patients — a sort of international legalese.

No, it’s not really fair to blame President Obama personally for the waves of aerial bombing that took more than an hour on October 4 to destroy a neutral hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan, even though it appears on its face to be yet another US war crime.

But it’s totally fair to blame President Obama for giving the world another six years (so far) of President Bush’s policy of bringing chaos and devastation to whatever part of the Middle East happens to be annoying the folks who have decided these things since 2001. Not that it was all bread and roses before that, given the century-plus of unrelenting Western subjugation of the region by direct force and by establishing vicious proxy dictatorships (exhibit #1 is Iran).