Friday, May 28, 2010

Memorial Day 2010

This weekend as we pause for a moment to remember the brave troops who died for our nation, let's also remember who made these wars possible.  Here is a partial list:



CACI- Interpreters and interrogation - Abu Grhraib, etc.
Halliburton - construction military bases, oil field, infrastructure
Titan Same as CACI   - worth $1B
Bechtel - Construction and engineering 
Aegis Defense Services - police
Custer Battles - first war contractor found guilty of fraud.
KBR
General Dynamics - tank shells, Stryker vehicles, bullets, etc.
Nour USA Ltd.  Pipelines
Chevron,
Exxon Mobil
Veritas Capital Fund/DynCorp - train Iraqi police
Washington Group International - build schools, water works, utilities
Environmental Chemical - clean up battlefield
Aegis -  Private security
International American Products - provide electrical services
Erinys - protecting Iraq’s oil reserves
Fluor - water sewage
Perini - Environmental cleanup (run by Dianne Feinstein’s husband)
URS - environmental cleanup (also run by Dianne Feinstein’s husband)
Parsons - Tesla Motors - reconstruction and construction of buildings
First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contraction - 
Armor Holdings - Armor for military vehicles.
L3 Communications - training Iraqi law enforcement personnel
AM General - Extra wide ATVs
Cummins - power generators
MerchantBridge - telecommunications
GlobalRisk Strategies - Risk management - insurance - humanitarian aid.
Lockheed-Martin,
Northrop Grumman,
ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC

More than half of the American defense budget now goes to these companies.  It is in their best interests to have war.  The more wars we have the more money they make.   They NEED war.  They also conveniently fall outside most of the judicial requirements of the laws of our nation, the nation they are housed in, and the nation they are engaged in.  They are not bound by any constitution, law, sovereign, church or any rule of law.  Their only obligation is to maximize their own profit.

Let's remember these guys this Memorial Day.  They even take care of those graveyards we will see on TV.  

Thursday, May 27, 2010

How Much Did You Spill?

How much did you spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

We all know about the spill now.  And we all know about the anger.  We have seen a few of the tears and a lot of pointed fingers.  We have heard the screams against the government, against BP, against Halliburton, against Deep Water, against all those poor pensioners in England, and against all the others involved in this catastrophe.  

How about you?  And me, too.  What is our responsibility for this incredible mess?

My nieghborhood is well stocked in SUVs just like the ones in this picture .  We have a lot of big cars that can’t get very good gasoline milage.  Every house but one has two cars.  Or three.  Some have four, one has  five (teen-agers).  

We have a lot of grass in this neighborhood.  Legal grass.  The kind  you grow in your front yard.  And it is always clipped two inches high.  All weekend long the ‘hood sounds like an Air Force flight line during a major launch exercise.  Everybody has push mowers that run on gasoline, everybody has a riding mower.  There are clippers, blowers, weed eaters, even chain saws, and mulchers.  Some run on electricity - not that big a deal as far as the spill goes.  Some people, like me, hire a guy to drag a mower or two in on his truck which gets 5 mpg, then cut grass, eat weeds and blow it all away.  I pay him money and I think he sends some down to the Gulf to help pay for the spill.  I’ll ask him next time I see him.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

A Picture of Islam

Today was the day to make fun of Mohammed. It was the day to draw or create pictures depicting him as an animal, insect, plant or worse.  Pakistan apparently shut down access to Facebook and YouTube because of those pictures, and some of the pictures were probably broadcast.  I say probably because I haven’t seen any so far and while I’m not looking FOR them I am pretty open to most stuff that crosses the net.

At any rate the entire thing has become a huge mess.  Islam has a religious requirement that certain images not be created.   This accounts for some of the amazing art found in Muslim mosques.  There were to be no representations of any thing that was created by God.  That included people, animals, plants, even earth and clouds.  Significant modification to that  tradition is now apparent with photographs, video and movies moving through the Islamic world on newspapers, magazines, movie theaters, computers and internet.  But the requirement is basically still there, particularly with respect to the Islamic Prophet Mohammed.  Any picture representing to present his likeness, even if intended to present a handsome, intelligent, pious and glorious image is still considered a vulgar and insulting sacrilege to roughly a billion Muslims on the planet  

This issue resurfaced recently when a writer was innocently trying to put together a children’s book series about the various religions.  She had words and pictures of Rama, Buddha, Moses, Jesus and many other religious leaders and then found out that she couldn’t put even her obviously and intentionally not-realistic pictures of Mohammed in her series-to-be.  That was a minor problem that affected her project.  Then Danish newspapers picked up the story and ran a series of cartoons about  Mohammed to show that there was no problem, the main issue was not Islamic religious legal technicalities but the western values of Free Speech.  The cartoons went hypersonic when death threats supposedly by Islamic “martyrs” were directed toward some of the Danish cartoonists.  Some of those cartoonists are apparently still living in fear of their lives for that act.  

Now enter a stupid American TV program called “South Park”.  They spoof and make fun of everything and everybody they can find.  They decided to run a series or a show which depicted  Mohammed as a bear.  MORE death threats came from more Islamic “martyrs”, and South Park dropped the segment the day it was to be shown.

So now comes someone on Facebook.  Apparently this episode is seen as the  catyclsmic collision between the great western world’s right to free speech with an Islamic religious taboo. The Muslim response has been to threaten to assassinate more of the perpetrators, now even a treat to kill innocent people as retaliation.

The western right to free speech is not a gift given by any god, it is a right that was denied by an almost endless series of kings, popes and other creatures of nobility and it was won in an almost endless series of wars.  It is based on the understanding that most governments and most religions want to control all that is printed about them and their activities.  Any westerner (European or American) would  therefore “know”  that if they were restricted from writing about or photographing  some event or thing that it was probably illegal to begin with and SHOULD be written about or photographed and published.

Muslims have had a problem with the religious requirement against depiction anything in the natural world.  Any showing of Mohammed cannot possibly be based on historical drawings so they would all have to be bogus.  But to threaten the western people who attempt to present Mohammed, including innocent people who happen to be near the target is repulsive to all mankind and all religions.  

It is my feeling that Islam should be less concerned about images of Mohammed, and more concerned about the image of Islam.