22. October 2009 by admin.

It’s easy with all of the domestic trouble we are experiencing to forget about the wars that are continuing now for many years in Iraq and Afghanistan and the many lives—combatants and civilians—that have been lost because of the need to control natural resources (and if you believe that the wars the U.S. is waging truly have anything to do with ending Terrorism, perhaps you’d be interested in joining the Richard Cheney Fan Club) in foreign lands.

But we must not forget that our government in the United States is conducting these wars with more than 50% of the U.S. population in strong opposition.  This opposition continues to exist despite the need for many Americans to focus on their economic survival and preserving the health and well-being of their families.

There’s a site that monitors the ongoing cost of the wars to the U.S. citizenry—appropriate since it is the citizens of the U.S. who pay for the bulk of the wars.  The site is CostofWar.com.

Here’s a snapshot of the ever-increasing war costs in dollars:

Take a long look at these numbers  and think about how much better this money could be spent on food and healthcare for poor families, particularly poor American children—60,000,000+ children are considered ‘food insecure’, either not having enough food to maintain baseline health, or severely undernourished.  We could alternatively provide healthcare to all Americans with that money.

Keep in mind, this is not the military budget per se, so getting rid of these costs would not impact our ability to defend the United States…

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10. October 2009 by admin.

Jonathan Pilger is a fearless journalist who, like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein and others, tries to uncover the linkages between American policy and big business and separate what politicians say from what they do.   You can find some excellent documentaries by Pilger on Amazon and Netflix—I strongly encourage you to watch them if you can.

There’s  no question in my mind that President Obama is much more literate, verbally proficient, and intelligent than Bush II is.  And I much prefer Joe Biden to Dick Cheney—in fact I would prefer Spiro Agnew to Dick Cheney. 

However, as I predicted to friends and family before Obama took office, our president doesn’t appear to be doing anything that a centrist Republican (like Clinton—and if you don’t think Clinton was a centrist Republican, take a look at what he did while in office) wouldn’t do.  Obama is backed by the same business, energy sector, and financial interests as Bush was, and has taken a pretty conservative approach in action if not words, as Pilger points out in this brief video below.

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9. October 2009 by admin.

This is a nice picture, entitled “The Anger of Zeus” by a photographer named Pedro Pais.

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9. October 2009 by admin.

Here’s a video of Yamaha singing female she-bot.  While still not photorealistic, the robots are getting ever closer to lifelike.  It makes you wonder if Dick Cheney wasn’t made by Yamaha too.

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