Trump said: There should be systems to track Muslims. He is suggesting that we issue ID cards to Muslims.
When WW II broke out, we imprisoned innocent Japanese people in the United States. Our leadership and our media are all frothing at the mouth because Muslim extremists have killed hundreds of people in France.
That is tragic. Out-of-control terrorism is tragic. But for our nation to get all worked up about one religious minority and lump them all in with terrorists is outrageous.
Hitler did just that in 1933. The German people were suffering economically. Hitler, pretty much on his own, decided that it was the fault of the Jews (a religious minority) and then he systematically started persecuting this minority.
Eventually they had to carry IDs (a yellow star on their clothing), just like Trump is now suggesting we do with Muslims (carry an ID). If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply, deeply offended, that a clown like Trump can accuse me on national TV of being suspicious of terrorism and introduce measures where I have to publicly identify myself as part of a religious or ethnic group.
Forming special badges or IDs for a religious group does not end well.
I don’t think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability we are seeing right now. I think that was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of the United States.
— Bernie Sanders during the Debate
I agree that our decision to invade a strong country in the middle of the Middle East and completely removing its government, infrastructure and power structure created many vacuums on the political, religious, ideological and societal levels. Leaders of all types filled the vacuums, and it will take decades before things shake out and settle down.
I hate to say this, but Iraq needs a dictator. Unfortunately, guys like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and Mao don’t come around too often, so we’ll just have to wait until one emerges.
Perhaps we can send Dick Cheney to Iraq to fill that role? But it would have been so much cheaper to leave Saddam Hussein there!
If you want to degrade and defeat the Islamic State and the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Khorasan group, the al-Qaeda element… in northern Syria, you are going to have to have a ground force.
Seriously, are we even talking about putting soldiers on the ground in Syria? This is reckless and stupid beyond belief.
When we put soldiers in Afghanistan, at least we had the cooperation of the anemic government and supposedly its people, and we had one clearly defined enemy.
When we invaded Iraq, we had a clear objective of toppling the dictator, and then “build a nation on the principles of democracy.” A fairly clear enemy and mission.
Look how successful we have been in these two nations in the last 14 and 12 years! We spent more than a trillion dollars, the countries are demolished and we’re no closer to stable government than before. However, there are a LOT MORE TERRORISTS now in both of those countries. They are petri dishes of terrorism.
We have failed miserably.
The American tax payer got nothing out of those initiatives. The country paid dearly. Thousands of American soldiers died. Tens of thousands were maimed for life. Families and lives were destroyed.
All. For. Nothing.
And now, we’re seriously thinking about doing this again? We are putting soldiers into another Middle Eastern country, into an ongoing conflict, where we can’t even figure out who exactly the enemy is and what we’re trying to get done there! And the Russians are already stirring that pot, too? What’s America got to do with it?
According to the World Wildlife Foundation, in 2014 the total population of African elephants was estimated to be around 700,000, and the Asian elephant population was estimated to be around 32,000. The population of African elephants in Southern Africa is large and expanding, with more than 300,000 within the region; Botswana has 200,000 and Zimbabwe 80,000. Large populations of elephants are confined to well-protected areas. However, conservative estimates were that 23,000 African elephants were killed by poachers in 2013 and less than 20% of the African elephant range was under formal protection.
In 2013 alone, over 1,000 park rangers were killed while attempting to defend African elephants from poachers. The elephant is a terribly endangered animal and it may only be a few more decades before there are no more wild elephants left.
Imagine my surprise when I found this advertisement in the October 2015 Robb Report Collection edition:
This is a magazine for the very rich. It is full of articles and advertisements for super cars, private jets, 3rd homes in remote islands, art and culture, and – apparently – big game hunting.
It is beyond my comprehension how BigGame.org can position itself as a conservation and education organization, when it’s really just a club for big game hunters – the Dallas Safari Club.
It makes it sound like killing elephants is a noble and worthy endeavor.
Tell me what you will, we can educate and observe completely without shooting a single elephant for sport. Making it sound like hunters are the good guys in this terribly destructive game is simply irresponsible.
Hunting big game for sport is as outdated as slavery. What exactly are “hunters’ rights” that need to be protected? Sounds kind of like protecting the rights of slave owners to me.
Elephants, along with whales and apes, are the most intelligent creatures on this planet, and we’re wiping them out – for sport (in the case of big game hunting) and the relentless greed for ivory in mostly Asian markets.
We humans have a responsibility to protect our fellow intelligences.
Here is a partial view of a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. Everyone of these tents and shacks is packed with innocent families, their children, their babies and a few possessions they could carry. Every one of these people were driven from their homes. They left their possessions, their heritage, the places where their parents and grandparents lived, their familiar surroundings. They did this because it was too dangerous to stay, or impossible to live there anymore, or because their homes were destroyed.
This is civil war. Assad claims his people love him and want him to stay in power and live in opulence in his palace. The dissidents want freedom from Assad’s tyranny. Then the criminals who claim to be religious (ISIS) took advantage of the disaster for their own enrichment and good. This is what happens when a country comes apart at the seams.
Tell that to the father in one of these tents who is trying to keep his children fed, alive, warm and protected.
[attribution not found]When the Saudi King visits DC, he books an entire hotel. And we think that’s cool. I wonder what Donald Trump would say to the Saudi King?
“Man, you have to build a wall! Aren’t you a nation of laws? You have to keep out the illegal and the criminals! Yeah, some of them are good people. I love them, and they love me.”
If Trump were king, that’s what he would do. But Salman already is king. So that’s what he does.
Seventy-one refugees were found dead in a refrigerated truck in Austria. More than eighty refugees, many of them children, washed up dead on a beach in Libya. And the Pope offers “a special prayer” according to the front page of the USA Today of 8/31/15.
A Special Prayer?
Thousands, no – millions, of people are driven from their own countries in the Middle East, mostly by sectarian violence and associated power grabs of the religious leaders and monarchs. They flee from religious oppression of one type, and they die, only to be waved away by religious ridicule of another type:
We entrust each of them to the mercy of God.
It is pretty sad if the “spiritual head” of a billion or so Catholics had nothing better to say or do. Does he really think that these desperate millions, some of which wash up dead on the beaches of the Mediterranean, derive any good from his ridiculous excuses? The only thing he is doing it make the rest of us feel ok for what has happened. The mercy of God is upon the victims, so it’s ok.
It’s religion of one type, and then on another type, that killed them in the first place. And it’s religious excuses that have made us all think it’s ok for a few thousand years now.
When will we ever stop listening to the blathering nonsense that comes out of the mouths of il Papa and his illustrious predecessors?
When will we finally admit that it’s religion in the first place that’s the root of the problems we’re dealing with?
[Credit: Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images ]
So two yahoos from Southie in my hometown of Boston severely beat up a Hispanic homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of the brothers reportedly told police that “Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported.”
Then, further in the article, here is what Trump is quoted as saying:
“I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that.”
Statements like these, and movements like these, have often in history been the beginnings of very bad eventual outcomes.
For example, in the 1920s, Germany was not doing very well. The economy was a disaster, people were hungry, humiliated from World War I, and hopeless. Decades of abuse by bad leadership had created a vacuum.
Then came an unlikely little man with a powerful speaking voice. Whenever he spoke, he incited passion in his listeners. He spoke of new hope, of national pride, of honor, of making his country great again. He also started to spread the seeds that much of the economic demise of the country was due to the Jews.
With his upbeat and passionate message, he gathered more and more followers and eventually he managed to get himself elected through crafty and actually illegal maneuverings.
Within weeks of being elected, he outlawed other political parties and systematically took over police and security. Suddenly, those that earlier were just blamed for the demise of the country, no longer had the protection of the system. The police had turned against them. Jews started to flee while they still could.
But the country was “becoming great again.” There were massive public works projects and everyone was employed. Industry boomed. The people were proud. The country hosted the 1936 Olympics. The people were passionately behind their leader, their Führer.
Pretty soon, Jews could openly be abused, beaten, robbed, raped and killed without any recourse. The German Third Reich was supposed to last 1000 years, yet it rose for only about six or eight, and then went down in a spectacular firestorm of world-wide disastrous proportions. As we so say, the rest is history.
But let’s remember how it all started.
There was a man who fired up his listeners. They came to listen to him to beer halls and stadiums by the hundreds first, then by the thousands, and always left with fire in their bellies.
There was a man who said he knew how to make the country great again, and he started cranking the economic engine unlike anything seen before. He kept saying he knew what he was doing.
There was a man who, probably with all good intention, thought he had figured it all out: It was the fault of the Jews. Too many of them were usurping the power and money from the country and its people.
Trump does all those things today. He says that 7.5% of all births in the United States are by illegal parents and he wants to take away the birthrights of those United States citizens. Note that he is already setting himself up to perform illegal acts, all in the name of the country. After all, we’re being “stupid, right?” And his listeners with fire in their bellies applaud.
By targeting illegals, he is creating an atmosphere of making them at least one of the scapegoats of our demise. It’s the Mexicans’ fault. Whether those “Mexicans” are illegal or legal, you can’t tell from the outside. So an entire class of our society is becoming a target of hate without any solid ground. When idiots like the guys in Boston (article above) beat up immigrants, Trump, rather than being outraged like any decent citizen would be, he dismisses it as “passionate” and thus we have it:
A leader is officially condoning violence against an arbitrary subset of the population that he has identified as being “the problem” of the country that we all must make great again. He is encouraging this behavior.
It’s beginnings like these that have paved the road for some of history’s greatest thugs, it’s beginnings like these that have resulted in entire countries of decent, hard-working, pious people being hijacked and forced to commit unspeakable crimes and atrocities, all in the name of country and leader.
Radical Islam is alive and well right here in our neighborhood. This video is about five years old, but the story has not changed. David Horowitz is a Jewish writer and professor.
Elephants are far more endangered than lions, since ivory sells for as much as $1000 per pound in Asia. I can blame the poachers, but I know that the market, mostly in Asia, provides the incentive. China’s wealth makes this worse. Elephants are facing extinction. The supply of ivory will one day stop dead – when there are no more wild elephants.
Pigs are highly intelligent animals, rumored to be smarter than dogs or cats. The novel Animal Farm by Orwell takes advantage of that fact for its plot. Pigs in “factory farms” spend their entire lives in small cages. Mother sows can’t even turn around. Their waste is flushed into open cesspools and when they fill up, the farmers spray the waste into the air so the globules drift away with the wind – onto the neighbors.
This is what it takes to provide cheap pork at Costco. Real farms would be way more expensive. Our hunger for inexpensive meat overrules our sense of responsibility for the lives and welfare of animals and the pollution of our environment.
Check out the video above and then go enjoy your BBQ.
King Rat tells the story of a group of American, English and Australian POW in Changi, the Japanese prison camp outside of Singapore, in the approximate location of the Singapore airport of today.
The King is an American corporal who has mastered the workings of the black market. Everyone in the camp reveres and secretly hates him for his “success.” Where everyone is close to starvation or suffering from disease, where men are dressed in rags and loincloths, the King has all the food, cigarettes and clothes he needs. His entourage, those feeding off him, includes men and officers alike. Over the years, he has built a reputation of being the person that can “get things” and trade. Outside the camp, the traders and guards trust him and his integrity. Inside, prisoners come to him with their little treasures and ask him to trade them for money, food or favors. He obliges, for a fee.
In a world of prison camps, in North Korea, in China, in Guantanamo, in Africa and in the Middle East, in prison camps where men are hurt and broken, reading King Rat brings life in prison alive in front of our eyes. We feel what it’s like in stark, shocking reality.
I am grateful to those that came before me and paid so dearly so I can sit here and have the right and freedom to write what I want.
I am grateful for having had a chance to read James Clavell’s King Rat.
Imagine you are playing a video game. You hunt down bad guys and blow them to pieces with missiles. A few minutes later, the rescuers come from all directions with shovels to help any possible buried survivors. For good measure, you fire another missile into the rescue mission. You call it a follow-up. You just killed more than a dozen people, seemingly by just moving objects on a screen.
But it isn’t a video game. Your shift is over. You get up from your chair, unplug your headset, and someone else takes over. You get out of the air-conditioned trailer on an airbase in Nevada, get into your car and drive home to Las Vegas, to your wife and kids. Backyard barbecue tonight.
Good Kill tells the riveting story of modern-day warfare. “Pilots” sit safely on the ground in trailers in the U.S. flying killer robot machines over targets anywhere in the Middle East, on the other side of the globe. The killer robots can circle for many hours and practically fly themselves. They are so high up, they cannot be seen from the ground. But the “pilots” have high-resolution cameras. They get a laser fix on the target, pull the trigger, and a Hellfire missile is on its way. Time to impact, 10 seconds. Hopefully no kids or other innocent victims walk into the “theater” within those 10 seconds. When the missile hits, there is a cloud of fire and destruction. Another $64,000 of American tax payer money well spent.
Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) is a former fighter pilot with 3,000 hours in an F-16 and six tours of duty in the Middle East. He considers himself a pilot. Playing video games, albeit deadly ones way beyond what an F-16 could do, is not his idea of warfare and he yearns to get back into the cockpit of a real plane. When the CIA takes over and directs his crew and their missions, the psychological impact of those orders, which often kill innocent civilians simply because they happen to be around a “high value target,” is demoralizing to the crew. Egan has a hard time going home to his wife and family and playing father and husband. He is distant and deeply troubled. He is part of a killing machine in 21st century warfare.
Good Kill is a fictional account of supposedly true events. We will never know how true. We have all learned about drone strikes and their impact on terrorism. I believe that this type of warfare simply is a terrorism breeder. You want more terrorists, send more Hellfire missile out of the blue sky into civilian neighborhoods in Yemen and Afghanistan. It works perfectly. Every boy who sees his father blown to pieces grows into a fiercely dedicated combatant within just a few years. The Middle East we have created is a petri dish to grow terrorists.
If Good Kill only approximates what is really going on, even if it is a fictional exaggeration, it exposes a frightening reality that we, the American tax payer, must become aware of. Bush started the war on terror, but Obama refined it and sanitized it. We’re not seeing the body bags coming off airplanes anymore. But we know the killer robots are out there, looking down from the blue sky.
Good Kill tells the story of what our government thinks is okay to do in our name, to the people of the Middle East, and to our own soldiers.
The little girl thinks the camera pointed at her is a weapon, so she surrenders.
The United Nations estimate that the Syrian civil war of four years has claimed more than 200,000 lives, including 10,000 children. Almost four million people are registered as refugees in neighbouring countries, and 6.5 million displaced within Syria.
And the dictator goes on 60 minutes in a suit and lisps that the people want him there.
