Been listening a lot to Joni Mitchell's SHINE lately and this song stood out when I saw something in the news.
And a safe place
For kids to play
Shine on bombs exploding
Half a mile away
Let your little light shine
Let your little light shine
Shine on world-wide traffic jams
Honking day and night
Shine on another asshole
Passing on the right!
Shine on the red light runners
Busy talking on their cell phones
Shine on the Catholic Church
And the prisons that it owns
Shine on all the Churches
They all love less and less
Shine on a hopeful girl
In a dreamy dress
From NPR:
The world is getting greener.
That's according to Chi Chen, a doctoral student in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. Chen has been mining data collected by an orbiting NASA camera that monitors green vegetation on Earth's surface, day by day.
This week, Chen and his colleagues published a new study showing that the amount of our planet's land surface covered by green leaves increased between 2000 and 2017.
The extent of the global greening is bigger than previously measured using other, less precise instruments. Even more interesting: Chen was able to pinpoint the causes of increasing — or decreasing — leaf cover in particular areas.
In some places, changes in leaf cover apparently resulted from weather and climate change. The growing season is getting longer in some temperate areas, and rising carbon dioxide levels may be producing bigger, leafier plants.
One large area of Brazil lost vegetation. "I personally checked the data, and that's because of drought," Chen says.
The most striking changes, though, were the result of human decisions in China and India. Both countries have been getting a lot greener.
That's good. Of course, it's not enough. We're destroying the world. And one of the biggest polluters? War. We need to stop bombing. We need to stop using Depleted Uranium. We need to stop using White Phosphorus. And grasp that when I say, "We need to," I'm referring to us, the US. Our government's doing nothing to help. Oh, it's happy to push it off as a personal issue. But it's industrial and it' war and those are not individual issues.
Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Thursday, February 14, 2019. Nearly 16 years of corporate media promoting war in Iraq.
What might seem like a passing moment of poor taste becomes an eternity of proof as a result of filming your stupidity and then deciding to post your stupidity to social media.
What might seem like a passing moment of poor taste becomes an eternity of proof as a result of filming your stupidity and then deciding to post your stupidity to social media.
US soldier in #Iraq mocking the call to prayer...
He doesn't realize he is in someone else's country occupying it,if the adhan irritates him he should go back to his own country
"So they have indeed denied, then the news of what they mocked at, will come to them." #QURAN 26:6
"And the evil of what they did will appear to them, and they will be completely encircled by that which they used to mock at!" 45:33
May these Filthy USA terrorists burn in Hell!
Jokes on him...he'll probably end up killing himself when he's back home cos of PTSD, like most Iraq vets. We'll see who mocks who then.
He doesn't know that ignorance leads to hell fire.
Poor guy doesn't know. He is under pressure being in a place that he shouldn't be but to be with his family and nation.
his need hidayah insaallah doa
One day you will regret for this
The dogs of hell!!
that is wahhabi khawarij haha
Idiot just idiot
IS this what you call democrazy and you are expecting to happen in Iraq ??
Those are actually some of the kinder reactions to that video.
Aziz Ahmad (NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS) offers an essay this morning about how ISIS is increasing violent attacks in Iraq. He notes:
For the next two hours, Abu Samya laid bare his transformation from a laborer in a mixed, well-to-do suburb to an inmate in
Camp Bucca, the US-run prison that came to define an era of the
American occupation of Iraq. The journey took him from political
disillusion to ideological commitment, and back again, shaping his
values, then shattering them within a decade.
During our discussion, he reflected on a prewar era when
sect or ethnicity barely mattered. “We lived in peace,” he said. He
pulled back a sleeve to reveal a scar that he claimed was caused by an
electric drill used in torture by Shia militiamen after sectarian
tensions exploded during the civil war unleashed by the US invasion.
That scar has since been both a constant reminder and a visceral
incentive for revenge.
“I started to hate them and the government,” he said.
Abu Samya proceeded to tell me his story in unabashedly sectarian terms. Though just one man’s account, it could
easily have been a collective statement about a society blighted by
fifteen years of war and deprivation, often on a family-by-family basis.
His sense of disenfranchisement led him to the
Islamic State, or ISIS, the terrorist group whose claim to address the
grievances of Iraq’s Sunnis acted as a rallying call for many who were
not attracted purely by ideology.
In the article, Ahmad offers a list of three things that need to be done. It seems an honest attempt at coverage. There's no honesty to be found in Chloe Cornish and Aime Williams' piece for THE FINANCIAL TIMES OF LONDON which offers 'historical insight' like the following:
In Baghdad, Mr Shanahan sought to mend fences. Mr Trump had initially riled Iraqi leaders by making a Christmas visit to American troops in the country without paying any courtesy calls on senior officials in Baghdad. Then the president caused more upset this month by saying he might want to maintain the US’s “unbelievable and expensive” military bases in Iraq beyond their anti-Isis mission in order to monitor Iran. “I want to be looking a little bit at Iran, because Iran is a real problem,” he said. The comment enraged many Iraqi lawmakers, who had already accused Mr Trump of violating Iraqi sovereignty, and fuelled demands from some that American troops be withdrawn.
The Iraq War did not start with Donald Trump becoming president. Nor did calls for US troops to leave Iraq start with his presidency. An ongoing illegal war is reduced to five minutes to misdirect and flat out lie. The war is illegal and should not have ever started. It did start but it continues thanks to outlets like THE FINANCIAL TIMES OF LONDON.
16 years of coverage and 16 years of poaching journalists from other outlets and what great report has THE FINANCIAL TIMES OF LONDON ever assembled on Iraq?
How sad and how telling.
What Donald Trump did?
It angered the pampered puppet government. The Iraqi people have long called for US troops to leave their country. The leaders need them to stay in power because they are not popular with the Iraqi people. The US installed Iraq's current president as well as the current prime minister. And they're the ones offended.
Because of death and destruction?
No because Donald didn't visit with them on his visit to Iraq.
Oh, what a horrible snub to their image!!!!
And the nonsense about watching Iran? Turkey gets so much from the US government because Turkey gave up land for a CIA outpost in southern Turkey for the US to spy on Iraq (specifically to spy on northern Iraq). That's not a new development. We covered it back when it was, over 13 years ago.
This is about wounded egos.
And if wounded egos get US troops out of Iraq, great. But let's not pretend like this is a real issue or something that won't be paved over with money at some point. Puppets have collapsable spines.
They are nothing more than private dancers.
You keep your mind on the money
Keeping your eye on the wall.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES piece, like so much of what passes for coverage these days, has a subtext that argues for the war to continue. In this case, these leaders, these poor leaders (elected by whom?), are victims of Donald Trump! We must overcome Donald! We must stay in Iraq!
That's the subtext to this b.s. Crap like this is why the Iraq War will hit the 16 year mark next month.
Iraq remains one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And this detail somehow always disappears when corporate media wants to sell continued war. They play as though it didn't happen or, if they admit it happened, they play as though no one's sure how it happened.
The non-responsive, Baghdad-based government is a creation created by the US government. The same US government created the process by which there is no direct vote of Iraq's top leaders.
And when you don't answer to the people, when the US picks you and installs you, you grow ever more corrupt.
ISIS is a problem, yes.
The answer to that is not troops on the ground. That's never the answer to terrorism. The only way to stop terrorism is to take away any legitimate gripes terrorists may have.
The government of Iraq does not take care of the people and allows huge numbers to be persecuted. That is what breeds terrorism. As one puppet after another installed as prime minister has failed to address that, the situation in Iraq has grown worse. If that shocks you or surprises you, you're the perfect audience and foil for corporate media which has a highly pronounced estrangement from the truth.
The corporate press spends forever and a day justifying continued war. They do not call out the corruption in the Iraqi government, they do not call out the refusal of the Iraqi leaders to meet the demands of the people. But then again, the Iraqi people have always demanded an end to US occupation so the corporate press has long been against them.
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