be the change you want to see in the world

It is freezing in Victoria and we’re buried in snow.

I wonder why so many people are dying in Baghdad. Didn’t the Coalition assume control of Iraq four years ago after being greeted with wine and roses? Oh yeah. Well, that said, what is the cause of all this violence? But wait. That isn’t the right question. The right question is, how are people getting away with all this violence. This violence was repeatedly predicted as the outcome of the fall of Saddam. Furthermore, aren’t there any police there? Who is in charge of law and order? Who is supposed to be protecting the civilians of Iraq?

Generally, the responsibility of the United States to restore law and order and public life in areas under effective control of its military is reflected in Article 43 of the Annex to the Hague Convention of 1907, which requires that the occupying power “shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.”

Read the rest here.

So, then why is all this violence happening?

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — More than 140 bodies have been found dumped across Baghdad over the past three days, police said Wednesday.

Police said 52 bullet-riddled bodies were found Wednesday, with 20 of them blindfolded, tied up and possibly tortured.

Police also discovered 29 bodies on Tuesday and 60 on Monday.

The dead are thought to be victims of Sunni-Shiite sectarian revenge killings.

That word came as the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq issued a grim bimonthly human rights report that underscored the instability and death resulting from sectarian violence.

The report said 7,054 civilians were killed violently in September and October in Iraq, with almost 5,000 in Baghdad alone — most of them shot to death and showing signs of torture.

It is now beyond clear, with the sacking of Rumsfeld, that the United States bears full responsibility for not keeping order in Iraq after occupation. This is just blunt point in fact. Mission Accomplished day was the day when Iraqi civilians should have been able to move about in their country under law and order. It was all just a farce, and average folks are being slaughtered because the United States has still not gotten a handle on a situation that, from the start, has been their responsibility to control.

The blistering hurricane of political rhetoric finally dwindles.

The thousands upon thousands of voices shouting each other down in a din of talking points slowly decreases. As it does, individual voices start to emerge.

First, a chorus of dozens, then a few.

Then, at the end of the night, balloons and streamers now being swept up, lights turning down and clicking off, one voice remains and echoes in the minds of Republicans everywhere.

As operatives, spear-chuckers, researchers and spinners drift off to sleep the dead sleep known only to those who have worked political campaigns, one voice - that of George Allen - repeats a single word.

Slowly, monotonously and yet, each reiteration is a painful, melancholy repeated affront:

macaca

macaca

macaca

macaca

You know, I get tired of posting gloom and doom stuff…but that doesn’t change the fact that our generation is saddled with fixing the mess of the previous generations. Take the world’s oceans: polluted and abused beyond anyone’s knowledge or estimation.

If current trends of overfishing and pollution continue, the populations of just about all seafood face collapse by 2048, a team of ecologists and economists warns in a report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

“Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world’s ocean, we saw the same picture emerging. In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems,” said the lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are — beyond anything we suspected,” Worm said.

Getting people to recognize and psychologically prepare themselves to make the adjustments necessary to deal with the problems will be the great accomplishment of our times. If we can do it, we will be the next Great generation.

The challenge we face is that humans do not have a truly global consciousness. Globalism is not an evil. It is an absolute necessity. Global mechanisms will foster global consciousness. One of these global mechanisms is global electronic communications. This gives us the information we need from around the world to see what the largest picture looks like.

The next required advance will be a mechanism that helps us turn the font of information we have at our fingertips into a resource of knowledge, and, for once, perhaps we can start to learn prior to making the mistake.

Some mistakes are just too big to fix.

It is no secret that the American armed forces are the last resport for many who do not have another way to feed their family or provide a future for their children better than their own. And, yes, this is often due to being uneducated, which is different from being stupid, but the average american voter won’t grasp that nuance.

So the media in the US have lept on the Kerry miscue (whether it really was or not is irrelevant since the miscue is as true as the original speech) and are now pushing it hard. Why? Why must Americans be fed this kind of noninformation just prior to a crucial vote? Is it because the obviousness of everything else is just tiresome?

Why is it that an election that needs to be decided on facts is instead possibly being decided on some bizarre non-statement; some error which rings true - which is true - but is forbidden.

Don’t accidentally appear to offend the troops. Don’t accidentally not criticize the troops but open yourself to that willful misinterpretation. If you do, we might vote Republican. The troops…you mean the poor, uneducated cannon fodder Americans idealize, glorify and imagine shitting candy for Iraqi children?

Americans who respond to the call to idolize, deem infallible, and rally ’round the troops are simply hiding from the ugly scar that is their nation’s foriegn policy. They don’t want to know. They participate in this fascist mind control technique to successfully push in to their unconscious all the questions they might otherwise have about why America caused the death of half a million of the Iraqis they were supposed to be saving. Who really knows just how utterly destroyed Iraq is, and will be for decades?

Like a Jack Nicholson character once said. “The truth? You can’t handle the truth.”