The Days of the Dead

Horror as the background music, or Muzak, of life:

http://www.counterpunch.org/jw10262010.html

A few months after that night drinking beers at Fort Hood, I was again in Killeen, Texas. A taxi driver bringing me in from the bus station told me he had planned to be career military, but things changed when he did his time in Iraq. Now his wife was a few months from getting out of the army herself, he said, and then they would leave this bleached, desiccated town, this awful swathe of beige and neon and yellow ribbons in the middle of nowhere, and do something else. Other than that, he didn’t want to talk about Iraq. We rode through the nighttime streets in a thick silence. Outside the motel he turned toward me as he made change. It was a cheap place with brash lighting that cut slantwise through the taxi window and gave one side of his brown, angular face an intense clarity. He looked at me. “I killed a family,” he said. “At a checkpoint. I killed them all.” That was it. I took the change, and he drove off. 

JoAnn Wypijewski is on the road in a ’63 Valiant, sending stories to CounterPunch as she goes. She can be reached at jwyp@earthlink.com

Bastille Day, Et Tu Soldier?

To Whom May He Be Addressing?

http://www.counterpunch.org/moses07142010.html

I just want to say that based upon my observation of a few dozen glowing faces this past weekend at the convention of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) many of whom qualify as name droppable because you have heard of them and from them during this despicable first decade of the 21st Century--I just want to report that resistance is the health of the people.

Mammals Going Postal

Prisons Are Prisons:

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02262010.html

Then, on Feb. 20, 1991, Keltie Byrne, a 20-year-old marine biology student, champion swimmer and part-time trainer, slipped while she was riding on the head of one of the orcas. Tillikum, Nootka and Haida took turns in dragging her beyond reach of trainers trying to hook her out with long poles.

Practical Hope

Let's Do It:

http://www.counterpunch.org/miller02052010.html

But I would have liked to see more attention paid to one of the most important things that organizers do, namely, develop relationships of mutual confidence among people, so they can act together; also, that organizers, successful ones at least, build powerful organizations.

Flag Ryhmes With Drag

"If ignorance is truly bliss, then why do so many Americans need Prozac?" 

-David Macgowan

Americans Have No Shame:

http://us.oneworld.net/article/368472-cancer-the-deadly-legacy-invasion-iraq

Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq. Thousands of infants are being born with deformities. Doctors say they are struggling to cope with the rise of cancer and birth defects, especially in cities subjected to heavy American and British bombardment.

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The Good Professor Chimes In:

http://www.counterpunch.org/linebaugh01082010.html

We distinguish ‘the common’ from ‘the public’. We understand the public in contrast to the private, and we understand common solidarity in contrast to individual egotism. The commons has always been an element in human production even when capitalism acquired the hoard or laid down the law. The boss might ‘mean business’ but nothing gets done without respect. Otherwise, sabotage and the shoddy result.

Pres. BlackBush Says "Spend"

United States of the Abused:

http://counterpunch.org/levine12042009.html

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?

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Western Pathology at Work:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/07/people-unable-cope-modern-life-study

Millions of people are unhappy, lonely and unable to cope with profound changes in the workplace, relationships and family life, according to a major study.

International Labor News #3

Great (???) Britian:

http://counterpunch.org/milne09302009.html

The walkouts were all illegal. Under British anti-union laws, introduced by the Thatcher government and retained by New Labor, solidarity action is banned.

It's Not Your Fault

EWS Says "A Must Read":

http://counterpunch.org/ 08/20/09

With the innovation of increasingly marketable psychotropic drugs over the past four decades, public health officials have been free to legitimize healthcare budget cuts, hospital closures, and the widespread dismantlement of social services, by devolving responsibility for mental health to the individual and by transforming happiness into a problem of consumer choice. Miserable people – the exhausted assembly-line worker, the desperate college student, the alcoholic veteran – no longer pose a threat to the status quo so long as they agree to self-medicate and to keep themselves, thereby, in a state of artificial equanimity... Let’s be candid. The drug barons’ ongoing campaign to pathologize entirely natural emotional responses to hunger, humiliation, financial insecurity, racism, sexism, overwork and isolation is a mercenary tactic, designed to create markets, maximize profits and minimize dissidence.

Jose, Can You See?

Nothing Wrong With This Country:

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/17/scalia-actual-innocence/

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.

To Make More Efficient Killers? How About Their Victims' First?:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/mental-stress-training-is-planned-for-u-s-soldiers.html

The Army plans to require that all 1.1 million of its soldiers take intensive training in emotional resiliency, military officials say.

The Elite's Boy Does What The Elite Want:

http://counterpunch.org/ 08/14/09

Obama is turning out to be a disastrous president, wholly unsuited for the times and our national and global challenges, and his job approval ratings reflect this.

A More Peaceful World Is Proclaimed

Bring A Hatpin to the Wake. Make sure he is dead:

http://counterpunch.org/cockburn07072009.html

He contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world.

TCB

Our own worst enemies:

http://www.counterpunch.org/goekler03242009.html

Coming to a neighborhood near you:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1169244/Two-killed-Thai-army-fires-protesting-crowds-tourists-warned-Stay-away-Bangkok.html

The damage we do to each other:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-teen-suicide-battery-charge-apr15,0,7141500.story