"The U.N. expects another bumper crop of opium in Afghanistan this year, close to last year's all-time record of about 9,000 tons:Cultivation is still increasing in the insurgency-hit south and west of the country, the report said, and taxes on the crop have become a major source of revenue for the Taliban insurgency."
"In a display of natural fury unusual for this time of year, tornados and violent thunderstorms have killed at least 50 people in five south-central states. VOA's Greg Flakus reports."
"...So why am I then choosing Obama? A number of reasons, starting with why I am not voting for Clinton, and don’t think you should, either:
1.) Over the past few weeks I have grown weary of the Clintons, and weary really is the right term. They are tiring to the bone. Everything is calculated, nothing is what it seems to be, and they are just too cynical for even me... Everything with the Clintons is so recycled, so old, so tawdry. Yes, Hillary, I do need a change.
2.) There is nothing in the Clinton past that makes me believe they will end the war in Iraq, and additionally, I can see her engaging in military adventurism just to prove she is strong on defense.
3.) I don’t see her rolling back (at least willingly) the executive over-reaches of the past 8 years.
4.) I don’t trust her. I just don’t. Flame me all you want, but I think she has the capacity and willingness to be just as secretive as the Bush administration.
...
Why then, choose Obama?
1.) I trust his judgement. He has been using this to great effect during the campaign, but it is true- on one of the most important foreign policy judgements of my lifetime, Obama was right. This war has been a disaster, should never have been launched, the junior Senator was right, Hillary was wrong, I was wrong.
...
4.) I like the impact he has on people. I am a cynical bastard, but I really have enjoyed the fact that he really does seem to inspire people. I have somehow been immune to his charms (and mocked them), but I am not oblivious to the impact he has had on others. That is a good thing..."
"Song & video, featuring a star cast, by Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas. Inspired by Barack Obama's 'Yes We Can' speech."
Hipster to man pressing napkin against Annie Leibovitz picture to write down a number: What are you doing?! You can't do that!
Russian man: Is okay -- it happens.
--Brooklyn Museum
Overheard by: I swear, I didn't know him!
"...But there was more to the movie than that. That's the second thing people forget about the Rambo series: The first installment is explicitly anti-war and surprisingly radical.
The film opens with Rambo learning that one of his war buddies has died of exposure to Agent Orange. Right after that, when the sheriff starts to harass the soldier, Teasle tells him that "wearing that flag on that jacket, and looking the way you do, you're asking for trouble around here." The reference to the flag seems to signify an intolerance toward veterans, but the second clause implies that Teasle doesn't like Rambo because of his appearance—i.e., because he looks like a hippie drifter. When the sheriff's men finally find out that Rambo is a Green Beret who served in Vietnam, one of them exclaims, "Jesus! That freak?"
This identification of Rambo with the counterculture is a residue of Morrell's novel, which was partly inspired by a news report. "In a southwestern American town," Morrell writes, "a group of hitchhiking hippies had been picked up by the local police, stripped, hosed, and shaved—not just their beards but their hair. The hippies had then been given back their clothes and driven to a desert road, where they were abandoned to walk to the next town, thirty miles away....I wondered what Rambo's reaction would be if, after risking his life in the service of his country, he were subjected to the insults that those hippies had received."
The most jarring thing about the movie's politics comes later. Everyone remembers Rambo's much-quoted soliloquy at the end of the film, the one where he complains about "maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting on me, calling me a baby-killer." What isn't quoted as often is a conversation between Teasle and Col. Trautman, the Special Forces officer who trained Rambo. Trautman, played by Richard Crenna, describes his student's immense skills as a fighter, and he suggests the police should defuse the situation by letting Rambo escape, waiting a few days, then putting out a nationwide APB and picking him up later. Teasle refuses.
Trautman: You want a war you can't win?
Teasle: Are you telling me that 200 men against your boy is a no-win situation for us?
Trautman: You send that many, don't forget one thing.
Teasle: What?
Trautman: Plenty of body bags.
A small but committed guerilla force humiliating a larger power that doesn't comprehend the fight it's in—the comparison to Vietnam is obvious. It's also a little discomfiting, because it puts Rambo in the role of the Viet Cong. Morrell was wrong: The movie did transpose the Vietnam war to America. It just did it in a radically different way than the book did, and with radically different implications. It asks the audience to cheer for a guerilla hero.
This was surprisingly common in the allegedly right-wing cult movies of the '80s. Consider John Milius' Red Dawn (1984), in which a small group of Colorado high school jocks battle a Soviet occupation. The film outraged liberal critics, but further to the left it had some supporters. In a witty and perceptive piece for The Nation, Andrew Kopkind called it "the most convincing story about popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable Battle of Algiers," adding that he'd "take the Wolverines from Colorado over a small circle of friends from Harvard Square in any revolutionary situation I can imagine." The one sympathetic character among the occupying forces is a Cuban colonel with a background in guerilla warfare. At one point he tells a Russian officer, voice dripping with disgust, that he used to be an insurgent but now is "just like you—a policeman." Increasingly sympathetic to the Coloradoan rebels, at a key moment the Cuban allows two of them to escape.
...Rambo: First Blood Part 2 starts with the title character being freed from a prison "hell-hole." Dangling the possibility of a pardon, Trautman asks if Rambo is willing to go on a covert reconnaissance mission to find MIAs in communist Vietnam. Rambo accepts with just one question: "Do we get to win this time?"
So begins the movie everyone remembers; or, rather, the movie everyone thinks they remember. If Stallone's speech about the mistreated vet serves as a screen memory that conceals the more radical implications of the first Rambo picture, then the hype and hysteria around the follow-up film has done something similar for First Blood Part 2. Yes, it's an ultraviolent story about a supersoldier refighting the Vietnam war. Yes, it implies that we could have won Vietnam the first time around if our hands hadn't been tied by liberals back home. Yes, Ronald Reagan co-opted it, joking at the end of one hostage crisis that "After seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens." The word "Rambo" entered the language, in phrases like "Rambo foreign policy." Some veterans picketed the picture. One vet—Gustav Hasford, author of the book that became Full Metal Jacket—called it "Triumph of the Will for American Nazis."
All of which makes it easy to forget that this movie is as cynical about the government as any 1970s conspiracy thriller. Indeed, the POW/MIA rescue genre evolved directly from those post-Watergate pictures... In First Blood Part 2, likewise, we learn that Rambo was never supposed to find any prisoners; he rescues them only by ditching the authorities' plan and setting off on his own. (I haven't read Morrell's novelization of the film, but it apparently includes a scene in which Rambo chuckles darkly as he informs the disbelieving POWs that Ronald Reagan has become president. He "couldn't bring himself to tell them that Vietnam was about to change its name to Nicaragua.")
...When the Cold War ended, Sylvester Stallone's movies lost their hold on the culture and decayed into '80s kitsch. But that distrust of the government didn't disappear; if anything, it intensified and crossed what used to be sharp ideological lines. (In the early '90s, it wasn't that unusual to hear left-wing radicals pondering the possibility of a POW coverup—or right-wing radicals touting the powers of hemp.) Since 2001, the balance has tipped back and forth. When the wounds of 9/11 were fresh, the outrage of the heartland populists turned outwards again; since then, the failures of the Iraqi occupation have driven many of them back to an anti-government stance..."
"A 79-year-old nun was sentenced Friday to one year in a county jail for sexually abusing two teens when she was their principal four decades ago.
Sister Norma Giannini avoided a trial by pleading no-contest in November to two felony counts of indecent behavior with a child.
"I ask forgiveness from the bottom of my heart," she told Circuit Judge M. Joseph Donald at her sentencing.
...A psychologist told prosecutors in 2006 that Giannini identified four other victims to an Archdiocese of Milwaukee panel. The three were in Milwaukee and one was in Chicago, where she worked before and after her stint in Wisconsin, the Chicago Tribune reported Friday."
"Japan has executed three men convicted of murder, including a man who killed a woman after completing a prison term for raping her.
The hangings were carried out Friday in Tokyo, Fukuoka and Osaka, the Japan Times reported."
"In Japan, Setsubun (節分) is the day before the beginning of each season. The name literally means 'seasonal division', but usually the term refers to the spring Setsubun, properly called Risshun (立春), celebrated yearly on February 3. In its association with the Lunar New Year, Spring Setsubun can be thought of (and indeed was previously thought of) as a sort of New Year's Eve, and so was accompanied by a special ritual to cleanse away all the evil of the former year and drive away disease-bringing evil spirits for the year to come. This special ritual is called mamemaki (豆撒き, lit. bean scattering).
...At Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines all over the country, there are celebrations for Setsubun. Priests and invited guests will throw roasted soy beans (some wrapped in gold or silver foil), small envelopes with money, sweets, candies and other prizes."
"Maybe we have reached — or rather, far surpassed — Inane Study Saturation. Maybe the scientific method we rely on so desperately to illuminate every single microfacet of our lives has become far too much of a fanatical religion unto itself, a bloody altar of ostensibly infallible truth to which we have gladly sacrificed the nubile virgins of common sense and intuition and consciousness and spiritual intelligence. You think?
This, then, is the danger: Despite the frequent inanity, despite the insulting silliness of much of the information, we've been led to believe that it is only through a relentless obsession with tiny, data-driven studies that we can obtain real knowledge, real understanding of what we're about and how we should eat, sleep, screw, breathe.
As such, we risk perhaps the most vital and precious aspect of human understanding, our innate sense that everything is far, far more complicated and messy and juicy and fluidly interconnected, far more non-dissectible than we like to imagine, and in fact trying to dismember human experience into its drab components merely destroys the holistic integrity of the whole damnable circus."
"It turns out there is a neurological explanation for why people scratch and cut themselves, and spank each other for pleasure. Inflicting small amounts of physical pain, whether from scratching your skin vigorously or doing something more extreme, deactivates the parts of your brain associated with unpleasant or painful emotions. Though scientists have long speculated that there was some kind of neurological payoff from self-inflicted pain, a study published yesterday demonstrated precisely why your brain gets a reward when you hurt your body.
...It's also possible that the pain of scratching, or more intense pain from cutting, suppresses painful memories too."
"In an attempt to respond to the rising obesity crisis happening in the state of Mississippi right now where they earned the dubious distinction as the first state in the U.S. to surpass 30 percent obesity rates in 2007 (30.6 percent), state House of Representatives members W. T. Mayhall, Jr. and John Read, both Republicans, and Democrat Bobby Shows thought it would be prudent to LEGISLATIVELY require restaurant owners to discriminate against fat people wanting to eat at their establishment. I kid you not, that's what the bill says and they are DEAD SERIOUS (hat tip to Regina Wilshire for telling me about this one)!
The 'Three Blind Mice' of Mississippi, as I have dubbed Mayhall, Read, and Shows, go on to propose in their bill that the Mississippi Department of Health in conjunction with Mississippi's Council on Obesity would set the criteria for establishing what the weight limit will be for patrons wishing to dine at a restaurant anywhere within the state borders (ostensibly using the overused and irrelevant body mass index to determine whether someone is obese or not). Strict compliance with this law will be required of the restaurants or else the state 'may revoke the permit of any food establishment that repeatedly violates the provisions of this"
"Authorities in Afghanistan have sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for having downloaded and shared copies of a report criticizing the oppressive treatment of women in some Islamic societies."
"“And apparently, NASA must be used to convince the public that our current technology, such as with our very old and decrepit Space Shuttle program, is the best we have, while our military conducts space missions with technology that we can only fantasize about while watching Star Trek.” - USAF Medic, 1980s"
