They will never be fogotten

[scaredyclassic]

I loathe halloween.

[scaredyclassic]

One holiday I do like is day of the dead.

[scaredyclassic]

I also wouldn’t mind some sort of primitive dance celebrations at the equinox. My problem with thanksgiving, aside from killing all the natives, is that it’s a harvest holiday meant to celebrate the harvest after all the hard labor. Except now there’s no harvest labor and the turkey farm runs 24/7 365 days a year and the fruits get flown in from other hemispheres. We aren’t a harvesting people and a harvest holiday doesn’t make sense.

But mainly it’s the genocide.

[NotCranky]

International peace day is September 11th. Imagine what a great Monday night football halftime show that will be…

[scaredyclassic]

What about a new holiday– national consumption day– like thanksgiving but we celebrate the bountiful supply of consumer goods. But it’s organized. We give thanks fir all the really good stuff in our life that we work to acquire.

[NotCranky]

[quote=Jacarandoso]International peace day is September 11th. Imagine what a great Monday night football halftime show that will be…[/quote]
I mean Sept. 21.
I think the U.N. owns it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_of_Peace

[briansd1]

Yesterday was Mid-Autumn festival. My Taiwanese guest went out and bought a moon cake for us to enjoy with special tea she brought from Taiwan.

That was also harvest moon celebrated in many cultures. The night sky is very bright and farmers can go out and work the fields at night.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/harvest-moon-2011-brightening-sky-tonight/story?id=14503535

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/harvest-moon-peaked-sunday-night-photos-video/2011/09/12/gIQAy3y6MK_blog.html

[briansd1]

walter, what kind of fruit trees do you have on your acreage?

If you plan pomegranate, you can harvest in late October. I think they will do well in Temecula. I eat the arils including the seeds — lots of antioxidants for long life.

[scaredyclassic]

Pomegranates are suspiciously middle eastern cultivated primarily in that region but yeah I have one pomegranate tree. Not really an American type fruit. Too complicated too messy too much ambiguity.

[UCGal]

[quote=briansd1]Yesterday was Mid-Autumn festival. My Taiwanese guest went out and bought a moon cake for us to enjoy with special tea she brought from Taiwan.

That was also harvest moon celebrated in many cultures. The night sky is very bright and farmers can go out and work the fields at night.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/harvest-moon-2011-brightening-sky-tonight/story?id=14503535

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/harvest-moon-peaked-sunday-night-photos-video/2011/09/12/gIQAy3y6MK_blog.html%5B/quote%5D
A Vietnamese friend brought in moon cakes to work yesterday. Sweet (literaly and figuratively)

[Arraya]

Immanuel Kant called absolute moral imperatives that are used to carry out immoral acts “a radical evil.” He wrote that this kind of evil was always a form of unadulterated self-love. It was the worst type of self-deception

Now, Robert Pape is the gold standard when it comes to modern terrorism studies. Actually, the world’s leading practitioners of suicide terrorism are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka–a secular group drawn from Hindu families. 99% of “terrorism” is for political reasons. The CIA has called this “Blow-back”for decades.

A piece written by Ron Paul. Ironically, picked up by on of the most liberal papers in the world. This is something I have been saying for quite some time. We’ve done everything in our power to increase violent reprisals.
http://hawaiinewsdaily.com/2011/09/ron-paul-foreign-occupation-leads-to-more-terror/

Though it is hard for many to believe, honest studies show that the real motivation behind the September 11 attacks and the vast majority of other instances of suicide terrorism is not that our enemies are bothered by our way of life. Neither is it our religion, or our wealth. Rather, it is primarily occupation. If you were to imagine for a moment how you would feel if another country forcibly occupied the United States, had military bases and armed soldiers present in our hometowns, you might begin to understand why foreign occupation upsets people so much. Robert Pape has extensively researched this issue and goes in depth in his book “Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It”. In fact, of 2,200 incidents of suicide attacks he has studied worldwide since 1980, 95% were in response to foreign occupation.

Pape notes that before our invasion of Iraq, only about 10% of suicide terrorism was aimed at Americans or American interests. Since, then however, not only is suicide terrorism greatly on the rise, but 91% of it is now directed at us.

Instead, we chose a course of action that led to the further loss of 8,000 American lives, left 40,000 wounded and has hundreds of thousands seeking help at the Veterans Administration. We are three to four trillion dollars poorer. Our military is spread dangerously thin around the globe, at the expense of protection here at home. Not only that, but we have allowed our freedoms to be greatly threatened and undermined from within. The Patriot Act, warrantless searches and wiretapping, abuse of habeus corpus, useless and humiliating searches at airports are just a few examples of how we’ve allowed the terrorists to “win” by making our country less free.

Suicide terrorism did not exist in Iraq before we got there. Now it does. There are no known instances of Iranians committing suicide terrorism. If we invade and occupy Iran, expect that to change, too.

Muslim terrorism, specifically, has exponentially increased since the 90s, in all it’s manifestations.

The AQ brand is a recent evolution(global Jihad), which, ironically, was funded and trained by US forces back in the 80s including children’s books, to fight the soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Surely some of you will find this post distasteful. Frankly, I don’t care. Self-examination is something rare for Americans. Just a word of advice. It might be a good time to start. The world is in the midst of a transition.

1) change and process are at the heart of our universe; 2) the change we do see is governed by an infinite net of causal conditions and relationships; and 3) everything is interdependent.

[scaredyclassic]

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

If the USA were occupied, we would be very upset. If some guys broke out of jail and started looting art museums and some dude said, well that’s freedom, this prison- industrial complex gas been keeping people down too long, I think I’d be really pissed.

[Anonymous]

[quote=KSMountain]Uh Mr. Ogre.,

Are you aware of *why* we might have tried to block Japan’s access to oil at that time?[/quote]Uh KSMountain I’ve read numerous books on the reasons why we pushed Japan into a corner, which lead to Pearl Harbor. It’s obvious that you’ve done nothing but naively swallow the party line propaganda.

Intelligent, educated people know the US was upset that our trade with China was interrupted and FDR desperately wanted into the war in Europe. The atrocities were completely irrelevant when it came to our involvement. China and Japan were vicious adversaries in the region for centuries committing heinous acts against each other tit for tat. It was none of our business and the monetary costs and the loss of life weren’t worth that entanglement or any of the other wars in the last 100+ years.

The bottom line is that the USA promotes the propaganda that we “fight the good fight, we fight for our freedom, and are the righteous defenders of liberty” when the truth is we fight for our own interests and have our military scattered across the globe in our quest for imperial domination.

It’s not worth the money and I’m sick of the military welfare state. These people need to get a real productive job instead of suckling off of the government teat.

[Anonymous]

Ogre:

You make some good points and I agree with much of what you say, but there is one serious flaw in your post above.

Your argument that “we pushed Japan into a corner, which lead to Pearl Harbor” seems to suggest that Japan had no choice but to attack Pearl Harbor. This claim, of course, is nonsense. Japan had a choice. They certainly were not forced into planning and launching a large, sophisticated naval attack. Japan choose to use force in an attempt to alter US policy. It was a poor choice.

True, it was propagandized by the US. Pearl Harbor was not a “sneak attack” on a nation “at peace.” It certainly was not terrorism, or anything even close. The attack was a strategic military action against the military assets an adversary already engaged in the conflict. In short, it was fair game.

It is ironic how the term “sneak attack” came to imply some sort of foul play when in fact it was just good execution – not much different than Washington crossing the Delaware. The fact that either was effective in the element of surprise is hardly an ethical breach.

Propaganda aside, the US generally did “fight the good fight” during WWII. Of course there are well-established debates about some decisions, but I really don’t want to get into them here. The point is the American leadership, on balance, did an admirable job of winning the wars humanely and ethically, both during the war and in the occupations that followed.

Since WWII, however, we haven’t done so well in the “good fight,” and really don’t have much to be proud of when it comes to upholding standards. And, I agree, the “military welfare state” is out of control.

[Allan from Fallbrook]

[quote=pri_dk]Ogre:

You make some good points and I agree with much of what you say, but there is one serious flaw in your post above.

Your argument that “we pushed Japan into a corner, which lead to Pearl Harbor” seems to suggest that Japan had no choice but to attack Pearl Harbor. This claim, of course, is nonsense. Japan had a choice. They certainly were not forced into planning and launching a large, sophisticated naval attack. Japan choose to use force in an attempt to alter US policy. It was a poor choice.

[/quote]

Pri: Ogre makes good points? Uh, where? I’ve heard of rank revisionism, but this takes it to a whole new level.

Japan was not seeking to alter US policy at all. Japan was engaged in the pursuit of complete hegemony in the Pacific, the so-called “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere

The Japanese push began during the First World War, when Japan was a titular Allied power. The Japanese in 1915 issued what were known as the “Twenty-One Demands”: http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/21demands.htm, essentially designed to grant the Japanese ascendancy over China and Chinese land and holdings.

As far as “painting Japan into a corner”, perhaps Mr. Ogre is referring to the Washington Conference of 1921: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/636484/Washington-Conference, which was held to limit the naval arms race in the Pacific and address rising concerns over Japanese militarism in the region.

FDR ran on an explicitly anti-war platform and was committed to keeping the US out of the war. The fact that the US was so woefully unprepared when war was declared against Japan and Germany significantly undercuts the assertion that FDR “wanted in” on WWII. The US Army was nowhere near being ready to take on either Japan or Germany and FDR had had since September 1939 to prepare. If this was indeed a fait accompli, one would think that FDR would have done a better job of being ready for it. A brief history of US Army mobilization here: http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/brief/overview.htm#2, and this details Army preparedness (and lack thereof) from the interwar years (1918 – 1941), as well as the “crash course” the US took following the Pearl Harbor attack.

The alternative theory that somehow Japan was “pushed” into war is risible. The Japanese had been pursuing an aggressive campaign of conquest that dated back to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 – 1905 (http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/romeo/russojapanese1904.htm) and viewed China and her territories in much the same way that Hitler viewed the wide open spaces of Eastern Europe: As “living spaces” (lebensraum) for German “settlers”. The Japanese had a growing populace and the Great Depression had struck Japan hard, forcing them to seek settlement space for the excess Japanese citizenry, in addition to seizing Chinese industrial facilities.

Pseudo-intellectual claptrap notwithstanding, this attempt at somehow painting Japan as victim (especially the sickening comment about the Japanese “holocaust”) completely unravels when you consider the actual facts.

[Author]

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