in my humble opinion the level of negativity, contempt and hate that consumes you is not healthy
i hope i'm wrong and you live a long and prosperous life
(...) The deployments involve stepping into a zone of regional rivalries and is not a simple matter of protecting good guys against bad guys. Despite the perennial fixation on Iran, Tehranâs regional rivals â including ones that are the origin or destination of much of that commercial shipping that the administration wants to protect â are just as distant from American values and interests. Saudi Arabia, traditionally the principal rival, is at least as much of an authoritarian state as Iran and an oppressive violator of human rights whose actions and ideology have had lethal consequences for Americans both individually and on a larger scale.
The stated reason for considering the placement of U.S. troops on commercial ships, and part of the background to the other U.S. military deployments to the region, involves Iranâs interception, seizure, or other harassment of some oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. With different U.S. policies, this situation could have been avoided. Iran has not intercepted shipping because Iranians have some genetic malice that compels them to do such things. As with many other Iranian policies and actions, this practice is reactive.
It was the United States, not Iran, that began the latest round of going after another nationâs tankers and seizing its oil. The U.S. actions reflect a unilateral U.S. policy of trying to prevent Iranian oil exports. This policy is not grounded in international law, and Iran unsurprisingly has labeled the U.S. seizure and selling of Iranian oil as âpiracy.â The U.S. government has not found a buyer for a tanker full of Iranian oil that it seized at sea in April and brought to Houston, because shippers and potential buyers fear repercussions. (...)
In 1980, when I asked the press office at the U.S. Department of Energy to send me a listing of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency mailed me an official booklet with the title âAnnounced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979.â As youâd expect, the Trinity test in New Mexico was at the top of the list. Second on the list was Hiroshima. Third was Nagasaki.
So, 35 years after the atomic bombings of those Japanese cities in August 1945, the Energy Department â the agency in charge of nuclear weaponry â was categorizing them as âtests.â
Later on, the classification changed, apparently in an effort to avert a potential P.R. problem. By 1994, a new edition of the same document explained that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki âwere not âtestsâ in the sense that they were conducted to prove that the weapon would work as designed . . . or to advance weapon design, to determine weapons effects, or to verify weapon safety.â
But the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually were tests, in more ways than one.
Take it from the Manhattan Projectâs director, Gen. Leslie Groves, who recalled: âTo enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids. It was also desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb.â
A physicist with the Manhattan Project, David H. Frisch, remembered that U.S. military strategists were eager âto use the bomb first where its effects would not only be politically effective but also technically measurable.â
For good measure, after the Trinitybomb test in the New Mexico desert used plutonium as its fission source on July 16, 1945, in early August the military was able to test both a uranium-fueled bomb on Hiroshima and a second plutonium bomb on Nagasaki to gauge their effects on big cities.
Public discussion of the nuclear era began when President Harry Truman issued a statement that announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima â which he described only as âan important Japanese Army base.â It was a flagrant lie. A leading researcher of the atomic bombings of Japan, journalist Greg Mitchell, has pointed out: âHiroshima was not an âarmy baseâ but a city of 350,000. It did contain one important military headquarters, but the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city â and far from its industrial area.â
Mitchell added: âPerhaps 10,000 military personnel lost their lives in the bomb but the vast majority of the 125,000 dead in Hiroshima would be women and children.â Three days later, when an atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, âit was officially described as a ânaval baseâ yet less than 200 of the 90,000 dead were military personnel.â
Since then, presidents have routinely offered rhetorical camouflage for reckless nuclear policies, rolling the dice for global catastrophe. In recent years, the most insidious lies from leaders in Washington have come with silence â refusing to acknowledge, let alone address with genuine diplomacy, the worsening dangers of nuclear war.
in my humble opinion the level of negativity, contempt and hate that consumes you is not healthy i hope i'm wrong and you live a long and prosperous life
in my humble opinion the level of negativity, contempt and hate that consumes you is not healthy
i hope i'm wrong and you live a long and prosperous life
Minihan followed up by releasing a 20-page âMobility Manifestoâ that was both urgent and irreverent. âIf you are easily offended by intentional crass, please stop reading now,â he wrote in the opening. The document goes on to criticize âexcuse-laden admiration for the status quoâ and declare that air mobility forces were in âcrisis.â
While U.S. airmen are the best in the world, he wrote, there is âsignificant riskâ in inaction that requires ârevolutionaryâ moves to ensure that the Air Force can continue to do its part.âIf this comes across as harsh, good,â Minihan wrote. âWe are not looking for blue skies or smooth air. We are looking to deliver.â
Weeks later, Minihanâs memo predicting war within China drew international attention. He ordered airmen to get their personal affairs in order and to âfire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.â
âAim for the headâ when doing so, he directed.
The Pentagon distanced itself from the remarks, while Chinaâs state-run Global Times cited analysts decrying what they called the U.S. militaryâs prevalence of âsuper-hawkish war maniacs.â
One influential retired general, Barry McCaffrey, tweeted that Minihan needed âto be placed on terminal leave,â effectively fired, after showing bad judgment and âcowboy aggression.â
Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the United States was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that âwar crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.â This same standard prevailed in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and practically any other place where the U.S. has militarily intervened.
I still remember when Americans made fun of âold guardâ Soviet leaders and used words like âscleroticâ to describe them. They were a visible symbol of Soviet tiredness and decline, the refuse of the past when compared to a younger, more vigorous, United States with its dominant and thrusting world economy.
The $850 billion chicken comes home to roost The military industrial complex is not designed to actually fight wars. If so, you wouldnât see Ukraine struggling right now to win one.
As originally designed, the Bradley tanks promptly burst into flame when hit with anything much more powerful than a BB pellet, incinerating anyone riding inside. The armor bureaucrats were well aware of this defect, but pausing development for a redesign might have hurt their budget, so they delayed and cheated on tests to keep the program on track. Prior to one test, they covertly substituted water-tanks for the ammunition that would otherwise explode.
Only when Jim Burton, a courageous air force lieutenant colonel from the Pentagonâs testing office, enlisted Congress to mandate a proper live fire test were the armyâs malign subterfuges exposed and corrected. His principled stand cost him his career, but the Bradley was redesigned, rendering it less potentially lethal for passengers. Hence, forty years on, the survival of those lucky Ukrainians.
This largely forgotten episode serves as a vivid example of an essential truth about our military machine: it is not interested in war.
How else to understand the lack of concern for the lives of troops, or producing a functioning weapon system? As Burton observed in his instructive 1993 memoir Pentagon Wars, the U.S. defense system is âa corrupt business â ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom.â
Nothing has happened in the intervening years to contradict this assessment, with potentially grim consequences for men and women on the front line. Today, for example, the U.S. Air Force is abandoning its traditional role of protecting and coordinating with troops on the ground, otherwise known as Close Air Support, or CAS. Given its time-honored record of bombing campaigns that had little or no effect on the course of wars, CAS has probably been the only useful function (grudgingly) performed by the service. (...)
While "His Lordship" Christopher Nolan always has been intent on igniting the nerve of violence in his movies (see: the Batman cinema massacre) like a typical Umrican he left out Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his movie on the Atom bomb.
I just seems like the latest Umrican (Hollyweird) hypocrisy.
This post resembles that of a certain smooth-brained troll who posted here years ago.
/observation
While "His Lordship" Christopher Nolan always has been intent on igniting the nerve of violence in his movies (see: the Batman cinema massacre) like a typical Umrican he left out Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his movie on the Atom bomb.
I just seems like the latest Umrican (Hollyweird) hypocrisy.
Hollywood What âOppenheimerâ leaves out The three-hour-long movie has gripping drama and important history, but it ignores the first victims of the nuclear era.
But one impact of the test is clear. In the months after the explosion, the entire state of New Mexico saw an unprecedented spike in infant mortality, with 56 percent more New Mexican babies dying during live births in 1945 than in 1944. That number went back down in 1946 and has never reached such high levels since, a statistical anomaly with a 0.0001 percent chance of being caused by natural conditions, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.