277 Million Boston Bombings - Robert Scheer

To this day, antipersonnel weapons—the technologically refined version of the primitive pressure cooker fragmentation bombs exploded in Boston—maim and kill farmers and their children in Southeast Asia.

The horror of Boston should be a reminder that the choice of weaponry can be in itself an act of evil. President Obama made clear that “anytime bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror.”

Obama was right to blast the use of weapons that targeted civilians in Boston as inherent acts of terrorism, but by what standard do such weapons change their nature when they are deployed by governments against civilians?

America’s role in the deployment of antipersonnel land mines, and our country’s refusal to sign off on a ban on cluster munitions agreed to by most of the world’s nations, that offers the most glaring analogy with the carnage of Boston.

To this day, antipersonnel weapons—the technologically refined version of the primitive pressure cooker fragmentation bombs exploded in Boston—maim and kill farmers and their children in Southeast Asia.  The United States dropped 277 million cluster bomblets on Laos between 1964 and 1973.

From 2001 through 2002, the United States dropped 1,228 cluster bombs containing 248,056 submunitions in Afghanistan, and U.S. and British forces used almost 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 million to 2 million submunitions during the first three weeks of combat in Iraq in 2003.

The whole point of a cluster weapon is to target an area the size of several football fields with the same bits of maiming steel that did so much damage in Boston. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been active in attempting to clear land of remaining bomblets, estimates 10,000 Lao civilian casualties to date from such weapons. As many as twenty-seven million unexploded bomblets remain in the country, according to the committee.

On Aug. 1, 2010, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning such weapons, became a matter of international law for the 111 nations, including 18 NATO members, that signed the agreement. The U.S. was not one of them. Current American policy, according to the Congressional Research Service report, is that “cluster munitions are available for use by every combat aircraft in the U.S. inventory; they are integral to every Army or Marine maneuver element and in some cases constitute up to 50 percent of tactical indirect fire support.”

The full article is available here

Austerity's Failure = Everywhere You Look - Jon Queally

Austerity leads the economy to perform more poorly.

The last week has been a flurry of headlines decrying the complete and utter failure of the 'austerity experiment' across the globe, with an influential academic paper from Harvard economists becoming the poster-child not only of poor scholarship but also failed common sense.

As New York Times columnist and Nobel economist Paul Krugman notes:

"The austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics.

The academic research mentioned is the work of Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, which was revealed last week to be riddled with spread sheet errors that vastly undercut the paper's conclusion. Those faulty conclusions, however, were widely used by pro-austerity policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic to justify slashing public spending, imposing harsh cuts on social programs and worker benefits."

In a Bloomberg interview earlier this month Columbia University's Joseph Stiglitz was blunt about the historical record. “There is no instance of a large economy getting to growth through austerity," he said. "Austerity leads the economy to perform more poorly. It leads to more unemployment, lower wages, more inequality.”

The Reinhart and Rogoff paper was not used only to argue for cuts to popular social insurance programs, it was also used to argue against government efforts to boost the economy and create jobs.

You get the idea: The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1% wants becomes what economic science says we must do.

The full article is available here

What if the Tsarnaevs Had Been the "Boston Shooters"? - John Cassidy

Yes, this is only a counter-factual exercise, which, like all such riffs, shouldn’t be taken too literally. But it’s hard to think about it for long without coming to the conclusion that there’s something askew with the way we think about and react to various types of extreme violence, and the weapons used in such episodes.

In a country where each life (and death) is supposed to count equally, surely the victims of gun violence should be accorded the same weight as the victims of bomb violence. And the perpetrators should get equal treatment, too. But, of course, that’s not how things work. 

Most Americans associate bomb attacks with terrorists. When they hear of mass shootings, they tend to think of sociopaths and unbalanced post-adolescents. If the Tsarnaevs had managed to carry out a gun massacre unharmed and escaped, their identities unknown, would the first presumption have been that the shooters were Islamic extremists? Or would people have looked in another direction?

Terrorism, especially homegrown terrorism, is a minor threat to public safety and public health. It pales in comparison to gun violence.

The full article is available here

Our Souls And A Planet's Worth of Suffering - Bill Hodgeman

I don't think that the human soul was made to sustain information about a planet's worth of suffering--everyday--when, in most cases, there's nothing we can do about it. 

For most of history, people were only aware of the tragedies that happened in their own communities, and in most cases, they COULD do something about it. 

Lopsided Information- Action ratios are bad for the soul.

Boston bombing: Bad journalism fuels terrorism hysteria - Robin Abcarian

What is wrong with the New York Post?

Thursday morning, the tabloid newspaper’s front page featured a huge photo of two young men with backpacks, with the giant headline: “Bag Men: Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon.”

In the online story, the pair’s faces had big red circles around them. Yes, sort of like targets. Turns out, the young men had nothing to do with the blasts.  After an appropriate hail of criticism, Post Editor Col Allan, incredibly, defended his decision to smear two innocent men. And yes, that was a smear.

By making a lame pun about their backpacks, the Post leaped past any kind of journalistic restraint and implied the men were suspects in the case. How could you read the photo and the giant headline any other way?

Claims feed into stereotypes and affirm our worst prejudices. A Saudi Arabian kid running from the blast must be the suspect. A couple of swarthy backpack-toting kids watching the race must be the suspects.  The New York Post promulgated both those stories.

The full article is available here

Oklahoma Grandmother Bike-Locks Herself to KXL Pipeline Machinery - Jacob Chamberlain

Zorn was eventually removed from the equipment by local police and taken into custody.

Oklahoma grandmother Nancy Zorn, 79, locked herself to a piece of heavy machinery Tuesday morning in protest of TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline construction, halting work on a construction site of the tar sands harbinger for several hours.

“Right now our neighbors in Arkansas are feeling the toxic affect of tar sands on their community. Will Oklahoma neighborhoods be next?” Zorn asked, referring to the thousands of barrels of tar sands oil which spilled out of an Arkansas pipeline last week.

“I can no longer sit by idly while toxic tar sands are pumped down from Canada and into our communities. It is time to rise up and defend our home. It is my hope that this one small action today will inspire many to protect this land and our water.”

Zorn was eventually removed from the equipment by local police and taken into custody.

Zorn is the second Oklahoma grandmother this year risking arrest to stop construction of the pipeline, Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance said Tuesday. The action is part of a series of civil disobedience actions against the pipeline construction led by the group.

The full article is available here