war
You are viewing stuff tagged with war.
You are viewing stuff tagged with war.
Mosab Abu Toha, writing from Gaza:
I plan to go back through the wreckage for my books and rescue whatever I can. I will not put them on bookshelves this time. I just want to make sure that the pages are intact. My brother Hamza will do the same thing with his Arabic grammar and literature books, which he has spent ten years collecting. Both of us pray that in the coming days, it will not rain and soak their pages.
Reuters (and Mykala, when I woke up this morning) told me this happened today:
Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Thursday in a massed assault by land, sea and air, the biggest attack by one state against another in Europe since World War Two.
Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Inadvertent confirmation of war’s futility, from a Wikipedia article about American Samoa:
In March 1889, a German naval force invaded a village on Samoa, and by doing so destroyed some American property. Three American warships then entered the Apia harbor and prepared to engage three German warships found there. Before guns were fired, a typhoon wrecked both the American and German ships. A compulsory armistice was called because of the lack of warships.
The Onion - America’s Finest News Source presents: Delicious Snacks Distract Congressmen From Horrors Of War. I love how the bag sounds keep getting more and more ridiculous. Thanks, Nils!
This past January, The New York Times had an article: Tears Are Shed at the White House for a Marine’s Bravery in Iraq. Here are the details of that marine’s actions:
But the events of April 14, 2004, changed everything. That day, Corporal Dunham and his men were in the town of Karabilah, near the Syrian border, when they received reports that insurgents had ambushed a marine convoy. Corporal Dunham and his men boarded Humvees and headed toward the area, where they spotted a convoy of cars filled with Iraqis fleeing, according to various accounts.
The patrol led by Corporal Dunham stopped the Iraqi convoy and began inspecting the vehicles for weapons. As Corporal Dunham inspected one vehicle, a man jumped out and grabbed him by the throat. Two other marines ran over to subdue the attacker, who dropped a grenade, according to the accounts. It was then that Corporal Dunham made a fateful decision: he threw his Kevlar helmet and held it down over the grenade. He died a few days later from his wounds .
Bruce Schneier makes some good points about the embarassing public displays of stupidity that culminate in a broken home front against terrorism. In his essay, The War on the Unexpected, he writes:
The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or a trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.
Slashdot has an article titled The Real Mother of All Bombs, 46 Years Ago; inevitably, the discussion turned to Cold War politics. I found this comment to be particularly interesting:
There are frequently crickets in the basement of my parent’s home, which nobody likes to kill. So, after accidentally amputating the legs off one too many crickets in attempts to remove them from the premises, my mother devised a system whereby a check box (remember checks?) is used to scoop up the crickets. Recently, my dad was trying to save a cricket, so he asked after the whereabouts of this box. He found it. It’s labeled in permanent marker: “Box for catching/releasing crickets.”
Poison gas pictures from WWI - These images are, to me, rather powerful. Particularly “British infantry advancing through gas” and “British 55th (West Lancashire) Division troops blinded by tear gas.”