War

Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers | The New Republic

Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers | The New Republic

The Afghanistan Papers are, in other words, a bombshell. Yet the report has received scant attention from the broader press. Neither NBC nor ABC covered the investigation in their nightly broadcasts this week. In other outlets, it has been buried beneath breathless reporting on the latest developments in the impeachment saga, Joe Biden’s purported pledge to serve only one term, and world leaders’ pathological envy of a 16-year-old girl.

The relentless news cycle that characterizes Donald Trump’s America surely deserves some blame: This isn’t the first time that a consequential news story has been buried under an avalanche of other news stories. But one major reason that the Afghanistan Papers have received so comparatively little coverage is that everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive. There are no hearings, few press gaggles.

George W. Bush started the Afghanistan War and botched it in plenty of ways, not least by starting another war in Iraq. But Barack Obama, despite his obvious skepticism of the war effort, exacerbated Bush’s mistakes by bowing to the Washington foreign policy blob and authorizing a pointless troop surge. Now, although both Democrats and Donald Trump seem to be on the same page about getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan, there has been little progress with peace talks. The pattern across administrations is that any movement toward resolution is usually met with a slow slide back into the status quo, a.k.a. quagmire.

How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster – Los Angeles Times

How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster – Los Angeles Times

Five thousand miles west of Los Angeles and 500 miles north of the equator, on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide.

Here in the Marshall Islands, Runit Dome holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet — or 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools — of U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium. Nowhere else has the United States saddled another country with so much of its nuclear waste, a product of its Cold War atomic testing program.

Phil Ochs – The Men Behind the Guns

Let's drink a toast to the admiral
And here's to the captain bold
And glory more for the commodore
When the deeds of might are told
They stand to the deck through the battle's wreck
When the great shells roar and pound
And never they fear when the foe is near
To lay their orders down

Wikipedia – Gestapo

Wikipedia – Gestapo

I knew very little about the gestapo and how they operated in the Nazi state. They really weren't the all powerful force they were made out to be, mostly relying on the public to report traitors and so-called sexual deviants to their forces. With the term gestapo thrown around in American politics so much, it's interesting to learn more about these forces controlled by Hitler and directly responsible for implementing the holocaust.