Cash & John/Leissring Drawing/Andrew Sullivan: Inch by Inch/Non Sequitor Disses Facebook/Blake's Motto/

P1 Poetical

HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!

That's my son, NYC poet John Coletti low-fiving Cash Wollard! (above)

Jack Leissring Drawing

and a cartoon from Wiley
William Blake's Motto

I must Create a Syetem or be enlav'd by another
Man's.

I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create."

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P2 Political

Barrack Obama Slowly Moving Mountains

Andrew Sullivan, former conservative, first a sample, then go to the full article

No recent president has had such a substantive start since Ronald Reagan. But what Reagan did was to shift the underlying debate in America from what government should do to what it should not. His was a domestic policy of negation and inactivism, and a foreign policy of rearmament and sharp edges. Obama has, in a mirror image of 1981, reoriented America back to a political culture that asks what government will now do: to prevent a banking collapse, to avoid a depression, to insure the working poor, to ameliorate climate change, to tackle long-term debt. The point about health insurance reform, after all, is that it represents a big expansion of government intervention in the lives of the citizenry — and that’s a game-changer from three decades of conservative governance.

Andrew Sullivan: Inch by inch, Barack Obama is moving mountains

Posted using ShareThis

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P3 Philosophical

Philosophy is the no-man's-land between science and theology, exposed to attack from both sides. - Bertrand Russell

I cannot enjoy the present happiness, for anticipating the future; which is about as foolish as the dog who dropt the real bone for its shadow. - Charles Darwin

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Spitzer on Politics/Herbert and Coletti on War/Bizarro on Fear of Flying

P1 Political

(painting by Jim Spitzer)

Another Big Mistake?

From a recent Bob Herbert column:

"I hate war," said Dwight Eisenhower, " as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

He also said, "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 not clothed."

(Ed: Yikes, Eisenhower, in today's relative terms, appears to be the "progressive"! This is pretty profound stuff.) Bob Herbert continues:

A recent Bill Moyers program on PBS played audio tapes of Johnson on which he could be heard telling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, "Not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 (American Troops) are going to end that war," McNamara replies, "That's right."

As one of the strongest Obama supporters there is, I personally have one (actually several) huge question(s) for the man who purportedly studies history, "Do you, Mr. President, seriously believe that this escalation in Afghanistan will do anything more than placate unnamed American interests? Do you seriously believe that, in a multi-thousand-year-old tribal culture, you can succeed in creating an effective National Afghan Military? What of those same words about the ARVN in Vietnam? Do you not see even the hint of similarity? I'm kind of lost here. What happened to your guts? What happened to "just say no"?


Here's a link to the full Bob Herbert column.

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P2 Poetical

American Interests – Part II

Oil juice sloppy slick
energy-bartered lives
human bodies exploded
 like dinosaurs
into fossil fuel futures,
 if there is a future to be.

Defense Department
defending what? ——

America?
you? me?
my children?
my father?
all those kids who go to war 
to defend
 liberty
 shores
 nation
 way of life? ——

When was the last war
to defend against invasion?
World War II
after Pearl Harbor?
Afghanistan after
World Trade Center?
Certainly not
“Remember the Maine”
“Remember the Alamo”
Korea
Vietnam
Iraq.

Why then can these                            
our boys and girls                
desire to fight
for American
Interests?
spheres of influence?
oil?
dominoes?
treaties and pacts?                   
war contractors?
college education?
jobs?
manliness?
thrills?
personal honor?
jingoes and jangoes?
Their fellow soldiers?
the kids and families
they’ve killed and wounded?

Who attempts to embrace
these “American Interests”
(young women are trained to fight and die for)
stress the “American” part
as in fighting for America.
They gloss over those troubling
“Interests”
as in America
(n) interests.

Soldiers long to proudly declare
“I’m defending America
and what she stands for.”
So tell me, America,
what do you stand for
right now, this very second?

(ed coletti 2009)

Comment or Read Comments Here on
any of the above or below. Log in under "Name" or "Anonymous," but
please be sure to sign some facsimile of your name. Actual name is
best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

P3 Philosophical (sort of)