If Graham and the rest of the party over country folks manage to ram this through (which they won’t, but worst case scenario), I am going to hide in the hills and start planning the revolution.  I never really wanted to own a gun until they started making noise about this back in 05, I really wanted to in 06 with the MCA, and now I’m browsing gunsamerica again (and actually moving to a state that doesn’t have the gun control laws of California).Â
From the la times:
As the Bush administration deals with the fallout from the recent killings of civilians by private security firms in Iraq, some officials are asking whether the contractors could be considered unlawful combatants under international agreements.
The question is an outgrowth of federal reviews of the shootings, in part because the U.S. officials want to determine whether the administration could be accused of treaty violations that could fuel an international outcry.
But the issue also holds practical and political implications for the administration’s war effort and the image of the U.S. abroad.
If U.S. officials conclude that the use of guards is a potential violation, they may have to limit guards’ tasks in war zones, which could leave more work for the already overstretched military.
Unresolved questions are likely to touch off new criticism of Bush’s conduct of the unpopular Iraq war, especially given the broad definition of unlawful combatants the president has used in justifying his detention policies at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Of course, the problem is we don’t have enough troops to not use mercenaries…and it’s become really clear the mercenaries we use don’t have our best interests at heart. Since the PNAC folks are fond of considering America the new Rome, perhaps it’s germane at this point to remind them what happened to Rome when their military ceased to be citizens and began being the tribes they originally fought. It wasn’t pretty.
So this site never really got off the ground, mostly because people got busy. Then there was a database issue, then meteors. The dead rose from the grave, DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER, MASS HYSTERIA!
Ahem. sorry about that.
Since I’ve kept up the registration on the site, and have decided to split up my current one-stop-shop journal, the medieval geek’s guide, into more specific topic-driven journals, I thought it might be a good idea to take this ol’ girl and turn her into my political journal. So what does that mean?
There are some posts before this. Those are posts that were on the guide before but fit better here. From this post, out, everything political I want to write about will appear on this journal. The other topics are as follows:
My hope in doing this is to formalize the tone of the guide to better fit what I do academically, provide a place to seriously discuss political ideas here, build a steampunk aesthetic and world at sailingtheaether, and provide a place for random musings at stochasticeffluvia. Please let me know what you think.
So as things stand, there are three things I tend to talk about on this log: Med/Renn stuff (mostly during the school year), teaching issues and snark, and general life stuff. As of late, I’ve also been talking about the steampunk party and the outfit I’m making for that. That may grow into a more general neo-victorian fashion sense as time goes on.
I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to diversify this information. The medieval stuff would stay in medievalgeek.com, political stuff might go in modernmoderate.com, steampunk stuff might go in a heretofore unnamed blog (wingsofsteam.com and clockworkdreams.com, the two domains I came up with at this late hour, are both registered already), and the teaching issues and general life snark might stay here or go somewhere else. I’m leaning towards the somewhere else. This would make medievalgeek my professional medievalist journal (or at least the journal wherein I talk about the things I’m doing professionally), the teaching journal something else entirely (I’m tempted to put teaching here but I don’t really teach the middle ages yet), the steampunk stuff for fun in its own place, politics in modern moderate, and general life stuff…someplace?
I would aggregate all these journals (with the exception of englishthoughts.org, the page I set up to use as a teaching aid) to my livejournal, so for the majority of you this wouldn’t effect anything. It would, however, change the tone of posts dependent on where I’m writing.
The Project for the New American Century liked to suggest that America was the new Rome.?Ǭ� In light of today’s Fresh Air, I think it’s more accurate to call it the new Byzantium.
More on this when I’ve time to address it properly.
Molly Ivins is dead.?Ǭ� I realize this may or may not matter to you, but some of the best political writing I ever read — even when I didn’t agree with it — was from her.
The link to her last column is here.
I’m holding a wake for the concept of habeas corpus.?Ǭ� I am drinking lambic and may finish up everything I have in the fridge.?Ǭ� I’d go with scotch but I don’t want to be that far gone since I have to teach tomorrow.?Ǭ� It’s a bit sad because it’s just me, but hey, what are you going to do.?Ǭ� In the land of the blind the one eyed man is really fucked.
I’m planning out my next unit for the class I’m teaching, and I’d like it to be on politics and ethics as a lead-up to the election in November.?Ǭ� I’m thinking about including a smattering of readings from the Federalist, various speeches, and so forth, but I’d like most of the articles and essays I’m having them read be opinion pieces and the like.?Ǭ� What I would really like is to have reading that is entertaing and funny.
The problem is I don’t want to be biased, and I don’t know of any conservative funny opinion commentator.?Ǭ� I know there’s no shortage of OMG Lie-brals types, but I’m looking for a conservative equivalent of Molly Ivins and her type of commentator.?Ǭ� PJ O’Rourke has come to mind, but I’m not sure of anyone else.?Ǭ� Anyone able to give me some suggestions?
There is a tendency amongst social libertarians and social progressives to tar all Christians with the same brush that, deservingly, the religious right gets. Because of this, I think it’s equally important to acknowledge when members of the evangelical community disagree with the administration and the lock-step position of the religious right in regards to it. I am not a Christian — I cannot accept the divinity of Jesus Christ — but I do respect his teachings, and it’s nice to see that there are those who are in the evangelical Christian community that do as well. An exerpt:
The Bible contains something like 2,000 references to the poor and the believer’s responsibility for the poor. Sadly, that obligation seems not to have trickled down into public policy. On judicial matters, the religious right demands appointees who would diminish individual rights to privacy with regard to abortion. At the same time, it approves a corresponding expansion of presidential powers, thereby disrupting the constitutionally mandated system of checks and balances.The torture of human beings, God’s creatures ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù some guilty of crimes, others not ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù has been justified by the Bush administration, which also believes that it is perfectly acceptable to conduct surveillance on American citizens without putting itself to the trouble of obtaining a court order. Indeed, the chicanery, the bullying, and the flouting of the rule of law that emanates from the nation’s capital these days make Richard Nixon look like a fraternity prankster.
Where does the religious right stand in all this? Following the revelations that the U.S. government exported prisoners to nations that have no scruples about the use of torture, I wrote to several prominent religious-right organizations. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization’s position on the administration’s use of torture. Surely, I thought, this is one issue that would allow the religious right to demonstrate its independence from the administration, for surely no one who calls himself a child of God or who professes to hear “fetal screams” could possibly countenance the use of torture. Although I didn’t really expect that the religious right would climb out of the Republican Party’s cozy bed over the torture of human beings, I thought perhaps they might poke out a foot and maybe wiggle a toe or two.
I was wrong. Of the eight religious-right organizations I contacted, only two, the Family Research Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, answered my query. Both were eager to defend administration policies. “It is our understanding, from statements released by the Bush administration,” the reply from the Family Research Council read, “that torture is already prohibited as a means of collecting intelligence data.” The Institute on Religion and Democracy stated that “torture is a violation of human dignity, contrary to biblical teachings,” but conceded that it had “not yet produced a more comprehensive statement on the subject,” even months after the revelations. Its president worried that the “anti-torture campaign seems to be aimed exclusively at the Bush administration,” thereby creating a public-relations challenge.
This article just makes me sick. This guy was maybe the closest thing we would have to the D&D notion of a Paladin, and our government’s policies and persuit of profit simply wasn’t something he could live with.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-colonel27nov27,0,6096413,full.story
I want to say something about this in relation to the middle ages, so I may edit this later.
