America's heart?

Jesus: "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also"

Priorities: $30 Billion versus $1000 Billion. So where is America's heart?

1100 civilians violently killed in Iraq in November.

The *most* telling thing here, apart from the amounts, is the difference in level of detail about how many deaths are happening. He very happily announces 5700 deaths per day worldwide from HIV/AIDS> Does he say anything about deaths per day in Iraq under American occupation?

From the presidents comments on World AIDS day According to the most recent estimates by the United Nations, more than 33 million people around the world live with HIV. They are mothers, they are fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and teachers. And each day, some 5,700 lose their lives. When Americans witness this suffering, they feel a duty to respond. Some are motivated by conscience and a conviction that America should use its great influence to be a force for good. Many others are driven by faith -- by the call to love your neighbor as yourself, even when that neighbor may live on the other side of the world. This spirit of brotherhood and generosity has long defined our country. And over the past six years, we have rallied that spirit in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Here at home, we've taken new measures to increase HIV/AIDS testing, expand treatment, and improve care. We've worked with healthcare providers to make voluntary HIV screening a routine part of medical care, so all Americans can know their status. And we've worked with Congress to renew the Ryan White Care Act, which helps HIV/AIDS patients receive lifesaving drugs. Overseas, the scope of the challenge is much longer -- much larger, and this nation is responding. In 2003, I proposed the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief -- a five-year, $15 billion initiative to expand prevention, treatment, and care in the most heavily-affected countries. Congress approved the plan with bipartisan support. I want our fellow citizens to think about what this means: Every year, American taxpayers send billions of their hard-earned dollars overseas to save the lives of people they have never met. In return for this extraordinary generosity, Americans expect results. So the Emergency Plan includes specific, measurable targets for progress. It demands honesty and accountability for all those involved. It puts local partners in the lead, because they know the needs of their people best. With this strategy, we have pioneered a new model for public health. And so far, the results have been striking: Five years ago, only 50,000 people with AIDS in sub-Sahara Africa were receiving antiretroviral drugs. Today, thanks to the emergency plan and to the generosity of the American taxpayer, that number is nearly 1.4 million. Think about that, over a five-year period of time the number of people in sub-Sahara Africa has increased from 50,000 to 1.4 million thanks to the American taxpayer. Around the world, another 6.7 million people with HIV/AIDS have received compassionate care, including 2.7 million orphans and vulnerable children. Tens of millions have received prevention -- prevention messages based on the proven principles of ABC, which is Abstinence, Be faithful, and use Condoms. The money that you have spent [sic] is being spent wisely and saving lives. Some call this a remarkable success. I call it a good start. So we have worked with the private sector and G8 nations to increase their commitments. This May, I proposed to double our nation's initial pledge to $30 billion over the next five years. These American funds will help us support treatment for nearly 2.5 million people, prevent more than 12 million new infections, and support care for 12 million people, including more than 5 million orphans and vulnerable children. Now the time has come for United States Congress to act again. I'm confident they will, and I call on Congress to show America's leadership and compassion by reauthorizing the emergency plan and doubling our commitment to this urgent cause.

And from the president's radio address this week Next week, Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess. Members are coming back to a lot of unfinished business. And the clock will be ticking, because they have only a few weeks to get their work done before leaving again for Christmas. Congress must address four critical priorities. First, Congress needs to pass a bill to fund our troops in combat. Second, Congress needs to make sure our intelligence professionals can continue to monitor terrorist communications so we can prevent attacks against our people. Third, Congress needs to pass a bill to protect middle-class families from higher taxes. And fourth, Congress needs to pass all the remaining appropriations bills to keep the Federal Government running. Congress's first priority should be to provide the funds and flexibility to keep our troops safe and help them protect our Nation. Beginning in February, I submitted detailed funding requests to Congress to fund operations in the war on terror. Our military has waited on these funds for months. The funds include money to carry out combat operations against the enemy in Afghanistan and Iraq. They include money to train the Afghan and Iraqi security forces to take on more responsibility for the defense of their countries. And they include money for intelligence operations to protect our troops on the battlefield. Pentagon officials recently warned Congress that continued delay in funding our troops will soon begin to have a damaging impact on the operations of our military. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has already notified Congress that he will transfer money from accounts used to fund other activities of the military services to pay for current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and no more money can be moved. So he has directed the Army and Marine Corps to develop a plan to lay-off civilian employees, terminate contracts, and prepare our military bases across the country for reduced operations. Military leaders have told us what they need to do their job. It is time for the Congress to do its job and give our troops what they need to protect America. ... And from the Washington Post in October President Bush challenged Congress to another clash over the direction of the Iraq war yesterday as he asked lawmakers for $46 billion more to pay for overseas military operations and insisted that they approve it by the end of the year. The president's war funding plan revived the political struggle over Iraq that has grown somewhat dormant in Washington over the past month. Democrats vowed not to rubber-stamp the request and indicated that they will disregard Bush's holiday deadline, holding off any action until next year as they debate a new strategy to counter his leadership on the war. The latest spending proposal brings the total current fiscal year request for Iraq, Afghanistan and counterterrorism operations to $196.4 billion, by far the largest annual tally since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. If approved by Congress in its entirety, it would bring the total appropriated since then to more than $800 billion. At their current rate, war appropriations could reach $1 trillion by the time Bush leaves office, a total that by some measures would exceed the cost of the Korean and Vietnam wars combined. And from Iraq Body count: 1100 civilians killed in Iraq in November, including 75 killed directly by U.S. soldiers, 2 of whom were children.

how I want to be buried

EcoEternity Forest. (anti)H/T Chuck Colson.

I think this is a really kewl idea.

The weekly roundup in Iraq

I really think if you are American, you should oughtta read this (there, I attempted to put an oughty-should on you! Consider yourself notified). Even if you average out to every man,woman, and child, as an American you've spent nearly $1500 to help bring about this state of things in Iraq. And that's more than any single one of the lower 2 billion income earners in the world earns in 2 years.

Again, stolen from Lily Hamourtziadou

Fear

At Baghdad’s Yarmouk hospital, a man and his wife, both injured in a bomb attack that killed 15 people in Amil, were lying on stretchers in the emergency room. The man, whose right foot had been amputated, screamed at his wife, who had shrapnel wounds and was unconscious: ‘Fatima! Where are the kids, Fatima?’ (LA Times, 30 May).

Iraqis live in a fear few of us can even imagine, a fear even fewer of us will ever experience. Police and morgue officials giving information on daily casualties, do so in anonymity, fearing they could be targeted by militants. Unclaimed and unidentified bodies fill the morgues every month, their relatives too frightened to identify and claim the bodies. They join thousands of others buried in mass graves.

In May 2,770 civilians were killed in Iraq, an average of 89 a day. The violence is up from April, when there were 2,590 reported civilian deaths, an average of 86 a day; in March the toll was 2,731, an average of 88 a day.

This past week alone, 680 civilian lives were snuffed out in violent attacks.

On Monday 28 May 125 die, 100 of them in Baghdad. The dead include 14 policemen, a college student, a newspaper editor and a translator.

On Tuesday 29 May, the worst day of the week, 150 lose their lives. Two car bombs kill 49 people in Baghdad, a journalist is killed by gunmen, together with 7 members of his family near Falluja, and 78 bodies are found in Baghdad, Suwayra, Baquba, Balad, Toz and Abu Tomar.

On Wednesday 30 May over 80 civilians die. Among the dead, 2 elderly people sleeping on the roof of their homes (common in Iraq during the summer, to escape the intense heat) killed by a US helicopter during an air raid over Sadr City. Militia raids in Amil, Baghdad, kill 21 Sunni men. Iraqi TV, Al-Iraqiya, reports that Sadr City residents call upon officials to intervene to stop the raids and shelling of the city by the Multinational Forces. ‘Citizens in the city affirmed that military operations in their city cause a large number of innocent casualties…The evenings are filled with the sounds of lethal ammunitions and terrifying raids. The residents do not sleep quietly or safely. No single day passes without the Multinational Force raiding and attacking several houses and causing the martyrdom and wounding of dozens of innocent people.’ (Al-Iraqiya 1 June)

Around 90 die on Thursday 31 May. In the worst incident, a suicide bomber kills 30 in a police recruitment centre in Falluja. Gunmen kill a lecturer in Fine Arts in Basra, while an Associated Press reporter is shot dead in Baghdad. The 26-year-old cameraman leaves a wife 8-months pregnant with their first child. 45 bodies are found in 7 cities, and 14 unidentified bodies are buried in Kirkuk.

Around 75 die on Friday 1 June. The dead include 3 children (7, 9 and 11 years of age) killed as a US tank fires on suspected insurgents near Falluja. The insurgents, who were thought to be planting a bomb, escape. Another US raid on Sadr City kills 2, one of them an ambulance driver. Gunmen kill 7 at a fake checkpoint in Khalis, and 33 bodies are found in Baghdad, Baquba and Khalis.

On the quietest day of the week, Saturday 2 June, 57 civilians die. Among them an Imam and a Sheikh, shot dead in Baghdad, and 8 killed by mortars in Fadhil, Baghdad –one of them a child. Police find 40 bodies in 5 cities. More than 2,000 people march the streets of Shula, a Shiite district in Baghdad, to demand improvements in basic services like electricity and water. The demonstrators denounce the United States, Israel and the US-backed Iraqi government.

On Sunday 3 June the dead exceed 100. A car bomb kills 10 in a market in Balad Ruz, gunmen kill 5 at a fake checkpoint near Baquba, US air strikes kill 5 in Sadr City and 2 in Dhilu’iya, while gunmen shoot dead a Catholic priest, 31-year-old Father Ragheed Ganni, and 3 deacons in Mosul. Police find 64 bodies in 6 cities. Another 41 unclaimed bodies are buried in Kirkuk.

Meanwhile, General Raymond Odierno, the number 2 head of US forces in Iraq, has stated that ‘the surge is not yet fully in place, and it will take time and patience before we begin to realise its effects.’ In fact, ‘we could be in Iraq for 50 years’ according to US Defence Secretary Robert Gates. The sad truth is that the US will never leave Iraq. Despite the massive civilian death toll, despite the massive rise of terrorism, despite the rapidly increasing deaths of American soldiers.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has apologised for the deaths of American troops in his country. After a month when 2,770 Iraqi civilians die, the Iraqi President apologises for the deaths of 126 American soldiers. He continues: ‘Everyone in Iraq knows that…the United States saved the Iraqi people…the majority of people are for having the American Army.’ He really speaks for himself, as neither he nor anyone else in the Iraqi government would survive for one day if the US army that backs them withdrew from Iraq.

Weekly roundup of civilian deaths in Iraq under U.S. occupation

stolen from Lily.

The violence this week has caused over 600 civilian deaths.

More than 80 die on Monday 21 May. Gunmen kill 7 inside a minibus near Hibhib, one of them a child, while US forces shoot dead a civilian in Ishaqi, after their patrol is hit by a roadside bomb. In Baghdad, Falluja and Baquba, police find 51 bound and tortured bodies.

(Read more ...)

On Tuesday 22 May 125 lose their lives. In the day’s largest incident, a car bomb blows up 25 people, including 3 children, in Amil, Baghdad. Gunmen shoot dead 8 college students in Baghdad, while mortars kill another 4 students in Adhamiya, Baghdad. Near Baquba, gunmen kill 6 people, mother, father and 4 children, while US forces kill 4 civilians in two different incidents in Baghdad and Mosul. In Albu Ubaid, east of Ramadi, a suicide bomber enters a house and blows up 10 members of the same family. Police find 46 bodies in 5 cities, most of them in Baghdad.

On Wednesday 23 May 110 die, including 20 killed by a suicide bomber in a café in Mandali, 3 children killed by mortars in Khan Bani Saad, a primary school pupil killed when mortars fall on his school in Mahmudiya, and 8 policemen. 49 bodies are found in 6 cities, most of them in Baghdad.

Around 100 die on Thursday 24 May, among them 35 people who die when a car bomb explodes during a funeral in Falluja. Gunmen set up a fake checkpoint and shoot dead 11 people inside a minibus when it stops. After planting a bomb among the bodies, they blow up another 2 who come to the scene. 2 more civilians are shot dead by US forces, while a truck driver is killed by Blackwater security contractors in Baghdad. Also, 27 bodies are found, most of them in Baghdad.

On the quietest day of the week, 58 die on Friday 25 May. In an attack on Aswad village, gunmen kill 17 people, while mortars kill 2 children in Baghdad. Police find 26 bodies, mostly in Baghdad. In Kufa, Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr calls for all Iraqis to fight the occupying forces united.

Another 60 civilians are killed on Saturday 26 May. In an air raid over Sadr City, Baghdad, US planes kill up to 5 people. According to several reports and witnesses, as well as Iraqi officials, the dead are civilian drivers queuing in their cars to buy petrol. 11 cars are destroyed in the raid. During another air strike by British forces, up to 8 civilians are reported killed in Basra. Police find 27 bodies, mostly in Baghdad.

Around 75 are killed on Sunday 27 May. Among the victims, a famous Iraqi calligrapher shot dead in Baghdad, a child blown up by a car bomb in Falluja, 2 farmers, a head of council and his assistant, and 3 women and a child killed by mortars in Baghdad. In Baghdad police find 44 bodies, tortured and shot in the head.


This is what the pursuit of self-interest by a powerful state has led to: the total devastation of a country and its people. The collapse of Iraq: a country that had no terrorists before its invasion, a country that never attacked America. The goal has been achieved: the US is in Iraq and it will stay there to protect its interests. Yet too much has been lost on both sides to make this a sweet victory..

620 Civilian deaths in Iraq under U.S. occupation this week

Stolen from Lily Hamourtziadou.

This week the nameless and faceless Iraqi civilians who died exceeded 620.

Over 80 die on Monday 14 May, half of them in Baghdad. US troops kill an Iraqi policeman in Abu Dsheer in Baghdad; US forces also kill a child when they open fire on a house near Dujail. In a gun battle between British forces and gunmen in Basra 2 students are killed, caught in the crossfire.

Over 100 die on Tuesday 15 May, including 45 killed by a suicide truck bomb in a market in Abu Saida, 7 killed by bombs in al-Tayaran square, Baghdad, and 4 by mortar fire in Ur, Baghdad. Police find 23 bodies in Baghdad, Suwayra and Baquba. In Karbala, 91 unidentified bodies are buried in a mass grave.

Around 90 die on Wednesday 16 May. Among them 9 civilians killed in clashes in Nasiriya, 2 by mortars in Baghdad’s Green Zone, while a child is shot dead by Iraqi police trying to break up a protest. In Baghdad 30 bodies are found.

On Thursday 17 May 80 civilians lose their lives, half of them in Baghdad. Among the victims 2 journalists working for ABC news, ambushed and shot dead in Baghdad, and 30 bodies found bound and tortured in Baghdad. More bodies are found in Baquba, Kirkuk, Latifiya and Karma.

On Friday 18 May the civilian death toll is 90. A US patrol, firing randomly, shoots dead 2 civilians in Baghdad, after a roadside bomb explodes next to them. Gunmen shoot dead 3 lorry drivers near Kirkuk, a suicide bomber kills 3 policemen at a checkpoint in Jarf al-Sakhr, police find 25 bodies in Baghdad, 30 in Diyala, 5 in Hilla and 5 in Kut. All tortured and shot, one of them a 12-year-old child.

Over 100 die on Saturday 19 May. In a Kurdish Shiite village gunmen shoot dead 15 men and 1 woman, 15 are killed in various incidents in Baghdad, 3 children are blown up by a bomb in Nassiriya, and police find 60 bodies in Baghdad, Mosul, Falluja, Basra, Hilla, Khalis and Muradiya.

Around 70 die on Sunday 20 May, half of them in Baghdad.

Recreating the Old Testament

Another 23 people were killed execution style in Iraq Sunday afternoon.

All Headline News reports:

Iraq was rocked by fresh violence Sunday when gunmen took 23 Kurds from a bus in northern Iraq and shot them execution-style just hours after two suicide car bombers set off explosives near a police station in Baghdad killing 13 people and wounding 82, authorities said.

According to police, the shootings near the northern Iraqi town of Mosul happened after a group of gunmen stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny Kurdish religious sect. The gunmen then separated the Kurds from the other passengers and took them away to be shot.

The 23 dead were mostly Yazidis, members of a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians, the Associated Press reports. Police said the executions appeared to be in response to the stoning death of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam.

Now where I have read about a stoning death before ...

Do you care--does it matter to you in slightest, as you buy your coffee and go off to work or school on Monday morning, that 36 people were killed and 82 injured yesterday in a country which the U.S. and Britain illegally invaded and illegally continue to occupy?

Nah--surely not. Never mind. Sorry to be a pain in the arse. Go on now. Don't miss the baseball game this afternoon, whatever you do.

another 22 violent deaths in iraq this weekend

It seems reasonable to me to remember that since Iraq is a nation of 27 million, and the U.S. is a nation of 300 million, as a percentage of population iraq's losses are 10 times bigger than a loss of the same number in the U.S.

How is it that if 22 people had been killed in 4 violent attacks in the U.S. this weekend, it would have been at the top of both national and international headlines, but it did approach the tops of headlines when it happened in iraq?

How is it that 300 million americans are going to sleep in this morning, or get dressed up and go off to church, or do some outdoors acitivity, or go to work, or what have you, and mostly not know or care that in a nation across the world which we have invaded and occupied the violence is completely out of control?

death: in iraq, in Virginia, and way out of focus?--a british journalist in Kuwait

Wanted to draw your attention to this intriguing article written by British journalist Polly Toynbee today in the Kuwait Times, entitled "We need to focus on last week's deaths in iraq"

A couple quotes:

It was a good week for death. In Iraq, 200 people were blown to bits in what witnesses called "a swimming pool of blood" with "pieces of flesh all over the place". Remember that the dead are only part of the story: add to each of the war's hundreds of thousands of civilian corpses all those burned and crippled survivors, far beyond Iraqi medical facilities' ability to cope, breadwinners and babies lost. Few families are untouched by the sheer scale of slaughter. But it is hard for news media to find new ways to refresh repeat tales of daily carnage. The pictures and the thoughts tell the same dismal story day after day, raising the same terrible questions: what have we, the British, done, what have we unleashed, how can it end?

...

these 32 dead students follow in a cortege of identical tragedies: as soon as we knew this was just another deranged loner, what more was there to think? It happened in Dunblane, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Tasmania and elsewhere, routine school misfit revenges. The collective insanity of Americans about guns is an oft-reprised wonderment to Europeans. But there is nothing new about the National Rifle Association: even Al Gore in his Inconvenient Truth had to prove he was a regular guy by talking affectionately about his guns. The journalist Lionel Shriver made the best point in the London Guardian this week: why encourage copycats by giving these narcissistic fantasists the publicity they kill for? This boy's glory video means his name liveth for evermore - and a good deal longer than the roll call of fallen US soldiers.

...

Attitudes to death and mourning grow odder the rarer dying young becomes. There is less sense of proportion about the risks of dying, or about the inevitability of death itself, even when people die in old age. The temptation is to regard every death as avoidable, deny any accident is ever accidental, always find someone to blame, and hunt down that doctor in charge.

...

People no longer know how to approach death and its rituals. Abandoning religion doesn't necessarily mean resorting to reason. With no hereafter, body parts are gaining morbid significance in a strange new fetishism. The story of secret biopsies taken from dead workers at the UK nuclear plant at Sellafield in the 70s and 80s is interesting and potentially sinister for those who live and work there, since the reports were never published. But defying all sense, the focus of the story for relatives and the media has been on the "shocking" discovery that removal of mostly small slices and some whole organs from corpses means that loved ones buried less than whole bodies.

Read the whole article

racism violence fear and shame

Wikipedia define racism thusly:

Racism is a belief or ideology that all members of each race possess
characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially to distinguish it
either superior or inferior to another race or races. It is also the prejudice
directed against someone of a differet race based on such a belief.

So in the huge media frenzy over the violent deaths of 33 people in Virginia on Monday, I just have one question: Does it not prove we are racist?

What do I mean? Well, Tuesday, another 58 people were killed or found dead in Iraq, in violence which sans doute is related to the ongoing U.S. occupation and U.S. instigated four year old war.

So does the average American consider the violent deaths of Iraqi people less important, less cause for, as the Seattle Post Intelligencer put it today "Rage and Grief" than the violent deaths of American people? It seems fairly obvious to me that they do. Based on proportion of national population, Iraq's loss on Tuesday is 1700% bigger than America's loss on Monday.

In fact, I bet the average American is more disturbed emotionally, yesterday and today, about the violent death of 33 VT students than they are or ever have been about the deaths of 800,000 people in Iraq under U.S. invasion and occupation.

So does that make us racist?

Roy Barnsness pointed out the other night that we all, each and every one of us, have fear and shame, and that we must, in one way or another, live with the horror of the fact that we are constantly in both roles: victim, and perpetrator. How can we end the passive and active violence which we experience and perpetrate, perpetrate and experience? Can we choose to examine our fear and shame and ... de escalate the level this violence?

My sister's getting married!

Generally speaking I hate weddings. In fact, the only weddings I've attended and not hated have been my own and a couple weddings performed by Dave Sellers.

Why do I hate them? I guess I'm just shocking awful at compartmentalizing, at least in one particular way. If something amazingly good and beautiful and delightful is happening, I tend to see it in the light of it's future death. Yes, all things die, and entropy grinds on, and I find it hardest to forget this when most other people find it easiest. I'm wierd that way--it's part of my makeup, somehow.

So I'm supposed to say something at my sis's reception today, and I have no idea what. ... Certainly not the above. It will come to me.

huh?

The site of the bombing in Kapisa Province, northeast of Kabul.s


two headlines from today's new york times:

1.U.S. Airstrike Kills 9 in Afghan Family
2.Bush Approves Aid Programs for Latin America

From the first story:

Nine members of a family were killed in an American airstrike in central Afghanistan, including five women and three children during a battle with militants, Afghan officials said today. The United States military acknowledged it had dropped two 2,000 pound bombs on a compound Sunday night. ... United States forces would work with the Afghan authorities to “investigate and identify those responsible,” the statement (from the U.S. military) said.

From the second story:

''The United States of America is committed to helping people rise out of poverty,'' the president said. ... ''In an age of growing prosperity and abundance, this is a scandal and it is a challenge,'' Bush said.

I'm confused.

tough question of the week

So there seems to be a bit of a conversation going on over at Conversation at the Edge about abortion, growing out of a recent Time magazine article. In that conversation, Jennifer shared the link to her story on Imnotsorry.net. In Jennifer's story, a priest was trying to convince Jennifer not to have the abortion, and Jennifer asked him

If God kills babies why can’t I?

I think that's a reasonable question for all the christian pro lifers out there.

Quote of the week

This from Byron's post Fearless Service III. For me, it captured perfectly and instantly what it feels like to be human

We are all dying, giving birth astride a grave.