My father used to say that the history of a time can’t be written until all the bodies are buried. There’s definitely something to that, and the little bits that do peek out often reveal the shape of an underlying mass of buried secrets. It’s enough to turn you into a conspiracy theorist.
Imagine if North Korea decided to boost its economy by renting out nuclear deterrent, “Dictators: keep the US away with Credible Deterrent(tm) warheads! (first strike capability not included)” – with Iran, Nicaragua, and Taiwan being their first customers.
If you study the actual workings of the justice system over the course of our history, it becomes clear that it favors the rich over the poor, the white over the black, the orthodox over the radical.
Warning: War, Death, Sam Harris
Here’s the part that horrifies me: when I hear “wedding party hit by air-strike” I assume that it’s notable because it’s a wedding party, and that what we’re seeing is just probability in action.
“Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” [cnn]
In The Year of The Pig one of the striking moments, which I focused on, [stderr] is when several of the people promoting the US’ involvement in Vietnam used the same construction for their arguments; it was clear that they were tapped into a common source – presumably what are now called “talking points memos” produced by government agencies in order to get out a consistent “message” to the public.
In the Year of The Pig [wc] was one of the first feature-length documentaries attempting to reveal the foolishness and corruption of the Vietnam War.
The Korean nuclear program was carried out secretly, and they acquired the components and capability to build a bomb but did not proceed to enrichment or to producing the firing circuits and weaponizing a deliverable warhead.
The US is still at war: overt war such as Afghanistan, and covert wars all over the world. Let’s have a day of remembrance.
The US talks a lot about non-proliferation, and regularly joins with the world community to levy sanctions on nations that are not complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran and North Korea being prime examples of countries that have had a great deal of pressure (in the case of North Korea, the population has been starved) against their nuclear ambitions.