Critical Brain Candy

Sign me up. It’s the Guiness Lifestyle Diet. This guy lost 9lbs in a week by only consuming Guiness, Milk and vitamin tablets. This sounds a lot better than the Atkins diet, and a lot more fun too

But he had to take the week off work to do it. Perhaps I need a job that would be more accepting of this new lifestyle.

An interesting discussion about militarism and what it has become in this century. Seduced by war

It’s such a complicated issue. There’s a lot more than just Imperial aspirations going on right now. A lot of money is involved, and I don’t just mean by taking money from Iraqs oil industry. “Defense”, which these days is a funny term since it’s most visibly offensive, is a half-trillion dollar per year industry in the US. It’s very hard to argue that the drive to continue and increase this funding doesn’t at least slightly affect the governments propensity to use it.

Then there’s obviously the politics of it. This massive “war on terror” has more to do with giving the average American an illusion of safety because something’s being done (ie: someone is being bombed to repay 9/11). The stats show that terrorist activity has increased since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, which isn’t news, but no one seems to care. “The military is involved, so something is being done.” This is an interesting point in the article above about how much of a change this is from the Vietnam era when people lost all trust in the military. Someone has worked very hard to rebuild that trust, and I’m sure it cost a ton of money.

Found an interesting site called Informed Consent that’s run by a history professor and talks about the middle east. He pointed to this site containing a video of the aftermath of last years assault on the city of Falluja in Iraq. That site is here. The links are under the pictures of the trucks.

This video was taken by an independent group. No reporters were allowed in at the time. I really wish the American public would see these kinds of images. Perhaps they would become slightly less desensitized to the ravages of war and murder. The public in general now sees war almost like a movie. They see bright colours flashing on CNN and Fox of bombs bursting over Baghdad and go get popcorn to watch the show.

These days as long as these wars don’t touch their wallets (or at least are fooled into believing that) people don’t care. The government gets a blank slate to murder whoever they want, as long as they get their Starbucks and their SUVs.

I don’t say this to jab at the people who actually do support the war for some reason, even though I have a ton of issues with them. Rather it’s for the large section of the population that’s simply apathetic. They’re the ones destroying the West (in all western countries). At least form an opinion and stand up for what you believe in.