War casualties.

[stilltrucking]

Did I read that headline right?

The military is suffering more deaths by suicide than combat?

[saw]

I read it too, but it's not talked about much, since it puts a negative spin on our wars....but IVAW ( Iraq Veterans Against War ) has reported this that since the year began in Afghanistan there have been more suicides than death by combat.....pretty scary stuff.....there have been many suicides once the vets return home as well...PTSD is rampant with not enough trained personal or facilities to handle our veterans.....most are on waiting lists along with vets that need prophetic limbs.....when will this madness end ?

[stilltrucking]

"When will this madness end?"

I don't know.

When did it begin I wonder?

[jimboloco]

when will this madness end?
i had a horrible memorial day weekend
unbelieveable despair
scared myself
i need some help
tomorrow the shrink
lift me up
i hate this shit

i have a plan
die the great death
forget the self
the lamp casts light arcs of yellow and gray
horizontal and vertical lines
fingers spread out
hand pressed onto table
that's the best
pray

i might go to the ER some day
at the VA

40 years of this shit
now i am straight
holes in my brain
was lucky in the war
flew thru a hole in the war
carried the dead

more nam vets kia by their own hand, yes
over 70,000 plus and counting
as old age, infirmity and depression endure

i will go to hell before i smoke pot again
i love torturing myself
i was a vvaw and still am
ivaw new voices remain

yes the john q public does not see the strain
i am a survivor
and see the war more clearly now than ever
and it was stupid and insane

time for a cigarrillo
and sleep

[mnaz]

the military will NEVER adequately address PTSD and related ills, mainly because they represent a soldier's "weakness and failure" (relative to military purpose). we have many documented stories by now of "in-house" ostracizing and worse. and the war-crossed public isn't much more sympathetic or helpful either.

[stilltrucking]

"I am sinking in the quicksand of my thoughts"

I have heard it called our three trillion dollar war
part of that is the health problems of the soldiers going out fifty years from now.

veterans health issues increase more with age than the civilians do.

How pure can I be jimboloco
it gnaws me
I want to run down the street screaming
It ain't the debt limit stupid, it is the god dam wars.

I am going to wined up like Nietzsche hugging a horse.
So I take Old Kurt Vonnegut's advice (blessed be his memory) I listen to the music

I'm not a prophet or a stone age man
Just a mortal with potential of a superman, I'm living on
I'm tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien
Can't take my eyes from the great salvation of bullshit faith
If I don't explain what you ought to know
You can tell me all about it on the next Bardo
I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain't got the power anymore ...

Quicksand David Bowie

[mnaz]

one could argue (with some rationality) all day long about how military might and a prolonged military buildup defeated the evil 20th century twin scourges of fascism and totalitarian communism, and let's face it, few would challenge such group-think type wisdom. but in the long run not much good can come of an economy based so heavily on the military machine.

these endless "asymmetric" conflicts we're into . . . "liberating" countries from their dangerous leaders (and their resources) are a tragic, draining farce. and even if one tries to put the best possible face on it, claim that some good is coming from it all (and thus, pursuing these policies is worthwhile), this would essentially mean we are now officially the world's full-time super-cop, bearing 95% of the burden of "cleaning the scum out of dodge," economically, physically, socially . . . the whole thing. bullshit. we all should know by now that the costs of endless war are more than the sums of red ink in pentagon outlays.

[stilltrucking]

how military might and a prolonged military buildup defeated the evil 20th century twin scourges of fascism and totalitarian communism, and let's face it, few would challenge such group-think type wisdom. but in the long run not much good can come of an economy based so heavily on the military machin

yes nothing happened before December 7 1940. All the bad shit happened since then.

I could argue how military might and prolonged military build up created those scourges. Those scourges the outcome of world war one. The military build up that brought us Verdun also brought us Fascism and Communism and world war two. But all the world war one vets are dead. So we don't need to think about that.

I am sorry for the sarcasm mnaz, doing a lot pain drugs, feel like I am drunk all the time, but the weirdest drug is for the tingling, something called gabapentin, keeps me staring into the dark.


I hear what you are saying mnaz, I think I do. You are so subtle.
I think people are short sighted when the talk about the "Good War"
The really good war was the first one. More than a good war, it was the Great War to make the world safe for the banksters. It lasted from 1914 to 1945.
Yesthere was only one world war so far, from 1914 to 1945 with a brief intermission to raise another generation of warriors and heroes and cannon fodder.

group think we are so good at that.
"There is an american born every minute" How we going to keep them down on the farm after they see a military recruiter

Read a sound byte about how the families of TBI vets are going broke taking care of their wounded heroes.

[stilltrucking]

"War is personal"

Sgt. José Pequeño / Age 34 / Sugar Hill, New Hampshire

http://www.thenation.com/article/war-personal

We see all the feel good shows on TV doing wonderful things for veterans. Is Mrs Pequeno getting everything she need to take care of her son? I seem to remember some bad stories about veterans families getting short shrift from the VA?

I will have to Google that.
__________________________________

Does America Want to Know the Real Cost of War?
“Every vote that Congress has taken for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has failed to take into account the actual cost of these wars by ignoring what will be required to meet the needs of veterans,” said Chairman Filner. “The Congress that sends them into harm’s way assumes no responsibility for the long-term consequences of their deployment. Each war authorization and appropriation kicks the proverbial can down the road. Whether or not the needs of soldiers injured or wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan will be met is totally dependent on the budget politics of a future Congress which includes two sets of rules – one for going to war and one for providing for our veterans who fight in that war.”

[stilltrucking]

When Congress passed legislation last year to pay family caregivers of veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, the program was supposed to be up and running by now.

But the Department of Veterans Affairs is not only tardy implementing the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act signed by President Obama in March 2010, it is also excluding many wounded veterans’ families that Congress wanted to help with the legislation.

Washington Sen. Patty Murray, who chairs the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, says Congress wanted the law to help at least 3,500 caregivers of severely wounded veterans, at a cost of $1.7 billion over five years. But the VA plans to only serve 840 and has only set aside a fraction of the funding authorized for the caregiver program. That’s “unacceptable,” Murray says.



Read more: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/03/0 ... z1PDcCNQaW

[mnaz]

... how military might and prolonged military build up created those scourges. Those scourges the outcome of world war one. The military build up that brought us Verdun also brought us Fascism and Communism and world war two.

true, of course. it's actually a good point that i've also made on occasion. the endless path of war is in many ways one long disastrous chain reaction. yet we're conditioned to think of each new war devoid of any context, the "unavoidable just cause" against "unprovoked evildoers" far away. the people who start these wars wouldn't have it any other way.

[stilltrucking]

e_dog wrote:

21 Nov 2007, 22:39
WWI was inevitable at least far back as the Frankly Prussian War. or maybe back to ole Neopolyon...


http://studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.p ... n&start=15

e_dog wrote

Barak Obama is a smiley face symbol placed on the death machine which is American military-capitalism...
http://studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.p ... war#p92381

i wonder how e_dog is doing. He knew Obama better than I did.

Candidate Obama said:

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... 3/18/libya

We are made for the word the Bible says, we are also made for war. I am going to stop hating war so much. I am going to embrace it. War has brought so many gifts to us, the Jeep for example. And emergency rooms in civilian hospitals have benefited with new procedures for saving people after their bodies have been nearly destroyed in traffic accidents. And brain researchers are learning so much about the human brain from TBI.

[stilltrucking]

His 90 days are up this week. Then what?

War Power
The president's campaign against Libya is constitutional

Critics will claim that a pattern of consistently violating the Constitution cannot remedy the illegality of these actions. But that is not the right way to view this pattern. An important principle of constitutional law—especially when the allocation of power between the branches is at issue—is that constitutional meaning gets liquidated by constitutional practice. As Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist explained in his opinion in Dames & Moore v. Regan: "[A] systematic, unbroken, executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of the Congress and never before questioned … may be treated as a gloss on 'Executive Power' vested in the President by § 1 of Art. II. Past practice does not, by itself, create power, but long-continued practice, known to and acquiesced in by Congress, would raise a presumption that the [action] had been [taken] in pursuance of its consent."

Congress has known about this pattern of presidential unilateralism for some time and done little in response. It has never impeached a president for using force in this way. It has continued to finance an enormous standing military force in the face of this practice. And it has done practically nothing by statute to push back on the president's power to initiate military action with that standing military force. Not even the famous War Powers Resolution of 1973 does much to address the unauthorized initiation of force by a president. It requires the president to submit a report to Congress within 48 hours whenever armed forces are introduced "into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances." After the president reports the introduction of forces abroad, the resolution requires him to withdraw those forces within 60 days (or 90 days, based on military necessity) unless Congress has authorized continued operations
http://www.slate.com/id/2288869/

[mnaz]

after i met the 85-year-old saipan vet in the desert, i looked up the battle of saipan; pure obscenity of course, with use of flame throwers and such. when i cleaned out my folks' basement recently to get the house ready for sale, i found all kinds of military / war literature dating back to 1939... articles describing "cleaning out the germans" and such. also, some surreal '60s civil defense pamphlets, one that described thermonuclear war as little more than an inconvenient stay in your basement. . . it all got recycled. except for the civil defense stuff; i kept that. . . and on the work bench i found a dusty packet-- some sort of mask for protection against nerve gas or something. i myself barely missed being involuntarily sent as cannon fodder in vietnam. what good is war to end all war if it is endlessly glorified and used to justify more of the same damned shit?

[stilltrucking]

When is the last time the godless red Chinese fought a war, other than a civil war? Tibet I guess, Korea? How do they manage to stay out of the crusades?

I tried to enlist in 1964. They would not take me just because I used to go to bed at night with visions of a shot gun tucked up under my chin. I felt guilty as hell for years about not being able to do my patriotic chores, that was till I met a world war two vet who told me that I should feel grateful that I was spared.