News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend to happen with alarming regularity. An entire building collapsed there not long ago, killing more than 1,000. It’s a delicate balance, isn’t it? Between protecting human life and encouraging business investment? You don’t want thousands of people dying every year in preventable accidents, but on the other hand you don’t want to add a few cents to the price of a finished t-shirt.
It’s only polite to take a moment to recognize the dead Bangladeshis. And it’s terribly impolite to call them “slaves,” since slaves don’t earn $1.80-a-day. Also, unlike slaves these Bangladeshis had a choice! So, . . . → Read More: Mourning the Real Victims of the Bangladesh Garment Factory Disasters
Originally posted April 28th, 2013
By Michael Konik
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to assemble publicly with unmarried members of the opposite sex; freedom to participate in an electoral charade; freedom to watch nudity on television. The very concept of freedom is an affront to these heartless killers.
After the Boston Marathon bombs, there might be another reason worth considering, a reason that some unpatriotic thinkers have been suggesting since September 11, 2001.
Maybe terrorists don’t hate our freedoms. Maybe they hate our policies.
The surviving suspect in Boston indicated that his brother and he were outraged at U.S. involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Other captured evildoers have indicated . . . → Read More: Why Terrorists Hate America
Originally posted April 1st, 2013
By Michael Konik
Some professor type at an East Coast university just presented a detailed analysis of how much the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will ultimately cost the American people, when you figure in healthcare costs for wounded and maimed veterans. And all the other stuff: bombs and radios and what have you. Supposedly the price tag will eventually be about $6 trillion. Or, $6,000,000,000,000, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
Six trillion dollars! It sounds like a lot of money, and it is. Our current annual budget — like, to run the whole country and keep our brave military protectors well fed — is around $3.8 trillion. So, yeah, it’s going to take some time to pay for these two wars. Maybe around thirty or forty years, unless we find soon another resource-rich nation we can annex, perhaps Mexico. Some economists predict that America won’t feel the full cost of these wars for . . . → Read More: No Cost Too High in the Fight for Freedom
Originally posted March 17th, 2013
By Michael Konik
Howard “Buck” McKeon represents California’s Twenty-fifth Congressional District, which is home to an Army fort, an Air Force base, a Navy weapons station, and a Marines mountain warfare training area. So if anyone is perfectly qualified to head the House Armed Services Committee it’s old Buck.
Thank God that conflict of interest concerns don’t disqualify the honorable McKeon from guiding where and how our military money is spent. Because without defense hawks like old Buck to keep an eye on our security, we might get lackadaisical and let our guard down, and the next thing you know a bunch of Al Qaeda will be waltzing into the Wal-Mart with nuclear bombs in their backpacks.
We’ve previously mentioned in this space that the peace-loving U.S. of A. spends more on defense than all of the other nations of the world combined. There’s a good reason for that: We’re . . . → Read More: In Defense of Defense
Originally posted February 10th, 2013
By Michael Konik
The nerve of these people!
We are outraged. We are livid. This kind of barbarity cannot be permitted in civilized society.
Mahmoud Shaaban is an “ultraconservative” Islamic cleric in Egypt. “Hard-line,” “orthodox” – whatever. In the name of his great religion, he and his fellow cleric Wagdi Ghoneim have issued fatwas (edicts) calling for the deaths of Egypt’s opposition leaders. Shaaban said on a recently aired TV show that political opponents of the President should be punished. By death.
The reason? According to the Mullahs, Egypt’s opposition leaders, including former Atomic Energy Commission chief Mohamed ElBaradei, are seeking to “bring down” a publicly elected leader, the deeply religious Mohamed Morsi.
Ergo: these political opponents deserve to be eliminated with extreme prejudice.
Composing “kill lists” without judicial oversight — without any oversight — is an offense to human decency. Who do these Islamic clerics think they are, deciding . . . → Read More: Those Ridiculous Clerics!
Originally posted February 3rd, 2013
By Michael Konik
Guns are not the problem. People are not the problem. Young people are the problem.
They don’t listen. They play awful video game simulations of mass murder. They shoot six-year-olds.
And no amount of background checks or ammo-clip restrictions will change that. There’s only one way to solve the gun situation, one way to bring peace and civility back to our public areas while also not trampling on our inalienable American right to bear arms (as outlined with great clarity in the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America).
The maintenance of civil order in our fragile society rests on a rock solid foundation of family discipline. A child who disrespects his parents must be removed from society. Permanently. So that other children will see the importance of respecting their parents.
Originally posted December 23rd, 2012
By Michael Konik
The world didn’t end. We went on. After the last of the murdered children was laid to rest, buried in the Connecticut dirt, it was time for life to get back to normal. To play our “first-person shooter” video games – “Assassin’s Creed” anyone? – and watch our TV programs – Criminal This and Criminal That – and go to the movies!
What’s playing? There’s Tom Cruise in his latest. My, he’s a handsome fellow. And what a big gun he carries!
And there’s Leonardo di Caprio and Jamie Foxx, also handsome fellows. How amusing it is to watch such handsome fellows shoot guns at each other! They’re directed by Quentin Tarantino, so you know all the violence is meant to serve a higher aesthetic.
How about Zero Dark Thirty? It’s based on true events, you know. About how our national heroes found and murdered . . . → Read More: Life as a First-Person Shooter
Originally posted November 27th, 2012
By Michael Konik
The grave necessity of Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker’s book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, was never clearer than the 2012 elections, in which citizens were presented with a “choice” between two competitie sub-brands of The Money Party monopoly. If you’re pro-war, pro-assassination, pro-bribery and pro-coal, you couldn’t go wrong with either guy. Which is why “Winner-Take-All” is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand how we allowed our democracy to be hijacked and what we can do to take it back.
Originally posted November 18th, 2012
By Michael Konik
So long as the American people are quite alright with their elected offices being available for rent, let’s have some fun.
We’re resigned to a world where money is speech, not property, a world where no one minds that half their Members of Congress are millionaires (as opposed to 1% of the population-at-large), where $372 was spent on promoting or attacking 11 California initiatives, much of it by secret donors who went to court to keep their identities shrouded. We get it.
Since the Supreme Court has taught us that corporations are people and since it has come to light that this particular group of people largely controls the Land of the Free, we think it best if all of us could stop pretending it’s otherwise. Let’s celebrate!
Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, had a cool idea. He thinks that . . . → Read More: The NASCAR President
Originally posted November 11th, 2012
By Michael Konik
In the days preceding the storm of the century, two candidates running for President of the United States strenuously assured voters that they would pump more crude, frack more natural gas, and burn more coal than the other guy. Whether or not an energy policy built on a fossil-fuel paradigm could or could not be sustained wasn’t discussed, at least by Messrs. Obama and Romney, who proudly reiterated their fealty to the oil and mining companies that sign the checks. Virtually every other candidate for President –the ones who weren’t members of the Democratic or Republican crime syndicates, such as Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party — characterized our looming environmental disaster as the biggest threat facing America, not terrorism or the national debt, as the Military-Industrial complex would like us to believe.
News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend to happen with alarming regularity. An entire building collapsed there not long ago, killing more than 1,000. It’s a delicate balance, isn’t it? Between protecting…
Were you aware that bottled water is “bad for the environment,” “bad for public water sources,” and “bad for your wallet”?
Neither were we! It’s pretty funny to think of something so obviously good – so amazing, when you think about it – as inherently evil, or something. Bottled water…
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to…
The whole world is worried about North Korea. We’re not. We think locally. The area around which we can walk or ride our bike is our concern. We’re civic-minded that way.
Hollywood Boulevard is nearby. We walk on its sidewalks almost every day, often to access the subway, which serves…
We’ll never win a popularity contest, that’s for certain. We’re OK with that. To us, it’s more important to do what’s right than to be liked and admired and affirmed. That’s why we feel comfortable sticking up for society’s downtrodden, the friendless, powerless folks who bear the daily aspersions and…
Certain simple ideas have the power to transform humanity (for the better). Creating an organic community garden is one of those life-changing concepts. The forward-thinking nonprofit, EnrichLA, builds gardens at schools, using students, parents, and community volunteers to construct irrigated planting beds, trees, flowers, and vegetables. In the tradition of Habitat for Humanity, it all happens [...]
