CIVILIANISM PODCAST

Obama is being influenced by his bad angels, listening to the wrong people, and doing the wrong things in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Giving him the Nobel Peace Prize for this was a mistake.

The drone attacks he orders are horrifying and illegal, killing innocent people even as they execute a few “real” targets.   The escalation of his war will not bring peace. Unfortunately, this war will drag on and on and on without the American people protesting it. There might not be a draft, but there are 56,000 contractors headed for Afghanistan too. . . . privatizing our military force in the Middle East even further, even as our peace/war president plans a “surge”.

Not only are another 30,000 troops being deployed to Afghanistan, “but also 56,000 military contractors will join them.”

Militarism grows and grows, even as we let other things go, like real health care reform, serious climate change work and the smart grid, etc.

An analysis of Obama’s Nobel speech and the “Just War”  and “Just Peace” theories is here.  I don’t buy it. I think no war that kills civilians, and keeps on killing civilians, can be anything but just another war.  Unless this war is solving some serious problem or threat, (and it’s not) we need to leave.

A good angel would know this.

This episode contains part of a protest rally including speakers Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney, and it also contains bits of President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Get involved, contact your President and your Congressmen and tell them to stop this stupid war.  It might be the end of us if we don’t. War is still a racket.

Download this episode here, or subscribe on the right.
Artwork by Jay Long.

Sami Rasouli

Sami Rasouli, a well known Iraqi-American peace activist, traveled to central Minnesota last week and gave us an update on Iraq.   Iraqis need our help, and a lot of things need a lot of work in Iraq. They also need peace building and better relations with American citizens. He drops a couple of mostly unknown bits of info too, like that most of the scientists in Iraq were deliberately killed by Israeli intelligence (Mossad) during the war.

Shockingly, he said that Iraqis learned from John Wayne movies, not George Bush Sr., that America is a culture of force and violence. We have to reverse this perception. Learn more in this episode of Civilianism, which you can download here or subscribe to on the right.

There are two articles related to the topics in this podcast. One is “Oil Billions and Weapons of Mass Deception in Iraq” which you can read here, and the other is “Huge Rise in Birth Defects in Falluja” which you can read here.

The organizations that Sami Rasouli hopes you will check out and become involved in are found here:

The Iraq and American Reconciliation Project (IARP)  and the Muslim Peacemaker Team.

You can get involved as easily as helping to buy water sanitation equipment in Iraq, which is very much needed.

What’s coming in the future and will capitalism play a part? Soon people will be concerned with bigger problems than economic models, such as environmental migration and shortages, but money will play a part. The survival of civilization depends on our imagination, creativity, on our sense of identity and community and how willing we are to share and live together. Some great thinkers and futurists gather in this audio to think of how we can survive for the sake of all humanity.

This was originally titled A Possibility of Hope, from the makers of the movie, Children of Men.

Humans have an instinct not just for survival, but of realizing all humans should benefit from the attempts at our survival in the future.

These are ideas on the future from philosophers, historians, cultural critics, futurists, a sociologist, a human geographer, and an economy expert.

The broad topics covered in this episode are Reality, Fear, Walls, Fever, (global warming) and Hope. . . .
You can download this episode here.

Speakers: Naomi Klein, James Lovelock, John Gray, Saskia Sassen, Tzvetan Todorov, Slavoj Zizek, Fabrizio Eva