Category: america

pia & the US bases

bakit di ko makuhang madismaya sa sagot ni bb. pilipinas ms. universe re the u.s. bases.  kasi hindi naman nakakagulat.  iyan naman mismo ang naghaharing pananaw, in no uncertain terms.  good to be reminded what we’re up against.

amazing obama

It may seem odd, decades after the civil-rights movement, to note that for a sitting President to say that the Confederacy fought for the institution of slavery—and that doing so was a moral wrong—is a radical statement. Yet it is, and shortly after making it the President fell silent. It appeared that perhaps he had lost his way, but then, in a remarkable moment, he began to sing “Amazing Grace,” a hymn that is at once a lament, a prayer, and a hope—written by John Newton, a onetime slave trader who became an abolitionist. Immediately after the speech, people began debating whether the song had been part of the prepared text or whether the President sang it out of an impromptu spiritual imperative. In either case, he was likely hoping to see in the national culture precisely the transformation that Newton had experienced in himself, one that facilitated his first truthful accounting of the evil of slavery. 

— JELANI COBB

charleston too quick to forgive

“We have no room for hate so we have to forgive.”

i couldn’t quite believe that the victims’ families were already talking forgiveness.  i can understand eschewing hate, but what about the hurt and the anger?  so soon after the massacre, i would still be too hurt and angry to forgive.  i’d need time to process the loss of a loved one in a house of god during bible study.  i’d need to know more about this killer — is it genetic, he has ku klux klan roots?  is he psychotic, completely out of touch with reality?  or is it racism, he simply hates american blacks the way hitler hated jews?  where did he learn this hate?  from a family member?  a friend?  a teacher?  the web?  all of the above?  i would want to know where he was coming from when he planned and carried out the killings.  to start a race war, he confessed.  as if a race war has not been going on in america like forever.  i guess he wanted to liven things up, he was bored?  i would need convincing that he did not know what he was doing before i can even begin to think forgiveness.

The Geopolitics of American Global Decline

Washington Versus China in the Twenty-First Century
By Alfred W. McCoy

For even the greatest of empires, geography is often destiny. You wouldn’t know it in Washington, though. America’s political, national security, and foreign policy elites continue to ignore the basics of geopolitics that have shaped the fate of world empires for the past 500 years. Consequently, they have missed the significance of the rapid global changes in Eurasia that are in the process of undermining the grand strategy for world dominion that Washington has pursued these past seven decades.

Read on…