Iron Man Versus the Imperialists

Heroism, when applied to foreign policy, is a moral vanity that usually prescribes a cure more corrosive than the disease it confronts. It will always be good celluloid for Iron Man to incinerate terrorists who -- living out their own imperial perversions -- overrun villages full of innocents. But the real world does not contain magic suits that kill the bad guys without harming the civilians and let the good guy fly away without a scratch on him. In that world, the actual answer to the Iron Man complex is one of two things. America either needs to submit the Iron Man armor to a series of institutions to govern its just use, or it needs to take off the suit once and for all.

Korean War -Truth about mass killings comes out

Fifty-eight years ago, at the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean authorities secretively executed, usually without legal process, tens of thousands of southern leftists and others rightly or wrongly identified as sympathizers. Today a government Truth and Reconciliation Commission is working to dig up the facts, and the remains of victims.

How could such a bloodbath have been hidden from history?

Among the Koreans who witnessed, took part in or lost family members to the mass killings, the events were hardly hidden, but they became a "public secret," barely whispered about through four decades of right-wing dictatorship here.

"The family couldn't talk about it, or we'd be stigmatized as leftists," said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, leader of an organization of families seeking redress for their loved ones' deaths in 1950.
Kim, whose father was shot and buried in a mass grave outside the central city of Daejeon, noted that in 1960-61, a one-year democratic interlude in South Korea, family groups began investigating wartime atrocities. But a military coup closed that window, and "the leaders of those organizations were arrested and punished."

Then, "from 1961 to 1988, nobody could challenge the regime, to try again to reveal these hidden truths," said Park Myung-lim of Seoul's Yonsei University, a leading Korean War historian. As a doctoral student in the late 1980s, when South Korea was moving toward democracy, Park was among the few scholars to begin researching the mass killings. He was regularly harassed by the police.

Scattered reports of the killings did emerge in 1950 — and some did not.

British journalist James Cameron wrote about mass prisoner shootings in the South Korean port city of Busan — then spelled Pusan — for London's Picture Post magazine in the fall of 1950, but publisher Edward Hulton ordered the story removed at the last minute.

Earlier, correspondent Alan Winnington reported on the shooting of thousands of prisoners at Daejeon in the British communist newspaper The Daily Worker, only to have his reporting denounced by the U.S. Embassy in London as an "atrocity fabrication." The British Cabinet then briefly considered laying treason charges against Winnington, historian Jon Halliday has written.

Associated Press correspondent O.H.P. King reported on the shooting of 60 political prisoners in Suwon, south of Seoul, and wrote in a later memoir he was "shocked that American officers were unconcerned" by questions he raised about due process for the detainees.

Some U.S. officers — and U.S. diplomats — were among others who reported on the killings. But their classified reports were kept secret for decades.

Intel Mash Maker, Mashups for the Masses

Today, I came across this really interesting mashup built for the site http://mashmaker.intel.com/web/. It is powered by Intel's Mash Maker technology. If you have it installed, you can see the mashup by clicking http://mashmaker.intel.com/bm/?bm=1186.Mash Maker's natural and simplified approach to creating mashups, makes it easier, faster, and fun to create personalized mashups on-the-fly. Mash Maker's inbuilt technology enables you to browse and easily view information the way you want, and presented the way you want. You can even program it. Download it now from http://mashmaker.intel.com.

Bush Tells Isreali Knesset that Obama is like Hitler... WTF?

I really thought things could not get much worse... I thought GWB had done it all and stooped as low as it goes..

Oh, how wrong I was...

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said. "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.
"We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
U.S. President George W. Bush's speech to the Israeli parliament 5/15/08

Bush today broke all the rules of protocol. In front of the Israeli Knesset he said that Obama and the other democrats who want some form of diplomacy instead of the constant saber rattling and arrogance of the bush years... he called them the same as Nazi sympathizers before world war II.

He broke the unwritten rules about talking about US politics in front of foreign audiences.
He broke the long standing protocols against a sitting presidents using their office to partisan ends in the election of their successor.

But worst of all he broke Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies)

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

No rational discussion or measured discourse is possible once Godwin's law is breached.

What a maroon.