Re-reporting, editing, commentary by Carolyn Bennett
Deliberate cruelty
Reported by the Associated Press, U.S. President Barack
Obama has proposed a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2014 that, among other warped priorities, increases war funding and decreases education funding.
Citadel of U.S. global
violence: protracted war
Department of Defense
Total Spending: $682.9 billion [700 BILLION]
Percentage Change from 2013: 0.5 percent increase
Discretionary Spending: $615.3 billion
Mandatory Spending: $67.6 billion [70 BILLION]
Cradle of future
creators and leaders
Department of Education
Total Spending: $56.7 billion [60 BILLION]
Percentage Change from 2013: 10.8 percent decrease
Discretionary Spending: $71.2 billion
Mandatory Spending: $0 [ZERO]
The U.S. president’s proposed defense spending is almost 12
times ─ even on an incomplete list as war spending is spread out across
government agencies ─ the level of education spending. It’s a good thing the
president and members of congress are millionaires, pensioned, on corporate
payrolls and speaker circuits so they don’t have to worry about their heirs and
the future of their heirs.
Connected with defense is nuclear proliferation. Under “energy,”
the president is proposing a 35.3 percent increase over 2013, which includes is
a $2.1 BILLION DOLLAR upgrade in the
U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
Britain and the United States ─ under threat by no nation or
people but instead a threat to all ─ are upgrading their deadly weaponry while
demonizing Iran for wanting nuclear technology for energy purposes. While claiming
not to “trust” Iran, demanding an end to energy use of nuclear material and attempting
to destroy peoples and drive them from their land (Iraq, Iran, North Korea and
other places) by the imposition of economic sanctions (warfare by another name)
─ the United States alone holds the distinction of having wiped out hundreds of
thousands of people and lands, committed unconscionable harm lasting well into the
future, with its detonation of the atomic bomb.
U.S./West’s straw man (person) tactic justifying cruelty
To ‘attack a straw man’ is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it
with a superficially similar yet unequal or different proposition (the ‘straw man’); and to refute the ‘straw
man’ without ever having actually refuted the original position.
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traw man fallacy occurs in the following pattern of
argument:
Person 1 has
position X.
Person 2
disregards certain key points of X and instead presents the superficially
similar position Y. The position Y is a
distorted version of X and can be set up in several ways, including:
Presenting a misrepresentation of
the opponent’s position;
Quoting an opponent’s words out of
context—i.e., choosing quotations that misrepresent the opponent’s actual intentions;
Presenting someone who defends a
position poorly as the defender, then refuting that person’s arguments—thus
giving the appearance that every upholder of that position (and thus the position
itself) has been defeated;
Inventing a fictitious persona with
actions or beliefs which are then criticized, implying that the person
represents a group of whom the speaker is critical;
Oversimplifying an opponent’s
argument then attacking this oversimplified version.
Person 2 attacks
position Y, concluding that X is false/incorrect/flawed.
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his reasoning is fallacious because attacking a distorted
version of a position does not address the actual position. The ostensible
argument that Person 2 makes has the form:
‘Don’t
support X because X has an unacceptable (or absurd or contradictory or
terrible) consequence.’
However, the actual form of the
argument is:
‘Don’t
support X because Y has an unacceptable (or absurd or contradictory or
terrible) consequence.’
This argument doesn’t make sense;
it is a non sequitur. Person 2 relies on
the audience not noticing this.
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nited States’ nuclear straw man against Iran
In a report yesterday by Press TV, Iran’s Ambassador to
France, Ali Ahani, continued to emphasize “that Iran has vehemently rejected
claims that its nuclear energy program has military purposes, saying Leader of
the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei issued a religious decree
(fatwa) two years ago on the prohibition of production, proliferation and the
use of nuclear weapons.”
Note:
The Iranian cleric and politician Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei served as
president of Iran (1981–89) and as that country’s Rahbar or Leader from 1989. A
religious figure of some significance, Khamenei was generally addressed honorifically
as Ayatollah.
“On February 22, 2012, Ayatollah Khamenei said the Islamic
Republic considers the pursuit and possession of nuclear weapons ‘a grave sin’
from every logical, religious and theoretical standpoint [and described the
proliferation of nuclear weapons as ‘senseless, destructive and dangerous,’
adding that the Iranian nation has never sought and will never seek atomic
bombs as the country already has the conventional capacity to challenge the
nuclear powers.”
Ahani reiterated to
Press TV that the Ayatollah Khamenei had announced that the use of atomic
weapons is a crime against humanity. As far back as September 1974, he said, “Iran
proposed an initiative to the United Nations on the establishment of a Middle East Free of Nuclear Weapons and
has been following up on it insistently. However it seems that everybody is
overlooking such realities and no country is willing to acknowledge Iran as a
responsible country and a signatory to the NPT (Non-proliferation Treaty or Treaty
on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) that seeks to use its legal rights
just as other IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) members.…|
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The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) closely
monitors Iran’s nuclear energy work through cameras that have been installed at
the country’s nuclear facilities and sites and record all activities around the
clock.” Ahani said Iran’s “‘nuclear energy program is completely non-military
[and] it is the Western countries that insist Iran is pursuing a military
nuclear program.’
“The United States, Israel and some of their allies have
falsely accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy
program, with the U.S. and European Union using the claim as an excuse to
impose illegal sanctions against Tehran.
The West, the ambassador said, “refrains from accepting the
realities of Tehran’s nuclear energy program.”
Priorities in chaos and killing
Stockpile, destabilize, displace, destroy by any means
Air, ground or underground, sea, robotics, remote
The U.S. President’s budget proposes ZERO for a national domestic
jobs program and ZERO for mandatory domestic education spending but gazillions for high tech public funding private ventures
(drones?).
“Advanced Manufacturing Technology
Consortia program” (WHAT!?): $21 million
“International Trade Administration”:
$520 million (off shoring jobs?)
U.S. wars against peoples of Afghanistan, Pakistan
The people of Pakistan continue to suffer under U.S.
technology. In today’s news today four people died needlessly. Press TV reports
“a U.S. killer drone fired two missiles at a house in Datta Khel area located
some 35 kilometers (22 miles) west of Miranshah, the main town in the Pakistani
tribal region of North Waziristan.” The full death toll is not yet known but at
the time of the report four people had died as a result of yet another attack “carried
out by a U.S. assassination drone in northwestern Pakistan.”
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hat is to me patently, disingenuously callous is to hear that
deaths of the young in the United States (Connecticut or Chicago or Colorado or
Virginia) murdered by whomever in public places are somehow more important than
the hundreds of millions of defenseless children, women and men slaughtered,
wounded in mind and body (not to mention young U.S. soldiers), robbed of their
livelihoods and homes in so many malicious ways and there is no outrage, arrest
or prosecution, or demands for the carnage to stop. I suspect Washington’s orators
don’t care about the dead in California or New York or New Orleans or Georgia
or Connecticut or Chicago or Colorado or Virginia either. 
I seem to digress but they all connect; now return to U.S.
massacres in Afghanistan’s southern neighbor bordering India.
The author, political analyst and historian, Webster Tarpley,
told Press TV that Washington’s use of assassination drones and continued
military presence in neighboring Afghanistan is a ploy to weaken, divide and
destroy Pakistan. Consider similarly factional or sectarian violence all across
the Middle East, where people had once lived together in harmony (consider the
Koreas that had been trying to normalize, to resolve their conflict, consider Africa
and the Americas) ─ stirred up and inflamed by Western foreigners in Iraq, Syria,
Turkey, Lebanon.
“The use of U.S.-led assassination drones in Pakistan and
the ongoing war in Afghanistan,” Tarpley said, “are both part of Washington’s
policy to eventually break up states which are ‘big enough to defend
themselves.’”
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his is the chronically violent, irrational and insensible model
of U.S. engagement in the world. It is an ethos, a character that drives U.S. budgetary
priorities and it inflicts deep and lasting harm on the United States of America
and its people and on other nations and peoples of the world.
Sources and notes
“An agency-by-agency guide to Obama’s 2014 budget” The
Associated Press, Sunday, April 14, 2013 | 12:38 a.m., http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/apr/14/us-obama-budget-agency-highlights/
“West refuses to accept realities of Iran's nuclear energy program: Envoy,” April 13, 2013, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/04/13/298005/west-evading-realities-of-iran-nwork/
“U.S. assassination drone attack kills 4 in NW Pakistan,”
April 14, 2013,
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/04/14/298274/us-drone-strike-kills-4-in-pakistan/
“U.S. seeks to divide Pakistan through drones, Afghan war:
Analyst,” April 14, 2013,
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/04/14/298241/washington-seeks-to-divide-pakistan/
Straw man (person): “One common folk etymology of ‘straw man’ is that it refers
to men who stood outside courthouses with a straw in their shoe in order to
indicate their willingness to be a false witness.”
Straw man, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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