Four days and 1,800 miles later, we are back from the AmeriCorps Alums Memorial Day Service Weekend in Biloxi, Mississippi. A much better summary about the trip will be here soon.
Monthly Archive for May, 2006
Description from A&E’s website:
Featuring candid interviews and never-before-seen video, we tell the story of the hardest hit combat unit of the Iraq war. Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, a reserve unit out of Columbus, Ohio was deployed to Iraq from February 28-September 30, 2005. This two-hour documentary captures significant moments from their tour of duty, including dramatic combat missions. Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company provides an unprecedented and harrowing window into the harsh reality of war.
Upcoming Airings:
- Thursday, May 25 @ 9pm/8C
- Friday, May 26 @ 1am/12C
- Saturday, May 27 @ 8pm/7C
- Sunday, May 28 @ 12am/11C
Excerpt about the A&E program from today’s Dispatch
Near the end of a new documentary on Columbus’ Lima Company, Lance Cpl. Trevor Smith talks of the Marine unit’s fame:
“I just feel like we got all this attention because a lot of us were killed… I don’t appreciate this stuff. I just want people to know about my friends.”
Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company, which airs Thursday night and other days on A&E, helps us to know them.
The reservists gave the film’s producers more than 15 hours of video that they took in Iraq. This was private footage shot during the company’s seven month deployment last year.
No one seems to have felt restrained in front of their own cameras, said Michael Epstein, the film’s producer and director.
We see a Marine licking the bottom of another’s foot for a $5 bet; Lance Cpl. Christopher Dyer playing Puff the Magic Dragon on guitar in the barracks; Lance Cpl. Nicholas Bloem trying to eat 15 little pizzas in 20 minutes.
We also see a nighttime firefight; Marines assaulting the building where Dyer was killed; the burning amphibious vehicle that held the bodies of Bloem and 10 other Marines. [read the rest of the article]
At the time of this posting we have lost 2,457 soldiers and an estimated 40,000 Iraqi civilians in this illegal war and occupation.
And again I ask, for what?
Even though Iraq and 9/11 have absolutely nothing to do with eachother aside from The Project for a New American Century, some Americans still believe there’s a connection and subsequent justification for war. Going along with this misconception, I say this: we lost 2,986 people on September 11th; casualties from the occupation of Iraq will inevitably surpass that number. Then how easy will it be for the remaining supporters of this war to use “Remember 9/11?” as justification?
How in the hell can people still support this war and the administration responsible for it?
This article from AlterNet is especially interesting to read four days before my trip down to Biloxi for AmeriCorps Alumni service in the Gulf Coast. We (myself, Ellen, and two friends who are also AmeriCorps Alums) will be working with the Hands On Network in Biloxi, Mississippi just days before Hurricane Season 2006 kicks off.
Seems like just a short time ago I was constantly refreshing my browser (before I discovered Bloglines) hoping for an update from Interdictor. That was my main source for updates, loading their webcam feeds, watching the fires, the emptiness of the streets, the fleeting reports of localized nightmares. If you want to jump back in time, here’s a good place to jump: Interdictor’s post on August 29th at 9:44am:
“It’s definitely a mess outside, but as long as no flooding occurs, the city should be fine.”
Now it’s May 2006 and I’m finally going to see for myself what it looks like down there. I’m hoping it’s not as bad as I’m hearing, I want to keep my faith in our country’s ability to rebuild whatever is lost. It’s been nine months since it all went down. Two cells could transform into a little human in that time.
Surely a country that claims to be so developed has been able to make a significant dent in the rebuilding of one of its greatest cities. This country that likes to flaunt its supposed superiority wouldn’t leave its citizens stranded in a trailer [they can take no ownership of] for almost a year? And certainly not because they’re poor and don’t have the same skin tone as the ones who control the money needed to rebuild?
I hope I’m proven wrong.
Blowin’ in the Mississippi Wind
How has FEMA ‘prepared’ Gulf Coast residents for storm season 2006? By doing next to nothing, of course.
I’m standing on the coast, staring not at the Gulf of Mexico but inland, into the nothingness that used to be Waveland, Mississippi. Where once homes, a library, and the city hall stood, there’s only rubble, ghostly slabs of concrete, sun-bleached pants, nightgowns, and curtains eerily draped high in the trees, and a single, green minivan crumpled like an aluminum can. Oh yes, and then there are the “travel trailers” — FEMA supplied — that sit on the tombstone-like slabs and house many of the residents who remain in this small seaside town.
Now, your basic travel trailer is great for a family vacation to Yellowstone, but as protection against a storm? Even when tethered to the ground (and some of these aren’t), trailers can rock back and forth in relatively mild winds and be heavily damaged in your ordinary thunderstorm. But here in Waveland, where Katrina hit with devastating Category-4 force nine months ago, and far more important, less than two weeks before the next hurricane season revs up on June 1st, these trailers shelter hundreds of families. In fact, over 90,000 Katrina families scattered across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama now sleep in FEMA trailers and are likely to face, in the months to come, a new danger on the unreconstructed coastline of the southeast – that, in a storm much kinder than Katrina, their “homes” will be turned into flying tuna cans.
In October 2004, experts at the American Meteorological Society, considering mobile home communities, issued a report which concluded in part: “The public perception that only tornadoes and hurricanes destroy mobile homes is wrong. These homes can be demolished by many kinds of severe winds.” In fact, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), nearly half of the deaths caused by tornadoes in the U.S. come when trailer residents either stay put to ride out the storm or flee in areas without immediately available shelters. Forget hurricanes, Mississippi is hit with an average of 24 tornadoes a year and already ranks second in the nation in the number of tornado-related deaths and injuries.
Gusts of 50 miles per hour lasting more than three seconds can damage mobile homes. From March 2003 to April 2005, thirteen storms with winds of at least 58 mph — the low-end of a severe storm — blew through Waveland and surrounding communities according NOAA’s online database. At that strength, such a storm wouldn’t even qualify as a Category-1 Hurricane.
Having put over 100,000 Mississippi residents in 38,000 trailers, how has FEMA addressed this issue? Its website essentially dumps the problem in the laps of the trailerized, suggesting that it’s their responsibility to closely monitor weather patterns, as in the event of a tropical storm or a Category-1 hurricane they would have to be the first — in some cases, the only people — to evacuate. Oh, and they’ll need to leave the trailers behind. It’s illegal to move the FEMA trailers.
FYI, AlterNet has a great collection of articles regarding Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath.
Okay so I jinxed myself with that last post, the command line prompt quickly crept up on me. I’m just trying to install Limewire and it’s driving me crazy.
First I downloaded the .rpm package, which required installing Alien to convert it to a .deb package. I was able to handle that using Synaptic Package Manager. Then I installed the .deb package using the terminal (alien -i LimeWireLinux.rpm) and it appeared to install, it’s showing up on my Applications list under Internet programs. But when I click on it, absolutely nothing happens.
I also tried to download the .zip version that’s available, but then I wasn’t sure what to do with that once I had the regular folder extracted. I found a READ ME file that had me messing with Java, it said my JRE was too old so I went to java.com to get the latest one. I thought I had that installed properly but it’s still not working. Aggh! So annoyed right now. I just want LimeWire!
This is where the whole “Linux for human beings” line fails. I thought the whole idea behind Ubuntu was to make it as usable as Windows, but right now it’s far from it (for me.) And I just know if I were to go to one of the Ubuntu Support sites and ask about how to do this I would get some complicated answer that would just make me feel stupid. I’m not a programmer, I don’t think like one, and none of the Linux support geeks can ever seem to grasp that.
Maybe I should just be happy that I got Ubuntu installed this weekend and leave it at that. I have managed to finally understand what GNOME and Debian all mean in the context of Ubuntu. The terms had me confused at first, it’s hard going from an OS like Windows where the name Windows includes the OS, kernal, GUI, etc. to an open source collaboration like Ubuntu where each component of the OS has its own name and background groups. And all the familiar terms have new names, like recognizing “package” instead of “software”, or .tar and .deb instead of .zip. I’m learning a new language, and it sucks. But that’s what I signed up for when I wiped out my HD and said goodbye to Microsoft, so I’ll just have to deal with it and learn!
I’m writing this post using my newly installed Ubuntu Linux operating system! I finally took the plunge, no more dual-boot hanging-onto-Windows-just-in-case, it’s 100% Linux for me now.
I had a brief run-in with Ubuntu when it first came out, I set my laptop up to dual-boot with the 5.4 version but somewhere in the manual partitioning I messed something up so it wasn’t very stable and would randomly shut down. I also couldn’t figure out how to install new programs and a bunch of my peripherals weren’t being supported (the USB ports weren’t recognized) which left me with little I was able to do.
Now I’ve got Ubuntu 5.10 installed, all of my peripherals are working wonderfully (wireless mouse, CD-RW, and digital camera) with zero configuration on my part, and I haven’t touched a single command line prompt.
So far, I’m impressed. And glad to be free from the shackles of Microsoft once and for all. At least until I go to work on Monday.
Ellen just checked her email for the first time on the new OS and wrote me a nice email that explains how she feels about this exciting OS conversion “hello linux…i’m ellen and i have no idea what you are.”
Yeah, well, I’m still very excited about it. :-) Now my next goal is to get it looking the way I want it, specifically some new Firefox chrome and I need to pretty-up the desktop. What a fun way to spend a Sunday!
I’ve been listening to Anti-Flag’s “For Blood and Empire” album repeatedly lately. All the lyrics are amazing, and the CD insert alone contains so much important information that needs to get out there.
One song that especially got me thinking was Project for a New American Century. I knew I had heard that name before, but couldn’t really remember what it was all about. I found this article written by William Rivers Pitt in 2003 that provided a quick recap of what PNAC is all about:
“The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, is a Washington-based think tank created in 1997. Above all else, PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana.”
That’s some pretty scary stuff. And like Pitt explains, while this group is unfortunately not unique, they wouldn’t be such a concern if the members and creators of PNAC didn’t get shuffled into power with the theft of the 2000 Presidential election. Once that happened, all their crazy ideas of an American Empire were theirs to start implementing, regardless of human or financial cost. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush. All PNAC. All hell-bent on World Domination.
I highly suggest reading this article if you’re unfamiliar with PNAC. It’s something every American needs to know about. The Information Clearinghouse has plenty more articles involving PNAC if you want to keep reading. It’s also interesting to check out PNAC’s official website to see how they put a nice shiny cover on all their plans.
“The People versus the Powerful is the oldest story in human history. At no point in history have the Powerful wielded so much control. At no point in history has the active and informed involvement of the People, all of them, been more absolutely required.”
William Rivers Pitt
UPDATE // Every time this episode airs I get tons of hits to this post and I bet people are hoping they’ll find an mp3 of the song. Sorry to disappoint you but if I did that I’d risk having my site taken down amid charges of illegal music sharing. I suggest downloading Limewire and finding it there instead. Now back to your regularly scheduled post…
Don’t worry, no plot spoilers in this post!
I was happy to see/hear last night’s ER season finale conclude with a song from Snow Patrol’s newest album, Eyes Open, which I’ve been listening to all week.
Open Your Eyes just so happens to be one of my three favorite songs on the new album (along with Chasing Cars and Make This Go On Forever) so I’m glad they’ll be getting some exposure from the ER episode.
All this feels strange and untrue
And I won’t waste a minute without you
My bones ache, my skin feels cold
And I’m getting so tired and so oldThe anger swells in my guts
And I won’t feel these slices and cuts
I want so much to open your eyes
Cos I need you to look into mineTell me that you’ll open your eyes…
