U.S. bombing Buddhist Laos (video)

Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman, Nermeen Shaikh

Laotian Theravada Buddhist devotion, Luang Prabang, Laos (William Day/flickr.com)

 

Fifty years ago this month, the United States began raining down bombs on Laos [a landlocked Theravada Buddhist nation in Southeast Asia near Vietnam, China, Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia], in what would become the largest bombing campaign in history.

From June 1964 to March 1973, the United States dropped at least two million tons of bombs on the small, landlocked southeast Asian country. That is the equivalent of one planeload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years -- more than was dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.
 

40 years after secret U.S. war in Laos, millions of bomblets (seen here) keep killing

 
This part of the deadly legacy of the U.S. War on Vietnam lives on: In a sense the bombing continues today because of unexploded cluster bombs (scattering bomblets), which had about a 30 percent failure rate when they were thrown from American planes over large swaths of Laos.

Experts estimate that Laos today is littered with as many as 80 million "bombies" or bomblets -- baseball-sized bombs designed into cluster bombs to scatter on impact to kill long after the initial bombing.

Since the initial bombing stopped four decades ago, tens of thousands of people have been injured, maimed, and killed as a result. Democracy Now! is joined by Karen Coates and Jerry Redfern, co-authors of Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos (eternalharvestthebook.com).
 

The full Democracy Now! episode, June 25, 2014

• The man who co-wrote MLK’s "Beyond Vietnam" speech 
• SPECIAL: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his own words 
• Oliver Stone on 50th anniversary of JFK assassination and the "Untold History of the United States"
• VIDEO: Jeremy Scahill and Noam Chomsky on secret U.S. "Dirty Wars" from Yemen to Pakistan to Laos

• IRAQ: Maliki calls unity gov’t calls a "Coup" against Iraq 
• U.S. flies spy planes over Iraq; Syria bombs Sunni targets
• U.S. talks Iraq crisis with NATO allies
• Republican Sen. Cochran defeats Tea Party challenger after appeal to black voters
• Rangel claims victory in New York primary
• Federal Court rules "No-Fly" List unconstitutional!
• Obama admin warns of deportation of thousands of kids
• Assange attorneys petition Sweden to drop arrest warrant
• Palestinian prisoners end mass hunger strike
• Witnesses: Militants kidnap dozens in Nigeria
• Connecticut removes transsexual teen from adult prison

"Kill Anything That Moves!" (video)

Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; Mitch Jeserich (KPFA.org, 01-30-14), The Tet Offensive

(Movieclips) A scene from "Platoon" showing how Christian American soldiers treated innocent Buddhist civilians in a war that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with money and our peculiar form of war-profiteering capitalism. See you in hell, Charlie.

We are currently doing the exact same thing to Afghans in Afghanistan without ever wondering who gets us into these apparently pointless wars (which are not pointless but based on lies that fall apart under scrutiny). "Truth is the first casualty of war." And "those who forget history are condemned to repeat it" as new White House and Pentagon officials seek more adventures in genocide, slavery, and atrocities in our and/or our God's name.

 

Not the Buddha but the monk and Bodhisattva Hotei (Budai), Vietnam

 

LISTEN: Letters and Politics - Jan. 30, 2014 at 10:00 am

The historical Shakyamuni Buddha (WQ)

Journalist Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (nickturse.com), talks about our previous adventure in American empire -- the U.S. War on Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia). That was when we began to explain our fear-based massacres with koans like, "We had to burn the village to save the village." 

In the second 30 minutes of the show, Jane Gleeson-White talks about how accounting, bookkeeping, and high finance make everything possible -- including saving the world -- based on historical research from her fascinating book, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance. (download)

"The Internet's Own Boy"/"The Rocket" (film)

Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman at Sundance (DemocracyNow.org)

 

Aaron Swartz: The Life We Lost and the Day We Fight Back

Amy Goodman

PARK CITY, Utah - A year after Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide at the age of 26, a film about this remarkable young man has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
 
The film, titled “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” directed by Brian Knappenberger, follows the sadly short arc of Swartz’s life. A coalition of Internet activists, technologists, and policy experts are joining together on Feb. 11, 2014 for “The Day We Fight Back.”
 
As they say on their Website, reflecting on the victory against SOPA, “Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance. If Aaron were alive, he’d be on the front lines." Listen

 

(EK) Harvard student downloads academic JSTOR articles and bam!

 

"The Rocket" (Laos) directed by Kim Mordaunt and starring Sitthiphon

Disamoe, Loungnam Kaosainam, Suthep Po-ngam (from Australia)

 

THE ROCKET: A boy who is believed to bring bad luck to everyone around him leads his family and two new friends through Buddhist Laos to find a new home. After a calamity-filled journey through a land scarred by the legacy of American war, to prove he's not bad luck, he builds a rocket to enter the most exciting and dangerous competition of the year: the Rocket Festival.

• Marianne Williamson is running for Congress
• Is Ted Nugent racist on MLK Jr. Day? (The LipTV)
• Religious conflict reaches a six-year high

Martin Luther King Jr. in his own words (video)

Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman, DemocracyNow.org

Historian on the March on Washington and the Kennedys’ aversion to MLK’s struggle

 

MLK Jr., born Michael in 1929, was assassinated at age 39 on April 4, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was a Protestant minister, Ph.D., Nobel laureate, and cheated on his wife rather being the saint many attempt to portray him as. While he is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, Dr. King was also a fierce critic of military-industrial U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War as well as U.S. genocides in Laos and Cambodia. He also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People’s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Let us listen to his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, delivered at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, as well as his last speech, "I Have Been to the Mountain Top," which he gave on April 3, 1968, the night before [the government] assassinated him.

 

Malcolm X Day 2015

(Daily Kos) Today (Jan. 20th), is the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We now have an entire generation who has grown up in the United States with this holiday... But there has been a lot of racist resistance to it. There is a government sponsored Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, which mentions, "After a long struggle, legislation was signed in 1983 creating a federal holiday marking the birthday" though his actual birth date was Jan 15, 1929.

The Golden Triangle Buddha (photos)

CC Liu (Berkeley), Wisdom Quarterly; UrsulasWeeklyWanders.com (instagram, facebook)

Small gecko under the Buddha's gorgeous middle finger sits protectively (Ursula/UWW)

 

There is a golden Buddha in the center of the infamous Golden Triangle, the former crossroads of nefarious activity between mountainous Thailand, Burma, and Laos. Where Theravada Buddhist cultures now meet and mingle, drug lords once ran Chinese money in exchange for opium, heroin, human trafficking, and sundry warlord activity like Southeast Asian and CIA money laundering.

Jogging in Lumpini Park, Bangkok (UWW)

It was a den of iniquity, a big den, the size of a jungle. When Axl Rose first sang "Welcome to the Jungle," he probably had this triangular patch in mind as a counterpart the ruined asphalt grid called Los Angeles and in particular its concrete capital HollywoodLand. But intrepid traveler and photographer Ursula_in_Aus (Ursula_Bkk when in Bangkok) has a backstory to accompany these beautiful pictures.

Golden Triangle

Ursula_in_Aus (edited, abbreviated by Wisdom Quarterly)

...Google “Golden Triangle.” One of the entries that pops up relates to Euclidean geometry and a golden ratio that forms the hypotenuse of the golden or sublime triangle: a magical isosceles with “divine” proportions. It is the basis for perfect pentagrams and logarithmic spirals.

 

But Asia's Golden Triangle is 950,000 square kms of mountainous jungles that, until the early 21st century, was responsible for most of the world’s heroin production.

Novice at Shwe Yan Pyay, Burma (UWW)

The contradictory “divine” heart of this triangular region is a golden Buddha, joyfully and soberly sitting at the at confluence of the Ruak and Mekong rivers, the intersection of three countries that form the triangle.

 

The first time I visited this giant marvel, it struck me how imposing the image was, sitting so serenely, facing and overlooking Thailand, apparently oblivious to the gambling casinos across the waters behind it (gambling being the least of the area's vices). More