Category Archives: Criminal Injustice

White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

America, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Just War, Military, War

Just to remind you what a monster one must be to say the following words: “the nuclear option is on the table.”

“On August 6th and 9th, 1945, two atomic bombs vaporized 210,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who survived are called “hibakusha”—people exposed to the bomb—and there are an estimated 200,000 living today. Today, with the threat of —nuclear weapons of mass destruction frighteningly real—the world’s arsenal capable of repeating the destruction at Hiroshima 400,000 times over—Oscar® award-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki revisits the bombings and shares the stories of the only people to have survived a nuclear attack.”

The teletwits of cable haven’t commemorated this mass murder. Photos are all important. Watch the “Video Promo.” I’ve attached a few links you can follow. I’m not going to attempt to describe the flesh of a young girl melted away, hanging in strips from her still-alive body.

Photographs Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

A Photo-Essay on the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Update #1: : There is no disputing that the intentional slaughter of 200,000 innocents was mass murder. What else? Mercy killing? Preemptive killing of innocents? It’s the coward’s way out. It’s un-Christian, un-Jewish, unethical; flouts every stricture of Just War and natural justice, you name it. To defend it is indefensible. There is, moreover, no way to say who and how many were “saved” by the bombing. That’s why it’s such a convenient course of action for the evil. It’s open-ended and vague. To do so, is to exclude oneself from humanity.

Update #2: Pearl Harbor is the magic word for the crowd that is always licking its chops for blood. In Pearl Harbor you have the Japanese attacking a military target—a naval base. They killed a few thousands of what to them were enemy combatants, i.e. Americans. That act, according to some monsters, provides the warrant the US needed to slaughter 200,000 mostly civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and destroy those cities. Truman had planned to drop a couple more “Little Boys” and “Fat Men,” as they were dubbed affectionately.

Part of the Just War doctrine, adhered to by a dwindling number of REAL Christians, is the concept of proportionality in war. One of the best dissections of the bankrupt case for this atrocity was made by historian Ralph Raico. While we’re at it, let’s see a consistent application of principles, please. To intentionally target civilians is to engage in the act of terrorism.

Sock it to those Civilians!

Update #3: On the topic of intentionally targeting innocent civilians with the most devastating weapon known to man we heard, unfortunately, mainly from people bereft of a developed theory of justice. Rather, in discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the emphasis was mostly on crude collectivism. However charitable I‘d like to be, I can’t even credit some of the individuals who wrote in with advancing a sophisticated utilitarianism. Mostly, it was, “We socked it to ‘em for our boys, yeah baby. We kicked some ass.” (The booties of babies and their mothers…)

There were others (unpublished of course) who—without any familiarity with my writings on Just War, including pre-emptive war, Israel, and Iraq—offered unsubstantiated deductions about my positions. For example: it was asserted by one bombast that I opposed the war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam was better than the current chaos. No, that’s the position taken in retrospect, after the failure in Iraq, by some of the nation’s reigning philosopher kings.

If you intend to offer an opinion about it, read my perfectly validated case against that war. Once again, my position against that travesty, again—perfectly validated today—rested on principles of natural justice, Just War, and the reality shared by the “reality-based community,” not the pie-in the sky occupied by neoconservatives, who admitted to creating their own reality when it came to the danger from saddam, because they possessed the power to so do.

Don’t waste your time on a classically liberal blog if you haven’t acquainted yourself with the writing you propose to “refute” so stridently. Of course, even the fact that I was right about the war against Iraq has not persuaded warriors suspended in a Third Dimension that my philosophy was validated, not by chance, but by following objective reality and immutable principle. So, can I sell you shares in a Bed and Breakfast in Baghdad?

Update 4 (May 7, 2008): Recently revealed are these new photos of the American government’s war crimes (via LRC.com).

[All comments were lost in a server crash early in 2008]

‘Sex, God & Greed’

Christianity, Criminal Injustice, Journalism, Media, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Courts

In 2003, Daniel Lyons, in Forbes, hashed out all there is to say about the sexual-abuse shakedown to which the Catholic Church has been subjected. It’s worth revisiting this exceptional exposé, now that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, lamentably, has decided to capitulate, rather than fight a racket facilitated by courts that are conduits to theft. Writes Lyons:

“….The focal point of this tort battle is the Catholic Church. The Church’s legal problems are worse even than most people realize: $1 billion in damages already paid out for the victims of pedophile priests, indications that the total will approach $5 billion before the crisis is over… The lawyers are lobbying states to lift the statute of limitations on sex abuse cases, letting them dredge up complaints that date back decades. Last year California, responding to the outcry over the rash of priest cases, suspended its statute of limitations on child sex abuse crimes for one year, opening the way for a deluge of new claims. A dozen other states are being pushed to loosen their laws.”

“’There is an absolute explosion of sexual abuse litigation, and there will continue to be. This is going to be a huge business,’ MacLeish, age 50, says. A Boston-based partner of the Miami law firm of GREENBERG TRAURIG (2002 billings: $465 million)…”

Lyons and Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal are the only writers I know of to have pointed out how many of these class-action claims are, if not bogus, backed by the discredited excavation of false memories. (See my “Repressed Memory Ruse”):

The repressed memory hoax “…. relies on a controversial theory that has split the world of psychology into bitterly opposing camps for more than a decade: the notion that people can wipe out memories of severe trauma, then recover these repressed memories years later…
Richard McNally, a Harvard psychology professor…. thinks recovered memories of trauma are questionable. He has conducted numerous studies on memory, particularly with sexual abuse victims. He says people don’t forget a trauma like anal rape. They might forget something like being fondled as a child, but that’s because the fondling was not traumatic, he argues. ‘It might be disgusting, upsetting—but not terrifying, not traumatic.’”

“McNally’s take on this subject has set off a hometown feud with Daniel Brown, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who is a leading proponent of recovered memory. The two archrivals have never met, engaging instead in a ‘battle of the books.’
In 1998, when Brown won an award for his 786-page tome, Memory, Trauma Treatment & the Law, McNally wrote a scathing review that criticized Brown’s methodology. In March of this year McNally published his own book, Remembering Trauma, in which he bashes repressed-memory theory and criticizes Brown’s work yet again.