April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

war

You can’t handle the truth

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That is the message that the Washington Post has for it’s readers.

The images are contained in thousands of pages of NCIS investigative documents obtained by The Washington Post. Post editors decided that most of the images are too graphic to publish…

The descriptions of some of the photos do indeed sound brutal. A brutality the people in the pictures had no choice to avoid.

The people of America have a right, indeed they have a duty, to see what transpires in their name. It is all too easy to think of war in the abstract when you do not hear the planes flying overhead. Do not feel the earth shake and the air cloud as your neighbours die. Do not wonder where you will get food and water for you family or if indeed any of you will live to need it.

Photos help to pierce through that cloud of complacency.

For more information read Media refuses to print grisly photos

Contact the Washington Post ombudsman:

Deborah Howell

202-334-7582

ombudsman@washpost.com

Scared yet?..now?…how about now?

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Now we don’t know who, when or where.. we do know

“The technical capability required to construct and use a simple RDD is practically trivial, compared to that of a nuclear explosive device or even most chemical or biological weapons,” the CSIS study says.

A homemade radiological weapon could consist of a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material commonly found at universities, medical and research laboratories or industrial sites.

But we don’t know what they are waiting for

“Indeed, it is quite surprising that the world has not yet witnessed such an attack,” the study says, adding “it appears that we are positively overdue for one.”

Oh yes and apparently they have figured out what really matters to the leaders in the west

The intelligence service points to the notion terrorist thinking has shifted from the desire to inflict mass casualties to “one of inflicting severe economic damage.”

And so it ends..

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notebook

I had a bad feeling about this year, and I was unfortunately right about that.

Personally I lost a mom, a cat, two jobs, and had two serious health scares.

Politically saw the election of Harper and crew, a renewed and emboldened attack on women’s rights and freedoms, the realization that though the wheel was invented, many still want to put corners on it and have a nuanced discussion over who should be using it, continued death and destruction by the powerful who stand to gain more.. upon the many who have nothing left to lose, and the death of a puppet who had turned on his masters. [Read more…] about And so it ends..

Away in a manger

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Christmas Eve many focus on a birth of long ago, and so I give you a story of birth.

From the Independent

In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem – but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.

Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. “What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured,” she says.

Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly, digging hard into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged sentences what happened. “It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on,” she says. She was already nervous about the birth – her first, and twins – so she told her husband to grab her hospital bag and get her straight into the car.

They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. “Obviously, we told them we couldn’t wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn’t understand.”

Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. “I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital,” she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could “certainly” have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.

A song of Peace

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Christmas in the Trenches by John McCutcheon

My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
‘Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.

I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, “Now listen up, me boys!” each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
“He’s singing bloody well, you know!” my partner says to me
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was “Stille Nacht.” “Tis ‘Silent Night’,” says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky
“There’s someone coming toward us!” the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one long figure trudging from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shown on that plain so bright
As he, bravely, strode unarmed into the night
Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man’s Land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave ’em hell
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeezebox and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men

Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
“Whose family have I fixed within my sights?”
‘Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I’ve learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same

The Price…

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Screams splinter the air
Shattered pieces of innocence
Pierce her soul
Unasked for knowledge
Never forgotten
The price a child has paid.

Shunned and alone
With stripes her body is adorned
Her pleas fall to deaf ears
Her life unmourned
Pain grips her now
The price she must pay.

Blood flows like water
Tears flow like rain
Mother cries for daughter
Memories of pain
Silent as unspoken sorrow
Her life ebbs away
She’ll never know the price
A woman must pay.