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POPSReading List: They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War 
In her May 9, 1862, diary entry, Sarah Morgan expressed the desires of many a Civil War-era woman when she exclaimed, "O if I was only a man! Then I could don the breeches, and slay them with a will!" (Charles East, ed., The Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan, , 65). Such statements may sound girlishly brave, but the meticulous and persistent detective work of DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook has proved that there were plenty of women who actually did "don the breeches." They have uncovered evidence confirming the existence of over 240 women who masqueraded as men and fought for the Union and Confederate Armies. They have drawn on prodigious archival research in repositories across the country, from Virginia to California, from Michigan to Texas; ... and they have canvassed an incredible array of newspapers, to say nothing of their diligent sifting of National Archives record groups. http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5005902928
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POPSWar is a Racket by Major General Smedley Darlington Butler "And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. . . . War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it." Read his anti-war manifesto @ clip source.
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POPSHow you can reshelve Bush's crime memoir Another reason to visit my favorite bookstores.I wanted to use confessional instead of memoir, but then I remembered that to confess is to acknowledge shame or embarrassment over ones actions. No risk of that with Bush.
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POPSWikileaks Iraq War Logs wikileaks.org is still down for 'scheduled maintenance.' US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
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POPSLiving in the USA: The forever culture war Economic strife doesn't just restart the culture war. It reorders the conflict, shifting both the issues at stake and the targets of the moment. One of the great errors of defining the culture war of the 1980s and 1990s as primarily about women's and gay rights is that liberals got the idea that this was a war we could win. Just give it time, and Americans would become more LGBT-friendly and more accepting of abortion rights, and we would have somehow mended America's deepest ideological rifts. In some ways, that is proving true. ... Today we have a biracial president. Women's right to work and be compensated fairly is generally accepted. Each poll on marriage equality is more encouraging than the last. These particular issues are falling off the agenda. ... however, the broader culture war seems to get uglier and uglier. The underlying sentiment ... that only certain Americans are "real Americans" who deserve rights and respect -- has not gone away.
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POPSCollateral Murder: War and Gaming Apache Pilot logic is similar to the logic of the average gamer. The gaming industry has been training killers for decades. This is their moment in the sun. From my clip Militainment: "Bloodthirsty, but fucking cool" ...the nexus of video gaming, war and militainment iis growing even fuzzier ... even for parents, war is becoming something for their kids to play at. Related clip: Gen. McChrystal: We've Shot 'An Amazing Number of People' Who Were Not Threats'
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POPSMilitainment: "Bloodthirsty, but fucking cool" ...the nexus of video gaming, war, and militainment is growing even fuzzier with the rapid growth in unmanned systems that use video-gaming technology to conduct actual military operations (the United States now has some 7,000 unmanned systems in its aerial inventory and another 12,000 on the ground). ... the executive at robot-maker Foster-Miller worries that it is becoming too fuzzy. "It's a Nintendo issue," ..."You get kids used to playing Grand Theft Auto moving on to armed robots. Are you going to feel guilt after killing someone?" With more and more soldiers sitting at a robot's computer control ... the experience of war is not merely distanced from risk, but now fully disconnected from it. One Air Force officer speaking to Wired's Noah Shachtman about his experiences in the Iraq war, which he fought from a cubicle hundreds of miles away, described the feeling: "It's like a video game.... It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it's fucking cool." - More @ source
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POPSClipping Comments: Obama's Nobel Lecture - Short Arc of War. Long Arc of Peace Obama only points to the fact that the institutional landscape of Post World War II, "A decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats." Yes, President Obama institutions have expiry dates. The institutions born of what Obama asked for in his plea for "the continued expansion of our moral imagination" arose because people of imagination in 1942 from the US Treasury and British Exchequer called together whole systems thinkers to ask the questions. The writ was to answer why the "War to end all Wars" had a demand performance thirty years latter and the world was suffering from the Great Depression. The writ was to create the new generation of institutions to change the game. This was in 1942 when neither nation knew whether they would be defeated and the "goose step" of Fascist troops would echo through London and Washington.
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POPSLawmakers Propose 'War Surtax' to Pay for Troop Increase in Afghanistan "If we have to pay for the health care bill, we should pay for the war as well ... by having a war surtax," Obey told ABC News in an interview that aired Monday. "The problem in this country with this issue is that the only people that has to sacrifice are military families and they've had to go to the well again and again and again and again, and everybody else is blithely unaffected by the war."
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