How much longer?

Originally published at Wake Up. You can comment here or there.

From the always excellent Glenn Greenwald’s piece on The Real U.S. Government:

That’s really the only relevant question: how much longer will Americans sit by passively and watch as a tiny elite become more bloated, more powerful, greedier, more corrupt and more unaccountable — as the little economic security, privacy and freedom most citizens possess vanish further still? How long can this be sustained, where more and more money is poured into Endless War, a military that almost spends more than the rest of the world combined, where close to 50% of all U.S. tax revenue goes to military and intelligence spending, where the rich-poor gap grows seemingly without end, and the very people who virtually destroyed the world economy wallow in greater rewards than ever, all while the public infrastructure (both figuratively and literally) crumbles and the ruling class is openly collaborating on a bipartisan, public-private basis even to cut Social Security benefits?

The answer, unfortunately, is probably this: a lot longer. And one primary reason is that our media-shaped political discourse is so alternatively distracted and distorted that even shining light on all of this matters little.

Kill journalists and civilians, then cover it up. It’s the American way!

Wikileaks released video today of two journalists from Reuters (and several other people) being killed by American troops in Iraq in 2007:

[Warning: Video contains graphic violence.]

Dan Froomkin observes:

Calling it a case of “collateral murder,” the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing until-now secret video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.

None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.

Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.

In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.

“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.

A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: “Come on, let us shoot!”

Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.

And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”

Does your agent have a Destructo-Ray Projector too?

I love this quote from Warren Ellis:

Sometimes my agent talks to me as if she has some kind of remote-operated Destructo-Ray Projector in my office that’ll burn off one of my balls if I disobey her instructions. But she speaks with such confidence that I start to worry that she does actually have some kind of remote-operated Destructo-Ray Projector in my office, and so I go to the meeting.

Oh yeah, LJ

I didn’t post all that often to Livejournal before, but now it seems I’m posting even less, as Twitter (I’m @mkcurry) and Facebook are getting most of the brief posts that I was putting here. Some of what I’ve posted about there in the last few weeks:

– I’m now reading slush for Fantasy Magazine.

– I’ve been to excellent concerts by Vienna Teng (with The Paper Raincoat) and brilliant fiddle player Brian Conway.

– The new album by The Paper Raincoat is awesome.

– The Yoshida Brothers are also awesome: http://is.gd/3HqHb

I think that’s a representative assortment of the parts other than me gushing about new novels and short stories by various talented writers.