Politics: The Real News - Bush heats up words with Iran and Russia

Who has the right to own a nuclear weapon? I've been pondering this for a while now. When Russia and the US both had enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other, we arrived at peace. When India and Pakastan both achieved nuclear weapons, they were forced to decide how far they were willing to go. It seems to me that nuclear weapons may actually be one of the best war deterrents that has ever existed. It brings two sides of a conflict face to face with annihilation. It forces them to decide how important their hatred of the enemy really is. When only one side of a conflict has a nuclear weapon, the side without it is at a decided disadvantage.

The yahoos over here in the US are always running around saying "we should just nuke em" to just about any small country that represents the slightest threat. With this kind of casual attitude about our power, what would they be saying if we attacked a country like Iran and they then shut down the oil infrastructure crippling the US economy? How easily would desperate people in the US, who are now paying $10 per gallon for gas, be convinced that nuking Iran was actually a good idea if it might make it all stop? How likely would they need to be to decide nuking Iran was a good idea if Iran could nuke us back?

So I ask again. Who has a right to own nuclear weapons? Who has a right to say "we should just nuke em?" Now that the genie is out of the bottle with nuclear weapons how can only some people be forced to live under the threat of nuclear annihilation while others can casually sit back and gloat about their ability to annihilate? Don't gun advocates always argue that the best defense against a man with a gun threatening your family is to own a gun yourself? How is it these same people would say that we should attack someone for wanting the national defense equivalent of a gun to protect their families?

I'm just sayin. . . .

Why We Fight

Why We Fight

The BBC presents Why We Fight by Charlotte Street, a documentary on the commerce of war, and how the military industrial complex profits so much from war, that it must create wars to continue the growth of it's business.

Broken into 4 parts at about 25 minutes each.

This is part 1 of 4:

Saturday Feature: Free-Will productions - The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror

Free-Will Productions is a husband and wife documentary team from Los Angeles who have teamed up with a video editor and a composer. They have been making films since 1995 and they reinvest all the money they make from sales to TV and home video back into new documentaries. In this manner they operate with complete independence. As they put it:

"Free-will productions is proud to say that our only executive producer is our own public."

Their work can be purchased directly from their website linked above. In The Oil Factor, they explore all the various relationships, motives and human costs surrounding oil and the complete dominance of energy interests in the US government. They suggest a direct tie between out interest in Saudi Arabia and the attacks against us by terrorists. They did a great job in their investigations and they have a lot of notable people that contribute their voices to the project.

Saturday Feature: MEF - Peace Propaganda and The Promised land

Another great documentary by The Media Education Foundation. This one examines the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the way the media shapes people's opinions about it.

Education: Ken Schooland/Kerry Pearson - The Philosophy of Liberty

I posted a link to the flash version of this video in a past post but it really needs to be highlighted so I found the embeddable YouTube version and I am giving it it's own spot. It addresses issues of liberty and, in particular, the danger presented by people who want surrogates to defend their liberty for them rather than doing it themselves:

It is based on part of a very influential book by Ken Schooland named The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible. They also have a website based the book. that features the video.