Dismembered

Hahahahahaaah! I wish that weren't funny, or that it wasn't an issue in current events that a cartoonist was compelled to characterize. I wish a lot of things, as we all do these days, of course.

Looks like the talk about Iraq being a staging ground for military forays (doesn't 'forays' make it sound fun?) into Iran, etc, wasn't all that cynical. After all, we had to pull out of Saudi Arabia after the attacks of 9/11/01, which was what bin Ladin (and possibly the House of Saud) was aiming for, and if we're gonna shine the light of Democracy across the Middle East, we need a base of operations.

If you haven't yet picked up the Guardian muckraker Greg Palast's book, "Armed Madhouse," you must. I was up later than I should have been reading and even laughing - thankfully, or I would have been crying. He's a bit of a ranter and kinda hard to follow in some of his narratives, but he sure has uncovered a tangled web, and man-oh-man is our government up to some shit. They can't even agree on what their mission is in the Middle East; it's unfortunate they agree we oughta be there. With the "madhouse" chock full of megalomaniacs, it makes sense they would all have their own ideas about how to run the world.

Rob Brezsny says:

Philosopher William James proposed that if our culture ever hoped to
shed the deeply ingrained habit of going to war, we'd have to create a
moral equivalent. It's not enough to preach the value of peace, he said.
We have to find other ways to channel our aggressive instincts in order to
accomplish what war does, like stimulate political unity and build civic
virtue.

Astrology provides a complementary perspective. Each of us has the
warrior energy of the planet Mars in our psychological make-up. We can't
simply repress it, but must find a positive way to express it. How you
might go about this project?