Today, Veterans Day 2017, is nothing like Veterans Day 1977, forty years ago when I observed my first Veterans Day after getting out of the military.

“The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.” - Joe Hill, The Fireman

To me, murder is murder. There should be no diplomatic immunity, executive privilege, or collateral damage when it comes to killing human beings. Some may say that war is different but that's a lie because all war is a lie. The wars conducted this century under presidents Bush, Obama and Trump are based on nothing but lies.

Pyongyang 1953

Considering present day circumstances, how are people affected when they read the below excerpt from the DPRK’s Foreign Minister’s cable to the United Nations Security Council dated 13 January 1951.

Could it be? Are the people in charge of this country that crazy? Would they really risk a nuclear war based on lies?

Heh. You bet your ass they are and would.

History is Written by the Victors
and
... the microbes will have the last word

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.
African Proverb

Napoleon once said, "What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
(paraphrasing ~François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), "Jeannot et Colin”)

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

The obscurest epoch is today.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains

Yeah, I know, I put in a cute comment about arendt's use of "Mr. Burns" -- standard academic writing would have been "Burns" or "Ken Burns." Apologies to arendt.

When does a war become an occupation?

Before Occupy Wall Street, this was the plan to try to bring an end to the utter abomination that is the United States Empire war in and occupation of Afghanistan.

Years ago I wrote an essay titled, "I just wrote a check for U.S. Imperialism and War". It was around April 15th of a year during the Neverending War Period, of which we currently reside, when I had to write a check to cover the federal taxes owed the previous year.