Anybody else ever get a sense when someone gives you the cold shoulder on Facebook? When they don’t give you the time of day or get testy or don’t answer messages? Growing up in Minnesota tunes you in to passive-aggressive. Growing up female makes you intolerant of it. What’s the point of such interactions? Or more aptly, anti-interactions?

Came across a post about how Viet Cong guerrilla forces defeated the US in the Vietnam War. The official name was the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam & it actually embodied both guerrilla & regular army units under a single command structure. They had over 40 years of experience in fighting French colonialism.

Whatever accommodations the Vietnamese leadership has made to neoliberal economics, the monumental achievement by the Vietnamese people of defeating US militarism can never be honored enough. One of its political reverberations was called “the Vietnam Syndrome,” the popular opposition to US wars which lasted years & which media & the US Pentagon worked tirelessly to reverse.

When I took the 90-pound male dog to get him fixed & medically checked, I promised to return him to the business place where he hangs out as an abandoned dog. For some reason they want him back but not his sister & her pups.

He’s been here near two weeks, gets regular meals, gets in line for treats & petting with all the rest, lines up next to my bed to get kissed & hugged in the morning when I awake. He knows how being in a family feels now & will not willingly go back to being homeless & alone. Somehow I have to persuade them to let me find him a home.

In a move as predictable as the sun rising in the east & setting in the west, the Aung San Suu Kyi regime announced that the UN commission will not be granted visas to enter Myanmar to investigate charges of murder, rape, & torture of Rohingya Muslims by the military in Arakan (Rakhine) state.

It’s often pointed out that Suu Kyi does not control the military which actually runs Myanmar. That’s true, but with complete gusto she fronts for the military’s ethnic cleansing & publicly denies & scoffs at charges of human rights crimes against Rohingya.

We stand in full solidarity with the Rohingya for full democratic, human, civil, & refugee rights. The UN may be debarred from entering Arakan state but in the meantime they can proceed with the investigation by interviewing some of the 75,000 Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh since October 2016.

(Photo is the human face of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar)

“Extrajudicial killings by the police & the lynchings of the Indian Muslims by the extensions of the State are now a routine in India.”

–Khurram Parvez

If you believe the narrative that Syrian & Russian bombers are defending Syrian national sovereignty against US-backed “jihadist head choppers” trying to oust Assad & that there is no popular revolution against Assad’s dictatorship, can you elaborate for us:

–Why out of over 10,000 US-coalition airstrikes in Syria since 2014–that’s over 84,000 bombs & missiles–there have been only three hostile encounters with the Syrian army & one of those was on empty airport hangars?

–Why the US claims its priority in Syria is to fight ISIS but like Syrian & Russian bombers is also bombing cities with tens of thousands of civilians, including with white phosphorous? Why isn’t the US fighting the Syrian army if it wants to take down Assad?

–Why the US is using guerrilla forces rather than just bombing the hell out of Assad’s palace in Damascus along with bombing Syrian military bases? Wouldn’t bombs be a quicker way to bring down the regime than terrorist groups & special forces? That could have been done before Russian bombers entered the air war in 2015.

–What is this deconfliction strategy all about where the US collaborates with Russia & Syria so they don’t interfere with each others operations? And since the US has deconfliction monitors doing constant surveillance over Syria, why is it so secretive about what the hell all those foreign mercenaries & terrorist groups are doing there?

–How did a popular revolution involving hundreds of thousands of people get coopted by terrorists, if that is what you claim–although Assadist ideologues on the payroll claim there never was a revolution? So can Assadists come to some agreement about whether there ever was a revolution or what happened to it?

–How many ISIS & Al-Qaeda-type fighters are there in Syria? How many have been killed so far? Where are they getting their arms? How are they getting their arms past the Syrian, Russian, US, Iranian, & Hezbollah air & ground forces? Why aren’t the arms supply routes being cut off, like they did in Vietnam? How did ISIS get its hands on over $1-billion of US weapons, according to the Pentagon?

Make a stab at it; try to answer some of these questions. Or is the simple-minded & profoundly Islamophobic scenario of benevolent Assad against head chopping jihadis sufficient to support Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians?