Hasta La Gadget!

To celebrate the third anniversary of the video game Injustice: Gods Among Us, Samsung and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment have teamed up to release a limited edition Batphone for your utility belt.

The Galaxy S7 Edge Injustice Edition is a sleek, black version of Samsung’s Android phone, with gold detailing and the very necessary bat symbol on the back. But that isn’t all you get. It comes with even more goodies for your batcave. It also comes with the Gear VR headset, Injustice game credits, and Oculus VR content vouchers.

If you are a Batman fan who has to have this in your life, the limited-edition phone will available early next month, but only in select territories like China, Singapore, South Korea, Latin America and Russia. More countries will follow, but I doubt we will see it in North America.

[via TheFireWire]

I admit I live in my own little world. That’s what happens when you write all the time — during the day, the technical stuff, and at night, the fiction and the blogs. I hate to admit that within this world, I have virtually no social life. While I hope that changes someday, and I meet a nice man and go out more, every so often, reality rears its ugly head and intrudes on my world. Then I reluctantly feel I have to speak out.

When I attended Ohio Wesleyan University, I learned about critical thinking, read great literature, studied history, and examined and discussed viewpoints that differed from my own. The discourse was civilized and uplifting and above all enlightening. I am a progressive type. Sure, I like progress. I yearn to see America moving forward, to provide safety nets for the poorest of us, stop the rapaciousness of big business and instill within them a conscience (after all, according to the Supreme Court, they’re people just like us.

I want a fair deal or, dare I say it, a “New Deal” for everyone.

Being progressive however does not mean that I cannot respect and understand true conservative values. I can even agree with some of them. More importantly, I usually respect the person, even when I disagree with their ideas. For the record, my mother was a Republican – as she said, a member of the party of Lincoln – and I respected her values.

I really wish that the constant scrutiny by the 24/7 media, the vilification of anyone running for office, and the chance of an error or a change of opinion being brought before the public eye and turned into a crucifixion, didn’t discourage intelligent, high-minded persons with integrity from seeking public service. Instead, we are stuck with the thick-skinned, the bent, and the buffoons seeking to fill the House, the Senate, and even the Presidency.

When I was four years old, my family went to the Ohio State Fair in Columbus (I think it was the Ohio State Fair, but since I was only four, I can’t swear that it was.) Anyway, I was riding on a carousel, when a boy pushed me off and into the gravel below. I was pretty badly hurt and my mother, always a quivering tower of Jell-O in these circumstances, fainted at the sight of my torn and bleeding knee. Luckily, my uncle got me to the nearby nurse’s station.

I was alone there, scared and crying, when a nice lady from the next bed came over and sat with me. It was none other than Dale Evans, rider of Buttermilk, Trigger‘s best friend and wife to Trigger’s rider, Roy Rogers. She comforted me and held my hand as the nurse picked out the gravel embedded in my right knee and dressed the wound. (To this day I still have a scar.) She talked and sang to me, and made a fuss over me, even though she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to rest in the nurse’s trailer before the evening show.

When my uncle finally came for me, she gave him special guest box seat tickets for the show, right in front. I was so excited when she and Roy Rogers rode Buttermilk and Trigger over to where I was sitting, and I got to stroke their manes. Even in the middle of the show, she told my now-recovered mother and the rest of the family how brave I was. I may have been limping but inside I was floating on air for the rest of the weekend.

Years later, I found out that we had vastly different viewpoints on politics and other issues. That didn’t matter. All I remembered was the nice lady who held my hand and sang to me. It was perhaps one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned. Separate the person from the politics and always appreciate the good in the person. Essentially, “do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.”

What I want is a political system where civil discourse and a mutual desire to improve and enhance the lives of all Americans are the ultimate goal. Not some throwback to the 1950’s or the antebellum South that excluded so many of us from achieving the American Dream. The South lost the Civil War, right?

We must stop equating the cult of personality with political acumen. Reality-TV does not qualify someone to be president. We must realize that even if someone is a celebrity, it’s not an automatic ticket to a political office, especially the highest in the land. I think what bothers me most is the name calling – by everyone – and the singular lack of workable, reasonable ideas to discuss over a wide range of important issues.

I have friends who thought that I was too harsh the last time I wrote about Donald Trump. I don’t think so. I stated then, and I reiterate, the man has no φιλότιμο, loosely “love of honor.” He seems to deliberately misinterpret the Golden Rule, and turns it on its head to proclaim “do it to others, before they do it to you”.

His wife Melania Trump once said, “he’s no Hitler” but as Adam Gopnik stated in the New Yorker magazine “…Hitler wasn’t Hitler–until he was.” Unlike Hitler, Donald Trump has no written agenda spelled out in the pages of a Mein Kampf.

Instead, he relies on Twitter and the ever-so-compliant media to get out his branded messages of hate, misogyny, racism, and discord. Even if he doesn’t “actually” buy into these sentiments, he caters to those that do. The adulation of the masses that exalt their hatreds and translates them into political agendas provides his vision of America.

It’s not an America we can afford.

Don’t like immigrants? Deport them, and build a wall.

Don’t like Muslims? Ban them.

Don’t like women being equal ? Humiliate and punish them.

Don’t like the Constitution? Ignore it.

Don’t like America, the land of the free, the home of the brave? Destroy it from within.

Whenever I hear him say a “businessman” should be president, I can’t help thinking of those other businessmen like Warren Harding or Herbert Hoover who led us into the Great Depression. Or our latest example of a businessman as president, George W. Bush whose lies and deceit still have us embroiled in never-ending wars and produced the Islamic State.

I don’t think any of those people were bad men. I’d probably enjoy a chat with them, maybe even a cookout, but it doesn’t mean that they were good presidents or had the best interests of the American people in mind.

I don’t know Donald Trump. He’s probably a good father and a nice grandfather with a bad comb-over and little hands. However, I really hated his TV shows. I thought he was arrogant, childish, and mean-spirited, and his attitude left me not liking his brand. What bothers me is that he is carrying this brand into the political arena and that same mean-spiritedness is translating itself to his followers.

Only they don’t think it’s reality TV, it’s simply reality that feeds into their own fears, prejudices, and senses of non-existent persecution. He caters to the lowest common denominator and instead of offering solid solutions, he only feeds fears, just like the demagogues of the past did.

His “brand” of republicanism is vastly different from the conservative values espoused by Dale Evans, my mother, or any of the fine upstanding conservatives whom I respected and admired even when we differed.

We need them back. We need politics to reach for the pinnacle of American society and elevate us into the country we strive to have as the envy of the world. Not some half-baked version of the worst among us.

Or one day, we’re going to turn around and realize we aren’t the United States of America anymore.

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Memorial Day weekend was replete with parades, American flags, and tributes to our war dead, but little reflection on war, particularly the tragic fact that the United States has fallen into the death trap that President Eisenhower warned us about: the military-industrial complex.

Instead of defending our nation as the Constitution stipulates, since the 9/11 attacks the U.S. military, CIA, and military contractors have been waging aggressive wars or interfering by proxy in other nations’ internal affairs.

Looking at our national budget, you can see the overwhelming power of the military. The $600 billion price tag, way over $1 billion a day, eats up 54 percent of all federal discretionary funds. That’s almost as much money as the military budgets of the rest of the world combined. It’s no wonder we don’t have money to address the crisis of global warming, build a decent public transportation system, institute a medicare-for-all health system, or provide the free college education that all our youth deserve.

There have been a few great wins for diplomacy under President Obama, particularly the historic Iran nuclear deal and opening to Cuba. For the most part, however, President Obama has carried over many of the Bush policies. Fifteen years after 9/11, the U.S. military is still in Afghanistan (the longest U.S. war in history) and the Taliban remain strong. U.S. soldiers are still in Iraq, where our invasion opened up the floodgates of sectarian violence that gave birth to the Islamic State. President Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has bombed seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Syria. He never made good on his promise to close the prison in Guantanamo. But he did do something unique: Instead of capturing prisoners and locking them up in Gitmo, he decided instead to kill “suspected terrorists” through drone warfare.

The barbarism of targeting “suspects” by remote control from the comfort of an air-conditioned base in the United States, including in countries where we are not at war, should enrage all Americans who cherish the rule of law. As Army Chaplain and Unitarian Minister Christopher John Anton said last month when he resigned from the military:

The executive branch continues to claim the right to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, for secret reasons, based on secret evidence, in a secret process, undertaken by unidentified officials. I refuse to support this policy of unaccountable killing.

A practical reason for focusing on nonviolent approaches is that violence rarely works. A Rand study examining the 40-year history of groups once designated as terrorists found that out of 268 groups, 43 percent came to their demise through their participation in the political process, 40 percent through effective policing, and only 7 percent through military force.

Add to this scientific evidence the wisdom of the Great Chinese philosopher Lao-Tseu, who said, “It is only when you see a mosquito landing on your testicles that you realize that there is always a way to solve problems without using violence.”

The problem is not just our frequent military interventions, but also the massive amounts of weapons sold by our merchants of war. The United States has become addicted to the lucrative business of war, with U.S. companies now accounting for 31 percent of global arms exports. While the manufacturing base of our nation has been gutted by globalization, the weapons industry is alive and thriving.

The country that is the number one purchaser of U.S. weapons is Saudi Arabia. U.S. arms dealers have sold the Saudis a record $97 billion in weapons in the past 10 years, most of those deals made under President Obama. These transactions represent the largest weapons deals in the history of humankind, and they have been made to one of the most repressive regimes in the world. How tragic that U.S. businesses are arming a country where nonviolent protesters are beheaded in public squares; where bloggers are sentenced to ten years in prison and 1000 lashes; where it is prohibited to set up a church or synagogue; where women are not even allowed to drive; and where the government exports the intolerant form of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, that forms the ideological basis of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

For the past year, the Saudis have been using U.S. weapons, including internationally banned cluster bombs, to decimate neighboring Yemen, creating a severe humanitarian crisis. (One bit of good news is that just this month, the campaign to stop the sale of cluster munitions to Saudi Arabia was successful, with the administration placing a hold on these sales.)

When Pope Francis spoke to Congress in September 2015, he said this:

Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.

Congress applauded enthusiastically but then turned around to “dial for dollars,” collecting millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the weapons makers and Pentagon contractors, and in turn awarding them billions in contracts, often no-bid contracts.

Just prior to the Memorial Day commemorations, President Obama made a trip to Vietnam. How did he seal our friendship with that nation, after slaughtering two million of their people? By agreeing to sell them weapons.

From there, Obama went on to Japan, thankfully visiting Hiroshima and giving a very moving speech. Left unsaid, however, was that the Obama administration has agreed to spend $1 trillion in the next 30 years to modernize U.S. nuclear weapons instead of eliminating them.

The anti-war movement was strong and vibrant under George Bush, inspiring hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets in protest. When Obama became president, the movement fell apart, mainly because many people thought Obama would end U.S. military adventurism.

There can be no illusion, however, about the next resident in the White House. Imagine the conflicts Donald Trump will stir up if he has the chance to insult all the world’s heads of state. And let’s remember that the Democratic presidential option, Hillary Clinton, supported the invasion of Iraq, the surge in Afghanistan, the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya, the drone wars, and the military coups in Egypt and Honduras. She even talked about obliterating Iran.

In the aftermath of the Memorial Day military parades and with a new administration looming on the horizon, a critical task for the coming year is to build a renewed, more vibrant, interracial, and multi-generational peace movement that will pressure the next administration to:

1. Stop obligating our young men and women to fight unwinnable wars of choice that only make more enemies, and fatten the bank accounts of the military contractors and weapons manufacturers.

2. Cut the military budget so that we have funds for the critical needs here at home, from universal healthcare to free college education to green jobs.

3. Take much better care of our veterans, including the homeless vets, jobless vets, and vets suffering from mental wounds that lead them to commit suicide at a heartbreaking rate of 22 a day.

As Vietnam vet Dan Shea said when he reflected on the names etched and not etched on the Vietnam Memorial, including the missing names of the Vietnamese and all the victims of Agent Orange, including his own son: “Why Vietnam? Why Afghanistan? Why Iraq? Why any war? … May the mighty roar of the victims of this violence silence the drums that beat for war.”

Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the human rights organization Global Exchange. She is the author of a forthcoming book about Saudi Arabia entitled “The Unjust Kingdom” and is the author of “Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.”

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By U.S. Library of Medicine

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, was the first woman ever awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Two years later, the medal was revoked. Congress changed the Medal of Honor criteria to include only “actual combat with the enemy,” and honors bestowed upon some 911 others who served the military in other capacities — such as medical care for the wounded — were voided.

Undaunted by this, as she was in the face of other slights in her life, Walker wore the medal every day till the day she died.

Not until 112 years later was the award to her restored — posthumously — by President Jimmy Carter.

Mary Walker was born in Oswego, in upstate New York, in 1832. She was the fifth daughter of Alvah and Vesta Whitcomb Walker, and all children were encouraged to pursue their education.

She and her sisters originally went into teaching after completing their studies, but Mary Walker enrolled in Syracuse Medical College at the end of her teenage years. She graduated with a doctor of medicine degree in 1855.

Dr. Walker went into private practice and married Albert Miller, also a physician, and the couple moved to Rome, New York. At the beginning of the Civil War, she volunteered for the Union Army as a civilian. The U.S. Army had no female surgeons, and at first she was only allowed to practice as anurse.

During this period, she served at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), July 21, 1861, and at the Patent Office Hospital in Washington,D.C. She worked as an unpaid field surgeon near the Union front lines, including at the Battle of Fredericksburg and in Chattanooga after the Battle of Chickamauga.

As a suffragette, she was happy to see women serving as soldiers and alerted the press to the case of Frances Hook in Ward 2 of the Chattanooga hospital, a woman who served in the Union forces disguised as a man.

In September 1862, Walker wrote to the War Department requesting employment as a spy, but her proposal was declined. In September 1863, she was employed as a “Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian)” by the Army of the Cumberland, becoming the first female surgeon employed by the U.S. Army. Walker was later appointed assistant surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry. During her service, she frequently crossed battle lines and treated civilians.

Outside a Union hospital, 1862

On April 10, 1864, she was captured by Confederate troops and arrested as a spy, just after she finished helping a Confederate doctor perform an amputation. She was sent to Castle Thunder in Richmond, Virginia, and remained there until August 12, 1864. She was released as part of a prisoner exchange.

While she was imprisoned, she refused to wear the clothes provided because, she was told, they were more “becoming of her sex”. Walker was exchanged for a Confederate surgeon from Tennessee on August 12, 1864.

She went on to serve during the Battle of Atlanta and later as supervisor of a female prison in Louisville, Kentucky, and as the head of an orphanage in Tennessee.

In 1865 Dr. Walker was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for her bravery during the Civil War. Her name was removed from the honor list of awardees in 1917, along with others, when the terms used to designate eligibility for the award were reappraised. She refused to surrender the medal.

Drexel University photo

In the mid-nineteenth century, as women were campaigning for a more public and professional role in society, clothing became a central issue in the struggle for women’s rights. Feminists argued that tight corsets and long heavy skirts were bad for women’s health and even designed to limit the possible activities that women could undertake.

By 1861, her typical ensemble of choice included trousers with suspenders under a knee-length dress with a tight waist and a full skirt. She was arrested for impersonating a man several times, although she argued that Congress had awarded her special permission to dress in this way.

Despite the controversy surrounding her career and her politics, Dr. Mary Walker was proud of her accomplishments as a physician and an advocate for women’s rights. As she concluded in 1897,

“I am the original new woman… Why, before Lucy Stone, Mrs. Bloomer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were — before they were, I am. In the early ’40’s, when they began their work in dress reform, I was already wearing pants … I have made it possible for the bicycle girl to wear the abbreviated skirt, and I have prepared the way for the girl in knickerbockers.”

(To read about the two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner who became a vocal war critic, click here).

Collect and save for future generations the special moments in your own life. Go to OurPaths.com.

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Just when I think I’ve seen it all, or at least a lot of it over 15 years of Pajama Program, a horrific memory engulfs me and shakes me all over again. That’s when I feel like all the steps we’re taking to move us forward are barely keeping us in place.

Gratefully we’re now able to start seeing our way clear to bringing our 5-yr plan to fruition. We’ve been updating this plan for several years now and it’s such an amazing feeling to start thinking seriously about more Reading Centers, vetting more Organizations for our list to receive new pajamas and books, and designing more Programs for all our children. This afternoon as I was outlining some of our next steps for our plan it hit me – a flashback of a visit to an emergency shelter in Colorado came crashing back to me. A staff member at the shelter was holding a child who was smeared with blood on his face and his pants. He was crying uncontrollably. As I entered the shelter the woman holding the 2-yr old was clearly shaken and told me the police just brought him in – he was caught in the crossfire of his parents in a knife fight. A knife fight in which blood was splattered all over a 2 year old child – their child. I couldn’t believe it then and I still cannot believe it now. This memory came at me out of the blue as many of them do. Nothing triggered the flashback of this incident which happened more than ten years ago, but all of a sudden I remembered it like it was this morning.

We read about these abusive cases but we know there are thousands more of these incidents we never read about, moments like these that don’t make the news. Children are brought into shelters and Group Homes every day and every single one of them relies on the kindness of strangers. Some of the children are going through extreme trauma and even the most well-trained professionals can’t instantly soothe their fears or comfort them or promise them tomorrow will be better.

I hate these flashbacks. They make me cringe. Sadness turns into anger in my heart and I look for someone to blame. These children are victims, they did nothing to deserve what’s happened to them. In an instant they find themselves alone, abandoned and often harmed. For most of them the only good in their lives is the first person who takes them into their arms at the shelter or Group Home. The extraordinary individuals who do whatever they can in those initial moments to convince these children to stay in their arms, to not give up on all of us, to let us find a way to make things better for them, are their angels on earth. The rest of us make up the second tier support system, each of us with a small part to play in making tomorrow better for these children. For me, that awful memory is just that – a memory of something I saw, the result of an act of negligence and sometimes cruelty. But for these children the incident is a full-out nightmare. When these memories unexpectedly flood back to me I can’t stop them but I can use them. I can take the shock and anguish I remember feeling in those dreadful moments and channel that energy into relentless motivation to keep going, keep helping to make tomorrow better for these kids. Those angels are the first hope for these children and it’s up to the rest of us to take the next steps in keeping that hope alive.

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