Looks like the « ‘how I love the smell of Napalm in the morning’ boys are firmly in control » of the Imperial military:

‘The US has already admitted that it used napalm during the siege of Baghdad. The truth was reluctantly confirmed by the Pentagon after news reports corroborated the evidence. The military has tried to conceal the truth by saying that there is a distinction between its new weapon and “traditional napalm”. The “improved” product carries the Pentagon moniker “Mark 77 firebombs” and uses jet fuel to “decrease environmental damage”. The fact that military planner’s even considered “environmental damage” while developing the tools for incinerating human beings, gives us some insight into the deep vein of cynicism that permeates their ranks. …

‘The charges of “war crimes” and use of banned weapons comes on the heels of a confidential report just released by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The report confirms that the US military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion “tantamount to torture” on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The report concludes that the military has developed a system to break the will of prisoners through “humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions….The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.” (New York Times)’

Be sure and « check out the latest from Fallujah at the ‘Fallujah in Pictures’ blog ». You can’t support the Imperial war effort and not look closely at these pictures, which graphically show the cost of war … to both sides.

An excellent commentary from a reader of the Los Angeles Times named G. Llloyd Helm appeared in today’s edition:

The other day I was in Barnes & Noble and an ugly fact came home to me. I can’t afford to buy books anymore. I used to pick up a book every week or two and was never without a paperback book stuck in my back pocket. Now buying a book is a major purchase.

Hard-bound books are averaging $25 apiece, and paperbacks are often more than $5 each. If you are making minimum wage, that boils down to four hours’ work for a hard-bound book. …

The National Endowment for the Arts released a study in July that found the reading of literature over the last 20 years had gone down like an express elevator; only 57% of Americans read any book at all last year. Part of the reason is that there are thousands of young people graduating from high school who can barely read anything more complicated than “Dick and Jane.”

But even those who can read aren’t doing so, and it should be obvious even to those dunderheads in publishing that the price of books has something to do with that. When a kid, especially one who doesn’t read well anyhow, can go to a movie or buy a computer game for less money than it costs to buy a paperback, which one is he or she going to choose?

I almost never buy books anymore unless I absolutely have to. I have more books sitting on my floor than I could possibly read anyway. And even if a lot of books I see in Borders look enticing, their prices are an instant disincentive (and I’m not singling Borders out). This was true even when I wasn’t a poverty-stricken grad student. Tonight in Borders I lingered over the following books, but I would never have bought them at their list prices:

• Augusten Burroughs: Magical Thinking: True Stories (St. Martin’s Press, $23.95)
• Geoffrey Stone: Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from The Sedition Act of 1798 to The War on Terrorism (W.W. Norton, $35.00)
• Ken Bloom and Frank Vlastnik: Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, $34.95)

One more reason for the preservation of libraries. And, paradoxically, one more reason for publishers to hate libraries.