stitches and wars
we had our first trip to the emergency room with musa a few nights ago! alhamdulillah he is fine now. but he tried to eat a piece of broken crockery (yes, i was stupid enough to leave it in a place where he could get at it) and had to get a couple of stitches in his lip. thank God it wasn't a swallowable piece. please make duaa for my baby!!!
i promised to write more about why we fight, which hubby and i watched a couple of nights ago. this is about american involvement in military actions pretty much from eisenhower on... one interesting tidbit is that it was eisenhower who created the term "military-industrial complex" in his farewell speech, only in his first draft he had called it the "military-industrial-congressional complex", but edited that out in order to avoid ruffling too many feathers. his speech was remarkably prescient - don't so many past presidents' words seem so these days? - and this film does a great job of contextualizing today's conflicts, with footage from eisenhower and interviews with his son and granddaughter, as well as interviews with everyone from richard perle and william kristol to pilots who flew in the march 19 2003 bombings of baghdad to a vietnam vet cop who lost his son in 9/11 and later became disillusioned by bush's lies... the film is paced by segmenting it with footage from and interviews about the invasion of iraq, but there's plenty of history in between. it also discusses the project for the new american century... basically you get the sense that our government has involved us in conflicts over the last 50 years for quite its own reasons, which generally center on establishing american dominance worldwide, and the people of this country have pretty much bought every lie and keep falling for it again and again... it sounds like such a conspiracy theory, but the proof is right in front of us, if we only open our eyes! why is it so hard for us as a nation to do so?
oh and another interesting bit... one of the interviewees posited another take on eisenhower's term - calling it the "military-industrial-congressional-think tank complex". well, maybe he didn't actually call it that, but he said that think tanks were sort of a fourth party to this complex that determines our military involvement. and this is a scary thought - that some or even much of our foreign policy decision-making is determined by private parties not at all accountable to voters. and then it seems like congress rolls over to whoever's decisions are influenced by them and voila - you have presidents declaring war instead of congress...
i remember in a media theory class i took back in, oh, must have been 2001 or 2, one issue we looked at was the effect of mass media - television in particular - on the way people think and receive and process information. i don't recall any specific theories, but one general idea i remember is that people get used to receiving quick information, simplified and reduced into bytes, and it basically comes and goes, in one ear and out the other so to speak... the speed and the instantaneous nature of information make it easy to forget and move on to the next byte, and people seem to lose a sense of history and context (hence when saddam invades kuwait it's easy to demonize him, and forget that just a few years earlier we were supporting him against the evil shi'a regime next door). and that's only a matter of a couple of years... not even the decades it took to forget vietnam.
actually i don't know if this is a theory we read or just a thought that i had had in the class :) but oh well!! still. this is just one of many reasons i feel like too much TV is a problem, especially TV news. if you stay away from it for a month or two, getting what you need from the internet, then watch an hour of CNN - guaranteed you'll be brimming with scorn :)
musa is fussy fussy so must go... but do rent this film. oh God he has pooped AGAIN!!! it's like every diaper change! it's like a newborn again! only it's stinky watery diarrhea instead of nice thick yellow breastmilk poop.
is it possible to have an intestinal virus or something that would not make him sick per se (no fever or vomiting or even crankiness) but would give him diarrhea? the doctor told me it was just because his congestion was causing him to turn away from solids and favor liquids (water and nursing) so the excess liquid intake was causing diarrhea. but i'm not so sure now...
i promised to write more about why we fight, which hubby and i watched a couple of nights ago. this is about american involvement in military actions pretty much from eisenhower on... one interesting tidbit is that it was eisenhower who created the term "military-industrial complex" in his farewell speech, only in his first draft he had called it the "military-industrial-congressional complex", but edited that out in order to avoid ruffling too many feathers. his speech was remarkably prescient - don't so many past presidents' words seem so these days? - and this film does a great job of contextualizing today's conflicts, with footage from eisenhower and interviews with his son and granddaughter, as well as interviews with everyone from richard perle and william kristol to pilots who flew in the march 19 2003 bombings of baghdad to a vietnam vet cop who lost his son in 9/11 and later became disillusioned by bush's lies... the film is paced by segmenting it with footage from and interviews about the invasion of iraq, but there's plenty of history in between. it also discusses the project for the new american century... basically you get the sense that our government has involved us in conflicts over the last 50 years for quite its own reasons, which generally center on establishing american dominance worldwide, and the people of this country have pretty much bought every lie and keep falling for it again and again... it sounds like such a conspiracy theory, but the proof is right in front of us, if we only open our eyes! why is it so hard for us as a nation to do so?
oh and another interesting bit... one of the interviewees posited another take on eisenhower's term - calling it the "military-industrial-congressional-think tank complex". well, maybe he didn't actually call it that, but he said that think tanks were sort of a fourth party to this complex that determines our military involvement. and this is a scary thought - that some or even much of our foreign policy decision-making is determined by private parties not at all accountable to voters. and then it seems like congress rolls over to whoever's decisions are influenced by them and voila - you have presidents declaring war instead of congress...
i remember in a media theory class i took back in, oh, must have been 2001 or 2, one issue we looked at was the effect of mass media - television in particular - on the way people think and receive and process information. i don't recall any specific theories, but one general idea i remember is that people get used to receiving quick information, simplified and reduced into bytes, and it basically comes and goes, in one ear and out the other so to speak... the speed and the instantaneous nature of information make it easy to forget and move on to the next byte, and people seem to lose a sense of history and context (hence when saddam invades kuwait it's easy to demonize him, and forget that just a few years earlier we were supporting him against the evil shi'a regime next door). and that's only a matter of a couple of years... not even the decades it took to forget vietnam.
actually i don't know if this is a theory we read or just a thought that i had had in the class :) but oh well!! still. this is just one of many reasons i feel like too much TV is a problem, especially TV news. if you stay away from it for a month or two, getting what you need from the internet, then watch an hour of CNN - guaranteed you'll be brimming with scorn :)
musa is fussy fussy so must go... but do rent this film. oh God he has pooped AGAIN!!! it's like every diaper change! it's like a newborn again! only it's stinky watery diarrhea instead of nice thick yellow breastmilk poop.
is it possible to have an intestinal virus or something that would not make him sick per se (no fever or vomiting or even crankiness) but would give him diarrhea? the doctor told me it was just because his congestion was causing him to turn away from solids and favor liquids (water and nursing) so the excess liquid intake was causing diarrhea. but i'm not so sure now...
posted by Ayesha | 2:22 PM
1 Comments:
Sinan and Sayf have a bit of the cold as well. I was up with Manal until 3am this morning helping her. It gave me an excuse to take a four day weekend! LOL!
Insha'Allah, they all feel better again soon.
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