News bits: Ohio Abortion rights win; Kentucky and Virginia

The Hill reports:

Ohio passes Issue 1 ballot measure enshrining abortion protections

That's a good thing. Very good. This brings the clash between God and secular law into sharper focus. The Christian nationalists are not going to give up in Ohio or anywhere else.

Also, voters made marijuana legal in Ohio.

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The Hill writes:

In Kentucky, [Democrat] Beshear won his reelection bid after campaigning on expanding abortion access. Beshear’s campaign released an ad showing a prosecutor criticizing the lack of exceptions for rape and incest under Kentucky’s ban on the procedure. His GOP opponent, Attorney General Daniel Cameron, said during the campaign that he would approve legislation that would include rape and incest as exceptions to the ban, but later appeared to tack to the right on the issue.

And in Virginia, Democrats maintained their majority in the state Senate and flipped the House of Delegates by largely campaigning in competitive districts on the threat of an abortion ban.

Thoughts about honesty and trust: The Talib censure

An example of why honesty and trust are 

critically important for a democracy

The American mainstream media is gushing with dozens of reports that the House voted 234 to 188 to censure Michigan representative Rashida Talib. 22 Dems joined all but 4 Repubs in whacking her. The reports all say that she was censored for repeatedly saying in public at a political rally "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" According to Talib the slogan was "an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate." According to the Antidefamation League, that slogan is antisemitic and a call for the destruction of Israel. 

One of her defenders at least implicitly believes the slogan was antisemitic and/or a call for the destruction of Israel. Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland defended Talib's right to free speech saying the vote is anti-free-speech, but speech that some people hate (because it calls for violence against Israel). He framed the censure as coming from people who "want to impose a new political straitjacket of cancel culture" on the country.

Of the several reports on the censure I've read, none even consider Talib's honesty -- that is simply not mentioned. The MSM tends to see it the way the antidefamation league sees it, at least implicitly calling Talib a liar. ABC News captures the unspoken Talib is a liar allegation succinctly: This was the second time Tlaib faced a censure resolution over her criticism of Israel.

Part of Talib's post on X

explaining and defending her comments

Al Jazeera writes about the origin and meaning of the slogan from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. As is usual with just about everything related to the endless horror and propaganda lollapalooza (something that is extraordinarily impressive; an outstanding example) called Israel-Palestine, it's complicated:

To the crowds waving Palestinian flags, the chant reverberating across the globe expresses the desire for freedom from oppression across the historical land of Palestine. But for Israel and its backers, who label the phrase as pro-Hamas, it is a veiled call to violence that bears an anti-Semitic charge.

The United Kingdom’s Labor Party on Monday suspended Member of Parliament Andy McDonald for using the phrase “between the river and the sea” in a speech at a pro-Palestinian rally. (the same thing that got Talib censured)

The debate over partition predates the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. A plan put forward a year earlier by the United Nations to divide the territory into a Jewish state – occupying 62 percent of the former British mandate – and a separate Palestinian state was rejected by Arab leaders at the time. [See, I told 'ya that even the Arabs don't want or like the Palestinians -- everyone hates 'em]

More than 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in what became known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”. [Note: This bit of history seems to be accurate to me, but it is bitterly contested and rejected as a lie by many or most pro-Israel partisans. This is why I keep pointing to the census data from 1947 and 1948 -- something happened in those two years and it was not trivial:

]

To Palestinian and Israeli observers alike, different interpretations over the meaning of the slogan hang on the term “free”.

Nimer Sultany, a lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, said the adjective expresses “the need for equality for all inhabitants of historic Palestine”.

“Those who support apartheid and Jewish supremacy will find the egalitarian chant objectionable,” Sultany, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, told Al Jazeera.

“It’s important to remember this chant is in English and it doesn’t rhyme in Arabic, it is used in demonstrations in Western countries,” he said. “The controversy has been fabricated to prevent solidarity in the West with the Palestinians.”

Pro-Israel observers, however, argue the slogan has a chilling effect. “To Jewish Israelis what this phrase says is that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, there will be one entity, it will be called Palestine – there will be no Jewish state – and the status of Jews in whatever entity arises will be very unclear,” Yehudah Mirsky, a Jerusalem-based rabbi and professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University.

“It sounds much more like a threat than a promise of liberation. It doesn’t betoken a future in which Jews can have full lives and be themselves,” he said, adding that the slogan made it more difficult for left-wing Israelis to advocate for dialogue.

Mirsky argued that those who chant the slogan are “supporters of Hamas”, while Sultany claimed that pro-Palestinian protesters should not be equated to supporters of the armed group, who were the exception at the thousands-strong protests.

Israel’s use of ‘from the river to the sea’

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, which describes itself as conservative and nationalist, has been a staunch promoter of the concept of “Eretz Israel”, or the Bible-given right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the party’s original party manifesto in 1977 stated that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. It also argued that the establishment of a Palestinian state “jeopardises the security of the Jewish population” and “endangers the existence of the state of Israel”.

Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, has been among the promoters of international recognition of the Jewish historic claim to lands from the river to the sea.

So with that little bit of context, did Talib utter an antisemitic call for the destruction of Israel? She says no, her critics say yes. Is Talib a liar? Or, are her critics arrogant jackasses who believe what they want to believe, despite the inconvenient underlying reality that she may be telling the truth about what she actually meant by what she said? Are her critics just unhinged crackpots? Are they bigots, or even worse, racists? Can they read Talib's mind, or do they just not care what her intent was and look only at the overt behavior? 

My guess is that some of all of that is in play to varying degrees among varying people. Maybe she is telling the truth about what the slogan means to her. 

For me, the analysis comes down to how honest Talib has shown herself to be. What is her public track record for honesty and dishonesty? If she has a good track record of honesty, I'd give her the benefit of the doubt. Or, is that just Germaine engaging in nutty self-delusion?

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For the wonks

One can and arguably should analyze this on an even deeper level, or two. 

The quoted Al Jazeera content includes this statement: “The controversy has been fabricated to prevent solidarity in the West with the Palestinians.”

Who fabricated the controversy? Israel, arguably with the complicity of the US and its MSM.

My understanding of Israeli propaganda and deceit tactics, which are second to none in the world, is that Israel is adept and aggressive at co-opting inconvenient narratives about the history and aspirations of the Palestinian people and history at least since the 1940s. The Israelis are expert at taking an innocent, aspirational slogan like what is at issue here and twisting it into vicious hate speech. That could very well be the situation here. Just as I look to Talib's track record of honesty, I also look to Israel's track record for the same thing. Israel is and has been a chronic liar. It gets no credibility from me. I have to rely on facts that appear to be real and not spun, e.g., the population data for Palestine, especially from 1947 to 1948.

That's an another level of analysis for consideration.

The same analysis about the Israel-Palestine horror can be applied to the (i) US government, (ii) the American mainstream media, and (iii) people or special interests with skin in the game such as an ideology, set of dogmas or financial interest. For example, both the Dem and Repub parties are suspect because of the corrupting power of Jewish money in politics. Much or most of the Christian nationalist movement has aligned with Israel and it wants to foment a final Armageddon war so the rapture can come and all the good Christians can go to heaven and the rest of us, satisfyingly to the Christians, burn forever in screaming agony in a lake of eternal fire.

An anecdote: I recall watching an unscripted and deeply revealing moment on a C-Span TV broadcast call-in segment years ago. Brian Lamb was the host and moderator, while the guest answering caller questions was a journalist who was clearly advocating for Israel and denigrating the Palestinians and their cause. On C-Span TV, the calls and questions from callers are pre-screened to limit cranks and crackpots from hijacking the program. One caller diverted from his stated and approved question and instead asked the journalist if he was Jewish. The look of horror and shock on the faces of both Lamb and the journalist was precious and telling. They hated that question.

After recovering his composure, Lamb jumped in and scolded the caller for asking such an inappropriate and insulting question. I thought the question was on point, reasonable and refreshing. Lamb refused to let the journalist answer the question. He just cut the caller off and went on to the next call. 

The next caller did the same thing and asked the same question, saying that it was proper to know if a journalist might have some reason for bias. The look on the faces of Lamb and the journalist was beyond precious. They looked like they were in a small room where someone had just unleashed a gigantic, noisy fart of unprecedented intensity and sulfuric fragrance. Lamb was beside himself with shock and anger. He just cut the mofo caller off. 

That anecdote is how I see the US MSM dealing with the endless Israel-Palestine horror. Lamb, who was the supreme Poobah and epitome of C-Span, twice refused to even answer a reasonable, on-point question. It was beneath his majestic dignity and the unquestionable dignity of the infallible journalist. I was significantly less trusting of the MSM after that, and still am today. 

In my opinion, honesty and trust are necessary for a viable democracy. I see this as an example of why that is the case.

News bits: Israel's defense - waddabout US war casualties?; Fraud case update; Etc.

Israel points to civilian casualties in American wars in defense of the civilian casualties it is piling up. The NYT writes: 

Under Scrutiny Over Gaza, Israel Points to Civilian Toll of U.S. Wars

Israeli officials say it is impossible to defeat Hamas without killing innocents, a lesson they argue Americans and their allies should understand

Falluja. Mosul. Copenhagen. Hiroshima.

Facing global criticism over a bloody military campaign in Gaza that has killed thousands of civilians, Israeli officials have turned to history in their defense. And the names of several infamous sites of death and destruction have been on their lips. 

In public statements and private diplomatic conversations, the officials have cited past Western military actions in urban areas dating from World War II to the post-9/11 wars against terrorism.  

“In 1944, the Royal Air Force bombed the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen — a perfectly legitimate target,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in an address to his nation on Oct. 30. “But the British pilots missed and instead of the Gestapo headquarters, they hit a children’s hospital nearby.

So, what about civilian casualties in US wars? Does that justify what Israel does now? Wabbadout all the civilians the US killed in Vietnam? Wikipedia writes:

Estimates for the number of North Vietnamese civilian deaths resulting from US bombing range from 30,000–65,000. Higher estimates place the number of civilian deaths caused by American bombing of North Vietnam in Operation Rolling Thunder at 182,000. American bombing in Cambodia is estimated to have killed between 30,000 and 150,000 civilians and combatants.

That is a lot of civilian deaths.

To me, the “defense” of civilian deaths because other nations do it reflects, among other things, (i) the mostly irrelevant status of morality in politics and war, and (ii) the lasting damage that unwarranted wars leave in their wake. War is extremely bad on multiple levels.

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DJT was forced to testify yesterday in his civil fraud case in New York. This case could bankrupt him, if he doesn’t have the cash to pay the penalty.  And, it could put him completely out of business in New York state. This fraud lawsuit is really important. DJT knows that. He is fighting poison tooth and claw to avoid what is starting to look (more likely than not) like a major court loss for him. Of course, he will appeal a loss. But for now, he’s in deep trouble. The NYT reported several instances of bad news for DJT yesterday. 

First, when he started blithering as usual, the judge kept telling DJT to shut up and answer the question. That’s refreshing. For example, as he was musing (trying to divert attention) about Scotland’s oil reserves, judge Engoron cut him off: “Irrelevant, irrelevant. Answer the question.” Scotland’s oil reserves?? Bloviation to avoid answering inconvenient questions is a hallmark of DJT's “style”, if that is what one can call the grifter’s tactic. 

Second, due to his lack of self-control, DJT in autoblither mode could not help himself. He admitted that he was involved in approving some financial statements submitted to banks in 2021 after he was out of office. His lawyers hoped he wouldn’t say something like that because the judge has already held that those statements were fraudulent. Maybe DJT didn’t realize it, but he admitted in open court under oath to committing fraud. In his defense, DJT claimed he was busy “keeping our country safe” as president. The prosecuting attorney cut that BS off real quick: “Just to clarify the record, you weren’t president in 2021, correct?” DJT reluctantly acknowledged that he was not.

Third, and this one is a total hoot, DJT’s lawyers were flummoxed because they could not help or manage DJT. He’s always in autoblither mode. One of his lawyers, Alina Habba, complained to the press “the only thing they want are facts that are bad for Trump.” Well duh, that’s what lawsuits are for. Yeah, they want bad facts. That’s their freaking job. The plaintiff or prosecution tries to prove its case using facts that are bad for the accused. The defense, like Ms. Habba Dabba Doo, is supposed to pokes holes in the attacks. My God, DJT has a goof-ball attorney.

At this point, a plea of insanity might be DJT’s best defense. 

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The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope is starting to send back images of deep space. While the JWST looks in great detail at small areas of space, Euclid is designed to look at big areas of space in great, but different kinds of detail.

The image above shows one thousand galaxies in the Perseus Cluster, with more than 100,000 additional galaxies visible farther away. The small dots of light are galaxies that can contain up to hundreds of billions of stars each.

Globular cluster NGC 6397

Final checks and calibrations of Euclid’s instruments are now in progress. One instrument is a 600-megapixel camera for imaging visible light and a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer that will record the light from galaxies in non-visible wavelengths. The data will be used to get the distance of galaxies from Earth. The first formal scientific observations are scheduled to start in early 2024. Scientists plan to release Euclid’s first maps of the universe in 2025. That initial map of the universe will include more area than in all of the data collected so far by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Euclid will map the universe over the next six years. 

Between JWST and Euclid, human knowledge will soon come to have a much better grasp of the structure of our little universe. This is exciting, to say the least. Images not behind a paywall are at the ESA's website. Shockingly beautiful deep space images are coming out to the public. 

The ESA comments:

“Dark matter pulls galaxies together and causes them to spin more rapidly than visible matter alone can account for; dark energy is driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Euclid will for the first-time allow cosmologists to study these competing dark mysteries together,” explains ESA Director of Science, Professor Carole Mundell. “Euclid will make a leap in our understanding of the cosmos as a whole, and these exquisite Euclid images show that the mission is ready to help answer one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics.”

“We have never seen astronomical images like this before, containing so much detail. They are even more beautiful and sharp than we could have hoped for, showing us many previously unseen features in well-known areas of the nearby Universe. Now we are ready to observe billions of galaxies, and study their evolution over cosmic time,” says René Laureijs, ESA’s Euclid Project Scientist.

An election day...

It’s November 7^th today, election day in the U.S.  If you are in the U.S.:

• Will you be voting (if so, in person, mail-in, early voted)?
• What state are you in?
• What issues are on your ballot?
• And if I may, how will you be voting?
• Other thoughts

A strong, accurate opinion about the failing mainstream media

It is comforting to see a slow increase in heads with hair on fire, like mine has been for the last ~6-7 years. This hair on fire opinion comes from Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch:

With the world on fire, a cowardly, timid news media is a threat to U.S. democracy

News organizations are using cowardly words to describe killing abroad, fascism at home — downplaying the danger to democracy

There was a shocking and incredibly important story on the front page of the New York Times last week. As reported by an A-team of journalists including two Pulitzer Prize winners, the Times warned its readers that Donald Trump — if returned to the White House in 2025 — is grooming a new team of extremist government lawyers who would be more loyal to their Dear Leader than to the rule of law, and could help Trump install a brand of American fascism.

You say you didn’t hear anything about this? That’s not surprising. The editors at the Times made sure to present this major report in the blandest, most inoffensive way possible — staying true to the mantra in the nation’s most influential newsroom that the 2024 election shouldn’t be covered any differently, even when U.S. democracy is on the line.

“Trump Allies Want a New Style of Lawyer if He Returns to Power,” was the original online headline for the piece, as if maybe they were talking about colorful drawling Southerners with seersucker suits, rather than rabid-dog ideologues who would do the dirty work of overturning an election that career government attorneys refused to do before Jan. 6, 2021.

That “new style of lawyer” — pro-Trump, “America First” zealots who think the ultraconversative lawyers bred in the Federalist Society are too soft to carry out their leader’s autocratic call for a “final battle” against traditional democratic governance that he calls “the deep state” — was described, numbingly, by the Times as “more aggressive legal gatekeepers.” Their dangerous antidemocratic mission was blandly outlined as a plan to “take control of the government in a way unseen in presidential history.”

I’m picking on this one article in the Times, and its timid, inoffensive packaging, not because it is unique, but because it is far too typical right now. In one of the most perilous moments of crisis the world has seen in 75 years, and with the basic notions of free speech under assault, most newsrooms aren’t fighting back. They are, instead, pulling their punches in a defensive, “rope-a-dope” crouch, and thus failing to truly inform — when democracy itself is at risk.

This NYT story uses overly tidy language. I’ll translate.

“A new style of lawyer” = fascist lawyers

“Aggressive legal gatekeepers” = Roy Cohn-style crooked lawyers

“take control of the government in a way unseen in presidential history” = overthrow democracy pic.twitter.com/kntes5ikOW— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) November 1, 2023

Right now, Ground Zero is the horrific conflict in the Middle East, where bombing by Israel in response to a violent Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7 is killing thousands of children, yet too many newsrooms adopt a passive voice to describe the bloodshed or who is to blame for attacks. It can be hard at times to distinguish what is real — “Explosion at Gaza refugee camp leaves massive crater,” was the BBC headline for an Israeli bombing that killed or wounded scores of civilians — and what is satire. The Onion’s take — “The Onion Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble That Way” — felt more honest and heartful than many serious-news headlines.

What worries me even more, frankly, is how the push not to offend with Middle East news coverage is emblematic of a bigger trend of newsroom timidity and even rank cowardice that also permeates domestic news coverage, at a moment when right-wing extremists are controlling the U.S. House and are on track to regain the White House and full governmental control in a chaotic election year.

The mainstream, elite media seems especially flummoxed by the new Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson was an obscure back-bencher on Capitol Hill and remains a man of mystery with no apparent bank account or tangible assets. But the extremism of his Christian nationalist views — more radical than anything seen in American history — are no secret. Johnson believes that our country should be ruled by his own brand of religious fundamentalism which posits that the Earth is only 6,000 years old but inspires hateful policies toward the LGBTQ community and fringe opposition to women’s abortion rights.

That danger isn’t conveyed in business-as-usual fluff pieces like the Washington Post’s “House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana hometown guided by faith and family” article in which neighbors hailed the softer side of a man who was at the center of schemes to block the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Another Post piece questioned whether Democrats could truly make a political boogeyman out of Johnson given “his low profile and quiet tone” — as if Christo-fascism isn’t so bad when delivered in a gentle drawl, from behind oversized dad glasses.

This deference to authority is already bleeding into serious policy coverage. Far too many news outlets uncritically repeated Johnson’s first major pronouncement — that $14 billion for Israel could be paid for by cutting the number of IRS agents (who audit the GOP’s millionaire donors), when even a third-grade math student would know that reducing revenue agents would cost the government money. Getting it right isn’t only important because Johnson is now the most powerful Republican in Washington, but also because he’s a kind of a John-the-Baptist prophecy of an even more dangerous Trump 47 in 14-plus months.

It’s weird because Trump is arguably the most media-covered figure in American history — even now, there’s an entire TV network built around covering his legal woes, in MSNBC — and yet there’s not nearly enough coverage of the stakes of his proposed second term. This includes an assault on democratic institutions and agencies in the guise of “dismantling the deep state,” a focus on political revenge that would include pardoning Jan. 6 insurrectionists while his Justice Department pursued political rivals, and brutal policies toward the marginalized such as refugees or the urban homeless.

The world is staring into an abyss, much as it did in the 1930s. Now, as then, the global rise of right-wing authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel is linked to aggressive militarism that targets civilians and risks a world war. Here at home, the growing sense of chaos abroad and a broken government on Capitol Hill, with Republican Johnson poised to make matters worse, has imperiled the flawed small-d democratic government of President Joe Biden and has primed too many voters to fall into the waiting arms of a wannabe dictator.

Yet the news rarely reflects the reality, or this risk. Why is that?

It’s not that there aren’t a lot of remarkable individual journalists out there doing some remarkable and at times courageous work, exposing the rot in Capitol Hill or risking their lives to bring news from Israel and Gaza, where at least 36 reporters or photojournalists have paid with their lives. But the institutional caution that frames their work has been getting a lot worse. Some of it is probably business-driven — to avoid offending readers who might cancel a subscription. A lot of it seems a desire in newsrooms, after Trump’s whirlwind, lie-filled first term, to return to normalcy and the kind of balance that treats the two parties equally, which means ignoring that one has become an authoritarian cult.  

We are at war, dammit, literally and figuratively, and we can’t win this fight by hiding in the corner and absorbing the punches. There is a higher truth that doesn’t repeat lies but calls them out, doesn’t hide from accountability when there is blame to be assigned, and uses the keyboard as a weapon to fight for democracy instead of dispassionately reporting, evenhandedly, on its slow death. And if we don’t start fighting for that truth right away, the BBC might eventually be reporting on “the crater” where a free press used to stand.

Ah, that feels good. 👍 Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The US military and war: Arrogant, callous and expensive

A NYT article discusses injury to US Army and Marine troops who suffer from what appears to be serious, irreparable brain injuries from shock waves caused by firing thousands of heavy artillery rounds at the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in 2016:

To defeat ISIS, the United States relied on artillery crews firing more intensively than any had in generations.

The big howitzers used in the height of the offensive against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, from 2016 to 2017, could hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and gun crews fired them almost nonstop, day and night for weeks on end.

The strategy worked as intended, and the Islamic State was soon smashed to near oblivion. But keeping the number of U.S. troops involved to a minimum meant that each gun crew had to fire thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds than any American gun crew had fired at least since the Vietnam War. Some troops fired more than 10,000 rounds in just a few months.

Many members of the gun crews developed devastating and puzzling symptoms.

Members of the gun crews started to have memory and balance problems, nausea, irritability and crushing fatigue. Those symptoms were signs of concussion, but also what anyone might feel after working 20-hour days in the desert and sleeping in foxholes. Crews trained to endure didn’t complain.

The crews were screened for signs of brain injuries after deployment, but those screenings were designed to spot the effects of much larger explosions from enemy attacks — not repeated exposure to blast waves from routine firing of weapons. Few of the troops screened positive.

Crew members who were told they were healthy struggled to understand why they were stalked by panic and sleeplessness. Some thought they were going insane.

When the troops started to act strangely, they were often treated ineffectively or punished.

Nothing in the gun crew members’ records suggested they had ever been exposed to damaging blasts in combat, so when some sought medical help from the military, doctors repeatedly failed to consider the possibility of a brain injury.

When job performance deteriorated or behavior turned erratic, many crew members were seen not as wounded, but as problems. They were passed over for promotion or punished for misconduct. Some were forced out of the service with punitive discharges and cut off from veterans’ health care.

Their problems have spilled over into civilian life, wrecking marriages and making it hard to hold down jobs. Some are now homeless. A striking number have died by suicide. Many still have no idea that their problems may stem from blast exposure.

Studies are starting to reveal the risk posed by blast exposure, but progress is slow.

Research suggests that repeated exposure to the blast waves generated by firing heavy weapons like cannons, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets and even large-caliber machine guns may cause irreparable microscopic damage to the brain. Vast numbers of military veterans may have been affected.

But the damage is nearly impossible to document, because no brain scan or blood test now in use can detect those minute injuries in a living brain. Making diagnosis more complicated, many of the symptoms can be identical to those of P.T.S.D.

As things now stand, the microscopic damage from blast exposure can only be definitively documented by examining thin slices of brain tissue under a microscope once someone has died. Tissue samples taken from hundreds of deceased veterans who were exposed to blasts during their military careers show a unique and consistent pattern of microscopic scarring.

The Army and the Marine Corps both say that they now have programs to track and limit daily exposure for troops. But Marines in the field say they have not seen the new safety programs, and troops throughout the military are still training with weapons that the Defense Department is concerned may pose a risk.

The costs of modern American wars last a lifetime. American war is shockingly expensive. Costs include human, economic and social damage to the economy, society and soldiers and their families for their entire lives. I suspect it also causes some damage to democracy.

An analysis of Iraq war cost:

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.** But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

** We were lied to.

Brown University data

This also means that the US is still incurring costs from the catastrophic Vietnam war. A 2022 analysis asserts that (1) based on the current dollar value, the Vietnam War cost the equivalent of about $1 trillion, and (2) the US pays $22 billion per year in war compensations to Vietnam veterans and their families.