The American Spectator

New York Times Magazine

In the Letters section of a famous old organ of contemporary belles-lettres a potential homicidal maniac manifests the first stirrings of what could be real trouble:

I lived in the Fairbanks, Alaska area for almost 14 years and spent a great deal of time in the bush. I appreciated the silence there, psychologically depended on it. I spent many hours just sitting in places where quiet filled my ears, but there were also many times that the sounds of nature were almost deafening (the mosquitoes!). I always found that nature’s “silence,” that is, what remains when the din of human presence is subtracted, far superior as an affirmation of being. Only there can I really become aware of the effect of my presence. Here in the New York-Boston corridor, noise is everywhere, almost impossible to bear. I can’t separate my presence from the noise. I miss the silence and my absence within it.

Patrick Atwood
Warwick, R.I.

(April 1, 2012)

The Nation

The Afghan war, wherein American soldiers are murdered by their Afghan allies in their offices and on the field of combat, as seen through the bloodshot eyes of a typical Nation editorialist:

The murder in Panjwai of sixteen civilians, including nine children, by an American soldier on March 11 puts an exclamation point on ten and a half years of failed war in Afghanistan.

Following repeated US bombings of wedding parties, countless dead civilians as a result of night raids and drone strikes, atrocities by the notorious “kill team” in 2010 and, in 2012, the digitally recorded image of US troops urinating on dead Afghans and the burning of Korans, the United States is far from success in its longest-running imperial misadventure.…

Whatever trust there was between US troops and the people they were protecting and training has long since been broken, and there is nothing for the United States to do now but leave in the most responsible way it can.

(April 2, 2012)

HuffingtonPost.com

Dithyrambic utterances from one Gavriel Brown, trapped in his hallucinations about Occupy Faith: