If this reported use of chemical weapons proves to be true, given stated commitments, President Obama may be ordering American forces into another war in the Middle East.

Another day, another apparent suicide in Afghanistan. This time a Commander with the Navy SEALs – one of America’s toughest, most highly trained, and rigorously psychologically screened special operations forces.

…Based on the right’s passionate and indignant opposition to any and all policies that would curtail them.

Michael Hayden, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director under President George W. Bush, delivered a speech yesterday where he outlined the ways that President Barack Obama has managed a “practical consensus,” which has fostered “powerful continuity between two vastly different presidents”—himself and his predecessor, Bush.

The Pentagon has a well-documented history of seeking to influence entertainment that Hollywood produces so that negative portrayals of the United State military are not produced, but the NBC show “Stars Earn Stripes” takes the propagandistic efforts of the military-entertainment industrial complex to the next level.

One of the most inspiring events thus far at the Veterans For Peace National Convention underway in Miami was a presentation on Thursday by several veterans who have refused to participate in war. Typically, they have done this at the risk of significant time in prison, or worse. In most cases these resisters avoided doing any time. Even when they did go behind bars, they did so with a feeling of liberation.

On September 17, 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement first encamped in New York City’s Zucotti Park, soon renamed Liberty Square. Within weeks, Occupy groups were spreading like wildfire throughout the United States so that, even today after the breakup of the encampments, almost every major city in the United States has an active Occupy cell. In those first months, thousands took to the streets and made groundbreaking use of social media to orchestrate major actions nationwide; the United States became the latest country to develop a major people’s movement since the wave of protest began in the Middle East earlier that year. The Occupy name, and the ideas behind it, quickly became international.

Very few people complained about the merger of government and industry except President Eisenhower who used the euphemistic term Military Industrial Complex. Actually a form of codependency, where the US needed this arrangement just as much as industry did.

Drone warfare, as global activist Medea Benjamin persuasively explains in her new book on the subject, is a quantum leap in military affairs. It has reshaped the day-to-day waging of war in ways more profound even than the last great technological leap in warfighting, nuclear weapons. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles has transformed not only the techniques of war but also the ethical, political, and psychological context of war. And it has done so largely by stealth. Drones have snuck up on us, and we’ve barely had a chance to discuss their implications.

Today is Memorial Day, the last day of the three-day weekend. Veterans and community groups will remember those who died in battle and, as they have done for more than a century, will place small flags on graves.

But, for most of America, Memorial Day is a three-day picnic-filled weekend that heralds the start of Summer, just as Labor Day has become a three-day picnic-filled weekend that laments the end of Summer.