I will be leaving to Spain (Morocco and Portugal as well) Monday until the end of July and will not be posting as much as normal. At least twice a week i will try and find a internet cafe and post some updates about my research in Almeria and non-school related topics. I hope everyone has a great summer and makes a difference in some form!!! PEACE AND LOVE and check for updates!!!
Ty
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Memorial Day: A Celebration of Militarism
by max bluntHow fitting and how vulgar that as Amerika celebrates the wars and war heroes of its past, the U.$. military is pursuing two open wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We should take this day of remembrance to renew our solidarity with the international proletariat, and to strengthen our resolve in opposition to the ongoing imperialist war against the oppressed nations.
Organizing from within imperialist borders, it is our responsibility to expose the undeclared wars that make Amerikan imperialism the number one threat to the survival of this planet and its people.
Because we work in the countries whose citizens live as parasites off the labor of the neo-colonies, we must also take care to expose the culture of militarism within the oppressor nations.
We may mourn the loss of all lives that have been taken in the service of perpetuating Amerika's and its imperialist allies' hegemony over the oppressed nations......LINK
A Katrina Health Care System By ATUL GAWANDE
This is my fourth week as a guest columnist. Let’s take a look at the health care news that’s transpired in that time.
First, DaimlerChrylser sold off 80 percent of its Chrysler division for three pebbles and a piece of string. O.K., the cash payment was actually $1.35 billion. But for an 82-year-old company that built more than two million cars and trucks last year, took in $47 billion in revenue, and owns 64 million square feet of factory real estate in North America alone, that’s almost nothing. Yet analysts say that it was a great deal for Daimler. Why? Because the buyer, Cerberus Capital Management, agreed to absorb Chrysler’s $18 billion in health and pension liability costs.
Stop and think about this for a minute. The deal meant that the costs of our job-based health insurance system — costs adding $1,500 to each car Chrysler builds here, but almost nothing to those built in Canada or Europe — have so broken the automaker’s ability to compete that giving it away became the smartest thing Daimler could do. Chrysler’s mistake was to hang around long enough to collect retirees and an older-than-average work force. As a result, it now has less market value than Men’s Wearhouse, Hasbro, the Cheesecake Factory, NutriSystem, Foot Locker and Pottery Barn. Oprah is worth more than Chrysler. This is not good.
Meanwhile, officials at West Jefferson Medical Center outside New Orleans reported that the number of indigent patients admitted there has tripled since Hurricane Katrina. The uninsured are now 30 percent of their emergency room patients. Officials in Houston hospitals are reporting similar numbers. Conditions seem worse rather than better. Katrina caused a vicious spiral. Large numbers of people lost their jobs and, with them, their health coverage. Charity Hospital, the one state-funded hospital in New Orleans, closed. The few open hospital emergency rooms in the area have had to handle the load, but it’s put the hospitals in financial crisis. Four hundred physicians filed a lawsuit against the state seeking payment for uncompensated care, and massive numbers of doctors and nurses have left the area.
In Washington, a conference held by the American College of Emergency Physicians revealed that New Orleans may have it worst, but emergency rooms everywhere are drowning in patients. Mandated to care for the uninsured, they are increasingly unprofitable. So although the influx of patients has grown, 500 emergency rooms have closed in the last decade. The result: 91 percent report overcrowding — meaning wait times for the acutely ill of more than an hour or waiting rooms filled more than six hours per day. Almost half report this occurring daily.
A few days later, the Commonwealth Fund released one of the most detailed studies ever done comparing care in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Britain. We’ve known for awhile that health care here is more expensive than anywhere and that our life expectancy is somehow shorter. But the particulars were the surprise.
On the good side, the study found that once we get into a doctor’s office, American patients are as likely as patients anywhere to get the right care, especially for prevention. Only Germans have a shorter wait for surgery when it’s needed. And 85 percent of Americans are happy with the care they get.
But we also proved to be the least likely to have a regular doctor — and starkly less likely to have had the same doctor for five years. We have the hardest time finding care on nights or weekends outside of an E.R. And we are the most likely (after Canadians) to wait six days or more for an appointment when we need medical attention. Half of Americans also reported forgoing medical care because of cost in the last two years, twice the proportion elsewhere.
None of this news, however, did more than lift a few eyebrows. So this is the picture of American health care you get after watching for a few weeks: it’s full of holes, it’s slowly bankrupting us and we’re kind of used to it.
That leaves two possibilities: (1) We’ve given up on the country; or (2) we’re just waiting for someone else to be in charge.
I’m pulling for No. 2.
U.S. accused of human rights violations
GENEVA -- A U.N. investigator accused the United States on Friday of human rights violations in its fight against terrorism, criticizing the use of military commissions to try civilians and interrogation practices.
Martin Scheinin, of Finland, also said several U.S. laws enacted since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks had undermined civil liberties, citing the Patriot Act, the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act....LINK
The Case for Gamesmanship
The Democrats' internecine squabbling over the war is a family argument about tactics, not a showdown over principle. The left should remember that.
By Jonathan AlterI've been reading a lot of commentary, and have written some of it myself, denouncing Democrats who failed to oppose to the death the supplemental spending bills allowing Chimpy the Prez to continue his war in Iraq. I've also grown increasingly uncomfortable with the hysterical, absolutist, and all-knowing--even though it's not really all that smart--hectoring.
So when Howie mentioned Jonathan Alter's contrary argument, I went ahead and read it.
Alter makes clear that he has lots of disagreements with aspects of the Democratic congressional leadership's handling of the issue but insists that doesn't change "the elemental fact" "that Democrats may have won the midterms but they lack the votes to end the war in Iraq." They "didn't have anywhere near the votes to override [Bush's] veto [of their bill with a timetable for withdrawal]. Bush and his war might be terribly unpopular, but under our system, he's still holding the high cards."
So why not keep passing bills and letting Chimpy veto them ("the 'Chinese water torture' option backed by John Edwards, among others")? Two reasons, says Alter....LINK
Friday, May 25, 2007
THE INTELLIGENCE THAT EVERYONE SAW? Did President Lie...Again?
by Steve Young.....the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East. In fact, the CIA did tell the president that "toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists."
And even with that information, this administration still failed to prepare for "a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists."...LINK
Environmentalists Classified as Terrorists, Get Stiff Sentences.
10 Militant Environmentalists Could Be Sentenced as Terrorists Without Having Killed a Soul\
By RUSSELL GOLDMANThe first two members of a radical environmental group who admitted to setting a series of fires aimed at saving animals, were sentenced Thursday to 12 to 16 years in federal prison.
In an unusual move, the judge agreed with a prosecutor's request to classify the crimes as acts of domestic terrorism, making them subject to harsher prison sentences.....LINK
America's Propaganda Model: Assembly Line Production for the Masses
by max bluntMaufacturing Indifference
Much of the media agenda is noisy and negative, stripped of all meaning:
Superficial, often celebrity-dominated with little in-depth explanatory or investigative journalism.
They would rather market American Idol as the American Ideology. To them, the only “hegemony” in Canada is its beer and hockey.
The people who run our media are, after all, in the end, promoting a culture of consumption, not of engaged citizenship.
They want eyeballs for advertisers, not activists to promote change.
The sound-bytes presented as substance are there for entertainment, not illumination. It’s heat, not light, all the way......LINK
US Commits 'Sociocide' in Iraq: Deliberate Murder of A Whole Society
by max bluntThis week the World Socialist Web Site ran a three-part article, The US war and occupation of Iraq—the murder of a society by Bill Van Auken.
The series, bringing together facts and statistics drawn from the international media and a variety of studies and surveys, painted a horrifying picture of Iraqi society after more than four years of US-led war and occupation, preceded by more than a decade of lethal sanctions.
“Taken together,” the article argued, “US operations in Iraq have amounted to sociocide - the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire society.”
Here are certain of the series’ key findings:
— The US occupation is responsible for the death, displacement or disappearance of between 4 and 5 million Iraqis.....LINK
Thursday, May 24, 2007
My letter to the recently elected Senator from Montana.
Dear Mr. Tester,
Geography Graduate Student at The University of Montana
"Our Voices Have Been Lost"
By Deanie Mills | bio
"What good does it do to speak out if nothing changes? Our voices have been lost."
Those words are made all the more wrenching by the fact that they were spoken in tears by retired officer Andrew Bacevich, Vietnam vet, graduate of West Point, freqent and outspoken critic of the Iraq War, on the death of his beloved son, Andrew, a 1st Lt. killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on Mother's Day.
The interview was done on NPR's "Morning Show" yesterday. (I had trouble downloading the audio and so am quoting from memory, but the words, "Our voices have been lost," were burned into my brain.)
I could identify quite powerfully with Mr. Bacevich, who now teaches at Boston University. For one thing, his family has a long and proud tradition of military service, as does mine. He is a combat vet who has spoken out against this war from the beginning, and while I'm not a vet, I'm in a family surrounded by them, and I, too, spoke out even when it caused problems within my own family--even my own marriage. And yet, his son went to that same war, as did mine.
I understood exactly what Mr. Bacevich meant when he mentioned that he never did "burden" his son with his views on the war while he was in uniform and especially while deployed, because "he had enough on his mind." I am quite sure that his son was just as aware as mine on how his dad felt, but they respected one another deeply, as do my son and I.
When these guys are deployed, they don't need to hear about how badly the war is going--they can see it up-close and personal. They don't want to hear how badly the administration is handling strategy and tactics--they deal with it every day. As my son said once from a quick sat-phone call home from the Anbar, "We're fighting an unconventional war with conventional tactics and it's not working."
When they call home, they're under unimaginable stress and are so exhausted they can hardly speak, frustrated and angry and depressed, and all they want to hear is how their old dog is doing, how the family is, whether the bluebonnets are yet in bloom.
It is a terrible, awful feeling to hate this war and to love our warriors who go fight it.
We are wracked each and every day by the same terrors and anxieties as those who support the war, but we can't comfort ourselves with the platitudes that our loved ones are fighting for our freedom, or "fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them over here"--because we just don't believe it.....LINK
There's Something Rotten in the State of America
by max blunt I think most of us have noticed it. There is a mortal rot in the country, made manifest by many little rots that are hard to integrate mentally yet are, I think, somehow related.
The change is grave, accelerating, probably irreversible, and fascinating. Things are not as they were.
The United States is the most hated country on the planet, followed by, to the extent that there is a distinction, Israel. So far as I know, there are no other contenders.
You can say “Who cares?” as many will say, or “Screw’em if they can’t take a joke,” or “I’d rather be feared than loved.” All very droll.
Still, it is an interesting datum. No country ever lives up to its own PR, but there was a time when America was widely admired. Now, almost universally, it is seen as a rogue state. And is.
This carries a price. The US consulate in Guadalajara is part fortress, part prison, with barriers and cameras and bars and rentacops, and they take away a woman’s lipstick if she is going to enter......LINK
A New Silent Majority
Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter’s remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn’t attack President Bush personally, but said that “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” which can’t really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.
In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken “an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president,” and portrayed Carter’s words — unfairly it seems — as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it “unprecedented.” Yet as an article in this newspaper on Tuesday pointed out, “presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones.”
The pattern is familiar. Polls show that most Americans want our government to stop its unilateral swaggering, and to try to solve our differences with other nations through diplomacy. In early April, for example, when the speaker of the House, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, visited Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad, a poll had 64 percent of Americans in favor of negotiations with the Syrians. Yet this didn’t stop an outpouring of media alarm.
A number of CNN broadcasts — including one showing Pelosi with a head scarf beside the title “Talking with Terrorists?” — failed even to mention that several Republican congressmen had met with Assad two days before Pelosi did. The conventional wisdom on the principal television talk shows was that Pelosi had “messed up on this one” (in the words of NBC’s Matt Lauer), and that she and the Democrats would pay dearly for it.
So it must have been a great surprise when Pelosi’s approval ratings stayed basically the same after her visit, or actually went up a little.
Or take the matter of the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Most media figures seem to consider the very idea as issuing from the unhinged imaginations of a lunatic fringe. But according to a recent poll, 39 percent of Americans in fact support it, including 42 percent of independents.
A common explanation of this tendency toward distortion is that the beltway media has attended a few too many White House Correspondents’ Dinners and so cannot possibly cover the administration with anything approaching objectivity. No doubt the Republicans’ notoriously well-organized efforts in casting the media as having a “liberal bias” also have their intended effect in suppressing criticism.
But I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn’t meet with enough criticism, and if that’s partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think – when actually it often doesn’t....2nd half on NY Times but you need a online subscription to view it.........sorry
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Unmasking of the Authoritarians
by Manuel ValenzuelaPhoenix Rising
Can you smell the putrid fumes of authoritarianism rising like smoke from burning trash, filling our senses with the toxins of despotism? Do you see these clouds of tyranny surpassing the morning horizon, their darkened haze making blind our eyes, deaf our ears and ignorant our minds? Can you hear the America of yesterday screaming in agonizing pain as the cancer of the authoritarian personality slowly devours her from within? If so, you are not alone, for evolving within our shores since 9/11 lies a most ominous and frightening reality, namely, the rise and acceptance of American-style authoritarianism.
Conceived through the neoconservative Mein Kampf, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” birthed through the controlled demolition of skyscrapers that gave rise to the New Pearl Harbor and nurtured through the psychological war of fear and terror upon the American populace, conveniently labeled the War on Terror, authoritarianism, and an absolute belief in it, has planted itself firmly upon American shores. The emergence of this pathogen, – for that is what it is – usually contained and restrained within the minds of millions of individuals, has dramatically shifted the personality and beliefs of American society, perhaps forever altering the makeup and psyche of the nation.
Thanks in large measure to an overwhelming propaganda campaign by the neocon controlled corporatist media, an onslaught of manipulation upon the American populace has resulted in the acceptance of authoritarian tendencies in a large segment of the citizenry. In present day American media, neocon anchors, reporters, talking heads and stenographers are allowed to parade uninterrupted and unobstructed, day after day, parroting neocon talking points and propaganda, stirring fear and insecurity and hatred and anger, hiding truth and disseminating fictions, all systemically done to condition the people into accepting Machiavellian-style governance....LINK
Americans Can't Impeach Bush - It Would Be Condemning Themselves
by max bluntFor many Americans, who Bush attacked or the reasons he gave, didn't matter -- what mattered was that we were fighting back.
To this day, the primitive feeling that in response to 9/11 we had to hit hard at "the enemy," whoever that might be, is a sacred cow.
America's deference to the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach is profound: It's the gut belief that still drives Bush supporters and leads them to regard war critics as contemptible appeasers.
This is why Bush endlessly repeats his mantra "We're staying on the attack."
The unpleasant truth is that Bush did what a lot of Americans wanted him to. And when it became clear after the fact that Bush had lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, it made no sense for those Americans to turn on him.
Truth was never their major concern anyway -- revenge was. And if we took revenge on the wrong person, well, better a misplaced revenge than none at all.....LINK
The Insanity of the U.S. Embargo on Cuba
By Nathaniel Hoffman, AlterNet."Don" Albert Fox, a stocky Floridian who talks in a hushed, confidential tone, has his own custom cigar bands and a retired master cigar roller in Havana who keeps him well stocked.
The tiny labels contain a Cuban flag and an American flag, representing the friendships that Albert A. Fox, Jr. has been carefully nurturing since about 2000.
In the late 1990s Fox tried to take his aging mother to Cuba, her birthplace. The U.S. government denied them permission to travel there.
Since that first denial, the Tampa political operative has been to Cuba more than 60 times. He's met with President Fidel Castro on nine of those visits and has contacts at many levels within the Cuban government.....LINK
Not a "Compromise," It's a Blank Check by John Nichols
The question is not whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid flinched in their negotiations with the Bush administration over the continuation of the Iraq occupation.They did. Despite some happy talk about benchmarks that have been attached to the Iraq supplemental spending bill that is expected to be considered by Congress this week, the willingness of Pelosi and Reid to advance a measure that does not include a withdrawal timeline allows Bush to conduct the war as he chooses for much if not all of the remainder of his presidency. This failure to abide by the will of the people who elected Democrats to end the war will haunt Pelosi, Reid and their party -- not to mention the United States and the battered shell that is Iraq......LINK
Ok...the Dems cave in and give Bush a blank check for the occupation of Iraq...I see two possible reasons both of which are not any better:
1) The Dems give Bush the money so that he can mess up even more and leaving voters in '08 no choice but to vote for 'the other party' and thus the Dems would have a overwhelming majority. This is fucking sick....we are willing to let more American lives (most around my age) die so that a party can gain more power. Instead of allowing this they should be putting impeachment papers in the Senate/House. I say when election time comes we either vote for a different party or a democratic candidate who is not afraid of the powerful lobbies and corporations that run this country and will stand up and say we need out of Iraq and need to focus on all the domestic issues going on (Health care, education, etc.)
2) They some how have been brainwashed into thinking that this occupation will be successful. If this is the case, all is lost and are federal republic is doomed to a slow but steady decline!
Thats my thoughts and I am sticking to them.....PEACE AND LOVE....speak out, get out, however you can lets try to make a difference and bring this country back to the people!!
1) The Dems give Bush the money so that he can mess up even more and leaving voters in '08 no choice but to vote for 'the other party' and thus the Dems would have a overwhelming majority. This is fucking sick....we are willing to let more American lives (most around my age) die so that a party can gain more power. Instead of allowing this they should be putting impeachment papers in the Senate/House. I say when election time comes we either vote for a different party or a democratic candidate who is not afraid of the powerful lobbies and corporations that run this country and will stand up and say we need out of Iraq and need to focus on all the domestic issues going on (Health care, education, etc.)
2) They some how have been brainwashed into thinking that this occupation will be successful. If this is the case, all is lost and are federal republic is doomed to a slow but steady decline!
Thats my thoughts and I am sticking to them.....PEACE AND LOVE....speak out, get out, however you can lets try to make a difference and bring this country back to the people!!
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Why Bush hasn't been impeached
Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves.
By Gary Kamiya
The Bush presidency is a lot of things. It's a secretive cabal, a cavalcade of incompetence, a blood-stained Church Militant, a bad rerun of "The Godfather" in which scary men in suits pay ominous visits to hospital rooms. But seen from the point of view of the American people, what it increasingly resembles is a bad marriage. America finds itself married to a guy who has turned out to be a complete dud. Divorce -- which in our nonparliamentary system means impeachment -- is the logical solution. But even though Bush cheated on us, lied, besmirched our family's name and spent all our money, we the people, not to mention our elected representatives and the media, seem content to stick it out to the bitter end....LINK
All the Presidential Candidates Are Cowards
Every Candidate Wants You to Stay Ignorant of the Best Kept Political Secret - Everby Joel S. Hirschhorn
Virtually all Americans do not know what all the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates know. It is one of the best kept secrets - ever.
There is a piece of the U.S. Constitution that has been consistently disobeyed by the federal government during the entire history of the country. This is it in a nutshell: Article V says that if two-thirds of state legislatures request Congress for a convention to propose constitutional amendments, then Congress "shall" call such a convention.
But no such amendment convention has been created. Even though there have been over 500 such state legislature requests from all 50 states. Congress has always refused to call an Article V convention, despite the one and only specified requirement in the Constitution being fulfilled.
All of the amendments that have been made to the Constitution have been proposed by Congress, the other specified route in Article V. Clearly, Congress has never wanted to share power. And note that whether a proposed constitutional amendment is initiated by Congress or an Article V convention it faces exactly the same ratification requirements by states....LINK
Money Is the Root of American 'Democracy'
by max blunt Democrats Make Pact with DevilThe “Devil” in this case is the multi-national corporatocracy. The so-called “front-running” Democrats sold themselves themselves to the Devil long ago.
As revealed at length by Jeff Faux in “The Global Class War,” this sell-out occurred when President Clinton joined with Reagan and Bush I in ramming through NAFTA and the WTO on the “fast track.”
Both became tools through which America’s economic elite were about to outsource this nation’s manufacturing base in a never-ending search for cheap foreign labor and lax foreign laws that permit them to carry out environmental degredation without risk of economic accountability.
Perhaps there is no company in the world has benefited more from this economic betrayal of American labor than the company where Hillary Clinton had once sat on the board of directors.....LINK
American Cities and the Great Divide via The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
A public high school teacher in Brooklyn told me recently about a student who didn’t believe that a restaurant tab for four people could come to more than $500. The student shook his head, as if resisting the very idea. He just couldn’t fathom it.
“How much can you eat?” the student asked.
When I asked a teacher in a second school to mention the same issue, one of the responses was, “Is this a true story?”
A lot of New Yorkers are doing awfully well. There are 8 million residents of New York City, and roughly 700,000 are worth a million dollars or more. The average price of a Manhattan apartment is $1.3 million. The annual earnings of the average hedge fund manager is $363 million.
The estimated worth of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, ranges from $5.5 billion to upwards of $20 billion.
You want a gilded age? This is it. The elite of the Roaring Twenties would be stunned by the wealth of the current era.
Now the flip side, which is the side those public school students are on. One of the city’s five counties, the Bronx, is the poorest urban county in the nation. The number of families in the city’s homeless shelters is the highest it has been in a quarter of a century. Twenty-five percent of all families with children in New York City — that’s 1.5 million New Yorkers — are trying to make it on incomes that are below the poverty threshold established by the federal government.
The streets that are paved with gold for some are covered with ash for many others. There are few better illustrations of the increasingly disturbing divide between rich and poor than New York City.
“I get to walk in both worlds,” said Larry Mandell, the president of the United Way of New York City. “In a given day I might be in a soup kitchen and also in the halls of Fortune 500 companies dealing with the senior executives. I’ve become acutely aware that the lives of those who are well off are not touched at all by contact with the poor. It’s not that people don’t care or don’t want to help. It’s that they have very little awareness of poverty.”
I’d always thought of the United Way as a charitable outfit. But Mr. Mandell has committed his organization to the important task of raising the awareness of Americans and their political leaders to the pressing needs of America’s cities, and especially the long-neglected, poverty-stricken neighborhoods of the inner cities.
It’s a measure of how low the bar has been set for success in America’s cities that New York is thought to be doing well, even though 185,000 of its children ages 5 or younger are poor, and 18,000 are consigned to homeless shelters each night. More than a million New Yorkers get food stamps, and another 700,000 are eligible but not receiving them. That’s a long, long way from a $500 restaurant tab.
Only 50 percent of the city’s high school students graduate in four years. And if you talk to the kids in the poorer neighborhoods, they will tell you that they don’t feel safe. They are worried about violence and gang activity, which in their view is getting worse, not better.
This is what’s going on in the nation’s most successful big city.
Mr. Mandell is upset that urban issues, which in so many cases are related to poverty, have played such a minuscule role in the presidential campaign so far. “People need to become more aware of the issue of poverty,” he said. “It’s discouraging, frankly, to have it barely mentioned at all in the debates.
“It’s true that John Edwards is the one candidate who seems concerned about it, but to actually have the issue come up just briefly in the debates, and not at all in the Republican debate — well, my view is that we have to change that.”
The United Way of New York has issued a white paper on “America’s Urban Agenda” that says, “The greatest single challenge most American cities face lies in the increasing divide between the haves and have-nots.”
There was a time, some decades ago, when urban issues and poverty were important components of presidential campaigns. Now the poor are kept out of sight, which makes it easier to leave them farther and farther behind. We’ve apparently reached a point in our politics when they aren’t even worth mentioning.
Gonzales proposing new Orwellian thought crimes law
by John Aravosis (DC) · 5/21/2007 07:21:00 PM ET
First off, what this legislation is really about: The Homeland Security department getting carte blanche authorization to fish through your computer and tap your phones with impunity, whenever they want, so long as they argue that they think you might have ever tried to download even a single song via Limewire or some of other music-sharing software, or have ever copied a photo off the Internet, or even watched a single clip from any TV show on YouTube. They're going to use this legislation to hunt for terrorists, and won't need search warrants, etc. That's what this is about.
Now to the specifics.
1. Why change the law to an "attempt" to infringe? Copyright law has been fine until now, why change it?
2. As mentioned above, they can wiretap anyone who may be "attempting" to infringe on copyright. That means if they suspect that you may have saved a copy on your computer of one of my orchid photos they can tap your phones, without a warrant I suspect. They can also tap your phone if they think your teenage daughter may be "attempting" to download a song online. They could also tap the phones of every YouTube user who has ever posted a clip from any TV show. Think about that.
3. They can seize your computer, forever, if you "intend" to copy even one song or one photo from the Internet. Not if you DO copy it. Just if you even just plan on it in your mind. And the religious right has a problem with hate crime laws? At least with hate crime laws you actually have to have committed a violent crime like murder or aggravated assault. And Bush is threatening a veto of that bill. But he has no problem with a bill that throws you in jail for just thinking of maybe downloading music or a photo or posting a copy of a Washington Post article to your blog or putting a clip from the Daily Show or South Park on YouTube (that too would permit Bush to tap your phones).
And finally, if Homeland Security doesn't have enough work to do already, and has the time to set up a hotline to the Record Industry Association every time little Suzie downloads a Christina Aguilera song, well, then we might as well just pack it in and put up a big welcome sign for Osama to hit us again.
by John Aravosis (DC) · 5/21/2007 07:21:00 PM ET
At what point do these so-called conservatives out there plan to speak up against this crap?
From CNet, then my analysis:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including "attempts" to commit piracy.... The Bush administration is throwing its support behind a proposal called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, which is likely to receive the enthusiastic support of the movie and music industries, and would represent the most dramatic rewrite of copyright law since a 2005 measure dealing with prerelease piracy....
The IPPA would, for instance:
* Criminalize "attempting" to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place....
* Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations. Wiretaps would be authorized for investigations of Americans who are "attempting" to infringe copyrights....
* Allow computers to be seized more readily. Specifically, property such as a PC "intended to be used in any manner" to commit a copyright crime would be subject to forfeiture, including civil asset forfeiture....
* Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America. That would happen when CDs with "unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance" are attempted to be imported.
First off, what this legislation is really about: The Homeland Security department getting carte blanche authorization to fish through your computer and tap your phones with impunity, whenever they want, so long as they argue that they think you might have ever tried to download even a single song via Limewire or some of other music-sharing software, or have ever copied a photo off the Internet, or even watched a single clip from any TV show on YouTube. They're going to use this legislation to hunt for terrorists, and won't need search warrants, etc. That's what this is about.
Now to the specifics.
1. Why change the law to an "attempt" to infringe? Copyright law has been fine until now, why change it?
2. As mentioned above, they can wiretap anyone who may be "attempting" to infringe on copyright. That means if they suspect that you may have saved a copy on your computer of one of my orchid photos they can tap your phones, without a warrant I suspect. They can also tap your phone if they think your teenage daughter may be "attempting" to download a song online. They could also tap the phones of every YouTube user who has ever posted a clip from any TV show. Think about that.
3. They can seize your computer, forever, if you "intend" to copy even one song or one photo from the Internet. Not if you DO copy it. Just if you even just plan on it in your mind. And the religious right has a problem with hate crime laws? At least with hate crime laws you actually have to have committed a violent crime like murder or aggravated assault. And Bush is threatening a veto of that bill. But he has no problem with a bill that throws you in jail for just thinking of maybe downloading music or a photo or posting a copy of a Washington Post article to your blog or putting a clip from the Daily Show or South Park on YouTube (that too would permit Bush to tap your phones).
And finally, if Homeland Security doesn't have enough work to do already, and has the time to set up a hotline to the Record Industry Association every time little Suzie downloads a Christina Aguilera song, well, then we might as well just pack it in and put up a big welcome sign for Osama to hit us again.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Why the US Government Is Hated All Over the World by Fred Reed
Something is wrong with the United States. I think most of us have noticed it. There is a mortal rot in the country, made manifest by many little rots that are hard to integrate mentally yet are, I think, somehow related. The change is grave, accelerating, probably irreversible, and fascinating. Things are not as they were.The United States is the most hated country on the planet, followed by, to the extent that there is a distinction, Israel. So far as I know, there are no other contenders. You can say “Who cares?” as many will say, or “Screw’em if they can’t take a joke,” or “I’d ratherh be feared than loved.” All very droll. Still, it is an interesting datum. No country ever lives up to its own PR, but there was a time when America was widely admired. Now, almost universally, it is seen as a rogue state. And is.
This carries a price. The US consulate in Guadalajara is part fortress, part prison, with barriers and cameras and bars and rentacops, and they take away a woman’s lipstick if she is going to enter. Maybe a country that fears lipstick needs to think. The French consulate around the corner is wide open, like all others that I know of. The French, Chinese, Japanese and so on aren’t hated.
(1) The US government now lives in its own, strange, insulated world.
(2) The United States is the most militarily aggressive country on the planet, followed closely by Israel. I am aware of no other contenders.....LINK
- This is very scary and makes me think, what the hell happened to our country with Bush as president. The amount of change not only here in the US but in the world is astonishing!!
Bush Anoints Himself as the Insurer of Constitutional Government in Emergency
Bush Anoints Himself as the Insurer of Constitutional Government in Emergency
By Matthew Rothschild
With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.
With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.
Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility “for ensuring constitutional government.”
He laid this all out in a document entitled “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51” and “Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20.”
The White House released it on May 9.
Other than a discussion on Daily Kos led off by a posting by Leo Fender, and a pro-forma notice in a couple of mainstream newspapers, this document has gone unremarked upon.
The subject of the document is entitled “National Continuity Policy.”
It defines a “catastrophic emergency” as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.”.....LINK
THE HONORABLE, ENRAGED GENTLEMAN FROM VIRGINIA
His razor-thin victory in a swing state delivered the Senate to the Democrats. Since then, Senator Jim Webb has publicly refused to shake the hand of George W. Bush, delivered the most devastating State of the Union response in memory, and had to explain why an aide brought a loaded gun into the Capitol. It’s been a busy few months for the straightest talker in D.C.
Today is what’s known in the Senate as “vote-a-rama,” a daylong marathon of budget votes that requires members to be within a ten-minute walk of the Senate floor at all times. It’s not Jim Webb’s kind of day. He hates being chained to the floor schedule. “I’ve done all this stuff all over the world as a writer,” Webb told me. “Going places where nobody knows who you are, and nobody cares, and you can go into the back alleys, go into the bad areas, you know? Really see things. To me, government is a cage.” All this week, in an attempt to at least partially escape that cage, Webb has been spending his free time at his private writing office across the Potomac River in Arlington, working on a big speech about the future of the Democratic Party that he delivered yesterday at the National Press Club. Webb fancies himself an ideas guy—“If I had to pick a prototype for the Senate, it would probably be Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who came out of an intellectual career,” he said at the NPC—but there’s nothing high-minded about today. Today is about making sausage. Over the next seven hours, Webb will vote on dozens of arcane amendments to the main budget resolution, the blueprint for how the United States government will spend $3 trillion next year. There are reams of amendments to boost funding for every imaginable pet project—training physicians, combating meth, boosting nanotechnology. There are deviously worded land-mine amendments written with nothing other than future campaign commercials in mind, like the DeMint amendment “to prevent the adding of earmarks for spinach producers to an emergency war-supplemental-appropriations bill.” There are even votes on the technical aspects of this baffling process itself, like the Conrad amendment “to clarify the treatment of certain provisions in conference reports.”......LINKFear of Eating
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Yesterday I did something risky: I ate a salad.
These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.
Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.
Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. U.S. officials can’t inspect overseas food-processing plants without the permission of foreign governments — and since the Food and Drug Administration has limited funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And that’s not a healthy place to be, especially when it comes to imports from China, where the state of food safety is roughly what it was in this country before the Progressive movement.
The Washington Post, reviewing F.D.A. documents, found that last month the agency detained shipments from China that included dried apples treated with carcinogenic chemicals and seafood “coated with putrefying bacteria.” You can be sure that a lot of similarly unsafe and disgusting food ends up in American stomachs.
Those who blame corporations also have a point. In 2005, the F.D.A. suspected that peanut butter produced by ConAgra, which sells the product under multiple brand names, might be contaminated with salmonella. According to The New York Times, “when agency inspectors went to the plant that made the peanut butter, the company acknowledged it had destroyed some product but declined to say why,” and refused to let the inspectors examine its records without a written authorization.
According to the company, the agency never followed through. This brings us to our third villain, the Bush administration.
Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years. We don’t know how many times concerns raised by F.D.A. employees were ignored or soft-pedaled by their superiors. What we do know is that since 2001 the F.D.A. has introduced no significant new food safety regulations except those mandated by Congress.
This isn’t simply a matter of caving in to industry pressure. The Bush administration won’t issue food safety regulations even when the private sector wants them. The president of the United Fresh Produce Association says that the industry’s problems “can’t be solved without strong mandatory federal regulations”: without such regulations, scrupulous growers and processors risk being undercut by competitors more willing to cut corners on food safety. Yet the administration refuses to do more than issue nonbinding guidelines.
Why would the administration refuse to regulate an industry that actually wants to be regulated? Officials may fear that they would create a precedent for public-interest regulation of other industries. But they are also influenced by an ideology that says business should never be regulated, no matter what.
The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don’t know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it’s ideologically inconvenient.
That’s why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective drugs? “It’s in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things,” he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police itself.
O.K., I’m not saying that Mr. Friedman directly caused tainted spinach and poisonous peanut butter. But he did help to make our food less safe, by legitimizing what the historian Rick Perlstein calls “E. coli conservatives”: ideologues who won’t accept even the most compelling case for government regulation.
Earlier this month the administration named, you guessed it, a “food safety czar.” But the food safety crisis isn’t caused by the arrangement of the boxes on the organization chart. It’s caused by the dominance within our government of a literally sickening ideology.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
My Arrest in Spain
The Easy Road from Tourism to Terrorism
By PETER GELDERLOOS
"I'm a tourist! Tourist!" I protested, somewhere in the dungeons of the Guardia Urbana located inconspicuously along La Rambla.
"¡No!" the cop yelled back, wagging his finger. "¡Terrorist!"
On the street just above me, only minutes after the alleged terrorist act, all the other tourists were strolling calmly, perusing postcards and tapas menus, glancing over the stands of books set out for the St. Jordi holiday, 23 April, watching the performance artists who always line Barcelona's signature pedestrian avenue. There was no panicked stampede, only the same mundane crush that always drowns the city. But then, I wasn't exactly arguing with the voice of reason. The cop was sure I was a terrorist because he was sure I was a squatter, and he was sure I was a squatter because he thought I looked like one (I was wearing a political t-shirt and had some slogans scribbled on my shoes).
In fact, it was the squatter's assembly that had organized the little protest on La Rambla. They had a festive, balloon-lined banner that read, in Catalan, "a city without squats is a dead city," they handed out flyers arguing against gentrification and explaining the reasons for squatting, and they concluded the little event by firing off a petardo, a little firework cannon that shoots flyers into the air. It made a damn loud noise, perhaps louder than intended, but in the end it was only that-a noise. But the police, always training for the worse, came in and made it worse. They charged in yelling, and adding an element of panic the firework never did. I was in the area and I saw the police running-at this point they were chasing one of the protestors-and I did what I would have done in the US:.....LINKSaturday, May 19, 2007
Poisoned Toothpaste in Panama Is Believed to Be From China
By WALT BOGDANICH and RENWICK McLEAN
Diethylene glycol, a poisonous ingredient in some antifreeze, has been found in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste in Panama, and customs officials there said yesterday that the product appeared to have originated in China.
“Our preliminary information is that it came from China, but we don’t know that with certainty yet,” said Daniel Delgado Diamante, Panama’s director of customs. “We are still checking all the possible imports to see if there could be other shipments.”
Some of the toothpaste, which arrived several months ago in the free trade zone next to the Panama Canal, was re-exported to the Dominican Republic in seven shipments, customs officials said. A newspaper in Australia reported yesterday that one brand of the toothpaste had been found on supermarket shelves there and had been recalled.
Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government inadvertently mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. Records show that in that episode the poison, falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, also originated in China.....LINK
Friday, May 18, 2007
Barack Obama Sells His Soul to Rise in White Washington
by max bluntBarack Obama has become a major celebrity: a truth becomes a cliché.
His campaign has raised massive amounts of funding. He draws large and enthusiastic crowds when he appears. Often described as charismatic, he is more importantly smart and well spoken.
Yet before I jump into his campaign, I have a few questions that I first want to share with you and which I hope he will address in the not-too-distant future.
There is a way in which I cannot tell who is the real Senator Obama. For one, he has not carved out—at least as of this writing—any cutting edge issues where he is taking the lead and defining the terrain.
Second, and to some extent more troubling, he permits people to see and assume in him what they want to see and assume.
I have said to many of my friends that this situation reminds me of an episode from the original Star Trek series where there was a creature that appears to the viewer the way the viewer would like to see it......LINK
Is there any doubt now that it is a coup attempt?
This is a difficult subject to talk about. Americans are happy if they're not paying attention or "not satisfied" with the direction of the country.
But no matter how they feel when you talk to them they probably all take for granted that the state of the country is just a little or moderately off and will soon be back on track.
Seven years ago a Turkish friend of mine said that America would have a civil war within 20 years. I was shocked that she would say this. I tried to convince her that the checks and balances built into our system would prevent that from happening.
What I couldn't anticipate is a situation that would lead to such a bitter division that existed for so long. We're not so divided now but there are still forces out there trying to tear us apart so that they can take over. Now, it scares me to think how close we came to being taken over. Even though it feels like the tide is changing, we're not out of the woods yet.
We are in Constitutional Crisis now; the Constitutional Confrontation is yet to come...LINK
Don’t Blame Bush
By PAUL KRUGMAN
I’ve been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we’ve all been too hard on President Bush.
No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.
But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.
Now, Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have done a few things other Republicans wouldn’t. Their initial domestic surveillance program was apparently so lawless and unconstitutional that even John Ashcroft, approached on his sickbed, refused to go along. For the most part, however, Mr. Bush has done just what his party wants and expects.
There was a telling moment during the second Republican presidential debate, when Brit Hume of Fox News confronted the contenders with a hypothetical “24”-style situation in which torturing suspects is the only way to stop a terrorist attack.
Bear in mind that such situations basically never happen in real life, that the U.S. military has asked the producers of “24” to cut down on the torture scenes. Last week Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, circulated an open letter to our forces warning that using torture or “other expedient methods to obtain information” is both wrong and ineffective, and that it is important to keep the “moral high ground.”
But aside from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, “where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo.” His remarks were greeted with wild applause.....LINK
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
by Bob Burnett
n Berkeley, it's difficult to travel more than a few blocks without seeing an "Impeach Bush" bumper sticker. And whenever I write a column about the 43rd President, I receive emails suggesting that the simplest solution to America's problems is his impeachment. Nonetheless, I'd never taken the possibility of impeachment seriously until this week, when I realized I've had enough: I want Dubya to go down.
The movement to impeach George W. Bush started around Labor Day, in 2002, when it become clear that he was determined to invade Iraq. In March 2003, it gathered momentum when many Americans joined marches and silent vigils to protest what we considered to be an ill-considered and dangerous action. Bush was enormously popular and many "blue" Americans felt we had lost our country: we couldn't understand why so many of our fellow citizens supported Dubya; or why they voted to reelect him in 2004. In those dark days, the impeachment movement seemed to be the last refuge of die-hard liberals: a defiant stance that had little hope of success.
Times changed: in 2006, Democrats took control of Congress and Bush's popularity rating sank to Nixonian depths. Meanwhile, evidence of his malfeasance exploded. Suddenly, even conservative Republicans were criticizing the President, calling for him to abandon his customary intractability and engage in real bipartisanship.
As the impeachment movement grew stronger, I resisted its call for several reasons. While I've never doubted that there are strong legal grounds for Bush's impeachment, I've been troubled by pragmatic considerations: if Dubya was removed from office, Dick Cheney would become President; impeachment proceedings would tie up the 110th Congress at a time when congressional energy needs to be focused on undoing Bush Administration mistakes –- such as ending the war in Iraq; and the impeachment process would further polarize a nation that has become far too adversarial and combative. When the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said that impeachment was "off the table," I agreed: it's one thing to be right and quite another thing to be effective, I thought.
My thinking changed after I read George Packer's magnificent commentary in the May 14th New Yorker Magazine...... LINK
n Berkeley, it's difficult to travel more than a few blocks without seeing an "Impeach Bush" bumper sticker. And whenever I write a column about the 43rd President, I receive emails suggesting that the simplest solution to America's problems is his impeachment. Nonetheless, I'd never taken the possibility of impeachment seriously until this week, when I realized I've had enough: I want Dubya to go down.
The movement to impeach George W. Bush started around Labor Day, in 2002, when it become clear that he was determined to invade Iraq. In March 2003, it gathered momentum when many Americans joined marches and silent vigils to protest what we considered to be an ill-considered and dangerous action. Bush was enormously popular and many "blue" Americans felt we had lost our country: we couldn't understand why so many of our fellow citizens supported Dubya; or why they voted to reelect him in 2004. In those dark days, the impeachment movement seemed to be the last refuge of die-hard liberals: a defiant stance that had little hope of success.
Times changed: in 2006, Democrats took control of Congress and Bush's popularity rating sank to Nixonian depths. Meanwhile, evidence of his malfeasance exploded. Suddenly, even conservative Republicans were criticizing the President, calling for him to abandon his customary intractability and engage in real bipartisanship.
As the impeachment movement grew stronger, I resisted its call for several reasons. While I've never doubted that there are strong legal grounds for Bush's impeachment, I've been troubled by pragmatic considerations: if Dubya was removed from office, Dick Cheney would become President; impeachment proceedings would tie up the 110th Congress at a time when congressional energy needs to be focused on undoing Bush Administration mistakes –- such as ending the war in Iraq; and the impeachment process would further polarize a nation that has become far too adversarial and combative. When the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said that impeachment was "off the table," I agreed: it's one thing to be right and quite another thing to be effective, I thought.
My thinking changed after I read George Packer's magnificent commentary in the May 14th New Yorker Magazine...... LINK
We're Still Slaves Sold in the Market-Place
by jo swift Prisoners used to know all about treadmills. They were big wheels, like old-fashioned water wheels, powered by the weight of prisoners endlessly walking forward and, of course, getting nowhere.
The turning wheel held several prisoners, all treading forward for hours on end. It was used to power other machines.
But really it was a form of punishment.
Has much changed? Today we're virtual prisoners, chained in our cubicles, toiling for 'the man'.
We're replacable pawns to further profits. Yet, there's no revolution, no anger, no challenge to the status quo. We accept our lot, programmed to obey authority.
Wasn't that what school was all about? Sitting behind a desk for six hours, mindlessly bored. Just being 'trained' to fit into the new-style treadmill of work.
Got to work hard in school and get good grades so you can get a good job so you can buy everything you want... and if you don't get a 'proper' job, you're a 'failure'.....LINK
Evil Empire
Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America?By Chalmers Johnson
05/17/07 "ICH" -- -- In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.
The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.
If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them.".....LINK
Monday, May 14, 2007
'America': Barbaric, Opportunistic, Exploitative, Racist & Imperialist
by max bluntAmericans are absolutely convinced they possess the right to pursue “happiness” and “security”, regardless of the cost to the Earth and the rest of its sentient inhabitants.
Americans are in a race to hoard the most toys, to eat the most food, to have the most orgasms, to be the best looking, and to be the biggest winners as we engage in a repugnant orgy of narcissistic and gluttonous hedonism.
Contrary to the false consciousness bestowed upon us by a horde of incredibly adept propagandists who “dutifully” man the bulwarks of exploitative capitalism, we are not “benevolent liberators” or “peace makers”.
We wage war perpetually, strip the world bare like a swarm of locusts, and give virtually nothing in return. Ensuring our “happiness” and “security” extracts a tremendous price from the rest of the Earth.....LINK
The Nation’s Borders, Now Guarded by the Net
By ADAM LIPTAKAndrew Feldmar, a Vancouver psychotherapist, was on his way to pick up a friend at the Seattle airport last summer when he ran into a little trouble at the border.
A guard typed Mr. Feldmar’s name into an Internet search engine, which revealed that he had written about using LSD in the 1960s in an interdisciplinary journal. Mr. Feldmar was turned back and is no longer welcome in the United States, where he has been active professionally and where both of his children live.
Mr. Feldmar, 66, has a distinguished résumé, no criminal record and a candid manner. Though he has not used illegal drugs since 1974, he says he has no regrets.
“It was an absolutely fascinating and life-altering experience for me,” he said last week of his experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic drugs. “The insights it provided have lasted for a lifetime. It allowed me to feel what it would be like to live without habits.”
Mr. Feldmar said he had been in the United States more than 100 times and always without incident since he last took an illegal drug. But that changed in August, thanks to the happenstance of an Internet search, conducted for unexplained reasons, at the Peace Arch border station in Blaine, Wash....LINK
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Three infinitely important lessons George Bush has taught America
by W. Christopher Epler (Bill)Great article....check it out...LINK
Commercial culture in the United States is schizophrenic towards young women....LINKPussy, Porn & Puritanism: America's Weird Attitude to Sexby max blunt
Movies, porn, music, fashion, and glossy magazines fixate on the sexualized woman.
All that advice on how to be more attractive, how to give great blow jobs, and how to be good in bed, sexuality and sexual pleasure are still defined on male terms.
Sex is over when the man ejaculates; blow jobs are less gross than “carpet munching;” and sexually experienced men are virile, whereas experienced women are sluts.
Under such slanted expectations and double standards, women are seen not as autonomous sexual actors but as passive sexual objects.
By objectifying women and defining them by their chosen sexual activity, pop culture conflates sexual acts with the entirety of sexuality.
The Moral Obligation to Lose The War
By Robert Shetterly
05/12/07 "Common Dreams' -- -- Every act has moral and immoral potential. The girl scout who helps an unsteady old man across the street could also have pushed him aside. The aftermath of each action engenders a new range of moral possibilities. Having pushed him aside, she might then regret her act and return to help him. Even when we’ve made bad choices, acted out of indifference or greed rather than compassion and generosity, another choice awaits us: how to compound or rectify the immoral act, stay the course or imagine how to salvage some measure of moral standing. Since even a racist like George Wallace can have a Road to Damascus experience, anything is possible.
The immense immorality of the choice to attack Iraq, and base that choice in lies, propaganda, and fear is hardly news now. But the fact that, above all else, it was a moral choice means that another moral choice is possible. And only one choice would atone for the original.
This war will not end until the funding is cut off. Anyone who would continue the funding to “support the troops,” should also tell you that once you make a moral mistake, keep making it, and that those who pay with their blood for your mistake are grateful for the support. The logic of this position would also maintain that policy is made by soldiers and officers, not by the people, the Congress and the President.
None of the offered plans now before us to de-escalate the war disavow what we all know to be its original goals — control of Iraq’s oil and the building of large, permanent US military bases in Iraq. Nor do any of these bills address the central issue of accountability, the fact that this war is a war crime, a crime against our democracy, our Constitution, the Iraqi people, international law, and our own soldiers. Without accountability, our democracy is meaningless. Without moral action, our claim to integrity and respect are meaningless.....LINK
By Robert Shetterly
05/12/07 "Common Dreams' -- -- Every act has moral and immoral potential. The girl scout who helps an unsteady old man across the street could also have pushed him aside. The aftermath of each action engenders a new range of moral possibilities. Having pushed him aside, she might then regret her act and return to help him. Even when we’ve made bad choices, acted out of indifference or greed rather than compassion and generosity, another choice awaits us: how to compound or rectify the immoral act, stay the course or imagine how to salvage some measure of moral standing. Since even a racist like George Wallace can have a Road to Damascus experience, anything is possible.
The immense immorality of the choice to attack Iraq, and base that choice in lies, propaganda, and fear is hardly news now. But the fact that, above all else, it was a moral choice means that another moral choice is possible. And only one choice would atone for the original.
This war will not end until the funding is cut off. Anyone who would continue the funding to “support the troops,” should also tell you that once you make a moral mistake, keep making it, and that those who pay with their blood for your mistake are grateful for the support. The logic of this position would also maintain that policy is made by soldiers and officers, not by the people, the Congress and the President.
None of the offered plans now before us to de-escalate the war disavow what we all know to be its original goals — control of Iraq’s oil and the building of large, permanent US military bases in Iraq. Nor do any of these bills address the central issue of accountability, the fact that this war is a war crime, a crime against our democracy, our Constitution, the Iraqi people, international law, and our own soldiers. Without accountability, our democracy is meaningless. Without moral action, our claim to integrity and respect are meaningless.....LINK
The Hidden War for Oil
Carl Bloice elucidates the failure or unwillingness of the Western media to accurately report the invasion and occupation of Somalia by a US backed Ethiopian government. He asserts that behind the US-Ethiopian political alliance lies a strategic move to secure positioning in this oil region.
By Carl Bloice
05/11/07 "All Africa" -- -- The US bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya, three days before a large anti-war action in Washington on 27 January 2007.
Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN), was present in Nairobi. After returning home, she asked: how 'to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?'
Writing in the San Francisco community newspaper Bay View, Kidane suggested one valid reason: 'Perhaps US-based organizations don't have the proper analytical framework to understand the significance of the Horn of Africa region. Perhaps it is because Somalia is largely seen as a country with no government and in perpetual chaos; with "fundamental Islamic" forces, not deserving of defense against the military attacks by US in search of "terrorists".'
To that it may be added the role of the major US media in the lead up to the invasion and the suffering now taking place in the Horn of Africa.....LINK
Carl Bloice elucidates the failure or unwillingness of the Western media to accurately report the invasion and occupation of Somalia by a US backed Ethiopian government. He asserts that behind the US-Ethiopian political alliance lies a strategic move to secure positioning in this oil region.
By Carl Bloice
05/11/07 "All Africa" -- -- The US bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya, three days before a large anti-war action in Washington on 27 January 2007.
Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN), was present in Nairobi. After returning home, she asked: how 'to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?'
Writing in the San Francisco community newspaper Bay View, Kidane suggested one valid reason: 'Perhaps US-based organizations don't have the proper analytical framework to understand the significance of the Horn of Africa region. Perhaps it is because Somalia is largely seen as a country with no government and in perpetual chaos; with "fundamental Islamic" forces, not deserving of defense against the military attacks by US in search of "terrorists".'
To that it may be added the role of the major US media in the lead up to the invasion and the suffering now taking place in the Horn of Africa.....LINK
Imanual Kant: What is Enlightenment (1784)
Interpreted by The Dude:
Interpreted by The Dude:
I can't say that I completely have a hold of it, but
basically this is how I figure it: Kant was saying
that peoples' lack of knowledge was not because they
were ignorant, but because they were too scared to
know. They feel comfortable being in a groove, letting
people tell them what to think, how to act, etc. The
only way for society to become 'enlightened' is if the
people in power allow that to happen, and that's why
religious leaders are not good for society. It's a
conflict of interest, and they don't encourage
learning, but instead dictate that their people follow
without questioning. What is necessary is that the
leader is confident enough in his power to allow
people to argue about his policies, but nevertheless
obey him.
So, there it is, dude. I don't know how accurate my
interpretation was, but that's basically what I got
from reading it, in a nutshell. Good shit. Later.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Diminish Violence and Extremism
by Kamala SarupPeace will reduce conflicts, violence and extremism. If the leaders of countries promote education and values that emphasize national and international identification, then the conflicts will diminish, in the long run. If they promote sufficient economic, judicial and political equality, then the people at the bottom of the ladder will not want to topple those at the top. Therefore, the results of reducing violence and extremism are that when people engage in production and art rather than war, then the killing and maiming are reduced and the general living standards are increased and people are more satisfied.
The results of reducing conflict, violence and extremism are that when people engage in production and art rather than war, then the killing and maiming are reduced and the general living standards are increased and people are more satisfied. However, people are ignorant, aggressive and acquisitive, so conflicts remain. That is why, in every country, it is necessary to have organized, non-violence groups.
Most of the conflicts, violence and extremism in the World are the result of poverty and oppression. Unfortunately, under capitalism, "the consumer is king", and under communist governments the hierarchy takes care of itself, so people born in more favorable environments with ability and motivation will get a big share of the food while those in less favored environments will go poor and they engage in war.....LINK
Cat Food & Capitalism
by max bluntSo we have recently been reading about all that contaminated cat food (also dog food and feed for some other animals) that had to be recalled because it was full of Chinese wheat gluten.
The New York Times reports (5/3/07) that thousands of animals have become sick or died (according to the FDA 4,000 dogs and cats have died already). How did it happen?
We all know that capitalists guiding interest is to make the biggest possible profit. They hate regulations (bad for business) and when they are regulated will try to get around the regulations anyway they can.
The Bush administration, very capitalist friendly, has really helped the American capitalists by pushing deregulation, supporting “voluntary compliance” (i.e., no compliance), and failing to use the federal regulatory agencies to really regulate.
Thus OSHA doesn’t inspect, the Labor Department doesn’t properly function, we don’t how much mad cow disease is in the country because of a weak Agriculture Department, unsafe drugs are on the market because of the FDA, etc.
Bush is the best president for business, the worst for people.....LINK
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