Relatively Speaking

You're F*cking Up America

2010-05-26T22:51:00.000-07:00

If you buy fresh produce packaged inside a plastic box, you're fucking up America.

If you shop at the market but do not own a re-usable bag, you're fucking up America.

If you live in California, and have a sizable lawn that serves no utility besides enhancing aesthetics, you're fucking up America.

If you speak of economic justice as a derogatory term, you're fucking up America (Glen Beck).

If you live in a city, but do not have a container for recycling in your home, you're fucking up America.

If you dispose of more dishes than you wash, you're fucking up America.

If you do not know where your nearest farmer's market is located, you're fucking up America.

Continuation of a Discussion on Cap and Trade

2010-01-04T00:47:00.000-08:00

starting here at Wine and Bowties.

Re-posted for reasons of convenience.

My rebuttal has been posted in red.

Alex

You’re certainly correct that the fees incurred on energy companies would mean a rise in energy prices for the consumer. I am, however, in favor of energy being more expensive. Regardless of how much we bitch about gas prices, the fact is that we have so much pollution largely because we drive too much. If gas becomes more expensive, we Americans would have to restructure our lives around it. In many European countries, for instance, the price of gas is significantly higher, but as a result, public transportation services are much more efficient, affordable and useful.

Higher energy prices means a lot more than just higher gas prices for your typical automobile commuter. Higher energy prices mean more expenses for businesses. Companies are going to shell out more money from their bottom line. This is going to slow up our economy. So unless you are an “expert” on anthropogenic warming, I suggest taking a neutral position regarding raising energy prices at least 1. until you know more about whether or not it is even necessary to address carbon emissions and 2. until our economy is better able to take such a hit. Raising energy prices at this time will deal a significant blow to the country’s productive capacity. And it is our productive capacity that is our biggest hope for recovery.

Public transportation is great; and it works really well in Europe because much of Europe was designed before the car. Over in the states, the prospect of public transportation is much more daunting in places like LA which were designed with the car as the primary mode of transportation. Sure we can come up with systems, but it will take billions of dollars in planning, resources and labor. We all know our state credit card is maxed out

And I doubt our pollution is largely because we drive too much, at least on a world scale. “The 15 biggest ships emit about as much sulphur oxide pollution as all cars combined.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_pollution#Exhaust_emissions). It really depends what you define as pollution. If its carbon dioxide, then theoretically you will have the EPA taxing cow farts and overseeing plankton spawning projects. One of Lee’s better points is that we ought to know for sure what the facts are with CO2 and warming before we go writing costly legislation that could potentially be unnecessary. I would like to reiterate that unless you are an expert on anthropogenic global warming, it will only hurt our situation by calling for prescriptions to a disease you do not understand.

Of course, simply selling carbon credits is not the solution. Of course there would need to be a cap, which Annie in fact says should be the job of the EPA. The whole point of having an EPA is so that they can exercise some regulatory power over pollution. The notion that that would somehow allow to them to regulate “every facet of American life” is an unfounded load of bullshit. I mean, what “factual evidence” is that based on. Certainly not the legislation he’s referring to. The ultimatum comes in the form of “solid caps” and “strong laws”, rather than the lax ones proposed in the current Cap & Trade proposal.

Which brings me to my next point. I still think Lee is a dummy, but let me elaborate a bit. His political theory is vastly oversimplified, and his thinking is a strain of the kind of unfounded fear-mongering that dominates right-wing politics these days.

First off Lee states that our country became the richest in the world because we are a “free nation with limited government”. The fact is that our nation’s economy almost collapsed completely with the Great Depression. How did we escape this calamity? Big government solutions initiated by Roosevelt. Relief programs, taxation, public works programs, and reglulation of unscrupulous business practices. Without massive amounts of government aid and regulation, we simply would not have been able to dig our economy out of the depression.

Right here is another debate in itself. There are plenty of examples where limited government has played a significant contribution to our nations “wealth”. I simply do not know enough history to sit here and hash out a debate regarding whether or not limited government vs big government solutions have contributed more or less to the best aspects of this country. I’ve heard many argue also that WWII was the primary factor for getting the U.S out of the Great Depression. Like Michael Moore put it in Capitalism:ALS, we bombed the hell out of our competition, so we naturally became the leading car manufacturer in the world. What I will say is that Roosevelt era programs is not an end all be all argument to quashing the assertion that we are the richest nation in the world as a result of free government. The dynamics are far too complex to try and invalidate the point with such a simple rebuttal.

And let’s get something straight. The notion that the invisible hand of the free market will somehow lead to a less problematic solution than government regulation makes no sense.

In certain respects the invisible hand is a much better solution than government intervention. Keeping this on a general level, look at the U.S government subsidizing agriculture. Once a railway was built right down the middle of Mexico, cheap u.s agriculture flooded the Mexican markets and devastated local economies; and Jamaica, etc. In terms of clean energy, it may be a better idea having venture capitalists invest in methane harvesting plants for cattle feces rather than having the EPA tax it. This too is too complex and debatable for a simple response.

Yes there is in all likelihood a happy medium of free market and big government policies. Naomi Klein’s book the Shock Doctrine does a brilliant job at highlighting the failures of the free market systems of Milton Friedman and total reliance on the invisible hand. And yes I am with you 100% that our wealth and prosperity came at the destruction, poverty and exploitation of other countries; that our wealth is distributed inequitably; and that there is an inherent problem with greed and self interest being an underlying drive of our current capitalist system. I am also with you that Lee does have a right wing bias, especially with his seemingly black and white tone regarding socialism as being completely negative. If you think he is a dummy for being so gung ho about limited government, completely anti-socialism and wealth redistribution, that is fine with me. I find it to be relatively justified. Yet I still feel that those issues aside, he presents valid points that should not be overlooked i.e increasing energy costs, not having money for dividends, not making widespread legislation without addressing critical discrepancies in the proxy vs instrumental data., etc.

Furthermore, the invisible hand is not something we should lock up and throw and away the key. If anything please consider that there are certain systematic functions of our day to day that are better suited for the invisible hand than big government. There may be a role better served by the invisible hand than big government when it comes to cleaner energy. Just look at the Prius. It may be slow, but it will in all likelihood be steady. People vote with their dollars, and if there are enough people willing and able to vote “green” then you can bet there will be a capitalist looking for a way to deliver.

The nature of the free market benefits corporate giants. Sure we are the richest nation, but our prosperity comes at the price of destruction, poverty and exploitation of other countries. Not to mention, the wealth, however great it may be, is distributed more inequitably here than almost anywhere in the world. Free market dogma posits greed and self-interest as the tendency to which we should entrust global economy, rather than the desire for justice or equality. That’s the inherent problem.

Wealth redistribution and socialism always seem to come into the conversation. But the fact that those words automatically generate a negative response doesn’t really make sense. For one, it’s not the Cold War anymore; contrary to what Glenn Beck might tell you about “Comrade Obama”, we’re not fighting a war of containment right now. The fact is that our economic policies arenot entirely capitalist or socialist. They’re somewhere in between which is why we have social services, support programs, good hospitals, and taxes. Put the market completely in charge of those things and god knows what happens.

The fact is our government would benefit from adopting more traditionally “socialist” traditions. For one, we could use higher corporate and property taxes, particularly on the wealthiest of the wealthy. The corporate powers that control resources continue to hoard wealth, living in absurd luxury while our infrastructure suffers. To my mind, it’s time that wealth gets reinvested into education, healthcare reform, or as Annie suggested, perhaps even foreign aid, given the ill-gotten benefits our country has reaped from poorer nations.

(real quick on the above. I went to private high school where the per capita cost for each student was lower than surrounding public schools, yet our school managed to put out a better quality education with less per capita resources. It’s a slippery slope you get on saying our infrastructure is suffering because wealthy corporations are hoarding too many resources. Often it’s the inefficiencies of entrusting our government to address specific localized needs from the top down that gets us into trouble)

As far as Global Warming is concerned, like I said, I’m not the expert. But a three minute video that cites two charts doesn’t convince me that more than 90% of the scientific community is wrong.

$100 Billion Bailout For IMF Tagged On To War Funding Bill

2009-06-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

'Democrats in Congress have agreed to provide a $100 billion credit line to the International Monetary Fund, tagging it onto the war supplemental intended for operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

The measure would also increase the U.S. member contribution to the IMF by $8 billion and authorize the United States to back the IMF’s plan to sell 400 tons (12.97 million ounces) of gold, according to lawmakers’

Article here

From "I Know I'm Not Alone"

2009-05-27T15:01:00.000-07:00

a documentary by Michael Franti, song Tolerance - Michael Franti

http://www.iknowimnotalone.com/

Cheney '94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire C-SPAN

2009-05-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

"How many additional dead American's was Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many and I think we got it right."

Peaceful Jews vs. Rabid Zionist

2009-05-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

Anti-Zionist Jewish Protesters are Attacked by an AIPAC Conference Attendee

China Faked their Spacewalk Endeavour

2009-05-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

This is pretty comical.
What are the chances China is the only country to fake a space expedition?

Obama's Admits his Cap and Trade System Will Cause Energy Prices To Skyrocket

2009-05-04T14:09:00.000-07:00

Another Water Powered Car

2009-05-04T13:38:00.001-07:00

http://danieldingel.com/watercar

Mercury Poison for Green Lightbulb Workers

2009-05-04T12:15:00.001-07:00

The increasing demand for energy efficient light bulbs - which require mercury to operate - are creating health risks for Chinese workers who manufacture the bulbs. The lack of uniform health and safety regulations in China have left large swaths of said workers with dangerously high levels of Mercury in their systems.

One worker is quoted:

Our forefathers had been mining for mercury since the Ming Dynasty [1368-1644] and in olden days there was no pollution from such small mines. But in modern times thousands of miners came to our land, dug it out and poured chemicals to wash away the waste. Our water buffaloes grew stunted from drinking the water and our crops turned grey. Our people fell sick and didn’t live long. Anybody who could do has left.

The article aslo describes the mining process:

Until recently, the conditions were medieval. Miners hewed chunks of rock veined with cinnabar, the main commercial source of mercury. They inhaled toxic dust and vapours as the material seethed in primitive cauldrons to extract the mercury. Nobody wore a mask or protective clothing.

Link

BTW If a Mercury lightbulb breaks in your home the room should be cleared for at least 15 minutes in order to avoid inhaling Mercury vapors.

Australian Inventors Invent Magnetic Motor

2009-05-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

The video say just one for 5 grand could power an entire home for decades.

Here's a link for more info.

Murs: "The Science"

2009-04-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

Large Scale Solar Storm Predicted between 2010-2012

2009-04-29T00:54:00.000-07:00

a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

Link to rest of article
Supplementary article

Herbal Pandemic Preparedness

2009-04-29T00:38:00.001-07:00

Herbal Pandemic Preparedness
Sources: Farmacy Herbs, Karlo Berger, American Red Cross.

Step One Prevention:
If the flu hits your area the best practice is prevention

Tea:
Sage, Skullcap, Oregano, Thyme, Elder Flower, Holy Basil, Nettle.
2-3 cups daily

Tincture:
Echinacea 2x daily; 2 dropperful (One week on, one week off)
Astragulus Tea (3 cups) or Tincture( 2 dropperful 3x daily)

Food;
Miso, raw garlic, veggie broths, Cayenne pepper, Turmeric, organic
veggies, meats and grains.
Stay away from processed foods, food coloring and sugar and alcohol
(sugars in the body feed bacteria and viruses) and coffee (coffee
dehydrates the body and depletes you of vitamins and minerals that will
help fight off pathogens).

Anti-Viral/ Anti-biotic Hand Wash:
10 drops grapefruit seed extract/ 10 drops tea tree essential oil extract
in 1 gallon water

Antiseptic Spray for surfaces:
Vodka, Water, Tea Tree Oil, Lavender Essential oil. Disinfect door knobs
switches , handles, toys and other surfaces that are commonly touched.

Air Sanitizer:
Simmer water on low heat in a pot with 5 drops Eucalyptus Essential Oil or
5 drops Tea Tree Essential Oil or Lavender Essential Oil

If you do come down with the flu, then focus on immunity!

Continue tea:
Sage, Skullcap, Oregano, Thyme, Elder Flower, Holy Basil, Nettle.
(1 quart daily.)

add these tinctures 2 droperfull 3x daily
Meadowsweet, Japanese Knotweed, Turmeric
(keep up the echinacea and the astragulus)

Colloidal Silver: 2 squirts three times daily

Vitamin C 20000 mg daily

Grapefruit seed Extract: 1/4 teaspoon once daily.

Sleep Aids/ Pain Relief:
Valerian, Chammomile, White Willow Bark, Lemon Balm, St. Johns Wort
Take 1-2 squirts of tincture as needed or 1-2 cups of tea as needed

Stay home and avoid sharing items with household members (pens, papers,
computers, remote control. sheets, towels eating utensils, food.)

Wear a surgical mask when around others.

Clean sheets, bedding and clothes every day.

Take baths with 10 drops of lavender essential oil and 10 drops rosemary
essential oil and sea salt.
If your fever is high, use lukewarm water, if your fever is not high, hot
baths are okay.
(Remember fevers are our bodies way of heating up to kill pathogens. Very
high fevers are dangerous, but a low fever is actually good)

Drink veggie and chicken broths with miso and raw garlic (tons of it!) and
a pinch of Cayenne Pepper.

If you have an appetite eat only organic brown rice and greens/ steamed
veggies ( the simpler the better with food, if you put food that is hard
to digest in your body, your energy goes to digesting, rather than
fighting pathogens)

Air sanitizer: Water steam with Eucalyptus Essential Oil or Tea Tree
Essential Oil or Lavender Oil (do this in the room every 5 hours)

Caregivers should wear disposable gloves and wearing a mask when giving care

Israel Mashup Catch-Up

2009-03-24T10:11:00.000-07:00

1. Israel to double up West Bank settlers
2. Israeli occupation forces and protected Jewish settlers are waging war on Palestinian olive orchards throughout the occupied West Bank
3. Israeli soldiers admit 'murdering' Gazans
4. You are fighting a religious war against gentiles': What rabbis told Israeli soldiers in Gaza war
5. US Army Confirms Israeli Nukes By law, the U.S. would have to cease providing billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel if it determined the country had a nuclear weapons program. That's because the so-called Symington Amendment, passed in 1976, bars assistance to countries developing technology for nuclear weapons proliferation.
6.

Biosand Water Filters

2009-03-08T03:54:00.000-07:00

Filters bacteria, viruses, arsenic, etc. The sand and mold is relatively inexpensive, easy to produce and acquire, and a single system can provide enough water for a family of 8 over the span of many years. It simply requires stirring the top layer in order to clean.

To purchase commercially
Humanitarian Video
Link1
Link2
Link3
Wiki Link
Link 4
Water quality test

While I'm at it I thought I would throw in the Katydyn product page
and a video on the Black Berkey water filters. Each Black Berkey will filter up to 3,000 gallons of water; and all you have you do for maintenance is wipe the outside down with a Scotch Brite pad. A pair of black Berkey's run for $99 and you can make your own drip containers out of sparkletts bottles or buckets. You can also purchase flouride and arsenic attachments for the filter (these are the white canisters you see below) I think the Berkey's even filter out radon!

Microsoft Surface

2009-03-08T03:46:00.000-07:00

Ray Gun

2009-03-08T03:42:00.001-07:00

The Economic Collapse: How It Was Engineered

2009-03-02T12:45:00.000-08:00

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Are We Really OK with Electroshocking Toddlers?

2009-02-09T13:32:00.000-08:00

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. -- C.S. Lewis

Psychiatry's "shock doctrine" is quite literally electroshock, and its latest victims are – I'm not kidding – young children.

On Jan. 25, 2009, the Herald Sun in Melbourne, Australia, reported: "Children younger than 4 who are considered mentally disturbed are being treated with controversial electric shock treatment." In Australia, the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is increasing, and the Herald Sun's report on "Child Shock Therapy" stated that last year, "statistics record 203 ECT treatments on children younger than 14 -- including 55 aged 4 and younger."

Many Americans think that ECT has gone the way of bloodletting, but it continues to be regarded by American psychiatry as a respected treatment, especially for patients who are "treatment resistant" to drugs. Although ECT for young children is nowhere near as common as for adults, most U.S. states do not prohibit ECT for kids. California prohibits ECT for children under the age of 12 but allows children between 12 and 15 to receive ECT if three psychiatrists are in favor of it.

You might think that before any child receives a series of 70 to 170 volts of brain zappings and is thrown into seizures, every other non-traumatic therapy would have been attempted. You might think that before using ECT, in addition to trying every type of psychotherapy, there would also be an exhaustive effort to find a therapist with whom a kid might genuinely connect. You might think all this, but you would be wrong. It is not unusual for psychiatrists to simply prescribe one drug, then another drug, then several drug combinations (called "cocktails"), and if those fail, recommend ECT.

The disproportionate use of ECT on women, especially older women, once made it a feminist issue, but I heard no feminist opposition when Kitty Dukakis recently came out positively about her own ECT. Psychiatry is well aware of its historical bad press about ECT, including Sylvia Plath's nightmarish ordeal, so today, ECT is far more pleasant to observe. Patients are administered an anesthetic and a muscle relaxant prior to ECT so they don't writhe in agony as seizures are induced. However, the effects on the brain have not changed.

There are various modern ECT techniques. However, the scientific reality is that for all of these techniques, without evidence of any brain malignancy, the brain is damaged. Neurologist Sidney Sament describes the process:

"After a few sessions of ECT, the symptoms are those of moderate cerebral contusions ... Electroconvulsive therapy in effect may be defined as a controlled type of brain damage produced by electrical means ... In all cases, the ECT ‘response' is due to the concussion-type, or more serious, effect of ECT. The patient 'forgets' his symptoms because the brain damage destroys memory traces in the brain, and the patient has to pay for this by a reduction in mental capacity of varying degree."

In January 2007, the journal Neuropsychopharmacology published an article about a large-scale study on the cognitive effects (immediately and six months later) of currently used ECT techniques. The researchers found that modern ECT techniques produce "pronounced slowing of reaction time" and "persisting retrograde amnesia" (the inability to recall events that occurred before the traumatic event) that continue six months after treatment.

While ECT proponents admit to collateral damage, especially memory loss, they claim that it is an effective treatment. However, a Kitty Dukakis testimonial is not exactly science. With respect to preventing suicide, the Journal of Affective Disorders in 1999 ("Retrospective Controlled Study of Inpatient ECT: Does it Prevent Suicide?") reported, "We failed to demonstrate that ECT had prevented suicide in hospitalized patients."

Longtime ECT critic, psychiatrist Peter Breggin, in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine in 1998 ("Electroshock: Scientific, Ethical, and Political Issues"), reported that at establishment psychiatry's "Consensus Conference on ECT" in 1985, ECT advocates were unable to come forth with one controlled study showing that ECT had any positive effect beyond four weeks and that many other ECT studies showed that it had no positive effect at all.

The heretical Breggin added, "That ECT had no positive effect after four weeks confirms the brain-disabling principle, since four weeks is the approximate time for significant recovery from the most obvious mind-numbing or euphoric effects of the ECT-induced acute organic brain syndrome." Breggin's "brain-disabling principle" is that even when ECT does "work," it works only temporarily -- the same way that a blow by a sledgehammer or an acid trip might temporarily disconnect one from the reality of one's life and the sources of one's emotional pain.

Psychiatry will always find celebrities who swear by ECT, but the American public rarely hears about those celebrities who have cursed their ECT. In Papa Hemingway, A.E. Hotchner recounts the sad end to Ernest Hemingway's life. Hemingway became extremely depressed, was medicated and ultimately given ECT; but he became even more depressed and complained about the effects of the electroshock:

"Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business?"

In 1961, after a second series of ECT, Hemingway used his shotgun to commit suicide.

If you feel sorry for Hemingway, then what kind of emotional reaction do you have upon discovering that last year 203 Australian children -- including 55 age 4 and younger -- received ECT?

Obama's statement on the Crisis in Palestine

2009-01-06T22:22:00.001-08:00

by Andrew Hughes

Coca -Cola Products Containing Major Quantities of Pesticides

2009-01-06T22:06:00.000-08:00

Apparently these drinks had levels of pesticides that far exceeded those deemed safe for drinking water. Up to 300% higher levels in some cases.

Doctor Decries Israeli Attacks

2009-01-05T23:32:00.000-08:00

Scientists plan to ignite tiny man-made star

2008-12-29T15:05:00.000-08:00

It is science’s star experiment: an attempt to create an artificial sun on earth — and provide an answer to the world’s impending energy shortage.
link

Possibilities for an abundant future

2008-12-28T23:41:00.001-08:00

These machines produce water from moisture in the air

Water for Irrigation from the Air

Water Machines

Home Use

Water Mill

Candy

2008-12-23T22:31:00.000-08:00

UFO's/E.T's In Earth's History

Dumbing Down the Masses

2008-12-23T21:57:00.000-08:00

Poisons such as Mercury and Flouride are administered in vaccines and tap water respectively.

There is Hardly a Method You Know

2008-12-22T11:50:00.000-08:00

The article is a very detailed investigation of the white vigilante groups that formed, with police approval, in the white enclave of Algiers Point in New Orleans in the days after Hurrican Katrina. Although authorities had designated the area -- which had largely escaped damage in the storm and flood -- as a vital evacuation point for those trapped in the city, a group of white residents seized the opportunity to declare open season on anyone with black skin. Many African-Americans were shot and several were killed; but no one knows the exact number, because New Orleans police have refused to investigate any of the incidents, and coroner's records of the gun-blasted bodies that showed up in the area have unaccountably gone missing.
Article HERE

Water Powered Car (COooool!)

2008-12-14T02:48:00.000-08:00

Hold fast to the internet, for the internet may die;
and then we may never again see amazing things like this:

A couple decades later:

State Secret: Thousands Secretly Sterilized

2008-12-03T23:12:00.000-08:00

N.C. Woman Among 65,000 Sterilized by Gov't., Often Without Their Knowledge, in 20th Century

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Health/story?id=708780

The Turkey Has Been Found Guilty

2008-11-22T01:33:00.000-08:00

It's Crime?? Succulence

History's 30 Greatest Conspiracy Theories

2008-11-20T19:50:00.000-08:00

According to the Telegraph

Destruction of Forests Linked to Use of Common Household Products

2008-11-17T20:47:00.000-08:00

Palm Oil, who knew?

Link

Powel Predicting a Crisis

2008-10-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

Watch at 2 mins 40 secs the video below:

It's frightening how Powell and Biden are so sure of themselves.

Porous Defenses

2008-10-25T05:25:00.001-07:00

Congressional investigators have found alarming weaknesses in security procedures at two top laboratories that work with the world’s most dangerous biological agents and diseases. As the country races to open more labs to develop vaccines and treatments for exotic diseases and potential biological weapons, the government clearly has a lot more work to do to ensure that dangerous materials cannot fall into terrorists’ hands.

link

Attack on U.S. Embassy in Yemen Linked to Mossad

2008-10-09T19:35:00.000-07:00

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism..."

link

CONNECTING THE DOTS

2008-10-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

A curious article discussing the nature of the film 'Obsession'. I had never heard of it until reading this article, but it is distressing to know such misleading propaganda is being spread concerning "Islamo-Fascism"; particularly among susceptible voting blocs.

link

From Trap to Crunch to Assimilation - The Great American Power Lunch

2008-10-07T22:13:00.000-07:00

one of the more informative takes on this crisis

Before I start with anything about the banks and the financial markets and this whole mess, I should start at the beginning of all this. On the news the words are flashed, subprime, subprime, mortgage, housing crisis. Crisis crisis crisis! Well just what the hell is the subprime mortgage crisis?

link

Cynthia McKinney States 5,000 Executed During Hurricane Katrina

2008-10-07T19:48:00.000-07:00

Can of Worms

2008-09-29T20:09:00.000-07:00

educate-yourself.org

'project blue beam'

Relativity drive: The end of wings and wheels?

2008-09-26T23:05:00.000-07:00

Roger Shawyer has developed an engine with no moving parts that he believes can replace rockets and make trains, planes and automobiles obsolete. "The end of wings and wheels" is how he puts it. It's a bold claim.

link

"discretion is the better part of valour"

2008-09-26T12:13:00.000-07:00

"In My World..."

2008-09-26T11:29:00.000-07:00

....In my world, the bank entrusted with holding my money was seized and sold by the federal government to JP Morgan Chase.

M.A.V

2008-09-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

craayzee....(link has video)

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio — It may look like a futuristic arcade game, but it's a scene from an official Air Force animated video: Bad guys of indiscernible origin being shadowed, from a careful distance, by small robotic drones designed to resemble birds and insects.

Ming the Mechanic: The unknown 20 trillion dollar company

2008-09-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

There is a busy little private company you probably never have heard about, but which you should. Its name is the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. See their website. Looks pretty boring. Some kind of financial service thing, with a positive slogan and out there to make a little business. You can even get a job there. Now, go and take a look at their annual report. Starts with a nice litte Flash presentation and has a nice message from the CEO. And take a look at the numbers. It turns out that this company holds 23 trillion dollars in assets, and had 917 trillion dollars worth of transactions in 2002. That's trillions, as in thousands of thousands of millions. 23,000,000,000,000 dollars in assets.

Link

America Reduced to Third World Status

2008-09-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

found on davidicke.com

World history is spotted with stories of political conquests: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, the Pharaohs, Alexander the Great, and Roman Caesars, each who seized physical control of a country, its economy and assets. History holds no story of a take over based solely on a country’s assets, until now. The modern day Attila’s, Genghis Khan’s, Pharaoh’s, and Caesar’s are the men who own and control the Central Banks of the world. America’s Central Bank is the Federal Reserve, which controls our monetary system, is not part of our governmental system, and, although its name would imply, it has no reserves.

The 13th month of America’s credit crisis may hold its own in history as a country whose economic power and bulk of wealth overnight become the assets of the Federal Reserve. This may well be the finest coup d’état.

rest of the article is here

How 6,700 Tons of Radioactive Sand from Kuwait Ended Up in Idaho

2008-09-17T20:53:00.000-07:00

On April 26, 2008, the BBC Alabama arrived in Longview, Wash., carrying 6,700 tons of Kuwaiti sand. The sand had become contaminated with depleted uranium when U.S. military vehicles and munitions caught fire at Doha Army base in Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War. The depleted uranium was being repatriated. The sand was a gift of the Kuwaiti government.

So was the cost of repatriation. Neither government will discuss just how much the tab was.

The Longview Daily News reported that Mike Wilcox, vice president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union Local 21, initially had been "concerned about the safety of longshoremen and the entire community when he heard a shipment of depleted uranium was coming into Longview."

But the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined that the sand contained "unimportant quantities" of radioactive material, and officials from the Department of Health would be available to test radiation levels -- just in case any of the sand spilled.

At the last minute, the Army notified port authorities that tests had revealed that the sand was also contaminated with lead -- in fact, four times more lead than the EPA's limit for hazardous materials. Transshipment was delayed for a few days awaiting a green light from the EPA.

Wilcox told the Daily News that he hoped the delivery would be a one-time thing.

Over the next month, longshoremen loaded 160 containers onto railcars bound for an Idaho-based waste disposal site owned by a company called American Ecology. When the sand arrived at the Idaho site, the company did its own tests and, as Chad Hyslop, project director for American Ecology, told the Daily News, "found no hazardous levels of lead."

Doug Rokke, who quit his job directing the cleanup of radioactive battlefields for the Army, contacted American Ecology and discovered "that they had absolutely no knowledge of U.S. Army Regulation 700-48, U.S. Army PAM 700-48, U.S. Army Technical Bulletin 9-1300-278, and all of the medical orders dealing with depleted uranium contamination, environmental remediation procedures, safety and medical care."

Hazardous materials storage has become a lucrative and growing business, especially since Donald Rumsfeld began implementing his plans for a sleek new "global cavalry" capable of swift and lethal response from strategically placed "frontier stockades" to punish bad guys whenever and wherever they have been bad. According to the Pentagon's annual "Base Structure Report," which itemizes its foreign and domestic military real estate, the Department of Defense currently operates more than 800 such bases around the world; 5,311 if you count the ones in American territories and on the U.S. mainland; probably well over 6,000 if you count the ones, like Doha in Kuwait, that for some reason didn't make the list. (Similarly omitted are all U.S. bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Uzbekistan.)

Rumsfeld, coyly switching metaphors, referred to them as "lily pads," which is about as convincing a euphemism as "American Ecology." Lily pads may sound greener and friendlier than, say, "footprint," which makes one at least think of boot heels, but it is safe to assume -- because there has never been an exception -- that every one of those bases is an environmental disaster area. The U.S. military is the most profligate polluter on the planet.

The Thule base in Greenland, for example, was sort of a pioneer lily pad. In the '40s, it was a convenient hop, skip and a bomber run to Berlin, and later it was part of the Cold War surveillance network. In 1953, the U.S. Navy sailed into Thule Harbor and informed the local Inughuit community that they had 48 hours to leave. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks, but there are houses 100 miles north of here with your names on them. We promise.

"Everyone packed what they could on their dogsleds and set off north across the ice," remembers Aron Qaavigaq, who was 12 at the time. "After a while, my father stopped and looked back. He and my mother were crying. ... We were young and very excited to be going somewhere new. But they kept crying, so we knew there was something wrong."

There were no houses. Qaavigaq and his family spent the winter in tents 695 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The hunting and fishing was lousy, and now the ice is melting. After 55 years, Qaavigaq and the rest of the Inughuit still want to go home. But first they want the United States to clean up the mess they have made: thousands of barrels of toxic chemistry, rubbish heaps, electrical equipment contaminated with PCBs, and one whole hydrogen bomb -- serial number 78252 -- which was never recovered when a B-52 crashed upon landing in 1968.

Unfortunately, unlike the emir of Kuwait, the Inughuits are poor and not very many of them survived the transplant. In a deal struck with the Danish government in 2003, the Bush administration agreed to return the original Inughuit community land in return for continued use of the base.

But the administration insists it is not responsible for any cleanup. "They said if they were to clean up after themselves at Thule, then they would be met by similar demands in the Philippines, Japan and elsewhere in the world," Svend Auken, Denmark's former minister of the environment, told the Christian Science Monitor in August. "They didn't want to set that precedent." CSM also quotes Cheryl Irwin, a spokeswoman for the secretary of defense, opining that cleanup costs "reflected a shared burden with our host nation for our contribution for defense of the free world." The United States has, however, agreed to forgo "any claims for residual value of improvements made while there."

There is a growing resistance to the omnipresence of U.S. military installations around the world. The coalition, though practically invisible in the United States, is evident elsewhere. NOBASES seeks "an end to military domination and intimidation and an end to the social, environmental and economic consequences of these bases in the host countries." The coalition has recently organized massive demonstrations in Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere, and though few have ultimately been successful, they have made acquiescing to American military expansion an increasingly expensive political choice for foreign leaders.

Here at home in Idaho, however, raping the land is cheap. American Ecology supplies the lubricant, and Idaho's Republican officials bend over. Senators Mike Crapo and Larry Craig, Representatives Mike Simpson and Bill Sali, and Gov. Butch Otter and Lt. Gov. Jim Risch have all benefited from American Ecology's generosity.

In the first quarter of 2008, American Ecology reported a record disposal volume and a $13.4 million profit, a 17 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

Asked if the sand is dangerous, Hyslop said, "It's not something you want laying around in Kuwait." So, send it to Idaho instead!

If American Ecology were really thinking outside the litter box, it would be supporting the NOBASES effort to repatriate all our military’s leavings.

Clues to new breakthrough in modern weaponry and warfare

2008-09-17T02:48:00.000-07:00

The program — which Woodward compares to the World War II era Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb — must remain secret for now or it would "get people killed," Woodward said Monday on CNN’s Larry King Live.

"The top secret operations will "some day in history … be described to people’s amazement," Woodward told King.

While he would not reveal the details, Woodward said the terrorists who have been targeted were already aware of the capabilities.

"The enemy has a heads up because they’ve been getting wiped out and a lot of them have been killed," he said. "It’s not news to them."

here

links on economy

2008-09-17T02:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article6259.html
http://www.rense.com/general83/crash.htm

Best Freudian Slip Ever?

2008-09-03T17:46:00.000-07:00

Posted on: August 28, 2008 9:09 AM, by Ed Brayton

Then again, it may not be a slip. Maybe the guy is just ignorant.

In an alley behind a non-descript row of brick buildings on North Speer Boulevard, and on the other side of a large metal gate with armed guards standing in front, Republicans have set up a "war room" in Denver...
Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said the team of nearly two dozen staffers at the opposition headquarters will be "fact-checking" statements made by the Obama campaign and by speakers during the convention.

"Just consider this the Ministry of Truth," quipped Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.

A) That may be the funniest name I've seen in months. B) Someone needs to tell him that the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's book was the place where they crafted lies.

copied from this site: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2008/08/best_freudian_slip_ever.php

McClueless

2008-08-18T16:34:00.000-07:00

"Most working families today do not have homes that have anywhere near ten rooms. John McCain has ten houses. Many working people in America have to work two and three jobs to provide for their families and pay their car loans. John McCain hops on a private jet. Is it any wonder why McCain champions a George Bush agenda of cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, helping oil companies turn record profits, and leaving working families to fend for themselves? McCain's velvet world leaves him utterly unprepared to make the tough choices we need to restore the middle class and ensure that everyone in America has quality, affordable health insurance."

- Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

Israel's prime minister to step down

2008-07-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

* Story Highlights
* Israel's prime minister announces he will not be party leader at the next election
* Ehud Olmert has been embroiled in a corruption probe
* He said he will resign once his Kadima party elects a new chairman
* Kadima has agreed to hold primary elections by September 17

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Scandal-hit Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced Wednesday that he will not be his party's leader going into the next election.

Citing "a wave of investigations and criticism" at the hands of his political opponents, he said he will resign once his Kadima party elects a new chairman.

"I am not doing this out of a feeling that I cannot do my job. ... I believe in my ability to continue," he said at his official residence.

"When forced to choose between my own personal standing and considerations that relate to the welfare of the state, it is the latter that will take precedence."

There has been a slew of inquiries into allegations against Olmert. He denies any wrongdoing and has never been convicted of a crime.

Last month, Israeli lawmakers reached a deal that will allow Olmert to stay in power for a few more months. In exchange, Olmert's party agreed to hold primary elections by September 17.

No date has been set for general elections, which will have to be held by sometime next year. VideoWatch Olmert explain why he is stepping down »

Olmert has been embroiled in a corruption inquiry, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak had said he would pursue new elections if Olmert didn't step down.

Barak's office said after the announcement, "Prime Minister Olmert made a right and appropriate decision.''

Barak is the leader of the Labor party, Olmert's chief coalition partner, and a former prime minister himself.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, one of Olmert's top rivals within Kadima, said in May that the party needed to be ready to replace the prime minister should he step down. There was no immediate reaction Wednesday from Livni.

Olmert had said he would resign only if he is indicted on corruption charges.

Israeli authorities are investigating allegations that Olmert, while serving as Jerusalem mayor and a government minister, asked various public organizations to cover the same expenses and pocketed the extra money.

In May, a U.S. businessman testified that he gave cash-filled envelopes to Olmert.

Olmert was Jerusalem's mayor from 1993 to 2003 and served in several cabinet posts from 2003 to 2006. He took over as prime minister after a 2006 stroke left then-premier Ariel Sharon in a coma from which he has never recovered.

CNN's Atika Shubert in Jerusalem said the allegations surrounding Olmert had made him deeply unpopular with Israelis.

Olmert's announcement comes as the United States is pushing for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement before President Bush leaves office in January.

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Washington remains committed to working with Israel, and "the Israelis will work out their own politics."

And a White House official said Wednesday that Bush spoke with Olmert to wish him well after he announced his decision to step down.

"Relations between the United States and Israel during Prime Minister Olmert's tenure have been exceptionally close and cooperative, and the president has appreciated his friendship, his leadership, and his work for peace," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

Let's hope the next prime minister is a little more justice and tolerance inclined. I doubt it but fingers will remain crossed.

Dr. Kush: How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry.

2008-07-25T18:18:00.000-07:00

by David Samuels
The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_samuels?currentPage=all

Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States of America

2008-07-23T13:25:00.000-07:00

From Jack Cafferty's CNN blog:

"In case you’re wondering why our economy is in the toilet, President Bush had the explanation at a closed Republican fund-raiser in Houston last week:

”Wall Street got drunk – it’s one of the reasons I asked you to turn off your TV cameras. It got drunk and now it’s got a hangover. The question is: how long will it sober up.”

The depth of the intellect at the very top of our nation’s government is staggering, isn’t it? Quite an assessment coming from a reformed alcoholic. The president had apparently requested that those attending the event turn off their cameras, but the comments were recorded and started popping up on Texas news outlets.

The White House grabbed their brooms and immediately began sweeping up after him. They say Mr. Bush was referring to the fact that, “the markets were using very complex financial instruments that had grown up over the years, and when confronted with the shock of this housing downturn, they did not fully understand what the consequences were going to be.”

Problem is, that doesn’t sound at all like the president saying “Wall Street got drunk.” It’s that kind of shallowness that has created an appetite in the American public and overseas for someone like Barack Obama.

King Abdullah of Jordan actually cut short his vacation this week so he could meet with Obama. It must be like someone who works in a nursery all week finally getting a chance to have a conversation with an adult."

Crisis of Faith: Danger

2008-07-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

They're in deep S-

2008-07-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

Waxman Threatens Mukasey With Contempt Over Cheney's FBI Interview on CIA Leak Probe

Karl Rove's Contempt for the Constitution and the Public's Right to Know

Did you know that Karl Rove was relatively recently added to the cast of the illustrious quality fair television programming that is the Fox News Channel? I don't know what to say about that. I think you understand. They're ON THE WRONG SIDE! Or are we the enemy?

Words to Live By

2008-06-10T23:18:00.000-07:00

From the preface to the 1900 edition of Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman:

"The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman it is enough … the fact will prevail through the universe … but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured … others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches … and shall master all attachment."

A Superhighway to Bliss

2008-05-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

By LESLIE KAUFMAN
New York Times

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.

But she did it by having a stroke.

On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.

After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”

While her spirit soared, her body struggled to live. She had a clot the size of a golf ball in her head, and without the use of her left hemisphere she lost basic analytical functions like her ability to speak, to understand numbers or letters, and even, at first, to recognize her mother. A friend took her to the hospital. Surgery and eight years of recovery followed.

Her desire to teach others about nirvana, Dr. Taylor said, strongly motivated her to squeeze her spirit back into her body and to get well.

This story is not typical of stroke victims. Left-brain injuries don’t necessarily lead to blissful enlightenment; people sometimes sink into a helplessly moody state: their emotions run riot. Dr. Taylor was also helped because her left hemisphere was not destroyed, and that probably explains how she was able to recover fully.

Today, she says, she is a new person, one who “can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere” on command and be “one with all that is.”

To her it is not faith, but science. She brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities. Generally, the left brain gives us context, ego, time, logic. The right brain gives us creativity and empathy. For most English-speakers, the left brain, which processes language, is dominant. Dr. Taylor’s insight is that it doesn’t have to be so.

Her message, that people can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life by sidestepping their left brain, has resonated widely.

In February, Dr. Taylor spoke at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference (known as TED), the annual forum for presenting innovative scientific ideas. The result was electric. After her 18-minute address was posted as a video on TED’s Web site, she become a mini-celebrity. More than two million viewers have watched her talk, and about 20,000 more a day continue to do so. An interview with her was also posted on Oprah Winfrey’s Web site, and she was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for 2008.

She also receives more than 100 e-mail messages a day from fans. Some are brain scientists, who are fascinated that one of their own has had a stroke and can now come back and translate the experience in terms they can use. Some are stroke victims or their caregivers who want to share their stories and thank her for her openness.

But many reaching out are spiritual seekers, particularly Buddhists and meditation practitioners, who say her experience confirms their belief that there is an attainable state of joy.

“People are so taken with it,” said Sharon Salzberg, a founder of the Insight Mediation Society in Barre, Mass. “I keep getting that video in e-mail. I must have 100 copies.”

She is excited by Dr. Taylor’s speech because it uses the language of science to describe an occurrence that is normally ethereal. Dr. Taylor shows the less mystically inclined, she said, that this experience of deep contentment “is part of the capacity of the human mind.”

Since the stroke, Dr. Taylor has moved to Bloomington, Ind., an hour from where she was raised in Terre Haute and where her mother, Gladys Gillman Taylor, who nursed her back to health, still lives.

Originally, Dr. Taylor became a brain scientist — she has a Ph.D. in life sciences with a specialty in neuroanatomy — because she has a mentally ill brother who suffers from delusions that he is in direct contact with Jesus. And for her old research lab at Harvard, she continues to speak on behalf of the mentally ill.

But otherwise, she has dialed back her once loaded work schedule. Her house is on a leafy cul-de-sac minutes from Indiana University, which she attended as an undergraduate and where she now teaches at the medical school.

Her foyer is painted a vibrant purple. She greets a stranger at the door with a warm hug. When she talks, her pale blue eyes make extended contact.

Never married, she lives with her dog and two cats. She unselfconsciously calls her mother, 82, her best friend.

She seems bemused but not at all put off by the hundreds who have reached out to her on a spiritual level. Religious ecstatics who claim to see angels have asked her to appear on their radio and television programs.

She has declined these offers. Although her father is an Episcopal minister and she was raised in his church, she cannot be counted among the traditionally faithful. “Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain,” she said.

Still, Dr. Taylor says, “nirvana exists right now.”

“There is no doubt that it is a beautiful state and that we can get there,” she said.

That belief has certainly sparked debate. On Web sites like evolvingbeings.com and in Eckhart Tolle discussion groups, people debate whether she is truly enlightened or just physically damaged and confused.

Even her own scientific brethren have wondered.

“When I saw her on the TED video, at first I thought, Oh my god, is she losing it,” said Dr. Francine M. Benes, director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, where Dr. Taylor once worked.

Dr. Benes makes clear that she still thinks Dr. Taylor is an extraordinary and competent woman. “It is just that the mystical side was not apparent when she was at Harvard,” Dr. Benes said.

Dr. Taylor makes no excuses or apologies, or even explanations. She says instead that she continues to battle her left brain for the better. She gently offers tips on how it might be done.

“As the child of divorced parents and a mentally ill brother, I was angry,” she said. Now when she feels anger rising, she trumps it with a thought of a person or activity that brings her pleasure. No meditation necessary, she says, just the belief that the left brain can be tamed.

Her newfound connection to other living beings means that she is no longer interested in performing experiments on live rat brains, which she did as a researcher.

She is committed to making time for passions — physical and visual — that she believes exercise her right brain, including water-skiing, guitar playing and stained-glass making. A picture of one of her intricate stained-glass pieces — of a brain — graces the cover of her book.

Karen Armstrong, a religious historian who has written several popular books including one on the Buddha, says there are odd parallels between his story and Dr. Taylor’s.

“Like this lady, he was reluctant to return to this world,” she said. “He wanted to luxuriate in the sense of enlightenment.”

But, she said, “the dynamic of the religious required that he go out into the world and share his sense of compassion.”

And in the end, compassion is why Dr. Taylor says she wrote her memoir. She thinks there is much to be mined from her experience on how brain-trauma patients might best recover and, in fact, she hopes to open a center in Indiana to treat such patients based on those principles.

And then there is the question of world peace. No, Dr. Taylor doesn’t know how to attain that, but she does think the right hemisphere could help. Or as she told the TED conference:

“I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.”

video: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

Rubbish

2008-05-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent, and Daniel Howden
Tuesday, 5 February 2008

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" – a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.

He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"

Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.

Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that there was "no reason to doubt" Algalita's findings.

"After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems."

Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said.

According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,

Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.

How much is your time worth?

2008-05-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

03/13/99
How Much Is Your Time Worth?

I've been meaning to write this article for about six years. I
kept "not quite getting around to it" and putting it off, sometimes to
a degree that I find maddening.

To put it into my perspective, roughly 87,660,000 children
have died of starvation in the time that I've been not writing this
article. That's a population roughly the 3.5 times the size of Mexico
City, the most populous city currently on the planet.

When I first wrote this article in early 1999, I pointed out
that roughly 40,000 children die of starvation every day on this
planet. I learned this fact in the late 1980's or very early
1990's, when I began studying global health and housing issues.

Happily, those numbers are changing for the better, and less
people are starving to death each day. Unhappily, they aren't changing
very quickly, so we're still losing 24,000/day as of this update in
mid-May, 2003. As a result, some of the figures in the examples are a
bit out of date. However, the general point of this essay stands, so
I'll keep the original figures, and leave calculating the current
rates as an exercise for the reader in whatever time you're reading
this. Hopefully, all of this will seem like quaint history before much
longer, and no one will be dying of starvation anymore, but there's
still a lot of work left to do.

I bought a book called "Ending Hunger: An idea whose time has
come" (ISBN 0-03-006189-X) from a thrift-store on May 3, 1999, just a
month and a half after writing the first draft of this article. I
found it for $2.29, and it's a fantastic resource for those interested
in hunger issues and information. As of this update (mid-May, 2003),
Amazon.com has 49 new & used copies available, starting at $0.95.

The book was published and (c) 1985 by Praeger Publishers, and
author credit goes simply to "The Hunger Project". On page 2 it states
as its reference numbers the following statistics:

* 1 billion of us chronically undernourished
* 13-18 million of us dead a year
* 35,000 of us a day
* 24 of us (18 of whom are children) a minute

Then continues with:

"Yet because we view hunger in the background of life, this
terrible toll does not enter our headlines, nor, for most of us, our
concerns.

For most of us. But not for all."

If you're interested in finding out the current hunger
numbers, I'd recommend starting with the Worldwatch Institute at
http://www.worldwatch.org/ (While there, you might also want to pick
up a copy of the current edition of their book, "State of the World".)

For about as close to "live" data as you'll likely find, check
out o.s.Earth's "Worldometers". Their Food Supply meters are at
http://www.osearth.com/resources/worldometers/worldfood.shtml and
there are many other ones to check out. Please do.

Another good reference, and excellent project, is The Hunger
Site, at http://www.thehungersite.com/ There, you can click on links
that will cause internet advertisers to donate money that buys food
for starving people. (This is about the only good use I've ever seen
for advertising on the Internet. <*grin*> )

The Hunger Site states: "About 24,000 people die every day
from hunger or hunger-related causes. This is down from 35,000 ten
years ago, and 41,000 twenty years ago. Three-fourths of the deaths
are children under the age of five."

At the beginning of the article, I made the claim that
87,660,000 children had died in the time I'd spent *not* writing this
piece. Here's my original math, using the 40,000/day figure:

40,000 people (I said "children", but the 75% figure from
"Ending Hunger" might make that only 30,000 children) starve to death
each day.

There are 365.25 days in a year (the .25 adds up to one leap
year every four years.)

(6)*(365.25)*(40,000)=87,660,000 children who've starved to
death in the past six years on planet earth. The numbers are a bit
rough, but don't worry, it will be larger by the time you read this,
and should cover any discrepancy.

Sorry to start this whole thing off on such a down note, but
it really is frustrating, and maddening.

Anyway, 40,000 per day is roughly 1,666 per hour, which is
roughly 28 per minute, which is roughly one child dying every 2
seconds. Mind you, this is only death from starvation and
malnutrition. Not disease, or accident, or war, or any of the litany
of other things that can kill children. It also doesn't cover adults
or senior citizens, just kids. It's a whole lot of kids, though.

So, roughly six years ago (from the initial writing - early
1993), I was walking down a street in San Jose, California, working in
a job I didn't like very much, fresh out of college with a head full
of ideas and ideals. I was calculating exactly how much I was making
per hour doing what I was doing (a dismal number somewhere in the
single-digit dollars per hour), and then calculating what I figured
was the potential value to society if I were able to pursue my chosen
work of finding solutions that would keep those kids from starving to
death.

Know what hourly rate I came up with?

$1.66 billion/hour. In long form, that's roughly
$1,660,000,000/hour.

Here's my math:

40,000 dead kids per day equals 40,000 people who can't ever
contribute to society, per day. That's lost value to society as a
whole. This is calculated by looking at a "standard" working-life of
approximately 40 years per person, and a rough estimate of a person
earning roughly $1,000,000 in their lifetime (a conservative estimate,
since that would average to about $25,000 per year for 40 years with
no raise, ever, in that entire time). It also doesn't take into
account the fact that society generally figures they're getting MORE
out of a person than they're paying that person, otherwise, it's not a
profitable venture for them.

So, we end up with (40,000/day)*($1,000,000 potential personal
income)=$40,000,000,000 day, or $1,666,666,666/hour lost to society.

Of course, I don't actually expect anyone to PAY me $1.66
billion per hour to go work on figuring out how to feed the world, or
to eliminate homelessness, ensure clean drinking water for all, or
similar things. To be quite frank, there's no one in the world,
individual or government, who can afford such rates. I'm merely
calculating the potential worth to society, and quietly wondering to
myself if we can afford NOT to be addressing these issues.

These are merely the things that I'd RATHER be doing with my
time, if I, like most others, wasn't worrying about how to pay the
rent, power, phone and grocery bills, and all the other things that
pop up unexpectedly. It also causes me to wonder about all those other
billions of people out there, and what it would be that THEY would do,
if they didn't have to worry about scraping out a living in an office,
or a factory, or a field, or an alleyway. What would happen if
EVERYONE had the means to support themselves indefinitely, and could
really turn their attention to whatever it was that their
inner-compass pointed them towards?

How much is it worth to society to develop a cure to AIDS? How
about cancer? How about antigravity or interstellar travel? How about
new music? New art? Perhaps teaching the future generations of
scientists, doctors, lawyers, and parents? How about writers?
Programmers? Designers? Space Technicians? Much much is it worth to us
to negotiate an end to the constant bickering between countries? To
stop genocide and conflict between nations who have historically
battled over who-knows-what?

I don't know if these things HAVE a price, but I'm certain
that they're worth a lot. An awful lot.

My main curiousity is in figuring out ways to make sure that
people have their basic needs met. That they have a roof over their
heads, clean water to drink, plentiful food to fill their bellies, and
lots of new ideas to fill their minds. I want to see people who have
lots of leisure time to ask themselves and each other "What if...?",
then try to find new answers. Having people punch clocks and then
stand around for 8 hours per day doing robot work seems better just
left for robots. I think that people, and the minds that those people
posess, have far more important things to be doing with their
time. And I think that their time is probably worth a LOT more to
society than whatever the going rate is in the job market.

So I ask you, and I ask you to ask yourself: What is it that
you'd REALLY rather be doing, if you had your choice? What sort of
changes might that activity bring about? Who might it benefit (think
BIG!), and how would it help? Then ask yourself if you (and we) can
really afford NOT having you follow your chosen path?

In short, I'd like you to figure out:

"How much is your time REALLY worth?"

Pat

___________________Think For Yourself____________________
Patrick G. Salsbury - http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/
Check out the Reality Sculptors Project: http://reality.sculptors.com/
---------------------------------------------------------
"Kick your own ass. Live up to your true potential."
-World Entertainment War

Most Recent Update: 11-05-03

2008-05-18T17:27:00.000-07:00

glad this man is on TV.

Oh Billy, Come Now.

2008-05-13T23:37:00.000-07:00

I have to thank Colbert for this one.

Myanmar Cyclone

2008-05-11T22:06:00.000-07:00

YANGON, Myanmar May 12, 2008, 12:38 am ET
AP

Myanmar's monumental task of feeding and sheltering 1.5 million cyclone survivors suffered yet another blow Sunday when a boat laden with relief supplies — one of the first international shipments — sank on its way to the disaster zone.

The death toll jumped to more than 28,000 and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband warned that "malign neglect" by the isolated nation's military rulers was creating a "humanitarian catastrophe of genuinely epic proportions."

The junta has been sharply criticized for its handling of the May 3 disaster, from failing to provide adequate warnings about the pending storm to responding slowly to offers of help.

Though international assistance has started trickling in, the few foreign relief workers who have been allowed entry into Myanmar have been restricted to the largest city of Yangon. Only a handful have succeeded in getting past checkpoints into the worst-affected areas.

But in what was seen as a huge concession by the junta, the United States finally got the go-ahead to send a C-130 cargo plane packed with supplies to Yangon on Monday, with two more air shipments scheduled to land Tuesday.

At the Thai air force base in Utapao, the C-130 was loaded with 28,000 pounds of supplies, including mosquito nets, blankets and water. Lt. Col. Douglas Powell, U.S. Marines spokesman for the operation, said the plane was carrying U.S. government, not military, supplies and was unarmed.

Myanmar's military rulers are deeply suspicious of Washington, which has long been one of the junta's biggest critics, pointing to human rights abuses and its failure to hand over power to a democratically elected government.

"We hope that this is the beginning of a long line of assistance from the United States," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters in Crawford, Texas over the weekend. "They're going to need our help for a long time."

Highlighting the many challenges ahead, however, a Red Cross boat carrying rice, drinking water and other goods for more than 1,000 people sank Sunday near hard-hit Bogalay town. All four aid workers on board were safe.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies could not say how much of the cargo has been lost, but it said the food supplies were contaminated by river water.

"Apart from the delay in getting aid to people we may now have to re-evaluate how we transport that aid," said Michael Annear, the IFRC's disaster manager in Yangon, who described the sinking as "a big blow."

Other aid was increasingly getting through, the group said, but on "nowhere near the scale required."

Heavy showers were forecast for the coming week, further complicating delivery of aid that is still barely reaching victims in the Irrawaddy delta, which was pounded by 120 mph winds and 12-foot-high storm surges from the sea.

In hard hit Laputta, hundreds of survivors crowded the floor of a monastery's open-air hall, the sound of hungry children wailing. Many people tried to sleep sitting up because of lack of space.

Pain Na Kon, a tiny nearby village of just 300, was completely obliterated. The only 12 known survivors huddled together in a tent set up in a rice field, sharing a small portion of biscuits and watery soup handed out at a local monastery.

"We don't know when they will also run out of food," said U Nyo, casting glances at his 6-year-old niece, Mien Mien, who lost both her parents in the cyclone and sat outside in the dark.

U Nyo called out to her gently, but Mien Mien stared emptily into the darkness. Overcome with emotion, U Nyo walked, teary-eyed, over to the girl and sat beside her in silence.

His wife, Saw San Myant, described in a hushed voice what had happened to Mien Mien's father.

"We hung together on a coconut tree as the tide continued to rise. Her father was separated. He tried to hang onto a pole of the hut but that was broken. The wind was too strong. She saw her father swept away by the water but we didn't see anyone else. We think they are all dead," she said.

On Sunday, Myanmar's state television said the death toll from Cyclone Nargis had gone up by about 5,000 to 28,458 — with another 33,416 missing — though some experts said it could be 15 times that if people do not get clean water and sanitation soon. The U.N. said about 2 million people were severely affected by the storm.

"A natural disaster is turning into a humanitarian catastrophe of genuinely epic proportions in significant part because of the malign neglect of the regime," said British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

"I would be amazed if there hadn't been about 100,000 who had died already ... what's more, hundreds of thousands more are at risk," he told British Broadcasting Corp. television.

Meanwhile, aid was piling up in foreign countries, awaiting approval from the junta.

The country's main airport in Yangon is incapable of handling more than five flights a day, when it should be taking in at least one every hour, said PLAN, a London-based children's aid group.

"Logistically, the situation looks bleak," it said in a statement. "In short, they have one congested airport, ill equipped to deal with the influx of cargo, no port, restricted fuel and no trucks."

Aid group World Vision said it has requested visas for 20 people and received approval for two, while the U.N. World Food Program had one approved out of the 16 it requested. Still, the U.N. was making some progress in aid delivery.

The junta released 38 tons of high-energy biscuits to the WFP that were confiscated on Friday and several other shipments were on their way.

"We're delighted and very encouraged by what is a very positive sign," said the group's spokesman, Marcus Prior.

But World Vision, which has a big presence in Myanmar, said relief material delivered so far is a tiny fraction of what is needed.

The junta says it wants to hand out all donated supplies on its own.

But many survivors have been without help for more than a week after fleeing their inundated villages to take shelter in monasteries and schools in towns. The canals and flooded roads to higher ground were littered with the bloated bodies of humans. The stench was everywhere.

"The first few we saw, we were all very shocked," said U Pinyatale, a monk living near the Pyapon River, where dozens of corpses floated in the brackish waters. "After a while, there were just too many."

The Panama Deception

2008-04-28T23:49:00.000-07:00

I find it sickening, however, not surprising, that the U.S can get away with the building up of a ridiculous pretext in order to rationalize a totally inhuman attack resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent victims, not to mention the displacement of thousands more. It's interesting to note that the motive behind this attack, comically named "operation just cause," is very much so parallel to interventions in the Middle East and everywhere else the U.S sees an opportunity to profit off the suffering of others. I suggest you guys take a gander at this "hidden horror."

Water as Fuel

2008-04-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

This is apparently old news, but I hadn't heard of it until now. From the little that I've read on it so far there seems to be the question of how this would work without using electricity to generate the radio waves needed. Regardless, it's pretty interesting and worth taking a look at.

Human Nature?

2008-04-14T18:25:00.000-07:00

'World peace' hitcher is murdered

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

Turkish police say they have detained a man in connection with the killing.

Reports say the man led the police to the body.

Autopsy

Ms di Marineo was hitch-hiking from Milan to Israel and the Palestinian Territories with a fellow artist on their "Brides on Tour" project.

They had separated in Istanbul, planning to reunite in Beirut.

Ms di Marineo was last seen on 31 March in Gebze.

An Italian embassy official told the Associated Press news agency police tracked the man when he put a new SIM card into Ms di Marineo's mobile phone.

Local media identified the suspect only by the initials MK and said he had a previous conviction for theft.

Ms di Marineo's sister, who had gone to Turkey to look for her, identified the body. An autopsy is being conducted in Istanbul.

"Her travels were for an artistic performance and to give a message of peace and of trust, but not everyone deserves trust," another sister, Maria, told the Italian news agency, Ansa.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7344381.stm

Published: 2008/04/12 14:42:57 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Overdrawn... The Seemingly Perpetual Cycle Of In and Out of Debt

2008-04-08T00:02:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I sometimes feel as though my life is dictated by my relationship with the bank that alternates between only two possible situations: the instance in which they hold my money and the one in which I owe them money. It seems as though there is a balance so delicate between these two that it's nearly impossible to achieve a stable and lasting security within that relationship. But there's something about it that doesn't feel right. I mean, I suck at handling money but I'm capable of learning a lesson, especially after overdraft fee #68. Alas, it may be time for a breakup, and this one might be awkward because, as it turns out, it's not me--it's them.

For those who can relate, and for anyone currently involved with a bank, these may be things you know already but it never hurts to remind yourself of who you're dealing with and to be sure to, erm, check yourself before your wreck yourself--financially speaking.

These facts were taken from the site for the documentary film above -- overdrawnmovie.net:

-- Banks make approximately anywhere from $17 to more than $50 billion per year (depending on who you talk to) from Overdraft (or Non Sufficient Fund, NSF) Fees, which represents roughly 30% of their fee revenues. Almost all of this (80% by one estimate), comes from low-income consumers. In the case of Washington Mutual, they make about $1 billion from their 10 million checking account customers, which comes to about $100 per customer, per year. These accounts are advertised as "free checking".

--Though the banks continue to call overdraft charges 'fees', they are in fact loans (which is stated in three different places in documents of the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency), which means that they should be covered under the Truth in Lending Act. A loophole currently exists which allows them to continue to call advancing credit to consumers 'fees'.

--Banks have been chastised by the US Government for misleading advertising practices, insuffiently informing account holders of the nature of their "Overdraft Protection" programs, and turning an old system of ad-hoc bounced check policies into a major new sourc of revenue.

--The average NSF fee has more than quintupled in the last twenty years, from around $4 to more than $20.

Brown Says China May Hold Talks with Dalai Lama

2008-03-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

NPR.org, March 19, 2008

· British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday that the Chinese government is willing to hold discussions about Tibet with exiled spiritual leader Dalai Lama.

Brown said China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao set two conditions for the talks, which have already been met.

"The premier told me that, subject to two things that the Dalai Lama has already said — that he does not support the total independence of Tibet and that he renounces violence — that he would be prepared to enter into dialogue with the Dalai Lama," Brown told parliament.

Brown said during a conversation with Wen on Wednesday that he made it clear the violence in Tibet must end.

Protests against Chinese rule reached a peak Friday in a riot in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The Dalai Lama's government-in-exile — based in the Indian town of Dharamsala — said 99 people died when Chinese security forces tried to break up the riot. The Chinese government put the death toll at fewer than 20.

The official China News Service reported that 160 Lhasa rioters had so far given themselves up to authorities. The Tibet government set a deadline of midnight Monday for those involved to surrender or face harsh punishment.

On Tuesday, Wen accused the Dalai Lama's supporters of organizing the violent clashes in hopes of sabotaging the Olympics and bolstering their campaign for independence in the Himalayan territory.

The protests, which are the most serious challenge to China's rule in the region in almost two decades, are forcing human rights campaigners to re-examine their approach to the Aug. 8-24 games.

The Dalai Lama has said he wants only greater autonomy for his homeland, not independence from China.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government insisted that the unrest in Tibet would not deter plans to take the Olympic torch to the top of Mount Everest.

Brown plans to meet with the Dalai Lama when the Buddhist leader visits London in May — a move that could undermine Brown's efforts to strengthen relations with China.

Brown visited Beijing in January, stressing that Britain is open to Chinese trade and investment and lobbying for China's new $200 billion sovereign wealth fund to open an office in London.

From NPR staff and wire reports

Why is No One Talking About This Right Now?...

2008-03-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

...because it's not you, your people, your country, your liberty, or your life. But when it comes to that point, what will we say then, that we were silent now; that a distance of a few thousand miles absolves us from responsibility; that if we believe in what we say we believe, spiritually and politically, we have a responsibility to talk about it, educate one another, and at the very least feel empathy and compassion for the suffering of ALL living beings.

Today, the Dalai Lama warned that if the violence didn't end soon, he would resign the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

People have been putting footage of the uprisings in Dharamsala and Lhasa on Youtube. Google owns Youtube, and thanks to Google's recent deal with the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party today has blocked all access to Youtube to Chinese citizens. SAY SOMETHING.

Excerpt of Obama's Speech Today on Race, Class, and what Matters in the United States

2008-03-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the bad quality of the video.

1% of Adult males behind bars

2008-03-03T20:01:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you have heard about this but just in case...

NEW YORK (AP) -- For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report.

San Quentin State Prison in California holds more than 5,200 inmates.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.

The steadily growing inmate population "is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime," the report said.

Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are prompting officials in many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft in crime.

"We're seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets," she said in an interview. "They want to be tough on crime, they want to be a law-and-order state -- but they also want to save money, and they want to be effective."

The report cited Kansas and Texas as states which have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. Their actions include greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for ex-offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.

"The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens," the report said.

While many state governments have shown bipartisan interest in curbing prison growth, there also are persistent calls to proceed cautiously.

"We need to be smarter," said David Muhlhausen, a criminal justice expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation. "We're not incarcerating all the people who commit serious crimes -- but we're also probably incarcerating people who don't need to be."

According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.

The largest percentage increase -- 12 percent -- was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state's crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state's inmate population has increased by 600 percent.

The Pew report was compiled by the Center on the State's Public Safety Performance Project, which is working directly with 13 states on developing programs to divert offenders from prison without jeopardizing public safety.

"For all the money spent on corrections today, there hasn't been a clear and convincing return for public safety," said the project's director, Adam Gelb. "More and more states are beginning to rethink their reliance on prisons for lower-level offenders and finding strategies that are tough on crime without being so tough on taxpayers."

The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime or in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as "three-strikes" laws, that result in longer prison stays.

"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."

The nationwide figures, as of January 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails -- a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.

The report said the United States is the world's incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.

Fidel's Resignation

2008-02-26T14:04:00.000-08:00

[col. writ. 2/19/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

As news flashed of the formal resignation of Cuba's Fidel Castro from the office of the President, morbid celebrations broke out in 'Little Havana' (Miami), Florida, the U.S. capital of the Cuban exile anti-Castro movement. Just as they rejoiced at his illness in 2006, they reveled at his resignation.

But, Fidel's almost 50-year run as Cuban head-of-state has had a momentous impact, not just in Cuba, but in Latin America, and the vast world beyond.

For as Fidel steps down from power, almost a 1/2 dozen of his ideological sons and daughters have come to power throughout Latin America. While nominally socialist, and deeply nationalist, many of them were inspired by the Cuban Revolution. Some, like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, have embraced a continental and internationalist perspective, one that is overtly opposed to the interventionist policies of the U.S. backed IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank.

Latin America, largely through Cuba's steadfast example, has turned away from the draconian U.S. backed rule of the generals, to the rule of democratic and leftist populists.*

In the realm of education, Cuba's performance has been exemplary. In Central and South America, the average literacy rate is 86.4 percent. Cuba's literacy rate is 98%.

Under its socialist system all education is free. In fact, Cuba is the educator of choice for thousands of people from around the world, especially in higher, and medical education. All of this --for free!

Castro didn't inherit a country with such a high literacy rate. Indeed, in 1981 over a million Cubans (mostly folks in the nations's rural areas) were illiterate. Over 100,000 children over 10 years of age volunteered to participate in the "literacy brigadistas" covering the country to teach the poor and the peasants how to read and to write.

One such man, an alfabetizado (or student) named Juan Martinez wrote, in one of the first sentences of his life, "Nunca me he sentido cubano hasta que aprendi a leer y a escribir..." (In English his words meant, "I never really felt Cuban until I learned to read and write." (Keeble, 54)

In foreign affairs, Cuba put her considerable military power in the front ranks against the racist apartheid system of South Africa. Cuba, supporting the armed forces of Angola, fought South Africa at a place called Cuite Carnivals, inflicting such losses on the apartheid army that it began the long road to negotiation, settlement, and dissolution.

Yes, Castro is laying aside his office, a process which, for U.S. presidents usually means the opportunity to accrue obscene amounts of money. But he leaves a proud tradition of Latin American sovereignty, impressive successes in the field's of education and medicine, and revolutionary resistance to the racist apartheid regime of South Africa.

In large part, his efforts paved the way to peace and democracy in South Africa.

His name, and his example will be remembered for centuries, for the ability of the small to stand up to the mighty.

http://www.prisonradio.org/CastroCubaMumia.htm

URB Next 100 Cover

2008-02-22T01:49:00.000-08:00

Jay Electronica and Erykah Badu cover URB’s Next 100 issue, due out the first week of March.

Here’s a quick quote from the cover story. He’s talking about how he envisions a Jay Electronica concert.

“It’s like a revue from the ’30s or ’40s that comes to town for maybe three days…You sit down and you’re served food and a curtain opens and I come out and talk to the people. A ventriloquist’s dummy might walk out of a wooden cabinet and perform ‘Voodoo Man.’ The curtains may open and you see me performing a song chained in a tank of water. I’ll be performing magic.”

Link in the trunk

A bigger picture

Dead Prez. They Schools

2008-02-21T00:16:00.000-08:00

Nope, that's y'all flag.

Tending to the embers of passion...
(dead) End

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac

2008-02-20T20:17:00.000-08:00

This documentary is about an hour long.

The Yogis of Tibet

2008-02-18T09:04:00.000-08:00

"Since the invasion of Tibet over 50 years ago, China has systematically destroyed the Tibetan culture. One of the most profound losses is the tradition of the great master yogis. The entire system which supported these fascinating mind masters has been inexorably eliminated. In order to record these mystical practitioners for posterity, the filmmakers were given permission to film heretofore secret demonstrations and to conduct interviews on subject matter rarely discussed. This profound historical, spiritual and educational film will someday be the last remnant of these amazing practitioners."

FISA Bill Bush Bluff Bull

2008-02-15T16:01:00.000-08:00

Olbermann for President.

Extra Extra! A message from the apostle Immortal Technique

2008-02-13T02:19:00.000-08:00

The Rumors are true, there will be a new Immortal Technique CD coming out at the end of this Spring. And I am going on a short tour to promote it before I go back and finish the next CD. I have partnered with Green Lantern to bring you the new project entitled

“The 3rd World”

It is an album/mixtape of all original tracks. Political but something very brutal and street orientated like I mentioned in earlier interviews.

I was told that for every page you write in a journal you lose readers, and while I don’t expect you all to sit here for 20 minutes in your busy day to read this entry... It costs less than a stamp to print this up and read in the bathroom or on a break to spread the word.

Now… all of the journal entries that I have made on this page have been toward a specific cause or a subject matter that I have found integral to the survival, advancement, and the education of the Revolutionary spirit of my people. When I say “my people” though, I have already lost some of the more cynical and semantic-driven individuals who would answer, “Are we not all Americans?” Or even deeper and more placating to philosophical means, “Are we not all human beings?” And what of the class structured divisions? Am I to resent another because they were born into wealth, by no fault of their own, as are those who are looked down upon by this society because they are born naked into the world screaming in a refugee camp? Is it not my responsibility to educate those that are kept in a prison of opportunity and blind ignorance to the outside world much like the prince Siddhartha before his divine revelation? Who are “my people?”

It took me most of my young life to begin understanding and learning the extremely long and painful history behind the concept of race. That it was built around the necessity to justify slavery and religious superiority for something beyond the visible goals mentioned. It was created to enforce economic and political domination. When I acknowledged that, it shone a light on a great many things. We must understand that the countries that we immigrate from to America are the bread basket for this empire, and without them there wouldn’t be a fraction of the luxuries, culture and food we have now. The propaganda behind immigration is a necessity for some to drum up because there is a fear of our culture. But if we take away the influence of Latino, African, Asian and Middle Eastern cultures what do the xenophobic racists who hide behind the preservation of “American Culture” really have. I am not threatened by other people’s beliefs and their religious preferences because my convictions are strong, because I have faith in my perspective and I welcome the ideological challenges and historical debate. Were I weak and fearful of confronting those changes perhaps I would fear the addition of more opinions. Such the same are people with allowing others to practice their own culture, because in truth American culture is essentially to many uneducated white Americans supposed to be centered in European culture. Which has never really been true, but has been perceived that way for the past couple of centuries. But now we are calling on America to fulfill it’s promise or wear the crown of hypocrisy it has been ducking and dodging for years.

It was Leo Strauss, one of the surrogate fathers of modern conservatism that suggested that liberalism had failed in the 60’s and 70’s because of the social revolt and apparent movement towards nihilism and hedonistic impulses that tried to devoid the nation of a moral foundation. But there is no greater mischaracterization. The nation was not led astray or conflicted but was in fact schizophrenic during that Revolutionary era. It was torn between the identity it claimed as the Land of the Free and that of the violent oppressor of it’s own people and those with a desire of self-governing over the 3rd World. There are people who have been naïve enough to believe the subtle propaganda thrown out there that attempts to marginalize people who speak about the method in which Communism and Capitalism served the great empires of the world. In such a manner was their service rendered that too many people behind the scenes grew rich at the expense of vassal states that served one or the other side. They were dedicated to the doctrine but unable to look beyond the meaning of their own significance when confronted with the reality that they were pawns in a much larger game. And while the people who lived through such chaos begin to realize the cause and effect in their old age sometimes their children forget. The second generation immigrants that come here from Latin American, Middle Eastern, African and Asian countries sometimes have only have a pedestrian understanding of what past US interventionism has been a part of, in order to protect what it calls “it’s interests.”

With the dollar in the toilet and the subject of the economy FINALLY becoming a national issue the ideas on how to rebuild an economy, and define our foreign policy are still muddled. Some proposed that a low dollar is good for business because others can now buy American products cheaper and it helps us sell goods abroad, until it began to sink like the Lusitania and the average persons savings account lost a significant % on the global market. But since that idiot Brit Hume and the rest of the Right Wing fluff girls on Fox aren’t missing a meal and, none of their friends are struggling to make ends meet, they kept proposing that the economy was doing fine… Unless of course you asked a regular person, and regular people I’m glad to see have finally started making issues like these and healthcare a part of the election instead of nonsense sidelines distractions like missions to Mars and constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage or the big illegal immigrant scare which I’ll discuss shortly…

I recently walked into a store downtown the other day because it was cold as hell outside and I wanted to buy a hat. I found two that looked identical, one was a little thicker than the other and hat a larger brim on it. I picked the heavier hat and looked it over, it had a big sticker that said “Made in America” and named a factory in Michigan where it was made. And right next to it there was another hat with some famous name brand that was thinner and looked kinda flimsy. I looked inside the hat and it said “Made in Vietnam.” Vietnam is a country that this nation once lost a Guerilla war against, (for a variety of reasons) but while the fall of Saigon symbolized the end of Americas forced occupation of the country it was a pyrrhic victory for that nation and its neighbors that had their entire infrastructure obliterated after relentless bombing runs and years of fighting the colonial powers who have historically profited from this political love/hate relationship.

I compared the hats in price and I saw that this item that was made for and handful of pennies in a foreign country with a brand name was selling for about $16 while the sturdier American made $4 hat stood unassumingly right next to it.

I usually buy hats, gloves and mixtapes all from the street vendors on 125th to offset the gentrification perpetuated by the corporate investments in the neighborhoods ruthless gentrification. Harlem is certainly not the same crime ridden area that had left murdered people on our front door when I was a child, but it was made into a nicer place for the specific purpose of moving certain people out and replacing the population of the area. All the while skyrocketing the cost of living. The equivalent of me coming over to your house renovating and cleaning it and you thinking I’m so nice for doing so, until you realize my ulterior motives. That I’m planning on eating in your kitchen, sleeping in your bedroom and living in your living room, but don’t worry I left you a little spot to sleep, next to the shitter. I often explain to my friends in the music business that soon there will be no more “hood” in New York City of which to speak in their rhymes, only to reminisce about. As outsourcing increases and technological revolution sets in workers find their job skills obsolete and their rents quadruples. But, like so many other things this is just a microcosm of a global effort to ethnically cleanse populations.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/gentrification/

US economists have always “conveniently” seen the nationalization of natural resources as bad for the 3rd world because it is said to limit competition and stifle the growth of the global market. Unless of course you are CITGO or have control of your own nation with the sphere of influence and authority to create a national policy around your own market. These are the same people that advocate the exploitation of foreign workers under the premise that those are the best paying jobs in the developing world’s sector and that they are doing the local population a favor by being there. And the 3rd world governments are usually compliant, not because of the economic growth to the nation itself, but rather they look the other way from substandard conditions and outlawed unionizing because of the massive amount of corporate kick-backs they get. The responsibility for unbridled corruption falls on the shoulders of both laissez fair economics practicing companies and installed regimes that are “friendly” to what we call “US interests.” Maybe that’s why we forcefully install and protect so many dictatorships and look away from the abuses of those authoritarian regimes we try to pass of as democracies engage in.

Some will point out that I could have saved you all about 3 or 4 paragraphs by concluding that we go to war for money. Some people have told me that these long dissertations of mine are too complicated to read and that they should be simplified because somehow I’m “less from the streets” if I express myself in these terms. But I’m writing this from Harlem right now. I’m still back and forth from South America where the ghettos are tougher than anything ever seen in the States. And the purpose for this was to express that the economic downturn and outsourcing in this nation does NOT strengthen the local structure but reverses the functionality of labor practices, democracy and human rights law in the developing world.

Global trickle down economics shouldn’t be the mantra of 21st century society.

Needless to say I bought the $4 hat and I left and it left me thinking about the rational behind the debasement of our currency. I also thought about how whenever I did any of the prison programs I do for young Black and Latino people and walked through all the neighborhoods in America I saw people of all so called races, and social walks of life who gained nothing but suffering from our foreign policy.

So naturally the question that always comes to mind when I read about protecting US interests is “Just whose interests in the US are we protecting?” It’s most certainly not the interests of the people at the bottom of the de facto caste system. They are not on the board of directors at the Banks that give developing countries loans to pay off the interest from the loans they were previously given a few decades ago. And they aren’t ones who have been selling you a $5 cup of coffee that costs a fraction of a penny to produce while starving out their workers and blocking their collective bargaining. People who argue that the middle class would enjoy discounts by way of cheaper products because of outsourcing jobs are useless. Their like an asshole who roots for a sports team with the logic that if they win the superbowl, or the world series they will personally inherit the economic boom enjoyed by the city itself. Local businesses have a good day but, sports stores sell Jersey’s, the city pays for a new stadium sometimes. But after that the painfully obvious fact that there is little gain sinks in and someone’s who just lost their 401K ‘s gotta clean up the ticker tape parade. Mind you this coming from a man who put up dough on the Giant’s for 17-1 odds, so it’s not about me hating on sports.

The average American citizen shares probably about a fraction of a percentage, an almost negligible amount of profit for what we achieve abroad. Compared to those sitting on the top of the pyramid that it is. Everything that we touch is imported from the far reaches of the world. Here it provides us with a variety of goods, but what do we trade for that? When did turning a blind eye to Pakistan’s political assassinations while dumping money in the hands of warlords and funding the political “stability” (ie: payoffs to heads of state that allow horribly sub-standards conditions of work) suddenly become in the interest of all the Black and Latino and even middle class white communities???

They aren’t protecting us from terrorism. As a matter of fact it’s become apparent that whether they like to admit it or not the end result of them shielding extremists and militants justifies our presence in the region. We have trouble even deciding what that word and torture means anymore. It isn’t even in the interest of any of the Semitic Diaspora here of either Jewish or Palestinian descent who wish to find a lasting peace when we fund billions of dollars to an IDF war machine. But it’s still actually seen as the “duty” of American according to the corporate media to sponsor that. (Both Hillary and Obama are staunch supporters of Israel by the way)

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1201523779464&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

It’s interesting that the ratio of the population would really have us sending more money to a variety of other countries that have a higher number of representatives among our constituency. This unbalance wouldn’t bother me so much as a taxpayer except that when the inner city communities ask for money from the Federal Government it’s characterized as welfare by the pious GOP and even some Democrats and Libertarians. I think back to the people of El Salvador and those in Nicaragua whose right to elect whatever form of government suited their economy best was blocked. A civil war was funded to a degree that I don’t think modern historian really have the intellectual courage to come to terms with yet. But they have to now. Because the restructuring of 500 yr old class and racial structures perpetrated by European nations during the age of Conquest is the right of every 3rd World nation. It is not our right to be hateful and racist in a reactionary manner but it is our right to be offensive with facts to the oppressor if that means taking back what was stolen from us during the era of Colonialism.

Colonialism. I am one of many who have suggested that this word doesn’t do the period of 1492 to 1994 justice. It doesn’t embody the same awe inspiring terror that words and phrases like “Genocide” or “Systematic Rape” do. But that is exactly what it is. It is decorated with high interest loans that modernize a small % of the country, it is littered with so-called missionaries, it even though it exchanged military presence for a more subtle mercantile monopoly it cannot hide. It coats the concept of ruthless and deceptive control with sweet sugar, but the sugar itself was probably processed through the backbreaking slave labor that our ancestors toiled in during the age of our physical bondage. And now to escape mental slavery we must understand the various dimensions of this foreign policy. We must comprehend the history that mutated a free nation into a slave state after years of violating the land and the people who lived on it.

Around the world there are those who don’t live in the safety of a college dorm or the shelter of even pubic housing and whose Revolutionary ideas, are not sabotaged by the super powers that be. To understand instead of romanticize why people in developing countries Revolt and yet are fearful of Revolution for a good reason we must destroy the mythology of such a struggle. For innocent people always die and innocent women are always raped, even in fighting for the most just causes. I have stated before that this has happened in all Revolutions dating back to the dawn of organized government and tribal society. But when a system has become so corrupt, so blatantly abusive of the people and their capacity to endure the hypocrisy and burden of a nonfunctional or non-believable centralized system, the people chose to risk it all. They risk death, misery torture, and they risk uncertainty. They risk starvation and annihilation for a new life, not just for themselves, but more importantly for their children. But when governments are overthrown by outside sources for the purpose of regime change the economic motivations far outweighs the peoples’ interests.

That is the difference in between a Revolution, and what the ideal that the right wing asks the people of Iraq to pay for. In the end it is someone else’s vision of their country and the control of their oil supply. The concept of Freedom is a propaganda tool rather than a symbiotic partner of Democracy. The Revolution is betrayed and the war exists to prolong war itself and consolidate power, not abroad, but here.

Trying to understand the dynamic of our relationship as a Federal Republic, whose corporations are its image abroad as much as it’s military presence around the world without digesting these facts is nonsensical. In order to understand Christianity for example or even Islam, one must understand the history of their regions of origin. One must learn the history of the Egyptian Dynasty’s, the Roman Empire, the Parthian Empire, Zoroastrianism, The Khazars, The Byzantine Empire, the Caliphate and the Northern African nations who adopted all these religions at one point in time. One must be able to grasp the idea of what the world that these faiths were born into was like. Judaism admiringly has the benefit of the Old Testament, which is intertwined with the historical essence of a people and the geopolitical reality of migration, survival and knowledge of self. Something I wish my people had more of. A Cultural Revolution without the destruction of ancient artifacts and the violation of human rights to bring a people struggling with their identity a new idea of who they were as a point of trajectory to not just see who they are, but who they will become in the future.

End of Part 1.

This political season because of the amount of influence that I guess I have with people who choose to immerse themselves in the culture and roots of Hip Hop, Supporters of Street Organizations, Youth in general and specifically the young Latino, Black & Middle Eastern intellectual base, I have been approached by many representatives for the people who are running for office. Some have asked me for endorsements, and some have just wanted to talk. (Note: Hillary Clinton and the Major Republican factions were not among them.) I have, been approached the most though by Cynthia McKinney, Obama and Ron Paul supporters who are either former Democrats or Republicans, (I have right wing acquaintances believe it or not…) I had a small debate with a select few of the more heavily involved upper tier of them about some serious issues I had with Ron Paul as a political entity. Even though some people throw their support behind him because of his libertarian and fiscal conservatism, we must be clear that he doesn’t pose a threat to the structure of the right wing as much as he poses a threat to the balance of the left wing. Libertarian doesn’t mean liberal after all, and it’s not synonymous with Revolutionary.

If there are young and impressionable people coming from the left and the democratic party to support a man who claimed to be “the most conservative member of the Republican Party” during the presidential debates. There is something wrong with that. That’s not hip, sexy or cool. Stripping down the Dept. of Education and replacing it with some bone marrow devoid femur of a tax credit borders on ludicrous and I don’t mean the rapper muthafucka. He may speak volumes of truth about some domestic issues and the foreign policy that we have concerning Iraq. But it’s not enough.

I won’t vote for someone just because they wish to end the war and talk about bringing the troops home, because so does Obama and even Clinton alludes to downsizing. But think about it, without that message, without his call for the ending of the war in Iraq and talking about the causes for 9/11, he would not be in the limelight or have garnered a tenth of the support that he had. It would be the equivalent, numerically, although not ideologically to George Bush not being an evangelical Christian and seeking the nomination back in 2000. I’m not suggesting that people who support him are all naïve and stupid, not at all. But I have only met a handful of people who knew the extent of his positions besides a “humble foreign policy” and closing the borders. Sure I read the websites and watched the debates, read all his platforms but I also did research. This debate is interesting on all key issues especially for Republicans.

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/special/forums/video.html

I can applaud Dr. Paul’s theorized ideas about US policy abroad and while I will admit that his ideas about tax reform are very interesting especially about deconstructing the IMF (which I’m sure would cost him his life,) some of his domestic policies are an indefensible failure. Sadly some have even become the safe haven for white people who like to hide their bigotry and small-minded uncultured ideas about the principles of democracy and the historical context of immigration behind his message. And I’m not saying he’s a racist, because first of all that terminology itself is so overused it needs to be updated and redefined as much the phrase “Real Hip Hop.” I’m not mad because he got money and refused to give it back to white supremacists. I understood his reasoning. I didn’t, however buy his rationale that claimed a, ‘property rights’, issue as the reason he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. The bill that allows Black, Brown and White people to eat at the same places, go to the same schools and drink at the same fountains, that legislation that hate it or love it, forced integration. That’s something confederate flag waving whites have associated with “big government” and have hated Democrats for, ever since in the South was occupied by General Grants Army.

No, we didn’t need to go to “white schools” to get a better education, (“I’ve heard this attempt at a logical argument by conservative African Americans) we needed the same resources and attention that this fundamentally racist government thought we didn’t need because we were slated to be a permanent underclass in the land of the free. Blacks and Indigenous people were purported by Eugenicists during the early 20th century to become extinct, so therefore no effort was made to preserve their condition. And even without that theory there was no real expectation for us to join the elite that’s why education was seen as a farfetched idea for our populations.

The Civil Rights Bill and the way it was implemented as well as Affirmative Action are as I stated before, are a pathetic excuse for reparations, but without it we would be a modernized version of South Africa during the early 1980’s.

There is little justification for this issue so I refuse to be mischaracterized as someone who “Doesn’t get it” or is “confused” about his position. No son, I know what they are and apparently if your reading this and you are in disagreement then there is a question about your Revolutionary nature...not mine.

I would love to see Cynthia McKinney get some more light in the press considering that if we are talking about standing up for your principles and putting it all on the line, none of them hold a candle to this woman. But I would also love to see Obama get the nomination and win, I liked his reps very much, just like the Ron Paul supporters ( who were very respectful and debated well), very dedicated to changing the direction of this nation. I just think that whoever Republicans are hoping to win they must have an agenda behind it and right now they are attacking Clinton hard because they want her to lose against Obama. I think they still believe she has a better shot of getting independent votes than McCain. Although, pay attention… McCain was smart enough to not feed into the negative media about illegal immigration. After his endorsement meeting with Arnold Schwarzenegger who beat native Californian Cruz Bustamante it became obvious that he plans to go after minorities by splitting the Latino vote almost in half the way Schwarzenegger did. McCain hopes to achieve the same result knowing that even if Clinton wins instead of Obama he is still not going to get any significant % of the African American vote. So that’s why banking on the Nation’s largest minority will be a must.

Some people are taken aback by McCain’s ideas about being in Iraq for 100 years, but I think that in some capacity we will remain there for a considerable amount of time regardless of who is president. After all the war in Germany has been over for about 60 years and we still have almost 80,000 troops there and the German government foots a 1 billion $ a year bill for their presence. We have 40,000 troops in South Korea and another 40,000 or so in Japan…We have thousands in Italy, Panama, Afghanistan, the Balkans etc… Essentially everywhere that we have gone to war or “intervened” so I think whether we are ready to accept it or not unless someone who has no strings attached wins this race it will be the same thing over and over again.

That’s why, I can heavily appreciate any message about America not being in Iraq, although having a non interventionist policy in these terms of absolutism leaves questions about what one would do in cases like Rwanda and Darfur. But realize that when you decide to police the world and reap the economic benefits of having a capitalist scaffold built around the world you have to pay maintenance of an empire. If nothing else for the illusion that you really represent freedom and liberty for the people around the world, but when we go to Kuwait and not to Rwanda it makes things to obvious... Anything else gives us the same Clintonesque lateness that brought us to Bosnia a couple of years AFTER the massacres to overthrow an old fraction of a man who had already committed atrocities in the face of the world unchallenged. The question was posed here…

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/special/forums/video.html Check the Darfur q&a

I think this debate is important to keep having, in order to better understand when and how to intervene, when or when not to send US troops or when to work with the UN to give food or supplies to a cause. It is objectionable to anyone with a conscious to NOT think we should have done more or should be doing more all these scenarios. But the question becomes, when do we run in to provide aid for the sake of our moral responsibility and when is it a question of our selfish corporate interests? What litmus test can be run to determine the global consequence and the genuine cause that precedes any other agenda when we enter another nation?

That is the real debate we need to have.

A charismatic leader who is true to his or her ideals, and doesn’t betray them for the sake of money or comfort is admirable. But that doesn’t imply they are Revolutionary. Ron Paul was a breath of fresh air in some domestic respects and when it comes to his position on world issues he was often mischaracterized and slandered as a, “Neville Chamberlain” of the Right Wing when he is just a man who understands the fiscal reality of this mess in Iraq. He was right on when he was talking about repealing federal drug laws that are fundamentally racist, I thought his honest views about abortion brought legal issues into question and he admirably changed his position on the death penalty. But he and other conservatives and libertarians are not at all progressive or Revolutionary as some call them when it comes to the issues of immigration. Unless Revolutionary involves repealing the citizenship of children here in American born to undocumented parents and shipping them back home. He’s definitely not as intellectually backward enough to think we can round people up with the Army so I can applaud that because he was definitely not as one dimensional as say this screaming harpy below.

Who I’m going to present now, not because there is an ounce of validity that can even be considered, but to show how conservatives invent people. This woman had NO political leverage whatsoever. She didn’t even have a reason for being on the air. She’s helped nobody but herself talking about (just like Lou Dobbs) and yet FOX and others have decided to give people like this a platform. Because it is a divisive issue for whites in America and it is becoming so for Blacks especially where there are issues of Black/Brown violence growing in the communities. She reportedly endorsed Ron Paul openly once after Tom Tancredo (long overdue to) threw in his chips but the endorsement was asked to be rescinded, and subsequently was, because to put it quite frankly, they thought the bitch was a liability.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvtuJXajE2M

Smart move.

None of my criticisms of any of the politicians I have mentioned are said out of disrespect, so I don’t think it’s possible to marginalize or attempt to defame me as an individual for having a mind of my own and not wanting to be a part of the “Young Libertarian Republican Revolution.” Because to be quite honest I’d rather shoot heroin...

But, I do have a great amount of esteem for any man who will stand among the people in his own party or political wing and fight vigorously against pure illogicality.

For example I have argued hard with a lot of rebels and historically challenged militants about how white people are not devils. I’ve definitely had the ongoing discussion about Marx’s economic principles being flawed and how socialism itself needs a new definition and new understanding, a new testament if you will. I’ve argued about Che Guevara’s mishandling of the Cuban economy and his marriage to Communism instead of Revolutionary independence even though he was right about the Sino Soviet dispute. I’ve argued about how Islam, although incredibly revolutionary in its context as a spiritual and social mechanism for people who live under oppression still has the capacity as it has proven in the past to be an agent of conquest in Africa just as Christianity once was. And although my mind was opened to another chamber by reading the Qu’ran, you cannot talk to me about it as a religious faith without speaking on the history of Islam, Arabs and The Middle East in general and the entire region in historical perspective. If you are majoring in the subject or would like to learn more I would suggest reading at least couple of volumes of Al-Tabari’s (838-923) “The History of Prophets and Kings”. I highly recommend Volume 36, “The Revolt of the Zanj”, for those who are more advanced in this area of study.

****I will NOT tolerate someone’s misinterpretation of what I just said, because all versions of history are my greatest ally. Virtually all religions after all are brought to people by their conquerors. And any religion can be used by an imperial power’s tool to reinforce it’s sphere of influence over a region much like the Ottoman Empire did in the Balkans, Spain did with Christianity in the Americas. So whether in violent campaigns or through the condescension of missionary agents that come into a country to offset the cruelty of the colonial powers the result is the same... a consolidation of political power through the use of religion.****

But this is not a criticism of any religion in specific terms but rather the idea that anyone who would follow a prophet or a doctrine is flawed from the moment they are born. They are human after all and so when unquestionable divinity is attributed to anyone or anything besides God, it is often the benchmark for where the excuses and indulgences of civic and economic practice begin. A prophet of God is a man of peace but his followers are almost always men who use the divine power of the message to satisfy their thirst for power. And then it is no longer God making man in his own image but rather man who makes and then remakes God in HIS own image to suit whatever military, economic or social agenda he has planned.

We all have our hypocrisies and flaws. But I’m not conceited or easily disillusioned so I don’t shy away from addressing them and trying to fix them when they are pointed out, that’s the process of growing intellectually. I think anyone who would take offense to my honest and fair questions would do themselves, their ideas and their favored candidate a great disservice.

After all I can at least validate the honesty of the opinions given by John McCain, Ron Paul, Colin Powell and others who walked their talk and went to fight in Vietnam. However misguided that war really was, at least they stood by what they preached, it actually makes a debate with their ideas more constructive. Unlike the college Republican chicken hawks who cloud issues to avoid debate and ramble about Islamo-Fascism but would rather get raped with a paddle at a Fraternity initiation than fight in the desert against the, “mortal enemies of America.” I would think they’d be the first in line to raise arms against those who attacked us because they were jealous of our freedom and driven insane by the fact that we have cable TV.

As an apprentice of Revolution I train, and I read a lot. The master teachers I have studied from like John Henrik Clarke and others, opened doors to the past and helped me gain a perspective of my peoples past. But this also left me and other Revolutionaries with the responsibility of our nation’s future. A revolutionary owes his allegiance to the people, and therefore, I cannot be the champion of a privileged class of American citizens before those in our country that suffer the greatest weight of what this Federal Republic requires in order for them to earn their right to live here.

I fight for the working class and the immigrant in America who built and is building our future as we speak. I don’t think that everyone who has issues with immigration is a racist, that’s just not true. After all you can have serious issues with the domestic and foreign policy of Israel and not be Anti-Semetic (no matter what AIPAC says), and you don’t have to hate Blacks to question Affirmative action. But I spit in the face of those who would persecute immigrants under the guise of legality. So don’t think you can fuckin’ toy with me with your sheetrock-thin talking points. After all, how many Native American treaties and international laws has the US violated? I fight for both the documented and undocumented that live in this far reaching empire, those of all colors who have found their calling in a Revolutionary spirit.

Some people think I hate America. But I just see her for what she was, I see her for more than what she is, and I see what she still could be. I see potential for advancement in the way we think as human beings, while others just see the opportunity to keep using her like a whore until there is nothing left. Before of course they discard her and move on through the evolution of globalization that makes corporations gods and nations the lowly servants of false idol. I guess it makes it easier to marginalize my positions by calling me a conspiracy theorist for believing that government lies to it’s people, than it is to talk truth. It’s easier to send me death threats and bullshit emails about immigration, messages about being a nigger and spic instead of discussing the past 2000 years. I guess you forgot that I passed The Point of No Return…

And I think the people of this nation deserve better than what they have. They deserve to pay less taxes, and to have more accountability from their government. To have more efficient service and to stop the political nepotism that exists in Washington and, that has ruled this country incompetently for too long. America can be better than this. And its problems do not stem from people coming here to work. After all most of us immigrated here because our countries were taken over in a post-colonial age with the help of this and other former imperial powers for the express, purpose of exploiting our nations’ resources. Much like the music industry comes to the Underground to try and prostitute our talent. We come here for a new life, for freedom from fake democracy and the repression both political and religious of our people. We come here for the promise. But that promise is sometimes a lie.

The immigration issue is not a simple legal issue, it is a complex human rights question and a global reality that repeats itself every generational cycle. And now it is a tool to dismantle progressive ideas and to dismantle a nation of people who are on the brink of Revolution but choose to go backwards and forget what it was supposed to mean to be an “American”. I am not opposed to having immigrants learn English, after all I did. Spanish was my first language. But the attitude that we must give up all our culture just to assimilate is the testament to the racism sometimes involved with the immigration issue, because white Europeans didn’t have to give up theirs completely.

Our lengthy, often ignored, proud history before enslavement is who we really are spiritually, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if we had a less important role in defining what it means to actually be a human being they wouldn’t give a fuck about us learning it. Those who worked here for over 10 years to build America should be able to celebrate that just as others here do without being deported. Spare the children who are innocent in all this prison camp like imprisonment and homelessness when you ship their parents back with these ICE traps. Learn, that if there is a God he surely would not smile down on a nation that cast out his poorest and humblest, and those that are stronger in their practice of faith than much of this nation. But even if we take religion out of the equation completely, one day the climate of this Earth will change. Remember that the only thing that protects us from the merciless radiation of the Sun is the magnetic field around Earth, which is theoretically caused by the constant revolutions of molten iron. Interestingly enough due to our slightly elliptical shape, the most protection garnered from this field, is at our equator, the center of the 3rd world. Perhaps one day we will be crossing the border South instead of North for survival, and I’m sure someone will come up with an excuse to take our land again.

I could go on for about 30 more pages of history and rip apart the general consensus on immigration held by those who favor deportation in America. But I won’t I’ll just say that we as so called Latino people are not the first to receive this treatment, all South Eastern Europeans (and Middle Easterners) including Italians, Armenians, Slavs, Greeks, etc were portrayed in the same light when they first came here. Immigrants are the life and blood of America, and yet we must suffer as many others did before us, the torments of the establishments that finds us incapable of assimilating to the American family and championing their selfish angry Eurocentric nationalist ideas. Interestingly enough while these nationalities I mentioned were eventually incorporated into America through the idea of a “melting pot”, we indigenous people were never meant to be a part of the melting pot idea. That was reserved for European immigrants. We were just the brown wood destined to be fuel for the fire. It is a destiny we now have the power to change and that we need to change. After all the real victims of the worst economies in America are those who are at the bottom, not the upper or middle class.

My people are suffering the most in this country, more than anyone. And regardless of your skin color, or religious affiliation, if you are strong willed, mature, progressive, intelligent, compassionate and Revolutionary, if you are someone who believes in truth and freedom, they are YOUR people too. And that in turn answers the initial question about who “my people” are.

Afterthoughts:

I hear the word “change” being thrown around so much, repeated over and over by candidates, but nothing too specific about what exactly they will change. Ending the occupation in Iraq is a good change, but cutting funding for the Dept. of Education (whose teachers are severely underpaid and not given resources for better education as it is) because its BIG government isn’t a good change. Neither is repealing Roe Vs. Wade, and taking a woman’s right to a terminate pregnancy when she is the victim of rape or incest because of some theological doctrine that people who run as the Christian candidates like to use selectively. While I am not personally in favor of abortion that is my personal choice (that I will speak of on a later day) that I cannot apply to others. I think there is something to be said about the legality of life in the womb. But I sometimes wonder though how these individuals who have run on these strict pro-life tickets like Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, Fred Thompson and Dick Cheney would’ve reacted if their wife or daughter was raped and she became pregnant, or if she was knocked up by some “swarthy non-English speaking sweaty illegal alien.” Someone that makes everything in their home including their dinner but they resent having to treat at the same hospitals or teach at the same schools.

My experience has taught me that people’s self-righteous, sanctimonious nature is usually only applicable in a vacuum, because in real life you have to bleed for it. So it’s easy for some people to think like this. It’s also easy for them to chant “stay the course”, most of them never picked up a rifle or stayed on extended tours in 120 degree weather while their families suffered back in the states, otherwise they might understand what it feels like to want to come home. It’s easy to think that “surge is working” until you realize that your tax dollars you don’t want going to “big government” are in Iraq buying off street gangs, Extremist Militia’s, with monthly stipends to decrease violence against US troops. Then again this war being conceived and then run by people who dipped out when it was their chance to serve still amazes me.

Next thing you know they’ll be putting Arabian Horse racers in charge of FEMA and hooking their girlfriends up with high paying jobs at the World Bank.

The world is a cold place sometime. I’m glad I bought that $4 hat.

Con Amor de Revolucion,

Immortal
Technique

President of Viper Records

PLEEEEEEEEEEASE read the rest.

New Orlean City Council Shuts Down Public Housing Debate

2008-02-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

New Orleans: Locked Outside the Gates
By Bill Quigley
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 28 December 2007

In a remarkable symbol of the injustices of post-Katrina reconstruction, hundreds of people were locked out of a public New Orleans City Council meeting addressing demolition of 4,500 public housing apartments. Some were tazered, many pepper sprayed and a dozen arrested.

Outside the chambers, iron gates were chained and padlocked even before the scheduled start.

The scene looked like one of those countries on TV that is undergoing a people's revolution - and the similarities were only beginning. (See video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMBWAXfGsc4 )

Dozens of uniformed police secured the gates and other entrances. Only developers and those with special permission from council members were allowed in - the rest were kept locked outside the gates. Despite dozens of open seats in the council chambers, pleas to be allowed in were ignored.

Chants of "Housing is a human right!" and "Let us in!" thundered through the concrete breezeway.

Public housing residents came and spoke out despite an intense campaign of intimidation. Residents were warned by phone that if they publicly opposed the demolitions they would lose all housing assistance. Residents opposed to the demolition had simple demands. If the authorities insisted on spending hundreds of millions to tear down hundreds of structurally sound buildings containing 4,500 public housing subsidized apartments, there should be a guarantee that every resident could return to a similarly subsidized apartment. Alternatively, the government should use the hundreds of millions to repair the apartments so people could come home. Neither alternative was acceptable to HUD. A plan of residents to partner with the AFL-CIO Housing Trust to save their homes was also ignored.

Outside, SWAT team members and police in riot gear and on horses began to arrive as rain started falling. Those locked out included public housing residents, a professor from Southern University, graduate students, the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, ministers, lawyers, law students, homeless people who lived in tents across the street from City Hall, affordable housing allies from across the country and dozens of others.

Inside the chambers, the Rev. Torin Sanders and others insisted that the locked out persons be allowed to come and stand inside along the walls - a common practice for over 30 years. No one could recall any city council locking people out of a public meeting. The request to allow people to stand was denied. The council then demanded silence from those inside. Those who continued to demand that the others be let in were pointed out by police, physically taken down and arrested. Ironically, some young men were tasered right in front of the speaker's podium.

This was a meeting the council had repeatedly tried to avoid. It was only held after residents (100 percent African-American and nearly all mothers and grandmothers) got an emergency court order stopping demolitions until the council acted. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced long ago it was going to demolish 4,500 public housing apartments despite the Katrina crisis of affordable housing, no matter what anyone said. HUD had no plans to ask the council or anyone else for approval. The judge said otherwise, so the meeting was scheduled.

Leaders of the US Congress - Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid - asked that the decision be delayed 60 days so they could try to move forward on Senate Bill 1668, which would resolve many of the demolition problems. This request was backed by New Orleans Congressman William Jefferson, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama.

Opponents cited the affordable housing crisis in New Orleans. Homeless people camped across from City Hall and for blocks under the interstate. The number of homeless people has doubled since Katrina. Thousands of residents in FEMA trailers across the Gulf Coast were being evicted. (More on the reasons to oppose demolition can be found here).

Solidarity demonstrations opposing demolition were held in Washington, DC; New York; Oakland; Minneapolis; Houston; North Carolina; Maine; Philadelphia; Cleveland, New Jersey and Boston. Thousands of people across the country contacted city council members. Dozens of community, housing and human rights groups petitioned the council not to demolish until there was an enforceable requirement of one-for-one replacement of housing.

But hours before the meeting began, a majority of the council publicly announced on the front page of the local paper that they were going to approve demolition no matter what people said at the meeting. The paper, the developers and others were delighted. Residents and affordable housing allies were not.

Inside, the council started the meeting surrounded by armed police, National Guard and undercover authorities from many law enforcement agencies.

Outside, the locked-out could see the people who had been arrested on the inside being dragged away to police wagons. A few of the protesters then pulled open one of the gates. The police started shooting arcs of pepper spray into the crowd. A woman's scream pierced the chaos as police fired tasers into the crowd. Medics wiped pepper spray from fallen people's eyes. A young woman who was tasered in the back went into a seizure and was taken to the hospital.

Inside and out, a dozen people were arrested - most for disturbing the peace. They joined another dozen who had been arrested over the past week in protest actions against the demolitions.

The City Council meeting continued. Supporters of demolition were given careful, courteous attention and softball questions by council members. Opponents less so.

Despite pleas from displaced residents, dozens of community organizations and federal elected officials, the New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to allow demolition to proceed. In its approval, the council did promise to urge HUD to listen to residents and to work for one-for-one replacement of affordable housing. Several city council members read from typed statements about their reasons to support demolition: the deplorable state of public housing; the lack of available money for repair; the oral promises of all, the federal government and developers, to do something better for the community.

After the meeting, residents vowed to continue their struggle for affordable housing for everyone and to resist demolitions - putting their bodies before bulldozers if necessary.

The struggle for affordable housing continues, as does the campaign to stop demolition until there is a real right to return and one-for-one replacement of housing. Residents and local advocates applaud and appreciate the support of allies from across the nation. Critics label national supporters as "outside agitators" - exactly the same charge leveled at civil rights activists historically. But people understand that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Public housing residents and local affordable housing advocates welcome the humble participation of social justice advocates of whatever age, of whatever race, from whatever place, who join and act in true solidarity.

Residents vow to make sure that the promises made by the council and the mayor are enforced. For example, the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, announced that he would not allow HUD to demolish two of the four housing developments until HUD gave documentation of funded plans including one-for-one replacement of the housing demolished and details of the developments and their plans.

The Senate will continue to be lobbied to pass SB 1668 - which would really guarantee one-for-one replacement of housing. It is currently stalled in the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee because of opposition by Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter.

Litigation is still pending in state and federal courts to enforce Louisiana and US laws that should protect residents from illegal demolitions. Investigations into the legality of locking people out of a public meeting, the legality of a law passed at such a meeting and the indiscriminate use of tasers and pepper spray are all ongoing.

Padlocked and chained gates will only amplify the voices of the locked-out calling for justice. Pepper spray and tasers illustrate the problems, but will not deter people from protesting for just causes. Bulldozers may start up, but just people will resist and create a reality where housing is a real human right.

Stephanie Mingo, a working grandmother who is one of the leaders of the residents, promised to continue the resistance and the fight for affordable housing: "We did not come this far to turn back now. This fight is far from over. We are not resting until everyone has the right to return home."

Those wanting additional information should look to: http://www.justiceforneworleans.org or http://www.defendneworleanspublichousing.org.

Microchip future not sci-fi

2008-02-08T22:04:00.000-08:00

Technology already exists that could lead to the tracking of purchases and people. Critics fear a loss of privacy.
By Todd Lewan
The Associated Press
Article Last Updated: 01/27/2008 01:22:46 AM MST

Here's a vision of the not-so-distant future:

• Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items — and, by extension, consumers — wherever they go, from a distance.

• A seamless, global network of electronic "sniffers" will scan radio tags in myriad public settings, identifying people and their tastes instantly so that customized ads, "live spam," may be beamed at them.

• In "Smart Homes," sensors built into walls, floors and appliances will inventory possessions, record eating habits, monitor medicine cabinets — all the while reporting data to marketers eager for a peek into the occupants' private lives.

Science fiction? In truth, much of the radio frequency identification technology that enables objects and people to be tagged and tracked wirelessly already exists — and new and potentially intrusive uses of it are being patented, perfected and deployed.

Some of the world's largest corporations are vested in the success of RFID technology, which couples highly miniaturized computers with radio antennas to broadcast information about sales and buyers to company databases.

Already, microchips are turning up in some computer printers, car keys and tires, on shampoo bottles and department store clothing tags. They are also in library books and "contactless" payment cards (such as American Express' "Blue" and ExxonMobil's "Speedpass").

Companies say the RFID tags improve supply-chain efficiency, reduce theft and guarantee that brand-name products are authentic, not counterfeit. At a store, RFID doorways could scan your purchases automatically as you leave, eliminating tedious checkouts.

At home, convenience is a selling point: RFID-enabled refrigerators could warn about expired milk, generate weekly shopping lists, even send signals to your interactive TV so that you see "personalized" commercials for foods you have a history of buying.

Potential for abuse

"We've seen so many different uses of the technology," said Dan Mullen, president of AIM Global, a national association of data-collection businesses, including RFID, "and we're probably still just scratching the surface in terms of places RFID can be used."

The problem, critics say, is that products with microchips might do a whole lot more.

With tags in so many objects, relaying information to databases that can be linked to credit and bank cards, almost no aspect of life may soon be safe from prying eyes, says Mark Rasch, former head of the computer-crime unit of the U.S. Justice Department. He imagines a time when anyone from police to identity thieves might scan locked car trunks or home offices from a distance.

"Think of it as a high-tech form of Dumpster-diving," Rasch said.

Passive vs. active tags

Presently, the radio tag most commercialized in America is the so-called "passive" emitter, meaning it has no internal power supply. Only when a reader powers these tags with a squirt of electrons do they broadcast their signal, indiscriminately, within a range of a few inches to 20 feet.

Not as common, but increasing in use, are "active" tags, which have internal batteries and can transmit signals, continuously, as far as low-orbiting satellites. Active tags pay tolls as motorists zip through tollgates; they also track wildlife.

Retailers and manufacturers want passive tags to replace the bar code for tracking inventory. These radio tags transmit Electronic Product Codes, number strings that allow trillions of objects to be uniquely identified. Some transmit specifics about the item, such as price, though not the name of the buyer.

The recent growth of the RFID industry has been staggering: From 1955 to 2005, cumulative sales of radio tags totaled 2.4 billion. Last year alone, 2.24 billion tags were sold worldwide, and analysts project that by 2017 cumulative sales will top 1 trillion — generating more than $25 billion in annual revenues for the industry.

Privacy concerns, some RFID supporters say, are overblown. But industry documents suggest a different line of thinking, privacy experts say.

A 2005 patent application by American Express itself describes how RFID-embedded objects carried by shoppers could emit "identification signals" when queried by electronic "consumer trackers."

In 2006, IBM received patent approval for an invention it called "Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items."

The documents "raise the hair on the back of your neck," said Liz McIntyre, co-author of "Spychips," a book that is critical of the industry. "The industry has long promised it would never use this technology to track people. But these patent records clearly suggest otherwise."

Corporations say patent filings shouldn't be used to predict a company's actions.

Source
End.

Help Wexler Impeach

2008-02-08T12:31:00.000-08:00

Do you want impeachment hearings on Cheney and Bush? Of course you do!!! So take action and make your voice heard.
http://www.wexlerwantshearings.com

PAZ...and pass it on.

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Air war is on its way

2008-02-01T21:11:00.001-08:00

Place the rest of it here.
posted January 29, 2008 3:34 pm

Tomgram: Bombs Away Over Iraq

Looking Up
Normalizing Air War from Guernica to Arab Jabour
By Tom Engelhardt

A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. ("Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.") Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:

"The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.

"In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad."

And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:

"The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.'s."

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew up "an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq."

Note that both pieces started with bombing news -- in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these last days -- those 100,000 pounds of explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad -- simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the New York Times, it was buried inside a single sentence.

Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned to the subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the Bush administration's invasion of 2003 and probably represents a genuine shifting of American military strategy in that country. Despite a few humdrum wire service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has bothered to cover the story adequately either.

For those who know something about the history of air power, which, since World War II, has been lodged at the heart of the American Way of War, that 100,000 figure might have rung a small bell.

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (a prelude to World War II), the planes of the German Condor Legion attacked the ancient Basque town of Guernica. They came in waves, first carpet bombing, then dropping thermite incendiaries. It was a market day and there may have been as many as 7,000-10,000 people, including refugees, in the town which was largely destroyed in the ensuing fire storm. More than 1,600 people may have died there (though some estimates are lower). The Germans reputedly dropped about 50 tons or 100,000 pounds of explosives on the town. In the seven decades between those two 100,000 figures lies a sad history of our age.

Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 10 miles south of the Iraqi capital that was the target of the latest 100,000-pound barrage has recently been largely off-limits to American troops and their Iraqi allies. The American military now refers generically to all Sunni insurgents who resist them as "al Qaeda," so in situations like this it's hard to tell exactly who has held this territory.

At Guernica, as in Arab Jabour 71 years later, no reporters were present when the explosives rained down. In the Spanish situation, however, four reporters in the nearby city of Bilbao, including George Steer of the Times of London, promptly rushed to the scene of destruction. Steer's first piece for the Times (also printed in the New York Times) was headlined "The Tragedy of Guernica" and called the assault "unparalleled in military history." (Obviously, no such claims could be made for Arab Jabour today.) Steer made clear in his report that this had been an attack on a civilian population, essentially a terror bombing.

The self-evident barbarism of the event -- the first massively publicized bombing of a civilian population -- caused international horror. It was news across the planet. From it came perhaps the most famous painting of the last century, Picasso's Guernica, as well as innumerable novels, plays, poems, and other works of art.

As Ian Patterson writes in his book, Guernica and Total War:

"Many attacks since then, including the ones we have grown used to seeing in Iraq and the Middle East in recent years, have been on such a scale that Guernica's fate seems almost insignificant by comparison. But it's almost impossible to overestimate the outrage it caused in 1937… Accounts of the bombing were widely printed in the American press, and provoked a great deal of anger and indignation in most quarters…"

Those last two tag-on paragraphs in the Parker and Rasheed Los Angeles Times piece tell us much about the intervening 71 years, which included the German bombing of Rotterdam and the blitz of London as well as other English cities; the Japanese bombings of Shanghai and other Chinese cities; the Allied fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities; the U.S. atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Cold War era of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in which two superpowers threatened to use the ultimate in airborne explosives to incinerate the planet; the massive, years-long U.S. bombing campaigns against North Korea and later North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; the American air power "victories" of Gulf War I and Afghanistan (2001); and the Bush administration's shock-and-awe, air-and-cruise-missile assault on Baghdad in March 2003, which, though meant to "decapitate" the regime of Saddam Hussein, killed not a single Iraqi governmental or Baath Party figure, only Iraqi civilians. In those seven decades, the death toll and damage caused by war -- on the ground and from the air -- has increasingly been delivered to civilian populations, while the United States has come to rely on its Air Force to impose its will in war.

One hundred thousand pounds of explosives delivered from the air is now, historically speaking, a relatively modest figure. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a single air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf, did that sort of damage in less than a day and it was a figure that, as again last week, the military was proud to publicize without fear of international outrage or the possibility that "barbarism" might come to mind:

"From Tuesday afternoon through early Wednesday the air wing flew 69 dedicated strike missions in Basra and in and around Baghdad, involving 27 F/A-18 Hornets and 12 Tomcats. They dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of ordnance, said Lt. Brook DeWalt, Kitty Hawk public affairs officer."

As far as we know, there were no reporters, Iraqi or Western, in Arab Jabour when the bombs fell and, Iraq being Iraq, no American reporters rushed there -- in person or by satellite phone -- to check out the damage. In Iraq and Afghanistan, when it comes to the mainstream media, bombing is generally only significant if it's of the roadside or suicide variety; if, that is, the "bombs" can be produced at approximately "the cost of a pizza" (as IEDs sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies. From the air, even 100,000 pounds of bombs just doesn't have the ring of something that matters.

Some of this, of course, comes from the Pentagon's success in creating a dismissive, sanitizing language in which to frame war from the air. "Collateral damage" stands in for the civilian dead -- even though in much of modern war, the collateral damage could be considered the dead soldiers, not the ever rising percentage of civilian casualties. And death is, of course, delivered "precisely" by "precision-guided" weaponry. All this makes air war seem sterile, even virginal. Army Col. Terry Ferrell, for instance, described the air assaults in Arab Jabour in this disembodied way at a Baghdad news conference:

"The purpose of these particular strikes was to shape the battlefield and take out known threats before our ground troops move in. Our aim was to neutralize any advantage the enemy could claim with the use of IEDs and other weapons."

Reports -- often hard to assess for credibility -- have nonetheless seeped out of the region indicating that there were civilian casualties, possibly significant numbers of them; that bridges and roads were "cut off" and undoubtedly damaged; that farms and farmlands were damaged or destroyed. According to Hamza Hendawi of the Associated Press, for instance, Iraqi and American troops were said to have advanced into Arab Jabour, already much damaged from years of fighting, through "smoldering citrus groves."

But how could there not be civilian casualties and property damage? After all, the official explanation for this small-scale version of a "shock-and-awe" campaign in a tiny rural region was that American troops and allied Iraqi forces had been strangers to the area for a while, and that the air-delivered explosives were meant to damage local infrastructure -- by exploding roadside bombs and destroying weapons caches or booby traps inside existing structures. As that phrase "take out known threats before our ground troops move in" made clear, this was an attempt to minimize casualties among American (and allied Iraqi) troops by bringing massive amounts of firepower to bear in a situation in which local information was guaranteed to be sketchy at best. Given such a scenario, civilians will always suffer. And this, increasingly, is likely to be the American way of war in Iraq.

The ABCs of Air War in Iraq

So let's focus, for a moment, on American air power in Iraq and gather together a little basic information you're otherwise not likely to find in one place. In these last years, the Pentagon has invested billions of dollars in building up an air-power infrastructure in and around Iraq. As a start, it constructed one of its largest foreign bases anywhere on the planet about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad. Balad Air Base has been described by Newsweek as a "15-square-mile mini-city of thousands of trailers and vehicle depots," whose air fields handle 27,500 takeoffs and landings every month.

Reputedly "second only to London's Heathrow Airport in traffic worldwide," it is said to handle congestion similar to that of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. With about 140,000 tons a year of cargo moving through it, the base is "the busiest aerial port" in the global domains of the Department of Defense.

It is also simply massive, housing about 40,000 military personnel, private contractors of various sorts, and Pentagon civilian employees. It has its own bus routes, fast-food restaurants, sidewalks, and two PXs that are the size of K-Marts. It also has its own neighborhoods including, reported the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks, "KBR-land" for civilian contractors and "CJSOTF" (Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force), "home to a special operations unit [that] is hidden by especially high walls."

Radar traffic controllers at the base now commonly see "more than 550 aircraft operations in just one day." To the tune of billions of dollars, Balad's runways and other facilities have been, and continue to be, upgraded for years of further wear and tear. According to the military press, construction is to begin this month on a $30 million "state-of-the-art battlefield command and control system [at Balad] that will integrate air traffic management throughout Iraq."

National Public Radio's Defense Correspondent Guy Raz paid a visit to the base last year and termed it "a giant construction site… [T]he sounds of construction and the hum of generators seem to follow visitors everywhere. Seen from the sky at night, the base resembles Las Vegas: While the surrounding Iraqi villages get about 10 hours of electricity a day, the lights never go out at Balad Air Base."

This gargantuan feat of construction is designed for the military long haul. As Josh White of the Washington Post reported recently in a relatively rare (and bland) summary piece on the use of air power in Iraq, there were five times as many U.S. air strikes in 2007 as in 2006; and 2008 has, of course, started off with a literal bang from those 100,000 pounds of explosives dropped southeast of Baghdad. That poundage assumedly includes the 40,000 pounds of explosives that got modest headlines for being delivered in a mere 10 minutes in the Arab Jabour area the previous week, but not the 16,500 pounds of explosives that White reports being used north of Baghdad in approximately the same period; nor, evidently, another 15,000 pounds of explosives dropped on Arab Jabour more recently. (And none of these numbers seem to include Marine Corps figures for Iraq, which have evidently not been released.)

Who could forget all the attention that went into the President's surge strategy on the ground in the first half of last year? But which media outlet even noticed, until recently, what Bob Deans of Cox News Service has termed the "air surge" that accompanied those 30,000 surging troops into the Iraqi capital and environs? In that same period, air units were increasingly concentrated in and around Iraq. By mid-2007, for instance, the Associated Press was already reporting:

"[S]quadrons of attack planes have been added to the in-country fleet. The air reconnaissance arm has almost doubled since last year. The powerful B1-B bomber has been recalled to action over Iraq… Early this year, with little fanfare, the Air Force sent a squadron of A-10 ‘Warthog' attack planes -- a dozen or more aircraft -- to be based at Al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq. At the same time it added a squadron of F-16C Fighting Falcons… at Balad."

Meanwhile, in the last year, aircraft-carrier battle groups have been stationed in greater numbers in the Persian Gulf and facilities at sites near Iraq like the huge al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar continue to be upgraded.

Even these increases do not tell the whole story of the expanding air war. Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press reported recently that "the military's reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq." The use of such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including Hellfire-missile armed Predators, doubled in the first ten months of 2007 -- with Predator air hours increasing from 2,000 to 4,300 in that period. The Army alone, according to Baldor, now has 361 drones in action in Iraq. The future promises much more of the same.

American military spokespeople and administration officials have, over the years, decried Iraqi and Afghan insurgents for "hiding" behind civilian populations -- in essence, accusing them of both immorality and cowardice. When such spokespeople do admit to inflicting "collateral damage" on civilian populations, they regularly blame the guerrillas for turning civilians into "shields." And all of this is regularly, dutifully reported in our press. On the other hand, no one in our world considers drone warfare in a similar context, though armed UAVs like the Predators and the newer, even more heavily armed Reapers are generally "flown" by pilots stationed at computer consoles in places like Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. It is from there that they release their missiles against "anti-Iraqi forces" or the Taliban, causing civilian deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

As one American pilot, who has fired Predator missiles from Nellis, put it:

"I go from the gym and step inside Afghanistan, or Iraq… It takes some getting used to it. At Nellis you have to remind yourself, 'I'm not at the Nellis Air Force Base. Whatever issues I had 30 minutes ago, like talking to my bank, aren't important anymore.'"

To American reporters, this seems neither cowardly, nor in any way barbaric, just plain old normal. Those pilots are not said to be "hiding" in distant deserts or among the civilian gamblers of Caesar's Palace.

Anyway, here's the simple calculus that goes with all this: Militarily, overstretched American forces simply cannot sustain the ground part of the surge for much longer. Most, if not all, of those 30,000 troops who surged into Iraq in the first half of 2007 will soon be coming home. But air power won't be. Air Force personnel are already on short, rotating tours of duty in the region. In Vietnam back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as ground troops were withdrawn, air power ramped up. This seems once again to be the pattern. There is every reason to believe that it represents the American future in Iraq.

From Barbarism to the Norm

The air war is simply not visible to most Americans who depend on the mainstream media. In part, this is because American reporters, who have covered every other sort of warfare in Iraq, simply refuse to look up.

It should be no surprise then that news of a future possible escalation of the air war was first raised by a journalist who had never set foot in Iraq and so couldn't look up. In a December 2005 piece entitled "Up in the Air," New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh suggested that "a key element of [any] drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower… The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what."

After Hersh broke his story, the silence was deafening. Only one reporter, as far as I know, has even gone up in a plane -- David S. Cloud of the New York Times, who flew in a B-1 from an unnamed "Middle Eastern airfield" on a mission over Afghanistan. Thomas Ricks traveled to Balad Air Base and did a superb report on it in 2006, but no reporter seems to have bothered to hang out with American pilots, nor have the results of bombing, missile-firing, or strafing been much recorded in our press. The air war is still largely relegated to passing mentions of air raids, based on Pentagon press releases or announcements, in summary pieces on the day's news from Iraq.

Given American military history since 1941, this is all something of a mystery. A Marine patrol rampaging through an Iraqi village can, indeed, be news; but American bombs or missiles turning part of a city into rubble or helicopter gunships riddling part of a neighborhood is, at best, tag-on, inside-the-fold material -- a paragraph or two, as in this AP report on the latest fighting in an undoubtedly well-populated part of the city of Mosul:

"An officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said three civilians were wounded and helicopters had bombarded buildings in the southeastern Sumar neighborhood, which has seen frequent attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces that have led to a series of raids."

The predictably devastating results of helicopters "bombarding" an urban neighborhood in a major Iraqi city, if reported at all, will be treated as just the normal "collateral damage" of war as we know it. In our world, what was once the barbarism of air war, its genuine horror, has been transformed into humdrum ordinariness (if, of course, you don't happen to be an Iraqi or an Afghan on the receiving end), the stuff of largely ignored Air Force news releases. It is as unremarkable (and as American) as apple pie, and nothing worth writing home to mom and the kids about.

Maybe then, it's time for Seymour Hersh to take another look. Or for the online world to take up the subject. Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the U.S.) will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those "precision" bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the U.S. Air Force looses 100,000 pounds of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the "liberation" of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.

In the meantime, brace yourself. Air war is on the way.

Vote Neither

2008-02-01T12:01:00.000-08:00

It is of course greatly disappointing that it has come down to Obama and Clinton with no Kucinich in sight. There is no use mourning what I feel is the inner deterioration of America no matter which rotten road we take. I was listening to NPR yesterday and the Peace and Freedom party wants the troops to come home immediately but how are we to leave the Afghan and Iraqi people without cleaning up the mess? They want us gone but fear us gone because the civil war will aggravate. I heard a woman say "With the Americans we have a sense of security." People say to cameras that they want Sadaam back. "Sadaam was bad but this is worse! Bring him back!". To be honest though, I don't know of any alternatives either way. The civil war must end but I'm not sure it can or will. Things have become too extreme for peace to be a thought in the minds of those who chant violence as the answer.

I wanted to share this because I think it's important to know where Ann Coulter stands on issues to guide where I DON'T stand on them. For the record, I'm not voting for McCain and definitely not for Clinton. My hope left with Kucinich's exit.

Papal Visit Scuppered by Scholars

2008-01-15T15:12:00.000-08:00

Pope Benedict XVI has cancelled a visit to a prestigious university in Rome where lecturers and students have protested against his views on Galileo.

The Pope had been set to make a speech at La Sapienza University on Thursday.

Sixty-seven academics had said the Pope condoned the 1633 trial and conviction of the astronomer Galileo for heresy.

The Vatican insists the Pope is not "anti-science" - but in light of the protests they have decided it would be better for him not to attend.

Galileo had argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

The Vatican says the Pope will now send his speech to La Sapienza, instead of delivering it in person.

Landmark controversy

Pope Benedict was in charge of Roman Catholic doctrine in 1990 when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he commented on the 17th-Century Galileo trial.

In the speech, he quoted Austrian-born philosopher Paul Feyerabend as saying the Church's verdict against Galileo had been "rational and just".

Galileo's inquisitors maintained the scriptures indicated the Earth was stationary.
Galileo, a devout Catholic, was forced to renounce his findings publicly.

Fifteen years ago Pope John Paul II officially conceded that in fact the Earth was not stationary.

The academics at La Sapienza signed a letter saying the Pope's views on Galileo "offend and humiliate us".

They said it would be inappropriate for the Pope to open their academic year on Thursday.

"In the name of the secular nature of science we hope this incongruous event can be cancelled," said the letter addressed to the university's rector, Renato Guarini.

In a separate initiative, students at La Sapienza organised four days of protest this week. The first revolved around an anti-clerical meal of bread, pork and wine, the BBC's Christian Fraser reports from Rome.

The banner at their lunch read: "Knowledge needs neither fathers nor priests".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7188860.stm
Published: 2008/01/15 18:42:11 GMT
© BBC MMVIII

what do you all think?

2008-01-14T16:44:00.000-08:00

A Nobel Laureate's Primary

By Sebastian Mallaby

Monday, January 14, 2008; Page A21

The presidential primaries are terrific fun, but they are also absurd -- far more absurd than even most critics recognize. It is not just that atypical, early states have disproportionate influence, or that outcomes can be swayed by floods of rain or money. The basic problem is one that's common to nearly all electoral contests: Whenever there are three or more contenders, it makes no sense to ask voters to select a single candidate.

To see why this is so, consider last year's Nobel Prize in economics, which went to three founders of a field known as mechanism design theory. Mechanism designers study the rules by which people with varying preferences can reconcile their interests. The first step is often to induce people to reveal preferences fully, so that a compromise that's best for everyone can be arrived at.

A good example comes from radio spectrum auctions. Once upon a time, a company that wanted the right to use spectrum simply went to the government and asked to buy it; there was no mechanism to discover whether some other company might have used the same spectrum better. So the government invited all potential users to reveal their preferences by bidding in an auction. The firm with the smartest plan to use the airwaves would be able to bid the highest price. In this way, a scarce public resource would be allocated wisely.

So far, so familiar; but consider the next twist. In a standard auction, companies will bid strategically: They will name a price that won't necessarily reflect what the spectrum is worth to them, because they may reckon that they can bag it with a lower bid. A company with a brilliant new cellphone technology that represents the best possible use of the spectrum may be able to pay $10 billion for it. But it might bid $8 billion and win, in which case the taxpayers would be short $2 billion. Or it might bid $8 billion and lose, in which case the radio spectrum would go to a rival that would use it less productively.

The mechanism designers solved this problem deftly. The highest bidder, they proposed, should win the auction, but the price he pays should be the one set by the runner-up. This ends the incentive to bid strategically. Each bidder will reveal what the spectrum is really worth to him, since he knows he won't pay the price he is naming. The spectrum will end up in the most productive hands, and at a fair price for taxpayers.

Now apply this logic to primary elections. We have progressed beyond the no-auction phase, for which the analogy is monarchy. But we are stuck with the equivalent of flawed, high-bid auctions.

When voters express a preference for a single candidate, they reveal remarkably little. Unless one candidate gets more than half the votes, unlikely in a multi-candidate field, it's impossible to know which candidate is the real preference of a majority of the voters. For example, Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire with 39 percent of the vote, but we can't tell if she would have beaten Barack Obama in a two-person contest. We can't even be sure she would have beaten John Edwards.

Just like badly designed auctions, the primaries encourage "strategic" behavior that conceals true preferences. Some Democratic voters who preferred Bill Richardson may have chosen not to reveal that, figuring that a vote for him would be wasted. Some independent voters may have preferred Obama yet voted instead in the Republican contest for John McCain, believing that Obama would win the Democratic contest without their assistance. If voters don't reveal their true preferences, it's hard to reconcile them successfully.

What elections ought to do is discover which candidate would beat each of the other candidates in head-to-head matchups. Eric Maskin, one of last year's Nobel laureates for mechanism design, will suggest how a better system could do that in a lecture Thursday at Georgetown University. Maskin's argument is that voters should list candidates in order of preference, so we wouldn't have to guess whether Clinton would have beaten Obama in a two-person contest. If a majority of voters for Edwards, Richardson and the other also-rans put Clinton higher on their lists than Obama, she would win the contest under Maskin's system. But if Obama ranked higher than Clinton on a majority of voters' lists, then he would win. After all, most people would have preferred him.

Instead of this common-sensical system, we have a farce: On the basis of a three-point margin over Obama that tells us little about which of the two candidates voters actually preferred, Clinton has transformed her prospects. Maskin and other election theorists have patiently explained this absurdity for years. Surely the recognition of the Nobel Prize should now persuade the world to listen.

smallaby@cfr.org

The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See

2008-01-12T01:49:00.000-08:00

High-school teacher Greg Craven offers a simple and logical argument for the need to address the possibility of climate change.

Visit his YouTube channel to watch numerous videos that thoroughly address any objections to his argument.

!!!!!KUCINICH FOR PRESIDENT!!!!

2008-01-07T14:55:00.000-08:00

ON IRAQ:

ON HEALTHCARE:

ON IMMIGRATION:

EDUCATION:

THE ENVIRONMENT:

WORKER'S RIGHTS:

ENERGY:

ECONOMY:

GO KUCINICH GO KUCINICH GO!

Words of God

2008-01-05T17:32:00.002-08:00

If you're ever in an argument or debate about illegal immigration with any person whose testament of faith begins with the Old Testament...

"You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt."
(Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 22:21)

SMMMACK

Muslim Woman Convicted of a Thought-Crime in the UK

2007-12-29T23:19:00.000-08:00

At Mother's, they put out this newspaper at the restaurant called "Epoch Times," I think they're based in the UK, though I'm not certain. This article was in the edition I read today.

By Stephen Jones
Epoch Times UK Staff
Civil Rights groups have welcomed a court's decision to free a Muslim woman convicted of what they say amounts to a 'thought crime'.

Samina Malik, who called herself the "lyrical terrorist" after writing poetry praising suicide bombers, walked free of the Old Bailey last Thursday after gaining a nine month suspended sentence for possessing extremist literature.

While working as a shop assistant in stationer WHSmith, the 23-year-old of Southall, London, scribbled on the back of till rolls poems such as "Kafirs your time will come soon, and no one will save you from your doom".

Malik was the first woman to be convicted under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act, which states that: "A person commits an offence if he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism."

Although she was found guilty of the offence last Wednesday, she was said to be not guilty of the more serious offence of possessing articles for terrorist purposes.

In her defence, Malik said: "This does not mean I wanted to convert my words into actions. This is a meaningless poem and that is all it ever was. To partake in something and to write about something are two different things."

Deputy President of writers' group, English PEN, Lisa Appignanesi, said: "A prison sentence for Samina Malik would have a chilling effect on every British citizen's right to express themselves fully and freely.

"This in turn would have a knock-on effect for citizens of other countries, whose governments look to the UK for leadership on such issues.

"To make a felon of a girl dreaming and writing behind a bookshop counter would have Byron and Shelley turning in their graves."

Director of the libertarian group, Jonathan Heawood, added: "Her worst crimes are against prosody and a fitting response would be to send her on a creative writing workshop."

As well as the extremist poems, police also found in Malik's house documents on a computer relating to terrorism, including: the al-Qaeda Manual, the Terrorists Handbook, the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, a manual for a Dragunov Sniper Rifle, the Firearms and RPG handbook, and a document called "How to win hand to hand fighting".

Defending her in court, John Burton said Malik's offences showed "a significant degree of immaturity" and she had behaved more like a rebellious teenager than a young woman in her 20s.

Although she faced up to 10 years in jail, she was given a suspended sentence, meaning she does not need to serve time in prison unless found guilty of another offence.

Assistant Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala, welcomed the judge's decision.

He said: "If the police believed that Samina may have constituted a threat to society then they could surely have placed her under surveillance and waited until they had uncovered some actual terror-related activity as opposed to just downloading stuff from the internet.

"Instead, given the wide-ranging powers they now enjoy under section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 they were able to prosecute Samina for a thought crime."

A Friendly Reminder

2007-12-28T13:56:00.000-08:00

The United States' embargo against Cuba has been in place for 46 years. After the Soviet Union's fall in '89-'92, The United Nations has ANNUALLY condemned the embargo. It stands only now as the means by which Cuba is made an example of economic collapse for any vulnerable nation that actively stands against U.S. foreign policy and oligarchical capitalism.

In the U.N.'s World Food Program, it costs 19 cents to feed a child for a day.

Nineteen cents.

20,000 children die of hunger every day. 20 will have died by the time you're done reading this.

One minute of war in Iraq would feed 2,000,000 children for a day.
One day of war in Iraq would feed 8,000,000 children for a year.

There are an estimated 800 million hungry human beings in the world. Three to four months of war in Iraq would feed them all.

(The following are the views and opinions of this author and not necessarily those of others associated with this blog...though I do hope so)

Let's count the number of wars that the United States has engaged itself in in the last half-century. How many people--LIVES! THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS. THEY SMILE AND CRY LIKE YOU. THEY HAVE THEIR OWN LIVES. THEIR OWN LIVES!--how many of them could the wealthiest and most prosperous nation in history have fed, clothed, sheltered, and educated? And why in God's name would that nation want to do that in the first place?...

...MAYBE BECAUSE A LIFE IS ETERNALLY HOLY, BEAUTIFUL, PRECIOUS, AND FRAGILE...
...AND MAYBE BECAUSE WE ALL SHARE THE SAME RESPONSIBILITY FOR ONE ANOTHER,
we are, after all, our brothers' keepers, are we not? The oligarchy that controls this nation politically, economically, and militarily claim it to be so through their professed beliefs in Judeo-Christian theology. Wolves in sheep's clothing. This nation claims vague ideals of 'democracy,' 'freedom,' and 'JUSTICE' only for the benefit of wealthy families and multinational corporations who have been protected by a military-industrial complex since the end of World War II; and that military-industrial complex is protected and ensured by a voting population of apathetic and feebleminded consumers, forced into fear by their government, with attention-spans long enough to hate this or that candidate or this or that policy based soley on unfounded and ethically and socially illogical premises propagated by this same oligarchical elite. It's not about dominating one group of people or another, it's about a few groups of people grabbing as much money as they can from the dead bodies of their own brothers and sisters. And granted, there are people who do their part to help through complex and simple means alike, but it sickens me to think that all the people, myself included, who recognize this and have yet to leave or take themselves off of the grid are tacitly complying with this hatred and greed. But how in the name of Peace is anyone going to solve anything by leaving??? Look at us, Ulysses between a rock and a hard place.

Jesus must be gouging his eyes out on his crown of thorns.

End Post.

Something Shiny Amidst The Muck and Mire?

2007-12-28T12:23:00.000-08:00

I've heard more good than bad about Edwards.
But that is just me...

Behind the Edwards Surge: Right Message at the Right Time
By John Nichols
The Nation

Wednesday 26 December 2007

Much was made of Illinois Senator Barack Obama's superb speech to a huge crowd of Iowa Democrats at the mid-November Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines. Without a doubt, it helped to propel Obama ahead of New York Senator Hillary Clinton in polls conducted in the weeks after the event.

But Obama's speech in November may not turn out to be the definitional statement of the fight for Iowa.

What could turn out to be the most critical comment of the campaign came from John Edwards in the last debate between the Democratic contenders - and the former senator from North Carolina may well claim the caucus-night victory that is the reward for delivering the right message at the right time.

It wasn't a great rhetorical flourish. It wasn't even a new statement. Rather, it was a particularly pointed and effective restatement of the core anti-corporate message of his campaign.
But it came precisely when Iowa Democrats were getting serious about the caucuses. And it gave Edwards the boost he needed to get back in the competition - and, he is, very much in the competition now.

Please!

No serious observer of the December 13 debate in Des Moines doubted that the standout performance, and the standout message, was that of Edwards.

Indeed, undecided voters assembled in focus groups that watched the debate for the major television networks rated Edwards off the charts. That's going to help the 2004 Democratic nominee for vice president as the Iowa caucuses approach. Despite the intense focus on the campaigns of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, most polls suggest that Edwards is very much in the running in Iowa. And rightly so.

To a far greater extent than Obama or Clinton, Edwards has struck at the heart of issues that should matter most in the race to replace not just George W. Bush, but the Bush agenda of corporate giveaways, job-crushing free trade deals, war profiteering in Iraq, and subprime mortgage profiteering in Indiana, Idaho, Illinois and, yes, Iowa.

Edwards summed up his increasingly aggressive and powerful anti-corporate themes with a declaration: "What makes America America is at stake: jobs, the middle class, health care, preserving the environment in the world for future generations.

"But all those things are at risk. And why are they at risk? Because of corporate power and corporate greed in Washington, D.C. And we have to take them on. You can't make a deal with them. You can't hope that they're going to go away. You have to actually be willing to fight. And I want every caucus-goer to know I've been fighting these people and winning my entire life. And if we do this together, rise up together, we can actually make absolutely certain, starting here in Iowa, that we make this country better than we left it."

But the former senator's most effective statement at the Des Moines Register debate on Thursday was one that reflected his deep level of engagement with working people in the upper Midwest, an engagement born of long months spent in Iowa and neighboring states - at a time when Clinton and Obama were spending considerably more time fighting over who had better relations with the media moguls on Hollywood's A-list and in the suites of Manhattan's mortgage manipulators.

Edwards got to know workers in Iowa. He stood with them in their struggles.

Turning a broad question about human rights toward the specific issue of trade policy, the former senator said that human rights, human needs and human values "should be central to our trade policy."

"But," he added, "if you look at what's happened with American trade policy, look at what America got: Big corporations made a lot of money, are continuing to make a lot of money in China. But what did America get in return? We got millions of dangerous Chinese toys. We lost millions of jobs.

"And right here in Iowa, the Maytag plant in Newton closed. A guy named Doug Bishop, who I got to know very well, had worked in that plant, and his family had worked in that plant literally for generations. And his job is now gone. The same thing, by the way, happened in the plant that my father worked in when I was growing up. It is so important that we stop allowing these corporate powers and corporate profits to run America's policy, whether it's trade policy, how we engage with China. This is not good for America. It's not good for American jobs. And it's not good for working people in this country."

That's an issue Edwards has taken far, far more seriously than his opponents in what is now a three-way race in Iowa. And that seriousness has benefitted the former senator.

Remembering the workers who have been battered by the failed trade policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations matters. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both supporters of recent trade agreements, have never connected on the same level. Edwards, who once had a shaky record on these issues but has come to be a passionate proponent of fair trade, comes across as the candidate who gets it. That's why he won the debate in Des Moines. That's why every serious survey that has been conducted in recent days shows him within striking distance of the Iowa win that once was assumed to be Clinton's for the taking and that was then supposed to be Obama's.

No one who is watching the rapid evolution of this race is any longer counting Edwards out in Iowa - or in the rest of a yet-to-be-defined race for the Democratic nomination.

Blood Pressure Elevation

2007-12-27T01:50:00.000-08:00

All I really wanted for Christmas was for O'Reilly to be banished from planet Earth. But a new camera will do.

200th Post!

2007-12-25T02:05:00.000-08:00

"Something of the sort has already been described for the self-actualizing person. Everything now comes of its own accord, pouring out, without will, effortlessly, purposelessly. He acts now totally and without deficiency, not homeostatically or need-reductively, not to avoid pain or displeasure or death, not for the sake of a goal further on in the future, not for any end other than itself. His behavior and experience becomes per se, and self-validating, end-behavior and end-experience, rather than means-behavior or means-experience. At this level, I have called the person godlike because most gods have been considered to have no needs or wants, no deficiencies, nothing lacking, to be gratified in all things. The characteristics and especially actions of the “highest,” “best” gods have then been deduced as based upon not-wanting."
--Abraham H. Maslow
"Toward a Psychology of Being", 3rd Edition, Page 121

A Meditation on Solidarity

2007-12-21T00:07:00.000-08:00

Chomsky's Pill

2007-12-13T20:42:00.000-08:00

It's Always E=mc^2/sqrt(1 - v2/c2) In Philadelphia

2007-12-09T16:45:00.000-08:00

The liberty bell crack, self-titled cheese steaks, the statue of Rocky Balboa, now this....

The Philadelphia Experiment

We should have known Philadelphia was hiding something.

The Power of Nightmares

2007-12-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

Watch the rest of this series at http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

Bush Says Iran Still a Danger Despite Report on Weapons

2007-12-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

By STEVEN LEE MYERS and HELENE COOPER
New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — President Bush warned today that Iran remained a threat despite an intelligence assessment that it had halted a covert program to develop nuclear weapons four years ago, as the administration struggled to salvage a diplomatic process now in disarray.

Once again facing criticism over the handling — and meaning — of intelligence reports, Mr. Bush said the new assessment underscored the need to intensify international efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

He said Iran could not be entrusted with acquiring even the scientific knowledge to enrich uranium for peaceful civilian use, explicitly declaring for the first time what has been an underlying premise of the Bush administration’s policy. He also appeared to rule out any new diplomatic initiative with the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous, if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Bush said, sounding defensive at times, during a news conference dominated by questions about the assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate. “What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?”

The assessment reversed one in 2005 that asserted that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons,” with American intelligence agencies now saying that they do not know whether Iran intends to take that step.

Mr. Bush said that the reversal was based on “a great discovery” by American intelligence agencies, but neither he nor other officials would elaborate. Current and former American and foreign officials said the new findings were based on intercepted communications and accounts provided by individuals with access to information about Iran’s nuclear program.

Representative Jane Harman, a Democrat of California, said that she read the classified version of the report today and described the intelligence agencies’ work “a sea change” from the 2005 assessment in the quality of its analysis and presentation of facts. Asked about the basis for the new findings, she said: “I think we have some better sourcing. That’s all I can say.”

Mr. Bush’s remarks did little to silence critics, who have accused him of hyping the case for confronting Iran. Nor did it ease they concerns of some allies. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, said he was perplexed by the new assessment and suspicious of the new evidence. “We should all look under the hood of these intelligence reports,” he said.

Mr. Bush and his senior aides spent the day trying to hold together the already-fragile coalition of world powers seeking to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Mr. Bush telephoned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has voiced skepticism about an aggressive American effort to punish and isolate Iran.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also telephoned her counterparts from the five other countries that have been pursuing United Nations sanctions against Iran to urge that they continue work on a new round of increasingly tighter sanctions.

“This report is not an ‘O.K., everybody needs to relax and quit’ report,” Mr. Bush said. “This is a report that says what has happened in the past could be repeated and that the policies used to cause the regime to halt are effective policies. And let’s keep them up. Let’s continue to work together.”

There were already signs that this effort had been complicated by the new report. R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, held a conference call this morning with his counterparts from the five countries — France, Germany, China, Britain and Russia.

One European diplomat described the conference call as “listless.”

“We’re all flabbergasted,” the diplomat said of the report generally. “You get such a surprise, and then you sit together and consider how to move forward. To be on safe ground, we decided to keep moving forward” with the effort to press for further sanctions.

A senior Bush administration official said the intelligence assessment on Iran was a setback in the effort to persuade China to endorse a new round of sanctions at the United Nations Security Council. While there had been indications over the weekend that the Chinese might drop their opposition to such a move, it appeared today that they were reconsidering again, the official said.

The new intelligence assessment, the official said, “gives the Chinese an opportunity to get off the hook.”

Mr. Bush opened himself to new criticism over his credibility when he said that the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, alerted him about new intelligence about Iran’s weapons program in August but did not explain what it was in detail.

As recently as October, Mr. Bush continued to warn darkly of Iran’s nuclear weapons threat, invoking World War III, despite the new information. He responded to a question about that today by saying he had received the final assessment, with its drastically altered findings, only last week.

“That’s not believable,” said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a candidate for president. “I refuse to believe that. If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in American, modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”

While many officials, lawmakers and diplomats focused on the halting of Iran’s weapons program, Mr. Bush emphasized the report’s finding that “a growing amount of intelligence indicates Iran was engaged in covert uranium conversion and uranium enrichment activity” from the late 1980’s until the freezing of that effort in 2003. Mr. Bush’s senior aides describe that as the first evidence of what many officials had only suspected.

“And so I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program,” Mr. Bush said. “They halted the program. And the reason why it’s a warning signal is that they could restart it.”

Critics, though, blamed the Bush administration’s hard line and harsh language for compounding Iran’s determination and undermining diplomatic efforts. They called on the administration to make a more concerted diplomatic effort to persuade Iran’s government to abide by its commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“Their actions have been totally self-defeating,” Mr. Biden said of the Bush administration. “Every time they rattle the saber, what happens is the security premium for oil goes up. It raises the price of oil. It puts more money in the pocket of Ahmadinejad and the very people we think are the bad guys.”

Mr. Bush maintained that the administration had made offers to Iran as part of the European Union’s diplomatic efforts as long ago as 2003, including promising American support for membership in the World Trade Organization and an easing of sanctions to allow the sale of spare airplane parts.

“What changed was the change of leadership in Iran,” he said, referring to the elections in Iran in 2005. “We had a diplomatic track going, and Ahmadinejad came along and took a different tone. And the Iranian people must understand that the tone and actions of their government are that which is isolating them.

Flynt Leverett, a Middle East expert at the New America Foundation who once served on the National Security Council under Mr. Bush, said the president had consistently ruled out any real entreaty to Iran that could resolve the international deadlock over its nuclear ambitions.

“The really uncomfortable part for the administration, aside from the embarrassment, is the policy implication,” Mr. Leverett said of the new intelligence assessment. “The dirty secret is the administration has never put on the table an offer to negotiate with Iran the issues that would really matter: their own security, the legitimacy of the Islamic republic and Iran’s place in the regional order.”

Promises

2007-11-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

Promises- The Film

PROMISES follows the journey of one of the filmmakers, Israeli-American B.Z. Goldberg. B.Z. travels to a Palestinian refugee camp and to an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and to the more familiar neighborhoods of Jerusalem where he meets seven Palestinian and Israeli children.

Though the children live only 20 minutes apart, they exist in completely separate worlds; the physical, historical and emotional obstacles between them run deep.

PROMISES explores the nature of these boundaries and tells the story of a few children who dared to cross the lines to meet their neighbors. Rather than focusing on political events, the seven children featured in PROMISES offer a refreshing, human and sometimes humorous portrait of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Check it out!
http://www.promisesproject.org/#