Muslim Woman Convicted of a Thought-Crime in the UK

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." Read more!

A Friendly Reminder

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. Read more!

A Meditation on Solidarity

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Chomsky's Pill

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What is Compassion?

This morning while getting ready for work my mom was watching the spanish news. Not unlike any other news channels they are mostly covering the fire crisis in California. They go into a story about a family of 6 illegal immigrants, previously living in San Diego, whose home burnt down and then they were deported. I'm rummaging trying to find a non-bias story to show you all what I'm talking about but I could only find this one. Not unbiased but at least it's a source to confirm that I'm not making shit up. Also, know that some of these deportees are children. Of course no one else but the spanish channel will tell you that and show you their faces and earnestness.

Read the comments. I am not mad at these people. I'm just disappointed.

I just left the following input:

"The lower I go in these comments the more depressed I get for a vast majority of you people. Obviously there is no value in human life or the fact that people are people just like you. What would you care about more, a family of natural Americans being found burnt alive or a family of illegal immigrants being burnt alive? The question alone is stupid because the answer is an obvious one. Not to me. Question why they're illegal and go into the history of this nation. Mexico was stolen. Actually this entire country was stolen if you want to talk about people not belonging. Of course it's not about these people being burnt alive. It's about you all believing that they were looting. Check your sources and the motives of those sources. Check what happened during Katrina. How quickly we forget. How convenient that you never knew or cared to find out. The way this society works has infiltrated your minds with ethnocentrism. "Get out of America!". One world, people. ONE. WORLD. America's sovereignty is going to cease after NAFTA and the North American Union come into play. Hopefully then you will realize that just because you were born on this side of that man-made fence, doesn't make you more of a human being than any other person with air in their lungs and a goal to survive. You'd think and I'd hope disasters like this would put things in perspective for the population (the way 9/11 did) and reaffirm the truth of the common goal of humankind. News like this reminds people like me not to lose sight of that, but people like you dig right into terms like "illegal" and start getting rushes from knowing your brother or sister is losing an entire livelihood, regardless of where they had no choice but to be born. Don't believe that they were looting unless you know the situation personally and have heard or seen them yourself, after all, these people are more afraid of you than you are of them. Illegals looting American items actually means human beings doing what they can to survive. Goodbye ethnocentric majority. Good luck."


Sigh. Read more!

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The Shock Doctrine
By Naomi Klein
The Guardian UK

Saturday 08 September 2007

Her explosive new book exposes the lie that free markets thrive on freedom. In our first exclusive extract, the No Logo author reveals the business of exploiting disaster.

I met Jamar Perry in September 2005, at the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dinner was being doled out by grinning young Scientologists, and he was standing in line. I had just been busted for talking to evacuees without a media escort and was now doing my best to blend in, a white Canadian in a sea of African- American southerners. I dodged into the food line behind Perry and asked him to talk to me as if we were old friends, which he kindly did.

Born and raised in New Orleans, he'd been out of the flooded city for a week. He and his family had waited forever for the evacuation buses; when they didn't arrive, they had walked out in the baking sun. Finally they ended up here, a sprawling convention centre now jammed with 2,000 cots and a mess of angry, exhausted people being patrolled by edgy National Guard soldiers just back from Iraq.


Please!
The news racing around the shelter that day was that the Republican Congressman Richard Baker had told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities." All that week Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a "smaller, safer city" - which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets", you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway.

Over at the shelter, Jamar could think of nothing else. "I really don't see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn't have died."

He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity. It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?" A mother with two kids chimed in. "No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."

One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, "Uncle Miltie", as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. "Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."

Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions.

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that "Katrina accomplished in a day ... what Louisiana school reformers couldn't do after years of trying". Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman's plan "an educational land grab". I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, "disaster capitalism".

Privatising the school system of a mid-size American city may seem a modest preoccupation for the man hailed as the most influential economist of the past half century. Yet his determination to exploit the crisis in New Orleans to advance a fundamentalist version of capitalism was also an oddly fitting farewell. For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.

In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as "the shock doctrine". He observed that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change". When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the "tyranny of the status quo". A variation on Machiavelli's advice that "injuries" should be inflicted "all at once", this is one of Friedman's most lasting legacies.

Friedman first learned how to exploit a shock or crisis in the mid-70s, when he advised the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock after Pinochet's violent coup, but the country was also traumatised by hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy - tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and deregulation.

It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a "Chicago School" revolution, as so many of Pinochet's economists had studied under Friedman there. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic "shock treatment". In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or "shock therapy", has been the method of choice.

I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering. Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. "When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself," said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.

When I began this research into the intersection between super-profits and mega-disasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to "liberate" markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at WTO summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the IMF.

As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. What was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.

Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical free-market "reforms". In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. The Falklands war in 1982 served a similar purpose for Margaret Thatcher: the disorder resulting from the war allowed her to crush the striking miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a western democracy.

The bottom line is that, for economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint, some sort of additional collective trauma has always been required. Friedman's economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy - the US under Reagan being the best example - but for the vision to be implemented in its complete form, authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian conditions are required.

Until recently, these conditions did not exist in the US. What happened on September 11 2001 is that an ideology hatched in American universities and fortified in Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home. The Bush administration, packed with Friedman's disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld, seized upon the fear generated to launch the "war on terror" and to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering US economy. Best understood as a "disaster capitalism complex", it is a global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the US homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all "evil" abroad.

In a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the centre of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary functioning of the state - in effect, to privatise the government.

In scale, the disaster capitalism complex is on a par with the "emerging market" and IT booms of the 90s. It is dominated by US firms, but is global, with British companies bringing their experience in security cameras, Israeli firms their expertise in building hi-tech fences and walls. Combined with soaring insurance industry profits as well as super profits for the oil industry, the disaster economy may well have saved the world market from the full-blown recession it was facing on the eve of 9/11.

In the torrent of words written in eulogy to Milton Friedman, the role of shocks and crises to advance his world view received barely a mention. Instead, the economist's passing, in November 2006, provided an occasion for a retelling of the official story of how his brand of radical capitalism became government orthodoxy in almost every corner of the globe. It is a fairytale history, scrubbed clean of the violence so intimately entwined with this crusade.

It is time for this to change. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a powerful reckoning with the crimes committed in the name of communism. But what of the crusade to liberate world markets?

I am not arguing that all forms of market systems require large-scale violence. It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that demands no such brutality or ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy - such as a national oil company - held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.

John Maynard Keynes proposed just that kind of mixed, regulated economy after the Great Depression. It was that system of compromises, checks and balances that Friedman's counter-revolution was launched to dismantle in country after country. Seen in that light, Chicago School capitalism has something in common with other fundamentalist ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity.

This desire for godlike powers of creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For 35 years, what has animated Friedman's counter-revolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom available only in times of cataclysmic change - when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way - moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility. Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture - a flood, a war, a terrorist attack - can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.

Torture: The Other Shock Treatment

From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade. Chile's coup featured three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would re-emerge three decades later in Iraq. The shock of the coup prepared the ground for economic shock therapy; the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks.

But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic. Torture, or in CIA parlance, "coercive interrogation", is a set of techniques developed by scientists and designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation.

Declassified CIA manuals explain how to break "resistant sources": create violent ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them. First, the senses are starved (with hoods, earplugs, shackles), then the body is bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings). The goal of this "softening-up" stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind, and it is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever they want.

The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely. The original disaster - the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown - puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies. Like the terrorised prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.

Read more!

Politics in Black and White

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 24 September 2007

Last Thursday there was a huge march in Jena, La., to protest the harsh and unequal treatment of six black students arrested in the beating of a white classmate. Students who hung nooses to warn blacks not to sit under a "white" tree were suspended for three days; on the other hand, the students accused in the beating were initially charged with second-degree attempted murder.

And one of the Jena Six remains in jail, even though appeals courts have voided his conviction on the grounds that he was improperly tried as an adult.

Many press accounts of the march have a tone of amazement. Scenes like those in Jena, the stories seemed to imply, belonged in the 1960s, not the 21st century. The headline on the New York Times report, "Protest in Louisiana Case Echoes the Civil Rights Era," was fairly typical.

But the reality is that things haven't changed nearly as much as people think. Racial tension, especially in the South, has never gone away, and has never stopped being important. And race remains one of the defining factors in modern American politics.


Consider voting in last year's Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a "thumping," with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races.

And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There's a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book "Whistling Past Dixie": "Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past."

Republican politicians, who understand quite well that the G.O.P.'s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites, have tacitly acknowledged this reality. Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.

Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California's Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states' rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered. In 2000, Mr. Bush made a pilgrimage to Bob Jones University, famed at the time for its ban on interracial dating.

And all four leading Republican candidates for the 2008 nomination have turned down an invitation to a debate on minority issues scheduled to air on PBS this week.

Yet if the marchers at Jena reminded us that America still hasn't fully purged itself of the poisonous legacy of slavery, it would be wrong to suggest that the nation has made no progress. Racism, though not gone, is greatly diminished: both opinion polls and daily experience suggest that we are truly becoming a more tolerant, open society.

And the cynicism of the "Southern strategy" introduced by Richard Nixon, which delivered decades of political victories to Republicans, is now starting to look like a trap for the G.O.P.

One of the truly remarkable things about the contest for the Republican nomination is the way the contenders have snubbed not just blacks - who, given the G.O.P.'s modern history, probably won't vote for a Republican in significant numbers no matter what - but Hispanics. In July, all the major contenders refused invitations to address the National Council of La Raza, which Mr. Bush addressed in 2000. Univision, the Spanish-language TV network, had to cancel a debate scheduled for Sept. 16 because only John McCain was willing to come.

If this sounds like a good way to ensure defeat in future elections, that's because it is: Hispanics are a rapidly growing force in the electorate.

But to get the Republican nomination, a candidate must appeal to the base - and the base consists, in large part, of Southern whites who carry over to immigrants the same racial attitudes that brought them into the Republican fold to begin with. As a result, you have the spectacle of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, pragmatists on immigration issues when they actually had to govern in diverse states, trying to reinvent themselves as defenders of Fortress America.

And both Hispanics and Asians, another growing force in the electorate, are getting the message. Last year they voted overwhelmingly Democratic, by 69 percent and 62 percent respectively.

In other words, it looks as if the Republican Party is about to start paying a price for its history of exploiting racial antagonism. If that happens, it will be deeply ironic. But it will also be poetic justice.
Read more!

Gambling with Profighti

A man is approached in the parking lot.
The approacher moved swift. The man did not know what was to happen.
This man is Jameson.
The approacher is Prohfighti
Prohf told him;
Gospel in the garden
Gospel in the trees
The Gospel that's inside of you
The gospel inside of me
"I'm sorry but we have a movie to catch."
Do you realize what's going to happen to you?
"Pardon me?"
The world is moving toward a close
"They've been saying that for centuries."

It's going to happen soon. Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?
"No"
If you do not reach out for God you will perish.
"I don't know if I believe in God"
Just repeat after me: Jesus Christ is my personal Lord and Savior
"I don't feel comfortable saying something I don't believe"
We'll then you will die
"We will all die at some point"
Jameson is in a lose-win situation. Lose his pride or win his salvation. Prohfighti has made it known that by physically stating the oath Jameson will be saved, regardless of whether or not he believes it at the moment.
"Will you be satisfied if I say it and leave me to meet my movie"
Yes, for my soul and yours are alike. Repeat after me.
_______________________________________

So Jameson said the oath & parted ways with Prohf.

The End. Read more!

Pentagon Sued Over Mandatory Christianity

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Tuesday 18 September 2007

A military watchdog organization filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and a US Army major, on behalf of an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. The suit charges the Pentagon with widespread constitutional violations by allegedly trying to force the soldier to embrace evangelical Christianity and then retaliating against him when he refused.


The complaint, filed in US District Court in Kansas City, by the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), on behalf of Jeremy Hall, an Army specialist currently on active duty in Speicher, Iraq, alleges that Hall's First Amendment rights were violated beginning last Thanksgiving when, because of his atheist beliefs, he declined to participate in a Christian prayer ceremony commemorating the holiday.

"Immediately after plaintiff made it known he would decline to join hands and pray, he was confronted, in the presence of other military personnel, by the senior ranking ... staff sergeant who asked plaintiff why he did not want to pray, whereupon plaintiff explained because he is an atheist," says the lawsuit, a copy of which was provided to Truthout. "The staff sergeant asked plaintiff what an atheist is and plaintiff responded it meant that he (plaintiff) did not believe in God. This response caused the staff sergeant to tell plaintiff that he would have to sit elsewhere for the Thanksgiving dinner. Nonetheless, plaintiff sat at the table in silence and finished his meal."

Moreover, the complaint alleges that on August 7, when Hall received permission by an Army chaplain to organize a meeting of other soldiers who shared his atheist beliefs, his supervisor, Army Major Paul Welborne, broke up the gathering and threatened to retaliate against the soldier by charging him with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The complaint also alleges that Welborne vowed to block Hall's reenlistment in the Army if the atheist group continued to meet - a violation of Hall's First Amendment rights under the Constitution. Welborne is named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

"During the course of the meeting, defendant Welborne confronted the attendees, disrupted the meeting and interfered with plaintiff Hall's and the other attendees' rights to discuss topics of their interests," the lawsuit alleges.

The complaint charges that Hall, who is based at Fort Riley, Kansas, has been forced to "submit to a religious test as a qualification to his post as a soldier in the United States Army," a violation of Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation said Defense Secretary Robert Gates is named as a defendant in the lawsuit because he has allowed the military to engage in "a pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense and the United States military."

The lawsuit seeks an injunction against Welborne from further engaging in behavior "that has the effect of establishing compulsory religious practices" and asks that Gates prevent Welborne from interfering with Hall's free speech rights.

Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization that seeks to enforce the law mandating the separation between church and state in the US military, said the lawsuit would be the first of many his group intends to file against the Pentagon.

"This landmark federal litigation is just the first of a galaxy of new lawsuits that will be expeditiously filed against the Pentagon in a concentrated effort to preserve the precious religious liberties guaranteed by our beautiful United States Constitution," Weinstein said Monday. "Today, we are boldly stabbing back against an unconstitutional heart of darkness, a contagion of fundamentalist religious supremacy and triumphalism noxiously dominating the command and control of the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind: our honorable and noble United States armed forces."

A Pentagon spokesman said he could not comment on the lawsuit because he has not yet seen it.

Weinstein, a former White House attorney under Ronald Reagan, general counsel H. Ross Perot and an Air Force Judge Advocate (JAG), has been waging a one-man war against the Department of Defense for its blatant disregard of the Constitution. He published a book on his fight: "With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military." Weinstein is also an Air Force veteran and a graduate of the Air Force Academy. Three generations of his family have attended US military academies.

Since he launched his watchdog organization nearly two years ago months ago, Weinstein said he has been contacted by more than 5,000 active duty and retired soldiers, many of whom served or serve in Iraq, who told Weinstein that they were pressured by their commanding officers to convert to Christianity.

The lawsuit also includes examples of other alleged constitutional abuses by Pentagon officials.

Last month, the Pentagon's Inspector General responded to a complaint filed last year by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation alleging that Defense Department officials violated military regulations by appearing in a video promoting a fundamental Christian organization.

The Inspector General agreed and issued a 47-page report that was highly critical of senior Army and Air Force personnel for participating in the video while in uniform and on active duty.

The report recommended that Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack Catton, Army Brig. Gen. Bob Caslen, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, Maj. Gen. Peter Sutton, and a colonel and lieutenant colonel whose names were redacted in the inspector general's report, "improperly endorsed and participated with a non-Federal entity while in uniform" and the men should be disciplined for misconduct. Caslen was formerly the deputy director for political-military affairs for the war on terrorism, directorate for strategic plans and policy, joint staff. He now oversees the 4,200 cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point. Caslen told DOD investigators he agreed to appear in the video upon learning other senior Pentagon officials had been interviewed for the promotional video.

The inspector general's report recommended the "Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff of the Army take appropriate corrective action with respect to the military officers concerned."

The Army generals who appeared in the video appeared to be speaking on behalf of the military, but they did not obtain prior permission to appear in the video. They defended their actions, according to the inspector general's report, saying the "Christian Embassy had become a 'quasi-Federal entity,' since the DOD had endorsed the organization to General Officers for over 25 years."


Thank you Mikey Weinstein! I can't wait to see what some of the other lawsuits will bring up.
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Ultra-Mega-Ignoramus Maximus Prime Supreme Rex

"God Hates Fags"
I had heard of the Phelps family a couple months back when I was flipping through channels and found a hateful (and pretty reptillian-looking) woman on the screen preaching righteous death and fiery hell to all America. I found it resonating in the worst way possible. This family is called the "most hated family in America". One of my friends on MySpace posted this 6-part BBC documentary on them by Louis Theroux which I just finished watching. I would like to share part one with you all and the links to the other 5 parts. (Part 5 has a really funny part in which Fred Phelps, the head honcho pastor, at the church yells "YOU'RE GONNA EAT YOUR BABIES!" during one of the sermons) The worst and most disillusioning part about this documentary and Jesus Camp is always taking a look at the children and how they're being built and fed this sectarian exclusivity to God bullshit. You want to shake them and stop the cycle of detrimental traditions and beliefs of hateful messages and hope that they eventually find common sense and break away if not tear down the whole wall of hatred from the nucleus out. It's ironic how much Shirley Phelps resembles my quintessential anti-Christ.


Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

I highly suggest sitting through the painful reality of these people when you have an hour to spare. Not that they're the ones living in pain, I meant it pains me to see this kind of extremism devoted to an anti-loving cause.
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Inherent Greed and Disregard for the Value of Human Life

21st Century Slavery Under Global Capitalism

TODAY, IT IS ESTIMATED THAT 27 MILLION people in Africa, Asia and Latin America work WITHOUT PAY—AS MODERN-DAY SLAVES.

Women are bought and sold in the trafficking of sex slaves. Bonded laborers are forced to work without pay and with no rights, to pay off debts. Children work with no pay and are sold into sexual slavery.

If things could talk…much of your clothes, your car, your food, your rugs…could tell you they were made with the use of modern-day slave labor.

*****

The fishing industry in Lake Volta, Ghana. Children, as young as three, mend, set and pull nets, and clean fish. Weights are tied on them so that when they dive into the lake to retrieve snagged nets, they will descend more quickly. A lot of this goes on at night, and in the dark depths these children get tangled and trapped in the nets and drown. Their bodies wash up on the shore. The ones who survive get little food. Two boys said when they ate some of the fish they netted, their master beat them with a cane.

Brick kilns in Pakistan. Whole families are lured into the work with promises of good pay. But then end up trapped in bondage – the whole family working for free in order to pay off their debts. Armed guards severely punish any worker who disobeys. A 30-year-old man has old and new scars from such treatment. Once he was beaten unconscious, then locked in a small shed. After three days he was brought out in front of the other workers, hung upside down by a rope and beaten.

A mining town on the Amazon River. Gold from here goes to the biggest banks in the world. Wilma Huamani Sacsi cries when she thinks about her son, Luis Alberto, who never saw his second birthday. With all the workers, he lived in the most unsanitary conditions and had little to eat. When his belly swelled up from a kidney infection, Wilma asked the boss for money to go to a health clinic. But he just told her to go back to work. Holding her son, Wilma set off on foot to the nearest clinic—14 miles away. A doctor there said Luis needed to go to a hospital. Wilma begged in the streets to pay for the trip. But by the time she got enough, Luis was dead.

WHAT KIND OF SYSTEM PRODUCES SUCH HORRORS?

A CAPITALIST-IMPERIALIST SYSTEM WHERE COMMODITY PRODUCERS WILL ALWAYS STRIVE TO FIND THE MOST PROFITABLE WAY TO MAKE THEIR PRODUCTS. And slave labor—not paying workers -- is VERY PROFITABLE.

*****

Along the Amazon River in Brazil, thousands of bonded laborers produce charcoal by burning pieces of hardwood. Recruiters target desperate people in impoverished cities with the promise of jobs with pay. But people end up thousands of miles away into the jungle, working with no pay and no rights because of an endless debt for things bought from the company store – like food, clothing and supplies, even tools, boots and gloves they need for the job.

These slaves work in 95-degree heat and suffer from malaria and chronic coughs. They live in shacks made from plastic sheeting. They are fed rancid meat. Drinking water is contaminated. Latrines are just holes in the ground. Deep in the jungle, they can’t leave even if they want to. They don’t have money to make the trip home and armed guards threaten them if they try to escape.

Charcoal from these camps is used to make pig iron, a basic ingredient of steel. Brokers from steelmakers and foundries buy this pig iron. Then it’s purchased by some of the world’s largest companies to produce things like cars, tractors, sinks, and refrigerators. Companies like Nucor Corp., the second-largest U.S. steel company. Carmakers like Ford, General Motors, Nissan, and Toyota. Producers of appliances like Whirlpool and Kohler.

THE MOST PRIMITIVE AND BARBARIC FORMS OF LABOR SERVE THE INTERESTS OF THE LARGEST AND MOST MODERN CAPITALIST CORPORATIONS IN THE U.S. AND AROUND THE WORLD—which are driven by the need to maximize profit and to come out on top in the cut-throat competition with other capitalists.

The Brazilian government raids slave labor camps and frees people. But as long as Brazil is subordinate to imperialism, it can’t escape the logic of capital. And no matter how many slave labor camps are shut down, they will keep re-emerging—because this system will continue to produce desperate people with no way to survive and capitalist vultures looking to maximize their profits by maximizing exploitation.

*****

Ideologues of globalization extol subcontracting and outsourcing. But in fact what this provides are two valuable things for the capitalists: 1) it cheapens production immeasurably and 2) it provides them with PLAUSIBLE DENIAL that distances them from the brutal, inhuman and murderous production process in which the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings are violently crushed.

And all this is happening under the dominance of U.S. imperialism, the direct and indirect involvement of major global corporations, and the enforcement of IMF and World Bank policies.

What does it say about this system that here in the 21st century you have the most high-tech knowledge and industrial capacity existing alongside the most barbaric, primitive and inhuman slave-like conditions of labor? It may seem like these two things are worlds and centuries apart. But in fact they are part of the integrated system of contemporary global capitalism. A system completely outmoded and unnecessary. [Source]


"The more you know, the harder it is to sleep at night." Oy. Greed officially rules the world.
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Jena Six

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Professor Peter Singer on Colbert

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