life goes on?!

The Money, Indeed

2010-04-08T19:31:00.003-04:00

Amazing ! [via The Daily Dish}

The Money

08 Apr 2010

One of the critical legacies of Pope John Paul II was his unwavering support for the biggest institutional force in the greater conspiracy to commit and hide sex abuse in the Catholic Church. I'm referring to the Legion of Christ, a creepy, vast, enormously wealthy church within a church, run by pederast, pedophile, bigamist and con artist, Marcial Maciel. Maciel, who was addicted to morphine, abused (at least) twenty seminarians and had (at least) two wives, and several children. The Legion at its peak had resources of $33 billion. His chief enablers and supporters were, of course, the theocons, who got a thrill up the leg observing this strictly orthodox leadership cult, combining the political and social attitudes of the 1950s with the oomph of modern day evangelical growth and money.

Richard John Neuhaus was a staunch supporter and dismissed all the charges against Maciel with "moral certainty." Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum spoke at Legion conferences. Bill Bennett spoke at Legion events and said, "I am fortunate enough to know and trust the priests of the Legionaries of Christ. ... The flourishing of the Legionaries is a cause for hope in a time of much darkness." Bill Donohue supported Maciel against now-substantiated charges of abuse. But in some ways, Maciel's most disturbing enabler was Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard Law Professor and former ambassador to the Vatican:
[Glendon] taught at Regina Apostolorum Athenaeum, the Legion's university in Rome, and advised in the planning that led to the order's first university in America, University of Sacramento, Calif. In a 2002 letter for the Legion Web site she scoffed at the allegations against Maciel and praised his "radiant holiness" and "the success of Regnum Christi [the order's lay wing] and the Legionaries of Christ in advancing the New Evangelization."

Maciel - whom John Paul II called an "efficacious guide to youth" - ran what can only be called a corrupt cult, designed in part to protect his own long life of sexual abuse and misconduct, where members were ruthlessly pressured to raise and give money to the organization.

How did Maciel get away with this for so long?

Jason Berry, a journalistic icon in the coverage of the sex abuse scandal, has added a critical and disturbing aspect of this story. Yes, it's about money, the one thing that has not emerged yet in the church's current crisis. Yes, vast amounts of money that Maciel retained and funneled - in cash - to critical Vatican officials, who subsequently turned a blind eye to Maciel's crimes (Ratzinger was one of the very few Vatican officials who refused to accept the money, an indication both of his integrity but also of his awareness of what Maciel was up to). This flow of cash to important and influential figures was a massive operation and Berry has even found former members of the Legion who were recruited to hand over the cash to critical cardinals and officials in plain sealed envelopes:

"When Fr. Maciel would leave Rome it was my duty to supply him with $10,000 in cash -- $5,000 in American dollars, and the other half in the currency of the country to which he was traveling," explained Fichter. "I would be informed by one of his assistants that he was leaving and I would have to prepare the funds for him. I never questioned that he was not using it for good and noble purposes. It was a routine part of my job. He was so totally above reproach that I felt honored to have that role. He did not submit any receipts and I would have not dared to ask him for a receipt."

Among those who were recipients of large gifts were the head of the Congregation for Religious, the organization that actually had the authority to investigate Maciel. That gift - in true mafioso style - was a lavish and generous renovation of his residence.

Maciel then wanted to institute a personal vow for members of the Legion - as a way to bind cult-members to silence about any and all of Maciel's crimes. Even the head of the Congregation for Religious, in his newly fabulous apartment, balked at this. So Maciel went directly to John Paul II's key aide and personal confidant, Polish Msgr Dziwisz. And by going directly, I mean funneling huge amounts of cash. One way Maciel did this was by selecting key wealthy Legion members for attendance at the Pope's private mass. These Legionnaires subsequently donated vast amounts to Dziwisz as a gift to the church - a bit like getting campaign contributions by having private access to politicians. Money quote:

One of the ex-Legionaries in Rome told NCR that a Mexican family in 1997 gave Dziwisz $50,000 upon attending Mass. "We arranged things like that," he said of his role as go-between. Did John Paul know about the funds?

Only Dziwisz would know. Given the pope's ascetic lifestyle and accounts of his charitable giving, the funds could have gone to a deserving cause. Dziwisz's book says nothing of donations and contains no mention of Maciel or the Legion. The priest who arranged for the Mexican family to attend Mass worried, in hindsight, about the frequency with which Legionaries facilitated funds to Dziwisz.
"This happened all the time with Dziwisz," said a second ex-Legionary, who was informed of the transactions.
Fr. Alvaro Corcuera, who would succeed Maciel as director general in 2004, and one or two other Legionaries "would go up to see Dziwisz on the third floor. They were welcomed. They were known within the household."
Struggling to give context to the donations, this cleric continued: "You're saying these laypeople are good and fervent, it's good for them to meet the pope. The expression is opera carita -- 'We're making an offering for your works of charity.' That's the way it's done. In fact you don't know where the money's going." He paused. "It's an elegant way of giving a bribe." ...
When Martínez Somalo, a Spaniard, became head of the congregation overseeing religious in 1994, Maciel dispatched a priest to Martínez Somalo's home. The young priest carried an envelope thick with cash. "I didn't bat an eye," he recalled. "I went up to his apartment, handed him the envelope, said goodbye. ... It was a way of making friends, insuring certain help if it were needed, oiling the cogs."

Another critical figure who was the recipient of vast amounts of Legion money was Cardinal Sodano. Sodano was critical to fending off investigation of Maciel once formal charges were brought in 1998:
"Cardinal Sodano was the cheerleader for the Legion," said one of the ex-Legionaries. "He'd come give a talk at Christmas and they'd give him $10,000." Another priest recalled a $5,000 donation to Sodano.

Sodano was also the key Vatican figure who this Easter derided the latest stories of abuse as "petty gossip" and declared the church united in defending the Pope. He has refused to answer Berry's questions about the Legion's cash gifts to him over the years.

So this multiple rapist and bigamist essentially got away with his crimes because he bought silence from key Vatican officials, at the very least by ingratiating himself by donating huge amounts to the church and at the very most by directly bribing key officials with envelopes stuffed with cash.

Benedict XVI knew all of this. To his credit, he was clearly troubled by it, and never accepted its compromising money. But given the authority to pursue Maciel in 2001, Ratzinger held off for four years until Maciel's protector, John Paul II, was incapacitated and near death. Which means to say: Ratzinger knew what had gone on, and allowed a clear molester and bigamist to remain a pillar of John Paul II's church for years.
John Paul The Great? More like: John Paul The Great Enabler of Abuse In the Pursuit of Orthodoxy and Money.

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Sometimes The Other Side Just Wins

2010-03-24T11:39:00.006-04:00

Some Advice For Republicans I

24 Mar 2010 01:17 pm

Russell King provides some:
You can't demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, and then ignore them when they don't.
You can't whine that it's unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party's former leader admits you've been doing it for decades.
You can't portray yourself as fighting terrorists when you openly and passionately support terrorists.
You can't complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you've routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain -- threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented -- and admitted it. Some admissions are unintentional, others are made proudly. This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.

Continue reading "Some Advice For Republicans I" »
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"Sometimes The Other Side Just Wins"

24 Mar 2010 10:25 am

A reader writes:

Oh please ... ”contempt" for the electorate”? As I recall, the bill passed with 219 votes precisely because Congress and the President were empowered by the electorate in 2008. Perhaps Megan thinks we should just dispatch with the whole notion of elections and just leave decisions up to Rasmussen and Gallup. Perhaps the pollsters could set up shop at the Capitol and the White House. What a thought! Voters don’t just vote for ideas, but for representatives, who tend to be extraordinarily useful in making reasonable decisions when unreasonable minority factions are scaring the shit out of everyone else.

Another writes:

Her post strikes me as a bit hysterical, and it seems as if Megan has no recollection of 2000 through 2008. As I recall there were a number of things that happened during those years that did not satisfy the will of the people. The 2003 House vote on the Medicare Modernization Act, where the GOP leadership held the vote open for hours (literally in the middle of the night), while twisting arms with some pretty craven tactics, seemed far worse than anything we have seen in the past week.

Another:

I am not sure what Megan means by "legislative innovations." Does she mean a straight up or down vote after a year of debate and negotiations? Does she mean reconciliation, a move used by Republicans and Democrats alike for years? The only "innovation" we saw this weekend was Democrats not backing down.

The will of the people was clearly expressed in November 2008 when Obama won the presidency with a clear mandate and the Democrats won overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. Health care reform was a central part of Obama's campaign as well as the campaigns of many Democratic Reps and Senators. Health care reform was not some wild surprise Obama sprung on the American people after he tricked them into electing him. I don't think polls should be totally ignored, but I think that election day is the ultimate poll.
Also, she seems only interested in Congress honoring the will of certain people. My rep, Luis Guiterrez, was threatening to vote no. I and many others called and wrote to his office to urge him to vote yes. He listened to his constituents and voted yes. He was honoring the will of the people in his district. I also wrote to my senators, Obama, and Pelosi. Why should some Tea Party protester's desires trump mine? McArdle ignores the fact that there are millions of regular citizens like me communicating with their legislators, and even more who silently wanted this legislation to pass.
Sometimes the other side just wins - it doesn't mean the end of the country as we know it, and it doesn't mean that they cheated. I have only read a few things here and there by McArdle, but that post pretty much guarantees that I won't be reading much more by her. Not because she disagrees about HCR but because of the lack of intellectual honesty displayed in that posting.

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Night of the Living Dead

2010-03-23T23:18:00.004-04:00

via "Seeking Spirit"

night of the living dead: political conservatism in america
This is a remarkable article and I have published it in its entirety….I would love to hear more discussion of its contents….S Spirit

Night of the Living Dead: The Party of Palin

by Jim Chaffee

[ opinion - february 10 ]

“What up?” – Michael Steele

Ever wonder why the scariest caricature of the living dead is a smiling Dick Cheney? Believe me, that is more than a freakish coincidence of genetics.

Ghouls, zombies, vampires and other variants of the undead are the stuff of modern US horror media, threats from within haunting the modern “social psyche.” During the so-called Cold War, popular horror genres reflected national paranoia of threat from without: alien invaders and giant bugs. Contemporary psychological horror is more apt to be the homegrown sociopath as superman à la Silence of the Lambs than the externally brainwashed fantasy creature of The Manchurian Candidate.

It is no surprise that the threat is seen as from within when one considers the uncanny resemblance of the modern conservative movement to the soulless, brain-eating undead. As already noted, Cheney’s pale visage in its familiar grimace-smile would have made a terrifying poster for yet another remake of The Night of the Living Dead. That was before said countenance became cliché.

Unlike the anxiety of the Cold War years, the current apprehension is not a product of government propaganda. It is a deep shudder from within society of dread felt rather than understood, which cannot be expressed even when understood for reasons we will attempt to lay bare. Worse, it seems the trend is to accept the undead and their variants as normal part of society. Which is no surprise, given the length of time people have had to live with the likes of Antonin Scalia and Pat Robertson, among a host of other superstitious zombies.

The word conservative

The central tenet of modern conservatism is a foreign policy based on aggressive and blatant militarism. Certainly militarism is not something new in the US; witness leaders like Harry Truman, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The difference was that the US did not consider it part of its national identity to brazenly dictate terms to the rest of the world.

Moreover, following WWII there had been a movement on the part of the Democrats and the Supreme Court to dismantle local versions of apartheid in the Southern US and force upon the rest of the nation a sort of legal racial equality with an attempt to erase white dominance (this push for equality is a significant factor in defining the term “liberal”). Legal racial equality is not social racial equality, however, and this action caused a strong reaction resulting in movements among disgruntled locals who considered the white race to be the one chosen to rule the US. They were joined by superstitious cliques appalled at the freedom of speech given groups they considered immoral, by which they meant not living in accord with their own chosen interpretation of some form of holy writ, most often the Bible. These local movements were eventually fodder for a global marriage fused by the militarist Ronald Reagan, a president who was an essential pivot in the evolution of a new form of governance for the US. But this comes later in the story.

An influential portion of these militarists are of a particular superstitious persuasion, members of religions who worship the genocidal monstrosity of Moses and Joshua (as opposed to those who worship the later “softer” divinity of the New Testament, another demarcation in the boundary separating liberal versus conservative), mythical Jewish leaders of a war of genocide and ethnic cleansing. It is not difficult to fathom that people who believe that anything one does under the orders of God (the titular name they give their supreme monstrosity) is not only just and right, but in fact holy, can believe that their God-chosen nation is now under holy orders to cleanse the earth of “evil” by violent means. Nor is it difficult to fathom that such people believe, for example, that this thing they call God would preserve its chosen during a nuclear conflagration After all, the human primate is not a rational creature, no matter what the formal academic body of knowledge called Economics would have us believe.

Not all these militarists are influenced by Biblical superstition. A significant portion of them have been inculcated into a secular mythology of the US as leader of the free world, conqueror of Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan. That history shows it was actually the Soviet Red Army that defeated Hitler, almost single-handed, is irrelevant. This myth is of particular significance to those who never served their country, patriots like Reagan and Cheney, the latter a draft-dodger. They need no more excuse to force the US’s will upon other nations than this one.

Note that these people are not fiscal conservatives; fiscal conservatism is incompatible with militarism. Militarists spend whatever is necessary to build military dominance to terrify other nations. That a significant portion of this spending is for bluster value is evidenced by the lack of US military success in actual warfare. Consider the fact that when the US went to war in Iraq, its too-few troops were poorly equipped despite the billions spent on “defense.” The war machine produced by “defense spending”is not of any particular value to the military in fighting wars; much of the product ends up in the desert “bone-yards” of Arizona or in storage facilities for no wars. A significant portion of the billions is for paper. The real purpose of “defense spending” since Reagan’s presidency has been jobs: constant fiscal stimulus (with horrendous overhead).

The first serious modern politician at a Presidential level to openly express militarism was Barry Goldwater. He gained support via his focus on the notion of local control, an expression that Southern racists have used as a codeword for re-institution of apartheid. But his expression of militarism (“extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”) cost him the election to Johnson. Of course, it was Johnson who escalated the conflict in Vietnam after winning election by implying Goldwater would nuke North Vietnam, among other countries. Perhaps Johnson was not far off, given the nuclear inclinations of Goldwater’s incarnation as VP in Bush the Younger’s regime. The irony that Goldwater’s “liberty” be extended outside the US by the new conservatives who would force freedom and liberty (“Democracy”) on other nations at gunpoint would not be lost on Goldwater.

The conservatives who form the militarist movement are mostly called social conservatives. That they sometimes gather into their fold people who consider themselves libertarians or fiscal conservatives is irrational, but few humans are given to or capable of careful logical consideration. (There is also the problem of a “two-party system” which allows little realistic choice.) In fact, many of them are opposed to logic or ratiocination, and openly cry out for what can only be called anti-rationality. This is clear from contemporary confusion of scientific thought with legal thought (there is no court of science) or with religion. Another sort of derangement becoming common, especially in the media, is typified by the megalomania of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who believes in his Pope-like infallibility as a unique supernatural interpreter of the Constitution guided by the Holy Founding Fathers. (The same phenomenon occurs within elements of the libertarian movement, but unlike Ron Paul, most of the more vocal bozos in the “teabag parties” are ignorant of the Constitution and its history. Their version of this document and their history of its adoption, which denies the myriad compromises required to get it approved, exists only in their imaginations.) This sort of insanity has become an embedded part of the conservative movement’s claim to be the only group that can pick truly “unbiased” justices for the Supreme Court. The mania is apparent when one listens to the arguments made by supporters of particular political ideology, no matter what ilk, standing reason on its head to play a game of gotcha. This sophistry is a significant part of the popular media portrayal of legal proceedings. However, it is only the conservatives who claim to be led by supernatural, usually divine, guidance.

Besides the lack of rational argument there is the substitution of ideological belief for factual evidence. History is cast aside as lies or propaganda if it is not in accord with the world-view of the ideologue. This is independent of the persuasion, but it is currently a form of mass hysteria among the so-called social conservatives. In fact, it may be their hallmark. For example, I have an old friend who claims to be a libertarian but who prefers Republicans to Democrats because they spend less money. He disregards the fact that under Reagan the US national debt doubled and the US became a net debtor nation for the first time. He claims that Reagan’s tax cuts brought in more revenue, even though the budget deficits under Reagan were the most massive in modern times before Bush the Younger. He denies the reality that Bill Clinton zeroed the budget deficit, since the fact that a Democrat could be more fiscally conservative than a Republican is outside his Weltanschauung. (The proof, for those who understand government finance, is that the Clinton Treasury was able to halt sales of long term paper and considered halting sales of all debt instruments, a move considered unwise for reasons of mechanization should some new administration once again begin printing money, which was exactly what Bush the Younger did. But in other words, Clinton was able to cease printing money.) Nor is such delusion isolated. It is a condition among what one would like to call otherwise reasonable people, but that would be a mistake given the irrational decisions made by these people in their everyday lives.

In fact, what is occurring is that human primates of the US, and perhaps the world, are forming what might be called clots of irrationality in which their collective visions of reality are at odds not only with other clots, but with events occurring around them that are open to objective inspection. For example, my friend stated that all mutual funds are Madoff-schemes; that if the mortgage on your home is higher than the current market value you ought to let it go to foreclosure because you could easily buy a lower priced home with a new loan; that the stock market was still at its lows of March 2009 though the DOW had climbed to 10,000 (not to mention the foreign exchanges like the Bovespa); that if you have a strong legal case against a corporation, no matter the value of the suit settlement, lawyers would line up to take the case because they would be paid their enormous fees as part of the court costs (there is no general legal provision for the court to pay a lawyer’s fees for the winner or the loser). Those were among his less absurd assertions. It became pointless to argue with him since he would make any argument, no matter reality. Whether or not that was a conscious decision or due to some external problem like brain damage, since he seemed to be a rational human at one time, is not clear. But it is scary.

Anti-rationality and legal sophistry are apparent when one witnesses people redefining scientific theory to suit their arguments against that theory. A brother-in-law of mine once asked me, If we evolved from apes, why are they still here? Of course, the question makes no sense in terms of evolution. But I have witnessed arguments in which an individual with no idea of what comprises a specific scientific theory tells someone who specializes in that theory and made contributions to that theory, what the theory comprises. When the expert points out the incorrectness of the assumptions regarding the theory, the expert is told that he does not understand the theory. Of course, this allows the people arguing against the theory to reformulate the debate to their advantage. It is the classic straw man argument. This has become the method most used by the conservatives and unfortunately, it will work because few people are able to recognize the fallacy of such arguments. As when someone who knew nothing about mathematics told me that the infinite series with nth term 1/n converges. I gave a proof that it did not, but no one witnessing the argument could determine who was right since they were not capable of the requisite logical thought.

W H McNeill’s ambitious history The Rise of the West makes the point that as societies disintegrate they lose faith in their traditional values and their authority figures, seeking out new forms of belief and new authority figures. The human primate is at base a superstitious creature, so this is not unexpected. Clearly it is happening within the West, where dissatisfaction with science has risen to new heights even as the primate love for technological toys grows. I believe that this is part of the phenomenon of the rise of the irrational conservatism discussed above. My friend, trained in mathematics, has turned his back on all scientific and mathematical argument. Nor is he a singleton. I have had similar experiences dating back to the late 1990s with people trained in science or mathematics or both. Some of them were guided by religious superstition, but many of them were guided by secular superstition that is not well-defined. Often it is some belief in ideas of Adam Smith that Smith never voiced, a misunderstanding of Smith, or a belief in Hayek and the Austrian school of economics which is a kind of secular religion. Sometimes it is fundamentalist belief in some sort of rugged individualism or libertarian anarchy (often tied to the Austrian school of economic religion), ironically by people who exist because of social institutions and inventions or who survive on government funding of some kind. My libertarian friends who work for the government fail to see the irony of their positions.

The purpose here is not to attempt to determine why these absurd reactions are occurring now, but instead to take a global view with historical hindsight in order to forecast their potential effects.

Ronald Reagan’s social experiment >>>[read the rest at Seeking Spirit]
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Whether It's Doing It Well Enough

2010-03-23T20:36:00.004-04:00

from the Daily Dish:

What Last Night Meant

22 Mar 2010 11:38 am

Seth Masket:

[W]hile I don't think tonight will have an extraordinary effect on elections in the near or distant future, I do think this will have a profound impact on public policy. Even if this bill seems watered-down to you, realize that from this point forward, the federal government is responsible for making sure people have health insurance. The question is no longer whether government should do it; it's whether it's doing it well enough. I heard somewhere that the two major votes tonight were symbolic ordered that way -- first they passed health reform, then they passed reconciliation to improve it.

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Weekly Review

After President Barack Obama promised to issue an
executive order guaranteeing that federal funds will not
be used for abortions, the U.S. House of Representatives
voted 219-212 to approve the Patient Protection And
Affordable Care Act. The 2,400-page health-care plan lacks
a public option but does provide for state-run health-care
"exchanges," to open in 2014, at which point the
uninsured--barring Indian tribes and the very poor--will
face fines if they do not have health insurance. The bill
also introduces a 10 percent excise tax on indoor tanning
salons. Representative Paul D. Ryan (R., Wis.), called the
bill "a fiscal Frankenstein"; some protesters reportedly
screamed "faggot" at Representative Barney Frank (D.,
Mass.) and "nigger" at Representative John Lewis (D.,
Ga.). A Walmart in New Jersey asked all black people to
leave, and an Ohio man told police that since January he's
been sucker-punching little children at his local Walmart
for thrills. ACORN was close to bankruptcy, and Thomas
Hagan, who shot Malcolm X, was granted parole. A Kentucky
man was charged with wanton endangerment after he got
drunk and put his five-week-old son to bed in an oven. A
small plane crashed onto the beach in Hilton Head, South
Carolina, killing a jogger who was wearing
headphones. Wachovia Bank was fined $50 million, and
required to remit a further $110 million, for laundering
funds for Mexican cocaine cartels; Mexican police were
praying to spirits and sacrificing chickens to protect
themselves from drug lords. Members of the Winnemem Wintu
Indian tribe traveled from California to New Zealand to
beg forgiveness of the salmon.

North Korean finance minister Pak Nam-gi, whose attempts
at currency reform failed, was executed by firing squad
for being "a son of a bourgeois conspiring to infiltrate
the ranks of revolutionaries to destroy the national
economy." Indian politicians wanted to ban both black
magic and Lindsay Lohan. Scientists found that dogs likely
originated in the Middle East, not in Asia, and a rocket
fired from Gaza kiled a Thai worker in Israel. A Swedish
report found that the United Arab Emirates is now the
fourth-largest importer of weapons in the world. Acting
president of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan dissolved his
cabinet. Researchers announced that the fire-bombing of
Dresden killed only 25,000 people. A Bavarian baby-food
company said it was planning to market its product to
adults who dislike chewing, and psychologists in Arizona
found that deep conversations yield more happiness than
does small talk. France was considering a reversal of the
ban on bordellos, and cold weather in Florida led to a
U.S.-wide shortage of good tomatoes. A fire in Las Vegas
killed hundreds of rare birds.

Alex Chilton died, aged 59, as did Chaucer scholar Charles
Muscatine, aged 89. Uganda's Kasubi Tombs, burial place of
four Kabakas of the Buganda Kingdom, burned down, and
three protesters died in the ensuing riots. Dutch
officials repudiated a claim by U.S. general and former
NATO commander John Sheehan that the gayness of the Dutch
army had rendered it unable to defend Srebrenica against
the Serbs, and the Vatican was investigating the daily
appearances in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, of the
Virgin Mary, who is crowned with stars and floats upon a
cloud. Pope Benedict XVI wrote a letter to Ireland to
apologize for the sexual abuse of children by Church
leaders, and a lawyer in Oregon was planning to release
the Boy Scouts' "perversion files," a secret archive of
1,000 documents identifying Scout molesters. A cable
network in North Carolina played two hours of porn on the
Kids On Demand channel. A South London fox was accused of
stealing from a shallow grave and devouring the corpse of
a pauper infant. "The rule," explained a local
gravedigger, "is four babies per grave." Yellow dust
coated Beijing, and archaeologists in the Chinese
autonomous region of Xinjiang uncovered the burial grounds
of an unnamed people with European features who died
nearly four millennia ago and whose mummies were buried
upside down in boats, in the desert, beneath graves marked
by tall, phallic poles. The citizens of Somerton, Arizona,
dug up a time capsule from 1985 and found a VHS tape and a
copy of "Time" magazine.

-- Paul Ford

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2010-03-21T22:26:00.003-04:00

via tumblr

The Touch of the Master's Hand

"Twas battered and scared, and the auctioneer
Thought it scarcely worth his while
To waste much time on the old violin,
But he held it up with a smile.
"What am I bidden, good folks," he cried,
"Who'll start bidding for me?
A dollar, a dollar - now who"ll make it two _
Two dollars, and who"ll make it three?

"Three dollars once, three dollars twice,
Going for three". . . but no!
From the room far back a gray-haired man
Came forward and picked up the bow;
Then wiping the dust from the old violin,
And tightening up the strings,
He played a melody,pure and sweet,
As sweet as an angel sings.

The music ceased and the auctioneer
With a voice that was quiet and low,
Said: "What am I bidden for the old violin?"
And he held it up with the bow;
"A thousand dollars - and who'll make it two?
Two thousand - and who'll make it three?
Three thousand once, three thousand twice
And going - and gone," said he.

The people cheered, but some of them cried,
"We do not quite understand -
What changed its worth?" The man replied:
"The touch of the masters hand."
And many a man with life out of tune,
And battered and torn with sin,
Is auctioned cheap to a thoughtless crowd.
Much like the old violin.

A "mess of pottage," a glass of wine,
A game and he travels on,
He's going once, and going twice -
He's going - and almost gone!
But the MASTER comes, and the foolish crowd,
Never can quite understand,
The worth of a soul, and the change that's wrought
By the touch of the MASTER'S hand.

~Myra B. Welch

Obama Will Triumph

2010-03-21T21:21:00.004-04:00

Obama Will Triumph -- So Will America

By Frank Schaeffer

Before he’d served even one year President Obama lost the support of the easily distracted left and engendered the white hot rage of the hate-filled right. But some of us, from all walks of life and ideological backgrounds -- including this white, straight, 57-year-old, former religious right wing agitator, now progressive writer and (given my background as the son of a famous evangelical leader) this unlikely Obama supporter -- are sticking with our President. Why?-- because he is succeeding.

We faithful Obama supporters still trust our initial impression of him as a great, good and uniquely qualified man to lead us.

Obama’s steady supporters will be proved right. Obama’s critics will be remembered as easily panicked and prematurely discouraged at best and shriveled hate mongers at worst.

The Context of the Obama Presidency

Not since the days of the rise of fascism in Europe, the Second World War and the Depression has any president faced more adversity. Not since the Civil War has any president led a more bitterly divided country. Not since the introduction of racial integration has any president faced a more consistently short-sighted and willfully ignorant opposition – from both the right and left.

As the President’s poll numbers have fallen so has his support from some on the left that were hailing him as a Messiah not long ago; all those lefty websites and commentators that were falling all over themselves on behalf of our first black president during the 2008 election.

The left’s lack of faith has become a self-fulfilling “prophecy”-- snipe at the President and then watch the poll numbers fall and then pretend you didn’t have anything to do with it!

Here is what Obama faced when he took office-- none of which was his fault:

# An ideologically divided country to the point that America was really two countries

# Two wars; one that was mishandled from the start, the other that was unnecessary and immoral

# The worst economic crisis since the depression

# America’s standing in the world at the lowest point in history

# A country that had been misled into accepting the use of torture of prisoners of war

# A health care system in free fall

# An educational system in free fall

# A global environmental crisis of history-altering proportions (about which the Bush administration and the Republicans had done nothing)

# An impasse between culture warriors from the right and left

# A huge financial deficit inherited from the terminally irresponsible Bush administration…

And those were only some of the problems sitting on the President’s desk!

“Help” from the Right?

What did the Republicans and the religious right, libertarians and half-baked conspiracy theorists -- that is what the Republicans were reduced to by the time Obama took office -- do to “help” our new president (and our country) succeed? They claimed that he wasn’t a real American, didn’t have an American birth certificate, wasn’t born here, was secretly a Muslim, was white-hating "racist", was secretly a communist, was actually the Anti-Christ, (!) and was a reincarnation of Hitler and wanted “death panels” to kill the elderly!

They not-so-subtly called for his assassination through the not-so-subtle use of vile signs held at their rallies and even a bumper sticker quoting Psalm 109:8. They organized “tea parties” to sound off against imagined insults and all government in general and gathered to howl at the moon. They were led by insurance industry lobbyists and deranged (but well financed) “commentators” from Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh.

The utterly discredited Roman Catholic bishops teamed up with the utterly discredited evangelical leaders to denounce a president who was trying to actually do something about the poor, the environment, to diminish the number of abortions through compassionate programs to help women and to care for the sick! And in Congress the Republican leadership only knew one word: “No!”

In other words the reactionary white, rube, uneducated, crazy American far right,combined with the educated but obtuse neoconservative war mongers, religious right shills for big business, libertarian Fed Reserve-hating gold bug, gun-loving crazies, child-molesting acquiescent “bishops”, frontier loons and evangelical gay-hating flakes found one thing to briefly unite them: their desire to stop an uppity black man from succeeding at all costs!

“Help” from the Left?

What did the left do to help their newly elected president? Some of them excoriated the President because they disagreed with the bad choices he was being forced to make regarding a war in Afghanistan that he’d inherited from the worst president in modern history!

Others stood up and bravely proclaimed that the President’s economic policies had “failed” before the President even instituted them! Others said that since all gay rights battles had not been fully won within virtually minutes of the President taking office, they’d been “betrayed”! (Never mind that Obama’s vocal support to the gay community is stronger than any other president’s has been. Never mind that he signed a new hate crimes law!)

Those that had stood in transfixed legions weeping with beatific emotion on election night turned into an angry mob saying how "disappointed" they were that they’d not all immediately been translated to heaven the moment Obama stepped into the White House! Where was the “change”? Contrary to their expectations they were still mere mortals!

And the legion of young new supporters was too busy texting to pay attention for longer than a nanosecond… “Governing”?! What the hell does that word, uh, like mean?”

The President’s critics left and right all had one thing in common: impatience laced with little-to-no sense of history (let alone reality) thrown in for good measure. Then of course there were the white, snide know-it-all commentators/talking heads who just couldn’t imagine that maybe, just maybe they weren’t as smart as they thought they were and certainly not as smart as their president. He hadn’t consulted them, had he? So he must be wrong!

The Obama critics' ideological ideas defined their idea of reality rather than reality defining their ideas—say, about what is possible in one year in office after the hand that the President had been dealt by fate, or to be exact by the American idiot nation that voted Bush into office… twice!

Meanwhile back in the reality-based community – in just 12 short months -- President Obama:

#Continued to draw down the misbegotten war in Iraq
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Thoughtfully and decisively picked the best of several bad choices regarding the war in Afghanistan
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Gave a major precedent-setting speech supporting gay rights
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Restored America’s image around the globe
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Banned torture of American prisoners
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Stopped the free fall of the American economy
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Put the USA squarely back in the bilateral international community
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Put the USA squarely into the middle of the international effort to halt global warming
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Stood up for educational reform
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Won a Nobel peace prize
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Moved the trial of terrorists back into the American judicial system of checks and balances
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Did what had to be done to start the slow, torturous and almost impossible process of health care reform that 7 presidents had failed to even begin
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Responded to hatred from the right and left with measured good humor and patience
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Stopped the free fall of job losses
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Showed immense personal courage in the face of an armed and dangerous far right opposition that included the sort of disgusting people that show up at public meetings carrying loaded weapons and carrying Timothy McVeigh-inspired signs about the “blood of tyrants” needing to “water the tree of liberty”…
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

#Showed that he could not only make the tough military choices but explain and defend them brilliantly
(But that wasn’t good enough for his critics)

Other than those "disappointing" accomplishments -- IN ONE YEAR -- President Obama “failed”! Other than that he didn’t “live up to expectations”!

Who actually has failed...

...are the Americans that can’t see the beginning of a miracle of national rebirth right under their jaded noses. Who failed are the smart ass ideologues of the left and right who began rooting for this President to fail so that they could be proved right in their dire and morbid predictions. Who failed are the movers and shakers behind our obscenely dumb news cycles that have turned “news” into just more stupid entertainment for an entertainment-besotted infantile country.

Here’s the good news: President Obama is succeeding without the help of his lefty “supporters” or hate-filled Republican detractors!

The Future Looks Good

After Obama has served two full terms, (and he will), after his wisdom in moving deliberately and cautiously with great subtlety on all fronts -- with a canny and calculating eye to the possible succeeds, (it will), after the economy is booming and new industries are burgeoning, (they will be), after the doomsayers are all proved not just wrong but silly: let the record show that not all Americans were panicked into thinking the sky was falling.

Just because we didn’t get everything we wanted in the first short and fraught year Obama was in office not all of us gave up. Some of us stayed the course. And we will be proved right.

PS. if you agree that Obama is shaping up to be a great president, please pass this on and hang in there! Pass it on anyway to ensure that his “report card” gets the attention it deserves.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of “Patience With God – Faith For People Who Don’t Like Religion (Or Atheism).”

*** Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Schaeffer

Fight

2010-01-22T22:31:00.001-05:00

Now Fight!

[Re-posted from earlier today]

The seismic events of the last few days ends, in some respects, the phony war of the first year of Obama's presidency. As is the case in truly fracturing democracies, the opposition simply does not and cannot accept the fact that it is out of power. The incoherence of the opposition to Obama - that he is both Jimmy Carter and Adolf Hitler, as Stephen Colbert pointed out last night - reveals the irrationality of the hate. It began immediately on the FNC/RNC right. And the ferocity of the campaign against Obama, the sheer dickishness of the GOP and its acolytes, the total oppositionism to everything he has done and indeed anything he might do... suggests that any hope for some kind of cooperation from this rump is impossible.

But the truth is that these forces have also been so passionate, so extreme, and so energized that in a country reeling from a recession, the narrative - a false, paranoid, nutty narrative - has taken root in the minds of some independents. Obama, under-estimating the extremism of his opponents, has focused on actually addressing the problems we face. And the rest of us, crucially, have sat back and watched and complained and carped when we didn't get everything we want. We can keep on carping if we want to. But it seems to me that continuing that - as HuffPo et al. appear to be doing - is objectively siding with the forces of profound reaction right now.

Don't get me wrong. Criticism is still vital. I'm not going to give up on advocating marriage equality or a carbon tax, rather than cap and trade, or for an independent investigation of Bush era war crimes. I think pushing Obama to a more populist position on banks is well and good. But given the alternative, I am going to step up my support of this president in the face of what he is confronting, even when he is not exactly doing everything I want. In my view, you should too.

Look at what we are facing right now: a take-no-prisoners right, empowered by a massive new wave of corporate money unleashed by the Supreme Court, able to wield a 41 seat minority to oppose anything Obama wants, setting up a cycle of failure for a president whom they can then pillory at the polls, and unrepentant about near-dictatorial powers for the presidency, and the routinization of torture in the American government. These forces cannot be appeased. They simply have to be confronted.

I do not believe in some massive turn left or faux-populism that Obama cannot characterologically embody. I do not think ramming the healthcare reform bill through before Brown is seated is good politics. I still believe that Obama should embrace a major assault on long-term debt and make that a center-piece of his SOTU next week.

But I have come around to thinking that the one huge mistake right now would be to surrender the Senate health reform bill.

The dust should indeed settle. But it is absurd that one special election should upend a clear campaign promise, a year of work, and a necessary start on a critical reform without which we hurtle toward bankruptcy even more quickly.

More to the point, politics is also about morale and will as well as reason and moderation. I believe Obama has been both reasoned and moderate and civil in navigating between the Democratic Congress and the embittered, mutinous GOP. I don't think his tone should change. But I do think that any surrender on health now would be a betrayal of his entire campaign. I don't think the Senate bill is perfect; but it's far far better than nothing. And not passing it means not passing anything and surrendering to forces that are as proto-fascist as any we have seen in recent times.

This is about more than health reform and we have to see it in that context. This is about a cynical nihilist attempt to break this presidency before it has had a chance to do what we elected it to do by a landslide vote. It is an attempt to destroy a majority's morale, to break a president's foreign policy autonomy, to prevent engagement in the Middle East peace process, to stop action on climate change, to restore torture, to increase tensions with the Muslim world, to launch a war on Iran. We cannot delude ourselves that if Obama fails, this is not the alternative. It is.

And we have to re-engage as powerfully as we did in the campaign to fight back against these now emboldened forces of reaction. I think this is true not just for the sake of the country but also for the sake of the GOP. The nihilist obstructionism and rhetoric they have embraced makes constitutional democracy close to impossible. Their total lack of any workable alternatives to dire problems is a form of degeneracy we have to avoid empowering.

So fight, Mr President. And to the House Democrats who won't go along with the only way to salvage health reform: this is the only sure-fire way you will lose in November. If you pass this bill, you may also go down in this climate. But you will have done something you can be proud of. Politics cannot always be about narrow self-interest. If it always is, nothing important can get done.

Do your duty. And grow some. Fight back. Explain why you're right. Tell the liberals they can always come back later to reform the bill. Just get this passed.

(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty.)
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A Start Point

2010-01-19T11:37:00.002-05:00

Suicides Or Homicides In Gitmo?

Those three simultaneous suicides at Gitmo in 2006? Maybe not-so-suicides. A remarkable new set of witnesses came forward in the torture story today - in a must-read report by Scott Horton published by Harper's Magazine. Dish summary here, here and here.

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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 
Weekly Review
 
An earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter scale hit
Haiti, with an epicenter about 10 miles from
Port-au-Prince. Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive
said that 70,000 bodies had been found so far, and
Lt. Gen. P. K. Keen, a top commander of the U.S. military
effort to bring aid and maintain order on the island, said
that estimates of 150,000 to 200,000 dead were "a start
point"; those estimates would make the toll four to five
times that of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that inspired
Voltaire's Candide. The body of Monsignor Joseph Serge
Miot, archbishop of Haiti, was discovered in the ruins of
the archdiocesan offices. Pat Robertson blamed the
earthquake on a pact that Haitians allegedly made with
Satan during their 1791 revolt against "you know, Napoleon
the Third and whatever"; David Brooks cited poverty as the
deeper problem, linking it to voodoo. Miami's Royal
Caribbean cruise line, which had been "optimistic" about
2010 profits, continued service to its beach resort at
Labadee, on the island's unaffected north shore. "We
welcome the continuation of the positive economic benefits
that the cruise ship calls to Labadee contribute to our
country," said Haiti's special envoy to the United
Nations, Leslie Voltaire.
 
Congress's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission began
hearing testimony from leaders of surviving American
banks. "The irony here is that it's as if there was an
earthquake," said commission chair Phil Angelides, "and
the only buildings standing today are the buildings that
were at the epicenter of the earthquake." Angelides
compared the hearings with the Pecora hearings of the
1930s, at which J. P. Morgan, Jr., appeared with a female
midget in his lap. "Not to be funny about it," JPMorgan
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the FCIC, "but my daughter
asked me... 'What's the financial crisis,' and I said,
'Well, it's something that happens every five to seven
years.'" The deputy finance minister of Yemen announced
plans to open a stock market; it was unclear how the
failing state would enforce investment laws. "Before you
build a state," observed one Yemeni analyst, "you cannot
organize a regulator." Yemeni officials claimed to have
killed six suspected Al Qaeda militants in airstrikes near
the Saudi Arabian border; Al Qaeda said that the victims
were "brothers" rather than "holy warriors" and were only
injured in the attack. A motorcycle bomb killed Iranian
physicist Masoud Ali Mohammadi in Tehran; an opposition
group blamed Hezbollah, but Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad described the method used as "Zionist." Scott
Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, was charged
with masturbating in front of a webcam for a police
officer posing as a 15-year-old girl.
 
One-hundred-four-year-old former Coney Island strongman
Joseph Rollino, who reportedly bent a quarter with his
fingers on his last birthday, was hit by a minivan with a
defective horn in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and died. An
airplane flying a banner to celebrate the one-year
anniversary of US Airways Flight 1549's successful
emergency landing on the Hudson River made an emergency
landing on Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill. A sheep
in Turkey gave birth to a lamb with a human face, and the
remains of five Native Americans from Tierra del Fuego,
Chile, kidnapped in 1881 by a German animal trader and
exhibited in zoos as "Savages from the Land of Fire," were
returned to Chile. Austrian scientists stopped burying
live pigs in snow and monitoring their deaths. French New
Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer died, and scientists found that
watching four hours of television a day raises the risk of
fatal heart disease by 80 percent. Art Clokey, the creator
of Gumby, died. "Gumby is a symbol of the spark of
divinity in each of us," wrote Clokey, a seminary dropout
who studied with Serbian avant-garde filmmaker Slavko
Vorkapic. "Eddie Murphy instinctively picked up on this
when he asserted, 'I'm Gumby, dammit.'"
 
-- Sam Stark
 
* * * * * * * * * * *

Guantanamo - Camp "No"

2010-01-19T10:23:00.003-05:00

“The truth is what matters,” he said. “They practiced every form of torture on my son and on many others as well. What was the result? What facts did they find? They found nothing. They learned nothing. They accomplished nothing.”

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle
By Scott Horton

The Sound of One Hand Clapping ?

2010-01-15T16:21:00.002-05:00

From the Daily Dish

Another Kennedy Tragedy? Ctd
A reader writes:

Funny to read your take on the MA scare because three minutes ago I had the opposite thought, which was: will someone someday (okay, maybe me in a few hours..) step back and conclude that the Democrats performed brilliantly this past year?

For all the bites taken out of HCR legislation by myriad constituencies, it remains a remarkably well-crafted bill -- and so many of the fights over things that could have devolved into gross interest group giveaways have played out in public (like the excise tax) and been negotiated sanely, with many features of what was originally the Baucus bill improving through negotiation (though it's not over). Instead of 'moralizing' the difficulties -- they are failures of Democratic strategy and character -- look at the structural impediments that those with a decent and public-minded take on the core architecture of the bill have faced down.
First among them is no help from the Republicans. The stonewalling of 40 Senate Republicans on this bill is nothing short of disgusting. As Paul Starr has pointed out, the bill represents an essentially Republican approach to HCR - its chief tenets were proposed by Republicans in the Eisenhower, Nixon and even Gingrich-Dole eras. As Ezra Klein has pointed out repeatedly and in multiple ways, Republicans could have got major concessions, e.g., tort reform, if they'd negotiated in good faith.
Working down from Republican intransigence: Democrats won their majorities in large part by coopting what passes for the center in this government- and tax-phobic electorate. Blue Dog Dems are fulfilling the natural role of Republicans. But the Democratic party is starting the process down forty votes. The same dynamic held for the stimulus package. On climate control, there is no way to reasonably expect action from Democrats without some cooperation from Republicans. When one party is completely dysfunctional, that distorts the functioning of the competent party. There is no center because the center is the sound of one hand clapping.
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Not Atheism Keeping People At Home

2010-01-14T18:15:00.002-05:00

When the Truth Is Found to Be Lies

"The great Institutions of American higher ed are not designed to produce intelligence, after all, nor even to reward it. They are designed to produce and perpetuate an Establishment. Intelligence is irrascible, iconoclastic, prickly, argumentative, and reactionary. It resembles a gaggle of Frenchmen at a dinner party, not a Cabinet meeting. It rankles; it doesn't conciliate. It certainly doesn't become the President of the United States. Good Lord, here is Bill Clinton, Rhodes scholar, surely the most . . . supple-minded of recent presidents, calling Tom Friedman "our most gifted journalist at actually looking at what is happening in the world and figuring out its relevance to tomorrow" and praising Malcolm Fucking Gladwell as one of our most "penetrating" thinkers. Which is to say, a smart guy by the lights of the Times book review, but not exactly a mind for the ages, eh?"

**
Is the Fermented Tea Kombucha Really the Healing Wonder Drink It's Cracked Up to Be?
By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet.

**
Just Like Heaven

Raised in the liberal Protestant youth-group tradition I understood hell as absence from God and heaven as a kind of communion. After death, I believed, you just would hang there in space, connected to everything else, wired into a reticulation of phosphorescent splines. No wings, no ghosts, nothing to resurrect.

*
My mother lives in the panhandle of Maryland, near West Virginia. I visited her not long ago and we went to her small hilltop Methodist church. The service was halfway between evangelical (PowerPoint) and mainstream (hands clasped, not raised, in prayer). The minister spoke against internet pornography and warned of the unchecked rise of godlessness. Darwin was not in fashion there. The pews were half-full. When they passed the plate I put in $5. It’s not atheism keeping people at home.

*
In their graceless state the godless are supposed to be allergic to places of terror and emptiness. Foxholes, Ground Zero, outer space—all locations, I’ve been told, where you won’t find atheists. “Clay is fashioned into vessels,” reads the 11th chapter of the Tao Te Ching (written 2,500 years after Noah’s flood carved out the Grand Canyon), “but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends.”
*
“Therefore,” concludes the 11th chapter of the Tao Te Ching, “what has a (positive) existence serves for profitable adaptation, and what has not that for (actual) usefulness.” Such as the space between letters, words, and paragraphs.

--Paul Ford

Is America Going To Hell ?

2010-01-12T21:11:00.003-05:00

arsvitaest:

The renowned ballroom dancing team Antonio and Renée de Marco, 1935.
Photo by Edward Steichen
(via torontoist)


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Weekly Review

President Barack Obama addressed the nation with the
results of a security review he ordered after the failed
Christmas Day underwear bombing. "We are at war against Al
Qaeda," he said, noting also that when it comes to
security matters the buck stops with him. Rudy Giuliani,
who was mayor of New York during the September 11 attacks,
said that Obama's response to terrorism was
inadequate. "We had no domestic attacks under Bush," said
Giuliani. The White House sought to reassure Americans
that it had no intention of invading Yemen or Somalia, and
also that the State of the Union address would not
conflict with the season premiere of "Lost." "I don't
foresee a scenario in which the millions of people that
hope to finally get some conclusion in 'Lost' are
preempted by the president," said Press Secretary Robert
Gibbs. Senator Harry Reid apologized for saying, during
the 2008 presidential campaign, that Obama was a viable
candidate because he was "light-skinned" and had "no Negro
dialect, unless he wanted to have one." G.O.P. Chairman
Michael Steele called on Reid to step down as Senate
majority leader over his "anachronistic language"; Steele
also called the current Republican platform "one of the
best political documents that's been written in the last
25 years," adding, "honest Injun on that." An effigy of
Obama was hanged over a sign that celebrates Jimmy Carter
in Carter's hometown of Plains, Georgia.

Seven coalition soldiers and one embedded British
journalist were killed in attacks in Afghanistan. A
military spokesman said that an increasing number of such
deaths were likely in the future. "We are making more
contact with insurgents in places where they had sanctuary
before," he said, "and there will be more of that kind of
activity." North Korea announced that it would not give up
nuclear weapons until the United States signed a peace
treaty bringing a formal end to the Korean War after 60
years, and Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only confirmed survivor
of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic attacks, died at
the age of 93. Muslims in Malaysia firebombed at least
half a dozen churches in the wake of a court ruling that
allows the nation's Christians to refer to God as "Allah,"
and Brit Hume encouraged Tiger Woods to convert to
Christianity. A Massachusetts man was convicted of animal
cruelty for raping his roommate's pet rabbit.

A parliamentary panel in Iran blamed Tehran's prosecutor,
Saeed Mortazavi, for the beating deaths of three
protesters in a detention center last summer, but called
charges that protesters were raped by guards "illusions of
a mother." The website of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad was hacked. "Dear God, In 2009 you took my
favorite singer--Michael Jackson; my favorite
actress--Farrah Fawcett; my favorite actor--Patrick
Swayze," read a message on the site. "Please, please,
don't forget my favorite politician--Ahmadinejad; and my
favorite dictator--Khamenei in the year 2010." The Supreme
Court ruled that a federal judge in California could not
broadcast over YouTube a trial challenging the
constitutionality of Prop 8, the California ballot
initiative that banned gay marriage. Democratic Senators
Christopher Dodd and Byron Dorgan and Governor Bill Ritter
announced that they would not seek re-election in 2010. It
was revealed that Iris Robinson, the 60-year-old wife of
Northern Ireland's First Minister, Peter Robinson, had a
months-long affair with a 19-year-old man, acquired
$80,000 in loans for him, and called him "the other son I
would have loved to have been a mother to." British
researchers said that the G-spot does not exist.

-- Christopher R. Beha
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


**
JUST LIKE HEAVEN
By Paul Ford

**

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.

by James Fallows

How America Can Rise Again

What We Choose To See and Know

2010-01-05T08:17:00.002-05:00

The Full Gitmo List
If you need a factual account of who was seized and imprisoned at Gitmo, Andy Worthington has compiled the definitive one. It's particularly apposite when you hear the current debate in which Cheneyites still use as a premise the notion that everyone in Gitmo was and is "the worst of the worst." Since the Bush administration released hundreds even they realized were innocent of anything, they had already conceded this, but won't, of course, publicly admit it (that would require admitting error which Cheney and Bush are incapable of doing). But this staggering fact is worth reiterating again and again and again as the disgraceful legacy of Cheney and Bush gets burnished by the pro-torture right:
I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.
If you want another highly credible source for the same conclusion, read National Journal's exhaustive study, summarized by Stu Taylor here. Of 132 cases examined by NJ's Corine Hegland, more than half were not even accused of fighting the US at all.These people were those whom National Review's Cliff May wanted assassinated en masse by a missile.

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**
Why Are We So Blind to the True Horrors of War?

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on January 5, 2010, Printed on January 5, 2010

This article first appeared on TruthDig.

War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of human rights is a farce.

In Peter van Agtmael’s "2nd Tour Hope I don’t Die" and Lori Grinker’s "Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict," two haunting books of war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war’s savagery.

"Over ninety percent of this soldier’s body was burned when a roadside bomb hit his vehicle, igniting the fuel tank and burning two other soldiers to death," reads the caption in Agtmael’s book next to a photograph of the bloodied body of a soldier in an operating room. "His camouflage uniform dangled over the bed, ripped open by the medics who had treated him on the helicopter. Clumps of his skin had peeled away, and what was left of it was translucent. He was in and out of consciousness, his eyes stabbing open for a few seconds. As he was lifted from the stretcher to the ER bed, he screamed ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ then ‘Put me to sleep, please put me to sleep.’ There was another photographer in the ER, and he leaned his camera over the heads of the medical staff to get an overhead shot. The soldier yelled, ‘Get that fucking camera out of my face.’ Those were his last words. I visited his grave one winter afternoon six months later,” Agtmael writes, “and the scene of his death is never far from my thoughts."

"There were three of us inside, and the jeep caught fire," Israeli soldier Yossi Arditi, quoted in Grinker’s book, says of the moment when a Molotov cocktail exploded in his vehicle. “The fuel tank was full and it was about to explode, my skin was hanging from my arms and face -- but I didn’t lose my head. I knew nobody could get inside to help me, that my only way out was through the fire to the doors. I wanted to take my gun, but I couldn’t touch it because my hands were burning." [To see long excerpts from “Afterwar” and to read an introduction written by Chris Hedges, click here.]

Arditi spent six months in the hospital. He had surgery every two or three months, about 20 operations, over the next three years.

"People who see me, see what war really does," he says.

Filmic and most photographic images of war are shorn of the heart-pounding fear, awful stench, deafening noise and exhaustion of the battlefield. Such images turn confusion and chaos, the chief element of combat, into an artful war narrative. They turn war into porn. Soldiers and Marines, especially those who have never seen war, buy cases of beer and watch movies like "Platoon," movies meant to denounce war, and as they do so revel in the despicable power of the weapons shown. The reality of violence is different. Everything formed by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief and destruction.

Chronicles of war, such as these two books, that eschew images and scenes of combat begin to capture war’s reality. War’s effects are what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the eight schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan a week ago and listen to the wails of their parents we would not be able to repeat clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan people. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war’s perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war’s consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining. And the press is as guilty as Hollywood. During the start of the Iraq war, television reports gave us the visceral thrill of force and hid from us the effects of bullets, tank rounds, iron fragmentation bombs and artillery rounds. We tasted a bit of war’s exhilaration, but were protected from seeing what war actually does.

The wounded, the crippled and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted off stage. They are war’s refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myth of glory, honor, patriotism and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless. And those whom fate has decreed must face war’s effects often turn and flee.

Saul Alfaro, who lost his legs in the war in El Salvador, speaks in Grinker’s book about the first and final visit from his girlfriend as he lay in an army hospital bed.

"She had been my girlfriend in the military and we had planned to be married," he says. "But when she saw me in the hospital -- I don’t know exactly what happened, but later they told me when she saw me she began to cry. Afterwards, she ran away and never came back."

The public manifestations of gratitude are reserved for veterans who dutifully read from the script handed to them by the state. The veterans trotted out for viewing are those who are compliant and palatable, those we can stand to look at without horror, those who are willing to go along with the lie that war is about patriotism and is the highest good. “Thank you for your service,” we are supposed to say. They are used to perpetuate the myth. We are used to honor it.

Gary Zuspann, who lives in a special enclosed environment in his parent’s home in Waco, Texas, suffering from Gulf War syndrome, speaks in Grinker’s book of feeling like "a prisoner of war" even after the war had ended.

"Basically they put me on the curb and said, okay, fend for yourself," he says in the book. "I was living in a fantasy world where I thought our government cared about us and they take care of their own. I believed it was in my contract, that if you’re maimed or wounded during your service in war, you should be taken care of. Now I’m angry."

I went back to Sarajevo after covering the 1990s war for The New York Times and found hundreds of cripples trapped in rooms in apartment blocks with no elevators and no wheelchairs. Most were young men, many without limbs, being cared for by their elderly parents, the glorious war heroes left to rot.

Despair and suicide grip survivors. More Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war than were killed during it. The inhuman qualities drilled into soldiers and Marines in wartime defeat them in peacetime. This is what Homer taught us in "The Iliad," the great book on war, and "The Odyssey," the great book on the long journey to recovery by professional killers. Many never readjust. They cannot connect again with wives, children, parents or friends, retreating into personal hells of self-destructive anguish and rage.

"They program you to have no emotion -- like if somebody sitting next to you gets killed you just have to carry on doing your job and shut up," Steve Annabell, a British veteran of the Falklands War, says to Grinker. “When you leave the service, when you come back from a situation like that, there’s no button they can press to switch your emotions back on. So you walk around like a zombie. They don’t deprogram you. If you become a problem they just sweep you under the carpet.”

"To get you to join up they do all these advertisements -- they show people skiing down mountains and doing great things -- but they don’t show you getting shot at and people with their legs blown off or burning to death," he says. "They don’t show you what really happens. It’s just bullshit. And they never prepare you for it. They can give you all the training in the world, but it’s never the same as the real thing."

Those with whom veterans have most in common when the war is over are often those they fought.

"Nobody comes back from war the same," says Horacio Javier Benitez, who fought the British in the Falklands and is quoted in Grinker’s book. "The person, Horacio, who was sent to war, doesn’t exist anymore. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about normal life; too much seems inconsequential. You contend with craziness and depression."

"Many who served in the Malvinas," he says, using the Argentine name of the islands, "committed suicide, many of my friends."

"I miss my family," reads a wall graffito captured in one of Agtmael’s photographs. "Please God forgive the lives I took and let my family be happy if I don’t go home again."

Next to the plea someone had drawn an arrow toward the words and written in thick, black marker "Fag!!!"

Look beyond the nationalist cant used to justify war. Look beyond the seduction of the weapons and the pornography of violence. Look beyond Barack Obama’s ridiculous rhetoric about finishing the job or fighting terror. Focus on the evil of war. War begins by calling for the annihilation of the others but ends ultimately in self-annihilation. It corrupts souls and mutilates bodies. It destroys homes and villages and murders children on their way to school. It grinds into the dirt all that is tender and beautiful and sacred. It empowers human deformities -- warlords, Shiite death squads, Sunni insurgents, the Taliban, al-Qaida and our own killers—who can speak only in the despicable language of force. War is a scourge. It is a plague. It is industrial murder. And before you support war, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women and children who know it.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

© 2010 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144929/

We WIN ??

2009-12-22T22:58:00.003-05:00


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Weekly Review

Senate Democrats succeeded in producing an "historic"
health-care reform bill that will force millions of people
to buy insurance and will tax existing benefits if they
are too generous, but will not include a public option or
force the pharmaceutical industry to lower its
prices. Liberal Democrats were upset with Senator Joe
Lieberman for playing bad cop in the Senate negotiation
process, thus ensuring that both the public option and the
Medicare "buy-in" options were scuttled. An amendment that
would have allowed Americans to buy their medication
abroad failed in the Senate, in large part because of
resistance from the White House, and Republican senators
tried to slow debate on health care by demanding a
700-page amendment be read out loud, thus delaying the
passing of a bill that provides funding for
U.S. troops. Neither President Obama nor the Senate
leadership seemed particularly upset or surprised by the
final bill, which Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader,
was planning to pass by Christmas Eve. Health insurer
stocks closed on a 52-year high. "We WIN," emailed one
insurance industry insider. "Administered by private
insurance companies. No government funding. No government
insurance competitor." Scientists discovered that a
species of bee mummifies its enemies alive, wrapping
predators in resin, wax, and mud until they can no longer
move, then lets them starve. Sean Diddy Combs said that he
wished President Obama could be his father. "I'd want to
be Sean Combs Obama," he said. "I hope he reads this
interview and adopts me." A new species of warbler was
discovered.

The UN climate summit in Copenhagen, described by one
participant as "the most chaotic show on Earth," concluded
and was almost immediately decried as a failure. Nobel
Peace laureate Barack Obama ordered the bombing of
suspected Al Qaeda camps in Yemen, killing 49 civilians,
including 23 children. The United States was planning to
purchase an empty super-maximum security prison in
Illinois to house the Guantanamo detainees, and a group of
Chinese martial-arts monkeys landed kung fu kicks, several
punches, and a strike with a stick on the man who makes
them perform at the mall. A day after German officials
reached an agreement to pay $90 million to maintain
Auschwitz, thieves stole the iron "arbeit macht frei" sign
that hung over its gate, and several dozen hipsters
attempted to stage a naked bike ride through a Brooklyn
Hasidic neighborhood to protest the removal of a bike
lane; after a snow storm forced them to wear clothes some
of the hipsters pinned fake breasts to their clothes. A
Canadian professor analyzed 23 episodes of "Thomas the
Tank Engine" and found the show sexist. Croatian parents
were complaining that the large-breasted fox in "Hedgehog
House," a children's puppet show, is "too sexy," and that
her dreams about a hedgehog's "sharp spines" had sexual
connotations. Fifty sewing needles were found inside a
two-year-old Brazilian. "We think it could have only been
by penetration," said Dr. Luiz Cesar Soltoski, "because we
found needles in the lung, the left leg and in different
parts of the thorax."

Katie Spotz, a 22-year-old American, announced that she
would soon attempt a solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean
in a rowboat. Walt Disney's nephew Roy died, as did Oral
Roberts and reformist Iranian cleric Grand Ayatollah
Hoseyn Ali Montazeri. Chinese doctors were preparing to
remove a 55-pound tumor from the back of Sun Fengqin,
known as "Tortoise Woman," and staff at a British
aquarium, worried about the flatulence of George the
turtle after feeding him Brussels sprouts, lowered the
water level in his tank so that escaping gas wouldn't
trigger overflow sensors. A British law firm was selling
divorce vouchers--good for one hour of legal advice--as a
gift for the holidays; Italians were angry over a nativity
displayed in a Verona courthouse that features a black
Jesus; and Wisconsin police arrested a drunken Santa Claus
after he interrupted two sisters playing in their front
yard to say that he was looking for his reindeer. "I knew
it wasn't the real Santa," said 9-year-old Katie, "because
Santa doesn't drink alcohol." A Frenchman spent nearly
$37,000 on a bottle of two-hundred-year-old Cognac, and
the Stooges were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame. "Am I still cool," asked Iggy Pop at the induction
ceremony, "or is that over now?"

-- Claire Gutierrez
 
* * * * * * *

Doing Another Job Altogether

2009-10-27T18:30:00.003-04:00

SIDESHOW:

Froomkin: "Historically speaking, White House criticism of the media has often been unseemly and defensive, with the president's ire generally provoked by journalists who excel at their work -- by asking cheeky questions, exposing important things that the president would prefer be kept secret, holding the powerful accountable and playing host to a vibrant and informed exchange of a wide range of political opinions. But in this case, the critique is something else entirely. The litmus test is that the Obama White House is not upset at news gatherers for doing their job. What Obama and his aides are correctly pointing out is that the people working at Fox News are doing another job altogether."

**
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Weekly Review
 
Twin car bomb attacks just outside the Green Zone in
Baghdad destroyed three government buildings, killed 155
people, and injured 520. The attack was the country's
worst since 2007 and killed an unspecified number of
children at the Justice Ministry day-care center. "There
were children killed in the swings," said a rescuer,
"others who died right where they sat on the see-saws."
More violence is expected as elections near; three
beheaded bodies were found in the province of
Babel. Fourteen Americans were killed in two helicopter
crashes in Afghanistan, and the Department of Defense
announced that 72 members of the U.S. military had
recently died while serving in Operation Enduring Freedom
in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan,
the Philippines, the Seychelles, the Sudan, Tajikistan,
Turkey, and Yemen, as well as at Guantanamo Bay. The
United States was planning a fact-finding mission to
Burma, and North Korean diplomats attended nuclear talks
in New York City. Democratic senators believed that a
health-care bill with some sort of public option would
soon pass in Congress. "Blue Dogs bark," explained a
disappointed Senator John McCain, "but never bite." The
Secret Service asked for a budget increase to handle the
death threats against President Obama. A Minnesota man
pleaded guilty to driving a La-Z-Boy while intoxicated,
and Bernard Kerik was in jail for violating his bail. An
apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared on a football-sized
rock in California, and the face of Christ was found in
the wood paneling of the men's room of an Ikea in
Glasgow. Jews fought with Muslims at the Temple Mount, and
Lebanon announced it had bested Israel's record by
creating a two-ton plate of hummus.
 
In Kyrgyzstan, where the full cabinet resigned after
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev took steps to consolidate his
power, an ice-skating bear mauled a circus director to
death. A mob in the Indian state of Jharkhand beat five
Muslim widows and forced them to eat excrement for their
witchcraft, and scientists said that a large meteorite
crater in Latvia was likely created by people with
shovels. It was revealed that a British investigation into
sex trafficking that lasted six months and involved every
police force in the country failed to find anyone who had
forced anybody into prostitution. Britain replaced its Law
Lords with a new Supreme Court whose justices wear no
wigs, and Morrissey collapsed onstage in Swindon. A man
was set on fire at a pub in Leeds and severely burned; he
had been all in cottonballs, dressed as a sheep. Sweden's
Lutheran church decided to consecrate gay
marriages. Nigeria was cracking down on its online
scammers, and Easter Islanders voted to limit the number
of visiting tourists. Soupy Sales died. Hundreds of
bishops called for Catholic leaders in Africa to step down
for corruption. Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana was named
to head the Vatican's justice and peace office, leading to
speculation that he could become the first black pope, and
after 25 years away from Uganda, Charles Wesley Mumbere, a
nursing assistant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, returned
home and ascended the throne as omusinga, or cultural
leader, of the Rwenzururu Kingdom, to lead the Bakongo and
Bamba peoples of the Mountains of the Moon. Scientists
found that death may make the pygmies short.
 
Microsoft released Windows 7, and Sun Microsystems said it
would lay off 3,000 people; economists said that the
U.S. economic recovery will not bring back lost
jobs. China was accused of cyberspying on American
businesses and announced that its GDP had grown at a rate
of nearly 9 percent in the third quarter. About 100,000
Italian women signed a petition of protest after Silvio
Berlusconi made fun of a homely lady, and Texas
researchers found that estrogen regulates fat-cell growth
and keeps womens' bellies from growing as fat as mens', at
least pre-menopause. "Nobody ever does female rodent
research," said one scientist, explaining why such basic
findings were so long in coming. "Male researchers hate
working with female rats." Chicago rats fed a diet of
sausage, pound cake, bacon, cheesecake, and Ho Hos began
to behave like rats addicted to heroin, consuming
increasing amounts of food to feel satisfied and
continuing to eat even when to do so meant that electric
shocks were delivered to their tiny paws. When switched to
healthful food ("the salad option") the rats, which had
become obese, their brains numbed by junk, simply refused
to eat. A man in Iowa punched another man, who was
ordering Mexican food, for being a zombie. Researchers
from Oregon determined that ancient beavers did not eat
trees, and a firm in New Jersey was distributing vaginal
mints.
 
-- Paul Ford
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 
Letters

The Fact of Evolution

To the Editor:

Nicholas Wade chides Richard Dawkins in his review of “The Greatest Show on Earth” (Oct. 11) for getting “his knickers in a twist” over contemporary creationism, a worldwide campaign of disinformation on which millions of dollars are being spent annually. What would it take to get Nicholas Wade’s knickers in a twist? The claim that condoms don’t prevent the spread of HIV? Or does religious faith excuse any evil deed? If geologists had to confront a similar propaganda campaign against plate tectonics, they would get a little testy too, I imagine, and physicists might grow impatient if they had to devote half their professional time and energy to fending off claims that quantum mechanics is the work of the devil.

What is going on at The New York Times? Why is it so bizarrely respectful of those who doubt evolution? In recent years The Times has published three preposterous Op-Ed articles by evolution-doubters (Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Michael J. Behe and Senator Sam Brownback). These no more deserved space in The Times than the opinions of flat-earthers or trance-channelers. In the wake of Judge John E. Jones III’s decision in the Dover, Pa., case that intelligent design is a religious viewpoint that may not be taught in public schools, one would think The Times would finally recognize that the intelligent design campaign is a hoax and dishonest to the core, and stop giving it respectability in its pages.

DANIEL DENNETT
North Andover, Mass.
The writer is the author of “Breaking the Spell” and “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.”

•

To the Editor:

In his review of “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Nicholas Wade charges that Richard Dawkins is guilty of a philosophical error. According to Wade, philosophers of science divide scientific propositions into three types — facts, laws and theories — and, contrary to Dawkins’s assertions, evolution, which is plainly a systematic theory, cannot count as a fact. However, contemporary philosophy of science offers a vastly more intricate vocabulary for thinking about the sciences than that presupposed in Wade’s oversimplified taxonomy and in his confused remarks about “absolute truth.” Although philosophers may quarrel with aspects of Dawkins’s arguments on a range of issues, he has a far firmer and more subtle understanding of the philosophical issues than that manifested in Wade’s review.

The crucial point is that, as Dawkins appreciates, the distinction between theory and fact, in philosophical discussions as in everyday speech, can be drawn in two quite distinct ways. On the one hand, theories are conceived as general systems for explanation and prediction, while facts are specific reports about local events and processes. On the other hand, “theory” is used to suggest that there is room for reasonable doubt, whereas “fact” suggests something so amply confirmed by the evidence that it may be accepted without debate.

Opponents of evolution slide from supposing that evolution is a theory, in the first sense, to concluding that it is (only) a theory, in the second. Any such inference is fallacious, in that many systematic approaches to domains of natural phenomena — like the understanding of chemical reactions in terms of atoms and molecules, and the study of heredity in terms of nucleic acids — are so well supported that they count as facts (in the second sense). Many scientists and philosophers who have written about evolution have pointed out that the contemporary theory that descends from Darwin has the same status — it, too, should count as a “fact.” Dawkins is entirely justified in following them.
PHILIP KITCHER
New York
The writer is the John Dewey professor of philosophy at Columbia University and a former editor in chief of Philosophy of Science, the journal of the Philosophy of Science Association.

Got Into The Habit

2009-10-18T13:33:00.002-04:00


The Berlin Reunion - The Big Picture - Boston.com


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Weekly Review

As the United States marked the eighth anniversary of its
war in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal asked
President Barack Obama to send 40,000 more troops
there. Senator John McCain was in favor of the surge,
while Vice President Joe Biden argued for unmanned
drones. Within days of Pakistan's announcing a new
anti-Taliban offensive in Waziristan, the tribal area that
borders Afghanistan, a suicide bomber dressed as a
paramilitary officer blew himself up inside a U.N. aid
agency in Islamabad, two car bombs killed dozens in
markets in Peshawar, and ten gunmen disguised in army
fatigues attacked the country's military headquarters,
holding 45 hostages until a commando raid freed 42 of
them; the remaining hostages and nine of the militants
were killed. It was revealed that a young Afghan girl was
killed last summer when a box designed to break open in
mid-air and scatter public information leaflets fell
intact from a British plane and landed on her. A British
study found that children who are given too many sweets
risk becoming violent adults, possibly because they never
learn patience, and President Obama won the Nobel Peace
Prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen
international diplomacy," even though the deadline for
nominations was February 1st, ten days after he took
office. Searching for water, the United States bombed the
moon.

Government ministers in the Maldives, which rising sea
levels will make uninhabitable by 2100, were taking scuba
lessons and practicing hand signals so that they can hold
cabinet meetings underwater. The government of Ecuador was
expelling migrants in the Galapagos because
environmentalists fear that the human population, which
doubled to 30,000 in the past decade, and which has
introduced rats, cattle, and fire ants to the island,
threatens native species, among them giant tortoises and
brightly colored boobies. A Saudi man was sentenced to
five years in prison and 1,000 lashes for bragging about
his sex life in an interview on Lebanese
television. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi vowed
not to step down after the country's highest court
overturned a law granting him immunity from
prosecution. "I am the best prime minister ever," said
Berlusconi, who is embroiled in corruption and bribery
scandals. "I am absolutely the politician most persecuted
by prosecutors in the entire history of the world
throughout the ages." He added that he had spent "200
million euros on judges... excuse me, on lawyers." The
Supreme Court convened its new term, and Justice Sonia
Sotomayor asked 36 questions in her first hour; Justice
Clarence Thomas had not asked a question for more than
three years. British entrepreneurs launched Internet Eyes,
a program that allows registered users to monitor live
feeds from some of the United Kingdom's 4.2 million
surveillance cameras in order to search for a crime in
progress, with cash prizes for viewers who spot the most
criminals. Insurgents in Somalia forced thousands of
people to watch as they amputated a foot and a hand from
each of two men accused of robbery. House Democrats
pledged to write into health-care-reform legislation a ban
on the practice whereby some insurers deny coverage to
battered women because domestic violence is designated a
"pre-existing condition." A Sioux City, Iowa, family found
a dead deer dressed in a clown suit and wig on their front
porch. British scientists reported that learning to juggle
can permanently increase brain function, and Cirque du
Soleil founder Guy Laliberte returned to Earth, after a
visit to the international space station, wearing a foam
clown nose.

Astronomers discovered the largest ring in the solar
system, a colossal circle of debris around Saturn caused
by the planet's moon Phoebe having been hit by wayward
space rocks. Archaeologists announced a new stone circle a
mile from Stonehenge that suggests the prehistoric
monument was part of a larger burial
complex. U.S. coroners were reporting a sharp increase in
the number of unclaimed bodies due to the
recession. Florida hospital officials advised more than
1,800 people to get screened for HIV and hepatitis after a
nurse was found to have re-used IV bags on multiple
patients. Scientists announced that they had developed a
vaccine that prevents cocaine users from getting
high. France's new culture minister, Frederic Mitterand,
was called on to resign after acknowledging that he "got
into the habit" of paying young boys for sex in Southeast
Asia. Egyptian lawmakers called for a ban on the
Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, which leaks fake blood,
and on National Coming Out Day, thousands of gay-rights
activists marched on the U.S. Capitol. Mary Cheney was
pregnant again. A teddy bear made of placenta was touring
England as part of an exhibit of sustainable toys. The
Mediterranean Sea was plagued by an outbreak of giant,
mucuslike sea blobs.

-- Margaret Cordi
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Doonesbury

2009-10-18T13:29:00.001-04:00

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau

Vegemite and Cream Cheese & the Weaver of a Prayer Shawl

2009-10-06T13:18:00.003-04:00

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Weekly Review

The International Monetary Fund said that the global
economy was improving and that banks would probably have
to absorb another $1.5 trillion in losses in addition to
the $1.3 trillion already written off. There remained, the
IMF said, "risk of a reintensification of the adverse
feedback loop between the real and financial sectors." At
Anadolu University in Istanbul, a student threw a white
Nike shoe at IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn
and shouted, "Get out of the university, IMF thief!"
U.S. unemployment rose to 9.8 percent, underemployment
rose to 17 percent, and the average American workweek
shrank by six minutes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics,
raising its earlier estimates, reported that eight million
jobs had vanished in the recession so far, the largest
mass layoff since the end of World War II. "This is what a
recovery looks like," said former Federal Reserve chairman
Alan Greenspan. Ninety-nine of the hundred largest
metropolitan areas had lost jobs in the past year. The
exception was the area around McAllen, Texas, a border
town where per-capita income is $12,000 and the incidence
of heavy drinking is 60 percent higher than the
national average. President Obama called the new jobs
figures "sobering." John "Bootsie" Wilson, the last
surviving member of the Silhouettes, the soul group that
sang the 1958 hit "Get a Job," died. Sarah Palin announced
that the co-author of her forthcoming memoir "Going Rogue"
will be a fundamentalist Christian named Lynn
Vincent. "Many Muslims are kind and gentle people,"
Vincent co-wrote in an earlier book, "but about one in
ten, according to scholars who study Jihad, have declared
war on our way of life." Alaskan porcupines were in heat,
and David Letterman told a long joke about his affairs
with coworkers. Lovebugs near Hilton Head, South Carolina,
emerged en masse to mate and die.

An earthquake in Indonesia killed more than six hundred
people, floods in India killed 271, a tsunami in the
Samoas killed more than 160, and soldiers in Conakry,
Guinea, fired on pro-democracy marchers, killing 87. "What
upsets me most," said opposition leader Sidya Toure, "is
that they destroyed my library." The United Kingdom opened
a new Supreme Court with carpets by Sir Peter Blake, who
also designed the cover of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band," and one hundred thirty-one walruses in
northern Alaska died in a walrus stampede. Chicago's Field
Museum announced that it would exhibit the body of a
one-month-old woolly mammoth, possibly dislodged from
Siberian permafrost by climate change, and Catholics and
Episcopalians brought pets to church to be blessed, in
honor of St. Francis of Assisi. Columnist William Safire,
who called himself a language "maven"--a word of Yiddish
origin, first popularized in a 1960s ad for pickled
herring--died, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accidentally
revealed that his original, Jewish surname is Sabourjian,
Persian for "weaver of the prayer shawl."

Scientists announced the discovery of a
4.4-million-year-old hominid primate skeleton that is 1
million years older than the Australopithecus afarensis
known as Lucy. The bipedal creature, named Ardi, had more
useful big toes than we have. Kraft Foods agreed not to
call a new mix of Vegemite and cream cheese "iSnack2.0,"
after Australian consumers complained. The creator of the
name, said one protester, should be made to run down the
street "wearing nothing but a generous lathering of
old-fashioned Vegemite as retribution for his cultural
crime." Chicago lost to Rio de Janeiro in a bid to host
the 2016 Olympics. "If they have Obama," said soccer
superstar Pele, "we have Pele." China celebrated the
sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the socialist
People's Republic of China under the democratic
dictatorship of the Communist Party and Chairman Mao, and
the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, under chairman Max
Baucus, finished its proposed health-care reform bill,
after striking down the "public option" favored by 57
percent of Americans. The Senate Finance version of the
bill will now be analyzed by the Congressional Budget
Office, then melded with a more liberal version by the
Senate Health Committee, and sent to the Senate floor for
debate. Elk in the Rocky Mountains were gathering their
harems for mating, and tourists gathered to listen to
their eerie bugling. "At the end, they let out two to
three grunts and spray urine on their abdomen, chest, and
neck," explained Bob Kreycik, a retired veterinarian in
Loveland, Colorado. "The more they smell, the more the
cows like it."
 
-- Sam Stark
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

How Marijuana Heals
(Andrew Sullivan)

New evidence of the efficacy and lack of side-effects of marijuana in the treatment of several diseases. On the treatment of chronic pain:

“Cannabinoids may augment the analgesic effects of opioids, allowing longer treatment at lower doses with fewer side effects.”

This is an empirical and scientific question, not a social or moral one. And what many do not seem to understand is that marijuana is often most effective in enabling patients to tolerate medication regimens that would otherwise be impossible to maintain: chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis meds, AIDS therapy, etc. And yet it is still close to impossible to do real research on it ... because it may give people pleasure. One day, people are going to look back on this small period of prohibition and wonder what on earth were people thinking of.

(By the way, Fortune's recent cover-story on the de facto legalization of pot in California is one of the most thorough and informative I've read. Yes, it's the cover of Fortune. The times they are a-changing.)

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(photo from Daily Dish)

Nuclear Materials for "Medicinal Purposes"

2009-09-29T12:45:00.003-04:00

Daily Dish

Understanding The Tea Party Right

This struck some chords:

Materialism is deeply and profoundly threatening to many people. It's the reason that the philosopher Peter Singer is so widely attacked, despite his humanitarian intentions. The current Pope and the last one both railed against this form of materialism. The materialism of the secular left opens it up to charges that it promotes a "culture of death." Liberals are said to like to kill fetuses and the elderly; they don't treat anything as sacred. This term has been bandied about on the right for many years, and while it is a gross exaggeration, it is based in a real truth, a real difference on the question of the sacredness of life. So when Palin threw out the term "death panels," the term struck a chord that had been played many times in recent years.

Liberals were flabbergasted, because it's a blatant lie, but it's false only in a logical sense, not an emotional one. And once again, logic has little to do with morality. If a pro-life social conservative asks himself whether Obama is secretly plotting to create death panels, he is not asking whether this is likely to be true, he is asking only "can I believe it," and the answer is usually yes.

Of course, liberals believe that it is conservatives who like to kill people (think militarism and capital punishment). Both sides care about life, but in different ways. Both sides live inside their own moral matrices. And just like in the movie The Matrix, morality is a "consensual hallucination" that is very hard to step out of. But moral psychology can help people to understand that there are moral motivations on all sides. People may not be logical, but few of them are crazy.

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Weekly Review

President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy revealed that
Iran had a secret uranium-enrichment facility. The
announcement, based on previously classified intelligence,
came soon after the U.N. Security Council passed a
resolution to limit the proliferation of nuclear
weapons. "What business is it of yours," countered Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "to tell us what to do or
not?" Ahmadinejad previously said that he wanted nuclear
materials only for "medicinal purposes." World leaders
converged in Pittsburgh for the G-20 summit, as did
protesters. City officials freed 300 prisoners so that
they would have 1,000 cells available, but ended up
arresting only 149 people in two days. The protesters held
demonstrations against pollution, global warming,
automobiles, homophobia, African debt exploitation,
corporate subsidies, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
child labor, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the
Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Burmese junta, and
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's presence at the
summit. Anarchists in black sang, to the tune of the
Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," "We all live in a fascist
bully state." "I feel like it's real exclusive," said
15-year-old Rosi Lowe of the summit, "and doesn't
represent the entire world." A $1,000 reward was on offer
in Philadelphia for information leading to the conviction
of the person who wrapped a cat's entire body in duct
tape.

With 15 minutes allotted to him, Libyan leader Colonel
Muammar el-Qaddafi spoke to the General Assembly of the
United Nations for more than an hour. During his address
he tore up a copy of the U.N. founding charter, proposed
resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by creating a
single state called "Isratine," and stressed that Arabs do
not hate the Jews. "You are the ones who burned them," he
said to the Assembly, "not us." He also suggested that the
swine flu virus was a military weapon that escaped from a
lab. Marilyn Manson announced that he had swine flu but
insisted he never had sex with a pig. Two Asian men stole
Rene Magritte's painting "Olympia" from a Brussels museum
during business hours, and Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old
British man living on welfare, uncovered with his metal
detector a treasure trove of 1,500 gold and silver
Anglo-Saxon artifacts worth 1.6 million
dollars. California scientists made paralyzed rats walk
again. A New Zealand aircraft company auctioned off a
chance to test its new jetpack, and a 310-mile-wide dust
storm swept through Sydney, Australia, shrouding the city
in orange powder, which one tourist described as "a
nuclear winter morning." The last Ottoman, Ertugrul Osman,
died, as did Milton Meltzer, the author of nearly 100
non-fiction books for children. "You may ask, what is the
relevance of all this history to the young?" Meltzer
wrote. "Ours is not a past of sweetness and light, no
matter what the textbook tells us."

Roman Polanski was arrested in Zurich for having sex with
a thirteen-year-old American girl in 1977. A 26-year-old
Filipino man cut off and boiled his father's head with
seasoning, and scientists concluded that 128,000 of
Europe's new cancers were brought on by fatness. An
Indonesian woman gave birth to a nineteen-pound baby
boy. California firefighters sawed through a dumbbell
fastener after a man got his penis stuck in the fastener,
where, over several days, it turned black and swelled to
five times its original size. A Pennsylvania judge ruled
that a police officer who orally violated five calves was
not guilty of animal cruelty, pointing out that it was
impossible to know whether the young cows were "tormented"
or "puzzled," or even irritated that the policeman's penis
was not actually food. "If the cow had the cognitive
ability to form thought and speak," reflected Judge James
Moreley, "Would it say, 'Where's the milk? I'm not getting
any milk.'" Germany's first nudist hiking trail, which
will not officially open until May, had its soft opening,
and NASA revealed that the mysterious streak of light
spotted by onlookers in the night sky above North America
was a fortnight's worth of astronaut urine.

-- Claire Gutierrez

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Pure poetry. "A fortnight's worth of astronaut urine." *sigh* I love Harper's News.....

Humor Break

2009-09-27T18:16:00.001-04:00

Get It Together

2009-09-27T18:01:00.002-04:00

ur request is being processed...

Bill Maher

Posted: September 25, 2009 08:36 AM
New Rule: If America Can't Get it Together, We Lose the Bald Eagle
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-if-america-cant_b_299383.html
*
New Rule: If America can't get its act together, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can't get up. As long as we're pathetic, we might as well act like it's cute. I don't care about the president's birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to "Yes we can." Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they've gotten is a dog.

Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can't make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there's still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can't make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress's climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions... by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where's the fire? Oh yeah, it's where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States!

We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn't start until 2016. In that year, our cars of the future will glide along at a breathtaking 35 miles-per-gallon. My goodness, is that even humanly possible? Cars that get 35 miles-per-gallon in just six years? Get your head out of the clouds, you socialist dreamer! "What do we want!? A small improvement! When do we want it!? 2016!"

When it's something for us personally, like a laxative, it has to start working now. My TV remote has a button on it now called "On Demand". You get your ass on my TV screen right now, Jon Cryer, and make me laugh. Now! But when it's something for the survival of the species as a whole, we phase that in slowly.

Folks, we don't need more efficient cars. We need something to replace cars. That's what's wrong with these piddly, too-little-too-late half-measures that pass for "reform" these days. They're not reform, they're just putting off actually solving anything to a later day, when we might by some miracle have, a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, "If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense." So let's start from scratch.

Even if they pass the shitty Max Baucus health care bill, it doesn't kick in for 4 years, during which time 175,000 people will die because they're not covered, and about three million will go bankrupt from hospital bills. We have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don't let Obama do anything. What kills me is that that's the Democrats' plan, too.

We weren't always like this. Inert. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law and 11 months later seniors were receiving benefits. During World War II, virtually overnight FDR had auto companies making tanks and planes only. In one eight year period, America went from JFK's ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon, to actually landing a man on the moon.

This generation has had eight years to build something at Ground Zero. An office building, a museum, an outlet mall, I don't care anymore. I'm tempted to say that, symbolically, all America can do lately is keep digging a hole, but Ground Zero doesn't represent a hole. It is a hole. America: Home of the Freedom Pit. Ironically, it's spitting distance from Wall Street, where they knock down buildings a different way - through foreclosure.

That's the ultimate sign of our lethargy: millions thrown out of their homes, tossed out of work, lost their life savings, retirements postponed - and they just take it. 30% interest on credit cards? It's a good thing the Supreme Court legalized sodomy a few years ago.

Why can't we get off our back? Is it something in the food? Actually, yes. I found out something interesting researching last week's editorial on how we should be taxing the unhealthy things Americans put into their bodies, like sodas and junk foods and gerbils. Did you know that we eat the same high-fat, high-carb, sugar-laden shit that's served in prisons and in religious cults to keep the subjects in a zombie-like state of lethargic compliance? Why haven't Americans arisen en masse to demand a strong public option? Because "The Bachelor" is on. We're tired and our brain stems hurt from washing down French fries with McDonald's orange drink.

The research is in: high-fat diets makes you lazy and stupid. Rats on an American diet weren't motivated to navigate their maze and once in the maze they made more mistakes. And, instead of exercising on their wheel, they just used it to hang clothes on. Of course we can't ban assault rifles - we're the first generation too lazy to make its own coffee. We're the generation that invented the soft chocolate chip cookie: like a cookie, only not so exhausting to chew. I ask you, if the food we're eating in America isn't making us stupid, how come the people in Carl's Jr. ads never think to put a napkin over their pants?

Bill Maher is host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher"

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-if-america-cant_b_299383.html

Doonesbury

2009-09-27T13:18:00.000-04:00

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau

Can You Dig It ?

2009-09-24T19:45:00.004-04:00

Daily dish
The Obama Gambit

It's remarkable to read and watch the usual suspects splutter and harrumph at an American president who actually seeks to engage foreign powers as equals rather than as subordinates. What Obama sees as self-confidence in the supreme military and economic powerhouse on the planet, they see as craven weakness. So you get Paul Hinderaker throwing up in his mouth watching the UN address:

Obama then listed a series of decisions that he hoped might placate the assembled thugs, dictators, and hypocrites -- a crowd from which he feels compelled to seek approval on behalf of the United States. Obama noted that he has banned torture, closed Gitmo, moved to end the war in Iraq, moved towards disarmament, attempted to advance the ball on creating a Palestinian state, "re-engaged the United Nations, paid our bills, joined the Human Rights Council."

So here was the president of the United States doing everything but getting down on his hands and knees before the representatives of every wretched regime in the world to plead that the U.S. has turned over a new leaf and, in effect, become harmelss.

Notice the neocon right's view of the rest of the fricking world: "assembled thugs, dictators, and hypocrites." Against this, we have blameless America, always right, never wrong, and blameless Israel, always the victim, never the aggressor. And when you realize that this was the worldview of the last president, you understand why he got so little of any substance from any foreign country, except Britain, whose prime minister's career was destroyed by the decision.

Obama's promise was and is a re-branding of America (which was the primary reason I supported him). Of course, if you are a neocon, you see no need to rebrand after Gitmo, Iraq, Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Torture and pre-emptive wars waged on false pretenses are things to be proud of. But if you are capable of absorbing complicated reality, you realize that such a re-branding was essential if the US were to dig itself out of the Bush-Cheney ditch and to advance its interests by defter means than raw violence and occupation.

What are the results so far?

As with much of the rest of the Obama presidency, we do not know yet. But I agree with Packer that so far, Obama seems more JFK than LBJ in foreign affairs (except that it was his predecessor who revealed the limits of swagger in global politics rather than himself). So far, it appears that the Israelis, playing the game they think is still apposite, have no interest in cooperating with the US. Netanyahu believes his contempt for the American president is risk-free because Israel has a lock on the US Congress on the issues that matter to it. Obama's counter is to reiterate his views on the settlement question and to up the ante by proposing final status talks right away. We have no idea where this will end up. And it will be impossible to call Netanyahu's bluff if the Palestinians decide to miss yet another opportunity. But it's a process, and the US is still very much in the game. And one suspects Netanyahu has not yet absorbed the shift going on - even in Congress.

On Iran, we see an interesting dynamic. The missile defense maneuver simultaneously improved Israel's security and pleased the Russians. Yesterday we saw much more positive signs from Moscow on Iran sanctions than at any point in the past. They may not deliver, but the tone has shifted. I'll believe Russian support for sanctions on Iran when I see it. But sometimes, a little give from the superpower can be more effective than the superpower acting as if it is a tiny vulnerable country paranoid about its defenses and terrified by a two-bit, half-cracked dictator who is clinging onto power through a coup.

What I'm seeing in American foreign policy, in other words, is less fear and more confidence. Confidence is not the same thing as weakness. It is better understood, I think, as a rational attempt to seek self-interest through international cooperation, to see the US less as the hegemon than as the facilitator. If it works, it will be a breakthrough. If it works.

But isn't it worth trying?

(Photo: US President Barack Obama (R) leaves the room after a bilateral meeting with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev at the Woldorf Astoria in New York, NY, September 23, 2009. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty.)
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AND !

We're Number 37

2009-09-23T21:24:00.000-04:00

Being There For Her...

2009-09-22T14:45:00.004-04:00

100 year flood [from a friend's facebook telling of]


"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."  

- Buckminster Fuller 

**
Sideshow

The Man Who Threw The Shoe - on why he threw it:
 "We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman
and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread.
 And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would
celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that
we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade. Our patience and
our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression. But the invasion divided
brother from brother, neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into
funeral tents."



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Weekly Review
 
After months of negotiation by the bipartisan "gang of
six" in the Senate, Senator Max Baucus unveiled his
$776-billion health-care reform bill, which is supported
by none of the gang's three Republican members and
received a lukewarm response from Democrats. Baucus's
plan, which includes member-run insurance co-operatives
but no public option, would mandate that all Americans buy
insurance and would provide subsidies for those who can't
afford it. The subsidies would be paid for in part by an
excise tax on so-called "Cadillac" insurance plans,
including those provided to firefighters, coal miners, and
many other union workers. "That's not really a smart
idea," said Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller. The bill
will now be taken up by the Senate Finance Committee,
whose members have already drafted at least 564
amendments. One year after the collapse of Lehman
Brothers, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that
the recession is "very likely over." He added that many
people will continue to "find that their job security and
their employment status is not what they wish it was." A
North Carolina man had surgery to remove a plastic spoon
that had been in his lung for two years. "There was an
object down there, and it had writing on it," the man
said. "It spelled out 'Wendy's' on one side and
'hamburgers' on the other."
 
A quarter of the votes in Afghanistan's presidential
elections were under review for fraud, including hundreds
of thousands from polling stations where every vote went
to incumbent Hamid Karzai; General Stanley McChrystal,
America's top commander there, said that without
additional troops the war "will likely result in failure,"
adding that Afghans have "little reason to support their
government." President Barack Obama said that sending more
troops would put the cart before the horse. An Australian
quadriplegic who had won a landmark "right to die" court
decision exercised that right, and France announced plans
to factor happiness into calculations of its gross
national product. Sultan Kosen of Turkey was named the
world's tallest man. "The first thing I want to do is have
a car that I can fit in," said Kosen, who is 8'1". "But
more than that I want to get married." One-time child
music prodigy Helen Goddard, now a music teacher in London
and known as "jazz lady," was sent to jail for having sex
with a 15-year-old female student who she claimed had
pressured her into the relationship. Actor and dirty
dancer Patrick Swayze, folk singer Mary Travers, shopping
mall pioneer Melvin Simon, and Irving Kristol, the
"godfather of neo-conservatism," died, and South Africa's
sports minister threatened to start "a third world war" if
hermaphrodite runner Caster Semenya was barred from
competition. Later, the president of Athletics South
Africa admitted that the organization had administered
earlier gender tests on Semenya and that the team's doctor
had recommended that she withdraw from races.
 
FBI raids in Denver and New York led to the arrest of
three men alleged to have links to Al Qaeda and to have
been planning terrorist attacks on targets in New York
City. A college student in Baltimore killed a burglar in
his off-campus home with a samurai sword, a Wichita couple
were robbed at knifepoint while attempting to have sex in
a dumpster, and a man in Wisconsin was arrested after
planning to slash the face of the woman he loved and torch
her Toyota in order to "be there for her." It was revealed
via Twitter that President Obama called Kanye West a
"jackass" and that a coyote ran off with Jessica Simpson's
maltipoo. Based on a single fossil smuggled out of China,
paleontologists announced the discovery of the Raptorex, a
roughly human-sized version of the Tyrannosaurus
rex. Researchers determined that watermelon may help men
get erections, and John Edwards was said to be
contemplating a public admission that he did in fact
father a child with his mistress, whom he allegedly
promised a rooftop wedding in New York City, with a
performance by the Dave Matthews Band.
 
-- Christopher R. Beha
 
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Call It Ludacris

2009-09-22T12:43:00.002-04:00

Rappers like Ludacris and hosts like Glenn Beck are strict capitalists.

September 20, 2009
Call It Ludacris: The Kinship Between Talk Radio and Rap

By DAVID SEGAL

If you’re driving alone through the plains of Nebraska and need a little company, you can’t do better than the nationally syndicated maestros of political talk radio. Hour after hour, rant after rant, it is a feast of words and feverish emotion, interrupted only by regular commercials and the occasional call from the awe-struck fan.

I’d heard these voices before, but only in sound bites. When you don’t own a car and don’t tune in at home, you probably don’t run into Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin. On the highways of the Cornhusker State, they ran into me, every time I hit the scan button. After a while, it felt like a series of visits from very colorful and highly agitated relatives. Or it would if I had a lot of relatives certain that America is slouching toward a socialist abyss.

The apparent influence of these conservative talk professionals has caused more hand-wringing than usual in recent weeks, in the wake of our summer of angry town hall meetings and the “You lie!” outburst of Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina. And when you hear Barack Obama likened to Pol Pot — as Mr. Savage did in a recent show— you can understand the concern. But to my uninitiated ears, there was something reassuringly familiar about political talk radio, and not because I know a lot about firebrands.

It’s because I listen to a lot of rap. Gangsta rap, in particular.

I’ll admit that the parallels between Jay-Z and Rush Limbaugh do not seem obvious, and to grasp them you need to look beyond the violence and misogyny that have made rap a favorite target of the right wing. (Come to think of it, perhaps each of these realms will be chagrined to be likened to the other.) But as soon as you dig beneath the surface, the similarities between talk radio and gangsta rap are nothing short of uncanny. And these similarities are revealing, too.

But before we get to the revelations, let’s examine the kinship. For great careers in both businesses you’ll need:

EGO Extolling your greatness is nearly as crucial to rap as it is to talk radio. One consistent theme of Jay-Z’s lyrics is the genius of Jay-Z’s lyrics. He claims a charisma that is almost mystical and skills on the mic that make him the “Mike Jordan of recording,” “the Bruce Wayne of the game,” a “god.”

Rush Limbaugh peppers his show with self-adulating incantations that would seem right at home on a Snoop Dogg track, calling himself “Chief Waga-Waga El Rushbo of the El Conservo Tribe,” “doctor of democracy,” and “a weapon of mass instruction.” Both he and Jay-Z have referred to themselves as “a living legend.”

HATERS You’re nobody in hip-hop until you claim to have hordes of detractors. The paradox, of course, is that the artists who regularly denounce their haters have a huge and adoring audience. How does Lil Wayne complain in song about the legions who seek his ruin even as he dominates the charts? Ask Michael Savage, who is forever describing himself as an underdog, marginalized by the media — on the more than 300 stations that carry his show.

FEUDS 50 Cent vs. Ja Rule. Lil’ Kim vs. Foxy Brown. Jay-Z vs. Nas. Every couple of years, one rapper will pick a fight with another and battle it out with the winner typically determined by sales. This will sound familiar to anyone who has followed, say, Bill O’Reilly’s broadsides at Mr. Limbaugh (“Walk away from these right-wing liars!” Mr. O’Reilly said of an unnamed rival, described as someone who smokes a cigar and owns a private jet) or Mark Levin’s attack on Mr. O’Reilly. (“He has a fledgling radio show, that has no ratings,” Mr. Levin said in 2008, “and he’ll be off radio soon because he’s a failure.” Levin’s predication came true in January of this year.) Liberal ranters can partake, too, as MSNBC host and fulminator par excellence Keith Olbermann has proven with his long running O’Reilly spat.

VERBAL SKILLS Without them, you can’t rap and you’ll never make it as a talk radio opinion-machine. Free-style rap requires precisely the facility with words that it takes to free-associate for two or three hours a day. Forget, for a moment, what the Fox TV and radio gabber Glenn Beck is saying and marvel for a moment at how long he can say it — and how sharp and funny he can be. In a recent and genuinely hilarious bit, he lampooned the sleepiness of NPR talk shows by affecting a plummy British accent and repeatedly urging a caller — a member of his coterie in actual fact — to “please use your indoor voice,” though the caller was talking at a perfectly reasonable volume.

Mr. Savage’s riffs are a quirky, zig-zagging flow of ideas that at their best are a kind of talk show scat, jumping from a mini-lecture about the Khmer Rouge, to a rave about barbecue chicken, to a warning that he feels a bit manic, which means he’ll be depressed for tomorrow’s show.

If Mr. Limbaugh is conservative talk radio’s answer to Jay-Z, Mr. Savage is its Eminem — a man whose own neuroses are one of his favorite topics.

Even beyond simple matters of style, rap and conservative talk radio share some DNA. Once you subtract gangsta rap’s enthusiasm for lawlessness — a major subtraction, to be sure — rap is among the most conservative genres of pop music. It exalts capitalism and entrepreneurship with a brio that is typically considered Republican. (Admiring references to Bill Gates are common in hip-hop.)

Rappers tend to be fans of the Second Amendment, though they rarely frame their affection for guns in constitutional terms. And rap has an opinion about human nature that is deeply conservative — namely, that criminals cannot be reformed. The difference is that gangsta rappers often identify themselves as the criminals, and are proud of their unreformability.

Finally, rappers and conservative talkers both speak for a demographic that believes its interests and problems have been slighted and both offer stories that have allegedly been ignored.

Obviously, there are limits to all these parallels, but there is one more worth noting: rap has inspired its share of fear and now, liberals and moderates are asking the same question about conservative talk radio that conservatives have long asked about rap: How dangerous is it?

There’s a curious role reversal here, with fans of Mr. Limbaugh, et al., now under the very suspicion that had long been cast on fans of gangsta rap. The suspicion boils down to another question: Can people listen to highly provocative words (and in rap’s case, irresistible beats) and still be civil?

This seemed like a good question to pose to a man uniquely situated to opine about the shaded part of the Venn diagram of rap and conservative talk radio. I’m talking about DJ Clayvis, né Clay Clark, an Oklahoma-based, right-leaning talk show host and rapper. He has written anti-Obama raps, including “Audacity of Nope” and, though he believes his favorite talkers are sincere conservatives, he has long understood that his two different callings have a lot in common.

“The differences between Ludacris and Rush Limbaugh are not that great,” he said. “Both have a huge egos, both bring a lot of bravado, both are sort of playing characters when they perform. And at the end of the day, they’re both entertainers.”

Vodka

2009-09-21T12:28:00.002-04:00

Vodka

Who Knew?

1. To remove a bandage painlessly, saturate the bandage with vodka. The stuff dissolves adhesive.

2. To clean the caulking around bathtubs and showers, fill a trigger-spray bottle with vodka, spray the caulking, let set five minutes and wash clean. The alcohol in the vodka kills mold and mildew.

3. To clean your eyeglasses, simply wipe the lenses with a soft, clean cloth dampened with vodka. The alcohol in the vodka cleans the glass and kills germs.

4. Prolong the life of razors by filling a cup with vodka and letting your safety razor blade soak in the alcohol after shaving. The vodka disinfects the blade and prevents rusting.

5. Spray vodka on wine stains, scrub with a brush, and then blot dry.

6. Using a cotton ball, apply vodka to your face as an astringent to cleanse the skin and tighten pores.

7. Add a jigger of vodka to a 12-ounce bottle of shampoo. The alcohol cleanses the scalp, removes toxins from hair, and stimulates the growth of healthy hair.

8. Fill a sixteen-ounce trigger-spray bottle with vodka and spray bees or wasps to kill them.

9. Pour one-half cup vodka and one-half cup water into a Ziploc freezer bag and freeze for a slushy, refreshing ice pack for aches, pain or black eyes.

10. Fill a clean, used mayonnaise jar with freshly packed lavender flowers, fill the jar with vodka, seal the lid tightly and set in the sun for three days. Strain liquid through a coffee filter, then apply the tincture to aches and pains.

11. To relieve a fever, use a washcloth to rub vodka on your chest and back as a liniment.

12. To cure foot odor, wash your feet with vodka.

13. Vodka will disinfect and alleviate a jellyfish sting.

14. Pour vodka over an area affected with poison ivy to remove the urushiol oil from your skin.

15. Swish a shot of vodka over an aching tooth. Allow your gums to absorb some of the alcohol to numb the pain.

And silly me! I've only been drinking the stuff! Hmmm...

Rodeo Clowns and Corporate Shenanigans

2009-09-21T00:05:00.002-04:00

September 20, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day

By FRANK RICH

IF only it were just about the color of his skin.

With all due respect to Jimmy Carter, the racist component of Obama-hatred has been undeniable since the summer of 2008, when Sarah Palin rallied all-white mobs to the defense of the “real America.” Joe Wilson may or may not be in that camp, but, either way, that’s not the news. As we watched and rewatched the South Carolina congressman’s star turn, what grabbed us was the act itself.

What made the lone, piercing cry of “You lie!” shocking was that it breached a previously secure barrier. It was the first time that the violent rage surging in town-hall meetings all summer blasted into the same room as the president. Wilson’s televised shout was tantamount to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. When he later explained that his behavior was “spontaneous” rather than premeditated, that was even more disturbing. It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people.

The White House was right not to second Carter’s motion and cue another “national conversation about race.” No matter how many teachable moments we have, some people won’t be taught. (Though how satisfying it would have been for Obama to dismiss Wilson, like the boorish Kanye West, as a “jackass.”) But there is a national conversation we must have right now — the one about what, in addition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it. We are kidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or even Obama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed.

Many of those Americans may hate Obama, but they don’t love the Republican establishment either. Michael Steele, who was declared persona non grata at one of the mad “tea parties” in April, was not invited to that right-wing 9/12 March on Washington last weekend. There were no public encomiums for McCain or Bush. No Senate leader spoke to the gathering, and perhaps only Palin and Ron Paul would have been welcome from the ranks of what passes for G.O.P. presidential timber. If there was a real hero to this crowd, it was the protest’s most prominent promoter, the radio and TV talker Glenn Beck.

Time put Beck on its cover this week. Man of the Year may not be far behind. Beck is not, as many liberals assume, merely the latest incarnation of Rush Limbaugh. He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents — and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts.

Though Beck’s daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic. It’s not just because he is younger (45). This self-described “rodeo clown,” who wells up with tears for dramatic effect, doesn’t come across as cranky or pompous, like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. A fervent Mormon convert and proselytizer, he is untainted by association with the old Dobson-Robertson-Reed religious right. Unlike Limbaugh, he bonds with his fallible listeners by openly and repeatedly owning up to his own mistakes, including his history of drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike Hannity, he is not a Republican apparatchik.

Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a “racist,” but the race card is just one in his deck. His ideology, if it can be called that, mixes idolatrous Ayn Rand libertarianism with bumper-sticker slogans about “freedom,” self-help homilies and lunatic conspiracy theories. (He fanned Internet rumors that FEMA was establishing concentration camps before tardily beating a retreat.) It’s the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them, and there is no one handier than a liberal, all-powerful president (who just happens to be black).

Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator — with appropriately overheated capital letters — in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.

“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.

Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. That’s what F.D.R. did, and that’s the promise Obama made, swaying some Republicans and even some racists, during the campaign.

Too many Americans are impatiently waiting for results. It’s hard to argue that the stimulus package reviled by big government-loathers is a success when unemployment continues to rise and most Americans feel none of the incipient “recovery” spotted by Ben Bernanke. The potential dividends to be gained at the end of the protracted health care debate also remain, for now, an abstraction to many who have lost and are continuing to lose their jobs, their savings and their homes.

Nor has Obama succeeded in persuading critics on the left or right that he will do as much for those Americans who are suffering as he has for the corporations his administration and his predecessor’s rushed to rescue. To mark the anniversary of Lehman’s fall, the president gave a speech on Wall Street last Monday again vowing reform. But everyone’s back to business as usual: The Wall Street Journal reported that not a single C.E.O. from a top bank attended. The speech sank with scant notice because there has been so little action to back it up and because its conciliatory stance was tone-deaf to the anger beyond the financial district.

That same day a United States District Court judge in New York, Jed S. Rakoff, scathingly condemned the Obama Securities and Exchange Commission for letting Bank of America skate away with what Rakoff called an immoral and unjust wrist tap to settle charges that it covered up $3.6 billion paid out in bonuses when it purchased Merrill Lynch. How is this S.E.C. a change from the Clinton-Bush S.E.C. that ignored all the red flags on Bernie Madoff?

Beck frequently strikes the pose of an apocalyptic prophet, even insisting that he predicted 9/11. This summer he also started warning of domestic terrorism in the form of a new Timothy McVeigh. On this, one fears he knows whereof he speaks. For all our nation’s unfinished business on race, racism is not Obama’s biggest challenge during our unfinished Great Recession. He — and our political system — are being seriously tested by a rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox and a backbencher from South Carolina.

Cognitive Dissonance

2009-09-20T14:35:00.002-04:00

Daily Dish:
Anecdote Of The Day

This apocryphal tale made me chuckle:
"I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.
The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics.

Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.
"With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.' "
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Fast Train to Crazytown

2009-09-18T18:50:00.000-04:00

Attention: David Brooks

Ahem:

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Killed by an 860 -pound Altar

2009-09-15T21:53:00.004-04:00

from my flickr photostream

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Weekly Review
 
President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of
Congress and implored Democrats to pass their own
health-care legislation. During the speech, the president
noted that the bill would not extend health insurance to
illegal immigrants, at which South Carolina Representative
Joe Wilson shouted, "You lie!" Afterwards, Wilson received
$1 million in campaign contributions. Shares in health
insurance companies went up, and the number of Americans
without health insurance rose to 46.3 million. Tens of
thousands of people gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol
to protest health-care reform, the expansion of
government, illegal immigration, abortion, the size of the
national deficit, limitations on gun ownership, the
linguistic plurality of the United States, the Wall Street
bailout, the energy bill, and the appointment of White
House czars. Signs carried at the protest depicted Obama
as Adolf Hitler, as Che Guevara, as the Joker from the
most recent Batman movie, and as an African witch
doctor. "Bury Obamacare with Kennedy," read one sign. "Joe
Wilson for president" read another. Samoans began to drive
on the left side of the road in spite of a late appeal by
the People Against Switching Sides (PASS).
 
The Treasury Department announced plans to phase out its
bank-bailout programs. "It is clear," said Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner, "that we have stepped back from
the brink and that we are pointed in the right direction."
Three more banks closed, adding to the 89 that failed so
far this year, and investment firms revealed plans to buy
life-insurance policies from elderly and sick people and
package them into securitized investment products. "We're
hoping to get a herd stampeding after the first offering,"
said a banker. In Pakistan, at least nineteen women trying
to collect free handouts of flour were killed in an actual
stampede. A developer in London was found guilty of
murdering his tenant so he could move ahead with plans to
flip the property, and a group of men in Florida were
holding up pawn shops in various costumes, including
hospital scrubs, child safety-seats, and sinks. The
U.S. was growing more pot. "The need to... distract
yourself is pretty much a constant in human behavior
through good times and bad," said one
marijuana-eradication official. Scientists at Stanford
University determined that stem cells could be made from
fat cells removed during liposuction.
 
Jim Carroll died, as did Nobel Prize-winning agronomist
Norman Borlaug, and Gertrude Baines, who at 115 was the
world's oldest person. A 107-year-old woman in Malaysia
was looking for her 23rd husband. Authorities in Sudan
were planning to lash a woman for wearing tight pants. A
German AIDS awareness campaign was criticized for
portraying Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Joseph Stalin
having sex with naked women. Police in Turkey rescued nine
women from a villa where they had spent the last two
months being made to fight each other, wear bikinis, and
dance by a swimming pool for what they falsely believed
was a reality-TV show. California state legislator Mike
Duvall, a Republican, resigned after he unwittingly
bragged about having sex with much younger
women--including one who wore "little eye-patch
underwear"--into a hot microphone before a hearing. A
former jail deputy in Ohio was charged with two
health-code violations after he fed a prisoner a bologna
sandwich that had been rubbed on another prisoner's
penis. A man in Wales was sentenced to prison for
murdering his partner after she changed her relationship
status on Facebook to "single." Walmart employees beat a
shoplifter to death, and two Massachusetts teenagers were
killed in a dispute over a parking space. After
successfully praying for his release from a stuck
elevator, a devout Catholic in Vienna went directly to
church, where, giving thanks to God, he embraced an
860-pound altar, which fell over, killing him
instantly. Canadian scientists discovered the smell of
death.
 
--Genevieve Smith
 
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The Year of the Flood

2009-09-15T21:43:00.002-04:00

Image from the Burning Blog

September 15, 2009

Books of The Times

A Familiar Cast of Fighters in a Final Battle for the Soul of the Earth

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD

By Margaret Atwood

434 pages. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $26.95.

The flood referred to by the title of Margaret Atwood’s new novel isn’t the biblical deluge, sent by God to wipe out wickedness and sin, but a waterless one: an uncommon pandemic that cannot be contained by “biotools and bleach,” and that sweeps “through the air as if on wings,” burning “through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror and butchery.” This flood has killed millions upon millions, and electrical, digital and industrial systems are failing, as their human keepers die.

In “The Year of the Flood” we are transported to a world that is part Hieronymus Bosch, part “A Clockwork Orange.” “Total breakdown” is upon the land, and a private security firm named CorpsSeCorps has seized power, taking control where the local police forces have collapsed from lack of financing. The Corps people not only use brutal tactics like Internal Rendition to enforce their will, but they are also conducting sinister experiments, monkeying with human and animal genetics and creating strange new mutant species.

A kind of companion piece to her lumpy 2003 novel, “Oryx and Crake,” this book takes us back to that post-apocalyptic future and it does so with a lot more energy, inventiveness and narrative panache.

Like “Oryx” and the author’s 1986 novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” this is another dystopian fantasy that’s meant to be a sort of cautionary tale about the wrongs and excesses of our own world — be it antifeminism, denial of global warming, or violence and materialism. But while those earlier books were hobbled by didactic asides and a preachy, moralistic tone, Ms. Atwood has loosened up in this volume and given her imagination free rein. Having already mapped out the basic geography of her futuristic world in “Oryx,” she dispenses here with exposition and focuses on her two heroines’ efforts to survive in the wake of the Waterless Flood.

One woman, Toby, has survived inside an upscale spa, where she subsists on supplies from a storeroom and the garden, where they used to grow vegetables for customers’ organic salads. She eventually ventures out, journeying back to her parents’ old neighborhood to find a rifle she’d buried under some patio stones. Her father had used the rifle to commit suicide, after his wife died of a mysterious illness that consumed all their savings.

Toby later learns that her mother was most likely a guinea pig for a drug company named HelthWyzer that was “seeding folks with illnesses” via souped-up supplement pills — “using them as free lab animals, then collecting on the treatments for those very same illnesses.”

After her parents’ death, Toby is forced to take a series of demeaning jobs, culminating in her employment at a revolting fast-food chain called SecretBurgers, which is rumored to run human corpses through its meat grinders. There, she becomes the sexual toy of a violent, piggish manager named Blanco — until she is unexpectedly rescued by a group of demonstrators known as God’s Gardeners, a hippielike sect pledged to preserve all animal and plant life. Over the years Toby will rise through the ranks of the Gardeners and eventually become one of their elders.

When she realizes that she is one of the few survivors of the Waterless Flood, Toby wonders why she was chosen: “Why has she been saved alive? Out of the countless millions. Why not someone younger, someone with more optimism and fresher cells? She ought to trust that she’s here for a reason — to bear witness, to transmit a message, to salvage at least something from the general wreck. She ought to trust, but she can’t.”

Among the other people living with God’s Gardeners is a girl named Ren, who has been brought there by her mother, Lucerne, a HelthWyzer executive’s former wife, who has run away from home with a lover. Ren will later be taken back to the HelthWyzer compound, where she falls in love with Jimmy — the hero of “Oryx and Crake,” also known as Snowman — who will break her heart by taking up with her best friend, Amanda.

After her biofather is kidnapped, Ren winds up working as a trapeze dancer at a sex club named Scales and Tails — one of her teachers actually recommends it as a good job with health benefits and a dental plan — and it is there, in an isolation room, that Ren will wait out the Waterless Flood.

In recounting the stories of Ren and Toby, Ms. Atwood does a deft job of turning them into credible human beings — not simply cartoon heroines wandering through a special-effects-laden apocalyptic landscape in which killing droughts and hurricanes and new diseases have led many to predict “a massive die-off of the human race.”
Although some of the chapters in this book start with annoying passages detailing the Gardeners’ ecological credo, Ms. Atwood largely refrains from the sort of proselytizing that tarnished her earlier ventures into science fiction. By focusing on her characters and their perilous journeys through a nightmare world, she has succeeded in writing a gripping and visceral book that showcases the pure storytelling talents she displayed with such verve in her 2000 novel, “The Blind Assassin.”

Fear Does Not Condone Torture

2009-09-15T21:36:00.002-04:00

Burning man festival: Burn night

From the Miami Herald

Fear was no excuse to condone torture

Similar stories:

•
Senate probe blames top Bush officials for abuses

Senate probe blames top Bush officials for abuses

WASHINGTON â€” Top officials â€” including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff â€” were responsible for the use of "abusive" interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantánamo Bay, in Afghanistan and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a bipartisan Senate report concluded Thursday.
The long-awaited Senate Armed Services Committee report bluntly refuted the Bush administration's repeated claims that the abuses, which helped fuel the Iraq insurgency and damaged America's reputation around the world, were the work of a few low-level "bad apples."
"Senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees," said the report's 19-page unclassified executive summary. "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the

•
Torture no longer will be tolerated

Torture no longer will be tolerated

O ne of Barack Obama's first decisions as president was to ban the use of torture and coercive techniques against terror suspects. CIA Director Leon Panetta made that policy change official last week in announcing the closing of secret foreign sites used by the United States to imprison and torture detainees. The decisions will help restore America's diminished status as a nation of laws -- not of men.
The change is a dramatic break from Bush administration policies, and shows that President Obama believes terrorists can be stopped without the use of torture. The idea that extreme physical punishment is sometimes necessary to stop an imminent attack became a cardinal doctrine in the Bush White House. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has used that rationale repeatedly in asserting that is why the United States has not been attacked again since Sept. 11, 2001.
No prosecutions

•
Study: Dozens of terrorism suspects wrongly detained

Study: Dozens of terrorism suspects wrongly detained

GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. They shouted, ``Allahu Akbar'' -- God is great -- as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as ``the worst of the worst.''
But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops dragged him out of his home in Afghanistan in 2003 and held him for three years at Guantánamo, believing that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces.

•
Probe finds Pentagon lawyers abetted abusive interrogations

Probe finds Pentagon lawyers abetted abusive interrogations

The Pentagon in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks pursued abusive interrogation techniques once used by North Korea and Vietnam on American POWs despite stern warnings by several military lawyers that the methods were cruel and even illegal, according to a Senate investigation.
The findings, detailed in a hearing Tuesday, brought rebukes of the Pentagon effort from Democrats and Republicans alike.
''The guidance [administration lawyers] provided will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities,'' said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an Air Force Reserve colonel who teaches military law for the service.

•
Easing of laws that led to detainee abuse hatched in secret

Easing of laws that led to detainee abuse hatched in secret

The framework that allowed the abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, and kept them detained for years without due process, was not the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.
It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.
Many of their legal interpretations have now been struck down by the Supreme Court. On June 12, the Court ruled that keeping detainees from challenging their detention in federal courts, was unconstitutional [and violated the military's own legal code and the 1949 Geneva Conventions].

BY CHARLES C. KRULAK and JOSEPH P. HOAR

In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster.
But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.
We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on the treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Cheney and others who orchestrated America's disastrous trip to ``the dark side'' continue to assert -- against all evidence -- that torture ``worked'' and that our country is better off for having gone there.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Cheney applauded the ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' -- what we used to call ``war crimes'' because they violated the Geneva Conventions, which the United States instigated and has followed for 60 years. Cheney insisted the abusive techniques were ``absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States.'' He claimed they were ``directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States. It was good policy . . . It worked very, very well.''
Repeating these assertions doesn't make them true. We now see that the best intelligence, which led to the capture of Saddam Hussein and the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was produced by professional interrogations using non-coercive techniques. When the abuse began, prisoners told interrogators whatever they thought would make it stop.
Torture is as likely to produce lies as the truth. And it did.
What leaders say matters. So when it comes to light, as it did recently, that U.S. interrogators staged mock executions and held a whirling electric drill close to the body of a naked, hooded detainee, and the former vice president winks and nods, it matters.
The Bush administration had already degraded the rules of war by authorizing techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions and shocked the conscience of the world. Now Cheney has publicly condoned the abuse that went beyond even those weakened standards, leading us down a slippery slope of lawlessness. Rules about the humane treatment of prisoners exist precisely to deter those in the field from taking matters into their own hands. They protect our nation's honor.
To argue that honorable conduct is only required against an honorable enemy degrades the Americans who must carry out the orders. As military professionals, we know that complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality. Moral equivocation about abuse at the top of the chain of command travels through the ranks at warp speed.
On Aug. 24, the United States took an important step toward moral clarity and the rule of law when a special task force recommended that in the future, the Army interrogation manual should be the single standard for all agencies of the U.S. government.
The unanimous decision represents an unusual consensus among the defense, intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies. Members of the task force had access to every scrap of intelligence, yet they drew the opposite conclusion from Cheney's. They concluded that far from making us safer, cruelty betrays American values and harms U.S. national security.
On this solemn day we pause to remember those who lost their lives on 9/11. As our leaders work to prevent terrorists from again striking on our soil, they should remember the fundamental precept of counterinsurgency we've relearned in Afghanistan and Iraq: Undermine the enemy's legitimacy while building our own. These wars will not be won on the battlefield. They will be won in the hearts of young men who decide not to sign up to be fighters and young women who decline to be suicide bombers. If Americans torture and it comes to light -- as it inevitably will -- it embitters and alienates the very people we need most.
Our current commander-in-chief understands this. The task force recommendations take us a step closer to restoring the rule of law and the standards of human dignity that made us who we are as a nation. Repudiating torture and other cruelty helps keep us from being sent on fools' errands by bad intelligence. And in the end, that makes us all safer.
Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999. Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994.

Next Prozac ?

2009-09-13T22:30:00.002-04:00

Marijuana Goes Mainstream, Ctd

Jonah Lehrer continues a discussion he began at the Dish:
I thought this brand new paper on stress and the cannabinoid receptor was extremely interesting. The Israeli scientists demonstrated that microinjecting an agonist of the CB1 receptor (a primary binding site of THC, the active ingredient in pot) significantly reduced the elevation of stress hormones in response to scary stressors. They researchers argue that their evidence "supports a wide therapeutic application for cannabinoids in the treatment of conditions associated with the inappropriate retention of aversive memories and stress-related disorders." Like I said before, pot just might be the next Prozac. Are you listening Eli Lilly?
(Image from the LA Times shows medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles; Hat tip: Reason)
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**
Grrr, Sniff, Arf
By CATHLEEN SCHINE

INSIDE OF A DOG

What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

By Alexandra Horowitz

353 pp. Scribner. $27

The literature about dogs is not quite the same as the literature about, say, Norwegian rats. Dogs get the literary respect: there are brilliant memoirs about dogs like J. R. Ackerley’s “My Dog Tulip” and Elizabeth von Arnim’s “All the Dogs of My Life”; there’s James Thurber and Virginia Woolf and Jack London; there’s Lassie and Clifford and, of course, Marley. White rats, on the other hand, get most of the scientific attention. Alexandra Horowitz’s “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know” attempts to rectify that situation, exploring what science tells us about dogs without relegating our pets, emotionally, to lab rats. As a psychologist with a Ph.D. in cognitive science, as well as an ardent dogophile, Horowitz aims “to take an informed imaginative leap inside of a dog — to see what it is like to be a dog; what the world is like from a dog’s point of view.”

Her work draws on that of an early-20th-century German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, who proposed that “anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umvelt . . . : their subjective or ‘self-world.’ ” Hard as we may try, a dog’s-eye view is not immediately accessible to us, however, for we reside within our own umwelt, our own self-world bubble, which clouds our vision.

Consider one of Horowitz’s examples: a rose. A human being experiences a rose as a lovely, familiar shape, a bright, beautiful color and a sublime scent. That is the very definition of a rose. But to a dog? Beauty has nothing to do with it; the color is irrelevant, barely visible, the flowery scent ignored. Only when it is adorned with some other important perfume — a recent spray of urine, perhaps — does the rose come alive for a dog. How about a more practical object? Say, a hammer? “To a dog,” Horowitz points out, “a hammer doesn’t exist. A dog doesn’t act with or on a hammer, and so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick.” Dogs, it seems, are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology. Their goals are not only radically different from ours; they are often invisible to us. To get a better view, Horowitz proposes that we humans get down intellectually on all fours and start sniffing.

Dogs, as anyone who has ever met one knows, sniff a lot. They are, says Horowitz, “creatures of the nose.” To help us grasp the magnitude of the difference between the human and the canine olfactory umwelts, she details not only the physical makeup of a dog nose (a beagle nose has 300 million receptor sites, for example, compared with a human being’s six million), but also the mechanics of the canine snout. People have to exhale before we can inhale new air. Dogs do not. They breath in, then their nostrils quiver and pull the air deeper into the nose as well as out through side slits. Specialized photography reveals that the breeze generated by dog exhalation helps to pull more new scent in. In this way, dogs not only hold more scent in at once than we can, but also continuously refresh what they smell, without interruption, the way humans can keep “shifting their gaze to get another look.”

Dogs do not just detect odors better than we can. This sniffing “gaze” also gives them a very different experience of the world than our visual one gives us. One of Horowitz’s most startling insights, for me, was how even a dog’s sense of time differs from ours. For dogs, “smell tells time,” she writes. “Perspective, scale and distance are, after a fashion, in olfaction — but olfaction is fleeting. . . . Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you’re headed.” While we mainly look at the present, the dog’s “olfactory window” onto the present is wider than our visual window, “including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future about it.” Now that’s umwelt.

A dog’s vision affects its sense of time, too. Dogs have a higher “flicker fusion” rate than we do, which is the rate at which retinal cells can process incoming light, or “the number of snapshots of the world that the eye takes in every second.” This is one of the reasons dogs respond so well to subtle human facial reactions: “They pay attention to the slivers of time between our blinks.”) It also helps explain those eerily accurate balletic leaps after tennis balls and Frisbees, but Horowitz lets us see the implications beyond our human-centric fascination with our pets. This is more than a game of fetch; it is a profound, existential realization: “One could say that dogs see the world faster than we do, but what they really do is see just a bit more world in every second.”

Humans are good at seeing things right in front of us, Horowitz explains, because our photoreceptors are centrally located in an area of the retina called the fovea. Dogs do not have foveae and so are not as good at seeing things right in front of them. Those breeds, like pugs, that have retinas more like ours and can see close up, tend to be lap dogs that focus on their owners’ faces, making them seem “more companionable.” In dogs with long noses, often bred for hunting or herding, however, the photoreceptors cluster along a horizontal band spanning the middle of the eye. This is called a visual streak, and those dogs that have it “have better panoramic, high-quality vision, and much more peripheral vision than humans.”

As for their hearing, despite a talent for detecting those high-pitched whistles that are inaudible to us, dogs’ ability to “pinpoint where a sound is coming from is imprecise” compared with ours. Instead, their auditory sense serves to help them find the general direction of a sound, at which point their more acute sight and smell take over. As for dogs’ ability to respond to language, it has more to do with the “prosody” of our utterances than the words themselves. “High-pitched sounds mean something different than low sounds; rising sounds contrast with falling sounds,” Horowitz writes. Dogs respond to baby talk “partially because it distinguishes speech that is directed at them from the rest of the continuous yammering above their heads.”

Horowitz also discusses the natural history of dogs, their evolutionary descent from the wolves, but she cautions the reader to pay attention to those wolf traits dogs have discarded along the way. “Dogs do not form true packs,” she writes. “They scavenge or hunt small prey individually or in parallel,” rather than cooperatively, as wolves do. Countering the currently fashionable alpha dog “pack theories” of dog training, Horowitz notes that “in the wild, wolf packs consist almost entirely of related or mated animals. They are families, not groups of peers vying for the top spot. . . . Behaviors seen as ‘dominant’ or ‘submissive’ are used not in a scramble for power; they are used to maintain social unity.”

The idea that a dog owner must become the dominant member by using jerks or harsh words or other kinds of punishment, she writes, “is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the timeworn fiction of the animal kingdom with humans at the pinnacle, exerting dominion over the rest. Wolves seem to learn from each other not by punishing each other but by observing each other. Dogs, too, are keen observers — of our reactions.”

In one enormously important variation from wolf behavior, dogs will look into our eyes. “Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.” They are staring, soulfully, into our umwelts. It seems only right that we try a little harder to reciprocate, and Horowitz’s book is a good step in that direction. But she can be a bit coy and overly stylish in her attempt not to sound too scientific, and to the particular choir to which she is preaching, much of her material will be familiar.

In that same vein, the tone of the book is sometimes baffling — an almost polemical insistence on the value of dogs, as if they’d long been neglected by world opinion. But then Horowitz will drop in some lovely observation, some unlikely study, some odd detail that causes one’s dog-loving heart to flutter with astonishment and gratitude. When researchers, she notes in one of these fine moments, studied the temporal patterns of dogs interacting with people, they found the patterns to be “similar to the timing patterns among mixed-sex strangers flirting.”
Cathleen Schine’s most recent novel is “The New Yorkers.” Her next book, “The Three Weissmanns of Westport,” will be published in February.

I Need A Drink

2009-09-08T14:22:00.005-04:00

From The Daily Dish
My Take On The Healthcare Debate

I wrote my column on it. I don't find the opposition to reform somehow illegitimate. There are many reasons to criticize the plans now congealing; and the end-result looks to me more and more like a simple extension of healthcare security to a lot of people without any real or strong mechanisms to curtail the soaring costs that are bankrupting the country and putting so much strain on US business. Of course, I belong in that archaic camp that believes it is the job of a liberal president to expand such coverage and the job of a conservative opposition to propose ways to afford it. Instead, the chairman of the GOP is making the Republican position on Medicare indistinguishable from the most cynical Democratic scare tactics, and complaining about any attempt to curtail costs. If you have to strip out of a bill a mere conversation with seniors about powers-of-attorney for end-of-life decisions, you are not interested in a serious conversation about curtailing healthcare costs.
I agree with most everything David Brooks has written on this subject. If we had a functional and serious conservative movement in this country - instead of a Poujadist mob of cynical know-nothings - we would be talking about the kind of questions David Goldhill discusses in the best single piece on the debate I have yet read - the cover-story in the current Atlantic. We'd be talking about re-thinking the insurance model for large parts of medical care, we'd be cutting subsidies for employers, we'd be empowering patients to seek better coverage with better value and providing the tools to help them make informed decisions. Instead, we're talking Hitler and Oligarhy and "taking the country back".
Anyway, my column is here. It's bullish on Obama, as I remain.

Ben Nelson tipped his hand in a way today that suggests what I think we'll end up with - which will be a huge step forward on the accessibility front, if not on costs. (But we can come back on costs, and must, in a broader context of fundamental fiscal reform). My view of the president remains what it was two years ago: We're still lucky to have this small voice of reason in this nutty time. And if he becomes the first Democratic president to initiate universal healthcare access in his first year, he will indeed be transformational on a core domestic question.
Hang in there, Mr President. I have a feeling that the forces that elected you are re-grouping now we know exactly how determined and incoherent the opponents of change on all fronts have become. Above all, remember the discipline you showed in your campaign. You won through a combination of persistence, strategy and a refusal to take the bait. Don't take the bait, Mr President. The degenerate right (a better one will come along in time) only knows Rovian cultural warfare. They want you to fight back on their terrain. Don't. Just move forward. Talk to the country as a serious president should - about the problems we face and the debate we need to have to confront them.
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Let’s Get Fundamental
It’s Time to Get Help
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After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal
exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.
by David Goldhill

How American Health Care Killed My Father
**
Speechless

by FmH

“Bill O’Reilly explaining that of course America has lower life expectancy than Canada — we have 10 times as many people, so we have 10 times as many deaths.

I need a drink.” — Paul Krugman (New York Times op-ed)
*
The "Atlantic" healthcare article is one I've shared with many people who do not share my political views, and it has afforded us a point of agreement and a facilitated discussion.
I don't know how Obama can function in this National Trip to Crazytown that the right-wing dysfunctionals seem determined to inflict on us. The media coverage of them makes it impossible to GET AWAY FROM THEM. It's like a disease, a virus, a sickness.
*
SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD
*

Cannibalizing Other Galaxies

2009-09-08T13:44:00.004-04:00

Dept. of Nothing New Under the Sun

Here’s John Stuart Mill, writing in 1861:

If we ask ourselves on what causes and conditions good government in all its senses, from the humblest to the most exalted, depends, we find that the principal of them, the one which transcends all others, is the qualities of the human beings composing the society over which the government is exercised…
Again, how can institutions provide a good municipal administration if there exists such indifference to the subject that those who would administer honestly and capably cannot be induced to serve, and the duties are left to those will undertake them because they have some private interest to be promoted? Of what avail is the most broadly popular representative system if the electors do not care to choose the best member of parliament, but choose him who will spend most money to be elected? How can a representative assembly work for good if its members can be bought, or if their excitability of temperament, uncorrected by public discipline or private self-control, makes them incapable of calm deliberation, and they resort to manual violence on the floor of the House, or shoot at one another with rifles? How, again, can government or any joint concern, be carried on in a tolerable manner by people so envious that, if one among them seems likely to succeed in anything, those who ought to cooperate with him form a tacit combination to make him fail?

At least no one on the floor of our House is shooting at one another with rifles. Yet.

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Weekly Review

Polls showed that the level of public support for
health-care reform was plummeting, a result of both
Democratic capitulation--as when Senate Finance Committee
Chair Max Baucus (D., Mont.), after a year of preparation,
released a proposal that lacked a public option--and a
Republican campaign of lies regarding "death panels," the
cost of medical care, cuts in Medicare benefits, and
"rationing." President Barack Obama indicated that the
White House may give up on Congress and draft its own
bill; he also telephoned representatives who support the
public option, including Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.), to
talk about the bill. "I didn't come away from this
discussion feeling that we were dead," said Grijalva. The
president scheduled a health-care speech before a joint
session of Congress, and FOX News announced that it would
not air it. A fight at a pro-health-care rally near Los
Angeles ended when a pro-reform protester bit off the
finger of an anti-reform protester. FOX News host Glenn
Beck wrote that he had deciphered the secret code of the
Obama Administration: "OLIGARHY," he wrote on a chalkboard,
pronouncing it "oligarchy." Encouraged by Beck and fearful
of socialist indoctrination, conservative parents planned
to keep their children at home on Tuesday, when President
Obama will encourage the nation's students to do their
homework. The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent,
and David Wahl, a 52-year-old employee at the New Flyer
bus factory in St. Cloud, Minneapolis, who sat behind Vice
President Joe Biden when Biden insisted during a town-hall
meeting that the company would benefit from the stimulus
plan, was let go. Dozens of alpine cows threw themselves
off a Swiss cliff.

More than 90 Afghans, including 40 civilians, were killed
when NATO launched an air strike on two fuel tankers that
had been hijacked by the Taliban. Officials in Afghanistan
found that hundreds of thousands of votes were cast for
Afghan President Hamid Karzai at 800 fake polling
sites. "If Karzai is re-elected," said one tribal elder,
"people will leave the country or join the Taliban." A new
species of giant rat was discovered in a Papua New Guinea
volcano, and scientists were working on making single-cell
slime molds into robots. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe
returned from Argentina, where he met with other South
American presidents and caught swine flu, and the United
States, facing a swine-flu-vaccine shortage, released
videos that feature Elmo from Sesame Street encouraging
people to wash their hands. Police in Australia were
investigating an adolescent girl and two boys for child
pornography because one of the boys used his mobile phone
to film the girl losing her virginity because she wanted
to have sex before the Large Hadron Collider was turned on
and the world ended. The Catholic church recommended that
before sex married couples recite the Prayer Before Making
Love, which asks God to "clothe us in true dignity"; and,
to celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage in
Vermont, Ben and Jerry's changed the name of Chubby Hubby
to Hubby Hubby. Art conservators restoring a
seventeenth-century painting by Poussin uncovered an erect
penis, and at a Dutch museum a moon rock from the first
manned lunar landing was discovered to be petrified wood.

Argentina legalized the personal possession of marijuana,
and Zambian President Rupiah Banda evicted two hundred
primates from the State House after a monkey peed on him
during a press conference. The wife of Japan's next prime
minister said that her soul once rode to Venus on a
triangular UFO. After sixty years Ikea switched its
typeface to Verdana from a customized version of Futura,
provoking global outrage. "Look, I know this isn't world
hunger," said a Romanian design consultant. "But if a
company like Ikea can make this mistake, you have to
wonder who is going to lead when it comes to design." A
Detroit man admitted to chopping up the body of a homeless
man and stuffing the parts in his freezer, saying that he
had stumbled upon the corpse and didn't know what to do
with it; two Florida men were convicted of gang raping a
woman and forcing her to perform oral sex on her
12-year-old son; and a court hearing in Cincinnati was
halted when the defendant, a 66-year-old man charged with
robbery and kidnapping, squeezed out his colostomy bag
onto a table and ate the contents. The Andromeda galaxy
was expanding by cannibalizing other galaxies.

-- Claire Gutierrez
 
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I Have Tried To Right My Path

2009-09-01T12:41:00.003-04:00

Burning Man Begins

Goddamn Hippies Watch

by Chris Bodenner

Burning Man began today. Photographer John Curley and his team will be documenting the desert debauchery on the Burning Blog. (Jealous.) If you're unfamiliar with the week-long phenomenon, here's a brief take from Wikipedia:

Burning Man is an annual event held in the Black Rock Desert, in Northern Nevada. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening. In 2008, 49,599 people participated in Burning Man. The event is described by many participants as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance. Participation is encouraged.

A recent report on the playa (that's dry lakebed) after the jump:

[N]ot bad. Yes there are chunky areas. Yes there are areas that will force you off your bike. But in general, not bad at all. There is a surface crust of an inch or so in most places, with some patches, like the area above, a bit deeper than that. The surface is hard-packed right now, but obviously that's going to change when everyone gets here. Will there be dust? Yes there will be dust.

Bonus hippies: A video shot at Venice Beach of a topless protest staged by a UFO cult called the Raelians (NSFW, obviously). One woman explains at length the difference between their group and the Scientologists.

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Weekly Review

Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D., Mass.) died of brain cancer
at age 77 and was buried near his brothers John and Robert
at Arlington National Cemetery. He served 46 years in the
Senate, where he was an advocate for voting rights for
minorities (and 18-year-olds), the rights of the disabled,
the abolition of the draft, and--less successfully--health
care reform. "The place won't be the same without him,"
said Senator John McCain (R., Ariz.). Rush Limbaugh said
that Kennedy was "the lion of the Senate" and that "we
were his prey." "He left a woman to drown," tweeted Fox
News analyst Tammy Bruce, "and now he's left us to drown."
"Hopefully," said Eric Sanger, a director at the Sean
Hannity Show, "this event will mark the end of this
repugnant family." Shortly before he died, Kennedy (who
received his first communion from Pope Pius XII) sent a
letter to Pope Benedict XVI. "I know that I have been an
imperfect human being," he wrote, "but with the help of my
faith, I have tried to right my path." The Pope had no
comment. The White House announced that the economy would
shrink by 2.8 percent this year, and President Obama
reappointed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal
Reserve. A new, less-redacted version of a 2004 CIA report
on interrogation methods was released. "I'm very proud of
what we did," said Dick Cheney of the torture program,
which involved guns, shackles, mock executions, and
drills. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., against the
supposed wishes of the White House, appointed a prosecutor
to investigate the CIA's practices, and Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for those who protested his
sham victory, including opposition leaders, to be
vigorously prosecuted.

Forty people died in a bombing in Afghanistan. Jets from
Israel bombed an alleged tunnel in Gaza, and
Scientologists were digging tunnels in southern
California, which was still burning. Romanians booed
Madonna after she asked them to stop discriminating
against Gypsies. Dominick Dunne died, as did 36-year-old
DJ AM, whose passing was much tweeted. "Don't know how i
am gonna play 2night but i am for AM," wrote Blink-182
drummer Travis Barker. "My brother is gone. i love u and
miss u." Edward Rondthaler, a proponent of spelling
reform, died at age 104. "Foenetic speling," he once
wrote, "wil maek reeding and rieting neerly automatic for
evrybody." A man who was sniffing gas from an aerosol can
was tasered by Ohio police, at which he burst into flames,
and Oklahoma methamphetamine addicts discovered a new
method--"shake-and-bake"--for making meth quickly in a
soda bottle. "If there is any oxygen at all in the bottle,
it has a propensity to make a giant fireball," said a
Missouri police sergeant. "You're not dealing with rocket
scientists here anyway." India lost contact with the
Chandrayaan-1 moon probe, and South Korea's first
satellite failed to reach orbit.

British apocalypse scientists found that
mixotrophs--organisms that derive energy from dead organic
matter--can live for six months in total
darkness. Thousands of people signed a petition asking the
British government to issue an apology for how it treated
gay mathematician Alan Turing, and a Welsh man named
Roland Mery, facing a two-year wait before he could have
gender-reassignment surgery, chopped off his own
penis. "Ring 999, Julie," he yelled to his wife, "I've
done it!" Sean Lynde, a graphic designer and a former
roadie for the band Guster, was arrested in New York City
for poisoning and beating to death his girlfriend's four
kittens, six months after someone posted a notice on
Craigslist that read "KEEP CATS AWAY FROM THIS MAN." A
deaf, blind, 16-year-old dog named Louie died after being
left alone for hours in the hot car of Robin Starr, CEO of
the Richmond, Virginia, SPCA. Parts of a baby were found
in the sewage works of the English town of Hull, and
wealthy Ugandans were sacrificing children. "They say if
you don't take blood, the wealth will go," explained an
investigator. The U.S. Forest Service warned campers to
look out for marijuana growers, who can be identified by
"tortilla packaging, beer cans, Spam, tuna, Tecate beer
cans," and the sound of Spanish music. "When I go
camping," said an immigrant-rights activist, "I'll be sure
to play nothing but Bruce Springsteen." Twin monkeys in
Oregon were born to two mothers by means of a new
technique that will one day allow for a child to have
three parents. IBM took a picture of a solitary molecule,
and scientists at CalTech found that the amygdala
regulates our sense of personal space.

-- Paul Ford
 
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Addiction of Fame and Power

2009-08-27T16:48:00.003-04:00

Quote For The Day

By Andrew Sullivan
"The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle -- all things that we have always condemend as "torture" and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies ("torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .") -- reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives," - Glenn Greenwald, Salon.
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Inside The Mind Of A Politician

by Patrick Appel
Yglesias admits:
I find it very difficult to extend my powers of moral imagination to the kind of people who hold high political office in the United States. Tyler Cowen deems the relevant psychological dynamic the addiction of fame and power and it’s just an addiction I have a hard time understanding. If some weird situation somehow resulted in me becoming a United States Senator, I would spend six years making trouble, having fun, and trying to do the right thing. Probably I’d lose a primary or something since I wasn’t bothering to raise money or campaign. Then I’d [write] a book about it.
Wilkinson chimes in:

The incentives of the political process create a kind of filter that selects for individuals extraordinarily fixated on power and status and extraordinarily motivated to keep it. If this is right (anyone know of personality studies of politicans?), then the problem with standard public choice is that it gives too much credit to politicians by assuming they’re like everyone else and therefore it fails to capture just how exceptionally prone politicians are to narcissism, motivated cognition, self-deception, and brazen lying.
It would be incredible to see personality profiles of politicians at different levels of government, but politicians by and large have a flexible definition of truth, so I'm not convinced that you would be able to get accurate psychological profiles.
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from " A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit

Next door to Holshouser's kitchen, an aid team from the mining boomtown of Tonopah, Nevada, set up and began to deliver wagonloads of supplies to the back of Holshouser's tent. The Nevadans got on so well with the impromptu cook and hostess they gave her a guest register whose inscription read in part: "in cordial appreciation of her prompt, philanthropic, and efficient service to the people in general, and particularly to the Tonopah Board of Trade Relief Committee. . . . May her good deeds never be forgotten." Thinking that the place's "Palace Hotel" sign might cause confusion, they rebaptized it the Mizpah Café after the Mizpah Saloon in Tonopah, and a new sign was installed. The ornamental letters spelled out above the name "One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin" and those below "Established April 23, 1906." The Heberew word mizpah, says one encyclopedia, "is an emotional bond between those who are separated (either physically or by death)." Another says it was the Old Testament watchtower "where the people were accustomed to meet in great national emergencies." Another source describes it as "symbolizing a sanctuary and place of hopeful anticipation." The ramshackle material reality of Holshouser's improvised kitchen seemed to matter not at all in comparison with its shining social role. It ran through June of 1906, when Holshouser wrote her memoir of the earthquake. Her piece is as remarkable for what it doesn't say: it doesn't speak of fear, enemies, conflict, chaos, crime, despondency, or trauma.

If You Don't Know Where You Are Going ....

2009-08-27T16:32:00.002-04:00

Wall Street Rules: The Bernanke Reappointment

By Robert Borosage

The reappointment of Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve -- cleverly timed to defuse the news of burgeoning federal deficits -- was preordained. The "markets" demanded it, and as James Carville noted, when the markets speak, presidents listen. (Carville, shocked at how Bob Rubin's arguments about the markets trumped all Clinton campaign pledges, exclaimed: "I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.")

The conventional wisdom holds that Bernanke's reappointment is well-deserved. Officially, we are told the recovery is beginning. Bernanke is credited for the bold, inventive and unprecedented wielding of the power of the Federal Reserve to stave off a depression. And now, as the Fed faces the next perilous months, it is hard to imagine anyone else entrusted with the job. Or as the more cynical suggest, Bernanke helped create the mess, it is only right that he be charged with cleaning it up.

But before the Senate bestows upon Bernanke the reverence once reserved for Alan Greenspan, some basic questions should be posed. Senator Chris Dodd, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, has a particular stake in challenging Bernanke about what he has learned from the past desperate months as well as what he intends for the next years. Consider.
1. What do you know now that you didn't know then?

Before the crisis, Bernanke served as Sancho Panza to Alan Greenspan's Don Quixote, extolling the virtues of deregulation, lauding the ability of markets to self-regulate, celebrating the strength of our banking system, seconding Greenspan as he jousted with imagined inflation while oblivious to the housing bubble, orgiastic greed and gambling, and predatory lending that constituted real and present dangers. Greenspan has now admitted that he was blinded by a "mistaken" set of beliefs. How has the crisis disabused Bernanke of his ideological predilections? How, in concrete ways, has it changed his views about how the economy works, and about the role of regulation and regulators in curbing Wall Street's excesses?

2. Why shovel trillions into the banks and finance houses and ask nothing of them for the American people?

Once the Federal Reserve belatedly awoke to the severity of the crisis, Bernanke joined with Treasury Secretary Paulson, and former New York Federal Reserve Bank president (now Treasury Secretary) Tim Geithner in cobbling together a series of ad hoc emergency measures to stave off financial collapse. Mistakes -- like letting Lehman go belly up -- were made, but that was to be expected since they had to make it up as they went along. For this, Bernanke deserves the thanks of a grateful nation and world.

But the Senate should press the Chairman on how he defends the terms of the deals, and what he would do now to change them.

Essentially, Bernanke, Geithner and Paulson flooded the financial system with dollars, about two trillion and still counting. They chose to resuscitate essentially bankrupt banks, not take them over and reorganize them. They asked little or nothing from the banks in return -- no requirements on lending, no marking of toxic paper to market, no change in business models or compensation schemes, no changes in management.

So now, the banks are officially said to be "healing." But they still are burdened with toxic paper; they still aren't doing much lending. People are still losing their jobs and their homes, credit card and commercial defaults remain at high levels. And the most aggressive of the investment houses seem to be headed back to the old ways. Goldman Sachs shamelessly announces that it is putting aside several billion for bonuses, based on profits largely from computerized gambling essentially with taxpayers' money.

Why not "resolve" the banks rather than just try to resuscitate them? Why not require changes in compensation schemes, limits on exotic trading and securities, mandates to return to the essential business of lending money to Main Street? Why not force changes in management to hold people accountable for their catastrophic actions?

3. If you are going to spend our money, why can't we see the books?

In the emergency, the Federal Reserve has revealed its power to put literally trillions into the economy without a vote of Congress. This untrammeled power was vital in the crisis, and is utterly corrosive in a democracy, particularly in an insulated institution that sees itself as Wall Street's protector. Bernanke has opposed a bi-partisan effort by the Congress to get an audit of the Fed's books, so that Congress could learn where the money went.

Senator Dodd should make himself the tribune of the American people here. Why should the Fed have this power? How can it be made more accountable to Main Street than Wall Street? Why should its books not be audited? Would Bernanke support the creation of a Congressional Finance Office to give Congress independent advice on the Fed and the financial community, as the Congressional Budget Office provides on the budget?

4. If you don't know where you are going, you are likely to end up in the wrong place. (from the existential philosopher, Yogi Berra)

Going forward, President Obama has stated that we can't go back to the old economy where finance captured 40% of the nation's profits. To achieve that, the banking sector should be smaller and strictly regulated. The casino should be shut down. Banking should return to the boring profession of taking deposits and distributing loans.

Yet thus far the emergency policies have consolidated the banking sector, subsidized the big guys, increased concentration, and done little to reform practices, protect consumers, curb dangerous compensation schemes, or outlaw exotic securities. The bankers have responded to even the meekest of reform proposals with full court lobbying, arguably using some of the money taxpayers provided to lobby against the protections that taxpayers desperately need.

How does Bernanke propose we get finance under control? Does he agree with Obama that the financial system must be smaller and more constrained? How would he propose to do that?

5. Why should we reward failure with more authority?

The Federal Reserve had significant powers to regulate the housing market, to crack down on predatory lending, to curb the speculative excesses of the banking sector. Yet under Greenspan and Bernanke, those powers went unused Bernanke argued forcefully that the Fed should not act to counter asset bubbles, echoing Greenspan that it was easier to clean up the messes after they burst. Clearly the last months have punctured that illusion. But Bernanke continues to argue that the Federal Reserve play the lead role in regulating the banks, assessing systemic risk, overseeing those institutions deemed "too big to fail."

Why? Why should the Fed, Wall Street's instrument from its inception, pretend to be an effective cop on the financial beat? Why not leave it to do monetary policy, and assign regulation to independent agencies more accountable to the Congress? Why would we reward failure by increasing the Fed's powers? Shouldn't Congress enforce anti-trust policies to insure that no institution is ever too big to fail, rather than trying to regulate such institutions? Why not have an independent agency tasked with protecting consumers from predatory financial practices?

6. What has the Fed learned from Japan's mistakes?

As Bill Greider and Paul Krugman have argued, the US looks more and more like Japan in its lost decade. Here, as in Japan, the major insolvent banks were subsidized, not reorganized. They remain weak, reluctant to lend, a heavy weight on the economy. As in Japan, the "green shoots" of recovery have been watered by heavy deficit spending, but political opposition is growing to taking on more debt. In Japan, when the economy would show signs of growth, worried politicians would cut spending, and the economy would sink again. The result was a decade of stagnation, until finally the Japanese garnered the gumption to restructure the banks -- and were able to export into America's bubble.

Bernanke should be pressed: Aren't the major banks in their present condition likely to remain a drag on any recovery? How will we avoid a decade of stagnation? What will provide the source of growth, since we can't relay on exports to the US?

Ben Bernanke has performed valiantly in an unprecedented crisis. But save the laurels for later; the Senate should grill him, not deify him. He was wrong about deregulation of financial markets, blind to the dangers of the housing bubble, wrong about its impact on the real economy once it burst, slow in seeing the recession coming. We need to know how his core beliefs have changed given that reality.

And his bold steps to stave off the crisis have reflected the many of the same ideological predispositions - reluctance to take over and reorganize the major banks, unwillingness to force heads to roll, opposition to mandates on the banks that were bailed out, insistence on preserving the powers and the prerogatives of the "Temple." A crisis, it is said, changes everything. We now know that the Fed has powers far beyond the mysteries of monetary policy. The Chairman can no longer hide behind opaque language, or argue that the mysteries of the Temple must be preserved. The Chairman has been revealed as the second most, if not the most powerful figure in Washington. So, before the Senate gives its consent to his reappointment, Senator Dodd, Chair of the Finance Committee, should insist that we learn learn how Mr. Bernanke's beliefs have changed, and how he would change his policies going forward.

Predatory Bee-Eating Hornets Terrorizing the French

2009-08-25T13:36:00.004-04:00

from my flickr photostream

from wood s lot

Obama and the congressional leadership have shut out advocates of single-payer. The press, including papers such as The New York Times, treats single-payer as a fringe movement. The television networks rarely mention it. And yet between 45 and 60 percent of doctors favor single-payer. Between 40 and 62 percent of the American people, including 80 percent of registered Democrats, want universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans. The ability of the corporations to discredit and silence voices that represent at least half of the population is another sad testament to the power of our corporate state.

- Chris Hedges

*

Harpers Weekly

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Weekly Review

Barack Obama claimed that the same groups that attacked the
U.S. on September 11, 2001, were "plotting to do so again,"
that the eight-year conquest and occupation of Afghanistan
were a "necessity," and that free-spending congressional
legislators were conspiring with the military-industrial
complex to weaken national security with "exotic" defense
projects. The White House shut down an email tip box
intended to receive reports of "fishy" claims about Obama's
health-care reform effort. Afghanistan's Interior Ministry
was trying to determine whether it was terrorists, robbers,
or thieves that attacked a bank in Kabul, and international
forces in Ghazni province mistakenly killed four Afghan
policemen. Both Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah claimed
victory in Afghanistan's presidential election. Israeli
housing officials denied that a construction freeze was in
effect in the West Bank, and a senior U.S. State Department
official said that the government was considering Muammar
Qaddafi's request to pitch a large Bedouin tent in New York
City's Central Park. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said
that Barack Obama's speech last June in Cairo "removed all
doubts about the United States in the Muslim world." Angry
Turks took to the streets of Ankara to protest a ban on
smoking in bars and restaurants, Venezuelan president Hugo
Chavez was prosecuting "media crimes," and Robert Novak, the
Prince of Darkness, died. In Malaysia a thirty-two-year-old
female fashion model was convicted of drinking beer in
public and was sentenced to be caned, Israel's foreign
minister accused Sweden of blood libel, and predatory
bee-eating hornets were terrorizing the French. A majority
of New Zealanders think children should be smacked.

President Obama announced that the "cash for clunkers"
program would be shut down, a victim of its own success, and
members of his administration expressed surprise that
liberal Democrats had made the health-care debate their
"Waterloo." An unidentified man brought an assault weapon to
an Arizona speech by the president. Dr. Delos Cosgrove,
chief executive of the Cleveland Clinic, called for fat
people to be banned from medical work. "Why is [that]
unfair?" Delos asked. "Has anyone ever shown the law of
conservation of matter doesn't apply?" British parents were
exposing their children to "eye sun danger," and researchers
in Washington, D.C., continued in their quest to cure
cellulite. A metastudy by several U.S. universities applied
the Tightwad-Spendthrift scale to romantic relationships and
determined that cheap and profligate people can love each
other. Capuchin monkeys prefer human beings who act like
monkeys.

Representative Barney Frank (D., Mass.) refused to speak to
a woman at a town hall meeting because she reminded him of a
dining-room table. Shaved eyebrows were now trendy, as,
among the men of New York City, were potbellies, also known
as Kramdens. Bernie Madoff has a small penis. Oenological
investigators concluded that five Italian vintners had
passed off unauthorized grapes as authentic brunello di
Montalcino of the 2003 to 2007 vintages. American housewives
were getting drunk in greater numbers. "The boredom, the
stress," said one woman. "I just decided one day I'd start
sipping on wine at four when Oprah came on." U.S. officials
admitted that the CIA had outsourced the assassination of
top Al Qaeda operatives during the Iraq War, and David
Copperfield denied charges that he sexually assaulted a
22-year old model who was his guest on his private island in
the Bahamas. Elderly American athletes were under suspicion
of using performance-enhancing drugs. Frank Levine, who in
June set the national record in the 400-meter dash for men
ages 95 to 99, confirmed that he regularly used Viagra. "I
need it," he said. South African teenager Caster Semenya,
who is undergoing gender verification to prove that she is a
woman, won a gold medal in the 800-meter at the World Track
and Field Championships in Berlin, and Hindu transvestites
in India were worshipping Krishna while dressed as Radha,
the female consort of the svayam bhagavan, or Supreme Being.
"I can't put it into words properly," said V. K. Saxena, a
72-year-old retired railway worker in New Delhi, "but I feel
more holy dressed as a woman."

-- Theodore Ross
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

*
Well,  I feel more holy dressed as a woman as well :)

*

life goes on?!

The Money, Indeed

Sometimes The Other Side Just Wins

Night of the Living Dead

by Jim Chaffee

[ opinion - february 10 ]

The word conservative

Ronald Reagan’s social experiment >>>[read the rest at Seeking Spirit]

Whether It's Doing It Well Enough

Obama Will Triumph

Fight

A Start Point

Guantanamo - Camp "No"

The Sound of One Hand Clapping ?

Not Atheism Keeping People At Home

Is America Going To Hell ?

What We Choose To See and Know

© 2010 Truthdig All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144929/

We WIN ??

Doing Another Job Altogether

Got Into The Habit

Doonesbury

Vegemite and Cream Cheese & the Weaver of a Prayer Shawl

Nuclear Materials for "Medicinal Purposes"

Humor Break

Get It Together

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-if-america-cant_b_299383.html

Doonesbury

Can You Dig It ?

We're Number 37

Being There For Her...

Call It Ludacris

Vodka

Rodeo Clowns and Corporate Shenanigans

Cognitive Dissonance

Fast Train to Crazytown

Killed by an 860 -pound Altar

The Year of the Flood

Fear Does Not Condone Torture

Senate probe blames top Bush officials for abuses

Torture no longer will be tolerated

Study: Dozens of terrorism suspects wrongly detained

Probe finds Pentagon lawyers abetted abusive interrogations

Easing of laws that led to detainee abuse hatched in secret

BY CHARLES C. KRULAK and JOSEPH P. HOAR

Next Prozac ?

INSIDE OF A DOG

What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

I Need A Drink

by David Goldhill

Cannibalizing Other Galaxies

I Have Tried To Right My Path

Addiction of Fame and Power

If You Don't Know Where You Are Going ....

Predatory Bee-Eating Hornets Terrorizing the French

© 2010 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144929/