February 6, 2011 archive

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Special Super Bowl Schedule!

Our regular featured content-

And these articles-

Along with The MomCat’s weekly feature Rant of the Week.

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Moe Lane shoots Reagan in the face for his 100th birthday

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

or just after.

Moe Lane (Turdus turdus) tests the reality of the fields with his sweet questionings:

People ask where Ronald Reagan’s monument is.

To which I say: look around you.

Blammo!

A Kindergarten Revolution in Northeast Africa

Juan Cole’s website is apparently assembled by an IRC-era net-bot with simple instructions like “Cole-Bot, get Egypt video!”

“5 Year Old Child Heads Demo in Alexandria Egypt!”

“And the wolf will lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them!” -Isaiah 11:16

So judging from the Juan-Cole-Bot and genius reporters like Christiane Amanpour (“The Muslim Brotherhood only wants to support civilian democracy!”), you might think that Northeast Africa is a democratic paradise, except where the USA is propping up a demon like Hosni Mubarak!

So let’s take a little tour of the other prosperous, peaceful, and democratic regimes of that blessed region!

Northeast Africa

Immediately to the south we find ourselves in the Republic of the Sudan, which virtually nobody calls a “client-state” of the USA, and yet somehow even without the intervention of the Great Satan, those highly independent Muslims have managed to kill a few hundred thousand of their fellow citizens, and then a few hundred thousand more, and then..

Likewise neighboring Libya subscribes to the democratic principle of “one man, one vote,” except that the “one man” is Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, and his “one vote” is the only vote that counts.

And yet again, although nobody calls Libya a “client-state” of the USA, it isn’t easy to discover anything that most of us would recognize as “democracy.”

Rounding out the top right-hand corner of Africa we arrive at the Republic of Chad, where civil war raged for no less than 30 years between independence in 1960 and the ascension of General Idriss Déby around 1990, and General Déby still rules that unfortunate country 21 years later, and continually justifies his ranking as the 15th worst dictator in the world!

And once again, even without American support, Chad has somehow evolved into one of the most corrupt and un-free countries on the face of the earth!

But Egypt would have naturally developed into blissful democracy, except for the Great Satan’s puppet, Hosni Mubarak!

And a little child shall lead them!

Harharharhar!!!

Smile or Die

270 Million: Super Egypt Bowl

Day 13 of Egypt’s fight for freedom from tyranny, and the US is focused on a display of excess and inanity called the Super Bowl.



Photobucket

Somehow, that is for me, what amounts to a perfect vignette of all that is wrong in the World. There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying athletic contests as a “pastime,”  be it football, soccer, baseball, or hockey ~ or anything else that suits your fancy. What rankles me is that it has become a religious ritual worked into a fervor, treating men playing a game as “Gods” with all the residual excesses that provides in our system, and nothing but a vehicle to promote advertising for the already sickeningly wealthy who can purchase the air time to try and dupe us into buying McLard burgers and cheapass beer. Not that I have anything AGAINST cheapass beer. But it would be a LOT cheaper if they didn’t have to spend 3 million dollars for a 30 second spot.  

Injustice at Every Turn — Part I: Education



Scarlet Letter

Yesterday I examined the sample taken by the researchers for the report Injustice at Every Turn, disseminated jointly by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

The first turn will be education.

Education is a fundamental human right. It can expand our horizons, help us learn about ourselves and our world and build foundational skills for our working lives. In the United States, there is a strong connection between one’s level of educational attainment and income. In addition, individuals who have higher education levels are less likely to be dependent on public safety-net programs, to be incarcerated, or to experience extreme poverty. They are also more likely to have positive health outcomes, such as lower rates of smoking, and high rates of civic participation.

Unfortunately, not all students have the opportunity to pursue education in a safe environment. Our data shows that transgender and gender non-conforming people are currently unable to access equal educational opportunities because of harassment, discrimination and even violence. Our data also shows the way this discrimination impacts educational attainment, which in turn affects other outcomes such as income, incarceration, health and suicidality, over respondents’ life spans.

Dominionism’s Threat Against Indian Country

Religion and state have united to assimilate the American Indian in the past, such as with Ulysses S. Grant’s Peace Policy that created the Indian Boarding Schools, and in more recent times such as  “‘pro-Peabody Western Coal’ Indians and obtaining a false ‘Hopi-Navajo’ Tribal Counsel designation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs…” who were  several First Mesa Hopi who had been converted to Mormonism.  ‘Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them,’ and you cannot change what you do not acknowledge.

Getting to a better building …

Construction and use of buildings account for a major share of global warming emissions. Depending on how one calculates, allocating roughly 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to this built infrastructure is roughly correct.  Heating … cooling … lighting … building materials … etc, it all adds up (and up … and up).  A good share of the building GHGs relates back to energy usage — where, after all, does the lion’s share of coal-generated electricity end up other than illuminating our entertainment systems and over-cooling during summer heat?

A simply reality: tremendous room exists for efficiency measures at not just cost effective but, in fact, profitable financial rates of return.  That energy efficiency has remained an under-exploited  example of a win-win-win space means that it remains a place for fast and effective action.

Today, President Obama focused on this win-win-win opportunity.  

This Week At The Dream Antilles

And what a week it was.  Your bloguero finds himself hiding out in Columbia County,

New York, southeast of Albany and abutting the Massachusetts border, an area deep  in winter, full of snow,  crusted of with heavy ice,  and very cold.  In two words: hard winter.

While some blogs can tell you what’s coming in the future, an attribute your bloguero  admires, The Dream Antilles can’t.  Why not?  Because in a phrase: this blog doesn’t  know what’s coming up.  Your bloguero doesn’t know what, if anything, will write itself into pixels this week.  This is just one of the blog’s many delightful but sometimes vexing idiosyncrasies, like having the comment instructions be en Espanol.   And having the videos be too narrow.   Like having many dead links in the blog list.  Like, because of the bloguero’s obvious laziness, not giving you the links to stories in this posting: you just go to The Dream Antilles and scroll down to what you’re looking for.  It is not a long way.  Like the way he refers to himself in this post in the third person, as if he were the typing Deion Sanders.

So, if you look at the past week you will find:

Bob Marley’s Birthday: He’d Be 65.  Hard to imagine, but it’s been almost thirty years since he passed on.  And he’s an icon.  So we celebrate his birthday with a video of him performing “No Woman No Cry,” one of my favorites.

Making The Independent Judiciary A Joke  complains about Clarence Thomas’s wife’s rightwing political activism as a threat to judicial independence.  Specifically, she’s selling access. The comments posted to this essay at dKos make one suspect that commenters at that blog are on the payroll of rightwing think tanks.  Prove that wrong.

Announcing An Internet Serialized Novel tells the world that our friend, the novelist Claudia Ricci, is posting a serialized version of her latest novel at Huffington Post.  This is exciting, and it might herald the return of the serialized novel to America.  

Storm Central? is an essay about what happens when bad weather detains your bloguero at home and the local NPR affiliate is on full time fund raising, which by the way persists even as you read this.  He gave, really he did, but he notices a passive aggressive tilt in the fund raising strategy.

Welcome to the Port Writers Alliance.  What a great idea.  The Dream Antilles is honored.

Enough, I Say, Enough.  Even more crummy weather increases your bloguero’s cabin fever and grouchiness.  And why on earth not?  You have to be here to understand it.

Haiku For Imbolc.  Imbolc is the cross-quarter day, February 1, half way between the start of Winter and the first day of Spring.  So we’re half the way there, but it’s still a long slog to the first snow white.

Four Haiku For Egypt.  Fed up with all of the  analysis and blibber blabber, your bloguero cuts to the chase: poetry in support of democracy and the protestors in Egypt.

This essay about what is on The Dream Antilles is a weekly Sunday morning very early digest for the Writers Port Alliance.  See you next week, if the creek don’t rise.

 

Six In The Morning

There’s The Door Don’t Let Hit You On The Way Out  

Protesters in Tahrir Square are right to be sceptical despite the apparent shake-up in Egypt’s ruling party

Robert Fisk: Mubarak is going. He is on the cusp of final departure

The old man is going. The resignation last night of the leadership of the ruling Egyptian National Democratic Party – including Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal – will not appease those who want to claw the President down. But they will get their blood. The whole vast edifice of power which the NDP represented in Egypt is now a mere shell, a propaganda poster with nothing behind it.

The sight of Mubarak’s delusory new Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq telling Egyptians yesterday that things were “returning to normal” was enough to prove to the protesters in Tahrir Square – 12 days into their mass demand for the exile of the man who has ruled the country for 30 years – that the regime was made of cardboard.

Mila Kunis – Old Soul

Mila Kunis - Old Soul
Mila Kunis – Old Soul

Late Night Karaoke

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