November 20, 2007 archive

….sigh….

Sure, he’s not popular with our Great Orange Overlod.  Good for Kos.  No, really!  He has set up a ‘progressive’ community, and we have the right to ignore his dissmissive ‘Ughs.’  Why should we ignore those ‘Ughs?’

This is an Open Thread: Free Thinking Zone

U.N. steeply lowers its AIDS estimates ,A gap in GOP candidates’ healthcare proposals ,Audit Finds Misuse of $34 Million student Loan Subsidy,  Radiation Detectors for Border Are Delayed Again, US plans case against AP photographer

U.N. steeply lowers its AIDS estimates

By Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

November 20, 2007

The United Nations on Monday radically lowered years of estimates of the number of people worldwide infected by the AIDS virus, revealing that the growth of the AIDS pandemic is waning for the first time since HIV was discovered 26 years ago.

The revised figures, which were the result of much more sophisticated sampling techniques, indicate that the number of new infections peaked in 1998 and the number of deaths peaked in 2005.

USA

A gap in GOP candidates’ healthcare proposals

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 20, 2007

WASHINGTON — When Rudolph W. Giuliani was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the spring of 2000, one thing he did not have to worry about was a lack of medical insurance.

Today, the former New York mayor joins two other cancer survivors in seeking the Republican presidential nomination: Arizona Sen. John McCain has been treated for melanoma, the most serious type of skin malignancy, and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson had lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system.

Take a look at this tortured dog:

(photo courtesy of the Humane Society of the United States, with permission)

This is one of the poor dogs that was lucky enough to survive the torture inflicted on him at Michael Vick’s fancy house (and dog torture camp) in Virginia.

Other dogs were not so “fortunate.”

According to prosecutors, Vick and his cohorts began purchasing pit bull puppies in late-2001 and would eventually “sponsor” individual dog fights with purses as high as $26,000. In the indictment’s most harrowing parts, federal investigators describe what happened to some Bad Newz Kennels dogs that either lost matches or did not perform well in test fights. After a March 2003 loss by a female pit bull, codefendant Purnell Peace, “after consulting with Vick,” electrocuted the animal. In April, prosecutors allege, Vick, Peace, and Quanis Phillips, “executed approximately 8 dogs that did not perform well in ‘testing’ sessions.” These animals, the indictment claims, were killed “by various methods, including hanging, drowning, and slamming at least one dog’s body to the ground.”

Source and link to indictment

Mr. Vick entered prison today.  He has pled guilty to federal charges related to illegal gambling and dogfighting.  He was scheduled to be sentenced on these charges on December 10.

Former American football star Michael Vick turned himself over to US marshals here Monday to begin serving a prison sentence for his role in a dogfighting conspiracy.

Vick, a National Football League star with the Atlanta Falcons before the dogfighting scandal ruined his career, and three co-defendants pleaded guilty to one count of interstate travel to aid illegal gambling and dogfighting.

Source ~ Agence France Press

How incredibly sad this all is.  

Notable for his 2001 NFL Draft pick from Virginia Tech, league records, and lucrative endorsements, his ban from the Falcons team in 2007 was due to involvement with illegal dogfighting and gambling activities and garnered him notoriety in animal cruelty awareness and enforcement.

Source

A young man with the world by a string — a gifted athlete with a multi-million-dollar contract with which he could have done so much good.  And he chose to spend his money torturing dogs — apparently for fun and profit.

I cannot begin to comprehend what would motivate anyone to torture animals, for any reason.  Even more mind-boggling to me is the idea that someone with all the money in the world would choose to spend it to place bets on animal torture.

But countries, like fish, rot from the head down, and I cannot help but think tonight, as well, that we now live in a country where debates about the torture of human beings have become part of our lexicon — and acceptable.  We live in a country where candidates for the highest office in the land think it is okay to endorse (publicly) a form of torture used during the Spanish Inquisition:

I abhor what Michael Vick did.  I am glad he is going to prison.  He deserves to go to prison.

But what kind of message are the Republican candidates for President sending to the children of this country with their pro-torture talking points? Or to the rest of the world?

Torture, cruelty in any form, whether toward people or animals, is simply not acceptable. Ever.  Not here.  Not in the country we live in.  That’s the message we should be sending.

Oh great.

I get to be the one to push Pretty Bird Woman House down.  Well I don’t care what you think.

I’m actually kind of happy with where we are as a blog.

I’m incredibly impressed with the quality of our original content.  Our comments are overwhelmingly witty and thoughtful and frankly- there are a fair amount of them.

As a group we’re working to make this a place that people feel comfortable expressing themselves.  There are no bad ideas, only bad actors.  Wrong! is just a rating and has virtually no effect on your standing here.  Hide is for content that is offensive.  There is no Auto Ban, your fate is decided in the committee of 30+ Contributing Editors and Admins.

This particular mini rant is inspired by the remarks of my activist brother (who also has an account on dK I gave him as a gift).  When I talked with him today he was all excited and worried about a comment he had made here!

Well Michael, you’re part of the family and I feel naturally protective, but this is a pillow fight.  Your disapproval of each other can NOT be used to harm you here.

For the most part that’s true wherever you are and yet people are so defensive.

According to William James, arguably one of the most insightful students of the mind, certainly since his own time, self-esteem can be represented as a fraction, with one’s pretensions in the denominator, and one’s actual successes in the numerator:

Thus, one can increase self-esteem either by increasing the numerator by increasing actual successes, or by decreasing one’s pretenses to greatness.  It was James’s claim that both self-satisfaction (high self-esteem) and self-abasement (low self-esteem) are intimately related emotional primitives.  The barometer of self-esteem could wax and wane seemingly due to various organic causes from day to day, but in non-pathological cases, it was overall subject to personal dispositions toward pretense and reality-based, objective outcomes.

This is a Diary that in one form or another has run at Daily Kos for the past three years. A number of people have asked me to post it again, and I thought my friends at docudharma might also be interested. This is a heavily edited version of last’s year’s piece:

I forced myself to watch the History Channel’s Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower last weekend. I don’t feel as if I totally wasted my time. Including performances and interviews of some Wampanoags, descendants of the indigenes who saw the Puritans make landfall 387 years ago, made the program a good deal more palatable than it might have been.

I would have preferred a bit more about how one reason the Pilgrims were “persecuted” in England and Holland was because of their efforts to get everyone to comply with their own crabbed view of religion. Something they also did here in America. Not dissimilar from what some modern day others would like to do now. But what an improvement the program was over past efforts.

A while back, our fearless leader suggested that we have some sort of Top Comments-ish diary series. I was thinking that the Monday afternoon open thread could serve as a forum where people link to their favorite comments and essays over the past week. For instance, I really enjoyed Nightprowlkitty’s essay this past Friday – a must-read, in opinion of this humble pickle.

So, is this a good idea? Should it be more formal? If so, will you help out?

What are your favorite dharmatic moments of the past week?