May 2008 archive

May 19 2008

Happening Now

Mudslide Buries 200 Relief Workers in China Earthquake Zone

BEICHUAN, China –  A state news agency says more than 200 relief workers have been buried by a mudslide in Sichuan province.

Updates To Follow As They Become Available

Times London

More than 200 earthquake relief workers have been buried by mudslides in China over the last three days, it was announced today.

The state Xinhua news agency said the workers from the Transport Ministry were buried while repairing damaged roads. It did not give a figure for the number of people killed.

May 19 2008

Police State 2.0: It’s Here

cross posted at The Ohm Project: an exercise in resistance

High resolution cameras covering nearly every inch of public space.  National IDs crammed with biometric data.  Facial recognition software that can’t be defeated even by plastic surgery.  And a massive database to connect the cameras, the IDs, all financial and medical data.

It’s not merely resident in the mind’s eye of a screenwriter of the next dystopian thriller.  According to Naomi Klein in the latest issue of Rolling Stone , China has already implemented much of the above and is only a year or two away from completing this Information Age 1984 with the eager help of U. S. corporations and an American government that looks the other way as anti-export laws are violated.

Klein says that the latest unrest in Tibet was a test for the ever-expanding system, called the "Golden Shield."  And the oppressive infrastructure earned at least an A-.  Dissident cell phones were jammed.  Information favorable to the protestors was blocked on the Internet.  Photos of the participants, especially the leaders, were rapidly disseminated on "Most Wanted" posters on the Internet and the protests were "spun" through Chinese media to make the Tibetans look like violent thugs.

May 19 2008

Monday Brain Teaser

0.5% of the employees of Company X use drugs.  Company X therefore decides to administer a drug test to all of its employees.  The drug test is 99% accurate and 99% specific (which means that 99% of all positives will be true positives, and 99% of all negatives will be true negatives).

What is the probability that any given positive test will be that of an actual drug user?

May 19 2008

Compassion Is The Answer, But What Is The Question?

No one event triggered this devolution, but it undeniably was pushed along many times by the moral relativism of the last 50 years, when most of society’s widely accepted norms were undermined by the quicksand of nonjudgmentalism; when the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, were abolished in favor of differences that were to be respected if not celebrated, and codified when necessary to surmount widespread public opposition.

Paradoxically, people and institutions whose beliefs do not permit them to tolerate the most abhorrent differences were judged to be evil. Through rigid enforcement of increasingly fascist speech and thought codes, relativists turned America into a nation of lip-biters who with their silence condoned as normal behaviors and beliefs that are irrefutably unnatural and inherently immoral.

snip

No, the [recent California Supreme Court] ruling merely answered homosexuals’ purely emotional plea for cultural acceptance by giving civil unions their proper label – “marriage” – the will of Californians, as democratically expressed twice, and the dark societal consequences be damned.

–Editorial in the May 17, 2008 Waterbury Republican.

link: http://www.rep-am.com/articles…

Anyone who regularly reads my blogs probably thought to log in and find the latest news from Myanmar, or of the earthquake in China.

But today I want to write about something that underpins almost every headline here and abroad: human suffering. The answer on how to understand human suffering has been written about and expounded upon by far more eloquent and profound people than me. Everyone from Martin Luther King, to Gandhi, to the Dalai Lama agrees that compassion is the ultimate answer.

But what is the question?

May 19 2008

They hate Us

But the one thing throughout this period that Americans could always depend on, even after Nixon and the collapse of public faith in the president’s morals, was that the lies the American president told would always be the very best lies that science, computerized research, and Washington’s most devious spooks could produce. Our president may lie, but he will lie effectively and spectacularly, with all the epic stagecraft and lighting and special effects available to the White House publicity apparatus. He is never a hack, never a half-assed, off-the-cuff, squirming, my-dog-ate-my-homework sort of liar. Or at least he wasn’t until George W. Bush came around.

“They hate us for our freedom” was possibly the dumbest, most insulting piece of bullshit ever to escape the lips of an American president.

–Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

They Hate Us.

Yes, They do.

“They Hate Us For Our Freedoms”

The ringing words of presidential banality.  Inspiring, after a fashion.

The community Bush limited his comments to hate us.

Not because of our freedoms…they don’t know us

We won’t let them.

They no nothing of our freedoms.

They no nothing of freedom.  Not yet.

They know what they dream, and we’re not in those dreams.

Only in their nightmares.

They hate us because they don’t trust us.  Not yet.

The people I am limiting my comments to hate Us.

They hate Us for our freedoms.

Conservatives in power and their minions selling it on cable.  They.

Liberals like me…someone with questions, actually expecting answers.  Us.

Our freedoms, guaranteed.  Us.

Freedoms, meddlesome nuisance to Standard Operational Conduct.  They.

They hate Us.

May 19 2008

Religion and Politics: John Rawls on Public Reason

Is a Christian presidential candidate allowed to appeal to religion when on the campaign trail?  Is a pro-lifer allowed to appeal to his or or interpretation of the Bible?  Is an Atheist pro-choicer allowed to appeal to his or her conception of the universe — when making a political argument?

Meta-questions like these, questions about the nature of proper poltical debtate, swirl about in the poltical aptmosphere.  Sometimes they are brought up explicitly, more often implicitly, as when one person argues from firmly-held religious stance and another says, “Don’t make your beliefs my law.”

The underlying issue is about the nature of democracy itself — which is to say about poltical convesation in a pluralistic society itself.  We want to be pluralistic, and we want to be able to talk to each other.  So what is to be done?

This meta-issue can be articulated, and a view about it defended, explicitly.  By looking at one such stance, we can hopefully think more clearly about what our own views are: what we think ought to be allowed, and why, in political debate.

May 19 2008

Lasthorseman Presents Believe It Or Not

Precursor Googles

Anomalies of Denver International Airport

Alex Jones “Endgame”

Project Eschelon

If nothing else it’s far more entertaining than any episode of “24”.

May 19 2008

‘We mourn the dead from Iraq’

This report by Joy First of Madison WI is among posts on the Iraq Moratorium website from participants in Moratorium activities this month:

We Mourn the Dead from Iraq – 9th Iraq Moratorium

As part of the Iraq Moratorium, eight activists in Madison, WI participated in a solemn vigil at Hilldale Mall on May 16, 2008, calling for an end to the war and occupation in Iraq.  This was, in the words of Gandhi, “an experiment in truth” as we pushed to see how far we could go in speaking out against the utter devastation and the crippling suffering of the people of Iraq.  Two of us had been in court the day before and were found guilty of trespassing after we were arrested for speaking out against the war at Hilldale Mall in February.

Three of us wore paper mache masks of Iraqi women and long dark gowns and we carried paper mache babies, one who was severely hurt.  The masks sat on the top of our heads with scarves over the back of the masks that hung down and came around covering our faces.  We could only see faintly as we looked through the light-weight fabric over our face.  The expressions on the faces of the masks, the Iraqi women, were haunting.  

The other five people in our group handed out leaflets about the suffering of Iraqi women, and carried signs saying “We mourn the dead from Iraq’ as we walked in a slow and solemn procession through the mall.  We planned to stay there and march for one hour from 5:30-6:30 pm unless we were arrested before then.  There were not a lot of people inside the mall, but those who were seemed very interested in our procession and gratefully accepted a leaflet.  A good number thanked us for being there or made other positive comments.  It was a very powerful experience, very sad, wearing the masks and carrying the babies who were hurt.  I have been spending a lot of time with my grandchildren, including my newest granddaughter, Linnea, just one week old on the day of our action, and I was feeling very emotional thinking about the suffering of the children of Iraq.

Mall security asked us to leave and said we could march outside (which was surprising because I believe that is still private property).  We went outside because there were a lot of people eating at outside seating at several restaurants adjoining the mall and we were able to walk by them and hand out leaflets.

When we walked back inside the mall, we met the police and they told us we must leave.  We decided to go outside again and the police told us we could stay there as long as wanted, but if we came back inside, there would be a physical arrest.  I asked the police if this wasn’t private property outside the mall, and the police said it was not, but I believe they are wrong about that. They explained a physical arrest would mean they would handcuff us, transport us downtown, book us, and we would have to pay bail to be released.  We were surprised to hear this.  We follow the principles and guidelines of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others doing nonviolent civil resistance to speak out against the war crimes of our government.  The police in Madison have always arrested us, wrote a citation on the spot, and released us.  When we asked why they would respond with a physical arrest, they said that when the bad behavior continues, they have to take us in.  Bad behavior??!!??  Us??!!??  I wonder when someone in law enforcement will have the guts to arrest Bush and his cronies for their bad behavior – war crimes against humanity.  We walked for a few more minutes and at 6:30 we left the mall.  However, we plan to return and continue our commitment to work for peace, calling attention to the devastating human suffering resulting from the crimes of our government.

May 19 2008

Kept Hidden From History

I was just  surfing a few sites, reading a few articles when i came across the following, Mass Killings In South Korea In 1950 Kept Hidden From History, at of all places the Huffington Post.

This Aug. 2007 photo, released by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, shows the remains of some of 110 victims of 1950 executions of political prisoners at Cheongwon, Chungbuk, south of Seoul, South Korea. The commission, which excavated the site, is investigating that and other mass killings in South Korea in 1950-51. A commission chief investigator estimates up to 7,000 were killed in the central city of Daejeon alone, and tens of thousands elsewhere. (AP Photo/ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission)

May 19 2008

Frog-marching Rove? *updated**

From crooks and liars http://www.crooksandliars.com/…

Crier: Well here’s the way this plays out. If the full House issues the contempt citation then it’s supposed to go to the Department of Justice and they’re supposed to take it to a Grand Jury. They’re supposed to enforce it. Well they’ve already, the Bush administration says no, uh, there’s Executive authority, we’re saying privilege. They’re not going to enforce it. You might then try the Federal courts. The Federal courts are liable to say it’s a political question. But the Constitution gives the Congress the inherent power to issue contempt and then to prosecute on this.

Abrams: On their own.

Crier: They can send the Sergeant at Arms out into the countryside, arrest, haul somebody in and in days gone by used to literally hold them in the basement of Congress in an impromptu jail and then they could have a trial. That is still their power today.

a full transcript at the link

May 19 2008

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

Kate Bush



Cloudbursting

May 18 2008

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 US military: soldier shot at Quran for practice

By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

10 minutes ago

BAGHDAD – An American soldier used a Quran, the Islamic holy book, for target practice in a predominantly Sunni area west of Baghdad, prompting an apology from the U.S. military, a spokesman said Sunday.

Separately, mortar shells slammed into a residential area north of the Iraqi capital, killing at least four people and wounding 30, most children playing outside, officials said Sunday.

The shelling occurred as clashes broke out in Shiite areas late Saturday despite a truce reached last week by Shiite politicians and followers of anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

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