Oct 11 2008
For more clarification,see here.
Not that long ago, the United Nations performed a Human Rights Investigation of the forced Navajo resettlement from Arizona to Nevada, under Special Rapporteur A. Amor. A law revised and submitted to Congress by Senator John McCain and others before him was determined to be the root cause of violations, which after ratification by President Clinton in 1999 during a globally publicized sit in by Songstress Julia Butterfly Hill at Big Mountain, Arizona.
Oct 11 2008
Originally published in Free Inquiry
Every society has the criminals it deserves.
-Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine”
My sister must have been terrified the night that her junkie boyfriend beat her to death in that filthy motel room. Terrified and disoriented, she would have been struggling to understand what was happening to her. Beating a human being to death is apparently not an easy thing to do. According to the coroner’s testimony, it took about five minutes for her to die. What was she thinking, in those five minutes? At what point in that five-minute period did she suspect she might die in that squalid room? At what point did she know she would die there and then?
I would lay awake at night, for months after her death, unable to turn off the endless broken loop playing in my brain that kept repeating these questions. More than answers, I wanted revenge: hard, bloody-fisted revenge, bitter and uncompromising Old Testament revenge. More, I wanted to stand before those in power, point my finger at all the world’s death rows, and scream at the top of my lungs, “Kill them all, and let God sort them out!” I was slowly going mad with my ache for revenge.
But-but-revenge is not justice.
Oct 11 2008
When Accusing Someone Of Being A Terrorist
And You Say It Enough People Begin
To Believe Them Which Then Leads To
The Incitement Of Violence Through Words And Actions
Rich Nations Pushing for Coordination in Rescue
By MARK LANDLER
Published: October 10, 2008
WASHINGTON – The United States and six other nations that are among the world’s richest agreed on Friday to a coordinated plan to rescue the financial industry, but fell short of offering concrete steps to backstop bank lending on a day when fear tightened its grip on investors from Wall Street to Hong Kong.
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said the United States would move aggressively on one part of the plan by infusing American banks directly with cash and taking ownership stakes in return.
Western Journalists in Iraq Stage Pullback of Their Own
By Ernesto Londoño and Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 11, 2008; Page A01BAGHDAD — The number of foreign journalists in Baghdad is declining sharply, a media withdrawal that reflects Iraq’s growing stability and the financial strains faced by some news organizations.
In a stark indication of the changing media focus here, the number of journalists traveling with American forces in Iraq has plummeted in the past year. U.S. military officials say they “embedded” journalists 219 times in September 2007. Last month, the number shrank to 39. Of the dozen U.S. newspapers and newspaper chains that maintained full-time bureaus in Baghdad in the early years of the war, only four are still permanently staffed by foreign correspondents. CBS and NBC no longer keep a correspondent in Baghdad year-round.
USA
U.S. to buy shares in banks
Treasury secretary says the move, previously rejected, is now needed to inject cash into the financial system.
By Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson said today that the Bush administration would buy stakes in banks and other financial institutions to help ease the economic crisis.Paulson said the Treasury Department was working on a plan to use some of the $700 billion in the financial rescue package to purchase equity in “a broad array of financial institutions.” The equity would be in the form of nonvoting shares, with the goal of the plan being to help those institutions raise new private capital.
As Congress worked on the bailout legislation last month, Paulson had dismissed the idea of equity purchases. Today, he said the administration had decided that such a move was needed now, in concert with the purchase of mortgage-backed securities, to help inject cash into the banking system.
Oct 11 2008
Ya don’t say?
NTT’s Communication Science Laboratories compiled a list of the 50 most common first words in Japanese spoken by babies. Not surprisingly, results showed that manma (food) was first, with mama at No. 4 and papa eighth.For the first time ever, the Fisheries Agency successfully caught wild parent eels in the spawning season off the Mariana Islands. Researchers hope the discovery will lead to a stable supply of larvae. We just hope those newly orphaned eel kids make out all right.
“Sento-kun,” the official mascot of a 2010 festival celebrating the transfer of Japan’s national capital to Nara 1,300 years ago, made his debut. Sento-kun looks like a young Buddha with antlers sprouting from his bald head.
Researchers at Fujita Health University and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology announced they had succeeded in almost destroying a cancerous tumor in a mouse after injecting the animal with a medicine-filled carbon “nanohorn.”
Two medical workers affiliated with the aid organization Medecins du Monde, including a Japanese woman, were kidnapped in eastern Ethiopia.
Fifteen short-tailed albatross chicks were moved from their breeding grounds on Torishima, one of the Izu Islands, due to fears of a volcanic eruption.
Speaking of natural disasters, earthquakes and global warming are the problems Japanese people most often fret over, according to a survey by Tezukayama University and the National Research Institute of Police Science. Illnesses and accidents were also prominent, as were abnormal weather and wars.
Oct 11 2008
Ya don’t say?
NTT’s Communication Science Laboratories compiled a list of the 50 most common first words in Japanese spoken by babies. Not surprisingly, results showed that manma (food) was first, with mama at No. 4 and papa eighth.For the first time ever, the Fisheries Agency successfully caught wild parent eels in the spawning season off the Mariana Islands. Researchers hope the discovery will lead to a stable supply of larvae. We just hope those newly orphaned eel kids make out all right.
“Sento-kun,” the official mascot of a 2010 festival celebrating the transfer of Japan’s national capital to Nara 1,300 years ago, made his debut. Sento-kun looks like a young Buddha with antlers sprouting from his bald head.
Researchers at Fujita Health University and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology announced they had succeeded in almost destroying a cancerous tumor in a mouse after injecting the animal with a medicine-filled carbon “nanohorn.”
Two medical workers affiliated with the aid organization Medecins du Monde, including a Japanese woman, were kidnapped in eastern Ethiopia.
Fifteen short-tailed albatross chicks were moved from their breeding grounds on Torishima, one of the Izu Islands, due to fears of a volcanic eruption.
Speaking of natural disasters, earthquakes and global warming are the problems Japanese people most often fret over, according to a survey by Tezukayama University and the National Research Institute of Police Science. Illnesses and accidents were also prominent, as were abnormal weather and wars.
Oct 11 2008
John McCain is pushing the meme Obama isn’t being open or honest about his association with Bill Ayres. Well John, openness and honesty, truthfulness should start with YOU. Every time you get in front of a camera with that self serving smirk and exhort Barack Obama to tell the truth, to be straight with Americans, remember you are the fraud here, you are the liar.
John McCain exists simply for John McCain, for him there is no higher purpose than nurturing and protecting his myth. McCain is a survivor, like a cockroach. Follow me below the fold for the truth about the little man who would be president, the truth too many have forgotten. A look at the real John McCain stripped of the patriotic myth and maverick hype.
Oct 11 2008
Crossposted under my real name at Huffington Post’s Off the Bus.
It’s likely that most Americans have never heard of Katherine Gun. She is the former British secret service officer who leaked an email describing a plot orchestrated by the Bush and Blair administrations to force the hand of the United Nations in authorizing the invasion of Iraq. Gun was put on trial for leaking the email and the story garnered wide coverage in Europe. Unsurprisingly, in the hype that characterized the runup to the war here in the States, the story received little media play.
The larger story is being told for the first time in long form. PoliPoint Press has just released “The Spy Who Tried to Stop A War,” Gun’s story as written by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, the former a senior executive for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, the latter a former FBI special agent.
I caught up with Gun on her recent trip to the U.S.
Oct 11 2008
Old family story. My mother would never admit she was wrong about anything while we kids were growing up … with six children and little money, I guess she felt she had to be stronger than human or everything would fall apart.
Anyway, one day we were getting out our cereal for breakfast and my sister says, “Ma, this milk is spoiled!”
For some reason my mother didn’t want to hear that.
So she walked over to the table, drank some of the milk right out of the carton and proclaimed immediately “Sweet as sugar!”
A split second later the milk registered on her taste buds and she exclaimed “Sour as hell!”
It became a family joke, of course, used on many different occasions.
I once heard a woman say that having her purse stolen felt like being violated … not rape, but in the same vein. Now with the giant handbags women wear in New York City, I’d say it’s more like having your car stolen.
I haven’t checked my 401(k) statement yet – I was going to, but I forgot my password. It’s probably a lot less than it was.
Oct 11 2008
The spy novelist John Le Carre invented a word perfectly suited for Richard Bruce Cheney and George W. Bush — “politopath,” a merger of “politician” and you-know-what.
In a few hours, we’ll reach the beginning of the end of the Cheney-Bush regime, the final hundred days. It ought to be a milestone marked by glee, yes? But knowing how soon we won’t have this pair of politopaths to kick around anymore places me somewhere between an aneurysm and a sigh. Because the puppet master and his perpetually adolescent companion will get to abandon their posts, unpunished for hundreds of lies told, hundreds of people tortured, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed, hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, trillions of dollars of debt incurred.
Unimpeached, much less tried, they will get to emerge from their eight years of assault on the Constitution and display of royal prerogative with their pensions intact and most of their rap sheets classified. No orange jumpsuits for them, no isolation units where guards videotape their every trip to the shitter, no hard labor, no electronic shackles. Two aging war criminals will soon clean out their desks, torch their hard drives, say farewell to the pleasures of the unitary executive and pal around forever with the feral plutocrats whose vaults they so prodigiously filled during two terms of plunder and rapine.
Like the reckless CEOs who’ve walked away from the wreckage of their companies with tens of millions in salaries, options and bonuses, the ruthless Mister Bush and Bunker Dick seem destined to roam free. Starting on that January afternoon of a hundred days from now, even the suggestion that they – and others on their team – should pay for their misdeeds will be shouted down in wwwLand and elsewhere. Old news, the megamedia will declare. Vendettas erect obstacles to bipartisanship, Democratic Party leaders will proclaim. Too many crucial matters other than justice to worry about, the so-called pragmatists will say. Just as they have said since I wrote A Thousand %$#@#&!!%$# Days 900 days ago.
Oct 11 2008
This past April, newspapers were a twitter with the discovery made by two Cambridge University researchers: John Coates, a former trading floor manager on Wall Street, and Joe Herbert, a neuroscientist. In their abstract, they wrote:
We found that a trader’s morning testosterone level predicts his day’s profitability. We also found that a trader’s cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk.
Their research findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor.
So, as The Guardian observed Testosterone is the secret ingredient for making (and losing) lots of money. “Money doesn’t make the world go round: it’s testosterone. The more that traders have, the richer they’ll become – up to a point.”
