Nov 28 2008
We all might have assumed that Sean has been busy making the movie Milk (which I hope to see over the weekend). But I just learned that he recently paid a visit to both Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro because he’s written about it in The Nation Magazine. And before I say anything more about this particular piece, I’d like to state that Mr. Penn is an amazing writer! So I urge you to go check out the whole thing.
Here’s an introductory video from The Nation (my title comes from here).
Nov 28 2008
Just brief thought on the day after Thanksgiving.
Now that Bush is gone and we can begin to take an intelligent law and order approach to terrorism, which as horrible as we all agree it is, will always be with us to some extent, we will ‘need’ a new enemy.
Human nature demands it. It demands that we have someone or some thing on which to focus our ire. Sad but true. Sure, terrorist blow people up and we should do all we can to prevent that from happening….without giving them exactly what they want, which is for us all to live our lives in fear and to change our society for the worse because of that fear. We cannot let them turn our world into a police state to prevent the relatively few deaths they cause.
Of course the ideal would be to transform ourselves into a totally just and equitable world so that terrorists have nothing to blow people up for. While we are waiting for that to happen, or perhaps as part of that effort, we can redefine who the bad guys are.
We are facing a financial crisis, and we are facing a climate crisis, and of course we are facing the seemingly eternal ‘injustice’ of the rich living high on the hog while children starve. Perhaps we need a Global War On Robber Barons? A Global War on Polluters? A Global War on Poverty? A Global War on Greed?
Somewhere around 4 million people actually starve to death a year. Compared to perhaps 20, 000 deaths from terrorism. Yes, that IS comparing apples to oranges, but…..When you are watching your people starve to death it is very easy to become a terrorist. Especially if you are also watching, say American teevee shows that portray, shall we say, an alternate lifestyle to the one you see around you. And as Climate Crisis accelerates more and more people will face both these fates. Starvation and the desperation and helplessness that leads people to blow other people up. Not all terrorism stems from starvation of course, just as not all crime stems from poverty. Some folks are just ….bad. But most terrorism is not born in a vacuum.
How about addressing the causes of terrorism, not just the symptoms? Yes it is a simplistic thought, nearly as simplistic as the thought of invading Iraq to end terrorism. But in my opinion, it is at least a thought moving in the right direction. And moving in the right direction is about all that we can hope for, in this complex world where there are no quick and easy solutions to the problems we face.
Nov 28 2008
Nov 28 2008
ABC News:
In a personal and wide-ranging interview conducted by his sister about his legacy, his faith and the influence of his father, President George W. Bush said he hopes to be remembered as a liberator of the Iraqi people.
“I’d like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace,” Bush told his sister, Dorothy Bush Koch, in a conversation recorded for the oral-history organization StoryCorps for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
An excerpt of the interview was aired on National Public Radio Thursday, and the White House released additional excerpts with both the president and first lady Laura Bush today.
“I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process,” Bush said, according to White House excerpts.
[snip…]
Bush said his No Child Left Behind policy, which has been widely criticized by educators as too focused on test scores, is one of his significant achievements.
“I think the No Child Left Behind Act is one of the significant achievements of my administration because we said loud and clear to educators, parents and children that we expect the best for every child, that we believe every child can learn, and that in return for Federal money we expect there to be an accountability system in place to determine whether every child is learning to read, write, and add and subtract,” he said.
[snip…]
“I would advise politicians, however, to be careful about faith in the public arena,” he said.
Read it all here, if you can stand to…
Nov 28 2008
Time for me and Aero to come clean. We have issues with portion control and nibbling. You can see she’s a big girl in this shot.
The vet just verified she’s my 2nd biggest pootie ever at 14 pounds ( I once had a 16 pound female-very large frame but still too heavy) As for me, the waistline isn’t budging, though the rest of me seems to be maintaining a toned look better than last winter.
As noted in previous diaries, I have a healthy diet and good exercise habits. And I still think stress promoting the fat storage is a factor. However, the clue that I really still eat more than I need came in an unexpected way.
(crossposted at the GOS)
Nov 28 2008
“Few opinions that I will express” are more certain that Michael Medved denies genocide. No, it is not an opinion, he literally denies genocide (1st article from 2007).
Reject the Lie of White “Genocide” Against Native AmericansFew opinions I’ve expressed on air have produced a more indignant, outraged reaction than my repeated insistence that the word “genocide” in no way fits as a description of the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists or, later, American settlers.
Consequently, Medved has a current egregious example of his genocide denial.
Nov 28 2008
Black Friday?
Perhaps Its The Wrong Kind Of
Black Friday
Indian Commandos Storm Jewish Center
By KEITH BRADSHER and SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: November 28, 2008
MUMBAI, India – Indian commandos slid down ropes from a hovering army helicopter Friday morning as security forces stormed a Jewish center that had been seized by terrorists during a coordinated series of attacks on Mumbai, India’s commercial and entertainment capital.
The blue-uniformed commandos landed on the roof and soon made their way inside Nariman House, home to the Orthodox Jewish group Chabad-Lubavitch. A gunbattle then broke out inside the building, with hundreds of shots being fired over the next four hours.Elsewhere in the city, Indian Army and paramilitary commandos made their way through two charred luxury hotels, searching for survivors of the bands of gunmen who unleashed two days of chaos beginning Wednesday night.
Home-grown militants are prime suspects
Raid involving the taking of hostages suggests only marginal link to al-Qaida
Jason Burke
guardian.co.uk, Friday November 28 2008 00.01 GMT
The Mumbai attacks are unique in the history of recent violent militancy, Islamist or otherwise. As Indian security agencies race to work out who was behind them they will be negotiating a maze of conflicting clues.A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen claimed the operation. The name indicates a local group – the Deccan is the central Indian plateau – and a probable link to the Indian Mujahideen who started a bloody bombing campaign a year ago.
It is this group, too, that threatened the people of Mumbai with “deadly attacks” two months ago and has credibly claimed responsibility for the series of attacks in recent months.
USA
Cyber-attack on Defense Department computers raises concerns
The ‘malware’ strike, thought to be from inside Russia, hit combat zone computers and the U.S. Central Command overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan. The attack underscores concerns about computer warfare.
By Julian E. Barnes
November 28, 2008
Reporting from Washington — Senior military leaders took the exceptional step of briefing President Bush this week on a severe and widespread electronic attack on Defense Department computers that may have originated in Russia — an incursion that posed unusual concern among commanders and raised potential implications for national security.Defense officials would not describe the extent of damage inflicted on military networks. But they said that the attack struck hard at networks within U.S. Central Command, the headquarters that oversees U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and affected computers in combat zones. The attack also penetrated at least one highly protected classified network.
Military computers are regularly beset by outside hackers, computer viruses and worms. But defense officials said the most recent attack involved an intrusive piece of malicious software, or “malware,” apparently designed specifically to target military networks.
Nov 28 2008
Nov 28 2008
 Muse in the Morning |
State of the Onion XVI
Art Link Inside
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Nov 28 2008
Original article via Socialist Appeal (US):
Many workers are concerned about the present crisis of U.S. capitalism and how it affects them. Therefore, Socialist Appeal thought it might be helpful to explain some basics about capitalism and why we believe that socialism is the only solution to the crisis.
Nov 28 2008
It’s ironic that WalMart has become an iconic symbol of the very same small towns that they’ve destroyed. Main Street sits, rotting if even in a beautiful way, as a vacant reminder of the not-too-distant past when we built walkable communities that worked. Places worth caring about, aesthetically pleasing mixed-use human scale neighborhoods that grew organically over time as the need arised. Buildings designed and built by real people, kept up with pride by the business owners who lived in an apartment on top of the store itself, or in a house a few blocks away. One with a long porch, on a street with sidewalks…so they could greet their neighbors as they walked by on a Sunday morning.
I’m not gonna think that I can influence the shopping habits of America with one blog post, but I am going to ask you the favor of at least considering what I have to say. If you’re gonna shop tomorrow, at least consider our neighbors and our neighborhoods. America is in the late stages of a serious disease, but fortunately there’s a cure…
