December 2008 archive

Dec 19 2008

Muslim in America

By NLinStPaul

Today, while perusing articles at ColorLines, I was struck by several that had to do with what it means to be Muslim in America.

Their lead story is by Seth Wessler and is titled Silenced in the Classroom. It tells the story of Khalil Gibran International Academy, started in NYC in 2007.

The Khalil Gibran school was to have been a refuge in the midst of post-Sept. 11 New York City, a place where a mixed group of Arabic speakers and non-Arabic speakers would learn together. The school, which opened in 2007 with a sixth-grade class, was designed to grow into a middle and high school in the spirit of the more than 65 dual-language schools in New York City, which teach in Spanish, Creole, Russian and other languages. By graduation, it was expected that Khalil Gibran students would have a command of Arabic and an understanding of the cultural context in which the language exists.

15 comments

Dec 19 2008

Get Website Badge for Petition for a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Bush War Crimes

By Edger

Sponsored by Docudharma.com and Democrats.com: A Citizen’s Petition to Attorney General-Designate Eric Holder asking him to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes.

You can read and/or sign the Petition for a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Bush War Crimes here, or by clicking on the Badge below.

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To embed the Petition Badge linking to the Petition on your blog or website, copy the code from the box above, and paste it where you want the badge to display.

Optionally, you may want to add the following text above or below the badge on your site:

Formal Petition to Attorney General-Designate Eric Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes.

Sponsored by Docudharma.com and Democrats.com.

You can also embed the Citizens Petition For Special Prosecutor promotional video on your blog or website to help promote awareness of the petition:

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From President-Elect Obama’s Change.org

“Ideas For Change In America”

Appoint a Special Prosecutor for the Crimes of the Bush Administration:

President-elect Obama recently said, “if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law.”

Attorney General-designate Eric Holder recently said top Bush Administration officials “authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance of American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the Writ of Habeus Corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants, and authorized the use of procedures that both violate international law and the United States Constitution.”

The Bush administration has refused to investigate its own crimes and President Bush may issue blanket pardons before he leaves. President Obama must appoint a Special Prosecutor – ideally Patrick Fitzgerald – to fully investigate these crimes and prosecute those responsible to demonstrate that we are truly a Nation of Laws and no one – including the President – is above the law.

– Bob Fertik (President of Democrats.com), New York, NY Dec 06 @ 06:02AM PST

Dec 19 2008

The Defining Moment?

By Edger

“The more you begin to investigate what we think we understand, where we came from, what we think we’re doing, the more you begin to see we’ve been lied to, we’ve been lied to by every institution…”
— Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Zeitgeist

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
— Hunter S. Thompson

The entire global economy depends not just on politicians and economists and crooked financial industry executives who make decisions for the world, but on transportation; planes, trains, trucks, and automobiles.

Nothing gets delivered. Nothing gets anywhere. Not food, Not goods. Nothing. Anywhere. Without transportation.

And all of our transportation systems depend on oil and cannot function without oil.

Transportation is the heart that pumps the blood to drive the economy. Energy, oil, is the nourishment that enables the heart to keep on pumping.

Fatih Birol, IEA

What happens when the heart stops pumping? The body, the economy, dies.

Fatih Birol is the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA), and each year publishes the World Energy Outlook, the forecasting report that governments all over the world use to know what energy supplies will be available when planning development of transportation strategies and systems to keep the economy humming along.

Systems that will use the energy Birol’s report tells them will be available to power that development.

George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books Heat: how to stop the planet burning; The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain; as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. He lives in mid-Wales with his daughter Hanna.

Britain’s leading green commentator, George Monbiot, talks to Fatih Birol at the IEA in the Real News video below, who reveals for the first time a startling and worrying prediction for the date of peak oil.

And finds that the rate of decline of oil production that Birol and The International Energy Agency have been giving to governments around the world for the past few years has been simply an assumption – a guess – based on no research at all.

4 comments

Dec 19 2008

Today’s the day. Do something

By xofferson

Today is Iraq Moratorium #16.

It is a day to interrupt business as usual and take some action to end the war and occupation of Iraq.

Join a group action or do something yourself. Write a letter. Send an email. Call your Congress members. Wear a button or armband to work or school. Donate to your favorite peace group. Or do something more creative. You’ll find lots of ideas on the Iraq Moratorium website.

Since the monthly actions, on the Third Friday of the month, began in September 2007 more than 1,500 events in 43 states and 260 communities have been listed on the website, and many more have gone unreported.

Be part of it. The war has to stop, and we have to stop it.

Do something.

antiwar, Iaq, Iraq Moratorium, Peace
2 comments

Dec 19 2008

Friday Night at 8: High Tone Spirit Talk

By Nightprowlkitty

I looked up the etymology of torture, it’s from the French, and among other descriptions I noticed the word “twisting.”

Try to put aside for just a brief moment any outrage, fear, anger, any high emotion that automatically occurs when the subject of torture, and more specifically, institutionalized torture a’la Woo/Cheney, etc. comes to mind.

Just for a brief moment.

Twisting. For some reason that makes me think of someone taking a beautiful sacred mesa and brutally mining it so that it is utterly destroyed.

In other words, taking something useful and making it useless.

I recently read a wild novel by the equally wild Whitley Streiber, 2012, a Philip K. Dickian paranoia trip with some interesting notions, one being that there are monster people (somewhat lizard like but who can mimic human beings if necessary) who want to enslave our souls and the sacred spots on the planet were put there to keep the monsters’ giant “lenses” from working and stealing every human’s soul with a weird sparkly light that when poured over a person basically turns them into a zombie.

Well, that’s a terrible review, but I found the notion interesting in the sense that we have sacred places on our planet for a real reason, not just some mumbo jumbo hooie or sentimental “tree hugging’ motive. Winter Rabbit, among others, has enlightened me to the reality of why human beings need sacred spaces. And Streiber just gave a jazzed up high tech paranoid illustration of that in his book. But for me, the conclusion is the same. Sacred places, the word “sacred” itself, is a part of our human condition, and can be a very instructive teacher if we open ourselves to learn. I’m sure all of us here have experienced the sacred, but the word itself is either laughed at or “twisted” by fundamentalists of every stripe into something awful.

When we raze mountaintops and destroy sacred spaces, we are twisting something valuable into something not only useless but dangerous and toxic.

Why would we as a society do that? And why would we allow others to do that as a regular mode of business?

Dec 19 2008

Docudharma Times Friday December 19

By The Time Bush Bails Out

The Big Three

It Will Be Just Another

In A Long List Of Failures

Friday’s Headlines:

GM Town ‘On Edge Until Bush Gives Us the Money’

Hamas answers Israeli air raid with rockets as truce ends early

Iran mulls financial bailout as stock market falls

Chinese crew used beer bottles to fight off pirates

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi: a sacrificial lamb, says wife

AstraZeneca row as corruption claims engulf Nobel prize

Former East Bloc Countries Sign Accord on Stasi Files

South Korea ‘plotted to kill Kim’

All roads lead out of Afghanistan

New target for Mexico’s drug cartels: schools

NASA’s spending is under scrutiny

Obama’s transition team wants to know about the agency’s basic money management, including cost overruns.

By Mark K. Matthews and Robert Block

December 19, 2008

Reporting from Washington — Most nights it’s possible to look skyward with a pair of cheap binoculars and see a $100,000 mistake circling the Earth. The glowing object — an orbiting NASA tool bag — was lost last month by an astronaut during a routine spacewalk.

The canvas-and-acrylic caddy contained two grease guns, a scraper, a trash bag and some wipes, hardly cutting-edge technology. So why did it cost $100,000?

NASA officials said they had no answer to that question — beyond the fact that, as spokesman Allard Beutel put it, “space flight is expensive.” That expense is drawing serious scrutiny from the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Of 74 questions submitted to the agency by Obama’s NASA transition team, more than half asked about basic spending issues, including cost overruns.

UN tribunal jails Rwanda genocide mastermind for life

Theoneste Bagosora, country’s defence chief of staff, denies directing massacre of 800,000 by Hutu militia

Chris McGreal

guardian.co.uk

An international court has sentenced the mastermind of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Theoneste Bagosora, to life imprisonment in what prosecutors hailed as the most significant verdict of its kind since Nuremberg.

The five-year trial of Bagosora, who was the chief of staff in Rwanda’s defence ministry, established that he oversaw a complex and extensive conspiracy to commit genocide, including years organising and arming the “Interahamwe” militia which led the killing of about 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, sitting in Tanzania, heard that in April 1994 he personally ordered the murder of individual politicians, including Rwanda’s moderate prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimina, and the killing of 10 Belgian peacekeepers to drive the UN out. Bagosora then unleashed the genocide against the Tutsi minority, mobilising the general Hutu population to support the Interahamwe and the army in the mass killings.

USA

W. Mark Felt, Watergate Deep Throat, Dies at 95

By TIM WEINER

Published: December 19, 2008

W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the F.B.I. when he helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, Calif.His death was confirmed by Rob Jones, his grandson.

In 2005, Mr. Felt revealed that he was the one who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had gone on for more than 30 years.

Dec 19 2008

billions in bonuses as economy bleeds out

By pfiore8 in Economy, Politics

Pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package

The sums that continue to be spent by Wall Street firms on payroll, payoffs and, most controversially, bonuses appear to bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors in the banks. Shares in Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have declined by more than 45% since the start of the year. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have fallen by more than 60%. JP MorganChase fell 6.4% and Lehman Brothers has collapsed.

At one point last week the Morgan Stanley $10.7bn pay pot for the year to date was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. In effect, staff, on receiving their remuneration, could club together and buy the bank.

^{guardian.co.uk, 17 Oct 2008}

21 comments

Dec 19 2008

Muse in the Morning

By Robyn in Art, Community, Poetry

Muse in the Morning

Happy pre-Solstice

Art Link

World without Form

Glad Yule

It is a time of wonder

and some confusion

about why the sun

coming north again

and days getting longer

should bring on

the severest cold

but I know there is

an answer in science

I do not look

to dragons

or evil

to solve

my riddles

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–December 14, 2005

Dec 19 2008

Bush slowly murdering the auto industry.

By dkmich

Lord_Mike posted this link in quick hits at OpenLeft.

White House considering “orderly” bankruptcy to deal with ailing automakers Jennifer Loven, AP White House Correspondent, Thursday December 18, 2008, WASHINGTON (AP) —

The Bush administration is seriously considering “orderly” bankruptcy as a way of dealing with the desperately ailing U.S. auto industry. — snip —

Dec 19 2008

The Velveteen Rabbit . . . a retelling

By pfiore8

_________________________________________________________________________________

“What is a LEADER?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“A LEADER isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. It’s realizing that every experience develops some latent force within you.¹ You begin to understand that vision is the art of seeing the invisible² so that when you want to build a wagon, you don’t gather the other toys to collect wood or assign them tasks, but rather you teach them to long for ways to traverse the endless immensity of the backyard.³ Then you become a LEADER.”

Dec 19 2008

Late Night Karaoke

SPEAK

XTC: Making Plans for Nigel

Dec 19 2008

New School Occupation by Students!!!

By rjones2818

Via New School in Exile:

The New York Schools in Exile Occupation

The original idea of the University in Exile, and the New School in general, was to be a safe-haven for academic freedom and scholarship free of oppressive political regimes, be they in Europe or America, and to be a center for critical engagement with important issues of our times. It was known for its deep thinkers, its innovative academics, and its committment to social and political justice as a bedrock of all other scholarship. The New School, under its current administration, is no longer able to fulfill that role of critical engagement and dissent. This continued betryal of our founding principles cannot be tolerated any longer, and the time has come to revive the University in Exile. This is a call for student action!