May 2009 archive

It’s already happened in the Northeast, and the Pacific Coast. The process is well under way in the Great Lakes region, the mid-Atlantic region, and the Mountain West (excluding the Mormon Belt) . . . yep, except for the South, Americans are turning against conservative values like homophobia, intolerance, and racism in huge numbers, as the overwhelming majorities that Democrats have won in 2006 & 2008, and the overwhelming popularity of President Obama show.

I submit to you that there is area of the US which has only just begun to change though – and that would be the Great Plains states – North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas – as well as Montana, which I’m including in this analysis. It’s already been widely reported here, here and elsewhere that RepubliCon strength is overwhelmingly over-represented in the South – defined as the 11 states of the confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky in the first hyperlink from the National Journal. DailyKos blogger Steve Singiser notes in that second link that:

At the Congressional level, the disparities are, if possible, even more stark. In the United States Senate, Republicans control 19 of the 26 seats in the South. Outside the South, Democrats control 53 seats. The GOP controls just 21 seats outside of the South.

What this means, in a nutshell, is that outside of the South, Democrats come very close to controlling three-quarters of the seats in the United States Senate.

The other major area of RepubliCon strength is the Mormon Belt.

Animusic

Future Retro

Starship Groove

Are we free to hate?  If so, why?  We have freedom of speech, but hate speech is a crime.  

Hate is acceptable except for under the most extreme circumstances…  Why do we do it?  Because we can.  Because we can’t help it.  Because we like to.  We’re human beings with human emotions and one of those emotions is hate.  The problem is that hate is normal.  We all do it.  We really don’t think about it.  We always worry about the hate of others.  That is… unless their hates match our own.  We all feel justified in our hate.  It fills us with a sense of superiority and control.  What useful or positive purpose does hate serve under any circumstances?  It just seems a bit hypocritical of us to condemn only certain kinds of hate.  Can’t we just somehow decide as a species that hate is not a behaviorally correct attitude?

We can never bring an end to war or bigotry without ending the hatred first.  As long as we continue to allow ourselves this acidic emotion we are no better than those haters we criticize.  We can’t end hate with hate.  We can’t end war with war.  We can’t end torture with torture.  We can’t end terrorism with terrorism.  We can’t end bigotry with bigotry.  Sometimes you fight fire with fire…  most times you use a hose.  

You can’t end hate with hate.  

Memorial Day  

U.S. Relies More on Aid of Allies in Terror Cases



By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: May 23, 2009

WASHINGTON – The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials.

The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to new limits.

In the past 10 months, for example, about a half-dozen midlevel financiers and logistics experts working with Al Qaeda have been captured and are being held by intelligence services in four Middle Eastern countries after the United States provided information that led to their arrests by local security services, a former American counterterrorism official said.

UN chief flies into Sri Lanka as Tamils’ tales of terror emerge

250,000 Tamil civilians are held behind the wire of one refugee camp. Many have stories of a desperate escape. Most go unheard – but 10-year-old Sopika’s account is a testimony to brutality

Gethin Chamberlain in Colombo

The Observer, Sunday 24 May 2009

The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday visited a mass displacement camp packed with Tamil civilians as he appealed to Sri Lanka’s triumphant government to “heal the wounds” after three decades of civil war. As he surveyed the beleaguered and shell-shocked refugees held there and as the army searched for Tamil Tiger fighters among them, he would not have found time to talk to Sopika, aged 10.

Sopika is one of at least 250,000 Tamil civilians being held in Menik Farm in the north of the country. Barbed-wire fences encircle the endless rows of white tents, preventing civilians from getting out and journalists from getting in, as the government continues to prevent the stories of Sopika and thousands like her from being told.

USA

Dust storms speed snowmelt in the West

An unusually high number of the storms has left a film of dust on the Rocky Mountain snowpack, causing it to melt earlier and forcing farmers to adjust. This could be the new normal, scientists say.

By Nicholas Riccardi

May 24, 2009

Reporting from Denver — A series of unusual spring dust storms has left the snowcapped mountains of western Colorado stained brown and red, even a bit pink. The dust is speeding up the runoff to rivers that supply millions of people with water and raising fears of an increasingly arid West.

Twelve dust storms barreled into the southern Rockies from the deserts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico so far this year. In contrast, four storms hit the mountains all year long in 2003. Eight occurred in each of the last three years.

“This year’s been really, really strong,” said Jason Neff, a hydrologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “Something’s been going on, and I don’t think we’re exactly sure what.”

The storms leave a dark film on snow that melts it faster by hastening its absorption of the sun’s energy. That, coupled with unseasonably warm temperatures, has sped up the runoff here, swelling rivers to near flood stage, threatening to make reservoirs overflow and fueling fears that there will not be enough water left for late-summer crops.

Look Inside Its Dishwasher Safe

(Crossposted from The Free Speech Zone)

Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner and Managing Attorney for CCR’s Guantanamo project Shayana Kadidal responded with disappointment to President Obama’s speech this morning. CCR represents the detainees at Guantánamo and is part of the key FOIA lawsuit surrounding the torture photo disclosures.

Ratner and Kadidal were disturbed by the direction the Obama administration is taking on questions of human rights, transparency, accountability and the law. CCR’s Executive Director, who met with the president yesterday, briefed his colleagues before boarding a plane this morning.

Said Ratner, “The president wrapped himself in the Constitution and then proceeded to violate it by announcing he would send people before irredeemably flawed military commissions and seek to create a preventive detention scheme that only serves to move Guantanamo to a new location and give it a new name.”

Said Kadidal, “Preventive detention goes against every principle our nation was founded on. We have courts and laws in place that we respect and rely on because we have been a nation of laws for hundreds of years; we should not simply discard them when they are inconvenient. The new president is looking a lot like the old.”

http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom…

On the Unmasking of Demons: Yes We Must

Dr. Bee Z. Bywydd

Thomas Paine’s Corner

Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”
– Carl Sagan

We are a species of superstitious monkeys, in insectoid mutational phase, armed with mass-incineration weaponry, at the edge of a teeming galaxy. All of us are possessed by demons, a lying Legion of deceptions and delusions. Our Earth has maxxed-out on demonic monkeys and now She’s coughing out storms to flush our fires away.

So we’re all in a Panic. Or running for our lives, shivvering in the deep freeze, slogging through toxic flood waters. Deep in the Voodoo, shite out of luck, over the falls in a Titanic barrel of insane monkeys. Because our society is an onion of lies within lies, all ruled over by ominous wargods and mass-incineration weapons. We chatter on about superstitions and pseudo-news, nearly cut off from any natural identity. Our instincts have been hijacked and most of us are living like serfs in Roman-occupied city-ghettos. Being entrained to think we must kill to get our way. This is “God’s will”?

“There are years when nothing happens and years in which centuries happen.”
– Carlos Fuentes

Americans of certain dying generations will yet argue the righteousness of the mass-incineration of two cities full of innocent humans as “for the good of the nation,” every Hiroshima Day for half a century. Here we can grab the most dangerous demon by the horns. War has warped us all to the core (Corps), now bred for murder on massive scales.

Or shall we insist on another round of robust patriotic chanting, another atomic bomb test, or let’s see what the Bush family has brought us today? Hooray, a brand new AIRCRAFT CARRIER!; bigger than many American communities, named for the “Man who has everything” (according to W, as he commissioned it)- CIA President 41, from his son, CIA President 43. How mind-bendingly metaphoric. Cost more than your children’s education (or imprisonment), but our demons are very happy! More mass-incineration ahead!

Read the whole thing here… (it’s worth it!)