South African authorities have charged 270 miners with murder in the killings of 34 fellow workers, even though police are believed to have fired the fatal shots.
Whaaaaaat? Well, in fact, the South African authorities are using a sort of they made us do it defense. In an ugly throw-back to the Apartheid-era, the miners are being charged under the common purpose law:
Because of course, it’s always a good idea to blame the victim. This is unbelievably frightening… to now put this massacre at the feet of the miners is breathtaking. Really jaw-dropping insanity.
I mean WTF???????????
Watch out, because this is our world now and those in power (all of them) make it harder and harder for us to act on the truth as we are being buried in bullshit… being forced to accept lie after lie, no matter what we see, no matter what the facts may indicate. One can only wonder how long before police in Oakland or New York City adopt a similar strategy…
This video is amazing… look at it and bear witness; one never knows if it will disappear.
Neither the weary, disciplined […] soldiers, ranked along the west bank, nor the anxious, helter-skelter tribes amassing on the east bank could have been giving much thought to their place in history. But this moment of slack, this relative calm before the pandemonium to follow, gives us the chance to study the actors on both sides of this river and to look backward on what has been and forward to what will be.
…
[I]ts foundations were unassailable, sturdily sunk in a storied past and steadily built on for eleven centuries and more. There was, of course, the prophecy. Someone, usually someone in his cups, could always be counted on to bring up that old saw: the Prophecy of the Twelve Eagles, each eagle representing a century, leaving us with- stubby fingers counting out the decades in a puddle of wine- only seventy years remaining! Give or take a decade! Predictable laughter at the silliness of the whole idea. But in seventy years exactly, the empire would be gone.
With my thoracic surgery staring at me from the other side of the weekend, I decided that grabbing something from the past and emending it would be easier than writing something totally new. So I did. This is from May 25, 2008.
I am intensely interested in how words have come to mean what they do. Since words are all I have to argue for my inclusion into human society, how could I not need to be interested in those long forgotten thought processes.
I just listened to this interview and can now say what many, me included, have thought all along, not only about him but as to our own previous administration, he’s certifiably crazy! I mean that in the so called World View, especially of righteousness, he just spoke. What’s going on has Nothing to do with any religious ideology but does for those who want to use that as their excuse, boy do they got some splanin to do at the pearly gates. He seems to Not Understand that humans going into others countries and Destroying Them as that Kills and Maims Tens of Thousands plus and Millions of Refugees is Not going to create Rage and Hatred, not only in those countries but from others on the planet. He and like are beyond nuts, Way Beyond!!
They better not build that mosque down by Ground Zero, we’re being told, not just because it’s insensitive, but because we have no idea what they’ll be up to down there.
I mean, where did the money come from?
Who does this Imam hang out with, anyway?
And, at a time when our Nation faces more threats than ever, why would we let these Muslim madmen situate their “terror command posts” anywhere?
Well, I don’t know about all of that…but I do know a place where lots of these Islamic terrorists go to obtain the equipment and supplies they need to support their particular craft, and I decided to make a bit of an undercover visit to the spot, so that I might “observe and report” on what goes on at this specific location.
So put on your dark glasses…and let’s go see what we can find out.
In a piece titled “The Obama agenda and the enthusiasm gap,” and by “gap” I hope he doesn’t intend something on the order of a “spark plug gap” when many of us are seeing a “no man’s land” between existentially warring armies littered mostly with our dead bodies, Robert Reich looks to the November elections and sees storm clouds, due to Obama’s tepid policies:
Whatever the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections, the activist phase of the Obama administration has likely come to a close. The president may have a fight on his hands even to hold on to what he’s already achieved because his legislative successes have been large enough to fuel strong opposition but not big enough to strengthen his support. The result could be disastrous for him and congressional Democrats.
Activist phase? Is “legislative success” akin to “staying the corporate course?” By “opposition” Reich probably means utterly predictable gun-toting, racist, Randian, war-mongering, just-say-no wingnuts, but how about the resentment fueled amongst hope-and-changers who have been completely shafted on just about every issue from GITMO to the economy?
[R]eality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.
The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common.
I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.
The sorcerer’s description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.
When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.
In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world.Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world.
The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.
After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.
Pre- existing conditions? They are still in there, only now, instead of getting denied they get to jack the price up 3X and you’ll be FORCED to buy something, and without competition who are you gonna choose? THEY WILL ALL CHARGE THE SAME CLIMBING PRICE!
Yearly caps? They are STILL IN THERE!
Death Panels? For Profit death panels, you betcha.
And loopholes, loopholes, loopholes!
I’m sorry, but Obama is NOT FDR. This is NOT the same political climate as when Social Security was passed or when Medicare was passed. Hell, this isn’t even the same century!
So get over the fact that you have been TOTALLY SCREWED at this point and do something about it. This bill, as it stands, is so poisoned it should be killed and began again from the start, no matter how long and painful it might be. This CAN be dealt with in a year or two when the Conservative Wing of the Democratic part loses in droves, because that is coming one way or another.
I am PISSED, and you should be pissed too, cause we’re getting SCREWED on this deal. The ONLY winners are the political class and the special interests. Consumers are getting sold down the river.
It’s almost funny. Here comes a bus. Soon my fellow progressives and I will be thrown unceremoniously under it. The last ten days it’s almost as if the purpose of going to a bus stop is to be run over by oncoming omnibuses: climate change, health care, Afghanistan. You name it. Name a progressive cause and it’s been squished in the past two weeks. And if it hasn’t, if you can think of one that is not now looking like a beer can reconfigured by an oncoming locomotive, just wait tell next week.
I could react with anger to these developments. Certainly not with surprise. For example, I almost reacted in anger just a few moments ago when I read this in the New York Times:
Independent Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman says he expects to support the Democrats’ health care legislation as long as any government-run insurance plan stays out of the bill.
Lieberman has been a question mark on the health care legislation for months. To win him over, Senate leaders said late Monday they were backing away from a Medicare expansion Lieberman opposed. They already had dropped a full-blown government insurance program.
Lieberman told reporters Tuesday that if the Medicare expansion and government insurance plan are gone, ”I’m going to be in a position where I can say what I’ve wanted to say all along: that I’m ready to vote for health care reform.”
Senate leaders need Lieberman’s support to secure 60 votes necessary to advance the legislation in the 100-member Senate.
Isn’t that great? We somehow went from single payer universal health care (that could never pass, they said) to a robust public option (that could never pass, they said) to a weak tea public option for the select few all of whom live down the block (that could never pass, they said) to a medicare buy-in (that could never pass, they said), to nothing (which evidently Uncle Joe approves and which can easily pass because, well, because it’s nothing and nothing is what we have now so it’s easy to pass).
Remind me if you can why I voted in 2006 and 2008 for Democrats? Remind me, if you’re really creative, why 70% of the population wants health care and they’re just not gonna get it. Maybe I’m forgetful. As I said, I almost got angry about this.
I also almost got angry last night when I heard two Democratic Senators on Maddow and Keith explain how much progressives had helped with the HCR bill and how even if it didn’t have a public option or a medicare buy in or anything else of any value to people who actually need health care and insurance, it was still an enormous victory because, get this, it will provide a foundation for the future. And in the future we can build upon the foundation (if you like this metaphor). And soon on this foundation there will be a 1700′ tall, glistening sky scraper, a beacon to the nation if not the world, called Universal Health Care and you, my dear friends, can even go in an visit the lobby of this edifice. Soon, of course, is a term of art. It means a time between now and the next, distant ice age. You can visit the magnificent structure for which you have provided the foundation if you can live to be 200 years old without adequate health insurance. I personally am not taking this as a bet. Are you kidding me? This is truly a case in which legislative nothing is claimed to be governmental something. So I was almost getting angry. And thinking of things I could do to get even (I’m like that. I don’t apologize for being like that). I’m a Buddhist, but revenge did cross my mind and perch on my eyebrows like a carrion vulture.
Then I recalled some recent pacifying remarks by Pinche Tejano. His remarks were to the effect that it was all just a computer game and should be treated as such (his analysis was far more eloquent and intelligible than this very basic boil down of his very subtle and correct idea). So I began to think about all of this electoral politics as just a game. I couldn’t get mad about a game that was obviously rigged so that I couldn’t get to the next level, so that I would have an EPIC FAIL. What’s to get mad about that? It happens all the time. Especially to people like me with no game skillz. No game cred. In a word, losers. Suckers. I’m used to being pwned by games. I don’t like losing, but I don’t get mad about it. It beat the hell out of being almost angry about politics. Yeah. All of a sudden all of this electoral politics and senate politics and astroturf movements and Joe Lieberman made sense. It was all just like son of Pac Man. It was finally sensible. Even to me.
How did I know that Strongbad was so prescient? How did I know that Home Star Runner was really equipping me for the future of politics? My head asploded.
I’ve spent a lot of time on DailyKos. Often times, when I find a diary that seems outside of the mainstream progressive movement or contentious, but something I really agree with, there’s a “Crossposted at Docudharma” link in it. That’s what steered me to this site a few months ago. I’ve been reading the site occasionally, then frequently ever since.
Those crazy “Birthers” are getting an awful lot of ink and air time lately, offering good comedy fodder for late night television while occasionally making regular people turn away in revulsion. Like the “Teabaggers” weren’t hilarious enough to use the name of a sexual weirdness as their moniker, or to publicize their racist rants and ridiculous charges against the President, after being the very same wackos who accused those who questioned any illegal act of the last administration of being traitors.
CNN commentator Roland S. Martin has a piece up today (July 22) entitled, Obama birth issue is nutty that proceeds to make good fun of the wingnuts. But since one of George W. Bush’s first serious actions as President after 9-11 was to arrange the biggest government overhaul since the New Deal – by inventing the so-called “Department of Homeland Security” – there are Americans out in the hinterland who are suddenly quite confused about their legal status. I’m one of them, and so is recent Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Who, like me, actually wasn’t born in the United States of America.
McCain, like me, was a Navy brat. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, I was born in the Philippines. There used to be a clear law on the books that held the children of American citizens born in a foreign country are indeed ‘natural born’ American citizens, even if they automatically get dual citizenship for the country in which they were born. I had that until I was 18, though after that I would have had to formalize, and I was never very fond of Ferdinand and Imelda “Shoe-Lady” Marcos. So I let it slide. Still, if nobody questioned McCain’s citizenship qualification for POTUS, the fervor with which wingnuttia rants about Obama seems even crazier. I mean, even if Hawaii hadn’t been a state when he was born, did not all Hawaiians receive automatic citizenship when it WAS made a state? It was a territory, after all. Like Puerto Rico. Which apparently some wingnuts in Congress think is a foreign country too, thus Judge Sonia Sotomayor can’t be a citizen either. Weird.
