Not only did Osama bin Laden get a lot of aid and support from the UAE, but it was one of three nations in the world to recognize the legitimacy of Afghanistan’s reprehensible Taliban. AQ Khan, the supposedly “renegade” Pakistani scientist, funneled most of the nuclear secrets and materials that he sold to Liberia, Iran and North Korea through Dubai while the government beamed its approval.posted by Cyndy | link | | |
As middle east regimes go, it ranks about average, ahead of the American-created mess in Iraq, the thuggish and brutal regime of Musharraf in Pakistan, and the religiously insane kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Compared to most regional countries, it actually does fairly well in regard to women’s rights. And of course, it’s swimming in wealth, with gleaming, ultra-modern cities and incredible amusement parks hiding the large portion of the population that isn’t sharing in the obscene wealth.
The Putsch junta, ever corrupt, is attracted to wealth like flies to offal. If their followers put party ahead of country, they put money ahead of both. And the UAE is pure, undiluted money. [more]
On Friday, Space Adventures in Virginia, US, announced its plans to build a $265 million spaceport in the United Arab Emirates, with prospects for additional ports in Singapore and North America.posted by Cyndy | link | | |
...)The Explorer vehicles will carry as many as five people into space, giving them an opportunity to peer back at their home planet for several minutes before returning to Earth.
There was no “referral” and there will be no “punitive action” because there are no violations. “Rather”, as Prather ads, “the IAEA Board ‘REQUESTED’ that Director-General Mohamed El Baradei report to the Security Council”…”calling on Iran to-among other things-implement ‘transparency measures’”.posted by Cyndy | link | | |
These “transparency measures” have nothing to do with Iran’s obligations under the NPT. They are additional demands made at the behest of the Bush administration (through strong-arm tactics with nations on the IAEA Board) that will force Iran to provide access to “individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual-use equipment, certain military owned workshops, and research and development as the Agency may request in support of its ongoing investigations”.
...Why is the IAEA facilitating another war by placating the Bush administration instead of condemning its obvious belligerence?
We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights. We mourn all who have died or been injured in this war; we acknowledge with shame abuses carried out in our name; we confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to deter our leaders from this path of preemptive war. Lord, have mercy.
The rivers, oceans, lakes, rainforests, and wetlands that sustain us, even the air we breathe continue to be violated, and global warming goes unchecked while we allow God’s creation to veer toward destruction. Yet our own country refuses to acknowledge its complicity and rejects multilateral agreements aimed at reversing disastrous trends. We consume without replenishing; we grasp finite resources as if they are private possessions; our uncontrolled appetites devour more and more of the earth’s gifts. We confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to call our nation to global responsibility for the creation, that we ourselves are complicit in a culture of consumption that diminishes the earth. Christ, have mercy.
The vast majority of the peoples of the earth live in crushing poverty. The starvation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the treatable diseases that go untreated indict us, revealing the grim features of global economic injustice we have too often failed to acknowledge or confront. Our nation enjoys enormous wealth, yet we cling to our possessions rather than share. We have failed to embody the covenant of life to which our God calls us; hurricane Katrina revealed to the world those left behind in our own nation by the rupture of our social contract. As a nation we have refused to confront the racism that exists in our own communities and the racism that infects our policies around the world. We confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to call our nation to seek just economic structures so that sharing by all will mean scarcity for none. In the face of the earth’s poverty, our wealth condemns us. Lord, have mercy.
Justices, in their first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts, moved decisively to keep the government out of a church's religious practice. Federal drug agents should have been barred from confiscating the hoasca tea of the Brazil-based church, Roberts wrote in the decision.
“If I were to try to dream up an initiative to highlight that Republicans are on another planet when it comes to energy policy, this investigation would be it,” said Markey. “Having utterly failed, after repeated giveaways to the industry, to do anything to help the American people deal with skyrocketing heating oil prices, natural gas prices, gasoline prices and rising dependence on foreign oil, what do they decide to investigate? A charitable donation of heating oil to relieve the suffering of a few thousand American families!
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, art critic, museum exhibition curator, and political activist. She won wide acclaim and recognition for her 1994 book, Savage Dreams : A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (Vintage). Centering on counter-histories of Yosemite National Park and the landscape of Nevada's nuclear test sites, Savage Dreams is a destabilizing and demystifying intervention into the tragic and romantic mythopoetics of place in the American West. Her 1997 A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (Verso) is a travel narrative which navigates through ideas about remembering and forgetting, identity and landscape, and patterns of movement, from colonialism to tourism and nomadism. Her recently published Wanderlust, Solnit writes, is a history of "walking as a cultural activity, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the contemporary paleontological arguments about bipedal evolution, from an aesthetic pleasure in eighteenth-century England to the growth of politically active walking clubs at the turn of the century and the birth of the outdoor industry and climbing gyms, as well as histories of the rise and fall of urban walking as a pleasure, pedestrian uprisings, and the gender politics of public space."The important point is that she is a museum curator and art critic. So why would she write about Wal-Mart? And why should we care? After all, the Blogosphere is littered with essays about Wal-Mart; the fact that there is much dissent about their practices hardly needs amplification. The reason she writes about it, is that she is concerned about the actions of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton. Ms. Walton is opening an art museum: Crystal Bridges. Ms. Solnit sees an opportunity to make use of that phenomenon as a metaphor for some incisive social commentary.
So now a portrait of antislavery and wilderness advocates belongs to a woman whose profits came from degrading working conditions in the U.S. and abroad and from ravaging the North American landscape.One of the advantages of an education in the Humanities is that it provide one with the skills needed to find meaning in symbolic expressions. It also provides the skills needed for a more subtle, but powerful process: the adaptation of symbols originally created to express one idea, then using them to express other ideas. posted by : Joseph j7uy5 | link | | |
It's pathetic to watch most of the genuine opposition to Bush coming from people in his own party, from torture policies (Sen. John McCain, R-AZ) to NSA spying (Rep. Heather Wilson, R-NM), while most Democrats in Congress are lying down, sitting back or are just comatose. Meanwhile, with no opposition worthy of the name, the Bush administration is hacking away at what's left of the Constitution, international law, and civil liberties.
Essay: Stranger Than Fiction - 2/16/06He also has an interview with Ms. Boggs here. What is interesting about this story, is that Mr. Boggs ended up writing a widely-acclaimed book, despite his low level of formal education.
There isn’t a better story in Michigan than this, and you’ve probably never heard it. Years ago, a Chinese-American woman with a Ph.D from Bryn Mawr moved to Detroit to publish a newsletter.
She was a follower of an obscure Caribbean leader of a tiny Marxist sect. One night, Grace Lee invited one of the sect’s few other local members for dinner. She barely knew him.
He was a black autoworker from Alabama, with an eighth-grade education and six kids. He showed up two hours late. He told her he didn’t like what she had made for dinner and sneered at her taste in music. And then, he asked her to marry him. And she said yes. [...]
His 1963 book, The American Revolution: Notes From a Negro Worker’s Notebook, was so brilliant it drew a fan letter from Bertrand Russell, then the best-known philosopher living.Between the two of them, they anticipated some of the consequences of increasing mechanization of the auto industry.
He was black, she Chinese-American, and together they tried to come up with a new vision for a post-industrial Detroit. Now she is 90 and still trying to change the city. Among other things, she is the guiding spirit of Detroit Summer. It’s an annual program that brings school children together with older generations to “rebuild Detroit from the ground up.”It is a great human-interest story, and a great local-history story. posted by : Joseph j7uy5 | link | | |
"For me, this is a second betrayal." Hackett told the
NYT. "First, my government misused and mismanaged the
military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to
support candidates like me."
...) Mr. Hackett was the first Iraq war veteran to seek
national office, and the decision to steer him away
from the Senate race has surprised those who see him as
a symbol for Democrats who oppose the war but want to
appear strong on national security.
...) "Hackett is seen by many as a straight talker, and he became an icon to the liberal bloggers because he says exactly what they have wished they would hear from a politician,"
...) Mr. Hackett was widely criticized last year for using indecent language to describe President Bush. Last month, state Republicans attacked Mr. Hackett for saying their party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said "aren't a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden."
The Compact started two years ago when Perry and a group of his friends, who were tired of devoting so much of their time and money on items they don't need, vowed to go six months without buying anything new.posted by Cyndy | link | | |
American consumerism, they say, has led to global environmental and socioeconomic crises, and the only way to reverse it is to stop buying into it.
The Compact has several aims:
1) to go beyond recycling in trying to counteract the negative global environmental and socioeconomic impacts of U.S. consumer culture, to resist global corporatism, and to support local businesses, farms, etc. -- a step, we hope, inherits the revolutionary impulse of the Mayflower Compact
2) to reduce clutter and waste in our homes (as in trash Compact-er)
3) to simplify our lives (as in Calm-pact)
So, here goes for the rules
It is my pleasure to be able to share some of my thoughts with you this evening on matters of national security and the Constitution. I come here not as a Democrat, not as a former Republican, but as an American who is deeply troubled by the direction we are headed as a nation.
Over the past 30 years, I have served this country in a variety of positions from the FBI to the CIA, and as a lawyer and a prosecutor. I would like to share with you some of the perspectives those experiences have provided me.
...) The Administration’s ignoring of the law in the case of wiretapping is but one part of what I see as an emerging pattern or practice of illegal and unethical conduct.
When my CIA classmate, Valerie Wilson’s cover was exposed by the White House in 2003, I as well as other members of my class appeared in October of that year on Nightline to explain the consequences of that unprecedented act. It was from that program that the CIA leak case became a national story. Behind the scenes, there is an interesting, as well as informative story. [ read on ]
At first, this seemed like some kind of nutty homophomic scheme, but it sounds as though they really are trying to increase the world's population of this particular species (which, they mention, is an endagered species.) It does seem kind of meddlesome, though.Zoo tempts gay penguins to go straight
A German zoo has imported four female penguins from Sweden in an effort to tempt its gay penguins to go straight.
The four Swedish females were dispatched to the Bremerhaven Zoo in Bremen after it was found that three of the zoo's five penguin pairs were homosexual.
Keepers at the zoo ordered DNA tests to be carried out on the penguins after they had been mating for years without producing any chicks.
It was only then they realised that six of the birds were living in homosexual partnerships.
Director Heike Kueck said that the zoo hoped to see some baby penguins in the coming months.
She said that the birds had been mating for years and one couple even adopted a stone that they protected like an egg.
Kueck said that the project has the support of the European Endangered Species Programme because the penguins, which are native to South America, are an endangered species. [...]
The view in my blog with a view is not fixed. Sometimes it tilts its window and slants its light to politics or culture -- or to poetry and digital art -- or to chaos and nonsense. And, ideally, hopefully, sometimes to Alice Fulton's "third space: the non-binary in-between."posted by Cyndy | link | | |
posted by : Joseph j7uy5 | link | | |
Bush-appointed judges most conservative on record, new UH study finds. Judges appointed by President George W. Bush are the most conservative on record when it comes to civil rights and liberties, according to a new study by a political science professor at the University of Houston. Bush judicial appointees are significantly more conservative than even the very conservative voting record of jurists appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr. in the realm of civil rights and liberties, said Robert Carp, professor of political science at UH. When it comes to these decisions, the Bush team is a full 5 percentage points more conservative than even the trial judges appointed by Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.
ScienceBlog 04:00 Feb-08
The lawmaker, Representative Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, a House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency, broke ranks with the White House on Tuesday and called for a full Congressional inquiry into the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program.
...Ms. Wilson said in the interview Tuesday that she considered the limited Congressional briefings to be "increasingly untenable" because they left most lawmakers knowing little about the program. She said the House Intelligence Committee needed to conduct a "painstaking" review, including not only classified briefings but also access to internal documents and staff interviews with N.S.A. aides and intelligence officials.
Ms. Wilson, a former Air Force officer who is the only female veteran currently in Congress, has butted up against the administration previously over controversial policy issues, including Medicare and troop strength in Iraq. She said she realized that publicizing her concerns over the surveillance program could harm her relations with the administration. "The president has his duty to do, but I have mine too, and I feel strongly about that," she said.
The years of illegal spying have given the Bush administration power over the media and the opposition. Journalists and Democratic politicians don't want to have their adulterous affairs broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed in headlines in the local press with their names attached. Only people willing to risk such disclosures can stand up for the country.
Switch Grass May Bounce Back As Player in New Energy GoalsNot that I spent a lot of time digging, but I actually did not find any results for any polls done after the speech. This seems odd. There is a website, PollingReport.com, that lists Bush's recent approval ratings. There were surveys done in the following periods (all in 2006): 1/3-5; 1/4-8; two from 1/5-8; 1/6-8; 1/10-11; 1/9-12; 1/12-15; 1/20-22; 1/20-25; two from 1/22-25; 1/24-25; 1/23-26; 1/24-26; and 1/26-29. I don't know how often the site is updated, but as of this moment, it shows nothing covering the time after the speech.
by: Gary Wulf, Dow Jones Newswires
Central City, Neb. - Switch grass used to blanket the Eastern and Central U.S. from the Gulf Coast to Canada, providing a habitat for birds and food for deer, which would munch on the five-foot-tall perennial.
Cleared by pioneers to make room for food crops, switch grass was relegated to use as erosion control in low-quality land but may be making a comeback.
President Bush, during the State of the Union address, said the U.S. is "addicted" to oil and presented switch grass as part of a new energy initiative. [...]
“This is going to be one of the most important speeches President Bush ever delivers,” said John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International, “because it’s going to be important for him to win back his own constituency. Right now, his numbers are very, very low. Support for the war in Iraq is low, support for his handling of the economy is low, and even support for his handling of the war on terrorism is not where it has traditionally been.”So if Mr. Zogby thought that the SOTU would be "one of the most important speeches President Bush ever delivers,” then why are there no data to assess the effectiveness of the speech?
RNC Says Don't Expect Bush Bounce(There is a similar article on the Gallup site, but you have to pay to read the whole thing. I won't bother linking to it. They also have a blurb about an "instant reaction" poll done right after the speech, but the abstract doesn't provide enough information to draw any conclusions, and they do not portray it as a scientific poll.)
The RNC is playing down expectations for President Bush's State of the Union address tonight by sending around this analysis by pollster Matthew Dowd:
"In looking at poll movement before and after State of the Union addresses, the average over the last fifty years is actually a slight drop (-0.2%). President Bush’s average change is also a drop (-0.4%). Only one of his SOTU addresses showed positive movement (2005), which is likely attributed to the intervening events of the 2005 Inaugural and January 2005 Iraqi elections. Even the “Great Communicator” President Ronald Reagan’s average poll movement after State of the Union addresses was negative (-2.6%), and in fact Reagan only had one SOTU speech with positive poll movement!" [...]
Bush seeks State of the Union bounceJudging from the RNC memo, it sounds as though it is routine for polling agencies to assess the effect of a Presidential State of the Union Address. Yet, by now they've had a week to do so. Either they just did not do it this time, or they did it, and decided to withhold the results. In either case, I would wonder why. In order to be valid, the post-speech survey would have to be done immediately after the speech, or at least within a couple of days. So if no polls have been done by now, we'll never know whether there was a Bush Bounce, or not. posted by : Joseph j7uy5 | link | | |
President 'upbeat,' set to focus on kitchen-table issues
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush will attempt to revive his presidency with an "upbeat" State of the Union address that stresses kitchen-table issues such as energy and health care, according to his spokesman.
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Tuesday night's speech will be "optimistic and confident," centering around four new proposals. [...]
Have patience and indulgence toward the people... Reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your soul, and your flesh shall become a great poem.posted by Cyndy | link | | |
~Walt Whitman
Mr Bush is seeking a 6.9% hike in US military spending to $439.3bn, and a 3.3% rise in homeland security funds.
To keep plans to cut the fiscal deficit on track, big cuts have been proposed in healthcare spending.
Mr Bush wants to cut spending on Medicare - the healthcare programme for the poor, elderly and disabled - by $35.9bn over the next five years.
Savings are also sought in vocational education, justice and transportation.
A group of distinguished experts and scholars, including Robert M. Bowman, James H. Fetzer, Wayne Madsen, John McMurtry, Morgan Reynolds, and Andreas von Buelow, have concluded that senior government officials have covered up crucial facts about what really happened on 9/11.posted by Cyndy | link | | |
They have joined with others in common cause as members of "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" (S9/11T), because they are convinced, based on their own research, that the administration has been deceiving the nation about critical events in New York and Washington, D.C.
"Soon after Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes and jobs, President Bush said the region looked like it had been obliterated by a weapon. It was. Indifference is a weapon of mass destruction. And the Bush Administration's indifference to the economic security of New Orleans residents continues to this day.
"For the 500,000 evacuees still not back in their homes, unemployment is epidemic: About one-quarter of whites, and one-half of African-Americans, are still out of work. It's not because jobs are scarce; in fact, there is a labor shortage in New Orleans. Most of those who have returned from the Katrina diaspora have found jobs. The massive unemployment is caused by the lack of housing near the reconstruction job sites.
"The indifferent Bush Administration, through the now-infamous FEMA, is compounding the unemployment problems of hurricane victims. FEMA located the largest temporary housing facility for evacuees ninety-one miles from New Orleans, in Baker, Louisiana. That's hardly a reasonable commute, especially for low-income folks. Barry Kaufman,
business manager of Local 689 of the Construction and General Laborers, told the New York Times he had "at least 2,000" evacuees willing to take cleanup jobs. The trouble was getting them there; the local's hiring hall, along with thousands of evacuees, has been displaced to Baton Rouge, more than an hour's drive away.
"So the cleanup jobs are going to out-of-town contractors, young single out-of-towners and undocumented workers. Not that these folks are getting a great deal either: President Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, requiring that the area's average wage be paid on all federal construction projects. George Miller led the fight in Congress to roll back that suspension. But the President also lifted
the requirement that all federal contractors have an affirmative-action plan, and the Department of Homeland Security granted a waiver to employers from collecting the immigration status of reconstruction hires.
"Unlike the damage caused by Katrina, these problems are entirely man-made -- and they can be solved. Several steps can be taken to address the employment problems the Administration has exacerbated. First, we need to put housing near jobs. ACORN has recommended that temporary housing facilities be re-sited in New Orleans, or as near
the city as possible.
"Second, all federal reconstruction contracts, subcontracts and grants should require corporate recipients to hire locally. A high standard, such as the 50 percent requirement in Senator Ted Kennedy's bill, or the 40 percent level in the Congressional Black Caucus's bill, should be the guide.
"Third, let's recognize that New Orleans today is an extreme microcosm of America -- saddled with a broken infrastructure and significant unemployment at a time when federal budget deficits are peaking and dampening the prospects of adequate rebuilding money. Nationally, estimates of what it will take to fix our crumbling
infrastructure exceed $1 trillion.
"Where will the money come from? Congress should direct the Federal Reserve to make zero-interest loans available to states and municipalities for the express purpose of modernizing and repairing our nation's schools, water systems, bridges and streets. These loans would be integrated into the normal open-market operations of the Fed, which controls the nation's money supply in a similar way.
"I will be introducing the Repairing America's Infrastructure Act, a bill that already has bipartisan support, in the upcoming session of Congress. While creatively financing the rebuilding of New Orleans, we can start rebuilding the rest of America's infrastructure -- and creating good jobs, with fair wages, in the process."
... when seated, pay attention to the sensation of breathing; when walking, notice the feeling of moving your feet; and whenever you find that your mind has wandered into thought, simply come back to the mere awareness of sensation. Once meditators have developed an ability to concentrate on the flow of physical sensations in this way, they are encouraged to pay attention to the entire range of their experience. The practice from then on is to be precisely aware, moment by moment, of the full tumult of consciousness and its contents: sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, intentions, and emotions. Of critical importance for the purposes of science: there are no unjustified beliefs or metaphysics that need be adopted at all.
'As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies, we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and to ensure the minimal requirements for biosocial survival to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.'
~ R D Laing in The Politics of Experience.