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[Apr. 4th, 2008|04:48 pm] |
Telling It Like It Wasn't
Friday, April 4, 2008; 12:00 AM
Philip Geyelin was editorial page editor of The Washington Post from 1968 to 1979. This anecdotal account of the riot -- and its coverage -- was first published on April 11, 1968.
In a riot, as in other things, McCluhan may be right: the medium can become the message. And the President's Riot Commission may be right, too. While the message may be pure truth, it can also get badly garbled when the Almighty Eye tries to focus on the phantasmagoria of urban rioting.
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| International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination |
[Mar. 21st, 2008|12:50 pm] |
RACIST PRACTICES PERPETUATE SOCIAL, ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES, UNDERMINE DEVELOPMENT,
SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL IN MESSAGE ON INTERNATIONAL DAY
UN.ORG
Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, observed 21 March:
On 21 March 1960, police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators protesting racially discriminatory laws in Sharpeville, South Africa. 69 people died and scores more were injured. Every year, the world commemorates that massacre to focus attention on the fight against racism wherever and whenever it occurs.
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| The War That Never Ends |
[Mar. 20th, 2008|11:13 am] |
In These Times
Iraq Veterans Against the War’s ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings revealed the awful truths of the occupation and the ongoing struggle for those who have returned home.
By Jacob Wheeler
Last Memorial Day, Sgt. Kristofer Goldsmith tried to kill himself. He had just been stop-lossed along with 80,000 other soldiers as part of the surge of U.S. forces to be sent to Iraq in the Bush administration’s last-ditch attempt at victory. Goldsmith already suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), though Veterans Affairs (VA) refused to diagnose him. His contract with the army was almost up, and he couldn’t bear the thought of an 18-month deployment.
Like the dozens of disgruntled veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who testified at the Iraq Veterans Against the War’s (IVAW) emotional and groundbreaking “Winter Soldier” hearings, held from March 13-16 at the National Labor College near Washington D.C., Goldsmith had enlisted as a proud American eager to defend his country and trusting of the government that would send him into battle. Goldsmith hails from Long Island, and a day after watching smoke pour out of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, he had told friends that he “wanted to kill everyone in the Middle East.”
Goldsmith arrived in the sprawling ghetto of Baghdad’s Sadr City at age 19. He admits to following the command of his superiors and taking photos of unearthed dead bodies, more as war trophies than as evidence. “The images of dead bodies are burned into my memory,” Goldsmith said. His unit harassed the local population, and stopped cars, even as someone’s wife was going into labor in the back seat. And one day he trained his weapon on a six-year-old Iraqi boy pointing a stick at him as if it were an AK-47. “We were so desensitized. … The U.S. government put me in that position,” he said. “It took a lot of thinking not to kill the boy that day.”
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| Can the Dalai Lama resign? |
[Mar. 18th, 2008|10:17 am] |
The Dalai Lama has said he will resign if the violence continues in Tibet. But how can he quit a position he was born into?
BBC
China has blamed the Buddhist spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, for orchestrating violence after days of rioting by Tibetans protesting at Chinese rule.
While denying accusations of inciting violence in Tibet, the Dalai Lama - who endorses non-violent protest - has gone so far as threatening to "completely resign" if the situation veers out of control.
But can the man many Tibetans consider as their leader just throw in the towel?
The crux of the answer is that the Dalai Lama has two roles - religious and political - and he can only resign from one of them.
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| oldie, but a goodie |
[Mar. 12th, 2008|09:53 pm] |
Christopher Lee McCuin, 25, from Tyler, Texas in the United States has been arrested after police found him possibly preparing to eat the body parts of his dead girlfriend, Jana Shearer aged 21. He was also charged with stabbing his ex-wife's boyfriend, William Veasley, 42.
According to reports, Shearer's mother was told by McCuin to "look in the garage" where she discovered the mutilated body of her daughter. She then flagged down a police officer on the road.
McCuin called 911 after the mother left the house. According to reports, he told the dispatcher that he was boiling Shearer's body parts and preparing to eat them. When police got to his home, they discovered one of Shearer's ears boiling in a pot, and an unnamed piece of her flesh on the kitchen table, with silverware placed beside it. The rest of her body had several "chunks" missing from it, according to the Tyler Morning Telegraph quoting Sheriff J.B. Smith of the Smith County Sheriff's Department.
Police later found out that McCuin had stabbed his ex-wife's boyfriend, and also broke into Tyler Custom Openings, a local business, sometime on Friday or Saturday. He started by going to Shearer's home on Friday January 4 to have a discussion with her, but she was never seen alive again. Before stabbing Veasley, he beat Shearer "with a blunt object, multiple times" to death. On Saturday morning, he arrived at his ex-wife's home and fought with Veasley, stabbing him. He is currently in critical condition at a local hospital.
McCuin then broke into the Tyler Custom Openings and then went to his mother's house where he took her to his home to show her what he had done. Although McCuin was inside the house when police arrived, he was able to escape and was chased for a short distance before being caught again.
McCuin is currently being held on a US$2,000,000 bail at Smith County jail.
full story:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/01/06/texas.slaying.ap/index.html#cnnSTCVideo |
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| Security hole at Obama events? |
[Feb. 27th, 2008|11:37 pm] |
Apparently the U.S. Secret Service has established a pattern of screening early comers with metal detectors etc, doing so slowly, and then dropping the whole screening idea later on to get the crowds inside.
The story appears to have been broken by the Dallas-area Star Telegram:
DALLAS -- Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.
The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.
Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department's homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order -- apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service -- was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena's vacant seats before Obama came on.
full story
Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Making Light has done you and me the favor of reading through some of the 50+ pages of comments on that article, many of which seem to imply that this is not an isolated incident, but rather the M.O. of the Secret Service this past year. Repeated comparisons are drawn to high schools, sporting events, and other places in which screening twenty thousand people in two hours is a normal thing. "Dude, this is the town that shot JFK" is also an unescapable observation.
Her post is very long and very well written and is itself a summary of much, much more, and I shouldn't try to summarize it here.
Go read it yourself.
The Secret Service is sticking up for themselves, and Obama isn't calling them out. Then again, if I had bodyguards who I thought were slacking because they didn't like me, but I couldn't afford to replace them, I wouldn't antagonize them myself. "I am easy to shoot, everyone" is also not typically a favored strategy in life. |
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| To Denounce and Reject |
[Feb. 27th, 2008|01:57 pm] |
Why the Farrakhan litmus test must go.
By Marjorie Valbrun
TheRoot.com
Updated: 10:58 AM ET Feb 27, 2008
Feb. 27, 2008 --It was the fall of 1985 when Min. Louis Farrakhan burst onto the New York City political scene. I was a journalism student at Columbia University at the time and, truth be told, I was woefully naive and politically uninformed. I had only a vague idea of who Farrakhan was until he gave a controversial Madison Square Garden speech to 25,000 people.
His arrival would prove to be one of my earliest lessons in the hypocrisy of the media and of the white political establishment. One after another prominent black political leaders were sought out by reporters and asked if they would publicly denounce, condemn, or repudiate Farrakhan. White political leaders called on black leaders who did not respond to promptly do so, and harshly criticized those who refused. It was all very surreal, and even as an inexperienced political watcher and budding student journalist, I knew there was something very wrong with this picture.
Bullying black leaders to represent the entire black race and to speak and think as one, while also treating every loud-mouthed, controversial black leader as if they represent the opinions, political views and personal aspirations of every black American, seemed to me to be a journalistic and political double-standard that was rarely, if ever, applied to white leaders and politicians.
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| Survey: US Religious Landscape in Flux |
[Feb. 25th, 2008|02:59 pm] |
By ERIC GORSKI
The Associated Press
Monday, February 25, 2008; 12:00 PM
-- The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.
The study released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is unusual for it sheer scope, relying on interviews with more than 35,000 adults to document a diverse and dynamic U.S. religious population.
While much of the study confirms earlier findings _ mainline Protestant churches are in decline, non-denominational churches are gaining and the ranks of the unaffiliated are growing _ it also provides a deeper look behind those trends, and of smaller religious groups.
"The American religious economy is like a marketplace _ very dynamic, very competitive," said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum. "Everyone is losing, everyone is gaining. There are net winners and losers, but no one can stand still. Those groups that are losing significant numbers have to recoup them to stay vibrant."
The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey estimates the United States is 78 percent Christian and about to lose its status as a majority Protestant nation, at 51 percent and slipping.
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| Fidel’s Farewell |
[Feb. 25th, 2008|11:44 am] |
The New Yorker
by Alma Guillermoprieto
And that it should end so ingloriously! No fighting to the last man at the battlements, no martyr’s surrender to an assassin’s bullet, only a creaking, shuffling exit through the ward’s doors, hospital gown flapping. We are less than a year away from the half-century marker of a most astonishing marathon, but even this artist of endurance must bow to fate and acknowledge that it’s time to go. Vámonos, Fidel: no one is standing in the way.
So he leaves the field: Fidel Castro Ruz, son of a wealthy Spanish plantation owner and a Cuban washerwoman; rowdy street fighter and student leader; unstoppably audacious politician; revolutionary icon of the lordly profile; self-invented tropical socialist; epic enemy of the United States. In 1953, the extraordinary strength of his conviction persuaded more than a hundred men (and two women) to join him in an attack on one of the dictator Fulgencio Batista’s principal military garrisons. Nearly half his men died in the ill-fated attack and its aftermath; he escaped unharmed and emerged a hero. In December, 1956, following a period of imprisonment and exile, he led another improbable attack—this time by sea—against Batista. Again, he lost nearly all his men but survived, along with his kid brother, Raúl, and a scruffy Argentine named Ernesto Guevara. Washington had tired of the unsavory Batista, and it left the dictator to his enemies. On January 8, 1959, Fidel—in Cuba he would forever be known by his first name—entered Havana in triumph, promising Cubans an alternative to what had seemed their inescapable destiny as a Caribbean island. No more whoredom and ruffled cha-cha singers, no more death or blindness for want of simple prescription medicine, no more surrendering smiles for the tourist and the client, no more begging.
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[Feb. 24th, 2008|12:13 pm] |
Al Jazeera is doing a poll to gauge world opinion of the U.S. presidential race. The current results are here.
1) Go vote!
2) Bearing in mind that this is an unscientific poll of 9,000 Al Jazeera readers... the results are pretty interesting.
Barack Obama is a clear worldwide favorite, followed by Romney*, Paul, Huckabee, Clinton, Gravel, and McCain, in that order. He sweeps every region except the Middle East, where he scores a whopping 4.5%. The only other place where he gets less than half the vote is the United States.
Although the number one candidate (by a margin of 8%) is a Democrat, the next three favored candidates are all Republicans.
Collectively, the world would rather see Mike Gravel in office than John McCain, who comes in dead last. The only region where McCain garners more than 7% of the vote is South America, where he gets 15%. Not surprisingly, the man who wants to stay in Iraq for 10,000 years polls at 1.8% in the Middle East.
Although, who is the prevailing candidate in the Middle East? It's Romney - who garners three quarters of the vote there, and has 1-3% support everywhere else. This is the man who supports Israel and the "surge" in Iraq, and refuses to set a timetable for withdrawal. So if people in the Middle East aren't voting based on Israel policy and the War on Terror... what are they voting on?
* not in the race anymore, but was in it when the poll began, and has not been removed from the poll. |
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| Raelians Rocket From Clones to Clitorises |
[Feb. 19th, 2008|09:07 am] |
By Eliza Strickland Wired
The Raelians have championed some strange causes in the movement's 25-year history, including aliens and human clones, but now they are going to bat for a body part -- the clitoris.
The cult's leader, Rael, whose real name is Claude Vorilhon, has become outraged by the custom of female genital cutting, the primarily African practice in which part of a girl's genitalia is sliced away.
Now the Raelian Movement has resolved to build a hospital in the West African country of Burkina Faso, where women could come to have their clitorises "reconstructed."
"Rael thought this is a crime against humanity," says Lara Terstenjak, a spokeswoman for Clitoraid, a nonprofit set up by the Raelians to sponsor genital surgeries.
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| Annals of American History |
[Feb. 18th, 2008|09:45 am] |
The Water Cure
Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.
by Paul Kramer
The New Yorker
February 25, 2008
Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.
The Americans were not done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to imperialists that the Philippines, Spain’s largest colony, might serve as an effective “stepping stone” to China’s markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event of war, and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore George Dewey returned the exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines independent in June, and organized a government led by the Philippine élite.
During the next half year, it became clear that American and Filipino visions for the islands’ future were at odds. U.S. forces seized Manila from Spain—keeping the army of their ostensible ally Aguinaldo from entering the city—and President William McKinley refused to recognize Filipino claims to independence, pushing his negotiators to demand that Spain cede sovereignty over the islands to the United States, while talking about Filipinos’ need for “benevolent assimilation.” Aguinaldo and some of his advisers, who had been inspired by the United States as a model republic and had greeted its soldiers as liberators, became increasingly suspicious of American motivations. When, after a period of mounting tensions, a U.S. sentry fired on Filipino soldiers outside Manila in February, 1899, the second war erupted, just days before the Senate ratified a treaty with Spain securing American sovereignty over the islands in exchange for twenty million dollars. In the next three years, U.S. troops waged a war to “free” the islands’ population from the regime that Aguinaldo had established. The conflict cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and about four thousand U.S. soldiers.
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| U.S. Officials Say Broken Satellite Will Be Shot Down |
[Feb. 14th, 2008|03:55 pm] |
By DAVID STOUT and THOM SHANKER
Published: February 14, 2008
NYT
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to shoot down a disabled 5,000-pound spy satellite before it enters the atmosphere in early March, a senior Pentagon official said Thursday.
The official said the operation was expected to be carried out from a Navy cruiser that would fire a missile specially fitted for the mission. Other details on the timing and location of the operation were not available, pending a Thursday afternoon briefing at the Defense Department. Navy ships routinely carry missiles to shoot down aircraft.
It was not immediately known if the operation was prompted by fears that the satellite’s debris would pose a danger if the satellite were allowed to tumble back into the atmosphere on its own; by reasons of secrecy, or by some combination of factors.
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| US charges six suspects over 9/11 |
[Feb. 11th, 2008|11:47 am] |
BBC
The Pentagon has announced charges against six Guantanamo Bay prisoners over their alleged involvement in the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US.
Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the six, who include alleged plot mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The charges, the first for Guantanamo inmates directly related to 9/11, are expected to be heard by a controversial military tribunal system.
About 3,000 people died in the hijacked plane attacks.
Tribunal process
Brig Gen Thomas Hartmann, a legal adviser to the head of the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, said the charges alleged a "long-term, highly sophisticated plan by al-Qaeda to attack the US".
Sheikh Mohammed, who was said to have been al-Qaeda's third in command when he was captured in Pakistan in March 2003, has reportedly admitted to decapitating kidnapped US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.
The other five defendants are Ramzi Binalshibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Mohammed al-Qahtani.
Any trials would be held by military tribunal under the terms of the Military Commissions Act, passed by the US Congress in 2006. The Act set up tribunals to try terror suspects who were not US citizens.
The law is also being challenged by two prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who say they are being deprived of their rights to have their cases heard by a US civilian court.
After the release of hundreds of Guantanamo detainees without charge, about 275 prisoners remain in the detention centre in Cuba. The US says it plans to try about 80 of them.
Nineteen men hijacked four planes in the 9/11 attacks. Two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York, another the Pentagon in Washington and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. |
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| African-Americans and Caucasians have similar emotional brain activity when seeing African-Americans |
[Feb. 7th, 2008|10:00 am] |
African-Americans and Caucasians have similar emotional brain activity when seeing African-Americans
10 May 2005
African Americans and Caucasians viewing African American faces display extremely similar changes in the activity of brain structures that respond to emotional events, a new UCLA study finds.
The changes occur in the amygdala, a region of the brain that serves as an "alarm" to activate a cascade of other biological systems to protect the body in times of danger, said Matthew D. Lieberman, assistant professor of psychology at UCLA and lead author of the study.
The findings will be published May 8 in the online version of Nature Neuroscience, and later in the print version.
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| Media on Healthcare: |
[Feb. 4th, 2008|10:20 am] |
Saying what they don’t mean
FAIR
By Janine Jackson
At the end of an unusually long editorial headlined “The High Cost of Healthcare,” the November 25 New York Times dismissed the idea of publicly funded universal healthcare, which all other industrialized countries use to provide medical treatment to all of their citizens while spending much less per capita than the U.S.
Framing a public health insurance system as a sentimental lefty dream, the paper’s editorialists wrote that “deep in their hearts, many liberals yearn for a single-payer system.” But single-payer, the paper assures us, is “no panacea for the cost problem” and has “limited political support.”
Knocking down the straw man that single-payer would solve all healthcare problems isn’t much of an achievement; while advocates point out that single-payer systems in other countries cost far less than the U.S.’s profit-dominated healthcare industry, the main benefit they point to of universal health coverage is that it would provide everyone with healthcare.
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| The Minsky Moment |
[Jan. 28th, 2008|09:53 am] |
by John Cassidy
February 4, 2008
The New Yorker
Twenty-five years ago, when most economists were extolling the virtues of financial deregulation and innovation, a maverick named Hyman P. Minsky maintained a more negative view of Wall Street; in fact, he noted that bankers, traders, and other financiers periodically played the role of arsonists, setting the entire economy ablaze. Wall Street encouraged businesses and individuals to take on too much risk, he believed, generating ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. The only way to break this pattern was for the government to step in and regulate the moneymen.
Many of Minsky’s colleagues regarded his “financial-instability hypothesis,” which he first developed in the nineteen-sixties, as radical, if not crackpot. Today, with the subprime crisis seemingly on the verge of metamorphosing into a recession, references to it have become commonplace on financial Web sites and in the reports of Wall Street analysts. Minsky’s hypothesis is well worth revisiting. In trying to revive the economy, President Bush and the House have already agreed on the outlines of a “stimulus package,” but the first stage in curing any malady is making a correct diagnosis.
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| Group plans march against 'Jena Six' on MLK Day |
[Jan. 18th, 2008|09:18 am] |
USA Today
By Abbey Brown and Billy Gunn The (Alexandria, La.) Town Talk
JENA, La. — Some Nationalist Movement protesters planning to march through Jena on Martin Luther King Jr. Day will be armed, according to their spokesman.
The Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement, which describes itself as "pro-majority," organized the rally to be held Monday. The group plans to protest the celebration of the slain civil rights leader and the support that six black Jena teens charged with beating a white classmate have received.
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Pro-majority? Looks like USA today decided to publish an unedited press release from a white supremacist group, that promises to “bring their ‘tools for empowerment’” which one can only assume include shotguns and flaming crosses. Thanks Gannet! When you said “The Nation’s Newspaper” I has no idea you meant the Aryan Nation. |
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| How the Pentagon Planted a False Story |
[Jan. 17th, 2008|09:01 am] |
IPS
by Gareth Porter
Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the Jan. 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.
The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the Navy itself.
Then the Navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that U.S. warships would "explode" in "a few seconds." Although it was ostensibly a Navy production, IPS has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defense Department.
The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three U.S. warships occurred very early on Saturday Jan. 6, Washington time. But no information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.
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| Why people believe weird things about money |
[Jan. 14th, 2008|10:52 pm] |
Why people believe weird things about money
Evolution accounts for a lot of our strange ideas about finances.
By Michael Shermer
January 13, 2008
Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.
Surprisingly -- stunningly, in fact -- research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?
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