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Scarabus
Crawling toward the sunlight
Archive for December, 2010
Latest good stuff from Ricardo Levins Morales at RLM Arts
Friday, December 31st, 2010Coming kvetch in Wingnuttery?
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010I saw this today in The Village Voice blog:
Alana [S.] has “gay, bisexual, and transgendered friends,” and accepts that “gayness is not a taboo anymore.” (“That said,” she adds, “I can not endorse gay marriage.”) So now it’s her turn to be the victim. “Kids (like me!) eventually grow brains and realize that they’ve been suckered out of a major, major requisite for happiness,” she said. You can’t put your arms around a fluid fertilization medium!
Her plight, and that of others in the “D-Generation” (for “donated,” not for the very fine Jesse Malin band, alas), is recorded at Family Scholars under the “My Daddy’s Name is Donor” tag. There you may read stories like “Donor Kids Crave Genetic Identity” and weep. And they’re all over that movie with the photogenic, inseminated lesbians — a Family Scholar is here to tell you that “in real life, there is no script for these kids,” and you’ll certainly hear from her again come Oscar time.
Expect more op-eds on this theme until they get a Proposition on the California ballot. It’s time someone put a stop to activist embryologists!
My first thought was that, if it weren’t for in vitro fertilization (last alternative for many infertile couples), a lot of these persons wouldn’t be around to worry about this. Whatever. More interesting were some thoughts about logical equivalencies.
“You can’t put your arms around fertilization medium!”
True. But neither can you put your arms around seminal fluid.
Of course in Aubrey Beardsley’s world…
Fears leads to virtual slavery
Monday, December 27th, 2010
What exactly does the term “terror” mean these days, here in the U.S.? Especially to law enforcement, intelligence, security, legislation, administration of justice, executive control and manipulation?
Are they, more or less deliberately, expanding the perceived threat of terror while beclouding its legitimate definition? After all, a terrified population is a manipulable population, suckers for a tyrant who promises to make them safe and keep them strong. Remember the 1930’s? Italy? Germany?
In taking the oath of office, the president swears to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. But in referring to what they had sworn to, both George Bush and Barack Obama have talked only about “protecting the American people.” On the pretense of pursuing the impossible goal of “keeping the American people safe” both men have, ironically, violated their actual oath. They have systematically dismantled many of our most important Constitutional freedoms.
How far might this dangerous change in perspective, reflected in the seemingly innocuous change in phrasing, actually take us? Glad you asked! How’s this for an ironically symbolic example? Check this post from AlterNet. (Remember, the purpose of the ACLU is to protect Constitutional rights.)
ACLU’s Holiday Message Labeled ‘Suspicious Activity’ By Tennessee Counter-Terrorism Officials
Tennessee’s state counter-terrorism officials at the Tennessee Fusion Center maintain an open-source internet map which identifies “terrorism events and other suspicious activity.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee found its way briefly onto the map earlier this month, after the civil rights group penned a letter to school superintendents encouraging “schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.” The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports what happened next:
The Fusion Center’s Internet map is part of a national map maintained by globalincendentmap.com. Information is provided by agencies across the U.S. It includes various blinking icons. The map’s label originally was titled Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity.
Near Nashville, a blinking hexagon-shaped symbol with an exclamation point read “ACLU cautions TN schools about ‘observing one religious holiday.’” The hexagon symbol, when clicked on, originally stated “suspicious activity.” But it later was changed to say “general nonincident terrorism news” after inquiries by reporters.
As reported by the Nashville Times Free Press, The ACLU failed to see any humor in the irony:
ACLU bristles over terror list
By: Andy SherWednesday, Dec. 22, 2010
NASHVILLE — State anti-terrorism officials listed the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee on an Internet map detailing “terrorism events and other suspicious activity” after the group warned schools to ensure holiday celebrations “are inclusive.”
ACLU-Tennessee Executive Director Hedy Weinberg called the Tennessee Fusion Center’s tracking of First Amendment-protected activity “deeply disturbing.”
While saying improving and sharing anti-terrorism intelligence among different levels of government is “legitimate and important,” Weinberg said, “Equating a group’s attempts to protect religious freedom in Tennessee with suspicious activity related to terrorism is outrageous. Religious freedom is a founding principle in our Constitution — not fodder for overzealous law enforcement.”
<snip>
Mike Browning, a spokesman for the Office of Homeland Security, said “certainly it was not our intent to post it [ACLU's letter to schools] as a terrorist incident. That was a mistake.”
Torture is evil. Torture of Manning is evil.
Monday, December 27th, 2010Note: This isn’t a newsflash, but I wanted to point toward better documentation than I can provide.
Private Bradley Manning is being tortured. Torture is never justified and rarely productive — never dependably productive — regardless of what George Bush or his mentor the fictional “Jack Bauer” might suggest. You want an example? Torture was routine during the Renaissance in the West. Check the “confessions” of the monk Savanarola in Florence.
In writing of Savonarola I use the plural, “confessions,” deliberately. Under severe torture he gave a false confession in order to stop the pain. Released from the pain, he recanted. Tortured again, he repeated the process. Eventually he was burned at the stake.
At least Savonorola was given a trial, though. The evidence might have been trumped up. The judges might have determined in advance what the verdict and sentence would be. But at least he was given a trial. Bradley Manning has been convicted of nothing. He has not had the benefit of even a show trial. But he is being destroyed psychologically and physically by glaringly cruel and unusual punishment.
It’s a violation of the international laws to which nations have agreed for the purpose of resolving differences in a civilized way, protecting each other’s citizens when in foreign custody, and protecting their own citizens from internal temptation to violate human (and in our case Constitutional) rights.
I don’t care whether you’re “left” or “right,” Democrat or Republican. This is about whether you’re rational and civilized. Republican Bush detained and tortured U.S. citizens and foreign nationals without warrant or trial? That was evil. Democrat Obama detains and tortures U.S. citizens and foreign nationals without warrant or trial? That’s equally evil.The act itself is evil, regardless of who the person responsible might be.
If the cost of preventing domination by foreign tyrants or terrorists is to submit to domestic tyrants and terrorists, then what’s the point? This isn’t just a Devil’s bargain. It’s also a fool’s bargain. Story from Huffington Post, though citing stories from dependable, non-ideological, easily corroborated standard sources:
Daphne Eviatar
Senior Associate, Human Rights First’s Law and Security Program
Posted: December 23, 2010 12:21 PMThis past May, PFC Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst who allegedly boasted of leaking video and documents to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, was arrested. Originally held in Kuwait, in July he was transferred to a prison at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia. (Firedoglake has a helpful timeline of events here.)
According to Manning’s military defense lawyer, David Coombs, Manning is being held in maximum custody, alone in a cell about six by 12 feet. He does not see any other inmates and has only minimal exchanges with guards, who wake him up at 5:00 a.m. daily and check on him every five minutes. Coombs writes: “PFC Manning is required to respond in some affirmative manner. At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay.”
According to Coombs, Manning eats all his meals in his cell, is not allowed to exercise in his cell (if he tries to do sit-ups the guards stop him) and is not allowed sheets or pillows to sleep with.
The military’s explanation of these conditions is twofold. A Quantico prison spokesman told Agence France-Press that Manning is being held in “maximum custody” because he is considered a risk to national security.
Manning is also said to be a threat to himself, given the serious trouble he’s in. As a result, he’s on “Prevention of Injury” watch, which accounts for the lack of sheets and pillows.
Jesus would have been a hospitable Jew
Saturday, December 25th, 2010As Watertiger reminds today, Jesus would undoubtedly have celebrated Hannukah. And he would also have been a good host, in the tradition of the Middle East.
Poor, pitiful CEOs :-(
Saturday, December 25th, 2010A wonderful post I caught today at T r u t h o u t, written by the inimitable Jim Hightower. This guy can always be counted on to nail important topics with laugh-out-loud acerbic wit:
Obama to the Corporate Powers: I Feel Your Pain
Thursday 23 December 2010
by: Jim Hightower, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Guess who’s whining the loudest these days, wailing that they’re getting a raw deal from Barack Obama.
Not the unemployed and barely employed – even though the White House has blithely ignored their critical need for a national jobs program. Not the poor, even though their ranks are swelling as millions of Americans fall out of the middle class.
No, no, the most insistent demand for attention is coming from way above the poor and the middle class. Believe it or not, it’s the CEOs of Americas biggest corporations and the top bankers of Wall Street who’re stamping their little Gucci-clad feet, bawling that they should be getting more love and support from the president.
It seems that the feelings of these precious ones have been hurt by Obama’s occasional condemnation of the stupefying greed that’s been shown by the likes of health insurance executives and Wall Street banksters. As one CEO put it, Obama’s attitude “felt too much like we were the bad guys.”
Boo-Hoo. Quick saying mean things about me, Mr. President.
Sorry for the hiatus.
Saturday, December 25th, 2010We’re visiting family in Atlanta, so I haven’t had much time to blog as opposed to enjoying snuggling my granddaughter.
Then, today, my rassafratz MacBook started jerking me around. Well, not the hardware, but some part of the software. But I’m still trying!
This being Wikipedia and my being unaware of many of these observances, I must urge caveat emptor. Still, for edification: cultural and/or religious celebrations on or near the Winter Solstice.
Whatever your culture or faith, best wishes for your personal celebration. And best wishes that we might gain in knowledge of and respect for one another. Celebrations are best when they’re shared.
The Roman god Mithras is pissed because Constantine stole his birthday and gave it to Jesus … in the 4th century of a sort of common era whose calendar includes some and excludes many.
(My very clever daughter has suggested a cool follow-up. Later.)
Still relevant!
Monday, December 20th, 2010I don’t know I missed this the first time, but it fits absolutely perfectly with the study showing how misinformed Fox viewers/listeners are. (Speaking of which, did you read the LA Times, hardly a bastion of the fictitious “liberal media,” finally had enough, telling Fox that the “network should stop calling itself an objective news source”?)
To “self-parody” is to say such outrageous things that to make you look foolish one need only quote you back to yourself, right? Looking for an example? Here it is. Knock yourself out!
The only question after all this is whether to laugh, cry, scream, or…? The internet is the only defense, and it’s under serious attack. On the one hand corporations are lobbying congress and the FCC BIG time to allow them to control content and access. On the other governments (being led right now by the Obama administration) and corporations (like Bank of America, already facing serious civil and criminal charges for their contributions to the mortgage/foreclosure crisis), governments and corporations, are using the Wikileaks embarrassment as an excuse severely to censor access to the net to publish or to read or to interact with other citizens.
If you’re new to these ideas, start by checking sites like Freepress and Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Disclosure: I give donations to both organizations.) To see opposing views, check sites like these: Debatepedia and NetCompetition.
All the news that’s fit to print? Wrong!
Sunday, December 19th, 2010The masthead of the NYT has borne this slogan for over a century: “All the news that’s fit to print.” Never has been true, of course, but it’s definitely worse now than in past decades. Sometimes they do the right thing immediately, as in publishing the Wikileaks documents. Sometimes they do the right thing belatedly, as in James Risen’s story about the Bush administration and CIA’s role in the campaign of deceit that led our nation like lobotomized sheep into the oil war in Iraq. Sometimes they do the wrong thing, as in publishing Judith Miller’s stenographic repetition of the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq.
And sometimes they totally ignore news that’s not just “fit” to be printed, but so far beyond merely “fit” that to bury or ignore it is a serious failure of journalistic judgement and integrity. (I say “failure” out of generosity. I should probably have said “deliberate, shameful dereliction.”) Consider this:
“Thursday and Friday … over a hundred US veterans opposed to US wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, and their civilian supporters, chained and tied themselves to the White House fence during an early snowstorm to say enough is enough.” 135 of them were arrested, including “Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who used to provide the president’s daily briefings; Daniel Ellsberg, who released the government’s Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration; and Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for [ironically in this context] the NYT.”
(Everything in quotes should be credited to Truthout. I’ve made slight alterations for the sake of economy and consistency of grammar and usage. I urge readers to go to the source, not just to )
“Making the media cover-up of the protest all the more outrageous was the fact that most news media did report on Friday, the day after the protest, the results of the latest poll of American attitudes towards the Afghanistan War, an ABC/Washington Post Poll which found that 60% of Americans now feel that war has ‘not been worth it.’ That’s a big increase from the 53% who said they opposed the war in July.”
Did you catch that? The poll showing that a majority of Americans oppose the war was conducted by ABC and the Washington Post. The dry statistics of the poll were given dramatic flesh-and-blood exemplification the same weekend, in Washington—you know, as in Washington Post? But neither ABC nor the Washington Post foregrounded the connection. In fact, they buried it. And so did the NYT. The obvious question is “Why?” Incompetence? Unconscious bias? Deliberate collusion? Unconscious collusion, fostered by an inside the Beltway smugness and knee-jerk willingness to trade integrity for access?
Fox responds … typically!
Saturday, December 18th, 2010For an on-line NYT article, Brian Stelter got a response from Fox News about the just-released study revealing that Fox viewers overall are significantly more misinformed than viewers of any other cable or broadcast network. Not surprisingly, the response was to deny, not just the value, but also the truthfulness of the study. On what basis? A claim that undergraduates at the University of Maryland, whose faculty and graduate students conducted the project, study less than those at other schools. (My previous post deals further with the study.)
Asked for comment on the study, Fox News seemingly dismissed the findings. In a statement, Michael Clemente, who is the senior vice president of news editorial for the network, said: “The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.”
Mr. Clemente oversees every hour of objective news programming on Fox News, which is by far the nation’s most popular cable news channel.
For the record, the Princeton Review says the University of Maryland ranks among the “Best Northeastern Colleges.” It was No. 19 on the Review’s list of “Best Party Schools.”
The study was backed by two parts of the University of Maryland, the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies.