Morning Dharmenizens, Skip Sunshine here with the weather for the week…
May 19, 2008 archive
May 19 2008
Docudharma Times Monday May 19
Seeking More Oil
Bush Leaves With A Fruit Basket
China Faces Economic Aftershocks
Fearful After the Quake, People Shun Jobs, Homes
SHIFANG, China, May 18 — Statistically speaking, Zhang Zhengjie and his factory are fine.Number of workers injured: zero. Number dead: zero. The factory’s steel-reinforced walls shook but held during last week’s massive earthquake. After it was over, the only evidence that something nightmarish had taken place in other parts of the city was the presence of minor fractures in pipes that were easily fixed.
May 19 2008
Muse in the Morning
 The Lure of the Gold
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Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…
May 19 2008
New Reports: U.S.-South Korean Killing Fields, 100,000+ Executed
Associated Press is reporting shocking news of mass graves being uncovered in South Korea. The expose is partly due to the work of a South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The mass executions of many tens of thousands took place in 1950, only weeks after North Korean armies invaded the South. One mass grave was exposed by a typhoon a few years ago. Recently declassified U.S. documents showed the Americans had taken pictures of a mass killing outside Daejeon. As reported at ABC News:
May 19 2008
New Reports: U.S.-South Korean Killing Fields, 100,000+ Executed
Associated Press is reporting shocking news of mass graves being uncovered in South Korea. The expose is partly due to the work of a South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The mass executions of many tens of thousands took place in 1950, only weeks after North Korean armies invaded the South. One mass grave was exposed by a typhoon a few years ago. Recently declassified U.S. documents showed the Americans had taken pictures of a mass killing outside Daejeon. As reported at ABC News:
May 19 2008
Happening Now
Mudslide Buries 200 Relief Workers in China Earthquake Zone
BEICHUAN, China – A state news agency says more than 200 relief workers have been buried by a mudslide in Sichuan province.
Updates To Follow As They Become Available
Times London
More than 200 earthquake relief workers have been buried by mudslides in China over the last three days, it was announced today.The state Xinhua news agency said the workers from the Transport Ministry were buried while repairing damaged roads. It did not give a figure for the number of people killed.
May 19 2008
Police State 2.0: It’s Here
cross posted at The Ohm Project: an exercise in resistance
High resolution cameras covering nearly every inch of public space. National IDs crammed with biometric data. Facial recognition software that can’t be defeated even by plastic surgery. And a massive database to connect the cameras, the IDs, all financial and medical data.
It’s not merely resident in the mind’s eye of a screenwriter of the next dystopian thriller. According to Naomi Klein in the latest issue of Rolling Stone , China has already implemented much of the above and is only a year or two away from completing this Information Age 1984 with the eager help of U. S. corporations and an American government that looks the other way as anti-export laws are violated.
Klein says that the latest unrest in Tibet was a test for the ever-expanding system, called the "Golden Shield." And the oppressive infrastructure earned at least an A-. Dissident cell phones were jammed. Information favorable to the protestors was blocked on the Internet. Photos of the participants, especially the leaders, were rapidly disseminated on "Most Wanted" posters on the Internet and the protests were "spun" through Chinese media to make the Tibetans look like violent thugs.
May 19 2008
Monday Brain Teaser
0.5% of the employees of Company X use drugs. Company X therefore decides to administer a drug test to all of its employees. The drug test is 99% accurate and 99% specific (which means that 99% of all positives will be true positives, and 99% of all negatives will be true negatives).
What is the probability that any given positive test will be that of an actual drug user?
May 19 2008
Compassion Is The Answer, But What Is The Question?
No one event triggered this devolution, but it undeniably was pushed along many times by the moral relativism of the last 50 years, when most of society’s widely accepted norms were undermined by the quicksand of nonjudgmentalism; when the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, were abolished in favor of differences that were to be respected if not celebrated, and codified when necessary to surmount widespread public opposition.
Paradoxically, people and institutions whose beliefs do not permit them to tolerate the most abhorrent differences were judged to be evil. Through rigid enforcement of increasingly fascist speech and thought codes, relativists turned America into a nation of lip-biters who with their silence condoned as normal behaviors and beliefs that are irrefutably unnatural and inherently immoral.
snip
No, the [recent California Supreme Court] ruling merely answered homosexuals’ purely emotional plea for cultural acceptance by giving civil unions their proper label – “marriage” – the will of Californians, as democratically expressed twice, and the dark societal consequences be damned.
–Editorial in the May 17, 2008 Waterbury Republican.
link: http://www.rep-am.com/articles…
Anyone who regularly reads my blogs probably thought to log in and find the latest news from Myanmar, or of the earthquake in China.
But today I want to write about something that underpins almost every headline here and abroad: human suffering. The answer on how to understand human suffering has been written about and expounded upon by far more eloquent and profound people than me. Everyone from Martin Luther King, to Gandhi, to the Dalai Lama agrees that compassion is the ultimate answer.
But what is the question?
May 19 2008
They hate Us
But the one thing throughout this period that Americans could always depend on, even after Nixon and the collapse of public faith in the president’s morals, was that the lies the American president told would always be the very best lies that science, computerized research, and Washington’s most devious spooks could produce. Our president may lie, but he will lie effectively and spectacularly, with all the epic stagecraft and lighting and special effects available to the White House publicity apparatus. He is never a hack, never a half-assed, off-the-cuff, squirming, my-dog-ate-my-homework sort of liar. Or at least he wasn’t until George W. Bush came around.
“They hate us for our freedom” was possibly the dumbest, most insulting piece of bullshit ever to escape the lips of an American president.
–Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
They Hate Us.
Yes, They do.
“They Hate Us For Our Freedoms”
The ringing words of presidential banality. Inspiring, after a fashion.
The community Bush limited his comments to hate us.
Not because of our freedoms…they don’t know us
We won’t let them.
They no nothing of our freedoms.
They no nothing of freedom. Not yet.
They know what they dream, and we’re not in those dreams.
Only in their nightmares.
They hate us because they don’t trust us. Not yet.
The people I am limiting my comments to hate Us.
They hate Us for our freedoms.
Conservatives in power and their minions selling it on cable. They.
Liberals like me…someone with questions, actually expecting answers. Us.
Our freedoms, guaranteed. Us.
Freedoms, meddlesome nuisance to Standard Operational Conduct. They.
They hate Us.
May 19 2008
Religion and Politics: John Rawls on Public Reason
Is a Christian presidential candidate allowed to appeal to religion when on the campaign trail? Is a pro-lifer allowed to appeal to his or or interpretation of the Bible? Is an Atheist pro-choicer allowed to appeal to his or her conception of the universe — when making a political argument?
Meta-questions like these, questions about the nature of proper poltical debtate, swirl about in the poltical aptmosphere. Sometimes they are brought up explicitly, more often implicitly, as when one person argues from firmly-held religious stance and another says, “Don’t make your beliefs my law.”
The underlying issue is about the nature of democracy itself — which is to say about poltical convesation in a pluralistic society itself. We want to be pluralistic, and we want to be able to talk to each other. So what is to be done?
This meta-issue can be articulated, and a view about it defended, explicitly. By looking at one such stance, we can hopefully think more clearly about what our own views are: what we think ought to be allowed, and why, in political debate.
May 19 2008
Lasthorseman Presents Believe It Or Not
Precursor Googles
Anomalies of Denver International Airport
Alex Jones “Endgame”
Project Eschelon
If nothing else it’s far more entertaining than any episode of “24”.