Dec 30 2008
If you are as old as I am, you remember the movie The Star Chamber.
It was about a group of judges who met in secret. The would discuss and debate over which criminal who got off due to a technicality that they should put out a “hit” on, and, they would then hire an assassin to kill that person.
I find echo chambers to be much the same thing.
Dec 30 2008
Interesting post over at zuky, who quotes Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine on the present situation in Gaza:
From the standpoint of Tikkun, war is the wrong response. If Israel wants peace with Palestinians, it can achieve it by negotiations based on the Saudi peace initiative; it cannot achieve it by killing more Palestinian civilians or even by wiping out the current generation of Hamas activists. There is no path to peace-peace is the path. And if Israel wants to destroy Hamas, it has one clear way: rebuild Gaza and the West Bank with a massive Marshall Plan type enterprise-adopt our Strategy of Generosity and renounce the strategy of domination. Trust in God, trust in love, trust in kindness, trust in generosity-and give those strategies a ten year chance to work and Israel will get far more security than it will achieve by this latest violation of international law, Torah ethics, and common sense.
I have no expertise on this issue, but I do find that line compelling. Would that we’d all learn that precious path.
Open Thread is hereby Open!
Dec 30 2008
First Lady Laura Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former White House political advisor Karl Rove were seen stumbling out of a 1963 Volkswagen Microbus yesterday, trailing a billowing cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, blinking and waving their hands in front of their faces. Upon emerging from the brightly festooned van, the three high-powered advisers to President George W. Bush immediately walked over to talk to reporters.
The Secretary of State absently munched from a jumbo-sized bag of Doritos® as she told CBS’s Rita Braver,
I think generations pretty soon are going to start to thank this President for what he’s done.
Dec 29 2008
Obama promised that he would investigate and prosecute Bush team for “genuine crimes” because no one is above the law, but he would not prosecute “really dumb policies.” Obama plans to have his AG review the available information to determine if investigations are needed. Well, AG nominee Eric Holder knows that many crimes have been committed:
Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution…. We owe the American people a reckoning.
Dec 29 2008
The NY Times reports from Central Falls, Rhode Island with a City of immigrants fills jail cells with its own.
Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.
Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.
After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt – only blocks from home, but in a separate world.
In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime – people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.
If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.
| A Growing Detention Network
Click the map for larger, interactive map. |
Four at Four continues with wind versus coal and the national power grid, dismal economic news, and the silver lining.
Dec 29 2008
I am in pain. This diary will not be a reasoned presentation of fact. I do not want to make a reasoned statement of fact, even if I could, which is doubtful.
The very title of this diary is not a reasonable statement of fact.
It is the slogan which has been used for well over a century to justify the “supposedly” reasonable Jewish takeover, invasion, acquisition, domination of Palestine. Palestine is seen as “…a land without a people…”, an empty space which the Jewish people, the “…people without a land…”, can claim as their own and set up the state of Israel.
The FACT that this mode of thinking continues into the 21st century is a profound tragedy and a frightening indication that the human species might become extinct. This mode of thinking, of seeing others as less than human, less important, non-existent even, is the basis of war and injustice.
Einstein refered to this mode of thinking when he said that — with the splitting of the atom, everything has changed save man’s [sic] way of thinking and thus we drift toward unimaginable peril — to a space where we must ask along with the Palestinian poet:
Where shall the birds fly after the last sky?
by Mahmoud Darwish
1941– 2008
Please fly on beneath the fold…
Dec 29 2008
Burning the Midnight Oil for the Next American Revolution
We do not have a progressive populist movement in this country. We do not have an effective change coalition in this country. And the first implies the second, since successful progressive populism has been a component of all of our effective change coalitions for over a century.
To fend off the possible semantic quibble … yes, by an effective change coalition, I do mean to say change going forward. We have, obviously, had effective reactionary coalitions without a progressive populist component!
In sketching out the potential membership for an effective change coalition, I have previously identified farmers. And so I take special interest when Stranded Wind at the Daily Kos adopts a provocative and potentially quite divisive framing for discussion of organic farming “versus” sustainable production of chemical fertilizer such as ammonia (NH3) derived fertilizers produced with the harvest of sustainable, renewable electric power:
On one side of the field we have the hemp clothes and Birkenstocks set flinging organic tomatoes. The other side has Monsanto’s minions, flinging GMO hand grenades with one hand and trying to lasso producers with the other. The official federal referee of the USDA would like to help but their rules are the province of misguided ideologues and sociopathic transnational corporations.
Stuck in the middle is the puzzled farmer, who just wants a fair price for the work he does and some protection for when things go badly. They’d happily plow the earthly remains of all three of the above groups into the soil if it would increase yields and get unsolicited opinions out of their business.
A reaction, after the fold …
Dec 29 2008
Greetings folks, I hope your holiday season is going well. In case you were wondering, there was no Manufacturing update last week, family and health related issues. This week will be kinda short, my apologies, but I wanted to cut some of the gloom and doom for the holiday season. We got stuff on solar energy, a new grant system for electric car innovation, milestones on wind, and something for the kids! But as always, we hit our first section…
Dec 29 2008
What a world!
How does one even begin to comment?
Not to diminish the achievement of President Elect Barack Obama, it does seem in some ways a dirty joke on African American aspirations that we would finally elect an African American just at THE moment in history when the country is about to tank, and tank hard. Welcome to the presidency African America. Here’s the big, reeking pile of dung we’ve turned the country into for you. Good fuckin’ luck with that!
Dec 29 2008
I’ve written before about what this current recession is doing to state budgets, the “first responders” in delivering whats left of this country’s safety net. But this morning, I read an essay from a very tired social worker at Whiskey Fire that brought it all down to a very personal level.
I have had a ringside seat to the economic downturn this year. It is not an abstraction to me. The folks at the bottom are always the first to feel the pinch, when it comes. Clients of the agency I work at come through our doors every day requesting assistance with basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter and medications. As the year has progressed and New York State has chosen to repeatedly victimize its most vulnerable citizens, it has become more difficult to help people meet these needs. I have visited food banks with empty shelves, been told clients were ineligible for help when I knew they were and had to challenge these decisions. I have sat with clients while their applications for public assistance were reviewed by fraud investigators at social services…
For nearly 30 years we have done our best to dismantle the safety net for the poor and struggling among us. I keep praying that we have reached the end of this folly. At 42, these policies are what I have known my entire work life. I dream about social service programs and rules that would treat people like human beings, rather than as an undesirable applicant to be culled out. I want so badly for us as a nation to stop punishing people for being poor, or elderly or a child of poor people. This holiday season was hellish as I watched scores of our clients navigate the realities of a holiday with nothing but further grinding poverty. Some days I am just weary from the strain of witnessing the suffering that goes on around me. It takes a toll that is more than physical, it eats away at the soul to see people ask for so little and receive far less.
Dec 29 2008
|
to see if I was looking back to see if they were looking back at me.
**
…
If proof were needed that the US constitution still worked, here it was. If proof were needed that America had expunged its original sin of racial discrimination, here it was. And if proof were needed that Americans were pragmatists, not ideologues, here it was.
…
By year end, it was possible for the first time to detect – rather than just to hope for – the beginning of the end of the Great Repression. The downward spiral in America’s real estate market and the banking system had finally been halted by radical steps that the administration had initially hesitated to take. At the same time, the far larger economic problems in the rest of the world had given Obama a unique opportunity to reassert American leadership, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.
The “unipolar moment” was over, no question. But power is a relative concept, as the president pointed out in his last press conference of the year: “They warned us that America was doomed to decline. And we certainly all got poorer this year. But they forgot that if everyone else declined even further, then America would still be out in front. After all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
And, with a wink, President Barack Obama wished the world a happy new year.
**Niall Ferguson is a contributing editor of the FT and the author of “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World” (Penguin)
