October 12, 2009 archive

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

Now with World and U.S. News.  36 Story Final.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 41 dead as suicide blast hits northwest Pakistan

by Lehaz Ali, AFP

Mon Oct 12, 10:12 am ET

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) – A devastating suicide bomb hit northwest Pakistan killing 41 people Monday, as the military geared up for an assault on Taliban rebels blamed for increasingly bloody and brazen attacks.

The bomber, reported to be aged about 13, flung himself at a military convoy passing through a busy market in Shangla, a northwest district near Swat where the army claimed to have flushed out Taliban rebels after a fierce offensive.

But Islamist extremist groups appear far from quashed, with an audacious raid on army headquarters over the weekend leaving 23 people dead and underscoring the vulnerability of the nuclear-armed nation. Eight days of bloodshed.

War, Peace, the Nobel, the Audacity, and the Dawn

I suppose we should not  begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, though it represents a  radical break in tradition, since he’s only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely  through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the world for years.

Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906  as reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines.  Senator George Hoar’s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt’s eligibility for the Peace Prize:  

“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives-the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”

   

TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of  Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet  (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet  including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and portions of Pakistan.      

People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, albeit Norwegian. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or  Vietnamese or Afghans  and still  win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.  

Roundabout Monday (Open Thread)

Gah!

I’ve been on the phone all morning with a whole lotta cluck and clatter.

Don’t dessert me now, Dharmanauts!! 🙂

The “Civil” Wars

An article written in today’s Washington Post posits whether or not the foul-mouthed chorus of immature slights and sharp elbows that characterizes an internet world shows a new degree of rudeness or whether said dialogue merely reflects a new awareness of the democratic insult.  I myself received an tremendous amount of hateful, childish comments when a few seconds of the iReport I posted online to CNN was chosen for broadcast and aired on the network itself.  What I had been attempting to convey in my talk were the many complexities of the life of Ted Kennedy, but what I quickly noticed were that the personal attacks I received did not even come close to directly addressing what I said.  No one was really listening to or even contemplating my words, rather they just wanted to vent.  I think the most bizarre and gratuitous insult I received was the poster who told me to “comb [my] f__king hair”.      

For all the debate and the analysis, true civility might very well be an ideal rather than a reality.  The instant feedback and information deluge of our internet age gives us the realization that human discourse provides us equal, ample evidence of every conceivable shade of good and bad.  Nowadays, we often believe we live in the worst of all possible worlds.   A pessimistic approach does not provide much in the way of comforting, helpful answers, but neither does the kind of radical optimism rightly savaged by Voltaire in Candide.   As the article addresses, looking into the past to find evidence of a time where the trains always ran on time, every imaginable need was cheap and readily available, and people treated each other with courtesy and respect is wistful nostalgia for times that never really were.  

Mary Schmich’s opinion column entitled “Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young” includes this bit of advice.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

There have been as many pronouncements that society is on the brink of self-destruction as there have been prophetic sureties of the imminent Second Coming of Christ or the End of the World according to calendars of ancient indigenous peoples.   The Post story addresses how the conservative pitchfork rabble falsely accused a DC area author and government worker of having some secret connection to the now infamous rap song, recorded in a New Jersey school over the summer by students, the lyrics of which dared to praise the President.   The unfortunate subject of this massive knee-jerk, Charisse Carney-Nunes, voices how many of us feel when subjected to another pitched volley of irrationality hurled at us by an army of plate glass window-smashing malcontents.            


Carney-Nunes spends a lot of her free time teaching children how to bridge divides, but she has no idea how to build a dialogue with those who attacked her.

“How can I talk to those people?” she said. “These are people who persist in believing that Barack Obama is a Muslim, that he isn’t a citizen of this country. You tell me: Where is the beginning of that conversation?”

Contentious times produce contentious disagreements.   We still believe, as did those who shaped this nation, in a liberal line of logic that insists, provided enough education, people can become self-aware, rational beings.   The flaws in this argument are particularly glaring now, when education alone, or as the Right likes to call it, indoctrination, seems to be insufficient in the face of emotional excess.   From a distance, it is interesting to observe the internal conflict within many people now up in arms over something that shows itself whenever passions are overheated.  As though at war with both hemispheres of their brain, they bounce back and forth from uncivilized raw emotion to some degree of civilized restraint.  That they themselves seem incapable of recognizing this is problem enough.  


“Completely false allegations incubate in the fringe and jump within days to the mainstream, distorting any debate or progress we can have as a society,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which released a report last month noting a rise in the “militia movement” over the past year. “What’s different is that a great deal of this is real fear and frustration at very real demographic and cultural changes.”  

I believe that we are on the right side of history and that our cause is just and good.   Yet, I resist strongly the temptation to gloat or to condescendingly dismiss those who fear that reform, any reform, means destruction and that change, when enacted, can never be undone.  Being snide and condescending only makes matters worse.   Every meaningful conservative has one foot in the past and values the sanctity of the status quo.   But as we have seen, merely returning to old ways does not provide simple solutions.  The past is too messy and composed of too many ironies to be anyone’s Golden Age, either for us or for them.   We ought to take the lessons of the past as they are, without smoothing away its rough edges or glossing over the bits that don’t serve our purpose.  The Past, in its pure form, has no bias to Left or Right.  It can be frequently be instructive, so long as we know that it calls us out as much as it calls out our opposition.    

Returning to the subject of common decency or the lack thereof,  driving much of this conservative grassroots backlash is the reality that this nation will soon consist of an ethnic and racial plurality, and many on the Right fear that balancing authority among separate identity groups, each with its own cultural peculiarities and goals, will lead to disunion and strife.   Pat Buchanan and others have advanced this argument before and I fully expect to see more instances of it as the Caucasian majority in this country begins to slowly, but surely recede.  We portray these people as foolish or intent on selfishly benefiting from a sense of white privilege and entitlement at our own peril.  Fighting fire with fire in this instance is the surest way to eventually cause an inferno.  Anyone with an itchy trigger finger is merely looking for a reason to pull it.  And as for us, any self-contained group does an excellent job of talking to itself, but finding a way to know how to converse with the broader universe is the key challenge.  Much of our discourse could be rightly described as choir practice, which is good to some extent, but we would probably be better served by developing ways to speak to the vast majority of Americans who do not embrace the politics of the conservative nutroots.  

Richard Engel in Afghanistan at a “Tip of the Spear”

The Video below, not a trailer, is the first video of this series that aired the night of 10.11.09 in an hour special, MSNBC broke it up online into six parts, the rest are linked below the video.

One of many of the articles recently written as the focus, after seven years, once again turns to the Afghan occupation as does the debate on being there, occupied now going into the ninth year. It was not secured after ridding the Taliban government and al Qaeda was put on the run when we invaded, destroyed and occupied the innocent people of Iraq where we still have tens of thousands of soldiers and private contractors, some being of our now mercenary army.

Docudharma Times Monday October 12




Monday’s Headlines:

U.S. Can’t Trace Foreign Visitors on Expired Visas

Blood, rage & history: The world’s first terrorists

New Bill Would Raise Rates, Says Insurance Group

Federal scientists oppose offshore drilling plans

Taking On Skyscrapers to Protect View of an ‘Old Friend’

Top UN official in Afghanistan admits fraud tainted election

The Big Question: Is the bitter divide between Turkey and Armenia coming to an end?

Czech Cabinet in emergency session to force President Klaus to sign Lisbon treaty

Iran dismisses Clinton warning on nuclear drive

Apartheid leader Eugene Terre’Blanche returns to politics

Brazilian newspapers celebrate a rise in circulation

The Week in Editorial Cartoons – The Last Edition

Crossposted at Daily Kos.  Look in the Comments Section of Daily Kos for more cartoons on the economy and sports.  Somehow, I couldn’t fit them in the main text of the diary.

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

Glenn Beck’s Fear and Paranoia



Dave Granlund, Politicalcartoons.com

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

A Transition through Poetry XXXIV

Art Link

Passage

Rites and Passages

(the latter years)

Isolating

Declaring

Bemoaning

Observing

Writing

Speaking

Affirming

Protecting

Finding voice

Initiating

Writing

Speaking up

Ghettoizing

Returning

Creating space

Confronting the beast

Writing

Speaking out

Helping

Representing

Taming the beast

Depicting

Moving on

Broadening

Writing

Spreading out

Identifying the larger beast

Combining

Proclaiming

Defending

Teaching

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–November 15, 2005

The Open Letter I Wanted To Write To The Generations Before Me

(Cross posted from  The Free Speech Zone)

I want to thank all the generations before me for electing the government representatives we’ve had since 1980 and for the great wealth you’ve left us in your wake that gave us the economic stability we have today.  

Your selfless pursuits around the world to make it a better place have shown the world who you truly are, and they have rewarded us for our actions.

I appreciate you taking to the streets to demand that your children and grandchildren have government sponsored single-payer health care.  Now we get amazing free health care thanks to all of you.

When you took to the streets for the $4 Trillion in funds that you forced your government to put up for future generations in order to pay for our government sponsored health care, you single-handedly stopped the government from using those funds to bailout a corrupt and irresponsible Wall Street.  

Today, you’ve given us a nation to be proud of and I’d like to thank your for that.  You proved that you would not sit back and watch as both party’s sold out our future.

Thank you so much for all you have done for our generation, you truly deserve the title “The Greatest Generation”.

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

BrokenRoots Sunday: Art & HPRP & Homeless in America

US President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama last winter signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, appropriating $1.5 billion for a Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP). These monies are being distributed via a formula used for the Emergency Shelter Grant (ESG).

HUD, oversees the funding and serves as the hub for information on the program, And the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) is working alongside to ensure the successful implementation of HPRP.

This Sunday, BrokenRoots shines a light on HPRP: How’s it doing so far? What are its guidelines and philosophy? Who’s eligible and how is HPRP  defining homelessness? And, perhaps more significantly, as the days grow shorter and the temps drop, what are YOU doing about the homeless crisis in your own backyard? We’ll provide a few suggestions and solicit some ideas.

If it’s Sunday, It’s ‘Homeless in America”

Weekly World Activist

A weekly roundup of the news made by of, by and for the active engaged progressive people of the world.  

HEAD LINES

Canada:  Nickel Mine Strike

libcom:

After months of unresolved bargaining a strike began on July 13th at the Sudbury mine in northern Ontario, Canada, after employers Vale Inco refused to alter its original demands for concessions. United Steel Workers union members (USW Local 6500) in Sudbury and Port Colburne in Ontario and Voisey Bay in Labrador responded by voting 85% in favor of strike action.

The strike affects 3,073 employees at Vale’s integrated mining, milling, smelting and refining operations in Sudbury, 116 employees at the Port Colborne refinery and over 200 at Voisey Bay. The concessions demanded by the company include a drastic change in pension benefits for new hires (the pension Fund is $725 million in deficit), changes to seniority rights and a cap on the “Nickel Bonus”. “This bonus was negotiated in earlier years to allow the company to benefit from relatively lower wages when nickel prices were depressed and workers to benefit when the price was high. Nickel bonuses – once used to placate underpaid unionised workers – in recent years suddenly paid off ‘big’

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