http://www.globalissues.org/ar…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
http://www.rollingstone.com/po…
Riverkeepers — North Carolina
http://www.riverlaw.us/newsupd…
March 29, 2010 archive
Mar 29 2010
What’s on Your Dinner Menu Tonight?
Mar 29 2010
Blasts in Moscow metro kill at least 37
HQ of Russia’s successor to the Soviet-era KGB is located above one station
MOSCOW – At least 37 people were killed Monday when two separate blasts rocked metro stations in central Moscow during rush hour, law enforcement and emergency officials said.
Russian prosecutors said they had launched a “terrorism probe.”
No group immediately took responsibility for the blasts but suspicion is likely to fall on groups from Russia’s North Caucasus, where Moscow is fighting a growing Islamist insurgency. Emergency Ministry spokeswoman Irina Andrianova said the dead in the first explosion included 14 people who were in the train’s second car where the blast occurred and another 11 people who were on the platform at the Lubyanka station in central Moscow. The explosion occurred at 7:56 a.m. local time (11:56 p.m. ET).
Mar 29 2010
Manifest Destiny and the Enablers
While the citizens of the country await their shackles to corporate healthcare from the ruling class, the global game of power and corporate interests continues to play out around the globe. The rules of the game were set long before Obama became President and are as institutional to the ruling class as football is to Texas. The name of the game is to win, just as any game. Winning means staying at the top of the power rankings, the status of being number one and the treasures that follow. The United States, or rather those that are on the U.S. team, which includes many outside the U.S., has been number one since the end of World War II, almost 65 years.
We’ve reached the trillion dollar mark in defense and homeland security spending. One trillion dollars per year with no end in sight. Estimates of 1000 military bases worldwide with more being built as we speak. We have more nukes, more weapons, more ships, and more fighter jets than the rest of the world combined. We won. No one can touch us. So why can’t the game be over? Why can’t we start a new game?
Manifest Destiny was a policy of imperialistic expansion defended as necessary or benevolent. “Manifest Destiny was the 19th century belief that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. It was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico.”
“Manifest Destiny was always a general notion rather than a specific policy. The term combined a belief in expansionism with other popular ideas of the era, including American exceptionalism, Romantic nationalism, and a belief in the natural superiority of what was then called the “Anglo-Saxon race”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M…
Those beliefs or notions led to official government policies to commit genocide against the Native American peoples.
Fast forward 170 years. Manifest Destiny redux. The U.S. is still pretending to be a benevolent and necessary leader of the human race, spreading democracy and the ideals of liberty and justice for all. Westward expansion accomplished on it’s stolen continent, the expansion has gone north, south, east, and west. American interests of gold, pelts, and land have turned to interests in oil, natural gas, and corporate control.
Terrorists are still in the way, just as with the original Manifest Destiny. Native Americans were being portrayed as terrorists to the United States citizens well before the idea of Manifest Destiny was being espoused.
Geronimo surely had a different opinion as to who the real terrorists were.
The U.S. is and always has been an imperialist nation controlled by a ruling class. Since the end of the Cold War, the ruling class has had nearly free reign in expanding it’s global Manifest Destiny ambitions. Many millions of people have died or lived their lives in misery from the effects of U.S. imperialism. Those ambitions are at fever pitch in the year 2010.
This game won’t end. Not unless the American people put an end to it, which is highly unlikely. The game plan of the ruling class is the same as in 1840, and the reaction of the American people to the propaganda spread to support the actions of the ruling class is the same. The government says the terrorists are a danger to our way of life, which enables the ruling class to pursue their Manifest Destiny. Native Americans have paid the price for that. African American have paid the price. Iraqi’s, Afghani’s, Vietnamese, Koreans, Africans, Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans, all have paid the price for the Manifest Destiny of the United States of America.
I wish I could go back in time. If I had one opportunity, I’d go back to 1852 and land in Indianapolis, Indiana. I’d look up my Great (x5) Grandmother, Indiana Maxwell, and beg her to reconsider her plans to travel on that wagon train to Oregon City. I would tell her, “Grandma, we have to stop this now before it’s too late!” I’m not sure if she would understand. I know there were people back then that did understand. But as now, they are few and far between.
Mar 29 2010
Coffee Party Founder Explains Lack of Pre-Defined Platform
From the video, below:
A lot of you have written to us and asked us why we haven’t put forth a very clear platform of issues that the Coffee Party stands for. It’s not that we don’t have opinions. It would have been very easy for Annabel and I and the other early members of the Coffee Party to decide what our opinions were on the issues, and put that on the website and say tat “This is Coffee Party – take it or leave it.” But if we’d done that, we would have missed the opportunity to bring so many new people into the process. and so many diverse voices – we really, really benefited from the wisdom, the expertise, the creativity, we’re experimenting with how we can use new technology to empower the maximum number of Americans to communicate how they feel about the issues. We want you to complete your Coffee Party sphere. This is in the left column of our website, and it’s a very sophisticated tool that’ll helps you create a visual representation of how your see yourself, your future, how you see America’s future, and how you see the issues.
Mar 29 2010
Capital Controls are here
When a government plans to do something unpopular, they try to hide it.
For instance, when the Democrats decided last month to renew the draconian Patriot Act, they hid it in a medicare reform bill. They originally tried to hide it in a Pentagon funding bill.
It turned out to be a very successful strategy because it was almost totally ignored by the major media. In fact, it was so successful that last week Congress slipped in what might be the most ominous law of the year.
Mar 29 2010
Pique the Geek 20100328: Nuclear Fusion: Hell on Earth
There was no Pique the Geek last week because I was preparing for Youngest Son to visit. We had a great time last week, cooking, eating, throwing darts, and rebonding. For those of you interested in what we ate, I hosted What’s for Dinner last evening, here.
It is not either possible nor feasible to attempt the fusion that Sol does here on earth because of the impossibility of gathering enough mass to make a very slow reaction work (remember, fusing two protons to a deuteron requires the involvement of the weak nuclear force, and that is a very slow process), nor the temperatures required to make that happen.
Please see the two previous installments of this series here and here, to make things more clear.
Mar 29 2010
Arundhati Roy
Corporate propaganda for globalization in India is adequately represented by the all-singing shit-film Slumdog Millionaire, but the reality of most of India is much more accurately described by the great novelist and activist Arundhati Roy.
The publication of The God of Small Things catapulted Arundhati Roy to instant international fame. It received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 1997. It reached fourth position on the New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. From the beginning, the book was also a commercial success: Roy received half a million pounds as an advance; It was published in May, and the book had been sold to eighteen countries by the end of June.
The God of Small Things received stellar reviews in major American newspapers such as The New York Times (a “dazzling first novel,” “extraordinary,” “at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple”) and the Los Angeles Times (“a novel of poignancy and considerable sweep”), and in Canadian publications such as the Toronto Star (“a lush, magical novel”). By the end of the year, it had become one of the five best books of 1997 by TIME.
Since The God of Small Things Roy has devoted herself mainly to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays, as well as working for social causes. She is a spokesperson of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and of the global policies of the United States.
She also criticizes India’s nuclear weapons policies and the approach to industrialization and rapid development as currently being practiced in India, including the Narmada Dam project and the power company Enron’s activities in India.
About the Narmada Dam, a truly monstrous construction which was gradually elevated to a height of 400 feet and displaced hundreds of thousands of villagers along the Narmada River, Ms. Ray wrote…
Big Dams are to a Nation’s ‘Development’ what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons Governments use to control their own people. Both Twentieth Century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of civilisation turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link – the understanding – between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.
Official India was so delighted to have its own nuclear weapon that it made Prof. Dr. Abdul Kalam President of India in 2002, while Arundhati Roy was marginalized by Indian media for her opposition.
And even after India had already exploded an actual nuclear weapon at Pokhran, official India still claimed that even their 12 kiloton bomb wasn’t really a “nuclear weapon,” and their nuclear program was intended for peaceful purposes only!
Mar 29 2010
Dynaflow
Bright white sun blanks out the blue of the sky, bounces off the pale desert sand, chars the tips of the cactus and only the black strip of asphalt, having no soul, can stand to fully absorb it. In the wilderness man has the conceit to think he has conquered, by imposing that black strip, the low growling tiger of pathetic internal combustion thinks it speeds across the conquered sixteen feet. The sun mocks its power and speed by its mere existence. But the tiny spark of consciousness inside, driven by the need to feel in control in the mighty presence of even a small weak sun, ignores the existence of any power greater than itself as it grips the wheel and cranks the stereo.
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