June 5, 2010 archive

Nine Meals from Anarchy

So appropriate!  So true!

http://www.naturalnews.com/028…

http://www.informationliberati…

www.informationliberation.com has excellent Bilderberg coverage as does the Alex Jones emporium.

It is after all very sad when after 55 years I view “the future” in terms of how long I could survive by selling off shit.  Nothing beyond that.

In XP I could open two browser windows at the same time, with this new Winblows 7 I can’t.

Docudharma Times Saturday June 5




Saturday’s Headlines:

Pelicans, Back From Brink of Extinction, Face Oil Threat

British Columbia’s New Vine Trail

USA

Gulf oil spill could push Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe to the point of no return

Ramping up praise for Arizona crackdown

Europe

Vote on border dispute leaves Slovenes divided

How Rudolph Hess was persuaded to reveal Nazi secrets

Middle East

Gaza Flotilla: protesters’ story

Film about Iranian protest victim Neda Agha-Soltan beats regime’s censors

Asia

The ‘Bullet Magnet’, Mick Flynn, recalls a firefight with the Taleban in 2006

Cheonan credibility gap widens

Africa

Soccer slums: The truth about African football

Egypt, Sudan lock horns with lower Africa over control of Nile River

Silent, but deadly.

Somebody light a match!

At least two builders were “panicking” in late 2006 over the smell coming from drywall they had acquired from Miami-based Banner Supply, according to e-mails and letters, and the builders had isolated the problem to wallboard made by a Chinese manufacturer.

Snip –

But in a sworn deposition in May, Banner executive Scott Giering said he wasn’t aware of any problem with the Chinese-made drywall his company sold, other than through media reports. When [Miami attorney Ervin] Gonzalez asked him about if he was aware the drywall smelled bad, Giering said that was up for interpretation.

“Some people happen to like rotten egg smells,” Giering said.

“Smells like flatulence, doesn’t it,” Gonzalez asked, to which Giering replied, “Some people happen to like that.”

This hasn’t gone to the jury yet, so my conclusion is still “up for interpetation,” but I’m ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.  

The Iowa

They don’t build them like that anymore.

Oil pours from cap over Gulf gusher, some captured

By MELISSA NELSON and HOLBROOK MOHR, The Associated Press

Saturday, June 5, 2010; 3:31 AM

PENSACOLA BEACH, Fla. — Oil poured out of a cap that robots adjusted over the gusher in the Gulf, though some was being collected, as the slow-motion catastrophe spread deeper into the marshes and beaches of four states along the coast.

The spreading slick arrived with the tide on the Florida Panhandle’s white sands Friday as BP continued its desperate and untested bid to arrest what is already the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.

“Progress is being made, but we need to caution against overoptimism,” said Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man for the crisis. Early Friday, he guessed that the cap was collecting 42,000 gallons a day – less than one-tenth of the amount leaking from the well. Later, BP said in a tweet that since it was installed Thursday night, it had collected about 76,000 gallons.

On April 19th, 1989, 47 sailors were killed following an explosion in the Iowa’s No. 2 turret.

Forty seven, eleven, the Iowa was not retired out of respect for the dead.  It was because we simply did not have the technology to replace that turret any more.  All the machines to build it had been disassembled and sold for scrap.

Want to go to the Moon?  How about vacation in low Earth orbit?

We don’t do that any more.  We have iPhone 4Gs assembled in China by suicidal slaves.

Welcome to your virtual life (not to be confused with your real one).

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience. – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

Late Night Karaoke

OPEN THREAD

Barney Frank: Israel is Mandela, Gaza is apartheid South Africa

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U.S. Senator Barney Frank equates Israel’s brutal embargo against the Gaza Strip with the 1980s U.S. sanctions against the South Africa apartheid regime. Can a member of Congress get any more down on his hands and knees toward a foreign power, one that seems to have just engaged in murder and piracy on the high seas, and this from a supposed liberal beacon in the U.S. Senate?

Barney Frank Compares Israel’s Gaza Blockade to Sanctions Against Apartheid

By Nathan Guttman

Published June 04, 2010

Israel’s blockade against Gaza is comparable to the sanctions levied by the U.S. Congress against the apartheid regime of South Africa in 1986, Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank told the Forward in an interview June 3.

Rebuffing critics who decry the effects of the Israeli blockade on the health and welfare of Gaza’s Palestinian residents, Frank said, “I remember that argument being used against our tough sanctions against the South African regime during apartheid. People said, ‘You’re hurting the South African black people,’ and Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill and we overrode his veto.

“A few years later,” Frank recalled, proudly, “I listened to Nelson Mandela in the Capitol thank us for helping maintain the sanctions because they were so effective.” . . .

And now Frank listens to Benjamin Netanyahu deny medicine and infant formula to the Gaza Strip and he hears Nelson Mandela in that? Here’s more obsequiosity from the leading ‘progressive’ in the U.S. Senate:

Acting Effectively in Ambiguous Times

When people hesitate to take a stand on issues from the Gulf oil spill to the horror show off the coast of Gaza, it’s often because they’re unsure of the outcomes of their actions. The issues themselves can be complex and overwhelming. I’ve talked in an earlier Soul of a Citizen excerpt about the trap I call the perfect standard, where we feel we need to know every conceivable answer before we start to take a stand. But we also hold back because all our actions seem fruitless or compromised and because we’re uncertain just how they’ll will play out. Yet acting despite this ambiguity is often the most effective way to make change.

Heartfelt social involvement inevitably leads us into uncertain spiritual and emotional terrain. Theologian George Johnson amplifies this point in Beyond Guilt and Powerlessness. “Most of us,” he says, “are more comfortable with answers than with questions. When faced with a problem we generally approach it with the assumption that information, insights, and proper action will bring satisfactory solutions. We want to fix things right now.”

But as Johnson explains, “the reality of a broken world” often leads to ambiguity rather than certainty. “What we thought, believed, assumed, or followed is suddenly brought into question …. Receiving more information unsettles us rather than making things clear and easy …. It should not surprise us that our journey into the lives of those who cry for help will be discomforting.”

As a result, those of us who work for social justice often have no choice but to pursue our fundamental goals by approaches that are sometimes unclear, ad hoc, and seemingly contradictory. I remember one Vietnam-era demonstration in San Francisco that focused on the role of major oil companies in promoting the war. My friends and I drove the 35 miles to get there. As we stopped to fill up at a gas station, we felt more than a little absurd, but there was no other reasonable way to get there. I experience a similar disjunction when flying across the country to give climate change talks that I hope will move people to act, while contributing to the very greenhouse gases I’m aiming to reduce.  

We’re used to dealing with contradictory situations in our personal lives. We love family and friends despite their flaws and missteps, sometimes major ones, while trying to help steer them do what’s right. A lonely few wait indefinitely for partners who match their romantic ideal in every possible way, but most of us take the leap of falling in love with people who, like ourselves, fall well short of faultlessness; then we do our best to love them for who they are. Anyone who has children knows that they are the very embodiment of unpredictability. We can influence, but surely not control them. To all those who are dear to us we can only respond, moment by moment, as lovingly and mindfully as possible, improvising as we go. We embrace these necessarily uncertain human bonds, because the alternative is a life of isolation.

Effective public involvement demands a similar tolerance for our own doubts and mixed feelings, and for the inevitably partial nature of almost all of our victories. Think of our relationship to political leaders we have supported. We work for their campaigns knowing that it may take at least as much effort to convince them to act with courage and vision once in office as it did to help them get elected to begin with. The Gulf oil disaster is an example. The Minerals Management Service, the Federal agency that bent the rules to allow the drilling to begin with, was riddled with Bush/Cheney appointees who’d spent their entire careers taking lavish gifts from the oil industry while granting them every favor they’d wanted. If McCain and Palin were in charge, we’d have “drill baby drill” until the shores of the Potomac were soaked with oil.

But many of us are also profoundly frustrated that Obama hasn’t been tougher in responding to this immensely challenging crisis. We want him to put the government in charge of the efforts to plug the leak. We want him and Congress to remove the oil-drilling liability cap so the costs of the disaster will be borne by BP, Halliburton and Transocean, instead of the taxpayers and the ordinary citizens whose lives and livelihoods are being destroyed.  We want him to lead on shifting our economy away from coal and oil.  We need to speak out on all of these issues and more, and find ways of pressuring Obama to lead, as when he recently advocated rolling back “billions of dollars in tax breaks” for oil companies and using the money for clean energy research and development. Yet the magnitude of the crises we face and the ambivalencies of his responses make it easy to write off the very possibilities of our doing this. By dismissing them because we want all our victories to be pure, we end up dismissing our own power.

When we do act, others may view us as heroic knights riding in to save the day, but we’re more like knights on rickety tricycles, clutching our hesitations along the way. Gandhi called his efforts “experiments in truth,” because successful approaches could be discovered only through trial and error.  As I’ve explored, Gandhi himself was once so literally tongue-tied he could not get a single sentence out while advocating for his clients in court, and consequently lost all his cases.  So we grow into our involvements and strengths, taking action despite all our uncertainties.

We might therefore characterize the citizens who make the most difference in this difficult time as people of imperfect character, acting on the basis of imperfect knowledge, for causes that may be imperfect as well and in circumstances they’d rarely have chosen. I think that’s a profile any of us could match. If the change we need occurs, it’s those who act for justice despite their doubts, limitations, and uncertainties who will ultimately bring it about.

Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”

Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004.

For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. You can also join Paul’s monthly email list and follow Paul on Facebook  at Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks

From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.

FRIDAY NIGHT DISTRACTIONS

Tonight, I decided I needed to be distracted myself, so I went out at 4:30 this afternoon with my iPod on, my camera, & went riding my bicycle on the street.

Thinking I`d get away from the catastrophe in the gulf & the murderous piracy in the sea off Gaza, the first thing I saw was a snake. A snake in the grass. I thought of the CEO of BP immediately, then shut those thoughts down, called the little twins & their dad (they were getting in their car) over to see The Snake, then put bad thoughts out of my mind.

I caught this also, with which I decided to start over again.

SUNRISE

DSCN7629

Random Japan

WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT

It was reported that a group of rice farmers in Gifu Prefecture who have revived a 1,000-year-old technique of planting crops in a circular pattern are wont to chant, “The rice fields here are round, not square.”

A self-published book of poetry by a 98-year-old first-time author in Tochigi Prefecture has sold an astounding 40,000 copies. In one of the poems, the woman “confesses her hidden love for a doctor paying her house visits.”

A team of researchers at Osaka University have discovered that “something in red wine helps rats have erections.”

The shogi world was abuzz after former champion Naoko Hayashiba announced her return to the game following 15 years of semi-retirement.

Friday: Buh-bye, BP Tony Hayward- Hello …. Dudley ?

__________

Friday news dump-

Bp Tony falls on his sword-  will anyone be surprised ?  But to an American named, of all things…..  Dudley?

BP Oil Spill,bp Tony of Deepwotter SpinMeister,LMRP CAP,Top Cap #3,Climate,Nature,Tragedy,Gulf of Mexico,Oil Spill,Gulf of Mexico Satellite Picture

We won’t have bp Tony of Deepwotter Spinmeister to slosh around anymore. Damn.

The Florida Coral Reefs may be Next …

If BP, along with the ‘Best and the Brightest’ can’t manage to turn off the spigot … The Florida Coral Reefs may be Next

Group Records Florida Coastal Environment Before Oil Arrives

Creighton Team Helps Oil Spill Study

MSNBC June 3, 2010

A research team from Creighton University is gathering data along Florida’s Gulf Coast and trying to stay ahead of the oil spill.

The team’s leader, John Schalles, said recovery crews aren’t the only ones scrambling against the resulting environmental disaster.

Creighton Professor John Schalles on the Oil Spill



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

draft 2 test/Friday: Buh-bye, BP Tony Hayward- Hello …. Dudley ?

test

top of diary will not publish

__________

Friday news dump-

Bp Tony falls on his sword-  will anyone be surprised ?  But to an American named, of all things…..  Dudley?

BP Oil Spill,bp Tony of Deepwotter SpinMeister,LMRP CAP,Top Cap #3,Climate,Nature,Tragedy,Gulf of Mexico,Oil Spill,Gulf of Mexico Satellite Picture

We won’t have bp Tony of Deepwotter Spinmeister to slosh around anymore. Damn.

Love the Brit slang:


BP hives off “toxic” Gulf Spill operation to dilute anti- British feeling in US   –  The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi…

Responsibility for the leaking well and the clean-up strategy will placed in the hands of Bob Dudley, one of the company’s most able directors.

Dudley, a US citizen, has been looking for a suitable role in the company since he was thrown out of Moscow in a battle with the Russian shareholders of the TNK-BP joint venture in the middle of 2008.

Hayward said the clean-up business would be run separately by Dudley with his own staff but the finances and budget would come from the main BP group. The BP chief executive said the purpose of the split was to allow Dudley to concentrate on the Gulf problem while he and other directors were not distracted from keeping the main business on track.

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