July 2010 archive

Jul 29 2010

News at Noon

By Nightprowlkitty

From Reuters

Exxon profit tops Wall Street

By Anna Driver

July 29, 2010

(Reuters) – Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) reported a better-than-expected second-quarter profit on Thursday, as oil prices and margins to process crude into fuel rebounded from a year earlier and production rose.

Conditions in the refining sector have improved in recent months, with business and consumer demand for diesel and gasoline rebounding.

Crude oil prices have also climbed about 30 percent from a year ago, another factor that has contributed to higher profits in the second quarter for oil companies.

Jul 29 2010

Future? What Future?

By Edger

These are two of the cheerful passages in the article. If you’ve never read the whole thing I’d recommend it…

The Delusion Revolution:
We’re on the Road to Extinction and in Denial

By Robert Jensen

Imagine that you are riding comfortably on a sleek train. You look out the window and see that not too far ahead the tracks end abruptly and that the train will derail if it continues moving ahead. You suggest that the train stop immediately and that the passengers go forward on foot. This will require a major shift in everyone’s way of traveling, of course, but it appears to you to be the only realistic option; to continue barreling forward is to court catastrophic consequences. But when you propose this course of action, others who have grown comfortable riding on the train say, “Well, we like the train, and arguing that we should get off is not realistic.”

In the contemporary United States, we are trapped in a similar delusion. We are told that it is “realistic” to capitulate to the absurd idea that the systems in which we live are the only systems possible or acceptable because some people like them and wish them to continue. But what if our current level of First World consumption is exhausting the ecological basis for life? Too bad — the only “realistic” options are those that take that lifestyle as non-negotiable. What if real democracy is not possible in a nation-state with 300 million people? Too bad — the only “realistic” options are those that take this way of organizing a polity as immutable. What if the hierarchies on which our lives are based are producing extreme material deprivation for the oppressed and a kind of dull misery among the privileged? Too bad — the only “realistic” options are those that accept hierarchy as inevitable.

Let me offer a different view of reality: (1) We live in a system that, taken as a whole, is unsustainable, not only over the long haul but in the near term, and (2) unsustainable systems can’t be sustained.

How’s that for a profound theoretical insight? Unsustainable systems can’t be sustained.

16 comments

Jul 29 2010

Capitalism FAIL: Killing YOU By The Numbers.

By Diane G

Hat tip to Gottlieb who sent me the link to Business Insider’s “22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America”

You should view the whole slide show. However, I will provide the statistics here, with few enough of the images to give you a taste. Those of you who know me, know I am the Queen of “You say Socialist like its a Bad Thing,” a Commie-Pinko Motherfuckress.

Here is proof fucking POSITIVE of why I am correct, and why I am fighting to wake people against the propaganda that keeps them perpetually supportive of a system whose main goal is to rape them blind and make them like it.

Their data is in bold, my commentary follows in italic, just to be clear about who is saying what.

– 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

So, you fuckwits, do you really still hang on to the dream that you too can be rich if you only get your lucky break in the market? This isn’t “hard-wurkin-merricuns” doing well. These are professional players who created and regulate the system to keep theirs theirs and take more of yours by any trickery they can create.

18 comments

Jul 29 2010

“Inception” in Afghanistan

By Jacob Freeze

Among the two or three ideas which the recent American movie “Inception” ponderously expounds is what you might call the increasing speed of consciousness of dreams within dreams.

While only a minute passes in reality, the dreamer experiences hours in a dream, and maybe months in the dream within that dream, and so on until the most embedded dream extends forever, in one heartbeat of the sleeping body which hosts the dreams.

This is exactly the opposite order of so many nightmares within nightmares which compose the American occupation of Afghanistan.

A village which somehow endured for a thousand years is destroyed in one second by American bombers, and at the next level of reality in some miserable refugee camp, opium-addicted mothers pass their addiction along to their children, and at the next level of reality those same children appear in an even more miserable orphanage, “with no doors or windows, and no food,” and at the next level…

Then, just as winter was coming, the government closed the orphanage. By the spring, only 160 kids returned. “They started working as laborers and slaves and couldn’t come back,” said Farid. “This winter the government wanted to send them back to the community, that means nowhere, then they don’t have food or somewhere to stay.” One boy was discovered in the market. He was covered in scabies, sleeping under the stalls, raped repeatedly.

And while those children descended month after month and year after year through so many levels of the infinite misery of ordinary reality in Afghanistan…

Meanwhile the American public snoozed peacefully in its idiotic delusions about the Global War on Terror, and President Obama has recently re-authorized the abject Patriot Act, as if nothing had happened and as if no time had passed since September 11, 2001.

Jul 29 2010

Docudharma Times Thursday July 29

Thursday’s Headlines:

Gulf oil slick breaks up rapidly and begins to slip below waves

The dead sea: Global warming blamed for 40 per cent decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton

USA

As Desert Deaths Soar, a Morgue Grows Crowded

White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity

Europe

Catalonia votes to ban all forms of bullfighting in nationalist move

Russian court blocks YouTube

Middle East

Baghdad revisited: the Chalabi family’s return from exile

Deep undercurrents stir in the Middle East

Asia

Floods wash barrels of chemicals into China river

Plan B for Afghanistan

Latin America

Photo and letter stir speculation on missing Mexico political figure

Jul 29 2010

Muse in the Morning

By Robyn in Art, Community, Poetry

Muse in the Morning

All that we are is the result

of what we have thought:

it is founded on our thoughts,

it is made up of our thoughts.

If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought,

pain follows him, as the wheel follows

the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.

–Dhammapada, verse 1

Phenomena XXVI: transgressing

Bruise

Torture

How much

information

did you get

from the fly

after you picked off

its wings?

What intelligence

did you gain

from the butterfly

when you

crushed it

with water?

Did the squirrel

divulge secrets

concerning

a ticking bomb

as you

dissected it

Did you

move on

to people?

Knocking

the corners off

those

with too many

sandblasting

the surface

of those

too different

forcing into focus

the fuzzy people

is how some people

spend too much time

It’s a short step

from here to torture

Is it forward or back?

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–April 18, 2008

Jul 29 2010

Adorable Lindsey Graham Threatening to Prosecute NYT, Guardian UK, & der Speigel- oh, wait a second

By AmericanRiverCanyon in War

This past weekend July 25, saw 3 major on line news publications, the New York Times , The Guardian UK, and Germany’s der Speigel publish the Afghanistan War Logs, 90,000+ documents from wikileaks, which show that the United States and NATO forces have been killing many more civilians in the Afghanistan occupation than has been previously acknowledged. The war of the air vs the ground explosives has also ramped up in neighboring Pakistan, where, since January 2009, according to the BBC, nearly 2,500 people have been killed by either American drone attacks or by Islamic or Pakistani ISI forces- and “extremists” have killed more than 1,700 in Pakistan. There have been more than 2000 Afghan casualties from roadside bombs. Adding up all the numbers and then some, there’s at least 7,000 dead from the war in this border region.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl…

https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

Using a theory I read about elsewhere, if each one of these deceased casualties has at least 6 surviving relatives, parents, siblings, and/or offspring, the United States has just created, with the aid of whatever factions they’re paying in Pakistan, at least 36,000 more angry people whose religious warrior culture teaches them that it’s okay to extract revenge upon the invading enemy.

Jul 29 2010

Late Night Karaoke

Late Night Karaoke

Jul 28 2010

“Forcing people to save is a cost that I am willing to bear.”

By A Siegel

That Nobel prize, PhD, and ten patents to his name are hints that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu is beyond simply a bright man. Secretary Chu is also a dedicated public servant. He is also a thoughtful, self-effacing, and, well, simply entertaining speaker. A chance to be in the room, to seem him speak, is one of those things not to pass up.

The other evening, Secretary Chu spoke at an evening reception leading into today’s Center for American Progress Doing What Works that examined paths for improving government performance and foster increased (reasons for) public confidence in government. He spoke to perspectives on the role of government and provided some thoughts from the Department of Energy.

Jul 28 2010

(R)’s Wanted To Cut VA Budget, Right After Voting More On War Spending!!!

By jimstaro

And not with just one amendment but Three of them, which we All know they would have walked in lockstep in voting for!

Not only do they not want their pimps, the wealthy, the corporations, whoever else they get on their knee’s for, to pay for veterans issues, and more, but they keep trying to Cut VA Budgets by millions while pushing Defense and their Wars of Choice Spending to the limits!!

The following link just popped into my e-box, a quick search didn’t bring up another just yet, wondering if the FOX and company will be outraged, or even report on this as they wave their flags and yell patriotism meme’s, they’re patriotism definitions!

Jul 28 2010

Open Brass

By Nightprowlkitty

Jul 28 2010

News at Noon

By Nightprowlkitty

From Reuters

Pakistan passenger plane crashes, 152 dead

By Kamran Haider

July 28, 2010

(Reuters) – A Pakistani passenger plane crashed in heavy rain near Islamabad on Wednesday, killing all 152 people on board, officials said, in the worst aviation accident in Pakistan.

Two Americans were among the victims, a U.S. embassy spokesman told Reuters. He had no further details.

“There are no survivors. We believe all are dead. We are recovering the remains of the dead bodies from the wreckage,” Imtiaz Elahi, chairman of the state-run Capital Development Authority, a city municipal body.